BOSTON -- The Boston School Committee, once synonymous with fierce resistance to racial integration, took a historic step Wednesday night and threw off the last remnants of a busing system first imposed in 1974 under a federal court desegregation order.
Instead of busing children across town to achieve integration, the plan adopted by the committee is intended to allow more students to attend schools closer to home.
That was the objective sought by Mayor Thomas Menino, who appointed a special advisory group last year to overhaul the system. He said that keeping students closer to home would encourage more parental involvement, develop neighborhood cohesion and ultimately improve the schools.
"Tonight's historic vote marks a new day for every child in the city of Boston," the mayor said in a statement.
But numerous parents and activists complained during a hearing before the committee's deliberations that the new system would leave some children -- mostly black and Hispanic -- in the lowest-performing schools.
"No way we can stand around the playground and say, 'Yeah, we're all getting a fair shake,' " one father testified.
They were angry, too, that the committee had not tackled what many agree is the district's fundamental problem -- the scarcity of good schools.
The Springfield School District will pay outgoing School Superintendent Walter Milton $177,797 under a separation agreement obtained by The State Journal-Register. Milton's resignation takes effect March 31, according to the agreement.
The 16-page agreement, signed by Milton Jan. 31, was released to The State Journal-Register Tuesday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The school district also will continue to pay for Milton's health and dental insurance until May 31, 2014 unless Milton finds a new job that provides similar benefits, according to the agreement. Milton will receive Illinois Teachers Retirement System credit for about 56 days of unused sick time.
The document says Milton sought the agreement in order to be able to pursue other positions. Milton said at Monday's school board meeting he decided to search for a new job after being denied a contract extension several months ago, and after realizing that he and the board have "fundamental policy disagreements." "I would have loved to have had the opportunity to fulfill the school year," Milton said Tuesday. "I was honored to serve. I love Springfield public schools."
Resignation, reference language
Once Milton resigns, the agreement says, a Sept. 28 letter from school board president Susan White will be removed from Milton's personnel file, as well as his response. The nature of the letter was not disclosed. The State Journal-Register filed FOIA requests for those letters Tuesday.
White would not comment on whether Milton's settlement -- to be paid in two installments by May 1 -- was taken into consideration when the school board determined budget reductions for next year. Along with a non-disparagement clause, the agreement outlines language to be used in response to inquiries, and it includes Milton's resignation letter and a recommendation letter to be sent when the school board is asked to provide a reference for Milton.
That recommendation letter matches an emailed statement that White sent Feb. 4 to a reporter in Madison, Wis. and to The State Journal-Register. That letter indicated Milton would end his employment with the district March 31. At the time, White said the date was a typographical error. The email prompted The State Journal-Register to submit a series of Freedom of Information Act requests regarding Milton's employment status.
Johnson: Resignation 'coerced'
The agreement is signed by six of the seven school board members, all except Judy Johnson. "No, I won't sign it," Johnson said Tuesday. "I don't agree with the action the board has taken. I don't think it's fair. To me, it's forced and coerced. Dr. Milton has done a good job."
A statement to media and district employees, slated for release March 11, also is included in the agreement. The agreement, which stipulates that the statement would be the only comment made by the board and Milton to media and employees regarding the separation agreement, apparently explains board members' recent silence on the matter.
The agreement also allows the board to search for candidates to become interim superintendent without notifying the public. White said the details of the negotiations needed to be confidential because they involved a personnel matter.
"In my opinion, there's nothing about the way this negotiation has been handled that is inappropriate," White said. White said she is frustrated that the word "secret" is being used to describe the private deliberations during which board members and Milton agreed to the separation agreement.
"This negotiation was no more secret than any other personnel matter the board considers in executive session," White said. "There are reasons, and I think public policy reasons, why employment and bargaining matters take place in private. ... There's a privacy component that employees are entitled to." White said any steps to accept Milton's resignation or hire an interim superintendent will be done in public.
Even though the details of the separation agreement have been released, and though Milton has made public statements, White said board members are still bound by the confidentiality agreement and cannot comment on much, including the timing of Milton's planned departure.
Because the School Board candidates Sarah Manski, TJ Mertz, and Ananda Mirilli are on the primary ballots for Seat 5 on February 19, 2013, the above link is a version of the candidate forum held on February 18, 2013 edited to include only the above candidates for Seat 5. The video is about one(1) hour in length.
School reform superintendent Paul Vallas spoke at LaFollette High School at the behest of Boys and Girls Club of Dane County CEO Michael Johnson. The two and a half hour presentation with question and answer periods as attended by about 100 people in the LaFollette Auditorium.
Paul Vallas has been the Superintendent of schools in Chicago (CPS), Philadelphia, New Orleans, and currently Bridgeport Connecticut. He is currently hired to improve the schools in both Chile and Haiti, and has been praised in two State of the Union addresses. His work as a superintendent has engendered both strong support and strong disagreement.
The two and a half hour meeting has been divided into five clips and I have tried to summarize comments made by Paul Vallas, the panel and the audience members who spoke.
Before I became president of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, I worked in economic development in the administrations of five Wisconsin governors, both Democrats and Republicans. Over those years, leaders in both parties called for "jobs, jobs, jobs."
Some economists rate Wisconsin's personal income growth levels in 48th place. Now, in an election year and in a time of recession and jobless recovery, the critical question is what can the state do to promote job creation? The Journal Sentinel Editorial Board has rightly made jobs and job creation its sole agenda item for 2012.
There is a direct link between the level of educational attainment (percentage of the population with a postsecondary degree) in a state and the growth of personal income in that state. Because of that link, there is also a clear and certain pathway to economic growth and job creation.
The Wisconsin Technology Council has called upon the state to add 150,000 degree-holders to bring Wisconsin to the national average. Competitive Wisconsin Inc., a coalition of corporate and union leadership, not wishing our state to be average, urged Wisconsin to add 170,000 baccalaureate degree-holders to bring this state up to the level of our neighbor, Minnesota.
Legislation to allow home-schooled students to play varsity sports at public schools passed the Republican-controlled Virginia Assembly on Wednesday. It will now go before the State Senate. Robert McDonnell, Virginia's Republican governor, has said he supports the bill.
Alabama and Mississippi are considering similar legislation, and 25 states now allow home-schooled students to play sports at public schools with varying restrictions. Is this a move in the right direction?
The College Board AP Report to the Nation shows that students who earn advanced placement credit in high school typically experience greater academic success in college, are better prepared for coursework, and are more likely to earn a college degree than their peers.
In 2011, 903,630 seniors took an AP exam before leaving high school with 540,619 scoring a three or higher. That doubles the 431,573 who took the exam in 2001 when only 277,507 scored a three or higher. In all, 62,068 students across Wisconsin took AP exams in 2011.
Joanne Berg, University of Wisconsin-Madison vice provost for enrollment management, says that "students who took AP credits were able to graduate sooner than other students, were able to start advanced courses sooner, and actually free up courses for other students who weren't able to take AP credits."
Along with the release of the report, representatives from the UW-Madison are also featured in several videos speaking to the value of the AP program. The videos can be viewed here.
The 8th Annual AP Report to the Nation (.pdf/1.7MB) reports on each state's efforts to improve high school achievement by involving greater segments of the student population -- and traditionally underserved minority students in particular -- in rigorous AP courses.
Deborah Gist, Rhode Island's Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, has implemented some major reforms since assuming her role in 2009. She has raised the score required to pass teacher-certification tests and allowed a superintendent to fire all of the teachers at a school that was resisting reforms. Perhaps most notably, she has overseen the implementation of a new teacher-evaluation system. The Hechinger Report recently interviewed Gist about her state's new approach to evaluating teachers.
Since changing your teacher-evaluation process in 2009 to include students' standardized test-scores and yearly evaluations of teachers and administrators, what has the feedback been? Where are you at as far as implementing the changes, how is it going, and what have you learned?
I started Apps for Kids because my 8-year-old daughter Jane and I like to play games on the iPhone and iPad together. We have a lot of fun checking out new apps, and then seeing if we can beat each other's high scores. My friends who have kids of their own were always asking Jane and me what apps they should download, and so I thought maybe we should share that advice to a larger audience. So we started Apps for Kids, and people seem to really like it
California voters made a pact in 1988 when they approved Proposition 98.
The state would provide a guaranteed minimum level of funding for public schools. In exchange, schools would be held "accountable for the job they do and the tax dollars they spend." Every year each school would publish a School Accountability Report Card - the SARC.
A generation later, that report card still is not very readable and has little role in driving school improvement. A 2004 UCLA report concluded, "Running the school system without a useful and understandable SARC is like driving a $100,000 sports car with a broken speedometer, temperature gauge and gas gauge."
Unfortunately, political leaders faced with the overly complex, confusing system seem to lunge in opposite directions.
Ask Detroit teachers about their biggest challenge, and many will say, "You can't teach kids who don't come to class." Last year, the average Detroit public high school student missed at least 28 days of school.
Now, as part of its effort to get parents more involved, the district has launched a major initiative to improve attendance. The effort includes parent workshops and attendance agents charged with pushing parents to send their kids to school every day.
George Eason is one of Detroit's 51 attendance agents. He's staring at a printout that says a lot about the city's attendance problems. He flips the pages, counting the absences that one student has racked up only midway through the school year.
Gov. Dannel Malloy has indicated that he plans to make good on his promise to enact education reform -- he has announced a series of legislative proposals over the past week aimed at improving and expanding schooling opportunities in Connecticut.
Malloy's proposals, if enacted by the state's General Assembly convening for its legislative session today, would affect students in levels ranging from preschool to professional job training programs. Last Thursday, Malloy proposed allocating an additional $12 million of the state budget to boost the quality and accessibility preschool education in the state. The next day, the governor announced that he will propose legislation to change the Connecticut Technical High School (CTHSS) system to tailor its curricula to the needs of the state's employers so that students will be better prepared for employment upon graduation. On Monday, Malloy put forth a legislative proposal to improve low-achieving schools and increase charter and magnate school funding.
"We made a promise to our kids that education will prepare them for college or the workforce," Malloy said in a Feb. 6 press release. "Transforming our educational system -- fixing the schools that are falling short and learning from the ones that are graduating high-achievers -- will help us develop the skilled workforce that will strengthen our state and our economy."
Amy and Mark Denicore are headed to a full-blown trial to defend themselves against charges that they violated Virginia law by making their kids late to elementary school too often.
The Loudoun County couple was arraigned Monday morning in juvenile and domestic relations court. Judge Pamela L. Brooks set a trial date of March 14.
The Denicores are each charged with three Class 3 misdemeanors, each of which carries a maximum fine of $500. Their three children, ages 6, 7 and 9, have been late to school almost 30 times since September. Most of their tardies were three minutes or less.
Two seats on the eight-member board are opening up. In both races, opponents of the proposed charter school, which is being championed by the Urban League of Madison as a way to target the long-standing achievement gap between white and minority students, are pitted against supporters of the plan.
Arlene Silveira, an incumbent who voted against Madison Prep, is being challenged by Nichelle Nichols, the vice president of learning for the Urban League. Similarly, in an open seat that Madison Prep supporter Lucy Mathiak is vacating, Mary Burke, a wealthy philanthropist (and former state secretary of Commerce) who pledged $2.5 million to the Madison Prep project, is running against Michael Flores, a firefighter with union backing.
John Matthews, president of Madison Teachers Inc, says his union is planning to be very active in support of Silveira and Flores. In not-so-subtle terms, he challenged Burke's ability to understand the challenges that the Madison middle class and poor face in the school system.
"She's a one percenter," he said, invoking the language of the Occupy Wall Street movement. "She's a very nice person, a very well-intentioned person but you want somebody who understands what it's like to be a parent and understands the needs of parents to be involved."
Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin is starting to feel surrounded. On her state's southern border, Texas has no income tax. Now two of its other neighbors, Missouri and Kansas, are considering plans to cut and eventually abolish their income taxes. "Oklahoma doesn't want to end up an income-tax sandwich," she quips.
On Monday she announced her new tax plan, which calls for lowering the state income-tax rate to 3.5% next year from 5.25%, and an ambition to phase out the income tax over 10 years. "We're going to have the most pro-growth tax system in the region," she says.
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute's George Lightbourn on the correct way to assess state finances (which is not now being done by the Walker administration, nor was it done by the Doyle, McCallum, Thompson, Earl, Dreyfus, Schreiber or Lucey administrations, and so on, and so on, and so on):
Sheila Weinberg from the Institute for Truth in Accounting coined the term, "political math." When politicians delay a payment and refer to the delay as a "savings," they're using political math. Or when no money is set aside for a bill they know is coming due, practitioners of political call the IOU a "savings." It's political math that allows state government to meet the balanced budget requirement while state accountants show it to be running a $3 billion deficit (according to the official tally released over the Christmas holiday).
Both Republicans and Democrats have used political math to make budgets balance over the years. Political math allowed my former boss Scott McCallum to balance the budget using one-time tobacco money and it was political math that green lighted Jim Doyle to "borrow" over $1 billion from the transportation fund. Thanks to political math, Governors and legislatures of all political stripe have been able to buy more government than they could really afford.
Madison Schools Superintendent Dan Nerad packed the house Monday night for what he termed "a call to action" to the community to join his administration in a strategy to close the racial achievement gap that has haunted the school district for decades.
His blueprint for change, "Building our Future," weighs in at 100 pages and took an hour to outline with a Power Point presentation to an audience of about 200 at the Fitchburg Community Center. The proposal will be digested, dissected and debated in the weeks to come, including at a series of community meetings hosted by the school district.
But one thing is clear: from Nerad's point of view, the future of children of color in our city lies not only in the hands of the teachers and administrators who shape their lives at school, but also in the hands of their families, their neighbors, and members of the community who live and work all around town.
"It can't be the schools alone; it has to be the schools working with the community if we're going to have outcomes," he said.
Madison school superintendent Dan Nerad unveiled his long awaited, and much anticipated plan (mp3 audio) to close the district's more than 40-year-old racial achievement gap Monday night before the full school board and around 75 citizens who packed into a room inside the Fitchburg library.
The 109-page plan, titled "Building Our Future: The Preliminary Plan for Eliminating Gaps in MMSD Student Achievement," makes about 40 recommendations at a cost of $60.3 million over the next five years.
Several recommendations called for building on existing programs, like AVID/TOPS, an acclaimed program that focuses on students in the academic middle.
Others, like a "parent university," a model school for culturally relevant teaching, career academies within the high schools and a student-run youth court, would be new to the district.
Ideally, substantive program review in necessities such as reading and math would occur prior to the addition of new spending.
As the Chicago Public Schools begin what are certain to be contentious contract talks with the Chicago Teachers Union, Mayor Rahm Emanuel emerged as the star of a new online video criticizing the union and promoting charter schools, whose teachers mostly are not unionized.
An interview with Mr. Emanuel is a highlight of the 35-minute video, produced by the Michigan-based Education Action Group Foundation and the Fox News political analyst Juan Williams. Mr. Williams narrates the video, saying the union is "radically politicized" and is "repeatedly providing terrible examples for Chicago's schoolchildren."
A spokeswoman for Mr. Emanuel said last week that the mayor did not share those views of the union, and his comments in the video were more measured, but union officials were still upset. The mayor discussed how he faced union opposition to some of his education proposals, such as extending the length of the school day this year.
It's a little early for budget season, but Sunday's State Journal included an article by Matt DeFour that kicks off discussion of the school district's finances for 2012-13. According to the article, preliminary numbers indicate about a $12.4 million budget gap for the district.
Here are ten quick thoughts on these preliminary figures.
1. To make sense of budget gap talk, it's helpful to understand the assumptions behind the concept. Budget gaps are traditionally calculated within the context of a school district's state-imposed revenue limit authority. (For the sake of clarity, it's helpful to think of revenue limits as spending limits.). Costs are projected to go up by X millions, the school district is constrained by revenue limits to increase its spending by no more than Y millions, and the difference between X and Y is the measure of the gap that traditionally has to be bridged through painful budget cuts.
Los Angeles Unified School District is embroiled in negotiations over teacher evaluations, and will now face pressure from outside the district intended to force counter-productive teacher evaluation methods into use. Yesterday, I read this Los Angeles Times article about a lawsuit to be filed by an unnamed "group of parents and education advocates." The article notes that, "The lawsuit was drafted in consultation with EdVoice, a Sacramento-based group. Its board includes arts and education philanthropist Eli Broad, former ambassador Frank Baxter and healthcare company executive Richard Merkin." While the defendant in the suit is technically LAUSD, the real reason a lawsuit is necessary according to the article is that "United Teachers Los Angeles leaders say tests scores are too unreliable and narrowly focused to use for high-stakes personnel decisions." Note that, once again, we see a journalist telling us what the unions say and think, without ever, ever bothering to mention why, offering no acknowledgment that the bulk of the research and the three leading organizations for education research and measurement (AERA, NCME, and APA) say the same thing as the union (or rather, the union is saying the same thing as the testing expert). Upon what research does the other side base arguments in favor of using test scores and "value-added" measurement (VAM) as a legitimate measurement of teacher effectiveness? They never answer, but the debate somehow continues ad nauseum.
It's not that the plaintiffs in this case are wrong about the need to improve teacher evaluations. Accomplished California Teachers has published a teacher evaluation report that has concrete suggestions for improving evaluations as well, and we are similarly disappointed in the implementation of the Stull Act, which has been allowed to become an empty exercise in too many schools and districts.
The Chester Upland School District is more than $20 million in debt, its bank account is almost empty and it cannot afford to pay teachers past the end of this month.
To make matters worse, the local charter school, with which the district must divide its financing, is suing the district over unpaid bills.
The district's fiscal woes are the product of a toxic brew of budget cuts, mismanagement and the area's poverty. Its problems are compounded by the Chester Community Charter School, a nonprofit institution that is managed by a for-profit company and that now educates nearly half of the district's students.
The district sees the charter as a vampire, sucking up more than its fair share of scarce resources. The state, it says, is giving the charter priority over the district.
"It's not competition, it's just draining resources from the district," said Catherine Smith, a principal at Columbus Elementary, a district school. "It's a charter school on steroids."
Wisconsin's public school open enrollment period begins Monday, and for the first time, families will have three months to decide whether and where to enroll their students outside of their home school district.
For the Madison School District, the extra time could mean more families choosing to leave for other districts or virtual schools, though Superintendent Dan Nerad said it's too early to know what the affect will be.
"By the nature that there's an open window, that's likely to happen for us as well as other districts around the state," Nerad said.
Gov. Scott Walker signed legislation last week extending the official open enrollment period from three weeks in February to three months. Applications must be completed by April 30.
Proponents of the change, including school choice advocates and the virtual school industry, tout open enrollment as giving parents and students more control of their educational options.
Altogether, Nerad makes about 40 recommendations in six categories -- instruction, college and career readiness, culturally relevant practices, school environment, family engagement and staff diversity.
"The plan is based on the view that there isn't one thing alone the school district can do to eliminate achievement gaps," Nerad said. "We're attempting to be comprehensive with the proposal."
The plan's projected cost for next year is $12.4 million, which Nerad is recommending come from the district's untapped property taxing authority under state-imposed limits. The amount includes adding about 67.5 positions, including behavioral support staff, reading specialists and parent liaisons.
Some recommendations wouldn't take effect until future years. The district estimates they will cost $20.9 million in 2013-14 and $26.6 million by 2016-17. The district doesn't have the authority to raise property taxes by that amount, though Nerad said part of the discussion in coming months will involve whether the private and nonprofit sectors can help fund the strategies.
"We're going to have to struggle through the conversation of how to get it done," Nerad said.
While we are pleased that our advocacy over the last 19 months has resulted in the District developing a plan to address the gap, we are also mindful of history. Our organization has pushed hard for our public school system to embrace change, address the gap and expand educational opportunity many times before.
In the 1960s, Madison learned that a wide gap existed between black and white students in reading, math and high school completion in Madison's public schools. In the 1970s, the Urban League of Greater Madison reported that just 60% of black students were graduating from the city's public high schools. In the 1980s, ULGM released a widely reported study that found the average GPA for a black high school student attending the city's public high schools was 1.58 on a 4.00 scale, with 61% scoring below a 2.0 GPA. It also found that a disproportionate number of black students were enrolled in remedial math and science classes, and that black students were significantly over-represented in special education and school suspensions. Then, in the 1990s, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute issued a report that stated there were two school districts in MMSD, one that poorly served black children and one that served everyone else.
Today, just 48% of black and 56% of Latino students are graduating from high school. Just 1% of black and 7% of Latino high school seniors are academically ready for college. Nearly 40% of all black boys in middle school are enrolled in special education, and more than 60% of black and 50% of Latino high school students earn below a 2.0 GPA.
Over the years, several district-wide efforts have been tried. Unfortunately, many of these efforts have either been discontinued, unevenly implemented, ineffective, lacked the support of parents/community/teachers, or failed to go far enough to address the myriad needs of students, families, teachers and schools. Madison also has a well-documented history of not heeding the advice of leaders and educators of color or educational experts, and not investing in efforts to codify and replicate successful strategies employed by its most effective educators. MMSD also has not acted fast enough to address its challenges and rarely looks beyond its borders for strategies that have proven effective elsewhere in the country.
The stakes are higher now; too high to continue on our present course of incrementalism rooted in our fear of the unknown, fear of significant change, and fear of admitting that our view of Madison being the utopic experience of the Midwest and #1 city in the U.S. doesn't apply to everyone who lives here. We no longer have the luxury of time to figure out how to address the gap. We cannot afford to lose nearly 300 black, 200 Latino and an untold number of Southeast Asian and underprivileged white students each year from our public schools. And we cannot afford to see hundreds of students leave our school system each year for public and private schools outside of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
We must embrace strategies that work. We must also behave differently than we have in the past, and can no longer afford to be afraid of addressing intersection or race and poverty, and how they are playing out in our schools, social relationships and community, and impacting the educational success of our kids.
Furthermore, we need all hands on deck. Everyone in our community must play a role in shaping the self-image, expectations and outcomes of our children - in school, in the community and at home. Some children have parents who spend more quality time with their career and coworkers than with their family. Some children have a parent or relative who struggles to raise them alone. Some have parents who are out of work, under stress and struggling to find a job to provide for their family. And unfortunately, some children have parents who make bad decisions and/or don't care about their well-being. Regardless of the situation, we cannot allow the lack of quality parenting to be the excuse why we don't reach, teach, or hold children accountable and prepare them for the future.
As we prepare to review the Superintendent's plan, we have developed a rubric that will allow for an objective review of his proposal(s). The attached rubric, which you can access by clicking here, was developed and informed by members of the staff and Board of Director of ULGM, business and community leaders, and teachers and leading experts in the field of K-12 and higher education. The tool will be used by an independent Community Review Panel, organized by the Urban League. pver the next several weeks to vet the plan. The intent of this review is to ensure MMSD has an optimal plan for ensuring that all of the children it serves succeed academically and graduate from high school prepared for college and work.
Specifically, our reasons for establishing this rubric and a Community Review Panel are four-fold:
Develop an objective and comprehensive understanding of the plan and its many elements;
Objectively review the efficacy of the plan, its goals and objectives, and desired outcomes;
Formally communicate thoughts, concerns and ideas for supporting and/or improving the plan; and
Effectively engage the Madison community in supporting and strengthening its public schools.
We have high expectations of the Superintendent's plan. We hope for a bold, transformational, aggressive and concise plan, and stand ready to assist the Superintendent and his team in any way we can. We hope you will be standing their with us, with your arms outstretched and ready to uplift or babies - the next generation.
Here are things that impressed Desiree Pointer Mace when she and her husband were considering where to send their first child for school: The seventh and eighth graders at Woodlands School, 5510 W. Blue Mound Road, held the door for guests, said hello and shook hands. And you could ask a student in any class what he or she was working on and get a good answer.
Pointer Mace is not your typical parent. She is associate dean for graduate programs in education at Alverno College.
But if her credentials are distinctive, the goals she has for school for her children are not unusual: A place where they thrive and develop, both in academics and in personal traits.
Only some of the things she - or any good parent - want can be reduced to numbers or grades. A lot of important aspects of a school involve quality, not quantity. They can be put under the broad label of "school culture."
Show me a good school and I'll show you a place where kids not only get good grades and scores, but a place where relationships of all kinds matter and are healthy.
This is my third and (I hope) last column in a series on education. If things work as planned this is where I'll make some broad generalizations that piss-off a lot of people, incite a small riot in the comments section, after which we'll all feel better and switch to discussing the Facebook IPO. So let's get to it. I believe that education is broken in the U.S. and probably everywhere else, that it is incapable of fixing itself, and our only significant hope is to be found in the wisdom of Sharon Osbourne.
These conclusions are based on my experiences as a teacher, a parent, on the content of those two previous columns, one visit to OzzFest, and on my having this week read a couple books:
Mary Battaglia kindly forwarded this email sent to the Madison School Board:
The high school graduation racial gap has been in the Madison news as though it only affects our fair city. It does not require much research, something the local media has failed to do, to see this is a national concern. According to an analysis called "Schott 50 State Report on Black Males in Public Education," nationally only 47% of black males graduated from high school in 2007. (1) It has been reported that Madison's graduation rate for black males is 50%. Obviously a pathetic rate compared to the 87% for whites, but what has not been a part of the local conversation is how Madison compares in relationship to the rest of the nation, and perhaps figure out where black males are graduating at a higher rate, and why. The Schott's report, revealed two communities with large minority populations with much better graduation outcomes than the rest of the nation, Baltimore and Fort Bend, Texas. What MMSD should be looking into is what are these cities doing, and what curricula or community effort has made them successful? One interesting part of the gap for Madison and the state of Wisconsin is the high rate of whites graduating. While Wisconsin is the worst defender in the racial gap, the states total graduation rate is one the highest in the nation.
When you read various assessments of the "reason" for the gap nationally, the theories include the lack of financial investment, lack of good teachers, and the lack of community structure. While I find these proposals reasonable, I fail to understand how in this community they are relevant. MMSD spends well over $13,000 per student, lack the overwhelming urban problems of Milwaukee and Chicago, and have many fine teachers that somehow get non-minority students educated. These excuses ring hallow as to why MMSD has such a poor rate. What does ring true is we are not educating the population as it exist today. In the last 25 years the MMSD's minority rate has increased from 20% to one closer to 48%. (2) In the last 25 years MMSD has changed from a district of less than 25% free and reduced lunch to one that is closer to 50%. (3)Madison is still teaching to the population of 25 years ago, the students have changed, but the curriculum has not.
Perhaps, MMSD could improve the graduation rate for all students, with a significant change of focus. For example, MMSD's high school's emphasize 4 year college candidates when many of the students would do better in a 2 year or technology school focus. There has been an increased coordination with MATC, but what would be beneficial is to offer a dual graduation for students, so as they graduate from MMSD, they also have a 2 year degree or a certificate from MATC. This is a system that has been successful in a high school in North Carolina. (4) A student that wants to head to college still has that opportunity and perhaps a chance to make some money to support the effort. Perhaps, another way to improve graduation outcomes would include an overhaul of the summer school program. Currently, MMSD summer school staff are paid poorly, the programs focus is mostly on students that have flunked their classes and need a recovery grade, and the programs poor reputation have lead many staff to discourage students from participating. (5) Why not invest in a comprehensive retooling of the summer program that provides a better salary for staff, and includes enrichment, regular classes, as well as recovery options. Let's find a creative summer program with smaller class sizes and build a program that is the envy of the country and one that works. If summer school is going to be provided, then make it an awesome program, not just a warehouse for failing kids. Perhaps, as most research reveals, early education is a key component to better graduation outcomes, and the district finally is getting a 4K program up and running after a decade long battle with the union.
Madison Prep was an idea, but it is a unique group of students that would select to participate in such a rigorous program, which means an already motivated student or parents with very high expectations, both factors that frequently mean a student would do well anyway. MMSD needs to look at students that may not be that motivated or academically talented and assess what works to keep them engaged. The one thing MMSD has no control over is probably the most important issue for a students outcome. Research concludes the number one predictor of a students academic success is parental expectations. (6) Our schools cannot change parental expectations, however, they can change what a student expects. MMSD students need to expect a positive future, a purpose and a reason to stay in school. Not all kids will succeed but more than half of the black male students should. Let's develop a district that gives all the students the opportunity to succeed.
This statement is based on personal experience of having many staff, from middle school up to high school, discourage my daughter who struggles in math from attending summer school. I have also spoke to many parents with the same experience.
*** Of note the data of graduation rate is debated in academic circles as the data is not always standardized. Some data includes GED and 5 year rates others include only 4 year rates.
When Christopher Chamness entered the third grade last year, he began to get stomach aches before school. His mother, Edy, said the fire had gone out of a child who she said had previously gone joyfully to his classes.
One day, when he was bored in class, Christopher broke a pencil eraser off in his ear canal. It was the tipping point for Ms. Chamness, a former teacher, and she asked to observe his Austin elementary school classroom. What she saw was a "work sheet distribution center" aimed at preparing students for the yearly assessments that they begin in third grade and that school districts depend upon for their accountability ratings.
Arizonans cannot afford to wait for better education. Although Arizona is one of the fastest improving states in education, at the current rate, it would take decades for our students to catch up with those in the number one state in the country, Massachusetts.
Arizona students continue to lag their national and international peers in academic performance, high school graduation rates and degree attainment. With 74 percent of Arizona fourth graders below proficient in reading and 69 percent of our eighth graders below proficient in math, the gap is only widening between the preparedness of our graduates and the skills and knowledge Arizona employers require.
Fortunately, Tucson has many examples of bright spots that show all of us the potential for Arizona education. Tucson Unified School District's University High School was recently named a 2011 Higher Performing School by the National Center for Education Achievement; Vail Unified School District is nationally recognized for its use of technology to engage students and raise student achievement; BASIS Charter School, which started in Tucson and has grown to other parts of the state, was named a top high school by Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report; and the University of Arizona is ranked among the top public research universities in the nation. All of them embrace a culture of high expectations and are working to ensure all students graduate ready to compete and succeed in the 21st century global economy.
A state law that allows school districts to deny enrollment to students expelled by other districts is unconstitutional, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Dane County Circuit Court.
The suit was filed against the Oregon School District, which denied enrollment to a middle school student after the Janesville School District expelled him in November.
The student was expelled after serving suspensions last October for an alleged sexual assault and possession of tobacco on campus, according to the complaint. The student denied both charges, the complaint states.
Jeffrey Spitzer-Resnick, an attorney with Disability Rights Wisconsin. said his organization disapproves of the expulsion law, which has been on the books since 1997. The state constitution guarantees a free education to all students between the ages of 4 and 20.
The dangers which Peter Wilby points out (Does Gove realise he is empowering future dictators?, 31 January) were recognised 70 years ago. Unfortunately secretaries of state know very little history. The Oxford historian Dr Marjorie Reeves, when invited to be on the Central Advisory Council For Education (England) in 1946, was told by the permanent secretary, John Redcliffe-Maud, that the main duty of council members was "to be prepared to die at the first ditch as soon as politicians try to get their hands on education".
A war had been fought to prevent the consequences of such concentrated power. The 1944 Education Act, hammered out during the war years, created a "maintained system" of education as a balance of power between central government, local government responsibility, the voluntary bodies (mainly the churches) and the teachers. That balance is now disappearing fast, without the public debate it needs and with hardly a squeak from Labour. The existing education legislation refers to the fast-disappearing "maintained schools", leaving academies and free schools exposed, without the protection of the law, to whatever whimsical ideas are dreamt up by the present or future secretaries of state, to whom they are contracted with minimal accountability to parliament.
Professor Richard Pring
Green Templeton College, Oxford
• The removal of 3,100 vocational subjects from the school performance tables from 2014 (Report, 31 January) has major implications. It is certainly the case that "perverse incentives" were created by the league tables to use soft options to boost school league table positions - the phenomenon known as gaming. However, the cull to 70 accepted vocational subjects, with 55 allowed on the margins, essentially destroys vocational and technical education. Given that the old basis is the one for the current (2012 and 2013) tables, a whole raft of students are on worthless courses.
Unlike many of my colleagues and friends, I personally support the use of standardized testing results in education policy, even, with caution and in a limited role, in high-stakes decisions. That said, I also think that the focus on test scores has gone way too far and their use is being implemented unwisely, in many cases to a degree at which I believe the policies will not only fail to generate improvement, but may even risk harm.
In addition, of course, tests have a very productive low-stakes role to play on the ground - for example, when teachers and administrators use the results for diagnosis and to inform instruction.
Frankly, I would be a lot more comfortable with the role of testing data - whether in policy, on the ground, or in our public discourse - but for the relentless flow of misinterpretation from both supporters and opponents. In my experience (which I acknowledge may not be representative of reality), by far the most common mistake is the conflation of student and school performance, as measured by testing results.
I am running for the Madison School Board because I care about the state of our public schools and this community.
The facts are: I am employed at the Urban League of Greater Madison and spoke in support of Madison Prep as a parent and citizen. Am I running because Madison Prep was voted down? No. My focus is broader than the charter school proposal, but the Madison Prep vote was a defining moment in my decision to declare candidacy.
It became apparent to me as I sat in the auditorium that night that we can no longer afford to wait for our district to take the casual approach to the urgent matter of minority under-achievement. Our entire community is affected by the failure to do so.
Every child in this district -- from the at-risk, the middle-of-the-road student, to the most academically talented -- should have an equal opportunity to thrive in our school system. And here's the reality, Madison -- we are not delivering.
It's been hard for us to accept that we are a different community than we were 10 years ago, but we are. If we move beyond politically correct conversations about race and poverty, we'd readily realize that we cannot go about "business as usual."
An 11-year-old class-action lawsuit that has seen Milwaukee Public Schools battle a disability rights group, the state and the courts over how it finds and serves children with special needs came to a dramatic climax Friday when a federal appeals court ruled in favor of the district.
The decision, outlined in a dense 51-page ruling by a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, upholds all four areas of appeal the state's largest school district had sought - incuding the certification of the class itself.
By throwing out the class-certification order from a lower court, the judges subsequently vacated the liability and remedial orders the school district was under obligation to follow as well.
On Friday night, January 20th, my friend and fellow conservative blogger Mr. Chandler of Buckhorn Road zipped down to the Sacramento Convention Center to hear a talk by noted "education historian" Diane Ravitch. I didn't realize it was sponsored by a bunch of teachers unions; I thought it was going to be an intellectual talk by someone who used to agree with me but now has switched sides. I thought I was going to get some really good information that would "challenge my assumptions" and make me think. Instead, what I got was, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor, a liberal red-meat bacchanalia. As Mr. Chandler described it, we were "pilgrims in an unholy land".
Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Gregory Thornton believes the best way to deal with youth violence, at least in the short term, is to take troublemakers out of regular schools and place them into alternative schools.
We agree. But there are not enough seats for the growing number of chronically disruptive youth, which is why the School Board should grant Thornton's request, coming in April, to fund more of those seats.
During the past two weeks, more than 20 students were arrested for fighting and disorderly conduct at Washington and Madison High Schools. Several Milwaukee police officers were injured during the incidents, including one officer who was kicked in the face by an 18-year-old.
Over the years, MPS has limited the number of violent incidents. But Thornton said MPS has been limited to Band-Aid approaches, and the recent uptick in violence is ominous.
Last year alone, the district spent about $10 million on safety measures, which included having additional security guards and metal detectors on every door at some schools. For a cash-strapped school district, that money would be better used on instruction.
It is easy to look at the upcoming Spring elections and focus solely on the potential recall of Gov. Scott Walker. It has become a national issue, and millions of dollars from both Wisconsin and out-of-state are being thrown into the election. But there is another important choice to make on the ballot: two candidates for Madison school board representatives.
While most school district elections are fairly boring and forgettable, this year's vote could help seal the fate of Madison Preparatory Academy. The proposed charter school is aimed at helping lower-income students gain access to college-prep courses. It is championed by Urban League of Greater Madison President Kaleem Caire, but has not gained his level of enthusiasm in the rest of the city. Voters should support Mary Burke and Nichelle Nichols who have pledged support for the school.
You work immense hours and subject yourself to scathing criticism all in the pursuit of better serving children. I know a few of you--and without fail you are all passionate about your work. In short, I'm a fan. So know that I'm not writing this letter to attack anyone--rather, I aim to offer advice, which I hope some of you accept.
In the following letter I aim to convince you of this: the single most important reform strategy you can undertake is to increase charter school quality and market share in your city--with the ultimate aim of turning your district into a charter school district.
In other words: rid yourself of the notion that your current opinions on curriculum, teacher evaluation, technology, or anything else will be the foundation for dramatic gains in student achievement. If history tells us anything, they will not be:
The U.S. Education Department is probing complaints that Harvard University and Princeton University discriminate against Asian-Americans in undergraduate admissions.
The department's Office for Civil Rights is investigating a complaint it received in August that Harvard rejected an Asian- American candidate for the current freshman class based on race or national origin, a department spokesman said. The agency is looking into a similar August 2011 allegation against Princeton as part of a review begun in 2008 of that school's handling of Asian-American candidates, said the spokesman, who declined to be identified, citing department policy.
Both complaints involve the same applicant, who was among the top students in his California high school class and whose family originally came from India, according to the applicant's father, who declined to be identified.
Today we learned from Bloomberg that the U.S. Education Department is investigating complaints that Harvard University and Princeton University discriminate against Asian-Americans in undergraduate admissions. It is a common belief among Asian-American families that their children are held to higher academic standards than applicants from other ethnic groups, including whites. Such practices were openly acknowledged as a result of internal investigations at universities like Berkeley and Stanford in the 1980s and 1990s. Have they now been corrected?
Statistics seem to support a claim of widespread discrimination across most of elite higher education. For example, in comprehensive statistics compiled as part of Duke University's Campus Life and Learning project (as reported in a recent analysis by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono and collaborators), Asian-American students averaged 1457 out of 1600 on the math and reading portion of the SAT, compared to 1416 for whites, 1347 for Hispanics and 1275 for blacks. There is every reason to believe that a similar pattern holds at nearly all elite universities in America, with some notable exceptions such as Caltech. In fact, Duke may be one of the mildest offenders when it comes to Asian-American admissions: with the goal of increasing its overall student quality, Duke has reportedly been more friendly recently to Asian-American applicants than traditional powers such as Harvard and Princeton.
In the Wild West of college admissions, there is no Data Sheriff.
The latest reminder arrived on Monday when Claremont McKenna College announced that a senior administrator had resigned after admitting to falsely reporting SAT statistics since 2005. In an e-mail to the campus, Pamela B. Gann, the college's president, said an internal review found that scores for each fall's freshman class had been "generally inflated by an average of 10-20 points each." The apparent perpetrator was Richard C. Vos, long the college's dean of admissions and financial aid, who has resigned from the college.
The announcement has shaken those who work on both sides of the admissions process. In the span of 24 hours, Mr. Vos, described by several colleagues as an engaging and thoughtful dean, has become a symbol of the pressures that come with top-level admissions jobs. As one mid-career dean said on Tuesday, "I just keep thinking about how much pressure an experienced and mature admissions professional must be under to do whatever he did."
Numerous academic studies have shown that income inequality in the U.S. over the 20th century exhibits a U-shape. After reaching a peak in the 1920s, it fell during the Great Depression and World War II and rebounded mainly in the 1980s and 1990s.1 The rebound has been attributed to various economic factors, such as globalization, immigration, the growth of super-star salaries, and the computer revolution. However, these factors might better be described as the normal outcomes of a growing economy, according to Adam Smith's idea that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. The resurgence of inequality has also been attributed to tax policy, particularly the reduction of top marginal rates on personal income from 94 percent in 1945 to 28 percent in 1988.2
The first decade of the 21st century does not exhibit the same trend. Based on the most recent IRS data, from 2009, income inequality has fluctuated considerably since 2000 but is now at about the level it was in 1997. Thus, the Bush-era tax cuts (which had provisions benefitting both high- and low-income taxpayers) did not lead to increased income inequality. By contrast, inequality rose 12 percent between 1993 and 2000, following two tax rate increases on high-income earners. Thus, changes in inequality over the last two decades appear to be driven more by the business cycle than by tax policy.
Madison Public Schools' Superintendent Nerad's request community input into his plan to eliminate the long-standing Racial Achievement Gap
via email:
Below is a letter from Dr. Daniel Nerad, Superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District. Please show up on Monday, February 6 to learn about his plan and register to participate in an input session. We need you to exercise your voice, share your view and speak to our children's needs. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.
-- "Letter from Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963
February 2, 2012
RE: Invitation to attend Board of Education meeting on Monday, February 6, 2012
Dear Community Leader:
As you may know, this Monday, February 6, 2012, we are poised to present to the Board of Education a significant and system-wide plan to close the achievement gaps in the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Building Our Future: A Plan for Eliminating Gaps in MMSD Student Achievement
We invite you to attend Monday's Board of Education workshop at the Fitchburg Public Library, 5530 Lacy Road in Fitchburg beginning at 6:00 p.m. This workshop is for presentation purposes only. Members of the public will not have the opportunity to speak. However, Monday's workshop marks the beginning of a two-month, community-wide engagement process. We invite parents, students, and residents concerned about the future of our children to join one or more of the many sessions held throughout Madison to learn about the achievement gaps in the MMSD and discuss and provide input into the plan.
I have greatly appreciated your concern, commitment, and willingness to challenge us to provide the kind of education that every child deserves and is due. Together, we must eliminate our achievement gaps.
The Board of Education workshop on Monday, February 6th is just the beginning. Please consider participating in one of the upcoming information and input sessions. To register for a session, go to: www.mmsd.org/inputsession
Beginning Tuesday, February 7, go to: www.mmsd.org/thefuture to read more about the Plan.
Sincerely,
Daniel A. Nerad
Superintendent of Schools
Reprinted from a letter sent to community leaders today by Superintendent Nerad. We are sharing this to inform you and help the Madison Metropolitan School District get the word out. We have not yet seen the plan and therefore, this email should not viewed as an endorsement of it. We will reserve judgment until after the plan is released, we have had a chance to review it, and the public has responded.
Question 23 has implications for the future of our public schools, along with the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school:
Given Act 10's negative Impact on Collective Bargaining Agreements, will you introduce and vote for a motion to adopt the Collective Bargaining Agreements (182 page PDF Document) negotiated between MTI and The Madison Metropolitan School District as MMSD policy?
I suspect that at least 60% of Wisconsn school districts will adopt their current teacher contracts as "handbooks". The remainder will try different approaches. Some will likely offer a very different environment for teachers.
lot is riding on Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad's upcoming plan for improving low-income, minority student achievement.
The plan is billed as a blueprint for addressing an intractable, divisive issue in Madison, and it could also factor into the upcoming School Board discussion of Nerad's future in Madison.
The United Way of Dane County has made closing the achievement gap one of its primary issues for more than 15 years through the Schools of Hope tutoring program. But president Leslie Howard said the recent debate over the proposed Madison Prepatory Academy charter school has drawn more public attention to the issue than ever before.
"I don't want to say something so grandiose that everything's at stake, but in some ways it feels like that," Howard said.
Wisconsin is fortunate to have many fine K-12 schools educating our young people. The quality of this state's educational system is among the best in the United States, and the same can be said for Wisconsin teachers.
Those accolades notwithstanding, there is one area in which Wisconsin schools should consider focusing some of their educational muscle: personal financial literacy.
More than ever before, our children -- by the time they graduate from high school -- need to be able to cope in the increasingly fast-paced world of financial services.
Today, many young people rarely handle cash, opting instead for the use of debit cards, credit cards and smartphones to make purchases. Those who have jobs probably never see a paycheck because most employers use direct deposit for their payrolls. And, most teens probably have never read the fine print of the contract for their mobile telecommunications devices.
States are now working intently on developing plans that will make new, common standards a reality. A recent report from Education First and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center concludes that that all but one of the 47 states adopting the Common Core State Standards is now in the implementation phase. Seven states have fully upgraded professional development, curriculum materials, and evaluation systems in preparation for the 2014-2015 school year.
Nary a word has been spoken about how to prepare teachers to implement common standards appropriately in the early childhood years. Although the emphasis on content-rich instruction in ways that builds knowledge is an important one, standards groups have virtually ignored the early years when these critical skills first begin to develop.
Young children are eager to learn about the sciences, arts, and the world around them. And, as many early childhood teachers recognize, we need to provide content-rich instruction that is both developmentally appropriate and highly engaging to support students' learning.
Let's cut right to the chase -- I have about the same chance of being picked up by the Boston Red Sox as a utility player as President Obama does of having his proposals to control college costs get through Congress this year. But looking at what the President proposed on Friday (in a raucous speech at the University of Michigan) through the lens of short-term Capitol Hill feasibility misses the significance of what Obama is up to. Just a few years ago, the ideas the President hinted at in last week's State of the Union and is now describing in more depth were considered fringe topics, basically the province of a few wonks and reform-minded policymakers. Talk of improving productivity in higher education bordered on blasphemy. Now the President of the United States is on board.
Obama wants to provide more data to parents and students about what colleges cost and how their students do after graduation. He also wants to change how federal aid works in order to create incentives for schools to keep costs down and keep interest on federal student loans low. Most noteworthy is his attempt to catalyze innovations at colleges and universities to improve productivity and encourage states to reform higher education through a grant competition similar to his Race to the Top program that has led many states to adopt K-12 reforms in order to win federal dollars. More specifics on the higher-ed competition will accompany the President's budget request in February.
"And I tell you this: you do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it's usually called 'assault' - not 'leadership'."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, as told to Emmet John Hughes, for "Re-Viewing the Cold War: Domestic Factors and Foreign Policy in the East-West Confrontation"
Last year, someone said to me: "Laurie, I heard you're a nut job. So tell me, who are you, really?" I said: "You've heard me talk. What do you think?" The person chuckled and said: "I kind of like you. I think you care."
I do care. I have a fierce protective instinct toward the community, the country, and the children. I'm a patriot, but no politician. I'm not interested in making money or gaining political allies through District 81, the union or the media. I was trained as an old-style reporter, with an eye to supportable facts and a determination to know and report the truth. I'm not a natural extrovert, but five years of dealing with administrators and board directors have turned me into a fighter. I'm not a liar, and I'm no quitter, and I don't know how to do just the bare minimum of anything (except dusting).
We're teachers who believe that teacher evaluation, including the use of reliable test data, can be good for students and for teachers. Yes, yes, we know we're not supposed to exist. But we do, and there are a lot more of us.
In February the membership of United Teachers Los Angeles will vote on a teacher-led initiative urging union leaders to negotiate a new teacher evaluation system for L.A. Unified. The vote will allow teachers' voices to be heard above the din of warring political figures.
Although LAUSD and UTLA reached a contract agreement in December that embraced important school reforms, they haven't yet addressed teacher evaluation. Good teaching is enormously complex, and no evaluation system will capture it perfectly. But a substantive teacher-led evaluation system will be far better for students and teachers than what we have now, a system in which virtually all teachers receive merely "satisfactory" ratings from administrators.
These are interesting times to be a Stanford professor. Or to stop being a Stanford professor, as the case may be...
Last week, news broke that Professor Sebastian Thrun would be stepping down from teaching at Stanford to launch an online learning company called Udacity. Udacity is an outgrowth of his incredibly popular Artificial Intelligence class offered through Stanford last fall.
Now it appears that two other Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng (Ng taught last term's massive Machine Learning class) have started their own company, Coursera, one that offers a very similar service as Thrun's.
According to the startup's jobs page, the two are "following up on the success of these courses to scale up online education efforts to provide a high quality education to the world. Out platform delivers complete courses where students are not only watching web-based lectures, but also actively participating, doing exercises, and deeply learning the material."
Education is undergoing a revolution (curricular deliver, opportunities for students, high and low cost delivery). Will Madison be part of it? We certainly have the resources and infrastructure. Will intransigence reign?
Newt Gingrich wants the U.S. to return to the moon, but as challenges go he has nothing on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's school reform plans.
Mr. Jindal wants to create America's largest school voucher program, broadest parental choice system, and toughest teacher accountability regime--all in one legislative session. Any one of those would be a big win, but all three could make the state the first to effectively dismantle a public education monopoly.
Louisiana is already one of 12 states (including Washington, D.C.) that offer school vouchers, but its program benefits fewer than 2,000 students in New Orleans. Governor Jindal would extend eligibility to any low-income student whose school gets a C, D or F grade from state administrators. That's almost 400,000 students--a bit more than half the statewide population--who could escape failing schools for private or virtual schools, career-based programs or institutions of higher education.
In 2011 Kaleem Caire, President and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, reintroduced the topic of the Academic Achievement Gap that exists in theMadison Metropolitan School District (MMSD). As reported, just 48% of African American students and 56% of Latino students graduated on time from MMSD in 2010.
Just as staggering as these statistics is the fact that until the conversation was reintroduced, a large majority of our community was not aware that the academic achievement gap even existed. Why is that? Four more important questions may be: How did we get here?What have we proposed before? Why has this problem persisted? AND - What should we do now? To answer these questions, and many more, the Urban League of Greater Madison would like to invite you to participate in a community forum moderated by Derrell Connor.
The Milwaukee School Board is once again ignoring Superintendent Gregory Thornton's request to explore privatizing a portion of the school lunch program. And that's just another sign that the board is more concerned with saving union food service jobs than with saving money that could be better spent on educating kids.
The board and Thornton have been down this road before. In his latest proposal, Thornton asked the board to approve the establishment of a leased commissary. The board voted down the proposal, 5-4, in favor of a central kitchen run by district staff. They would not even consider the possibility of looking at other options to see if those would be more cost effective.
In a cash-strapped district, this makes absolutely no sense.
"I was just talking about privatizing a piece of it," a frustrated Thornton said. "I was not talking about how to transport the food or service the food."
The board appears to be against exploring any food service options that would eliminate union jobs. Currently, the food service workforce includes 48 temporary employees and more than 100 part-time employees. Administrators say they have had a hard time filling food service jobs.
Wisconsin's science standards--unchanged since 1998, in spite of much earlier criticism, ours included--are simply worthless. No real content exists to evaluate.
In lieu of content, the "authors" have passed the buck by merely citing unelaborated references to the now outdated National Science Education Standards (NSES). Rather than using the NSES as building blocks for a comprehensive set of science standards, however, Wisconsin has used them as an escape hatch to avoid hard work and careful thought
Madison Schools Superintendent Dan Nerad says the state already has plans to review its standards in all areas.
"I think we have to be cautious not to look at the current state because it is very much in flux right now," Nerad says. "Things are going to change. it doesn't makes sense to look backwards as it does to look forward."
In his State of the Union address, President Obama called on every state to require students to stay in school until they graduate or turn 18. "When students don't walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma," he said.
The White House cited studies that showed how raising the compulsory schooling age helps prevent kids from leaving school. And while some of that is true, some of it is also wishful thinking.
Sixty-two New York City schools are on a path to be closed or otherwise re-shaped this year. Here's a score card to help you keep track of what schools are affected and how.
This post lists the 19 schools that the Department of Education wants to phase out, along with the six that will have their middle school grades removed (that's called truncation).
Until Feb. 9, when the Panel for Educational Policy votes on the changes, hearings are going on almost every night at the schools that are to be phased out or truncated. You can find the calendar of hearings here.
It was Jamie Oliver's toughest challenge... getting US youngsters to ditch junk food and eat a healthier diet.
But six months after he convinced an LA school to swap fattening burgers for low-calorie salads, his revamped menu is - literally - being binned.
Hundreds of students at West Adams Preparatory High School, where his hit show Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution was filmed, are refusing to eat his cuisine.
Instead, bins are overflowing with the TV chef's veg curries, quinoa salads, Thai noodles and wheatbread burgers.
She doesn't buy books for her classes if she can help it. She works two jobs, sometimes donating plasma for extra cash. She doesn't own a car, shops at Goodwill and rarely goes out to eat.
Despite all of that, UW-Madison student Dena Ohlinger, 23, could no longer afford tuition as a full-time student and cut back to part-time last year. Ohlinger, a fifth-year senior from a small town in southeastern Wisconsin, said her debt is ballooning and she worries she is a financial burden on her parents. It is a struggle each semester to pay tuition.
"I've felt this over and over again, if I was realistic about my financial situation and was trying to make a responsible decision, it would not include college," she said.
Ohlinger is not alone. The cost of college has far out-paced inflation over the past five decades, making it harder for students to work their way through college and come out debt-free, or even with manageable debt. Tuition, books and living expenses for an in-state student living on an adequate but moderate budget is estimated at $22,542 at UW-Madison for 2011-12. It was $1,430 in 1960, which equates to $10,867 in 2011 dollars, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Janesville Gazette reported last week that principals at some of the city's public elementary school are attributing some major positive academic and behavioral trends to a relatively minor change: moving recess from after to before lunch.
I remember the post-lunch recess -- chasing girls, pick-up football, the bloody nose I gave my best friend.
In fact, I remember school-day and school-year schedules being much the same as the ones my 5-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son experience at their Madison public elementary school -- from the timing of recess, to summer vacation, to days off to honor such notables as Polish-born Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski (keep in mind this was the Chicago area, which has a large Polish population).
I suppose that could be because at some point decades ago, the public education establishment discovered the perfect academic schedule and, well, why tinker with something that works?
Janesville's experience suggests something else, though: that post-lunch recess is just another public education tradition among a slew of public education traditions that could benefit from a fresh pair of eyes.
Madison Preparatory Academy doesn't have the money to open as a private school next fall and its future is in the hands of the Madison School Board, according to a lead supporter of the charter school proposal.
Supporters still want to open Madison Prep in the fall but haven't been able to raise about $1.2 million needed to run the school because its future beyond next year remains uncertain, Madison Prep board chairman David Cagigal said last week; moreover, a key donor said her support is contingent on School Board backing.
Cagigal said the private school option was never intended to be more than an interim plan before the school opened as a public charter school. One of the most common reasons charter schools fail is lack of funding, he added.
"We can't approach these donors unless we mitigate the risk," Cagigal said. "The only way we can do that is seek a 2013 vote."
Cagigal acknowledged that if the School Board doesn't vote on opening Madison Prep as a charter school in 2013, "then we may have to wait."
Charter schools: The Oakland school board rejected the charter school petitions submitted by the faculties of ASCEND and Learning Without Limits, public elementary schools in the Fruitvale area that want to secede from the school district. The district's charter schools office recommended that the board approve the request, but Superintendent Tony Smith took a different stance, pointing to the financial investment the district has made in the schools since they opened.
This section of a staff resolution seems to sum up the superintendent's position: "Whereas, the District cannot succeed at its strategic plan to create a Full Service Community School District that serves the whole child ... if after millions of dollars in investment, individual schools that have achieved because of the District's investment can separate and opt out of the District, with the consequence that the District loses its collective identity as a school system serving children in all neighborhoods in
For the first time this year, LAUSD has prepared reports for teachers that rate their effectiveness. When I received an email saying I could now view my own personal "Average Growth over Time" report, I opened it with a combination of trepidation, resignation and indignation.
First, the indignation. It is, I think, the key factor that has kept me teaching past the five-year mark, when most new teachers quit the profession. I am in my sixth year of teaching after a nearly 20-year career as a professional writer. I know that I am smart, hardworking and competent, and despite the many frustrations of teaching in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I have refused to throw in the towel -- as so many do.
Indignation is also what fueled my reaction when I saw the rating the school district sent. It showed me to be on the low side of average for high school English teachers in the district.
As state after state rewrites their education laws in line with the mandates from Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver process, the teaching profession is being redefined. Teachers will now pay the price - be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students' test scores. Under NCLB it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers to NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label.
This revelation came to me as I read the Score Card on Education prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), authored by Dr. Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips. This is a remarkable document. It provides their report on where each of the states stands on the education "reform" that has become the hallmark of corporate philanthropies, the Obama administration and governors across the nation.
It begins with a histrionic comparison between the struggle over our schools and the Battle of Britain in the Second World War. The authors write:
The recent controversy over the Urban League of Greater Madison's proposal for a Madison Preparatory Academy has been framed primarily as a local story pitting contending interests within the city. The charter school's promoters, supporters and mainstream media have portrayed the ULGM's CEO and President, Kaleem Caire as the Prep's public champion and native son returned home on a mission to help "close the achievement gap," the racial disparities in Madison's schools.
But Caire's well-established national ties, spanning more than a decade, to numbers of conservative foundations, think tanks and individuals bent on privatizing public school coffers, creating for-profit schools, and destroying teachers' unions, certainly suggest that there is more to the story.
Caire has consistently dismissed any suggestion of his links to various right-wing efforts. On occasion he has admitted some distant connections but asserted his independence by saying, "They have their agenda, but we have ours." Lately, he has taken to waving off critic's references to such ties as nothing more than "guilt-by-association crap" or part of a "conspiracy" and "whisper campaign" coming from those trying to discredit the Mad Prep Academy project. However, a readily traceable history reveals some truth to the charges.
School principals, including some who back more rigorous review of teachers, are balking at education reforms required by Race to the Top. New teacher evaluations are all-consuming, they say.
Sharon McNary believes in having tough teacher evaluations.
But these days, the Memphis principal finds herself rushing to cram in what amounts to 20 times the number of observations previously required for veteran teachers - including those she knows are excellent - sometimes to the detriment of her other duties.
"I don't think there's a principal that would say they don't agree we don't need a more rigorous evaluation system," says Ms. McNary, who is president of the Tennessee Principals Association as well as principal at Richland Elementary. "But now it seems that we've gone to [the opposite] extreme."
In New York, which is also beginning to implement a new teacher evaluation system this year, many principals are even less constrained in their opinion
ONLY 21 states require students to attend high school until they graduate or turn 18. The proposal President Obama announced on Tuesday night in his State of the Union address -- to make such attendance compulsory in every state -- is a step in the right direction, but it would not go far enough to reduce a dropout rate that imposes a heavy cost on the entire economy, not just on those who fail to obtain a diploma.
In 1970, the United States had the world's highest rate of high school and college graduation. Today, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we've slipped to No. 21 in high school completion and No. 15 in college completion, as other countries surpassed us in the quality of their primary and secondary education.
On primary and secondary education, Obama essentially advocated three directives: raise the dropout age to eighteen, continue his Race to the Top program, and loosen the standardized restrictions on teachers. Obama is right to say that the minimum requirements set by No Child Left Behind, in the ten years the law has been in effect, have done little to shrink the achievement gap, and to consider an alternative. But it's too early to know if Race to the Top is the right one. The first, sufficiently rigorous evaluation will begin in March, and will only be completed and released two years later. He's also right to say that "teachers matter," and that good ones ought to have the freedom and income to do their job well.
That education cannot be treated in a bubble is an important truth that should not be missed. And yet, while the President's diagnosis--even with its simplifications--was accurate, his prescriptions were light on details. "Challenges remain," he said, but "we know how to solve them." Do we? It was not even clear how to resolve tension between his stated desire not to confine educators to "teaching to the test" and the way the Race to the Top rewards testing, aside from handing it off to individual states. Injunctions like "more competition" miss the wide scope of the problem. Indeed, in a country where the fault lines in education align so neatly along economic, racial, and geographic divisions, there's almost an urge to accept rhetorical shows of confidence, and not look too far beyond them.
What if you suddenly found out that half of the eighth-graders in Wisconsin, all kids you thought were highly rated readers, really didn't merit being called proficient? That instead of four out of five being pretty decent in math, it was really two out of five?
You better start thinking how you'd react because it's likely that is what's coming right at us. That's how dramatic a proposal last week by the state Department of Public Instruction is.
As parents, teachers, school leaders, politicians, community leaders and taxpayers, will we be motivated to do better? Will we see the need for change? Will we rise to the occasion? Or will we settle for being discouraged and basically locked into what we've come to expect?
Here's what's going on: With Congress failing to pass a revision, originally due in 2007, of the education law known as No Child Left Behind, the U.S. Department of Education has begun issuing waivers from the enforcement program of the increasingly dysfunctional law. Wisconsin wants a waiver - it's one of the things people such as Republican Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic-oriented Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers agree on. So a task force developed a proposal. People have until Feb. 3 to react to the proposal and the application is to be submitted Feb. 21.
The plan will change a lot of important dynamics of what students and schools in Wisconsin are expected to accomplish. It calls for publicly rating all schools on a 1 to 100 point scale, with student outcomes as a key factor. Schools that score low will face orders to improve and, possibly, closing. And that goes for every school with students whose education is paid for with public dollars - in other words, private schools in the voucher programs for Milwaukee and Racine kids are included.
Overall, the waiver plan means we are at the point where Wisconsin gets serious about raising expectations for student achievement. Wisconsin is regarded as having one of the lowest bars in the U.S. for rating a student as proficient. No more, the proposal says.
....
Eighth-grade reading: Using the WKCE measuring stick, 86% of students were rated as "advanced" or "proficient." Using the NAEP measuring stick, it was 35% - a 51-point difference. At least as vivid: Using the WKCE measure, 47% of eighth-graders were "advanced," the top bracket. Using the NAEP measure, it was 3%. Three percent! In other words, only a handful of kids statewide would be labeled advanced under the new system, not the nearly half we're used to.
Fourth-grade reading: On the WKCE scale, 82% were proficient or advanced. On the NAEP scale, it was 33%.
A substantial improvement in academic standards is warranted and possibly wonderful, assuming it happens and avoids being watered down. The rightly criticized WKCE was an expensive missed opportunity.
UW campuses issued identically worded denials of our requests for course syllabi, which is one of the many sources of information we use to rate programs for the National Review of teacher preparation programs. They argue that "syllabi are not public records because they are subject to copyright" and therefore do not have to be produced in response to an open records request.
We believe that the University's reading of the law is flawed. We are engaged in research on the quality of teacher preparation programs, and so our request falls squarely within the fair use provision of copyright law. What's more, these documents were created at public institutions for the training of public school teachers, and so should be subject to scrutiny by the public.
Public higher education institutions in Wisconsin and Georgia--and possibly as many as five other states--will not participate voluntarily in a review of education schools now being conducted by the National Council for Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report, according to recent correspondence between state consortia and the two groups.
In response, NCTQ and U.S. News are moving forward with plans to obtain the information from these institutions through open-records requests.
In letters to the two organizations, the president of the University of Wisconsin system and the chancellor of Georgia's board of regents said their public institutions would opt out of the review, citing a lack of transparency and questionable methodology, among other concerns.
Formally announced in January, the review will rate education schools on up to 18 standards, basing the decisions primarily on examinations of course syllabuses and student-teaching manuals.
Lake Wobegon has nothing on the UW-Madison School of Education. All of the children in Garrison Keillor's fictional Minnesota town are "above average." Well, in the School of Education they're all A students.
The 1,400 or so kids in the teacher-training department soared to a dizzying 3.91 grade point average on a four-point scale in the spring 2009 semester.
This was par for the course, so to speak. The eight departments in Education (see below) had an aggregate 3.69 grade point average, next to Pharmacy the highest among the UW's schools. Scrolling through the Registrar's online grade records is a discombobulating experience, if you hold to an old-school belief that average kids get C's and only the really high performers score A's.
Much like a modern-day middle school honors assembly, everybody's a winner at the UW School of Education. In its Department of Curriculum and Instruction (that's the teacher-training program), 96% of the undergraduates who received letter grades collected A's and a handful of A/B's. No fluke, another survey taken 12 years ago found almost exactly the same percentage.
Steve Jobs didn't think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It's worth remembering that in the wake of last week's breathless coverage of Apple's new iBooks platform, which the company promises will radically change how students use and experience textbooks. Under Apple's plan, companies and individuals will be able to self-publish textbooks, ideally creating a wider array of content. Students will be able to download and use these books on their iPad much like they would use a regular textbook -- including highlighting passages, making notes and pulling out passages or chapters that are especially important to them. Apple says it also plans to cap the price of textbooks available through iBooks at $14.99, a significant departure from the price of many textbooks now.
Critics were quick to pounce that Apple wasn't being revolutionary enough. Former school superintendent and current ed-tech investor Tom Vander Ark chided Apple for not thinking past textbooks, which he considers hopelessly 20th century. Others worried that Apple's real goal wasn't to open up the textbook industry but to control it and profit from it through restrictive licensing agreements and a platform that dominates the market. I'm sure the for-profit company's shareholders will be horrified at that news.
Education was the topic of discussion in northeast Louisiana Thursday as Governor Bobby Jindal and the state's new Superintendent of Education John White visited the area.
Jindal spoke to the Monroe Chamber of Commerce about what he called a "critical time" in Louisiana's history and the role his aggressive education reform package will play in the state's continuing journey to improvement.
White joined Jindal at the Monroe Chamber of Commerce but spent most of his visit in area schools observing teachers and students.
First Niagara Bank has pledged $3 million to support a nonprofit group that is representing business interests in Connecticut's education reform debate.
The money will go to Hartford's Connecticut Council for Education Reform (CCER), which is led by a group of prominent Connecticut business leaders including former Hartford Financial Services Group CEO Ramani Ayer, and Peyton Patterson, the former chief executive of NewAllinace Bank, which was acquired by First Niagara Bank last year.
The Connecticut Council for Education Reform also unveiled Thursday its education agenda for the upcoming legislative session, which includes urging the state to adopt:
--Teacher and leader employment and retention policies that attract the highest quality professionals and insist upon effectiveness as defined by their ability to demonstrate improvement in student performance, not seniority, as the measure of success defined by redesigned evaluation systems.
Idaho's controversial new school reform laws gutted teacher associations' collective bargaining powers, but local union leaders say they can still work effectively with their district administration to help shape policies.
"This (legislation) basically said to districts that if you don't want to work with teachers in these areas, you can say by law you don't have to do it anymore," Boise Education Association President Andrew Rath said. "But I think they've found that districts want to work with the teachers."
Association leaders Sam Stone of Caldwell and Luke Franklin of Meridian agreed.
"We can always talk to our district," Franklin said. "Our relationship isn't really 'us against them.'"
The Students Come First laws, unveiled by schools Superintendent Tom Luna one year ago and approved by the 2011 Legislature, limits teacher contract negotiations to the issues of pay and benefits and eliminates working conditions and other issues from master contracts.
A committee tasked with mapping out the controversial introduction of compulsory national education in all Hong Kong government schools has suggested it be delayed until as late as 2015.
The Education Bureau last year proposed introducing the curriculum into primary schools as early as September this year, and into secondary schools in the 2013-14 academic year.
However, a source said the Moral and National Education Ad Hoc Committee had now proposed postponing full introduction of the subject - which critics have labelled as brainwashing - until the 2015-16 academic year.
The source said schools would be given three years to get ready for the new curriculum, and it would not specifically cover sensitive topics such as the June 4, 1989, crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Schools could start teaching the subject before then if they were ready.
n recent listening sessions with Madison parents, I heard how we can improve our schools, what we can be really proud of and stories about our wonderful teachers. In these discussions and in others, people have talked about addressing the racial achievement gap and shared concerns about Madison Prep.
For the 12 years I have been involved in Madison schools, I have been championing education and addressing the racial achievement gap. An East High teacher and I co-founded the AVID/TOPS program, which I also supported financially and continue to co-chair. This program has increased the number of students graduating and going on to post-secondary education. But AVID TOPS alone is not enough. We need to do more.
When Madison Prep was discussed last fall, it was the only proposal put on the table in the last five years to significantly address the racial achievement gap. At that time the teachers union and the planners of Madison Prep were in agreement that the school would run with Madison School District employees, union teachers and under the leadership of the district (as an instrumentality). A major concern raised was that Madison Prep would pull resources needed by existing schools.
Learning to Write Teaches Westerly Students Science "Therefore, in conclusion, learning to write promotes scientific thinking. Other districts would do well to take notice."
Back in December 2009, excited 4th graders at Westerly's State Street School (http://sss.westerly.k12.ri.us/) sat down to take a practice science test. Like little sports jocks, the kids approached the task as if it were training for the big game coming in the spring, the statewide science NECAP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NECAP).
In 2008, the whole Westerly district had performed so poorly on that test that teachers actually volunteered their time to form a K-12 Science Task Force focused on redeeming their sullied academic reputation. (See last week's column about this Task Force (link to my column from last week) .)
Then, insult to injury, in 2009 State Street's scores tanked again.
The heat was on. State Street had already started implementing the Task Force's recommendations, including its strong emphasis on teaching writing.
Wait. Writing? That's English, not science. But more on this in a moment.
Westerly's students had struggled particularly with the "inquiry" part of the NECAP, where kids to do a hands-on task and draw conclusions from what they see in front of them.
State Street's Principal Audrey Faubert says, "Science (NECAP) is only given at the 4th grade (and later at 8th and 11th), so K-3 weren't exposed to the rigors of testing. We decided to give all the kids an inquiry task to complete. And the faculty also took some of the released test items from the RIDE website. (http://www.ride.ri.gov/assessment/necap_releaseditems.aspx) Even though they'd been teaching inquiry with the science kits (http://www.uri.edu/hss/education/GEMSNET-URI/index.html) , it was interesting for the teachers to be on the other side of a test."
But the spotlight's glare was on those 4th graders.
Faubert smiled sadly, "The room was buzzing. The kids thought they did fantastic."
Working in pairs, the school's entire teaching staff scored the kids' work. The results were enough to induce clinical depression.
But as it turns out, the school's good efforts hadn't quite paid off yet. The Task Force was onto a good thing when they decided writing was key to learning science. State Street's instruction had only just started to take root.
Here's the problem: Old science was about answers. When a test asks a question like: "How does wind change sand dunes?" somewhere in the science textbook was an answer that the kid was supposed to have memorized.
New science is about thinking and reasoning. The way Faubert puts it is: "The (NECAP) science test is a thinking test, not a knowledge test. Science isn't about recall any more, but about synthesizing information." New science poses essential questions, such as the sand dunes example, but now the kids need to derive the answer themselves, by sorting through data. Teachers provide techniques, tools, research methods, and experiences. But like scientists themselves, students must do their own research and figure out what their discoveries mean.
Writing is always the product of thinking. Writing forces a kid to organize her thoughts to be expressive and communicate clearly.
Middle-school principal Paula Fusco says "Prior to the work of the Task Force, we'd left writing up to the English teacher. But whatever the kids did or didn't know, they weren't able to communicate their understanding of science."
To work on that understanding, Fusco says, "we've been taking the vocabulary out of NECAP--infer, predict, explain. So the kids aren't afraid of the words they're encountering."
The ability to define "predict" doesn't help at all if the ability to MAKE a prediction isn't also a familiar habit. Kids need to demonstrate, by their writing, that they understand what they need to DO when the test asks them to predict, infer or explain.
Similarly, Fusco's teachers began to work with the kids on "sentence starters" to guide their thinking--However, In conclusion, Whereas, Therefore.
Fortunately, Westerly's students were in the habit of writing in science journals. But they had used them mainly to record observations. Faubert says, "Every teacher brought in examples of their students' science journals. Oh, here are the strengths and weaknesses right in our own notebooks. We'd never had the kids prove their thinking in their journals. Think like a scientist, based on what's in front of you. Prove your thinking. Prove your thinking. We said that so many times."
At the end of the day, teaching the kids to EXPLAIN their predictions and reasoning was the clearest way to teach them habits of scientific thinking. And those explanations also helped the teachers assess kids' understanding and misunderstanding.
By February, State Street dared to try another practice test with the 4th graders. Again, the staff scored it together. Ahhh, much better. So much so, Faubert felt more confident about improving on the 49 percent proficiency they'd managed in the prior year's test.
In fact, when the results were released last Fall, State Street kids hit 80 percent proficiency, 8th highest in the state, out of over 150 schools that take that test. (And Westerly is the 8th lowest-income community in the state.)
Superintendent Roy Seitsinger's take on the situation is this: "Nobody (meaning veteran educators) signed up for what we're doing now. Most of the people weren't trained to bring students through a thinking process. Now the educators' job is to teach kids how to sift through all that information and to be critical, reflective and make decisions. We have too much information and not nearly enough sorting skills."
Therefore, in conclusion, learning to write promotes scientific thinking. Other districts would do well to take notice.
Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at EducationViews.org and GoLocalProv.com. She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building a demonstration project in Central Falls, Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.
he Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his tenured position to aim for an even bigger audience.
Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he has departed the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital - Life - Design conference in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters.
During his talk, Mr. Thrun explored the origins of his popular online course at Stanford, which initially featured videos produced with nothing more than "a camera, a pen and a napkin." Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace. Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course's popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said.
Bill Cosby and Dick Morris presumably disagree about most things, so it's instructive to note that both have officially endorsed "School Choice Week," which began yesterday with a series of rallies and events around the country celebrating the idea of parents being able to decide where their children go to school. Indeed, school choice seems like such an obviously good idea that the most interesting thing about School Choice Week is why it exists at all.
That school choice is valuable is beyond dispute. That's why there's a multi-billion dollar private school industry serving millions of students. And it's why there is a much larger system of school choice embedded in the American real estate market. While some parents pay school tuition directly, many more pay it through their monthly mortgage and property tax bills. Anyone who has deliberately purchased a home in a "good" school district is, by definition, a beneficiary and supporter of school choice.
The most important domestic subject that I FAIL to adequately cover is K-12 education. It's potentially the most effective tool we have for increasing vertical mobility in our society -- and hence is currently misused as the best single method to repress disadvantaged minorities.
What the education unions and their bought-and-paid-for Democrat allies have done to inner city black and Hispanic kids would warm the cockles of any KKK Grand Dragon. The Progressives' steadfast opposition to improving education angers me every time I think about it.
Thus I include intact below an excellent op-ed on the topic from the LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS. It's upbeat -- giving the growing success of the school choice movement in all its many flavors.
Sadly, California is one of the least successful states in this effort to improve education. All we hear from CA liberals is that we don't spend enough. But the growing popularity and acceptance of school choice in other states is going to make it more and more difficult for our voters to ignore this innovation.
The top priority facing southeastern Wisconsin - and, indeed, the biggest challenge for the entire state - is the creation of more new jobs.
There are many good ideas for creating new jobs, and many deserve further consideration. The creation of new venture capital funds, tax breaks for industries and workforce training incentives for companies that locate in Wisconsin are all worthy of further consideration and possible action.
But the best strategy for creating new jobs is to look at what companies want when deciding where to expand a plant or locate a production facility. No doubt, they look at quality of life, housing, transportation, the overall community and other factors.
However, time and again, one of the top assets that attracts new jobs is a quality education system at all levels that produces bright, articulate and engaging future workers who accept the challenge of the new international economy and the interdependent global economic landscape. That starts at kindergarten and continues beyond high school. Gone are the days when a student could graduate from high school and move to a job that could last a lifetime.
Details of the latest plan to eliminate and replace school property taxes have been finalized and the legislation will be introduced shortly in the Pennsylvania House and Senate.
House Bill 1776, The Property Tax Independence Act, looks in part to the former School Property Tax Elimination Act (SPTEA) for its basic structure. While The Property Tax Independence Act mirrors some of the provisions of the former SPTEA, the plan has been comprehensively rewritten to account for lawmakers' concerns and preferences in order to eliminate objections common to the previous legislation.
The Property Tax Independence Act will eliminate school property and local school nuisance taxes across the Commonwealth and will replace those taxes with funding from a single state source.
The Property Tax Independence Act introduces a modernized school funding method that is based on 21st century economic realities.
The Property Tax Independence Act will ABOLISH the school property tax as well as eliminate the local school earned income tax and nuisance taxes such as the per capita and privilege-to-work taxes imposed by school districts.
The Property Tax Independence Act uses in great measure our current sales tax mechanism to fund schools, restoring the original intent of the tax.
The sales tax provides a predictable and stable funding source that is tied to economic growth. This is in clear contrast to the school property tax which is not based on economic growth and is subject to much variation.
Current school spending regularly exceeds tax revenue and The Property Tax Independence Act addresses this problem head on by limiting school budget increases to the rate of inflation.
Wisconsin's property taxes have increased significantly over the years. How long will this continue?
As Highland Park schools officials pleaded their case against an emergency manager to officials in Lansing on Friday, Gov. Rick Snyder sent a letter to the district's parents informing them that without state intervention there would be no district by the end of next month.
Parents of Highland Park School District students told district officials today they received a letter from the governor informing them of the school district's dire financial situation.
In a letter dated Jan. 20, Snyder told parents finances for the school district have reached a crisis stage and during the 2010-11 school year, the district was $3 million over budget.
The letter also mentioned the state forwarded an emergency advance of $188,000 to the district on Jan. 13.
WITH little fanfare, a dangerous notion has taken hold in progressive policy circles: that the amount of money borrowed by the federal government from Americans to finance its mammoth deficits doesn't matter.
Debt doesn't matter? Really? That's the most irresponsible fiscal notion since the tax-cutting mania brought on by the advent of supply-side economics. And it's particularly problematic right now, as Congress resumes debating whether to extend the payroll-tax reduction or enact other stimulative measures.
Here's the theory, in its most extreme configuration: To the extent that the government sells its debt to Americans (as opposed to foreigners), those obligations will disappear as aging folks who buy those Treasuries die off.
Closing the gap between what the campaign proposed and the estimates of the campaign offsets would require scaling back proposals by about $100 billion annually or adding newoffsets totaling the same. Even this, however, would leave an average deficit over the next decade that would be worse than any post-World War II decade. This would be entirely unsustainable and could cause serious economic problems in the both the short run and the long run.
The way Florida grades its public schools will soon be changing.
On Tuesday, the state Board of Education heard an extensive presentation on proposed changes to the school grading formula.
The ideas ran the gamut, from incorporating the test scores of children with disabilities, to giving extra points to students who boost their test scores into the highest range.
Of course, high school grades will have to take into account the new end-of-course exams, which are being given this year in algebra, geometry and biology. Some middle-school students will also be taking the exams -- and the grades given to middle schools need to reflect that, too.
In the paper Flyvbjerg looks at infrastructure projects in a number of countries (not in China, though, because he needed decent data) and shows how the benefits of these projects are systematically overstated and the costs systematically understated. More important, he shows how these terrible results are simply the expected outcomes of the way infrastructure projects are typically designed and implemented.
It is not a very happy paper in general, but I am pretty sure that many people who read it probably had a thought similar to mine: if infrastructure spending can be so seriously mismanaged in relatively transparent systems with greater political accountability, what might happen in a country with a huge infrastructure boom stretching over decades, much less transparency, and very little political accountability? Isn't the potential for waste vast?
In a hushed first-grade classroom at Public School 55 in the South Bronx, Edward Muñoz, a bashful 7-year-old in scuffed sneakers and a worn hoodie, was sounding out tricky words with his tutor.
Together they plowed through a book about a birthday barbecue, tackling the words "party" and "presents." Then they played a rousing game of word-based tic-tac-toe, with Edward eventually declaring victory.
Exchanges like theirs take place every day in classrooms around the country, now that links between early literacy gains and later school success have been clearly documented.
But Edward's tutor was not in the classroom. His school, a 20-minute walk from the nearest subway stop in a crime-plagued neighborhood, has long had trouble finding tutors willing to visit. "It is hard to get anyone to volunteer," said the school's principal, Luis Torres, who sometimes cancels fire drills because of the gunfire he hears outside.
The state could more aggressively intervene in the lowest-performing publicly funded schools under a proposed accountability system unveiled Monday.
The system would rate schools on a scale of 0 to 100 based on student performance and growth on state tests, closing achievement gaps and preparing students for college and careers. Ratings also would be tied to dropout rates and third-grade literacy levels.
The http://dpi.state.wi.us/esea/pdf/eseawaiver_coverletter.pdf">http://dpi.state.wi.us/esea/index.html">Department of Public Instruction released a draft application to the U.S. Education Department for a waiver from the 10-year-old federal No Child Left Behind Act, which State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said "has shackled schools by being overly prescriptive and prohibiting creative reforms."
"Wisconsin's request for flexibility from NCLB is driven by the belief that increasing rigor across the standards, assessment and accountability system will result in improved instruction and improved student outcomes," Evers said
Raising Expectations, Increasing Rigor
As noted in Principle 1, DPI has significantly raised expectations for schools and the proportion of students who graduate ready for college and career, as indicated by the adoption of rigorous academic standards, higher cut scores based on NAEP as the state transitions to SBAC, increasingly rigorous and adaptive assessment systems, and increased graduation requirements. The new accountability report card and the new system of support, rewards, and recognition will reflect these new expectations. While the state has previously emphasized graduation rates (and boasted one of the highest in the nation), DPI also recognizes the state has significant achievement and graduation gaps. The accountability index prioritizes achievement and attainment using measures which emphasize not only graduation, but also the proportion of students graduating college and career ready. Additionally, the system examines achievement gaps within and across schools as a means to address the state's existing gaps. Using a multifaceted index will help pinpoint areas of need within a school, as well as areas of strength, and help schools track their progress at meeting the needs of all student subgroups. Within the system of support, identified schools will participate in diagnostic reviews and needs assessments (Priority and Focus Schools, respectively) to identify their instructional policies, practices, and programming that have impacted student outcomes and to differentiate, and individualize reforms and interventions. While planning and implementing reforms, schools and districts will have access to increasingly expansive and timely data systems to monitor progress. Additionally, the state will require Priority and Focus Schools to implement RtI (with the support of the Wisconsin RtI Center and its resources) to ensure that all students are receiving customized, differentiated services within a least restrictive environment, including additional supports and interventions for SwDs and ELLs as needed, or extension activities and additional challenge for students exceeding benchmarks.
Hold district accountable for deceit, academic failure and questionable activity "Where ignorance is bliss, ignorance of ignorance is sublime." - Paul Dunham
Last week, I went to a Spokane Public Schools math presentation at Indian Trail Elementary School. It was billed as a forum in the school newsletter and on the reader board outside of the school. It was not, in any way, a forum. It was a tightly controlled 20-minute presentation that offered no data, little information, allowed for no parent input and was patronizing in tone.
At one point, parents were asked to define math to the person next to us. (The principal said he would not offer his definition.) We also were told to describe to our neighbor a math experience we'd had. These conversations ended right there, thus being pointless. We watched a video of several small children talking about the importance of math. The kids were cute, but the video was long. It was made clear to us that math is hard, parents don't get it (see slide 7 of the presentation), "traditional math" is no longer useful, and math is intimidating to all. Printed materials reinforced the idea of parent incompetence, with students supposedly "taking the lead" and teaching their parents.
Parents were warned to stay positive about math, however, despite our supposed fear and lack of skill, and we also were told what a "balanced" program looks like - as if that's what Spokane actually has.
ALEC's 17th edition of the Report Card on American Education contains a comprehensive overview of educational achievement levels (performance and gains for low-income students) for the 50 states and the District of Columbia (see full report for complete methodology). The Report Card details what education policies states currently have in place and provides a roadmap for legislators to follow to bring about educational excellence in their state.
Focusing on the reforms recently enacted in Indiana, and with a foreword by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, this Report Card on American Education examines the experiences other states can learn from the struggles and triumps in Indiana.
Authors Dr. Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips analyze student scores, looking at both performance as well as how scores have improved over recent years. Additionally, each state is graded based on its current education policies.
This is the status of Minnesota's public pension fund obligation. And it may be optimistic.
You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going," Yogi Berra once famously said. "Because you might not get there."
Berra's characteristically unique advice is worth keeping in mind for anyone addressing the issue of public pensions.
Lots of uncertainty, to say the least, comes into play in guaranteeing lifetime retirement incomes for hundreds of thousands of Minnesota public employees -- past, present and future. And wherever we do arrive in this effort will have profound implications for government employees and taxpayers, and for the future of public services in our state.
According to the latest data on the condition of Minnesota's public pension funds, the bleeding has stopped but there is still considerable work to do.
As of last summer, the three major statewide pension plans that provide pensions for the bulk of Minnesota's public employees -- the Minnesota State Retirement System for state workers, the Public Employees Retirement Association for local workers and the Teachers Retirement Association for teachers -- were, altogether, $10.5 billion short of meeting their long-term obligations.
District leadership style has swung back and forth between two extremes. It needs to be stopped and held at the center.
The Seattle School Board of 2000 - 2003 contributed to the financial fiasco that toppled the Olchefske administration. It was not just their misplaced trust, but the blindness of their trust that allowed things in the district - not just the financial reporting - to spiral down. They could have found the budget problem in the numbers reported to them (Director Bass did find it), but the majority of them lacked the necessary skepticism to look for it.
In response, the voters replaced them with a more activist board. It started with Director Bass elected in 2001. The four board directors elected in 2003 formed a much more hands-on and skeptical board majority - perhaps too much. They found a District that was poorly managed. They found all kinds of problems that had grown over the years and they were blunt and public about exposing it. I won't say that they were wrong, but they were perhaps impatient. Culture doesn't change overnight. This Board was accused of micro-managing the district and they were accused of being dysfunctional.
Value added" or "VA" refers to the use of statistical techniques to measure teachers' impacts on their students' standardized test scores, controlling for such student characteristics as prior years' scores, gender, ethnicity, disability, and low-income status.
Reports on a massive new study that seem to affirm the use of the technique have recently been splashed across the media and chewed over in the blogosphere. Further from the limelight, developments in Wisconsin seem to ensure that in the coming years value-added analyses will play an increasingly important role in teacher evaluations across the state. Assuming the analyses are performed and applied sensibly, this is a positive development for student learning.
The Chetty Study
Since the first article touting its findings was published on the front page of the January 6 New York Times, a new research study by three economists assessing the value-added contributions of elementary school teachers and their long-term impact on their students' lives - referred to as the Chetty article after the lead author - has created as much of a stir as could ever be expected for a dense academic study.
Like it or not, sports is a business. From big-time professional leagues like the National Football League to local high school action, sports have been a reliable revenue stream for decades.
At the college level, successful athletic programs have paid dividends for their schools by generating cash. Sporting events boost local economies in tourist dollars, money spent at bars, restaurants and hotels, and of course tax revenue for local government.
It's the fight over local business and tax revenue that has become the real center stage in a battle over tournament scheduling and the location of tournaments that is raging between the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Athletic Department and the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, which officiates high school sports in the Badger State. At issue is where the boys and girls state basketball tournaments will play in 2013 and beyond.
Eliminating high school athletics during a school year is unusual, especially in a sports-loving state such as Texas.
But that's exactly what's happening in this small ranching community where the school district is taking desperate measures to prevent a state-mandated closure due to poor academics.
The Premont Independent School District is even deploying its superintendent, a constable and high school principal to the homes of truant students in an effort to improve dismal attendance.
MADISON -- Wisconsin's request for waivers from several provisions of federal education law creates the expectation that every child will graduate ready for college and careers by setting higher standards for students, educators, and schools.
"Education for today's world requires increased rigor and higher expectations," said State Superintendent Tony Evers. "The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has shackled schools by being overly prescriptive and prohibiting creative reforms that would help more students gain the skills needed for further education and the workforce. Wisconsin's request for flexibility from NCLB is driven by the belief that increasing rigor across the standards, assessment, and accountability system will result in improved instruction and improved student outcomes."
To receive waivers, state education agencies must demonstrate how they will use flexibility from NCLB requirements to address four principles: transitioning to college- and career-ready standards and assessments; developing systems of differentiated recognition, accountability, and support; evaluating and supporting teacher and principal effectiveness; and reducing duplication. The Department of Public Instruction has posted its draft waiver request online and is asking for public comment through a survey. After the two-week comment period, the agency will revise the waiver request and submit it to the U.S. Department of Education by Feb. 21.
In the world outside public education, people apply for a job they want, interview with their potential boss, compete against other applicants and are ultimately selected if they look like a good fit for the position.
It doesn't work that way in public education.
In schools, teachers do all the normal things to get hired, but when it comes to placement, seniority is what counts, not the perfect fit. The teacher with the longest tenure in a district gets first dibs on any available job at a school, with the principal - the school's boss - getting little or no input.
School district officials in Oakland want to change that, believing that it's in the best interests of students when a teacher - new, veteran or in between - wants to work at a school and the school wants that teacher.
Six months after barely closing a $712 million deficit, Chicago Public Schools officials have spent nearly $10 million that has not yet been budgeted in their aggressive push to lengthen the school day.
Fifty schools have gone to a longer day this year. With the entire city school system moving to a seven-and-a-half-hour school day next year, parents and community members are questioning how the cash-strapped district plans to pay for the extended time at more than 675 schools.
Becky Carroll, the school district's spokeswoman, said that cuts would need to be made elsewhere to allow the costs of a longer day to fit into the district's nearly $6 billion budget.
"A budget is about priorities, and you invest in what your priorities are," she said. "At the end of the day, this is a critical priority."
An extensive review of relevant research has demonstrated that the more physically active schoolchildren are, the better they do academically. Researchers analyzed 14 studies, ranging in size from as few as 50 participants to as many as 12,000.
All of the studies involved children between the ages of 6 and 18.
Charter schools are public schools. Historically, however, the relationship between school districts and charters has been nonexistent at best, antagonistic at worst. As the charter sector continues to grow steadily, an analysis of the national landscape explores how that relationship needs to start changing--and where it already has.
This year's 6th annual edition of Hopes, Fears, & Reality provides a clear roadmap for school districts and charter schools interested in working together to improve education options. The report explains the risks and technical challenges behind charter-district collaboration and provides powerful examples of how they can be overcome.
Emails and direct messages from teachers wanting to vent about the proposed contract between their union and the state have been flowing into my inbox.
Every single one came with a request not to publish the name of the writer. "I just want you to know," they say, of the reason they're writing. The problem with knowing, though, is that you can never un-know. These teachers were sharing thoughts that give deep insight into educators' concerns as they head to the polls Thursday to vote on the new contract.
You might be shocked to learn that some of them said they would prefer abiding with the "last, best and final" offer Gov. Neil Abercrombie imposed on them last July, than take the deal struck earlier this month. They all have their reasons for thinking the way they do about the current agreement. Reasons that deserve to be aired.
So we made a deal of our own. I asked the ones who had contacted me if it would be OK to share their words with our readers -- with the understanding that I will not publish or share names, positions or any information that could betray their identities. We granted them anonymity because they said they feared retaliation and wouldn't share their thoughts otherwise.
Where will the thin blue line lead these children? What will their path mean to Milwaukee's education scene?
I'm talking about the 330 kindergarten through fifth-grade students at Milwaukee Scholars Charter School.
The corridors of the school's new building at 7000 W. Florist Ave. have gray carpeting - except for blue stripes near each wall.
When students pass in the halls, whether in groups or solo, they are required to walk only on the blue stripe on the right side of the hall as they face it. Get caught off that stripe and you can get marked down in the school's discipline system.
Minus the blue lines and with a discipline system that isn't structured quite so firmly, Milwaukee Math and Science Academy, a charter school at 110 W. Burleigh St., brings to mind the same questions for its 160 kindergarten through fifth-grade pupils.
There used to be a time when Milwaukee was considered one of the most active education reform cities in the country. The City's private school choice program, the oldest and largest in the country, was our ticket to fame (or infamy, depending on who you ask) through most of the 1990's. The choice program was supposed to be a game changer to public education. It was supposed to set off a chain reaction of innovation and competition that would not only improve the lives of children, but change the way we configured our education policy for the City of Milwaukee. In short, we were going to be the hotbed of the reform movement for decades to come.
Sadly, the game changing education movement we expected didn't come to pass. There is no doubt, however, that the existence of parent choice in Milwaukee has changed the lives of thousands of kids. The movement that created and protected the choice program fostered the development of two of the City's best charter schools and promoted a small sector of independent charters authorizers and schools. Unfortunately, aside from these developments there has been little large-scale reform in Milwaukee since the mid-1990's. Instead of a catalyst, the choice program became a scapegoat for both political parties and many status quo stakeholders. The failing public school district in Milwaukee has been allowed to sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand while union interests and their status quo Democrats blamed the choice program for all the public schools considerable ills. The GOP used the choice program as the be-all-end-all urban education solution, and was happy to let thoughtful public school policy and funding fall by the way side. The independent charter school community put their heads down and tried to stay out of the political fray - they served small pockets of kids very well, but without the ability or the will to take their model to scale. As a result, Milwaukee, not only fell behind, we fell off the map entirely.
It's not the iPhone 5, it's not the iPad 3, but there was a big Apple product announcement today. A new version of its iBooks software geared at providing interactive student textbooks, which would be read -- of course -- on the iPad. The potential hurdles are many, including the fact that iPads still cost around $500.
We wanted to get away from the business case study, though, and explore what this might actually eventually mean in the classroom. So we called Katie Cohen. Until June of last year, she was a high school science teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Katie, thanks for being with us.
Katie Cohen: Thank you very much.
Ryssdal: So listen, in any ideal world, if all of your had had iPads, what would that have meant for you as a teacher?
The move comes 10 months after a USA TODAY investigation found high erasure rates on standardized tests in many District of Columbia public schools, and six months after Georgia's governor released findings of a major investigation that found widespread cheating in Atlanta public schools.
The U.S. Department of Education says it will host a symposium on cheating and publish "best practices" recommendations on how to prevent, detect and respond to cheating in schools.
Companies like Apple "say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force," said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor's degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. "They're good jobs, but the country doesn't have enough to feed the demand," Mr. Schmidt said.
Some aspects of the iPhone are uniquely American. The device's software, for instance, and its innovative marketing campaigns were largely created in the United States. Apple recently built a $500 million data center in North Carolina. Crucial semiconductors inside the iPhone 4 and 4S are manufactured in an Austin, Tex., factory by Samsung, of South Korea.
But even those facilities are not enormous sources of jobs. Apple's North Carolina center, for instance, has only 100 full-time employees. The Samsung plant has an estimated 2,400 workers.
....
"We shouldn't be criticized for using Chinese workers," a current Apple executive said. "The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need."
Well worth considering from a curricular, finance and social perspective.
Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) requires that, taken as a whole, services provided in Title I schools from state and local funds be at least comparable to those provided in non-Title I schools (Section 1120A). The purpose of this comparability requirement is to ensure that federal assistance is providing additional resources in high-need schools rather than compensating for an inequitable distribution of funds that benefits more affluent schools. The Title I comparability requirement allows school districts to demonstrate compliance in a number of ways, including through a district-wide salary schedule, and does not require districts to use school-level expenditures. Several recent policy reports have called for revising the Title I comparability provision to require comparability of actual school-level expenditures (Hall and Ushomirsky, 2010; Miller, 2010; Luebchow, 2009; Roza, 2008).
Until recently, data on school-level expenditures have not been widely available, in part because most school districts have not designed their accounting systems to track revenues and expenditures at the school level. However, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) required each school district receiving Title I, Part A, ARRA funds to report a school-by- school listing of per-pupil education expenditures from state and local funds for the 2008-09 school year to its state education agency and required states to report these data to the U.S. Department of Education.
This report from the Study of School-Level Expenditures presents findings on how state and local education expenditures at the school level vary within school districts. This study is not examining compliance with the current Title I comparability requirement, nor does it examine the comparability of resources between districts. Rather, it focuses on the question of whether Title I schools and higher-poverty schools have comparable levels of per-pupil expenditures as non-Title I schools and lower-poverty schools within the same district. More specifically, this report examines three questions:
Throughout my years of being an educator in a traditional school setting, the most challenging aspect has been dealing with the adults, not the students. My views were often those of the minority and consistently clashed with the culture of failure that had been developed over the decades.
One opinion of mine in particular that seldom receives little to no kudos, and is often met with anger and opposition, is that our children do not need sympathy. And when it came to school work, believe me, I gave very little sympathy, if any at all.
"So harsh," one might say. Well, I have been regularly accused of being unfeeling, insensitive and even heartless. Nevertheless, my students were successful for the most part.
They passed because they knew the material, not because I felt sorry for them. In my classroom, I refused to allow feelings of sympathy to override my charge as an educator. It was my duty to educate students to the best of my ability, regardless of their race, culture, socioeconomic status or family or living situation. My standards were high, and I expected my students to rise to the occasion.
In Buffalo, New York, the heart of the American rust-belt, the public school system pays for its teachers to get plastic surgery. Hair removal. Miscrodermabrasian. Liposuction. If you can name the procedure, it's probably covered.
No, I am not exaggerating. And no, this article is not an excuse to make "Hot For Teacher" cracks. When I write that Buffalo's school system pays, I mean it literally. The perk is included as a self-insured rider in its teachers' contract. Therefore, the district has to cover the cost of each nip and tuck itself. There's no co-pay, so the school district ends up footing the entire bill. It estimates the current annual cost at $5.2 million, down from $9 million in 2009.
This in a city where the average teacher makes roughly $52,000 a year. The plastic surgery tab would pay salaries for 100 extra educators.
s The Buffalo News has reported, the rider existed for years with little notice. It dates back at least to the 1970s, when "getting a little work done" wasn't par for the course among women (and some men) of a certain age. Instead, it was intended to cover serious reconstructive surgery, on burn victims, for instance. In 1996, the rider was nearly cut. But after the daughter of a district employee was hurled through a windshield during a car wreck, requiring surgery to repair scars on her face and body, union officials lobbied to keep the benefit in place.
I see a lot of support among the District leadership for clear job descriptions and duties for everyone in the District - everyone, that is, except the District leadership. Each Board member will acknowledge that the Board has the duty to enforce policy yet no Board member will allow that duty to be explicitly stated in any document. It does not appear in the newly adopted Series 1000 Policies. It does not appear in the policy that describes the duties of the Board. It does not appear in the policy on governance. Now the Board is going to adopt two more elements of Board policy that should mention this duty yet fail to do so.
The board policy preamble on the Board meeting agenda this week is an ideal place for it, but instead the preamble makes reference to it only vaguely and euphemistically as "governance tools". It says that policies can be used by the superintendent to hold staff accountable but it neglects to say that they can be used by the Board to hold the superintendent accountable.
Before a crowd of hundreds of school district officials and school board members in Milwaukee, Gov. Scott Walker announced Thursday that recommendations from a variety of state education task forces will soon be solidified in formal legislation.
The work of three main groups spearheaded by Walker over the past year - a reading task force, a team that's looked at how to design a statewide teacher and principal evaluation system, and a group figuring out how to rate school quality - will make up a reform package of education legislation, Walker said.
Meanwhile, some critics questioned the governor's tone of collaboration and cooperation Thursday, saying that after cutting education spending and limiting collective bargaining, he's trying to play nice now only because he's likely facing a recall election.
Even state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, who has worked closely with Walker on the task forces and praised the work of those involved, made it clear he was concerned about being left out of the legislation-drafting process.
The proposed legislative reforms have been developed over the past year by three statewide task forces working separately on improving literacy, developing a teacher evaluation model and creating a school accountability system to replace No Child Left Behind.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, who helped lead all three groups, said he wasn't involved in drafting the education legislation, but would support any actions that are the direct product of the task forces "and deliver on the intent of these collaborative groups."
"Many students' schools are already planning for more budget cuts next year on top of cuts made this year," Evers said in a statement. "Education reforms must be fully funded and not simply be more unfunded mandates that result in further cuts to educational programming for our students."
Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, ranking Democrat on the Assembly Education Committee, said in a statement she has concerns the work of the task forces was "being hijacked for political gain."
"It is unnerving to hear that (Evers) was not consulted during the drafting of this legislation," Pope-Roberts said. "Cutting our state's foremost education experts out of the process at this time is very shortsighted and reckless."
Online education will turn the academy inside out, argue US authors. Sarah Cunnane reports
Graduation rates in the US have fallen, and states have slashed funding for higher education. As a result, public universities have raised tuition fees, and many are struggling to stay afloat during the recession. But two authors working in the US higher education sector claim that the academy has a bigger battle on the horizon: the "disruptive innovation" ushered in by online education.
This disruption, they say, will force down costs, lure prospective students away from traditional "core" universities, transform the way academics work, and spell the end for the traditional scholarly calendar based around face-to-face teaching.
Clayton M. Christensen, the Kim B. Clark professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Henry J. Eyring, advancement vice-president at Brigham Young University-Idaho, outline their ideas in The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out.
Renewing his call for passage of a vouchers pilot program, the Opportunity Scholarship Act, the governor drilled into his education reform proposals for government cost-savings.
"Let's face it: more money does not necessarily lead to a better education," Christie said. "Today, in Newark, we spend $23,000 per student for instruction and services. But only 23% of ninth graders who enter high school this year will receive high school diplomas in four years. Asbury Park is similar: per pupil costs, at almost $30,000 a year, are nearly 75% above the state average. But the dropout rate is almost 10 times the state average. And math S.A.T. scores lag the state average by 180 points.
"It is time to admit that the Supreme Court's grand experiment with New Jersey children is a failure," the Governor added. "63% of state aid over the years has gone to the Abbott Districts and the schools are still predominantly failing. What we've been doing isn't working for children in failing districts, it is unfair to the other 557 school districts and to our state's taxpayers, who spend more per pupil than almost any state in America."
In recent decades, key sectors of the American economy have experienced huge and disruptive transformations -- shifts that have ultimately yielded beneficial changes to the way producers and customers do business together. From the deregulation that brought about the end of AT&T's "Ma Bell" system, to the way entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs forever changed the computer world once dominated by IBM, to the way the internet and bloggers have upended the business model of traditional newspapers, we have seen industries completely remade -- often in wholly unexpected ways. In hindsight, such transformations seem to have been inevitable; at the time, however, most leaders in these fields never saw the changes coming.
The higher-education industry is on the verge of such a transformative re-alignment. Many Americans agree that a four-year degree is vastly overpriced -- keeping many people out of the market -- and are increasingly questioning the value of what many colleges teach. Nevertheless, for those who seek a certain level of economic security or advancement, a four-year degree is absolutely necessary. Clearly, this is a situation primed for change. In as little as a decade, most colleges and universities could look very different from their present forms -- with the cost of a college credential plummeting even as the quality of instruction rises.
Just when all signs indicated that supporters of Madison Preparatory Academy were abandoning hope of joining forces with the Madison school district, they've decided to give it one more shot. They're seeking another vote on the controversial charter-school proposal in late February.
Urban League of Greater Madison CEO and president Kaleem Caire says Madison Prep will open this fall as a private entity, but hopes it will transition into the district in 2013, once the district's union contract expires.
Board members who voted against the charter school in December expressed concerns that it would put the district in breach of its contract with Madison Teachers Inc., due to a provision requiring district schools to hire union staff.
School board president James Howard, who voted for Madison Prep, says the board may not have time to address the proposal in February.
Whether the Urban League -- which proposed Madison Prep as an ambitious step toward closing the district's decades-old achievement gap -- can recapture its earlier momentum is uncertain, considering that Superintendent Dan Nerad and school board members seem particularly excited about their own plans to address the issue.
"We're going at it from so many different angles right now," says board member Beth Moss. "I can't see how we can't make some improvement."
We produced the above piece for PBS NewsHour in November of 2011; the focus was on new school choice initiatives in Indiana and the backlash they're receiving. School choice remains a major issue in education as 2012 begins, so we wanted to convene several experts for a discussion on the topic. Feel free to add your own comments below, as well.
Two decades after it was first devised at Princeton's Center for Creative Leadership, the learning development concept known as 70/20/10 is transforming Melbourne Business School's approach to workplace learning.
The concept has spurred Mt Eliza, the executive education arm of MBS, to develop an interactive online tool called Thread, which is due to be launched this month. Mt Eliza has high expectations for Thread, with hopes that it can transform the executive education provider in Victoria, Australia, into a world leader in e-learning.
It is canvassing for a partnership with Ashridge - the UK business school that provides Mt Eliza with online modules through Virtual Ashridge - as well as with other international business schools.
While Mt Eliza will not comment on the talks, Matt Williams, design manager for Thread, says: "Whenever we need to partner with a European institution, it tends to be Ashridge". The two schools collaborate on a Masters of Management programme and several executive education courses.
The quality of elementary education is falling in rural schools almost two years after education was made a fundamental right in April 2010.
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2011, a survey of government and private schools in rural areas conducted by the NGO Pratham, shows a decline in schoolchildren's "learning outcome levels" compared with the previous year, whether in reading or arithmetic skills. (See chart)
However, students of private schools have done slightly better than those of government schools, reveals the annual survey, started seven years ago and considered most authoritative.
For example, 56 per cent Class V students at government schools were unable to read Class III-level text but the figure was 38 per cent in private schools.
When Gov. Bobby Jindal pushed through New Orleans' school voucher program four years ago, political interest in using taxpayer money to send students to private schools had waned across the country. School choice advocates had suffered several stinging defeats, causing some to throw their weight behind charter schools, which generally receive more bipartisan support.
In 2009, St. Joan of Arc School in New Orleans had more than 80 students receiving vouchers.
Now, as officials expect Jindal to begin an effort to expand Louisiana's voucher program, the national landscape has changed dramatically.
Although charter schools continue to dwarf vouchers in terms of overall growth, voucher programs have rebounded on the national political and educational scene in the past year. In 2011, more than 30 states introduced bills that would use taxpayer dollars to send children to privately run schools, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That's up more than 300% from the previous year, when only nine voucher bills were introduced.
Governor Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday proposed an overhaul to the state's pension system and new teacher evaluation system while presenting his $132.5 billion budget plan for the next fiscal year.
The plan reduces overall spending by .2 percent from last year.
In a PowerPoint presentation, Cuomo said his executive budget includes no new taxes, one shot revenues or gimmicks.
It also closes a budget gap of $3.5 billion.
However, while the governor plans to increase education spending by 4 percent or roughly $805 million, he also plans to make that increase contingent upon real reform and, specifically, teacher evaluations.
He's giving the state's teachers 30 days to come up with a statewide evaluation system or he will write his own into the budget for the legislature to approve.
Districts would have one year to get the new system up and running or the state would withhold the promised 4 percent increase in school aid.
The analysis draws on a variety of data, some of which are a couple of years old, so it doesn't reflect changes in the past year under Gov. Scott Walker.
The report rated Wisconsin in six categories: chance for success; K-12 achievement; standards, assessments and accountability; teachers; school finance; and transitions and alignment.
The state scored highest in school finance, ranking ninth nationally. The lowest marks came in standards, assessment and accountability, where Wisconsin ranked 46th.
"The so-called loophole was inserted into the state budget at the final stage of approval in June by members of the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee. The last-minute language allowed voucher schools to expand from their sole location in Milwaukee to Racine."
It is worth pointing out that the while the language enabling the expansion of school choice to Racine did occur near the end of the budget process, expanding the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) to Racine was hardly a new concept. A proposal to bring vouchers to Racine was included and passed in the original Assembly version of the 2007-2009 budget (it was eventually removed during the budget process).
For decades, the prevailing wisdom in education was that high self-esteem would lead to high achievement. The theory led to an avalanche of daily affirmations, awards ceremonies and attendance certificates -- but few, if any, academic gains.
Now, an increasing number of teachers are weaning themselves from what some call empty praise. Drawing on psychology and brain research, these educators aim to articulate a more precise, and scientific, vocabulary for praise that will push children to work through mistakes and take on more challenging assignments. Consider teacher Shar Hellie's new approach in Montgomery County.
To get students through the shaky first steps of Spanish grammar, Hellie spent many years trying to boost their confidence. If someone couldn't answer a question easily, she would coach him, whisper the first few words, then follow up with a booming "¡Muy bien!"
Bob Lutz, the former Vice Chairman of General Motors, is the most famous also-ran in the auto business. In the course of his 47-year rampage through the industry, he's been within swiping range of the brass ring at Ford, BMW, Chrysler and, most recently, GM, but he's never landed the top gig. It's because he "made the cars too well," he says. It might also have something to do with the fact that Maximum Bob, who could double as a character on Mad Men, is less an éminence grise than a pithy self-promoter who has a tendency to go off corporate message. That said, his new book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, has a message worth hearing. To get the U.S. economy growing again, Lutz says, we need to fire the M.B.A.s and let engineers run the show.
Lutz's main argument is that companies, shareholders and consumers are best served by product-driven executives. In his book, Lutz wisecracks his way through the 1960s design- and technology-led glory days at GM to the late-1970s takeover by gangs of M.B.A.s. Executives, once largely developed from engineering, began emerging from finance. The results ranged from the sobering (managers signing off on inferior products because customers "had no choice") to the hilarious (Cadillac ashtrays that wouldn't open because of corporate mandates that they be designed to function at -40°F). It's pretty easy to imagine Car Guy Lutz removing his mirrored shades and shouting to the cowering line manager, "Well, customers in North Dakota will be happy. Too bad nobody else will!"
Should an engineering degree cost more than a degree in English? Or a degree in education?
The question was posed at a House Education Committee meeting Friday.
On hand for the discussion: University of Florida President Bernie Machen, Florida State University President Eric Barron and state University System Chancellor Frank Brogan.
The topic is timely. Gov. Rick Scott has called on universities to produce more majors in science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- but without extra dollars from the state. Scott's proposed budget does not boost funding for public colleges and universities.
After a pretty rough year at Department of Education headquarters, Mayor Bloomberg appears to have gotten his school-reform groove back. It couldn't come at a more crucial time. The city's public schools have made some real progress on Bloomberg's watch, but need a new shot in the arm to help many more students meet higher standards and ensure they're ready for college.
The mayor laid out a bold and aggressive agenda in his State of the City Address last week, full of common-sense ideas that hark back to the early days of his tenure when no cow was too sacred in the pursuit of higher achievement.
Back then, he took on the three pillars of the education bureaucracy -- tenure, seniority and lock-step teacher pay -- and refocused our schools on empowerment for teachers and principals and more accountability for results.
Emergent Spanish for Educators @ Madison's Cherokee Middle School
Rafael Gomez, via a kind email:
Dear Cherokee Staff:
We have an opportunity to have Emergent Spanish for Educators (Jan. to April 2012) The class will take place at Cherokee every Mondays starting Jan. 23 at 3:30 to 5:45 except the session it will be from 3:45 to 4:45.
All participants will get 3 PAC credits. It is 30 hours of instruction.
Description of the course:
This course will provide participants with skills needed to make an easy transition from English only into Emergent Spanish and have fun while doing it. Participants will be assisted to become more comfortable using their Spanish pronunciation, construction of basic statements and conversing in Spanish with instructor and/or participants.All participants will end up with a learning center to continue learning Spanish.
Objectives:
1. Acquire a repertoire o Spanish vocabulary
2. Increase comfort level to use Spanish
3. Increase awareness of culture and language
4. Gain skill to use their learning center.
Ritual:Participants will interact with parents and students who are native Spanish speakers.
It took nearly a year for Dale Kleinert to negotiate his first teachers' contract. When Kleinert started his job as schools superintendent in Moscow, Idaho, the talks were already underway. Then, discussions reached an impasse. There were disagreements over pay and health care costs, and the pace slowed further when first an outside mediator and later a fact-finder didn't render a decision. It wasn't until May of 2011 that Kleinert and his union counterparts finally reached an agreement.
Just before then, while Kleinert and the teachers were still stuck, Republican lawmakers in Boise were finishing work on plans to take away much of the leverage that Idaho teachers had long enjoyed in these kinds of negotiations. So for Kleinert's next round of talks with Moscow's teachers, which began pretty much right after the previous ones wrapped up, the rules were very different.
In Eastern Washington, voters are being asked to approve school district levies in a Feb. 14 election. Spokane residents might have seen one or two or 10 billion signs about it strategically placed around the city. I saw a "vote yes for kids" sign at City Hall, tacked to the incoming side of the city bulletin board. I mentioned it to a woman at the counter, and she took it down.
Twice on its front page, The Spokesman-Review published pro-levy material that (to a journalist), can only be seen as full-page advertisements. First was "Anatomy of a Levy." Then there was "Faces of a Levy." Where can it go from there? Ears of a Levy? Elbows of a Levy? Butt-cheeks of a levy?
Meanwhile, the union president published a pro-levy article in the KIDS Newspaper, and the school district helpfully delivered that pro-levy article to elementary schools and students across the city.
Clearly, the district, union and newspaper want us to support the levy. Some local advocates would rather we not. Whatever you decide, please don't just stay home. If just three people vote on the levy, it will pass or fail based on the three votes. As you're bombarded with a heavy emotional campaign to "vote yes for the kids," however, here are a few things to consider.
How does a project increase 42% in less than a year? How does it mushroom 83% in less than 2 years?
WHY WHY WHY does this district continue to pound for more than more, better than best? And how do these numbers keep growing? What originally was discussed as a maximum taxpayer commitment of $475,000 has ballooned into the idea of going to referendum with the "new building (elementary school) referendum? Note once again that no decision has been made to even BUILD a new building...but athletic director McClowry and district administration put forth a Situation Report that sure seems certain that that is what's going to happen?
Let's stroll back through time, shall we? Take a look see at how the landscape of the Ashley Project has changed.
The state Senate will take up a bill Tuesday to rewrite the open enrollment law governing when students can transfer out of their home district into another district.
The bill would allow students and parents more time to request a move to a district outside their own. It would require students' home districts to share details about any discipline problems with the outside district.
The bill has ping-ponged back and forth between the Senate and Assembly for the last year as the two houses have worked to agree on amendments.
The Senate action will come amid a busy day at the Capitol, with opponents to Walker expected to deliver more than 700,000 signatures seeking to force a recall election against him.
Supporters said the open enrollment bill would help students struggling in one district move into another one where they can thrive. Opponents argue the legislation could harm some school districts by siphoning off students to other districts, including virtual schools that rely on the Internet to help teach students in their own homes.
In my last post, I argued that software will take over many of the tasks doctors do today. And what of education? We find a very similar story of what the popular - and incredibly funny! - TED speaker Sir Ken Robinson calls "a crisis of human resources" (Click here for the RSA talk from the same speaker which has been animated in a highly educational fashion). At the TED 2010 conference, he stated that "we make poor use of our talents." Indeed, in the same way that we misuse the talents and training of doctors, I believe we misuse the talents and training of teachers.
I want to comment on what I consider a far greater misuse of talent and training: that of our children/students, mostly here talking about high school education. We have focused so much of our education system on children attending primary school, then middle school, then high school, all with the objective of attending university. This is a progression that still remains unchanged and largely unchallenged. Yet, this system is completely linear and, most tragically, unwaveringly standardized not only through instruction methods, but also through testing. Worse, it is mostly what I call "fixed time, variable learning" (the four-year high school) instead of "fixed learning, variable time" to account for individual students' capabilities and status.
Identifying Emerging Trends In Education
There are new key trends that I see emerging in education enabled by advancing technology: namely decentralization and gamification. By understanding these trends, it is much easier to imagine why we won't need teachers or why we can free up today's teachers to be mentors and coaches. Software can free teachers to have more human relationships by giving them the time to be guidance counselors and friends to young kids instead of being lecturers who talk at them. This last possibility is very important--in addition to learning, schools enable critical social development for children through teacher student relationships and interacting with other children--classrooms of peers and teachers provide much more than math lessons. And by freeing up teachers' time, technology can lead to increased social development rather than less as many assume.
Six school districts in Wisconsin - Hartland-Lakeside, Phelps, Oregon, Oshkosh, Beloit and Sparta - have scheduled school referendums for either February or April.
My advice to school officials who want to prevail: encourage high turn-out among voters who cast their ballots at polling places that are actually inside the schools themselves. It, oddly enough, makes a significant difference.
You probably don't believe this. Neither did voters who were part of an extensive study of polling places in Arizona in 2000 when a ballot initiative proposed raising the state sales tax to support education spending.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study on what's known as "priming" concluded that voters in school buildings are unaware of the influence of so-called "environmental stimuli." We like to think we're smarter than that. Who wants to admit that their vote was based even in part on whether they were standing in a school hallway or a gym rather than a church or a town hall when they cast their ballot? Are we that easily manipulated?
A long-awaited audit documents the perfect storm that swamped state government's ability to manage Wisconsin's Medicaid program, which provided health care to 1.18 million elderly, poor and disabled at a cost of $7.5 billion last year.
It's an alarming read, even for an eyes-glaze-over financial report. It could be a tea party manifesto. It explains why Democrats, who ran the Capitol for a two-year period that ended a year ago, blocked earlier requests for the audit.
Between 2007 and 2011, state Auditor Joe Chrisman and his staff found, Medicaid budget and program controls were drowned by factors that included:
A state hiring freeze and a requirement that state workers take eight unpaid days for two straight years.
The 2008-'09 expansion of Medicaid to more than 100,000 children, families, pregnant women and adults without dependent children.
The recession, which cost thousands their jobs, forcing them and their families onto Medicaid rolls.
Between 2007 and 2011, the cost of Medicaid went up by 51% (from $5 billion to $7.5 billion), while its caseload went up by 36% (from 870,201 to 1.18 million). But there's so much more to ask about those numbers. At some point, lawmakers who must approve Medicaid budgets should ask the state Department of Health Services:
Out of control healthcare spending certainly affects K-12 budgets....
Much like the brief torrential rain which drenched New Yorkers on Thursday morning, Mayor Bloomberg's Thursday afternoon State of the City Address received a deluge of media attention. Today, the print and electronic media feature talk of his jeremiad against the UFT, of his attempted resurrection of 'market reforms' such as merit pay which have been discredited even in 'reform' circles, as study after study has shown them ineffective, and of his claims that he will introduce a new evaluation system by fiat. Tellingly, nowhere will you read an account of what the Mayor's proposed imposition of closure under the Turn-Around model would mean for the PLA schools, were he to be successful in implementing it.
Consider what is happening to just a few of the PLA schools. Note that we use here the performance data that, the DoE insists, informs their decisions on the future of schools.
Naomi Lemberger says the way she takes notes in class helps things stick in her brain. She doesn't use the usual approach (scribble for page after page, then promptly forget - I've been doing it all my life).
In a typical instance, she takes those conventional notes within a box covering the upper right section of a sheet of paper and equal to about half the sheet. In a column on the left side of the paper, she writes down questions or sometimes phrases that her main notes cover. And, after a class or at the end of a unit, she writes in a box across the bottom of the sheet a reflection - basically, a summary of what she thinks she learned. She reviews the overall results, especially when she's preparing for tests. Teachers frequently review her notes.
It's a system called Cornell Notes. It goes back more than half a century and has been used (and often dropped) in many schools, including several in the Milwaukee area.
At Brookfield East, where Lemberger is a junior, Cornell Notes is a key element of the education program - and a key, in the opinion of school leaders and many teachers, to why the already high-performing school has seen an uptick in overall student success in recent years.
School principals then would have discretion over how to use those funds, as long as they go to teachers. Those dollars could be spent on one-time teacher bonuses, teacher development projects or however the principal sees fit. "The idea is to give principals more power and to help them create a culture of success," says Ford.
To be eligible to participate in the program, schools also would have to agree to eliminate the traditional teacher pay schedules that mainly reward longevity on the job.
"The No. 1 goal of public education in everything we do is raising academic achievement," says Ford. "So in the report I propose a framework that takes into account the views of teachers and the existing research on what motivates teachers."
It's certainly an interesting concept. But would it work?
Adam Gamoran, a UW-Madison professor of sociology and educational policy studies, says that while research clearly shows some teachers are much more effective than others, what's not so clear is which attributes these top educators share and whether or not it's even possible to lead them to teaching more effectively with incentives.
Next year, Verona superintendent Dean Gorrell is in line to collect a $50,000 longevity bonus on top of his $140,000 salary.
In 2014, Madison superintendent Dan Nerad qualifies for a $37,500 payment for six years of service, which like Gorrell's would be paid into a retirement account. Nerad already receives an annual $10,000 payment into his retirement account, which is separate from his state pension and in addition to a $201,000 yearly salary.
And in 2017, Monona Grove superintendent Craig Gerlach can leave the job with an extra year's salary, currently $150,000, paid into a retirement account over the following five years.
Over the past decade, such perks have been added to some Dane County superintendent contracts, even as, on average, their salary increases outpaced teacher pay hikes, according to data provided by the Department of Public Instruction.
"Any type of payout at that level is clearly going to be an issue from the public's point of view," Dale Knapp, research director at the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, said of the longevity payouts. "The problem becomes once these start getting into contracts, it becomes competition and then they become more prevalent."
Adding bonus language to superintendent contracts became increasingly popular in recent years as school districts faced state-imposed rules on increasing employee compensation.
Perhaps, one day soon, teachers will have similar compensation freedom, or maybe, superintendents should operate under a one size fits all approach...
I'd rather see teacher freedom of movement, and compensation.
Teachers are the most important factor in determining the success of students. No technology, curriculum, or standard can supplant the need for a quality teacher in every classroom. We know children learn differently, we know there is no single recipe for a successful teacher, yet we continue to pay teachers as if they are interchangeable assembly-line workers producing an identical commodity called education.
In a report released this week I propose dumping district-wide lock-step pay schedules that reward only formal education and years on the job in favor of a compensation reform that rewards and motivates teachers in a way conducive to raising the academic achievement. I do not propose a merit pay system that gives bonuses to individual teachers in return for raising test scores.
Why? The track record of such systems can at best be called uneven. Teachers are not uniformly motivated by monetary compensation. Research by UW-Madison professor Allan Odden and others shows teachers value collaboration and student success above other factors. Any reform that does not recognize this is doomed to fail. No less important, students need schools that deliver consistent teacher quality from start to finish so that the work of a good teacher in one grade is not undone by a sub-par teacher the next.
Regular readers know that state finances were worse than the Doyle administration admitted during its eight years of fiscal incompetence. But state finances are also worse than the Walker administration admits now.
The proof is the state's Comprehensive Annual Fiscal Report, an inch-thick annual tree-killer that summarizes the differences between politicians' claims about the state's fiscal health, and the reality of the state's fiscal health.
The proposals would allow charter schools in the state, establish a process for failing schools to be taken over by outside organizations and continue an overhaul of the way all teachers and principals are evaluated.
Charters, which are public but independent schools allowed to use unconventional techniques, would be closely monitored by a state board, lawmakers said. Only 50 would be allowed in the state - with no more than 10 new ones authorized each year. Each would be required to adopt a specific plan to serve educationally disadvantaged children.
The evaluations, which would include student test scores and classroom observations, would build on a pilot system already used in several districts in the state, lawmakers said.
Poor performance on the evaluations could lead teachers to lose their tenure, but the focus would be on improvement of teaching methods.
The reactions ranged from withering (in the case of UFT President Michael Mulgrew) to bewildered (Ernest Logan, principals union president) to supportive (charter school operator Eva Moskowitz and others whose organizations would benefit from the proposals).
Below, I've compiled the complete set of education-related reactions that dropped into my inbox. I'll add to the list as more reactions roll in.
When asked why he didn't second Ed Hughes' motion at the Dec. 19 meeting to delay the schools' opening until 2013, Howard replied, "We had not discussed the implications of what that means. I think we have time if we're talking about 2013, to make sure we do it correctly, because we don't know what the rules of the game will be in 2013."
Superintendent Dan Nerad said, "Whether it will move forward I don't know. That depends on whether the motion gets on the floor. I don't have a read on it at this point."
Others aren't as diplomatic. "This is a waste of time and money for all involved," said TJ Mertz, an Edgewood College professor and district watchdog who is among Madison Prep's most ardent critics.
"The votes are not there and will not be there," he continued. "It distracts from the essential work of addressing the real issues of the district, including issues of achievement for students in poverty."
A merit pay program that incentivizes teachers is about to get a test run at the local level. Two Wisconsin school districts are moving forward with a plan that would reward good teachers with salary bonuses in the 2012-2013 school year.
The Cedarburg and Hartland-Lakeside School Districts will be amongst the first to institute merit pay programs for educators in the Badger State. Bonuses will be tied to teacher evaluations - instructors that earn high marks from administrators will be eligible for extra compensation in the following school year. In Cedarburg, these additional payments range from $1,700 to $2,200.
The ability to institute bonus systems on a district-to-district basis is a new one in Wisconsin. In previous years, most plans would have been wiped out by collective bargaining between the school district and their local teachers' union. Since Act 10 removed most of these bargaining scenarios, school boards now have more freedom to enact reforms like merit pay in their classrooms.
The board voted unanimously Monday in favor of Cross County School District's proposed charter elementary school. The board also approved applications for proposed charter schools in Lincoln, Osceola and Warren.
Department of Education spokesman Seth Blomeley says charter schools are eligible to apply for up to $600,000 in federal money to use toward startup and other one-time costs.
Cecelia Thornton sets up a makeshift classroom at her kitchen table every day after school to tutor her grandchildren in reading and writing with materials she buys at the local thrift store in the Mojave Desert town of Adelanto (San Bernardino County).
That's the key reason why she and a band of other parents and guardians filed a petition Thursday under California's "parent trigger" law to demand reforms at the K-6 school where just 35 percent of pupils last year tested proficient in reading and 46 percent in math.
The Times and a host of otherpublications heralded last week's new study extolling the lifelong money-earning benefits of having a good primary/middle-school teacher. Oh, yay! Let's do what these economists from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggest, right?
Actually, ugh, no. What economists Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia want to do, apparently, is to identify and fire "weaker" teachers, for the sake of a barely perceptible increase in students' "lifetime income." Nobody has actually tried this yet; the report doesn't describe an experiment. It's just the conclusion they draw from their analysis of massive amounts of data gathered from public schools in New York City and cross-referenced against IRS records and the like.
Here's a bit from the summary of the original paper. Note that a "high-VA" ("value-added") teacher is a "good" one--meaning by this, solely, that the teacher in question has succeeded in raising standardized test scores.
Leaders of a proposed charter school for low-income minority students said Friday that they expect to have sufficient funding and will open Madison Prep as a private academy next fall but will continue to return to the Madison School Board for approval, starting with a proposed revote in February to make the school a publicly funded charter starting in 2013.
That would be just weeks before a Madison School Board election in which two Madison Prep supporters are vying for seats.
"We will go back, and we'll go back, and we'll go back until the vote is a yes," said Laura DeRoche-Perez, director of school development at the Urban League of Greater Madison. "That is because we cannot wait."
The prospects for school board approval for the 2013 opening, at least with the current board, appear uncertain after the same board voted against the school opening in 2012 by a 5-2 margin in December. Those who opposed cited the school's plan to use non-union teachers and staff and concerns over the school's accountability to taxpayers and the district and don't appear to have wavered in their opposition.
New Mexico lawmakers are considering a proposal from the Martinez administration to link teacher evaluations to student test scores. This is a crucial element in the overall reform plan offered by Public Education Secretary Hanna Skandera. Not surprisingly, it's proving contentious. It will be a huge topic in the coming 30-day legislative session set to begin Tuesday, Jan. 17.
The Obama administration's education secretary, Arne Duncan, favors eliminating legal barriers to linking student test scores to teacher evaluations. That means student tests could determine tenure, raises and even termination. He talks about it in the Atlantic Monthly article "What Makes a Great Teacher?" which goes into great detail about the efforts of educational researchers to tease out what constitutes excellence in teaching. Are great teachers just hard-wired that way, or can we cultivate them?
The latest installment of the Fordham Institute's Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning series investigates one of the more controversial aspects of digital learning: How much does it cost? In this paper, the Parthenon Group uses interviews with more than fifty vendors and online-schooling experts to estimate today's average per-pupil cost for a variety of schooling models, traditional and online, and presents a nuanced analysis of the important variance in cost between different school designs. These ranges--from $5,100 to $7,700 for full-time virtual schools, and $7,600 to $10,200 for the blended version--highlight both the potential for low-cost online schooling and the need for better data on costs and outcomes in order for policymakers to reach confident conclusions related to the productivity and efficiency of these promising new models. Download "The Costs of Online Learning" to learn more.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, directly confronting leaders of the teachers' union, proposed on Thursday a merit-pay system that would award top performers with $20,000 raises and threatened to remove as many as half of those working at New York City's most troubled schools.
Delivering his 11th and penultimate State of the City address, Mr. Bloomberg vowed to double down on his longstanding efforts to revive the city's long-struggling schools, saying, "We have to be honest with ourselves: we have only climbed halfway up the mountain, and halfway isn't good enough."
"We cannot accept failing schools," he said during an often-passionate one-hour speech at Morris High School in the Bronx. "And we cannot accept excuses for inaction or delay."
Madison Prep and Urban League to seek new vote on Madison Prep
Kaleem Caire, via email:
MEDIA ADVISORY
For immediate release: January 12, 2012
Contact: Laura DeRoche-Perez
Director of School Development
Urban League of Greater Madison
2222 S. Park St., Suite 200
Madison, WI 53713
Lderoche@ulgm.org
608-729-1230 (office)
608-556-2066 (cell)
Urban League and Madison Prep Boards to Hold Press Conference
Will announce their plans to seek a new vote on authorizing the opening of Madison Prep for 2013
WHAT: Madison Preparatory Academy and the Urban League of Greater Madison will announce their intentions to seek a February 2012 vote by the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education to authorize Madison Prep to open in the fall of 2013. Three MMSD Board of Education members have already shared their support of the motion.
WHEN: 3:30 pm CST, Friday, January 13
WHERE: Urban League of Greater Madison, 2222 S. Park St., Madison, WI 53713
WHO: Madison Preparatory Academy Board of Directors
Urban League of Greater Madison
Others
For more information, contact Laura DeRoche-Perez, Director of School Development, Urban League of Greater Madison, at lderoche@ulgm.org or 608-729-1230.
Barack Obama has been accused of "class warfare" because he favors closing several tax loopholes -- socialism for the wealthy -- as part of the deficit-cutting process. This is a curious charge: class warfare seems to be a one-way street in American politics. Over the past 30 years, the superwealthy have waged far more effective warfare against the poor and the middle class, via their tools in Congress, than the other way around. How else can one explain the fact that the oil companies, despite elephantine profits, are still subsidized by the federal government? How else can one explain the fact that hedge-fund managers pay lower tax rates than their file clerks? Or that farm subsidies originally meant for family farmers go to huge corporations that hardly need the help?
Actually, there is an additional explanation. Conservatives, like liberals, routinely take advantage of a structural flaw in the modern welfare state: there is no creative destruction when it comes to government programs. Both "liberal" and "conservative" subsidies linger in perpetuity, sometimes metastasizing into embarrassing giveaways. Even the best-intentioned programs are allowed to languish in waste and incompetence. Take, for example, the famed early-education program called Head Start. (See more about the Head Start reform process.)
The idea is, as Newt Gingrich might say, simple liberal social engineering. You take the million or so poorest 3- and 4-year-old children and give them a leg up on socialization and education by providing preschool for them; if it works, it saves money in the long run by producing fewer criminals and welfare recipients -- and more productive citizens. Indeed, Head Start did work well in several pilot programs carefully run by professionals in the 1960s. And so it was "taken to scale," as the wonks say, as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.
That Kaleem Caire, the charismatic champion of the Madison Preparatory Academy, is frustrated by the proposal's defeat before the Madison School Board last month should surprise no one.
But the prospect that resentment over the defeat of the proposal runs so deep that it could poison the initiative's future prospects as a private school or public charter -- that's a distressing possibility whose existence is just now emerging.
The proposal for the school by the Urban League of Greater Madison has won many supporters because of the embarrassingly persistent achievement gap between whites and minorities in the Madison School District, but when Caire spoke Monday to Communities United, a community group dedicated to social justice, his passionate appeal to go beyond the district's existing model was laced with anger towards the School Board members who voted down the plan.
Much of the discussion Monday between Caire and a handful of staffers from the Urban League -- where he is president and CEO -- and those at the Communities United meeting centered around the ultra-sensitive topics of race and racism.
Even in that friendly environment (the informal, nonpartisan coalition was already on record in favor of the school), Caire's accusations against school officials were rejected as political spin by a Madison City Council member on hand and criticized as more of the "race card" by an African-American activist who has skirmished with Caire before over Madison Prep. But a Latina parent and activist greeted his words as an apt assessment of the situation in Madison schools.
Take advantage of great dual credit courses at your high school! Many of Minnesota's high schools offer Dual Credit programs that allow qualifying students to earn college credit while still in high school at little or no cost. Dual Credit programs are a great way for high school students to challenge themselves academically, earn college credit, and save time and money. Eligible high school students can choose to participate in the following dual credit programs: Postsecondary Enrollment Options (PSEO),Concurrent Enrollment (CE), Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB).
When a fledgling charter school took over the Cottrell Elementary building this fall, district administrators didn't worry about losing per-pupil state funding, and there were no protests decrying the move as a threat to public education.
That's because the Oregon Trail School District created the charter school.
Amid increasing budget constraints and continued pressure to reform public education, some savvy educators are taking advantage of federal charter school grants of up to $500,000 to create a hybrid: the district-initiated charter school.
In Oregon, taxpayers finance charter schools, which are typically run by organizations independent from school districts. But two Clackamas County districts have discovered the Oregon charter school law can provide extra funds and flexibility for their own innovative programs.
Charter schools provide an intriguing opportunity to rethink the role of public schools in preparing students to become informed and engaged participants in the American political system. As public schools of choice, charter schools are freed from many rules and regulations that can inhibit innovation and improvement. They can readily adopt best practices in civic education and encourage (or even mandate) extracurricular activities to enhance civic learning. With their decentralized approach to administration, they can allow parents and students a far greater role in school governance than they would have in traditional public schools.
In exchange for that flexibility, charter schools must define a clear mission and performance outcomes for themselves. In service of their chosen missions, high-performing charters seek to forge a transformative school culture for their students--expressed in slogans on hallway placards, banners, and T-shirts, and heard in chants, ceremonies, and codes of conduct. Successful charters create a culture in which everyone associated with the school is united around a common mission, enabling them to articulate goals and aspirations that might otherwise be hampered by constituency politics and parental objections. Charter school leaders can (and do) speak forthrightly about the need to teach students good social skills, instill among their pupils a sense of community, and encourage students to make positive change in the world.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just came out with its latest advice for how to improve schools. As the foundation sees it, districts don't have a good sense of who their good and bad teachers are, and need better evaluations. But is this really the problem?
Ever since it abandoned its former educational preoccupation, small schools, the Gates Foundation has hit upon stellar teaching as the key to transforming the nation's schools. It's not exactly a new idea, but it's one worthy of rediscovering.
A Stanford economist named Eric Hanushek has put into numerical terms a concept that most people know with their gut. A New Yorker story on the matter a few years ago summarized his findings: "Students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material."
Accountability for significantly narrowing the achievement gap must be at the top of the Madison School District agenda in 2012. How long should the current members of the School Board, Superintendant Dan Nerad, the administration and staff have to demonstrate gains in narrowing the gap?
In 2010 a five-year strategic plan was implemented with narrowing achievement gaps as the number one priority, and we are now starting to get results from the initiatives in the plan.
What will the level of accountability be for those of us who approved the plan? What will the level of accountability be for those of us who have responsibility for implementing the plan?
The question must be: Have we achieved the desired results or educational outcomes demanded by the taxpayers?
Click here to watch Sunday's "For the Record" on WISC-TV (Ch. 3) with Neil Heinen. Panelists include State Journal editorial page editor Scott Milfred, Republican insider Brandon Schulz and The Progressive editor Matt Rothschild. They bantered about the recent Iowa caucus results, the U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin, the likely gubernatorial recall and the coming Madison School Board elections, which Milfred argues are likely to decide whether a charter school called Madison Preparatory Academy opens its doors."
Charter schools--public schools of choice that are operated autonomously, outside the direct control of local school districts--have become more prevalent over the past two decades. There is no consensus about whether, on average, charter schools are doing better or worse than conventional public schools at promoting the achievement of their students. Nonetheless, one research finding is clear: Effects vary widely among different charter schools. Many educators, policymakers, and funders are interested in ways to identify and replicate successful charter schools and help other public schools adopt effective charter school practices.
Charter-school management organizations (CMOs), which establish and operate multiple charter schools, represent one prominent attempt to bring high performance to scale. Many CMOs were created in order to replicate educational approaches that appeared to be effective, particularly among disadvantaged students. Attracting substantial philanthropic support, CMO schools have grown rapidly in the past decade. Some of these organizations have received laudatory attention through anecdotal reports of dramatic achievement results.
The National Study of CMO Effectiveness aims to fill the gap in systematic evidence about CMOs, providing the first rigorous nationwide examination of CMOs' effects on students' achievement and attainment. The study includes an examination of the relationships between the practices of individual CMOs and their effects on student achievement, with the aim of providing useful guidance to the field. Mathematica Policy Research and the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) are conducting the study with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation and project management assistance from the NewSchools Venture Fund. This updated edition of the report provides key findings from the study on CMO practices, impacts, and the relationships between them. A forthcoming report will explore promising practices in greater depth.
It is taken as conventional wisdom that "there aren't any" teachers, administrators, or other people of color and that's why MMSD's staff lacks diversity. According to the document at the link below, people of color are applying. They aren't getting hired. That is happening in many cases because the applicants - even for entry level jobs - are "screened out" because they "lack the qualifications" or have other deficits. Others are referred for interviews but not hired. This is the case from custodians and educational assistants up through principals and high level administrators.
It is true that recruitment must improve for teachers, but I would argue that is about missed opportunities (e.g. job fairs in urban districts undergoing layoffs, continuing to rely on UW-Madison as the largest source of teacher candidates given the lack of diversity in the School of Education, etc.). It also is about entrenched patterns of hiring, that could be changed with high quality leadership.
The decision to post a position as a strongly HR/employment-related position and then hire someone with no experience in those areas is disturbing given the MMSD's track record and the need to make knowledgeable, skillful, and significant change. Indeed, it points to the fundamental problem in diversifying MMSD staff at any level.
There is currently much interest in improving access to high-quality teachers (Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2010; Hanushek, 2007) through improved recruitment and retention. Prior research has shown that it is difficult to retain teachers, particularly in high-poverty schools (Boyd et al., 2011; Ingersoll, 2004). Although there is no one reason for this difficulty, there is some evidence to suggest teachers may leave certain schools or the profession in part because of dissatisfaction with low salaries (Ingersoll, 2001).
Thus, it is possible that by offering teachers financial incentives, whether in the form of alternative compensation systems or standalone bonuses, they would become more satisfied with their jobs and retention would increase. As of yet, however, support for this approach has not been grounded in empirical research.
Denver's Professional Compensation System for Teachers ("ProComp") is one of the most prominent alternative teacher compensation reforms in the nation.* Via a combination of ten financial incentives, ProComp seeks to increase student achievement by motivating teachers to improve their instructional practices and by attracting and retaining high-quality teachers to work in the district.
The local press failed to notice that Carmel Valley, where the Dumanis presser was held isn't even in the San Diego Unified School District. The Mayoral candidate appeared blissfully unaware that schools in that area are part of the San Dieguito district as she prattled on about "Leadership, vision and experience are needed to put our schools on a new path because it's clear the path we are on today is the wrong one."
Asked about who she worked with in drafting her plan, Dumanis would only say that she'd consulted with an unnamed group of teachers, parents, students and others interested in reform. It's clear though, that if you look at her list of campaign contributors, the "Bold" plan is largely drawn from the wreckage of the failed San Diegans for Great Schools ballot initiative that, despite receiving over $1 million in donations from a few well heeled "philanthropists", couldn't gather enough signatures to be placed in front of the voters.
In 1998, Massachusetts debuted a set of tests it created for people who wanted teaching licenses. People nationwide were shocked when 59% of those in the first batch of applicants failed a communications and literacy test that officials said required about a 10th-grade level of ability.
Given some specifics of how the tests were launched, people who wanted to be teachers in Massachusetts probably got more of a bum rap for their qualifications than they deserved. But the results certainly got the attention of people running college programs to train teachers. They changed what they did, and the passing rate rose to about 90% in recent years.
One more thing: Student outcomes in Massachusetts improved significantly. Coming from the middle of the pack, Massachusetts has led the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade scores in reading and math on National Assessment of Education Program (NAEP) tests for almost a decade.
Could this be Wisconsin in a few years, especially when it comes to reading?
Gov. Scott Walker and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers released last week the report of a task force aimed at improving reading in Wisconsin. Reading results have been stagnant for years statewide, with Wisconsin slipping from near the top to the middle of the pack nationally. Among low-income and minority students, the state's results are among the worst in the country.
The salaries of California State University campus presidents would be capped, and discussions about their pay would be held in public, under a bill being proposed by a state senator frustrated that CSU has been raising executive pay as well as tuition.
The proposal comes months after CSU trustees hired a campus president in San Diego for $400,000 a year - $100,000 more than his predecessor - and at the same meeting that they approved a 12 percent tuition increase.
"It is not reasonable to give $100,000 raises to executive positions, especially when simultaneously raising tuition," said state Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance (Los Angeles County), author of SB755.
Sometimes it's hard to realize progress when you're caught up in the daily grind. You tend to take for granted where you are since the focus is always on what's next. So, this post is a glance back at where we were a year ago in three priority areas in New Jersey education: tenure reform, leadership at the NJ Department of Education, and the search for Newark Public Schools' superintendent.
1) New Jersey's tenure reform debate
On December 9, 2010, Senator Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), Chairwoman of the NJ Senate Education Committee, held the state's first-ever hearing on tenure reform. Although conversations on tenure reform today are commonplace in New Jersey, there was no substantive discussion of it before Ruiz's hearing.
Witnesses at the hearing included officials from NJ Department of Education (NJDOE), Colorado state Senator Michael Johnston (sponsor of Colorado's "Great Teachers and Great Leaders" bill - aka SB 191, considered to be one of the strongest teacher evaluation and tenure reform bills in the nation), TNTP's Executive Vice President and General Counsel Daniel Weisberg, and the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), among others. A few highlights from the day's testimony:
JEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight, putting a price on the value of good teachers. A large and new study addresses just that.
Ray Suarez has the story.
RAY SUAREZ: The debate over testing in schools, and whether students' scores adequately reflect a teacher's performance, has been raging for well over a decade. Now a new study has tracked more than two-and-a-half million students over two decades.
It found test scores are indeed a good gauge for evaluating student performance. And the study found replacing a bad teacher with an average or a good one can translate into a huge economic difference. Combined, the students could earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more over their working lifetimes.
We look at the study and the response it's stirred with Harvard economist Raj Chetty, one of its three authors. And we hope to be joined by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers union.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo picked a fight last week with what has long been Albany's most powerful force: public schools.
In his State of the State address, he accused teachers' unions, school boards and school aid lobbyists of being more interested in adults than children.
"We need major reform," he said Wednesday. "We need to focus on student achievement. ... We've wasted enough time."
In their best Robert DeNiro, they shot back: "You talkin' to me?"
In the balance could hang whether the poorest school districts, mostly in larger cities and in rural areas, will get a larger share of state school aid. That had been the case for most of the past decade after the state's highest court found New York failed to adequately fund education for years. But not last year, in Cuomo's first budget.
Bashing the No Child Left Behind Act has become so politically popular that it's easy to forget how overwhelmingly bipartisan it was -- the legislation passed the House with 384 votes and the Senate with 91. As the law marks its 10-year anniversary on Jan. 8, it's important to look at both its successes and its failures. Did NCLB solve all of our public education problems? No. But it set a lot of good things in motion and was specifically designed to be revised after five or six years (in a reauthorization that has yet to happen and is unlikely to before this year's election.) The No Child law didn't get everything right the first time, but that's the wrong yardstick. If we held other policy areas -- think food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security -- to the same standard No Child is held to these days, i.e., flawlessness, then we would have jettisoned those and many other worthy programs long ago.
No Child Left Behind was designed to bring accountability into public schools. It is not a new federal program. Rather, it is the latest modification to the mammoth Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the omnibus law that governs most federal involvement in public schools. The No Child revisions built on President Bill Clinton's 1994 Improving America's Schools Act, which built on the lessons learned during the Reagan years. As former governors, both Clinton and President George W. Bush shared a commitment to having specific standards for what skills children should be learning and holding schools accountable for teaching them. By the late 1990s, key organizations including the Education Trust and the Citizens Commission for Civil Rights were calling for stricter accountability measures, and Democrats on Capitol Hill -- including California Representative George Miller, a key player on education policy in the House -- were responding. When Bush became President and got recalcitrant Republicans to fall in line and support his accountability measures, it was a Nixon-to-China move on education policy.
In the private sector, people with SAT and GRE scores comparable to those of education majors earn less than teachers do. Does that mean teachers are overpaid? Or that public schools should pay more to attract top applicants who tend to go into higher-paying professions?
California calls its "Academic Performance Index" (API) the "cornerstone" of its accountability system. The API is calculated as a weighted average of the proportions of students meeting proficiency and other cutoffs on the state exams.
It is a high-stakes measure. "Growth" in schools' API scores determines whether they meet federal AYP requirements, and it is also important in the state's own accountability regime. In addition, toward the middle of last month, the California Charter Schools Association called for the closing of ten charter schools based in part on their (three-year) API "growth" rates.
Putting aside the question of whether the API is a valid measure of student performance in any given year, using year-to-year changes in API scores in high-stakes decisions is highly problematic. The API is cross-sectional measure - it doesn't follow students over time - and so one must assume that year-to-year changes in a school's index do not reflect a shift in demographics or other characteristics of the cohorts of students taking the tests. Moreover, even if the changes in API scores do in fact reflect "real" progress, they do not account for all the factors outside of schools' control that might affect performance, such as funding and differences in students' backgrounds (see here and here, or this Mathematica paper, for more on these issues).
Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled his new budget plan, calling for a painful $4.8-billion cut in public school funds if voters reject a proposed tax hike that he hopes to put on the ballot in November.
Despite the possible reduction -- the equivalent of slashing three weeks from the school year -- the spending blueprint Brown released Thursday is a relatively optimistic document. It assumes he will have to close a $9.2-billion deficit, a vast improvement over last year's $26-billion gap.
Half of the deficit would be wiped out through the temporary half-cent sales-tax hike and increased levies on the wealthy that Brown wants voters to approve -- or by the schools cuts. The remainder would be eliminated with reductions in welfare, Medi-Cal and other programs.
My views about education are, like many others, informed by my own experiences. Born the son of a black sharecropper in rural Alabama near the end of WWII, I attended segregated schools for most of my early years of education, including the first three. And, my teachers in Alabama were all black, all female. The remainder of my primary and secondary schooling was in low income, mostly black communities in Cincinnati, Ohio. All of my teachers in Cincinnati were white and mostly female. I had both good and bad educational experiences in Alabama and Ohio. The one thing these experiences had in common was that those experiences, both good and bad, were determined by the quality of teachers I had. No surprise there.
What is surprising is that the good teachers I had overcame all the "social and economic disabilities" a student like me brought to class with him. My parents were typical of most black families: uneducated or under-educated. My father had no education and could not read or write. My mother had a fifth or sixth grade education. So she could read and write, but knew little about how urban education systems worked. We were very poor, living on the largess of the landowners where we lived in Alabama and on welfare most of the time in Cincinnati. I worked at school and after school from seventh grade on. My experience was not atypical. Most of my classmates had similar stories. Some of us succeeded against great odds. The ones who did succeed educationally did so because there were teachers along the way who encouraged, inspired, and demanded our best.
The education reform package advanced Tuesday by the state's largest teachers' union would speed up the dismissal process for poor teachers, but would not strengthen the link between job security and how well students do on state tests.
Mary Loftus Levine, executive director of the Connecticut Education Association, said student achievement has always factored into teacher evaluations.
"There are multiple indicators. It's not just about test scores," she said, adding true reform would be to streamline the dismissal process for bad teachers and do more to make sure teachers have proper training before and once they get into the classroom.
The CEA package, called A View From the Classroom, contains a number of other suggestions to provide universal preschool and all-day kindergarten and increase state funding for local education expenses.
School districts and their supporters around the country have launched a wave of lawsuits asking courts to order more spending on public education, contending they face new pressures as states cut billions of dollars of funding while adding more-rigorous educational standards.
About half of the school districts in Texas have sued the state since the legislature cut more than $5 billion from school budgets last year, citing fiscal pressures. School-funding suits also are pending in California, Florida and Kansas, among other states. The suits generally claim schools lack the resources to provide the level of education required by state constitutions.
Critics of such lawsuits--and states being sued--say it is the prerogative of legislatures to decide how much states should spend on education.
In Washington state, the Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the state legislature to come up with a plan for additional funding. Gov. Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, said in a statement she agreed with the ruling, noting that without ample funds it is "difficult for students to gain the skills and knowledge needed to compete in today's global economy."
In the early 20th century Helen Todd, a factory inspector in Chicago, interviewed 500 children working in factories, often in dangerous and unpleasant conditions. She asked children the question: "If your father had a good job and you didn't have to work, which would you rather do--go to school or work in a factory?" 412 said they would choose factory work. One fourteen year old girl, who was interviewed lacquering canes in an attic working with both intense heat and the constant smell of turpentine, said "School is the fiercest thing you can come up against. Factories ain't no cinch, but schools is worst."
The recent expansion of the "ASER-like" simple assessments of literacy and numeracy skills of all children in a village based approach provides an accurate, and chilling, picture of just how little learning is going on inside schools in many poor countries. The ASER data can show the learning profile, the association of measured skills and grade completion, by showing what fraction of children who have completed which grade can read a simple story (expected of a child in grade 2) or do simple arithmetic operations. Take Uttar Pradesh in 2010. By the end of lower primary school (grade 5) only one in four children could divide. Even by grade 8, the end of upper primary only 56 percent could. Similarly, by grade 5 only 44 percent could read a level 2 paragraph and by grade 8 still only 77.6 could. A large plurality of children, even of those that had persisted and been promoted through eight full grades or primary school--roughly 8000 hours of available total instruction--were either illiterate or innumerate or both.
Some math classrooms are so quiet you can hear the sound of pencils on paper.
Robert MacCarthy's class at Willard Middle School in Berkeley has a different soundtrack. His sixth-graders problem-solve out loud -- sometimes into a big blue microphone -- and applaud each other afterward. They take on lively games and challenges that mix math with art.
Maybe, if they're lucky, they'll get to star in a math music video produced by their teacher and classmates under the label mathisnotacrime productions. "Integer Eyes" is the latest hit. "Math Hustla," released in 2009, quickly became a Willard classic.
"I never met an expression that I couldn't simplify. I never met a problem that I couldn't solve," two students rap, alternating lines, as they move to the beat.
Math can be a tough sell for adolescents. When students hit middle school, they often grow frustrated with math and begin to question the importance of knowing how to isolate a variable or graph an equation. Some end up failing the same courses again and again and eventually drop out of school -- even as their schools devote more time to the subject, said Harold Asturias, director of the Center for Mathematics Excellence and Equity at UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science.
Education Insider is a monthly report and webinar that provides real-time insights on federal education policy trends, debates, and issues--from the handful of decision makers that are driving the process.
Trying to follow the ins-and-outs of Federal education reform -- a morass of legislation, regulations, grants, mandates and more -- is like assembling a giant jigsaw puzzle. It is often difficult to see the entire picture when all you have is a few pieces. The challenge is piecing together bits of conversations, speeches, legislation, regulations, and other expressions of policy intent to discern what is happening in the debate. This process is even more complex since other policy issues and political agendas can change the trajectory of education policy.
As with any issue, there are only a handful of insiders that will shape the debate but never before has there been an attempt to tap their collective insights and forecasts.
Organizations must anticipate and react to Federal policy and funding changes need high quality information and analysis and the complete picture that Education Insider provides.
Here's a depressing but documented comparison of California taxes and economic climate with the rest of the states. The news is breaking bad, and getting worse (twice a month, I update crucial data on this fact sheet):
REVISED: California has the 3rd worst state income tax in the nation. 9.3% tax bracket starts at $46,766 for people filing as individuals. 10.3% tax starts at $1,000,000. Governor Brown is putting on the ballot a prop to change the "millionaires' tax" to 12.3%, starting at $500,000. If approved, CA will be #1 in income tax rates. http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp59_es.pdf
California corporate income tax rate (8.84%) is the highest west of the Mississippi (our economic competitors) except for Alaska. http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp59.pdf Table #8 - we are 8th highest nationwide.
MTEL 90: Teacher Content Knowledge Licensing Requirements Coming To Wisconsin....
The Wisconsin adoption of teacher content knowledge requirements, on the form of MTEL 90 (Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure) by 2013-2014 would (will?) be a significant step forward via the Wisconsin Read to Lead Report), assuming it is not watered down like the oft criticized (and rightfully so) WKCE.
There are significant implications for :Education School preparation/curriculum with the addition of content knowledge to teacher licensing requirements.
In Madison, the influx of poor people from Chicago is testing the city's historical liberalism. About one-quarter of the 3,300 Madison families receiving welfare are former Illinois residents.
Even Mayor Paul Soglin, who earned his liberal stripes in the anti-establishment politics of the 1960s as a Vietnam War protester, now talks of "finite limits of resources" for the poor.
"We're like a lifeboat that holds 12 people comfortably," Mr. Soglin said. "We've got about 16 in it now, and there's a dozen more waiting in the water. Since we're already in danger of going under, what can our community be expected to do?"
A vibrant economy in Wisconsin accounts for much of the migration among poor people, most of them looking for jobs. The state's unemployment rate has dipped below 4 percent while that in Illinois is 4.4 percent.
my correspondent notes:
Here is an interesting article from 1995. Worth revisiting with Soglin back in office (just because he is the mayor quoted at the time), but mostly as it pertains to our discussions around Madison Prep. What are the unique attributes and qualities that make up both our white population and our minority population?
Summary of the Wisconsin Read to Lead Task Force Recommendations, January, 2012
Teacher Preparation and Professional Development
All teachers and administrators should receive more instruction in reading pedagogy that focuses on evidence-based practices and the five components of reading as defined by the National Reading Panel (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension).
There must be more accountability at the state level and a commitment by institutions of higher education to improving teacher preparation.
Licensure requirements should be strengthened to include the Massachusetts Foundations of Reading exam by 2013.
Teacher preparation programs should expand partnerships with local school districts and early childhood programs.
Information on the performance of graduates of teacher preparation programs should be available to the public.
A professional development conference should be convened for reading specialists and elementary school principals.
DPI should make high quality, science-based, online professional development in reading available to all teachers.
Professional development plans for all initial educators should include a component on instructional strategies for reading and writing.
Professional development in reading instruction should be required for all teachers whose students continually show low levels of achievement and/or growth in reading.
Screening, Assessment, and Intervention
Wisconsin should use a universal statewide screening tool in pre-kindergarten through second grade to ensure that struggling readers are identified as early as possible.
Proper accommodations should be given to English language learners and special education students.
Formal assessments should not replace informal assessments, and schools should assess for formative and summative purposes.
Educators should be given the knowledge to interpret assessments in a way that guides instruction.
Student data should be shared among early childhood programs, K-12 schools, teachers, parents, reading specialists, and administrators.
Wisconsin should explore the creation of a program similar to the Minnesota Reading Corps in 2013.
Early Childhood
DPI and the Department of Children and Families should work together to share data, allowing for evaluation of early childhood practices.
All 4K programs should have an adequate literacy component.
DPI will update the Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards to ensure accuracy and alignment with the Common Core State Standards, and place more emphasis on fidelity of implementation of the WMELS.
The YoungStar rating system for early childhood programs should include more specific early literacy criteria.
Accountability
The Educator Effectiveness Design Team should consider reading outcomes in its evaluation systems.
The Wisconsin School Accountability Design Team should emphasize early reading proficiency as a key measure for schools and districts. Struggling schools and districts should be given ongoing quality professional development and required to implement scientific research-based screening, assessment, curriculum, and intervention.
Educators and administrators should receive training on best practices in order to provide effective instruction for struggling readers.
The state should enforce the federal definition for scientific research-based practices, encourage the use of What Works Clearinghouse, and facilitate communication about effective strategies.
In addition to effective intervention throughout the school year, Wisconsin should consider mandatory evidence-based summer school programs for struggling readers, especially in the lower grades, and hold the programs accountable for results.
Family Involvement
Support should be given to programs such as Reach Out and Read that reach low-income families in settings that are well-attended by parents, provide books to low-income children, and encourage adults to read to children.
The state should support programs that show families and caregivers how to foster oral language and reading skill development in children.
Adult literacy agencies and K-12 schools should collaborate at the community level so that parents can improve their own literacy skills.
Improved Videos of December 19 Public Appearances and Vote on Madison Prep Are Available
MMSD has now posted the videos from the December 19, 2011 meeting at which the Board of Education voted on the proposed Madison Preparatory Charter School. The first video contains the public appearances statements; the second contains the board comments, vote, etc., through the vote to adjourn.
The versions that are now posted are much improved - the video that was originally posted had issues with sound quality and ended abruptly during board statements. The new videos have terrific sound quality and contain the full meeting. (Thanks to MMSD staff for the work that went into this.)
This article is second in a series of articles regarding media coverage of public education. This article and its predecessor in the series show that Spokesman-Review coverage of the 2011 school-board election in Spokane was biased in favor of a particular candidate and a particular agenda.
On Sept. 28, I filed a Public Disclosure Commission complaint regarding election activity in 2009 and 2011 by Spokane Public Schools administrators, board directors, (new school board director) Deana Brower, and bond and levy advocacy organization Citizens for Spokane Schools (CFSS).
According to Washington State law, articulated in RCW 42.17.130, school district employees and school board directors are prohibited from using public resources to promote - directly or indirectly - elective candidates or ballot propositions such as bonds and levies. This is what RCW 42.17.130 says, in part:
Studies have consistently shown that compared to their white counterparts, minority students are less likely to graduate high school on time or receive any form of higher education, and more likely to drop out of high school.
While some experts point to methods for closing achievement gaps and enhancing the performance of the bottom 5 percent of schools and students by way of legislation and policy, a new report out by the Public Education Network examines the role of the parent.
Whereas just 37 percent of the general public considers schools in their communities -- versus schools in other areas -- as examples of institutions needing reform, about 70 percent of black and Latino parents point to those in their neighborhoods.
Among the "open courseware" projects at elite U.S. institutions, MITx will be the first to offer an institutional credential -- albeit not from MIT proper but from MITx, which will exist as a nonprofit apart from the university. (The Stanford professors who offered an interactive open course in artificial intelligence to all comers in the fall plan to send each non-enrolled student a certifying letter with their cumulative grade and class rank, but Stanford itself is not recognizing them.)
But MIT stamp or no, that is still a big step, says Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a D.C. think tank.
"I think this is the future," says Carey, who has written on the emerging relevance of nontraditional credentials. "It's just the logical next step for the ethic behind the [open educational resources] movement," he says.
In interviews, MIT officials took care to emphasize that MITx is not meant to supplant the traditional "residential education" that the university cultivates in its Cambridge, Mass., enclave.
Kimberly Lynch, a redhead with freckles, had a keen interest in sunblock. So much so that she spent the past year developing a new method to test the effectiveness of sunscreens and recently submitted the results to a medical journal.
The 17-year-old senior at Bergen Academies in Hackensack, N.J., is quite a bit younger than most scientists submitting papers to accredited medical journals. Then again, Lynch doesn't go to a typical public high school.
Bergen Academies, a four-year high school, offers students seven concentrations including science, medicine, culinary arts, business and finance, and engineering. It even has its own stem-cell laboratory, where Lynch completed her experiments under the guidance of biology teacher Robert Pergolizzi, a former assistant professor of genetic medicine at Cornell University.
WASHINGTON -- During her first six years of teaching in this city's struggling schools, Tiffany Johnson got a series of small raises that brought her annual salary to $63,000, from about $50,000. This year, her seventh, Ms. Johnson earns $87,000.
That latest 38 percent jump, unheard of in public education, came after Ms. Johnson was rated "highly effective" two years in a row under Washington's new teacher evaluation system. Those ratings also netted her back-to-back bonuses totaling $30,000.
"Lots of teachers leave the profession, but this has kept me invested to stay," said Ms. Johnson, 29, who is a special-education teacher at the Ron H. Brown Middle School in Northeast Washington. "I know they value me."
Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino has appointed the founder of a Dorchester charter school to the School Committee, in the latest signal of warming relations between Menino and the independently run institutions.
The appointee, Meg Campbell, is founder and executive director of the Codman Academy Charter Public School. The school has been noted for its good track record for college admissions, the mayor's office said yesterday in a prepared statement.
Campbell said last night in a telephone interview that she believes Menino made a bold choice by appointing her to the panel, given her leadership position at a charter school.
"I think it's a tribute to the mayor's overriding commitment'' to education, she said. "It doesn't matter to the mayor where you go to school. It matters that you get a phenomenal education.''
Editor's note: This is the second in a two-part series discussing the presidential candidates' views and likely policies toward higher education. This part focuses on the Republican candidates' positions. On December 12, Jay Schalin presented the higher education track record and statements of Barack Obama.)
For the most part, the Republican primary has focused on economic issues such as employment, taxation, and government spending. Higher education hasn't been a prime topic.
But for future students, taxpayers, and university officials, the presidential hopefuls' higher education policies could loom large. Decisions at the top could further inflate the higher education bubble or, alternatively, spur educational innovations. A look at the Republican field (in alphabetical order) reveals a variety of policy choices gleaned from their websites, statements, and debates.
We're in duck and cover mode...purely from the title of this entry.
But, you know what, folks? Whether you are a Walker devotee or a Walker detractor, you have to admit that EVERYTHING that Act 10 did was not bad. Yes, at its heart, Act 10 was a heinous attempt to cut public employees down at the knees. That was neither right nor fair. You can argue whatever you like, but the fact remains that for these scorned public workers, benefits were improved over the years IN LIEU OF salary increases. Rightly or wrongly so, that is what it boiled down to. Publicly, governors declared victory by giving public employees only modest raises (1-2%) each year. In some years, they got nothing. Quietly, however, behind the scenes, they negotiated with the unions to pick up the tab for a greater percentage of benefits...or offered another few days of annual leave(vacation).
This didn't happen overnight, people! This process developed over the past 25-35 YEARS! We know of many examples of private sector workers who took a job with in the public sector at a substantial demotion in terms of pay. These workers made a choice to do so in exchange for enhanced job security. Again...be it right or wrong, that's what they did. It took many of these workers 10 years or more to be earning the same salary they did when they left the private sector. But it was a choice, and they were OK with their choice.
Don't tell us that the private sector is struggling. Certainly, many private businesses and employees have suffered since the economic crisis which began over 3 years ago. But many are faring much better. We are hearing of BONUSES being given this holiday season. Public employees have never and WILL never hear of such a thing. We also know many private sector employees that have good to excellent health and retirement benefits.
New York State's education commissioner threatened on Tuesday to withhold tens of millions of dollars in federal grants to struggling schools in New York City and nine other districts statewide if they do not prove by Saturday that they will carry out new evaluation systems for teachers and principals.
Officials and union leaders in each district must first agree on the details of the evaluation systems, like how much weight students' standardized test scores will have on the annual ratings that teachers and principals receive. Compromise has thus far proved elusive.
I'd say that it probably will be, yes, and I've been saying so for some time. Think about it for a moment, we still use the educational techniques of the Early Middle Ages.
I first saw this point at Brad DeLong's place. When books are hand written, extremely expensive (as in, more than a year's wages possibly) then it makes sense for students to gather in one place and listen to the book being read to them.
Thus what we call a lecture. However, once printing has made the book cheap there's really not all that much point to such a gathering. Classes, OK, that's different, they're more interactive. And yes, of course, there's more to college than just the lectures and the education.
Schools which fail to improve within six years of being classed "satisfactory" should be relabelled inconsistent and pushed harder to improve, a report says.
The Royal Society of Arts report says half of the 40% of England's schools classed as "satisfactory" failed to improve within two Ofsted inspections.
Last month Ofsted said nearly 800 schools were "coasting" in this way.
The report says such schools are more likely to be in poorer areas.
The RSA report , published jointly with Ofsted, focused on the 40% of secondary schools in England rated as "satisfactory".
It noted that half of these schools remained "satisfactory" for at least two inspections and about 8% declined to an "inadequate" rating.
Quite the year we had in Wisconsin education in 2011, so we have lots of awards to give out in our annual recognition ceremony. Let's get right to the big one for this year:
The "Honey, I Blew Up the Education Status Quo" Award: No surprise who is the winner. Like him or hate him (and there certainly is no middle ground), when you say Gov. Scott Walker, you've said it all. State aid cuts. Tightened school spending and taxing. Benefit cuts to teachers. An end to teacher union power as we knew it. No need to say more.
Book of the Year: In some school districts - and the number will grow quickly - it was the handbook issued by the school board, replacing contracts with teachers unions. No more having to get union approval for changing every nitpicky rule about the length of the school day or assigning teachers to lunch duty.
Tool of the Year: Well, it wasn't anything small. In the Legislature, it was more like a jackhammer, as Republicans and Democrats engaged in all-out battle. As for schools, Walker talked often about giving leaders tools to deal with their situations. This is where it will get very interesting. Will leaders act as if they are holding precision tools to be used cautiously or as if they, too, are holding jackhammers? As one state school figure said privately to me, how school boards handle their new power is likely to be a key to whether there is a resurgence of teacher unions in the state. Which leads us to:
I think Borsuk's #3 is critical. I suspect that 60ish% of school boards will continue with the present practices, under different names. The remainder will create a new environment, perhaps providing a different set of opportunities for teachers. The April, 2012 Madison School Board election may determine the extent to which "status quo" reins locally.
New Jersey lawmakers are rightfully concerned about the proliferation of applications for new charter schools and their subsequent lack of effective oversight, but legislation proposed by Assemblywoman Mila Jasey requiring proposed charter schools to be approved at the polls is thoroughly misguided and symptomatic of a disappointing trend in how we view charter schools and the role they play in addressing the horrible inequities in our state.
I am disappointed by what is said by many of those who will establish recently approved charters. When asked what is special about their school's program, they often say something like: "We plan to hire high-quality teachers and have longer hours." My former students would call that a "duh" statement -- their fancy term for a tautology.
The Mind Trust's plan for transforming Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) would dramatically shrink the central administration, send about $200 million more a year to schools without raising taxes one cent, provide pre-k to all 4-year-olds, give teachers and principals more freedom, hold them accountable for student achievement gains, and provide parents with more quality school choices. It is the boldest school reform plan in the country.
An Indianapolis nonprofit has unveiled an ambitious 160-page reform proposal to completely overhaul Indianapolis Public Schools.
If it came to fruition, the sweeping proposal offered by the Mind Trust would create one of the nation's most radical new organizational approaches to public education.
"If we're going to be serious about doing something transformational, we need an aggressive plan," Mind Trust CEO David Harris said. "Incremental reforms haven't worked here, and they haven't worked in other parts of the country."
It's that the new Mind Trust report that calls for a sweeping overhaul of the way Indianapolis Public Schools operates will not turn into another tired battle over turf, pride and special interests. Instead, my hope is that it will lead to a broad and much-needed communitywide discussion about the future of the state's largest, and in some ways most important, school district.
The thorough, sensible and provocative report should spark the same kind of urgent discussion and action that we're seeing over mass transit, and that we've seen for decades over sports stadiums.
Those other issues are important. The education debate is vital.
What is it about graphs and economics? In a discipline where facts are murky and certainty is elusive, graphs offer a bright light of information and a small confidence that the world can be summed up between two axes. So when the BBC asked a group of economists to name their graph of the year, we decided to do the same (so did Wonkblog!). Here, from economists on left and right, and from economic journalists from around the beat, are the graphs of the year. Click through the gallery or scroll down to find the graphs organized under categories including Europe, spending & taxing, and energy.
Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ), which combines community programs with "No Excuses" charter schools, is one of the most ambitious social experiments to alleviate poverty of our time. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of attending the Promise Academy charter schools in HCZ on educational outcomes, with an eye towards informing the long-standing debate on whether schools alone can eliminate the achievement gap or whether the issues that poor children bring to school are too much for educators alone to overcome. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies suggest that the effects of attending the Promise Academy middle school are enough to close the black-white achievement gap in mathematics. The effects in elementary school are large enough to close the racial achievement gap in both mathematics and English Language Arts. We conclude by presenting two pieces of evidence that suggest high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor. Community programs appear neither necessary nor sufficient.
Nichols said though she disagreed with Silveira's vote, "This is bigger than Madison Prep."
"My motivation comes from listening to a lot of the community dialogue over the last year and hearing the voices of community members who want greater accountability, who want more diversity in the decision-making and just a call for change," Nichols said.
Silveira did not return a call for comment Friday.
Two candidates have announced plans to run for the other School Board seat up for election next spring, which is being vacated by Lucy Mathiak. They are Mary Burke, a former state commerce secretary and Trek Bicycle executive, and Michael Flores, a Madison firefighter, parent and East High graduate.
THE SPORTING SCENE about the football program at Don Bosco Preparatory School in Ramsey, New Jersey. Don Bosco, which belongs to the Salesian order of Roman Catholicism, was founded in 1915, as a boarding school for Polish boys, and shut its dormitories for good in 1969. Its reinvention as a football factory began in 1999, with the arrival of a new principal, Father John Talamo.) Talamo, who was thirty-four, had grown up on the outskirts of New Orleans, and brought with him the football-centric values of his native Louisiana.
A global study of learning standards in 74 countries has ranked India all but at the bottom, sounding a wake-up call for the country's education system. China came out on top.
1. A big chunk of India is still at the margin where malnutrition and malaria and other negatives matter for IQ. Indian poverty is the most brutal I have seen, anywhere, including my two trips to sub-Saharan Africa or in my five trips to Haiti. I don't know if Pisa is testing those particular individuals, but it still doesn't bode well for the broader distribution, if only through parental effects.
Truly involving parents and communities in our public schools, and the decisions that affect them, is essential to improving our school system.
While parent involvement is crucial to a child's educational success, the reality is that such involvement is not always present for various reasons. However, the larger communities in which a student's school and home are located also play an instrumental role in nurturing educational achievement, as expressed by the African proverb, "It takes a village to raise a child."
Unfortunately over the past several years, the Department of Education has consistently failed to meaningfully empower and involve these important stakeholders in its decisions about schools. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the Education Department's decisions and proposals regarding closing or phasing out schools, and opening new ones.
Many South Carolina public colleges and universities are excessively expensive and have strayed too far from their core mission: educating students, according to a recent study by a Columbia-based think tank.
Tuition is rising faster than household income in South Carolina, says the study of eight colleges and universities by the S.C. Policy Council, a public policy research and education foundation that advocates for more limited government.
The study, which did not include Winthrop University, The Citadel and many other state institutions, also says:
The colleges and universities do a poor job of retaining and graduating students.
It's lunchtime at Van Nuys High School and students stream into the cafeteria to check out the day's fare: black bean burgers, tostada salad, fresh pears and other items on a new healthful menu introduced this year by the Los Angeles Unified School District.
But Iraides Renteria and Mayra Gutierrez don't even bother to line up. Iraides said the school food previously made her throw up, and Mayra calls it "nasty, rotty stuff." So what do they eat? The juniors pull three bags of Flamin' Hot Cheetos and soda from their backpacks.
"This is our daily lunch," Iraides says. "We're eating more junk food now than last year."
For many students, L.A. Unified's trailblazing introduction of healthful school lunches has been a flop. Earlier this year, the district got rid of chocolate and strawberry milk, chicken nuggets, corn dogs, nachos and other food high in fat, sugar and sodium. Instead, district chefs concocted such healthful alternatives as vegetarian curries and tamales, quinoa salads and pad Thai noodles.
It's dangerous to be away. I briefly left the country a few weeks ago, and while I was gone, the district superintendent announced her retirement and The Spokesman-Review (SR) launched what I see as a media "lynching" of a local high school teacher.
Did you read about the attack on Jennifer Walther, an Advanced Placement English teacher (news.google.com search) at Ferris High School in Spokane, WA? Are you shocked by the newspaper's biased coverage? I'm not shocked. Nowadays, the SR doesn't bear much resemblance to the newspapers I've enjoyed reading. Smaller, thinner and nastier, it contains less content, less local news and more ads. Often biased, incomplete or hypocritical, the paper tolerates questionable material that fits an editorial agenda.
I'm an avid newspaper reader, but I canceled the SR in 2008 when it kept quoting unsubstantiated rumors from the ex-boyfriend of the daughter of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Things have not improved since then.
Now, the SR is using its bully pulpit to accuse Walther of doing something the SR appears to do nearly every day of the week - pursue a biased political agenda. Evidence suggests that, rather than stand up for this teacher, the school district and teachers union initiated or are assisting with the pile-on.
Wow....talk about standing out in a crowd!
The SPASD Administration wants SPASD to stand out, and it sure does now.
We're the leaders! Well...in millrate anyway.
If we look at SPASD vs. the 20 similar sized school districts (10 larger and 10 smaller in enrollments), Sun Prairie is head and shoulders above the rest in mill rate ($12.62) and has the 4th highest tax levy!
While our rival, Middleton-Cross Plains bests out slightly in terms of tax levy, we cream them in mill rate.
A $200,000 home in Sun Prairie will pay $482 MORE in taxes this year than a similar value home in MCPSD.
As discussed in prior posts, high-quality analyses of charter school effects show that there is wide variation in the test-based effects of these schools but that, overall, charter students do no better than their comparable regular public school counterparts. The existing evidence, though very tentative, suggests that the few schools achieving large gains tend to be well-funded, offer massive amounts of additional time, provide extensive tutoring services and maintain strict, often high-stakes discipline policies.
There will always be a few high-flying chains dispersed throughout the nation that get results, and we should learn from them. But there's also the issue of whether a bunch of charters schools with different operators using diverse approaches can expand within a single location and produce consistent results.
Charter supporters typically argue that state and local policies can be leveraged to "close the bad charters and replicate the good ones." Opponents, on the other hand, contend that successful charters can't expand beyond a certain point because they rely on selection bias of the best students into these schools (so-called "cream skimming"), as well as the exclusion of high-needs students.
Educators forced out or disciplined by local districts over cheating and other state testing violations continued working in schools or administering state exams as their cases languished in Springfield without investigation, the Tribune has learned.
Contrary to Illinois law, state officials for years didn't investigate or pursue discipline of educators reported for testing misconduct -- from excessive coaching to giving students answers to prepping them with actual test questions, a Tribune investigation found. Some may have been allowed to keep teaching even if the state had investigated, but in the meantime, educators were allowed to jump easily to new jobs while the state delayed.
Illinois State Board of Education officials say they were instead focused on higher-priority discipline cases because of limited resources, though lawmakers have given the agency $1.3 million since 2008-09 to pursue educator misconduct. Typically, they addressed violations by throwing out test results and letting local officials discipline educators.
Buffalo's Promise Neighborhood project was one of five in the nation to secure federal funding to provide "cradle to career" services for children in an effort to improve educational outcomes among low-income areas, federal officials announced today.
The local initiative will receive five years of funding from the federal government, including $1.5 million in its first year. M&T Bank this fall pledged to match the federal funds and to raise an additional $9 million in private funding.
The initiative is largely modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone, where families in a 100-block area receive wraparound services, from health care to educational support, beginning with prenatal care and leading through high school graduation.
Buffalo's Promise Neighborhood will focus on the 14215 ZIP code, building on the success that has been realized in the Westminster Community Charter School. The plan seeks to stabilize the neighborhood, increase services to families, and ultimately improve the education at three schools in that area: Bennett High School, Highgate Heights Elementary and Westminster Community Charter School.
When asked to identify the qualities that lead to success in life, experts often list the ability to overcome obstacles. Pushing past adversity, through determination and persistence, is the hallmark of the greatest leaders, the most successful parents, the most prized employees, we are told. Those who make no excuses, who do whatever it takes to get something done, are the ones who have the capacity to achieve greatness.
In education, we focus a lot on accommodating our student's needs. We have English Language Learners (E.L.L.s) and special education students. We have kids with emotional disturbances and anger issues. We have kids who are acting out, and kids who are uninterested or bored.
It's our job to teach them no matter what. We are often the adults that children see with the most consistency and frequency, and we are responsible for their educations, in the broadest sense of that word. But to truly help them be successful, we ourselves have to embody the "no excuses" attitude.
The director of the Iowa Department of Education said he's willing to be patient with his plan to overhaul the state's public school system, acknowledging that many people aren't ready for changes he thinks are essential.
Gov. Terry Branstad chose 40-year-old Jason Glass largely because of his background in education reform, and since coming to Iowa he has been leading the push for dramatic changes to the state's public schools.
Because he began his job only a couple weeks before the last legislative session began, this was supposed to be the session where Glass would see his ambitious plans enacted. He proposed a 15-page package of proposals that would shake up the state's schools, changing the way they do business on everything from paying teachers to opening the profession to non-traditional educators.
That still may happen, but Branstad has temporarily shelved a proposed tiered system of teacher pay that increased salaries for beginning teachers and let teacher move through a series of pay grades based on performance in the classroom.
Sherri and Cliff Nitschke thought they were planning wisely for their children's college educations when they opened a 529 savings account in 1998.
The Fresno couple saved diligently over the years in hopes of avoiding costly student loans. But their timing couldn't have been worse.
When they needed the money a decade later, their 529 account had plunged in value during the global financial crisis. Their portfolio sank 30% in 2008, forcing the Nitschkes to borrow heavily to send their two sons to UCLA.
"529s were no friend to us," Cliff Nitschke said. "Honestly, it's probably one of the worst things we did. I could have made more money putting it in a mayonnaise jar and burying it in the backyard."
Over the last decade, 529 savings plans have surged in popularity as parents scramble to keep up with rapidly escalating college costs.
With one hand, Gov. Bob McDonnell touted his plan this week to pump millions more dollars over the next two years into Virginia's K-12 education system. With the other, he proposed cutting millions of dollars that will leave holes in the budgets of school districts across the commonwealth.
The result, unfortunately, is a budget that fails to boost the quality of K-12 education in Virginia and, in fact, may ultimately undermine it.
McDonnell's decision to withhold inflationary adjustments for so-called "non-personal" education expenses, including school utilities and employee health care and student transportation, means localities will be forced to cover an extra $109 million over the next two years. Revising a formula that factors in federal funds will allow the state to save another $108 million.
African-American students whose primary language is English perform significantly worse in math and reading than black students who speak another language at home -- typically immigrants or refugees -- according to new numbers released by Seattle Public Schools.
District officials, who presented the finding at a recent community meeting at Rainier Beach High School, noted the results come with caveats, but called the potential trend troubling and pledged to study what might be causing it.
Michael Tolley, an executive director overseeing Southeast Seattle schools, said at the meeting that the data exposed a new achievement gap that is "extremely, extremely alarming."
The administration has for years analyzed test scores by race. It has never before broken down student-achievement data by specific home language or country of origin -- it is rare for school districts to examine test scores at that level -- but it is unlikely that the phenomenon the data suggest is actually new.
Sweeping education reforms proposed by Gov. Terry Branstad are likely to include the creation of a task force that would consider extending the amount of time Iowa students spend in school.
Branstad announced in October that he'll ask lawmakers to approve reforms aimed at improving education for Iowa's 468,000 students and better the quality of the state's teachers.
Class-time extensions were not included in his original plan.
But Jason Glass, director of the Iowa Department of Education, last week told an advisory group of school superintendents that Branstad is expected to add the creation of a task force to consider such extensions. The task force would likely consider adding 10 days to the school year, lengthening school days and requiring struggling students to go to school on Saturdays or take summer classes, the Des Moines Register reported ( http://dmreg.co/rFkPsg).
Iowa currently has a 180-day school year. State law mandates that each school day last at least 5.5 hours, but most students are in class an average of 6.5 hours.
Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University, and national expert on why schools in Finland are so successful, visited Anchorage and Bethel area schools last month, ate the lunches and sat in on classes.
Some things impressed him, and others illustrated problems that schools face across the U.S., he said.
Abrams was here to participate in a conference on how to improve Anchorage schools that was sponsored by Mayor Dan Sullivan.
Before and after the November conference, Abrams went to King Career Center and William Tyson Elementary in Anchorage for half-day each, and spent full days at Denali Montessori, Begich Middle and East High in Anchorage. He also observed classes at a school-within-a-school run by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council at Bartlett High.
It would be easy to be shocked by The Daily Telegraph's revelations about exam boards - but the truth is that Britain's examination system has been heading for a crash for years. The culprit? The process that saw it transformed from a national treasure to a profit-driven industry. Today, examining is not an extension of teaching and learning, but a career in itself - one that has, on occasion, meant acting as little more than an arm of government.
The first mistake was to divorce the examination system from its end-users. In the past, academic exam boards were not only named after leading universities, but had a significant number of dons actually marking scripts. Today, the boards' management structures hardly have any connection with the universities. Control of the content and structure of the examination system needs to be placed firmly in the hands of universities - and, in the case of vocational training, of employers - so they can ensure that students possess the knowledge and skills their bosses or lecturers require, not what is cheapest, most convenient or most politically correct.
The phone call came late one afternoon last March. Rachel Krinsky -- then the executive director for the Road Home, a nonprofit agency serving homeless families in Dane County -- was preparing to meet with the board of directors, which had recently voted to end a three-year campaign to raise money to build apartments for homeless families.
Having fallen $900,000 short of its fundraising goal, the board decided to build seven apartment units instead of the 15 it had sought, meaning eight families would remain on the street. "We had been fundraising for a long time and were out of ideas," Krinsky recalls. "Everyone was tapped out."
On the phone was Mary Burke, a wealthy 52-year-old philanthropist and former business executive, calling with unexpected news: She wanted to give the $450,000 needed to build those eight additional units. (The remaining $450,000 was an endowment goal.)
Krinsky's jaw dropped.
"I was just stunned," she says. "Mary wasn't even in our database."
Burke announced recently that she plans to run for one of two Madison School Board seats on the April, 2012 ballot.
The whole agonizing conflict over Madison Preparatory Academy did not end on Monday night, when the school board voted 5-2 against allowing the African American charter school to open next fall. Now comes the lawsuit.
But first, our community faces two immediate tasks: healing the wounds that were ripped open during the Madison Prep controversy, and getting something done about the urgent problem the charter school was developed to address -- Madison's disgraceful achievement gap for African American children.
Monday night's six hours of emotional testimony mostly highlighted the first of those two problems. In front of the packed auditorium at Memorial High School, Urban League president and Madison Prep founder Kaleem Caire read "What happens to a dream deferred?" to the school board. Nichelle Nichols, the Urban League's vice president of learning, read a poem that placed the blame for her own children's spoiled futures squarely on Madison Metropolitan School District officials: "My kids are in the gap, a chasm so dark.... I ask, Mr. Superintendent, what happened to my sons...?"
The sense that Madison has mistreated children of color was a powerful theme. White business leader and former teacher Jan O'Neil pointed out the "huge amount of capital in this room," all focused on solving the historic educational inequality for African American kids. A "no" vote, she warned the board, might be hopelessly polarizing.
The Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union opened negotiations earlier this month on a state-mandated requirement about what should-and should not-be included in teachers' performance evaluations.
CPS and the union have until March to grapple with the specific terms, such as what tests to use for measuring academic growth, how much the results should factor into the evaluations, and how to measure the performance of teachers whose subjects are not tested on state exams.
To add to the mix, an organized group of public school students, the Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE), are preparing a formal request to CPS in the coming months to include student input in the new teacher evaluation system.
Some teachers want their students to weigh in on their performance.
Gregoire: What is it? You'll have to help me on that.
PubliCola: It seems more aggressive than the one you laid out. [Gregoire announced a reform proposal last week - AP report here - that will put a pilot project of 4-tiered teacher evaluations in play statewide]. It ties teacher evaluations to student test scores, calls for charter schools, and allows the state to step in and take over failing schools. It's in sync with President Obama's education reform agenda. The proposal you came out with last week seems like a "lite" version of that to education reformers [because the evaluations aren't tied explicitly to "student academic growth"].
Gregoire: I don't really think so. I think what it is is a Washington reform. The most recent studies on charter schools come out of Stanford. And there's no guarantee of anything there. As many as there are doing OK, there are an equal number that are not. ... Why would we go down a path where there's no big success to be had? And our voters have already turned [charters] down three times.
I developed this lab school idea, which serves two purposes: One, you have our four-year university schools partner up with one of our bottom five percent schools and really run the school and get them to transition out of their low performance. And two, you really do take your schools of education and improve them dramatically, because if they're going to train teachers, what better training for them than to be inside a classroom and see what works and what doesn't work?
PubliCola: What about tying test scores to teacher evaluations?
An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students -- a captive market -- fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. At a time of fiscal austerity, these companies are seducing school administrators with promises to cut costs through privatization. Parents who want healthier meals, meanwhile, are outgunned.
Each day, 32 million children in the United States get lunch at schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program, which uses agricultural surplus to feed children. About 21 million of these students eat free or reduced-price meals, a number that has surged since the recession. The program, which also provides breakfast, costs $13.3 billion a year.
As nine states await their prize money after coming out on top late last week in the Education Department's Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge, the rest are left empty-handed, having spent thousands of hours carefully crafting plans that ultimately fell short.
"We invested a ton of time. That time equates to money," said Bobby Cagle, commissioner of Georgia's Department of Early Care and Learning.
Mr. Cagle estimated that he and his staff spent more than 2,000 hours on the effort, and said his agency is greatly disappointed by the result.
The data presented in this combined report―Rankings & Estimates―provide facts about the extent to which local, state, and national governments commit resources to public education. As one might expect in a nation as diverse as the United States--with respect to economics, geography, and politics--the level of commitment to education varies on a state-by-state basis. Regardless of these variations, improvements in public education can be measured by summary statistics. Thus, NEA Research offers this report to its state and local affiliates as well as to researchers, policymakers, and the public as a tool to examine public education programs and services.
Part I of this combined report--Rankings 2010--provides state-level data on an array of topics relevant to the com- plex enterprise of public education. Since the 1960s, Rankings has presented facts and figures useful in determining how states differ from one another--or from national averages--on selected statistics. In addition to identifying emerging trends in key economic, political, and social areas, the state-by-state figures on government financing, state demographics, and public schools permit a statistical assessment of the scope of public education. Of course, no set of tables tells the entire story of a state's education offerings. Consideration of factors such as a state's tax system, pro- visions for other public services, and population characteristics also are needed. Therefore, it is unwise to draw con- clusions based solely on individual statistics in this report. Readers are urged to supplement the ranked data with specific information about state and local service activities related to public education.
Part II of this combined report--Estimates 2011--is in its 67th year of production. This report provides projections of public school enrollment, employment and compensation of personnel, and finances, as reported by individual state departments of education. Not surprisingly, interest in the improvement and renewal of public education continues to capture the attention of the nation. The state-level data featured in Estimates permit broad assessments of trends in staff salaries, sources of school funding, and levels of educational expenditures. The data should be used with the un- derstanding that the reported statewide totals and averages may not reflect the varying conditions that exist among school districts and schools within the state.
Public education in the United States is a joint enterprise between local, state, and federal governments. Yet, progress in improving public education stems primarily from the efforts of state education agencies, local districts, and indi- vidual schools. These public organizations deserve credit for recognizing that spending for education needs to be ac- knowledged as an investment in our nation's most valuable resource--children. Similarly, this publication represents a collective effort that goes well beyond the staff of the National Education Association. Individual state departments of education and the NEA's state affiliates participate in collecting and assembling the data shown here. As a result, the NEA appreciates and acknowledges the cooperation it receives from all those whose efforts make this publication possible.
Wisconsin ranks 21st in average teacher salaries (page 35), 10th in property tax revenue as a percentage of total tax revenue (page 52), 16th in per capita state individual income tax revenue (page 53) and 15th in public school revenue per student.
The American Federation of Teachers, vilified by critics as an obstacle to school reform, is leading an unusual effort to turn around a floundering school system in a place where deprivation is layered on heartache.
The AFT, which typically represents teachers in urban settings, wants to improve education deep in the heart of Appalachia by simultaneously tackling the social and economic troubles of McDowell County.
The union has gathered about 40 partners, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cisco Systems, IBM, Save the Children, foundations, utility companies, housing specialists, community colleges, and state and federal governments, which have committed to a five-year plan to try to lift McDowell out of its depths.
The McDowell Initiative, to be announced Friday, comes in the middle of a national debate about what causes failing schools in impoverished communities: the educators or the environment?
On Monday morning, the start of the school week, five teenagers rowed toward the breakwater leading into San Francisco Bay.
"It's so foggy you can't even see the Golden Gate Bridge," said Austin, a 17-year-old student at Downtown High School in Potrero Hill, as he worked the oars. When the students passed an old sailboat, their instructor, Jeff Rogers, told them it was built 120 years ago in Hunters Point.
"Hey," Austin said. "My 'hood."
If not for the boating expedition, Austin might have still been home, in bed, instead of in school. But on that day his classroom happened to be a sailboat. Before coming to Downtown, he was a chronic truant in the San Francisco school system, one of the thousands of students at risk of dropping out. Now he attends school about 80 percent of the time.
A year after Luiz Munoz-Rivera School shut its doors as the public school system dealt with a budget shortfall, the district has opted to reopen it for nearly the same reason.
Rebranded as the Rivera Learning Community, the school has become the flagship for the district's efforts to invest in in-house special education programs rather than send students to expensive out-of-district institutions.
The rising cost of out-of-district placement for special education students has dogged the district for years and drawn heavy criticism from the state Department of Education.
AFRICAN-American students are lagging behind other students, including other black ethnic students whose home language is not English, according to new numbers released by Seattle Public Schools. ["'Alarming' new test-score gap discovered in Seattle schools," page one, Dec. 19.]
This is an important problem that other cities have confronted head-on. First, they have admitted they really don't know how to solve the problem. Second, they acknowledge that the normal remedies school districts use to solve achievement problems are too weak to work.
These admissions have led other cities to open themselves up to experimentation in schools serving the most disadvantaged: longer school days and years; no-excuses instructional models; new sources of teachers; partnerships with businesses and cultural institutions that can provide enrichment and role models; use of online instruction to teach subjects like science where school staff are often not qualified; new schools run by national institutions with track records of improving achievement for the most disadvantaged.
There is something truly disturbing about a society that seeks to control the behavior of schoolchildren through fear and violence, a tactic that harkens back to an era of paddle-bruised behinds and ruler-slapped wrists. Yet, some American school districts are pushing the boundaries of corporal punishment even further with the use of Tasers against unruly schoolchildren.
The deployment of Tasers against "problem" students coincides with the introduction of police officers on school campuses, also known as School Resource Officers (SROs). According to the Los Angeles Times, as of 2009, the number of SROs carrying Tasers was well over 4,000.
As far back as 1988, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, National Congress of Parents and Teachers, American Medical Association, National Education Association, American Bar Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics recognized that inflicting pain and fear upon disobedient children is far more harmful than helpful. Yet, we continue to do it with disturbing results, despite mountains of evidence of more effective methods of discipline.
Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer's new study of 35 New York City charter schools attempts to find a preliminary answer to the question of how different practices within charters are correlated with student progress on math and ELA tests. In general, this study's premise and methods represent a promising shift away from just looking at test scores to measure school quality; it acknowledges variations between charters and gets to the issue of what policies and practices are actually happening inside these schools.
The researchers looked at a wide variety of possible practices based on surveys of principals, interviews with teachers, visits to schools, and reviews of site visit reports from authorizers. The result was that they found five policies that were significantly correlated to increased test scores: "frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations." As Matt DiCarlo recently noted, the efficacy of some these factors in raising test scores -- particularly increased instructional time -- has also been supported in other studies.
Three more Kansas counties have enrolled to participate in a new program that aims to attract new residents to rural areas by offering to repay college tuition debts.
The Kansas Department of Commerce said that Chautauqua, Gove and Pawnee counties had joined the state's rural opportunity zone program aimed at slowing or reversing the rate of population decline in the counties. To date, 43 of 50 eligible counties are participating.
Counties participating in the program agree to partner with the state to offer student loan reimbursements of up to $3,000 a year for five years to new college graduates. The department said there were 158 applications from across the country for the program.
Pierre "Nic" Antoine, principal of two Catholic schools in Racine formed by school mergers, understands the pain families feel when their schools are closed.
But with the expansion of private-school vouchers to Racine, Antoine believes Catholic education has been reinvigorated this year. Enrollment is stable at Our Lady of Grace Academy, which added 30 voucher students this year, and up by about 20% at John Paul II Academy, which added 40 voucher students.
"We went from being 70% full in 2010-'11 to being 95% full this year," Antoine said of John Paul II Academy.
The boost in student enrollment is part of a larger trend in the Milwaukee Archdiocese this year - enrollment is up for the first time in 13 years, driven by voucher student enrollment that increased from 7,502 students last year to 8,831 students this year.
Nationwide and in Milwaukee, Catholic school enrollment has decreased over the years. After the recession caused families to tighten their budgets, some private schools' enrollment figures dropped even further, prompting mergers and closures.
Around 2,000 teachers, parents and children rallied outside the Legislative Council building in Tamar yesterday, urging the government to implement 15 years of free education starting from kindergarten.
The coalition of 17 groups - including the Hong Kong Professional Teachers' Union and the Hong Kong Federation of Education Workers - also demanded a pay scale for kindergarten teachers that guarantees an annual salary rise, a better teacher- to-pupil ratio, and an improved Pre-primary Education Voucher Scheme.
Union chairman Fung Wai-wah said the public has already agreed on the 15 years of free education and it should be implemented immediately.
A Miami lawmaker wants public charter schools to be more transparent.
State. Sen Larcenia Bullard, D-Miami, filed a bill Wednesday that would require charter schools to post information about their management companies on their school websites.
Bullard, vice chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Her proposal was submitted days after The Miami Herald concluded a three-part series examining South Florida's $400 million-a-year charter school industry. The investigation found that charter schools have given rise to a cottage industry of for-profit management companies, some of which have almost total financial control over the charter schools they run.
Kansas City, Mo., schools are losing their accreditation on Jan. 1. Missouri law allows students from unaccredited districts to enroll for free in nearby school systems, so the suburban districts outside Kansas City are bracing for an influx of students.
Jacob Rainey is inspiring people all across the sports world - and no more so than giants from the NFL.
The Virginia prep quarterback who had to have part of his right leg amputated has moved the likes of Alabama coach Nick Saban, Green Bay Packers linebacker Clay Matthews and Denver quarterback Tim Tebow.
A highlight film of Rainey on YouTube shows why college coaches had taken notice.
It shows the once-promising quarterback at Woodberry Forest School throwing a 40-yard dart for a touchdown, running into the line on a quarterback sneak, then emerging from the pile and sprinting 40 yards for a TD. There is also of clip of him running a draw for another 35-yard score.
All that was taken away, without warning when he was tackled during a scrimmage on September 3. He suffered a severe knee injury and a severed artery and part of his right leg had to be amputated.
Two of our overriding efforts in Lower Education in recent years have been: 1) raising the low math and reading scores of black and Hispanic students, and 2) increasing the number of our high school and college graduates capable of employment in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics [STEM}.
Very recently evidence has been allowed to surface pointing out that while students in the bottom 10% of academic performance have indeed improved, students in the top ten percent of academic performance have stagnated, where they have not dropped out from boredom. Related evidence now suggests that complacency with secondary public education in our more affluent suburbs may have been quite misplaced as well.
As Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum point out in their recent book, That Used To Be Us, "average is over." That is to say, students in other cities (Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai) and countries (Finland, South Korea, Japan) take their educations so much more seriously than our students (and teachers) do that their economies are achieving gains on our own that are truly startling, if we take the time to notice.
If we are to retain good jobs, restart our manufacturing, and otherwise decide to compete seriously with others who seem to take both education and work more seriously than we have come to do, it might be wise to increase the interest of our students in STEM fields. According to the Kaiser Foundation, our students aged 8-18 are spending, on average, more than seven hours a day with electronic entertainment media.
Now of course we want our young people to buy our electronic entertainment hardware and software and we definitely want them to have a good time and be happy, but probably we would like them to be employable some day as well. Friedman and Mandelbaum point out that not only blue collar jobs and white collar jobs, but increasingly sophisticated professional work can be done to a high standard at a much lower cost in other countries than it can be done here.
Having our students spend 53 hours a week on their electronic entertainment media, while their high school homework tops out, in many cases, according to ACT, at three to four hours a week, is not a plan that will enable us to resume our competitive position in the world's economies.
So perhaps we should assign students in high school 15 hours a week of homework (which would reduce their media time to a mere 38 hours a week) and pass on to them the information that if they don't start working to a much much higher academic standard they will probably face a more depressing future in a greatly diminished nation than they currently imagine they will have.
But, is STEM enough? I remember the story told about a visit Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, made to the gleaming new Salk Laboratory in La Jolla. A young biologist, thrilled to be a guide to the Nobel Prize-winner, was very proud to be able to show off all the bright new spotless expensive state-of-the-art research equipment. When they finished the tour, the young man could not stop himself from saying, "Just think, Sir Alexander, with all this equipment, what you could have discovered!" And Sir Alexander said, "not penicillin."
Because the discovery of penicillin relied on serendipity and curiosity. Fleming found some petri dishes contaminated by something that had come in, probably, through one of the dirty old badly-closed windows in his lab in England. Instead of washing the dishes so he could start over with them, as most scientists would have done, he asked himself what could have killed off those bacteria in the dishes. And a major breakthrough was made possible.
Just in passing, amid the rush for more STEM, I would like to put in a word for serendipity, which often fuels creativity of many kinds, by making possible the association of previously unrelated ideas and memories when in contact with a new fact or situation not deliberately sought out.
I argue that serendipity is more likely to occur and to be fruitful if our students also have a lot of experience with the ROOTS of civilization, that is, the history, literature, art, music, architecture and other fields which have provided the background and inspiration for so much that we find worthwhile in human life. Steve Jobs found his course in calligraphy useful when he came to think about Macintosh software, but there are countless examples of important discoveries and contributions that have been, at least in part, grounded in the ROOTS of civilized life. So let us push for more STEM, by all means, but if, in the process we neglect those ROOTS, our achievements will be fewer, and our lives will be the poorer as a result, IMHO.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, second biggest in the United States with some 700,000 students, located in the center of the most segregated area in the country for Latino students, is a place where students of color are very often denied any opportunity to do any meaningful preparation for college and are often attending dropout factory high schools. In this system, where mandatory desegregation was abandoned in 1981, there's one small place where's there some racial and economic diversity and special programs offered for students who choose to participate in them.
More than 170 magnet school programs exist in the Los Angeles Unified School District. They have been funded with billions of dollars of state money for desegregation assistance. The strong magnets are one of the last vestiges of middle class education that exist in the City of Los Angeles and one of the few places where students from really disadvantaged backgrounds can come to classes with students from more advantaged backgrounds, in schools where the teachers want to participate in those schools and where there's a special curriculum offered to draw them there. Not all of these schools are great schools. Some of them are phony magnets, and some of them are wonderful schools. But they are a really important option for the City of Los Angeles. When a student can transfer from a dropout factory school to one where many students go to college, a bus is a great educational investment.
Only about one of every four U.S. classrooms has an "excellent teacher," one who produces enough learning progress to close achievement gaps and help all students leap ahead to higher-order learning. Three-quarters do not.
The school models presented here aim to change that. These models use job redesign, technology, or both to help excellent teachers reach more students. Done right, all the models presented here can meet our Reach Extension Principles. Most models can be used for whole schools or single courses.
Here's a quick overview: Our primary goal is to enable schools to reach significantly more students with excellent teachers. Every model outlined here identifies the excellent teacher in charge--the person who is truly accountable for learning. In more detailed models coming in 2012, we also indicate what people, technology, and other resources the excellent teacher has authority to choose and change. We organized the models around two key dimensions:
That's the question state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist asked the General Assembly this past June. It's also the one she posed to a hundred people at Westerly Middle School Thursday night, appearing at a community forum on the state of education in Rhode Island.
"We want each of us to be asking each other 'How's school?' We're asking our teachers.... are they getting the support they need, are things moving forward for them?" Gist said. "We also want you to hold us accountable for all of the things we promised to you, that we would do, so that your school gets the support it needs."
Gist has visited more than 100 schools in her two years as commissioner and said she considers input from students, teachers and administrators as a critical link in improving education.
In her opening remarks she commented on some significant achievements. New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) results for Rhode Island high schools increased last year. Math results were up 6 percentage points, science 5 points and reading 3 points.
Here's how five people answered this week's question posed by Capital Times freelancer Kevin Murphy. What do you think? Please join the discussion.
"I don't agree with that decision. We need something to close that achievement gap and this was something that could have closed that gap and they won't even take a chance with it. It's the best idea to come forward so far and it should have been tried."
Easter Carson
retired school district employee
Madison
"It was a good idea and I think anything new in the way of education needs to be tried. Give it a try. It was a pretty proposal with non-coed instruction, uniforms for students, minority staff. It certainly is worth a try given the track record the school district has had with minority students so far."
I can't shake the feeling that something important was going on at our School Board meeting last Monday night to consider the Madison Prep charter school proposal, and that the actual School Board vote wasn't it.
The bare-bone facts are that, after about 90 public speakers, the Board voted 2-5 to reject the Madison Prep proposal. I reluctantly voted against the motion because I was unwilling to violate the terms of our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers.
After the motion failed, I moved that the Board approve Madison Prep, but delay its opening until the fall of 2013. My motion failed for lack of a second. (And no, I don't have an explanation for why neither James Howard nor Lucy Mathiak, who voted in favor of the first motion, was willing to second my motion.)
Probably like most who attended Monday night's meeting, I have thought a lot about it since. People who know I voted against the proposal have come up to me and congratulated me for what they say was the right decision. I have felt like shaking them and saying, "No, you don't understand. We blew it Monday night, we blew it big time. I just hope that we only crippled Madison Prep and didn't kill it."
I appreciate that that's an odd and surprising place for me to have ended up. To echo the Talking Heads, "Well, how did I get here?" I'll try to explain.
Despite efforts by school administration to streamline its special education services, an unforeseen 59 students joined special ed this year, causing the district to face a deficit for the third year running.
Superintendent Dr. Stephen Falcone told the Board of Education that he's expecting a $251,866 shortfall, primarily due to out of district tuition increases of more than $550,000, and another year of reduced state funding. Darien also lost $225,000 in stimulus money after receiving it for the past two years.
To close some of this gap, Falcone advised a number of saving measures to get the schools back on track. [see related story]
The Courier-Post is all over Camden Public Schools' failure to accurately report incidents of violence and vandalism. (See earlier story here.) Each year, per state mandate, districts file reports with the State DOE listing rates of violence and then the State reports out to the Legislature. While there has been a 6.4% increase in violent incidents (some of this, no doubt, attributable to the new Harassment, Intimidation and Bullying legislation), Camden Public Schools appears to be a land of milk and honey: there were only 29 incidents all of last year and only 35 for 2010-2011.
Among other districts in the area "almost 30 districts reported more violent incidents than Camden - including Audobon, Cherry Hill, Cinnaminson, and Washington Township."
In a bold move that is generating controversy within its own ranks, the California Charter School Association is urging that 10 of the 145 charter schools up for renewal this year be denied their charters because they failed to meet academic performance benchmarks set by the association.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan hailed the association for its "courageous leadership" in attempting to "hold schools accountable." "This is an important conversation for California to have, and one that we need to have across the country," Duncan said, echoing remarks made by several charter school leaders.
But the association's action has also provoked fierce criticism from schools it has recommended for closure, as well as from some long-time supporters of the charter movement.
Ladd and Fiske's essay was one of those broadsides that spreads through the teacher ranks like a brush fire. I received my email copy from one of our district's veteran teachers, a hard-working, dedicated woman who rarely misses an opportunity to remind me that she and her colleagues would be doing a fine job were it not for unmotivated kids and their irresponsible parents. And Diane Ravitch weighed in, calling to mind, in tune with the season, the story of Scrooge and Tiny Tim, offering to "update this tale for today's school reformers" by calling attention to Ladd and Fiske's op-ed. (Ravitch says she uses Ladd'sEducation and Poverty paper in her post.)
What I don't understand in all of this is who exactly is claiming that class (or poverty or parents or kids) doesn't matter? Ladd and Fiske spend most of their essay stating the obvious: that socio-economic circumstance matters to education outcomes. The evidence that our policymakers and reformers are in denial of this salient fact?
Iowa's school population is shrinking at the same time it becomes poorer and more racially and ethnically diverse, according to an Iowa Department of Education report released Wednesday.
Wednesday's 209-page report shows the continuation on several trends in Iowa's school systems across the state.
"It's useful in many ways," said Jay Pennington, the department's bureau chief of information and analysis services. "It provides local districts with a way to compare themselves with others in the state and provides the public with a lot of information about their district and others."
The most straightforward, clear and dispassionate vote taken on the Madison Preparatory Academy charter school proposal at last Monday's Madison Metropolitan School District Board meeting didn't even count. It was the advisory vote cast by the student representative, Philippo Bulgarelli.
The School Board turned down the controversial proposal on a 5-2 vote, and after nearly five hours of public testimony, all the school board members gave speeches explaining how they arrived at their decisions. In addition to being the most succinct, Bulgarelli's statement penetrated all of the intense emotions and wildly divergent interpretations of data and personal anecdotes used to argue both for and against the proposal. Bulgarelli said that the students for whom he speaks did not have enough information to make a reasonably good decision, so he voted to abstain.
A headline-generating study, published in the journal Pediatrics this week, suggests that approximately one in three Americans is arrested before age 23. That's up from about one in five in 1965, the last time a similar study was conducted. The study used data from surveys given to the 7,335 people who enrolled in the federal government's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1996.
This study, a recent joint initiative between the Departments of Justice and Education and a spate of anecdotal stories in the news all suggest a surge in the arrests of minors, and particularly in arrests that originate in schools. But the federal government is both fighting the "school-to-prison" pipeline while continuing to fund the same programs that critics say are causing it. Moreover, because the government hasn't been collecting data on school-based arrests, and the little available data shows overall arrests of juveniles are down, it's difficult to determine if a problem exists, much less whether federal initiatives are solving it -- or contributing to it.
Students in Democracy Prep High School's Korean classes typically learn words that boost their vocabulary and develop basic grammar -- standard fare for introductory foreign language instruction. But this week the lessons took a turn for the geopolitical.
Youngjae Hur greeted his students yesterday with an unusual pop quiz in English and asked them to define words such as "despotism," "denuclearize," and "repressive."
For Hur, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's abrupt death over the weekend offered the school a unique opportunity to infuse what students learn about the South Korean language and culture every day with the politics that have shaped life on the Korean Peninsula for decades.
"It's important to let them know not just the skills to understand the language, but also the culture, the history, the politics," said Hur, a first-year teacher who moved to the United States from South Korea three years ago. "Especially at this special moment."
Changes to policies and procedures over the handling of funds will ensure that nothing like the theft of more than $300,000 from Fort High should occur again, the Rainy River District School Board said following the sentencing last Thursday of former FFHS secretary Fawn Lindberg.
"Obviously, there were some shortcomings in terms of oversight, both at the school and right through the board office--and those things hopefully have now all been corrected," noted board chair Michael Lewis.
A press release issued by the board called the theft a "systemic failure from the top down."
While Lindberg didn't have the authority to authorize or sign cheques, it was noted during last Thursday's court proceedings that a practice had developed whereby blank cheques would be signed in advance by the principal and vice-principal, who did have signing authority.
From June, 2005 to October, 2007, Lindberg fed a gambling addiction by stealing $312,426.45, using some 146 cheques she had made out in her name or to "cash."
The theft came to light in the fall of 2007 after a deficit of more than $175,000 was noticed by board administration and investigated.
The gap in grade point averages between male and female students widens when their college football team is winning.
As the college football season approaches its climax, a just-released set of statistics should give fans of Bowl-bound teams pause.
According to three University of Oregon economists, when a university's football team has a winning season, the grade point average of male students goes down.
At least, that was the case at their own school over the course of nine recent seasons. Given that the University of Oregon is "largely representative of other four-year public institutions," they have no reason to believe the equation won't apply elsewhere.
Improving the academic performance of at-risk high school students has proven difficult, often calling for an extended day, extended school year, and other expensive measures. Here we report the results of a program for at-risk 9th and 10th graders in Binghamton, New York, called the Regents Academy that takes place during the normal school day and year. The design of the program is informed by the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation and learning, in general and for our species as a unique product of biocultural evolution. Not only did the Regents Academy students outperform their comparison group in a randomized control design, but they performed on a par with the average high school student in Binghamton on state-mandated exams. All students can benefit from the social environment provided for at-risk students at the Regents Academy, which is within the reach of most public school districts.
One body of knowledge that we drew upon to design the Regents Academy is based on the work of Elinor Ostrom [19], [20], who received the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009. Ostrom is a political scientist by training but has become part of the evolutionary science community. Working primarily with groups attempting to manage common pool resources, she identified eight design features that contributed to the success of each group, which can also be used by groups attempting to achieve other shared objectives. Briefly, the design features are: 1) a strong group identity, including understanding and agreeing with the group's purpose; 2) benefits proportional to costs, so that the work does not fall unfairly on some individuals and unearned benefits on others; 3) consensus decision-making, since most people dislike being told what to do but will work hard to achieve their own goals; 4) low-cost monitoring, so that lapses of cooperation can be easily detected; 5) graduated sanctions to correct misbehaviors, which begin with friendly reminders and escalate only as needed; 6) conflict resolution that is fast and perceived as fair by group members; 7) sufficient autonomy for the group to make its own decisions without interference from other groups; 8) relations among groups that embody the same principles as the relations among individuals within the group. These design features are consilient with the general evolutionary dynamics of cooperation and the social environment of small-scale human societies throughout our own history as a species. Any educational program, including one for at-risk high school students, can potentially benefit from implementing these design features.
A second body of knowledge that we drew upon concerns development and psychological functioning, e.g., in benign vs. harsh environments [21]-[23]. The dysfunctions that arise from harsh environments are often interpreted as breakdowns of normal development and psychological functioning. While this is sometimes the case, evolutionary science offers an alternative possibility. Humans, like all species, are adapted to cope with harsh environments, but these adaptations involve tradeoffs with respect to long-term individual welfare and conduct toward others. Learning and cooperation to achieve long-term goals are eclipsed by the need to survive and reproduce over the short term. Some adaptations to harsh environments operate early in life and are difficult to reverse, such as the insecure attachment styles first documented by pioneering evolutionary psychologist John Bowlby [24], which has led to an extensive body of recent research [25]. Other mechanisms operate in response to immediate circumstances and can be modified by providing a safer and more secure environment [26], [27]. Most at-risk adolescents have experienced hardship throughout their lives, making it difficult for them to adapt to a safe and secure environment. Moreover, even if such an environment can be provided at school, the rest of their lives often remain harsh. Providing a safe and secure school environment might therefore not be sufficient, but it is surely necessary for at-risk students to cooperate and to achieve long-term goals.
A third body of knowledge that we drew upon concerns basic principles of learning that apply to many species [28], along with more specific adaptations for learning and cultural transmission in human groups [16], [29]-[34]. In a longitudinal study of students who were identified as gifted at the beginning of high school, Csikszentmihalyi et al. [35] examined the factors that led some to fulfill their promise and others to become merely average by the end of high school. It was primarily those who enjoyed what they were doing over the short term that developed their talents. The prospect of a long-term benefit, such as a career in science, was not sufficient to sustain day-to-day activities that were unrewarding. If this is true for the most gifted students, then it applies with even greater force for the most at-risk students [36]. If cooperation and learning outcomes aren't rewarding over the short term (what B.F. Skinner called "selection by consequences" [37]), positive outcomes cannot be expected over the long term. In addition, human groups evolved adaptations for social learning and spreading information for thousands of years before the advent of any formal school program. In modern times, complex bodies of information are culturally transmitted in hunter gatherer and many traditional societies largely without formal instruction [38]. Knowing how this occurs can help teachers shape their curriculum, instruction, and assessment to better maximize their students' natural tendencies to learn, and to make learning and teaching more spontaneous and self-organizing in modern classroom environments [39], [40].
The five-member majority of the board blew it this week by voting down the Urban League of Greater Madison's request for an unusual charter school called Madison Prep
The school would have offered a longer school day and year, higher standards and expectations, uniforms, mandatory extracurricular activities, same-sex classrooms, more minority teachers as role models, and stepped-up pressure on parents to get involved in their children's education.
Madison Prep represented a huge opportunity -- with unprecedented community support, including millions in private donations -- to attack the stubborn achievement gap for low-income and minority students.
But a majority of the School Board rejected Madison Prep, citing excuses that include a disputed clause in its teachers union contract and a supposed lack of accountability.
Wracked with frustration over the state's legions of unprepared high school graduates, the California State University system next summer will force freshmen with remedial needs to brush up on math or English before arriving on campus.
But many professors at the 23-campus university, which has spent the past 13 years dismissing students who fail remedial classes, doubt the Early Start program will do much to help students unable to handle college math or English.
"I'm not at all optimistic that it's going to help," said Sally Murphy, a communications professor who directs general education at Cal State East Bay, where 73 percent of this year's freshmen were not ready for college math. Nearly 60 percent were not prepared for college English.
"A 15-hour intervention is just not enough intervention when it comes to skills that should have been developed over 12 years," Murphy said.
The remedial numbers are staggering, given that the Cal State system admits only freshmen who graduated in the top one-third of their high-school class. About 27,300 freshmen in the 2010 entering class of about 42,700 needed remedial work in math, English or both.
Madison Urban League President Kaleem Caire fought hard to win approval of his Madison Prep project. But the Madison School Board ultimately rejected a plan that would have steered tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into a project that board members felt lacked sufficient oversight and accountability.
The response of Caire and his fellow Madison Prep advocates was to suggest a variety of moves: the filing of a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice, or perhaps a request for state intervention to allow the project to go forward without state approval.
We would suggest another approach.
Caire has succeeded in garnering a good deal of support for Madison Prep. He could capitalize on that support and make a run for the School Board.
Changing the school board would either require: patience (just two of seven seats: Lucy Mathiak, who is not running after two terms and Arlene Silveira, who apparently is seeking a third term) are up in April, 2012 or a more radical approach via the current Wisconsin method (and Oakland): recalls. Winning the two seats may not be sufficient to change the Board, given the 5-2 no vote. Perhaps the "momentum", if realized, might sway a vote or two?
Madison Preparatory Academy Board Commits to Establish Madison Prep as an Independent School in Fall 2012 and address the Achievement Gap in Madison's Public Schools
Kaleem Caire, via email
For Immediate Release: December 21, 2011
Contact: Laura DeRoche-Perez
Director of School Development
Urban League of Greater Madison
2222 S. Park St., Suite 200
Madison, WI 53713
Lderoche@ulgm.org
608-729-1230 (office)
608-556-2066 (cell)
Madison, WI - This morning, the Board of Directors of Madison Preparatory Academy unanimously decided to pursue a set of actions that will assist with eliminating the racial achievement gap in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD). These actions are consistent with the objectives of the Urban League of Greater Madison.
Specifically, Madison Prep's Board has committed to partnering with the Urban League of Greater Madison to:
Work with the Madison Metropolitan School District to ensure MMSD has a bold and effective plan for eliminating the racial achievement gap that embraces innovation, best practices and community engagement as core strategies.
Evaluate legal options that will ensure MMSD affirmatively and immediately addresses the racial achievement gap.
Establish Madison Preparatory Academy as an independent school within the boundaries of the Madison Metropolitan School District in August 2012 as a model of whole school reform and a necessary education option for disadvantaged children and families.
David Cagigal, Chair of Madison Prep's Board, shared that "Madison Prep is a necessary strategy to show how our community can eliminate the achievement gap and prepare our most vulnerable students for college. MMSD's rejection of our proposal does not change this fact."
Cagigal further stated that, "We look forward to engaging the Greater Madison community in addressing the racial achievement gap in Madison's public schools and supporting the establishment of Madison Prep next fall."
For more information, contact Laura DeRoche Perez, Director of School Development, Urban League of Greater Madison, at Lderoche@ulgm.org or 608-729-1230.
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I am ambivalent. My state, Tennessee, is the first state that has implemented the annual teacher and principal evaluations as required by Race to the Top (RTT). In 2010, I was involved with writing Tennessee's successful RTT application, especially the section on "great teachers and leaders." In my state role, I celebrated the RTT requirement for annual teacher and principal evaluations based substantially on student growth as one of the most important levers to accelerate student achievement.
Now, in 2011, I am at the local level watching the fall-out. Although I still support annual teacher evaluations that include student achievement growth and regular teacher observation scores, it is clear that the initiative is off to a rocky start. And this has implications for more than just the educators and students in Tennessee. As noted in Education Week, many policymakers are concerned that the rocky implementation of Tennessee's new teacher evaluation system may hinder efforts in other states.
Supporters of a controversial charter school proposal geared toward low-income, minority students said Tuesday they will continue to fight to establish it next fall -- including possibly as a private school.
Their comments came Tuesday after the Madison School Board voted 5-2 early that day to reject a proposal for Madison Preparatory Academy, which would offer single-sex classrooms and a college preparatory curriculum.
The board didn't vote on an alternate proposal to approve the school but delay its opening until 2013.
David Cagigal, president of the Madison Prep board, said a private school would be expensive because the school's target low-income population wouldn't be able to afford tuition. Instead, the board would ask private donors to replace the roughly $9,300 per pupil it had sought from the School District.
"Maybe money is not the issue if we want to go ahead and prove our point," Cagigal said. "I can assure you we will persist with this idea of closing the achievement gap."
The proposed Madison Prep Charter School was voted down by the Madison school board on Monday. A bold proposal to address the achievement gap in Madison, Madison Prep supporters have a very good point- the status quo is not working for minority students.
There wasn't any magic to the Madison Prep proposal: longer school year, extended school days, smaller class ratios, additional support services, we know these things work, and taken together these things would likely make a significant impact on student achievement. But all these things cost significant amounts of money which is ultimately the problem. What distribution of resources is the most effective and fair?
Sometimes it's possible to be absolutely right on the specifics of a thing and totally wrong about the big picture.
That's what can be said about the Madison school board's decision the other night to reject the proposal for the Madison Preparatory Academy. Board members were correct to be concerned that their support for the academy could have violated their contract with the Madison teachers union, and they were right to be concerned about lack of oversight over public funds.
But what the Urban League was saying about the big picture remains paramount:
Last week I wrote that it seemed hypocritical that average Madisonians and other liberals in city government and the left-leaning Madison press haven't been beating the drum for proposed charter school Madison Preparatory Academy.
The school's target clientele, after all, is one the left usually considers sympathetic: poor, disenfranchised minority youth historically denied access to educational opportunity.
But it took a reader to point out an even bigger elephant in this oddly somnolent room: UW-Madison.
It was only a few months ago that Madison's prime educational attraction and the jewel of the UW System mounted a vigorous and very public defense of attempts to create a more diverse student body through its affirmative action policies.
You'd think this powerful institution might also be showing a little love for a similar social justice cause in its own backyard.
Shocking outcome of School Board vote: MMSD says NO to Madison Prep
Kaleem Caire, via email:
Dear Madison Prep,
First, thank you to all of you who have supported the Madison Prep effort to this point. Your volunteer hours, work on Design Teams, attendance at meetings, letters to the district and media, and many other acts of support have not gone unnoticed by the Urban League and Madison Prep.
In earlier morning hours today, the MMSD Board of Education voted 5-2 AGAINST Madison Prep. This outcome came after hours of testimony by members of the public, with Madison Prep supporters outnumbering opponents 2:1. Lucy Mathiak and James Howard voted YES for Madison Prep; Ed Hughes, Arlene Silviera, Beth Moss, Maya Cole, and Marj Passman voted NO. After the vote was taken, Ed Hughes made an amendment to the motion to establish Madison Prep in 2013 (rather than 2012) in order to avoid what some see as a conflict between Madison Prep and the teachers' union contract. Mr. Hughes' motion was not seconded; therefore there was no vote on establishing Madison Prep one year later.
While the Urban League and Madison Prep are shocked by last night's outcome, both organizations are committed to ensuring that Madison Prep becomes a reality for children in Madison. We will continue to press for change and innovation in the Madison Metropolitan School District and Dane County to ensure that the racial achievement gap is eliminated and that all children receive a high quality education that adequately prepares them for their future.
We will advance a number of next steps:
1.We will pursue different avenues, both public and private, to launch Madison Prep. We are still hopeful for an opening in 2012. There will be much the community will learn from Madison Prep and our children need this option now.
2.We will continue to coordinate community support and action to ensure that the Madison Metropolitan School District is accountable for eliminating the racial achievement gap. We will consider several strategies, such as implementing a Citizen Review Board that will hold the school board and district administration accountable for good governance, planning, implementation, execution, community engagement and student achievement results. We will also consider legal avenues to ensure MMSD understands and responds to the community's sense of urgency to address the sizable and decades-long failure rates of Black and Latino children.
3.We must also address the leadership vacuum in K-12 education in Madison. Because of this, we will ensure that parents, students and community members are informed of their rights and responsibilities, and have a better understanding of promising educational strategies to close the achievement gap. We will also work to ensure that they have opportunities to be fully engaged in planning, working and deciding what's best for the children educated in our public schools.
4.We will continue to work in collaboration with MMSD through our existing partnerships, and hope to grow these partnerships in the future.
Thank you for everything you have done and continue to do to ensure that children in our schools and families in our community have hope, inspiration, support and opportunity to manifest their dreams and make a difference in their own lives and the lives of others.
As expected, the Madison Metropolitan School Board voted 5 -2 last night against authorizing the Madison Prep charter school. Only two board members overseeing a school district with an African-American graduation rate below 50% saw fit to support a new approach
Those voting against the school did offer reasons. Board member Beth Moss told the Wisconsin State Journal she voted no because of concerns about the school's ability to serve students needing more than one year of remedial education. Board member Ed Hughes said he could not support the school until after the Madison teachers union contract expires in 2013.
But no worries, Superintendent Dan Nerad told the Wisconsin State Journal he has a plan:
There's nothing like standing in the schoolhouse door.
For me, the Madison School Board's 5-2 vote to shoot down Madison Preparatory Academy, a proposed charter school specifically designed for low-income minority students, brings to mind images of George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door to block the integration of the University of Alabama, or state officials blocking James Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi.
If you think that's harsh, remember that those pieces of history were not only about Civil Rights and desegregation, they were about every person's right to pursue a quality education.
In the Madison Metropolitan School District, a 48% graduation rate among African American students indicates that quality has not been achieved. Not even close.
Fortunately, this is one dream that's not going to be allowed to die. Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, is the driving force behind Madison Prep, and he isn't ready to wave the surrender flag.
Following the school board vote, Caire vowed to file a racial discrimination lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Justice, and he also urged supporters of Madison Prep to run for school board.
Love it, love it, love it.
At one point in the development of Madison Prep, Caire sounded optimistic that the school district was a real partner, but the majority of board members had other ideas. Caire and the Urban League did their best to address every objection critics put in their way, and now it's clear that the intent all along was to scuttle the project with a gauntlet of hurdles.
Q. What were some early management challenges for you?
A. At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.
Q. How big a group was this?
A. There were about 25 teachers and instructors and others. And very quickly I went from being this wonderful person, "Geoff is just so nice, he's just such a great guy," to: "I cannot stand that guy. He just thinks he's in charge and he wants to do things his way." And it was a real eye-opener for me because I was trying to change something that everybody was comfortable with. I don't think we were doing a great job with the kids, and I thought we could perform at a higher level.
Educators from across the state made a last-ditch effort Thursday to sway the state Education Board toward adopting their favorite of three teacher evaluation systems that next year will be used to evaluate every teacher in Oklahoma.
In the end, the board decided not to decide.
After an almost equal amount of support was expressed for two of the three systems, the board voted to adopt all three models for a one-year pilot.
School districts will be able to select any of the three models and will receive a portion of approximately $1.5 million in funding for the evaluation system based on student enrollment numbers.
"When I hear the dialogue back and forth about the strengths and weaknesses of these systems, I wonder if it's really about the strengths and weaknesses of these systems or if it's about who gets the money to further develop their model," said state Education Board Member Lee Baxter, of Lawton. "I'd like to find a way to not make this decision. I'd like to find a way to go through the pilot program and allow the districts to be involved with the evaluation system that they want to over a year's period of time."
Proponents of the Madison Preparatory Academy said they're looking to take legal action against the Madison Metropolitan School District after the school board voted against the proposed charter school.
The Madison Board of Education put an end to the Madison Prep proposal with a 5-2 vote early Tuesday morning, and reaction was swift.
"Because (the school board members) don't take us seriously -- they will sit right up here and look in our face and not even know they're insulting us with the things that they say," said Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League Of Greater Madison President, shortly after the vote. "We are going to turn our attention immediately, immediately, to address this legally."
In the last decade, we have emerged from the Education Stone Age. No longer must we rely on primitive tools like teachers and principals to assess children's academic progress. Thanks to the best education minds in Washington, Albany and Lower Manhattan, we now have finely calibrated state tests aligned with the highest academic standards. What follows is a look back at New York's long march to a new age of accountability.
DECEMBER 2002 The state's education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, reports to the state Regents: "Students are learning more than ever. Student achievement has improved in relation to the standards over recent years and continues to do so."
JANUARY 2003 New York becomes one of the first five states to have its testing system approved by federal officials under the new No Child Left Behind law. The Princeton Review rates New York's assessment program No. 1 in the country.
The donor whose $350 million gift will be critical in building Cornell University's new high-tech graduate school on Roosevelt Island is Atlantic Philanthropies, whose founder, Charles F. Feeney, is a Cornell alumnus who made billions of dollars through the Duty Free Shoppers Group.
Mr. Feeney, 80, has spent much of the last three decades giving away his fortune, with large gifts to universities all over the world and an unusual degree of anonymity. Cornell officials revealed in 2007 that he had given some $600 million to the university over the years, yet nothing on its Ithaca campus, where he graduated from the School of Hotel Management in 1956.
The $350 million gift, the largest in the university's history, was announced on Friday, but the donor was not named. Officials at Atlantic Philanthropies confirmed on Monday evening that it was Mr. Feeney, a native of Elizabeth, N.J., who is known for his frugality -- he flies coach, owns neither a home nor a car, and wears a $15 watch -- as well as his philanthropic generosity, particularly to medical research.
On the 5-2 Madison School Board No (Cole, Hughes, Moss, Passman, Silveira) Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Vote (Howard, Mathiak voted Yes)
The Madison School Board voted early Tuesday morning against a charter school geared toward low-income minority students.
Moments later, Urban League of Greater Madison President Kaleem Caire announced to a crowd of emotional supporters that he planned to file a racial discrimination lawsuit with the U.S. Justice Department. He also urged the supporters to run for School Board.
"We are going to challenge this school district like they've never been challenged before, I swear to God," Caire said.
The School Board voted against the plan 5-2, as expected, just after midnight. In the hours leading up to the vote, however, hundreds of Madison Preparatory Academy supporters urged them to change their minds.
More than 450 people gathered at Memorial High School for public comments, which lasted more than four hours.
It was the first School Board meeting moved to Memorial since a 2001 debate over the Pledge of Allegiance in schools.
But the night's harshest criticism was leveled not at the proposal but at the board itself, over a perceived lack of leadership "from the superintendent on down."
"You meet every need of the unions, but keep minority student achievement a low priority," said one parent.
Others suggested the same.
"This vote is not about Madison Prep," said Jan O'Neill, a citizen who came out to speak. "It's about this community, who we are and what we stand for -- and who we stand up for."
Among the issues raised by opponents, the one that seemed to weigh heaviest on the minds of board members was the non-instrumentality issue, which would've allowed Madison Prep to hire non-union staff.
A work preservation clause in the district's collective bargaining agreement with the teacher's union requires the district to hire union staff. Board member Ed Hughes said he wanted to approve Madison Prep, but feared that approving a non-instrumentality school would put the district in breach of its contract with Madison Teachers, Inc.
"It's undeniable that Madison school district hasn't done very well by its African American students," he said. "But I think it's incumbent upon us to honor the contract."
(new charter school being opened in the MASH [Middleton Alternative Senior High School] building. This proposal got started less than a year ago, got a planning grant from DPI in August, and will open in the fall.)
It's Thursday morning and a group of students are seated around an oblong table in a classroom at Middleton High School.
Most of the students are black. A few are white. Together they make up the school's Black Student Union (BSU), which was founded last year thanks in large part to the work of a few dedicated teen-agers. Today they are passing around a small toy, a black and white Holstein cow (the student holding the cow has the floor), and talking candidly about issues of race.
"I don't want us to be a joke," said one student. "I don't see other student organizations treated like a joke, and I want this one taken seriously, too."
Another turns her criticism inward, saying she feels it is important that African-American students not perpetuate negative stereotypes about themselves in the school's corridors.
Yet another suggests holding more public events and charitable activities, prompting one young woman to volunteer to prepare food for a bake sale.
Part 1 here, (the introductory material is copied from there).
The discussion around the Madison Preparatory Academy (MPA) proposal and the related events and processes has been heated, but not always grounded in reality. Many have said that just having this conversation is a good thing. I don't agree. With myths being so prevalent and prominent, a productive conversation is nearly impossible. Since the vote is scheduled for Monday (12/19), I thought it would be good to take a closer -- fact based, but opinionated -- look at some of the myths. This is part two, although there are plenty of myths left to be examined, I've only gotten one up here. I may post more separately or in an update here on Monday.
Three things to get out of the way first.
One is that the meeting is now scheduled to be held at 6:00 Pm at the Memorial High School Auditorium and that for this meeting the sign up period to speak will be from 5:45 to 6:00 PM (only).
Second, much of the information on Madison Prep can be found on the district web page devoted to the topic. I'm not going do as many hyperlinks to sources as I usually do because much of he material is there already. Time constraints, the fact that people rarely click the links I so carefully include, and, because some of the things I'll be discussing presently are more along the lines of "what people are saying/thinking," rather than official statements, also played a role in this decision. I especially want to emphasize this last point. Some of the myths being examined come straight from "official" statements or sources, some are extensions of "official" things taken up by advocates, and some are self-generated by unaffiliated advocates.
Millions of learners have enjoyed the free lecture videos and other course materials published online through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare project. Now MIT plans to release a fresh batch of open online courses--and, for the first time, to offer certificates to outside students who complete them.
The credentials are part of a new, interactive e-learning venture, tentatively called MITx, that is expected to host "a virtual community of millions of learners around the world," the institute will announce on Monday.
Here's how it will work: MITx will give anyone free access to an online-course platform. Users will include students on the MIT campus, but also external learners like high-school seniors and engineering majors at other colleges. They'll watch videos, answer questions, practice exercises, visit online labs, and take quizzes and tests. They'll also connect with others working on the material.
The first course will begin around the spring of 2012. MIT has not yet announced its subject, but the goal is to build a portfolio of high-demand courses--the kind that draw more than 200 people to lecture halls on the campus, in Cambridge, Mass. MIT is investing "millions of dollars" in the project, said L. Rafael Reif, the provost, and the plan is to solicit more from donors and foundations.
A majority of the Madison School Board won't support opening next fall a controversial, single-sex charter school geared toward low-income minority students.
But it's unclear whether a compromise proposal to start Madison Preparatory Academy in 2013 will gain enough votes Tuesday night when the board meets.
School Board members Beth Moss and Arlene Silveira were the latest to publicly express their opposition to the current proposal for the school.
For the last 17 months, I have followed the commentary and misinformation shared about our organization's proposal to establish Madison Preparatory Academy.
Some who have written and commented about our proposal have been very supportive; others don't think Madison Prep should exist. With less than 24 hours until the Madison School Board votes on the school, we would like to bring the public back to the central reasons why we proposed Madison Prep in August 2010.
First, hundreds of black and Latino children are failing to complete high school each year. In 2009, the Madison School District reported that 59 percent of black and 61 percent of Latino students graduated. In 2010, the percentage of graduates dropped to 48 percent for Black and 56 percent for Latino students. This not only has an adverse impact on our young people, their families and our community, it results in millions in lost revenue to the Madison district every year.
Second, in 2010, just 20 percent of the 387 black and 37 percent of the 191 Latino seniors enrolled in the district completed the ACT college entrance exam. The ACT is required for admission by all public colleges and universities in Wisconsin. Unfortunately, just 7 percent of black and 18 percent of Latino student who completed the ACT were "ready for college." This means that only 5 of 387 black and 13 of 191 Latino students were academically ready for college.
The motto of fee-paying Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen is: "Now you should use all your masterly skills" (Omni nunc arte magistra).
Michael Gove, the education secretary, is a former pupil. Since his appointment, he has given every sign that he has taken the motto to heart. In a blizzard of reforms, his skill has been to appear charming, collaborative and collegiate, while exercising a determination to do it his way, "it" in this case being the radical remodelling of the education system.
Yesterday, a glimpse of how his affability camouflages an iron resolve was again revealed when it was announced that the final results of an independent review of the national curriculum, expected in the new year, will now be delayed for 12 months. Critics say the delay is driven by the minister's desire to stamp his authority on the review process.
The main principle of the Harlem Children's Zone is simple: When failure is not allowed, success prevails.
"Are your kids graduating high school? No. Are your kids going to college? No. That's not success," Geoffrey Canada, president and chief executive officer of the Harlem Children's Zone, asked a Buffalo audience Friday.
Entitled "Power of Education -- Children First," the summit was held at the Adam's Mark Hotel in downtown Buffalo. The purpose was to advance the cause of educational reform in the interests of children across Western New York and explore how to create those opportunities. About 300 people attended.
Public employee union leaders Mary Bell and Marty Beil say the collective bargaining restrictions on their members enacted this year have galvanized the state's labor movement and paved the way for victory in potential recall elections in 2012.
But even if Dems are swept into the governor's office and the Senate majority, the union heads say they aren't necessarily seeking a complete return to the way things were before February.
"There has to be some changes ... has to be some tweaking there," said Beil (left), executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union. "But certainly not tweaking in the areas of the unions being able to bargain collectively for wages, hours and working conditions."
Bell, leader of the Wisconsin Education Association Council -- the state's largest teachers union -- added she's simply hoping for a collective bargaining environment that ensures the voice of workers and "whether that is the law we had or the law that we needed even then, I think, is the question."
"But the most important piece of this is that if you're going to make that kind of significant change, you do not do it without a conversation among the people that are affected," Bell told a WisPolitics.com luncheon. "That's what's been so offensive about the last year."
As No Child Left Behind becomes an ever bigger disaster, Secretary Duncan faces a major dilemma. How can he continue to enforce this law he has declared a train wreck?
Last spring, in an attempt to goad Congress into accepting his formula for revising No Child Left Behind, Education Secretary Arne Duncan made some dire predictions.
In his testimony, he said:
...we did an analysis which shows that -- next year -- the number of schools not meeting their goals under NCLB could double to over 80 percent -- even if we assume that all schools will gain as much as the top quartile in the state.
So let me repeat that: four out of five schools in America many not meet their goals under NCLB by next year. The consequences under the current law are very clear: states and districts all across American may have to intervene in more and more schools each year, implementing the exact same interventions regardless of the schools' individual needs.
The state has threatened to withhold $2.5 million in federal funding from the Brandywine School District because it believes it is not giving teachers enough time to plan how to best educate students.
State Department of Education officials decided to put the school district on notice after it was discovered it failed to properly implement required 90-minute common planning times for high school teachers.
The state has offered to help the school find a way to incorporate the program properly. But if that's not accomplished by next school year, the district stands to lose its portion of the state's Race to the Top grant.
The Charter School Review Panel, which is the agency charged with overseeing charter schools, "has misinterpreted state law and minimized its role in the system's accountability structure," the report states in its summary. It adds that the panel has delegated too much of the monitoring and accountability to the boards of individual schools.
The auditor's two overarching findings were:
The Charter School Review Panel fails to hold charter schools accountable for student performance.
Charter school operations fail to comply with state law and principles of public accountability.
Most of the information in the report was not news to the officials who oversee the 32-school charter school system, or to members of the public following the numerous nepotism, ethics and other scandals at charter schools around the state.
No matter where the votes fall Monday when the Madison School Board decides whether to OK a charter school proposal for the controversial Madison Preparatory Academy, the idea of a buttoned-down, no-nonsense alternative to the city's public schools already has entered the local popular culture. It is not only a beacon of hope in efforts to end a lingering race-based academic achievement gap, but also has become an emblematic stick to nudge underperforming kids into line.
As high school senior Adaeze Okoli tells it, when her little brother isn't working up to his potential, her mom jokingly threatens to send him to Madison Prep.
That anecdote says a lot about how distinct a presence the proposed school already has become in local communities of color. It makes me wonder how kids would feel about attending a school that is boys-only or girls-only and requires uniforms, longer school days, a longer school year and greater parental involvement.
Put the kids first for a change, Urban League of Greater Madison president Kaleem Caire, the architect and unflagging advocate of the school plan, chided school district administrators after they declared that his proposal would violate the district's union contract with its teachers and provide inadequate accountability to the School Board. But for all the analysis and debate about the Madison Prep plan, I haven't heard much from young people about how they would like to go to such a school, and how they think the strict rules would influence learning.
To sound out some students, I turned to the Simpson St
Superintendent Dan Nerad acknowledged last week that existing Madison School District programs aimed at boosting minority achievement "are not having the impact we need for our kids."
"The data is telling us we need to do different things," Nerad added.
And the Urban League of Greater Madison's proposal for an unusual public charter school catering to low-income blacks and Latinos "has elevated the conversation, and I appreciate that," the superintendent said.
"I'm not raising any concerns about the programming side of it," he told the State Journal editorial board.
It sounded like a windup to endorsing the Madison Preparatory Academy, which faces a final vote by the Madison School Board on Monday night.
Instead, Nerad is recommending the School Board reject the academy, primarily because of complicated contract language.
The Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors met on December 15, 2011, and adopted the following resolution:
Motion: The Board of Directors encourages a comprehensive approach to eliminate the student achievement gap currently present in Madison schools.
The Board strongly endorses the advancement of the Urban League of Greater Madison's proposed Madison Preparatory Academy. The Board also acknowledges and endorses the continued investment in successful strategies already employed by the Madison Metropolitan School District and the United Way of Dane County.
Comments:
The Chamber Board recognizes that there is no panacea or singular solution to eliminating the student racial achievement gap. Rather, a comprehensive approach should be employed utilizing multiple strategies to address this problem.
The Chamber Board acknowledges the work of community and school leaders who have worked tirelessly on this issue. In particular, the United Way of Dane County has demonstrated tremendous leadership to ensure all struggling students achieve better results. The GMCC is a partner in Schools of Hope, a collaborative community initiative aimed at reducing the achievement gap. In addition, the United Way is committing more than $2 million over the next year for programs to address this issue.
The Madison School Board Monday night needs to work out the necessary details to make the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy a reality.
There's absolutely no question that our school system, long deemed to be one of the best in the country for a vast majority of its students, is failing its African-American students and, as board member Ed Hughes recently pointed out, we need to accept that fact and be willing to give the Urban League an opportunity to show us a better way.
Still, it needs to be done carefully and not by yielding to heated tempers and ill-informed finger-pointers. This, after all, is not about conservatives vs. liberals, as some would gleefully proclaim, or even union supporters against those who believe unions lurk behind every failure in American education. It's about honest philosophical differences among well-meaning people on how best to educate our children during troubling economic times.
Yet, more importantly, despite the enormous hurdles, it has got to be about the kids and finding a way for them to succeed.
Though there are difficult issues to overcome, there's no need for the board and the Madison Prep advocates to draw lines in the sand. There surely is a middle ground that can honor the union contract, maintain a level of accountability at an acceptable cost to the taxpayers, and give the final OK to open the school.
One of the last remaining opportunities for a locally-elected government body to stop the increasing spread of the entitlement society and the dumbing down of education will occur Monday when the Madison School Board, together with their highly paid educational professionals, will determine the fate of Madison Prep Academy.
Based on news reports, the local teachers union and its always pushy head, John Matthews, oppose the venture. Why? Because the proposal advocates flexibility by hiring non-union teachers at a cost savings of millions!
To Matthews and MTI, your argument that "it's all about the kids" rings hollow and empty again.
Even though I am not a member of a minority and I dislike paying more real estate taxes for unnecessary projects, this non-union driven proposal by Kaleem Caire deserves approval for the future benefit of Madison's kids and residents.
It's ironic that John Matthews, executive director for Madison Teachers Inc., writes in a State Journal guest column that Madison Prep charter school could be implemented only if it was more like Nuestro Mundo.
In 2004, when Nuestro Mundo applied, Matthews didn't support the formation of a charter school. He opposed the charter despite the fact that Nuestro Mundo wanted teachers to remain in the collective bargaining agreement as members of MTI.
If the Madison School Board had listened to Matthews back in 2004, there would not be a Nuestro Mundo charter school.
Nuestro Mundo came into existence through the work of members of the community and the efforts of three Madison School District board members, Ruth Robarts, Ray Allen and Juan Jose Lopez. In spite of the many legal and economic questions, they found a way to make Nuestro Mundo a reality.
Matthews has not assisted in the formation of charter schools. Don't look to him for a balanced opinion -- he's anti-charter.
Yesterday, the California Charter Schools Association caused a stir. The pro-charter group came out with a list of 10 independently-run schools it deemed underperforming -- and encouraged their respective school districts to close them when their 5-year contracts expire!
That list included West County Community High in Richmond, as my colleague Hannah Dreier reported in today's paper. Leadership High in San Francisco was also on it.
The complete list included 31 schools, but the association only published the names of those that are nearing the end of their 5-year terms and seeking a charter renewal.
Here's the reasoning behind the mov, from the news release:
When the Obama administration was seeking to drum up support for its education initiatives last spring, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told Congress that the federal law known as No Child Left Behind would label 82 percent of all the nation's public schools as failing this year. Skeptics questioned that projection, but Mr. Duncan insisted it was based on careful analysis.
President Obama repeated it in a speech three days later. "Four out of five schools will be labeled as failing," Mr. Obama said at Kenmore Middle School in Arlington, Va., in March. "That's an astonishing number."
Now a new study, scheduled for release on Thursday, says the administration's numbers were wildly overstated. The study, by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington research group headed by a Democratic lawyer who endorses most of the administration's education policies, says that 48 percent of the nation's 100,000 public schools were labeled as failing under the law this year.
More schoolchildren than ever are taking their classes online, using technology to avoid long commutes to school, add courses they wouldn't otherwise be able to take -- and save their school districts money.
But as states pour money into virtual classrooms, with an estimated 200,000 virtual K-12 students in 40 states from Washington to Wisconsin, educators are raising questions about online learning. States are taking halting steps to increase oversight, but regulation isn't moving nearly as fast as the virtual school boom.
The online school debate pits traditional education backers, often teachers' unions, against lawmakers tempted by the promise of cheaper online schools and school-choice advocates who believe private companies will apply cutting-edge technology to education.
Is online education as good as face-to-face teaching.
You'll often hear the argument that half or almost half of all beginning U.S. public school teachers leave the profession within five years.
The implications of this statistic are, of course, that we are losing a huge proportion of our new teachers, creating a "revolving door" of sorts, with teachers constantly leaving the profession and having to be replaced. This is costly, both financially (it is expensive to recruit and train new teachers) and in terms of productivity (we are losing teachers before they reach their peak effectiveness). And this doesn't even include teachers who stay in the profession but switch schools and/or districts (i.e., teacher mobility).*
Needless to say, some attrition is inevitable, and not all of it is necessarily harmful, Many new teachers, like all workers, leave (or are dismissed) because they are just aren't good at it - and, indeed, there is test-based evidence that novice leavers are, on average, less effective. But there are many other excellent teachers who exit due to working conditions or other negative factors that might be improved (for reviews of the literature on attrition/retention, see here and here).
As chief financial officer for one of Illinois's largest school districts, Cheryl Crates watches the money.
Early this year, she was counting on $14 million more rolling in for Community Unit District 300, after the expiration of a tax break at Sears Holdings' 800-acre headquarters in Hoffman Estates; it is the Sears corporate campus, which includes an on-site auto center, walking trails and even a hair salon for employees. When Crates met with Hoffman Estates officials in March, she learned the money might not be coming after all because the tax break might not expire.
"I cried," Crates said. "The school district has cut for the last two years. We've had no wage increases, and we were planning on that revenue to bring down our class sizes. We have one algebra class with 47 students. It was devastating."
Crates and her school district had suddenly found themselves at the epicenter of Illinois's latest political and financial crisis, described by one lawmaker as round-robin blackmail among Midwestern states. Unless Illinois agreed to extend the tax break, Sears threatened to leave. The state of Ohio, for one, dangled $400 million in tax incentives as a lure.
Online learning--for students and for teachers is one of the fastest growing trends in educational uses of technology. The National Center for Education Statistics (2008) estimated that the number of K-12 public school students enrolling in a technology-based distance education course grew by 65 percent in the two years from 2002-03 to 2004-05. On the basis of a more recent district survey, Picciano and Seaman (2009) estimated that more than a million K-12 students took online courses in school year 2007-08.
Online learning overlaps with the broader category of distance learning, which encompasses earlier technologies such as correspondence courses, educational television and videoconferencing. Earlier studies of distance learning concluded that these technologies were not significantly different from regular classroom learning in terms of effectiveness. Policy makers reasoned that if online instruction is no worse than traditional instruction in terms of student outcomes, then online education initiatives could be justified on the basis of cost efficiency or need to provide access to learners in settings where face-to-face instruction is not feasible. The question of the relative efficacy of online and face-to-face instruction needs to be revisited, however, in light of today's online learning applications, which can take advantage of a wide range of Web resources, including not only multimedia but also Web based applications and new collaboration technologies. These forms of online learning are a far cry from the televised broadcasts and videoconferencing that characterized earlier generations of distance education. Moreover, interest in hybrid approaches that blend in-class and online activities is increasing. Policy makers and practitioners want to know about the effectiveness of Internet based, interactive online learning approaches and need information about the conditions under which online learning is effective.
Chicago Public Schools is floating a plan to phase out one of its most popular magnet schools.
LaSalle Language Academy magnet school in Old Town gets 1,500 applications a year for around 70 openings.
Now, CPS wants to slowly convert the magnet to a neighborhood school that draws from the immediate area, one of the ritziest in the city. The school would take no new magnet school kindergartners in the fall, unless they already had a sibling enrolled in the school. Instead, the kindergarten would be filled with neighborhood children.
The change would relieve overcrowding at nearby Lincoln Elementary, where rising test scores have made the school a popular option for Lincoln Park families.
But LaSalle parents say the change would also dismantle their school's diversity, achieved from 30 years as a desegregation school.
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad said Wednesday he will unveil next month a new plan for improving the achievement of low-income minority students.
The plan will summarize the district's current efforts as well as put forth new approaches, such as a longer school year and opening magnet schools, Nerad said.
The Madison Metropolitan School District has a problem educating minority pupils. Less than 50 percent of African-Americans graduate in four years and only 31 percent even take the ACT, an important prerequisite for admittance to four-year colleges. Yet the Madison School Board appears poised to vote down Kaleem Caire's promising proposal to educate the very demographic the district has proved incapable of reaching.
Caire's proposed school, Madison Prep, has several attributes that differentiate it from traditional MMSD schools. Among other things the school would have an extended school day and offer an International Baccalaureate program. Both features have proven track records in schools in Milwaukee.
Much has been made of the fact that there is no guarantee that Madison Prep would be successful. Well no, but the strength of the charter model is that, if the school is unsuccessful, the MMSD board is empowered to terminate its contract. Given the achievement levels of Madison's minority students, any hesitation of the board to try the innovative model is inexplicable.
Worse yet, the reasons for rejecting Madison Prep are divorced from education. The proposed school is a non-instrumentality charter, meaning the School Board authorizes the school but the school is not required to use MMSD employees, including union teachers. Madison Teachers Inc. Executive Director John Matthews finds this problematic, telling The Capital Times that the Madison Prep proposal could "easily be implemented" if it was an instrumentality school employing union teachers. Perhaps it would be easier, but it would also take away from Caire's goal of raising minority student achievement. There are key advantages to the non-instrumentality structure, most notably the ability to assemble and compensate a staff free from the pay schedule and work rules contained in the MTI contract.
Inside Chicago Public Schools, the joke long has been that when a school gets a fresh coat of paint and new windows, you can expect the central office to shut it down and open a charter in the building.
On Thursday, as Chicago Public Schools released a detailed list of $660 million in capital construction projects for the coming year, the district's top financial officer acknowledged, for perhaps the first time, that there's a kernel of truth in that.
"If we think there's a chance that a building is going to be closed in the next five to 10 years, if we think it's unlikely it's going to continue to be a school, we're not going to invest in that building," Chief Operating Officer Tim Cawley said.
I want to support the Urban League's Madison Prep charter school proposal. It is undeniable that the Madison School District has not done well by its African-American students. We need to accept that fact and be willing to step back and give our friends at the Urban League an opportunity to show us a better way.
The issue is far more complicated than this, however. There are a number of roadblocks on the path to saying yes. I discuss these issues below. Some are more of an obstacle than others.
The biggest challenge is that a vote in favor of Madison Prep as it is currently proposed amounts to a vote to violate our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers. I see no way around this. I believe in honoring the terms of our contracts with our employees. For me, this means that I have to condition my support for Madison Prep on a one-year delay in its opening.
Most other obstacles and risks can be addressed by including reasonable provisions in the charter school contract between the school district and Urban League.
One wonders what additional hurdles will appear between now and 2013, should the District follow Ed's proposal. Kaleem Caire:
For the last 16 months, we have been on an arduous journey to develop a public school that would effectively address the educational needs of children who have under-performed or failed to succeed in Madison's public schools for at least the last 40 years. If you have followed the news stories, it's not hard to see how many mountains have been erected in our way during the process.
Some days, it has felt like we're desperately looking at our children standing dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, some already fallen over while others dangling by their thumbs waiting to be rescued; but before we can get close enough to save them, we have to walk across one million razor blades and through thousands of rose bushes with our bare feet. As we make our way to them and get closer, the razor blades get sharper and the rose bushes grow more dense.
Fortunately, our Board members and team at the Urban League and Madison Preparatory Academy, and the scores of supporters who've been plowing through the fields with us for the last year believe that our children's education, their emotional, social and personal development, and their futures are far more important than any pain we might endure.
Monday's vote will certainly reflect the District's priorities.
As some citizens collect signatures to recall Mayor Jean Quan, another group named Concerned Parents and Community Coalition is trying to oust five of the seven Oakland school board directors. It's targeting those who voted `yes' on the proposal this fall to close elementary schools: Jody London, David Kakishiba, Jumoke Hinton Hodge, Gary Yee, and Chris Dobbins.
The school board meets tonight, and members of the coalition planned to march to the district office from nearby Laney College at 4 p.m. and present the directors with intent to gather signatures for a recall. Our photographer went out there around 4:30 p.m. and found about six people, not counting reporters.
(7:15 p.m. UPDATE: More supporters have packed the board room. Board President Jody London turned off the mic after Joel Velasquez, of Concerned Parents, went over the time limit. London later called a recess as he continued to speak, with the help of supporters, in Occupy "mic-check" fashion. People then began chanting "Stop closing schools!" and "Recall!")
The public debate about the success and expansion of charter schools often seems to gravitate toward a tiny handful of empirical studies, when there is, in fact, a relatively well-developed literature focused on whether these schools generate larger testing gains among their students relative to their counterparts in comparable regular public schools. This brief reviews this body of evidence, with a focus on high-quality state- and district-level analyses that address, directly or indirectly, three questions:
Do charter schools produce larger testing gains overall?
What policies and practices seem to be associated with better performance?
Can charter schools expand successfully within the same location?
The available research suggests that charter schools' effects on test score gains vary by location, school/student characteristics and other factors. When there are differences, they tend to be modest. There is tentative evidence suggesting that high-performing charter schools share certain key features, especially private donations, large expansions of school time, tutoring programs and strong discipline policies. Finally, while there may be a role for state/local policies in ensuring quality as charters proliferate, scaling up proven approaches is constrained by the lack of adequate funding, and the few places where charter sectors as a whole have been shown to get very strong results seem to be those in which their presence is more limited. Overall, after more than 20 years of proliferation, charter schools face the same challenges as regular public schools in boosting student achievement, and future research should continue to focus on identifying the policies, practices and other characteristics that help explain the wide variation in their results.
The Madison Metropolitan School District's Board of Education vote on the proposed charter school, Madison Preparatory Academy, is just around the corner.
We have heard from school board members, business leaders, teachers and other members of the community. It's safe to say that this is one of the most important issues in this city's history. While I am happy that Madison is finally having the long overdue conversation about how we educate our students who are falling through the cracks, I am not happy that the Urban League of Greater Madison and the school district couldn't come together to agree on a solution. In fact, it bothers me greatly.
It is a huge mistake to have this yearlong discussion come down to a contentious school board vote on Dec. 19. Both sides needed to come together to figure out a way to make Madison Prep a reality before that meeting.
Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Dan Nerad and various members of the school board say approving Madison Prep would violate the current contract with Madison Teachers, Inc. So, if 2012 isn't feasible, committing to a date to open Madison Prep's doors in 2013, and using the next three to six months to figure out the terms of that agreement should have been an option. But, unfortunately, that's not going to happen. Instead we have a school district and a civil rights organization arguing over ways to address the achievement gap and graduation rates. Not a good look. And the future relationship between the MMSD and the African American community could hang in the balance.
The Michigan House of Representatives voted Wednesday night to approve Senate Bill 618, which will lift the state's various caps on charter schools, House sources have confirmed. If and when the bill is signed by Governor Rick Snyder, it will go into law. The bill was passed 58-49, according to the Michigan Information & Resource Service (MIRS).
SB 618 had been tie-barred to a group of other Senate bills in the so-called "parent empowerment package," which means they all would've had to pass for any to take effect. But that tie-bar was broken when the House Education Committee approved SB 618 at its Nov. 30 meeting.
Some 35 amendments were offered, according to a House source. Several were approved. Perhaps the most consequential among the amendments phases in the lifting of the cap on charter schools, allowing up to 300 to be established through the end of 2012, 500 through 2014, and starting in 2015, no cap at all.
State Rep. Jeff Irwin, who represents Ann Arbor in Lansing, said that the "huge, gaping problem" in the bill, lifting the cap all at once, was addressed but he still wasn't happy with the way the bill turned out. None of the amendments proposed by Democrats passed, Irwin said; they weren't even brought to a vote.
It looks like the biggest traffic jam in California next year may well be the various tax increases being pushed for the November ballot.
So far, at least five big tax measures are in play. Think Long Committee for California, a group of high-powered movers and shakers funded by billionaire Nick Berggruen, has proposed a $10 billion revenue increase by expanding the sales tax to services. A teachers' union is advocating an income tax increase on those who earn more than $1 million annually to fund schools. Environmental activists are trying to generate $1.1 billion for clean energy by taxing out-of-state businesses. Another measure would tax oil and gas generation to help pay for education and state universities.
And then there's Gov. Jerry Brown's recently announced measure to temporarily increase the sales tax and bump up income tax rates for the state's top earners. Brown had hoped to have a ballot measure last June to extend a temporary increase in income, sales and vehicle license fee rates that went into effect in 2009, but was unable to coax a single Republican legislator into voting even to put such an extension on the ballot. Hence, the tax increases have all expired.
George W. Bush is writing a sequel to his big education act. The No Child Left Behind law was signed almost a decade ago, with overwhelming approval from Congress (384 to 45 in the House and 91 to 8 in the Senate). Now, amid a bipartisan effort to gut its accountability measures, the former President is quietly pushing new education-reform initiatives aimed at improving and empowering school principals, who too often lack the training or authority to effectively run their schools. And once again, he's approaching this massive education problem by blurring political lines.
I was invited in my role as TIME's education columnist to sit in on a small meeting this week that Bush organized in New York City, and I was struck by the roster of advisers he had assembled to guide the George W. Bush Institute's education work. The group included some big names in the education non-profit world as well as leaders of traditional public schools and charter schools. But by my informal count, most of the 10 people around the table were Democrats, including Clinton and Obama administration alums. "He cares about education deeply, and he gets it," one staunchly Democratic education consultant, who now works with the institute, told me. The former President has already recruited officials from his administration as well as liberal stalwarts like Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust and Democratic education leaders like former North Carolina Governor James Hunt.
The University of California, Berkeley, announced Wednesday that it would offer far more financial aid to middle-class students starting next fall, with families earning up to $140,000 a year expected to contribute no more than 15 percent of their annual income, in what experts described as the most significant such move by a public institution.
As state budget cuts have led to rising tuition and fees at the University of California and other prestigious campuses across the nation, the middle class has increasingly been squeezed out of what was long seen as higher education's best balance between quality and affordability.
At Berkeley, officials said, the number of low-income and wealthy students has grown over the last several years, while the number from middle-class families has remained flat. That has raised concerns that some of the state's best and brightest are choosing private schools whose generous financial aid can erase differentials in sticker price or not enrolling at all. The cost of a year at Berkeley has risen sharply to $32,000.
The Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will vote December 19, 2011, on the Madison Preparatory Academy proposal for non-instrumentality charter school authorization. Active Citizens for Education endorses and supports the approval of the proposal.
In addition to the rationale and data cited by the Urban League of Greater Madison, and significant others throughout the Madison community, supporting the curricular, instructional, parental and behavioral strategies and rigor of the school, ACE cites the following financial and accountability support for approval of the Academy as a non-instrumentality charter school.
Financial: Should the Board deny approval of the proposal as a non-instrumentality the District stands to lose significant means of financial support from state aids and property tax revenue. The District is allowed $10,538.54 per student enrolled in the District the 2011-12 school year. With the possibility of Madison Prep becoming a private school if denied charter school status, the 120 boys and girls would not be enrolled in MMSD; therefore the District would not be the beneficiary of the state and local revenue. The following chart shows the cumulative affect of this reduction using current dollars:
2012-2013 6th grade 120 students @10,538.54 = $1,264,624.80
2013-2014 2 grades 240 students @10,538.54 = $2.529,249.60
2014-2015 3 grades 360 students @10,538.54 = $3,793,874.40
2015-2016 4 grades 480 students @10,538.54 = $5,058,499.20
2016-2017 5 grades 600 students @10,538.54 = $6.323.124.00
2017-2018 6 grades 720 students @10,538.54 = $7,587,748.80
2018-2019 7 grades 840 students @10,538.54 = $8,852,373.60
This lost revenue does not include increases in revenue that would be generated from improved completion/graduation rates (currently in the 50% range) of Black and Hispanic students resulting from enrollees in a charter school arrangement.
Accountability: The MMSD Administration and Board have been demonstrating a misunderstanding of the terms 'accountability' and 'control'. The State charter school law allows for the creation of charter schools to provide learning experiences for identified student groups with innovative and results-oriented strategies, exempt from the encumbrances of many existing state and local school rules, policies and practices. Charter schools are authorized and designed to operate without the 'controls' which are the very smothering conditions causing many of the problems in our public schools. The resulting different charter school environment has been proven to provide improved academic and personal development growth for learners from the traditional school environment. Decreasing impediments and controls inhibiting learning increases the requirements for 'accountability' to achieve improved learner outcomes on the part of the charter school. Should the charter school not meet its stated and measurable goals, objectives and results then it is not accountable and therefore should be dissolved. This is the 'control' for which the Board of Education has the authority to hold a charter school accountable.
Let us describe an analogy. Private for-profit business and not-for-profit organizations are established to provide a product and/or service to customers, members and the public. The accountability of the business or organization for its continued existence depends on providing a quality product/services that customers/members want or need. If, for whatever reasons, the business or organization does not provide the quality and service expected and the customer/member does not obtain the results/satisfaction expected, the very existence of the business/organization is jeopardized and may ultimately go 'out of business'. This scenario is also absolutely true with a charter school. It appears that the significant fears for the MMSD Administration and Board of Education to overcome for the approval of the proposed non-instrumentality Madison Prep charter school are: 1) the fear of loss of 'control' instead of accepting responsibility for 'accountability', and 2) the fear that 'some other organization' will be successful with solutions and results for a problem not addressed by themselves.
The MMSD Board of Education is urged to approve the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy non-instrumentality charter school proposal; thereby, relieving the bondage which grips students and sentences them to a future lifetime of under-performance and lack of opportunities. Thank you.
Contact: Don Severson, President, 608 577-0851, donleader@aol.com
ACE Media Conference 12/15/2011 12:30p.m. Financial and Accountability Issues Facing MMSD Board of Education
Don Severson, via a kind email:
(Madison, WI) The Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will make a decision at its regular meeting December 19th regarding the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM) proposal for a non-instrumentality charter school. Active Citizens for Education (ACE) has discussed several issues related to the proposal with the Board of Education, administration and with ULGM.
The Board of Education, in its deliberations, must weigh several implications and consequences for the schools, students, parents and the taxpaying public.
In its public statement, ACE will announce its position on the
financial implications of the proposal for future MMSD budgets and the taxpayers; how the issues of "control" and "accountability" relate to the authority of the Board of Education regarding approval or non-approval of the charter school proposal; and Madison Preparatory Academy over-all proposal.
The media conference will be held
December 15, 2011 (Thursday)
12:30 PM, Conference Room
Genesis Enterprise Center (GEC)
313 West Beltline Highway (off Rimrock Road to the west)
Mr. Severson will be available for questions and comments following the media conference.
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad said Wednesday he will unveil next month a new plan for improving the achievement of low-income minority students.
The plan will summarize the district's current efforts as well as put forth new approaches, such as a longer school year and opening magnet schools, Nerad said.
Nerad discussed the plan in a meeting with the State Journal editorial board less than a week before the School Board is to vote on Madison Preparatory Academy, a proposed charter school geared toward low-income, minority students.
Nerad said he opposes the current proposal for Madison Prep primarily because it would violate the district's contract with its teachers union, but that he agrees with the charter school's supporters in that a new approach to close the achievement gap is necessary.
"I made a purposeful decision to not bring (a plan) forward over the past several months to not cloud the discussion about Madison Prep," Nerad said. "It's caused us to take a step back and say, 'We're doing a lot of things, but what else do we need to be doing?'"
Superintendent Nerad's former District; Green Bay offers three "magnet options":
Here's a quote from an on-line comment of a Madison Prep opponent responding to one of the several op-ed pieces posted in the Cap Times in recent days: "There are barriers to students with special education needs, barriers to students with behavioral needs, and barriers to kids who rely on public transportation. These children are simply not the 'right fit'. It is Madison Prep's proposal to leave these kids in their neighborhood schools."
The notion seems to be that Madison Prep may not be welcoming for students from all points along the spectrum of educational needs, even though our neighborhood schools are obligated to serve everyone.
I think the self-selection process for Madison Prep should be taken into account in assessing how its students perform. But it does not trouble me that the school is not designed to meet the needs of all our students. No one need apply to attend and no student will be denied current services or programs if Madison Prep is authorized.
Thirteen high schools won high praise for their soaring graduation rates during the Miami-Dade School Board's last meeting for the year Wednesday.
Overall, Miami-Dade County's public schools hit their highest graduation rate ever, nearly 78 percent -- higher than Broward County's and just shy of the state's 80 percent rate.
But the celebration came with a warning: Next year could be very different.
There is a new FCAT 2.0 and, in the pipeline, a new scoring scale for that exam, plus more weight on reading and a new grading model for state-issued letter grades. Other changes in 2012: More tests will be administered via computers and new end-of-course exams will be given in geometry and biology.
"As we celebrate this year's outstanding graduation accomplishments, it's important to inform the community what's happening in Tallahassee and across our state," said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. "The new standards are going to change the game for all of us."
Parts of the new standards are still being developed. On Monday, the State Board of Education will consider proposed new scoring levels for the FCAT 2.0 and the algebra end-of-course exam.
A Chicago Board of Education meeting came to a sudden halt Wednesday when a raucous group of protesters from the Chicago Teachers Union, Occupy Chicago and other organizations erupted into a chorus of chants denouncing board members.
It was the first board meeting since Chicago Public Schools announced a series of closings, consolidations and turnarounds that could affect 21 schools on the city's South and West sides. While none of those actions were being voted on, the agenda included the approval of 12 new charter schools.
The protesters drowned out the voice of CPS chief executive Jean-Claude Brizard, who had just begun a presentation to board members. "You have failed...You have produced chaos...You should be fired" they chanted.
When they paused, board president David Vitale said he hoped they had "gotten it out of their system," which set off another round of shouting.
Welcome to the third edition of the relaunched Learning Matters podcast. In this episode, Learning Matters web producer Ted Bauer speaks with UPenn vice dean and professor Doug Lynch about various issues in education, including his business plan competition. Lynch draws pointed contrasts between corporate education and public education, and is candid about the notion of success and failure within the field. Enjoy the conversation.
School districts across Wisconsin have made strides toward reforming the state's teacher evaluation process by implementing new merit-based salaries for teachers under new powers provided by the budget repair legislation.
Under Gov. Scott Walker's controversial legislation, bargaining units for teachers are still able to negotiate base wages, but cannot negotiate other areas, including certain funds allocated for teacher performance. The bill now gives more authority to district leaders to make changes in working conditions, hours and compensation systems for teachers and staff.
Cedarburg School District in eastern Wisconsin is one of many schools making a move toward the merit-pay system for teachers. The district's superintendent, Daryl Herrick, said the new criteria for pay would be based on a new evaluation model.
"There would be teachers in three-year cycles," Herrick said. "There will be varied activities in the cycles where both the evaluator and the teacher provide direct observations to indicate their performance levels. We'll also have a goal-setting process in order to determine performance."
Appearances suggest Madisonians would be sympathetic to Madison Preparatory Academy.
Here is a citizenry known for its progressivism, inclusiveness and embrace of the disenfranchised.
And here is a five-year educational experiment aimed at helping students of darker skin and lesser means who are sometimes only a couple of years removed from failing schools in Chicago and Milwaukee.
I guess appearances can be deceiving.
On Monday, the Madison School Board is likely to go along with district administrators' recommendation to vote down a five-year charter for Madison Prep, a project of the Urban League of Greater Madison that would aim to improve the performance and life prospects of students the district has so far failed to reach.
I suspect Madison Prep's future wouldn't be so dire if over the last year Madison's supposedly liberal power structure had been willing to take up its cause.
My decision to vote against the Madison Prep proposal is very difficult. I pushed for the planning grant over a year ago when only one other School Board member would sponsor the proposal.
I raised many questions because of the complex scope of the Urban League's proposal for a charter school that aims to reduce the achievement gap between white and minority students. My concerns come down to this: Will this proposal be the best investment for the most students? Is this college-prep program the area of focus that would best serve the many struggling students in our district?
The fundamental conclusion I came to over the course of a year is that this proposal would put the district at risk legally and would challenge our district philosophy pertaining to special education students. Perhaps more importantly, the proposal constructs undue barriers such as mandatory information meetings, fundraising and parent contracts. These admission policies would have the effect of excluding students based on language background, prior academic performance, or parental self-selection.
My decision has nothing to do with defending the status quo or protecting the union. However, as a School Board member, parent and neighbor to many children in our district, I believe we have some of the most dedicated and knowledgeable staff in education today.
The bigger question here is whether bankruptcy would actually help any of these struggling districts. Debts could be restructured and bondholders paid off, but would the districts be in any better shape? It's not even clear to me that a higher level of state oversight would make a difference. The state might just know sooner that it has to find the money for a bailout. And with revenues falling everywhere, it would probably be impossible for the state to insist that all at-risk districts bulk-up their reserve funds.
Throwing up your hands probably isn't an option, however, when it comes to public education. But obviously in close to a fifth of the state's school districts, cost structures aren't able to cope with major budget shocks, at the state or local level. And remember, the state's population is growing -- it could hit 48 million by 2020. A well-educated workforce is something that California will urgently need to remain competitive in the 21st century. But in order to have that, the state is going to need to do something to stabilize the finances of its public education system. And before that...deal with the falling axe of the trigger cuts.
1) For NEA and Affiliates, It's Already 2012. Back in May, and again in July, there was a huge stink about NEA's decision to endorse President Obama for reelection a year earlier than usual. Despite the debate over what message the endorsement sent to the members and the White House, it was procedurally necessary, because the union could not devote money and resources to the Presidential campaign until after an endorsement - and these days waiting until July of an election year is simply too little, too late.
We now have some indications of what NEA has been doing with the additional time. To begin with, the union cleverly melded its organizing in support of Obama's latest edu-jobs legislation with organizing for Obama himself in 2012. Though the bill itself has little chance of passage, it does serve the purpose of emphasizing where the President and NEA align, rather than where they differ.
The union devoted the fall to identifying potential Obama activists from among its members in 16 states, presumably those NEA considers to be battleground states. They are: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. Along with this recruiting, the union's PAC has a "Educators for Obama" web site where volunteers can sign up.
Last week, I posted an item that asked readers for their suggestions on how to reform Michigan schools. It drew a good number of comments, and I'll be posting some of them later this week.
But today I'm offering offering more food for thought, in the form of a memo written by my good friend Tim Bartik, an economist for the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and a former school board president for Kalamazoo Public Schools. Through his work as an economist and as a school board member, Bartik is one of the best-informed people around on best-practices in education and here's what he has to say:
This week's map takes advantage of new migration data recently released by the IRS. It shows, for the year 2009, the net annual income of all migrants to and from each state to other states, as a percentage of that state's aggregate income. (Foreign migration is deliberately excluded.) At the top of the list is Montana, where migrants, in a single year, brought with them a net income totaling more than 1% of the state's entire annual income. At the bottom is Michigan, where migrants leaving the state took with them 0.43% of Michigan's entire annual income.
The Urban League's proposal to create a Madison Preparatory charter school is, at its heart, a proposal about public education in our community. Although the discussions often boil down to overly simplistic assertions about whether one position or the other is supportive of or hostile toward public education, it is not that simple. What we are facing is a larger and more fundamental question about our values when it comes to the purpose of public education and who it is supposed to serve.
I am voting "yes" because I believe that strong public education for all is the foundation for a strong society. While our schools do a very good job with many students who are white and/or living above the poverty line, the same cannot be said for students of color and/or students living in poverty. The record is most dismal for African American students.
The Madison Prep proposal is born of over 40 years of advocacy for schools that engage and hold high academic expectations for African American and other students of color. That advocacy has produced minor changes in rhetoric without changes in culture, practice, or outcome. Yes, some African American students are succeeding. But for the overwhelming majority, there are two Madison public school systems. The one where the students have a great experience and go on to top colleges, and the one that graduates only 48% of African American males.
The individual stories are heartbreaking, but the numbers underscore that individual cases add up to data that is not in keeping with our self-image as a cutting edge modern community. We ALL play a role in the problem, and we ALL must be part creating a sound, systemic, solution to our failure to educate ALL of our public school students. In the meantime, the African American community cannot wait, and the Madison Prep proposal came from that urgent, dire, need.
Our track record with students and families of color is not improving and, in some cases, is going backward rather than forward as we create more plans and PR campaigns designed to dismiss concerns about academic equality as misunderstandings. To be sure, there are excellent principals, teachers, and staff who do make a difference every day; some African American students excel each year. But overall, when presented with opportunities to change and to find the academic potential in each student, the district has failed to act and has been allowed to do so by the complicit silence of board members and the community at large.
A few turning points from the past year alone:
The Urban League - not MMSD administration or the board - pointed out the dismal graduation rates for African American students (48% for males)
Less than 5% of African American students are college ready.
AVID/TOPs does a terrific job with underrepresented students IF they can get in. AVID/TOPs serves 134 (2.6%) of MMSD's 4,977 African American secondary students.
The number of African American students entering AVID/TOPs is lower this year after MMSD administration changed the criteria for participation away from the original focus on students of color, low income, and first generation college students.
Of almost 300 teachers hired in 2011-12, less than 10 are African American. There are fewer African American teachers in MMSD today than there were five years ago.
Over 50 African Americans applied for custodian positions since January 1, 2011. 1 was hired; close to 30 custodians were hired in that time.
4K - which is presented as a means to address the achievement gap - is predominantly attended by students who are not African American or low-income.
In June, the board approved a Parent Engagement Coordinator to help the district improve its relations with African American families. That position remains unfilled. The district has engagement coordinators working with Hmong and Latino families.
The single most serious issue this year, however, came in May when MMSD administration was informed that we are a District Identified for Improvement (DIFI) due to test scores for African American students along with students from low income families and those with learning disabilities. This puts Madison on an elite list with Madison (Milwaukee?) and Racine. The superintendent mentioned DIFI status in passing to the board, and the WI State Journal reported on the possible sanctions without using the term DIFI.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with NCLB, DIFI status is a serious matter because of the ladder of increasing sanctions that come with poor performance. In an ideal world, the district would have articulated the improvement plan required by DPI over the summer for implementation on the first day of school. Such a plan would include clear action steps, goals, and timelines to improve African American achievement. Such a plan does not exist as of mid-December 2011, and in the most recent discussion it was asserted that the improvement plan is "just paper that doesn't mean much." I would argue that, to the African American community, such a plan would mean a great deal if it was sincerely formulated and implemented.
At the same time, we have been able to come up with task forces and reports - with goals and timelines - that are devoted to Talented and Gifted Programing, Direct Language Instruction, Fine Arts Programing, and Mathematics Education to name a few.
Under the circumstances, it is hard to see why the African American community would believe that the outcomes will improve if they are 'just patient' and 'work within the existing public school structures to make things better.' Perhaps more accurately, I cannot look people in the face and ask them to hope that we will do a better job if they just give up on the vision of a school structure that does what the MMSD has failed to do for the African American community since the advocacy began some 40 years ago.
Join us for an evening with one of the country's most notable figures in public education. Labor lawyer, former President of the United Teachers Federation and current President of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten discusses the challenging terrain of our public education system.
Burke, who made headlines recently for pledging $2.5 million to Madison Preparatory Academy, a controversial charter school proposal, plans to run for the seat being vacated by Lucy Mathiak.
Burke also served as president of the Boys & Girls Club of Dane County for nine years and along with the Burke Foundation has donated about $2.6 million to the AVID/TOPS program, which has shown promising results in improving achievement among low-income, minority students.
Burke emphasized closing the district's racial achievement gap as a motivation for her decision to run.
Several others have expressed interest in running for the seat, including Joan Eggert, a Madison schools parent and reading specialist in the McFarland School District, who issued an official announcement last week.
Others who said they are considering a run include parents Jill Jokela and Mark Stokosa. Tom Farley, who ran unsuccessfully in 2010 against James Howard, said Monday he is no longer interested in running and Burke's entry in the race makes him confident in that decision.
Mr. Ed Hughes
Board of Education
Madison Metropolitan School District 545 West Dayton Street
Madison, WI 53713
Dear Mr. Hughes:
This letter is intended to respond to your December 4, 2011 blog post regarding the Madison Preparatory Academy initiative. Specifically, this letter is intended to address what you referred as "a fairly half-hearted argument [advanced by the Urban League] that the state statute authorizing school districts to enter into contracts for non-instrumentality charter schools trumps or pre-empts any language in collective bargaining agreements that restricts school districts along these lines." Continuing on, you wrote the following:
I say the argument is half-hearted because no authority is cited in support and itjust isn't much ofan argument. School districts aren't required to authorize non-instrumentality charter schools, and so there is no conflict with state statutesfor a school district to, in effect, agree that it would not do so. Without that kind of a direct conflict, there is no basis for arguing that the CBA language is somehow pre-empted.
We respectfully disagree with your assessment. The intent of this letter is to provide you with the authority for this position and to more fully explain the nature of our concern regarding a contract provision that appears to be illegal in this situation and in direct conflict with public policy.
Background
As you are aware, the collective bargaining agreement (the "CBA") between MMSD and MTI Iprovides "that instructional duties where the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction requires that such be performed by a certificated teacher, shall be performed only by 'teachers."' See Article I, Section B.3.a. In addition, "the term 'teacher' refers to anyone in the collective bargaining unit." See Article I, Section B.2. You have previously suggested that "all teachers in MMSD schools-- including non-instrumentality charter schools- must be members of the MTI bargaining unit." As we indicated in our December 3, 2011 correspondence to you, under a non-instrumentality charter, the school board may not be the employer of the charter school's staff. See§ 118.40(7)(a).
Under Wisconsin's charter school law, the MMSD School Board (the "Board") has the exclusive authority to determine whether a school is an instrumentality or not an instrumentality of the school district. See§ 118.40(7)(a). That decisio n is an important decision reserved to the Board alone. The effect of that decision drives whether teachers and staff must be, or cannot be, employees of the Board. The language of the CBA deprives the Board ofthe decision reserved to it under the statute and that language cannot be harmonized to give effect to both the statute and the CBA. Alternatively, the CBA language creates a situation whereby the Board may exercise its statutory authority to approve a non- instrumentality charter, but it must staff the school with school district employees, a result clearly prohibited under the statute. For reasons that will be explained below, in our view, the law trumps the CBA in either of these situations.
Analysis
Under Wisconsin law, "[a]labor contract may not violate the law." Glendale Professional Policeman's Ass'n v. City ofGlendale, 83 Wis. 2d 90, 102 (Wis. 1978). City ofGlendale addressed the tension that can arise between bargained for provisions in a collective bargaining agreement and statutory language. In City of Glendale, the City argued that a provision dealing with job promotions was unenforceable because it could not be harmonized with statutory language. Specifically, the agreement in question set forth parameters for promoting employees and stated in part that openings "shall be filled by the applicant with the greatest department seniority..." City of Glendale, 83 Wis. 2d at 94. Wisconsin law provided the following:
The chiefs shall appoint subordinates subject to approval by the board. Such appointments shall be made by promotion when this can be done with advantage, otherwise from an eligible list provided by examination and approval by the board and kept on file with the clerk.
Wis. Stat.§ 62.13(4)(a).
The City contended that "the contract term governing promotions is void and unenforceable because it is contrary to sec. 62.13(4)(a), Stats." City ofGlendale, 83 Wis. 2d at 98. Ultimately, the court ruled against the City based on the following rationale:
Although sec. 62.13(4)(a), Stats., requires all subordinates to be appointed by the chief with the approval of the board, it does not, at least expressly, prohibit the chief or the board from exercising the power of promotion of a qualified person according to a set of rules for selecting one among several qualified applicants.
The factual scenario in City ofGlendale differs significantly from the present situation. In City of Glendale, the terms of the agreement did not remove the ability of the chief, with the approval of the board, to make promotions. They could still carry out their statutory duties. The agreement language simply set forth parameters that had to be followed when making promotions. Accordingly, the discretion of the chief was limited, but not eliminated. In the present scenario, the discretion of the Board to decide whether a charter school should be an instrumentality or a non-instrumentality has been effectively eliminated by the CBA language.
There is nothing in the CBA that explicitly prohibits the Board from voting for a non-instrumentality charter school. This discretion clearly lies with the Board. Pursuant to state law, instrumentality charter schools are staffed by District teachers. However, non-instrumentality charter schools cannot be staffed by District teachers. See Wis. Stat.§ 118.40. Based on your recent comments, you have taken the position that the Board cannot vote for a non-instrumentality charter school because this would conflict with the work preservation clause of the CBA. Specifically, you wrote that "given the CBA complications, I don't see how the school board can authorize a non-instrumentality Madison Prep to open its doors next fall, and I say that as one who has come to be sympathetic to the proposal." While we appreciate your sympathy, what we would like is your support. Additionally, this position creates at least two direct conflicts with the law.
First, under Wisconsin law, "the school board of the school district in which a charter school is located shall determine whether or not the charter school is an instrumentality of the school district." Wis. Stat. § 118.40(7)(a) (emphasis added.) The Board is required to make this determination. If the Board is precluded from making this decision on December 19"' based on an agreement previously reached with MTI, the Board will be unable to comply with the law. Effectively, the instrumentality/non- instrumentality decision will have been made by the Board and MTI pursuant to the terms and conditions of the CBA. However, MTI has no authority to make this determination, which creates a direct conflict with the law. Furthermore, the Board will be unable to comply with its statutory obligation due to the CBA. Based on your stated concerns regarding the alleged inability to vote for a non-instrumentality charter school, it appears highly unlikely that the Board ever intentionally ceded this level ofauthority to MTI.
Second, if the Board chose to exercise its statutorily granted authority on December 19th and voted for a non-instrumentality charter school, this would not be a violation of the CBA. Nothing in the CBA explicitly prohibits the Board from voting for a non-instrumentality charter school. At that point, to the extent that MTI chose to challenge that decision, and remember that MTI would have to choose to grieve or litigate this issue, MTI would have to try to attack the law, not the decision made by the Board. Pursuant to the law, "[i] f the school board determines that the charter school is not an instrumentality of the school district, the school board may not employ any personnel for the charter school." Wis. Stat.§ 118.40(7)(a) (emphasis added). While it has been suggested that the Board could choose to avoid the legal impasse by voting down the non-instrumentality proposal, doing so would not cure this conflict. This is particularly true if some Board members were to vote against a non-instrumentality option solely based on the CBA. In such a case, the particular Board Member's obligation to make this decision is essentially blocked. Making a decision consistent with an illegal contract provision for the purposes of minimizing the conflict does not make the provision any less illegal. "A labor contract term whereby parties agree to violate the law is void." WERC v. Teamsters Local No. 563, 75 Wis. 2d 602, 612 (Wis. 1977) (citation omitted).
Conclusion
In Wisconsin, "a labor contract term that violates public policy or a statute is void as a matter of law." Board of Education v. WERC, 52 Wis. 2d 625, 635 (Wis. 1971). Wisconsin law demonstrates that there is a public policy that promotes the creation of charter schools. Within that public policy, there is an additional public policy that promotes case-by-case decision making by a school board regarding whether a charter school will be an instrumentality or a non-instrumentality. The work preservation clause in the CBA cannot be harmonized with these underlying public policies and should not stop the creation of Madison Preparatory Academy.
The Madison Prep initiative has put between a rock and a hard place. Instrumentality status lost support because of the costs associated with employing members of MTI. Yet, we are being told that non-instrumentality status will be in conflict with the CBA and therefore cannot be approved. As discussed above, the work preservation clause is irreconcilable with Wisconsin law, and would likely be found void by acourt of law.
Accordingly, I call on you, and the rest of the Board to vote for non- instrumentality status on December 19th. In the words of Langston Hughes, "a dream deferred is a dream denied." Too many children in this district have been denied for far too long. On behalf of Madison children, families and the Boards of the Urban League and Madison Prep, I respectfully request your support.
Respectfully,
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
cc: Dan Nerad, Superintendent
Dylan Pauly, Legal Counsel
MMSD Board ofEducation Members
ULGMand Madison Prep Board Members and Staff
Godfrey & Kahn, S.C.
As schools across California bemoan increasing class sizes, the Alliance Technology and Math Science High School has boosted class size -- on purpose -- to an astonishing 48. The students work at computers most of the school day.
Next door in an identical building containing a different school, digital imaging -- in the form of animation, short films and graphics -- is used for class projects in English, math and science.
At a third school on the same Glassell Park campus, long known as Taylor Yards, high-schoolers get hands-on experience with a working solar panel.
These schools and two others coexist at the Sotomayor Learning Academies, which opened this fall under a Los Angeles school district policy called Public School Choice. The 2009 initiative, the first of its kind in the nation, has allowed groups from inside and outside the Los Angeles Unified School District to compete for the right to run dozens of new or low-performing schools.
As a fledgling voice of reform in higher education, Salman Khan is an oddity. He cannot name any higher education accrediting agencies off the top of his head. He advocates for competency-based credentialing, but has never heard of Western Governors University. He is capable of talking on the phone for a full hour without using the word "disruptive" once. Until recently, he was an analyst for a hedge fund.
Here is what Khan does know: algebra, statistics, trigonometry, calculus, computer science, biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, economics, and finance -- well enough, at least, to demonstrate the concepts via brief video tutorials on Khan Academy, his free learning website. What began in 2006 as an attempt to tutor his young cousin from afar has evolved into a 2,700-video library with millions of monthly visitors.
Many have lauded Khan's natural skill as a teacher. Khan's charmingly unpolished home recordings form the public face of the organization and provide a peg for media narratives about online learning and the YouTube-ification of the textbook in an era where the rising prices and demand for higher education has collided with the Internet's culture of free.
The public is in a foul mood over increasing college costs and student debt burdens. Talk of a "higher education bubble" is common on the contrarian right, while the Occupy Wall Street crowd is calling for a strike in which in which ex-students refuse to pay off their loans.
This week, President Barack Obama held a summit with a dozen higher-education leaders "to discuss rising college costs and strategies to reduce these costs while improving quality." The administration plans to introduce some policy proposals in the run-up to the presidential campaign.
Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions.
What does the Hillsborough County, Fla., school district have that Milwaukee Public Schools doesn't? What about Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina?
Much better overall scores in reading and math, for one thing. They were at the top of the list of 21 urban school districts in results released last week as part of the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP. Milwaukee was near the bottom.
But here's something else Hillsborough County - which is the Tampa school district - has: Among its 193,000 students, 57% are from low-income homes. For Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the percentage of low-income students among its 136,000 students is 52%.
For MPS, with 80,000-plus students, the low-income rate is 83%.
Each of the four urban districts that scored the best in fourth-grade reading had a low-income rate of 61% or less. Among the four with the worst results, MPS was the lowest with its 83% rate. Detroit, with the worst scores, was listed in the NAEP report at 87%, Cleveland at 100%, and Fresno, Calif., at 93%.
The budget signed by Gov. Scott Walker makes some of the biggest cuts in the nation to education even as it makes one of the largest spending increases in the country in health care for the poor, two new reports show.
At the same time, Wisconsin has avoided large tax increases and ranks more toward the middle of the pack when looking at cuts to schools over the past four years and what the overall education spending in the state is.
Together, the new reports highlight a trend in Wisconsin - the priorities of holding down taxes and paying for rapidly growing Medicaid health care programs are squeezing school funding.
"You're going to see everything else in the budget under stress as long as Medicaid is growing rapidly, at least more rapidly than tax revenues," said Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
Walker and Republican lawmakers closed a $3 billion budget gap over two years by relying on cuts to schools and local governments rather than tax increases. Democrats decried the cuts as harmful to students and local services, but the governor said he had protected those services by allowing local governments to find savings from union employees' benefits.
A survey this month by the nonpartisan National Governors Association and the National Association of State Budget Officers showed that the budget as passed by Walker and GOP lawmakers made the fifth-largest cuts to state funding for education in the nation at $409 million, with Wisconsin topped only by the much larger states of New York, California, Pennsylvania and Florida.
Gov. Bobby Jindal continued his push for overhauling the state's public education system, asking a handful of lawmakers and some members of the state's chief school board for their input Friday. Jindal, who has targeted "education reform" as his chief agenda item for his second term, met with several veteran and rookie lawmakers and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education members behind closed doors at the Governor's Mansion for 90 minutes to get their thoughts on potential programs and legislation.
"We are open to listening to people's ideas," Jindal told reporters after the meeting. "But we will not tolerate those who defend the status quo and (want to) keep doing what we have been doing and expect different results.
And no matter which way the Dec. 19 vote goes, there's no way to know now whether the school will be entirely effective.
"This is the most difficult decision I will ever make on the School Board," said Marj Passman, who plans to vote against the proposal. "It has the potential for polarizing our community, and that's the last thing I want to happen."
The vote comes more than a year after the charter was proposed and in the wake of a School District report outlining its opposition to Madison Prep. The school would violate the district's contract with its teachers and preclude sufficient oversight of the $17.5 million in district funds the school would receive over five years, the report said.
District opposition likely will lead the board to reject the proposal, said School Board president James Howard.
"I don't see how it can pass," said Howard. He and Lucy Mathiak are the only two board members who said they will vote to approve the school.
In interviews last week, Passman, Maya Cole and Ed Hughes said they expect to vote against the proposal. Arlene Silveira and Beth Moss declined to disclose how they plan to vote.
Urban League of Greater Madison president Kaleem Caire, the lead proponent of the charter, acknowledged he doesn't have the votes. But he's engaged in a full-court press to generate public support for the proposal.
"We have a moral obligation to do whatever it takes to support our children and special interest of adults should not come before that," Caire said last week.
Two School Board seats will be on the Spring, 2012 ballot. They are currently occupied by Lucy Mathiak, who is not running again and Arlene Silveira. I suspect the outcome of this vote will drive new candidates, and perhaps, even recalls.
In research organizations that have been "captured" by vested interests, the scholars who receive the most attention, praise, and reward are not those who conduct the most accurate or highest quality research, but those who produce results that best advance the interests of the group. Those who produce results that do not advance the interests of the group may be shunned and ostracized, even if their work is well-done and accurate.
The prevailing view among the vested interests in education does not oppose all standardized testing; it opposes testing with consequences based on the results that is also "externally administered"--i.e., testing that can be used to make judgments of educators but is out of educators' direct control. The external entity may be a higher level of government, such as the state in the case of state graduation exams, or a non-governmental entity, such as the College Board or ACT in the case of college entrance exams.
One can easily spot the moment vested interests "captured" the National Research Council's Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA). BOTA was headed in the 1980s by a scholar with little background or expertise in testing (Wise, 1998). Perhaps not knowing who to trust at first, she put her full faith, and that of the NRC, behind the anti-high-stakes testing point of view that had come to dominate graduate schools of education. Proof of that conversion came when the NRC accepted a challenge from the U.S. Department of Labor to evaluate the predictive validity of the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) for use in unemployment centers throughout the country.
Diane Ravitch, an American historian of education, wrote a col- umn in The New York Times in 1985 about the ignorance of his- tory among 17-year-olds in the United States, based on a study of 7,000 students. As a history teacher myself at the time, I was interested to see that what concerned me was a national problem, and I began to think about these issues. It occurred to me that if I had one or two very good students writing his- tory papers for me and perhaps my colleagues had one or two, then in 20,000 United States high schools (and more overseas) there must be a large number of high school students doing exemplary history research papers. So in1987, I established The Concord Review to provide a journal for such good work in his- tory. I sent a four-page brochure calling for papers to every high school in the United States, 3,500 high schools in Canada, and 1,500 schools overseas. The papers started coming in, and in the fall of 1988, I was able to publish the first issue of The Concord Review. Since then, we have published 89 issues.
Every year, the education magazine Phi Delta Kappan hires the Gallup Organization to survey American opinion on the public schools. Though Gallup conducts the poll, education grandees selected by the editors of the Kappan write the questions. In 2007 the poll asked, "Will the current emphasis on standardized tests encourage teachers to 'teach to the tests,' that is, concentrate on teaching their students to pass the tests rather than teaching the subject, or don't you think it will have this effect?"
The key to the question, of course, is the "rather than"--the assumption by many critics that test preparation and good teaching are mutually exclusive. In their hands, "teach to the test" has become an epithet. The very existence of content standards linked to standardized tests, in this view, narrows the curriculum and restricts the creativity of teachers--which of course it does, in the sense that teachers in standards-based systems cannot organize their instructional time in any fashion they prefer.
A more subtle critique is that teaching to the test can be good or bad. If curricula are carefully developed by educators and the test is written with curricula in mind, then teaching to the test means teaching students the knowledge and skills we agree they ought to learn--exactly what our teachers are legally and ethically obligated to do.
Seeing that the district is quietly working towards presenting a plan to build yet another elementary school (to the tune of $18-22M), we felt it was long overdue to take a look at our debt picture. That is what people do before planning big purchase, right????
Pick up any newspaper or magazine and it won't be long before you see what folks all over the country are doing during this 3 year (and counting) downturn in the economy. They're paying down their debt and not creating new debt. Sounds like a solid plan...right? Nope, at least not in Sun Prairie. The FTT Committee will be reviewing APL population estimates this coming Monday, and that will be the first shot fired in a battle to build an 8th elementary school. APL estimates are ALWAYS a prelude to "time to build".
A technology shift is underway. The PC's promise to transform how learning happens in the classroom is being realized by Apple's iPad. Students and teachers in grade school through higher education are using the iPad to augment their lessons or to replace textbooks.
The iPad is especially helpful for students with special needs. Its simplified touch interface and accessibility features help these children learn more independently; aftermarket accessories assist in making the iPad more classroom-friendly.
In March, I wrote about how my mother learned how to use her iPad for basic stuff-like checking e-mail and browsing the Web-without ever having used a PC in her life. Students at all grade levels are finding it just as easy to use.
Jennifer Kohn's third grade class at Millstone Elementary School in Millstone, NJ, mastered the iPad with minimal training. For the most part, the students didn't need to be taught how to use their apps, Kohn says.
It is simply time to be honest. If you are sincerely concerned about the educational problems in Milwaukee and want to see real solutions implemented, then it is time to take a look at the truth. The desire to be politically correct for some and the reluctance to accept reality for others is what has delayed real progress in Milwaukee.
So, here it is point blank:
Wisconsin - not just Milwaukee - has a problem educating African-American youths.
According to the recent test scores reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the achievement gap continues to widen. In other words, white students continue to outperform minority students, especially African-Americans. In fact, Wisconsin has the largest white-black achievement gap in the nation and continues to be the only state with a gap well above the national average.
Basically, white students have an 86% high school graduation rate, while African-American students graduate at a rate of 49%. So, quality education is not difficult to find in Wisconsin, but for some reason African-American youths are not getting it.
Flor Perez, a 1995 Santa Cruz High graduate, sits inside the library of her alma mater with her 15-year-old son Alex as the two plot his path to college.
As part of a preparedness course for ninth-graders and their families, the Perezes match high school course offerings with entry requirements for four-year universities. They want to make sure Alex knows the right classes to take now to get into college after earning his diploma.
Flor wished there had been a similar program when she was growing up. Now in her 30s and expecting her third child, she's majoring in health science and nursing at San Jose State University while raising Alex and his younger brother.
"We had to see a counselor and make our own appointment," she said of her time in high school. "This workshop actually includes the parents. It allows us to make sure our kids are on track."
Madison Public Schools: A Dream Deferred, Opportunity Denied? Will the Madison Board of Education Hear the 40-year long cries of its Parents and Community, and Put Children and Learning before Labor and Adults?
Kaleem Caire, via email:
December 10, 2011
Dear Friends & Colleagues.
For the last 16 months, we have been on an arduous journey to develop a public school that would effectively address the educational needs of children who have under-performed or failed to succeed in Madison's public schools for at least the last 40 years. If you have followed the news stories, it's not hard to see how many mountains have been erected in our way during the process.
Some days, it has felt like we're desperately looking at our children standing dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, some already fallen over while others dangling by their thumbs waiting to be rescued; but before we can get close enough to save them, we have to walk across one million razor blades and through thousands of rose bushes with our bare feet. As we make our way to them and get closer, the razor blades get sharper and the rose bushes grow more dense.
Fortunately, our Board members and team at the Urban League and Madison Preparatory Academy, and the scores of supporters who've been plowing through the fields with us for the last year believe that our children's education, their emotional, social and personal development, and their futures are far more important than any pain we might endure.
Our proposal for Madison Prep has certainly touched a nerve in Madison. But why? When we launched our efforts on the steps of West High School on August 29, 2010, we thought Madison and its school officials would heartily embrace Madison Prep.We thought they would see the school as:
(1) a promising solution to the racial achievement gap that has persisted in our city for at least 40 years;
(2) a learning laboratory for teachers and administrators who admittedly need new strategies for addressing the growing rate of underachievement, poverty and parental disengagement in our schools, and
(3) a clear sign to communities of color and the broader Greater Madison community that it was prepared to do whatever it takes to help move children forward - children for whom failure has become too commonplace and tolerated in our capital city.
Initially, the majority of Board of Education members told us they liked the idea and at the time, had no problems with us establishing Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality - and therefore, non-union, public school. At the same time, all of them asked us for help and advice on how to eliminate the achievement gap, more effectively engage parents and stimulate parent involvement, and better serve children and families of color.
Then, over the next several months as the political climate and collective bargaining in the state changed and opponents to charter schools and Madison Prep ramped up their misinformation and personal attack campaign, the focus on Madison Prep got mired in these issues.
The concern of whether or not a single-gender school would be legal under state and federal law was raised. We answered that both with a legal briefing and by modifying our proposal to establish a common girls school now rather than two years from now.
The concern of budget was raised and how much the school would cost the school district. We answered that through a $2.5 million private gift to lower the per pupil request to the district and by modifying our budget proposal to ensure Madison Prep would be as close to cost-neutral as possible. The District Administration first said they would support the school if it didn't cost the District more than $5 million above what it initially said it could spend; Madison Prep will only cost them $2.7 million.
Board of Education members also asked in March 2011 if we would consider establishing Madison Prep as an instrumentality of MMSD, where all of the staff would be employed by the district and be members of the teacher's union. We decided to work towards doing this, so long as Madison Prep could retain autonomy of governance, management and budget. Significant progress was made until the last day of negotiations when MMSD's administration informed us that they would present a counter-budget to ours in their analysis of our proposal that factored in personnel costs for an existing school versus establishing a modest budget more common to new charter schools.
We expressed our disagreement with the administration and requested that they stick with our budget for teacher salaries, which was set using MMSD's teacher salary scale for a teacher with 7 years experience and a masters degree and bench-marked against several successful charter schools. Nevertheless, MMSD argued that they were going to use the average years of experience of teachers in the district, which is 14 years with a master's degree. This drove up the costs significantly, taking teacher salaries from $47,000 to $80,000 per year and benefits from $13,500 to $25,000 per year per teacher. The administration's budget plan therefore made starting Madison Prep as an instrumentality impossible.
To resolve the issue, the Urban League and Board of Madison Prep met in November to consider the options. In doing so, we consulted with every member of MMSD's Board of Education. We also talked with parents, stakeholders and other community members as well. It was then decided that we would pursue Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality of the school district because we simply believe that our children cannot and should not have to wait.
Now, Board of Education members are saying that Madison Prep should be implemented in "a more familiar, Madison Way", as a "private school", and that we should not have autonomy even though state laws and MMSD's own charter school policy expressly allow for non-instrumentality schools to exist. There are presently more than 20 such schools in Wisconsin.
What Next?
As the mountains keep growing, the goal posts keep moving, and the razor blades and rose bushes are replenished with each step we take, we are forced to ask the question: Why has this effort, which has been more inclusive, transparent and well-planned, been made so complicated? Why have the barriers been erected when our proposal is specifically focused on what Madison needs, a school designed to eliminate the achievement gap, increase parent engagement and prepare young people for college who might not otherwise get there? Why does liberal Madison, which prides itself on racial tolerance and opposition to bigotry, have such a difficult time empowering and including people of color, particularly African Americans?
As the member of a Black family that has been in Madison since 1908, I wonder aloud why there are fewer black-owned businesses in Madison today than there were 25 years ago? There are only two known black-owned businesses with 10 or more employees in Dane County. Two!
Why can I walk into 90 percent of businesses in Madison in 2011 and struggle to find Black professionals, managers and executives or look at the boards of local companies and not see anyone who looks like me?
How should we respond when Board of Education members tell us they can't vote for Madison Prep while knowing that they have no other solutions in place to address the issues our children face? How can they say they have the answers and develop plans for our children without consulting and including us in the process? How can they have 51 black applicants for teaching positions and hire only one, and then claim that they can't find any black people to apply for jobs? How can they say, "We need more conversations" about the education of our children when we've been talking for four decades?
I have to ask the question, as uncomfortable as it may be for some to hear, "Would we have to work this hard and endure so much resistance if just 48% of white children in Madison's public schools were graduating, only 1% of white high school seniors were academically ready for college, and nearly 50% of white males between the ages of 25-29 were incarcerated, on probation or under some form of court supervision?
Is this 2011 or 1960? Should the black community, which has been in Madison for more than 100 years, not expect more?
How will the Board of Education's vote on December 19th help our children move forward? How will their decision impact systemic reform and seed strategies that show promise in improving on the following?
Half of Black and Latino children are not completing high school. Just 59% of Black and 61% of Latino students graduated on-time in 2008-09. One year later, in 2009-10, the graduation rate declined to 48% of Black and 56% of Latino students compared to 89% of white students. We are going backwards, not forwards. (Source: MMSD 2010, 2011)
Black and Latino children are not ready for college. According to makers of the ACT college entrance exam, just 20% of Madison's 378 Black seniors and 37% of 191 Latino seniors in MMSD in 2009-10 completed the ACT. Only 7% of Black and 18% of Latino seniors completing test showed they had the knowledge and skills necessary to be "ready for college". Among all MMSD seniors (those completing and not completing the test), just 1% of Black and 7% of Latino seniors were college ready
Too few Black and Latino graduates are planning to go to college. Of the 159 Latino and 288 Black students that actually graduated and received their diplomas in 2009-10, just 28% of Black and 21% of Latino students planned to attend a four-year college compared to 53% of White students. While another 25% of Black and 33% of graduates planned to attend a two-year college or vocation program (compared to 17% of White students), almost half of all of all Black and Latino graduates had no plans for continuing their education beyond high school compared to 27% of White students. (Source: DPI 2011)
Half of Black males in their formative adult years are a part of the criminal justice system. Dane County has the highest incarceration rate among young Black men in the United States: 47% between the ages of 25-29 are incarcerated, on probation or under some form of court supervision. The incarceration phenomena starts early. In 2009-10, Black youth comprised 62% of all young people held in Wisconsin's correctional system. Of the 437 total inmates held, 89% were between the ages of 15-17. In Dane County, in which Madison is situated, 49% of 549 young people held in detention by the County in 2010 were Black males, 26% were white males, 12% were black females, 6% were white females and 6% were Latino males and the average age of young people detained was 15. Additionally, Black youth comprised 54% of all 888 young people referred to the Juvenile Court System. White students comprised 31% of all referrals and Latino comprised 6%.
More importantly, will the Board of Education demonstrate the type of courage it took our elders and ancestors to challenge and change laws and contracts that enabled Jim Crow, prohibited civil rights, fair employment and Women's right to vote, and made it hard for some groups to escape the permanence of America's underclass? We know this is not an easy vote, and we appreciate their struggle, but there is a difference between what is right and what is politically convenient.
Will the Board have the courage to look in the faces of Black and Latino families in the audience, who have been waiting for solutions for so long, and tell them with their vote that they must wait that much longer?
We hope our Board of Education members recognize and utilize the tremendous power they have to give our children a hand-up. We hope they hear the collective force and harmony of our pleas, engage with our pain and optimism, and do whatever it takes to ensure that the proposal we have put before them, which comes with exceptional input and widespread support, is approved on December 19, 2011.
Madison Prep is a solution we can learn from and will benefit the hundreds of young men and women who will eventually attend.
If not Madison Prep, then what? If not now, then when?
JOIN US
SCHOOL BOARD VOTE ON MADISON PREP
Monday, December 19, 2011 at 5:00pm
Madison Metropolitan School District
Doyle Administration Building Auditorium
545 West Dayton Street
Madison, WI 53703
Contact: Laura DeRoche Perez, Lderoche@ulgm.org
Phone: 608-729-1230
CLICK HERE TO RSVP: TELL US YOU'LL BE THERE
Write the School Board and Tell Them to "Say 'Yes', to Madison Prep!"
Madison Prep 2012!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Fax: 608-729-1205
www.ulgm.org
OUR RESPONSE TO MMSD'S NEW CONCERNS
Autonomy: MMSD now says they are concerned that Madison Prep will not be accountable to the public for the education it provides students and the resources it receives. Yet, they don't specify what they mean by "accountability." We would like to know how accountability works in MMSD and how this is producing high achievement among the children it serves. Further, we would like to know why Madison Prep is being treated differently than the 30 early childhood centers that are participating in the district's 4 year old kindergarten program. They all operate similar to non-instrumentality schools, have their own governing boards, operate via a renewable contract, can hire their own teachers "at their discretion" and make their own policy decisions, and have little to no oversight by the MMSD Board of Education. All 30 do not employ union teachers. Accountability in the case of 4K sites is governed by "the contract." MMSD Board members should be aware that, as with their approval of Badger Rock Middle School, the contract is supposed to be developed "after" the concept is approved on December 19. In essence, this conversation is occurring to soon, if we keep with current district practices.
Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA): MMSD and Madison Teachers, Incorporated have rejected our attorney's reading of ACT 65, which could provide a path to approval of Madison Prep without violating the CBA. Also, MTI and MMSD could approve Madison Prep per state law and decide not to pursue litigation, if they so desired. There are still avenues to pursue here and we hope MMSD's Board of Education will consider all of them before making their final decision.
Madison Metropolitan School District was provided an award from the Microsoft Cy Pres settlement in the Fall of 2009. Since that time the district has utilized many of these funds to prorate projects across the district in order to free up budgeted funds and to provide for more flexibility. The plan and process for these funds liquidates the General Purpose portion of the Microsoft Cy Pres funds, provides an equitable allocation per pupil to each school, and is aimed at increasing the amount of technology within our schools.
The total allocation remaining from Cy Pres revenues totals $2,755,463.11, which was the target for the technology acquisition plan. Two things happened prior to allocating funds to schools: first was to hold back $442,000 for the future purchase of iPads for our schools (at $479 per iPad this equates to a 923 iPads), and second was to hold back $200,000 necessary for increased server capacity to deal with the increase in different types of technology.
The final step was to allocate the remaining funding ($2,113,463.11) out to the schools on a per pupil basis. This was calculated at $85.09 per pupil across all schools within the district.
I found the device distribution to be quite interesting. The iPad revolution is well underway. Technology's role in schools continues to be a worthwhile discussion topic.
Madison Teachers, Inc. on The Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School
John Matthews, Executive Director of Madison Teachers, Inc., via email:
The Urban League proposes that Madison Prep be operated as a non-instrumentality of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Urban League's proposal is unacceptable to Madison Teachers, because it would effectively eliminate supervision and accountability of the school to the Madison School Board regarding the expenditure of millions of dollars in taxpayer money, and because it would also violate long-standing terms and conditions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the Madison Metropolitan School District and MTI.
The Urban League proposes to use District funds to hire non-District teaching staff at lower salaries and benefits than called for in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. It was recently stated in a meeting between representatives of Madison Prep, the School District and MTI that the Urban League plans to hire young African-American males and asks that MTI and the District enable them to pay the teachers they hire less than their counterparts, who are employed by the District. MTI cannot agree to enable that. We believe that such is discriminatory, based both on race and gender. The MTI/MMSD Contract calls for teachers to be compensated based upon their educational achievement and their years of service. MTI and MMSD agreed in the early 1970's that the District would not enable such undermining of employment standards. The costing of the Contract salary placement was explained by both Superintendent Nerad and John Matthews. Those explanations were ignored by the Urban League in their budgeting, causing a shortfall in the proposed operational budget, according to Superintendent Nerad.
It is also distasteful to MTI that the Urban League proposes to NOT ADDITIONALLY pay their proposed new hires for working a longer day and a longer school year. Most employees in the United States receive overtime pay when working longer hours. The Urban League proposes NO additional compensation for employees working longer hours, or for the 10 additional school days in their plan.
Finally, the Urban League is incorrect in asserting that MTI and the District could modify the MMSD/MTI Contract without triggering Act 10, Governor Walker's draconian attack on teachers and other public employees. The Contract would be destroyed if MTI and the District agreed to amend it. Such is caused by Walker's Law, Act 10. MTI is not willing to inflict the devastating effects of Act 10 on its members. The Urban League states that Walker's Act 65 would enable the Contract to be amended without the horrible impact cause by Act 10. That claim is unfounded and in error.
The Madison Prep proposal could easily be implemented if it followed the Charter Plan of Wright School, Nuestro Mundo, and Badger Rock School, all of which operate as instrumentalities of the District, under its supervision and the MMSD/MTI Collective Bargaining Agreement.
But the current proposal is "unacceptable" to Madison teachers because it would "effectively eliminate School Board oversight of the expenditure of millions of dollars in taxpayer money" and violate the district's contract with its union, Matthews said.
Matthews initially declined to comment on Madison Prep when I contacted him yesterday, but later responded in an e-mail.
In his response, Matthews criticized Madison Prep's plan to pay its teachers lower salaries and benefits than other district teachers, and not offer overtime for working longer days.
He also said the Urban League is incorrect in asserting that the current union contract can be modified without nullifying it under the state's new collective bargaining law.
Supporters of a controversial, single-sex charter school Thursday blasted the Madison School District for its opposition to the proposal and said the teachers union is an impediment to improving student achievement.
At a news conference, the Urban League of Greater Madison's president, Kaleem Caire, also said the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, which would target low-income, minority students, isn't dead and called on the School Board to put "learning before labor" when it votes Dec. 19 whether to approve the charter.
"Our children aren't there to be subjects of teachers and teachers unions," Caire said. "But the decisions that have been made in the Madison Metropolitan School District for a mighty long time have been determined by adults getting what they need first before kids."
Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews declined comment Thursday.
School employees approved state certification for about 85 percent of the unions seeking the limited collective bargaining rights allowed under Wisconsin's controversial new law governing public employees, officials said Thursday.
Members of 208 local bargaining units for teachers and school support staff voted by telephone over the last two weeks, according to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, which oversaw the elections.
In November, all six state employee unions that sought official status won recertification elections.
Elections for municipal employee unions are scheduled to take place early in 2012.
WHERE: Urban League of Greater Madison, 2222 S. Park St., Suite 200, Madison, WI 53713
WHO: Kaleem Caire, Urban League President & CEO Urban League of Greater Madison Board of Directors Madison Preparatory Academy Board of Directors Community Leaders and Parents
For more information, contact Laura DeRoche Perez, Director of School Development, Urban League of Greater Madison, at lderoche@ulgm.org or 608-729-1235.
Fellow members of the Electronic Educational Entertainment Association. My remarks will be brief, as I realize you all have texts to read, messages to tweet, and you will of course want to take photos of those around you to post on your blog.
I only want to remind you that the book is our enemy. Every minute a student spends reading a book is time taken away from purchasing and using the software and hardware the sale of which we depend on for our livelihoods.
You should keep in mind the story C.S. Lewis told of Wormwood, the sales rep for his uncle Screwtape, a district manager Below, who was panicked when his target client joined a church. What was he to do? Did this mean a lost account? Screwtape reassured him with a story from his own early days. One of his accounts went into a library, and Screwtape was not worried, but then the client picked up a book and began reading. However, then he began to think! And, in an instant, the Enemy Above was at his elbow. But Screwtape did not panic--fortunately it was lunchtime, and he managed to get his prospect up and at the door of the library. There was traffic and busyiness, and the client thought to himself, "This is real life!" And Screwtape was able to close the account.
In the early days, Progressive Educators would sometimes say to students, in effect, "step away from those books and no one gets hurt!" because they wanted students to put down their books, go out, work for social justice, and otherwise take part in "real life" rather than get into those dangerous books and start thinking for themselves, for goodness' sake!
But now we have more effective means of keeping our children in school and at home away from those books. We have Grand Theft Auto and hundreds of other games for them to play at escaping all moral codes. We have smartphones, with which they can while away the hours and the days texting and talking about themselves with their friends.
We even have "educational software" and lots of gear, like video recorders, so that students can maintain their focus on themselves, and stay away from the risks posed by books, which could very possibly lead them to think about something besides themselves. And remember, people who read books and think about something besides themselves do not make good customers. And more than anything, we want and need good customers, young people who buy our hardware and software, and who can be encouraged to stay away from the books in libraries, which are not only free, for goodness's sake, but may even lead them to think. And that will be no help at all to our bottom line. Andrew Carnegie may have been a philanthropist, but by providing free libraries he did nothing to help us sell electronic entertainment products. We must never let down our guard or reduce our advertising. Just remember every young person reading a book is a lost customer! Verbum Sap.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
* Please see TJ Mertz's comment below. A link to the document was forwarded to me via a kind reader from Madison Teachers, Inc. Twitter Feed (a "retweet" of Karen Vieth's "tweet"). Note that I enjoyed visiting with Karen during several Madison School District strategic planning meetings.
A screenshot of the link:
The outcome of the Madison Prep "question" will surely reverberate for some time.
Chicago Public Schools on Tuesday became the latest large urban district to sign a compact agreement with the education-reform powerhouse Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, pledging greater cooperation and collaboration between the city's charter and traditional neighborhood schools.
The agreement allows Chicago to compete for a piece of a $40 million grant from the Gates Foundation, aimed at building relationships between charters and neighborhood schools and allow for the sharing of innovative ideas.
Most Atlantic readers know that, although the U.S. spends more per student on K-12 education than any other nation except Luxembourg, students in a growing number of nations outperform our own. But think about this: Among the consistent top performers are not only developed nations (Japan, Finland, Canada), but developing countries and mega-cities such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
Even if we find a way to educate our future work force to the same standards as this latter group -- and we are a very long way from that now -- wages in the United States will continue to decline unless we outperform those countries enough to justify our higher wages. That is a very tall order.
You would think that, being far behind our competitors, we would be looking hard at how they are managing to outperform us. But many policymakers, business leaders, educators and advocates are not interested. Instead, they are confidently barreling down a path of American exceptionalism, insisting that America is so different from these other nations that we are better off embracing unique, unproven solutions that our foreign competitors find bizarre.
Kaleem Caire has only been back in Madison for less than two years, but he sure has grabbed our attention.
Caire didn't waste any time after coming home from a successful private sector career on the East Coast to be the new president for the Urban League of Greater Madison, starting to shake up the local establishment more or less immediately upon arrival. He has been pushing a bold proposal to attack the long-standing issue of minority underachievement in the Madison public schools. His idea for the Madison Preparatory Academy was vetted well in Nathan Comp's cover story for Isthmus last week.
For well over a year now, Caire has been shuttling between the district administration, Madison Teachers, Inc. (MTI) union leaders, school board members, parents, editorial boards and community meetings fighting for this idea.
In response to union and district administration concerns, he changed the proposal to make the school an "instrumentality" of the district, meaning it would be under school board control and be staffed by MTI member teachers. But that proposal came in at a cost for the district of $13 million over five years. Superintendent Dan Nerad, for whom I have a lot of respect, told the League that he couldn't support anything over $5 million.
IF you want to see the direction that education reform is taking the country, pay a visit to my leafy, majority-black neighborhood in Washington. While we have lived in the same house since our 11-year-old son was born, he's been assigned to three different elementary schools as one after the other has been shuttered. Now it's time for middle school, and there's been no neighborhood option available.
Meanwhile, across Rock Creek Park in a wealthy, majority-white community, there is a sparkling new neighborhood middle school, with rugby, fencing, an international baccalaureate curriculum and all the other amenities that make people pay top dollar to live there.
Such inequities are the perverse result of a "reform" process intended to bring choice and accountability to the school system. Instead, it has destroyed community-based education for working-class families, even as it has funneled resources toward a few better-off, exclusive, institutions.
This article evaluates the economic viability of a student's decision to borrow money in order to attend law school. For individuals, firms, and entire nations, the ratio of debt to income serves as a measure of economic stability. The ease with which a student can carry and retire educational debt after graduation may be the simplest measure of educational return on investment.
Mortgage lenders evaluate prospective borrowers' debt-to-income ratios. The spread between the front-end and back-end ratios in mortgage lending provides a basis for extrapolating the maximum amount of educational debt that a student should incur. Any student whose debt service exceeds the maximum permissible spread between mortgage lenders' front-end and back-end ratios will not be able to buy a house on credit.
These measures of affordability suggest that the maximum educational back-end ratio (EBER) should fall in a range between 8 and 12 percent of monthly gross income. Four percent would be even better. Other metrics of economic viability in servicing educational debt suggest that the ratio of total educational debt to annual income (EDAI) should range from an ideal 0.5 to a marginal 1.5.
Oregon plans to recruit and hire a new "chief education officer" who will have unprecedented power over education, including control of the chancellor of higher education, the next superintendent of Oregon's public schools and the state community college commissioner.
Gov. John Kitzhaber's new overarching education board, with control over preschool through universities, unanimously endorsed the general job description for that education officer Thursday.
Kitzhaber said he hopes to have the right person in the job by April.
The chosen leader will need the vision to help Oregon streamline, improve and connect all the education programs and institutions that serve or should serve learners from birth through college, he said. He or she will also have to be an education expert, plus be able to motivate those who work in the current system to embrace change. The political challenges will be huge.
If policymakers (see Brown, Jerry) still aren't convinced that education data matters, two reports released this week demonstrate that high quality, actionable information about schools and students is vital in efforts to improve education and student outcomes.
Bill summarized the important work of the Data Quality Campaign yesterday. More states than ever are collecting the information educators and policymakers need to make informed decisions about what's working and what isn't in schools. But just because the data can be collected, it doesn't mean that states' work is complete. Data for Action 2011 identifies four challenges - turf, trust, technical issues, and time - that continue to hinder states' efforts to utilize the full potential of their data (shameless plug: you should read my report, Data That Matters, for another set of 4 Ts that all states should follow to make their data user-friendly and actionable for school leaders).
Millions of students attend abysmally weak school systems that leave them unprepared for college, even as more jobs require some higher education. The states have an obligation to help these students retool.
More than 35 percent of students need remediation when they reach college, according to the federal government. A study by the organization that administers the ACT, the college entrance exam, finds that only a quarter of the 1.6 million 2011 high school graduates who took the exam met college-readiness benchmarks in English, reading, math and science.
Some students need one or two remedial courses before they can enroll in credit-bearing college classes. Others need so much remedial work that they will exhaust state and federal student aid without ever getting a degree. This is especially troubling because many of these students have passed state exams that are supposed to certify them as ready for college.
The debate over whether the Madison School Board should give the final OK to the Madison Preparatory Academy is getting a bit nasty.
And that should not be.
While the passion on the part of the advocates for the school, led by the energetic Urban League CEO Kaleem Caire, is perfectly understandable given our schools' dismal record on minority achievement, so is the questioning from those who aren't convinced the prep idea will solve that problem.
Now, on the eve of a vote on that final approval, is not the time to point fingers and make accusations, but to come together and reasonably find ways to overcome the obstacles and reassure those who fret about giving up duly elected officials' oversight of the school and the impact it will have on the entire district's union contracts if not done correctly.
The union problem is not the fault of the union, but stems from Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature's action to dramatically change public employee collective bargaining in Wisconsin. If the union or the School Board makes concessions for Madison Prep, the collective bargaining agreement for the entire district, which is to expire in June 2013, could be negated.
About 12 percent of all charter schools have bargaining agreements. Why do charter schools unionize? What is in these charter school contracts? Can they be considered innovative or models for union reform? And how do they compare to traditional district/union teacher contracts? Center on Reinventing Public Education legal analyst Mitch Price investigated those questions in his study of charter school collective bargaining agreements.
Price examined nine charter schools unionized either by management design or by teacher vote. For comparison, he examined traditional district contracts and analyzed data from non-unionized charter schools as well. He found that the new contracts can be crafted in ways that respect the unique missions and priorities of charter schools, provide teachers with basic protections, and maintain organizational flexibility. However, while these new contracts innovate in many ways, they could go much further given the opportunity to create contracts from scratch.
Prior to the Thanksgiving break, we administered a survey asking for feedback from families about their knowledge and thoughts on the changes we are making to the curriculum delivery model at Wedgwood. Thank you to the 259 families who responded to the survey. We have 449 students currently enrolled at Wedgwood, 185 of whom are siblings. If respondents only completed one survey per family, as requested, our sample is quite accurate.
Overall, families want more information about what cluster grouping is. This was expressed in a variety of ways by families of general education, spectrum and special education students. I will attempt to clarify what it is here and how Wedgwood staff is using this information to move forward.
For those who do not know, cluster grouping is a method of grouping gifted students (gifted being identified as students who score in the 98th - 99th percentile on a cognitive ability test) into clusters of 6 students in one classroom that also include high achievers and above average students. The remaining students would be clustered so that the highest achieving students and lowest achieving students are not in the same classroom. With that as a guide, Wedgwood is developing plans to move from having self-contained spectrum classrooms to integrated classrooms using an interpretation of this model. We are already doing this in 1st grade, albeit more heterogeneously than what the research we based our 1st grade model on suggests.
Are you confused about what Wedgwood is doing with their Spectrum program? Join the club. Everyone is confused about what Wedgwood is doing with their Spectrum program. The president of the confusion club appears to be the school's principal, Chris Cronas.
In another issue, Sam Castaneda Holdren, a spokesman for Stand for Children, said the organization collected about 100,000 voter signatures for a ballot question that would codify into law new educator-evaluation regulations approved in June by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
The new state regulations call for evaluating teachers and administrators partly by the scores of their students on the MCAS statewide tests, feedback from students and parents, by state and local observations in classrooms and other measures.
The ballot question would go beyond the state regulations in some respects, said Jason Williams, executive director of Stand for Children in Massachusetts. For example, the question would mandate that the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education approve evaluation plans developed through bargaining with unions in school districts if those local plans differ from a state model that will eventually be developed. Right now, the department could only review those local plans, not reject them, Williams said
The Urban League's Madison Prep proposal continues to garner attention as we draw closer to the School Board's December 19 up-or-down vote on the proposal.
This weekend the news has been the school district administration's analysis of the Urban League's current proposal for a non-instrumentality charter school (i.e., one where the teachers and other school staff would be employees of the Urban League rather than the school district and the school would be free of most administrative oversight from the district).
The analysis recommends that the School Board reject the Madison Prep proposal, for two principal reasons.
The first is that, as a matter of policy, the administration is opposed to non-instrumentality charter schools because of the lack of day-to-day oversight of their operations. The second reason is that there does not seem to be a way the school district could enter into a contract for a non-instrumentality charter school without running afoul of our collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI).
The Virginia Beach, Va., school district believes its own system is worth about $1.53 for every $1 spent from the 70,000-student district's operating fund.
Not content with making an argument that good schools have an economic value that is unmeasurable, the district asked a university economist to calculate just what it brings both to the city and the Hampton Roads region in southeastern Virginia.
The report generated for the district, the third-largest in the state, is more than an academic exercise for James G. Merrill, the Virginia Beach superintendent. The district is one of the few in the state that receive money from local taxpayers based on a revenue-sharing formula, which is currently under fire. As the city and the school district head into budget season, Mr. Merrill said he wanted to make an argument for school funding based on business principles.
Paula Prosper worried that her son was not ready for the differences between his private Montessori school and the public Fairfax County seventh grade she planned to transfer him to next year.
Prosper, a teacher, asked if he and she could sit for a few hours at Longfellow Middle School "to see what happens in classes and to get a feel for the school in general." The answer was no, with explanations that made little sense.
Prosper said Longfellow's director of student services, Gail Bigio, told her "it had to do with privacy issues for the teachers -- the public employees whose salaries are paid by my tax dollars. Then she brought up immunization and likened it to the students attending the school who wish to have a visiting cousin shadow them." Longfellow Principal Carole Kihm told me Bigio did not mention teacher privacy.
Roughly one-third of students in Harris County's public schools leave without a diploma, according to a new analysis from Children at Risk.
The Houston-based research and advocacy nonprofit calculated for the first time a decade of average graduation rates for Harris County. It also calculated graduation rates for all the public high schools with available data in Harris, Brazoria, Chambers, Fort Bend, Galveston, Liberty, Montgomery and Waller counties for the ninth-grade class of 2004-05. The rate reflects students who graduated within six years.
As the graphic below shows, the percentage of students graduating high school has increased over the decade, but black and Hispanic students and those from low-income families graduate at much lower rates than their Anglo, Asian and more affluent classmates.
There's a debate brewing - mostly via keyboards - about whether schools still need to teach cursive writing to classrooms of digitally wired kids.
I'd be a better defender of beautifully flowing handwriting if my own hadn't deteriorated over the years to a hybrid of cursive, printing, squiggles and shorthand. My wife nudges me out of the way every time we step up to sign a guest book. My lame defense is that I'm left-handed.
Still, I'm glad I learned cursive at Our Lady of Sorrows, my Catholic elementary school where every classroom came with a strip of capital and lowercase letters above the blackboard. Even if a person doesn't write that way very often - thank-you notes and postcards come to mind - it's nice to be able to decipher other people's hen-scratching.
Wisconsin is one of more than 40 states that don't require cursive in their core curriculum standards, though the state Department of Public Instruction doesn't have any data on schools or districts that have actually dropped it in favor of spending more time on other subjects. Cursive may indeed fade away, but who wants to jump first?
What's most important, said DPI spokesman Patrick Gasper, is learning the various types of writing - persuasive, storytelling, speeches and so forth - and not whether it's written, printed or typed.
If we don't change the way ICT is thought about and taught, we're shutting the door on our children's futures
So, in the immortal words of Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's technology correspondent, coding (ie computer programming) is "the new Latin". This was the headline on his blog post about the burgeoning campaign to boost the teaching of computer skills in UK schools.
Dedicated readers will recall that it is also a bee in the bonnet of this particular columnist. The ICT (information and communications technology) curriculum in our secondary schools has been a national disgrace for as long as I can remember. This is because it effectively conflates ICT with "office skills" and generally winds up training them to use Microsoft Office when what they really need is ICT education - that is to say preparation for a world in which Microsoft (and maybe even Google) will be little more than historical curiosities, and PowerPoint presentations will look like Dead Sea scrolls.
Rory Cellan-Jones's blog post was prompted by signs that the campaign to rethink ICT education is gathering momentum. It was first given a boost by a report written by two elders of the computer games world, Ian Livingstone and Alex Hope, on the need to transform the UK into "the world's leading talent hub for the video games and visual effects industries". Their report recommended, among other things, that computer science should become part of the national curriculum.
Citing a critical need to not underestimate the stakes at hand, Commissioner of Education Chris Nicastro presented to the State Board of Education today her analysis of ways the state could assist the Kansas City Public Schools in regaining accreditation.
The State Board met in Branson on Dec. 1-2, where discussion of the Kansas City Public Schools was part of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's recommendation for revamping a statewide system of support. This system would identify risk factors and target limited resources to assist unaccredited school districts and those that are at risk of becoming unaccredited. Currently, nearly one dozen schools would receive focused attention.
Here's the bottom line on public schools in Wisconsin after a big cut in state aid to K-12 education:
• The kids are mostly all right.
• The teachers are smarting from smaller paychecks.
• The full impact of the two-year, $750 million cut won't be known until next school year.
That's what a recent survey of Wisconsin school administrators suggests.
The Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators surveyed more than 80 percent of districts across the state in early fall. The results are being cited -- and exaggerated -- in a variety of ways. The Democrats and unions suggest the sky is falling. Republican Gov. Scott Walker pretends all is well.
And the political spin will only speed and sharpen if Walker faces a recall election next year as expected.
Moving from elementary school to middle school, or from middle school to high school, was simple once. A counselor, principal, or teacher informed the student which school she would attend when summer ended. And the parents got their children to the right school on a specified day at the end of August.
No choices.
No decisions.
Public education long ago parted ways with the one-size-fits-all approach, particularly in urban or suburban school districts large enough to design schools focused on particular areas of student interest. We have moved on to science magnets, liberal arts and fine arts academies, performing arts institutes, and single-gender schools.
The single-gender model for girls has been around for more than 100 years, mostly in parochial and private schools where they have done remarkable work educating young women. They are a novelty in public education. And an all-girls school is the new kid on the block in the Austin school district -- and in other districts in Texas.
Recommendations:
We are in agreement that the achievement gaps for low-income students, students of color, students with disabilities, and English Language Learners must be eliminated. The Administration agrees that bolder steps must be taken to address these gaps. We also know that closing these gaps is not a simple task and change will not come overnight, but, the District's commitment to doing so will not waiver. We also know that to be successful in the long run, we must employ multiple strategies both within our schools and within our community. This is why the District has held interest in many of the educational strategies included in the Madison Prep's proposal like longer school days and a longer school year at an appropriately compensated level for staff, mentoring support, the proposed culture of the school and the International Baccalaureate Program.
While enthusiastic about these educational strategies, the Administration has also been clear throughout this conversation about its concern with a non-instrumentality model.
Autonomy is a notion inherent in all charter school proposals. Freedom and flexibility to do things differently are the very reasons charter schools exist. However, the non-instrumentality charter school model goes beyond freedom and flexibility to a level of separateness that the Administration cannot support.
In essence, Madison Prep's current proposal calls for the exclusion of the elected Board of Education and the District's Administration from the day-to-day operations of the school. It prevents the Board, and therefore the public, from having direct oversight of student learning conditions and teacher working conditions in a publicly-funded charter school. From our perspective, the use of public funds calls for a higher level of oversight than found in the Madison Prep proposal and for that matter in any non-instrumentality proposal.
In addition, based on the District's analysis, there is significant legal risk in entering into a non- instrumentality charter contract under our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers.
In our analysis of Madison Prep's initial instrumentality proposal, the Administration expressed concerns over the cost of the program to the District and ultimately could not recommend funding at the level proposed. Rather, the Administration proposed a funding formula tied to the District's per pupil revenues. We also offered to continue to work with Madison Prep to find ways to lower these costs. Without having those conversations, the current proposal reduces Madison Prep's costs by changing from an instrumentality to a non-instrumentality model. This means that the savings are realized directly through reductions in staff compensation and benefits to levels lower than MMSD employees. The Administration has been willing to have conversations to determine how to make an instrumentality proposal work.
In summary, this administrative analysis finds concerns with Madison Prep's non-instrumentality proposal due to the level of governance autonomy called for in the plan and due to our collective bargaining agreement with our teachers. Based on these issues, we cannot recommend to the Board that Madison Prep be approved as a non-instrumentality charter school.
We know more needs to be done as a district and a community to eliminate our achievement gaps. We must continue to identify strategies both within our schools and our larger community to eliminate achievement gaps. These discussions, with the Urban League and with our entire community, need to continue on behalf of all of our students.
The problem concerns a "work preservation" clause in the Madison Teachers Inc. contract that requires all teaching duties in the district be performed by union teachers.
Exceptions to the clause have been made in the past, such as having private day-care centers offer 4-year-old kindergarten, but those resulted from agreements with the union. Such an agreement would nullify the current union contract under the state's new collective bargaining law, according to the district.
Caire said a recent law signed by Gov. Scott Walker could allow the district to amend its union contract. However, School Board member Ed Hughes, who is a lawyer, disagreed with Caire's interpretation.
Nerad said even if the union issue can be resolved, he still objects to the school seeking autonomy from all district policies except those related to health and safety of students.
.....
Caire said Madison Prep's specific policies could be ironed out as part of the charter contract after the School Board approves the proposal. He plans to hold a press conference Tuesday to respond to the district's review.
"The purpose of a charter school is to free you from red tape -- not to adopt the same red tape that they have," Caire said. "We hope the board will stop looking at all of those details and start looking at why we are doing this in the first place."
The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, a longtime beneficiary of NEA funds, garnered $400,373 from the union during its last fiscal year. The Great Lakes Center for Education, which, like the Economic Policy Institute, always churns out studies that dovetail nicely with NEA positions, got $250,000 from the national union. (Three affiliates -- Michigan Education Association, Education Minnesota, and the Illinois Education Association -- chipped in another $30,000, according to each of their respective federal filings.) National Board for Professional Teaching Standards got $10,000 from the union last fiscal year. And the University of Colorado at Boulder also picked up $250,000 for a "sponsored project", likely something being put together by one of the NEA's longtime fellow-travelers, Kevin Welner's National Education Policy Center that is based on the university's campus.
Over the last several months it's been a pleasure to witness the easing of ill will between the leadership of NJ's primary teachers' union, NJEA, and members of Gov. Christie's educational team. After several years of bitter recrimination from both sides of the table, everyone seems to have moved on from the trauma of our botched Race To The Top application and former Comm. Bret Schundler's resignation. Sure, the sting of last Spring's health and benefits reform bills, championed by Gov. Christie, must be a sore spot for union leadership, but there appears to be a shared recognition that we should recalibrate the balance between the needs of schoolchildren and the needs of teachers. Suddenly NJ's 100-year old tenure law is on the table - a boon for both student and professionals - and Ed. Comm. Cerf 's speech at NJEA's Annual Convention earlier this month and was courteously received (except for a few nasty tweets).
So we'll hold onto the progress and roll our eyes at the retro and reactive press release just out from NJEA President Barbara Keshishian, in which she claims, in outraged tones, that NJ's alleged achievement gap among black, white, Hispanic, and poor kids is a "classic strawman" on the part of Gov. Christie and "based on a deliberate misuse of the data."
Fewer than one-third of California students who took a statewide physical fitness test this year managed to pass all six areas assessed, new results show.
State Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, a longtime cross-country coach who has made physical fitness a signature issue, announced the results this week as he launched a program to improve children's health. The campaign will use such celebrity athletes as NBA all-star Bill Walton and others to visit schools to urge students to drink more water, eat more fruits and vegetables and increase their exercise.
"When only 31% of children are physically fit, that's a public health challenge we can't wait to address," Torlakson said in a statement.
Authorizers don't run charters; they oversee the administrators and school boards that handle day-to-day operations of a charter school. Authorizers are also primary decision makers on which schools to sponsor.
During the 20-year history of charter schools there have been examples of teachers starting schools, and some charters have unionized teachers.
MFT will be the first union to serve as a charter sponsor. Formally, it has created an organization called the Minnesota Guild of Charter Schools (informally 'the Guild') that will serve as authorizer.
This makes sense. I hope we see much more of this.
Elementary Support & Services
National Novel Writing Month
Future Problem Solving
Math enrichment
GEMS
William & Mary Literature groups
M2 and M3 Math groups
American Math Competition 8
Science enrichment pilot College for Kids I (support)
Middle School Support & Services
WCATY courses
Future Problem Solving
Online courses
Advanced Math courses
Assistance with Science Symposium
American Math Competition 8
College for Kids II (support)
Great Books Pilot
Hybrid Geometry Pilot
High School Support & Services
College Matters at UW Madison
Math Meets (competitions)
Respectful Relationship days
Leadership Conference (pilot, grant application in progress)
Assistance with High School Science Symposium
Mentor Services
1. Falk- Working with students in a writing group
2. Stephens- Working with a group of students in math
3. Lapham-1'1/2"dgrade-Math
4. Schenk- Science/math enrichment
5. Crestwood- Math enrichment
6. Crestwood- Math enrichment
7. Crestwood-Math enrichment
8. Franklin- Math enrichment
9. Randall- Math enrichment
10. Randall - Math enrichment
Of course Madison Prep wants the media opportunity of children waiting in an auditorium, some advocates for the school have demonized teachers, the Madison Prep Board has decided that the only way to make the school happen is to employee non-union staff and not pay them for the extended day and year (that they are also seeking African American and Latino staff, makes this even worse). It should also be noted that school choice backers like the Kochs, the Waltons and (Bradley and Koch funded) ALEC aren't all that keen on "the right to clean water" either.
On Dec. 19, the Madison school board is scheduled to vote on whether to approve Madison Preparatory Academy, a charter school that would target at-risk minority students.
For more than 18 months, the proposal -- drawn up by the Urban League of Greater Madison as an ambitious step toward closing the district's racial achievement gap -- has polarized the community, with a broad range of critics taking aim on multiple fronts.
The proposal, at least by local standards, is a radical one, under which the Urban League would operate two largely taxpayer-funded, gender-specific secondary schools with an unprecedented level of autonomy. If approved, Madison Prep would open next fall with 120 sixth-graders and peak at 840 students in grades 6 through 12 by its seventh year.
Opponents say the Urban League's proposal combines flawed educational models, discredited science, fuzzy budgeting and unrealistic projections of student success. While some applaud certain elements of the proposal, like longer school days and academic years, they maintain that Madison Prep won't help enough students to justify the $17.5 million cost to the district over its first five years.
Madison schools aren't failing, by any stretch of the imagination, for many students.
In fact, if you're a white, middle-class family sending your children to public school here, your kids are likely getting an education that's on a par with Singapore or Finland -- among the best in the world.
However, if you're black or Latino and poor, it's an unquestionable fact that Madison schools don't as good a job helping you with your grade-point average, high school graduation, college readiness or test scores. By all these measures, the district's achievement gap between white and minority students is awful.
These facts have informed the stern (and legitimate) criticisms leveled by Urban League President Kaleem Caire and Madison Prep backers.
But they doesn't take into account some recent glimmers of hope that shouldn't be discounted or overlooked. Programs like AVID/TOPS support first-generation college-bound students in Madison public schools and are showing some successes. Four-year-old kindergarten is likely to even the playing field for the district's youngest students, giving them a leg up as they enter school. And, the data surrounding increasing numbers of kids of color participating in Advanced Placement classes is encouraging.
Stepping back from the local district and looking at education through a broader lens, it's easy to see that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have aimed to legislate, bribe and punish their way toward an unrealistic Lake Wobegon world where all the students are above average.
Remarkable. Are there some excellent teachers in Madison? Certainly. Does Madison's Administration seek best in the world results? A look at the math task force, seemingly on hold for years, is informative. The long one size fits all battle and the talented and gifted complaint are worth contemplating.
Could Madison be the best? Certainly. The infrastructure is present, from current spending of $14,963/student to the nearby UW-Madison, Madison College and Edgewood College backed by a supportive community.
How Madison Prep Can Be a Non-Instrumentality (Non-Union)?
Kaleem Caire, via email
December 2, 2011
Greetings Madison Prep.
Tomorrow afternoon, we are expecting to learn that MMSD's Administration will inform the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education that Madison Prep should not be approved. A possible reason we expect will be MMSD's concern that the current collective bargaining agreement between the District and Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI) has a "work preservation clause" which the teacher's union advocated for long ago to ensure that it was the only game in town to represent public school teachers in Madison.
Below, is the cover note that I forwarded to Ed Hughes of the Board of Education and copied to a number of others, who had asked a thoughtful question about our proposal to establish Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality charter school, we hope, in fall 2012. Also see the letter attached to this email.
---------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 2, 2011
Greetings Ed.
Attached, please find a letter that contains the answer to your question referenced in your email below. The letter contains the explanation of a path to which Madison Prep could be established as a non-instrumentality public charter school, under Wisconsin law, and in a way that would not violate the current collective bargaining agreement between MMSD and Madison Teachers Inc.
We look forward to answering any questions you or other members of the Board of Education may have.
Thank you so much and Many blessings to you and your family this holiday season.
Onward.
cc: Daniel Nerad, MMSD Superintendent
Dylan Pauly, MMSD Legal Counsel
MMSD Board of Education Members
ULGM Board of Directors
Madison Prep Board of Directors
Godfrey & Kahn, S.C.
Steve Goldberg, CUNA Mutual Foundation
This letter is intended to respond to your November 78,207I email and to suggest that there is a viable option for moving forward with Urban League's proposal for the Madison Preparatory Academy ("Madison Prep") that: [i) will reduce cost; and (ii) will not sacrifice the union security provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement "Agreement" or "Contract") between the Madison Metropolitan School District ("MMSD" or "District") and Madison Teachers, Inc. ("MTI").
Your email asks for a response to a question concerning how the school district could authorize Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality charter without thereby violating the terms of the District's Agreement with MTI. Your email references a provision in the MTI Agreement that provides "that instructional duties where the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction requires that such be performed by a certifìcated teacher, shall be performed only by'teachers."' .See Article I, Section 8.3.a. In addition you note that "the term 'teacher' refers to anyone in the collective bargaining unit." See Article I, Section 8.2. You conclude your email by stating that "it appears that all teachers in MMSD schools -- including non-instrumentality charter schools - must be members of the MTI bargaining unit."
The Urban League is aware of the Agreement's language and concedes that the language, if enforceable, poses an obstacle as we look for School Board approval of the plan to open and operate a "non-instrumentality" school. Under an instrumentality charter, the employees of the charter school must be employed by the school board. Under a non-instrumentality charter, the school board may not be the employer of the charter school's staff. See S 118.40(7)(a). Thus, the statement in your email that all teachers, including those in a non-instrumentality charter school - "must be members of the MTI bargaining unit" and, presumably, employed by the school board is not permitted under Wisconsin law.
Under Wisconsin's charter school law the School Board has the exclusive authority to determine whether a school is an instrumentality or not an instrumentality of the school district. .See S 118.40(7)(a). That decision is an important decision reserved to the School Board alone. The effect of that decision drives whether teachers and staff must be, or cannot be, employees of the School Board. The language of the Contract deprives the School Board of the decision reserved to it under the statute and that language cannot be harmonized to give effect to both the statute and the Agreement. Alternatively the Contract language creates a situation whereby the School Board may exercise its statutory authority to approve a non-instrumentality charter but it must staff the school with school district employees, a result clearly prohibited under the statute. In our view the law trumps the Contract in either of these situations.
The situation described above could likely only be resolved in a court of law. The Contract includes a "savings clause" that contemplates that where a court invalidates a provision in the Agreement, the invalid provision is deleted and the remainder of the contract remains intact. See Article VIII, Section E.
The Urban League is, however, mindful that litigation is both expensive and time consuming. Moreover it is clear that the Contract language will become a prohibited subject of bargaining in the near future when the current Agreement expires. Unfortunately, the children we seek to serve, do not have the time to wait for that day.
Our second purpose in writing is to make you aware of a possible solution to a major obstacle here. One of the major obstacles in moving forward has been the cost associated with an instrumentality school coupled with MTI's reluctance to work with the District in modifying the Contract to reduce costs associated with staffing and certain essential features of Madison Prep, like an extended school day, As we understand it MTI does not want to modify the Contract because such a modification would result in an earlier application of 2077 Wisconsin Act L0 to the District, members of the bargaining unit and to MTI itself.
We understand MTI's reluctance to do anything that would hasten the application of Act 10 in the school district, With the passage of 2011. Wisconsin Act 65, that concern is no longer an obstacle.
Act 65 allows the parties to a collective bargaining agreement to enter into a memorandum of understanding that would run for the remaining term of the collective bargaining agreement, for the purpose of reducing the cost of compensation or fringe benefits in the collective bargaining agreement,
The Act also provides that entering into such a memorandum would not be considered a "modification" of the collective bargaining agreement for the purposes of Act 10. Act 65 was published on November 23,2077 and took effect the following day. The law allows the parties to a collective bargaining agreement to enter into such a memorandum no later than 90 days after the effective date of the law.
The Urban League believes that Act 65 gives the Board and MTI the opportunity to make changes that will facilitate cost reductions, based in compensation and fringe benefits, to help Madison Prep move forward. And, the law allows the parties to do so in a way that does not adversely impact the teachers represented by MTI or the union security provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
For example, the parties could agree to reduce the staffing costs for Madison Prep, The parties could also agree that a longer school day would not have to cost more. And, the parties could agree that the work preservation clause referenced in the first part of this letter does not apply where the School Board has determined a charter school willbe a non-instrumentality of the District, a move that would also most certainly reduce costs. These changes would not be forced upon any existing MTI represented teacher as teachers would apply for vacancies in the school.
We hope that the School Board will give serious consideration to the opportunity presented by Act 65. 0n behalf of the Urban League of Greater Madison and Madison Preparatory Academy, we thank you for your support of Madison Prep.
Value-added and other types of growth models are probably the most controversial issue in education today. These methods, which use sophisticated statistical techniques to attempt to isolate a teacher's effect on student test score growth, are rapidly assuming a central role in policy, particularly in the new teacher evaluation systems currently being designed and implemented. Proponents view them as a primary tool for differentiating teachers based on performance/effectiveness.
Opponents, on the other hand, including a great many teachers, argue that the models' estimates are unstable over time, subject to bias and imprecision, and that they rely entirely on standardized test scores, which are, at best, an extremely partial measure of student performance. Many have come to view growth models as exemplifying all that's wrong with the market-based approach to education policy.
It's very easy to understand this frustration. But it's also important to separate the research on value-added from the manner in which the estimates are being used. Virtually all of the contention pertains to the latter, not the former. Actually, you would be hard-pressed to find many solid findings in the value-added literature that wouldn't ring true to most educators.
This past weekend the New York Times devoted two big op-eds to the decline of the suburb. In one, new urban theorist Chris Leinberger said that Americans were increasingly abandoning "fringe suburbs" for dense, transit-oriented urban areas. In the other, UC Berkeley professor Louise Mozingo called for the demise of the "suburban office building" and the adoption of policies that will drive jobs away from the fringe and back to the urban core.
Perhaps no theology more grips the nation's mainstream media -- and the planning community -- more than the notion of inevitable suburban decline. The Obama administration's housing secretary, Shaun Donavan, recently claimed, "We've reached the limits of suburban development: People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities."
Yet repeating a mantra incessantly does not make it true. Indeed, any analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census would make perfectly clear that rather than heading for density, Americans are voting with their feet in the opposite direction: toward the outer sections of the metropolis and to smaller, less dense cities. During the 2000s, the Census shows, just 8.6% of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than 1 million people took place in the core cities; the rest took place in the suburbs. That 8.6% represents a decline from the 1990s, when the figure was 15.4%.
Two Madison School Board members who say they are likely to vote no on Dec. 19 when the Madison Preparatory Academy proposal comes before the board for final approval or denial have some ideas they believe would better serve all of Madison's students.
Marj Passman, School Board vice president, says she hopes the local Urban League and its president, Kaleem Caire, will pursue funding for Madison Prep as a private school if the proposal fails to gain approval from a majority of board members. Passman says it's likely she will vote against Madison Prep as a public charter school, although she will look at an administrative analysis due by Dec. 4 prior to making her final decision.
"There's been a lot of community support and I'm sure he (Caire) can come up with the money for the school as a private academy," Passman told me in a recent phone interview.
"Then he could pursue the school in its purest form, he won't have to compromise his ideas, and he can showcase how all these elements are going to work to help eliminate the achievement gap, increase graduation rates and raise GPAs for minority students," she says.
...
Board member Maya Cole also tells me she is a "pretty firm no vote" against the Madison Prep proposal. What Cole would like to see as an alternative is a charter school embedded within an existing district middle school like Wright or Toki, using district staff.
Black and Hispanic students in a special Madison School District college preparatory program have higher grade point averages, attendance rates and test scores than their peers who aren't in the program, according to a UW-Madison analysis.
The study of the AVID/TOPS program -- geared toward preparing low-income, minority students for college -- comes as the Madison School Board contemplates a proposal to create Madison Preparatory Academy, a controversial charter school with similar goals.
Some opponents of Madison Prep argue the AVID/TOPS program is a proven way of helping close the achievement gap between white and minority students.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said the district is pushing ahead with a proposal to expand the program in middle school. It currently serves 491 students at East, West, Memorial and La Follette high schools and Black Hawk Middle School.
"I would not tell you that AVID alone will make the difference," Nerad said. "But it's a very important piece for us."
The new Brookings index on school choice is interesting and worth a look but as I go through it two things seem to jump out. First, despite the rhetoric in the public square there still isn't a great deal of real choice in education. And second, the index seems to reward places (relatively speaking) that have limited choices but still do all the things you should do (information, transportation etc...nonetheless). That's like having an incredible restaurant with easy valet parking, wonderful fresh food, great service, and lovely ambiance - but that can only seat four people a night. Nice but limited.
The Obama administration's decision to allow states to request waivers from No Child Left Behind was a step in the right direction, but only a baby step. Four in five schools across the country will be deemed "failing" this coming year if nothing stops the "train wreck" that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will inflict upon the nation's schools. These include schools in which the vast majority of students are proficient in math and English, as well as schools in which students, teachers, and principals are making real progress in the face of formidable challenges: concentrated poverty, large numbers of students with special-needs, and state budget cuts that have severely reduced the resources needed to address the obstacles to learning.
Duncan's characterization of NCLB is apt; a recent National Research Council study found that 10 years of test-based accountability "reform" has delivered no significant progress for students. Throughout the country, pressure to improve test scores has led to an increase in intense test preparation. In many cases, this has led to less time for actual learning and reduced the ability of schools to respond to the learning needs of the most disadvantaged students. Instead of focusing on how to deliver high quality instruction schools have become preoccupied with how to produce increases in test scores. Reports of widespread cheating on state exams appearing in city after city are increasingly viewed not as isolated instances of teacher misbehavior, but as a consequence of high-stakes testing.
Parents gathered in the auditorium of the Talented and Gifted School for Young Scholars on Tuesday morning were not happy.
Their school, one of only three citywide gifted and talented programs in Manhattan, shares space in an East Harlem building with three middle schools. They learned recently that one of the schools, Esperanza Preparatory Academy, wants to expand to a high school, and they are concerned that the expansion will cause overcrowding and bring other problems.
Tuesday's meeting was called by the Education Department last week after parents flooded the office with calls and e-mails expressing concern about the addition of high school grades when their school has children as young as kindergarten.
The Oakland school district is closing five elementary schools next year. Two of its other schools might be converted into independently run charters, taking 800 children with them. And at least one -- quite possibly, two -- brand new charter schools open next fall, with plans to admit more than 600 students, combined.
But OUSD's leaders aren't bracing for a big enrollment drop. They predict the school system's enrollment will hold firm in September -- and even grow slightly (by 125 students, to 38,166).
Will the numbers bear out? They didn't this fall. Enrollment in the city's district-run schools, though flat, came in 300 students shy of projections, creating a $1.6 million budget gap that needed to be closed immediately.
Colleges should examine a wider set of social, economic and personal characteristics to determine how they can help students remain in school and graduate, a new report has found (PDF report link).
Aside from SAT scores and high school grade point averages, students' success in college relies on a number of other factors -- often overlooked -- that more accurately predict whether they will stay in school, according to the report scheduled for release Tuesday by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA.
Using information from a national survey of college freshmen in public and private institutions as well as graduation data, the report found, for example, that students who visit a college before enrolling, participate in clubs and other activities and those who have used the Internet for research and homework are more likely to complete a degree earlier than others. The costs of attending a college and the institution's size also contribute to students' success, the report found.
Chicago Public Schools officials plan to overhaul 10 schools next year, six of which will be managed by a private organization in the latest move by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration to turn to the private sector to aid poorly performing public schools.
The proposed overhauls--commonly called turnarounds--involve the firing of existing staff and improvements to school curriculum and culture. Turnarounds are the first step in a series of school actions that include consolidating and closing underperforming schools.
A new state law requires CPS to announce all school closings and turnarounds by Thursday. There was vociferous opposition to any proposed closings at recent public hearings, which were also required by the law, even though though the list of targeted schools had not yet been released.
The elementary schools slated for turnaround are: Pablo Casals, 3501 W. Potomac Ave.; Melville W. Fuller, 4214 S. Saint Lawrence Ave.; Theodore Herzl, 3711 W. Douglas Blvd.; Marquette, 6550 S Richmond St.; Brian Piccolo, 1040 N Keeler Ave.; Amos Alonzo Stagg, 7424 S Morgan St.; Wendell Smith, 744 E 103rd St. and Carter G. Woodson South Elementary Schools, 4414 S Evans. The Chicago Vocational Career Academy, at 2100 E 87th St., and Tilden Career Community Academy, 4747 S Union Ave., high schools also are targeted for turnaround.
Reihan Salam directs us to an essay about labor unions by Alan Haus, an IP and employment law attorney in San Francisco. Haus thinks that conservatives ought to be more supportive of the power of labor unions in promoting higher wages:
There is much that could be said about the economic effects of promoting higher wages. For Republicans, the disadvantages should be trumped not only by the advantages but also by a vital consideration of political philosophy: the society of limited government to which most Republicans aspire will only come about in the real world if most Americans earn enough money to save for retirements and college educations, and provide for their long-term healthcare through substantially private markets. Achieving this requires some measure of support for a high wage economy.
But Haus is a lot less enthralled with every other aspect of organized labor:
There is much less competition in the public sector than the private sector, and that has made all the difference.
Since the Great Recession began in 2008, there has been a growing criticism of public sector unions, reflecting taxpayer concerns about union compensation and unfunded pension liabilities. These concerns have led to proposals to change public sector union policy in very significant ways. Earlier this month, voters in Ohio defeated by a wide margin a law that would have restricted union powers, although polls showed broad support for portions of the law that would have reduced union benefits. In Wisconsin, a state with a long-standing pro-union stance, Governor Scott Walker advanced policy in February that would cut pay and substantially curtail collective bargaining rights of many public sector union workers. In Florida, State Senator John Thrasher introduced legislation that would prevent governments from collecting union dues from union worker state paychecks. And it is not just Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida that are attempting to change the landscape of public unions. Cash-strapped governments in many states are considering ways to reduce the costs associated with public unions.
The Madison School District has agreed to terms for releasing more than 1,000 sick notes submitted by teachers who missed work in February during mass protests over collective bargaining.
The district will remove the teachers' names and other identifying information from the notes, under an agreement reached Monday with the Wisconsin State Journal, which requested the records under the state's Open Records Law.
"It's essentially what we asked for in May," State Journal Editor John Smalley said Tuesday. "It was never our intention to publish any names or individual situations, but to look at the collective situation of all of these sick notes and how the district as an institution handled it."
School Board President James Howard said the agreement protects teachers while complying with the newspaper's needs and a Nov. 21 court ruling ordering the district to turn over the notes. The newspaper sued the district for the records after the district denied requests for them.
Many friends of mine are upset with the legal battle the Wisconsin State Journal waged to obtain the 1,000 sick notes Madison teachers used to get off work during the union protests in February. My own radio host and boss, Kurt Baron, referred to the paper as the "Wisconsin State Urinal" in describing his decision to no longer have the paper as his home page online. Some called into the show and promised to cancel their subscriptions.
Teachers should have a right to individual privacy over their medical records. We shouldn't know whether John Q. cited herpes or hemorrhoids on his doctor's note.
I am less sympathetic, however, to the teachers' right to collective privacy. As long as their names are redacted, the public has the right to know if 273 teachers cited malaria and 345 claimed to suffer from ebola.
Unfortunately the recent ruling will violate individual privacy by allowing the State Journal to see the names of the teachers on the sick notes.
No one wants to see the Kansas City School District recover just enough to regain provisional accreditation and limp along in wounded form for another decade or so.
Kansas Citians are looking for an administrative structure capable of running schools that meet the state's expectations and prepare students for college and jobs.
With the school district scheduled to become unaccredited on Jan. 1, the Missouri Board of Education is contemplating structural changes. Chris Nicastro, the education commissioner, has spent considerable time trying to figure out what to recommend to the board when it meets Thursday and Friday. At one point, she asked members of the Kansas City school board if they'd be willing to step aside in favor of an appointed board. Most would prefer to remain in charge.
School board governance has not served Kansas City well in recent decades. Candidate choices have mostly been weak. Voter participation in elections has been abysmal. Boards have been factious and meddlesome.
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
As soon as the school day ended, the rush at the health clinic began.
Two high school seniors asked for sports physicals. A group of teenagers lined up for free condoms. A girl told a counselor she needed a pregnancy test.
The clinic, at Belmont High School near downtown Los Angeles, is part of a rapidly expanding network of school-based centers around the nation offering free or low-cost medical care to students and their families.
In California, there are 183 school health centers, up from 121 in 2004. Twelve more are expected to open by next summer, according to the California School Health Center Assn.
The centers have become a small but important part of the nation's healthcare safety net, experts say, treating low-income patients who might otherwise not have regular medical care. Now, they add, campus clinics are serving as a model for health officials trying to reduce costs.
Christine Eastus was a double major in English and chemistry with plans to go to medical school. Instead -- to the chagrin of her parents -- she became a teacher.
In the 1970s, she taught English at Greenhill School in Addison, Texas.
"Once I started teaching, it was a completely new world, sort of frightening in a sense, because you're dealing with students who are so impressionable, but it's heady stuff particularly when people like you, catch the bug and become writers and let you know about it," she tells NPR's John Burnett. "That is a real high, to hear from someone who's your age still remembering me and I'm sure many of them curse me because I guess I was a bit demanding."
Workplace mentors used to be older and higher up the ranks than their mentees. Not anymore.
In an effort to school senior executives in technology, social media and the latest workplace trends, many businesses are pairing upper management with younger employees in a practice known as reverse mentoring. The trend is taking off at a range of companies, from tech to advertising.
The idea is that managers can learn a thing or two about life outside the corner office. But companies say another outcome is reduced turnover among younger employees, who not only gain a sense of purpose but also a rare glimpse into the world of management and access to top-level brass.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says she's concerned about the economy, the deficit, and the "jaded" nature of American politics - but she says the country's "biggest single problem" is with the public school system.
Rice, speaking to CBS' Bob Schieffer on a special Thanksgiving edition of "Face the Nation," argued that the nation's educational system is failing crucial populations, and that "it's gonna drive us into class warfare like we've never seen before."
Responding to a question about the current state of American politics, Rice argued that "we've become a bit jaded as a country."
But she said that wasn't her biggest concern with the future of America right now.
"I think we've got a deeper problem," she said. "It speaks to the way that, for instance, I and my family got ahead. I think the biggest single problem we've got is the K-12 education system."
English class is about to start, and Taneli Nordberg introduces the day's guests: a row of fresh-faced university students sitting in the back of the classroom. They're training to be teachers at the University of Helsinki.
Nordberg, 31, wants the eighth-graders to become teachers for a moment.
"I want you to tell the teacher trainees something you would like them to do when teaching and something you want them to avoid doing," he explains. "In English, please."
The students tumble up to the chalkboards and start writing. Some of the advice is predictable - "not too much homework" - but much of it is insightful.
The exercise, though short and light, is something of a microcosm of the Finnish educational approach - engagement and collaboration between teacher and student, a comfortable atmosphere, and the expectation of quality in how students express themselves.
Over the past decade, students in Finland have soared on international measures of achievement. They've continued to post some of the best scores in the developed world in reading, math and science, according to a respected international exam. The country has one of the narrowest gaps in achievement between its highest and lowest-performing schools, and on average spends less per pupil than the United States.
Students in the Madison School District's dual-language immersion program are less likely than students in English-only classrooms to be black or Asian, come from low-income families, need special education services or have behavioral problems, according to a district analysis.
School Board members have raised concerns about the imbalance of diversity and other issues with the popular program.
As a result, Superintendent Dan Nerad wants to put on hold expansion plans at Hawthorne, Stephens and Thoreau elementaries and delay the decision to the spring on how to expand the program to La Follette High School in 2013.
"While the administration remains committed to the (dual-language) program and to the provision of bilingual programming options for district students, I believe there is substantial value in identifying, considering and responding to these concerns," Nerad wrote in a memo to the board.
In Madison's program, both native English and Spanish speakers receive 90 percent of their kindergarten instruction in Spanish, with the mix steadily increasing to 50-50 by fourth grade.
Parents across the Washington region will soon have more readily available -- and useful-- information about how their public schools are doing, the result of new initiatives underway at the local and state level for reporting and displaying education data.
The District, Maryland and Virginia are pledging some changes as part of their applications to the Obama administration for exemption from unpopular requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, among them the mandate for 100 percent proficiency by 2014 on standardized reading and math tests.
Alas, Milwaukee Public Schools: The School Board and administration will never take the kind of bold action that's needed to stabilize the financial picture. The system is awash in empty buildings, and they won't do anything about it. They'll never take real action to improve what goes on in classrooms. It's hopeless.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. And maybe wrong about the fourth one.
Without much fuss or attention, this has been an autumn of big change in the way MPS is run. It is still a highly troubled system, but it's time to give credit to the leaders for taking action on some of the things that most threaten MPS. You can criticize them for not acting sooner or for other things, but let's take advantage of some holiday cheer to look at recent events. There's still life in the lumbering giant.
If you ask Superintendent Gregory Thornton, he'll tell you what's under way is "a quiet storm, and, when we wake up, the flowers will have bloomed."
(Thornton, by the way, seems to be talking like a guy who isn't going to pack up and leave soon, which has been a matter of speculation since shortly after he arrived 17 months ago.)
Among the extended family I saw over the holiday was a young relative who is working as a substitute teacher in the Northeast since he can't find a full-time teaching post. He shared a story that surprised me, and I wanted to run it by folks here.
He was subbing at a low-performing high school that recently had a well-publicized stabbing. A student in his class pulled what he thought was a real gun on him, and they had a standoff for several minutes until the teen put the "gun" away and the teacher tackled him to the floor. It turned out the gun was a toy, and the student received a three-day suspension for the incident.
The substitute teacher was disappointed with the punishment, but said the school wanted to prevent another round of negative press.
Would such an incident be kept quiet in Georgia? Could it go so easily unreported under zero tolerance policies in which students can get suspended for Tweety Bird key chains?
Here's a depressing but documented comparison of California taxes and economic climate with the rest of the states. The news is breaking bad, and getting worse (twice a month, I update crucial data on this fact sheet):
California has the 3rd worst state income tax in the nation. 9.3% tax bracket starts at $46,766 for people filing as individuals. 10.3% tax starts at $1,000,000. http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp59_es.pdf
California corporate income tax rate (8.84%) is the highest west of the Mississippi (our economic competitors) except for Alaska. http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp59.pdf Table #8 - we are 8th highest nationwide.
Wisconsin needs a new system of school accountability, but implementing effective measures will be difficult because there are so many different ideas about what it takes to make a good school.
The best schools have high standards in the basics - reading, math, science and writing. But they also excel at art, music and gym. They are places with strong leadership, inspired teachers and an organic system of training and mentoring.
To create more such schools and hold all schools accountable in a fair manner, though, requires all those with an interest in that issue to be at the table. Unfortunately, that's not the case now.
When Gov. Scott Walker and State Superintendent Tony Evers formed a team to improve school accountability, the Wisconsin Education Association Council chose to sit this one out.
We get it: The state's largest teachers union has plenty of reason to be upset with Walker for stripping it and other public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights - and for cutting funding to schools. But we still think the union's refusal to take a place at the table was a mistake. The union needs to be involved in such efforts. Now, it's on the outside looking in.
Wisconsin's current assessment system is the oft-criticized WKCE, which has some of our nation's lowest standards.
A sweeping tax overhaul unveiled this week by a billionaire-backed coalition of political leaders has drawn fire from the California Teachers Association, one of the most influential groups at the Capitol and on the campaign trail.
The Think Long Committee for California hopes to place initiatives on the November 2012 ballot to raise $10 billion in taxes each year, mostly by charging sales taxes on services. Half of that money would go to K-12 schools. But deep within the plan is a proposal to eliminate a constitutional requirement that California increase funding for schools in good years to compensate for prior cuts.
Education groups like CTA rely on that Proposition 98 requirement as leverage each year when negotiating school funding in the state budget.
The union's president, Dean E. Vogel, said in a statement, "The Think Long Committee Report was supposed to be a bipartisan path to rebuilding California's future, not a dangerous detour that would hurt students and the poor. Educators are alarmed by these recommendations to raise taxes on the poor, lower taxes for corporations, dismantle Proposition 98 - the state's minimum school funding law - and avoid repaying $10 billion already owed to public schools and students."
JEFFREY BROWN: And we turn to the high school dropout problem.
Over the next 18 months, the NewsHour and other public media partners are examining the consequences of, and solutions for, one of this country's most pressing education issues. The project is called American Graduate.
Tonight, a look at Detroit, where four out of 10 children don't graduate. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has called it "arguably the worst school district in the country." But he's also said he's encouraged by new efforts to improve the schools.
NewsHour correspondent Hari Sreenivasan reports on some of those efforts in this co-production with Detroit Public Television.
HARI SREENIVASAN: It's another morning at Cody High School in Detroit, and teachers like Antonio Baker know that, for some of their students, just getting here is a victory.
ANTONIO BAKER, Medicine and Community Health Academy, Cody Small Schools: I had a young man who came in the classroom. He was really upset and he was just lashing out. He had, like, little dried-up blood on his uniform.
The new Advanced Learning Task Force (or Steering Committee or Advisory Committee or whatever) has had its first meeting. It's kind of a mess.
I'm on the committee. So is Melissa. So are Dr. Vaughan and Dr. Thompson. There are principals, central staff, teachers and community members. The committee is too big for any real discussion. It will be almost impossible for it to reach any authentic consensus. I suspect that staff will just write our conclusions for us and then allow us a final meeting to argue for small edits - which they will unilaterally decide to accept or reject. That's how the Demographic Task Force worked.
The committee met once in November and will meet again in December. By that time we will already be overdue with our recommendation to FACMAC on the placement of elementary north-end APP. FACMAC needs it now. Without it, they will just move forward with their decisions without input from the Advanced Learning Committee.
Many Minnesota residents expect a bigger bill when their property tax statements arrive this month. But across the border, North Dakota residents are considering a proposal to make the state the first in the nation to abolish property taxes.
Supporters gathered more than 28,000 signatures to put that question on the ballot next June.
Backers of the measure say there's plenty of revenue to go around without property taxes. But local government officials say eliminating property tax would create chaos.
That worries officials like Terry Traynor, assistant director of the North Dakota Association of Counties.
"I'm fearful that it has a possibility of passing," Traynor said. "The proponents have a very attractive message to sell: Do you like property taxes? If you don't, vote for this and they go away."
As the superintendent of the Perth Amboy school district, I am responsible for the education of more than 10,000 children.
We are fortunate to have the dedication of hundreds of committed and talented teachers and administrators who focus on education every day. But for 15 to 20 percent of each week, I shift focus from our students, who should be at the center of all we do, to certain adults who no longer have a place in our education system, yet simply can't be dismissed.
There has been much discussion about teacher evaluation and its potential to improve learning in our classrooms. This issue focuses on things like linking teacher tenure and pay to student test scores, and so-called value-added data. There are many disagreements about these measures, but I believe we can agree on the fact that there are certain teachers who just should not be working with children. We don't want teachers in our classrooms who talk explicitly about sexual acts, or who hit children, put soap in their mouths or curse at them. We certainly don't want teachers who make repeated sexual advances to other teachers, do drugs at school or fly into rages for no apparent reason. I have active cases like these, and have returned almost all of these teachers to their positions.
The new president of the statewide teachers union has a tough task reorganizing the 13,000-member group after it took a beating during the 2011 Idaho Legislature, with measures passed to weaken their collective bargaining and phase out some job protections.
Cyr is starting a three-year term as president of the Idaho Education Association after nearly 30 years teaching in Moscow public schools. Her husband, Craig, works at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc., in Pullman, Wash., and remains in Moscow, where their four adult children also live.
"I go home when I can, but it's often time to work," Cyr said.
Among her top priorities: A campaign to repeal the sweeping education changes that were signed into law earlier this year with backing from public schools chief Tom Luna and Gov. Butch Otter. The laws will go before Idaho voters in November 2012.
When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released their 2011 results, things seemed to be working out well for Wisconsin's public schools. The state posted above average numbers in key subjects like reading and mathematics in fourth and eighth grade.
However, a deeper look into those numbers exposes some troubling trends. Namely, Wisconsin's Hispanic students are regressing when it comes to reading in the state's classrooms.
The state's 2011 results held steady at 202 points for fourth-grade reading amongst Hispanic pupils. This was down from a score of 208 in 2007 and less than the state's score of 209 in 1992, the first iteration of the test. In eighth grade, the average score dropped from 250 to 248. This is a decrease from 1998's average of 256 - the first year the test was recorded for the group.
These results highlight a grim trend. Over the past two decades, reading achievement amongst the state's Hispanic students has regressed. While national averages have seen a growth of 5.7 percent in fourth grade reading and 5.5 percent in eighth grade reading amongst Hispanic test takers, Wisconsin has posted losses. The state's scores dropped by 3.4 percent and 2.8 percent in the two grades, respectively.
Earlier this year Wisconsin teachers and their supporters compared Wisconsin and Texas academically and claimed that Wisconsin had better achievement because it ranked higher on ACT/SAT scores. The fact that this claim ignored the ethnic composition of the states, prompted David Burge to use the National Assessment of Educational Progress(NAEP) to compare educational achievement within the same ethnic groups. His conclusion, based on the 2009 NAEP in Reading, Mathematics, and Science (3 subject areas times 2 grades, 4th and 8th, times 3 ethnicities, white, black, and hispanic equals 18 comparisons), was Longhorns 17 - Badgers 1.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html
The 2011 NAEP results are now available for Reading and
Mathematics. The updated conclusion (2 subject areas times 2 grades, 4th and 8th, times 3 ethnicities, white, black, and hispanic equals 12 comparisons) is Longhorns 12 - Badgers 0. Not only did Texas students outperform Wisconsin students in every one of the twelve ethnicity-controlled comparisons, but Texas students exceeded the national average in all 12 comparisons. Wisconsin students were above the average 3 times, below the average 8 times, and tied the average once.
Charter schools, once considered the experimental outliers of public education, are poised to go mainstream in Santa Clara County.
That's due in part to sheer numbers. Eight new charter schools opened this school year, taking in 1,600 students. Last week alone, five charter schools were approved to open next August in the county. But perhaps more important, key places in the county have seen a transformation in attitude, from hostility and suspicion to acceptance and collaboration.
The growing number of charters cements the county's reputation, along with the giant Los Angeles Unified district, as the most charter-friendly place in the state. In a month or so, the county school board will consider approving 20 more charters schools for Rocketship Education. The increase comes amid widespread growth of charter schools in California. Today about 7 percent of the state's public school children attend a charter, which are public schools operating independently from local school boards and most of the state Education Code.
Scott Walker is now waging his war on public education by coming up with accountability standards that favor charter and private schools. His School and District Accountability Design Team consists of thirty business and education professionals from across the state.
The Design Team is led by "Quad-Chairs" Governor Scott Walker, Senator Luther Olsen, chair of the Senate Education Committee, Representative Steve Kestell, chair of the Assembly Education Committee, and Tony Evers, State Superintendent of Schools in Wisconsin. The proceedings are being facilitated by a team of high-paid consultants working with the American Institute for Research (AIR), a company that racked up $299 million in revenue for the 2009 fiscal year.
Dear Colleague: I am writing this letter because I sincerely fear that the future of our children and grandchildren could be in jeopardy. While there are numerous important issues facing America today, one continues to be high on my priority list, K-12 Math and Science. What scares me the most is that no one seems to care - not parents, teachers, administrators, politicians or business people - that we have FALLEN TO 25th GLOBALLY IN MATH.
It has been our strength in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and the resultant innovation that fueled the great businesses of the 20th century. Automobiles, airplanes, radio, television, space travel, telecommunications and the Internet are just a few industries that are reliant on strong Math and Science skills and have produced a significant number of good jobs. There is a very good chance that our personal good fortunes can in some way be tied to the early innovation of our grandparents.
This comparative table needs no detailed explanation. Based on 2009 statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), it clearly shows how far we have fallen and how competitive the rest of the world has become
If you spend any amount of time on Facebook, eventually you'll see a copied-and-pasted status update that looks something like this: "If you learned long division by hand, bicycled to school in the rain, drank lead-tainted water directly from the hose, played fast-pitch baseball in the dark with shiftless strangers, skinned your knee and ignored it until it became infected and led to a series of painful brain hemorrhages, sucked mercury from thermometers like marrow from the bones of dead hobos, and lived to tell about it, repost this and be thankful for the good old days."
The implication, of course, is that kids are too mollycoddled these days, and we're overthinking their upbringing - why can't we just do things the way we used to? After all, we turned out fine.
I can't help but believe that this notion - as well as sharp resistance to it - has contributed greatly to the statewide rift over collective bargaining that's culminated in the current gubernatorial recall effort.
After all, in the past, kids did just fine under the tutelage of bitter, underpaid nuns and schoolmarms. Why spend more money for worse results? Teachers deserve a pay cut. They're not holding up their end of the bargain.
I suspect that this attitude is actually fairly pervasive. Commenting on one of my recent blog posts, a reader said this: "Go back to teaching math, science, history and [E]nglish the way it was taught in the 50's. Students either passed or failed based on work not on some stupid self-esteem."
As my previous post described, things are looking up at Leopold Elementary School. Leopold, the largest elementary school in Madison, has strong leadership and a talented and hard-working staff. Their efforts are paying positive dividends for the school's 700+ young students.
There's a millstone around Leopold's neck, however, and it's called No Child Left Behind. According to that much-maligned federal law, Leopold is a "School Identified for Improvement" (SIFI).
What gives? If so many signs point toward Leopold succeeding, why do the feds consider that it is falling short.
While many criticize the Ted Kennedy / Bush No Child Left Behind initiative, we parents certainly have a great deal more information on our publicly financed schools than before. For that, I am thankful. I am also thankful that NCLB has, to some extent, increased attention on our schools, including curricular issues.
After more than two years under state control, Detroit's public school district appears to be getting its basic finances in order by privatizing services, cutting wages, restructuring debt and aggressively seeking out students to fill its classrooms.
The district's operating deficit stands at $83 million, down from $327 million at the start of the year, according to documents released by the district Monday. The progress under the district's new state-appointed emergency financial manager could offer a roadmap for the city of Detroit, which is running out of cash and may itself fall into state hands.
Misleading the Taxpayer: the Per-Pupil Expenditure Dilemma: How Much Do We Spend Per Pupil?
The Common Sense Institute of New Jersey, a libertarian organization that opposes current levels of government spending, has just put out a new report called "Misleading the Taxpayer: the Per-Pupil Expenditure Dilemma." The author, Mark Jay Williams, compares various ways that New Jersey estimates education costs and concludes that the variability among different formulas amounts to systemic underestimation by local school districts and a veritable sleight-of-hand for taxpayers.
If you can compartmentalize the political bent there's some interesting stuff. For example, New Jersey spends 54.9% more per pupil than the national average ($16,271 vs. $10,499) . Also, the three ways residents can view per pupil costs -- the DOE's User-Friendly Budgets (the "primary tool responsible for misleading taxpayers"), costs-per-pupil in the NJ State Report Cards, and The Taxpayer's Guide to Education Spending - have a surprisingly wide range. The author writes, "[d]epending on the reporting source utilized, Asbury Park's per-pupil expenditures ranged from $22,090 to $39,149, a difference of $17,059.
It's that time again!
December 1 marks the date on which those interested in running for the Sun Prairie School Board can start circulating nomination papers. All it requires is a cakewalk 100 signatures.
We've already heard rumors of several potential candidates...possibly enough to require a primary!
The seats available this year are (at least currently occupied by) John Whalen and Terry Shimek.
Will they even run for re-election????
Whalen hasn't been looking so hot lately...with all the squirmingly unprofessional body language he's shown at the board table. Shimek is well....the King of all Flip Flops and a Teller of Tall Tales. Neither is serving the taxpayers of this community, particularly senior citizens.
Madison has two seats on the spring, 2012 ballot. They are currently occupied by Lucy Mathiak, who is not running for re-election and Arlene Silveira.
For the past five years, ConnCAN has analyzed the state's graduation rates; this Issue Brief provides a more detailed examination of the latest data. In addition to relatively flat graduation rates across the board in Connecticut, the data reveal dramatic, persistent gaps by race.1 These numbers point to an urgent need for policy change to reverse these trends. By 2020, nearly one-third of Connecticut's population and nearly half of the youngest workers (25-29 year olds) will be non-white.2 If we fail to increase graduation rates significantly, especially for students of color, we risk seeing a continued increase in the proportion of children who are not prepared for success in our state--and we put our state's economic future in peril.
As with previous years, our analysis also reveals that Connecticut State Department of Education graduation rates are significantly higher than the rates reported in Education Week's Diplomas Count report. Edu- cation Week uses a more accurate cohort method to calculate these rates. Connecticut plans to use this method beginning with the class of 2009.3 The analyses in this report draw on data for the Class of 2008, which is the most recent data available from both the Connecticut State Depart- ment of Education and from Education Week's Diplomas Count report.4
The Baltimore school system will launch its first districtwide Saturday School initiative in December, a program promised by city schools CEO Andrés Alonso to help remedy declining scores on state tests.
The $3 million Saturday School program will run for 10 weeks, primarily targeting students who scored basic in math on the 2011 Maryland School Assessments. Students in grades four through eight are eligible for the program, which will offer between 20 and 30 hours of additional math instruction for up to 7,000 students before the 2012 assessments in March.
A principal whose school will host one of the programs said she is convinced that the additional instructional time will benefit her students.
Back in January, we launched the Get Smart Connecticut campaign, calling on our state leaders to staff smart (improve the way we evaluate and retain teachers) and spend smart (fix our broken school funding system). This is our report
to you, the people who seek meaningful education reform in Connecticut, about what happened during the 2011 legislative session.
To be sure, the legislature made some modest gains on the education front. But as an advocacy movement, we hold our leaders and ourselves accountable for meaningful policy change, the kind of change that will close our state's achievement gap and improve opportunities for even our highest performing students. How did we do on our two legislative goals? Well, to put it plainly, we got bupkis. That's right--the legislature did not pass any legislation to improve Connecticut's teacher evaluation and layoff policies or to fix our broken school finance system.
We could look at that and say, wow, nothing happened, so let's just pack it up and go home. But we have no desire to call it quits. In fact, we're more motivated now than ever to push forward. Despite the fact that legislation on these two issues was not enacted, we're proud that the statewide conversation about wholesale education reform has changed dramatically during this campaign. When we consider the public dialogue around fixing the education funding system and effectively evaluating teachers, we are incredibly hopeful.
While students at a Toronto school were aghast when administrators banned hard balls from their playground this week, the decision isn't a new one.
Debate on whether kids should be playing with sponge balls in lieu of harder play objects has raged on in schools across Canada and beyond.
Almost two weeks ago, a student in St. Catharines, Ont. managed to overturn his school's ban on all balls except basketballs.
Ten-year-old Mathew Taylor started a petition and arranged a meeting with the principal of Lockview Public School, the Niagara Falls Review reported. Thanks in part to his efforts, the report said balls have returned to the school's playground.
Washington state education officials know a lot more about your kids than they ever knew about you.
They can now track a child from kindergarten through college enrollment and soon will be able to tell you everything about every kid who has gone to school in Washington from preschool through their first job.
Everything includes every school they attended, every achievement test they passed or failed, their ethnic identity, whether they qualified for free lunch, what college they chose, if they had to take remedial courses, when they started college, and more.
Of course this information is anonymous to outside viewers, including researchers and the public, but it gives local school officials a lot to comb through to find ways to improve their preparation of students for college and the world.
Last week, I posted a quick and dirty reading of the DPI/WASD survey on the impact of the biennial budget on school districts. I thought that the survey needs a more thorough vetting but that it seemed to be a polemical document and did not support the claims of disaster that some are making in response to it.
Jay Bullock tries to defend the survey but I am afraid that he totally misses the mark. I have no reason to doubt that a number of districts had some kind of staff reduction. Most did not but it appears that somewhere in the neighborhood of 42% of the surveyed districts did.
But the doesn't tell us much. How deep were the reductions? How do they relate to changes in enrollment? What impact, if any, do they have on the delivery of services. Jay thinks that any reduction in staffing is a catastrophe, writing "[s]o, yes, a lot of districts were able to stave off disaster in this area but, you know, a full third didn't. " (emphasis in original)
Ellen Lindgren, 62, has served on the Middleton Cross Plains Area Board of Education for 17 years. She is currently the board president. Lindgren became involved with issues affecting children and schools when her oldest child -- now in his early 30s and a high school social studies teacher in California -- was in pre-school. All three of her children attended public elementary, middle and high schools in the Middleton area district.
A registered nurse who has experience on both sides of the bargaining table, she is now mostly retired. Even before Gov. Scott Walker announced unprecedented cuts in state funding for Wisconsin public schools last spring, Lindgren had been raising her voice to protest nearly two decades of state-imposed revenue caps that made it difficult, even in affluent communities like hers, to balance school budgets and keep up with inflationary costs.
Now she is speaking out even more forcefully on a number of topics, including the governor's budget, which she says is balanced on the backs of teachers, his near elimination of collective bargaining and his support for voucher schools over funding for conventional public schools.
Last week, Lindgren took questions from members of the press during a telephone conference call with Mike Tate, chair of Wisconsin's Democratic Party. Lindgren was objecting to a recent TV ad that touts the governor's record of helping school boards balance their budgets and features Karin Rajcinek, a recently elected Waukesha School Board member who praises Walker for his efforts.
Redistributed state tax spending for K-12 is coming back to earth after decades of growth. It would certainly be useful to debate statewide priorities, though Wisconsin is not facing another round of budget changes, like California...
Response to P4-5 of the Admin Analysis (No College Going Culture) [Page 23 of BP][Response] MMSD and the Boys & Girls Club have done an excellent job implementing the AVID/TOPS program in MMSD's four high schools. While AVID is beginning to build a college going culture among the students it serves (students with 2.0 - 3.5 GPAs), more than 60% of African American high school students in MMSD, for example, have GPAs below a 2.0 and therefore do not qualify for AVID. At 380 students, AVID serves just 10% of all students of color enrolled in MMSD high schools.
While the Urban League believes AVID/TOPS should continue to grow to serve more students, it also believes MMSD must invest more resources in programs like Schools of Hope, MSCR, Aspira/Juventud, ACT Prep, Culturally Relevant Teaching and Commonwealth's middle school careers program.
It must also invest in a system-wide, whole school reform agenda that addresses not only educational skill-building among students, but establishes a college going culture in all of
its schools for all students while addressing curriculum quality, instructional and school innovation, teacher effectiveness, diversity hiring and parent engagement at the same time. ULGM is ready to help MMSD accomplish these goals.
Response to P6 of the Admin Analysis (NO COLLEGE GOING CULTURE) [Page 23 of BP]
[Response] While MMSD offers advanced placement classes, very few African American and Latino students enroll in or successfully complete AP classes by the end of their senior year (see page 5 of the Madison Prep Business Plan). Nearly half of African American and Latino males don't make it to senior year. Additionally, MMSD states that its students "opt to participate," meaning, they have a choice of whether or not to take such classes. At Madison Prep, all students will be required to take rigorous, college preparatory courses and all Madison Prep seniors will complete all IB examinations by the end of their senior years, which are very rigorous assessments.
E. Response to questions from P7 of Admin Analysis (STUDENT PERFORMANCE MEASURES) [Page 29 of BP]
[Response] The Urban League acknowledges that WKCE scores of proficient are not adequate to predict success for college and career readiness. In the Madison Prep business plan, WKCE is not mentioned; instead, ULGM mentions "Wisconsin's state assessment system." It is ULGM's understanding that by the time Madison Prep reaches the fifth and final year of its first charter school contract, Wisconsin will have implemented all of the new standards and assessments affiliated with the Common Core State Standards that it adopted last year. ULGM anticipates that these assessments will be more rigorous and will have an appropriate measurement for "proficiency" that is consistent with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and work. Additionally, Madison Prep will provide several supports to assist students below proficiency. These strategies are explained in Madison Prep's business and education plans.
F. Response to Recommendation on P7 of Admin Analysis (STUDENT PERFORMANCE MEASURES) [Page 29 of BP]
[Response] Madison Prep will adjust its goals in its charter school contract to be commensurate with existing state and district accountability standards. However, to move a school whose student body will likely have a sizeable number of young people who are significantly behind academically to 100% proficiency in one academic year will require a miracle sent from heaven.
Recipe for a revolution in school lunches Healthful offerings like saffron rice, Jerusalem salad and free-range chicken are a low-cost hit with low-income students.
For lunch, Josh Rivera chose a plate of saffron rice, Jerusalem salad and a Greek-marinated kebab of free-range chicken raised without antibiotics.
"Last year I used to get a burger and pizza, but they were really greasy," the high school sophomore said. "This is a lot tastier than before."
Lynn Vo, a sophomore who was eating organic fruit salad along with penne in a Bolognese sauce made with grass-fed beef, agreed. "Last year the pasta tasted like sweat," she said. "But this year it's really good."
It's astonishing enough that notoriously picky high schoolers would have something nice to say about their cafeteria, in this case the one at Niles North High School in Skokie, Ill., just north of Chicago. But these meals containing premium ingredients are provided free to low-income students or sold for $2.25 at most.
Although he didn't ask for it in his re-election campaign, Mayor Greg Ballard could become the boss of Indianapolis Public Schools in the coming year.
The most likely plan would include mayoral appointment of the School Board, combined with a decentralization of IPS. Schools would have an independence similar to what charter schools have, along with strict accountability to the mayor for performance.
A formal proposal along these lines will come from The Mind Trust, a local education reform organization led by David Harris, who was the city's charter school czar during Bart Peterson's administration. A shift in oversight of IPS would have to be approved by the General Assembly and Gov. Mitch Daniels. Informal talks about IPS reform took place earlier this year among Republican and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly as well as Indianapolis civic leaders.
Of Milwaukee's 187 elementary schools, only a dozen exceeded the statewide average in reading on Wisconsin's standardized test last year, according to statistics compiled on the whole range of schools in the city by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce. When it comes to math, only 22 of those schools made that grade.
Shouldn't parents have easy access to this information? Shouldn't they know which schools didn't make the grade?
We think so, and so does the MMAC.
MMAC and an array of education experts, including Howard Fuller of Marquette's Institute for the Transformation of Learning, and UW-Madison's Value-Added Research Center, are developing a community "report card" for all city schools. The "report card" would include schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system but also voucher and charter schools outside of the traditional district. While a wealth of data is available for all public schools on the state Department of Public Instruction website, creating an easily accessible, easily digestible common report makes sense to us. Look for that new "report card" sometime after the first of the year.
Newt Gingrich has some unconventional ideas about education reform. He wants every state to open a work-study college where students work 20 hours a week during the school year and full-time in the summer and then graduate debt-free.
In poverty stricken K-12 districts, Mr. Gingrich said that schools should enlist students as young as 9 to14 to mop hallways and bathrooms, and pay them a wage. Currently child-labor laws and unions keep poor students from bootstrapping their way into middle class, Mr. Gingrich said.
"This is something that no liberal wants to deal with," he told an audience at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard on Friday, according to Politico.
A Dane County judge on Monday ordered the Madison School District to turn over more than 1,000 sick notes submitted by teachers who didn't come to work in February during mass protests over collective bargaining.
Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colas said the district violated the state's Open Records Law by issuing a blanket denial to a request for the notes from the Wisconsin State Journal rather than reviewing each note individually.
Under the records law, government agencies must make public the records they maintain in most circumstances.
State Journal editor John Smalley said the court ruling was a victory for open records and government accountability. He said the newspaper was not planning to publish individual teacher names but rather report on the general nature of the sick notes the district received from employees.
Let's see: Longer school year, parent report cards, meaningful teacher evaluations and bonus pay, union staff, teacher compensation of between $60,000 and $65,000.
Sounds about right to me. Where do I sign up?
Unfortunately, I can't, because while this seems like a pretty good model for a proposed charter school targeting under-performing, low-income minority students -- really, for any public school -- it was looking less and less possible last week.
The sticking points are an overly rigid Madison teachers union contract and a punitive new state law that pretty much makes tinkering with that contract tantamount to killing it.
Or, to put it another way, the issue, as it so often is, is money.
Under the proposal released last month by the backers of Madison Preparatory Academy, the school would employ union teachers at salaries of about $47,000, with benefits bringing total compensation to between $60,000 and $65,000.
In its own analysis of Madison Prep's financials, though, the district found the school would be required to pay about $76,000 per teacher, with benefits bringing total compensation to about $100,000.
As California's budget crisis deepens, many fear that education funding could soon be placed back on the chopping block. Per-student funding of K-12 schools has already been reduced by more than 20 percent. If budgets are cut further, will it even be possible to get a high-quality education in California public schools?
The simple answer is yes. A high-quality education might be priceless in today's economy. But it doesn't have to be overly expensive to provide.
In this recession, nearly every state has already cut services. In fact, "elementary and high schools are receiving less state funding than last year in at least 37 states," according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
But if we operate under the assumption that primary and secondary education have to be expensive to be good, we will be needlessly trading quality for austerity and thereby shortchange students.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has declined to release to The Times the names of teachers and their scores indicating their effectiveness in raising student performance.
The nation's second-largest school district calculated confidential "academic growth over time" ratings for about 12,000 math and English teachers last year. This fall, the district issued new ones to about 14,000 instructors that can also be viewed by their principals. The scores are based on an analysis of a student's performance on several years of standardized tests and estimate a teacher's role in raising or lowering student achievement.
Teachers' unions and some other education-related groups in Michigan have increased their spending to lobby state officials in 2011, largely in response to sweeping changes in school policy and budget cuts adopted by the Republican-led state Legislature.
The Michigan Education Association, the state's largest teachers' union, reported lobbying expenses of $324,197 for the first seven months of the year, according to state records. The Michigan chapter of the American Federation of Teachers reported expenses of $119,748. That's a combined increase of about 11% compared with the same period in 2010.
The unions have opposed much of the education-related legislation passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder so far this year. The changes include making teacher performance the key factor in awarding tenure and deciding layoffs rather than seniority, a law that gives state-appointed emergency managers for school districts and cities more power, and education funding cuts adopted as part of the budget year that began Oct. 1.
While giving tours of Leopold Elementary to prospective area home buyers, Principal John Burkholder counters "myths" about overcrowding, chaotic hallways and "that we are a black hole when it comes to education."
"I always give them a challenge when I take the tour to find a chaotic hallway." Burkholder said, noting the school is at 82 percent capacity this year and calmer than it was as recently as five years ago.
But some parents also ask about one stigma that's harder to dispel -- Leopold is designated as a failing school under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The designation and related sanctions, which cost the Madison School District nearly $300,000 this year, were imposed despite a UW-Madison analysis showing Leopold students made some of the biggest improvements in the district on state test scores last year.
Late last week I got an email from Kaleem Caire, Urban League CEO and champion of the Madison Preparatory Academy charter school proposal.
Caire was unhappy with the way I had characterized the latest version of the charter school proposal.
In a blog post following the Madison Prep board's decision late Wednesday to develop the proposed school as what's known as a "non-instrumentality" of the school district, I described this type of school as being "free from district oversight."
While it's true that the entire point of establishing a non-instrumentality charter school is to give the organization maximum freedom and flexibility in the way it operates on a day-to-day basis, I agree it would be more accurate to describe it as "largely free of district oversight," or "free of routine oversight by the School Board."
In his message, Caire asked me, and my fellow reporter, Matt DeFour from the Wisconsin State Journal, to correct our descriptions of the proposed school, which will be approved or denied by the Madison School Board in the coming weeks.
In his message, Caire writes, "Madison Prep will be governed by MMSD's Board of Education. In your stories today, you (or the quotes you provide) say we will not be. This continues to be a subject of public conversation and it is just not true."
I wonder if other Madison School District programs, many spending far larger sums, receive similar substantive scrutiny compared with the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB charter school? The District's math (related math task force) and reading programs come to mind.
Ideally, the local media might dig into curricular performance across the spectrum, over time along with related expenditures and staffing.
The unseen academy: As officialdom's demands for meaningless Transparency and Information multiply, Thomas Docherty asks: has clandestine scholarship become the only way to carry out real research and teaching?
For a number of years, the university, in common with much of public life in general, has become obsessed with the need to present itself to the world through the twin pillars of Transparency and Information. It is taken for granted that we will piously revere, and robustly comply with, the demands of these iconic towers. Ostensibly, demands for Transparency and Information are positively good: after all, who would want important decisions to be based on a lack of information; and who would want procedures to be covert, operated according to unspoken laws or whimsy, and governed by secretive cabals?
But Information and Transparency are not as innocuous as they seem, especially in the university. When unquestioning respect for them is simply taken for granted as an axiomatic good, they start to assume the power of the obsessive fetish, and the price of fealty exacted is high. Transparency and Information become the means of securing the university's official conformity with the prevailing social or governmental orthodoxy and dogma. When they assume a primary importance, they govern the official identity of the university, and they thereby deprive the institution of the capacity to make any serious claim for a cultural function beyond the society's or the government's official views of the academy.
With college costs skyrocketing and the number of jobs for new grads on the decline, it's no wonder that students are questioning whether a degree is worth the investment. But given that the jobs of the future are projected to require some form of post-secondary education, a key question is how to provide academic knowledge and industry-specific training that will prepare students for the future. The answer might come from a throwback to the Middle Ages: apprenticeships.
Traditionally, we think of interning as the way for students to get on-the-job experience. But internships vary in quality and often aren't paid, which means that students from low-income backgrounds are unable to take advantage of the opportunity. Apprenticeships offer a new model, combining paid on-the-job training with college or trade school classes.
The demand for apprenticeships is particularly acute in the United Kingdom, where a recent BBC survey of high schoolers revealed that two-thirds say they'd forgo attending college in favor of entering an apprenticeship. Businesses there also support the apprenticeship revival. Adrian Thomas, head of resourcing for Network Rail, a company that maintains the U.K.'s rail infrastructure told The Independent that "the investment that we make in our apprentices is driven by needing people with the right skills coming in to support our maintenance teams." Thomas says organizing an apprenticeship program makes "both economic and safety sense," because without the trainees, his company would be in the position of having to look outside the country for employees, or retrain workers from other industries.
Listen to the pundits, and public education has a Goldilocks problem. Are teachers being overpaid, underpaid or paid just right? Few arguments in education are as contentious -- or as misleading. A report released Nov. 1 by two conservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, set off fireworks with the claim that teachers are overpaid by a collective $120 billion each year and that their pensions, health care and other benefits make their total compensation 52% higher than "fair market levels."
The report looked at a variety of factors to reach its conclusion. Some are well known issues; for instance, teachers enjoy more generous benefits than most workers. But the analysis also rested on a variety of debatable assumptions about the quality of the teaching force, the job security that teachers have and opportunities for teachers in the private sector. Only by accepting all of the authors' assumptions do you reach the eye-popping $120 billion figure.
Gov. Chris Christie Wednesday unveiled what he describes as a comprehensive education reform agenda to address teacher accountability, improving low-performing schools, and rewarding those that do better.
The governor said the plan, unveiled in an No Child Left Behind waiver application to the U.S. Department of Education, is shaped in a manner consistent with President Obama's national education reform package and includes his education proposals that are awaiting consideration in the Democratic-controlled Legislature.
"There is no issue more important to the future of our state and country than putting the opportunity of a quality education within every child's reach, no matter their zip code or economic circumstances," Christie said. "Our education reforms, contained in four specific bills sitting in the Legislature today, are aggressive in meeting this challenge, bipartisan and in-line with the Obama Administration's national agenda to raise standards, strengthen accountability systems, support effective teachers and focus more resources to the classroom.
The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.
HOW SHOULD WE characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn't be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.
The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.
Wednesday I wrote about some of the ways collective bargaining can have a monetary cost. Last night the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) provided an example of how its reform has given local governments a path to financial stability. The MPS board, reports Erin Richards in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, approved by a vote of 6-3 a set of reforms projected to reduce the district's post-retirement benefit liability by $900 million over the next thirty years.
The National Day of Listening is a new national holiday started by StoryCorps in 2008. On the day after Thanksgiving, StoryCorps asks all Americans to take an hour to record an interview with a loved one, using recording equipment that is readily available in most homes, such as computers, iPhones, and tape recorders, along with StoryCorps' free Do-It-Yourself Instruction Guide.
Celebrating the National Day of Listening provides a noncommercial alternative to "Black Friday" shopping sprees. Tens of thousands of Americans have participated in the National Day of Listening, and educators and community organizations have incorporated StoryCorps' interviewing techniques into their programs.
Taxpayers in Zion-Benton Township High School District can now compare contract proposals put forward by the union and school board.
The proposals are posted online on the Web site of the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board at http://www2.illinois.gov/elrb/Pages/FinalOffers.aspx. The two sides have been negotiating since April 21 and after several mediation sessions, the district declared an impasse on Oct. 31.
The online posting is mandated under SB7, the state's school reform law, which orders more transparency in contract negotiations. The law stipulates that any unsuccessful mediation be followed by publication of last best offers -- a move intended to help the public understand unresolved issues and positions taken by each side.
Keith Nelson says it has been a godsend for Wisconsin Academy to take part in Milwaukee's school voucher program. Thirteen voucher students are enrolled this fall, which stands to bring the school more than $83,000 in public money this school year.
The 13 students are less than a thousandth of the 23,198 city of Milwaukee residents whose education in private schools - the vast majority of them religious - is being supported by tax dollars this fall.
But the Wisconsin Academy involvement is eye-catching: The coed boarding high school with about 100 students is in Columbus, northeast of Madison and more than 70 miles from Milwaukee.
And the school's involvement illustrates the core essence of the voucher program. Whether you find it wonderful, enraging or simply really interesting, it is (best as I've ever figured out) a fact that nowhere in America, present or past, has so much public money been spent on sending children to religious schools. Both the Wisconsin and United States supreme courts have found this constitutional.
Does FERPA ban schools from allowing students to post their schoolwork on the open Web?
Of the trio of laws that address children's and students' privacy and safety online, FERPA is often the one least cited outside of educational circles. The other two, COPPA and CIPA, tend to be in the news more often; the former as it relates to some of the ongoing discussions about privacy and social networking, the latter as it relates to BYOD and filtering programs. But in all cases, there seems to be a growing gulf between the laws and their practical application or interpretation, particularly since these pieces of legislation are quite old: COPPA was enacted in 1998, and CIPA in 2000. FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, dates all the way back to 1974.
FERPA is meant to give students control over access to and disclosure of their educational records. This prevents schools from divulging information about a student's grades, behavior or school work to anyone other than the student without that student's consent (with some exceptions, such as to parties involved with student aid or to schools to which students are transferring). The classic example used to explain how FERPA works: you can't post a list of students' names and grades on a bulletin board in the hallway.
Teachers from two East Oakland elementary schools are on a mission to shake up the status quo in the Oakland school district.
This fall, they voted to turn their schools -- ASCEND and Learning Without Limits - into independently run charters so that they could have more control over staffing, curriculum, budgeting and other things, such as the school calendar. Hearings on those charter conversion petitions and others begin at 6 p.m. Monday evening in the district office at 1025 Second Avenue.
But the teachers at these two schools have goals beyond charter conversion. They want to organize like-minded educators around some of their ideas, such as changing the way teachers are evaluated. They also want to do away with a layoff system driven almost entirely by credential and years of service in a district (though they're not against including seniority as a factor). They, like the union's current leaders, think teachers should have more say in what materials they use to teach children.
A lack of leadership and the failure to support and mentor junior colleagues have been highlighted in a major study of the professoriate.
Of the 1,200 academic staff from lower grades who responded to a survey commissioned by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, more than half (53 per cent) said they did not receive sufficient help or advice from professorial staff.
Only about one in seven (14 per cent) said they did receive enough support.
Asked if they had received excellent leadership or mentoring from professors in their university, 26 per cent said "never" and 36 per cent "occasionally". This compares with 9 and 19 per cent who responded "very often" and "quite often", respectively.
The study was led by Linda Evans, a reader in education at the University of Leeds, who revealed the provisional findings to Times Higher Education.
There are some questions every school leader should be able to answer: Are my teachers helping their students learn? Who are the outstanding teachers I need to fight hard to keep? Which teachers aren't meeting my expectations? How can I help my good teachers become great?
As the superintendent of one of the nation's largest school districts, I believe helping our campus leaders answer these questions is the most important part of my job. After all, decades of research show that nothing we can do to accelerate student learning matters more than ensuring a great teacher leads every classroom.
Unfortunately, the teacher-evaluation systems that should help principals answer such questions are often useless. Most evaluation systems rate nearly all teachers "satisfactory," based on infrequent and cursory classroom observations, and they rarely consider how much students are actually learning.
I recently read an editorial piece by Arlene Ackerman, former Philadelphia public schools superintendent and longtime educator, on how she came to the realization that our public education system will not improve on its own. I have come to the same realization, because among other reasons, there is no indication school districts are suddenly going to hold themselves accountable for elevating the academic achievement of all students; or take every step necessary to ensure all students only have effective teachers. There are also just too many people who have a vested interest in keeping the current system intact, who are resistant to even the smallest of changes - let alone the dramatic improvements most of us recognize must be made in order for the system to succeed.
The traditional school establishment and its supporters know if you change the ingredients, it likely changes the recipe. If you change the recipe, you get a different dish; and, there are no real internal motivators to change a system that has served a whole bunch of adults so well for such a long time.
Education is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their government and economic institutions, millions of us still believe in its saving grace. National leaders, from Benjamin Rush on, oversaw plans for extending its benefits more broadly. In the 19th century, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie famously conceived of schools as ladders on which the industrious poor would ascend to a better life, and he spent a good bit of his fortune laying the foundations for such an education society. After World War II, policy makers who believed in the education gospel grew numerous enough to fill stadiums. One by one, the G.I. Bill, the Truman Commission report, and the War on Poverty singled out education as the way of national and personal advance. "The answer to all of our national problems," as Lyndon Johnson put it in 1965, "comes down to one single word: education."
The American education gospel is built around four core beliefs. First, it teaches that access to higher levels of education should be available to everyone, regardless of their background or previous academic performance. Every educational sinner should have a path to redemption. (Most of these paths now run through community colleges.) Second, the gospel teaches that opportunity for a better life is the goal of everyone and that education is the primary -- and perhaps the only -- road to opportunity. Third, it teaches that the country can solve its social problems -- drugs, crime, poverty, and the rest -- by providing more education to the poor. Education instills the knowledge, discipline, and the habits of life that lead to personal renewal and social mobility. And, finally, it teaches that higher levels of education for all will reduce social inequalities, as they will put everyone on a more equal footing. No wonder President Obama and Bill Gates want the country to double its college graduation rate over the next 10 years.
It's easy to get angry at banks and CEOs, especially as more Americans slip below the poverty line while the rich keep getting richer. But if the goal of Occupy Wall Street is improving social mobility in this country, then the movement really needs to focus as much on educational inequality as it does on income inequality. There is perhaps no better example of how the system is rigged against millions of Americans than the education our children receive.
Public schools are obviously not to blame for the mortgage crisis, over-leveraged investment banks or the other triggers of our current economic woes. But when it comes to giving Americans equal opportunity, our schools are demonstrably failing at their task. Today zip codes remain a better predictor of school quality and subsequent opportunities than smarts or hard work. When you think about it, that's a lot more offensive to our values than a lightly regulated banking system.
America's system for financing K-12 education is not neutral about innovation and the use of new technologies. Indeed, that system is stacked against them. To remedy this, our education-funding system needs to shift dramatically. Instead of today's model which rigidly funds programs, staff positions, and administrative structures, instead of schools and students we need an approach in which funding follows the student. At present, America's charter-school finance structure provides the best prototype, but even it does not go far enough. An appropriate school- finance system must also be able to defund ineffective schools and provide space and incentives for online providers to bring their products to the marketplace.
Smaller schools? More charters? Those are yesterday's headlines in the world of school reform. The hot-button topic now is the inclusion of student test scores in teacher evaluations. Yet as school administrators and the teachers union battle it out in current contract negotiations in Los Angeles, who would have guessed that state law addressed this issue long ago?
A lawsuit filed by a group of parents, aided by the reform group EdVoice, claims that the Los Angeles Unified School District must include standardized test scores or some other measure of student progress to comply with the 40-year-old Stull Act. Though filed only against the district, the suit has statewide implications.
The Stull Act mainly concerned itself with the appeals process for teachers who had been fired. But it included some common-sense language about teacher evaluations, instructing school districts to make student progress one of many factors in teachers' performance reviews. In 1999, specifics were added to the law, requiring teacher evaluations to measure that progress in part through state-approved assessments.
November 17, 2011 Madison, Wis. - Last night, by unanimous vote, the Board of Directors of Madison Preparatory Academy announced they would request that the Madison Metropolitan School District's Board of Education approve their proposal to establish it
The Urban League of Madison, via a kind Kaleem Caire email:
November 17, 2011
Madison, Wis. - Last night, by unanimous vote, the Board of Directors of Madison Preparatory Academy announced they would request that the Madison Metropolitan School District's Board of Education approve their proposal to establish its all-boys and all-girls schools as non-instrumentality public charter schools. This means that Madison Preparatory Academy would employ all staff at both schools instead of MMSD, and that Madison Prep's staff would not be members of the district's collective bargaining units.
If approved, the Board of Education would retain oversight of both schools and likely require Madison Prep to submit to annual progress reviews and a five year performance review, both of which would determine if the school should be allowed to continue operating beyond its first five-year contract.
"We have worked for six months to reach agreement with MMSD's administration and Madison Teachers Incorporated on how Madison Prep could operate as a part of the school district and its collective bargaining units while retaining the core elements of its program design and remain cost effective," said Board Chair David Cagigal.
Cagigal further stated, "From the beginning, we were willing to change several aspects of our school design in order to find common ground with MMSD and MTI to operate Madison Prep as a school whose staff would be employed by the district. We achieved agreement on most positions being represented by local unions, including teachers, counselors, custodial staff and food service workers. However, we were not willing to compromise key elements of Madison Prep that were uniquely designed to meet the educational needs of our most at-risk students and close the achievement gap."
During negotiations, MMSD, MTI and the Boards of Madison Prep and the Urban League were informed that Act 10, the state's new law pertaining to collective bargaining, would prohibit MMSD and MTI from providing the flexibility and autonomy Madison Prep would need to effectively implement its model. This included, among other things:
Changing or excluding Madison Prep's strategies for hiring, evaluating and rewarding its principals, faculty and staff for a job well done;
Excluding Madison Prep's plans to contract with multiple providers of psychological and social work services to ensure students and their families receive culturally competent counseling and support, which is not sufficiently available through MMSD; and
Eliminating the school's ability to offer a longer school day and year, which Madison Prep recently learned would prove to be too costly as an MMSD charter school.
On November 1, 2011, after Madison Prep's proposal was submitted to the Board of Education, MMSD shared that operating under staffing and salary provisions listed in the district's existing collective bargaining agreement would cost $13.1 million more in salaries and benefits over five years, as compared to the budget created by the Urban League for Madison Prep's budget.
Cagigal shared, "The week after we submitted our business plan to the Board of Education for consideration, MMSD's administration informed us that they were going to use district averages for salaries, wages and benefits in existing MMSD schools rather than our budget for a new start-up school to determine how much personnel would cost at both Madison Prep schools."
Both MMSD and the Urban League used the same district salary schedule to write their budgets. However, MMSD budgets using salaries of district teachers with 14 years teaching experience and a master's degree while the Urban League budgeted using salaries of teachers with 7 years' experience and a master's degree.
Gloria Ladson Billings, Vice Chair of Madison Prep's Board and the Kellner Professor of Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison stated that, "It has been clear to all parties involved that the Urban League is committed to offering comparable and competitive salaries to its teachers but that with limited resources as a new school, it would have to set salaries and wages at a level that would likely attract educators with less teaching experience than the average MMSD teacher. At the budget level we set, we believe we can accomplish our goal of hiring effective educators and provide them a fair wage for their level of experience."
Madison Prep is also committed to offering bonuses to its entire staff, on top of their salaries, in recognition of their effort and success, as well as the success of their students. This also was not allowed under the current collective bargaining agreement.
Summarizing the decision of Madison Prep's Board, Reverend Richard Jones, Pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church and Madison Prep Board member shared, "Our Board has thought deep and hard about additional ways to compromise around the limitations that Act 10 places on our ability to partner with our teachers' union. However, after consulting parents, community partners and the MMSD Board of Education, we ultimately decided that our children need what Madison Prep will offer, and they need it now. A dream deferred is a dream denied, and we must put the needs of our children first and get Madison Prep going right away. That said, we remain committed to finding creative ways to partner with MMSD and the teachers' union, including having the superintendent of MMSD, or his designee, serve on the Board of Madison Prep so innovation and learning can be shared immediately."
Cagigal further stated that, "It is important for the public to understand that our focus from the beginning has been improving the educational and life outcomes of our most vulnerable students. Forty-eight percent high school graduation and 47 percent incarceration rates are just not acceptable; not for one more day. It is unconscionable that only 1% of Black and 7% of Latino high school seniors are ready for college. We must break from the status quo and take bold steps to close the achievement gap, and be ready and willing to share our success and key learning with MMSD and other school districts so that we can positively impact the lives of all of our children."
The Urban League has informed MMSD's administration and Board of Education that it will share with them an updated version of its business plan this evening. The updated plan will request non-instrumentality status for Madison Prep and address key questions posed in MMSD's administrative analysis of the plan that was shared publicly last week.
The Board of Education is expected to vote on the Madison Prep proposal in December 2011.
Copies of the updated plan will be available on the Urban League (www.ulgm.org) and Madison Prep (www.madison-prep) websites after 9pm CST this evening.
For more information, contact Laura DeRoche Perez at Lderoche@ulgm.org or 608.729.1230.
A Madison School Board vote to approve Madison Preparatory Academy has been delayed until at least December after the proposed charter school's board decided to amend its proposal to use nonunion employees.
The Madison Prep board voted Wednesday night after an analysis by the school district found the pair of single-sex charter schools, geared toward low-income minority students, would cost $10.4 million more than previously estimated if it were to use union staff.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said the district would have to update its analysis based on the new proposal, which means a vote will not happen Nov. 28. A new time line for approval has not been established.
In announcing Wednesday's decision, the Madison Prep board said the state's new collective bargaining law made the school district and teachers union inflexible about how to pay for employing teachers for longer school days and a longer school year, among other issues.
Backers of the Madison Preparatory Academy are now recommending establishing the proposed single-sex public charter school as what's known as a "non-instrumentality" of the district.
Ultimately, that means the school's staff would be non-union, and the Urban League-backed charter school would have an unprecedented degree of autonomy in its operations, free from district oversight.
With the recommendation, made at a meeting Wednesday, Madison Prep supporters, the school district and the local School Board wade into uncharted waters.
Because of the change, school officials will need to revise their administrative analysis of the charter school proposal in advance of a School Board vote on whether to approve the Madison Prep plan.
It looked like a typical Friday reading block in Stephanie Jierski's third-grade class at Van Winkle Elementary.
The students were divided into groups with some reading on their own, some paired to finish assignments and others working with the teachers. Those gathered by Jierski received remediation on compound words.
What a visitor to the Jackson school wouldn't see - the related planning behind the scenes - helps explain why Principal Wanda Walker-Bowen says Jierski is a good teacher.
High School teacher Joseph Thomas, suspended for refusing to meet with a district-assigned peer evaluator, said he hopes for a compromise that will put him back in the classroom.
Thomas said he met with school district officials for more than an hour Monday and told them he would be willing to be evaluated by a middle school teacher with experience in grades 7 through 12. "As long as they're playing by the rules, I fell that I should too," said Thomas, an 18-year teacher.
If that cannot be arranged, Thomas was told he could be suspended without pay, fired and have 10 days to appeal. There was no comment Monday from the district, which suspended Thomas with pay pending an investigation into behavior officials are calling insubordinate.
News of Thomas's suspension generated a variety of reactions.
Students may covet seats in Stanford's popular iPhone and iPad application development course, but you don't need to be in the classroom to take the course.
Anyone with app dreams can follow along online.
Stanford has just released the iOS 5 incarnation of iPhone Application Development on iTunes U, where the public can download course lectures and slides for free. Some of the most talked-about features of Apple's latest operating system include iCloud, streamlined notifications and wireless syncing.
When Stanford's first iPhone apps course appeared online in 2009, it made iTunes history by rocketing to a million downloads in just seven weeks.
Alberto Martín is an engineer and independent iOS developer in Salamanca, Spain. He has been a diligent student of the online app development class since it first appeared.
It would cost cash-strapped California at least $2 billion to meet the requirements for relief from the federal No Child Left Behind law, state officials said.
Although the state Board of Education made no decision at its meeting in Sacramento, the clear implication of a staff report presentation was that California should spurn an opportunity to seek a waiver from federal rules that sanction schools for low test scores. The No Child Left Behind rules are widely unpopular here and elsewhere in the country.
For the first time next year, thousands of Chicago Public Schools teachers will be evaluated based partly on how well their students are doing academically. Many fear they will face dismissal if the standards are not applied fairly.
"It's going to make people really angry," said Ruth Resnick, a librarian at O'Keefe Elementary School, who spoke last week at a public forum about carrying out a new state law that changes how teachers, principals, librarians and other staff are graded.
But state and district leaders say the new evaluations will be better than the decades-old system now in use. They say more thoughtful and effective evaluations will not only increase student achievement, but also provide teachers with better feedback for how to improve.
During the past three decades, Milwaukee no doubt has led the nation in the number of plans advanced to improve K-12 education. With another initiative announced last week, Journal Sentinel readers can be excused for feeling they've heard this story before.
New recommendations - from the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce - are encouraging in one important area. MMAC and its allies have convinced innovative educators from elsewhere to open schools in Milwaukee. Two years ago, I visited a Rocketship charter school in San Jose. It's great news that impressive operation is coming here.
However, the worthwhile goal of adding high-quality charter schools stands in contrast to other aspects of the MMAC plan. Business leaders who will be asked to finance it should apply the kind of scrutiny required in the world where they operate.
The plan comes up short in two major areas. First, it relies on a dated, narrow and misleading description of the major problem. Second, it walks back from the organization's historic commitment to creating a real education marketplace.
A major breakthrough in Michael Gove's education revolution will be heralded tomorrow with the launch of the first-ever 'free schools' for special needs children.pecial needs children Read more: http://www.dailym
And two of Britain's oldest football clubs, Everton and Derby County, are to open free schools for children from difficult backgrounds.
Education Secretary Mr Gove believes the latest batch of establishments will silence critics who claim they are designed to be the elitist preserve of pupils of sharp-elbowed, middle-class parents.
A funny thing happened on the way to reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the sweeping school-reform law better known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB): The debate over reauthorization has spawned a political alliance between the tea party and the teachers unions. These strange bedfellows have teamed up to push for turning teacher-evaluation standards over to the states--in other words, to turn back the clock on educational accountability.
On the right are tea party activists who want the federal government out of everything, including establishing teacher standards. On the left are teachers unions who bridle at the notion of anyone establishing enforceable teacher standards. And in the middle is another generation of American kids who are falling further and further behind their European and Asian counterparts.
Parent-teacher conferences for elementary-school children are scheduled for Tuesday afternoon and evening, and for middle-school children on Wednesday. One teacher explains how his school has been able to draw parents in.
Many teachers and schools are wondering how to get more parents to come to parent-teacher meetings. At my school, the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science, where over 90 percent of parents come to the meetings, something seems to be working well.
What is the school doing to make them want to come? First it expends serious effort. A.M.S., as we call it, took responsibility for reaching out to the parents by making visits to the home of every new student before school started. So, come parent meetings, it is the parents' turn to go out of their way to meet the teachers.
After its big referendum victory last week, Ohio teachers union vice president Bill Leibensperger said "There has always been room to talk. That's what collective bargaining is about. You bring adults around a table to talk about serious issues." He voiced an argument made by union supporters through the fight over Senate Bill 5 (and the similar battle in Wisconsin over public sector union rights): All employees want is the right to bargain; they are more than willing to make concessions during these difficult times.
If we want to win the fight for the more immediate future, we're going to need to take on the unions directly, and take over the school boards.And to be sure, you can find examples of unions--of police, firefighters, even teachers--who have agreed to freeze wages or reduce benefits in order to protect the quality of services or keep colleagues from being laid off. But they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Several members of the audience joined in the discussion over the public's relative support for Quincy schools. Among them was Larry Troxel, a local minister, who said the public has a desire to support education but has lost trust over the years in the School Board's handling of finances.
"I've seen previous boards buy out the contracts of two previous superintendents so they could bring in their own local person to be superintendent," Troxel said.
He also pointed to a previous board decision to build Lincoln Elementary School only to close it and sell it after a relatively short period of time.
"The boards over the last 30 years have lost the confidence of the taxpayers in this community," he said. "And just this sort of argument -- and especially saying that we don't care about education -- is dead wrong. We care. But we don't trust the board that wants to always raise taxes and spend more money, because we've seen money wasted."
Board member Steve Krause said "you can't damn the current board in front of you for past indiscretions."
Every week, middle and high school students are invited to the UW Madison campus to hear a talk designed to stimulate their interest in math and science and then to mingle with professors and their peers over pizza.
Called Madison Math Circle, the activity was started this fall as a replacement for the former High School Math Nights previously run on campus every other week. Organizer Gheorghe Craciun, associate professor in the math and biomolecular chemistry departments, said middle school students are now included because he found high school students are often too busy with other activities to attend.
Kevin Zamzow, who attended the Nov. 7 Madison Math Circle with his son, Noah Zamzow-Schmidt, approached the UW Madison math department about organizing the activity. Math circles are held at campuses around the country although Zamzow doesn't know of another one in Wisconsin.
"I enjoy math," said Noah, 12, a seventh grader at Edgewood Campus School who is taking 10th and 11th grade math classes at Edgewood High School. "I really enjoyed the topic tonight."
If the home-schooling anarchist parents in the Sunday Magazine played to a fantasy of what home schooling could be -- the traveling, the rebellion against the authority of the classroom, the rugged individualist children -- then The Wall Street Journal's counterpoint, "My Teacher Is an App," is the disillusioning reality for many.
The article reports that an estimated 250,000 students in 2010-11 attend school online, sometimes in the form of full-time public cyberschools, sometimes in a cyber "hybrid" school. These children aren't "home schooled" from a statistical point of view; they're enrolled in schools with names that sound like online degree factories (Georgia Cyber Academy, Florida Virtual School), but are legitimately run by states and districts or outsourced to for-profit corporations. They're going to school. At home.
The problems facing the children attending Buffalo's public schools are supposed to be addressed by the School Board. The nine members ran for office because they felt they were the best able to take care of our kids.
The fact is they are not getting the job done; student achievement and graduation rates are both far too low. Board members need to act in new ways and not get bogged down with the same failed ideas. And if they are incapable of seeing that our kids get the education they are entitled to, the state must step in and take over.
The district faces many problems, but the most immediate one is how to turn around its seven failing schools. A total of $42 million is available -- $2 million a year for each school for three years -- to turn those schools around. But first the district must come up with a turnaround plan for each school that is acceptable to the state Education Department. The district must choose from three models outlined by the state. The state also says, for reasons never explained, that the same model can't be used for all seven schools.
The federal Elementary/Secondary Education Act, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act requires that districts and schools make adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward state-established benchmarks in four areas: test participation, reading proficiency, math proficiency, and the other academic indicator: attendance or high school graduation.
This letter is to inform you that your district, or one or more of your schools, has either missed AYP; is identified for improvement; is no longer identified for improvement status; or missed AYP in the prior school year bnt remains in satisfactory status by meeting AYP for the current school year: 2010-11.
The enclosed Preliminary Annual Review of Performance report(s) are color coded according to the following:
A new analysis (PDF) by the Madison school district shows that the budget submitted by the Urban League of Greater Madison for a pair of sex-segregated charter schools could potentially cost the district an additional $13 million over the schools' first five years.
The new numbers came as a shock to Urban League president Kaleem Caire, who says that Madison Prep may pull out of a tentative agreement with Madison Teachers, Inc., that would require Madison Prep to hire mostly union staff.
"It's become clear to us that the most reasonable path to ensure the success of these kids is as a non-instrumentality," says Caire. "Others on our board want to look at a couple of other options, so we're looking at those before we make that final determination."
One of those options would be to scale back the program, including the proposed longer school days and extended school year.
On Nov. 10, Spokane Public Schools hosted a lovely “Breakfast for Community Leaders.” The district’s goal was to assure well-connected and like-minded folks in the city that – as the district put it – it’s “better preparing all students for success after graduation.” A few students also were brought in to “share their stories about the effectiveness of that preparation and what high school is like today.”
Superintendent Nancy Stowell began the breakfast by saying she wanted to “put to rest” the “fingerpointing and blame” the district faced during the 2011 board election. Here are a few examples of how she put things to rest.
Stowell praised the district for higher graduation rates, saying the next challenge is college readiness. Wasn't college readiness always the goal? Most parents think so. So, the district is letting more of the kids leave, and at some point, they'll start getting them ready for postsecondary life? How does that work?
The concept of charter schools is all the more confusing in Wisconsin because we have three types operating in the state. However, all three types do have some basic similarities.
First and most important they are all public schools.
Second, they are all free from many traditional public school regulations.
Third, they all operate under a contract with an authorizer that can be no longer than five years. It is this contract that specifies their regulations and goals.
In one of my previous post entitled what every teacher should know about google. reference was made to the notions of the 21st century learner and how these learners depend wholly on media and social networking to live in this fast_paced world. In today's post i will present two short videos that will hopefully change what some think about teaching. The following videos are among the top educative videos online .
With the advance of technological innovations into our lives , education has been radically transformed and teachers who do not use social media and educational technology in thier teaching no longer fit in the new system.That's why every educator and teacher should reconsider certain values and principles . watch this first one minute 40 seconds video to see the negative side that every teacher must not have
The Star article, "Poverty tightens its grip in cities," described a recent Brookings Institution study on the increasing concentration of poverty in cities, including Kansas City.
Poor public schools, such as the Kansas City School District, are a major factor in creating pockets of poverty. Those with enough resources move out of underperforming districts leaving the poorest of the poor behind.
Reversing this trend requires, among other things, fixing the school district problem. A number of solutions have been proposed, most of which will be as effective as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Real change requires something more fundamental: What the left calls giving "power to the people" and what the right calls being "free to choose."
The Madison Metropolitan School District is one of fewer than 400 public school districts in the nation being honored by the College Board with a place on the 2nd Annual AP® Honor Roll, for simultaneously increasing access to Advanced Placement coursework while maintaining or increasing the percentage of students earning scores of 3 or higher on AP exams. Achieving both of these goals is the ideal scenario for a district's Advanced Placement program, because it indicates that the district is successfully identifying motivated, academically-prepared students who are likely to benefit most from AP coursework.
Since 2009, the MMSD increased the number of students participating in AP from 692 to 824 (up 19 percent), while maintaining the percentage of students earning AP Exam scores of 3 or higher above the 70 percent criteria threshold (87% in 2009, 79% in 2011). The majority of U.S. colleges and universities grant college credit or advanced placement for a score of 3 or above on AP exams.
"We are thrilled with this recognition for AP access and student performance," said Superintendent Dan Nerad. "Obviously, credit goes to the students who score well on AP Exams, and parents and guardians, teachers and other MMSD staff share in this Honor Roll placement. This shows that the Madison School District is on the right path with our work to elevate the performance of all students, but we have much more work to do."
The growing popularity of online public schools lets states and local school districts effectively outsource some teaching functions--to parents.
Students enrolled in an online school full-time are required to work closely with a "learning coach," usually mom or dad, to ensure that they are staying on track in their studies.
For younger students, the learning coach becomes the primary teacher. A typical first-grade language arts lesson, for instance, asks the student to brainstorm a list of words about her favorite place, then write three complete sentences. Parents go online to certify that their child has done the work and to answer questions about its quality--for instance, did the child use proper punctuation?
"It's not about just putting them in front of a computer and saying, 'Here, get this work done,'" says Allison Brown, who has three young children attending Georgia Cyber Academy, a statewide online charter school run by the private firm K12 Inc.
SEATTLE School Board President Steve Sundquist's re-election defeat underscores the axiom that no good deed goes unpunished.
A good board member is exiting.
The Seattle Times endorsed Sundquist, inspired by his background as a proven business leader with deep roots of volunteerism in our local schools. Sundquist was a calm and able presence during some of the district's most contentious times. He did not hesitate to move the board toward firing Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson and her financial chief in the wake of a small-business-contracting scandal. City Hall and state legislators found him someone they could work with.
Perhaps Sundquist's defeat to retired teacher Marty McLaren was to be expected. The election was the first after a year of financial and management upheaval in the Seattle Public Schools. Indeed, a big story last week was the arrest of the former district employee facing felony theft charges connected to the scandal.
"What did you learn in school today, dear?" a mother asks her fourth grader.
"Oh, mom, it was so exciting! We learned to chant slogans and clap and sing protest songs," says her nine-year old after a school field trip to the Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin.
The field trip got mixed up somehow in the on-going political protest of Governor Scott Walker's budget reform law. You know, that hotly-contested-by-unions law curbing certain collective bargaining privileges of entitlement-minded Wisconsin public employees? Yeah, that one. It created quite a a stir in February, causing Senate Democrats to flee to Illinois on behalf of their generous gift-giving friends in, yes, those same public employee unions igniting the protests and the recall elections.
Who knew kids from Portage, Wisconsin, 40 miles north of Madison, would be thrust into the hornets' nest of political protesters, mostly teachers, doing battle with a duly-elected governor and those mean and nasty budget-minded Republicans? Who knew? Not parents, certainly.
Instead of a lesson in state government, the kids got an impromptu lesson in raucous, union-driven, leftist power politics at the State Capitol, still strewn with placards of the February protests against budget reforms to erase a $3.5 billion shortfall. Most of the physical damage to the Capitol done by February protesters occupying it had been repaired, at a cost to taxpayers in the low millions. Despoiling public property is apparently what they do?
Wisconsin (and just about every other state) is involved in developing new state tests. That work is one of the requirements of getting a waiver and, if a bill ever emerges form Congress, it will almost certainly continue to require every state to do testing.
But the new tests aren't scheduled to be in place for three years - in the fall of 2014. So this fall and for at least the next two, Wisconsin's school children and schools will go through the elaborate process of taking a test that still gets lots of attention but seems to be less useful each year it lives on.
I remember a conversation with a well educated Madison parent earlier this year. "My child is doing well, the WKCE reports him scoring in the 95th percentile in math"......
Critique of the District (MMSD)
Page # 23: MPA - No College Going Culture among Madison's New Student Population
The data on student performance and course-taking patterns among students in MMSD paint a clear picture. There is not a prevalent college going culture among Black, Hispanic and some Asian student populations enrolled in MMSD. In fact, the opposite appears to be true. The majority of these students are failing to complete a rigorous curriculum that would adequately prepare them for college and 21st century jobs. Far too many are also failing to complete college requirements, such as the ACT, or failing to graduate from high school.
Page # 23: No College Going Culture among Madison's New Student Population -
MMSD Response
MMSD has taken many steps towards ensuring college attendance eligibility and readiness for our students of color. Efforts include:
AVID/TOPS
East High School became the first MMSD school to implement AVID in the 2007-2008 school year. Teens of Promise or TOPS became synonymous with AVID as the Boys and Girls Club committed to an active partnership to support our program. AVID/TOPS students are defined as:
"AVID targets students in the academic middle - B, C, and even D students - who have the desire to go to college and the willingness to work hard. These are students who are capable of completing rigorous curriculum but are falling short of their
potential. Typically, they will be the first in their families to attend college, and many are from low-income or minority families. AVID pulls these students out of their unchallenging courses and puts them on the college track: acceleration instead of remediation."
The MMSD has 491 students currently enrolled in AVID/TOPS. Of that total, 380 or 77% of students are minority students (27% African-American, 30% Latino, 10% Asian, 10% Multiracial). 67% of MMSD AVID/TOPS students qualify for free and reduced lunch. The 2010- 2011 school year marked an important step in the District's implementation of AVID/TOPS. East High School celebrated its first cohort of AVID/TOPS graduates. East Highs AVID/TOPS class of 2011 had a 100% graduation rate and all of the students are enrolled in a 2-year or 4- year college. East High is also in the beginning stages of planning to become a national demonstration site based on the success of their program. This distinction, determined by the AVID regional site team, would allow high schools from around the country to visit East High School and learn how to plan and implement AVID programs in their schools.
MMSD has a partnership with the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE) and they are conducting a controlled study of the effects of AVID/TOPS students when compared to a comparison groups of students. Early analysis of the study reveals positive gains in nearly every category studied.
AVID pilot studies are underway at two MMSD middle schools and support staff has been allocated in all eleven middle schools to begin building capacity towards a 2012-2013 AVID Middle School experience. The program design is still underway and will take form this summer when school based site teams participate in the AVID Summer Institute training.
I found this commentary on the oft criticized WKCE exams fascinating (one day, wkce results are useful, another day - this document - WKCE's low benchmark is a problem)" (page 7):
Page # 28: MPA - Student Performance Measures:
85% of Madison Prep's Scholars will score at proficient or advanced levels in reading, math, and science on criterion referenced achievement tests after three years of enrollment.
90% of Scholars will graduate on time.
100% of students will complete the SAT and ACT assessments before graduation with 75% achieving a composite score of 22 or higher on the ACT and 1100 on the SAT (composite verbal and math).
100% of students will complete a Destination Plan before graduation.
100% of graduates will qualify for admissions to a four-year college after graduation.
100% of graduates will enroll in postsecondary education after graduation.
Page # 28: Student Performance Measures - MMSD Response:
WKCE scores of proficient are not adequate to predict success for college and career readiness. Cut scores equated with advanced are needed due to the low benchmark of Wisconsin's current state assessment system. What specific steps or actions will be provided for students that are far below proficiency and/or require specialized support services to meet the rigorous requirements of IB?
Recommendation:
No Child Left Behind requires 100% proficiency by 2014. Madison Prep must be held to the same accountability standards as MMSD.
Single-gender classrooms, and, to a lesser degree, single-gender schools, are a hot trend in education circles. In less than a decade, Wisconsin has gone from zero classrooms segregated by gender to more than a dozen scattered across the state. That mirrors increasing numbers throughout the country.
But there's growing pushback from researchers, who claim the desire to separate boys from girls in school is based on what they call "pseudoscience."
In September, the prestigious journal, Science, published results of a study that showed sex segregation did not contribute to increased academic performance and harmed students by making sex stereotypes acceptable. Seven well-regarded researchers, including UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde, write in the article, "A new curriculum, like a new drug or factory production method, often yields a short-term gain because people are motivated by novelty and belief in the innovation. Novelty-based enthusiasm, sample bias and anecdotes account for much of the glowing characterization of (single-sex) education in the media."
In addition, the American Civil Liberties Union has successfully sued on the basis of sex discrimination, recently forcing a public high school in Pittsburgh to abandon its single-sex classrooms and a school board in Louisiana to end its practice of separating boys and girls at a middle schoo
Government health experts recommended Friday that all children be tested for high cholesterol before they reach puberty, in an effort to get an early start in preventing cardiovascular disease.
The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute said a child's first cholesterol check should occur between ages 9 and 11 and the test should be repeated between ages 17 and 21. The American Academy of Pediatrics endorsed the guideline.
The recommendation reflects growing evidence the biological processes that underlie heart attacks and other consequences of cardiovascular disease begin in childhood, even though manifestations of the diseases generally don't strike until middle age or later.
The guidelines also come amid broad concern about growing numbers of American children who are overweight or obese and thus potentially on course for diabetes, high blood pressure and other abnormalities. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 17% of American children are obese, triple the level three decades ago.
More than 100 people turned out for a community meeting on a new charter school proposal Tuesday night on the city's far Northwest Side, with public school teachers pressing freshman Ald. Nicholas Sposato (36th Ward) to block the plan put forward by one of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's staunch allies.
At the urging of Chicago Teachers Union organizers, teachers and union representatives packed the meeting room to oppose the proposal from the United Neighborhood Organization, the city's most prominent Latino community group.
UNO wants to buy a parcel in the ward, at 2102 N. Natchez Ave., for a new school that would open next year. But the proposal for the site in the Galewood neighborhood first needs a zoning change, so Sposato called the meeting to gather feedback from constituents.
The Wall Street Journal's excellent series on jobless young people features an article today on why students study liberal arts in college over STEM subjects, and why so many would-be STEM majors shift to liberal arts, despite the apparent loss of career prospects. Larry Ribstein follows up with commentary suggesting that law school becomes a logical option for students who were badly guided in their choices of majors -- leading them to liberal arts with few skills and few prospects in today's world.
I want to reiterate something I wrote about a few weeks ago about the incentive structures for students. I'm basing this on my current experience as a law professor who talks a lot with students at a mid-tier law school and what led them there, as well as my experience as a parent of a student who will be doing humanities as her major at Rice, a school with world class STEM and world class humanities.
There are a lot of smart students out there who will nonetheless not be able to compete in world class institutions in STEM. Why? They might have, say, near 800s in verbal and writing, and mid 600s in math on the SAT. (This matches up, btw, to Gene Expression blog's mapping of the GRE scores of various college majors for the highest testing of the humanities majors -- the philosophy students, who have about exactly those scores. I'll put up the charts in a later post, but very roughly the verbal and math scores flip for the highest scoring of the sciences -- physics, and are somewhere in the middle for the highest scoring of the social sciences, economics.) At a school like Rice -- and any university ranked above it -- specialization has already taken place, sorting by subject area. A tiny handful of students can be true polymaths, but that's hardly the norm. Instead, the STEM students are sought competitively on a world-wide basis, and it will be academic suicide and frankly impossible for a student who is not at the top of those competitive areas even to pass the classes.
It's time to restructure all of our schools to become inclusive of all of our children.
We have reached the tipping point where it is no longer educationally or morally defensible to continue to segregate students with disabilities. We shouldn't be striving to educate children in the least restrictive environment but rather in the most inclusive one.
Inclusion is founded on social justice principles in which all students are presumed competent and welcomed as valued members of all general education classes and extra-curricular activities in their local schools -- participating and learning alongside their same-age peers in general education instruction based on the general curriculum, and experiencing meaningful social relationships.
Cheryl M. Jorgensen, Ph.D., is a member of the affiliate faculty with the National Center on Inclusive Education at the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire. In 2008 she received the National Down Syndrome Congress Education Award for her leadership and pioneering research supporting the inclusion of students with Down syndrome. She has written this open letter to Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer for New York City schools.
Excellent teachers and excellent education are inseparable. In fact, teacher quality is one of the most important determinants of whether a child succeeds in school and continues to college.
A handful of states have been working hard to recruit and nurture great teachers -- starting with strong, effective evaluation systems. Tennessee has led the charge.
When it comes to improving public schools, ideas can only take us so far. It's effective implementation of those ideas that yields results. Last year, the state passed bold, bipartisan legislation, the First to the Top Act, to create a rigorous teacher and principal evaluation system that has the potential to set an example for the rest of the country. The legislation was supported by the teachers' union, the business community and a wide range of education stakeholders.
It was encouraging to see the state Department of Public Instruction release a framework for evaluating public school teachers that is the product of much time and thought by a broad array of smart people.
I can even ignore that it took until now to devise such a framework when the quality of public school teachers and, indeed, public education itself have been among the hottest of public policy topics since, well, forever.
Harder to ignore is that while the state took a decidedly top-down approach to grading teachers, it's taking a decidedly hands-off approach to how districts use the grades.
DPI's 17-page "preliminary report and recommendations" employs plenty of euphemisms and academia-speak to go into great detail about technical aspects of the proposed evaluation system without saying how the evaluations should be used when it comes to paying teachers -- or dismissing bad ones.
This week the Montana Board of Education voted to become the 45th state to adopt the national Common Core standards. Standards, of course, don't matter at all if they just sit on shelves. If they're serious about ensuring that more students graduate from high school ready to succeed in college or postsecondary training programs, states and school districts have to see them, and the curriculum associated with them, as the organizing principle of public education. Decisions about accountability, teacher preparation, professional development, instructional materials, technology, teacher evaluations, class size, how to use time and even how money is spent have to be made with the standards in mind. They aren't a program. They are the program.
Except, apparently, in California. There the standards, which the state board of education voted to adopt in August of 2010, are being treated as an add-on, an unfunded mandate, an optional program.
A new survey of the majority of the state's school districts shows many of them were forced to make staff reductions and increase class sizes as a result of school aid cuts in Gov. Scott Walker's state budget, according to the state Department of Public Instruction and a school administrators association.
But the governor's office, briefed Wednesday afternoon on the survey to be announced at a Thursday news conference, says the Walker administration's reforms are working and points out that the majority of teacher layoffs have been in districts that didn't adopt the reforms - notably in Milwaukee, Kenosha and Janesville.
The survey, by the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, was conducted in the early fall of the current school year, after the state Legislature passed a two-year budget that trimmed $749 million in aid to public school districts, in addition to reductions in the limits of what districts can levy in property taxes.
The survey was sent to administrators in all 424 state school districts, and 83% of the districts responded.
Wisconsin shed about 3,400 education positions this year, triple the number from last year. At least one-third of the state's districts increased elementary class sizes. And at least four in 10 districts are using one-time federal stimulus funds to balance their budgets.
But there have been no widespread reductions in course offerings, and the number of students per teacher, librarian and counselor remained about the same.
Those are the findings of a statewide survey of school superintendents about their 2011-12 budgets. Two-thirds of those responding to the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators survey anticipate next year's staff cuts will be as bad or worse than this year.
The survey didn't ask about property taxes, but the Legislative Fiscal Bureau has projected an average increase of just 0.6 percent on the December tax bills, far less than the average 4.84 percent annual increase over the previous decade.
Today the Department of Public Instruction released the data for a survey done by the Wisconsin Association of Schools District Administrators. The administrators for 353 school districts responded, which accounts for 83% of Wisconsin school districts. The median student to teacher ratio in Wisconsin this year is 13.5 to 1. Attached is a copy of the survey questions, and the raw data responses.
Address the fundamental teaching and learning needs of schools in the Local Education Agency (LEA), especially the academic problems o f low-achieving students.
MMSD has been identified by the State of Wisconsin as a District Identified for Improvement, or DIFI. We entered into this status based on District WKCE assessment scores. The data indicates that sub-groups of students-African American students, English Language Learner Students with Disabilities or Economically Disadvantaged -did not score high enough on the WKCE in one or more areas of reading, math or test participation to meet state criteria.
Under No Child Left Behind, 100% of students are expected to achieve proficient or advanced on the WKCE in four areas by 2014. Student performance goals have been raised every year on a regular schedule since 2001, making targets more and more difficult to reach each year. In addition to the curriculum changes being implemented, the following assessments are also new or being implemented during the 2011-12 school year (see Attachment 1):
Updating the 2009 Scholastic Bowl Longhorns 17 - Badgers 1; Thrive's "Advance Now Competitive Assessment Report"
Peter Theron via a kind Don Severson email:
Earlier this year Wisconsin teachers and their supporters compared Wisconsin and Texas academically and claimed that Wisconsin had better achievement because it ranked higher on ACT/SAT scores. The fact that this claim ignored the ethnic composition of the states, prompted David Burge to use the National Assessment of Educational Progress(NAEP) to compare educational achievement within the same ethnic groups. His conclusion, based on the 2009 NAEP in Reading, Mathematics, and Science (3 subject areas times 2 grades, 4th and 8th, times 3 ethnicities, white, black, and hispanic equals 18 comparisons), was Longhorns 17 - Badgers 1.
The 2011 NAEP results are now available for Reading and
Mathematics. The updated conclusion (2 subject areas times 2 grades, 4th and 8th, times 3 ethnicities, white, black, and hispanic equals 12 comparisons) is Longhorns 12 - Badgers 0. Not only did Texas students outperform Wisconsin students in every one of the twelve ethnicity-controlled comparisons, but Texas students exceeded the national average in all 12 comparisons. Wisconsin students were above the average 3 times, below the average 8 times, and tied the average once.
Again, as in 2009, the achievement gaps were smaller in Texas than in Wisconsin.
Thrive released its "Advance Now Competitive Assessment Report," which compares the Madison Region to competitors Austin, TX, Des Moines, IA, and Lincoln, NE, across the major areas of People, Prosperity and Place, 3MB PDF via a kind Kaleem Caire email.
A common story line in American education policy is that public school teachers are underpaid--"desperately underpaid," according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a recent speech. As former first lady Laura Bush put it: "Salaries are too low. We all know that. We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more."
Good teachers are crucial to a strong economy and a healthy civil society, and they should be paid at a level commensurate with their skills. But the evidence shows that public school teachers' total compensation amounts to roughly $1.50 for every $1 that their skills could garner in a private sector job.
How could that be? First, consider salaries. Public school teachers do receive salaries 19.3% lower than similarly-educated private workers, according to our analysis of Census Bureau data. However, a majority of public school teachers were education majors in college, and more than two in three received their highest degree (typically a master's) in an education-related field. A salary comparison that controls only for years spent in school makes no distinction between degrees in education and those in biology, mathematics, history or other demanding fields.
Last month, Randi Weingarten held a book party for Steven Brill, the veteran journalist and entrepreneur who had just published "Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools," his vivid account of the rise of the school reform movement. When Brill told me this recently, I nearly fell out of my chair. Weingarten, you see, is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and for much of his book, Brill treats Weingarten the way reformers always treat her and her union: as the enemy.
"Class Warfare" takes us into the classrooms of the Harlem Success Academy and other successful charter schools, where the teaching is first-rate and those students lucky enough to be admitted are genuinely learning. It charts the transformation of the Democratic elite, starting with President Obama, from knee-jerk defenders of the status quo to full-throated reform advocates. It recounts the efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to increase the effectiveness of public school teaching. And it tells the stories of the country's two best-known reformers, Joel Klein in New York City and Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., as they push to establish performance measures that will allow them to reward good teachers -- and fire bad ones. (Klein and Rhee left their posts as school department heads last year.)
Today, I walked my first-grade son to our neighborhood public school before joining over 500 leaders converging on New York City to make tangible commitments to promote economic mobility in America at the Opportunity Nation summit. I told Matthew that people were coming virtually every sector -- business, education, non-profit and community organizations, religious institutions and the military -- to focus on how to provide him and his peers from every background a great education and a shot at the American dream. When I dropped Matthew off at his school's front door, he looked at me and warned me with a big smile not to follow him inside -- something I occasionally do partly to make him laugh and partly out of that desire to support him wherever he goes.
I didn't follow my son inside that schoolhouse door. But I have been working hard to determine what commitments I can personally make to provide our kids and all of America's children with tools they can use to create opportunity once they walk as young adults out of our sight-line into America's future.
One must know where one is in order to determine where to go and how to get there, but today's parents face significant challenges in that regard.
XIAO HUA Interview; Chinese International School, Hong Kong
William Hughes Fitzhugh, Founder & Publisher, The Concord Review
1. Please tell us about yourself. What inspired you to start The Concord Review?
Diane Ravitch, an American historian of education, wrote a column in The New York Times in 1985 about the ignorance of history among 17-year-olds in the United States, based on a recent study of 7,000 students, and as a history teacher myself at the time, I was interested to see that what concerned me was a national problem. I did have a few students at my high school who did more than they had to in history, and when I began a sabbatical leave in 1986, I began to think about these issues. In March 1987, it occurred to me that if I had one or two very good students writing history papers for me and perhaps my colleagues had one or two, then in 20,000 United States high schools (and more overseas) there must be a large number of high school students doing exemplary history research papers. In June of 1987, I incorporated The Concord Review to provide a journal for such good work in history. In August 1987, I sent a four-page brochure calling for papers to every high school in the United States, 3,500 high schools in Canada, and 1,500 schools overseas. The papers started coming in, and in the Fall of 1988 I was able to publish the first issue (of now 89 issues) of The Concord Review.
2. What makes for a great history research essay?
In order to write a great history essay it is first necessary to know a lot of history. Students who read as much as they can about a historical topic have a better chance of writing an exemplary history paper. Of course they must make an effort to write so that readers can understand what they are saying and so they will be interested in what they are writing, and they must re-write their papers, but without knowing a good deal about their topic, their paper will probably not be very interesting or very good.
3. Please tell us about some of the most outstanding essays you have received. What made them special?
In 1995, I as able to begin awarding the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes for the best few papers from the 44 published in each volume year of The Concord Review. Many of these papers are now on our website at www.tcr.org, and students and teachers who are interested may read some there. I have several favorites and would be glad to send some to anyone who asks me at fitzhugh@tcr.org.
4. Please tell us about some of your most interesting authors. Where did they go to college, what did they study, and what are they doing now?
About 30% of our authors have gone to Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford and Yale, and many have gone to other good colleges, such as those at Cambridge and Oxford. Three, that I know of, have been named Rhodes Scholars. I work alone, so that I am not able to follow up on authors very well. I know that many are doctors and lawyers and some are professors and entrepreneurs, but I have lost track of almost all of them, for lack of funding and staff to help me keep in touch with them.
5. Please tell us how you evaluate and select essays for publication in The Concord Review.
The purpose of The Concord Review is two-fold. We want to recognize exemplary work in history by secondary students (from 39 countries so far) but we also want to distribute their work to inspire their peers to read more history and work harder on their own research papers, because being able to read nonfiction and write term papers are important skills for future success in college and beyond, and also because students should know more history if they want to be educated. So I look for papers that are historically accurate, well-researched, serious and worth reading.
6. What are your favorite books and why?
I was an English Literature major at Harvard College and I read English Literature at Cambridge for one year, and I still enjoy Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and so on, but I also have a number of favorite historians, such as Martin Gilbert, David McCullough, David Hackett Fischer, James McPherson, G.M. Trevelyan, John Prebble, Max Hastings, and others. I also read a fair number of books on education and contemporary intellectual culture.
7. Do you have any advice on how to write well?
As I suggested, there is no substitute for knowing a lot about the subject you are writing about. I think it helps to read your drafts to a friend or family member as you go along as well. You will find all sorts of things you want to improve or correct as you offer what you write to another person. So, read (study), write, and re-write...that is about it. And read the good writing of other authors.
8. Do you have advice on how students can best prepare themselves to do well in college?
There is a great deal of emphasis, at least in the United States, on math and science, but, in my view, there is much too little attention here on the importance for secondary students of being able to read complete nonfiction books and to write serious (e.g. 6,000-word) research papers. I have heard from a few of my authors that they are mobbed when they get to college by their peers who never had to write a research paper when they were in high school and so have no idea how to do it. Students who write Extended Essays for the International Baccalaureate Diploma have an advantage, as do the many students from all over the world who write history research papers on their own as independent studies and send them to The Concord Review.
When thousands of white students abandoned the Memphis schools 38 years ago rather than attend classes with blacks under a desegregation plan fueled by busing, Joseph A. Clayton went with them. He quit his job as a public school principal to head an all-white private school and later won election to the board of the mostly white suburban district next door.
Now, as the overwhelmingly black Memphis school district is being dissolved into the majority-white Shelby County schools, Mr. Clayton is on the new combined 23-member school board overseeing the marriage. And he warns that the pattern of white flight could repeat itself, with the suburban towns trying to secede and start their own districts.
"There's the same element of fear," said Mr. Clayton, 79. "In the 1970s, it was a physical, personal fear. Today the fear is about the academic decline of the Shelby schools."
Of the nation's 10 largest cities, eight use armed police in some form. And in the ninth city, New York, officers receive far more training and scrutiny prior to hiring.
Five of those city school districts - San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio - employ their own police officers, who receive comparable training to regular city police.
Chicago, Phoenix, and the San Jose Unified School District base city police officers in some of their buildings. In the case of San Jose, the officers are not in uniform, but rather dress casually in polo shirts and conceal their weapons.
In New York - the nation's largest school system - the city police department's school-safety division staffs the schools with unarmed officers who receive 14 weeks of training, intensive background scrutiny, and drug and character screening. (Armed precinct-based officers, however, also come into the schools.)
The nation's largest cities are by no means alone.
The Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of large urban districts, surveyed members in 2004 and found that 29 of 37 respondents indicated its officers were armed. Las Vegas, Miami, and Indianapolis are among other bigger districts with their own police forces.
For years, this veteran teacher had received exemplary evaluations but now was feeling pressured to raise her students' test scores. Her principal criticized her teaching and would show up to take notes on her class. She knew the material would be used against her one day.
"My principal told me right to my face that she -- she was feeling sorry for me because I don't know how to teach," the instructor said.
The Los Angeles educator, who did not want to be identified, is one of about three dozen in the state accused this year of cheating, lesser misconduct or mistakes on standardized achievement tests.
Banning sugar-filled sodas from American schools as an effort to combat childhood obesity doesn't reduce overall consumption levels of sweetened beverages, research found.
In U.S. states that banned only soda, about 30 percent of middle-school students still purchased sugary drinks like sports and fruit beverages at school, similar to states that had no policy, according to a study released online today in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. In states that banned all sugar-sweetened beverages, students still consumed the drinks outside of school, the researchers said.
Over the past 25 years, children have gotten more of their calories from sugary beverages and consumption of the drinks has been associated with childhood obesity and weight gain, the authors said. Today's study is the first to look at whether efforts by states to curb these drinks really works, said Daniel Taber, the lead study author.
Marla Sole recognizes the positive success stories of many charter schools ("approximately four times as likely as public schools to be ranked in the top 5%"), but then she comments that charter schools "were approximately two-and-a-half times as likely as public schools to be ranked in the bottom 5%" (Letters, Oct. 31).
What Ms. Sole fails to mention is that when a charter school is failing, its charter can be revoked. The parents also have the opportunity to send their children to a different school, possibly one of those in the top 5%. When the public school is a failure, we do not close it. Instead we hear calls demanding even more money to fix the failure, and we continue to force the children to attend that failing school, with no other opportunities for an education. Charter schools have that flexibility to be reformed and if that fails, the school is shut down.
An overwhelming majority of Newport-Mesa Unified School District teachers have no confidence in their beleaguered superintendent, according to a vote announced by the teachers union.
Ballots sent out Oct. 20 to the teachers in the Newport-Mesa Federation of Teachers showed 91.2% voted no confidence in Jeffrey Hubbard, union officials confirmed.
Of the 959 members, 379 participated -- a nearly 40% voter turnout.
The substitution of government debt for consumer debt helped end the recession and start a recovery, economists say, but it leaves the nation's long-term economic health in peril.
Households have reduced debt by $549 billion since 2007, mostly by cutting mortgages through defaults and paying down credit cards. During that time, the federal government has added more than $4 trillion in debt, pushing the country's total borrowing to a record $36.5 trillion, excluding the financial industry, according to the Federal Reserve.
"Government will eventually need to reduce the deficit," says Susan Lund, research director at McKinsey Global Institute, part of the business consulting firm. "But it's a very difficult balancing act to avoid withdrawing stimulus too soon while stopping before you borrow too much."
Anyone following what's been happening in Wisconsin's public schools can see what Gov. Scott Walker's $1.6 billion budget cut and extreme policies have meant for our students and communities.
Across the state, class sizes are on the rise and students have fewer opportunities -- including in key areas such as reading, math and science.
Walker has taken an ax to our public schools, while at the same time increasing taxpayer funding of private schools. He's turned his back on the Wisconsin tradition of valuing public education. As a result, his extreme policies are hurting our students.
The governor says everything is fine, but we can see for ourselves that he's not telling the whole story. With 97 percent of local school districts receiving less state aid this year, and a promise of more cuts next year, local schools will continue to struggle.
On Sept. 28, 2011, a PDC complaint was filed with the Public Disclosure Commission because of concerns noted in multiple public records from Spokane Public Schools. This PDC complaint is about Washington State's RCW 42.17.130.
Daniel Schwartz could have attended an Ivy League school if he wanted to. He just doesn't see the value.
Mr. Schwartz, 18 years old, was accepted at Cornell University but enrolled instead at City University of New York's Macaulay Honors College, which is free.
Mr. Schwartz says his family could have afforded Cornell's tuition, with help from scholarships and loans. But he wants to be a doctor and thinks medical school, which could easily cost upward of $45,000 a year for a private institution, is a more important investment. It wasn't "worth it to spend $50,000-plus a year for a bachelor's degree," he says.
As student-loan default rates climb and college graduates fail to land jobs, an increasing number of students are betting they can get just as far with a degree from a less-expensive school as they can with a diploma from an elite school--without having to take on debt.
DFER Wisconsin headed into the fall of 2011 with three major objectives: two of objectives required action by the state legislature (a phrase that is oxymoronic at best right now) and the third required action by the Milwaukee City Council. I'm happy to say we won more than we lost, but there is plenty of work left to be done.
Six million, give or take. That's how many children are in public school in California.
Arguably, we won't have a strong economic future if they don't get a good education.
But boy, do the grown-ups love to muck things up for the kids.
Politics, ego, endless skirmishes between school districts and teacher unions -- it all gets in the way of the kids' best interests. And California spends less per pupil than all but a few states when you adjust for regional cost-of-living differences, leading to an annual ritual of laying off thousands of teachers and other staffers.
But in Los Angeles, the status quo is under attack.
Parents and education advocates are suing L.A. Unified in an effort to enforce an overlooked state law that requires teacher and principal evaluations to be linked to student achievement.
The Design Team believes that the successful development and implementation of the new performance-based evaluation system is dependent upon the following guiding principles,
which define the central focus of the entire evaluation system. The guiding principles of the educator evaluation system are:
The ultimate goal of education is student learning. Effective educators are essential to achieving that goal for all students. We believe it is imperative that students have highly effective teams of educators to support them throughout their public education. We further believe that effective practice leading to better educational achievement requires continuous improvement and monitoring.
A strong evaluation system for educators is designed to provide information that supports decisions intended to ensure continuous individual and system effectiveness. The system must be well-articulated, manageable
The new results once again underscore how true it is that the reading proficiency of African-American students is in a crisis. But the smugness about kids elsewhere in the state, especially white kids, is misguided.
Here are a few slices of how Wisconsin kids did in the latest round of National Assessment of Educational Progress tests:
White fourth-graders scored below the national average for white kids by a statistically significant amount. White eighth-graders scored exactly at the national average.
Wisconsin fourth-graders who don't qualify for free or reduced-price lunch - that is to say, who aren't poor - scored below the national average for such kids, again by a significant amount. Eighth-graders were, again, exactly at the national average.
Only 35% of Wisconsin eighth-graders were rated as proficient or advanced readers. The figures haven't budged since at least 1998.
(In fairness, the national figure is 32%, and it hasn't budged in a long time, either. But there are states such as Massachusetts and Florida, where there have been significant improvements.)
NAEP is a strict grader - Wisconsin's own tests last year rated 86% of eighth-graders proficient or advanced. Some argue NAEP is too strict. However, it uses the same measuring stick for everyone, so comparisons to other states and the nation are fair.
Four years ago Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen predicted that online education would take off slowly and then hit everyone by surprise: the S-curve effect. And indeed, while it initially grew slowly, online education has exploded over the past several years. According to the 2010 Sloan Survey of Online Learning, approximately 5.6 million students took at least one web-based class during the fall 2009 semester, which marked a 21% growth from the previous year. That's up from 45,000 in 2000 and experts predict that online education could reach 14 million in 2014.
Consider a recent Economist article featuring Bill Gates's educational poster child: Khan Academy, founded by Salman Khan in 2006. Khan's business model is simple, yet impactful. As The Economist noted, it flips education on its head. Rather than filling the day with lectures and requiring students to complete exercises after school, Khan focuses on classroom exercises throughout the day and allows students to download more lectures after school. When students arrive at their Silicon Valley suburb classroom with their white MacBooks, they begin their day doing various online learning exercises. The teacher, aware of what her students are working on based on her own monitor screen, then approaches students and provides one-on-one feedback and mentoring, tailoring her message to students' particular learning paces and needs.
Among the many new program integrity rules the U.S. Education Department issued a little over a year ago was one that went relatively unnoticed at the time: a rule that defines the "last date of attendance" for students who withdraw from online programs more stringently than in the past, and differently than for students in a traditional classroom.
At the time, the rule was lost in the hubbub over state authorization rules, the definition of a "credit hour," and other, more controversial, regulations, some of which colleges challenged in Congress or in court. But before the program integrity rules took effect in July 2011 -- and even before they were published publicly, in October 2010 -- the Education Department was already using the new definition of "last date of attendance," which varied considerably from the previous version, to begin investigations and, in some cases, collect financial aid refunds for students who dropped out.
When the Education Department began using the "last day of attendance" rule to evaluate colleges in audits, it had never been publicly announced. In effect, a group of higher education associations has argued, the department was expecting institutions to play a game without knowing the rules.
The teaching profession is crucial to America's soci- ety and economy, but public-school teachers should receive compensation that is neither higher nor lower than market rates. Do teachers currently receive the proper level of compensation? Standard analytical approaches to this question compare teacher salaries to the salaries of similarly educated and experienced private-sector workers, and then add the value of employer contributions toward fringe benefits. These simple comparisons would indicate that public-school teachers are undercompensated. However, comparing teachers to non-teachers presents special challenges not accounted for in the existing literature.
First, formal educational attainment, such as a degree acquired or years of education completed, is not a good proxy for the earnings potential of school teach- ers. Public-school teachers earn less in wages on aver- age than non-teachers with the same level of education, but teacher skills generally lag behind those of other workers with similar "paper" qualifications. We show that:
A new generation of student debtors has seized the public stage. While the demands of the Occupy Wall Street movement are many, college lending reform is near the top of every list. Decades of greed, inattention, and failed policy have created a growing class of young men and women with few prospects of landing jobs good enough to bear the weight of their crushing college loans.
Some activists have called for wholesale student-loan forgiveness--a kind of 21st-century jubilee. That's unlikely. But there's something the federal government can do right now to help students caught by our terribly unjust higher-education financing system: End all federal student-loan defaults forever by moving to income-contingent loans.
The concept is simple. Right now, students pay back their loans on a fixed schedule, typically amortized over 10 years. Since people usually make less money early in their careers, their fixed monthly loan bill is hardest to manage in the first years after graduating (or not) from college. People unlucky enough to graduate during horrible recessions are even more likely to have bad jobs or no jobs and struggle paying back their loans. Not coincidentally, the U.S. Department of Education recently announced a sharp rise in loan defaults.
Teachers have been under a hot spotlight in recent years, blamed for public education's shortcomings. Now the colleges that train them are feeling the heat.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is calling for reforms in the nation's education schools, arguing too many are "mediocre" and send out graduates who aren't ready to teach.
In a speech last month, Duncan noted 62 percent of new teachers reported feeling unprepared. He called that figure from a 2006 study "staggering."
The Florida Department of Education (Reports) has crunched student-test-score data and tied results back to teachers' education schools, looking to tease out which institutions are best. That effort could ramp up into a more-detailed rating system for all Florida's education schools.
The most intense, and controversial, scrutiny likely will come when teacher colleges find themselves graded A to F next year, with the results posted in U.S. News & World Report.
A controversial bill that would have established a state-run authorizing board to help expand the number of independent charter schools in Wisconsin was not able to gather the 17 votes necessary for passage in the state Senate by the end of the day Thursday.
Now, with the current floor session complete and legislators heading home until January, the bill, at least in its current form, is dead.
Whether the bill -- first introduced early last spring -- comes back with enough adjustments to make it palatable during the spring session remains to be seen.
Sources close to Republican legislators at the Capitol say that several GOP senators raised questions about a number of elements of the bill, suggesting it could be difficult to rework it sufficiently to pass muster in a chamber where Republicans have a razor-thin 17-16 majority and Democrats have indicated their opposition.
With only 24 days remaining till the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will vote on the Madison Preparatory Academy charter and only 9 days until the MMSD administration is required to issue an analysis of their proposal (and that is assuming the analysis is issued on a Sunday, otherwise we are talking only one week), there are still many, many unanswered questions concerning the school. Too many unanswered questions.
Where to start?
All officially submitted information (and more) can be found on the district web site (scroll down for the latest iterations, and thanks to the district public info team for doing this).
The issues around instrumentality/non instrumentality and the status of staff in relation to existing union contracts have rightfully been given much attention. It is my understanding that there has been some progress, but things seem to be somewhat stalled on those matters.
Charter schools--public schools of choice that are operated autonomously, outside the direct control of local school districts--have become more prevalent over the past two decades. There is no consensus about whether, on average, charter schools are doing better or worse than conventional public schools at promoting the achievement of their students. Nonetheless, one research finding is clear: Effects vary widely among different charter schools. Many educators, policymakers, and funders are interested in ways to identify and replicate successful charter schools and help other public schools adopt effective charter school practices.
Charter-school management organizations (CMOs), which establish and operate multiple charter schools, represent one prominent attempt to bring high performance to scale. Many CMOs were created in order to replicate educational approaches that appeared to be effective, particularly among disadvantaged students. Attracting substantial philanthropic support, CMO schools have grown rapidly from encompassing about 6 percent of all charter schools in 2000 to about 17 percent of a much larger number of charter schools by 2009 (Miron 2010). Some of these organizations have received laudatory attention through anecdotal reports of dramatic achievement results.
Education think tanks and reformers have been abuzz today with the release of NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores — also known as “The Nation’s Report Card.” The biennial release charts student achievement in math and English in fourth and eighth grades. (For an explainer on all things NAEP, go here.) The 2011 stats showed slight improvement in math across both levels, but reading scores among fourth-graders remained stagnant.
NAEP provides us the data, but officials do not surmise causes or reasons for growth – or lack thereof. That’s why we have eduwonks. Here’s what they had to say (in no particular order):
Rhode Island teachers who receive poor evaluations for five consecutive years will lose their certification under new rules adopted by state Education officials.
Teachers will receive one of four ratings during annual evaluations: highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective. Any teacher deemed "ineffective" for five years in a row will automatically lose their certification.
State Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, says schools should only hold levy votes in even-numbered years, when turnout is already higher for other elections.
He plans to push for such a requirement in law when lawmakers reconvene in January. Garofalo, who chairs the House Education Finance Committee, says the levy bill will be the first his committee will discuss.
"Everybody knows that next Tuesday we're going to see unbelievably low voter turnout," Garofalo said. "The irony is at the same time we're seeing so much press about a $300-million state subsidy for a Vikings stadium, there's going to be $900 million in tax revenue on the ballot next Tuesday -- and there's been very little coverage of it."
Voters in 126 school districts will see tax questions on the ballot next Tuesday. Garofalo cited data from the state Education Department that finds more than 70 percent of referenda pass during odd-numbered years, a number that falls to 52 percent during even-numbered years.
Address the fundamental teaching and learning needs of schools in the Local Education Agency (LEA), especially the academic problems o f low-achieving students.
MMSD has been identified by the State of Wisconsin as a District Identified for Improvement, or DIFI. We entered into this status based on District WKCE assessment scores. The data indicates that sub-groups of students-African American students, English Language Learner Students with Disabilities or Economically Disadvantaged -did not score high enough on the WKCE in one or more areas of reading, math or test participation to meet state criteria.
Under No Child Left Behind, 100% of students are expected to achieve proficient or advanced on the WKCE in four areas by 2014. Student performance goals have been raised every year on a regular schedule since 2001, making targets more and more difficult to reach each year. In addition to the curriculum changes being implemented, the following assessments are also new or being implemented during the 2011-12 school year (see Attachment 1):
The Measures of Academic Progress (MAP): Grades 3-7. MAP is incorporated into the MMSD Balanced Assessment Plan as a computer adaptive benchmark assessment tool for grades 3-7. Administration of the assessment was implemented in spring, 2011.
Cognitive Ability Test (CogAT): Grades 2 and 5. As proposed in the Talented and Gifted Plan approved by the Board of Education in August, 2009, the district requested approval of funds to purchase and score the Cognitive Ability Test (CogAT) which was administered in February, 2011, to all second and fifth graders.
The EPAS System: Explore Grades 8-9, Plan Grade 10, ACT Grade 11. The EPAS system provides a longitudinal, systematic approach to educational and career planning, assessment, instructional support, and evaluation. The system focuses on the integrated, higher-order thinking skills students develop in grades K-12 that are important for success both during and after high school. The EPAS system is linked to the College and Career Readiness standards so that the information gained about student performance can be used to inform instruction around those standards.
Attached are six documents describing programs being implemented for the 2011-12 school year to address the needs of all students.
1. Strategic Plan Document: Year Three (Attachment 2)
2. Strategic Plan Summary of Three Main Focus Areas (Attachment 3)
3. Addressing the Needs of All Learners and Closing the Achievement Gap Through K-12 Alignment (Attachment 4)
4. Scope and Sequence (Attachment 5)
5. The Ideal Graduate from MMSD (Attachment 6)
6. 4K Update to BOE- Program and Sites- (Attachment 7)
Madison School District administrators aren't keeping track of the best classroom instruction. Not all principals create a culture of high expectations for all students. And teachers aren't using the same research-based methods.
Such inconsistencies across the district and within schools -- stemming from Madison's tradition of school and teacher autonomy -- are hurting student achievement, according to a district analysis required under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
"There are problems within the entire system," Superintendent Dan Nerad said. "We do have good practice, but we need to be more consistent and have more fidelity to our practices."
Inconsistencies in teaching and building culture can affect low-income students, who are more likely to move from school to school, and make teacher training less effective, Nerad said.
The analysis is contained in an improvement plan the district is scheduled to discuss with the School Board on Monday and to deliver next week to the state Department of Public Instruction.
In 2010-11, a record number of students took advantage of Wisconsin's open enrollment program to attend school elsewhere than in their own district. The 34,498 participants was 8.1% higher than in 2010 and nearly five times higher than in 2001. Open enrollment numbers varied widely, with 13 districts experiencing net outflows of more than 10% of their student populations and 34 with net inflows of similar magnitude. These findings are detailed in SchoolFacts11, the annual reference book from the Wisconsin Tax- payers Alliance (WISTAX) that provides, for every school district in the state, a wide range of information on enrollment, finance, staffing, and test scores.
In 2010-11, 4.0% of Wisconsin's public school students attended a district other than their own. Dover (26.2%) and South Shore (23.0%) both had net outflows (students leaving less those coming) of more than 20%. Eleven other districts (Florence, Mercer, Neosho, Palmyra-Eagle, Richfield, Stockbridge, Twin Lakes, Washington-Caldwell, Wheatland, Winter, and Wonewoc-Union Center) had net outflows of over 10%.
Charter schools have been a welcome addition to Wisconsin's educational environment. For supporters of education reform, charter schools are a win-win: They are free to adopt curricula that differ from often-rigid public school methods, yet they remain accountable to taxpayers because they answer to local school boards. Examples include Chippewa Valley Montessori and McKinley charter schools in the Eau Claire district and Wildlands School, a collaboration between the Augusta school district and Beaver Creek Reserve.
Institutions like these offer options within public education for students who might not reach their full potentials, or even learn effectively, in traditional settings. Nonetheless, the state Legislature should be cautious as it considers opening the door to so-called independent charter schools. Unlike traditional charter schools, which maintain contracts with local school districts, independent charter schools are answerable instead to outsiders - in the case of pending legislation, a yet-to-be-created statewide board. Currently, such independent charter schools are allowed only in Milwaukee and Racine; under the bill, they could operate in any district with more than 2,000 students - including Eau Claire.
Last week, the Legislature's budget-writing Joint Finance Committee passed the bill. Next it will go to the full Legislature.
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis has had some ugly squabbles with Rahm Emanuel--the longer school day battles, for starters, including his recent charge that the union is "cheating children out of an education"--and, in my opinion, she has often emerged the loser.
Last week, she filed the CTU's latest lawsuit against the city, charging that the school board is using its "TeacherFit" questionnaire to hire teachers who are willing to buck the union.
The camera doesn't favor her, and in her battle to stop the new mayor from pushing through a longer school day, she seems on the side of outmoded, lumbering labor. Who, after all, wants to deny Chicago public school kids more time for math, reading, lunch, and recess?
But in person, Lewis, 58--South Sider (grew up in Hyde Park, now lives in the Oakland neighborhood), CPS lifer (Kenwood, '71), daughter of two teachers, former high-school chemistry teacher (Sullivan, Lane Tech, King College Prep), wife of a now-retired CPS P.E. teacher--has a sharp sense of humor, and intelligence and articulateness to spare. After an hour spent with her at a conference table at the CTU's headquarters in the Merchandise Mart, if someone asked me to choose a few words to describe her, I'd say "substantial, self-confident, direct."
The Department of Justice has begun an investigation into Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction, probing whether Milwaukee's state-administered voucher system is discriminating against students with disabilities. In response, the state is arguing that federal obligations don't apply to Wisconsin's voucher schools, according to a letter obtained by The Huffington Post Thursday.
Milwaukee's voucher system, which allows low-income students to attend private schools using tax dollars, came under fire in June for allegedly discriminating based on disability. The complaint ultimately led to the Department of Justice investigation.
Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction responded to the DOJ Sept. 27 in a letter that has not yet been made public.
About 5,500 students at Milwaukee Public Schools are on a path that research shows leads to better understanding of science, engineering and math, more engagement in school and improves their academic performance. Project Lead the Way does all that.
Which is why William Symonds thinks more kids should have such "apprenticeship" opportunities.
And we think he's right.
Symonds, head of the Pathways to Prosperity Project at Harvard University, says kids need to be more firmly connected to the workplace - at a younger age. His message: Four-year college degrees aren't for everyone, and by overemphasizing that goal, parents, schools and businesses have left a huge swath of kids behind. There is certainly evidence of that in Milwaukee.
And while it's a fact that southeastern Wisconsin needs more college graduates, the goal of more baccalaureate degrees is not incompatible with the idea of offering high school students multiple pathways to careers.
The two most common criticisms about charter schools are that A) many of them aren't that good and B) the good ones can't be replicated to serve enough kids to really make a difference. TIME got an exclusive first look at the most comprehensive evaluation of charter school networks ever, and although the study, which will be released on Nov. 4, underscores the challenge of creating quality schools, it also makes clear that it is indeed possible to build a lot of schools that are game-changers for a lot of students.
The study, conducted by Mathematica Policy Research and the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education, examined networks of affiliated charter schools, which in the education world are referred to as charter school management organizations (CMOs). There are more than 130 of these non-profit networks serving about 250,000 students nationwide. I was on an advisory board for the early conception and design of this study, the goal of which was to better understand how CMOs operate and how effective they are. The study is filled with valuable data about how CMOs manage their teachers, how much funding they get and how they use it and what kinds of students they serve. But I'm focusing here on student achievement, which is, of course, the most contentious issue in the national debate about charter schools.
I've had the privilege of meeting with union leaders from around the country to explain what Teach Plus is. Many love it; plenty are skeptics.
In every case, I begin with three opening points. First, I describe our mission as very similar to the union's: to retain excellent teachers in the classroom and strengthen the teaching profession. Second, I talk about our belief that leadership opportunities are a key lever to helping promising young teachers extend their commitment to the classroom. Third, I state my personal belief in the value in the role of unions and describe the role Teach Plus has been able to play in helping a subset of Gen Y teachers to see that value for the first time. We're usually off to a good start.
Then I say we focus our work on high-performing teachers* in years 3-10. It is at that point that many union leaders begin scratching their heads about whether our presence in a city will be a headache or a help. By design, our approach is not about the unity and equality of all teachers. In that way, it is at odds with an industrial union model.
Charter schools, publicly financed but independently operated, have encountered fierce resistance in many suburban communities, criticized by parents and traditional educators who view them as a drain on resources.
The district, in Westchester County, sued the State Education Department and the Amani school this year, calling the approval an "arbitrary and capricious" decision, and sought to block Amani from moving forward. It has refused to turn over state, federal and local aid money to Amani, so the state has begun paying the charter directly. During the summer, district workers were sent to knock on the doors of Amani students to check that they lived in the district, a tactic that angered some parents. And in recent weeks, the district has delayed providing special education services to Amani students.
Everything you wanted to know about urban education and its solutions!
Dr. Armand A. Fusco, via a kind email:
"No one has been able to stop the steady plunge of young black Americans into a socioeconomic abyss." Bob Herbert / Syndicated columnist
Everything you wanted to know about urban education and its solutions!
For over 50 years this shame of the nation and education has remained as a plague upon its most vulnerable children. All reform efforts involving billions of dollars have not alleviated this scourge in our public schools. The rhetoric has been profound, but it has been immune to any antidote or action and it is getting worse; but it doesn't have to be!
The following quotes summarize the 285 pages and over 400 references from my book.
Edited Insightful Quotes
The explanations and references are found in the contents of the book.
School pushouts is a time bomb exploding economically and socially every twenty-six seconds
Remember what the basic problem is--they are in all respects illiterate and that is why they are failing.
Every three years the number of dropouts and pushouts adds up to a city bigger than Chicago.
Politics trump the needs of all children to achieve their potential.
One reason that the high school dropout crisis is known as the "silent epidemic" is that the problem is frequently minimized.
Simply stated black male students can achieve high outcomes; the tragedy is most states and districts choose not to do so.
In the majority of schools, the conditions necessary for Black males to systematically succeed in education do not exist.
While one in four American children is Latino--the largest and fastest growing minority group in the United States--they are chronically underserved by the nation's public schools and have the lowest education attainment levels in the country.
Miseducation is the most powerful example of cruel and unusual punishment; it's exacted on children innocent of any crime.
Traditional proposals for improving education--more money, smaller classes, etc.--aren't getting the job done.
The public school system is designed for Black and other minority children to fail.
The U.S. Department of Education has never even acknowledged that the problem exists.
Though extensive records are kept...unions and school boards do not want productivity analysis done.
Educational bureaucracies like the NEA are at the center of America's dysfunctional minority public schools.
Does bonus pay alone improve student outcomes? We found that it does not.
Performance pay is equivalent to "thirty pieces of silver."
Data necessary to distinguish cost-effective schools are all available, but our system has been built to make their use difficult.
Districts give credit for students who fail standardized tests on the expectation that students someday will pass.
We saw some schools that were low performing and had a very high parent satisfaction rate.
We're spending ever-greater sums of money, yet our high school graduates' test results have been absolutely flat.
America's primary and secondary schools have many problems, but an excess of excellence is not one of them.
Not only is our use of incarceration highly concentrated among men with little schooling, but corrections systems are doing less to correct the problem by reducing educational opportunities for the growing number of prisoners.
Although states will require school districts to implement the common core state standards, the majority of these states are not requiring districts to make complementary changes in curriculum and teacher programs.
We can show that merit pay is counterproductive, that closing down struggling schools (or firing principals) makes no sense.
The gap between our articulated ideals and our practice is an international embarrassment.
It's interesting to note that despite the growing support by minority parents for charters, the NAACP, the National Urban League, and other civil rights groups collectively condemn charter schools.
Public schools do respond constructively to competition by raising their achievement and productivity.
Gates Foundation has also stopped funding the small school concept because no results could be shown.
The policies we are following today are unlikely to improve our schools.
Our country still does a better job of tracking a package than it does a student.
Indeed, we give these children less of all the things that both research and experience tell us make a difference.
Reformers have little knowledge of what is working and how to scale what works.
The fact is that illiteracy has persisted in all states for generations, particularly among the most vulnerable children, and getting worse is a testament that national policy and creative leadership rings hollow.
We can't change a child's home life, but what we can do is affect what they do here at school.
Only a third of young Americans will leave high school with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.
Black churches can no longer play gospel in the sanctuaries while kids drop out into poverty and prison. They must embrace school reform and take the role that Catholic churches have done for so long and for so many.
There is only one way to equalize education for all--technology.
Whatever made you successful in the past won't in the future.
The real potential of technology for improving learning remains largely untapped in schools today.
Can't read, can't learn, can't get a job, can't survive, so can't stay within the law.
Of the 19.4 million government workers, half work in education, which rivals health care for the most wasteful sector in America.
The only people not being betrayed are those who feed off our failing education system...that group gets larger every year.
Mediocrity, not excellence, is the national norm as demonstrated by the deplorable evidence.
Parents are left to face the bleak reality that their child will be forever stuck in a failing school and a failing system.
The key is that unless there is accountability, we will never get the right system.
The very public institutions intended for student learning have become focused instead on adult employment.
We conclude that the strategies driving the best performing systems are rarely found in the United States.
No reform has yet lived up to its definition!
Minority males don't get the beef, they get the leftovers.
The cotton plantations have become the school plantations (children held in bondage of failing schools) and the dropouts move on to the prison plantations.
Guest Speaker Mark Seidenberg (Donald O. Hebb and Hilldale Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, UW-Madison): Professor Seidenberg gave an excellent presentation on the science of reading and why it is important to incorporate the findings of that science in teaching. Right now there is a huge disconnect between the vast, converged body of science worldwide and instructional practice. Prospective teachers are not learning about reading science in IHE's, and relying on intuition about how to teach reading is biased and can mislead. Teaching older students to read is expensive and difficult. Up-front prevention of reading failure is important, and research shows us it is possible, even for dyslexic students. This will save money, and make the road easier for students to learn and teachers to teach. Seidenberg endorses using the Massachusetts model exam for teachers of reading (MTEL 90), which was developed with input from reading scientists. He also supports universal assessment to identify students who are at risk, and he mentioned the Minnesota Reading Corps as a model of reading tutoring that would be good to bring to Wisconsin.
Lander: Can Seidenberg provide a few examples of things on which the Task Force could reach consensus?
Seidenberg: There is a window for teaching basic reading skills that then will allow the child to move on to comprehension. The balanced literacy concept is in conflict with best practices. Classrooms in Wisconsin are too laissez-faire, and the spiraling approach to learning does not align with science.
Michael Brickman: Brickman, the Governor's aide, cut off the discussion with Professor Seidenberg, and said he would be in touch with him later.
Particularly in rough economic times, states must make hard choices about resources. But there is one targeted investment that mayors, business leaders, educators, and parents are crying out for, and that states have already initiated. It is reports for high schools on their students' postsecondary performance, answering the critical questions: Do students enroll in a postsecondary institution? Do they pass their non-remedial courses? In which academic areas are they thriving, or struggling? These data will enable high schools everywhere in a state to find out how their graduates are doing anywhere in the state. Without this information, high schools are handicapped in their ability to prepare students for college and career.
Indeed, too many students, especially low-income students, are not prepared. In the last decade, Americans have enrolled in college in record numbers. But once there, they are stumbling at alarming rates and at enormous cost to themselves, their families, and their city and state tax bases. By one estimate, the lost personal income for one year of one class of these students is $3.8 billion; the federal government loses $566 million and the states lose $164 million in taxes from this cohort of college students who should have graduated and the numbers multiply each year. 1
Superintendents and principals are desperate to know what went wrong. Business leaders anx- iously hope for employees who are ready for 21st century work. Governors, too, know that above all they need an educated workforce to compete in the national and global marketplace.
States are making progress toward producing the high school postsecondary performance data these stakeholders need. But in the meantime, the stakeholders are restless.
Value-added measures are often criticized for providing a narrow view of a teacher's performance. Conversely, broader measures like observations are seen as too subjective. A new study shows--happily--that both types of evaluations are consistent and complementary: they predict future students' achievement. Teachers who score well on one also score well on the other. Best of all, combining them produces a stronger and more accurate measure of a teacher's effectiveness than using either alone.
Jonah E. Rockoff and Cecilia Speroni of Columbia University looked at the ability of three measures to predict teacher effectiveness: a rigorous job application process, observations and ratings by trained mentors, and value-added calculations based on students' math and English scores.
Nicole is a teacher's dream student. Bright, curious and hard-working, she has high expectations for herself and isn't satisfied with anything less than A grades. In fact, her mother says, she sometimes has to be told not to take school too seriously.
But when Nicole was tested in seventh grade to see if she'd qualify for an eighth-grade algebra course that would put her on track for advanced math courses in high school, her score wasn't top-notch. She assured the teacher she wanted to tackle the course anyway. He turned her down.
In fact, her score could not predict whether she'd succeed. Neither could the color of her skin.
As an African-American girl, Nicole didn't look much like the high-flying students her teacher was accustomed to teaching in his accelerated math classes at a Madison middle school. But instead of backing off, Nicole and her family challenged the recommendation. Somewhat grudgingly, her teacher allowed her in the class.
Fast forward a year: Nicole and one other student, the two top performers in the eighth-grade algebra class, were recommended for advanced math classes in high school.
Following is commentary on Wisconsin's NAEP reading scores that was sent to the Governor's Read to Lead task force by task force member Steve Dykstra.
2011 NAEP data for reading was released earlier than usual, this year. Under the previous timeline we wouldn't get the reading data until Spring.
While we returned to our 2007 rank of 25 from our 2009 rank of 30, that is misleading. All of our gains come from modest improvement among Black students who no longer rank last, but are still very near the bottom. The shift in rank is among Wisconsin and a group of states who all perform at an essentially identical level, and have for years. We're talking tenths of points as the difference.
It is always misleading to consider NAEP scores on a whole-state basis. Different states may have very different demographic make-ups and those difference can either exaggerate or mask the actual differences between the two states. For instance, the difference between Florida and Wisconsin (all scores refer to 4th grade reading) at the whole-state level is only 3 points. In reality, the difference is much greater. Demographic variation masks the real difference because Florida has far more minority students and far more poverty than Wisconsin. When we look at the subgroups, comparing apples to apples, we see that the real differences are vast.
When we break the groups down by gender and race, Florida outperforms Wisconsin by a statistically significant margin in every group. The smallest difference is 8 and some are as large as 20. If we break the groups down by race and school lunch status Florida outperforms Wisconsin by a statistically significant margin in every group, except black students who don't get a free lunch. For that group Florida does better, but not by enough to declare statistical certainty. The smallest margin is 9, and many are at or above 15.
10 points are generally accepted as a grade level for this range of the NAEP. Every Florida subgroup except one exceeds it's Wisconsin counterpart by a nearly a full grade level, and most by a lot more.
When we compare Wisconsin to Massachusetts the story is the same, only worse. The same groups are significantly different from each other, but the margins are slightly larger. The whole-state difference between Wisconsin and Massachusetts (15+ pts) only appears larger than for Florida because Massachusetts enjoys many of the same demographic advantages as Wisconsin. In fact, Wisconsin students are about the same 1.5 grade levels behind both Florida and Massachusetts for 4th grade reading.
If you want to dig deeper and kick over more rocks, it only gets worse. Every Wisconsin subgroup is below their national average and most are statistically significantly below. The gaps are found in overall scores, as well as for performance categories. We do about the same in terms of advanced students as we do with low performing students. Except for black students who don't get a free lunch (where the three states are in a virtual dead heat), Wisconsin ranks last compared to Florida and Massachusetts for every subgroup in terms of percentage of students at the advanced level. In many cases the other states exceed our rate by 50-100% or more. Their children have a 50 -100% better chance to read at the advanced level.
We need a sense of urgency to do more than meet, and talk, and discuss. We need to actually change the things that will make a difference, we need to do it fast, and we need to get it right. A lot of what needs to be done can be accomplished in a matter of days. Some of it takes a few hours. The parts that will take longer would benefit from getting the other stuff done and out of the way so we can devote our attention to those long term issues.
Our children are suffering and so far, all we're doing is talking about it. Shame on us.
Comparing Rhetoric Regarding Texas (10th) & Wisconsin NAEP Scores: Texas Hispanic and African-American students rank second on eighth-grade NAEP math test
Texas Hispanic and African-American students rank
second on eighth-grade NAEP math test
Texas Hispanic and African-American students earned the second highest score among their peer groups on the 2011 eighth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics test. The state's white eighth grade students ranked fourth, missing out on the second place position themselves by less than one point.
Only Hispanic students in Montana earned a higher scale score on the math test than did eighth-grade Hispanic Texans. Only African-American students in Hawaii earned a higher average score than did their counterparts in Texas.
White students in the District of Columbia earned an average scale score of 319, the highest score for that ethnic group. Texas students ranked fourth, with less than a fraction of a point separating this group from students in Massachusetts and New Jersey. Massachusetts students had the second highest scale score at 304.2876, while Texas received an average score of 303.5460.
Overall, the state ranked 10th among the states with an average scale score of 290, substantially above the national average score of 283.
NAEP math on upward trend, state reading results stable
Wisconsin's biennial mathematics and reading results held steady on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation's Report Card. The state's overall trend in mathematics is improving.
For fourth-grade mathematics, the state's 2011 scale score was 245, up one point but statistically the same as in 2009, compared to the national scale score of 240, a one-point increase from 2009. Wisconsin results for fourth-grade math are significantly higher than in 2003 when the average scale score was 237. At eighth grade, the Wisconsin scale score for mathematics was 289,
the same as in 2009 and up five points from 2003, which is statistically significant. For the nation, the 2011 mathematics scale score was 283, up one-point from 2009. State average scale scores in mathematics at both grade levels were statistically higher than the national score.
Since the recession began, the specter of massive teacher layoffs has been hanging over the nation's schools. The feds have repeatedly come to the rescue--even when some parts of the country didn't seem to be particularly struggling--providing funds first in the form of stimulus dollars, followed by last year's EduJobs.
So far this year there appears to be little likelihood of a comparable rescue package. The president's job bill offers the only hope, but we all know how far that one isn't going. The White House has been making the case nonetheless, supplying sobering evidence of a decline in education jobs and that as many as 280,000 "educator jobs" are at risk this school year.
Not discounting this evidence, we've been struck by the lack of reports on layoffs in newspapers this fall. Last spring, they were all reporting about school districts handing out pink slips by the thousands, but there's been little follow up on teachers converting from pink-slip status to no-job-at-all status.
One year at Princeton University: $37,000. One year at a New Jersey state prison: $44,000.
Prison and college "are the two most divergent paths one can take in life," Joseph Staten, an info-graphic researcher with Public Administration, says. Whereas one is a positive experience that increases lifetime earning potential, the other is a near dead end, which is why Staten found it striking that the lion's share of government funding goes toward incarceration.
The comparison between higher education spending and correction spending highlighted in the following chart is not perfect. Universities have means to fund themselves; prisons rely on the government. So it makes some sense that a disproportional amount of money flows to the correction centers. Also, take note, comparing African Americans in college and African Americans in dorms is not completely fair. For one, college implies an 18-22 age range, and incarcerated adults can be of any age. Also, it doesn't take into account African Americans who commute to school.
On Tuesday, the Milwaukee Common Council will consider the Charter School Review Committee's recommendation that the City of Milwaukee contract with Rocketship Education to open a network of independent charter schools.
Rocketship Education selected Milwaukee as its first expansion city outside of California because it saw great need but also because it sees the opportunity to be part of a systemic change in a community that desperately needs it. Rocketship has never promised miracles. It does promise a chance - a chance for children and a chance for Milwaukee.
Milwaukee has serious challenges and an urgent need to grow, develop and attract more schools that are effective in educating low-income children. Closing the gap in educational achievement for all 127,000 of the city's K-12 schoolchildren is a community-wide responsibility.
There are no miracles, and we cannot wait for Superman. What we can do is expand our best-performing schools and work to improve our high-potential schools that operate as Milwaukee Public Schools or under the charter and choice programs. This requires the development of quality teachers and school leaders.
IN LATE 1965, President Lyndon Johnson stood in the modest gymnasium of what had once been the tiny teaching college he attended in Texas and announced a programme to promote education. It was an initiative that exemplified the "Great Society" agenda of his administration: social advancement financed by a little hard cash, lots of leverage and potentially vast implicit government commitments. Those commitments are now coming due.
"Economists tell us that improvement of education has been responsible for one-fourth to one-half of the growth in our nation's economy over the past half-century," Johnson said. "We must be sure that there will be no gap between the number of jobs available and the ability of our people to perform those jobs."
To fill this gap Johnson pledged an amount that now seems trivial, $1.9m, sent from the federal government to states which could then leverage it ten-to-one to back student loans of up to $1,000 for 25,000 people. "This act", he promised, "will help young people enter business, trade, and technical schools--institutions which play a vital role in providing the skills our citizens must have to compete and contribute in our society."
A Scottish child stumbling to school in the dark. An English child strolling to class in daylight: How Berlin Time could spell the end of the United Kingdom
A compelling new argument has emerged to clinch the case against Berlin Time - otherwise known as Double Summer Time.
This unwelcome import from the Eurozone could be the straw that breaks Britain, and the rapture with which the Scottish National Party has greeted Government plans to consult on implementation proves it.
Already euphoric about the first opinion poll in years to put support for independence ahead of opposition to it, the SNP has seized on the proposed time shift like manna from heaven. Nationalist spokesmen blame 'Tory time bandits' for plans they claim will endanger the lives of Scottish children, cripple business and plunge Scotland into perpetual darkness.
There are 19 gym teachers in the Farmington School District who make more than $85,000 a year each. The average gym teacher's salary in Farmington is $75,035. By comparison, the science teachers in that district make $68,483 per year on average.
That's not unusual in Michigan schools, according to Freedom of Information Act requests received from around the state.
In the Woodhaven-Brownstown district, 18.5 (FTE) science teachers average some $58,400 per year in salary, while 12 gym teachers averaged nearly $76,700. In Harrison, science teachers earned $49,000 on average while gym teachers averaged $62,000.
This is not unusual, because school districts don't differentiate what a teacher does when considering compensation, regardless of the district's educational needs. Teachers are paid on a single salary schedule based on seniority and education level.
r spent slightly more than $500,000 combined on their four campaigns, which was 81% of the total amount spent by those running in 2007. These incumbent Directors are endorsed for reelection in 2011 by the Seattle Times while The Stranger, an alternative newspaper, recommends three of the challengers.
This election has parallels to dissatisfaction underlying Occupy Wall Street. Many Seattle residents see the "School Reform" pushed by the District as largely driven by those more interested in profit by corporations than student learning. Public records of where the $500,000 plus came from in 2007 indicate likely pro corporate connections.
On March 2, 2011 after giving the public only 22 hours notice, the Board bought out Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson and her CFO-COO Mr. Don Kennedy for $360,000. The Superintendent had Broad Academy training and pushed for School Reform along the lines advocated by the Broad Academy in her 3.5 years in Seattle.
It will be interesting to see if Madison has contested board races in 2012...
Racine Unified School District (RUSD) implemented a district-wide vision for improvement in March 2009. Called the North Star vision, it is intended to specify "the path to successful completion of high school for all RUSD students with an ultimate goal of every graduate being ready for a career and/or college." It includes performance targets at each grade level to be used in creating school improvement plans and in setting school-level learning targets.
The vision is the result of a collaborative effort by the school board, district administrators, the teachers and administrators unions, and the support staff union. A simple graphic illustrating the measures of focus at each grade level has been widely distributed to parents, teachers, and district stakeholders.
For dedicated readers, this 14th Annual Comparative Analysis of the Racine Unified School District will look quite different from the previous 13 reports. For the first time, we compare the district's performance to its own goals, as well as to its peers and to its past performance. The peer comparison tables, which have been the hallmark of previous reports, appear in Appendix I. The body of the report is focused on the district goals established in 2009 as the North Star vision, which according to the district, "is a shared vision that clearly identifies the path to successful completion of high school for all RUSD students with an ultimate goal of every graduate being ready for a career and/or college."
As in previous reports, we also present contextual information about the Racine community and student body. RUSD has experienced many changes over the past 14 years, including: slipping from the third largest district in the state to the fourth largest, becoming a majority minority district, and now having most of its students quality for free or reduced-price lunch. The community has also become less wealthy during this time and seen fewer adults obtain college degrees. It is clear that RUSD has many challenges to overcome and a loss of significant state aid for this school year is yet another challenge. Consequently, this year's report also includes a more in-depth analysis of the district's fiscal situation.
Madison Preparatory Academy would open next fall in a former church on the city's Near West Side if the School Board approves a contract for the controversial charter school.
The non-profit organization that would run the school has signed a letter of intent to lease the former Mount Olive Lutheran Church at 4018 Mineral Point Road, according to a business plan for the school released Saturday morning.
The site is on a Metro bus route and includes a 32,000-square-foot facility and 1,200-square-foot house. It also achieves the school's goal of being located near the Downtown, said Urban League of Greater Madison President Kaleem Caire.
"It's a good neighborhood," Caire said. "We would hope the neighbors would want to get involved with the kids in the school."
The business plan lays out several other new details including a daily schedule from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with 90-minute classes, report cards for parents and performance bonuses for staff.
Meanwhile, Progressive Dane announces its opposition to the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school.
Madison Preparatory Academy's educational program has been designed to be different. The eight features of the educational program will serve as a powerful mix of strategies that allow Madison Prep to fulfill its mission: to prepare students for success at a four-year college or university by instilling Excellence, Pride, Leadership and Service. By fulfilling this mission, Madison Prep will serve as a catalyst of change and opportunity for young men and women who live in a city where only 48% of African American students and 56% of Latino students graduate from high school. Madison Prep's educational program will produce students who are ready for college; who think, read, and write critically; who are culturally aware and embrace differences among all people; who give back to their communities; and who know how to work hard.
One of the most unique features of Madison Prep is the single gender approach. While single gender education has a long, successful history, there are currently no schools - public or private - in Dane County that offer single gender education. While single gender education is not right for every student, the demand demonstrated thus far by families who are interested in enrolling their children in Madison Prep shows that a significant number of parents believe their children would benefit from a single gender secondary school experience.
Madison Prep will operate two schools - a boys' school and a girls' school - in order to meet this demand as well as ensure compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The schools will be virtually identical in all aspects, from culture to curriculum, because the founders of Madison Prep know that both boys and girls need and will benefit from the other educational features of Madison Prep.
The International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum is one of those strategies that Madison Prep's founders know will positively impact all the students the schools serve. IB is widely considered to be the highest quality curricular framework available. What makes IB particularly suitable for Madison Prep is that it can be designed around local learning standards (the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards and the Common Core State Standards) and it is inherently college preparatory. For students at Madison Prep who have special learning needs or speak English as a second language, IB is fully adaptable to their needs. Madison Prep will offer both the Middle Years Programme (MYP) and the Diploma Programme (DP) to all its students.
Because IB is designed to be college preparatory, this curricular framework is an ideal foundation for the other aspects of Madison Prep's college preparatory program. Madison Prep is aiming to serve a student population of which at least 65% qualify for free or reduced lunch. This means that many of the parents of Madison Prep students will not be college educated themselves and will need the school to provide considerable support as their students embark on their journey through Madison Prep and to college.
College exposure, Destination Planning, and graduation requirements that mirror admissions requirements are some of the ways in which Madison Prep will ensure students are headed to college. Furthermore, parents' pursuit of an international education for their children is increasing rapidly around the world as they seek to foster in their children a global outlook that also expands their awareness, competence and comfort level with communicating, living, working and problem solving with and among cultures different than their own.
Harkness Teaching, the cornerstone instructional strategy for Madison Prep, will serve as an effective avenue through which students will develop the critical thinking and communication skills that IB emphasizes. Harkness Teaching, which puts teacher and students around a table rather than in theater-style classrooms, promotes student-centered learning and rigorous exchange of ideas. Disciplinary Apprenticeship, Madison Prep's approach to literacy across the curriculum, will ensure that students have the literacy skills to glean ideas and information from a variety of texts, ideas and information that they can then bring to the Harkness Table for critical analysis.
Yet to ensure that students are on track for college readiness and learning the standards set out in the curriculum, teachers will have to take a disciplined approach to data-driven instruction. Frequent, high quality assessments - aligned to the standards when possible - will serve as the basis for instructional practices. Madison Prep teachers will consistently be analyzing new data to adjust their practice as needed.
Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of young men and women of color is uncertain.
Black and Hispanic boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve their dreams and aspirations. Likewise, boys in general lag behind girls in most indicators of student achievement.
Research indicates that although boys of color have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein men of color find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young men of color will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Likewise, girls of color are failing to graduate high school on-time, underperform on standardized achievement and college entrance exams and are under-enrolled in college preparatory classes in secondary school. The situation is particularly pronounced in the Madison Metropolitan School District where Black and Hispanic girls are far less likely than Asian and White girls to take a rigorous college preparatory curriculum in high school or successfully complete such courses with a grade of C or better when they do. In this regard, they mimic the course taking patterns of boys of color.
Additionally, data on ACT college entrance exam completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement tests scores provided to the Urban League of Greater Madison by the Madison Metropolitan School District show a significant gap in ACT completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement scores between students of color and their White peers.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men and Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Women will be established to serve as catalysts for change and opportunity among young men and women in the Greater Madison, Wisconsin area, particularly young men and women of color. It will also serve the interests of parents who desire a nurturing, college preparatory educational experience for their child.
Both schools will be administratively separate and operated by Madison Preparatory Academy, Inc. (Madison Prep), an independent 501(c)(3) established by the Urban League of Greater Madison and members of Madison Prep's inaugural board of directors.
The Urban League of Greater Madison, the "founder" of Madison Prep, understands that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, limited access to schools and classrooms that provide academic rigor, lack of access to positive male and female role models in different career fields, limited exposure to academically successful and achievement-oriented peer groups, and limited exposure to opportunity and culture experiences outside their neighborhoods contribute to reasons why so many young men and women fail to achieve their full potential. At the same time, the Urban League and its supporters understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to specifically address these issues.
Madison Prep will consist of two independent public charter schools - authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education - designed to serve adolescent males and females in grades 6-12 in two separate schools. Both will be open to all students residing within the boundaries of the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) who apply, regardless of their previous academic performance.
Lawsuits for School Reform?: Parent Power May Insert Itself in L.A. Unified's Teachers' Contract; Demand that the LAUSD Immediately Comply with the Stull Act
Earlier this year, Dropout Nation argued that one way that school reformers -- including school choice activists and Parent Power groups -- could advance reform and expand school choice was to file lawsuits similar to school funding torts filed for the past four decades by school funding advocates. But now, it looks like Parent Power activists may be filing a lawsuit in Los Angeles on a different front: Overhauling teacher evaluations. And the Los Angeles Unified School District may be the place where the first suit is filed.
In a letter sent on behalf of some families Wednesday to L.A. Unified Superintendent John Deasy and the school board -- and just before the district begins negotiations with the American Federation of Teachers' City of Angels unit over a new contract -- Barnes & Thornburg's Kyle Kirwan demanded that the district "implement a comprehensive system" of evaluating teachers that ties "pupil progress" data to teacher evaluations. Kirwan and the group he represents are also asking for the district to begin evaluating all teachers "regardless of tenure status" and to reject any contract with the American Federation of Teachers local that allows for any veteran teacher with more than a decade on the job to go longer than two years without an evaluation if they haven't had one in the first place.
We represent minor-students currently residing within the boundaries of the Los Angeles Unified School District (the "District" or "LAUSD"), the parents of these students, and other adults who have paid taxes for a school system that has chronically failed to comply with California law.
Our clients seek to have the District immediately meet its obligations under the Stull Act, a forty year old law that is codified at California Education Code section 44660 et seq. (the "Stull Act").
In relevant part, the Stull Act requires that "[t]he governing board of each school district establish standards of expected pupil achievement at each grade level in each area of study."
Cal. Educ. Code § 44662(a). The Stull Act requires further that "[t]he governing board of each school district ... evaluate and assess certificated employee performance as it reasonably relates to ... [t]he progress of pupils toward the standards established pursuant to subdivision (a) and, if applicable, the state adopted academic content standards as measured by state adopted criterion referenced assessments ...." Cal. Educ. Code§ 44662(b)(l).
In the forty years since the California Legislature passed the Stull Act, the District has never evaluated its certificated personnel based upon the progress of pupils towards the standards established pursuant to Education Code section 44662(a) and, if applicable, the state adopted academic content standards as measured by the state adopted criterion referenced assessments; never reduced such evaluations to writing or added the evaluations to part of the permanent records of its certificated personnel; never reviewed with its certificated personnel the results of pupil progress as they relate to Stull Act evaluations; and never made specific recommendations on how certificated personnel with unsatisfactory ratings could improve their performance in order to achieve a higher level of pupil progress toward meeting established standards of expected pupil achievement.
I love this scene in Goodwill Hunting because it sums up in large part how I feel about the current education system (only Matt Damon says it way cooler than I ever will).
Does it trouble anyone else that university presidents (in Canada at least, I can't vouch for the USA) make more money than the Prime Minister does? It is primarily tax dollars that pay both of their salaries (most universities in Canada operate with about 60-70% of their costs covered by the government). How about the whole notion of publishing journal articles in a specific language that only certain people can speak effectively (APA, MLA, Chicago etc)? If you do not want to lay eyes on a somewhat cynical rant about the tyranny of post-secondary education monopolies then please avert your eyes.
Cynical or Realistic?
In my masters course last week someone who was taking their first course in several years (after being in the workforce for a substantial period of time) asked me why so much emphasis was placed on getting the exact period and comma marks right when citing sources (she was not questioning the validity of citing a source, only the extremely specific emphasis put on the minutiae of it). My response shocked her a little.
After revving up a few hundred adolescents in the Central Middle School auditorium during a recent homecoming pep rally, educators had to get the children out the doors and onto school buses idling outside.
And there wasn't much time to do it.
As the children began to get up, principal Darren Guido jumped to direct traffic. Moments later, outside, aspiring school leader Nakia Fambro noticed some students were dallying. She rushed to the office.
"If you are a bus rider, the buses are leaving in 30 seconds," Fambro announced over the intercom system, repeating the urgent message several times.
Adrian of OpenClass responds to our questions. See our responses below:
Adrian writes:
@Nixty, a competitor to OpenClass, asks:
What happens when readily available free courses/texts help students learn better than Pearson's closed expensive courses/texts?
What happens when we have clear research support that shows how students taking the open and free course learn more than students taking Pearson's closed and expensive course?
Pearson's stated aim is to make the LMS a commodity so they can sell more of their closed content and course tools. What happens when Pearson isn't selling enough of their closed content and course tools?
Adrian's Answer: Is this a trick question? Doesn't this boil down to the more general question -- What happens when a free product is better than one you pay for? There's only one conclusion I can come to - free wins that round. And 'for pay' has to come up with something worth paying for, which is the essence of competition, the arms race that drives economics to produce improvement. I believe Pearson has proven it is up to that challenge for the long haul.
The Seattle Times has made their perspective clear: they support the current school board. Not only did they endorse the incumbents in the upcoming election, they have gone out of their way to claim that the Board is not to blame for the recent scandals. They write that the Board has learned from those mistakes - not that they made any mistakes - and will do better now - not they they hadn't done well enough before. The Times would have us believe that the Board isn't to blame, but that the system is to blame - nevermind that the Board controls the system.
I attended the talk last night by Dr. Dina Bulles put on by Wedgwood Elementary (and held at Nathan Hale High). (FYI, her name is pronounced Bree-yays.) The other SPS staff represented were the principal of Wedgwood, Chris Cronas, Ex. Director, Phil Brockman, and head of Advanced Learning, Bob Vaughn. Mr. Cronas pointed out that several Wedgwood teachers were in attendance as well. There were a large number of seats put out but the room wasn't full. My guess is it was about 60 people.
Dr. Bulles explained that in her district, Paradise Valley School district (which is just outside of Phoenix, Arizona), all of their elementary schools use cluster grouping. (Her district is about 35,000 students and there are 31 elementary schools.) She said out of those 35,000, about 5,000 student received gifted classes/services. (Help me out anyone else who attended; I thought she said towards the end that this was included high school students taking AP/IB. Is that what you heard?) She also made a startling statement that 68% of her teachers (and I believe this is in elementary) had 3 years or less of teaching experience. Wow.
I attended the talk last night by Dr. Dina Bulles put on by Wedgwood Elementary (and held at Nathan Hale High). (FYI, her name is pronounced Bree-yays.) The other SPS staff represented were the principal of Wedgwood, Chris Cronas, Ex. Director, Phil Brockman, and head of Advanced Learning, Bob Vaughn. Mr. Cronas pointed out that several Wedgwood teachers were in attendance as well. There were a large number of seats put out but the room wasn't full. My guess is it was about 60 people.
Dr. Bulles explained that in her district, Paradise Valley School district (which is just outside of Phoenix, Arizona), all of their elementary schools use cluster grouping. (Her district is about 35,000 students and there are 31 elementary schools.) She said out of those 35,000, about 5,000 student received gifted classes/services. (Help me out anyone else who attended; I thought she said towards the end that this was included high school students taking AP/IB. Is that what you heard?) She also made a startling statement that 68% of her teachers (and I believe this is in elementary) had 3 years or less of teaching experience. Wow.
What was most fascinating to me and an absolute pleasure is that here was a educator who made no apologies for wanting to serve gifted students. She gave a PowerPoint and several times talked about the need to serve these students needs as a district would any other student with a special need like ELL or Special Education. It was very refreshing and I have never, in all my years in SPS, heard any SPS principal or Board member or staff member or Superintendent speak in this manner.
She started out by showing a list from J. Skabos about differences between gifted children and bright children (and I note that she believes both groups need to be served). I couldn't find the exact list but here is link to one that is quite similar.
Ah, the achievement gap. So much trouble to fix, so why bother trying? That seems to be the attitude in Washington, where pundits have spent the last several months ripping the current focus on improving the low end of student performance in our nation's schools. In September the Obama Administration put forward a plan to offer waivers to states that want more flexibility -- i.e., less ambitious targets -- under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Last week the bottom really fell out when the Senate committee that handles education passed a rewrite of the No Child law basically leaving it to states to figure out how (and probably, in practice, even whether) to close the gaps. In other words, a decade after an overwhelmingly bipartisan effort to get serious about school accountability, it's open season on a strong federal role in education. How did we get here?
Let's start with the pundits. Leading the charge is the American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess, who, in the fall issue of National Affairs, launched a contrarian broadside against NCLB's focus on low-achieving students. "The relentless focus on gap-closing has transformed school reform into little more than a less objectionable rehash of the failed Great Society playbook," Hess wrote. Next came a September report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, another conservative think tank, claiming that the current focus is shortchanging high-achievers. Yet the data in the Fordham report didn't support its alarmist conclusions that high-achievers were being hurt by today's policies. The truth is, according to Fordham's own data, that high-performers didn't fare that badly overall. Other evidence bears this out. None of that slowed down the pundits.
Geography has long been recognized as a "core academic subject" in federal education legislation. However, unlike all the other core academic subjects, including history, civics, economics, foreign languages and the arts, there is no dedicated federal funding stream to advance geography education. As a result, our nation is facing a crisis in geographic literacy that is jeopardizing our global competitiveness, our position of diplomatic leadership, and our ability to fill and retain over 150,000 jobs in geospatial technology in the next decade.
After years of futility inside the classroom, Chicago Public Schools soon will adopt a more rigorous internal evaluation system that judges schools on how well they prepare students for college, a move that could lead to more school closings in the years ahead.
This stricter method of evaluation promises to be an eye-opener for many parents, considering the current process used for years already paints a bleak picture of the district: 42 percent of schools -- 207 elementary and 76 high schools -- are on probation for low-academic performance and poor attendance.
Seventy-two schools have been on probation for five consecutive years, and 16 of them for 15 years in a row.
Approximately 123,000 students are in underperforming schools, officials said, prompting parents in large numbers to uproot their families for neighborhoods with better schools inside or outside the city. Maps presented to the school board Wednesday showed a correlation between some of the city's poorest-performing schools and schools that are most underenrolled.
Update: a reader asked about who pays for these audits and I mistakenly said the SAO. It turns out that the Legislature had passed a law for a hotline but had not funded it. For the first year, the SAO ate the cost for hotline investigations but could not sustain that cost. So if the State Auditor chooses to go forward with hotline requests (and I'm sure they don't follow-thru with all of them), it costs the district $83.60 per hour. (I just removed that "number of hours" as that is for the NEXT audit, not this special one.)
On the one hand you could say, "Well, look at that money and the SAO found nothing illegal." On the other hand, you can look at this sad and sorry mess of a process and say that it sure doesn't look good or smell good. I'll have more to report on this after I read the SAO work product documents which I believe will make compelling reading.
End of update
A new low for reporting is the Times' article about the MLK, Jr. building sale.
I have blogged recently about the absurdity of Madison Prep having to get its education plan approved by the school board of a district that has proved incapable of effectively educating the very students Madison Prep seeks to serve. The state charter authorizing board would give startup charter schools like Madison Prep an authorizer option outside of their local school board. No longer would a resistant board be a brick wall for new charter schools.
The Department has identified the following constituencies as having interests that are significantly affected by the topics proposed for negotiations. The Department plans to seat as negotiators individuals from organizations or groups representing these constituencies:
Postsecondary students, including legal assistance organizations that represent students.
Teachers.
Financial aid administrators at postsecondary institutions.
Business officers and bursars at postsecondary institutions.
Admissions officers at postsecondary institutions.
State officials, including officials with teacher preparation program approval agencies, State teacher licensing boards, higher education executive officers, chief State school officers, State attorneys general, and State data system administrators.
Institutions that offer teacher preparation programs, including schools of education.
Institutions of higher education eligible to receive Federal assistance under Title III, Parts A, B, and F, and Title V of the HEA, which include Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, American Indian Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian- Serving Institutions, Predominantly Black Institutions, and other institutions with a substantial enrollment of needy students as defined in Title III of the HEA.
Two-year public institutions of higher education.
Four-year public institutions of higher education.
Private, non-profit institutions of higher education.
Private, for-profit institutions of higher education.
Operators of programs for alternative routes to teacher certification.
Accrediting agencies.
Students enrolled in elementary and secondary education, including parents of students enrolled in elementary and secondary education.
School and local educational agency officials, including those responsible for hiring teachers and evaluating teacher performance.
The topics the committee is likely to address are as follows:
The requirements for institutional and program report cards on the quality of teacher preparation (Section 205(a) of the HEA);
The requirements for State report cards on the quality of teacher preparation (Section 205(b) of the HEA);
The standards to ensure reliability, validity, and accuracy of the data submitted in report cards on the quality of teacher preparation (Section 205(c) of the HEA);
The criteria used by States to assess the performance of teacher preparation programs at higher education institutions in the State, the identification of low-performing programs (Section 207(a) of the HEA), and the consequences of a State's termination of eligibility of a program (Section 207(b) of the HEA);
The definition of the term ''high quality teacher preparation program'' for the purpose of establishing the eligibility of an institution to participate in the TEACH Grant program (Section 420L(1) of the HEA);
The definition of the term ''high quality professional development services'' for the purpose of establishing the eligibility of an institution to participate in the TEACH Grant program (Section 420L(1) of the HEA); and
The service and repayment obligations for the TEACH Grant Program (Subpart E of 34 CFR 686).
Here's a pop quiz: What foods are best to eat before a high-stakes test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers.
Chiefly, testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory. The method is more effective than re-reading a textbook, says Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. If you are facing a test on the digestive system, he says, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts.
In his junior year of high school in Cary, N.C., Keenan Harrell bought test-prep books and subjected himself to a "relentless and repetitive" series of nearly 30 practice SAT college-entrance exams. "I just took it over and over again, until it became almost aggravating," he says.
Only one in four students who enter high school in New York City are ready for college after four years, and less than half enroll, according to the A-through-F high school report cards released on Monday.
Those numbers, included for the first time in the report cards, confirmed what the state suggested several months ago: the city still has a long way to go to prepare students for successful experiences in college and beyond. And they were a signal that graduation rates, long used by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as a validation of his education policies, were not as meaningful as they seemed.
"There's a huge change in life chances for kids who are successful in post-secondary education," the city's chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said. "We really have a task to prepare kids for that, and the data is one of the most motivating tools."
Is Denver going to follow in the footsteps of other reform minded urban school districts that saw momentum, change, and improvement fade away? Or will we be one of the few cities to sustain and even accelerate effective school reform?
In less than two weeks, the most hotly contested and expensive school board race in the history of Colorado will come to an end. It looks like nearly $1 million will be spent by both sides in this election by the time Election Day arrives on November 1st.
Denver has a seven-person school board with four members currently supporting the Superintendent Tom Boasberg and a broad set of reforms while the remaining three board members have relied upon Diane Ravitch to try to thwart nearly every reform initiative. Needless to say, if two of the three seats go to anti-reform candidates, Boasberg will need to look for another job and the Colorado reform community is going to have to look to some other districts for bold leadership.
Denver has been the epicenter for reform in Colorado since Michael Bennet took the helm of Denver Public Schools (DPS). Most of the reforms, which were highlighted in Colorado's Race to the Top application and elsewhere, are dependent upon Denver leading the charge.
We applaud the Urban League's energy and persistence in identifying the significant achievement gap that remains in Madison schools. We welcome the fact that the Urban League has helped focus broader community discussion on this issue, and the need to serve more effectively and successfully African-American and Hispanic students. The achievement gap is real and must be addressed.
While the Madison Preparatory Academy may provide a fine educational experience for 840 students, the Madison Metropolitan School District is charged with improving outcomes for more than 12,000 children of color. We may be better served by using our limited and diminishing resources:
1. To increase the number of students in AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) by expanding this nationally proven and successful program, now in all four high schools, to lower grade levels. AVID is a college readiness system that accelerates learning for students in the academic middle who may not have a college tradition in their families. Ultimately, AVID uses research-based instructional strategies to increase academic performance schoolwide. East High, the first Madison school to implement AVID, has had two graduating classes. These graduates, who attend a variety of Wisconsin colleges and universities, are 90 percent students of color and 74 percent low income; 52 percent of these graduates speak a language other than English as their first language.
I will not be working in the office Thursday. I have to care for my kids, two of whom, like lots of other Wisconsin public school students, have the day off.
Why, you ask, are classes canceled on this entirely unremarkable Thursday the week before Halloween? On a day not set aside for any national holiday, nor part of any traditionally recognized vacation season, nor beset by record-breaking snowfall or some other natural cataclysm?
Well, because historically, a couple of consecutive weekdays in October have been something of a Wisconsin public schools-recognized holiday -- the traditional time for the annual convention of the statewide teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council.
I know what you're saying: "Don't be ridiculous. Teachers have two and a half months in the summer to hold their convention! Why wouldn't they have it then?"
And I hear you; an October teachers convention does defy logic. Yet, that's been the case until this year, when things managed to get even more illogical.
The case of turnover in the Harlem Success schools is only the latest example of this issue, but it's a striking one. Over a third of the teachers at Harlem Success 3 have chosen to leave the school in the past few months, a decision Moskowitz describes as "frankly, unethical." At the same time, however, Moskowitz chooses to employ her staff with a policy of "at will employment" rather than a negotiated contract. Under this model, she and her principals have the right to terminate teachers' service at the school at any time, for any reason. In fact, Steven Brill's Class Warfare describes the case of one new teacher who was "forced out" only a few months into the school year when a young principal at Harlem Success decided she wasn't a "good fit" for the school.
Here's a pop quiz: What foods are best to eat before a high-stakes test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers.
Chiefly, testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory. The method is more effective than re-reading a textbook, says Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University. If you are facing a test on the digestive system, he says, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts.
In his junior year of high school in Cary, N.C., Keenan Harrell bought test-prep books and subjected himself to a "relentless and repetitive" series of nearly 30 practice SAT college-entrance exams. "I just took it over and over again, until it became almost aggravating," he says.
On Wednesday night at Oakland Technical High School, the Oakland school board votes on a staff resolution to close five elementary schools, Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell Park and Santa Fe. But the board is expected to be presented with another downsizing proposal, too: The faculties at two other schools, ASCEND and Learning Without Limits, have voted to secede from OUSD and operate those schools as independently run charters.
You can read more about it here. That story will be in Tuesday's Tribune. (And here is a link to a Sunday story about school closures.)
District staff estimate the budget shrinks by roughly $5,500 for each student who leaves OUSD (additional funds, such as the parcel tax, go to the district regardless of its enrollment/attendance). The enrollment of the two elementary schools adds up to about 800 -- which means the district's budget could take a hit of more than $4 million at the same time the administration is trying to save $2 million by closing schools.
While a small number of cynics out there still argue that classroom teachers are not really an important ingredient in a child's overall education recipe, one of the most important developments in K-12 education policy in the last few years has been the recognition that decades-old teacher evaluations (where the best a child can hope for is a 'satisfactory' teacher over an 'unsatisfactory' teacher) aren't up for the task of recognizing which teachers are hitting the ball out of the park with their students.
At DFER, we've long believed that the widespread irrelevance of excellence itself in the K-12 world has created a culture that has actively done damage to the lives of too many children who deserved much, much better from our nation's most important public institution.
But there have been a lot of positive developments in this area of late. There's obviously a long way to go, and surely some of what has been done to-date will need to be changed/enhanced/expanded, but we are clearly closer to a day where the link between teaching and learning is more clear in workplace evaluations for educators. (And we continue to hope and believe that this will usher in a new era where successful teachers are treated more like the community heroes that we believe they are.)
Chicago charter schools could soon receive financial incentives similar to those being offered to city elementary schools that vote to lengthen the school day.
The Chicago Board of Education will vote on a resolution Wednesday that would create a $4.4 million grant fund for charter schools that choose to extend their day. Individual schools would eligible to receive $75,000 and individual teacher stipends of $800. Roughly 42 schools will be awarded money under the program, which Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman Becky Carroll estimated will cost about $6 million.
Carroll told the Chicago News Cooperative in September that charter schools would not be included in the city's longer day incentive program, which has been one of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's signature education initiatives. She said the decision to incorporate charters followed "an organic conversation" between CPS and charter operators and is about ensuring "equity in the system."
The move to include charter schools is the latest salvo in the fight between the district and the Chicago Teachers Union over the length of the school day.
An independent charter school program would expand to medium and large school districts around Wisconsin, under a bill passed Wednesday by Republicans on the Legislature's budget committee.
The proposal passed 12-3 on a party-line vote, with Republicans voting in favor and Democrats voting against.
The bill would take an independent charter school program currently operating in only Milwaukee and Racine and extend it statewide to districts with more than 2,000 students. That would apply to roughly a quarter of the state's districts.
Republicans said it would help provide another options for students whose schools are failing them.
"The bill we are taking up today is truly something that is going to help the long-term prospects of Wisconsin," said Rep. Robin Vos (R-Burlington), a co-chairman of the committee.
But Democrats said that the program would undermine local control of schools by elected officials in favor of an unelected board. They said the proposal could also prove another financial blow to regular public schools that are losing nearly $800 million in state aid over two years as part of the state budget and having tight state caps placed on their property tax levies.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MJS) reports today on the 10.3% local tax levy increase in Milwaukee attributable to the Milwaukee school choice program. Because the choice program is not a taxing authority, the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) levy is used as a fiscal agent to pay 34% of the total cost of the MPCP. As I've noted before, the levy used to pay for choice does not lower the actual total revenue MPS receives.
There are two reasons for the increase in the MPCP levy this year. First, the local share of the cost of the choice program increased from 30% in 2010-11 to 34% this year due to a reduction in state poverty aid used to offset the MPCP levy. The second and more important reason, which Erin Richards focuses on in her MJS article, is the increase in choice program enrollment. The Department of Public Instruction estimates 22,400 Milwaukee students are using choice this year, up from about 20,300 last year. The rise is a direct result of changes in the 2011-13 state budget that raised income eligibility requirements for participating students and allowed suburban schools to enroll Milwaukee pupils through the program.
Charter schools are largely viewed as a major innovation in the public school landscape, as they receive more independence from state laws and regulations than do traditional public schools, and are therefore more able to experiment with alternative curricula, pedagogical methods, and different ways of hiring and training teachers. Unlike traditional public schools, charters may be shut down by their authorizers for poor performance. But how is charter school performance measured? What are the effects of charter schools on student achievement?
Assessing literature that uses either experimental (lottery) or student-level growth- based methods, this analysis infers the causal impact of attending a charter school on student performance.
Focusing on math and reading scores, the authors find compelling evidence that charters under-perform traditional public schools in some locations, grades, and subjects, and out-perform traditional public schools in other locations, grades, and subjects. However, important exceptions include elementary school reading and middle school math and reading, where evidence suggests no negative effects of charter schools and, in some cases, evidence of positive effects. Meta-analytic methods are used to obtain overall estimates on the effect of charter schools on reading and math achievement. The authors find an overall effect size for elementary school reading and math of 0.02 and 0.05, respectively, and for middle school math of 0.055. Effects are not statistically meaningful for middle school reading and for high school math and reading. Studies that focus on urban areas tend to find larger effects than do studies that examine wider areas. Studies of KIPP charter middle schools suggest positive effects of 0.096 and 0.223 for reading and math respectively. New York City and Boston charter schools also appeared to deliver achievement gains larger than charter schools in most other locations. A lack of rigorous studies in many parts of the nation limits the ability to extrapolate.
Charter schools provide plenty of compelling news. Often the coverage is of great schools producing amazing outcomes for kids. But too often the stories are more tragic or sordid. A school's governing board becomes mired in dysfunctional arguments; a school's students are performing badly on state tests for several years running; somebody absconds with money; or a student with disabilities is discouraged from enrolling in a school.
Facing these unfortunate circumstances, a person is likely to shout, "Somebody should do something!" The outraged observer is correct. Generally, the "somebody" that ought to act is a charter school authorizer. Strong charter school authorizers screen initial applicants to avoid future failures. They also implement practices that respect each school's autonomy while also protecting against abuses and ensuring that floundering schools close. Twenty years into the charter school movement, it appears that it will be difficult to hold all charter schools accountable unless we start to hold authorizers accountable for fulfilling their responsibilities.
With increasing pressure over the last decade to improve student achievement, a growing body of research highlights the crucial role school principals play in creating good environments for learning.
But in Minnesota, there is no uniform method to evaluate the state's roughly 1,700 principals. That's about to change, due to a law passed this summer, and a group of educators who will develop the evaluation criteria and method.
In the state education budget that passed this summer was a requirement that every principal be evaluated starting the 2013 school year. The law also lays out what must be measured.
At Nicolet Union High School, science teacher Karyl Rosenberg keeps the evaluations she's received over the past 21 years in neat files: one for each of her first three years of probationary teaching, and one every third year after that.
So far this year, she's been observed twice briefly by a principal. But how she will be formally evaluated in years to come is still unclear.
That's because many districts across the state, including Nicolet, are developing new systems for measuring teacher performance that aim to better distinguish superior educators from those who are average or below par. They will likely use student achievement growth as one measure of performance, and the results of the evaluation may help administrators decide whom to promote, dismiss or provide with more targeted help.
Research continues to show that the most significant in-school factor to improve student performance is teacher effectiveness, but Wisconsin districts such as Nicolet have been spurred to action by another factor: the Act 10 legislation signed by Gov. Scott Walker.
The legislation has dramatically limited collective bargaining in about two-thirds of the state's districts so far, and it allows for pay structures and staffing decisions based on factors other than seniority. But for quality rather than years of experience to be used as a determining factor in such decisions, administrators need an accurate tool to assess it.
On Oct. 24, a Spokesman-Review reporter called me to talk about education. Over five years of education advocacy, this was the second phone call I've received from a SR reporter.
The first call came Oct. 13, after I submitted a Letter to the Editor about the formal complaint I filed Sept. 28 with the Public Disclosure Commission (PDC). This PDC complaint concerns Spokane Public Schools and school board candidate Deana Brower. Reporter Jody Lawrence-Turner called me to ask for a copy of the complaint.
On Monday, Lawrence-Turner called again as I was driving home with my daughter and a student I'm tutoring. Before I talked with Lawrence-Turner, I confirmed that we were having a conversation that was NOT on the record. Having confirmed that, I talked with her about various education-related topics.
If Lawrence-Turner wonders why I asked if our conversation was off the record, all she needs to do is look at her articles. Gee, do you think The Spokesman-Review and Lawrence-Turner want Brower to win the school board election? I offered my entire blog to Lawrence-Turner, the information in it, and the links to district emails - and this is what she wrote. It looks to me like yet another slanted article with unsupported insinuations regarding school board candidate Sally Fullmer and a local community member, and with an accompanying free pass for opponent Brower.
A Minnesota school district must report to the federal government any future allegations of harassment against Somali students as part of a tentative agreement to end a civil rights investigation, the district's superintendent said Monday.
St. Cloud Superintendent Bruce Watkins said all but the final details of the agreement had been reached with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. The deal up for board approval Thursday night requires that the district make its schools more welcoming to Somalis; it finds that the district broke no federal rules in handling previous incidents, Watkins said.
An Oklahoma school district is facing a lawsuit for allegedly forbidding organizers of a Christian club from promoting events on campus.
"This is a simple matter of a school district targeting a Christian organization," said Matt Sharp, an attorney representing the "Kids for Christ," a community-led Christian group suing the Owasso Public Schools.
If you want to tell if someone is a good driver, you watch them drive. If you want to tell if someone is a good teacher, watch them teach. When it comes to evaluating teachers, the further from the classroom you get, the weaker the measure is.
There's no doubt about it - high-quality evaluation systems for teachers and principals help students and schools. Our union of educators has called for consistent evaluations for years - and even advanced our own proposal back in January. We have been one of many voices on the State Superintendent's Educator Effectiveness Design Team, which is near to releasing a comprehensive evaluation framework.
The education community knows what works: professional development, consistent and thorough classroom observation and using results to help good educators become great.
It was troubling, then, when last week the state Senate voted to advance a bill to tie teacher discipline - even firing - to students' Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE) test scores.
A much-heralded cap on property taxes championed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is encountering resistance as some communities across New York chafe at what amounts to a restriction on their spending and seek to exempt themselves from the new limits.
The communities, which include affluent New York City suburbs and rural communities near the border with Canada, are declaring that they cannot restrain the growth of property taxes and still comply with a variety of state-mandated programs and provide the services residents expect. And now dozens of town and county boards are overriding, or proposing to override, the cap.
"We should be able to dictate our own financial future," said Lee V. A. Roberts, the supervisor in the Westchester County town of Bedford, where the Town Board has already voted to grant itself a waiver from the cap.
The Legislature approved the tax cap in late June, an effort to limit the annual growth of local property taxes to 2 percent or the rate of inflation. After that measure passed, Mr. Cuomo vowed that it would "provide much-needed relief" from rising taxes, and he was so proud of the law that he signed it six times, once in his office and five times on the front lawns of houses in high-tax communities.
The Madison School Board unanimously adopted the 2011-12 district budget and tax levy on Monday, saving the average Madison homeowner $2.74 over their 2010-11 property tax bill.
The $372 million budget requires the district to levy slightly more than $245 million in taxes, down 0.03 percent, or about $62,000, from last year's levy.
The district gets more than $40 million in state funding and more than $10 million in federal funding. The rest of the budget gap is filled by student fees, special education funding and small-class-size funding, said Assistant Superintendent for Business Services Erik Kass.
Superintendent Dan Nerad's $3.5 million spending recommendations were amended into the adopted budget, but Kass said $2.5 million of that amount was reallocated money that already was built into June's preliminary budget.
Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Dan Nerad has proposed about $3.5 million in additional spending on top of the school district's current budget for 2012.
MMSD spokesperson Ken Syke said about $2.5 million of that money will come from sources previously unaccounted for, but income taxes in the City of Madison may need to be upped to cover the remaining additions.
"$1.6 million of that [money] became available because of debt defeasance, and $937,000 of it is coming from revenue from a Medicaid time study," he said.
In addition to the newly available $2.5 million, the district has introduced a recommendation for a total of $1,034,935 in additional funding for school maintenance programs, a statement issued by the district said.
The Madison School Board is considering about $3.5 million in additional spending proposals before it sets its 2011-12 budget and property tax levy Monday night.
The new spending proposed by Superintendent Dan Nerad would come on top of the $369 million budget approved in June.
For an average Madison home valued at $239,239, the new spending would mean $28.71 more than what the board approved in June, for a December bill of $2,665.12. The school tax bill on the average home still would decline $2.74.
Nerad proposed the new spending because of additional revenue identified by the district since the board voted in June. The net result of the new spending and revenue would be a property tax levy that is about the same as the 2010-11 school year.
Most area schools will be closed Thursday and Friday, but with the annual teachers union convention canceled districts are considering whether to do away with the mid-semester break in the future.
Many school districts had already set their calendars for this year by the time the Wisconsin Education Association Council announced in May it would cancel its fall convention.
But Sun Prairie and McFarland have decided to hold classes next year on the days previously set aside for the WEAC convention. Others, including Cambridge, Belleville and DeForest, are thinking about doing the same.
"Early indications are people would favor having regular classes on those days to reduce breaks in instruction for students," DeForest Superintendent Jon Bales said. "It also allows for the addition of makeup snow days at the end of the year without going too far into the month of June."
The annual state teachers union convention that has traditionally meant a two-day school holiday at the end of October is off this year, leaving public school districts with decisions about how to schedule students and teachers.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council canceled the convention, which would have been Thursday and Friday this week, after changes in state law weakened the union and its local affiliates.
Without the certainty of having input into school calendars through the negotiations process, members could not guarantee that they could all get the days off from school, said WEAC President Mary Bell, who added that the convention was "the flagship piece of professional development that we provided for members."
Some school districts, with their calendars already set before the convention was called off, are keeping the school holiday for students but bringing teachers in for training or other activities. Others, such as Waukesha, are keeping the holiday and treating it as two unpaid days for teachers.
The Pacific Collegiate School in Santa Cruz, Calif., is a public charter school. It must hold a random lottery when it has more applicants than vacancies. It is not supposed to be selective.
Yet somehow its average SAT score has risen to the top 10th of 1 percent nationally. Less than 10 percent of its students are from low-income families, compared with 40 percent in its city. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that the school is allowed to ask (not require, it emphasizes) that every family donate $3,000 and 40 hours of volunteer time a year.
As a supporter of the charter school movement, I get grief from people who say that charters -- independent public schools using tax dollars -- are private schools in disguise. They are almost always wrong about that, but there are enough Pacific Collegiate situations to make me wonder whether the rules need revision.
For some of us, it was Spock. For others, a humiliating performance as a pilgrim in the kindergarten musical. For me, it was William Blake's relentless (and beautiful) attacks on Reason. But everyone at some point encounters - and many of us swallow - the dangerous notion that creativity and calculation are irreconcilable enemies.
This perspective lives at the very heart of our school curricula from first grade through graduate school, as our talents are identified and we, complicit in the scheme, label ourselves 'artistic' or 'sporty' or 'scientific.' No doubt there are real, epigenetic differences in the way people think and see the world, but in epigenesis lies the key: Nature gives us talents, but nurture determines how we use them, and how mono or multidimensional our minds become.
Like many quants - the mathematicians whose equations shape high-stakes decision making on Wall Street - Emanuel Derman arrived on Wall Street with little knowledge of economic theory. Unlike many of his colleagues, though, he had a background in theoretical physics, a field in which imagination and mathematics are happy bedfellows. From 1990-2000, Derman led Goldman Sachs' Quantitative Strategies group, presiding over the rise of mathematical modeling as the engine driving financial betting on Wall Street.
SPRINGFIELD ---- Two lobbyists with no prior teaching experience were allowed to count their years as union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of subbing in 2007, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found.
Steven Preckwinkle, the political director for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and fellow union lobbyist David Piccioli were the only people who took advantage of a small window opened by lawmakers a few months earlier.
In the end it couldn't have come as any great shock when the Department of Justice intervened on behalf of a Muslim school teacher who claimed that the board of her Illinois school district was guilty of religious bias. Nor could it have come as any surprise that the Board of Education, Berkeley School District 87 Cook Country Illinois, was finally forced to settle the case brought against it by the DOJ. Still, even Americans accustomed to the relentless -- more precisely the relentlessly selective -- political correctness of the Obama Justice Department had to have been startled at the facts of this case and the deranged notions of equity that had impelled Eric Holder's DOJ to go rushing into battle against the school district.
The school teacher in question, Safoorah Khan, a middle school math lab instructor, had worked at the school for barely a year when she applied for some 19 days unpaid leave so that she could make a pilgrimage to Mecca. The school district denied the request: She was the only math lab instructor the school had, her absence would come just at the period before exams, and furthermore, the leave she wanted was outside the bounds set for all teachers under their union contract.
Last week I walked into West High School for the first time since our daughter, Kate, graduated in 2001.
I'd been warned I might be taken aback by how much the place had changed in a decade. But in fact, I had the opposite reaction. Based on my few hours there, it doesn't seem to have changed much at all.
It had the same delightful, eclectic, intellectual vibe and ethnic diversity one would expect at the public high school located nearest the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Its student body of 2,100 -- largest of the city's four high schools -- hails from 55 countries. It routinely has more semifinalists for National Merit Scholarships, 26 last year, than any school in Wisconsin.
The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
But the school's chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don't mix.
This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.
Considerable research confirms the relationship between school start times, sleep deprivation, and student performance, truancy, and absenteeism, as well as depression, mood swings, impulse control, tobacco and alcohol use, impaired cognitive function and decision-making, obesity, stimulant abuse, automobile accidents, and suicide. Mounting evidence about the biology of adolescent sleep, and about the impact of later start times, shows that starting school before 8 a.m. not only undermines academic achievement but endangers health and safety. Because logistical and financial issues prevent local school systems from establishing safe and educationally defensible hours, however, federal legislation mandating start times consistent with student health and educational well-being is essential.
As the parent of two former and one current Severna Park High School student, I've been living with the issue of early high school start times for years. Although the consensus of scientific opinion is that teenagers (and young adults) would be better off if school hours were better aligned with their biological clocks, the possibility of changing school hours inevitably sparks raging controversy, both here and across the country.
Changing school hours costs money, and we all know school systems don't have a lot of that on hand. It also means changing the way we do things, and most of us don't like doing that much either. On the other hand, Moses didn't come down from Mount Sinai with commandments that schools must start at 7:17 a.m. and end at 2:05 p.m.
Surely if we know students learn better, and are healthier and safer, with different hours, we should make that our number one priority. Shouldn't we?
The Severna Park High School CAC (and the now defunct countywide CAC) have been working on the issue of high school start time for years, decades even - to no avail. Many of us have become convinced that the only solution to the problem is a national mandate. That's why I created a petition on We the People on WhiteHouse.gov, a new platform that allows anyone to create and sign petitions asking the Obama Administration to take action on a range of issues.
Finland is dominating my educational radar screen.
When I read Linda Darling Hammond's excellent "The Flat World and Education" (2010) a few months ago, her description of "The Finnish Success Story" fascinated me. Watching the film American Teacher last month, the most hopeful piece of information for me was that in Finland teaching is the most admired job by college students. In the Q and A that followed a local showing of the movie, questions and comments about the Finnish system dominated. A few days later The Answer Sheet reprinted a compelling letter from Diane Ravitch to Deborah Meier reporting on her visit to Finland and on the Finnish system of education. Finland. Finland. Finland.
And now comes a book by Pasi Sahlberg, the leading authority on Finland's educational reform strategy, "Finnish Lessons," to be published next month by Teachers College Press. A former teacher, leader of professional development for the Ministry of Education and then with the World Bank, where he wrote a definitive report on Finnish education, Sahlberg is now the leader of one of Finland's major organizations in the field of innovation.
A tragedy of American politics is that civil rights groups like the NAACP oppose education reform, even as reform's main beneficiaries are poor and minority students in places like Harlem and New Orleans. The latest evidence comes in a study showing that black students in charter schools outperform their peers in traditional public schools.
The California Charter Schools Association looked at the state's Academic Performance Index (API), which runs on a scale from 200 to 1000, and found that the average black charter student outscored the average black traditional school student by an average of 18 points over the last four years of publicly available data.
In reform hubs like Los Angeles, the charter advantage was 22 points, in Sacramento 48 points, in Oakland 51 and in San Francisco 150. In San Diego, the other major urban center, traditional schools outscored charters by an average of eight points.
America's schoolteachers are some of the most brilliant, driven and highly skilled people working today--exactly the kind of people we want shaping young minds. But they are stuck in a system that doesn't treat them like professionals.
In most workplaces, there is an implicit bargain: Employees get the support they need to excel at their jobs, and employers build a system to evaluate their performance. The evaluations yield information that employees use to improve--and that employers use to hold employees accountable for results.
At Microsoft, we believed in giving our employees the best chance to succeed, and then we insisted on success. We measured excellence, rewarded those who achieved it and were candid with those who did not. Teachers don't work in anything like this kind of environment, and they want a new bargain.
After a bleak State of the Schools Report was released Wednesday by Nebraska's Department of Education, many are wondering what needs to be changed in our schools to improve student scores. One special Omaha Public Schools teacher is not discouraged.
The Nebraska Teacher of the Year was awarded Tuesday at Liberty Elementary School at 20th and St. Mary. She has been a kindergarten teacher there for the past eight years. Despite the report, which some would say is disappointing, Luisa Palomo has a lot of hope for our students.
Palomo made her first official address under her new title Thursday at UNO to high school students interested in becoming future educators. "I did not see it coming, but I'm thrilled, I'm thrilled that I get to share the good things that are happening at our school and in Omaha with people around the country."
Some of the alarming statistics outlined in the report show that Nebraska is falling behind, particularly in math scores. Palomo says steps are being taken to improve Nebraska's education scores, including here in Omaha.
The age-old tension between federal authority and states' rights is back in a big way in this year's presidential campaign, with Republican candidates taking the let-the-states-handle-it position on everything from environmental regulation to health-care reform.
Now President Barack Obama's education policy, a rare bipartisan winner, may also be headed back to the states, which were collectively responsible in recent years for dumbing down standards, ignoring obvious failure and otherwise jeopardizing the whole future of the country.
With the support of Republicans, Obama over the past three years has moved aggressively to set high education standards from Washington and let states and localities figure out how to meet them. But now the Tea Party is pushing Republicans to abolish the Department of Education and resist any federal "intrusions" into education.
Legislation rewriting the No Child Left Behind education law finally gained traction this week, and the Senate Democrat whose committee passed the bill said on Friday that progress became possible because lawmakers were irritated by the Obama administration's offering states waivers to the law's key provisions.
"Some of us on both sides of the aisle were upset with them coming out with the waiver package that they did, so that spurred us on," Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who heads the Senate education committee, said in an interview. "It gave us a sense of urgency."
Mr. Harkin's committee voted 15 to 7 on Thursday to approve a bill that would greatly reduce Washington's role in overseeing public schools. It was co-sponsored by Senator Michael B. Enzi, the Wyoming Republican who is the committee's ranking minority member. Mr. Harkin called it "a good compromise bill" that would have bipartisan support in the full Senate.
To note; again, not hugely comprehensive but a look at what the basic history is of charter schools. I think the history can best be summed up by saying the charter schools idea started as one thing and spread, like cracks on a windshield, in all directions. This is not to say that there are not some charters that are innovative. (I still need to do research to see if I can find even one charter that reflects the earliest thinking.)
Like NCLB, where we have 50 different tests and no real way to prove how American students are doing as a whole, there is charter law in 41 states and the District of Columbia and every single law is different, the numbers of allowed charters is different, the accountability is different and yet, the movement grows. When I get to the Landscape Today, I have some thoughts on why that is (and it's not because charters do well).
In a seminal paper published in 1955, Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman envisaged a universal school choice program for parents of all economic stripes to find schools best suited to their children. Friedman argued that injecting competition into the education market would greatly expand the range of parental choice and result in higher levels of academic attainment.
Unfortunately, today's school choice programs have yet to provide a real test for Friedman's free market thesis. They are simply too encumbered with anti-competitive and anti-free market constraints meant to equalize opportunities for disadvantaged students.
Despite the constraints, some choice programs around the country have shown encouraging results. Studies in Florida, Maine, Vermont, Ohio and Wisconsin have demonstrated that the proximity of choice programs to public schools had improved public school performance.
A 2001 study done by Caroline Hoxby, an economist from Harvard University, showed that Milwaukee's choice program had improved public school performance in math, science, language and social studies. Five more studies ensued, each showing results of increased academic productivity. According to Hoxby, just the threat of introducing choice competition into school districts had provoked a marked rise in public school productivity.
2011-2012 $369,394,753 Madison Schools Budget update
2011-2012 Revised Budget 1.3MB PDF (Budget amendments document). District spending remains largely flat at $369,394,753, yet "Fund Equity", or the District's reserves, has increased to $48,324,862 from $22,769,831 in 2007 (page 24). The District's property tax "underlevy" (increases allowed under Wisconsin school revenue limits which are based on student population changes, successful referendums along with carve-outs such as Fund 80, among others) will be $13,084,310. It also appears that property taxes will be flat (page 19) after a significant 9% increase last year. Interestingly, MSCR spending is up 7.97% (page 28).
2011-2012 enrollment is 24,861. $369,394,753 planned expenditures results in per student spending of $14,858.40.
I welcome clarifications and updates to these numbers, which are interesting. We've seen a doubling of District reserves over the past few years while spending has remained relatively flat as has enrollment.
Higher standards, expectations and school uniforms.
Mandated extracurricular activities.
Grades for parents based on their involvement at the school.
More minority teachers as role models.
More connections and internships with local employers.
Millions in private fundraising.
If the Madison Preparatory Academy can pull off all of that, how could it not improve the academic success of its largely black and Latino students?
That's the big picture view Madison should adopt as it considers the Urban League of Greater Madison's intriguing charter school request. Instead, a disproportionate amount of time and concern has been spent on a final part of the proposal:
When a prominent educational figure remarked that, "a lot of people who have been hired as teachers are basically not competent," it was a rare candid statement about teacher quality. The comment arguably overstates the problem and -- in fairness -- he was also quick to point out that with several million teachers there would of course be some lousy ones, just as there would be in any field. Still, it was a jarring thing to say.
Education policy debates are often like an argument between a couple in a bad relationship -- about everything except the actual problems. Our leaders seem congenitally unable to lead a difficult but honest conversation about our nation's teaching force that acknowledges that several things are all true at once -- we have a teacher quality problem and a management problem, teachers are not to blame for all that ails our schools, we can't fire our way to better schools, but removing some percentage of low-performers would be quite good for students. Instead we have a shallow debate dancing around the thing that matters most in schools: instructional quality.
Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform
One of the greatest public education challenges in California--and the nation--is the achievement and opportunity gaps between African American students and their White and Asian peers.
The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) has an interest in understanding how the state's charter public schools can accelerate closing achievement gaps for African American students, while at the same time advancing educational innovation that improves teaching and learning for all public school students.
The Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform report, released by CCSA in October 2011, details the performance and enrollment trends of African American students in both charter public and traditional public schools. The results show that California charter public schools are effectively accelerating the performance of African American students, and that African American students are enrolled at higher percentage in the state's charters, among other findings.
Since the inception of the Charter Schools Act in California in 1992, charter schools have become an important part of the public education system, opening their doors in both urban and rural areas, in order to provide quality educational options for families. Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform demonstrates that as laboratories of innovation, California's highly effective charter public schools can demonstrate proven paths to success that should be replicated nationally.
"It makes ... no sense to subordinate teaching to planting, cultivating, and harvesting when so few of us work on farms or live by agriculture ... we do not need the summer off." So spoke President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg of George Washington University in remarks to his faculty on November 11, 2002.
President Trachtenberg was not the first, nor will he be the last, to propose pushing universities to a real year-round calendar. Instead of two 14- to 15- week semesters, have three. Students, if they wish, could study hard and graduate in three years, saving considerable amounts (even if per-semester tuition charges remained unchanged) and gain one more year in the labor force. That option could become more appealing if we rationalized federal student financial assistance. With year-round schooling, buildings and equipment that lie idle for vast periods could be utilized far more efficiently, in the long run reducing capital-expenditure outlays (which many in the university community think are somehow provided by God, not requiring annual budgeting).
"The next twenty-five years offer an opportunity to transform the way students have learned for centuries. We will be able to deliver education to students where they are, based on their specific needs, desires, and backgrounds."--Andrew S. Rosen
Imagine a university where programs are tailored to the needs of each student, the best professors are available to everyone, curriculum is relevant to the workplace - and the value of the education is demonstrable. In Change.edu, Andrew S. Rosen shows how that future is possible but in danger of being stifled by a system of incentives that emphasize prestige and tradition, rather than access and outcomes.
The U.S. higher education system has historically been considered one of the best in the world. This thought-provoking story presents the imperative for transforming that system for the 21st century and beyond. Rosen takes on the sacred cows of traditional higher education models, and calls on the country to demand the changes we need to build a qualified workforce and compete in a global economy. Change.edu is sure to open minds -- and open doors to a wealth of opportunities.
New York University pulled out of the National Merit scholarships, becoming at least the ninth school to stop funding one of the largest U.S. merit-based aid programs, because it doesn't want to reward students based on a standardized test.
The National Merit Scholarship Corp. distributed more than $50 million to students in the 2009-2010 year based on the PSAT college entry practice exam. Most of the money comes from almost 200 colleges, including Northwestern University and University of Chicago, to fund awards of as much as $8,000 over four years. Companies such as Boeing Co. and Pfizer Inc. also sponsor the program, primarily to benefit their employees' children.
NYU's withdrawal is another blow to National Merit, already ignored by many elite colleges and a subject of a critical report by a Harvard College-chaired commission. Schools are debating how to allocate scarce financial-aid dollars as tuition costs rise and the economy remains sluggish. While high schools trumpet National Merit winners, relying heavily on a standardized test is a flawed way to evaluate students, said Shawn Abbott, assistant vice president of admissions at NYU.
..........
National Merit hasn't collected any fees from the PSAT for the past 14 years, though it is entitled to a "nominal percent" of revenue under their contract, Kauffmann said. Instead, it has reinvested the funds into the program to keep test fees low and expand access to fee waivers, he said.
The College Board gains a marketing benefit from its association with National Merit when school districts or states consider using public funds to pay for the PSAT in 11th grade or ACT Inc.'s 10th-grade test known as PLAN, according to Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for FairTest, a nonprofit group in Boston that works to end the misuses of standardized testing. Almost 1.3 million 10th-graders nationally took the PLAN test in the 2010-2011 academic year, according to the nonprofit ACT.
High School Students--please study less, if you can. As you should know, jobs and our economy depend on consumers buying goods and services, and the time you spend reading and writing, doing math and science problems, and the like, is simply time spent out of the economy and contributes nothing to the effort to sell products and provide jobs for the American people.
You could consider your time away from studying as part of your community service, putting the needs of the economy ahead of your own selfish desire to learn and grow by doing homework for yourself alone. By spending more time buying and using goods produced by America's workers, you are making a contribution to the community in which you live.
If you have to do three or four hours of homework a week, at least do it using a computer and software which you or your family have purchased. If you do it that way, naturally you will find it easier to play the games you have bought, spend time with social media, and to listen to the songs you paid for at the same time, and you can also surf the Web for products on which you may wish to spend more money in the future.
While in the short term you may do less well in school by combining your schoolwork with your commercial obligations, at least you will be helping to keep our economy going and providing jobs for our unemployed workers.
It is possible that when it comes time for you to look for a job, you may not have the knowledge, skills, and general educational background to qualify for the ones on offer, but that is not your problem in the present.
If you need to learn something in the future, there will always be digital learning and online classes for you to buy. There will be no need to go to the library or read on your own. We expect young people to make sacrifices and to do community service, and refraining from studying is one painless and very useful way for you to work on behalf of those in your country who need jobs now, so that our economy can get help in its recovery on the backs of those of our students who have decided to study even less than they usually do.
The main thing is not to let your schoolwork interfere with your own purchases or with influencing as much as possible the purchases of your parents and friends.
As our President has told us, we need more jobs right now, and if you spend too much time on reading books, writing term papers, and stuff like that, you will be basically just more of a drag on our economy than you should be, so please study less, or if possible, not at all, and help keep our economy growing. You will learn less, but someone somewhere in our economy will thank you for spending more time away from those old printed school books and term papers!
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
School officials could use standardized tests to help decide whether to discipline or fire a teacher, under a bill passed by the state Senate Thursday.
The bill passed 17-16 on a party-line vote, with Republicans supporting it and Democrats in opposition.
Current law allows school administrators to use standardized tests as one of multiple criteria to evaluate teachers' performance but prohibits school districts from using the test results to fire or suspend a teacher. The bill would allow such actions as long as the test results weren't the sole reason for removing, suspending or disciplining a teacher.
Democrats urged senators to hold off on the bill and wait for an effort by GOP Gov. Scott Walker and state schools Superintendent Tony Evers to finish its work developing a system to better evaluate student learning.
"This is a very unfair position that we're putting teachers in," Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) said.
Black and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve their dreams and aspirations. Likewise, boys in general lag behind girls in most indicators of student achievement.
Research indicates that although boys of color have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein men of color find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young men of color will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Likewise, girls of color are failing to graduate high school on-time, underperform on standardized achievement and college entrance exams and are under-enrolled in college preparatory classes in secondary school. The situation is particularly pronounced in the Madison Metropolitan School District where Black and Latino girls are far less likely than Asian and White girls to take a rigorous college preparatory curriculum in high school or successfully complete such courses with a grade of C or better when they do. In this regard, they mimic the course taking patterns of boys of color.
Additionally, data on ACT college entrance exam completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement tests scores provided to the Urban League by the Madison Metropolitan School District show a significant gap in ACT completion, graduation rates and standardized achievement scores between students of color and their white peers.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men and Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Women will be established to serve as catalysts for change and opportunity among young men and women in the Greater Madison, Wisconsin area, particularly young men and women of color. It will also serve the interests of parents who desire a nurturing, college preparatory educational experience for their child.
A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was "tricky," and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.
These are among the 14 cases of cheating by educators substantiated by New York City's special commissioner of investigation for schools since 2002.
They represent a tiny fraction of the more than 1,250 accusations of test tampering or grade changing that the special commissioner has received since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the city schools -- most are handled by the Education Department, which has declined to provide a full accounting of its investigations.
A state labor relations board sided with the Chicago Teachers Union Thursday, voting unanimously to seek an injunction that would stop Chicago Public Schools from offering financial incentives to teachers who add time to their days.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made a longer school day one of his top priorities, and the vote by the five-member Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board threatens to disrupt his efforts, at least temporarily.
The labor board's decision is only the first step in a legal process. The board must petition Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan to pursue the case and, if she agrees, the panel would then ask a circuit court judge to grant the injunction.
Bert Grover, a pistol of a state legislator from the '60s who became a prominent state educator and then was elected superintendent of Wisconsin's public schools, has been battling some health issues the past several months -- not the least of which was a severe staph infection following some knee surgery -- but he's doing quite well these days, thank you.
I called Bert (actually Herbert J. Grover, Ph.D., but he has never been much for formalities) at his Gresham home last week not only to check in, but to get his take about what's been happening to Wisconsin's public education system now that Gov. Scott Walker and his gang have taken over state government.
"Well, let's just say this. Public schools are supposed to be places that are bubbly, enthusiastic, optimistic, hopeful," the 74-year-old educator remarked. "Sad to say, Walker has removed most of that."
Six of every 10 Illinois public schools failed to meet federal test targets this year and risk federal sanctions as a result, according to information released Thursday by the Illinois State Board of Education.
High schools fared the worst.
Statewide, 656 of the 666 public high schools fell short of the proficiency standard on math and reading tests that students take every spring. Only eight high schools where students take the exam in 11th grade met federal standards. Two more high schools made it based on participation and student performance on other state exams.
I am writing to thank you for your encouragement and support in my decision to seek election to the MMSD Board of Education in late fall 2005. Your help in getting elected, your support during tough times, and your help in finding solutions to problems, have made a great difference to my service on the board.
I am writing to let you know that I will not seek re-election in 2012. I continue to believe that the Board of Education is one of the most important elected positions for our community and its schools, and encourage others to step forward to serve in this capacity. MMSD is facing significant challenges, and it is more important than ever that thoughtful citizens engage in the work that will be needed to preserve the traditional strengths of our public schools while helping those schools to change in keeping with the times and the families that they serve.
At the same time, I do not view school board service as a career, and believe that turnover in membership is healthy for the organization and for the district. I have been fortunate to have had an opportunity to serve on this board, and to work with many fine community organizations in that capacity. For that I am grateful.
Again, thank you for your interest, support, and collegiality.
Lucy J. Mathiak
716 Orton Ct.
Madison, WI 53703
Madison School Board
Seat #2
I am appreciative of Lucy's tireless and often thankless work on behalf of our students.
Every organization - public or private, deteriorates. It is often easier to spend more (raise taxes), raise fees on consumers - or a "rate base", reduce curricular quality and in general go along and get along than to seek substantive improvements. Change is hard.
In closing, I had an opportunity to hear Peter Schneider speak during a recent Madison visit. Schneider discussed cultural differences and similarities between America and Germany. He specifically discussed the recent financial crisis. I paraphrase: "If I do not understand a financial vehicle, I buy it". "I create a financial product that no one, including me, understands, I sell it". This is "collective ignorance".
Schneider's talk reminded me of a wonderful Madison teacher's comments some years ago: "if we are doing such a great job, why do so few people vote and/or understand civic and business issues"?
What, then, is the payoff of increased rigor and the pursuit of high standards throughout an organization? Opportunity.
I recently met a technical professional who works throughout the United States from a suburban Madison home. This person is the product of a very poor single parent household. Yet, high parental standards and rigorous academic opportunities at a somewhat rural Wisconsin high school and UW-Madison led to an advanced degree and professional opportunities.
A young and tech-savvy charter school network that's gotten attention for reducing the achievement gap in San Jose, Calif., got the green light from a Common Council committee Tuesday to bring the model to Milwaukee.
Rocketship Education, a nonprofit management company, has applied for a charter from the City of Milwaukee that would allow it to open a publicly funded school in the fall of 2013, with the eventual intent to serve up to 4,000 children in eight K-5 schools by 2017. Each school would have to show measurable progress before subsequent schools could open.
The organization, started in 2006, currently serves about 2,500 students in five San Jose area elementary schools.
A majority of members on the Steering and Rules Committee on Tuesday approved sending Rocketship's application to the full council for consideration.
Rocketship CEO and co-founder John Danner explained the organization's three areas of emphasis: engaging parents through teacher-led home visits and training them to advocate for their children; developing talent by growing a pipeline of teachers who can become school leaders; and giving all students individualized learning plans that blend six hours a day of face-to-face instruction with two hours of lab time spent working with online computer programs and low-cost tutors.
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) shifted a major teacher evaluation requirement out of his rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act -- known as No Child Left Behind -- over the weekend, shifting the dynamics of the debate over the bill's passage.
The initial sweeping education law called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was enacted in 1965, and a 2001 reauthorization under George W. Bush took on the name, "No Child Left Behind." The law has been up for reauthorization since 2007. Harkin's rewrite, the first comprehensive reform to the legislation, came out of negotiations with Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions committee that Harkin chairs.
Harkin released a draft of the bill last week that required school districts and states which receive educator development funding to create teacher evaluation systems that would take student performance into account. But changes over the weekend through a manager's amendment removed the requirement from the bill, instead shifting the teacher evaluation component to a competitive grant program called the Teacher Incentive Fund.
"Our shared goal is that every teacher should receive the high-quality preparation and support so that every student can have the education they deserve," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said at the report's release here on Friday at a forum sponsored by Education Sector. The current system provides no measurement of teacher effectiveness, and thus no guarantee of quality, he said. Despite federal rules requiring states to identify low-performing teacher preparation programs, in the past dozen years, more than half haven't pointed to a single one. "That would be laughable if the results weren't so tragic for our nation's children," Duncan said.
The plan also includes special aid for programs that recruit more diverse candidates who become successful teachers, to address the increasing difference between the proportion of minority students and that of minority teachers.
A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was "tricky," and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.
These are among the 14 cases of cheating by educators substantiated by New York City's special commissioner of investigation for schools since 2002. They represent a tiny fraction of the more than 1,250 allegations of test tampering or grade changing that the special commissioner has received since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the city schools -- most are handled by the Department of Education, which has declined to provide a full accounting of its probes. But as cheating scandals have engulfed school districts in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., as well as New Jersey and Pennsylvania, a review of this relative handful of substantiated local cases shows that cheating schemes can be mundane or audacious, with motivations that include inflating the statistics that are used to evaluate a school, and helping a favorite student become eligible to graduate.
Today, full page ads appear in the L.A. Times, Daily News and La Opinion taken out by Don't Hold Us Back -- respected organizations calling out United Teachers Los Angeles and LAUSD for letting kids fail. The new supergroup includes The United Way, The Urban League, Community Coalition, Alliance for a Better Community, Families in Schools, Asian Pacific American Legal Center and Communities for Teaching Excellence.
The ad's bland wording at first seems a bit "so what?" but it's actually written in code to UTLA leaders, who have helped the local teachers union gain a reputation as one of the most anti-reform big-city education unions in the U.S. Here's a translation:
In one line, the ad says teachers should "be rewarded for academic excellence."
That sounds normal, right?
But in fact, that idea has for years been vehemently opposed by UTLA. UTLA has fiercely fought efforts to reward the most effective teachers, or the teachers who take on the toughest assignments, by giving them financial sweeteners -- merit pay.
In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more." I've come to embrace Huebler's idea, though it might be retooled as: "The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more."
It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing: With an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information--how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it--is what distinguishes my writing from yours.
The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term "unoriginal genius" to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius--a romantic, isolated figure--is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, "moving information," to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.
The Senate approved a measure Tuesday that would curtail the expansion of school vouchers in Wisconsin, at least for now.
The voucher program provides parents in eligible school districts with state subsidies to help defray their children's private school tuition. The subsidies have been a point of contention in Wisconsin for years. Conservatives insist the program gives children in struggling school districts an alternative, but opponents see it as vote of no confidence in public education and complain it pulls precious state dollars away from public schools.
The state Department of Public Instruction estimated it handed out $130.7 million in vouchers during the 2010-11 school year. Nearly 40 percent of that money came from a reduction in state aid for public schools in the city of Milwaukee, while the rest came from tax dollars, according to DPI.
The state budget Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed earlier this year laid out new qualifying criteria for vouchers based on a city's size, poverty levels and per-pupil spending. The new standards made districts across Milwaukee County as well as in the city of Racine eligible.
D.C. teacher Stephanie Black sent me an absorbing e-mail that began with a favorable review of my book "Work Hard. Be Nice" on KIPP school founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg. Then she explained why her positive feelings about the KIPP charter school network had deepened her distaste for the D.C. teacher evaluation program, IMPACT.
I have not taken a strong stand for or against IMPACT, other than to say it is better than the weak evaluation systems in many districts that give almost all teachers satisfactory ratings. Black's personal reaction to what happened at her school is moving and persuasive. I am going to ask a D.C. school official to respond.
From the dawn of institutionalized schooling until now there have always been reformers, who want to modify the way schooling is done. For the most part, such reformers can be scaled along what might be called a liberal-conservative, or progressive-traditionalist, continuum. At one end are those who think that children learn best when they are happy, have choices, study material that is directly meaningful to them, and, in general, are permitted some control over what and how they learn. At the other end are those who think that children learn best when they are firmly directed and guided, by authoritative teachers who know better than children what to learn and how to learn it. Over time there has been regular back-and-forth movement of the educational pendulum along this continuum. But the pendulum never moves very far. Kindhearted progressives, viewed as softheaded by the traditionalists, push one way for a while, and that doesn't work very well. And then hardnosed traditionalists, viewed as petrified fossils by the progresssives, push the other way for a while, and that doesn't work very well either.
Kaleem Caire is feeling pretty confident that the Madison school board will approve Madison Preparatory Academy in late November. After all, he's made substantial concessions to appease his most influential critics, and support for the charter school, which would target at-risk minority students, appears to be gaining momentum.
Still, Caire, who is CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, the nonprofit agency that would run the school, faces a dedicated opposition that remains unflinching in its wide-ranging criticism, some of it highly personal. Some opponents have called Caire an "enemy of public education."
"The fact that people scrutinize us isn't the issue, but it gets to the point where some of this borders on ridiculous," he says.
Caire proposed the school last year, calling it an important first step in closing the minority achievement gap, a problem first documented by the Urban League in 1968. Supporters say that after four decades of doing little, the time has come for a more radical approach.
"Can you imagine this city if 48% of the white kids were dropping out?" asks Gloria Ladson-Billings, an education professor at UW-Madison and Madison Prep board member. "I don't get why that kind of failure is tolerable."
Madison Schools Superintendent Dan Nerad publicly touted President Barack Obama's stalled jobs proposal Monday, saying it would help the School District pay for millions of dollars in needed maintenance projects.
"We either pay now, or we pay more at a much later date," Nerad said at a press conference at West High School, which is due for about $17.4 million in maintenance projects over the next five years.
A School Board committee is reviewing maintenance projects identified in a 2010 study by Durrant Engineers that said the district may need to spend as much as $83.7 million over five years on projects not already included in the budget.
The committee is expected to make recommendations early next year. Nerad said the committee hasn't decided yet whether to recommend another maintenance referendum. A 2004 referendum authorizing $20 million over five years ran out last year.
Federal tax receipts, spending and deficits, fiscal years 2007-2011, billions of dollars:
"It'll be OK," Gov. Scott Walker said last winter when he announced a budget that snatched away more than $800 million in opportunities to learn from Wisconsin public school kids. "I'm giving you the tools to make it work."
Well, the tools the governor gave local school districts are the right to force teachers to pay more toward their retirement, and the option to unilaterally require educators to kick in more for their health care. The problem is that the tools, along with any money some of them might have left over from federal jobs funds, are one-time solutions. These tools can't be used again unless school districts ask teachers to give up even more of their take-home pay.
By law, all school districts have to balance their budgets. They always have, and always will. That's not the point. The point is that the governor has hijacked the language. Educational accountability isn't about balancing the budget, it's about giving kids opportunities to grow up into good, contributing adults. That's not what Gov. Walker wants to talk about.
The red line, here, is median real household income, as gleaned from the CPS, indexed to January 2000=100. It's now at 89.4, which means that real incomes are more than 10% lower today than they were over a decade ago.
More striking still is the huge erosion in incomes over the course of the supposed "recovery" -- the most recent two years, since the Great Recession ended. From January 2000 through the end of the recession, household incomes fluctuated, but basically stayed in a band within 2 percentage points either side of the 98 level. Once it had fallen to 96 when the recession ended, it would have been reasonable to assume some mean reversion at that point -- that with the recovery it would fight its way back up towards 98 or even 100.
Instead, it fell off a cliff, and is now below 90.
The president of a conservative group that claims the University of Wisconsin-Madison discriminates against prospective white and Asian students called on Republican Gov. Scott Walker or state lawmakers Monday to step in to end the practice.
Republicans have balked for years at what UW-Madison calls a holistic admissions policy, which calls for admissions officers to take a number of factors into consideration, including academic performance and race. GOP lawmakers believe the policy permits reverse discrimination.
The Center for Equal Opportunity in Falls Church, Va., reviewed UW-Madison admissions data from 2007 to 2008 and found black and Hispanic applicants had a better a chance of getting in than whites or Asians. Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, chairman of the Assembly's higher education committee, had the center's president, Mark Clegg, walk the panel through the report -- a move that indicates Republicans are looking at the UW System's admission policies again.
When the United States took control of the Philippines at the turn of the 19th century, one of the first things the U.S. did was send in American teachers. The goal was to establish a public school system and turn the Philippines into an English-speaking country.
It worked so well that two centuries later, American schools started traveling to the Philippines to recruit teachers to come here.
In a new documentary called The Learning, filmmaker Ramona Diaz follows four teachers on their journey from the Philippines to classrooms in Baltimore, where 10 percent of the city's teachers -- about 600 -- were Filipino in 2010.
"At the height of the recruitment, which was in '05, '06 and '07, they were recruiting from overseas because there was a shortage of math and science and special-ed teachers," Diaz tells Rebecca Roberts, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered.
After district officials already lowered their estimated tax increase to 2.1 percent earlier this month in advance of a planned refinance of the district's debt-service fund, the district is again lowering the tax burden on Waunakee property owners, this time by an additional 0.7 percent. So when property owners receive their bills, they'll see about a 1.4 percent increase in their school tax levy.
The new numbers come after the district saw less than anticipated growth in student population taken during the school's annual September head count.
In the count, taken on the third friday of classes, Waunakee had 3,874 students reporting to classes, up 180 students from the previous year. It's fewer than the 3,900 students district officials thought would be attending class, meaning the district is losing out on $172,791 in anticipated revenue under the complex revenue cap formula.
Because the enrollment count is a direct relationship with school revenue streams - as one goes up the other does, too - a lower enrollment means districts can't raise as much money. That means districts can cut from one of two streams of income, state aid or property taxes. But since Waunakee is already losing the maximum amount of state aid for the 2011-2012 budget - 10 percent - the district will trim back how much it takes from taxpayers.
Frederick M. Hess's long essay in the latest issue of the quarterly National Affairs pleased those of us who share the American Enterprise Institute scholar's dislike for politicians' fixation on closing the achievement gap. Reducing the gap sounds good until you realize that means it is okay for high achievers to stagnate so that low achievers can catch up.
I have been venting about this for several years and getting only puzzled looks. Hess's piece -- the most detailed and vehement ever on the subject -- will hopefully lead to more discussion of better ways to deal with the different average achievement levels of poor kids and affluent kids.
I think we have borrowed language from another issue, the income gap, and shoved it into the education debate, where it doesn't belong. Making money and learning about the world are not similar enterprises. If someone accumulates $1 billion and spends it on Rolls-Royces and gold bathroom fixtures, that is very different from fixating on learning something new about solar energy and making the world a cleaner place.
At the Board meeting of Wednesday, October 19, the Board will both introduce and adopt their Superintendent Evaluation Instrument.
It is, on the whole, a better considered evaluation tool than they have used before. It has some elements that I really like. It is also missing a few things that I would like to see it include.
I encourage you to read it for yourself and reach your own opinion. Then send that opinion to the Board within the next two days because that's when they will be voting on it. So be quick about it.
In a move that has startled many on the left and the right, Iowa Republican Gov. Terry Branstad has made public his new 18-page education reform bill titled "One Unshakable Vision: World-Class Schools for Iowa." The plan, officially released Oct. 3, makes sweeping changes to the Iowa public education system, as well as to the process for becoming a teacher in Iowa, which could substantially affect aspiring teachers at Iowa State and other colleges and universities in Iowa.
Under this new education bill, students in K-12 public school will be subjected to a more intense Iowa core curriculum, third graders will be required to take a reading test in order to move on to the fourth grade, ninth graders will be asked to take a standardized test that would compare them to other students on an international basis, and 11th graders will be required to take a college entrance exam.
As for teachers, the required grade point average for admission into teaching programs at Iowa universities will be raised from a 2.5 to 3.0, core content coursework may be increased, new teachers will enter into an apprentice program in which they will be mentored and trained by distinguished veteran teachers, and a new pay ladder will be implemented from which pay will be tied to both performance and experience. Many believe that these new ambitious approaches are needed to make Iowa a leader in education again, but many still remain wary of some of the ideas proposed in the bill, especially the new standards for prospective teachers at Iowa universities.
My high school algebra 2 class which I had in the fall of 1964, was notable for a number of things. One was learning how to solve word problems. Another was a theory that most problems we encountered in algebra class could be solved with arithmetic. Yet another was a girl named Fran who I had a crush on.
Fran professed to not like algebra or the class we were in, and found word problems difficult. On a day I had occasion to talk to her, I tried to explain my theory that algebra was like arithmetic but easier. Admittedly, my theory had a bit more to go. She appeared to show some interest, but she wasn't interested. On another occasion I asked her to a football game, but she said she was washing her hair that day. Although Fran had long and beautiful black hair, and I wanted to believe that she had a careful and unrelenting schedule for washing it, I resigned myself to the fact that she would remain uninterested in me, algebra, and any theories about the subject.
My theory of arithmetic vs. algebra grew from a realization I had during that the problems that were difficult for me years ago when I was in elementary school were now incredibly easy using algebra. For example: $24 is 30% of what amount? In arithmetic this involved setting up a proportion while in algebra, it translated directly to 24 = 0.3x, thus skipping the set up of the ratio 24/30 = x/100. Similarly, it was now much easier to understand that an increase in cost by 25% of some amount could be represented as 1.25x. What had been problems before were now exercises; being able to express quantities algebraically made it obvious what was going on. It seemed I was on to something, but I wasn't quite sure what.
Newcomb Central School had two big problems when Skip Hults took over as superintendent five years ago: There were only 55 students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, and the cultural diversity was zero.
Hults took a novel approach solving both problems: He recruited students from abroad.
"We realized that if we wanted to keep our school, we needed to expose our kids to the world," Hults said.
The innovation has worked as Hults intended. This fall, the school has nearly twice as many students, 96, including nine from such nations as Brazil, Russia, Korea, Spain, and Thailand. Lured by Newcomb's innovative programs, other students have come from neighboring districts, one from 50 miles away. And parents and teachers mention signs that show students are becoming more engaged in the world, too.
Roll call is a thing of the past in Washington County Schools. Students now check in with finger scanning devices.
School Superintendent Sandra Cook said the old method just wasn't cutting it.
"We got to talking about attendance in our district and how it was inconsistent," said Cook.
The systems have been up and running for two months inside the schools, but since the majority of students ride the bus every day, district officials decided to move the devices there.
But the transition hasn't been easy. One of the biggest challenges they've faced is where to put the devices on the buses. State safety codes require the isles to be kept completely clear, so one of the ideas they've discussed is to put a laptop on one side of the steering wheel and the finger scan system on the other.
New York state officials say cheating on state Regents exams is a growing concern but just a fraction of the cases are being discovered as the tests are being used more to evaluate schools and teachers.
State Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. says New York's system is missing many more cases in public, private and public charter schools. He is expected to announce on Monday several measures aimed at discouraging and catching cheats.
Cheating is often reported by students and parents, officials say, and the number of confirmed cases remains a fraction of the 222,000 teachers in the state's classrooms. Data obtained by The Associated Press shows just 50 cases were confirmed in the 2009-10 school year and 41 in the 2010-11 school year.
The data gives an incomplete picture of a problem that also concerns the state teachers' union.
The first class of sixth-graders in the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy would attend school nearly year-round, be in class from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., and participate in mandatory extracurricular activities.
Parents would take classes in how to prepare their students for college while the school would aim to enroll at least 70 percent minorities and 65 percent low-income students.
Those and other new details about the controversial charter school proposal are included in a draft business plan the Urban League of Greater Madison provided to the Madison School Board this week. The School District provided a copy to the State Journal at the newspaper's request.
The business plan is incomplete. More details will be shared with the board by the end of the month, Urban League President Kaleem Caire said.
Both the Associated Press (AP) and the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) today highlight the relationship between reductions in school aids across the state and the way school choice and charter programs are funded. The AP story notes "$110 million [was] taken from public schools to pay for an expansion of voucher and charter schools in Milwaukee and Racine." Unfortunately the story fails to mention that the statewide aid reductions to pay for the charter program and the aid reductions in Milwaukee and Racine to pay for choice do not translate into less funding for school districts.
Why? Neither the charter nor choice aid reductions impact revenue limits. Districts can and do make up for the reduction with property taxes. In English, this means the Milwaukee Public Schools, Racine Unified, and the majority of school districts in the state that set their education levy at the highest permitted amount do not lose actual dollars because of these programs, they simply receive them from a different source.
School spending in Wisconsin, traditionally among the nation's highest, was falling even before changes in the current state budget and may already be no more than the U.S. average.
The conservative-leaning Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance reported last week that, while operational spending per pupil remained 5.5 percent above the national average in 2009, when debt and maintenance are figured in, overall spending was 1.6 percent below the U.S. average.
WISTAX estimated that, had the new state revenue limits been in place for 2009, instructional spending also would have been reduced to near the national average.
WISTAX researchers compared 2009 U.S. census data on school spending and revenues by state and also looked ahead to how recent state law and budget changes might affect Wisconsin's ranking. (A PDF of the analysis accompanies this story.)
Before Hurricane Katrina, more than 60 percent of children in New Orleans attended a failing school. Now, only about 18 percent do.
Five years ago, less than a quarter of the children in a special district set up by the state to manage the lowest performing schools scored at or above the "basic" level on state tests. Now, nearly half do.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the progress made by New Orleans's school reform effort in the six years since Hurricane Katrina has been "stunning." And there are many reasons for optimism about a system that is overwhelmingly made up of poor and minority students -- just the sort of place where optimism is in short supply.
There are three important things to consider about the New Orleans experience: Many of the structural changes occurred because the hurricane essentially destroyed the old system, allowing the city to begin fresh. Charter schools, while a foundation of the system now, did not by themselves improve achievement. And finally, New Orleans has done the hard work of changing the school culture while embracing new instructional methods.
But the center's director, Dan Goldhaber, cautioned that the study is just a first step toward determining what kind of training -- not where the training occurred -- best prepares teachers for excellence in the classroom.
Even so, it's the kind of information U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan would like every school to have access to and that's why he recently announced a new program to use federal dollars to pay for similar research.
Washington state schools are among the first to see which teacher training programs seem to result in the best student test scores, but 35 states now have the means to do similar research, according to the Data Quality Campaign, a national organization formed by education and business groups to track state progress on collecting data about students and schools.
If Milwaukee needs a big, well-crafted, we're-all-in-this-together effort by a wide-range of power players working on meeting the educational needs of so many thousands of our children, why do I sense so much reluctance to be enthusiastic about an effort that aims to be all of those things?
Two simple answers:
Because we've been down roads like this before and nothing much came from them.
Because a lot of people, including some of those power players, are skeptical about our collective ability to make real progress.
I'm sympathetic with both of those points.
For years, I've seen community leaders of all kinds say good things (and often mean them) and come up with no consequential results.
I, too, suffer from oh-no-not-another-big-initiative syndrome. And we all know how deeply entrenched our problems are.
But overall, I say: It's time to get moving, folks.
But it's clear that teachers are doing their part to keep one small, if important, piece of the public education reform movement alive: making sure they have an organized voice.
Now we should do ours.
Say what you want about his approach, Walker basically gave reform-minded school districts their chance by ramming through a collective bargaining law that drastically limits what's subject to negotiation.
So, if you think the school year should be longer, if you'd like to see your district have an easier time keeping that awesome first-year teacher and ditching the underwhelming 20-year vet, if you want more money put into recruiting minority teachers and less into teachers' generous health care and pension benefits -- now's your chance.
For despite what you might have heard from union backers, teachers union priorities and students' needs are not always the same thing.
Unions exist, appropriately, to protect their members. You can quibble about whether Walker went too far in lessening their power. But a grudge against a transitory public figure shouldn't take precedence over trying something new to improve public education.
Besides, it's not as if teachers won't have a seat at the reform table.
As a disruptive innovation--an innovation that transforms a sector from one that was previously complicated and expensive into one that is far simpler and more affordable--the rise of online learning carries with it an unprecedented opportunity to transform the schooling system into a student-centric one that can affordably customize for different student needs by allowing all students to learn at their appropriate pace and path, thereby allowing each student to realize her fullest potential.
Whether it does this in the coming years will depend on several variables.
Entrepreneurs and investors--both for-profit and non-profit--are doing their part, as they seek to fashion the future by solving the problems they see students and teachers struggling with today.
Some, like those at Los Altos School District and Rocketship Education, are creating new learning and schooling models and liberating students and teachers.
What a month. I've learned so much in the past 30 days, I need a new brain in which to put it. This old brain of mine feels full. And tired. Public education is a rolling stone run amok. Who can keep up?
This is why we parents and advocates tend to hedge our comments. We never know how things really are, and the minute we figure it out, they change it - without telling us. When we ask for updates, we have to drag it out of them, kicking and screaming through public records requests. And when we get the information, by golly - they change it again.
They do that because a) rolling stones can't be held accountable, and b) they get to say, "You just don't get it." And we don't. That's one reason why few parents will discuss education in any depth. They know they don't get it. Real knowledge is held over our head like a favorite toy, just out of reach. "Jump for it!" But most parents won't jump for it; we just leave. Since 2002, full-time student enrollment in District 81 dropped by about 3,000 students (net), even as operating costs grew by about $60 million.
Public records requests are an effective way of clearing up the fog. After I found out that RCW 42.17.130 prohibits using public resources (directly or indirectly) to campaign for an elective candidate or a ballot proposition (such as a bond or levy), I noticed how close the ties were between District 81 and bond/levy advocacy organization Citizens for Spokane Schools (CFSS).
These days everyone is for education reform. The question is which approach is best. I favor the Steve Jobs model.
In 1984 Steve introduced the Mac with a Super Bowl ad. It ran only once. It ran for only one minute. And it shows a female athlete being chased by the helmeted police of some totalitarian regime.
At the climax, the woman rushes up to a large screen where Big Brother is giving a speech. Just as he announces, "We shall prevail," she hurls her hammer through the screen.
A plan to provide vouchers to students from low-income families and are enrolled in failing schools is at the center of a four-point education reform agenda, but the Corbett administration declined to state how much these reforms would cost taxpayers.
Calling on lawmakers to give students and their families access to the widest variety of educational options, Gov. Tom Corbett announced Tuesday a plan that would:
Offer a voucher program;
Expand the educational tax credit program;
Create a new statewide commission to oversee and evaluate charter schools;
Gov. Terry Branstad received a standing ovation when he took the stage in Ankeny High School's auditorium to talk education reform Wednesday night.
He left the stage about 90 minutes later, to another round of applause, although the crowd stayed their seats this time.
It was the governor's fourth community forum since he unveiled his education blueprint last week. The blueprint will form the basis of a legislative package for education reform in the state that the governor plans to send to the General Assembly when it reconvenes in January.
The blueprint calls for changing the way teachers are paid and evaluated, institutes a third-grade reading test students must pass to reach the fourth and a calls for a series of the end-of-course exams high school seniors must pass to graduate, among its biggest changes.
And at least to the 120 or so that came out to the Ankeny forum, those changes are sitting well, for the most part.
Gov. Jerry Brown's message accompanying his veto of legislation to overhaul California's system of measuring the performance of students and their schools was blunt, iconoclastic and witty. In disputing the conventional wisdom emphasizing the importance of testing, the governor invoked Greek mythology - mocking the "siren song" of the latest trends in education reform - and quoted Albert Einstein - "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
But his veto message raised larger questions: Is Brown rejecting the value of testing in general or just attempting to play the role of a policy provocateur?
In a phone interview this morning with a U-T editorial writer, the governor said it was "neither a rejection of testing or a spur to debate." Instead, Brown said, it was "critical reflection" on the bill by Senate President Darrell Steinberg and its addition of more vague measures of student and school performance, which he called "a fool's errand."
"I believe [in] a certain amount of testing," Brown said, calling the existing Academic Performance Index "a good metric." But he said it shouldn't crowd out "other good measures" of student performance.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinelrecently reported on a new civic effort to improve K-12 education in Milwaukee titled "Milwaukee Succeeds." The effort is certainly ambitious. Erin Richards and Tom Tolan report that it is "focused on large, big-picture ideas that are easy for folks to stand behind, such as making sure all children are prepared to enter school, succeed academically and graduate, take advantage of postsecondary education or training, and contribute to the Milwaukee community."
It is ironic that the Journal Sentinel also recently ran a profile of former Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) superintendent Lee McMurrin. It was McMurrin who in 1975 unveiled his own ambitious ten-point plan for fixing K-12 education in Milwaukee. His goals, according to an August 6, 1975 Milwaukee Journal story, included improving attendance, achievement, job placement for graduates, and the creation of a plan to engage staff in school improvement.
Ten years later McMurrin's plan was replaced by a new plan from Milwaukee school board members Joyce Mallory, Mary Bills and David Cullen titled "A Plan for the Future and a Plan for Now." Their plan, according to a November 17, 1985 Milwaukee Journal article, called for the creation of a 20-member committee of community leaders "to look at the work of futurists and strategic planners and come up with new ideas for running the schools here." Their committee was to include "religious and business leaders, college educators, legal officials and public officials."
Imagine a world, in which when you teach something to someone the knowledge is considered your "intellectual property". Your students are not permitted to teach the things they have learned from you to anyone else, neither for money, nor even for free.
To become a teacher, one must buy into the guild for a lot of money, inherit rights from someone who was a teacher, or teach something that hasn't been learned from anyone, i.e. something newly invented.
Being a teacher was a very powerful position. Having a monopoly to teach and usually even your own districts to educate exclusively, a teacher could charge any price. Furthermore, teachers even had the right to dictate the purpose and conditions on which the knowledge they taught was allowed to be used.
Abby Ramirez wants other people to come to - and act on -- the same beliefs she has: That a large majority of low-income children can become high-performing students and that the number of schools where such success is widespread can be increased sharply in Milwaukee.
In an "On the Issues" session with Mike Gousha at Eckstein Hall on Tuesday, Ramirez described the work of Schools That Can Milwaukee, a year-old organization that has the goal of increasing the number of students in high-performing schools to 20,000 (more than twice the current total) by 2020. Ramirez is executive director of the organization.
"If you haven't seen a high-performing school, go visit one because it will change your belief in what's possible," she told about 150 people at the session hosted by Gousha, the Law School's distinguished fellow in law and public policy. She said you can tell in such a visit that the program is different - more energetic, more focused, more committed to meeting ambitious goals - than in schools where there is an underlying belief that the students aren't going to do well because of factors such as poverty.
Almost every local teachers union in the state without a contract has filed to keep its official status, according to a State Journal analysis.
Of 156 local teachers unions in school districts that did not extend a collective bargaining agreement for this year, only 12 filed with the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission to hold votes later this fall.
"That's a very high number, higher than I would have anticipated," said John Witte, a UW-Madison political science professor who studies education issues in Wisconsin. "It very clearly shows that the teachers are not giving up on their unions at this point."
Another 268 local teacher unions -- 63 percent, which is more than previous estimates -- did not have to decide about recertification this year because their contracts continued through this school year. Among those with contracts are unions in 10 of the 11 largest school districts in the state.
Many of the districts continue to collect union dues from employees with contracts, though some negotiated changes to end that practice.
We founded the American Center for School Choice because we believe a focus on parental empowerment can contribute to a broadening and coalescing of the coalition that seeks to provide the best possible education for children. Simultaneously, empowering parents creates a common good--for the child, the parent, the family, and society.
We begin with the delicate subject of authority--that of parent or of government over the mind of the young. In our culture, authority over thought (or even behavior) has never been a popular premise for argument. But no other way exists; some adult will in fact select a preferred set of skills and values and will attempt, through schooling, to convince Johnny, Susie, Jamal, or Juanita of their truth. Authority is simply a fact.
Whether one is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or the National Education Association, we must proceed by asking which big person will decide this issue for some little person. The fact of authority is no exit, but it is instead the necessary entrance to the debate of educators and society about content, values, money, liberty, the best interest of the child, and the common good.
Citing Pennsylvania's high dropout rates, Gov. Tom Corbett on Tuesday promoted taxpayer-paid vouchers as the ticket to a better education for low-income students in the state's worst-performing school districts as he detailed a broader plan to improve and reshape public education in Pennsylvania.
Under the proposal, parents who qualify could use the vouchers -- dubbed "opportunity scholarships" by Corbett -- to send their children not only to private or religious schools, but also to better-performing public schools. His plan also calls for changing how charter schools are established and teachers are evaluated, and expanding tax credits for businesses that fund scholarships.
Is United States Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) gearing up to take away a lot of rights from students with special needs and return decision-making about their education to states and localities?
Of course not, he's a leading advocate for special education on Capitol Hill. But given how his proposed rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would leave most school accountability decisions to states and localities (Update: Full text now online here (pdf)) it's a question worth asking. After all, like special education students a generation ago the needs of poor and minority students are systematically overlooked by states and local school districts. You see this in access to resources like curriculum and effective teachers, you see it in the flows of public dollars to schools, and you see it in areas of emphasis.
What's different for special education students today? Well, for all of its ongoing problems and friction points the federal "IDEA" special education law is widely credited with a substantial leap forward for students with special needs. Why? It established standards and legal recourse when special education students were being shortchanged. Hasn't always been pretty and is far from perfect but has resulted in real progress for kids in special education. The obvious counterfactual is how much progress would have been made for special education students absent IDEA? I'd argue some, sure, but not as much and not as systemically.
National Education Association's board of directors approved an allocation of up to $5 million to fund the campaign to defeat SB 5 in Ohio - the bill that severely restricts public employee collective bargaining.
The $5 million comes from the national union's Ballot Measure/Legislative Crises Fund, which was doubled in size by vote of NEA's delegates in July. This contribution is in addition to the estimated $5 million the Ohio Education Association dedicated to the referendum campaign, funded by a $54 special assessment the state union imposed on its members.
No factor is more important to the quality of education than the quality of the teacher. With so much at stake, it would be good to know just how well teacher preparation programs are equipping tomorrow's teachers -- and their students -- up for success.
To answer this question, the National Council on Teacher Quality has partnered with U.S. News & World Report to launch a review of the more than 1,400 teacher preparation programs around the country. NCTQ will look at whether the programs select academically capable students, ensure they know the subjects they will teach and equip them with the techniques they need to help their students achieve. The review will let aspiring teachers know where they can get the best preparation, and encourage other programs to emulate the models of their field.
In the 2008-09 academic year, the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development produced more than 300 of the 4,500 new teachers who graduated in Minnesota. Yet despite its key role in filling the state's ranks of educators and despite being sent a formal request to participate in July, as of this week, CEHD has not indicated that they will cooperate with the review.
The system's corps of lecturers feels this threat sharply. "We believe that if courses are moved online, they will most likely be the classes currently taught by lecturers," reads a brief declaration against online education on the website of UC-AFT, the University of California chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, "and so we will use our collective bargaining power to make sure that this move to distance education is done in a fair and just way for our members."
Mending a frosty relationship between school and city leaders, building a new elementary campus and addressing long-term budget challenges are some of the key concerns emerging from the San Mateo-Foster City School District board election race.
The race features political newcomers Fel Anthony Amistad and Audrey Ng and incumbent Colleen Sullivan vying for two spots on the board in the Nov. 8 election. Board President Mark Hudak is not running for re-election.
During a recent editorial meeting with the Times, Amistad, Ng and Sullivan all agreed that the relationship between the district and the Foster City council needs improvement. Much of the tension has involved the district's search in recent years for public land on which to build a proposed new school to address a student population surge.
We're glad state lawmakers are attempting to fix a potential problem created when the controversial school voucher provision was hurriedly stuck into the biennial budget passed in June.
Senate Bill 174 would prevent the state's voucher program from expanding to districts that don't already qualify. The Green Bay School District falls into that category, but could eventually meet the qualifications.
Without the legislation, districts such as Green Bay could become eligible and begin the process of offering school vouchers without a full public hearing process. That would be unfair to taxpayers, parents, students and the public at large.
As your editor expected, the waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act being pushed by President Barack Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, aren't worth the paper upon which they are written.
Under the Obama plan, states will be allowed to evade the aspirational 100 percent proficiency provision with a vague set of "ambitious but achievable goals" and an equally amorphous requirement that states must put "college and career-ready" curriculum standards in place. Many surmise the latter means implementing Common Core standards in reading and math -- something that 45 states have done so far. But Duncan has had to avoid making such a public statement means in order to avoid the full wrath of congressional Republicans and some reformers who essentially declare that doing so oversteps the Department of Education's authority. As a result, a state can probably come up with some mishmash, call it college- and career-ready, and easily get it past federal officials.
Welcome to Fantasyland. Eric Welch just sent me a detailed plan for a public charter school in Fairfax County. He and several other people on the board of what they call the Fairfax Leadership Academy say they want to help low-income families with a school unlike any local students have had before.
They are deluded to think this would ever be approved, although Welch, much-honored as an educator, knows a lot about kids and teaching. We met several years ago when I visited his class at J.E.B. Stuart High School, where he used a program known as Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) to prepare average students for challenging courses. He is now the executive director and board chairman of the planned academy.
Counting him, the 17-member board includes 12 current or former Fairfax school educators, plus state Del. Kaye Kory (D-Fairfax). I expected more sense than this from such capable people, well-versed in the ways of public school politics. I hope they read the next few sentences carefully.
To bolster their case and push their agendas, advocates for market-based education reform and market-based policies in general tout “miracle schools” that have supposedly produced amazing results . Urban Prep in Chicago is often exhibit A.
As Diane Ravitch wrote of Urban Prep and other ed deform favorites ” the only miracle at these schools was a triumph of public relations.”
Locally, backers of the Madison Preparatory Academy have incorporated much of the Urban Prep model in their plan and have repeatedly cited the “success” of that school as evidence of the soundness of their proposal. Just this weekend Derrell Connor was quoted as saying in relation to Madison Prep “We are using Urban Prep (in Chicago) as an example, which for the last four years has a 100 percent graduation rate and all those kids have gone on to college.” As I pointed out in a back-and-forth in the comments on that interview, the actual Urban Prep graduation rate is far below 100% (62.6% is the correct figure, my mistakes in the comments, also there have only been two graduating classes, not four) .
"Because we're in that position is exactly why we thought we could ask those questions," said Smith College President Carol Christ. "We aren't worried about what's going to happen next year."
And Smith isn't alone. In the past year, presidents of several elite liberal arts colleges have questioned whether the financial model underpinning their institutions - one relying on high tuition costs and student aid paying for expensive instruction and residential life on beautiful campuses -- is sustainable over the long term. They have also begun to question whether the education they offer, with small classes, relatively rigid schedules, limited course and major offerings, and intense academic rigor, is going to continue to appeal to students.
"The model - if it's not breaking - it's showing signs of age," said Richard Kneedler, former president of Franklin and Marshall College, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, and a consultant with Ann Duffield and Colleagues, a presidential consulting firm. "The price has been pushed up at a number of the top institutions. It's gotten to the point where people are asking a lot of questions about it, and this high price is creating a sense in part of the public that higher education is becoming a commercial exercise."
Choehorned into a small living room in a South Los Angeles apartment, a dozen parents discuss why their kids' school ranks as one of the worst in the nation's second-largest school district.
The answers come quickly: Teachers are jaded; gifted pupils aren't challenged; disabled students are isolated; the building is dirty and office staff treat parents disrespectfully.
"We know what the problem is -- we're about fixing it," said Cassandra Perry, the Woodcrest Elementary School parent hosting the meeting. "We're not against the administrators or the teachers union. We're honestly about the kids."
School parent groups are no longer just about holding the next bake-sale fundraiser. They're about education reform.
Maryland has long been a leader in the field of educational accountability, and the Baltimore City school system took a crucial next step last year with a new teacher contract that will directly tie promotion and advancement to student outcomes. So it's mystifying that so little effort is being made to hold the private tutoring groups that are getting millions of dollars a year to help students from Baltimore's worst-performing schools accountable for the results they promise, or even to know whether they're making a difference.
As part of the No Child Left Behind law, districts were required to set aside part of their federal Title I money to pay for free private tutoring for poor students at failing schools. Since Baltimore City has such a high proportion of students from poor families, and because the school system historically has struggled to meet NCLB's progress requirements, the city has been obliged to spend some $55 million on private tutors over the last nine years, with little oversight by the school system or the state.
That paradox arose because the NCLB law specifically forbade city school officials from vetting or ranking the private tutoring companies for effectiveness, on the theory that schools that were already judged to be failing should not be allowed to interfere with parents' decisions about what was best for their children. At the same time, the law required school systems to fully inform parents about the availability of such services and pay for whatever programs the parents chose. That prompted hundreds of tutoring outfits to emerge in hopes of capitalizing on the federal largesse. Some had established records of excellence, but many did not.
California Gov. Jerry Brown is one of the most powerful anti-student testing politicians in the country. So, when given the chance to sign into law a new system of education accountability that would place far less emphasis on test scores, what did Brown do? He vetoed it. In his veto message over the weekend he called the bill "yet another siren song of school reform" that "relies on the same quantitative and standardized paradigm at the heart of the current system."
California Senate Bill 547 would have replaced what is known as the Academic Performance Index, which dates to 1999 and is based entirely on test scores, with the Education Quality Index, which, as the name implies, incorporated a broader range of measures. Schools' graduation rates, for example, as well as new indices of college preparedness and career readiness, would have been factored in. So would the availability and participation in extracurricular and enrichment opportunities. As for test scores, they would contribute no more than 40 percent of the value of the EQI for high schools and no less than 40 percent for elementary schools.
One of the major complaints of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, many of whom have taken on significant student debt, is that the cost of college is too darn high. And they're right, but not because of greedy corporate fat cats. No, the real guilty party here is federal politicians, who for decades have been fueling high profits -- and prices -- at both for-profit and nonprofit schools.
Wait. Big profits at nonprofit colleges? Yes, money has been piling up even at schools you thought had no interest in profit. And Washington, D.C., is the biggest hand feeding the beast.
Thanks to recent congressional hearings and battling over new regulations for for-profit schools, most people -- including many college-aged, profit-disdaining Wall Street squatters -- are probably at least vaguely aware that for-profit colleges are making good money.
This week's Isthmus includes an opinion column by Larry Kaufmann entitled "What's So Bad About School Choice?" Mr. Kauffmann is identified as "an economic consultant based in Madison." I bet Mr. Kaufmann is really smart in a lot of ways. But this column of his seems strikingly misguided.
In a nutshell, Kaufmann argues that our public schools have failed. Public education "is one of the most unproductive and underperforming sectors in America." Spending on schools has gone up but "students' combined math and reading scores have been flat." Hence, our educational productivity "has fallen by 50% since 1970."
If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Kaufmann apparently is an economist and his preferred solution to what he sees as the underperformance of the educational-output industry is to unleash the magic of the market.
Specifically, his answer is unfettered school choice. Instead of shoveling money down educational sinkholes, parents should be given vouchers to purchase educational services from whomever they choose. Kaufmann assumes that parents as consumers will choose wisely; innovative and efficient schools will flourish; less effective schools will exit the market; and math and reading scores will soar.
The British are coming! The British are coming!
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Public education needs more money! Public education needs more money!
One of these statements (had Paul Revere actually said it) was true. One of these statements is obviously false. And the third, well, skies don't fall, silly.
Taxpayers keep hearing how the funding for public education has been cut. We're constantly barraged with: "Money is tight." "We've cut the budget to the bone." "We're running out of options." "We've done all we can; now we have to cut programs and teachers." These claims defy explanation. They aren't true in Spokane. They aren't true in Washington State. They aren't true in most other states, and they aren't true at the federal level. Unfortunately, many people believe them.
A city council candidate insisted recently: "We can't gut education!" Last week, a Spokane reporter wrote: "Since 2002, Spokane Public Schools has cut $45 million from its budget..." In its budget forums last spring, district administrators and board directors told the public that since 2002, the district has cut $54 million from its budget. Spokane school board candidate Deana Brower has repeatedly said that the district needs more money.
Let's look at some numbers. Follow the links to the budget documents. See how the budget has grown, and see the district's tendency to budget for greater expenditures than it has in revenues.
I am returning Senate Bill 547 without my signature.
This bill is yet another siren song of school reform. It renames the Academic Performance Index (API) and reduces its significance by adding three other quantitative measures.
While I applaud the author's desire to improve the API, I don't believe that this bill would make our state's accountability regime either more probing or more fair.
This bill requires a new collection of indices called the "Education Quality Index" (EQI),consisting of "multiple indicators," many of which are ill-defined and some impossible to design. These "multiple indicators" are expected to change over time, causing measurement instability and muddling the picture ofhow schools perform.
SB 547 would also add significant costs and confusion to the implementation of the newly-adopted Common Core standards which must be in place by 2014. This bill would require us to introduce a whole new system of accountability at the same time we are required to carry out extensive revisions to school curriculum, teaching materials and tests. That doesn't make sense.
Finally, while SB 547 attempts to improve the API, it relies on the same quantitative and standardized paradigm at the heart of the current system. The criticism of the API is that it has led schools to focus too narrowly on tested subjects and ignore other subjects and matters that are vital to a well-rounded education. SB 547 certainly would add more things to measure, but it is doubtful that it would actually improve our schools.
Adding more speedometers to a broken car won't tum it into a high-performance machine.
Over the last 50 years, academic "experts" have subjected California to unceasing pedagogical change and experimentation.
The current fashion is to collect endless quantitative data to populate ever-changing indicators of performance to distinguish the educational "good" from the educational "bad." Instead of recognizing that perhaps we have reached testing nirvana, editorialists and academics alike call for ever more measurement "visions and revisions."
The University of Wisconsin System is trying to help transfer students get a degree quicker and cheaper as part of its effort to increase the number of college graduates in the state.
Transferring credits from one school to another often means wasted time and money because course requirements don't match. With some 17,000 students - the equivalent of two small UW universities - transferring into and within the UW system each year, making the process more efficient could have a dramatic effect on retention and graduation rates.
Such a step might not seem like an economic driver, but boosting the percentage of Wisconsin residents who have a college degree could help lure companies to the state, system officials reason. That, in turn, could stimulate the economy.
Many college students today aren't dropped off at one school as freshmen and picked up at the same school four years later with a degree, said UW System President Kevin Reilly. It's more of a "swirl," he said, with students leaving college for a number of reasons, then returning to school somewhere else with credits to transfer.
The parent-teacher organizations and associations in our schools do good work, yet rarely agitate for change. Parents often pick their neighborhood because they like the school the way it is. Teachers often prefer to make their own decisions without parental interference.
But occasionally, as happened at Leesburg Elementary School in Loudoun County, parent dissatisfaction reaches a level where the PTO begins asking questions and sending e-mails to the principal or, worse, the principal's bosses. Then those evening meetings, which used to put me to sleep, get stressful.
Communication breakdowns between parents and schools are common. We education writers usually shrug them off as too local and trivial. But little stories like the flap at Leesburg Elementary expose a major flaw in the way schools treat parents (that's right, I think the school is usually the villain) and deserve more attention than they get.
AMONG the episodes in his life that didn't last, that were over almost before they began, including a spell in the army and a try at marriage, Michael Hart was a street musician in San Francisco. He made no money at it, but then he never bought into the money system much--garage-sale T-shirts, canned beans for supper, were his sort of thing. He gave the music away for nothing because he believed it should be as freely available as the air you breathed, or as the wild blackberries and raspberries he used to gorge on, growing up, in the woods near Tacoma in Washington state. All good things should be abundant, and they should be free.
He came to apply that principle to books, too. Everyone should have access to the great works of the world, whether heavy (Shakespeare, "Moby-Dick", pi to 1m places), or light (Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, the "Kama Sutra"). Everyone should have a free library of their own, the whole Library of Congress if they wanted, or some esoteric little subset; he liked Romanian poetry himself, and Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha". The joy of e-books, which he invented, was that anyone could read those books anywhere, free, on any device, and every text could be replicated millions of times over. He dreamed that by 2021 he would have provided a million e-books each, a petabyte of information that could probably be held in one hand, to a billion people all over the globe--a quadrillion books, just given away. As powerful as the Bomb, but beneficial.
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Representative Michele Bachmann promises to "turn out the lights" at the federal Education Department. Gov. Rick Perry calls it unconstitutional. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, would allow it to live but only as a drastically shrunken agency that mainly gathers statistics.
Even Mitt Romney, who in 2008 ran for president defending No Child Left Behind, the federal law that vastly expanded Washington's role in public schools, now says, "We need to get the federal government out of education."
For a generation, there has been loose bipartisan agreement in Washington that the federal government has a necessary role to play in the nation's 13,600 school districts, primarily by using money to compel states to raise standards.
The Web site of Carnegie Learning, a company started by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University that sells classroom software, trumpets this promise: "Revolutionary Math Curricula. Revolutionary Results."
The pitch has sounded seductive to thousands of schools across the country for more than a decade. But a review by the United States Department of Education last year would suggest a much less alluring come-on: Undistinguished math curricula. Unproven results.
The federal review of Carnegie Learning's flagship software, Cognitive Tutor, said the program had "no discernible effects" on the standardized test scores of high school students. A separate 2009 federal look at 10 major software products for teaching algebra as well as elementary and middle school math and reading found that nine of them, including Cognitive Tutor, "did not have statistically significant effects on test scores."
Amid a classroom-based software boom estimated at $2.2 billion a year, debate continues to rage over the effectiveness of technology on learning and how best to measure it. But it is hard to tell that from technology companies' promotional materials.
Consider three anecdotes from Mary Diez, dean of education at Alverno College:
Several years ago, she was walking up to the door of a Milwaukee high school. A student told her, "Lady, you don't want to go in there. It's not a nice place." Unfortunately, she said, he was right. Too many staff members didn't really care about the kids, and you had the feeling the place could go out of control at any time. Is that the formula for a successful school?
While Diez was involved in an effort to help 11 specific schools in the city, a principal showed her a six-page document, listing rules and the consequences for violating them. Her response: "You think, if you had more engaging classes, you would need all that?"
Students at one school were telling her about their favorite teacher. "She respects us and we respect her back," one said. The teacher had found something you don't learn from a course or a manual: the right mix of caring for kids and demanding educational progress from them that brings good outcomes, even with high-needs youths.
Diez is one of the leading figures in the Milwaukee area in what I believe (and this may be hopeful thinking) is a growing commitment by schools and educators to strengthen their work on improving the character traits of their students - and of staff members.
According to statistics provided by the Oakland school district (and crunched by your devoted education reporter):
TOTAL SUSPENSIONS in 2010-11: 6,137
TOTAL DAYS OF SCHOOL MISSED: 14,533
DEFIANCE ("disruption/defy authority") was the basis for 43 percent of all suspensions.
BLACK MALES made up less than 20 percent of all students in OUSD, but received about half of the suspensions.
At least two of the schools had more suspensions than students: Barack Obama Academy and Youth Empowerment School. YES (on the King Estates campus) closed in June, and Barack Obama Academy, an alternative middle school that opened on the Toler Heights campus in 2007, is slated to merge with Community Day.
Have you ever experienced an online course ? If you are reading this article, I'm presuming the answer is yes. Whether you are the teacher or the student, you probably thought, at one time or another: the experience could have been better if... Maybe it wasn't exactly those words, but I'm sure you found out that the Learning Management System (LMS) you were using - or the course material you were producing/looking at - wasn't as hot as you expected.
This is quite common. In the beginning of this century, LMSs are only starting to be usable by the mainstream. What we're asking teachers is to create online material without, sometimes, any knowledge of computers or the LMS itself.
How can the experience be better? LMS can be simpler if online material can be produced without requiring a degree in computer science... and in a reasonable time frame.
The Big Easy's School Revolution John White, superintendent of New Orleans' public schools: 'In other cities, charter schools exist in spite of the system. Here they are the system.'
At John McDonough High School in this city's Esplanade Ridge district, the new superintendent points to a broken window boarded up with plastic. Nobody thought to fix it properly. "Why? Because these are the poor kids," says John White, who arrived in New Orleans this spring. "The message is: 'We don't care.'"
John Mac is one of the worst schools in New Orleans, which makes it one of the worst in America. It scored 30 out of 200 on a statewide performance scale when 75 counts as "failing." In a school built for 800 students, 340 are enrolled. Virtually all are African-American. A couple years ago, an armed gang burst into the cafeteria and assassinated a student.
Mr. White looks in on classrooms. In one, groups of seniors chat loudly and puzzle over a basic algebra problem. In another the teacher struggles to start a conversation about a USA Today article that few students had read. A girl in the corner sits with a jacket over her head, headphones in both ears.
An article in today's Capital Times details the ongoing saga of Madison Urban League CEO Kaleem Caire's efforts to create an all-male charter school targeted towards African-Americans in Madison. The story highlights Wisconsin's need for an improved charter school law.
The school, Madison Prep, aims to use an extended school day, uniforms, and family engagement to get 6th - 12th graders ready for college. The need for a new approach in Madison is great, just 48.3% of African-American students graduate high school in four years. The problem is that charter schools outside of Milwaukee and Racine can only be authorized by school districts and the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) has not been eager to authorize Madison Prep.
Backers of the Madison Preparatory Academy and Madison School Board members appear to have ironed out some of the major wrinkles in the plans for the controversial new charter school aimed at improving the academic performance of minority students.
But the devil remains in the details, board members say. Bringing several issues into clearer focus and then getting agreement will be essential to move the project forward. A final vote by the School Board will take place before the end of the year.
Details to be examined include the fine print on a broad agreement announced last week between the Madison teachers union and organizers of the Urban League-sponsored charter school.
"There are still some tremendously big questions that haven't been answered about how this agreement would actually work," says Marj Passman, School Board vice president. "It's not clear to me that all the parties are on the same page on all the issues, large and small."
The National Education Policy Center finds that districts, including L.A. Unified, have increasingly suspended minority students, mostly for nonviolent offenses, over the last decade.
In the decade since school districts instituted "zero tolerance" discipline policies, administrators have increasingly suspended minority students, predominantly for nonviolent offenses, according to a report released Wednesday.
The National Education Policy Center found that suspensions across the country are increasing for offenses such as dress code and cellphone violations. Researchers expressed concerns that the overuse of suspensions could lead to dropouts and even incarceration.
Suspensions are falling mostly on black students; nearly a third of black males in middle school have been suspended at least once, researchers from the University of Colorado-based group found.
Today, Madison Preparatory Academy Board Chair, David Cagigal, announced a gift of $2.5 million presented to the public charter school from Madisonian Mary Burke.
Ms. Burke, a retired business executive whose family owns Trek Bicycles and who served as Wisconsin's Secretary of Commerce during the Doyle Administration, described the reason for her gift.
"We all know Madison can do better. I am happy to do my part to invest in our community and the future of all of our youth. Madison Prep is a powerful idea backed up by a powerful and cost-effective plan. It offers real hope to Madison students, teachers and families who want to realize their expectations and dreams."
Ms. Burke also shared, "I understand we are in tight budget times and don't want concerns about the cost of Madison Prep or the availability of public funding to supersede the real need for the School Board to support it. I am confident Madison Prep will be a great opportunity for children and want to see it happen. I hope my gift helps the School Board overcome its financial concerns."
Gloria Ladson-Billings, Vice Chair of Madison Prep's Board and the Kellner Family Professor of Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison sees Ms. Burke's gift as an investment in innovation and human potential.
"We need to search for new solutions to solve the achievement gap in our Madison schools. To do this, we must be willing to innovate. Madison can be a perfect incubator for new educational methods and approaches. Mary Burke's gift is stunning in its generosity and powerful in its potential."
Mr. Cagigal sees the gift as the start of an important trend in the region. "Mary is absolutely committed to eliminating the achievement gap and is investing her resources in multiple approaches to achieve this goal. Whether it's Madison Prep or the Boys & Girls Club's AVID/TOPS program, Mary believes that supporting such efforts will ultimately benefit our entire community in the future. She is setting a great example for others and we are very thankful to have her in our corner."
With Ms. Burke's gift, the Urban League of Greater Madison will further reduce its request for per pupil funding from the Madison Metropolitan School District from $11,471 per pupil to $9,400 in the school's first year, and $9,800 per pupil in years two through five of the school's proposed five year budget. The Madison district currently spends $13,207 per pupil to educate students in middle and high schools.
Madison Preparatory Academy plans to open two college preparatory public charter schools in the fall of 2012, one for boys and one for girls. Their mission will be the same: to prepare students for success at a four year college or university by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service. Both academies will be tuition-free, offer an identical curriculum in a single-sex education environment, and serve as catalysts for change and opportunity, particularly for young people of color.
Beginning with the 2012-13 school year, the Academies will serve 60 sixth grade boys and 60 sixth grade girls when they open next year, eventually growing to serve 820 students total.
Madison's Board of Education will vote next month on the new charter schools.
SJ: You need a person. Especially with computers the way they are now. Computers are very reactive but they're not proactive; they are not agents, if you will. They are very reactive. What children need is something more proactive. They need a guide. They don't need an assistant. I think we have all the material in the world to solve this problem; it's just being deployed in other places. I've been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system. I know this isn't what the interview was supposed to be about but it is what I care about a great deal.
DM: This question was meant to be at the end and we're just getting to it now.
SJ: One of the things I feel is that, right now, if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part. What happened was that mothers started working and they didn't have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids' school. Schools became much more institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids' education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control, which is what happened in our country, is that the service level almost always goes down. I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the telephone company was all one. I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell Logo on it and it said "We don't care. We don't have to." And that's what a monopoly is. That's what IBM was in their day. And that's certainly what the public school system is. They don't have to care.
Let's go through some economics. The most expensive thing people buy in their lives is a house. The second most expensive thing is a car, usually, and an average car costs approximately twenty thousand dollars. And an average car lasts about eight years. Then you buy another one. Approximately two thousand dollars a year over an eight year period. Well, your child goes to school approximately eight years in K through 8. What does the State of California spent per pupil per year in a public school? About forty-four hundred dollars. Over twice as much as a car. It turns out that when you go to buy a car you have a lot of information available to you to make a choice and you have a lot of choices. General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and Nissan. They are advertising to you like crazy. I can't get through a day without seeing five car ads. And they seem to be able to make these cars efficiently enough that they can afford to take some of my money and advertise to other people. So that everybody knows about all these cars and they keep getting better and better because there's a lot of competition.
Monopolists hate competition, and they'll say almost anything to prevent it. When natural gas competition was introduced in the mid-1980s, pipeline executives told regulators it would lead to gas explosions throughout Manhattan. As implausible as that tale was, it pales in comparison to the misinformation campaign waged by the public school monopoly against school choice.
The school choice movement is gathering steam because of one simple fact: Public education is one of the most unproductive and underperforming sectors in America. Since 1970, spending on public schools (per student, in inflation-adjusted terms) has more than doubled. Over the same period, students' combined math and reading scores have been flat, and the U.S. has fallen behind most other industrial nations on standardized tests.
Educational productivity can be measured as the "output" of educational achievement for each inflation-adjusted dollar spent per student, and by this measure, the productivity of American public schools has fallen by 50% since 1970. A dollar invested in public schools in the U.K., Ireland and New Zealand now yields nearly twice the educational achievement as the same dollar spent in U.S. public schools.
These results cannot be explained by the efforts made to educate the disadvantaged, or by "exit exams" that reduce the pool of high school graduates in some countries. America's public schools clearly need to be improved but, in spite of receiving a massive increase in resources, have consistently failed to do so. Given this dismal performance, the current calls for fundamental educational reform are natural, healthy and long overdue.
At the time, Julie Fitzgerald didn't know much about standardized testing or the laws in place that promote it. She just saw her young child crying.
"He was trying to do his math homework, which is a subject he usually enjoyed," she recalled. "He was really struggling, and he put his head down on the counter and started to cry. He said, 'I'm stupid.'"
Fitzgerald learned that her son, then in the second grade, had taken an assessment test that day in school and had become overwhelmed by it. A year later, she has informed Portland school officials in writing that she's opting both of her kids, students at Hall Elementary School, out of standardized testing.
She's one of few parents in Portland to take that step, but represents a local tie to a growing nationwide movement of parents dissatisfied with assessment tests mandated by state and federal education laws.
Families were more dependent on government programs than ever last year.
Nearly half, 48.5%, of the population lived in a household that received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2010, according to Census data. Those numbers have risen since the middle of the recession when 44.4% lived households receiving benefits in the third quarter of 2008.
The share of people relying on government benefits has reached a historic high, in large part from the deep recession and meager recovery, but also because of the expansion of government programs over the years. (See a timeline on the history of government benefits programs here.)
A week after President Obama said he planned to rollback No Child Left Behind requirements, a majority of states have indicated they're on board with the plan, and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is encouraging others to do the same.
In a recent appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Duncan said that he wants "to get out of the way of the states," and that teachers need "room to move and we can't keep beating down from Washington."
In a letter to state education officials, Duncan stated that he was encouraging state and local government agencies to request waivers to NCLB, which Duncan says he is able to enact through a section in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The new waivers will provide flexibility to school curriculum, provided that the governing bodies meet certain requirements.
It appears that the one thing holding down student achievement was the jeans the teacher wore to class. Oh, if only we had realized that unless the teacher was wearing a tie while dodging spitballs from his class of 60 kids, that would make all the difference as to whether or not Johnny could read.
No one cares to lower class sizes, and heaven forbid we should give teachers the opportunity to have any say in their workplace. So let's enact dress codes for teachers. No one is saying where the teachers are going to get the money for all these clothes, but I guess Goodwill might be high on the list.
What an interesting paradox to read the Oct. 2 article on dress codes for teachers in the same newspaper that carried the lament that we need more people with manufacturing skills such as machinists and CNC operators. Does anyone remember that some people who work with their hands are the ones who are actually helping the economy along? I mean, are we so blinded by the thought that we all want everyone to be a doctor, lawyer or MBA that we have forgotten that some people are amazing at doing jobs that don't require wearing a suit?
In this era of tumult and freefall for teachers in public schools, the imposition of a teacher dress code seems almost over the top. At first glance, it appears heavily dredged in the flour of unbounded management power.
A number of public school districts in the metro area have imposed dress codes on their teaching staff. While the codes vary in detail, they seem to center around a neat, casual appearance for the teachers.
Politics aside, when one steps back and examines the strengths of the policy, it is a good idea. Teachers quoted in an Oct. 2 Journal Sentinel article, for the most part, appear to be supportive. In my experience, most teachers already dress this way, what I call "respectfully comfortable."
The key issue to me is that teachers not be mistaken for students because of lax appearance. Clothing is a powerful symbol in all areas of life; it makes announcements as to how a person wishes to be perceived. Teachers do and should occupy an arena of esteem and authority. This can be diminished if a teacher shows up in class wearing clothes so informal as to send a message to students that, hey, we're all buddies and I want to be your friend.
"Our shared goal is that every teacher should receive the high-quality preparation and support so that every student can have the education they deserve," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said at the report's release here on Friday at a forum sponsored by Education Sector. The current system provides no measurement of teacher effectiveness, and thus no guarantee of quality, he said. Despite federal rules requiring states to identify low-performing teacher preparation programs, in the past dozen years, more than half haven't pointed to a single one. "That would be laughable if the results weren't so tragic for our nation's children," Duncan said.
The plan also includes special aid for programs that recruit more diverse candidates who become successful teachers, to address the increasing difference between the proportion of minority students and that of minority teachers.
Measuring teacher performance has been a focus for Duncan, who last year upset many programs by suggesting that master's degrees in education should not automatically merit higher paychecks, saying that money should be redirected to teachers who either prove their ability to perform or work in high-needs areas such as low-income districts. The new federal proposal, which Duncan announced here on Friday, was widely praised for its goal of improving student outcomes. But it also prompted some skepticism from teacher education groups questioning its feasibility.
t sounds so democratic, a very American idea: break down the walls of "remedial," "average" and "advanced" classes so that all students in each grade can learn together, with lessons that teachers "differentiate" to challenge each individual. Proponents of this approach often stress that it benefits average and lagging students, but a new study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute suggests that the upsides may come at a cost to top students -- and to the international competitiveness of the United States.
Dear Common Council Members, Mayor Barrett, Treasurer Whittow, and Comptroller Morics:
As members of the Milwaukee Legislative Caucus, we are writing to request that you adopt and implement the Milwaukee Public School Board's proposal to break out the tax levy associated with the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) from the tax levy for Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) on all annual tax documents sent to taxpayers.
Inclusion of this information would amount to a simple act of truth in advertising and transparency in government. Milwaukee's taxpayers deserve to know exactly how much of their money is going to fund private and religious schools through the MPCP.
As you know, in 2010, state law compelled MPS to levy over $50 million in taxes to subsidize the private and religious schools that make up the voucher program, over which MPS has no authority or control. This amounts to 17 percent of the total MPS tax levy going to non-MPS schools.
Everybody hates the No Child Left Behind Act. In the last few weeks, both conservative Republicans and President Obama have announced plans to overhaul George W. Bush's signature education law by sending power over K-12 schooling back to the states. On the surface, this might seem like a rare moment of bipartisan consensus. Don't believe it. The two plans actually represent radically different views of the federal government's responsibility for helping children learn.
To see why, it helps to understand some common misconceptions about NCLB. The law requires schools to administer annual reading and math tests in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and it holds schools accountable for the percentage of students who pass the tests. That target percentage increases steadily over time, to 100 percent in 2014. Since universal proficiency is obviously impossible, the law has been cast as a malevolent force designed to tar public schools with "failing" labels as a prelude to corporate takeover and/or conversion to the free-market voucher nirvana of Milton Friedman's dreams.
There are, however, three aspects of NCLB that render this scenario very unlikely. First, states were given total discretion to set their own academic standards, pick their own tests, and decide what scores on the tests count as passing. Last year, for example, Alabama reported that 87 percent of its fourth graders had passed the state's reading test. Yet Alabama is, by all available measures, one of the most academically low-performing states in the nation. According to the federal National Assessment of Education Progress, only 34 percent of Alabama fourth graders are proficient in reading. The lesson: Give state education officials the ability to decide how their performance will be judged, and they'll respond in predictable fashion.
Seventh-grade history teacher Mark Stevens bellowed a set of 21st-century instructions as students streamed into class one recent Friday at Fairfax County's Glasgow Middle School.
"Get a computer, please! Log on," he said, "and go to your textbook."
Electronic books, having changed the way many people read for pleasure, are now seeping into schools. Starting this fall, almost all Fairfax middle and high school students began using online books in social studies, jettisoning the tomes that have weighed down backpacks for decades.
It is the Washington area's most extensive foray into online textbooks, putting Fairfax at the leading edge of a digital movement that publishers and educators say inevitably will sweep schools nationwide.
But questions remain about whether the least-privileged children will have equal access to required texts. Many don't have computers at home, or reliable Internet service, and the school system is not giving a laptop or e-reader to every student.
Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player's salary is based on how long he's been in the league. It's about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he's an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player's been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.
Let's face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?
No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn't get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.
Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: "They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans." The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn't help.
Stopping in areas notorious for volatile labor relations this year, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wrapped up his Great Lakes bus tour in Milwaukee and Chicago on Friday with little talk of teachers union battles.
In Milwaukee, Duncan was joined by Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who outraged educators by signing a budget in June that severely limited their collective bargaining rights, at a town hall event focused on connecting learning to career skills.
"All of us feel your presence today but appreciate your interest in Milwaukee and particularly the Milwaukee Public School system," Walker said in the library of Milwaukee's School of Career and Technical Education.
"You've done some things we agree with, and you've done some things that we don't agree with," Duncan said, addressing Walker. "Limiting collective bargaining rights is not the right way to go," he added, garnering applause.
The Chicago Teachers Union's closed-door "policy briefings" for aldermen Monday were as much about public relations as they were about school policy, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's unofficial City Council floor leader, Ald. Patrick O'Connor (40th Ward) said after attending one of the three sessions.
For weeks, the union and Emanuel have been locked in a war of words over the mayor's push to immediately extend the school day by 90 minutes. On Monday, the union's leaders made their case instead to 25 of the council's 50 members, with eight other aldermen sending aides to the meetings.
"They're trying to win a little more sympathy from the public and the City Council, and this was their effort to do that," O'Connor said. "I think today was an attempt by the Chicago Teachers Union to basically say, 'We don't like to be vilified. We don't want to be in a position when people are upset with us as being an obstruction to a longer school day.'"
It was interesting to read the op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from Mary Bell, the president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC). In Bell's world, the state's teachers unions are a benevolent force for education in Wisconsin.
Maybe that is the view from the WEAC office building on Nob Hill outside Madison. Parents, advocates for reform in education, and even a few teachers might have a little less sanguine view of the supposed benefits of the teachers unions.
We should be grateful to Bell for at least differentiating between the role of the teacher and the union. "As educators, we are determined to help every student succeed. As a union, we are determined to help every educator - and our schools - succeed."
We're just not sure in what the union wants the teachers and school districts to succeed. If it's in educating children, the union has done it's best to fight any needed education reforms that would allow teachers and schools to succeed.
It all seemed like a good idea at the time: give students an option to attend school online rather than through traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions.
The concept launched in Colorado in 1995 was intended to help at-risk students who struggle in traditional settings and to provide a choice for students and parents looking to reap more from their educational experiences.
Here in Poudre School District, its online school, the Global Academy, is controlled with much the same accountability as other PSD schools, including regular audits and monitoring for achievement and standardized testing.
DATE: October 3, 2011
TO: MMSD Board of Education
FROM: Don Severson, President, 577-0851, donleader@aol.com RE: Madison Preparatory Academy Hearing
Notes: For public appearance
The actions of the past few days are stunning, but not necessarily surprising ULGM (Madison Prep) and MTI have made working 'arrangements' regarding employment of teachers and staff and working conditions, the details of which have yet to be made public.
Major issue: 'negotiations/arrangements' have been made between MP & MTI without MMSD BOE nor administration at the table--both observed and verified by parties not involved.
In other words, MTI is the de facto negotiator for the Board and NOT the elected BOE, nor specified as its representative
ACE has publicly stated its support of MP. We must now withhold affirmation of that support until and unless major, systemic changes occur in how the proposal process and plans (both academic and business) play out.
By design, default, benign neglect or/and collusion the BOE has abdicated the authority vested in it by law and the electorate of the District with regards to its fiduciary irresponsibility and lack of control for policy-making.
Lest you are OK with your past and current operating methods; have forgotten how you are demonstrating your operating methods; or don't care, you have been elected to be the leader and be in charge of this District, not MTI.
By whatever BOE action or in-action has thus far been demonstrated, the proposed operational direction of MP has been reduced to appearing and acting in the mirror image of the District. This is inappropriate to say the least. The entire purpose of a charter school is to be different and to get different results.
How is forcing MP to operate in essentially the same fashion as the District and at a cost of more money....any different from....operating the District's nearly 30 current alternative/innovative programs and services for 800 students, at millions of dollars, taking away from other students in the District? And, you can't even produce data to show what differences, if any, are being made with these students.
This current Board, and past Boards of Education have proven over and over again that spending more money and doing essentially the same things, don't get different results (speaking here essentially about the 'achievement gap' issue)
Continuing to speak bluntly, the Board's financial and academic philosophies, policies and actions are inconsistent, phony and discriminatory.
Let us be clear...
The process for consideration of the Madison Prep charter school proposal must
be open and public
be under the leadership of the BOE
be accountable to the BOE and the public
have ALL stakeholders at the same table at ALL times
Late last week the proposal cleared a major hurdle with the announcement that the Urban League had struck a deal with MTI to employ unionized teachers, nurses and clerical staff.
AFSMCE Local 60 President Tom Coiyer asked the district to use its own unionized custodial staff rather than allow them to be contracted. And Don Severson, president of a conservative district watchdog group, withdrew his previous support because of the deal struck between the Urban League and MTI, which didn't involve the School Board.
MTI executive director John Matthews, who attended but did not speak at the hearing, said the union would no longer oppose the proposal. However, he remains skeptical that Madison Prep would be more successful than the district's high schools at closing the achievement gap.
At this time of year there is always talk of education. The autumn term has started; some children are entering school for the first time; others are making the transition from primary to secondary; young adults are being driven, with bulging bags and cases, to halls of residence by parents who may be more traumatised than they are. And this year, at least in the UK, there is more talk than ever, because education is being "shaken up" by Michael Gove, a notably driven and idealistic, and ideological, education secretary; and also by a universities minister, David Willetts, of legendary intellectual firepower. A new class of "free schools" has been created; the whole system of university education has been rethought, or at least put on a different financial footing.
Of course the idea of free schools sounds grand - but free from what? Or, more importantly, free for what? Trying to get some perspective on what this idea of freedom might mean, I found myself looking back to two inspiring experiments in education, both of which were conducted in Madrid before the Spanish Civil War.
The more famous of the two was the Residencia de Estudiantes - the arty version of an Oxbridge college at which Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí, Falla and others spent time in the 1920s and 1930s, and which served as a seedbed for much of the burgeoning artistic creativity of that brilliant, short-lived time.
But the less well-known Institución Libre de Enseñanza, or Free Institute of Education, founded in 1876 by Francisco Giner de los Ríos, is possibly more relevant to my theme. In this case the word "free" meant very specifically free from the dead hand of state and religious control. The Spanish "Glorious Revolution" of 1868 had promised a more modern, secular, scientific model of education; but the Restoration of 1874 brought back not only the Bourbons but a repressive, state-controlled education system in which the minister dictated the choice of textbooks and curriculum, and forbade the teaching of non-Catholic religious doctrine or critical political ideas.
Joe Nystrom, who teaches math at a low-income high school here, used to think that only a tiny group of students -- the "smart kids" -- were capable of advanced coursework.
But two years ago, spurred by a national program that offered cash incentives and other support for students and teachers, Mr. Nystrom's school, South High Community School, adopted a come one, come all policy for Advanced Placement courses. Today Mr. Nystrom teaches A.P. statistics to eight times as many students as he used to, and this year 70 percent of them scored high enough to qualify for college credit, compared with 50 percent before. One in four earned the top score possible, far outpacing their counterparts worldwide.
South High students said Mr. Nystrom and his colleagues had transformed the culture of a tough urban school, making it cool for boys with low-slung jeans who idolize rappers like Lil Wayne to take the hardest classes.
It would have been easy to predict an unpromising future for Maurice Thomas when he was born. His mother was single, 17 years old, and the product of a low-income, troubled Milwaukee home.
But Thomas had some big things going for him: His mother's dedication to education. Teachers who pushed him forward with care and skill. And his own commitment to making a difference.
"Trajectory" is a word used often by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, the organization that over two decades has trained more than 20,000 high performing college graduates to be teachers and placed them in high-needs classrooms across the country for their first two years out of school.
Kopp is convinced that the trajectory of the lives of children - in fact, of entire communities - can be turned for the better, especially by education.
When Kopp published her book, "A Chance to Make History," last winter, Maurice Thomas, who was with Teach for America in Atlanta, was one of the people she wrote about in detail. She described his impact as a teacher and how he had become deeply involved in getting his students to succeed.
Most principals can't identify or explain what constitutes good teaching, much less help teachers improve, according to a new book.
It's happened hundreds of times. An audience of principals, superintendents and instructional coaches is shown a short videotape of a classroom lesson and asked to score it from 1 to 5. It would seem straightforward: The teacher is good, bad or somewhere in-between. But invariably, the scores come in all over the map, with high and low in fairly equal numbers.
Having toured the United States with those videotapes, two leaders of the University of Washington's Center for Educational Leadership conclude that most school leaders can't identify or explain what constitutes good teaching, much less come up with helpful suggestions for improvement.
There is little question in my mind that national standards will be a blessing. The crazy quilt of district and state standards will become more rational, student mobility will stop causing needless learning hardships, and the full talents of a nation of innovators will be released to develop a vast array of products and services at a scale that permits even small vendors to compete to widen the field to all educators' benefit.
That said, we are faced with a terrible situation in mathematics. In my view, unlike the English/language arts standards, the mathematics components of the Common Core State Standards Initiative are a bitter disappointment. In terms of their limited vision of math education, the pedestrian framework chosen to organize the standards, and the incoherent nature of the standards for mathematical practice in particular, I don't see how these take us forward in any way. They unwittingly reinforce the very errors in math curriculum, instruction, and assessment that produced the current crisis.
One wonders what became of the Madison School Districts Math Task Force?
The ongoing debate over whether using student test results on standardized exams is a good way to evaluate a teacher's effectiveness just took a new twist.
The U.S. Department of Education on Friday released a report calling for new regulations designed to link federal funding for teacher-education programs to the test scores of students.
"While there are many beacons of excellence, unfortunately some of our existing teacher preparation programs are not up to the job," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says in the forward to the report. "They operate partially blindfolded, without access to data that tells them how effective their graduates are in elementary and secondary school classrooms after they leave their teacher preparation programs. Too many are not attracting top students, and too many states are not setting a high bar for entry into the profession."
The report, which outlines the Obama administration's proposals for teacher education reform, also calls for additional funds for teaching scholarships and expanding efforts to create more minority teachers. It's mainly catching the eyes of higher education officials nationally, however, for proposing ways to hold colleges, universities and programs that produce teachers accountable for those they send into the classroom.
It was sometime in July 2009 that then-Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) Superintendent Mark Roosevelt and then- Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers (PFT) President John Tarka had some things to work out. They were in yet another on a proposal to the Gates Foundation that would eventually win them $40 million and national acclaim, and they decided to leave the room where they were meeting with staff.
When they didn't come back for much longer than expected, Rob Weil, director of field programs in the Educational Issues department of the American Federation of Teachers, who was visiting Pittsburgh and sitting in on the meetings, decided to look for them. He expected that maybe each had wandered away indi- vidually for a break. Instead, he found them both in Roosevelt's office, huddled together looking over some documents, deep into a conversation that obviously hadn't broken since they left 15 minutes earlier. "This is what needs to happen," he told them.
"I wish more places would do that: have an honest discussion about the issues," Weil says now, thinking back to that visit. "Mark and John already knew that the relationship [between the union and] the district had to change for the future of the kids in Pitts- burgh. They said that outright."
We have historically been uncomfortable with so-called "charter" schools, which too frequently sacrifice the principle of providing all students with a well-rounded education in favor of narrower experiments.
And we have never had any taste for separate-but-equal -- or more usually separate-and-unequal -- schemes that divide students along lines of race, class and gender.
The proposal to create a charter school with single-sex classrooms focused on raising the academic performance of minority students has been sincerely and generally well presented by Urban League President Kaleem Caire. We respect that Caire is attempting to address serious issues, including a lingering frustration with the Madison Metropolitan School District's responses to the achievement gap that has plagued the district for many years.
Tim Comer says when his son moved from a mostly black magnet school in Chicago to the Madison School District in 2006, "he went from sharp to dull."
Comer, 45, a black father and unemployed electronic engineer, said the difference was that Madison was "laid back" while the Chicago school pushed students to work extra hard to succeed.
"In Chicago he was always a frontrunner," Comer said. "But here, he's always on the back burner."
Comer's dissatisfaction is shared by many black parents in Madison where, despite decades of efforts, a significant gap persists between white and black students' academic performance and graduation rates.
Although the gap is closing among students completing algebra by the 10th grade, it has widened on 4th grade reading tests and in high school graduation rates since 2003. Those changes have come as the number of black students in the district has increased and the number of whites has declined.
"We know that we're not pushing the needle significantly," Superintendent Dan Nerad said about what he considers "the most significant social justice issue in America."
State leaders have created at least five task forces over the past three decades to provide recommendations for overhauling Iowa's education system. The groups produced at least six reports with their ideas for changes. These are the highlights of the proposals.
"First in the Nation Education," 1984
Implement an effective evaluation process for teachers, administrators and support services staff.
Give all educators 12-month contracts and use time for planning, developing, implementing and evaluating programs, staff development and more instruction time.
After a two-hour meeting and four months of ongoing discussions, MTI agreed to work "aggressively and proactively" with Madison Prep, through the existing collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District, to ensure the school achieves its diversity hiring goals; educational mission and staff compensation priorities; and staff and student performance objectives.
Where we started.
In March 2011, we submitted a proposal to MMSD's Board of Education to start an all-boys public charter school that would serve 120 boys beginning in the 2012-13 school year: 60 boys in sixth grade and 60 boys in seventh grade. We proposed that the school would operate as a "non-instrumentality" charter school, which meant that Madison Prep would not employ teachers and other relevant support staff that were members of MTI's collective bargaining unit. We also proposed a budget of $14,471 per pupil, an amount informed by budgets numbers shared with us by MMSD's administration. MMSD's 2010-11 budget showed the projected to spend $14,800 per student.
Where we compromised.
A. Instrumentality: As part of the final proposal that the Urban League will submit to MMSD's Board of Education for approval next month, the Urban League will propose that Madison Prep operate as an instrumentality of MMSD, but have Madison Preparatory Academy retain the autonomy of governance and management of both the girls and boys charter schools. MTI has stated that they have no issue with this arrangement.
What this means is that Madison Prep's teachers, guidance counselor, clerical staff and nurse will be members of the MTI bargaining unit. As is required under the current CBA, each position will be appropriately compensated for working extra hours to accommodate Madison Prep's longer school day and year. These costs have been built into our budget. All other staff will employed by Madison Preparatory Academy, Inc. and the organization will contract out for some services, as appropriate.
B. Girls School Now: When we began this journey to establish Madison Prep, we shared that it was our vision to establish a similar girls school within 12-24 months of the boys school starting. To satisfy the concerns of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction about how Madison Prep complies with federal Title IX regulations, we offered to start the girls school at the same time. We have since accelerated the girls school in our planning and look forward to opening the girls and boys schools in August 2012 with 60 sixth grade boys and 60 sixth grade girls. We will add one grade per year in each school until we reach a full compliment of 6th - 12th grades and 840 students total.
C. Costs: Over the past six months, we have worked closely with MMSD's administration to identify an appropriate budget request for Madison Prep. Through an internal analysis of their spending at the secondary level, MMSD recently reported to us that they project to spend $13,207 per pupil on the actual education of children in their middle and high schools. To address school board members' concerns about the costs of Madison Prep, we worked hard to identify areas to trim spending without compromising our educational mission, student and staffing needs, and overall school effectiveness. We've since reduced our request to $11,478 per pupil in Madison Prep's first year of operation, 2012-13. By year five, our request decreases to $11,029 per pupil. Based on what we have learned about school spending in MMSD and the outstanding educational needs of students that we plan to address, we believe this is a reasonable request.
Why we compromised.
We have more information. After months of deliberation, negotiation and discussion with Board of Education members, school district administration, the teacher's union and community stakeholders, we've been able to identify what we believe is a clear path to getting Madison Prep approved; a path that we hope addresses the needs and interests of all involved without compromising the mission, objectives and needs of our future students.
We believe in innovation and systemic change. We are very serious about promoting change and opportunity within our public schools, and establishing innovative approaches - including new schools - to respond to the educational needs, interests and challenges of our children, schools and community. Today's children are tomorrow's workforce; tomorrow's leaders; tomorrow's innovators; and tomorrow's peacekeepers. We should have schools that prepare them accordingly. We are committed to doing our part to achieve this reality, including finding creative ways to break down boundaries rather than reinforce them.
The needs and desires of our children supersede all others. Children are the reward of life, and our children are our first priority. Our commitment is first and foremost to them. To this end, we will continue to seek ways to expand opportunities for them, advocate on their behalf and find ways to work with those with whom we have differences, even if it means we have to compromise to get there. It is our hope that other organizations and individuals will actively seek ways to do to the same.
We see the bigger picture. It would not serve the best interests of our community, our children, our schools or the people we serve to see parents of color and their children's teachers at odds with each other over how best to deliver a quality education to their children. That is not the image we want to portray of our city. We sincerely hope that our recent actions will serve as a example to areas businesses, labor unions, schools and other institutions who hold the keys to opportunity for the children and families we serve.
Outstanding Issues.
Even though we have made progress, we are not out of the woods yet. We hope that over the next several weeks, the Board of Education will respond to your advocacy and work with us to provide the resources and autonomy of governance and leadership that are exceedingly important to the success of Madison Prep.
We look forward to finding common ground on these important objectives and realizing our vision that Greater Madison truly becomes the best place in the Midwest for everyone to live, learn and work.
Thank you for your courage and continued support.
Madison Prep 2012!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Fax: 608-729-1205 www.ulgm.org
Big news over the weekend in the Madison Preparatory Academy saga. There has been significant and positive movement on four issues by the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM). First, they have changed their request from non-instrumentality to instrumentality, increasing control by and accountability to the district. Second, they have agreed to be staffed by teachers and other educators represented by Madison Teachers Incorporated (MTI) and follow the existing contract between MTI and the Madison Metropolitan School District (the memo on these two items and more is here). ULGM has also morphed their vision from a district-wide charter to a geographic/attendance area charter. Last, their current budget projections no longer require outrageous transfers of funds from other district schools. Many issues and questions remain but these move the proposal from an obvious red light to the "proceed with caution" yellow. It is far from being a green light.
Before identifying some of the remaining questions and issues, I think it is important to point out that this movement on the part on the Urban League came because people raised issues and asked questions. Throughout the controversies there has been a tendency to present Madison Prep as initially proposed as "THE PLAN" and dismiss any questioning of that proposal as evidence that the questioners don't care about the academic achievement of minorities and children of poverty. This has been absurd and offensive. Remember this started at $28,000 per/pupil. Well, ULGM has moved this far because people didn't treat their proposal as if it had been brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses; if the proposal is eventually approved, MMSD and likely Madison Prep will be better because these changes have been made. As this process enters the next phases, I hope everyone keeps that in mind.
Many sets of state and national mathematics stan- dards have come and gone in the past two decades. The Common Core State Mathematics Standards (CCSMS), which were released in June of 2010,*have been adopted by almost all states and will be phased in across the nation in 2014. Will this be another forgettable stan- dards document like the overwhelming majority of the others?
Perhaps. But unlike the others, it will be a travesty if this one is forgotten. The main difference between these standards and most of the others is that the CCSMS are mathematically very sound overall. They could serve--at long last--as the foundation for creating proper school mathematics textbooks and dramatically better teacher preparation.
Before the CCSMS came along, America long resisted the idea of commonality of standards and curriculum--but it did not resist such commonality in actual classrooms. Despite some politicians' rhetoric extolling the virtues of local control, there has been a de facto national mathematics curriculum for decades: the curriculum defined by the school mathematics textbooks. There are several widely used textbooks, but mathe- matically they are very much alike. Let's call this de facto math- ematics curriculum Textbook School Mathematics (TSM).1
Since January 2007, I've attempted repeatedly and in myriad ways to persuade Spokane Public Schools' leadership to provide teachers with good math materials so that our children will gain sufficient basic math skills. It's an effort you'd think would be welcome, respected, and relatively painless. Alas.
In 2008, after repeated failed efforts to get a conversation going with the district or with the daily newspaper, I decided to take that conversation public. Thus was born my blog, Betrayed. Shortly after that, I began writing my book, Betrayed: How the Education Establishment Has Betrayed America and What You Can Do about it. The book was published in January 2011, and shortly thereafter, I worked with two professionals to hold public forums in Spokane and talk directly with the people. The district leadership does not appear to appreciate my efforts to inform the people and try to get the children the mathematics they need.
A school district's activities should be an open book to the community that pays for them. My blog, book and advocacy all required thorough and accurate information. Therefore, over these nearly five years of effort, I've had to file public records requests with the district in order to obtain pertinent information that wasn't available in any other venue. For records other than internal district communications, my searches usually went like this:
Last year, 120 students took 223 Advanced Placement exams from 15 different exams last year. Congratulations to all of our faculty and staff who contributed to our students' success.
34% of juniors - over 40% of seniors and over a quarter of juniors took at least one AP course and exam in 2010-2011. The most recent report available shows the national figure in 2010 was 2010 was 26% for Wisconsin.
86.7% of EHS students who took an AP course scored a 3 or higher (passing), compared with 69.9% in the State of Wisconsin and 60.2% globally.
38.2% of the EHS graduating class passed (scored 3, 4 or 5) at least one AP exam. According to the 2010 AP report, the national average was 16.9% and Wisconsin average was 18.3% for any time during high school.
EHS offers one AP course for every 13-14 seniors.
For the period 1997-2011:
Edgewood's average ACT score rose about 2 points to 25.0 with an average of 96% of EHS students taking the test over that period. During the same period, state and national averages remained essentially unchanged from the low 22s and about 21, respectively. In 2010-11, 71% of Wisconsin students and 49% of all US students took the test.
The total number of students taking Edgewood's AP courses more than tripled.
The average number of tests taken per EHS AP student per year rose from 1.34 to 1.86.
The percent of students receiving passing scores (3, 4 or 5) rose from 54% to 87%.
Celebrating the one-year anniversary of Massachusetts's successful pitch for $250 million from the Obama administration's Race to the Top program, Gov. Deval Patrick, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and state Education Secretary Paul Reville on Wednesday touted the efforts the state has made to improve innovation and student performance in public schools.
The anniversary comes as state education officials indicate they plan to seek a waiver from key provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that require 100 percent of students to be proficient in English and math by 2014. Obama announced the opportunity for states to apply to opt out of portions of NCLB last Friday.
Duncan credited Massachusetts with setting "a great example for the country," despite Reville acknowledging that under No Child Left Behind over 90 percent of Massachusetts schools have been categorized in some way as "underperforming" based on the most recent MCAS scores.
How does Wisconsin compare to Massachusetts? Find out, here.
I've been something of a pessimist when it comes to the general state of public education.
But I'm coming around. I'm coming around to the view that big, important, disruptive -- and positive -- changes are coming; and they're coming faster than many might think. I've concluded that those who see online learning as a part of the solution to crumbling school budgets and lackluster student performance are right. I now believe that the education world is on the brink of a revolution that will come about not because of politics and policy, but despite them.
The potential is so compelling that if the education establishment does not encourage the move to smart online learning, parents, students, teachers and innovative administrators will lead the charge. They will engineer the shift. And they'll do it in a matter of years, not decades.
Someone PLEASE explain to us the fascination the district (or a portion thereof) has with the need for Mandarin Chinese in the curriculum!
We hear the argument, "China is the second largest country by size and most populous--and therefore the ability to speak Chinese will ultimately have value".
Right. And property values always rise. And 100-year storms only occur once in one hundred years.
In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That's the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio's Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.
An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father's address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher's license she had been working on.
Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher's license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested--and await sentencing--for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts.
You can buy a pair of jeans at Wal-Mart for $29 and one from Ralph Lauren for $98. While both cover your backside, one comes with a label of status that appeals to some and not to others. Customers -- and let's not forget that students are customers of academic services -- like choices and they usually make selections based on more than one factor, price being only one.
When my son checked into his freshman dorm, there were no lights in his room - nothing on the ceiling, walls or desk. There were two outlets: if you wanted light, Yale required you to bring your own lamp. I thought this took the parable of Plato's Cave a bit too far.
Applicants to GW look for more than overhead lights: they want living and dining choices, places to study and swim, comfortable desks and chairs, and tennis and basketball courts. Yes, they are looking for great professors but they want more than classroom life. The only way to provide more books in the library, more theaters for performances, laboratories for experiments, coffee shops for study breaks is to have the dollars to build and maintain all these things - and dollars come from tuition.
At the same time as the demand for quality services increased, so too did the cost for basic utilities: electricity, water, security, oil, insurance, personnel health and other employee benefits have all risen over the past 40 years.
Teacher preparation programs play an essential role in our elementary and secondary education system, which relies on them to recruit, select, and prepare approximately 200,000 future teachers every year.1 Strong programs recruit, select, and prepare teachers who have or learn the skills and knowledge they need to be hired into teaching positions, be retained in them, and lead their students to strong learning gains. Weak programs set minimal standards for entry and graduation. They produce inadequately trained teachers whose students do not make sufficient academic progress.
Unfortunately, while there are shining examples of strong programs throughout the country, too many of our teacher preparation programs fall short. As a whole, America is not following the lead of high-performing countries and recruiting the nation's best and brightest into teaching. Instead, only 23% of all teachers, and
only 14% of teachers in high-poverty schools, come from the top third of college graduates.2 Our differences with other nations are not due to teacher preparation alone. We must do more to support and reward excellent teaching at various stages in the education system. However, we can do more in the area of preparation. After admission, too many programs do not provide teachers with a rigorous, clinical experience that prepares them for the schools in which they will work. Only 50 percent of current teacher candidates receive supervised clinical training. More than three in five education school alumni report that their education school did not prepare them for "classroom realities." 3
Many Americans, having grown accustomed to Caesarism, probably see magnanimity in that front-page headline. Others, however, read it as redundant evidence of how distorted American governance has become. A president "gives" states a "voice" in education policy concerning kindergarten through 12th grade? How did this quintessential state and local responsibility become tethered to presidential discretion? Here is how federal power expands, even in the guise of decentralization:
Ohio Sen. Robert Taft (1889-1953) was "Mr. Republican," revered by conservatives chafing under the domination of the GOP by Eastern money that preferred moderates such as New York Gov. Tom Dewey, the GOP's 1944 and 1948 presidential nominee. In "The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party," Michael Bowen, historian at Pennsylvania's Westminster College, recounts how Taft leavened his small-government orthodoxy with deviations, including federal aid to primary and secondary education.
In the 79th Congress (1945-47), Taft sponsored legislation to provide such education more than $8 billion over 25 years. The sum was huge (the 1947 federal budget was $34.5 billion), and the 25-year horizon said that federal intervention would not be temporary. Taft drafted his bill with help from the National Education Association (NEA), the teachers union that today is an appendage of the Democratic Party, except when the relationship is the other way around.
It started with a partnership between the school district and the teachers' union.
Next came $100 million in grant funding from Bill and Melinda Gates, then the arduous job of explaining the Empowering Effective Teachers plan to more than 11,000 teachers.
On Monday night, a small group of parents braved heavy rains for its chance.
Turnout at Chamberlain High School to hear Hillsborough County school officials explain and answer questions about the program was sparse. But Melissa Erickson, president of the county PTA council, didn't mind.
Fordham's latest study, "Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students," is the first to examine the performance of America's highest-achieving children over time at the individual-student level. Produced in partnership with the Northwest Evaluation Association, it finds that many high-achieving students struggle to maintain their elite performance over the years and often fail to improve their reading ability at the same rate as their average and below-average classmates. The study raises troubling questions: Is our obsession with closing achievement gaps and "leaving no child behind" coming at the expense of our "talented tenth"--and America's future international competitiveness? Read on to learn more.
There are few sure investments in this chaotic economic climate, but on a national level, education has proven to pay off big down the road. As tight economic times have put the squeeze on education budgets here in the U.S., a new report shows the big benefits of even small investments in early education worldwide.
For every dollar invested in boosting preschool enrollment, middle- and low-income countries would see a return of some $6.40 to $17.60, according to a new analysis published September 22 in The Lancet. "Early childhood is the most effective and cost-effective time to ensure that all children develop to their full potential," noted the authors, led by Patrice Engle, of California Polytechnic State University. "The returns on investment in early child development are substantial."
Education writers rarely examine high school sports, but something is happening there that might help pull our schools out of the doldrums.
In the last school year, a new national survey found, 7,667,955 boys and girls took part in high school sports. This is 55.5 percent of all students, according to the report from the National Federation of State High School Associations, and the 22nd straight year that participation had increased.
Despite two major recessions and numerous threats to cut athletic budgets to save academics, high schools have found ways not only to keep sports alive but increase the number of students playing. We have data indicating sports and other extracurricular activities do better than academic classes in teaching leadership, teamwork, time management and other skills crucial for success in the workplace.
Coaches may be the only faculty members still allowed by our culture and educational practice to get tough with students not making the proper effort. They have the advantage of teaching what are essentially elective non-credit courses. They can insist on standards of behavior that classroom teachers often cannot enforce because the stakes of dismissing or letting students drop their courses are too high.
Like most of his fellow school board members and practically everyone else in Madison, he was bowled over by Urban League president Kaleem Caire's vision for Madison Prep, a charter school that would aggressively tackle the school district's entrenched minority achievement gap.
"The longer day, the instructional focus, and the 'no excuses' approach appealed to me," Hughes says.
But as he looked into the details, Hughes became more and more concerned about the cost of the school and "whether there is a good match between the problem we are trying to address and the solution that's being proposed."
Caire is a superstar who has galvanized the community to get behind his charter school. At school board hearings, only a handful of speakers express any reservations about the idea, while an overwhelming number speak passionately about the need to break the school-to-prison pipeline, and about Madison's moral obligation to do something for the kids who are not being served.
Hughes listens respectfully. But, he says, "for Madison Prep to be the answer, we'd need to know that the students it was serving would otherwise fall through the cracks."
.....
But Hughes' big problem with the Urban League's draft proposal, submitted to the district last February, is cost. The total cost to the school district of $27 million over five years is just too much, he says.
I don't know if the Urban League's plans for Madison Prep will come to fruition. If they do, I predict here and now that the school will have a higher graduation rate than the Madison school district as a whole for African-American students and probably for other groups of students as well. I also predict that all or nearly all of its graduates will apply to and be admitted to college. What is impossible to predict is what difference, if any, this will make in overall educational outcomes for Madison students.
Of course charter schools like Madison Prep will have higher graduation rates than their home school districts as a whole. Students enrolled in charter schools are privileged in one clear way over students not enrolled. Each student has a parent or other caregiver sufficiently involved in the child's education to successfully navigate the process to get the student into the charter school. Not all students in our traditional neighborhood schools have that advantage. Other things equal, students with more involved parents/caregivers will be more likely to graduate from high school. So, one would expect that charter schools will have higher graduation rates.
The changes are just in time for a public hearing on the Urban League-backed school on Monday, Oct. 3 at 6 p.m. at the Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton St.
In a major shift, the proposed charter school will now be what's called an "instrumentality" of the Madison Metropolitan School District. That means a significant portion of the school's staff will be covered by the contract the district has with the local teachers union, Madison Teachers Inc. The contract runs through the end of June 2013
On the eve of a public hearing for Madison Preparatory Academy -- a proposed charter school with single-sex classrooms focused on raising the academic performance of minority students -- backers of the school agreed to employ union staff, eliminating a potential hurdle to approval of the school.
A budget plan for Madison Prep, proposed by the Urban League of Greater Madison, also was released late Friday. It estimates the Madison School District would spend $19.8 million over five years on the school, or about $2,000 less per student than it spends on other secondary-school students.
In lengthy meetings Friday, Urban League officials hammered out an agreement with Madison Teachers Inc., the union that represents Madison school teachers. MTI executive director John Matthews said the union, which previously opposed creation of Madison Prep, will remain neutral on whether the school should be approved.
Fascinating. It will be interesting to see the substance of the arrangement, particularly its implications for the current MMSD schools and Madison Prep's curriculum and operating plans.
A friend notes that the change is "stunning" and that it will likely "cost more" and perhaps "gut" some of Madison Prep's essential components.
Those of us who inhabit the core of the university's academic environment share the enthusiasm for measuring and evaluating the quality of our institutions, although we have less enthusiasm for the endless ranked lists that appear in popular publications.
While some dote on the U.S. News rankings, which like their BCS counterpart rely on hugely unreliable opinion surveys, we, however, prefer our own system for evaluating the Top American Research Universities that recognizes the importance of successful performance among highly competitive institutions without requiring a simple top to bottom ranking that often distorts more than it informs.
For over ten years, The Center for Measuring University Performance, now located at Arizona State University, has produced an annual report on the Top American Research Universities that uses objective data on nine measures to put universities into categories according to their performance.
Shaun Johnson is a blogger and assistant professor of elementary education at the College of Education at Towson University in Maryland. He has been active in the movement to protest overuse of standardized tests by persuading parents to opt their children out of the testing, an option few exercise or even know they have.
I told him I thought that was a bad idea. He agreed to debate the issue here. I start:
Mathews: You realize, I assume, that the vast majority of parents approve of testing and want their schools to be accountable in this way. Politicians who embrace the notion that we have to junk standardized tests don't go far. You are never going to get much support for an opt-out. Why do it? Why not instead come up with an alternative that makes sense to most parents? You don't have that yet.
Johnson: There's a lot of assumptions being thrown around here. I think you assume incorrectly that a vast majority of parents approve of testing and want "schools to be accountable in this way." It's the only "way" that's been offered to them within the mainstream conversation on education. As a result, parents, and even many educators, don't necessarily receive the perfect information to make rational decisions. The test-driven mandate is what predominates in educational discourse in both traditional and non-traditional media.
Two years ago in a column on how schools could save money, I suggested replacing elementary school homework with free reading.
"Throw away the expensive take-home textbooks, the boring worksheets and the fiendish make-a-log-cabin-out-of-Tootsie-Rolls projects," I wrote. "Eliminating traditional homework for this age group will save paper, reduce textbook losses and sweeten home life. Students should be asked instead to read something, maybe with their parents -- at least 10 minutes a night for first-graders, 20 minutes for second-graders and so on."
Many readers liked the idea, but they and I were sure it would go nowhere, particularly in the Washington area. Many children here see homework as a welcome rite of passage, like getting a library card or being allowed to watch the seamier shows on the CW. Many parents equate heavy homework with good teaching.
David Crane, the former economic adviser--at that moment rapidly receding into the distance--could itemize the result: a long list of depressing government financial statistics. The pensions of state employees ate up twice as much of the budget when Schwarzenegger left office as they had when he arrived, for instance. The officially recognized gap between what the state would owe its workers and what it had on hand to pay them was roughly $105 billion, but that, thanks to accounting gimmicks, was probably only about half the real number. "This year the state will directly spend $32 billion on employee pay and benefits, up 65 percent over the past 10 years," says Crane later. "Compare that to state spending on higher education [down 5 percent], health and human services [up just 5 percent], and parks and recreation [flat], all crowded out in large part by fast-rising employment costs." Crane is a lifelong Democrat with no particular hostility to government. But the more he looked into the details, the more shocking he found them to be. In 2010, for instance, the state spent $6 billion on fewer than 30,000 guards and other prison-system employees. A prison guard who started his career at the age of 45 could retire after five years with a pension that very nearly equaled his former salary. The head parole psychiatrist for the California prison system was the state's highest-paid public employee; in 2010 he'd made $838,706. The same fiscal year that the state spent $6 billion on prisons, it had invested just $4.7 billion in its higher education--that is, 33 campuses with 670,000 students. Over the past 30 years the state's share of the budget for the University of California has fallen from 30 percent to 11 percent, and it is about to fall a lot more. In 1980 a Cal student paid $776 a year in tuition; in 2011 he pays $13,218. Everywhere you turn, the long-term future of the state is being sacrificed.
This same set of facts, and the narrative it suggested, would throw an ordinary man into depression. He might conclude that he lived in a society that was ungovernable. After seven years of trying and mostly failing to run California, Schwarzenegger is persuasively not depressed. "You have to realize the thing was so much fun!" he says. "We had a great time! There were times of frustration. There were times of disappointment. But if you want to live rather than just exist, you want the drama." As we roll to a stop very near the place on the beach where he began his American bodybuilding career, he says, "You have to step back and say, 'I was elected under odd circumstances. And I'm going out in odd circumstances.' You can't have it both ways. You can't be a spoiled brat."
Ten Wisconsin senators, from both parties, have joined forces to propose legislation that would require any further expansion of voucher schools to receive a full public debate.
The state's voucher program provides taxpayer funds for families to send their children to private schools. It has served low-income students in Milwaukee for about 20 years, but was expanded by Gov. Scott Walker in the state budget passed in June without public debate or other legislative action.
Also included was language allowing automatic expansion of the voucher program in the future to any school district in Wisconsin that meets certain financial and demographic criteria.
That mechanism isn't sitting well with some senators, including Senate President Mike Ellis, R-Neenah. He introduced SB 174, which ensures that any further expansion of the voucher program would include full public debate and legislative action.
"Sen. Ellis is not an enthusiastic advocate nor is he an opponent of voucher programs. But he's long argued that policy issues should not be added into the budget process and this legislation addresses concerns about automatic expansion without proper debate," says Michael Boerger, an aide to Ellis.
We have had a lively debate in the Washington area, and other regions blessed with competitive high schools, about the demands we make on students.
Much of the talk has been about the documentary "Race to Nowhere." The film's creator, Vicki Abeles, told me its popularity is proof of a "silent epidemic" of "pressure-cooker education" nationally.
How much academic stress do students feel? Hart Research Associates just asked them. The answer was: not a lot. Of a representative sample of the high school Class of 2010, 69 percent said the requirements for graduating, including tests and courses, were "easy" or "very easy." And 47 percent said they totally or mainly wish they had worked harder in high school. An additional 16 percent partially feel that way.
The Hart poll, done for the College Board, was not inspired by discussions of "Race to Nowhere," College Board officials say, but it is relevant. It includes a question about the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs; those college-level courses and extra-long final exams that are often said to be crushing our youth.
ImagineK12, an incubator modeled after Y Combinator to help education startups "get it right and get funded," held its first demo day for its first cohort of 10 companies Sept. 9 in Palo Alto, Calif., and a week later the companies presented at TechCrunch Disrupt.
The companies' pitches were crisp and intriguing, and I was struck--and encouraged--by how many of them are attempting disruptive strategies. Who knows how many in the cohort will be successful of course--they are all heading into notoriously choppy waters in a space that, as I've written about, feels a bit overheated at the moment--but by going this route, they do improve their odds.
Here is a rundown of just some of the things that struck me.
GoalBook: The company's mission is to create a personal learning plan for every student. So where are they starting? Special education. Why? The law requires students to have individual learning plans (ILPs). Goalbook can create help a teacher and school create these way more affordably--not a bad thing in times of budget cuts when less expensive (think low-end disruption) could be critical to allowing districts to continue to fulfill their legal mandate.
Anthony Cody's recent reflection on this year's Education Nation program on MSNBC offers an important caution to those trying to develop "multiple measures" for student learning and effective teaching. If the decision to use a given measure is determined solely by whether or not it's linked to higher standardized test scores (as with the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching study), then you don't really have "multiple measures."
Tracking test scores can be an important tool in helping students make progress, and it is useful to know which elements of classroom practice have a significant impact on students' performance on end-of-the-year tests. For example, teachers in Chicago who had high ratings on Charlotte Danielson's framework for evaluating effective teaching have also been shown to have higher value-added scores. However, when test scores are used as the sole measure of effective teaching and learning -- or when valuable aspects of effective teaching and important types of student learning are discarded or ignored because they don't align with standardized test results -- our students are the ones who ultimately pay the price.
Do you notice what is bothering me? Mrs. Gates begins by acknowledging that good teaching cannot be reduced to a test score -- or at least that this is often said. She then asserts that the half billion dollars they have spent on research in this area have uncovered a number of things that can be measured that allow us to predict which teachers will have the highest test scores. A great teacher is defined over and over again as one who made sure students “learned the material at the end of the year.”
Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, co-authored with Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, pushing "Digital Promise," a new program to use technology to "revolutionize" K-12 education.
It was published the day after Hastings sent an email to Netflix customers informing them that, in addition to having just ticked them off by both limiting their choices and hiking rates, he also planned to split the company into two separate and unrelated entertainment services.
In part, that was down to a wonderfully diverse range of ideas and participants. Vidal Sassoon's touching monologue about his journery from orphan to perhaps the most famous hairdresser in the world sat seamlessly beside Marcus du Sautoy discussing multi-dimensional symmetry. Alan McGee's tales of launching Oasis into super-stardom and his battles with drug abuse somehow beautifully complemented Aubrey de Grey's explanations of the complexities of regenerative therapies for ageing. Even cybernetic professor, Kevin Warwick's description of a future where our bodies are augmented and invaded by technology managed not to feel at odds with Charles Roberts' inspirational not-for-profit project Greeenstar, which aims to help consumers make green choices by including environmental weightings in internet searches.
Such cohesion is no mean feat, and successfully achieving it made for a relentless yet inspiring day - a sentiment echoed by the attendees I spoke to. "I just love the fact that there are talks on such a wide range of topics," one of them told me. "I'm learning about areas I would never sit down and read about. It makes you value the overlap between topics in a whole new way."
Blurring of boundaries was celebrated by du Sautoy, too, who took time to probe the fallacies of the science-humanities divide. "When I was at school I was frustrated by the idea of being put in an arts or science box," said du Sautoy. "But mathematicians often talk of beauty and aesthetics. The mathematics I do, I do because it tells an interesting story." A refreshing alternative to conventional career advice, and an important point to remember: a career in science needn't mean you can't dabble in the arts, and vice versa.
A Madison teachers union will receive a national award for its organizational work during last spring's protests against Gov. Scott Walker's budget repair bill throughout Wisconsin.
The Institute for Policy Studies, located in Washington, D.C., announced Tuesday Madison Teachers Incorporated would be honored with the Letelier-Motiff Human Rights Award on Oct. 12, said ISP spokesperson Lacy MacAuleyet.
IPS annually presents two awards to honor those who the group believes to be "unsung heroes of the progressive movement." One award is presented domestically and one internationally, she said.
MTI Executive Director John Matthews said the union has never received an award of this caliber.
"This is a first," Matthews said. "[The national distinction represents] significant recognition for MTI's leadership. MTI hasn't slowed its effort in the movement."
If the teachers union is as wonderful as it claims, then it should have no problem attracting members, without the need to force teachers to join. How is this any different from any other professional organization that teachers, as professionals, may choose to join? It's a question I have been pondering since I became a public school teacher in Wisconsin.
For years, I have chosen not to be a member of the union. However, this is a choice I didn't exactly have before Gov. Scott Walker's collective-bargaining bill became law. As a compulsory union state, where teachers are required to pay union dues as a condition of employment, the most I could hope for was a "fair share" membership, where the union refunded me a small portion of the money that was taken from my paycheck that lawyers have deemed "un-chargeable."
Every September, after lengthy, bureaucratic and unadvertised hurdles, I would file my certified letter to try to withdraw my union membership. Then, the union would proceed to drag its feet in issuing my small refund. I often wondered why this kind of burden would be put on an individual teacher like me. Shouldn't it be up to the organization to convince people and to sell its benefits to potential members afresh each year?
Why should I have to move mountains each fall to break ties with this group that I don't want to be a part of in the first place? Something seemed dreadfully wrong with that picture.
Union's efforts help all students, educators and schools
I became a Wisconsin teacher more than 30 years ago. I entered my classroom on the first day of school with my eyes and heart wide open, dedicated to the education of children and to the promise public schools offer. I was part of our state's longstanding education tradition.
Like many beginning teachers, I soon encountered the many challenges and opportunities educators face every day in schools. About 50% of new educators leave the profession within their first five years of teaching. New teachers need mentors, suggestions, support and encouragement to help them meet the individual needs of students (all learning at different speeds and in different ways) and teach life lessons that can't be learned from textbooks.
That's where the union comes in. In many ways, much of the work the Wisconsin Education Association Council does is behind the scenes: supporting new teachers through union-led mentoring programs and offering training and skill development to help teachers with their licenses and certification. Our union helps teachers achieve National Board Certification - the highest accomplishment in the profession - and provides hands-on training for support professionals to become certified in their fields. These are efforts that benefit all Wisconsin educators, not just a few, and no single educator could accomplish them all alone.
When Debbie Sumner Mahle, an Atlanta mother, wants to know what her sons, ages 6, 7 and 10, are working on in school, she turns on her computer and logs into NetClassroom. The portal lets her see not just their school assignments but also their attendance and grades.
More public and private school systems are wiring up data-management systems, and school work is just the tip of the iceberg. Parent-accessible websites and "learning community management systems"--or LCMSs, in the age of no jargon left behind--are increasingly handling schools' scheduling, emergency contacts, immunizations, academic assessments and even meals, with some offering a daily nutritional breakdown of lunch.
Ms. Sumner Mahle receives email reminders to place her sons' requests at orderlunches.com, which manages the meal program at their school, the Davis Academy. If she wants to work a shift as a cafeteria monitor, or bring cupcakes to a Halloween party, she signs up at volunteerspot.com.
The governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, and the governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, were both in New York City earlier this week for a Manhattan Institute conference about a "new social contract" with public employees.
Mr. Walker spoke first. He said the changes enacted in Wisconsin that had opponents sitting in and sleeping over in the state capital in protest earlier this year had saved $1.44 billion for state and local governments combined. He said school districts had used the savings to hire more teachers to reduce class sizes and to offer merit pay.
Mr. Walker said voters are looking for "not Republican leadership, not Democrat leadership, they just want leadership."
Mr. Walker contrasted his approach with that of Governor Patrick Quinn, a Democrat, of Wisconsin's neighbor Illinois, who "laid off thousands" of state workers after "massive tax increases."
Further Commentary on the Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School: Gender discrimination likely a red herring in charter school discussion
The Madison School District now has another justification for killing a charter school aimed at doing what the district hasn't: consistently educate minority students.
Last week, the state Department of Public Instruction said the first half of a planning grant for Madison Preparatory Academy would be released. Madison Prep would focus on low-income minority students and was originally just for boys but has since been revamped to include girls in separate classrooms.
But DPI had a catch: In order to get the rest of the grant, the school must provide scientific research that single-gender education is effective. If you're going to discriminate by gender, DPI is saying, at least have a good reason for it.
I can't help but wonder: Is this the best DPI can do?
I don't know much more than what I've read in this newspaper about how Madison Prep would organize itself, what kinds of educational approaches it would use or how capable its sponsor, the Urban League of Greater Madison, would be.
ewsletter (as of this writing PD has not taken a position on the Madison Prep proposal). I've only changed minimally for posting here; one thing I have added is some hyperlinks (but I did not link as thoroughly as I usually do), another is a small "For Further Reading" set of links at the end," and of course the song. This is intended to be a broad overview and introduction to what I think are some of the most important issues concerning the decision on the Madison Preparatory Academy presented in the context of related national issues. Issues raised in this post have been and will be treated in more depth -- and with hyperlinks -- in other posts]
For decades free market advocates such as the Bradley Foundation, the Walton Foundation and the Koch brothers have a waged a multi-front campaign against the public sector and the idea of the common good. Public education has been one of the key battlegrounds. In the coming weeks the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will decide whether to approve a proposal for the Madison Prep Charter School. This proposal and the chief advocate for it - Kaleem Caire of the Urban League of Greater Madison - have their roots in the Bradley/Walton/Koch movement, and like much of that movement they offer false promises of educational progress in order to obscure the damage being done to every child in our public schools.
The very subject of giftedness is fraught with contradiction and controversy. On the one hand, we often encounter misunderstanding, envy, and perceived elitism--and on the other, admiration, dependency, and respect. Little wonder that our K-12 education system has not yet determined how best to nurture extraordinary individuals so that they can become extraordinary contributors to society--and feel rewarded in doing so. Unfortunately, it is not simply the gifted who are underserved by most of our nation's 14,000 public school systems; that group is just more acutely neglected, along with the economically less fortunate, than the nation's student population as a whole.
When I read "Library Limbo," a news story about library staff members being laid off the University of San Diego, I had to resist adding a comment because I needed what preschools sometimes call a "time out." My first responses were strong, but not measured, and in stories like this there are always layers of complexity that the best journalist in the world cannot represent. Rarely are personnel decisions of any kind easy to describe, and some of the key information is usually not publicly available. Often what is described as the elimination of a position becomes suddenly not discussable because it's a personnel matter. A personnel matter that can't be discussed is not about a change in a position but about the performance of the person in the position, which is a different . . . hang on, I apparently need to go sit quietly in the corner for a few more minutes . . .
Okay. So let's not talk about that particular situation at the University of San Diego because I don't know enough about it to comment meaningfully. Instead I want to propose a few general things about libraries, change, and organizations.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said the corporate and investment-banking arm of Royal Bank of Canada agreed to pay $30.4 million to settle charges it inappropriately sold unsuitable investments to five Wisconsin school districts.
The settlement, disclosed Tuesday, with the SEC comes as the agency is stepping up its probe into complex derivatives transactions at the heart of the financial crisis. The school district case is the latest to arise out of those efforts, SEC officials said.
"This unit has brought several cases and there will still be some more to come," said Kenneth Lench, chief of the SEC enforcement division's structured- and new-products unit, which jointly investigated the matter with a separate municipal securities-enforcement team.
In the coming weeks, Madison police dogs will be able to sniff through the halls, bathrooms and parking lots of the city's middle and high schools if school principals suspect there may be illegal drugs there.
The School Board voted 5-1 Monday to allow the sweeps, which school officials say will help eliminate drug use and trafficking in schools and decrease violence. Annual evaluations will be conducted to assess the program's effectiveness.
Supporters, including Madison Police Chief Noble Wray, said it could be an effective and color-blind tool as part of a strategy to keep schools safe. The dogs would search for marijuana, heroin and cocaine.
Luis Yudice, coordinator of safety and security for the school district, said one statistic that led officials to consider these searches was the 60 percent increase in student code-of-conduct violations since 2007 occurring because of drugs.
The Global Report Card was developed by Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee as part of the George W. Bush Institute's Education Reform Initiative. The Bush Institute works to increase dramatically the number of American students who graduate high school ready for college or prepared for a good career by:
cultivating a new generation of principals
implementing cutting edge research
advancing accountability
Driven by accountability and data, these initiatives challenge the status quo and lead a wide range of partners to share goals and use clear metrics tied to student achievement.
Summary of Methodology
The calculations begin by evaluating the distributions of student achievement at the state, national, and international level. To allow for direct comparisons across state and national borders, and thus testing instruments, we map all testing data to the standard normal curve using the appropriate student level mean and standard deviation. We then calculate at the lowest level of aggregation by estimating average district quality within each state. Each state's average quality is evaluated then using national testing data. And finally, the average national quality is determined using international testing data. Essentially, this re-centers our distribution of district quality based upon the relative performance of the individual state when compared to the nation as a whole as well as the relative performance of the nation when compared to our economic competitors.
For example, the average student in Scarsdale School District in Westchester County, New York scored nearly one standard deviation above the mean for New York on the state's math exam. The average student in New York scored six hundredths of a standard deviation above the national average of the NAEP exam given in the same year, and the average student in the United States scored about as far in the negative direction (-.055) from the international average on PISA. Our final index score for Scarsdale in 2007 is equal to the sum of the district, state, and national estimates (1+.06+ -.055 = 1.055). Since the final index score is expired in standard deviation units, it can easily be converted to a percentile for easy interpretation. In our example, Scarsdale would rank at the seventy seventh percentile internationally in math.
Tests used to be just for evaluating students, but now the testing of students is used to evaluate teachers and, in fact, the entire educational system. On an individual level, some students and parents have noticed a change -- more standardized tests and more classroom and homework time devoted to preparation for them.
So what exactly do test scores tell us?
Poor test scores are the initial premises in most current arguments for educational reform. At the end of last year, reading scores that showed American 15-year-olds in the middle of an international pack, led by Asian countries, prompted calls from researchers and educators for immediate action. This year two sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, showed that 45 percent of students, after two years of college, have made no significant gains on a test of critical thinking. Last week's report of falling SAT scores is the latest example.
Public and private school teachers will explore the shifting line between "mainstream" students and special education students during a two-day special education summit at The Martin Institute that begins Tuesday, Sept. 27.
The session is for special education teachers. The Wednesday session is for teachers outside the specific special education area. Both are on the Presbyterian Day School campus in East Memphis.
The summit and an 18-month focus on special education that follows arose from a series of luncheons and discussions Institute director Clif Mims had last spring with special education teachers.
The teachers and school system administrators cited "inclusion teaching" as both a trend and a challenge for all teachers.
Bill Gates has donated more than $5 billion to improve U.S. schools. But he sees little bang for all those bucks. What do other philanthropists--and the school systems who've benefited from them--think they have to show for what's been spent?
Two months ago, Bill Gates told the Wall Street Journal that private money--including upwards of $5 billion in Gates foundation funding--"didn't move the needle much," in terms of substantial, measurable improvements in student achievement and graduation outcomes.
"It's hard to improve public education--that's clear," Gates said. "If you're picking stocks, you wouldn't pick this one."
A 3,000 plus word article by Bill Lueders in the Capital Times today questions the motives behind legislators that support the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Specifically targeted is Rep. Howard Marklein, a freshman legislator from Spring Green who had the gall to not only support school choice in Milwaukee but also to introduce legislation to improve the program.
Lueders quotes Rep. Sandy Pope-Roberts as asking: "What's in this for Howard Marklein?...If it isn't for the campaign funds, why is he doing this?"
Perhaps he is doing it because it benefits taxpayers in the 51st Assembly district. As Marklein points out to Lueders, an analysis by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau shows the MPCP is a benefit to his constituents. Without the MPCP, the 15 school districts represented by Rep. Marklein would lose $1.3 million in state aid. The estimate assumes that 90% of students in the MPCP would have no choice but to return to the more expensive Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system if the MPCP was ended. The 90% figure is the number used by the official state evaluators of the MPCP and is based on evidence from choice programs around the country.
This is Take Two in a series. Take One, with a fuller introduction, can be found here. Briefly, the idea of the series is to counter anti-teacher and anti-teachers' union individuals and "reform" groups appropriation of the phrase "it is all about the kids" as a means to heap scorn and ridicule on public education and public education employees by investigating some of the actions of these individuals and groups in light of the question "is it all about the kids?" In each take, national developments are linked to local matters in relation to the Madison Prep charter school proposal.
Take Two: A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words: Public Lotteries and the Exploitation of Families and Children
Just as many predicted, sales figures show that more people are opting to buy e-books rather than printed copies. Sales of e-books rose 167 percent in June, reports Publishers Weekly, with sales totaling $473.8 million for the first half of the year. But sales of print books -- both paperbacks and hardcovers -- continue to decline.
It isn't just publishers that are scrambling to adjust their business models to the growing demand for e-books; so too are libraries having to reconsider how they will provide content for their patrons.
Even though there's keen interest on the part of library patrons to check out e-books, making a move to digital loans is not going to be easy. That's true for all libraries, but it's especially true for school libraries, many of which already face budget woes, and as such, have to weigh carefully how to invest in new books to stock the shelves.
Education is a key part of job creation and long-term economic growth. That's one of the reasons why the issue is so important to me and governors across the country. It's also why I'm excited to be participating in an extended national discussion about the future of education, how it will be the backbone of future innovation, and help grow our economy.
As part of an "Education Nation Summit" hosted by NBC on Monday, I will be talking with a bipartisan group of governors about education in America and its importance to economic competitiveness.
Although Democratic and Republican governors don't always agree on every issue, there is broad consensus about the need to improve education in our country to keep our workforce the best in a global economy. Almost every governor has dealt with declining revenues and difficult budget decisions, but almost every governor has ideas on how to reform and improve education that go beyond spending more money.
This interactive timeline digs deep into the Education Week archives to tell the story of U.S. education and the changing policies, theories, and perspectives that have influenced it since 1981, the year the publication began.
With the help of some Republican governors and school board members, the Obama Administration is on the verge of taking over education.
Common Core is the latest attempt to expand the reach of federal government even more broadly into our daily lives. Common Core, which was reportedly conceived by the National Association of Governors, was originally presented to the states as an effort to develop consistency in state curriculums for college and workforce readiness. Theoretically, the Common Core standards will improve education outcomes and increase transparency and accountability.
One problem with the new Common Core standards is that they are almost indistinguishable from the old state standards they are supposed to replace. According to an Education Week blog by Catherine Gewertz, many teachers and administrators don't see any difference between their old state standards and the Common Core standards. The fact is, state boards of education have bought into something that most of them had little or no input in and that many of them really do not fully understand and that will inevitably lead to having federal government bureaucrats setting education standards for Alabama's children.
On a recent school day, sixth-grader Cassidy Wimmer places surveyors' flags in spots where runoff water from the Beltline, other roads and parking lots flows toward the wetlands of Indian Springs south of Madison.
She and her classmates are part of a field biology class at Badger Rock Middle School and they're learning a hands-on lesson about water quality and the environment in the neighborhood that surrounds their school.
"It's interesting to see where the water travels," she says. "It probably has a lot of pollution in it."
Meanwhile, other students from Badger Rock are studying an enormous burr oak tree, and estimating its age. Still other sixth-graders are helping move a giant compost pile toward a community garden at their school that they help tend. Their lesson today is on improving soil to nourish growing plants, and learning the ideal ratio of carbon to nitrogen to create the best compost.
Chicago's charter school advocates could have reason for unprecedented optimism, given that new Mayor Rahm Emanuel frequently praises their efforts - and that a prominent charter-school executive was Emanuel's election campaign co-chairman.
Yet, rather than assume that they will reap the benefits of firm political backing, charter advocates say they are organizing a show of support from parents to help convince the new mayor and other leaders that they deserve more funding.
A rally on Saturday, billed as the "Charter schools Day of Action," is among the first public displays of a new public-relations push. The New Schools for Chicago group, which is devoting tens of millions of dollars to scores of new charters, has entered into a $250,000 contract with the United Neighborhood Organization to organize public support, said Juan Rangel, UNO's chief executive officer.
WORTHINGTON, Minn. (AP) -- Perla Banegas arrived in Worthington a decade ago, on a Greyhound bus from Los Angeles. Her single mom had heard about a safe, quiet town in the upper Midwest and steady jobs at its meatpacking plant.
In sixth grade that year, Banegas quickly got a reputation as a painfully shy kid -- and a talking-to for taking too many bathroom breaks. She wasn't shy: She just didn't understand a word of English in class. In bathroom stalls, she'd have a good cry and then give herself a pep talk: "You have to go back and try."
There has been plenty of chatter in the past weeks about Chicago's plans to extend its school days by 90 minutes. An editorial in today's Washington Post asks why won't the Chicago Teachers' Union support a longer school day? Well, they are a union, which is designed to protect teachers pay and work. But this aside, how many people do you know that would accept 2 percent more pay for more than 20 percent more work?
Teachers at more than a dozen CPS schools have agreed to the terms, and more will likely sign on in the coming weeks. They are the heroes of this editorial because they are "willing to buck the union leadership" and because, we are reminded, it's all about the student. Except it's not just about the student. Remember that most important in-school factor for student learning that needs better systems for evaluation, training, support, promotion and pay? We held a focus group recently with about a dozen teachers from Chicago-they were open to talking about evaluation reforms and career ladders and differential pay structures. But the 2 percent for 90 more minutes a day? At least this one small group was entirely against it.
Imagine what would happen to Milwaukee's most vulnerable children if it weren't for the services provided by their school district: Milwaukee Public Schools.
I know what some of you are thinking: Their parents should be providing for them. Or: MPS might get better results if the district focused more on education and less on being a social service agency.
I agree. Parents are responsible for their kids, and the district is responsible for education. I'm not here to defend the district against justifiable criticism.
But understand: Many of the kids who attend MPS come from homes so impoverished that even the most basic things - breakfast or a place to sleep - are missing. How can the district educate kids living in such circumstances?
The U.S. Census Bureau reported last week that nearly half of Milwaukee's kids live in poverty. More than 80% of MPS students receive free or reduced-price lunch.
Does it surprise you to hear that is the percentage of Milwaukee Public Schools children who had adults in their lives attend parent-teacher conferences last spring?
Or that the figure for a year earlier was 47%, meaning the percentage dropped by half in one year?
I've often heard anecdotes from teachers or principals about how low involvement is in parent-teacher conferences. Five parents show up for conferences involving a class of 27 kids. Numbers like that. There are individual MPS schools where participation is high, but that underscores how low the figure is at many other schools.
Parent-teacher conference attendance is sometimes overemphasized. There are other things parents can and should do that are much more important. But conferences can be seen as a measure of parent involvement. I had never seen specific numbers for MPS as a whole until now. The School Board was given a report on parent involvement this month, including numbers produced by stepped-up efforts in MPS to monitor this.
In record-setting numbers, young adults struggling to find work are shunning long-distance moves to live with Mom and Dad, delaying marriage and buying fewer homes, often raising kids out of wedlock. They suffer from the highest unemployment since World War II and risk living in poverty more than others -- nearly 1 in 5.
New 2010 census data released Thursday show the wrenching impact of a recession that officially ended in mid-2009. It highlights the missed opportunities and dim prospects for a generation of mostly 20-somethings and 30-somethings coming of age in a prolonged slump with high unemployment.
"We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers," said Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. He noted that for recent college grads now getting by with waitressing, bartending and odd jobs, they will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions when the job market eventually does improve.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said Friday that Wisconsin will seek waivers to avoid having to meet basic elements of the federal No Child Left Behind education law at the "first possible moment."
Evers spoke during a conference call with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan shortly after President Barack Obama announced that he was allowing states to seek the waivers.
"This is absolutely outstanding news," said Evers, who has long advocated for states to be given the ability to get out of meeting some parts of the law.
Obama is allowing states to scrap the hugely unpopular requirement that all children must show they are proficient in reading and math by 2014 if states can meet conditions designed to better prepare and test students.
Education chiefs from more than 20 states gathered at the White House on Friday morning to hear President Barack Obama formally propose relaxing certain tenets of the No Child Left Behind act for states that agree to meet a new set of standards he called more flexible.
In characterizing the nearly 10-year-old act as too rigid, the president appeared to strike a chord with school administrators across the country. How much enthusiasm his solution will generate remains to be seen. It calls for evaluating teachers in a way that wouldn't be legal in California, for example, a state that very much supports amending the No Child Left Behind Act.
"It's problematic," Michael Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education, said of a condition that would require states to set specific policy on teacher evaluation, something that in California currently can be done only at the local level. To comply, he said, "we would need legislation passed."
My training as a historian has taught me that all knowledge is tentative and that this is especially true when it comes to assigning motives to people's actions. It has also taught me to not accept self-proclaimed motives at face value , to only state an opinion about the motives of others when there is a preponderance of evidence, and to look at actions and consequences as well as rhetoric when trying to make sense of things.
With those caveats, I think it is worthwhile to investigate the motives, actions and the consequences of the actions of Kaleem Caire and some of others associated with the Madison Prep proposal and the Urban League of Greater Madison in relation to public education.
Enemies of teachers and teacher unions have seized upon the phrase "it is all about the kids" to ridicule and attack teachers and their representatives. With union and (almost all) others, of course it isn't "all about the kids." Interestingly, those who blame unions for some or all of the ills of public education -- like many of the proponents of Madison Prep -- often offer their own versions of "it is all about the kids." Examples include Michelle Rhee who named her group Students First (Valarie Strauss pointedly offered a column on Rhee's organization titled "Rhee's campaign is not about the kids.") and the anti-Union political bribery has been done in Illinois (and elsewhere) under the banner of Stand for Children ( a must-see video here).
While Perry has been outspoken against the Common Core, he and his education commissioner have pulled the quality of Texas tests up to a level respected among education reformers. Test scores among kids of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are higher in Texas than in Wisconsin, for example, which has fewer students qualifying for free- and reduced-price lunch.
Though Perry will probably make this point on the campaign trail, he's not likely to promise to take over the nation's schools. On the contrary, he'll likely pick up on his recent call to repeal No Child Left Behind and let states take charge of their education systems. In his book released last year, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Perry argues that Washington has taken power away from states. At a speech in November in Washington, Perry took aim at two of former President Bush's signature accomplishments, No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit program, saying they were examples of areas in which Washington need not be.
"Those are both big government but more importantly, they were Washington-centric," he told the Dallas Morning News. "One size does not fit all, unless you're talking tube socks."
Despite a decade of technological advances that make it possible to work almost anywhere, many of the nation's most educated people continue to cluster in a handful of dominant metropolitan areas such as Boston, New York and California's Silicon Valley, according to census data released Thursday.
The upshot is that regions with the most skilled and highly paid workers continue to widen their advantages over less well-endowed locales.
"In a knowledge economy, success breeds success," said Alan Berube, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
Of the largest 100 metropolitan areas, those with the highest percentage of college graduates in 2000 outpaced in education gains areas with lower percentages of college grads. For instance, the 10 cities with the highest share of their population holding a bachelor's degree or higher saw that share jump by an average of 4.6 percentage points over the decade, while the bottom 10 saw their share grow 3.1 percentage points.
In a recent eduwonk post regarding NCLB's complex and controversial school restructuring options, Andrew Rotherham wrote, "When it comes to tackling these problems, we have a serious failure of creativity, imagination, and, of course, political will. That's not this law's fault, and it's not going to be solved by any future law. Rather, it's cultural, deep rooted and demands real leadership..."
He has a point. However, the restructuring project is pretty daunting and beset with real practical constraints. Take the staffing issue. Which staff would you replace if the achievement failure is limited to the Hispanic subgroup within the school, but two-thirds of the students are Hispanic? What do you do if you are having difficulties with second-language learners, but your school has kids who speak fifteen different languages? Would you really fire all of the special education staff, even if there is no hope of hiring more?
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Americans Say Federal Gov't Wastes Over Half of Every Dollar; Believe state and local governments waste proportionately less money
PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans estimate that the federal government wastes 51 cents of every dollar it spends, a new high in a Gallup trend question first asked in 1979.
The current estimate of 51 cents wasted on the dollar is similar to what Gallup measured in 2009, but marks the first time Americans believe more than half of federal spending is wasted. The low point in the trend is 38 cents wasted on the dollar, in 1986.
Americans are less likely to believe state and local governments waste money they spend than they are to believe this about the federal government, with the state estimate at 42 cents on the dollar and the local at 38 cents.
At its next general session, the Legislature will be considering a bold plan that would put a new face on public education in Utah and dramatically alter the relationships between school districts, individual schools and students.
The question being asked now: Will the plan propel individual student achievement or stunt it?
Legislation proposed by Rep. John Dougall, R-American Fork, would give each high school student in Utah an individual education savings account, sort of like a debit card, and that student could use that money any way he or she wanted toward earning a diploma.
The plan would be unique in the United States and, just like initiatives from the Utah Legislature on public employee pension reform and Medicaid reform, could become a model for other states, its supporters boast.
Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are scheduled Friday to detail plans to waive some of the law's toughest requirements, including the goal that every student be proficient in math and reading by 2014 or else their schools could face escalating sanctions.
In exchange for relief, the administration will require a quid pro quo: States must adopt changes that could include the expansion of charter schools, linking teacher evaluation to student performance and upgrading academic standards. As many as 45 states are expected to seek waivers.
For many students, the most tangible impact could be what won't happen. They won't see half their teachers fired, their principal removed or school shut down because some students failed to test at grade level -- all potential consequences under the current law.
Wisconsin has moved to take authority away from local elected school boards and parents and to rest it with political appointees who respond to Gov. Scott Walker and out-of-state groups that are spending millions of dollars to undermine public education.
Wisconsin's best and brightest teachers -- the Teacher of the Year award winners -- have joined mass demonstrations to decry the assault by politicians and their cronies on public education.
What's Walker's response? He wants to tell the nation how to do the same.
The state Department of Public Instruction is requiring backers of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy to provide scientific research supporting the effectiveness of single-gender education to receive additional funding.
The hurdle comes as university researchers are raising questions about whether such evidence exists. In an article published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers also say single-gender education increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.
Efforts to justify single-gender education as innovative school reform "is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence," according to the article by eight university professors associated with the American Council for CoEducational Schooling, including UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde.
The Urban League of Greater Madison originally proposed Madison Prep as an all-male charter school geared toward low-income minorities. But after a state planning grant was held up because of legal questions related to single-gender education, the Urban League announced it would open the school next year with single-gender classrooms in the same building.
A newly published article by child development experts and neuroscientists blasting the trend toward single-sex education as "pseudoscience" won't help the cause of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy.
Neither will the continued opposition of the South Central Federation of Labor, which reiterated its opposition to the Urban League-sponsored proposal this week because teachers at the school would not be represented by a union. The Madison Metropolitan School District has a collective bargaining agreement with Madison Teachers Inc. that runs through June of 2013, and Madison Prep's plan envisions working conditions for its staff -- a longer school day and a longer school year, for example -- that differ substantially from the contract the district has with its employees.
With a public hearing on the charter school scheduled for Monday, Oct. 3, the debate surrounding Madison Prep is heating up on many fronts. The Madison School Board must take a final vote giving the charter school a go or no-go decision in November.
Kaleem Caire, CEO of the Urban League and a passionate proponent for the separate boys and girls academies aimed at helping boost minority youth academic performance, says he is unimpressed by an article published in the prestigious journal, Science, on Sept. 23, that says there is "no empirical evidence" supporting academic improvement through single-sex education.
Are other DPI funded initiatives held to the same "standard"?
The timing of these events is certainly interesting.
14mb mp3 audio. WORT-FM conducted an interview this evening with Janet Shibley Hyde, one of the authors. Unrelated, but interesting, Hyde's interview further debunked the "learning styles" rhetoric we hear from time to time.
In attempting to improve schools, it is critical to remember that not all reforms lead to meaningful gains for students. We argue that one change in particular--sex-segregated education--is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence. There is no well-designed research showing that single-sex (SS) education improves students' academic performance, but there is evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.
Single-sex education is ineffective, misguided and may actually increase gender stereotyping, a paper to be published Friday asserts.
The report, "The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling," to be published in Science magazine by eight social scientists who are founders of the nonprofit American Council for CoEducational Schooling, is likely to ignite a new round of debate and legal wrangling about the effects of single-sex education.
It asserts that "sex-segregated education is deeply misguided and often justified by weak, cherry-picked or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence."
In the spirit of the new school year, here's a quiz for readers: In which of the following subjects is the performance of American 12th-graders the worst? a) science, b) economics, c) history, or d) math?
With all the talk of America's very real weaknesses in the STEM subjects (science, technology, English and math), you might be surprised to learn that the answer--according to the federal government's National Assessment of Educational Progress--is neither science nor math. And despite what might be suggested by the number of underwater home loans, high-school seniors actually fare best in economics.
Which leaves history as the answer, the subject in which students perform the most poorly. It's a result that puts American employers and America's freedoms in a worrisome spot.
But why should a C grade in history matter to the C-suite? After all, if a leader can make the numbers, does it really matter if he or she can recite the birthdates of all the presidents?
Well, it's not primarily the memorized facts that have current and former CEOs like me concerned. It's the other things that subjects like history impart: critical thinking, research skills, and the ability to communicate clearly and cogently. Such skills are certainly important for those at the top, but in today's economy they are fundamental to performance at nearly every level. A failing grade in history suggests that students are not only failing to comprehend our nation's story and that of our world, but also failing to develop skills that are crucial to employment across sectors. Having traveled in 109 countries in this global economy, I have developed a considerable appreciation for the importance of knowing a country's history and politics.
The good news is that a candidate who demonstrates capabilities in critical thinking, creative problem-solving and communication has a far greater chance of being employed today than his or her counterpart without those skills. The better news is these are not skills that only a graduate education or a stint at McKinsey can confer. They are competencies that our public elementary and high schools can and should be developing through subjects like history.
Far more than simply conveying the story of a country or civilization, an education in history can create critical thinkers who can digest, analyze and synthesize information and articulate their findings. These are skills needed across a broad range of subjects and disciplines.
In fact, students who are exposed to more modern methods of history education--where critical thinking and research are emphasized--tend to perform better in math and science. As a case in point, students who participate in National History Day--actually a year-long program that gets students in grades 6-12 doing historical research--consistently outperform their peers on state standardized tests, not only in social studies but in science and math as well.
In my position as CEO of a firm employing over 80,000 engineers, I can testify that most were excellent engineers--but the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly.
Now is a time to re-establish history's importance in American education. We need to take this opportunity to ensure that today's history teachers are teaching in a more enlightened fashion, going beyond rote memorization and requiring students to conduct original research, develop a viewpoint and defend it.
If the American economy is to recover from the Great Recession--and I believe it can--it will be because of a ready supply of workers with the critical thinking, creative problem-solving, technological and communications skills needed to fuel productivity and growth. The subject of history is an important part of that foundation.
Mr. Augustine, a former Under Secretary of the Army, is the retired Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin.
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Fred Frangiosa's presence was conspicuous last week when Gov. Chris Christie visited a Bergenfield middle school to promote his plans for remaking teacher evaluation statewide.
Frangiosa is president of the Bergenfield Education Association, and it is his union's 450 teachers who will help test the new system. Bergenfield is one of 10 pilot districts for Christie's plan.
But there was Frangiosa, sitting in Christie's audience in a middle school classroom -- not a cheerleader for the plan, by any means, but not protesting it, either.
"You can't sign off on something if you don't know what it is," Frangiosa said, "and you can't oppose it either. "
WEA Trust doesn't like what Mark Belling has to say, and the health insurer wants the conservative talk show host to "cease and desist."
WEA Trust, which bills itself on its website as a not-for-profit insurance group for Wisconsin public school employees and their families, today sent a letter to the afternoon, drive-time, radio host at 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, demanding Belling stop making what WEA Trust describes as "defamatory public accusations.
Belling repeatedly has accused the private health insurance company of "racketeering" by transferring its revenue to the Wisconsin Education Association Council, or WEAC, the state teachers union, an act that would be illegal under state and federal law.
As we ramp up to the 2012 election, politicians are really starting to grandstand about their accomplishments, but what do the everyday people think about how their state is doing? This infographic done with 1Bog, asked hundreds of U.S. residents in all 50 states to grade their state on several different factors.
VocabularySpellingCity.com is dedicated to helping students, teachers, parent-teachers, and school systems. VocabularySpellingCity is an award-winning site with ongoing introduction of new features, many based on input from existing users.
The site was launched on the web as SpellingCity in 2008 and has grown primarily through word of mouth. During the 2008-2009 school year, the site was used by over a half-million people in the peak months. In 2009-2010, SpellingCity was used by over a million unique visitors a month. The site's services have been steadily expanded over the years. SpellingCity became VocabularySpellingCity in January 2011 to reflect the addition of significant vocabulary capabilities. During the 2010-11 school year, the site attracted nearly two million unique visitors per month - over four million visits total, and over 40 million page views monthly. (source Quantcast.com). This level of traffic and usage gives VocabularySpellingCity a ranking as a top 1000 site in the U.S. during its peak months. VocabularySpellingCity is supported by revenues from Premium Memberships (which are priced low for maximum accessibility) and advertising displayed to non-Premium Members. VocabularySpellingCity prides itself as being amongst the best values in education.
"School choice" is a broad term that refers to a wide range of alternatives, including themed charter schools that are entirely under the control of their home school districts. Forty states and the District of Columbia have those in place, according to the American Federation for Children, a national school choice advocacy group.
But it is the voucher programs, in which public funds are used to send children to private schools, that are the focus of much of the energy around the choice movement. Seven states and the District of Columbia have those, and Milwaukee's voucher program is the first and largest of its kind in the country. That makes Wisconsin a key national battleground.
"Wisconsin has a high level of value to the movement as a whole," says Robert Enlow, president of the Indianapolis-based Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, a nonprofit group that advocates for school choice. The state, he says, is notable for "the high level of scholarship amounts that families can get."
Milwaukee's voucher program had 20,300 full-time equivalent voucher students at 102 private schools in 2010-11, compared to about 80,000 students at Milwaukee's public K-12 schools. The total cost, at $6,442 per voucher student, was $130.8 million, of which about $90 million came from the state and the rest from the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Critics see the school choice program as part of a larger strategy -- driven into high gear in Wisconsin by the fall election of Gov. Scott Walker and other Republicans -- to eviscerate, for ideological and religious reasons, public schools and the unions that represent teachers.
It would be interesting to compare special interest spending in support of the status quo, vs groups advocating change, as outlined in Bill Lueders' article. A few links:
How much do election-year firewalls cost to build? For the state's largest teachers union, $1.57 million.
That's how much the Wisconsin Education Association Council said last week it will spend trying to make sure four Democratic state senators are re-elected - enough, WEAC hopes, to keep a Democratic majority in the 33-member state body.
Although there are 15 Democratic candidates running for the state Senate, and 80 Democrats running for the state Assembly, the latest WEAC report shows that the teachers union is placing what amounts to an "all in" bet on saving just four Democratic senators who are finishing their first terms.
In an Oct. 25 report to the Government Accountability Board, the 98,000-member union reported that it will independently:
WEAC is always one of the top spending lobbyists in the Capitol and they took a central role this year fighting Gov. Scott Walker's plan curbing public employee union rights, including teachers.
Back in 2009, when Democrat Jim Doyle was governor and Democrats controlled the Senate and Assembly, WEAC wasn't helping to organize massive protests but it was a regular presence in the Capitol.
Spending in the summer's recall elections by special interest groups, candidates and political action committees shattered spending records set in previous elections, with $43.9 million doled out on nine elections, according to a study released Tuesday by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Spending by six political action committees or special interest groups topped the $1 million mark. We Are Wisconsin was the top spender.
The union-backed group spent roughly $10.75 million, followed by the conservative-leaning Club for Growth at $9 million and $4 million in spending from the Greater Wisconsin Committee.
The struggling Kansas City, Missouri School District was stripped of its accreditation on Tuesday, raising the possibility of student departures and a state takeover. The action follows weeks of tumult that included another round of turnover of top leadership.
Though not entirely unexpected, the move was a painful return to reality for the city after a period of optimism that difficult choices were finally being made to confront longstanding problems in the school district, most notably the closing of nearly half the schools in response to a huge budget deficit.
The Missouri Board of Education cited the continued failure to improve academic performance and the continued instability in district leadership as driving its decision. The district has been provisionally accredited for nearly a decade after a two-year period during which it was unaccredited.
"We've given Kansas City more time than maybe we should have to address the problems," said Chris L. Nicastro, the state education commissioner, who had recommended the move. "Over a sustained period of time, student performance has not met state standards."
It's time for a tuition revolt, and higher taxes aren't the answer. Students and the rest of the public are now paying for decades of mission creep and bureaucratic bloat.
The regents of the University of California met this past week to revisit an old issue they've never really dealt with well -- how to cope with erratic (and usually dwindling) state aid.
Sooner or later, they'll probably raise tuition again, as they have in the past. But for now they are quailing at a plan, offered by UC's president, to raise students' costs by at least 8%, and up to 16%, annually for the next four years. "It scares the bejesus out of folks," said one of the regents, California's Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom.
If the past is any guide, that horror will give way to realism. The regents will take a shot at raising more private money from corporations, foundations, rich alumni and the like. They'll come up short, if only because every other academic institution is trying to do the same thing and there's only so much money to go around.
THE latest bad but unsurprising news on education is that reading and writing scores on the SAT have once again declined. The language competence of our high schoolers fell steeply in the 1970s and has never recovered.
This is very worrisome, because the best single measure of the overall quality of our primary and secondary schools is the average verbal score of 17-year-olds. This score correlates with the ability to learn new things readily, to communicate with others and to hold down a job. It also predicts future income.
The decline has led some commentators to embrace demographic determinism -- the idea that the verbal scores of disadvantaged students will not significantly rise until we overcome poverty. But that explanation does not account for the huge drop in verbal scores across socioeconomic groups in the 1970s.
I have attended dozens of legislative hearings, community meetings, and board meetings where the problems related to public education are discussed. Not to mention the numerous one-on-one conversations I've had with adults who are usually middle or upper class, where the subject of parental involvement in children's education is raised as a major factor contributing to the ills of public education. Educators who work in urban areas are quick to point out how negligent their students' parents are and are eager to recite anecdotes to illustrate their case. What is not said, but clearly implied is this: if the parents of these children in low-performing schools would do their jobs as parents, these children would not be failing.
Every time I hear someone raise the issue of parental involvement, I can't help but think of the parents in the latest "education" movies: The Lottery and Waiting for Superman. What good did "parental involvement" do for their children that didn't get accepted into a charter school? If they were not lucky enough to have their number called, they were still stuck in bad schools with educators who, for the most part, had given up on them. What good did "parental involvement" do for them?
Scientists habitually moan that the public doesn't understand them. But they complain too much: public ignorance isn't peculiar to science. It's sad if some citizens can't tell a proton from a protein. But it's equally sad if they're ignorant of their nation's history, can't speak a second language, or can't find Venezuela or Syria on a map.
Indeed, I'm gratified and surprised that so many people are interested in dinosaurs, the Large Hadron Collider or alien life - all blazingly irrelevant to our day-to-day lives. We should be grateful to David Attenborough, Robert Winston, Brian Cox and other popular writers and television presenters for generating such interest. But it's depressing that all too often this natural enthusiasm of the young has been stifled by the time they leave school.
That's sad, because science is important for its own sake. It is a cultural deprivation not to appreciate the wonderful panorama offered by modern cosmology, DNA and Darwinian evolution. This common understanding should transcend all national differences - and all faiths, too. It should be part of global culture; but even in the UK a group of scientists including Attenborough has this week felt the need to reassert this.
Pearson PLC on Thursday said it has acquired U.S.-based online schooling network Connections Education for $400 million in cash, as the U.K.-based publishing giant ramps up its extensive North American education operations.
Pearson acquired the company from an investor group led by private-equity investment firm Apollo Management LP.
"Virtual schooling is an attractive choice for a growing group of American parents and in the next decade it will take off in other countries," Chief Executive Marjorie Scardino said.
Connections Education supplies "virtual" education services to students in grades K-12 and learning programs to educational institutions globally. It operates online public schools accredited in 21 U.S. states, serving more than 40,000 students who choose not to attend traditional schools, Pearson said.
If people want a charter school to be an inspiration to other youngsters in the community, here's a better way to do it. Instead of building an entirely new school, which costs a ton and isolates the kids from the rest of their peers, why not go with the school within a school model, in which a charter is operated within an existing public school?
That's the only original idea I have. Now here is my two cents on the rest of the plan.
I believe Kaleem Caire knows what he is talking about though. It's frustrating to see a debate on the crisis facing minority students as polarized between the know-nothings on the right who believe the only issues facing blacks are self-inflicted cultural ones and the lefties who refuse to accept that anything besides racism and poverty are responsible for the poor performance of black males in America.
Spending in the summer's recall elections by special interest groups, candidates and political action committees shattered spending records set in previous elections, with $43.9 million doled out on nine elections, according to a study released Tuesday by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Spending by six political action committees or special interest groups topped the $1 million mark. We Are Wisconsin was the top spender.
The union-backed group spent roughly $10.75 million, followed by the conservative-leaning Club for Growth at $9 million and $4 million in spending from the Greater Wisconsin Committee.
Put in perspective, the $43.9 million spent on the recalls more than doubled the previous record for spending by candidates and groups in legislative races, which was $20.25 million for 99 Assembly seats and 16 Senate seats in the 2008 general elections, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
A controversial bill that would create an independent, statewide authorizing board for charter schools is facing a tougher path now that Republicans have a razor thin 17-16 edge in the Wisconsin Senate. The legislation is designed to expand charter school choice in Wisconsin and to allow charters to be formed even in communities where they are not approved by local school districts.
Although the bill, introduced by Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, last spring, has been modified from its original form, the amended Senate Bill 22 still doesn't pass muster with the Department of Public Instruction. Perhaps more importantly, moderate Republican Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, says he continues to have "more concerns than enthusiasm" for the legislation.
If he, or one of the Senate Democrats that opposed the earlier legislation, can't be persuaded that more independent charter schools would benefit Wisconsin students, SB 22 will be in trouble if it moves from the Joint Finance Committee to a vote in front of legislators, likely in October.
The great schools revolution Education remains the trickiest part of attempts to reform the public sector. But as ever more countries embark on it, some vital lessons are beginning to be learned
FROM Toronto to Wroclaw, London to Rome, pupils and teachers have been returning to the classroom after their summer break. But this September schools themselves are caught up in a global battle of ideas. In many countries education is at the forefront of political debate, and reformers desperate to improve their national performance are drawing examples of good practice from all over the world.
Why now? One answer is the sheer amount of data available on performance, not just within countries but between them. In 2000 the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) at the OECD, a rich-country club, began tracking academic attainment by the age of 15 in 32 countries. Many were shocked by where they came in the rankings. (PISA's latest figures appear in table 1.) Other outfits, too, have been measuring how good or bad schools are. McKinsey, a consultancy, has monitored which education systems have improved most in recent years.
That's Kaleem Caire. He said it not recently but in 1998 in an op-ed questioning why his hometown wasn't paying more attention to the poor educational outcomes and high incarceration rates of black males.
"I'm asking Madison to be your best self and get this done!"
That's also Caire, in an interview this week about his proposal for a publicly funded charter school designed to improve educational outcomes of low-income minority students.
What hasn't changed, then to now, is Caire's conviction that Madison's public schools are failing minority students and his willingness to force issues that cause some distress to the city's white liberal establishment.
What has changed is Caire's clout. He returned to his hometown in 2010 after a decade long detour with his family to the East Coast. As president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, and public face for the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy, his profile has skyrocketed. But with it has come criticism and skepticism over a plan that challenges Madison's longstanding commitment to inclusive learning.
Education remains the trickiest part of attempts to reform the public sector. But as ever more countries embark on it, some vital lessons are beginning to be learned
FROM Toronto to Wroclaw, London to Rome, pupils and teachers have been returning to the classroom after their summer break. But this September schools themselves are caught up in a global battle of ideas. In many countries education is at the forefront of political debate, and reformers desperate to improve their national performance are drawing examples of good practice from all over the world.
Why now? One answer is the sheer amount of data available on performance, not just within countries but between them. In 2000 the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) at the OECD, a rich-country club, began tracking academic attainment by the age of 15 in 32 countries. Many were shocked by where they came in the rankings. (PISA's latest figures appear in table 1.) Other outfits, too, have been measuring how good or bad schools are. McKinsey, a consultancy, has monitored which education systems have improved most in recent years.
One of the most frustrating aspects of working on the improvement of math education is dealing with an educational establishment that makes decisions based on fads and opinions rather than empirical facts.
Now, let us accept that there are different approaches to teaching mathematics, with a major divide between the "reform, discovery approaches" and the more "traditional, direct instruction" approaches. Reform/discovery approaches became the rage among the educational community in the 1990s and I believe it is a major, but not sole, reason that math performance has lagged.
As a scientist, it would seem to me that the next step is clear: test a variety of curriculum approaches in the classroom, insuring the class demographics are similar, and find out what works best. In short, do a carefully controlled experiment with proper statistics and find the truth in an empirical way. But what frustrates me is that such experimentation is virtually never done by the educational bureaucracy. They seem to go from fad to fad and student progress suffers. Reform math, Integrated Math, Teach for America, Whole Language, and many more.
High-school teachers in the Spanish capital started a two-day strike Tuesday, disrupting the school days of hundreds of thousands of youths as opposition to sweeping austerity measures starts to harden ahead of general elections this November in the euro zone's fourth-largest economy.
The Madrid protests were echoed by demonstrations across the country against spending cuts on education. Teachers in Galicia, in northwest Spain, have called a strike for later this month. The protests follow close on the heels of a series of rallies called by unions against new constitutional budget controls they say will undermine the social welfare state.
The cuts in education are part of a new round of austerity from regional governments as Spain aims to narrow its budget deficit to 6% of gross domestic product this year, from just over 9% in 2010. Most of the country's 17 regions are now in the hands of the conservative Popular Party. Currently in the opposition at the national level, the Popular Party is widely tipped by opinion polls to win the Nov. 20 elections and oust the incumbent Socialists. If he becomes prime minister, party leader Mariano Rajoy has pledged to follow the example of austerity set by the regions, regardless of any public backlash.
America's school system is broken. On that the Forbes 400 can agree. America's richest give more to education-related causes than to any other issue. But in terms of how best to reform education, there is little consensus.
Education-related causes that have materially benefited from Forbes 400 wealth vary from Michael Moritz's $50 million check to his alma-mater Christ Church to Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark's public schools. Bill and Melinda Gates have focused their efforts on reorganizing high school curriculum, while Eli Broad believes our educators would benefit from managerial expertise. Their ideas are so divergent that this year, my colleagues and I reached out to a few billionaires, as well as a few recipients of their charity, to solicit their best ideas for K-12 education reform.
Middle school and high school students who have not received the required whooping cough vaccine are denied attendance at some California schools. This comes as a result of a law passed last year, after a spike in potentially fatal diseases swept through schools. Last year, there were 70 reported cases for whooping cough.
This law, passed in September 2010, required all students entering grades seventh through twelfth grade to be vaccinated by the start of 2011-2012 school year. Even after a 30 day extension period before the law went into effect, students were still unable to meet the deadline for the vaccination.
The state wants to end its long-running payments for desegregation programs, but three school districts that receive the money say they need it to continue key programs. And a federal judge has accused the schools of delaying desegregation so they can keep receiving an annual infusion of $70 million.
A federal appeals court will hear arguments Monday from both sides. The judges are expected to decide eventually whether Arkansas still has to make the payments and whether two of the districts should remain under court supervision.
The schools, which serve about 50,000 students, have come a long way since 1957, when the governor and hundreds of protesters famously tried to stop the Little Rock Nine from entering Central High School. But thousands of white and black children still have to be bused to different neighborhoods every day under one of the nation's largest remaining court-ordered desegregation systems.
Now parents are worried about the schools' future, and some are considering enrolling their children elsewhere.
The entity that oversees Racine Unified's teachers' and educational assistants' unions is looking for a new executive director.
The job of executive director for the Racine Education Uniserv Council - which includes the Racine Education Association teachers' union and the Racine Educational Assistants Association union - was posted online Sept. 1.
The executive director is involved in long-range planning, membership programs, contract negotiations, employment recommendations and accounting, among other duties, according to the job posting.
Peg Tyre is the author of "The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve."
THE school year is in full swing and, if you are the parent of a school-age child, you've probably figured out how to get your children up each weekday morning, dressed and out the door -- toast in hand -- in order to catch the school bus. Good for you.
If you've met and exchanged contact information with your child's homeroom teacher or gone the extra step and volunteered to become the class parent, give yourself a pat on the back. You're on your way to becoming an engaged parent -- the kind of adult, education researchers say, who helps children to be the best they can be in school.
Now, steady yourself. New legislation, called the parent trigger, which is being proposed in more than 20 states, including New York, is about to make your role as an engaged parent a lot more complicated.
Student loan defaults are rising fast, according to figures released this week by the U.S. Department of Education. While much of the press coverage focused on defaults by students attending for-profit schools, defaults at state colleges and universities went up, too. The bad job market is a big factor: Unemployment in 2010 was 10.1 percent for people between the age of 25 to 34, and those numbers are even higher when you remove people above the age of 30. At the same time, state budget cuts to higher education have led to big tuition hikes at many public colleges. California students graduated from public colleges with the least debt in the country in 2009, but tuition jumped 18 percent last year for in-state students in California and double-digit increases are projected for the next several years, as well.
California Gov. Jerry Brown already anticipates relying on spending cuts and forgoing higher taxes to balance his state's budget next year, sobered by his deadlock with Republicans over revenue issues this year.
"There will be no taxes, as far as I know, by the legislature," he said in an interview this week.
The Democrat also said he hasn't decided whether to seek a ballot measure next year that would allow him to bypass the legislature and ask voters to boost taxes--apparently backing off earlier plans to do so. "I'm talking to groups...but we don't have a clear path forward," he said.
On Sept. 9, the last day of the legislature's eight-month session, Mr. Brown failed to pass a plan to rework state tax breaks after GOP senators balked. It was the 73-year-old's latest letdown after he unsuccessfully tried to pass a budget pairing deep cuts with the extension of some expiring tax increases. Those higher taxes would have been subject to voter approval.
Friday was graduation day for Brian Steven Hernandez, a goal that was never a sure thing growing up in his tough North Hollywood neighborhood.
At Jack B. Clarke High School, within the locked gates of a state youth correctional facility in Norwalk, Hernandez realized he could turn his life around.
But Hernandez and his 22 classmates, proudly wearing maroon caps and gowns, are the last graduates to receive diplomas at Clarke, which is closing at year's end due to state budget cuts.
"This is the place where I learned I could change if I wanted to," said Hernandez, 20, who has been in juvenile detention for 5 years after being convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. "It sucks for the other kids that have to go to other places that are much harder places to be in to learn."
Operated by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the Southern Youth Correctional Reception Center and Clinic will be the third such facility to close since 2009. Shuttering the facility will save the state about $44 million annually, officials said.
Milwaukee's private school voucher program, now in its twelfth year, is dwarfed by the 30-year-old voucher program in Chile, where almost half of all students attend private voucher schools. The Chilean program is therefore of significant interest to school reformers and researchers looking to make voucher and charter schools a success in the US.
The most recent research, published by the Cato Institute, finds that when the Chilean public school test scores are compared with those of independent private schools and with those of private schools that are part of multi-school networks or franchises, the students in the franchised private schools perform best. (The independent, mom-and-pop private schools do about the same as the public schools.) In addition, the Chilean research indicates the more schools there are in the franchised networks, the better they outperform the others.
The researchers note that in Chile, "The private voucher school sector is essentially a cottage industry. More than 70 percent of private voucher schools are independent schools that do not belong to a franchise." The franchised schools are either owned by for-profit school management companies; affiliated with non-profit, secular organizations; or part of the Catholic or Protestant school systems.
Do these findings reflect what we know about Milwaukee's program? Its hard to say, since only one year of comparative data on student performance in voucher schools is available and it does not differentiate between the various types of private schools. However, those data do indicate considerable variability in performance across Milwaukee's voucher schools--some are producing high scoring students and some are no better than the worst public schools. It would be nice to know if all the high performing private schools had something in common besides the fact they participate in the voucher program.
Nashville bills itself as Music City-now it's trying to lock in the future of that status. The city is overhauling its music education program across all 144 public schools, Mayor Karl Dean announced today at a press conference at the Ryman Auditorium, downtown Nashville's temple of country music.
Classes in country, rock and rap will supplement the traditional curriculum of orchestra, choir and band. Instruction in songwriting, production and other skills such as DJ-ing will also be added to music theory and other existing offerings. The new program, dubbed Music Makes Us, will be funded through a mix of public and private funds, primarily commitments from Nashville's deeply embedded music industry, which includes hundreds of record labels, publishers and venues, plus countless professional musicians.
"The music industry has picked this as their cause," Mr. Dean said yesterday in an interview. "It just makes sense to take advantage of this asset we have here."
Student achievement and educational attainment have stagnated in the U.S., and a host of our leading economic competitors are now out-educating us. In a knowledge economy, such stagnation is a slow-acting recipe for obsolescence.
Imagine, though, an online high-school physics course that uses videogame graphics power to teach atomic interactions, or a second-grade online math curriculum that automatically adapts to individual students' levels of knowledge. All of this will happen. The only question is: Will the U.S. lead the effort or will we follow other countries?
In the past two decades, technology has revolutionized the way Americans communicate, get news, socialize and conduct business. But technology has yet to transform our classrooms. At its full potential, technology could personalize and accelerate instruction for students of all educational levels. And it could provide equitable access to a world-class education for millions of students stuck attending substandard schools in cities, remote rural regions, and tribal reservations.
Other countries are far ahead of us in creating 21st-century classrooms. South Korea, which has the highest college attainment rate in the world, will phase out textbooks and replace them with digital products by 2015. Even Uruguay, a small country not known for leadership in technology, provides a computer for every student.
If people want a charter school to be an inspiration to other youngsters in the community, here's a better way to do it. Instead of building an entirely new school, which costs a ton and isolates the kids from the rest of their peers, why not go with the school within a school model, in which a charter is operated within an existing public school?
That's the only original idea I have. Now here is my two cents on the rest of the plan.
I believe Kaleem Caire knows what he is talking about though. It's frustrating to see a debate on the crisis facing minority students as polarized between the know-nothings on the right who believe the only issues facing blacks are self-inflicted cultural ones and the lefties who refuse to accept that anything besides racism and poverty are responsible for the poor performance of black males in America.
I saw the intersection of both the cultural and economic aspects that bring black guys down. At my high school, in Montclair, NJ, which was slightly majority-minority, blacks were not only much more likely to come from poor or uneducated backgrounds, but many black kids from well-to-do or educated families felt pressure to conform to the mainstream image of black Americans. To not be "oreos." This, according to friends who spent their whole lives in Montclair, was one of the reasons why groups of friends were generally more integrated in grade school and middle school than in high school.
Whoever thought before this year that Illinois would be held up as a model over Wisconsin of people - politicians, specifically - playing nicely together and making forward-thinking change?
But you hear that fairly often when it comes to education policy. It's one of the things U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in Milwaukee on Sept. 9.
He criticized the way Gov. Scott Walker and legislative Republicans kiboshed teachers union rights and said Illinois did much better by coming up with bold changes that were passed by the legislature with support from both political parties, business and civic leaders, education activists and many (but not all) union leaders.
What Illinois did is noteworthy, especially if you consider what would have seemed doable anywhere in the United States five years ago.
Beginning with steps taken in 2010, Illinois' Democratically controlled legislature is now mandating that a teacher's actual performance be a key in assignments, tenure decisions, firing decisions, and, when necessary, layoffs. How students are progressing will be central to determining a teacher's rating.
As many students and parents struggle to make payments on their student loans, many are finding this debt comes with some serious strings attached.
After years of economic difficulty and rising college tuition, the recent news that the default rate on federal student loans has risen came as little surprise to many. Nearly one in ten federal student-loan borrowers defaulted during the two years ended Sept. 30, 2010, meaning they failed to make a payment on their loans for more than 270 days, according to the Department of Education. That's up from 7% in 2008. Much of that increase came from for-profit colleges, whose students' default rate jumped to 15% from 11.6%, but the default rate among students at public and private, four-year universities also increased.
What many people may not realize, however, when taking out a student loan is just how different it is from other kinds of debt. Credit-card debt, for example, can be wiped out in bankruptcy. Mortgages can be discharged through foreclosure. For borrowers with crippling student loan debt, financial failure offers no such fresh start. The loan still must be paid off, and often with new collection costs tacked on, making it much more expensive than before. On top of that, up to 25% of a person's wages can be deducted until the loan is paid back in full. (Private lenders must get court approval for wage garnishment and the amount they can take varies.) With federal loans, the government can also keep your federal and state income tax refunds, intercept future lottery winnings and withhold part of your Social Security payments. "Defaulting can be completely devastating to a family's finances and sense of well being," says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org and Fastweb.com.
For many middle school students, the words "Phys Ed" are enough to provoke fear--fear of getting dressed in the locker room, of wearing a nerdy uniform, of looking clumsy, of being picked last.
Tammy Brant, a gym teacher at Selma Middle School, in Selma, Ind., is rethinking the way schools have taught girls and boys about fitness. Instead of group calisthenics and contests that favor the most athletic kids, Ms. Brant, like many other teachers nationwide, devotes class time to fitness instruction and to games structured so that more kids can play and enjoy.
Instead of pushing everyone to hit specific performance targets, she urges them to progress toward individualized "fitness zones." She teaches the stages of a workout--warm-up, training, cool-down--and straps a heart monitor on each child. The goal is to instill healthy habits for life.
A dozen students in uniforms of white-collared shirts and blue slacks looked up attentively at their sixth-grade teachers at the Brennan Rogers School on the first day of school this year.
"We will never make you do something that doesn't guide you to a purpose, we're not here to waste your time," said second-year teacher Kimberlee Henry. Her students nodded. "Everything you will do this year will prepare you for something else, giving you the skills you need to go on to high school, college, and excel at life."
The school's focus wasn't always as sharp. Brennan Rogers, which has about 360 kindergarten through eighth-graders, spent decades failing its students. Parents commonly campaigned for transfers to other schools that weren't plagued with violence and lagging from inattention.
Now, the school serves as the centerpiece of a sweeping reform effort launched three years ago by New Haven Mayor John DeStefano to turn around this inner-city district, where one in four children drops out every year and test scores have languished for decades.
Many years ago, I attended a public high school student's graduation ceremony out in what I consider the sticks.
I was amazed at the overt Christianity. There was a prayer at the beginning, and again at the end. The commencement speeches were full of references to God.
My own public high school was roughly one-third Jewish, so this wouldn't have flown. Someone would have sued, and rightfully so. A Jewish student should be able to go to his own public high school graduation without being told he needs to pray to Jesus Christ.
But out in the sticks, I guess, that sort of thing was okay.
Being a lawyer, I approached the father of the graduate, knowing he was not religious, and asked if he would like to bring a lawsuit against the school district. He said he found the ceremony offensive, but that he owns a business in that town, and he was certainly not going to bring a lawsuit just because they turned his son's graduation ceremony into a revival meeting. Fair enough. I let the matter drop.
Bello and former USA Today reporter Jack Gillum exposed test security problems in the D.C. schools. Now, we learn that most states are even worse than D.C. because they don't bother even to look for evidence of unusual numbers of wrong-to-right erasures.
USA Today reports that only 20 states and the District do any erasure analysis. Four others give tests online (a good way to prevent principals from changing answers after the kids go home) and so don't have erasures to check. It said five other states, including Maryland, plan to check erasures next year because of the outbreak of cheating scandals in Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia and the District. New York may do the same.
SAT scores for the high-school graduating class of 2011 fell in all three subject areas, and the average reading and writing scores were the lowest ever recorded, according to data released on Wednesday.
The results from the college-entrance exam, taken by about 1.6 million students, also revealed that only 43% of students posted a score high enough to indicate they were ready to succeed in college, according to the College Board, the nonprofit that administers the exam. Students had to score a 1550 out of a possible 2400 to meet that benchmark, which would indicate a 65% chance of getting at least a B-minus average in the first year of college, the Board calculated.
The report on the SAT, long known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, comes on the heels of results from the ACT college-entrance exam that suggested only 25% of high-school graduates who took that exam were ready for college. And results from national high-school math and reading exams show only modest progress over the past five years. The data highlight the difficult task faced by the Obama administration in pursuing education policies to help Americans remain globally competitive.
SAT reading scores for graduating high school seniors this year reached the lowest point in nearly four decades, reflecting a steady decline in performance in that subject on the college admissions test, the College Board reported Wednesday.
In the Washington area, one of the nation's leading producers of college-bound students, educators were scrambling to understand double-digit drops in test scores in Montgomery and Prince William counties and elsewhere.
The most striking thing about Tuesday's press conference on UW-Madison's alleged affirmative-action-driven bias against white and Asian applicants was not the loud, mildly violent protest that overran it.
It was the university professor who publicly touted the rising admission rate for white students and the declining rate for blacks. This from an institution that only 11 years ago was so worried about its less-than-diverse image that it Photoshopped a black student onto an admissions catalog.
That aside, nothing about the presser/protest was all that ground-breaking, and Roger Clegg, president of the conservative outfit that did the study showing UW's bias, got to the nut of the whole affair in only about 35 minutes.
"I view discrimination as something that happens to individuals, rather than something that happens to aggregate groups," he said.
there's been a lot going on recently with books. i've been watching eric ries and i'm blown away by how successful he's been at promoting his book the lean startup. i saw that @dharmesh wrote about it at onstartups.com, and tweeting out small agreeable little tidbits from the book is genius--i don't know whether this was intentional or not, but that's an awesome idea.
i met noah kagan last friday to catch up over drinks at showdown in sf, and i met someone interesting there: laura roeder. i usually meet people who claim to be "social media experts" (as every hacker reading this rolls their eyes) but this woman actually had a significant following and presence on twitter and facebook, and not one of those fake "follow me and i'll auto-follow you back" type of things. i dropped in on a small video conference she was doing today corresponding to her book launch, which i had not realized she was working on (for some reason, she didn't mention it when we met, even though i had mentioned startups open sourced was paying my rent at this point).
The number of Arkansas students taking Advance Placements tests in math, science and English has risen 32 percent in the past five years and there has been a nearly 50 percent rise in the number of students receiving qualifying scores, state education officials heard today.
Also, the state Board of Education learned of an academic turnaround for a Fort Smith elementary which last year ranked among the lowest performing school in the state.
Tommie Sue Anthony, president of the Arkansas Advanced Initiative for Math and Sciences, which is funded primarily through a grant from the national Math and Science Initiative, told board members that the number of students achieving scores of 3 or better on AP math, science and English scores -- the highest possible score is 5 -- increased in Arkansas by 46 percent from 2007 to 2011.
Dominic Randolph can seem a little out of place at Riverdale Country School -- which is odd, because he's the headmaster. Riverdale is one of New York City's most prestigious private schools, with a 104-year-old campus that looks down grandly on Van Cortlandt Park from the top of a steep hill in the richest part of the Bronx. On the discussion boards of UrbanBaby.com, worked-up moms from the Upper East Side argue over whether Riverdale sends enough seniors to Harvard, Yale and Princeton to be considered truly "TT" (top-tier, in UrbanBabyese), or whether it is more accurately labeled "2T" (second-tier), but it is, certainly, part of the city's private-school elite, a place members of the establishment send their kids to learn to be members of the establishment. Tuition starts at $38,500 a year, and that's for prekindergarten.
Randolph, by contrast, comes across as an iconoclast, a disrupter, even a bit of an eccentric. He dresses for work every day in a black suit with a narrow tie, and the outfit, plus his cool demeanor and sweep of graying hair, makes you wonder, when you first meet him, if he might have played sax in a ska band in the '80s. (The English accent helps.) He is a big thinker, always chasing new ideas, and a conversation with him can feel like a one-man TED conference, dotted with references to the latest work by behavioral psychologists and management gurus and design theorists. When he became headmaster in 2007, he swapped offices with his secretary, giving her the reclusive inner sanctum where previous headmasters sat and remodeling the small outer reception area into his own open-concept work space, its walls covered with whiteboard paint on which he sketches ideas and slogans. One day when I visited, one wall was bare except for a white sheet of paper. On it was printed a single black question mark.
For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is 49, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes in the high school soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and to middle school are "a patently unfair system" because they evaluate students almost entirely by I.Q. "This push on tests," he told me, "is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human."
One of the world's oldest publishing companies brought in a ringer to revolutionize the way the company does business. The result? The first fully-interactive textbook
Nature Publishing Group, which publishes several highly regarded scientific journals and textbooks, was founded in England in 1869, eight years before electric lights illuminated the streets of London. Now, 140 years later, with the help of Harvard Classics scholar Vikram Savkar, the company is beginning to disrupt the traditional textbook model that it helped to create. This month at California State University, the company released Principles of Biology, an interactive, constantly updating biology textbook that retails for less than $50. Like most digital textbooks, the software is accessible on laptops and tablets, but unlike most digital textbooks, it's not just a scan of a .pdf. The company calls it a "digital reinvention of the textbook," meaning that students can interact with the material; they can literally match amino acids and corresponding DNA with their fingers. Inc.com's Eric Markowitz spoke with Vikram Savkar about what it takes to create a culture of innovation in an old-school company.
It's not supposed to be a competition among schools or states, or anything beyond the recognition of individual academic excellence. But the numbers of students from West High School ranking as semifinalists in the annual National Merit Scholarship Program are always impressive, and this year is no exception.
Twenty-six West students are on the list, announced Wednesday. Other Madison students who will be now eligible to continue in the quest for some 8,300 National Merit Scholarships, worth more than $34 million, include 10 students from Memorial, six from Edgewood, five from East, one from St. Ambrose Academy and one home-schooled student. Winning National Merit scholars will be announced in the spring of 2012.
Other area semifinalists include 20 additional students from around Dane County, including seven students from Middleton High School, four from Stoughton High School, three from Mount Horeb High School and one student each from Belleville High School, DeForest High School, Monona Grove High School, Sun Prairie High School, Waunakee High School and a Verona student who is home-schooled.
We brag about how well Wisconsin students do on the ACT, and this is certainly good. But about 30 states have higher cut scores than Wisconsin when it comes to identifying National Merit Scholars, which means that their top 1% of students taking the test score higher than our top 1% do. (We in the MMSD are justly proud of our inordinate number of National Merit semi-finalists, but if - heaven forbid - MMSD were to be plopped down in the middle of Illinois, our number of semi-finalists would go down, perhaps significantly so. Illinois students need a higher score on the PSAT to be designated a National Merit semi-finalist than Wisconsin students do.)
Using the elite private school where Mayor Rahm Emanuel now sends his kids as a starting point, Chicago Teachers Union officials have crafted a proposed schedule that adds 75 minutes to the typical public elementary school student's day.
The union's latest salvo in the battle over a longer school day uses as a comparison point the schedule of one third-grade classroom at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, union officials said Tuesday.
Just like at what U of C kids often call "the Lab School,'' the CTU proposal offers a well-rounded curriculum featuring far more art, music, physical education and other extras than most CPS kids now get and even includes the study of a second language.
Ultimately, the proposed CTU schedule would provide an even longer school day than the Lab School , where a third-grader's tuition is $21,876. And it does so without requiring Chicago Public School teachers to add any minutes to their work day.
During a recent discussion on Channel 10's "News Conference" about efforts to expand charter schools in Rhode Island, James Parisi, field representative and lobbyist for the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, challenged the notion that charter schools improve student performance.
"I think one of the studies that I pay most attention to," Parisi said, "indicated, on a nationwide basis, looking at two and a half thousand charter schools around the country, maybe 20 percent do better than the community public schools, 40 percent or so do worse and the rest are not having any significant difference."
Rhode Island has 16 charter schools, including a new one opening Sept. 7, and more are expected to open soon. The state has a three-year, $9.4-million federal grant to expand existing charter schools, open additional ones and build partnerships between charter and traditional public schools.
For most of the 20th century, California led the nation -- and the world -- in the number of high school graduates who went on to college and earned degrees. Its famed public higher education system profoundly shaped the aspirations of the state's citizens and, ultimately, their views on what it meant to be a Californian. That system also attracted talent from throughout the nation and the world, and it helped build and sustain an entrepreneurial spirit that shaped new sectors of the state's economy -- from microchips to biotechnology.
California's higher education system will help define the state's future too. However, the next chapter may be much less positive. The danger signs are numerous: falling public funding on a per-student basis, unprecedented limits on new enrollments, cuts in faculty positions and relatively low degree-production rates compared with economic competitors in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world. Whereas California was always among the top states in degree-completion rates, it now ranks among the bottom 10. And yet educational attainment levels are exactly what predicts the overall economic performance of states and nations.
Madison Preparatory Academy today announced its inaugural Board of Directors. Board members represent a diverse cross-section of corporate and community leaders from the Greater Madison area who are all passionate about and dedicated to ensuring Madison Prep becomes a reality for young men and women. They are:
Tyler Beck, Undergraduate Student, UW-Madison
Dave Boyer, CEO, MCD, Inc.
David Cagigal, Vice Chair, Urban League of Greater Madison
Elizabeth Donley, CEO, Stemina Corporation
Rosa Frazier, Clinical Professor/Immigration Law, UW-Madison Law School
Dennis Haefer, Vice President of Commercial Banking, Johnson Bank
Donna Hurd, Executive Director, Boardman Law Firm
Torrey Jaeckle, Vice President, Jaeckle Distributors
Rev. Richard Jones, Pastor, Mount Zion Baptist Church
Gloria Ladson-Billings, Chair of Urban Education and Professor of Curriculum & Instruction and Education Policy Studies, UW-Madison
Maddy Niebauer, Managing Director of Strategy & Human Assets, Teach for America
J. Marshall Osborn, Retired Math Professor, UW-Madison
Fran Petonic, President, Meriter Foundation
John Roach, Owner & CEO, John Roach Projects
Mario Garcia Sierra, Director of Programs, Centro Hispano
Derrick Smith, Area Manager, Thermo Fisher Scientific Corporation
Terrence Wall, President, T. Wall Properties
About Madison Preparatory Academy:
Madison Preparatory Academy (Madison Prep) is a tuition-free public charter school that will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly for young people of color. Its mission is to prepare students for success at a four year college or university by instilling excellence, pride, leadership, and service. The school will open in the Fall of 2012 to students in the Madison Metropolitan School District, pending approval from the Board of Education in the Fall of 2011.
For more information, contact Laura DeRoche-Perez at 608-729-1230 or Lderoche@ulgm.org
It's no surprise Kaleem Caire, a black man and head of the Urban League of Greater Madison, took a lot of guff from pundits last week after he banned the media from a forum for parents of black school children.
Strike at our bread and butter -- access -- and we shall strike back.
I wrote Thursday that closing a meeting on a topic already so fraught with sidestepping -- race -- doesn't really move us toward honest talk.
After speaking with Caire on Friday, I still think that's true. But it also might be beside the point.
Caire and his proposed Madison Prep charter school are conundrums for those who control the city's levers of power, who are overwhelmingly liberal, middle class and white.
Is your child ready for first grade? Earlier this month, Chicago Now blogger Christine Whitley reprinted a checklist from a 1979 child-rearing series designed to help a parent figure that one out. Ten out of 12 meant readiness. Can your child "draw and color and stay within the lines of the design being colored?" Of course. Can she count "eight to ten pennies correctly?" Heck, yeah, I say for parents of kindergarteners everywhere. "Does your child try to write or copy letters or numbers?" Isn't that what preschool is for?
"Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend's home?"
It's amazing what a difference 30 years have made. Academically, that 1979 first grader (who also needed to be "six years, six months" old and "have two to five permanent or second teeth") would have been considered right on target to start preschool. In terms of life skills, she's heading for middle school, riding her two-wheeled bike and finding her own way home. It's not surprising that I came to this link via Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Kids blog. What is surprising is just how shocking a jolt it is to realize how stark the difference is between then and now.
To be sure, the Task Force recognizes, these are not always easy lines to draw. How do we define the level of school failure that is sufficiently injurious to children that we can no longer afford to "empower" districts with the authority to be the primary decision-maker? In addition to the core duty of setting goals and enforcing a schedule of consequences for failure, are there other areas that are so central to success that a state should continue to hold them "tight" rather than devolve them to local control?
(Examples might include teacher certification and evaluation criteria, requirements that schools have systems and processes in place to enable data driven decision-making to adjust instruction and address deficiencies, or matters related to health and safety.) As the entity ultimately responsible for the fiscal health of the State and the legal distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funds, should state authorities reserve a larger measure of involvement to assure that districts are responsible wards
of taxpayers' money?
These are difficult questions, which the Task Force will continue to wrestle with throughout its tenure.Whatever the answer in these more nuanced areas however, the Task Force believes that there is much that can and should be accomplished as quickly as possible with respect to the two inextricably connected elements of the Governor's charge: 1) an evaluation and redesign of the State's accountability system, and 2) reduction of "empowerment - restricting" red tape.
With respect to the first, the Task force has concluded that the State's accountability system warrants significant revision. More likely to frustrate than positively affect behavior, the system is a patchwork of essentially unconnected, sometimes contradictory, federal (No Child Left Behind) and State (QSAC, etc.)mandates.
Members of Scotland's largest teaching union are to be balloted on strike action over proposed changes to teachers' pensions.
The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) is to recommend that its members vote in favour of a strike, with action set to begin in November.
Its executive committee agreed to send out ballot papers later this month.
EIS general secretary Ronnie Smith claimed teachers had already taken their fair share of pain.
The decision comes after an EIS sub-committee recommended balloting its members over UK government proposals to increase pension contributions while reducing the amount teachers will receive in retirement.
The opinion was requested after GOP lawmakers questioned the legality of Gov. Mike Beebe's recommendation that former State Sen. Shane Broadway (D) be appointed by the higher education board to the post. Broadway removed himself from consideration for the position on Friday (Sept. 9) citing his wife's health and the stress of travel related to the job.
McDaniel said in his opinion, "I cannot resolve the group of questions asking me to specifically decide the case of the proposed appointment of Shane Broadway." McDaniel cited the office's long-standing policy of not addressing hypothetical situations in opinion decisions.
Two studies released today by the Center for Equal Opportunity reveal severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity in undergraduate and law school admissions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with African Americans and Latinos given preference over whites and Asians.
The studies are based on data supplied by the schools themselves, some of which the university had refused to turn over until a lawsuit was filed by CEO and successfully taken all the way to the state supreme court. The studies were prepared by Dr. Althea Nagai, a research fellow at CEO, and can be viewed on the organization's website, www.ceousa.org.
CEO president Roger Clegg will answer questions about the studies when they are formally released at a press conference today at 11:00 a.m. at the DoubleTree hotel in Madison--525 W. Johnson St.
The odds ratio favoring African Americans and Hispanics over whites was 576-to-1 and 504-to-1, respectively, using the SAT and class rank while controlling for other factors. Thus, the median composite SAT score for black admittees was 150 points lower than for whites and Asians, and the Latino median SAT score was 100 points lower. Using the ACT, the odds ratios climbed to 1330-to-1 and 1494-to-1, respectively, for African Americans and Hispanics over whites.
Two reports released today allege the University of Wisconsin discriminates against whites and Asian applicants and have electrified both UW administration and some student leaders.
A crowd of more than 150 students filled the Multicultural Student Center in the Red Gym on Monday after an ominous message from UW Vice Provost for Diversity and Climate Damon Williams claimed a threat had been made against the diversity efforts in the campus community.
The reports were released at midnight on Tuesday from the Center for Equal Opportunity in conjunction with a press conference CEO President Roger Clegg will hold at the Double Tree Inn at 11 a.m. today. Clegg will also be at a debate on the future of Affirmative Action at the UW Law School at 7 p.m. this evening.
Williams said the timing of the events is no coincidence.
In an interview with The Badger Herald, Clegg said the reports show how a heavy preference is given to blacks and Latinos over whites and Asians in the admissions process for undergraduate programs and in the law school.
Whites and Asians aren't getting a fair crack at being admitted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That's what two studies released late Monday night by the Center for Equal Opportunity indicate. The organization states in a press release accompanying the studies that there is "severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity in undergraduate and law school admissions" at Wisconsin's flagship institution of higher education.
The CEO -- a conservative think tank based out of Sterling, Va., that pushes "colorblind public policies" and backs the elimination or curtailment of existing racial preference and affirmative action programs -- reports that UW-Madison gives "African Americans and Latinos preference over whites and Asians" in admissions. The studies, which initially were embargoed until Tuesday morning, were released late Monday on the CEO website.
According to the executive summary of the report examining undergraduate admissions at UW-Madison: "In 2007 and 2008, UW admitted more than 7 out of every 10 black applicants, and more than 8 out of 10 Hispanics, versus roughly 6 in 10 Asians and whites."
The Center for Equal Opportunity and its president and general counsel, Roger Clegg, claim to advance educational opportunity by punishing colleges and universities for attempting to level a highly unequal playing field.
The CEO's name is laughable. It is the exact opposite of what the organization does. The misnomer is a deliberate deception. It is a lie so blatant that it would be considered a joke in very poor taste were it not so outrageously fallacious.
The record of CEO's lawsuits has never been in support of equality--it has always been to preserve and protect educational opportunity for those most fortunate social classes and racial/ethnic groups. There is no no record of this organization filing a lawsuit on behalf of newly emerging and underrepresented populations in higher education--it always and only files lawsuits on behalf of the already-advantaged.
Teacher evaluations for years were based on brief classroom observations by the principal. But now, prodded by President Barack Obama's $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, at least 26 states have agreed to judge teachers based, in part, on results from their students' performance on standardized tests.
So with millions of teachers back in the classroom, many are finding their careers increasingly hinge on obscure formulas like the one that fills a whiteboard in an economist's office here.
The metric created by Value-Added Research Center, a nonprofit housed at the University of Wisconsin's education department, is a new kind of report card that attempts to gauge how much of students' growth on tests is attributable to the teacher.
For the first time this year, teachers in Rhode Island and Florida will see their evaluations linked to the complex metric. Louisiana and New Jersey will pilot the formulas this year and roll them out next school year. At least a dozen other states and school districts will spend the year finalizing their teacher-rating formulas.
"We have to deliver quality and speed, because [schools] need the data now," said Rob Meyer, the bowtie-wearing economist who runs the Value-Added Research Center, known as VARC, and calls his statistical model a "well-crafted recipe."
f you discovered that only one in four graduates from your neighborhood high school would earn a college degree, would you be alarmed?
For decades, there has been a laser-like focus in education reform on the lowest-performing students and schools. This focus continues to be critical for maintaining America's social fabric and ensuring that all children have an opportunity to succeed, but it is not enough. In this paper, we urge that America must embark upon a second phase of education reform that squarely focuses on dramatically improving achievement in the middle-class schools that the majority of children attend.
Our findings show that middle-class schools seem to be forgotten in the education debate. There is a paucity of academic literature on their performance, expectations, and on ideas for reform. Yet, they produce the students who are the backbone of the U.S. economy. Among parents of school-aged kids in middle-class jurisdictions, there is a strong belief that these schools are educating students at the highest levels. More than seven of ten parents with children in the public schools grade their kids' schools as either an A or a B,1 and nine of ten parents of school-age children expect their kids to go to college.2 But that is far from the reality. Middle-class schools are falling short on their most basic 21st century mission: to prepare kids to get a college degree.
In order to maintain a prosperous middle class, grow our economy, and foster a public education system that taxpayers deserve, it is necessary to shine a light on the experience of middle-class students. These are students that don't attend America's best schools but also don't attend the worst. They attend the schools that are in every city, town, and suburb. For our nation to succeed, their schools must be college factories--graduating high school students who are prepared to get to and through college.
A proposal that Milwaukee taxpayers be told on tax bills exactly how much of their money is going to private schools through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program is on the fast track for school board consideration.
During a special MPS board meeting Saturday morning to discuss the district's long-range master plan for buildings, board member Larry Miller asked that his "voucher tax" transparency proposal be discussed at a school board committee meeting Tuesday, rather than wait to be introduced at the board's next regular meeting Sept. 22, and then be referred to committee for discussion at a later date.
"The urgency of this is there's a huge tax burden on the community and it's important for the community to be educated on this burden," Miller told the board Saturday morning.
The tax that MPS must levy under state law to support low-income Milwaukee students enrolled in private schools under the choice program would have ranked just behind Milwaukee Area Technical College and ahead of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District if it had been broken out, ranked, and displayed under the "Levy by Unit of Government" section of tax information sent to taxpayers in 2010, Miller said.
It has been nearly 50 years since Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, pulling the curtain back on invisible poverty within the United States. If he were writing today, Harrington would find the same populations he described then: young, marginally educated people who drift in and out of low-pay, dead-end jobs, and older displaced workers, unable to find work as industries transform and shops close. But he would find more of them, especially the young, their situation worsened by further economic restructuring and globalization. And while the poor he wrote about were invisible in a time of abundance, ours are visible in a terrible recession, although invisible in most public policy. In fact, the poor are drifting further into the dark underbelly of American capitalism.
One of the Obama administration's mantras is that we need to "out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build" our competition in order to achieve fuller prosperity. The solution to our social and economic woes lies in new technologies, in the cutting edge. This is our "Sputnik moment," a very American way to frame our problems. However, the editors of The Economist wrote a few months back that this explanation of our economic situation is "mostly nonsense."
The president of the Chicago Teachers Union says Mayor Rahm Emanuel "exploded" at her during a debate over a longer school day, pointing his finger in her face and cursing.
CTU President made the allegations in a Friday morning press release detailing a complaint filed by the union to the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board over the ongoing battle between the union and City Hall.
"A couple of weeks ago I sat down with the mayor in his office to talk about how to roll out a longer school year and what components would go into making it a better school year for our students but he did not want to have that conversation," said Lewis. "When I explained to him that a longer school day should not be used for warehousing or babysitting our youth he exploded, used profanity, pointed his finger in my face and yelled. At that point the conversation was over -- soon thereafter we found ourselves subject to a full-scale propaganda war over a moot point."
Learning in public schools is set to resume on Monday after striking teachers accepted on Sunday a Government offer to hire more tutors in phases.
The Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) officially called off the four-day strike on Sunday and urged teachers to ignore the Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers (Kuppet) which has defied a call by the Government to end the industrial action.
KNUT's Secretary General David Okuta told journalists in Nairobi that the resolution to call off the strike was reached by KNUT National Executive Council following a commitment by Government to meet most of their demands.
Value added is the use of statistical technique to isolate the contributions of schools to measured student knowledge from other influences such as prior student knowledge and demographics. In practice, value added focuses on the improvement of students from one year to the next on an annual state examination or other periodic assessment. The Value-Added Research Center (VARC) of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research produces value-added measures for schools in Madison using the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) as an outcome. The model controls for prior-year WKCE scores, gender, ethnicity, disability, English language learner, low-income status, parent education, and full academic year enrollment to capture the effects of schools on student performance on the WKCE. This model yields measures of student growth in schools in Madison relative to each other. VARC also produces value-added measures using the entire state of Wisconsin as a data set, which yields measures of student growth in Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) relative to the rest of the state.
Some of the most notable results are:
1. Value added for the entire district of Madison relative to the rest of the state is generally positive, but it differs by subject and grade. In both 2008-09 and 2009-10, and in both math and reading, the value added of Madison Metropolitan School District was positive in more grades than it was negative, and the average value added across grades was positive in both subjects in both years. There are variations across grades and subjects, however. In grade 4, value-added is significantly positive in both years in reading and significantly negative in both years in math. In contrast, value-added in math is significantly positive--to a very substantial extent--in grade 7. Some of these variations may be the result of the extent to which instruction in those grades facilitate student learning on tested material relative to non-tested material. Overall, between November 2009 and November 2010, value-added for MMSD as a whole relative to the state was very slightly above average in math and substantially above average in reading. The section "Results from the Wisconsin Value-Added Model" present these results in detail.
2. The variance of value added across schools is generally smaller in Madison than in the state of Wisconsin as a whole, specifically in math. In other words, at least in terms of what is measured by value added, the extent to which schools differ from each other in Madison is smaller than the extent to which schools differ from each other elsewhere in Wisconsin. This appears to be more strongly the case in the middle school grades than in the elementary grades. Some of this result may be an artifact of schools in Madison being relatively large; when schools are large, they encompass more classrooms per grade, leading to more across-classroom variance being within-school rather than across-school. More of this result may be that while the variance across schools in Madison is entirely within one district, the variance across schools for the rest of the state is across many districts, and so differences in district policies will likely generate more variance across the entire state. The section "Results from the Wisconsin Value-Added Model" present results on the variance of value added from the statewide value-added model. This result is also evident in the charts in the "School Value-Added Charts from the MMSD Value-Added Model" section: one can see that the majority of schools' confidence intervals cross (1) the district average, which means that we cannot reject the hypothesis that these schools' values added are not different from the district average.
Even with a relatively small variance across schools in the district in general, several individual schools have values added that are statistically significantly greater or less than the district average. At the elementary level, both Lake View and Randall have values added in both reading and math that are significantly greater than the district average. In math, Marquette, Nuestro Mundo, Shorewood Hills, and Van Hise also have values added that are significantly greater than the district average. Values added are lower than the district average in math at Crestwood, Hawthorne, Kennedy, and Stephens, and in reading at Allis. At the middle school level, value added in reading is greater than the district average at Toki and lower than the district average at Black Hawk and Sennett. Value added in math is lower than the district average at Toki and Whitehorse.
3. Gaps in student improvement persist across subgroups of students. The value-added model measures gaps in student growth over time by race, gender, English language learner, and several other subgroups. The gaps are overall gaps, not gaps relative to the rest of the state. These gaps are especially informative because they are partial coefficients. These measure the black/white, ELL/non-ELL, or high-school/college-graduate-parent gaps, controlling for all variables available, including both demographic variables and schools attended. If one wanted to measure the combined effect of being both ELL and Hispanic relative to non-ELL and white, one would add the ELL/non-ELL gap to the Hispanic/white gap to find the combined effect. The gaps are within-school gaps, based on comparison of students in different subgroups who are in the same schools; consequently, these gaps do not include any effects of students of different subgroups sorting into different schools, and reflect within-school differences only. There does not appear to be an evident trend over time in gaps by race, low-income status, and parent education measured by the value-added model. The section "Coefficients from the MMSD Value-Added Model" present these results.
4. The gap in student improvement by English language learner, race, or low-income status usually does not differ substantively across schools; that between students with disabilities and students without disabilities sometimes does differ across schools. This can be seen in the subgroup value-added results across schools, which appear in the Appendix. There are some schools where value-added for students with disabilities differs substantively from overall value- added. Some of these differences may be due to differences in the composition of students with disabilities across schools, although the model already controls for overall differences between students with learning disabilities, students with speech disabilities, and students with all other disabilities. In contrast, value-added for black, Hispanic, ELL, or economically disadvantaged students is usually very close to overall value added.
Value added for students with disabilities is greater than the school's overall value added in math at Falk and Whitehorse and in reading at Marquette; it is lower than the school's overall value added in math at O'Keefe and Sennett and in reading at Allis, Schenk, and Thoreau. Value added in math for Hispanic students is lower than the school's overall value added at Lincoln, and greater than the school's overall value added at Nuestro Mundo. Value added in math is also higher for ELL and low-income students than it is for the school overall at Nuestro Mundo.
Year four of the five-year REaL Grant has several key areas of focus to support our three grant goals:
Increase student achievement for all students
Strengthen student-student and student-staff relationships
Increase post-secondary outcomes for all students
Following the completion of the K-12 Literacy Evaluation during the 2010-2011 school year there is a renewed commitment and expectations to develop core practices in literacy across the content areas. Professional development around literacy has been scheduled for the 2011-2012 school year and includes: instructional resource teachers, reading interventionists, learning coordinators, literacy coaches. Data from WKCE and EXPLORE indicate the need to improve core practices in literacy.
The division of Curriculum and Assessment has structured the entire 2011-2012 school year with high school department chairperson meetings across the district. The central purpose of this important dialogue is to build consensus around a curriculum scope and sequence that is aligned to both the ACT Career and College Readiness Standards and the Common Core State Standards. Much progress has been made with the adoption of common course names and numbers throughout our high schools.
AVID/TOPS has increased in capacity throughout the high schools and preliminary data indicates continued significant differences in the success of our AVID/TOPS students and their comparison group counterparts. Several teachers and departments outside of our AVID/TOPS classrooms have adopted the AVID/TOPS strategies and we look forward to supporting this demand helping our schools develop consistent systems of support and shared high expectations for all students.
Several professional development opportunities over the summer were supported by the REaL grant. Examples include: Critical Friends, Adaptive Schools, AVID Institute, and Align by Design. Additionally, school leadership teams under the direction of principals, REaL grant coordinators and literacy coaches met to create the Welcome Back Conference sessions for their respective schools.
Principals and teacher leaders continue to increase their capacities as instructional leaders. This year we also have in place a coordinated plan to help assistant principals progress their roles as instructional leaders. This has been an area clearly lacking in the first three years of the grant. Principals and all assistant principals will receive the same professional development each month.
The four high schools received a significant grant from the DPI to support safe schools. These added resources and action plans will compliment the REaL grant goals of improved relationships. High schools continue to address critical student behavior issues with a greater systematic approach. Two areas identified district wide based on the success in one school are: Youth Court and Restorative Justice classes.
Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot simultaneously measure the location of a particle while also measuring the momentum of that particle. When you apply this principle to schools, it's a little disheartening--if we attempt to measure where we are now, we are no longer certain how fast we're improving. If the environment in which the measurement is taking place is also moving (think of the vast legal and budgetary changes at the state level), the uncertainty is all but overwhelming.
Thus, this year's analysis of public school data in southeast Wisconsin heeds Heisenberg and emphasizes the use of the 2010-11 data as a baseline. Knowing that all Wisconsin school districts will be in a state of flux over the next few years due to changes in contractual bargaining legislation, the state budget, a slow economic recovery, a new standardized testing system, and new standards for curriculum, in the future we hope to measure their improvements over time as these various "new normals" kick in. For now, we emphasize where they've been and where they are currently.
Map Highlights
This animated map provides a striking visual of employment trends over the last business cycle using net change in jobs from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on a rolling 12-month basis. We used this approach to provide the smoothest possible visual depiction of ongoing employment dynamics at the MSA level. By animating the data, the map highlights a number of concurrent trends leading up to the nation's present economic crisis. The graphic highlights the 100 largest metropolitan areas so that regional trends can be more easily identified.
The timeline begins in 2004 as the country starts its recovery from the 2001 recession, following the bursting of the dot-com bubble. At first, broad economic growth was apparent across most of the country. Two notable exceptions are the Bay Area -- the hub of the tech boom that drove job growth during the prior decade -- and several metropolitan areas within the Midwest. The map reveals that much of the industrial Midwest never fully recovered from the previous recession, as manufacturers continue to shed jobs while other parts of the country were adding them in large number.
For our Sept. 13 public affairs forum with Chicago schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard and teachers union leader Karen Lewis, we asked Trib Nation to write an essay on what makes public education succeed or fail.
Here are the contributions from winners Ray Salazar, G. A. Finch, Trevon Martin, Eva Delgado, Cassandra Eddings and Devyn Rigsby, along with two other noteworthy essays from Gary Lawson and Ron Barker:
G. A. Finch, parent:
I chair the LSC at Decatur Classical, an obscure selective enrollment school that the Tribune, Sun-Times, and Chicago Magazine have ranked the highest performing elementary school in Illinois. Despite its diversity in income, ethnicity, race and religion, it consistently exceeds state testing standards.
Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but - wait for it - to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.
Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a "keep out" sign on the gates.
You might resent Murdoch's paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That'll be $31.50.
Although, the majority of Thai children have access to basic education, as net enrolment for primary and secondary schoolage children increases, people still question the quality of education being provided as international learning assessments show Thai students' performances lag behind most Asian countries.
So, the Office of the Education Council (OEC) is preparing to propose government strategies to enhance the teaching levels and ensure quality education for all children in collaboration with the United Nations Country Team (UNCT).
The net enrolment for primary schoolage children in Thailand increased from 81 per cent in 2000 to 90 per cent in 2009. And, net enrolment for secondary schoolage children increased from 55 per cent in 2000 to 72 per cent in 2009, according to UN Data Online and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation Education for All Monitoring Report.
Ten months after Mount Horeb area voters approved $10.5 million in renovations to the village's first- and second-grade building, a walk through the Primary Center reveals little resemblance to the building's previous 93 years of life. Classroom walls and staircases have been removed, and a gaping hole allows workers to see the basement from the second floor.
The construction is part of a year-long project that Mount Horeb Area School District Superintendent Wayne Anderson said "will bring the school into the 21st century."
The Primary Center, constructed in 1918, provided a challenging place for teachers to hold class, with inconsistently sized rooms, split levels and distractions including a bug infestation, said Vicky Rosenbaum, a first- and second-grade teacher at the school. The school was without air conditioning and operated its heating system on the original 1918 boilers, which made the building prone to extreme and fluctuating temperatures. The Primary Center also had a mysterious problem with bees, she said.
[Note from Laurie Rogers: Recently, results from the 2011 state standardized test scores came out, and the general impression given to the public -- for example from the state education agency (OSPI) and from media in Seattle and in Spokane -- was that improvements had been made. It's all in the definitions: How do you define "improvement"? Did some of the numbers go up? Assuredly. Did that mean that real improvments in real academic knowledge had been made? It's best to remain skeptical.
Most students in Spokane are as weak in math skill this year as they were last year. Given a proper math test that assesses for basic skills, many high schoolers still test into 4th or 5th-grade math. College remedial rates are still high. Parents are still frantic, and students are still stressed out about math. So ... what do those higher scores actually mean? I've been trying to find out. It's hard to say.
No statistic about higher education commands more attention--and anxiety--among members of the public than the rising price of admission. Since 1980, inflation- adjusted tuition at public universities has tripled; at private universities it has more than doubled. Compared to all other goods and services in the American economy, including medical care, only "cigarettes and other tobacco products" have seen prices rise faster than the cost of going to college. And for all that, parents who sign away ever-larger tuition checks can be forgiven for doubting whether universities are spending those additional funds in ways that make their kids' educations better--to say nothing of three times better.
Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer--admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like--for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.
In an attempt to counter Mayor Rahm Emanuel's relentless campaign for a longer school day, the Chicago Teachers Union claimed Friday that 30 elementary schools have voted to reject the city's offer to extend the school day in exchange for financial incentives.
Emanuel and the Chicago Public Schools have offered up to $150,000 in discretionary funds and a roughly 2 percent raise for teachers at city elementary schools that elect to waive a portion of the union contract and add 90 minutes to the day. CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll told the Chicago News Cooperative that the union's list is not accurate. She said the only schools that have voted are the four elementary schools that have accepted the district's deal.
"Not a single school voted down waivers. Not true," Carroll said in an email. "Only four have voted on waivers and they all supported them."
rne Duncan has the across-the-spectrum appeal to make just about everybody on the Wisconsin education scene eager to be in the room with him, and the political guts to tell Gov. Scott Walker face-to-face and in front of all those folks that he was wrong to kibosh collective bargaining in Wisconsin.
In short, he is about as interesting and significant a person as anyone in American education.
The U.S. secretary of education stopped by the Milwaukee School of Career and Technical Education (that's the new version of Custer High School) for an hour and a half Friday, enough time for several hundred people, from big shots to students, to get a dose of the highly demanding form of optimism that is a key to Duncan.
You want to get some positive re-enforcement for the things you're doing, Duncan is your guy. You want to hear how what you're doing isn't anywhere near enough, Duncan is your guy.
"Motivation is part of education and classroom teachers should have input because they are the ones doing the work. "
"Not all candy purchases are used for motivation."
"The question becomes do we want to be the food police in the schools. "
"Teachers and principals might not understand why this issue is being pushed so hard. "
---Administration Response to "Candy Purchases" issue (Minutes of the Finance Committee meeting 8-22-11)
An annual report on Iowa public schools shows students in 30 districts aren't making the progress required by the federal No Child Left behind law, triggering required actions such as changing staff members.
Most college students studying for degrees in science, technology, engineering or math make the decision to do so in high school or before -- but only 20 percent say they feel that their education before college prepared them "extremely well" for those fields, according to a survey released today by Microsoft and polling company Harris Interactive.
The survey, which asked college students pursing STEM degrees and the parents of K-12 students about attitudes toward STEM education, also found that male and female students enter the fields for different reasons: females are more likely to want to make a difference, while males are more likely to say they've always enjoyed games, toys or clubs focused on the hard sciences.
A group of business and philanthropic leaders appointed by Governor Dannel P. Malloy presented their education reform proposals to the state Board of Education Wednesday, pitching changes to teacher certification requirements, preparation programs and evaluations to help close Connecticut's dramatic achievement gap.
Members of the Connecticut Council on Education Reform said they considered the timing appropriate, coming as Malloy introduced his new education commissioner and reiterated that education will be a priority in next year's legislative session.
"We think next year could be the lynchpin," said Steve Simmons, vice chair of the council and CEO of Simmons/Patriot Media and Communications. "The governor has said that this first year was focused on the budget crisis and the second year was going to be education reform. I think we have a great chance here over this next nine or ten month period to really push for change."
A debate related to the repeal of collective bargaining rights for most public employees in Wisconsin is whether teachers' job security should be tied to seniority.
The Cadott school board recently rewrote its employee handbook, which now says the needs of the district, not the seniority of its employees, will be the "prime consideration" to determine which employees should be laid off.
Other school districts are deciding how to proceed. In the past, representatives of the school board and teachers union would negotiate the handbook's contents. Now, the board can unilaterally set the rules, which has teachers understandably unnerved. Job security, especially in this economy, is paramount.
Madison Preparatory Academy will receive the first half of a $225,000 state planning grant after the Madison School Board determined Thursday that the revised proposal for the charter school addresses legal concerns about gender equality.
Madison Schools Superintendent Dan Nerad announced the decision following a closed School Board meeting.
Questions still remain about the cost of the proposal by the Urban League of Greater Madison, which calls for a school for 60 male and 60 female sixth-graders geared toward low-income minorities that would open next year.
"I understand the heartfelt needs for this program," Nerad said, but "there are other needs we need to address."
The school district does not have a lot of spare money lying around that it can devote to Madison Prep. Speaking for myself, I am not willing to cut educational opportunities for other students in order to fund Madison Prep. If it turns out that entering into a five-year contract with Madison Prep would impose a net cost of millions of dollars on the school district, then, for me, we'd have to be willing to raise property taxes by that same millions of dollars in order to cover the cost.
It is not at all clear that we'd be able to do this even if we wanted to. Like all school districts in the state, MMSD labors under the restrictions of the state-imposed revenue caps. The law places a limit on how much school districts can spend. The legislature determines how that limit changes from year to year. In the best of times, the increase in revenues that Wisconsin school districts have been allowed have tended to be less than their annual increases in costs. This has led to the budget-slashing exercises that the school districts endure annually.
In this environment, it is extremely difficult to see how we could justify taking on the kind of multi-million dollar obligation that entering into a five-year contract with Madison Prep would entail. Indeed, given the projected budget numbers and revenue limits, it seems inevitable that signing on to the Madison Prep proposal would obligate the school district to millions of dollars in cuts to the services we provide to our students who would not attend Madison Prep.
A sense of the magnitude of these cuts can be gleaned by taking one year as an example. Since Madison Prep would be adding classes for seven years, let's look at year four, the 2015-16 school year, which falls smack dab in the middle.
Last night I (TJ) was asked to leave the meeting on African American issues in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) advertised as being facilitated by the Department of Justice Community Relations Service (DOJ CRS) and hosted or convened by the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM) with the consent and participation of MMSD. I was told that if I did not leave, the meeting would be canceled. The reason given was that I write a blog (see here for some background on the exclusion of the media and bloggers and here for Matt DeFour's report from outside the meeting).
I gave my word that I would not write about the meeting, but that did not alter the request. I argued that as a parent and as someone who has labored for years to address inequities in public education, I had both a legitimate interest in being there and the potential to contribute to the proceedings. This was acknowledged and I was still asked to leave and told again that the meeting would not proceed if I did not leave. I asked to speak to the DOJ CRS representatives in order to confirm that this was the case and this request was repeatedly refused by Kaleem Caire of the ULGM.
An idea hatched in Madison aims to give parents with boys in Wisconsin's second-largest city another positive option for their children. It's an idea that ought to be channeled to Milwaukee.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men would feature the rigorous International Baccalaureate program, longer days, a longer school year and lofty expectations for dress and behavior for boys in sixth grade through high school. And while it would accept all comers, clearly it is designed to focus on low-income boys of color. Backers hope to open a year from now.
One of the primary movers behind Madison Prep is Kaleem Caire, the head of the Urban League of Madison, who grew up in the city and attended Madison West High School in 1980s, Alan J. Borsuk explained in a column last Sunday. Caire later worked in Washington, D.C., as an education advocate before returning to Madison.
Caire saw too many young black men wash out and end up either dead or in jail, reported Borsuk, a senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School. And Caire now is worried, as are we, about the atrocious statistics that place young black boys so far behind their white peers.
The Department of Justice official explained the shadowy, confidential nature of the Community Relations Service to the audience by describing the kinds of situations it intervenes in, mostly having to do with hate crimes and rioting. He said in no uncertain terms, "We are not here to do an investigation," and even asked for the audience members to repeat the sentence with him. He then went on to ask for people to respect the confidentiality of those raising issues, and laid out the structure of the meeting: 30 minutes for listing problems relating to the achievement gap and 45 minutes generating solutions.
I will respect the confidentiality of the content of the meeting by not repeating it. However, I will say that what was said in that room was no different that what has been said at countless other open, public meetings with the School District and in community groups on the same topic, the only difference being that there were far fewer parents in the room and few if any teachers.
It turned out that the Department of Justice secretive meeting was a convenient way to pack the house with a captive audience for yet another infomercial about Madison Prep. Kaleem Caire adjourned the one meeting and immediately convened an Urban League meeting where he gave his Madison Prep sales pitch yet again. About 1/3 of the audience left at that point.
School boards across Wisconsin are coming out with employee handbooks to replace union contracts after the elimination of most collective bargaining powers for teachers. Some major trends include elimination of seniority protection and just cause for teacher non renewal.
Cadott School District Administrator Joe Zydowsky says the school board has been working since spring on the employee handbook that will set the work rules for district personnel. Zydowsky says they did solicit comments from teachers and staff while writing the book, "We tried to have as much input as possible but ultimately it came down to being the responsibility of the school board."
The finished product eliminates layoff protections based on seniority and a provision that the district provide just cause for not renewing a teacher's contract. Zydowsky says those changes give the district flexibility in personnel matters, "Sometimes that might mean that we have to make a reduction in staff. Sometimes that might mean we need to make a change in staff and the new employment policies of our school district will make it easier for us to make those changes when they're necessary."
very principal looks forward to the first day of school when students return with fresh minds eager to learn and ready to work. But as students prepare to hit the books in the next couple weeks, some of them won't have to take the bus to school, wander the halls looking for their classroom or search rows of desks to find their seat.
Virtual schooling with Wisconsin Connections Academy (WCA) allows students to receive a top-notch public education online from the comfort of their homes. Virtual education is an increasingly popular alternative to the traditional brick and mortar classroom, but many parents still don't fully understand online learning and how it works.
Virtual public schooling is not homeschooling. In fact, the two are quite different. Virtual public schools deliver public education to a student's home at no cost that combines state-certified teachers and a rigorous curriculum that correlates to state standards. At WCA, students learn at home under the guidance of a Wisconsin certified teacher. A Learning Coach, typically a parent, assists the student in day-to-day activities. Our teachers work directly with both the student and Learning Coach to develop an individual learning plan, provide instruction and evaluate assignments.
While they say that all politics is local, Colorado seems to be national news, yet again. Our state is featured prominently in Steven Brill's new book, Class Warfare, which is receiving a lot of press from national news outlets.
Weaving a narrative around the passage of Senate Bill 10-191 in Colorado, Brill tells a good story, replete with heroic figures like Senator Mike Johnston. I worked closely on SB 191 from its inception to passage, I can tell you that the on the ground details of its success are even more interesting than what's depicted in Brill's account.
Please see DFER's case study on SB 191 here for a close examination of the strategy, the broad coalition, and the bipartisan champions that helped make SB 191 a reality. Without the active support of the sophisticated coalition of political leaders on both sides of the aisle, including House sponsors Rep. Christine Scanlan and Rep. Carole Murray, non-profit organizations such as Stand for Children Colorado, civil rights groups, and business leaders that worked with the media, spoke with legislators, and reached out to their communities, the bill would not have passed. For further reading, Van Schoales, a DFER-CO Advisory Committee member, has written a review of Class Warfare: available here.
Did Joey show up to school today? What grade did Britney receive in third grade English? Did the Larson Family pay the towel fee? Does Mrs. Rendell cover metrics in her math class?
Some in Wisconsin are making plans for a state-wide student information system set for implementation next year. The plan is to have every school in the state use the same web-based system. A single private company will be awarded a five year contract.
Most of the cost for operating the system will be shouldered by cash strapped schools.
The private vendor will be paid by fees assessed on each school district. The annual cost of maintaining the system has not yet been determined; estimates run between eight and twenty-two million a year. Fifteen million dollars in start-up costs for the new system was set aside in a special account controlled by the Legislature's budget writing committee. But the money to run the new system has not been budgeted.
I see the effects of deep budget cuts when I visit our local schools. Class sizes are larger, bus rides longer, experienced teachers retired, fewer electives, support staff reduced to bare bones and fees increased. Some teachers are reduced to part time.
The threat of possible litigation has roiled the already turbulent waters surrounding the proposal for a single-sex Urban League charter school.
Madison school officials began feeling skittish over recommending a $225,000 planning grant for the Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men after the state Department of Public Instruction raised concerns recently that the school doesn't meet state and federal requirements to provide gender-equal education.
Now, a new legal threat has emerged, this one from Madison Teachers Inc. Together, the two issues could cause the board to pull back from supporting the planning grant, possibly as early as Thursday.
First, some background: After DPI put the planning grant on hold, the Urban League of Greater Madison last week submitted a new proposal to simultaneously establish a separate campus for girls. Kaleem Caire, Urban League president and a driving force behind Madison Prep, wants to see the schools open next year, initially with 60 sixth-grade girls and 60 sixth-grade boys. The proposal calls for adding 120 additional sixth-graders in each of the four subsequent years. Because the proposal now envisions 600 students rather 480 as originally planned, it would require more funding from the Madison Metropolitan School District than originally planned.
A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults.
Sure, there was some moral outrage at seven-year olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work--they said they couldn't afford to hire adults. It wasn't until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.
Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence--it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.
Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.
Oregon's public schools are stuck in an old-fashioned way of doing business, Gov. John Kitzhaber said Tuesday, telling an audience of school teachers and administrators that improving education "requires the courage to change."
He laid out a vision of an education system that identifies at-risk children from birth, gives their parents the tools they need to help children be ready to read by kindergarten, and helps students transition through the education system without falling behind.
"The path forward in this new century requires innovation, requires the willingness to challenge assumption, requires the courage to change," Kitzhaber said at the annual back-to-school event for Springfield Public Schools employees.
As students in much of the state returned Tuesday to classrooms more crowded than last year, Kitzhaber said education is underfunded at all levels. But he said the lack of money makes it even more important to overhaul the education bureaucracy and turn "islands of excellence" into a "culture of excellence."
Going online to get a college degree has been championed as a cost-effective way to educate the masses and challenged as a cheapening of academia. Now, the online classroom is coming to the vaunted University of California system, making it the nation's first top-tier university to offer undergraduate credit for cyberstudies.
By dislodging education from its brick-and-mortar moorings, the University of California - short on money and space - hopes to ease the path to a diploma for students who are increasingly forced to wait for a vacant seat in a lecture hall. Especially in high-demand "gateway courses," such as chemistry, calculus and composition.
This summer, UC Berkeley tested its first pilot course: Chemistry 1A. For one student, working as a lifeguard in San Rafael, it accelerated her progress toward a joint degree in biology and economics. Another was able to live at home in Sacramento, because she registered for summer school too late to get dorm space.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel focused on parents Tuesday in his quest for a longer school day, saying they should demand the extra hours teachers already approved outside the Chicago Teachers Union contract at STEM Magnet Academy and two other schools.
"Three schools took this step forward. We hope other schools will do the same," Emanuel said as he kicked off a new school year at STEM, a new magnet school in an old Chicago Public School building.
"Most important, the parents want this," said Emanuel, whose campaign promises included a longer school day. "Parents need to ask their schools, 'How can we get the same thing?'"
Meanwhile, CPS officials Tuesday invited all elementary schools to join the "Longer School Day Pioneers Program," which adds 90 minutes of daily instructional time this school year in exchange for pro-rated teacher raises of 2 percent. Plus, schools that join in September will net an extra $150,000; those that start in January will get $75,000, a CPS news release explained.
While attending a recent party on the shores of Lake Mendota, the use of drug-sniffing dogs in city high schools became a discussion topic. As parents and taxpayers, we concluded that the use of random sweeps is an excellent idea because Madison and Dane County have seen dramatic increases in drug use among younger people.
We thought it incredible that John Matthews, the teachers union boss, would utter such nonsense that there wouldn't be better control with drug-sniffing dogs and "why do we want to make kids go to school in that environment?"
On Thursday, August 25, 2011, leadership of the Urban League of Greater Madison, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and the Madison Metropolitan School District met at DPI's Madison offices to discuss how the Urban League and MMSD would address DPI's concerns that a comparable option to Madison Prep's charter school for boys also be available to girls at the same time the boys' school would open in August 2012.
During that meeting, all three parties discussed ways "comparability" could be achieved. DPI suggested and the Urban League agreed that starting the girl's campus at the same time as the boy's campus would be the best way to achieve comparability and sufficiently comply with state law and federal Title IX regulations that address single-sex public schools.
Initially, the Urban League planned to wait 12-24 months to start the girls' campus of Madison Prep. However, given DPI's concerns, we saw this as the perfect opportunity and argument to serve girls right away, and subsequently adjusted our plans to include a girls' campus of Madison Prep last week. You can review a copy of the proposal we submitted last week to DPI and MMSD that explains how we'll adjust our plans and add the girls' campus in 2012 by clicking here. We have also attached the document to this email here.
Today, we were excited to learn from a DPI official, Mr. Bob Soldner, that our proposal for adding the girls' campus now satisfies DPI's concerns that a comparable option would be available for boys and girls at the same time. Mr. Soldner also said he was awaiting a response to our plan from the Madison Metropolitan School District before releasing our $225,000 charter school planning grant, which DPI put on hold two weeks ago.
I just learned 2 hours ago from MMSD Superintendent, Dr. Daniel Nerad, that the Board of Education decided today to hold an executive session tomorrow at 4:30pm at the Doyle Administration Building to "discuss the legal implications of Madison Prep and the potential for litigation." Dr. Nerad said that immediately following their executive session, the Board of Education would also hold a "special public meeting" to discuss Madison Prep.
Unfortunately, the Urban League of Greater Madison and the Board members of Madison Prep will not be able to attend the public meeting on Madison Prep tomorrow as we are attending a long-scheduled fundraiser for the school at the same time tomorrow - 5:30pm. This will be the first major fundraiser for the school, and is being hosted by four prominent leaders and advocates for children in Greater Madison.
We hope that those of you who support Madison Prep and are not attending our fundraiser tomorrow night will be available to attend the public meeting of the Board of Education tomorrow to express your support for our proposal to establish Madison Preparatory Academy campuses for boys and girls. We assume a critical decision regarding our charter school grant application will be decided tomorrow. You can find the agenda for the Board of Education's meeting by clicking here.
For more information about tomorrow's Board of Education meeting, please contact the Madison Metropolitan School District's Board of Education at board@madison.k12.wi.us or 608-204-0341. For more information about our updated Madison Prep proposal, please contact Ms. Laura DeRoche Perez at Lderoche@ulgm.org or 608-729-1230.
We intend to host our own public forum on Madison Prep in the near future. More details and information will be shared with you soon.
Thank you so much. It's all about the future of our children.
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Phone: 608-729-1200
Fax: 608-729-1205 www.ulgm.org
A Madison charter school geared toward low-income, minority students would include single-gender classrooms for both boys and girls in 2012 under a revised proposal for Madison Preparatory Academy.
The new proposal from the Urban League of Greater Madison would nearly double the contribution required by the Madison School District in the fifth year -- from $4.8 million in the original plan to $9.4 million -- but the net cost to the district remains unclear.
The Urban League submitted the proposal to the school district and the state Department of Public Instruction on Friday, and it was made public by the district Wednesday. The revision came after DPI withheld support for a $225,000 planning grant for an all-boys charter school that the Urban League had discussed creating for more than a year. State officials said that such a school would discriminate against girls and that if they open an all-male school, they must open a similar school for girls at the same time.
The Madison School Board has scheduled two meetings for Thursday, one in closed session at 4:30 p.m. to discuss legal issues related to the new proposal and the second in open session at 5:30 p.m., Superintendent Dan Nerad said.
Yes, the US Department of Education owns guns. Its Office of the Inspector General has statutory authority to make arrests, conduct warrants, and pound open your front door. Usually if you get involved in some sort of fraud scheme related to federal student loans.
A meeting Wednesday to discuss the minority achievement gap in the Madison district will be closed to the media, even if that means kicking School Board members out, the organizer said Monday.
The Urban League of Greater Madison invited Madison School Board members to its meeting facilitated by an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, but if four board members attend, it would be considered a quorum of the school board and need to abide by the open meetings law.
Four of the seven school board members confirmed with the State Journal Monday that they plan to attend the meeting.
"We'll have to kick one of them out," said Urban League President Kaleem Caire, laughing. "I'm serious."
Wisconsin has the dubious distinction of reducing state aid per student this school year the most of 24 states studied by an independent, Washington-based think tank, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
According to a preliminary study released Sept. 1 by the nonprofit research organization, the dollar change in spending from the last fiscal year to this year dropped $635 per student under Gov. Scott Walker's budget that took effect July 1. New York was in second place, cutting state school aid $585 per student. California was third at $484.
The study only reports on the 24 states where current-year data is available. Those states educate about two-thirds of the nation's K-12 students.
In percentage terms, Wisconsin had the third sharpest state school aid cut, at 10 percent. Illinois was worst, cutting state aid 12.9 percent. Texas was second at 10.4 percent. Wisconsin now provides an average of about $9,500 per student.
In the camp of free online learning, Irishman Mike Feerick believes his Alison.com has more to offer than the buzz-heavy Khan Academy. Feerick, a Harvard MBA and serial entrepreneur, has an impressive track record at several startups including his current project: Alison.com. It offers 300 free courses online that lead to training certificates and it has nearly 700,000 people taking the courses globally. Mr. Feerick, an Ashoka Fellow, says the enterprise has turned the corner on profits in recent months. "I think we're proving there is a market for education online," he said recently over coffee in Berlin. He points to the United Nation's 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26, as justification for his business model: "Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free..." He's a key figure in the open-source learning world and a rival of sorts to Salman Khan. Wired Academic editor Paul Glader recently interviewed Mr. Feerick:
WA - How did you first decide to become a social entrepreneur in the education space?
MF - I've always been interested in social enterprise. Part of that came from working with Chuck Feeney - an american philanthropist [and founder of the Duty Free Shoppers Group]. I worked closely with him as an assistant 20 years ago. He's been a huge funder of education. You can't spend too much time with him without feeling responsibility for the world and wanting to do something about it... The wonderful thing about education is that it really underpins progress on nearly everything - from climate change, to ecology to economics. It's all about people learning and teaching and improving. If I could make quality education free online, than I could be making my contribution to society.
Largely ignored during the past 30 years of efforts to reform K-12 schools, the higher education community is about to feel the glare of the public spotlight on its work -- and that attention is causing concern and skepticism.
In January 2011, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), an independent, nonprofi t group that advocates for reforms in teacher policies, said it would rate all teacher preparation programs and publish the results next year in U.S. News & World Report. The announcement has rankled many, even in the teacher reform movement, and highlights in sharp relief the divergent factors and strategies at play. Most school reform efforts have focused on schools, districts, and communities. But the move to assess teacher education and publicize the results puts higher education under a spotlight that it has rarely experienced.
Schools of education have responded to the news with alarm, describing the national review of teacher preparation as "flawed," "unnecessary," and "a violation of sound research." The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), a national alliance of educator preparation programs, found in a recent survey that only 12% of its member institutions plan to participate willingly.
The Case For Change. We live in extraordinary times. The Internet began as a communications link to enable information sharing and collaboration between universities, research centers, and other institutions of higher learning. The World Wide Web began for many of the same reasons. Both are now a primary means of communication on the planet, with an unprecedented speed, reach, and multimodal capacity born of the computer's inherent property as a "universal machine," a machine that can simulate or model any other machine. These advances have come within an astonishingly short time frame. Interactive computing is about fifty years old. The concept of personal computing emerged a little less than forty years ago, at a time when notions of personal computers seemed laughable to many people. Within the last thirty years we have moved from slow desktop computers with dual floppy disk drives to powerful laptops to sophisticated smart phones that are essentially full-featured, always-connected pocket computers that also do telephony, audio-video recording and editing, and geo-location. Moreover, some believe that we will soon be carrying web servers around in our pockets, context-sensitive machines that can seamlessly link us to many types of devices in settings ranging from offices to trains, planes, and automobiles--and everywhere in between.
That's what President George W. Bush had in mind when he signed "No Child Left Behind" into law in 2001. Signaling his strong concerns about that legislation's shortcomings, it is also why Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced earlier this month that he would override the requirement under No Child Left Behind that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.
Mr. Duncan said he is waiving the law's proficiency requirements for states that have adopted their own testing and accountability programs and are making other strides toward better schools. Without the waivers, he said, 80 percent of American schools would get failing grades under the law.
But No Child Left Behind has an even more pernicious effect - it is discouraging the teaching of science courses, particularly at the elementary level, at a time when America needs them the most. What is more central to our current economy, security and core values than science? Where would we be without Google and Apple, stealth technology, gene-based therapy, and high-tech prosthetics?
British science fiction author and futurist Arthur Clarke once said: "It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars."
He was referring to competing human space programmes, but the quote may be seen to have some relevance to the debate over the proposed "national education" of Hong Kong school pupils.
To many the question is simply whether Beijing-style propaganda should be introduced through the public education system in what has remained largely a free city in the 14 years since the handover of sovereignty from Britain in 1997.
Conflict has erupted in the Legislative Council, in public forums and on the street, with one faction accusing the government of sacrificing personal liberty and the other saying it has sacrificed national unity by not introducing the subject earlier. A public consultation ended on Wednesday.
Once, someone asked me about the modern education reform movement, and this is what I said: "The past twenty years of education reform consist of brilliant people working very, very hard to achieve moderate gains."
Why has this occurred? See picture below:
In short: we've built an irrational system. Let's just call it 'The Man' -- and we all know who the Man is. The Man is the existing structure, one that evolved over time to serve a now-vanished 19th century world and no longer serves its original purpose. The Man causes rational people to act in ways that cause the whole system harm. And, when it comes to educators -- specifically, unions and charters -- who are held down by the Man, I can sympathize with both sides of the debate.
John Knight said he didn't get into education for the money.
The superintendent of the Drummond Area School District, a 400-student public school system in the far northern Wisconsin community of Bayfield, this year is expected to make an arguably comfortable salary of $96,000.
But he has to work five jobs to earn his pay.
This past school year, Knight earned $19,050 as superintendent. He also served as the district's director of pupil services, director of transport and director of food services and technology coordinator and principal of Drummond Elementary School. All positions combined will net Knight's $96,000 salary.
This jack-of-many-educational-trades earned nearly the same salary as the previous district administrator, whose sole position was superintendent.
In this week's chart, Mercatus Center Research Fellow Matthew Mitchell uses data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to illustrate the increase in the size of federal, state, and local expenditures as a share of GDP over the course of the past century.
The chart shows how expenditures as a share of GDP spiked during World War II but were reduced rapidly and significantly. However, spending never returned to the pre-war level and has followed a general upward trend ever since.
Today federal, state, and local expenditures as a share of GDP are back at the highs reached during World War II. This time, however, we are unlikely to see a swift decrease. Wartime expenditures on items like weaponry and salaries for conscripted soldiers were relatively easy to wind down. The bulk of current and future government spending is on entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. This variety of spending is nearly impossible to reduce in the near term.
In college, I pumped my fist at a rally against standardized testing. I'd never seen the exam I was protesting, but stood in solidarity with educators and labor organizers who felt the testing movement was an attack on teachers, particularly those working in poor public schools. My opposition grew when I became a teacher in the South Bronx, one of America's poorest communities. I wanted to uplift my students and resented the weight of a looming high-stakes test.
Besides, I thought good teachers should be left to their own devices. And, I was certain that I was a good teacher. For the most part, my students were punctual, respectful, and engaged. It wasn't until my second year in the classroom that I began questioning this assumption.
In a routine evaluation, my principal praised my organization, management, and facilitation, but posed the following question: "How do you know the kids are really getting it?" She urged me to develop more-rigorous assessments of student learning. Ego and uncertainty inspired me to measure the impact of my instruction. I thought I was effective, but I wanted proof.
Your school days and years are strikingly longer than Chicago's -- a bit more than an hour more instructional time per day and 10 additional instructional days on the annual calendar, according to calculations by the Chicago Teachers Union.
That's about 250 extra hours in the classroom per year, which is roughly equivalent to three extra school years from first grade through 12th grade. That eye-opening number is figuring into the debate here about increasing classroom time for Chicago's students, as Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel has said he wants to do.
So, Houston, is all this extra schooling paying off?
The average ACT score for Houston's public high school students is 19.7, compared with 17.3 in Chicago, according to state report-card figures. From 2002 to 2009, your average eighth-grade reading scores inched up 4 percent while our scores were flat, and your average eighth-grade math scores rose 13 percent compared with our 9 percent increase, according to the National Association of Educational Progress.
On the other hand, Houston's four-year graduation rate is basically the same as Chicago's, depending on who's crunching the numbers. And 87 percent of Chicago's pupils are classified as "low income," compared with 79 percent of pupils in Houston labeled "economically disadvantaged."
Due to a slew of administrative retirements, 39 schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools system will have new principals this school year. The aptitude of this incoming class of leaders is unarguably pressing in the turbulent wake of the spring's budget showdown and its rippling effects on education.
Principals are charged with the daunting task of cultivating and maintaining school environments that are conducive to learning. Their performance strongly correlates to the ultimate success or failure of their schools.
While it's easy to spot those who excel in the role, it's trickier to pinpoint the attributes that define principals on the high end of the efficacy spectrum. What exactly sets them apart?
Effective principals recognize the value of each employee's role in achieving schoolwide success. They treat staff members as competent professionals, involve them in goal-setting and school improvement plans and delegate key responsibilities as much as plausible.
While they monitor progress to ensure accountability, proficient principals don't fall into the trap of micromanagement. Rather, they articulate high expectations and trust staff members to successfully fulfill their obligations.
Kaleem Caire knows what it is like to be a young black man growing up in Madison and going on to success. A troubled kid when he was a student at Madison West High School in the 1980s, he went on to become a nationally known Washington-based education advocate before returning in 2010 to head the Urban League of Greater Madison.
Kaleem Caire knows what it means to be a young black man growing up in Madison and going on to failure. He saw what happened to many childhood friends who ended up dead or in prison. He sees it now in the disturbing statistics on African-American education outcomes and unemployment.
And Kaleem Caire has an eye-catching idea he thinks will put more black and Latino youths on the path to success - enough to make a difference in the overall troubling picture of minority life in the state's second largest city.
The idea? An all-male charter school for sixth- through 12th-graders with longer days and longer school years than conventional schools, an International Baccalaureate program, and high expectations of students and teachers, including academic performance, the way they treat others, and the way they dress.
Kaleem Caire says there's a simple fix for concerns that a proposal for an all-male charter school in Madison would discriminate against girls.
"If it's a problem, we'll introduce a single-sex charter school for girls at the same time we start the boys' school, in the fall of 2012-2013," Caire said in an interview Friday.
Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, first began talking a year ago about creating a rigorous, prep-style public charter school for boys aimed at improving minority student performance. With its single-sex approach, International Baccalaureate curriculum, emphasis on parent involvement and expanded hours and days, Madison Preparatory Academy would not only be unique in the Madison district, but also unique in the state.
The fate of Madison Preparatory Academy will be a defining moment for our school climate.
A new report on the academic performance of low-income students receiving Tax Credit Scholarships in Florida finds they are making modestly larger gains in reading and math than their counterparts in public school.
That conclusion from 2009-10 test data is encouraging for those of us who work to provide these learning options, which served 34,550 low-income students statewide last year. But the report, released today and written by respected Northwestern University researcher David Figlio, is also a reminder of the inherent complexities of judging whether these programs work.
By keeping charter operators out of the first round of applications to run new schools, the L.A. Unified board has scaled back its goal of making educational excellence the highest priority.
The Public School Choice initiative was a landmark reform for the Los Angeles Unified School District. By allowing alternative operators -- whether charter school organizations, the mayor or groups of teachers -- to apply to manage scores of new and low-performing schools, it set the standard for putting students first. The theory was that anyone could apply and the very best applications would win, ensuring that students attended the best-run schools the district could offer. Just as important, charter operators in the program would have to accept all students within each school's enrollment area rather than using the usual lottery system under which more-motivated families tend to apply to charter schools.
Of course, this is L.A. Unified, which means things didn't always work out. More than one management contract was awarded on the basis of political alliances. Charter schools were disappointingly unwilling to take on the tougher challenge of turning around failing schools; most of their applications were for the new, pretty campuses.
Instructors have to spell out every detail for today's students, and do some of their thinking for them.
When I was an undergraduate at UCLA in 1972, I was enrolled in four classes. On the first day of the term, each instructor went through the ritual of introducing the course and handing out the syllabus, if there was a syllabus. In the freshman composition course, taught by a man who later distinguished himself as a James Joyce scholar, I remember no syllabus at all, only the comment that we would be writing a number of formal papers.
In Cultural Anthropology there was a syllabus--a single mimeographed sheet with a few dates on it (exams, deadlines for papers) and the mandatory bibliography. In first-term German, as in freshman composition, the teacher issued no syllabus. The chapters of the primer were syllabus enough. For my fourth course, a survey of ancient civilizations, the textbook's table of contents served as the syllabus.
Admission to UCLA in the mid-twentieth century was still rigorous and exclusive; our preceptors rightly took for granted that students understood that the ten weeks of the term would correspond to a structure. Students would expect regular quizzes, that they would have to submit formal essays at the midterm and at the end of the quarter, and that they would have to keep up with the reading.
Toby Young is not nervous about publicity. I first met him at last year's Conservative party conference in Birmingham. The journalist and author approached me in a bar, pretended to punch me in the stomach several times, then looked up and asked: "Why haven't you written about my school yet?"
Young, 47, is chairman of the governors at the West London Free School, a new secondary school in Hammersmith, which will welcome its first pupils (120 children aged 11) next month. It is a high-profile project that has made Young a regular participant in debates about education in Britain.
The school is one of the first wave of "free schools", funded by the state but founded by private groups such as churches or community groups (in Young's case, local parents), intended to bring new providers into the education system.
What makes the West London Free School particularly unusual is the celebrity of its chairman. Young first attracted attention in the early 1990s as the bumptious co-founder and editor of the Modern Review magazine before moving to the US. In New York he worked as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine where he was not a success and fell out with Graydon Carter, its editor, though subsequently Young managed to convert the experience into a successful book, play and film, all called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
Before classes began at Spring Creek School near Decker, Mont., community volunteers cut back the grass, cleared tumbleweeds and made sure there were no rattlesnakes around the playground. Last week, the one-room schoolhouse opened for its six K-5 students.
"We all pitch in out here to support the school," says Loren Noll, a neighbor who showed up to dig weeds. Even though his 4-year-old daughter isn't old enough to attend, Mr. Noll volunteers as chairman of the school board.
In the U.S., 237 public schools had only one teacher, according to 2009 federal data, down from 463 in 1999. Most are located in remote areas. And while conditions are far from the rough-hewn rooms of "Little House on the Prairie," such schools often lack the amenities typically associated with high-quality schooling, such as computer labs, libraries, sports, art, music, nurses and psychologists.
In Canada the rise of the incubator choices is quite noticeable. The success of the Y-Combinator (YC) model is hard to ignore, it seems to be the accepted way to grow young tech companies at the moment. However, it isn't clear if the model works anywhere but YC and TechStars, these programs cost a lot of money to run so does the math hold up for everyone?
How many companies make it a big enough exit (assuming you need a $30 million exit per incubator) and in what time frame? In Canada there is a trend that shows some crazy growth in exits but how many are in that 'big enough' range or more that haven't been around for 5-10 years or more? I think one maybe two. It isn't just Canada though, how many exists are there in a year for any tech startup anywhere? Likely not enough to sustain the current number of incubators globally.
Last week during Arne Duncan's Twitter Town Hall there was one phrase that keeps sticking in my mind. John Merrow asked him what his message is for teachers who feel under attack.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's response included this:
"We have to do everything we can to support teachers. I worry about losing too much of our great young talent."
It is hard to disagree with this. I spent the last four years leading a program in Oakland designed to do just that. We created TeamScience to give novice science teachers a professional community to belong to, offering them experienced colleagues as mentors as well as workshops, curriculum and professional development. We did this because we have a huge turnover issue among our science teachers. Most of the vacancies are filled with interns from Teach For America and other programs, and three years after they start, 75% of these teachers have left the District.
Every child deserves a great teacher. New Jersey -- which ranks among the top states in the nation in student achievement -- is making great strides in delivering on that promise.
Research shows that the effectiveness of the teacher in front of the classroom is the most important in-school factor affecting student learning, and we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to our teachers for our children's success.
Precisely because teaching is an honored craft, we must recognize and respect effective educators, support teachers in their efforts to continue to develop their skills and ensure that those comparatively few individuals who are unable to improve no longer remain in the classroom.
The former president of the teachers union in the nation's second largest school district is moving on to a new job that might surprise many: He is launching a charter school organization after often criticizing such schools in his previous role.
If approved by the Los Angeles Unified School District, the schools are planned to open next year, possibly as soon as February or in September at the latest, with campuses in South Los Angeles, he said.
The model he wants to create will be a radical departure from both traditional and charter schools, promised Duffy. "We want to create a system that's not just good for kids and fair to teachers, but that's revolutionary," he said.
From the standpoint of most spectators, football is all about the game. From the standpoint of most players, football is all about practice. What players go through at practice, particularly two-a-days, can be more grueling than what they go through during games. When coaches tell players, "Compared to practice, the game will be fun," they aren't kidding.
Though spectators and viewers think of games as the dangerous part of football, because it's during games that injuries are widely seen -- coaches whom I have interviewed think players are more likely to be injured at a practice than during a game. Partly this is simply because players spend so much more time practicing than performing, meaning more hours of risk.
Let me speak for all public school educators when I say unequivocally: We will. We say send us your poor, send us your homeless, the children of your afflicted and addicted. Send us your kids who don't speak English. Send us you special-needs children, we will not turn them away.
But I tell you today, public school teacher, you will fail to take the shattered children of poverty and turn them into the polished products of the private schools. You will be unacceptable, public school teacher. And I say that is your badge of honor. I stand before you today bearing proudly the label of unacceptable because I educate the children they will not educate.
Day after day I take children broken by the poverty our leaders are afraid to confront and I glue their pieces back together. And at the end of my life you can say those children were better for passing through my sphere of influence. I am unacceptable and proud of it.
More heat on Hong Kong national education: Controversial plan suffers a fresh blow with a pro-government teachers' body raising objections and calling for a trial scheme first
The government faces mounting pressure to scale back its controversial plan to introduce national education to all schools within two years. Many teachers have raised objections during the four-month public consultation which ends today.
The plan to require all primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong to include national education as a study subject has triggered heated debate in the city. It is one of the key political objectives for Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, who step downs as chief executive next year.
For years, the pro-Beijing camp in Hong Kong have been critical of schools' lack of efforts to instil a sense of national identity in students, and feared it would alienate them from the rest of the country. The opposition worried compulsory national education would be used to rationalise autocratic rules on the mainland and become a "brain-washing" tool.
The Madison School District is on pace to add 300 new teachers this year -- the most in at least 19 years.
Already this year, the district has hired 260 new classroom leaders, largely a response to a wave of teacher retirements prompted by a new law curtailing collective bargaining by public employees. Another 40 or so could be added throughout September.
For the thousands of students heading back to school Thursday, the turnover means both the loss of institutional memory and the potential for fresh ideas to reshape the classroom experience, Madison principals say.
"You lose a lot of knowledge around education that's critical to helping kids be successful," said Bruce Dahmen, principal at Memorial High School, which hired about 30 new teachers, including 12 first-timers. "With that change comes new opportunities. (New teachers) sometimes bring a different energy."
The Obama administration recently attempted a pre-emptive strike on Texas Governor Rick Perry by unleashing Education Secretary Arne Duncan to attack Texas' record on education. Duncan's arguments have generated a lot of useful discussion across the web, but Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, throws some rudimentary data analysis into the picture.
If you look at Texas' simple average test scores in reading and math for fourth and eighth grade students, they're about average. But Texas' schools serve a population with several challenges, in particular many low-income and Spanish speaking children.
An arm of the U.S. Department of Justice that mediates racial tension in communities is intervening in the debate over the achievement of racial minorities in the Madison School District.
The Justice Department's Community Relations Service won't discuss its role.
But in an email announcement this week, the Urban League of Greater Madison said DOJ this summer "raised concerns about academic achievement disparities among students of color in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) to the District's administration."
DOJ officials will participate in a meeting Wednesday called by the Urban League to discuss minority achievement, graduation rates and expulsion rates in the Madison district, according to Urban League President Kaleem Caire.
Ariana Taylor thought she was ready for college after taking Advanced Placement physics and English at her Chicago public high school and graduating with a 3.2 GPA.
Instead, at Illinois State University, she was overwhelmed by her course load and the demands of college. Her GPA freshman year dropped to 2.7 -- and that was significantly better than other graduates from Morgan Park High School, who averaged a 1.75 at Illinois State.
"It was really a big culture shock," said Taylor, 20, now a junior who has started a mentorship program for incoming freshmen. "I had no idea what it would be like."
A Tribune analysis of data available to Illinois citizens for the first time raises fundamental questions about how well the state's public high schools are preparing their students for college. The data show these students struggle to get a B average as freshmen at the state's universities and community colleges, even after leaving top-performing high schools with good grades. In fact, public school graduates at 10 of the state's 11 four-year universities averaged less than a 3.0 GPA their freshman year.
First-year performance at Illinois public universities and colleges
The newly-released High School-to-College Success Report shows how Illinois public school graduates fared when they became freshmen at the state's universities and community colleges. The ACT company tracked more than 90,000 students who graduated from public high schools between 2006 and 2008, and then enrolled full-time at an Illinois university or community college that fall. The data do not include students who went to a private college or out-of-state. For each high school, families can look up average high school GPAs and grade point averages earned at each public university and community college that students attended.
The fifth meeting of the Read to Lead task force was held on August 25, 2011, at Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Governor Walker was delayed, so State Superintendent Tony Evers opened the meeting. The main topic of discussion was accountability for reading outcomes, including the strategy of mandatory grade retention. Troy Couillard from DPI also presented an overview of reading reform in Milwaukee Public Schools.
Accountability
Superintendent Evers said that Wisconsin will seek a waiver from the No Child Left Behind proficiency requirements by instituting a new system of accountability. His Educator Effectiveness and Accountability Design teams are working on this, with the goal of a new accountability system being in place by late 2011.
Accountability at the educator level:
The concept of using student achievement or growth data in teacher and principal evaluations is not without controversy, but Wisconsin is including student data in its evaluation model, keeping in mind fairness and validity. The current thought is to base 50% of the educator evaluation on qualitative considerations, using the Danielson Frameworkhttp://www.danielsongroup.org ("promoting professional learning through self assessment, reflection on practice, and professional conversations"), and 50% on student data, including multiple measures of performance. 10% of the student data portion of the evaluation (5% of the total evaluation) would be based on whole-school performance. This 5% would be based on a proficiency standard as opposed to a value-added measurement. The 5% is thought to be small enough that it will not affect an individual teacher adversely, but large enough to send a message that all teachers need to work together to raise achievement in a school. The task force was asked if it could endorse whole-school performance as part of teacher evaluation. The task force members seemed to have some support for that notion, especially at the principal level, but had some reservations at the level of the individual teacher.
Kathy Champeau was concerned that some schools do not have the resources to serve some children. She also felt it might not be fair to teachers, as they have no control over other teachers in the school or the principal.
Steve Dykstra said it is important to make sure any value-added system is designed to be fair.
Rachel Lander felt it would be better to use value-added data for whole-school performance rather than a proficiency standard, but supported the importance of schoolwide standards.
Rep. Steve Kestell supported the 5% requirement, and questioned what the qualitative half of the evaluation would be based on. He felt perhaps there could be some schoolwide standards to be met in that part of the evaluation, also.
Tony Evers responded that the Danielson Framework was research-based observations, and that the evaluators would need to be highly trained and consistent in their evaluations.
Tony Pedriana had questions about the type of research on which the Danielson Framework is based.
Evers said he would provide further information to the task force.
Mara Brown said she cannot control what the teacher down the hall does, and that the 5% should apply only to principals.
Linda Pils agreed with the 5%, but felt principals need to be watching and guiding new teachers. She agreed with Dykstra's comments on measuring growth.
Sen. Luther Olsen was concerned that the 5% portion of a teacher's evaluation may be the part that tips the balance on job retention for an individual, yet that individual has no control over whole-school performance. He understood the principle of getting everyone involved and committed to a goal, but was concerned with possible consequences.
Mandatory Retention:
The task force was asked to consider whether Wisconsin should implement a mandatory retention policy. If so, what would it look like, and if not, what can be done to make sure students are reading at grade level?
After a guest presentation and discussion, the consensus of the task force was that Wisconsin should not have mandatory retention. Reasons cited were negative effects on later achievement, graduation, self esteem, and psychological well-being. Third grade was felt to be far too late to start intervention, and there needs to be more emphasis on developing teacher expertise and focusing on the responsibility of teachers, principals, and higher education as opposed to threatening the students with retention. Retention without changing the curriculum for the student the following year is pointless.
Dr. Elaine Allensworth, a director at the Consortium on Chicago School Research, joined the task force by telephone to summarize the outcomes of a mandatory retention project in Chicago. Students more than 1 year below the cut-off level on certain tested skills were retained unless they passed the test after a summer bridge program. Students identified as at-risk were given after-school tutoring during the year. Retention was thought to have three primary mechanisms that would affect student performance: motivation for students, families, and teachers to work harder, supplemental instruction after school and during the summer, and an additional year in the grade for failing students. All students in the school could be affected by the motivation and the supplemental instruction, but only the retained students by the extra year of instruction. The study found that the threat of retention worked as a positive motivator for teachers, parents, and some older students. However, there were also negatives in terms of higher-achieving students receiving less attention, more time on test preparation, and an instructional shift to focus on tested skills. The supplemental instruction, especially the summer bridge program, was the biggest positive of the retention project. There was high participation, increased personal attention, and higher-quality instruction. Retention itself had more negative effects than positive. Academic gains were either non-existent or rapidly-disappearing. Multiple year retentions resulted in a problematic mix of ages in classrooms, students unable to finish high school by age 18, and a negative overall attitude toward school.
Dykstra said it appeared that the impetus to do things differently because of the threat of retention had some benefit, but the actual retention had either no effect or a negative effect. He wondered if there was some way to provide the motivation without retention.
Allensworth agreed that the challenge was to provide a motivation without having a threat.
Pils asked if third graders could even understand the threat of retention.
Allensworth replied that they understood if teachers helped them. She also said that some schools with low-quality instruction had no way to improve student learning even with the threat of retention.
Allensworth replied that teaching the skills on the test was productive, but not the excessive time that was spent on test-taking strategies. She also said the tendency to teach more narrowly could cause problems later in high school where students needed to be able to participate in broader learning.
Marcia Henry inquired about students who returned to their old rate of learning when they returned to the regular classroom after successfully completing the summer bridge.
Allensworth replied that the summer program used higher quality curriculum and teachers, there was more time provided with students, and the students were more highly motivated.
Dykstra asked if it was possible to determine how much of the summer gain was due to student motivation, and how much due to teachers or parents.
Allensworth said those factors could not be pulled apart.
Champeau questioned whether the summer bridge program taught to the test.
Allensworth replied that it taught in a good way to the skills that the test assessed.
Brown asked if intervention was provided for the first time in third grade.
Allensworth replied that some schools began providing intervention and retaining in first or second grade.
Dykstra asked if the project created a situation where a majority of the school's resources were concentrated in third grade, leaving other grades short.
Allensworth said they didn't look at that, though some schools appeared to put their better teachers at certain grades.
Dykstra thought it was the wrong approach to tie services and supports to a specific grade rather than a specific student.
Are some types of consequences necessary to achieve the urgency and intensity necessary for performance improvement? Should there be mandatory summer school or other motivators? The task force did not seem to arrive at a consensus on this.
Lander said schools need the resources to do early intervention, plus information on what should be done in early intervention, and this is not currently the case in Wisconsin.
Pils questioned where teachers would find the time to provide intervention. She liked the idea of after-school and summer programs as well as reading the classics to kids. Providing a model of best instruction is important for teachers who don't have that background.
Mary Read commented on Bill Gates' experience with spending a lot of money for minimal results, and the conclusion that money needs to go into teacher training and proven programs such as the Kipp schools or into a national core curriculum.
Dykstra noted that everyone agrees that teacher training is essential, but there is disagreement as to curriculum and training content. His experience is that teachers are generally unable to pinpoint what is going wrong with a student's reading. We must understand how poor and widespread current teacher training is, apologize to teachers, and then fix the problem, but not at teachers' expense.
The facilitators asked what the policy should be. Is there an alternative to using retention? Should teacher re-training be mandatory for those who need the support?
Evers said that a school-by-school response does not work. The reforms in Milwaukee may have some relevance.
Olsen suggested that there are some reading programs that have been proven successful. If a school is not successful, perhaps they should be required to choose from a list of approved instructional methods and assessment tools, show their results, and monitor program fidelity. He feels we have a great resource in successful teachers in Wisconsin and other states, and the biggest issue is agreeing on programs that work for intervention and doing it right the first time.
Kestell said some major problems are teachers with high numbers of failing students, poor teacher preparation, the quality of early childhood education, and over-funding of 4K programs without a mandate on how that money is used. There has been some poor decision-making, and the kids are not responsible for that. We must somehow hold schools, school board, and individual educators accountable.
Champeau said teachers have no control over how money is spent. This accountability must be at the school and district level. More resources need to be available to some schools depending on the needs of their student population.
Lander: We must provide the necessary resources to identified schools.
Dykstra: We must develop an excellent system of value-added data so we can determine which schools are actually doing well. Right now we have no way of knowing. High-performing schools may actually be under-performing given their student demographics; projected student growth will not be the same in high and low performing schools.
Pedriana: We have long known how to teach even the most at-risk readers with evidence-based instruction. The truth is that much of our teacher training and classroom instruction is not evidence-based. We need the collective will to identify the evidence base on which we will base our choices, and then apply it consistently across the state. The task force has not yet taken on this critical question.
Pils: In her experience, she feels Wisconsin teachers are among the best in the country. There are some gaps we need to close.
Pedriana: Saying how good we are does not help the kids who are struggling.
Pils: We need to have our best teachers in the inner city, and teachers should not need to purchase their own supplies. We have to be careful with a limited list of approved programs. This may lead to ethics violations.
Pedriana: Referring to Pils' mention of Wisconsin's high graduation rates in a previous meeting, what does our poor performance on the NAEP reading test say about our graduation standards?
Michael Brickman (Governor's aide): There is evidence of problems when you do retention, and evidence of problems when you do nothing. We can't reduce the failing readers to zero using task force recommendations, so what should we do with students who leave 3rd grade not reading anywhere near grade level? Should we have mandatory summer school?
Henry: Response to Intervention (RTI) is a perfect model for intervening early in an appropriate way. A summer bridge program is excellent if it has the right focus. We must think more realistically about the budget we will require to do this intervention.
Olsen: If we do early intervention, we should have a very small number of kids who are still behind in 3rd grade. Are we teaching the right, most efficient way? We spend a lot of money on K-12 education in Wisconsin, but we may need to set priorities in reading. There is enough money to do it. Reading should be our mission at each grade level.
Facilitator: What will be the "stick" to make people provide the best instruction?
Dykstra: Accountability needs to start at the top in the state's education system. When the same people continue to make the same mistakes, yet there are no consequences, we need to let some people go. That is what they did in Massachusetts and Florida: start with two or three people in whom you have great confidence, and build from there.
Facilitator: Is there consensus on mandatory summer school for failing students?
Michele Erickson: Summer school is OK if the right resources are available for curriculum and teachers.
Kestell: All grades 4K - 3 are gateway grades. They are all important.
Champeau: Summer school is a good idea, but we would need to solve transportation issues.
Dykstra: We should open up the concept of summer school beyond public schools to any agency that offers quality instruction using highly qualified instructors from outside the educational establishment.
Lander: Supports Dykstra's idea. You can't lay summer instruction on schools that can hardly educate during the school year.
Brown: Could support summer school in addition to, but not in place of, early intervention during the school year.
Erickson: Look at the school year first when allocating resources. Summer school is a hard sell to families.
Pedriana: Agrees with Olsen that we probably have sufficient funds for the school year, but we need to spend it more wisely. We cannot expect districts to make the commitment to extra instruction if there is no accountability at the top (including institutions of higher education). We need to resolve the issue of what knowledge and content standards will be taught before we address summer school or other issues.
Milwaukee Public Schools' tiered RTI system was presented by DPI's Troy Couillard as an example of an accountability system. MPS chose a new core reading program for 2010-11 after submitting its research base to DPI. Teachers were provided with some in-service training, and there are some site checks for fidelity of implementation. Tier 2 interventions will begin in 2011-12, and Tier 3 interventions in 2012-13. He felt that the pace of these changes, plus development of a data accountability system, student screening with MAP and other testing, progress monitoring, and professional development, has MPS moving much faster than most districts around the county on implementing RTI. DPI embedded RTI in the district's Comprehensive Literacy Plan. DPI is pushing interventions that are listed on the National RTI site, but teachers are allowed to submit research for things they are using to see if those tools might be used.
Pils: Kids in MPS are already struggling. Reading First would suggest that they have 120 minuets of reading a day instead of the 90 minutes provided in the MPS plan.
Couillard: Tier 2 intervention for struggling students will add onto the 90 minutes of core instruction.
Olsen: Can this system work statewide without DPI monitoring all the districts?
Couillard: Districts are trained to monitor their own programs.
Pils: Veteran schools with proven strategies could be paired with struggling schools as mentors and models.
Pedriana: We have no way of knowing what proven strategies are unless we discuss what scientific evidence says works in reading. The task force must grapple with this question.
Brickman: Read to Lead task force needs to start with larger questions and then move to finer grain; this task force may not be able to do everything.
Pedriana: Is there anything more important for this task force to do than to decide what evidence-based reading instruction is?
Brickman: Task force members may submit suggestions for issues to discuss at the final meeting in September. Tony could submit some sample language on "evidence-based instruction" as a starting point for discussion.
Henry: The worst schools should be required to at least have specific guidelines, whether it is a legislative or DPI issue. Teacher retraining (not a 1-day workshop) is a necessity. Teachers are unprepared to teach.
Olsen: Wisconsin has always been a local control state, but one of the outcomes of the task force may be that we have a method for identifying schools that are not doing well, and then intervene with a plan. The state is ultimately responsible for K-12 education. Districts should take the state blueprint or come up with their own for approval by the state.
Erickson: Can we define what will work so districts can just do it?
Evers: MPS experience shows there is a process that works, and districts can do their own monitoring.
Dykstra: Sees value in making a list of things that districts are not allowed to do in reading instruction; also value in making a list of recommended programs based on alignment with the convergence of the science of reading research. That list would not be closed, but it should not include programs based on individual, publisher-funded studies that do not align with the convergence of the science. This could be of benefit to all districts. Even those doing relatively well could be doing better. Right now there is no list, and no learning targets. The MPS plan contains the Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards, which contain errors. DPI needs to correct that information and distribute it right now. That would be a good example of accountability at the state level.
Couillard: The new statewide data collection system will help districts monitor their own data.
Champeau: School needs change depending on demographics. The goal should be to build decision-making capacity at the local level, not dictation from outside. We should be talking more about people than programs. Have MPS teachers been doing a better job? What will they do if their program goes away? We need to work on the underlying expertise and knowledge base.
Facilitator: There appears to be agreement that the state can intervene in failing districts.
Lander: We might have some consensus as to what teachers need to know, and then go into schools to see if they know it. If not, we need to teach them.
Pedriana: What is so bad about providing a program, with training, of course? It would help people.
Facilitator: There is consensus around training of teachers.
Dykstra: Some of the distinction between training and programs is artificial. You need both.
Other things the state could require: weighting of reading in evaluation systems, grading of schools etc.
Dykstra: If giving schools grades, they should get separate grades for how they do in teaching separate content areas. In addition, everything should be reported in the best value-added system we can create, because it's the only way to know if you're doing a good job.
Pils: Doesn't like grading of schools. She has a whole folder on cheating in districts that have grading of schools and high stakes tests.
Evers: Do we just want to measure what schools are doing, or do we want to use it to leverage change?
Erickson: Wisconsin has gone from 3rd to 30th on the NAEP, so of course we should be seeking change.
Walker: The idea is not to pick on failing schools, but to help them. We must be able to deploy the resources to the things that work in accordance with science and research to teach reading right.
Dykstra: We should seek small kernels of detailed information about which teachers consistently produce better results in a given type of school for a given type of student. There is a problem with reliability when using MAP data at an individual student level.
Supt. Evers talked about the new state accountability system as being a better alternative to no Child Left Behind. Governor Walker said the state is not just doing this as an alternative to NCLB, but in response to comments from business that our graduates are not well-prepared. Parents want to know what all schools are doing.
Olsen: We need a system to monitor reading in Wisconsin before we get into big trouble. Our changing population is leading us to discover challenges that other states have dealt with for years.
Kestell: The accountability design team is an excellent opportunity to discuss priorities in education; a time to set aside personal agendas and look for solutions that work.
Next Meeting/Status of Report
Michael Brickman will try to send out a draft of a report the week of August 29 with his best interpretation of task force consensus items. The final meeting will be Sept. 27, perhaps in Madison, Eau Claire, or Wausau. Some task force issues will need to be passed on to other task forces in the future.
The amount of funding available for K-12 education in Colorado has led to considerable debate. The Lobato case being heard before the state Supreme Court challenges the constitutionality of our school finance system, and Proposition 103 is a ballot initiative for raising additional state revenues for public schools. If either of these efforts is successful, hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenues will flow to K-12 education. But if Colorado significantly increases funding for schools, can it reasonably expect dramatically better results?
It is true that studies examining the link between school funding levels and student outcomes, typically standardized test scores, have failed to find a strong relationship. These results have led some to conclude that money does not much matter.
However, this research may be misleading. Schools have many other responsibilities than teaching reading and math. Parents and policymakers expect schools to teach many other subjects such as social studies, science and the arts. We also expect schools to help socialize children. To the extent that schools dedicate resources to these ends, an aggregate fiscal measure such as total spending per student is not an appropriate metric when coupled with a narrowly defined outcome such as math or reading test scores.
n the eyes of Steven Brill, the American Federation of Teachers building a website attacking Michelle Rhee and masking its origins is worse than Rhee's creating a billion-dollar organization aimed at revamping education that doesn't disclose its backers.
Brill, author of the recent Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools, came to the education beat after writing a piece for the New Yorker about the "Rubber Room," a place where New York City public school teachers were paid to stay out of classrooms.
"People are generally making a mistake when they don't disclose who's donating," Brill told The Huffington Post. "But when you set up a website to attack them for it and don't define the source, that's worse."
III. The Sleeper Issue: A Collective Bargaining Agreement that Cannot Be Amended Even a Teeny, Tiny Bit
If this weren't enough, there seems to be another legal issue. This is one that has not attracted much attention, but it seems to me to be a serious problem, at least over the short term.
The school district and Madison Teachers Inc (MTI) have a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that governs terms and conditions of employment for teachers and other represented staff. The plans for Madison Prep calls for working conditions and terms of employment for the school's teachers that differ in significant ways from what the CBA calls for. For example, Madison Prep plans to offer an extended school day and school year and plans to structure its pay for teachers in a different way.
In more normal times, it would be theoretically possible for the school district and MTI to enter into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) by which the parties agree to modify the terms of the CBA in some regards in order to accommodate Madison Prep's plans.
Some people give back to their community. Then there's Fresno County School Superintendent Larry Powell, who's really giving back. As in $800,000 - what would have been his compensation for the next three years.
Until his term expires in 2015, Powell will run 325 schools and 35 school districts with 195,000 students, all for less than a starting California teacher earns.
"How much do we need to keep accumulating?" asks Powell, 63. "There's no reason for me to keep stockpiling money."
Powell's generosity is more than just a gesture in a region with some of the nation's highest rates of unemployment. As he prepares for retirement, he wants to ensure that his pet projects survive California budget cuts. And the man who started his career as a high school civics teacher, who has made anti-bullying his mission, hopes his act of generosity will help restore faith in the government he once taught students to respect.
The Indiana Department of Education released a new report card this week on all Hoosier public schools that boils school improvement on test scores and other federal academic standards into letter grades of A to F.
The new grading system received mixed review from educators, who wonder whether the new accountability system provides an accurate snapshot of their performance.
"The grading system as far as I'm concerned is about politics," said Mary Mathes, a retired teacher who is a board member in the South Harrison school district.
Delivering courses in cyberclassrooms has gained broad acceptance among top college leaders, but the general public is far less convinced of online education's quality, according to new survey data released this week by the Pew Research Center, in association with The Chronicle.
Just over half of the 1,055 college presidents queried believe that online courses offer a value to students that equals a traditional classroom's. By contrast, only 29 percent of 2,142 adult Americans thought online education measured up to traditional teaching. The presidents' survey included leaders of two-year and four-year private, public, and for-profit colleges and was conducted online. The public survey was conducted by telephone.
The gauge of differing perceptions comes at a critical moment for online education. Just 10 years ago, few colleges took teaching onto the Internet, and skepticism about the practice was the norm among professors and university leaders.
I finished my schooling back in 2010. As norms have it, I was supposed to join a college. But I didn't.
My question: Why the____?
Hell broke loose! Relatives were all restless, self-righteous were giving lectures, concerned were trying to explain and dad nagged me day-and-night. But even after seeking advice of respected ones; there was little logic anywhere.
I didn't think I could learn anything valuable in a college. So why go? Just because everyone does? It's funny how "education" (I call it literacy) is not good enough for the real world. And still they are the standard. Irony!
So I took a gap year, to figure out my life and what next. During my gap year, I failed a startup, helped people, failed people, lost things, gained things, travelled, met people and did things I always wanted to do.
Weeks after Indiana began the nation's broadest school voucher program, thousands of students have transferred from public to private schools, causing a spike in enrollment at some Catholic institutions that were only recently on the brink of closing for lack of pupils.
It's a scenario public school advocates have long feared: Students fleeing local districts in large numbers, taking with them vital tax dollars that often end up at parochial schools. Opponents say the practice violates the separation of church and state.
In at least one district, public school principals have been pleading with parents not to move their children.
"The bottom line from our perspective is, when you cut through all the chaff, nobody can deny that public money is going to be taken from public schools, and they're going to end up in private, mostly religious schools," said Nate Schnellenberger, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association.
Today's map comes a day late - we've been hard at work getting the data ready. We've updated our interactive State Migration Calculator with the latest IRS data, and it now includes migration in 2008-09. I've used the new data to create a map of interstate movement of income over the past decade. Florida is the big winner - migrants bought a net $70 billion dollars in annual income into the state between 1999 and 2009. New York, on the other hand, lost the most income: $45 billion.
In overwhelming numbers, Minnesota superintendents say the state education funding formula is broken and without changes education quality will diminish, according to Minnesota 2020's latest survey of school administrators.
"To maintain a high level of academic achievement in a time of shrinking state funding, school districts have cut around the edges, but after nearly a decade of underfunding and recent delayed state payments, it's getting difficult to keep cuts out of classrooms," superintendents report in the survey sent to them at the end of the 2010-11 school year.
If you saw Waiting for "Superman," Steven Brill's tale in Class Warfare will be familiar. The founder of Court TV offers another polemic against teacher unions and a paean to self-styled "education reformers." But even for those who follow education policy, he offers an eye-opening read that should not be missed. Where the movie evoked valiant underdogs waging an uphill battle against an ossified behemoth, Brill's briskly written book exposes what critics of the reformers have long suspected but could never before prove: just how insular, coordinated, well-connected, and well-financed the reformers are. Class Warfare reveals their single-minded efforts to suppress any evidence that might challenge their mission to undermine the esteem in which most Americans held their public schools and teachers. These crusaders now are the establishment, as arrogant as any that preceded them.
Brill's heroes make a high-profile gallery. They are public-school critics like former New York and Washington, D.C. schools chancellors Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee. They also include charter school operators David Levin (KIPP) and Eva Moskowitz (Harlem Success Academies), as well as alternative teacher and principal recruiters Wendy Kopp (Teach for America) and Jon Schnur (New Leaders for New Schools). Their ranks boast billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Obama himself. And they don't lack for savvy, richly endowed representation. Democrats for Education Reform, a lobbying, political action, and communications campaign rolled into one, has brought them all together. Lavishly supported by the newfound wealth of young Wall Street hedge fund managers answerable to no one, DFER's troops have been working overtime to radically transform American public education.
But when it comes to sick time for teachers who work around lots of kids known for having lots of germs, Forbes has cautioned districts to tread lightly and not make big changes if it's not necessary to balance the budget.
The school districts of Hamilton and Elmbrook in Waukesha County both have modified their sick-time policies. Hamilton educators used to have about 20 sick days per year, and the new policy cuts that approximately in half, said Denise Dorn Lindberg, spokeswoman for the district.
Accrual reduction
Hamilton's teaching staff members used to be able to accrue a maximum of 75 sick days over the course of their career; the new maximum is 30 days - time that can be used to cover extended recovery from illness or injury. But while the bank of days went down, it's also been restructured to act more like a portable benefit, Lindberg said. For example, any unused leave acquired beyond 30 days can be converted to $125 per day and deposited in a teacher's retirement account.
While most adults agree with President Obama that a world-class education is the most important factor in the success of America's children and status in the world, most don't think U.S. public schools provide that level of education.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of American Adults shows that 61% agree with President Obama when he says "a world-class education is the single most important factor in determining not just whether our kids can compete for the best jobs but whether America can out-compete countries around the world." Twenty-five percent (25%) disagree with that statement, while another 14% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
However, only 26% believe U.S. public schools provide a world-class education. A majority (62%) does not think American public schooling provides that level of education, while another 12% are not sure.
The survey of 1,000 Adults was conducted on August 20-21, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
It's rare to hear the word "education" from Tennessee's leaders without "reform" coming after it.
Three years ago, the state began rewriting its curriculum and rethinking the way it dealt with educators. The resulting changes won Tennessee a half-billion-dollar federal grant to attempt to move students from among the lowest-achieving in the nation to the top of the pack.
The state is birthing charter schools at a brisk pace, from none seven years ago to 40 today and, some estimate, up to 20 per year moving forward.
Teachers will be judged routinely on their classroom performance and their students' test scores. Individual districts are rolling out their own reforms, such as Williamson County's invitation for students to bring their own technology and Metro Nashville's dividing of high school students into specific areas of study called academies.
Earlier this year, I shared my disappointment with Fast Company's compilation of "13 Radical Ideas for Spending $100 Million to Overhaul Schools" The problem was that these ideas really just weren't all that radical. Even Will Richardson, who was featured in the article, commented on my blog that he agreed (see comment here). Richardson did feature a radical idea in his own blog a few years back in his post, One Town's Reform...Close the Schools. The article explains how a UK community shut down its 11 schools replacing them with dynamic learning centers that looked very different than traditional compulsory schools. According to their site, they are still going strong.
The learning center idea has certainly taken off as more and more people are realizing that the compulsory, oppressive, disconnected, test-driven schools that exist today are not the best option when it comes to preparing children for success in the world.
The 2010 elections had many obvious effects, but one of the lesser-known is that they revived the school-choice movement in a big way. Although many education writers had assumed the movement was dead, there have been far more efforts to pass school-choice programs this year than ever and, more importantly, the success rate has gone up too.
This reflects the political nature of school choice, which has in modern times been promoted primarily by Republicans. Increasingly, however, Democrats, particularly minority Democrats, have begun bucking the wishes of the national teachers unions, which oppose school choice in any form.
School choice has even broken into the national consciousness with the success of such documentaries as "The Lottery" and "Waiting for 'Superman.'" These focused on parents' efforts to get their children into charter schools, which are public schools operated independently of their local school districts--and, not coincidentally, without teacher union involvement.
From the perspective of status quo supporters, charter schools are the least threatening form of school choice, because they remain public schools, meaning they cannot charge tuition and their admissions practices typically are controlled by lottery. This year has seen dramatic increases in interest in charter schools, as an alternative to regular public schools. Even the Obama administration got into the act, by making the removal of existing caps on the number of charter schools a component of states' applications for federal "Race to the Top" funds.
Fifteen years ago, Wisconsin fourth-graders placed third in the country in state rankings of reading ability known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. By 2009, our fourth-graders' scores plunged to 30th, with a third of the students reading below basic levels. The scores of minority youth were even bleaker, with 65% of African-American and 50% of Hispanic students scoring in the below-basic range.
As a member of Gov. Scott Walker's blue ribbon reading task force, I am one of 14 people charged with reversing that drop. And, as a 50-year veteran educator, I have a partial solution. Let me spell it out for you: We need better teacher preparation.
How many of you remember your very best teachers? I remember Miss Hickey at Lincoln School and Miss Brauer at Folwell School in Rochester, Minn. They taught me to read.
I travel throughout the country consulting and providing staff development for school districts and literacy organizations. I've met thousands of dedicated teachers who tell me they are unprepared to teach struggling readers.
This situation is not the teachers' fault. Some teachers in Wisconsin had only one course in reading instruction. Most were never exposed to the latest research regarding early reading acquisition and instruction. In contrast, several states require three or four classes in courses that contain the latest in science-based reading instruction.
The number of arrests and citations for incidents at Madison's four main high schools dropped last year to the lowest level in more than a decade, according to police data.
But arrests and citations at West and Memorial were twice the number at East and La Follette -- a reversal of the situation 10 years earlier when there were more than twice as many at the city's East Side high schools.
West was the only school with an increase from the previous year.
The Wisconsin State Journal obtained the data from the Madison Police Department amid a debate over whether the Madison School District should use drug-sniffing police dogs in random sweeps of high schools. The School Board was to consider the issue Monday but delayed a vote until late September -- in part to review the arrest and citation data.
District officials say an increase in drug-related disciplinary referrals in recent years, and the use of drug dogs in area school districts, support the use of police dogs. Community surveys also have showed strong support.
Luis Yudice, the School District's security coordinator, who introduced the drug-sniffing dog proposal with the support of Madison police, is concerned drugs in schools can lead to more gang activity, fights and weapons in schools as students arm themselves in self-defense. He views the police dog policy as a possible deterrent that could prevent a crisis.
Just a day after a New York court found that value-added ratings for public school teachers should be revealed and reported publicly -- something that Joel Klein's DOE succeeded in encouraging the press corps to ask for -- TFA founder Wendy Kopp shot back at the notion that her organization should reveal the value-added ratings for its teachers -- and in particular the charge of being "hilariously hypocritical" in Steve Brill's book. Brill claimed that, because it promotes accountability so fiercely, TFA should reveal its teachers' performance ratings. Kopp claims to have been outraged at the LA Times' decision to name names last year and she writes, "Is it really naive to think that we should not be printing the names of teachers and the results they get on standardized tests in newspapers? Or is the naivete the notion that this might be a good path forward?" I wish Kopp had been so clear back a year ago when this was all first being debated -- it would have been brave and right of her -- and I love to poke TFA in the eye for, well, whatever I can think of (it's not hard to find things). But she's right that publishing the names and ratings is dumb, that the LA Times shouldn't have done it, that there's nothing necessarily hypocritical about TFA's decision to use the scores internally, and that Brill was amusing but incorrect to slam TFA in his book. Full Kopp statement below.
Jeni Callan sits near the front of the school bus, listening and taking tidy notes on a legal pad.
It's new teacher orientation day in the Hamilton School District, and the yellow bus carrying nearly 30 new hires for the 2011-'12 school year is winding through Waukesha County as the district's spokeswoman shouts out the history of each passing school.
Callan, 26, is about to start her dream job as a language arts teacher at Templeton Middle School and knows that her good fortune is partially attributable to an unusually high number of retirements in Hamilton at the end of the school year.
But the job market has not been so kind to other young educators hunting for work, especially those lacking credentials to teach in specialty fields such as special education, math or physics.
"This is maybe the most unusual hiring climate for teachers that I've ever seen," said Bill Henk, dean of Marquette University's College of Education.
For a while now, I've had to get accustomed to the characterization of my 25-year teaching career with the Los Angeles Unified School District as a series of reprehensible acts on my part. As a teacher, I've been the bad guy.
First, over the 16 years I taught elementary, I wanted to teach immigrant children how to speak, read and write in English. Prior to 1997 when the passage of Propostion 227 mandated that immigrant children in California should learn English, my views were considered reactionary and contrary to the best interests of Hispanic children. I was told bluntly that by refusing to teach exclusively in Spanish I was destroying the children's chances of success. One coordinator told me I was perpetuating "English as King." "No," I countered, "English is the common language of most of the world," but this was a non-starter in such circles.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been a presidential candidate for barely two weeks, but already polls indicate he's even with President Barack Obama. So the administration trotted out Education Secretary Arne Duncan to knock him down a peg.
Texas schools have "really struggled" under Gov. Perry, Mr. Duncan told Bloomberg's Al Hunt Aug. 18. "Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college ... I feel really badly for the children there."
It's cheesy for a Cabinet officer to be so political. But that's not why Mr. Obama shouldn't have used the former Chicago superintendent of schools as his attack dog.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, fourth- and eighth-graders in Texas score substantially better in reading and math than do their counterparts in Chicago. The high school graduation rate in Texas (73 percent) is much better than Chicago's (56 percent). Mr. Duncan's charges were recycled. "In low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote in March.
You may have read some news stories lately about how some school districts are doing quite well under Gov. Scott Walker's budget, despite a drastic decline in school aid.
Monona Grove is not one of them.
"We're not great," said MGHS Superintendent Craig Gerlach of the district's financial situation.
Districts that have prospered under the Walker budget constraints "may have been in a better situation than we were beforehand," he said.
The Walker budget is slightly more rewarding to school districts that have growing student populations, he said, "but we're more in the 'slightly declining' enrollment situation."
The district spends about $13,000 per student, Gerlach said, but will receive about $600 less per pupil this year than last.
MGSD will also lose about $1.2 million in other state money.
The budget is "relatively balanced" this year, partly because the district received $850,000 in federal job stimulus funds, but that is one-time money that won't be around next year.
MGSD did save some money because teachers are now being forced to contribute to their own health insurance and retirement funds.
Total Wi school funding in 1998 was $7,527, not the $4,956 reported by Sunny in her recent column. Corrected for inflation that's $9899. In 2008 average spending was (correctly reported) $10,791. In real dollars that's an 8% increase, less than 1% per year, not the whopping 64% increase reported by Sunny.
So were did that 1%/year go? Not into the pockets of teachers, who have been losing ground to inflation in the last decade, and not into smaller class sizes (average class size has been creeping up in Wisconsin.) No, any employer will tell you that health care costs have been increased by more than 50% over this period - and school districts feel the same effects. The fact that cost increases are slowly squeezing the life out of our schools is another reason we need to fix the broken health care system in this country.
I just checked the definition of syllabus in the Oxford English Dictionary. It states what I used to assume it meant: "a statement of the subjects covered by a course of instruction or by an examination, in a school, college, etc.; a programme of study." The oldest quotation using the word is from 1656, when it meant something more along the lines of a table of contents or concordance. The best quote, though, is from 1939 and is taken from W. H. Auden's "Commentary" in Journey to War:
"... the young emerging from the closed parental circle, to whose uncertainty the certain years present their syllabus of limitless anxiety and labour."
But I think we may be a little too fond of limiting and certainty. These days syllabi are looking more and more like those Terms of Service that pop up when we use software. You know, the long documents in fine print with a scrollbar that we click through so we can move on. I thought nobody read them, but it turns out the excellent people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation actually track changes to them for us. (The EFF points out that these documents have a sinister side. They are contracts that we can't negotiate, and they contain provisions we might not agree to, if we understood what they actually meant.) But the most striking thing about TOS is that they are full of rules - and very few people read them. So maybe they're not the best model for the syllabus.
The National Education Association has always been an outlier in the world of organized labor. A member of neither the AFL-CIO nor Change to Win, the union experienced consistent and substantial growth during the same decades industrial union membership was disintegrating.
The last couple of years have provided the first opportunity to observe NEA's actions during a period of declining membership. It appears the teachers' union is following the AFL-CIO model for remaining relevant despite dwindling numbers - accelerated political action.
One of the constant internal battles in the labor movement has been over organizing vs. political action. Do you devote resources to growing membership in order to increase political clout, or do you increase political contributions in order to establish a friendly organizing environment? Although there have been fits and starts in both directions, overall the latter choice prevailed.
The start of the school year isn't normally the time for issuing report cards. But it's been an unusual and momentous year, so as the first day of classes approaches for almost every school in the state, here's a report card on what I'll call the war against the triangle.
Last winter, before Scott Walker was sworn in as governor, a leading Republican told a group of people (according to a reliable person who was present) that there was a triangle that was blocking the path to educational improvement in Wisconsin and his party was going to take out each leg of the triangle.
What were the legs?
Teachers unions, particularly the Wisconsin Education Association Council. WEAC spent hugely on political campaigns and was pro-Democratic. It also was the largest lobbying force in the Capitol. WEAC represented the unwillingness of teachers organizations to change and the need to get rid of most collective bargaining matters.
The state Department of Public Instruction, which represented the status quo, overregulation of schools and how things couldn't change if they were in the hands of government bureaucrats.
Milwaukee Public Schools, which represented - well, which represented Milwaukee Public Schools. Or, to put it another way, a money pit where there was never any positive change.
Because of space, some stuff couldn't make it into the Arne Duncan School of Thought interview in TIME, here's one answer I thought was pretty interesting though:
How should Americans think about the consequences of failing to address our educational problems?
Our ability to provide a great education and to have a strong country and a strong country are inextricably linked. The jobs of the future are going to require some sort of college-level experience whether it's two-year, four-year, trade or technical but the world has changed. When I was growing up on the south side of Chicago thirty years ago in high school my friends could drop out and still get a decent job in the stockyards and steel mills and own their own homes, support a family, and do OK. Those jobs are a distant memory of a bygone era. The jobs today are going to go to countries that are producing knowledge workers. And many countries are out-educating us.
Yep - it's the "A" word again. "Assessment." And in higher education, that word is just about everywhere we turn. I suspect that when you saw that word, you likely got a chill up your spine - oh no! Not assessment. Not again! Yep - assessment. Again. But I have developed a take on assessment that might help us see it differently. I believe that doing assessment is not about pleasing accreditors or other external stakeholders (what Peter Ewell, in a 2009 occasional paper for NILOA, identifies as the "Accountability Paradigm"), nor is its strength in supporting continuous quality improvement (what Ewell identifies as the "Improvement Paradigm"). Though these are perfectly legitimate reasons for attending to the work of assessment, to be honest, neither truly fuels my intrinsic desire to engage in the hard work of it all. Instead, I believe that assessment is really an act of care.
I care about my students; therefore, I assess. Let me explain.
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis Thursday rejected an offer of a 2 percent raise for working a 90-minute-longer school day, saying teachers would not be "bullied" by public attempts to push through a slapdash plan.
Lewis refused a proposal involving elementary-school teachers only that was aired in the media Tuesday evening by Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and later amplified in writing to the union Wednesday morning.
"We fully support a better, smarter school day for our children but teachers are now being asked to work 29 percent longer for only a 2 percent pay increase," Lewis said in a written statement. "To that we say thanks but no thanks."
Lewis left the door open to further talks on the issue, however. She told the Chicago Sun-Times the union is crafting ways to add 15 to 60 more minutes to the elementary school day.
A proposal to raise taxes by $3 billion over five years to help fund Colorado's education system will be on the November ballot, Secretary of State Scott Gessler said Wednesday.
The idea from Democratic state Sen. Rollie Heath would raise the sales and use tax rate to 3 percent, up from 2.9 percent, and raise the state's individual and corporate tax rates to 5 percent, up from 4.63 percent. The increases would be in effect from 2012 to 2017.
"I think we got a real shot at getting this done," said Heath, a Boulder senator. He said he decided to ask for the tax increases because of repeated cuts to the state's education budget in recent years.
This month, 500,000 hopeful substitute teachers are queuing up for work in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and countless small-town schools across the nation. I know from first-hand experience that the extra income and flexibility are big draws, especially if one is unemployed.
But I also know that the job can be demanding, low paying, and conducted without supervision or assistance. Who, I wondered, could do this work coolly and expertly and be willing to accept per diems that start at $45 and average $105?
The answers -- from the United States, the UK, and Japan -- may surprise you.
It is settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality.
However, a small number of dissenting voices have begun to speak. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in Academically Adrift have suggested that (p. 131) "Studying is crucial for strong academic performance..." and "Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning..."
This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Domed to Fail (p. 150) that: "Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education." More recently, and less on the fringe of this new concern, Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) (p. 162) that "One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students' academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers' influence."
There are necessarily problems in turning attention toward the work of students in judging the effectiveness of schools. First, all the present attention is on teachers, and it is not easy to turn that around. Second, teachers are employees and can be fired, while students can not. It could not be comfortable for the Funderpundits and their beneficiaries to realize that they may have been overlooking the most important variable in student academic achievement all this time.
In February, when the Associated Press reported that Natalie Monroe, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, had called her students, on a blog, "disengaged, lazy whiners," and "noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS," the response of the school system was not to look more closely at the academic efforts of the students, but to suspend the teacher. As one of her students explained, "As far as motivated high school students, she's completely correct. High school kids don't want to do anything...(but) It's a teacher's job...to give students the motivation to learn."
It would seem that no matter who points out that "You can lead a student to learning, but you can't make him drink," our system of schools and Funderpundits sticks with its wisdom that teachers alone are responsible for student academic achievement.
While that is wrong, it is also stupid. Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote that; "For education, a man's books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his."
As in the old story about the drunk searching under the lamppost for his keys, those who control funds for education believe that as long as all their money goes to paying attention to what teachers are doing, who they are, how they are trained, and so on, they can't see the point of looking in the darkness at those who have the complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be--namely the students.
Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools. What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, history, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them. Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.
This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students. And students, who see little or no pressure to be other than "disengaged lazy whiners" will continue to pay the price for their lack of education, both in college and at work, and we will continue to draw behind in comparison with those countries who realize that student academic achievement has always been, and will always be, mainly dependent on diligent student academic work.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics(r) www.tcr.org/blog
It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school's principal, decided to try something extreme--by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher's best efforts. The school's team of special educators--including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist--convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it's practically obsolete.
Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.
"I took Besart on that year as my private student," Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles "Yellow Submarine" poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet. When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori's desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country's vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn.
School districts in they future won't just receive report card ratings from the state, they will be ranked from best to worst in a new system.
The mandate in Gov. Kasich's $112 billion executive budget was handed to the Ohio Department of Education to devise the ranking procedure.
The listing may be ready for the beginning of the 2012-2013 school year, according to ODE spokesperson Patrick Gallaway.
The ODE is now required to rank schools within comparable groupings on the basis of student results and cost effectiveness, according to the fifth book of the governor's budget containing selected reforms.
A new alternative middle school for students with behavior problems and learning disabilities is set to open this September.
School officials last night briefed the Trenton board of education on the district's newest school.
Some, like board member T. Missy Balmir, called the concept "long, long overdue."
Others, like board president Rev. Toby Sanders and vice president Sasa Olessi Montaño asked for strict monitoring of the program's success and use of district dollars.
"This is a huge undertaking, a new school in our district, a district facing the financial situation that we're facing," said Olessi Montaño.
A Capitol Conversation on Wisconsin's Reading Challenges
UW-Madison Professor Mark Seidenberg and I had an informative conversation with two elected officials at the Capitol recently.
I am thankful for Mark's time and the fact that both Luther Olsen and Steve Kestell along with staff members took the time to meet. I also met recently with Brett Hulsey and hope to meet with more elected officials, from both parties.
The topic du jour was education, specifically the Governor's Read to Lead task force.
Mark kindly shared this handout:
My name is Mark Seidenberg, Hilldale Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, seidenberg@wisc.edu, http://lcnl.wisc.edu. I have studied how reading works, how children learn to read, reading disabilities, and the brain bases of reading for over 30 years. I am a co-author of a forthcoming report from the National Research Council (National Academy of Sciences) on low literacy among older adolescents and adults. I'm writing a general audience book about reading research and educational practices.
We have a literacy problem: about 30% of the US (and WI) population reads at a "basic" or "below basic" level. Literacy levels are particularly low among poor and minority individuals. The identification of this problem does not rest on any single test (e.g., NAEP, WKCE, OECD). Our literacy problem arises from many causes, some of which are not easy to address by legislative fiat. However, far more could be done in several important areas.
1. How teachers are taught. In Wisconsin as in much of the US, prospective teachers are not exposed to modern research on how children develop, learn, and think. Instead, they are immersed in the views of educational theorists such as Lev Vygotsky (d. 1934) and John Dewey (d. 1952). Talented, highly motivated prospective teachers are socialized into beliefs about children that are not informed by the past 50 years of basic research in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.
A vast amount is known about reading in particular, ranging from what your eyes do while reading to how people comprehend documents to what causes reading disabilities. However, there is a gulf between Education and Science, and so this research is largely ignored in teacher training and curriculum development.
2. How children are taught. There continue to be fruitless battles over how beginning readers should be taught, and how to insure that comprehension skills continue to develop through middle and high school. Teachers rely on outdated beliefs about how children learn, and how reading works. As a result, for many children, learning to read is harder than it should be. We lose many children because of how they are taught. This problem does NOT arise from "bad teachers"; there is a general, systematic problem related to teacher education and training in the US.
3. Identification of children at risk for reading failures. Some children are at risk for reading and school failure because of developmental conditions that interfere with learning to read. Such children can be identified at young ages (preschool, kindergarten) using relatively simple behavioral measures. They can also be helped by effective early interventions that target basic components of reading such as vocabulary and letter-sound knowledge. The 30% of the US population that cannot read adequately includes a large number of individuals whose reading/learning impairments were undiagnosed and untreated.
Recommendations: Improve teacher education. Mechanism: change the certification requirements for new teachers, as has been done in several other states. Certification exams must reflect the kinds of knowledge that teachers need, including relevant research findings from cognitive science and neuroscience. Instruction in these areas would then need to be provided by schools of education or via other channels. In-service training courses could be provided for current teachers (e.g., as on-line courses).
Children who are at risk for reading and schooling failures must be identified and supported at young ages. Although it is difficult to definitively confirm a reading/learning disability in children at young ages (e.g., 4-6) using behavioral, neuroimaging, or genetic measures, it is possible to identify children at risk, most of whom will develop reading difficulties unless intervention occurs, via screening that involves simple tests of pre-reading skills and spoken language plus other indicators. Few children just "grow out of" reading impairments; active intervention is required.
I am cautiously optimistic that we may see an improvement in Wisconsin's K-12 curricular standards.
DPI has publicly stated that it is not uncommon for grant awards to be delayed for various reasons. In our case, DPI wants to ensure that all parties - MMSD, DPI and the Urban League of Greater Madison - are on the same page with regard to how Madison Prep will comply with federal and state statutes relative to single sex public schools. We welcome this conversation. MMSD and the Urban League have been working together on this issue since June.
There are also public charter schools such as Bluford Drew Jemison S.T.E.M Academy for boys in Baltimore, Maryland that was approved by the Board of Education of Baltimore City Public Schools without approving a similar school for girls at the same time. Bluford Drew Jameson is part of BCPS' bold and aggressive Charter, Innovative and Transformation Schools Plan to revitalize public education in the city. BCPS' efforts are being heralded nationally as they are seeing clear signs of turning around.
With Confidence, Precedent and Support, We Will Succeed
Given the successful growth of single sex public/charter schools across the country, along with our plans to comply with the new Title IX regulations and our publicly stated commitment to establish the 6-12 grade Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Women, we are confident that the issues raised by DPI will be resolved.
With your support and that of DPI and MMSD, Madison Prep will soon provide a long overdue solution to a deeply rooted pattern of academic failure and under-performance, particularly among African American and Latino boys in our community. It will also serve as a learning laboratory that informs the programs, strategies and practices of schools and educators across Greater Madison and the State of Wisconsin.
We look forward to Madison Prep producing hundreds of confident, excited and future-focused young men who are ready for college and committed to promoting the schools values - leadership, excellence, pride and service - in their community, homes, peer groups and daily lives.
There are two different types of charter schools in the City of Milwaukee, and by at least one measure, those not chartered by the Milwaukee Public Schools are performing better.
Milwaukee's ACT scores rose in 2011, but they still weren't able to match the production of the city's non-union charter schools. In the end, the non-district charter schools left their instrumentality counterparts in the dust when it came to college readiness.
The city's non-instrumentality charter schools outperformed the MPS average when it came to the ACT, a selective college readiness test, in the past school year. These schools aren't operated or authorized by local school boards, and have been more successful in preparing students when weighed against the city's average. In the four qualifying high schools, students averaged a score of 18.8.
Protesters have barricaded streets and burned tires in Chile's capital, Santiago, amid a 48-hour strike to press for education reform.
Police and protesters clashed Wednesday, as the government tried to shut down demonstrations in some parts of the city.
Reports from Santiago say business in most parts of the city was un-interrupted, with public transportation continuing to function and traffic flowing through most streets.
The strike was called by Chile's main labor union, CUT, in support of students who have been protesting for weeks for education reform and an overhaul of educational funding. In addition, strike organizers have called for tax reform and constitutional change.
Even The New York Times is now questioning the massive spending increases on education that have occurred over the last generation in a discussion entitled "Spending Too Much Time and Money on Education?":
Americans are spending more and more on education, but the resulting credentials -- a high-school diploma and college degrees -- seem to be losing value in the labor market.
Americans who go to college are triply hurt by this. First, as taxpayers: state and federal education budgets have ballooned since the 1950s. Second, as consumers: the average college student spends $17,000 a year on school, and those with loans graduate more than $23,000 in debt. And third, as a worker: in 1970, an applicant with a college degree was among an elite 11 percent, but now almost 3 in 10 adults have a degree.
Given that a high school diploma, a bachelor's degree and even graduate school are no longer a ticket to middle-class life, and all these years of education delay the start of a career, does our society devote too much time and money to education?
Now that Gov. Scott Walker's major cuts for public schools have been enacted, my question for my fellow educators is: What do we do next? I am sick and tired of constantly reacting to bad news and bad policy and always being in the position of having to play defense. Educators and school districts should organize to go on the offensive.
Walker's budget has significantly damaged one of the best public education systems in the country. He turned half of our community members against us using false information, and now we will be fighting a public relations battle while also working harder to educate students with fewer resources.
Through all of this, we Wisconsin educators will still stand tall and deliver a top-notch education for the children of this state, regardless of what Walker has done, because that is what Wisconsin professional educators do.
My fear is that after we deliver, Walker and his minions will use the media and their bully pulpit to take all the credit for the successes that we will achieve in our classrooms. I can see the headlines now of Walker proclaiming how well his budget cuts worked because schools are performing well under his budget.
So what do we do? What should our strategy be? Here are some suggestions:
The Neshaminy School District, mired in a contract impasse with its teachers for more than three-and-a-half years, will host a state hearing Thursday on a bill that would make teacher strikes and school lockouts illegal.
The Pennsylvania House Education Committee, chaired by Rep. Paul Clymer, R-Bucks, will discuss House Bill 1369 at Neshaminy High School starting at 10 a.m. The hearing is open to the public.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Todd Rock, R-Franklin, contains financial penalties, including a $5,000 individual fine, per incident, for inciting a strike; striking teachers losing two days of pay for each day of an illegal strike; and the striking union forfeiting its dues check-off privilege for one year.
I was reminded of this story after reading about the lobbying some parents of Madison elementary school children do to get their kids assigned to teachers who match their "learning styles."
What a contrast between a parent who's more or less OK with a school official delivering not only a beating, but an undeserved beating, and parents who seek to intervene in the basic decisions of professional educators.
Such lobbying and the district's willingness to hear it have "been a common thing as long as I can remember," said district public information officer Marcia Standiford, a former teacher and audio/visual specialist who has been with the district for 15 years. Parents of Madison elementary students have long been asked to fill out questionnaires about their kids to help in assigning them to teachers.
In his rural district, which serves 249 students, the 2011-13 state budget has been nothing to celebrate. In fact, it has accelerated a difficult process of belt-tightening that's been going on for almost 20 years due to revenue controls that have limited the amount districts can increase taxes to keep up with rising costs. The revenue controls hit some schools especially hard, especially those with declining enrollment, high-needs students or high property values. The new state budget's huge reduction in overall aid for schools -- $793 million over the biennium -- accompanied by new limits on how much money districts can raise in property taxes to offset those losses -- has, for many school districts, made a bad situation worse.
According to Quinton, Pepin parents are supportive of education, and he credits his School Board and staff for helping run "a tight financial ship." Nonetheless, many of the district's programs and services have been trimmed once again, from transportation to teaching staff, athletics to academic assistance for at-risk students. Paring back has been a way of life in Pepin for many years, Quinton says, but the newest round of losses caused by this budget cut to the bone.
The U.S. economy will have another big budget deficit in fiscal 2011 and faces at least a couple more years of sluggish growth, as the effects of the recent recession persist, government forecasters said Wednesday.
The Congressional Budget Office projected a deficit of almost $1.3 trillion for fiscal 2011. Though that will mark the third straight year of deficits above $1 trillion, the deficit forecast was a slight improvement from the almost $1.4 trillion estimated in an April analysis and reflected higher-than-anticipated revenue from individual income taxes.
The outlook for the U.S. economy also remains challenging, with growth expected to remain too slow this year and next year to make a big dent in the unemployment rate. The jobless rate will fall to 8.9% by the end of calendar 2011 and 8.5% by the end of 2012, the forecast said, as the economy grows by 2.3% this year and 2.7% next year, measured from fourth quarter to fourth quarter.
Could you give our readers a short crash course to the main ideas of your book?
"The Innovative University" makes the case that a "disruptive" technology, online learning, is bringing fundamental change to higher education. Traditional universities and colleges are vulnerable because their model of education was already becoming too expensive for many students. Most young students will continue to want the campus-based learning experience, but they will expect to pay less and to enjoy a combination of face-to-face and online instruction. Institutions that don't provide a hybrid will see declining enrollments. Most institutions will also have to focus more narrowly on student instruction, rather than emulating the large research universities, such as Harvard. Making these changes will be hard, given the strength of higher education tradition and the autonomy of faculty members. However, we believe that it can be done.
AFTER a summer of budget cuts in Washington and state capitals, we have only to look to our schools, when classes begin in the next few weeks, to see who will pay the price.
The minimum required school day in West Virginia is already about the length of a "Harry Potter" double feature. In Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, summer school programs are being slashed or eliminated. In Oregon and California this year, students will spend fewer days in the classroom; in rural communities from New Mexico to Idaho, some students will be in school only four days a week.
For all the talk about balancing the budget for the sake of our children, keeping classrooms closed is a perverse way of giving them a brighter future.
Chicago Public Schools today launched their plans to extend students' time in the classroom by 90 minutes each and by two weeks each year and set up an advisory committee to figure out how it'll be done.
However, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said she would decline an invitation to serve on the committee, saying in a written statement that, "this news has nothing do with helping our children and everything to do with politicizing a real serious problem."
Mayor Rahm Emanuel began pushing for a longer school day while he was on the campaign trail, saying Chicago's school day is the shortest in the nation when compared to public school systems in nine other large cities. School reform legislation passed in June allows the district to implement a longer school day in the fall of 2012 with or without the union's agreement, and CPS officials have said they would do that.
The founder of The American Lawyer magazine and Court TV tells the story of a coalition of unlikely allies in the fight to change a school system that many parents believe is failing the nation's children. He debated education solutions with former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch.
Since the early 1990s, more young women than young men have been completing college. The survey attempted to gauge the public's reaction to this educational trend. Respondents were asked whether the fact that women are now more likely than men to get a college degree is a good thing for society, a bad thing or if it doesn't make much difference. Slightly over half of the public (52%) say this is a good thing for society, 39% say that it doesn't make much difference, and only 7% view this as a bad thing.
A similar share of men and women (50% and 55%, respectively) view the female advantage in college education as a good thing for society. Men are somewhat more likely than women to view this as neutral for society (45% vs. 34%), while women are nearly twice as likely as men to say it is a bad thing for society (9% vs. 5%).
Gov. Rick Scott is exploring dramatic higher-education reforms that are similar to those already under way in Florida's public school districts.
Patterned after reforms being championed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who recently announced he's running for president, Scott is looking at changing the way professors are paid and moving toward a merit-pay system with limits on tenure.
Texas has been debating such changes to save money and bolster professor productivity -- going so far as to consider tying professor pay to how many students they teach and how much research money they bring in.
Instructors would get annual bonuses as high as $10,000 a class if they rated highly on student satisfaction surveys. Even the assignment of faculty offices and parking spaces would be based on their performance.
Every year I tell students in a journalism seminar I teach about the junior reporter for The American Lawyer - the magazine I founded and edited -who committed a classic error when he submitted a draft of a profile about some lawyer in the news who had made it big. Midway through the article, the young reporter described a showcase this lawyer had in his office that displayed a bunch of combat medals. The reporter declared, matter-of-factly, that our legal hero had won the medals for his heroics in Vietnam, which was relevant, he added, because the lawyer made his war record and his lock-n-load approach to his work part of his pitch to potential clients.
In the margin next to the statement about the lawyer having won the medals I wrote, "Who says?" When the reporter came to ask me what I had meant, I told him to check with the Pentagon about the supposed medals. Which the reporter did, and which caused a mini-scandal after we reported in our otherwise positive profile that our hero hadn't won them.
The story has three points. First, that reporters should believe nothing told to them by a biased source, especially when what they are being told is a checkable fact. Second, that while opinions deserve balanced reporting of both sides' views, facts are facts. They are knowable. The guy either got medals or he didn't. Third, the best way to test facts that you think you know is to put them in front of the person with the greatest stake in refuting them. In this case when we confronted the lawyer with the Pentagon's records that he had not won any medals, he produced no evidence to the contrary and, in fact, ultimately confessed his deception. Case closed.
Wisconsin DPI announces $6 million for charter school planning and dissemination grants; Proposed IB Madison Preparatory Academy Charter School Not Funded
Groups planning new charter schools and established charter schools that want to replicate their success are sharing $6 million in federal charter school grants.
Planning grants total $4.5 million and will go for planning activities in 23 charter schools that have already been approved by their local school board or authorizing authority. Five of those grants are going to districts that do not currently have charter schools. Five grants, totaling $625,000, will support the expansion of successful charter school models. Another seven grants, totaling $875,000, will help charter schools that are in the second year dissemination activities.
"Planning grant proposals in this round of funding are for a mix of innovative charter schools," said State Superintendent Tony Evers. "This is just what the charter school law promotes: local solutions to serve students and their families."
After years of frustration with its own teacher-evaluation system, the second-largest school district in the country is pilot-testing a new idea against the wishes of its union.
With the Obama administration offering incentives for school systems to revamp how they evaluate teachers' effectiveness, the episode with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) carries important lessons nationwide, analysts say.
The fresh approach in Los Angeles meshes with the Obama administration's efforts to use more systematic and data-driven approaches to evaluate teachers. It includes parent and student feedback, students' standardized test scores, and more detailed observations given by peers - who watch teachers and then type their observations and questions into laptop computers, then discuss their impressions the next day.
Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, is quiet and thoughtful in one-on-one conversations. She's a middle-aged, cheery, bespectacled woman whose dimpled face is surrounded by a thick corona of whitish-gray hair.
But when fighting for her members, Bell forcefully projects her belief in teachers' right to respect, decent pay and union representation. At a rally with tens of thousands at the Capitol on a snowy, bitter Feb. 26, Bell expressed outrage at Gov. Scott Walker's proposals for the near-total stripping of union rights for teachers, librarians, highway workers, prison guards and other public workers across the state. Yet her anger was tempered by her humor and her belief in Wisconsinites' fundamental commitment to fairness and public education.
The rhetoric Mary Bell used that day about "Wisconsin values" was no stretch for her, because she perceives herself as a typical Wisconsinite, sharply different from the image of the insular Madison insider, as Walker likes to portray his enemies.
Like so many debates in America today, the fight over public education is as polarized as it is consequential. There appears to be a general sense of agreement that the results we are getting are woefully inadequate, especially given the demands that a high-tech, global economy will place on our future work force. Nevertheless, there's a sharp disagreement over exactly what to do.
Spending more money is of course a perennial demand. Since 1970 America has more than doubled the real dollars spent on K-12 education. We have increased the number of teachers by more than a third, created legions of nonteaching staff, and raised salaries and benefits across the board. Yet fewer than 40% of the students who graduate from high school are ready for college. At the same time, students in other countries are moving ahead of us, scoring higher--often much higher--on international tests of reading, math and science skills.
It is August, and the Census Bureau is counting things again. This time it was items associated with school, which is just around the corner for children across the country.
Ever wondered, for example, how much people spend on back-to-school clothes? About $7 billion, according to figures released Friday by the bureau, judging from sales at family clothing stores in August 2010, the last back-to-school shopping month for which it has data. That is about the size of the Los Angeles city budget. It represents a small increase from 2009.
The bureau estimated that 55 million students would be enrolled in pre-kindergarten through high school this fall, and that 11 percent would be in private schools. That total is up by about 16 percent from 20 years ago.
One way REL Northwest connects practitioners with research is by posting responses to inquiries made to the Ask A REL Reference Desk. The free Reference Desk service provides educators, policymakers, and community members with prompt, authoritative resources on topical issues, customized to their local needs. Recent responses point to research on topics such as mathematics interventions, data-driven decision making, and the impact of early childhood education programs.
The latest inquiry is on a topic that's receiving increased national attention due to budget challenges: whether consolidating school districts might result in lower overall costs for education. Unfortunately, research on consolidation does not offer definitive guidance for making such decisions. There are several reasons for this: empirical studies of consolidation employ different analytical approaches to data; older data in some studies yield results that may not be representative of current district conditions; studies do not uniformly separate costs related to merging only a narrow range of district services from costs related to merging entire districts or combining schools; different studies focus on different costs or estimate costs in different ways; and much of the literature consists of advocacy.
As Education Week has reported today, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan clarified that states will not have to endorse the Common Core State Standards in order to successfully obtain a waiver from portions of No Child Left Behind. While the full details of Duncan’s all-or-nothing waiver proposal have not been released, most (including Education Sector’s Kevin Carey) speculated that states would have to demonstrate they embraced high academic content standards – i.e. Common Core – in order to be let off the hook for meeting the 100% proficiency by 2014 deadline.
While taping C-SPAN’s Newsmakers program, Duncan assured states who have not yet adopted Common Core that the Department is “happy to work with them” as long as they verify their own standards are rigorous. Duncan also noted that this process would likely involve states having their standards approved by their state’s postsecondary institutions – supposedly to certify that they are “college and career ready” standards.
This site is dedicated to informing people about words that are not verbs, even though people misuse them that way. You have to pick one of the non-verbs about which this site knows:
First, a lesson from baseball: It was roughly a year ago that Brewers fans were wringing their hands that the pitching was bad and there was little prospect for fixing that in the off-season, given a weak free agent scene and limited finances. Now, the Brewers have pitching that is basically amazing.
Sometimes, things do improve dramatically. Sometimes, that happens even when there are sound arguments for why they won't.
I could write this entire column - if not a book - on why I'm pessimistic about things getting a lot better on the Milwaukee education scene. I would present a pretty sound case, too.
Maybe I'm wrong. In fact, I hope I'm wrong. I'd like to see things take off like a rocket ship.
There is perhaps no more eloquent statement on the essential link between time and learning than the National Education Commission on Time and Learning, which delivered its report in April 1994. In its highly-quotable declaration, the commission makes very clear that unless the education system is completely reconfigured around the objective of achieving proficiency, rather than meeting arbitrary time requirements, we will never reach the goal of serving all children well. In the commission's words:
"Learning in America is a prisoner of time. For the past 150 years, American public schools have held time constant and let learning vary. The rule, only rarely voiced, is simple: learn what you can in the time we make available.... If experience, research, and common sense teach nothing else, they confirm the truism that people learn at different rates, and in different ways with different subjects. But we have put the cart before the horse: our schools and the people involved with them-students, parents, teachers, administrators, and staff-are captives of clock and calendar. The boundaries of student growth are defined by schedules for bells, buses, and vacations instead of standards for students and learning."
Less than two months after a new state law took health benefits off the bargaining table for public workers and required them to pay at least 12.6 percent -- up from zero, in some school districts -- of their health insurance premiums, WEA Trust has lost a fifth of its business.
And that means big changes could be coming for the Madison-based group health insurer of mostly school districts that employs nearly 500.
"We're going to have to adapt and adjust," said Mark Moody, president and CEO of WEA Trust. "You can't absorb a 20 percent loss and not do anything."
The Trust, a not-for-profit company, provides health insurance to just over 100,000 employees in about 60 percent of the state's 425 school districts.
It was created in 1970 by the state's largest teachers' union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, or WEAC.
Critics have long accused the two bodies of working together to fleece taxpayers through over-priced contracts they say school boards have effectively been forced to sign under union pressure.
If you didn't get the Madison School District's invitation to Thursday's meeting about a controversial proposal to let police bring drug-sniffing dogs into schools, don't take it personally; neither did School Board President James Howard.
The meeting was for minority community leaders to ask questions and provide feedback about the proposal, which the School Board is expected to vote on Aug. 29.
School Board members weren't invited, which Howard, who learned about the meeting Wednesday from a television reporter, said is a problem.
"Board members should always be informed of these meetings," Howard said. "I don't know why the ball got dropped."
The School District's revamped communications department organized the meeting at the Urban League on South Park Street as part of a new outreach effort, said Marcia Standiford, the department's new manager.
Half of all women who have graduated from a four-year college give the U.S. higher education system excellent or good marks for the value it provides given the money spent by students and their families; only 37% of male graduates agree. In addition, women who have graduated from college are more likely than men to say their education helped them to grow both personally and intellectually. These results of a nationwide Pew Research Center survey come at a time when women surpass men by record numbers in college enrollment and completion.
The survey also found that while a majority of Americans believe that a college education is necessary in order to get ahead in life these days, the public is somewhat more inclined to see this credential as a necessity for a woman than for a man. Some 77% of respondents say this about women, while just 68% say it about men.
A front-page August 16 Washington Times' headline screamed: "Scores show students aren't ready for college -- 75% may need remedial classes."
Seventy-five percent is a number that gets people's attention. It isn't the usual trifling stuff the U.S. Department of Education puts out about math or reading scores being up by two percent one year and down by three percent the next. Add to that another finding reported in the same article: "A 2008 report by the education advocacy group Strong American Schools found that 80 percent of college students taking remedial classes had a high school GPA of 3.0 or better."
So are we saying that even when students score well, they don't know much? Apparently. Readers who have been following this series (see links to other articles below) may recall U.S. Commissioner of Education Statistics' Pascal D. Forgione, Jr., Ph.D., who famously admitted in a speech, "Our idea of 'advanced' is clearly below international standards."
According to the news article, "75 percent [of college freshmen] likely will spend part of their [first] year brushing up on high-school-level course work."
The state's education commissioner says she's exploring ways to make the ACT college entrance exam even higher-stakes for Minnesota students than it already is.
Wednesday's release of ACT scores shows 72 percent of Minnesota high school graduates took the test. No state with that much participation scored higher. But 72 percent isn't enough for Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius, especially considering there are waivers available so students can take the test for free.
The problem, she said, is not enough students realize how crucial the ACT is.
"There are so many tests that they're taking; they don't know which is the important test," Cassellius said. "We want to have a test that actually measures their career and college readiness."
With thousands of kids starting to pack for their first year at college or preparing to return after the summer break, now is a good time to talk to them about some important health and wellness issues on campus. To help parents figure out what to look for and worry about, School of Thought asked Dr. Drew Pinsky, the best-selling author and TV and radio host who has been dubbed the "surgeon general of youth culture" by the New York Times. On his college radar: prescription drugs, hook-up culture and processed food. As a practicing physician and the father of triplets, Dr. Drew isn't fielding abstract questions -- his own kids are starting university this fall.
College isn't always a bastion of healthy living. Late nights, pizza and stress can't be good for you. What should parents talk to their children about when they leave for college?
Start with the easy stuff -- safety. In the [college] age group, accidents are a major cause of morbidity, and alcohol is often involved in some fashion. Remind students that they're on their own and are not invincible.
I've been to hundreds of colleges all over the country, and almost every one has an outstanding health and mental-health service. Tell them to take advantage of the screenings, services and mental-health services that are there if they need them.
Katy Daugherty enrolled at Tennessee State University because of the school's flexible daytime, evening and online classes and its new urban-studies program.
Once on campus at this historically black college, where more than 70% of the students are African-American, Ms. Daugherty, 29, who is white, became the minority.
"It was definitely different, having grown up and been in the majority, and all of a sudden you are in the minority," she says.
In what has become a mutually beneficial relationship for schools and students, many of the nation's 105 historically black colleges are increasingly wooing non-black students. The goals: to boost lagging enrollment and offset funding shortfalls.
When Gaston Caperton was recruited to run the College Board, owner of the SAT entrance exam, he said he didn't want to just run "a testing company."
Founded by Harvard and 11 other universities in 1900 to create a standardized test to admit students based on merit rather than family connections, the College Board by 1999 was facing cash-flow problems.
Caperton turned the nonprofit company into a thriving business, more than doubling revenue to $660 million by boosting fees, expanding the Advanced Placement program and the sale of names of teenage test-takers to colleges. A former West Virginia governor, he persuaded 11 states to cover fees for a preliminary SAT in the 10th grade.
Picture the following scenario. You ask your friend to come up with a creative meal that will amaze your guests at a dinner party you are holding, but you impose some constraints. Your friend can only use the ingredients from a restrictive list and must follow the specific directions from a meal you cooked these same guests just weeks earlier.
What are the odds that your friend makes something innovative? Not good. After all, you've practically defined the solution by specifying nearly all of its inputs before she can even consider what she might cook.
A far better way to generate an innovative solution is to define the outcome you need -- a five-course meal for eight -- and then allow your friend to figure out the best way to get there.
The (Seattle) Times' editorial board is nothing if not amusing. Their current editorial on the School Board races puts forth the results without much analysis (because, of course, if they said, out loud, that the incumbents all appear to be in trouble that would hurt their cause). Here's how they framed the results:
Frustration about Seattle School Board leadership weighed heavily on the minds of primary voters who, in all but one board race, were more generous with their votes for challengers than incumbents.
Yes, generous is one way to put it. Another would be that all the incumbents appear to be in trouble.
They can only say about the challengers that they raise valid concerns about the district and the current Board. Almost like, "thanks for pointing that out, now move along."
Apple Inc. (AAPL), Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. (INTC) may participate in the government's project to supply as much as 15 million tablet computers for school children over four years, state-owned Anatolia news agency said, citing Turkish Trade Minister Zafer Caglayan.
Apple officials told Caglayan during his visit to the U.S. that the Cupertino, California-based maker of smart devices may also decide to use some Turkish manufacturers to make some peripheral equipment such as covers, earphones for its iPad and iPhone models, Caglayan said at a news conference with Turkish reporters in Seattle, according to the Ankara-based agency.
here are still some open questions in the aftermath of the WEAC layoffs - which the union appears reluctant to answer. WEAC executive director Dan Burkhalter wouldn't tell the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about membership levels, saying it was "internal information," and a WEAC spokeswoman "refused an on-camera interview with WISC-TV Monday, and a conference call later that day was cut short after only two reporters had asked questions."
Most media outlets have been reporting that the 42 pink-slipped staffers constitute 40 percent of the union's workforce, but there must be some detail missing. The union's 2008-09 filings show 151 employees, and I can guarantee you WEAC was not servicing 98,000 members with 105 staffers.
The law school at Villanova University has been censured for submitting falsified admissions data for several years to the American Bar Association. Villanova's average Law School Admissions Test scores were padded by two to three points from 2005 to 2009, law school dean John Gotanda said. The median GPA was raised by up to 0.16 points. Both data sets often factor into law school rankings. The law school could have lost its accreditation because of the scandal. The school must post the reprimand on its website for two years. School officials described the misreporting as an "odd" scheme, considering the inflation "didn't propel us into the top 50."
Displaced whale dies in Calif. river
A 45-foot gray whale that delighted people for more than a month after taking up residence in Northern California's Klamath River died Tuesday after beaching itself on a sandbar. In June, the whale and its calf took refuge in freshwater for an unknown reason while migrating north from Baja California. Scientists said it may have been escaping from killer whales. The calf swam out to sea on July 23, about the right time for it to go off on its own.
Nearly three-quarters of New Jersey school superintendents said the state Education Department did not play an important role in helping districts raise students' achievement or prepare graduates for college and careers, according to a survey the department released Monday.
Many superintendents criticized how the state set goals and evaluated districts' progress and said they did not find school report cards or state and federal data requirements useful in improving students' performance.
They also expressed dissatisfaction with the state's handling of special-education services and its guidance on curriculum and instruction. For instance, 63 percent of superintendents said they had not found the department's efforts helpful in improving math instruction, and 59 percent said the same of improving literacy.
In the field of Internet policy, 2011 has been the year of privacy. Congress has introduced six bills related to online privacy, and the Obama administration released two major reports recommending greater federal oversight of online markets. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appears poised to step up regulatory activity on this front. State-level activity is also percolating, led by California, which floated two major bills recently.
These efforts would expand regulatory oversight of online activities in various ways. Some measures would institute "Fair Information Practice Principles" (FIPPS), governing the collection and use of personal information online. Others would limit some types data collection, ban certain data or advertising practices, or create new mechanisms to help consumers block online ad-targeting techniques. Another measure would mandate websites adopt a so-called Internet "Eraser Button," which would allow users to purge unwanted personal information from online sites and services.
Unions representing Madison teachers and Milwaukee sanitation workers sued Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday, alleging that the controversial law severely restricting the collective bargaining rights of most public workers in Wisconsin is unconstitutional.
The lawsuit, brought by Madison Teachers Inc. and AFL-CIO Local 61 in Milwaukee alleges that the state legislature passed what was originally called the budget repair bill in violation of the state constitution's provision that governs special legislative sessions.
The lawsuit also alleges that the law places severe and unfair restrictions on what unions and their members can discuss with municipalities and school districts, and imposes severe wage increase limits that don't apply to nonunion workers.
Governor John Kitzhaber announced Tuesday that Representative Ben Cannon will join his staff as Education Policy Advisor. Representative Cannon, currently a state Representative for Portland, teaches middle school Humanities.
"Ben's passion and expertise on education policy will be a great asset to my office and the state," said Kitzhaber. "He'll bring the same dedication he has shown his constituents to implementing an education improvement agenda to ensure better results for Oregon students, more resources for teachers, and a more prosperous future."
"Serving as state Representative has been the highest honor I have ever held, and this was an incredibly difficult decision for me," Cannon said. "But I am convinced that to advise the Governor on education policy represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a difference on the same issues that drew me to teaching and politics in the first place. The achievements of the Governor and the Legislature this year have created a rare window of opportunity to make important improvements to the Oregon's public education system."
Oregon Rep. Ben Cannon, D-Portland, is resigning from the Legislature to become Gov. John Kitzhaber's top education adviser.
Cannon, a Democrat now in his third term in the House, will replace Nancy Golden, a temporary hire who has returned to her position as superintendent of the Springfield School District this summer.
His resignation is effective Sept. 1. He starts his new position Sept. 6
"It was a tremendously difficult decision to leave the Legislature," Cannon said by phone Tuesday, "but I have the opportunity now to continue to serve the people of Oregon and this governor on an issue that matters so much to me as a teacher, and to me as a father."
State auditors on Wednesday confirmed a report that found little difference in test scores between students in Milwaukee's school voucher program and those in the city's public schools.
Wisconsin lawmakers had asked the state Legislative Audit Bureau to evaluate a study, conducted by privately funded education researchers, that analyzed test scores from both groups of students. The study had found no significant difference, a conclusion that state auditors also reached.
The researchers studied the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, a voucher program that allows low-income children in Milwaukee to attend private schools at taxpayers' expense. The two-year budget signed by Gov. Scott Walker in June repealed the enrollment limit for voucher schools in Milwaukee and expanded vouchers to schools in suburban Milwaukee and Racine.
Given recent school-related political conflicts in Wisconsin, it is of interest that only 42 percent of that state's white students are proficient in math, a rate no better than the national average.
At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. This is the second study of student achievement in global perspective prepared under the auspices of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG).
In the 2010 PEPG report, "U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective," the focus was on the percentage of U.S. public and private school students performing at the advanced level in mathematics.1 The current study continues this work by reporting the percentage of public and private school students identified as at or above the proficient level (a considerably lower standard of performance than the advanced level) in mathematics and reading for the most recent cohort for which data are available, the high-school graduating Class of 2011.
Proficiency in Mathematics
U.S. students in the Class of 2011, with a 32 percent proficiency rate in mathematics, came in 32nd among the nations that participated in PISA. Although performance levels among the countries ranked 23rd to 31st are not significantly different from that of the United States, 22 countries do significantly outperform the United States in the share of students reaching the proficient level in math.
In six countries plus Shanghai and Hong Kong, a majority of students performed at the proficient level, while in the United States less than one-third did. For example, 58 percent of Korean students and 56 percent of Finnish students were proficient. Other countries in which a majority--or near majority--of students performed at or above the proficient level included Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands. Many other nations also had math proficiency rates well above that of the United States, including Germany (45 percent), Australia (44 percent), and France (39 percent).
Senator, please allow me to express my thanks for including me in these vital hearings on the readiness of our high school graduates for college work.
It would be my sad duty to report to you that if high school football coaches no longer ask their athletes to learn to block and tackle, that would fail to prepare them for college teams. Oh--wait, Senator, that is not correct. (Shuffles papers, starts over).
It would be my sad duty to report that if our high school basketball coaches no longer taught their athletes to dribble, pass, and shoot baskets, then they too would fail at basketball in college.
Oh--my apologies, Senator, that is not my testimony--just a little bad joke. Of course our high school coaches take athletics much too seriously to allow that sort of thing to happen to our kids. In fact, The Boston Globe has more than 100 pages a year on high school athletes. No, Senator, there is no coverage for high school academic achievement.
But I am sorry to have to report that our History and English teachers at the high school level no longer ask our students to read complete nonfiction books or to write substantial research papers, and naturally, this unfits them for the nonfiction books they will be asked to read and the substantial research papers they will be asked to write at the postsecondary level, in what we might call Upper Education.
The famous and influential American educator, John Dewey, wrote in 1896 that: "The centrality of reading and writing was 'one of education's great mistakes.'" In following in his footsteps, many of our educators have pushed academic reading and writing so far to the periphery of the curriculum that, for too many of our high school students, they might just as well have fallen off the edge of the flat earth of American secondary education.
The California State College System recently reported that 47% of their Freshmen were required to take remedial reading courses. Of course they can't handle nonfiction books as they have never been assigned one in their whole high school career.
I have had the privilege of publishing 956 serious (average 6,000 words) history research papers by secondary students from all over this country and from 38 other countries, and I have formed the opinion in the process that high school students are fully capable of reading complete nonfiction books and of writing serious research papers.
But it should be no surprise that so long as our educators never assign nonfiction books or ask students for research papers, they will continue to believe that their students may be able somehow to manage Calculus, European history, Latin, Chemistry, British Literature and the like, but they must still not be able, for some unexplained reason, to read a history book or write a real term paper.
While our colleges do complain, persistently, about the poor preparation in reading and writing of the students who come to them, what do they do in setting requirements for admission?
Senator, hard as it may be to believe, all the writing that colleges ask for is a 500-word "college" essay about the life of the applicant. It is hard to conceive of a more nonacademic task than that, or one more likely to retard the assignment of serious reading and writing at the high school level.
When we celebrate athletes and ignore scholars in our high schools, and when we set such low standards for the high school diploma and for college admission, we should not be surprised that more than one million of our high school graduates need to be in remedial courses when they get to college every year, and that more than half of those will never graduate.
Yes, Senator, I believe that until we take reading and writing more seriously at the secondary level, we can continue to push more and more students into college, but more and more of them will be sadly unprepared to take advantage of that academic opportunities there, and more and more of them will drop out before they graduate from college.
Thanks again for the opportunity to discuss these problems.
===============
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The average ACT score among the Madison School District's 2011 graduates dipped to its lowest level in 15 years, while the gap between white and minority student scores shrank for the first time in five years.
Though Madison's average score dipped from 24.2 to 23.9, district students still outperformed the state average of 22.2 and national average of 21.1. A perfect score on the college entrance exam is 36.
Madison's average scores in recent years have ranged from 23.5 in 1995 to 24.6 in 2007. The average score was also 23.9 in 2003.
With the highest percent of students taking the ACT in state history, Wisconsin's Class of 2011 posted an average score slightly above that from the previous year's graduates and maintained the state's third-place ranking among states in which the test is widespread.
Seventy-one percent of the 2011 graduates from Wisconsin private and public schools took the college admissions test, averaging a 22.2 composite score on the 36-point test, according to information to be publicly released Wednesday. The nationwide average was 21.1 on the ACT Assessment, which includes tests in English, reading, mathematics and science.
State schools superintendent Tony Evers credited the results to more high school students pursuing more demanding coursework.
"The message of using high school as preparation for college and careers is taking hold with our students," Evers said in a news release. "Nearly three-quarters of our kids said they took the rigorous classes recommended for college entry, up from just over half five years ago."
Even so, ACT reported that only 32% of Wisconsin's recently graduated seniors had test results that showed they were ready for college-level courses in all four areas. Results for individual subjects ranged from 39% readiness in science to 75% in English.
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed...and not before.
On November 7 (2005), Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district's student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district's success in closing the academic achievement gap "based on race".
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, "for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we've reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap". Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level "is the original gap" that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
The average ACT score among the Madison School District's 2011 graduates dipped to its lowest level in 15 years, while the gap between white and minority student scores shrank for the first time in five years.
Though Madison's average score dipped from 24.2 to 23.9, district students still outperformed the state average of 22.2 and national average of 21.1. A perfect score on the college entrance exam is 36.
Madison's average scores in recent years have ranged from 23.5 in 1995 to 24.6 in 2007. The average score was also 23.9 in 2003.
With the highest percent of students taking the ACT in state history, Wisconsin's Class of 2011 posted an average score slightly above that from the previous year's graduates and maintained the state's third-place ranking among states in which the test is widespread.
Seventy-one percent of the 2011 graduates from Wisconsin private and public schools took the college admissions test, averaging a 22.2 composite score on the 36-point test, according to information to be publicly released Wednesday. The nationwide average was 21.1 on the ACT Assessment, which includes tests in English, reading, mathematics and science.
State schools superintendent Tony Evers credited the results to more high school students pursuing more demanding coursework.
"The message of using high school as preparation for college and careers is taking hold with our students," Evers said in a news release. "Nearly three-quarters of our kids said they took the rigorous classes recommended for college entry, up from just over half five years ago."
Even so, ACT reported that only 32% of Wisconsin's recently graduated seniors had test results that showed they were ready for college-level courses in all four areas. Results for individual subjects ranged from 39% readiness in science to 75% in English.
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed...and not before.
On November 7 (2005), Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district's student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district's success in closing the academic achievement gap "based on race".
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, "for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we've reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap". Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level "is the original gap" that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
I'm not surprised more students are taking college-readiness and remedial courses at community and four-year colleges.
In the 1990s, I taught introductory composition at a private, career-oriented college and at a public university in Chicago, where it became clear that many of my students still hadn't learned the difference between "it's" and "its," for example, or proper use of a comma. Never mind critical thinking.
It was especially evident at the private college that many of these high school graduates were forking over thousands of dollars so some master's level English major with no formal training in education could teach them what they should have learned for free in public school.
The experience puts "Learning to Learn Camp," Madison Area Technical College's nine-week, $478.75 incarnation of the college preparatory class, in something of a darkly comic light.
The president of the Chicago Teachers Union said Friday on a radio show that there is a "very high" likelihood that teachers will ask her to take a strike vote, given how angry and disrespected they feel.
But clarifying later to the Chicago Sun-Times, Karen Lewis said she did not predict that teachers will ultimately go on strike, only that the probability is high that members will call for a strike vote.
"People are very upset. People feel disrespected,'' Lewis told WLS- AM Radio's Connected to Chicago, which airs at 6 a.m. Sunday.
"We have teachers who have been extremely vilified for political purposes,"
Michigan's school accreditation system "no longer has relevance" state educators say, as every school in the state has met state criteria despite sliding backward on federal testing goals.
The Rhode Island Department of Education's (RIDE) consulting budget has ballooned to over $28 million for the 2012 fiscal year, nearly double what it was spending just two years ago, GoLocalProv has learned.
According to the agency, the sudden jump in consultants and vendor spending is directly related to a number of federal grants the department has received over the past several years, including the $75 million in Race To The Top funds secured last year. RIDE says the outside contractors are helping with curriculum development, data management and overseeing an inter-district transportation system for new teachers.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's quarterly report on debt and credit, U.S. households had $11.42 trillion in debt outstanding in the second quarter. That was down from a peak of $12.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2008, when the financial crisis took hold, and the lowest since the first quarter of 2007. Mortgage debt, home equity loans, credit card debt and auto loans are all down sharply -- partly because people are being more careful, but also because many have defaulted.
But student loans are up sharply. There was $550 billion in student debt outstanding in the second quarter, up 25% from $440 billion in the third quarter of 2008.
This is what one of Los Angeles Unified's most ambitious reform efforts looks like: about 30 people gathered in a Gardena school auditorium, watching a video of a teacher trying to get her young students to understand a John Updike poem.
The viewers furiously type their observations into laptop computers and discuss their impressions of the lesson the next day. They ask open-ended questions -- "What are some possible explanations for the lack of understanding of the vocabulary?" -- all aimed at helping the teacher improve.
These training sessions are the school district's first concrete steps toward replacing its age-old teacher evaluation system, which is widely regarded as a failure. The new version is based on more detailed observations, student and parent feedback, and students' standardized test scores.
Chicago Public Schools will offer merit pay to principals who perform well on a new set of evaluative metrics that may include student growth on test scores, the school climate and leadership skills, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Monday.
The performance rewards will be paid for over the next four years by a new $5 million fund created through charitable donations, Emanuel said. The district plans to create a similar incentive program for teachers, he said.
CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said the bonuses will range from about $5,000 to $10,000 per principal.
While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to. And that's to be expected. Serious "deep attention" reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea (only about 150 years old) that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level.
At the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps 2 percent of Americans attended a university; now the number is closer to 70 percent (though only about 30 percent get bachelor's degrees). A particularly sharp acceleration occurred in the years after 1945, when the GI Bill enabled soldiers returning from World War II to attend college for free, thus leading universities across the country to throw up quonset huts for classrooms, and English professors to figure out how to teach 40 students at a time, rather than 11, how to read sonnets. (And those GI's wanted their children to have the same educational opportunities they had, or better ones.) These changes have had enormous social consequences, but for our purposes here, the one that matters is this: From 1945 to 2000, or thereabouts, far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books.
It's getting time to fish or cut bait. We've taken a good hard look at the proposed/draft 2011-12 SPASD budget, and we find a number of budget lines to be potentially low hanging fruit...ripe for the pickin'.
Maybe we don't have it right...we can admit it when we make an error...but it places the burden of proof squarely upon the district. PROVE to the community that you absolutely need all that is budgeted, and you have our support.
One might easily see such a thing in a Shanghai alleyway and think nothing of it: a bundle of fabric tied up with a rope. Except that this particular bundle was screaming.
I could not tell at first if the squalling child was male or female, but I knew exactly what it was doing there: a desperate mother had swaddled her newborn infant in several layers of clothing and left it alone in the winter darkness - so that it could have a chance to live.
For me, it was an all-too-familiar story: my own two daughters were abandoned at birth, left alone in a Chinese street to the mercy of strangers. But that was more than a decade ago - a decade in which China has become a powerful force in markets from natural resources to sports cars, from luxury goods to aircraft carriers. In a China of diamond iPads and gold-plated limousines were babies still ending up in anonymous alleyways?
The idea that school choice is automatically better than no choice has recently been reinforced again, with the "Parent Trigger" in California. Under a law passed there last year, parents whose children attend underperforming public schools can get together, and if 51% of them sign a petition, they can demand their district change the school administrators or convert the school to a charter. So far, a parent group from Compton "pulled the trigger," but parents from poor urban schools and well-funded suburban schools have been seeking information on how to use the Parent Trigger law to improve their schools.
Similar bills, which are supported by education reformers on both sides of the political aisle, have been passed in Connecticut, Ohio and Mississippi. About a half dozen state legislatures--including New York -- are expected to consider Parent Trigger type bills this year.
The state will launch a Web site Monday that will eventually provide parents -- and everyone else -- a way to gauge how well individual high schools prepare their graduates for college.
By the end of September, the site, www.mischooldata.org , will include first-ever information on how many students from each school go to college, how many earn at least a year's worth of college credit within two years of graduation, and how many have to take remedial courses in college.
The information could be used by parents and the public to rate high schools and for administrators to improve curricula.
Quite simply, Pell Grants are not supposed to be for the middle class. As the U.S. Department of Education's website makes clear, Pell is supposed to be for "low-income undergraduate and certain postbaccalaureate students."
So why characterize Pell as a benefit for the middle class? Because lots of people consider themselves to be in that group -- which federal politicians rarely define -- and policymakers want their votes.
Unfortunately, as Rep. George Miller (D-CA) recently demonstrated, saying Pell is intended for the middle class also makes it a valuable weapon in waging class warfare.
"Pell is the reason they are able to go to college and get ahead," Miller said in response to congressional Republicans purportedly looking to trim the program as part of debt reduction. "It's a shameful excuse and an attack on middle class families."
Would you rather have someone graduate high school with good computer skills or good character traits?
I grant it's a false choice. You ought to have both, and they're not in conflict. But I ask this as a way of asking what our priorities are when it comes to educating children.
It's hard to find a school that doesn't have lots of computers these days. The intense push to load schools up with computers seems to have eased, compared with a decade ago. Money is tighter now, and many schools don't need much more because they have a lot already.
But it's not so easy to find schools that have good character education programs.
Schools are held accountable for teaching reading and math and so on. The pressure is always on for academic records for each student and for a school as a whole. But students' character? Other than attendance and discipline for behavior problems, interest in that is pretty inconsistent.
Of course, many would say, it's not the school's job to civilize children. That's the parents' job. Absolutely correct, and I think more should be done to try to get more parents to do that job.
Some are calling it the summer of the teacher handbook.
With the start of school approaching on Sept. 1, about two-thirds of Wisconsin's school districts are rushing to finalize employee handbooks to replace now-extinct collective bargaining agreements that for decades outlined duties and salaries for workers.
The passage of the state's new "Act 10" legislation - in effect for all districts that didn't extend a contract with teachers before the passage of the law - gives administrators the ability to make sweeping changes to teachers' pay scales, hours and working conditions without having to negotiate them with unions.
Some sacred cows are disappearing, such as teacher tenure, layoffs based on seniority and the guarantee of 10 years' worth of post-retirement health insurance. Other big and complex changes on the horizon include new salary structures and pay-for-performance plans.
In the midst of unsettled, economically anxious times, conservative policy advocates have embraced a public chaos strategy. While they create disorder, sapping public confidence in public infrastructure, conservative policymakers pursue a policy agenda limiting public investment in public systems that serve all Minnesotans. They create cover for their true aim, directing public investment's benefits to fewer and wealthier people.
"No Child Left Behind" is a terrific example of this strategy. By creating an impossible performance standard--every child must pass the mandated standardized exam--the results allow conservative advocates to express outrage and shock that public schools are failing the public. It's not responsible public policy but it is a marvelously self-fulfilling prophecy, consistent with conservative traditions of defunding government while attacking it for failing to do what they've deliberately prevented it from doing.
In the meantime, while modest income people struggle, our country still fights two wars and gives huge tax breaks to the very richest Americans. Minnesota has its own version of this experience, revealed during the recent budget stand-off and state government shutdown. Conservative policy leaders preserved a lower effective tax rate on the richest Minnesotans while cutting state services and accelerating program costs shift to property tax payers.
Those favored by fortune can educate themselves in all countries: and it is for that reason that the American thinkers did not dedicate their cares to the aristocratic element of society, but rather to the lowest ranks of the great mass of the people, whom they have struggled to enlighten; comprehending that education ought not to be a privilege, but something which belongs to all, as much as the air we breathe; and that every citizen has as imprescriptible a right to the light of the Spirit as he has to the light of the sun which illuminates him.
There are lessons that Michigan business and government must learn from the lost decade that stripped our state of pride and nearly 1 million high-paying middle-class jobs.
If we don't embrace and imagine a better future, instead falling back on "business as usual," we will be relegated to the trash heap of dinosaurian, economic history.
The revisionists among us would like us to believe Michigan's fate was pre-determined by the collapse of the domestic auto industry, capped off by a global economic meltdown in 2008.
While the perfect storm of events that hit Michigan were clearly impactful, they need not have defined us. As my dad always told me, "You have little control what happens to you in this life, you have 100 percent control over how you respond."
A state court judge on Friday blocked a suburban school district south of Denver from using public funds to help residents pay for private and religious schools.
Judge Michael A. Martinez ruled that a voucher program designed by the Douglas County School District violated the state constitution because it sent public funds to schools that infused religion throughout their curriculum, required students and faculty to meet certain standards of faith and required students to attend religious services.
The program "provides no meaningful limitations on the use of taxpayer funds to support or promote religion, and no meaningful protections for the religious liberty of participating students," the judge wrote in a 68-page decision. He also said it amounted to direct public aid to churches and church-sponsored schools, in violation of the Colorado constitution.
In our last post, we made some estimates on potential savings in the 2011-12 budget due to over-budgeting for health insurance premiums in the wake of Governor Walker's budget.
Our calculations were based on the following:
The cost to the district for a Family plan was estimated to be: $14,249
The cost to the district for a Single plan was estimated to be: $ 6,307
Despite a lousy economy and high gas prices, college visits by prospective students increased over the last year, according to an informal poll by the New York Times. Almost three-quarters of the 41 colleges surveyed said they had more visitors this summer than last. When did the pre-enrollment campus visit become a "thing"?
The late 1960s. The college visit as we know it--with guest-lectures from the provost, tours, and occasional free goodies--dates to the Vietnam era. During this time, universities faced increased competition from a boom in two-year colleges, while cheaper airfare, the civil rights movement, and a shift to co-educational teaching gave prospective students more choice than ever among postsecondary schools. Colleges realized they needed to market themselves more vigorously, and campus visits became a big part of the pitch. (This was a smart move: A 1982 study found that about 16 percent of prospective students considered their campus visit the most influential factor in naming their first-choice college.)
Bullying can affect a student's academic performance, but a school's bullying climate may be linked with lower overall test scores, a study finds.
The study, presented recently at the American Psychological Assn.'s recent annual convention in Washington, D.C., surveyed 7,304 ninth-grade students and 2,918 teachers who were randomly chosen from 284 high schools in Virginia. Students and teachers were asked about incidents of bullying and teasing at the school. Ninth-grade students were chosen because researchers felt this first year of high school was a critical adjustment period, and because poor test scores in this grade may be linked with a higher drop-out rate.
In the study, bullying was defined as using strength or popularity to deliberately injure, threaten or embarrass another person, and that harassment can be verbal, physical or social. Two students close in strength who argue are not considered bullies.
Assembling diverse classes is an oft-stated goal among New York City private schools, with brochures featuring beaming multicultural students.
But this September Dalton will approach a rare benchmark: Nearly half of the incoming kindergarten class will be students of color.
Dalton will dramatically exceed the citywide average for kindergarten diversity at New York's private schools, which was 30% students of color last year, according to data from the National Association of Independent Schools.
It's a milestone in an aggressive campaign by the admissions director, Elisabeth "Babby" Krents, to broaden the school's reach since she assumed the position in 1996. The previous year, the kindergarten class was 6% diverse. This year, it will be 47% of the 97-member incoming class.
Eight states have raised their standards for passing elementary-school math and reading tests in recent years, but these states and most others still fall below national benchmarks, according to a federal report released Wednesday.
The data help explain the disconnect between the relatively high pass rates on many state tests and the low scores on the national exams, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
In fourth-grade reading, for example, 35 states set passing bars that are below the "basic" level on the national NAEP exam. "Basic" means students have a satisfactory understanding of material, as opposed to "proficient," which means they have a solid grasp of it. Massachusetts is the only state to set its bar at "proficient"--and that was only in fourth- and eighth-grade math.
In the drama of public education, many people seem to see school boards as wearing black hats. When is the last time you heard a positive reference to school boards in our ongoing national debate? School boards are part of the problem, right?
Actually, local school boards have an essential role in education reform. More often than not, they are composed of energetic citizens who bring a passion for their communities to bear on nettlesome issues ranging from graduation rates to childhood obesity and bullying.
As a longtime school board member in New York State and chair of the student achievement committee for the National School Boards Association, I have been looking at what research says about school boards and student achievement. Does what happens in the boardroom make a difference in the classroom? The answer is yes, unequivocally.
Controlling for demographic differences, districts with high levels of student achievement have school boards that exhibit habits and characteristics that are markedly different from boards in low-achieving districts.
We love robots - tireless, productive workhorses of the modern assembly line. But we also hate robots - sinister mechanical simulacra of the human workers they make redundant.
In the latest episode in our complicated relationship with automatons and automation, it is appropriate that Foxconn should have a lead role. The Taiwanese company manufactures the chattering classes' favourite piece of science fiction come true, the Apple iPad, as well as devices for Nokia and Sony. It employs 1m people in China. It was the epicentre last year of concern about pressure on low-paid young workers, following a series of suicides at its Shenzhen factories. It is, in short, iPad users' window on to dilemmas of assembly-line politics and management that the developed world last grappled with on this scale decades ago.
One of the summer scandals keeping us education wonks amused until school starts is a American Federation of Teachers gaffe in Connecticut. Union officials posted online an analysis of their lobbying against a parent trigger law in that state that revealed too much about their distaste for letting moms and dads decide who should run their schools.
Bloggers RiShawn Biddle and Alexander Russo exposed the union celebrating its gutting of a Connecticut version of California's parent trigger law. School reform organizations and editorialists were aghast. AFT president Randi Weingarten disowned the Web post. Activists pushing for parent triggers in Texas and New York welcomed the attention.
This idea has already reached the Washington area and may someday inspire legislation here. That would be bad. Despite its worthy proponents and democratic veneer, the parent trigger is a waste of time. Let's toss it into the trash with other once fashionable reform ideas like worksheets for slow students and brief constructed responses on state tests.
A balance of power in school governance is vital to ongoing improvements AND relevance.
The context for this advice was some technical information about e-learning system downtime that we needed to communicate with our leadership. I was thinking of how to present this information to communicate the meaning I thought most essential, and therefore drive toward the conclusions and actions I thought we should take. Controlling the message and managing the information might be an understandable desire, but when it comes to technology (and perhaps everything else), a controlled message is sometimes the wrong approach.
Deciding not to filter information does not mean that we cease thinking about how to effectively communicate. We need to understand the recipient of the information, and have insight into the most effective manner to package our communication. We should also be aware of how the communication will be perceived, and be prepared to address concerns or questions.
As most Coloradans know, at least those who keep up with statewide education news, the Douglas County school board recently approved -- unanimously -- a groundbreaking plan to help pay the tuition costs for hundreds of students so that they can attend private schools.
This plan, known colloquially as a school voucher program, enjoys ardent support from some quarters, but vigorous opposition elsewhere.
Is such a plan useful, does it seem a wise use of taxpayer provided money, and is it available to all students?
Or, as many think, should public money earmarked for education be used exclusively for public schools to benefit all students? As with so many topics dotting the American sociological landscape, the answers lie in the murky sea of the individual's political leanings.
IT BEGAN on August 4th with the metallic clink of a few pots and pans. By nightfall, thousands of people were on the streets of Santiago banging kitchenware, a form of protest last heard under the dictatorship of General Pinochet. This time the cacerolazos, as they are called, are being staged in the name of educational Utopia--and in response to a cack-handed government ban on marches.
Chile's school system is the least bad in Latin America, according to the OECD's PISA tests, which compare educational attainment across countries. But that does not make it good. And the overall performance hides huge disparities. Analysis done in Chile of the test results in the 65 countries that took part finds that it ranked 64th in terms of the variance of the results according to social class. Rich pupils get good private education; poor ones are condemned to underfunded, dilapidated state-funded schools.
WEAC is always one of the top spending lobbyists in the Capitol and they took a central role this year fighting Gov. Scott Walker's plan curbing public employee union rights, including teachers.
Back in 2009, when Democrat Jim Doyle was governor and Democrats controlled the Senate and Assembly, WEAC wasn't helping to organize massive protests but it was a regular presence in the Capitol.
Much of its lobbying in 2009 was in support of removing caps on raises for teachers during contract negotiations, a move supported by Doyle and approved by the Legislature.
Change is hard. So said many a politician trying to tackle problems confronting the state or nation.
The president of the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), Richard Iannuzzi, is a tell-tale example of someone having real difficulty with change by showing a dark side.
Yesterday's Associated Press story on the changing landscape of public education was telling. With strengthened accountability and teacher evaluation combined with tightening resources, changes are afoot. On the one hand, Governor Andrew Cuomo is recognizing the "gravitational forces" of change and is in some ways its instigator by his focus on "improving student performance," including his push that gave more teeth to the state Regents evaluation requirements.
From the Grand Rapids, Michigan Press, comes a story about Arne Duncan and what he thinks should happen for teachers and teacher training:
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says teachers should be paid between $60,000 to $150,000 - but should be held more accountable.
Duncan also told the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards last week that it should be more difficult for prospective students to enter college teacher preparation programs.
The latter sentence is part of a bigger discussion over whether colleges of education in this country do a good job of attracting good students and if they are training them properly. Indeed, a big worry expressed among some UW COE faculty about bringing in TFA is that if the COE doesn't step up and do better they could be shut down. Some of the UW COE faculty seem to think the TFA training may be the training of the future for teachers.
Spurred by a critical state audit, the Madison School District will begin a new program this year intended to better identify and provide services for talented and gifted students.
Using an approach similar to how it identifies and serves special education students, the district plans to categorize talented-and-gifted services into three tiers and identify where all students fit into those tiers based on a combination of test scores, grades, teacher and staff assessments, and parent and self-identification.
Students who qualify for the top tier could receive additional academic services outside of the classroom. The program also seeks to develop the potential talent of all students, especially those who may not have been identified in the past, such as English language learners and low-income students.
In the past, Madison schools have used a more ad hoc, less systematic, approach for identifying and serving students who demonstrate advanced abilities in intellect, academics, leadership, creativity, and the performance and visual arts. The district also has historically blanched at grouping students by ability.
A superstar teacher or charismatic principal rides to the rescue! Downtrodden public school children, otherwise destined to fail, are saved! We've all seen that movie--more than once, starting with "Stand and Deliver" and "Lean on Me" in the late 1980s and more recently with documentaries like "Waiting for Superman" and "The Lottery," which brilliantly portray the heroes of the charter-school movement. And we know the villains, too: teachers' union leaders and education bureaucrats who, for four decades, have presided over schools that provide comfortable public jobs for the adults who work there but wretched instruction for the children who are supposed to learn there.
One of the heroes of this familiar tale is Dave Levin, the co-founder of the highly regarded KIPP network of charter schools (KIPP stands for Knowledge Is Power Program). But Mr. Levin would be the first to tell you that heroes aren't enough to turn around an American public school system whose continued failure has become the country's most pressing long-term economic and national security threat.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, the first of two stories about the nation's schools.
Students returned to Atlanta classrooms for the start of a new school year today. But students and teachers will be laboring under the cloud of a major cheating scandal that's raising big questions in Atlanta and in districts across the country.
JOHN TULENKO: Parks Middle School in Atlanta, Georgia, was a beacon of hope. Located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, it had built a reputation as a high-achieving school.
Chandra Gallashaw felt lucky to send her children to Parks.
CHANDRA GALLASHAW, mother: This was a college prep middle school. I had seen the change going on over there. And I was really impressed with that. That's what made me want my daughter to go there more so than ever.
JOHN TULENKO: Parks had made some of the largest gains anywhere in Georgia. Pass rates on the state tests climbed from 35 percent to 78 percent in reading, and from 24 percent to 86 percent in math.
The city's biggest teachers' union has called on the government to scrap its plan to introduce mandatory moral and national education classes at schools after a survey of more than 2,000 of its members found widespread opposition to the proposal.
The pro-democracy Hong Kong Professional Teachers' Union, which claims a membership of 80,000, or 90 per cent of all the city's teaching professionals, says the poll found 70 per cent were against the move.
Union officials also criticised the government for carrying out consultation over the move in a "condescending" way and called for a new round of talks.
"If we have to speak in terms of grading requirements, this document [proposing the new curriculum] would be given a `fail'," said James Hon Lin-shan, deputy director of the union's rights and complaints department.
I’m not opposed to a new round of waivers on No Child Left Behind, but the devil is in the details. Unfortunately, the details seem to be getting short shrift lately in favor of the same talking points. To wit, let’s take a look at today’s NYT story on the forthcoming Duncan waiver proposal. Here it is (mostly) annotated with text from the article in itals.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has announced that he will unilaterally override the centerpiece requirement of the No Child Left Behind school accountability law, that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.
Public schools in Memphis, Tennessee, will be consolidated with those of the surrounding county beginning in 2013-14, a federal judge ruled Monday. The decision ends for now a yearslong fight over funding that spilled into questions of race and politics.
The 146-page ruling from Judge Hardy Mays was prompted by a lawsuit and subsequent voter referendum in March that dissolved the Memphis City Schools charter.
"The Memphis City Schools has been abolished for all purposes except the winding down of its operations and the transfer of administration to the Shelby County Board of Education under the terms of Public Chapter 1 and Tennessee education law," wrote Mays. He said the surrender of the city charter did not affect the validity of the city board's actions up until now.
State-level National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results are an important resource for policymakers and other stakeholders responsible for making sense of and acting on state assessment results. Since 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has supported research that focuses on comparing NAEP and state proficiency standards. By showing where states' standards lie on the NAEP scale, the mapping analyses offer several important contributions. First, they allow each state to compare the stringency of its criteria for proficiency with that of other states.
Second, mapping analyses inform a state whether the rigor of its standards, as represented by the NAEP scale equivalent of the state's standard, changed over time. (A state's NAEP scale equivalent is the score on the NAEP scale at which the percentage of students in a state's NAEP sample who score at or above that value matches the percentage of students in the state who score proficient or higher on the state assessment.) Significant differences in NAEP scale equivalents might reflect changes in state assessments and standards or changes in policies or practices that occurred between the years. Finally, when key aspects of a state's assessment or standards remain the same, these mapping analyses allow NAEP to substantiate state-reported changes in student achievement.
The following are the research questions and the key findings regarding state proficiency standards, as they are measured on the NAEP scale.
Wisconsin's oft criticized WKCE vis a vis NAEP:
WKCE "proficient" = 2009 NAEP Below Basic for grade 4 reading (along with 34 other states) and grade 8 reading (along with 15 other states)
= 2009 NAEP Basic for grade 4 math (along with 41 other states) and grade 8 (along with 35 other states)
WKCE results showed more positive changes than NAEP results for grade 4
reading from 2007 to 2009, grade 4 math from 2007 to 2009, and grade 4 math from 2005 to 2009
NAEP results showed more positive changes than WKCE results in grade 8
reading from 2005 to 2009.
The best way to eliminate grade inflation is to take professors out of the grading process: Replace them with professional evaluators who never meet the students, and who don't worry that students will punish harsh grades with poor reviews. That's the argument made by leaders of Western Governors University, which has hired 300 adjunct professors who do nothing but grade student work.
"They think like assessors, not professors," says Diane Johnson, who is in charge of the university's cadre of graders. "The evaluators have no contact with the students at all. They don't know them. They don't know what color they are, what they look like, or where they live. Because of that, there is no temptation to skew results in any way other than to judge the students' work."
Western Governors is not the only institution reassessing grading. A few others, including the University of Central Florida, now outsource the scoring of some essay tests to computers. Their software can grade essays thanks to improvements in artificial-intelligence techniques. Software has no emotional biases, either, and one Florida instructor says machines have proved more fair and balanced in grading than humans have.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel today said a property tax hike for Chicago Public Schools is acceptable because district administrators have made large cuts to the school budget and investment is necessary to improve important programs like early childhood education.
In his first comments since the proposed schools tax increase was announced last week, the mayor said school officials have done more to make the schools more efficient.
"I have no tolerance for an overblown bureaucracy, and I have no tolerance for inefficiency in the city budget, in other agencies, and I'm glad (school officials) followed the cut and invest strategy," Emanuel said. "I think they've made the tough choices."
"I also expect people to respect the hard-earned dollars of taxpayers," he added. "But they also rely on the school system. As you know, I said I was going to protect the classroom. We've not only protected the classroom, we've expanded educational choices and opportunities for the parents that rely on the school system, while other school systems are cutting back."
As the Madison School District's dual language immersion program enters its eighth year, the increasingly popular option for native Spanish and English speakers is experiencing growing pains.
The district is expanding the program to all of its high school attendance areas, and is looking into possibly adding French and Chinese dual language programs, which would also pair native and non-native English speakers.
National research has shown dual language programs improve student learning better than programs that teach English to non-native speakers or two languages to non-English speakers.
But some School Board members have concerns about the expansion, especially after a recent report highlighted some of the program's shortcomings.
"I'd rather fix the red flags and make sure we've got it right before we expand," said School Board member Lucy Mathiak. "I don't see how you expand a program and attend to the things that need to be dealt with at the same time."
Attorneys for all of the sides in the schools consolidation court case have a Friday, Aug. 12, deadline that will set the stage for the next crucial part of the landmark court case.
What does a new countywide school board look like and when is there a transition to that school board?
Federal Judge Hardy Mays ruled Monday that the county school system controls the move toward consolidation of Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools, which Mays ruled, will take place in August 2013. But he also ruled the county school board districts, which do not include the city of Memphis, are unconstitutional and have to be redrawn or changed in some way.
He gave the attorneys on all sides through Friday to suggest remedies. And his 146-page ruling left some clues about how he will judge the ideas.
Thursday morning in Washington DC -- the only city that could host such a vacuous, inane event -- the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is hosting (the hopefully one-off) "Education Reform Idol." The event has nothing to do with recognizing states that get the best results for children or those that have achieved demonstrated results from education policies over time -- but simply those that have passed pet reforms over the past year.
It purports to determine which state is the "reformiest" (I kid you not) with the only contenders being Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin and the only judges being: (1) a representative of the pro-privatization Walton (WalMart) Family Foundation; (2) the Walton-funded, public education hater Jeanne Allen; and (3) the "Fox News honorary Juan Williams chair" provided to the out-voted Richard Lee Colvin from Education Sector.
Online education is becoming a legitimate and viable option for education systems around the country. Both colleges and secondary schools are offering classes to students. In fact many states and schools are requiring students to take some method of mode of online learning. New York made major changes around seat time and face-to-face contact between student and teacher. The state's intentions are good. They want to move away the focus from seat time, and they want to offer courses that might be hard to offer in certain areas of the state to all students. With all these innovative systemic changes, one might think we are completely on the right track. I offer a word of caution.
Online education is in danger of replicating a system that isn't working. Yes, I wrote it. With all the potential for innovation that online education has to offer, we have fallen into the pitfall of replication. The keyword is "danger." There is much that online education can do to innovate the education system, and much that has already been done as a result. Yet most of the actual courses and pedagogical structures that are in place are simply replicating the traditional style of education.
Each summer as she sets up her classroom for the fall, elementary school teacher Kate Schmidt said it seems like she spends more of her own money for school supplies, her classes get larger and she has fewer colleagues.
"I remember people telling me that if you get through your first year of teaching, you're good to go," said the 22-year teaching veteran. "Well, I work much harder now than I ever did as a first-year teacher."
Schmidt, 43, teaches fourth-grade in the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan district in the Twin Cities suburbs which, like most districts, is coping with state funding that has failed to keep up with inflation for nearly a decade. Then in July the Legislature and Gov. Mark Dayton held back another $700 million to solve the latest budget deficit.
Coming out of negotiations this spring, Verona School District teachers and staff felt hopeful. In the face of unprecedented cuts in state aid to public schools, they were encouraged by the words of their administrators and School Board members about the value of shared sacrifice and the importance of pulling together to ensure a quality education for the district's students.
Then, last week, the School Board gave district Superintendent Dean Gorrell a more than 7 percent raise.
Now many Verona teachers and support staff -- education aides, cooks and custodians, among others -- feel betrayed, both by their School Board and their administration. They say it's not the additional money -- just under $9,500 -- that Gorrell will receive on top of his $130,000 annual salary, but the principle involved.
"It's not the dollar figure," insists Jennifer Murphy, a high school math teacher who is president of the Verona Area Education Association, the union representing the teachers.
An Associated Press analysis of student testing data shows Tennessee school systems without teachers' collective bargaining rights performed slightly better than those with negotiated contracts, but posted weaker gains.
Thirty-eight of the state's 135 local school districts did not engage in collective bargaining with their teachers before a new law eliminated those rights this year, according to the Tennessee Education Association.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) is a tuition-free public charter school that will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly young men of color. Our mission is to prepare students for success at a four year college or university by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service.
To achieve this mission, young men will receive an education that:
We write frequently about the charter-school wars in New York City because the battle touches so many aspects of the effort to give children from poor families the education necessary to escape their circumstances.
Today's report has good news: Results released yesterday of test scores in the New York State Assessment Program showed that the most relentlessly attacked charter schools - Eva Moskowitz'sHarlem Success academies - have outperformed their public-school peers, often by a wide margin.
At all New York City's public schools, 60% of third, fourth and fifth graders passed the math exam; at Harlem Success, 94% passed. In the state language arts exam, 49% from the city schools passed compared to 78% at the charters. The 94% pass rate for the academies' black and Hispanic students surpassed the 73% pass rate for white students taking the exam in New York state.
When the producers at Fox & Friends asked me to get up early on Saturday morning to debate the merits of students earning college credits in high school, my third thought (after "Am I being set up as the liberal stooge?" and "Will this get me on The Daily Show?") was, "Who could be against that?" The president of Belmont University, as it turns out. Here's the clip.
While our education system is structured to move people along in age cohorts, some people obviously learn much faster than others. Falling behind is a problem, but so is falling ahead and getting stuck in boring classes that you don't need. As I note, we've been running AP and IB programs in for decades now-I took seven AP tests as a high school student in the mid-80s. Curiously, the object lessons of this experience often seem lost in the broader education debate. People are constantly denouncing multiple-choice "fill in the bubble" standardized tests as horribly inadequate and a tool of corporatist oppression, yet well-off progressive parents scramble to enroll their children in high schools with a full slate of AP courses. "Teaching to test" is also a horrible sin, unless, apparently, the test is AP Physics and you're angling for the Ivy League.
Schoolteachers had better brace for eight hours of work daily. The Right to Education (RTE) Act, which specifies 45 working hours a week for teachers, including preparation hours, is reportedly about to be implemented in the state.
Though school education minister Bratya Basu said he was not aware of any such development, a senior school education department official said the state government has decided on several changes in schools. For instance, the number of class hours to be put in by students in a year has been fixed. The number will be 800 for classes I to V and 1,000 for classes VI to VIII.
"Students of classes I to V will attend school for 200 days a year while those in classes VI to VIII will have 220 school days annually," said a senior school education department official.
In a letter to constituents, and Wednesday on "Sly in the Morning", Senator Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend) extolled the education-saving virtues of Act 10, saying it was "...the best thing we could do for our public schools." Grothman went on to say that "Wisconsin Schools are just not that great right now," citing recent test scores as signs of an education emergency that only eliminating collective bargaining could remedy. Specifically noting that the "...most recent test scores show that black kids have the worst scores in the country..." and "...white kids scored lower than the national average." Grothman stated his belief that collective bargaining is a roadblock to student achievement that had to be removed - for the sake of the kids. According to Grothman, there are too many "bad teachers" protected by unions that are "too hard to get rid of," and that "people shouldn't need an Education degree to teach."
After speaking with Senator Grothman today two things are very clear - first, he was not very familiar with the full data from the scores, admitting that Governor Walker seemed to have "cherry picked" the scores he cited. The Senator was merely repeating the information he was given by Scott Walker, trusting its accuracy - even out of context. The other issue that was perfectly clear is that he (and the other Republicans) are behaving as puppets to Scott Walker and the Corporatics pulling HIS strings - believing every bit of misinformation being fed to them to demonize teachers and their unions. The best thing for Wisconsin and our children is for this propaganda to be exposed and debunked, so that a real debate about education can take place. For the record, this information was shared with Senator Grothman today.
On top of hefty charges for textbooks, technology, bus rides, sports and clubs, school districts are hitting up parents to pay fees for hundreds of individual courses, from French I to American literature, history, foods and furniture-making.
The so-called course or lab fees can range from $10 or $20 to more than $100 per class, depending on the school, records show, pumping up parents' bills and adding to the rising cost of a public school education in the Chicago region.
"This is like private school," said parent Gio Chavez, who walked out of Oak Lawn Community High School's registration this week shellshocked. The final tally for her sophomore son's classes: $665.
State records show that Texas school boards have paid more than $7.7 million in severance pay over the past several years to buy out the contracts of superintendents.
The Dallas Morning News reported Sunday that school trustees have offered buyouts to 71 superintendents since 2005 ( http://dallasne.ws/nonEL2). Most received six-figure checks.
The deals have become a common way for school districts to for part ways with their top school administrators. Among the largest settlements in recent years were in the Richardson and Irving school districts.
Though teachers have one- or two-year contracts, superintendents routinely have contracts of at least three years. School trustees also sometimes extend the contracts as shows of support during annual evaluations. To dismiss a superintendent and end the contract early requires a process that involves hearings, appeals and legal costs. So school boards choose to pay severance instead of paying salaries for the full length of superintendent contracts.
Critics of public school "reform" say that it looks too much like a business model with education foundations that have big wallets taking control away from local communities.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, along with his wife, Melinda Gates, founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which had an endowment of $33.5 billion as of 2009. The foundation is "driven by the passions and the interests of the Gates family," with an education goal to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology.
Another notable figure is Los Angeles entrepreneur and philanthropist Eli Broad (rhymes with road). With his wife Edythe, Broad founded The Broad Foundations, which have assets of $2.1 billion with a mission to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts.
"Priorities of some of these foundations nationally have taken precedence over parents and community members," said Pam Grundy, co-founder of Mecklenburg Acts, the local affiliate of Parents Across America. "They're trying to do a lot of things that have never been proven to work. We feel like our kids are like an experiment."
Few things about a school seem to matter more to parents than class size. For many of us it is the litmus test for a well-run school. Small class size speaks of a school that is focused on putting resources in the right place -- not administrative retreats, paneling for the principal's office, or expensive but rarely used class-room technology. Small class size is a signal to us that a hundred smaller decisions that accompany the running of a school have been shaped with our children as a priority. As a result, a school is able to invest in an appropriate number of teachers.
Classrooms with fifteen students and one teacher usually look better, too -- more controlled than classrooms with thirty kids. At best, we imagine that small classes are environments where our children will be closely observed and where teachers have the opportunity to get to know each child. We assume that in small classes our children will receive personalized attention and that learning can be sprinkled like stardust through the thoughtful, free-ranging give-and-take between student and teacher. Small class size creates an environment that invites parent involvement, as well. If your daughter is one of thirty second-graders, you know without being told that the teacher is going to be hard-pressed to remember which reading group your daughter is in, much less her progress with phonemes. It's not surprising that so many parents will move heaven and earth to get their children in schools with a low teacher-student ratio.
A banker, a professor, a hospital administrator, and a pastor are among the members of a newly created board to run Bridgeport's school district and overhaul its finances and student achievement.
Acting state Education Commissioner George Coleman announced the six appointments yesterday, saying the new board will start its work immediately in place of the nine-member elected school board being swept out during the state takeover.
State education officials decided this summer that Connecticut needed to assume control of the troubled Bridgeport schools under provisions of a 2007 state law that lets it step in when students' academic performance is in dire need of improvement.
At the start of this year, John Gee, executive director of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association, was predicting that the state soon would have one of the best laws in the nation for improving the number and quality of charter schools.
It's August now. There's no new law and Gee is gone as head of the group. Clearly, things haven't gone as expected this year for these important, independently operated, publicly funded schools.
Charters haven't fared as badly since January as, say, teachers unions. There are going to be more charter schools in Wisconsin this fall than ever - around 225. In Milwaukee, some weak schools are gone, some strong ones are picking up momentum, and there will be more than 10,000 kids in more than 25 charters in September. Charters are here to stay.
But the bumpy ride for charter school advocates in recent months underscores questions about how big and strong the movement is going to be.
Chicago property taxes that fund schools would be raised to the maximum allowed by law for the first time in four years -- costing the average homeowner an extra $84 a year -- under a proposed Chicago Public School budget released Friday.
To fill a $712 million deficit, the first budget outlined by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's new school team would hike property taxes by $150.3 million, cut spending by $320.7 million, and use $241 million in reserve dollars to keep the system in the black.
Faced with rising costs and the evaporation of one-time federal dollars, the budget marks the second year in a row that CPS plans to spend more than it takes in, a pattern experts call "unsustainable.'' And, CPS officials concede, even grimmer days await three years from now, when a pension contribution waiver expires and the system's pension tab will skyrocket.
In this batch of e-mails you start to sense some wariness on the part of UW (and I think they should be). I think TFA is having these universities create these single-use alt certifications but will, in the end, create their own on-line teaching and cut out the middlemen. If U-ACT still exists in 5 years, I'll be surprised.
David Szatmary (a financial Vice-Provost) to Stritikus; he submitted a number of questions like:
I am not sure the timing was ideal for Gov. Nathan Deal to talk about prodding Georgia's public colleges to raise student completion rates. Research shows that a major obstacle to college completion is affordability, and the steps taken by Deal to preserve the long-term viability of the HOPE Scholarship have made college more expensive for thousands of students.
As we have been discussing here on the blog, the cuts to higher education by the Legislature have led to dramatic increases in student fees as colleges look for new sources of revenue. While the University System raised about $221 million from student fees five years ago, it will raise $500 million this year because of rising enrollment and higher fees.
Research suggests that costs are a major reason why low-income students fail to finish college.
But Deal wasn't talking about higher ed funding or HOPE today. He announced that Georgia was one of 10 states to received a million dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant will help underwrite a Complete College Georgia Initiative aimed at improving graduation rates.
So which is it? Are most Colorado schools doing a good job, as officials regularly assure parents and the public, or are they failing miserably, as some of the same officials will be telling a state court over the next few weeks in a case known as Lobato vs. the State of Colorado?
Both types of assertions can't be true. And if some aren't, they amount to -- let's not sugarcoat it -- deliberate fibs.
Consider Center School District Superintendent George Welsh as a case in point. According to the website Education News Colorado, Welsh was asked Monday in court to reconcile an awkward contradiction. On the one hand, he'd testified at length on the district's failures. Yet he'd also sent a letter to parents in 2007 "citing the good education his own children had received."
"Is that a statement you stand by today?" an assistant attorney general asked Welsh.
"You've got to put a positive spin on things to make your community feel comfortable," Welsh said, but then, reports Education News, answered " 'no' when asked again if he stood by the 2007 praise of the district's quality."
It is often difficult to feel optimistic about the future of liberty. Those of us who value individual liberty and free markets look only at the encroachment of government in our lives. We often overlook the victories that should give us hope for the future of liberty. The school choice movement is one of the most important fights in the future of liberty, and one that we are starting to win.
It is fitting to talk about this now, because July 31 would have been Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman's 99th birthday. Over fifty years ago, Friedman jump-started the school choice movement with an article called "The Role of Government in Education." In it, he laid out a plan for school vouchers that would allow parents to have a choice in where they send their children. In a 2005 interview with Reason Magazine, Friedman said, "I want vouchers to be universal, to be available to everyone. They should contain few or no restrictions on how they can be used."
Douglas County, Colorado school voucher hearings wrap up; What happens when citizens lose faith in government? 2011 Madison School District Open Enrollment Data (4.73% Leave)
Closing arguments in the case challenging the Douglas County School District's voucher program ended three days of hearings that could halt the program in its infancy.
A standing-room-only crowd listened in Denver District Court while a legal team from the American Civil Liberties Union faced off against a team that included the Colorado Attorney General's Office to decide the fate of the district's school choice scholarship program.
Both sides agreed that any decision from Denver District Court Judge Michael Martinez will likely face an appeal, regardless of the ruling.
"There will be an appeal either way," said Michael McCarthy, a plaintiff attorney representing the Taxpayers for Public Education. "What (the school district has) done is press the envelope as far as they can. For those interested in preserving public education in this state, they have got in their face as far as they can."
In a bold bid to revamp public education, a suburban district south of Denver has begun handing out vouchers that use public money to help its largely affluent residents send their children to private and church-based schools. The Douglas County School District experiment is noteworthy because nearly all voucher programs nationally aim to help children who are poor, have special needs or are trapped in failing public schools. Douglas County, by contrast, is one of the most affluent in the U.S., with household income nearly double the national median, and has schools ranked among the best in Colorado. What do you think? Should vouchers only be used with lower-income students? Should they never be used? Do they violate the constitution?
One answer comes from Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist. One of Mr. Krastev's special interests is in the resilience of authoritarian regimes in the 21st century. To understand why they endure, Mr. Krastev has turned to the thinking of the economist Albert O. Hirschman, who was born in Berlin in 1915 and eventually became one of America's seminal thinkers.
In 1970, while at Harvard, Mr. Hirschman wrote an influential meditation on how people respond to the decline of firms, organizations and states. He concluded that there are two options: exit -- stop shopping at the store, quit your job, leave your country; and voice -- speak to the manager, complain to your boss, or join the political opposition.
For Mr. Krastev, this idea -- the trade-off between exit and voice -- is the key to understanding what he describes as the "perverse" stability of Vladimir V. Putin's Russia. For all the prime minister's bare-chested public displays of machismo, his version of authoritarianism, in Mr. Krastev's view, is "vegetarian."
"It is fair to say that most Russians today are freer than in any other period of their history," he wrote in an essay published this spring. But Mr. Krastev argues that it is precisely this "user-friendly" character of Mr. Putin's authoritarianism that makes Russia stable. That is because Russia's relatively porous dictatorship effectively encourages those people who dislike the regime most, and have the most capacity to resist it, to leave the country. They choose exit rather than voice, and the result is the death of political opposition: "Leaving the country in which they live is easier than reforming it."
I'm a policy guy, not a daddy blogger. As a general rule, I don't discuss my children in this column or on my Eduwonk blog. But when TIME asked me to write about how my wife (who also works in education) and I chose our kids' elementary school, I figured why not? We are constantly besieged by friends and colleagues who want to know how we went about picking a school, as if there were some secret education-analyst methodology I was privy to. I wish that were true! But even though I don't have access to the secret sauce, I do have a pretty good sense of how to kick a school's tires. Plus, I think it would be a shame not to use all of our parental angst for the greater good. And so, as our kids start a new year at a public school, here are some lessons from our school-hunting experience that might help guide yours.
Look beneath the label. "Public" or "private" doesn't really tell you much, so don't scratch a school off your list just because of how it's governed. There are terrific and lousy schools in the public, private and (publicly funded) charter-school sectors, so relying on labels alone is a big risk. Likewise, you should do more than glance at a school's test scores or demographic data. My wife and I, for instance, are both products of public schools. I went to ones in Virginia that on paper were both excellent and diverse. But in practice, there were different tracks for different students, so most of the kids in my gifted or AP classes were like me: Caucasian, middle-class, ruggedly good-looking. Well, two out of three of those anyway. My wife grew up in an Ohio district known for great academics but with no diversity. As our kids approached school age, we hoped to find a good school that was racially, ethnically and economically diverse -- a tall order given today's housing patterns and school boundaries. But most important, we wanted to find the right fit for our kids, so we were not opposed to going private if we couldn't find an option in the public sector that seemed to work for us. (See the 20 best- and worst-paid college majors.)
Los Angeles Unified fired 56 tenured teachers in the 2010-11 school year - more than four times the number terminated the previous year.
The information was learned by the Daily News, a sister newspaper of the Daily Breeze.
The increase over the 13 teachers fired in 2009-10 represents a policy shift for the district as it tries to improve the quality of teaching, despite state rules that can make the dismissal process lengthy and difficult.
A total of 758 teachers - those with tenure and without - as well as substitutes and administrators were fired last year and 105 more resigned to avoid dismissal, according to a district memo.
Among those fired for poor performance were 136 nonpermanent educators - those with less than two years' experience - and 312 substitute teachers.
The total represents less than 3 percent of the district's workforce of 30,000 teachers, but it's a significant increase from the number of terminations made in previous years.
Momentum for business schools to accept the GRE test, mainly used by graduate-school applicants in the social sciences and humanities, is building as those schools aim to attract less traditional applicants.
Since April, more than 100 business schools have said they will accept applications with GRE--Graduate Record Examination--scores. In the past, business schools have only accepted the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, which looks more at reading comprehension and reasoning. The GRE has a stronger focus on vocabulary and straightforward quantitative skills.
Excellence in Education explains Florida's reading reforms and compares Florida's NAEP progress with Wisconsin's at the July 29th Read to Lead task force meeting
When the AFT offers a road map on how to shut down Parent Power efforts, it offers a nice PDF document to do it. Apparently in a fit of celebration during last month's TEACH 2011 conference, the nation's second-largest teachers union offered up a presentation on how its Connecticut affiliate managed to make the state's Parent Trigger law a little less harder for parents to use. (Dropout Nation is doing everyone a courtesy by making it available for public consumption; the orginal is still available at the AFT's Web site. At least, for now.)
Remember a long time ago when educators were asking why Johnny couldn't read? Well now in California, it appears that there is a major push to delay learning how well Johnny can read in the first place.
Early assessments are essential to get kids like Johnny on track to succeed in school. These assessments provide critical data that help schools identify which kids need extra help and use best practices to help them get to grade level proficiency.
SB 740, a bill pushed by the California Teachers Association, is quickly moving through the California Legislature, which would eliminate standardized second grade testing. SB 740 eliminates a valuable early assessment mechanism for teachers and parents. Without the data from the second grade assessment, we will be less likely to know exactly which students need extra help. And we will likely have more schools that fail to close achievement gaps and allow students--especially low income and minority students--to fall further behind.
For the first time since 2007, Chicago Public Schools will seek to increase the amount of money it collects from property taxes to raise an estimated $150 million over the next fiscal year-and likely add to Chicago residents' property tax bills.
School district officials said the tax increase-to the maximum allowed by state law-is needed to help reduce a $712 million deficit. The tax increase is part of the district's proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2012 that was released Friday.
Asked if Mayor Rahm Emanuel had signed off on the politically sensitive decision, school district officials said the Board of Education, not Emanuel, decides whether to raise property taxes. But while the school system does develop its budget and has taxing authority, it has been intertwined with the mayor's office since Mayor Richard M. Daley took control of public schools in 1995. The current CPS leadership and school board were hand-picked by Emanuel.
The head of the USA's second-largest teachers union on Monday said local affiliates will defend the rights of teachers caught up in cheating scandals, including the one now unfolding in Atlanta. But she said cheating "under any circumstances is unacceptable."
Speaking to reporters during the American Federation of Teachers' biannual training conference, Randi Weingarten said the union would "obviously" represent teachers accused of cheating "to make sure that people have some kind of fairness -- and that it's not some kind of witch hunt."
A long-awaited report released last week by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, found teacher- or principal-led cheating in 44 of 56 Atlanta schools investigated. Investigators determined that 178 educators cheated. Of those, 82 confessed.
During the 2011-2012 school year, as MMSD implements Response to Instruction and Intervention (RTI2) and the new district School Support Teams, the plan for delivery of Talented and Gifted Services will continue to be integrated and refined so that it accomplishes the following: 1) is both systemic and systematic in nature; 2) is collaborative; 3) is financially sustainable; 4) is fluid and responsive to student needs; S) offers appropriate opportunities for student growth and talent development; 6) addresses the comprehensive needs (academic, social and personal growth) of students; 7) is aligned with State regulations, professional standards, current research, and effective practice; and 8) provides goals and evaluation procedures to evaluate growth and suggest areas in which change is needed. This Plan for TAG Services describes the following:
In a bold bid to revamp public education, a suburban district south of Denver has begun handing out vouchers that use public money to help its largely affluent residents send their children to private and church-based schools.
The move is being challenged in state court and a judge has held hearings this week to determine if the program can go forward.
The Douglas County School District experiment is noteworthy because nearly all voucher programs nationally aim to help children who are poor, have special needs or are trapped in failing public schools. Douglas County, by contrast, is one of the most affluent in the U.S., with household income nearly double the national median, and has schools ranked among the best in Colorado.
The program is also unique in that the district explicitly promotes the move as a way for it to save money. The district is, in effect, outsourcing some students' education to the private sector for less than it would spend to teach them in public schools.
Tax dollars soon could go to schools where teachers aren't required to be certified and where students aren't required to take the same standardized tests as their public school counterparts.
That concerns Democrats, who expressed concerns about Republican school-choice measures that were the subject of a House Education Committee public hearing today.
Rep. Jim Christiana, sponsor of one bill in the education reform package, said school choice isn't about turning public schools into private ones; it's about letting parents choose where their children will be best educated.
"We're not saying students shouldn't have to take standardized tests. We're just saying the tests should be based on the curriculum you're offering," said Mr. Christiana, R-Beaver.
If the U.S. Department of Education fancies itself a school reform organization, then the School Improvement Grant is one of its most important programs -- if not the most important.
-- Check out the cross-post with our good (and cynical, insightful) friends at Title I-derland. --
The purpose of SIG is to transform "persistently lowest achieving schools" into good ones and, in so doing, demonstrate that the federal government can invest our money wisely. Of course, that is no small task. If this flops, then maybe ED should reconsider its role as a reform organization. The stakes are that high.
Most readers probably know how the program works. Basically, the state identifies the bottom 5 percent of its persistently lowest achieving schools, including Title I and Title I-eligible high schools with a graduation rate of 60 percent or less. Once those schools are identified, districts can apply for SIG funds on behalf of those schools, but only if they implement one of four prescriptive school intervention models.
The charts above show the differences in: a) monthly employment levels and b) monthly unemployment rates between 1992 and 2011 for: a) college graduates and b) workers with less than a high school degree. The differences are quite striking and interesting, and might help explain some of the labor market dynamics in the current "jobless recovery."
Note that the employment level for college graduates flattened during the 2008-2009 recession, but is now at a record high level. In contrast, the employment level for workers without a high school degree is about 2.5 million below the pre-recession peak. Likewise the jobless rate for college graduates has increased by a few percentage points because of the recession (and is now at 4.4%), but the jobless rate for workers with less than a high school degree has increased by more than six percentage points (now at 14.3%), and was recently almost ten percentage points above its pre-recession level.
I like writing about classrooms. I think state and national education politics, by comparison, are irrelevant and trivial. Steven Brill, in his new book "Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools," wants to prove me wrong. He may have done so.
The book is about the U.S. Education Department and school superintendents and teacher union leaders in New York, Denver, Florida, New Orleans and the District wallowing in regulations and legislation and memoranda of understanding. What a bore, I thought. I put it in the bathroom, my spot for stuff my job forces me to read. Within the first few pages, I was taking the book everywhere -- the supermarket checkout line, the dinner table, the movies.
It is funny, exciting, surprising and deep. Brill is a remarkable person, a reporter who became a mogul, creating American Lawyer magazine, Court TV, Brill's Content magazine and Press+, a new business model for journalism online. But he still likes reporting.
Never put on the Internet anything you wouldn't want to see in the newspaper, right? Tell that to the American Federation of Teachers, which recently posted online an internal document bragging about how it successfully undermines parental power in education.
This document concerns "parent trigger," an ambitious reform idea we've reported on several times. Invented and passed into law in California in early 2010, parent trigger empowers parents to use petition drives to force reform at failing public schools. Under California law, a 51% majority of parents can shake up a failing school's administration or invite a charter operator to take it over.
California's innovation caught on quickly--and that's where the AFT's PowerPoint presentation comes in. Prepared (off the record) for AFT activists at the union's annual convention in Washington, D.C. last month, it explains how AFT lobbying undermined an effort to bring parent trigger to Connecticut last year. Called "How Connecticut Diffused [sic] The Parent Trigger," it's an illuminating look into union cynicism and power.
This "everyone is saying teachers are overpaid" meme has quickly gained traction among the credulous. You can apparently attract celebrities like John Stewart and Matt Damon to rallies by playing the mom card and telling them that people are saying teachers are overpaid and it's important to push back on that notion. Great, except for the most part it's another in a long list of strawmen in the education debate. In fact, to the extent anyone in the mainstream of the education conversation is saying anything even approaching "teachers are overpaid" the conversation centers on the sustainability of current public sector benefit schemes for retirement (pdf) and health care. And while some of the "crisis" rhetoric is overblown there is a real problem with teacher pensions in some states. In the public debate that's a different issue though than cash compensation, which is what people usually discuss when they want to argue about this. So, it is worth pointing out that while teachers are not overpaid, the wages are competitive in many places. Like the pension issue, and given the structure of our education "system" like most issues, there is a a great deal of variance.
It's not often the words imagination and innovation are used in the context of transcripts, or anything related to most registrar offices. I was lucky this past month to attend the Registrar Forum at the AACRAO Technology Conference, and in the closing session, Tom Black, Associate Vice Provost for Student Affairs and University Registrar at Stanford made me remember how powerful thinking outside the box can be, especially for something I take for granted: a student's transcript.
Like many Registrars, I came to this profession through a work-study gig. I worked simultaneously in my college IT Help Desk and Registrar's Office, two offices with different orientations to student computing, but also a lot of overlap. When I was a freshman in the late 1990s, online services under one administrative umbrella were rare, and Wesleyan pioneered electronic portfolios as a wrap-around to most student computing services on campus. While I still think of the e-portfolio as a portal with another name, Tom Black's presentation made me realize the synergy between the two concepts, and how portfolios can enhance the academic transcript.
A business owner and father of three told a packed courtroom today that he joined a lawsuit to stop Douglas County School District's voucher program because it will harm his daughters' schools.
"This is taking money from public schools and funding religious and private schools. This is going to cost our school district precious resources that we do not have," Kevin Leung said. "I taught my children to do what's right. It might cost me business in Douglas County and things like that, but it doesn't matter. You have to do what's right."
Leung testified during the first of what is expected to be three days of hearings on a request to temporarily stop Douglas County from implementing the voucher program until a lawsuit challenging the legality of the program is resolved.
Do voucher programs force public schools into a zero-sum game by redirecting public funds and promising students to private schools? Or do school-choice options spur healthy competition by pressuring public schools to improve? Using data from Florida's Tax Credit Scholarship Program, David Figlio of Northwestern University argues that public schools improve their performance when faced with the prospect of losing students to nearby private schools through voucher programs, and that greater competition results in greater gains in public school students' test scores. In other words, the competitive effects of school choice could create a system where everybody wins.
At least 200 public schools in Michigan would be at risk of losing their state accreditation -- and being closed -- under new standards being pushed by the state Department of Education.
Under the changes, accreditation would be based on standardized test scores, a move state education officials say would help them identify failing schools that need support and intervention.
Currently, accreditation is awarded based on a school's compliance in six areas related mostly to administration and school organization. Schools can self-report data to the state, including staff certification, state curriculum compliance and school improvement plans.
The system misleads the public about how Michigan's 4,000 schools are doing, said Jan Ellis, Department of Education spokeswoman. She added that a revised accreditation system would make schools more accountable to parents and the public.
The state Public Education Commission plans hearings across the state on proposals to establish 21 charter schools.
The commission will start with hearings on Aug. 8 in Las Cruces and Deming. Meetings will be held during the rest of the week in Albuquerque, Moriarty, Taos, Penasco, Espanola, Santa Fe and Gallup.
Chance Bell does well academically, has played the piano since he was 5 years old and competes with a local swim team in the summer.
But the 12-year-old home-schooled boy from Rupert has hit the age where he wants to be more involved with his peers.
His parents, Jennifer and Mark Bell, are considering enrolling their eldest son in the state-funded Minidoka Virtual Academy that Minidoka County's school district will launch this fall.
"He wants more friends and he's interested in playing baseball," his mother said.
The district's full-time online program will offer students in grades K-8 core classes in language arts, math and science, along with a variety of electives and access to the district's extracurricular activities and athletic teams. The program, operated with software from the private online education company K12, includes regular testing after lessons and student participation in the Idaho Standards Achievement Test.
The Georgia Board of Education on Monday unanimously approved Ivy Preparatory Academy's plan to open k-12 boys and girls schools in DeKalb County.
The schools, Ivy Preparatory Academy at Kirkwood, will be housed on the former campus of Peachtree Hope Charter School. Each campus will have 265 students and a staff of 10. A parent information session will be held at 6 p.m. Tuesday on the DeKalb campus.
State charter school officials said the plan will help keep more educational options available for DeKalb students.
The state is pursuing its broad mission to improve Hawaii's public school system along several fronts, but sharpening the accountability of all parties surely is one top goal. And teachers are perhaps the most important of the parties being called to account, with plans to develop a more effective way to evaluate their work.
Proposing to overhaul teacher evaluations and make them more "performance-based" was a key element in the state's successful bid for a federal Race to the Top competitive grant -- specifically, to make student academic growth a factor in the teacher's score. To their credit, the Hawaii State Teachers Association leaders have said they favor it in concept.
The ongoing dispute between the union and the state administration, unfortunately, has further complicated what already was to be a complex process. However, the HSTA, which wants to reopen talks, has an opportunity to use evaluation reform as an olive branch to help restart negotiations for contract amendments.
An olive branch is clearly needed. The state imposed its "last, best and final offer," sparking an HSTA complaint that is now before the Hawaii Labor Relations Board.
The Round Rock school district, which earned the state's second-highest academic rating in 2010, this year has two schools that failed to meet state standards, securing "academically unacceptable" labels that will stick for two years.
The news comes as schools and districts across Texas see their ratings slide this year despite making academic gains. Figures released by the Texas Education Agency on Friday show that more than half of all Texas schools that had the highest rating in 2010, exemplary, fell in their ratings, and five times as many schools were deemed academically unacceptable, the lowest rating.
Locally, eight of the Austin school district's 112 rated schools missed state academic targets; last year, only one Austin school was rated academically unacceptable. Pflugerville this year has two schools rated unacceptable. Both traditional high schools in Bastrop failed to meet state standards and received the lowest rating. Hutto has two elementary schools that are rated unacceptable.
Appointed Detroit Public Schools Emergency Manager Roy Roberts and Gov. Rick Snyder announced on June 20 the formation of a statewide school district of "low performing" schools.
Critics of the new statewide school distrct, the Education Acievement System (EAS), say it unfairly targets Detroit students while continuing to drain DPS resources.
Beginning in 2012, according to the plan, DPS students from an undetermined number of schools would become part of the EAS for five years.
State school aid and federal grants would leave DPS and follow students to EAS, according to Lamar Lemmons, finance chair for the Detroit Board of Education.
The growing budget deficit, which now stands at $327 million, would remain. Lemmons says that scenario benefits the state apparatus, which has kept control over DPS finances by keeping the district in debt.
I feel you, Wisconsin Education Association Council; I don't trust Gov. Scott Walker, either.
But so far as I know, he's not trying to kill me.
This might be the key distinction in judging WEAC's decision to skip out on a Walker-associated effort to devise an accountability system for Wisconsin schools; one would think the state's largest teachers union would want to be a part of that.
Last week, WEAC president Mary Bell seemed to indicate it all came down to trust.
"How can we trust the governor to be a credible partner on education issues when they just passed laws to make massive cuts to school funding and silence our voices in schools?" she asked.
Detroit Public School union leaders said today they will use the weekend to strategize a response to the district breaking eight union contracts Friday to impose a 10 percent wage cut and increase employees' health insurance contributions.
"We're meeting with attorneys over the weekend and on Monday to outline what we're going to do and how we're going to do it," said Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers. The response could include a court challenge, Johnson said.
Emergency Manager Roy Roberts' order affects nearly 10,000 union and nonunion employees. The district, with a $327 million deficit, would save $81.8 million, officials said.
Teachers will have to contribute 20 percent toward their health care. Teachers will see a 10 percent cut in pay starting with their Sept. 20 paycheck, Johnson said.
Math teacher Antoine Joseph already had been thinking of leaving Miami Norland Senior High School, so when its annual grade from the state dropped from a D to an F nine years ago that just solidified his decision.
Joseph said it wasn't just a matter of being stigmatized as a failure - he was just tired of the circumstances behind the failing grade.
"There is a propensity to go to another school where the parents are more involved, the students are more eager to learn and they are more thirsty for knowledge," he said.
Joseph apparently was not alone. A recent study by a trio of economists showed a disproportionate number of Florida teachers left schools that got lower grades in 2002 after the state changed the way it evaluated them.
The researchers call it "accountability shock." That's their term for unexpected results from shake-ups in the way students, teachers, administrators or schools are evaluated, graded, rewarded or punished. The study is timely advice because accountability changes are in the works across the nation due to President Barack Obama's "Race to the Top" school initiative. The program is providing $4.35 billion in federal stimulus money to Florida, 10 other states and the District of Columbia for innovative changes aimed at improving student achievement.
The problem with many school districts, including Sun Prairie, is that the district administration (no matter how vehemently they argue to the contrary) find it too easy to spend other people's money. Instead of Tim Culver spending time with the high salaried muckety mucks, we'd love to see him visit a few seniors who are dangerously close to losing their homes.
We ALL want a good, solid, quality education for the kids of Sun Prairie. And we might all enjoy eating sea bass dinners. But the simple reality is that most of us don't have the means. It is also the seniors who struggle with property tax payments that built this district from the ground up.
The fourth meeting of the Governor's Read to Lead task force took place in Milwaukee on Friday, July 29. The meeting was filmed by Wisconsin Eye, but we have not seen it offered yet through their website. We will send out a notice when that occurs. As always, we encourage you to watch and draw your own conclusions.
Following is a synopsis of the meeting, which centered on reading improvement success in Florida and previously-discussed task force topics (teacher preparation, licensing, professional development, screening/intervention, early childhood). In addition, Superintendent Evers gave an update on activity within DPI. The discussion of the impact of societal factors on reading achievement was held over to the next meeting, as was further revisiting of early childhood issues.
Opening: Governor Walker welcomed everyone and stressed the importance of this conversation on reading. Using WKCE data, which has been criticized nationally and locally for years as being derived from low standards, the Governor stated that 80% of Wisconsin students are proficient or advanced in reading, and he is seeking to serve the other 20%. The NAEP data, which figured prominently in the presentation of the guest speakers, tell a very different story. Superintendent Evers thanked the task force members and indicated that this is all about "connecting the dots" and putting all of the "puzzle pieces" together. The work of this task force will impact the work going on in other education-focused committees.
The Florida Story: Guest speakers were Patricia Levesque, the Executive Director of the Foundation for Excellence in Education and the Foundation for Florida's Future, and Mary Laura Bragg, the director of Florida's statewide reading initiative, Just Read, Florida! from 2001 to 2006.
In a series of slides, Levesque compared Wisconsin, Florida, and national performance on the NAEP reading test over the past decade. Despite challenges in terms of English language learners, a huge percentage of students on free/reduced lunch, and a minority-majority demographic, Florida has moved from the scraping the bottom on the NAEP to the top group of states. Over the same time period, Wisconsin has plummeted in national ranking, and our students now score below the national average in all subgroups for which NAEP data is disaggregated. 10 points on the NAEP scale is roughly equivalent to one grade level in performance, and Florida has moved from two grade levels below Wisconsin to 1/2 grade level above. For a full discussion of Wisconsin's NAEP performance, see our website, http://www.wisconsinreadingcoalition.org.
Levesque and Bragg also described the components of the reading initiative in Florida, which included grading all schools from A to F, an objective test-based promotion policy from third to fourth grade, required state-approved reading plans in each district, trained reading coaches in schools, research assistance from the Florida Center for Reading Research, required individual student intervention plans for struggling students, universal K-2 screening for reading problems, improved licensure testing for teachers and principals, the creation of a reading endorsement for teaching licenses, and on-line professional development available to all teachers. As noted above, achievement has gone up dramatically, the gap between demographic groups has narrowed, early intervention is much more common, and third grade retention percentages continue to fall. The middle school performance is now rising as those children who received early intervention in elementary school reach that level. Those students have not yet reached high school, and there is still work to be done there. To accomplish all this, Florida leveraged federal funds for Title 1 and 2 and IDEA, requiring that they be spent for state-approved reading purposes. The Governor also worked actively with business to create private/public partnerships supporting reading. Just Read, Florida! was able to engineer a statewide conference for principals that was funded from vendor fees. While Florida is a strong local control state, reading is controlled from the state level, eliminating the need for local curriculum directors to research and design reading plans without the resources or manpower to do so. Florida also cut off funding to university professors who refused to go along with science-based reading instruction and assessment.
Florida is now sharing its story with other states, and offering assistance in reading plan development, as well as their screening program (FAIR assessment system) and their online professional development, which cost millions to develop. Levesque invited Wisconsin to join Indiana and other states at a conference in Florida this fall.
Questions for, or challenges to, the presenters came from three task force members.
Rachel Lander asked about the reading coaches, and Bragg responded that they were extensively trained by the state office, beginning with Reading First money. They are in the classroom modeling for teachers and also work with principals on understanding data and becoming building reading leaders. The coaches now have an association that has acquired a presence in the state.
Linda Pils stated her belief that Wisconsin outperforms Florida at the middle school level, and that we have higher graduation rates than Florida. She cited opinions that third grade retention has some immediate effect, but the results are the same or better for non-retained students later, and that most retained students will not graduate from high school. She also pointed out Florida's class size reduction requirement, and suggested that the NAEP gains came from that. Levesque explained that the retention studies to which Pils was referring were from other states, where retention decisions were made subjectively by teachers, and there was no requirement for science-based individual intervention plans. The gains for retained students in Florida are greater than for matched students who are not retained, and the gains persist over time. Further, retention did not adversely affect graduation rates. In fact, graduation rates have increased, and dropout rates have declined. The University of Arkansas is planning to do a study of Florida retention. The class size reduction policy did not take effect in Florida until last year, and a Harvard study concluded that it had no effect on student reading achievement. Task force member Steve Dykstra pointed out that you cannot compare the NAEP scores from two states without considering the difference in student demographics. Wisconsin's middle school scores benefit from the fact that we have a relative abundance of white students who are not on free/reduced lunch. Our overall average student score in middle school may be higher than Florida, but when we compare similar cohorts from both states, Florida is far ahead.
Tony Pedriana asked what kinds of incentives have been put in place for higher education, principals, etc. to move to a science-based system of instruction. The guests noted that when schools are graded, reading performance receives double weight in the formula. They also withheld funding for university programs that were not science-based.
DPI Update: Superintendent Evers indicated that DPI is looking at action in fours areas: teacher licensure, the Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards, the use of a screener to detect reading problems, and implementation of the Common Core State Standards.
The committee looking at licensing is trying to decide whether they should recommend an existing, off-the-shelf competency exam, or revise the exam they are currently requiring (Praxis 2). He did not indicate who is on the committee or what existing tests they were looking at. In the past, several members of the task force have recommended that Wisconsin use the Foundations of Reading test given in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
DPI is revising the WMELS to correct definitions and descriptions of phonological and phonemic awareness and phonics. The changes will align the WMELS with both the Report of the National Reading Panel and the Common Core State Standards. Per the suggestion of Eboni Howard, a guest speaker at the last meeting, they will get an outside opinion on the WMELS when they are finished. Evers did not indicate who is doing this work.
DPI is looking at the possibility of using PALS screening or some other tool recommended by the National RTI Center to screen students in grades K-2 or K-3. Evers previously mentioned that this committee had been meeting for 6-7 months, but he did not indicate who is on it.
Evers made reference to communication that was circulated this week (by Dr. Dan Gustafson and John Humphries) that expressed concern over the method in which DPI is implementing the Common Core. He stated that districts have been asking DPI for help in implementing the CC, and they want to provide districts with a number of resources. One of those is the model curriculum being developed by CESA 7. DPI is looking at it to see how it could help the state move forward, but no final decision has yet been made.
Task force member Pam Heyde, substituting for Marcia Henry, suggested that it would be better to look at what Florida is doing rather than start from ground zero looking at guidelines. Patricia Levesque confirmed that Florida was willing to assist other states, and invited Wisconsin to join a meeting of state reading commissioners in October.
Teacher Preparation: The discussion centered around what needs to change in teacher preparation programs, and how to fit this into a four-year degree.
Steve Dykstra said that Texas has looked at this issue extensively. Most schools need three courses to cover reading adequately, but it is also important to look at the texts that are used in the courses. He referenced a study by Joshi that showed most of the college texts to be inadequate.
Dawnene Hassett, UW-Madison literacy professor in charge of elementary teacher reading preparation, was invited to participate in this part of the discussion. She indicated we should talk in terms of content knowledge, not number of credits. In a couple of years, teachers will have to pass a Teacher Performance Assessment in order to graduate. This was described as a metacognitive exercise using student data. In 2012-13, UW-Madison will change its coursework, combining courses in some of the arts, and dropping some of the pedagogical, psychological offerings.
Tony Pedriana said he felt schools of education had fallen down on teaching content derived from empirical studies.
Hassett said schools teach all five "pillars" of reading, but they may not be doing it well enough. She said you cannot replicate classroom research, so you need research "plus."
Pils was impressed with the assistance the FCRR gives to classroom teachers regarding interventions that work. She also said spending levels were important.
Dykstra asked Mary Laura Bragg if she had worked with professors who thought they were in alignment with the research, but really weren't.
Bragg responded that "there's research, and then there's research." They had to educate people on the difference between "research" from vendors and empirical research, which involves issues of fidelity and validation with different groups of students.
Levesque stated that Florida increased reading requirements for elementary candidates from 3 to 6 credits, and added a 3 credit requirement for secondary candidates. Colleges were required to fit this in by eliminating non-content area pedagogy courses.
Kathy Champeau repeated a concern from earlier meetings that teacher candidates need the opportunity to practice their new knowledge in a classroom setting, or they will forget it.
Hassett hoped the Teacher Performance Assessment would help this. The TPA would probably require certain things to be included in the teacher candidate's portfolio.
Governor Walker said that the key to the effectiveness of Florida's retention policy was the intervention provided to the students. He asked what they did to make sure intervention was successful.
Levesque replied that one key was reading coaches in the classroom. Also, district reading plans, individual intervention plans, student academies, etc. all need to be approved by the state.
There was consensus that there should be a difference in reading requirements for elementary vs. secondary teachers. There was no discussion of preparation for reading teachers, reading specialists, or special education teachers.
Licensing: The discussion centered around what teacher standards need to be tested.
Dykstra suggested that the Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading, written by Louisa Moats, et al, and published by the International Dyslexia Association in 2010, would be good teacher standards, and the basis for a teacher competency exam. There was no need for DPI to spend the next year discussing and inventing new teacher standards.
Champeau said that the International Reading Association also has standards.
Pedriana asked if those standards are based on research.
Dykstra suggested that the task force look at the two sets of standards side-by-side and compare them.
Professional Development: The facilitators looked for input on how professional development for practicing teachers should be targeted. Should the state target struggling teachers, schools, or districts for professional development?
Rep. Jason Fields felt all three needed to be targeted.
Heyde asked Levesque for more details on how Wisconsin could do professional development, when we often hear there is no money.
Levesque provided more detail on the state making reading a priority, building public/private partnerships, and being more creative with federal grant money (e.g., the 20% of each grant that is normally carved out by the state for administration). There should be a clear reading plan (Florida started with just two people running their initiative, and after a decade only has eight people), and all the spending should align with the plan to be effective. You cannot keep sending money down the hole. Additional manpower was provided by the provision that all state employees would get one paid hour per week to volunteer on approved reading projects in schools, and also by community service requirements for high school students.
Bragg suggested using the online Florida training modules, and perhaps combining them with modules from Louisiana.
Dykstra also suggested taking advantage of existing training, including LETRS, which was made widely available in Massachusetts. He also stressed the importance of professional development for principals, coaches, and specialists.
Bragg pointed out that many online training modules are free, or provided for a nominal charge that does not come close to what it would cost Wisconsin to develop its own professional development.
Lander said there were many Wisconsin teachers who don't need the training, and it should not be punitive.
Champeau suggested that Florida spends way more money on education that Wisconsin, based on information provided by the NAEP.
Levesque clarified that Florida actually is below the national average in cost per student. The only reason they spend more than Wisconsin is that they have more students.
Rep. Steve Kestell stated that teachers around the entire state have a need for professional development, and it is dangerous to give it only to the districts that are performing the worst.
Sarah Archibald (sitting in for Sen. Luther Olsen) said it would be good to look at the value added in districts across the state when trying to identify the greatest needs for professional development. The new statewide information system should provide us with some of this value added information, but not at a classroom teacher level.
Evers commented that the state could require new teacher Professional Development Plans to include or be focused on reading.
Pils commented that districts can have low and high performing schools, so it is not enough to look at district data.
Champeau said that administrators also need this professional development. They cannot evaluate teachers if they do not have the knowledge themselves.
Dykstra mentioned a Florida guidebook for principals with a checklist to help them. He is concerned about teachers who develop PDP's with no guidance, and spend a lot of time and money on poor training and learning. There is a need for a clearinghouse for professional development programs.
Screening/Intervention: One of the main questions here was whether the screening should be universal using the same tools across the state.
Champeau repeated a belief that there are districts who are doing well with the screening they are doing, and they should not be required to change or add something new.
Dykstra responded that we need comparable data from every school to use value added analysis, so a universal tool makes sense. He also said there was going to be a lot of opposition to this, given the statements against screening that were issued when Rep. Keith Ripp introduced legislation on this topic in the last biennium. He felt the task force has not seen any screener in enough detail to recommend a particular one at this time.
Heyde said we need a screener that screens for the right things.
Pils agreed with Dykstra and Heyde. She mentioned that DIBELS is free and doesn't take much time.
Michele Erickson asked if a task force recommendation would turn into a mandate. She asked if Florida used a universal screener.
Levesque replied that Florida initially used DIBELS statewide, and then the FCRR developed the FAIR assessments for them. The legislature in Florida mandated the policy of universal kindergarten screening that also traces students back to their pre-K programs to see which ones are doing a better job. Wisconsin could purchase the FAIR assessments from Florida.
Archilbald suggested phasing in screening if we could not afford to do it all at once.
Evers supports local control, but said there are reasons to have a universal screener for data systems, to inform college programs, and to implement professional development.
Lander asked what screening information we could get from the WKCE.
Evers responded that the WKCE doesn't start unitl third grade.
Dykstra said we need a rubric about screening, and who needs what type and how often.
Pedriana said student mobility is another reason for a universal screener.
There was consensus that early screening is important. Certainly by 4K or 5K, but even at age three if a system could be established. Possibilities mentioned were district-run screenings or pediatrician screenings.
Walker reminded the task force that it only makes sense to screen if you have the ability to intervene with something.
Mara Brown wasn't sure that a universal screener would tell her anything more about her students than she already knows.
Levesque said she could provide a screening roadmap rubric for the task force.
No one on the task force had suggestions for specific interventions. The feeling was that it is more important to have a well-trained teacher. Both Florida and Oregon started evaluating and rating interventions, but stopped because they got bogged down. Wisconsin must also be careful about evaluations by What Works Clearinghouse, which has some problems.
Pedriana asked if the task force is prepared to endorse a model of instruction based on science, where failure is not an option.
The facilitator said this discussion would have to wait for later.
Early Childhood: The task force agreed that YoungStar should include more specific literacy targets.
Rep. Kestell felt that some district are opening 4K programs primarily for added revenue, and that there is wide variability in quality. There is a need to spend more time on this and decide what 4K should look like.
Evers said we should use the Common Core and work backward to determine what needs to be done in 4K.
Wrap-Up: Further discussion of early childhood will be put over to the next meeting, as will the societal issues and accountability. A meeting site has not yet been set, but Governor Walker indicted he liked moving around the state. The Governor's aides will follow up as to locations and specific agenda. The next meeting will be Thursday, August 25. All meetings are open to the public.
An effort to develop a statewide school accountability system marks a turning point in Wisconsin, education experts said last week as a public effort to design the system got under way.
When the modern school accountability movement began in the 1990s, several states such as Massachusetts, Kentucky and Florida developed their own systems for measuring how well schools helped students learn. Wisconsin created a statewide test in 1993, but deferred to local districts on what it meant for schools.
"Some states have embraced (school accountability) more than others," said UW-Madison education professor Doug Harris. "Wisconsin hasn't."
Gov. Scott Walker and State Superintendent Tony Evers, who otherwise have clashed on education issues, have agreed to change that. A task force they formed began collecting information at a symposium last week organized by Walker, Evers and the La Follette School of Public Affairs and will soon meet to begin designing the system.
When it comes to developing a system for accountability for Wisconsin's schools, including ways to measure whether students are meeting the ultimate goal of being ready for a career or college, Betebenner says, "My advice to you is to go slow ... and be deliberate."
John Johnson, director of education information for DPI, was encouraged by the standing-room-only crowd and the attendance by a number of policymakers, including key legislators, at Thursday's meeting.
"Maybe by wading into school reform rather than diving into the deep end of the pool with Race to the Top, we'll actually be able to swim, instead of drowning," he says.
When Jodi Bell enrolled in Miami Dade College's bachelor in education program, she thought she had chosen a recession-proof career and expected to land a job in special education upon graduation.
But while she's been in school, the job market has shrunk.
Broward County laid off 1,400 teachers this spring; Dade was able to balance its budget without slashing teacher jobs, but a few hundred non-instructional positions were cut.
But Bell, who is expected to graduate in May 2012, is still optimistic she'll land a job in her chosen career.
"I'm willing to move for a job, I'm not tied down to this area," Bell said. "I'm optimistic, I'm doing well in my program and my program is good."
PBIS is all the rage in school districts across the country. No...Sun Prairie didn't just dream this up all by themselves. What, exactly, is PBIS? PBIS stands for Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. It's an offshoot of the IDEA program (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). You may see/hear it as SWPBS (School-wide Positive Behavior Supports). In a nutshell, PBIS is a system of behavior modification, with three stages of intervention.
Primary intervention is targeted to all students and is s system designed to clearly identify which behaviors are acceptable and which are not. Exhibiting positive behavior is rewarded in some fashion. In theory, about 80-85% of students respond to this primary level of intervention. The overall target is to develop a system in which positive reinforcements (for "acceptable/desired" behaviors) outnumber negative reinforcements (for unacceptable behaviors) by about 4:1. In this way, kids overwhelmingly see that "being good" is the place to be. You get rewards.
PBIS extends further to the 2nd tier, kids that do not respond well to these primary tactics. These kids represent about 10-15% of the population and are those that potentially are at risk for "failure", or at the very least not realizing their academic potential. This group, however is not in need of individualized attention, but rather is targeted in small groups (a modernized form of "group" therapy). The third tier, which includes about 5-10% of students, covers those students who require individualized attention to develop positive behaviors and squelch those behaviors which are not acceptable.
Leadership in any organization comes from the top. No, the superintendent is not "the top" of a school district organization. The top spot is held by the School Board, seven elected individuals who work together to implement policies and practices to meet the changing needs of students and families, all within the limited resources, financial and otherwise, that are available.
I have been fortunate during my first two years as superintendent to work with a dedicated and hard-working School Board. Being a board member requires the commitment of endless hours of time and effort, and is frequently somewhat thankless as there are very few decisions made in a large school district that will be welcomed by all. The service and support of our current board is appreciated.
Recently the School Board met in a retreat to review the best practices of high-performing boards and evaluate what changes they can implement to improve not only the functioning of the School Board, but ultimately the effectiveness and efficiency of the school district. I commend our board for this undertaking as it is a great modeling and example of the culture we are seeking to develop in the South Washington County Schools of continuous improvement and performance excellence. While the School Board generally functions very well, there is always room for improvement and this board is committed to such evaluation, assessment and improvement of their performance.
Several Madison groups gathered on the Capitol square Saturday afternoon to be part of the national movement to "Save Our Schools."
Rallies across the nation, including a march in Washington, D.C., were planned for the weekend to highlight what organizers feel is a crisis in public education.
Those who attended the rally said they want the political games to end in the nation's capital when it comes to the debt ceiling impasse.
"I think the debt ceiling has something to do with public education," said Todd Allan Price, an assistant professor at National-Louis University. "It's showing where our misplaced priorities are. The debt ceiling has actually been raised many, many times before and the president could do that, but the problem is, is there's a lot of gamesmanship going on."
With the economy forcing closer scrutiny of budgeting at all levels of government and politicians zeroing in on government workers' pay, perhaps the most visible target is education.
For the most part, elementary and secondary education in the United States is funded with local tax dollars, with assists from state and federal coffers. And the biggest line-item expense? Teacher salaries. When it comes time to cut the budget, layoffs are announced, and because of union contracts teachers with seniority are favored. Usually those most recently hired are the ones who go.
But is this the smartest way to fix the budget? Dan Goldhaver, director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington Bothell, and Roddy Theobald, a researcher at the center and a doctoral student in statistics, write in the fall issue of Education Next this subservience to union seniority rules is wreaking havoc on the education system, often axing the most energetic and creative educators in the system. Worse yet because they are the most recent hires, their salaries are at the low end of the pay scale so it takes more layoffs to meet the dollar figure necessary to reduce the budget, pushing up class size and sometimes forcing districts to eliminate subject areas and programs entirely
Chance Bell does well academically, has played the piano since he was 5 years old and competes with a local swim team in the summer.
But the 12-year-old home-schooled boy from Rupert has hit the age where he wants to be more involved with his peers.
His parents, Jennifer and Mark Bell, are considering enrolling their eldest son in the state-funded Minidoka Virtual Academy that Minidoka County's school district will launch this fall.
"He wants more friends and he's interested in playing baseball," his mother said.
The district's full-time online program will offer students in grades K-8 core classes in language arts, math and science, along with a variety of electives and access to the district's extracurricular activities and athletic teams. The program, operated with software from the private online education company K12, includes regular testing after lessons and student participation in the Idaho Standards Achievement Test.
Add your voice to the discussion. Click here to submit a letter or mini editorial to the Journal staff.
Whatever the endeavor - be it business, athletics ... or education -nobody stays number one by staying the same.
Historically, we Iowans have prided ourselves on the quality of our schools. We have considered ourselves at or near the top in the nation.
The state's education system still gets good, passing grades, don't get us wrong, but we can and should do better in our classrooms to prepare our children for the realities and dynamics of a changing, more-global workforce. "We must," in the words of Iowa Department of Education Director Jason Glass, "have a world-class education system ..."
School administrator pay is not capped or regulated in Washington and it's not consistent by student population or region, according to an analysis of statewide compensation records obtained by The Spokesman-Review.
Last year, for example, West Valley School District Superintendent Polly Crowley - who oversees a district with about 3,600 students - made about $12,000 more than Superintendent Nancy Stowell of Spokane Public Schools, the state's third-largest district with about 28,100 students. Compensation for 21 Washington public school administrators exceeded that of the governor - $199,038 - in 2010, while 41 top school officials made more than the state's K-12 superintendent, Randy Dorn. His total compensation was $146,751.
Superintendents overseeing similar-size districts in the same county can have salaries that vary by thousands of dollars. And the superintendent of the second-largest school district is not necessarily the second-highest paid in the state.
An Indiana Education Committee met for the fist time in Indianapolis Thursday to evaluate whether the state should cap school superintendent salaries and benefits.
Indiana's 2011 Interim Study Committee on Education Issues is being co-chaired by State Senator Dennis Kruse. Kruse says the committee decided superintendent compensation was an issue for local school boards, not legislators.
"School board members need the flexibility to be able to choose the best person, and they need that negotiation to be able to offer a package deal that's better than what they might be getting in another state as well as another community. Each individual school corporation has different needs and they have different budgets."
The disparities in pay from district to district are significant. There are 291 school districts in Indiana, and according the Indiana Department of Education, superintendents earn a collective $33 million each year. That's an average of more than $113,000.
Among the many prominent thinkers attending the Urban League's annual conference Thursday, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates made his case for focusing on teachers.
One of the nation's oldest civil rights groups, the Urban League, is holding its annual conference in Boston this week.
Much of the conference focused on education Thursday -- specifically, the persistent achievement gap between black and Latino students and their white counterparts.
Gates has been in the education reform game for a while, pouring billions of dollars into scholarships, research and trying to improve public schools. Gates said there have been advances on most other civil rights issues, but not much progress on education.
Five Wisconsin school districts that invested in $200 million worth of risky financial instruments that deflated in the economic collapse are engaged this month in settlement talks with the financial institutions they claim led them astray, according to court documents.
The legal counsel for the school districts - Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee, Whitefish Bay, Kenosha and Kimberly - and for Stifel Financial Corp. and the Royal Bank of Canada met in New York this month and asked a Milwaukee County circuit judge for time to continue those talks.
"The schools are actively engaged in the mediation process, which we are hoping will produce a settlement," said Stephen Kravit, one of the attorneys representing the districts.
Kravit and other attorneys for the school districts and financial institutions met in court Thursday for a status hearing. The next major hearing, which is likely to discuss amendments to a cross-claim that Stifel filed against the Royal Bank of Canada last month, is scheduled for Aug. 30.
The seasons, they go 'round and 'round, and the painted ponies go up and down.
No, I'm not just having a Joni Mitchell musical flashback. The painted ponies on my mind are block scheduling and the way school systems - Milwaukee Public Schools particularly - make and unmake decisions, over and over.
Block scheduling of high schools and middle schools is an idea that seems to come around, pass by, then come around again. In fact, at the moment, it is both coming and going in the Milwaukee area.
Under a block plan, the traditional daily schedule of seven classes of 45 or 50 minutes is replaced with four classes of 80 to 90 minutes. Commonly, courses are completed in a quarter, rather than a semester, and then new classes start. Some argue that longer class periods allow different learning styles and more depth. Others argue block schedules mean more wasted time. I've seen evidence of both in classes I've observed. Research nationally doesn't reach a strong overall verdict.
Brookfield East and Brookfield Central high schools in the Elmbrook district will switch to blocks for the coming school year. And Homestead High School in Mequon is going to a relatively rare trimester program, in which the school year will be broken into three sections. As part of that, there will be fewer, but longer, classes each day.
Is the role of a board director accountability and responsiveness to the district -- or to voters?
Should directors work to support the superintendent and staff? Or, should they work to hold the district accountable for fiscal responsibility and academic outcomes?
If the district and the voters disagree on what should happen with taxpayer money and our children, to whom should the board listen?
Your views on this will guide you as you vote. As the only elected officials in our school district, board directors should be accountable and transparent to the people. They approve expenditures of taxpayer dollars, and they oversee the education of our children. There should be very little about their work that’s closed to public view. When the district pushes something the community doesn’t want, the board should pay attention and be inclined to support the electorate.
That’s why, on July 27, I asked Spokane board directors to allow the people to vote on whether the district should spend several million tax dollars on a proposed new data system, and on the new federal vision for public education. As directors contemplate these multi-million-dollar expenditures on (unproved) products – they're also contemplating cutting people and programs that parents actually want. So, at the July 27 board meeting, I asked the directors to put the proposed expenditures on a ballot. They were silent. They looked at each other. Then, they went on with their meeting.
State-mandated unification and consolidation of school districts in the past has not fared well with wary Arizona voters.
School districts have been concerned about losing local control, teachers and their identities if merged with each other.
A committee of school officials, board members and politicians are tackling the issue again, this time with the goal of offering Arizona's 227 school districts options to explore.
This is an important moment in the history of education in the state of Iowa.
Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, Iowa Education Director Jason Glass and an array of educational experts offered a set of challenges to educators at the two-day Education Summit in Des Moines.
The message was simple: Things need to change if Iowa is to regain its status as one of the strongest educational systems in the nation.
Although the statistics about Iowa students' performances on the National Assessment of Educational Progress can be used to support diverse narratives about how students are performing compared with their peers across the nation, international comparisons tell an unambiguous story: American schools will need to do better if the United States is going to produce a globally competitive work force for the 21st century.
When Newark's public school system accepted $5 million from the federal government last year to turn around the poorly performing Malcolm X. Shabazz High School, it agreed to replace at least half of the school's teachers, under the belief that principals could then hire better ones.
Instead, Shabazz swapped teachers with two other failing schools.
Some 68 teachers were shuffled among Shabazz, Central High School and Barringer High School, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Shabazz, which had 90 teachers, sent 21 of them to Barringer. And Barringer sent 21 of its teachers to Shabazz, according to teacher transfer records obtained through an open records request.
"Federal money may have unintentionally funded the infamous 'dance of the lemons' that has been a harmful practice in districts for decades," said Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group that helps school districts recruit teachers.
So Newark officials elected to use the "replace 50% of the staff" form of intervention for Shabazz High School. But, remember, teacher tenure is inviolable. Therefore, what happened to the 45 teachers who were removed to improve student achievement? According to the Journal, 21 of them went to Barringer High School, which is also a chronically failing school. And what happened to the 21 Barringer teachers who were supplanted by the exodus from Shabazz? Simple. They went to Shabazz. Actually, 68 teachers were rearranged among three of Newark's high schools.
Detroit public school teachers will take a 10 percent wage cut and pay more for health care in what the school system's manager on Friday said were "extreme measures" needed to address a financial emergency.
The measures are designed to save nearly $82 million as part of the Detroit Public Schools' effort to address a $327 million deficit.
"These wage concessions and health care cost-sharing plans are being implemented because we are in an extremely difficult financial period for Detroit Public Schools," Roy Roberts, the emergency manager for the school system, said in a statement.
With Washington focused on a last-minute debt deal, one California congresswoman wants her colleagues to turn their attention to an anti-immigration law that's been off the books for 70 years. Democrat Judy Chu of the 32nd District in Los Angeles County has called on fellow members to join her in a "Resolution of Regret" over the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882--a bill that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi endorsed on Wednesday.
Setting aside Ms. Chu's sense of priorities, there's a deep irony in her resolution. Even as she calls public attention to sins committed while Chester A. Arthur was president, Ms. Chu staunchly supports the most harmful form of anti-Asian discrimination in the U.S. today: racial preferences in hiring and university admissions.
Ms. Chu's resolution rightly notes that the Chinese Exclusion Act was "incompatible with the basic founding principles of equality recognized in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution." It goes on to call on Congress to "reaffirm its commitment to preserving the same civil rights and constitutional protections for people of Chinese or other Asian descent in the United States accorded to all others." Yet "the same" rights aren't what Ms. Chu wants for Asians today.
With Republicans controlling a majority of state houses and the U.S. House of Representatives, interest in school vouchers has spiked during the past year at the federal, state, and local levels. Vouchers are payments that parents use to finance private school tuition for their children. Although vouchers can be privately funded, the programs that attract the most attention and controversy provide vouchers paid for with public tax dollars.
In the deal that ended the stalemate over the federal fiscal year 2011 budget, Congress restored funding for the District of Columbia voucher program, which had been discontinued in 2009 by the Obama Administration and the previous Democratic- controlled Congress. Vouchers are also likely to be a hot-button issue during the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the 2012 national elections. Indiana recently enacted a statewide voucher program, and other states are actively considering voucher proposals with strong support from key legislators and governors. The school board in Douglas County, Colorado, adopted a local private school voucher program this spring.
In 2000, the Center on Education Policy (CEP), an independent nonprofit organization, reviewed and summarized the major research on school vouchers in the report School Vouchers: What We Know and Don't Know and How We Could Learn More, available at www.cep-dc.org. Since 2000, much has changed in the voucher landscape. On the legislative front, new voucher programs have been established during the past decade in D.C., Ohio, and New Orleans, in addition to the recently adopted programs in Douglas County and Indiana. Citizens' referenda on vouchers in California, Michigan, and Utah were defeated by sizeable margins. On the judicial front, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the longstanding Cleveland voucher program was constitutional, but state Supreme Courts struck down an established voucher program in Florida and a new statewide program in Colorado. On the research front, numerous studies have added to the knowledge base about vouchers, including comprehensive studies examining the longer-term effects of vouchers in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and D.C.
This CEP report provides updated information for policymakers and others about the status of publicly funded voucher programs and the findings of major voucher studies published since 2000. Other types of programs also subsidize private school tuition including tuition tax credits, specialized vouchers for students with disabilities, town tuition programs for remote rural students, and privately funded vouchers but in order to produce a succinct report focusing on the most controversial form of subsidy, we limited our review to publicly funded voucher programs for general education students.
THE American ideal of lazy summers filled with fun has an unintended consequence: If students are not engaged in learning over the summer, they lose skills in math and reading. Summers off are one of the most important, yet least acknowledged, causes of underachievement in our schools.
Decades of research confirm that summer learning loss is real. According to a report released last month by the RAND Corporation, the average summer learning loss in math and reading for American students amounts to one month per year. More troubling is that it disproportionately affects low-income students: they lose two months of reading skills, while their higher-income peers -- whose parents can send them to enriching camps, take them on educational vacations and surround them with books during the summer -- make slight gains. A study from Johns Hopkins University of students in Baltimore found that about two-thirds of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income ninth graders could be explained by summer learning loss during the elementary school years.
Last week, the New York Times reported that in 2007, Deutsche Bank entered into an agreement with two German universities, Humboldt University and the Technical University of Berlin, to fund a mathematical laboratory. The problematic parts were the 'secret' terms: according to the article, the Deutsche Bank could not only influence the hiring process, but bank employees could serve as adjunct professors. Perhaps the most disturbing aspects of the agreement were that the bank had veto power over the laboratory's research agenda and, more importantly, "was given the right to review any research produced by members of the Quantitative Products Laboratory 60 days before it was published and could withhold permission for publication for as long as two years."
In a letter emailed to teachers today (which you can read here), MTEA president Bob Peterson gave the results of the survey:
The survey showed that 52.4% of the membership opposed additional concessions and 47.5% favored them. Based on the results and the many thoughtful comments, the Executive Board decided to not pursue any additional concessions.
Considering that last fall's vote, which involved far larger concessions than those considered this time around, was overwhelming in favor, I think it's clear that Milwaukee teachers feel first, that we're not opposed to giving back, but we also recognize that we have given quite a lot.
But the closeness of this week's vote suggests that there is still room for compromise in the future, if we ever get the right to bargain collectively back. Currently, you might recall, it's against the law for the union and the district to meet and mutually discuss the employment conditions of Milwaukee's teachers.
One can only marvel at how masterfully Gov. Scott Walker gutted Wisconsin's public employee unions. This was deft work, surgically precise in its neutering of 50 years of collective bargaining rights.
Walker tightly limited bargainable items, made union dues voluntary, ended the lifeblood of payroll deductions for dues collection and mandated yearly certification votes for unions trying to represent public workers.
The last item is particularly devilish. To be certified, the union must receive not just a simple majority of the votes, but 51% of the entire workforce, including those who don't bother to vote at all.
Reality check: Walker himself wouldn't be governor today if he had to meet that threshold. Candidate Walker won 52.3% of the vote last November, but that was just 25.8% of the voting-age electorate. David Ahrens, a labor activist, studied the legislative numbers and found that only two of 132 lawmakers reached the 51% threshold and just one in a contested election.
For a lot of people, the Republican crackdown reeked of unfairness. This is a major reason Walker and the GOP legislative majority are nervously playing defense today: They seemed downright thuggish, to use a favorite conservative pejorative, in beating down the unions.
Gov. Terry Branstad will not seek changes to the state's universal preschool program for at least the next two years as the state moves forward with its education reform package.
The commitment is a change from Tuesday when Branstad sidestepped several questions about the future of the state's preschool program during a news conference immediately following the Iowa Education Summit.
Pre-K education found wide support among the summit's speakers and audience members, who frequently applauded when a panelist or presenter indicated their support for such programs.
Earlier this year, Branstad pushed a proposal that would have every parent pay something - based on a sliding income scale - for their child to attend a preschool program. The plan didn't make it through the Legislature, and the governor ultimately backed off, although he indicated he issue wasn't settled.
The repeal of much of Wisconsin's collective-bargaining law with regard to many of Wisconsin's public employees has not been adequately explained. This repeal will do more to improve the quality and lower the cost of Wisconsin government than anything else we've done. There are approximately 275,000 government employees in the state of Wisconsin. About 72,000 work for the state, 38,000 for cities and villages, 48,000 for counties, 10,500 (full time equivalent) for technical colleges, and 105,229 for schools. Only half of state employees are unionized, but almost all school employees are.
As you can see, the biggest impact will be on Wisconsin's schools. Since my office has received the most complaints from school teachers, let's look at how collective bargaining affects both the cost and quality of our schools.
Under current law, virtually all conditions of employment have to be spelled out in a collectively bargained agreement. Consequently, it is very difficult to remove underperforming school teachers. It may take years of documentation and thousands of dollars in attorney fees to fire a bad teacher. Is it right that two or three classes of second-graders must endure a bad teacher while waiting for documentation to be collected? Just as damaging is the inability to motivate or change the mediocre teacher who isn't bad enough to fire. Good superintendents are stymied when they try to improve a teacher who is doing just enough to get by.
As is becoming increasingly common these days however, mine turned out to be a minority view. Other Board members took turns identifying parts of the revision that they did not like, raising some concerns that they had previously expressed and some that were new. The general tenor of the comments was that the current format of the Code was fine but that Code should be stricter and that more violations should lead to mandatory recommendations for expulsion.
About an hour into the meeting, I expressed some frustration with the proceedings (since I'm just figuring this stuff out, this video starts with eight seconds of black) :
Eventually Board members settled on deep-sixing the Work Group's proposal but adopting some (but not all) of the substantive changes reflected in the revision. For example, the aggravated theft offense was added. The change to the unintentional use of force against a staff member violation was adopted (a very good move, btw), but the change to the possession and distribution of drugs or alcohol violation was not (I think). Another change boosted the potential consequences imposed for non-physical acts of bullying or harassment.
Also on our agenda Monday night was the creation of a new Board Ad Hoc Committee on Student Discipline, Conduct and Intervention, to be chaired by Lucy Mathiak. Some Board members suggested that the revisions recommended by the Work Group and rejected by the Board might be re-considered by the members of this committee in some fashion.
I found the Board's rejection of the proposed revisions and ad hoc amending of the existing Code an unfortunate turn of events and criticized what I described as our legislating on the fly right before the vote:
In Monday's post, I went through the DC teacher evaluation system, IMPACT, which weights value-added improvements in student scores at 50 percent of the teacher's evaluation, with the remaining half of the evaluation covering 22 areas (fit into 9 categories). Five classroom observations are held,
three times by a building administrator and twice by an outside "master evaluator" who is a subject-matter expert and does not report to the building administrator.
Teachers in tested subjects are evaluated by standards different from those used for paraprofessionals, counselors, special education teachers and others in the system, with teachers in non-tested subjects having only 10 percent of their evaluation based on student scores.
The "Race to the Top" program extends the reach of the federal government too far into states' public schools operations, a leading Republican senator said on Wednesday.
The Obama administration also risks neglecting poorer states by moving toward competitive education funding, Sen. Richard Shelby, the most powerful Republican on the Banking Committee, said at a hearing on education spending.
If you monitor education topics on Twitter you will quickly get the impression that huge numbers of American public schools are being replaced with charter schools. And you will also pick up lot of antipathy toward the schools from some of the most visible promoters of this week's SOS Marches.
But the numbers show that, in most places, charter schools are insignificant.
Charters are not allowed in nine states (Alabama, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia) and they make up fewer than 3 percent of all schools in 12 other states. More than 10 percent of schools are charters in only three states--Arizona, Florida, Hawaii. Charters in Washington, D.C. get a lot of attention, as they should, because they constitute 45 percent of the schools. New Orleans, where 70 percent of students attend charters, is another hot spot. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has a handy map that profiles the charter school situation in each state, going back to 1999.
The new Palm Beach County public schools budget comes with a slight property tax increase, a $500 raise for all teachers, less than 100 employee layoffs, compliance with state class-size limits, and no major school construction projects.
Following a 20-minute hearing, the School Board on Wednesday voted 5-1 to tentatively approve a $2.3 billion spending plan for the 2011-12 school year. Major changes are not anticipated before the board's final hearing and vote on Sept. 14.
"I'm not going to support it because we are giving some people raises while laying off others," said board Vice Chairwoman Debra Robinson. Board member Monroe Benaim was absent, and no one from the public commented before the vote.
The Palm Beach County School District supports 172,664 students and spends $13,320 each, based on a $2,300,000,000 budget. Locally, Madison budget plans to spend about $362,000,000 for 25,000 students; $14,480 per student..
Education leaders told a House committee Wednesday to focus on crafting comprehensive blueprint for teacher evaluations as Congress moves ahead in overhauling No Child Left Behind.
The four witnesses called before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce agreed educators have not come up with an ideal framework to evaluate teachers. They also expressed concern over whether teachers are being prepared for the classroom, and said the right people might not be going into education in the first place.
Witnesses questioned whether the higher education institutions were actively recruiting people who had a true interest or in being educators.
Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said half the people that graduate from an education program don't wind up getting teaching jobs.
Is it a given that technology enhances the acts of writing, as it does the arts and sciences of film-making, design, engineering, data collection and analyses, and so forth? What about the teaching and learning of writing?
In a flurry of recent exchanges (subject "Writing horse-shoe-of-horse-heading-east Technology") on the Writing Program Administration (WPA) listserv, scholars in writing studies have argued these points in some theoretical and practical depth. Maja Wilson, from the University of Maine, sums up the argument nicely: "Steve [Krause, of Eastern Michigan University], and others were arguing that to teach writing, you need to teach the tools available now and not teach or allow the tools on their way out (pen, pencil), because if you aren't teaching the tools, you aren't teaching writing. Rich [Haswell, professor emeritus from Texas A&M University], and others argued that, while teaching the use of all those tools can be a good thing, it isn't necessary to teach writing: writing itself transcends the particular tools, so while teaching the tools can be involved in teaching writing, it isn't necessarily the same thing."
No statistic in education is more damning than the nation's dropout rate. Almost 4 million students start ninth grade every year. One in four won't graduate.
About half of those who drop out every year are black. Most will end up unemployed, and by their mid-30s, six out of 10 will have spent time in prison. In Chicago, one young man dropped out, spent time in jail and is now getting a second chance.
For a kid who's been hustling and gang-banging on the streets of South Chicago for much of his life, 19-year-old Patrick Lundvick doesn't look menacing at all.
New Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard unveiled a major reorganization of the district's management structure Wednesday, overhauling how schools are divided regionally and creating new upper management positions.
Brizard created four new cabinet-level positions: Chief Community and Family Engagement Officer and Chief Portfolio Officer, who will report to Brizard, and Chief of Leadership Development and Chief of Instruction, who will be under Chief Education Officer Noemi Donoso. District spokeswoman Becky Carroll said the new positions will not increase the size of the central office staff.
Brizard said the Chief Portfolio Officer will face a "monumental task" to develop the district's strategy for increasing high-quality school options, especially in high-need neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. The portfolio officer will be charged with helping to decide when to open new schools and close existing ones, Brizard said, and may also work to attract outside school operators, such as the College Board, to run schools in Chicago.
A survey of media reports on higher education might easily lead those of us working in the field to wonder: When did students and their parents start seeing college as a gantlet rather than as an exciting pathway to opportunity? When did policy makers stop seeing higher education as a valuable public investment? When did tenure become a guarantee only of a declining real wage? When did I start playing for a losing team?
We believe that the answer to these questions is "never," or at least "not yet." Traditional colleges and universities continue to play an invaluable role in our society, all the more so as the world changes. Three of their functions are, for now, irreplaceable.
One is the discovery of knowledge. Though the proportion of basic research performed by businesses continues to grow, university-based research remains powerfully innovative. That was true when the first computers and the Internet were pioneered, and it remains true in the age of Google and Facebook, both spawned in universities.
Gov. Terry Branstad's "education summit" highlights this state's deficiency in education. In an increasingly competitive national and global economy, students need an education to face any challenge they -- and this country -- encounter.
We've made many attempts over the years to fix education. But we've all seen the No Child Left Behind Act's overemphasis on test scores, and we haven't really had time to measure how well the Iowa Core Curriculum delivers its "challenging and meaningful content to students that prepares them for success in life."
The most important thing in education is employing teachers who want to teach. One way to attract good teachers whose work is worth paying for, of course, is to raise salaries above the statewide average of $41,970.
When Luis Mario Rojas was fired from the Elizabeth Board of Education in 2006, he claimed he had been the victim of a political purge.
In a federal lawsuit, Rojas said that while district officials cited a poor work record and budget cutbacks, the real reason for his termination after nearly 20 years on the job was that he became viewed as a disloyal soldier. His sister, former board member Oneida Duran, had a falling out with those in control of the school district.
Earlier this year, board members agreed to resolve the matter. They gave Rojas $68,997 to settle his complaint. In addition, they paid out another $24,652 to settle a separate workers' compensation case. Then they put him back on the payroll -- paying him $60,064 annually until he becomes eligible for retirement in two years.
As part of the agreement, he promised never to say a word about it.
It's hard to frame the decision by the state's largest teachers union to not participate in a unique task force to improve our schools as anything other than disappointing.
Sure, leaders of the Wisconsin Education Association Council are angry and frustrated to the extreme with Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers for requiring more financial contributions from all public sector employees - including teachers - while strictly limiting collective bargaining.
Go ahead - be angry and frustrated. But don't just withdraw from a great opportunity to improve our schools
Mayor Rahm Emanuel certainly made news over his angry, finger-wagging scolding of NBC Chicago TV reporter Mary Ann Ahern the other day.
Ahern dared ask the Rahmfather whether he'd send his kids to the public schools he controls. He reportedly became indignant, took off his microphone and ended the interview.
Later, and with great courtesy, Emanuel revisited the topic with a rival station -- which then reported the big exclusive that the mayor was sending his children to a private school.
Emanuel runs Chicago Public Schools. He's shown grit to stand publicly and admonish the teachers union to improve the product. But he decided his children will not attend the public schools.
Public school systems around the country may have spent the past several years starving for cash in this financially troubled era, but a new report shows that philanthropists doled out $684 million in private grants from 2000-08 to organizations involved in reforming the teaching profession.
The analysis, the first comprehensive examination of philanthropy activity in this area, showed that the biggest chunk of the money -- 38 percent -- went to teacher recruitment, while 22 percent was spent on professional development, 14 percent on teacher preparation and less than 10 percent for everything else.
One organization was the big winner in the money giveaway, according to the University of Georgia researchers who did the analysis, and given all the attention it has received from school reformers, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, it should come as no surprise.
The stagnation of Iowa's educational system will impact the region negatively in more than just rankings, according to the United States Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. The status quo has potential to cripple Iowans entering a globally competitive job market.
"The countries out there that out-educate us, they out-compete us," Duncan said. "The sad truth is that Iowa has started slowly slouching toward mediocrity."
The Keynote speaker of Gov. Terry Branstad's much publicized Education Summit, said that reform will be tough, possibly unpopular, but absolutely necessary to remain relevant in a "knowledge economy."
Public schools," ALEC wrote in its 1985 Education Source Book, "meet all of the needs of all of the people without pleasing anyone." A better system, the organization argued, would "foster educational freedom and quality" through various forms of privatization: vouchers, tax incentives for sending children to private schools and unregulated private charter schools. Today ALEC calls this "choice"-- and vouchers "scholarships"--but it amounts to an ideological mission to defund and redesign public schools.
The first large-scale voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, was enacted in 1990 following the rubric ALEC provided in 1985. It was championed by then-Governor Tommy Thompson, an early ALEC member, who once said he "loved" ALEC meetings, "because I always found new ideas, and then I'd take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare [they were] mine."
ALEC's most ambitious and strategic push toward privatizing education came in 2007, through a publication called School Choice and State Constitutions, which proposed a list of programs tailored to each state.
WRC recommends reading the following open letter from Madison neuropsychologist Dan Gustafson to the Governor's Read to Lead task force. It reflects many of our concerns about the state of reading instruction in Wisconsin and the lack of an effective response from the Department of Public Instruction.
An Open Letter to the Read-To-Lead Task Force
From Dan Gustafson, PhD
State Superintendent Evers, you appointed me to the Common Core Leadership Group. You charged that the Leadership Group would guide Wisconsin's implementation of new reading instruction standards developed by the National Governors' Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
It is my understanding that I was asked to join the group with the express purpose of bringing different voices to the table. If anything, my experience with the group illustrates how very far we need to go in achieving a transparent and reasoned discussion about the reading crisis in Wisconsin.
DPI Secretly Endorses Plan Created by Poor Performing CESA-7
I have grave concerns about DPI's recent announcement that Wisconsin will follow CESA-7's approach to implementing the Common Core reading standards. DPI is proposing this will be the state's new model reading curriculum.
I can attest that there was absolutely no consensus reached in the Common Core group in support of CESA-7's approach. In point of fact, at the 27th of June Common Core meeting, CESA-7 representative Claire Wick refused to respond to even general questions about her program.
I pointed out that our group, the Common Core Leadership Group, had a right to know about how CESA-7 intended to implement the Common Core Standards. She denied this was the case, citing a "non-disclosure agreement."
The moderator of the discussion, DPI's Emilie Amundson, concurred that Claire didn't need to discuss the program further on the grounds that it was only a CESA-7 program. Our Common Core meeting occurred on the 27th of June. Only two weeks later, on July 14th, DPI released the following statement:
State Superintendent Evers formally adopted the Common Core State Standards in June 2010, making Wisconsin the first state in the country to adopt these rigorous, internationally benchmarked set of expectations for what students should know and are expected to do in English Language Arts and Mathematics. These standards guide both curriculum and assessment development at the state level. Significant work is now underway to determine how training will be advanced for these new standards, and DPI is currently working with CESA 7 to develop a model curriculum aligned to the new standards.
In glaring contrast to the deliberative process that went into creating the Common Core goals, Wisconsin is rushing to implement the goals without being willing to even show their program to their own panel of experts.
What Do We Know About Wisconsin/CESA-7's Model Curriculum?
As an outsider to DPI, I was only able to locate one piece of data regarding CESA-7's elementary school reading performance:
4TH GRADE READING SCORES, 2007-08 WKCE-CRT,
CESA-7 IS AMONG THE WORST PERFORMING DISTRICTS.
CESA-7 RANKED 10TH OF THE 12 WISCONSIN CESA'S.
What Claire did say about her philosophy and the CESA-7 program, before she decided to refuse further comment, was that she did not think significant changes were needed in reading instruction in Wisconsin, as "only three-percent" of children were struggling to read in the state. This is a strikingly low number, one that reflects an arbitrary cutoff for special education. Her view does not reflect the painful experience of the 67% of Wisconsin 4th graders who scored below proficient on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
As people in attendance at the meeting can attest, Claire also said that her approach was "not curriculum neutral" and she was taking a "strong stand" on how to teach reading. Again, when I pressed her on what these statements meant, she would only reference oblique whole language jargon, such as a belief in the principal of release from instruction. When I later asked her about finding a balance that included more phonics instruction, she said "too much emphasis" had been given to balanced literacy. After making her brief statements to the Common Core group, she said she had already disclosed too much, and refused to provide more details about the CESA-7 program.
Disregarding Research and Enormous Gains Made by other States, Wisconsin Continues to Stridently Support Whole Language
During the remainder of the day-long meeting on the 27th, I pressed the group to decide about a mechanism to achieve an expert consensus grounded in research. I suggested ways we could move beyond the clear differences that existed among us regarding how to assess and teach reading.
The end product of the meeting, however, was just a list of aspirational goals. We were told this would likely be the last meeting of the group. There was no substantive discussion about implementation of the goals--even though this had been Superintendent Evers' primary mandate for the group.
I can better understand now why Emilie kept steering the discussion back to aspirational goals. The backroom deal had already been made with Claire and other leaders of the Wisconsin State Reading Association (WSRA). It would have been inconvenient to tell me the truth.
WSRA continues to unapologetically champion a remarkably strident version of whole-language reading instruction. Please take a look at the advocacy section of their website. Their model of reading instruction has been abandoned through most the United States due to lack of research support. It is still alive and well in CESA-7, however.
Our State Motto is "Forward"
After years of failing to identify and recommend model curriculum by passing it off as an issue of local control, the DPI now purports to lead. Unfortunately, Superintendent Evers, you are now leading us backward.
Making CESA-7 your model curriculum is going to cause real harm. DPI is not only rashly and secretly endorsing what appears to be a radical version of whole language, but now school districts who have adopted research validated procedures, such as the Monroe School District, will feel themselves under pressure to fall in line with your recommended curriculum.
By all appearances, CESA-7's program is absolutely out of keeping with new Federal laws addressing Response to Intervention and Wisconsin's own Specific Learning Disability Rule. CESA-7's program will not earn us Race to the Top funding. Most significantly, CESA-7's approach is going to harm children.
In medicine we would call this malpractice. There is clear and compelling data supporting one set of interventions (Monroe), and another set of intervention that are counter-indicated (CESA-7). This is not a matter of opinion, or people taking sides. This is an empirical question. If you don't have them already, I hope you will find trusted advisors who will rise above the WSRA obfuscation and just look at the data. It is my impression that you are moving fast and receiving poor advice.
I am mystified as to why, after years of making little headway on topics related to reading, DPI is now making major decisions at a breakneck pace. Is this an effort to circumvent the Read-To-Lead Task Force by instituting new policies before the group has finished its scheduled meetings? Superintendent Evers, why haven't you shared anything about the CESA-7 curriculum with them? Have you already made your decision, or are you prepared to show the Read-To-Lead that there is a deliberative process underway to find a true model curriculum?
There are senior leaders at DPI who recognize that the reading-related input DPI has received has been substantially unbalanced. For example, there were about five senior WSRA members present at the Common Core meetings, meaning that I was substantially outnumbered. While ultimately unsuccessful due to logistics, an 11th hour effort was made to add researchers and leadership members from the Wisconsin Reading Coalition to the Common Core group.
The Leadership Group could achieve what you asked of it, which is to thoughtfully guide implementation of the Common Core. I am still willing to work with you on this goal.
State Superintendent Evers, I assume that you asked me to be a member of the Leadership Group in good faith, and will be disappointed to learn of what actually transpired with the group. You may have the false impression that CESA-7's approach was vetted at your Common Core Leadership Group. Lastly, and most importantly, I trust you have every desire to see beyond destructive politics and find a way to protect the welfare of the children of Wisconsin.
Iowa school reform legislation doesn't need consensus as much as it needs follow-through and buy-in from the top.
Teachers need to be evaluated by their peers and paid according to how well they perform in the classroom and on the test.
Principals need more training, and school districts need to be more selective in whom they hire for a building's top job. Tenure has to be earned, not once, but several times during an educator's career.
Those were just a few of the opinions aired at the Iowa Education Summit during the first day of the two-day Iowa Education Summit that brought teachers, principals, business leaders, college professors, politicians, nonprofit representatives and the nation's top educational authority, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, to Des Moines. The summit is expected to be the catalyst for a wide-reaching education reform package Gov. Terry Branstad will introduce next legislative session.
A health insurance company affiliated with the state's largest teachers union is caught in the cross-fire of Wisconsin school reform politics, the company's CEO told the Journal Sentinel editorial board Monday.
"We haven't really wanted to be the story," said Mark Moody, president and CEO of WEA Trust. "We've become the lightning rod for debate."
Moody said WEA Trust has lost about 17% of its subscribers as a number of school districts have switched insurance providers in the wake of deep state budget cuts. WEA Trust at the start of the year insured two-thirds of Wisconsin's 424 school districts, but only 35% of the state's teachers, since many of the insured districts are small, he said.
One renewal sweetener WEA Trust offered to districts - which the provider said was done in accordance with federal rules - may prompt legal action.
I am about to do something rash, which is to disagree with Lucy Kellaway. Last week, the fearless observer of business follies went too far: she called for PowerPoint to be banned.
The prosecution's argument is simple: many PowerPoint presentations are very bad. This is true but it hardly makes the case for a ban. Serviceable tools can produce awful results in the wrong hands, as anyone who has seen me put up shelves can attest. Banning the screwdriver is not the answer.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told an Iowa education summit Monday that Americans need to set aside political differences that divide them and unite behind reforms that will provide the educational excellence that children need to pursue their dreams in a competitive global economy.
However, Christie did not duck controversy either by calling for an overhaul of the current tenure system for teachers, saying children should not be the victims of a failing system that does not reward excellence or enforce consequences for failure.
"You have to draw some lines in the sand, but you also have to leave some room for compromise," he told reporters after delivering a half-hour address to about 1,700 participants in a summit called by Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad to brainstorm on ways to rekindle the state's once-proud tradition of educational excellence that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said was "at the top of the mountain" in 1992.
The Chronicle of Higher Education released a report today "Great Colleges to Work for 2011" based on responses from nearly 44,000 people at 310 institutions. The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor made the list, and its profile included the institutional details displayed in the chart above: 9,652 full-time administrators and professionals vs. 6,305 full-time faculty and 1,260 part-time faculty. In other words, there are 53% more full-time administrators than full-time faculty. Is this evidence of "administrative blight."
Of all the problems this country faces in education, one of the most complicated, heart-wrenching and urgent is the dropout crisis. Nearly 1 million teenagers stop going to school every year.
The impact of that decision is lifelong. And the statistics are stark:
The unemployment rate for people without a high school diploma is nearly twice that of the general population.
Over a lifetime, a high school dropout will earn $200,000 less than a high school graduate and almost $1 million less than a college graduate.
Dropouts are more likely to commit crimes, abuse drugs and alcohol, become teenage parents, live in poverty and commit suicide.
Dropouts cost federal and state governments hundreds of billions of dollars in lost earnings, welfare and medical costs, and billions more for dropouts who end up in prison.
NPR is looking at the dropout crisis through the stories of five people. Three dropped out of school years ago. They talk about why they left school, the forces in their lives that contributed to that decision and its impact in the years since.
As hundreds of thousands of public school supporters gather in Washington DC the weekend of July 28 to 30, 2011, Wisconsin advocates will hold a rally in support of the Save Our Schools agenda at 3:00 PM on Saturday July 30, near the State St. entrance to the Capitol.
"Public schools are under attack. There is a need for national, state, and local action in support of our schools. Wisconsin has been ground zero in this; the Save Our Schools demands from the Guiding Principles provide a great framework to build our state movement and work to expand opportunities to learn" said education activist Thomas J. Mertz.
The Save Our Schools demands are:
Equitable funding for all public school communities
An end to high stakes testing used for the purpose of student, teacher, and school evaluation
Teacher, family and community leadership in forming public education policies
Curriculum developed for and by local school communities
Doing more with less doesn't work. "The time to act is now. While phony debates revolve around debt ceilings, students and teachers across the country are shortchanged. We need real reform, starting with finally fixing the school funding formula, and putting families and communities first. What child and what teacher don't deserve an excellent school?" said rally organizer Todd Price, former Green Party Candidate for Department of Public Instruction and Professor of Teacher Education National Louis University.
The event will feature speeches from educators, students, parents and officials, as well as opportunities for school advocates from throughout Wisconsin to connect and organize around issues of importance in their communities.
A new analysis of the nation's schools found that Rhode Island falls below the national average for offering high-level curriculum such as Advanced Placement or talented and gifted programs, particularly in the more suburban districts in the state.
The report, which seeks to showcase what is known as the "opportunity gap" between wealthy and high-poverty school districts, actually suggests that Rhode Island offers similar chances to be involved in specialty programs in urban schools as it does in suburban schools. In fact, in some cases, the high-level programs are more available in cities like Providence than they are in Barrington.
But the reality is the state offers very little advance programming overall, meaning that while there may not be a significant gap between the city schools and the ones from more rural areas, Rhode Island schools are still being outpaced by the rest of New England and most cases, the country.
The Numbers
The study, which was conducted by ProPublica, found that Rhode Island falls well-behind the rest of the country when it comes to offering AP tests, advanced mathematics courses and talented and gifted programming.
More students, however, are taking chemistry and physics than in other parts of the country.
This summer, the Relay Graduate School of Education will open as New York's first standalone college of teacher preparation in nearly a century. Relay is being created out of Teacher U, a program within Hunter College and one of the many new models that have gained traction around the country. Relay preaches the practical over the theoretical -- and will have no traditional courses, no campus, no lectures -- all with the end goal of changing the way teachers in this country are taught.
"This," says Matthew Carpenter, "is my favorite exercise." I peer over his shoulder at his laptop screen to see the math problem the fifth grader is pondering. It's an inverse trigonometric function: cos-1(1) = ?
Carpenter, a serious-faced 10-year-old wearing a gray T-shirt and an impressive black digital watch, pauses for a second, fidgets, then clicks on "0 degrees." Presto: The computer tells him that he's correct. The software then generates another problem, followed by another, and yet another, until he's nailed 10 in a row in just a few minutes. All told, he's done an insane 642 inverse trig problems. "It took a while for me to get it," he admits sheepishly.
Carpenter, who attends Santa Rita Elementary, a public school in Los Altos, California, shouldn't be doing work anywhere near this advanced. In fact, when I visited his class this spring--in a sun-drenched room festooned with a papercraft X-wing fighter and student paintings of trees--the kids were supposed to be learning basic fractions, decimals, and percentages. As his teacher, Kami Thordarson, explains, students don't normally tackle inverse trig until high school, and sometimes not even then.
As Iowa political and education leaders prepare to make sweeping changes in the state's schools, experts monitoring similar efforts across the country caution that much of what is being tried is still controversial and uncharted territory.
For example:
- A growing body of anecdotal evidence and research supports the push toward longer school days and years to benefit students' academic achievement, especially among low-income or disadvantaged children. But the cost-benefit ratio of such moves remains fiercely debated and some experiments have had mixed results.
John Behrens directs Cisco's Networking Academy. They partner with 10,000 schools in 160 countries and provide free online courses on computer networking. In addition to being an important workforce development strategy, they wanted the Academy to be an important demonstration project for eLearning.
Prior to joining Cisco in 2000, John was a professor of education at ASU. John directs curriculum, assessment, and technology associated with the Academies, so he has the opportunity to create a fully aligned instructional system with an integrated data architecture behind it.
The Academy serves high school and post secondary students interested in careers in networking and IT as well as students that just want broader job skills. They serve 1 million students annually and deliver 40,000 exams most weekdays.
A heat dome has settled over much of American education. Is Gov. Scott Walker just going to add to the stifling atmosphere? Or is Walker right that there are cool breezes in his ideas for how to increase school quality overall?
First, the national perspective: You would think by now, the heat would have been drained from some of the debate about what works in education, especially when it comes to serving urban kids. People have been working on this for decades. Haven't we figured out answers yet?
In most ways, no. Even a lot of things that seem like answers haven't been brought successfully to wide use. Things that look good on paper (or in a political speech) have often accomplished little in reality. The profoundly troubling march to perpetuating educational failure, for the most part, continues.
As disappointment grows, the debates between "education reformers" and those who think the "reformers" are going in the wrong directions often have been contentious. If you follow the tweets and postings and such, you'll find occasional light but a lot of heated rhetoric. Add in this year's wars over the pay, benefits and unions of public employees, combined with the hyperpartisan nature of the times, and you have an atmosphere that should carry health warnings.
For a measure that was supposed to have been stripped of all policy measures, the 148-page K-12 education bill lawmakers approved early Wednesday morning, scarcely an hour after it was released, contains an awful lot of specific, prescriptive language laying out how Minnesota school districts and their staffs are to go about their business.
And the devastation the shift will cause is where most of the educators canvassed on Wednesday would like the public's attention to stay, given that the cumulative deficit it has caused is about an eye-popping $3 billion. That's some $3,000 per pupil, or more than half the annual general fund appropriation.
Recently, the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) announced a redesign of all education programs within its six universities and 13 community colleges called "Ready2Teach." The TBR is initiating change in the process of preparing new teachers for public school classrooms.
Although as a private college, Maryville College is not governed by the TBR, our goal in the teacher education program is to equip our teacher licensure students with research-based knowledge and skills that will facilitate the learning for all children. My concern about the June 13 Associated Press story about Ready2Teach that ran in the News Sentinel, and across the state, was the inaccuracies about how we currently prepare new public school teachers. Here are a few misconceptions:
n Education majors spend most of their time in college listening to lectures about teaching methods or education theory.
There's lots of discussion regarding the pros and cons of tenure. The Trenton Times describes an instance that highlights the difficulties school districts face in dismissing tenured employees. Rayshaun Davis, a member of one of the Trenton Public Schools unions, the Business-Technical Employees Association, was assigned as a Youth Development Liaison at Trenton Central High in a program designed to "help students avoid teen pregnancy, substance abuse and other pitfalls of at-risk youth."
Massachusetts' METCO program (Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity) enables about 3,300 students who live in Boston and Springfield to attend opportunity-rich suburban schools. Since the vast majority of the students in METCO are either African American or Latino and most suburban districts remain overwhelmingly white, METCO fulfills two goals: it creates a degree of racial and ethnic diversity and provides students who'd otherwise attend challenged school districts the opportunity to attend schools with reputations for rigor and excellence.
METCO is one of eight voluntary interdistrict school desegregation programs in the United States and the second longest-running program of its kind. This paper describes the structure and history of METCO and summarizes what is known about the academic achievement and experiences of students who participate in the program. We argue that given METCO's generally positive track record, its enduring popularity and the well-established benefits of racial and ethnic diversity in schools, educational leaders should seriously consider expanding METCO, should provide more incentives to suburban districts to participate and should conduct more rigorous, transparent analyses of the program.
William Klein'a story may sound familiar to his fellow graduates. After earning his bachelor's in history from the College at Brockport, he found himself living in his parents' Buffalo home, working the same $7.25-an-hour waiter job he had in high school.
It wasn't that there weren't other jobs out there. It's that they all seemed to want more education. Even tutoring at a for-profit learning center or leading tours at a historic site required a master's. "It's pretty apparent that with the degree I have right now, there are not too many jobs I would want to commit to," Mr. Klein says.
So this fall, he will sharpen his marketability at Rutgers' new master's program in Jewish studies (think teaching, museums and fund-raising in the Jewish community). Jewish studies may not be the first thing that comes to mind as being the road to career advancement, and Mr. Klein is not sure exactly where the degree will lead him (he'd like to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in the Middle East). But he is sure of this: he needs a master's. Browse professional job listings and it's "bachelor's required, master's preferred."
If you're a politician who has all kinds of things to say about public education, do voters have the right to know where you send your children to school?
That's a question that seems to be surfacing a lot lately. A few weeks ago, on NBC's "Meet the Press," Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, as vicious a critic of teachers unions as exists among American politicians today, repeated his assertion that where he chooses as a parent to educate his four children (Catholic schools, as it turns out) is nobody's business.
This week, Rahm Emanuel, the newly installed mayor of Chicago, stormed out of an interview when asked the same question, which he apparently considered a violation of his privacy. Mr. Emanuel, who has also called for school reforms, is sending his children to the same private school the Obama girls once attended.
"My children are not in a public position," Mr. Emanuel testily told the local NBC reporter who asked the question. "The mayor is."
Was the $5 Billion Worth It? A decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks teachers, charters--and regrets, Mea Culpa on Small Learning Communities; Does More Money Matter?
One of the foundation's main initial interests was schools with fewer students. In 2004 it announced that it would spend $100 million to open 20 small high schools in San Diego, Denver, New York City and elsewhere. Such schools, says Mr. Gates, were designed to--and did--promote less acting up in the classroom, better attendance and closer interaction with adults.
"But the overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about--whether you go to college--it didn't move the needle much," he says. "Maybe 10% more kids, but it wasn't dramatic. . . . We didn't see a path to having a big impact, so we did a mea culpa on that." Still, he adds, "we think small schools were a better deal for the kids who went to them."
The reality is that the Gates Foundation met the same resistance that other sizeable philanthropic efforts have encountered while trying to transform dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider.
In the 1970s, the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, among others, pushed education "equity" lawsuits in California, New Jersey, Texas and elsewhere that led to enormous increases in state expenditures for low-income students. In 1993, the publishing mogul Walter Annenberg, hoping to "startle" educators and policy makers into action, gave a record $500 million to nine large city school systems. Such efforts made headlines but not much of a difference in closing the achievement gap.
Asked to critique these endeavors, Mr. Gates demurs: "I applaud people for coming into this space, but unfortunately it hasn't led to significant improvements." He also warns against overestimating the potential power of philanthropy. "It's worth remembering that $600 billion a year is spent by various government entities on education, and all the philanthropy that's ever been spent on this space is not going to add up to $10 billion. So it's truly a rounding error."
Gov. Terry Branstad appeared in the gym at Corning Elementary this morning for an town hall meeting on education, a day after his administration released a school report card that found "an alarming slide toward mediocrity."
The purpose of the meeting was to get ideas on how to improve Iowa schools. Branstad asserts that Iowa's school performance has stagnated while other states have jumped ahead.
"We've been complacent too long," Branstad said.
Branstad told the Associated Press that education reform would be central to the next legislative session, which begins in January, and he argued that it was vital to change how teachers are paid. In addition to linking increased pay to classroom performance, Branstad said the state should consider increasing starting salaries.
Iowa's education system may be in need of a major remodel. Students are missing the mark in math and reading competency while their counterparts in other states have made significant gains, according to a new report released today by the Iowa Department of Education.
Achievement trends show stagnant scores across the board, from disadvantaged and minority students to white, relatively affluent students. The results document Iowa's slide from a national leader in education to a national average, or sometimes below average, performer over the past 20 years.
"There are many good schools across the state, but given the global nature of the economy, we need them to be great," said Jason Glass, director of the Iowa Department of Education. "We must have a world-class education system to have a world-class workforce."
Iowa has slid from a national leader in elementary and secondary education to an average performer over the past 20 years as other states accelerated past it, according to a state report released today.
The Iowa report card -- the first released under Republican Gov. Terry Branstad -- provides an unvarnished assessment of the state's academic performance and sounds a clarion call to improve. The report, "Rising to Greatness: An Imperative for Improving Iowa's Schools," says performance on various national and state tests show "an alarming slide toward mediocrity."
In some ways, Iowa public schools have improved over years past, but other states have surged ahead, said Jason Glass, director of the Iowa Department of Education, which produced the report.
Restoring the greatness of Iowa schools will require more than "tinkering around the edges," he said.
The state's largest teachers union will not participate in discussions led by Gov. Scott Walker and State Superintendent Tony Evers to develop a new statewide school accountability system.
Instead, starting in September, the Wisconsin Education Association Council will collect input from teachers and communities around the state about their priorities related to school accountability, WEAC president Mary Bell said in a conference call Friday.
Bell said her organization supports Evers, but doesn't trust Walker or Republican legislators on the task force.
"How can we trust the governor to be a credible partner on education issues when they just passed laws to make massive cuts to school funding and silence our voices in schools?" Bell said.
Bryan Kennedy, president of AFT-Wisconsin, said he also declined an invitation to participate.
As promised, this is my follow-up post based on our trip to the Save Texas Schools conference in Austin this past weekend. It was a sobering experience. The long and the short of it is this: Texas has abandoned its children. The Governor and the Legislators in Austin have set the stage for a protracted crisis not only in education but in the State economy. With respect to the former, we can look forward to larger class sizes, the elimination of many important programs, and the placing of even more responsibility of the backs of overworked (and fewer) teachers. Texas already ranked an embarrassing 44th in education and these developments do not bode well for future of the Lone Star State. As far as the economy is concerned, every public education layoff means less income not only for those individuals, but for local businesses where they would have shopped. Indeed, the Legislative Budget Board forecast that almost 45% of job losses would actually be in the private sector (Center for Public Policy Priorities: CPPP Urges Rejection of HB1). Furthermore, the lack of a decent education will greatly reduce the future earning power of Texans. The only firms willing to relocate here will be those hoping to find a source of cheap, low-skilled laborers. Texas will become the alternative to outsourcing to an impoverished, third-world country. The stars at night no longer look so big and bright.
Education officials across the state spent the day poring over the $13.6 billion dollar K-12 education budget bill that Gov. Dayton signed into law Wednesday.
The central provision of the bill is a $700 million delay in state aid payments for schools, a critical and controversial element for balancing the budget. School districts will need to figure out how to manage that funding delay -- which they've had to do before.
Think of the delay in schools' state aid payments this way:
Your boss says to balance the company budget, she needs to borrow money from your paycheck. She'll pay you 60 percent of your salary this year, and repay the other 40 percent next year.
Meanwhile your bills are still the same, so you'll likely need to borrow money to meet all your obligations. And even though you'll get all your money next year, you're on the hook for loan interest payments in the meantime.
Congratulations to the students, teachers and administrators of the Blackstone Valley Mayoral Academy, in Cumberland, who have achieved something extraordinary. All 152 of the kindergarten and first-grade students in the school who took the state Developmental Reading Assessment this year scored proficient, or better.
"To my knowledge, this is the first time in Rhode Island that every student at a school scored proficient or better on this early-grade assessment!" wrote Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist in a congratulatory letter.
Literacy in the early grades is obviously a crucial foundation for learning throughout one's school years, so this unprecedented achievement is one to celebrate.
Higher education in this state has been studied before. Scholars have offered opinions. Commissions have issued reports.
"Report after report," is how Lindsey Alexander put it.
As a project manager for the Citizens League, Alexander is helping produce the next one. Since January, the league, along with the Bush Foundation, has been studying how higher education might be reformed.
Will its findings have more power than reports past?
The timing might be right.
The University of Minnesota, the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system and the Minnesota Private College Council all have new leaders. That's led to predictions of more willingness for reform.
This piece is part of a leadership roundtable on the right way to approach teacher incentives -- with opinion pieces by Duke University behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard Gardner, and Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein.
In recent years there seems to have been a surge in academic dishonesty across many high schools. No doubt this can be explained in part by increased vigilance and reporting, greater pressure on students to succeed, and the communicable nature of dishonest behavior (when people see others do something, whether it's tweaking a resume or parking illegally, they're more likely to do the same).
But, I also think that a fourth, significant cause in this worrisome trend has to do with the way we measure and reward teachers.
To think about the effects of these measurements, let's first think about corporate America, where measurement of performance has a much longer history. Recently I met with one of the CEOs I most respect, and he told me a story about when he himself messed up the incentives for his employees, by over-measurement. A few years earlier he had tried to create a specific performance evaluation matrix for each of his top employees, and he asked them to focus on optimizing that particular measure; for some it was selection of algorithms, for others it was return on investment for advertising, and so on. He also changed their compensation structure so that 10 percent of their bonus depended on their performance relative to that measure.
In the wake of the Atlanta cheating scandal and recent cheating allegations in other school districts (including Washington, DC), On Leadership convened a roundtable on how best to approach teacher incentives in the U.S. education system -- with opinion pieces by Duke University behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard Gardner, and Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein.
Recent news reports of widespread or suspected cheating on standardized tests in several school districts around the country have been taken by some as evidence that we must reduce reliance on testing to measure student growth and achievement. Others have gone even farther, claiming that cheating is an inevitable consequence of "high-stakes testing" and that we should abandon testing altogether.
Former local business executive Erroll Davis, 66, who was chairman and CEO at Alliant Energy and then led the University System of Georgia, has now been tapped to lead the embattled Atlanta Public Schools.
The largest district in Georgia, with about 50,000 students, is reeling from a scathing, 800-page report released July 5 that showed nearly 180 teachers and school administrators were involved in systematically changing students' test answers at 44 of 56 of Atlanta's elementary and middle schools accused of cheating. The adults provided answers to students or erased and corrected tests so students appeared to be performing at or above local and national performance benchmarks.
A National Guard school program for at-risk teenagers is scheduled to open in 2012 in eastern Kentucky. The Appalachian Youth ChalleNGe Academy, to be housed in a renovated former elementary school, will be the second ChalleNGE school in Kentucky. Bluegrass ChalleNGe Academy at Fort Knox opened in 1999.
"Here in Harlan, we found a county with a school system that was willing to help make a program," said Col. John Wayne Smith, director of the Fort Knox program. "We believe that with an academy here, we will be able to get kids to come who wouldn't come to Fort Knox."
The primary recruiting area for the new program is 23 counties in eastern Kentucky, with any remaining openings being offered to teens in the Appalachian region of neighboring states, Smith said last week in the Harlan Daily Enterprise.
"I was looking at the numbers in our target population. I found that Appalachia has a higher rate of these kids, but we also found that because of positive family connections in the area, youth are hesitant to leave and come to Fort Knox. We have had a few come to us, but nothing like the numbers we should be getting," he said at a community meeting.
"What are the right incentives to have in place for teachers?" The very question itself is jarring. It implies that teachers don't want to perform well and that they need incentives, which in today's parlance translates into rewards (money) and reprimands (fear of loss of benefits or position).
Let me present a very different picture: Teachers should be regarded as and behave like professionals. A professional is a certified expert who is afforded prestige and autonomy in return for performing at a high level, which includes making complex and disinterested judgments under conditions of uncertainty. Professionals deserve to live comfortably, but they do not enter the ranks of a profession in order obtain wealth or power; they do it out of a calling to serve. Be it law, medicine, auditing, education or science, the expectation is the same: professionals should work hard to gain the requisite credentials, behave ethically as well as legally, and when they err, should take responsibility for their error and try to learn from it.
Days after California's public universities handed lucrative new pay and bonuses to three executives and a chancellor while raising student tuition, a state senator has introduced a bill to make such pay increases illegal in tough economic times.
The bill, filed Monday by state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, would prohibit executive pay increases at the University of California and California State University in years when the state does not raise its allocation to the schools.
This year, California slashed $650 million from each university system. In response, the UC regents and CSU trustees raised tuition last week, both for the second time in less than a year. CSU tuition is 23 percent higher than it was last fall. UC tuition is 18 percent higher.
At the same time, CSU trustees approved a $400,000 salary for Elliot Hirshman, incoming president of the San Diego campus, that is $100,000 higher than his predecessor. The campus foundation will pay for $50,000 of it.
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WHEN school textbooks make the headlines in East Asia, they are usually cast as bystanders to some intractable old dispute, and related demands that children be taught "correct" history. Thankfully though, future-minded officials in South Korea have given cause for this correspondent to write about something altogether different: by 2015, all of the country's dead-tree textbooks will be phased out, in favour of learning materials carried on tablet computers and other devices.
The cost of setting up the network will be $2.1 billion. It is hoped that cutting out printing costs will go some way towards compensating for this expenditure. Environmentalists will of course be pleased, regardless. A cloud network will be set up to host digital copies of all existing textbooks, and to give students the (possibly unwelcome) ability to access materials at any time, via iPads, smartphones, netbooks, and even Stone-Age PCs. Kids will need to come up with a new range of excuses for not doing their homework: the family dog cannot be blamed for eating a computer, nor can a file hosted on a cloud network be left behind on a bus.
The Madison School District has reached an agreement with its teachers union over changes to planning time -- a resolution Superintendent Dan Nerad said fits within the bounds of the state's new collective bargaining law.
An earlier proposal prompted hundreds of teachers to protest at a School Board meeting in May and Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews to threaten a job action if the matter wasn't resolved.
The issue relates to changes in the district's 2011-13 collective bargaining agreement with MTI, which was approved in March before the state's collective bargaining law took effect.
In the past, disagreements over contract language were often resolved through memorandums of understanding (MOUs). But once the collective bargaining law took effect June 29, districts that approved contracts after Feb. 1 couldn't modify them through MOUs, or else they would be
Update: I originally thought this was from a teacher but it is from a parent. My apologies
Below is a post from a parent, "No Confidence," from another thread but I read it and said bingo! (Emphasis mine.)
I think that the first change that could make some difference would be for teacher & administrators to understand the limits of their abilities to assess. At least the teacher could say, Sally is learning differently than many other kids I see and we don't know why. Johnny is refusing to do writing assignments and we don't know why.
Next I think that PD should include training about learning & developmental differences, with case studies, to the extent that at least teacher are familiar with the possibilities. (I have spoken with so many SPS teachers & administrators who believe that twice exceptional kids don't exist.) There are signs to look for.
Teachers' Unions: Back to the Future. Back in 1998, the Illinois Education Association commissioned the Global Business Network to assess the union's direction for the next 10-15 years and help devise options for dealing with possible scenarios. The result, a report titled The Future of the Illinois Education Association [3.1MB PDF], is a fascinating read not just for its insights into the union's strategic thinking, but for which "predictions" it got right and wrong.
I put the scare quotes around "predictions" because GBN was explicit in stating that the possible scenarios it outlined were not predictions, but merely various possibilities for which the union should plan. As the authors put it, "After imaginatively dwelling in each scenario, participants can develop strategic options that are appropriate to managing in just that scenario."
GBN developed a matrix of four scenarios, based on the variables of strong vs. weak political environments, and strong vs. weak membership connection with the union. Each of the four contains at least some relevance to current events, although other aspects read like one of those "flying car, food pills" science fiction stories written in the 1930s about life in the 1970s.
Last week I saw two women getting into a cab outside an office in central London. Both were in high heels and smart suits and were struggling with a flip chart, its pages flapping in the wind. The quaint sight of the large pad on aluminium legs filled me with longing for the days when people giving presentations wrote things down with felt pens on big sheets of paper.
I might have forgotten this scene, were it not for the fact that the very next day I was sent an invitation to join a brand new political party in Switzerland, the Anti PowerPoint party. "Finally do something!" its slogan says.
Actually I've been quietly doing something for years: I've been declining to learn how to use the ubiquitous piece of software. As a presenter, I'm a PowerPoint virgin, though as an audience member I've been gang raped by PowerPoint slides more times than I can count.
THE United States supports schools in Afghanistan because we know that education is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to build a country.
Alas, we've forgotten that lesson at home. All across America, school budgets are being cut, teachers laid off and education programs dismantled.
My beloved old high school in Yamhill, Ore. -- a plain brick building that was my rocket ship -- is emblematic of that trend. There were only 167 school days in the last school year here (180 was typical until the recession hit), and the staff has been reduced by 9 percent over five years.
This school was where I embraced sports, became a journalist, encountered intellectual worlds, and got in trouble. These days, the 430 students still have opportunities to get into trouble, but the rest is harder.
Milwaukee Public Schools laid off 519 employees after losing about $80 million in the state's new two-year budget - which dramatically reduces education spending statewide - but most other Wisconsin districts have avoided layoffs and massive cuts to programs.
School districts' ability under Gov. Scott Walker's budget-repair legislation to obtain greater contributions from employees toward health care and retirement costs, and to work outside of collective bargaining agreements, appears to have generated the necessary savings to balance most budgets.
Some districts are even hiring new teachers for the 2011-'12 academic year.
Critics say that a good financial picture now for schools will be short-lived, and that most districts will nose-dive next year because the recently acquired savings are a one-time fix.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has been at odds with state schools chief Tony Evers over budget cuts, vouchers and teachers' collective-bargaining rights. But they have found common ground in their aggravation with No Child Left Behind.
Messrs. Walker and Evers formed a joint committee this month that will write a new state policy to replace the federal law requiring schools to ensure all students are passing state math and reading exams by 2014. No Child Left Behind is "broken," they have said.
"We are not trying to get around accountability," Mr. Walker, a Republican, said in a phone interview. "But instead of using the blanket approach that defines a lot of schools as failures, we will use a more strategic approach so we can replicate success and address failure."
Wisconsin and other states say No Child Left Behind unfairly penalizes schools that don't meet rigid requirements. Tired of waiting for Congress to overhaul the law, some states have taken matters into their own hands.
Michael Horn spoke to the National Coalition Public School Options today in Washington DC. NCPSO is an extraordinary network of parents that advocate for educational options for families particularly online learning.
Horn is a coauthor of Disrupting Class and a leading advocate for online learning. He gave the roomful of discerning parents a little history of disruption.
In 1989, Clay Christensen joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School and began studying why successful organization fail. He found that the factors that had promoted success were often cause of the demise. These organizations would add sustaining innovations--think computers and cars--that made models a little better and a little more expensive every year. This cycle of product improvement leaves room for new competitors to fulfill similar needs for substantially less.
These "disruptive innovations" often replace non-consumption for under served consumers. In education non-consumption includes credit recovery, dropout recovery, and home education.
'Honors' Should Mean a Challenge, Not an Upgrade to First Class
For example, most of our honors students place out of the first-year composition course, so it is entirely possible for them to graduate without having taken a course that involves heavy-duty writing. I would argue that the ability to write effectively is the most important skill a student should have. Is there some way to build this into an honors program before a student begins work on a senior thesis?
April really is the cruelest month. I discovered that firsthand this year, as the changes I have made during my two years as director of the University of Florida honors program began to take effect. Our application procedure, once a mere formality, now de-emphasizes standardized-test scores and has caused some students to be turned away. The resulting torrent of angry phone calls and e-mails made me dread going to work all month.
May put an end to that, but it gave rise to a new stream of questions, mostly about housing. One parent made multiple requests for a layout of the honors dorm so she could ensure that her son's room location was optimal.
Has it really come to this? Are honors programs devolving into concierge services? I approach my role as director from the point of view I held as a student more than 20 years ago--that honors is a challenge to engage--but find myself confronted with parental and student expectations that honors is nothing more than a reward for a job well done in high school.
Which raises the question: Why do students want to be in our honors program? I hope they want to surround themselves with serious, like-minded peers to form a real intellectual community. But my darker suspicions about their motivation were confirmed when, during dinner with a few students, one said that the impression he'd received during his visits to the campus was that honors was like flying first class. You know: smaller classes, easier access to advising, better dorm. Further reflection led me to realize that students at universities like Florida have always been "honors students," and that the label is important to them (and their parents). Why would they accept being just a "regular" student here? I suppose that attitude is a natural outcome of today's K-12 achievement culture, but it is shocking nonetheless.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. Honors programs were created with good intentions, but it did not take long for them to be perceived as "better" than the regular university experience. Today's parents and students pursue any avenue they think will give them an advantage, beginning in elementary school; hence the proliferation of honor societies, tutoring services, test-preparation courses, and leadership programs. Students are sorted and ranked by their test scores and other metrics from the time they enter school, so they expect that the process will follow them to college.
Critics of honors programs, most notably Murray Sperber in his book Beer and Circus, say this division between "regular" and "honors" students should not exist. Sperber recalls his undergraduate days at Purdue, in the 1960s, when all classes were of reasonable size, taught by regular tenure-track faculty. State flagship institutions, he argues, should stop exploiting large numbers of undergraduates (and taking their tuition dollars) to support ever-expanding research enterprises and instead return to a focus on education. He asserts that while students would like smaller classes and more individual attention, universities cynically ply them with permissive alcohol policies and large athletics programs to keep them quiet. Honors programs, he argues, are a "life raft" for a few lucky students to navigate those treacherous seas.
I agree with some of Sperber's arguments, but I am enough of a realist to know that the ship has sailed. Business-minded legislatures are demanding more education while offering less money to pay for it. They expect flagships to produce cutting-edge research that will drive states' economies. They are also loath to authorize tuition increases, thereby forcing universities to increase class sizes and find other ways to generate revenue. So a return to the glory days is unlikely.
But Sperber misses an important point: Many students view college simply as a means to an end and are not especially engaged in the educational process. This does not make them unintelligent or unworthy of attending a selective public university, but it does not obviate the need for an honors program to challenge students who are seeking more.
So what does the future hold for honors programs at large public research universities? I suspect that those institutions that have the resources to do so (usually via endowments designated to support honors) will very likely continue much as they always have--offering small sections of lower-division courses, recruiting faculty to teach interesting electives on offbeat topics, providing specialized advising, facilitating undergraduate research. In short, offering what they advertise: a liberal-arts-college environment within a large university.
Since honors students at selective public universities meet most of their general-education requirements through advanced placement, perhaps it is time to shift the focus of the honors curriculum to the sorts of skills that these students may still need to improve. For example, most of our honors students place out of the first-year composition course, so it is entirely possible for them to graduate without having taken a course that involves heavy-duty writing. I would argue that the ability to write effectively is the most important skill a student should have. Is there some way to build this into an honors program before a student begins work on a senior thesis?
I also worry that, by skipping general-education courses, students may miss out on acquiring a deeper understanding of material they learned in high school. One step I am taking to combat this at Florida involves a new course built around the concept of justice, to be offered to all first-year students in the honors program as of next spring. The goal is to give our students a common intellectual experience that will help hone their critical-thinking and writing skills. We also encourage our students to pursue double majors, to study abroad for a semester, or to get involved in research.
But those are technical matters. In my view, a philosophical change is needed. We should move away from the notion that honors is an upgrade to first class, one to which students are entitled merely because they scored well on some dubious standardized tests. When I speak to groups of prospective students, I emphasize this point, explaining that honors is a challenge, not a reward, and that moving from high-school honors to university honors is shifting from a culture of achievement to a culture of engagement.
That should be an honors program's true function--engaging students who want to push the boundaries and helping them find ways to do it, rather than providing further empty rewards for students who jump through hoops with style.
This has been a horrible year for teachers unions. The latest stunner came in Michigan, where Republicans enacted sweeping reforms last month that require performance-based evaluations of teachers, make it easier to dismiss those who are ineffective, and dramatically limit the scope of collective bargaining. Similar reforms have been adopted in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, Indiana, Tennessee, Idaho and Florida.
But the unions' hegemony is not going to end soon. All of their big political losses have come at the hands of oversized Republican majorities. Eventually Democrats will regain control, and many of the recent reforms may be undone. The financial crisis will pass, too, taking pressure off states and giving Republicans less political cover.
The unions, meantime, are launching recall campaigns to remove offending Republicans, initiative campaigns to reverse legislation, court cases to have the bills annulled, and other efforts to reinstall the status quo ante--some of which are likely to succeed. As of today, they remain the pre-eminent power in American education.
Over the long haul, however, the unions are in grave trouble--for reasons that have little to do with the tribulations of this year.
The first is that they are losing their grip on the Democratic base. With many urban schools abysmally bad and staying that way, advocates for the disadvantaged are demanding real reform and aren't afraid to criticize unions for obstructing it. Moderates and liberals in the media and even in Hollywood regularly excoriate unions for putting job interests ahead of children. Then there's Race to the Top--initiated over union protests by a Democratic president who wants real reform. This ferment within the party will only grow in the future.
Teacher-certification requirements are among the most onerous rules enforced by state education agencies and have the potential seriously to limit the scope, quality, and accessibility of virtual schooling for years to come.
By design, certification requirements prohibit unlicensed individuals who reside within a state -- such as higher education faculty, private-sector professionals, private school faculty, and independent scholars -- from teaching virtual courses.
States should allow their virtual schools to have the flexibility to focus on hiring candidates who possess the requisite skills and relevant knowledge and experience, rather than those who possess mandated credentials.
DEREK BOK, a former president of Harvard, once observed that "universities share one characteristic with compulsive gamblers and exiled royalty: there is never enough money to satisfy their desires." This is a bit hard on compulsive gamblers and exiled royals. America's universities have raised their fees five times as fast as inflation over the past 30 years. Student debt in America exceeds credit-card debt. Yet still the universities keep sending begging letters to alumni and philanthropists.
This insatiable appetite for money was bad enough during the boom years. It is truly irritating now that middle-class incomes are stagnant and students are struggling to find good jobs. Hence a flurry of new thinking about higher education. Are universities inevitably expensive? Vance Fried, of Oklahoma State University, recently conducted a fascinating thought experiment, backed up by detailed calculations. Is it possible to provide a first-class undergraduate education for $6,700 a year rather than the $25,900 charged by public research universities or the $51,500 charged by their private peers? He concluded that it is.
Mr Fried shunned easy solutions. He insisted that students should live in residential colleges, just as they do at Harvard and Yale. He did not suggest getting rid of football stadiums (which usually pay for themselves) or scrimping on bed-and-board.
[ Ed. Note: In the immediate aftermath of the CSU Board of Trustees approving a salary of $400,000 -- 25% more than his predecessor was paid -- for the new President of San Diego State University on July 12, 2011, this piece is particularly appropriate.]
Higher education is very important to California -- to the students, to their parents, to the employers who hire the graduates, and to the people and organizations that fund the portion of the costs that is not covered by tuition. Therefore it is extremely important that educational funding be spent as efficiently as possible, and even more so in this time of financial distress.
I have taught at two campuses in the California State University system since 1998. My personal experiences at those schools raised concerns about administrative practices. Further research revealed statistics that all the stakeholders should be aware of, because of their effects on both the cost and quality of the education we provide.
For example, based on data in the California State University Statistical Abstract, the number of full-time faculty in the whole CSU system rose from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, an increase of only 3.5 percent. In the same time period the total number of administrators rose 221 percent, from 3,800 to 12,183. In 1975, there were three full time faculty members per administrator, but now there are actually slightly more administrators than full-time faculty. If this trend continues, there could be two administrators per full-time faculty in another generation.
I currently teach at Cal Poly in Pomona, where the trends for the whole system also are visible. In 1984 we had 90 "Management Personnel Plan" employees, but in 2010 there were 132. Based on data provided by the chief financial officer, the total compensation of those employees, including fringe benefits, was $20.6 million in 2010.
To put this total into perspective, if the administrators were reduced by 42 to return to the same level as in 1984, the university could hire over 50 full-time faculty (who are typically paid less than administrators). These additional faculty could teach over 300 additional classes per year, which would make it easier for students to graduate in a more timely fashion. The additional instructors would also make it unnecessary to eliminate academic programs as is currently being proposed.
Following up on a recent post on college grade inflation, there's also evidence that grade inflation is taking place at America's high schools. In a study by the college entrance exam company ACT, it found evidence of significant grade inflation between 1991 and 2003 for high school students taking the ACT exam. While ACT scores remained stable between 1991 and 2003, the chart above shows that the average high school GPA increased for ever ACT composite score over that period. From the study:
"Each point on each curve represents the average GPA for all students in 1991 and 2003 who earned that specific ACT Composite score. The curve for 2003 is higher at every Composite score point than the 1991 curve, which is evidence of the existence of grade inflation.
A "satisfactory" evaluation never did much for seventh-grade teacher Susan Cox.
In her 21 years teaching kids, she's earned a national board certification and a master's degree. She's taken on new projects and district initiatives. She's hoping the new evaluation system Wenatchee School District plans to pilot next year will become the next step up in her teaching.
"I can't remember how many years I've been on a short (evaluation) form," Cox said. "I'm observed once and that's it. But this is going to be very different."
Matthew Stewart believes there is a place for charter schools. Just not in his schoolyard.
Mr. Stewart, a stay-at-home father of three boys, moved to this wealthy township, about 20 miles from Midtown Manhattan, three years ago, filling his life with class activities and soccer practices. But in recent months, he has traded play dates for protests, enlisting more than 200 families in a campaign to block two Mandarin-immersion charter schools from opening in the area.
The group, Millburn Parents Against Charter Schools, argues that the schools would siphon money from its children's education for unnecessarily specialized programs. The schools, to be based in nearby Maplewood and Livingston, would draw students and resources from Millburn and other area districts.
"I'm in favor of a quality education for everyone," Mr. Stewart said. "In suburban areas like Millburn, there's no evidence whatsoever that the local school district is not doing its job. So what's the rationale for a charter school?"
A year ago, Adrian Fenty was the mayor of Washington, DC and Michelle Rhee was the chancellor of DC Public Schools. Rhee had made overhauling the DC system of teacher evaluation the centerpiece of her controversial and widely noted reforms. Instead of the standard system of seniority-based raises and nobody ever being fired for bad teaching, Rhee wanted to give the best teachers big raises and show the worst teachers the door.
The American Federation of Teachers was so alarmed by the prospect of the DC teachers union acceding to this plan that AFT President Randi Weingarten shoved aside local leadership and forced Rhee into a protracted series of negotiations. But because teacher evaluation is legally excluded from collective bargaining in DC, Rhee was able to put her system in place unilaterally. After a year of evaluations under the new IMPACT evaluation system, she made good on her promise: big raises for the highest performers in a time when teacher salaries were being cut and frozen in other cities, pink slips for the lowest performers, and a one-year grace period for hundreds more "minimally effective" teachers who would be fired if they didn't improve. Unable to stop the plan through negotiations, the AFT turned to raw politics, pouring $1 million into Vincent Gray's campaign to unseat Fenty. Gray won, and Rhee's divisive tenure soon came to an end.
Scott Walker, the governor who set the stage for a burst of educational excellence? The guy who helped teachers make their work more successful and more rewarding (at least intangibly)?
Goodness, turning those question marks into periods is going to be a project. It's hard to imagine how Walker's standing among teachers could be lower.
But Walker thinks that will be the verdict several years from now.
By winning (as of now) the epic battle to cut school spending and erase almost all collective bargaining powers for teachers, as well as other educational battles, Walker has changed the realities of life in just about every school in the state, including many private schools.
The focus through our tumultuous spring was on money, power and politics. Now the focus is shifting to ideas for changing education itself.
So what are Walker's ideas on those scores?
In a 40-minute telephone interview a few days ago, Walker talked about a range of education questions. There will be strong criticism of a lot of what he stands for. Let's deal with that in upcoming columns. For the moment, I'm going to give Walker the floor, since, so far this year, the tune he calls has been the tune that the state ends up playing. Here are some excerpts:
Much like our exploding federalism, history will certainly reveal how Walker's big changes played out versus the mostly status quo K-12 world of the past few decades. One thing is certain: the next 10 years will be different, regardless of how the present politics play out.
I found the interview comments on the teacher climate interesting. Watching events locally for some time, it seems that there is a good deal more top down curricular (more) and pedagogy (teaching methods) dogma from administrators, ed school grants/research and others.
It just got easier to become superintendent of a troubled New Jersey school district.
The state Board of Education Wednesday relaxed the requirements for hiring superintendents in more than 50 districts with failing schools, opening the positions for the first time to non-educators.
Backed by the Christie administration, the new regulations take effect immediately as part of a pilot program for districts with schools that fail to meet federal standards for student achievement based on test scores.
The city Department of Education and the teachers union have agreed on a teacher evaluation system at 33 failing schools that will for the first time use individual student progress to measure the performance of educators.
The agreement caps months of wrangling between the United Federation of Teachers and the DOE and comes amid a nationwide trend toward making student test scores a key component of teacher evaluations.
The agreement was reached, in part, under pressure from the state Education Department, which was withholding $65 million in federal funds for turning around failing schools unless the city and the union could agree on a new teacher grading system aligned with state guidelines.
The DOE and the UFT jointly announced the news on Friday. The 33 schools will also get help to turn themselves around. In some cases, principals will be removed.
Students packed the lobby of Chicago Public Schools headquarters Thursday to deliver a critical report on school discipline policies that contends the district spends more than 14 times as much on school security as it does on student counseling.
The report, produced by Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, a student-led "education justice" advocacy group, claims that CPS' approach to discipline and disproportionate security and guidance budgets hurts graduation rates and deprives the cash-strapped district of revenue.
"Even with all the security in our schools, students don't feel safer," said O'Sha Dancy, a rising sophomore at Dyett High School. "We are not in a prison."
The report is the result of a year-long effort in which VOYCE members and The Advancement Project, a civil rights organization, studied discipline policies at schools around the country and conducted a cost-analysis of the CPS budget to determine how much was being spent on security and police services in schools. Among the findings is that the district paid $51.4 million for school security guards in Fiscal Year 2011 compared to $3.5 million for college and career counselors.
Only two years ago, Atlanta Public Schools were the toast of the educational establishment. Scores on standardized tests had been rising--skyrocketing, in some cases--for a decade. In February 2009, schools chief Beverly Hall was feted as national superintendent of the year.
Two months later, dozens of Ms. Hall's teachers and principals engaged in the annual ritual required to produce such success: They cheated on the state standardized test.
The difference between 2009 and previous years of cheating (dating back at least as far as 2006, and perhaps 2001) was that reporters at my newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, questioned the schools' remarkable scores on Georgia's Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. Those articles prompted an investigation by then-Gov. Sonny Perdue, and this month the devastating final report arrived. It uncovered cheating by adults in 44 schools, covering 1,508 classes--almost all of them serving low-income, minority students.
Stuart Rojstaczer is a retired Duke University professor who has tirelessly crusaded for several decades against "grade inflation" at U.S. universities and maintains a website with lots of historical GPA data and charts (GradeInflation.com). The chart above illustrates grade inflation at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor over roughly the last half century (data here), with the average GPA rising from 2.57 in 1951 (C+/B-) to 3.27 by 2008 (B+). The grade inflation at Michigan is similar to the national trend at most American universities over time.
Catherine Rampell at the NY Times Economix Blog writes about a new paper by Professor Rojstaczer and co-author Christopher Healy titled "Where A Is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940-2009," published in the Teachers College Record. The main findings of the paper appear below, illustrated by this chart:
A typical school district's reaction to tight budgets is to cut, cut, cut. While cutting education waste can sharpen focus, cutting into innovation leaves your district extremely vulnerable to competition. School districts are no longer just competing against the local private school; rather they are competing with education over the net and the global market place as well. Now more than ever we need contenders.
With the right trainers, district leaders or contenders can become innovation champions for kids. Here's four ways you can step into the ring and put on the gloves for the upcoming education fight with the rest of the world.
Complete an Open Education Resource Scan - What are you paying for in your district with educational technology? What outcomes have you realized? Is there an open free alternative? Can this resource be shared among multiple users for multiple purposes? Example: Are you paying for a learning management system and creating your own content? Or, are you using a free engine and wrapping it around content not just for instruction but for professional development as well.
Last September, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced: "Today is a great day! I have looked forward to this day for a long time-and so have America's teachers, parents, students, and school leaders."
Duncan was excited about a new way of testing students, one that goes "beyond the bubble test," the standardized assessments students take every year that have long been criticized as not only useless in measuring any kind of real learning, but actually detrimental to the entire education system.
Ask most teachers, and you'll hear a litany of reasons why they detest these assessments. They contend the current tests have no bearing on student learning. They waste time that could be better spent in class (the former president of United Teachers Los Angeles, "dismisses the weeks before spring testing as 'Bubbling-In 101,'" according to a Los Angeles Times article.) They complain about having to teach to the tests, leaving them little time to try new ways of engaging students. And in some states, teachers are evaluated based on those very scores.
On June 30th, the Denver Public School Board voted unanimously on nine separate proposals for new charter and innovation schools. That's right, the DPS Board that is notorious for its contentious 4-3 split on nearly every major policy (turnarounds, innovation schools and charters) voted 7-0 in favor of these promising new schools. Here's hoping that this is a sign of the Board's commitment to putting kids first with our new reform minded mayor-elect, Michael Hancock.
The new charter schools, which will be located in all quadrants of the city, include: an all-boys K-12 charter modeled after a school in New Orleans and backed by former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, two additional West Denver Prep middle school campuses and a new West Denver Prep high school, a new KIPP elementary school, two new Denver School of Science and Technology campuses, a K-5 performance school being started by a current DPS principal and district educators, and a new preschool-8 charter school started by a Get Smart Schools fellow.
The District of Columbia Public Schools has notified 413 employees of their separation as the result of IMPACT evaluations, the DCPS said on Friday.
IMPACT evaluates teacher performance based on student achievement, instructional expertise, collaboration, and professionalism. Other employees are assessed based on criteria specific to their jobs.
The 413 represent just over 6 percent of the 6,500 total DCPS employees. DCPS issued separation notices based on performance and on noncompliance with licensing requirements for the 2010-2011 school year, according to a DCPS statement.
After years spent directing the distribution of more than $1 billion from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation into hundreds of schools across the nation, Tom Vander Ark set his sights on the New York area, with a plan to create a network of charter schools of his own.
Mr. Vander Ark, the foundation's former executive director of education and a national leader in the online learning movement, was granted charters in 2010 to open a high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and two others in Newark. The New York school, Brooklyn City Prep, also got space in a public school building -- a precious and controversial commodity -- hired a principal, and welcomed applications from 150 eighth graders this spring.
But after spending more than $1.5 million of investors' money on consultants and lawyers, Mr. Vander Ark, 52, has walked away from the project, and the schools will not open as planned this fall, leaving others involved stunned and frustrated.
The list of delays states are encountering in implementing their Race to the Top plans keeps getting longer.
Every state but Georgia has now amended its Race to the Top plan in some way, usually to push back a timeline or scale back an initiative. In all, the dozen winners from the $4 billion competition have changed their plans, so far, 25 times, according to the list of amendments approved by the U.S. Department of Education. Remember, the winners were chosen based, at least in part, on their promises in those plans.
The changes includes a 32-page amendment with dozens of changes to New York's plan, including one of the first amendments I've seen that doesn't just push back a timeline, but eliminates a small piece of the state's plan. That particular amendment eliminates a $10 million program to provide competitive grants for charter school facilities in New York, and redistributes the money across a few other programs, including a general "school innovation fund." This may--or may not--be a big deal, but it's at least worth noting.
The California Board of Education has approved a new set of regulations that will give parents more control to force changes to low-performing public schools.
The "parent trigger" rules will allow a majority of parents at low-performing schools to petition school districts for major changes that include adding intervention programs, removing the principal, replacing staff, converting the campus to a charter, or closing the school altogether.
Supporters of California's "Parent Trigger" law, applaud during testimony in support of the measure during the the state Board of Education meeting in Sacramento Wednesday. By a unanimous vote, the board approved the "trigger" law, which will allow parents to demand a turnaround at failing schools through a petition signed by a majority of parents at the school. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
"We want not just parental involvement, we want true power to help guide the education of children," former state Sen. Gloria Romero, the co-author of the legislation that led to the rules, told the Associated Press.
POLITICIANS of all stripes fulminate at the failure of posh universities to enroll a greater number of students from poor families. That more pupils from Eton, the prime minister's alma mater, go to Oxford University than do boys from all over England who received free school meals because their family income was low is widely paraded as evidence of this failing. So the decision to raise the maximum tuition fee charged by universities to £9,000 a year from 2012 was tempered with policies designed to promote access: English universities were told they could charge high fees only if they did more to help the poor. On July 12th they unveiled plans to do both.
The government's desire to create a market in which institutions compete for students on cost has been thwarted by the universities themselves: many students enrolled at middling redbricks will pay the same high fees as those who gaze at dreaming spires. To compensate for slashed state funding, all 130 English universities will substantially increase their tuition fees; two-thirds will charge the top rate for some subjects and a third will charge it for all their courses.
Sugary soft drinks, diet sodas, and artery-clogging food will be a thing of the past at Massachusetts public school snack shops, vending machines, and a la carte cafeteria lines under rules unanimously approved yesterday by state health regulators.
The nutrition standards adopted by the Public Health Council take effect in the 2012-2013 school year and are believed by advocates to be among the most comprehensive in the country.
But the council - an appointed panel of doctors, consumer advocates, and professors - delayed a ban on sweetened, flavored milk until August 2013 to give schools more time to find other ways to encourage children to drink milk.
The interim superintendent of Atlanta's public schools promised to reform the district and remove teachers and supervisors implicated in one of the nation's biggest cheating scandals.
Erroll Davis Jr. removed the city's four area superintendents as well as two principals this week, pending further investigation into cheating on standardized tests. At the same time, a former Atlanta deputy superintendent agreed to go on paid leave from a Texas school district that hired her earlier this year.
All were named in an 800-page state report released last week that outlined widespread, systematic cheating by students, teachers and administrators on standardized tests required annually at Georgia's elementary and middle public schools. The cheating, which was intended to raise scores to meet performance benchmarks, involved practices such as teachers erasing incorrect answers on the standardized tests.
AT ITS heart--as in so many scandals--lay a simple thing: the friction of rubber on paper. Too many wrong answers were erased, too many right ones inserted. Questions about dramatic improvements in standardised-test scores taken by children in Atlanta's public schools (APS) were first raised a decade ago. They were thoroughly answered last week when Governor Nathan Deal released a report that found cheating throughout Atlanta's school system, not by pupils but by teachers, with the superintendent and her administration either encouraging it or turning a blind eye.
Cheating occurred in 44 of the 56 Atlanta elementary and middle schools examined, and with the collusion of at least 178 teachers, including 38 principals. (And the report cautions that "there were far more educators involved in cheating, and other improper conduct, than we were able to establish sufficiently to identify by name in this report"). Answer-sheets in some classrooms found wrong-to-right erasures on test sheets that had standard deviations 20 to 50 times above the state norm. According to Gregory Cizek, who analysed test scores for the special report, the chance of this occurring without deliberate intervention is roughly the same as that of the Georgia Dome, a 70,000-seat football stadium, being filled to capacity with spectators who all happened to be over seven feet tall.
On a sunny morning late last month, Noemi Donoso, Chicago Public Schools' new chief education officer, organized a three-inch-thick binder stuffed with paperwork and district data at a table in her office.
It was one of more than 20 such binders from CPS area offices Donoso has been studying since Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed her to oversee curriculum and instruction for the nation's third-largest school district in April. The post has traditionally been held by former CPS principals and Donoso, an outsider groomed in charter schools, faces responsibilities that her predecessors did not.
A sweeping state education bill passed in May by the General Assembly enables CPS to lengthen the school day and fundamentally changes the process of evaluating teachers. Managing the implementation of those reforms will be Donoso's biggest undertaking, said Tim Knowles, director of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago and a member of Emanuel's education transition team.
Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring, building on Christensen's contribution to business, health care and K-12 education, apply Christensen's model of disruptive innovation to higher education. Unlike the many doom-and-gloom books of recent years, this work offers a hopeful analysis of the university and its traditions and how it must find new models for the future.
"The Innovative University" builds upon the theory of "disruptive innovation" and applies it to the world of higher education. The concept, originally introduced by Christensen in his best-selling book "The Innovator's Dilemma," holds that sustaining institutions or models exist, until change "disrupts" the traditional or "sustaining" model. In the case of higher education, the disruptor to the traditional university might be a recession, the rise of for-profit schools or the prevalence of high-quality online programs. The authors suggest that to avoid the pitfalls of disruption and turn the scenario into a positive and productive one, universities must change their institutional "DNA."
A public school district in Michigan has used its phone alert system to point voters toward the recall effort against Gov. Rick Snyder. In early June, shortly after the Snyder recall reached the petition-gathering phase, the alert system for Lawrence Public Schools sent out the following robocall to residents of the district:
"This is a message from the Lawrence Public Schools (inaudible) alert system. This is an informational item and not directly associated with the school. Concerned parents interested in cuts to education . . . we're here to inform you that there is information about the problem. Also, be advised that there is a petition to recall Governor Snyder. If you want, stop by Chuck Moden's house right by the school June 7th/8th between 3:30 and 4:00 pm. Thank you. Goodbye."
As part of Gov. Susana Martínez's education-reform effort, she persuaded the New Mexico Legislature to pass a bill by which our public schools will be given grades.
It's an exercise in teacher/administrator accountability, and pretty clearly the public needs more accountability from those folks; our state for years has been at the bottom of national rankings in education, and toward the top when it comes to dropouts.
Education and jobs tend to be a chicken-and-egg proposition -- so, figure the governor and her choice as education secretary, Hanna Skandera, let's begin where we have the chance, and the challenge, of improving the poultry.
But the new school year and the school-grading process are fast approaching. Some superintendents question the state's readiness to apply A's, B's, C's, D's and F's -- especially considering the damage those last two letters might do.
As a candidate, Dannel Malloy a year ago placed education at the center of his campaign. He pledged that if elected governor, he would build on a slew of long-awaited education changes Connecticut lawmakers had passed in order to snag federal Race to the Top funds, intending to push the state even further.
If statewide test scores out this week are any indication, Mr. Malloy still has a long way to go before being known as an education reformer.
Despite being one of the country's biggest education spenders on a per-student basis, Connecticut's 2011 test scores for reading, math and writing barely inched up from the year before, as poor children and those in urban areas continue to lag well behind their richer, more suburban peers.
Only 58% of Connecticut's third graders and 45% of 10th graders meet state standards for reading, and the results are worse for children whose families are eligible for free or reduced-price meals: Nearly twice the percentages of wealthier students scored at the standards for those grades than their peers who are eligible for the meals.
In the typical Oregon public school classroom, students of the same age work at achievement levels that often vary by two or three grades, sometimes more.
That didn't make sense to Mary Folberg. When she launched Northwest Academy, a private college preparatory school for grades 6-12 in downtown Portland, she grouped students the way she did as a dance instructor at Jefferson High, by proficiency rather than age.
That's the seismic shift Gov. John Kitzhaber wants to make in the state's public school system through a package of education bills passed by the Legislature last month.
At the heart of the package is one bill pushed by Kitzhaber to create paths from pre-school through college on which students advance at their own paces. The bill creates a 15-member Oregon Education Investment Board, chaired by the governor, to control the purse strings on all levels of education from preschool through college -- about $7.4 billion or half of the state general fund.
Despite a competitive economy in which success increasingly depends on obtaining a college degree, one in four students in this country does not even finish high school in the usual four years.
Matthew Kelly was in danger of becoming one of them.
Tests showed he had a high intellect, but Mr. Kelly regularly skipped homework and was barely passing some of his classes in his early years of high school. He was living in a motel part of the time and both his parents were out of work. His mother, a former nurse, feared that Matthew had so little interest he would drop out without graduating.
Then his guidance counselor suggested he take some courses at a nearby vocational academy for his junior year. For the first time, the sloe-eyed teenager excelled, earning A's and B's in subjects like auto repair, electronics and metals technology. "When it comes to practicality, I can do stuff really well," said Mr. Kelly, now 19.
Montclair High School students will have to get their parents to re-register them and prove they live in Montclair or they won't be allowed back in the classroom when school starts in September.
According to an advisory issued late Thursday afternoon by the Montclair School District, the re-registration is part of an effort to "verify, update and document the residency of all students currently enrolled in the Montclair Public Schools."
The statement, issued by Assistant Schools Superintendent Felice Harrison, said the parents or guardians of all MHS students will be required to fill out registration forms and "submit residency verification documents."
The registration will take place at both the Montclair High School main building at 100 Chestnut St., and the George Inness Annex at 141 Park Street, between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday through Thursday. There are no Friday hours.
Members chipped in $23.4 million to WEAC in 2008 union dues Dues pay exorbitant union salaries; WEAC awarded just $18,850 in scholarships out of $24 million budget
With the practice of paying forced union dues soon to become a relic of the past for many public employees, officials of the Wisconsin Education Association Council have reportedly contacted members in a bid to convince them to continue paying up through automatic bank withdrawals.
That's not surprising because the revenue stream the state's largest teachers' union is trying to protect is substantial. In fact, the organization collected more than $23.4 million in membership dues in fiscal year 2009 from its approximately 98,000 members.
The numbers are included on WEAC's IRS forms for the year. Fiscal year 2009 was the latest filing available. The state's new collective bargaining law that took effect this week will end mandatory dues payments and government collection of dues for many public employees immediately and for most of the rest when current contracts expire.
According to IRS documents, the union mustered membership dues of $23,458,810 in fiscal year 2009. National Education Association revenue totaled another $1,419,819, while all revenues totaled $25,480,973, including investment income of $367,482.
My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable, and that by extension people who own different words live in different conceptual worlds -- called "Whorfianism" after its academic evangelist, Benjamin Lee Whorf -- is so pervasive in modern thought as to be unremarkable.
Eskimos, as is commonly reported, have myriads of words for snow, affecting how they perceive frozen percipitation. A popular book on English notes that, unlike English, "French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition ... and knowledge that results from understanding." Politicians try to win the rhetorical battle ("pro-life" vs. "anti-abortion"; "estate tax" vs. "death tax") in order to gain the political advantage.
Here is another example of New York charter schools using their greater autonomies to develop innovative practices, in this case achieving operating efficiencies during this time where increasing pension costs are a particular concern for school districts. A recent Fordham Institute study reports that, between 2004 and 2010, district pension costs nationally increased from 12% to over 15% of salaries, amid concern that the public pension plans are underfunded.
The study reports that some New York charter schools are opting out of the traditional teacher-pension system, with only 28% of the state's charters participating in the state or city teachers retirement systems (NYSTRS and TRSNYC, respectively) in 2008-9. Those that opt-out cite the high cost of employer contributions. In 2009, the annual employer contribution rate to NYSTRS was 6.19% of an employee's annual salary, and that to TRSNYC was an astonishing 30.8% (by far the highest in this six-state study).
But that doesn't mean that these charter schools are not interested in helping their employees have a more secure future. Schools that choose not to participate in public pension plans most often provide their teachers with defined-contribution plans (401(k) or 403(b)) with employer matches similar to those for private-sector professionals. Although employer contribution rates vary, they generally range up to 6% of the employee's salary. Vesting periods range from immediate vesting to five-year vesting schedules.
Point/Counterpoint: Message From a Charter School: Thrive or Transfer
In 2008, when Katherine Sprowal's son, Matthew, was selected in a lottery to attend the Harlem Success Academy 3 charter school, she was thrilled. "I felt like we were getting the best private school, and we didn't have to pay for it," she recalled.
And so, when Eva S. Moskowitz, the former city councilwoman who operates seven Success charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, asked Ms. Sprowal to be in a promotional video, she was happy to be included.
Matthew is bright but can be disruptive and easily distracted. It was not a natural fit for the Success charters, which are known for discipline and long school days. From Day 1 of kindergarten, Ms. Sprowal said, he was punished for acting out.
"They kept him after school to practice walking in the hallway," she said.
Several times, she was called to pick him up early, she said, and in his third week he was suspended three days for bothering other children.
The facts clearly show that Success Academies' educators are incredibly committed to serving children with special needs, we serve a high percentage, and do not push out children who don't "thrive." The Success Academies' special education population is equal to the citywide average of 12.5%. Our ELL population is 9.6%, and when you factor in children who we have successfully taught English (and are no longer ELL), we clearly educate the same children. As Winerip points out, our student attrition rate is significantly lower than our co-located schools and the citywide average.
As the paper trail examined by Winerip clearly indicates, no one pressured Ms. Sprowal to leave the school. Her son did not have an IEP until 3 years after he left the school. When the family left the school in 2008, Ms. Sprowal wrote effusive emails about how happy she was with how the school handled her situation. Three years later, after coaching from the United Federation of Teachers, his mother is now unhappy. The UFT spent five years hovering over our schools to find hordes of students who were unfairly "pushed" out, and the best they could find was a single story with a happy ending.
Most educators would agree that children are different and don't all excel in the same settings. That's why having choices is so important. Different schools are different in their approaches. Some are strict, some less strict, some have bigger class sizes, some smaller etc.. It is our obligation to advise a parent that there might be a better setting for their child.
Our schools are a work in progress, every day we try to do better for the largest number of children. While I don't believe that the school mishandled the situation, we are always working to improve how we serve children with all types of needs. For next year, we have added a 12:1:1 program at two of our schools and a Director of Special Education at the network-level who comes from the city's District 75.
What is most troubling about several of Winerip's recent columns is the suggestion that low-performing schools can't be expected to do any better. Winerip recently wrote that it wasn't Jamaica High School's fault that only 38% of its kids graduate with regents diplomas, because it gets more of the tough-to-serve kids (2% more homeless children, 6% more children with special needs). What school could possibly do better under those circumstances?
The theme is repeated in this story. 33% of 4th graders passed the state ELA test at PS 75, but public schools like PS 75 get more tough-to-serve children. (PS 75 does not, but schools like it do, he argues) When schools like ours have 86% of 4th graders passing the same test, it must be because we don't have the same kids, because schools can't possibly be expected to do that well.
Winerip also makes the argument that schools like PS 75 care about children and thus have low test scores while schools like Harlem Success Academy don't care about children and thus have high test scores.
Those are both false arguments that we must dispel if we're to improve the quality of public education. Schools with tough-to-serve children can do better and it's possible to care about children AND want them to perform well on tests.
At Success Academies, we want children to achieve at high levels AND we care deeply about their social and emotional development. We aim to create schools that are nurturing, joyful, and compelling AND that prepare children to excel in whatever their chosen field. I tell our principals, our true measure of success is whether children race through the door each morning and are disappointed to leave each day because school is just that compelling. Do we also want our children to score well on tests? Yes. High performance and joy are not mutually exclusive.
"When high stakes are attached to tests, people often act in ways that compromise educational values. High-stakes testing incentivizes narrowing of the curriculum, gaming the system, teaching to bad tests and cheating."
That passage, taken from a July 1 letter education historian Diane Ravitch wrote to the New York Times disputing columnist David Brooks' characterization of her public policy views, can easily be superimposed onto the current national education portrait.
Ever since Congress and President George W. Bush reauthorized the Early and Secondary Education Act in 2002 to become No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools have been under the gun to up state-mandated student test scores or face financial and structural consequences. Results from those exams are notoriously inflated or teased with public relations precision, not out of the malfeasance of school administrators but as a function of what happens when students are taught to a series of exams that determine a great portion of the state's education funding.
The Atlanta cheating scandal has put a spotlight on how schools could fudge standardized tests.
In California, schools are supposed to report any irregularities in testing and investigate them themselves. The state no longer collects data on erasures, one of the ways that investigators detected cheating in Atlanta. Nor does it do random audits during testing, according to USA Today.
Irregularities can range from teachers accidentally not following exact instructions on how to administer state tests to outright cheating. The state then decides if it needs to adjust school scores to discount some of the test results. California keeps the records of testing irregularities for just one year.
I last requested those records for all schools in San Diego County in April. Keep in mind, these are the school districts that followed the rules and reported irregularities, just like they are supposed to.
If you are Chris Whittle, an educational entrepreneur, you gather well-to-do parents at places like the Harvard Club or the Crosby Hotel in Manhattan, hoping the feeling of accomplishment will rub off. Then you pour wine and offer salmon sandwiches and wow the audience with pictures of the stunning new private school you plan to build in Chelsea. Focus on the bilingual curriculum and the collaborative approach to learning. And take swipes at established competitors that you believe are overly focused on sending students to top-tier colleges. Invoke some Tiger-mom fear by pointing out that 200,000 Americans are learning Chinese, while 300 million Chinese have studied English.
Then watch them come.
As of June 15, more than 1,200 families had applied for early admission to Avenues: The World School, a for-profit private school co-founded by Mr. Whittle that will not open its doors until September 2012. Acceptance letters go out this week. Gardner P. Dunnan, the former head of the Dalton School and academic dean and head of the upper school at Avenues, said he expected 5,000 applicants for the 1,320 spots available from nursery through ninth grade. "You have to see the enthusiasm," Mr. Whittle crowed.
A lively debate about charter schools, high-stakes testing and impoverished students arose as David Brooks criticized Diane Ravitch, she answered back and readers joined the fray.
THE LETTER
To the Editor:
Re "Smells Like School Spirit," by David Brooks (column, July 1):
Mr. Brooks has misrepresented my views. While I have criticized charter schools, I am always careful to point out that they vary widely. The overwhelming majority of high-quality research studies on charters shows that some are excellent, some are abysmal and most are no better than regular public schools.
Some charters succeed because they have additional resources, supplied by their philanthropic sponsors; some get better results by adding extra instructional time. We can learn from these lessons to help regular public schools.
Others succeed by limiting the admission of students with disabilities and those who can't read English, or by removing those with learning problems. These students are then overrepresented in regular public schools, making comparisons between the two sectors unfair.
I don't want to get rid of testing. But tests should be used for information and diagnostics to improve teaching and learning, not to hand out bonuses, fire teachers and close schools.
When high stakes are attached to tests, people often act in ways that compromise educational values. High-stakes testing incentivizes narrowing of the curriculum, gaming the system, teaching to bad tests and cheating.
Poverty has a strong influence on academic achievement, and our society must both improve schools and reduce poverty.
Top-performing nations like Finland and Japan have taken the time to build a strong public school system, one with a rich curriculum and well-educated, respected teachers. Our desire for fast solutions gets in the way of the long-term thinking and the carefully designed changes that are needed to truly transform our schools.
Looking to attract employers' attention, some law schools are throwing out decades of tradition by replacing textbook courses with classes that teach more practical skills.
Indiana University Maurer School of Law started teaching project management this year and also offers a course on so-called emotional intelligence. The class has no textbook and instead uses personality assessments and peer reviews to develop students' interpersonal skills.
New York Law School hired 15 new faculty members over the past two years, many directly from the ranks of working lawyers, to teach skills in negotiation, counseling and fact investigation. The school says it normally hires one or two new faculty a year, and usually those focused on legal research.
Creating a new system of accountability for schools in Wisconsin could be a great help to parents and school districts and, thus, an important educational reform for the state. If the new system is fair and done right, it would provide plenty of clear information on which schools are achieving the right outcomes.
Ideally, it would measure schools not only on whether they have met certain standards but how much students and schools have improved over a certain time period. It also would measure all schools that receive public funding equally - public, charter and voucher - so that families would have the information they need to make good choices. That's all important.
Simmering tensions between the nation's largest teachers' union and a highly acclaimed national service program boiled over this week. The National Education Association vowed to "publicly oppose Teach for America (TFA) contracts when they are used in Districts where there is no teacher shortage or when Districts use TFA agreements to reduce teacher costs, silence union voices, or as a vehicle to bust unions."
Teach for America is a nonprofit organization that recruits graduates from leading universities to teach for two years in some of the nation's most impoverished school districts. Study after study shows that TFA's dedicated teachers are effective in lifting achievement levels among the poor and minority students they serve. Why would the NEA want to deprive our neediest kids of good teachers?
NEA member Marianne Bratsanos of Washington, who proposed the anti-TFA resolution, complained that the volunteer group undermines schools of education and accepts money from foundations and other funders who are hostile to unions. The key complaint, however, seems to be that TFA volunteers are displacing more experienced teachers, even in districts with no teacher shortages.
Full disclosure: I'm a TFA alum. You may discount my views accordingly, but the NEA's indictment is very far from the reality I encountered on the ground teaching Language Arts to inner city kids in Charlotte, N.C.
The Rev. Reginald Jackson watched in horror last week as the political romance between Gov. Chris Christie and state Senate President Steve Sweeney exploded in flames.
It started when the governor pruned the budget of nearly everything Democrats wanted, after refusing to talk to Sweeney. And it ended with Sweeney's obscene tirade.
All that's left now is the smoldering wreckage of a relationship that's been at the core of every major reform since Christie took office. A week after the governor called to discuss the meltdown, Sweeney still had not returned his calls.
The last time Iowa was considered No. 1 overall in education, teachers faced fewer challenges in the classroom, students were more homogenous and school districts required less of them to graduate.
That was 1992.
Today, as Gov. Terry Branstad endeavors to restore the state's standing as a national education leader, teachers, policymakers and politicians fiercely disagree over what it will take to get back on top. Some dispute that Iowa's students have slid dramatically in performance at all.
What the different factions do agree on is that Iowa is experiencing rapid change in the classroom: Students are significantly poorer, more urban and more diverse than they were in 1992. Course work is more rigorous than it was in the early 1990s but, in an increasingly competitive global economy, that course work is still not believed to be enough.
Change is hard for most organizations. It is easy to live on the "fumes" of the past, until it is too late to change.
How does Wisconsin compare to the world? Learn more at www.wisconsin2.org
Three years ago, Heather Vogell, an investigative reporter at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, sat down with a data analyst to crunch some numbers.
She had just received the latest crop of scores for the CRCT, a state standardized test. Curiously, Vogell noted, several schools statewide had changed in status between the spring 2008 administration of the test and the summer retest in 2008, going from not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress rates, a calculation set by federal legislation that determines the fates of individual schools, to meeting the measure.
"We saw there were a lot more schools that met AYP than we had expected. It was a larger shift," Vogell told The Huffington Post.
Like any intrepid reporter, she had some questions. "We were poking around. We saw some schools that had very hard to believe gains, just looking with the naked eye," she said.
Higher education keeps getting lower. And not just in my home state, where the core curriculum at the University of Arkansas' campus at Fayetteville is being hollowed out. It's happening all over. In Britain, the study of the humanities is being diluted, too.
Happily, this sad trend has inspired a familiar reaction. Over here, as state universities cut back on required courses that once were considered necessary for a well-rounded education, small liberal arts colleges have taken up the slack. Now comes word from England that A.C. Grayling, the renowned philosopher, has joined with other free-spirited academics to start a new, private College of the Humanities.
These new schools are part of an old tradition. Isn't that how the first universities in Europe began -- as communities of scholars teaching the classical curriculum? They were founded, organized and run by the faculty, not administrators. And out of those universities came a great renaissance, the rebirth of classical education after what we now call the Dark Ages.
Roger Pascoe, head of music at Hanover primary school in Islington, north London, says 11-year-old Gabriel Millard-Clothier throws himself into everything he does. Gabriel plays the flute, the violin and the bass recorder and has recently been awarded a £1,000 ($1,600) bursary from the London Symphony Orchestra, which means he gets a year's mentoring from a senior orchestra member. He has already played on stage at the Barbican.
Gabriel's sister, Phoebe, 13, plays piano (classical and jazz) and the cello. Then comes younger sister, Honey, eight, on piano, flute and descant recorder and finally six-year-old Lucien, who plays classical guitar. Is this a typical family? Is Hanover primary an unusually musical school? Pascoe says the headteacher is keen on music and promotes it. Gabriel thinks Pascoe is an awesome teacher. On the other hand, Gabriel doesn't like to practise. "No child likes to practise," says Pascoe. "That would be strange."
Phoebe has a music scholarship at St Marylebone School in London, a top state school. Competition is intense: for entry in September 2011, the school had more than 200 applicants for eight music places.
The numbers reflect a trend: many children are taking up one, if not two or three musical instruments despite the costs, which can run into thousands of pounds for a family with two or three children and much more for someone such as the writer and broadcaster Rosie Millard, mother of the Millard-Clothier children. While she may be at the extreme end of the spectrum (her children's regime is detailed in her blog, helicoptermum.com), Millard is certainly not alone in her determination. Many parents have a quiet obsession with making their children learn music, even if they are not musical themselves.
A state school board has set a minimum score on a language-competency test for teachers who have not mastered English.
The Providence Journal reports that the state Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education voted on Thursday to set a minimum score. Education Commissioner Deborah Gist described the score as the "bare minimum'' of fluency.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett on Tuesday hailed Indiana's first statewide all-online public high school as a "revenue generator" and a model for how cash-strapped school districts can save money.
"This is in many ways a breakthrough for the state," Bennett said at a news conference Tuesday formally announcing Achieve Virtual Education Academy, which will be available to Hoosier students this fall. Wayne Township will run the accredited school, which will award regular high school diplomas.
Achieve Virtual allows for the school corporation and its teachers to be entrepreneurial while also allowing children to learn in a way that suits them, Bennett said, making it a "win-win-win opportunity."
It's much tougher to implement the law than it is to write it -- that's the lesson educators are learning this summer as they work to implement a complicated new educator evaluation system.
Some area school leaders question how fair the system can be and say they don't believe it's possible to get everything done on time with the state's strict timeline.
"The timetable is practically impossible," Watertown City School District Superintendent Terry N. Fralick said. "By and large, we feel the timetable cannot be met. But we will do our best to work on it and show good faith."
District officials will work with the Watertown Education Association and the Watertown Association of Supervisors and Administrators, the unions that cover teachers and principals, respectively. School leaders in other north country districts and across the state will be doing the same thing.
A system for providing clear, plentiful and sophisticated information for judging the quality of almost every school in Wisconsin, replacing a system that leaves a lot desired on all of those fronts - that is the goal of an eye-catching collaboration that includes Gov. Scott Walker, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, and leaders of eight statewide education organizations.
Walker and Evers said Friday that they will seek approval from the U.S. Department of Education to allow the new school accountability system to replace the decade-old, federally imposed one they labeled as broken.
They want at least a first version of the new system to be ready by spring, and to apply it to outcomes for schools in the 2011-'12 school year.
The new accountability program would include every school that accepts publicly funded students, which means that private schools taking part in the state-funded voucher program would, for the first time, be subject to the same rules as public schools for making a wealth of data available to the public. Charter schools and virtual schools would also participate.
Sweden could become the first country in Europe to offer Chinese lessons to all schoolchildren under plans floated by the Swedish education minister.
Jan Björklund said giving future generations access to Chinese language tuition was crucial to national competitiveness.
"Chinese will be much more important, from an economic perspective, than French or Spanish," he told the Dagens Industri newspaper.
Other western countries have also started introducing Chinese to school curriculums in recognition of China's growing global role, but Mr Björklund's plan aims to put Sweden ahead of the pack.
In a flurry of education bills passed last week, Oregon governor John Kitzhaber oversaw legislation to appoint an unlikely candidate for superintendent of schools: himself. Though many states have moved towards more centrally controlled education systems, Oregon became the first state to abolish the traditional office of superintendent and appoint the governor as superintendent of public instruction.
The governor will appoint a deputy superintendent to oversee the day-to-day activities in K-12 schools. The deputy must perform any duty designated by the governor and can be removed at any point following consultation with the state school board (which will also be newly appointed by the governor; this "superboard" of officials will oversee spending and policy for all grade levels).
How did this state of affairs come about? After Oregon's application for the 2010 Race to the Top Competition placed seventh to last, parents and legislators began to press for innovation and reform. Kitzhaber argues that central authority will help him push needed reforms. Kitzhaber is already on the reform track with legislation allowing universities and community colleges to sponsor charter schools and raising the cap on online charter schools. He is also earning pushback from the state's teacher's unions.
Delivering her first State of Education address on Thursday, Oklahoma's new Republican Superintendent Janet Barresi urged public school administrators and teachers to rise to the challenge of budget cuts totaling $100 million this year to public schools.
Barresi, a dentist and charter school organizer elected in November to replace longtime Democratic Superintendent Sandy Garrett, delivered her address to about 2,500 participants at the annual administrative conference at the Cox Convention Center.
IT IS not exactly unusual for children to cheat at school. But Indonesians have learned recently that their teachers add a new twist to a familiar tale: ordering their own pupils to cheat, even if they do not want to. Not surprisingly, the revelation has led to an anxious debate about whether anyone can trust the grades of millions of young men and women who come onto the labour market each year in South-East Asia's biggest economy.
The scandal came to light at the beginning of June when the mother of a 13-year-old boy in Surabaya, in eastern Java, told the local media that her son had been forced by his teachers to share his answers to a national exam with his classmates. The mother, Siami, first complained to the school but was ignored. So she took her story to a local radio station.
I am disappointed to see Jonathan Kozol, a lion in the struggle for education equity, refer to "so-called" achievement gaps.
Ingraham High School in Seattle, WA, is both racially and economically diverse. Of the 1051 students, half are low income, 30 percent are White, 30 percent Asian, 24 percent African American, and 12 percent Latino. In 2010, 65 percent of Ingraham's White students were proficient in Math, compared to only 5 percent (yes, 5 percent) of African American students and 16 percent of Latinos.
With nearly one in six students exhibiting mental health problems and fewer specialists to monitor their behavior, Madison school and community leaders are launching new efforts to better treat student mental health.
The Madison school district is expanding services this fall, and Superintendent Dan Nerad is calling for a task force from the broader community, including health care providers, to review the issue and devise solutions.
"The need far outweighs the resources that are currently available," Nerad said.
Local experts say untreated children's mental health problems such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress can result in lower academic performance, higher dropout rates, and more classroom disruptions, truancy and crime.
The problems are often exacerbated by childhood trauma related to poverty, domestic violence and substance abuse. Madison's growing number of low-income students, who account for two-thirds of those exhibiting mental health problems, also face barriers to accessing mental health services, local experts and advocates say.
In a sign of the endless march of technology individual schools will no longer be required to instruct pupils in long hand from the age of eight, and they may only learn to print.
The move has led to fears that youngsters could grow up not even knowing how to sign their own name.
According to a memo sent by the Department of Education to schools on April 25 they can continue to teach handwriting of they want, but children will be expected to achieve proficiency with a keyboard.
A year ago, everyone from President Obama's education point man Arne Duncan to then Rochester schools Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard talked about the need for greater teacher accountability. Even the leaders of teachers unions were talking about the importance of holding teachers and principals accountable through more rigorous evaluations.
So much can change in 365 days.
Last week, the New York State United Teachers union sued the State Education Department over teacher evaluations. The union says that the Board of Regents overreached its authority and violated state law by approving stronger regulations for evaluations than the law required.
The regulations allow school districts to double the weight given to state tests, permitting the use of test results to count for up to 40 percent of a teacher's evaluation. The law allows student test results to count for 20 percent of a teacher's evaluation.
Written by an experienced elementary school teacher, Seattle
Dear Laurie Rogers:
Thanks for writing your book. One of the things that you discuss in your compelling discourse is the low standards that our colleges have had in the subject matter (as opposed to teaching theory, sociology, and psychology) for those who have a desire to become teachers in our public schools.
For the past twenty-two years, I have diligently taught 4th and 5th grade students. For the first eighteen years, I taught math according to the classical mode that you describe in your book. As the reforms took hold, and we were monitored ever more closely, I was forced into using Everyday Math according to a pacing guide set by the district. As you have rightly observed, it is a program that emphasizes coverage and not mastery.
For much of the year, I had 34 students. Of these 34 students, seven had Special Education IEPs and were to be served according to a pull-in model which never quite materialized. I did have a special ed. instructional assistant for 50 minutes a day until she was pulled to serve in a more "needy" classroom. One of my students was mentally retarded and never once scored about the first percentile on the MAP test. Another student started the year almost totally blind and had a personal assistant for two hours out of the day to teach her Braille. Two were removed from their homes by CPS and placed under foster care: one for neglect and the other for domestic violence. Three students were absent for more than 30 days each. I could go on, but I think that you get the picture.
The provisions of the Budget Repair Bill have gone into effect. For school districts that (unlike Madison) did not extend their collective bargaining agreement with their teachers unions, it is a brand new day.
In those districts, collective bargaining agreements are essentially gone and the districts have much wider discretion over compensation and working conditions for their teachers and other staff.
The Kaukauna School District is one that has taken advantage of the Budget Repair Bill provisions. Like nearly all school districts, Kaukauna now requires its teachers and staff to pay the employees' share of their retirement contributions, which amounts to 5.8% of their salary, and is also requiring a larger employee payment toward the cost of health insurance, up to 12.6% from 10%.
The district also took advantage of the expiration of its collective bargaining agreement to impose a number of other changes on its teachers. For example, it unilaterally extended the work day for high school teachers from 7.5 to 8 hours and increased the teaching load from five to six high school classes a day.
In May 2011, state education agency representatives from New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Tennessee attended a series of workshops and briefings organized by the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE). The sessions described the changes that have taken place in Louisiana over the past six years, including the creation of the Recovery School District (RSD) that redeveloped unproductive schools in New Orleans and elsewhere, the restructuring of the LDOE, and efforts to create a new performance-based organizational culture in state and local education agencies.
Presenters included LDOE staff, RSD administrators, academic observers, nonprofit service partners, and education stakeholders. There was a candid discussion of the LDOE's overall school improvement goals, steps taken to achieve those objectives, and in some cases missteps made in the effort to dramatically turn around a large number of schools in a relatively short time and to prompt improvements in all schools across the state.
Facing criticism for a property-tax cap that doesn't include significant mandate relief, Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday said local governments and schools need to tighten their belts to deal with a cap that will limit tax increases to 2 percent a year.
Municipalities and schools have raised objections over the recently adopted property-tax cap that doesn't include the broad reforms they were seeking to state-imposed mandated services.
But Cuomo, during a ceremonial tax-cap bill signing outside Buffalo, said schools and local governments need to find ways other than raising taxes.
State investigators have uncovered a decade of systemic cheating in the Atlanta Public Schools and conclude that Superintendent Beverly Hall knew or should have known about it, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned.
In a report that Gov. Nathan Deal planned to release today, the investigators name nearly 180 educators, including more than three dozen principals, as participants in cheating on state curriculum tests, officials said over the weekend. The investigators obtained scores of confessions.
The findings suggest the national accolades that Hall and the school system have collected -- and the much-vaunted academic progress for which she claimed credit -- were based on falsehoods. Raising test scores apparently became a higher priority than conducting the district's business in an ethical manner.
Details are beginning to tumble out from a 428-page report by state investigators on alleged cheating in Atlanta Public Schools.
On Tuesday, Gov. Nathan Deal released only a two-page summary of the report showing organized, systemic cheating in Atlantic Public Schools by scores of educators, including 38 principals.
Deal says "there will be consequences" for educators who cheated and has forwarded the findings to three district attorneys as well as state and city education officials.
GWEN IFILL: Now, an exhaustive new report reveals nearly 200 educators cheated to boost student test scores in Atlanta, a problem that has surfaced in school districts across the country.
The Georgia investigation commissioned by Gov. Nathan Deal found, results were altered on state curriculum tests by district administrators, principals and teachers for as long as a decade. Educators literally erased and corrected students' mistakes to make sure schools met state-imposed testing standards. And it found evidence of cheating in 44 of the 56 schools examined for the 2009 school year.
A couple of key actions have to happen this week for Teach for America to come to Seattle Schools.
One is at the Board meeting on Wednesday night. There is a state entity called the Professional Educator Standards Board (PESB) that grants educational entities the right to create conditional certificate programs. They require School Board approval has to happen prior to "applying for a conditional certficiate for a teacher candidate. Therefore, Board action is required to hire any TFA candidate if any are selected for hire by a school-based hiring team."
The second action that needs to happen is on Thursday, at the PESB meeting where the UW's College of Education will present their proposal for their teaching certificate program for TFA recruits (and only TFA recruits; no one else can apply to this program).
If you would like to let the PESB know what you think of the plan, e-mail them at pesb@k12.wa.us before Thursday.
About a dozen members of a bipartisan, mostly volunteer organization called Common Ground file into Superintendent Tony Evers' utilitarian conference room in downtown Milwaukee. The group is exploring how to help Milwaukee's beleaguered schools, and it has scheduled a meeting with the head of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction as part of its research.
Tall, thin and gray haired, Evers has a boyish smile and a welcoming manner. He's now in a white shirt and tie, sans the suit coat he wore to an earlier meeting with suburban school officials in Pewaukee.
Common Ground, a nonpartisan coalition that includes churches, nonprofits and labor unions, has come to Evers' office today looking for advice on how best to direct its considerable resources toward helping Milwaukee students, whose performance in both traditional public schools and in taxpayer-funded voucher schools ranks at the bottom of major American cities.
After initial pleasantries and introductions are exchanged, Keisha Krumm, lead organizer for Common Ground, asks Evers a question. "At this stage we're still researching what issue we will be focusing on. But we do want to know what you can do. What's your power and influence?"
How does Wisconsin compare to other states and the world? Learn more at www.wisconsin2.org.
RSS Local Schools Madison schools losing $6.7 million in Redistributed State Tax Dollars
The Madison School District will lose $6.7 million in state aid next year -- $2 million more than it anticipated -- according to estimates released Friday by the Department of Public Instruction.
The 13.5 percent cut is third-highest in the state among K-12 districts and higher than the 10 percent cut the School Board used to calculate its preliminary budget last week.
The $43.2 million in aid is also nearly one-third less than the $60.8 million the district received from the state four years ago.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said continuous cuts in state aid are hurting the quality of public education.
"School districts like ours cannot continue to be in an environment like this with increased expectations for student performance, and yet we're not willing to provide the resources," Nerad said.
School may be out for the summer, but school choice is in, as states across the nation have moved to expand education opportunities for disadvantaged kids. This year is shaping up as the best for reformers in a very long time.
No fewer than 13 states have enacted school choice legislation in 2011, and 28 states have legislation pending. Last month alone, Louisiana enhanced its state income tax break for private school tuition; Ohio tripled the number of students eligible for school vouchers; and North Carolina passed a law letting parents of students with special needs claim a tax credit for expenses related to private school tuition and other educational services.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker made headlines this year for taking on government unions. Less well known is that last month he signed a bill that removes the cap of 22,500 on the number of kids who can participate in Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program, the nation's oldest voucher program, and creates a new school choice initiative for families in Racine County. "We now have 13 programs new or expanded this year alone" in the state, says Susan Meyers of the Wisconsin-based Foundation for Educational Choice.
Heavily Democratic Massachusetts on Friday became the latest state to curtail public workers' collective-bargaining rights, as lawmakers approved a $30.6 billion budget that gives cities and towns greater leeway to force employees to pay more for their health care.
The restrictions come as states including Ohio and Wisconsin, where Republicans control the governor's office and legislature, have been attacking collective bargaining.
More-recent moves elsewhere show Democrats, long union allies, are starting to demand more savings from public employees as well. In New Jersey, the Democrat-controlled legislature recently passed cuts to pension and health-care benefits pushed by Republican Gov. Chris Christie.
In Massachusetts, House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo, a Democrat, said after Friday's vote that "this common-sense reform will save $100 million for cities and towns and preserve the jobs of fire-fighters, police officers and teachers."
U.S. officials defended their schools--blaming poor performance on the relative prevalence of immigrant families in the United States. But Schleicher and his colleagues noted that native-born Americans performed just as unimpressively. In fact, worldwide, the share of children from immigrant backgrounds explains only 3 percent of the variance between countries. A country's wealth does not predict success, either. Gross domestic product per capita predicts only 6 percent of the difference in scores. Schleicher also noticed, however, that in the U.S. in particular, poverty was destiny. Low-income American students did (and still do) much worse than high-income ones on PISA. But poor kids in Finland and Canada do far better relative to their more privileged peers, despite their disadvantages.
In Germany, the test became a household name and inspired a prime-time TV quiz show, The PISA Show. Even Schleicher's father began taking his work more seriously. Meanwhile, Schleicher visited dozens of schools and pored over the data. He concluded that the best school systems became great after undergoing a series of crucial changes. They made their teacher-training schools much more rigorous and selective; they put developing high-quality principals and teachers above efforts like reducing class size or equipping sports teams; and once they had these well-trained professionals in place, they found ways to hold the teachers accountable for results while allowing creativity in their methods. Notably, in every case, these school systems devoted equal or more resources to the schools with the poorest kids.
These days, Schleicher travels the world with a PowerPoint presentation detailing his findings. It seems to have more data points embedded in its scatter plots than our galaxy has stars. When his audiences get distracted by the tribal disputes that plague education, he returns to the facts with a polite smile, like C-3PO with a slight German accent. He likes to end his presentation with a slide that reads, in a continuously scrolling ticker, "Without data, you are just another person with an opinion ... Without data, you are just another person with an opinion ..."
Why is the performance of students in other countries surpassing that of U.S. students? It's a question that Marc S. Tucker, president and chief executive officer of the National Center on Education and the Economy in Washington sought to answer at a May symposium focused on education reforms in other countries, including Canada, China, Finland, Japan and Singapore.
After the symposium, Tucker spoke about what we can learn from his group's findings. Below are excerpts of the conversation.
Q: The report indicates that countries outperforming the U.S. have developed strategies we have not. What are the key lessons about high performance we can take away from what is being done elsewhere?
Where does Wisconsin stand globally? Learn more, here: www.wisconsin2.org.
Released on April 28, 2011, The Promise of College Completion: KIPP's Early Successes and Challenges reports the college outcomes for our earliest KIPP students. It also examines our early lessons learned in supporting KIPP students through college, and shares the ways we are addressing the challenges of college completion.
Starting this fall, the Indiana Department of Education will no longer require Indiana's public schools to teach cursive writing.
State officials sent school leaders a memo April 25 telling them that instead of cursive writing, students will be expected to become proficient in keyboard use.
The memo says schools may continue to teach cursive as a local standard, or they may decide to stop teaching cursive altogether.
Greene County resident and parent Ericka Hostetter has mixed feelings about the teaching of cursive. She has three children, and two will be in public schools next fall.
"I'm right in the middle," she said, noting that she learned about it on Facebook. "I don't use cursive much. I use keyboard. I use my phone, so even for my generation, I think we use the keyboard more."
I will begin by acknowledging there are many facets of the latest California Budget that are onerous to many organizations. With that said, I will focus on the educational piece.
The latest State Budget by our leaders in Sacramento has not only put education in a precarious and unknown position but also ties the hands of the very people who are supposed to protect and lead school districts.
If in January revenues fall $2 billion or more short of projections the following will happen:
School district revenues would be reduced 4 percent, or $1.5 billion (an average of $250 per student)
Michelle Langenfeld will earn $190,000 a year when she takes over as superintendent in mid-July, making her the highest paid school official in the greater Green Bay area.
That's about what the district would have paid former superintendent Greg Maass if he'd kept his post, Green Bay School Board officials say. Maass, who started a similar position in Massachusetts on Friday, collected roughly $188,000 in 2010-11.
Salaries and benefits for public workers have come under the microscope as governments search for ways to trim costs.
Click on the link at left beneath Related Links to search our salary database.
A new state law requires all public employees to pay 5.8 percent of their salaries toward retirement benefits. Most public employees also are being asked to pay more for insurance to help balance the books.
Michigan has joined the ranks of states that have made education reform a priority. Although the state still lags far behind others in terms of student performance, new tenure and teacher evaluation measures should help Michigan students improve.
On Thursday, the Senate passed revised versions of House reform bills. It will now be more difficult for new teachers to achieve the protections of tenure and easier to lose them if they don't do their jobs well. And teacher performance will be judged largely on how much their students learn.
Similarly, seniority can no longer determine teacher layoffs; rather, the most effective teachers will remain in classrooms. These are common-sense changes, which place the needs of children first.
It was a tough week for lawmakers, squeezed from both sides of the reform debate. Education unions, such as the Michigan Education Association, pressured lawmakers to avoid such rigorous reforms, while groups such as the Education Trust-Midwest and StudentsFirst firmly advocated the changes.
The House quickly signed off on the amended bills, which now head to Gov. Rick Snyder. Although some reforms could be stronger, lawmakers accomplished much in a short amount of time.
Do all Chicago public high schools really need two Chicago police officers stationed inside them every day -- at a cost of $25 million a year?
The tab for police service -- begun under former Mayor Richard M. Daley -- recently more than tripled, prompting Chicago Public School officials faced with a $712 million deficit to start taking a hard look at whether every penny of that cost is being spent effectively.
"We're looking at if we need two police officers in every high school all day long. My guess is we don't," CPS Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Public schools aren't the only ones divided over the state's new private school voucher program that became law Friday and is supposed to be in place by the time classes start in August.
Greater Lafayette private schools are split over the new system -- one that some say will expand educational opportunities but others fear could drag state regulations into the mix and restrict freedoms their classrooms currently enjoy.
A handful of Lafayette area schools will be taking advantage of the program. But with such a short time before the new school year starts, the most basic information about how to use the voucher program created by the General Assembly in April still is not available -- not even the online application form.
The process likely will face even greater delays in light of a lawsuit filed Friday in Marion County Superior Court by the Indiana State Teacher's Association. The lawsuit, which seeks an injunction to prevent the disbursement of funds under the new program, will continue to stall the process as it winds its way through the court system. All the while, private schools hoping to participate wait for answers.
One of the many things I learned producing my film The Finland Phenomenon, was the importance of setting a very high standard for the education and training of teachers.
Finland's high school teachers are required to have both a Bachelors and Masters degree in the subject they teach (e.g. - math, physics, history, etc) combined with one-year of pedagogical training with very heavy emphasis in real classroom teaching experience under the guidance of an outstanding seasoned teacher.
By contrast, most U.S. States require only a Bachelors degree from a college of education with an emphasis in the subject to be taught - and frequently that subject matter is taught by professors in the Education School, not in the actual subject department. Think of it as content and rigor "light" for teachers.
So, what should America do to apply this obvious lesson from Finland? My thoughts:
1- each U.S. State needs to cut off the supply of teachers not sufficiently prepared to teach this generation at its source. The source is colleges of education. A State legislature and Governor can change the requirements to be a teacher in their State. All it takes is courage to withstand the screams from colleges of education - the sacred cash cow of most universities.
2- To teach at the high school level, a State should require the prospective teacher to have at least an undergraduate degree in the subject they plan to teach and from the department that teaches that subject (e.g. - teaching math? Require a B.S. from the Math department).
The two energetic foes on school reform reportedly did not get along. Ms. Gist says that Ms. Ravitch kept making points irrelevant to Rhode Island. Ms. Ravitch says Ms. Gist interrupted her discourse repeatedly, and that in encounters with the powerful in America since 1958 (such as Sen. John F. Kennedy [D-Mass.]), she had "never encountered such behavior."
She demanded an apology from Ms. Gist. They later made peace. Mr. Chafee said he saw nothing inappropriate in Ms. Gist's behavior.
Both women have egos large enough to encompass their educational ambitions -- in fact, Ms. Ravitch has two pedagogical histories under her belt. She was once on Ms. Gist's "side" on school reform. That changed, says Ms. Ravitch, after she lost confidence in testing and charter schools as the prime strategies for success, and started pushing for more respect (pay) for teachers, less reliance on tests, less hope in charter schools and more trust in -- well, so far as we can tell -- in the status quo.
Well, that oversized Kindle didn't become the textbook killer Amazon hoped it would be, but at least one country is moving forward with plans to lighten the load on its future generation of Samsung execs. South Korea announced this week that it plans to spend over $2 billion developing digital textbooks, replacing paper in all of its schools by 2015. Students would access paper-free learning materials from a cloud-based system, supplementing traditional content with multimedia on school-supplied tablets. The system would also enable homebound students to catch up on work remotely -- they won't be practicing taekwondo on a virtual mat, but could participate in math or reading lessons while away from school, for example. Both programs clearly offer significant advantages for the country's education system, but don't expect to see a similar solution pop up closer to home -- with the US population numbering six times that of our ally in the Far East, many of our future leaders could be carrying paper for a long time to come.
Vice President Joe Biden lambasted what he called an increasingly union-hostile "new" Republican party, during remarks delivered to National Education Association representatives today, raising the specter of high profile labor fights picked by Republican governors with public workers unions across the country.
"There is an organized effort to place blame for budget shortfalls on educators and other public workers. It is one of the biggest scams in modern American history," Biden said during a speech laden with political red meat, smoothing over past disagreements between teachers unions and the Obama Administration.
"The new Republican party has undertaken the most direct assault on labor, not just in my lifetime ... but literally since the 1920s," he said. "This is not your father's Republican party. This is a different breed of cat."
Biden's remarks to one of the nation's largest teachers unions, a speech that lasted about 30 minutes, came a day before its members are expected to decide whether to cast their support behind the administration in the 2012 presidential election.
The National Education Association Representative Assembly opened this morning in Chicago with 7,321 delegates attending, which is by far the lowest number since I began covering the convention in 1998.
The atmosphere still resembles a political party convention, with speeches, confetti and deafening music, including the new NEA theme song, "Standing Strong":
"Standing strong, standing tall. Standing up for what is right and true, NEA is standing up for me and you!"
Coming soon to a Chevy truck commercial near you.
It is customary for the mayor of the host city to welcome the delegates, but since the mayor is Rahm Emanuel, NEA prudently got hold of Illinois Gov. Quinn instead. After the delegates adopted the standing rules for the assembly, it was time for NEA president Dennis Van Roekel's keynote speech.
There were two new business items (NBIs) of note debated this afternoon. The first was NBI C, submitted by the NEA Board of Directors, which directs the NEA president to "communicate aggressively, forcefully, and immediately to President Barack Obama and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that NEA is appalled with Secretary Duncan's practice of..." and then lists 13 of Duncan's most heinous crimes, like "Focusing so heavily on charter schools that viable and proven innovative school models (such as magnet schools) have been overlooked, and simultaneously failing to highlight with the same enthusiasm the innovation in our non-charter public schools."
Widespread unhappiness among teachers about President Barack Obama's education policies is threatening to derail a National Education Association proposal to give him an early endorsement for re-election.
The political action committee of the NEA, the nation's largest union, adopted a resolution in May to endorse Mr. Obama. The proposal will come before the NEA's 9,000-member representative assembly on Monday at the union's annual convention here.
The union has never endorsed a presidential candidate this early in the campaign cycle, instead waiting to make the decision during the election year. But union leaders, anticipating a tough re-election campaign, wanted to bolster support for the president early on, a move that has run into opposition from union members.
Vice President Joe Biden says the "new Republican Party" fundamentally doesn't believe in public education the way Democrats do.
"There is an organized effort to place blame for budget shortfalls on educators and other public workers. It is one of the biggest scams in modern American history," he was quoted as saying by the Chicago Tribune.
A growing number of urban districts across the country are profoundly changing the role of the school district and its relationship to schools in order to bring about dramatically better outcomes for students. New York City, New Orleans, Chicago, Denver, Hartford, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., are among more than 20 districts pursuing a "portfolio strategy" of continuous improvement. These districts are creating diverse options for families in disadvantaged neighborhoods by opening new autonomous schools, giving existing schools more control of budgeting and hiring, and holding all schools to common performance standards.
CRPE has been studying the development of the portfolio strategy in several cities for the past three years. This interim assessment finds that:
It all started when my daughter, also a Madison teacher, called me. "You have to get down to the union office. We need to call people to go to the rally at the Capitol." I told her I hadn't heard about the rally. "It's on Facebook," she responded impatiently. "That's how they did it in Egypt."
That Sunday rally in Capitol Square was just the first step in the massive protests against Gov. Scott Walker's infamous "budget repair bill." The Madison teachers' union declared a "work action" and that Wednesday, instead of going to school, we marched into the Capitol building, filling every nook and cranny. The excitement mounted day by day that week, as teachers from throughout the state were joined by students, parents, union and nonunion workers in the occupation and demonstrations.
Madison teachers stayed out for four days. It was four exhilarating days, four confusing days, four stressful and exhausting days.
When we returned to school the following week, I debated how to handle the days off. We had received a three- page email from our principal warning us to "remain politically neutral" as noted in the school board policy relating to controversial issues. We were to watch not only our words, but also our "tone and body language." If students wanted to talk about the rallies, we were to respond: "We are back in school to learn now."
These days tenure for teachers is such a brawl in America's elementary and secondary schools that it's easy to forget that it's more a cornerstone of higher education. When Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, announced earlier this month that he was leaving the White House to return to the University of Chicago it was a reminder just how strong the ties -- and inducements -- of university tenure can be, and why it has recently come under fire.
At colleges and universities, tenure basically bestows a job for life unless an institution runs out of money. Originally intended to shield professors from meddling by college administrators, donors or politicians, tenure has evolved into one of the most coveted perks in higher education. It signals excellence and it confers employment stability.
The Oakland school district on Wednesday night unanimously passed a budget for the upcoming school year -- a conservative plan that included deep cuts and extra cash reserves to help cushion the district against the state's volatile funding stream.
The school district's total budget for 2011-12 is projected to be $472.8 million, down from $650.5 million in 2010-11. More than three-quarters of the decline -- $136 million of the $178 million drop -- is construction related. That's because the district has used much of its voter-approved bond money. So (Can you tell where this is going?) board members are already talking about asking Oakland taxpayers to support another levy, possibly next year.
The school district's general fund is smaller, too, without federal stimulus funds to mitigate years of state cutbacks: $376 million, down from $412 million in 2010-11.
Oakland's enrollment is 38,826. The current budget is $472,800,000; which yields per student spending of $12,177. Locally, Madison spends roughly $14.5k per student.
On the Milwaukee Public Schools: All hands on deck Sacrifices are needed to ensure that Milwaukee kids are educated despite state budget cuts. The district, its union and businesses should be willing to step up.
The state budget has left Milwaukee Public Schools reeling. Meeting this challenge requires a response from the entire community.
Local businesses and foundations will be called on to do more. The Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association should make a contribution to the district's pension plan to save teacher positions. And the district itself has to become more efficient by selling unused buildings and finding a less expensive way to feed its 85,000 students.
Of the 519 district employees being sent layoff notices, 354 would be teachers, according to Superintendent Gregory Thornton. Most of the cuts will come in kindergarten through eighth grade. And, as usual, it's mostly teachers with the least amount of experience who will be shown the door.
School districts have known for months that their state aid would be significantly cut for the new fiscal year that begins July 1. Today, reality hits home.
As expected, 410 of the state's 424 public school districts will receive less aid for the 2011-'12 fiscal year than for fiscal 2010-'11, according to the state Department of Public Instruction, which is required by law to provide general state aid estimates to school districts each July 1.
Many school districts handled the cuts by increasing employee contributions to health care and retirement when contracts expired this week, as part of the state's new collective bargaining law.
Kaukauna School District, which is expected to lose $2.75 million in state aid, was able to swing a $400,000 budget deficit into an estimated $1.5 million surplus by asking workers to pay more for health insurance and contribute pay toward their pensions, the Post-Crescent in Appleton reported. That district plans to hire teachers and reduce class size.
Once upon a time, the car was the key to understanding the U.S. economy. Then it was the family home. Nowadays, it is any device created by Steven P. Jobs. Call it the Apple economy, and if you can figure out how it works, you will have a good handle on how technology and globalization are redistributing money and jobs around the world.
That was the epiphany of Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick and Kenneth L. Kraemer, a troika of scholars who have made a careful study in a pair of recent papers of how the iPod has created jobs and profits around the world. The latest paper, "Innovation and Job Creation in a Global Economy: The Case of Apple's iPod," was published last month in The Journal of International Commerce and Economics.
One of their findings is that in 2006 the iPod employed nearly twice as many people outside the United States as it did in the country where it was invented -- 13,920 in the United States, and 27,250 abroad.
You probably aren't surprised by that result, but if you are American, you should be a little worried. That is because Apple is the quintessential example of the Yankee magic everyone from Barack Obama to Michele Bachmann insists will pull America out of its job crisis -- the remarkable ability to produce innovators and entrepreneurs. But today those thinkers and tinkerers turn out to be more effective drivers of job growth outside the United States than they are at home.
>Last year, battles over charter schools dominated much of education coverage. This year, the controversy over "teacher evaluations" is poised to be the biggest fight among people with competing visions for improving public schools. For a primer on how these new teacher assessments work, don't miss Sam Dillon's recent piece in the New York Times. Reporting from Washington, D.C., Dillon found that last year the city fired 165 teachers using a new teacher evaluation system; this year, the number will top 200.
D.C. relies on a relatively new evaluation system called Impact, a legacy of its former school chief Michelle Rhee, who noticed that, despite the district's low test scores, most teachers were getting nearly perfect evaluations. Rhee and the proponents of this new evaluation system feel that the old system relied too much on the subjective evaluations by the principal or a few experienced teachers. Opponents of the old system say these internal measurements are not data-driven or rigurous enough to allow principals and districts to identify struggling teachers who need assistance or to find the successful ones who deserve to be recognized and empowered.
Impact or other new evaluation systems are currently being implemented in around 20 states. The basic idea to use performance-based evaluations that use external measures such as test scores in addition to the internal measures mentioned above. Sparked by President Obama's Race to the Top grants, these "value-added" evaluations rely heavily on kids' test scores in math and reading. Teachers whose subjects are not measured by test scores are observed in the classroom. For example, D.C. teachers get five yearly classroom observations, three by principals and two by "master educators" from other schools.
What happens when the gods of high finance dump a gigantic pile of gold on the richest university in the world?
It sounds like the kind of hypothetical one might pose in a smoke-addled dorm room at 2 a.m. But it is, of course, what actually happened to Harvard University, along with a few of its elite competitors, over the last 20 years.
The answer is that the university reveals its true self. It shows the world what it cares about--and what it doesn't.
In 1990, Harvard had an endowment of about $4.7-billion. That was still a lot of money, about $7.7-billion in today's dollars. Only five other universities have that much money now. Over the next two decades the pile grew to colossal heights, $36.9-billion by mid-2008.
This study describes how the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was used for internationally benchmarking state performance standards. The process is accomplished in two steps. First, PISA items are embedded in the administration of the state assessment and calibrated on the state scale. The international item calibrations are then used to link the state scale to the PISA scale through common item linking. The second step is to use the statistical linking as part of the state standard setting process to help standard setting panelists determine how high their state standards need to be in order to be internationally competitive. This process was carried out in Delaware, Hawaii, and Oregon, and results are reported here for two of the states: Hawaii and Delaware.
Key words: Equating, linking, item response theory, international benchmarking.
Introduction
In 2010, the American Institutes for Research obtained permission from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to use secure items from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for purposes of linking state assessments within the United States to the PISA scale. The OECD provided a representative sample of 30 secure PISA items in Reading, Mathematics, and Science. The PISA items covered the 2006 and 2009 PISA assessment cycles. In addition to the PISA items, the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), which is the current vender for the OECD contracted to conduct PISA, provided the international item parameters and their standard errors, as well as the linear transformations needed to link the state assessments to the PISA scale. The administration, security, and scoring of the PISA items were carried out by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) based on a License Agreement between AIR and the OECD and monitored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
I hope you enjoyed a few days off after a busy year. To the normal craziness of spring, you probably had the heartache of considering budget cuts and layoffs.
You probably work in a state and district that imposes a lot of constraints on your hiring, curriculum, materials, school hours, and facilities. After food and transportation, if your district takes more than 5% for administration your kids are getting shorted.
Let's think about the improvement levers you've been able to influence:
1) Culture: the behavior you model, the tone of your communications, and the way you deal with challenges shape the culture of your school community.
2) Goals: the way you describe and champion learning expectations for your students and goals for your staff may be your most important role. The habits of mind that you encourage could shape student thinking for decades.
A former classroom teacher who grew up in the inner city in Milwaukee, Andreal Davis is the assistant director for equity and family involvement for the Madison Metropolitan School District. She is in charge of making sure resources are allocated fairly among schools, that students come to school prepared and that they have equal access to learning opportunities. And in a district where there are now more students of color than there are white students, and where the number of students from economically disadvantaged families is just a shade under 50 percent, an increasingly important part of Davis' job is to help teachers, students and their families work together effectively.
Research shows that a strong partnership between home and school is one of the most critical elements in helping all students succeed, but when there's little common ground or cultural understanding between teachers and the families they are serving, misunderstandings and communication failures are inevitable, and can lead to rocky relationships.
The next time some Republican wonders why the African-American community doesn't just come to its senses and start to vote the GOP ticket, point him to Pennsylvania.
This past November, Republican Tom Corbett successfully campaigned for governor on a platform that included giving Pennsylvania moms and dads more options for where they can send their children to school. Given that he enjoys Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, prospects for making good on this promise were, as the Philadelphia Inquirer recently put it, "once considered a slam dunk." With just two days before the legislature takes off for the summer, however, the GOP leadership is sending mixed signals. As we go to press, school choice is in political limbo.
At the heart of this debate is Senate Bill 1. Co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Jeffrey Piccola and Democrat Anthony Williams, it would allow parents of a needy child to take the money the state pays to their home school district and apply it to the public, private or parochial school of their choice. The plan would be phased in and expanded over three years. It further includes a $25 million increase in a popular state program that gives tax credits to businesses that donate money for scholarships.
Barely six weeks after his inauguration as mayor, Rahm Emanuel faced his first open dispute Wednesday with a unionized workforce that largely opposed his candidacy.
In a statement issued Wednesday afternoon, labor officials responded testily to Emanuel's public threat earlier in the day to lay off hundreds of city workers unless their unions accept his demands for unspecified "work rule changes and efficiencies."
Emanuel said his proposal would save the city $20 million, and its rejection would force him to lay off more than 600 city workers, but labor leaders shot back that the plan was "unacceptable."
The impasse came as a two-year contract concession agreement with city worker unions was set to expire Thursday. Under the deal, forged by Mayor Richard M. Daley in 2009, workers took as many as 24 unpaid days off work each year and gave up overtime pay and wage increases.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday approved a new law that gives Gov. Nathan Deal the power to suspend the entire Atlanta school board for jeopardizing the city district's accreditation.
With that consent, state school board members will hold a hearing that involves the local nine-member board no later than July 31. They will then make a recommendation to the governor.
Deal does not have to follow the state board's recommendation. But if he suspends local members, Deal will make interim appointments and ousted board members will be allowed to appeal for reinstatement.
"I'm pleased," said House Majority Whip Edward Lindsey, R-Atlanta, who helped write the bill that gave Deal such extraordinary power over the board's future. "Now we can focus on the best needs of the 48,000 children in Atlanta Public Schools."
No wonder bullying remains a persistent problem in public schools.
When teachers engage in such behavior, kids can be expected to follow their example.
It's become apparent that bullying may be necessary to guarantee the survival of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state's largest teachers union.
That's because state law will no longer bully on behalf of the union.
Until now, anyone who secured a teaching job at a Wisconsin public school automatically became a de facto member of the teachers union. Teachers had the option of avoiding official membership, but dues were still deducted from their paychecks and they were still represented by the union.
Florida Leads the Nation in the Percentage of High School Students Enrolled in High Level Classes; Some States Still Leave Low-Income Students Behind; Others Make Surprising Gains
Florida is a state of stark contrasts. Travel a few miles from the opulent mansions of Miami Beach and you reach desperately poor neighborhoods. There's the grinding poverty of sugar cane country and the growing middle class of Jacksonville. All told, half the public-school students in Florida qualify for subsidized lunches. Many are the first in their families to speak English or contemplate attending college.
In many states, those economic differences are reflected in the classroom, with students in wealthy schools taking many more advanced courses.
The Opportunity Gap
But not in Florida. A ProPublica analysis of previously unreleased federal data shows that Florida leads the nation in the percentage of high-school students enrolled in high-level classes--Advanced Placement and advanced math. That holds true across rich and poor districts.
Studies repeatedly have shown that students who take advanced classes have greater chances of attending and succeeding in college.
Our analysis identifies several states that, like Florida, have leveled the field and now offer rich and poor students roughly equal access to high-level courses.
In Kansas, Maryland and Oklahoma, by contrast, such opportunities are far less available in districts with poorer families.
That disparity is part of what experts call the "opportunity gap."
Members of state teachers unions sued Thursday to block part of a law giving Gov. Scott Walker veto powers over rules written by other state agencies and elected officials.
The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal skirmishes between the GOP governor and public employee unions.
In the case, parents of students and members of the Wisconsin Education Association Council and Madison Teachers Inc. challenge the law for giving Walker the power to veto administrative rules written by any state agency. That law wrongly gives Walker that power over the state Department of Public Instruction headed by state schools superintendent Tony Evers, the action charges.
"The state constitution clearly requires that the elected state superintendent establish educational policies," WEAC President Mary Bell, a plaintiff in the suit, said in a statement. "The governor's extreme power grab must not spill over into education policy in our schools."
The measure, which Walker signed in May, allows the governor to reject proposed administrative rules used to implement state laws.
'The idea - which I have to say has affected large numbers of politicians - that you can just give people at university a certificate and, hey presto, they'll earn this amount more and the country will be x-amount richer has always seemed so bizarre to me that I have to pinch myself that so many apparently rational people believe exactly that.'
Professor Alison Wolf is a breathless speaker - as I discovered while trying to keep up during the course of our interview. But as the author of Does Education Matter? Myths About Education and Economic Growth, and more recently of the government-commissioned Review of Vocational Education, Wolf is certainly worth listening to on the plight of British universities. And nowhere is her insight more valuable than when it comes to tackling what she has called 'the great secular faith of our age' - namely, the idea that education is the key to economic growth, swelling both an individual's bank balance and expanding a nation's GDP.
The state's most powerful political force got rolled in the 2011 Legislature.
Last week, Gov. John Kitzhaber and his allies rammed a dozen education bills through roadblocks erected by the 48,000-member Oregon Education Association.
A coalition of Kitzhaber, House Republicans, a few Democrats willing to buck the teachers' union, and newly emboldened interest groups handed the OEA its biggest policy setbacks in years.
"There is a strong desire for real movement forward on education, and people were willing to break a few eggs to get there," says Rep. Chris Garrett (D-Lake Oswego), one of three Democrats who voted "yes" on HB 2301, a controversial online charter-school bill that catalyzed the breakthrough.
To be sure, OEA successfully pushed for a $175 million increase in the K-12 budget over Kitzhaber's opening proposal, and the union helped forestall any significant changes to the Public Employees Retirement System this session. But in terms of educational politics, this session saw substantive bills that have been stymied for many sessions zip through.
After banning flavored milk, the Los Angeles Unified School District is doing something kids all over will cheer about: They issued a decree that homework can only count for only 10 percent of a student's grade. The policy goes into effect July 1.
The idea behind the new rule is that it will level the playing field for students who don't have educational support at home. Also, Los Angeles isn't alone in this new approach. The Los Angeles Times reports:
In many districts, limits are being placed on the amount of homework so students can spend more time with their families or pursue extracurricular activities like sports or hobbies. The competition to get into top colleges has left students anxious and exhausted, with little free time, parents complain.
Today marks one year since Arizona adopted the common core state standards, but you wouldn't know it based on any information provided by public officials or the press in Arizona. Indeed, you would have an impossible time finding any details about the Arizona State Board's official action to adopt the standards.
Last year, I wrote about the bizarre situation where states that were completely overhauling their K-12 reading and math standards in favor of the more advanced, 21st century common core state standards were not only downplaying this standards transformation, but in some instances, also appeared to be proactively burying the information.
Arizona fell into this last group as I mentioned last July:
Board members approved a separation agreement that effectively made the meeting Gorman's last as superintendent, ending a five-year reign marked by rising test scores, budget cuts and aggressive reforms that sparked outcry from teachers.
Board members praised Gorman for increasing student achievement and managing a diverse, 135,000-student school system full of competing constituencies, even at the cost of increasingly personal criticisms leveled at him.
Kaukauna Area School District projects $1.5 million surplus after contract changes to health care, retirement savings; Milwaukee Plans to Lay Off 354 Teachers
As changes to collective bargaining powers for public workers take effect today, the Kaukauna Area School District is poised to swing from a projected $400,000 budget shortfall next year to a $1.5 million surplus due to health care and retirement savings.
The Kaukauna School Board approved changes Monday to its employee handbook that require staff to cover 12.6 percent of their health insurance and to contribute 5.8 percent of their wages to the state's pension system, in accordance with the new collective bargaining law, commonly known as Act 10.
"These impacts will allow the district to hire additional teachers (and) reduce projected class sizes," School Board President Todd Arnoldussen wrote in a statement Monday. "In addition, time will be available for staff to identify and support students needing individual assistance through individual and small group experiences."
Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Gregory Thornton announced at a news conference this afternoon that 519 layoff notices would be issued for next school year, including 354 teachers.
Most of the teacher cuts come at the elementary level. The district has about 125 elementary schools. The elementary schools most affected are those that lost funding for a program that reduces class sizes.
The layoffs are the result of a number of budgetary factors, including the loss of $84 million in state aid to MPS for the next fiscal year, Thornton said.
Thornton called on the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association to reconsider the district's request that teachers pay 5.8% of their salaries toward their pensions, which would have reduced the number of layoffs by about 200 teachers.
Phil Frei and his Traveling Pie-in-the-Sky Budget Show like to compare Sun Prairie administrative costs to the state average. And we look great! That trick's not working so well anymore. As they say in the deep south, "that dog don't hunt". Heck even the new associate editor for the STAR, covering the recent budget hearing, asked if we didn't have a more realistic comparison.
Even as administrators and legislators push schools to dump printed books in favor of electronic ones, evidence mounts that paper books have important advantages as tools for learning. Last month, I reported on a study out of the University of Washington which showed that students find printed books more flexible than e-books in supporting a wide range of reading and learning styles. Now comes a major study from the University of California system showing that students continue to prefer printed books to e-books and that many undergraduates complain that they have trouble "learning, retaining, and concentrating" when reading from screens.
The University of California Libraries began a large e-textbook pilot program in 2008. In late 2010, more than 2,500 students and faculty members were surveyed to assess the results of the program. Overall, 58% of the respondents said they used e-books for their academic work, with the percentage varying from 55% for undergraduates to 57% for faculty to 67% for graduate students. The respondents who used e-books were then asked whether they preferred e-books or printed books for their studies. Overall, 44% said they preferred printed books and 35% said they preferred e-books, with the remainder expressing no preference. The preference for print was strongest among undergraduates, 53% of whom preferred printed books, with only 27% preferring e-books. Graduate students preferred printed books by 45% to 35%, and faculty preferred printed books by 43% to 33%.
In less than 10 minutes, Detroit Public Schools Emergency Manager Roy Roberts tonight reviewed an 11-page summary of the district's $1.2-billion budget for next school year that projects cutting $200 million from the deficit and reducing all wages by 10%.
Roberts' first public hearing on the budget since taking over in May as the state appointee in charge of DPS began tonight at 6 p.m.
The budget projects that the $327-million deficit will be reduced to $127 million as DPS sells $200 million in bonds, he said.
"We treasure your input, we're going to take it to heart," Roberts said to the audience.
Well, the budget battle royale in Wisconsin has come and gone. The tent city of protestors has packed up and moved on. Our state electeds are no longer front and center on Fox News, MSNBC, Colbert or the Daily Show. The guy blowing the vuvuzela outside Governor Walker's East Wing Capitol office is probably still there, but the tidal wave of fervor and insanity that engulfed us seems to have finally receded.
And for all my bright shiny optimism early in this legislative session, some of which persisted well into the spring, I am disappointed with the outcome. There have been some good public policy changes, but on the whole the political losses and missed opportunities far outweigh the gains.
Good News First...
We found middle ground on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program...more or less. The program will remain means tested, but more working class families will be eligible. The private schools that participate will continue to administer the state assessment to choice students so an accurate picture of student performance is available in all publicly funded schools. Unfortunately, many solid choice schools are still being slowly strangled by the discrepancy in funding between kids in the public schools and kids enrolled in choice and charter schools, and we have still done little to get lousy schools out of the education pipeline in Milwaukee once and for all.
Associated Press:The Indiana Department of Education is spending nearly $700,000 to develop strategies for overseeing troubled schools that don't involve a traditional school board.
The work by The MindTrust is being done as the state prepares to recommend which of 18 failing public schools should be removed from district control and given to private school operators to attempt a turnaround.
All 18 schools have scored in the lowest category on the state ISTEP+ exam for five straight years. A 1999 state law allows the state to take over schools if test scores are in the lowest category for a sixth consecutive year.
The education department has paid more than $680,000 to The MindTrust in an effort to make sure none of the failing schools -- seven of which are in the Indianapolis Public Schools system -- return to the hands of a school board that will lead it back to failure.
"The fact that we have as many failed schools in IPS as we do reflects a larger issue in the overall system," David Harris, chief executive officer of The MindTrust, told the Indianapolis Business Journal. "The state doesn't want to return schools to a governance structure that isn't going to produce conditions that are optimal for success."
I recently wrote about how having friends at work was never a priority. However, the fact of the matter is I have made some close ones - people I really respect and enjoy being around. That makes work pleasant, as we're all dealing with similar challenges together, instead of battling alone. Of course, it makes you want to go to work everyday, knowing that you're going to a place where you are liked and like the people around you.
Now, I've heard anecdotes recently from a variety of schools about colleagues not being so supportive of each other, saying nasty things behind others' backs and the like. I hope no one is doing this to me, and if any of my colleagues have any kind of issue with me, that they can bring it to my attention and we can work it out.
Like everyone else, I want to be recognized for my positive attributes, and I want those to be my hallmarks and form my reputation.
We recently celebrated the end of the school year with our annual party. This one had the added wrinkle of being a defacto retirement party for some much loved members of the staff.
I was moved by the way people spoke about each retiree. I didn't expect such wonderful things to be said, and more importantly, the honorees were genuinely surprised and touched.
Students across the U.S. are enjoying or getting ready for summer vacation, but teachers may be looking forward to the break even more. American teachers are the most productive among major developed countries, according to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data from 2008 -- the most recent available.
Among 27 member nations tracked by the OECD, U.S. primary-school educators spent 1,097 hours a year teaching despite only spending 36 weeks a year in the classroom -- among the lowest among the countries tracked. That was more than 100 hours more than New Zealand, in second place at 985 hours, despite students in that country going to school for 39 weeks. The OECD average is 786 hours.
And that's just the time teachers spend on instruction. Including hours teachers spend on work at home and outside the classroom, American primary-school educators spend 1,913 working in a year. According to data from the comparable year in a Labor Department survey, an average full-time employee works 1,932 hours a year spread out over 48 weeks (excluding two weeks vacation and federal holidays).
A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Education Testing Service's Achievement Gap Symposium, which addressed research and solutions for our education system in Pre-K-third grade, especially for low-income, minority and African American students. What I found most interesting was a comment Jerry D. Weast, Superintendent of the Montgomery County Public Schools and one of the speakers, said: "structure drives your culture and culture drives your expectations." Weast believes the achievement gap can be solved if a district or school can establish a culture with high expectations.
To do this, teachers should be mentors and role models. All children, especially minority students need someone like Mrs. Menendez, my kindergarten teacher, who told me that I would grow up to be a great lawyer one day. She also told my parents that they needed to make sure they did everything in their power to get me through high school and college. Today, my master's program is nearly done and law school is next on the schedule. Parents of minority and low-income children need this kind of one-on-one advice.
Legislation to reform Delaware's charter school system by requiring background checks for charter founders and board members and placing the schools under tighter financial oversight got a unanimous passing grade in the House Thursday.
House Bill 205, sponsored by Rep. Terry Schooley, D-Newark, was prompted by a News Journal investigation that found the state Department of Education failed to check the credentials or criminal background of the founder of Reach Academy. Reach Academy is facing closure amid serious financial problems and a fight over control of the board.
The legislation, which now moves to the Senate for consideration, would require yearly mandatory external audits for charter schools and allow the Office of Management and Budget to analyze the financial status of a struggling school and manage some of the school's finances. It also would require that decisions to close a school be made no later than January so parents can enter their children in the school-choice program and meet deadlines to get into charter schools.
Wisconsin's "Read to Lead" Task Force convened for its second meeting last month to address teacher training and reading interventions. Here's an excellent debrief (via School Information System) from Wisconsin Reading Coalition on the discussion. And here are my notes from the gallery:
After only about a month as top boss of Detroit Public Schools, Roy Roberts, a 72-year-old former General Motors executive and private equity firm founder, is well aware that some people already want him gone.
The district's new financial manager said he's OK with that reality, adding that differing opinions have value. His only request: Stay out of the way as he tries to turn around one of the nation's worst public school systems.
I don't care what people think about me, really ... because I know what parents are going to think," Roberts told The Associated Press during an interview in his Detroit Midtown office. "They're going to love it because I'm trying to do the right thing for their children, and you won't find a parent that doesn't want that. I'm simply going to look at a system and say 'What is the best system we can put in place to educate these kids?' I don't care about the politics."
What concerns him, he said, is a massive budget deficit and students who either don't receive a legitimate education or flee the district in search of one. Those mountainous challenges form the ridge that for decades has left the 74,000-student district on the shadowy side of progress.
Aaron Pallas, an ed school professor at Teachers College, appears to be unwilling to acknowledge that our public schools are failing to effectively educate huge numbers of our kids, or that there's much we can do about it. He struggles to debunk existing examples of demonstrable success perhaps fearing that we might otherwise ask why do we keep doing so poorly when we have proof that we can do so much better.
To that end, last week Pallas penned a piece in this column challenging my assertion in a Washington Post op ed that our "schools can get much better results with th[e] same kids than they're now generally getting." Employing a locution that I never used, and that cannot fairly be inferred from what I said, he tries to portray my view as placing "the emphasis on what schools can extract from kids." (His italics.)
No, Professor Pallas, I don't think knowledge resides in kids and, like iron ore, all we need to do is carefully extract it. What I do think is that our schools, and especially our teachers, need to do a much better job of educating our kids - that is, teaching them the skills and knowledge they will need to be successful in the 21st century. As I put it in my piece, "teachers matter, big time."
Providence's teachers union is asking a Rhode Island education board to review a state official's decision to prohibit seniority as a basis for assigning teachers.
The union says the state's education commissioner, Deborah Gist, has taken the position that using seniority alone to assign teachers doesn't comply with state regulations.
Baltimore city schools Andres Alonso said last week that while the school district has gone to great lengths to tighten testing security, he anticipates coming before the city again to announce that more schools attempted to game the system.
There are two more investigations pending, from a batch of four schools referred to the state last year. The 2011 Maryland School Assessments will be released next week.
In a news conference last week, Alonso told reporters that it may take one or two more years before cheating is eradicated from the system. He vowed, however, that at some point, "we will emerge from this conversation--it may take one or two years--but we will emerge with our heads held high."
He also indicated that Maryland's new teacher evaluation system, which is partly based on student progress, will spur a "perverse incentive to do something wrong." Baltimore is one of seven districts that will pilot the new state evaluation system in the fall.
So we've got all these empty school buildings in Milwaukee at the same time we've got schools or potential schools that need decent buildings. Resolving this doesn't sound like the most complicated issue facing the human race.
Almost needless to say, it's complicated.
For quite a while, there was not much action on the empty-school front. Now, there's a lot, including plans being developed on two different (and potentially competing) tracks.
Making maximum use of these assets will take cooperation between leaders of Milwaukee Public Schools and non-MPS schools, who are not known for cooperating across turf lines. But there is some chance that at least hunks of the empty-school issue will be worked out cooperatively and to the actual benefit of school kids. In fact, a major example of that is unfolding without public controversy right now.
School Board members last week were given a list of 29 properties owned by MPS that were considered "surplus." Several of them are not schools. Several currently are being leased or used in some way. When you boil it all down, there are maybe a dozen that seem to be good candidates to be used as schools.
With green lights being given by the state Legislature to open more charter schools (independent or semi-independent, nonreligious, publicly funded schools) and private schools in the publicly funded voucher program, more people are eyeing empty MPS buildings. Getting use of them could save millions of dollars, compared with the alternatives.
School voucher advocates have had two recent op-eds in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "The story behind school choice study" by John Witte and Patrick Wolf on May 28 and "Special needs students benefit from many choices" by Susan Mitchell on June 19. Both are at best misinformed and at worst deceptive. The facts should matter.
State law says voucher schools must accept special education students. Then why are so few special education students (the number hovers near 1%) attending voucher schools? I put this question to a voucher school principal, who said her school has no special education services or students.
I asked her how that was possible. She stated that she simply tells parents of special education students that she cannot provide the services that their children need. Parents then choose another school, she said - most likely in Milwaukee Public Schools.
MPS does receive more money per student than voucher schools receive. But Mitchell claims MPS receives $15,000 per student while voucher students receive $6,442. She somehow arrived at these numbers without doing her homework. One needs to subtract from the total the amount transferred to voucher schools for a variety of programs.
It's not just rhetoric, people, these are truly unprecedented times. The economy seems to choke and sputter like an engine with a fouled spark plug. Consider all that has transpired of late, and it all begs the question: is it time for new leadership within the Sun Prairie School District? We offer 5 solid indicators.
1. District Administrator Tim Culver's Unofficial Approval Rating is at an all-time low.
Years ago Culver could toss it aside as just a few malcontents. He's referred to them as "Nitters and Pickers" and "Wreckers". SheeeeAH...as if name calling is really going to solve the problem. But these folks didn't go away. Rather, they have brought the dirty laundry out into the bright of day. And they multiplied like rabbits on the farm.
For a school district to function effectively and move forward, its leader must have the support of both the public and the district staff. Frankly we don't hear much other than outright contempt for Culver from any of the schools. Ask any of your friends and neighbors and the story is the same...the staff just no longer support Culver. OK...he may have the support of a few of his inner circle administrators...you know...his "pets". And let's not think for one minute that Culver doesn't have his pets. It's as plain as day for anyone who takes the time to see which administrators are getting the 7% raises, and which ones are getting a pittance. It's also clear which administrators are getting revised job descriptions to give them whatever they want.
After months of work across the state to define multiple measures of student growth, the Delaware Department of Education has asked the United States DOE for, and - word is - will receive, permission to delay implementation of our DPAS II teacher evaluation system, which will impact the roll-out of numerous other Race to the Top reforms.
The revised DPAS II evaluation system would have identified teachers as "highly-effective," "effective," "needs improvement," or "ineffective," ultimately impacting eligibility for various initiatives. Below are programs and policies that will be affected by delaying DPAS II implementation:
Diane Ravitch, the historian and leading education reform critic, can be hard to understand. Not that her writing is difficult. Quite the opposite actually, it's incredibly lucid and lively, and my favorite thing about her in fact. Rather it's difficult to understand who exactly the person is that could contain both the Diane Ravitch who once wrote so passionately and doggedly in favor of school choice and accountability from the halls of the Hoover Institute, and the Diane Ravitch who now writes reform criticisms with the hyperbole and one-sidedness of a teacher's union spokesperson. But in a new City Paper piece, Dana Goldstein tries to reconcile the two and find the intellectual continuities that have stayed with her on such a seemingly bipolar intellectual journey. As much of a Ravitch critic as I may be, like Goldstein, I believe that there are some coherent ties that bind old and young Diane, and perhaps surprisingly, one of them is Friedrich Hayek.
The Recovery School District, a state body that oversees the majority of New Orleans public schools, is laying off more than 70 employees at its central office, part of a sweeping organizational overhaul initiated by the district's new leader.
RSD officials have been saying for weeks that the district will need to downsize as it turns over more of the schools it manages to independent charter operators and closes others. That's been the RSD's strategy since it took over schools in the city following Hurricane Katrina.
But in an interview Friday, RSD Superintendent John White said the district has now begun to notify employees who will lose their jobs as a result of cutbacks, which will take the central office head count down by 35 percent, from 220 people to 144.
The sequencing of the 6 billion chemical "letters" of human DNA was completed in draft in 2000 and in final form in 2003. But clinical benefits have arrived more slowly than the initial hype suggested. This is mainly because the human genome actually works in a much more complex way than predicted by the late-20th-century model.
Twenty-first-century research shows that we have only 21,000 genes, one-fifth of the number predicted when the project started, and that just 1.5 per cent of the genome consists of conventional protein-coding genes. Efforts are under way to understand the vital regulatory and other functions of the non-coding regions of the genome, once dismissed wrongly as "junk DNA".
"It's an extraordinary day for New Jersey," Chris Christie boomed proudly when we talked this afternoon. It's a pretty extraordinary day for New Jersey's governor, too.
Regular readers of The Times Magazine may recall that I wrote a cover piece on Mr. Christie back in February, exploring in some detail his long campaign to remake the pension and health care system for New Jersey's public service unions. Near the end of that piece, in a kind of "to be continued" way, I noted that Mr. Christie had made a lot of noise for his agenda but hadn't yet achieved the most pivotal pieces of reform.
And so Mr. Christie was calling, minutes before the New Jersey House started voting on a bipartisan reform package, to do a little crowing. He wanted me to know that he and the leaders of New Jersey's Democratic-controlled Legislature were about to do something pretty amazing.
Sir Terry, who stepped down from the helm of Britain's largest private employer earlier this year after 14 years in charge, was addressing an audience of teachers at the Wellington College Festival of Education.
"Standards in schools vary too widely, more widely than you would find in business," he said.
"The standards in too many schools are simply not good enough.
"The answer is deceptively simple. It is about good leadership in each school, good teachers in each classroom and support in their work by the wider society."
He said this was often hampered by a "myriad" of well-meaning Government initiatives and a tendency to "micromanage" education, with "too much management, and not enough help or trust".
I greatly admire both Jeb Bush and Joel Klein, so I have mixed feelings saying that I'm confused about their op-ed this morning.
The article is entitled "The Case for Common Educational Standards." But the article does not contain any case for common educational standards.
Quite the contrary, the article emphasizes the case against common standards. As in:
And, while education is a national priority, the answer here does not appear to be a new federal program mandating national standards. States have historically had the primary responsibility for public education, and they should continue to take the lead.
So that would be an argument against common standards.
Parents, do you want to encourage your young people to think mathematically this summer and beyond? Here are some ways to accomplish that.
Preschoolers
Nurturing Mathematically Talented Preschoolers-In this blog entry, Natasha Chen shares her experience on parenting a mathematically precocious child. The author acknowledges that it can be difficult to find a program for three- to five-year-olds, so she offers some tips that she has found useful. Her suggestions include
State lawmakers on Friday approved a bill that would allow school districts to borrow as much as $1 billion without voter approval, but a spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said the measure would most likely be vetoed.
Without advance notice and with little debate, the bill won Senate approval late Thursday night, several days after the legislative session had been scheduled to end. The Assembly passed the measure Friday afternoon, and the governor's office then took the unusual step of publicly opposing the legislation moments after its passage, effectively dooming it.
Elizabeth Lynam, deputy research director at the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-backed group that generally favors lower spending, described the bill as one of the worst things the Legislature had done this session.
Remember how Culver and a group of his peeps were going to explore the possibility of an elementary charter school/ Mandarin Chinese immersion program and report back to the board?
Well skip the board and just sign up because we're hearing that incorporating Mandarin Chinese into the district is a done deal that will occur by the start of the 2012-1 school year.
POINT - COUNTERPOINT ON THE MANDARIN CHINESE PLAN
POINT
Mandarin Chinese? Really? Don't go screamin' "xenophobia", now, but one has to wonder: Is Culver thinking that the economy is tanking so badly that we all should be brushing up on the new landlords' language? Or is he still trying to catch up with his district administrator buddy in Verona? And why are we worrying about what ANYBODY is up to instead of just focusing on our own kids?
And while we're on the subject. We're hoping that the rumors we're hearing are just that...rumors. 'Cause we'd be wondering how much it would cost John Q. TaxPayer to develop this little Mandarin Chinese program.
Based on current educational and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain. African American and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among young men failing to achieve academic success and are at greater risk of dropping out of school. Boys in general lag behind girls on most indicators of student achievement.
In 2009, just 52% of African American boys and 52% of Latino boys graduated on-time from Madison Metropolitan School District compared to 81% of Asian boys and 88% of White boys.
In the class of 2010, just 7% of African American seniors and 18% of Latino seniors were deemed "college-ready" by ACT, makers of the standardized college entrance exam required for all Wisconsin universities.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) is a public charter school being developed by the Urban League of Greater Madison. Madison Prep will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly young men of color. Its mission is to prepare scholars for success at a four year college by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service. A proposed non-instrumentality charter school located in Madison, Wisconsin and to be authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District, Madison Prep will serve 420 students in grades 6 through 12 when it reaches full enrollment in 2017-2018.
While a panel discussion held by The College Board on Capitol Hill this week was meant to highlight a new report on the lagging rates of educational attainment among non-White men, some of the panelists questioned the need for more research on the subject.
"How much data do we need?" asked panelist Dr. Roy Jones, executive director for the Eugene T. Moore School of Education's Call Me MISTER Program at Clemson University. (MISTER is an acronym for Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role-models).
His remarks came after a discussion of the new report titled "The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color: A Review of Research, Pathways and Progress," co-authored by John Michael Lee Jr., a co-panelist and policy director at the College Board's Advocacy and Policy Center.
The June 18 editorial "Students of history" outlined steps that should be taken to correct the distressing ignorance of U.S. students about civics. I am sure most education professionals will endorse those recommendations, such as civic-oriented activities, because they follow modern theories of education. Unfortunately, these actions would introduce gross inefficiencies and time-wasting activities into the curriculum. Modern education theories are the main reason students complain of too much work but show themselves to be poorly educated in most subjects.
I took a one-year high school course in civics 60 years ago that was taught by our football-basketball-baseball coach, whose main interest was athletics, not civics. We never took any field trips or did any community service. Yet we learned civics. How? We went through the textbook. It wasn't sexy or exciting -- real learning seldom is -- but it worked. To really improve students' knowledge, schools need only buy good textbooks and tell the teachers to teach the book. It's that easy.
Both the Oregon House and Senate this week passed 3 groundbreaking education bills that are now on their way to the Governor's desk to be signed into law. The bills bring more choice to Oregon's public education system and allow students to learn in schools where they best grow, learn and succeed.
From the standpoint of the state Republican party, who sponsored and supported these bills, they accomplish 3 goals:
allow students to enroll in the school district of their choice
raise the enrollment cap on virtual charter schools
empower community colleges and public universities to create charter schools.
"The Legislature is on track to have its most successful session on education reform in decades," said House Education Committee Co-Chair Matt Wingard (R-Wilsonville). "Together, these reforms help promote choice, accountability and innovation in our educational system. I'm particularly pleased with the progress we've made in expanding choice for parents and their children."
When Gov. Rick Snyder this week announced his big, long-awaited plan to rescue the Detroit Public Schools he also promised to raise money to send all of the district's graduates to community colleges or training programs. The idea is modeled after the Kalamazoo Promise, a similar but more ambitious plan launched in 2005 that provides full scholarships for that city's graduates to any Michigan public college or university. Anonymous donors pony up $20 million a year for the program, which has inspired similar programs in 23 communities across the country, including five others in Michigan, according to the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. (Complete list here.)
Not only do such programs increase college attendance, they give families who now reside in those communities an incentive to stay and entice new ones to relocate, spurring economic growth and development. The schools in El Dorado, Ark., for example, have seen a 5 percent enrollment increase since its program began four years ago. Detroit badly needs such a boost. The city lost 25 percent of its population over the past decade and 44 percent of its students since 2003 but did not cut expenses fast enough, which contributed to a $327 million deficit for this year.
Already, national political fundraising ma- chines are beginning to hum and s putter toward early targets in their quest to break another election cycle's worth of spending records. The nation's largest teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA), was the heaviest contributor to U.S. political campaigns in 2007-08, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Early indications show it is a front-runner to be so again. Along with its state affiliates, the NEA took in $1.5 billion in revenue in 2008-09, the Education Intelligence Agency notes. Nearly all of this revenue came from member dues, and most of the war chest will be spent seeking to increase spending and to block those school reforms deemed most threatening to union clout.
The stakes are high, even by contemporary standards. The nation's annual taxpayer investment in kindergarten-through-12th-grade public education runs over half a trillion dollars and accounts for more than 4 percent of gross domestic product. Meanwhile, teachers union members are starting their summer under the dark cloud of a trillion dollars in unfunded educator pension-fund liabilities.
June 9: Notes from Superior Court Hearing on the Compton Parents and the Parent Trigger Petition
Location: Downtown Los Angeles
You've probably heard the Compton Parent Trigger story by now: over 200 parents grew tired of seeing their kids drop out and fail to learn to read at one of the chronically, lowest performing schools in California. So they banded together to use the historic new Parent Trigger Law (which I authored), only to face an all-out assault by the Compton Unified School District against their efforts to create a better future for their children.
What these parents are doing invokes the spirit of Mendez, a 1946 federal court case that challenged racial segregation in Orange County schools. In its ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in an en banc decision, held that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students into separate "Mexican schools" was unconstitutional. Likewise, in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education the United States Supreme Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional.
Following the exploits of Madison Teachers Inc. leader John Matthews in the State Journal makes it obvious that he is a negotiator extraordinaire.
He's managed to have his people on one side of the "negotiating table" and at least some he helped elect on the other side, so it is not a "bargaining table" but a "collaboration table."
Maybe, however, he has gone too far in not enthusiastically promoting measuring teacher performance, as encouraged by President Barack Obama. Now it seems Wisconsin's taxpayers need to take back some of the functions, like measuring employee performance, usually ascribed to management but, through negotiation, given to the employee.
I appreciated the respect for John Matthews' achievements conveyed by Madison labor mediator Howard Bellman's comment in Sunday's article, and his concern about the possible effect of Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to destroy the Madison teachers union and public employee unions throughout Wisconsin:
"It would be like somebody watching all their paintings burn up... What he's accomplished over the years would have been just a memory."
However, that analogy fails to give consideration to the value of his work beyond creating a robust and effective union. For the artist, the joy of the creation might be lasting, but the product of his efforts would be gone. That would not be the case for what Matthew's efforts have produced.
fter encouraging Madison teachers in February to stage an illegal sick-out, which robbed children of educational opportunities and caused disruption for many parents, he now says teachers are "ready to do whatever it takes" to continue the protest of state budget reductions. He was also quoted as saying; "It's going to get down and dirty."
Wow! This kind of rhetoric coming from a 71-year-old man who receives about $310,000 in annual income and benefits from union fees. Makes you ask the question: What is his priority?
A mind is a precious thing to waste, so why are millions of America's students wasting theirs by going to college? All of us who have been there know an undergraduate education is primarily a four year vacation interrupted by periodic bouts of cramming or Google plagiarizing, but at least it used to serve a purpose. It weeded out underachievers and proved at a minimum that you could pass an SAT test. For those who made it to the good schools, it proved that your parents had enough money to either bribe administrators or hire SAT tutors to increase your score by 500 points. And a degree represented that the graduate could "party hearty" for long stretches of time and establish social networking skills that would prove invaluable later on at office cocktail parties or interactively via Facebook. College was great as long as the jobs were there.
Now, however, a growing number of skeptics wonder whether it's worth the time or the cost. Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and head of Clarium Capital, a long-standing hedge fund, has actually established a foundation to give 20 $100,000 grants to teenagers who would drop out of school and become not just tech entrepreneurs but world-changing visionaries. College, in his and the minds of many others, is stultifying and outdated - overpriced and mismanaged - with very little value created despite the bump in earnings power that universities use as their raison d'être in our modern world of money.
Fact: College tuition has increased at a rate 6% higher than the general rate of inflation for the past 25 years, making it four times as expensive relative to other goods and services as it was in 1985. Subjective explanation: University administrators have a talent for increasing top line revenues via tuition, but lack the spine necessary to upgrade academic productivity. Professorial tenure and outdated curricula focusing on liberal arts instead of a more practical global agenda focusing on math and science are primary culprits.
The slow pace of America's economic recovery means many states are still hurting financially. As many as 15 states still can't agree on a budget, and that's a problem, because in many states the fiscal year begins next month.
Parents are understandably anxious about what this all means for the upcoming school year. And they should be. An analysis released earlier this month by the National Governors Association and National Association of State Budget Officers found that 16 states are planning cuts for next year, following 18 that made extra cuts midway through last year. And that's before cuts at the local level. So even though fear about the education budget axe never matches the reality, there will be real sacrifices in some states and communities and, overall, spending remains below what it was just a few years ago. (See if the golden age of education spending is over.)
Unfortunately school districts and states are more tight-fisted about sharing information than they are about spending money. And too often budget cuts are based more on what's easiest for the adults in charge of the schools rather than the kids in them. So here are 5 things parents should know -- or ask -- about the spending decisions and how they will impact schools next fall.
Kentucky is seeking to become the first state in the nation to use its statewide accountability system to determine whether schools are meeting the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Gov. Steve Beshear sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Monday, asking for a waiver that would allow Kentucky to replace the current method for determining if schools are making adequate yearly progress under the federal law with a new measuring stick that state officials are still developing.
That would allow Kentucky more control over determining whether schools are making sufficient academic progress each year.
"I believe that federal law should set high expectations for education goals, but grant power and judgment to states and districts with regard to the means of achieving those goals," Beshear said in a statement Monday.
[Note from Laurie Rogers: This is part 3 of a series of articles on Celesta, a grade-11 student in Spokane, WA. I interviewed her for a June 4 episode of "Cut to the Chase," a local radio show hosted by Rob Chase for the ACN Network. Part 1 of the series described Celesta as lacking multiple basic skills in mathematics. Part 2 discussed the district's response to my queries about how to help Celesta and her classmates.]
I've been writing about Celesta, a high school student who was carrying a 3.6 GPA, who passed her math tests, got As in her math classes, was placed into honors pre-calculus, and who - like many of her classmates - suddenly found out she was missing multiple critical skills in elementary math. She was struggling to pass her honors math class. She also has few skills in grammar.
I've been trying to figure out a way to help Celesta and her classmates.
The best way to help the students:
Go back in time and teach the students the grammar and the six years of math skills the district refused to give them. I need a time machine to do that, and no one has invented one - not that they've told me, anyway.
The achievement gap between Hispanic and white students is the same as it was in the early 1990s, despite two decades of accountability reforms, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday.
Performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows the gap narrowed by three points in fourth- and eighth-grade reading since 2003, a reduction researchers said was statistically significant. But the overall difference between them remains more than 20 points, or roughly two grade levels.
"Hispanic students are the largest minority group in our nation's schools. But they face grave educational challenges that are hindering their ability to pursue the American dream," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.
Idaho's new multimillion-dollar student data system is causing giant headaches at school districts around the state and local school officials say it isn't working.
State Superintendent of Schools Tom Luna said he's working to address the concerns, and said some aren't valid. "This is the first year ISEE has been operational," Luna told the Legislature's Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, which is holding its interim meeting this week. "We are the last state in the nation to deploy a statewide longitudinal data system, but we have made progress quickly. This is the most accurate data we have ever had."
Tom Taggart, president-elect of the Idaho Association of School Business Officials and director of business and operations for the Lakeland School District, told the lawmakers, "We want to look forward in what we can do to make this work, without being too negative, but I think part of our message is a dose of reality as to what's going on at the school level. ... We're the nuts and bolts people who are in the business offices in the schools. We like it when things work, and when they don't work we like to find a way to fix them."
There's a certain childlike innocence that goes along with the popular modern sport of teacher bashing. I say this because most people get over the idea that teachers are ultra-powerful beings who live unattainable lives of luxury at around the age of 7, when they realize that rumpled, coffee-stained JC Penney office apparel is not haute couture. Many critics of teachers, however, manage to hang on to this silly notion way past the time when their skulls have fully hardened.
Call me a fuzzy-headed liberal, but I just don't see the point in bashing people who help train our future workforce.
Of course, the tired old canard that teachers are remorseless, mustache-twisting budget-drainers has been resurrected in the past few months - first when the governor's budget repair bill touched off mass protests among public employees, and most recently when the Wisconsin Supreme Court removed the final barrier to the bill's enactment.
Some have reacted to teachers' and other public employees' reluctance to lie down and simply accept significant cuts in compensation and the stripping of their collective bargaining rights with everything from derision to rancor.
For example, some local wags took to calling Walkerville - the protest village near the Capitol that was inhabited by disgruntled public employees and their supporters - "Entitledtown."
Yesterday, I did an interview for the BAM network on Good Boss, Bad Boss. The content expert on line was Justin Snider, who teaches at Columbia and has in-depth knowledge about K-12 schools, as that was the focus of the conversation. Justin had great questions and comments about bosses in general (see this recent post) and about school principals in particular. I thought he made especially good comments about how the best principals are PRESENT, constantly interacting with teachers, students, and parents. He especially suggested that school principals think about where their offices are located.. are they in a place that essentially requires them to keep bumping into teachers and parents, or are they in some corner of campus that reduces the amount of interaction.
Teacher at Work: Improving Teacher Quality Through School Design (October 2009)
There is no question that high-quality teachers have an enormous impact on student achievement. Over the years, schools and districts have looked at a variety of ways to attract better teachers to public schools, especially those serving the poorest students.
"But these reforms are likely to disappoint if nothing is done to fundamentally overhaul the way the work of teachers is organized," Elena Silva argues in Teacher at Work. Better teaching, she says, will in the long run come not only from attracting a strong pool of talent and giving them boosts in pay, but from "changing the nature of the job."
In the report, Silva highlights promising models of school design, such as Generation Schools in New York City, which provides a school model that focuses on the strategic use of people and time, and calls for a new approach to addressing the teacher quality challenge in public education.
Education Sector: What drew you to this issue in the first place?
This is our district and how it operates even during hard times.
Update: I attended the joint Mayor/Superintendent event tonight (separate thread to come) but I asked the Mayor two things. One, how many staff at City Hall got a raise since he has been Mayor because the District had and, if he was hearing from powers that be about taking over the school district. (I pointed out that we RIFed teachers, laid off elementary counselors and maintenance workers with a $500M backlog in maintenance.) On the latter, he said no and that he felt that they were still in the collaboration stage with the district and it was working well. On the former he stated that the unionized city workers had been persuaded to NOT take a 2% raise but take the amount of inflation and that NO other city workers (non-unionized) had a raise. (He said he could not himself take a pay cut under City Charter but had given $10k to charities and that his staff was making less than the previous administration.)
The Superintendent jumped in and said that they gave bumps to people who got promotions. I had specifically said in my question to the Mayor that these were not for people with promotions and/or additional job responsibilities and I said that again. She then said that they had found that they hadn't been paying people what they should and gave them raises. You can imagine how that went over in the room.
Paying administrative people what they are worth in a poor economy in a district that says it has no money. It is not the fault of those people to ask for the money but it is wrong for the district to pay them more now. There's no amount of waffling that can change that.
Three civil liberties unions plus some Douglas County parents filed a lawsuit this morning against the authorization of funds by the state treasurer to a lottery program created to subsidize scholarships to private schools--many of which are religious schools.
The national Americans Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ACLU of Colorado, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State filed the lawsuit in Denver District Court on behalf of plaintiffs who allege that the Douglas County Pilot Voucher Program disrupts the separation between church and state.
The Douglas County school board-approved Pilot Voucher Program is a scholarship lottery for 500 students to attend one of 19 private schools, but 14 of those schools are religious. In charge of implementing the state's first ever voucher program is Dr. Christian Cutter, assistant superintendent for the Douglas County School District.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday defended the decision by his handpicked school board to cancel 4 percent pay raises for Chicago teachers, arguing that teachers have gotten two types of pay raises since 2003 while students got "the shaft."
With a $712 million deficit, Emanuel said the Board of Education could not continue to honor a contract that satisfied everybody's concerns but the only group that really matters: Chicago Public School students.
"Teachers got two types of pay raises. People in public life got labor peace. Can anybody explain to me what the children got? I know what everybody else got," Emanuel said.
"Just a little north of 50 percent of our kids graduate. Our [test] scores haven't moved. Yet, in all that time, not one additional minute of instructional time for the children of Chicago where they can be safe and learning. . . . Our future -- which is what this is about, the mission of education -- our children got the shaft. . . . I will not accept our children continuing to get the shaft."
The worst of Detroit's schools will be pulled out of the district--which the nation's top education official calls the "bottom of the barrel"--and placed in a new system that gives principals and staff more control over spending, hiring and improvement efforts, state officials announced Monday.
The overhaul is meant to help address problems in a debt-plagued district where nearly one in five students drops out. While the Detroit Public Schools has had a state-appointed emergency financial manager for two years, the current one said there's only so much that can be done without more radical change.
"The system is broke and I can't fix it, and you can't fix it," Roy Roberts said at a news conference where he and the governor announced the plan.
As many as 45 schools could be moved to the new system in the fall of 2012. Principals will be in charge of hiring teachers, and they and their staffs will handle day-to-day operations.
In an unusually blunt assessment, the board says its academic-performance goals, particularly for disadvantaged students, "are not on track to be met."
Each year about this time Seattle School Board members evaluate their only employee, the district's superintendent. With an interim superintendent on the job only a few months, this year had to be a little different.
In fact, you could say the board did the evaluation three months ago when they fired the previous superintendent, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, following revelations that an employee had spent money on contracts for which the district received little or nothing in return.
With Goodloe-Johnson gone and no need to attach accomplishments or failures to the superintendent or go through the agony of determining whether or not she got a raise, the board in a report at its regular meeting last week focused on what the district itself had or had not accomplished. The result was surprising and refreshingly candid language about where the district stands.
Most of the questions from Little Rock reporters were about Pulaski County, the state's second-largest district with more than 17,000 students. In the brief YouTube clip below, Kimbrell responds to my question about whether the reorganization period is seen as a time to talk about reconfiguring the three public school districts in Pulaski County. Many Jacksonville residents have wanted to secede from the doughnut shaped district. Others have talked about combinations with Little Rock and North Little Rock to create, for example, two districts on either side of the Arkansas River. In short, said Kimbrell, yes, it should be discussed.
Other high points:
No one factor precipitated the Pulaski takeover. Kimbrell said he certainly gave great weight to wishes of the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee, which recommended the option. But he also referred obliquely to ousted Superintendent Charles Hopson's seeming statements that he didn't intend to be guided by Board wishes in some spending decisions. The "tone at the top" is vital, he said, in answer to a question about why the state decided to both oust Hopson and dissolve the school board.
Hopson's contract is now null, Kimbrell said. The state has no obligation to pay him.
Join us next week,
Wednesday, June 22, at the Alliant Energy Center's Exhibition Hall as we welcome fellow Rotarian Kaleem Caire to the podium for a presentation on the features of the Madison Preparatory Academy, its timeline for implementation and a status report on where it is in the school development and approval process.
Attendees will learn why and how the Urban League hopes to lead a renaissance in K-12 education in Greater Madison, tying its charter school effort to local school improvement
initiatives, economic development projects and advancements and innovations in higher education and workforce development in Greater Madison.
To compile the 2011 list of the top high schools in America, NEWSWEEK reached out to administrators, principals, guidance counselors, and Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate coordinators at more than 10,000 public high schools across the country. In order to be considered for our list, each school had to complete a survey requesting specific data from the 2009-2010 academic year. In total, more than 1,100 schools were assessed to produce the final list of the top 500 high schools.
We ranked all respondents based on the following self-reported statistics, listed with their corresponding weight in our final calculation:
Four-year, on-time graduation rate (25%): Based on the standards set forth by the National Governors Association, this is calculated by dividing the number of graduates in 2010 by the number of 9th graders 2006 plus transfers in minus transfers out. Unlike other formulas, this does not count students who took longer than four years to complete high school.
Percent of 2010 graduates who enrolled immediately in college (25%): This metric excludes students who did not enroll due to lack of acceptance or gap year.
AP/IB/AICE tests per graduate (25%): This metric is designed to measure the degree to which each school is challenging its students with college-level examinations. It consists of the total number of AP, IB, and AICE tests given in 2010, divided by the number of graduating seniors in order to normalize by school size. AP exams taken by students who also took an IB exam in the same subject area were subtracted from the total.
Average SAT and/or ACT score (10%)
Average AP/IB/AICE exam score (10%)
AP/IB/AICE courses offered per graduate (5%): This metric assesses the depth of college-level curriculum offered. The number of courses was divided by the number of graduates in order to normalize by school size.
WHEN THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION last week released the results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress -- "the Nation's Report Card" -- the bottom line was depressingly predictable: Not even a quarter of American students is proficient in US history, and the percentage declines as students grow older. Only 20 percent of 6th graders, 17 percent of 8th graders, and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrate a solid grasp on their nation's history. In fact, American kids are weaker in history than in any of the other subjects tested by the NAEP -- math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, and economics.
How weak are they? The test for 4th-graders asked why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure in US history and a majority of the students didn't know. Among 8th-graders, not even one-third could correctly identify an advantage that American patriots had over the British during the Revolutionary War. And when asked which of four countries -- the Soviet Union, Japan, China, and Vietnam -- was North Korea's ally in fighting US troops during the Korean War, nearly 80 percent of 12th-graders selected the wrong answer.
Historically illiterate American kids typically grow up to be historically illiterate American adults. And Americans' ignorance of history is a familiar tale.
When it administered the official US citizenship test to 1,000 Americans earlier this year, Newsweek discovered that 33 percent of respondents didn't know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, 65 percent couldn't say what happened at the Constitutional Convention, and 80 percent had no idea who was president during World War I. In a survey of 14,000 college students in 2006, more than half couldn't identify the century when the first American colony was founded at Jamestown, the reason NATO was organized, or the document that says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Numerous other surveys and studies confirm the gloomy truth: Americans don't know much about history.
Somewhere in heaven, it must all make Harry Truman weep.
He never attended college and had no formal intellectual credentials, but Truman was an avid, lifelong student of history. As a boy he had devoured Plutarch's Lives and Charles Horne's four-volume Great Men and Famous Women, developing an intimacy with history that would later become one of his greatest strengths. "When Truman talked of presidents past -- Jackson, Polk, Lincoln -- it was as if he had known them personally," the historian David McCullough wrote in his landmark biography of the 33rd president.
Truman may have been exaggerating in 1947 when he told Clark Clifford and other White House aides that he would rather have been a history teacher than president. Yet imagine how different the NAEP history scores would be if more teachers and schools in America today routinely imparted to their students a Trumanesque love and enthusiasm for learning about the past.
Alas, when it comes to history, as Massachusetts educator Will Fitzhugh observes, the American educational system imparts a very different message.
While the most promising high school athletes in this country are publicly acclaimed and profiled in the press and recruited by college coaches and offered lucrative scholarships, there is no comparable lauding of outstanding high school history students. A former public school history teacher, Fitzhugh is the publisher of The Concord Review, a journal he began in 1987 to showcase the writing of just such exceptional student scholars. The review has printed 924 high-caliber research papers by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations, The New York Times reported in January, winning a few "influential admirers" along the way.
But this celebration of what Fitzhugh calls "Varsity Academics®" amounts to just drops of excellence in the vast sea of mediocrity that is American history education. Another kind of excellence is represented by the National History Club that Fitzhugh launched in 2002 in order to encourage middle and high school students to "read, write, discuss, and enjoy history" outside the classroom. Beginning with a single chapter in Memphis, the club has grown into an independent national organization, with chapters in 43 states and more than 12,000 student members involved in a rich array of history-related activities.
"Our goal," says Robert Nasson, the club's young executive director, "is to create kids who are life-long students of history." He and Fitzhugh have exactly the right idea. But as the latest NAEP results make dismally clear, they are swimming against the tide.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Every year or two, my husband, an academic advisor at a prestigious Midwestern university, gets a call from a student's parent. Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so's son is a sophomore now and still insistent on majoring in film studies, anthropology, Southeast Asian comparative literature or, god forbid ... English. These dalliances in the humanities were fine and good when little Johnny was a freshman, but isn't it time now that he wake up and start thinking seriously about what, one or two or three years down the line, he's actually going to do?
My husband, loyal first and foremost to his students' intellectual development, and also an unwavering believer in the inherent value of a liberal arts education, tells me about these conversations with an air of indignation. He wonders, "Aren't these parents aware of what they signed their kid up for when they decided to let him come get a liberal arts degree instead of going to welding school?" Also, he says, "The most aimless students are often the last ones you want to force into a career path. I do sort of hate to enable this prolonged adolescence, but I also don't want to aid and abet the miseries of years lost to a misguided professional choice."
Now, I love my husband. Lately, however, I find myself wincing when he recounts these stories.
>Most of the inside-the-beltway chatter this week was around Secretary Arne Duncan's announcement on Monday, via Politico, that if A.: Congress did not act soon to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, he would B.: proceed to "develop a plan that trades regulatory flexibility for reform." I can't confirm this, but the rumor is that the plan arrived at OMB last night, and will be finalized in August. At any rate, it doesn't seem like they're playing games on this one. All signs suggest that they plan to follow through.
We ran down our concerns when we got a whiff of this back in December (here). Long story short, we don't like the process and see serious pitfalls ahead on the substance. We recommend you also take a look at takes this week by reform veterans like Margaret Spellings (the first two Vinnie Barbarino paragraphs alone tell you most of what you need to know), Andy Rotherham, and Jeanne Allen.
I know that the current Secretary sincerely thinks states and school districts need relief. And I would agree that in some instances, some flexibility that allows states to revise their current plans makes sense. But the lack of action on the Hill is not why a waiver process is so urgent per se. In fact, both the turbulence around reauthorization and, now, the waiver process, stem from an underlying third variable: the temporary lapse in strong leadership on the part of those who know, can do, and have done, better.
Gov. Rick Snyder will create a new authority to run several failing Detroit Public Schools as part of a sweeping reform package to be announced Monday for the struggling district, sources said.
The plan would restructure the failing school district, which has a $327 million budget deficit, by moving underperforming DPS schools under a new authority to be run by current DPS Emergency Financial Manager Roy Roberts, according to sources.
Roberts would have the authority to make new work rules at those schools, a process sources familiar with the discussions said could take a year. A law passed this year gives emergency managers new powers to control academic and financial matters and to cancel or modify union contracts.
Running for re-election in a tight race last fall, state Rep. Keith Farnham received a sizable chunk of his campaign cash -- $50,000 of $462,000 -- from Stand for Children, an Oregon-based education group seeking sweeping reforms in Illinois.
Shortly after the November election, the group was moving to get changes in place, fast -- among them, tougher tenure requirements, limiting teachers' ability to strike, and lengthening the school day in Chicago.
Stand for Children had, after all, successfully worked to overhaul school policies in other states around the country.
But Illinois was not Colorado or Wisconsin, where the power structure made it easier to push laws that weakened union rights. No, Illinois had a Democratic-controlled, union-backed legislature and governor's office.
A decade ago, Philadelphia families were told that a state takeover was necessary to fix a failing, bankrupt school system. As we face the third school financial crisis since then, we have to ask whether this experiment has finally run its course.
Back then, privatization and education-management organizations were promoted as the saviors of failing schools, even though they had limited success elsewhere. After investing hundreds of millions of dollars, there has been little measurable benefit.
Today we chase after other quick fixes - Renaissance Schools and Promise Academies. There is also a strong push in Harrisburg for vouchers.
Yet, what good are these "fixes" when high school science programs face the layoffs of 42 chemistry, biology, and physics teachers? The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers reports pink slips going to 115 English teachers, 121 math teachers, 66 social studies teachers, and 323 special education teachers. We should think about the effect of losing 50 art teachers across the district.
I find myself more and more interested in the growing debate over how much and what to teach high school students. I support the side that thinks all students should be given skills that will make them ready for college because the same abilities---to write, read, do math and manage their time--are necessary if they want good jobs or trade school slots after high school.
On the other side are those who think college prep for all is a failed experiment. They say it alienates too many students and must be replaced by vocational programs that get to the heart of what employers want without killing student interest with required essays on the Romance poets and the Federalist papers. A recent report by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which I trashed here, is the best and most complete recent example of this argument.
I hadn't encountered any promising efforts to bring the two sides together until I saw a commentary, "Untangling the Postsecondary Debate," by Mike Rose, professor of social research methodology at UCLA, in the latest Education Week "Diplomas Count" report. He is critical of both sides, but helped me most in understanding where my arguments are weak.
We have been discussing the issue of tracking in high school, particularly the standard system of regular (or general), honors (or advanced) and Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses. Parents in Fairfax County are resisting the school district's elimination of honors courses, leaving only a choice between regular or AP classes. I suggested the district get rid of the regular and leave only honors and AP, because research shows that the college skills taught in honors classes are also important for students who want to get a good job or go to trade school right out of high school.
This generated much comment from around the country, including the two responses below from high school administrators who share the belief that they are not giving all of their students the enriched education they need. I think they provide a useful perspective from inside schools. What do you think of what they are saying?
Mike Musick is the principal of Conifer High School in Conifer, Colo. About nine percent of its students are low-income, and its AP test participation rate is high enough to rank well on my annual Challenge Index list. Amy Fineburg, an assistant principal, asked that I identify her high school only as a high-achieving one in Alabama. But I can say that its demographic and academic characteristics are similar to Conifer High's.
Her 30-minute turn at Jefferson Middle -- an actual class at the Southwest D.C. school -- will be reviewed by school officials, who will use the 360-degree camera to gauge not only her performance but how students responded.
If they like what they see, they will upload the video with the rest of her application to an online portal principals can access to view job candidates. The District, which employs about 4,000 teachers, expects to hire 600 to 800 for the coming academic year. That number reflects the usual turnover along with vacancies expected to emerge in the summer with the dismissal of instructors who receive poor evaluations.
Sowers received 48-hours' notice for what she was expected to cover in the taped lesson. But she entered the room knowing nothing about her students or their relative abilities. That meant showtime came with some surprises.
"It's one thing to talk about these issues on high," says Howard Fuller, who has done that often as one of the nation's most eloquent and best known education activists.
"But when you get over here on 33rd and Brown . . . " His sentence trails off. That's where CEO Leadership Academy is located, and that's where Fuller has come face to face with how tough it is to achieve high results among exactly the students he most wants to help.
Howard Fuller: Former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent. Leading advocate for Milwaukee's private school voucher program. Local and national leader in charter school issues.
Howard Fuller: Hands-on chair of the board of a small high school where test scores for 10th-graders last fall were awful and where the record of success has been plainly disappointing.
A couple years ago, Fuller told me that, as much as he thought he knew about how hard it is to achieve educational success in a high-poverty, urban setting, he didn't know how hard it really was until he got involved at CEO.
What's the projected tax levy?
What they want you to focus on is the % increase over last year...and that is 3.48%.
Yeah?...but what is the actual levy amount?
OK, since they won't, let's do the math for you.
It starts with last year's tax levy, which was $45,503,637. Therefore, if the district's draft budget represents a 3.5% increase, then the plan is to levy $47,087,164 this year.
The increase in levy is this $1.6M, with $650K of that going to debt and $950K additional for the General Fund.
The big news today is that the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee in a 9-4 vote released legislation that would increase public employee contributions to health care premiums from 1.5% to between 3.5%-35% of the premium. Higher-paid employees would contribute more and lower-paid employees would contribute less. Pension contributions would also go up by a percentage point or two, and the increases would be phased in over a few years.
The bill now goes to the Assembly Budget Committee on Monday, and then to the full Senate on Thursday.
It's unclear whether Assemblywoman Sheila Oliver's proposal to have the legislation sunset after four years is still a go.
Amidst the Senate deliberations yesterday, public worker unions, including NJEA, held a smaller-than-expected rally; the subsequent news reports and editorials in today's papers largely express astonishment at the loss of power of collective bargaining units. Here's a sampling:
The newly seated Chicago Board of Education may have won the first battle with Chicago teachers this week when it rescinded a 4 percent pay raise, but it may also have ended a relatively peaceful era in labor relations and created a more pugnacious adversary.
The Chicago Teachers Union has absorbed a number of recent setbacks. On Monday, a sweeping education bill that reformed teacher tenure and limited teachers' ability to strike was signed into law. And on Wednesday, the board unanimously nullified raises that would have cost nearly $100 million.
Some teachers and observers say that backing the union into a corner on wages and other key issues could be the spark to reinvigorate the membership.
"If you act in a confrontational way, you're poking your finger in the eye of those teachers, and very typically you generate unintended negative consequences," said Robert Bruno, director of the labor education program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
School Board challenger Kate Martin, who’s running against District 2 incumbent Sherry Carr (Carr represents north central Seattle around Green Lake), has been one of the most passionate speakers at the candidate forums the past two nights. At both the 43 District on Tuesday night and at the 36th District last night, she lamented that only four of her son’s friends were graduating, while the rest, more than 40 kids, had dropped out.
And though Martin hasn’t gotten any district Democrats’ endorsements, she has prevented Carr from getting the nod. Last night, she had back up from local celebrity Cliff Mass, the recently ousted KUOW weatherman.
Students in schools of education pay a lot of attention to the problems of learning how to learn, lifelong leaning, and the like. In the absence of much knowledge of history, economics, physics, literature, foreign languages, chemistry, calculus and so on, this can degenerate into what Professor E.D. Hirsch, Jr., calls "How-to-ism," an absorption in "pedagogy" without any secure foundation in academic knowledge.
It is also the case that most graduates of our schools of education are shocked by the day-to-day problems of managing youngsters with Twitter, popular music, sports, popularity, and Grand Theft Auto on their minds. But it should be noted that it is very hard to get students interested in academic work, for instance history, if the teacher doesn't know any history herself. This problem causes some number of coaches who teach Social Studies to shy away from the Renaissance in favor of current events, which may seem more approachable both to them and their students. How 'bout those Bruins!
In the meantime, even American students who are Seniors in high school show a pitiful ignorance of the most basic knowledge of the history of their own country, as revealed in the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress report released this month.
In The Knowledge Deficit, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., tried to get across the point that teaching learning skills, for example, which pedagogy graduates are supposed to be good at, does little or nothing for helping students acquire knowledge. He argues that the only way to increase knowledge is to build on a stronger and stronger base of knowledge, not by wasting time on the dubious techniques of "Learning How to Learn."
I am convinced that one of the reasons even some students who do not require remediation in reading and writing when they get to college still fail to gain a degree after six or eight years, in part go under academically because they do not bring enough knowledge to help them understand what the professor is talking about. Their ignorance makes them feel lost. Some become determined to find the knowledge they have not been given in high school, but too many quit instead.
To be more fair to the education schools, even Harvard has had great difficulty in committing its faculty to teach certain basic areas of knowledge. The faculty tried to avoid arguing over what needed to be taught, so they fell back on allowing each department to teach "the skills" of its discipline, which they believed could be taught with any subject matter (such as that which the professor's research happened to focus on at the moment).
The problem, as pointed out in an article by Caleb Nelson in The Atlantic called "Harvard's Hollow Core," is that "One cannot think like a physicist, for example, without actually knowing a great deal of physics." Similarly, it is quite hard to think like a historian if you don't know any history.
So the whole "Learning How to Learn" paradigm collapses of its own emptiness and leads to academic failure for many students who have been offered rubrics, techniques and skills as a substitute for the academic knowledge they would need to survive in college.
The Common Core is offering national goals for knowledge. Others have critiqued their weakness in math, but I would suggest that their goals for reading in history are scarcely challenging for eight graders. Reading The Declaration of Independence and A Letter from the Birmingham Jail is not a waste of time, but for high school students, why not offer Mornings on Horseback, Washington's Crossing, Battle Cry of Freedom and The Path Between the Seas? In other words, actual history books? I cannot find out when it was decided (or by whom) that American high school students can manage European history, calculus, Latin, chemistry and so on, but cannot be expected to read through even one complete history book? How did our expectations for nonfiction reading (and gathering knowledge thereby) get so dramatically dumbed down? Of course STEM is very important, but even engineers and scientists need to read and write.
To demonstrate how far we have slid down the slope of expectations since Thomas Jefferson's day, here is an example from The Knowledge Deficit (p. 9):
"In our pre-romantic days, books were seen as key to education. In a 1786 letter to his nephew, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors: [history] Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Anabasis, Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin. On morality, Jefferson recommended books by Epictetus, Plato, Cicero, Antoninus, Seneca, and Xenophon's Memorabilia, and in poetry Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Milton, Shakespeare, Ossian, Pope and Swift."
The state budget bill now in Gov. Scott Walker's hands would leave schools with roughly $900 million less in state aid and property tax authority over the next two years, state figures show.
Going beyond simple cuts in state aid to schools, the budget bill would also end up requiring many districts - perhaps two-thirds of them statewide - to cut their property tax levies, according to one analysis by a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor.
Now that the 2011-'13 budget bill stands on the verge of becoming law and the protests have died down, schools - and taxpayers - can start to digest the changes in store for them. Those range from new savings on teachers' benefits to expansions of private school voucher programs in Milwaukee and Racine.
"We're really entering a new phase in school funding," said Dan Rossmiller, lobbyist for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. "It suggests huge challenges."
The cuts to schools are the single biggest item in the Republican budget toward closing a two-year, $3 billion budget deficit without relying on tax increases. The controversy about the cuts is likely to continue, with at least one district saying it's considering a lawsuit.
A federal judge has halted longtime state payments intended to help integrate three Arkansas school districts, including Little Rock, site of one of the most bitter desegregation fights in U.S. history.
U.S. District Court Judge Brian S. Miller, who oversees the districts' federally ordered desegregation efforts, found the payments were "proving to be an impediment to true desegregation" by rewarding school systems that don't meet their long-standing commitments.
Judge Miller's recent rulings triggered protests by the school districts. But some lawmakers and state officials hailed the decision to shut off the payments, which totaled roughly $1 billion over the past two decades.
Lawyers for Little Rock and the other districts said the loss of as much as $70 million for the year that begins in August would cause budgetary chaos. The state payments amount to about 10% of the Little Rock budget and about 9% for each of the other two districts. The parties have until Friday to seek a stay of the order.
Last week Democratic heavyweight George Norcross got up on a stage with Gov. Chris Christie to announce that not only does he support the Opportunity Scholarship Act (the voucher bill) but also he's opening charter schools Camden.
To add to the cognitive dissonance, the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) joined forces with the nepotistic Elizabeth school board to campaign against Sen. Ray Lesniak (D-Union), the former chair of the NJ Democratic party -- and the chief sponsor of the school voucher bill.
To muddy matters further, Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver (D-Essex), a steadfast ally of the teachers union, looks likely to overcome her initial opposition to a health and pension benefits reform bill -- despite protestations from NJEA leaders. The legislation would require public employees, including teachers, to contribute substantially more than the current 1.5 percent of base pay toward pension and healthcare premiums. (The Assembly Budget Committee just announced it will hear the bill on Monday.)
In the battle for nutrition bragging rights, Los Angeles has beat New York -- at least when it comes to scratching chocolate milk and other less-healthful items from the school lunch menu.
Yesterday, the Los Angeles Unified School District voted 5-2 on a new dairy contract to remove flavored milk from school menus, the Los Angeles Times reports. The district also banned sodas and chicken nuggets recently in its battle against childhood obesity. "By the fall the district will be a national leader," Matthew Sharp, with California Food Policy Advocates, tells the Times.
But the question is, will kids reach for the plain stuff?
After Donna Cushlanis's son, who was in second grade, kept bursting into tears midway through his math problems, which one night took over an hour, she told him not to do all of his homework.
"How many times do you have to add seven plus two?" Ms. Cushlanis, 46, said. "I have no problem with doing homework, but that put us both over the edge. I got to the point that this is enough."
Ms. Cushlanis, a secretary for the Galloway school district, complained to her boss, Annette C. Giaquinto, the superintendent. It turned out that the district, which serves 3,500 kindergarten through eighth-grade students, was already re-evaluating its homework practices. The school board will vote this summer on a proposal to limit weeknight homework to 10 minutes for each year of school -- 20 minutes for second graders, and so forth -- and ban assignments on weekends, holidays and school vacations.
John Danner, CEO and Founder of Rocketship Education, presented the Rocketship charter elementary school model and argued that hybrid schools are better for both students and teachers. Rocketship Education currently operates two open enrollment schools and serves a primarily low-income student population. The organization, which aims to have clusters in 50 cities over the next 15 years, works to eliminate the achievement gap by ensuring its low-income students are proficient and college-bound when they graduate from elementary school.
Shantanu Sinha, President and COO of the Khan Academy, described how their online academy began when the founder created math instruction videos to tutor his cousins. In just seven months, the Khan Academy has grown to serve over 2 million unique users per month with close to 60 million lessons delivered. With a mission "to deliver a world-class education to anyone anywhere," the Academy is utilized mainly by students at home as a supplement to their regular school instruction. Increasingly, though, Khan lessons are used in public schools to provide self-paced exercises and assessments to students, so as to avoid gaps in learning.
Presentations and ensuing discussion with local leaders pointed to two core components of innovative education that Washington State can learn from: efficient use of teacher time and skill as well as individualized instruction. Each builds on the lessons which Joel Rose, founder of School of One, emphasized at the launch of the Washington Education Innovation Forum.
As he won control of the city's public schools nine years ago this week, Mayor Bloomberg boldly promised: "We will not have to tolerate an incapable bureaucracy which does not respond to the needs of the students."
Sadly, New York City isn't even close to achieving that bold vision: We learned this week that only one in three city high-school graduates is prepared for college-level work.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg's promise is being put to the test like never before.
As the school year winds down, City Hall and the United Federation of Teachers have ratcheted up an intense game of chicken over the future direction of the city's school system. What schools will look like come the fall is anyone's guess.
Some education leaders worry a new law intended to give students more opportunities to take online classes will be difficult to implement, might limit students' educations and could hurt some schools in the long run.
Educators expressed their concerns to lawmakers at an Education Interim Committee meeting Wednesday. The law would allow Utah students, starting in the fall, to take up to two courses online instead of at their regular schools. And whoever provides that online course -- either another school district or a charter school -- would get part of the money that would normally go to the student's home school district or charter.
The state school board will hold a special meeting on June 27 to pass an emergency rule outlining how the program should work. But state education leaders told lawmakers Wednesday that while they support online education, certain aspects of the law might be troublesome.
According to the law, online classes would take the place of regular school day classes. Students, however, wouldn't have to take the online classes during the day, meaning they could potentially have nothing to do at school for up to two periods a day.
President Barack Obama's administration said it would offer states relief from the nation's main public-education law if Congress fails to enact changes by the start of the school year.
States may avoid requirements of the No Child Left Behind law that, for example, more students pass standardized tests each year if they agree to administration-backed "reforms," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said June 10 in a press briefing. The Education Department has pushed states to adopt national academic standards and merit pay for teachers. The law ties U.S. funding to test results.
Democratic Senator Tom Harkin and Republican Representative John Kline are among the members of Congress who have criticized the law's focus on holding schools accountable only through testing proficiency. Almost four years ago, Congress released a draft bill to revamp the law, and in March 2010, the Obama administration issued a blueprint for change. No legislation has been formally introduced, giving Congress less than three months to meet the administration's deadline.
Maybe, in 2001, it seemed like 2014 was too far away to be worth much worry. In 2011, it's not so far away. Not that it's clear what is going to be done now about what was one of the more idealistic, well-intended, but ridiculous, notions ever put into federal law.
In 2001, and with strong bipartisan support, Congress approved the No Child Left Behind education reform law. Amid its complex notions, there were some clear intentions: Congress and the president (George W. Bush at that point, but Bill Clinton and Barack Obama would say much the same) were tired of putting a lot of money into schools across the country and not seeing much to show for it. They wanted to see the American education world buckle down to work especially on improving the achievement of low income and minority students. And they wanted every child to be reading and doing math on grade level by - oh, pick a date far away - 2014.
So they called the law No Child Left Behind. A wonderful idea - are you in favor of leaving some children behind? I'm not.
Here are some details, according to a summary from Minority Leader Mark Miller's office:
-increase funding to K-12 by $356 million.
-repeal expansion of the choice program.
-repeal elimination of funding for gifted and talented programs, AODA grants, and science, technology, engineering and match grants.
-Fund the Wisconsin GI Bill and tie financial aid to increases in tuition.
-Boost funding to tech colleges by $17 million annually.
-repeal a provision JFC put into the budget that would create an individual income tax credit derived from property assessed as manufacturing or agricultural property. The tax credit would kick in Jan. 1, 2013, and when fully phased in for tax year 2016 would be worth $128.7 million annually.
As of early afternoon Wednesday the fate of voucher schools in Green Bay is uncertain. Rumors are flying that the proposal to use tax dollars to pay families to send their children to private and religious schools in that city will be pulled from the state budget.
It's been a hot topic.
The voucher story I posted on Chalkboard last week detailed Green Bay Supt. Greg Maass' unhappy reaction to both the proposal and the abrupt legislative process that put it in the budget. It definitely struck a nerve, and drew many comments.
Some of the most interesting reactions went well beyond the issue of vouchers and whether public money should be used to fund private schools. They expressed the heart of the debate surrounding public schools, or "government" schools as some folks call them.
Are public schools failing? Who's to blame? What responsibilities does a civil society owe to children who are not our own? What kind of reforms do parents, and taxpayers, want to see?
Here are some excerpts that are revealing of the divide in the debate:
VHOU812 wrote: ...As a consumer of the public (or private) educational institutions, I am demanding more value. If it is not provided, I will push to refuse to purchase and home school. This is not what I want. I want security knowing that I am satisfied with the investment in my children's education. I don't get that feeling right now from publc schools, and that is the core of the problem that public schools need to fix. I also see that private institutions, by their nature, can make changes to respond to consumer demands very quickly, and it is clear public schools either can't, or won't.
Wolfram's words are well worth considering: "You have to ask, what's the point of universities today?" he wonders. "Technology has usurped many of their previous roles, such as access to knowledge, and the social aspects."
Here is the presentation from today's Work Session on the Strategic Plan with survey results.
Highlights:
5905 responses - 64% family member, 26% teacher or school staff, 1% principals, 5% community, 4% Central Office
By zip code - looks like a somewhat even distribution with NE - 98115 with 528 responses, SE - 98118 with 221 responses, SW - 98136 with 118 responses, West Seattle - 98116 with 182 responses and NW - 98117 with 433 responses. (There were more zip codes than those.)
page 8 has a breakdown of coaches and costs - overall it costs $6.4M for 65.6 coaches (the salary swings are interesting)
Professional development in math, science and reading helping teachers and students - the big answer was .... no opinion. And, out of the nearly 6,000 responses, only 3443 people answered this question. Effective/somewhat effective (families-27%/teachers-51%). Ineffective/somewhat ineffective (families-22%/teachers-28%)
MAP test results effectiveness. Effective/Somewhat Effective (families-41%/teachers-33%). Somewhat effective/ineffective (families-45%/teachers50%). Out of 6k responses, only 3682 respondents answered.
MAP- how many times a year should it be used? 3x- families-30%, teachers-23%, principals-40%. Hmm, looks like principals like it more than teachers. 2x -families-29%,teachers-30%, principals, 40%. That's a lot closer. And hey, they ARE reducing MAP to two times a year for 2011-2013 (winter and spring)
NSAP. More efficient/somewhat more - families-42%/teachers 23%/principals 55%. Somewhat less/less efficient - families-27%/teachers-29%/principals-31%.
Governor Walker's Read to Lead task force met on May 31st at the State Capitol. Following are observations from WRC.
Note: Peggy Stern, an Oscar-winning filmmaker currently working on a project about dyslexia, had a crew filming the meeting. If we are able to acquire footage, we will make it available. If you would like Wisconsin Eye to record future meetings, please contact them at comments@wiseye.org.
Format: Unlike the first task force meeting, this meeting was guided by two facilitators from AIR, the American Institutes for Research. This was a suggestion of Senator Luther Olsen, and the facilitators were procured by State Superintendent Tony Evers. Evers and Governor Walker expressed appreciation at not having to be concerned with running the meeting, but there were some problems with the round-robin format chosen by the facilitators. Rather than a give-and-take discussion, as happened at the first meeting, this was primarily a series of statements from people at the table. There was very little opportunity to seek clarification or challenge statements. Time was spent encouraging everyone to comment on every question, regardless of whether they had anything of substance to contribute, and the time allotted to individual task force members varied. Some were cut off before finishing, while others were allowed to go on at length. As a direct result of this format, the conversation was considerably less robust than at the first meeting.
Topics: The range of topics proved to be too ambitious for the time allowed. Teacher preparation and professional development took up the bulk of the time, followed by a rather cursory discussion of assessment tools. The discussion of reading interventions was held over for the next meeting.
Guests: Dawnene Hassett, Asst. Prof. of Curriculum and Instruction and new elementary literacy chair, UW-Madison Tania Mertzman Habeck, Assoc. Prof. of Curriculum and Instruction, UW-Milwaukee
Mary Jo Ziegler, Reading Consultant, Wis. Department of Public Instruction
Troy Couillard, Special Education Team, Wis. Department of Public Instruction
Next Meetings: The Governor's office will work to set up a schedule of meetings for the next several months. Some of the meetings may be in other parts of the state.
Action: WRC suggests contacting the offices of the Governor, Luther Olsen, Steve Kestell, and Jason Fields and your own legislators to ask for several things:
Arrange for filming the next meeting through Wisconsin Eye
Bring in national experts such as Louisa Moats, Joe Torgesen, and Peggy McCardle to provide Wisconsin with the road map for effective reading instruction, teacher preparation, and professional development . . . top university, DPI, and professional organization leaders at the May 31st meeting asked for a road map and admitted they have not been able to develop one
Arrange the format of the next meeting to allow for more authentic and robust discussion of issues
Summary
Teacher Training and Professional Development
The professors felt that the five components of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension) are generally taught in preparation programs, but that instruction varies widely from one institution to another. Reading course work requirements can vary from 12 credits to just one course. They also felt, as did the teachers on the panel, that there needs to be more practical hand-on experience in the undergraduate program. There was a feeling that teachers "forget" their instruction in reading foundations by the time they graduate and get into the classroom. They have better luck teaching masters level students who already have classroom experience. The linguistic knowledge means very little without a practicum, and we may need to resort to professional development to impart that information. Teachers need to be experts in teaching reading, but many currently don't feel that way. It is important, especially with RTI coming, to be able to meet the needs of individual students.Both professors and teachers, as well as others on the panel, felt a "road map" of critical information for teacher preparation programs and literacy instruction in schools would be a good idea. This was a point of agreement. Hassett felt that pieces of a plan currently exist, but not a complete road map. The professors and some of the teachers felt that teacher prep programs are doing a better job at teaching decoding than comprehension strategies. They were open to more uniformity in syllabi and some top-down mandates.
Marcia Henry mentioned studies by Joshi, et al. that found that 53% of pre-service teachers and 60% of in-service teachers are unable to correctly answer questions about the structure of the English language. Tony Pedriana cited another Joshi study that showed college professors of reading were equally uninformed about the language, and the majority cannot distinguish between phonemic awareness and phonics. He also said it was very difficult to find out what colleges were teaching; one college recently refused his request to see a syllabus for a reading course. Steve Dykstra read from the former Wisconsin Model Academic Standards and the current Wisconsin Model Early Learning Standards, which contained incorrect definitions and examples of phonemic awareness. He questioned whether teachers were being adequately prepared in decoding skills. Rep. Steve Kestell was concerned with the assessment that most teachers do not feel like experts in teaching reading, and he wondered if updated techniques for training teachers would make a difference.
Sarah Archibald (aide to Luther Olsen) proposed looking at a more rigorous foundations of reading test, as found in other states, as a requirement for teacher licensure. This would be one way to move toward more uniform instruction in teacher prep programs. Steve Dykstra pointed out that a test alone will not necessarily drive changes in teacher preparation, but publishing the passage results linked to individual colleges or professors would help. Evers indicated that DPI has been looking for several months into teacher testing and licensure.
Gov. Walker asked if the ed schools were looking at the latest trends in teacher preparation to become better. The professors indicated that the ed schools confer with local districts in an effort to improve.
Supt. Evers said it was probably not a good idea that teacher prep programs across Wisconsin vary so much.
Hassett indicated that some flexibility needs to be retained so that urban and rural areas can teach differently. There was some disagreement as to whether teachers of upper grades need to be trained in reading, or at least trained the same way.
Linda Pils pointed out that the amount and quality of professional development for Wisconsin teachers is very spotty. Most panel members felt that a coaching model with ongoing training for both teachers and principals was essential to professional development, but the coaches must be adequately trained. There was some discussion of Professional Development Plans, which are required for relicensure, and whether the areas of development should be totally up the individual teacher as they are now. Steve Dykstra felt that much existing professional development is very poor, and that money and time needs to be spent better. Some things should not count for professional development. Michele Erikson felt that it would be good to require that Professional development be linked to the needs of the students as demonstrated by performance data. Mary Read pointed out that coaching should extend to summer programs.
The main consensus here was that we need a road map for good reading instruction and good teacher training and coaching. What is missing is the substance of that road map, and the experts we will listen to in developing it.
Assessment
Mary Jo Ziegler presented a list of formal and informal assessment tools used around Wisconsin. Evers pointed out that assessment is a local district decision. Many former Reading First schools use DIBELS or some formal screener that assesses individual skills. Balanced literacy districts generally use something different. Madison, for example, has its own PLA (Primary Language Assessment), which includes running records, an observational survey, word identification, etc. MAP assessments are widely used, but Evers indicated that have not been shown to be reliable/valid below third grade. Dykstra questioned the reliability of MAP on the individual student level for all ages. PALS was discussed, as was the new wireless handheld DIBELS technology that some states are using statewide. Many members mentioned the importance of having multiple methods of assessment. Kathy Champeau delivered an impassioned plea for running records and Clay's Observational Survey, which she said have been cornerstones of her teaching. Kestell was surprised that so many different tools are being used, and that the goal should be to make use of the data that is gathered. Dykstra, Henry, and Pedriana mentioned that assessment must guide instruction, and Archibald said that the purpose of an assessment must be considered. Couillard said that the Wis. RTI center is producing a questionnaire by which districts can evaluate assessment tools they hear about, and that they will do trainings on multiple and balanced assessments. Dykstra questioned the three-cue reading philosophy that often underlies miscue analysis and running records. no consensus was reached on what types of assessment should be used, or whether they should be more consistent across the state. Hassett questioned the timed component of DIBELS,and Dykstra explained its purpose. Some serious disagreements remain about the appropriateness of certain assessment tools, and their use by untrained teachers who do not know what warning signs to look for.
Intervention
Evers began the topic of intervention by saying that DPI was still collecting data on districts that score well, and then will look at what intervention techniques they use. Henry suggested deferring discussion of this important topic to the next meeting, as there were only 8 minutes left.
Newly-seated Chicago School Board members ruled Wednesday that the cash-strapped CPS system does not have the $100 million it would cost to cover promised 4 percent raises for teachers and other union workers.
The unanimous decision to stop the raises from going into effect came after board members were told that nearly three-quarters of the system's teachers will still get other raises based on length of service and educational advancement -- at a cost to the district of $35 million.
The decision came during a "special meeting" called to determine if the district had enough money to fund the scheduled 4 percent raises to teachers and seven other bargaining units representing building engineers and other support staff. Under the contract, the board can reject contractual raises if it determines the system does not have the funds to pay for them.
Even without the 4 percent pay hikes, the raises most teachers will receive could range between 3 and 5 percent for those with less than 13 years in the system, and 1 percent for those with more experience, officials said.
Pleading poverty, the newly-seated Chicago Board of Education voted Wednesday to rescind a scheduled 4 percent raise for Chicago Public Schools teachers that would have cost almost $100 million.
The board's unanimous decision came after it revealed that the CPS budget deficit -- which it said is now $712 million -- includes millions of dollars in previously undisclosed costs.
The yearly raises are part of the Chicago Teachers Union contract, which is in its final year, but they are only enacted if the board agrees the district can afford them. The raises have been approved each year since the current contract began in 2007.
Board president David Vitale said teacher layoffs could still occur despite the vote. The CTU and other unions whose contractual raises were affected have until 11:59 p.m. Monday to ask to re-open part of their contracts in order to negotiate around the raises.
Facing an estimated $712 million deficit, the new Chicago Board of Education cried uncle on Wednesday, voting for the first time in 20 years not to fund promised raises.
Now it's time for Chicago teachers to stand up and accept reality.
Chicago teachers and the seven unions representing other school employee unions should accept the wage freeze or, at a minimum, try to negotiate less than the promised 4 percent raise.
Holding on to the pipe dream of getting that 4 percent raise -- and risking a summer of uncertainty and a possible strike at the end -- does no one, least of all Chicago students, any good.
The Board of Education simply has no more rabbits to pull from its budget hat.
We say that cautiously, knowing that CPS said much the same last year as it tried to persuade teachers to forgo their raise. And then, voila, CPS managed to fill its deficit without increasing class size or scaling back programs significantly.
Just like large companies eager to get a foothold in one of the world's most important markets, international business schools are moving into China in a big way.
Eager to capitalize on demand in a fast-growing economy that has a huge need for well-trained managers, big name B-schools from Europe and the U.S. are launching and expanding M.B.A.-program collaborations with Chinese universities or going it alone with courses aimed at mid-career executives.
Experience in China is also a selling point at home, since Western students increasingly see the benefits of studying at an institution whose faculty have close-up experience of the country. Such links can also give M.B.A. students the chance to study in China for a module or a semester.
"The lure is to go and learn about what's happening, and be in the middle of the action in one of the most dynamic economies in the world," says Krishna Palepu, senior associate dean for international development at Harvard Business School. The school has had a faculty research base in China for about 20 years but now shares a new Shanghai classroom with other Harvard schools.
I have been trying to find the campaign websites for all the candidates running for Seattle School Board this year (candidate filings closed 5 p.m. Friday), and the final list looks something like this. Two things: there's like a ton of them and only four open seats; not all of them have a website yet.
Most of the new candidates are running because they are tired of the corruption and cronyism in Seattle Public Schools. Some want to focus on closing the achievement gap and raising test scores. Others are just sick of the influence a plethora of foundations have on education these days.
At least one of the candidates is a reluctant one who says he's running because he is tired of mediocrity in our schools and the "business as usual approach" of our school board. Another lists this thing as his campaign website. This one sued the district against its new high school math textbooks in 2009.
The incumbents say they are fed up of the same things their challengers are (of course, I mean there can only be so many problems in one district, right?).
In a bare-bones basement office in Buffalo, N.Y., Katie Campos, an education activist, is plotting a revolution. She and her minuscule staff of the advocacy group Buffalo ReformED are against incredible odds. In less than a week, they are trying to get a controversial law known as the "parent trigger" through the New York legislature. It's a powerful nickname for game-changing legislation that would enable parents who could gather a majority at any persistently failing school to either fire the principal, fire 50% of the teachers, close the school or turn it into a charter school.
Campos and her group are working with some 4,000 frustrated parents like Samuel Radford III, who refuses to accept that as African Americans, his three sons in Buffalo public schools have only a 25% chance of graduating. Radford voiced his concerns for years but saw no improvement, so rather than continue to wait for the district to act, he became vice president of the District Parent Coordinating Council and threw his support behind passing parent-trigger legislation. "This is our chance to not just confront the problem but be part of the solution," Radford says. On June 15, Buffalo ReformED plans to fill a bus of parents like Radford and ride to the state capitol, in Albany, to host an informal hearing on the bill and speak to members of the senate and house education committees.
At statehouses around the country, the Great Recession is far from over: It could take years for many states to climb out of the hole and return to pre-downturn spending levels.
An Associated Press examination of 50 balance sheets shows state budgets and bank accounts still ravaged by a drop in tax revenue. Many states are also facing enormous long-term pension and health care obligations. At the same time, the payout of stimulus money from Washington that helped many states in their darkest hours has come to an end.
While some states saw a modest jump in tax collections this spring, the combined revenue projected by the 50 states in the coming fiscal year - $734 billion - is still down by about $34 billion, or 5 percent, from the 2007-08 fiscal year, when the recession began.
Some states are in far worse shape. New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Illinois and Louisiana reported deficits that are more than 20 percent of the state general fund.
When the Chicago Board of Education meets Wednesday to vote on a scheduled 4 percent raise for teachers, one figure will be crucial to the debate: The $724 million deficit the Emanuel administration says Chicago Public Schools is facing for the upcoming year.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel and CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard have repeatedly cited the almost $720 million deficit, and Emanuel mentioned it again Monday when he called on the state to give CPS the roughly $300 million it is owed in back payments. But a Chicago News Cooperative review of the district's funding sources shows that the calculations are inconsistent and CPS's actual deficit is still unclear.
There is no question CPS is in a large financial hole. The extent of the deficit, however, depends primarily on how much federal stimulus money the district has available and whether late payments from the state are taken into account.
CPS has come to rely on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal stimulus funds, which are drying up. In the administration's most recent budget presentation, in March, officials said CPS will have exhausted $260 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and $104 million from the federal Education Jobs Fund.
More than one-fifth of Texans say education is the most important issue facing the state, though it is unclear whether Republicans will pay a political price for cutting education funding, according to poll results released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Texas Lyceum group.
The group released preliminary findings from the telephone survey, conducted at the end of last month, as the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature inches closer to passing a state budget that cuts billions from public schools.
When asked an open-ended question about the most important problem facing Texas, 23 percent of 707 respondents named education, as did 33 percent of 303 likely voters in the group surveyed. Lyceum pollsters define likely voters as Texans who are somewhat interested in politics, are registered to vote and have voted in most or all elections.
Fewer than a quarter of American 12th-graders knew China was North Korea's ally during the Korean War, and only 35% of fourth-graders knew the purpose of the Declaration of Independence, according to national history-test scores released Tuesday.
The results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that U.S. schoolchildren have made little progress since 2006 in their understanding of key historical themes, including the basic principles of democracy and America's role in the world.
Only 20% of U.S. fourth-graders and 17% of eighth-graders who took the 2010 history exam were "proficient" or "advanced," unchanged since the test was last administered in 2006. Proficient means students have a solid understanding of the material.
Diane Ravitch’s New York Timesop-ed seems to have stuck in the craw of many a reformer, including Arne Duncan himself. What really burned people up was Ravitch’s “straw man” arguments: that reformers say poverty doesn’t matter, or only care about gains in student achievement. "No serious reformer says accountability should just be based on test scores. We all favor multiple measures,” Jon Schnur* complained to Jonathan Alter last week.
Rather than get defensive at Diane's defeatism, we reformers should clarify the ends that education reform can achieve.
Please. Remember the old adage, watch what we do, not what we say? The No Child Left Behind act is still the law of the land, and it most definitely rests on the principle that poverty is “no excuse” for low achievement. And it absolutely punishes schools for bad test scores alone. Diane is on firm ground when she writes:
With 240 students, the academy is one-seventh the size of Jefferson and takes only Loudoun County residents (Jefferson draws from most of Northern Virginia), but it has won glowing reviews from students and has created a research curriculum rare in U.S. secondary education.
“It was completely unlike the standard classroom procedure that I was used to, and I absolutely loved it,” said Carter Huffman, an academy graduate now at MIT. “I have yet to hear of another school that so encourages all of its students to pursue major independent research.”
Elizabeth Asai, another academy graduate, said she and a couple of Yale classmates received university funding this year to design biomedical devices, usually a process daunting to undergraduates. Her friends “were astounded by the ease of presenting our proposal and actually receiving a grant,” she said, but, having attended the Academy of Science, to her “this seemed normal.”
The big shoe ready to drop this summer on the DCPS labor relations front involves the estimated 550 teachers who are subject to dismissal if they receive a second consecutive "minimally effective" rating on the IMPACT evaluation system. For Mayor Vincent C. Gray and Acting Chancellor Kaya Henderson, it will be a closely watched test of their resolve to follow through on a signature initiative of the Michelle Rhee era, designed to improve teacher effectiveness by pushing poor performers out of the system.
It now appears that some teachers -- most likely younger ones -- will get a reprieve from the two-strikes-and-out rule established in 2009. Earlier this week, human capital chief and IMPACT architect Jason Kamras told principals that if they had young teachers with promise who were headed for a second poor evaluation, they could apply for exceptions.
"We recognize that in some cases, a principal might want to retain a second-year teacher who has received minimally effective ratings in each of his or her first two years of teaching but has demonstrated improvement and the potential to become an effective teacher in the following year," Kamras said.
The board is now considering policy changes that would require the superintendent's recommendation before it could bring independent schools into the district fold.
Until the change is approved, however, the leaders of a pair of civic groups are standing by letters sent to the board last week warning that they believed it had assumed authority that could return it to its micromanaging habits of old.
Board president Airick Leonard West said he wants the conversation to refocus on the district's vision of a portfolio of schools that are held accountable for their performance.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is signaling that he's prepared to give public schools relief from federal mandates under No Child Left Behind if Congress does not pass the law's long-awaited overhaul and re-authorization this year.
"This is absolutely plan B," Duncan told reporters during an embargoed conference call on Friday. "The prospect of doing nothing is what I'm fighting against."
That relief could take the form of granting waivers on test scoring to flexibility on how schools spend federal dollars. "We can't afford to do nothing," he said.
Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the mandate, signed into law in 2002 with bi-partisan support, is dated and flawed. One of the major complaints is that some schools have been labeled failures despite making improvements.
The caps and gowns haven't changed much. "Pomp and Circumstance" continues to mark the occasion. And many of those valedictorians are bound to quote "The Road Not Taken."
Commencement ceremonies have remained virtually unchanged over the years. But don't be fooled. The high school experience leading up to graduation has never looked so different for American teenagers.
Everything from technology to academic innovations to the lagging economy has influenced high schools and the students they serve -- locally and nationwide.
No longer a novelty, independent charter schools will issue a record number of diplomas to students who received a new brand of education -- often in some unlikely venues, including shopping malls, museums and an old Navy boot camp.
More students than ever will graduate this year after taking some of their courses online.
And tough economic times have created a rising population of homeless students -- and programs and schools designed to educate and help them.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie added a new element Thursday to his efforts to give children in the state's lowest-performing school districts a better education while keeping the costs to taxpayers down.
He proposed letting local school boards hand control of some so-called "transformation schools" to education management organizations, possibly including for-profit firms.
The proposal is one of several ideas Christie is pushing to try to expand options for students in troubled school districts.
"None of these things are silver bullets," he said. The governor framed the idea as an experiment that could offer lessons to other schools.
At first, no more than five of the privately run schools across the state would be allowed - and they would go only in places where the local school boards want them.
The money - part of the state's $700 million in Race to the Top winnings - will go to Wireless Generation, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., to develop software to track student test scores, among other things.
Klein took a job at News Corp. overseeing their educational technology business after he left the chancellor job in December.
City rules forbid former workers from contacting the agency that employed them for one year, but the rules would not formally bar contact between Klein and the state.
"It raises all kinds of red flags," said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York.
"It just smacks of an old-boys club, where large amounts of public money are spent based not on 'is this the best product?' but 'I know this guy and I like him and I want to be sure he makes a lot of money.'"
Klein did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Not long ago, Bucyrus International Inc. stood out in Milwaukee as a veritable poster child for business opportunity and expansion. Mayor Tom Barrett singled out chief executive Tim Sullivan in his 2005 "state of the city" address: "Thank you for believing and investing in our city."
And so it was awkward last week when Sullivan told a packed auditorium of civic leaders that he needed to make a "confession," something he's kept quiet for years. Finding qualified, factory-grade welders in an old-line industrial city such as Milwaukee had become arduous to near impossible. Calling himself a "killjoy," Sullivan said he quietly phoned a few contacts in Texas to see whether the Lone Star State could provide him enough welders who are qualified to piece together the colossal mining machines that Bucyrus ships to India, China and elsewhere around the world.
A delegation of senior Texas government authorities met Sullivan at the airport, including the mayor of the town of Kilgore. In a one-hour lunch, they matched Bucyrus with a ready-to-occupy factory with every possible amenity.
More important, they asked Sullivan exactly what sort of workers he needed. Sullivan said 80 with specific skill. The state gave Sullivan a guarantee that the workers would be waiting when the doors opened at the expansion site in Kilgore. State officials customized a recruitment, training and certification program. One year later, when the expansion site in Kilgore opened its doors, the 80 welders were waiting.
In the two years since then, the Texas site has more than doubled to 184 total workers and plans to keep hiring. And back in Milwaukee, Sullivan has said next to nothing in public about the Kilgore expansion.
"We have a complete disconnect between jobs and education and training," Sullivan said. In Milwaukee, "we're a long way" from replicating the feat in Texas.
"There is no stomach in this state to change the curriculum," he said. "Who is initiating education reform in the state right now? No one."
Although taxpayer-funded MATC probably is the institution best suited to address the skills mismatch, the tech school cannot bear all the blame for its inability to deliver customized workforce training, Sullivan said.
Many Milwaukee-trained welders simply are not mentally prepared by metro Milwaukee's grade schools and high schools, Sullivan said.
At tomorrow's (June 13) school board meeting, an "informational" agenda item will be presented regarding the switch from conventional grading/report card system to the "Grading For Learning" system throughout grades K-7. This switch will be flipped for the 2011-12 school year.
Grading for Learning has been looming on the horizon for several years now. It's not something new to Sun Prairie. In fact, a number of school districts have implemented it and a number will begin implementation this year. Grading for Learning is a concept introduced by Ken O'Connor.
It's located in a grimy and windowless building that it shares with an adult school on the edge of downtown. But to its students and teachers, the Santee Construction Academy is something of an educational utopia.
There are small classes with attentive teachers. A curriculum designed to prepare students for the real world with training for in-demand jobs. An atmosphere that students say is akin to a family.
The campus fits the bill of what some educators and others describe as a model with its career training and staff commitment. Yet, in about two weeks, this program will be history.
It turns out that the same factors that have made the academy successful -- despite lukewarm test scores -- also made it vulnerable to the sweeping cuts Los Angeles public schools are being forced to make with a tightening budget. The program costs more than $1.5 million to operate.
But after learning of the Madison School District's failure to adequately boost test scores under No Child Left Behind, I had to wonder: Heat or no heat, what cause for picnicking is there in the advent of a nearly three-month long break from formal learning for brains that, in their youth, are veritable sponges for knowledge?
I'm less worried about my children, who have a standard pair of educated, middle-class parents. They probably won't make major academic strides over the summer, but they won't lose much ground or -- worse -- fill their free time picking up bad habits.
But here's the thing about the Madison district: Increasingly, its students aren't like my kids.
They are like the kids who live in the traditionally lower-income, higher-crime Worthington Park neighborhood. These and the kids from the tonier Schenk-Atwood neighborhood where we live share a school, but they don't necessarily share the same social, educational and financial advantages.
A school board member shared the following information which was received from a community member, knowing grade inflation is one of SP-EYE's hot buttons. The contributor wasn't identified, but it doesn't matter. It's a great comparison from 20 years ago to today. If these numbers are valid (and we have absolutely no reason to suspect they are not), they represent cause for alarm.
Class of 2011
Class of 1991
Total Students
485
300
# on Honor Roll
187* (39%)
24 (8%)
* This is reportedly the lowest in the past 7-8 years!
New York City has become the latest battleground in the national fight for education equality.
In some schools, hallways serve as a stark dividing line. Classrooms with peeling paint and insufficient resources sit on one side, while new computers, smartboards and up-to-date textbooks line the other. One group of students is taught in hallways and cramped basements, while others under the same roof make use of fully functional classrooms.
New York City has increasingly resorted to co-locating charter schools inside existing public school buildings as way to cut costs. When handled improperly, co-location can lead to visible disparities, division and tension among students. In many instances, traditional students are forced into shorter playground periods than their charter school counterparts, or served lunch at 10 am so that charter students can eat at noon. The inequity is glaring, and it is certainly not lost on the students themselves.
That is the way Gary Sasse, a top-level official in the Carcieri administration -- and long-time head of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council -- described the front-page news Friday about the Senate's votes a day earlier for bills allowing retirees to return to return to work with state pensions and paychecks.
"It was not that long ago that many of us spoke out against the practice of allowing retired public employees to a collect retirement check while on the state's payroll. Now it appears that the practice may be coming back. Situational expediency should not trump sound personnel practices. Based on Rhode Island history this could be a dangerous precedent,'' wrote Sasse in an email.
Now the director of the Bryant University's Institute for Public Leadership, Sasse was commenting on the Senate's approval of a bill to allow up to 50 retired school teachers and administrators to work as $500-a-day consultants to the Department of Education, without giving up their pensions. The sponsor: state Sen. Hanna Gallo, a speech pathologist in the Cranston school system.
Richmond Open Source Radio's Will Snyder talks about the recent approval of virtual classrooms in Virginia with Rob Jones, VEA's Director of Government Relations and Research and Bill Tucker, Managing Director of the think tank Education Sector. (29 minute mark)
In some ways, it seems like a natural cause for the N.A.A.C.P.: students -- many of them poor, most of them black -- treated as second-class citizens when the public schools they attended had to share buildings with charter schools. A lawsuit filed last month by the N.A.A.C.P. and the United Federation of Teachers described children having to eat lunch so early it might as well be breakfast, and getting less exercise because gym hours were evenly divided between the schools despite big differences in their enrollment sizes.
But black children have been major constituents of charter schools since their creation two decades ago. So when thousands of charter-school parents, students and advocates staged a rally on May 26 in Harlem, it was not so much to denounce the litigation as it was to criticize the involvement of the N.A.A.C.P.
Since then, a war has broken out within the civil rights community in New York and across the country over the lawsuit against the city and the larger questions of how school choice helps or hurts minority students.
At Monday's (June 13th) School Board meeting, the board will consider increases to administrator pay that result in a net 2% increase in salary. Note that 2% is a figure based on the salary pot for 2010-11. Assuming that (A) replacement administrators will not get any increases, that means the average per administrator will amount to MORE than 2%. As usual, some administrators get very healthy increases, while those in Culver's doghouse will net less than the average.
This recommendation includes administrators with the exception of the District Administrator, who will be determined separately.
"Today marks the beginning of a very dark week at The School District of Philadelphia," began a press release issued last Monday by the District itself. No doubt many Philadelphia school employees would agree. That day, the District issued layoff notices to 3,024 of its workers, including 1,523 of the District's approximately 11,000 teachers.
Budget problems are nothing new for Philadelphia's School District, which was taken over by the state of Pennsylvania a decade ago in part because of its chronic funding problems. Through all those difficulties, though, it has no modern history of teacher layoffs on this scale.
The moves were designed to close a $629 million shortfall in the School District's $2.7 billion budget--a gap caused by the end of federal stimulus funding and the knowledge that cuts in state funding were on the way.
I recently met with one of the several new employees at Seattle Public Schools and gave a rundown on history and culture of the District.
Here's the short version:
1. There is a complete disconnect between what is said, done, and decided in the JSCEE and what happens in the schools.
The headquarters folks make bad decisions because they have no idea how those decisions will actually play out in the schools - and they don't want to know. Their decisions don't matter because they don't check to confirm they are being followed and they couldn't enforce them anyway. The schools know all of this - that the District headquarters is clueless about the realities of schools, that their decisions are horrible, that they will never come around and confirm compliance with the decision, and that they are powerless to enforce those decisions - so they simply ignore the decisions. The schools see the gap between them and the district headquarters as insulation and they work to keep it. They don't want any district interference because it is always bad. The schools work to go unnoticed by the district headquarters. Ideally, they would like the District headquarters to forget they are there. The tall blade of grass gets cut; the high nail gets hammered down. If you have ever been part of an alternative school or an advanced learning program, you've heard people say "Don't make waves, we don't want to attract the District's attention." There are very, very few examples of district intervention in a school that proved beneficial. I think the District's decision to put elementary APP in Lowell in 1997 was one. The interventions at Hawthorne and West Seattle Elementary are looking like they could buck the trend. STEM might also. If so, they would be the exceptions rather than the rule.
What if, despite everything else going on, we were able to put together a strong, multi-faceted campaign that made progress in fighting the reading crisis in our midst?
The optimist in me says it might happen, and I point to five things that are going on to support that. (Don't worry, the pessimist in me will show up before we're done.)
One: I attended the second meeting of Gov. Scott Walker's Read to Lead Task Force recently. Unlike most anything else going on in the Capitol, this was a civil, constructive discussion involving people of diverse opinions. The focus of the afternoon-long session was how to improve the way teachers are trained to teach reading.
Walker and Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public instruction, disagree strongly on some major school issues, but they sat next to each other, facing university professors, teachers, reading advocates of varying philosophies, and others. There even seemed to be some emerging agreement that the state Department of Public Instruction and university leaders could and should take steps to ensure that teachers are better trained before they get into classrooms and, once there, get more effective help in continuing to develop their skills.
The broad goal of Walker's task force is to get almost all kids reading on grade level before they leave third grade - a wonderful goal. But reaching it raises a lot of issues, including how to deal with sharply contending schools of thought on how to best teach reading.
Nonetheless, at least for an afternoon, important people were engaged in a serious discussion on a huge issue, and that seemed encouraging.
"And while the proportion of tenure-track teaching faculty has dwindled, the number of managers has skyrocketed in both relative and absolute terms. If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it's unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years."
Responding to the latest in a series of consulting scandals that have plagued the Department of Education in recent years, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer -- who was joined by UFT President Michael Mulgrew at a press conference at the Manhattan Municipal Building -- called for a freeze on all new, nonessential DOE consulting contracts. Declaring consulting "the new political patronage of our time," the two leaders also called for a "top-to-bottom" probe of all existing DOE contracts.
"There is something wrong here," Mulgrew said of the DOE's inability to effectively oversee its contractors and consultants. "The parents in this city, the children in the schools, the teachers are sick and tired of every week hearing about another scandal with outside contractors and consultants making millions of dollars that should be used in the classroom for direct services for students."
Mulgrew said revelations of the DOE financial scandals were especially disheartening at a time when the mayor is pushing to lay off more than 4,200 teachers on the grounds that the city can no longer afford to pay them.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, joining a parade of officials from across the country who are seeking to rein in spending by limiting public employees' pensions, proposed Wednesday to broadly limit retirement benefits for new city and state workers in New York.
Mr. Cuomo said New York State and New York City simply could no longer afford to offer new employees the generous benefits their predecessors received.
Among the most significant changes the governor proposes is to raise the minimum retirement age to 65 from 62 for state workers, and to 65 from 57 for teachers.
"The numbers speak for themselves -- the pension system as we know it is unsustainable," the governor said in a statement. "This bill institutes common-sense reforms to bring government benefits more in line with the private sector while still serving our employees and protecting our retirees."
Mr. Cuomo's proposal escalates a battle between the first-term Democrat and a major Democratic Party constituency: public-sector labor unions.
In most Chinese high schools, outdated rote learning is the norm. But one school in Beijing is promoting creativity and independent thinking.
TESS VIGELAND: This week, we've been looking at China's higher education system -- what it takes to get into college and what happens once students get there. China's emphasis on taking tests to get ahead in society raises questions about whether those students will be creative enough to thrive in an economy based on innovation. One school in Beijing is trying to get away from the testing culture.
Our China correspondent Rob Schmitz has the final of three reports.
There's been a considerable legislative activity affecting our schools lately, with the Joint Finance Committee completing its work on the Governor's proposed budget and other legislative committees active as well.
Here's an update on two developments of particular interest to those of us in Madison - the retention of school districts' ability to use property tax carryover authority to increase spending above otherwise applicable revenue limits and the most recent iteration of the Republican charter school expansion legislation working its way through committee.
Other legislative developments will have significant impact elsewhere in the state in the short run and could well affect Madison significantly in the longer run - I'm thinking of the expansion of voucher schools into all of Milwaukee County and Racine and perhaps Green Bay - but the two developments that will likely have a more immediate impact are my focus for today.
State employee tries to sic IRS on education reform group
A new controversy related to the Madison protests has emerged. This one involves the taxpayer-funded email account of American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin leader and Department of Workforce Development employee William Franks.
For reasons explained below, the Education Action Group submitted an open records request for communications from Frank's taxpayer-funded email account that contained specific, strike-related key words.
Upon receipt of the records, EAG discovered that a state attorney allowed Franks to fill the open records request himself. That means he might have been free to turn over the entries he cared to include and delete other entries. Not only that, but the state attorney told Franks that "if you have personal email that contains those specified words in the request, please send copies of those to me, so we can discuss this further." That sounds like one bureaucrat helping another skirt the law and avoid a potentially embarrassing situation.
Allied Drive advocates say a Madison School District proposal to abandon plans for a 4-year-old kindergarten site in the South Side neighborhood is short-sighted and potentially harmful to students.
Currently, 66 students are assigned to the Allied Learning Center next fall, including nine students from the Allied Drive neighborhood, one of the city's poorest. But district officials have asked the school board to consider moving the students to other district sites, saying several parents had asked to send their children to other locations.
Ald. Brian Solomon, 10th District, said that recommendation is a "huge concern" touching on issues of civil rights, racial justice and the city's efforts to improve a neighborhood once riddled by drugs and violence.
"This will have such an impact on the long-term success of these kids," Solomon said. "Having every opportunity possible to allow the (Allied) parents to have more involvement will undoubtedly prepare these kids better for future years."
Superintendent Dan Nerad brought the issue to the board's attention last month after the parents of 16 students assigned to the Allied Learning Center requested different sites. In addition to the parents' concerns, Nerad noted the $15,000 cost to add playground equipment and about $150,000 for additional staffing as other reasons not to use the site.
Education officials are collecting data on Iowa students who earn community college credits while in high school to see how well-prepared those students are for college.
According to a new report by the Iowa Department of Education, more than 38,200 high school students in Iowa took classes last year for credit through community colleges, 50 percent more than five years earlier. Those students accounted for more than 25 percent of the enrollment at the state's community colleges.
The Des Moines Register reported Wednesday that the state hasn't tracked passing and failing rates, and officials don't know whether the courses are as tough as those offered at the college level. But state officials are now collecting that information, said Roger Utman, administrator for the Education Department's Division of Community Colleges and Workforce Preparation.
IT IS one of the oldest debates in education. Should teachers tell pupils the way things are or encourage them to find out for themselves? Telling children "truths" about the world helps them learn those facts more quickly. Yet the efficient learning of specific facts may lead to the assumption that when the adult has finished teaching, there is nothing further to learn--because if there were, the adult would have said so. A study just published in Cognition by Elizabeth Bonawitz of the University of California, Berkeley, and Patrick Shafto of the University of Louisville, in Kentucky, suggests that is true.
Dr Bonawitz and Dr Shafto arranged for 85 four- and five-year-olds to be presented, during a visit to a museum, with a novel toy that looked like a tangle of coloured pipes and was capable of doing many different things. They wanted to know whether the way the children played with the toy depended on how they were instructed by the adult who gave it to them.
One group of children had a strictly pedagogical introduction. The experimenter said "Look at my toy! This is my toy. I'm going to show you how my toy works." She then pulled a yellow tube out of a purple tube, creating a squeaking sound. Following this, she said, "Wow, see that? This is how my toy works!" and then demonstrated the effect again.
Unfortunately, this is not true. The UFT contract makes only one reference to layoffs which is to say that if they are necessary they will done in accordance with applicable state law. It is the law and not the contract that creates a seniority based system for layoffs. This is a small error in an otherwise well done report.
d an on-again, off-again relationship with Gov. John Kitzhaber. The Oregon Education Association endorsed his opponent in the Democratic primary, largely because of Kitzhaber’s “performance-based funding” proposal. When Kitzhaber won the nomination, OEA and other public sector unions bet the ranch on him.
Gov. Kitzhaber’s latest proposal is a merger of the state boards dealing with K-12 and higher education, which has caused OEA some heartburn. “I am surprised and disappointed to hear that OEA has changed course and now opposes Senate Bill 909 and a package of modest education reforms that would deliver better results for students, more resources for teachers and more accountability for taxpayer dollars. For them to cling to the status quo is not in the best interest of Oregonians," said Kitzhaber in a statement.
Meanwhile in California, David Kieffer, the executive director of the state SEIU affiliate announced his opposition to Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan for a special election in September to extend and raise taxes. The state’s public sector unions are interested parties because they would be expected to fund the campaign with dues dollars.
An Interview with Joe Nathan: How Cincinnati, Ohio Public Schools Eliminated the High School Graduation Gap between White and African American Students
1) Joe, there seems to be a lot of good news coming out of Cincinnati in terms of increased high school graduation rates. What's happening in Cincinnati?
Recently Elizabeth Holtzapple, Cincinnati Public Schools Director of Research, Evaluation and Testing, told me that the district's public schools increased overall high school graduation rates to 81.9% in 2010. That is up from 51% to 2000. She also reported the district also has maintained something major it first achieved in 2007. While continuing to increase overall high school graduation rates, CPS also has eliminated the high school graduation gap between white and African American students.
2) About how long has this concerted effort been going on?
This work has been going on for the last decade. It has involved a series of coordinated, research-based strategies, along with tremendous, creative and courageous work by people in schools, as well as the broader community. There was no single, "silver bullet."
3. What were the key strategies?
Cincinnati used several strategies. The most important included
Focusing on just a few goals (increasing overall graduation rates and reducing the high school graduation gap).
Taking educators, parents, community leaders and students to visit some of the nation's most effective urban district and charter public schools.
Focusing staff development on a few key areas: literacy, numeracy and learning to work more effectively with today's urban youth.
Increasing youth/community service so students learned they are capable of more than they thought.
Positive ongoing leadership from the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers
Holding principals accountable and replacing some in schools where there was not much progress.
Is it the best of times or end times for public charter schools? Four thousand charter-school leaders, teachers, advocates and policymakers will gather in Atlanta this month at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools' annual conference. The gathering of upstarts is larger than what many long-standing traditional-education groups can muster, but in states and cities across the country, charter schools are facing increased political pressure and scrutiny. In Georgia, the state's supreme court just ruled that the arrangements for charter schools are unconstitutional. Welcome to town! (See what makes a charter school great.)
Charter schools, the first of which was created in 1992, are public schools that are open to all students but run independently of local school districts. There are now more than 5,000 of them educating more than a million students. Charter schools range in quality from among the best public schools in the country to among the worst. That variance is proving to be a political Achilles' heel for charter schools, fueling a serious backlash. (See "KIPP Schools: A Reform Triumph, or Disappointment?")
In New York City, the NAACP joined the teachers' union in a lawsuit that would have the effect of curbing charter-school growth. That sparked a protest by families in Harlem, and the NAACP was roundly criticized for its stance, which apparently owes more to politics than kids.
The federal government's financial condition deteriorated rapidly last year, far beyond the $1.5 trillion in new debt taken on to finance the budget deficit, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
The government added $5.3 trillion in new financial obligations in 2010, largely for retirement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. That brings to a record $61.6 trillion the total of financial promises not paid for.
This gap between spending commitments and revenue last year equals more than one-third of the nation's gross domestic product.
Medicare alone took on $1.8 trillion in new liabilities, more than the record deficit prompting heated debate between Congress and the White House over lifting the debt ceiling.
In the last two years, teaching candidates from Oakland Teaching Fellows and Teach for America pretty much had a lock on all open special education positions in the Oakland school district.
All but three of the 70 new hires during that time period were teachers placed in Oakland schools through one of those two programs, according to a report the school district released today.
But district staff say in the report that is about to change:
The Milwaukee School Board voted Tuesday night to ask the teachers union for up to a 5.8% pension contribution, which potentially could be done under legislation passed last week by the Legislature's budget committee. That legislation, if passed by the full Legislature, would allow districts to enter into side agreements without reopening contracts.
If the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association agreed to the pension contribution, the $19.2 million generated could save 198 teaching positions, including 51 positions in the Student Achievement Guarantee in Education, or SAGE, program, according to district estimates. That program allows an 18-to-1 student-to- teacher ratio in kindergarten through third grade at schools with qualifying low-income children.
The pension contribution savings also could restore 22 nurses and one nursing supervisor position, plus 27 art and music teachers, said Board President Michael Bonds, who proposed that the union be approached for the concession as the board wrestled with its budget for the 2011-'12 fiscal year.
"This is a golden opportunity to save jobs, help our kids, and it's consistent with state law," Bonds said after the meeting.
It's not too late. The state Supreme Court has one more chance to get it right.
In the legal equivalent to a 70-yard Hail Mary pass into the end zone, the Georgia Charter Schools Commission's existence is dependent upon one of four judges -- in response to a pending motion for reconsideration -- reversing his or her position and voting to not strike down a law that catapulted Georgia to win a $400 million federal Race to the Top grant and recognition as a leader in public school choice.
As an attorney, a former Atlanta Public Schools elementary teacher and a once bright-eyed judicial intern in our state's highest court, I have struggled to understand the court's unnecessarily harsh decision. Despite their vote, I do not believe that the four judges who decided to dismantle the commission based on historically inaccurate and intellectually dishonest reasoning condone the mediocrity that permeates our public schools.
Nor do I think that any member of the court believes that low-income Georgia families stuck in these mediocre schools have access to political and economic capital of the magnitude expended by local boards of education in their efforts to preserve sole control over charter schools. But I do suspect these judges, on a very basic, instinctual, "gut-feeling" level, under-appreciate the magnificent danger posed to returning to the pre-2008 days of leaving charter school authorization in the exclusive hands of locally elected school boards.
School principals should be able to hire any teacher of their choosing, and displaced tenured teachers who aren't rehired elsewhere within the system should be permanently dismissed, according to a controversial new report on the Los Angeles Unified School District. The report will be presented Tuesday to the Board of Education.
The research, paid for largely by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, offers a roadmap for improving the quality of teaching in the nation's second-largest school system, with recommendations strongly backed by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
The complaint, filed with the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, comes as expansion of the voucher program to other cities moves closer to Legislative approval.
The program, which began 20 years ago and serves nearly 21,000 students, provides public money for students to attend private schools, including religious schools.
The complaint states that 1.6 percent of voucher students have disabilities, compared with 19.5 percent of Milwaukee Public School students. It alleges the state has failed to hold private voucher schools accountable for serving children with disabilities.
Now we grade the students, but how do we determine if a school is "good" or "bad"?
NewsHour Education Correspondent John Merrow explores the question in this report.
JOHN MERROW: Reading is the foundation of all learning. But according to the nation's report card, only 33 percent of fourth-graders are competent readers.
At this elementary school in New York City, 33 percent would be good news. Last year on the state reading test, only 18 percent of fourth-graders were on grade level, strong evidence of a failing school.
Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday will announce a new policy to disburse hundreds of millions of dollars in federal job training funds each year - and will link the funds to reforms of local education curriculums.
The disclosure came Wednesday morning from Tim Sullivan, chief executive officer of Bucyrus International and the chairman of the Governor's Council on Workforce Investment, a state advisory panel. Sullivan spoke at a meeting of the Milwaukee 7 economic development group.
Under the current system, federal job training funds, disbursed by multiple federal agencies, are paid directly to five state agencies, which in turn have established formulas to spend their share.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Senate legislative leaders have reached a deal to cut pensions and benefits for current public employees, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The deal would require workers to pay more of their salaries into the pension system, give up annual cost-of-living increases and pay a percentage of their health care premiums in a tiered system based on their salary, this person said. New employees would have to work longer to get full benefits. Current retirees would not be affected by the deal, nor will people who have at least 25 years in the system.
Top Democratic lawmakers appear to support the proposal. Senate President Stephen Sweeney, who is also a private-sector labor leader, believes he has the votes in his caucus to make it work, according to a person familiar with the matter. It's unclear whether Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver is on board with the deal -- one legislative source said she was -- and if she would be able to muster enough votes in the Assembly, which has been more of an obstacle to Christie's agenda.
Bill Gates likes Salman Khan a lot, so much so that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is streaming cash to his Khan Academy, an internet silo of over 2,100 free, downloadable video tutorials on Calculus, Physics, Organic Chemistry, et al. Mr. Khan's Academy only has a "faculty of one," but my own students enjoy Mr. Khan's glib teaching style, and they consult his clips on quadratic equations, conic sections, and those hated word problems involving railroad trains. So is the Khan video approach a "disruptive technology" which undermines the existing deathbed educational model by doing it faster, better, and cheaper? Mr. Gates thinks so. "It's a revolution," he enthuses. "Everyone should check it out." (www.khanacademy.org) Wearing his education reformer hat, Mr. Gates declares himself "superhappy."
Mr. Khan, then, by all reports, is an entertaining, trustworthy, and helpful tutor of math and science. However, when he essays history, it's a different story and one that exposes something disquieting about a hidden potential of Internet learning, especially if, as some predict, The Khan Academy is the future of education.
Curious about Mr. Khan's take on something non-science, I pulled up his video "U.S. History Overview 3--World War II to Vietnam"
The screen looks like a squashed, two-dimensional schoolroom; you see a combined blackboard and bulletin board with colorful squiggly dates on a scroll down timeline, random photos (Hitler, Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, mushroom cloud), and tiny maps. Mr. Khan remains offscreen but writes or circles things onscreen with his pointer and provides his signature breathless voiceover.
The federal government's financial condition deteriorated rapidly last year, far beyond the $1.5 trillion in new debt taken on to finance the budget deficit, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
The government added $5.3 trillion in new financial obligations in 2010, largely for retirement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. That brings to a record $61.6 trillion the total of financial promises not paid for.
This gap between spending commitments and revenue last year equals more than one-third of the nation's gross domestic product.
Medicare alone took on $1.8 trillion in new liabilities, more than the record deficit prompting heated debate between Congress and the White House over lifting the debt ceiling.
Social Security added $1.4 trillion in obligations, partly reflecting longer life expectancies. Federal and military retirement programs added more to the financial hole, too.
e are rapidly on course to create a dual-level school system for Wisconsin students. In smaller cities and rural and suburban areas, school systems will continue to spend about $10,000 per pupil. That is a bit less than the national average of $10,499, as a recent Census Bureau report found.
But in big cities such as Milwaukee and Racine, and perhaps in Green Bay and Beloit, more and more students will be educated at choice schools that spend about $6,400 per pupil. These school systems tend to have students who are poorer, more likely to have learning disabilities, and they are typically the most challenging to teach. Yet Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators propose to spend less than two-thirds of the average per-pupil spending in other schools in the state and nation.
This situation, I might add, is not simply the fault of Republicans. Many Democrats, in hopes of killing school choice, have adamantly opposed spending more on vouchers in the past, so the per-pupil rate has always been absurdly low. On the other side are Republicans who can't lose with school choice: It undercuts public schools and lowers the number of teachers union members in cities such as Milwaukee. And it allows them to portray themselves as reformers trying to do something about failing schools.
Better public schools are obviously crucial to the future of Rhode Island's students, particularly poor and minority ones, and to its overall economic future.
One of the brightest signs in a long time that Rhode Island can turn things around is the mayoral academy concept, which is thriving in Cumberland, serving that community, Central Falls, Pawtucket and Lincoln. Through the bold leadership of the region's mayors and with the strong support of the General Assembly (especially House Speaker Gordon Fox), it is doing wonderful work.
Dedicated teachers there spend long hours helping students dramatically advance in math, reading and writing, free of union red tape. A mark of the esteem in which parents hold the school is that 877 children vied in April for only 250 open spots, chosen strictly by lottery.
Now, Cranston Mayor Alan Fung is working hard to bring that concept to his city and Providence through a new mayoral-academy program. His plan calls for an academy to grow into two elementary schools, two middle schools and a high school over the next decade.
The state Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education is slated to decide whether to go forward on June 16. Though Governor Chafee has stripped that board of some of its most dedicated reformers, members owe it to the children of Rhode Island to move forward with this promising effort.
It all comes down to the quality of instruction. Good schools hire and develop good teachers that provide instruction of consistent quality. And that comes down to execution. Achievement First is a charter network that is very good at execution and, as a result, is one the best networks in the country.
The good news is that the innovative Rhode Island Mayoral Academies (RIMA) organization convinced AF to come to RI. ProJo.com said: "One of the brightest signs in a long time that Rhode Island can turn things around is the mayoral academy concept, which is thriving in Cumberland, serving that community, Central Falls, Pawtucket and Lincoln. Through the bold leadership of the region's mayors and with the strong support of the General Assembly (especially House Speaker Gordon Fox), it is doing wonderful work."
The bad news is that "union members packed a hearing on May 26 and urged state officials to reject this opportunity. Some charged that mayoral academies would "siphon" money from the system." Unfortunately the 'protect the system' argument has Rhode Island politicians wavering.
"They're ready," Matthews said afterward, "to do whatever it takes."
After 43 years as executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., Matthews is in the spotlight again after encouraging a four-day sick-out that closed school in February. The action allowed teachers to attend protests at the Capitol over Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to curb collective bargaining by public employees. The matter remains in the courts, but it prompted a hasty contract negotiation between the district and union.
Teachers aren't happy about some of the changes, and Matthews is preparing for a street fight.
"It's going to get down and dirty," Matthews said, alluding to the possibility of more job actions, such as "working the contract" - meaning teachers wouldn't work outside required hours - if the School Board doesn't back off changes in the contract. "You can't continually put people down and do things to control them and hurt them and not have them react."
Moreover, the latest battle over collective bargaining has taken on more personal significance for Matthews, whose life's work has been negotiating contracts.
Big U.S. employers, worried about replacing retiring baby boomers, are wading deeper into education and growing bolder about telling educators how to run their business.
Several initiatives have focused on manufacturing and engineering, fields where technical know-how and math and science skills are needed and where companies worry about recruiting new talent.
Their concerns are borne out by the math and science test scores of 15-year-old students in the U.S., which continue to lag behind China, Japan, South Korea and Germany, for example.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a report in May that said higher education had failed to "tap the potential of digital technology" in ways that would "transform learning, dramatically lower costs or improve overall institutional productivity."
The Chamber report praised Internet educational institutions like Khan Academy, which built its reputation on YouTube.com math lessons.
State Superintendent Tony Evers on Monday blasted the Legislature's budget committee for its late-night vote Friday to expand to Green Bay a program that allows students to attend private and religious schools at taxpayer expense.
The voucher expansion should be removed from the state budget and "a true local public debate needs to occur," Evers said in a statement. He also referred to the budget committee's vote to include Racine in the voucher program Thursday night.
"Raising taxes on the citizens of Green Bay and Racine in the dead of night, without public hearings or the support of their locally elected school officials echoes the type of non-representative, undemocratic actions taken by the English parliament against the American colonists through their stamp and tea taxes," Evers said.
He raised several questions about the action Friday night by the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee to include in the state budget an expansion of the school voucher program for Green Bay.
Green Bay property taxpayers are now on track to pay millions for private and religious schools, Evers said. "At the same time, their public school system is being cut $40 million, which will certainly raise class sizes and reduce educational opportunities for public school students."
In March, it was announced with much fanfare that the Milwaukee teachers' union was dropping it's controversial Viagra lawsuit against MPS.
However, the MacIver News Service has learned that the effort to force MPS to provide coverage for erectile dysfunction treatments has arisen again, albeit in a different venue.
The Milwaukee Teachers Education Association's (MTEA) decision earlier this year came just eight months after filing their August of 2010 suit in Milwaukee County Circuit Court wherein they argued that the board's policy of excluding erectile dysfunction drugs from their health plan coverage was discriminatory against men.
In response, Superintendent Nerad directed West to start providing honors courses in the fall of 2010. West staff protested, however, and Nerad retracted the directive.
Community members sent another petition in July, 2010-this time signed by 188 supporters-again calling for multiple measures of identification and advanced levels of core courses for 9th and 10th graders at West. This time there was no response but silence.
In the meantime, Greater Madison Urban League President Kaleem Caire told us: "The law is there for a reason. Use it."
So, after years of trying to work with the system, we filed a formal complaint with the DPI in September, 2010. Little did we know what upheaval the next months would bring. In October, the district administration rolled out its College and Career Readiness Plan; teachers at West agitated, and students staged a sit-in. In February, our new governor issued his reform proposal; protesters massed at the Capitol, and school was called off for four days.
In the meantime, the DPI conducted its investigation. Though our complaint had targeted West for its chronic, blatant, willful violations, the DPI extended its audit to the entire Madison School District.
In the raging debate over school choice--perhaps the only educational issue that gets heated enough to interest politicians--the combatants, including me, tend to go with our own conclusions rather than the research. Timothy Hacsi in his 2002 book "Children As Pawns" showed this is the way we usually argue about schools in America.
But research is still being done. It is refreshing to find a new book presenting some of the most recent findings, as disturbing as they might be to my favorite biases. "School Choice and School Improvement," edited by Mark Berends, Marisa Cannata and Ellen B. Goldring, is the latest offering of Vanderbilt University's National Center on School Choice.
Here are what the data say. Feel free to ignore if it conflicts with your arguments. I certainly will:
Recently I participated in a panel discussion following a showing of the film " Waiting for Superman ." The film is deeply moving. Only a heart of granite would remain unmoved by the plight of the children and caretakers as they learn they would not get into their schools of choice.
In the discussion, Jim Johnson, a UNC-Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School professor and founder of the Union Independent School in Durham, made a crucial observation. He noted that the debate around public charter schools versus traditional public schools, or private versus public schools, deflected us from the underlying issue: the plight of children who have no adult advocates.
As Johnson pointed out, despite failing to win a place in their school of choice, the students featured in the film all had a least one adult in their lives who knowledgeably advocated for them and cared deeply about their learning opportunities.
Last summer, Maryland won a $250 million federal grant with a promise to build a model to evaluate teachers and principals that would be "transparent and fair" and tie their success for the first time to student test scores and learning.
Now, the state that prides itself on cutting-edge practices and top-in-the-nation schools is struggling -- along with every state or school system that has ever tried -- to come up with a reliable formula for improving the teacher workforce and rooting out the lowest performers.
State lawmakers have struggled for decades to bring equality to how school districts are funded, yet some districts receive thousands more per student than others, a California Watch analysis has found. And the data show spending more provides no assurance of academic success.
Last year, California schools spent an average of $8,452 to educate each student, a figure that includes money from local, state and federal sources, including one-time stimulus funds.
But that average masks enormous differences in spending. The Carmel Unified School District, for example, spent nearly three times as much as the Norris School District in Bakersfield. According to the state's Legislative Analyst's Office, some of the smallest schools in the Sierra foothills, with just a handful of students, received about $200,000 per student.
Members of the Los Angeles teachers union voted overwhelmingly to approve a temporary salary reduction in exchange for sparing thousands of jobs, the union announced Saturday.
The vote, which took place Thursday and Friday, means that the Los Angeles Unified School District's swollen class sizes will not increase next year and that the vast majority of teachers, nurses, librarians and magnet school coordinators -- who run popular special programs -- are likely to keep their jobs.
At the last school board meeting, we learned, in a late addendum to the Personnel agenda item, that High School Assistant Principal Rainey Briggs ($75,971) is also leaving the district. Word on the street is that he has been offered a Principalship in the Madison school district. Hmmm? Don't we have a Principal position open here in Sun Prairie? At Creekside elementary? Was Briggs interested in that position? Was he interested but Culver was not, n'est ce pas? Enquiring minds are wondering.
Briggs has developed a reputation as a charismatic, inspiring, and aspiring leader within the district and the community. We've heard anecdotal tributes to his efforts to work with kids at the high school and middle school level. We're hoping we didn't let him go without a fight. In fact, the board meeting got a little edgy when 3 board members voted AGAINST accepting his resignation. It came down to poor Terry Shimek having to cast the final vote to accept the resignation of Briggs as well as the Sound of Sun Prairie leaders who resigned amid stormy allegations. It was the right move for Shimek...they couldn't really deny these folks...right? (although Briggs had technically committed to honoring his contract earlier this year). You can't force people to stay when they wish to go...right?
The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s--far more in the US than in most advanced countries--and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and--even more dramatically--among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.
Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that's not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.
It doesn't take a multivariate correlation to conclude that these two things are tightly related: If politicians care almost exclusively about the concerns of the rich, it makes sense that over the past decades they've enacted policies that have ended up benefiting the rich. And if you're not rich yourself, this is a problem. First and foremost, it's an economic problem because it's siphoned vast sums of money from the pockets of most Americans into those of the ultrawealthy. At the same time, relentless concentration of wealth and power among the rich is deeply corrosive in a democracy, and this makes it a profoundly political problem as well.
If Gov. Scott Walker's budget is passed with recommendations approved Thursday by the Joint Committee on Finance, there will be more students in more voucher schools in more Wisconsin communities.
But critics of school voucher programs are hoping legislators will look long and hard at actual student achievement benefits before they vote to use tax dollars to send students to private schools. They also suggest that studies that have touted benefits of voucher programs should be viewed with a careful eye, and that claims that graduation rates for voucher schools exceed 90 percent are not just overly optimistic, but misleading.
"The policy decisions we are making today should not be guided by false statistics being propagated by people with a financial interest in the continuation and expansion of vouchers nationwide," wrote state Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, in a news release Friday.
Pope-Roberts is particularly critical of statistics that school choice lobbyists and pro-voucher legislators are using that claim that 94 percent of school voucher students graduated from high school in four years.
It's good news, she says, but it tells a very selective story about a relatively small subset of students who were studied. That graduation rate reflects only the graduation rate for students who actually remained in the voucher program for all four years: Just 318 of the 801 students who began the program stayed with it.
Instead of playing cricket with the kids in the alleyway outside, four-year-old Sumit Jha sweats in his family's one-room apartment. A power cut has stilled the overhead fan. In the stifling heat, he traces and retraces the image of a goat.
In April, he enrolled in the nursery class of Shri Ram School, the most coveted private educational institution in India's capital. Its students include the grandchildren of India's most powerful figures--Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress party President Sonia Gandhi.
Sumit, on the other hand, lives in a slum.
His admission to Shri Ram is part of a grand Indian experiment to narrow the gulf between rich and poor that is widening as India's economy expands. The Right to Education Act, passed in 2009, mandates that private schools set aside 25% of admissions for low-income, underprivileged and disabled students. In Delhi, families earning less than 100,000 rupees (about $2,500 a year) qualify.
Shri Ram, a nontraditional school founded in 1988, would seem well-suited to the experiment. Rather than drill on rote learning, as many Indian schools do, Shri Ram encourages creativity by teaching through stories, songs and art. In a typical class, two teachers supervise 29 students; at public schools nearby, one teacher has more than 50. Three times a day, a gong sounds and teachers and students pause for a moment of contemplation. Above the entrance, a banner reads, "Peace."
Mr. Educational Landscape Watcher here, with his jaw hanging open while he thinks about a few questions that boil down to this: What next?
In January, Gov. Scott Walker told a convention of school board members and administrators from around Wisconsin that he was going to give them new tools to deal with their financial issues. Naïve me - I thought he meant bigger hammers and saws.
It turned out Walker was thinking along the lines of those machines that can strip-mine most of China in a week.
Goodness gracious, look at where things stand less than five months later, with more earth moving and drama ahead. Every public school in Wisconsin will be different in important ways because of what has happened in Madison. The private school enrollment in the Milwaukee and Racine areas will get a boost, maybe a large one. The decisions many people make on schooling for their kids are likely to be changed by what has happened in Madison. And then there's the future of Milwaukee Public Schools (he said with a shudder).
As the Legislature's budget committee wraps up its work, let's venture thoughts on a few questions:
y first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being eaten up by social commitments--which may have been huge, but about which I was ignorant--they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with the academic experience. If I was naïve about this, they were gracious enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of what we were doing.
At a certain appointed hour, the university decided to make its way in the world without me, and we parted company. I was assured that there were no hard feelings. I was fortunate to get a position in a public university system, at a college with an overworked faculty, an army of part-time instructors, and sixteen thousand students. Many of these students were the first in their families to attend college, and any distractions they had were not social. Many of them worked, and some had complicated family responsibilities.
In 2008, MMSD received a 5.3 million dollar grant Smaller Learning Communities Grant from the federal government. This grant is known locally as Relationships, Engagement, and Learning (REaL). Work to date has focused on developing teacher capacity, aligning curriculum, improving instructional practice all for the end goal of improving student achievement. During the 2010-11 school year, MMSD unveiled a comprehensive process plan for aligning curriculum PrK-12 with specific focus on the four high schools. The attached report serves as a status update on the MMSD High School Curriculum Alignment Process.
Today brings us a new Seattle Times editorial on education. "Thinking beyond 'college for all" by Lynne Varner says that education reformers are right to promote college for every student, but they should adopt a broader definition of college, one that includes post-high-school credentials other than baccalaureate degrees.
Of course, this is what Shep Siegel has been saying for years. And I have been saying it as well ever since I heard Dr. Siegel say it. So, welcome to party, Ms Varner. Where ya been?
Here's the crux: every student should go on from high school to some form of post-secondary education - a four-year college, a two-year college, an apprenticeship, a vocational program, or some sort of training program. All of it is post-secondary education and all of it needs to be included when we think of "college" in the context of "college for all".
For the most part, organizations are incapable of innovating. Most organizations are founded with a particular mission and method for pursuing that mission. If circumstances require that the mission or method be changed, organizations generally can't do it. They'll just keep doing what they were initially established to do until they can no longer continue operating.
Progress occurs not by turning around failing institutions, but by replacing those organizations with new ones that have a better mission and/or method. Of the original 500 companies included in the S&P 500 in 1957 only 74 (15%) exist today as independent companies. In the private sector, innovation primarily occurs by replacing or fundamentally re-organizing organizations and not by "reforming" them.
And while U.S. real GDP has nearly quintupled since 1970, education achievement of 17 year-olds and high school graduation rates have remained basically unchanged over the same time period. Perhaps the reason for progress in the economy but not in education stems from our willingness to allow new organizations to replace old ones in the private sector, but not in education.
The share of residents turning to food stamps has risen in nearly every state nationwide in the past year even as unemployment has moderated.
After a temporary plateau in February, the number of Americans receiving food stamps ticked up again in March. Nearly 44.6 million received food stamps in March, up more than 11% from the same time a year ago, the Department of Agriculture said Tuesday.
The share of the population receiving food stamps nationwide has also risen as households struggle with high unemployment and stagnant wages. Some 14.4% of Americans relied on food stamps in March, up 1.4 percentage points from a year earlier.
In Winter 2011, the Center for Applied Linguistics conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the dual language immersion (DLI) programs in the Madison Metropolitan School District, including a charter school with DLI implemented K-5, three elementary schools just beginning implementation, and one middle school site with DLI in sixth grade. The goal of the evaluation was to gather sufficient information for strategic planning to adjust any program components that are in need of improvement, and to strengthen those areas of the programs that are already in alignment with best practices. This report provides feedback on student outcomes, things that are going well, and recommendations for the short-, mid-, and long-term.
High School course sequence and alignment by course title across the four large high schools is nearly complete. All course titles will be fully aligned by 2011-12. This allows us to look at fine arts courses that are being offered at all of our high schools and what courses are more building-specific. Fine Arts Leadership Teams and High School Department chairs have discussed the equity (and inequity) across the attendance areas, and these two groups will offer recommendations during the 2011- 12 school year to improve access for all students to a wide variety of high school fine arts offerings.
Through the new Curricular Materials budget process now managed by Curriculum & Assessment (formerly ELM), the purchase of the Silver Burdett Making Music series for all elementary schools began this spring. All kindergarten books have been purchased, and 1" grade materials will be purchased with the 2011-12 Curriculum Materials budget. The decision was made to purchase one grade at a time so that all elementary schools have equitable resources.
Funds from the Curricular Materials budget and the Fine Arts Task Force allocation were used to purchase REMO World Music Drumming instruments and curriculum forall32elementaryschools. Schools were assessed on their current inventory- some schools received full sets and some schools will divide sets based on need. All schools will receive the full complement o f curriculum materials, and professional development in 2011-12 will include world music drumming and drum circles.
2010-11 was the first year in which a formal curricular review cycle has been initiated. According to the program review cycle approved by the MMSD Board of Education, literacy was the first area to be reviewed. As a part of an intensive first year (Year 1) review cycle, the Literacy Evaluation and Recommendations were presented to the Board in February, 2011. At the March, 2011 Board meeting, a panel presentation was made in addition to sharing updated action plans and budget implications. Additional budget clarifications were made at the April, 2011 Board meeting.
Recommendations Requested on June 6, 2011
It is recommended that the Board approve the Literacy Program Evaluation: Findings and Recommendations.
It is recommended that the Board approve $611,000 to support the Literacy Program Evaluation recommendations. $531,000 of this amount is included in the Superintendent's 2011-12 Balanced Budget Funding for READ 180 in the amount of $80,000 is included in the recommended funding for additions to the 2011-12 cost-to-continue budget (memo dated May 16, 2011) from cost savings measures.
It is recommended that the Board approve the plan to purchase learning materials to support literacy in the amount of $415,000. In October, 2011, the Board requested a plan to outline the purchase. This plan supports the Literacy Evaluation Recommendations, including K-12 literacy instructional materials, Dual Language Immersion, and equity purchases. Funding for the $415,000 purchases is included in 2010-11 contingency accounts (Fund 10) transferred to Curriculum & Assessment (Fund 10) to supplement the Instructional Learning Materials Budget (ELM).
Supporting Documentation
The full report, K-12 Literacy Program Evaluation: Findings and Recommendation for Continual Improvement of Literacy Achievement & K-12 Alignment was submitted by courier to the Board on February 22, 2011. This document is in a 3-ring binder, and is not being re-sent in this packet
A summary document, titled Recommendations, Cost Considerations and Plan Description (dated March 17, 2011) provides more detail regarding how the action steps are being carried and reflects the most current budget requests totaling $611,000.
Recommendations #1 - #5:
Recommendations #1-#5 focus on increasing mathematical knowledge for teaching in MMSD 's middle school teachers of mathematics. These recommendations address our workforce, hiring practices, professional development, partnerships with the UW and work with the Wisconsin DPI to change certification requirements.
The C&A Executive Director, C&A Assistant Director, Deputy Superintendent, Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Schools and Mathematics Instructional Resource Teacher met with Human Resources to discuss the implementation of the district-wide expectation for the hiring and retention of Math Specialists. This team created wording to be inserted into all middle school positions that state expectations for teachers involved in teaching mathematics.
The Mathematics Instructional Resource Teacher from Curriculum and Assessment has visited middle schools across Madison to share information with teaching staff and answer questions regarding the Middle School Math Specialist professional development program and the associated expectation for middle school teachers of mathematics. The resource teacher has also met with the Middle School Math Leadership Academy, and the Learning Coordinators to share information and answer questions. A website was created to provide easy access to the needed information. (A copy of the website is attached as Appendix E.)
The Middle School Math Specialist Advisory group that includes UW Mathematics, UW Mathematics Education, Education Outreach and Partnerships, and Madison Metropolitan School District has met throughout the year to provide updates, guidance to the development of the Math Specialist program, and continual feedback on the courses and implementation.
The first cohort of classes in the Middle School Math Specialist program being offered at UW-Madison began in August of20!0. During the first year, the three courses were co-taught by representatives from UW-Mathematics (Shirin Malekpour), UW- ( Mathematics Education (Meg Meyer), and MMSD (Grant Goettl). A total of22 MMSD teachers participated, with seven completing one course, two completing two courses, and ten completing all three offered courses. The topics of study included number properties, proportional reasoning, and geometry.
The first cohort will continue into their second year with eleven participants. The topics of study will include algebra and conjecture. The first cohort will complete the five course sequence in the spring of 2012.
The second cohort is currently being recruited. Advertising for this cohort began in March and sign-up began in April. This cohort will begin coursework in August of 2011. In the first year they will participate in three courses including the study of number properties, proportional reasoning, and geometry. This cohort will complete the five course sequence in the spring of 2013.
The tentative plan for facilitation of the 2011-2012 courses is as follows:
The 2010 Report provides a baseline from which the MMSD will measure future progress in meeting the three goals set forth in the BOE equity policy. Data reported in The State of the District 2010 (http://boeweb.madison.k12.wi.us/files/boeffheWholeThing.pdf) informs key findings in this first annual report. Additionally, critical issues related to the specified equity goals are framed within the context of the Strategic Plan Objectives/Strategies. Outlined below, specific performance measures prescribed in the Strategic Plan will serve as indicators of progress towards meeting the MMSD equity goals.
As educators, one of our defining beliefs is the principle that we do not use the students entrusted in our care as a vehicle for promoting and accomplishing our political agendas. We hold to this core value even when the political agendas we are pursuing involves causes that will better the lives of those young people, such as full funding for day care centers and schools. When communities and families send their young to us to be educated, they trust that we will exercise the authority given to us as teachers responsibly: we do not manipulate young people into political action they do not fully understand, but educate them into the skills and knowledge of democratic citizenship, in order that one day they will be prepared to make and act on their own informed choices of political action.
So when Eva Moskowitz and her Harlem Success Academies turned out students and parents to support the closing of district schools at the February meetings of the Panel for Educational Policy, many of us present were shocked at the way in which 5 year old and 6 year old children were sent to the microphones to speak words they clearly did not understand, put into their mouths by adults who called themselves educators, even as they ignored our most fundamental professional ethics. But if we were paying attention, we would have seen that this crass political exploitation of children is actually a consistent behavior of Moskowitz and Harlem Success.
The Detroit Public School system hopes to convert dozens of schools into charters in the next year or so in a last-ditch effort to cut costs and stop plummeting enrollment.
The plan faces tremendous skepticism from a generation of parents and teachers frustrated from previous reform efforts.
No one has ever done what DPS is trying to do: turn more than 40 schools into charters, some in just a few short weeks.
Greg Richmond of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers says that when the city first approached him with this idea, he hesitated.
This year, we had some truly remarkable news regarding our state assessments. For the first time, Rhode Island high-school students outscored their peers in New Hampshire and Vermont in reading and writing. That's right: Rhode Island high-school students were the best.
Across our state, we see examples of success and pockets of excellence. Many of our schools are moving from good to great. We have the skills and the knowledge base to create a system of public schools in which all students have access to excellence. But we are not there yet.
Our mathematics and science scores, particularly in high school, are far too low. And nearly one of every four students fails to graduate.
To transform education in Rhode Island, we need to turn around our lowest-achieving schools and get them on the road toward success. We have to close the achievement gaps that separate some student groups from others.
Wide gaps separate the performance of our students with disabilities, our English-language learners, and our students living in poverty from their peers across the state. Our Hispanic students, for example, are the lowest-achieving in the country in mathematics - a fact we cannot tolerate and must change.
Even our highest-performing schools can improve their achievement levels. We need to raise our graduation rates, increase the percentages of students going to college, and provide multiple pathways for students seeking entry into challenging and rewarding careers.
Panel moderator and executive director of the Aspen Institute Education & Society Program Ross Wiener underlined that an adversarial relationship between management and labor is not inevitable if both sides are committed to maximizing student outcomes by providing the best-equipped, most effective teachers.
The partnership between PPS and the PFT is a powerful example of what's possible when districts and unions honestly confront the issues, and when leaders on both sides are willing to change. "Pittsburgh's pursuit of an ambitious reform agenda through cooperative efforts offers a powerful counterpoint to the current focus on union-district discord," said Wiener. "While collaboration can't substitute for a substantive improvement agenda, there's every reason to believe we'll make more progress when people are working together. Genuine collaboration will look different in every context, but there are important lessons in Pittsburgh's journey."
Hosted by the Aspen Institute Education & Society Program, the panel discussion was based upon release of its newest report: "Forging a New Partnership: The Story of Teacher Union and School District Collaboration in Pittsburgh." The report, authored by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff writer Sean Hamill, provides an in-depth look at the breakthrough collaboration that took place in Pittsburgh over the past five years. The report also highlights important principles applicable to other districts across the US.
In the long run, education is the issue that will most determine this country's role in the world.
In the long run, it will be the position of the leaders of the Democratic party, state by state and in congress, that will determine the quality of education in America. Democrats have historically supported increased spending but not always measures that increase quality. DFER makes the case in its statement of principles:
A first-rate system of public education is the cornerstone of a prosperous, free and just society, yet millions of American children today - particularly low-income and children of color - are trapped in persistently failing schools that are part of deeply dysfunctional school systems. These systems, once viewed romantically as avenues of opportunity for all, have become captive to powerful, entrenched interests that too often put the demands of adults before the educational needs of children. This perverse hierarchy of priorities is political, and thus requires a political response.
With politicians and education policy-makers preoccupied by budget cuts and layoffs, it is easy to overlook why we find ourselves in this position. Fortunately, the U.S. Census Bureau rides in to remind us.
Each year the bureau publishes a comprehensive report on public school revenues and expenditures. Coupled with education staffing statistics from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data, it gives us a fundamental picture of the finances and labor costs of the American public school system.
The latest Census Bureau report provides details of the 2008-09 school year, as the nation was in the midst of the recession. That year, 48,238,962 students were enrolled in the U.S. K-12 public education system. That was a decline of 157,114 students from the previous year. They were taught by 3,231,487 teachers (full-time equivalent). That was an increase of 81,426 teachers from the previous year.
This is not new information. We knew last October that the entire public education workforce - teachers, principals, administrators and support workers - grew by more than 137,000 employees during the recession.
The state's top education official told lawmakers Wednesday that it will take more than money and standardized tests to improve Rhode Island's public schools.
In an address to a joint session of the state House and Senate, Education Commissioner Deborah Gist said parents, teachers and elected leaders must work together to increase student performance and turn out graduates ready for jobs or college.
"To transform our schools, we must also transform the culture," she told lawmakers. "We need to speak out in support of public education and the things we believe in, but we should not question the good intentions of those with whom we disagree. We must never let our dialogue and discourse become toxic."
As the mother of a special needs child and as someone who works professionally with individuals with disabilities, I support Assembly Bill 110, the Special Needs Scholarship Act. The bill would allow the small group of parents whose children's needs cannot be met by their school district to pursue an appropriate education for their children, just as any parent would want to do.
It is a sad fact that some school districts across this state fail to provide special needs students with the education they require due to lack of funding/resources, specialized training and sometimes willingness. In these few cases, the scholarships would help move these children into a program that meets their needs and prepares them for success.
Our family lives in the Racine Unified School District. We removed our son from the district when he was 3 due to inappropriate, undocumented, unapproved and sustained restraint by teachers at his school. (In 2007, the Journal Sentinel reported on the case, with the state Department of Public Instruction echoing concerns about the school's use of restraint. Following an investigation, the DPI determined that teachers in the district had improperly used restraint.)
Robyn Bagley is the chair for Parents for Choice in Education and recently sat down with the Comcast Newsmakers. She is discussing the Utah Statewide Online Program that was passed in the previous session. Learn more about the digital learning and news that is occurring in Utah now.
This is a unique moment in American history--a tipping point that will determine whether we pull our nation back from the brink of financial collapse. Spending has risen to unprecedented levels--threatening limited government and economic freedom. The Heritage Foundation's 2011 Federal Budget in Pictures paints a clear picture of how much the federal government is spending, how deep it is in debt, how massive entitlement programs are, and what we pay in taxes.
Be sure to share our infographic with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, through email, or by posting on your own blog. The embed code below allows you to easily share the infographic with your blog readers.
ids, step away from the scalpels.
In a win for animal rights activists, foregoing the formaldehyde-laced high school rite of passage, Rancho Verde High School in Moreno Valley, California will swap real frogs for their virtual counterparts. In exchange for a minimum five-year commitment, the school will receive free software courtesy of animal-rights groups who advocate for the virtual curriculum.
While the school's assistant principal, Kevin Stipp, said the virtual lesson will not be the same as performing the dissection on a real animal, he told the Riverside Press Enterprise, "it's not so drastically different that the kids won't get something out of it."
The Madison School District failed to follow state law when it denied the Wisconsin State Journal access to more than 1,000 sick notes submitted by teachers who didn't show up for work in February, according to a lawsuit filed by the newspaper Thursday.
The lawsuit, filed in Dane County District Court, asks the court to force the district to release the notes under the state's open records law, which requires government agencies to release public documents in most circumstances.
The lawsuit says the sick notes are public records because the public has a special interest in knowing how governments discipline employees, who are ultimately responsible to the public.
"We can't know if things were dealt with appropriately if we can't see the underlying documents on which decisions were made," said April Rockstead Barker, the newspaper's lawyer.
Dylan Pauly, a School District lawyer, declined comment until she had a chance to review the lawsuit.
The for-profit college boom looks an awful lot like the subprime mortgage bubble. But it's the differences that can teach us how to change the market for higher education.
In the 2000s, home prices went on an historic tear. Easy credit backstopped by government loan guarantees and securitized by Wall Street created excess demand for residential investment. "Fringey" market players like exurban developers and subprime lenders finally blew the bubble past the breaking point.
When a bubble watcher like Vikram Mansharamani looks at the market for higher education, he can't help but find parallels. Historic price increase? College inflation outpaces health care inflation. Easy credit? Total financial aid for college has doubled since 2002. Fringey market players? For-profit schools stand accused of luring low-income students into government-sponsored debt to obtain degrees of questionable value. Easy money, moral hazard, artificial demand? Check, check, check.
But the parallels between the housing bubble and education have their limits. The Great Recession started with a domino of broken promises and failed expectations. Families stopped paying back mortgages, banks wrote down mortgage-backed assets, contagion spread. In education, the domino line is shorter. If students don't pay back their loans to the federal government, the government just pays itself the difference. The only way for the market to change is for Washington to change the market.
At 10:35 a.m. on a Wednesday, six seniors at the Calhoun School, a progressive private school on the Upper West Side, were discussing the role of social class in "Year of Wonders," a historical novel about an English village hit by the plague in the 17th century.
At noon, the students were still at it. They had moved on from deconstructing the novel, by Geraldine Brooks, to hashing out topics for research papers in the science and social studies class, called Disease and Society: one wanted to tackle 17th-century grave digging in London; another would explore the obligation midwives had to report illegitimate children. Throughout, they had staged only one mutiny, asking to work elsewhere because the classroom was first too cold, then too intellectually stifling (requests denied).
If the subject matter was a bit unusual for high school students, the amount of time they had to grapple with it was more so -- 2 hours 10 minutes, in what is called a class block. Long blocks became standard this year at Calhoun, as part of a radical attempt to alter the structure of the school day and school year.
Parents in Fairfax County have proved themselves one of the largest and most powerful forces for innovation in American education. But they have taken a wrong turn in their effort to save the three-track system--basic, honors and AP/IB-- in the county's high schools.
Many Fairfax parents actively oppose the elimination of honors courses in upper high school grades. They don't want to leave their children with the choice of just the basic course or the college level Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate version. "Let's keep choices on the table," West Potomac High School parent Kate Van Dyck told me.
They can win this fight and keep the honors courses, but it will take some courage and imagination. Instead of insisting on the old three tracks, tell the schools to keep the honors option and eliminate the basic course.
SAY this about all the bickering over the federal debt ceiling: at least people are talking openly about our nation's growing debt load. This $14.3 trillion issue is front and center -- exactly where it should be.
Into the fray comes a thoughtful new paper by Joseph E. Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which studies economic policy. Written with Marc Hinterschweiger, a research analyst there, the report states plainly: "That government debt will grow to dangerous and unsustainable levels in most advanced and many emerging economies over the next 25 years -- if there are no changes in current tax rates or government benefit programs in retirement and health care -- is virtually beyond dispute."
The report then lays out a range of outcomes, some merely unsettling, others downright scary, that face us as a nation if we continue down the big-spending path we are on.
The Common Core standards released in 2010 for English language arts and mathematics have already been adopted by dozens of states. Just how much change do these new standards represent, and what is the nature of that change? In this article, the Common Core standards are compared with current state standards and assessments and with standards in top-performing countries, as well as with reports from a sample of teachers from across the country describing their own practices.
The Common Core standards released in 2010 represent an unprecedented shift away from disparate content guidelines across individual states in the areas of English language arts and mathematics. Led jointly by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the Common Core State Standards Initiative developed these standards as a state-led effort to establish consensus on expectations for student knowledge and skills that should be developed in Grades K-12. By late 2010, 36 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the standards (http://www.corestandards.org/). These standards are therefore poised to be widely adopted and to become entrenched in state education policy.
REAL disposable income for Americans was pretty much flat in the first quarter, according to figures released today. Spending edged up, thanks to a fall in the savings rate. But this is back to the bad old days of consumption financed on the never-never. Indeed, we seem to be attempting to reconstruct the pre-2007 economic model even though that model was shown to be deeply flawed. The recent post on profit margins was evidence of the same effect. And even the rally in the equity markets, propped up by quantitative easing, is merely a subsidy for the better-off and Wall Street traders, whose fortunes are more tied to share prices than those of the average Joe. Surely the point of economic policy is to benefit the average person, not the chosen few.
Daughter comes home from school in the usual mood, with a smile and offhand assurances that school was fine and everything's fine and so on and so forth, but: for moment I catch her staring into the Void, a shadow on her features, and it's time for the parental probe: what's the matter? Oh nothing. C'mon. Something's the matter. You know I'll ask until I get it. Nothing's the matter. i can tell. Nothing - well, there was this one thing.
And so it transpired that she did not get the score in Technology class she thought she deserved, at least relative to the other Powerpoints the kids had done. They had do a PP on an animal. As far as she could tell she had the same amount of content, and applied transitions to the bullet points, which no one else did. Then she said that the kids who got higher marks used all kinds of transitions between the slides, and she only used a fade, so maybe that was it, but that was STUPID.
On September 20,2010, eight residents of the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) filed a complaint (numerous others were listed as supporting the complaint) alleging the school district was not in compliance with the Gifted and Talented (G/T) standard, Wis. Stat. sec. 121.02(1)(t), that requires that each school board shall "provide access to an appropriate program for pupils identified as gifted and talented." Based upon this complaint, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (department) initiated an audit pursuant to Wis. Admin Code sec. PI 8.02. The purpose ofthe audit was to determine whether the school district is in compliance with Wis. Stat. sees. 121.02(1)(t) and 118.35, and Wis. Admin. Code
sec. PI 8.01(2)(t)2. The investigation focused on three core content areas: English/language arts; science; and social studies; in particular at the 9th and 1oth grade levels, per the letter of complaint.
The department informed the school district of the audit on October 13, 2010, and requested information and documentation for key components of the G/T plan. The school district provided a written response and materials on November 29, 2010 and supplemental materials on December 21 , 2010.
On January 25 and 26, 2011, a team of four department representatives conducted an on-site audit which began with a meeting that included the school board president, the district administrator, the deputy superintendent, the secondary assistant superintendent, the executive director of curriculum and assessment, the interim Talented and Gifted (TAG) administrator, an elementary TAG resource teacher, a secondary TAG resource teacher, and legal counsel. After this meeting, the team visited East, West, LaFollette, and Memorial High Schools. At each of these sites, the team conducted interviews with the building principal, school counselors, teachers, and students. At the end ofeach ofthe two days the department team met with parents.
TEN years ago, Congress adopted the No Child Left Behind legislation, mandating that all students must be proficient in reading or mathematics by 2014 or their school would be punished.
Teachers and principals have been fired and schools that were once fixtures in their community have been closed and replaced. In time, many of the new schools will close, too, unless they avoid enrolling low-performing students, like those who don't read English or are homeless or have profound disabilities.
Educators know that 100 percent proficiency is impossible, given the enormous variation among students and the impact of family income on academic performance. Nevertheless, some politicians believe that the right combination of incentives and punishments will produce dramatic improvement. Anyone who objects to this utopian mandate, they maintain, is just making an excuse for low expectations and bad teachers.
To prove that poverty doesn't matter, political leaders point to schools that have achieved stunning results in only a few years despite the poverty around them. But the accounts of miracle schools demand closer scrutiny. Usually, they are the result of statistical legerdemain.
Today, the following members of Chiefs for Change, Janet Barresi, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Information; Tony Bennett, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction; Steve Bowen, Maine Commissioner of Education; Chris Cerf, New Jersey Commissioner of Education; Deborah A. Gist, Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education; Kevin Huffman, Tennessee Commissioner of Education; Eric Smith, Florida Commissioner of Education; and Hanna Skandera, New Mexico Public Education Department Secretary-Designate, released a statement supporting the National Council on Teacher Quality's colleges of education review.
"Great teachers make great students. Preparing teachers with the knowledge and skills to be effective educators is paramount to improving student achievement. Ultimately, colleges of education should be reviewed the same way we propose evaluating teachers - based on student learning."
"Until that data becomes available in every state, Chiefs for Change supports the efforts of the National Council on Teacher Quality to gather research-based data and information about the nation's colleges of education. This research can provide a valuable tool for improving the quality of education for educators."
Public higher education institutions in Wisconsin and Georgia--and possibly as many as five other states--will not participate voluntarily in a review of education schools now being conducted by the National Council for Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report, according to recent correspondence between state consortia and the two groups.
In response, NCTQ and U.S. News are moving forward with plans to obtain the information from these institutions through open-records requests.
In letters to the two organizations, the president of the University of Wisconsin system and the chancellor of Georgia's board of regents said their public institutions would opt out of the review, citing a lack of transparency and questionable methodology, among other concerns.
Formally announced in January, the review will rate education schools on up to 18 standards, basing the decisions primarily on examinations of course syllabuses and student-teaching manuals.
An Ohio school district is the latest to implement a controversial "pay to play" policy, reports The Wall Street Journal. Medina Senior High, faced with budget cuts and repeated rejection of proposals to increase taxes, has started charging students for, well, just about everything. After-school sports, clubs, electives and even required courses such as Spanish all carry a price tag.
The Dombi family is feeling the strain; education and activities for their four children racked up a bill of $4,446.50 this year. And even then, they had to make some tough choices -- their oldest daughter had to forgo choir as it would cost an additional $200.
"It's high school," Ms. Dombi told The Wall Street Journal. "You're supposed to be able to try different things and see what you like."
In a recent editorial, the Los Angeles Times questions the constitutionality of similar fees in California.
Illinois' runaway pension system is placing the state's fiscal health in jeopardy. State contributions to the pension system have already crowded out payments to social service providers. But less focus has been placed on current state workers and teachers, particularly those with retirements more than a decade away. Their outlook is very much at risk, which is why their unions' opposition to pension reform is contrary to their interests.
Illinois' pension system is hopelessly insolvent with about $60 billion of assets and $200 billion in "legacy" liabilities (using an appropriate discount rate). Illinois state workers and teachers currently have roughly 9 percent of each paycheck withheld and sent to the pension black hole. The premise is that the funds will be held by the pension system, invested responsibly, and used to make payments to the workers upon retirement. Unfortunately, pension officials are using those contributions from current workers to pay current retirees.
With deadlines looming against a backdrop of uncertainty, some area school districts are scurrying to reach agreements with employee unions, gaining concessions in benefits to avoid mass layoffs and program cuts.
A few agreements are new or extended contracts, including a two-year contract for teachers approved last week in Menomonee Falls. Others, such as an agreement approved for West Allis-West Milwaukee teachers, are more limited. School districts could have made the changes without union approval if the law largely eliminating collective bargaining for most public employees wasn't stalled in court.
School officials also are crafting new employee handbooks to replace union contracts, outlining benefits and working conditions no longer subject to negotiations if, as expected, collective bargaining is limited to wages.
Some districts are obligated by contract to send layoff notices by June 1. Districts also must give 30 days' notice if they want to switch to less expensive insurance plans before the new fiscal year begins July 1. Many districts have union contracts that expire June 30.
Against all logic and growing opposition from both sides of the political spectrum, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) seems poised and determined to proceed with the new Gainful Employment regulations, which would serve as a guidepost for their issuance of federal student loans for private sector colleges. The proposed Gainful Employment regulations would require that career education providers and programs provide students for "gainful employment" in recognized occupations.
To determine if these programs are eligible, ED wants to tie its federal loans to students' debt-to-income ratio as well as the repayment rates of the for-profit institution. While there has been much debate over the origin of this proposal, its impact could not be more clear: for-profit colleges would suffer and, more significantly, low-income and minority college enrollment would drop precipitously.
I've been watching as UW Madison moves into the post-NBP phase of life (wait, there is life after NBP?). In particularly, I'm finding the (re)framing of recent events by NBP proponents both fascinating, and disturbing.
Spin is, to some degree, expected. We can't blame Chancellor Martin for trying to save face, or Governor Walker for that matter.
What I didn't expect, and what upsets me most, is the self-righteousness evident in those who proclaim "we accomplished something here." Something, they claim, UW System did not. Could not. Would not.
Sad and short-sighted, perhaps, but not surprising. On the other hand, a recent tweet from a Madison student stopped me in my tracks. On Saturday he wrote, "No #UWNBP. Disappointing. Looks like we have to be tied to the poor decisions #UWSystem makes." Surprised at his statement, I responded, "Ever been to System? Ever met anyone there? Why do you follow blindly what u r told? #UWNBP #UWSystem." To which he replied "It's fun to make assumptions."
The pressure is off of district administrators and the school board here in Sun Prairie, because of the shocking cajones of the DeForest Board of Education and DeForest Area School District Administrators.
While we're getting worked up --and justifiably so--- about our own district administration on the cusp of getting 1.6% increases in the midst of tight times, the DeForest Administration Team ---with the support of the Board of Education-- awarded themselves titannic raises under the guise of "Dane County Market Equity" adjustments. The raises are retroactive to January 1, 2011. For appearances sake--you just KNOW they'll spin this in budget documents--- their salaries are being frozen for 2011-12. Geeeee whiz! With those increases, they should be frozen permanently.
Gesturing like a conductor, the Van Hise Elementary teacher exhorted her third-graders for answers while deftly involving a special-needs youngster.
I was in class as part of the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools' "principal for a day" program, and I recall thinking: This would be a really tough job to do well day after day.
Teachers have always impressed me, apparently a lot more than they do Scott Walker.
The Republican governor continues to wage his cynical campaign against labor unions representing teachers and other public employees. The conflict rumbles on, with a judge ruling last week that the legislative vote to extinguish collective bargaining rights violated the state's open meetings law.
The collateral damage to the morale and reputations of Wisconsin's 60,000 or so classroom teachers seems of no concern to Walker and his allies inside and outside the state.
In fact, based on recent Walker press releases, teachers and teachers unions remain a prime target. In terms of there being a bulls-eye on teachers' backs, just consider last week.
I am a teacher with Teach Plus, which was featured in the opening lines of "Behind Grass-Roots School Advocacy, Bill Gates" (front page, May 22). Our perspectives on what motivated our advocacy were not included in the article.
Thousands of great teachers are being laid off this spring, simply because they lack seniority, and many are seeking opportunities to fight for their jobs and for their students. Depicting us as the pawns of Bill Gates is unjustified, particularly since his foundation, while supporting the national organization Teach Plus, does not finance the work of the Indianapolis chapter.
Only in this era of relentless teacher-bashing by the news media could a story about teachers fighting for their own jobs and the jobs of their colleagues be spun into a conspiracy theory.
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said leaders in the House and Senate had agreed on a school finance plan as he left a meeting with education and budget chiefs from both chambers.
As expected, it is the "hybrid of a hybrid" Sen. Florence Shapiro described. All districts would take what will likely be a 6 percent across-the-board reduction in the first year, the approach pushed by the House. In the second year, Shapiro's SB 22 would take effect: 75 percent of the remaining $2 billion reduction in state funding would come from cutting property wealthy, target revenue districts; all districts would bear cuts to make up the that last 25 percent.
During the 2013 session, Shapiro said lawmakers will adjust the school funding formulas once again based on the money available. The current plan contains a 2018 deadline for the phase out of target revenue, but as Shapiro pointed out, there are three legislative sessions between then and now.
Financially pinched states across the nation are making draconian cuts in spending for social services and public education. But there's one area that gets gentler treatment under Republican governors and legislators: prisons. In fact, while Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and the GOP-controlled legislature were whacking $300 per student from the state's K-12 school budget, he was simultaneously moving some of the "savings" over to corrections and prisons.
That prompted Nathan Bootz, superintendent of public schools in the small town of Ithaca in central Michigan, to pen a letter to the local Gratiot County Herald suggesting a modest proposal:
AS DOES much else in the universe, education moves in cycles. The 1960s and 1970s saw a swell of interest in teaching styles that were less authoritarian and hierarchical than the traditional watching of a teacher scribbling on a blackboard. Today, tastes have swung back, and it is fashionable to denigrate those alternatives as so much hippy nonsense.
But evidence trumps fashion--at least, it ought to. And a paper just published in Science by Louis Deslauriers and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia suggests that at least one of the newfangled styles is indeed superior to the traditional chalk-and-talk approach.
Dr Deslauriers's lab rats were a group of 850 undergraduate engineering students taking a compulsory physics course. The students were split into groups at the start of their course, and for the first 11 weeks all went to traditionally run lectures given by well-regarded and experienced teachers. In the 12th week, one of the groups was switched to a style of teaching known as deliberate practice, which inverts the traditional university model. Class time is spent on problem-solving, discussion and group work, while the absorption of facts and formulae is left for homework. Students were given reading assignments before classes. Once in the classroom they spent their time in small groups, discussing specific problems, with the teacher roaming between groups to offer advice and respond to questions.
With few exceptions, Americans spend more on public education than anyone else in the world, but we get some of the worst results. The reason is that most of our public education systems do not properly teach students what they need to know.
That's it. There is no magic. And the federal takeovers, the jazzy new technology, Bill Gates' money, the data-gathering, reform, transformation, national initiatives, removal of teacher seniority, blaming of parents, hand-wringing in the media, and budget shifting won't change that simple fact.
In all of the local, state and federal plans for reforming and transforming public education, I see the bureaucracy growing, the taxpayer bill exploding, the people's voice being eliminated, good teachers being threatened with firing or public humiliation, and students not being taught what they need to know.
A May 25 Wall Street Journal article says some schools now charge parents fees for basic academics, as well as for extracurricular activities, graded electives and advanced classes. Those are private-school fees for a public-school education, and that's just wrong.
Call for revolution in English teaching: Professor says multilingual teachers who grew up speaking Cantonese provide a better model for Hong Kong children than native English speakers
English should be taught in Hong Kong by multilingual teachers, not native English speakers, according to a Hong Kong education professor who is organising an international conference on English as a lingua franca, being held in the city.
"It's a revolutionary shift that we're arguing for, and it's that the multilingual way becomes the linguistic model for teaching kids English here, not that of a native English speaker," says Andy Kirkpatrick, chair professor of English as a professional language at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.
Educators have long grappled with the challenge presented by chronically underperforming schools. Environments that consistently fail to prepare students for higher levels of education threaten opportunities for high school graduation, postsecondary education, and career success. The U.S. Department of Education reinforced the urgency of reversing sustained poor performance in early 2009 when it identified intensive supports and effective interventions in our lowest-achieving schools as one of its four pillars of education reform. However, federal and state policies have often situated the cause--and thus the remedies--for persistent low performance at the school level. This brief uses the experience of eight California school districts--all members of the California Collaborative on District Reform--to suggest a more systemic approach to school turnaround.
We explore the district perspective on school turnaround by describing several broad themes that emerged across the eight districts in the California Collaborative on District Reform. We also profile three of these districts to illustrate specific strategies that can create a coherent district-wide approach to turnaround. Building on these district perspectives, we explore considerations for turnaround efforts in the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
The district initially projected enrollment at 1,500 students, but so far has enrolled 1,730 students and counting. Parents can enroll their students in the free program at any time.
The higher number is a good thing and likely resulted from an extensive amount of community outreach, according to Deputy Superintendent Sue Abplanalp.
The past few weeks have seen a lively debate surrounding the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and Gov. Scott Walker's various proposals to expand it. It is time for researchers to weigh in.
For the past five years, as mandated by state law, we have led a national team in a comprehensive evaluation of the choice program. Our study has applied social science research methods to carefully matched sets of students in the choice program and in Milwaukee Public Schools. Whenever possible, we have used measures that are applied consistently in the public- and private-school sectors, generating true apples-to-apples comparisons.
This is what we have learned:
Competitive pressure from the voucher program has produced modest achievement gains in MPS.
The three-year achievement gains of choice students have been comparable to those of our matched sample of MPS students. The choice students are not showing achievement benefits beyond those of the students left behind in MPS.
High school students in the choice program both graduate and enroll in four-year colleges at a higher rate than do similar students in MPS. Being in the choice program in ninth grade increases by four to seven percentage points a student's prospects of both graduating from high school and enrolling in college. Students who remain in the choice program for their entire four years of high school graduate at a rate of 94%, compared with 75% for similar MPS students.
Office of the Governor, Governor's Conference Room 115 East State Capitol Madison, WI 53702
Welcome and opening remarks by Governor Walker and Superintendent Evers.
Introductions from task force members and guest members representing UW colleges of education.
A discussion of teacher training and professional development including current practices and ways to improve.
Short break.
A discussion of reading interventions including current practices and ways to improve.
A discussion of future topics and future meeting dates.
Adjournment.
Governor Scott Walker
Chair
Individuals needing assistance, pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act, should contact the Governor's office at (608) 266-1212, 24 hours before this meeting to make necessary arrangements.
This paper is the answer to a question: What would the education policies and practices of the United States be if they were based on the policies and practices of the countries that now lead the world in student performance? It is adapted from the last two chapters of a book to be published in September 2011 by Harvard Education Press. Other chapters in that book describe the specific strategies pursued by Canada (focusing on Ontario), China (focusing on Shanghai), Finland, Japan and Singapore, all of which are far ahead of the United States. The research on these countries was performed by a team assembled by the National Center on Education and the Economy, at the request of the OECD.
A century ago, the United States was among the most eager benchmarkers in the world. We took the best ideas in steelmaking, industrial chemicals and many other fields from England and Germany and others and put them to work here on a scale that Europe could not match. At the same time, we were borrowing the best ideas in education, mainly from the Germans and the Scots. It was the period of the most rapid growth our economy had ever seen and it was the time in which we designed the education system that we still have today. It is fair to say that, in many important ways, we owe the current shape of our education system to industrial benchmarking.
But, after World War II, the United States appeared to reign supreme in both the industrial and education arenas and we evidently came to the conclusion that we had little to learn from anyone. As the years went by, one by one, country after country caught up to and then surpassed us in several industries and more or less across the board in precollege education. And still we slept.
"Everything about this program pushes definitions about what is a semester, what is the university, what is a classroom, and where do the faculty belong?"
In the spring of 2008, John Katzman, the founder of the Princeton Review, approached the Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program at at the University of Southern California with a revolutionary idea. USC could increase its graduates by a factor of ten without building another room.
Every year, California adds 10,000 new teachers. And every year until 2008, USC graduated about 100. The school felt "invisible." How could it build influence without new buildings? Katzman said his new project, 2tor, Inc, an education technology company, promised a solution. Forget the brick and mortar, and go online, he said. USC was skeptical. Surely, no Web program could possibly deliver an in-classroom quality of instruction.
Katzman disagreed. I have something to show you, he said.
I thought about this (the accelerating move away from Frederick Taylor [Blekko | Britannica | Clusty] style 19th Century education that we still seem to spend buckets of money on) while attending this week's Madison School District Strategic Plan 2 year review. More on that meeting next week.
When two faculty members disagree about issues related to research, is it right for an administrator to intervene?
A faculty committee at the University of California at San Diego examined that question in a report this week that finds that a dean responded to a dispute between two professors by telling one not to publish or speak out about the other's research. And that order, the committee concluded, violated basic principles of academic freedom.
"Faculty members' rights to study, re-analyze, and publish controversial scholarly materials cannot be abridged," says the report from the UCSD Committee on Academic Freedom. "These rights to academic freedom cannot be administratively revoked to prevent possible future breaching of professional norms. In our view, the campus administration's fundamental responsibility is precisely to protect the right of faculty members to research and publish scholarly work even when others, on or off campus, find the work or its conclusions controversial or objectionable."
Giving children in poverty private-school vouchers to escape failing public schools in Milwaukee is one thing.
But Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to hand vouchers to wealthy families in Milwaukee and other cities isn't justified or affordable for taxpayers.
This is especially true given the state's budget problems and cuts in aid to public schools. Walker's proposal could result in beleaguered taxpayers having to subsidize private school tuition for wealthy families who never intended to send their kids to public schools in the first place.
The Republican-run Legislature should keep Milwaukee's private school choice program as it is: focused on needy, urban children.
When times are tough, as they are now, and schools need to reduce their teacher rolls, the importance of teachers in our children's education demands that we keep the best.
It seems like common sense, Management 101, for any organization, company or agency that wants to do a better job in tough times. Your employees are your most important assets. So if some have to go, which ones do you keep? You save the best.
That commonsense rule of thumb should apply to schools and teachers. Research shows there is not a single school-based factor that has more of an impact on student learning than the quality of a child's teacher.
If a college student today stepped into a time machine and traveled back to Plato's Academy of ancient Athens, she would recognize quite a bit. Sure, it might take some time to master ancient Greek and the use of stylus on wax, but she would eventually settle into a familiar academic routine. Senior scholars across a range of subjects like astronomy and political theory would lecture, pose questions, and press answers to a small group of attendants. Junior attendants would listen, answer, and defend responses.
That a class in 2011 resembles a lecture from 2,300 years ago suggests that two millennia of technological upheaval have only brushed the world of academics. Some professors use PowerPoint, and many schools manage their classes with online software. But even these changes don't fully embrace the potential of Web, mobile, and interactive technology.
"The present resistance to innovation [in education] is breathtaking," Joel Klein writes in The Atlantic this month. The former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education was writing about public high schools, but he might as well have been talking about universities. Despite college costs rising faster in college than any institution in the country including health care, we have the technology to disrupt education, turn brick and mortar lecture halls into global class
The union and the district have locked horns on terms of a new contract. The school board rejected a fact finder's report in March, which the teachers union voted to accept, and the process continues to stall.
Karen Dombi was thrilled when her three oldest children were picked for student government this year--not because she envisioned careers in politics, but because it was one of the few programs at their public high school that didn't charge kids to participate.
Budget shortfalls have prompted Medina Senior High to impose fees on students who enroll in many academic classes and extracurricular activities. The Dombis had to pay to register their children for basic courses such as Spanish I and Earth Sciences, to get them into graded electives such as band, and to allow them to run cross-country and track. The family's total tab for a year of public education: $4,446.50.
"I'm wondering, am I going to be paying for my parking spot at the school? Because you're making me pay for just about everything else," says Ms. Dombi, a parent in this middle-class community in northern Ohio.
Public schools across the country, struggling with cuts in state funding, rising personnel costs and lower tax revenues, are shifting costs to students and their parents by imposing or boosting fees for everything from enrolling in honors English to riding the bus.
Pay for teachers would be cut 1.9 percent and for school administrative staff by 3 percent over the next two years under a budget agreement released by lawmakers on Tuesday.
The pay cuts, worth $179 million, are part of more than $4 billion in cuts lawmakers are proposing as a way to close a roughly $5 billion budget shortfall.
The size of pay reductions for educators was a key area of disagreement during budget negotiations over the past several months.
A briefing on the proposal was scheduled for 10 a.m. The legislation still has to be voted on in the House and Senate.
Some of Hawaii's charter school boards are so closely entwined with their school's leadership that the relationships could limit their ability to exercise independent oversight, a critical component to ensuring success.
Each volunteer board is responsible for governing the school, hiring the principal, setting policy and ensuring financial and academic viability, but a few might simply let the principal call the shots.
Some recent cases that have raised concern:
» Board members of Kula Aupuni Niihau a Kahelelani Aloha, a tiny bilingual school in Kekaha, Kauai, are related to the school's administrator and defer to her in fiscal matters, according to a recent independent financial audit.
"During our audit, we noted very minimal fiscal oversight by the Board of Directors and no Finance Committee," auditors concluded. "The fiscal operations and control are left to the Principal and the Accountant. The Local School Board currently does not have a member well versed in fiscal controls or financial statements."
A report from Wisconsin Democracy Campaign shows proponents of the school choice program outspent opponents 3-to-1 during the last election season. Nearly $1 million in outside election spending came from state business lobby Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.
Assembly Republicans approved a bill earlier this month to expand voucher school enrollment in Milwaukee. Democrats call the program a privatization of education.
Opponents of the plan spent about $1 million to help elect mostly Democrats, with $841,000 coming from state teachers union Wisconsin Education Association Council. Sen. Spencer Coggs of Milwaukee received more than $39,000 in direct campaign contributions from opponents, the single largest amount for any Democratic senator.
Teachers in the Hartland-Lakeside School District have agreed to switch health insurance providers to save the district $690,000, but the executive committee of a union that represents Arrowhead High feeder schools is blocking the change, officials say.
Faced with a $1.2 million reduction in state aid for the 2011-12 school year, the School Board has been looking at ways to reduce costs and avoid program cuts and increases in class sizes, Superintendent Glenn W. Schilling said Tuesday.
The board determined it could achieve some saving by switching teachers' health insurance from WEA Trust, the nonprofit company started 40 years ago by the state's largest teachers union, to another provider when the contract expires on June 30.
In the end, the board and teachers - after a series of joint meetings to study the issue - agreed to go with United Healthcare.
How much did your parents earn when they were your age? Unless you buck the trend, the answer is less than you earn. But now, for the first time in decades, it's not clear if the same will apply to your children. From the US to Germany, living standards for typical households had stopped rising long before the economic downturn. It is time to step back from the anxieties over cuts to ask: have we stopped getting richer?
Even posing that question may feel counter-cultural. Our expectations have been shaped by the rhythm of late 20th-century capitalism: occasionally there are recessions and incomes fall, but then recovery comes and wages rise. Put simply, it has long been safe to assume that national economic growth leads to widespread personal gain.
But recent economic history complicates that assumption. In the five-year period before the downturn, while the overall British economy grew by 11 per cent, average wages were already flatlining. Disposable income per head fell in every English region outside London from 2003 to 2008. During a supposed national boom time, Britain's households were drawing a bust. A half-decade trend doesn't, of course, put us on an ineluctable path towards longer-term stagnation. But it should shake us out of complacency.
Rupert Murdoch signalled that News Corp, the media group he heads, is to make a significant new push into the education technology market, in a high-profile speech to the e-G8 conference of internet entrepreneurs and European policymakers in Paris.
Describing education as the "last holdout from the digital revolution", Mr Murdoch outlined a vision for personalised learning and more engaging lessons delivered by the world's best teachers to thousands of students via the internet.
"The same technologies that transformed every other aspect of modern life can transform education, provide our businesses with the talent they need to thrive, and give hundreds of millions of young people at the fringes of prosperity the opportunity to make their own mark on this global economy," he said.
With Joel Klein, the former New York schools chancellor hired by News Corp in November, Mr Murdoch has visited pioneering educational schemes and classrooms worldwide, including South Korea, California and Sweden.
High schools are offering a new deal at 39 Los Angeles campuses: Students who raise their scores on the state's standardized tests will be rewarded with higher grades in their classes.
If it works, schools also will benefit because low scores can lead to teachers and administrators being fired and schools being closed. A proposed teacher evaluation system relies specifically on these tests for part of an instructor's rating. Even the new superintendent's salary, and his tenure, are tied to scores on the California Standards Tests, which are administered this month.
Too many young children in Michigan aren't getting the foundation of learning they need before starting school that would allow them to succeed once their K-12 education begins. Gov. Rick Snyder is on the right track with his proposals for early education, which highlight the importance of lifelong learning.
It's a fine line for the state to walk. After all, should the state -- and taxpayer money -- be more wrapped up in making up for the shortcomings of parents? Probably not. But if the Michigan Education Department narrowly targets funding for pre-kindergarten development to the most at-risk youth and families, and offers guidance to other parents in teaching their young children themselves, it could provide a sturdier platform for these kid's futures.
In his speech on education last month, Snyder gave some startling statistics. Michigan kindergarten teachers say that only 65 percent of children enter their classrooms "ready to learn the curriculum."
The tea partiers are demanding that Congress not raise the debt ceiling but instead avoid default by cutting spending dramatically. Federal spending on education emerges as the discretionary item in the federal budget most available for the knife, and a House bill is being introduced by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., that lists 43 education programs to be cut.
We've spent $2 trillion on education since federal aid began in 1965. The specified goals were to improve student achievement, eliminate or narrow the gap between upper-income and low-income students, and increase graduation rates from high school and college.
We have little or nothing to show for the taxpayers' generosity. Even Education Secretary Arne Duncan admitted that 82 percent of public schools should be ranked as failing.
So how will the army of educrats, whose jobs depend on billions of dollars of federal handouts, save their jobs? They've come up with an audacious plan that pretends to be useful in enabling them to discover what works and what doesn't, but it is so large and complicated that it would take years and require a huge computer-savvy payroll and billions of taxpayers' dollars.
And incidentally, it would be illegal because it's based on using executive branch regulations to override federal statutes.
A judge has tentatively ruled that a petition by a group of Compton parents to force a poorly performing elementary school to convert to a charter school could fail because the signatures on the petition were not dated.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Anthony Mohr called the failure to document the dates when the McKinley Elementary School parents signed the petition "fatal," according to the Associated Press.
The Compton Unified School District, which governs McKinley, argued that dating each signature was crucial in determining whether a signer's child was enrolled at the school and had legal rights over the child at the time, the AP reported.
Mohr said in his tentative ruling Friday that he understood the "pain, frustration and perhaps education disadvantages" his 14-page decision might cause but added that he needed to follow the law.
Since being named to Gov. Scott Walker's Read to Lead Task Force, I have come under some political scrutiny by those who oppose the governor's conservative agenda, most notably his attempt to disenfranchise teachers of their right to bargain collectively. Evidently, there are some who feel that it is acceptable to thwart an initiative that seeks to remedy the deplorable state of reading achievement in our state and use it as a weapon to extract some measure of political redress.
I am willing to take political heat for my participation on the panel, but the fact that I must is symptomatic of why we have been stymied in our efforts to address a public health issue of pandemic proportions and leave countless children as collateral damage in the process.
Having been both a teacher and administrator, and having served several stints as my school's union representative, I am naturally opposed to any action that would reduce teacher benefits and marginalize due process protections. But such issues have no place in any discussion that seeks to address how we set about the task of building competent readers. While we have much to accomplish in that regard, there are those who would claim otherwise even though:
Two-thirds of state fourth-graders cannot demonstrate age-appropriate reading ability.
Wisconsin's rank for that same cohort has dropped precipitously over the past decade - from 3rd to 30th among all states and the District of Columbia.
Nearly half of Americans say that they definitely or probably couldn't come up with $2,000 in 30 days, according to new research, raising concerns about the financial fragility of many households.
In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Annamaria Lusardi of the George Washington School of Business, Daniel J. Schneider of Princeton University and Peter Tufano of Harvard Business School used data from the 2009 TNS Global Economic Crisis survey to document widespread financial weakness in the U.S. and other countries.
The survey asked a simple question, "If you were to face a $2,000 unexpected expense in the next month, how would you get the funds you need?" In the U.S., 24.9% of respondents reported being certainly able, 25.1% probably able, 22.2% probably unable and 27.9% certainly unable. The $2,000 figure "reflects the order of magnitude of the cost of an unanticipated major car repair, a large copayment on a medical expense, legal expenses, or a home repair," the authors write. On a more concrete basis, the authors cite $2,000 as the cost of an auto transmission replacement and research that reported low-income families claim to need about $1500 in savings for emergencies.
Pledging to provide relief to highly taxed suburban homeowners, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and legislative leaders said Tuesday that they had agreed to place a 2 percent limit on property tax increases in a plan that rivals the toughest such measures in the nation.
The proposed property tax cap, an agreement in principle that must be approved by the Legislature, is aimed at reversing the economic decline in many parts of the state outside of New York City. It also seeks to curb soaring property tax bills in areas like Long Island, Westchester County and pockets of upstate New York, where residents are facing among the highest property taxes in the nation.
Some residents, particularly those who are older and live on fixed incomes, are being forced out of their homes by rising property taxes.
"It is going to be a game changer, and it's going to change the trajectory of this state," Mr. Cuomo said.
New York has long had some of the highest property taxes in the nation, and those taxes increased by 5.5 percent, on average, each year from 1999 to 2009, according to statistics provided by the Cuomo administration.
State College Area School District in Pennsylvania several years ago abandoned plans to build a new high school. This month, it received a notice that it owes $10 million to Royal Bank of Canada for skipping an interest payment on money it never borrowed for a school it didn't build.
The notice was the latest step in a legal battle over what the district calls a "naked swap" and what RBC describes as a binding legal agreement. The conflict is an example of how cities, states, schools and other public entities are second-guessing financial deals they made in recent years, pitting them against their own bankers and advisers.
Many of the regrets revolve around interest-rate swaps that became popular as a way for municipal borrowers to guard against jumps in rates. Typically under these contracts, a borrower pays a bank interest with a fixed rate and the bank pays interest with a floating rate in return. When interest rates declined, swaps proved costly to many borrowers.
Under the new plan, a chief of staff, chief business officer for the division of finance and operations, a chief of schools, a chief academic officer and a chief of accountability will all report to the superintendent.
The district will bring back the chief of schools position, whose responsibility will include working with principals, evaluating schools and organizing professional development for teachers.
"That's an enhancement to support implementation of our Strong Schools, Strong Communities vision plan" that realigns school boundaries, Kelly said.
The former secondary schools assistant superintendent position will split into a high school and a middle school assistant superintendent positions.
That will allow for the middle school superintendent to focus on the district's transition of sixth-graders moving from elementary into middle schools.
"We're making a major switch by moving our sixth grade into middle school grades," Kelly said. "We need a lot of leadership and focus to make sure that's done correctly. We want that to be a seamless transition for our students and staff."
In the first sentences of an opinion issued last week by the state Supreme Court, Chief Justice Carol Hunstein declared without qualification that the Georgia Charter School Commission was illegal because of an "unbroken ... constitutional authority" existing since the adoption of the 1877 Constitution giving only "local boards of education" the power to create k-12 public schools. As a result, schools for 15,000 underserved children soon may be forced out of business.
But it's the next sentence in the 1877 Constitution -- left out of the court's opinion -- that reveals the true aim of "local control" in education in that era and punctures the logic of disallowing the charter commission a say in education today.
It reads: "Separate schools shall be provided for the white and colored races."
Arguing law with the Georgia Supreme Court may be above my pay grade. But I do know something about Georgia history. And it is astonishing that the court's four-member majority, without the tiniest acknowledgement of Georgia's history of racially abusive statutes, tainted court rulings and educational malpractice with regard to black children, would unblinkingly rely on one of the bleakest moments in the state's political and legislative past for the foothold of its ruling.
The Indiana Commission for Higher Education has approved a new Urban Education Studies Ph.D. to be offered by the IU School of Education at IUPUI starting in fall 2012. This is the first doctorate degree in education to be offered entirely on the IUPUI campus. The degree will be one of just a handful of urban education doctorates in the country, focused on preparing researchers to study schools in complex urban environments. Faculty and students in the program will conduct community-based research designed in partnership with P-12 schools and community organizations. It will be the only urban education doctoral program in the state of Indiana.
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"IUPUI's Ph.D. in urban education program is a distinctive, research-oriented degree program, and the first of its kind in Indiana," said IUPUI Chancellor Charles R. Bantz. "The interdisciplinary focus will prepare scholars who are capable of making significant contributions to improve urban education."
Hundreds of teachers packed the Madison School Board meeting Monday night to protest changes in their contract next year related to planning time for elementary school teachers.
Some speakers reminded the board that elementary school planning time was a key issue in the 1976 teachers strike that closed school for two weeks. Tension among teachers is already heightened because of state initiatives to curtail collective bargaining and reduce education funding.
"Compensation has been reduced, morale is low, stress is high," Lowell Elementary teacher Bob Arnold said. "Respect and support us by preserving our already inadequate planning time."
School districts across the state are being asked to release the names of teachers who called in sick during protests in February at the Capitol, a move that led to closures for a day or more in many districts.
It's unclear how many of the state's 424 districts received requests, but several conservative groups have made public records requests for teacher names. Most districts have released them.
But the Madison School District denied several requests, saying the release could risk the safety of teachers and students, and disrupt morale and the learning environment in schools.
And the s, the state's largest teachers union, used a similar argument in asking a La Crosse County judge to quash the release of teacher names in the La Crosse and Holmen districts.
The judge recently blocked the release of names in Holmen and may rule soon on the La Crosse case.
State Superintendent Tony Evers [SIS link] in a memo Monday urged the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee to restore funding for public schools and work collaboratively to improve the quality of all Milwaukee schools before considering any voucher expansion.
"To spend hundreds of millions to expand a 20-year-old program that has not improved overall student achievement, while defunding public education, is morally wrong," Evers said in the memo.
Gov. Scott Walker has proposed eliminating the income limits on participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, eliminating the enrollment cap and has proposed opening up private schools throughout Milwaukee County to accept vouchers from Milwaukee students. Walker has spoken of expanding the voucher program to other urban areas in the state, such as Racine, Green Bay and Beloit.
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was created to improve academic performance among low-income students who had limited access to high-performing schools. Low-income students use taxpayer money to attend private schools, including religious schools. Each voucher is worth $6,442. The program now is limited to 22,500 students; 20,189 are in the program this year.
However, after 20 years and spending over $1 billion, academic performance data and the enrollment history of the school choice program point to several "concerning trends," Evers said in his analysis of voucher student enrollment, achievement, and projected cost for long-term expansion.
Low-income students in Milwaukee Public Schools have higher academic achievement, particularly in math, than their counterparts in choice schools. Evers cited this year's Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts exams and the legislatively mandated University of Arkansas study, which showed significant numbers of choice students performing below average on reading and math.
At a press conference in Racine, DPI Superintendent Tony Evers gave his harshest criticism of school vouchers yet. Well beyond the typical quibbles over test scores and graduation rates, Evers claimed that school vouchers were de facto "morally wrong." It's not every day that a State Superintendent of education accuses an education-reform program of being immoral. In doing so, Tony Evers may have bitten off more than he could chew.
Calling a school voucher program morally wrong inculpates more than just the program, it inculpates parents, teachers, organizations, lawmakers, and a majority of Americans that endorse it. In fact, one could reasonably argue that Evers' statement makes himself morally culpable since Milwaukee's voucher program operates out of the Department of Public Instruction of which he is the head. What does it say about the character of a man that knowingly administers an immoral program out of his own department?
In short, Evers' argument goes something like this: voucher programs drain public schools of their financial resources; drained resources hurt children academically; hurting children academically is morally wrong; ergo, voucher programs are morally wrong.
When Mayor Rahm Emanuel's new Chicago Board of Education swings into action, it should not mark the occasion with a private dinner.
The members should have breakfast together in any of several thousand elementary school classrooms. There, they will get a glimpse of the mess they have inherited. Bring antacids and a nutritionist.
A Breakfast in the Classroom program approved by their predecessors is completing its mandatory rollout. All that can be said with certitude is that it has shortened instructional time in a system with the shortest school day and year of the nation's 50 largest districts.
How do we make schools more relevant to students? Teach them the skills they need in the real world, with tools they use every day. That's exactly what Esther Wojcicki, a teacher of English and journalism at Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto, Calif., is attempting to do with the recent launch of the website 21STcenturylit. I interviewed Esther about the site, and how she hopes it will serve as a useful tool for both students and educators.
How do you describe the mission for 21STcenturylit?
Wojcicki: The mission of 21STcenturylit.org is threefold: It is to teach students how to be intelligent consumers of digital media, how to be skillful creators of digital media, and to teach students how to search intelligently. We are living in an age when digital media and new digital tools are revolutionizing the world. Schools need to help students learn these skills, not block and censor the Internet.
KALAMAZOO -- Michigan school officials appear to be winning the public-relations battle over funding cuts in education, but Republicans lawmakers are winning the war on shaking up K-12 financial practices.
The probable implications as the dust settles this summer and fall: School employees will see cuts in benefits and possibly in pay; unions will have less leverage in contract negotiations, and schoolchildren will see larger class sizes and more participation fees for extracurricular activities.
There's a downside for the GOP, too, in the form of public backlash. A recent statewide poll by Epic MRA indicates two-thirds of Michigan residents, including a majority of Republicans, oppose cutting K-12 education to balance the state budget.
The decision to fire a teacher for viewing porn at school has cost the Middleton school board about $300,000 in legal fees.
A teachers' union filed a grievance after the seventh-grade teacher at Glacier Creek Middle School was dismissed.
Ellen Lindgren, the president of the Middleton-Cross Plains School Board, said the board hates spending its limited cash on lawyers, but it's doing so because the community supports firing teachers who view porn at school.
Time is a valuable thing. I often wish I had more of it. I can pretty much say with confidence that you, Reader, probably wish you had some more too.
I don't like to waste people's time. I don't believe that any of us who engage in something we love want to either. When I form my lessons, teach a classroom full of high school students, or present information to my colleagues, I don't want others to wish they were somewhere else. Learning is at its best when students are engaged. Engagement can look like a variety of things: a student hard at work on his or her own composition, a thoughtful classroom discussion about ethics, participation in the school science fair, or designing an exercise regimen in P.E.
Teachers do not believe that what we teach is a waste of time. We can engage students easily when things are important to us.
This week thousands of Arizona high school seniors will don caps and gowns and receive their high school diplomas, while others who successfully completed 12 years of schooling but failed the state's infamous AIMS test will be left feeling dejected and betrayed by our failing public education system. How can students pass all 12 grades and not pass the high-stakes test? What happens to these students now? These are but a few symptoms of Arizona's broken educational system.
Perhaps also reflecting on graduation day and the state's failing school system, the Arizona Republic recently published an editorial on education reform: 5 vital ways to reform K-12 education.
The five suggestions read like a right-wing wish list: 1) competition; 2) high expectations; 3) quality teachers; 4) intelligent use of technology; and 5) private sector involvement. Not surprisingly, the editorial was written by Craig R. Barrett, former CEO of Intel and current president and chairman of BASIS, a system of charter high schools.
I picked a bad week to start doing "On the Agenda" posts on the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education doings. Too much going on. Given the amount to cover, I'm going to try to keep the comments and context minimal. I should also note that I haven't yet decided how regularly I will do these again.
The details for all of the meetings are here. Here is the rundown.
I attended Mumford High School in Detroit, from the fall of 1964 through June of 1967, the end of a period known to some as the golden age of education, and to others as an utter failure.
Raymond
I attended Mumford High School in Detroit, from the fall of 1964 through June of 1967, the end of a period known to some as the golden age of education, and to others as an utter failure. For the record I am in the former camp, a product of an era which in my opinion well-prepared me to major in mathematics. I am soon retiring from a career in environmental protection and will be entering the teaching profession where I will teach math in a manner that has served many others well over many years and which I hope will be tolerated by the people who hire me.
I was in 10th grade, taking Algebra 2. In the study hall period that followed my algebra class I worked the 20 or so homework problems at a double desk which I shared with Raymond, a black student. He would watch me do the day's homework problems which I worked with the ease and alacrity of an expert pinball player.
While I worked, he would ask questions about what I was doing, and I would explain as best I could, after which he would always say "Pretty good, pretty good"--which served both as an expression of appreciation and a signal that he didn't really know much about algebra but wanted to find out more. He said he had taken a class in it. In one assignment the page of my book was open to a diagram entitled "Four ways to express a function". The first was a box with a statement: "To find average blood pressure, add 10 to your age and divide by 2." The second was an equation P = (A+10)/2. The third was a table of values, and the last was a graph. Raymond asked me why you needed different ways to say what was in the box. I wasn't entirely sure myself, but explained that the different ways enabled you to see the how things like blood pressure changed with respect to age. Sometimes a graph was better than a table to see this; sometimes it wasn't. Not a very good explanation, I realized, and over the years I would come back to that question--and Raymond's curiosity about it--as I would analyze equations, graphs, and tables of values.
WHEN he first introduced cuts at a public meeting last month, Samuel Lee, the superintendent of the Bristol Township School District, was plainspoken and direct. He did not say that everyone would pull together and the children would get the same great education, but, rather, that worthy programs would be dismantled and young teachers would lose jobs. "Everything that is going to be presented tonight is not good for our kids," he said as about 300 teachers, parents and students looked on. "We are heartbroken."
I grew up in blue-collar Levittown, and have written about it several times for this newspaper as a window into national sentiment. The community was deeply skeptical of Barack Obama early in 2008, then voted for him in huge numbers in the fall. In 2010, the local Democratic congressman was turned out of office amid a wave of national anger over the economy.
Over the past several weeks, I have watched as local officials and community residents confronted a budget shortfall that threatens to reverse hard-won gains in schools that once performed poorly. But I did not hear much of the polarization, argumentation and point-scoring that the cable news universe reflects as the totality of our civic discourse. In Levittown, this time around, the mood is one of sadness, loss and resignation. "We're all struggling in this community," W. Earl Bruck, an electrician, and chairman of the board's budget committee, told those at the meeting. "I can tell you that I've been out of work for 56 weeks."
Republicans in the state Legislature want to allow school boards in Wisconsin to use teacher evaluations, which are based partly on the results of students' standardized test scores, as part of the criteria for firing or disciplining educators.
We have some concerns about the details, but it is a good idea to hold teachers accountable for their work and to make state test scores part of that process.
At the moment, student test scores can be used as part of a teacher evaluation but cannot be a basis for dismissal. While poor results on state tests never should be the sole reason for firing or disciplining a teacher, it makes little sense not to consider them as part of a holistic evaluation.
Developing meaningful evaluations is difficult, though, and the Legislature should work with teachers as well as administrators and the state Department of Public Instruction to ensure that this bill considers their perspectives.
We study grading outcomes associated with professors in an elite university in the United States who were identified -- using voter registration records from the county where the university is located -- as either Republicans or Democrats. The evidence suggests that student grades are linked to the political orientation of professors: relative to their Democratic colleagues, Republican professors are associated with a less egalitarian distribution of grades and with lower grades awarded to Black students relative to Whites.
The Milwaukee School Board and I recently had an unusual conversation. It came at the end of a meeting on our proposed budget. Struck by the sadness of the parents and teachers who had testified on the devastating impacts, and in dismay over the massive cuts to state funding offered by our governor, we came down to a question that summed up the past weeks: What do you do when the facts are not enough?
We have made considerable progress academically and financially. The 2009 McKinsey & Co. report listed potential cost savings for Milwaukee Public Schools in six areas. Efforts to trim costs for textbook purchases, food service, transportation, employee benefits and facilities were already underway when this report was released. Since 2009, the district has addressed each area and, as a result, at least $50 million has been or is scheduled to be saved.
Academic achievement is a priority. Fifty-seven percent of our schools increased their reading scores. Forty-three percent improved in math. Data released by the state Department of Public Instruction this spring shows MPS outperformed Milwaukee voucher schools on the state's test, even though the district serves a much higher proportion of students with disabilities.
WHO YOU WANT TO BE TODAY -- CEO Update, a D.C.-based trade publication for association executives (a.k.a., "what we read on Blain's couch while he's on conference calls"), finds seven lobbyists who made seven figures in 2009, the latest year with data available: 1) Cary Sherman, Recording Industry Association of America, $3,185,026; 2) Bruce Josten, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, $1,340,455; 3) Todd Hauptli, American Association of Airport Executives, $1,312,350; 4) Alan Roth, USTelecom: The Broadband Association, $1,159,138; 5) Cynthia Fornelli, American Institute of CPAs, $1,154,37; 6) Rick Pollack, American Hospital Association, $1,087,024; and 7) Howard Schloss, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), $1,065,628. (Fine print: "highest paid non-CEO staffer who is a federally registered lobbyist in a tax-exempt organization. Compensation figures include base pay, bonuses, deferred salary and nontax income on ... tax return from years ending in 2009.")
Gov. Brian Sandoval's veto this past week of the Democratic education funding bill marks a disappointing and counterproductive move for a governor who claims -- and I want to believe that he genuinely means this -- a commitment to improve the quality of education for Nevada's students.
The governor has proposed some thoughtful and worthwhile initiatives, most notably eliminating the "last in, first out" layoff policy in favor of one that allows principals to decide whom to lay off on the basis of teacher effectiveness. His proposals to reform the tenure system and the teacher evaluation system -- so that teachers who improve student achievement are retained and rewarded -- also merit support.
So, yes, eliminating the "last in, first out" layoff policy is both logical and useful. What would be more useful is mitigating layoffs altogether.
Politicians are usually sticks in the mud, technologywise, but that certainly wasn't the case down in Tallahassee this week. Florida legislators closed their eyes, clicked their heals, and took a giant leap forward into the Information Age, passing a budget measure that bans printed textbooks from schools starting in the 2015-16 school year. That's right: four years from now it will be against the law to give a kid a printed book in a Florida school. One lawmaker said the bill was intended to "meet the students where they are in their learning styles," which means nothing but sounds warm and fuzzy.
Gov. Brian Sandoval and former Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee would have us believe that education reform is based on ending teacher tenure. We get rid of seniority, then magically, education will be fixed. That is a smoke screen, and it's not real education reform.
If you truly want to reform education in Nevada, think outside the box. Why is the school year only 180 days, with a three-month vacation? No other major industrialized power in the world has such a schedule. That schedule has existed since the 1850s, when children provided much of the labor force for the family farm. Why not radically change the calendar, to better match what our competitors are doing?
Much of Europe and the Far East have school years of 200 to 220 days, with the longest break being one month. Ask teachers how much re-teaching they have to do to regain the skills lost over the summer.
Other countries have a longer school day as well. Why do we only have a day that requires students to be in school for less than seven hours?
The reading experts and government leaders on Wisconsin's "Read to Lead" task force are taking a close look at student reading achievement in Wisconsin schools. The meetings of the task force are open to the public; my "live tweeted" notes from the April 25, 2011 inaugural meeting are here:
Michelle A. Rhee butted heads frequently during her three-year tenure as schools chancellor of Washington with the president of the local teachers' union, George Parker, and eventually a voter backlash over the city's school reform wars cost both of them their jobs.
Now, in a strange-bedfellows twist, Ms. Rhee has named Mr. Parker as the first senior fellow of Students First, the national group she formed after stepping down as chancellor last fall. She says she hopes Mr. Parker can be a compelling voice for change, especially in speaking to teachers' union members around the country. He says Ms. Rhee hates teachers' unions less than most people think.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett asked that at a forum of civic leaders last week.
In the biblical story, two women claiming to be the mother of the same baby take their dispute to King Solomon. He calls for a sword so he can split the baby in two and give each woman half. One woman tells him to go ahead. The second tells him to give the baby to the first so the child can live. Solomon, of course, awards the baby immediately to the second. A true mother would sacrifice just about anything, even maternal rights, to let her child live.
What does this have to do with the next couple of years for students in Milwaukee Public Schools?
This: If people act with wisdom, maturity and a willingness to sacrifice for the good of kids, there could be significant relief from cuts that will negatively affect just about all 75,000-plus students. The list could start with easing the looming big jumps in average class size.
The sacrifice part would fall largely on MPS teachers. But it would put them in line with what is almost surely going to happen to the large majority of teachers across the state.
The wisdom part would have to start with Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislative leaders. Willingness to budge on ideological points hasn't been one of their most visible traits in recent months.
Many questions have arisen from recent political events about the power of unions. In a new working paper published today, Mercatus scholar Eileen Norcross, compiled research on unions and clears up some misconceptions about the difference between private and public sector unions and how they work.
"The main differences between public and private sector come from economics," said Norcross. "Private sector unions can raise their wages, but not their employment. By contrast, public sector unions can increase both wage and employment outcomes."
The result, says Norcross, is that public sector unions can grow the size of budgets, while private sector unions are constrained by the profitability of the firm.
"Unlike private sector unions, public sector unions rely not only on collective bargaining, but also leverage their political influence to achieve these gains," said Norcross. "In fact, empirical studies indicate the political activity of unions may be more effective than collective bargaining at raising employment."
The Christie administration has recalculated the amount it says New Jersey public school districts spend per pupil, increasing the state average rate by several thousand dollars to more than $17,800.
The figure, from the 2009-10 school year, has been adjusted to include costs such as transportation, federal funding, debt payments and legal judgments that can vary greatly from district to district. In the 2008-09 school year, using the previous calculation, the state average was $13,200 per student.
The Christie administration says the new figure is more transparent and complete.
Public school officials called vouchers "morally wrong" and potentially "crippling" for Racine at a press conference Thursday.
A school choice voucher program in Racine would cost taxpayers money while hurting the academic chances of public school students, officials said during the afternoon press conference at Walden middle and high school, 1012 Center St. The press conference was held in response to a proposal from Gov. Scott Walker to expand Milwaukee's school choice voucher program, which allows low-income Milwaukee students to receive state-funded vouchers to attend participating private schools. Walker has proposed removing the low-income requirement while also expanding the program to other cities.
Public school officials who spoke in Racine Thursday think that's a bad idea.
"School vouchers have been called 'a dagger in the heart of public education' and I think there's some truth to that," Racine Unified Superintendent Jim Shaw said at the conference. He explained vouchers take needed funds away from public schools -- when a child leaves a school with a voucher about $6,000 in per pupil state aid to that school leaves with them to pay for private school tuition.
Fact finding: The creation of a three panel board that will look at the final offers from the Board of Education and CTU, publish those offers and study the validity of the different claims. The fact finding process will take over 75 days to complete.
If fact finding does not produce a resolution, then CTU members can vote to strike. In order to authorize a strike 75% of all our bargaining unit members must vote for it.
Attainment of Tenure
Under last year's PERA law, 4 ratings were established: excellent, proficient, needs improvement and unsatisfactory in a four-year probationary period. To achieve tenure, a teacher must have:
3 consecutive years of excellent ratings grants immediate tenure within 3 years.
On the same day that University of Texas System regents unanimously agreed to refrain from micromanaging the state's largest university system, at least one regent seemed to do just that by requesting records on individual faculty members' workloads, average grades for each undergraduate course and student evaluation scores of teachers, as well as a timeline for producing those materials, emails obtained by the American-Statesman show.
Regent Alex Cranberg requested the materials for each course taught in the 2009-10 academic year at the UT System's nine academic campuses, according to the emails. One email said Regent Brenda Pejovich joined Cranberg in the request, but officials said in interviews that she had not done so.
Cranberg submitted his request to Sandra Woodley, a vice chancellor for the system, on Thursday afternoon, hours after Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa received an unqualified vote of support, including a standing ovation, from the Board of Regents following a speech in which he declared that universities "simply cannot be micromanaged." Woodley had a staff member send the request to the campuses on Friday.
George W. Bush X 2 = Barack Obama in both extra spending -- and tax cuts.
It's a crude but fair summary of the two presidents based on new data mapping how the nation moved from surpluses in 2001 to record deficits over the past decade. And it takes on special meaning given the turmoil these days in the Senate, whether in producing a budget, salvaging months of work by the bipartisan Gang of Six or expanding the Treasury's borrowing authority to avert default.
For Republicans, the new numbers -- compiled by the Congressional Budget Office -- bolster the GOP's argument that President Barack Obama has gone well past Bush's hearty appetite for new spending. But for Democrats, the same equation underscores the fact that the growth in discretionary appropriations since 2001 has been matched almost dollar for dollar by a series of tax cuts that were also expanded under Obama.
"Starve the beast is the worst kind of diet," an administration official joked when told of the numbers. "It shows the beast eats more."
Indeed, from 2002 through 2011, CBO estimates that the combined tax cuts enacted by successive Congresses cost $2.8 trillion, even as increased appropriations added $2.95 trillion above projections for discretionary spending.
The state Department of Education says a handful of public school districts will be picked to test new teacher evaluations beginning in September, with the bulk of New Jersey's 616 districts implementing the achievement-based reviews the following year.
Gov. Chris Christie has been pushing for revisions that would center teacher evaluations on student performance and teaching practices. Under the new system, teachers will be rated on a four-tiered scale from highly effective to highly ineffective. They will be rewarded or remediated based on their ranking and could be fired after two consecutive years of ineffective ratings.
I am in favor of a less adversarial and more collaborative and forward-looking relationship between the school district and MTI. I think it is unfortunate that the union seems to perceive that it is in its best interests to portray the school district administration as hostile to teachers. I would like to see a world where the union views itself less in an adversarial role as a bulwark against the administration's exploitation of teachers and more collaboratively as partners with the district in figuring out better ways to improve student learning.
From my perspective, my proposal - which, if adopted, would only have amounted to a gesture - wasn't intended to help persuade teachers to abandon their union. Instead, I'd hope that it may convey the message that, even when the administration and School Board disagree with teachers' positions and adopt policies that make their jobs harder, we are not the enemy. We want to work together collaboratively in pursuit of better results for our students.
The State Board of Education today approved higher reading benchmarks for elementary and middle school students beginning this September.
Four of the board's seven members spent several minutes voicing concerns about becoming too focused on test scores and the dangers of raising standards without supporting increased classroom time, improved instruction and student engagement.
Yet, the new rates passed 6 to 0 with chairwoman Brenda Frank abstaining.
Board members say despite concerns, it's critical to raise standards as states move towards a common curriculum and to give students and their parents a more honest assessment of whether the students are on track to graduate on time.
Right now, state leaders say meeting reading benchmarks in third or fourth grade doesn't mean that a child is likely to be on track in high school as well.
According to food revolutionary Alice Waters, what we choose to eat says as much about our values as the way we vote. In an interview with WSJ's Alan Murray, the author and chef outlines her vision for thoughtful eating and sustainable farming, while accusing corporations of having little interest in health and nutrition.
Ohio lawmakers are prepared to cut gifted education by a whopping 89 percent within the state's new education budget. Truly, today's economy means we all have to cut back, but why are gifted students targeted to take the biggest hit? Why are they singled out as not deserving an equal and appropriate education?
We are fortunate in the Marion City School District. We have not fallen victim to this unfair budget cut. Superintendent Barney and the school board have chosen to continue to serve our gifted students next year. For that, I am thankful. I must, however, be realistic. With monies being cut so dramatically, for how long will our district be able to maintain this service? Now is the time to let our legislators in Columbus know how important gifted service is. After all, public education is education for all children. Cutting funding for one specific group more deeply than any other group is simply unfair and unacceptable.
Soon after I became a school librarian, a teacher came to me about Mario, an eighth-grader who had never read an entire book. Mario struggled to read at all, and English was not his first language, but he was a bright kid whose teacher believed in him. I recommended a short, funny, mysterious book that appeals to reluctant boy readers. Mario took it home, read it in a week and came back with his friends in tow to check out the remaining titles in the series.
When he was ready to tackle more challenging content, I started him listening to audiobooks while following along in the text, a strategy helpful for building fluency and comprehension. Mario would come to the library even when his track was on vacation, and he'd sit for hours, headphones on, reading. Soon, he was able to transition into reading the books on his own. By the end of that one school year, Mario had read 42 books, exceeding the goal set by the state of California for eighth-graders. He was ready for high school.
We're not entirely sure what he's talking about, but former Gov. Howard Dean this morning, speaking on the subject of public charter schools declared "that battle is coming to an end."
On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," the one-time presidential hopeful and DNC Chair said "charter schools are the future," especially in inner cities, and praised the United Federation of Teachers in NYC for starting a charter school of their own.
To be sure, charter schools are an important part of the Democratic Party's official education platform (see here), but even in NYC, where the union and its charter school are co-located in a traditional public school building, union leaders and activists continue to spend a lot of time and money trying to whack the bejesus out of their vulnerable charter school competitors.
Professional scary person Meredith Whitney took to the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal this morning to sprinkle some more of her fear dust on the muni-bond market:
Municipal bond holders will experience their own form of contract renegotiation in the form of debt restructurings at the local level. These are just the facts.
She makes some good points, frankly, and offers some alarming numbers. State and local finances are plainly a mess, and off-balance sheet liabilities in the form of unfunded pension and other benefit obligations are a potential headache. That point is controversial, but it's always important to listen to Cassandras like Ms. Whitney, who made her bones as a prognosticator before the financial crisis.
But, interestingly, muni-bond investors are not exactly heading for higher ground today on her words. Muni-bond ETFs such as the iShares S&P National AMT-Free Muni Bond fund, are basically unchanged on the day -- at six-month highs.
Contrast that with last year, when Ms. Whitney's warnings of multiple muni defaults contributed to a brutal selloff in muni debt.
Education officials here are preparing to welcome 300 additional students in the next school year, on top of the 6,296 already enrolled. But a shrinking school budget in this Dallas exurb means there will be fewer teachers, aides, administrators and custodians.
School budgets are being cut across the country, but in Texas, which gained more residents than any other state during the past decade, school systems such as Little Elm Independent School District face the additional challenge of shedding costs while classrooms are bulging.
"It's really changing how we do business," said Lynne Leuthard, Little Elm's school superintendent.
The district is canceling prekindergarten for 3-year-olds--though keeping it for 4-year-olds--and cutting about 80 positions out of 827 in total; the layoffs include 30 teachers, a speech pathologist, a computer aide and 11 special-education aides.
"You just have to take the resources you have and spend them in the best way possible," Ms. Leuthard said.
It's a concept a kindergartner could understand: Children won't learn if they miss too much school.
Few would disagree, yet most school districts don't actually monitor the number of days that each child is absent. Schools track truancy (unexcused absences), and they count the number of children who show up each day. But they don't report chronic absenteeism, or the percentage of children who miss at least 10 percent of the school year, excused or unexcused.
"You can have a kid in kindergarten rack up a ton of excused absences, but they're missing a lot of school," said Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a national and state initiative to promote awareness of the issue.
Chang presented her research Friday at an education forum in Sacramento hosted by Tom Torlakson, state superintendent of public instruction.
The Oakland school district became one of the first in the state to actively monitor chronic absenteeism, and the results have been sobering. Chang's analysis showed that 14 percent of all district students and more than 20 percent of African-American students missed at least 18 days of school last year. The report found the highest percentages of chronically absent children to be concentrated in West Oakland, an economically distressed area with high rates of violence, asthma and housing instability.
Last September, when Joel Klein was still at the helm of the New York City Department of Education, he delivered a luncheon talk for a business roundtable, the Association for a Better New York (ABNY). I attended on behalf of the UFT. In his spoken presentation, Klein attributed to the late UFT and AFT President Al Shanker the following phrase:
When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.
Long before Joel Klein worked this line into his stump speech, I had come across it on the far right precincts of the web, where it is a staple of feverish discussions of the 'malevolence' of teacher unions.* Given the lack of source citation and the way in which the words rung so hollow as something Shanker would say, I was more than a tad bit suspicious about its authenticity.† Over the course of time, I asked a number of people -- some who had worked with Shanker for many years and others who had studied his life and career as scholars -- if they knew of any instance when he had spoken or written these words. Without exception, every person consulted had no knowledge of such a statement.
Madison School District Literacy Program; 2011-12 Proposed Budget Hearing Remarks
We urge the Board of Education to approve and implement the initiatives and budget proposed for the school-wide literacy program [Public Appearance Remarks]. It is deplorable that heretofore there has been no systematic plan to address the reading and writing shortcomings of the District. These shortcomings are the most fundamental causative factor contributing to the poor achievement performance of our students. The proposed design of systemic changes to the curriculum, instructional strategies, engagement of teachers, support staff, students and parents/other adults and the realignment of financial and other resources will result in measurable student growth. Board adoption of the $650,000.00 2011-12 budget considerations is an absolute necessity of the very highest priority.
Our thanks and compliments to the Board and the administration for undertaking the assessment of literacy in the District. However, the Board must take a greatly increased leadership role in demanding the vigorous evaluation and assessment all programs, services and personnel throughout the District. There must be demonstrable commitment and evidence of the systematic implementation of the strategic objective of the five-year District Strategic Plan to address the woefully inadequate and insufficient data upon which to make decisions about curriculum, instruction and performance of students and staff.
The Board must not give any support for an increase in property taxes in finalizing the 2011-12 budget. Nor, is there any justification for using any amount of "under-levy carry-over" if such authorization should be re-instated by the state. There is no evidence to support an increase in taxes. We must be able to prioritize the expenditure of revenues available within the limits established. The Board has already demonstrated it cannot effectively manage its allocations to areas of highest need to strengthen the impact on curriculum, instruction and performance affecting student learning. Until and unless the Board can demonstrate a higher and more effective level of leadership with its decisions and priorities it cannot be trusted with more money that will only get the same results.
We support an increase in allocations for maintenance and electrical infrastructure up-grades conditional upon 1) re-allocation of existing funds to these areas; 2) clear and enumerated priorities, established in advance, for maintenance projects that are specifically related to safety issues; and 3) electrical infrastructure up-grades specifically related to priorities established for improvements and expansion of technology as identified in the Technology Plan for use in student learning, instruction, business services and communications with the public.
The Board must not give approval to the proposed amendment for providing staff with year-end bonuses. This is absolutely the wrong message, for the wrong reasons at the wrong time. It cannot be justified in 'rewarding' those staff who wrongfully abdicated their responsibilities in the classroom to the students; by insulting those staff who did attempt to fulfill their responsibilities; as well as insulting the parents and students harmed by those detrimental actions. It would be far better to allocate the 'savings funds' to resources actively and directly impacting student learning. The Board must make a commitment to providing leadership toward academic improvements and to creating a working culture of mutual trust and collaboration with employees and taxpayers.
For further information contact: Don Severson, donleader@aol.com 577-0851
There is something horribly fascinating about watching Wisconsin Republicans discuss their plans for our state's school system.
First, they swing the bloody ax:
The biggest budget cuts to our public schools in state history, nearly $900 million. Kerchunk.
A bill to create a statewide system of charter schools whose authorizing board is appointed by Scott Walker and the Fitzgeralds, and which will funnel resources out of local schools and into cheapo online academies. Kerchunk.
Lifting income caps on private-school vouchers so taxpayers foot the bill to send middle- and upper-income families' kids to private school. Kerchunk.
Then comes the really sick part. They candy-coat all this with banal statements about "reforms" that will "empower" parents and students and improve education.
Last week, Walker went to Washington, D.C., to give a speech to school-choice advocates at the American Federation for Children. He started off by reading a Dr. Seuss book, and talking about how "every kid deserves to have a great education."
Portland isn't the kind of city to have nail-biting elections over school taxes. Levies "coast to victory" in the news headlines here. A special income tax will "pass easily by wide margins," even during an economic downturn.
Bonds pass, too -- until this week, when Portland voters narrowly rejected a $548 million capital bond and upended conventional wisdom about their loyalties and limits. This man-bites-dog result provides some invaluable lessons for the district and its campaign team as they regroup for the next bond effort.
Starting with this lesson: Never take voters for granted. Listen to what they're saying now -- not what they've said in the past.
Lately it's become fashionable -- especially among the highly credentialed -- to question whether it's really "worth it" to go to college. A recent report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education proposed deemphasizing college as the primary goal of our education system in favor of "multiple pathways" for students. Earlier this month, New York Magazine devoted almost 4,000 words to profiling venture capitalists (and college graduates) James Altucher and Peter Thiel and their efforts convince Americans that they'd be better off skipping college. Thiel is even creating a $100,000 fellowship for young people who agree to delay going to college in favor of an internship.
Make no mistake, there is widespread dissatisfaction with higher education. According to a new survey released by the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Americans felt that colleges provided an "excellent" or "good" value for the money. At the same time, 86 percent of college graduates still felt the investment was a good one for them.
One of the largest educational publishers in the world is offering cash prizes to the winners of a crowdsourced learning product innovation competition.
One of the world's largest educational publishers is turning to crowdsourcing for their next great product idea. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's (HMH) initiative--the HMH Global Education Challenge--is an Intel Science Fair-style competition for educators that is giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just one important caveat: HMH retains rights to the ideas.
The competition will be the first major attempt to develop for-market pedagogical materials via crowdsourcing. Participants will upload brief descriptions of their potential projects and then are able to view, comment, and vote on other proposals. A panel of judges, including former Education Secretary Bill Bennett and Bob Wise, the former governor of West Virginia, will decide on the winners from a pool of the 20 top-voted entries in September.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is offering a $100,000 grand prize for the winning entrant and a $25,000 second-place prize. Another $125,000 worth of prizes, including iPads, netbooks, and textbook donations, will be distributed to contestants and the schools of their choice.
Voters across New York State approved more than 93 percent of school budgets on Tuesday, as administrators facing sharp reductions in state education aid offered plans to cut staff and programs, tap into reserves and keep tax increases relatively low.
Statewide, districts proposed an average budget-to-budget increase of 1.3 percent, the lowest in 15 years. (The five largest school districts -- Buffalo, New York, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers -- do not hold budget votes.) The average increase in local tax collections was 3.4 percent, up slightly from 3.2 percent last year, though 36 districts proposed no increase at all, and 20 reduced their tax collection.
Over all, 634 budgets passed and 44 were rejected, according to an analysis by the New York State School Boards Association. As of Wednesday evening, only partial results had been released by the State Education Department.
Lincoln Heights Elementary School has lights that turn off when rooms are empty, thermostats that automatically set temperatures back at night and carbon dioxide sensors in the gym to circulate air only when it's occupied.
It was constructed to "green" building standards, which cost Spokane Public Schools nearly $460,000 extra for the South Hill facility.
But the energy savings aren't what the district thought they would be, a discovery that other owners of green buildings are making all over the state, a new report from the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee says. Seven of nine public buildings built to green standards and studied by committee staff fell short of the energy goals they were designed to meet.
The D.C. Public Charter School Board might soon close the Ideal Academy Public Charter School, more than a year and a half after I told it to.
When I made that suggestion in a December 2009 column, Ideal was a prime example of a charter school overdue for termination. Its high school, after four years, had shown that most of its students would be better off elsewhere.
"Of the 31 sophomores who took the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System test in math last spring," I said then, "only 25.8 percent scored at the proficient level or above. Only 38.7 percent reached that level in reading. Among secondary schools [in the District], only six regular schools and two charter schools had lower math proficiency rates. Only 11 regular schools and three charters were worse in reading proficiency."
California Governor Jerry Brown has taken a big step towards reducing the testing mania in the nation's most populous state. Up until his administration we have been on an accelerated path towards the comprehensive data-driven system that test publishers and corporate reformers have convinced leaders is needed to improve schools. But in the May budget outline from Brown's office, he makes it clear he is putting on the brakes.
Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing to suspend funding for CALPADS, the state student longitudinal data system, and to stop further planning for CALTIDES, the teacher data base that was to be joined at the hip with CALPADS.
What is even more encouraging is the explanation Brown offers, which shows a great deal of understanding of these issues. The document states:
Charter schools in Minnesota are getting a one-year reprieve from a deadline that threatened to close dozens of schools.
Those schools' sponsors were facing a summer deadline to continue sponsoring schools under a new system created two years ago. Schools without a sponsor, or authorizer, by this July would have had to close.
Gov. Mark Dayton signed legislation into law Wednesday that extends that deadline until next summer.
Eugene Piccolo with the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools said the deadline worried many schools.
Midday presents a forum on bullying in Minnesota schools including students, parents, teachers, and a panel of experts held last night at the UBS forum. The forum tops off a special series of reports on bullying from Minnesota Public Radio News.
I was surprised to learn this week that my high school occasionally brought in drug-sniffing dogs when I was a student there some 25 years ago.
That might be because they were only used after school hours. It also might be because the dogs weren't very effective, given that I never felt discouraged from engaging in the kinds of behaviors during school hours that the dogs are presumably meant to discourage.
Neither were many of my classmates, whose on-school-property, school-hours transgressions often made my own drug-related rebelliousness look pretty lame.
But it's not only questions about the effectiveness of siccing Fido on schools that make me wonder about a package of Madison School District security proposals sparked by new concerns over drug, gang and other criminal activity in and around schools.
Since 1998, The Post's Jay Mathews has ranked Washington-area public high schools using the Challenge Index, his measure of how effectively a school prepares its students for college. In 2011, the Post expanded its research to high schools across the United States.
The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests a school gave in 2010 by the number of graduating seniors. While not a measure of the overall quality of the school, the rating can reveal the level of a high school's commitment to preparing average students for college.
West Potomac High School in Fairfax County and Oakland Mills High School in Howard County are as close as schools come to being twins. Both are in affluent counties and serve ethnically and economically diverse populations. Forty-seven percent of West Potomac students and 52 percent of Oakland Mills students are black or Hispanic. Thirty-eight percent at West Potomac and 31 percent at Oakland Mills are from low-income families.
But when I indulge in my obsessive comparison of schools by their college-level course programs, significant differences emerge. Oakland Mills often bars students from taking Advanced Placement classes if they don't have B's in previous courses. West Potomac lets in everyone who signs up and pays the test fees. The AP test participation rate at West Potomac is three times what it is at Oakland Mills, but the passing rate on tests at the Fairfax school is lower: 61 percent, compared with 78 percent at Oakland Mills.
ON A call with a bank call center, I was just given a little dialect-identification practice. I had just given the attendant my full name. She then asked me "What's your last name?", or so I thought. I repeated it, slightly unsure why she'd asked me to repeat my last name (it's pretty ordinary). But I misheard her. She'd asked "what's your wife's name?" I asked her where her office was located. Any idea where in America a person has to come from to make "wife" sound remotely similar to "last"? Take a guess before reading on.
The office was in Dallas, Texas, which is very close to the borderline of the dialect region known as "Inland South", as you can see on this map. What makes the inland south different from the lowland south? One of the chief things is glide deletion in the [ai] sound before unvoiced consonants. Glide deletion is what turns "ride" into "rahd", where a diphthong (two vowels, one gliding into the other) becomes a monophthong or single vowel. This goes on all around the south. What makes an inland southern accent inland and not lowland is that the glide deletion happens before voiceless consonants (like f, t and s) as well as their voiced equivalents (v, d and z). Around the south, "ride" comes out "rahd". But if someone's "wife" comes out "wahf", chances are that person is from the inland south.
Funding would come from the $1.3 million windfall the district will get from docking the pay of 1,769 teachers who were absent without an excuse on one or more days between Feb. 16-18 and 21.
The district closed school during those four days because of the high number of staff members who called in sick to attend protests over Gov. Scott Walker's proposed changes to public sector collective bargaining.
"Under the circumstances it seemed to me the school district shouldn't necessarily profit from that, because the teachers agreed to make up the time in a way that took away planning time for them," said Hughes, who is considering a run for school board president when new officers are elected Monday.
Hughes is also proposing increasing the district's proposed property tax levy for next year by about $2 million to pay for maintenance and technology projects and any costs associated with the district's implementation of a state-imposed talented-and-gifted education plan.
"It seems goofy that we give away $1 million and then raise property taxes [50K PDF Ed Hughes Amendment]," board member Lucy Mathiak said.
If a school board member in Madison gets his way, the district would used money it saved when teachers forced schools to shut down during the budget debate to award end of the year bonuses to teachers.
WTMJ partner station WIBA Radio in Madison says that teachers in Madison would receive $200 gift cards as year-end bonuses.
"Whenever we can, we need to show some kind of tangible appreciation for the extremely hard work our teachers and staff do," said Ed Hughes, a member of the Madison school board.
"They've had a particularly tough year as you know, given that they kind of became political footballs in the legislature. We're ending up slashing their take home pay by a substantial amount, pretty much because we have to."
I plowed through a draft of the Oakland school district's strategic plan today -- all 50 pages of it. It'll be discussed at a special board meeting at 6 p.m. Wednesday (tomorrow) at the district headquarters. You'll find links to the report below.
I won't be surprised if long-time observers of the school system remind us all of the Five-Year Plans of OUSD Past -- enthusiastically presented, but long since forgotten. I wonder how this plan compares to former superintendents' visions for Oakland Unified. It certainly contains some provocative ideas, such as "risk screens" for African American male students at certain transitional points, and school quality reviews that go far beyond the API score.
The plan describes various school funding formulas that the district might adopt -- but it doesn't recommend any. The current system, Results-Based Budgeting, allocates funding based on each school's average attendance. And unlike schools in most other districts, Oakland schools must cover the actual salaries and benefits of their teachers out of that budget. Schools with lots of teachers who are high on the pay scale typically have a harder time making ends meet in this system, as do those with low attendance rates and/or declining enrollment.
Those schools might find the below statement interesting:
The critical factors of enrollment and teacher salary and benefits do not universally allow for a balanced budget, requiring subsidies based on school size and salary/benefit costs, rather than student needs. While the definition of an adequate core program may change as district‐wide priorities and financial position change, it is the main responsibility of the school district to provide a basic educational program to all students.
In the late days of March 2010, Congressional negotiators dealt President Obama's community-college reform agenda what seemed like a fatal blow. A year later, it appears that, remarkably, the administration has fashioned the ashes of that defeat into one of the most innovative federal higher-education programs ever conceived. Hardly anyone has noticed.
Obama originally called for $12-billion in new spending on community-college infrastructure and degree completion. The money was to come from eliminating public subsidies to for-profit banks that made student loans. But late in the process, some lawmakers insisted that savings that had already occurred, because of colleges' switching into the federal direct-loan program in anticipation of the new law, didn't count as savings. Billions were pulled off the table, and the community-college plan was shelved.
Two days later, negotiators found $2-billion. But they could spend it only on a U.S. Department of Labor program restricted to workers who had lost their jobs because of shifts in global trade. The fit with the president's expansive agenda seemed awkward, and the amount was pennies on the original dollar. Cynical commentators called it a "consolation prize."
Public education has reached a moment of rare consensus: something must be done about the sorry state of our public schools, particularly in urban and low-income areas, and that the solution must deliver better results at scale - and without significant additional resources. Other fields like medicine and communications have embraced innovation - a new approach that achieves a better result - as the best means to this end. But education innovation has not yet lived up to its promise. In this paper, education entrepreneur Kim Smith and innovation writer Julie Petersen chart a path forward for how the public, private and nonprofit sectors can work together to advance education innovation by steering capital toward products, services and approaches that improve educators' productivity and students' learning outcomes.
Today, the educational ecosystem is not set up to support meaningful and widespread innovation. The policy and investment context that defines the flow of capital in education can either encourage or inhibit this innovation, and today it does much more of the latter than the former. Public policies and regulations favor compliance over excellence, rarely allow state or district buyers to choose flexibly between a range of high-quality product or service options, inhibit the flow of information that would allow buyers to anticipate or measure performance improvements, and offering few meaningful incentives for these buyers to adopt better products and services. The philanthropic capital market similarly provides few mechanisms for rewarding dramatically improved outcomes (including little funding for the scale-up of successful organizations), instead favoring small doses of funding across many organizations. Private investors shy away from fueling education innovation, intimidated by policies that restrict the work of for-profit providers in education, frequent policy volatility at the local level, market domination by a few large publishers that feel little pressure from competition or from their customers to really innovate, and a slow, relationship-based sales cycle that rarely measures or rewards quality.
A few weeks ago I posted a report on Edwize about biases in last year's Teacher Data Reports. Teachers of high performing math students are 35 times more likely to fall at the bottom of the teacher ranking than at the top. [1]
Shortly after that, the DOE placed a document on its website that asserts that "...teachers of high-performing students are as likely to have high value-added scores as low value-added scores."
To me, call me crazy, this is unlikely to be true. First of all DOE charts found in the very same document seem to contradict that (more on that in a minute). What's more, DOE used a broad definition of "teachers of high-performing students," and also included some reports that were so unreliable they were not issued to teachers. Let's go through this step by step.
I visited the McIver Institute website to view the speech on your plans to expand school choice in Wisconsin which you gave to the American Federation for Children on May 9th. I have a few questions. If you want to just post your responses below in the comments section of this blog, that would be super! Thanks in advance.
1. Did you use a teleprompter? I don't think I saw you look at your notes more than once or twice in the thirty-three minute speech. If you gave that speech just winging it, I am very impressed. (When you ate David Gregory's lunch in his interview of you, I also gave you credit where it was deserved.) My one (very small) constructive criticism of your speaking style is to suggest that you cut back on nodding your head up and down "yes" when applause is washing over the podium. It makes you look a little bit like Dan Aykroyd in the Blues Brothers, and a little too self-congratulatory. On the other hand, if you make it to the presidency some day, and Mr. Aykroyd can lose some weight, he will probably be all set for a return gig on SNL.
Assembly Democrats today proposed using more than half of the new money in last week's bolstered revenue projections to increase K-12 funding in the state budget, charging that Republicans have failed to distinguish between priorities that can wait and those that cannot.
"We are actually fighting for the very future of public education," Rep. Fred Clark, D-Baraboo, said at a press conference outside the Capitol this morning. Clark is running against GOP Sen. Luther Olsen in a potential recall election.
Dems proposed directing $356 million more toward school aids in the budget after LFB projections added $636 million to state coffers over the next biennium last week. Their proposal would also reserve $200 million of that revenue to repay the Patients Compensation Fund, $100 million to pay down some state debt and $20 million to increase aid to technical colleges.
That was the blunt message Wednesday from Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Gregory Thornton, at a forum on how to fix what ails MPS, local government and the city as a whole in an era of declining public resources.
He said while rhetoric about change has been good, with a series of reforms laid out over the years, the focus and follow through have been lacking.
"We have an 'execution gap,' " Thornton said at the forum on Milwaukee's future with top city, civic and business leaders at Marquette University. "The problem is, we are not playing very well together."
He said greater effort at partnerships was needed and that the foundation for some solutions was already in place. MPS has vast libraries that might be put to greater use by the community, for example, he said.
Parents, teachers and students have been in shock since the Seattle School District's interim Superintendent decided to fire a popular principal for little reason, they thought. They fought. They won.
This afternoon Superintendent Susan Enfield reversed her decision about dismissing Ingraham Principal Martin Floe, and sent the high school's staff this letter:
When I was appointed Interim Superintendent, it was with the clear charge to strengthen opportunities for all students to learn. You asked me to bring high levels of transparency and accountability to this effort. The decision I made last Tuesday about the leadership of Ingraham High School Principal Martin Floe reflects my efforts to realize these commitments.
However, I also know that a good leader listens. After extensive conversations with Ingraham High School staff and the community, I have decided to renew Mr. Floe's contact for the 2011-12 school year, under the condition that he continue on a plan of improvement, which I, along with his Executive Director, will monitor throughout the year.
For weeks, Samantha Cormode's friends at Fairfax High School had been racking up invitations to prom, but she hadn't been asked.
Samantha, a senior who is headed to Virginia Tech with hopes of earning a spot on the women's soccer team, had been busy studying for finals, preparing for AP exams and making sure she stayed on top of everything she needed to do for college.
She'd been without a steady boyfriend since September, when she and last year's boyfriend/prom date had gone their separate ways. She had opted not to go to this year's event with a group of her friends because last year's boyfriend/prom date would be among the revelers with his new girlfriend.
ome people who favor national standards have pointed to the variability among states as making comparisons difficult and have been quick to point to national standards and tests as a consistent, nationwide, uniform system to judge all schools in the same way. No one has been more outspoken on those points than the Fordham Institute, whose 2007 The Proficiency Illusion report was touted far and wide. It was followed in 2009 by another Fordham report, The Accountability Illusion, that took states to task not only for having distinct definitions of proficiency, but also with fuzzing the issue even more by playing with other NCLB accountability rules. Checker Finn came out on its publication declaring:
"This report's crucial finding is that - contrary to what the average American likely believes - there is no common, nationwide accountability system for measuring school performance under NCLB. The AYP system is idiosyncratic, even random and opaque. Without a common standard to help determine whether a given school is successful or not, its fate under NCLB is determined by a set of arcane rules created by each state..."
Responding to an increase in violence, drugs and gang activity in and around schools, the Madison School District is considering a broad effort to improve building security, including the use of drug-sniffing dogs in high schools next year.
The district also is proposing to lock the main entrances of middle school buildings during the day. Other recommendations include redesigning main entrances at West and Memorial high schools and adding surveillance cameras to all elementary and middle schools, district security coordinator Luis Yudice said.
"We are not doing this because we believe we have severe problems in our schools (or) because we experienced a tragedy in our schools," Yudice said. "We don't want to wait until there's a crisis. We want to get ahead of the game."
A rural legislator who received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from out-of-state school choice advocates took flak back home for supporting expansion of a Milwaukee voucher program when his own school district is struggling financially.
According to a story in the Sauk Prairie Eagle last week, an aide to Rep. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, had to use a gavel to bring order back to a budget listening session at Sauk Prairie Memorial Hospital on May 6.
Marklein, a freshman Republican legislator, was asked if campaign contributions were influencing his support for two pieces of recent school choice legislation which provide public tax dollars for families to spend in private schools in Milwaukee. This, at the same time that the River Valley School District, which Marklein represents, has been forced to cut programs and staff and is facing more cuts in Gov. Scott Walker's budget.
How much do election-year firewalls cost to build? For the state's largest teachers union, $1.57 million.
That's how much the Wisconsin Education Association Council said last week it will spend trying to make sure four Democratic state senators are re-elected - enough, WEAC hopes, to keep a Democratic majority in the 33-member state body.
Although there are 15 Democratic candidates running for the state Senate, and 80 Democrats running for the state Assembly, the latest WEAC report shows that the teachers union is placing what amounts to an "all in" bet on saving just four Democratic senators who are finishing their first terms.
In February 2011, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) convened a conference to help districts implementing school choice under the U.S. Department of Education's Voluntary Public School Choice program. The conference, sponsored by the Department of Education, provided grantees access to the most current knowledge from district and charter leaders and school choice researchers on how to effectively implement public school choice.
The conference focused on the most pressing issues faced by localities committed to public school choice. Panelists addressed how choice districts can
actively manage the supply of schools in the district,
make careful decisions about the allocation of resources across these now independent schools,
build fair and transparent enrollment systems,
effectively communicate to all parents about their choices, and
invoke creative solutions to ensure that students with special needs are well served in these diverse schools.
The Denver mayoral race has been remarkable in its focus on education reform. Never before has there been so much discussion, debate and even television ads on this critical issue in the city's mayoral race. We are fortunate to have two candidates, Michael Hancock and Chris Romer, who are both education reformers.
Some point to the Denver mayor's lack of direct authority over the city's schools to argue that the candidates' rhetoric is better suited for the upcoming school board race. This misses the point: Denver's next mayor is sure to have a significant impact on public education in our city. And as President Obama and Colorado's U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet are demonstrating on the national level, serious and much-needed education reforms require strong leadership.
Hancock and Romer have their differences when it comes to education policy, but both realize the central importance of high-quality public education to bringing growth and prosperity to Denver. There are some truly great public schools in our city, but when the district schools as a whole are struggling to sufficiently prepare one-fifth of their students for college, work and civic participation, fundamental reform is required.
Question: how many degrees of separation are there between the broadening coalition opposing the expansion of charter schools in New Jersey and the National Education Association?
First, a news hook and a bit of back story. On Saturday morning New Jersey School Boards Association’s Delegate Assembly overwhelming approved an emergency resolution put forth by the Princeton Board of Education that would require voter approval for the authorization of any new public charter school. The approval implicitly supports a pending bill sponsored by Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan (and, as NJ Spotlight reports, complicates prospects for a more carefully crafted bill that would expand authorizers beyond the DOE, sponsored by Assemblywoman Mila Jasey).
NJSBA’s disapprobation of charter school expansion is right in line with the political agendae of other education groups like Education Law Center, Garden State Coalition of Schools, and a new group called Save Our Schools NJ (SOS NJ). Their well-coordinated message is simple: taxpayers cough up the dough for public education so taxpayers should have veto power within their communities regarding the opening of any taxpayer-supported charter school. Anything else is taxation without representation, right? If a potential charter school wants to open, then it can put the question to a vote during election season.
Jeb Bush left the Florida governor's office in 2007, but his influence still holds sway in Tallahassee, and now is felt in state capitals from New Jersey to Oregon, where lawmakers are eager to adopt his ideas on how to improve education.
Since leaving Tallahassee, the popular former Florida governor has developed a national reputation as an education powerhouse and champion of vouchers and charter schools. His latest recognition: the Bradley Foundation, a conservative group that says it shies away from lauding politicians. Last week, it gave the Republican its Bradley Prize, a distinction that carries a $250,000 stipend.
"The reforms that he put in place during his two terms as Florida governor in many ways lead the country in elementary and secondary education," said Michael W. Grebe, the president and chief executive officer of the Bradley Foundation, which has spent more than $40 million over the last 20 years in support of charter schools and voucher programs, including as a donor to Bush's education foundation. "He put in place programs that have clearly raised academic standards. It's measurable, demonstrable. We're also really impressed by what he continues to do as a private citizen. When he left office, he didn't leave behind his work."
NEA Gives Friend of Education Award to 14 Fugitive Wisconsin Democrats. Each year the National Education Association issues a "Friend of Education" award to some liberal worthy known for toeing the union line. Last year's award went to Diane Ravitch, and previous winners are Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy.
This year the union decided to honor the 14 Wisconsin Senate Democrats who fled the state rather than debate and vote on the governor's collective bargaining bill.
It is believed to be the first multi-week sojourn to the Tilted Kilt ever to result in an award from a major national organization.
School boards across Wisconsin could use teacher evaluations - which rely in part on the results of students' standardized state test scores - as part of the reason for dismissing and disciplining educators, according to legislation considered by the Assembly and Senate education committees Monday.
Senate Bill 95 proposes modifying 10 state mandates so that local school districts have more flexibility to decide what's best for their communities, said Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), a co-sponsor of the bill with Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills).
The legislation covers a wide berth of areas - from allowing school boards to offer physical education credit to high school students who participate in one season of an extracurricular sport, to changing the way a state-funded class-size reduction program is implemented in the elementary grades - but was criticized by some legislators who thought it was too hastily brought to a hearing Monday.
Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee) noted that details about the bill were released only one business day earlier, on Friday, by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
"I'm pretty sure if there had been more notice on this, this room would have been packed," she said, looking at the meager crowd of about 30 people.
Thank you for this opportunity to testify on Senate Bill 95.
Due to time limitations — both the time allotted here and the very, very short time between the release of the Bill on Friday and the scheduling of this hearing for today — I will be confining myself to only two of the topics covered in this wide ranging measure. Those are the dilution of the Student Achievement Guaranty in Education (SAGE) and the use of student standardized test scores as a determinant of educator employment conditions. I will note that I believe every section of this Bill should be thoroughly sifted and winnowed.
Before directly addressing the proposals on SAGE and the use of student standardized test scores, I’d like to say a few things about the broader trend in educational thinking and policy in Wisconsin.
Rahm Emanuel will be sworn in today as mayor of Chicago, having campaigned on promises to fix a school system that graduates only half its students. The veteran Democrat talks a good game and has appointed a schools CEO with strong reform credentials. But Mr. Emanuel has miles to go before he proves that his famous political toughness is a match for the unions and bureaucrats who will oppose any reform worthy of the name.
In addressing Chicagoans today, Mr. Emanuel will likely celebrate Illinois Senate Bill 7, which last week passed the state legislature and awaits Governor Pat Quinn's signature. The law is certainly welcome, and Mr. Emanuel was right to support it. But its provisions say less about the boldness of lawmakers than about the implacability of the status quo.
On the plus side, the law ties teacher tenure and layoffs to student performance, not just to seniority. The law also makes it easier to fire ineffective teachers--easier, that is, than the traditional process that in Chicago can include more than 25 distinct steps. And while it's good that the law makes it harder for the Chicago Teachers Union to strike, Illinois remains one of only 11 states to allow teachers to strike at all.
ased on current educational and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain. African American and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among young men failing to achieve academic success and are at greater risk of dropping out of school. Boys in general lag behind girls on most indicators of student achievement.
In 2009, just 52% of African American boys and 52% of Latino boys graduated on-time from Madison Metropolitan School District compared to 81% of Asian boys and 88% of White boys.
In the class of 2010, just 7% of African American seniors and 18% of Latino seniors were deemed "college-ready" by ACT, makers of the standardized college entrance exam required for all Wisconsin universities.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) is a public charter school being developed by the Urban League of Greater Madison. Madison Prep will serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity, particularly young men of color. Its mission is to prepare scholars for success at a four year college by instilling excellence, pride, leadership and service. A proposed non-instrumentality charter school located in Madison, Wisconsin and to be authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District, Madison Prep will serve 420 students in grades 6 through 12 when it reaches full enrollment in 2017-2018.
Gov. Cuomo yesterday wrote Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the state Board of Regents, urging a drastic change of direction as the state Education Department develops a new teacher-evaluation system. The governor's right: The first draft of that system deserves an F.
It seems Tisch got the message. Soon after the governor's letter went public, she released a statement committing to an overhaul of the evaluation system.
Cuomo's recommendations address many of the problems and offer a good starting point to build upon. Now it's up to Tisch and the Regents to adopt them in earnest when they meet Monday.
here's a train coming, folks. And, unlike the proposed Madison-to-Milwaukee rail, this train really is high-speed.
If we're not paying attention, it could end up crippling public education in Wisconsin.
Gov. Scott Walker had already included in his 2011-13 budget proposal a plan to change the Milwaukee school voucher program, which allows low-income students to attend private schools on the taxpayers' dime.
It would eliminate the enrollment caps; expand it to include schools in all of Milwaukee County, not just the city; and phase out income limits, opening the program to middle- and high-income families.
The Assembly last week passed a separate bill that eliminated the caps and the Milwaukee-only school requirement.
Speaking before the Board of Education during its meeting Thursday night, President Jack Lyness expressed strong feelings in opposition to the nation's burgeoning "charter school movement."
Charter schools are primary or secondary schools that are funded by government but operate independently from local boards of education in exchange for meeting academic standards stipulated by the state Commissioner of Education. Unlike private schools, charter schools are not permitted to charge tuition, and they are considered part of the public school system.
Many parents of New Jersey school children are considering charter schools as an alternative to traditional public schools. As of January, there are 73 charter schools in New Jersey-the state is the fourth largest charter authorizer in the U.S.-and the state Department of Education website predicts there will be more than 100 by the fall. This year, more than 22,000 children in grades pre-K through 12 throughout the state are enrolled in a charter school. According to the New Jersey Charter Schools Association, 66 percent of the state's charter schools achieved adequate yearly progress in 2008-09 compared to 44 percent of their local district schools.
There are people who have been making a splash nationally by spreading word that judgment day will be May 21, and by fall, the earth will no longer exist.
If so, we don't need to be so alarmed about the future of Milwaukee Public Schools. Or a list of other school districts that aren't in quite as bad shape. Yet.
But in case we remain in this vale of tears a bit longer, let's talk about what is expected to happen to class sizes in MPS. This won't be pleasant.
MPS Superintendent Gregory Thornton used a number last week in a talk before civic leaders and, later, in comments to the School Board: 34. That's going to be the average class size next year, he said.
For kindergarten through 12th grade? No, he told me, for kindergarten through eighth grade. There's no estimate for high schools yet, he said. (As a general matter, high school classes are larger than younger grades.)
"Class sizes will increase," Thornton said. "That's just a reality. . . . This is a community that needs learning to be personalized and customized." In other words, it needs at least reasonable class sizes.
So 34 compared to what this year? Thornton estimated 28 to 29.
The children of Milwaukee deserve a quality education regardless of whether they attend Milwaukee Public Schools, a charter school or a private school through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
A key element to support quality is transparency. Clear, easy to understand and readily available information, including test score results, helps parents and the public evaluate their schools. Traditional public and charter schools throughout the state have been using publicly reported test score results and other data to drive school improvement for years. This transparency was extended to the voucher program through laws enacted in the 2009-'11 budget.
This fall, for the first time, students attending private schools through the state's voucher program had their academic progress assessed with the same statewide tests as their public school peers. Results reported this spring showed that some public, charter and private schools in Milwaukee are doing very well, but too many are not providing the education our children need and deserve.
We believe that students in the voucher program, receiving taxpayer support to attend private Milwaukee schools, must continue to take the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination. Standardized tests, including the WKCE, do not paint an entire picture of a student, and many private schools participating in the voucher program take other quality tests. We need to put all the schools in MPS, charter and choice programs on a common report card.
A "dagger," said the well-meaning man, "in the heart of public education." That man, who superintends Green Bay's public school system, was reacting to word that Gov. Scott Walker proposed letting parents statewide have the same option poor Milwaukeeans now have - to take their state school aid to a private school, if they choose it.
Parents with options: That was the violence that Greg Maass, that superintendent, was talking about. I don't mean to single out Maass. He colorfully phrased the apocalyptic view that many others had toward Walker's idea. A writer for The Progressive, the left-wing Madison magazine that figures we peaked in about 1938, tiresomely said it was "war on education."
Right: To increase options is to war on education. Actually, though, that is the heart of the complaint of the public school establishment. Giving families more control over where they can get a publicly funded education necessarily means less control for those in charge of what had been the only place you could get one.
But will Walker's idea kill off public education? Unlikely: Incumbent school systems already live with publicly funded competition.
Former D.C.school chancellor Michelle A. Rhee was often denounced as a hard case who used her maniacal emphasis on rigor to beat up D.C. teachers and students. I think that was a misreading of what she actually did.
Often the principals she hired were more concerned with creating an atmosphere where teachers connected with kids. Making students work hard was not a priority. Instead, the idea was to convince them to love learning and get those who were way behind up to grade level. Rhee and the principals and teachers she brought into the system talked about raising the ceiling on achievement and bringing more Advanced Placement and other college-level programs into D.C. high schools, but they didn't do much. My records of AP test participation in the city show no significant gains after Rhee arrived.
I think this is because there is a reluctance, even among the most energetic and reform-minded educators, to push low-income kids too hard. I think many well-meaning and hard-working people in the D.C. school system are biased against rigor. A glaring example of this was unearthed by my colleague Bill Turque in his article about the D.C. Public Charter School Board's decision to approve the opening of BASIS DC, designed to be the most demanding school ever seen in the District.
School districts would be able to use standardized test scores as a factor in disciplining or firing teachers under a Republican bill made public Thursday and scheduled for a public hearing Monday.
Currently, districts can use the scores to evaluate teachers, with certain limitations, but not to discipline or fire them.
The bill comes after the state lost out on federal education funding in part due to limitations in how districts can judge teaching performance, and as a state task force develops a plan to better evaluate teachers.
In addition to the teacher evaluation changes, the bill sponsored by the chairmen of the Senate and Assembly education committees also would allow students to receive physical education credit for playing after-school sports, allow athletics suspensions based on police records and alter funding rules for certain programs, among other things.
When it comes to transparency, Wisconsin school districts are like the kids who spent all night playing video games and the next morning pray that their teachers won't call on them in class. They are falling behind, offering few of the answers that parents and taxpayers deserve.
Wisconsin's 442 school districts have earned an overall grade of D on disclosure, according to an analysis conducted by Sunshine Review. The analysis tests the information publicly available on district websites against a 10-point transparency checklist in areas ranging from budgets to criminal background checks on employees.
The Madison Metropolitan School District - one of the state's largest - did a little better, earning a C-minus.
Want to know basic information, such as what taxes are levied by your school district or how much money it receives from the state and the federal government? Sorry, but chances are you live in a district that does not list tax data on its website - 73% fail to do so.
Nearly two-thirds of school districts neglect to post their current budget along with budgets from previous years so taxpayers can compare spending from year to year. Less than 2% of districts post audits of their finances and performance online or disclose a schedule of upcoming audits.
THERE'S a debate going on (Sarah Lacy on Peter Thiel, William Deresiewicz, Annie Lowrey, Matthew Yglesias and even our own Schumpeter and Lexington) about whether the American higher-education market is failing, perhaps in the way the housing market failed (leaving average people with huge overhangs of debt for assets that turn out not to be worth what they thought they were worth), or perhaps in the way the health-care system is failing (sucking up an ever-bigger slice of the national income for services that don't seem to be providing significantly higher value). Brad DeLong writes that he doesn't understand why competition in higher education doesn't seem to work to keep prices down: why doesn't Yale cut tuition by $5,000 per year to suck top students away from Harvard, or why doesn't Berkeley offer an out-of-state programme for an extra $3,000 per year to suck top students away from the Ivies? And then he makes this very interesting point:
The week before classes resumed, the middle school's gymnasium was still a makeshift morgue. But the bodies were removed and the floor disinfected, so Kirikiri Middle School could welcome back students for the first time since the tsunami swept away much of this port town.
"In this disaster, we lost many precious things," said Nagayoshi Ono, the principal of one of the two schools that have shared the building since Kirikiri reopened two weeks ago, because it is Otsuchi's sole surviving middle school. "We face a test like a nation at war, and how we respond to this test is up to us."
Two months after an earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan's northern coastline, survivors are moving to pick up the pieces. As in many hard-hit areas, teachers and students at this tiny middle school seem to share a conviction that by seeking to resume pre-disaster routines, they can move their devastated communities a step closer toward healing.
The Washington region is a hot zone of student achievement, with leading high schools offering a plethora of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes to prove that theirs is a rigorous path to college.
But next year, a public charter school will open in the nation's capital that raises the concept of academic rigor to a new level. Seventh-graders will take Algebra I and Latin. AP courses will not be an option for high school students -- they'll be the heart of the curriculum.
To graduate, students will be required to complete at least eight AP courses and pass six exams.
The school, to be known as Basis DC, replicates a model developed in Arizona and represents a potential turning point for a charter sector in the District that has grown explosively in the past decade but yielded uneven results.
Class size is one of the small number of variables in American K-12 education that are both thought to influence student learning and are subject to legislative action. Legislative mandates on maximum class size have been very popular at the state level. In recent decades, at least 24 states have mandated or incentivized class-size reduction (CSR).
The current fiscal environment has forced states and districts to rethink their CSR policies given the high cost of maintaining small classes. For example, increasing the pupil/teacher ratio in the U.S. by one student would save at least $12 billion per year in teacher salary costs alone, which is roughly equivalent to the outlays of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the federal government's largest single K-12 education program.
The substantial expenditures required to sustain smaller classes are justified by the belief that smaller classes increase student learning. We examine "what the research says" about whether class-size reduction has a positive impact on student learning and, if it does, by how much, for whom, and under what circumstances. Despite there being a large literature on class-size effects on academic achievement, only a few studies are of high enough quality and sufficiently relevant to be given credence as a basis for legislative action.
National Education Association officials announced Wednesday that they would put a "policy statement" before the union's governing body for approval that, among other changes, would open the door to the use of "valid, reliable, high-quality standardized tests," in combination with multiple other measures, for evaluating teachers.
The statement, passed by the NEA's board of directors May 7, wouldn't take effect unless the 9,000-delegate Representative Assembly signs on to it at its meeting over the Fourth of July weekend in Chicago. Those delegates could significantly modify the policy statement before approval, and it is likely to be a topic of lively debate.
Still, the announcement comes as a major entry by the NEA in discussions about teacher evaluation, tenure, and due process. To date, the national union has remained silent on most of those issues, even while the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the other national teachers' union, has put forth various proposals. ("NEA, AFT Choose Divergent Paths on Obama Goals," Aug. 25, 2010.)
There are tons of reasons why people don't take the medications they've been prescribed, including side effects, cost and complicated drug regimens.
A couple of different approaches to improving adherence are in the news today. The first is Script Your Future, a multi-year public-education campaign spearheaded by the National Consumers League and supported by health-industry companies, government agencies, nonprofits and others.
It's aimed chiefly at patients with diabetes, respiratory diseases including asthma and cardiovascular disease, all of which affect big swaths of the U.S. population and can be particularly troublesome when not treated correctly. The campaign emphasizes the consequences -- such as poor health and quality of life -- that can spring from skipping meds.
The Atlantic just published a long opinion piece by Joel Klein, including a repetition of his long-standing argument that New York City's charters perform miracles with "students who are demographically almost identical to those attending nearby community and charter schools," and that anyone who claims differently is a blind supporter of the "status quo." A closer look at Klein's own numbers, however, tells a very different story. According to the progress reports released by his Department of Education just last year, New York City's charter sector did not outperform similar district public schools. And the Harlem Success Academy -- the school which he specifically holds up as "almost identical" to neighboring district schools -- actually serves dramatically lower proportions of the city's neediest students and of English Language Learners than other Harlem schools.
As most observers of the city's schools know, each year the Department of Education releases progress reports with "grades" for each of its district and charter schools, which take into account the progress that students at each school made when compared to students at "peer schools" (those with similar student bodies in terms of poverty, Special Education status, and the proportion of English Language Learners, as well as other factors.) On the newest school Progress Reports, which were released by Klein's office in 2010, 58% of district schools got an A or a B in 2010, compared to only 34% of charters. In Districts 4 and 5 in Harlem, more than half of district schools got either an A or B (27 out of 53), compared to only 8 out of the 21 charters in those neighborhoods.
Legislation that would make it easier to dismiss ineffective teachers statewide and allow mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel to lengthen the Chicago school day unanimously passed an Illinois House committee Wednesday, despite objections by the Chicago Teachers Union.
The measure, passed unanimously by the state Senate in April, now goes before the full House.
Lawmakers are pursuing passage of a separate "trailer" bill intended to help defuse a dispute that erupted last week when union officials charged the legislation was changed at the last minute without their knowledge.
Chicago Teachers Union officials object to passages in the legislation that would curb their bargaining rights and limit their ability to strike.
As the debate continues over the anticipated funding cuts coming to the Milwaukee Public School system, a lot of the blame for funding shortfalls has been placed squarely on the shoulders of public school teachers.
To be sure the compensation packages for teachers - especially those who've worked in the district for a long time - do play a part in the discussion. But for the focus and blame to be solely on how much teachers in MPS make is unfair and unproductive. I've made a fair amount of noise over the past several years about an issue no one else seems to want to discuss when it comes to cuts within MPS: administrative staff in central office.
I live a half block north of MPS central office and it's always surprised me how many people actually work there. When my wife Jenny started working within MPS I learned a lot more about the infrastructure that runs MPS and I've come to see it for what a bureaucratic nightmare it is.
It's been frustrating for me to see the "boots on the ground" teachers and others who work in the classrooms across Milwaukee to be vilified while central office staff always seem to escape the budget cuts. While we've been happy to cut 1000's of teachers over the past few years, the staff within central office has remained largely untouched. They're not part of the "evil teachers union" after all.
Aphorism: Short, sweet little sayings expressing an idea or opinion are familiar to everyone -- they just don't always know the technical term for them. Dorothy Parker was a particularly adroit user of aphorisms.
Apostrophe: Beyond a term for daily punctuation, apostrophe also pulls audiences aside to address a person, place or thing currently not present. O, Shakespeare! Such a sterling example of apostrophe use!
Applicability: The venerable Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien coined this term when badgered one too many times about whether or not his beloved fantasy series was supposed to be a World War II allegory. It wasn't, but he thought readers could easily apply such an interpretation to the text without losing anything.
As legislators prepared to move a sweeping overhaul of state education law through the Illinois House this week, the Chicago Teachers Union's sudden turnabout on the bill is raising questions about the union's role in negotiations and the leadership ability of its untested leader, Karen Lewis.
When the education bill passed the Illinois Senate unanimously last month, the support of the states' teachers unions seemed to signal an unprecedented, collaborative effort to reform education policy. Lewis and the leaders of the state's other two major teachers' unions had agreed to substantial changes on tenure, evaluations and bargaining procedures. But last Wednesday the Chicago Teachers Union membership voted to consider pulling its support, claiming that language curbing collective bargaining rights was inserted into the bill without its knowledge and amounted to an "atomic bomb."
"The recent steps they've taken have certainly concerned a number of the entities they've dealt with in Springfield," said Darren Reisberg, deputy superintendent for the Illinois State Board of Education, who participated in the bill's negotiations.
The MacIver Institute's new Open Government site provides you with one location for data on Wisconsin public employee salaries, benefits and labor contracts. We have worked hard to not just allow "access" the way many government information sites do, but to give you all of the data in a format that allows you to select and sort the information as you see fit.
Most areas of our site are available to anyone, including some basic tabular information, but our more extensive analysis and graphics pages require an initial sign-in as users of the Open Government site - but the good news is that sign-in is free and easy! All we need is your name, email, city, and state. We will use your email address to let you know when we add more data sets to the website.
The first time you click on a link to our analysis and graphics pages you will be routed to the sign-in page. Then, if you use the same computer and the same internet browser in the future, you should not have to enter your sign-in information again.
Gov. Scott Walker didn't offer details about how private school voucher programs could work in Green Bay, Racine and Beloit, but on Tuesday, advocates in those cities said they envisioned systems similar to the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
Or, perhaps, similar to Walker's future vision for the Milwaukee program, which Walker has pushed to modify by lifting the cap on enrollment, phasing out income limits for participants and expanding the program to Milwaukee County so suburban private schools can accept publicly funded voucher students from the city.
"Why reinvent the wheel all over again when we can learn from the benefits and mistakes of the Milwaukee program?" asked Laura Sumner Coon, the head of a nonprofit in Racine that currently provides scholarships for 13 area low-income students to attend private schools.
Public-school leaders in all three cities Tuesday vehemently opposed the idea of channeling taxpayer money out of their systems and into private schools.
Green Bay Superintendent Greg Maass said he hadn't read any research that showed vouchers benefited kids more than maintaining or improving the education they receive in traditional public schools. And research on academic achievement showed voucher-school students haven't performed at much higher levels than their public-school counterparts, he said.
At a conference last summer, Bill Gates predicted that "place-based activity in college will be five times less important than it is today." Noting the ever-growing popularity of online learning, he predicted that "five years from now, on the Web--for free--you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university."
"College, except for the parties," Gates concluded, "needs to be less place-based."
Although it's bold and thought-provoking, Gates's prediction is oversimplified. As we can already see, something more complex is happening. Across the United States and the world, colleges and universities, historically defined by their physical campuses, are diversifying their delivery systems. They're expanding them to provide higher education not only online, but also in new physical locations, both domestically and worldwide. Online education may be on the rise, but place-based education is, too.
An Illinois lawmaker says parents who have obese children should lose their state tax deduction.
"It's the parents' responsibility that have obese kids," said state Sen. Shane Cultra, R-Onarga. "Take the tax deduction away for parents that have obese kids."
Cultra has not introduced legislation to deny parents the $2,000 standard tax deduction, but he floated the idea Tuesday, when lawmakers took a shot at solving the state's obesity epidemic.
With one in five Illinois children classified as obese and 62 percent of the state's adults considered overweight, health advocates are pushing a platter of diet solutions including trans fat bans and restricting junk food purchases on food stamps.
Today, the Senate Public Health Committee considered taxing sugary beverages at a penny-per-ounce, in effect applying the same theory to soda, juices and energy drinks that governs to liquor sales. Health advocates say a sin tax could discourage consumption, but lawmakers are reluctant to target an industry supports the jobs of more than 40,000 Illinoisans.
"It seems like we just, we go after the low-hanging fruit, where its easy to get," said state Sen. Dave Syverson, R-Rockford. He said the state needs to form a comprehensive plan to address physical fitness and disease prevention, rather than taking aim at sugary drinks.
All high school students should be fluent in a language other than English, and it's a matter of national urgency. So says Russell Berman - and as president of the Modern Language Association (MLA), his opinion carries some clout.
"To worry about globalization without supporting a big increase in language learning is laughable," the Stanford humanities professor wrote in this summer's MLA newsletter, in an article outlining the agenda for his presidency.
In conversation, he is just as emphatic, calling for "a national commitment to ramping up the quality of education."
"Budget attacks on language programs from the Republicans and Democrats are just the contemporary form of a xenophobia that suggests we don't need languages - and it's deeply, deeply misguided."
Dual-language immersion programs are the new face of bilingual education -- without the stigma. They offer the chance to learn a second language not just to immigrant children, but to native-born American students as well.
In a Glendale public school classroom, the immigrant's daughter uses no English as she conjugates verbs and writes sentences about cats.
More than a decade after California voters eliminated most bilingual programs, first-grader Sofia Checchi is taught in Italian nearly all day -- as she and her 20 classmates at Franklin Elementary School have been since kindergarten.
Yet in just a year, Sofia has jumped a grade level in reading English. In the view of her mother -- an Italian immigrant -- Sofia's achievement validates a growing body of research indicating that learning to read in students' primary languages helps them become more fluent in English.
Does the Nanny State have no bounds? Apparently not, as even beverages are at risk. The newest example of "government knows best" can be found in public schools, where chocolate milk is soon to be banned in an effort to target childhood obesity.
MSNBC reports, "With schools under increasing pressure to offer healthier food, the staple on children's cafeteria trays has come under attack over the very ingredient that made it so popular-sugar."
Some school districts have already moved towards removing flavored milk from the menu. Others have sought milk products that are flavored with sugar, a healthier alternative to high-fructose corn syrup.
In the state of Florida, the Board of Education is currently considering a statewide ban of chocolate milk in schools. School boards in Washington, D.C., and Berkeley, California, have already done so. Similarly, Los Angeles Unified's Superintendent John Deasy has announced plans to push for the removal of chocolate and strawberry milk from school menus.
Samantha Sherwood had lofty aspirations when she settled on a family-studies major at the University of Connecticut, like redrawing welfare rules or weaving together a sturdier safety net for people in need. She figured that she could change the world in big, broad strokes, and that she might pick up a fancy title and ample salary along the way.
Instead, Ms. Sherwood, 25, joined up with Teach for America, the program that puts top college graduates into the nation's most poverty-stricken schools, deciding that the best way to make a difference would be, as she put it on Monday, "to be there, where the rubber meets the road."
The world she is poised to change is a science classroom at a middle school in the South Bronx filled with sixth graders who seem as eager to hear her tell them about the whims of the weather as she is to listen to their tales of teenage crushes and broken hearts.
Now in her third year of teaching, earning about $45,000, Ms. Sherwood has come face to face with another place where rubber and road meet: she is most likely among the 4,100 New York City teachers scheduled to be laid off under the budget Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled on Friday.
Gov. Scott Walker wants to bring voucher schools to urban areas beyond Milwaukee, and predicts lawmakers will approve that expansion by the end of June.
"I think one of the things between now and the time we finish this (state) budget off at the end of June, we're going to be able to add and go beyond the boundaries of the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County. We're actually going to be able to add communities like Racine and Beloit and even Green Bay . . . because every one of those communities deserves a choice as well, and with this budget that's exactly what they're going to get," Walker said in a Monday speech to school choice advocates in Washington, D.C.
The proposal comes at a time when Walker is proposing cutting public schools by $841 million over two years and injects a new campaign issue into attempts to recall nine state senators.
A day after Walker made his comments, the Assembly planned to eliminate the cap on the number of children who can participate in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. The 20-year-old system allows low-income children to use taxpayer-funded vouchers worth $6,442 each to attend private schools in Milwaukee, including religious schools.
No truer statement was made about the education reforms enacted in the 2011 Indiana General Assembly than the one uttered Thursday by Gov. Mitch Daniels.
"If we've learned anything in Indiana, we've learned change can happen, but change is hard," Daniels said at a bill-signing ceremony. "Change always brings uncertainty."
"Uncertain" sums up the future awaiting Indiana's public schools and the teachers who work in those facilities.
Change indeed came during the thorny legislative session. Republicans seized their sudden super majorities in the Indiana Senate and House, ramming through almost every "change" dreamed of by the governor and his superintendent of public instruction, Tony Bennett.
Joshua Falso made his first visit to Bowling Green State University on Saturday.
He toured the campus, donned a cap and gown, and graduated.
Falso, 25, of Cleveland, earned his bachelor of science degree in technology by taking classes online while he served in the Air Force, including a stint in Iraq.
Online education has ballooned in the past 10 years as millions of students of all ages earn certificates, licenses and degrees -- from associate through doctorate -- from any location where they can use a computer.
Most parents would certainly agree that ensuring their children get a good education is a top priority.
However, recent findings from the Fraser Institute suggest that not all schools are created equally - not even close.
The Fraser Institute, one of Canada's leading public policy think-thanks, released their annual school rankings on May 8, which examine the performance of Ontario high schools over the past five years.
"Our report card is the number one source for objective, reliable information about how Ontario secondary schools stack up in terms of academics," said Michael Thomas, the co-author of the Report Card on Ontario's Secondary Schools 2011.
Students use Tasers at school to defend themselves against bullies
STUDENTS are using stun guns in schools to protect themselves against bullies and to threaten fellow classmates.
At least one schoolboy has been hospitalised as a result of being attacked with one of the electro-shock weapons, arising from a confrontation in the playground, according to reports obtained under freedom of information laws by The Daily Telegraph.
Serious incident reports show stun guns have been used on three occasions as a weapon against students or as a threat.In the most serious case a Year 10 boy who challenged a boy to a fight at school in southwestern Sydney accosted his victim after school, pulling up in a silver car driven by a stun gun-wielding male of an unknown age.
The driver got out of the car, "pulled a Taser-like device from his pocket" and stabbed a schoolboy with it, the incident report said.
Civic and school board experience:
I have attended over 100 school board meetings. Since 2008, I have often been the only person at the school board meetings not on the board or employed by the district.
I have relentlessly pushed for greater transparency of board meetings: airing meetings on TV, publishing agendas and orders of business on the web, as well as school budgets, audited financials, powerpoint presentations and video on the web. I researched and recommended digital recording technology to record meetings and make podcasts of meetings which was later purchased and adopted by the school board.
I not only attend the meetings but publish reports about them on the web. I also publish articles and opinion pieces by other members of the community.
To mark the 49th Anniversary of the Lincoln School desegregation case, I edited and published an 8-part series on the history of the Lincoln School case, one year before the 50th Anniversary of the Kaufman decision. I met with the leadership of the association of black churches in New Rochelle, the President of the N.A.A.C.P. and other leaders in the African-American community. I appeared before the school board to inform them of the upcoming event, of which they were unaware, and urged them to properly mark the occasion of the 50th Anniversary on January 24, 1961. These efforts initiated the year-long celebration of the 50th Anniversary in our schools.
I don't have a magic bullet to fixing education Michigan.
And the truth is, no politician does, either. The vast majority come up with some sound bites and maybe a bill or two that simply validate their ideology and pay back their favorite interest groups. The goal is to help out the teachers' unions or pump up private schools.
Few of them are really trying to improve how kids learn.
Like many governors before him, Gov. Rick Snyder is trying to leave his mark on the state's educational system and I wish him the best of luck. The only hope for this generation of kids is to get a top-notch education from preschool to postgrad -- and the governor is dead-on to take that kind of holistic approach.
Snyder is a great role model, having earned three degrees from the University of Michigan by the age of 23.
As for the governor's education doctrine, it's a pretty standard reform agenda that includes revamping tenure, holding teachers accountable for student performance, computerized learning, more options for high schoolers to earn college credit and degrees and an emphasis on early childhood education.
THREE YEARS AGO, in a New York Times article detailing her bid to become head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten boasted that despite my calls for "radical reform" to New York City's school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and I had achieved only "incremental" change. It seemed like a strange thing to crow about, but she did have something of a point. New York over the past nine years has experienced what Robert Schwartz, the dean of Harvard's education school, has described as "the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country," resulting in gains such as a nearly 20-point jump in graduation rates. But the city's school system is still not remotely where it needs to be.
That story holds more than true for the country at large. Nearly three decades after A Nation at Risk, the groundbreaking report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people," the gains we have made in improving our schools are negligible--even though we have doubled our spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) on K-12 public education. On America's latest exams (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), one-third or fewer of eighth-grade students were proficient in math, science, or reading. Our high-school graduation rate continues to hover just shy of 70 percent, according to a 2010 report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, and many of those students who do graduate aren't prepared for college. ACT, the respected national organization that administers college-admissions tests, recently found that 76 percent of our high-school graduates "were not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses."
While America's students are stuck in a ditch, the rest of the world is moving ahead. The World Economic Forum ranks us 48th in math and science education. On international math tests, the United States is near the bottom of industrialized countries (the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and we're in the middle in science and reading. Similarly, although we used to have one of the top percentages of high-school and college graduates among the OECD countries, we're now in the basement for high-school and the middle for college graduates. And these figures don't take into account the leaps in educational attainment in China, Singapore, and many developing countries.
Madison students are slated to get a double dose of standardized tests in the coming years as the state redesigns its annual series of exams while school districts seek better ways to measure learning.
For years, district students in grades three through eight and grade 10 have taken the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE), a series of state-mandated tests that measure school accountability.
Last month, in addition to the state tests, eighth- and ninth-graders took one of three different tests the district plans to introduce in grades three through 10. Compared with the WKCE, the tests are supposed to more accurately assess whether students are learning at, above or below grade level. Teachers also will get the results more quickly.
"Right now we have a vacuum of appropriate assessment tools," said Tim Peterson, Madison's assistant director of curriculum and assessment. "The standards have changed, but the measurement tool that we're required by law to use -- the WKCE -- is not connected."
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker continues to court national support for an extreme agenda of attacking public employees and public services while diminishing local democracy and shifting public money to private political allies. Despite the fact that Walker's moves have been widely condemned in his home state, the hyper-ambitious career politician has repeatedly suggested that he will not moderate his positions because he wants to shift the tenor of politics and policymaking far beyond Wisconsin.
Walker's stance has earned him talk as a possible dark-horse contender for a chance at the 2012 Republican nod, and the governor has not discouraged it.
To that end, Walker was in Washington Monday night to deliver a keynote address at the innocuously named American Federation for Children's "School Choice Now: Empowering America's Children" policy summit. It's actually a key annual gathering of advocates for privatizing public education, and of some of the biggest funders of right-wing political projects nationally.
The appearance comes at a time when education cuts are becoming a front-and-center issue, as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has stirred an outcry in the nation's largest city by proposing to lay off thousands of teachers.
Republican Gov. Scott Walker will be on a national education stage tonight to tout his efforts to expand charter school and voucher programs, but he is running into obstacles back home, and not just from those you might expect.
At an Assembly Education Committee hearing last week, for example, a bill Walker backs that would allow parents of special education students to use state tax dollars to pay for private school tuition hit significant roadblocks. In fact, the Republican chair of the committee, Rep. Steve Kestell of Elkhart Lake, called the funding mechanism for the legislation in its current form a "fatal flaw" in a telephone interview Friday.
"The bill is an intriguing proposal," Kestell says. "Where we have a big challenge is how to pay for it."
Kestell and other representatives grilled the authors of the bill during committee testimony. The language of the proposal appears to be taken fairly literally from generic legislation used in other states that have passed special education voucher programs. Kestell says the legislation would have to be "Wisconsinized" to be acceptable.
The bill was also sharply criticized by disability rights groups, who say it would strip hard-won legal rights from families with special-needs children, and by the state Department of Public Instruction, which faults the bill for demanding no accountability from private schools for actually providing the special education services that would be the basis for the vouchers.
Wisconsin union protests may not be national front page news, but as its model is picked up nationwide, educators worry as childrens programs are cut while football coaches continue to earn big bucks.
In Wisconsin, educators worry about children's programs like Headstart being trimmed, and feared cut, as well the breakfast programs for hungry children being eliminated, as football coaches get first rank in the hiring and firing parades.
The FASEB Journal examines the problems of education, as the editor wonders, as educators do, what has happened to education and the value placed on it in the decisions made by politicians. He uses some of what happened in Wisconsin as a model to look at this issue. The Journal points out the United States will continue to pedal backwards in relationship to the accomplishments of other countries, as children fall further and further behind youngsters of comparable ages in other countries. Right now only Luxembourg , among the developed countries, is the only one that pays less per child on education than the United States.
AUSTRALIA'S top public servant says the key to improving education standards is not in spreading more money on schools ''like Vegemite''. Rather, a targeted investment in teacher quality and innovative school leadership is needed.
The secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Terry Moran, said the focus should be on recruiting and investing in bright school graduates to become teachers and future school leaders.
An advocate of decentralising bureaucratic control of education and health services, Mr Moran said principals and teachers should be given greater autonomy to be more creative in the way they engaged students.
State school spending has increased dramatically in the last two decades.
Following the Wisconsin Legislature's commitment in 1996 to fund two-thirds of education expenses, the average cost of state aid for each of the 800,000-plus pupils in the public school system has grown from $3,188 to $5,028 in 2010-11.
But that's just on the surface, and in reality, dollars allocated for schools often don't make it to the classroom and are based on a complex formula focused as much on providing property tax relief as educating children.
New data include ratings for about 11,500 teachers, nearly double the number covered last August. School and civic leaders had sought to halt release of the data.
The Los Angeles Times on Sunday is releasing a major update to its elementary school teacher ratings, underscoring the large disparities throughout the nation's second-largest school district in instructors' abilities to raise student test scores.
The posting -- the only publication of such teacher performance data in the nation -- contains value-added ratings for about 11,500 third- through fifth-grade teachers, nearly double the number released last August. It also reflects changes in the way the scores were calculated and displayed.
Overall ratings for about 470 schools also are included in the release, which is based on student standardized test scores from the academic years 2003-04 through 2009-10. To obtain the rating of a teacher or school, go to latimes.com/valueadded and enter the teacher's or the school's name.
The initial release of teacher ratings last summer generated intense controversy -- and some praise -- across the country, and this round has already met with some opposition.
Two Republican governors are scheduled to speak at a Washington conference hosted by a nonprofit that pushes for private school vouchers and charter schools.
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania will address the American Federation for Children's second annual policy summit Monday.
Both are expected to talk about school choice. Walker has proposed expanding a school voucher program in Milwaukee. Corbett is proposing cutting $1.6 billion from public education while also pushing for vouchers, which would allow students in poor-performing public schools to transfer to private schools.
Union leaders and other activists are planning a rally outside the summit, which will also feature former District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Opponents say the federation is trying to "dismantle public education."
In an article about teacher retirements in the State Journal a couple of weeks ago, Madison Teachers Inc. Executive Director John Matthews had some harsh comments about the Madison school district and school board. Referring to the Teacher Emeritus Retirement Program, or TERP, Matthews said, "The evidence of the ill will of the board of education and superintendent speaks for itself as to why we have grave concern over the benefit continuing. . . . They tore things from the MTI contract, which they and their predecessors had agreed for years were in the best interest of the district and its employees."
In an article in Isthmus last week, Lynn Welch followed up with Matthews. Matthews comes out swinging against the school district in this article as well, asserting, "The bargaining didn't have to [involve] so much animosity. . . . If they wanted to make revisions, all they had to do is talk with us and we could have worked through something that would be acceptable to both sides. But they didn't bother to talk about it. You don't buy good will this way." While the contract includes very significant economic concessions on the part of the teachers, Matthews expressed unhappiness with the non-economic changes as well, labeling them "inhumane."
In the Isthmus article, Matthews asserts that the changes in the collective bargaining agreement "show how Walker's proposed legislation (still tied up in court) has already produced an imbalance of power forcing unions to make concessions they don't want to achieve a contract deal."
.........
The collective bargaining process is useful because it provides an established framework for hammering out issues of mutual concern between the school district and its employees and for conflict resolution. However, if the collective bargaining agreement were to disappear, the school district wouldn't immediately resort to a management equivalent of pillaging the countryside. Instead, the district would seek out alternative ways of achieving the ends currently served by the collective bargaining process, because the district, like nearly all employers, values its employees and understands the benefits of being perceived as a good place to work.
But when employers aren't interested in running sweat-shops, organizations set up to prevent sweat-shop conditions aren't all that necessary. It may be that John Matthews' ramped-up rhetoric is best understood not as a protest against school district over-reaching in bargaining, since that did not happen, but as a cry against the possibility of his own impending irrelevance.
Education reform: Shorter week, more learning More than 120 school districts across the U.S. are finding that less can be more -- less being fewer days spent in school.
The general assumption is that when it comes to educating American kids, more is more. Longer school hours. Saturday school. Summer school. Yet more than 120 school districts across the nation are finding that less can also be more -- less being fewer days spent in school.
The four-day school week has been around for decades, according to the National Council of State Legislatures, but it's quietly spreading as a money-saving tactic, especially after several states -- including Montana, Georgia, Missouri and Washington -- passed legislation allowing school districts to make the switch as long as they lengthened each school day so that there was no reduction in instructional hours. Teachers work just as much under the four-day plan, so there are no cost reductions there, but schools have saved from 2% to 9%, according to a 2009 report by the Center for Education Policy at the University of Southern Maine. Utility and transportation costs are lower; there's no need to serve a fifth lunch each week; even the reduced wear and tear on buildings has helped.
KnowledgeWorks, led for a decade by Chad Wick, a former bank CEO passionate about connecting urban kids to the idea economy, developed a 2020 forecast that outlines five learning priorities:
1. Students need the ability to sort, verify, synthesize, and use information to make judgments and take action. These skills have always been important but now that we're all drinking from a fire hose of information they are essential.
2. Students need a working knowledge of market economics and personal finance--most students still leave high school without them. Students will be navigating an increasingly dynamic economy in which technologies will improve and change at exponential rates and market opportunities will be big but competitive. Students need the ability to sell--themselves and an idea. They need to experience and give candid performance feedback and gain appreciation for a quality work product.
Curtis Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, an independent research institute, told Tom Friedman, "Fortunately, this is the best time ever for innovation," said Carlson, for three reasons: "First, although competition is increasingly intense, our global economy opens up huge new market opportunities. Second, most technologies--since they are increasingly based on ideas and bits and not on atoms and muscle--are improving at rapid, exponential rates. And third, these two forces--huge, competitive markets and rapid technological change--are opening up one major new opportunity after another."
Millionaires do screw up everything, don't they? They're hovering even now, ghostlike, haunting the working class amid the talk of expanding Milwaukee's school choice program.
Right now, if you're poor in Milwaukee - earning $39,000 or less for a family of four - you can take your state aid to any of a selection of superb private schools. Earn any more, as your typical machinist or firefighter would, and it's either endure the Milwaukee Public Schools, see if you can get into a charter school or pay thousands in tuition.
Gov. Scott Walker proposes lifting the income limit, and letting machinists and firefighters in on the deal. Critics are aghast with the thought that millionaires might benefit, too. Your tax dollars, they gasp, could pick up the $6,442 tab for some millionaire's son at some private school.
The horror. Not that a $6,442 voucher will take even a millionaire's kid very far at, say, the University School of Milwaukee, where tuition is $20K a year, should University School decide to take part. Nor will it suddenly relieve any millionaire of the tuition he's now paying at the more humble St. Parsimonious. Walker's reform phases in, and parents currently paying tuition can't get the state aid.
When I was college student and for a few years afterward, there were certain books -- often books I picked up by accident or for which I had low expectations -- that were so revelatory, so eye-opening, that after finishing them I walked around feeling at if I'd just landed on Earth. Everything looked new and strange, and every incident in the book felt as if it related directly to my own life.
It was a giddy sensation, and one that, sadly, comes much less frequently now. Reading William Deresiewicz's "A Jane Austen Education" brought me back to those heady days, when I believed that nothing could possibly be more important than literature.
Deresiewicz, a former English professor at Yale University and now a book critic, is an accidental Austen enthusiast. As a New Yorker and a graduate student at Columbia during the 1990s, he resisted Austen, preferring "modernism, the literature that had formed my identity as a reader and, in many ways, as a person. Joyce, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov: complex, difficult, sophisticated works."
Schoolchildren in Canada sing the national anthem in class everyday. It's also common for US students to recite a pledge of allegiance to their country.
In Hong Kong, most schoolchildren started to learn singing China's national anthem only after Britain returned its most famous colony to Beijing's sovereignty in 1997. Now, the SAR government wants to carry national education further, but is ironically chided for political brainwashing.
The criticism is simply strange. During the colonial era, students never had the opportunity to study modern Chinese history. Crucial chapters differentiating between the Republic of China - now Taiwan - and the People's Republic of China were nowhere to be found in textbooks. It was deliberate as this served the colonial regime's interest better for locals not to be identified with China.
Last week, the SAR launched a four- month consultation on moral and national education, proposing that primary and secondary schools devote 50 hours per year, or two lessons a week, for students to learn the national anthem, attend national flag-raising ceremonies, understand the Basic Law, support national sports teams, and appreciate Chinese culture and the development of China via current affairs. Teachers would have a large freedom in teaching. This is overdue. After all, it has been nearly 14 years since the handover.
The district started with a more than $3 million deficit and has spent months whittling down expenses. A proposed budget for next year includes a 1.4 percent tax increase. Here's a look at what the 10 candidates, vying for 5 spots, had to say about the district's budget picture:
Jennifer Clancy, a current board member, said the funding formula needs to be addressed at the state level, and state mandates need to be addressed, too. Locally, she said, the board has invested a lot of time in trimming expenses.
"If there was anything called fat, we've eliminated that," she said, noting the next step should be to look at the largest spending area -- salaries and benefits -- and work on that.
Ellen Freireich, also running for re-election, said the board needs to continue monitoring revenues and expenses to be fiscally responsible. Board members and taxpayers need to contact state legislators and express the urgency of the financial crisis, she said.
There is no doubt that recruiting and retaining excellent teachers in our nation's schools are central components of improving our education system. But it is equally important to acknowledge that a wide range of factors beyond how a teacher conducts his or her classroom significantly affects the success of our students and teachers.
Poverty, hunger, homelessness, health issues, exposure to violence and reduced investment in our schools are just a few of the many societal issues that influence the effectiveness of even the most talented teachers.
When a child comes to school hungry or poorly nourished, the student is not as likely to grasp even the most intricately planned and masterfully executed lessons.
When a student is stressed and sleep-deprived due to the foreclosure of his parents' home, the student will not be as capable of thinking critically and reflectively about even the most engaging of classroom activities.
In a report set for release in the fall and previewed at the American Educational Research Association convention in New Orleans in April, researchers analyzed how AVID, a study-skills intervention for middle-achieving students, played out in 14 Chicago high schools. They found AVID participants in 9th grade gained little advantage that year over peers not taking part in the program, and remained off track for graduation and college.
The study highlights a potential pitfall for the dozens of student-based interventions aiming to scale up nationwide through private support and programs like the federal Investing in Innovation, or i3, program: As programs move out of the schools for which they were originally developed, their success becomes increasingly dependent on individual schools' context and capacity.
Given the importance of economic and financial education, one might expect to find these subjects emphasized in Wisconsin's K-12 schools. Other states are ahead of Wisconsin. Twenty-one states now require high school students to take an economics course; thirteen states require students to take a personal finance course. In Wisconsin, neither is required, so few Wisconsin high school students take a course in economics or personal finance, and few teachers are qualified to teach one.
This widespread disregard has real consequences. The financial crisis from which our nation is currently recovering illustrates some of these, having arisen in part from ill-considered decisions by financially illiterate consumers of credit. For American workers, moreover, the trend away from defined-benefit pensions toward defined-contribution pensions places increasing investment responsibilities in the hands of individuals.
Evidence suggests that improvement will be a challenge. Surveys and assessments of economic and financial education generally yield dismal results. Americans are neither confident in their skills in these areas nor do they perform well on tests of knowledge. Their lack of economic and financial savvy plays out variously -- for example, in the lives of large numbers of Americans who find themselves "unbanked" and reliant on dubious sources of financial services such as payday-loan stores and check-cashing outlets. College students, meanwhile, rack up record levels of credit-card and student-loan debt.
LILY, who is three-and-a-half, loves her nursery school in Queens. Her mother calls her "the sponge" because every day she comes home with new nuggets of knowledge. But not every child is as lucky as Lily. A new report by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) shows that states' preschool funding is declining, which means fewer children will have access to early education, which most agree is essential especially for children living in low-income households. The study looked at the 40 states which fund programmes for three- or four-year-olds. "State cuts to preschool funding transformed the recession into a depression for many young children," says Steven Barnett, author of the NIEER report.
State preschool spending per child decreased by $114 to $4,028 last year. This is almost $700 less than in 2001-2002. Were it not for the additional funding provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it would be much less. Worryingly, the funding situation may get worse. The stimulus money helped keep many states afloat, a cushion that no longer exists. Only three states (Connecticut, Maine and Vermont) increased spending per child by more than 10%. Nine (Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Carolina) cut spending by at least 10%. Ohio, once a leader in early education, now has one of the lowest percentages of youngsters enrolled. It cut funding more than any other state.
When I first heard that you had written an open letter to the teachers of America, I was afraid to open the envelope.
Considering that it was just last year that you said Rhode Island school board members were "showing courage and doing the right thing for kids" when they fired the entire faculty at a high school, I thought your latest letter might contain a pink slip or at least some sort of reprimand to place in my permanent record.
Instead, I was told just how much you respect me and the hundreds of thousands of teachers in this great country.
The review of resources moving forward to be allocated for Madison Prep need further conversation for Administration to gain further direction. At the February 28, 2011 meeting dealing with Madison Prep differing ideas were talked about by various individuals as to the best way to deal with Madison Prep. In order to better understand the direction the board would like administration to head financially with this school, an understanding of what has been done in the past is necessary.
When the finances were completed for Badger Rock, they were put together with the express direction of the majority of the Board that they should break even and not cause reductions in other areas of the district budget. This was accomplished by transferring resources from Sennett Middle School specifically as those kids were moved from Sennett to Badger Rock. This worked for Badger Rock because they defined an attendance area, and agreed that 80% or 40 kids would be from the Sennett attendance area.
For Madison Prep, the issue of transfer becomes more difficult as they will technically pull students from all of our Middle School attendance areas. The amount of funds we are able to segregate for transfer with this model are much less if we are under the same circumstances where we should have a program that breaks even or doesn't cause reductions in other areas of the budget.
Comments on the Madison School District's Literacy Initiative and Budget Proposal
First of all, our thanks and compliments to you and the administration for undertaking the assessment of literacy in the District. Thanks also to staff and outside advisors for their contributions to making the Report and Recommendations the most meaningful and significant direction for systemic change toward achieving measurable results in student achievement and staff performance in the District's recent history.
We urge the Board of Education support of the Literacy Report AND adoption of the recommendations for implementation of the initiatives and for the budget proposed in the Superintendent's Preliminary Budget for 2011-12. It is vital for the Board to support the direction of the initiatives for balanced literacy with integrity at all grades levels of the District. It is deplorable that heretofore there has been no systematic plan to address the reading and writing shortcomings of the District that are the most fundamental causative factor contributing to the "achievement gap". Finally, we have pro-active leadership from Dr. Sue Abplanalp, who has a full grasp of the organizational development and change processes critical and significant to the implementation and sustainability of difference- making strategies. The proposed design of systemic changes to the curriculum, instructional strategies, engagement of teachers, support staff, students and parents/other adults and the realignment of financial and other resources will result in measurable student growth. Board adoption of the $650,000.00 2011-12 budget considerations is an absolute necessity of the very highest priority. We urge you to get on with it. Thank you.
For further information contact: Don Severson, donleader@aol.com 577-0851
The April 28 State Journal editorial urged punishment of sick note scammers (some teachers and doctors during the recent protests), and included a column by Chris Rickert titled "Don't cry for teachers who choose early retirement." Many taxpayers in Madison and Wisconsin would say "amen."
It's ironic and hypocritical that a national radio ad expresses support for Teacher Appreciation Week and touts teachers so soon after over 1,700 Madison teachers didn't show up for work -- 84 of them turning in fraudulent sick notes. The teachers used students as pawns at protest marches and contributed to protester damage at our Capitol.
In the minds of many property taxpayers and even some students, teachers have lost much respect and trust. This could be reversed if teachers and their arrogant union boss John Matthews would express in a public statement regret for their selfish and illegal actions.
Questions & Suggestions for the Madison School District's Innovation & Alternative Programs
225K PDF: As a result of the presentations and discussion at the first Committee meeting I have some questions and suggestions I want to share with you.
1. Regarding the "Charge" for the Committee: Is the identification and planning for expansion limited to "programs and educational options"?
Recommended suggestions: Think beyond programs, services and projects for processes to affect 'systemic' changes.
Questions and Concerns Regarding the "Findings and Recommendations" of the MMSD K-12 Literacy Program Evaluation report
The following questions and concerns are submitted to you for your consideration regarding the "findings and recommendations" of the MMSD K-12 Literacy Program Evaluation report:
1. What findings and recommendations are there for 'year-around' literacy experiences to help mitigate 'losses' over the summer months in achievement gains during the traditional academic year?
Although "summer loss" was not a particular focus of discussion during the evaluation process, there are several ways in which the recommendations address reducing the impact of summer reading loss. These include:
Recommendation I - curricular consistency will provide for a more seamless connection with content and instruction in summer school, Saturday school (pending funding) and after school supports.
Recommendation II - more explicit instruction focused in early grades will allow students to read for enjoyment at earlier ages.
Recommendation III - a well-developed intervention plan will follow a student through summer school and into the following academic year
2. What are the findings and recommendations regarding parental (significant adults in student's life) participation, training, evaluation and accountability in the literacy learning process?
Parental participation opportunities to support their children's enjoyment and achievement in literacy include:
Literacy 24-7: Parent training for Spanish speaking families on how to promote literacy learning. Read Your Heart Out Day: This event builds positive family, community and school relationships with a literacy focus and supports both the family involvement and cultural relevance components of the Madison Metropolitan School District Strategic Plan.
Tera Fortune: Professional development for parents about the Dual Language Immersion Program with a focus on bi-literacy throughout the content areas. MALDEF Curriculum Training: Nine-week training covering a variety of topics to assist parents in sharing the responsibility of student success and how to communicate effectively in schools.
Regular column in Umoja Magazine: Forum to inform families and community members about educational issues through African American educators' expertise. Several columns have focused on literacy learning at home.
Training is provided for parents on how to choose literature that:
Has positive images that leave lasting impressions
Has accurate, factual information that is enjoyable to read
Contains meaningful stories that reflect a range of cultural values and lifestyles
Has clear and positive perspective for people of color in the 21st century
Contains material that is self affirming Promotes positive literacy learning at home
Evaluations of the Read Your Heart Out and Family Literacy Night were conducted by requesting that participating parents, staff, students and community members complete a survey about the success of the event and the effects on student achievement.
3. What are the consequential and remediation strategies for non-performance in meeting established achievement/teaching/support standards for students, staff and parents? What are the accompanying evaluation/assessment criteria?
A District Framework is nearing completion. This Framework will provide clear and consistent expectations and rubrics for all instructional staff and administrators. Improvement will be addressed through processes that include the School Improvement Plans and staff and administrator evaluations processes.
MMSD proposes to maintain Reading Recovery teachers and teacher leaders as an intervention at grade 1. There are currently two Reading Recovery teacher leaders participating in a two-year professional development required to become Reading Recovery teacher leaders. One of these positions will be certified to support English Language Learners. The modifications proposed include: 1) targeting these highly skilled Reading Recovery teachers to specific students across schools based on district-wide data for 2011-12 and 2) integrating the skills of Reading Recovery staff into a comprehensive intervention plan along with skilled interventionists resulting in all elementary schools benefiting from grade 1 reading intervention.
5. How will the literacy learning process be integrated with the identification and development of Talented and Gifted (TAG) students?
The Response to Intervention model is based on evidence-based instruction and responds to students who need additional challenge and/or support.
6. What will be the 2010-2011 budgetary priorities and strategies for undertaking the literacy program and resources recommendations outlined in the report?
PreK-12 literacy will be a priority for the 2011-12 budget process. In addition to the prioritization of funding within our budget parameters, MMSD is in the process of writing a major grant (Investing in Innovation - i3) to support the recommendations of the literacy evaluation as a key strategy to close achievement gaps and improve literacy for all students to be ready for college and/or careers.
For generations, Wisconsin has taken pride in the opportunities we offer children through our public schools. When students or schools are struggling, we work together to find solutions.
Wisconsin is at the top when it comes to ACT and Advanced Placement scores and graduation rates, and just last month, significant gains on test scores were reported along with a narrowing of achievement gaps between minority groups. That's a foundation that should be built upon, not dismantled.
Gov. Scott Walker's education plan included in his state budget proposal will move our students and state backward. Whether you have children in a public school or not, whether you are Democrat, Republican or somewhere in between, children are counting on the state to do what's right. Public education must remain a top priority.
For months, Wisconsinites have been telling their legislators that we believe there is a better way - a balanced way - to respond to tough fiscal times without throwing away our tradition of high-quality public education. Linda Copas of Plainfield pointed out to the Joint Finance Committee that in her small school district, the number of students who live in poverty has more than doubled, but the governor's education plan ignores that. Kim Schroeder, a Milwaukee teacher, said his students are losing opportunities such as gym, art and music.
How much would we spend per student if we wanted to give every child in Milwaukee a real opportunity to get a good education?
I'm sure $6,442 is too low. That's the amount paid in public money for each student in the private school voucher program. Ask anyone involved in operating such a school, especially when it comes to providing a quality program for older students. Show me a good voucher school, and I'll show you a good private fundraising operation.
I'm almost as sure it's not $7,775, the amount provided for students in the charter schools that operate independent of Milwaukee Public Schools. Same reason.
In some cases, it might be in the neighborhood of $9,091, the amount expected to be provided by MPS next year for students in "partnership" schools, generally alternative schools for kids who haven't thrived in conventional settings. But that's too low in many cases, also.
How about $13,200? That's one estimate of what spending per student in MPS is going to work out to be next year. That's down from around $15,000 this year, by some calculations, largely because of the end of the federal economic stimulus program that brought a short-term surge of money to MPS. Ask most parents in MPS, and they'll tell you that's not enough because they are looking toward service cuts and larger classes next year.
I've read Dr. Seuss' "Oh, the Places You'll Go" quite a bit over the past few weeks as I visited schools in Milwaukee, Green Bay and Stevens Point to read to second- and third-graders and meet with teachers and school officials. I've been visiting schools to promote our Read to Lead Task Force, which is finding ways to make sure all Wisconsin students can read before they complete the third grade.
As a parent with two boys in public schools, it has been great to see the passion our teachers have for showing children how education can take them to amazing places. Like the teachers I met, I believe strongly in the power of education to open new worlds of opportunity, break the cycle of poverty and empower those searching for hope with a sense of purpose and self-determination.
All too often, people focus on the negatives in our education system. We are trying to focus on our strengths - particularly in reading - and then replicate that success in every classroom across our state.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
Reality Check: Milwaukee Exceed's Madison's Black Not Hispanic 4 Year High School Graduation Rate: 59.5% to 48.3%
Andrew Shilcher, via email:
In response to the press release that the DPI put out today, I did some digging to see where Madison and Milwaukee stacked up. You can check out how each district breaks down for yourself by following the links at the bottom, but here are some of the highlights (if you want to call them that)
According to WINSS...
The 4 year graduation rate for Black Not Hispanic students in MMSD for the 2009-2010 school year was 48.3%.
The 4 year graduation rate for Black Not Hispanic students in MPS for the 2009-2010 school year was 59.5%.
The 4 year graduation rates for Hispanic students in MMSD and MPS for the 2009-2010 school year are comparable at 56.7% in MMSD and 59% in MPS.
The statewide average 4 year graduation rate for Black Not Hispanic students for the 2009-2010 school year was 60.5%.
The statewide average 4 year graduation rate for Hispanic students for the 2009-2010 school year was 69%.
I won't go into the difference between the 4 year rates and Legacy rates, but you can check those out at the links below too. 4 year rates place students in a cohort beginning in their first year of high school and see where things stand within that cohort 4 years later. Legacy rates are a yearly snapshot of the number of graduates for a year compared to the number of students expected to graduate high school for that given year. For a further explanation of this refer to http://dpi.wi.gov/spr/grad_q&a.html.
IS YOUR son an accomplished violinist? Buy a house near one of the many state-funded schools that can now prefer pupils with musical talents, and he will sail to the front of the queue for a place. Is little Johnny a whizz at maths? Alas, only a few scattered patches of England now have academically selective "grammar" schools that can legally admit him ahead of his innumerate friends. Piety might help: have him baptised and attend services regularly and he could win a place at one of the many high-performing church schools.
England's state schools have an absurdly complex rule book for how they may and may not choose their pupils. (The rest of Britain goes its own way in education policy.) This infuriates conscientious parents and forces them to resort to all sorts of tricks to get their offspring a decent, publicly-funded education. Michael Gove, the education secretary, is bent on overhauling the rules. But it will not be easy.
Is the school voucher plan just signed into law by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels going to improve education in his state? It's an ambitious experiment:
The plan is based on a sliding income scale, with families of four making more than $60,000 qualifying for some level of scholarship if they switch from public to private schools... Other voucher systems across the country are limited to lower-income households, children with special needs or those in failing schools. Indiana's program would be open to a much larger pool of students, including those already in excellent schools... within three years, there will be no limit on the number of children who could enroll.
I have no idea whether or not this is going to work. But I am thrilled that Indiana is trying it. Nationwide, 40 percent of registered voters and almost half of parents with school-aged children favor this policy, and it is one of the few education reform ideas consistently advanced by one of our two political parties. More importantly, two-thirds of Hoosiers supported the idea in a January poll.
This is as good as it gets if you believe that states should sometimes function as laboratories of democracy. Indiana voters get what they want, and the rest of us benefit from seeing how it works out on a larger scale than has ever been tried before. It's also heartening that Gov. Daniels is hedging his bets by trying to improve the public school system. His broader education agenda is outlined in this presentation, given at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
Gov. Chris Christie flashed with anger today when pressed on his recent remark that he could defy the state's highest court if it orders him to send more money to public schools.
"No comment," he said at a press conference to name a Newark school superintendent, visibly bristling when asked how seriously he is considering ignoring the state Supreme Court.
"I heard the question very clearly, and I don't have any comment," Christie repeated minutes later when pressed by a second reporter. "If you just want to follow up on why I 'no commented' that, then my answer to you is no comment."
Alfie Kohn has really pushed the buttons of ed reformers in his Education Week commentary, "How Education Reform Traps Poor Children." He bemoans the educational techniques of charter school teachers whom, he says, perseverate on mechanical drills and rote learning. This results in a pedagogy that is "noticeably different from the questioning, discovering, arguing, and collaborating that is more common (though by no means universal) among students in suburban and private schools." In low-income schools, he charges, "not only is the teaching scripted, but a system of almost militaristic behavior control is common, with public humiliation for noncompliance and an array of rewards for obedience that calls to mind the token-economy programs developed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals."
Phew. Strong stuff. This "pedagogy of poverty" (the phrase comes from a 1991 paper by Wisconsin professor Martin Haberman) is racist, charges Kohn, stemming from an over-emphasis on standardized tests. In the end it "serves to simultaneously narrow the test-score gap and widen the learning gap."
The University of Texas at Austin should boost enrollment by 10 percent a year and cut tuition at UT System campuses in half, the chairman of the system's board of regents suggests.
That's according to this story in today's Austin American-Statesman. The Statesman obtained a draft memo written by Gene Powell, chairman of the nine-member board, in early April. The memo outlines several goals, including:
Make UT-Austin the number 1 public university in the country
Increase undergraduate enrollment at UT-Austin by 10 percent a year for four years starting in 2013
Determine the percentage increase for the other UT System campuses, including UT-Arlington and UT-Dallas
Just when you thought the Madison School District had enough on its plate -- perennially tight budgets, teachers incensed at Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting, minority achievement gaps -- it's under a gun of a different sort:
Get your program for talented and gifted, or TAG, students in order, the state told the district in March, after a group of parents complained their kids were not being sufficiently challenged in the classroom.
I am dubious of efforts to devote additional time and money to students who already have the advantage of being smart -- and often white and upper-middle class -- and who have similarly situated parents adept at lobbying school officials.
Money, time and effort generally not being unlimited commodities in public school districts, the question over what is to be done about Madison's TAG program strikes me as one of priorities.
Improving TAG offerings would seem to require an equal reduction in something else. And maybe that something else is more important to more students.
Not that it's likely anyone on the School Board would ever acknowledge any trade-offs.
It's a "false dichotomy," said School Board member Ed Hughes, and "not an either/or situation." Can the district be all things to all people? I asked. "Sure," he said. "Why not?"
A dispute has developed between Madison teachers and the school district over changes to contracts secured during quickie negotiations in March. John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., is upset about what he calls an "unfair and unreasonable" process.
"The bargaining didn't have to [involve] so much animosity," says Matthews. "If they wanted to make revisions, all they had to do is talk with us and we could have worked through something that would be acceptable to both sides. But they didn't bother to talk about it. You don't buy good will this way."
Elsewhere, in an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, Matthews referred darkly to "the ill will of the board of education and superintendent" toward his members, as shown in these contract talks.
But school board members and district administrators take a different view, saying Matthews and his staff were at the bargaining table and agreed to all changes made to the contracts during an all-night negotiation that ended March 12; MTI members ratified the deal the next day. School Board President Maya Cole suggests that Matthews now has "buyer's remorse."
During the 1960s, the whole society caved in and gave up the ghost. The education system, such as it was, crashed. I was there, as a teacher, part of that time, and I saw it happen. It foundered on just this point. Repetition. It was as if minds had gone soft and couldn't perform.
Broadly speaking, the basics of arithmetic went out the window. So did spelling, grammar, and the ability to write coherent sentences. Poof. The amount of scut work it took to build a basic education became unacceptable.
When I read tracts about the intentional undermining of the American educational system, I sense truth in them, but to me the real crash was all about what I'm discussing here.
You can bring up drugs, horrible junk food, the influence of TV and the Internet, large classes, and so on. You can say they all make education a tougher job. Sure, I don't deny any of that, but the rubber meets the road in REPETITION. The grind. You can either do it or you can't. If you can't, everything you learn is faked. It SEEMS to be real, but it isn't.
Teachers unions and their political allies argue that market forces can't supply quality education. According to them, only our existing system--politicized and monopolistic--will do the trick. Yet Americans would find that approach ludicrous if applied to other vital goods or services.
Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries--"for free"--from its neighborhood public supermarket.
No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.
Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families' choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.
Urban Prep Academy will mark another first this year -- the city's all-male, all-African-American charter high school will be sending its first students to an Ivy League school in the fall.
Urban Prep Academy will mark another first this year -- the city's all-male, all-African-American charter high school will be sending its first students to an Ivy League school in the fall.
Seniors Matthew Williams and Julius Claybron have been accepted into Cornell University. Williams also has been accepted into Dartmouth College and wait-listed at Harvard and Yale, school officials said.
The students and 102 others in the Class of 2011 announced the colleges they will attend at a ceremony Wednesday at U.S. Cellular Field. They put on baseball caps for their college picks, which included Morehouse, Oberlin, Grinnell and the University of Michigan.
"The Widget Effect," a widely read 2009 report from The New Teacher Project, surveyed the teacher evaluation systems in 14 large American school districts and concluded that status quo systems provide little information on how performance differs from teacher to teacher. The memorable statistic from that report: 98 percent of teachers were evaluated as "satisfactory." Based on such findings, many have characterized classroom observation as a hopelessly flawed approach to assessing teacher effectiveness.
The ubiquity of "satisfactory" ratings stands in contrast to a rapidly growing body of research that examines differences in teachers' effectiveness at raising student achievement. In recent years, school districts and states have compiled datasets that make it possible to track the achievement of individual students from one year to the next, and to compare the progress made by similar students assigned to different teachers. Careful statistical analysis of these new datasets confirms the long-held intuition of most teachers, students, and parents: teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student achievement growth.
Some innovations change everything. The rise of personal computers in the 1970s decimated the mini-computer industry. TurboTax forever changed tax accounting, and MP3s made libraries of compact discs obsolete. Even venerable public institutions like the United States Postal Service, which reported an $8.5 billion loss in 2010, are not immune. It experienced a 6 billion piece decline in mail volume that fiscal year, thanks mostly, of course, to email.
These innovations bear the traits of what Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen terms a disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovations fundamentally transform a sector by replacing expensive, complicated, and inaccessible products or services with much less expensive, simpler, and more convenient alternatives. This pattern is as common in heavy industrials as in professional services, consumer packaged goods, and nonprofits. In one of its most recent manifestations, it is little by little changing the way people think about education.
Online learning appears to be a classic disruptive innovation with the potential not just to improve the current model of education delivery, but to transform it. Online learning started by serving students for whom there was no alternative for learning. It got its start in distance-learning environments, outside of a traditional school building, and it started small. In 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. But by 2010, over 4 million students were participating in some kind of formal online-learning program. The preK-12 online population is now growing by a five-year compound annual growth rate of 43 percent--and that rate is accelerating.
The topic of my speech was the continued value of local education in building Wisconsin's "knowledge economy," and the 50 or so school administrators in the room listened carefully to my message about preparing K-12 students for the rigors of a globally competitive 21st century.
It was hard, however, to ignore the elephant in the corner of my PowerPoint slides.
For most of the school superintendents, human resource directors and fiscal officers in the Green Bay audience, the most important thing on their minds was not to rush out and launch a program to improve science and engineering education.
Rather, the most pressing problem of the day for most school officials in Wisconsin is surviving an unsettled, contentious era in the relationship between local teachers, administrators and school boards.
While the legislative and legal battle lines have been drawn in Madison, the real struggles are being fought across the state, district by district, as the reality of budget cuts and the potential end of collective bargaining for unionized teachers sinks in.
A public school district in Mississippi and the federal government are divided over whether the schools are complying with a desegregation order that dates back to the civil rights era.
The Justice Department has asked a judge to order the Cleveland Public School District "to devise and implement a desegregation plan that will immediately dismantle its one-race schools," but an attorney for the district said it has been following the latest order and sends the federal government updates on its integration attempts.
The notion that a college degree is essentially worthless has become one of the year's most fashionable ideas, with two prominent venture capitalists (Cornell '89 and Stanford '89, by the way) leading the charge.
Pity the American parent! Already beleaguered by depleted 401(k)s and gutted real-estate values, Ponzi schemes and toxic paper, burst bubbles and bear markets, he is now being asked to contend with a new specter: that college, the perennial hope for the next generation, may not be worth the price of the sheepskin on which it prints its degrees.
As long as there have been colleges, there's been an individualist, anti-college strain in American culture--an affinity for the bootstrap. But it is hard to think of a time when skepticism of the value of higher education has been more prominent than it is right now. Over the past several months, the same sharp and distressing arguments have been popping up in the Times, cable news, the blogosphere, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. The cost of college, as these arguments typically go, has grown far too high, the return far too uncertain, the education far too lax. The specter, it seems, has materialized.
It's no surprise, given how the Great Recession has corroded public faith in other once-unassailable American institutions, that college should come in for a drubbing. But inevitability is just another word for opportunity, and the two most vocal critics are easy to identify and strikingly similar in entrepreneurial self-image. In the past year or so, James Altucher, a New York-based venture capitalist and finance writer, has emerged through frequent media appearances as something of a poster boy, and his column "8 Alternatives to College" something of an essential text, for the anti-college crusade. The father of two young girls, Altucher has a very personal perspective on college: He doesn't think he should pay for it. "What am I going to do?" he asked last March on Tech Ticker, a popular investment show on Yahoo. "When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?" To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam--college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. "The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That's why they keep raising tuition."
'Private school vouchers are not an effective way to improve student achievement," said the White House in a statement on March 29. "The Administration strongly opposes expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and opening it to new students." But less than three weeks later, President Obama signed a budget deal with Republicans that includes a renewal and expansion of the popular D.C. program, which finances tuition vouchers for low-income kids to attend private schools.
School reformers cheered the administration's about-face though fully aware that it was motivated by political expediency rather than any acknowledgment that vouchers work.
When Mr. Obama first moved to phase out the D.C. voucher program in 2009, his Education Department was in possession of a federal study showing that voucher recipients, who number more than 3,300, made gains in reading scores and didn't decline in math. The administration claims that the reading gains were not large enough to be significant. Yet even smaller positive effects were championed by the administration as justification for expanding Head Start.
What makes the ideal school? After entries from all over the country, Dea Birkett reveals the Children's Manifesto of ideas, from comfy beanbags to soothing music and pets
In January we launched the School I'd Like, asking schoolchildren what would make their perfect school. Hundreds of young people let us know in emails, essays, poems and pictures. From these ideas, we've compiled the Children's Manifesto for the school we'd like, overseen and edited by a panel of 10 children. Some of the ideas are blue-sky thinking: horses and sheep in playgrounds may never be the norm. But many are small and easy to implement. First-aid lessons, a choice of uniform and music instead of bells at break time involve little cost or effort.
Behind these specific, modest requests lie big ideas. The most important aspect of education children want changed is the timetable. They wanted their educational experience to be tailored to them. Sausage-machine schooling, with a one-size-fits-all schedule, is their biggest complaint. They don't want to do less work (although Friday afternoons off was a popular request). They just want work that enthuses and means something to them.
Sen. Kathleen Vinehout suggests that we can't afford expanded school choice in Wisconsin - but history shows that the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has saved the state hundreds of millions of dollars, especially in areas like Vinehout's hometown of Alma.
Vinehout's recent op-ed in the La Crosse Tribune suggested several changes to the proposed 2011 Wisconsin State Budget in order to accommodate potential shifts in fiscal projections over the next two years. One of the Senator's ideas is to cut any proposed expansions to charter school and MPCP. Her emphasis is clearly worded: "Get rid of the charter school expansion and new private school "choice" vouchers. We can't afford them."
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a consortium of 25 states working together to develop a common set of K-12 assessments in English and math anchored in what it takes to be ready for college and careers. These new K-12 assessments will build a pathway to college and career readiness by the end of high school, mark students' progress toward this goal from 3rd grade up, and provide teachers with timely information to inform instruction and provide student support. The PARCC assessments will be ready for states to administer during the 2014-15 school year.
PARCC received an $186 million grant through the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top assessment competition to support the development and design of the next-generation assessment system.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has selected Cami Anderson, a top New York City schools official, to lead the state-run Newark Public School system, according to several people with knowledge of the selection.
Ms. Anderson, 39 years old, will attempt to reform the largest and one of the most troubled public school systems in the state, a district that is the focal point for Mr. Christie's education policy. Newark has about 38,000 students, and only half of them graduate from high school in four years.
Oakland teachers, counselors, principals and other credentialed school-based staff: Friday is the deadline for completing an anonymous online survey about what it's like to work at each school in the district.
How much time do you spend on various tasks during the school day? Outside of the regular school day? Are efforts made at your school to minimize interruptions, or routine paperwork? How much time do you have to collaborate with other teachers?
The results will be published online, by school, in June -- that is, as long as the response rate is at least 50 percent for a given school. If not, those schools will be omitted from the results.So far, roughly one-third have responded, said Ash Solar, who is facilitating the Effective Teaching Task Force. The goal is at least 80 percent. (You can tell how many people from each school have responded by going here.)
I'm thinking of making a web site called "Change the Board" in which I - and others - would advocate for the replacement of the school board majority elected in 2007. The site would have a general argument for replacing the board majority in general and would also have specific arguments for replacing each of the four individual board members.
The web site would be just one part of a whole campaign. There would be other parts than just the web site. It would include press efforts, rallies, truth-squads (to critically examine board campaign claims), online ads, and maybe even some yard signs. I'm thinking that we could promote "Change the Board" as an independent effort separate from each of the individual challenger campaigns. I'd like to try to build some momentum behind "Change the Board" that could support all challengers.
The costs on something like this could be pretty minimal.
There has been much gnashing of teeth and consternation going on about teacher pay and a 3% pay cut teachers may be forced to swallow. What gets to me more than anything else is the vile comments that get posted afterward when an article is posted on teacher pay in the local newspapers. Given the comments, one would think that teachers were getting rich and not doing much to earn the vast sums of money they make. I have to say I look at that with bemusement. I guess it is time to put my cards on the table.
For regular readers of the SSS blog, you already know my story. However, many of you don't. I switched careers in my mid 40's to become a teacher. I am honored to teach math at Rainier Beach HS. I am in my 6th year. I love my job and I love teaching math to students. I think I have a great job. However, here are the facts of my situation.
I hold an undergrad in Accounting and a Masters in Finance. Before I decided to become a teacher, I worked for a bank in investment accounting. In 2003 (my last full year there), I made $75,000 (that included my bonus), had a defined benefit pension plan that my employer fully funded that would make it possible to retire comfortably after 25 years of service with basically with what I would be making in my last year of working, a 401k that the employer matched dollar for dollar up to 4% of my salary. On top of that, my health care was fully paid for and my wife was on the plan at no charge to me also. The plan was a top notch Blue Cross plan with no co-pays and a very, very large network of doctors, dentists, vision and mental health providers available to us. I also had 4 weeks vacation and every holiday off. I also was given a yearly bus pass, so I did not have to drive downtown.
The Board of Education's budget proposal -- which the district wouldn't release to the public after discussing much of it in an illegal closed-door session in late March -- has been outlined in a newsletter mailed last week to district taxpayers.
The Board of Education proposes an $8,637,708 budget with a 5 percent increase in the levy, or amount to be raised by taxes, for the 2011-12 school year. The budget calls for a levy of $3,247,066, up from $3,092,444.
At a meeting in late March, board members went into a 90-minute executive session, purportedly to discuss "personnel" issues. Instead, board members -- returning from their closed session once members of the public had left -- announced they had adopted the framework for a budget. The board said it would cap increases in the tax levy at 5 percent.
In discussing the budget in private, board members broke state law.
In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein pushes the concept of how the public can be manipulated during times of catastrophe or perceived crisis. Lately, it has been argued that the "financial crisis" is being used by market-driven reformers to undermine the public services sector. Specifically, if we look at public education, lawmakers are explicitly telling public schools that they will need to deal with less in the future because of state budget deficits. All of this is done with large support from the citizens because they are "shocked" and believe there is an economic crisis and that any publicly-supported service should be drastically cut to help bring back balanced budgets. Simultaneously, "the shockers" offer rewards in corporate tax cuts and in some cases implement new programs that end up costing the taxpayer more than the proposed cuts.
The citizenry is repeatedly told that the only way out of this budget crisis is to cut spending and that individual citizens (taxpayers) should not take on any of the burden. In fact, the propaganda leveled at the taxpayers also paints them as helpless victims that have been milked by greedy public-sector unions. In turn, the general public becomes very supportive of any promise to lift their burden and somewhat celebratory in watching their neighbors (public sector employees) lose, at a minimum, basic benefits.
Kaleem Caire has spent much of the last year making a passionate, personal and controversial pitch for a publicly funded male-only charter school called Madison Preparatory that would operate independently of the Madison Metropolitan School District. It aims to serve primarily minority boys in grades six through 12 and their families.
Caire, a Madison native and the president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, has mustered a great deal of community support by highlighting the struggles of and grim statistics surrounding black and Hispanic young boys and men in Dane County, and through telling his own powerful story of underachievement in Madison's public schools.
"I learned about racism and lower expectations for minority kids when I arrived the first day at Cherokee Middle School, and all the black boys and a few other minorities sat at tables in the back. I was assigned to remedial math, and even when I showed the teacher I already knew how to do those worksheets, that's where I was stuck," Caire says.
With its emphasis on discipline, family involvement, preppy-looking uniforms and a non-negotiable stance on being a union-free school, Caire's proposal for the boys-only middle and high school has won hundreds of enthusiastic supporters, including a number of prominent conservatives who, surprisingly, don't seem particularly troubled by the school's price tag.
Some might argue that certain programs within "traditional" public schools are experimental, such as Connected Math and Small Learning Communities among others.
Christina School District teachers at two of the state's lowest-achieving schools had 20 minutes to prove their worth.
Each was asked the same questions by a panel that included fellow teachers, district administrators and one state Department of Education official. Their answers were the only factors that determined whether each teacher would remain at Glasgow High School or Stubbs Elementary as part of the district's Race to the Top reforms.
Nineteen were not asked to stay. They will get a job at another district school.
Falling enrollment, budget cuts and layoff have led to corresponding declines in membership for most National Education Association state affiliates. Without compensatory action, fewer members mean less dues revenue - a situation these unions have not had to face in recent memory.
As the numbers show quite clearly, even lean times do not mean NEA's affiliates will become destitute. There is an awful lot of cash flowing through union headquarters around the country. But union officers and representatives are quick to find ways to spend it, particularly on their own employees. Adjusting budgets downwards is not their strong suit.
NEA itself had to revise its budget to account for membership loss and a smaller-than-planned increase in dues. It also froze the pay of its executive officers for the 2011-12 school year.
Two NEA state affiliates - California and Wisconsin - have different troubles to face in different political environments, so we shouldn't be surprised that they are applying different measures to their fiscal problems.
The California Teachers Association sets its dues level by a formula that involves the average teacher salary over the last three years. With layoffs occurring almost exclusively at the bottom of the salary scale, it actually has the effect of driving up the state's average teacher salary, and thus the dues level. With fewer members, CTA will raise its dues $8 next fall, to $647. This will mitigate the money lost, but not cover it entirely.
......
WEAC announced the cancellation of its fall convention, citing the uncertainty of whether it will be allowed to bargain the time off for its members. However, holding these events each year is also a budgetary drain, one that other NEA state affiliates have been forced to face.
Despite the serious state of financial affairs, WEAC is allocating up to $2 million for lobbying, legal action and internal communications in order to turn the political tide. It has, and will continue to receive, monetary and manpower assistance from NEA and other affiliates, including California.
These early signs indicate that the likely outcome of the collective bargaining battles in statehouses across the country is financially weaker teachers' unions - but only relatively. Overall, there may be fewer members and fewer staffers. The unions may require special assessments or higher dues increases just to restore former revenues. But $1.5 billion annually is still an awful lot of money. We may see it applied in concentrated form on the unions' existential issues, not diffused among feel-good projects.
If you've been wondering what's behind the recent resurgence of voucher bills in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Florida, Wisconsin and other states, researcher Rachel Tabachnick has done a remarkable job following the money -- some of which leads back to Democrats for Education Reform, a group familiar to those who follow school choice debates here in New York. According to her recent two-part series (which can be read here and here), much of the money and support for the voucher movement has come from groups linked to Betsy DeVos,
a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party; daughter of the late Edgar Prince and Elsa Prince-Broekhuizen; sister of Blackwater-founder Erik Prince; and wife of Dick DeVos (son of Richard and Helen DeVos). The Devos side of the family fortune comes from Amway/Alticor, the controversial, multi-tiered home products business. A Center for Public Integrity Report showed that the DeVos family and business interests were the fifth largest contributors in the 2003 -2004 election cycle, with 100% of the donations going to Republicans. Dick and Betsy DeVos have been credited with helping to finance the Citizens United case which allows Super PACs to raise unlimited funds and conceal the donors, meaning that we will no longer know who provides the millions of dollars for the big media campaigns, or reveal the information that I have in this article on the Pennsylvania campaign. The Prince and Devos families have also funded the Family Research Council, Focus on Family, and the ministries of the late D. James Kennedy, all warriors against separation of church and state.
India is considering allowing Western universities to plant satellite campuses directly in the subcontinent's fertile soil.
There is a bill currently making its way through the Indian parliament -- The Foreign Educational Institutions Bill -- that would open up for universities in the West, particularly in the U.S., a massive English-speaking market. Massive is the key word. We're talking hundreds of thousands of Indian students reaching college age who are interested in an education that would allow them to better participate in a globalizing economy.
At first glance, the passage of the bill, which is being pushed ahead by Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, benefits Western universities by providing them with a growth opportunity and allowing access to a well-educated student population interested in an education whose brand is recognized across the world.
The Madison School District is under added pressure to improve how it identifies and educates talented and gifted students after state officials found its program does not comply with state law.
In revealing shortcomings in the district's offerings for talented and gifted (TAG) students, the Department of Public Instruction challenges the approach some schools, particularly West High School, have used in which all students learn together.
"The district is going to have to face (the question): 'How do they reconcile their policy of inclusion with honors classes?'?" said Carole Trone, director of the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth at UW-Madison. "If parents see the other districts are challenging their students more, they might send their students there."
Developing a comprehensive system to identify TAG students -- including testing and staff training -- can be expensive, Trone said. Moreover, districts that don't identify students from all socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds open themselves up to discrimination lawsuits, she said.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said it's unclear how much such a revamped program will cost.
When our school administrators speak to the public, we often hear one or more of the following:
Blaming of others - Typical targets include teachers, parents, students, poverty, and a (fake) lack of money.
Deceitful presentation of student outcomes - They'll speak glowingly of some stray statistic that supposedly shows them in a slightly more positive light, but which also depends on the public not knowing the entire truth of it.
Astonishing ignorance or accidental honesty. Sometimes the truth comes out of them - in shocking or comical ways.
Requests for more money, on the heels of low student achievement. As pass rates go down, the expense per student continues to increase.
New policy that will serve their ulterior purpose, but which will make life more difficult for students, parents and teachers.
And so it went, at two recent gatherings for Spokane Public Schools. Teachers were blamed. Administrators praised themselves. The superintendent's comments caused a stir. And the school board voted to increase class sizes and cut 90 teachers.
.......
Increased expense for unproved programs
Taxpayers pay for scads of district and community programs devoted to reducing dropout rates and increasing on-time graduation rates. As district expenditures skyrocket, parents are still staring at students' low pass rates, high dropout rates, high rates of college remediation, and low levels of basic skills.
Dr. Stowell praised the district for obtaining a multi-million-dollar grant for Rogers High School, which suffers from particularly low graduation rates. (Please note the illogic of awarding grants to failing programs because they are failing. Failure thus results in more money.) Dr. Stowell said the grant will pay for longer school days, extra teacher pay, a homework center, and - you knew it was coming - a pilot evaluation for teachers.
Part I of a new blog series exploring data from Ohio e-schools. While online learning is still new to the vast majority of K-12 students and schools, Ohio has operated "e-schools," public charter schools that operate entirely online and which students "attend" on a full-time basis, for a decade. As policy debates around online learning grow, what do we know about these schools-who do they enroll and how well do they perform-and what can we learn from Ohio's e-school experience?
In 2001, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), Ohio's first charter 'e-school', opened its doors. Soon there were 27 e-schools across the state. And, despite a moratorium that has prevented any new schools from opening since 2005, total e-school enrollment has skyrocketed to over 29,000 students.
With several new GOP governors taking power, shock if not awe pervades the Midwest, particularly among those of us who are Democratic urban dwellers. Perhaps the wave of corporate tax breaks, service cuts to the needy, and transfer of school aid from poor to wealthy districts will be undone with the next swing of the political pendulum. Yet there is one GOP budget provision in Wisconsin that I hope survives.
For 20 years there's been debate about parental school choice, but only a few places actually have it. Milwaukee has had choice since 1991. At first it was very limited--no religious schools, the program restricted to families with very low incomes, and a cap on total enrollment of 1,000. But parents are now able to choose religious schools, the income limit has been raised to 175% of the federal poverty line ($39,113), and the cap has increased to 22,500 students.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has proposed allowing any Milwaukee parent, regardless of income, to enroll their children in private and parochial schools. This will address two problems with the current choice program. One, the cap on total enrollment has forced parents onto waiting lists and into lotteries. Two, the income limit has the effect of isolating low-income students from other more affluent students.
Other jurisdictions, including Florida, Arizona and Cleveland, have choice programs. In Washington, D.C., choice was implemented under President George W. Bush and frozen under President Barack Obama. But Florida's program requires a public school to fail, with failure measured by the state, not by parents. And all choice programs have limitations that undermine the desire of parents to have their children attend a school in which they have confidence. Yet if you think about it, America already has a school choice program in large metro areas. It's a system that segregates the poor from the rich and works against Americans who want to live in cities. Here's how it works.
OF all the goals of the education reform movement, none is more elusive than developing an objective method to assess teachers. Studies show that over time, test scores do not provide a consistent means of separating good from bad instructors.
Test scores are an inadequate proxy for quality because too many factors outside of the teachers' control can influence student performance from year to year -- or even from classroom to classroom during the same year. Often, more than half of those teachers identified as the poorest performers one year will be judged average or above average the next, and the results are almost as bad for teachers with multiple classes during the same year.
Fortunately, there's a far more direct approach: measuring the amount of time a teacher spends delivering relevant instruction -- in other words, how much teaching a teacher actually gets done in a school day.
GreatSchools is headquartered in San Francisco, home of the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). And it just so happens that San Francisco Unified is on the vanguard of school choice, allowing and encouraging all parents to make a proactive choice about which of the districts' approximately 160 schools they would like their children to attend.
SFUSD recently completed the "first round" of its school selection process for the 2011-12 school year, and released some interesting information about the process.
Like most districts, SFUSD has the concept of an "attendance area" for elementary schools. Perhaps the most interesting piece of data is that only 23 percent of kindergarten applicants listed their attendance-area school as a first choice. The remainder: 24 percent listed a city-wide school, and 53 percent listed another attendance area school as their first choice.
• School districts where students show an average of one year academic growth per year of instruction would get bonus money, on top of per-pupil state aid. Some individual schools might qualify. In the 2012-13 School Aid Fund, $300 million would be set aside for rewards.
• Some funding for all districts would be tied to achievement, not enrollment.
• Tougher standards for individual schools to ensure academic progress.
• Require all districts to develop online dashboard that shows funding and academic progress. Prohibit districts from paying more than 80% of employee health care; those that fail would lose some state per-pupil funding.
House Republican leaders have backed away from an earlier stand that teachers be allowed to continue collective bargaining on base salaries and benefits, clearing the way for total repeal of bargaining between teachers and school boards.
The Tennessee Education Association, which represents 52,000 of the state's 65,000 public classroom teachers, plans to continue lobbying House members before Tuesday's key committee vote in hopes of a last-ditch compromise. But TEA spokesman Jerry Winters said teacher morale "is horrible" and warned that if the negotiations law is repealed, "we're going to make sure that they go before these school boards and wear them out on some of these issues."
The Senate will likely approve the repeal bill Monday, after deferring its planned vote Thursday to give members time to review another new amendment by the bill's sponsor. Minutes later, House Speaker Beth Harwell endorsed the Senate version, which she said resulted from talks with House Republican leaders.
Governor Mitch Daniels signed Senate Enrolled Act 1 Saturday, a key measure in his comprehensive education reform package that changes the way teachers are evaluated and paid.
According to the governor's office, for the first time in Indiana, teacher effectiveness will be part of decisions for hiring, salary and promotions.
"Among all the things we can do to make more successful the children of this state, nothing comes close to a better teacher. We are so glad that Indiana has leaped to the forefront by saying to people of all backgrounds and all walks of life, 'come and teach,'" Daniels said, surrounded by Hoosier teachers from such organizations as Stand for Children, Students First and Teach for America.
Sen. Dennis Kruse, R-Auburn, was the author of the bill; Rep. Robert Behning, R-Indianapolis was the sponsor.
Gov. Chris Christie took his fight with the state's largest teacher's union to Harvard on Friday, repeating his claims that the New Jersey Education Association is the source of most education problems and calling them a "political thuggery operation."
The governor also acknowledged he has thought about the tough rhetoric he uses when describing the union, but said he would only stop if he is convinced the NJEA is willing to help change "the failed system."
Speaking to about 250 students and professors at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, Christie said his battle with the NJEA "is the only fight worth having," drawing applause.
"They're there to protect the lowest performers, to protect a system of post-production compensation," Christie said of the union. "For you to believe that's for the kids, you have to believe that a child will learn better under the warm comforting knowledge that a teacher pays nothing for their health benefits."
Conservatives may see Harvard as the heart of liberal darkness, but on Friday it gave a warm, even enthusiastic reception to Gov. Chris Christie and his ideas on education overhaul.
Speaking to almost 200 students and staff members at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the New Jersey governor drew rounds of applause with his talk of sharply limiting teacher tenure, rigorously evaluating teachers and administrators, curbing the power of teachers' unions and pledging to appoint more-conservative justices to the State Supreme Court.
Mr. Christie's first ovation came when he said, "The reason I'm engaging in this battle with the teachers' union is because it's the only fight worth having."
he ground he covered would be familiar to anyone who has watched the town hall-style forums in New Jersey that have made Mr. Christie a YouTube star. There, at least a few detractors usually show up to question him, and his policies and pugnacious statements can make even some supporters uncomfortable.
But here, during Mr. Christie's 40-minute opening talk and a question-and-answer session of the same length, the response was less equivocal.
The doorbell wasn't working when Bob Kattman visited a school recently. Kattman sent the principal an email afterward saying that he expected that wouldn't be the case the next time he arrived.
Kattman isn't particularly meddlesome or picky - in fact, his reputation is the opposite. But he has expectations for what he wants to see in a school. An orderly, functioning atmosphere where things like doorbells work is part of the recipe.
Other critical ingredients: strong school leadership, a united and energized staff, a clear academic program (although what the program is can vary widely), a focus on achievement, skillful use of data, an effective character education program for students and a climate in which everyone from the principal to the students is continuously asks how to do things better.
The success overall of the dozen schools in Milwaukee that Kattman oversees as head of the charter school office at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is one of the most important and promising developments on the education scene in Milwaukee and perhaps well beyond.
In one corner of the courtyard, green-painted railings enclose the tomb of a saint. In another, a pair of 12-year-old boys in spotless white shirts and neatly pressed trousers politely answer visitors' questions. In Diyarbakir, a city in Turkey's Kurdish south-east where many children work on the streets or land in jail for throwing stones at security forces, these two have come to prepare for high school entrance exams. Asked what they want to do later, one says "doctor" and the other, grinning, declares "police".
They are attending a study house run by supporters of Fethullah Gulen - a preacher who has inspired the creation of a vast network of schools and student dormitories that blend academic rigour, especially in the sciences, with a moral education based on Islamic principles.
"It's not just explaining English or maths - it's explaining what it means to be a good or bad person," says the director of Diyarbakir's 20 study houses. "In this system teachers come to school earlier, become friends with students and care about the relationship....In none of our schools do we teach religion. We tell them what's right and wrong. We show them good and bad practice, and they decide."
But in Turkey, opinion is sharply divided between those who see Mr Gulen as a force for social mobility and tolerance, and those who suspect he is insidiously undermining the country's secular foundations. His followers have been described as "Islamic Jesuits" - and as Turkey's equivalent of Opus Dei. Yet there is little doubt that the movement he inspires is now an important force shaping Turkish society, part of a broader evolution in which leaders emerging from a religious, business-minded middle class are gradually eclipsing older, fiercely secular, elites.
It's not home schooling, but it's not traditional school either: There is a range of arrangements parents can make to enroll kids in public schools while keeping them at home.
With help from the Internet and oversight by teachers, parents in many of the so-called Alternative Learning Experiences, or ALEs, have wide authority to chart their children's course. But state officials are taking steps to rein in activities seen as inappropriate for taxpayers to fund.
A rule Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn's office has developed would stop school districts from reimbursing parents of at-home enrolled students for what they buy. Instead, districts would pay directly for equipment and activities.
Reimbursements, also called stipends or parent accounts, can be used to pay for textbooks and basic supplies or for instruction in areas such as fine arts and physical education. A 2005 state audit found it was common for schools to pay for opportunities most students don't have: private gym memberships; music or horseback-riding lessons; ski rentals, lessons and lift tickets.
"Stipends can give the impression that ALE programs are essentially publicly financed home schooling," the superintendent's office said in a February description of concerns about the present rules.
One of the most negative reactions to the piece has come from former Chancellor Joel Klein, who (in an email exchange with the reporter) responded defensively to the article's implied criticism of his own administration's support for charters:
A thought-provoking article about a successful district middle school in the Bronx in a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine has led to some interesting public responses from charter advocates in New York. As the article notes, this school's principal and teachers combine innovative teaching and learning (such as a dual-language immersion program for its high proportion of English Language Learners) with a firm commitment to serving all students who want to come -- even if, unlike at charters, those students arrive in the middle of the year or as transfers in upper grades.
One of the most negative reactions to the piece has come from former Chancellor Joel Klein, who (in an email exchange with the reporter) responded defensively to the article's implied criticism of his own administration's support for charters:
Several media outlets, including the Grant County Herald Independent in Lancaster (the first newspaper I worked for, back when Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush were president) and the Wisconsin State Journal, are reporting an unprecedented number of teacher retirements as the latest consequence of Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to defang public employee unions.
The Herald Independent's story (to which I can't post since the Herald Independent is not online, so you'll have to trust me) includes a number of teachers from not just my days at the Herald Independent, but from my wife's days as a Lancaster High School student.
That is big news. It would be unprecedented big news if your memory includes only years that begin with the number 2. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s (and possibly before that), the state would occasionally encourage early retirements as, yes, a way to reduce spending on employee compensation, since the teachers in the classroom the longest were the highest paid given how teachers' pay is set.
In those days, the "rule of 85" applied -- if your age and years as a teacher (or other government employee, although I don't recall covering other government employee retirements) totaled 85 (for instance, you were 55 years old and you had taught for 30 years), you could retire with full benefits. The "rule of 85" appears to have been replaced by "the rule of 30" -- full retirement benefits kick in for anyone in the Wisconsin Retirement System with 30 years' service, although retiring employees younger than 57 have reduced benefits until their 57th birthday.
This week Governor McDonnell announced, as part of his "Opportunity to Learn" education reform agenda, an initiative to institute performance-pay at Virginia schools that are designated as "hard to staff."
While performance-pay is supported by President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, many Democrats side with teachers unions in opposing performance-pay. I have been critical of many aspects of Governor McDonnell's education policy including his lack of adequate funding and partisan decision not to participate in Race to the Top. This latest initiative however, is worthy of support.
Indiana will create the nation's broadest private school voucher system and enact other sweeping education changes, making the state a showcase of conservative ideas just as Gov. Mitch Daniels nears an announcement on whether he will make a 2012 presidential run.
The Republican-controlled state legislature handed Daniels a huge victory Wednesday when the House voted 55-43 to give final approval to a bill creating the voucher program that would allow even middle-class families to use taxpayer money to send their children to private schools.
In the midst of the Great Recession and severe investment declines, the gap between the promises states made for employees' retirement benefits and the money they set aside to pay for them grew to at least $1.26 trillion in fiscal year 2009, resulting in a 26 percent increase in one year.
State pension plans represented slightly more than half of this shortfall, with $2.28 trillion stowed away to cover $2.94 trillion in long-term liabilities--leaving about a $660 billion gap, according to an analysis by the Pew Center on the States. Retiree health care and other benefits accounted for the remaining $604 billion, with assets totaling $31 billion to pay for $635 billion in liabilities. Pension funding shortfalls surpassed funding gaps for retiree health care and other benefits for the first time since states began reporting liabilities for the latter in fiscal year 2006.
Precipitous revenue declines in fiscal year 2009 severely depleted state coffers and constrained their ability to pay their annual retirement bills. States' own actuaries recommended that they contribute nearly $115 billion to build up enough assets to fully fund their promises over the long term, but they contributed only $73 billion--or 64 percent of the total annual bill. This 2009 payment represents a three percentage point decline from the previous fiscal year's contribution, when they set aside just under $72 billion toward a $108 billion requirement.
If people are upset about the Sheboygan Area School District's proposed $13.8 million in cuts to balance the 2011-12 budget, they didn't come to Tuesday's school board meeting to say so.
At the board's regular meeting, Superintendent Joe Sheehan took the members through the proposed cuts quickly, fielded a few questions and didn't elaborate at all on more than $73,000 in cuts in co-curricular activities.
The meeting was held at the North High School Commons, but the roughly 40-person crowd didn't come close to filling it up. No one other than school officials or board members spoke about the cuts.
As legislators look for ways to take some of the sting out of Gov. John Kasich's school-funding plan, a Dispatch analysis finds that the districts that would feel the deepest cuts are generally those where taxpayers are making the least effort to fund their schools.
Using Department of Education data that attempt to measure how much taxpayers give to their schools compared with their ability to pay, the computer analysis suggests that, on average, districts facing the biggest percentage cuts are also those where residents could most afford to pay more in local taxes.
Kasich's school-funding plan, which would cut $852million from schools over two years, leaves no district unscathed. But it is designed to protect poorer districts that rely more heavily on state funding to run their schools.
We just received a tip that Seattle Public School students are using high-tech to steal teacher passwords, hack systems, and alter grades. I am waiting for SPS to confirm this.
According to an email sent by the district's Chief Informational Officer Jim Ratchford at 11:15 a.m. today to SPS employees, including Interim Superintendent Susan Enfield, Department of Technology Services has determined that network log-in credentials "are being stolen and used to inappropriately access district systems."
The email, whose subject line reads "Unauthorized Access Warning," says that the incident "appears to have been going on for the last few weeks, possibly longer." "At this point, we are aware of this happening at these schools: Ballard, Ingraham, and Sealth. However, all schools and teachers are at risk," Ratchford says in his email.
Two-thirds of Madison teachers participated in at least one day of a coordinated four-day absence in February to protest Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to curb collective bargaining, according to information released by the school district Friday.
According to the district, 1,769 out of 2,655 teachers took time off during the four days without a legitimate excuse. The records also show 84 teachers submitted fraudulent sick notes; 38 received suspensions for failing to rescind the notes by April 15, a deadline set by the district.
The exact number of teachers who caused school to shut down on Feb. 16-18 and 21 was unknown until now. The numbers "validate our decision to close our schools," Superintendent Dan Nerad said in a statement.
"We realize the challenges that our students' families experienced as a result of these school closings," Nerad said. "So we appreciate that we have been able to return since then to normal school schedules and that students have returned to advancing their learning through the work of our excellent staff members."
Madison Teachers Inc. Executive Director John Matthews acknowledged Feb. 15 that the union was encouraging members to call in sick to attend protests at the Capitol. It was the union's first coordinated work stoppage since 1,900 out of 2,300 teachers called in sick to protest contract negotiations in September 1997.
On Friday, Matthews emphasized that teachers accepted the consequences of their actions by agreeing to docked pay for the days missed. He called the suspension letters "a badge of honor for standing up for workplace justice."
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Wednesday it would be investing $20 million to bring new national education standards into the classroom using game-based learning, social-networking and other approaches to capture the imagination of bored or unmotivated students.
The Seattle-based foundation is partnering with the nonprofit arm of one of the largest textbook publishers in the United States to create the new learning tools and offer some of the materials for teachers and school districts to use for free. It is also working with education game developers and an online public school in Florida for this project.
Judy Codding, the Pearson Foundation executive leading the course development team, said during a news conference that her organization already planned to be involved in developing new ways to help teachers adopt the new national education standards that will replace local learning goals in more than 40 states.
The partnership with the Gates Foundation offers the philanthropic side of the textbook company the money it needs to really innovate and try out new ideas that catch kids' attention, said Codding, former president and CEO of America's Choice, an education reform company acquired last year by Pearson.
On Easter weekend, I went to a wedding in Michigan. The occasion featured a radiant young couple who are expecting their first child in June, amidst a loving community of family and friends. As it happened, many of the people assembled were teachers. And so, on this April weekend, with the countryside greening around us and signs of new life everywhere, I found myself engaged in many conversations about teachers and schooling.
I was struck by the optimism and ambition of many of these young people embarking on careers in education. With their talent and accomplishments, they could select careers that are much more financially rewarding than teaching. But instead, they have chosen the classroom as a site to try to make the world better. They see education as a place to help train young minds and create engaged communities.
One young man, a second-generation teacher, told me that he thinks he affects many more lives as a teacher than he did in his prior work as a student leader and activist. Teaching seventh- and eighth-graders on the south side of Chicago, he explained, forces him to keep learning with his students, to keep their interest and to motivate them.
At a board meeting of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board on Wednesday, Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes said that $10,000 bachelor's degrees -- books included -- as proposed by Gov. Rick Perry are "entirely feasible."
He hopes to have concrete proposals and coursework in place to meet the challenge before the start of the next legislative session in 2013.
A repeated theme in the board's discussion about the governor's cost-cutting proposal was that they were not seeking to replace existing degrees or artificially push the costs of those down, but were rather seeking to provide alternative options for low-income students. "We're not talking about every field," Paredes said. "We're not talking about every baccalaureate degree. We're not talking about every student."
Gov. Rick Snyder said today he wants to retool Michigan's school system so it demands and rewards performance in terms of student achievement.
He detailed changes to merit pay and the teacher tenure system; approval for more charter schools; a new state office devoted to early childhood education; tough anti-bullying measures; a greater emphasis on online education; and a more flexible system in which state funding would follow students wherever they go, rather than being assigned to a particular school district.
Further, the governor announced as many as 23 financially distressed school districts could be placed under emergency managers who have beefed-up powers to scrap collective bargaining agreements under controversial legislation he recently signed into law.
Snyder also expanded "Schools of Choice" plans and said residents of a local district will have the first opportunity to enroll there, but schools will no longer be able to refuse out-of-district students. And he called for consolidation and competitive bidding of school district business and administrative functions.
Los Angeles schools will remove high-sugar chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk from their lunch and breakfast menus after food activists campaigned for the change, L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy announced this week.
Deasy revealed his intent, which will require approval by the Los Angeles Unified Board of Education, during an appearance with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" Tuesday night.
The policy change is part of a carefully negotiated happy ending between the Los Angeles Unified School District and Oliver. The chef's confrontations with the school system became a main theme in the current season of the TV reality show "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution."
The timing of the flavored-milk ban, which had been under consideration for some time, gave Oliver a positive outcome and allowed the nation's second-largest school system to escape the villain's role. Deasy quickly alerted the school board to the deal before going on television.
Karen Lewis tells it like it is--- there are the reasons for the way teachers are compensated, and all of the little faddish fixes that are trumpeted by the corporate reform crowd aren't going to amount to a hill of beans. Unless, you make that hill of beans very small, very segregated, and ultimately very meaningless.
Higher education institutions, whether they are private or public, have an obligation to be transparent about the design and operations of their teacher preparation programs. After all, these institutions have all been publicly approved to prepare public school teachers.
Here at Transparency Central, you can keep track of whether colleges and universities are living up to their obligation to be open. Just click on a state to learn more about the transparency of individual institutions there.
NCTQ is asking institutions to provide documents that describe the fundamental aspects of their teacher preparation programs: the subject matter teachers are supposed to know, the real-world classroom practice they are supposed to get, the outcomes that they achieve once they enter the classroom. Taken together, the evidence we gathering will answer a key question: Are individual programs setting high expectations for what new teachers should know and be able to do for their students?
A number of institutions have let us know that they do not intend to cooperate with our review, some even before we formally asked them for documents. As a result, we have begun to make open records requests using state "sunshine" (or "freedom of information act") laws.
We'll be regularly updating our progress, so come back soon to learn more about our efforts to bring transparency to teacher prep.
Voters overwhelmingly believe that taxpayers are not getting a good return on what they spend on public education, and just one-in-three voters think spending more will make a difference.
Nationally, the United States spends an average of about $9,000 per student per year. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 11% of voters think the taxpayers are getting a good return on that investment. Seventy-two percent (72%) disagree and say taxpayers are not getting their money's worth. Sixteen percent (16%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Thirty-four percent (34%) voters believe student performance will improve if more money is spent on funding for schools and educations programs. A plurality (41%) disagrees and thinks that increased spending will not lead to improve student performance. Twenty-five percent (25%) aren't sure.
The survey also found that voters tend to underestimate how much is spent on education. Thirty-nine percent (39%) say the average per student expenditure is less than $9,000 per year while only 12% think it's higher than that. Nine percent (9%) estimate the right amount but a plurality of 40% is not sure. There is a wide range of expenditure on education depending upon the state and region.
School districts in southeastern Wisconsin pay significantly more for health insurance than do private businesses - as much as 76% more - and their employees bear much less of the overall cost, an analysis released Wednesday shows.
The relatively small contribution teachers in general make to their insurance coverage drew considerable attention during the superheated debate over Gov. Scott Walker's budget-repair bill and his bid to sharply limit collective bargaining by most government employees.
Less discussed has been the cost of the insurance plans, which significantly outweigh those offered by private-sector employers, according to an analysis by HCTrends, which describes itself as "a market-oriented forum" on health care issues.
For single coverage, southeastern Wisconsin school districts paid 76% more than private businesses in 2009-'10, according to HCTrends.
School districts in southeastern Wisconsin are paying twice as much for health insurance as private sector companies in Milwaukee, according to a new study by HCTrends. That's just the beginning of what the group found in its study of school district health insurance expenses in 2010.
"Health plan costs for the region's teachers are 63 percent higher, on average, than the plans offered at private-sector companies with some union representation, and 80 percent higher than the average single-coverage cost for all private-sector plans," according to the study.
"This combination of above-average plan costs and below-average employee contributions significantly increases the school district's health care costs. While the average teachers' plan costs 80 percent more than the average private-sector plan, the per-employee cost borne by the school district is twice as much as the cost borne by the average employer."
Philadelphia Deputy superintendent attended King High School private meeting
.com/philly/news/120557249.html">Martha Woodall:
hiladelphia Deputy School Superintendent Leroy Nunery has found himself involved in a power struggle over control of Martin Luther King High School.
Nunery was at the closed-door meeting of State Rep. Dwight Evans, School Reform Commission Chairman Robert L. Archie Jr., and an official from Mosaica Turnaround Partners that prompted the Atlanta company to drop its plans to convert King into a charter school.
District spokeswoman Jamilah Fraser on Saturday confirmed information The Inquirer had obtained from sources inside and outside the district that Nunery was the unidentified "district representative" mentioned in a statement about the meeting March 16. The session took place right after the SRC voted, 3-0, to select Mosaica to run King in the fall.
The next day, Mosaica backed out of its plans to run the East Germantown school.
Nunery, Fraser said, did not speak at the private meeting and had no advance notice of it.
The best schools -- whether they're charter schools, public schools or private schools -- are intentional about everything they do, says educational analyst Andrew Rotherham.
"They are intentional about who is in the building, who is teaching, how they use data, what's happening for students, the support for students, the curriculum, how progress is assessed," he says. "Everything is intentional and nothing is left to chance."
On Thursday's Fresh Air, Rotherham explains why he supports strategies that will redesign American public education with the help of charter schools, public sector choices and teacher accountability.
Rotherham is a partner at Bellwether Education, a nonprofit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. Bellwether advises grant-making organizations like The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, educational nonprofits and charter school networks on their operational and public policy issues.
Rotherham, who served in the Clinton administration as a special assistant of domestic policy, now spends his days thinking about how to make public and charter schools work for more kids. The public school system worked for him, he says, but only because he grew up in a nice suburb outside Washington, D.C.
The achievement gap between white and minority students has nothing to do with aptitude but correlates to socioeconomic factors such as poverty, racism and family structure. Still, it stands to reason that states with higher percentages of lower-performing students will perform lower in the aggregate than states with higher percentages of better performing students.
Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress test are broken down for ethnicity. The scores show white students in Texas consistently score higher than white students in Wisconsin, and black and Hispanic students in Texas also outscore their Wisconsin counterparts.
As for the writer's statement that Texas licenses mere four-year college graduates rather than school of education graduates, I say "good for Texas!" It's ironic that the most engaging teachers at our colleges and universities, such as UW-Madison's famous chemistry professor Bassam Shakhashiri, would not be allowed to teach in a Wisconsin public school because most have no degrees in education.
One indication of how disingenuous the world of public education has become is the sympathy some of us apparently feel for veteran Madison teachers who feel compelled to retire early.
As this newspaper detailed Sunday, early retirements have spiked over concerns about what Gov. Scott Walker's bid to curtail public sector collective bargaining rights will mean for teachers' retirements.
It's clear teachers beginning their careers today could be subjected to lots of things the private sector has had to endure for a long time (e.g., merit evaluations, higher health care costs). What puzzles me is what veteran teachers risk by working a few more years -- especially given the love they express for the job.
Take, for example, teachers' ability to parlay unused sick days into health insurance coverage or other benefits after they retire.
District spokesman Ken Syke said the district's legal team has not produced an opinion on this. But teachers union president John Matthews was certain it was a benefit long-time teachers would retain.
I. Introduction A.Title/topic-Talented and Gifted Compliance
B. Presenter/contact person -Sue Abplanalp, Jennifer Allen, Pam Nash and Dylan Pauly
Background information- On March 24,2011, MMSD received DPI's initial findings in the matter ofthe TAG complaint. DPI found MMSD to be noncompliant on all four counts. The Board has forty-five days from the date of receipt ofthe initial findings to petition the state superintendent for a public hearing. If the Board does not request such a hearing, the findings will become final. Once the findings are final, regardless of whether a hearing is held, if there is a finding of noncompliance, the state superintendent may develop with the Board a plan for compliance. The plan must contain a time line for achievement of compliance that cannot exceed ninety days. An extension of the time period may be requested if extenuating or mitigating circumstances exist.
II. Summary of Current Information:
Current Status: Currently, DPI has made an initial finding of noncompliance against MMSD. While the Board is entitled to request a public hearing on the issue of compliance, the administration does not recommend this course of action. Consequently, at this time, the administration is working toward the development ofa response to DPI's findings, which will focus on remedial steps to insure compliance.
Proposal: Staff are working on a response to the preliminary findings which we will present to the Board when completed. It is the administration's hope that this response will serve as the foundation to the compliance plan that will be developed once the DPI findings are final. The response will include input from the TAG Advisory Committee, the District's TAG professionals -- our Coordinator and staff. A meeting to begin work one the proposed response is currently scheduled for April28, 2011 from 4:00 p.m.-5:00pm. Subsequent meetings will follow.
I. Introduction A. Title/topic -Alternative Redesign to Address Mental Health Concerns B. Presenter/contact person- Sue Abplanalp, John Harper, Pam Nash and Nancy Yoder
Background information -The Purpose of this Proposal: Research shows that half of all lifetime cases of mental illness begin by age 14.1 Scientists are discovering that changes in the body leading to mental illness may start much earlier, before any symptoms appear.
Helping young children and their parents manage difficulties early in life may prevent the development of disorders. Once mental illness develops, it becomes a regular part of a child's behavior and more difficult to treat. Even though doctors know how to treat (though not yet cure) many disorders, a majority of children with mental illnesses are not getting treatment (National Institute of Mental Health).
II. Summary of Current Information: Success is defined as the achievement ofsomething desired and planned. As a steering committee, our desire and plan is to promote a strategic hub in three sites (Hoyt, Whitehorse and Cherokee) that connect, support and sustain students with mental health issues in a more inclusive environment with appropriate professionals, in order to maximize students' success in middle school and help them achieve their aspirations in a setting that is appropriate for their needs. The new site will also offer mini clinics from a community provider
Current Status: Currently, there is one program housed at Hoyt that serves 28-30 students in self contained settings. There is currently a ratio of 1:4 with 4 staff and 4 special educational assistants assigned to the program. In addition, there is a Cluster Program housed at Sherman with 2 adults and 6-7 students in the program.
Proposal: This proposal leaves approximately half of the students and staff at the current Hoyt site (those students who pose more of a danger to self or others) and removes all of the students and staff from Sherman (no program at Sherman) to the new sites. Students will attend either Whitehorse or Cherokee Middle Schools with a program that provides ongoing professional help and is more inclusive as students will be assigned to homerooms and classes, with alternative settings in the school to support them when they need a more restrictive environment with support from a smaller student ratio and a psychologist or social worker that is assigned to the team.
This initiative was discussed during Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting. Watch the discussion here (beginning at 180 minutes).
I find myself haunted by a 13-year-old boy named Saquan Townsend. It's been more than two weeks since he was featured in The New York Times Magazine, yet I can't get him out of my mind.
The article, by Jonathan Mahler, was about the heroic efforts of Ramón González, the principal of M.S. 223, a public middle school in the South Bronx, to make his school a place where his young charges can get a decent education and thus, perhaps, a better life. Surprisingly, though, González is not aligned with the public school reform movement, even though one of the movement's leading lights, Joel Klein, was until fairly recently his boss as the head of the New York City school system.
Instead, González comes across as a skeptic, wary of the enthusiasm for, as the article puts it, "all of the educational experimentation" that took place on Klein's watch. At its core, the reform movement believes that great teachers and improved teaching methods are all that's required to improve student performance, so that's all the reformers focus on. But it takes a lot more than that. Which is where Saquan comes in. His part of the story represents difficult truths that the reform movement has yet to face squarely -- and needs to.
Teachers' union activists in Chicago are contending with their union president's decision to back legislation that all but bans them from striking and makes major concessions to the corporate education "reform" agenda.
Reform groups that lead teachers unions are also having debates in Los Angeles, where the election for the union presidency was recently won by a challenger to the incumbent reform caucus, and in Washington, D.C., where a newly elected officers offered to take a pay freeze to save jobs.
But the biggest controversy is in Chicago, where Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Karen Lewis shocked members of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), a reform group that was the backbone of her candidacy last year, by personally giving the union's endorsement for sweeping legislation that, among other things, severely restricts teachers' right to strike, undermines seniority protections for Illinois teachers outside Chicago, and increases the school day without a guaranteed increase in pay.
To make matters worse, Lewis, a founding member of CORE, failed to report that she had already signed off on the legislation when she spoke to union delegates in a videoconference April 13, the day after she agreed to the legislation.
Connecticut school officials cannot be held liable for their decision to discipline a student for an Internet posting she wrote off school grounds, a federal appeals court ruled Monday as it defended the leeway given school administrators who act reasonably when confronted with dilemmas that test the boundaries of what is Constitutionally protected.
The 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan sided with Burlington, Conn., school officials after they punished Avery Doninger by preventing her from serving as class secretary as a senior.
Doninger sued the administrators at Lewis B. Mills High School, saying her free speech and equal protection rights were violated after she distributed the 2007 posting criticizing administrators for canceling a popular school activity. A lower judge had twice ruled school officials were entitled to immunity.
It's not that I don't care about K-12 education in Wisconsin. I DO care, very much.
But I have a hard time getting my undies in a bundle over Gov. Scott Walker's proposed education spending reductions because I have this fantasy that maybe if school administrators have less money, they'll have less time to come up with dumb stuff in the name of political correctness.
Take the Seattle public school administrators who decided that the term "Easter egg" is culturally offensive," and substituted the term "spring spheres" instead.
How much do I hate this? Let's start with the fact that eggs - at least the ones used in conjunction with Easter -- are NOT spheres: They're ovoids. I learned that in eighth-grade geometry. I object most strenuously to people who should know better teaching children something that simply is not true.
Indiana is on the verge of enacting major education reform legislation that will establish a new teacher evaluation system, will be tied to changes in teacher tenure, eliminate "Last in First Out (LIFO)," link teacher compensation to performance measures, and limit some aspects of what can be collectively bargained. Rep. Mary Ann Sullivan (D - Indianapolis) is the co-sponsor of the teacher evaluation bill as well as a companion bill containing the collective bargaining provisions (she is also the co-author of a bill to expand charter schools in Indiana). As a founding member of DFER-Indiana, she has faced incredible hostility from her Democrat colleagues in the House, along with being chastised by the unions especially for her votes and leadership on changing collective bargaining practices. In this post she shares some of her thoughts and beliefs on why she refuses to lose her focus on education reform, and why her commitment to those reforms does not make her anti-union:
For too many Democrats, being pro-labor has been an all or nothing proposition. As a pro-labor Democrat myself, I've been criticized when I mention the need for changes and limits to collective bargaining. Seeking change from unions, and teachers' unions in particular, doesn't mean I don't believe in them. Nothing could be further from the truth. I firmly believe unions must step up to the plate and meet the public demand for changes or they run the risk of being left out of the process or worse yet, losing the right to collectively bargain at all. Our teachers need this powerful collective voice and unions must rise to meet the demand for change, one prescribed by many of their members.
Among the drastic changes planned for Nevada's K-12 education system -- ranked at the bottom of the nation for high school graduation -- few strike a nerve like a plan to stop paying higher salaries to teachers with advanced degrees and switch to a pay-for-performance model.
The bill reflects a growing nationwide movement toward performance pay; it's based on research that shows an advanced degree seldom leads to increased student achievement at the elementary school level, and only sometimes increases it in high school classrooms.
"We're 50th in the nation," said Assemblyman Ira Hansen, R-Sparks. "We need radical surgery."
The Guardian highlights a serious problem both in the United Kingdom and the United States: students aren't comfortable with and sometimes aren't prepared for academic writing.
Whether the cause is an unsatisfactory education prior to enrollment or a long layoff since a student last studied formally, writing improvement is a priority.
Daphne Elliston cried the first time she had to write an assignment. She put it bluntly:
Hurdles include understanding content and vocabulary unique to academic writing, which can be a stumbling block to understanding the assignment itself. Research, too, is difficult when a student is having trouble with language.
And then they must analyze it, process it and put it into their own words to write the paper. It can be a daunting combination, but colleges and universities are trying to rectify it.
Daphne Ellison said she thought a gap in her education was the reason for her trouble with writing--she continued higher education after many years out of school--but Margi Rawlinson, an academic coordinator at Edge Hill University, says it's an epidemic not confined to non-traditional students:
"We have people with A-levels who are arriving poorly equipped for academic writing," she says.
"I think one of the issues at A-level is that they're not being taught to research independently, and [with essays] it's not just the writing--that's only part of it."
Rawlinson isn't alone in her assessment. Helena Attlee, a writer in residence at Worcester University and a fellow of the Royal Literary Fund echoes Rawlinson's diagnoses:
"It seems to me there's a lack of interface between A-levels and degrees, so the thing that people are required to do to get very good A-levels isn't equipping them to do what is required to get a degree."
A variety of support systems are in place for struggling writers, from one-on-one instruction to more detailed irection on particular assignments from professors themselves. School officials are hopeful that increased attention and support can improve an adult student's poor writing skills. Professor Wayne Martin, when askked whether students can really improve, sums it up:
"Yes, incredibly. And the biggest improvement is generally in the first five weeks," he says.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Obama had his "Sputnik Moment," when standardized test scores around the world pointed to the mediocrity of American students in reading, math and sciences. There is now a major mantra coming from Washington to all state capitals: the "race to the top" is on, and it doesn't include a continuation of the downward spiral of test scores. The new modus operandi: Leave aside achievement throughout the years in high school, the stream of G.P.As., the difficulty of courses taken during the years in 9 to 12, and any creative projects done by students. Base everything on standardized tests.
When career prospects, prestige, and job security are connected to one and only one criteria -- score on a standardized test -- human nature is bound to creep in. Baseball players start taking steroids; Olympic athletes try every means to beat the system. Will it happen to dedicated teachers who are working hard to educate our next generation? Will temptation overtake honesty, integrity and ethical behavior?
There have been fresh calls for schools to dump the dull ICT lessons that are turning kids off IT and failing to create the type of IT-savvy employees that UK businesses need.
Earlier this year, a discussion forum on digital skills heard from a BCS member and IT teacher that pupils and teachers are "bored rigid" by ICT lessons in their present form.
Intellect, the trade body for the UK's tech sector, has now called on the government to drop ICT lessons in their current form from the national curriculum and replace them with ones that focus on higher-value computer science skills. The organisation was submitting its response to a Department of Education review of the National Curriculum in England, launched in January this year.
ICT should also be taught by embedding interactive and multimedia technology across every subject, according to Intellect - which believes technology businesses could play a role here to help teachers make the best use of relevant equipment by supporting training.
Intellect reckons the ICT curriculum is too focused on teaching pupils how to use a limited number of software packages and is therefore failing to inspire students to develop more advanced computer skills.
It seems to me that the goals of Education Reform are primarily to bring the increases in productivity (and cost reductions) seen in other industries to the education industry. The greatest obstacle to the effort to cut the cost of education is teacher salaries. The cost of education cannot be cut until the cost of teaching is cut. The Education Reform movement seeks paths to cutting the cost of teaching.
While technology has allowed for amazing radical increases in productivity in nearly every other industry, teaching is still, for the most part, done exactly as it was done in pre-industrial times: face-to-face with a personal relationship between a professional teacher and a limited number of students. For there to be any improvement in productivity (and reduction in cost), this model must be broken.
Education Reform is pursuing four paths to increase productivity (and thereby reduce costs).
1. The de-professionalization of teaching. Teachers are professionals. They are expected to work with minimal supervision and direction. They are expected to use their expertise, judgement, and talent to respond improvisationally to student needs. In the Education Reform model, however, teachers are expected to deliver standardized lessons prepared centrally. They can make some small prescribed variations within a prescribed range. The best model for this is how professional bankers have been replaced by non-professionals, sitting in cube farms, wearing headsets, and completing loan application forms by working through a script on a computer screen. The script includes what to say if the customer says this or if the customer says that. Based on this model it isn't hard to imagine non-professionals in front of a classroom delivering a scripted lesson with scripted responses to expected student questions.
Nathan Carlberg, 27, is exactly the type of teacher Barack Obama, US president, wants to keep in the system. Fresh-faced and passionate, he troops around room 207 at Commodore John Rogers Elementary School in Baltimore dispensing superlatives to students who get the answers right to his spelling quiz.
"Bingo," yelps one of the second-graders and jumps up with his paper. Mr Carlberg ambles over. "Let me check," he says and the class is silent. "He got it right," shouts Mr Carlberg. The kids erupt, eager to win the next round.
Even a year ago this scene would have been unthinkable at CJR. It ranked as one of the worst five elementary schools in Maryland in 2010 but has since managed to pull itself around. Last year it became a "turnaround school", which meant every teacher had to reapply for his or her job. Only three were retained.
The turnaround process is one of the signature strategies of Mr Obama's new school agenda and its flagship Race to the Top programme. It revolves around a simple but controversial notion: giving incentives for innovation. Race to the Top awards money to school districts that can prove they have new strategies for improving teaching and results.
Michigan's public schools need to more rigorously measure students' academic growth, but with fewer state rules to make that happen, Gov. Rick Snyder said today.
That means more autonomy for individual schools and teachers, and a system to financially reward outstanding teachers who can mentor others.
Also, state schools superintendent Michael Flanagan called for a virtual deregulation of schools, such as eliminating minimum number of hours or days students must attend each year.
That's a change Snyder hinted he'll include in his special message on education Wednesday. He said the state should give teachers and schools and the state more flexibility to teach and to lift all students to higher academic standards.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder's budget plan, a serious and shocking change to the status quo, so stoked the flames of union passion there's a protest just about every other day in Lansing.
This may explain why the governor spread out his controversial announcements by a month or two. At noontime Wednesday, he will drop another bomb on the state: serious and shocking education system change. Expect more protest and outrage.
Now, the governor on Monday reminded the teachers and school administrators at the 16th annual Governor's Education Summit that he ran on a platform of reinventing Michigan. He also admitted everyone agrees with change until it affects them. He fully expects the protest express to continue muddying the Capitol lawn.
Until this year, Ena Baxter, an English teacher at Hillcrest High School in Queens, would often have her 10th graders compose papers by summarizing a single piece of reading material.
Last month, for a paper on the influence of media on teenagers, she had them read a survey on the effects of cellphones and computers on young people's lives, a newspaper column on the role of social media in the Tunisian uprising and a 4,200-word magazine article titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
A math teacher, José Rios, used to take a day or two on probabilities, drawing bell-shaped curves on the blackboard to illustrate the pattern known as normal distribution. This year, he stretched the lesson by a day and had students work in groups to try to draw the same type of graphic using the heights of the 15 boys in the class.
House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.
The 111-to-42 vote followed tougher measures to broadly eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states. But unlike those efforts, the push in Massachusetts was led by Democrats who have traditionally stood with labor to oppose any reduction in workers' rights.
Unions fought hard to stop the bill, launching a radio ad that assailed the plan and warning legislators that if they voted for the measure, they could lose their union backing in the next election. After the vote, labor leaders accused House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo and other Democrats of turning their backs on public employees.
Here's a status report on the region's public education from the New England Board of Higher Education.
Connecticut
Gov. Dannel Malloy's two-year plan to deal with a $3.2 billion deficit (in the first year alone) relies on significant concessions from labor to the tune of $1.5 billion. Unions gave Malloy strong support in his race for governor. The remaining portion of the deficit would be addressed through $750 million in program cuts and $1.5 billion in tax increases.
The General Assembly's Finance and Appropriations Committees met with Malloy and reached agreement on the budget for FY12-FY13. Following the meeting, the Joint Appropriations Committee released its budget, which will be debated in the House in the coming week. The governor and legislative leaders still must finalize an agreement with labor. Malloy has said he expects to see a budget on May 6.
Higher Education
Malloy has proposed a two-year $144-million cut to public higher education. Also included in his budget is a plan to restructure the system, which features the following:
Richard Whitmire's latest blog (via Whitney Tilson) suggests that edreform is in trouble "My sense is that the school reform movement -- roughly defined as those who believe that schools alone can make a dent in the seemingly intractable problems arising from the confluence of race and poverty -- is headed toward a major beat-down."
Here's what he's missing:
1.The Race: A half a dozen examples of the new employment bargain, data systems, and choice landscapes are sufficient to tip a lot of states.
2. The Khan-a-bes: the explosion of informal learning like Khan Academy is enveloping the formal system. It's now possible for anyone to learn anything anywhere.
3. Online learning. We finally have a massively scalable quality capability. The top half a dozen providers (both nonprofit and for-profit) could provision summer school for any interested student in America.
I announced on my radio show on WVOX last Friday my intention to file papers this week to run for school board in New Rochelle. Over the weekend I began obtaining the required signatures and getting the necessary paperwork in order. The papers are due Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. but I will likely file sooner than that.
Once I file, I will explain more fully how it came to be that the most vocal critic of the New Rochelle Board of Education and the current administration opted to become a candidate for one of the two open seats but for now let me say that it had been my hope to find a candidate that was not selected by "insiders" and would advance my goals of increased transparency, accountability, equity, and excellence in the New Rochelle system. After looking long and hard and talking to over a dozen prospective candidates, all of whom ultimately opted not to run, it became clear that if no one stepped forward the available board seats would filled by two candidates hand-picked by current board members with the goal of maintaining the status quo on the board. If all was well in the New Rochelle schools that might be acceptable but all is not well, as has been documented amply on Talk of the Sound over the past several years, and so more of the same is not only not acceptable but intolerable. I came to realize that I had no choice but to step forward to present New Rochelle residents with a clear alternative to more of the same.
More students are taking ambitious courses. According to a recent Department of Education study, the percentage of high school graduates who signed up for rigorous-sounding classes nearly tripled over the past two decades.
But other studies point to a disconnect: Even though students are getting more credits in more advanced courses, they are not scoring any higher on standardized tests.
The reason, according to a growing body of research, is that the content of these courses is not as high-achieving as their names -- the course-title equivalent of grade inflation. Algebra II is sometimes just Algebra I. And College Preparatory Biology can be just Biology.
Lynn T. Mellor, a researcher in Austin, Tex., who has studied the phenomenon in the state, compares it to a food marketer labeling an orange soda as healthier orange juice.
"Like the misleading drink labels, course titles may bear little relationship to what students have actually learned," said Dr. Mellor, who has analyzed course completion, test records and other student data in Texas. "We see students taking more and more advanced courses, but still not performing well on end-of-course exams."
California voters want government employees to give up some retirement benefits to help ease the state's financial problems, favoring a cap on pensions and a later age for collecting them, according to a new poll.
Voter support for rolling back benefits available to few outside the public sector comes as Gov. Jerry Brown and Republicans in the Legislature haggle over changes to the pension system as part of state budget negotiations. Such benefits have been a flashpoint of national debate this year, and the poll shows that Californians are among those who perceive public retirement plans to be too costly.
Voters appear ready to embrace changes not just for future hires but also for current employees who have been promised the benefits under contract.
Seventy percent of respondents said they supported a cap on pensions for current and future public employees. Nearly as many, 68%, approved of raising the amount of money government workers should be required to contribute to their retirement. Increasing the age at which government employees may collect pensions was favored by 52%.
Trying to plug a $3.8 million budget gap, the York Suburban School District, in the rolling hills of southern Pennsylvania, is seeking to raise property taxes by 1.4%.
No way, says Nick Pandelidis, founder of the York Suburban Citizens for Responsible Government, a tea-party offshoot, of the plan that would boost the tax on a median-priced home of $157,685 by $44 a year to $3,225.
"No more property-tax increases!" the 52-year-old orthopedic surgeon implored as the group met recently at a local hospital's community room. "If you don't starve the system, you won't make it change."
Fresh from victories on the national stage last year, many local tea-party activist groups took their passion for limited government and less spending back to their hometowns, and to showdowns with teacher unions over pay in some cases. Now, amid school-board elections and local budgeting, they are starting to see results--and resistance.
Higher Spending and Lower Scores: From 2000 to 2009, spending per student (in constant dollars) increased from $11,413 to $15,291 - a 34% increase. Meanwhile 11th grade PSSA reading proficiency remained steady at 71% while math fell from 69% to 62%. This means 29% of students are below acceptable reading levels and 38% are not proficient in math! The York Suburban experience mirrors the national trend where increased spending in the public education system has not resulted in improved student outcomes.
White schoolchildren in Britain's poorest communities lag behind peers who are black or of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, a Financial Times analysis of more than 3m sets of exam results reveals.
Poor white children even achieve worse average results than deprived pupils for whom English is a second language.
The average black pupil from among the poorest fifth of children, identified by postcode analysis, gains the equivalent of one more GCSE pass at A*, the highest grade, than the average white child from a similar background.
The figures highlight the challenge facing the coalition, which has identified social mobility as one of its top concerns. Earlier this month, the government published a "social mobility strategy", which stated that "tackling the opportunity deficit...is our guiding purpose".
Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust and Britain's leading educational philanthropist, said the FT results showed that "if the coalition is really serious about raising social mobility, it will need to find a way to crack the problems of the English white working class".
"I wanted an entire new board, an entire new corporate suite because what's happening today both on the finances and the educational scores -- needs to be shaken up. And what I know in my heart [is that] the people of the city do not think we're doing what we need to do for our children." -- Rahm Emanuel
Rahm Emanuel isn't even officially mayor yet and he's already got the city and its schools in a fine mess. His appointment of the embattled J.C. Brizard as schools CEO (that's what we call school superintendents here in Chicago) rivals only Bloomberg's pick of Cathie Black in New York as most embarrassing of the year. Black lasted a mere three months before high-tailing it back to the sanctity of the corporate world, where failure is more often than not rewarded with super bonuses and not just a kick in the ass and a golden parachute a la urban school bosses.
Bloomberg's choice of the eminently unqualified Black reset the I-don't-give-a-damn-what-anybody-else-thinks standard previously set by former D.C. mayor, Adrian Fenty, whose pick of the also unqualified Michelle Rhee earned him the total disdain of D.C. voters who ultimately booted both Fenty and Rhee out of town.
In the weeks ahead the biennial budget will be the dominant focus of the Legislature. Gov. Scott Walker has introduced his budget plan for Wisconsin, and while there are a number of troubling provisions, perhaps one of the most troubling is the drastic changes to public education that he proposes.
According to the Department of Public Instruction, school districts are expected to lose $1.68 billion in revenue authority and $835 million in state school aids over the next biennium. The governor has repeatedly touted the savings, tools and other reform measures that he says would soften the blow and even enhance education.
However, reducing the levy authority of school districts mandates a reduction in total spending, and changes to health insurance and pension contributions alone won't suffice to cover the difference. That means layoffs, a decision made by Walker and not by local school districts.
The governor recently went to great lengths to highlight projected savings and other ways school districts would benefit under his budget. My office compiled a spreadsheet that outlines the inaccuracies in the governor's projections. To outline the serious budgeting flaws, we relied on numbers from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau and the governor himself.
DURING JERRY BROWN'S first term in the 1970s his hair was still full and dark. His voice was not yet gravelly. Unlike his back-slapping father, he still bore traces of the Jesuit seminary where he had once studied to become a priest. He meditated on Zen koans. He declined the governor's mansion and slept on a mattress in a rented flat. He dreamed of large things whose time had not yet come, such as green energy. And yet, or perhaps because of all this, Jerry Brown failed to notice the anger boiling over in his state.
Californians were angry about property taxes. These local taxes were the main revenue source for school districts, cities, counties and California's many specialised municipal jurisdictions. And they had been rising. A homeowner's property tax was determined by two factors. One was the tax rate, the other the assessed value of the house to which the rate was applied. These assessments were soaring: between 1972 and 1977 home prices in southern California more than doubled, thus doubling homeowners' tax bills. Mr Brown and the legislature fiddled with relief measures, but their bills were half-hearted and the taxpayers were angry.
Dykstra, in particular, had a lot to say, but the discussion of how well Wisconsin kids are learning to read -- a subject that gets heated among education experts as well as parents and teachers -- struck me as quite engaging and generally cordial.
There seemed to be consensus surrounding the notion that it's vitally important for students to become successful readers in the early grades, and that goal should be an urgent priority in Wisconsin.
But how the state is currently measuring up to its own past performance, and to other states, is subject to some debate. Furthermore, there isn't a single answer or widespread agreement on precisely how to make kids into better readers.
John Covington hesitated before becoming this city's 26th school superintendent in 40 years. A blunt-talking African American from Alabama, he attended the Broad Superintendents Academy in Los Angeles, which prepares leaders for urban school districts, and when he asked people there if he should come here, their response, he says, was: "Not 'no,' but 'Hell, no!' " He says they suggested that when flying across the country he should take a flight that does not pass through this city's airspace.
How did this pleasant place become so problematic? Remember the destination of the road paved with good intentions.
This city is just 65 miles down the road from Topeka, Kan., from whence came Brown v. Board of Education , the fuse that lit many ongoing struggles over schools and race. Kansas City has had its share of those struggles, one of which occurred last year when Covington took office with a big bang: He closed 26 of the district's 61 schools. Kansas City had fewer students but twice as many schools as Pueblo, Colo., where Covington had been superintendent.
Thirty-five years ago, Kansas City's district had 54,000 students. Today it has fewer than 17,000. Between then and now there was a spectacular confirmation of the axiom that education cannot be improved by simply throwing money at it.
In the 1980s, after a court held that the city was operating a segregated school system, judicial Caesarism appeared. A judge vowed to improve the district's racial balance by luring white students to lavish "magnet schools" offering "suburban comparability" and "desegregative attractiveness." And he ordered tax increases to pay the almost $2 billion bill for, among other things, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a planetarium, vivariums, greenhouses, a model United Nations wired for language translation, radio and television studios, an animation and editing lab, movie editing and screening rooms, a temperature-controlled art gallery, a 25-acre farm, a 25-acre wildlife area, instruction in cosmetology and robotics, field trips to Mexico and Senegal, and more.
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
State taxpayers are getting a fantastic bargain this year on the education of about one in six Milwaukee children. But how long will they go on getting it?
The bargain is what we spend when a family takes its school aid in the form of a voucher to a private school in Milwaukee's choice program. Taxpayers shell out $6,442 per child, about 45% as much as the $14,183 per-child cost in the Milwaukee Public Schools, by the latest state figures.
The question is how much longer that can go on. Choice schools cannot charge poor families any more than the voucher, but researchers with the five-year study of school choice report that 82% of such schools have higher per-pupil costs. In the most recent figures, the average choice school spent $7,692 per child.
The voucher just isn't enough to run a school, said the University of Arkansas' Brian Kisida, one of the researchers: "How can you hire the best people on half the money?" He said that if he had Gov. Scott Walker's ear, he'd tell him to keep the rule requiring state tests, flawed as they are, and to raise the grant.
That isn't happening. Walker's two-year budget through 2013 freezes the voucher at $6,442, since the state is $3.5 billion in the hole. Walker also cuts how much public schools have, reducing their per-child revenue limit, their most fundamental number, by 5.5% in the first year and freezing it in the second.
Only 10 teachers in the entire Hawaii Department of Education have been fired for misconduct in the last two years. That's 10 out of about 12,000 teachers, or less than one-tenth of 1 percent. The Department also suspended 37 teachers for misconduct over the same period.
Teacher performance and accountability are central to most education reform discussions, and both play a key role in negotiations with the teachers union this year.
A Civil Beat investigation found that over the past two years the district disciplined teachers for misconduct in 42 of its 257 schools, or 16 percent. No teachers were fired on Kauai or the Big Island. Teachers were disciplined on all the islands, with 35 of the cases on Oahu, three on Maui, three on Kauai and six on the Big Island.
On a muggy afternoon in mid-April, Mary Ruiz, an animated 18-year-old, bounced through the air-conditioned corridors of her South Dallas high school.
"Excuse the mess," she said, brushing away a small scrap of paper in an otherwise spotless stairwell, giggling as she added, "I'm acting like this is my house."
Ms. Ruiz is a senior at the Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Center's School of Health Professions, a magnet in the Dallas Independent School District. The Townview Center, named for the panorama of the downtown Dallas skyline visible from its north windows, houses six magnets, including programs for law, business and science.
The Wisconsin Assembly recently held a hearing on Assembly Bill 92, which would eliminate the enrollment cap for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and extend the program to permit private schools located in Milwaukee County to participate.
Before any expansion of the program is considered, the funding mechanism for the choice program must be fixed. Choice students do not attend public schools, but Milwaukee property taxpayers still support their costs. In fact, until recently, Milwaukee property taxpayers actually paid more for students attending choice schools than they paid for students attending traditional Milwaukee Public Schools.
Over the past few years, I've worked with the state to correct this inequity. We have made a significant improvement from where we stood in the 2006-07 school year and Milwaukee taxpayers have benefited greatly.
Austin Polytechnical Academy, a school established in 2007 to help broaden the West Side community's academic opportunities and retool perceptions of vocational education, is facing harsh realities as it prepares to graduate its first senior class: lagging test scores, diminishing attendance and dismal reading levels.
Last October, Polytech joined the ranks of the 67 percent of Chicago's public neighborhood high schools when it was placed on academic probation. That same week, state-issued report cards showed that the school was not making sufficient yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Having both local and federal education officials label the school as failing is a bitter pill for parents, teachers and students. Yet people with a stake in Austin Polytech have always known they would need to struggle against long odds.
Administrators and teachers at Austin Polytech, which occupies two floors of a massive concrete building that once housed the failed Austin Community High School, have been working for four years to undo decades of neglect and failure.
With a proposed $74 million in cuts expected for Milwaukee Public Schools next school year, district officials are going to need help in filling some gaps. That's where the business community should step up, both with money and other support.
Businesses generally have been strong supporters of MPS, but at this critical time, MPS needs more of that. If nothing else, naked self-interest should compel businesses to pitch in.
Gov. Scott Walker's budget calls for $74 million in cuts for the district. This will have a huge impact, especially with no new federal educational dollars coming in next school year.
There are a number of ways businesses can help.
The GE Foundation stepped up in January when it announced that it would give MPS $20.4 million over five years to help the school system develop a rigorous math and science curriculum and provide professional development to teachers.
This is an investment in future MPS graduates, who GE hopes will be a part of Milwaukee's workforce. GE says it will be very visible in MPS. This is important because children need to see business leaders involved in education. Children need good role models.
Early in February, leaders of the state's largest teachers union took what was for them a major step - endorsing a series of reforms they had previously resisted, including performance pay, dividing up Milwaukee Public Schools and tying teacher evaluations to student test scores.
Within a week, however, Gov. Scott Walker released a plan to sharply curb the collective bargaining rights of most public-sector workers, and little more was heard from the Wisconsin Education Association Council about its reform initiatives.
Amid the debate over public workers' rights in Wisconsin, school reform has gotten lost in recent months, especially changes related to one of the most promising ways to improve academic achievement: focusing on teacher effectiveness.
Walker and his supporters have said that by prohibiting teachers unions from bargaining for anything other than inflation-tied wage increases, school boards are free to implement reforms that WEAC has been unwilling to embrace in the past.
A controversial review of America's teacher colleges has met resistance in Wisconsin, where education school leaders in the public and private sector say they will not voluntarily participate.
The National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit advocacy group, and U.S. News & World Report, known for its annual rankings of colleges, announced in January they would launch a first-ever review of the nation's roughly 1,400 colleges of education. The recruitment and training of teachers have become a hot-button issue tied to education reform, but university system presidents in Wisconsin as well as New York, Georgia, Oregon and Kentucky have expressed misgivings about the process of assessing and ranking their education schools.
"While we welcome fair assessment and encourage public sharing of our strengths and weaknesses, we believe your survey will not accomplish these goals. We therefore wish to notify you that our entire membership has decided to stand united and not participate further in the survey process," says an April 7 letter by Katy Heyning, president of the Wisconsin Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, and addressed to the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News. Heyning also is the dean of the College of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
The council, meanwhile, is filing open-records requests to get information about the public education schools in states that won't provide it voluntarily. Arthur McKee, manager of teacher preparation programs at the NCTQ, said the council had not received the letter from Heyning. But it had received a letter from UW System President Kevin Reilly.
That letter from March 28 says that UW's 13 teacher colleges declined to participate because of "serious concerns" about the survey's methods of data collection, analysis and reporting.
A few months ago, we moved out of Washington, D.C., to be closer to where we'll be sending our children to school. That decision wasn't just made because it's our parish school or because many DC public schools have serious problems. Prior to getting married, my husband and I separately served on the school board that oversaw the change in our parish school's curriculum to a Classical approach. It was a large undertaking but we couldn't be more pleased with the results.
From my experience, I know that the Classical movement is sizable and under-covered by major media. So I was completely delighted to read about a new Classical school in the area in a recent Washington Post. Written by Julia Duin, it begins with an anecdote that shows how Classical education works:
It's 1 p.m. and time for Amy Clayton's fifth grade to show off their memorization skills.
Decked out in blue long-sleeved shirts and dark pants for boys and bright yellow blouses and plaid jumpers for girls, the students begin with the words of Patrick Henry's immortal "Give me liberty or give me death" speech first delivered on March 23, 1775, in Richmond. That recitation merges into verses from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride." That morphs into a few phrases from the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution and finally to fragments of speeches by Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.
"Beautifully done," Clayton says at the conclusion. "We just encapsulated 80 years of American history in our recitation." She is engaged, dramatic, and students are nearly jumping out of their seats trying to answer her questions about the beginnings of the Civil War. To her right is a banner containing a quote from Aesop: "No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted." Near that hangs a crucifix.
Former premier Zhu Rongji made a rare public appearance yesterday, delivering a scathing criticism of the mainland's education system and other policies during a visit to his alma mater, Tsinghua University.
Zhu (pictured) lashed out at the much-criticised reform of tertiary education and urged mainland officials and scholars to speak the truth.
He said a newly published directive on trial reforms of the education system was "full of empty talk and nonsense", according to excerpts of his remarks posted on the popular microblog platform Sina Weibo.
Gov. Bob McDonnell on Tuesday rolled out Virginia's teacher merit-pay plan, inviting 57 districts that have struggling schools to apply for $3 million in total state funding for the 2011-12 school year.
At least 40 percent of a teacher's performance evaluation will be tied to student academic performance -- including improvements in standardized test scores. Schools that receive grants must adopt teacher-appraisal systems aligned with state-approved evaluation methods and performance metrics.
The General Assembly approved the pilot performance-pay initiative as part of McDonnell's amendments to the state budget. A key component of the Republican governor's education agenda, the initiative is aimed at attracting good teachers to so-called hard-to-staff schools. Such schools include those at risk of losing state accreditation and those that have a high percentage of English learners or special-needs students.
AMY GARDNER writes in the Washington Post of the emotional injury suffered by government employees when a goodly portion of the public begins to malign them as members of a parasite class who enjoy the ample fruits of less privileged and secure workers' labour. Efforts in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere to rein in the growth of public-sector salaries, pensions and health benefits have, Ms Gardner reports, "ripped apart how many public workers think of themselves and their role in society." She considers the case of Judy and Jim Embree "an operating room nurse and paramedic and firefighter" from Ohio, who have been taken aback by increasingly negative attitudes toward public-sector workers. "The divide between those who back union workers and those who don't comes down to a matter of perception over what qualifies as modest and what is too much," Ms Gardner writes. Would you say this modest or too much?
Judy Embree earns $63,000. Under current rules, she is eligible to retire in five years, at age 54, after 30 years on the job. Upon retirement, she will be paid about 66 percent of her wages.Jim Embree earns $70,700. He is eligible to retire in two years, at age 50, after 25 years on the job. He will take home 60 percent of his retiring salary.Both Embrees could continue to work and improve their pensions; Judy Embree would qualify for 100 percent of her wages after 44 years of service (at age 68), and Jim would max out after 33 years (at age 58) with 72 percent of his final pay.
Not surprisingly, the Embrees think this just about right. The article concludes with this reflection from Mr Embree:
More than 130 Madison teachers -- many of them worried that Gov. Scott Walker's collective bargaining law could lead to changes in post-retirement benefits -- are retiring in June, a big increase over recent years.
As of the April 15 deadline, 138 Madison teachers have decided to retire, Superintendent Dan Nerad said. That's a 62 percent increase over the average number of retirements over the previous five years.
The district plans to fill all of the positions, Nerad said, though the loss of so many more veteran teachers than usual could have a more noticeable effect on students and novice teachers.
"A lot of these people have been working with generations of students and influencing people for a long, long time," Nerad said. "Our intention is to replace them with knowledgeable people, but as a rule they will be less experienced."
More than 60 teachers indicated they were retiring earlier than anticipated because of concerns about the collective bargaining changes, said John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc.
It was not easy for me to stand before the state Legislature's Joint Finance Committee and threaten to withdraw my support from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which I have supported for more than 20 years. But if lawmakers approve Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to lift the income requirement that has maintained the program for children from low-income families, that is exactly what I will do.
The governor's plan would dramatically change the program's social justice mission and destroy its trailblazing legacy as the first and still one of the few in the nation that uses public dollars to help equalize the academic options for children from low-income and working-class families. I did not join this movement to subsidize families like mine, which may not be rich but have resources and, thus, options.
When I got into this battle in 1989, standardized test scores showed Milwaukee was failing to educate poor black children. That's when state Rep. Annette Polly Williams courageously stepped forth to make sure that poor families were afforded some opportunity to choose schools in the private sector for their children. She shepherded the pioneering voucher program through the Legislature.
With Secretary Arne Duncan at the helm, the U.S. Department of Education is gradually--and sometimes quietly--chipping away at key parts of the No Child Left Behind Act as states and districts demand more relief from the elusive goal that all students be what the law terms "proficient" in reading and math by 2014.
The pressure on Mr. Duncan to waive substantial parts of the 9-year-old federal school-accountability law is only growing as Congress continues to drag its feet on reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which NCLB is the latest version.
Although President Barack Obama and Mr. Duncan have called for revision of the law by the start of the next school year, draft legislation has yet to be introduced, and school leaders anxious about rapidly approaching deadlines are clamoring for leeway in the meantime.
Economic policy isn't just a domestic issue anymore. That is the conclusion we should draw from the market volatility this week, including the shift by Standard & Poor's to a negative outlook for U.S. government debt, and the meeting last weekend of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
This is a familiar fact for smaller countries. The emerging market nations have long understood that judgments made on Wall Street or at the IMF headquarters in Washington often had more power to shape their economic policy than the proposals of their own ministers of finance and central bankers. More recently, that is a lesson that fiscally weak Western countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal have been learning, too.
Now, as the relative power of the United States in the global economy declines, it is a fact of life that Americans need to get used to, too. That is one of the important messages of the S&P decision at the beginning of this week to put the United States on a negative outlook - essentially a warning that the ratings agency is no longer certain the United States will maintain its AAA rating.
There are a lot of reasons the S&P call should be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, the ratings agencies hardly covered themselves with glory in the run-up to the financial crisis, and surely no longer deserve oracular status - if they ever did.
After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested in teaching students to write and communicate clearly. The group's agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the meeting's 500 panels as I could, is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as instruments of white oppression. They believe rules of grammar discriminate against "marginalized" groups and restrict self-expression.
Even noted composition scholar Peter Elbow, in his address, claimed that the grammar that we internalize at the age of four is "good enough." The Internet, thankfully, has freed us from our previous duties as "grammar police," and Elbow heralded the day when the white spoken English that has now become the acceptable standard, will be joined by other forms, like those of non-native and ghetto speakers.
Freed from standards of truth claims and grammatical construction, rhetoric is now redefined as "performance," as in street protests, often by students demonstrating their "agency." Expressions are made through "the body," images, and song--sometimes a burst of spontaneous reflection on the Internet. Clothes are rhetorically important as "instruments of grander performance."
The big news back in my small, rural southeast Wisconsin hometown is that the high school and middle school have a few new teachers. Every time I run into someone from back home, they have to tell me, "Did you hear about the new science/math/Spanish teacher?" Unfortunately, teachers in my hometown and around Wisconsin are not retiring because it's their time. What we are seeing are effects from Gov. Scott Walker's Budget Tyranny Bill, and small and large school districts alike will continue to face large turnover in the foreseeable future.
When Walker tried to slash union's bargaining rights, he opened a legal can of worms. With all the actions that are being brought against his administration over the legality of his moves, it's difficult to remember that Wisconsin's teachers are left between a rock and a hard place as long as his measures stand. The educators who are now retiring likely didn't consider leaving their school systems until it became clear that he was going to put his bill into effect. They have two choices: Take whatever they can get out of early retirement now, or stay on and wait to see what retirement benefits, if any, the unions will be able to bargain for in the future. In addition, there is another worry about continuing to teach -- no one knows how expansive future layoffs will be.
The Journal of School Choice recently published an article in which researchers Jack Buckley and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj confirmed the UFT's findings in 2010 that charter schools in New York City enrolled a lower proportion of limited English proficient (LEP) students than the average district school in 2007-08. Overall, they find that among the city's charters from 2006-2008, "in the case of the LEP proportions, there is a large group of schools with very few, a handful with a larger proportion, and perhaps 1-3 schools, depending on the year, with a large share of LEP students."
This report provides a valuable complement to our findings in "Separate and Unequal," both in its examination of two additional years of data and in its use of sophisticated statistical formulas to account for possible errors in the numbers of LEP students that charters report to the state each year. As this chart from the article shows, even when the researchers controlled for that possibility, the proportion of LEP students in most charters in the city fell well below the district average (represented by the solid line on the graph).
EVERYTHING ABOUT CALIFORNIA'S school system is complicated, starting with the question of how bad its public schools are. Comparisons show that students in California fare worse than the national average in mathematics, reading, science and writing. But the numbers are unfair, says John Mockler, an expert in Californian education who has been following its fortunes since the 1960s. For instance, half of California's pupils are Hispanic, and 40% of those hardly speak English. Most other states don't face this problem.
Nonetheless, there is a broad consensus that California's public schools are not what they could be, nor what they used to be. California ranks 47th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in spending per pupil ($7,886, against an average of $11,397). It ranks last in the number of students per teacher: California's legislative analyst estimates that most classes have 28-31 pupils. And it ranks 42nd in the proportion of pupils who graduate (63%, against a national average of 69%).
The American Civil Liberties Union and its Rhode Island affiliate are urging federal justice officials in Washington to investigate the lockup of truants at the state Training School.
The ACLU has asked officials in the U.S. Justice Department -- who are scheduled to arrive in Rhode Island Tuesday -- to investigate "documented evidence" published in a December 2010 Providence Journal article that showed, since 2005, at least 28 youths from the state Family Court's truancy program had been detained overnight.
The Journal article described how juveniles who attended weekly truancy hearings in classrooms, cafeterias and school offices around the state were declared in criminal contempt of court and sent to the Training School. Their offenses included not answering a magistrate's questions, swearing or otherwise acting disrespectful. In one case, a 12-year-old girl was ordered held for two nights for slamming a door on her way out of the room. At the time, the girl had no parent or lawyer present.
If Wisconsin is to improve its public schools, it needs leaders willing to think and act boldly, kick sacred cows and innovate.
State and local officials should keep that in mind as they consider complaints that Gov. Scott Walker's move to restrict collective bargaining for most public employees risks cutting an essential partner out of education reform plans.
As the State Journal's six-part series "Labor's Last Stand" reported in Tuesday's installment, the complaints are based on the assumption that without teacher unions participating in the development and execution of reforms, those reforms will fizzle.
But framing the success or failure of school reform in terms of dependency on union bargaining is misguided. In the past, teacher unions have led some education reforms but have been roadblocks to others. In fact, it is insulting to individual teachers, school boards and superintendents to believe that nothing can be accomplished without going through a union.
The SAA's launching a last-ditch lobbying effort to try to limit the pending bill that will expand the open enrollment period. My transcription of the video alert:
Good afternoon SAA members, this is your lobbyist John Forester coming to you on Thursday afternoon, April the 21st, with a priority legislative alert on Senate Bill 2, having to do with the open enrollment application period. I need you to contact the members of the Assembly Education Committee in support of the SAA's position on Senate Bill 2.
Senate Bill 2 was amended and passed in the Senate earlier this legislative session. The bill had a hearing in the Assembly Education Committee on April the 7th, and could be voted on by the committee as early as next Tuesday, April the 26th. The SAA is seeking to amend the bill. I have provided for you my testimony on the bill, as well as a Legislative Council memo explaining how the bill was amended in the Senate. You can find contact information for the Committee members on the left side of our website.
Now let me tell you this flat and straight. Some version of this bill is going to pass this legislative session. We are simply trying to get the bill amended to make it less objectionable. Now let me give you some information specifically regarding the bill. If adopted, Senate Bill 2 would expand the open enrollment application period from 3 weeks to the 3 full months of February, March and April. As amended, Senate Bill 2 would also create an alternate open enrollment application process that would allow a parent of a pupil wishing to attend a nonresident school district to apply to that school district if the pupil satisfies at least one of seven criteria established in the bill. Now under this alternate process, applications may be submitted outside the 3 month open enrollment window. The primary focus of our opposition to Senate Bill 2 is the last of the seven criteria in the alternate application process and it reads as follows: "The parent of the pupil and the nonresident school board agree that attending school in the nonresident district is in the best interests of the pupil." Now because the nonresident school district, assuming it has room for more students, has a financial incentive to accept new open enrollment students, this provision of the bill essentially creates the potential for year-round open enrollment, and I know that I've received lots of phone calls from SAA members saying that that's exactly what this would do. This provision would also provide difficult students and parents with one more weapon to manipulate school districts into making decisions favorable to the student and the parents.
Now we have requested that the committee solve this problem with that criteria number 7 either by deleting the 7th criteria listed in the alternate application process or by changing "nonresident school board" to "resident school board" in the bill language that was referenced earlier. Now I have been told by Assembly Education Committee members that the only way to get the bill changed to the way that we would like is for local school districts to contact the committee members and make the case. I'm doing all that I can on this bill, folks, I need your help and I need it now. So again I'm asking you, especially if the legislators that are members of the Assembly Education Committee are your legislators, please contact them and contact them as soon as possible and ask for this change in the bill. Again, some version of the bill is going to pass, what we want to do is to make the bill a little bit better for us. Again, what it really comes down to is: our response to this legislative alert is going to determine how successfully we can reshape the bill. Again thank you very much for everything you do on a daily basis for the kids here in this state. Thank you for your support and contact those legislators. This is your lobbyist John Forester signing off and Happy Easter.
[emphasis added]
It's interesting to see the true motivations and conflicts of interest openly expressed. Now who represents the interests of children and their parents, again?
The assumption behind Gov. Brian Sandoval's education reform package is that red tape has prevented schools from getting rid of bad teachers, who are increasingly viewed as the greatest impediment to improving public education.
Simply put, the governor wants to make it easier to fire teachers by ending tenure and removing those who fail annual evaluations.
Testifying Saturday on behalf of the reform measure, Assembly Bill 555, Sandoval's senior adviser, Dale Erquiaga, noted that 0.3 percent of Nevada public school teachers annually lose their jobs because of poor performance. The national average, he said, is 1.5 percent.
The implication: The current process fails to weed out poor teachers.
Erquiaga argued the process is "too hard" and "too cumbersome," citing research showing 5 to 10 percent of teachers could be replaced for poor performance.
The almost complete overhaul of the Chicago Public Schools' leadership team announced by Rahm Emanuel Monday sets a tone for the district and aligns with his education agenda to increase the number of charter schools, turn around failing schools, implement merit pay and lengthen the city's school day.
"It's a really comprehensive set of appointments," said Barbara Radner, director of the Center for Urban Education at DePaul University. While his top choices, Jean-Claude Brizard and Noemi Donoso, have no previous ties to the city's schools, the rest of Emanuel's pics are strategic and, as he put it, share his "thirst for reform."
One by one, the children trooped to our table and put their apples in front of my son. By the fourth apple, I asked Christopher--my date for "Lunch with Your Second Grader" at the local elementary school in Kinnelon, N.J.--what was going on.
"Oh, they don't like the apples that come with lunch, so they give them to me," he reported, shrugging. "I can't eat them all."
I'm the mother of two boys, now middle-schoolers, one a good eater and one who would live on pizza and root beer if I let him. Christopher eats apples, and Nicholas leaves his on the lunch tray. He's the one who needs his chocolate milk. Yes, chocolate.
And so it was disturbing to hear about the recent chocolate milk ban in the Fairfax County, Va., school system and elsewhere around the country. Ditching chocolate milk to cut down on our children's sugar intake might be the right sentiment, but it's the wrong solution.
Wisconsin's performance on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is simply unacceptable and unnecessary. Click here to view a summary of the results. Click here for more statistics.
4/25/2011 meeting agenda:
A general and detailed agenda for the April 25th meeting of the Governor's Read to Lead task force have been released. We feel the important topics in reading reform can be addressed through this agenda.
General:
Introductions
Welcome and opening remarks by Governor Walker on the mission of the Task Force.
A discussion of the current state of reading achievement in Wisconsin
A discussion of current practices as well as ways to improve reading instruction at the classroom level in Wisconsin
A discussion of future topics and future meeting dates.
Adjournment
Detailed:
I. Identifying the problem and its root causes.
A. An overview of the problem in Wisconsin
B. What are the some of the root causes of illiteracy?
1. Teaching methods and curriculum
2. Teacher training and professional development
3. Problematic interventions
4. Societal problems
5. Lack of accountability
6. Others?
C. Why are we doing so much worse than many other states and so much worse, relative to other states, than we did in the past?
II. Reading instruction
A. How are children typically taught to read in Wisconsin schools?
B. How do early childhood programs fit into the equation?
C. How might reading instruction be improved?
D. How do these methods and curricula differ with ELL & special needs students?
E. How quickly could improved reading instruction be implemented?
Governor Walker's blue ribbon task force, Read to Lead, will have its first meeting on Monday, April 25, 2011, from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM. The meeting will be held in the Governor's conference room, 115 East, in the State Capitol. All meetings are open to the public. In addition, WRC will prepare reports on the progress of the task force to send as E-Alerts and post on our website, www.wisconsinreadingcoalition.org. Questions on the task force can be addressed to Kimber Liedl or Michael Brickman in the Governor's office at 608-267-9096.
In preparation for the meeting, the Governor's office made this comment:
"As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's education columnist observed on Sunday, "[t]his is not your ordinary task force." The creation of this task force is an opportunity to improve reading instruction and achievement in our state in an effort to open new opportunities for thousands of children. The MJS also noted that our task force "has diversity of opinion." This is by design. Governor Walker is not looking for a rubber stamp, but for a robust, yet focused, conversation that will ultimately lead to concrete policy solutions."
It seems that the academic expository writing of our public high school students will rise, or fall, to the level of our expectations. Here are excerpts from narrative essays, written by U.S. public high school students, to illustrate that claim--three have been written to the student's own high expectations and the other three to our generally low expectations for National Competitions, civics and otherwise:
Excerpt from a 40-page essay written as an independent study by a Junior in a Massachusetts public high school [endnote notation omitted]:
"At first, the church hierarchy was pleased at this outburst of religious enthusiasm and female piety; it was almost a revival. Hutchinson, after all, was a prominent and devout member of the Boston church, and only the most suspicious churchmen found immediate fault in the meetings. But soon, Hutchinson's soirées became less innocuous. In response to her audience's interest--in fact, their near-adulation--and in keeping with her own brilliance and constant theological introspection, she moved from repeating sermons to commenting on them, and from commenting to formulating her own distinct doctrine. As Winthrop sardonically remarked, 'the pretense was to repeat sermons, but when that was done, she would comment...and she would be sure to make it serve her turn.' What was actually happening, however, was far more radical and far more significant than Hutchinson making the words of others 'serve her turn.' She was not using anyone else's words; she was preaching a new brand of Puritanism, and this is what is now known as Antinomianism."
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Excerpt from a Grand Prize-winning 700-word essay written for a National Competition by a Junior from a public high school in Mableton, Georgia:
"Without history, there is no way to learn from mistakes or remember the good times through the bad. History is more than a teacher to me; it's an understanding of why I am who I am. It's a part of my life on which I can never turn back. History is the one thing you can count on never to change; the only thing that changes is people's perception of it.
It cannot be denied that every aspect of the past has shaped the present, nor that every aspect of the present is shaping and will continue to shape the future. In a sense, history is me, and I am the history of the future. History does not mean series of events; history means stories and pictures; history means people, and yet, history means much more. History means the people of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. History means me."
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Excerpt from a 30-page independent study by a Junior at a public high school in Worthington, Ohio [endnote notation omitted]:
"Opposition to this strictly-planned agricultural system found leadership under Deng Zihui, the director of rural affairs in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCCPC). This faction believed that peasants engaged in farming should have freedom in management, and advocated a form of private ownership. To them, peasants should have the power to buy, sell, or lease land, and to manage and employ labor. Zihui saw collectivization as a dangerous and detrimental practice to the Chinese economy. The production-team system that was practiced under collective farming did not maximize agricultural output. Production teams were comprised of around 20 to 30 households in the neighborhood, and net income was based on the performance of the production team as a whole. Individual peasants did not see direct returns for their efforts, and therefore the incentive to work hard did not exist under the production-team system. Consequently, agricultural outputs and farmers' per capita net income were significantly low; in 1957, each farmer received an average net income of 73.37 yuan."
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Excerpt from a 750-word Grand Prize-Winning essay for a National Competition by a Sophomore from a public high school in Rochester, Michigan:
"Similar to how courage has changed our country, having courage has helped shaped who I am today. When I was in 7th grade, I befriended two boys with autism in my gym class. I fully knew that being friends with them was not going to help me climb any higher on the social ladder, but I did not care. I had the courage to go against what was socially acceptable in order to do what was right. I soon not only played with them in gym but invited them to sit with my friends at lunch too. Someone had to have the courage to say that they deserved to be treated equally.
Equality is a civic value that Americans take pride in, and it needs to be defended.
Courageous people stand up for what is right in order to preserve these civic values.
Courageous acts in American history are what have molded us into the great nation we are today. They are, in large part, the reason why we became an independent nation and also an important reason why we have our first African-American president. Social and political movements in the U.S. began with one courageous person willing to stand up and go against the crowd. Every downpour has to start with one drop of rain."
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Excerpt from a 25-page essay by a Junior at a public high school in Manchester, Massachusetts [endnote notation omitted]:
"Paris was the center of medicine in the 19th century, an age which witnessed a revolt against dogmatism and a new emphasis on scientific thought. As universities were freed of political and ecclesiastic control, more social classes were able to attend, and true scientific thought was encouraged. A new type of clinical observation emerged that focused on active examination and explainable symptoms. Furthermore, laboratory medicine, meaning research-based medicine, gained a foothold. As medicine became more systematic, scientists moved away from the four humors view of the body and began conducting experiments in chemistry, notably biochemistry. In 1838, Theodor Schwann and Malthais Schleidan formulated the cell theory, and in 1854, Hugo von Mohl, John Goodsir, Robert Remak, and Rudolf Virchow demonstrated that cells arise from other cells. These two discoveries make up the modern cell theory and the foundation of all biological advances. With the discovery of cells came new opinions about the origins of disease, reviving interest in microbiology. The most widely accepted theory about how disease was spread was the "filth theory." According to the filth theory, epidemics were caused by miasmatic hazes rising from decaying organic matter. However, some disagreed with this hypothesis. The idea that epidemic diseases were caused by micro-organisms and transmitted by contagion was not new in the mid-19th century. It had been proclaimed by Fracastorius in the 16th century, Kircher in the 17th, and Lancisi and Linne in the 18th. Opposing the filth theory, Jacob Henle proposed the role of micro-organisms again in 1840. Unfortunately, many of his contemporaries viewed him as old-fashioned until some notable discoveries occurred. Bassi, Donné, Schoelein, and Grubi each proved fungi to be the cause of certain diseases. In 1850, bacteria, discovered earlier by Leeuwenhoek, were also confirmed as sources of disease. Even though micro-organisms as the source of disease was well documented, many did not accept this theory until about 20 years later. Nevertheless, people knew something was causing diseases, igniting a public hygiene movement in Europe and the dawn of the preventive medicine age."
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Excerpt from a First Prize essay by a public high school Sophomore for a National Creative Minds Competition [creative nonfiction writing] organized by the oldest and best-known gifted program in the United States:
"It is summer, one of those elusive, warm days when the world seems at peace. I splash around in the ocean, listening to the voices of the beachgoers mingling with the quiet roar of the waves. When I scoop water into my palm, it is clear, yet all the water together becomes an ocean of blue. Nothing plus nothing equals something; I cannot explain the equation of the ocean. I dip my head under to get my hair wet and to taste the salt once held by ancient rocks. I hold myself up on my hands, imaging I am an astronaut, and explore my newfound weightlessness.
But water is the opposite of space. Space is cold and lifeless, and water is warm and life giving. Both are alien to my body, though not to my soul.
Underwater, I open my eyes, and there is sunlight filtering through the ceiling of water. As I toss a handful of sand, the rays illuminate every drifting grain in turn. I feel as if I can spend forever here, the endless blue washing over me. Though the water is pure, I can't see very far. There is a feeling of unknown, of infinite depths.
As a little girl, I used to press my face against the glass of my fish tank and pretend I swam with my guppies, our iridescent tails flashing. The world moved so unhurriedly, with such grace. Everything looked so beautiful underwater--so poetic. It was pure magic how the fish stayed together, moving as one in an instant. What was their signal? Could they read minds? how did these tiny, insignificant fish know things I did not?"
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The questions suggest themselves: What sort of writing better prepares our students for college and career assignments, and must we leave high standards for high school academic expository writing up to the students who set them for themselves? [The more academic excerpts were taken from papers published in The Concord Review--www.tcr.org]
When budget cuts wiped out honors French classes at her Uxbridge, Mass., high school, 18-year-old Katie Larrivee turned to the Internet.
These days, Ms. Larrivee, who plans to study abroad in college, practices her pronunciation alone in front of a computer.
"J'ai renforcé ma comprehension de la langue" by taking an advanced-placement French course online, Ms. Larrivee says.
Advanced-placement classes have been booming amid efforts by high-school students and parents to trim college tuition costs and gain an edge in the college-admissions race. A record 1.99 million high-school students are expected to take AP exams next month, up 159% from 2000, says Trevor Packer, vice president, advanced placement, for the College Board, New York, the nonprofit that oversees AP courses and testing. About 90% of U.S. colleges and universities award college credit to high-school students who pass the program's rigorous subject-matter tests.
Seattle schools have forgotten to listen to parents: There's always an open door for businesses and well-financed interest groups with an agenda. Parents? Well, that's another story.
It's good that Seattle City Council members, our mayor, and the Seattle School Board are finally calling for needed reform and accountability within our district. While many in our community were stunned at the revelations about the depth of ineptitude, obliviousness, and near criminality within our school district, some parents felt a saddened sense of relief mixed with frustration. This is the part of the story that remains untold.
Parents in Seattle Public Schools have never been passive consumers but committed partners. Besides raising millions of dollars each year for our schools, they also get out the vote for our education levies and bonds. Some are watchdogs for our school district.
These "feet on the ground" parents know their schools and neighborhoods well.
Union relations
The current teachers' contract is set to expire at the end of the next school year, and with education reform bills in Springfield pressuring teachers to make concessions, the negotiations may become heated. "He's going to have to, in a very short period of time, figure out what he's going to keep and what needs to be cut back, and at the same time get off on the right foot with the teachers union," said Robin Steans, executive director of Advance Illinois.
Budget deficit
With federal stimulus funding drying up, more than $350 million in late payments from the state, and a scheduled raise for teachers, CPS is staring at an $820 million deficit. But Brizard may have help.
The Hudson school board will suspend dozens of employees whose absences during public worker protests in Madison, Wis., caused district schools to close Feb. 18.
About 40 employees of the Hudson school district, mostly teachers, will be disciplined. Punishment ranges from one to 15 days of unpaid suspension, according to the district.
The length of suspension is based on "the district's investigation into the actions believed to have been taken by each employee," said district communications specialist Tracy Habisch-Ahlin in an email. The suspensions are to be served by the end of this school year.
"Having to close schools on Feb. 18 was a serious issue that impacted over 5,000 students along with their parents or caregivers," said school board president Barb Van Loenen. "As a result, the board spent considerable time listening to our community members and ... deliberating an appropriate response for individuals who were involved in the excessive absences."
Mayor-Elect Rahm Emanuel's pick to guide the Chicago Public Schools is a New York superintendent who raised test scores and the union's ire in Rochester, closed under-performing schools and opened new ones-and has quite a task ahead if he is to fulfill the education agenda outlined by his new boss.
"I've decided to have a fresh start and hit the reset button on education," Emanuel said Monday in announcing Jean-Claude Brizard as his choice for chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools, along with an entirely new school board and new CPS leadership team.
The appointment raised concerns among the Chicago Teachers Union about Brizard's contentious relations with Rochester's teachers. In Brizard, Emanuel has chosen a proponent of charter schools and merit pay who also now must deal with an $820 million budget deficit.
The Chicago Teachers Union, with whom Brizard must start negotiating a new contract, criticized the selection. "We're disappointed both by the choice of Brizard and by the entire tone that the mayor-elect has adopted," said Jesse Sharkey, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union.
When districtwide layoff notices hit every one of Detroit Public Schools' 5,466 unionized employees late last week, an American Federation of Teachers spokeswoman called the move the largest "one fell swoop" firing of teachers in union memory.
More broadly troubling to teachers and education-reform observers, however, was DPS Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb's concurrent announcement that he plans to unilaterally modify the Detroit Federation of Teachers' collective bargaining agreement, the first test of a sweeping new state law.
Public Act 4, signed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) in March, grants the emergency managers of troubled school districts the power to "reject, modify, or terminate one or more terms and conditions of an existing collective bargaining agreement." Under the law, Bobb could choose to abrogate the Detroit teachers' contract entirely.
As the call for teacher evaluation and tenure reform intensifies across the country, the hypothetical arguments against holding teachers accountable become frustratingly similar. "How can we hold teachers accountable for students with difficult home lives? What about teachers who have homeless students in their classrooms? What about students whose parents are almost criminally uninvolved in their education? Certainly, it wouldn't be fair to make teachers responsible for those students." So, let's settle this once and for all: making sure that those students get an education is the whole purpose of public education. And the existence of teachers who feel they should only have to worry about the children of involved, employed, and educated parents is part of what drives the fervor for education reform.
Public education should be a refuge for those children. It should be the one place where a child can be certain that his parents' actions cannot hurt him, and where he can be sure all of the adults have only his best interests at heart. Public education should ensure that EVERY child graduates with the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in college and in the 21st century job market. It should be the springboard out of generational poverty. Instead of family struggles or background being an excuse to give up on students, it should be the inspiration to work twice as hard to be sure students get the education that could change the course of their lives.
The U.S. Constitution says nothing about public education, but all the state constitutions have clauses addressing it, and reading through them is a mildly inspiring way to spend half an hour. Arkansas: "Intelligence and virtue being the safeguards of liberty and the bulwark of a free and good government, the State shall ever maintain a general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools." Florida: "The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida." Idaho: "The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature . . ." Massachusetts: "It shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this Commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences." Michigan: "Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
The Texas state constitution hits a similar note in Article 7, which states: "A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools." Compared with the other states' fine print, this is pretty good. It isn't quite as ardent as Michigan's declaration, but it has considerably more enthusiasm than Wyoming's ("The right of the citizens to opportunities for education should have practical recognition"). And the idea it articulates, in one long legal sentence, is beautifully straightforward and persuasive: We need a well-educated populace in order to have a functional democracy, so the state should ensure that everyone gets an education. Simple.
First, we need to adopt a preliminary budget so that we can get any necessary layoff notices issued before our deadline. This requires us to resolve the OT/COTA issue, since the superintendent has recommended issuing layoff notices to our COTAs. But no other layoff notices are in the works for the Board to consider. (There could be some layoffs attributable to shifting enrollment levels among our schools, but the Board tends not to get involved in these.) This lessens the urgency and reduces the scope of our budget deliberations.
Second, it seems likely that we will spend less time on individual Board member's proposed budget amendments this year. In the past, Board members have generally had two primary motives for offering amendments. The first was to find alternatives for unappealing budget recommendations. We don't have a slew of unappealing recommendations this year. The second motive has been to reduce what a Board member considered to be an unacceptably large increase in our property tax levy. That shouldn't be an issue this year.
Individual Board members may come up with some sound and beneficial budget recommendations this year, of course. At this point, I don't expect to offer much in the way of amendments myself, since I'm aware of no low-hanging fruit and I'm not much in favor of trying to effect policy changes through the budget amendment process.
Third, our budget deliberations (and our recent extension of our collective bargaining agreements) have been shaped primarily in response to the Governor's budget recommendations. The budget bill is unlikely to pass before the end of June. Our budget choices are affected by the final form the budget bill takes. What happens with our underlevy authority is the most obvious example.
Under the circumstances, if we pass a preliminary budget before final action on the budget bill, our budget will be really, really preliminary. A lot of the heavy lifting budget-wise - like what to do with our underlevy authority, if it survives - can't take place until after June.
There are some other reasons as well why it makes sense to defer substantive budget deliberations to later in the year. For example, it would be helpful to know how our fund balance will look at the end of the fiscal year on June 30 and how it's changed from last year. We'd also be in a better position to make smart choices for next year if we have a clearer idea of how our 2012-2013 budget is looking and the more time passes, the clearer those numbers will come into focus.
Public higher education institutions in Wisconsin and Georgia--and possibly as many as five other states--will not participate voluntarily in a review of education schools now being conducted by the National Council for Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report, according to recent correspondence between state consortia and the two groups.
In response, NCTQ and U.S. News are moving forward with plans to obtain the information from these institutions through open-records requests.
In letters to the two organizations, the president of the University of Wisconsin system and the chancellor of Georgia's board of regents said their public institutions would opt out of the review, citing a lack of transparency and questionable methodology, among other concerns.
Formally announced in January, the review will rate education schools on up to 18 standards, basing the decisions primarily on examinations of course syllabuses and student-teaching manuals.
The situation is murkier in New York, Maryland, Colorado, and California, where public university officials have sent letters to NCTQ and U.S. News requesting changes to the review process, but haven't yet declined to take part willingly.
In Kentucky, the presidents, provosts, and ed. school deans of public universities wrote in a letter to the research and advocacy group and the newsmagazine that they won't "endorse" the review. It's not yet clear what that means for their participation.
Lake Wobegon has nothing on the UW-Madison School of Education. All of the children in Garrison Keillor's fictional Minnesota town are "above average." Well, in the School of Education they're all A students.
The 1,400 or so kids in the teacher-training department soared to a dizzying 3.91 grade point average on a four-point scale in the spring 2009 semester.
This was par for the course, so to speak. The eight departments in Education (see below) had an aggregate 3.69 grade point average, next to Pharmacy the highest among the UW's schools. Scrolling through the Registrar's online grade records is a discombobulating experience, if you hold to an old-school belief that average kids get C's and only the really high performers score A's.
Much like a modern-day middle school honors assembly, everybody's a winner at the UW School of Education. In its Department of Curriculum and Instruction (that's the teacher-training program), 96% of the undergraduates who received letter grades collected A's and a handful of A/B's. No fluke, another survey taken 12 years ago found almost exactly the same percentage.
Political leaders hope to act this year to renew and fix the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, also known as No Child Left Behind). In this important new paper, Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Executive Vice President Michael J. Petrilli identify 10 big issues that must be resolved in order to get a bill across the finish line, and explore the major options under consideration for each one. Should states be required to adopt academic standards tied to college and career readiness? Should the new law provide greater flexibility to states and districts? These are just a few of the areas discussed. Finn and Petrilli also present their own bold yet "reform realist" solutions for ESEA. Read on to learn more.
Early on Monday mornings, in my classroom at Babson College, I shepherd 30 undergraduates into the room with a smile and a "How are you?" or a "Good morning." From my seat, I have a clear view down a corridor to another classroom, where I can sometimes glimpse a colleague from my department offering the same perfunctory greetings. While we have a lot in common - PhDs from respected institutions, years spent writing and publishing, a passion for teaching - there is something that divides us: He is a tenure-track professor and I am an adjunct lecturer.
In the world of academia, the distinction between these job titles is a huge one. Tenure-track professors are hired by universities to do a combination of teaching and research and to help their departments develop. Pending a major review of their performance after five or six years - when they try to win tenure, which pretty much guarantees a job for life - tenure-track professors are essentially full-time members of the faculty. Their positions usually come with a range of benefits like health insurance and periodic semester-long sabbaticals.
On the other side of this divide, adjunct faculty members (whose positions are sometimes described by other labels such as "lecturer," "contingent faculty," or "instructor") are exclusively teachers. They generally work on a system of semester-to-semester contracts, rarely enjoy benefits, and often are considered part time, regardless of the amount of teaching they do.
A split in teachers' opinions over appropriate responses to an explosive state collective bargaining law resonates through disciplinary records released by the Oshkosh school district last week.
The records obtained by The Northwestern include forms signed by 86 employees who admitted they called in sick on Feb. 17 and 18 to join protests in Madison as well as a discipline settlement with teachers' union president Len Herricks, who incorrectly told staff members that district administration would condone calling in sick to attend the protests.
Comments hand-written by educators on many of the records show a range of regret, defiance and confusion felt by rank-and-file employees caught in a whirlwind of political rhetoric and polarization.
Antonoff said the proposed budget is inflated by purchases of technology "gimmicks" such digital whiteboards and audio equipment.
"We didn't have those," he said. "Computer is a distraction. . . . You learn the basics first."
Disagreeing, Acevedo said schools need modern technology to stay globally competitive.
Technology is a tool to save money, said Hughes, who opposes the proposed budget. Systems that enable Internet-based communication between parents, teachers and students save money the district would spend on ink, paper and postage, she said.
The Washington Teachers Union staged a protest, complete with a giant inflatable rat, in front of the Washington Post building today for reasons that are, frankly, hard to understand.
According to the Post, which gamely reported on the event, the protesters claimed that the Post's parent company's reliance on Kaplan was affecting its editorial page coverage by making it skew anti-teacher.
There are growing protests from teachers and parents across the country over high-stakes standardized testing and other school reform measures -- many of which the Obama administration has encouraged states to undertake -- as well as over huge cuts in public education.
The pushback has largely been local, though a national march on Washington is being organized for this summer as states move to enact reforms that call for more charter schools and vouchers and that make standardized testing more important than ever in evaluating schools, students and teachers.
In North Carolina, for example, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools this spring field tested 52 (yes 52) new standardized tests, including four exams each for kindergartners and first-graders, and kids lost as much as a week of instruction. That won't stop the district from adding even more tests next year, for art, music and physical education, and many teachers and parents fear that this is becoming the face of public education.
In 2008, Molly Rozga went back to school just shy of her 27th birthday.
Rozga wanted to work in a field where she could give back to the community and have the added comfort of job security. So, she chose education, thinking teaching was one of the most stable careers out there.
But in the current political environment, Rozga, now a 29-year-old junior education major at Alverno College, sees teaching as something "a little scary to be going into."
"It's giving me a little bit of anxiety," Rozga said.
With Gov. Scott Walker proposing to cut state aid to public schools and restrict collective bargaining for public school teachers as part of a plan to close a $3.5 billion state budget deficit, students like Rozga are stepping into a new world in their chosen field.
Cash-hungry states and municipalities, in pursuit of even the smallest amounts of revenue, have begun to exploit one market that they have exclusive control over: their own property.
With the help of a few eager marketing consultants, many governments are peddling the rights to place advertisements in public school cafeterias, on the sides of yellow school buses, in prison holding areas and in the waiting rooms of welfare offices and the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The revenue generated by these ads is just a drop in the bucket for states and counties with deficits in the millions or billions of dollars. But supporters say every penny helps.
Still, critics question whether the modest sums are worth further exposing citizens -- especially children -- to even more commercial pitches.
The new state law, held up pending a legal challenge, forbids most public worker unions from negotiating salary schedules, benefits and workplace rules with employers. It still allows bargaining over inflationary increases in "total base wages," but generally makes it harder for unions to operate.
It also means school administrators would be able to make major changes to pay scales, school calendars and work rules without consulting teachers.
Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state's largest teachers union, said that while teachers won't necessarily obstruct changes, they are less likely to offer new ideas themselves if they are not covered by a union contract.
"Innovation takes risk," Bell said. "Risk in an environment where your protection is gone is a much different proposition."
Just days before Walker announced his changes to collective bargaining, WEAC had announced support for a statewide teacher evaluation system and performance-based pay. That overture, however, has been largely overshadowed by the union controversy.
Three weeks ago I shared an interview with Superintendent John Kuhn of the Perrin-Whitt Independent School District in the great state of Texas. Today he offers us a reflection on a recent experience at the state Capitol.
Yesterday I testified before the Public Ed. Committee of the Texas House of Representatives on behalf of a bill that would initiate a two-year moratorium on standardized testing, known as STAAR in Texas. Here are the remarks I shared before the representatives began asking questions:
I have a dilemma: I personally believe state testing is morally compromised because TEA has overwrought test security to the point that it is a parody of big government interference and micromanagement, because testing has turned the adventure of education into something that feels more like an assembly line, because Austin has nudged our teachers from behind their podiums and has said Pearson can assess better than they can, because student creativity is being sacrificed in favor of standardization, because scores are used to unfairly punish schools and teachers that embrace the neediest students, and because test scores have been used during the past five years to drive a labeling process that has systematically concealed the fact that some schools are comparatively underfunded. Is a high target revenue "recognized" school really any better than a low target revenue "acceptable" school? Texas has published these labels with no mention of funding disadvantages, leaving the public to assume underperforming schools do so for no other reason than they are less competent institutions. I'm worried STAAR will continue this kind of railroading of our local schools.
I am probably the nation's most devoted reader of real-life high school reform drama, an overlooked literary genre. If there were a Pulitzer Prize in this category, Alexander Russo's new book on the remaking of Locke High in Los Angeles would win. It is a must-read, nerve-jangling thrill ride, at least for those of us who love tales of teachers and students.
Readers obsessed with fixing our failing urban schools will learn much from the personal clashes and political twists involved in the effort to save what some people called America's worst school. I remember the many news stories about Locke, and enjoyed discovering the real story was different, and more interesting.
Locke was not really our toughest high school. Russo finds some nice students and kind teachers. But its inner-city blend of occasional mayhem and very low test scores made it famous when its teachers revolted and helped turn it over to a charter school organization that tried to fix it by breaking it into smaller, more manageable pieces.
Indiana is on the verge of taking its most important strides forward on education in decades.
The final, and most important, piece fell into place Friday when Gov. Mitch Daniels announced that he would ask the General Assembly to expand full-day kindergarten to every school district in the state. That unexpected announcement, which dropped late in the legislative process, was made possible by a much better than expected revenue forecast.
Schools also will fare better than planned in the overall state budget. Districts absorbed 3 percent budget cuts last year, and the proposal before Friday was to write those reductions into the new two-year budget. Now, the governor and Republican legislators, who control the budget process, want to funnel an additional $150 million into public schools over the next two years.
Incoming Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel named a new schools chief Monday, choosing a leader known for his efforts to close low-performing schools, fire underperforming principals and link teacher pay to student test scores.
Jean-Claude Brizard, superintendent of schools in Rochester, N.Y., will succeed Terry Mazany, who has headed the nation's third-largest school district since November 2010. Mr. Emanuel, who is scheduled to take office in May, made the announcement at Kelly High School on Chicago's south side. The appointment must now be approved by the school board.
Mr. Brizard takes over a system that has seen three leaders in as many years. He will face a reported $750 million budget deficit, a looming contract negotiation with the Chicago Teachers' Union, and a district that has lost its mantle as a national leader in education innovation.
A visit to Newark by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Wednesday highlights the city's emerging status as a focal point in struggle over how to improve public schools.
Duncan has high hopes for Newark, which is looking for a new superintendent at a time when both Gov. Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker have made education their top issue. The Christie administration has approved a record number of public charter schools this year, many of them in Newark.
A $100 million education grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has meant, as Duncan put it, that "eyes of the country will be on Newark."
"The goal in Newark is that in five years, not 10 years, it should be the best urban school system in the country," Duncan said in an interview with the Star-Ledger.
The Middleton teachers' union and school board continue to battle over the latest proposed contract.
The two sides met during a school board meeting on Monday and more than 50 people lined up to voice their concerns about the deal.
Many teachers said that they believe the contract takes away their collective bargaining rights by proposing non-negotiable changes, including the removal of "just cause for discipline."
"Bullies are not welcome on school yards or on the school boards. It is time you step up to the plate and only deal with fiscal changes. Don't play into politics going on throughout our state," said Madison resident Cami Jo Sanner.
Standard & Poor's surprised markets today with a warning that the AAA rating of US debt is now on "negative watch", implying that there is a one-in-three chance that the US might lose its triple-A status in the next two years. Although there was nothing new in the underlying data cited by S&P, their judgment has clearly been impacted by the sharp political differences which have recently emerged in Washington about how to cut the deficit.
Both political parties agree that a large fiscal consolidation plan is needed, but they have widely different points of view on how the savings should be found. This has caused S&P to express scepticism about whether Washington can reach agreement on a deficit reduction plan and then stick to it over a series of difficult years.
That's how much the U.S. government spends, in inflation-adjusted dollars, per capita. Which means it's adjusted for both inflation and population increase. And note that that graph has a logarithmic scale.
A hundred years ago, federal spending for each person was the equivalent of $200 in today's dollars. After FDR, with all of his massive public spending, it was $1,000. This year, it's over $12,000. How long can this continue?
For the first time since the Great Depression, households are receiving more income from the government than they are paying the government in taxes. The combination of more cash from various programs, called transfer payments, and lower taxes has been a double-barreled boost to consumers' buying power, while also blowing a hole in the deficit. The 1930s offer a cautionary tale: The only other time government income support exceeded taxes paid was from 1931 to 1936. That trend reversed in 1936, after a recovery was underway, and the economy fell back into a second leg of recession during 1937 and 1938.
A new state law has emboldened the Detroit mayor and schools chief to take a more aggressive stance toward public unions as the city leaders try to mop up hundreds of millions of dollars in red ink.
Robert Bobb, the head of the Detroit Public Schools, late last week sent layoff notices to the district's 5,466 salaried employees, including all of its teachers, a preliminary step in seeking broad work-force cuts to deal with lower enrollment.
Earlier last week, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing presented a $3.1 billion annual budget to City Council in which he proposed higher casino taxes and substantial cuts in city workers' health care and pensions to close an estimated $200 million budget gap.
Mr. Bobb, already an emergency financial manager for the struggling and shrinking public school system, is getting further authority under a measure signed into law March 17 that broadens state powers to intervene in the finances and governance of struggling municipalities and school districts. This could enable Mr. Bobb to void union contracts, sideline elected school-board members, close schools and authorize charter schools.
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Mr. Bobb, appointed in 2009 by Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm and retained by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, pledged last week to use those powers to deal decisively with the district's $327 million shortfall and its educational deficiencies. Mr. Bobb raised the possibility of making unilateral changes to the collective-bargaining agreements signed with teachers less than two years ago.
He is also expected to target seniority rights that protect longtime teachers from layoffs and give them the ability to reject certain school placements.
There is, of course, no one perfect way to grade schools. The Children at Risk methodology is designed to evaluate schools on multiple academic measures and goes beyond the state's accountability system, which is based largely on whether students pass (or are projected to pass) the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Children at Risk looks at the higher standard of "commended" on the TAKS. At the high school level, the most weight is given to a six-year graduation rate, calculated by Children at Risk. No matter what a school is doing, if students don't graduate, then did it get the job done?
The formula also gives a boost to schools with larger concentrations of low-income children in an attempt to adjust for the impact of poverty. Children at Risk attempted to include as many schools as possible in the rankings, but those with insufficient data or atypical grade-level configurations were excluded. The rankings are based on public data from the Texas Education Agency from 2010 or 2009 (using the most recent year available).
Early on in the protests at the Capitol, I ran into a friend who predicted that the unions would agree to all of Walker's benefit cuts if he agreed to allow collective bargaining.
"They would do that?" I asked innocently. "They wouldn't tell the governor to rescind tax cuts on businesses before he attempts to balance the budget on the backs of workers?"
"Just wait," she said.
Little did either of us imagine that the unions would soon concede to all of the benefit cuts BEFORE Walker agreed to talk. When you give up key issues before the other side is at the table, there isn't much left to negotiate. It is certainly not the way we educators teach children to deal with a bully.
However things turn out with Walker's damaging repair bill, Wisconsin unions have helped dig themselves into a hole. Some unions may fare better than others. I am distraught about Madison Teachers Inc., which I belong to as a substitute teacher. In its rush to negotiate with the district immediately after Walker signed the bill, MTI plunged headlong into the very waters it was trying to avoid. The union allowed the lowest paid to, in effect, sail away in a leaky lifeboat.
Proposed overhaul of state accreditation rules but remain alarmed by its far-reaching implications.
They continue to raise serious questions about the proposal, which, among other things, would
- increase the number of already controversial state-mandated exams,
- require districts to be reviewed annually, instead of every five years, and
- force districts to track the progress of graduates and to report a variety of new details, including how many students complete federal financial aid forms.
Two days before the big Los Angeles labor demonstration, for example, a coalition of six unions representing more than 14,500 municipal workers reached a tentative agreement on a contract with an estimated $400 million in concessions, including cancellation of scheduled pay raises and a measure that would almost double workers' contributions to retirement benefits from 6 to 11 percent. That's close to the pension contribution of 12.8 percent mandated for Wisconsin public-sector workers in Walker's anti-union bill.
The LA contract, if approved, will save the city government $1 billion over 30 years. "The structural impact will go on forever," admitted Service Employees International Union Local 721 President Bob Schoonover.
Meanwhile, California Gov. Jerry Brown is using the Republican minority in the state legislature as a bogeyman to pressure state employees' unions to take concessions beyond the $400 million they accepted last year. "I tell my union friends, you're going to have to make some changes now, or much more drastic changes later," Brown said.
Nevertheless, union leaders are giving Brown a pass, despite budget proposals that will devastate working people in California. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently gave a speech in which she denounced Walker and defended public-sector workers--but embraced Brown's call for "shared responsibility, one that will hopefully lead to a better budgetary outcome in the short term, and a better economic output in the long term."
Students in Chicago's public schools will spend an extra hour or hour and a half in school each day once new legislation makes it out of Springfield, Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel said Friday.
Emanuel said the issue of how much more teachers will get paid is open to negotiation -- but not the question of whether the school day will be longer. It will be, Emanuel said.
"We're not going to negotiate or discuss whether children get more instruction -- we will work together so that gets done. I'm not deviating from that. I was clear about it," Emanuel said after speaking at a South Side charter school.
More than any other mayoral candidate, Emanuel said he strongly backed curtailing teachers' right to strike and a longer school day.
Chicago students are "cheated" by not getting as much school time as Houston's students, Emanuel said.
Teachers unions insist they aren't giving away the store in landmark education reform moving through Springfield this year that would make it harder for teachers to get tenure.
They point to other provisions -- a more open collective-bargaining system, training rules for school board members, school-by-school surveys on working conditions -- that they believe will work in teachers' favor.
But there is also a mostly unspoken incentive in what they see going on in neighboring states. Missouri and Indiana are considering virtually dismantling tenure. In Wisconsin, the very concept of collective bargaining is on life-support.
"We were engaging in this process before Wisconsin occurred," noted Ken Swanson, president of the Illinois Education Association. But he admits: "As all the parties saw what was unfolding in Wisconsin and elsewhere, it gave us further cause to come together and find common ground."
If there's one consistent trait of Ohio's governors, it's their desire to leave a personal mark on the state's education system.
Former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland wanted a longer school year, tougher standards and greater college access in his multi-faceted plan that never got off the ground thanks to politics and the state's budget crunch.
Now, his successor Republican John Kasich wants to change the game with his own ambitious ideas, including:
» Publicly ranking Ohio schools and rewarding those in the top 10 percent, while punishing those in the bottom 5.
» Creating "innovation" schools that, with staff and school board agreement, could get rid of most rules and create their own, possibly including longer class time.
For the past nine years our schools have been run by a top-down bureaucracy that too often alienates public school parents. To your great credit, you have said that you want to engage parents and communities more than in the past. But you have also said that you plan to stay the course on the Bloomberg administration's education policies and practices. I believe you have the background and experience to finally bring parents into our school system, but I know you will not be able to do it by maintaining the status quo.
I am a public school parent and I have talked with parents all over our city who are tired of the Department of Education treating them like problems instead of partners. They are looking for a chancellor who has the independence to bring real change to our school system. To accomplish this goal, I believe you must immediately take on three pressing issues facing our schools today: reforming the DOE's closed off, bureaucratic process for closing and co-locating schools; fully supporting the parents of students with disabilities; and most importantly, saving the over 4,600 teachers who will be fired under Mayor Bloomberg's budget.
PUBLIC finance can seem a dry, abstract subject until the point when it becomes all too real. Portugal and Greece managed for years with budget deficits, high public debt and low growth (Ireland, with the failure of its outsize banking sector, is a rather different case). Now they have been forced into painful restructuring by bond markets. On the other side of the Atlantic, America faces its most serious budget crisis for decades. On April 13th President Barack Obama is set to present yet another plan to reduce the country's mammoth deficit. America's economy is so large, and foreign appetite for greenbacks so voracious, that it seems inconceivable that it could suffer a fate similar to that of Portugal or Greece. The IMF's World Economic Outlook (WEO), published this week, aims to shatter such complacency. America, its authors write, lacks a credible strategy for dealing with its growing public debt, and is expanding its budget deficit at a time when it should be shrinking. The chart below, drawn from the WEO, illustrates the size of the problem America faces.
Terry Moe has spent years carefully researching this new book on the education unions. I look forward to seeing Terry's research, which informed his taking of the teacher unions to the woodshed in a debate a couple of years ago. Terry's opening statement was very powerful:
What we are saying is that the unions are and have long been major obstacles to real reform in the system. And we're hardly alone in saying this. If you read "Newsweek," "Time Magazine," the "Washington Post," lots of other well respected publications, they're all saying the same thing: that the teachers unions are standing in the way of progress. So look. Let me start with an obvious example. The teachers unions have fought for all sorts of protections in labor contracts and in state laws that make it virtually impossible to get bad teachers out of the classroom. On average, it takes two years, $200,000, and 15% of the principal's total time to get one bad teacher out of the classroom. As a result, principals don't even try. They give 99% of teachers -- no joke -- satisfactory evaluations. The bad teachers just stay in the classroom. Well, if we figure that maybe 5% of the teachers, that's a conservative estimate, are bad teachers nationwide, that means that 2.5 million kids are stuck in classrooms with teachers who aren't teaching them anything. This is devastating. And the unions are largely responsible for that.
They're also responsible for seniority provisions in these labor contracts that among other things often allow senior teachers to stake a claim to desirable jobs, even if they're not good teachers and even if they're a bad fit for that school. The seniority rules often require districts to lay off junior people before senior people. It's happening all around the country now. And some of these junior people are some of the best teachers in the district. And some of the senior people that are being saved are the worst. Okay. So just ask yourself, would anyone in his right mind organize schools in this way, if all they cared about was what's best for kids? And the answer is no. But this is the way our schools are actually organized. And it's due largely to the power of the unions.
Moves to weaken traditional job protections for teachers are gaining momentum around the country. Tenure reform bills were recently signed into law in Florida and Tennessee, and are being considered in Illinois, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and several other states. Delaware and Colorado passed such laws last year.
In Oklahoma, a bill cleared a House committee on April 12 that would broaden the list of reasons teachers can be fired to include dishonesty, insubordination, negligence, and failing to comply with school district policies.
Illinois teacher unions have numbers and money that translate into influence at the state Capitol, but they're still making major concessions on job security and the ability to strike.
While union leaders said they were driven by what's best for kids, they also acknowledge watching high-profile fights over public employee rights in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana.
"It made all the parties more cognizant that everyone was going to have to come away with less than their ideal on some issues," IEA President Ken Swanson said Thursday. "But at the end of the day, this thing was too important to not come to agreement."
Two days before the April 1 teacher retirement notification deadline in Milwaukee Public Schools, Karen Scharrer-Erickson drove to the district's human resources office on her lunch break.
The teacher of 43 years entered the room. Then she burst into tears.
"I am totally not ready," Scharrer-Erickson, a literacy coach at the Academy of Accelerated Learning, said this week. "I never thought about retiring until the (Gov.) Scott Walker situation, because this school is so special and I am working with the most incredibly caring teachers I have ever known."
At a time when the governor's plan to eliminate most collective bargaining for teachers and increase state employees' payments for health care and pension costs looms overhead, some school districts are seeing record numbers of senior teachers such as Scharrer-Erickson turn in their retirement paperwork.
Although their pensions are beyond the reach of lawmakers and local officials, many teachers fear that changes could mean they soon could lose early retirement benefits such as health insurance that helps support them until they are eligible for Medicare.
Are those in debt buying more education or are they seeking better branding in the form of coveted diplomas?
Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper but no less rigorous self-generated approach assembled from less famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources?
If not, then the money is actually being spent on the value of the degree, on the doors it will open and the jobs it will snag. If this marketing strategy works big, it pays for itself in no time.
As a retired educator with slightly more than 35 years working in the Madison Metropolitan School District, I can only describe the last few months as dispiriting.
I've watched as our new governor has apparently chosen public educators and public employees as his primary targets in a campaign that appears to be more about politics than economics. My pride in my profession and fears about the future of public schools in Wisconsin have been shaken greatly.
I have protested at the Capitol and appeared before the Senate Education Committee when it was considering a revision in the law pertaining to charter schools in our state. The governor wants to move approval of charter schools from a process involving local school board control and supervision to one driven by a state board molded by political appointees.
When students across the state sit down Monday to begin intensive testing in the main round of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, they'll be faced with an exam that is a bit different - and, in some cases, harder - than in previous years.
The Florida Department of Education is unveiling the FCAT 2.0 this year for grades 3-10 in reading and grades 3-8 in math.
The new FCATs were designed using the state's new Next Generation Sunshine State standards, which are considered more rigorous than the previous FCAT standards.
For instance, reading assessments will have more questions that require prior knowledge and reasonable inferences than previous FCAT exams. They will also include more historical documents and literature. Some of the reading passages are longer than in previous years.
A sprawling education-reform package that could lengthen the school year in Chicago, give school districts new powers to oust poorly performing teachers and impose new obstacles on teachers strikes passed the Senate Thursday without dissent.
The Senate's 59-0 vote on a plan that united teachers unions, reform groups and school boards capped a busy legislative day in which lawmakers rejected a business-backed workers compensation reform package and launched a new crackdown on the state's cash-strapped prepaid college tuition program.
"This is the reason why I serve in this chamber: It's for education youth development, giving that child who lives in a poor zip code the same opportunities as a child who lives in a wealthy zip code," Sen. Kimberly Lightford (D-Maywood) said of her school-reform bill as she choked up with emotion.
The legislation drew backing from Gov. Quinn, who said it "helps us make sure that we have the best teachers in our classrooms and assures effective teacher performance."
The bill under consideration is the result of negotiations between education groups Advance Illinois and Stand for Children, teachers' unions, and school administrators and it reforms tenure, establishes performance as a hiring standard and limits seniority and the right to strike. The Chicago Teachers Union, Illinois Federation of Teachers, Illinois Education Association have all backed the measure.
On the campaign trail, Emanuel backed an early version of the bill that the unions originally opposed, using harsh rhetoric against the teachers unions.
"Chicago kids are being cheated out of four years' worth of education," Emanuel said in February signaling he backed reforms to tenure and curtailing the right to strike. Teachers, he said "are working very hard in adverse conditions in many places but they are not underpaid."
Eleven schools in Milwaukee have been identified as some of the lowest performing in the state and are in line for over $6.3 million in federal grants to spur a turnaround. If MPS' targeted plans go through, more than half will be looking for new principals for the 2011-2012 school year - and one will be closed altogether.
Major reforms are in line for four of the schools, according to city superintendent Gregory Thornton. The city will adhere to the federal turnaround model designed specifically to combat the culture of failure in these schools. As a result, Pulaski High School, Northwest Secondary School, Washington High School of Information Technology, and Advanced Language and Academic Students (ALAS) will have their entire instructional staff released.
These schools will be tasked with finding a new principal and several new teachers, as only half of the existing teaching corps is eligible to be rehired. Many of these changes will come with assistance from outside sources, which will be accommodated by $6.3m of federal funding.
The new Seattle Public School Superintendent, Dr. Susan Enfield has promised to usher in a new era of transparency to SPS. In this spirit, she has agreed to answer your questions directly. Ask here about the direction Seattle Public Schools will be taking, how they are dealing with the budget crises, plans for opening/closing schools etc. On April 13, she will answer at least ten questions.
The Newark Council Education Committee met last night with group of stakeholders, including Theresa Adubato of the Robert Treat Academy, Junius Williams of the Abbott Leadership Institute, ELC founder Paul Tractenberg, and School Board Chair Shavar Jeffries. According to the Star-Ledger, the debate was noteworthy for its lack of contention, especially in light of recent fireworks. The meeting was chaired by South Ward Councilman Ras Baraka, who moonlights as Principal of Newark Central High School.
The conversation veered toward the disparity between the number of special needs kids in charter schools (like Robert Treat) and the number of special needs kids in traditional public schools. Here's Michael Pallante, who is the former principal of Camden Street School, a district K-4 school. He's now is at Robert Treat:
Two retired sanitation workers from Memphis stood proudly before the assembly gathered at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Milwaukee the Friday before the April 5 election. The Rev. Jesse Jackson made sure the message was clear. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life for these workers when they went on strike in Memphis in 1968. Now those assembled were to march in King's honor and vote for candidates who supported a basic civil right: collective bargaining.
Opponents of labor unions have cleverly made this budget battle a choice between workers and taxpayers, workers and children, workers and just about everything else. But these are false choices, and nowhere is this better illustrated than the attack on the Milwaukee Public Schools food service workers.
A high percentage of food service workers are black and Latino at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Like the sanitation workers in Memphis, school food service workers see themselves fighting for their civil rights. The false choice is that money saved from the cuts in pay and benefits could be used to help fund kindergarten or lower class sizes.
A misdialed union voicemail message, emails obtained through an open records request and official court documents reveal new details about the Madison teachers' work stoppage [Google Cached Link] that closed the district's public schools for four days.
The Madison Metropolitan School District called the "sickouts" a "strike" and accused the union of organizing it. The union, Madison Teachers Inc., however, maintained that teachers were calling in sick on their own initiative. New evidence suggests the union's claim is not true.
The MacIver News Service obtained dozens of emails in response to an open records request filed with the school district.
On Tuesday, February 15th, the day before the four day sick out began, Dan Nerad, Madison Schools Superintendent, sent out a mass email to teachers stating "Throughout the day we have received significant information indicating that staff members will call in ill tomorrow, Thursday and/or Friday to protest the Governor's actions. While I believe his actions warrant protest, I am asking that this course of action not be taken,"
Nerad was floored when he found out Matthews was telling the union MMSD was not willing to meet that past weekend. He said Matthews never confirmed a meeting with them.
Howard Bellman, the arbitrator, responded that he had suggested to Nerad they meet sometime over the weekend. Nerad said he wasn't available until Tuesday, and Bellman relayed that to the union.
Matthews then sent Nerad an email stating "Dan: I know that you are dealing with your Mother's illness at this time, and I respect that. However, for MMSD to not be prepared to deal with the issues facing both MMSD and MTI (your employees) today is reprehensible."
Later that day the Senate passed an amended version of the budget repair bill, and Nerad wondered if he could expect his staff to report to work on Thursday.
Matthews responded the union asked all teachers to go to work in the morning. He also pushed for a contract agreement for MTI's support staff groups.
"You have to know that our negotiations are at a very serious juncture. We simply must reach an agreement on Friday or the volcano may just erupt. It is not fair to those in the support unites to be treated differently than those in the professional unit. Because AFSCME took an inferior contract is no reason for MTI to do so. This matter is clearly in your hands to resolve, so be fair, creative and decisive. We have no time left to wring our hands. It is very difficult to hold people back from taking further action," said Matthews.
What happens in the classroom when a state begins to evaluate all teachers, at every grade level, based on how well they "grow" their students' test scores? Colorado is about to find out.
On exam day in Sabina Trombetta's Colorado Springs first-grade art class, the 6-year-olds were shown a slide of Picasso's "Weeping Woman," a 1937 cubist portrait of the artist's lover, Dora Maar, with tears streaming down her face. It is painted in vibrant -- almost neon -- greens, bluish purples, and yellows. Explaining the painting, Picasso once said, "Women are suffering machines."
The test asked the first-graders to look at "Weeping Woman" and "write three colors Picasso used to show feeling or emotion." (Acceptable answers: blue, green, purple, and yellow.) Another question asked, "In each box below, draw three different shapes that Picasso used to show feeling or emotion." (Acceptable drawings: triangles, ovals, and rectangles.) A separate section of the exam asked students to write a full paragraph about a Matisse painting.
Trombetta, 38, a 10-year teaching veteran and winner of distinguished teaching awards from both her school district, Harrison District 2, and Pikes Peak County, would have rather been handing out glue sticks and finger paints. The kids would have preferred that, too. But the test wasn't really about them. It was about their teacher.
Trombetta and her students, 87 percent of whom come from poor families, are part of one of the most aggressive education-reform experiments in the country: a soon-to-be state-mandated attempt to evaluate all teachers -- even those in art, music, and physical education -- according to how much they "grow" student achievement. In order to assess Trombetta, the district will require her Chamberlin Elementary School first-graders to sit for seven pencil-and-paper tests in art this school year. To prepare them for those exams, Trombetta lectures her students on art elements such as color, line, and shape -- bullet points on Colorado's new fine-art curriculum standards.
Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.
I can say that with confidence because it's about Peter Thiel. And Thiel - the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist - not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.
Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it's simply how he views the world. Of course a side benefit for the natural contrarian is it frequently leads to things like headlines and money.
Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. Thiel was one of the few who saw in coming. There's a famous story about PayPal's March 2000 venture capital round. The offer was "only" at a $500 million-or-so valuation. Nearly everyone on the board and the management team balked, except Thiel who calmly told the room that this was a bubble at its peak, and the company needed to take every dime it could right now. That's how close PayPal came to being dot com roadkill a la WebVan or Pets.com.
Among the winners in Friday night's federal spending agreement, count Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.
Mr. Perry and Republican members of the Texas Congressional delegation have been seeking to shake off a requirement that the state use $830 million in federal education money to supplement the budgets of Texas schools, rather than simply using the federal money to replace state funds for schools.
The spending agreement reached Friday to avert a government shutdown included language to eliminate that provision. Texas, which like many states has massive budget problems, has moved to cut about $4.8 billion in state aid to schools over two years.
As recently as 2009, during the tenure of the previous Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent, year-round schooling was proposed for all MPS schools. Today, 22 year-round schools operate in Milwaukee. These schools run for the same number of days in Milwaukee as all other public schools, but they feature a spread-out schedule with a one-month break in the summer.
Many studies indicate the shortened breaks offered by year-round schooling lead to greater information retention and higher test scores over time, especially in math. A 2007 study by Johns Hopkins University also suggests increased benefits of year-round schooling for lower socioeconomic status or otherwise at-risk students. Year-round schooling is found to mitigate neighborhood and familial risk factors affecting educational attainment and achievement.
Many of these promising studies seem to indicate the schools that offered more than the standard number of days of instruction, however, were the schools that are most successful in educational outcomes. The MPS current year-round school does not offer more than the standard 180 days instruction offered by all MPS programs, however, and perhaps this is a flaw of the current arrangement.
A major school accrediting agency gave board members until Sept. 30 to show major headway on six issues, including internal bickering, ethics and a "transparent" search for a new superintendent.
But board members could be on the hot seat -- and literally fighting to hold onto their school board seats -- as early as July under a bill that's drawing fire as it heads to the House floor Monday for debate and a possible vote.
The bill would require the Atlanta board -- and boards in a handful of other Georgia school systems -- to face a hearing before the state Board of Education by July 31. The hearing would be the first step in a two-step process that could end in the wholesale removal of local boards by the governor if it is determined they are not doing enough to maintain high standards.
Teachers deemed great would earn higher pay and those judged ineffective could lose their jobs under bills the governor sent to the Legislature Wednesday.
Declaring he "can't sit by and wait any longer" for lawmakers to draft their own bills for tenure reform, Governor Christie said he was hoping for sponsors for his legislation and wanted them to hold hearings quickly. He said the educations of too many children, especially in failing urban schools, were suffering because some lackluster teachers were in classrooms.
"New Jersey teachers should be held to the same standards of accountability that everybody else is," the governor said. Under his plan, he said, "If you're doing a good job, more times than not you'll keep your job. If you don't do a good job, you're probably going to lose your job."
Everyone's covering Gov. Christie's conditional veto of Senate Bill 1940, which posits that if a collective bargaining unit (i.e., local arm of a teachers union) agrees to wage or benefits concessions then "the amount of money which would have been required to fund those wages and benefits shall be applied to the maintenance of bargaining unit stall member positions." (See coverage from New Jersey Newsroom, The Record, Courier Post.)
The bill was approved by the Assembly on a vote of 69-11, and is sponsored by a bevy of 13 senators. It was apparently written by the NJEA executive office. From an editorial by NJEA President Barbara Keshishian that ran last month in the Star-Ledger:
Gov. Chris Christie said a requirement that the state provide extra funding to its 31 poorest school systems is driving up property taxes in other districts.
State spending in those poorer districts has risen to 59 percent of education outlays from 36 percent in 1988, Christie said at a town-hall meeting today in Cape May. More than 550 districts across the state split the remaining 41 percent, the first-term Republican said.
New Jersey's homeowners pay the nation's highest average property-tax bills, according to the Washington-based Tax foundation. Residential real-estate levies, the prime source of education money in middle- and upper-class school systems, rose about 4 percent in 2010 to an average of $7,756 per property.
Some advocates think vouchers are the future of Pennsylvania's troubled schools.
They say those vouchers will give parents choices and promote competition among the schools.
But the idea isn't getting straight A's across the board.
It's an issue state legislators are hashing out in Harrisburg and some area school districts say they don't want any part of.
Pennsylvania's Republican Governor Tom Corbett has already thrown his support behind vouchers..
While state Democratic leaders continue to debate the $730 million plan.
American high-schoolers are earning more credits and taking more challenging courses than they did 20 years ago, according to a new study of high school transcripts. But education experts still worry that not enough of them are graduating ready to enter college or get on track for science- and math-based careers.
Almost twice as many students completed at least a standard curriculum in 2009 as in 1990, the report shows. Curricular rigor improved for students across racial and ethnic groups, but significant gaps still remain.
The economic future of the country depends on improving education, and "the message [of this study] is that rigor works," says Bob Wise, president of Alliance for Excellent Education in Washington, which advocates for improving high schools. "But it puts an obligation on all of us to be sure we're not only providing rigorous courses, but also the support students need to succeed in them."
DID Cathleen P. Black, the former publishing executive who was removed last week after just three months as New York City's schools chancellor, fail because she lacked a background in education?
In this respect, she has had quite a bit of company over the decades. In 1996, Washington hired a former three-star Army general, Julius W. Becton Jr., to take over its low-performing schools; he left, exhausted, after less than two years. For most of the last decade, the Los Angeles Unified School District was run by non-educators: a former governor of Colorado, Roy Romer, and then a retired vice admiral, David L. Brewer III. They got mixed reviews. Raj Manhas, who had a background in banking and utilities, ran Seattle's schools from 2003 to 2007, balancing the budget but facing fierce opposition over his plans to close schools.
The recent release of two comprehensive data sets marked a milestone in the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. With the availability of school-by-school test score data for the first time, as well as the fourth year of results from a longitudinal study comparing voucher students to Milwaukee Public Schools students, citizens now have access to more information about the choice program's performance than ever before.
As has often been the case with this controversial program, however, the release of new information may only create additional grounds for debate on whether the program truly works. For example, while voucher opponents will point to test score data showing the program's achievement average is less than that of MPS, supporters will cite new data from the longitudinal study indicating that students who stayed in the choice program throughout their four years of high school had a 94% graduation rate and were more likely to enroll in four-year college than MPS graduates.
Indeed, the release of these seemingly contradictory results is likely to spur a new battleground in Milwaukee's long-running war over school choice: Do we need to be concerned about low test scores and low achievement growth if, in the end, the students enroll in college?
Long-troubled Audenried High School, once known locally as the Prison on the Hill, today boasts a new, $55 million building, a crop of dedicated young teachers and sharply higher test scores.
So when the school district announced in January that Audenried would be shut down, parents were surprised. Audenreid, they were told, would become one of 18 "turnaround" schools in the city.
Progress had been made in the school, but not enough, officials said. While scores have risen sharply, they fall short of the city's average, along with other performance measures. Major discipline problems at the school last year included the beating of a female student in a classroom.
The California State College System reported recently that 47% of their freshmen must take remedial reading courses before they can be admitted to regular college academic courses. The Diploma to Nowhere report of the Strong American Schools Project said that more than one million of our high school graduates are in remedial courses at our colleges each year.
Keep in mind that these are not high school dropouts. These are students who did what we asked them to do, were awarded their high school diplomas at graduation, applied to college, were accepted at college, and then told when they got there that they were not well prepared enough by their high schools to take college courses.
The Chronicle of Higher Education did a survey of college professors, who reported that 90% of their freshmen were not very well prepared in reading, doing research or writing.
From my perspective, these students, regardless of their gender, race, creed, or national origin, have been disadvantaged during their twelve years in our public schools. My research indicates that the vast majority have never been asked to do a single serious research paper in high school, and, while I have been unable to find money to do a study of this, I have anecdotal evidence that the vast majority of our public high school students are never asked to read one complete nonfiction book by their teachers during their four years.
Race can be a disadvantage of course, even for the children of Vietnamese boat people, and poverty can be a disadvantage in education as well, even for the children of unemployed white families in Appalachia. But the disadvantages of disgracefully low expectations for academic reading and writing are disinterestedly applied to all of our public high school students, it appears.
Huge numbers of unprepared public high school students provide an achievement gap all by themselves, albeit one that is largely ignored by those who think that funding is the main reason so many of our students fail to complete any college degree.
In that study by The Chronicle of Higher Education, they also asked English teachers if they thought their students were prepared for college reading and writing tasks, and most of them thought their students were well prepared. The problem may be that English departments typically assign fiction as reading for students and the writing they ask for is almost universally personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, supplemented now by work on the little 500-word personal "college essay."
It is hard to conceive of a literacy program better designed to render our public high school students poorly prepared for the nonfiction books and term papers at the college level. Of course, many colleges, eager to fill their dorms and please their "customers" with easy courses and grade inflation, are gradually reducing the number of books students are assigned and the length of papers they are asked to write, but this simply adds to the disadvantages to which we are subjecting our students, all the while charging them large amounts of money for tuition.
Many parents are satisfied when their children tell them that they love their high school, perhaps not fully realizing that the students are talking mostly about their social life and their after-school sports and other activities. They may remain unaware that our students are being prevented from learning to read history books and from writing serious term papers. No one mentions that disadvantage, so no doubt these parents are just as surprised, humiliated, and embarrassed as their children when they are not allowed into regular college courses when they get there.
Americans have big hearts, and are concerned when they are told of the plight of our disadvantaged students who are black, Hispanic, or poor. But they are naturally not really able to summon up much concern over an academic literacy achievement gap which disadvantages practically all of our public high school students, especially if the schools and the Edupundits keep them quite uninformed about it.
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"Teach by Example"
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The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
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Only a fool would think that the sick out that closed down Madison schools for five days in February was anything but an illegal, union-coordinated, illegal strike.
But there are a lot of fools in Madison, aren't there?
Now there is proof that the sickout was a premeditated, union-authorized job action -- a phone tree of teachers calling other teachers to close down the schools. This kind of activity is prohibited by the union's own contract and illegal in WI Statute Chapter 111.84(2)(e):
It is unfair practice for an employee individually or in concert with others: To engage in, induce or encourage any employees to engage in a strike, or a concerted refusal to work or perform their usual duties as employees.
The problem, of course, is finding an impartial prosecutor -- but that would require a level of professionalism sorely lacking in the Doyle-appointed incumbent.
I spent the first two months of 2011 living in Los Angeles, filming the second season of "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" for ABC. After last year's experience of trying to change food culture in the beautiful town of Huntington, West Virginia, I expected the challenges in L.A. to be very different. Shockingly, they were all too familiar.
L.A. is home to the nation's second biggest school district, which feeds 650,000 children every day. Half of these kids are eligible for free school meals. Within a few miles of the Hollywood sign there are entire communities with no access to fresh food. People travel for well over an hour to buy fruits and vegetables, and in one of the communities where I worked, children had an 80% obesity rate.
I had planned to work in the L.A. schools to try to figure out how school food could be better--and, ideally, cooked from scratch. Thousands of outraged parents, not to mention teachers and principals, wanted me in their schools. But I couldn't even get in the door: the Los Angeles Unified School District banned me from filming any of their food service operations, claiming that they didn't need me because they were already leading the charge. [You can read the LAUSD's response here.]
Few would argue that she was a good choice. But as you watched the almost giddy reception that greeted the departure of the New York City schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, last week -- "She wasn't in the class for the full semester so it wouldn't be appropriate for me to give her a grade," said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers -- it was hard not to wonder whether the debate over school reform has reached a point where debate is no longer possible.
As is often the case with morally charged policy issues -- remember welfare reform? -- false dichotomies seem to have replaced fruitful conversation. If you support the teachers' union, you don't care about the students. If you are critical of the teachers' union, you don't care about the teachers. If you are in favor of charter schools, you are opposed to public schools. If you believe in increased testing, you are on board with the corruption of our liberal society's most cherished educational values. If you are against increased testing, you are against accountability. It goes on. Neither side seems capable of listening to the other.
The data can appear as divided as the rhetoric. New York City's Department of Education will provide you with irrefutable statistics that school reform is working; opponents of reform will provide you with equally irrefutable statistics that it's not. It can seem equally impossible to disentangle the overlapping factors: Are struggling schools struggling because they've been inundated with students from the failing schools that have closed around them? Are high school graduation rates up because the pressure to raise them has encouraged teachers and principals to pass students who aren't really ready for college?
Odds are, your kid is in a failing school district.
Odds are even better, if your kid's school or school district isn't failing now, by federal standards, it will be in a year or two.
Last month, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan estimated that within three years no less than four out of five American schools will not meet the standard for "Adequate Yearly Progress." That's government speak for saying the schools aren't meeting the federally mandated No Child Left Behind Act.
This week Minnesota students will begin taking this year's version of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments - the standardized tests that will determine the supposed success or failure of each Minnesota public school and school district. Results of the tests will be made public in late summer, and most educators, like Duncan, are not optimistic concerning the outcome.
Idaho Gov. Butch Otter signed the state's third major school-overhaul bill of the session into law Friday, and a parents' group immediately filed paperwork for a referendum drive to overturn it.
The third bill, SB 1184, shifts funds from teacher salaries to technology upgrades and a merit-pay program, and brings a new focus on online learning. The two earlier bills, already signed into law and targeted in referendum drives, remove most collective-bargaining rights from teachers and set up a teacher merit-pay bonus plan. Both houses of Idaho's Legislature are controlled by Republicans.
Otter, also a Republican, said, "The system we had wasn't working, wasn't producing the kind of students that we needed."
State schools Superintendent Tom Luna, who joined Otter at the signing along with a group of legislative sponsors and supporters, said the bills will do "things that we know we should have done long ago."
A case of poor timing landed state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek in hot water with the House Appropriations Committee as he was testifying Wednesday about his agency's budget.
Pastorek, whose cocksure manner and $377,000 annual pay package has rankled legislators in years past, told Rep. Patricia Smith, D-Baton Rouge, early in the meeting that he planned to select a new superintendent for the Recovery School District "soon, very soon." But Pastorek didn't divulge to the committee members that he had tapped John White, deputy chancellor for New York City public schools, to take over the job held by Paul Vallas.
As Pastorek continued his testimony, lawmakers on the committee learned the truth, as the news of White's selection was reported on NOLA.com. And that brought a rebuke from the courtly committee chairman Jim Fannin, D-Jonesboro, who reminded the superintendent that he was under oath when he was being questioned. "So you weren't willing to share that? That you had made the selection?" Fannin asked.
Richard Miller has had one of the toughest jobs in higher education. The Olin Foundation tapped him a dozen years ago to create an engineering college on a hilltop in the Boston suburb of Needham. When Miller started, there were no buildings, no faculty, no curriculum, no students.
The foundation's mandate: design a boldly original model for a 21st century school whose graduates would be not just accomplished engineers but world-beater entrepreneurs and leaders.
Now the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering has a wind-swept cluster of six earth-toned buildings, 347 brainy students who pay a maximum of $38,000 tuition, an untenured faculty totaling 25 men and 13 women and a curriculum oriented toward what Miller calls "design based" learning. Miller, who has a Ph.D. in applied mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, has honed his leadership skills as Olin's chief creator and builder. The following is an edited version of an interview with Miller conducted by Inc. contributor Joseph Rosenbloom.
In a city where so many public schools are segregated by race and wealth, Public School 9 in Brooklyn is an exception.
It has a substantial number of poor children, with about 75 percent receiving subsidized lunches. And because it is in a gentrifying neighborhood, Prospect Heights, the school also has a sizable number of yuppie children.
The co-presidents of the parent-teacher organization are Nelly Heredia, a single mother with two children who is out of work, and Penelope Mahot, a married mother with two children who owns a product design company and a gift store. The mothers like the same things about P.S. 9: the principal, Sandra D'Avilar, makes herself available to parents; the school is full of experienced teachers; the parents' groups are thriving; the children are learning; there are classes in art, music, theater and dance.
Ohio Governor John Kasich wants the state's universities to offer a three-year degree program to make college more affordable, The Plain-Dealer reports. Students would have to squeeze in more courses during their time at school in order to satisfy degree requirements, much as they do today without an established three-year program. Ball State University in Indiana already offers three-year degrees for 30 of its 180 degree programs and Rhode Island lawmakers approved a measure in 2009 to offer three-year degrees at both of the state's public universities. Meanwhile, Kasich's budget anticipates a 10.5 percent cut in higher education funding in the 2012 fiscal year, less than had been feared, followed by a 3.7 percent increase in 2013, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
SESSION ENDS: Idaho lawmakers gaveled their session to a close Thursday having approved three major education overhaul bills that had been a priority for Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter and state superintendent Tom Luna, according to The (Spokane) Spokesman-Review. The bills would weaken teachers' tenure and collective bargaining provisions, expand online courses, reduce the number of teachers and institute a merit pay system. The state Senate also approved legislation to implement the changes immediately rather than on July 1 in an effort to dampen an attempt to put the controversial changes up to a referendum next year.
As a logical stage of development, the African American Communication and Collaboration Council (AACCC) has established a number of community projects for 2011. The AACCC will focus the wisdom and energy of its corresponding constituent groups toward areas in need of positive outcomes. The projects are designed to serve as a demonstration of what can be accomplished when the "talent" of the community is focused on solutions rather than symptoms.
Education
The AACCC's first educational pilot project is the "adoption" of Orchard Ridge Elementary (ORE) School for the first six months of 2011 (second semester of 2010/2011 school year).
After assessing the primary issues and unmet needs concerning student achievement, the AACCC, the ORE School Principal and Central Office MMSD administration (including the Superintendent) have determined a number of vital activities in which the AACCC could play a vital role.
Too much is at stake for the AACCC adoption of Orchard Ridge Elementary to be viewed as a "feel good" project. The student population of ORE involves 56% students of color, and fifty five percent (55%) of its student enrollment is from low-income homes. As dramatically depicted below, approximately two thirds of that population cannot read.
There are still a few things that have to happen before many of Idaho's newly minted education reforms can be fully executed in the state's kindergarten- through 12th-grade public schools.
Some of the responsibility for the success or failure of Idaho public schools chief Tom Luna's "Students Come First" education reform plan now rests with members of the Idaho State Board of Education. Other reform package measures require that school boards throughout the state create their own local policies and procedures to put the reforms, now Idaho law, into action.
"Implementation will determine how effective the reforms are and if the promised efficiencies will be realized," state education board spokesman Mark Browning said.
The sweeping changes to K-12 education were announced by Luna, with support from Gov. Butch Otter, in Janurary at the start of the legislative session.
Broken down into three bills, the reforms were passed by lawmakers during weeks of contentious House and Senate committee hearings, and protests by students and teachers throughout the state. The final bill was signed into law Friday by the governor, a day after the session adjourned.
The world had better start paying attention to the US government's inability to govern. The prevailing mood over this has been strangely complacent. Six months of the fiscal year gone and only now a ramshackle budget? Government brought to the brink of shutdown over trifling disagreements? Absurd, one thinks, but this is Washington. Do as most Americans do, and regard the pantomime with blithe contempt. In the end, out of sheer exhaustion, the actors do their deals and it is business as usual.
So it proved with the shutdown farce. Capitol Hill and its followers tracked the quarrel avidly. TV news showed clocks counting down the hours and minutes before "inessential services" would be suspended. Talks between Congress and the White House were covered as though a nuclear strike was imminent. With an hour to go, a deal that no one understood was done.
The president stood before the cameras: "Americans of different beliefs came together again," he said, as if expecting applause. Some laughed; most yawned.
The shutdown punch-up was a nuisance and proof of Washington's recklessness, but little apart from political advantage was at stake. Mostly, it was theatre. But a real fiscal crisis is coming. The debt-ceiling fight, next on the playbill, raises the theoretical possibility of a government default. Beyond that, public debt keeps rising. The current dysfunction shows how hard it will be to stop.
e know the District's mission - to educate Seattle's students. That work is done primarily in the schools. The mission of the schools - to educate students - no different from the District mission. The Central Office has two sides: Operations and Academics. The mission of the Operations side is also clear - to take on all of the non-academic work to free the schools to focus on academics. But what is the mission of the academic side of the Central Office?
What academic tasks are the proper work of the Central Office?
The lack of a clearly defined mission for the Academic side of the Central Office has led to two unacceptable consequences: tasks that the central office should do have been left undone and the central office has squandered resources and irritated colleagues by taking on work they should not be doing.
I suggest that the Central Office has three academic duties:
1. Quality Assurance. Someone needs to follow up on the schools and make sure that they are doing a good job. Someone needs to make sure that they are providing appropriate interventions for students working below grade level. Someone needs to make sure that they are providing appropriate challenge for students working beyond grade level. Someone needs to make sure that they are delivering - at a minimum - the core content in each subject at each grade level. Someone needs to make sure that the teachers understand that the Standards are a floor, not a ceiling. Someone needs to make sure that they are following the IEPs, that they are providing appropriate services to ELL students, that their Advanced Learning program meets the expectations for such programs, and so on. Someone needs to make sure that the schools offer all of the classes and opportunities that they are supposed to offer (music, AP classes, etc.). This work, Academic Assurances, is the District's work. Much of it has not been done. Much of it still is not done.
Along these lines, Dr. Enfield wanted to clarify her "Spectrum is Spectrum is Spectrum" remark, but she didn't really manage it. I will follow up with her.
Again and again, I clicked on Wisconsin on an interactive map of reading scores from across the nation. Wisconsin fourth-graders compared with other states. Eighth-graders compared with other states. White kids. Black kids. Hispanic kids. Low-income kids.
The color-coded results told a striking story: In each case, there were few states colored to show they had significantly lower scores than Wisconsin. For fourth-grade black kids, there were none. For fourth-grade low-income kids, there were four.
Here's one that will probably surprise you: For fourth-grade white kids, there were only four (Nevada, Louisiana, Oklahoma and West Virginia) that were significantly below Wisconsin. Wisconsin white kids score slightly below the national average, putting us in a pack of states with kind-of-OK results, significantly below more than a dozen that are doing better.
Wisconsin is not the reading star it was a couple of decades ago. You'll get little argument that this isn't good.
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But how reading is taught may be exactly what it heads for. In interviews, Dykstra and Pedriana said they hope there will be a comprehensive review of how reading is taught in Wisconsin - and how teachers are trained by universities to teach reading.
"We need to pay more attention to what works best," Dykstra said. "We have known for 40 years a basic model for how to teach kids to read that is more effective than the predominant model in the state of Wisconsin."
Pedriana said Wisconsin was a particularly "grievous example" of a state that had not done what it could to improve reading achievement. "Teacher training has to be addressed," he said.
Something unprecedented is happening with charter schools in San Diego and across California. This year, San Diego County saw a 14 percent increase in the number of charter schools operating, jumping from 81 to 92. Throughout California, 115 new charters opened - the largest number to ever open in a single year in any state in the nation. This brings California to 912 charter schools serving 365,000 students. Even though the state's funding crisis is disproportionately affecting charter schools, the pipeline for expansion is more robust than it has ever been.
What is causing this growth?
Plain and simple, it is coming in response to demand from parents. Parents are seeing the successes that charter schools are generating. In addition to offering highly innovative programs that cater to individual student needs, charter schools are becoming known for generating high levels of learning.
For students who have been treated for addiction, going back to a conventional high school is like sending an alcoholic into a bar, experts say. But, they add, it's extremely hard to find a safe, nurturing educational option for teens who are struggling to stay drug or alcohol-free.
Horizon High School is a tiny, non-profit, Madison-based recovery school where students learn and help keep each other on track and sober, day in and day out. It's one of only three recovery schools in Wisconsin.
Horizon High School serves about a dozen mostly local kids each year, employs a handful of teachers and counselors and operates out of rented space at Neighborhood House on Mills Street in Madison. For the students, it means close relationships with their teachers and each other, and routine, random drug tests as a fact of life.
For several months, I had been listening to my friend agonize over the challenges she had been facing with her 16 year old daughter, "Tammy" , who was attending a suburban public high school in Washington state.
It started with a few phone calls from the school about some relationship issues between Tammy and some other girls at school. Within a month, Mom was getting two or three calls a week informing her Tammy had skipped several classes that day. Over the next several months the skipping continued, Tammy's grades took a nose dive, and she became recluse and defiant at home. Meetings were held with the school administration, school counselor and the family. The parents did what they could administering consequences on their end. Yet nothing seemed to help.
My friend felt like she was loosing her daughter. Tammy could care less about graduating anymore - even though she used to love school as a child. That's when I mentioned to her the idea of enrolling Tammy into one of Washington State's online learning programs. At first, Mom was resistant. Like myself, my friend grew up in your "typical brick and mortar" school.....grouped by age, all taught the same thing at the same time no matter what level your were at, promoted regardless of mastery, huge masses of students moving through a system based on the industrial revolution. Tammy's high school had close to 2000 students in it. Her teachers had about 180 students a day. Would anyone even notice Tammy's plight?
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan lauded the city and state for its post-Hurricane Katrina education reform during a wide-sweeping conversation about education on Friday.
Duncan spoke to a room of education journalists during the Education Writers Association National Seminar and touched on national issues relevant to Acadiana school systems.
He touted drastic reform in education, an issue that he said touches so many other problems. For example, only 25 percent of America's youth qualify for the
Public education remains a passionate subject for Woz, who was unabashed in saying that schools today are far too structured and thus impede innovative thinking - which is key to "the artistic side" of technology.
At issue, he said, are rules that tell each student exactly what they should be studying and when.
The learning cycle between what is taught and when a student is tested on it is far too short, he proclaimed. Short learning-testing cycles, Wozniak said, are nothing like the projects that technology innovators are afforded in real life.
When pressed by an audience member about how schools should judge student performance, Woz said they should be given one long project that spurs innovative thinking at the beginning of a semester and graded on their results.
Choice students do not attend public schools, but Milwaukee property taxpayers still support their costs. In fact, until recently, Milwaukee property taxpayers actually paid more for students attending choice schools than they paid for students attending traditional Milwaukee Public Schools.
Over the past few years, I've worked with the state to correct this inequity. We have made a significant improvement from where we stood in the 2006-'07 school year, and Milwaukee taxpayers have benefited greatly.
But we have a lot more work to do to ensure this program is fair to all taxpayers.
For decades, our state has recognized that some communities have more wealth than others. That means that the amount spent on a child's education could change dramatically depending on which "side of the tracks" a student lives on.
The recent release of two comprehensive data sets marked a milestone in the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. With the availability of school-by-school test score data for the first time, as well as the fourth year of results from a longitudinal study comparing voucher students to Milwaukee Public Schools students, citizens now have access to more information about the choice program's performance than ever before.
As has often been the case with this controversial program, however, the release of new information may only create additional grounds for debate on whether the program truly works. For example, while voucher opponents will point to test score data showing the program's achievement average is less than that of MPS, supporters will cite new data from the longitudinal study indicating that students who stayed in the choice program throughout their four years of high school had a 94% graduation rate and were more likely to enroll in four-year college than MPS graduates.
Indeed, the release of these seemingly contradictory results is likely to spur a new battleground in Milwaukee's long-running war over school choice: Do we need to be concerned about low test scores and low achievement growth if, in the end, the students enroll in college?
That discussion is a relevant one given that higher educational attainment certainly is the overall goal for all Milwaukee students. Nevertheless, there are several reasons recent comparative test score results should not be dismissed.
Remember the statewide tests for public school students signed into law in 2008?
A Lincoln senator would like the state to consider deviating from that just a smidgen.
Lincoln Sen. Bill Avery would like to persuade the Legislature to go along with a pilot program that could change the statewide NeSA test for 11th-graders to the ACT college entrance exam.
The idea is to conduct the pilot in Lincoln and seven other districts in the state for three years. The program would evaluate whether the ACT would be an appropriate measure of content knowledge in reading, math and science, and of college and career readiness.
Avery believes having students take the ACT statewide could improve Nebraska's college-going rate. The current rate is 67 percent for graduating high school students, he said.
Maybe what the liberal arts needed was a full-blown depression.
"A couple of years ago I had great hope, because of the externality of the economic situation," Martin Ringle, the chief technology officer at Reed College, told a room full of fellow audience members at a summit of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) on Thursday.
"I was really hoping, contrary to all of my better judgment, that things would really go into the toilet," Ringle continued. "Because if we didn't stop at recession -- if we went all the way down to depression -- maybe that would be enough for the economic forces to require us to change."
What is keeping undergraduates from learning? Last month, I speculated from my perspective as a college teacher about a set of interlocking factors that have contributed to the problem.
In that column (The Chronicle, February 25), I referred to the alarming data presented by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011) in the context of President Obama's call for more students to attend college in order to prepare for the economy of the future. Why, I asked, should we send more students to college--at an ever greater cost--when more than a third of them, according to Arum and Roksa, demonstrate "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills" after four years of education?
This month I want to speculate on why students (and, to a lesser extent, their parents) are not making choices that support educational success. What could they possibly be thinking?
Nationally, 604 charter schools, roughly 12 percent, have collective-bargaining agreements. But 388 of those schools are in states where the law dictates that charters be included in existing collective-bargaining agreements with local districts, according to data collected by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Illinois law does not require charter schools to be part of local collective-bargaining units.
The high point in The Gallery of Antiquities, Balzac's great novel of debt, comes when gendarmes are arresting the young Count d'Esgrignons for a forgery committed to cover his borrowing. The loyal notary Chesnel, attached to the d'Esgrignons family by generations of service, has already spent his own modest fortune to get the young count out of such scrapes, but he is at the end of his resources. "If I don't manage to smother this story," he tells the count matter-of-factly, "you'll have to kill yourself before the indictment is read out." The count realises in a flash that people have lent him money not because they have more than they know what to do with, or because he's a nice guy, or because his privileges are the natural order of things. They have lent him money because they have made certain assumptions about his honour - misplaced assumptions, as it turns out.
Americans came face-to-face with their government debt this week and discovered that they are in the position of d'Esgrignons. There are several ways to measure how apocalyptic the situation is. The recent announcement by Pimco bond analyst Bill Gross that he was selling his long-term Treasury holdings has shaken people, and not just those who watch the business channels. In a memo laced with words like "staggering" and "incredible", Mr Gross described himself as "confident" the US would default on its debt if did not reform its entitlement programmes (pensions and government healthcare). Mr Gross cited an estimate by Mary Meeker, a venture capitalist, that government unfunded liabilities stand at $75,000bn. To spend time with the federal budget is to suspect that the US is the sick man of the global economy.
Stockman described the impending showdown as a "wakeup call"--the political equivalent of getting whacked in the head by a two-by-four containing a rusty nail.
"And then," Stockman added in a tone of lethal glee, "they're going to be calling their own bluff. Because at that point the problem will remain 98 percent as large as it was the morning before."
The 64-year-old Stockman, who made millions as an investment banker after serving as a Michigan congressman and then Reagan's fiscal guru in the early 1980s, makes Debbie Downer sound like a cockeyed optimist. During a conversation punctuated by mirthless laughter, he characterized America's elected officials as "the fools inside the Beltway," dismissed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, generally celebrated as the GOP's brightest policy star, as "an earnest young man" who offers discredited ideology over practical solutions, and predicted a long and agonizing epoch in which incomes will fall, the economy will stall and reality's bite will leave painful tooth marks.
EVERYONE knows the stereotypes about foreigners speaking English: Scandinavians are shockingly fluent, while the Japanese lag despite years and billions of yen spent trying. Now a big new study confirms some of those stereotypes. But it holds some surprises as well.
EF Education First, an English-teaching company, compiled the biggest ever internationally comparable sample of English learners: some 2m people took identical tests online in 44 countries. The top five performers were Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The bottom five were Panama, Colombia, Thailand, Turkey and Kazakhstan. Among regions, Latin America fared worst. (No African country had enough takers to make the lists's threshold for the minimum number of participants.)
This was not a statistically controlled study: the subjects took a free test online and of their own accord. They were by definition connected to the internet and interested in testing their English; they will also be younger and more urban than the population at large. But Philip Hult, the boss of EF, says that his sample shows results similar to a more scientifically controlled but smaller study by the British Council.
A second Kansas City charter school today announced it will close at the end of this school year.
Don Bosco Charter High School is shuttering its doors for good after operating more than a decade as a school for students at risk of dropping out.
School officials said this morning that because of poor student attendance they were unable to generate the revenue needed to continue operating the high school. State funding for public schools is based on a formula heavily weighted by the average student daily attendance.
But school leaders were quick to defend their students.
"It would be very easy to blame students, but I don't want to do that," said Al Dimmitt, chairman of the Don Bosco Charter High School Board of Directors. "We are dealing with a student population faced with a lot of challenges in life and attendance in school does not always arise to their top priority,"
Proposed Organization Goal Goal Area: Development of 2011 - 12 District Budget.
STATUS: New
Evidence of Need / Baseline Data: There is a need to implement a budget process and develop a proposed budget consistent with the Governor's proposed budget and the reduction of aid.
Target Date for Completion: June, 2011.
Objective: To provide leadership, supervision, and direction to MMSD staff in a budget planning exercise that anticipates and prepares for reduction in state aid for 2011-12.
Results: (For each objective, state the progress.) This goal will be assessed through the implementation of a budget process (budget timeline) and by the development of a proposed 2011-2012 District budget plan.
Action Plan: (Steps to be taken) 1. Implement the five-year budget model forecast to identify the impact of budget scenarios under consideration.
2. At the earliest date after the Governor releases his budget, work with department leaders to identify potential efficiencies and/or savings, taking into account Board priorities and District needs.
3. Use staff recommendations to develop a list of possible cuts for Board review no later than April 1, 2011. Said list must be reviewed and vetted to address mathematical and other errors before it is provided to the press, the Board, or MMSD staff. Said list must be vetted to remove any items that administration would not or could not implement before it is given to the Board for consideration.
4. Work to ensure that all spending for new programs with cumulative costs over $50,000 in property tax revenue be incorporated into the proposed budget and presented to the Board before it votes to approve the preliminary budget.
5. Identify the users of unexpended or unencumbered revenue, by source, as part of the budget materials presented to the Board.
Summary and Next Steps:
360 Degree Feedback:
Leadership Development Goal Goal Area: 360 Degree Feedback Reflection: What are my strengths?
STATUS: Completed
My strengths are in providing strategic, collaborative and participative leadership within the organization. Additional strengths include facilitation skills, communication skills, leading change, working with complex and difficult issues, multi-tasking, addressing diversity and resolving conflicts. Leadership practices inventory indicate strengths in the areas of inspiring a shared vision and modeling the way. My strengths remain stable over time.
Leadership Self-Development Goal: In what area(s) do I need to "grow"? To focus on encouraging the heart in others and challenging the process. Areas
needing developing remain stable over time. Kouzes and Posner profile used for this assessment
Objectives: What are the desired end results? (How will my leadership look different in the future? What building level changes, interventions would occur?)
To further develop skills and practice in encouraging the heart in others and challenging the process.
End of the Year Results: For each objective, state the progress.
This goal will be assessed by the completion of the 360 degree feedback tool and a review of the perceptions of others related to my personal skills in encouraging the heart in others and challenging the process.
Personal Development Plan: What will I do? (Steps to be taken, including focused reading, study group membership, conference attendance, peer partnerships, reflective journaling, other.)
1. Continue to read and learn about leadership in contemporary organizations.
2. Attend workshops/conferences consistent with needed leadership development areas.
3. Practice skills developed through various learning experiences.
Summary and Next Steps:
Recent readings about leadership in contemporary organizations include How Leaders Learn (Gordon A. Donaldson, Jr., The School Leaders Our Children Deserve; George Theoharis, Instructional Rounds in Education (Elizabeth A. City, Richard F. Elmore, Sarah E. Fiarman and Lee Teitel). I have not recently attended workshops/conferences consistent with the need to develop additional skills in encouraging the heart and challenging the process. Given this assessment, I see a need to continue to specifically work on skills related to challenging the process. Specific skills needing to be worked on include searching for opportunities to seek innovative ways to change and experimenting and taking risks. I believe I have made improvements in my skills related to encouraging the heart by recognizing the contributions of others. We are also in the process of identifying a 360 degree feedback tool for all administrators that will be completed prior to my summative performance evaluation in January.
There is a need to finalize the 360 degree tool for all administrators including me. This work is being developed by the Human Resources Department.
School districts across the nation are grappling with the question of how to improve student performance in a time of fiscal austerity. Some reformers are challenging the idea of automatic tenure, arguing that teachers should be paid based on performance rather than seniority. Moreover, recent legislative battles involving teacher compensation in Wisconsin and Ohio have put the issue squarely in the public spotlight.
One of the most straightforward ways school districts can obtain cost savings without harming students is to eliminate extra pay for teachers who earn a master's degree. Simply by giving up the extra payment for the master's degree, school districts in Florida could save better than 3 percent of their teaching personnel costs without losing any of their classroom effectiveness. In a paper just published in the Economics of Education Review, Matthew Chingos and I look at the characteristics of effective 4th through 8th grade teachers in Florida over the period 2002 to 2010.
We found that teachers with an M. A. degree were no more effective, on average, than teachers who lacked such a degree. Further, we found out that it did not make any difference from which public university in Florida a teacher had earned the degree. None of them had an educational program that correlated with a teacher's classroom effectiveness.
Yet a teacher who has taught for 10 years will earn 6.5 percent more (or about $2500), if he or she has collected that extra diploma. Since about half the teachers have pursued that advanced degree--given the extra dollars, why not?--the state could save better than 3 percent of its teaching personnel costs by eliminating this useless feature of the teacher compensation scheme.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Thursday called for public school teachers to be evaluated based equally on their classroom performance and student achievement and accused the state's largest teachers union of being a group of "bullies and thugs."
Christie laid out his proposal in a speech in New York sponsored by the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank. A teachers union spokesman called the governor's plan an "educational disaster."
Since taking office last year, the Republican Christie has emerged as a popular figure among conservatives nationally for his willingness to confront public employee unions, including teachers, over their salaries and pensions. Several other governors have since followed suit, saying such benefits for public employees are unsustainable over time.
The state, if you recall, released a snapshot of student performance in Milwaukee’s school choice program last week. Tony Evers, head of the Department of Public Instruction, used the numbers to make a political statement against school choice, which he opposes.
But the figureshad issues, and now still more are emerging. One of the surprises in the figures were how poorly one particular choice school, Tamarack Waldorf, did.
It’s surprising because Tamarack is by reputation a good school, unusually deliberate in its curriculum and rigorous in the peculiar way of schools in the Waldorf movement – where, for instance, children do not just have a chapter on photosynthesis but, instead, spend a couple of weeks learning the chemistry behind it and studying the geometry of branches and doing a project on forest ecology and reading literature about trees and taking a field trip to the park, the better to appreciate art involving trees and to make some of their own. Rather than taking tests, the children produce books to demonstrate their learning.
The kind of people who send their kids to such a school are generally engaged and intellectual parents – and, generally, not favorably disposed to standardized testing.
So an unusual number of Tamarack parents opted their children out of the state’s tests, as is the right of any parent in the state. You can see the figures here: In math and reading, about 55% of choice students at Tamarack didn’t take the state tests.
The state’s figures say that 42% of Tamarack students did well – scored “proficient” or “advanced” in reading, and 24% did in math. Those aren’t good scores. But they aren’t real, either.
As Tamarack administrator Jean Kacanek wrote to parents, “The data published is not complete because the Department of Public Instruction averaged scores of ‘0’ for each MPCP student in grades 4-8 at Tamarack who did not take the test. As one might expect for a Waldorf school, with a philosophy averse to standardized testing, many parents chose to opt out of the test.”
When the rankings of the best school systems in the world were released earlier this year, Americans were shocked: our former number one standing slipped again, this time to number 26.
The rankings showed a new trend: the highest-performing school systems in the world are mostly in Asia.
What are the Asian school systems doing right? And what can the United States learn? Asia Society invited top education ministers from China, Hong Kong SAR, Japan and Singapore, to sound off on these questions.
There was no lively debate. The answer was clear: invest in teachers.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett proposed cuts last month that would slash the state's higher-education budget to $567 million from $1.2 billion, affecting more than a dozen state-run and state-supported universities.
For the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration, tuition would have to be increased by 40% to break even, although the school doesn't plan to implement such a dramatic increase.
John Delaney, who has been the school's dean since August 2006, spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the budget cuts and how far the school is prepared to go to keep itself afloat. "I think we'll have to really change the way we do things," Mr. Delaney says.
The Watertown School Committee Monday night voted down the long-negotiated teachers' union contract in front of a standing-room only audience, citing the dire financial situation the schools face next year.
The 5-3 vote means negotiators will have to go back to the bargaining table after teachers thought they had an agreement with the School Committee that came only after 18 months of negotiations and the involvement of a mediator.
"We recommended in good faith that our members ratify the agreement...Our members trusted us and voted to ratify the agreement," said Watertown Educators Association president Debra King at Monday's meeting. "We expected the School Committee team would also act in good faith and ratify the agreement. But then came the disturbing turn of events that have led us to tonight."
I got my start as a journalist freelancing stories for the old Milwaukee Sentinel about problems with achievement test results at Milwaukee Public Schools. Throughout the 1980s, the media's increasing focus on problems at MPS helped to lay the groundwork for a radically different alternative - a voucher system where low-income families could choose to send their children to private schools. The case for school choice could not have been made without years of achievement test data showing the below-average performance of MPS schools.
So it is highly ironic - and quite alarming - that Gov. Scott Walker is proposing to end the requirement that choice schools participate in the state system of standardized testing. I can't think of a better way to guarantee these schools are failures.
Last week the media reported the results of state tests for MPS and choice schools. The average scores were astoundingly bad for some choice schools. The proportion of students who were proficient in reading and math was just 12 percent and 14 percent at Texas Bufkin Christian Academy; 17 percent and 6 percent at Travis Technology High School; 20 percent and 7 percent at Washington DuBois Christian Leadership Academy; 23 percent and 9 percent at Right Step, Inc.; 18 percent and 0 percent (Did no one take the math test?) at Dr Brenda Noach Choice School; 16 percent and 9 percent at Destiny High School. You get the feeling some of these schools worked harder on creating their name than educating the students.
A Massachusetts school committee has petitioned their legislature to opt out of Federal education standards which most states have adopted in attempt to get federal funding during lean budget times.
The Tantasqua Regional School Committee, the equivalent of our local Board of Education, is working with their state legislature to allow them to opt out of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
School Committee Chairman Kathleen Neal told the Gazette committee members are concerned with the cost of implementing the program as well as the way the standards were adopted with little public input last year.
The Massachusetts Core initiative was adopted during the summer and Neal said the committee had no idea it was being discussed until after the vote was passed with almost no notice to the general public. "If you are going to change the way you do assessments you should bring the people who are invested in it to the table." She expressed frustration at state officials lack of asking the local districts for solutions.
Full-time faculty members at Madison Area Technical College earned an average base pay of $79,030 last year, more than the average professor earned at all University of Wisconsin System campuses except UW-Madison.
Average take-home pay increased to $87,822 when sources such as summer school and overtime were factored in, according to a State Journal analysis of 2009-10 salary data, obtained through Wisconsin's open records law.
Officials say one reason MATC faculty are paid more than those in the UW System is because the technical college must compete with high-paying private-sector jobs to hire faculty to teach subjects such as plumbing, electrical fields and information technology.
But another reason for the gap may be the way salaries are set. Raises for UW System faculty must be included in the state budget along with other state workers, while MATC faculty negotiate their salaries with the district board through union representation.
As I think back over a dozen years in the classroom, I cannot recall the exact moment that I changed from an idealistic beginning teacher at the peak of my game to the space-wasting NEA member who is keeping some good young teacher on the unemployment line.
When did experience turn from an asset to the biggest roadblock to saving American public schools?
In Missouri, a bill has been proposed by Republican Rep. Scott Dieckhaus which would eliminate tenure and the due process it guarantees and allow administrators and school boards to fire teachers with or without reason.
Dieckhaus' bill also calls for a four-tier merit pay system, based almost entirely on the scores on standardized tests. The bill specifically forbids basing teacher pay on years of experience or advanced schooling.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said earlier this year he wouldn't "pick fights" with public-employee unions, but he's now headed for a showdown with teachers over his proposed education cuts.
The Michigan Education Association, which represents 155,000 teachers statewide, began polling members late last month to gauge support for a range of "crisis activities," including a strike, to protest the governor's proposed 4% cut in school funding.
In response, Republican lawmakers introduced legislation that would add stiff new penalties for teacher strikes--which are barred by state law--including revoking a teacher's certification. The teachers also plan a rally next week in the state capital of Lansing.
"The battle lines have already been drawn," said Bill Ballenger, editor of Inside Michigan Politics, a political newsletter in Lansing. "There is the gathering prospect that we could end up with another Wisconsin."
Gov. John Kitzhaber leads a full-court press today for what he considers to be the centerpiece of his education reform plan -- a single board that would help set the budgets for pre-kindergarten programs to universities and everything in between.
At a news conference, he surrounded himself with every top education official in the state to tout his bill that would establish the Oregon Education Investment Board. The board would replace the state boards of education and higher education, and would oversee spending on all facets of learning.
"The state needs to move from a funder to an investor," Kitzhaber said. And the money each program gets "needs to be based on outcomes rather than seat time."
Later today, Kitzhaber is scheduled to testify in front of the Senate Education and Workforce Development Committee on Senate Bill 909, which takes the first steps toward establishing the new uber-board.
Kitzhaber acknowledged that even under that system interest groups would still compete. But not as fiercely as they do under the current system.
John Kitzhaber: "If you're developing a single joint budget based on some clear criteria going in, it creates a rationale for that debate. Right now it's simply how do I get as much money as I can in my pot."
The unified education budget would still have to be approved by lawmakers. Kitzhaber made his pitch to members of the Oregon Senate Education Committee.
The U.S. Department of Education developed this broadband availability map and search engine as part of a collaborative effort with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This education-focused broadband map and database builds upon the NTIA State Broadband Data and Development (SBDD) Program that surveys bi-annually broadband availability and connectivity for the 50 United States, 5 territories, and the District of Columbia.
As we have seen in the past, teacher licensing requirements have little relation to student achievement. One reason for this may be that rather than driving up teacher quality, licensure requirements can be so full of bureaucratic red tape that they drive away smart and knowledgeable teaching candidates who have other options.
In support of that theory, I offer an anecdote, namely an email from a good friend of mine who has more knowledge and training than most prospective teachers -- she went to Princeton for undergrad, Yale for a master's degree, and Harvard for law school. But before she can even get in the door and start studying pedagogical techniques and the like, she is being told that she has to take nine (9) more undergraduate courses of background knowledge.
Gov. Chris Christie created a committee today that will be tasked with reviewing all of the state's education regulations.
The task force will return recommendations to eliminate regulations which take decision-making power away from the local districts, Christie said.
"What I want to have happen here is to return more of the power back to school districts and less from the central office in Trenton, so that we can encourage people to innovate," Christie said. "We've gotten into a pattern over the course of time with increasing money coming from Trenton over the last 20 to 25 years years with increasing regulation coming from Trenton. I don't think that's the best way for us to go at transforming education.
Michigan's education funding system has been broken for a long time.
Gov. Rick Snyder's plan to shift college and university funding into the School Aid Fund that pays for K-12 education is not a good long-term solution.
Snyder is trying to use the financial pressure to accelerate efforts to curb the overpromising of salaries, pensions and benefits - especially health care benefits - to teachers. Likewise, many in the Republican Party believe the state's colleges and universities have spent too much on salaries and benefits.
It's a serious time in the world of education labor. Some even call it war. And while the California Federation of Teachers is stockpiling arms in the Fight for California's Future, the union still has a wide range of priorities, as evidenced by its list of approved resolutions from last month's convention at the Marriott Manhattan Beach.
Resolution 1 calls on the state to research the effects of methyl iodide and asks CalSTRS to divest any investment in the company that manufactures it for agricultural use.
Resolution 2 institutes compensation for additional statewide CFT officers, the amount to be determined by the CFT Executive Council.
Resolution 4 directs the union to lobby for compulsory kindergarten.
The US Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by taxpayers in Arizona challenging a state tax credit program that primarily benefits parochial schools.
In a 5-to-4 decision, the high court said the taxpayers lacked the necessary legal standing to bring their lawsuit.
The action sweeps away a ruling by a federal appeals court panel that had struck down the tax credit program as a violation of the First Amendment's ban on government establishment of religion.
The majority justices did not directly address the larger constitutional issue. Instead, the 19-page decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy focuses on whether the complaining taxpayers had suffered a direct and personal injury from Arizona's religious school tax credit program.
Being born female set sometime actress Christine Liao on the road to a career in ballet, but it could all have been so different.
Growing up in a traditional, male-dominated environment, the founder of the Christine Liao School of Ballet and the Hong Kong Ballet Company may never have had such an impact on the art form had she not seen other career paths blocked.
And that's precisely why she is backing a new campaign called "Because I am a Girl", which will promote the rights of girls.
Liao began dancing when she was eight and, at the age of 19, she became a film actress using the stage name Mao Mei, and starred in eight films from 1955 to 1962. After graduating from the University of Hong Kong with a degree in languages and literature, she turned her back on the silver screen and considered becoming a lawyer or working in an office.
Take Google, for example - like WPP it has sited its European headquarters in Dublin although it most of its European revenues are generated outside Ireland - from the UK and other large EMEA economies such as Germany.
The internet giant doesn't pay 12.5% corporate tax in Ireland, it pays 20%. But that figure is not the interesting one. The interesting figure is the gargantuan "administrative expense" that reduces its gross profit from €5.5bn to just €45m.
Grant Thornton tax accountant Peter Vale, who works with multinationals in Dublin says the corporate tax rate of 12.5% may not be a critical factor for companies like Google.
The search engine is using Ireland as a conduit for revenues that end up being costed to another country where its intellectual property (the brand and technology such as Google's algorithms) is registered. In Google's case this country is Bermuda, according to an investigation by Bloomberg last year.
Vale points out that Bermuda is likely to be happy to receive tax revenues from such a huge company, saying: "To them, the 12.5% probably doesn't matter."
The 2009 Google Ireland Limited accounts show the company turned over a phenomenal €7.9bn in Europe for the year ending 2009 - up from €6.7bn the previous year.
Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of "education" to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren't true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they've been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. "Scientists" collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone's political beliefs... and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it's nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about.
I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of "anti-intellectualism" that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on "Americans" is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It's not a one-sided problem.
"Google was Obama territory [during the campaign], and vice versa. With its focus on speed, scale, and above all data, Google had identified and exploited the key ingredients for thinking and thriving in the Internet era. Barack Obama seemed to have integrated those concepts in his own approach to problem solving. Naturally, Googlers were excited to see what would happen when their successful methods were applied to Washington, D.C. They were optimistic that the Google worldview could prevail outside the Mountain View bubble. ... [A]nyone visiting the Google campus during the election year could not miss a fervid swell of Obama-love. While some commentators wrung hands over the Spock-like nature of the senator's personality, Googlers swooned over the dispassionate, reason-based approach he took to problem solving. ... 'It's a selection bias,' says Eric Schmidt of the unofficial choice of most of his employees. 'The people here all have been selected very carefully, so obviously there's going to be some prejudice in favor of a set of characteristics - highly educated, analytic, thoughtful, communicates well.' ...
"[O]ne of the company's brightest young product managers, Dan Siroker [the Chrome browser], ... got permission to take a few weeks off. ... At [Obama] campaign headquarters in Chicago, Siroker began looking at the web efforts to recruit volunteers and solicit donations. ... [H]e returned to Google to help launch Chrome. But over the July 4 weekend, he went back to Chicago to visit the friends he'd met on the campaign. Barack Obama walked through headquarters, and Siroker was introduced to him. He told the senator he was visiting from Google. Obama smiled. 'I've been saying around here that we need a little more Google integration.' That exchange with the candidate was enough to change Siroker's course once more. Back in Mountain View, he told his bosses he was leaving for good. He became the chief analytics officer of the Obama campaign. ...
"Just as Google ran endless experiments to find happy users, Siroker and his team used Google's Website Optimizer [tool for testing site content] to run experiments to find happy contributors. The conventional wisdom had been to cadge donations by artful or emotional pitches, to engage people's idealism or politics. Siroker ran a lot of A/B tests and found that by far the success came when you offered some sort of swag; a T-shirt or a coffee mug. Some of his more surprising tests came in figuring out what to put on the splash page, the one that greeted visitors when they went to Obama2008.com. Of four alternatives tested, the picture of Obama's family drew the most clicks.
"Even the text on the buttons where people could click to get to the next page was subject to test. Should they say, SIGN UP, LEARN MORE, JOIN US NOW, or SIGN UP NOW? (Answer: LEARN MORE, by a significant margin.) Siroker refined things further by sending messages to people who had already donated. If they'd never signed up before, he'd offer them swag to donate. If they had gone through the process, there was no need for swag - it was more effective to have a button that said PLEASE DONATE. ... There were a lot of reasons why Barack Obama raised $500 million online to McCain's $210 million, but analytics undoubtedly played a part."
Google Inc. has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it used deceptive tactics and violated its own privacy promises to consumers when it launched its social network, Google Buzz, in 2010. The agency alleges the practices violate the FTC Act. The proposed settlement bars the company from future privacy misrepresentations, requires it to implement a comprehensive privacy program, and calls for regular, independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. This is the first time an FTC settlement order has required a company to implement a comprehensive privacy program to protect the privacy of consumers' information. In addition, this is the first time the FTC has alleged violations of the substantive privacy requirements of the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Framework, which provides a method for U.S. companies to transfer personal data lawfully from the European Union to the United States.
"When companies make privacy pledges, they need to honor them," said Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC. "This is a tough settlement that ensures that Google will honor its commitments to consumers and build strong privacy protections into all of its operations."
According to the FTC complaint, Google launched its Buzz social network through its Gmail web-based email product. Although Google led Gmail users to believe that they could choose whether or not they wanted to join the network, the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective. For users who joined the Buzz network, the controls for limiting the sharing of their personal information were confusing and difficult to find, the agency alleged.
As mentioned here, I, too, would like the 5.25% tax rate that our good Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl supported (to repatriate foreign profits via a one year tax break). Timothy Aeppel looks at the results:
But it's far from clear whether the spending has spurred the job growth that backers of the break touted.
A law signed by President Bush shortly before the 2004 election allows companies to transfer profit from overseas operations back to the U.S. this year at a special low tax rate of 5.25%. Businesses often keep such funds outside the country in part to avoid paying taxes in the U.S., where the effective rate on repatriated profit for many companies is normally closer to 25%. Backers said the measure would provide an incentive to companies to invest those funds in U.S. operations.
Most companies using the break have offered only broad outlines for how they intend to use their windfall. For the most part, they say they are using the bulk of the money for tasks such as paying down debt and meeting payrolls. Direct job creation rarely appears on the list.
Why do countries and cities and states try to attract tech companies such as Google when they don't want to support the local community tax base?
Twitter, for example is trying to get out of paying San Francisco payroll taxes.
Yet the Obama administration believes that innovation from companies like Google and Twitter will help build jobs and provide the wealth to eliminate US deficits. Other governments have similar hopes.
That's a highly optimistic view and one that's not supported by the actions of those companies who seek the best deals they can get, and use every loophole to get out of paying a share of their profits to the communities where they live and work.
No longer the preserve of tree-huggers, the trend for sustainable design is gaining momentum as more people opt for homes and buildings created using renewable resources that don't cost the earth, literally. No wonder - these buildings use less energy, cost less to operate, use fewer natural resources and have less of an impact on the environment than their conventional counterparts.
Hong Kong Academy's green school, which opens in Sai Kung in 2013, is part of a new era in sustainable architecture in our city, says Josh Arnold, who teaches middle school science, maths and design technology at HKA.
Three distinguished scholars at the Brookings Institution have been spending much time worrying about what we education writers are going to do with ourselves in the uncertain future. This week, they released their third consecutive report on this subject, and filled me with hope that I had not had before.
The three -- governance studies director Darrell M. West, Brown Center on Education Policy Director Grover J. Whitehurst and governance studies senior fellow and Post political columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. -- have discovered among our fellow Americans a stubborn faith in education reporting in newspapers. That's right: The byproduct of dead trees sitting in front of your house getting soaked in the spring rain is still a useful tool.
They surveyed 1,211 adults in the continental United States and found that daily newspapers were the second-most common source for current education news among this diverse group, with 60 percent saying newspapers were a source of education news for them.
In a city hit hard by the recent economic downturn, school officials have set an ambitious agenda for turning around a struggling school system.
Within five years, Racine Unified School District officials say, their goal is to have 90% of third-graders reading at grade level or higher - a dramatic improvement over the 65% proficiency rate posted on the recent state test.
What they're asking for in return in a Tuesday referendum is an additional $118.5 million. If approved, it would be the largest successful referendum in Wisconsin, not even counting another question on the ballot that seeks an additional $10 million for district reserves.
"What this referendum is about is us, as a district, making a commitment, but also having the community make a commitment, to make us demonstrably better," Racine Unified Deputy Superintendent Alan Harris said.
School officials in Kenosha, Kimberly, Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee and Whitefish Bay claim they were misled about the nature of the investments
Securities and Exchange Commission staff have recommended taking enforcement action against an investment bank involved in five Wisconsin school districts' $200 million investment in risky financial instruments, the bank disclosed Friday.
The parent corporation for Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Inc. disclosed in an SEC filling that Stifel Nicolaus had received a "Wells Notice" from the federal agency on Friday, indicating that "the staff intends to recommend the filing of a civil or administrative enforcement action against Stifel Nicolaus for possible violations of securities laws related to its role" in the school districts' investments.
"Stifel Nicolaus plans to respond and explain why it believes enforcement action is not warranted," the company wrote in the filing.
Bankers with Stifel Nicolaus helped sell $200 million worth of complex financial instruments known as collateralized debt obligations in 2006 to five school districts - Kenosha, Kimberly, Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee and Whitefish Bay - as a way to help fund non-pension post-employment benefits for the districts' employees.
The striking bit of news out of that ongoing study comparing private and public schools in Milwaukee is this: Researchers aren't yet sure how, but the private schools are better at getting kids across the finish line.
This is one bright spot in a report otherwise showing that children using Milwaukee's school choice program were doing only about as well as Milwaukee Public Schools kids on state tests. The study, by independent university researchers, is following two sets of children, matched for background and poverty, to see which system does a better job of improving their scores on math and reading tests. So far, say researchers, there's no statistically significant difference.
But the study's oldest students have reached graduation age. There, say researchers, there is a difference. Children in choice schools were notably more likely to graduate from high school. Just among those who spent ninth grade taking their state aid to a private school in the form of a voucher, 77% graduated in four years; 69% of MPS kids did.
Among students who spent all four years in a choice school, 94% graduated on time; 75% of kids who stayed in MPS all four years did.
MISSED ADJUSTMENTS and OPPORTUNITIES RATIFICATION OF Madison School District/Madison Teachers Collective Bargaining Agreement 2011-2013
The Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education and the Madison Teachers, Inc. ratified an expedited Collective Bargaining Agreement for 2011-2013. Several significant considerations were ignored for the negative impact and consequences on students, staff and taxpayers.
First and foremost, there was NO 'urgent' need (nor ANY need at all) to 'negotiate' a new contract. The current contract doesn't expire until June 30, 2011. Given the proposals regarding school finance and collective bargaining processes in the Budget Repair Bill before the legislature there were significant opportunities and expectations for educational, management and labor reforms. With such changes imminent, there was little value in 'locking in' the restrictive old provisions for conducting operations and relationships and shutting the door on different opportunities for increasing educational improvements and performances in the teaching and learning culture and costs of educating the students of the district.
A partial listing of the missed adjustments and opportunities with the ratification of the teacher collective bargaining agreement should be instructive.
Keeping the 'step and advancement' salary schedule locks in automatic salary increases; thereby establishing a new basis annually for salary adjustments. The schedule awards increases solely on tenure and educational attainment. This also significantly inhibits movement for development and implementation of 'pay for performance' and merit.
Continues the MOU agreement requiring 50% of teachers in 4-K programs (public and private sites combined) to be state certified and union members
Continues required union membership. There are 2700 total or 2400 full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers, numbers rounded. Full-time teachers pay $1100.00 (pro-rated for part-time) per year in automatic union dues deducted from paychecks and processed by the District. With 2400 FTE multiplied by $1100 equals $2,640,000 per year multiplied by two years of the collective bargaining unit equals $5,280,000 to be paid by teachers to their union (Madison Teachers Inc., for its union activities). These figures do not include staff members in the clerical and teacher assistant bargaining units who also pay union dues, but at a lower rate.
Continues to limit and delay processes for eliminating non-performing teachers Inhibits abilities of the District to determine the length and configuration of the school day, length and configuration of the school year calendar including professional development, breaks and summer school
Inhibits movement and placement of teachers where needed and best suited
Restricts adjustments to class sizes and teacher-pupil ratios
Continues very costly grievance options and procedures and litigation
Inhibits the District from developing attendance area level teacher/administrator councils for collaboration in problem-solving, built on trust and relationships in a non-confrontational environment
Continues costly extra-duties and extra-curricular agreements and processes
Restricts flexibility for teacher input and participation in professional development, curriculum selection and development and performance evaluation at the building level
Continues Teacher Emeritus Retirement Program (TERP), costing upwards to $3M per year
Does not require teacher sharing in costs of health insurance premiums
Did not immediately eliminate extremely expensive Preferred Provider (WPS) health insurance plan
Did not significantly address health insurance reforms
Does not allow for reviews and possible reforms of Sick Leave and Disability Leave policies
Continues to be the basis for establishing "me too" contract agreements with administrators for salaries and benefits. This has impacts on CBAs with other employee units, i.e., support staff, custodians, food service employees, etc.
Continues inflexibilities for moving staff and resources based on changes and interpretations of state and federal program supported mandates
Inhibits educational reforms related to reading and math and other core courses, as well as reforms in the high schools and alternative programs
Each and every one of the above items has a financial cost associated with it. These are the so-called 'hidden costs' of the collective bargaining process that contribute to the over-all costs of the District and to restrictions for undertaking reforms in the educational system and the District. These costs could have been eliminated, reduced, minimized and/ or re-allocated in order to support reforms and higher priorities with more direct impact on academic achievement and staff performance.
For further information and discussion contact:
Don Severson President
Active Citizens for Education
donleader@aol.com
608 577-0851
I'm tired of talking about systems and governance and structures for education. If we've proved anything in Milwaukee, we've proved that these things make less difference than a lot of people once thought.
Since 1990, Milwaukee has been one of the nation's foremost laboratories of experimentation in school structures. This has been driven by hope (some national experts used the word panacea) that new ways of creating, running and funding schools would bring big progress.
A ton of data was unloaded during the last week, including test results from last fall for every school in Wisconsin, a new round of studies comparing performance of students in Milwaukee's publicly funded private school voucher program with Milwaukee Public Schools students and - for the first time - school-by-school test results for those voucher schools.
And what did I learn from all this?
1.) We've got big problems. The scores, overall, were low.
2.) We're not making much progress overall in solving them.
3.) Schools in all three of the major structures for education in Milwaukee - MPS, voucher schools and charter schools - had about the same overall results.
4.) Some specific schools really did much better than others, even when dealing with students with much the same backgrounds as those in schools that got weaker results.
In my dreams, all of us - especially the most influential politicians, policy-makers and civic leaders - focus a lot more on the fourth point than we have been doing.
Zimman's talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin's K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
In an attempt to close funding disparities between high- and low-poverty schools, a bill introduced in Washington, D.C., on Thursday would force districts to be more detailed in reporting school-by-school funding, closing a longtime loophole.
The bill, introduced by Sens. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Thad Cochran, R-Miss., targets districts that collect federal Title I funding for high-poverty schools.
"All too often, well-intentioned policies hatched in Washington do not work the way they were intended," Bennet said in a release. "We are one of only three developed countries to pump more money into affluent schools than low-income schools. That needs to change."
When federal Title I funding was started, it was meant to be an additional resource on top of other funds to help students in need get on an equal academic playing field.
JFC co-chair Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said in the last budget, cuts to K-12 education were offset by millions of stimulus dollars from the federal government.
"It was a luxury that was great at the time," he said. "Now we don't have that one-time money."
While he admitted that the "tools" Gov. Walker provides may not offset funding cuts dollar-for-dollar, he said asking teachers to pay more for health insurance coverage and pension will help. Vos then asked Evers if he supports the mandate relief initiatives Walker proposed in his budget.
Evers said the mandates, which include repealing the requirement that schools schedule 180 days instruction but retains the required number of hours per school year, won't generate much savings for school districts. He said the challenge schools face from reduced funding is much greater.
"It's nibbling around the edges," Evers said of the mandates. "I think we're beyond that."
Excerpts from Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers prepared remarks to the Joint Finance Committee:
"We know that resources are scarce. School districts around the state have demonstrated that they are willing to do their part, both in recent weeks in response to this state budget crisis and throughout the past 18 years under the constraints of revenue caps. While this difficult budget demands shared sacrifice, we need a budget that is fair, equitable, and does not undercut the quality of our children's education," Evers said.
"As you know, the Governor's budget proposal, which increases state spending by 1.7 percent over the next two years, would cut $840 million in state school aids over the biennium - the largest cut to education in state history. While these cuts present unprecedented challenges, an even larger concern is the proposed 5.5 percent reduction to school district revenue limits, which dictate exactly how much money schools have available to spend. Depending on the school district, schools would have to reduce their spending between $480 and $1,100 per pupil. Statewide, the proposed revenue limit cuts will result in a $1.7 billion cut over the biennium, as compared to current law. These dramatic and unprecedented revenue limit cuts will be a crushing challenge to our public schools, especially by the second year of the budget."
In contrast to some other states (yes, that means you, Wisconsin), Oregon's politicians and the leaders of its public colleges and universities are on the same page about changes the state should make in how it manages higher education. But don't blink, or you might miss the moment.
Governor John Kitzhaber and the president of the University of Oregon, Richard Lariviere, agreed Tuesday that the university would postpone for a year its push for legislation that would give it a new financing stream and an independent governing board separate and apart from the existing State Board of Higher Education.
Under the agreement, which was memorialized in an exchange of letters, Lariviere said the university would throw its support behind the governor's plan to create a single statewide board to oversee pre-K to postsecondary education. While Kitzhaber did not openly state in return that he would fully back the university's autonomy plan, Lariviere said in an interview Thursday that he was heartened by what university officials had heard in their discussions with the governor and his staff. "What we have received is as strong and as clear an endorsement of our ideas as we could reasonably expect at this stage," he said.
Time for a change: Susan Schmidt is a newcomer who is well-informed about what makes for successful schools. She appears ready to make the tough decisions needed to get the Milwaukee School district on track.
The Milwaukee School Board needs fresh ideas, which is why we favor newcomer Susan Schmidt over Terry Falk for the at-large seat on Tuesday's ballot.
Schmidt, 49, a single parent of two, is well-informed about what makes for successful schools, having visited and worked with a number of Milwaukee Public Schools and charter and choice schools.
Through her work with the nonprofit Scooter Foundation, established after her brother was shot and killed in Milwaukee in 2005, Schmidt opposes expanding choice beyond poor students. She believes the district needs to be more fiscally responsible. She said the board has a history of putting the needs of adults ahead of students.
The board's reluctance to allow Superintendent Gregory Thornton to explore the idea of outsourcing food service to save the district money is a prime example of the board's lack of leadership.
At Thursday night's school board meeting, the school board approved cuts and fee increases totaling nearly $1 million.
"(Superintendent Karen Schulte) made an extensive presentation that covered $12 million in cuts covering a good portion of our $13 million budget shortfall." said Keith Pennington chief financial officer of the Janesville School District.
The approved cuts include reducing district travel expenses and increasing fees for student athletic events.
"We are going to be increasing ticket prices for sporting events from $3 for adults and $2 for students to $5 for adults and $3 for students, which is aligned with the other schools in our conference," Pennington said. "Participation fee increases, student parking fees will increase from $50 a year to $100 a year and other miscellaneous costs surrounding athletic events."
Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius said Friday that the Dayton administration and the Republican-controlled Legislature have some work ahead of them to reach some compromise on the education funding bills that passed at the Capitol this week.
The proposals would boost the basic per-pupil funding. But it freezes spending for special education and other funding that goes primarily to the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth districts.
One example is aid that's distribute based on how concentrated poverty is in a school building. Cassellius says cutting that funding would hurt the most vulnerable students.
"It's really a realization of not understanding the difficult nature of concentrations of poverty, and the difficulty to meet the needs of all children and all the challenges that are there," she said.
The Madison School Board's recent consideration of the Urban League's application for a planning grant from DPI for the Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men prompted me to dig deeper into the issues the charter school proposal raises. I have several concerns - some old and some new - that are described below.
I apologize for the length of this post. It kind of turned into a data dump of all things Madison Prep.
Here are the seven areas of concern I have today about the Madison school district agreeing to sponsor Madison Prep as a non-instrumentality charter school.
1. The Expense.
As I have written, it looks like the roughly $14,500 per student that Madison Prep is seeking from the school district for its first year of operations is per nearly twice the per-student funding that other independent and non-instrumentality charter schools in the state now receive.
Independent charter schools, for example, receive $7,750 per-student annually in state funding and nothing from the local school district. As far as I can tell, non-instrumentality charter schools tend to receive less than $7,750 from their sponsoring school districts.
It seems that the Madison Prep proposal seeks to pioneer a whole new approach to charter schools in this state. The Urban League is requesting a much higher than typical per-student payment from the school district in the service of an ambitious undertaking that could develop into what amounts to a shadow Madison school district that operates at least a couple of schools, one for boys and one for girls. (If the Urban League eventually operates a girl's school of the same size as projected for Madison Prep, it would be responsible for a total of 840 students, which is a larger total enrollment than about 180 school districts in Wisconsin can claim.)
What about the argument that Madison Prep does not propose to spend any more on a per-student basis than the Madison school district already spends? There are a couple of responses. First, MMSD does not spend $14,500 per student on in-school operations - i.e., teachers, classroom support, instructional materials. The figure is more like $11,000. But this is not the appropriate comparison.
The release of the results of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, the standardized test that every state public school is required to give, is a rite of spring for Wisconsin schools.
Distributed every year, the WKCEs provide educators, parents and community members with information about how well schools and districts are performing, broken down by subject and grade level.
The WKCEs are used alongside other measures to determine where schools are falling short and what is working well. For parents with many different types of educational options from which to choose, the WKCEs allow them to make informed choices about their child's school. For taxpayers, the tests provide a level of transparency and demonstrate a return on investment.
But while state law requires all public schools to give the WKCEs, not all publicly funded schools are required do to so. Since its inception 20 years ago, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has been virtually without any kind of meaningful accountability measures in place. Choice schools have not been required to have students take the WKCEs. That is, until this school year.
We have all done it at one time or another -- opened our mouth before engaging our brain.
State Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, just had one of those moments. In reacting to the news that, on average, students attending schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice program performed about the same or slightly below students in Milwaukee Public Schools, she said taxpayers are being "bamboozled" and the program is "a disservice to Milwaukee students."
Whoa! Had she taken a moment to think before she spoke, here are a few things that should have occurred to her:
• Those private schools are performing about as well at educating Milwaukee children as the public schools -- at half the cost. Public funding for each child in the choice program costs taxpayers $6,442 while each child in Milwaukee Public Schools receives taxpayer support of over $15,000. If all of the 21,000 choice students moved back into Milwaukee Public Schools, that would require a $74 million increase in local property taxes across the state, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
The salary schedule for Madison teachers is frozen for the next school year.
But teachers will still get raises.
That's because, outside of the general salary schedule, Madison teachers are financially rewarded for their years of experience and for the higher education coursework they complete toward advanced degrees.
These "step and lane" raises, as they are called, will average 2.3 percent next school year for Madison teachers.
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad and two School Board members didn't know what this figure was when they met with the State Journal editorial board three weeks ago.
One School Board member even suggested the average teacher raise for years of experience and higher education credits would be so small it was hardly worth considering.
But a 2.3 percent raise sounds pretty good to private sector workers who have endured real pay freezes, furloughs and layoffs for years now because of the recession and slow economic recovery. The school district calculated the 2.3 percent figure last week at the State Journal's request.
Milwaukee Public Schools agree to close, merge, move schools
The Milwaukee School Board on Thursday night closed, merged or relocated about seven schools for next year to address space and facility issues in a district facing an upcoming $74 million budget shortfall.
At the same time, board members considered plans to open a handful of public charter schools next year. By late Thursday, they had approved an education management company to restart North Division High School as a charter school, and they had approved a voucher-school operator to open a public K-12 charter school with a residential element for high schoolers.
The board approved a proposal from Milwaukee College Prep, one of the city's highest-performing charter schools, to lease with an option to buy the vacant Thirty-Eighth Street School building. The deed restriction on the school, which keeps it from being used as a school that would compete with MPS, would be lifted after five years.
Robert Rauh, leader of Milwaukee College Prep, said College Prep proposed expanding into the Thirty-Eighth Street building as an MPS non-unionized charter school for kindergarten through fourth grade. Middle schoolers in grades five through eight would make up the population at Milwaukee College Prep's main campus in Metcalfe Park.
When we bought our home in Jackson (only the second purchase in my thirty plus years of rather hectic service in the "Military-Industrial Complex", helping fight and win the Cold War in all its versions across nearly half the lower 48 states), my wife and I found ourselves stakeholders in the Jackson Enterprise , both divisions - educational (60 percent) and municipal (40 percent). After observing the rapid deterioration in the management of both from the relatively peaceful days of the late 1990′s (zero increase in the school tax rate and an equally steady municipal tax rate) I took an active interest in the operation of the increasingly dysfunctional Board of Education (BoE). Of special interest is the BoE's stubborn and inflexible operating principle that "education" improvement is inevitable if you just shovel sufficient millions of dollars into the bottomless maw of the educator cadres (NJEA Jackson cell in cahoots with the School Administration), eventually some of that will stick. Ending this mind set is my overriding objective.
How do you feel your presence on the school board can benefit education in Jackson?
What passes for a proper education, to be fair, not just in Jackson, is the fostering in the Trophy Kids generation students of a conviction of entitlement and victimization if they are not pampered at every turn(expect to get a medal or commendation of some sort for just showing up on time ). Other countries, our main competitors, teach that students have an obligation to learn in return for the privilege, not the right, granted them . That is their duty to their parents and the nation, and ultimately themselves. That is why our pampered students get their clock cleaned in international math and science competitions, year after bloody year. My contribution to education in Jackson will flow from my thirty years of experience of overseeing and executing the staffing of programs in often way-off-the-road places demanding the hiring on tight schedules of large numbers (hundreds) of often ill-prepared junior engineers with king-sized salary expectations. Thank God for the availability of retiring US Army trained senior noncoms and warrant officers - they always save the contract and know how to run an mission to meet assigned objectives.
Today the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) released new results for the statewide exam.
Not surprising to those who have been paying attention, Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) did better than schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), otherwise known as the voucher program.
Overall, MPS had 47.8% of its students scoring as proficient in math, with 59% proficient in reading.
Among economically disadvantaged kids, MPS scored 43.9% in math and 55.3% in reading.
Those scores are lower for students in the voucher program--all of whom are economically disadvantaged, although that could change if Gov. Scott Walker has his way and opens up the program to middle-class and wealthy kids. Only 34.4% of voucher students scored proficient in math, while 55.2% were proficient in reading, about the same as MPS.
The East Valley School District is asking voters to approve a $33.75 million school construction bond on April 26. The bond will be used to expand and renovate its primary schools.
But the issue many are debating is the district's decision to eliminate its middle schools and turn its elementary schools into kindergarten through eighth grade schools, regardless of bond approval.
It's a model that's being considered across the country. Districts in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maryland and New York - including the large urban areas of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Baltimore - are moving toward K-8 schools.
"I've heard of charter schools," the woman told me. "But I really don't know understand them." People are not familiar with schools often run by a private group but using taxpayer dollars.
Imagine a school created with a business-like contact or "charter". This charter sets it own rules for the school and exempts it from the usual rules about classes, staff, budgeting and administration.
Many charter schools are created and run by local school districts but some are independent charters. Cost to local school districts for these independent schools this year was almost $60 million statewide. In our Senate District, school districts will pay an estimated $1.3 million in the next two years for these independent charter schools.
Relating to the Creation of the Governor's
Read to Lead Task Force
WHEREAS, the number one priority for children in grades kindergarten through third grade is to learn to read; and
WHEREAS, one third of all Wisconsin students cannot read at a basic level and two thirds of all African American students in our state cannot read at a basic level, which is the lowest rate in the nation; and
WHEREAS, in approximately ten years, Florida, through state reading law reforms, has improved from one of the lowest ranked states in the nation to one of the highest and in doing so achieved a much smaller racial achievement gap than Wisconsin; and
WHEREAS, it is critical to have initiatives that will empower teachers, districts, and parents--not lawmakers--with the ability to decide how best to teach reading and explore ways to provide teachers and parents with better tools to identify young struggling students and address why they are struggling and how to overcome those challenges; and
Arthur Culver: He is the superintendent in Champaign, Illinois and has been suggested in the Illinois media as a candidate for the Chicago's school chief job.
In 2009, the Champaign school board voted 4-3 to extend his contract. In 2007, the board extended Culver's contract from four years to five. His contract now goes to 2012. According to the local newspaper, Culver earns $226,049 a year.
Culver had been school chief in the Longview Independent School in Texas. (Here is a story about a controversy that followed Culver from Texas to Illinois.)
Culver came from Texas to Champaign in 2002. According to the newspaper in East Center Illinois, the News-Gazette, "Since then, he's had his hands full trying to meet the requirements of a consent decree negotiated before his arrival that is aimed at improving the performance of minority students. He's done a good job, so it's understandable a board majority would want to show its appreciation."
The Racine Unified School District is at a crossroads. We are doing the right things and we are making progress. On April 5, the school referendum will ask for your support in furthering that progress.
Racine Unified has a powerful vision of learning for all students, the North Star. It says that ALL students will graduate career- and/or college-ready. We have a data system that tracks learning, teaching, engagement and resources to monitor our progress and increase accountability. We have early successes in sixth-grade math, in writing at every measured grade level, the growth of student cohorts on the WKCE and dramatic improvements in such excellent schools as Gifford, Red Apple and Schulte Elementary Schools.
We have reorganized school schedules to increase instructional time and collaborative planning time for teachers. We have raised the bar for all students by reducing basic classes and expanding IB curriculum and AP courses across the district. We have increased tutoring, summer school and Lighted Schoolhouse programs. We are including special education children in regular education classrooms. We are negotiating a Master Teacher and Master Principal program as the first step toward pay for performance. We have school-based payday and data teams that have developed aggressive improvement plans for each school. We have reorganized the Administrative Service Center to support as well as supervise school improvement efforts.
While many high school magazines have discontinued, the annual Wayfarer magazine at Edgewood High School is thriving.
The school recently learned that the 2010 issue of Wayfarer, the 25th edition of the student literary and art magazine, received a Superior Award from the National Council of Teachers of English and was nominated for a Highest Award. The council annually reviews student literary magazines for quality, variety, editing and proofreading and design/artistic aspects. The Wayfarer is one of only two Wisconsin high school literary magazines to receive both of these honors.
Diane Mertens has been the faculty adviser for about 25 years and said an introduction to the magazine's 20th anniversary issue holds true today: "I continually rediscover how refreshing it is to look at the world through adolescent eyes. I also find it exciting to observe the editorial board's discussions as members debate the artistic merit and quality of student writing and artwork."
There are a few dissenters who have remained leery of the great success story of the KIPP schools, questioning the turnover of students in the acclaimed program. KIPP operates three schools in the metro area and a high school, KIPP Atlanta Collegiate, opens this summer.
Now skeptics are about to get some data on attrition and funding that may confirm their suspicions.
In a study bound to raise the hackles of KIPP supporters, researchers at the College of Education and Human Development at Western Michigan University and Teachers College at Columbia University found that KIPP has a high attrition rate among African-American boys.
While the study does not challenge the academic success of KIPP graduates, it raises questions about the funding and whether the high level of private dollars is sustainable. The study found that KIPP schools benefit tremendously by donations and private funding, earning an extra $6,500 on average per pupil.
Madison Metropolitan School District officials are beginning to digest new statewide test score results.
The results for Madison are mixed, but district leaders said that they believe they have a lot of work to do to improve.
The tests reveal that Madison is home to some very bright students, but Superintendent Dan Nerad said that schools aren't doing enough for students who are struggling. He said the test results are proof.
The results showed that, in general, reading levels among students increased across the board while math performance improved only slightly.
District officials said that they also continue to be a "bi-modal" district -- meaning there are students who are scoring at the highest level while it also has ones who are scoring at the lowest levels in nearly every grade in math and reading.
AMERICA'S schools are dotted with stories of progress. In December your correspondent watched a class of seven-year-olds on Chicago's poor West Side. As Mauricia Dantes, a consultant for IBM before she retrained as a teacher, led the pupils in a discussion about the deaf-and-blind author Helen Keller, one small girl declared: "I feel like I'm in college." One day, thanks to Ms Dantes and other teachers, she may be.
Barack Obama wants such scenes to be the rule rather than the exception. The question is what the federal government can do to help. Ten years ago Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), a bold effort to improve America's schools. On March 14th Mr Obama announced that he wants to pass a new version by August. It could be one of his most important feats. But it will not be easy.
In a recent CD post, I featured the public sector premium for full-time elementary and secondary school teachers, which ranges from 14% to 102%, depending on experience and education. The chart above is based on Department of Education data for the salaries of private and public school principals in 2007-2008 based on age. Compared to public school principals in the age groups above, private school principals have slightly more experience as principals, slightly less experience as teachers, and are less likely to have advanced degrees (Master's or Doctor's degrees). So the age group categories above don't control perfectly for education and experience, but still show huge premiums for public school principals of 43% or higher, with an overall average premium of 49%.
The state-appointed manager of Detroit Public Schools identified 45 schools in the struggling district that could be turned over to private charter operators in a bid to improve student performance.
Wednesday's release of the target list comes as the manager, Robert Bobb, heads into a new round of talks with unions, armed with broad new authority to reopen labor contracts, cut costs and dictate curriculum.
Since his appointment more than two years ago, Mr. Bobb's efforts to stabilize the district's finances and bolster its academics have faced resistance from teachers unions and the school board. Michigan Republican Gov. Rick Snyder changed all of that earlier this month, when he signed into law expanded powers for Mr. Bobb and other financial managers appointed to take over struggling cities and schools.
A Wayne County judge who earlier ruled that Mr. Bobb had improperly exerted control over academics stayed her order in light of the new legislation.
"This is one-man rule," said George Washington, an attorney for the school board. "He doesn't even have to meet with the school board."
Study: Voucher students more likely to attend college
Milwaukee voucher students are more likely to graduate and enroll in college than their public school counterparts, according to a new study from researchers the state asked to evaluate the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
Other findings, such as the neutral effect on student test scores, were discovered in past years of the study and reaffirmed in the latest findings.
"We haven't found any evidence of harm, and it wasn't for lack of looking," said lead researcher Patrick Wolf, who will be presenting the new research at UW-Madison today.
A day after the release of state test scores showed voucher-school students in Milwaukee achieving lower levels of reading and math proficiency than students in Milwaukee Public Schools, new data from researchers studying the voucher program's results over multiple years shows those students are doing about the same as MPS students, not worse.
The contradictory report is part of the latest installment of data from a group of researchers at the University of Arkansas who have been tracking a sample of Milwaukee voucher students matched to a set of MPS peers since 2005-'06.
After looking at achievement results on state tests over three years for those matched samples of students, the researchers' data continues to show little difference in academic achievement between both sectors in 2009.
For a matched sample of ninth-grade students in 2005-'06, the researchers found slightly higher graduation rates and college enrollment for voucher students three years later.
....
John F. Witte, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who's involved with research on the five-year study, said the program is justifiable because it gives low-income families more opportunities.
"Some higher-income people are free to switch schools or move their kids out of the city because they have resources, and some people don't have those resources, so the program balances that out," Witte said. "This was never intended to be a silver bullet."
The Indiana House on Wednesday passed what would be the nation's broadest use of school vouchers, allowing even middle-class families to use taxpayer money to send their children to private schools. The bill passed the house 56-42.
In an effort to lure House Democrats back from a five-week, self-imposed exile in Illinois, Republicans agreed to reduce the number of vouchers, with a limit of 7,500 the first year and 15,000 the second, 6News' Norman Cox reported.
Still, unlike other systems that are limited to lower-income households, children with special needs or those in failing schools, this one would be open to a much larger pool of students, including those whose parents earn up to $60,000 a year.
A week from today, about 10 percent to 15 percent of the voters will go to the polls and choose three members of the Rockford School Board to help govern the third largest school district in Illinois.
A fourth member, Bob Evans, will be re-elected because the Rockford College professor is unopposed.
We've written reams of copy here at the News Silo about the upcoming election. Our colleagues at WNTA radio and at the television stations have interviewed the candidates on the air. Forums have been held.
A lot of issues have been discussed. Should the board continue to be elected from seven subdistricts or should we pursue legislation at the state level to allow the mayor of Rockford and the Winnebago County Board chairman to appoint some or all of the members? What are the "real" numbers in the ongoing debate about the size of the budget shortfall for the remainder of this school year and the next? Do people trust the superintendent or should we hire a new one?
Even among the nation's woeful traditional big-city school districts, Detroit Public Schools is a particular abomination. Between falling into state receivership for the second time in the past 12 years, facing $327 million in budget deficits for the next four years, wrangling with scandals such as the travails of literacy-bereft now-former school board president Otis Mathis (who resigned last year after the district's superintendent complained that he had engaged in lewd acts during meetings), and constant news about its failure to educate its students, the Motor City district has secured its place as the Superfund site of education.
So it wasn't a surprise when Detroit's state-appointed czar, Robert Bobb, announced on March 12 that the district would slash its deficit -- and eliminate as much as $99 million in costs from operating its bureaucracy -- by getting rid of 29 percent of the 142 dropout factories and failure mills. But instead of just shutting down the 41 schools (as the district originally planned to do) it would convert them into charter schools, handing off instruction, curriculum, and operations to nonprofits, parents groups, and others interested in running schools.
Small class size is thought to be a ticket to classroom success. Some states require schools, by law, to limit the number of students assigned to one teacher. But Eva Moskowitz, founder and chief executive of the Success Charter Network, argues that formula doesn't guarantee a good education.
The Obama administration "strongly opposes" a bill championed by House Speaker John Boehner that would revive and expand vouchers for low-income students in the District of Columbia.
The administration's statement stops short of saying President Obama will veto the measure, known as the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act or SOAR.
"Private school vouchers are not an effective way to improve student achievement," said the Office of Management and Budget statement. "The administration strongly opposes expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and opening it to new students."
I came across the most recent summary report for the California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS) and I thought its pared-down tables and graphs nicely encapsulated the pension situation in the state.
First note that the average annual salary in 2010 for active working educators enrolled in the system was $64,156. The next table states that the average retirement benefit paid out in 2010 was $4,256 per month. That's $51,072 annually. In other words, the average retired teacher in California made more than the average working teacher in 28 states, according to the salary rankings published by NEA.
The final graph in the report provides the big picture. While the value of the pension system's assets has increased fairly steadily over the past nine years, the accrued liabilities have grown non-stop during the same period, leaving the fund at 78% of full coverage. What's more, CalSTRS operated on an assumed annual return of 8 percent. Last year, the pension board lowered that expectation to 7.75 percent, which means projections for the future will show even more of a gap.
Several decades ago, the Canadian Army was having a problem with its male recruits. Far too many of them were going Absent WithOut Leave, for various reasons, to various places, for varying amounts of time.
The Army tried giving them punishment laps, kitchen duty, latrine duty, even time in the stockade, but nothing worked--they were still going AWOL.
Finally, someone thought of trying something completely new. They sent the recruit home to his mother, with a note saying he was too immature for Army duty, and would she keep him at home for another year, and then perhaps he could try again. The AWOL problem disappeared.
Something like 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years, and they don't, for the most part, go home to mother, but they do leave a hole and a problem in filling their shoes back in the schools.
My guess is that no one conducts serious exit interviews with these teachers, who are perfectly free to leave the profession, for personal reasons, to start a different career, or whatever. But I would argue that a significant portion of them, it would be found if there were serious exit interviews conducted, have been virtually pushed out.
People go back and forth arguing whether teaching is a profession or a civil service job like firefighters and police, paid out of municipal taxes.
In general, professionals don't have clients delivered to them, as students are delivered to teachers, and if a client leaves a lawyer for another lawyer the first lawyer does not call his union representative.
For me, one test of whether a teacher is a professional or not is whether she/he can refuse service to someone. Lawyers who are about to try a case in court before a jury can interview potential jurors and they have, I think, two peremptory challenges, which allow them to say: "This potential juror and that potential juror are excused." They can exercise this privilege if there are a couple of people they think would prejudice their case or make it harder to win. They don't have to give any reasons.
A "professional" teacher, on the other hand, is not allowed to look over a class, and say, "This one and that one, I can't teach." Even if what it means is if those students stay in their class they may have to give 60% of their time to controlling them, and have only 40% of their time for the other 27 students. And it is worse than that, because the effort to control disruptive students does not come at one time in the class, but is needed to interrupt the rest of the class any number of times.
Teachers are trained and expected not to think about stuff like that. They are taught and expected to believe that it is their job to accept all comers and exercise their "classroom management skills" without being relieved of the burden of any disruptive student, no matter how much damage that student may do to the education of the other students in the class.
So teachers, for the most part, take all students, and their teaching suffers as a result. They are frustrated in their efforts to offer the best that they have to the majority of their students. And, by the way, it is no secret to the students that the school administration doesn't have enough respect for the teacher's professional work to remove such a student. And we wonder why people don't want to be teachers and don't want their children to be teachers.
Theodore Roosevelt had a guest in the oval office one day, when his daughter Alice came charging through the room screaming. The guest asked the President if he couldn't control her. TR responded that he could control Alice, or he could be President of the United States, but not both. He was a professional and was treated as such.
I blame teachers for not having the courage to say that if I have to keep this student or that student in my class, the education I am able to offer to the other students will be damaged by 60%. If they did say that, of course they would be judged incompetent in classroom management and probably encouraged to leave the profession.
Many too many do leave the profession, and I believe that many of them were literally pushed out through being prevented from doing their best by the unchecked and disregarded misbehavior of some students. I know that every Nobel Prize winner was once a high school student, but so was every rapist and murderer, and students who cannot conduct themselves as they should must not be allowed to ruin the careers of our teachers. Perhaps such students should be sent home to their mothers, but they don't belong in classrooms where important professional academic work is going on.
----------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
The 2010 Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam results reveal strong academic achievement for students in the Sun Prairie Area School District, according to district officials.
This past November, Sun Prairie administered the WKCE to more than 3,400 students in grades 3 through 8 and grade 10. Students in grades 3 through 8 were assessed in reading and math. Students in grades 4, 8 and 10 were also assessed in language arts, science, social studies and writing.
It is important to note that testing in the fall shows the impact of instruction from the previous school years and just two months at the designated grade level. For example, 6th grade scores reflect proportionately more about the 5th grade program than about the 6th grade program.
Combining all grade levels, 88 percent of Sun Prairie students are proficient or advanced in reading and 86 percent are proficient or advanced in math, according to district officials. The numbers are both an increase from last year.
In his (anonymous) new book, Professor X describes a scene he witnessed in a departmental office. A frazzled student comes in and wants the secretary to get a message to her professor. The secretary asks the professor's name, and the student turns out to be unaware -- at the midpoint of the semester.
The secretary shows no judgment but proceeds to figure out a way to identify the professor:
"Male or female?"
Female.
"Tall or short?"
Regular,
"Blond or brunette? Light hair, dark hair?"
She has dreads.
By process of elimination, the secretary identifies the instructor and promises to deliver the message. The secretary never smirks -- even after the student leaves. The student is treated with respect. Professor X marvels at the commitment of staffers to helping students at the colleges at which he teaches. "Nowhere are employees friendlier," he writes. "The staffers could not be more accommodating to students who have lost their way in the forests of financial aid or class schedules."
The latest data from the U.S. Census's American Community Survey paints a fascinating picture of the United States at the county level. We've looked the educational achievement and the median income of the entire nation, to see where people are going to school, where they're earning money, and if there is any correlation.
A school choice group that pumped millions of dollars into helping get its candidates elected in Ohio, Wisconsin and other states has yet to pay a record $5.2 million fine imposed three years ago by Ohio election officials, according to the state attorney general.
The fine imposed on All Children Matter languishes even as Ohio Gov. John Kasich pushes a $55.5 billion budget proposal that would continue to expand school choice, doubling the number of school vouchers in the state and lifting a cap on community schools.
The Ohio Elections Commission unanimously ruled in 2008 that All Children Matter, headed by former Michigan Republican Chairwoman Betsy DeVos and run out of that state, illegally funneled $870,000 in contributions from its Virginia political action committee to its Ohio affiliate. That violated a $10,000 cap on what Ohio-based political-action committees could accept from any single entity.
Michael J. Petrilli is the executive vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Raising the "status" of teaching is like chasing a mirage: It looks great from a distance but it never seems to materialize. Teachers today are one of the most respected members of our society, according to opinion polls. The growing backlash against perceived "teacher-bashing" in Wisconsin and elsewhere is more testament that Americans like their teachers. So what exactly is the problem the status-boosters are hoping to solve? Raising teachers' self-esteem?
On the other hand, it's true that teaching today is not among the most attractive careers open to talented young people. Making it more attractive is an objective we can do something about.
Today's teacher compensation system is perfectly designed to repel ambitious individuals. We offer mediocre starting salaries, provide meager raises even after hard-earned skills have been gained on the job and backload the most generous benefits (in terms of pensions) toward the end of 30 years of service. More fundamentally, for decades we've prioritized smaller classes over higher teacher pay. If we had kept class sizes constant over the past 50 years, the average teacher today would be making $100,000.
I just returned from the Association for Education Finance and Policy annual conference in Seattle, which was a really fantastic meeting. At the conference I saw Dartmouth economic historian, William Fischel, present a paper on Amish education, extending the work from his great book, Making the Grade, which I have reviewed in Education Next.
Fischel's basic argument is that our educational institutions have largely evolved in response to consumer demands. That is, the consolidation of one-room schoolhouses into larger districts, the development of schools with separate grades, the September to June calendar, and the relatively common curriculum across the country all came into being because families wanted those measures. And in a highly mobile society, even more than a century ago, people often preferred to move to areas with schools that had these desired features. In the competitive market between communities, school districts had to cater to this consumer demand. All of this resulted in a remarkable amount of standardization and uniformity across the country on basic features of K-12 education.
Hearing Fischel's argument made me think about how ill-conceived the nationalization effort led by Gates, Fordham, the AFT, and the US Department of Education really is. Most of the important elements of American education are already standardized. No central government authority had to tell school districts to divide their schools into grades or start in the Fall and end in the Spring. Even details of the curriculum, like teaching long division in 4th grade or Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, are remarkably consistent from place to place without the national government ordering schools to do so.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan ushered in the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament earlier this month with an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing that schools should only qualify for post-season play if they are on track to graduate at least 40 percent of their players.
The argument by Duncan, who is a basketball player and fan himself, has been made by many critics, including the Knight Commission for Intercollegiate Athletics, which proposed restricting participation to only those programs that graduated more than half of their players. And rightfully so: men's college basketball does a poor job of graduating its players, with 10 of the original 68 teams in the tournament not meeting the "50 percent" benchmark this year. This leaves players who don't go professional -- the vast majority of them -- without the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the real world. Many sportswriters and fans, on the other hand, think that Duncan's viewpoint is out of touch --and that critics of NCAA basketball and football need to come to grips with the fact that, for many athletes who play for hugely popular athletics programs, the sport is simply more important than the degree.
The Joint Committee on Finance is required to get input on the proposed budget at a series of hearing around the state. Let legislators and the governor know how you feel about the $1 billion in cuts to public education by attending a hearing. Here is a link to the hearing schedule: http://legis.wisconsin.gov/lfb/jfc/schedule.htm
The Wisconsin school board association on Monday urged districts that have not reached new deals with teachers' unions to hold off given the uncertainty over whether a new law removing nearly all collective bargaining rights is in effect.
Many school districts, counties and municipalities have been rushing to reach deals before the law that takes away all bargaining rights except over base salary kicks in.
Republican lawmakers pushed through passage of the law earlier this month despite massive protests that drew up to 85,000 people to the state Capitol and a boycott by Democratic state senators. Opponents immediately filed a series of lawsuits, and a hearing on one was scheduled Tuesday. The judge in that case had issued a restraining order barring Democratic Secretary of State Doug La Follette from publishing the law, typically the last step before it takes effect.
That's not to suggest Madison schools are flush with money. Gov. Walker, after all, is trying to balance a giant state budget deficit without raising taxes or pushing the problem further down the road. Walker has proposed cuts to most state programs, including aid to public schools.
Milwaukee Voucher School WKCE Headlines: "Students in Milwaukee voucher program didn't perform better in state tests", "Test results show choice schools perform worse than public schools", "Choice schools not outperforming MPS"; Spend 50% Less Per Student
Latest tests show voucher scores about same or worse in math and reading.
Students in Milwaukee's school choice program performed worse than or about the same as students in Milwaukee Public Schools in math and reading on the latest statewide test, according to results released Tuesday that provided the first apples-to-apples achievement comparison between public and individual voucher schools.
The scores released by the state Department of Public Instruction cast a shadow on the overall quality of the 21-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which was intended to improve results for poor city children in failing public schools by allowing them to attend higher-performing private schools with publicly funded vouchers. The scores also raise concerns about Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to roll back the mandate that voucher schools participate in the current state test.
Voucher-school advocates counter that legislation that required administration of the state test should have been applied only once the new version of the test that's in the works was rolled out. They also say that the latest test scores are an incomplete measure of voucher-school performance because they don't show the progress those schools are making with a difficult population of students over time.
Statewide, results from the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam show that scores didn't vary much from last year. The percentage of students who scored proficient or better was higher in reading, science and social studies but lower in mathematics and language arts from the year before.
Great. Now Milwaukee has TWO failing taxpayer-financed school systems when it comes to educating low income kids (and that's 89 per cent of the total population of Milwaukee Public Schools).
Statewide test results released Tuesday by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction include for the first time performance data from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which involves about 110 schools serving around 10,000 students. There's a total population of around 80,000 students in Milwaukee's school district.
The numbers for the voucher schools don't look good. But the numbers for the conventional public schools in Milwaukee are very poor, as well.
In a bit of good news, around the rest of the state student test scores in every demographic group have improved over the last six years, and the achievment gap is narrowing.
The test results show the percentage of students participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program who scored proficient or advanced was 34.4 percent for math and 55.2 percent for reading.
Among Milwaukee Public Schools students, it was 47.8 percent in math and 59 percent in reading. Among Milwaukee Public Schools students coming from families making 185 percent of the federal poverty level -- a slightly better comparison because voucher students come from families making no more than 175 percent -- it was 43.9 percent in math and 55.3 percent in reading.
Statewide, the figures were 77.2 percent in math and 83 percent in reading. Among all low-income students in the state, it was 63.2 percent in math and 71.7 percent in reading.
Democrats said the results are evidence that the voucher program is not working. Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Middleton, the top Democrat on the Assembly Education Committee, said voucher students, parents and taxpayers are being "bamboozled."
"The fact that we've spent well over $1 billion on a failed experiment leads me to believe we have no business spending $22 million to expand it with these kinds of results," Pope-Roberts said. "It's irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars and a disservice to Milwaukee students."
Rep. Robin Vos, R-Rochester, who is developing a proposal to expand the voucher program to other cities, took a more optimistic view of the results.
"Obviously opponents see the glass half-empty," Vos said. "I see the glass half-full. Children in the school choice program do the same as the children in public school but at half the cost."
Statewide the gap between the percentage of white and black students scoring proficient or advanced closed 6.8 percentage points in math and 3.9 points in reading between 2005-06 and this year. Comparing white students to Hispanics, the gap closed 5.7 points in math and 3.7 points in reading.
In Madison the gap between white and black students closed 0.4 percentage points in math and 0.6 points in reading. Among Hispanics, the gap increased half a point in math and decreased 1 point in reading.
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad was unavailable to comment Monday on the results.
A thread was requested about ALOs (Advanced Learning Opportunities, the third tier of the Advanced Learning program) and differentiated teaching. Differentiated teaching is a teacher knowing his/her students' strengths, challenges and readiness and being able to adjust teaching to the different levels in the classroom. (This doesn't necessarily mean teaching to every single student's level but rather knowing that there are different abilities in the classroom and trying to meet those needs.)
According to the complaint filed in Dane County Circuit Court, the union said the district "bargained in bad faith" and proposed non-negotiable contract changes including removal of just cause for discipline and discharge, total district discretion of work hours, elimination of seniority protections, elimination of fair share union dues, modifications/freezes on salary schedules and elimination of compensatory time off.
The district also proposed, according to the complaint, that the School Board be the final step in the grievance procedure as opposed to having a third-party arbitrator as the current agreement states.
In Houston, school district officials introduced a test score-based evaluation system to determine teacher bonuses, then -- in the face of massive protests -- jettisoned the formula after one year to devise a better one.
In New York, teachers union officials are fighting the public release of ratings for more than 12,000 teachers, arguing that the estimates can be drastically wrong.
Despite such controversies, Los Angeles school district leaders are poised to plunge ahead with their own confidential "value-added" ratings this spring, saying the approach is far more objective and accurate than any other evaluation tool available.
"We are not questing for perfect," said L.A. Unified's incoming Supt. John Deasy. "We are questing for much better."
School choice opponent Barbara Miner says that Wisconsin legislators should "just say no" to Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to expand educational options for Milwaukee parents (Crossroads, March 13).
My advice to legislators?
Just say yes.
Those who do will have Milwaukee residents, especially Milwaukee parents, on their side.
In a recent poll, Milwaukeeans rate the 20-year-old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program successful by a two-to-one margin (60%-28%). The results cut across racial and economic lines and extend even to households without school-age children.
Parents are especially enthusiastic. Two-thirds say the program is successful, and 64% endorse expansion.
There is good reason for their support. Students in Milwaukee's school choice program graduate from high school at rates 18% higher than Milwaukee Public Schools students, according to estimates by University of Minnesota professor John Robert Warren.
Memo to all Wisconsin legislators. There is an easy way to prove you care about public education in Wisconsin. And it won't cost a penny.
Just say no to Gov. Scott Walker's proposed expansion of the Milwaukee voucher program providing tax dollars to private schools.
This may seem merely like a Milwaukee issue. It's not. Voucher advocates have made clear for more than 20 years that their goal is to replace public education with a system of universal vouchers that includes private and religious schools.
The heartbreaking drama currently playing in Milwaukee - millions of dollars cut from the public schools while vouchers are expanded so wealthy families can attend private schools in the suburbs - may be coming soon to a school district near you.
For those who worry about taxation without representation, vouchers should send shivers down your spine. Voucher schools are defined as private even though subsidized by taxpayers.
A bill that would ban trans fats in Nevada public schools got support from health advocates and some mild opposition from administrators who don't want to be food police.
A Senate committee on Friday heard Senate Bill 230, which bans trans fats from vending machines, student stores, and school activities. The current bill version exempts school lunches, but pending rules through the national school lunch program would ban trans fats there, too.
Trans fats raise levels of harmful cholesterol and decrease levels of healthy cholesterol. They are common in processed snack foods, fried foods and baked goods.
There is a quiet but fierce battle going on in education today, between the unions that represent the public school teachers and the hedge-fund managers who finance the big charter chains, between those who trust teachers to assess a child's progress and those who trust standardized tests, and occasionally it flares out into the open over something as seemingly minor as the location of a school.
Ooh, those greedy hedge fund managers.
There are plenty of fierce battles in education today, some not so quiet, but I'm not sure the assignation of space in this Washington Heights neighborhood is one of them. Winerip describes two candidates for the space in question, one a traditional public school to be called Castle Bridge, which defines its mission as a non-reliance on standardized testing to gauge student learning, and the other a KIPP academy, with a well-proven track record of excellence.
As members of the Madison School Board, we appreciate that Mayor Dave Cieslewicz's vision for the future recognizes that strong Madison public schools are vital to a growing and vibrant community.
Whether it's been working together to establish the Meadowood Community Center, devoting city funds to improving safe routes for walking and biking to our schools or helping to plan for our new 4-year-old kindergarten program, the city under Cieslewicz's leadership has forged a strong and productive partnership with the school district.
We look forward to continuing our work with Mayor Dave on smart and effective responses to the challenges that lie ahead for our schools and our city.
Ed Hughes, Beth Moss and Maya Cole, members, Madison School Board
IMPORTANT SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: Madison Board of Education to Vote on Madison Prep Planning Grant!
Kaleem Caire, via email:
March 28, 2011
Dear Friends & Colleagues,
In 30 minutes, our team and the public supporting us will stand before the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education to learn if they will support our efforts to secure a charter planning grant from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction for Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men.
For those who still do not believe that Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men is a cause worthy of investment, let's look at some reasons why it is. The following data was provided by the Madison Metropolitan School District to the Urban League of Greater Madison in September 2010.
Lowest Graduation Rates:
In 2009, just 52% of Black males and 52% of Latino males graduated on-time from the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) compared to 81% of Asian males and 88% of White males.
Lowest Reading Proficiency:
In 2010, just 45% of Black, 49% of Hispanic, and 59% of Asian males in 10th grade in the MMSD were proficient in reading compared to 87% of White males.
Largest ACT Performance Gap:
Just 7% of Black and 18% of Latino seniors in the MMSD who completed the ACT college entrance exam were "college ready" according to the test maker. Put another way, a staggering 93% of Black and 82% of Latino seniors were identified as "not ready" for college. Wisconsin persistently has the largest gap in ACT performance between Black and White students in the nation every year.
Children Grossly Underprepared for College:
Of the 76 Black seniors enrolled in MMSD in 2010 who completed the ACT college entrance exam required by Wisconsin public universities for admission consideration, just 5 students (7%) were truly ready for college. Of the 71 Latino students who completed the ACT, just 13 students (18%) were ready for college compared to 403 White seniors who were ready.
Looking at it another way, in 2010, there were 378 Black 12th graders enrolled in MMSD high schools. Just 20% of Black seniors and completed the ACT and only 5 were determined to be college ready as state above. So overall, assuming completion of the ACT is a sign of students' intention and readiness to attend college, only 1.3% of Black 12th graders were ready for college compared to 36% of White 12th graders.
Not Enrolled or Succeeding in College Preparatory Courses:
High percentages of Black high school students are completing algebra in the 9th grade but only half are succeeding with a grade of C or better. In 2009-10, 82% of Black 9th graders attending MMSD's four comprehensive high schools took algebra; 42% of those taking the class received a C or better compared to 55% of Latino and 74% of White students.
Just 7% of Black and 17% of Latino 10th graders attending MMSD's four comprehensive high schools who completed geometry in 10th grade earned a grade of C or better compared to 35% of Asian and 56% of White students.
Just 13% of Black and 20% of Latino 12th graders in the class of 2010 completed at least two or more Advanced Literature courses with a grade of C or better compared to 40% of White and 43% of Asian students.
Just 18% of Black and 26% of Latino 12th graders in the class of 2010 completed at least two or more Advanced Writing courses with a grade of C or better compared to 45% of White and 59% of Asian students.
Just 20% of Black 12th graders in the class of 2010 completed 2 or more credits of a Single Foreign Language with a grade of C or better compared to 34% of Latino, 69% of White and 59% of Asian students.
Just 33% of Black students took Honors, Advanced and/or AP courses in 2009-10 compared to and 46% of Latino, 72% of White and 70% of Asian students.
Just 25% of Black students who took Honors, Advanced and/or AP courses earned a C or better grade in 2009-10 compared to 38% of Latino, 68% of White and 64% of Asian students.
Extraordinarily High Special Education Placements:
Black students are grossly over-represented in special education in the MMSD. In 2009-10, Black students made up just 24% of the school system student enrollment but were referred to special education at twice that rate.
Among young men attending MMSD's 11 middle schools in 2009-10, 39% of Black males were assigned to special education compared to 18% of Hispanic, 12% of Asian and 17% of White males. MMSD has been cited by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction for disparities in assigning African American males to special education. The full chart is attached.
Of all students being treated for Autism in MMSD, 14% are Black and 70% are White. Of all Black students labeled autistic, 77% are males.
Of all students labeled cognitively disabled, 46% are Black and 35% are White. Of all Black students labeled CD, 53% are males.
Of all students labeled emotionally disabled, 55% are Black and 35% are White. Of the Black students labeled ED, 70% are males.
Of all students labeled learning disabled, 49% are Black and 35% are White. Of the Black students labeled LD, 57% are males.
Black students are Disproportionately Subjected to School Discipline:
Black students make up a disproportionate percentage of students who are suspended from school. Only Black students are over represented among suspension cases.
In 2009-10, MMSD levied 2,754 suspensions against Black students: 920 to Black girls and 1,834 to Black boys. While Black students made up 24% of the total student enrollment (n=5,370), they accounted for 72% of suspensions district-wide.
Suspension rates among Black children in MMSD have barely changed in nearly 20 years. In 1992-93, MMSD levied 1,959 suspensions against a total of 3,325 Black students. This equaled 58.9% of the total black enrollment in the district compared to 1,877 suspensions against a total of 18,346 (or 10.2%) white students [Dual Education in the Madison Metropolitan School District, Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, February 1994, Vol. 7, No. 2].
Black males were missed a total of 2,709 days of school during the 2009-10 school year due to suspension.
Additionally, 20 Black students were expelled from the MMSD in 2009-10 compared to 8 White students in the same year.The Urban League of Greater Madison his offering MMSD a viable solution to better prepare young men of color for college and beyond. We look forward to making this solution a reality in the next 18 months.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men 2012!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Main: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Fax: 608-729-1205
Website: www.ulgm.org
When it comes to changing public education in Pennsylvania, Gov. Corbett's proposed billion-dollar funding cut to school districts this year could be just the beginning.
The governor also is pushing a legislative agenda that could significantly affect the way children are taught, the teachers who instruct them, and how schools craft their budgets.
One proposal that many suburban school boards fear and many taxpayers relish calls for voter approval of proposed district budgets when tax increases exceed inflation. If this were in effect now, more than 80 percent of the districts in Philadelphia's suburbs probably would have to vote.
Other Corbett initiatives would:
Give school boards, for the first time, a free hand to lay off teachers to cut costs, with the decider in the furloughs being classroom performance, not seniority.
Create vouchers providing state funding so low-income children in struggling schools could transfer to private ones. The role of charter schools would also be expanded.
I remember once, in the early 1980s, when I was teaching at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I visited a class in European History taught by my most senior colleague, a man with a rich background in history and many years of teaching.
He presented a lot of historical material in that class period, interlaced with interesting historical stories and anecdotes which the students seemed to enjoy. While I envied him for his knowledge and experience, I began to notice that the students were, for the most part at least, laid back and simply being entertained.
They were not being asked to answer challenging questions on the material, or demonstrate the knowledge they had gathered from their homework or outside reading in history, or, in fact, do anything except sit there and be entertained.
This was before the IPod, IPhone, IPad or laptops appeared in classrooms, so no one was texting anyone, but I did see that a few students were not even being bothered enough to be entertained. Here was this fine, educated instructor offering them European history and they were just not paying attention.
I understand that high school classes are only partly voluntary, that if students want a high school diploma they have to take some courses, and history is generally less demanding than calculus, chemistry or physics.
Nevertheless it stayed with me that there was so little "audience participation" from these Juniors and Seniors. I couldn't see that any of them felt much obligation, or opportunity really, to do the work or take part in the class.
Perhaps the teacher was trying to entertain them because a junior colleague was visiting the class, but I don't think that was it. I think that good teacher, like so many of us, and so many of his colleagues to this day, had bought the idea that it was his job to entertain them, rather than to demand that they work hard to learn history for themselves.
He told good stories, but the students said nothing. They, too, had adopted the notion that a "good" teacher would keep them entertained with the absolute minimum of effort on their part, as though it was the teacher's responsibility to "make learning happen," as it were, to them.
The memory of this classroom visit comes back to me as I see so many people in and out of education these days, talk about selecting, monitoring, controlling, and, if necessary removing, teachers who are not sufficiently entertaining, who do not "make students learn" whether they want to or are wiling to work on it themselves or not.
As a high school student in Pennsylvania recently commented, "It's a teacher's job to motivate students." Of course, football and basketball coaches are expected to motivate their athletes as well, but not while those athletes do nothing but sit in the stands and watch the coach do "his thing." They are expected to take part, to work hard, to get themselves into condition and to carry their load in the enterprise of sports.
A sports clothing store near me sells sweatshirts which say; "Work all Summer, Win all Fall." I confirmed with the store owner, a part-time high school football coach, that "Work" in this case does not mean get a summer job and save some money. Rather, it means run, lift weights and generally put time in on their physical fitness so that they will be in shape to play sports in the Fall.
I do not know of any equivalent sweatshirt for high school academics: "Study all Summer, Get Good Grades all Fall." I don't think there is one, and I think the reason is, in part, that so many of us, including too many teachers, have decided that teachers are the ones who need to work on, and take responsibility for, student academic learning. Their job goes way beyond the coaches' task of motivating young athletes who "Work all Summer" and come expecting to give it their all in the Fall.
Those who keep saying that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality simply conspire with all those others, including too many students, who support the idea that academic work and student learning are the teachers' problem, and not one in which the students have a major share. Of course teachers who are forced out of teaching because their students don't do any academic work suffer, but we should also be concerned with the consequences for so many of our students who have been led down the primrose path of believing that school is not their primary job at which they also must work hard.
-------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Terry Mazany, interim chief of Chicago Public Schools, was like a baseball manager beckoning a star relief pitcher an inning early to hold a lead. Rather than Mariano Rivera, he waved in Kate Maehr to last week's Board of Education meeting.
He had opened an ultimately melancholy session dominated by budget woes by suddenly and without explanation defending the Breakfast in the Classroom program, quietly pushed through in January.
The defense was due partly to an earlier mention in this column that generated lots of "Huh, are they serious?" responses among parents and others, according to board officials. The program mandates that the first instructional class open with pupils having breakfast at their desks, even at schools already offering pre-class breakfast.
Everybody knows education is expensive, but exactly how expensive depends on what you want to count.
And a difference of opinion over that issue led to a few tense moments at Saturday mornings's legislative forum in Salina.
Ken Kennedy, director of operations for the Salina School District, asked local lawmakers the final question of the forum, asking whether lawmakers had suggestions for what spending districts should cut, and how soon they'll know how much money they're getting for the 2011-12 school year.
Sen. Pete Brungardt, R-Salina, fielded the question first, saying it would likely be May before the Legislature passes a final budget -- and that more cuts are likely.
"It's clear the trend has been down," Brungardt said, adding that after accounting for inflation, school districts now have about the same funding as in 1990.
The incoming Los Angeles schools superintendent told the Board of Education on Saturday to withhold part of his $330,000 salary because of serious projected budget shortfalls.
In an email to his bosses, John Deasy said he had been meeting with employees to explain potential budget-cutting scenarios. Last month, the board approved sending preliminary layoff notices to almost 7,000 teachers.
"All of our work and plans for restoration are in serious peril," Deasy wrote. "This is remarkably painful and emotional. As such, given our current circumstances, at this time I respectfully will not accept the salary offered in your contract."
Deasy will not forgo his entire salary but will instead keep receiving the pay -- $275,000 -- he has been getting as deputy superintendent. The $55,000 difference represents a nearly 17% reduction.
The district has focused reading instruction and has launched an intensive effort aimed at boosting dismal outcomes. The MPS chief academic officer asks: Will we be given enough time?
Walk in many Milwaukee Public Schools classrooms today, and here's what you're likely to see:
There will be a teacher sitting at a table in a corner, guiding a handful of young readers or writers in targeted instruction. The other students, whether they be 4-year-olds or teenagers, will be actively engaged in small group work.
What you're not likely to see: a teacher holding court at the center of the room of mostly silent children, heads down on tables or blank stares on their faces.
As the district's new literacy effort takes hold, our students increasingly work in small groups at hands-on literacy stations set up around the room. Students, who otherwise would have had to wait for their teacher to pause and for their turn to speak, are instead guiding their own practice and that of their peers.
Beset by scandal over irregularities in test scores, Atlanta Public Schools has another, longer-running scandal on its hands: The district has underfunded its pension for custodians, bus drivers and cooks by more than a half-billion dollars.
APS has the worst underfunding of any large public pension plan in the state, according to a recent state audit. While it is generally agreed that, at any given time, a pension plan should contain 80 percent to 90 percent of the money it is obligated to pay out, APS has assets to cover just 17.4 percent of its pension promises.
The Jan. 1 report by the state Audits and Accounts Department found that pensions run by Georgia's cities, counties and other local governments are under water by almost $4.5 billion. Three plans run by the city of Atlanta, plus the APS plan, accounted for nearly 40 percent of the deficit statewide.
In Chicago last school year, 245 public school students were shot, 27 of them fatally.
It's a high toll. To try to find out who might be next, Chicago Public School officials developed a probability model by analyzing the traits of 500 shooting victims over a recent two-year period. They noted that the vast majority were poor, black and male, and had chronic absences, bad grades and serious misconduct.
Using this probability model, they identified more than 200 teenagers who have a shockingly good chance of being shot -- a better than 1 in 5 chance within the next two years.
Project Director Jonathan Moy says the probability model isn't perfect, but it's working.
Milwaukee's private school voucher program has broken new and controversial ground often in its 21-year history. Now, it is headed toward what might well be another amazing national first.
If Gov. Scott Walker and leading voucher advocates prevail, Milwaukee will become the first city in American history where any child, regardless of income, can go to a private school, including a religious school, using public money to pay the bill.
Universal vouchers have been a concept favored by many free-market economists and libertarians since they were suggested by famed economist Milton Friedman more than half a century ago. Friedman's theory was that if all parents could apply their fair share of public money for educating their children at whatever school they thought best, their choices would drive educational quality higher.
Coming soon (fairly likely): Milwaukee as the biggest testing ground of Friedman's idea.
But not only is it hard to figure out what to say about the future of vouchers, it's not easy to know what to say about the past of Milwaukee's 21-year-old program of vouchers limited to low-income students except that it has been popular (more than 20,000 students using vouchers this year to attend more than 100 private schools) and there is not much of a case (except in some specific schools) that it has driven quality higher, both when it comes to many of the private schools specifically and when it comes to the educational waterfront of Milwaukee.
Madison teachers wouldn't pay anything toward their health insurance premiums next year and property taxes would decline $2 million under Superintendent Dan Nerad's 2011-12 budget proposal.
The $359 million proposal, a 0.01 percent increase over this year, required the closing of a $24.5 million gap between district's estimated expenses from January and the expenditures allowed under Gov. Scott Walker's proposed state budget, Nerad said.
Nerad proposes collecting $243 million in property taxes, down from $245 million this year. Because of an estimated drop in property value, the budget would mean a $90 increase on an average Madison home, down from $170 this year. That amount may decrease once the city releases an updated average home estimate for next year.
School administrators should end their obsession with average test scores and focus instead on an absolute standard: Can each child actually read?
For more than two decades now, the Seattle school district has been telling us that its most important goal is "closing the achievement gap." Nevertheless, it is not unfair to say that only incremental progress has been made.
Seattle, as everyone knows, is not alone. "Closing the achievement gap" has come to stand for the perennial problems of American K-12 education -- though the inability of high schools to graduate more than two-thirds of their students has been running a close second.
Among the results of this frustratingly persistent problem is a vast, energetic industry of school reform, headlined in recent years by the involvement of powerful private foundations and the policy directives of the federal government: "No Child Left Behind" in the "Race to the Top."
PLEASE JOIN US MONDAY! Madison Board of Education to Vote on Madison Prep; costs clarified
March 25, 2011
Dear Friends & Colleagues,
On Monday evening, March 28, 2011 at 6pm, the Madison Metropolitan School District's (MMSD) Board of Education will meet to vote on whether or not to support the Urban League's submission of a $225,000 charter school planning grant to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. This grant is essential to the development of Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men, an all-male 6th - 12th grade public charter school.
Given the promise of our proposal, the magnitude of longstanding achievement gaps in MMSD, and the need for adequate time to prepare our final proposal for Madison Prep, we have requested full support from the school board.
Monday's Board meeting will take place at the Doyle Administration Building (545 West Dayton Street) next to the Kohl Center. We hope you will come out to support Madison Prep as this will be a critical vote to keep the Madison Prep proposal moving forward. Please let us know if you'll be attending by clicking here. If you wish to speak, please arrive at 5:45pm to register.
Prior to you attending, we want to clarify misconceptions about the costs of Madison Prep.
The REAL Costs versus the Perceived Costs of Madison Prep
Recent headlines in the Wisconsin State Journal (WSJ) reported that Madison Prep is "less likely" to be approved because of the size of the school's projected budget. The article implied that Madison Prep will somehow cost the district more than it currently spends to educate children. This, in fact, is not accurate. We are requesting $14,476 per student for Madison Prep's first year of operation, 2012-2013, which is less than the $14,802 per pupil that MMSD informed us it spends now. During its fifth year of operation, Madison Prep's requested payment from MMSD drops to $13,395, which is $1,500 less per student than what the district says it spends now. Madison Prep will likely be even more of a savings to the school district by the fifth year of operation given that the district's spending increases every year.
A March 14, 2011 memo prepared by MMSD Superintendent Daniel Nerad and submitted to the Board reflects the Urban League's funding requests noted above. This memo also shows that the administration would transfer just $5,541 per student - $664,925 in total for all 120 students - to Madison Prep in 2012-2013, despite the fact that the district is currently spending $14,802 per pupil. Even though it will not be educating the 120 young men Madison Prep will serve, MMSD is proposing that it needs to keep $8,935 per Madison Prep student.
Therefore, the Urban League stands by its request for equitable and fair funding of $14,476 per student, which is less than the $14,802 MMSD's administration have told us they spend on each student now. As Madison Prep achieves economies of scale, reaches its full enrollment of 420 sixth through twelfth graders, and graduates its first class of seniors in 2017-18, it will cost MMSD much less than what it spends now. A cost comparison between Madison Prep, which will enroll both middle and high school students at full enrollment, and MMSD's Toki Middle School illustrates this point.
We have also attached four one-page documents that we prepared for the Board of Education. These documents summarize key points on several issues about which they have expressed questions.
We look forward to seeing you!
Onward!
Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
Main: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Fax: 608-729-1205
Website: www.ulgm.org
In order to maintain Madison Prep, the school district would have to find these amounts somewhere in our budget or else raise property taxes to cover the expenditures. I am not willing to take money away from our other schools in order to fund Madison Prep. I have been willing to consider raising property taxes to come up with the requested amounts, if that seemed to be the will of the community. However, the draconian spending limits the governor seeks to impose on school districts through the budget bill may render that approach impossible. Even if we wanted to, we likely would be barred from increasing property taxes in order to raise an amount equal to the net cost to the school district of the Madison Prep proposal.
This certainly wouldn't be the first time that budgetary considerations prevent us from investing in promising approaches to increasing student achievement. For example, one component of the Madison Prep proposal is a longer school year. I'm in favor. One way the school district has pursued this concept has been by looking at our summer school model and considering improvements. A good, promising plan has been developed. Sadly, we likely will not be in a position to implement its recommendations because they cost money we don't have and can't raise under the Governor's budget proposal.
Similarly, Madison Prep proposes matching students with mentors from the community who will help the students dream bigger dreams. Effective use of mentors is also a key component of the AVID program, which is now in all our high schools. We would very much like to expand the program to our middle schools, but again we do not have the funds to do so.
Mr. Hughes largely references redistributed state tax dollars for charter/virtual schools - a portion of total District per student spending - the total (including property taxes) that Madison Prep's request mentions. I find Madison Prep's fully loaded school based cost comparisons useful. Ideally, all public schools would publish their individual budgets along with total District spending.
here are some problems that are too hard to solve in traditional ways. Teacher effectiveness and school choice fit the bill--they are complicated and contentious. The good news is that digital learning allows us to solve these problems in new ways.
It's pretty easy to solve the teacher problem if we focus on providing a 'great teacher for every course' rather than a great teacher in every classroom.'
If educational funding follows the student to the best course available (online or onsite) it provides a much more powerful and accountable model than partial funding for a private school down the street.
Digital Learning Now recommends that all students should be able to "customize their education using digital content through an approved provider." More specifically, DLN recommends that states:
Ambitious reforms across the country are reshaping teacher evaluation and performance management. Designing new systems for measuring teacher effectiveness and using that information to increase student achievement are at the heart of these efforts and at the center of important policy debates. Yet little information exists about how these systems work in practice and how to use evaluations in concert with other levers to improve teaching and learning.
As policymakers and education leaders seek to accelerate reform in this area, it is essential to learn from efforts already underway. The Education & Society Program published three new reports: profiles of the performance management work in District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) and the Achievement First (AF) charter school network; and a synthesis of issues that emerge from the two profiles. Both DCPS and AF are at the forefront of efforts to re-design teacher evaluation, performance management, and compensation policies. The commonalities, distinctions, and early lessons learned in these initiatives represent an important learning laboratory for the field.
So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.
Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.
Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.
The Death and Life of the Great American School System was wildly hailed as author and education critic Diane Ravitch's dramatic about-face on No Child Left Behind, charter schools, and school choice. What's missing from this sensational take is that Ravitch has changed her mind only about school reform tactics, and not about what constitutes good schools, or about her top priorities in fostering them.
She still stresses curriculum--apparently still her topmost priority. She still supports a challenging, content-rich core curriculum of the sort promoted by E.D. Hirsch and his Core Knowledge Foundation. She still believes that the best teachers are those with who know their fields well and are enthusiastic about teaching. She still believes that attracting such teachers is nearly as essential, if not as essential, as curriculum reform.
It's in the question of why we've strayed so far from these ideals that Ravitch has shifted. While her earlier research (c.f. Left Back, published in 2000) critiqued, inter alia, a variety of prominent fad-peddling members of the education establishment, Ravitch now appears to blame just three factors: the high-stakes testing and accountability of No Child Left Behind (NCLB); the meddling in education by powerful outsiders like politicians and businessmen; and school choice ventures that skim off the best students and leave the rest to the most struggling of public schools.
On NCLB testing and accountability, Ravitch is convincing. Tests can be effective, comprehensive measures of achievement, in which case teaching "to" them is equivalent to teaching students what they should learn anyway. But, as Ravitch explains, NCLB's top-down, high-stakes, punitive approach deters states from devising tests that come anywhere near this ideal.
In an earlier thread, skeptical wrote about Director Sundquist:
Sundquist also opened the last, hardest, of this year's budget sessions by making a sweeping statement that staff's board recommendations should be baseline accepted as the starting point of discussion.
For that reason alone, he does not deserve re-election. Which actions or statements by Board Directors make them un-deserving of re-election?
A Republican Assembly leader plans to add to the state budget bill an expansion of Milwaukee's voucher program to other school districts, potentially giving more families in cities such as Madison access to private and religious schools.
Voucher advocates say the time is ripe to expand the program to other cities, especially with Republicans in control of state government and a recent study suggesting students in the 20-year-old Milwaukee program are testing as well or better than their public school counterparts, with a lower cost per pupil.
They also argue that vouchers would level the playing field for private schools, which have seen enrollment decline as public charter schools have gained popularity.
But voucher opponents say expansion would further cripple public schools, which already face an $834 million cut in state funding over the next two years.
And state test scores to be released Tuesday, which for the first time include 10,600 Milwaukee voucher students, could suggest they are testing no better than poor students in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
"Given the proposed unprecedented cuts to public education as well as results from our statewide assessments, I question plans in the 2011-13 state budget for expanding the choice program in Milwaukee or anywhere else in Wisconsin," State Superintendent Tony Evers said.
The District is preparing a "Strategic Plan Refresh". They will review the Strategic Plan and decide which projects to continue, alter, defer, or remove. The refresh will have to include goals, timelines, status, and budgets for each of the projects.
I spoke with Mark Teoh last night and asked if he could include two items in the Refresh program:
1) A record of the various projects in the Strategic Plan, including those that were originally in it, those that were added, those that were completed, and those that were simply dropped without notice. Remember how there was supposed to be an APP Review in the plan? Remember how there was going to be an alternative education review? These projects just silently faded away. At the same time, Capacity Management and World Language curricular alignment, which were not part of the original plan, have been added.
2) A review of the community engagement protocols and some table that shows which of the projects are meeting the requirements of the protocol (it's easy - none of them).
Fifty teachers from Redondo Union High School stormed the Board of Education Tuesday night to protest the implementation of the International Baccalaureate program.
The group included a majority of the school's department heads and some of the longest-tenured and most respected teachers at RUHS. Their concerns ranged from the cost of the program to what they argued was a lack of teacher input and a greater need to address the needs of less high-achieving students.
Linda Dillard, the chair of the school's science department, told the school board that teachers have not been allowed to engage in a "data-driven, fact-finding process" to help determine if the program is a good fit for RUHS.
"How Not to Lay Off Teachers" in today's Wall Street Journal (link) rather weakly repeats something that everyone who studies the education mess knows. It's worth your time if you have any doubts that seniority is not the right way to determine who should be paid public money to teach in public schools. Of course just because everyone knows something doesn't mean much.
The steep deficits that states now face mean that teacher layoffs this year are unavoidable. Parents understandably want the best teachers spared. Yet in 14 states it is illegal for schools to consider anything other than a teacher's length of service when making layoff decisions.
It gets worse. "Many people don't realize that teachers are not evenly distributed nationwide," says Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project, which has released a new report on the nationwide impact on quality-blind layoffs. "Fourteen states have these rules but about 40% of all teachers work in those states, and they're the states with the biggest budget deficits." In addition to New York, the list includes California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin.
I had the chance to speak at a local university on Tuesday, talking to a class on cloud computing about the impact of technology (especially, of course, the cloud) on higher education. The class was great and was, itself, focused on team-based learning and simulations using a variety of cloud and web-based tools. What was even better, though, was the Q&A session with the students and my follow-up conversations with faculty and staff.
Let me start with something that ZDNet's digital video and photo blogger, Janice Chen, wrote in an unrelated discussion we were having about ZDNet's upcoming 20th anniversary:
I had the chance to speak at a local university on Tuesday, talking to a class on cloud computing about the impact of technology (especially, of course, the cloud) on higher education. The class was great and was, itself, focused on team-based learning and simulations using a variety of cloud and web-based tools. What was even better, though, was the Q&A session with the students and my follow-up conversations with faculty and staff.
Let me start with something that ZDNet's digital video and photo blogger, Janice Chen, wrote in an unrelated discussion we were having about ZDNet's upcoming 20th anniversary:
Kansas – A House committee passed a bill that would allow employee associations other than Kansas NEA access to teacher bulletin boards and orientation sessions.
Florida – The House Appropriations Committee approved a bill that would “require unions to get written authorization from union members in order to use those dues for political purposes.”
Alabama – The House Ways and Means Committee passed a bill that would provide taxpayer-funded liability insurance for education employees. In states where workers are not compelled to join unions or pay agency fees, liability insurance from the union is a powerful recruiting tool.
By now, the political lore is familiar: A major political party, cast aside by Wisconsin voters due to a lengthy recession, comes roaring back, winning a number of major state offices.
The 43-year-old new governor, carrying out a mandate he believes the voters have granted him, boldly begins restructuring the state's tax system. His reform package contains a major change in the way state and local governments bargain with their employees, leading to charges that the governor is paying back his campaign contributors.
Only the year wasn't 2011 -- it was 1959, and Gov. Gaylord Nelson had just resurrected the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Certain of his path, Nelson embarked on an ambitious agenda that included introduction of a withholding tax, which brought hundreds of protesters to the Capitol. Nelson also signed the nation's first public-sector collective bargaining law -- the same law that 52 years later Gov. Scott Walker targeted for fundamental revision.
Two different governors, two different parties, and two different positions.
Ironically, their assertive gubernatorial actions may produce the same disruptive outcome. By empowering the unions, Nelson's legislation led to public-sector strikes and work stoppages. By disempowering the unions, Walker's actions might lead to public-sector strikes and work stoppages.
In Walker's case, union members reluctantly agreed to his pension and health-care demands, but have fought desperately to preserve their leverage in negotiating contracts. That raises the basic question of the Madison showdown: Why is Scott Walker so afraid of collective bargaining?
The answer can be found in the rise of the state's teachers unions.
Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands."
Supporters of school vouchers like to say that their goal is to provide a higher-quality education for the children who need it most. The latest events in Colorado say otherwise. A voucher program there seems more likely to benefit middle-class children and religious schools than low-income public school students, and to worsen inequities in education.
Last week, the board of the Douglas County School District voted for a pilot program that will give the parents of 500 of its 60,000-students about $4,500 each -- 75% of what the district receives in per-pupil funding -- to use toward tuition at participating private schools of their choice. Many of the private schools in the area are religiously based.
Even in Colorado, where a dollar stretches a lot further than in Southern California, $4,500 falls significantly short of private school tuition. Most schools there range from about $7,000 up to $14,000. Clearly, the parents poised to benefit most from this taxpayer-sponsored perk are those with a few thousand to spare to fill in the price gap. There might be scholarships for some of the needier students -- about 10% of the Douglas County students qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches -- but no one is promising anything.
Interim Chicago Schools CEO Terry Mazany Wednesday delivered bad news -- followed by more bad news.
The estimated Chicago Public School deficit for next school year is $720 million, Mazany said. That's up $20 million from just before his predecessor walked out the door in late November.
Mazany called for "shared sacrifice,'' including from teachers. Their pay raises will cost $80 million but, Mazany said, any successor to him appointed after Rahm Emanuel is seated as mayor May 16 will have to decide whether to try to re-negotiate the teachers' contract to trim that tab.
The interim CEO also proposed a series of what he called "urgently" needed actions that would impact 4,800 students at 17 schools, displace up to 100 teachers and up-end the jobs of, eventually, nine principals.
Miami Dade College announced Wednesday the American Dream Scholarship. The 'free college' offer could help boost college graduation rates - a goal of President Obama's.
College tuition is going up and financial aid is on the chopping block in many states, but in the Miami area, one college is offering successful high school graduates a price tag that's hard to refuse: free.
Miami Dade College - the largest institution of higher education in America, serving more than 170,000 students on eight campuses - announced its American Dream Scholarship on Wednesday. It will cover 60 credits at a value of about $6,500 - enough to earn a two-year degree or start in on one of the four-year programs offered by the community college.
This spring's high school graduates in Miami-Dade County will be the first to benefit from the "free college" offer. To qualify for the new scholarship, students must have a 3.0 grade-point average and score well enough on entry tests to show they don't need remedial math or reading courses. Normally, about a third of the college's entering students pass at that level.
Madison teachers who missed school last month to attend protests and turned in fraudulent doctor's notes have been given until April 15 to rescind those notes, officials said Thursday.
The district received more than 1,000 notes from teachers, human resources director Bob Nadler said. A couple hundred of those were ruled fraudulent because they appeared to be written by doctors at the Capitol protests against Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to limit collective bargaining.
Teachers who don't rescind fraudulent notes could receive a disciplinary letter of suspension, the most serious form of discipline aside from termination, Nadler said. The suspension would be considered already served -- the time missed during the protests.
"We didn't want to give anybody more time off," Nadler said. "They can't afford it. We can't afford to have them gone any more. I don't think kids need their teacher gone another two days."
Testimony at the Capitol over a controversial bill that would strip control over charter schools from locally elected officials and place it in the hands of a politically appointed state-wide authorizing board drew hundreds on Wednesday to a standing-room-only Senate education committee hearing.
Senate Bill 22, authored by state Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) would also fund independent charter schools ahead of traditional public schools. I wrote about the bill on Tuesday and it's generated a robust conversation.
Madison Superintendent Daniel Nerad testified in opposition to the bill, and so did local school board member Marjorie Passman. Kaleem Caire, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison and a strong proponent of the proposed boys-only Madison Preparatory Academy for minority students, testified in support of the bill. Madison Prep, if approved, will be a publicly funded charter school in Madison.
This report collects the results of all available empirical studies using the best available scientific methods to measure how school vouchers affect academic outcomes for participants, and all available studies on how vouchers affect outcomes in public schools. Contrary to the widespread claim that vouchers do not benefit participants and hurt public schools, the empirical evidence consistently shows that vouchers improve outcomes for both participants and public schools. In addition to helping the participants by giving them more options, there are a variety of explanations for why vouchers might improve public schools as well. The most important is that competition from vouchers introduces healthy incentives for public schools to improve.
Charter schools may be multiplying fast across the country, but they're stalled in affluent, high-performing suburban school systems. Of the 5,300 charter schools in the U.S., only one-fifth are in suburbs.
Suburban parents are frustrated by what they see as arbitrary policies to keep charter schools from spreading and are fighting back.
That's the case with some parents in Montgomery County, Md., outside Washington, D.C., where Ashley Del Sole lives. Her oldest daughter is about to start school, but she can't go to her neighborhood school because it's overcrowded.
"My daughter is actually slated to go to a middle school next year for kindergarten because of the overcapacity problem," Del Sole says.
With millions being cut from Kansas schools by legislative action or local boards reacting to reduced funding, it is easy to fall into a trap of believing that with less money our schools can't possibly do as good of a job educating our kids. Probably, but not necessarily.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire who is devoting much of his fortune to improving education and who co-chairs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, wrote a provocative column this month in the Washington Post. Highlights from Gates' conclusions are spotlighted in this week's column to remind us that spending more money does not ensure better-educated kids and that some radical changes in how the dollars we now pour into education might significantly improve outcomes.
Fiscal Responsibility-The District has had the luxury of having sufficient resources to fund many non-essential expenditures. Our economy and funding levels have changed and will continue to do so going forward. The district must re-evaluate priorities. Significant cuts have been made to large ticket items but there is now work to do to improve the culture of fiscal responsibility. All decisions need to be made with an interest in doing what is best for the education of our children. If we can change the culture, we will be in a better position to afford the things we need to do, like pay our employees fairly.
Educating Our Children-The Liberty Public Schools have a long and proud history of excellence in education. It is essential that we continue to focus on our primary mission, the education of our children. We must ensure our financial resources are spent on classrooms, proven curriculum, books and employees. We must continue our high academic achievement by maintaining and re-establishing, where possible, the essential programs we have lost. As popular culture continues to call for school reform, we must ensure we are making decisions that will always lead to the right end goal, an excellent education for all of our children.
New Jersey has one of the most progressive education laws in the country -- the Abbott v. Burke case produced several rulings requiring the state to equalize public education funding for all students, meaning that poor, urban districts must receive the same relative amount of funding as wealthy suburban districts. Abbott vs. Burke requirements have been characterized as "one of the most remarkable and successful efforts by any court in the nation to cut an educational break for kids from poor families and generally minority-dominated urban neighborhoods."
Today, a judge found that Gov. Chris Christie (R) violated Abbott v. Burke requirements when he slashed $820 million in state aid to schools last year, because the cuts were slanted too heavily towards poor districts:
A proposed 2011-2012 school budget was approved unanimously by the Board of Education Tuesday night during a public hearing at the Clark Council Chambers. The spending plan would allocate just over $33.2 million, an increase of $225,000 over the previous year. The budget, if approved by voters, will mean a tax hike of three tax points, which translates into approximately $33 for the average taxpayer.
Tax increases to fund schools is nothing new. In 2010, Clark residents saw a $36 rise in their tax bills following a loss of more than $671,000 in state aid. For the 2011-2012 school year, the budget includes $414,448 in funding from the state, an increase of $325,460 over last year's spending plan. Overall, the budget yields a 0.83 percent increase over the 2010-2011 plan, well below the state-mandated 2 percent cap.
Considering the economic climate and rising costs, Superintendent of Schools Kenneth Knops noted that the school board took on a daunting task -- maintaining classroom quality while minimizing tax impact -- and largely succeeded.
Clark schools spends $14,896.85 per student. Madison's most recent 2010-2011 citizen's budget document indicates total planned spending of $358,791,418, which yields $14,661.90 per student (24,471 students).
Safoorah Khan had taught middle school math for only nine months in this tiny Chicago suburb when she made an unusual request. She wanted three weeks off for a pilgrimage to Mecca.
The school district, faced with losing its only math lab instructor during the critical end-of-semester marking period, said no. Khan, a devout Muslim, resigned and made the trip anyway.
Justice Department lawyers examined the same set of facts and reached a different conclusion: that the school district's decision amounted to outright discrimination against Khan. They filed an unusual lawsuit, accusing the district of violating her civil rights by forcing her to choose between her job and her faith.
"Not only has the $10,000 annual bonus failed to move effective teachers to high-poverty schools, it has also failed to make those teachers any more likely to stay in high-poverty schools than other teachers," said the report's author, Jim Simpkins.
Washington State provides $5,000 bonuses to those teachers who undergo and pass the rigorous national board certification process, a credentialing program that marks its graduates as among the best teachers. The evidence, however, on whether national board certified teachers (NBCTs) are actually more effective teachers is mixed.
In 2007, state legislators added a second $5,000 bonus for NBCTs who teach in a high-poverty school, defined as one where a large portion of students are on free or reduced-price lunches. According to the Center's report, " . . . less than 1% of Washington's NBCTs move from low-poverty to high-poverty schools each year."
The day after two education reform bills were signed into law, the state teachers union filed petitions to repeal them.
The actions of the Idaho Education Association could prevent those laws from ever being implemented.
The IEA filed two petitions - one for each reform bill.
It's likely a third petition will also be submitted if the third education reform bill, which is up for discussion for tomorrow, also becomes law.
"We just took the first step in the process," said Sherri Wood, president of the Idaho Education Association.
One of the most powerful tools for improving the educational achievement of poor black and Hispanic public school students is, regrettably, seldom even considered. It has become a political no-no.
Educators know that it is very difficult to get consistently good results in schools characterized by high concentrations of poverty. The best teachers tend to avoid such schools. Expectations regarding student achievement are frequently much lower, and there are lower levels of parental involvement. These, of course, are the very schools in which so many black and Hispanic children are enrolled.
The Newark Teachers Union sent an email to its 4,800 members urging them to protest against the placement of charter school in underutilized public school buildings at an Advisory board meeting held tonight at Barringer High School.
According to the Wall St. Journal, Union President Joseph Del Grosso strongly objects to the placement of charter schools in public school buildings, claiming that some of the private funding that the Charter schools will make obvious the stark differences between the two types of schools.
The meeting will begin at 6 P.M. Tuesday, and staff, students, and parents are all being invited to voice their concerns.
When I began teaching in New York City in 1975 I didn't initially see the need for a union or get involved in union activities. I knew, from history and the stories my parents and grandparents told, about the struggle for unions, but like so many today, I took the existence of a union and a contract for granted. My chapter leader gave me some advice and made sure I had all the necessary forms when I got appointed, but that was the sum of my union involvement until I moved to a position as an Education Evaluator on School Based Support Teams.
In that position, as a Special Education Teacher/Education Evaluator, I was much more exposed to the whims of management than I had been as a classroom teacher. Administrators didn't often walk into my SIE VIII classroom as most of them were afraid of the volatile students I taught. I worked with my co-teacher and we succeeded in making a difference for most of our students.
Boys' and girls' brains are different--but not always in the ways you might think.
A common stereotype is that boys develop more slowly than girls, putting them at a disadvantage in school where pressure to perform is starting ever younger. Another notion is that puberty is a time when boys' and girls' brains grow more dissimilar, accounting for some of the perceived disparities between the sexes.
Now, some scientists are debunking such thinking. Although boys' and girls' brains show differences around age 10, during puberty key parts of their brains become more similar, according to recent government research. And, rather than growing more slowly, boys' brains instead are simply developing differently.
Georgia charter school ruling to reverberate across nation
A state Supreme Court opinion that will decide who has the power to fund and open public charter schools is expected by March 31, ending a constitutional challenge that threatens to derail the education of thousands of students.
The two-year legal battle launched by seven local districts over power, money and the exclusive right to open neighborhood schools has threatened Georgia's reputation as a national leader in education reform.
The feud began in 2009 when the Georgia Charter Schools Commission, a state board, got into the business of approving and funding neighborhood schools such as Cherokee Charter Academy.
The school, which plans to open in the fall as Cherokee County's first charter campus, received more than 1,300 applications for about 700 spots. It was denied twice by the Cherokee Board of Education.
Don't let anyone tell you that things aren't changing. AFT Connecticut is supporting a reform package that would accelerate creation of better teacher evaluation standards. The Connecticut Education Association is opposing it.
The idea is to speed-up efforts already underway so that school districts have clear measures over what makes a good teacher. Instead of, say, how many years a teacher has been on the job -- which is the seniority standard that dominates in school districts.
The rival Connecticut Education Association will have none of this. John Yrkchik, in testimony prepared for delivery at tomorrow's public hearing by the education committee, says:
Bill Gates shook up the battle against AIDS in Africa by applying results-oriented business metrics to the effort. Now, he is trying to do the same in the tricky world of evaluating and compensating teachers.
The Microsoft Corp. co-founder has moved on from a $2 billion bet on high school reform--much of it spent on breaking up big, failing high schools and replacing them with smaller ones.
Now, he is venturing that improving teacher effectiveness is the key to fixing broken schools. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $290 million to school districts in Memphis, Tenn.; Hillsborough, Fla.; and Pittsburgh, and a charter consortium in California to build new personnel systems Mr. Gates hopes will be models for the country.
Under a Republican-sponsored bill, nine political appointees would get to authorize public charter schools while local school districts foot the bill. The creation of this state-wide charter school authorizing board -- with members appointed by the governor and the leaders of the state Senate and Assembly -- is a key provision of legislation authored by Sen. Alberta Darling of River Hills that will get a hearing on Wednesday at 10 a.m. at the Capitol before the Senate Education Committee.
Senate Bill 22 not only de-emphasizes local control, but also creates changes in how teachers are certified and removes caps from the numbers of students who may enroll in virtual schools. A companion bill is also pending in the state Assembly.
Opponents say the proposed changes would not only eliminate local control in favor of a new, politically motivated bureaucracy but would also siphon general aid away from all of Wisconsin's 424 public school districts in favor of charters. But backers say it will remove current barriers that prevent charter schools from realizing their full potential.
"This bill would get rid of the charter school lite culture we currently have in Wisconsin and allow these schools' full potential for autonomy, flexibility and innovation to be fully realized," says John Gee, executive director of the Wisconsin Association for Charter Schools.
On page 18 of this 21 page document, is a section titled "Board-Superintendent Communications". Under this section is this set of guidelines for communication between the Board and the superintendent:
Communications between the Board and the Superintendent will be governed by the following practices:
a. Exercise honesty in all written and interpersonal interaction, avoiding misleading information
b. Demonstrate respect for the opinions and comments of each other
c. Focus on issues rather than on personalities
d. Maintain focus on common goals
e. Communicate with each other in a timely manner to avoid surprises
f. Criticize privately, praise publicly
g. Maintain appropriate confidentiality
h. Openly share personal concerns, information knowledge and agendas
i. Make every reasonable effort to protect the integrity and promote the positive image of the district and each other
j. Respond in a timely manner to request and inquired from each other.
Research continues to confirm what intuition has told many of us for years: Teacher quality has a bigger impact on student learning than any other factor in a school. Nationwide, this finding has increasingly motivated policymakers and the public to focus reforms on dramatically improving teacher quality. National, state, and local leaders have initiated reforms designed to better prepare teachers for the classroom, more accurately identify and reward top teachers, support teachers' development, and equip education leaders to identify and remove the very least-effective teachers.
Discussions of teacher quality often lead to questions about which teachers are retained and dismissed in K-12 public schools, and thus to questions about tenure. Teacher tenure was designed in the early 1900s as a set of procedural protections against unfair and arbitrary dismissals.1 But today, concerns about the effect on student outcomes -- along with budgetary constraints -- dominate education reform discussions.
As a result, leaders in a handful of states and districts have begun making changes to align their tenure systems with their goal of increasing student learning. Common changes include streamlining tenure protections and increasing the rigor of the tenure-granting process.2 Parallel efforts to improve the quality, accuracy, and rigor of educator evaluations have strengthened the basis for personnel decisions based on performance, and have fueled increased interest in tenure reform
"...In other places, educators are experimenting with different ways to test what kids learn. Bill Tucker, a managing director at Education Sector, a Washington, D.C., think tank, says states like Oregon have led the way with so-called adaptive tests, computerized assessments that actually change as students answer questions right or wrong. Such tests satisfy the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law. Students sit for these tests any time they're ready, from October on, and the tests allow schools to find out more about how much kids have learned. And since each test is essentially different from the last, they're "harder to game," Tucker says.
In a bid to look beyond bedrock skills such as reading and math, a few states are also looking at other measures, such as how many of their high school graduates had to take remedial classes in college, Tucker says. Federal Race to the Top funding, part of the Obama administration's education stimulus plan, is pushing states to develop databases that would allow states to track graduates.
The federal government has also invested in two separate efforts by the states to overhaul tests; 45 states are participating. One project is aimed at developing so-called "through testing," which would sample every few months how much students learn, then combine those scores with the score on an end-of-year test. The other project focuses on computer-adaptive tests, like those used in Oregon, to be given at year's end.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed for the first time Monday raised the possibility he might try to seek special power to appoint city school board members, as he seeks to speed reforms mandated by the city system's accrediting agency.
His comments, however, were met cautiously, and are fraught with political and legal implications.
"Full reform may not be able to be passed during this legislative session, but I do believe something can be done," Reed said, adding that he would ask Gov. Nathan Deal to address the issue during a special reapportionment session in late summer. "If we continue to see the kinds of failures we are seeing now, he should consider adding this as a priority agenda item."
Reed said that he would ask for the temporary ability to appoint members to the school board, to help "break the logjam that exists around governance and a search for a new superintendent that is transparent."
On Wednesday morning at the state Capitol, the Senate Committee on Education will hold a public hearing on several bills: SB 20, SB 22 and SB 34. Senate Bill 22, which deals with public charter schools, is the bill with the most statewide effects. (The others focus solely on Milwaukee Public Schools.)
Two dimensions of SB 22 should give pause to citizens across the political spectrum because as written, the bill would make it less likely for charter schools to serve the common good. The effect will be to reduce the professionalism of the faculty and the level of local accountability for charter schools.
Clearly, the quality of education that occurs across sectors - public to private, preschool to postsecondary - is in the public interest. We all benefit when our schools educate children not only academically but in numerous other manners as well. Society is strengthened to the degree that children learn reflection, compassion, creativity and generosity. Schools can foster cross-cultural relationships and nurture respect amongst a populace that is growing increasingly pluralistic. While all schools serve the common good when they promote such learning, these characteristics define our expectations of public schools.
According to the Obama Administration, the majority of the nation's schools could be failing.
In a statement to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce just over a week ago, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that under the current No Child Left Behind law, 82 percent of the nation's schools may not be sufficiently educating students. But this is debatable.
It is true that far too many schools in the United States are not providing students with a good, or even remedial, education. Children in the U.S. continue to fall behind their peers internationally, and too few students are able to reach proficient levels in crucial areas like reading and math. This spells tragedy for the future of our nation.
The City Council on Monday moved forward an expanded Families and Education Levy that Seattleites will likely see on the ballot this fall - one that would nearly double the amount of taxes people are paying.
The measure is part of a city push to increase children's school readiness and performance, but it also comes at a time when the school district is reeling from a money management scandal that led to the superintendent being dismissed. The Council's Special Committee on Educational Achievement for Seattle Schoolchildren voted unanimously to send the levy to the full Council, which will consider it March 28.
One issue Councilmembers were alerted to was the fact that there would be a "bow wave" effect for this seven-year levy in which, beginning in 2016, the proposed spending wouldn't keep up with proposed revenues. By 2019 that gap would be about $8 million a year - a situation that future policy makers would have to deal with.
"We Are at War" - NEA's Plan of Attack. With the situation in Wisconsin stabilized, if not settled, there is time to examine the National Education Association's strategy for its short-term future. Though reasonable arguments can be made that the collective bargaining measures in Wisconsin, Ohio and Idaho aren't significantly different from the status quo in other states, there should be no mistake about it - NEA sees them as a threat to its very existence.
The reasons are not hard to understand. NEA has enjoyed substantial membership and revenue growth during the decades-long decline of the labor movement. It is now the largest union in America and by far the largest single political campaign spender in the 50 states.
But after some 27 years of increases, NEA membership is down in 43 states. The union faces a $14 million budget shortfall, and the demand for funds from its Ballot Measure/Legislative Crises Fund is certain to exceed its supply. Even the national UniServ grants, which help pay for NEA state affiliate employees, will be reduced this year.
In the past, NEA has routinely faced challenges to its political agenda, mostly in the form of vouchers, charters and tax limitations. But the state legislative and gubernatorial results in the 2010 mid-term elections emboldened Republicans for the first time to systematically target the sources of NEA's power, which have little to do with education and everything to do with the provisions of each state's public sector collective bargaining laws.
I'VE been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights not lower, but shorter.
I don't expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based careers, but learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students' daily chatter, as well as the world's conversation. The photo caption has never been more vital.
So a few years ago, I started slipping my classes short writing assignments alongside the required papers. Once, I asked them, "Come up with two lines of copy to sell something you're wearing now on eBay." The mix of commerce and fashion stirred interest, and despite having 30 students in each class, I could give everyone serious individual attention. For another project, I asked them to describe the essence of the chalkboard in one or two sentences. One student wrote, "A chalkboard is a lot like memory: often jumbled, unorganized and sloppy. Even after it's erased, there are traces of everything that's been written on it."
Lawmakers are cutting state appropriations and HOPE scholarship money for public college students at the same time they are maintaining relatively stable funding for private colleges.
For weeks, students at Georgia State, Kennesaw State and other public universities have been the face of protest as legislators reduced the benefits of the nationally lauded HOPE scholarship program.
But inside the Statehouse, a strong lobbying effort led by politically active private college presidents has worked to persuade lawmakers to maintain about $110 million in state funding for their colleges.
Years of overspending in a system that gives principals autonomy over their buildings' budgets has put more than 80 Milwaukee schools into significant debt, to a district total of almost $11.2 million.
The most recent budget documents show Bradley Tech High School with the highest accumulated deficit of more than $750,000, and the Marshall High School building with a deficit of more than $557,000. Even elementary schools that are cheaper to operate have run up debt, such as Brown Street Academy, which had a fiscal deficit of more than $350,000.
The concept of giving Milwaukee Public Schools principals more autonomy over their individual budgets, initiated during Howard Fuller's term as superintendent and moved into place around the 1996-'97 school year, was intended to free principals from the slow-moving bureaucracy at the central office and give them more discretion over how their money was spent.
Over the past year, I have traveled the nation speaking to nearly 100,000 educators, parents, and school-board members. No matter the city, state, or region, those who know schools best are frightened for the future of public education. They see no one in a position of leadership who understands the damage being done to their schools by federal policies.
They feel keenly betrayed by President Obama. Most voted for him, hoping he would reverse the ruinous No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation of George W. Bush. But Obama has not sought to turn back NCLB. His own approach, called Race to the Top, is even more punitive than NCLB. And though over the past week the president has repeatedly called on Congress to amend the law, his proposed reforms are largely cosmetic and would leave the worst aspects of NCLB intact.
Suzanne Fields writes in her March 5 column that teachers should put pupils first. I am appalled that teachers are being blamed for the state of education and the economy.
I have been a teacher in the Capital Region for 25 years and have had the privilege of working with highly qualified, dedicated, hardworking professionals. Yes, we consider ourselves professionals. The union has fought to improve salaries and working conditions, and protect workers from favoritism.
U.S. schools lag behind those in other countries because of America's culture. There has been a decline in discipline, self-discipline and structure in the home, as well as a host of other social problems. Teachers should be respected by their students and the families they serve; instead, they are unfairly under attack. Students in other countries work harder; their culture is one of respect for education and teachers.
Republicans in the Minnesota House offered a K-12 Finance bill that would dramatically alter the how the state's schools are funded, change teacher seniority rules and would allow public money to be spent for low-income students to attend private schools.
The bill, released Saturday afternoon, makes a slight reduction in expected growth for K12 schools, but increases the amount of money in the state's per pupil formula.
"The debate in education this year isn't going to be about how much we spend," said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington as he compared his bill to Gov. Mark Dayton's budget plan. "The debate instead will be what we fund and what reforms we make to the system."
Garofalo finds the extra funding in the per pupil formula by cutting the state aid schools rely on for integration. It also caps state special education funding at current levels, leading many Democrats to allege that it would force local school districts to raise property taxes to meet federal requirements. Garofalo says he plans to offer a bill later this session that would free up state requirements on schools with special ed students. He says that would save schools money.
I wrote several weeks ago (not in the newspaper) that education in Wisconsin was entering "unchartered" waters.
Oops. For one thing, I meant "uncharted" waters. A mental slip.
More important, the waters are, in reality, about to become increasingly chartered. Charter schools are in for major boosts, both in Milwaukee and statewide, if Republican proposals in the Legislature become law. In fact, a big step in that direction may come Wednesday when the state Senate Education Committee takes up three education bills.
But as more charter boats get launched, expectations rise for successful sailing. Will the resulting schools be piloted well? Will they set sail with enough skill and power to carry more kids to success?
"If we're going to maintain our credibility and maintain legislative support, we've got to show that we're not simply producing large numbers, we're producing quality schools," said Dennis Conta, who heads a coalition known as the Milwaukee Charter School Advocates.
Nationwide, the verdict is out on whether charter schools are a worthy innovation. The good ones offer important contributions to school improvement efforts. But, overall, those star schools are far outnumbered by charter schools where things aren't more successful than nearby conventional schools. Sometimes they're worse. There is no convincing case that charter schools overall have made things better.
Under the new contract, union members would have to pay 12.6 percent of the district's costs for health insurance coverage and half of the district's cost for pension benefits.
That could save as much as $1.1 million in 2011-12, according to district estimates.
The deal also eliminates contract language for class size, and makes job performance the first criteria in layoffs and non-renewals, putting seniority second.
It also allows teachers union members who retire by April 30 to leave retaining the health insurance benefits they had prior to Friday's contract extension.
The contract was drawn up in a draft proposal this week by Superintendent Bernie Nikolay and teachers union President Michael Dorn.
Michigan's largest teachers union is stirring up possible teacher strikes -- perhaps a statewide strike -- to protest what the union calls attacks by Gov. Rick Snyder and the Republican-led Legislature on unions, school funding and middle-class taxpayers.
A letter by MichiganEducation Association President Iris Salters to 1,100 locals asks them whether the union should authorize "job action," up to and including illegal strikes, to "increase pressure on our legislators."
The union and other education advocates have criticized Snyder's proposal to cut funding to schools by $470 per pupil as excessive.
The College Board Honors 4 Districts with Advanced Placement District of the Year Awards: Districts in Chicago; Tampa, Fla.; Hudson County, N.J.; and San Bernadino, Calif. to Be Recognized at the AP® Annual Conference in July
"These districts are defying expectations by expanding access while improving scores," said College Board President Gaston Caperton. "They are experimenting with initiatives and strategies that have driven increases in average exam scores when making AP available to a much broader and more diverse student population. Over the next two months we will work closely with each of the AP District of the Year winners to document what they are doing so we can share their best practices with all members of the AP community."
Wisconsin Districts that achieved recognition:
Appleton Area School District
Columbus School District
D C Everest Area School District
Diocese of Madison Education Office
Germantown School District
Green Bay Area Public Schools
Kimberly Area School District
Marshfield School District
Menomonie Area School District
Middleton-Cross Plains Schools
Monroe School District
Mt Horeb Area School District
Mukwonago Area School District
School District of Hudson
School District of Rhinelander
Stevens Point Area Public School District
Trevor-Wilmot Consolidated School District
Watertown Unified School District
Wauwatosa School District
West Bend School District
As Northern Virginia became home to more immigrant families in recent decades, Fairfax County officials say they started programs to teach English as a second language at every school - about 200 of them. Except one.
The holdout was the region's hallowed magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where many assumed that steep admissions standards rendered such a program for English language learners unnecessary.
But next year, at the behest of the school's teachers, Thomas Jefferson - often called TJ - plans to hire its first instructor to cater to a growing number of students who thrive in math and science classes but sometimes struggle with English.
The decision to hire the half-time teacher has reinvigorated a debate about TJ's mission - namely, how heavily the school's admissions policy should favor math and science standouts over well-rounded applicants with superior reading and writing abilities.
County hired deputy superintendent at salary of $214,000 even as it cuts teaching positions
Members of the Baltimore County delegation are demanding an explanation for the school system's spending on top-level administration and its policy of requiring written requests for salary information.
In a letter dated Friday, Sen. Kathy Klausmeier and Del. John Olszewski Jr. criticized the school system's recent hiring of a deputy superintendent at an annual salary of $214,000 even as the proposed budget calls for cutting 196 teaching positions at middle and high schools.
"Leaving 200 teaching positions vacant will no doubt mean larger class sizes and it may also mean that many important and valuable educational programs will either be understaffed or non-existent," they said in the letter to school Superintendent Joe A. Hairston.
They also called the salary of Renee Foose, who will begin her job as the county's deputy superintendent next month, "appalling to many Baltimore County residents."
Many of us are still trying to get over the shock of Gov. Rick Snyder's recent budget proposal and the devastating impact it will have on school districts. We knew there would be sacrifices from all sectors of the state, but we didn't expect such a disinvestment in public education. Snyder is proposing in his 2011-12 budget a $300 per pupil cut on top of the current $170 cut. Adding to the damage is an expected increase in retirement costs that could equate to an additional $230 per pupil. Add the numbers together and districts could be facing a $700 per pupil reduction.
Michigan districts have been reducing their budgets for the past 10 years. They've been forced to think creatively to provide quality education despite years of shrinking resources and one-time budget fixes. At the same time, the expectations for school reform and increased student achievement are at an all-time high, negative attacks on education are unprecedented. The result has been a focus on short-term fixes that offer temporary relief to schools with no assurance of long-term funding stability. Districts have been forced to plan from year-to-year as opposed to long-term planning which we know is more conducive to spawning true reform.
Kathy Hayes is executive director of the Michigan Association of School Boards.
Meanwhile, American kids, when compared with those in other countries, are in the middle of the pack or worse when it comes to reading, math and science proficiency, according to a study released last week. And locally, Madison schools struggle with rising numbers of low-income students and poor minority graduation rates.
These are not problems that can be solved by killing teachers unions, nor with teachers unions unwilling to participate in real reform.
But I suppose that as long as Walker and the unions remain in fight mode, solutions will have to wait.
On the face of it, the budget proposal that Ohio Governor John Kasich released this week looks like terrible news for state universities. Not only would Kasich's plan slash higher education spending by 10.5 percent but it also would cap tuition increases at 3.5 percent a year.
So it might come as a surprise that some university presidents received the plan warmly. Within hours, Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee released a statement praising the governor for "understanding that higher education and our state's long-term strength are inextricably linked."
Gee's optimism rests on another aspect of the governor's budget. In exchange for the budget cuts, Kasich would give state universities more autonomy in running their day-to-day affairs. Long-term, that could save schools money. "We at Ohio State continue to move aggressively in both advocating for regulatory freedom and reconfiguring and reinventing our institution," Gee said.
Upstate school district leaders and education groups are concerned that Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposed budget sharply reduces their state aid while sparing their downstate counterparts.
"I think it's completely immoral," said Bloomfield Central School District Superintendent Michael Midey in Ontario County. "Why is it that my students take a hit? I just don't understand it."
Among school districts facing the largest cuts per pupil, 97 percent are in upstate communities while 75 percent of those facing the smallest cuts are in downstate suburban communities, according to the Alliance for a Quality Education, an Albany-based union-backed advocacy group.
At issue is a proposed $1.5 billion cut to education aid in Cuomo's 2011-12 state budget plan, dropping local funding from $20.9 billion to $19.4 billion.
By all accounts, George Washington Elementary School is the very model of a modern urban public school.
Tucked into an up-and-coming neighborhood west of downtown, the school has produced impressive results on annual Maryland School Assessment (MSA) math and reading tests over the past several years. By 2007, scores had improved so steadily that the U.S. Department of Education made it a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. First lady Laura Bush came to town to hand out the award.
But in October 2008, a parent came forward with a troubling complaint: Someone was tampering with answer bubble sheets at Washington Elementary.
Soon, Baltimore Schools CEO Andres A. Alonso showed up at a PTA meeting at Washington and found "very poor" parent turnout and "an absence of student or staff enthusiasm," according to city records.
NUSD board members have medical, dental and vision coverage for themselves and their families that is paid for by the district. Possible changes sparked disagreements at budget workshop.
Debates surfaced among school board members on whether they should receive health benefits, a topic that was brought up during a budget workshop held on Tuesday night.
Disagreements began when board member Nancy Thomas presented the idea that board members should no longer participate in health benefits provided by Newark Unified School District.
The Obama Administration is doubling down on its push to overhaul the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Last Wednesday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan testified before Congress and aggressively urged action to revise the landmark and contentious education law that was passed in 2001. The President began this week with a speech at a northern Virginia middle school urging Congress to act and then spent part of Tuesday cutting several radio interviews prodding Capitol Hill even more.
This isn't the first time the Administration has implored Congress to change this law: it's been a constant drumbeat since 2009 (the law was due to be "reauthorized," Washingtonspeak for tuned up, in 2007 but Congress couldn't agree on how to do it) and even during the 2008 campaign. Now, frustrated with the lack of action, Obama and Duncan are trying a new approach: scaring Congress into acting. Both Obama and Duncan are highlighting Department of Education estimates that more than 80% of schools will not meet performance targets this year if the law isn't changed. One wag dubbed the new strategy a "fail wail."
They met on an icy afternoon, Clay Harris, an elementary math teacher at the end of a hectic day, and Eric Bethel, one of the city's new master educators, there to render a verdict on Harris's teaching that could determine whether he kept his job.
In polite, awkward silence, they walked to Harris's empty classroom at Beers Elementary School in Southeast Washington and settled in kid-size chairs at a low, yellow table.
Bethel set up his laptop. Harris took out a piece of paper for notes and began tapping his pencil on it.
"I didn't do everything perfectly," he said almost apologetically.
Claiming local school districts are playing "political games," New York's governor on Thursday defended his $1.5 billion cut to education spending.
Governor Andrew Cuomo's proposed cut in state aid to schools -- the largest in history -- is aimed at closing a $10 billion budget gap for the next fiscal year.
Cuomo told reporters on Thursday that his cuts average 2.7 percent per school district, and could be offset by rooting out inefficiencies, using reserve funds and lowering the salaries of superintendents.
"I know there is waste and abuse in the school districts; 2.7 percent in waste and abuse," Cuomo said after a private meeting with legislative leaders. "Districts say 'we don't have any.' I don't believe it."
Teachers' unions and school officials have attacked Cuomo's plan, saying that they've already made steep cuts in recent years, and that unfunded state mandates are driving up costs. Aid was cut by $1.4 billion in 2010 after being frozen in 2009. School districts have also assailed the governor's proposal to cap property tax increases.
Gov. Scott Walker's 2011-'13 budget proposal includes cuts to Wisconsin's public schools of more than $834 million. This represents the largest cut to education in our state's history. It would be impossible to implement cuts this size without significant cuts to educational programs and services for Wisconsin's children.
The proposal is drastic - and that is just part of the problem. You have likely heard the old adage that a frog placed in a pot of hot water will immediately jump out to avoid harm, while a frog placed in cool water will not notice if the heat is turned up and will unwittingly allow itself to be boiled alive. Similarly, the proposed cuts are placed on top of smaller cuts the schools have taken steadily over the past two decades.
In Wisconsin, school districts have been under strict limits on their revenues and spending. These limits have not kept pace with the natural increases in the costs of everyday things like supplies, energy and fuel. So every year, local school board members and administrators have had to cut their budgets to comply with their budget limits.
I have spent the last 25 years studying and working with governments and private groups to improve the education available to marginalized youth, in the United States and around the world. Most of that work was based in the belief that change at scale could result from the decisions made by governments, and that research could enlighten those choices. When I joined the Harvard faculty 13 years ago I set out to educate a next generation of leaders who would go on to advise policy makers or to become policy makers themselves, and designed a masters program largely responsive to that vision. During those years I continued to write for those audiences.
Over time, however, I have become aware that traditional approaches can't improve education at a scale and depth sufficient to ready the next generation of students for the challenges they will face. I have also become more skeptical of the assumed linear relationship between conventional research and educational change. I now believe the needed educational revitalization requires design and invention, as much as linear extrapolation from the study of the status quo -- that is, of the past. It also requires systemic interventions -- changes in multiple conditions and at multiple levels, inside the school and out. And it requires a departure from the conventional study into how much we can expect a given intervention or additional resource to change one educational outcome measure -- typically a skill as measured on a test or access to an education level, or transition to the next.
The tension which exists between Education Commissioner Deborah Gist and the leadership of the teachers' unions is simmering at a hotter level than usual this week as the Commissioner faces down an unfair labor practice complaint filed against her. But the complaint brings forth an important question of just who is intimidating whom when teachers and educational professionals are thrust into the midst of political battles.
The tireless and ever steely Gist was due for a complaint hearing before the union-sympathizing state Labor Relations Board (LRB) Tuesday which was prompted by an unfair labor practice charge filed against her by the union representing workers at her own RI Department of Education (RIDE).
The core of the complaint was that Gist violated state labor laws when she sent an e-mail out last February, at the height of the Central Falls teacher firing tempest, which basically advised her own employees that it would not be a great idea to physically partake in a protest rally which was designed to denigrate RIDE's own school transformation policy effort at the failing high school.
The Glendale Elementary School principal who was accused by some teachers of being a bully while praised by others as a visionary is leaving at the end of the year to take a principal job in Puerto Rico.
In a statement, Mickey Buhl said he knew sometime last school year that this would be his last year at Glendale. "The stage we are at makes it a wise time for a change for the school and for me," he wrote to parents last week.
Superintendent Dan Nerad praised Buhl as an "innovative instructional leader who has played a key role in improving the educational results for Glendale students."
During Buhl's six years, test scores among Glendale's low-income and minority students have improved as changes were made to foster more collaboration between teachers. But Buhl's aggressive management style rubbed some teachers the wrong way, prompting a district investigation last fall.
Vice chancellors of British universities (the equivalent of university presidents) could lose up to 10 percent of their salaries if they fail to do their job properly under new plans to establish fair pay in the public sector in Britain.
Under the proposals, set out today by journalist and economist Will Hutton, rank-and-file academics would also play a role in setting the salary of their vice chancellor. Hutton, executive vice-chair of the Work Foundation think tank, was commissioned by the British government last year to lead a review of fair pay in the public sector.
An interim report published in December revealed that universities had the highest pay differential between the top and bottom earners across the entire public sector, with vice chancellors earning on average 15.35 times the salary of those at the bottom of the pay spine such as porters and cleaners. For Russell Group universities (leading research universities), the ratio rose to 19:1.
Countries that outpace the U.S. in education employ many different strategies to help their students excel. They do, however, share one: They set high requirements to become a teacher, hold those who become one in high esteem and offer the instructors plenty of support.
On Wednesday and today, education leaders, including U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the nation's largest teacher unions, and officials from the highest scoring countries, are meeting in New York to identify the best teaching practices.
The meeting comes after the recently released results of the Programme for International Student Assessment exam of 15-year-olds alarmed U.S. educators. Out of 34 countries, it ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math.
"On the one hand, the United States has a very expensive education system in international standards," said Andreas Schleicher, who directs the exam. "On the other hand, it's one of the systems where teachers get the lowest salaries.
"Then you ask yourself, how do you square those things?"
Some 16 countries' teachers union leaders and education ministers say the U.S. must "raise the status of the teaching profession"-- meaning spend more money. We've wasted enough. Let's reduce unions' power.
Defenders of government control of education will believe any and every explanation for failure -- except government control.
Andreas Schleicher, the head of the division of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that conducts evaluations of the scholastic performance of different countries' 15-year-old pupils every three years, complains in a new report about the image of educators in America.
"The teaching profession in the U.S. does not have the same high status as it once did," he says, "nor does it compare with the status teachers enjoy in the world's best-performing economies."
The Hechinger Report: It's well-known that Finland's teachers are an elite bunch, with only top students offered the chance to become teachers. It's also no secret that they are well-trained. But take us inside that training for a moment - what does it look like, specifically? How does teacher training in Finland differ from teacher training in other countries?
Virkkunen: It's a difficult question. Our teachers are really good. One of the main reasons they are so good is because the teaching profession is one of the most famous careers in Finland, so young people want to become teachers. In Finland, we think that teachers are key for the future and it's a very important profession--and that's why all of the young, talented people want to become teachers. All of the teacher-training is run by universities in Finland, and all students do a five-year master's degree. Because they are studying at the university, teacher education is research-based. Students have a lot of supervised teacher-training during their studies. We have something called "training schools"--normally next to universities--where the student teaches and gets feedback from a trained supervisor.
Teachers in Finland can choose their own teaching methods and materials. They are experts of their own work, and they test their own pupils. I think this is also one of the reasons why teaching is such an attractive profession in Finland because teachers are working like academic experts with their own pupils in schools.
The Madison School District is positioned to reduce property taxes next year because of proposed reductions in state funding and concessions from its employee unions, a district official said Tuesday.
Gov. Scott Walker's budget proposal calls for a 5.5 percent reduction in district revenues, which the Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimated Tuesday would reduce district funding statewide by $465 million.
Madison estimates its revenues -- a combination of property taxes and state aid -- would drop $15 million under the governor's proposal, assistant superintendent for business services Erik Kass said.
The district's property taxes would be $243 million next year, or $2 million less than this year, Kass said, because of an increase in enrollment, a proposed $5 million reduction in state aid and a 2008 referendum that allows the district to exceed its revenue limit set by the state.
To improve its public schools, the United States should raise the status of the teaching profession by recruiting more qualified candidates, training them better and paying them more, according to a new report on comparative educational systems.
Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the international achievement test known by its acronym Pisa, says in his report that top-scoring countries like Korea, Singapore and Finland recruit only high-performing college graduates for teaching positions, support them with mentoring and other help in the classroom, and take steps to raise respect for the profession.
"Teaching in the U.S. is unfortunately no longer a high-status occupation," Mr. Schleicher says in the report, prepared in advance of an educational conference that opens in New York on Wednesday. "Despite the characterization of some that teaching is an easy job, with short hours and summers off, the fact is that successful, dedicated teachers in the U.S. work long hours for little pay and, in many cases, insufficient support from their leadership."
There's been a lot of negative media lately, particularly surrounding education and teachers' unions in Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida.
My children attend a Florida public high school that is ranked as one of the top five best schools in the state for academics, and consistently ranked number one in football and volleyball. They have an extensive Advanced Placement course program that is so popular that my kids cannot get into all of the AP courses that they want. The courses are large and overenrolled, but at least they are challenging.
From my perspective as a parent and a college educator, most of my kids' high school teachers have been excellent. A few, however, have been inferior -- a situation that does not really surprise me. As a former department chair and evaluator of faculty performance at the college level, I understand how flawed and difficult the evaluation process can be. I also understand how faculty have different strengths and weaknesses. The weaker scholar with the higher student GPA average may be the person who provides after-hours counsel to students in trouble. The faculty with the lower student evaluations and course G.P.A.'s may be the most intellectually challenging faculty in the classroom -- the one who students learn to appreciate after they graduate. And then there are a few faculty who should probably leave education entirely, but will not go and cannot be fired without difficulty, if they have tenure. All of these issues--teacher evaluation, compensation, tenure--are on the political table right now for public schools. Florida is one of the states that is pushing a bill to link secondary student performance to better teacher retention and merit pay. New Florida Governor (and Tea Party favorite) Rick Scott supports a bill in which teacher evaluations are no longer subject to the collective bargaining process, only pay and benefits are negotiated. Teachers' unions are unhappy about the methods (and the rhetoric) that many politicians are using for evaluating them and their classrooms. It's unfortunate how this clash between workers and management is playing out in the classroom.
"Life is difficult." I read the first line in The Road Less Traveled on my first day off after my first year as a superintendent and thought to myself, "M. Scott Peck should try being a school superintendent." Peck describes love as, "extending yourself to benefit another." At that point, I turned the book sideways and wrote "teaching" in big letters in the margin. Helping another person learn is the greatest gift a person can give. Becoming a school teacher is still the best way to give the gift of learning, but there is an expanding array of learning professions where skill and passion can unite to make a difference.
Jay Kimmelman is a serial edupreneur. After graduating from Harvard in 1999, Jay founded Edusoft to bring simple scanning technology to education assessment. The simple step automated data collection at a time when nearly every state was planning to implement standards and assessments. By 2003, EduSoft had achieved revenues of $20 million and Jay sold the company to Houghton Mifflin. That launched a worldwide journey to study the obstacles faced by people living in poverty. Jay spent 18 months studying subsistence farming in a remote Chinese village. In 2007, Jay moved to Kenya and launched Bridge International Academies, an affordable network of schools serving families in the slums of Nairobi for less than $40 per year. Jay built a scalable "school in a box' model by relentlessly driving down the cost of each component and pushing up the quality. Jay was not trained as an educator, but may do more to improve access to quality education in Africa than anyone in history.
Years from now, lets hope ed reformers looking back on 2011 and gauging the Republican "position" don't liken it to the opening of Charles Dickens' classic A Tale of Two Cities, with it having been among "the best of times and the worst of times" for education reform. Of course, at first blush this scenario would appear to be highly unlikely - an exaggeration at best -but sadly such a pronouncement seems less farfetched with each passing day of the new 112th Congress and with the emerging priorities of at least some self-proclaimed education reform governors.
Huh? Wasn't 2011-12 supposed to be a 'banner year' for all things education reform?
House Republicans today advanced a compromise on the bill that would originally have halted collective bargaining by Tennessee teachers -- allowing bargaining to continue but with new limits on what can be negotiated.
The House Education Subcommittee approved, on a party-line vote, the amendment that would strip out the bill's ban on collective bargaining and instead allow negotiations to continue between local teacher associations and school boards on base salaries, benefits and a few other issues.
It would prohibit negotiations on differential and merit pay, giving school boards full authority to enact merit pay plans. It would limit bargaining on "working conditions" -- currently a broad topic -- to matters affecting employees financially or their relationship with the school board.
Those of you who are excellent teachers and who stand in solidarity with our unions are probably no stranger to the question, "Well, why are you involved with the union if you're a good teacher?" It's time for educators to stand up and answer that question loudly and clearly.
EDUSolidarity, a group of progressive educators, encourages you to explain how being a union member supports and enables you to be the kind of teacher that you are. Include personal stories if possible. Focus not only on your rights, but also on what it takes to be a great teacher for students and how unions support that.
After a marathon bargaining session that lasted from Friday morning into early Saturday morning, the school district and MTI, our teachers union, settled on the terms of a two-year collective bargaining agreement for our teachers and four other bargaining units that will take effect on July 1. As is true for most negotiations, the terms of the final agreement varied considerably from the parties' initial offers (discussed in my previous post). The school board ratified the agreement on Saturday and MTI membership voted to approve the pacts today, Sunday.
Here are some frequently asked questions about the agreement along with my responses.
What is your reaction to the settlement?
I wonder if any provisions were included that address the District's "infinite campus" implementation challenges?
Two Cornellians on opposite sides of the education debate--controversial former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee '92 and teachers' union leader Randi Weingarten '80--sat down with CAM to talk about school reform. (But not together.)
They are the two strong-willed women at the heart of the nation's debate on school reform. Both were featured in last year's education documentary Waiting for Superman--one as a hero, the other as a heavy. They have offices seven blocks from each other in Washington, D.C., but are miles apart philosophically. And, yes, reform advocate Michelle Rhee '92 and union leader Randi Weingarten '80 are both Cornellians, a connection they've never discussed.
Rhee, forty-one, catapulted to national prominence--including appearances on Oprah and the covers of Time and Newsweek--as a result of her tumultuous three years as schools chancellor in the District of Columbia. Appointed in 2007 by Mayor Adrian Fenty to overhaul the troubled D.C. system, she fired hundreds of teachers and principals, closed schools, and reorganized the bureaucracy. Test scores rose and enrollment stabilized, but her steamroller style made enemies, not the least of them the Weingarten-led American Federation of Teachers. AFT poured money into the mayoral campaign of Vincent Gray, who defeated Fenty in last September's Democratic primary. Rhee, calling the outcome "devastating," resigned soon after. She has since started a new organization, Students First, to promote school reform. A native of Toledo and the divorced mother of two daughters, Rhee is engaged to former NBA star Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento.
In the words of Young Frankenstein's Inspector Kemp, "A riot iss an ogly think." So is the Wisconsin shootout; ugly - but inevitable.
The unions had to be expecting a tough time with their new Governor Walker. No doubt they anticipated a difficult negotiation - "hard bargaining", as the governor cut labor costs to balance the budget. Instead, they found themselves facing political forces who actually intend to put an end to them.
Unions have always decried every effort to rollback labor costs or union power as "union-busting." Now their past rhetorical excesses have caught up with them, as they confront the real thing. (Cf "Wolf, the Boy who Cried...")
At first it looked as if Walker was indeed bargaining hard. Rolling back pensions, increasing employee contributions, and making labor accept it as a compromise by agreeing not to end collective bargaining outright. And there would be the peace, as Don Barzini would say.
Well, gentlemen may cry "peace, peace," but there is no peace. Before it could be seen if Walker was a "let's make a deal" type, Democrats abandoned the state and the unions seized the Capitol to bully the governor and Republicans. They in turn found a parliamentary bypass and passed the bill to strip bargaining rights. The budget, with its real benefit reductions and budget cuts is still pending. But the unions appear to have used up most of their ammo, so their hopes cannot be high.
IN a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that "as many as a quarter of American students are not finishing high school." But our current educational approach doesn't just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life.
We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.
That's why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself.
Wisconsin's public school teachers and support staff are reeling after a week in which our state leaders put political ambitions before their constituents.
When the governor signed into law his unprecedented attack on workers' rights, he did so amidst plummeting approval ratings and an intense and growing base of Wisconsinites who are outraged by the actions he is taking to destroy our great state.
Make no mistake, this disregard for public opinion and workplace rights will have a broad and lasting negative impact on our state's future. From schools to hospitals to public services - and ultimately, to middle-class families across this state, the damage these actions set into place will be deep and wide.
On behalf of educators across our state, I remind you that weeks ago we accepted the financial concessions the governor asked for to help solve our state's budget crisis. But we have consistently said that silencing the voices of workers by eliminating their collective bargaining rights goes too far.
Mary Bell is a Wisconsin Rapids junior high teacher with 33 years experience in the classroom. She is serving as president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council.
With Republican governors across the nation looking for new ways to demean and disparage public school teachers, it was refreshing to see Gov. Andrew Cuomo take a different tack. He proposed legislation to expedite an agreed-upon evaluation system that could be used as early as next school year to elevate the quality and professionalism of New York's teaching work force.
While Cuomo's bill will have a positive impact on the state's education system years down the road, it doesn't address a major threat to teacher quality this year: seniority-based layoffs.
It is time for Cuomo to lead on the issue by eliminating the state law that requires layoffs to be based on seniority rather than effectiveness.
Iowa Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds said Monday that she may support requiring students to pass a competency test before graduating from high school.
Reynolds was asked about her views on required competency tests for high school students during a news conference to announce details of an education summit that Gov. Terry Branstad plans for July.
"I think it's something we need to take a look at," Reynolds said. "That's been very effective in Massachusetts, as has been indicated by the test scoring."
She said requiring such competency tests could help determine how effective schools are in bolstering student achievement.
Katie Couric reports on an experimental New York City charter school founded on the idea of hiring the best teachers by paying them $125,000, while denying them tenure.
The Legislative Fiscal Bureau this afternoon released a host of memos analyzing Gov. Scott Walker's 2011-13 budget and its impact on local government aids.
The memos outline the budget's impact on county and municipal aid, general transportation aid to counties and municipalities, state aid and levy information for technical college districts, and potential savings to local governments due to increase employee contributions to the Wisconsin Retirement System.
According to the LFB, the bill would reduce total funding for calendar year 2012 payments by $96 million, $59.5 million for towns, villages and cities, and $36.5 million for counties.
In freeing school boards from bargaining with employees over anything but inflation-capped wage increases, Wisconsin lawmakers might have opened the floodgates for districts seeking to drop coverage by the state's dominant - and highly controversial - health insurance provider for teachers.
WEA Trust, the nonprofit company started 40 years ago by the state's largest teachers union, currently insures employees in about two-thirds of Wisconsin school districts. The company's market dominance has dropped in recent years, although not as much as some school officials who complain about the company's costs would like.
After switching the district's nonunion employees to a different health insurance carrier, Cedarburg School Board President Kevin Kennedy said his school system is likely to look at cost savings by doing the same for its unionized teachers after unsuccessful attempts in previous years.
"It's such a large-ticket item; it's such low-hanging fruit," he said. "You can lay off an aide or increase your student fees, but that doesn't make up such a magnitude of saving as insurance does."
President Barack Obama called on Congress Monday to overhaul the No Child Left Behind education law, the third time this month he has focused on education in a bid to gain advantage in the federal budget battle.
The effort to change the law, George W. Bush's signature domestic achievement, is expected to be largely bipartisan. Mr. Obama asked lawmakers to send him a new version before school opens this fall.
At the same time, White House officials see an opportunity in education to win support in the budget debate, which Republicans have focused on cutting federal spending. On Monday, Mr. Obama paired some largely bipartisan ideas about policy with a partisan attack on GOP budget priorities. "Let me make it plain: We cannot cut education," said Mr. Obama at a middle school in Arlington, Va., part of what the White House labels "education month."
The White House's goal, beyond reauthorizing No Child, is to turn the spending debate from a general push for cuts toward a discussion of the implications for favored programs.
Gov. Scott Walker says the changes he has rammed through the Legislature will give school districts and local governments "the tools" they need to withstand the severe cuts in state aid his budget will deliver. What he doesn't get into is how the tensions caused by his agenda will divide the members of these bodies, as they have the state as a whole.
One example of this is the Madison school board, where disagreements over the impact of Walker's actions have spurned an ugly exchange, in which school board member Lucy Mathiak lobbed an F-bomb at a fellow board member, Marj Passman.
The exchange happened yesterday, March 14. Passman was contacted by a Madison school teacher who felt Mathiak had been dismissive of the teacher's concerns, urging her to "get over yourself." Passman, who allows that board members have been deluged with angry emails, says she expressed to Mathiak that she agreed this response was a little harsh.
Somewhat related: Jason Shepherd: Going to the mat for WPS
School board yields to pressure to keep costlier insurance option
Suzanne Fatupaito, a nurse's assistant in Madison schools, is fed up with Wisconsin Physicians Service, the preferred health insurance provider of Madison Teachers Inc.
"MTI uses scare tactics" to maintain teacher support for WPS, Fatupaito recently wrote to the school board. "If members knew that another insurance [plan] would offer similar services to WPS and was less expensive - it would be a no-brainer."
WPS, with a monthly price tag of $1,720 for family coverage, is one of two health coverage options available to the district's teachers. The other is Group Health Cooperative, costing $920 monthly for a family plan.
During the past year, the Madison school board has reached agreements with other employee groups to switch from WPS to HMO plans, with most of the savings going to boost pay.
In December, the board held a secret vote in closed session to give up its right to seek health insurance changes should negotiations on the 2007-09 teachers contract go into binding arbitration. (The board can seek voluntary insurance changes during negotations.)
Lucy has been a long time friend and I have long appreciated her activism on behalf of students, the schools and our community.
Based in a Meridian business park and powered by the K12 education company, the Idaho Virtual Academy is the state's oldest and largest online charter school, with 3,000 students from 43 counties.
State Superintendent Tom Luna's education reform would give students computers and require some online classes. His proposals, stuck in the Senate Education Committee for the past two weeks, would not affect the Virtual Academy, but the current debate has fostered numerous misconceptions about virtual education, according to academy staff and students.
"The biggest misconception is that the computer replaces the teacher," academy Head of School Desiree Laughlin said. More than 80 certified teachers who live and work in Idaho teach the classes, and learning coaches, generally parents, oversee the home study.
There will be blood. It's undeniable, especially when the governor goes out of his way to say that he doesn't have any on his hands.
Rick Perry, watching over a legislative session that threatens (at this point) to cut $9.3 billion or more from state spending on public education, said this week that it would not be the state's fault if any public school teachers lost their jobs. "The lieutenant governor, the speaker and their colleagues aren't going to hire or fire one teacher, as best I can tell," he said. "That is a local decision that will be made at the local districts."
House Speaker Joe Straus, Republican of San Antonio, said a day later that the governor was "technically correct," in that the teachers don't work directly for the state and the state won't be doing the firing. They may be cutting off the food supply to the kitchen, but it's the cooks who decide which diners will be fed.
The Legislature should attend to policies impacting distance education, teacher training and student counseling, a task force has said.
The tentative report serves as early recommendations from the group, which formed almost a year ago under a legislative directive.
Policy makers will ultimately look to its final recommendations for guidance when setting education policy. The group spent two days last week combing, as a co-chairman put it, through a "kitchen sink" of 63 ideas. Roughly half remained when it wrapped up work Friday afternoon.
The list -- still tentative -- places emphasis on turning to technology-supported distance education in a vast state with relatively few residents. The group suggested state education and workforce development departments should team with university leaders to assess broadband infrastructure. The list would also nudge lawmakers further by asking them to consider encouraging school districts to start requiring some online coursework before a student can graduate.
The U.S. is enjoying a new spring of education reform, with challenges to teacher tenure and "parent-trigger" for charter schools. So it's natural that the mother of all school choice reforms--vouchers--is also making a comeback.
Last week a House committee voted to restore Washington, D.C.'s opportunity scholarship program, which lets kids in persistently failing schools attend a private school of the family's choosing. Joe Lieberman is pushing similar legislation in the Senate, where it enjoys bipartisan support. The White House and teachers unions killed the program in 2009, despite clear evidence of academic gains.
Meanwhile, more states are realizing that true educational choice extends beyond charter schools. The most promising development is occurring in Pennsylvania, where a state-wide voucher bill supported by new Governor Tom Corbett is moving through the Republican-controlled legislature.
A generation ago, California had what was considered the best education system on the planet.
Today, our daughters and sons attend one of the worst-performing education systems in the industrialized world.
We are failing on the rock-bottom basics. California students' ability to read is ranked 49th in the country by the U.S. Department of Education. Our kids' ability to do math is ranked 47th and we are second to worst in science. Compared globally, the situation darkens further. Of the top 35 nations, the United States is ranked 29th in science and 35th in math. Your neighborhood school might be good by California standards, but that is a very low bar indeed. Our education crisis is a human tragedy and a looming economic disaster.
The Bay Area Council resolutely refuses to accept this crisis as our state's fate. Let's get past the political gridlock and get down to the real business of dramatically improving California schools. We know, as every honest study has shown, that it will take a combination of real dollars and major changes in the way we deliver education.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback is cutting $50 million from schools and will ask the Legislature to transfer nearly that much to cover increased costs in health and human services caseloads.
The school funding reduction makes up the lion's share of $56.5 million in total cuts announced late Friday.
Brownback, a Republican, said the reductions are necessary to meet the constitutional requirement that the state budget be in balance when the fiscal year ends in June.
"I wish we didn't have to do this," he said. "It's been difficult, but it's something we need to do."
The cut in base state aid to education will reduce the state's annual school spending per pupil by $22, from $4,012 to $3,990, according to Sherriene Jones-Sontag, the governor's spokeswoman.
Yesterday afternoon I got a call from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. She was responding to my request for her union's view of the charge that union rules might force KIPP to close its high-performing schools in Baltimore.
Weingarten was not happy. She unloaded the harshest assessment of KIPP, the nation's best-known charter school network, and its dealings with her and her union I have ever heard from her.
She said KIPP is playing by its own set of rules. She said the network, with 99 schools in 20 states and the District, has undermined her repeated attempts to establish a relationship that would allow them to work together for the greater good of children and public schools.
One of the great failures of high schools, my favorite subject, is the lack of effective training in productive behaviors and attitudes, such as cooperating, being on time, making eye contact, speaking persuasively, offering suggestions and focusing on tasks.
Many educators are trying to develop programs that teach these traits. Some call this character education, which has been around for decades. A few schools and school systems have made progress. Most have not.
Now a study offers renewed hope. An approach called social and emotional learning (SEL), which trains students to think and act in positive ways, can make a significance difference in school achievement, according to this research. The next step will be to see if it has the same effect on life and work after graduation.
Gov. Robert Bentley's proposed education budget would so severely underfund Alabama school systems that at least 49 of the 132 districts would be unable to operate, according to state Superintendent Joe Morton.
Bentley's budget, which he presented March 1, protects all state-funded teachers but underfunds transportation, utilities, operations and support workers such as secretaries, maintenance workers, cafeteria workers and janitors, Morton said.
"If the governor's budget is enacted into law without changes, we estimate at the end of fiscal 2012 that 89 school systems will have less than a one-month operating balance and 49 of the 89 will actually have a deficit budget," Morton said. "Alabama cannot operate public education with 37 percent of its school systems insolvent."
There are those who think the best way to determine teacher effectiveness is by looking only at students' test scores. The simplicity of this approach can be seductive, but it is inherently flawed. This approach only makes sense if you assume all children come to school with the same abilities, have the same educational resources and opportunities and return home to the same support systems. As a kindergarten teacher for more than 30 years, I can confirm what you already know to be true: Every child is different.
The fact of the matter is student achievement and teacher effectiveness aren't simple to measure, and the results of one test are not going to offer a complete assessment of either. Many different measures must be used in order to determine true effectiveness.
So how do you define teacher effectiveness? How to evaluate it? How to reward it? These are all good questions. Most research will tell you an effective teacher is one of the most important factors in a student's education, and I would agree. Research will also tell you that many other factors can and do influence student success: poverty, hunger, homelessness, language skills, parental involvement and education, the learning environment, hormones and personal motivation.
The chances the Madison School Board will approve an Urban League proposal for an all-male charter school geared toward low-income minorities are dwindling.
Madison Preparatory Academy would cost the district $1.1 million in 2012-13, its first year of operation. That would increase to $2.8 million by its fifth year, Superintendent Dan Nerad told the board last week.
"For each of these years, (the district) would be obligated to reduce programs and services to our existing schools to transfer this amount of money to Madison Prep," Nerad wrote in a memo.
Some school board members said last week that Gov. Scott Walker's budget proposal makes it less likely they will be able to support cutting other programs to find money for Madison Prep.
So much tumult lately. It's hard to focus on just one thing. So here are four short columns instead of one long one.
Column 1
Forget the Viagra. The teachers I've been in touch with lately need Prozac.
Somewhere in the chaos of last week, the Milwaukee teachers union confirmed that it had given up the fight for its members' rights to have drugs for sexual dysfunction covered by their insurance (a stand that, whatever its merits, belongs in the Hall of Fame of public relations blunders).
But depression among teachers - now that's a serious subject. Maybe not genuine, clinical depression. Rather, bad-morale, pessimistic, stressed-out, I-think-it's-only-going-to-get-worse depression.
Maybe the unhappiness will blow over. Daily routines tend to win out in our minds. Or maybe you think ill will is just a necessary by-product of the mother of all comeuppances that teachers deserved and got at the hands of Gov. Scott Walker and the legislative Republicans.
But marking the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War by staging a new one in Wisconsin will have long-term consequences on teachers and teaching. Some maybe on the upside. Some will have lasting effects as downers. Who goes into teaching, who stays, what the work is like - there will be big issues to sort out.
If Terry Mazany, the interim chief of Chicago Public Schools, is no longer chief upon the arrival of a new mayor, he can at least claim to have performed the impossible: shortening the school day.
In a Chicago Tribune homage to Mr. Mazany upon the "milestone" of his 100th day in office, various achievements were claimed as he threw his predecessor, Ron Huberman, under a school bus. ("The system was in free fall," Mr. Mazany said.)
Nowhere in a multimedia outreach by Mr. Mazany was there mention of a policy change that makes about as much sense as Gov. Scott Walker's joining the Wisconsin state employees union. You didn't think it could happen, but Chicago's pitifully short school day is getting even shorter.
Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren't open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America's children.
These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers -- and 47 percent of America's kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, "Closing the Talent Gap."
Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.
We all understand intuitively the difference a great teacher makes. I think of Juanita Trantina, who left my fifth-grade class intoxicated with excitement for learning and fascinated by the current events she spoke about. You probably have a Miss Trantina in your own past.
One Los Angeles study found that having a teacher from the 25 percent most effective group of teachers for four years in a row would be enough to eliminate the black-white achievement gap.
The emergency financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools presented a plan Saturday to turn nearly one in every three schools into charter schools as part of a bid to save the district millions of dollars and prevent massive school closings.
The 41 schools selected for independent control currently enroll about 16,000 of the district's 73,000 students and would operate as public school academies starting as soon as this fall. The district expects to release a list of the schools this week and solicit proposals for their transfer.
Recently the district led by a state-appointed manager overseeing a total of 142 schools has explored modeling Detroit on post-Katrina New Orleans, where a shrunken district was remade with mostly charter schools.
Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager, said in a news release Saturday that the charter-school plan would reduce operating costs by $75 million to $99 million, but did not say over what period of time any cost savings would be realized.
Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.
Khan discusses moving away from the "one size fits all" approach to education. However, he does advocate "peer to peer tutoring".......
As the debate rages over public unions and, in particular, over their role in school reform, an unfortunate dichotomy about America's teachers has emerged. On one side, unions and many teachers say that teachers are unfairly vilified, that they work incredibly hard under difficult circumstances and that they are underpaid. Critics, meanwhile, say that our education system is broken and that to fix it we need better teachers. They say that teachers today have protections and benefits not seen in the private sector - such as life tenure, lifetime pension and health benefits, and short workdays and workyears.
Both sides are right.
Teaching is incredibly hard, especially when dealing with children in high-poverty communities who come to school with enormous challenges. Many teachers work long hours, staying at school past 6 p.m., and then working at home grading papers and preparing lessons. Some teachers get outstanding results, even with our most challenged students. These are America's heroes, and they should be recognized as such. Sadly, they aren't.
Memo to all Wisconsin legislators. There is an easy way to prove you care about public education in Wisconsin. And it won't cost a penny.
Just say no to Gov. Scott Walker's proposed expansion of the Milwaukee voucher program providing tax dollars to private schools.
This may seem merely like a Milwaukee issue. It's not. Voucher advocates have made clear for more than 20 years that their goal is to replace public education with a system of universal vouchers that includes private and religious schools.
The heartbreaking drama currently playing in Milwaukee - millions of dollars cut from the public schools while vouchers are expanded so wealthy families can attend private schools in the suburbs - may be coming soon to a school district near you.
The Madison School District has reached a tentative agreement with all of its unions for an extension of their collective bargaining agreement through mid-2013.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said the agreement includes a 50 percent employee contribution to the pension plan. It also includes a five percentage point increase in employees' health insurance premiums, and the elimination of a more expensive health insurance option in the second year.
Salaries would be frozen at current levels, though employees could still receive raises for longevity and educational credits.
The district said the deal results in savings of about $23 million for the district over the two-year contract.
The agreement includes no amnesty or pay for teachers who missed four days last month protesting Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to strip public employee collective bargaining rights. Walker's signing of the bill Friday prompted the district and MTI to reach an agreement quickly
A two-year tentative contract agreement has been reached between the Madison Metropolitan School District and the Madison Teachers Union for five bargaining units: teachers, substitute teachers, educational and special educational assistants, supportive educational employees and school security assistants.
District administrators, with the guidance of the Board of Education, and Madison Teacher Inc. reps negotiated from 9 a.m. Friday until 3 a.m. Saturday when the tentative agreements were completed.
Under details of the contract, workers would contribute 50 percent of the total money that's being contribution to pension plans. That figure according to district officials, is believed to be very close to the 12 percent overall contribution that the budget repair bill was calling for. The overall savings to the district would be $11 million.
I present Blaska's Red Badge of Courage award to the Madison Area Technical College Board. Its part-time teachers union would rather sue than settle until Gov. Scott Walker acted. Then it withdrew the lawsuit and asked the board for terms. No dice. "Times have changed," said MATC's attorney.
The Madison school board showed a rudimentary backbone when it settled a contract, rather hastily, with a newly nervous Madison teachers union.
The school board got $23 million of concessions over the next two years. Wages are frozen at current levels. Of course, the automatic pay track system remains, which rewards longevity.
The Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison Teachers, Inc. have reached tentative contract agreements for five bargaining units: teachers, substitute teachers, educational and special educational assistants, supportive educational employees, and school security assistants.
District administrators, with the guidance of the Board of Education, and MTI reps negotiated from 9:00 a.m. Friday until 3:00 a.m. Saturday when the tentative agreements were completed.
The Board of Education held a Special Meeting today at 2:00 p.m. and ratified the five collective bargaining agreements. The five MTI units must also ratify before the contracts take effect.
Technology continues to become of more and more importance in the classroom. But is it being used properly and to the best of its' ability? Many would argue the answer is no. And one man is on a mission to change that - Salman Khan. Khan, along with his fellow brainiacs at the Khan Academy (and with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as Google), want to revolutionize the way technology is utilized, making the use of computers and videos to have a more positive and powerful impact. How?
Shantanu Sinha, the president of Khan Academy, stated in a piece for the Huffington Post that, "for the most part, we didn't teach kids with the computer, we taught them how to use the computer. Most kids need no help and could probably teach their parents." He added that, "in the end, computer labs were a side show, expensive investments largely squandered due to a lack of good content or purpose."
A federal judge in Kansas on Friday ruled against a group of suburban parents who sought to put a property-tax increase on the ballot in order to raise funds for their public schools.
Kansas, like a handful of other states, caps the amount of money that local school districts can raise from property taxes, in an effort to enforce a rough parity in spending across the state. Parents in the Shawnee Mission School District, which serves mostly affluent suburbs of Kansas City, sued to lift that cap. They were opposed in court by Gov. Sam Brownback's administration and a coalition of superintendents representing mostly poor and rural districts.
U.S. District Judge John W. Lungstrum dismissed the case on the grounds that the cap was a crucial and integral part of the state's complex formula for distributing education funds in a manner meant to ensure that wealthy school districts don't pull far ahead of poorer districts. "If the plaintiffs were to prevail on their claim that the cap is unconstitutional, the entire [school funding] scheme would be struck down," Judge Lungstrum wrote.
Philadelphia teachers union files suit to block firing of outspoken Audenreid teacher
The Philadelphia School District on Thursday agreed to delay disciplinary proceedings against outspoken English teacher Hope Moffett, pending the outcome of a hearing in U.S. District Court.
The decision came after the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers filed suit in federal court earlier in the day seeking to prevent the district from moving to fire Moffett - a move expected to come on Monday. "The suit is being filed on behalf of PFT members to protect their right to speak freely, without fear of retaliation or intimidation by the district," said Jerry T. Jordan, PFT president.
Moffett will continue to collect her salary but be assigned to what teachers call "the rubber room" while her case is heard in federal court.
Chicago needs more public high schools in general -- and more single-gender high schools in particular -- to bolster student performance and stem an exodus of middle class families, Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel said Friday.
During a town-hall meeting with Chicago high-school students, Emanuel blamed a "severe shortage" of high schools, in part, for an alarming, 200,000-person decline in the city's population in the 2010 U.S. Census.
The mayor-elect said that nine out of ten students who apply for admission to Lane Tech High School are turned away. On the West Side, there are 14,000 students "ready to go to high school and only 7,000 slots," he said.
4.813.3 Experience shall mean months, days and years of certificated employment in the Ann Arbor Public Schools. If two or more teachers have the same seniority and the Board must decide on laying off one of the teachers, the last four digits of the teachers social security number will be used as a tie breaker. The lower number will have the most seniority.
Education Commissioner Deborah Gist has ruled that the mass firings of all Providence teachers was legal, in a letter to a state senator obtained by GoLocalProv.
Gist says that budget issues--such as the financial crisis facing Providence--can be a cause for terminating teachers, in a March 8 letter she sent in response to a letter from state Senator James Sheehan, D-Narragansett, North Kingstown.
"As to your first question, there is a clear precedent for the use of 'financial exigency' as just cause for termination," Gist says in the letter.
Gist cited a 1982 case, Russell Arnold & Michael Clifford v. Burrillville School Committee. "In this case, the Commissioner held that 'fiscal exigency' could provide 'good and just case' for the termination of tenured teachers," Gist writes. "In short, provided that there exists adequate evidence of exigent fiscal circumstances, financial exigency has been found to satisfy the 'good and just cause' element of statutory protection for teachers."
Lots of press on NJEA's bill for lobbying last year: $6.8 million, far more than any other lobbying group in NJ. At about 200,000 members who pay an average of $730 in annual dues, that's about 5% of each teacher's contribution. Pennies in the grand scheme of things. And yet...here's NJEA Spokesman Steve Wollmer sounding a tad defensive in the Star-Ledger: "We spent that money. We felt we had to. The governor was putting out a lot of what we feel was misinformation on education and our members demanded we set the record straight"
and in NJ Spotlight: "It was unprecedented, but so is the severity of the attacks by this governor. Our membership insisted on it, and our leadership did, too."
and in the Asbury Park Press, "It's like a fight between two heavyweights; you land some punches, and everyone gets hurt. Our And we acknowledge that numbers for NJEA are down. But that's not going to stop us from telling the truth."
"Academically Adrift," a new book on the failures of higher education, finds that undergrads don't study, and professors don't make them.
Here's the situation. You're an assistant to the president at DynaTech, a firm that makes navigational equipment. Your boss is about to purchase a small SwiftAir 235 plane for company use when he hears there's been an accident involving one of them. You have the pertinent newspaper clippings, magazine articles, federal accident reports, performance graphs, company e-mails and specs and photos of the plane.
Now, write a memo for your boss with your recommendation on the SwiftAir 235 purchase. Include your reasons for finding that the wing design on the plane is safe or not and your conclusions about what else might have contributed to the accident.
Gov. Walker's proposed 2011-2013 biennial budget calls for an expansion of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program by repealing the enrollment cap, allowing private schools anywhere within Milwaukee County to participate, and expanding eligibility to all City of Milwaukee families by eliminating income limits.
During tough budget deliberations, it would be good to know whether the expanded choice program is likely to save or cost state taxpayers over the long run. Either is possible - taxpayers save if the students who join the expanded program otherwise would have been students at more costly public or charter schools and taxpayers lose if the new voucher users would have otherwise been free to the state as tuition-paying private school students.
There is a debate over the likelihood that the program will be able expand considerably, as capacity for new students in the county's existing private schools appears constrained at this time. However, the debate so far has overlooked the fact that the proposed budget would allow new voucher users to be existing private school students starting in the 2012-13 school year. There is a real concern that the expanded program may, in fact, increase costs for the state over the long run by increasing the total number of Wisconsin K-12 students who receive state support for their education.
Acting Comm. Christopher Cerf directly rebutted "myths" about charter schools at a State Board of Education meeting, according to The Record. Contrary to claims by anti-charter proponents, says Cerf, NJ's charter school admit very poor kids and children with disabilities, and perform better than traditional public schools in Abbott districts.
For example, in NJ 15.87% of kids are classified as eligible for special education services. (We rank second in the nation in this category. First is Massachusetts. Then again, the classification rate at Wildwood High is 24.6%, Asbury Park High is 20.2%, John F. Kennedy in Paterson is 24.1%, and Camden Central High is a stunning 33.6%. But back to charters.)
The Bloomberg administration's signature strategy for low-performing schools has been to shut them down, a drastic move that often incites anger and protests from teachers, parents and neighborhood officials. Since the beginning of the mayor's first term, more than 110 schools have been shuttered or are in the process of closing.
The administration is now thinking of testing another approach at two schools in the Bronx: replacing the principals and at least half of the teachers, but keeping the schools and all of their programs running -- a strategy known as a turnaround.
The plan would bring together unlikely partners: the New York City Department of Education, the teachers' union and the founder of a charter school network who is best known for turning around one of the toughest high schools in Los Angeles.
The morning after the Republicans stripped me of my rights, I stood in the hallway of my school, watching my four-year-olds stream in. They gave me hugs. They ran up to show me things: a new shirt, an extra pretty hair ribbon, a silly band. They wanted to know if it was chocolate milk day. They pointed out that one of their classmates, who had been out sick for a few days, had come finally come back!
And for a little while, normalcy returned to our world. I had spent the evening before at the Capitol, in the crowd of thousands that pushed against the locked doors, demanding to be let in. I think I spent most of the night in shock - not only at how suddenly I could be deprived of everything I had worked for, but of how suddenly the country I thought I knew could become unrecognizable. I was standing with a crowd on the steps in front of the Capitol door when a police officer slammed it shut in our faces. I walked around the building until I found a spot where protesters had lowered a bathroom window. And I watched in disbelief as people began hoisting each other in through the open window, while dozens milled around them. "Ssssh," they warned each other. Don't make any noises that might attract the police.
Officials in the suburbs of Memphis, Tenn., said Wednesday they would fight what they see as a shotgun marriage that joins its school system with that of the city, claiming the move will harm academic standards and increase bureaucracy.
City residents voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to merge its school system--the largest in Tennessee--with the system run by surrounding Shelby County. The two systems operate as separate entities and administrations, but draw money from the same county-wide tax-revenue base--rare for school districts.
The move by the Memphis schools, which still faces a federal lawsuit, has drawn the ire of suburban politicians.
"We will proceed, whether through legislative or judicial channels, to try to undo what we believe has been an ill-conceived and poorly executed plan to take over the Shelby County school system," said David Pickler, chairman of the Shelby County school board.
Gov. Bill Haslam went outside the state and outside the schoolhouse to find Tennessee's next education commissioner.
Kevin Huffman is a Washington, D.C.-based attorney who has two years of classroom experience and a decade as an administrator at Teach for America, a nonprofit dedicated to taking bright young college students with no teaching experience and training them to teach in some of the poorest schools in the nation.
"I put a special effort into finding the right fit for education commissioner," Haslam said in Thursday's announcement of one of his final Cabinet appointments. "... Kevin combines the experience of having been a bilingual first- and second-grade teacher to helping oversee a national organization with 1,400 full-time employees and a budget of $212 million."
This wealthy New York suburb prides itself on its public schools. Class sizes are small. Students can choose from an array of subjects not offered everywhere. Teacher pay ranks among the nation's highest. And voters long approved high real estate taxes to pay for it all.
But even here -- as in other affluent enclaves -- corners are being cut, bringing home the wrenching debate that has caused turmoil in so many other communities. What some really fear is that the cuts will continue. "You hear people say they want Mandarin taught in the sixth grade or they want smaller class size or some other enhancement," said Julie Meade, president of the Parent Teacher Association and mother of two school-age children. "But they don't talk about raising taxes to pay for what they advocate. I haven't heard anyone say raise taxes to pay for quality."
Ms. Meade and others in her P.T.A. are beginning to suggest that austerity may be going too far, particularly in the matter of class size, which has crept up in kindergarten through fifth grade to an average of 22 from 19.9 in 2006-7, the last full school year before the recession. While 22 is hardly overcrowding by the standards of most American school districts, it does push the envelope in the wealthiest suburbs.
A big crowd packed into the University of Wisconsin's Memorial Union Theater on Tuesday night to hear education historian Diane Ravitch, considered one of the most influential scholars in the nation on schools.
In her talk, she ripped into Gov. Scott Walker's budget, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's Race to the Top, the obsession with measuring student progress through high stakes testing, privatization of education through charters and vouchers and No Child Left Behind legislation that is closing schools and punishing teachers.
Her gloomy assessment of the current passion for "fixing" education and vilifying teachers is particularly striking because Ravitch herself is a former proponent of school testing and accountability and an early supporter of the No Child Left Behind legislation.
As numerous states -- most prominently Wisconsin and Ohio -- consider curtailing the collective bargaining rights of their workers, the debate has largely focused on money and power. If public employee unions are de-authorized or restricted, what impact will that have on state budgets? Tax rates? Political contests?
When it comes to teachers, however, this discussion bypasses a crucial question: What is the impact of collective bargaining on students? A study just published in the Yale Law Journal, which looks at recent, real-life experience in the state of New Mexico, provides a troubling answer.
It finds mandatory collective bargaining laws for public-school teachers lead to a welcome rise in SAT scores - and a disappointing decrease in graduation rates. Author Benjamin Lindy, a member of the Yale Law School class of 2010 and former middle-school teacher, reports that any improvements in student performance appear to come "at the expense of those who are already worse off."
Teachers unions across the state are urging school boards, including Madison's, to approve two-year contract extensions with major wage concessions before a Republican proposal to dismantle collective bargaining takes effect.
But the Wisconsin Association of School Boards is warning districts not to rush contract approvals as they may be limiting their options in the face of historic state funding cuts.
"We're telling people to be very cautious," said Bob Butler, an attorney with the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. "There's just a lot of unknowns for what their revenue will look like under the governor's (budget) proposal and how that proposal will evolve over time."
Two Seattle school board members were warned in late 2008 that a contractor hired by Silas Potter was unlicensed, paying below-market wages and not following safety rules on construction sites at two elementary schools, according to e-mails between the school board and union officials
The contractor, Solar West Office Solutions, was investigated by the state Department of Labor and Industries, which ordered the company to pay $57,000 in back wages. However, the school district wound up footing the bill because Solar West's owner, Keith Battle, could not be located and failed to respond to state officials, according to an L&I spokeswoman.
For four years, Potter ran both a school district program aimed at connecting minority contractors with the district and the Seattle Schools' small works roster, which allocates low-dollar construction contracts offered by the district. The district's minority contractor development program is now the subject of a criminal investigation.
Visit the Wisconsin Department of Administration website and look up "Budget in Brief" to find this and other information regarding the budget. The Drum received this document from a Waukesha County School District resident. These memos were sent out to all the parents of children in their district and we were told the teachers are not happy.
There are some interesting changes Gov. Walker is looking to pull of. The one that stands out to me is found in the last bulleted point on page 1. It is the repeal of the requirement that charter school teachers hold a DPI teacher license and the only requirement is to have a bachelor's degree.
This won't be popular, but I know several professionals that want to get involved in education and do not because of the licensing requirement. If this gets repealed I know that some will get involved in charter schools and they will have a positive impact on students. There will be more Black Male teachers as a result of this sea change.
Eleven New York City education reporters were huddling on e-mail last October 20, musing over ways to collectively pry a schedule of school closings out of a stubborn press office, when the chatter stopped cold. Word had filtered into their message bins that the city was about to release a set of spreadsheets showing performance scores for 12,000 of the city's 80,000 teachers--names included. Few understood better than the beat reporters that this wonky-sounding database was a game changer.
The Los Angeles Times already had jolted newsrooms across the country back in August, when it published 6,000 public school teachers' names next to its own performance calculations. New York education reporters, though, were considerably more reluctant to leap on this bandwagon. They found themselves with twenty-four hours to explain a complex and controversial statistical analysis, first to their editors and then to the public, while attempting to fend off the inevitable political and competitive pressure to print the names next to the numbers, something nearly every one of them opposed. "I stayed up all night kind of panicked," said Lindsey Christ, the education reporter for the local NY1 television station, "writing a memo to everyone in the newsroom explaining what was coming and what was at stake."
Six months ago, before Governor Walker's recent initiatives had Sconnies questioning the level of pay of teachers and other public servants, McKinsey and Company, the international management consulting company, published a report on whether the United States was falling behind other industrialized nations in attracting and retaining the best possible teachers for its K-12 systems. The report was entitled: Closing the Talent Gap, Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to a Career in Teaching. One aspect that the report noted was that pay for public school teachers in the United States is too low to attract candidates from the top one-third of university graduating classes, and pay over teachers' careers does not rise as fast as that of teachers in other industrialized countries.
In the third edition of the Advise the Advisor program, Melody Barnes, Director of the Domestic Policy Council and one of President Obama's senior advisors on education policy, is asking for feedback from parents, teachers and students on what's working in communities and what needs to change.
Providing our nation's students with a world-class education is a shared responsibility. It's going to take all of us - educators, parents, students, philanthropists, state and local leaders, and the federal government - working together to prepare today's students for the jobs of the 21st century.
You can add your voice to the conversation by answering one or all of the following questions at WhiteHouse.gov/Advise:
A bipartisan group of educators and business and labor leaders announced on Monday their support for a common curriculum that states could adopt for public schools across the nation.
The proposal, if it gains traction, would go beyond the common academic standards in English and mathematics that about 40 states adopted last year, by providing specific guidelines for schools and teachers about what should be taught in each grade.
For decades, similar calls for common academic standards, curricular materials and tests for use nationwide -- the educational model used by many countries in Europe and Asia -- have been beaten back by believers in America's tradition of local control of schools.
A new analysis finds that policies known as "last in, first out" may disproportionately affect schools receiving federal School Improvement Grants (SIGs).
A centerpiece of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's school reform agenda, SIG funds are intended to transform or turn around chronically failing schools. Analyzing Washington State personnel files, researchers at the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that teachers at risk of layoff are concentrated in schools receiving SIG funds. Many teachers in these schools are newly hired, chosen on the basis of high ability and commitment to education of disadvantaged children.
In Washington's SIG schools, about 23% of teachers are in their first three years of teaching. That's nearly twice the proportion of new teachers in other schools in the same districts.
A 5% budget reduction in Tacoma Public Schools, for example, could mean that Tacoma's SIG schools would lose one-quarter to one-half of their current teachers.
This whole obsession with public trust had me perplexed.
Why would the District suddenly be all concerned about public trust? The District, at least for the ten years that I have been active at the District level, has never shown any interest in public trust. In fact, the District has shown a gleeful contempt for the public trust. Their trust message to the public was the line from Animal House: "You fxxxed messed up. You trusted us."
Why, after successfully demonstrating for the past ten years that the District had no regard for the public trust, that the District didn't need the public trust, and that the District didn't particularly want the public trust, is the District suddenly interested in winning the public's trust?
What was billed as a funeral procession of sorts made its way from the Las Vegas Strip to the Palms hotel-casino on Sunday as about 500 people protested Gov. Brian Sandoval's proposed cuts to education -- or what attendees referred to as the "death of education" in Nevada.
Although it was a student-led protest, the rally attracted parents and educators as well, many of whom carried posters bearing messages such as "Nevadans care about education! So should you, Mr. Sandoval," "What happens in Vegas matters," and "Budget cuts? Nevada bleeds."
Protesters lamented the effects cuts would have on education in Nevada, arguing for more creativity and tax increases rather than slashing the budgets of K-12 and higher education.
"No matter how many budget cuts they take from us, we will continue to rise," said Greg Ross, a Nevada State College student. "... Education, no matter what happens at the end of the day, determines the future."
The battle over education reform in Idaho will continue this week. The House of Representatives is set to possibly send two of the three bills attached to Superintendent Tom Luna's plan to the governor's desk. The teachers' union is promising more demonstrations and there could also be more student walkouts.
Last week saw student walkouts most of the week from around the state, all in protest of Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna's Education Reform Plan.
But while it looks like a huge number of students, teachers, and parents are against his plan, Luna doesn't necessarily believe they're in the majority.
"Sometimes, there's an organized effort to get people to testify and protest, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they represent a majority," Luna said.
Some students we talked to did admit they were only protesting as a means of getting out of class. Luna believes more students would be in support if his plan if they really knew the facts about it.
As we debate Gov. Rick Snyder's proposed budget and whether his constituents can survive it, we should note what the late French essayist Joseph Joubert said: "The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress."
That should apply to how we spend tax money. And at risk of death threats, I want us to converse more about education spending.
I find it curious and heartbreaking that whenever a governor proposes cuts to schools, the first outcry is what it will cost the kids.
As Texas schools scrounge for cash to buy supplies and threaten to lay off teachers, $830 million in education funding earmarked for the state is sitting at the federal Department of Education.
The money, part of the stimulus package passed last year by Congress to help U.S. schools, is trapped by an increasingly hostile battle between the state's Republican and Democratic politicians over how to use it--to the dismay of school districts facing an almost $10 billion shortfall in state aid.
Democrats in the state's congressional delegation included a provision in the federal legislation requiring Texas to use the money to supplement existing spending. In the past, they contend, Republicans have replaced state education dollars with federal money, then used the savings for other purposes.
"Federal aid to education should actually aid education in our local Texas schools, not provide a bailout to the governor for his mismanagement of the state budget," said U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat who represents part of Austin.
Sony Michel is still a high school freshman, yet he has shown flashes of Hall of Fame potential. A tailback for American Heritage in Plantation, Fla., Michel has rushed for 39 touchdowns and nearly 3,500 yards in two varsity seasons.
"He's on par to be Emmitt Smith, on par to be Deion Sanders, on par to be Jevon Kearse," said Larry Blustein, a recruiting analyst for The Miami Herald who has covered the beat for 40 years. "He'll be one of the legendary players in this state."
Michel's recruitment will also be a test case for a rapidly evolving college football landscape. The proliferation of seven-on-seven nonscholastic football has transformed the high school game, once defined by local rivalries, state championships and the occasional all-star game, into a national enterprise.
As the White House seized that job news yesterday, President Obama went to Miami. He was there to talk about an issue that has bipartisan support: Education reform. The president visited a Miami high school with an inspiring comeback story. NPR's Greg Allen reports he was joined by a well-known Florida Republican: The former governor, Jeb Bush.
GREG ALLEN: There are many lessons to be learned from Miami's Central High School: The first is that when there's a president visiting, 600 students can make a lot of noise.
President BARACK OBAMA: It is good to be here today.
(Soundbite of cheering)
Mr. OBAMA: I'm excited.
ALLEN: Miami-Dade is the nation's fourth-largest school district, and for many years Central was one of its worst high schools. A perennial underachiever, for years it consistently ranked as a failing F school. President Obama noted that in one survey only a third of students said they felt safe at school.
The clamor over "last in, first out" -- shorthand for the way union contracts provide for the layoffs of public-school teachers, according to seniority -- is anything but an esoteric political debate for the young teachers at the Academy for Language and Technology, a small high school that opened in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx in 2007. According to a list released by the city, the school stands to lose as many as 9 of 29 teachers if the predictions of 4,675 layoffs before the next school year come true.
Many newer schools and those in poor neighborhoods, which tend to hire newer teachers, would lose a particularly large share of their staff members. The Academy for Language and Technology, which was created for native Spanish speakers, fits into both categories.
Stop the presses! The British, French and German heads of state agree on something: Cameron, Sarkozy and Merkel have all recently declared multiculturalism a failure.
Like the related dogma of diversity, multiculturalism is so deeply embedded in the lexicon of liberalism that it has become axiomatic. Proponents hold it so dear that the faintest doubt poses an existential threat.
With the stakes so high, agnostics face sanctimonious wrath: if you don't believe in multiculturalism there is simply something wrong with you; maybe you're even nuts. While I have reservations I think I'm basically sane, and I sure as heck hope the aforementioned world leaders are operating with a full deck.
It's important to distinguish between diversity and multiculturalism, which are often lumped together in liberal orthodoxy. Diversity is inherently good; but multiculturalism too often leads to separation and resentment that foments extremism.
Gov. Scott Walker's budget proposal calls for deep cuts in most areas of public education with one notable exception - public school choice programs.
In addition to steep reductions in school district funding, Walker's budget calls for a 10 percent cut to grants for programs such as bilingual-bicultural education and 4-year-old kindergarten. It also retains current grant funding for special education and low-income students, despite projected growth in those populations.
Meanwhile, Milwaukee's 20-year-old voucher program would receive $22.5 million more to accommodate 1,300 additional students. The growth would result from Walker's proposal to remove the program's income requirements and enrollment caps.
And independent charter schools would receive $18.4 million more over the biennium. Walker is projecting 600 additional students as his proposal would lift the state enrollment cap on virtual charter schools, allow the UW System's 13 four-year universities to establish charter schools, and allow independent charter schools in any district in the state.
Elementary School Level DLI: Proposal to plan and implement DLI programs at Stephens, Thoreau, and Hawthorne Elementary Schools for the 2011-2012 School year. Given the ongoing increase in the number of Spanish-speaking English language learners, MMSD needs to implement bilingual education programming in order to meet legal requirements imposed by the state statutes. It is recommended we start planning at these three sites during the 2011-2012 school year for program implementation during the 2012-2013 school year starting with a Kindergarten cohort.
La Follette High School Dual Language Immersion Program Proposal Update: A committee has been formed to start developing a proposal to bring to the BOE for a high school DLI continuation program. The committee is made up of representatives from the district ESLIBE/DLI Division as well as administrators and staff from La Follette High School. The committee meets biweekly. This high school DLI program would
serve the needs of students in the Sennett DLI program. The students are scheduled to start their high school programming during the 2013-2014 school year. A proposal is scheduled to be presented to the BOE in May of 2011 .
So what will things look like the day after the Milwaukee Public Schools system collapses?
Or, if you prefer, what needs to be done to avoid finding out the answer to that question?
Are these serious questions or is all this the-MPS-world-is-ending talk exaggerated?
I only have a firm sense of the answer to one of those questions, and it's No. 3: It probably won't be this fall (although it might be). But, best as I can see, the system as we know it stands at the brink of a momentous functional breakdown.
There have been people in recent years who thought the best solution to the problems of MPS was to blow up the system and build something better.
Wisconsin cannot continue to spend more money than it has while pushing a pile of bills into the future.
For too long, Wisconsin has lurched from one budget shortfall to another.
The near-constant distraction of the state's financial mess has kept our leaders from thinking long term. It has intensified partisan squabbles. It has forced difficult cuts and limited our state's ability to invest in its future.
Gov. Scott Walker's state budget, unveiled last week, is far from perfect. But it does one big thing right: It finally tackles Wisconsin's money problems in a serious way - without the usual accounting tricks and money raids that only delay tough decisions.
Walker is largely doing in his budget proposal what he said he'd do: Fix the budget mess without raising taxes.
Wisconsinites overwhelmingly want GOP Gov. Scott Walker to compromise, a new poll says.
The poll, commissioned by a conservative-leaning think tank, also found that state residents think Democratic President Barack Obama is doing a better overall job than Walker.
Further, Wisconsinites narrowly disapprove of Senate Democrats' decision to leave the state to block a Senate vote on Walker's budget repair bill, which contains language to strip away most public employee union bargaining rights.
The poll of 603 Wisconsinites was commissioned by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and conducted between Feb. 27 and March 1, the day of Walker's budget address, and has a margin of error of 4 percent. The survey of randomly selected adults included cell phone-users and was directed by Ken Goldstein, a UW-Madison political science professor on leave who is also the co-founder and director of the Big Ten Battleground Poll.
The poll's release comes amid talks between Walker's office and the Senate Democrats. Walker has hinted recently at compromise but said he won't compromise on the core principles of his bi
Days after Gov. Scott Walker proposed major cuts to state education funding, school officials are still trying to find out how harsh the impact might be on their own districts.
Although the governor recommended a two-year, $834 million decline in state aid for schools and an across-the-board 5.5% decrease in per-pupil revenue caps - restricting how much districts can collect from state aid and property taxes - how that plays out at the local level could still shock some communities.
They have only to think of two years ago when the Democrat-controlled Legislature dropped school aid by less than 3% and nearly one-quarter of the state's 425 school districts saw their general state aid decline by 15%. The proposed cut in school aid in Walker's budget is more than 8% in the first year.
"Whenever the state tries to do things at a macro level, with formulas and revenue caps and so forth, there are always glitches," said Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
At a time when public school students are being forced into ever more crowded classrooms, and poor families will lose state medical benefits, New York State is paying 10 times more for state employees' pensions than it did just a decade ago.
That huge increase is largely because of Albany's outsized generosity to the state's powerful employees' unions in the early years of the last decade, made worse when the recession pushed down pension fund earnings, forcing the state to make up the difference.
Although taxpayers are on the hook for the recession's costs, most state employees pay only 3 percent of their salaries to their pensions, half the level of most state employees elsewhere. Their health insurance payments are about half those in the private sector.
In all, the salaries and benefits of state employees add up to $18.5 billion, or a fifth of New York's operating budget. Unless those costs are reined in, New York will find itself unable to provide even essential services.
What to do? Time is no longer on the side of good. I suggest that we confront the nation's fiscal difficulties as soon as possible. That means both tax hikes and spending cuts, though I prefer to concentrate on the latter. Nonetheless it is naive to think spending cuts can do the job alone, and insisting on no tax hikes drives us faster along the path of fiscal ruin. The time for the Grand Bargain is now, it will only get harder:
Monday evening, the Portland School Board will vote on a teacher contract that, once again, ignores the elephant in the room -- Portland Public Schools' failure to adequately educate low-income children and children of color. We encourage all Portland residents to read the contract and see what some would have us celebrate. School board members should explain what they've gained and what they've given up with this negotiation. The public deserves answers.
The district's budget woes are real. But the bigger problem is that PPS time and again puts adult jobs and politics ahead of students' learning and graduating. Our community and state pay a hefty price. With an overall graduation rate of 53 percent (31 percent for Hispanic, 44 percent for African American and 45 percent for poor children), our quality of life is being redefined right before our eyes.
On Dec. 20, the Black Parent Initiative, the Coalition of Black Men, Community & Parents for Public Schools, and Stand for Children asked the school district, school board and teacher association to eliminate barriers to recruiting and retaining excellent teachers and principals, and to better serve our students, in particular our students of color. Barriers exist in both the teacher contract and district policy. The Native American Youth and Family Center, Latino Network, the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, the Hispanic Chamber and a number of civic leaders soon joined with us.
The problem with the current crisis in Madison over public-sector unions is that it distracts from the real issue where Wisconsin's public education is concerned.
The governor recently announced the need to send contract termination notices to public school teachers if a vote on his budget-repair bill doesn't happen soon.
Hmm. Do unionized teachers earn too much because of their unions? Can the state afford it?
The question should be: Would Wisconsin pay for excellent public schools even without teachers unions?
Teachers are not like General Motors workers in the '70s or janitors today. Those workers have nothing to offer but their strong backs and hands. If they do not bargain collectively, they lose. Nor can teachers be lumped in with police and firefighters. These workers are necessary in a society that wishes to be safe.
Effective teachers are the kind of professionals who are valuable because of their education, creativity, innovation and initiative. Excellent teachers should be allowed to rise to the top and be in demand, while ineffective ones should be trimmed. The large teacher unions I have belonged to (Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association and Chicago Teachers Union) seem to do the opposite. However, excellent teachers will still need to be attracted with competitive pay and benefits.
Take the school John Norquist sent his son to when he was mayor of Milwaukee. It's private because it bought into the decidedly non-mainstream Waldorf movement. The Norquist family obviously felt it was worth the tuition, which the mayor could afford.
The school also accepted children via Milwaukee's school choice program, so poor children could attend. Who was left out? Children from families neither poor nor well-off, including children whose parents worked for Norquist as firefighters and cops.
This is one reason Norquist says Gov. Scott Walker is right to expand school choice. By letting in the middle class, said Norquist, Walker makes better options available to middle-income parents in Milwaukee.
Norquist swiftly adds that he agrees with nothing else Walker has proposed lately. The ex-mayor goes on at length that he believes Walker wrong to limit public-union bargaining power.
That said, he vigorously favors more school choice. Milwaukee has school choice for the middle class, only it amounts to moving out to somewhere that the public schools are good. "One of the reasons people leave the city is because they feel they don't have good choices for their kids," Norquist said. "This bill changes that."
Teachers across the country have threatened a nationwide sit-down strike after widespread distortions in their salaries released in February under the Single Spine Salary Structure (SSSS).
The teachers were expecting an improved and enhanced salary under the much publicised single spine but were utterly shocked to notice that their salaries had either being halved or were lower than the preceding month.
They have accused the Fair Wages Commission of among other things failing to include their Professional Allowance in the build up of the SSSS and have threatened to disrupt the 54th Independence Day Celebration if government does not yield to their demands to review the salaries.
But speaking on Joy FM's News analysis programme News file the deputy Education Minister Mahama Ayariga stated that the agitations by the teachers are a misunderstanding of the issues.
Your fifth-grader asks you for help with the day's math homework. The assignment: Create a "stem-and-leaf" plot of the birthdays of each student in the class and use it to determine if one month has more birthdays than the rest, and if so, which month? Do you:
a) Stare blankly
b) Google "stem-and-leaf plot"
c) Say, "Why do you need to know that?"
d) Shrug and say, "I must have been sick the day they taught that in math class."
If you're a parent of a certain age, your kids' homework can be confounding. Blame it on changes in the way children are taught math nowadays -- which can make you feel like you're not very good with numbers.
Well, our math guy, Keith Devlin, is very good at math, and he tells Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon that there's a reason elementary schools are teaching arithmetic in a new way.
"That's largely to reflect the different needs of society," he says. "No one ever in their real life anymore needs to -- and in most cases never does -- do the calculations themselves."
"the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands."
It is settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality.
However, a small number of dissenting voices have begun to speak. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in Academically Adrift have suggested that (p. 131) "Studying is crucial for strong academic performance..." and "Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning..."
This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Domed to Fail (p. 150) that: "Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education." More recently, and less on the fringe of this new concern, Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) (p. 162) that "One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students' academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers' influence."
There are necessarily problems in turning attention toward the work of students in judging the effectiveness of schools. First, all the present attention is on teachers, and it is not easy to turn that around. Second, teachers are employees and can be fired, while students can not. It could not be comfortable for the Funderpundits and their beneficiaries to realize that they may have been overlooking the most important variable in student academic achievement all this time.
In February, when the Associated Press reported that Natalie Monroe, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, had called her students, on a blog, "disengaged, lazy whiners," and "noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS," the response of the school system was not to look more closely at the academic efforts of the students, but to suspend the teacher. As one of her students explained, "As far as motivated high school students, she's completely correct. High school kids don't want to do anything...(but) It's a teacher's job...to give students the motivation to learn."
It would seem that no matter who points out that "You can lead a student to learning, but you can't make him drink," our system of schools and Funderpundits sticks with its wisdom that teachers alone are responsible for student academic achievement.
While that is wrong, it is also stupid. Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote that; "For education, a man's books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his."
As in the old story about the drunk searching under the lamppost for his keys, those who control funds for education believe that as long as all their money goes to paying attention to what teachers are doing, who they are, how they are trained, and so on, they can't see the point of looking in the darkness at those who have the complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be--namely the students.
Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools. What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, history, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them. Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.
This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students. And students, who see little or no pressure to be other than "disengaged lazy whiners" will continue to pay the price for their lack of education, both in college and at work, and we will continue to draw behind in comparison with those countries who realize that student academic achievement has always been, and will always be, mainly dependent on diligent student academic work.
Budget cuts! Layoffs! Bigger classes! Oh my! Given the mini-Wisconsins erupting around the country, it's not surprising that parents are worried about their children's schools. At least 45 states will face some budget shortfall for the fiscal year that begins this July, according to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Last week the school board of Providence, Rhode Island gave pink slips to the city's entire teaching force. Rumors of class sizes as large as 60 students circulated in Detroit.
Reality check: There will be teachers teaching in Providence next year. Similar sky-is-falling scenarios will be averted in Detroit and elsewhere, too. But that doesn't mean that there will not be fewer teachers--and larger classes--in many places when school opens this fall. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan may well be right that scarce resources will be the "new normal" for schools.
The looming budget cuts are putting the question of class size front and center in local communities and the national education debate. A proposal to raise class sizes in Idaho by laying off more than 700 teachers led to protests around the state. Many other states and cities are considering changes to rules about class size.
On the surface, the fight between the governor of Wisconsin and organized labor is about balancing state budgets and collective-bargaining rights. Behind the scenes, hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to top labor leaders as well as campaign contributions to Democrats could be in jeopardy.
Union treasuries - filled by dues paid by union members - not only fund programs benefiting union members and their families. The money they collect also pays six-figure compensation packages for labor leaders and provides millions of dollars for Democratic causes and candidates.
The Center for Public Integrity found compensation for leaders of the 10 largest unions ranged from $173,000 at the United Auto Workers to $618,000 at the Laborers' International Union of North America, and almost $480,000 for the president of the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees. The latter is the target of GOP governors in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee and Kansas.
The union reports, filed with the Department of Labor, list compensation for all union employees and officers. Salaries make up the biggest portion, but other benefits can include tens of thousands of dollars for meal allowances, mileage allowances and entertainment. Health care and pension contributions are not specifically addressed.
Outside political action committees continue to dominate the contests over four seats on the Los Angeles Board of Education, spending more than $2 million combined, according to city records.
[Updated at 2:45 p.m.: The candidate attracting the most independent spending is Luis Sanchez, who is running for the one open seat, in District 5, which spans Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Eagle Rock and the southeastern portions of L.A. Unified, including the cities of Huntington Park, Bell and South Gate.
Outside groups have spent more than $727,000 for or against Sanchez. Nearly $500,000 has come in to support Sanchez. The source of this money is fund-raising led by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and, separately, spending by Local 99 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents many non-teaching school district workers. The local teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, has spent about $260,000 for a campaign opposing Sanchez. It's also spent more than $127,000 in support of Bennett Kayser, who is running against Sanchez.]
In these challenging financial times -- what I call 'The New Normal' -- governments at every level face a critical need to cut spending where we can in order to invest where we must," Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote to U.S. governors while offering "some options on the effective, efficient, and responsible use of resources in tight budget times."
The $821 billion economic stimulus plan passed in 2009 included the largest transfer of federal funds to states in U.S. history, with much of the money targeted toward healthcare and education.
The plan runs out this year and the states, which are only seeing a modest uptick in revenue as they still struggle with the fallout of the recession, are looking for places to cut to keep their budgets balanced.
Every day educators across the country are challenging the status quo and showing that low-performing schools can be turned around. Today, the President and I will visit Miami Central Senior High School to talk to some of those educators. Central has received nearly $800,000 in federal funding to support and accelerate turnaround efforts already underway.
Working with the school district and teachers union, Central promoted a strong school leader to be principal and replaced more than half the staff. It extended learning time after-school and during the summer, and engaged the community by offering Parent Academy classes for parents on graduation requirements and financial literacy. More than 80 percent of students are on free or reduced price lunch. Yet academic performance is steadily improving -- and students and teachers are showing that a committed school can beat the demographic odds.
The burdens of poverty are real, and overcoming those burdens takes hard work and resources. But poverty is not destiny. Hundreds of schools in high-poverty communities are closing achievement gaps. America can no longer afford a collective shrug when disadvantaged students are trapped in inferior schools and cheated of a quality education for years on end.
Last night on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed author, historian, and professor Dianne Ravitch on her new book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System."
Ravitch argued that testing and choice are undermining America's education system. She said that ever since the No Child Left Behind Act, "schools have been turned into testing factories."
She also discussed how being a teacher has turned into a thankless job, and that teachers have become entirely demoralized. She stated that "the whole public monologue for the last couple of years has been 'Blame the teachers for everything.'" Stewart agreed, noting that his mother worked in education for years.
Tying test scores to teacher evaluations could narrow curriculums in schools and reinforce teaching for the sake of passing a test, the New Jersey Education Association argued today, saying that plans by the Christie Administration to impose performance reviews based on how well students do on standardized tests were unworkable.
Last month, acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf unveiled a five-point reform proposal that would abandon New Jersey's teacher job guarantee program and replace it with an evaluation system rewarding educators for good student performance and working in at-risk schools
Under the plan, the state's public school teachers would be assessed and paid using a new rating system based in part on how their students do in the classroom.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Tuesday that he would introduce legislation to speed the implementation of a statewide system to evaluate teachers' performance.
His announcement came minutes after the State Senate passed legislation sought by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that would reverse a rule protecting long-serving New York City teachers from layoffs regardless of their effectiveness.
Mr. Cuomo's proposal would have far broader implications, affecting school districts across the state. But it would not affect the thousands of layoffs that Mr. Bloomberg maintains he will be forced to carry out because of cuts in state aid.
Rather, Mr. Cuomo is seeking to accelerate the introduction of new standards for teacher and principal evaluation that the state's Education Department, with the support of teachers' unions, has been developing since last year.
The administration had wanted to see those programs consolidated into a new, broader, $383 million funding stream aimed at improving literacy. Now it appears there may be a lot less available money for that effort.
The measure also gets rid of all funding for the rest of the year for the $88 million Smaller Learning Communities program, which was slated to be funneled into a broader program aimed at improving educational options.
And it scraps the Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnerships, or LEAP, program, financed at $64 million.
The bill also defunds a lot of programs that are right now classified as "earmarks," meaning money directed at one particular program or project. That includes a number of national education programs, such as Teach for America, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, National Writing Project, Reading is Fundamental, and the Close Up fellowship.
Gov. Pat Quinn defended his proposal to merge school districts on Wednesday, saying the money saved from cutting district administrators will put more teachers in Illinois classrooms.
Quinn said the state could save $100 million by cutting the Illinois' 868 school districts to about 300. Illinois has the third-most school districts in the nation behind Texas and California, and about 200 districts have just a single school.
"We don't need as many folks at the top level," Quinn told reporters at the Capitol. "We need folks on the front line, in teaching, imparting knowledge and making sure our kids get 21st century education."
Quinn said at least 270 superintendents earn more than his $177,412 salary.
The Minnesota Senate has passed a bill that creates a new method of obtaining teacher licenses.
The alternative licensing plan is aimed at meeting projected teacher shortages in the future. It's designed to give Minnesota schools an infusion of new, mostly young teachers who don't attend traditional teaching colleges, and help close an achievement gap between white and minority students that's one of the worst in the country.
Critics say it will harm schoolchildren by making it too easy to become a teacher. But the bill the Senate passed Thursday reflects a compromise between Gov. Mark Dayton and bill sponsors, and it's expected to get his signature.
The Republican faceoff with labor unions in the Midwest and elsewhere marks not just a fight over money and collective bargaining but also a test of wills over how to improve the nation's schools.
Various GOP proposals to narrow labor rights, dismantle teacher tenure and channel public money toward private schools raise a question: Should states work with teacher unions to overhaul education or try to roll over them?
Like many Democrats, President Obama wants collaboration. He has preached teamwork with unions even as he pushes harder than any of his predecessors to get bad teachers out of schools and pay more to those who excel.
Here in Indiana, Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) shares many of Obama's education goals. But Daniels, a possible 2012 presidential contender, and several of his Republican peers are pursuing reform through confrontation.
A tentative school budget of $83.3 million was approved by the Board of Education on March 3.
The budget includes a tax levy, the amount to be paid by taxpayers, of $73,158,200 million. The tax levy is a 1.75 percent increase over last year and below the 2 percent cap permitted for school districts. With debt service of $1,940,222, the total tax levy is $75 million.
For a property assessed at $411,663, the borough average, it amounts to a $181.93 annual increase or $15.16 a month, according to Superintendent of Schools Bruce Watson.
"We still have three weeks to work on it," said Watson during his presentation. "We can still change it."
The jabs Erin Parker has heard about her job have stunned her. Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.
"You feel punched in the stomach," said Ms. Parker, a high school science teacher in Madison, Wis., where public employees' two-week occupation of the State Capitol has stalled but not deterred the governor's plan to try to strip them of bargaining rights.
Ms. Parker, a second-year teacher making $36,000, fears that under the proposed legislation class sizes would rise and higher contributions to her benefits would knock her out of the middle class.
"I love teaching, but I have $26,000 of student debt," she said. "I'm 30 years old, and I can't save up enough for a down payment" for a house. Nor does she own a car. She is making plans to move to Colorado, where she could afford to keep teaching by living with her parents.
This front page story in today's NYT annoys the heck out of me because it's missing one word in its title - it should read: "Teachers UNIONS Wonder, Why the Scorn?" The author presents NO evidence that Americans don't cherish teachers other than a random placard and online comment. What Americans DO object to are unions using their enormous political influence to benefit their members while throwing kids under the bus - two great examples are the impossibility of firing even the most horrific teachers and doing layoffs purely by seniority. Checker Finn has it exactly right:
Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education policy group, said the decline in teachers' status traced to the success of unions in paying teachers and granting job security based on their years of service, not ability.
"They are reaping a bitter harvest that they didn't individually plant but their profession has planted over 50 years, going from a respected profession to a mass work force in which everyone is treated as if they are interchangeable, as in the steel mills of yesteryear," Mr. Finn said.
And why did the author quote the only young teacher in America who thinks it's fair that he's being laid off because he lacks seniority rather than doing it based on which teachers are best for kids? He could have easily quoted one of the Educators 4 Excellence teachers, for example:
Last month Mr. Tougher was notified that because of his lack of seniority, he will be laid off, or "excessed," this year under the state's proposed cuts to school aid. A union activist, he believes seniority-based layoffs are fair.
"The seniority part, I get that," said Mr. Tougher, who is single. "While it would be a bummer if I were excessed for next year, that's just how things go sometimes."
This is a story that tells how state benefits - and state power - works.
In 1994, former governor Tommy Thompson was running for reelection to his third term. He wanted to win by a wide margin to boast his chances of being considered as a possible candidate for president or vice-president of the United States. So Thompson let union leaders know he was open to improving the pension for state employees.
The overture worked. The state employees union backed Thompson in 1994 and again in 1998. And Thompson made good on his promise, helping to pass, in 1999, a state law that gave all employees a 10 percent increase in the value of their pension for all years worked prior to 2000 (any years worked after this got the usual pension multiplier).
But Thompson went further than the unions wanted. His law allowed employees to collect up to 70 percent of their final average salary in pension payments, an increase from the old 65 percent. That had little value for the unions: Employees would see their annual pension multiplier rise from 1.6 per year to 1.765 percent; even with that increase, however, they would have to work 37 years to hit the legal ceiling of 65 percent of their final average salary.
Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates will step into the national debate over state budgets Thursday with a call for states to rethink their public-employee benefits systems, which he says stifle funding for the nation's public schools.
Mr. Gates in an interview said he will use a high-profile conference Thursday in Long Beach, Calif., to urge that more attention be paid to how states calculate their employee-pension funding and health-care obligations. "These budgets are way out of whack," Mr. Gates said. "They've used accounting gimmicks and lot things that are truly extreme."
The comments come after Mr. Gates spent more than a year studying the issue and enlisting the advice of leading academics and others.
A fear of retaliation and an official policy that keeps Seattle Public Schools employees from directly raising concerns with the school board are at least partly to blame for a scandal involving $1.8 million in misused public funds, auditors and investigators say.
The scandal unfolding at the school district is calling into question why Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson and the seven members of the school board weren't alerted earlier to concerns about Silas Potter, who ran the Regional Small Business Development Program.
Those concerns aren't new -- at least, not to a handful of employees in the school district. But when those concerns were voiced over the last several years, they never made it up to the school board.
At Seattle Public Schools, when employees do speak up, they have to navigate an obstacle course of bureaucracy before gaining the ears of board members.
But the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is questioning the legality of Walker's proposal to fund the program through the Department of Administration.
Walker has proposed spending $600,000 in each of the next two years to implement recommendations of a new task force appointed by Walker that would develop a third-grade reading test. Walker noted Wisconsin's performance on a national fourth-grade reading exam has fallen from third out of 39 states in 1994 to 30th out of 50 states in 2009.
"From kindergarten to third grade, our kids learn to read, and then from third grade on, they use reading to learn," Walker said in his budget address. "We need to make sure every child can read as they move on from third grade."
In his 35 years as a high school English teacher in suburban Philadelphia, Thom Williams often encouraged his students to splash their most creative thoughts on the walls of his classroom.
Hundreds of students embraced his invitation, covering those painted cinderblocks with original art, quotes from favorite books, and deep thoughts born from teenaged angst.
"I looked to those walls for inspiration," says 18-year-old Lauren Silvestri, a student of Mr. Williams's at Marple Newtown High School in Newtown Square, Pa. Before graduating last year, she signed her name and a quote she loves. "It felt good to know I'd come back someday and my words on the wall would be there."
Her words won't remain for long, however. Mr. Williams died of cancer in December at age 63, and now the school is being renovated. That classroom's walls are set to be demolished or painted over. "Thom was a free spirit who encouraged his students to be free spirits," says Raymond McFall, the school's principal. Still, "I can't have everybody painting on the walls of the school."
The Coalition Government brought a big shift in ICT policy for education. From a position of active strategies, streams of guidance, heavy investment in connectivity, research and equipment, to a touch so light as to be barely perceptible.
The recent white paper, "The Importance of Teaching", emphasises standards for frontline teaching, with ideas about what the curriculum might contain, but scant reference to how they might teach, or with what resources. ICT has one mention - in relation to procurement. This is no oversight. Why the big change? And a recurrent fear among those consulted is worrying - they simply don't fully understand the importance of ICT.
A set of three simple questions were put to a number of leading figures involved in ICT for learning (the full set of questions and answers can be downloaded here) and three to schools minister Nick Gibb MP. While the Department for Education emphasised schools' new freedoms (see below), the other responses raised a range of worries.
State and local funding for general Wisconsin public school operations would drop 5.5% in 2011-'12 while Milwaukee's private-school voucher program could be poised for a massive expansion under Gov. Scott Walker's budget proposal, one that slashes $834 million in state K-12 education spending over the next two years.
The governor's 2011-'13 budget proposal would phase out the income requirements of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, eliminate the enrollment cap on student participation, and allow Milwaukee families to use their publicly funded voucher to attend any private school in Milwaukee County that wished to participate in the program.
Walker also hopes to remove a requirement that students in the choice schools take state tests, possibly scuttling new efforts to gauge whether the private school choice program has meaningful impact on academic achievement.
"We've been saying for a month now that the second shoe was going to drop," said Tom Beebe, executive director of Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools, referring to Walker's recent push for major concessions on benefits from teachers and other public employees. "It wasn't just dropped. It was thrown at the head."
The 14 Wisconsin Democratic senators who fled to Illinois share more than just political sympathy with the public employees and unions targeted by Gov. Scott Walker's budget-repair bill.
The Senate Democrats count on those in the public sector as a key funding source for their campaigns.
In fact, nearly one out of every five dollars raised by those Democratic senators in the past two election cycles came from public employees, such as teachers and firefighters, and their unions, a Journal Sentinel analysis of campaign records shows.
"It's very simple," said Richard Abelson, executive director of District Council 48 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. "We have interests, and because of that, we attempt to support candidates who support our interests. It's pretty hard to find Republicans who support our interests these days."
Critics of Walker's budget-repair bill say it would mean less union money for Democrats. That's because the legislation would end automatic payroll deductions for dues and would allow public employees to opt out of belonging to a union.
In comments on my post on Rand Paul and David Letterman, some commenters expressed interest in seeing the data on overall federal tax burden, not just the burden of the federal income tax. As it happens, the Congressional Budget Office reports such data. I would reprint their tables but I haven't yet figured out how to do that. So here is the link for 2006 data. Click on their data and you'll get an Excel spreadsheet that shows the following:
. The bottom quintile paid 4.3 percent of income in taxes,
. The top quintile paid 25.8 percent of income in taxes,
. The top decile paid 27.5 percent of income in taxes,
. The top 5 percent paid 29.0 percent of income in taxes, and
. The top 1 percent paid 31.2 percent of income in taxes.
The Governor has stated that the cuts in benefits he is imposing on public employees will allow school districts and other governmental agencies to absorb the cuts in state aid that they will sustain without requiring significant layoffs or decreases in services.
Does that claim hold up? Well, for our school district it looks like it might.
If my assumptions are correct, it looks like the big financial hits the Governor wants our teachers to absorb will enable us to make it through the recommended cuts in state aid and in our spending authority without the need for significant layoffs.
I need to emphasize that this conclusion is tentative and certainly subject to revision as I learn more. But this is how I see it now.
School budgeting issues are invariably confusing. The confusion can be reduced a bit if two issues are kept separate. The first is: How much money can we spend? The second: Where will that money come from?
I will not replicate here Kris Wigdal's list of boycott targets but here's the punchline: her list numbers 154 of the leading companies in Wisconsin! Suffice it to say it would be difficult to mow your lawn, do a summer cook out, quaff your thirst, gas up your car, or get medical care unless you do like the Fugitive 14 Senators and go out of state.
Madison school board member says governor's budget could work
I have long felt that Ed Hughes is probably squarely in the center of the Madison school board -- not too hot, not too cold. His take on Governor Walker's budget as unveiled Tuesday is that it could work for Madison without teacher layoffs:
With that question out of the way, we'll take a look at the thornier question of how those five states' test scores stack up nationally, and against Wisconsin in particular.
On Feb. 20, 2011, Angus Johnston, an adjunct assistant professor at the City University of New York, published a comprehensive analysis of this question on his blog. He published links to a chart that appears to have been the inspiration for the tweets and Facebook postings. It offers a state-by-state analysis of scores on the SAT and the ACT, the two leading college-admissions tests, assembled by University of Missouri law professor Douglas O. Linder.
Johnston is critical of Linder's methodology for a variety of reasons, which he explains in more detail here. But without even taking those concerns into account, we find the statistics unreliable. They were published in 1999, meaning that the statistics themselves are likely more than a dozen years old -- far too old to be presumed valid in 2011.
Fortunately, it's possible to obtain state-by-state rankings for the SAT and ACT of a more recent vintage. Here's a table of the relevant states:
Wisconsin may not be able to refinance $165 million in debt as planned in the municipal bond market this week or next, but that doesn't mean the state is in any kind of immediate fiscal peril.
Wisconsin has taken center stage this budget season, as Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, has pushed to eliminate most of the collective bargaining rights for the state's 170,000 public employees through a controversial budget "repair bill." Democratic state senators have fled the state to avoid voting on the measure.
Mr. Walker's latest tactic to lure them back has been threatening to make additional cuts or more layoffs, should the state be unable to refinance $165 million in debt for short-term budget relief. Under his plan, the state would issue a 10-year bond to restructure a debt payment that otherwise would be due May 1.
The MGEA has ratified the contract agreed to earlier today by the board. This contract is for the 2009-2011 school year and will expire June 30th.
The contract mostly maintains the status quo to allow us to complete the year in an orderly fashion even if the current budget repair bill passes. Hopefully it will give us enough time to deal with the implications of the yet to be released state budget and make layoff and staffing decisions with enough knowledge to minimize disruption. The same is true of senior teachers with the option to retire. It also minimizes risk: in the absence of a contract we would be governed only by the complex state statutes if the "budget repair bill" becomes law, and there is a risk that any disputes would end up in litigation without this settlement.
The agreed upon contract provides for 0% salary increase in the first year (2009-10) and 1% in the current year. This is significantly less than inflation and saves the district money relative to what had been budgeted. Given that the MGEA would retain the right to negotiate salaries up to the rate of inflation under the "budget repair bill' this is probably a deal for the district. A teacher who started in the district this year with a bachelors will receive $31,695 in salary (including the new teacher stipend), a teacher with a master's and 16 years experience will receive $51,717.
The U.S. government has 15 different agencies overseeing food-safety laws, more than 20 separate programs to help the homeless and 80 programs for economic development.
These are a few of the findings in a massive study of overlapping and duplicative programs that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year, according to the Government Accountability Office.
A report from the nonpartisan GAO, to be released Tuesday, compiles a list of redundant and potentially ineffective federal programs, and it could serve as a template for lawmakers in both parties as they move to cut federal spending and consolidate programs to reduce the deficit. Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), who pushed for the report, estimated it identifies between $100 billion and $200 billion in duplicative spending. The GAO didn't put a specific figure on the spending overlap.
One day after outlining plans to lay off teachers, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he is unsure whether additional funds from the state would change his call to eliminate more than 6,100 teaching positions.
Earlier this month, as part of his preliminary budget proposal for the fiscal year beginning July 1, the mayor requested $600 million in aid from Albany -- $200 million of which he said was needed for New York City's Department of Education. That additional aid from Albany would close the city's deficit, he said.
But America shouldn't compete on the basis of cheap labor: we are not nor should we try to be the Walmart of Work. So the first question becomes how do we compete in ways that don't involve endlessly ratcheting down wages and benefits? And the second, related question is how can we generate enough demand for American workers so that market forces drive incomes up from year to year and decade to decade?
The key to success is obvious: we need to continue to raise productivity throughout the economy. If productivity goes up quickly enough, wages can rise here even if they are falling elsewhere. This is getting harder; productivity is both easier to measure and to raise in manufacturing than in services. But substituting capital and technology for human sweat has to be a large part of what we do.
To raise productivity significantly, and especially to do it in ways that give us some long term advantages, we are going to have to do more about productivity in services. In particular we are going to have to look at health, government, education and the legal industry. Health care accounts for 18% of our GDP; education for 7%, and government spending (federal, state and local) accounts for 40%. (Because a lot of government spending goes to health and education, the total from these sectors is closer to 45% of GDP than 65%.)
In mid-2008, after Dan Nerad's departure, the Green Bay School Board granted a large salary concession to reel in successor Greg Maass as Green Bay School District superintendent.
Nerad's final annual salary was $148,000. Maass required an increase to $184,000 (plus benefits, annuity contribution, car allowance and assorted expenses). Everyone anticipated a leader who would take the district to the next level. Instead, partway into his third year, he decides to "retire" to the East Coast. Coincidentally, an opening in the small, high-wealth Marblehead, Mass., school district suddenly catches his eye. Having optimized his Wisconsin retirement pension formula with three years of high salary, now Maass may draw that pension while collecting a similar salary in Marblehead. And Green Bay is back to square one.
Can't blame Maass. Who doesn't try to optimize his or her personal welfare within the rules and guidelines of the system? Thousands of former soldiers, police officers and other public employees collect pensions while pursuing late career ventures. Most economists argue that all humans make economically rational decisions, so why shouldn't Maass? If we're not happy with that arrangement then we should lobby our state Legislature for change.
Can't blame the school board. It followed a traditional and thorough selection process. Members all had to rely on representations and intents expressed by the candidates interviewed. No doubt they all believed Maass would become a driver of educational improvement in the Green Bay district.
A record number of California teachers could see pink slips in their mailboxes over the next two weeks as school districts prepare for the worst possible budget scenario.
With the state budget hinging on proposed June ballot measures to extend and increase taxes, school districts won't know until summer whether they'll get enough money from the state to keep all their teachers.
Billions of dollars hang in the balance, but the uncertainty could force districts next month to send layoff notices to some 30,000 or more teachers, an increase from the 20,000 to 25,000 teachers who got a notice last year, education and labor officials said Friday.
The notices, required by state law to be sent out by March 15, will advise the teachers, mostly those with the least seniority, that they might not have a job next year. The layoffs must be confirmed in mid-May.
The federal government isn't simply bleeding money. Because of its addiction to red ink, it's bleeding power, which is starting to flow away from the nation's capital and out to the states. This is the little-recognized reality behind the remarkable political upheaval being seen in state capitals.
Republican governors such as Wisconsin's Scott Walker, New Jersey's Chris Christie and Indiana's Mitch Daniels are pursuing their own controversial fiscal policies out of what they consider financial necessity; they have budgets to balance, and little time and few options to do the job. But governors of both parties also have less reason to wait and hope for help from a federal government that, with overwhelming budget deficits, is losing its ability to offer financial goodies to the states.
For decades, the implicit deal between Washington and state capitals has been that the feds would offer chunks of cash, and in return would get commensurate influence over the states' social policies. Now that flow of federal goodies has begun what figures to be a long-term decline, as the money Washington has available to pass around to the states is squeezed. Already the funds the federal government offered states as part of the 2009 economic stimulus package have nearly run out, and the budget-cutting that has begun in Washington is curtailing the other money available to dole out.
The U.S. government has 15 different agencies overseeing food-safety laws, 20 separate programs to help the homeless and 80 programs for economic development.
These are a few of the findings in a massive study of overlapping and duplicative programs that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year, according to a new Government Accountability Office report to be released Tuesday.
The report from the nonpartisan GAO compiles a list of redundant and potentially ineffective federal programs, and it could serve as a template for lawmakers in both parties as they move to cut federal spending and consolidate programs to reduce the deficit.
The raucous Wisconsin debate over collective bargaining may be ugly at times, but it has been worth it for the splendid public education. For the first time in decades, Americans have been asked to look under the government hood at the causes of runaway spending. What they are discovering is the monopoly power of government unions that have long been on a collision course with taxpayers. Though it arrived in Madison first, this crack-up was inevitable.
We first started running the nearby chart on the trends in public and private union membership many years ago. It documents the great transformation in the American labor movement over the latter decades of the 20th century. A movement once led by workers in private trades and manufacturing evolved into one dominated by public workers at all levels of government but especially in the states and cities.
The trend is even starker if you go back a decade earlier. In 1960, 31.9% of the private work force belonged to a union, compared to only 10.8% of government workers. By 2010, the numbers had more than reversed, with 36.2% of public workers in unions but only 6.9% in the private economy.
How ironic that Wisconsin has become ground zero for the battle between taxpayers and public- employee labor unions. Wisconsin was the first state to allow collective bargaining for government workers (in 1959), following a tradition where it was the first to introduce a personal income tax (in 1911, before the introduction of the current form of individual income tax in 1913 by the federal government).
Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion. For a teachers union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teacher services to all public school systems in a state--or even across states--can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty.
In fact, labor unions were subject to U.S. antitrust laws in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was first applied in 1894 to the American Railway Union. However, organized labor managed to obtain exemption from federal antitrust laws in subsequent legislation, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
Madison school superintendent Dan Nerad also admitted that it has been "a difficult day."
"This district has been making reductions for over 15 years," Nerad says. "A year ago we had a reduction of 15% in state aid. This year's it's an 8% reduction in state aid. While we know that we face a budget deficit, there's also a need to know that our kids are educated well if our state is to stay strong."
Nerad says Walker's budget will cause a $20 million cut in revenue for the district in 2011. If the governor's budget repair bill passes in its current form, he says, the amount would be about $11 million. Obviously, given the current chaos in the Capitol, the future is murky.
The 2011 State of the Madison School District document puts spending at 379,058,945 for 24,471 students ($15,490.13/student).
To be clear, I'm making an argument that's different from "Government workers are overpaid." I'm saying that they are paid in the wrong ways -- in ways that make life easier on union leaders and elected officials, at least initially, but that eventually hurt both workers and taxpayers.
The best example is health insurance. Health plans for union workers and retirees are much more likely to require little or no co-payment, which leads to lots of medical treatments that don't make people any healthier, and to huge costs. Ultimately, some of these plans will probably prove so expensive as to be unsustainable. Workers would have been better off accepting a less generous benefit package and slightly higher salaries.
The solution today is not to cut both the pay and the benefits of public workers, as would happen if workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere lost their right to bargain. Remember, public workers don't get especially generous salaries. The solution is to get rid of the deferred benefits that make no sense -- the wasteful health plans, the pensions that start at age 55 and still let retirees draw a full salary elsewhere, the definitions of disability that treat herniated discs as incurable.
What strategies will you introduce to reduce the 6000+ families who move in and out of Madison Public School classrooms each year?
In the last three years more children opted out of the district than all previous years in the history of the district. That contributed to the increase of children from households below the poverty line rising to over 48% of the kids enrolled.
To stabilize our enrollment we need stable families and stable neighborhoods. This will require a collaborate effort between governments, like the city, the county and the school district, as well as the private sector and the non-profits. It means opening Madison's economy to all families, providing stable housing, and building on the assets of our neighborhoods.
One decades old problem is the significant poverty in the Town of Madison. I would work with town officials, and city of Fitchburg officials to see if we could accelerate the annexation of the town so we could provide better services to area residents.
MTIVOTERS 2011 School Board Election Questionnaire
Please respond to each ofthe following questions. If you wish to add/clarifY your response, please attach a separate sheet and designate your responses with the same number which appears in the questionnaire. Please deliver your responses to MTI Headquarters (821 Williamson Street) by, February 17, 2011.
General:
If the School Board finds it necessary to change school boundaries due to enrollment, what criteria would you, as a Board member, use to make such a judgement?
Ifthe School Board finds it necessary to close a school/schools due to economic reasons, what criteria would you, as a Board member, use to make such a judgement?
If the School Board finds it necessary, due to the State-imposed revenue controls, to make further budget cuts to the 2011-12 budget, what criteria would you, as a Board member, use to make such a judgement?
IdentifY specific MMSD programs and/or policies which you believe should to be modified, re-prioritized, or eliminated, and explain why.
What should the District do to reduce violence/assure that proper discipline and safety (of the learning and working environment) is maintained in our schools?
Do you agree that the health insurance provided to District employees should be mutually selected through collective bargaining?
_ _ YES _ _ NO Explain your concerns/proposed solutions relative to the District's efforts to reduce the "achievement gap".
Should planning time for teachers be increased? If yes, how could this be accomplished?
Given that the Wisconsin Association of School Boards rarely supports the interests of the Madison Metropolitan School District, do you support the District withdrawing from the W ASB? Please explain your rationale.
From what sources do you believe that public schools should be funded?
a. Do you support further increasing student fees? _ _ YES _ _ _ NO
Do you support the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools' (WAES) initiative to raise sales tax by 1% to help fund schools?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Do you support class sizes of 15 or less for all primary grades? _ _ YES _ _ NO
Do you support:
a. The use of public funds (vouchers) to enable parents to pay tuition with tax payers' money for religious and private schools?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
b. The expansion of Charter schools within the Madison Metropolitan School District? _ _ YES _ _ NO
c. The Urban League's proposed "Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men" as a charter school which would not be an instrumentality of the District?
_ _ YES _ _ _ NO
Do you agree that the usual and customary work ofteachers, i.e. work ofthose in MTI's teacher bargaining unit, should not be performed by others (sub-contracted)?
_ _ YES _ _ NO List MMSD staff and Board member(s) from whom you do or would seek advice.
Is your candidacy being promoted by any organization? _ _ YES _ _ NO
If yes, please name such organization(s). Have you ever been employed as a teacher? If yes, please describe why you left the teaching profession.
Do you support the inclusion model for including Title 1, EEN and ESL students in the regular education classroom? Why/why not?
What grouping practices do you advocate for talented and gifted (TAG) students?
Aside from limitations from lack ofadequate financial resources, what problems to you feel exist in meeting TAG students' needs at present, and how would you propose to solve these problems?
The Board ofEducation has moved from the development ofpolicy to becoming involved in implementation of policy; i.e. matters usually reserved to administration. Some examples are when it:
a. Decided to hear parents' complaints about a teacher's tests and grading. b. Decided to modifY the administration's decision about how a State Statute should be implemented.
Do you believe that the Board should delegate to administrators the implementation of policy which the Board has created?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Do you believe that the Board should delegate to administrators the implementation of State Statutes? _ _ YES _ _ NO
Do you support the Board exploring further means to make their meetings more efficient? _ _ YES _ _ _ NO
Do you support a merit pay scheme being added to the Collective Bargaining Agreement _ _ YES _ _ _ NO
If yes, based on which performance indicators?
Do/did/will your children attend private or parochial schools during their K-12 years? Ifno, and ifyou have children, what schools have/will they attend(ed)?
_ _ YES _ _ NO If you responded "yes", please explain why your child/children attended private parochial schools.
Legislation
Will you introduce and vote for a motion which would direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage oflegislation to eliminate the revenue controls on public schools and return full budgeting authority to the School Board?
_ _ YES _ _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage oflegislation to prohibit the privatization ofpublic schools via the use oftuition tax credits (vouchers) to pay tuition with taxpayers' money to private or religious schools?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage of legislation which will maintain or expand the benefit level of the Wisconsin Family and Medical Leave Act?
_ _ YES _ _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage oflegislation which will increase the retirement formula multiplier from 1.6% to 2% for teachers and general employees, i.e. equal that of protective employees?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage of legislation which will forbid restrictions to free and open collective bargaining for the selection ofinsurance for public employees (under Wis. Stat. 111.70), including the naming ofthe insurance carrier?
_ _ YES
_ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage of legislation which will guarantee free and open collective bargaining regarding the establishment of the school calendar/school year, including when the school year begins?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsiu Association of School Boards to request the introduction and promote the passage of legislation to forbid the work of employees organized under Wis. Stat. 111.70 (collective bargaining statute) to be subcontracted?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to seek passage of legislation which will require full State funding of any State-mandated program?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Will you introduce and vote for a motion to direct the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to seek passage oflegislation which will provide adequate State funding of public education?
_ _ YES _ _ NO
Do you support a specific school finance reform plan (e.g., School Finance Network (SFN), Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools (WAES), Andrews/Matthews Plan)?
Why/why not? Your Campaign:
Are you, or any of your campaign committee members, active in or supportive (past or present) of the "Get Real", "ACE", "Vote No for Change" or similar organizations?
Name ofCampaign Committee/Address/Phone #/Treasurer. List the members ofyour campaign committee.
IN 1975, when New York City teetered toward bankruptcy, Hugh Carey, then the governor of the state of New York, convinced the teachers' union to invest a significant amount of its pension funds in bail-out bonds. He also persuaded District Council 37 to shelve pay increases for its municipal workers. The unions played a crucial role in saving the city and probably the state with it. Thirty-five years later, during his gubernatorial campaign, Andrew Cuomo gave copies of "The Man Who Saved New York", an account of Mr Carey's role in the crisis, to labour leaders. Seymour Lachman, the book's co-author, reckons that, like Mr Carey, Mr Cuomo wants and needs the unions' help in surviving the current crisis.
Facing a $10 billion deficit, Mr Cuomo campaigned on pension reform, making it clear he was going to target public-sector unions and sounding more like his Republican neighbour across the Hudson, Chris Christie, than a Democrat. Mr Christie stirred up a lot of headlines when he took on the unions, most recently calling them greedy, selfish and self-interested. Mr Cuomo is less vitriolic, but no less adamant that he wants the unions to do their part. During his budget address on February 1st, in which he declared the state to be "functionally bankrupt", he called on the state's public-sector unions to make $450m in concessions. He threatened, as a "last resort", to lay off up to 9,800 state workers to get the savings needed.
Yet this year, when Vern Williams looked at the Jefferson application, he felt not the usual urge to get his kids in, but a dull depression. On the first page of Jefferson's letter to teachers writing recommendations, in boldface type, was the school board's new focus: It wanted to prepare "future leaders in mathematics, science, and technology to address future complex societal and ethical issues." It sought diversity, "broadly defined to include a wide variety of factors, such as race, ethnicity, gender, English for speakers of other languages (ESOL), geography, poverty, prior school and cultural experiences, and other unique skills and experiences." The same language was on the last page of the application.
"This is just one example of why I have lost all faith in the TJ admissions process," Williams said. "In fact, I'm pretty embarrassed that the process seems no more effective than flipping coins."
Education writer explains how the former D.C. schools chief helped stoke anti-union fires
A half-century ago, Wisconsin became the first state in the nation to pass legislation allowing collective bargaining for public employees, including educators. At the time, teachers across the country, who make up a significant share of public employees, were often underpaid and mistreated by autocratic administrators. In the fight for greater dignity, union leaders such as Albert Shanker in New York City linked teacher unionization to the fledgling civil rights movement.
Today, Wisconsin is again at the forefront of a union battle - this time in Republican Gov. Scott Walker's effort to cut his state's budget deficit in part by curtailing collective bargaining for teachers and other public employees. How did it become okay, once more, to vilify public-sector workers, especially the ones who are educating and caring for our children?
Education historian Diane Ravitch says the teachers on the front lines of labor rallies in Wisconsin reflect growing anger among educators nationwide. Teachers are sick and tired, she says, of being blamed for the ills of America's public schools.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
Now, as teachers started standing up in union protests in Wisconsin, Diane Ravitch sat down and wrote an opinion piece for CNN's website titled "Why America's Teachers are Enraged." When Diane Ravitch looked at the teachers camping out at Wisconsin's capital, she connected their demonstrations to what she says is a simmering rage felt among teachers across the country, an anger among educators who feel they've been unfairly blamed for everything that's wrong with schools today. Within a few days, Ravitch's article was a sensation on social media sites. She got 8,000 comments on Facebook.
We want to hear from teachers and parents, also students out there, about this issue. Do you feel that teachers are unfairly under attack, or do teachers need to rethink the way they do their jobs?
Gov. Andrew Cuomo introduced legislation Monday that would cap school superintendents' salaries based on district enrollment, with a maximum salary of $175,000 a year.
The proposal sparked immediate opposition from superintendents and other school officials, who said the state gives local school districts the authority to set superintendents' salaries.
Cuomo said his plan would save about $15 million a year. The best areas for potential savings include back-office overhead, administration, consultants and consolidations, he said.
"We must wake up to the new economic reality that government must be more efficient and cut the cost of bureaucracy," he said in a statement. "We must streamline government because raising taxes is not an option."
Labor bills and union protesters drew most of the attention at the Indiana Statehouse last week, as Democrats in the House of Representatives walked out and headed to Illinois to block Republicans from conducting business.
But the other half of the stalemate is over wide-ranging education reform that could change where Indiana children go to school, how their teachers are evaluated, and the formula for funding the system that uses about half of Hoosiers' state tax dollars.
Democrats say Republicans are trying to dismantle public education. Republicans say Democrats are just protecting teachers unions.
The guests sipped wine and nibbled sushi, guacamole and Gruyere - lawyers, bankers, preschool teachers, managers and consultants of various kinds, bound together by the anxious decision they must confront in the months ahead: where their 4-year-olds will go to school in the fall.
Downstairs, a flyer by the doorman's desk had greeted them with a provocative question: "Why should you have to spend college tuition on kindergarten?" Back upstairs, in the stylish apartment on West 99th Street, Eva S. Moskowitz, a former City Council member who runs a network of charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, delivered a tantalizing sales talk.
"Middle-class families need options too," she said.
But Moskowitz is trying to expand her chain into a whole new precinct of the city, the relatively well-off Upper West Side. And outside the parties she has organized to drum up interest, the reaction has been anything but warm from the neighborhood's stridently anti-charter political establishment.
This is your chance, Wisconsin taxpayer, to cut the 2012 state budget to fix the deficit.
To answer, you need to know what are the most expensive programs. Once you know that, you can set your own priorities. Is aid to public schools more important than health care spending, for example, or aid to local governments?
On Tuesday, you can see how your cuts compare to those that Republican Gov. Scott Walker will recommend.
So, let's start - and your budget cuts should total $1.3 billion. According to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the most state tax funds (not including federal and other funds) are spent on these programs.
No. 1: Aid to public schools: $5.3 billion in direct aid and $6.2 billion if you count tax credits paid property owners to hold down property taxes. Hint: Tuesday, Walker is expected to recommend a $450 million cut in aid to public schools next year. The governor signaled the size of this cut when he said that weakening collective bargaining laws for public employees would allow school districts to save even more - about $488 million - than the cut.
No. 2: Medicaid health care programs that now care for one in five Wisconsin residents: $1.55 billion from state taxes, although federal funds push the annual cost of this program to more than $6 billion. Hint: If you cut state tax funds for Medicaid, you will also be losing federal funds because about 60% of Medicaid funding comes from Washington. And if you cut state aid for Medicaid, you must also cut some care or pay less to medical professionals who provide that care, which could prompt them to no longer take Medicaid patients.
IF our state Legislature takes no action this session, Washington state will drop its new, improved math standards for an untested experiment: Common Core "national" standards that have never been used in the classroom and for which assessments have yet to be developed.
And there is a high price tag for such a switch, an expense our state can ill afford. Surprisingly, one of the most profound changes in U.S. education in decades has been virtually uncovered by the national media.
Until two years ago, our state had some of the worst math standards in the country, rated "F" by the Fordham Foundation, and lacking many of the essentials found in standards used by the highest-performing nations. That all changed in 2008, when under the impetus of the state Legislature, a new set of standards, based on world-class math requirements, was adopted.
Evaluating the success of the policy depends on where you sit.
"It's helped us in a thousand ways. It was absolutely central to our turnaround here," Mr. Daniels said in an interview. Without union contracts to slow him down, he said, it has been easy for him to merge the procurement operations of numerous state agencies, saving millions of dollars. One move alone -- outsourcing and consolidating food service operations for Indiana's 28 prisons -- has saved the state $100 million since 2005, he said. Such moves led to hundreds losing their jobs.
For state workers in Indiana, the end of collective bargaining also meant a pay freeze in 2009 and 2010 and higher health insurance payments. Several state employees said they now paid $5,200 a year in premiums, $3,400 more than when Mr. Daniels took office, though there are cheaper plans available. Earlier in his tenure, Mr. Daniels adopted a merit pay system, with some employees receiving no raises and those deemed to be top performers getting up to 10 percent.
Andrea Helm, an employee at a children's home in Knightstown, Ind., said that soon after collective bargaining was ended and the union contract expired, coveted seniority preferences disappeared. "I saw a lot of employees who had 20, 30 years on the job fired," she said. "I think they were trying to cut the more expensive people on top to make their budget smaller."
he housing bubble and subsequent Wall Street collapse wreaked havoc on the nation's retirement savings, as many pension funds and 401(k) plans suffered losses of 30% or more. State and local governments are now facing huge unfunded pension liabilities, prompting policymakers to scramble for ways to close the gap without slashing payrolls and services. But a new report from the Little Hoover Commission in Sacramento makes a more troubling point: Many state and local government employees have been promised pensions that the public couldn't have afforded even had there been no crash.
The commission's analysis of the problem is hotly disputed by union leaders, who contend that the financial woes of pension funds have been overblown. The commission's recommendations are equally controversial: Among other things, it urges state lawmakers to roll back the future benefits that current public employees can accrue, raise the retirement age and require employees to cover more pension costs. Given that state courts have rejected previous attempts to alter the pensions already promised to current workers, the commission's recommendation amounts to a Hail Mary pass. Yet it's one worth throwing.
A bipartisan, independent agency that promotes efficiency in government, the Little Hoover Commission studied the public pension issue for 10 months before issuing its findings Thursday. Much of the 90-page report is devoted to making the case that, to use the commission's blunt words, "pension costs will crush government." Without a "miraculous" improvement in the funds' investments, the commission states, "few government entities -- especially at the local level -- will be able to absorb the blow without severe cuts to services."
During the holiday break this winter, a woman in my neighbourhood was at the supermarket with her son when they ran into the son's teacher. "See you Monday," the mother said. The teacher gaily informed her she would not be back until mid-month, as she had planned a vacation in Central America. Teachers used to content themselves with the months off they enjoy in summers and at holidays, but they have got used to more. One can understand why American public employees ardently defend their unions, and the benefits they win. But one can also understand why, in a time of straitened budgets, union-negotiated contracts might be among the first places to make savings.
A fierce budget battle has been running for more than a week in Madison, Wisconsin. It goes far beyond salaries and benefits, to touch on the deeper question of whether collective bargaining has any place in government employment. Governor Scott Walker, a Republican elected last autumn with support from the Tea Party movement, believes it does not. His "budget repair" bill not only requires state employees to contribute to their pension and health plans. It would also end collective bargaining for benefits. Democratic senators, lacking the votes to defeat the bill, fled the state, denying the quorum necessary to bring it to a vote.
Mr Walker is not making a mountain out of a molehill. Wisconsin has a $137m budget gap to fill this year and a $3.6bn deficit over the next two. The big year-on-year leap reflects, in part, the expiration of federal stimulus spending, much of which was used to avoid laying off government workers. Citizens of other advanced countries sometimes make the mistake of assuming that the US has a skeletal bureaucracy. That is wrong. Once you include state, county and city employees, it is a formidable workforce and an expensive one. State employees account for up to $6,000bn in coming pension costs. Wisconsin's difficulties are milder than those elsewhere, which means that similar clashes are arising in other states, especially where Republicans rule.
Many states emphasise abstract concepts rather than history itself. In Delaware, for example, pupils "will not be expected to recall any specific event or person in history". Other states teach children about early American history only once, when they are 11. Yet other states show scars from the culture wars. A steady, leftward lean has been followed by a violent lurch to the right. Standards for Texas, passed last year, urge pupils to question the separation of church and state and "evaluate efforts by global organisations to undermine US sovereignty through the use of treaties".
Some states fare better. South Carolina has set impressive standards--for example, urging teachers to explain that colonists did not protest against taxation simply because taxes were too high. Other states, Mr Finn argues, would do well to follow South Carolina's example. "Twenty-first century skills" may help pupils become better workers; learning history makes them better citizens.
For nearly two decades the Tax Foundation has published an estimate of the combined state-local tax burden shouldered by the residents of each of the 50 states. For each state, we calculate the total amount paid by the residents in taxes, then divide those taxes by the state's total income to compute a "tax burden." We make this calculation not only for the most recent year but also for earlier years because tax and income data are revised periodically by government agencies.
The goal is to focus not on the tax collectors but on the taxpayers. That is, we answer the question: What percentage of their income are the residents of this state paying in state and local taxes? We are not trying to answer the question: How much money have state and local governments collected? The Census Bureau publishes the definitive comparative data answering t hat question.
It's not only Republicans like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie who are challenging unions. When it comes to teachers unions, increasingly it's Democrats like Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the public school system in Washington, D.C.
Rhee led the school district for almost three years. While she was there, she tied pay increases to merit rather than tenure and fired hundreds of teachers who she said were underperforming.
Those moves angered teachers unions across the country and made Rhee one of the most controversial figures in education reform. Now, she's heading up an education advocacy group based out of Sacramento, Calif., called StudentsFirst. With it, she tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz, she hopes to create a powerful lobby to push for education reform.
Oakland schools, rather than the district's headquarters, might absorb almost all of the budget cuts coming from the state this year, district staff tell us. The rationale? That the central office took the brunt of the reductions last year, sustaining two-thirds of the cuts.
Do you buy it?
Before you answer, get the facts in a new financial report published by the district and posted on the blog. It's fascinating (for a financial report) because it slices the current and past-year's expenses in so many ways.
About half of the cuts to the school district's "unrestricted," or general-purpose, fund and 56 percent of the cuts to the total general fund came from central services, according to the report.
Note: This isn't the full picture. Slide 2 suggests that adult education programs are not included in that breakdown. (Adult schools took a $7 million hit last year; that has been counted as a "central services" cut in past accounting, though it arguably is not.) Early childhood education, food services, construction dollars and self insurance don't appear to factor in either.
Here's an idea for resolving the state's budget repair bill crisis. Governor Walker's budget repair bill is designed to eviscerate public employee unions. But with a few changes it could actually lead to an innovative and productive way of addressing the legitimate concerns with the collective bargaining process, while preserving the most important rights of teachers and other public employees.
Background: A Tale of Two Unions
First, some background that highlights the two sides of the issue for me as a member of the Madison School Board. Early on Friday morning, February 25, our board approved a contract extension with our AFSCME bargaining units, which include our custodians and food service workers. The agreement equips the school district with the flexibility to require the AFSCME workers to make the contributions toward their retirement accounts and any additional contributions toward their health care costs that are required by the budget repair bill, and also does not provide for any raises. But the agreement does preserve the other collective bargaining terms that we have arrived at over the years and that have generally worked well for us.
AFSCME has stated that its opposition to the Governor's bill is not about the money, and our AFSCME bargaining units have walked that talk.
Our recent dealings with MTI, the union representing our teachers and some other bargaining units, have been less satisfying. Because of teacher walk outs, we have to make up the equivalent of four days of school. An obvious way to get started on this task would be to declare Friday, February 25, which has been scheduled as a no-instruction day so that teachers can attend the Southern Wisconsin Educational Inservice Organization (SWEIO) convention, as a regular school day.
Through a variety of circumstances, I've had an opportunity to recently visit with several Dane County (and Madison) businesses with significant blue collar manufacturing/distribution employment. In all cases, these firms face global price/cost challenges, things that affect their compensation & benefits. Likely reductions in redistributed State of Wisconsin tax dollars could lead to significantly higher property taxes during challenging economic times, if that's the route our local school boards take.
Let's face it: Teachers union president John Matthews decides when to open and when to close Madison schools; the superintendent can't even get a court order to stop him. East High teachers marched half the student body up East Washington Avenue Tuesday last week. Indoctrination, anyone?
This Tuesday, those students began their first day back in class with the rhyming cadences of professional protester Jesse Jackson, fresh from exhorting unionists at the Capitol, blaring over the school's loudspeakers. Indoctrination, anyone?
Madison Teachers Inc. has been behind every local referendum to blow apart spending restraints. Resist, as did elected school board member Ruth Robarts, and Matthews will brand you "Public Enemy Number One."
When then-school board member Juan Jose Lopez would not feed out of the union's hand, Matthews sent picketers to his place of business, which happened to be Briarpatch, a haven for troubled kids. Cross that line, kid!
The teachers union is the playground bully of state government. Wisconsin Education Association Council spent $1.5 million lobbying the Legislature in 2009, more than any other entity and three times the amount spent by WMC, the business lobby.
Under Gov. Doyle, teachers were allowed to blow apart measures to restrain spending and legislate the union message into the curriculum. Student test scores could be used to determine teacher pay -- but only if the unions agreed.
The most liberal president since FDR came to a school in Madison to announce "Race to the Top" grants for education reform. How many millions of dollars did we lose when the statewide teachers union sandbagged the state's application?
I have not seen the Madison business community step up to the plate like this since getting Monona Terrace built 20 years ago.
CUNA Mutual Foundation is backing Kaleem Caire's proposal for a Madison Prep charter school. Steve Goldberg, president of the CUNA Foundation, made that announcement this Saturday morning. The occasion was a forum held at CUNA to rally support for the project. CUNA's support will take the form of in-kind contributions, Goldberg said.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men would open in August 2012 -- if the Madison school board agrees. School board president Maya Cole told me that she knows there is one vote opposed. That would be Marj Passman, a Madison teachers union-first absolutist.
The school board is scheduled to decide at its meeting on March 28. Mark that date on your calendars.
CUNA is a much-respected corporate citizen. We'll see if that is enough to overcome the teachers union, which opposes Madison Prep because the charter school would be non-union.
Responding to criticism that tenure gives even poor teachers a job for life, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, announced a plan Thursday to overhaul how teachers are evaluated and dismissed.
It would give tenured teachers who are rated unsatisfactory by their principals a maximum of one school year to improve. If they did not, they could be fired within 100 days.
Teacher evaluations, long an obscure detail in an educator's career, have moved front and center as school systems try to identify which teachers are best at improving student achievement, and to remove ineffective ones.
The issue has erupted recently, with many districts anticipating layoffs because of slashed budgets. Mayors including Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Cory A. Booker of Newark have attacked seniority laws, which require that teacher dismissals be based on length of experience rather than on competency.
Ms. Weingarten has sought to play a major role in changing evaluations and tenure, lest the issue be used against unions to strip their influence over work life in schools -- just as Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin and Ohio are trying to do this week.
As you have surely read, there's a lot going on in Madison, Wis., these days. The tens of thousands of protesters currently storming the Capitol came about when our new governor, Scott Walker, called a special legislative session in order to introduce a "budget repair bill." The stated purpose for this emergency session and this bill was that we have a short-term deficit that needs to be addressed.
Gov. Walker and Republican legislators have taken the liberty of extending their scope well beyond that original purpose. Instead of focusing on the short-term deficit as promised, they are using this emergency session as an opportunity to introduce dramatic, systematic changes to how local governments operate all over Wisconsin. The most controversial, which saves no money in the near future and perhaps no money ever unless policymakers make future decisions to cut benefits, is to eliminate collective bargaining for non-public safety employees.
Below is an e-mail from David Boardman of the Times. (I had not written to him; he sent this on his own.)
My take on this issue of whether the Times held this story back - I think it's possible. I say that because of the issues that Charlie has raised, namely, that embedded in the Times' story of the internal auditor's resignation were many possible questions about Silas Potter.
That they were trying to get their facts right is good and admirable but it certainly took them a longer time than I might of thought given their resources. I'm a just one person, a citizen journalist so it is harder for me to press people I call for information. (However, that doesn't stop me from calling. Hey, I just left Fred Stephens a message to give me a ring. I won't hold my breath but it never hurts to ask.)
Here is my take on the issue of a conspiracy at the Times to cover the district and in particular, Dr. Goodloe-Johnson. Do I think the Times and the Alliance and Stand and the district all sat down in a room and said, "Here's what each of needs to do to move forward what we believe is best for public education in Seattle." No, I don't think that ever happened. I don't think even two of those groups got together in a room and said that.
Only 18 percent of the city's public school fourth graders and 13 percent of its eighth graders demonstrated proficiency on the most recent national science exams, far below state and national achievement levels, according to results released Thursday.
Alan J. Friedman, a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, the bipartisan group that oversees the tests, called the city's results "a big disappointment," particularly because New York has a number of cultural organizations devoted to science, like the Museum of Natural History and the New York Hall of Science in Queens, which he directed for 22 years.
The exam was given in 2009 to a sampling of 4,300 fourth and eighth graders in the city, or about 3 percent of students in those grades. Nationwide, 33 percent of fourth graders and 29 percent of eighth graders showed proficiency, and in New York State, those numbers were 30 and 31, respectively.
Here are the fiscal facts. Unlike most employees, few Wisconsin teachers have to contribute more than marginally to their retirement and health care costs. My colleague Bob Costrell, who has done substantial work in Milwaukee, calculates that the city's public school teachers get a remarkable package of benefits equal to 74% of salary, roughly double the normal benefits for workers calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics but in line with other Wisconsin teachers.
And that's not all. By collective bargaining agreement, the Wisconsin Education Association Council has a lock on health insurance coverage for members, not necessarily a great service for teachers but a wonderful profit center for the union.
What explains this? As one who has served in government and taught public personnel management, the answers are three-fold, and in combination explain why allowing a broad scope for collective bargaining undermines transparency and, ultimately, democracy.
First, teachers unions play a big role in politics, meaning that, as Terry Moe writes in "Teacher Unions and School Board Elections" (published in a Brookings Institution book on school boards), "the fact that school boards are elected means that the teacher unions can actually participate in choosing - or even literally choose - the management they will be bargaining with."
In the California school districts Moe studies, unions fund candidates and mobilize voters in (low-turnout) school board elections and often recruit the candidates. Unions thus control both sides of the collective bargaining table. Surveys of school board members suggest that business interests, in contrast, have little power.
I have not seen comparable research on Wisconsin, but I suspect similar dynamics.
The problem with public sector/private sector pay comparisons is that pay comes in two forms; current and deferred (ie pensions). A pension promise from the government is a very valuable thing indeed; some states have made it constitutionally protected. So, unlike the typical private sector employee who is now in a DC scheme, the public sector employee has certainty about his or her pension entitlement. If the equity market falters, the DC plan member will suffer; the employer of the DB member will make up the shortfall. In effect, the employer has written the employee a put option on the market.
How valuable is this option? We can make a judgment by looking at the Bank of England scheme. It avoids all equity risk by buying index-linked bonds to cover its pension liability. This costs it 55% of payroll in the current year (the ratio varies with the level of real yields). The average contribution into a DC scheme (employer and employee) is 10%, in both Britain and America. In a room full of actuaries last week, I asked whether this was a fair basis of pay comparsion and the answer was yes.
The fight to bring a little private-sector discipline to America's public sector has begun at last
ELECTIONS, Barack Obama once said, have consequences. The Republicans' triumph in last year's mid-terms was seen by many as an instruction from the electorate to hack away at America's sprawling government. In Washington, DC, that debate has gone nowhere. Both Mr Obama and his foes have produced fantastical budgets, full of illusory savings and ignoring the huge entitlement programmes. A government shutdown is looming. But look beyond the Beltway and something rather more promising is under way.
Unlike the federal government, which can borrow money to plug its budgetary gap, almost all the states are required to balance their budgets. Their revenues have been slashed by the recession; the stimulus funds that saw them through 2009 and 2010 have expired; medical costs are soaring. Tax rises remain unpopular, and so are deep cuts to important state-provided services like schools and the police. So governors are finally confronting the privileges that public-sector employees have managed to negotiate for themselves in recent decades.
School administrators and teachers raised questions Wednesday about the potential costs of a proposal backed by Republican Gov. Susana Martinez to stop promoting public school students who lack basic skills in reading.
Legislation under consideration by the House Education Committee will stop third-graders from moving to the fourth grade if they aren't proficient in reading starting in the 2012-13 school year. A student could be held back one year and schools will be required to provide students with programs to improve their performance.
In testimony to the committee, educational groups suggested that school districts will need additional money for remedial and intensive instruction to help struggling students.
"We know that if we are going to do effective remediation, there are going to be costs associated with that," said Tom Sullivan of the New Mexico Coalition of School Administrators.
Protests sparked by a push from Wisconsin Republicans to gut collective bargaining for unions - in order to balance the state budget - continue to spread, with several state capitals witnessing vitriolic faceoffs between union protesters and tea party activists this week.
About 300 union protesters and about 100 tea party activists taunted one another in front of the gold-domed Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Wednesday, in a scene echoing similar standoffs earlier in the week in Columbus, Ohio; Des Moines, Iowa; and Denver, Colo.
Meanwhile, deadlock continues in Madison, Wis., ground zero of the debate over public-sector union benefits and their impact on deficit-burdened state coffers. Democratic senators there have decamped for Illinois in protest - and to thwart a quorum for a vote on the union-targeting legislation. A similar episode is playing out in Indiana, where the state legislature is also controlled by Republicans.
As Wisconsin teachers and other public union workers take on Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his plans to end collective bargaining, Arizona teachers wonder: Could there be an impact here?
Unlike Wisconsin, Arizona is a right-to-work state, along with 21 other states. The National Education Association has an affiliate here - the Arizona Education Association - and most school districts have individual chapters. But Arizona doesn't have collective bargaining, what public workers are arguing to keep intact in Wisconsin.
The education association represents teachers when lobbying Arizona lawmakers and in negotiation efforts, such as "meet and confer" or "interest based bargaining" with school district leadership.
"With collective bargaining, you're a little more of a partner at the table than what we see here. In some regards we are a partner, but there are other issues we're not always included on," Mesa Education Association president Kirk Hinsey said, pointing out that a school district's governing board ultimately makes the decisions.
The word "fund-raiser" evokes an image of endless speeches, bland evening gowns and even blander buffets, but Edible Schoolyard's yearly benefit should veer a little more toward the wild side. With three fabulous hostesses (the food artist Jennifer Rubell, the fashion buyer Julie Gilhart and the 303 gallerist Lisa Spellman) and a storied downtown locale (the Odeon), the event promises to be more Studio 54 than Cipriani Ballroom. "It's the kind of fund-raiser that I would love to attend, a fund-raiser that is not boring" says Rubell, just back from the opening of her "Engagement" show at the Stephen Friedman gallery in London. "My favorite women in the city will be there, including Lynn Wagenknecht" -- the restaurant's owner -- "who came up with the idea."
The $50 cover charge goes toward supporting Edible Schoolyard, the Alice Waters-founded organization that creates small farms in public schoolyards to reconnect children with the food-growing cycle. "I think kids should be exposed to the aesthetics of food from a very young age," Rubell says. "And growing food is so exciting."
Lisa Fitzgerald is a counselor in the Hustisford school district and is married to Republican Senator Scott Fitzgerald.
Superintendent Jeremy Biehl says the school board decided Wednesday night to send preliminary layoff slips to all 34 members of the teaching staff, including librarians and counselors. Biehl says the action was taken because of the uncertainty of the state budget bill.
The Madison School District and others across the state are scrambling to issue preliminary layoff notices to teachers by Monday due to confusion over Gov. Scott Walker's budget repair bill and the delay of the state budget.
Madison may issue hundreds of preliminary layoff notices to teachers Monday if an agreement with its union can't be reached to extend a state deadline, school officials said Thursday.
The School Board plans to meet at 7 a.m. Friday in closed session to discuss the matter.
The Wisconsin Association of School Boards this week urged local school officials to decide on staff cuts by Monday or risk having potential layoffs challenged later in court.
"It's hugely important and hugely upsetting to everyone," said Craig Bender, superintendent of the Sauk Prairie School District, which will issue preliminary notices to 63 of its roughly 220 teachers. "It has a huge effect on how schools can function and how well we can continue to educate all kids."
Bender said the preliminary notices reflected "a guess" about the number of teachers who could lose their jobs because the state budget has not been released.
The first tremors of what could be coming when Gov. Scott Walker releases his 2011-'13 budget proposal next week are rippling through Wisconsin school districts, where officials are preparing for the worst possibilities and girding for fiscal fallouts.
"I'm completely nervous," Cudahy School District Superintendent Jim Heiden said. "Walking into buildings and seeing teachers break into tears when they see you - I mean, that's the level of anxiety that's out there."
For the past two weeks, protests in Madison have been the focus of a nation, as angry public-sector workers have descended on the Capitol to try to stop Walker's proposal to roll back most of their collective bargaining rights, leaving them with the ability to negotiate only limited wage increases.
Next week, the demonstrations could move to many of the state's 425 school districts, the first local entities that will have to hash out budgets for a fiscal year that starts July 1.
Gov. Scott Walker's secrecy and rhetoric regarding his budget plans are fueling rumors and anxiety as well as a flurry of preliminary teacher layoff notices in school districts around the state.
In Dane County, the Belleville school board voted to send layoff notices to 19 staff members at a meeting on Monday. Both the Madison and Middleton Boards of Education will meet Friday to determine their options and if they will also need to send out layoff notices, given the dire predictions of the governor's budget which will be announced March 1.
In Madison, hundreds of teachers could receive layoff notices, district officials confirmed. Superintendent Daniel Nerad called it an option that would provide "maximum flexibility under the worst case scenario" in an e-mail sent to board members Thursday evening.
Most districts are bracing, and planning, for that worst case scenario.
A resolution that could give the governor control over Utah education moved one step closer to becoming law Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the sponsor of another resolution that sought to amend the state constitution to make it clear that the state school board's control and supervision over education is "as provided by statute," said he will likely no longer push that measure.
The Senate voted 23-6 to give preliminary approval to SJR9, which seeks to amend the state constitution to place public and higher education under the governor's control. The Senate must now vote on the resolution one more time for it to advance to the House.
In order to take effect, SJR9 would ultimately have to pass the House and Senate by a two-thirds majority. The question would then be put to voters in the 2012 general election.
Advances in technology continue to change how adults view and interact with the world. Of course, those same advances are available to teachers and the youngsters who populate their classrooms.
These developments are leading to enormous challenges for teachers regarding the role digital devices can and should play in the learning process. For some educators, the view is that technology should only be utilized as a tool to help facilitate student understanding and mastery of the current curriculum. For other educators, technology is as fundamental to learning as reading and writing and therefore must become a separate segment of the school curriculum.
Amid substantial membership losses and a $14 million shortfall in its general operating budget, the National Education Association plans to double each active member's annual contribution to the national union's political and media funds.
Currently, $10 of each active member's NEA dues is allocated to these special accounts. The more than $20 million collected each year is then disbursed to state affiliates and political issue campaigns - such as last year's SQ 744 in Oklahoma. A portion of the money also pays for state and national media buys to support the union's agenda.
But the most recent numbers show NEA lost more than 54,000 active K-12 members since this time last year. Coupled with less-than-expected increases in the average teacher salary - upon which NEA dues are based - the union will find itself with $14 million less revenue than it had planned. This includes about $500,000 less in the political and media funds.
Robots could one day help teach kids in classrooms, suggests research involving droids and toddlers in California.
A robot named RUBI has already shown that it can significantly improve how well infants learn words, and the latest version of the bot under development should also be able to wheel around classrooms, too.
The idea to develop RUBI came to Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, when he was in Japan for research involving robots and his kids were in a child care center.
"I thought, 'Let's bring robots to the child care center,' and the children got really scared. It was a really horrible experience," Movellan recalled. "But it showed that the robots really got their attention, and that if we got the experience right, it could be potentially very powerful at evoking the emotional responses we'd want."
School districts required to offer health insurance through WEA Trust, a company created by the teachers' union, would save $68 million a year if employees could switch to the state health plan, Gov. Scott Walker said this week, repeating a claim he made last year.
"That's one of the many examples of why it's so critically important to change collective bargaining," Walker said at a news conference Monday before bringing up the issue again in his public address Tuesday.
Madison-based WEA Trust, created by the Wisconsin Education Association Council, disputes the claim. The insurer says it provides lower-cost choices, and districts can already join the state health plan.
"It's been an option for them for some time," said WEA Trust spokesman Steve Lyons.
About 65 percent of the state's school districts contract with WEA Trust, covering about 35 percent of school employees. Several large districts, including Green Bay, Madison and Milwaukee, don't offer the plan.
Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows:South Carolina - 50th
North Carolina - 49th
Georgia - 48th
Texas - 47th
Virginia - 44thIf you are wondering, Wisconsin, with its collective bargaining for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country.
As Mr Lemieux says, this doesn't show that collective bargaining makes school systems better. But it makes it pretty hard to argue the converse.
Our country is bankrupt. It's not bankrupt in 30 years or five years. It's bankrupt today.
Want proof? Look at President Barack Obama's 2010 budget. It showed a massive fiscal gap over the next 75 years, the closure of which requires immediate tax increases, spending cuts, or some combination totaling 8 percent of gross domestic product. To put 8 percent of GDP in perspective, this year's employee and employer payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare will amount to just 5 percent of GDP.
Actually, the picture is much worse. Nothing in economics says we should look out just 75 years when considering the present-value difference between future spending and future taxes. Over the full long-term, we need an extra 12 percent, not 8 percent, of GDP annually.
Seventy-five years seems like a long enough time to plan. It's not. Had the Greenspan Commission, which "fixed" Social Security back in 1983, focused on the true long term we wouldn't be sitting here now with Social Security 26 percent underfunded. The Social Security trustees, at least, have learned a lesson. The 26 percent figure is based on their infinite horizon fiscal- gap calculation.
The school district plans to send out dismissal notices to every one of its 1,926 teachers, an unprecedented move that has union leaders up in arms.
In a letter sent to all teachers Tuesday, Supt. Tom Brady wrote that the Providence School Board on Thursday will vote on a resolution to dismiss every teacher, effective the last day of school.
In an e-mail sent to all teachers and School Department staff, Brady said, "We are forced to take this precautionary action by the March 1 deadline given the dire budget outline for the 2011-2012 school year in which we are projecting a near $40 million deficit for the district," Brady wrote. "Since the full extent of the potential cuts to the school budget have yet to be determined, issuing a dismissal letter to all teachers was necessary to give the mayor, the School Board and the district maximum flexibility to consider every cost savings option, including reductions in staff." State law requires that teachers be notified about potential changes to their employment status by March 1.
"To be clear about what this means," Brady wrote, "this action gives the School Board the right to dismiss teachers as necessary, but not all teachers will actually be dismissed at the end of the school year."
The layoff clauses and the later deadlines for issuing layoff notices that are established by many of the layoff provisions in teacher collective bargaining agreements may be unavailable to districts if the budget repair bill passes in its current form. If this happens, the only way to reduce staff size for 2011-12 in some districts may be through the nonrenewal provisions of Wisconsin Statute 118.22. The absolute latest deadline for giving preliminary notice of nonrenewal to teachers for 2011-2012 would be February 28, 2011, but it would be preferable to have such notices issued by the 25th. Further, school districts that have always adhered to the section 118.22 nonrenewal deadlines to enact staff reductions must consider whether there is a need to issue additional preliminary notices of nonrenewal/staff reduction by the statutory deadline.
ACTION: WASB's Employment and Labor Law Staff encourages all school districts to give public notice of a special school board meeting for Thursday February 25, 2011 (or Friday February 26th if meeting on the 25th is not possible).
This presentation discusses the results of the DQC's sixth annual state analysis Data for Action 2010, a powerful policymaking tool to drive education leaders to use data in decision making.
In support of Pennsylvania's Senate Bill 1, which would provide taxpayer-funded vouchers to private schools, voucher evangelists have been citing a report by the Foundation for Educational Choice, "A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on How Vouchers Affect Public Schools." However, a review of the report by the National Education Policy Center finds no credible evidence that vouchers have improved student achievement.
Located at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the National Education Policy Center aims to provide high-quality information on education policy. Its review found that the "Win-Win" report, "based on a review of 17 studies, selectively reads the evidence in some of those studies, the majority of which were produced by voucher advocacy organizations.
"Moreover, the report can't decide whether or not to acknowledge the impact of factors other than vouchers on public schools. It attempts to show that public school gains were caused by the presence of vouchers alone, but then argues that the lack of overall gains for districts with vouchers should be ignored because too many other factors are at play." The review goes on to note that "existing research provides little reliable information about the competitive effects of vouchers, and this report does little to help answer the question."
The state of Michigan approved a plan for Detroit to close about half of its public schools and increase the average size of high-school classrooms to 60 students over the next four years to eliminate a $327 million deficit.
The plan was submitted in January by Robert Bobb, Detroit Public Schools' emergency financial manager, as a last-ditch scenario if the district couldn't find new revenue sources, which it hasn't so far. Final approval came after Mike Flanagan, the state superintendent of public instruction, cleared Mr. Bobb's initial plan with some new requirements, including that the district not file for bankruptcy protection during Mr. Bobb's remaining months in office.
The state approved the plan in a Feb. 8 letter, which the Detroit public-schools district released Monday.
Mr. Bobb said the deep cuts were necessary if the district hoped to be solvent again without additional state aid. But he said the strategy was ultimately ill-advised because it will likely drive even more students away, depriving the district of needed state funds, which Michigan apportions on the basis of enrollment.
Teachers in the School District of Fort Atkinson will not be paid for time taken off to participate in the ongoing protests at the State Capitol in Madison.
Fort Atkinson was among districts that were forced to cancel classes Friday in response to the number of teachers who failed to report for class, apparently opting to attend the protests on the governor's budget-repair bill. No Jefferson County schools were closed today due to either weather or the protests.
Following the adverse public reactions to teachers' departures causing school closures, the head of Wisconsin's teachers' union called upon educators to return to classrooms today and Tuesday rather than continue being absent to protest the anti-union bill in Madison.
Attached to this memorandum you will find the Fall Revised Budget version of the 2010-11 Citizen's Budget. The Citizen's Budget is intended to present financial information to the community in a format that is more easily understood. The first report includes 2009-10 Revised Budget, 2010-11 Revised Budget and groups expenditures into categories outlined as follows:
In-School Operations
Curriculum & Teacher Development & Support
Facilities, Other Than Debt Service
Transportation
Food Service
Business Services
Human Resources
General Administration
Debt Service
District-Wide
MSCR
The second report associates revenue sources with the specific expenditure area they are meant to support. In those areas where revenues are dedicated for a specific purpose (ie. Food Services) the actual amount is represented. In many areas of the budget, revenues had to be prorated to expenditures based on percentage that each specific expenditure bears of the total expenditure budget. It is also important to explain that property tax funds made up the difference between expenditures and all other sources of revenues. The revenues were broken out into categories as follows:
Local Non-Tax Revenue
Equalized & Categorical State Aid
Direct Federal Aid
Direct State Aid
Property Taxes
Both reports combined represent the 2010-11 Fall Revised Citizens Budget. This report can also be found on the District's web site.
The keys to success lie beyond K-12 education. It is critical to ensure that the earliest learners - those birth to age 5 - come to school prepared for learning in a school setting and that college students not only enter college but also succeed.
The recommendations made in this report align with and support these values. In addition to initiatives already underway, the task force recommends the following priorities, as well as the complete recommendations found in the full report:
Reorganize the Early Childhood Development Authority; create a system of support, including parent education, for students at all levels of kindergarten readiness; and create common school readiness standards and instruments.
Include sufficient funding in the state budget to improve access to effective, high-quality preschool programs.
Require, beginning in 2012-2013, collaboration among state-funded preschool, Head Start, and qualified child care programs in order to access state funding.
Create family literacy programs dedicating new state resources to provide comprehensive family engagement in all schools, especially the Commonwealth's lowest achieving schools.
Raise the compulsory school age, effective in 2016, from 16 to 18 with state-funded supports for students at risk of dropping out.
Create an advisory council, the Advanced Credit Advisory Council, to recommend policies, legislation, and a comprehensive funding model for advanced secondary coursework, college credit during high school, and early graduation options for the 2012 General Assembly.
Establish a steering committee to develop a comprehensive statewide plan for implementing a new model of secondary career and technical education with an emphasis on innovation, integration of core academics, 21st-century skills, project-based learning, and the establishment of full-time CTE programs, for implementation in the 2012 General Assembly.
Implement policies to enhance and expand virtual and blended learning, including funding options to ensure equitable access to students across the Commonwealth.
Include funding in the state budget to expand programs in Kentucky to recruit high-quality teacher candidates, including those who may enter through alternative certification routes.
Ensure school districts incorporate a balance of technology-enhanced formative and summative assessments that measure student mastery of 21st-century skills.
State Sen. Jim Tracy of Shelbyville, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, has said in a letter that he supports teachers but that teachers unions "are in the business of protecting membership and power, not serving the best interests of students or the teachers they represent."
Tracy also said teachers are receiving misinformation about some of the current proposals.
Tracy released the letter after news stories quoting his comments from a recent committee meeting. Gov. Bill Haslam's first legislative agenda includes proposals to make it more difficult for teachers to gain tenure.
"This is not at all about pointing fingers at the teachers," Haslam said. "It's about raising standards for all of us."
The governor said he's not taking a position on a bill that would eliminate teachers' collective bargaining rights that was advanced to a full Senate vote earlier this week.
A Chicago charter school that has received more than $23 million in public money since opening in 2004 is arguing that it is a private institution, a move teachers say is designed to block them from forming a union.
In papers filed with the National Labor Relations Board, attorneys for the Chicago Math and Science Academy on the city's North Side say the school should be exempt from an Illinois law that grants employees of all public schools the right to form unions for contract negotiations.
The school of about 600 students is appealing an unfavorable decision by a regional director of the national labor board. Academy officials say charter schools don't have the governmental ties that characterize public schools, such as government-appointed leadership or controls over wages, hours and working conditions. In other words, they say, the same freedoms over personnel and policy that many credit to charter schools' success are also indicative of their independence.
Gov. Chris Christie's controversial salary cap on new contracts for New Jersey public school superintendents is on track to cut about 10 percent from the combined $100 million currently paid to school chiefs throughout the state.
The pay ceiling went into effect Feb. 7, despite challenges from a superintendents' association, which says the cap will lead to massive turnover and discourage rising administrators from seeking the jobs.
State schools superintendent Mike Flanagan is urging Michigan educators and parents not to "panic" over Gov. Rick Snyder's budget plan that calls for spending cuts for cash-strapped public schools.
Flanagan said Friday in a podcast that Snyder is calling "for sacrifices from all of us, including schools" and urges school officials to remain calm despite the call for education cuts, The Grand Rapids Press reports.
"I'm asking all of us to hear this budget message and not do something I did as a superintendent 20 years ago and panic," he said.
Snyder's budget plan released Thursday proposes cutting public school funding by $470 per student, while intermediate school districts would be cut 5 percent.
Madison schools will open Tuesday for the first time in a week, but it won't be just any other school day.
Civil rights icon the Rev. Jesse Jackson will greet East High School students over the loudspeaker in the morning. Students have made posters in support of their teachers. And classrooms likely will be buzzing with discussion over the four-day teacher walkout prompted by Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to limit collective bargaining.
With that backdrop, district officials have been preparing principals and staff for what could be a dramatic day.
"We know that there's a lot of emotion here and we need to recognize that there's a lot of upset and upset in the parent community as well," Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad said.
The daunting tower of national, state and local debt in the United States will reach a level this year unmatched just after World War II and already exceeds the size of the entire economy, according to government estimates.
But any similarity between 1946 and now ends there. The U.S. debt levels tumbled in the years after World War II, but today they are still climbing and even deep cuts in spending won't completely change that for several years.
As President Obama and Republicans squabble over whose programs to cut and which taxes to raise, slow growth and a rising tide of interest payments - largely beyond their control - are making the job of fixing the budget much harder than in the past. Statehouses and governors face similar challenges.
Anyone who has ever tried to sneak healthy food into kids' lunches knows what Chicago Public Schools is going through.
Sometimes kids openly embrace the new food. Sometimes they eat it without realizing the difference. And sometimes they refuse it altogether.
CPS has met with all three reactions this school year, when it stopped serving daily nachos, Pop-Tarts and doughnuts and introduced healthier options at breakfast and lunch. But in a sign of how challenging this transition can be for schools, district figures show that lunch sales for September through December dropped by about 5 percentage points since the previous year, or more than 20,000 lunches a day.
The Washington Constitution makes education the highest priority of state government, but that doesn't stop lawmakers from cutting the money they spend on schools.
In fact, education spending as a percentage of the state budget has been declining for years.
In the past decade, education spending has gone from close to 50 percent to just above 40 percent of the state budget, despite the fact that some education spending is protected by the constitution.
The key to understanding state spending on education lies in knowing what qualifies as basic education and what does not. The definitions - some obvious, some less so - have been crafted over the years by state lawmakers, with pressure from the Washington Supreme Court.
Among the top five employers here are the county, the schools and the city. And that was enough to make Mr. Hahan, a union man from a union town, a supporter of Gov. Scott Walker's sweeping proposal to cut the benefits and collective-bargaining rights of public workers in Wisconsin, a plan that has set off a firestorm of debate and protests at the state Capitol. He says he still believes in unions, but thinks those in the public sector lead to wasteful spending because of what he sees as lavish benefits and endless negotiations.
"Something needs to be done," he said, "and quickly."
Across Wisconsin, residents like Mr. Hahan have fumed in recent years as tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs have vanished, and as some of the state's best-known corporations have pressured workers to accept benefit cuts.
Wisconsin's financial problems are not as dire as those of many other states. But a simmering resentment over those lost jobs and lost benefits in private industry -- combined with the state's history of highly polarized politics -- may explain why Wisconsin, once a pioneer in supporting organized labor, has set off a debate that is spreading to other states over public workers, unions and budget woes.
It's been a non-quiet week here in Madison. Everyone has his or her own take on the events. Since I'm a member of the Madison School Board, mine is necessarily a management perspective. Here's what the week's been like for me.
Nearly as soon as the governor's budget repair bill was released last Friday, I had a chance to look at a summary and saw what it did to collective bargaining rights. Basically, the bill is designed to gut public employee unions, including teacher unions. While it does not outlaw such unions outright, it eliminates just about all their functions.
Our collective bargaining agreement with MTI is currently about 165 pages, which I think is way too long. If the bill passes, our next collective bargaining agreement can be one paragraph -- way, way, way too short.
On Monday, Board members collaborated on a statement condemning the legislation and the rush to push it through. All Board members signed the statement on Monday evening and it was distributed to all MMSD staff on Tuesday.
It is no coincidence that the night President Obama sat down for a lovely dinner with a dozen of America's richest executives in Silicon Valley this week, that protests in Wisconsin over budget cuts and union worker rights reached a fever pitch. Though the President paid lip service to the protesters, a well-heeled, well-funded voting bloc he will no doubt rely on heavily for the 2012 presidential race, he understood what mattered most -- to him and America.
Technology
Innovation
Globalization
Education -- as offered by highly competitive colleges and universities that have little to no monopoly power
Entrepreneurialism - unshackled from government regulations, free from unionized labor and unfettered by legacy depictions of work and economy and business
Politics may force President Obama to become more actively, more visibly involved in the events of Wisconsin, where public worker unions, essentially America's last remaining unions, fight for de facto guarantees of job security, lifetime healthcare, lifetime benefits, sanctioned limits on hours worked and on responsibilities blurred. But the President is acutely aware that, as protests in Egypt offered a glimpse into the future, protests in Madison, Wisconsinwere a reminder of America's past.
This is Tea Party Redux. The Union Strikes Back. Yet just as with the angry tea party protests from two years ago, the song remains the same. Large swaths of Americans, having been party to an unspoken agreement that they would have a guaranteed middle class life, filled with highly targeted government benefits -- which they repeatedy insisted they "earned" and which they knew could not survive should they be spread throughout the wider population -- so too is it with the government worker unions. Unlike the entirety of the US population, they have a unique sanctuary within the American economy. Just like those in the Tea Party voiced their angry over policies that diminished their unique standing, in America and the world, so too do the protests in Wisconsin reflect anger and fear over exactly the same concerns. Both groups, of course, argued, believed perhaps, that what was good for them was good for workers, good for the middle class, good for America.
America's labor movement can claim historic victories that have served the common good. Safer workplaces. Laws to protect children from workplace exploitation. The eight-hour workday. Those who are in unions can justifiably be proud of those and other accomplishments.
But how proud are they that the children of Madison, Wis., have missed school the last two days because so many of their teachers abandoned their classrooms and joined a mass demonstration? Joined a mass demonstration to intimidate the members of the Wisconsin Legislature, who are trying to close a $3 billion deficit they face over the next two years?
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has demanded that state workers contribute roughly 5.8 percent of their wages toward their retirement. He wants them to pay for 12 percent of their health-care premiums. Those modest employee contributions would be the envy of many workers in the private sector.
Walker wants government officials to have authority to reshape public-employee benefits without collective bargaining. Walker wouldn't remove the right of unions to bargain for wages.
To the Monona Grove School Board,
The group of people in this school district who have sat across the bargaining table from the MGEA is rather small, and I am one of them. Bargaining with the MGEA was, hands down, the most bizarre and surreal trip through the looking glass I have ever experienced. I could drone on about a myriad of frustrations, but all else aside, I could never understand their complete and utter failure to realize the MG school board was not only not their enemy, but we also lacked the statutory power to improve their wages and benefits. While we could partake in rearranging the deck chairs on our own little Titanic, purchasing additional life boats was not within our power. Simply put, they directed a whole lot of energy toward a group who was essentially powerless all the while engaging in job actions that did little but harm students, demoralize many of their own members and generate ill will among the public. At times my own children were targeted, so please understand what I say next comes within this context.
Dawn of the dumbest data ... data-driven dementia... data: It keeps teachers busy. Take your pick. But these cats at my school really have to be stopped.
As you may suspect, we here at my school are "data-driven." That's right. There is no substitute for data. And the best thing about it, from an administrator's point of view, is that you don't have to worry about how long it takes teachers to collect the data or if it is really of any value in the first place. Just collect that data and tell everybody that you are collecting it and using it to make data-driven decisions ... for the kids. The rest, my friend, will fall into place. No worries.
I admire the erudite and public-spirited members of the Montgomery County Board of Education. Their superintendent, Jerry D. Weast, is one of the best in the business, a national leader with a smart staff.
So why are they so frightened of two little charter schools?
The Maryland State Department of Education shares my puzzlement. It looked carefully at the two most recent Montgomery charter applicants, Global Garden Public Charter School and Crossway Montessori Charter School, and promised them a $550,000 grant each once they got their charter approved. The charter groups had fresh ideas, energetic supporters and experienced educators, including two members of the Global Garden board who worked in Montgomery schools.
That was not enough to quell the fears of Weast's staff and an assortment of internal and external advisers. Weast's nine-page summary of their worries reads like a neurotic mother's letter to her son at summer camp, bemoaning all the terrible things that might happen to him.
In a controversial move, the Wake County School board in North Carolina voted to end its "busing-for-diversity" program in favor of sending children to schools in their own neighborhood. Host Liane Hansen talks with Superintendent Tony Tata, a military brigadier general and the former COO of the D.C. school system.
Perhaps this comes from too much time spent on airplanes but this week's White House budget projections reminded me of nothing more than a pre-flight safety video. The voiceover tells passengers to "stay calm and listen for instructions from the cabin crew in the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure" as eerily placid actors carefully strap on their oxygen masks or inflate their underseat life vests before attending to their children.
Of course this bears no resemblance to the unbridled panic that would ensue if a hole opened up in the fuselage at 35,000 feet. Perhaps US government economists operate on the same principle as airlines who refrain from showing videos of passengers trampling one another underfoot as the cabin fills with smoke. On the current fiscal trajectory, investors in America's Treasury market will rush madly for the emergency exits one of these days, but official forecasts assume they will never even break a sweat.
Of all the variables in any budget projection - economic growth, taxes, foreign military engagements - the thorniest is what Treasury investors will do. Discretionary items and even entitlements like social security can be cut but interest must be paid no matter what and, in the absence of perpetual quantitative easing, the government must pay what the market deems fair.
Wisconsin's fiscal crisis is real - not something ginned up by Gov. Scott Walker as a way to punish political opponents. The numbers don't lie. Like many other states, Wisconsin is in a fiscal quagmire, and not one of Walker's making.
The state has a budget hole of $3.6 billion for the 2011-'13 period. The budget must be balanced. But this time, it must not be "balanced" through trickery and gimmicks. This time, it should be balanced in fact as well as in theory. Walker intends to do that.
Walker is scheduled to deliver his budget address on Tuesday, although he may not release the budget document until later. We encourage the governor to show not only fiscal prudence but also ideological restraint. And we urge Walker to take special care with programs that help Wisconsin's most vulnerable citizens. Fairness and compassion should not take a holiday.
Walker's tough approach with state public employee unions in his budget repair bill is justified; their benefits for too long have been exempt from scrutiny. The governor's proposals would save $300 million over the next two years, he says.
The discipline policy in Fairfax County public schools failed Nick Stuban.
Stuban was a 15-year-old football player at W.T. Woodson High School who committed suicide during a disciplinary process that he was forced to undergo after he purchased a capsule of a legal substance.
According to a story by my colleague Donna St. George, he was kept out of school for seven weeks and not allowed on the school grounds to attend weekly Boy Scout meetings, sports events, or driver's education sessions. He killed himself Jan. 20.
This is not say the disciplinary system drove him to kill himself, or another boy before him in 2009. Suicide is complicated, and the reasons someone decides to take his/her own life are complex and often unknowable.
More traditional neighborhood schools are looking to operate as charters because they can get huge increases in funding as well as flexibility in how they use it.
The latest example is El Camino Real High School, one of Los Angeles Unified School District's star schools.
Although conversions are holding steady at about 10 percent of new charters nationally, in California they're on the rise. Long a forerunner in the charter school movement, the Golden State saw a jump in the number of conversions from six in 2009 to 16 in 2010, according to the California Charter School Association.
It's a troubling pattern for school districts -- every student enrolled in a charter means a funding loss, and defections of their own schools and principals are a blow to district esteem.
Milwaukee Public Schools is closed Monday for Presidents Day, according to a statement on the home page of the district's website.
Superintendent Gregory Thornton said in the statement he wants to "assure families that we intend to have classes on Tuesday as scheduled."
The home page also includes a "fact sheet for families" about the demonstrations in Madison. It says MPS closed schools Friday because more than 1,000 MPS teachers attended the demonstrations. Another day of school will be added to make up for Friday, and teachers who were absent without leave face possible disciplinary action ranging from pay deductions to termination, according the fact sheet.
Members of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association union plan to participate in demonstrations in Madison on Monday.
The Madison Metropolitan School District, which was scheduled to be open for Presidents Day, will close because of "substantial concerns about significant staff absences," according to a statement issues Sunday evening by the district.
However, classes are scheduled to resume Tuesday because the district "received assurances" that teachers would return then, the statement said.
When she was just 3, Teela Huff understood how to add numbers. By third grade, she was tutoring her peers.
"She can explain the problems to you without making you feel stupid," one of Teela's classmates wrote of her, according to her father, Tom.
But Teela's quick mind -- she is now a 10-year-old fifth grader but reads at a 12th-grade level -- meant her classes at Silver Oak Elementary in San Jose were often boring and frustrating. She finally enrolled in a program for gifted children, where students wrestled with things like mind-bending math riddles and thought-provoking questions like how to survive on a desert island. And she loved it.
Her new adventures in learning ended in September, however, when the Evergreen School District eliminated all programs for its 790 or so gifted children. The move was part of a statewide wave of cuts in a program known as Gifted and Talented Education.
Not even Ferris Bueller himself could have gotten around this one: A six-week pilot program by California's Anaheim Union High School District is testing the use of technology to combat tardiness amongst the district's seventh- and eighth-grade population.
How it works is fairly simple. Students with four or more unexcused absences in a year--approximately 75 are enrolled in the Anaheim test--are given handheld GPS devices instead of detentions or prosecutions. To make sure that said students are in school when they should be, the students are required to check in using the devices during five preset intervals: When they leave for school in the morning, when they arrive at school, lunchtime, when they leave school, and at 8 p.m. each day.
And if that's not enough, students in the program also receive a phone call each and every day to tell them that it's time to get up and get to school. An adult coach also calls the students three times per week to check up and discuss different methods the students can employ to ensure that they're where they should be at any given point during the day.
The explosive budget debate in Madison, like the explosive budget debate in Washington, is setting the table for 2012.
Part of the same struggle, the two battles are now feeding off each other, defining the parties and a broader political argument that both sides hope to somehow "settle" in the next election.
Some political consequences of the stand-off in Wisconsin are hard to predict, such as which side will win the fight for public opinion and where else the battle will "spread."
Others are more immediate. One obvious consequence of Gov. Scott Walker's push to curtail bargaining rights for public employees is the fire he has lighted under Democrats, labor and the left. While there are many ways the issue could play out over the coming months, this fact alone has significance for 2012, since by any measure Democratic voters were less motivated in 2010 than their GOP counterparts.
"Gov. Walker has done more to galvanize progressives and working people than anyone possibly could have done ... By going at people's throats and trying to destroy their rights, he has not only galvanized people in Wisconsin but across the country," former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold said in an interview Thursday, a day after launching a new political action committee.
A statewide grand jury investigating the Broward School District issued a scathing final report Friday evening, saying there was evidence of such widespread "malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance" by school board members and senior managers alike that only "corruption of our officials by contractors, vendors and their lobbyists" could explain it.
Leadership in the district is so lacking, the jurors said, they would move to abolish the whole School Board if only the state constitution would allow it.
The panel met in secret for a year, reviewed hundreds of documents and took widespread testimony reaching from past and current School Board members to school principals and secretaries. The conclusion: The district suffers from "gross mismanagement and apparent ineptitude" on a grand scale.
What do we want in the schools our children attend? People have a lot more in common in answering that than you might think.
A warm, caring environment, one where teachers, staff, parents and especially children feel like they count.
Good teachers. Beyond all the debate about how to improve teacher quality, anyone who ever went to school knows there are people who are really good teachers and people who aren't, because we had them both. And we want our kids to have good ones.
Small classes, or at least ones of reasonable size. The research on class size paints a somewhat mixed picture of how important it really is. A top flight teacher with a few more kids in the class is better than someone who is not very good with fewer kids. That said, show me parents who want larger classes for their kids and I'll show you really rare parents.
Enriching programs. They come in a lot of different, very good forms, but in every case, these are programs in which children become good at reading and reasonably good at math. Students gain a grasp of science, social studies, history. They get exposure to music and art and physical education. They learn how to learn. Positive character traits and habits are built and reinforced. Students work hard but have fun, too.
This Budget Hawk SUPPORTS MMSD Staff - A Response to ACE
I spoke in support of teachers at Monday night's meeting (2/14). I spoke from my seat as a board member. I appear to have missed the instructions to do so as private citizens (from board counsel) because SB11 was not on the agenda.
First, I find it bizarre that board members are not supposed to respond to comments from the public during public appearances. That is a long-standing tradition in this district, and any board responses are construed as just that. Responses from individual board members, not a board vote or proposal for board policy or action.
Second, I get the anger over taxes, property taxes and school costs. I am a non-union state employee who is paying more for benefits (already), lost the pay raise I was promised, and took a 3% pay cut from what I was earning through the mandated furlough system that we work within. I am seeing a great deal of pain in both the public and the private sector as we ALL deal with job insecurity, shaky hours, and a range of nasty impacts from the bad economy.
In full disclosure, I am a former union member who was on strike for six weeks in 1980. I agree with MTI on some issues, and strongly disagree on others. I support the right to bargain collectively. Period.
I also believe that it is reasonable to assert that I typically am the most consistent critic of MMSD when it comes to budget decisions and fiscal policy. I do not always prevail, but I have fought long and hard for transparency and for decisions that minimize the impact on property taxes.
This budget hawk believes that SB11 is draconian, malicious, and counterproductive to the goals the governor claims that he wants to achieve. I do not believe that it is necessary to end the right to bargain anything but wages in order to close Wisconsin's budget gap. I also note that the gap is less than we were led to believe (unless we are now saying that the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau is a tool of union sympathizers.)
I do not believe that the proposal to recertify collective bargaining organizations each year will enhance productivity or come without significant costs in conducting and verifying certification results. And I am stumped as to how turning back federal funds for Title I (aid to schools with high levels of poverty) will in any way improve schools or close the budget gap.
Speaking on the 14th, I responded that I find it unfortunate that this is portrayed as solely a debate over benefits and pay. It is not. It is about the rights that were won through established and legal systems labor organization, union formation, and collective bargaining. It is about the attempt to de facto decertify public sector unions rather than go through a decertification vote. That this is being done in a one-week timeline is mind boggling in its exercise of unilateral power.
Simplistic rhetoric may be handy for people seeking to raise support for their cause, but it helps no one in addressing a fundamental and complex issue: should public employees have the right to unionize.
My answer is yes. The perverse claim that unionized public employees have refused to compromise on wages or benefits is simply untrue in my experience as a board member. Most of the unions that we work with have been willing to make changes to benefits and other conditions of work as we have responded to the biennial budget cuts in promised state aid. MTI has been the least willing to concede. However, its members have overwhelmingly voted to reduce health insurance costs by choosing GHC vs. the far more expensive WPS programs.
The non-economic protections afforded union members have been immeasurable in protecting staff who have spoken out in the interest of helping students, saving district funds and cutting expenses, and improving safety and well-being within our schools.This applies to the full range of staff, not just teachers: aides, nurses, nursing assistants, custodians, trades workers, social workers, psychologists, and clerical staff.
The structure of grievances and dispute resolution has been important to resolving conflicts within schools and between school staff and the district. Simply put, even when I disagree with our unions on important issues, I value the structures and processes that are in place. Unilaterally ending those structures and processes is not likely to improve much in our schools, and least of all for our students.
Worst of all, the rhetoric invoked by people supporting the governor and his trajectory, is shameful. Before any of us seek to trash the work done by public employees, it would be wise to think again about who will be out plowing your highways and streets when the next storm hits, or who is caring for your disabled neighbor or family member, or who is putting in extra time at school because their students need them.
And before trashing the board of education, I would encourage people to consider why it is that so few people are willing to run for that office when our schools so urgently need engagement and participation. We don't always agree with each other or with administration. But each one of us puts in long hours reading about the issues, consulting with the community and with staff, and working to find answers to confounding questions. If you do not like the way the board is running, there are elections every year. Run. And then do the job the way that you think it needs to be done.
In the meantime, this budget hawk will stand by our staff. Because the vast majority have stood by our children and our schools for the past 15+ years of cuts, teacher/school-bashing, and increasingly difficult challenges in and out of the classroom.
Panoramas from Pro-union, Tea Party rallies at the Wisconsin Capitol
Click on the images above to view the full screen panoramas on mac/pc/iPhone/iPad and Android devices. Look for one or two more panoramas tomorrow.
I've posted a number of still images, here. Many Madison residents went about their weekend as always, including the ice fisherman captured in this scene (look closely for the eagle):
1. Intensify reading instruction in Kindergarten in order to ensure all No additional costs. Professional development provided by central students are proficient in oral reading and comprehension as office and building-based literacy staff must focus on Kindergarten. measured by valid and reliable assessments by 2011-2012. Instruction and assessment will be bench marked to ensure Kindergarten proficiency is at readinQ levels 3-7 {PLAA, 2009).
2. Fully implement Balanced Literacy in 2011-12 using clearly defined, Comprehensive Literacy Model (Linda Dorn), the MMSD Primary Literacy Notebook and the MMSD 3-5 Literacy Notebook.
a. Explore research-based reading curricula using the Board of Education Evaluation of Learning Materials Policy 3611 with particular focus on targeted and explicit instruction, to develop readers in Kindergarten.
b. Pilot the new reading curricula in volunteer schools during 2011-12.
c. Analyze Kindergarten reading proficiency scores from Kindergarten students in fully implemented Balanced Literacy schools and Kindergarten students in the volunteer schools piloting the new reading curricula incorporated into a
Balanced Literacy framework to inform next steps.
d. Continue pilot in volunteer schools in Grade 1 during 2012-13 and Grade 2 durino 2013-14. 2011-12 Budget Addition Request $250,000
3. Incorporate explicit reading instruction and literacy curricula into 6th grade instruction.
.....
3. Review previous Reading Recovery recommendations, with Additional Reading considerations to:
Place Reading Recovery Teachers in buildings as needed to (displaced rate when new teacher is hired).reflect the needs of 20% of our District's lowest performing first graders, regardless of what elementary school they may attend;
Analyze the other instructional assignments given to Reading Recovery teachers in order to maximize their expertise as highly skilled reading interventionists
Ensure standard case load for each Reading Recovery teacher at National Reading Recovery standards and guidelines (e.g. 8 students/year).
Place interventionists in buildings without Reading Recovery. Interventionists would receive professional development to lift the quality of interventions for students who need additional support in literacy.
Additional Reading Recovery and/or Interventionist FTE costs. 1 FTE-$79,915 (average rate when teacher is re-assigned). 1 new FTE-$61,180 (displaced rate when new teacher is hired).
On Tuesday, Feb. 15, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan convened hundreds of teachers'-union leaders and school-district leaders in Denver to discuss ways management and labor could work together better. Kumbaya!
Two days later, all hell broke loose in Madison, Wis. The flash point was Republican Governor Scott Walker's plan to address the state's budget gap by making public employees contribute more to health care coverage, coupled with a proposal to eliminate collective bargaining for most public employees -- including teachers. Democratic state legislators went into hiding to thwart a vote on the measure, and schools closed as thousands of teachers left their classrooms to descend on the state capital.
The two episodes vividly illustrate the hope -- and the reality -- of labor-management issues in education today. As Madison becomes ground zero for the debate over government spending and public-sector reform, some hard questions are getting lost in political theatrics and overwrought rhetoric. Here are questions Wisconsin's governor, labor leaders and President Obama should have good answers for but so far don't:
Cuts in its 2011-12 fiscal year budget figure to be painful for the Lyon County School District, but District officials hope to make sure those cuts have as little effect on students as possible.
District officials began brainstorming sessions last week, with the input from the members of the Board of Trustees' Budget Committee, to begin to identify and list priorities for which programs they are willing to cut.
LCSD Director of Finance Wade Johnson said the District's administration and the Board of Trustees will work to create a priority list of cuts and how much each cut could potentially save the District.
Then, when the District receives its actual budget figures, it will make whatever cuts have been prioritized to get down to the actual budget figure (listed for expenditures).
"Making concrete plans is premature, but we do need to start planning," Johnson said.
The Lyon County School District supports 8,730 students with an annual budget of $92,147,208 ($10,555,24/student). Locally, the 2011 State of the Madison School District reports $379,058,945 in planned 2010-2011 spending for 24,471 students. Madison's per student spending this year is $15,490.13.
President Obama released his 2012 budget proposal earlier this week to a fanfare of predictable criticism from the right and a few cries from the left. In a budget that saw cuts to many cherished programs, one of the big winners was education - with an 11 percent boost in total funding. Within education spending, however, the popular charter school movement wound up as a slight loser - with proposed funding reduced to $372 million after a pledge of $490 million in last year's budget.
While some charter school advocates may wring their hands over the slight reduction in proposed funding, the rest of us should be asking whether charter schools have been adequately scrutinized as part of a "tough choices" budget.
There are as many stories to tell about the ongoing protests at the state Capitol are there are protesters - tens of thousands. This is a story about three protesters I spoke to today. I noticed them because of their sign: "Sauk Prairie teachers." On the back was another message: "Stop GOP Class War."
All three teach at Sauk Prairie High School. This is the second day in a row that they've come to Madison to protest Scott Walker's move to strip them of their collective bargaining rights and undercut their unions. It probably won't be the last.
Their names are Betty Koehl, Alison Turner and Lynn Frick. Betty has taught at Sauk Prairie High for nearly 30 years; she's a Sauk Prairie native and a graduate of that school. Alison has taught for eight years. It is her second career. From 1993, she worked "in this building as a legislative aide," for state Reps. Mark Meyer and Gwen Moore. Lynn has been a teacher for 26 years, 21 of them at Sauk Prairie.
I ask each of them why they are here, and what they hope to accomplish.
Responds Betty, "I taught social studies for 30 years and, as a citizen and worker, I have to stand up for my rights and show my students that it's important to stand up for what you believe in."
The University of Wisconsin Athletic Department had its operating budget request of $88.368 million for 2011-12 approved without rancor or debate Friday.
Members of the UW Athletic Board voted unanimously to allow the department to spend $5.29 million more than its current operating budget of $83.219 million, an increase designed primarily to address two major capital projects.
The matter-of-fact process and calm pulse of the meeting was in contrast to the mood at the Capitol, where protesters, controversy and edgy rhetoric defined a state budget crisis.
Asked to weigh the two developments, UW athletic director Barry Alvarez acknowledged that sooner or later they will become one.
"Yes, he has made us aware of threats to him and family members and we are looking into those, and we are aware of those, and we are doing what we can to provide protection," Nampa Police Deputy Chief Craig Kingsbury said.
On Saturday night, a man who identified himself as a teacher reportedly showed up at Luna's mother's home in Nampa in order to speak with her about the superintendent's contentious education reform plan. Luna happened to be at his mother's house at the time, Department of Education spokeswoman Melissa McGrath said.
"The man was very angry... the superintendent did feel threatened," she said. The man eventually left after Luna spoke to him for several minutes. Luna told the man it was an inappropriate place and time, and later filed a police report, McGrath said.
Madison School District superintendent Dan Nerad called on teachers late Thursday to end their protest and return to the classroom.
"These job actions need to end," Nerad said in an e-mail to families of students. "I want to assure you that we continue to examine our options to more quickly move back to normal school days."
Madison schools are closed Friday for a third straight day. Nerad also apologized for the closures.
On Thursday, state and Madison teachers union leaders urged their members to report to the Capitol on Friday and Saturday for continued protests against Gov. Scott Walker's collective bargaining proposal.
"Even though the Madison School District can only react to the group decisions of our teachers, I apologize to you for not being able to provide learning for the last three days to your students," Nerad said.
For the last five years Community and Schools Together (CAST) has worked hard to assure that students in Madison and around the state have access to excellent educational opportunities. With you, we have been amazed by the events at the Capitol this week. The massive outcry is justified. The radical changes contained in Governor Walker's so-called budget repair bill will harm education and the future of our state.
The bill takes several unnecessary steps, such as limiting a union's ability to collect dues. These steps have no relevance to budget repair, but are instead about damaging union effectiveness.
Making public education work relies on trust and partnership. Despite Wisconsin's strong record on public education and despite all the benefits our communities receive from public education, Gov. Walker has decided to break trust and partnership with WEAC and other unions. In so doing, he has unnecessarily broken the state's relationship with teachers. The outcry has been mobilized by the broad assaults to organized labor, but they are marked most visibly by the many teachers, parents, and students who have provided the core and bulk numbers to the strong protests.
We support the protests and are against the bill. The bill damages our ability as a community to improve our schools. The bill takes an existing, deficient educational policy regarding school funding, leaving caps and constraints on school boards to raise revenues locally, but denies collective bargaining - one of the key measures that was needed to form the original policy. We believe the net effect is extremely damaging to education - destroying a climate of trust and good will that has served as a cornerstone of the collective bargaining process. We may pay less in taxes, but teachers, classrooms and students will suffer.
Quality teachers are essential to quality education, removing their right to bargain collectively demonstrates great disrespect for their contributions and will make it more difficult to attract and retain the quality teachers our children need.
CAST, instead, welcomes reasonable and rational debate on educational funding and policy. We believe that policy should allow collective bargaining, equity, and the opportunity for community involvement to answer critical funding needs schools may have - given the likelihood that the state is unable to fund them appropriately.
CAST also calls for the safety of protesters and for those working to protect public safety at the Capitol. We ask Governor Walker and others responsible for state leadership to open debate, to seek to find rational budget policies that best represent the communities they serve. We look forward to our teachers and students returning to the classrooms, where together they create the foundation for Wisconsin's future.
Submitted by Jackie Woodruff
Treasurer of CAST
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire -- William Butler Yeats
The Democratic National Committee'sOrganizing for America arm -- the remnant of the 2008 Obama campaign -- is playing an active role in organizing protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's attempt to strip most public employees of collective bargaining rights.
OfA, as the campaign group is known, has been criticized at times for staying out of local issues like same-sex marriage, but it's riding to the aide of the public sector unions who hoping to persuade some Republican legislators to oppose Walker's plan. And while Obama may have his difference with teachers unions, OfA's engagement with the fight -- and Obama's own clear stance against Walker -- mean that he's remaining loyal to key Democratic Party allies at what is, for them, a very dangerous moment.
OfA Wisconsin's field efforts include filling buses and building turnout for the rallies this week in Madison, organizing 15 rapid response phone banks urging supporters to call their state legislators, and working on planning and producing rallies, a Democratic Party official in Washington said.
Presidents' Day 2011 is right around the corner, but George Washington would be dismayed by the findings of this new study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Reviewers evaluated state standards for U.S. history in grades K-12. What they found is discouraging: Twenty-eight states--a majority--deserve D or F grades for their academic standards in this key subject. The average grade across all states is a dismal D. Among the few bright spots, South Carolina earns a straight A for its standards and six other jurisdictions--Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and the District of Columbia--garner A-minuses. (The National Assessment's "framework" for U.S. history also fares well.) Read on to learn how your state scored.
Overview
Wisconsin's U.S. history standards, for all practical purposes, do not exist. Their sole content is a list of ten eras in American and Wisconsin history, followed by a few brief and vague directives to understand vast swaths of history and broad historical concepts. Determining an actual course's scope, sequence, and content rests entirely on the shoulders of local teachers and districts.
Goals and Organization
Wisconsin's social studies standards are divided among five strands: geography, history, political science and citizenship, economics, and behavioral sciences. Each strand consists of a "content standard"--a one-sentence statement of the strand's purpose--and a one- paragraph "rationale" justifying its importance. The history strand also includes short lists of ten chronological/thematic eras for Wisconsin, U.S. history, and world history. The ten listed eras of U.S. history are said to apply to grades 5-12, and those for Wisconsin history to grades 4-12.
New Jersey's acting education commissioner on Wednesday unveiled a plan to overhaul the way teachers are evaluated -- and the consequences of poor evaluations.
Under the concept unveiled by Christopher Cerf, many key decisions about teachers -- including whether they receive lifetime tenure protections, how big their raises are and which ones are laid off when budgets are slashed -- would be based largely on how much their students progress.
Cerf said making the changes are essential to improving schools in New Jersey, where the public education system by many measures is among the best in the nation -- but with a serious caveat. Schools in the state's impoverished cities generally perform poorly -- and at great expense.
Seattle Public high schools have a wide variety of really good science classes. They range from the BioTech program at Ballard (celebrating its 10th year in 2011) to Marine Science to Forensics and many others. Here is a link to the SPS page on this issue.
The district is now moving onto science curriculum alignment as part of their overall alignment process. I do understand the idea of alignment so that students who move from school to school (and it happens more than you might think) will find the same level of instruction. This is fine.
The issue is that the district wants to make 4 science classes mandatory for graduation. Those classes are physical science, biology, chemistry and physics.
What that means is that most of the other science classes, unless they get certified as a substitute for one of the four, will be electives (AP and IB science courses will also count as substitutes). With so many other subject requirements for graduation, it is unlikely that most of the elective science classes would survive. It would be a big loss.
One of the most contentious budget debates this year may be over something the president did not include in his 2012 spending plan -- school vouchers. Now more often called "scholarships," vouchers have been debated for decades, but support for these initiatives is on the rise.'
Let's start with D.C. After years of discussion, Congress established a plan in 2004 to give 1,700 students in Washington a voucher of up to $7,500 to attend private and religious schools in the city as alternatives to the frequently lousy neighborhood schools. The program was controversial from the start -- it was the first federal funding for vouchers in three decades. But in 2009, under intense pressure from the teachers unions, Congress and the Administration began to dismantle the program and no new students are participating today. New Speaker of the House John Boehner says restoring the program is a top priority.
IF D.C. MAYOR Vincent C. Gray isn't careful, he could well argue the District out of $60 million in federal education dollars. Testifying before a Senate committee against the voucher program that enables low-income students to attend private schools, Mr. Gray (D) was warned that extra money for the city's traditional and public schools was likely conditioned on congressional reauthorization of vouchers. Money alone isn't reason for Mr. Gray to change his mind, but given that District children benefit from the program and that parents are desperate for the choice if affords, it's unfathomable that he is opposing this worthwhile program.
Mr. Gray was among those who appeared Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs as it considered legislation to extend the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, including an important provision to allow new students to be enrolled. Mr. Gray said that efforts should be focused on improving public schools, that Congress was inappropriately intruding into local affairs and that D.C. parents have enough education choices, given the number of flourishing charter schools and the public school reforms starting to take hold.
But how deep are these cuts really? Take a closer look, and they turn out to be less than meets the eye.
Consider: President Barack Obama's 2012 budget proposes to spend $3.48 trillion on everything except interest on the national debt. That's a 7 percent increase over what the government spent in 2010. And keep in mind that in 2010, there was a lot of stimulus money flying out the door.
A lot of people have a lot to say about the union protests in Wisconsin and the governor's plan to curtail collective bargaining for teachers. Those on the ground are best qualified to hash out the big issues, so I'll just add three morsels to the conversation.
1) Sickouts. The Madison school district and others were closed yesterday due to teacher sickouts. There has been some debate about whether this constitutes an illegal strike, but for a protest that centers on public employee collective bargaining, it's ironic that whatever you want to call it, yesterday's protest was a violation of the Madison teachers' collective bargaining agreement.
Madison teachers are allowed five personal leave days per year, but are required by contract to notify the principal at least three working days in advance. Since the teachers themselves didn't have that much notice of the protest, they had to use sick leave. The contract spells out in exacting detail the purposes for which sick leave can be used. Union rallies are not among them.
Some may consider the protest a matter of principle or civil disobedience, That's all well and good. But remember, the only reason to call in sick is so you still get paid for the day. So go ahead and yell. Just remember who's paying for the microphone.
The Madison contract also contains this provision:
Therefore, MTI agrees that there will not be any strikes, work stoppages or slow downs during the life of this Agreement, i.e., for the period commencing July 1, 2009 and ending June 30, 2011. Upon the notification of the President and Executive Director of MTI by the President of the Board of Education of the Madison Metropolitan School District of any unauthorized concerted activity, as noted above, MTI shall notify those in the collective bargaining unit that it does not endorse such activity. Having given such notification, MTI shall be freed of all liability in relation thereto.
Whatever you call it, it was certainly an "unauthorized concerted activity."
ACE Statement Regarding MMSD (Madison School District) Actions
Don Severson, via email:
Attached is the Active Citizens for Education statement regarding the MMSD Board of Education and Administration actions related to the Governor's Budget Repair Bill.
Here is the link to the video of the MMSD Board meeting on 02/14/11
Glaringly, there is no leadership from the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education nor administration for the overall good of the community, teachers nor students as evidenced by their actions the past few days. Individual Board members and the Board as a whole, as well as the administration, are complicit in the job action taken by teachers and their union. The Board clearly stepped out of line. Beginning Monday night at its Board meeting, Board member Marj Passman took advantage of signing up for a 'public appearance' statement as a private citizen. She was allowed to make her statement from her seat at the Board table instead of at the public podium--totally inappropriate. Her statement explicitly gave support to the teachers who she believed were under attack from the Walker proposed budget repair bill; that she was totally in support of the teachers; and encouraged teachers to take their protests to the Capital. Can you imagine any other employer encouraging their employees to protest against them to maintain or increase their own compensation in order to help assure bankruptcy for the organization or to fire them as employees? All Board members subsequently signed a letter to Governor Walker calling his proposals "radical and punitive' to the bargaining process. With its actions, including cancellation of classes for Wednesday, the Board has abdicated and abrogated its fiduciary responsibility for public trust. The Board threw their responsibility away as elected officials and representatives of the citizens and taxpayers for the education of the children of the District and as employers of the teachers and staff. The Board cannot lead nor govern when it abdicates its statutory responsibilities and essentially acts as one with employees and their union. Under these circumstances, it is obvious they have made the choice not to exercise their responsibilities for identifying solutions to the obvious financial challenges they face. The Board will not recognize the opportunities, nor tools, in front of them to make equitable, fair and educationally and financially sound decisions of benefit to all stakeholders in the education of our young people.
Raise our state's per capita income to 10 percent above Minnesota's by 2030.
In job and business creation over the next decade, Wisconsin is often predicted to be among the lowest 10 states. When I was a kid growing up in Madison, income in Wisconsin was some 10 percent higher than in Minnesota. Minnesota caught up to us in 1967, and now the average Minnesotan makes $4,500 more than the average Wisconsinite.
Lift the math, science and reading scores of all K-12, non-special education students in Wisconsin above world-class standards by 2030. (emphasis added)
Wisconsinites often believe we lose jobs because of lower wages elsewhere. In fact, it is often the abundance of skills (and subsidies and effort) that bring huge Intel research and development labs to Bangalore, Microsoft research centers to Beijing, and Advanced Micro Devices chip factories to Dresden.
Grow the economy (tax base) and significantly improve our schools....
If teacher layoffs are needed as school districts around the state balance budgets, who should go first?
Under the current system, teachers with the most seniority are protected from cuts. Some lawmakers are trying to change that with a bill that would allow districts to cut those who aren't effective, regardless of how long they've been on the job. Teachers "with a track record of closing the achievement gap" would be safe.
Sonya Langford, a seventh grade teacher in the University Place School District, wrote an interesting "letter to the editor" for the Tacoma News Tribune . She says the proposed House legislation would "send our public schools back years."
Money for schools is always a hot topic, even more so as the Legislature starts tackling the budget for 2011-13. Earlier this month, Gov. John Kitzhaber released his proposal, including $5.558 billion for K-12 schools. That figure, charges former Oregon House candidate Dan Lucas in an online post, sacrifices schools for the Department of Human Services and the Oregon Health Authority.
"Governor's proposed budget raids K-12 school funds to grow DHS again" is the title of the piece, posted on the conservative-minded Oregon Catalyst. Lucas explains that Kitzhaber not only takes $225 million out of the State School Fund but that he gives the money to human services, which is growing by $333 million.
Since the budget is set anew every two years, it's hard to trace one agency's growth to the demise of another. But we wanted to know if Lucas's numbers were accurate. Is K-12 losing money from the previous two-year period? Is social services growing? How much is one to blame for the other?
Douglas County, a swath of subdivisions just south of here that is one of the nation's wealthiest, is something of a public school paradise.
The K-12 district, with 60,000 students, boasts high test scores and a strong graduation rate. Surveys show that 90% of its parents are satisfied with their children's schools.
But a new, conservative school board is exploring a voucher system to give parents -- regardless of income -- taxpayer money to pay for their children to attend private schools that agree to abide by district regulations. If it's implemented, parents could receive more than $4,000 per child.
The proposal's supporters argue that competition can only improve already-high-performing schools.
Colorado's Douglas County School District spends $8512.74 per student ($476,977,336 for 56,031 students in 2009). Madison spent $15,241 per student in 2009, a whopping $6,728.26, 79% more than the "wealthy Denver suburbs".
Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad unveiled on Tuesday his new preschool program designed to award scholarships to low-income families, setting aside $43.6 million in state appropriations.
"By providing all Iowa children the opportunity to attend preschool, we will reduce the need for special-education services and for children to repeat grades," Branstad said in a press release.
The Iowa Preschool Scholarship eliminates universal preschool for 4-year-olds, but it aims to provide $3,000 scholarships to eligible 4-year-olds who attend at least 10 hours of preschool a week beginning in the 2011-12 school year.
Under the annual scholarship, families pay costs on a sliding scale depending on federal poverty guidelines up to 300 percent poverty. The plan means higher income families to pay full tuition.
The new makeup of the House of Representatives has brought with it new leadership on the House Education and Workforce Committee, and fresh ideas about education policy. Chairman John Kline (R-MN), at the helm of the committee that will be charged with overseeing a possible reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) this year, is already asking hard questions through a series of committee hearings on the effects of ever-growing federal involvement in education.
Last Thursday, the House Education and Workforce Committee held a full committee hearing to examine the challenges and opportunities facing the nation's classrooms. The hearing included testimony from Ted Mitchell, CEO of the NewSchools Venture Fund; Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom; Dr. Tony Bennett, Indiana superintendent of public instruction; and Lisa Graham Keegan, founder and president of the Education Breakthrough Network.
The hearing comes as national policymakers consider a possible reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the implications for local schools. Each of the expert witnesses' testimonies on the subject favored empowering those closer to the student. In his testimony, Bennett urged the federal government to get out of the way of states so that state and local leaders can more effectively meet student needs:
Tensions were high and the hallways packed for a special meeting of the Rockford School Board on proposed budget cuts to close schools, eliminate programs and layoff more than 300 employees.
Earlier this week the Rockford Education Association questioned whether those cuts need to happen at all, and now they're offering to pay fifty grand for an independent review.
Today, the board was split but approved a motion 4-3 to support the union's request
"The main reason is because it is projections, it is projections, legitimate projections based on trends, and I don't see the point to second guessing that," said School Board Member Jeanne Westholder.
"I think it is worth while to take a look, either to put it to rest or to be sure that we have the accurate figures to vote on," said School Board Member Alice Sautargis.
The district's finance team says they need to cut 50- million dollars, while the union believes it's more like 15- million.
President Barack Obama has unveiled a hugely disappointing budget, cutting only a few percentage points from the $100,000bn in projected US federal deficits over the remainder of this century. Why was it such a dud? Because Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - the entitlement programmes that will comprise more than 60 per cent of all spending just a decade from now - were left untouched.
Deck chairs are being rearranged on the Titanic. American politicians promise their constituents an ever-expanding social safety net, but with no intention of paying for it. Most experts know entitlement reform is essential, but few political leaders dare to lead - because doing so would be self-immolating.
Mr Obama's budget should have proposed much more significant cuts, but ultimately it is the US Congress that is responsible for tax and spending legislation. Mr Obama's budget is therefore aspirational, but unbinding. In the vernacular - he proposes, Congress disposes.
To put this failure right America's leaders must begin to make a strong moral case for entitlement reform. And to develop this argument they should turn first to an unlikely source of policy advice: The Vatican.
The logic behind president Obama's budget has one extremely sensible feature: it distinguishes between spending that simply adds to consumption, and spending that really does mean investment. His analogy over the weekend - that a family cutting a budget would rather not cut money for the kids' education - is a sound one. We do need more infrastructure, roads and broadband, non-carbon energy and basic science research, and some of that is something only government can do. In that sense, discretionary spending could be among the most important things government could do to help Americans create wealth themselves. And yet this is the only spending Obama wants to cut.
But the core challenge of this time is not the cost of discretionary spending. Obama knows this; everyone knows this. The crisis is the cost of future entitlements and defense, about which Obama proposes nothing. Yes, there's some blather. But Obama will not risk in any way any vulnerability on taxes to his right or entitlement spending to his left. He convened a deficit commission in order to throw it in the trash. If I were Alan Simpson or Erskine Bowles, I'd feel duped. And they were duped. All of us who took Obama's pitch as fiscally responsible were duped.
I, along with other citizens, had written to the State Auditor several years back, complaining about the BEX capital building program. When you write to the Auditor, they log your letter and make sure you get a follow-up (I know that seems odd to have a public entity actually listen and keep track of your concerns but that's just how the SAO rolls.)
The letter said some points made in the audit like:
The Grand Junction Sentinel headline today says it all: "Hickenlooper Proposes Huge Budget Cuts." Yes, while Colorado's new governor campaigned on promises of being an education governor, he has just proposed historically massive cuts to Colorado's already comparatively underfunded public schools. If that wasn't enough, he had the nerve to pretend he isn't choosing this path for his state, telling reporters "There's nothing I've ever grappled with as long and hard as" education cuts.
Evidently, we should all shed tears for the allegedly remorseful guv... except, we shouldn't. Because he's as much making this choice as circumstances are dictating it.
Yes, it's true - the new governor must propose a balanced budget and the legislature cannot raise revenues in the short-term. Thus, the education cuts. However, it is also true that this governor has been running around Colorado insisting he cares about education while simultaneously saying he opposes efforts to raise public revenues through any changes to Colorado's hideously regressive tax code.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, convening a two-day labor-management conference here on Tuesday, argued that teachers' unions can help solve many of the challenges facing public schools.
But as the conference opened, that view was under challenge in a number of state capitals.
Republicans in several states have proposed legislation in recent weeks that would bar teachers' unions from all policy discussions, except when the time comes to negotiate compensation. In Tennessee and Wisconsin, Republicans have proposed stripping teachers' unions of collective bargaining rights altogether.
Education historians said the unions were facing the harshest political climate since states began extending legal bargaining rights to schoolteachers decades ago.
The conference, convened by the Department of Education, drew school authorities and teachers' union leaders from 150 districts across the nation to Denver to discuss ways of working together. To participate, each district's superintendent, school board president and teachers' union leader had to sign a pledge to collaborate in good faith to raise student achievement.
Richard Whitmire's deft and revealing book about former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee chronicles a difficult time in the history of the city's schools, when good people fought hard against one another because of sharply contrasting views on how to help our children.
The book is "The Bee Eater," the title a reference to a moment when Rhee as a young teacher gained respect from her unruly Baltimore students by killing and swallowing a wayward insect flying around her classroom. The point was that this young woman had a taste for aggressive, if sometimes unappetizing, action.
The question of Rhee - her history, her iron confidence, her successes and failures - is still a hot topic. I got twice the usual page views on my blog last week just by raising the issue of her early teaching results. In this book, Rhee fans like me will enjoy remembering her unexpected success in bringing energy and sanity to the District's central office, closing 23 underused schools and getting an innovative new teachers contract. Her critics will nod as they read of her needlessly alienating city officials and good teachers and carelessly reawakening the race issue. Whitmire makes his admiration for Rhee clear but seems as baffled by some of her decisions as many of her friends were.
The Madison School District is preparing for "excessive" teacher absences Wednesday, and a teacher union leader urged school be closed because few teachers are expected to show up for work.
School officials announcement Tuesday in a letter to parents they expected many teachers to call in sick Wednesday.
The letter was distributed the same day nearly 800 Madison East High School students -- half the school -- walked out to participate in a demonstration at the state Capitol protesting Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to limit public employee bargaining power.
Students at West, Memorial and at other schools around the state -- from Shullsburg to Sheboygan -- also participated in demonstrations during school hours.
As of Tuesday evening, Superintendent Dan Nerad said a higher-than-usual number of teachers had called in sick for Wednesday, though he declined to disclose exact numbers. He said the district would monitor the expected absences overnight before deciding whether to cancel school.
Two years after his appointment as emergency financial manager for the Detroit Public Schools, Robert Bobb has outsourced many services, unearthed corruption and closed a number of schools.
Yet the district's mammoth deficit has continued to grow during amid the state's downturn and growing pension and debt obligations, and the city's schools are still grappling with longstanding problems, including political battles involving the state, school board and teachers' unions and a long-term exodus by students.
With weeks left in his term, Mr. Bobb has put forth some radical ideas to overhaul the system. One would split the district into two entities to help retire its debt, along the lines of the government-engineered bankruptcy of General Motors. Another would use money from a national tobacco settlement to inject $400 million into the Detroit schools and some 40 other deficit-ridden Michigan districts. A third is modeled on post-Katrina New Orleans, where a shrunken district was remade with mostly charter schools.
In his recent "State of our Schools" presentation, the Rochester schools Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard showed that three years into his tenure, Rochester's schools have had slow, but measureable progress in elementary and middle school achievement levels, fewer suspensions and more students graduating high school.
Still, Rochester continues to struggle with many challenges common for large urban communities in the state and throughout the country - challenges that will take much longer than three years to significantly improve.
While Rochester's school superintendents come and go, one district fixture remains: Adam Urbanski, the long-time head of the Rochester Teachers Association. He recently wrote in this newspaper that Rochester schools are "worse off" in the last three years, a period which happens to coincide with the Brizard's tenure.
The Green Bay School Board agreed Monday to send requests to about 17 search companies -- including the one used to recruit Superintendent Greg Maass -- for proposals to guide its efforts to find a new school leader.
Maass announced last week he will leave his Green Bay post at the end of June. He plans to accept a similar position in Marblehead, Mass., pending background checks and contract negotiations. He's been in Green Bay for three years.
Illinois-based Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates, the recruitment company that the Green Bay board hired last time to conduct its search, said it would waive its consulting fee because Maass is leaving within five years, School Board president Jean Marsch said. The district paid the firm $22,000 and covered another $12,500 or so in additional expenses, for things such as advertising, travel and lodging, in the search for Maass, she said. The district still would be on the hook for the additional costs.
But members said they'd still like to hear what other search firms have to offer.
Imagine "one-on-one tutoring for every student in every subject" and you get a picture of Open High School, a virtual charter school serving 250 Utah students in ninth and tenth grades, expanding to up to 1500 students 9-12 by 2014.
Aptly named, the Open High School of Utah Trailblazers are forging new paths in multiple arenas,s but what sets them apart is their commitment to use open education resources (OER) where possible and to share what they develop under Creative Commons licenses.
The curriculum is hosted on MoodleRooms learning management system (but they miss their BrainHoney gradebook).
The Madison School Board approved a one-year extension of Superintendent Dan Nerad's contract on a 5-2 vote Monday.
Board members Lucy Mathiak and Arlene Silveira voted against the extension. Maya Cole, Beth Moss, Ed Hughes, Marj Passman and James Howard voted to extend the contract through June 30, 2013.
Only Mathiak and Hughes spoke during the meeting. The board has been discussing Nerad's contract in multiple closed-door meetings.
Mathiak didn't address why she voted against the extension but said that she had reviewed board minutes, e-mails, notes of conversations and newspaper articles as she completed an evaluation that she received in December.
DN: Unless we get more of our kids to standards, children will not remain strong and the community will not remain strong. Our vision has to be about advancing learning for all kids while we work to address these very notable achievement gaps for certain groups of kids. It's not an either-or. It's not a zero sum. That's why I believe we can be about a conversation about achievement gaps and we can be about a conversation about how we can better serve talented-and-gifted students.
WSJ: Is that the central tension?
DN: That's the manifestation. If it's about human capital development, it has to be about all kids moving forward, but there's real constraints around that because we do in fact make budget decisions year by year and people feel disaffected by those budget decisions. There's real concern, and I'm right in line with that concern, that we aren't doing enough to face these achievement gaps in an aggressive enough way. (Other) people feel very strongly that we're not doing enough to advance the needs of our advanced learners.
WSJ: Summarize your first 2½ years in Madison.
DN: We immediately jumped into a referendum discussion. The need for that was identified prior to my coming. We spent a considerable amount of time in that first year focused on those issues. From there I worked with the board on some board reorganization. And then it moved into comprehensive strategic planning with our community. From there we did the reorganization of the administration. Creating a teacher and a parent council was part of our thinking about how we do our work differently. And then we had a major focus needed on this current year's budget. That was a very difficult conversation. We were looking at this huge gap and this huge amount of money. There has been one major thing after another. Take one, it's significant. Take them all, it's been very significant. And while I've been here 30 months, I'm still learning the culture of this organization and of this community. I've tried to be sensitive to the culture and there's been some tension about how we've done our work and has it been sensitive enough to the culture. None of that is lost on me.
With the new school year starting in March, high school teacher Jennifer Chung is worried about coping without her longtime classroom companion --- a hickory stick for smacking misbehaving students.
"I don't know if I can survive the jungle of 40 restless boys in each class, let alone keeping them quiet with no means to punish them," said the 36-year-old maths teacher in Gyeonggi province surrounding Seoul.
Education authorities in Seoul, the country's largest school district with 1.36 million pre-college students, last November banned corporal punishment.
Gyeonggi and one other province followed suit, with the new rule to take effect there in March.
There is no more pressing topic in education today than closing the achievement gap, and there is no one in America who knows more about the gap than Ronald Ferguson.
Although he is a Harvard professor based in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Ferguson, 60, spends lots of time flying around the country visiting racially mixed public high schools. Part of what he does is academic, measuring the causes of the gap by annually surveying the performance, behaviors and attitudes of up to 100,000 students. And part is serving as a de facto educational social worker, meeting with students, faculty members and parents to explain what steps their schools can take to narrow the gap.
The gap is about race, of course, and it inevitably inflames passions. But there is something about Dr. Ferguson's bearing -- he is both big (6-foot-3) and soft-spoken -- that gets people to listen.
Morton Sherman, the Alexandria school superintendent, watched him defuse the anger at a meeting of 300 people. "He talks about these things in a professorial way, a kind way," Dr. Sherman said. "It's not about him. He doesn't try to be a rock star, although he is a rock star in this field."
• No. 1. Once there was an enormous omelet, as big as a city, full of all sorts of stuff. Some of it was great. A lot of it was lousy. Almost nobody liked the omelet. "We can make it better by unscrambling it," some people said. But you can't unscramble an omelet. So everyone who tried to do that moved on to other things.
• No. 2. Once there were a bunch of big kids playing baseball. A little kid - well, he used to be a big kid, but things changed somehow - ran up and said he wanted to get in the game. He began throwing rocks at a tree to show how good he could pitch. The big kids said that was nice. Actually, they hoped the little kid would go away.
• No. 3. Once there were children who stood each day at the busiest corner in the city. Everyone could see they were hungry. Drivers who went by said the kids ought to be fed. Politicians said the kids ought to be fed. Everyone said the kids ought to be fed. The end.
OK, so they're not very entertaining parables. Sorry. I'm not even sure how well they fit what's going on. In fact, I really hope there's a much better ending to the third one. The history of the last couple decades around here supports the pessimistic storyline that leads to nothing. But this is a new day. Maybe something good will occur.
Which brings me to the proposal to break up Milwaukee Public Schools into a set of smaller districts.
In the two years since Congress made the federal government's largest one-time investment in public schools, change has rippled through classrooms from coast to coast, as districts have expanded school days, improved teacher training, and tried to tie teacher evaluations to student performance.
But the stimulus package's long-term impact on public education is far from certain and may already be flagging, according to a three-month investigation by 36 news organizations working in collaboration with the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news outlet, and the Education Writers Association. Indeed, the research found that many of the resulting policy changes are already endangered by political squabbles and the massive budget shortfalls still facing recession-battered state and local governments.
"We have a long way to go,'' Education Secretary Arne Duncan said, adding that his goal is for the United States to lead the world in academic achievement.
Under its "performance pay" proposal, teachers would get more for staffing hard-to-staff schools and filling hard-to-fill positions. Pay would also be related to regular employee evaluations -- if in some as-yet-undefined, possibly very weak way. WEAC president Mary Bell declined to specify how closely student test scores should track with evaluations and thus pay hikes, for instance.
Protecting pay is, of course, the most important of the union's objectives in its reform plan. But pay is a function of how much money is available, and while WEAC is advocating paying better teachers better salaries, it's not in favor of cutting pay for teachers who aren't so good. This is about a bigger education pie, in other words, not about the same pie cut into different-sized pieces.
Pay is also a function of who's handing out the raises, and WEAC is doing what it can to ensure those partly or mostly responsible for handing out the raises are as sympathetic as possible.
To wit, it would like to see the majority of the members on a teacher's evaluation panel be teachers themselves -- thus paving the way, it seems to me, for a lot of good reviews.
"It's an extremely difficult task," Bell said of evaluating one of your peers, but one that can work because "people care so deeply about the quality of the profession."
When Gov. Rick Perry challenged the state's public institutions of higher learning this week to develop bachelor's degree programs costing no more than $10,000, including textbooks, Mike McKinney was stumped.
"My answer is I have no idea how," McKinney, chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, told the Senate Finance Committee. "I'm not going to say that it can't be done."
Tuition, fees and books for four years average $31,696 at public universities in Texas, according to the Higher Education Coordinating Board. Sul Ross State University Rio Grande College is the cheapest, at $17,532.
The governor's call for low-cost degrees comes as legislative budget writers and the governor himself have proposed deep cuts in higher education funding -- cuts that would put pressure on governing boards to raise tuition, not lower it.
But officials of some university systems -- whose governing boards are fully populated by Perry appointees -- nevertheless struck an upbeat tone, or at least a neutral one. As McKinney, a former Perry chief of staff, put it: "If it can be figured out, we've got the faculty that can figure it out."
A spokesman for the University of Texas System said, "We look forward to reviewing details of the governor's proposal."
This is exactly the kind of thinking we need: fresh approaches toward all aspects of education.
Students in a new Hip Hop Studies class at West finished a unit on hip-hop history by writing verses. A few excerpts:
"'Why do you study hip-hop?
Isn't it just rappers that never ever stop?'
That right there's the problem,
People think it's just angry pop.
And even though they don't know
They go and talk about the videos
And go and slam it on their shows
One reader notes: "Is this the fabulous programming that we may lose if West (gasp) has real honors classes? ".
Don't fixate on the financial crisis. Our economic problems have been far longer in the making, and would have caught up with us sooner or later anyway.
That is one of the conclusions I take away from two striking essays: "The Great Divergence", published in Slate last September by the journalist Timothy Noah; and The Great Stagnation, just published as a short e-book by the economics professor and blogger Tyler Cowen.
The two essays describe two disturbing trends that, while logically separable, seem to be related. Noah discusses a sharp increase in income inequality in the US since the early 1970s. After analysing many explanations, he concludes that the chief culprits are a tolerance for super-high salaries and bonuses on Wall Street and in the boardroom, and a failure of the US education system. Blaming China is considered, but largely dismissed.
Cowen begins with the fact that median family income in the US has barely increased, again since the early 1970s. Its growth rate has been about 0.5 per cent a year after inflation. The median family income is the income of the family in the middle of the income distribution. It is a useful measure precisely because it ignores the action at the top: if a Connecticut hedge fund manager made an extra $11bn in a year, this would raise the mean income of the US's 110 million-ish households by $100 each. It wouldn't alter the median income by a cent
Four members of a suburban school board are being targeted in a recall effort over their support for a middle-school language program funded by the Chinese government, one of the members said Friday.
Hacienda La Puente Unified School Board President Jay Chen said he and the three other members of the five-member panel were being served with notices of intent to circulate recall petitions, each signed by 12 residents of Hacienda Heights in east Los Angeles County.
Chen, along with board members Norman Hsu, Joseph Chang and Anita Perez, voted last year to approve the agreement with China's international language-teaching agency to cooperate on the so-called Confucius Classroom Mandarin program.
More proof that pension costs are spiraling out of control: The number of retirees earning $100,000 or more from the California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS) has increased dramatically since 2009, according to new data obtained by the nonprofit California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.
For those of you not familiar with the foundation, it's one of the leading advocates for pension reform in California. On its website, the foundation publishes searchable databases of retirees earning $100,000 or more from a couple of state pension systems, including CalSTRS, the pension system for retired California teachers.
The foundation initially obtained the data for its "CalSTRS $100,000 pension club" database in May 2009. Back then there were 3,010 retirees earning $100,000 or more annually from CalSTRS. Earlier this month, the foundation obtained updated data from CalSTRS and the number has grown to 5,308 (5,309 if you count one woman earning $99,998.88).
That's a 76 percent increase. In less than two years.
THE success of the government's bid to create new "free schools"--funded by the state, but able to set conditions for staff, pick and choose from the national curriculum, and so on--rests on its ability to wrest power from local authorities and give it to community groups. The policy is a key element of David Cameron's "Big Society", but suffers from the same difficulty as the overall project: pushing through devolution in a time of austerity is tricky.
The aim of free schools, which are based on American and Swedish models, is to give parents more choice and promote competition. New schools can be established by parents, teachers, charities, religious outfits, universities, private schools and not-for-profit groups. They will be given public funds based on how many pupils enroll, with those from poor families attracting a premium.
"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards." - Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson
I was somewhat dismayed by the article in last Saturday's Daily News about the sudden thud in the bargaining process between the Red Bluff Union Elementary School Board and the teachers' union. It was a year ago last August when I congratulated the District and the teachers' union on the agreements they made to stave off fiscal problems for the 2009-2010 school year. Based on the article in the Daily News things are not so harmonious at this point. I have faith that in a community like ours things will work their way out, but it is difficult to tell given the limited statements made by the School Board representative and statements about filing a grievance or an unfair labor practice charge.
Saturday's article was followed up by coverage of the School Board meeting on February 8; it was equally dismaying.
The plan called for students with high scores to receive an "Honors'' diploma, those with average scores to earn a "Regents'' diploma, and ones who score "partially proficient'' to be granted a basic Rhode Island diploma. Children who fail the test would have the opportunity to take it again. If they fail a second time, but other requirements are achieved, they could still graduate with a certificate.
Opponents claimed the proposal created a state-sanctioned caste system that would stigmatize struggling students and haunt them when seeking future employment or college admission. Based on recent test scores, they countered that almost all students who were poor, minorities, had disabilities, or were learning English would get the lowest tier diploma, if they even got one at all.
Gov. John Kitzhaber aims to fix Oregon's broken school funding system by consolidating power and money into a single board for all levels of education -- a board that he would chair.
What youths need, he says, is a system that allows them to improve at their own pace, with funding that is targeted at schools and programs that are getting results.
On Friday, the governor ordered the creation of an investment team to design the framework for an Oregon Education Investment Board that would oversee education for children from birth through college. He will name the 12 members of the team next week.
The Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM) is submitting this budget narrative to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education as a companion to its line‐item budget for Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep). The budget was prepared in partnership with MMSD's Business Services office. The narrative provides context for the line items presented in the budget.
Madison Prep's budget was prepared by a team that included Kaleem Caire, President & CEO of ULGM; Tami Holmquist, Business Manager at Edgewood High School; Laura DeRoche‐Perez, ULGM Charter School Development Consultant; and Jim Horn, ULGM Director of Finance. Representative of ULGM and MMSD met weekly during the development of the Madison Prep budget. These meetings included including Erik Kass, Assistant Superintendent for Business Services and Donna Williams, Director of Budget & Planning. The budget was also informed by ULGM's charter school design teams and was structured in the same manner as start‐up, non‐instrumentality public charter school budgets submitted to the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board in Washington, DC. DCPCSB is widely regarded as one of the most effective authorizers of charter schools in the nation.
In addition, Madison Prep's Facilities Design Team is led by Dennis Haefer, Vice President of Commercial Banking with Johnson Bank and Darren Noak, President of Commercial Building with Tri‐North Builders. Mr. Noak is also the Treasurer of ULGM's Board of Directors. This team is responsible for identifying Madison Prep's school site and planning for related construction, renovation and financing needs.
......
Budget Highlights
A. Cost of Education
In 2008‐09, the Madison Metropolitan School District received $14,432 in revenue per student from a combination of local, federal and state government and local property taxes. The largest portion of revenue came from property taxes, $9,049 (62.7%), followed by $3,364 in state aid (23.3%), $1,260 in federal aid (8.7%) and $759 in other local revenue (5.3%). That same year, MMSD spent $13,881 per student on educational, transportation, facility and food service costs for 25,011 students for a total of $347,177,691 in spending.
In 2010‐11, MMSD's Board of Education is operating with an amended budget of $360,131,948, a decrease of $10,155,522 (‐2.74%) from 2009‐10. MMSD projects spending $323,536,051 in its general education fund, $10,069,701 on food service and $8,598,118 on debt service for a total of $342,203,870. Considering the total of only these three spending categories, and dividing the total by the official 2010‐11 enrollment count of 24,471 students, MMSD projects to spend $13,984 per student.3 This is the amount per pupil that ULGM used as a baseline for considering what Madison Prep's baseline per pupil revenue should be in its budget for SY2011‐12. ULGM then determined the possibility of additional cutbacks in MMSD revenue for SY2011‐12 and reduced its base per pupil revenue projection to $13,600 per student. It then added a 1% increase to it's per pupil base spending amount for each academic year through SY2016‐17.
ULGM recognizes that per pupil funding is an average of total costs to educate 24,471 children enrolled in MMSD schools, and that distinctions are not made between the costs of running elementary, middle and high schools. ULGM also understands that the operating costs between all three levels of schooling are different. Middle schools costs more to operate than elementary schools and high schools costs more than middle schools.
Reviewing expense projections for middle and high schools in MMSD's SY2010‐11 Amended Preliminary Budget, ULGM decided to weight per pupil spending in middle school at 1.03% and 1.16% in high school. Thus, in SY2012‐13 when Madison Prep opens, ULGM projects a need to spend $14,148 per student, not including additional costs for serving English language learners and students with special needs, or the costs of Madison Prep's third semester (summer).
B. Cost Comparisons between Madison Prep and MMSD
Staffing Costs
In 2010‐11, MMSD projected it would spend $67,133,692 on salaries (and benefits) on 825.63 staff in its secondary (middle and high) schools for an average salary of $81,312. This includes teachers, principals and in‐school support staff. In its first year of operation (SY2012‐13), ULGM projects Madison Prep it will spend $1,559,454 in salaries and benefits on 23 staff for an average of $67,802 in salary, including salaries for teachers, the Head of School (principal) and support staff. In its fifth year of operation, Madison Prep is projected to spend $3,560,746 in salaries and benefits on 52 staff for an average of $68,476 per staff person. In both years, Madison Prep will spend significantly less on salaries and benefits per staff member than MMSD.
Additionally, MMSD spends an average of $78,277 on salaries and benefits for staff in its middle schools and $79,827 on its staff in its high schools.
The high cost results from the likelihood that Madison Prep will serve more low-income, non-English speaking and special education students, said Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, which is developing the charter school. The school also plans to have a longer school year, school day and require students to participate in volunteer and extracurricular activities.
"What we're asking for is based on the fact that we're going to serve a high-needs population of kids," Caire said. "We don't know yet if what we're projecting is out of line."
Caire said the proposal will likely change as potential state and federal revenues are assessed.
A Republican charter school bill circulated in the Legislature this week could also alter the landscape. The bill would allow charter schools to receive approval from a state board, rather than a local school board, and those that don't use district employees, like Madison Prep, would be able to access the state retirement and health care systems.
The following analysis is done using the PMA Model information and is looking at the cost to continue budget figures that will be provided to the Board on March 14, 2011. The analysis includes the impact on the median home in Madison, and for that figure we contacted the City of Madison Assessor and were provided that value at $241,217. For comparative purposes ofthe effect on this home, we are using the assumed value from the 2010-11 analysis of$246,041 or 2%morethanthecurrentmedianvalue. Theequalizedpropertyvaluationforthe2011-12 budget year is also projected to decrease by 2.00% as part ofthis analysis.
What is the projected All Funds Property Tax Increase for the 2011-12 Budget Year?
$18,719,470 or a 7.64% increase when compared to 2010-ll actuals.
Where does the projected All Funds Property Tax Increase for the 2011-12 Budget Year come from?
Prior Decisions by the Board ofEducation:
Recurring Referendum from November of 2008: $4,000,000
4-K Levy Increase to start program: $3,554,415
Referendum Debt Service: ($2.327,900)
Subtotal: $5,226,515
Decisions to be made by the Board of Education:
Projected Revenue Limit Growth ($200 per pupil): $7,774,514
Projected Loss in State Aid: $4,515,523
Community Services Fund (MSCR and Non-MSCR): $469,460
Exempt Computer Aid (property tax relief): ($261,927)
Property Tax Chargeback ($4.615)
After Detroit, Milwaukee is the country's most segregated city. The Milwaukee Public School District (MPS) has an endemic racial achievement gap, in which, in terms of aggregate statistics, African American students perform three to four years below their European American counterparts in both math and reading. Combine this with a general dearth of resources -- as is common to virtually all of public education -- and you have a recipe for inadequate schooling that is failing its almost 90,000 students.
The crisis in Milwaukee is indicative of the educational crisis roiling the nation. Across the United States, school districts are facing enormous budget deficits, decreasing enrollment and intense pedagogical and ideological debates questioning the very foundations of modern education. The debate is particularly vociferous here in Wisconsin, where the Wisconsin Education Association Council feels threatened by Governor Scott Walker's educational platform. This past Tuesday, however, WEAC introduced a series of reforms it would endorse, many of which took observers by surprise, and received mixed reactions.
The reform drawing the most ire is the proposal to carve up MPS into multiple smaller districts to make them more manageable, and thus more successful. However, as pointed out by one observer, this separation of districts would probably mirror racial divisions within the city, compounding instead of alleviating racial achievement gaps.
Michelle Rhee, a national voice on education reform, told state lawmakers Thursday that charter schools and vouchers for low-income students have a place in public education, but in a blend with strong traditional schools.
"Vouchers in and of themselves are not the answer. Charters in and of themselves are not the answer," said Rhee, who last fall stepped down as chancellor of Washington, D.C., schools after three years in which she was both lauded and derided for her overhaul of the school system.
"The answer in my mind is a really strong traditional public school system. That has very specific strategies to turn around failing schools [and incorporates both vouchers and charters]."
Rhee is on a national tour talking about education reform, particularly teacher evaluations and performance.
Madison School District is one of the members of the Wisconsin School Consortium (Consortium) for Human Resource/Financial Business Solution System. The other member school districts are Racine, Middleton-Cross Plains and Verona.
Madison implemented the current system solution (Lawson) in 2003-04 and began the Consortium in 2005-06. To assure that the Consortium districts are getting the best value on their HR!Financial Business application software and related services, the Consortium opted to have a competitive RFP process for the following areas:
Evaluation of K-12 business application software including our current vendor, Lawson Software Evaluation of hosting vendors related to the business application software
The RFP process began in May where there were four qualified responders. The Consortium held all day demonstrations that were both on site and electronically through involving numerous representatives from the following areas of: Human Resources, Finance, School Sites, Food Service, Community Service, and General Administration.
The Consortium then moved their consideration primarily toward two of the vendors with reference calls, another set of demonstrations for further detail clarification, site visits and a virtual site visit
At this point the Consortium members are at a consensus that they will be dissolving the Consortium where two members, Verona and Middleton-Cross Plains are looking at one solution, Racine is considering staying with the current solution, and Madison is considering moving forward with a different solution because of the improved and integrated functionality combined with cost savings.
he 1970 film, "Tora! Tora! Tora!," ends with Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto sullenly observing that his nation might have "awakened a sleeping giant" in attacking Pearl Harbor. The quotation's historical accuracy hasn't been verified, but I've been thinking the same line could apply to slumbering public school teachers in Indiana.
A Facebook page, Support Indiana Teachers, has drawn close to 16,000 friends in just over a week. Granted, it takes little effort to click a computer key, but comments on the page indicate that teachers and other Hoosiers have finally taken note of the current anti-public education agenda and are angry enough to act.
Hundreds of educators and public education supporters showed up at the Statehouse rally Tuesday. We're receiving an ever-increasing number of letters to the editor critical of the legislative assault.
Still, it's probably too late. One lawmaker tells me that the newly elected majority in the House is so far to the right that support for public schools doesn't register. The Senate GOP majority has been drifting further to the right with every election.
A new report finds that charter schools use the freedoms they have from traditional school district mandates to define and operate schools in innovative new ways. However, expectations about what a school "should look like," the stress of tight and unstable budgets, and overwhelming administrative demands are powerful forces pulling charter schools back to traditional practice.
This report offers great reason for optimism that charter schools are well positioned to answer President Obama's call for public schools to innovate. But it also cautions that traditional regulatory structures and weaknesses in capacity must be addressed if they are to fully meet the challenge of innovation.
Based on a four-year study of the teachers, leaders, and academic programs in charter schools in six states, Inside Charter Schools: Unlocking Doors to Student Success observes that "autonomy only creates the opportunity for high-quality schools, it by no means guarantees it."
Author Betheny Gross, a researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington, argues that autonomy makes it possible for charter schools to:
One of the biggest stories of the past week has been the Wisconsin Education Association Council's recommendation to fragment Milwaukee Public Schools into smaller districts. According to WEAC, this would create "more manageable components" as well as "drive greater accountability within the system." However, a look at how Milwaukee's public schools operate as separate entities suggests that these schools will run into problems regardless of the size of their district.
In 2009, Milwaukee's schools carried over operating debts of over $8 million into the new school year. Of the 148 schools surveyed in October of 2010, 93 (62.8%) finished the preceding school year in the red. 42 of these schools racked up debts of more than $100,000. 20 more overspent their budgets by $40,000 or more.
As the MacIver Institute has previously noted, schools like Bradley Tech (running a deficit of over $750,000), Vel Phillips (-$475k), Audubon Middle (-$436k), and Wedgewood (-$382k) are some of the city's biggest offenders. While some schools have been able to create careful surpluses with their funds, the system as a whole has shown to be flawed. In all, the city's school-by-school deficits added up to over $10.7 million dollars in 2009-2010 alone.
The Anne Arundel County Board of Education on Wednesday approved Superintendent Kevin Maxwell's $968.6 million operating budget recommendations for next year by an 8-1 margin, after one board member unsuccessfully moved to have the budget amended and another complained that it requests too much additional spending as the county aims to be more fiscally responsible.
The board simultaneously approved the $156.9 million capital budget that gives $46.7 million to continuing construction projects at four schools, Northeast High School and Belle Grove, Folger McKinsey and Point Pleasant elementary schools. It also allocates $3.6 million for designs to replace Severna Park High School, $11 million for full-day kindergarten and pre-kindergarten additions, and $14 million for textbooks.
The operating budget for fiscal year 2012 is $37.3 million more than the previous year's budget. It funds negotiated agreements with unions, the system's health care obligations and 20 mentor teachers required to fulfill obligations associated with the Race to the Top federal money.
Anne Arundel spends $12,334.69 per student ($931,269,700 2011 budget for 75,500 students).
Since it hit the Associated Press wires, the story has spread to more than 200 publications. Natalie Munroe, an English teacher at Central Bucks High School, was suspended and faces dismissal for what she wrote about her students and school on her personal blog "Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?"
While the majority of New Jerseyans love public school teachers, more than half believe that the NJ Education Association (NJEA) is "playing a negative role in improving public education," according to a Quinnipiac poll released yesterday.
In addition, reports New Jersey Newsroom, 68% of residents favor implementation of a merit pay system and 62% support tenure reform. We're more split on school choice; the poll found that by a small margin we oppose school vouchers and charter school expansion. From Maurice Carroll of Quinnipiac:
With state aid stagnant or dropping, state revenue limits tightening, and school compensation costs outpacing revenues, school districts--particularly their administrators--face growing financial pressures. At the same time, in the never-ending search for savings, the work of administrators is receiving greater scrutiny by school boards and the public alike.
Administrators increasingly wear many hats: fiscal expert, economic forecaster, management consultant, marketer, and savvy politician. In small districts, it is no exaggeration to add bookkeeper, guidance counselor, math teacher, handyman, or coach.
How varied approaches to school administration have become is illustrated by two small northern Wisconsin districts, each with about 500 students. One has four administrators (a superintendent, a business manager, and two principals), while the other has just one (a superintendent).
The same can be found among large districts. A relatively large central Wisconsin district has 22 administrators, while a similarly sized district (about 10% more students) has 32 administrators, or nearly 50% more.
These comparisons suggest there is much taxpayers, educators, and school boards can learn about how schools and districts are managed, both in terms of expenditures and work performed...
The comprehensive article mentions:
Among full time Superintendents, highest salaries were Madison ($198,500), Green Bay ($184,000), Racine ($180,000), Milwaukee ($175,062) and Whitefish Bay ($170,850). On the other hand, 49 full-time district heads earned less than $100,000, including those in Augusta ($65,649), Florence ($85,000), Wheatland J1 ($85,517), Cameron ($86,111), Phillips ($87,000) and Wauzeka-Steuben ($87,000).
When benefits are added, districts with the highest total compensation included Madison ($256,715), Milwaukee ($243,365), Green Bay ($239,700), Franklin ($236,573) and Hamilton ($218,617). Benefits include retirement contributions, employer share of Social Security and Medicare, health, life and disability insurance and other miscellaneous benefits such as reimbursement for college courses.
a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/opinion/07mon1.html?_r=2&ref=opinion">TODAY'S New York Times editorial wisely comes out against the proposal to allow states to declare bankruptcy as a union-busting, budget-saving move. (Josh Barro's reasoning against state bankruptcy rings sound to me.) However, I think the Times' goes wrong here:
It is true that many public employee unions have done well during a time of hardship for most Americans. The problem, though, isn't the existence of those unions; it is the generous contracts willingly given to them by lawmakers because of their lobbying power and bloc-voting ability.
The Times' contention that the existence of public-employee unions is not the problem is true, if it is true, only because the unions "fix" a bargaining-power deficit public workers don't have. Without public-sector unions, government workers would lobby their way to padded paychecks, unobtanium-plated pensions, and hermetic job security anyway. Which is just to say, government workers don't really need unions at all. Indeed, the strategic logic behind private- and public-sector unions is fundamentally different. "The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," as some little somebody called Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it back in 1937.
"The Fraser Institute released its controversial B.C. elementary school rankings today," a TV news anchor intoned earlier this week, "and this year a school in the polygamous community of Bountiful topped the list. That's giving opponents of the rankings more ammunition."
The report continued with Susan Lambert, president of the B.C. Teachers' Federation, saying that "everyone who has anything to do, credibly, with the public education system, will tell you that the rankings are worthless." (The thousands of parents who consult the rankings don't count, as they should have realized by now.) "It's just another example of how ... meaningless the rankings are, and that we should pay no attention to them."
And then the Fraser Institute's Peter Cowley rebutted: "How is it possible that ... a president of a teachers' union can say, on the basis of the evidence that shows that [the school is] doing well, for one year, in reading, writing and math skills at Grades 4 and 7, we have to invalidate those results because of [the community's religious] beliefs?"
And that was pretty much it. It was the line most media outlets took, and it was almost completely beside the point.
More high school seniors are taking Advanced Placement courses in Minnesota and scoring higher on the tests, but the state's rankings are still below national averages.
According to new data from the College Board, more than 15,000 Minnesota high school seniors took an AP course last year, and nearly 10,000 of them scored at least a three on an AP test. A score of three to five usually allows students to gain college credit for that class.
Students have other options to take advanced coursework in Minnesota schools, including throughout the International Baccalaureate program. Tuesday's report was confined to the AP program.
New York state high-school students' college and career readiness lags far behind the graduation rates that most school districts post, according to data from the state Department of Education.
Across the state, the graduation rate in 2009, the last year for which figures are public, was 77%. But only 41% of high-school students were prepared for a career or college, the state said. The state defines students as college- and career-ready if they score at least an 80 on the state's math Regents exam and at least a 75 on the English Regents exam. New York students receive a high-school diploma if they achieve a score of at least 65 on Regents tests.
After 2½ years as Madison schools superintendent, Dan Nerad is still finding his footing.
For Nerad and his supporters, that's more of a statement about Madison's slippery and sometimes treacherous political terrain.
But among critics there is frustration that Nerad hasn't risen to the task, particularly given the high expectations for the former social worker and Green Bay superintendent.
The two views among Madison School Board members and others in the community are circulating as the board weighs whether to extend Nerad's contract beyond June 2012.
Supporters point to a long list of accomplishments so far despite severe obstacles -- implementation of 4-year-old kindergarten after decades of discussion, development of a strategic plan that brought in dozens of community voices and expansion of dual-language immersion programs.
When it comes to the quality of Madison's public schools, the issue is pretty much black and white.
The Madison Metropolitan School District's reputation for providing stellar public education is as strong as it ever was for white, middle-class students. Especially for these students, the district continues to post high test scores and turn out a long list of National Merit Scholars -- usually at a rate of at least six times the average for a district this size.
But the story is often different for Hispanic and black kids, and students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
Madison is far from alone in having a significant performance gap. In fact, the well-documented achievement gap is in large measure responsible for the ferocious national outcry for more effective teachers and an overhaul of the public school system. Locally, frustration over the achievement gap has helped fuel a proposal from the Urban League of Greater Madison and its president and CEO, Kaleem Caire, to create a non-union public charter school targeted at minority boys in grades six through 12.
"In Madison, I can point to a long history of failure when it comes to educating African-American boys," says Caire, who is black, a Madison native and a graduate of West High School. "We have one of the worst achievement gaps in the entire country. I'm not seeing a concrete plan to address that fact, even in a district that prides itself on innovative education."
What often gets lost in the discussion over the failures of public education, however, is that there are some high-poverty, highly diverse schools that are beating the odds by employing innovative ways to reach students who have fallen through the cracks elsewhere.
Dave Baskerville has argued that Wisconsin needs two big goals, one of which is to "Lift the math, science and reading scores of all K-12, non-special education students in Wisconsin above world-class standards by 2030". Ongoing use of and progress measurement via the WKCE would seem to be insufficient in our global economy.
Children are often happier with their online lives than they are with reality, a survey has revealed.
They say they can be exactly who they want to be - and as soon as something is no longer fun they can simply hit the quit button.
The study also shows that, despite concerns about online safety, one in eight young people is in contact with strangers when on the web and often lies about their appearance, age and background.
Researchers for children's charity Kidscape assessed the online activities of 2,300 11- to 18-year-olds from across the UK and found that 45 per cent said they were sometimes happier online than in their real lives.
Andy Rotherham just published a report with obvious conclusions: sustainability is impacted by location. More specifically, if you open a charter in California, you will spend a lifetime begging for money.
Find the New paper on charter school finance from Bellwether out today (pdf). Press release can be found here and The Wall Street Journal editorial page weighs-in on it here.
The New York State Education Department has released data that it said indicates that not all students graduating high school are prepared to enter college or careers.
The data compares graduation rates versus college- and career-ready graduation rate calculations for general education students who entered ninth grade in the 2005-06 school year, through June 2009.
General education graduation requirements for a local diploma include a score of 65 or better on two Regents exams and 55 or better on three Regents exams. The designation of college- and career-ready is defined by graduates who received at least an 80-percent grade on the math Regents exam and 75 on the English Regents exam.
In Rochester, there was a 46.6 percent graduation rate, with only 5.1 percent of graduates being college- and career-ready, said state education officials. This compares to 49.5 and 14.7 percent, respectively, in Syracuse, and 64.5 and 22.8 percent in New York City.
Don't be surprised if a surprising number of Michigan school districts fall short of proficient scoring after next year's round of standardized state testing.
The Michigan Board of Education approved higher cut scores, or scores that mark proficiency, for both the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) and Michigan Merit Exam (MME) tests at a board meeting Tuesday. According to experts, the new standards will be more honest about how well students are doing on the tests.
"It's going to make a real difference in the share of kids who are being labeled proficient and in the share of schools passing AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress)," said Susan Dynarski, associate professor of economics, education and public policy at the University of Michigan. "Michigan has been Lake Woebegone -- right now 95 percent of our third graders are labeled as proficient in math and under the new standards, it would become 34 percent."
The George W. Bush Institute's second big education initiative will seek to improve graduation rates by focusing on middle school as a foundation for future success.
Former first lady Laura Bush is set to announce the initiative, called "Middle School Matters," Wednesday in Houston at Stovall Middle School in the Aldine school district.
She says research has shown that 6th through 8th grade is a crucial time and that many high school dropouts essentially dropped out in middle school. One goal will be to ensure students are prepared for high school.
No one wants the big teacher layoffs that most analysts say are inevitable under our current state budget crisis. But many of us are very concerned that if such layoffs are necessary, the state's "last in, first out" rule will mean that many of our best teachers will be forced out regardless of their qualifications and effectiveness. This could be particularly devastating for schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, where teachers tend to have fewer years of experience
A new poll shows that a majority of New Yorkers disapprove of the state's "last in, first out" (LIFO) law that forces schools to fire the most recently hired teachers during a budget crisis, regardless of teacher quality
Beginning March 1, public schools in Madison and across the state will be constrained in their ability to dispense medication to students and respond to health emergencies.
"Our options are now limited," says Freddi Adelson, the Madison district's health services coordinator.
The changes, crafted by the state Department of Public Instruction and passed by the Legislature last year, set stricter rules for dispensing medications at school than current district policy.
For instance, Madison schools now let school nurses dispense acetaminophen or ibuprofen to the students of parents who give written permission. The new rules say schools can dispense only medications
As part of the five-year $1.3 million grant, Arabic classes would have been taught at Cross Timbers Intermediate School and other schools feeding into Summit High School.
Parents at Cross Timbers say they were caught off-guard by the program, and were surprised the district only told them about it in a meeting Monday night between parents and Mansfield ISD Superintendent Bob Morrison.
Wouldn't it be nice if taxpayers could somehow get a refund for government programs that didn't work?
Instead, the opposite tends to happen. Programs that fail to make a difference -- like many of those that train workers for new jobs -- endure indefinitely. Often, policy makers don't even know which work and which don't, because rigorous evaluation is rare in government. And competition, which punishes laggards in the private sector, is typically absent in the public sector.
But there is some good news on this front. Lately, both American and British policy makers have been thinking about how to bring some of the competitive discipline of the market to government programs, and they have hit on an intriguing idea.
State officers of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) today unveiled three dramatic proposals as part of their quality-improvement platform called "Moving Education Forward: Bold Reforms." The proposals include the creation of a statewide system to evaluate educators; instituting performance pay to recognize teaching excellence; and breaking up the Milwaukee Public School District into a series of manageable-sized districts within the city.
"In our work with WEAC leaders and members we have debated and discussed many ideas related to modernizing pay systems, better evaluation models, and ways to help turn around struggling schools in Milwaukee," said WEAC President Mary Bell. "We believe bold actions are needed in these three areas to move education forward. The time for change is now. This is a pivotal time in public education and we're in an era of tight resources. We must have systems in place to ensure high standards for accountability - that means those working in the system must be held accountable to high standards of excellence."
TEACHER EVALUATION: In WEAC's proposed teacher evaluation system, new teachers would be reviewed annually for their first three years by a Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) panel made up of both teachers and administrators. The PAR panels judge performance in four areas:
Planning and preparing for student learning
Creating a quality learning environment
Effective teaching
Professional responsibility
The proposed system would utilize the expertise of the UW Value-Added Research Center (Value Added Assessment) and would include the review of various student data to inform evaluation decisions and to develop corrective strategies for struggling teachers. Teachers who do not demonstrate effectiveness to the PAR panels are exited out of the profession and offered career transition programs and services through locally negotiated agreements.
Veteran teachers would be evaluated every three years, using a combination of video and written analysis and administrator observation. Underperforming veteran teachers would be required to go through this process a second year. If they were still deemed unsatisfactory, they would be re-entered into the PAR program and could ultimately face removal.
"The union is accepting our responsibility for improving the quality of the profession, not just for protecting the due process rights of our members," said Bell. "Our goal is to have the highest-quality teachers at the front of every classroom across the state. And we see a role for classroom teachers to contribute as peer reviewers, much like a process often used in many private sector performance evaluation models."
"If you want to drive change in Milwaukee's public schools, connect the educators and the community together into smaller districts within the city, and without a doubt it can happen," said Bell. "We must put the needs of Milwaukee's students and families ahead of what's best for the adults in the system," said Bell. "That includes our union - we must act differently - we must lead."
Madison's "value added assessment" program is based on the oft-criticized WKCE examinations.
The two public high schools, 21/2 miles apart in Northwest Washington, serve vastly different student populations. And they do it with vastly different levels of financial support, according to an analysis of school spending by a District advocacy group.
School Without Walls accepts only the city's most accomplished students after a competitive application process that requires interviews with prospective parents as well. More than 700 students are vying for 120 spots in next year's ninth-grade class. Those who are admitted will attend classes in a freshly renovated vintage building on the George Washington University campus. District funds per student: $10,257.
Cardozo, near 13th Street and Florida Avenue, is a neighborhood high school that takes all comers in an attendance area that includes about a dozen group homes and homeless shelters. Parole officers and social workers are sometimes the only adults who appear at the school on students' behalf. The wiring in the cavernous 1916 building was so bad a couple of years ago that when all of the computers were turned on, power in half of the school would go out, said Principal Gwendolyn Grant.
District funds per student: $7,453.
Locally, the Madison School District's 2010-2011 budget, according to the "State of the Madison School District Report" is $379,058,945. Enrollment is 24,471 which yields per student spending of $15,490.12.
Look quickly and you might think that charter schools have it easy, given the celebrated documentary "Waiting for 'Superman,'" the efforts of reformers like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein, and the support of the Obama Administration. That's why a report out Tuesday is a needed corrective: It demonstrates how government policies regularly discriminate against charters.
Published by Bellwether Education Partners, a reform-minded advocacy group, the report examines the finances of Aspire Public Schools, a network of 30 California charter schools with 9,800 students from kindergarten through high school. With extended school days and years, innovative curricula and other hallmarks of charter autonomy, Aspire ranks as California's single best school system serving a majority of very poor students. Yet it operates with margins of only 0.6%, or $60 per student, which make it harder to scrape together funds to open new schools.
There is no limit to what you learn about schools if you listen to teachers. Did you know, for instance, that Fairfax County, the Washington region's largest school district, is using 10 days a year of valuable instruction time on do-what-you-like recesses for high school students?
I didn't, either. West Springfield High School physics teacher Ed Linz says this program, designed to help struggling students, is a waste. At his school, students get 90 free minutes a week, which they can use to find dates for Saturday night or check basketball scores, if they want. But his principal, Paul Wardinski, says most students do homework, work on group projects and enrich their studies. It helps teachers to be creative, he says, even if some students look for imaginative ways to goof off.
Linz disclosed the recesses to the county School Board last month. Like President Obama, he said that this is our Sputnik moment and that we can't win the future throwing away precious class time.
Montgomery County is rightly proud of its public school system, which is widely regarded as one of the best in the state. Perhaps that's why, nearly eight years after state lawmakers passed a law allowing for the establishment of charter schools -- alternative institutions that receive public funds but operate independently -- the Montgomery County school board has yet to approve a single application to open one.
Is that because no one has come up with a credible plan for a school that would give parents more choices for educating their children? Or is it because local school officials simply don't want the competition?
The state school board looked into the matter last year, after Montgomery County school officials turned down the applications of two groups that wanted to set up new charter schools in the district. What they found goes a long way toward explaining why school reform advocates like the Washington-based Center for Education Reform have rated Maryland's charter school law as one of the weakest in the nation. Despite passing important reforms last year regarding lengthening of the time it takes teachers to earn tenure and linking student test scores with teacher evaluations, lawmakers need to take another look at strengthening the state's charter school law if Maryland is to build on those gains.
A long-simmering dispute between the state and parents who prefer to teach their children at home is being renewed.
The House Education Committee has scheduled for Tuesday hearings on three bills on home schooling in its largest room, the House chamber. Legislation regulating home schooling has drawn large crowds over the years.
Last month, a divorced couple who couldn't agree on how to educate their daughter took the fight to the state Supreme Court. The court is being asked if parents have a constitutional right to home school their kids. In this case, the father objected to his wife's strict Christian teachings and wants their daughter taught at public schools. The mother prefers home schooling.
Home schooling advocates say they want less regulation over what they argue is a parent's right.
In my short time as a teacher in Connecticut, I have muddled through President Bush's No Child Left Behind act, which tied federal funding of schools to various reforms, and through President Obama's Race to the Top initiative, which does much the same thing, though with different benchmarks. Thanks to the feds, urban schools like mine--already entitled to substantial federal largesse under Title I, which provides funds to public schools with large low-income populations--are swimming in money. At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up. We don't want for books--or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non-Title I schools can't afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.
Here's my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children--all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.
Carole G. Hankin, the schools superintendent in Syosset on Long Island, made an unexpected cameo appearance in Albany last week: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo cast her salary as a prime example of wasteful spending by school districts.
Mr. Cuomo did not mention Dr. Hankin by name in his budget address, but he did offer her salary: $386,868, more than the pay of any other superintendent in the state. "I applied for that job," the governor joked, adding that he had decided to run for governor, which pays $179,000, only after he had been rejected.
Mr. Cuomo's remarks came as he presented a budget calling for a $2.85 billion reduction in local school aid, a proposal that has already drawn fierce criticism from educators. But the governor offered some criticism of his own for school officials.
Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said that school districts had enough means to withstand the decline in state financing, and pointedly suggested that they look at whether they are spending too much on their own bureaucracy.
Private philanthropists have changed the face of public education over the last decade, underwriting the rise of charter schools and promoting remedies that rely heavily on student testing and teacher evaluation.
But with much less fanfare, wealthy donors have begun playing a parallel role in the country's next-largest educational network: Roman Catholic schools.
In New York -- as in Boston, Baltimore and Chicago -- shrinking enrollment and rising school deficits in recent years have deepened the church's dependence on its cadres of longtime benefactors. Donors have responded generously, but many who were once content to write checks and attend student pageants are now asking to see school budgets, student reading scores and principals' job evaluations.
In the jargon of education reform, they want transparency and accountability; and though the church bureaucracy has resisted similar demands from other constituents in the past, the donors are getting pretty much what they want.
Supporters call them a matter of choice, a lifeline for children stuck in broken schools. Opponents deride them as unconstitutional and unworkable and warn that they will erode conditions in some of Pennsylvania's most troubled schools.
The debate over taxpayer-paid tuition vouchers to help poor children find alternatives to attending the state's weakest-performing public schools has emerged as a major item on the legislative agenda for the next six months -- perhaps the major item after the state budget.
The voucher issue will come to the fore in the General Assembly on Feb. 16, when the chairman of the Senate Education Committee will lead a hearing on his bill to establish the Opportunity Scholarship and Educational Improvement Tax Credit Act.
The board also expressed concern about the $1.3 billion earmarked for education in the federal stimulus package that was supposed to be distributed in addition to the state education budget. Instead, that money was used to substitute for state education allocations.
"This is an alarming trend," said Board President Stephen Jambor. "While it makes great headlines to blame the schools, it is underhanded to underfund us in the first place. Your state taxes keep going up the hill to Albany. We have to get busy in fighting back because push has come to shove."
These issues have been detailed in a letter to the governor which was personally delivered by Sandbank. A copy of the letter will be posted on the district's website.
Anna Cook chose online education for her 7-year-old daughter this fall after an unhappy year at Lincoln Park Elementary School, where she said overwhelmed teachers and bullying made traditional school seem like "chaos."
"I didn't feel like my child was in a safe situation there," Cook said. "All I could do was get her out of there."
Cook is part of a steady stream of people choosing to leave the district. As the School Board prepares to cut $7.3 million from its budget, partly because of declining enrollment, it's taking a look Tuesday at that number, along with where the students are going and how to get them back.
Red Plan opponents have long said angry families are sending their students in droves to neighboring districts because of the plan. But Cook's story shows there are a variety of reasons families are seeking education elsewhere, including more choice, smaller class sizes and fresh starts.
The simplest of conversations, the most important of facts. And yet nearly six years after those images were discovered by the Madison School District, Nelson was a superintendent and had to be caught allegedly trying to solicit sex from what he thought was a 15-year-old boy online before the bizzaro world of public school human resources stood up and took notice.
I am assuming (safely, I really, really hope) that had my imagined exchange occurred, Nelson's public schools career would have been over. There also does not appear to have been anything contractually or legally to prevent it from occurring.
Madison human resources director Bob Nadler said Nelson had an oral agreement -- "not a contract" -- under which, in exchange for Nelson's resignation, the district would disclose nothing more than his dates of employment, position and salary.
These kinds of agreements happened with some frequency, according to Art Rainwater, the superintendent in Madison at the time Nelson was nabbed for porn. As to the exact circumstances surrounding how Nelson was lucky enough to get one and who it was with, well, "I honestly don't remember," Rainwater told me.
Not only could Madison have dropped the dime on its very own pervert; state law provides some liability protection for doing so. Employers who act in "good faith" when providing a reference are protected unless they knowingly lie or provide a reference maliciously or violate the state's blacklisting statute, according to Marquette University Law School Associate Professor Paul Secunda.
Rickert deserves props for contacting former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater (who now is employed - along with others from the Madison School District - at the UW-Madison School of Education) on this matter.
This search reveals that there have been six closed session meetings since August, 2010 on the Superintendent evaluation. I wonder how this frequency conflicts with the public's right to know?
I worried constantly about my daughter Jerlisa when she attended our neighborhood elementary school. I knew that I wanted a better education for her, but I didn't know how to make that happen. In 2005, I took a chance and applied to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. Little did I know how much more than $7,500 I would be gaining.
I grew up in the District and attended D.C. public schools. Jerlisa started off the same way. We enrolled her at Gibbs Elementary School for kindergarten, and as the years went by she started to fall behind. There was so much going on around the school and in the classroom. Every morning, I walked with her to school, and every afternoon I waited outside the school gates to walk her home again. She got teased for that, but I was worried about the drug dealers, addicts and bullies in the neighborhood. I didn't have any other choice. I had to make sure she was safe.
When Jerlisa was in fifth grade, she became anxious and didn't want to return to school. It was clear to me she wasn't getting the help that she needed. That's when I received fliers about the Opportunity Scholarship Program. Although I didn't know everything about the OSP, I knew I had to do something different, even if it meant getting out of my comfort zone. When you're a single mother on a fixed income, sometimes simple things like filling out your name, address or income on a form can be a scary thing to do.
Background information: In 2010, the Board approved a number of administrative recommendations geared toward increasing usage of the Infinite Campus System. The current timeline requires all high school teachers to use grade-level appropriate Infinite Campus teacher tools by the end of the fourth quarter of the 2010-2011 school year.
The administration has been notified by the vendor that significant changes will be made to the Infinite Campus interface in July 2011. Accordingly, if training sessions were to continue as required to meet the current deadline, those same teachers would have to be trained on a new interface only months later.
It would be more prudent to wait until the new interface is available and require full implementation of the Infinite Campus teacher tools at the high schools by the end of the second quarter of the 2011-2012 school year.
D. BOE action requested: Postpone mandatory use of Infinite Campus teacher tools at the high schools until the end of the second quarter of the 2011-2012 school year.
The system originally lifted off during the fall of 2007. I wonder how much has been spent on it without full use? This type of system can be a useful way for parents, teachers and students to communicate - if it is used.....
It is no secret that the children of certain families (and we all know who we are) are primed to take a disproportionate share of the places at the best--or at least the most prestigious--colleges. That's because we're already sending our kids to the kinds of excellent schools that help prepare them for admission to such colleges.
But just in case our children don't quite have the stats to make it into, say, Georgetown or UNC on their own steam, you can bet that we, as parents, will do everything in our power to make it happen. We are all caught up in a crazy arms race, where the order of the day (to borrow a useful term from the Cold War) is "escalation dominance."
In a report issued on February 2nd, Harvard researchers question the value of 'college for all.'
According to the co-authors of the report, Academic Dean Robert Schwartz and Ronald Ferguson, a Senior Lecturer at Harvard, the US's four-year colleges are failing students by focusing too much on classroom-based academics and not adequately preparing students for careers. The proposal has sparked immediately concern from educators as it raises the 'specter of tracking,' in which students (often from lower-income or disadvantaged backgrounds) are 'channeled unquestioningly into watered-down programs that curtail their prospects,' according to EdWeek.
Currently, 42 percent of 27-year-olds in the US have no more than a high school degree. Only 30 percent of Americans earn a bachelor's degree by the time they are 27. President Obama has stated that he wants to improve the nation's college graduation rate to 60 percent in 10 years (ABC News). The US now ranks in 12th place in the world for college graduates, In comparison Canada's college graduation rate is 55.8 percent; in South Korea and Russia, the rate for college graduates is 55.5 percent, according to statistics from the College Board.
A little over two weeks after celebrity cook Jamie Oliver started shooting the second season of his Food Revolution reality TV show at the Westwood-based Jamie's Kitchen, the Los Angeles Unified School District remains at odds with the production company about letting the show shoot in district schools.
However, Robert Alaniz, spokesperson for the district said that officials have been meeting with Oliver's team.
"He'd be more than welcome, but sans cameras," Alaniz said, adding that district officials simply believe that the school district is no place for a reality television show.
Pocatello-Chubbuck School District 25 has officially come out against an education reform plan backed by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna, arguing it adds new costs at a time when the state can't cover existing expenses.
School board members, who hosted a special meeting Tuesday to discuss the plan, even took exception with the name of Luna's plan, called "Students Come First."
"The legislation itself is insulting in its title, thinking that any one of the school boards in this state would not put children first," board members wrote in the document they authored outlining their position on the plan.
They noted past policy changes, including core standards and heightened graduation requirements, involved considerable input and time for research. Luna's proposed legislation, they argue, wasn't based on sufficient input or extensive research. They suggest implementing pilot programs to test various aspects of the plan, which could be used to measure success or as a basis for modifications.
The Birmingham school board plans to hire 60 Teach for America teachers over the next three years in an effort to bring more innovation to low-performing schools.
TFA is a privately run program that recruits recent college graduates, gives them five weeks of training in how to teach and sends them across the country for two years to work in largely under-performing schools.
In addition to paying their salaries, the Birmingham school system will also pay $5,000 per year per new hire to TFA for training.
On Jan. 15, I sat with my son, and 70,000 others, watching Auburn University celebrate winning the BCS national football championship because what my alma mater has just done could be a great example for Superintendent Witherspoon and members of the Birmingham school board.
This is so awesome. A school district in Knox City, Texas has allowed a student with a severe illness that keeps him at home to attend classes like a normal freshman by using a Vgo telepresence robot. My son's school had to have a meeting with the school board to let me GIVE them technology.
The boy is named Lyndon Baty and he suffers from polycystic kidney disease, and treatment for the disease has left his immune system suppressed. The poor immune system means he can't be around other kids to attend classes.
Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist is putting the brakes on regulations that require high school students to reach at least "partial proficiency" on state tests in order to graduate. She's pushing the 2012 deadline back two years.
But she says Rhode Island's high schools can't continue to dole out diplomas to students who cannot read, write or compute at a high-school level.
Schools must do more to help students reach the higher goals, and state education officials must find better ways to support schools, she says.
"We need people to understand we are not putting a two-year pause in place," Gist said in an interview Friday.
Parents of children who turn 4 on or before Sept. 1 can register at their local elementary school between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. for the half-day, tuition-free program.
As families begin to enroll their students Monday in virtual schools or neighboring districts through the state's open enrollment process, the Legislature is debating changes to the program.
The Senate approved a bill this week that would extend the enrollment period from three weeks in February to three months, starting this year. The bill still needs approval in the Assembly and the governor's signature.
The changes would make it easier for parents who want to enroll their students in public schools outside their own district, but may not be thinking about that decision in February, said Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, who introduced the bill.
Democrats opposed the changes, however, saying the wider window will cause administrative hassles and uncertainty for school districts about proper staffing levels as they try to budget for the next school year.
Gov. Mark Dayton pledged Friday to increase funding for K-12 education and laid out a plan that focuses on early learners and reducing achievement disparities between student groups.
But there was no detail on how much the plan would cost or how it would be accomplished with the state facing a $6.2 billion deficit.
Dayton deferred questions about funding to his Feb. 15 budget presentation, saying Friday's announcement was about fulfilling a campaign pledge to provide more money to schools.
He'll propose increasing aid each of the next two years, he said, "no excuses, no exceptions."
Dayton promised last year as a candidate to spend more on schools every year, but softened that stance because of the state's financial problems.
Dayton's seven-point education plan, titled "Better Schools for a Better Minnesota," calls for investment in early-childhood initiatives -- led by Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius -- and all-day kindergarten, as well as a push to increase the number of children ready for kindergarten and to ensure all children are reading by third grade.
Hundreds of protesters descended on Brooklyn Thursday, laying bare the deep philosophical divide that has become central to the Bloomberg administration's education policy: whether the city should fix failing schools or shut them down.
The dichotomy came to a head this week as the Panel for Educational Policy met twice to vote on whether to shutter 22 schools deemed failures because its students can't read or do math on grade level.
The panel, which is populated mostly by Bloomberg appointees, voted to close 10 schools at its meeting Tuesday and was expected to vote to close the other 12 Thursday night.
The administration and charter-school advocates argue that some schools are such failures they must be shut down completely and replaced with new schools. Students are allowed to register at the new schools, but for the most part, the new schools start up with different teachers and administrators. The city maintains that the new schools are more effective.
NJ’s voucher bill, the Opportunity Scholarship Act, is the big education news story today. Assembly Bill 2810 will be the subject of a hearing today before the Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee and proponents and opponents are going to the mattresses. Excellent Education for Everyone (E3) is running print ads that begin, “My school is failing me! I go to one of the worst schools in New Jersey. There are 80,000 kids just like me. The New Jersey Education Association wants to me to stay here. Will you help me get out?" New Jersey Teachers Association is running its own ad campaign, and has put out this set of talking points for parent leaders to use to lobby against the bill, which passed through the Senate Education Committee last month. (Here’s coverage from The Wall Street Journal and NJ Spotlight.)
Recently retired New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein made headlines this week when he told the Times of London that "it's easier to prosecute a capital-punishment case in the U.S. than terminate an incompetent teacher." The New York Post blared, "Joel: Easier to ax a killer than a teacher." The prize for most sensational probably goes to Liz Dwyer's headline, "Joel Klein Compares Teachers to Murderers."
There's plenty of scorched earth between Klein's words and these headlines, reflecting how unnecessarily polarized the education reform wars remain, even over the smallest changes in policy.
Advocates for virtual education say that it has the power to transform an archaic K-12 system of schooling. Instead of blackboards, schoolhouses, and a six-hour school day, interactive technology will personalize learning to meet each student's needs, ensure all students have access to quality teaching, extend learning opportunities to all hours of the day and all days of the week, and innovate and improve over time. Indeed, virtual education has the potential not only to help solve many of the most pressing issues in K-12 education, but to do so in a cost-effective manner. More than 1 million public-education students now take online courses, and as more districts and states initiate and expand online offerings, the numbers continue to grow. But to date, there's little research or publicly available data on the outcomes from K-12 online learning. And even when data are publicly available, as is the case with virtual charter schools, analysts and education officials have paid scant attention to--and have few tools for analyzing--performance. Until policymakers, educators, and advocates pay as much attention to quality as they do to expansion, virtual education will not be ready for a lead role in education reform.
I learned Mayor is having an informational briefing tomorrow morning about charter schools. It will be done by two staff from the Center for Reinventing Public Education from UW. Now this is fine but I will say that the CRPE is not exactly neutral on charters (the majority of their research is around it with them being in the pro column). Of course, it is a little odd use of time in a state that has no charter law and has turned it down three times.
When I saw the e-mail yesterday, I called and asked if I could come and listen. The staffer was very nice, said no and then said he would check. I was told today, sorry but no.
The issue isn't so much that I can't go. I'm sure there won't be any other media there but I operate on the "it doesn't hurt to ask" policy.
Speaking of Mayors, I've invited the four candidates for Madison Mayor to chat about education topics. Should they respond affirmatively, I will post the video conversations here.
"The sponsor of a bill that would make teacher effectiveness the main determining factor during layoffs says that the proposal is worth billions of dollars in school improvement," the AP in the Tacoma News Tribune reported last week. Senator Rodney Toms thinks seniority protections in teacher contracts that result in last-in-first-out (LIFO) doesn't make sense for kids.
There's nothing out there that I could do this year that makes a multibillion-dollar difference in education other than this legislation," he said. "To leave billions of dollars on the table because we like the status quo is unacceptable."
Tom said any other initiative aimed at improving student learning as much as one that ensures the best teachers remain in the classroom would cost the state billions of dollars. In other words, if his proposal is ignored and the system remains unchanged, a big potential savings would be lost, he argues.
Tom's bill, Senate Bill 5399, would require school districts facing layoffs to first lay off teachers who received the lowest average evaluation ratings during their two most recent evaluations, based on a formula that gives a weight of 60 percent to the most recent evaluation and 40 percent to the previous one.
In Deerfield, five candidates are running for two 3-year terms on the Deerfield School Board. The top four vote-getters in the Feb. 15 primary will advance to the April 5 general election.
Acknowledging that the achievement gap between African-American students and those of other races has persisted far too long, the Los Angeles Unified School District has established an African-American Education Working Committee designed to help create a plan to replicate "best practices" district-wide.
The 25-member committee has met twice since it was formed in mid-January, and has yet to determine specifics on what practices will be implemented and how.
But, committee member and Community Coalition lead organizer for youth programs Tonna Onyendu said "The beginning has been about introducing everyone to what the task force is about, and what the purpose is and why we are convening. Then we also made sure we were all on the same page in terms of what the goals of the task force are, which is to improve the educational outcome of African-American students within LAUSD."
In the middle of this winter of our discontent, the rearrangement of a state education Board may be going unnoticed by busy, weary families. But changes announced this week for the state Board of Regents has a whole lot to do with the future opportunities these families can expect for their children, whether they realize it or not. Chairman Robert Flanders, who provided strong leadership as an unwavering supporter of the bold reform vision of state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist, is stepping down and former House Majority Leader and friend to unions and union lawyers, George Caruolo, is Governor Chafee's pick for new Board Chairman.
Though it may be unfair to prejudge incoming appointments, it's a foregone conclusion to state that for the Board to lose Judge Flanders and the equally strong Gist supporters Angus Davis and Anna Cano-Morales all at once spells setbacks for the Gist engine for sure. But to characterize this as a victory for the Chafee-Union alliance, and a defeat for the lightning rod Commissioner is to miss the shameful truth. After all, if the leadership of the teachers' unions wants to reclaim their turf as the unnamed but fully operating Commissioners of Education, what record of victory are they actually trying to reclaim?
Deputy State Schools Superintendent Jorea Marple believes pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade education in West Virginia has reached a pivotal point, and the state's current direction for schools is just beginning to show benefits.
Mark Manchin, executive director of the state School Building Authority, wants to develop policies that help provide a "high-quality, 21st Century education" for children. He also promises to help support teachers and school administrators, provide safe and up-to-date school buildings and work with state lawmakers and the governor to ensure the state Board of Education's agenda is advanced.
Carolyn Long, chairwoman of the West Virginia University Board of Governors, believes her experience in both higher education and other public schools could help bring "these two cultures together" to serve the needs of West Virginia.
On 4 August 1822, James Madison wrote a letter to W.T. Barry about the importance of popular education and, by inference, the importance of the relationship of the First Amendment to the task of holding an elected government accountable for its actions. He concluded his opening paragraph, setting the tone for the entire letter, by saying, "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
Nowhere is the farce and tragedy feared by James Madison more evident than in the national debate over if, or how much, the defense budget should be cut back as part of our efforts to reduce the deficit. With the defense budget at war with Social Security, Medicare, and needed discretionary spending in education, investments in infrastructure, and elsewhere, it is a tragedy that must be undone if we are to protect our middle class way of life.
Arguments for consolidation, which merges schools or districts and centralizes their management, rest primarily on two presumed benefits: (1) fiscal efficiency and (2) higher educational quality. The extent of consolidation varies across states due to their considerable differences in history, geography, population density, and politics. Because economic crises often provoke calls for consolidation as a means of increasing government efficiency, the contemporary interest in consolidation is not surprising.
However, the review of research evidence detailed in this brief suggests that a century of consolidation has already produced most of the efficiencies obtainable. Indeed, in the largest jurisdictions, efficiencies have likely been exceeded--that is, some consolidation has produced diseconomies of scale that reduce efficiency. In such cases, deconsolidation is more likely to yield benefits than consolidation. Moreover, contemporary research does not support claims about the widespread benefits of consolidation. The assumptions behind such claims are most often dangerous oversimplifications. For example, policymakers may believe "We'll save money if we reduce the number of superintendents by consolidating districts;" however, larger districts need--and usually hire--more mid-level administrators. Research also suggests that impoverished regions in particular often benefit from smaller schools and districts, and they can suffer irreversible damage if consolidation occurs.
For these reasons, decisions to deconsolidate or consolidate districts are best made on a case-by-case basis. While state-level consolidation proposals may serve a public relations purpose in times of crisis, they are unlikely to be a reliable way to obtain substantive fiscal or educational improvement.
Fears of having to make millions of dollars in budget cuts at Oregon school districts were fueled Tuesday when Gov. John Kitzhaber proposed a K-12 education allocation of $5.56 billion for the next biennium.
Local school district officials said the amount would be insufficient to support existing services at schools, and they continued to hold out hope that the Legislature would augment that number.
One-time federal stimulus funds in this biennium helped to postpone some of the cuts districts now face, and education lobbyists are urging the Legislature to backfill what's lost in stimulus funds, so that total K-12 funding would reach $5.8 billion for the biennium.
"We were expecting this," said Ashland schools Superintendent Juli Di Chiro. "We are hoping the Legislature will see differently. At the minimum, we need level funding."
The Medford School District, with 12,300 students, expects cuts of $13.5 million to $14 million from its $90 million budget, under the governor's budget proposal.
All high school juniors in the Houston Independent School District will have the chance to take the SAT college entrance exam in class for free this April.
Typically, students only can take the SAT on Saturdays or Sundays. HISD officials say the district will be only the third in the country to offer the in-class testing -- which should significantly increase the number of students taking the exam.
Nearly 5,000 of HISD's graduates in 2010 -- less than half -- took the SAT, according to the district. It's likely other students took the ACT exam, which most colleges accept as well, but that number wasn't immediately available for the Class of 2010.
It has been 10 years since Wisconsin overhauled an old set of rules for state teacher licensure (PI 3 and PI 4) and replaced it with a new set called PI 34. At the time of its approval in 2000, PI 34 was warmly welcomed by state leaders and legislators from both sides of the aisle. It was praised as a way to create a new generation of Wisconsin teachers.
The purpose of this report is to assess PI 34 in an effort to learn whether it has made good on these high expectations.
The underlying issue in this assessment has to do with occupational licensure. Why is it widespread in many states including Wisconsin? There are two viewpoints. The first is that consumers don't have enough information to make judgments regarding the purchase of services from members of certain occupations. Licensure, according to this view, serves as a means to protect consumers from fraud and malpractice.
The second argument is made by economists. It opposes the first. Prominent economists claim that licensure benefits members of various occupations more than it benefits consumers. It does so by limiting access to the occupations in question, thus reducing competition. Those seeking protection from barriers of this sort believe that the various regulations will eventually enhance their incomes. The costs to consumers include reduced competition and restricted consumer choice.
...
PI 34's weaknesses far outweigh its strengths. The weaknesses include the following:
PI 34 undervalues the importance of subject-matter knowledge in initial training programs for teachers and in teachers' professional development activity.
PI 34 imposes an overwhelming regulatory system--dwarfing, for example, the regulatory system governing licensure for medical doctors.
PI 34 rules for licensure renewal fail to ensure that renewal will depend on demonstrated competence and professional growth. These rules create incentives for pro forma compliance, cronyism, and fraud.
PI 34 sets up high barriers (a single, proprietary avenue) for entrance into teaching. It makes licensure conditional on completion of approved training programs requiring, normally, at least two years of full-time enrollment in education coursework. Many highly trained professionals contemplating career changes are deterred by these requirements from becoming teachers, despite demand for their services.
PI 34 has no built-in measures for linking teacher licensure to teacher competence. Wisconsin has no evidence that any incompetent teacher has ever been denied licensure renewal.
PI 34 enables education producers (WEAC and the DPI) to dominate the licensure system. In this system, parents and students are marginalized.
PI 34 is particularly onerous for educators in large urban districts like Milwaukee, where producing academic gains is a challenging problem, and school principals, struggling to hire competent teachers, would benefit greatly from a flexible licensure system.
Mr. Cuomo's plan, particularly his hard line on public-school spending, drew criticism from teachers' unions and Democrats, who control the Assembly.
The budget would lower total spending on education and Medicaid to levels slightly below current-year amounts. For local governments that relied on stimulus money, the governor's budget will feel like a bigger cut. The budget pain is especially tough for New York City schools, which would see state aid cut by hundreds of millions of dollars.
The governor's plan would freeze higher-education spending and general aid to localities. He also seeks to squeeze $1 billion out of state agencies. Spending on public employee pensions, health insurance and other benefits would increase by $474 million, an 8% rise over the current fiscal year.
Mr. Cuomo, who has said he wants to create a lower-cost pension for new employees, did not include such plans in his budget, saving the battle for another day.
Business schools have long sold the promise that, like an F1 driver zipping into the pits for fresh tyres, it just takes a short hiatus on an MBA programme and you will come roaring back into the career race primed to win. After all, it signals to companies that you were good enough to be accepted by a decent business school (so must be good enough for them); it plugs you into a network of fellow MBAs; and, to a much lesser extent, there's the actual classroom education. Why not just pay the bill, sign here and reap the rewards?
The problem is that these days it doesn't work like that. Rather, more and more students are finding the promise of business schools to be hollow. The return on investment on an MBA has gone the way of Greek public debt. If you have a decent job in your mid- to late- 20s, unless you have the backing of a corporate sponsor, leaving it to get an MBA is a higher risk than ever. If you are getting good business experience already, the best strategy is to keep on getting it, thereby making yourself ever more useful rather than groping for the evanescent brass rings of business school.
I was assailed at my workplace. This wouldn't be out of the ordinary had my workplace been a boxing or MMA ring. But it is not typical, as my workplace is a school.
I was struck in the head and face from behind as I escorted a group of students from the cafeteria. I didn't pass out or fall down, but I was stunned.
I sought medical attention and received the pat "I'm sorry that happened to you" response from those who likely couldn't find the words to make meaning of what occurred.
My assault occurred several weeks after Flamond Hightower, a paraprofessional educator at Milwaukee's Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School, sent a notorious e-mail that identified the challenges at his school. The e-mail had been intended only for Wheatley faculty and staff but found its way to the electronic mailboxes of Milwaukee Public Schools employees throughout the district. Its message was clear and strong: HELP!
Hightower pointed to and was concerned about the disorder in his school. Perhaps his means of communicating were a bit extreme, but sometimes it takes an event before people listen.
The Detroit Public Schools is looking for an organization willing and able to open a public boarding school in fall 2012, the district announced today.
Now through Feb. 28, DPS is accepting applications for a high school that would be a charter school offering residential housing.
The school would target students in grades 9 to 12 and focus on providing a high-quality, rigorous college-preparatory curriculum for youths "who need a thoughtful, caring, safe, and nurturing day and residential environment," according to a DPS statement released today.
While observing recess outside the Kallahti Comprehensive School on the eastern edge of Helsinki on a chilly day in April 2009, I asked Principal Timo Heikkinen if students go out when it's very cold. Heikkinen said they do. I then asked Heikkinen if they go out when it's very, very cold. Heikkinen smiled and said, "If minus 15 [Celsius] and windy, maybe not, but otherwise, yes. The children can't learn if they don't play. The children must play."
In comparison to the United States and many other industrialized nations, the Finns have implemented a radically different model of educational reform--based on a balanced curriculum and professionalization, not testing. Not only do Finnish educational authorities provide students with far more recess than their U.S. counterparts--75 minutes a day in Finnish elementary schools versus an average of 27 minutes in the U.S.--but they also mandate lots of arts and crafts, more learning by doing, rigorous standards for teacher certification, higher teacher pay, and attractive working conditions. This is a far cry from the U.S. concentration on testing in reading and math since the enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002, which has led school districts across the country, according to a survey by the Center on Education Policy, to significantly narrow their curricula. And the Finns' efforts are paying off: In December, the results from the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an exam in reading, math, and science given every three years since 2000 to approximately 5,000 15-year-olds per nation around the world, revealed that, for the fourth consecutive time, Finnish students posted stellar scores. The United States, meanwhile, lagged in the middle of the pack.
Seizing on a national anxiety over poor student performance, many governors are taking aim at a bedrock tradition of public schools: teacher tenure.
The momentum began over a year ago with President Obama's call to measure and reward effective teaching, a challenge he repeated in last week's State of the Union address.
Now several Republican governors have concluded that removing ineffective teachers requires undoing the century-old protections of tenure.
Governors in Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada and New Jersey have called for the elimination or dismantling of tenure. As state legislatures convene this winter, anti-tenure bills are being written in those states and others. Their chances of passing have risen because of crushing state budget deficits that have put teachers' unions on the defensive.
A central Florida lawmaker wants school teachers to grade parents on their children's report cards.
State Rep. Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland, recently proposed a bill that would require public school teachers to grade the parents of their students in kindergarten through third grade.
A grade of "satisfactory," "unsatisfactory" or "needs improvement" would be added to their children's report cards.
The grading system would be based on the following criteria:
namored with President Obama's plans for the country.
Perhaps it's no surprise that the rumored "Sputnik moment" fell flat. After all, the "clean green" mantra lit up with squiggly bulbs just doesn't ignite the creativity of the populace like the notion of going to the moon. Of course there was more to the president's technological ideals than that, but he invested too many words in education to make them sound believable.
In a way Obama was playing it safe by pulling out the motherhood-and-apple-pie concept of winning the future through education for the children. Nobody (except the Grinch) would argue against something done for the children, would they?
"When a child walks into a classroom, it should be a place of high expectations and high performance. But too many schools don't meet this test. That's why instead of just pouring money into a system that's not working, we launched a competition called Race to the Top."
Ah, but Mr. President, a crucial distinction must be made here. There is a difference between education and federal spending on education. Since when has federal involvement in education helped the economy or improved learning?
Last week, 40-year-old Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar was released after serving nine days in jail on a felony conviction for tampering with records. Williams-Bolar's offense? Lying about her address so her two daughters, zoned to the lousy Akron city schools, could attend better schools in the neighboring Copley-Fairlawn district.
Meanwhile, conservatives view the case as evidence of the need for broader school choice. What does it say when parents' options are so limited that they commit felonies to avoid terrible schools? Commentator Kyle Olson and others across the political spectrum have called this "a Rosa Parks moment for education."
Henry Kranendonk describes himself as "a person who'd never served on anything other than a church board" until the day about three years ago when he got a call from an aide to Margaret Spellings, then the U.S. secretary of education.
Would he join an elite group of somewhat frustrated people working near the top of the national education pyramid?
Well, that's not quite how it was put. But that's a practical reading of what being a member of the National Assessment Governing Board has meant for Kranendonk, who was the top math specialist in Milwaukee Public Schools at that point.
Those unhappy numbers, released last week, about how only one in five high school seniors across the country is proficient in science? The data a year ago that put MPS fourth- and eighth-graders near the bottom of the proficiency list among 18 urban districts? Those reports over the last decade that showed Wisconsin had the largest or close to the largest gaps in the U.S. between white and black students in reading and math?
Principals and teachers may have violated state procedures by entering locked DeKalb County school closets on weekends and late at night to access students' answers to standardized tests.
Principals and teachers may have violated state procedures by entering locked DeKalb County school closets on weekends and late at night to access students' answers to standardized tests.
If so, they weren't caught on camera, but their security key cards gave them away.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution learned DeKalb County school district's internal investigation into possible cheating on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test hinged on illegal access to the tests and led to 24 educators being removed from the classroom this week. The list includes principals, assistant principals and teachers who are now doing administrative jobs.
"There's a chain of evidence that requires only certain people to have access to those tests," schools' spokesman Walter Woods said Friday. "There were several instances where employees accessed school over the weekend, and those employees were flagged."
From his office window, Steve Williams surveyed the chaos of construction. His view consisted of rocks and dirt beneath bulldozers and cranes, but where others might see excess, he saw something brazen, bold and gloriously Texan.
The $60 million football stadium at Allen High School, where Williams is the district athletic director, was starting to take shape.
This is no ordinary stadium, in no ordinary state, where football ranks near faith and family. Super Bowl XLV will take place a short drive southwest next Sunday at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, but while the "big game" will repeatedly highlight football's oversize importance in Texas, the folks in Allen need no reminders. Here, every game is big.
Williams -- Bubba to his friends -- arrived long before the boom, when Allen was more speck than sprawl, and now he cannot fathom all the fuss over this stadium, the calls from England, the Pacific Northwest, New York.
Student attendance rates are up, suspensions are down and math performance is improving in the nine struggling Houston ISD schools taking part in the district's experimental reform program called Apollo 20.
But the instruction in many classrooms remains too basic and boring, according to the first major progress report on the $29 million effort being watched by urban districts nationwide. Questions also remain about future funding of the program.
HISD Superintendent Terry Grier, who released the Harvard University report to the school board on Saturday, described the first-semester results as "very good news" but acknowledged some weaknesses.
"This is a three-year pilot," he said. "You're not going to turn around the lowest-performing schools in the district, all of them, in a year."
The Apollo program launched in August at five middle schools and four high schools that ranked among the lowest-achieving in the Houston Independent School District. The effort started with a staff shake-up. Grier's administration replaced all the principals, and about 40 percent of the teachers are new to the campuses.
The attached proposed changes to Policy 4025 reflect the amendments to Wis. Stat. §118.51, which now permits a nonresident district to consider whether a student has been habitually truant for purposes of allowing open enrollment into the non-resident district. This change applies to students who lived in the district, moved outside of the district boundaries, and are seeking to stay in the district as a nonresident student. A second change allows a district to prohibit a nonresident student from attending district schools after an initial acceptance if the student is habitually truant during either semester of the current school year. The open enrollment period begins February 7, 2011 and ends February 25, 2011.
Over the next five years, more than a million new teachers will enter public school classrooms. But the system in place to produce these teachers--supported by an ever-expanding set of federal financial aid programs and multimillion-dollar federal grants--offers no guarantees of quality for anyone involved, from the college students who often borrow thousands of dollars to attend teacher preparation programs to the districts, schools, and children that depend on good teachers.
"Simply put, the nation's thousands of teacher preparation programs are good at churning out teachers but far less successful at ensuring that those teachers meet the needs of public schools and students," say the authors of a new Education Sector policy brief. In A Measured Approach to Improving Teacher Preparation, analysts Chad Aldeman, Kevin Carey, Erin Dillon, Ben Miller, and Elena Silva examine the way the United States currently prepares teachers and offers some specific suggestions on how to improve it.
Mary was four years old when she entered the pre-kindergarten program in Marshall. Her parents were struggling with her behavior. She had a significant speech delay. She didn't like snuggling with them. She didn't want to read books. And she refused to let her parents touch her hair.
"What are we doing wrong?" her parents wondered.
Mary's early childhood teachers worked with her parents and her pediatrician to help diagnose the problem: Mary had autism. Her teachers created a special education plan for her, which included "social stories" -- books of pictures from Mary's daily life that helped explain mysterious rituals like brushing her hair.
The teachers taught Mary how to read facial expressions and verbalize her feelings, instead of having tantrums. They took her on field trips to public places, so she could get used to the noise and bustle of other people.
As Mary's parents began to understand autism, the teachers supported them by offering advice. The intense, early intervention helped Mary and her family learn to manage her autism. By sixth grade, Mary was doing so well she was able to exit special education services for good.
An unusual partnership has formed between City of Milwaukee leaders and suburban legislators to wrest control of empty, wasting Milwaukee Public Schools buildings, and a last-ditch effort by the superintendent to negotiate with them appears to be going nowhere.
State Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) and state Rep. Mark Honadel (R-South Milwaukee) co-authored the bill to help the city get more high-performing schools into vacant or underutilized MPS properties. The plan could open the buildings for a variety of uses and the city would direct proceeds from the sales or leases back to MPS.
"It's in the best interest of the taxpayer that we have a clear line of authority on property of the city," Darling said in an interview. "Many people have been patient about this for years."
To help the U.S. compete with emerging economies such as China and India, President Barack Obama pitched Congress on a renewed focus on education in his Jan. 25 State of the Union message. "This is our generation's Sputnik moment," he said, invoking the U.S. response to the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first satellite. That feat, at the height of the Cold War, jarred American assumptions of technological superiority.
With a divided Congress and House Republicans gunning for the Education Dept., Obama's school reform plans may depend largely on Big Business. Administration officials say they have had more than 30 meetings and phone calls over the last year with executives about school overhaul. Penny Pritzker, who led Obama's 2008 campaign fundraising effort and is chairman of Pritzker Realty Group in Chicago, says she's "sure that business leaders will be asked to go to Capitol Hill to make the argument" for an improved public education system. Jeffrey R. Immelt, the General Electric (GE) chief executive officer, agrees education should be a part of his portfolio as head of Obama's new jobs and competitiveness council, Pritzker says.
Full-time college students in the 1960s studies 24 hours per week, on average, and their counterparts today study 14 hours per week. The 10-hour decline is visible for students from all demographic groups and of all cognitive abilities, in every major and at every type of college.
The claim that this is true for "every type of college" is important because he wants to conclude that schools have lowered their standards. The alternative is that there are more, low-quality schools now, or that some schools have massively lowered their standards. These are both potentially problems -- and are probably real -- but are not quite the same problem as all schools everywhere lowering their standards.
So it's important to show that individual schools have lowered their standards, and that this is true for the selective schools as well as the not-selective schools. The article links to this study by Babcock. This study analyzes a series of surveys of student study habits from the 1960s to the 2000s, and thus seems to be the basis of his argument, and in fact the introduction contains almost the identical statement that I have quoted above. Nonetheless, despite these strong conclusions, the data that would support them appear to be missing.
The controversy at West High School continues about the Madison School District's new talented and gifted program. Students, parents and teachers decry the plan, pointing to the likelihood of a "tracking" system and increasingly segregated classes.
While I am in agreement with them here, I must differ when they mistakenly point to the current "embedded honors" system as a preferable method for dealing with TAG students.
The idea itself should immediately raise red flags. Teaching two classes at the same time is impossible to do well, if at all. Forcing teachers to create twice the amount of curriculum and attempt to teach both within a single context is unrealistic and stressful for the educators.
The system creates problems for students as well. There is very little regulation in the execution of these "embedded honors" classes, creating widely varying experiences among students. By trying to teach to two different levels within one classroom, "embedded honors" divides teachers' attention and ultimately impairs the educational experiences of both groups of students.
While the concerns raised about Superintendent Dan Nerad's plan are legitimate, "embedded honors" as a solution is not.
In February 2009, leaders from the Los Angeles Education Community publicly signed the L.A. Compact - a collaborative commitment to transform education in Los Angeles. The Compact signers have pledged to put the interests of students first. They have committed to work together to meet the following goals:
Goal 1: All students graduate from high school
Goal 2: All students have access to and are prepared for success in college
Goal 3: All students have access to pathways to sustainable jobs and careers
As part of their commitment, the signers pledged to release an initial data report in order to facilitate the measurement of their progress against these baselines in future years. The data in this report details Los Angeles Unified School District's rates of graduation, enrollment, preparation, and more. It then follows LAUSD graduates and tracks their progress in post-secondary education. At this point in its development, the report highlights several important markers as we discuss collaborative opportunities for improvement. The measurements and their sources will continue to be refined and expanded over the coming years.
A couple of highly valued sources have taken issue with a story I wrote in today's paper about the No Child Left Behind law.
The gist of their complaint, I believe, is that I did not walk readers through more of the fine print of the 2002 law to explain the context of the well-known goal of all students passing state tests by 2014. So let's do that now.
First of all, here's what the law says:
Section 1111 (b)(2)(F) Accountability--Timeline: Each State shall establish a timeline for adequate yearly progress. The timeline shall ensure that not later than 12 years after the end of the 2001-2002 school year, all students in each group described in subparagraph (C)(v) will meet or exceed the State's proficient level of academic achievement on the State assessments under paragraph (3).
This excerpt from a rather long statute marks the core of the promise of No Child Left Behind. "All students" means what it says. "Shall ensure" is self-evident. "Proficient" means, essentially, passing the test. The requirement here is for states to chart a path toward 100 percent proficiency by 2014. Not 90 percent, or 80 percent, but 100 percent.
The Department of Health and Human Services released its latest list of companies and organizations that received a one-year waiver of the Affordable Care Act's ban on annual dollar limits on benefits. A total of 733 waivers have been granted for 2011, of which at least 144 went to unions and union trusts, while an additional 18 went to school districts.
Waivers were granted to at least 17 locals and affiliates of the Teamsters, 11 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), 28 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), 7 of the SEIU, and one to the United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund.
Twenty-four DeKalb County educators have been reassigned to nonschool duties over irregularities in 2009 state testing that affected nine schools and possibly 1,400 students. The unidentified educators, both teachers and principals, could face losing their teaching licenses. The DeKalb District attorney will review the investigation conducted by the school system and determine if criminal charges are warranted.
DeKalb County schools Interim Superintendent Ramona Tyson said 29 current and former employees were referred to the state Professional Standards Commission.
Phil Skinner, AJC DeKalb County schools Interim Superintendent Ramona Tyson said 29 current and former employees were referred to the state Professional Standards Commission.
School officials told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday they referred 24 educators and five former employees to the Georgia Professional Standards Commission after an internal investigation uncovered numerous irregularities on the April 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests.
"No cheating has been proved and no one has come forward and admitted to cheating," schools spokesman Jeff Dickerson said. "But we couldn't have these individuals in the classroom right now. We made these decisions based on what is best for our students."
I attended 4 hours of the Board Work Session on the 2011-2012 Budget. Unfortunately, the meeting was 5+ hours (maybe longer, Dorothy?) It was taped so I will try to get a link if you care to listen.
I will write up my notes but for your reading pleasure here are the following:
staff finally got information to the Board that I know the Board has wanted for a long time. This would be benchmarking comparisons to other districts (both local and out-of-state). This chart is for 2009-2010 expenditures and FTE comparisons in dollars.
This chart is for 2009-2010 expenditures and FTE comparisons (as a % of total)
My irritation with these is that this is information that should have been presented LONG ago. It overburdened an already long and heavily detailed meeting.
The Powerpoint and another document - the Strategic Plan Budget Planning Tool for Fiscal Year 2011-2012 - are not yet up at the website. You'll want to see those as well but for now, the above charts should keep you busy. The Fiscal document really is key because it gets to the heart of the Strategic Plan.
Over at the mothership, Sunny Schubert has a wonderful column about a teacher she knows that has attempted to infuse his school with a little class. Zach, the fresh faced 22 year old newbie, decided he needed to set himself apart from his 7th grade students, so he started wearing a tie to school. For this transgression, he was mocked by the veteran teachers, none of whom saw any reason to dress up for school. In a show of solidarity with their teacher, Zach's students actually started wearing ties to school - while the other teachers took time out of their day to trash his classroom with gaudy neckties.
This story is good enough - but Schubert also mentions a wildly entertaining "scandal" brewing at Glendale Elementary School in Madison, which serves a large number of African-American children. (In fact, Glendale has the highest percentage of poor and minority students at any Madison elementary school.)
In 2005, Mickey Buhl took over as Glendale's principal, with the purpose of instilling the school with a new attitude and more innovative techniques. Since he took over, the school's test scores have risen dramatically.
When Paul Radspinner's 15-year-old son Mitchell wanted to participate in a student sit-in last October outside West High School, he called his dad to ask permission.
"He said he was going to protest, and wanted to make sure I had no problem with it. I thought, 'It's not the '60s anymore,'" recalls Radspinner. The students, he learned, were upset about planned curriculum changes, which they fear will eliminate elective class choices, a big part of the West culture.
"It was a real issue at the school," notes Radspinner. "The kids found out about it, but the parents didn't."
This lack of communication is a main reason Radspinner and 60 other parents recently formed a group called West Cares. Calling itself the "silent majority," the group this month opposed the new English and social studies honors classes the district is adding next fall at West, as well as Memorial. (East and La Follette High Schools already offer these classes for freshmen and sophomores.)
The parents fear separating smarter kids from others at the ninth-grade level will deepen the achievement gap by pushing some college-bound students into advanced-level coursework sooner. They also believe it will eviscerate West's culture, where all freshmen and sophomores learn main subjects in core classes together regardless of achievement level.
"It's a big cultural paradigm shift," says parent Jan O'Neil. "That's what we're struggling with in the West community."
Most states' evaluation, tenure and dismissal policies remain disconnected from classroom effectiveness.
Teacher evaluation is a critical attention area in 42 states because the vast majority of states do not ensure that evaluations, whether state or locally developed, preclude teachers from receiving satisfactory ratings if those teachers are found to be ineffective in the classroom. In addition, the majority of states still does not require annual evaluations of all veteran teachers, and most still fail to include any objective measures of student learning in the teacher evaluations they do require.
In 46 states, teachers are granted tenure with little or no attention paid to how effective they are with students in their classrooms. While there are a few states that have vague requirements for some consideration of evidence, and a few others that promise that teacher evaluations will "inform" tenure decisions, only Colorado, Delaware, Oklahoma and Rhode Island demand that evidence of student learning be the preponderant or decisive criterion in such decisions.
Dismissal is a critical attention area in 46 states. There are at least two state leaders taking this issue head on. In Oklahoma, recent legislation requires that tenured teachers be terminated if they are rated "ineffective" for two consecutive years, or rated as "needs improvement" for three years running, or if they do not average at least an "effective" rating over a five-year teaching period. In Rhode Island, teachers who receive two years of ineffective evaluations will be dismissed. Any teacher with five years of ineffective ratings would not be eligible to have his or her certification renewed by the state.
Education eyes were on Washington this week to see what President Obama would say about schools in his State of the Union address. But just as in 2010, if you really want to follow the action on education reform, it's better to look toward the states. All the new governors (29), education chiefs (18 new ones elected or appointed since November) and legislators (nearly 1,600) mean things are more fluid in the states, where teacher tenure is becoming a major flash point. Florida and New Jersey are considering pretty much ending tenure altogether. And while those states may be ground zero for tenure battles, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania are also considering significant changes.
Quick primer: When people refer to tenure for public-school teachers, what they're really talking about is a set of rules and regulations outlining due process for teachers accused of misconduct or poor performance. The elaborate rules often make it nearly impossible to fire a teacher. Joel Klein, who recently stepped down as New York City schools chancellor, has pointed out that death-penalty cases can be resolved faster than teacher-misconduct cases. In some places, the due-process rules are part of collective-bargaining agreements, and in others they're state law. In either case, there is a consensus among education reformers and some teachers'-union leaders that the rules need to be changed and the process streamlined. The contentious debate tends to be about how to modify what constitutes due process -- as negotiators did in a landmark teachers' contract in the District of Columbia in 2009 -- rather than get rid of it altogether.
"Since 1995 the average mathematics score for fourth-graders jumped 11 points. At this rate we catch up with Singapore in a little over 80 years . . . assuming they don't improve."
- Norman R. Augustine,
retired CEO of Lockheed Martin
What America needs, says one American parent, is more parents who resemble South Korean parents. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, 46, a father of a third-grader and a first-grader, recalls the answer Barack Obama got when he asked South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, "What is the biggest education challenge you have?" Lee answered: "Parents are too demanding." They want their children to start learning English in first rather than second grade. Only 25 percent of U.S. elementary schools offer any foreign-language instruction.
Too many American parents, Duncan says, have "cognitive dissonance" concerning primary and secondary schools: They think their children's schools are fine, and that schools that are not fine are irredeemable. This, Duncan says, is a recipe for "stasis" and "insidious paralysis." He attempts to impart motion by puncturing complacency and picturing the payoff from excellence.
Want to save $500 billion this year? Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has a way to do it.
Is it realistic? Maybe not every part of it, but have a look below and judge for yourself. I don't think his total removal of rental subsidies is unreasonable -- the fact that Section 8 is a total failure doesn't justify dumping its beneficiaries into oblivion. But there's also no reason every agency has to see its budget increase every year, and a lot of these cuts really do make sense. Most of them simply represent a return to 2008 levels of spending -- remember that a 30 percent cut is less than it seems when an agency's budget been increasing by 40 percent over the last few years.
Why fund NASA at traditional levels if President Obama has scaled back its mission? Why not let Indian tribes manage their own trust funds, especially considering the federal mismanagement? Why not realign our military bases abroad, sell unused federal buildings (something Obama has already begun doing), transfer some national parks to the states, and end the wasteful corporate subsidies that come out of the Departments of Energy and Commerce?
This exercise illustrates the huge changes that lie (not too far) ahead given the large deficits (and debt) we face.
SMALL rays of light can illuminate surprisingly large areas of darkness. The fuss continues to rumble on about the decision by Michael Gove, the education secretary, to publish revised school league tables showing how many pupils achieved a reasonable pass in five core subjects: English, maths, a foreign language, a science subject and either history or geography (a cluster of subjects that he is calling the English baccalaureate). This marked a sudden switch away from a system in which schools reported how many pupils gained a reasonable pass (an A, B or C grade) in any five subjects including English and maths.
As my colleagues in the Britain section reported earlier this month, this transparency ambush has already achieved one desired and desirable effect: to expose how many schools were boosting their scores by pushing pupils into soft, often vocational subjects which counted for as much as a pass in chemistry, French or history.
Tony Brown didn't set out to overhaul his college's policies on intellectual property. He just wanted an easier way of tracking local apartment rentals on his iPhone.
The University of Missouri student came up with an idea in class one day that spawned an iPhone application that has had more than 250,000 downloads since its release in March 2009. The app created by Brown and three other undergraduates won them a trip to Apple headquarters along with job offers from Google and other technology companies.
But the invention also raised a perplexing question when university lawyers abruptly demanded a 25 percent ownership stake and two-thirds of any profits. Who owns the patents and copyrights when a student creates something of value on campus, without a professor's help?
Like fellow Republican governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, New Mexico's new governor, Susana Martinez, is her state's first female chief executive. She is also the nation's first Latina governor, as Haley is the first woman governor in the United States of Indian descent.
But Martinez is not new to public service, having been a prosecutor for nearly a quarter-century. Her full biography is here. Her husband, Chuck Franco, has also had a long career in law enforcement. See the couple's photo below greeting a little girl.
Last week with Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell's State of the State address, we heard of the strong economy in the country's largest state geographically. (For links to all of the state of the state addresses published on Top of the Ticket so far, please scroll to the bottom.)
With New Mexico, however, we return to the familiar 2011 governmental theme of deficits and the need to cut spending. Martinez hits that theme strongly, imposing several major changes from policies of her predecessor, Democrat Bill Richardson.
She has ordered the state jet sold, cut expenses at the governor's residence by 55%, including letting go the two personal chefs who had been working there, cut her cabinet members' salaries by 10% and frozen all new vehicle purchases, except for law enforcement, among other stringencies.
"After decades of funding our eleven campuses on the basis of past appropriations and past expenditures, we have lost track of the rationale for each campus's funding level. We must begin a new approach to funding higher education where we ask the board of higher education to develop a funding methodology that is based on the outcomes that education leaders and citizens would like to see from their college campuses."
-- North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple's Jan. 4 state of the state address.
Faced with a 5 percent tuition rise and the likelihood of future increases, students at the City University of New York filed a lawsuit against the school protesting the tuition hike. Could we be on the verge of a student movement like that recently under way in England, where rioters incensed over tuition increases have thrown Molotov cocktails, smashed windows, and even attacked Prince Charles's car?
CUNY's was a modest hike, with average prices remaining well below the national average. CUNY takes pride in its history of serving low-income and first-generation students with a high-quality, affordable education.. But CUNY, like many public institutions in the U.S., is doing what led to student revolts in England: shifting the burden of paying for higher education from taxpayers to students. According to the State Higher Education Executive Officers association, tuition in the U.S. increased from 25 percent of all educational revenue to 37 percent from 1984 to 2009, even as total spending per student remained about the same.
Hispanics for School Choice (HFSC), a non-profit organization founded in Milwaukee County, is hosting a coming out event at the United Community Center (UCC) on January 24th. It marks the first time in Wisconsin history that leaders in the Hispanic community have organized to expand the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
A Buzz at the State Capitol
Last week, Executive Board members of Hispanics for School Choice created somewhat of a buzz as they descended upon the State Capitol to circulate their legislative agenda. Associates from the American Federation of Children and School Choice Wisconsin accompanied HFSC in separate meetings with Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, Education Committee Chair Steve Kestell, and Secretary of the Department of Administration Mike Huebsch to discuss a timetable of moving the School Choice program forward.
HFSC Board Members were also given exclusive entry to a closed caucus in the Grand Army of the Republic Hearing Room before Assembly Republicans - an access rarely granted to non-profit organizations of any sort for any reason. Before the 60-member caucus, Board Members of HFSC were introduced communicating the idea that HFSC aimed to be more of a resource to legislators than a needy lobbyist.
District, county, and state education offices are fond of sharing "best practices" through professional development. The idea is to spread the word about strategies that work in some schools so other teachers can use these strategies and get the same great results. There are times when it works this way. Unfortunately, things can get complicated when the same people who pick and distribute best practices are also responsible for checking whether they are being done correctly, and when none of those people are current teachers. Here's an example of how the sharing of best practices sometimes works once supervising offices get involved.
Phase one: A school seems to be successful in educating students in a given subject or demographic sub-group. Let's call this School A.
Phase two: A team of people who want to know what made School A successful descends upon the school. They sit in the classrooms. They ask questions. Then the team comes back with a report that says something like, "Teachers at School A are successful because they ask students to make their own test using fill-in-the-blank test questions. This is a research-based report."
Phase three: The information from the report is filtered through a series of people sitting in a quiet, student-less office. Materials are created. Packets are made.
In Jay Greene's recent blog post, "The Dead End of Scientific Progressivism," he points out that Vicki Phillips, head of education at the Gates Foundation misread her Foundation's own report. Jay's point was that Vicki continued to see what she and others wanted to see: "'Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests.' Science had produced its answer -- teachers should stop teaching to the test, stop drill and kill, and stop test prep (which the Gates officials and reporters used as interchangeable terms)."
I was intrigued by the education establishment's long-held view as Jay paraphrased it. This view has become one of the "enduring truths" of education and I have heard it expressed in the various classes I have been taking in education school the last few years. (I plan to teach high school math when I retire later this year). In terms of math education, ed school professors distinguish between "exercises" and "problems". "Exercises" are what students do when applying algorithms or routines they know and can apply even to word problems. Problem solving, which is preferred, occurs when students are not able to apply a mechanical, memorized response, but rather have to apply prior knowledge to solve a non-routine problem. Moreover, we future teachers are told that students' difficulty in solving problems in new contexts is evidence that the use of "mere exercises" or "procedures" is ineffective and they are overused in classrooms. One teacher summed up this philosophy with the following questions: "What happens when students are placed in a totally unfamiliar situation that requires a more complex solution? Do they know how to generate a procedure? How do we teach students to apply mathematical thinking in creative ways to solve complex, novel problems? What happens when we get off the 'script'?"
I do wish I had attended the Washington Policy Center breakfast last week. One reason is the speaker was Dr. Andres Alonso, the head of Baltimore Schools. He sounds like an interesting guy and I would have liked to hear him in person.
However, a couple of readers (Greg is one), pointed out that there was coverage of his speech in this week's Crosscut. What is interesting is he seems the non-firebreathing, anti-union, anti-parent Michelle Rhee. He came into an incredibly poor situation:
Only 35 percent of Baltimore's students received high-school diplomas the year before Alonso arrived. Proficiency levels as measured by standardized tests were in the cellar. Over nine years the district lost 25,000 students, dwindling from 106,540 in 1999 to 81,284 in 2008.
In the same period the district gained 1,000 staff, Alonso said. With costs rising despite continuing enrollment declines, "baseline aid from the state to the city had doubled.... It was clearly an organization not sustainable over time."
How could they lose over 25,000 students and gain 1,000 staff? Who was the superintendent before this guy?
The Gleason Family Foundation has long had an intense interest in the quality of education. With great disappointment over the decades, we've watched our public education system continually fail to meet the needs of all children.
The education special interests tell us that the crisis in education is a fabricated one. But the growing body of achievement data overwhelmingly shows that K-12 student performance, particularly in urban school systems, has been middling at best, comparing unfavorably even to some Third World countries.
Rochester, like all too many urban school systems, graduates fewer than 50 percent of its students, many of whom are totally unprepared to meet the challenges of an increasingly high tech world.
Well, members of the Wisconsin legislature have several important choices ahead of them as they look at the educational landscape in this state.
The temptation is to sweep our state's educational problems under the rug with one heck of a broom for an excuse, "there is no money."
To give in to that temptation would be wrong and there are steps the legislature can take to restore educational innovation and improve educational access without breaking the bank.
One of the steps would be to eliminate the cap on online public charter school enrollment. The cap is one of the most shameful educational policy holdovers from the Governor Jim Doyle era, and it needs to be repealed.
States are spending more than $79 billion on higher education in 2010-11, a decline of 0.7 percent from last year, according to a report being released today by the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University and the State Higher Education Executive Officers.
While a cut of less than 1 percent might seem like a relief, given the magnitude of some of the cuts public higher education systems have faced in recent years, the report contains plenty of danger signs for the future. More than $2.5 billion of the total state spending on higher education came from the federal government in the form of stimulus funds that have now run out. Over two years, state support is down nearly 2 percent -- in a period when the same economic downturn that has left state coffers empty has also spurred enrollment increases in much of public higher education, and greater demands for financial aid. And plenty of states are talking about additional cuts for 2011-12.
It's New Jersey School Choice Week. Gov. Chris Christie signed a proclamation encouraging all citizens to "join the movement for educational reform."
Or, at least, his brand of reform, one that includes cutting $1 billion from traditional public schools while spending taxpayer money on independent schools that have somehow failed to enroll New Jersey's neediest children, those with handicaps, language problems, and very low income.
In the last few days, the governor issued a study that purported to show charters "outperforming" traditional schools, approved 23 more charters, proposed laws making it easier to create the independent but publicly funded schools, and hired an organization run by Geoffrey Canada, the champion of New York charter schools, to try his magic in Paterson.
Some critics argue state studies comparing scores of charter schools with their home districts were not scientific and unbiased and, if they showed anything, proved test score averages can be improved by not enrolling children who don't do well on standardized tests.
The 2011 legislative session presents a historic opportunity for Oklahoma to lead in improving our children's future through comprehensive education reform. The combination of a reform-minded Legislature, governor and state school superintendent, along with an engaged public, provides a unique window for passing the greatest educational improvements in our lifetime.
The first reform is choice in education through an educational tax credit scholarship act that follows the example of the states that have seen the most rapid improvement in educational achievement. This bill empowers parents to find the schools that will best meet their children's needs, stimulates the creation of innovative scholarship schools, and provides the competition that has been proven to greatly improve the public schools.
Choice also is promoted by expanding the charter school laws, allowing the state schools superintendent to charter new schools, and freeing these highly successful charter schools to finance their own infrastructure needs.
I have a good feeling about this class. I'm going to like them. Liking a class is more practically useful than it sounds. In a likable class, discussions are freer, more open. When the students like one another, they take everyone's work more seriously. In another class I taught, after a woman read a section of her novel aloud, another woman asked, "May I be your friend?" The first woman answered, "You already are." The students will also feel safe with one another and will trust the group with personal information they use in their writing.
In my novel-writing workshop, a student wrote about a woman who was taking care of her husband, whose mind was deteriorating. She too was deteriorating from the effort. She told her story as a novel, but the students understood it was her own. They respect such disclosures. They unite with one another like a noisy brood of brothers and sisters. And they can always unite against me.
From a practical standpoint, we would like to think that every action taken by the Kansas Legislature would be "suitable" for the state.
However, that word has spawned considerable controversy in Kansas as it pertains to education funding -- controversy that has landed the state in court before and may do it again.
Gov. Sam Brownback wants to avoid that and many Kansans would agree with his contention that defending state laws in court is a poor use of precious resources. To that end, in his State of the State address, Brownback invited legislators to better define "a suitable education."
Like many Kansans, Brownback quoted a term that actually doesn't appear in Article 6 of the Kansas Constitution, which covers education. The actual wording is that the legislature "shall make suitable provision for finance of the educational interests of the state." The sentence even appears under Section 6: Finance.
Responding to concerns that potential locations for Madison's new 4-year-old kindergarten program are not located in poor neighborhoods where they may be most beneficial, school district officials said Monday they will evaluate additional sites.
The School Board on Monday approved 19 elementary schools with available space as potential 4K sites, but also asked the district to identify churches or community centers with space where Madison teachers could be assigned for the 2 1/2 hour daily program beginning this fall.
The district is expecting to hear back this week from 35 day care centers that were approved to participate in the program.
Not all of the 54 potential sites will end up being used, but the district won't know the exact distribution until parents register their students beginning Feb. 7.
The news that 45 percent of college students learn little or nothing during their first two years of college comes as no surprise to those who have been studying higher education. But it should serve as a wake up call for parents who go deeply into debt to purchase a very expensive diploma for their children.
The researchers who studied more than 2,300 undergraduates found that nearly half showed no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years. After four years, 36 percent of students still did not demonstrate significant improvement.
Undergraduate students just aren't asked to do much, according to findings in the new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses." Half of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester. One-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading a week.
Austin schools Superintendent Meria Carstarphen met with facilities task force members Saturday to encourage them to broaden their scope and not to focus as much on the district's looming budget crisis.
In recent weeks, the task force seemed to stray a bit from its mission of creating a 10-year plan on future schools, renovations and attendance zones. After it earlier this month named nine schools that could be closed for efficiency's sake, outraged community members rallied to save their schools.
Although the long-term plan probably will have recommendations on closures, task force members said they felt pressured to produce short-term fixes to help the district get past one of the worst anticipated budget shortfalls in its history.
On Saturday, Carstarphen, in effect, told task force volunteers that was her burden, not theirs.
"There's only so much in efficiencies you can do," she said. "You can't do it all. You don't need to do it all."
The Austin School District's 2010-2011 budget is $973,997,900 for 86,000 students ($11,325.55 per student). Madison's 2010-2011 budget is $379,058,945 (according to the January, 2011 "State of the District" presentation for 24,471 students. That is $15,490 per student.
Expect to hear the phrase "school choice" more than usual in the coming days. The fourth week of January is National School Choice Week, and advocates for educational freedom across the country will be highlighting its effectiveness for children.
Why school choice? Economist Milton Friedman best stated the philosophy behind it: "You can subsidize the producer or you can subsidize the consumer. In education, we subsidize the producer; we subsidize the school. If you subsidize the student instead, you would have competition. The student could choose which school he would go to, and that would force the schools to improve and to meet the tastes of their students."
But you don't have to get philosophical. Just ask the kids.
EVER since 1982, when the American penny (one-cent piece) ceased being minted from brass and started being made instead from zinc with a thin coating of copper, eighth-graders at some of the country's more inspired schools have been given a nifty little experiment in electrochemistry to do for homework. Your correspondent's 13-year-old came home recently with goggles and instructions to find the amounts of copper and zinc in a modern penny. While in class, each kid had first carefully weighed three such coins on a scientific balance. After that, the rest was up to them (and their dads).
The experiment is designed to test the pupils' knowledge of the galvanic series, and the science that explains how corrosion occurs. The series lists metals according to their resistance to electrochemical reaction--with the "noblest" (eg, palladium, platinum and gold) at the top of the rankings, and the most reactive or "basest" (eg, beryllium, zinc and magnesium) at the bottom. Copper comes 11 places above zinc in the table. Thus, when the two metals share an electrolyte, the zinc (being much the more reactive) will dissolve into the solution long before the copper. In a similar way, zinc anodes attached to the hulls of ships protect the vessels' steel plates from rusting away by being sacrificed instead.
The threat to revoke the accreditation of Atlanta Public Schools last week was as ominous as a shark fin: Could one unruly school board somehow pull the whole city under?
Shortly after the school system was placed on probation, however, powerful interests in the city and state coalesced into a formidable defensive line. Loss of accreditation, they said, simply can't happen.
"Come September, we will have an accredited, functioning school system," state Rep. Edward Lindsey, R-Atlanta, said of a Sept. 30 deadline facing the school board to improve its governance. "We are all committed we will work our way through this ... issue. That's the most important message any of us could give."
George Washington University has opened a private college-preparatory high school that will operate entirely online, one of the nation's first "virtual" secondary schools to be affiliated with a major research university.
The opening of a laboratory-style school under the banner of a prestigious university generally counts as a major event among parents of the college-bound. The George Washington University Online High School, a partnership with the online learning company K12 Inc., is competing with brick-and-mortar prep schools and with a small but growing community of experimental online schools attached to major universities.
Online learning may be the next logical step in the evolution of university "lab" schools, an ongoing experiment in pedagogy. Online instruction holds the potential to transcend the factory model of traditional public education, allowing students to learn at their own pace. In the ideal online classroom, no lesson is ever too fast or too slow, and no one ever falls behind.
The cost of K-12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy--where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision--investing in education yields great bang for the buck.
Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K-12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders--the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation - working in sync, command the field. Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making. And they fund the same vehicles to achieve their goals: charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don't rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher. Other foundations--Ford, Hewlett, Annenberg, Milken, to name just a few--often join in funding one project or another, but the education reform movement's success so far has depended on the size and clout of the Gates-Broad-Walton triumvirate.
A state Senate committee voted Thursday to advance a program that would offer vouchers for students in failing public schools to attend private and parochial schools.
The Opportunity Scholarship Act is a signature piece of Gov. Chris Christie's education reform agenda and another proposal over which he and the state's largest teachers union are coming to blows. The New Jersey Education Association vehemently opposes the voucher program, calling it "a government bailout for struggling private schools."
If implemented, the bill would cost about $825 million and serve 40,000 students in 166 chronically failing public schools by its fifth year. It could be a boon for parochial schools, which have been closing in droves because of declining enrollment, but could also force reductions in state aid to public school districts.
If the Milwaukee Public Schools system keeps operating the way it is now, things just aren't going to get much better. If we want things genuinely to improve, big changes need to be made. And the time for making changes is now.
I'm not presenting my views. I'm describing the views of Gregory Thornton.
With a half-year as superintendent of MPS behind him, he is beginning to make moves that are sure to define the success or failure of his time in Milwaukee - and may have a major impact on the shape of education in the city for years to come.
Lengthening school days and teacher workdays.
Giving administrators freer hands in hiring and assigning teachers.
Revising rules that make seniority the deciding factor in who gets laid off or reassigned when cuts are made.
Revamping teacher evaluations and maybe pay, including student performance as a factor.
Giving management more freedom to schedule training for teachers.
Revising the relationship between the School Board and the administration so the superintendent has a freer hand.
We heard encouraging words about school reform last week from Republican leaders in the state Legislature.
For starters, those leaders -- Sen. Luther Olsen of Ripon and Rep. Steve Kestell of Elkhart Lake -- both seem focused on change and flexibility, essential parts of any movement forward with our public schools. And both seem committed to reducing the mandates and state demands on local school systems.
That type of increased local control will be necessary not only to truly bring about change to public schools but also to maneuver them through an era of exceedingly tight budgets. Funding for schools no doubt will be squeezed as Gov. Scott Walker deals with the state's $3 billion-plus deficit in his two-year budget proposal next month.
It was a packed house today as teachers, parents, superintendents, and members of the community showed up to voice their concerns or approval for Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna's comprehensive plan for education reform.
It was also a historic day at the Statehouse as the Joint Finance-Appropriation Committee took public comment for the first time ever, and boy did they ever take public comment.
It was standing room only as people crowded in to give their 3-minute testimonies on Luna's plan to overhaul K-12 education in Idaho.
"Hansen has been hit hard by the cuts to education," said teacher Lauren Peters. "Unlike many districts, we were unable to pass our override levy. So our children lost out. Our drama and music classes are entirely gone."
"We don't have the money," said Danielle Aarons, a mother. "We have to make cuts. It's not fun, it's hard. But at home, in our budgets, this is what we have to do. It's simple math."
The first major point of Luna's plan includes merit pay for teachers and doing away with their tenure.
"Currently, there is no accountability system where districts, schools, or teachers are recognized or rewarded for top performance, or corrected when performance is poor," said Colby Gull, Superintendent of Challis schools.
The Report
The 2011 State of the District Report brings into focus the great strengths and challenges of the Madison Metropolitan School District, and sheds light on our strategies, plans and priorities for keeping all of the community's children on a secure path toward learning and healthy development.
Mission Critical
The mission statement of the Madison Metropolitan School District focuses on our commitment to ensuring that our students develop a love of learning, and the necessary citizenship skills that will allow them to function effectively in an evermore complex world and be of assistance to the communities in which they reside.
MMSD In Context
Students:
The MMSD is the second largest school district in Wisconsin with 24,796 students. This is the 3rd Friday of September 2010 count and includes pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.
Student Population by Race/Ethnicity:
White 47%
African-American 24%
Hispanic 17%
Asian 10%
Multiracial 6%
Native American 1%
49% Free and Reduced Price Lunch Students (37% State Avg.)
17% English Language Learners (6% State Avg.)
70 different languages spoken as the primary language in the homes of MMSD students
15% Students with Disabilities (14.1% State Avg.)
Employees FTEs*
Total 6,286 3,853.4
Some employee groups:
Teachers 2,626 2,500.61
Substitutes 729 N/A
Educational Assistants 625 480.55
Custodians 211 211.0
* Full-time equivalent; 1.0 FTE = a full-time position
Financial Status:
With the 2009-10 fiscal year ending June 30, 2010, the Madison Metropolitan School District's General Fund (10) expenditures were less than budgeted, allowing the district to increase fund balance over last year by $5.15 million, to $40.49 million.
The adopted 2010-11 budget continues to put resources where they are most needed - in the classrooms. The budgeted spending for all funds is a total of $379,058,945 which is an increase of $8,771,475 or 2.37% over 2009- 10.
The total property tax levy increased by $10,823,758 or 4.62%, with a mill rate increase of $0.88 or 8.65%. The following graph shows the breakdown of 2009-10 Actual Revenue by four major categories.
Policy makers are working behind the scenes to come up with a way to let states declare bankruptcy and get out from under crushing debts, including the pensions they have promised to retired public workers.
Unlike cities, the states are barred from seeking protection in federal bankruptcy court. Any effort to change that status would have to clear high constitutional hurdles because the states are considered sovereign.
But proponents say some states are so burdened that the only feasible way out may be bankruptcy, giving Illinois, for example, the opportunity to do what General Motors did with the federal government's aid.
Beyond their short-term budget gaps, some states have deep structural problems, like insolvent pension funds, that are diverting money from essential public services like education and health care. Some members of Congress fear that it is just a matter of time before a state seeks a bailout, say bankruptcy lawyers who have been consulted by Congressional aides.
There's always lots of talk about how Madison area teachers enjoy gold-plated health insurance plans, courtesy of the taxpayers. But a recently released report from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards should go a long ways towards dispelling that myth.
Almost 400 school districts showed insurance data for the 2009-2010 school year, and the cost of premiums for Madison school district employees were rock bottom, second only to the tiny Maple school district's premium costs. (Only about a quarter of the school districts in Wisconsin have yet reported their 2010-2011 figures).
Last year's premium costs for the Maple School District, located in Douglas County in northern Wisconsin, were $369.26 per month for a single person's policy; Madison's costs ran $419.13 for a single policy, with Hortonville in third place at $419.42. Family insurance premiums in Maple were $1107.79 per month while Madison's were $1119.10; Hortonville was 1220.41.
Governor Chris Christie has some changes in mind when it comes to education in the Garden State.
Christie invited players in the education reform movement to Trenton on Wednesday for a showing of "Waiting for Superman", the acclaimed documentary that looks at the failures of public education.
Christie said beforehand it's his goal to turn those failures around.
"The failed teacher must be shown the door, bad schools must be closed and start over," Gov. Christie said.
Hoping to give students in troubled districts more choices, the state has just approved the opening of 23 new charter schools across New Jersey. Charters are publicly funded schools that operate independently.
Let me start out by saying, I've never been suspended from school, and I attended Milwaukee Public Schools from kindergarten through 12th grade.
Was I an angel?
No, but I was lucky enough to have teachers and school leaders who reined me in if I got out of control.
Oh, and I can't forget my mother's threat:
"Don't make me come up to your school and embarrass you in front of your friends, because you know I'll do it."
As my mother prepared to leave for work every morning, she would always say to me before I locked the door behind her, "Be good in school, and remember I love you."
That message kept me out of fights, arguments and trouble - most of the time, anyway.
When I attended school 25 years ago, a suspension was a big deal. Today, a suspension is nothing more than a vacation for kids and an inconvenience to working parents.
There exists a familiar crescendo during the holiday season that achieves its apex as the New Year begins. If your family is like mine, it began with great anticipation about gifts, both receiving them and choosing just the right one.
But after the presents were opened and the last bit of leftover turkey devoured, we turned our attention to contemplating the purpose of the holidays and our ambitions for the upcoming New Year. As the president of one of America's oldest institutions of higher learning, Hampden-Sydney College, I thought it appropriate to offer my comments on the purpose of a college, for higher education is, or should be, central to the ambitions of all our young men and women.
A bit of history is illustrative.
Universities, when they were established more than a thousand years ago, focused on educating clergy and instilling religious piety. Over the years, religious education was supplement and then supplanted by the notion of civic virtue and, eventually, by secular humanism which became the core purpose of institutions of higher learning. The 1800s gave rise to the German university with its graduate students and deliberate focus on research. The American concept of a liberal arts education, which included emphasis on teaching and, usually, the shaping of moral character, was shaken to its core as research universities attracted talented professors, eager students, and government and foundation dollars. But undergraduate students still needed some degree of moral formation or at least some growing up. Colleges and universities still have to address this need -- particularly for the Millennials -- our wonderfully over-programmed, over-achieving and, at times, over-confident young people born after 1979.
Parsons previously served as the mayor of Bennettsville and also played a vital role among a group Citizens for Marlboro County, which opposes the construction of a landfill near the Wallace community.
Many residents say they felt there were a lot of issues that needed to be addressed not only when it came to the Marlboro County School Board, but in terms of the school district as well.
Some said tensions within the school board as well as news of an investigation over possible misuse of federal funds by the school district, played very influential roles when they cast their votes for the chairperson's position in November.
The methods behind the Harlem Children's Zone education and social project have been praised by President Barack Obama and lionized in the film "Waiting for Superman.'" But the integrated approach to raising successful children has been tough to repeat -- and now New Jersey is going to give it a try.
Officials in Paterson, N.J., will begin working with experts from the Harlem Children's Zone to mimic the model, the Christie administration said Wednesday.
Few details were given about what exactly that might look like. Geoffrey Canada, the outspoken president of Harlem Children's Zone, will work with city officials "over the coming weeks and months" to create a program. It's unclear whether there will be additional federal, state or private funding for the Paterson experiment.
Atlanta's public school system was told Tuesday it has until September 30 to make progress on a series of recommendations or risk its high schools losing their certification, a fate that would affect the college hopes of many of the system's graduates.
The probationary status stems from complaints that conflicts between members had severely hampered the school board's ability to govern effectively, according to a statement from AdvancEd, the world's largest school accrediting agency and the parent company of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
"This is designed to improve the school system," Mark Elgart, president and CEO of AdvancED, said at a news conference Tuesday. "The (school) board and the system have a choice here: They can choose to proactively take actions designed to improve it, building on these actions we have outlined, or they can fight it."
"Achievement, alignment and sustainability. We will focus all of our efforts in these three areas to build the strong schools that will become the heart, and the hope, of our communities." Superintendent Valeria S. Silva
Strong Schools, Strong Communities is our strategy for improving education for all students - without exception or excuse. The plan focuses clearly on the needs of students.
Changes, which will be phased in over the next three years, will require us to think differently about some of our long-held beliefs. The changes reflect the best and most successful practices in urban education. They honor and support the elements that have been successful in Saint Paul.
The plan will allow our schools to focus on delivering an education that will reach not only the children who are thriving today in Saint Paul but all of the students in our district. And, we believe, the changes we are making will reconnect many students to the communities where they live - truly making the schools the heart of our community.
We invite you to learn more by clicking on any of the links below, or by attending an upcoming information session near you (see end of page for dates, times and locations).
For Wisconsin, the last 10 years might be considered "the lost decade."
The deficit on the state's official financial statements topped $2.9 billion in 2010, more than three times what it was in 2000. Relative to the size of our economy, only Illinois had a larger deficit.
State debt is now more than double what it was in 2002. That explains why net state assets (e.g., cash or buildings) that are unrestricted and available for use are negative, a negative $9.4 billion. Only six states have weaker per-capita asset positions than Wisconsin.
How do objective outsiders view these developments? Moody's dropped state bond ratings in 1997 and again in 2001 and, technicality aside, has not changed them since. The firm rated 33 states higher than Wisconsin - and only two states lower.
If truth be told - a rarity when it comes to state finances - no governor or Legislature, Republican or Democrat, has fully come to grips with Wisconsin's fiscal problems in well over a decade.
I don't know if you've been following the discussion that's been out there the past week or so, about a book written by a Chinese-American woman named Amy Chua. It's about the differences -- the very big differences -- between western and Asian styles of parenting. Suffice it to say that Amy Chua is a strict mom: A's are the only grade that's acceptable, three hours of piano practice every day is barely enough -- that kind of thing.
Anyway, I've been wracking my brain trying to find a Marketplace angle to the thing. Commentator and educator Michelle Rhee says it's all Marketplace.
MICHELLE RHEE: We've lost our competitive spirit. We've become so obsessed with making kids feel good about themselves that we've lost sight of building the skills they need to actually be good at things.
A school that has served pregnant and parenting students for decades in Milwaukee Public Schools is likely to be closed at the end of the year so the district can instead focus on serving child parents mainstreamed in schools across the district.
Lady Pitts School, located in the lower level of Custer High School at 5075 N. Sherman Blvd., offers middle school and high school programming and has been a reprieve for teens during their transition to motherhood since 1966.
But today, the majority of teen parents in MPS choose to stay in their home high schools, according to a recent district survey. And while some alternative schools for pregnant girls still exist around the country, the model has fallen out of favor in many other areas.
School officials say that's partly because teenage pregnancy is less stigmatized than it used to be. More important, some school systems have recognized that young parents' academic needs are not always best served at a site sequestered from their traditional school.
Proposed New York Property Tax Cap Worries Bayport-Blue Point School Board
TheBayport-Blue Point School District Board of Education discussed the district administration's preliminary budget plan Tuesday night at its work session meeting, stressing that Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposed property tax cap would have a negative impact on the school district.
While the district begins to formulate its budget for the 2011-2012 school year, it does so without knowing how much state aid it will receive and if the governor's 2 percent tax cap proposal will be law. Cuomo is expected to release his new budget next month.
Superintendent of Schools Anthony Annunziato said the proposed tax cap would be crippling to public schools, including Bayport-Blue Point. "I don't know if we can get down to 2 percent," Annunziato said to the board and community members. "I don't think we can."
The Wisconsin school systems of Oshkosh and Eau Claire are about the same size and serve similar student populations. They also get largely similar results on state exams-but Eau Claire spends an extra $8 million to run its school system
This report is the culmination of a yearlong effort to study the efficiency of the nation's public education system and includes the first-ever attempt to evaluate the productivity of almost every major school district in the country. In the business world, the notion of productivity describes the benefit received in exchange for effort or money expended. Our project measures the academic achievement a school district produces relative to its educational spending, while controlling for factors outside a district's control, such as cost of living and students in poverty.
Our nation's school system has for too long failed to ensure that education funding consistently promotes strong student achievement. After adjusting for inflation, education spending per student has nearly tripled over the past four decades. But while some states and districts have spent their additional dollars wisely--and thus shown significant increases in student outcomes--overall student achievement has largely remained flat. And besides Luxembourg, the United States spends more per student than any of the 65 countries that participated in a recent international reading assessment, and while Estonia and Poland scored at the same level as the United States on the exam, the United States spent roughly $60,000 more to educate each student to age 15 than either nation.
Our aims for this project, then, are threefold. First, we hope to kick-start a national conversation about educational productivity. Second, we want to identify districts that generate higher-than-average achievement per dollar spent, demonstrate how productivity varies widely within states, and encourage efforts to study highly productive districts. Third--and most important--we want to encourage states and districts to embrace approaches that make it easier to create and sustain educational efficiencies.
This report comes at a pivotal time for schools and districts. Sagging revenues have forced more than 30 states to cut education spending since the recession began. The fiscal situation is likely to get worse before it gets better because the full impact of the housing market collapse has yet to hit many state and local budgets. At a time when states are projecting more than $100 billion in budget shortfalls, educators need to be able to show that education dollars produce significant outcomes or taxpayers might begin to see schools as a weak investment. If schools don't deliver maximum results for the dollar, public trust in education could erode and taxpayers may fund schools less generously.
While some forward-thinking education leaders have taken steps to promote better educational efficiency, most states and districts have not done nearly enough to measure or produce the productivity gains our education system so desperately needs. Some fear that a focus on efficiency might inspire policymakers to reduce already limited education budgets and further increase the inequitable distribution of school dollars. To be sure, our nation's system of financing schools is unfair. Low-income and minority students are far more likely to attend schools that don't receive their fair share of federal, state, and local dollars. But while the issue of fairness must be central to any conversation about education finance, efficiency should not be sacrificed on the altar of equity. Our nation must aspire to have a school system that's both fair and productive.
Our emphasis on productivity does not mean we endorse unfettered market-based reforms, such as vouchers allowing parents to direct public funds to private schools. Nor do we argue that policymakers should spend less on education. Indeed, we believe neither of these approaches can solve the nation's pressing education challenges. Transforming our schools will demand both real resources and real reform. As Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently said: "It's time to stop treating the problem of educational productivity as a grinding, eat-your-broccoli exercise. It's time to start treating it as an opportunity for innovation and accelerating progress."
The size of classes in schools around the country is growing. Half the districts responding to a recent poll say they are increasing class size because of budget pressures. Many school officials fear this will hurt students.
But some education reformers say there are ways to boost class size and save money at the same time.
Marguerite Roza analyzes school spending for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She's been watching districts deal with tight budgets through across-the-board cuts and other desperation moves.
Roza says she's worried that schools view tight spending limits as a lose-lose proposition.
Challenging economic times present an opportunity to rethink many processes...
Under the proposed plan, all new educators will have two-year contracts with raises and bonuses based on student achievement. Teachers with seniority will not be protected from workforce reduction layoffs, and collective bargaining will be limited to salary and wage-related benefits.
"We think that gives the local elected school board more control over the staff and the people that work in their schools," Luna said.
The plan further requires that once agreements between local teachers unions and school boards are reached, they must be published online immediately by school districts. In addition, collective bargaining negotiations for those contracts must take place during open meetings, with parents, teachers and the public able to observe.
The state will publish a fiscal report card for every district showing per-pupil spending, how much of a district's budget is going into the classroom, how much is spent on administration and how each district compares to other districts in the state.
Funding for the reform package aligns with the governor's proposed K-12 public schools budget of $1.2 billion, and includes a multi-year spending strategy using revenue from some cost-saving measures to pay for other programs.
Schools Superintendent JeanAnn Paddyfote is proposing a budget for the next school year that carries a 2.31 percent increase.
She believes it is "fiscally responsible'' and offers "exciting" educational enhancements.
She is scheduled to present her $58.262 million budget -- $873,773 for capital -- proposal to the Board of Education Tuesday night at Sarah Noble Intermediate School. Snow dates are Wednesday and Thursday.
The most dramatic piece of the proposed budget, supplemented by some $700,000 in federal education money, is a proposal to use the federal funding to hire nine teachers for an all-day kindergarten program.
Two years ago the district did a pilot, full-day class at John Pettibone Elementary School that showed good results, but funding was not available to continue it into the following year.
Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef who is beating the drums for a school lunch revolution, received a warm reception this weekend from hundreds of the people who make and serve food to children every day. It's the Los Angeles Unified School District that isn't so welcoming.
"I'm going to be honest. I'm actually petrified," Oliver said as he started his keynote address Saturday at the annual meeting of the California School Nutrition Assn. at the Pasadena Convention Center.
Perhaps he feared the "lunch ladies" might not be happy to hear from the man who clashed with their colleagues in Huntington, W.Va., last year on "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution." But he was applauded several times.
The education secretary nominee fired off one of her first public salvos last week, and it was a dilly. Responding to Education Week's Quality Counts grade of an F in K-12 Achievement and a D+ in Chance for Success in the report (though we got an overall grade of C), Hanna Skandera said, "It is unacceptable that New Mexico has an F in K-12 achievement and that our rankings have decreased each year. ... For every decision that needs to be made, we will ask, 'Are New Mexico students the winners in this decision?' Our focus must be on the classroom."
That's the same argument all the challengers for Santa Fe's board of education are making as they continue to hit the campaign trail this month (more on that in a moment).
Three San Francisco schools have begun the unsavory task of replacing half their teachers to fulfill a bargain that got them $5 million each in federal grants aimed at boosting test scores.
Bryant Elementary, Carver Elementary and Everett Middle are among 10 San Francisco schools that landed on the state's list of the 188 lowest-performing schools and are now required to take drastic steps to turn themselves around.
All told, the three schools must replace 26 teachers. Those teachers will get first choice to occupy vacancies left by retiring teachers at other schools. Those who transfer will remain at their current jobs through this school year.
South Dakota public schools spent only 1.4 percent more per student in 2009-10 than they did the year before, and some of the leanest districts again are near Sioux Falls.
The average district spent $7,958 per student last school year on its general, special education and pension funds, up from $7,850 the year before, according to the South Dakota Department of Education.
Sioux Falls came in at $7,288 per student, which ranks 124th among 154 districts. At $6,018, Chester Area spent the least. Superintendent Mark Greguson said that with 345 students - not counting its online high school for those in Hutterites colonies - Chester is able to maximize its teaching staff.
Marshall Middle School in Janesville is in its second year of offering single-gender classrooms, and students and teachers said the program has made a positive difference in their education.
Currently, more than 200 school districts around the country are testing out the teaching method, and about 10 schools in Wisconsin offer a single-gender classroom program.
Marshall Middle School teacher Charles Smith said getting eighth-grade boys and girls to agree on music isn't easy. But his social studies class is girls only, and Smith said the class prefers to study to the music of Beyonce.
"If the kids are comfortable, they feel better about it. Then this is a good place for them," said Smith.
Smith said the single-gender classroom is about making students feel comfortable.
While his students learn, he said he's also learning how to better tailor his lessons.
FOR decades, families in southeast Seattle have sent their children off every morning to low-performing neighborhood schools. And for equally as long, we have asked for better.
We have been told to be patient, that things will improve. We have been told that it's not the school's fault -- it's the children we send there. We have been told to be better parents. We have been told, because we are poor or immigrants or African American, that we shouldn't expect academic success.
But we don't believe this, and we are impatient. We know that across the country, children just like ours are excelling in school and succeeding in college.We are the Filipino Community of Seattle, East African Community Services, the Vietnamese Friendship Association, African American Community/Parent Coalition and more than a dozen other community organizations that represent the families and children of southeast Seattle. Together, we are the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition and we are tired of waiting.
Everyone knows that for many years, at least in this part of the Land Between the Coasts, high schools have been judged based on what percentage of their students graduate within four years of entering as freshmen. I start with this fact deliberately. More on this later.
More than 40 percent of area public high school graduates in 2009 entered Missouri colleges and universities so far behind in reading and math that they took at least one remedial course once they arrived on campus, data show.
Of the 7,067 area graduates who enrolled that year as freshmen in state-funded schools, 3,029 of them landed in academic purgatory, taking catch-up classes that didn't count toward a college degree, according to the Missouri Department of Higher Education.
The proportion of Missouri public school students who end up in remedial college classes has risen only slightly in recent years but is up sharply since 1996. Thirty-eight percent needed remediation before moving on to college-level courses in 2009, compared with 26 percent 14 years ago.
Who should govern universities? Should the best scholars sacrifice their career as researchers and govern academic institutions or should professional managers provide the experience of running healthy and competitive business? This question is currently discussed in different countries and across different academic cultures.
In his recent blog, "Training university administrators: Should management schools do it?" Prof. Philip Altbach raises this important question and stresses the risk of professional business management training for academic managers. Prof. Altbach explains that the uniqueness of universities as complex organizations needs further clarification. Certainly, recognizing the differences in specific environment matters but awareness of university processes is not enough. Those who have governing authority at universities must be respected by the academic community or forego their support for critical management decisions. Typically respect is based on academic status and research achievements, accomplishments less common among business professionals.
Larry Nichols sensed disdain for the level of instruction in public schools after taking the job of Galveston school district superintendent in September.
"One of the things attributed to public schools is that the curriculum is watered down, it's not as rigorous as it was," Nichols said.
To combat that idea, Nichols decided to begin challenging adults to answer the same questions that confront students. He began handing out 10 multiple-choice questions from the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS, the test every Texas high school senior must pass in order to receive a diploma.
Nichols handed the questions out every time he met with a local organization, among them the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, the Realtors Association, the Pachyderm Club.
Jeff Lowell, an assistant principal at Interlake High School in Bellevue, Wash., normally dismisses the e-mails he gets from businesses trying to sell to his 1,500 students.
He was intrigued, however, by the pitch he received in September from Fresh Healthy Vending, a San Diego franchise operation that offers vending machines stocked with snacks and drinks it touts as alternatives to junk food.
"Everybody (understands) what eating right does for you and how much it ends up affecting your ability to think," Lowell says. "We decided we wanted to try it."
Lowell signed a one-year contract allowing Fresh Healthy to park its machines near Interlake's gym in exchange for 15 percent of profits. In late November, Fresh Healthy installed three machines, featuring goodies such as Kashi granola bars and Stonyfield Farm fruit smoothies, next to older machines that sell Powerade and Dasani water. The top seller in the new machines so far: Pirate's Booty cheese puffs.
Gov. Scott Walker said he will try to impose strict limits on property tax increases while giving local governments facing cuts new tools to manage costs.
On Sunday's "UpFront with Mike Gousha," a statewide TV newsmagazine produced in conjunction with WisPolitics.com, Walker (left) said that even as he trims state spending while maintaining core services, he aims to do it in a way that doesn't simply pass costs off to the future or to local governments and property tax payers.
"We're going to have to make tough but compassionate decisions to do that," Walker said of his approach to closing the state's $3.3 billion deficit.
Asked if he would be willing to cap property taxes at about 2 percent, Walker said he hopes to get "closer to zero" while still allowing provisions for growth and development.
While Walker said local governments and school boards may see "changes" in state aid, they will have new tools to deal with them.
The Washington region has many school districts. Each has a school board, more or less. (The District's board is going through a neutered phase.) Each board has many members. Each member is being reminded this month, as meetings resume after the holidays, that his job is to endure boredom and verbal blows from the public.
School boards are also chided by the superintendents they hire, although usually not to their faces. Superintendents save their criticisms for off-the-record conversations with journalists like me, toward the end of a nice lunch. There, they feel better questioning the values and habits of the elected amateurs who could fire them immediately, if they wished.
The 21st century has not been good to school boards. Their political squabbles are often blamed for disorganized schools and low student achievement. In several cities, including the District, boards have been pushed aside in favor of mayoral control. The mayors in turn have stumbled, but few voters seem to want the school boards back in charge.
Like dinosaurs, school boards are dying fast. There were more than 80,000 in 1950. Now there are fewer than 14,000. One leading critic, former IBM chief executive Louis V. Gerstner Jr., said we don't need more than 70 - one for each state and one for each of the 20 largest districts.
But after combing through the data for and against this battered and bleeding symbol of local democracy, Gene I. Maeroff, a senior fellow at Teachers College at Columbia University, has concluded that "there is scant evidence that school systems would be better served if school boards did not exist."
To write his insightful new book, "School Boards in America: A Flawed Exercise in Democracy," Maeroff, a former New York Times reporter, made the sacrifice of getting himself elected to the school board in Edison, N.J. He is still there, enduring soporific meetings and nasty e-mails, convinced that despite its faults, the school board as an American institution will survive.
Proposals to study a merit-based pay system for teachers and to extend the school year by five days gained the approval of a House committee Friday.
Members of the House Education Committee agreed that the ideas deserved further discussion and should move to the floor of the House for debate.
One bill would study what a merit-pay system could look like for Wyoming's teachers, while the other piece of legislation would increase the number of school days from 175 to 180.
The Legislature's new Republican leaders will emphasize giving school districts, parents and students more choices as they seek reforms in K-12 education, and opposition is surfacing to a proposal that would kill Madison's 4-year-old kindergarten program.
Later this month, Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, a former teacher and co-chairwoman of the Legislature's budget committee, plans to introduce a charter school reform package that will, among other things, call for an independent statewide board to approve charter schools.
Currently local school boards approve charter schools, even if they won't be directly operated by the district. A statewide board could help proposals, such as an all-male charter school in Madison, move forward "without having to wait forever and ever and without having lots of obstacles," Darling said.
Other education reforms are expected in Gov. Scott Walker's 2011-13 budget proposal in February, said Rep. Robin Vos, Assembly chairman of the budget committee.
Olsen has hired education policy consultant Sarah Archibald, a UW-Madison professor and researcher at the conservative-leaning Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. Archibald has written about attracting high-quality teachers by offering bonuses to top math and science students who decide to teach, making it easier for teachers trained outside Wisconsin to obtain certification here and increasing the grade-point requirement for aspiring teachers above the current 2.5.
A Wisconsin case that could have nationwide implications for how reporters cover and how parents watch high school sports is making its way through the courts, with crucial constitutional arguments taking place Friday in federal court in Chicago.
The case pits community newspapers against the association that oversees high school sports in Wisconsin. Fans in many states rely on community newspapers for news about high school teams, and the newspapers say they need easy, unencumbered access to sporting events to provide that coverage. But the association says it can't survive if it can't raise money by signing exclusive contracts with a single video-production company for streaming its tournaments.
The newspapers argued Friday before the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals that the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of press should enable them to put such publicly funded events online as they see fit, free of charge.
The case began in 2008, when the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association sued The Post-Crescent of Appleton after it streamed live coverage of high school football playoff games. After a U.S. District judge sided with the association last year, saying its exclusive deal with a video production company didn't impinge on freedom of the press, the newspaper's owner, Gannett Co., and the Wisconsin Newspaper Association appealed.
When he unveiled his proposed budget earlier this week, Gov. Jerry Brown declared on the first page that it was time to push more authority to local governments, so decisions could be made "closer to the people."
A lot of local officials see his actions very differently.
One of Brown's proposals calls for eliminating municipal redevelopment agencies, which would take billions of dollars out of city coffers and send it instead to school districts, counties and the state. Brown projected that this would save the state $1.7 billion in the next fiscal year.
Sometimes, the biggest things are the ones that didn't happen. I feel that way about Wisconsin's high school graduation exam; the one we don't have.
At the urging of then-Gov. Tommy Thompson, the Legislature in the late 1990s approved creating a test that Wisconsin students would have to pass to get a high school diploma. Its general aim was to require students to show they could do 10th-grade work to graduate 12th grade.
But in short order, the graduation test picked up a lot of opposition. There were (and are) substantial problems with the idea. How do you make a test that is fair and reliable? Isn't taking classes and passing enough? And what about kids who just don't do well on tests, or who have special education needs? The list could go on.
For a couple of years, the test staggered around the political landscape in Madison before finally dying because it was decided the state didn't have enough money to pay for it.
But there were (and are) states that created graduation exams or, in some cases, exams connected to specific courses that had to be passed. In places such as Massachusetts, overall results have improved and many point to the graduation test as a big reason why.
It was awhile before Pewaukee High School English teacher Christina LeDonne knew that one of her students had misplaced his paperback copy of "Lord of the Flies" for a school assignment.
Armed with one of the laptops that the Pewaukee School District has given to every student in seventh through 10th grade this school year, the student tracked down an online version of the classic novel and read along with the rest of the class without skipping a beat.
Such incidents have only encouraged the view among school leaders and teachers - amazed by the continued growth of available, and even free, resources on the Web - that traditional print materials have a limited life expectancy in schools.
"I don't think it's just inevitable, I think it's here," Phil Ertl, superintendent of the Wauwatosa School District, said of the prospect of digital textbooks.
The proliferation of mobile technology, which is leading some schools to experiment with one-to-one computing initiatives, combined with the expansion of traditional textbook publishers onto the Internet means that many students are reading in a whole new way.
A lot has changed at Glendale Elementary School on Madison's East Side in the 51/2 years since Mickey Buhl became principal.
Classroom walls were knocked down to enhance teacher collaboration, brighter lighting was installed to sharpen young minds, and words such as "community" and "success" were written on the hallway walls to remind everyone of a shared mission.
Animal-themed class names replaced labels such as special ed and English-language learner while teachers joined three-person teams and developed new student achievement measures -- approaches other schools in the district are adopting.
Since Buhl (rhymes with "yule") started, test scores among low-income and special-education students have improved at the 425-student school, which has the largest proportion of low-income students in the city.
But behind the scenes, a long-simmering conflict over Buhl's performance has divided teachers.
Detroit was once America's fourth largest city, though today large sections of its inner core are abandoned to the elements, and monuments like Michigan Central Station are returning to dust. Another emblem of civic decline is a plan to desert nearly half of Detroit's public schools so that it can afford to fulfill its teachers union contract.
The school district is facing a $327 million deficit and has already closed 59 schools over the last two years to avoid paying maintenance, utility and operating costs. Under a worst-case scenario released this week by Robert Bobb, an emergency financial manager appointed by the state to resolve the Detroit education fisc, the district will close another 70 of its remaining 142 schools to save $31.3 million through 2013.
"Additional savings of approximately $12.4 million can be achieved from school closures if the District simply abandons the closed buildings," the proposal explains, purging costs like boarding up buildings, storage and security patrols.
Steven Wasko, a spokesman for Mr. Bobb, said that urban property sales have been difficult, in part because until recently the state board of education banned transactions with "competing educational institutions" like charter schools. Once buildings are deserted, even if the doors and windows are welded shut with protective metal covers, scavengers break in and dismantle them for copper wire, pipes and so on.
Gov. Chris Christie's tough-on-schools approach in a state that has zealously protected its public schools -- and its teachers -- has already put him at loggerheads with legislative leaders, unions and some parents in New Jersey.
And on Tuesday, the governor, a Republican, used his State of the State address to push his education agenda further by calling for an end to teacher tenure, on top of his support for merit pay for teachers based partly on student achievement and adoption of a voucherlike system that would give students in low-performing schools other options.
The proposals are not new; many have been suggested and tried in other school districts and other states. But with Mr. Christie's growing national stature and his ability to attract news media and political attention through his blunt -- and very public -- persona, his latest salvo has placed New Jersey center stage in the increasingly rancorous national debate over education.
Ethics complaints have been filed against two West Bend School Board members over their actions during the recent debate over a charter school proposed by a local Baptist pastor.
The full board is scheduled to hear and possibly act on the complaints at a meeting Monday after the district's attorney, Mary Hubacher, determined that the board members might have violated board policies if the allegations prove true. Hubacher recommended against board hearings on three other complaints, which involved the same board members.
In one of the complaints to be heard, School Board member David Weigand is accused of violating the School District's ethics policy by writing a letter to the editor published in a local newspaper that supported the charter school while the board was still deliberating whether to approve it.
The other complaint to be discussed at the hearing was filed against School Board member Tim Stepanski alleging he broke district policy regarding ethics, employee harassment and e-mail communications based on his e-mail correspondence with a constituent and district officials regarding the proposed charter school.
In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy. Businesses, of course, saw this as grim news. But the general public applauded labor's new power, even in the face of union tactics that many Americans frowned on, like sit-down strikes. More than seventy per cent of those surveyed in a 1937 Gallup poll said they favored unions.
Seventy-five years later, in the wake of another economic crisis, things couldn't be more different. The bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler saved the jobs of tens of thousands of U.A.W. workers, but were enormously unpopular. In the recent midterm elections, voters in several states passed initiatives making it harder for unions to organize. Across the country, governors and mayors wrestling with budget shortfalls are blaming public-sector unions for the problems. And in polls public support for labor has fallen to historic lows.
Fallout continues from the investigation of a Madison elementary school principal, accused of workplace harassment of his staff.
I wrote about the original report following an investigation into complaints against Glendale Elementary Principal Mickey Buhl, which was released as part of an open records report filed by The Capital Times. I also wrote about staff members who were disappointed by the report, which exonerated Buhl, and their response through Madison Teachers Inc.
This week, teachers and a parent came forward, defending Buhl and reacting to MTI claims that Buhl had created a climate of fear at Glendale, located at 1201 Tompkins Drive.
Ben Ketterer, a Glendale teacher for fourth and fifth grade students, wrote that most of his colleagues were more than content with the workplace environment at the school. "There is a multitude of staff (a likely 80-90 percent) who view their working environment positively, or at the very least, not negatively," Ketterer wrote.
Al Kouba, who lives in Bend, Ore., was told by his son in California that his family's Christmas letter would only be posted on Facebook--not mailed. That's when the retired systems engineer knew it was time to play catch up: "If you're going to communicate with your family, you have to be on Facebook," he says.
So he turned to a technology expert: his 15-year-old granddaughter, Marlee Norr. But as Marlee explained the steps to log on to the social-networking site, Mr. Kouba protested: "Look, kid, I'm 77 years old! I'm not quite as swift as I used to be." Both laughed, says Marlee, also of Bend, and she agreed to "back up and slow down."
The head of Minnesota's teachers union unveiled a plan Tuesday to help close the achievement gap between minority students and their white peers, annually evaluate teachers and offer broader pathways into teaching.
Education Minnesota has been criticized by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle for blocking similar education initiatives in the last legislative session. Now, those same critics hope the union's announcement is a sign its leaders are willing to work with them on improving the state's education system.
"I appreciate they understand the importance of those issues," said Rep. Sondra Erickson, R-Princeton, chairwoman of the House Education Reform Committee and a former English teacher. "It seems like they want a seat at the table and want to be part of the discussion."
Gov. Christie's State of the State speech was widely praised as diplomatic if short on specifics regarding education reform. Here comes the specifics, gleaned from reports from a Town Hall meeting in Paramus last night:
1) Replace lifetime tenure for teachers with renewable five-year contracts. (Here's NJEA's response, courtesy of spokesman Steve Wollmer, who warned teachers, "This is not reform, it's patronage. We do not need 125,000 more patronage jobs in New Jersey, we already have enough corruption. Your job security under the Christie proposal would be at the whim of a principal who may or may not be acting in the best interest.")
2) Raise contributions to health benefits premiums. Specifically, replace the newly-legislated benefits contributions for teachers of 1.5% of base pay with a plan through with all public employees would pay 1/3 of benefits plans. (According to the Courier-Post, a teacher earning $60,000 a year now contributes about $900 in benefits contributions. Under the new proposal, that teacher would contribute $7,333 for the same plan.)
uring the Board's budget planning work session, Director DeBell suggested that the Central Administration budget could be cut by about $12 million. Director Smith-Blum said that, nationally, central admin runs about 4-4.5% of district budgets. Don Kennedy, somewhat taken aback, said that such a cut would result in "a Very Different Model of central". Yep. That's the idea.
I advocate a "reset" for the central administration. I think it should be a whole lot leaner and more narrowly focused on just its core missions. I think that the central administration should do what we need it to do - and no more. I think we should rebuild it from the ground up and only put back those pieces that contribute directly to the central mission.
The Central Administration should only work on three things:
1) District Administration. Things like human resource, legal, and financial functions that need to be done centrally and shouldn't be done at the schools. There are other functions like facilities that, by virtue of their scope, need to be done at the District level.
States are the toast of Washington again. Tea Partiers and the incoming Republican majority in the House of Representatives idealize them. When Congress read the U.S. Constitution last week, the 10th Amendment -- the one reserving power to the states -- was an applause line. Of course, celebrating states and localism is nothing new. More than 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville declared that it is "the political effects of decentralization that I most admire in America." More recently, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis hailed states as "laboratories of democracy." But when it comes to education, we shouldn't lionize states when they're too often failing to fix our schools.
A crowd of about 100 people, mostly teachers, packed the Burlingame School District's Tuesday night board meeting imploring its members to keep the "early bird, late bird" language program intact. They got their wish, as the board voted 5-0 to maintain the program.
The program, which exists in just four districts statewide, shortens the class day while giving students more individualized reading and writing instruction.
District kindergarten-through-second grade students currently start their 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. school day an hour late or leave an hour early, with the first and last hours reserved for more individualized reading and writing instruction.
Twenty-three years ago I walked the halls of Evanston Township High School in Evanston, Ill., with a diverse mix of white-, black- and brown-skinned fellow students.
Then I would walk into an honors class and be confronted with a near-blanket of white.
Not much has changed at my alma mater, and as a result the school district has been embroiled in a contentious curriculum debate that touches on race, academics and the meaning of public education itself.
Sound familiar?
Evanston and Madison are both affluent, well-educated and liberal. And both have high schools where racial achievement gaps are the norm. Their school districts differ, though, in their approach to that gap today: Evanston is cutting honors classes; Madison is adding them.
Unlike Madison, Evanston has long had a sizable minority population and began desegregating its elementary and middle schools in the 1960s -- with some positive academic results.
Seniors at ETHS, the city's only public high school, last year had an average ACT score of 23.5, or 2.5 points higher than the national average. This in one of only five states that requires its students to take the test and in a high school whose student population, about 2,900, is 43 percent white, 32 percent black and 17 percent Latino.
When the new Board majority was elected in 2007 they started their terms of office talking a lot about Governance. It was all just talk; there wasn't any action associated with it. Then, after the first few months that talk faded away. Back then it was code for staying out of management and restricting themselves to "policy issues". After the audit was released six months ago, they started talking about Governance again. I'm not sure what it means this time around, but not only are they talking about it a lot, they are also claiming to take some action. I'm not sure those claims can be proven.
There was a discussion of Governance Priorities at the December 15, 2010 Strategic Plan Update work session.
One of the Governance Priorities is Budget development. They say that they will implement a comprehensive budget development process that reflects the strategic plan priorities and includes both internal and external engagement. Why isn't this what they were doing all along? I'm not asking that as an accusation, but to focus the attention on the obstacles to this sort of work. If they say that they are going to start doing this then they will have to identify and overcome those obstacles, won't they? I think that they have already found and addressed one of the historic obstacles, the budget timeline that put the central administration budget ahead of the schools' budgets. I suspect there are others.
The Madison Metropolitan School District is preparing to start up 4-year-old kindergarten this fall, but a state lawmaker said the program isn't worth the cost and wants it cut from the state budget.
More than 300 school districts in Wisconsin already offer 4-year-old kindergarten, but Gov. Scott Walker is considering a proposal to do away with the program.
This comes as Madison prepares to enroll any child who turns 4 years old on or before Sept. 1, 2011, and to launch 4K in the fall.
The turnout Wednesday at the last scheduled meeting for Madison's upcoming 4K program wasn't just standing-room-only; some parents, such as Emily Lockwood, weren't even able to step foot inside at the Lussier Community Center because the crowd was so large, WISC-TV reported.
"I'm excited. She loves to learn. She's really into numbers and letters and writing," said Lockwood, whose daughter Adele plans to attend the 4K program.
D.C. and Maryland school officials have agreed to national academic standards and have begun to lay the groundwork for new tests and teacher training. But it will take at least a few years before such measures generate notable change in the classroom.
The movement to adopt common standards swept 40 states and the District in 2010, a watershed for public education expected to ripple through many aspects of teaching and learning. The standards, spelling out what should be learned in English and math every year from kindergarten through high school, are meant to replace what has been a jumble of benchmarks that vary from state to state in content and depth.
The Center on Education Policy reported last week that many states plan to revise teacher training within the next two years. But in most cases, key measures will not be rolled out until 2013 or later.
Gov. Mitch Daniels has never been patient when it comes to pushing progress for Indiana. And Tuesday night he implored legislators not to wait any longer on key education and local government proposals.
"Wishing won't make it so. Waiting won't make it so. But those of you in this assembly have a priceless and unprecedented opportunity to make it so. It's more than a proposal, it's an assignment. It's more than an opportunity, it's a duty," he said.
Although some were searching for a hint about his presidential aspirations, Daniels used his seventh State of the State address to focus on Indiana - sticking to a familiar formula of highlighting successes and seeking improvement.
He reminded legislators of the progress they have made in road construction, cutting property taxes and keeping Indiana fiscally solvent. And he asked them to do more - much more.
The elite has become obsessed with fixing public schools. Whether it's Ivy League graduates flocking to Teach for America or new-money foundations such as Gates, Broad, and Walton bestowing billions on the cause, "for the under-40 set, education reform is what feeding kids in Africa was in 1980," Newark, New Jersey, education reformer Derrell Bradford told the Associated Press last fall.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is the latest entrepreneur to join this rush. He announced in late September that he planned to donate $100 million to the city of Newark to overhaul its school system. Zuckerberg, a billionaire by age 23, has little experience in philanthropy and no connection to Newark; he met the city's mayor, Cory Booker, at a conference and was impressed with Booker's ideas for school reform. Plans are still sketchy, but Zuckerberg has endorsed merit pay for teachers, closing failing schools, and opening more charters.
So will this princely sum produce a happy ending? Unlikely. The Zuckerberg gift, like all social action, is based on a particular "theory of change" -- a set of beliefs about the best strategy to produce a desired outcome. The United Way has one theory of change about the best way to feed the hungry (direct aid funded by international private donations). Che Guevara had a very different one (self-help through armed revolution). Unfortunately, the theory of change behind the recent infusion of private money into public schools is based on some questionable assumptions: First, public schools will improve if they harness more resources. Second, charter schools and strong, MBA-style leaders are the preferred means of improvement. And third, a school's success can be measured through standardized testing.
Recent reviews of the National Curriculum have failed to harness the insights emerging from high quality transnational comparisons, according to a top academic.
In a Cambridge Assessment paper out today (Thursday 18 November 2010), Tim Oates, Group Director of Assessment Research and Development, said: "We should appraise carefully both international and national research in order to drive an evidence-based review of the National Curriculum and make changes only where justified, in order to avoid unnecessary disruption to the education system.
"However, simply importing another country's classroom practices would be a gross error. A country's national curriculum - both its form and content - cannot be considered in isolation from the state of development of these vital 'Control Factors'*. They interact. Adjust one without considering development of the others, and the system may be in line for trouble."
In a foreword to Tim's paper, the Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State for Education, supported the call for international evidence to be at the heart of curriculum reform and said:
For the two decades that California has had a secretary of education, the position has never made much sense. Appointed by the governor, with a staff of a dozen or so people, this post has no real authority because the state Constitution places responsibility for the schools under the elected superintendent of public instruction, the job recently assumed by Tom Torlakson. The secretary's office has accomplished little and has had more than its share of turnover. Gov. Jerry Brown was right to get rid of it; that was an easy save of almost $2 million a year.
But to be completely clear, the secretary of education wasn't the real problem. The underlying mistake is contained in the Constitution, which mandates an elected superintendent. Ideally, Brown would be able to do away with that post and the appointed Board of Education, bring the Education Department under his wing and streamline the bulky and often-contradictory administration of the public schools.
n April 2010, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation convened a group of researchers and financial analysts to discuss how to better understand the financing and sustainability of CMOs. The goals of the meeting were twofold: (1) to suggest a set of common ways of assessing CMO financial viability, and (2) to outline a research agenda for settling the most urgent CMO finance questions relevant to policy and practice.
The following themes emerged from the meeting:
For most CMOs financial self-sustainability is an aspiration, not yet a reality.
Public funding levels clearly limit, but may not fully explain, CMO scale-up difficulties.
CMOs are experimenting with different cost and service delivery models, but there is little evidence yet about which ones are most cost effective.
Politically and financially, CMOs need to figure out how to do more school turnarounds.
Technology and innovation are critical paths to sustainability.
Spending comparisons between CMOs and school districts are hard to do and not likely to yield much payoff.
There is at least as much speculation about CMO finance as there is fact: a rigorous research and development agenda is needed.
My colleague Valerie Strauss, creator and proprietor of the fabulous The Answer Sheet blog on this Web site, recently encouraged a spirited debate over attrition rates at KIPP schools. I wrote my last book, "Word Hard. Be Nice" about the birth and growth of KIPP, the charter school network most successful in raising student achievement. (The official name is now just KIPP, not the Knowledge Is Power Program.)
I still follow KIPP closely. I want this blog to be the go-to place for anyone who wants to keep up with important developments in the network of 99 schools in 20 states and the District. Valerie has graciously agreed to allow me to put those recent KIPP posts from the debate here, so you can easily follow the lines of reasoning and can read my views.
It began with a great post (despite its polite digs at me) by Richard D. Kahlenberg, the Century Foundation senior fellow who has provided much original thinking on how to improve the education of disadvantaged children:
Via the indispensable Labor Union Report, comes news that Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel is bluntly telling union bosses that pensions will have to be cut:
In contrast to his main rivals in the mayor's race, Rahm Emanuel has told labor leaders that he favors reducing pension benefits for the city's existing work force and not just for new hires.
Although Mr. Emanuel has not yet publicly detailed his plan to confront the city's perennial budget deficits and the severely underfinanced employee pension funds, he told union officials in a private meeting on Dec. 15 that he thought it could be necessary to cut the pensions of all employees, said people who attended the meeting.
Mr. Emanuel made the comments while he was being interviewed by leaders of the Chicago Federation of Labor. That umbrella group for 300 unions has not yet endorsed any of the candidates who will be running in the Feb. 22 election to succeed Mayor Richard M. Daley, who is retiring.
"The sticking issue for all of us is the pension issue," said a labor activist who attended the meeting with Mr. Emanuel. "I can't tell my members we are going to support a guy who is going to cut your pensions."
Los Angeles named a new schools chief Tuesday, selecting a longtime educator known for his aggressive efforts to overhaul teachers' evaluations and link their pay to student achievement.
John Deasy, 50 years old and a former official at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will succeed Ramon C. Cortines, 78, who has headed the nation's second-largest school system for two years and said he planned to step down this year.
Mr. Deasy's appointment was widely expected after he was hired as deputy superintendent last August.
Board members of the Los Angeles Unified School District approved a three-year contract with Mr. Deasy in a 6-0 vote, with board member Steve Zimmer abstaining.
"Having had the opportunity to observe Dr. Deasy at work these past few months left me with no doubt in his ability to lead this district despite the uncertainty of the state's fiscal situation and the challenges that lay before us," school board Vice President Richard Vladovic said in a statement.
Over the long term, the only way we're going to raise wages, grow the economy and improve American competitiveness is by investing in our people - especially their educations.
Yet we're falling behind. In a recent survey of 34 advanced nations by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, our kids came in 25th in math, 17th in science and 14th in reading. The average 15-year-old American student can't answer as many test questions correctly as the average 15-year-old student in Shanghai.
I'm not one of those who believe the only way to fix what's wrong with American education is to throw more money at it. We also need to do it much better. Teacher performance has to be squarely on the table. We should experiment with vouchers whose worth is inversely related to family income. Universities have to tame their budgets for student amenities that have nothing to do with education.
But considering the increases in our population of young people and their educational needs, and the challenges posed by the new global economy, more resources are surely needed.
With the Republican takeover of state government this year, educational reformers have high hopes for change. The administration of Governor Jim Doyle did little to promote educational reform. Nowhere was that more evident in the state's double failure to win Race to the Top federal funds when Wisconsin's application failed to demonstrate movement in educational reform.
Doyle proposed a mayoral takeover of the struggling Milwaukee Public Schools after the federal Race to the Top funding competition was launched. The proposed mayoral takeover did not offer sufficient justification to win over opponents and the effort failed in the Democrat-controlled legislature.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin's two applications for federal Race to the Top funding did not even make the list of finalists. The main reason for the failures was the lack of teacher accountability for student performance.
Doyle's other record on education is an obstacle to other reforms, especially when it comes to school choice.
Wisconsin is certainly ripe for curricular and choice innovation.
Iowa blazed the trail nearly a century ago for how most teachers in the United States are paid today: by seniority and education level.
The man who becomes Iowa's top education official this month worked for the first school district in the country to toss out that tradition for a system of tying pay raises to test scores and annual evaluations.
Jason Glass, 39 - who was named Gov.-elect Terry Branstad's pick for Iowa Department of Education director this week - is an education consultant from Ohio.
But he cemented his reputation as a school reformer in Colorado, where he oversaw the Eagle County school district's performance pay system. School leaders and policymakers in many states, including Iowa, have courted performance pay but never taken the plunge. Teacher unions historically have fought the idea.
"The fear is that teachers are going to be pitted against each other," said Angie Jandrey, a Mount Pleasant kindergarten teacher.
In California, former auto worker Maria Gregg was out of work five months last year before landing a new job--at a nearly 20% pay cut.
In Massachusetts, Kevin Cronan, who lost his $150,000-a-year job as a money manager in early 2009, is now frothing cappuccinos at a Starbucks for $8.85 an hour.
In Wisconsin, Dale Szabo, a former manufacturing manager with two master's degrees, has been searching years for a job comparable to the one he lost in 2003. He's now a school janitor.
They are among the lucky. There are 14.5 million people on the unemployment rolls, including 6.4 million who have been jobless for more than six months.
But the decline in their fortunes points to a signature outcome of the long downturn in the labor market. Even at times of high unemployment in the past, wages have been very slow to fall; economists describe them as "sticky." To an extent rarely seen in recessions since the Great Depression, wages for a swath of the labor force this time have taken a sharp and swift fall.
Gov. Chris Gregoire has several good ideas about reforming public education. Her most dramatic recommendation -- consolidating several agencies into one Department of Education -- warrants consideration because consolidation often is an effective strategy during tough economic times. We made that point in a Dec. 17 editorial applauding Gregoire's proposal to merge 21 state agencies (not including education departments) into nine agencies.
But several concerns must be resolved before this giant merger is pursued. First, consider the size of that monolithic mega-bureaucracy. It would include four operations that currently are distinct and sovereign: the Department of Early Learning, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Education (which runs K-12 education, described in the state constitution as the state's "paramount duty"), the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges and the Higher Education Coordinating Board. Trying to align all of those diverse and complex missions into a Cabinet-level department could create a bureaucratic briar patch so thick that it would defeat the purpose of consolidation.
A more serious conception of the place of the teacher in the life of the nation is both necessary and timely. [I urge] changing the systems that support poorly trained, paid and esteemed teachers." Henry Wyman Holmes, Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1920
Over the last century, there have been dozens of reports and calls to action to improve teacher preparation, pay, performance, and prestige. Unfortunately, despite such declarations, Dean Holmes' words are no less apt today than they were 90 years ago.
Some help is on the way. New investments by the federal government and private philanthropists have launched literally hundreds of state and local policy initiatives to improve teacher effectiveness. Most of these efforts aim to develop better teacher evaluation systems and to target professional development and support to those teachers who need it most. Some go a step further and use evaluations to determine certification, promotion, and tenure.
Supporters of expanded charter schools and school vouchers say most Hoosiers want more education options for their children, and Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels will outline plans Tuesday to bring those choices to more Indiana families, especially low-income ones.
Advocates met at the Statehouse Monday to push education proposals that have renewed life during this legislative session because of support from Daniels and leaders in the GOP-controlled House and Senate. They say a poll they've paid for shows two-thirds of the state supports vouchers and expanded charter schools.
"This session brings the best opportunity for education reform in a generation," said Luke Messer, executive director of School Choice Indiana.
High school graduation rates increased for both Milwaukee Public Schools students and low-income city children using vouchers to attend private schools in 2008-'09, but voucher students are still more likely to graduate than their public school peers, according to data released Monday.
The latest findings add a seventh year of data - for 2008-'09 - to a study that has followed the graduation rates of both groups of students since 2002-'03.
Because the latest graduation rate went up 5 percentage points from the previous year for both Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and MPS students, the report contends that choice (also called voucher) students were 17% more likely to graduate from high school than children in MPS over the past two years of the study.
For voucher school students, the graduation rate increased to 82% in 2008-'09; for MPS students, it increased to 70%, the study says.
Wisconsin is ripe for many more student/parental choices.
In high school, I was a nerd with political ambitions, desperate for popularity. My U.S. history teacher encouraged criticism, giving me a chance for glory when, during the usual Friday game of 20 questions, he said the thing we were trying to guess occurred in the 19th century.
We failed to get the right answer: the Alien and Sedition Acts. That meant extra weekend homework. But, I thought to myself excitedly, wasn't he wrong? Weren't the acts in the Adams administration, late 1790s? "Mr. Ladendorff, will you cancel the homework if I can show that happened in the 18th century?" He nodded. I found the citation. Cheers! Pleasant looks from girls! For a few minutes, I was the hero.
The controversy over errors in Virginia history books, well covered by my colleague Kevin Sieff, reminds me of the best day I ever had in high school. It makes me wonder whether the delights of detecting errors by authoritative educators and their textbooks might turn the scandal into ways to make history classes, at least in high school, more exciting.
As to the first point, I wish people were a bit less concerned about what will inconvenience or irritate our teachers and a bit more concerned about what's best for our students. I think it is absolutely correct that the alignment plan will reduce the autonomy of teachers. Classes will have to be designed and taught against an overriding structure of curricular standards that will need to be addressed. I think that is a good thing.
We'd all like the freedom and autonomy to be able to define our own job responsibilities so that we could spend our time exclusively on the parts of our jobs that we particularly like and are good at, but that is certainly not the way that effective organizations work. I believe that teachers need to be held accountable for covering a specific, consistent, coherent and rigorous curriculum, because that is what's best for their students. I don't see how holding teachers to curriculum standards should inhibit their skills, creativity or engagement in the classroom.
The second point concerns 9th and 10th grade accelerated class options and the accusation that this will result in "segregation." This line of argument has consistently bothered me.
We don't hear much from African-American parents who are upset about the possibility of accelerated classes because, as the open letter puts it, they will result in "more segregation." On the contrary, we on the Board have heard a number of times from middle class African-American parents who are dissatisfied, sometimes to the point of pulling their kids from our schools, because their kids regularly experience situations where well-meaning teachers and staff assume that because the kids are African-American, they'll need special help or won't be able to keep up with advanced class work. I think that frustration with this essentially patronizing attitude has contributed to community support for the Madison Prep proposal. It seems to me that the open letter suggests the same attitude.
"Overall, had MPS graduation rates equaled those for MPCP students in the classes of 2003 through 2009, the number of MPS graduates would have been about 18 percent higher."
In coming months the future of education in Milwaukee and Wisconsin will receive much attention as elected officials seek to raise academic outcomes while facing a multi-billion dollar state budget deficit. In this challenging environment, Governor Walker and members of the Legislature would be wise to consider the results reported here on high school graduation rates in Milwaukee.
Using seven years of data, University of Minnesota Professor John Robert Warren, a recognized expert in the field, tracks graduation rates for students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) and the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). Professor Warren estimates that low-income school choice students were about 18% more likely to graduate from high school than students from across the economic spectrum in MPS. Significantly, he reports that these results occurred during a period when the historically low MPS graduation rate was increasing.
Thus, in one of the most important measures of educational achievement -- high school graduation -- recent developments in Milwaukee are positive, both for choice students and for students attending MPS. Professor Warren explains that separate research being conducted at the University of Arkansas will address whether expanded choice for Milwaukee parents has caused the higher rates reported here.
The MPCP, now twenty-one years old, serves more than 20,000 students. It saved state taxpayers $37 million in FY 2009. As this report shows, it achieved higher graduation rates than MPS in six of seven years studied. Had MPS attained the same graduation rate achieved in the MPCP, an additional 3,939 Milwaukee students would have received diplomas between 2003 and 2009. According to authoritative research cited in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the annual impact from an additional 3,939 MPS graduates would include an additional $24.9 million in personal income and approximately $4.2 million in extra tax revenue.
Unfortunately, benefits for high school students in the MPCP are at risk. This is because increased regulation and funding cuts threaten the viability of private high schools participating in the MPCP. For example, tax support for these schools is less than 45 per cent of the public support for MPS schools. This is not financially sustainable, a fact that has caused private high schools in the MPCP to reduce freshmen enrollment despite high parent demand. For the first time in several years, the number of 9th graders entering the MPCP actually decreased in 2010-11.
Without regulatory relief and increased financial support, the kind of positive results reported here are in jeopardy.
In Budget Crises, an Opening for School Reform School systems can put students first by making sure any layoffs account for teacher quality, not seniority.
In the past year, 46 states grappled with budget deficits of more than $130 billion. This year could be worse as federal recovery dollars dry up. And yet, for education reform, 2011 could be the best of times.
California, to name one example, bridged its $25.4 billion budget gap by cutting billions from public education. It is now forced to cut another $18 billion to fill its current deficit. State executives and legislatures face severe choices and disappointments that could undo political careers and derail progress.
On the bright side, public support is building for a frontal attack on the educational status quo. And policy makers are rising to the challenge, not only because their budgets are tighter than ever, but also because they see an opportunity to reverse the current trend of discouraging academic results for our children.
Three weeks ago, I founded StudentsFirst, a national organization to defend and promote the interests of children in public education and to pursue an aggressive reform agenda to make American schools the best in the world. In the first 48 hours, 100,000 Americans signed up as members, contributing $1 million in small online donations.
A smattering of cynicism can be necessary, even beneficial, when dealing with things that are new.
It's when a lack of understanding causes something with potential benefit to be viewed through jaundiced eyes that the cynicism can become a roadblock.
Take as an example ongoing discussion about a proposal to create a charter school for Jacksonville.
The sticking point in the months since the proposal for 8 Points Charter School was unveiled has not been the need or the curriculum, but rather the dollars and cents.
This should not become a bottom-line decision. While money has to be a concern given the sealed-wallet finances across the state, the greater question should be "is it something Jacksonville needs right now?"
Gov. Gregoire's' bold new proposals for an integrated education department? Great in concept (in fact, much needed). Hard to do. Even harder to insure better results than we're getting now.
That's how I'd summarize Gov. Gregoire's proposal to replace the various boards of education with a cabinet-level Department of Education.
First, the need: Sure, the state Board of Community and Technical Colleges, the Higher Education Coordinating Board, and the Board of Education for K-12 schools -- not to mention the entire Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction whose incumbent has already acquitted himself poorly in this debate -- all these bodies represent separate silos and have a tough time making their goals and systems fit together. Worse though, they're also creaky and inefficient, a poor system for making (or changing) policy. (The proposed new department would also absorb the recently created Department of Early Learning which already reports to the governor.)
In last week's Jackson Sun online poll, about two-thirds of 622 responders said they are against establishing a public charter school in East Jackson. Often the contrarian when it comes to public opinion, I am here to argue in favor of the school.
harter schools present an opportunity for innovation in public education. They are tools that can help move public education away from its 19th and 20th century education model. Charter schools are allowed to operate outside of the traditional public education rulebook, and for good reason. Innovation demands new approaches to old problems. Charter schools do have to meet federal guidelines regarding non-discrimination and other fairness laws, but beyond that, they are free to try new ideas to meet student needs.
This is especially important in today's technology-driven world where people get to individualize nearly every aspect of their lives. But public K-12 education has, for the most part, failed to keep up with this trend. Public education still is a homogenized, generic system. Classrooms and curricula in Los Angeles differ little from classrooms and curricula in Boston. There is little innovation in higher education teacher training as teachers are cranked out cookie-cutter fashion ready to step into a K-12 classroom to pick up where the last teacher left off.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will lay out his ideas for overhauling teacher tenure, giving parents a choice in where their children attend school and shoring up a teetering public worker pension system in his first State of the State address.
Christie told The Associated Press in an interview that he plans to stick to three themes Tuesday in a speech that will top out at under 30 minutes: education reform; changes to the pension and health benefits funds for government workers, teachers, police and firefighters; and responsible budgeting.
"It's going to be brisk and direct," Christie said of the speech, "talking about those things and why they're so important to the future of the state. We'll do a little bit of a review of where we've been and what we accomplished our first year in office, but the majority of the speech will be talking about those three big issues to me."
Michelle Rhee, who gained national attention as the chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C., called Monday for giving students government-funded vouchers to attend private schools, rating principals based on student achievement and getting rid of teacher tenure.
The release of the blueprint was the first formal action of Ms. Rhee's new advocacy group, StudentsFirst, which she launched in December, after leaving her job heading D.C. schools in October. Ms. Rhee said she was in discussions with the governors of Florida, New Mexico, New Jersey, Tennessee, Nevada and Indiana to adopt part, if not all, of the agenda.
In an interview Monday, Ms. Rhee said she recognized her platform would be controversial and tough to implement but that her group could help push through the changes.
StudentsFirst has attracted 140,000 members, including nearly 20,000 teachers, and collected $1.4 million in contributions, Ms. Rhee said. She has said her group would donate to political campaigns and help school districts fund chosen strategies.
Despite lingering concerns from some parents, students and teachers, the Madison School District will introduce 9th and 10th grade honors classes next fall at West High School -- changes that prompted a student protest last fall.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said he discussed with staff over the weekend the possibility of not introducing the honors classes after school board members and parents raised questions at a meeting Thursday night.
Nerad said the decision comes down to following the district's talented-and-gifted plan, which called for offering honors classes at all high schools starting in this current school year.
"This has already been put off a year," Nerad said in an interview Monday. "We have an obligation to move forward with what's been identified in the TAG plan."
On Friday, 18 West parents sent a letter to the district asking that the honors classes be delayed.
Leilei Song, who teaches in Mandarin at the state's first Chinese immersion school, reached back to her own childhood for a recent lesson with a combined kindergarten and first grade class.
She showed a Monkey King video -- a favorite of hers when she was growing up in China -- to the class at the Verona Area International School. A couple of her students, whose day is split between learning in Mandarin and in English, were very aware of how the video fits into lesson plans.
"We get to watch fun videos like Monkey King but they're in Chinese," kindergartener Zane Oshiro, 5, said.
"So we're learning," added first grader Mikala Feller, 6.
The United Kingdom is looking to Alberta's education system to see why students here consistently earn top marks in international testing.
A British multimedia company has produced a video series called Lessons from Alberta to examine why Alberta's public education system is so successful. The two 20-minute videos were released last month by Teachers TV, a free online service that offers educational videos and resources to people working in the British school system.
"Alberta, in Canada, has the highest performing schools in the English-speaking world," says a summary of one of the videos on the Teachers TV website. "This video explores the roots of the region's success, accountability, curriculum and teacher professionalism."
Sixteen years ago, Janet Barresi wanted to find a better middle school for her two sons. Eventually, she landed at the front of Oklahoma's charter school movement and took up education reform as a full-time job.
Barresi starts Monday as the new state superintendent of schools, succeeding Sandy Garrett.
In the 1990s, Barresi and other parents persuaded the Oklahoma City school board to create a parent-run "enterprise" middle school, which became one of the state's charter schools after the Legislature authorized them. She eventually started two charter schools and became president of the Oklahoma Association of Charter Schools.
Barresi spent more time on educational issues and sold her dental practice.
Less than a year after its impressive victory over those who wanted to put it to sleep, the Milwaukee School Board makes me think of famous moments from show business.
Unfortunately, those moments are Oliver Hardy telling Stan Laurel, "Another nice mess you've gotten me into," and Rodney Dangerfield saying, "I don't get no respect." More specifically:
A Nice Mess: The budget. Every school board in Wisconsin could join in this one. But MPS messes are always bigger than everybody else's. It is highly likely more than 300 jobs will be cut for next year as federal economic stimulus money and other grants dry up. Hundreds more jobs are likely to be lost because of the squeeze on general funds from the state and local property taxes. This could be very ugly, and the board probably will have little it can do about it.
No Respect: The empty school issue and legislative prospects in general. The board has been adamant about not selling the many empty schools MPS holds for use as schools. The board argues, Why help the charter and private school competition? So State Sen. Alberta Darling, now co-chair of the joint finance committee, and Common Council President Willie Hines announced last week they want to take power of these decisions from the board. Who's going to stop them? Probably nobody, particularly not the board.
The issues are the failure of the MMSD Administration to follow basic practices of open inclusive governance and the implementation of segregative policies.
Below (and here) [70K PDF] is an open letter drafted and signed by 18 West High parents on Friday 1/7/2010. Understanding the letter requires some background and context. The background -- along with the latest news and some final thoughts -follows.
WHEN Joan Carlson started teaching high school biology more than 30 years ago, the Advanced Placement textbook was daunting enough, at 36 chapters and 870 pages. But as an explosion of research into cells and genes reshapes our sense of how life evolves, the flood of new material has been staggering. Mrs. Carlson's A.P. class in Worcester, Mass., now confronts a book with 56 chapters and 1,400 pages, along with a profusion of animated videos and Web-based aids that supplement the text.
And what fuels the panic is that nearly every tongue-twisting term and microscopic fact is fair game for the year-end test that decides who will receive college credit for the course.
"Some of the students look at the book and say, 'My gosh, it's just like an encyclopedia,' " Mrs. Carlson says. And when new A.P. teachers encounter it, "they almost want to start sobbing."
Gov. Jerry Brown replaces seven state Board of Education members Several proponents of charter schools are removed. Many see the influence of the teachers union.
n one of Gov. Jerry Brown's first official acts this week, he sacked the majority of the state Board of Education, replacing several vocal proponents of charter schools, parent empowerment and teacher accountability.
A broad range of educators, policy makers and others say the move was widely believed to be the handiwork of the California Teachers Assn., which heavily supported Brown in his gubernatorial campaign. The union's support will be vital if he, as expected, places measures on the June ballot to temporarily raise taxes to ease the state's budget deficit. It also appears to delay a key vote about parents' power to reshape failing schools -- an effort opposed by the union -- leading to strong criticism of the governor from fellow Democrats.
"No doubt about it, this is in part looking at the November election first and foremost, and then of course upcoming elections," said former state Sen. Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat.
The class began with a Mayan-inspired chant and a vigorous round of coordinated hand clapping. The classroom walls featured protest signs, including one that said "United Together in La Lucha!" -- the struggle. Although open to any student at Tucson High Magnet School, nearly all of those attending Curtis Acosta's Latino literature class on a recent morning were Mexican-American.
For all of that and more, Mr. Acosta's class and others in the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican-American program have been declared illegal by the State of Arizona -- even while similar programs for black, Asian and American Indian students have been left untouched.
"It's propagandizing and brainwashing that's going on there," Tom Horne, Arizona's newly elected attorney general, said this week as he officially declared the program in violation of a state law that went into effect on Jan. 1.
Although Shakespeare's "Tempest" was supposed to be the topic at hand, Mr. Acosta spent most of a recent class discussing the political storm in which he, his students and the entire district have become enmeshed. Mr. Horne's name came up more than once, and not in a flattering light.
In a December speech heard around the halls of LAUSD, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa charged that United Teachers Los Angeles was the biggest obstacle to education reform. Ouch. With L.A. schools' dismal ranking and graduation rates, he implored the teachers union to join the education reform team. Rather than going the "united we stand, divided we fall" route, however, he embarrassed the union. From the full transcript:
William H. Fitzhugh, the cantankerous publisher of a journal that showcases high school research papers, sits at his computer in a cluttered office above a secondhand shop here, deploring the nation's declining academic standards.
"Most kids don't know how to write, don't know any history, and that's a disgrace," Mr. Fitzhugh said. "Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our schools."
His mood brightens, however, when talk turns to the occasionally brilliant work of the students whose heavily footnoted history papers appear in his quarterly, The Concord Review. Over 23 years, the review has printed 924 essays by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations.
The review's exacting standards have won influential admirers. William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions, said he keeps a few issues in his Cambridge office to inspire applicants. Harvard considers it "something that's impressive," like winning a national math competition, if an applicant's essay has appeared in the review, he said.
In an effort to be transparent in the district's budget transactions, the Wichita Public Schools launched its District Checkbook on its website. Superintendent John Allison made the announcement during the South Central Legislative Delegation meeting at Wichita State University on January 6.
"Many community members ask questions about school budgets, and this is a way to allow taxpayers to review transactions by month for the fiscal year, to see which fund is used, and the function for that transaction," said Superintendent Allison.
The District Checkbook shows every item the district purchases and what the purchases were for including instruction, support and bond construction. The items are reported by the categories defined by the State of Kansas and the categories are consistent throughout Kansas' school districts.
APPENDIX MMM-7-21 January 31, 2011
Urban League of Greater Madison
SUMMARY
On December 6, 2010, the Urban League of Greater Madison presented an initial proposal for the establishment of Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (a non-instrumentality all-boys secondary charter school) to the Planning and Development Committee of the MMSD Board of Education. During the discussion that followed, Board members agreed to submit follow-up questions to the Urban Leagne, to which the Urban Leagne would respond before the next meeting of the Planning and Development Committee. Questions were submitted by Ed Hughes and Lucy Mathiak. Furthermore, Arlene Silveira submitted questions presented to her by several connnunity members. Below each numbered Board member question, you will find the ULGM response.
1. Ed Hughes: Do you have a response to the suggestion that your proposal may violate Wis. Stat. sec. 118.40(4)(c) other than that you also intend sometime in the future to develop and operate a school for girls? If so, what is the response?
ULGM: Please refer to our letter to MMSD Board of Education members that responded to the ACLU's opposition to Madison Prep. The answer to your question is contained in that letter. We have attached the letter to this document for your review.
2. Ed Hughes: To the extent the information is available to you, please list the 37 or so non instrumentality charter schools currently operating in Wisconsin.
ULGM: The following list of non-instrumentality charter schools currently operating in Wisconsin was compiled from the 20 I 0-20 II Charter Schools Yearbook published by the Department of Public Instruction. You can find the complete Yearbook online at: http://dpi.wi.gov/sms/pdf/2010.llyearbook.pdf
1. Barron, North Star Academy
2. Cambridge, JEDI Virtual High School
3. City of Milwaukee, Central City Cyberschool
4. City of Milwaukee, Darrell Lynn Hines (DLH) Academy
5. City of Milwaukee, Downtown Montessori Academy
6. City of Milwaukee, King's Academy
7. City of Milwaukee, Milwaukee Academy of Science
8. Grantsburg, Insight School of Wisconsin
9. Hayward, Hayward Center for Individualized Learning
10. Hayward, Waadookodaading Charter School
11. McFarland, Wisconsin Virtual Academy
12. Milwaukee, Carmen High School of Science and Technology
13. Milwaukee, Highland Community School
14. Milwaukee, Hmong American Peace Academy (HAPA)
15. Milwaukee, International Peace Academy
16. Milwaukee, La Causa Charter School
17. Milwaukee, Milwaukee Community Cyber (MC2) High School
18. Milwaukee, Next Door Charter School
19. Milwaukee, Wings Academy
20. Milwaukee, Wisconsin Career Academy
21. Nekoosa, Niikuusra Community School
22. New Lisbon, Juneau County Charter School
23. New Richmond, NR4Kids Charter School
24. Sheboygan, Lake Country Academy
25. UW-Milwaukee, Bruce Guadalupe Community School
26. UW-Milwaukee, Business & Economics Academy of Milwaukee (BEAM)
27. UW-Milwaukee, Capitol West Academy
28. UW-Milwaukee, Milwaukee College Preparatory School
29. UW-Milwaukee, Milwaukee Renaissance Academy
30. UW-Milwaukee, School for Early Development & Achievement (SEDA)
31. UW-Milwaukee, Seeds of Health Elementary School
32. UW-Milwaukee, Tenor High School
33. UW-Milwaukee, Urban Day Charter School, Inc
34. UW-Milwaukee, Veritas High School
35. UW-Milwaukee, Woodlands School
36. UW -Milwaukee, YMCA Young Leaders Academy
37. UW-Parkside, 21st Century Preparatory School
38. Weyauwega-Fremont, Waupaca County Charter School
3. Ed Hughes: Do you have copies of any of the contracts Wisconsin non-instrumentality charter schools have entered into with their school districts? If so, please list the contracts and provide a copy of at least one of them.
ULGM: See attached contracts for Lake Country Academy in Sheboygan and the Wisconsin Virtual Academy in McFarland, which are both non-instrumentality charter schools.
4. Ed Hughes: To the extent the information is available to you, please list the amount ofper.student payment each non-instrumentality charter school in Wisconsin is contractually entitled to receive from its sponsoring school district.
ULGM: We have requested information from the DPI on the current per-student payments to each non-instrumentality charter school in Wisconsin, but we understand that DPI does not now have the information consolidated in one database. We expect that the per-student payment information will be available from DPI by January 17, and we will submit that information to the board and administration as soon as it becomes available from the DPI. The per-pupil payment to each district.authorized charter school in Wisconsin, including instrumentality and non-instrumentality charter schools, is determined through negotiations and mutual agreement between the school district, as the charter school authorizer, and the charter school developer/operator.
5. Ed Hughes: Please identify the minimum per-student payment from the school district that would be required for Madison Prep to be financially feasible from your perspective. If you don't have a specific figure, provide your best estimate of the range in which that figure is likely to fall.
ULGM: The MMSD Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent-Business in agreement with us that more time is needed to present a projected minimum payment from the school district. DPI's School Finance Data Warehouse indicates that MMSD reported $14,432 in revenue per student and spent $13,881 per student iu 2008-09. We are certain that we will not request more per student than what MMSD spends annually.
6. Lucy Mathiak: Do you know what Madison Prep will cost the district? And do you know where the money will come from?
ULGM: We have an idea ofwhat our school will cost but as stated in the answer to question number 5, we are working through several costs and line items with MMSD's Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent-Business. In Wisconsin, public charter schools are funded primarily by school districts or the state legislature (non-school district authorized schools). Generally, private funding is limited to 5% of costs during the budgeting process. However we will raise significantly more in private funding during the pre-implementation and implementation years of the school than we will in out years.
7. Lucy Mathiak: How the financial commitment asked of the district compares to the financial commitment to its existing schools?
ULGM: Assuming you mean existing traditional public schools, we will require more information from MMSD's administration to make this comparison. Given that Madison Prep will be a new school and a non-instrumentality, there will be costs that Madison Prep has that the school system does not, and vice versa. However, we are firmly committed to ensuring our school is operated within the annual per pupil cost MMSD now spends to educate students in middle and high schools.
8. Community Member, via Arlene Silveira: First of all, has the funding that is indicated as part of the proposal actually been acquired or promised? The proposal indicates $100,000/ year from the Madison Community Foundation, but I can't find any information from MCF itself about funding Madison Prep. All I can see is that they donated to the Urban League's capital and Workforce campaigns. Will you check into this? Also, the proposal indicates $250,000/ year for 3 years from Partners for Developing Futures. Last year, despite having received 25 applications for funding from "education entrepreneurs," this organization did not fund any of them due to the quality of the applications. How is the Madison Prep planning team able to claim this as a source of funding? Have promises been made?
ULGM: The Madison Community Foundation and Partners for Developing Futures were listed as potential revenue sources; these dollars were not committed. Our business plan followed the same approach as most business plans for start-up initiatives: listing prospective revenue sources. However, we do intend to pursue funding through these and other sources. Our private fundraising goals and needs in our five-year budget plan are reasonable.
9. Lucy Mathiak: What additional resources are needed to make the Madison Prep model work?
ULGM: Our school is designed as a demonstration school to be replicable, in whole or in part, by MMSD and other school systems. Therefore, we will not request more than the district's own annual costs per pupil at the middle and high school levels.
10. Lucy Mathiak: What resources are in hand and what resources will you need to raise?
ULGM: We presently have $50,000 to support the planning of the school, with the offer of additional support. However, we will secure additional private and public funding once the Board of Education formally approves the DPI planning grant application/detailed proposal for Madison Prep.
11. Lucy Mathiak: Ifthere is a proposed endowment, what is the amount of the endowment in hand, the estimated annual rate of return, and the estimated income available for use?
ULGM: New charter schools generally do not budget for endowment in their first few years of operation. We intend to build an endowment at some point and have line items for this in Madison Prep's budget, but these issues will be decided by the Board ofDirectors ofthe school, for which we will not begin recruiting until the Board of Education approves our DPI plauning grant application/detailed proposal.
12. Ed Hughes: Which parts of your proposal do you require non-instrumentality status to implement?
ULGM: Non-instrumentality status will be vital to Madison Prep's ability to offer an extended school day, extended school year, as well as the expectations we have of teachers to serve as mentors and coaches to students. The collective bargaining contract between the Board of Education and Madison Teachers, Inc. would not allow for this added instructional time. Yet this added instructional time will be necessary in order for students to meet Madison Prep's ambitious achievement goals. In addition, our professional development program will also require more hours of training. We also intend to implement other special activities for students and faculty that would not be allowed under MMSD and MTI's collective bargaining agreement.
13. Ed Hughes: What will be the school's admission policy? Please describe any preferences that the admission policy will include. To what extent will students who live outside ofthe Madison school district be considered for admission?
ULGM: Madison Prep will comply with all federal and state regulations relating to charter school admissions. In its inaugural school year (20 12-20 13), Madison Prep will be open to any 61h and 7'h grade male student residing within the boundaries of MMSD.
All interested families will complete an Enrollment Form at the Urban League's offices, online, during community meetings and outreach activities, through local partners, or during a visit to the school (after it opens). If Madison Prep receives less than 45 enrollment forms for either grade (6 and 7) in the tirst year, all students' who applied will be admitted. If the school receives more than 45 enrollment forms for either grade level in the first year, or enrollment forms exceed the seats available in subsequent years, Madison Prep will hold a public random lottery at a location that provides enough space for applicant students and families. The lottery will be held in accordance with DPI guidelines for random lotteries. If Madison Prep does not fill all available seats, it will continue its grassroots recruitment efforts until it reaches its enrollment goal.
14. Community Member, via Arlene Silveira: We know that Madison Prep won't accept girls. Will it except boys with Autism or Aspergers? If a boy has a learning disability, will he be allowed to attend? What ifthis learning disability makes it not possible for him to perform above grade level on a standardized test? Will he be allowed in? And can they kick him out if his test scores aren't advanced/proficient?
ULGM: Please see our answer to question #13. To be clear, Madison Prep will accept students with special learning needs, including students who speak English as a second language. As always, IEP teams will determine on a case-by-case basis if Madison Prep is an appropriate placement for special education students. No Madison Prep student will ever be expelled for academic performance.
15. Ed Hughes: An attraction ofthe proposed school is that it could provide the kind ofiutense academic and other sorts of support that could change the trajectories of its students from failure to success. How will you ensure that your school serves primarily students who require the sort of approach the school will offer in order to be successful?
ULGM: Please see our answer to question #13 and question #16 below. We will go to great lengths to inform parents about Madison Prep as an option for their child, and to recruit students and families to our school. We will over-market our efforts in low-income communities and through media, sports clubs, community centers, churches, employers, and other vehicles that reach these students and their parents. We are also exploring the legality of our ability to set an income goal or threshold for student admissions. Nonetheless, we believe that any young man, regardless of their family background, would be well served by Madison Prep.
16. Ed Hughes: To the extent yon know them, describe what the school's stndent recruitment and marketing strategies will be.
ULGM: Madison Prep's marketing plan will support three priorities and goals:
1. Enrollment: Recruiting, retaining, and expanding student enrollment annually -share Madison Prep with as many parents and students as possible and establish a wait-list of at least 20 students at each grade level by June I each year (with the exception of year one).
2. Staffing: Recruiting and retaining a talented, effective, and committed faculty and staff -field qualified applicants for each position in a timeframe that enables us to hire by June 30 each year.
3. Public Image and Support: Building, maintaining, and solidifying a base of support among local leaders, financial contributors, key partners, the media, and the general public.
To ensure the public is well acquainted with the school, Madison Prep, with the support of the Urban League of Greater Madison, will make use of a variety of marketing strategies to accomplish its enrollment, staffing, fundraising, and publicity goals. Each strategy will be phased in, from pre.launch of the school through the first three years of operation. These marketing strategies are less expensive and more sustainable with the budget of a new charter school than television, radio, and popular print advertisements. They also deliver a great return on investment if executed effectively. Each strategy will enable Madison Prep, with its limited staff, to promote itself to the general public and hard-to-reach communities, build relationships, sustain communications and achieve its goals.
A. Image Management: Madison Prep's logo and images of young men projecting the Madison Prep brand will be featured on the school'.s website, in informational and print materials, and on inexpensive paraphernalia (lapel pins, emblems, ink pens, etc). Students will be required to wear uniforms that include a red or black blazer featuring the Madison Prep emblem, a sweater, a red or black tie, white shirt, black or khaki pants, and black or brown dress shoes. They will also have a gym uniform and athletic team wear that features the Madison Prep emblem. Additionally, Madison Prep will ensure that its school grounds, educational facility, and learning spaces are clean, orderly and well-maintained at all times, and that these physical spaces reflect positive images of Madison Prep students, positive adult males, community leaders, families, and supporters. Madison Prep's Core Values will be visible through the school as well, and its students, faculty, staff, and Board of Directors will reflect an image in school and in public that is consistent with the school's Core Values and Leadership Dimensions.
B. Grassroots Engagement: Madison Prep's founders, Board members, volunteers, and its key staff (once hired) will go door-to-door in target neighborhoods, and other areas within MMSD boundaries where prospective candidates can be found, to build relationships with young men, families, and local community resource persons and advocates to recruit young men to attend Madison Prep. Recruiters will be dressed in the Madison Prep uniform (either a polo shirt, sweater or suit jacket/tie, each showing the Madison emblem, and dress slacks or skirt) and will visit homes in two person teams.
Madison Prep will also partner with City Council members, Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners, and local libraries to host community meetings year-round to promote the school in target neighborhoods and military bases. It will also promote the school to citizens in high traffic residential areas of the city, including metro stops, restaurants, community centers, community health agencies, and at public events. Madison Prep will engage the religious community as well, promoting the school to church leaders and requesting to speak before their congregations or have the church publicize the school during their announcements on Sundays and ministry activities during the week. Area businesses, hospitals, government agencies, foster care agencies, and mentorship programs will be asked to make information available to their patrons, clients, and families. Madison Prep will also seek to form partnerships with the Police Department and Court System to ensure judges, attorneys, neighborhood police officers, and family advocates know about the school and can make referrals of young men they believe will benefit from joining Madison Prep's school community.
C. Online Presence & Partnerships: Madison Prep will launch a website and update its current Facebook and Twitter pages prior ·to the school opening to expand its public presence. The Facebook page for Madison Prep presently has more than 100 members, has been operational for less than 2 months, and has not yet been widely marketed. The page is used to raise awareness, expand support, communicate progress, announce activities and events, and promote small-donor fundraising campaigns. The website will be used to recruit students, staff, and eventually serve as an entry-point to a member only section on the Internet for faculty, students, and parents. Madison Prep will also seek to establish strategic alliance partnerships with service associations (100 Black Men, Sororities and Fraternities, Civic Clubs or Organizations, etc.), enlisting their participation in the school's annual events. In addition, Madison Prep will establish partnerships with other public and private schools in the Madison area to recruit students, particularly elementary schools.
D. Viral Marketing: Madison Prep will use email announcements and social networking sites to share its mission, activities, employment opportunities, and successes with its base of supporters and will inspire and encourage them to share the information with their friends, colleagues, parents and young men they know who might be interested in the school. Madison Prep will add to its base of supporters through its other marketing strategies, collecting names and contact information when and where appropriate.
E. Buzz Marketing: Madison Prep will use subtle forms of marketing to recruit students and faculty, increase its donor and support base, and develop a positive public image. The school will maintain an influential board of directors and advisors, will engage notable people and organizations in the school, and will publicize these assets to the general public. The school will also prepare key messages and strategically involve its students, staff, and parents in key events and activities to market its brand -high achieving, thoughtful, forward thinking, confident and empowered young men who are being groomed for leadership and success by equally talented, passionate and committed adults. The messages, images, and quality of interactions that the broader community has with members of the greater Madison community will create a positive buzz about the school, its impact, and the success of its students.
F. School Visits & Activity Participation: Each year, from the week after Thanksgiving through the end of the school year, Madison Prep will invite prospective students and parents, funders, and members of the community to visit the school. A visit program and weekly schedule will be established to ensure that the school day and learning is not interrupted by visitors. Madison Prep will also establish an open visit policy for parents, and will create opportunities for them to leverage their ongoing involvement with the school and their young men. Through nurturing positive relationships with parents, and establishing an enviromnent where they are wanted and respected, Madison Prep will create spokespersons in the community who help grow its student body and community support. Finally, Madison Prep will host an annual community event that engages its school community with the greater Madison community in a day of fun, competitive events for families, and will serve as a resource to parents whose children do not attend Madison Prep by inviting them to participate in its Destination Planning workshops.
G. Popular Media: Madison Prep will allocate resources to market itself on Urban and News Radio during the peak student recruitment season in two phases. Phase I will take place in November 2011 and Phase 2 advertising will take place between Jannary and May 2012. To defray costs, Madison Prep will enlist the support of local and national celebrities for feature interviews, spotlights, and PSAs with Madison Prep's Leadership to promote the school.
17. Community Member, via Arlene Silveira: It looks like the Charter school is aiming for 50% of its population to be low-income. The middle school my children will go to, Sherman, is 71% low income. Blackhawk is at 62%. Wright is 83%. Sennett is 65%. Cherokee is at 63%. Toki is at 51%. Can we, in good conscious, start a new school-designed to help low income students -that has a lower percentage oflow-income students than six of our existing middle schools?
ULGM: The Urban League has set the 50% low-income target as a floor, not as a ceiling. In fact, we expect that more than 50% of Madison Prep students will qualifY for free or reduced lunch.
Furthermore, we have chosen to use the 50% figure to allow us to be conservative in our budgeting process. No matter what the level of low income students at Madison Prep -50% or higher-the student achievement goals and overall program quality will remain unchanged.
18. Ed Hughes: Have you considered limiting admission to students who have scored minimal or basic on their WKCE tests?
ULGM: No. Madison Prep will be open to any male student who wishes to attend, regardless of past academic performance.
19. Ed Hughes: Some have suggested that Madison Prep could skim offthe most academically.motivated African-American students from the District's middle and high schools, leaving fewer role models and academic peers for the African-American boys who remain in our existing schools. What is your response to that concern?
ULGM: The notion that charter schools skim off the most motivated students is a common misconception. First, this argument is not logical. Parents/caregivers ofchildren who are academically motivated and doing well in traditional public schools have little incentive to change their students' educational environment. Those kids will likely stay put. When a parent, teacher, social worker, or school counselor recognizes that a child isn't doing well in the traditional school and seeks an alternative, the charter school that is sought as an alternative does not in this process gain some advantage. In fact, research suggests the opposite. A 2009 study by researchers at Michigan State University, the University of Wisconsin, and Mathematic Policy Research examined charter schools from across the country to test the "skimming" theory. The researchers found no evidence of skimming. In fact, they found students who go to charter schools typically have LOWER test scores than their counterparts in traditional public schools. (Read the full paper at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/schoolchoice/conference/papers/Zimmer_COMPLETE.pdf)
20. Ed Hughes: Have you extended preliminary or informal offers of employment at Madison Prep to anyone? If so, identify to whom the preliminary or informal offers were made and for which positions.
ULGM:No.
21. Ed Hughes: What will he your strategy for recruiting teachers? What qualifications will you establish for teachers? Please describe the general range of salary and benefits you expect to offer to teachers.
ULGM: Teacher Recruitment -The overarching goal of teacher recruitment will be to hire a highly qualified, passionate, hard-working, diverse staff. The recruitment effort will include casting a wide net that allows Madison Prep to draw from the pool oflocal teachers as well as teachers statewide and nationwide who will embrace the opportunity to help build a school from the ground up. We will recruit though typical both typical means (postings on our website, WECAN, charter school association job pages) as well as through recruitment fairs outside of the state. Our hiring process will take place in early and mid spring rather than late spring and summer so that we may have a competitive edge in recruiting the teachers that are the best fit for Madison Prep. While the Head of School will be responsible for the hiring of teachers, he/she will engage a committee of teachers, community members, parents, and students in the process ofselecting teachers and other staff. In addition to a thorough interview, teacher candidates will be required to teach a sample lesson to a group of students, as well as other interview committee members. Teacher Qualifications-All teachers at Madison Prep will be licensed by the Department of Public Instruction.
General Salary Range and Benefits*-For the 2012-2013 school year, the salary for Master Teachers (of which there will be two) is currently projected to be $61,406 with a signing bonus of $2,000 and a maximum performance bonus of $2,750. The salary for general education teachers is currently projected to be $50,055 for the 2012-2013 school year, with a signing bonus of$2,000 and a maximum performance bonus of$1,750. Madison Prep intends to provide a full range of benefits to its teachers. *Salary and bonus figures are subject to change
22. Ed Hughes: MMSD already has a charter middle school with a very diverse student population -James C. Wright Middle School. If the school district chose to continue James C. Wright as an instrumentality charter school but modeled on your Madison Prep proposal, which components of your proposal do yon think could be implemented at the school and which components of your proposal could not?
ULGM: The Urban League is not in a position to determine how the fundamental elements ofthe Madison Prep proposal could or could not be implemented at James C. Wright Middle School. That determination would have to be made by the district administration and c01mnunity at Wright.
23. Community Member, via Arlene Silveira: Here is the annual report from one of the Urban League charter schools that the proposal cites as a model for Madison Prep: http://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/reports/2009/annual/0471.doc This is a report from the school's lO'" year in existence. Please note the test achievement goals and scores on page 4 and compare them with the extremely overconfident goals of the Madison Prep proposal. IfMadison Prep is serious about attaining the goal of 75% oftheir students scoring 22 or higher on the ACT or 1100 or higher on the SAT, how do they plan to achieve this and what will happen with those students who fail to meet this standard? What will happen to the teachers who don't meet their quota ofstudent test scores above this level? Please investigate these questions in detail and within the framework of Madison Prep processes from admissions through expulsion.
ULGM: The reference to the New Leadership Charter School in Springfield, Massachusetts in the Madison Prep initial proposal was meant to show the precedent for the establishment of charter schools by Urban League affiliates; the New Leadership Charter School is NOT a model for Madison Prep, nor was this ever stated in the initial proposal. That said, Madison Prep IS serious about our student achievement goals related to the ACT and SAT. We plan to meet these goals through-as the proposal states-an all-male student body, the International Baccalaureate Curriculum, college preparatory educational program, Harkness Teaching, an extended school day and year,mentoring and coll1111unity support, and a prep year. Students will be carefully assessed for years leading up to these tests to ensure their preparedness. When formative assessments indicate re-teaching is needed in order to meet the goal, students will receive further individualized instruction. Madison Prep teachers will not have student test score "quotas."
24. Lucy Mathiak: What would a timeline for the counterpart girls' school look like?
ULGM: We would like to initiate the process for the girls' school in the fall of 2012, with an opening aimed at 2014-2015. I continue to believe that the fate of this initiative will be a defining moment for the Madison School District. If approved and implemented, it will, over time, affect other traditional schools within the District. If it is rejected, a neighboring District will likely step in.
Finally, I found the Urban League's response to Ed Hughes' question #5 interesting:
DPI's School Finance Data Warehouse indicates that MMSD reported $14,432 in revenue per student and spent $13,881 per student iu 2008-09. We are certain that we will not request more per student than what MMSD spends annually.
The Madison Metropolitan School District has the responsibility to provide a safe and secure learning environment for students and staff. To this end, the district periodically conducts assessments of its facilities and reviews its operating practices to ensure that all that can be done is being done to ensure the safety of our schools.
Background
Following a school shooting in the Weston School District in Cazenovia, Wisconsin in 2006, Superintendent Art Rainwater issued security reminders that included the following:
Ensure that building security and door locking procedures are followed.
Ensure that all non-employees in a building are identified and registered in the office.
Ensure that communication systems, radios and PA's are functioning.
Have employees visibly display their MMSD identification badges.
Be aware of the school's security plan and of their role in security procedures.
Communicate with and listen to students.
Remind students that they should always communicate with staff and share information regarding any threats to the school or to other persons.
The process outlined below is intended to provide adequate and timely information to the Board of Education and Community relative to the development of the 2011-12 Budget. This process will create transparency, credibility around data, and provide options for the Board of Education along the way. This process as you will see, also leans very heavily on the 5 year model worked on and completed by the 5 Year Budget Model Ad Hoc Committee.
The goal of this upcoming budget process is comprised of five phases: planning, preparation, approval/ adoption, implementation, and review I evaluation. The proposed timeline and list of activities below are aimed at meeting the goals for planning, preparation, and approval/adoption. It is important to note that all phases of the process will be completed by utilizing the PMA Model and its summary reports only. The proposed process and timeline are as follows:
LOOK around the world and the forces are massing. On one side are Californian prison guards, British policemen, French railworkers, Greek civil servants, and teachers just about everywhere. On the other stand the cash-strapped governments of the rich world. Even the mere mention of cuts has brought public-sector workers onto the streets across Europe. When those plans are put into action, expect much worse.
"Industrial relations" are back at the heart of politics--not as an old-fashioned clash between capital and labour, fought out so brutally in the Thatcherite 1980s, but as one between taxpayers and what William Cobbett, one of the great British liberals, used to refer to as "tax eaters". People in the private sector are only just beginning to understand how much of a banquet public-sector unions have been having at everybody else's expense (see article). In many rich countries wages are on average higher in the state sector, pensions hugely better and jobs far more secure. Even if many individual state workers do magnificent jobs, their unions have blocked reform at every turn. In both America and Europe it is almost as hard to reward an outstanding teacher as it is to sack a useless one.
The proposals laid out by Mr. Cuomo -- including reducing the number of agencies, authorities and departments by 20 percent and capping the annual growth of state government to the rate of inflation -- set up a clash with the more liberal Democrats who control the State Assembly.
In addition to freezing the salaries of most state workers, Mr. Cuomo would reduce spending on Medicaid and limit local property tax increases statewide.
"New York has no future as the tax capital of the nation," Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said in his speech. "Our young people will not stay, businesses will not come, this has to change. Put it simply, the people of this state simply cannot afford to pay more taxes, period."
The roughly 47-minute speech also offered New Yorkers a different view of their new governor: he was highly animated in his expressions of frustration over the state's reputation and injected cornball humor, a PowerPoint slide show, and even air quotes into the formal setting.
I thought it fitting that my colleague Nick Anderson had his eye-opening piece on the Success For All reading program published in The Post on New Year's Day. The night before, we were all singing "Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind." That could be the theme song for Success For All.
As Anderson reveals, the cleverly organized and well-tested program, brainchild of legendary Johns Hopkins University research couple Robert E. Slavin and Nancy A. Madden, spent the Bush Administration in a wilderness inhabited by other wrongly discarded educational ideas. It did not disappear, but it did not get much attention or growth. Now it is back in the forefront of school improvement, beneficiary of a $50 million grant from the Obama administration. Its risen-from-the-dead story would be hard to believe if Anderson hadn't explained it so well in his story.
I know Madden and Slavin. A decade ago, I wrote a magazine piece about their unusual marriage and work, and what they had done to alter reading instruction throughout much of the country. [I would love to link to the piece, but I can't find it.] They had come from well-to-do families -- Madden from Edina, Minn., and Slavin from Montgomery County, Md. They met as undergraduates at Reed College, a Portland, Ore., institution that encourages social activists. They fell in love and decided to dedicate their lives to finding the best ways to teach children, particularly kids whose own upbringings weren't as comfortable as theirs had been. (They later adopted three children from South America.)
In the wake of a state review that found dozens of errors in Virginia social studies textbooks, Del. David Englin will introduce a bill Monday that would overhaul the state's textbook adoption process.
The legislation would shift the responsibility of vetting textbooks from panels consisting mostly of school teachers to the publishers. Companies would have to be certified with the Virginia Board of Education before their books are approved for use in public schools.
Last year, textbook review committees approved two books by Five Ponds Press - "Our Virginia, Past and Present" and "Our America to 1865" - that several state-appointed scholars found last month to have dozens of historical inaccuracies.
"As a legislator and a parent, I was shocked and appalled to learn that Virginia social studies textbooks had such egregious factual inaccuracies," Englin (D-Alexandria) said. "As parents, the bare minimum we expect from textbooks is that the facts are correct."
The new Wisconsin governor is considering sweeping reforms in Madison, one of which could directly impact Beloit schools.
Gov. Scott Walker and the incoming Republican legislature assumed power in the state Monday and wasted no time in introducing the possibility of expanding the state's school voucher program. The program, presently instituted in the Milwaukee area, allows students to receive taxpayer-financed vouchers to attend private schools, including religious schools. Just under 21,000 of the maximum 22,500 students enrolled in the program this year.
The governor has identified Beloit as one place where the vouchers could be phased in as part of a trial effort to spread the program statewide.
"I think school choice is successful," Walker told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. "I think it's worth looking at expanding it. How do you do that? There's really a multitude of options, not only those being discussed in other parts of the country. And we want to continue to be at the forefront of that."
"My concern is that the district has to become conscious of today's market. If you have a system that is attractive, people will send their kids here. If you don't, the days of an educational monopoly are over," he said.
Additional choices for our communities is a good thing. Thompson's perspective is correct and useful.
The Record reports today that the NJ DOE has drawn up changes to credential requirements for superintendents of "struggling school districts." Taking a page, perhaps, from Mike Bloomberg, some districts would have the ability to hire superintendents who lack specific educational certification or degrees from teaching colleges.
Richard Bozza, head of the New Jersey Association of School Administrators, says that the proposed change in employment requirements give some applicants a "free pass" and "our view is clear: you need to have an educational background to lead a district."
(Of course,, such changes offer a solution to the problem of traditionally-credentialed superintendents fleeing the state for greener pastures because of the newly-imposed salary caps, but that's another matter.)
Land values soared. States splurged on new programs. Then it all went bust, bringing down banks and state governments with them. This wasn't America in 2011, it was America in 1841, when a now-forgotten depression pushed eight states and a desolate territory called Florida into the unthinkable: They defaulted on debts.
This was an incredible step, even then. Fledgling U.S. states like Indiana and Illinois were still building credibility on global debt markets. They rightly feared "a prejudice so deep and wide" that they could never sell bonds in Europe again, said one banker.
Their paranoia would be familiar to the shell-shocked California and Illinois of 2011. Each is beset by budget problems so great that some have begun debating default or bankruptcy. These worriers may draw comfort from the state crises that raged and retreated long ago. Most of the states eventually paid off their debts, and changed their laws to safeguard their finances, helping make U.S. states some of the world's best credits.
Students at Broadway High School in Minneapolis are being told that some of the credits they've received for classwork might not be valid for graduation.
Minnesota Public Radio News has learned the Minneapolis school district is investigating whether some teachers at the school didn't have the proper licenses for classes they were teaching.
Associate superintendent Mark Bonine says issues surfaced this fall as Broadway's new site administrator, Sally Reynolds, took over the school.
"As Sally was assessing, she had some concerns around some credits," Bonine said.
The issue is whether those credits were earned properly, but Bonine added that students "are not at fault here."
Next month, Juan Botella will spend more than 60 days aboard a ship in the Southern Ocean to learn firsthand how scientific research is conducted - knowledge he will bring back to his classroom along with new information on how the southern polar region has changed.
The trip to the body of water surrounding Antarctica fulfills a lifelong dream for Botella, a science teacher at Monona Grove High School who's always wanted to travel there, although he's nervous about spending months on a boat.
"I would have liked to be on land," Botella admits, but added he's still excited for the trip. "I'm a very bad sailor. I am very easily seasick."
Botella, 43, was chosen from among more than 150 applicants to accompany and help 32 researchers collect and study water samples from the Antarctic region.
Schools around the country have begun to show measurable progress in closing achievement gaps, according to evidence from a growing range of sources. That's the good news.
The bad news is that in New Jersey this progress is much more limited, and it is young African-Americans who seem to be losing out the most.
Despite an influx of new funding to New Jersey's poorest urban school districts following the state Supreme Court's Abbott rulings, student achievement levels remain mostly flat at the lower end of the spectrum.
The percentage of black eighth-graders who scored above "basic" in reading actually declined, from 62 percent in 2005 to 60 percent in 2009 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the results from the international education test scores (PISA) were "a massive wake-up call" for American educators. Midmorning discusses what kind of reform American schools need, and if there is room for the rote test-driven education that put Shanghai on top and the U.S. far behind.
During her visit to High School for Violin and Dance in the Bronx on Monday, one of the stops in five-borough tour that worked as her formal introduction to her new job, New York City's schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, gathered around a table with students and alumni, discussing career paths, opportunities and plans.
One man told her he was studying architecture at State University of New York at Delhi. One woman said she was majoring in criminal justice at Hostos Community College. Another, who is graduating at the end of the month, described to Ms. Black how learning to play a musical instrument helped her learn new words.
Before she left the building, Ms. Black peppered the principal, Tanya John, with questions about college preparedness and the school's curriculum. Then, she revealed what is starting to look like an obsession.
Detroit Public Schools: 40,000 kids to get laptops from stimulus funds Read more: Detroit Public Schools: 40,000 kids to get laptops from stimulus funds
Detroit Public Schools will spend $49 million in federal money to push technology in the district, including distributing 40,000 new laptop computers to students in grades 6-12 for use in class, as well as more than 5,000 new desktop computers.
Each DPS teacher also will get a laptop.
The computers are being funded by stimulus money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Details are to be announced this morning by DPS emergency financial manager Robert Bobb.
The district already has started distributing the computers and expects to deliver them all by the end of this school year, said Kisha Verdusco, a DPS spokeswoman.
Like other union leaders, WEAC President Mary Bell can see some "labor unrest" among her members if they're targeted by the incoming Walker administration.
But she can't see them taking an extreme step like going on strike, something they're prevented from doing under Wisconsin law.
"My members care so desperately about the work they do that it would be extremely difficult to envision them leaving their classrooms, leaving their kids," Bell said in a new WisPolitics interview. "We have that history in Wisconsin, but it's been 30 years since those things took place."
With Scott Walker set to occupy the governor's office next week and Republicans poised to take over both houses of the Legislature, Bell and WEAC executive director Dan Burkhalter said their members are feeling apprehensive and somewhat targeted. Still, Bell pointed out they've felt targeted since the early 1990s, when the state imposed the qualified economic offer.
In the last budget, Dems and Gov. Jim Doyle lifted the QEO, which allowed districts to avoid arbitration so long as they offered teachers a bump in pay and benefits of at least 3.8 percent.
The former Garfield Elementary School building, stately and picturesque, looks as if it could be used for a movie set. That would be one way to fill the empty school with life.
For now, the century-old building at 2215 N. 4th St. sits empty.
Just down the road, construction is under way for a $7 million expansion to St. Marcus Lutheran School, one of the highest performing voucher schools in the city. But before St. Marcus raised millions of dollars, school leaders spent months in conversations with Milwaukee Public Schools about purchasing one of several nearby vacant buildings, including Garfield Elementary.
They were unsuccessful.
For MPS, one less building would mean revenue from the sale and a reduction in maintenance costs. So what happened?
"We were told we could buy them, but could not operate them as a school in competition with MPS," said Henry Tyson, St. Marcus' superintendent. "It became clear that the acquisition of one of those vacant MPS buildings was just not an option."
For the second time in the past four years, Madison won't have any contested school board contests.
Just like when they ran for the first time in 2008, former middle school teacher Marj Passman and attorney Ed Hughes did not draw any opponents for the spring election. That means seven of the previous nine contests will have featured one candidate.
Passman said her first term was a learning curve. The next term will focus on implementing projects such as the district's new strategic plan and an upcoming literacy evaluation.
"I was under the impression that the role of the CAC was to meet with a representative of each school, other interested parents and citizens, and to bring their educational concerns to the school board and the superintendent,'' he explained. ''I have been told that I essentially have this backwards and the CAC is supposed to only bring items to the parents that the school board determines are important."
In a certified letter, board of education President Patricia Nalley had written to Frank that the CAC must restrict its agenda to board-approved issues and would not be allowed to convene any type of candidates' forum. Frank also was told he'd have to cancel the CAC candidates forum, which was to include the four board members on the ballot for November's election.
It became apparent the CAC regulations had become a fantasy document. The democratic vision contained in these regulations had been greatly diluted over the decades and many surviving democratic provisions had long since stopped being consistently enforced.
The Christie Administration wants to bypass credential requirements for hiring leaders for the state's struggling school districts and has proposed changes that could open the jobs to applicants without experience as educators.
The proposal could give the administration much wider latitude in choosing leaders for state-run districts like those in Paterson and Newark, where it was looking for a way to give Mayor Cory Booker a bigger role in running the schools.
The proposed changes also could affect more than 50 districts, including Clifton and Passaic, that have been deemed "in need of improvement," and others where state test scores are lagging.
The administration proposes to amend certification requirements for superintendents in those districts so that the job could be open to those with a bachelor's degree and managerial experience provided they have no criminal record.
First, the Federal Government funds a program for youngsters that need help. It is called Headstart. The cry for help for such an age group should be addressed by this program, however the schools have found a cash cow in Wisconsin's 4 K Budget and can make extra funds this way.
Second, rather than looking to Arkansas, (or Georgia, who admit that the 4K program is a failure), we can look right here in Wisconsin. Three years ago I challenged Dan Nerad, the Green Bay Superintendent at that time, when he said, "early education promotes advancement of learning ."
"We do not need to look at studies from other communities, when we have the information right here in Green Bay! 8 years ago, we went from ½ day kindergarten to full day, and yet subsequent grade test scores failed to reflect the additional education time... in fact, scores are decreasing which is proof that extending hours does nothing."
The charge went unanswered.
Third, I have to say that you left a very large arrow out of your quiver, as your financial equation is not correct for 4 K.
While I feel that $9,900 is closer, let's use your $9,000 number, it is fine for expressing costs. To get funding for a student, he is counted as one FTE ( full time education) to get the 9K. 4K students however get a kicker. For 13 ¼ hours per week they are counted as .6 FTE ( .5 if less than 13 ¼). So 4 year olds are given a morning class, followed in the PM with another 4 year old. Those two half day students count as (2 x.6) 1.2 FTE or in cash terms, they bring in $10,800 to the district.
The Madison School District on Monday released a 27-page investigative report (PDF) exonerating Glendale Elementary Principal Mickey Buhl of multiple accusations of "misconduct and harassment" levied by or on behalf of a dozen current and former staff members at the school, located at 1201 Tompkins Drive, on the south east side.
The complaints cover incidents or disagreements covering the five years Buhl has been principal. Many concern the way in which Buhl discussed work performance with employees or attempted to mediate disputes among staff members. The report indicates that staff climate issues and concerns predated Buhl's tenure at the school.
The Madison School District on Monday announced dates and times for next fall's kindergarten registration.
Registration for Madison's new 4-year-old kindergarten program is scheduled for Feb. 7 from 1 to 6 p.m. Registration for 5-year-old kindergarten is scheduled for March 7 from 1 to 6 p.m.
Parents or guardians of children who will turn 4 or 5 on or before Sept. 1 must register at their local elementary school with proof of their child's age, residency and an immunization record. Children are welcome but not required to attend.
Teachers and like-minded parents have struck first in an expected statewide battle over education changes being proposed by Gov.-elect Rick Scott's transition team.
They have held meetings and conference calls, traded information via Facebook, planned an education summit and formed bill-writing committees to create alternative legislation.
And on Tuesday, they plan to wear red to send the new governor -- and the Republican-dominated legislature -- a message that they support public schools.
More than three dozen people have applied for an open seat on the St. Paul School Board.
The seat was left vacant in November when board member Vallay Varro stepped down to head an education non-profit. The St. Paul School Board now has to appoint someone to fill that seat for the year remaining in Varro's term.
With the application period now closed, the district says 41 people applied. Familiar names include two former St. Paul School Board members, Al Oertwig and William Finney. Finney also used to be St. Paul's police chief.
Nine months after Waukesha voters gave Larry Nelson a swift kick out of the mayor's office, denying him a second term, he's back to teaching - if in a distinctively different place and position than the one he left four years earlier.
Nelson is the English teacher at the Waukesha County Juvenile Center, where he teaches 11- to 17-year-olds who either are in shelter care or have been court-ordered to secure detention.
"I've always loved teaching, and even when I was mayor I felt I was teaching on a bigger scale," he said.
Since Nelson, 55, was granted a leave of absence from his Butler Middle School teaching job in Waukesha when he was elected mayor in 2006, the School Board allowed him to return this fall, his 31st year of teaching.
Nelson comes to work at 8 a.m. every day to find out how many students he has, and who they are, he said. He could have one, or 10. They may be around for a day, a week or a month. The longest has been two months. With much of his teaching one-on-one or in small groups, he can customize what he teaches, he said.
1) Who is being "Betrayed" by the public school system in America?
The education establishment is betraying the following groups:
The children, who aren't getting the education they need;
Parents, who struggle to manage bored and frustrated children, who must pay for several college remedial classes, and who sometimes wind up with students who have given up and dropped out;
Teachers, who are micromanaged and disrespected in myriad ways by the bureaucracy and then blamed for the results;
Taxpayers, who pay hundreds of billions of dollars each year for a largely failing K-12 education system;
Businesses, which must recruit from other countries;
Government agencies and military organizations that struggle to fill critical jobs with qualified Americans;
The country, which teeters on the brink of economic and social disaster, crippled by a populace that is not acquiring sufficient skills or knowledge to properly run it or even to fully understand the challenges that face it.
The only people not being betrayed are those who feed off of our failing education system.
It's this: The money a school district gets depends on enrollment. In Milwaukee, the one place private-school choice is now offered, the Milwaukee Public Schools' per-pupil funding is not hurt at all when kids go somewhere else (per-pupil, it increases annually). But when about 20,000 pupils go elsewhere, MPS has less money overall, since it's teaching fewer children.
Every school district statewide is liable to this already: Wisconsin parents can enroll children in any other public school district. More than 28,000 kids do this switch annually. For every child who moves, one district loses about $6,800 and another gains it. Since some places are big losers and others big gainers, this affects districts' budgets.
For instance, Milwaukee lost about $27 million in the latest year; other big losers were Racine, Green Bay and Madison. It made no difference to taxpayers overall, but the system moved money away from districts that parents shunned and toward ones they preferred.
The snag is transportation. Parents must take kids to their preferred district. This is tough for the poor, especially in places like Racine, where the local district includes all of suburbia as far as the edge of Oak Creek. It's perverse when there are private alternatives in poor neighborhoods.
When Grigsby and others make their complaint, it isn't to say that letting parents choose other schools will hurt weak districts' budgets, else they'd be wailing about public school choice, which does just that. The complaint is that the government-run school system overall will have less money as children and their aid leave.
The first middle-school dual-language immersion program in the Madison area was started at Sennett Middle School this year and the benefits are far reaching, according to Principal Colleen Lodholz.
At Sennett, 50 percent of the students' academic classes are taught in English and 50 percent are taught in Spanish.
"It really honors both languages," Lodholz said. "The students are good little ambassadors in terms of modeling the importance of learning a second language and the importance of learning about another culture."
Most of the 50 sixth grade students in the program come from Nuestro Mundo Community School -- the area's first elementary dual-language immersion program that started when they were kindergarteners -- and a strong sense of community was established, Lodholz said. Lodholz sees the students looking out for each other and fewer discipline issues, she said.
Until now, no one has tried to estimate the costs of educational adequacy across all 50 states using a common method applied in a consistent manner. UW-Madison education professor Allan Odden and colleagues have realized that goal.
In a recent report, Odden, Lawrence Picus, and Michael Goetz provide state-by-state estimates of the cost of the evidence-based model. The evidence-based model relies primarily on research evidence when making programmatic recommendations. The evidence-based approach starts with a set of recommendations based on a distillation of research and best practices. As implementation unfolds, teams of state policymakers, education leaders, and practitioners review, modify, and tailor those core recommendations to the context of their state's situation. Odden's report compares those estimates to each state's current spending.
Allan Odden and colleagues have developed the first state-level analysis of education finance spending using a model with consistent assumptions across all 50 states plus the District of Columbia.
Odden and colleagues studied districts and schools that have made substantial gains in student performance. They identified the strategies used, then compared those strategies to the recommendations of the evidence-based model. The research found a strong alignment between the strategies and the resources in the evidence-based model and those strategies used by districts and schools that have seen dramatic increase in student learning.
The Evidence-Based Model and Adequacy
When experts discuss education finance, they sometimes use the term "adequacy." Odden offers this definition: "Providing a level of resources to schools that will enable them to make substantial improvements in student performance over the next 4 to 6 years, as progress toward ensuring that all, or almost all, students meet their state's performance standards in the longer term."
"Substantial improvement in student performance" means that, where possible, the proportion of students meeting a proficiency goal will increase substantially in the short- to medium term. Specific targets might vary, depending on the state and a school's current performance. Yet this goal could be interpreted as raising the percentage of students who meet a state's student proficiency level from 35% to 70%, or from 70% to something approaching 90% and, in both examples, to increase the percentage of students meeting advanced proficiency standards. There are several approaches to estimating adequacy. They include cost functions, professional judgment, successful schools and districts, and the evidence-based approach.
............
Using the national average compensation figures, the weighted per pupil estimated costs for adequacy using the evidence-based model is $9,641, an average increase of $566 per student on a national basis. In 30 of the 50 states, additional revenues are needed to reach the estimated cost level. In the remaining 20 states and Washington, D.C., current funding levels are more than enough.
If all states were to receive funding at the estimated level of the evidence-based model, the total cost would be $27.0 billion, or a 6.2% increase. However, the politically feasible approach would not allow using the "excess funds" from the states currently spending more than that level. Given that, the total cost rises to $47.2 billion (a 10.9% increase) to fully fund the model's estimates.
Nor does this research address how the funds should be allocated once they are sent to school districts. This is an important point, Odden says, because some states currently spend more than identified in this model, yet do not appear to show the gains in student performance the model suggests are possible.
After years of watching escalating health insurance costs eat up and even surpass the savings provided by early retirements, some public school districts are getting tough in contract negotiations to reduce benefit levels.
The Hartland-Lakeside School Board and its teachers union went to arbitration in mid-December as district officials sought to cap insurance benefits and lower a stipend given to retiring teachers.
The Waukesha School Board has gone even further, denying almost all early retirement requests by teachers for the past two years as it advances toward arbitration in contract negotiations.
EIS general secretary Ronnie Smith warned that pupils would suffer most as a result of "damaging cutbacks".
The so-called "Manifesto for Education" will be launched by union officials next month.
The union said it was keen to protect the country's schools, colleges and universities.
Mr Smith said: "With the current financial crisis and the deep cuts to public spending, including reduced investment in education, it is vitally important that we make a stand to let the politicians know that continuing attacks on our education system cannot and will not be tolerated by the Scottish people.
New governors in 26 U.S. states are starting to take office with somber warnings to constituents of more tough times amid revenue shortfalls and a weak job market.
With sagging economies, soaring budget deficits and the loss of federal stimulus money, incoming governors face the deepest fiscal crisis in decades and expectations that they will remain true to campaign pledges to slash spending and taxes.
"I don't think a grand ceremony ... would be appropriate," Andrew M. Cuomo said Saturday after being sworn in as New York's governor. The Democrat, whose father led New York two decades ago, promised to put a lid on property taxes and shrink the state's government.
He said budget troubles were only part of the problem in a state that also faced a "trust deficit." "Too often government responds to the whispers of lobbyists before the cries of the people," Mr. Cuomo said.
Attached please find a proposed intergovernmental agreement with the Middleton/Cross Plains Area School District. The proposed agreement with Middleton/Cross Plains Area School District (MCPASD) allows the District to establish a 4k site in a nursery school (Orchard Ridge Nursery School) that lies within the MCPASD's border. The rationale for the District's desire to do so is the fact that Orchard Ridge is within 1/4 mile of MMSD's boundary and it serves primarily (70-80%) Madison residents. The agreement would also allow the District to serve MCPASD 4k students who chose to enroll at Orchard Ridge in exchange for direct non-resident tuition reimbursement by MCPASD to Orchard Ridge. Conversely, MCPASD will be allowed to establish 4k sites at two centers (LaPetite and Middleton Preschool) that are within MMSD's border. MCPASD's rational for wanting to contract with those sites is identical to MMSD's desire to contract with Orchard Ridge (i.e. proximity and demographics of children already at the center). MCPASD would also serve MMSD residents who chose to attend those sites in exchange for MMSD directly reimbursing LaPetite and Middleton Preschool. The agreement with MCPASD is attached for your review and action.
Value added is the use of statistical technique to identify the effects of schooling on measured student performance. The value added model uses what data are available about students--past test scores and student demographics in particular--to control for prior student knowledge, home and community environment, and other relevant factors to better measure the effects of schools on student achievement. In practice, value added focuses on student improvement on an assessment from one year to the next.
This report presents value-added results for Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) for the two-year period between November 2007 to November 2009, measuring student improvement on the November test administrations of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) in grades three through eight. Also presented are results for the two-year period between November 2005 to November 2007, as well as the two-year period between November 2006 to November 2008. This allows for some context from the past, presenting value added over time as a two-year moving average.
Changes to the Value Added Model
Some of the details of the value-added system have changed in 2010. The two most substantial changes are the the inclusion of differential-effects value-added results and the addition to the set of control variables of full-academic-year (FAY) attendance.
Differential Effects
In additional to overall school- and grade-level value-added measures, this year's value-added results also include value-added measures for student subgroups within schools. The subgroups included in this year's value-added results are students with disabilities, English language learners, black students, Hispanic students, and students who receive free or reduced-price lunches. The results measure the growth of students in these subgroups at a school. For example, if a school has a value added of +5 for students with disabilities, then students with disabilities at this school gained 5 more points on the WKCE relative to observationally similar students across MMSD.
The subgroup results are designed to measure differences across schools in the performance of students in that subgroup relative to the overall performance of students in that subgroup across MMSD. Any overall, district-wide effect of (for example) disability is controlled for in the value-added model and is not included in the subgroup results. The subgroup results reflect relative differences across schools in the growth of students in that subgroup.Much more on "Value Added Assessment", here.
We provide a list here of proven techniques. We gathered these in the course of serving on grant panels or as program officers, and, in some cases, through firsthand experimentation. We are biologists, but many of our suggestions will be useful to grant writers in all disciplines.
Pat Hill came cheap when he broke into college football coaching a little more than 3½ decades ago.
He worked his first job at a California community college without pay, making ends meet by moonlighting Tuesdays and Thursdays as a pinsetter at a bowling alley and Fridays and Saturdays, when football allowed, as a bouncer. He lived for a while in his Chevy van.
"I've never been a monetary guy," he says.
The contract that will take him into his 15th season as head coach at Fresno State offers further testament.
Hill will take a more than $300,000 cut in guaranteed pay in 2011, an extraordinary concession to a school budget stretched thin by the troubled economy. His guaranteed take of $650,000 remains considerable, but he'll have to cash in heavily on incentives to match, or even approach, his nearly seven-figure earnings in 2010.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office said it could not render an opinion on the 2010 consolidated financial statements of the federal government, because of widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations.
"Even though significant progress has been made since the enactment of key financial management reforms in the 1990s, our report on the U.S. government's consolidated financial statement illustrates that much work remains to be done to improve federal financial management," Acting Comptroller General Gene Dodaro said in a statement. "Shortcomings in three areas again prevented us from expressing an opinion on the accrual-based financial statements."
The main obstacles to a GAO opinion were: (1) serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense that made its financial statements unauditable, (2) the federal government's inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies, and (3) the federal government's ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements.
Just before the holiday break, the Madison School District approved the Badger Rock Middle School. This is big and exciting news for Madison, and I hope it sounds a new tone for education in the city.
It is not new news that Madison's school district has been struggling to maintain its national reputation for innovation and excellence. During the past two budget cycles, the district has suffered deep funding cuts and the loss of millions of dollars. And over the past five years, families have been migrating to surrounding school districts -- and to private schools.
But visionary leadership and innovative charter schools such as Badger Rock may just be the answer.
The philosophy for Badger Rock is cutting edge and simultaneously a throwback to classical education. Students learn from their environment. It is a setting and style that would make Aldo Leopold proud, and that ties local curriculum to Wisconsin's deep-seated environmental roots.
As far as I can tell, local school budgets have grown annually for decades. Ms. Joiner is referring to reductions in the increase. Spending growth slowed this year and will likely do so in the future. The Madison School District's "Budget Amendments and Tax Levy Adoption for 2010-11" mentions 2010-2011 revenues (property taxes, redistributed state and federal taxes and grants) of $423,005,653, up from $412,219,577 in 2008-2009. The document's 2009-2010 revenues are $489,487,261, which seems unusual. Enrollment has remained flat during the past few years (details here).
An athletic and academic standout in Lee County said a lunchbox mix-up has cut short her senior year of high school and might hurt her college opportunities.
Ashley Smithwick, 17, of Sanford, was suspended from Southern Lee High School in October after school personnel found a small paring knife in her lunchbox.
Smithwick said personnel found the knife while searching the belongings of several students, possibly looking for drugs.
"She got pulled into it. She doesn't have to be a bad person to be searched," Smithwick's father, Joe Smithwick, said.
The lunchbox really belonged to Joe Smithwick, who packs a paring knife to slice his apple. He and his daughter have matching lunchboxes.
"It's just an honest mistake. That was supposed to be my lunch because it was a whole apple," he said.
A 17-year-old honor student says she has been kicked off campus for the rest of the school year, because of a mix-up with her lunch box.
In October, senior Ashley Smithwick says she got in trouble at school for the first time in her life after she mistakenly took her father's lunch container -- that's identical to hers -- to Southern Lee High School.
Her dad's container had a three-inch paring knife inside.
"And I had just grabbed my dad's lunch box," Smithwick said. "I didn't mean to. I really didn't. I just grabbed it and went out the door."
School leaders say during that day a faculty member discovered a student with marijuana on campus and Smithwick's paring knife was found during a random search.
According to a written statement received by ABC11 from Lee County Schools Superintendent Jeff Moss on Wednesday, the knife was found in Smithwick's purse, not her lunchbox.
This chart by Mercatus Center Senior Research Fellow Veronique de Rugy compares K-12 education expenditures per pupil in each of the world's major industrial powers. As we can see, with the exception of Switzerland, the United States spends more than any other country on education, an average of $91,700 per student between the ages of six and fifteen.
That's not only more than other countries spend but it is also more than better achieving countries spend - the United States spends a third more than Finland, a country that consistently ranks near the top in science, reading, and math testing.
For those wanting a less colloquial explanation, the Big Society is an attempt to transform the relationship between the state and its citizens. Using the weapons of devolution and transparency, it seeks to empower individuals, improve public services that fail the most disadvantaged and reconnect the civic institutions that lie between the people and the state.
So why is the Big Society such a radical idea? As one of its leading proponents in government admits, it is a massive social experiment - stripping power from the state in the expectation that individuals, communities and enterprises will pick up the reins. "As in most such experiments, it is based upon instincts and understanding rather than empirical data," he says. "It will be two to three years before we begin to see if it is playing itself out properly. But the direction of change will be remorseless and I'm confident it will transform Britain."
This tussle between the responsibilities of state and citizens is at the centre of political struggles across the west, from France's battles over pensions to the backlash against Washington in the US. Unsurprisingly, the Big Society ideas - far removed from the rampant individualism of the Tea Party - are being watched with growing interest by moderate Republicans.
In Britain, they fit comfortably with a nation fed up with over-bearing statism and corporate irresponsibility. The latest British Social Attitudes survey revealed growing distrust of both state and big business, combined with a desire for smaller, more local institutions.
Three years ago, Congress stopped then-Education Secretary Margaret Spellings dead in her tracks. Cheered on by college leaders, Senator Lamar Alexander and other lawmakers -- irked by the Education Department's aggressive attempts to regulate higher education accreditation and by what they perceived to be the executive branch's encroachment on their turf -- took several legislative steps that effectively blocked the department from issuing new rules on student learning outcomes.
The players and the issues have changed, but signs are emerging that a similar showdown could unfold early next year over the Obama administration's plan to require for-profit colleges and other vocational programs to prove that they prepare their graduates for "gainful employment." Exactly how such a showdown would shake out is hard to predict, but the likelihood of it taking place grew significantly in recent days.
Public universities across the U.S. are arguing for freedom to reap more revenue and create more efficiencies to offset dwindling state dollars.
One way, they say, is to raise tuition. At California University of Pennsylvania, a 158-year-old state school serving 9,400 students, enrollment is rising for all but the poorest students, which, in part, has led to a novel idea: replace the "low tuition for all" policy with a market-rate policy.
University officials say students from wealthier families could afford to pay more than the average $5,804 annual tuition at the state's 14 universities. Fresh revenue from the higher tuition, they say, could be used to offer more scholarships to help the neediest students.
Gov. Mitch Daniels said Wednesday he will ask lawmakers to approve an education voucher system that would let low-income students use state money to help pay for private school tuition.
aniels provided few details about his proposal - including income levels at which families would qualify or the amount they could receive - but said it will be part of his larger education agenda for the 2011 session.
The governor and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett presented part of that agenda on Wednesday to the Indiana Education Roundtable, a group of education, business and labor leaders who advise the state on school issues.
But Daniels never mentioned the voucher program there. Instead, he and Bennett focused on only a few areas: Freeing schools of regulation, recognizing and rewarding high-quality teachers and limiting the issues for collective bargaining to teacher pay and benefits.
Supporters of the proposal to develop charter schools in the Madison Metropolitan School District -- including "academies" segregated along lines of gender -- have made a lot of noise in recent weeks about how the School Board should radically rewrite rules, contracts and objectives.
Fair enough. Let's have a debate.
Two School Board seats will be filled in the coming spring election -- those of incumbents Marj Passman and Ed Hughes.
Hughes and Passman have both commented thoughtfully on the Urban League's Madison Prep boys-only charter school proposal.
Hughes, in particular, has written extensively and relatively sympathetically about the plan on his blog.
Passman has also been sympathetic, while raising smart questions about the high costs of staffing the school as outlined.
But neither has offered the full embrace that advocates such as the Madison Urban League's Kaleem Caire and former Dane County Board member Dave Blaska -- now an enthusiastic conservative blogger -- are looking for.
Our community is certainly better off with competitive school board races.
In the version of history being taught in some Virginia classrooms, New Orleans began the 1800s as a bustling U.S. harbor (instead of as a Spanish colonial one). The Confederacy included 12 states (instead of 11). And the United States entered World War I in 1916 (instead of in 1917).
These are among the dozens of errors historians have found since Virginia officials ordered a review of textbooks by Five Ponds Press, the publisher responsible for a controversial claim that African American soldiers fought for the South in large numbers during the Civil War.
"Our Virginia: Past and Present," the textbook including that claim, has many other inaccuracies, according to historians who reviewed it. Similar problems, historians said, were found in another book by Five Ponds Press, "Our America: To 1865." A reviewer has found errors in social studies textbooks by other publishers as well, underscoring the limits of a textbook-approval process once regarded as among the nation's most stringent.
Bowling Green State University trustees justified recent sweeping changes to a key governing document as a necessary response to faculty unionization, but some professors there say the board is engaged in a retaliatory power grab.
Faculty voted in October to grant collective bargaining powers to the university's chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and the board responded Dec. 10 with changes to the Academic Charter that eliminated numerous faculty committees and stripped professors of their existing roles in the evaluations of deans, directors and chairs.
"This set of changes is allegedly done in response to collective bargaining, but there are so many changes that go beyond that, that clearly something else is afoot," said David Jackson, president of Bowling Green State University's Faculty Association, the AAUP union. "It certainly appears, to us anyway, that the administration is using the collective bargaining election and the need to negotiate salaries and benefits to justify wholesale changes."
Also of concern to Jackson and others is the elimination of the faculty's role in determining financial exigency, which universities can invoke to dismiss tenured professors. Removing even the faculty's advisory function in this area, as the trustees have done, constitutes "a clear taking of power," Jackson said.
It's been well-documented that many high school grads are now too fat to meet the U.S. military's physical requirements. Now it turns out that many of those same kids may be too dumb.
The nonprofit Education Trust released a first-ever report this week showing that more than one in five young people don't meet the minimum standard required for Army enlistment. Among minority candidates the ineligibility rates are higher: 29 percent. In Minnesota, the disparity for black applicants was even more startling: 40 percent were found to be ineligible. Among Hispanics in Minnesota the rate was 20 percent, but among whites, it was 14.1 percent.
This is more a distressing indictment of the U.S. education system than it is a testament to today's Cheeto-eating, Xbox-playing youth, say the authors of the report. It strips away that illusion that the military can be an easy landing ground for those not bound for college, and it suggests that national security is at stake.
The history of public debt is the very history of national power: how it has been won and how it has been lost. Dreams and impatience have always driven men in power to draw on the resources of others--be it slaves, the inhabitants of occupied lands, or their own children yet to be born--in order to carry out their schemes, to consolidate power, to grow their own fortunes. But never, outside periods of total war, has the debt of the world's most powerful states grown so immense. Never has it so heavily threatened their political systems and standards of living. Public debt cannot keep growing without unleashing terrible catastrophes.
Anyone saying this today is accused of pessimism. The first signs of economic recovery, harbingers of a supposedly falling debt, are held up to contradict him. Yet we wouldn't be the first to think ourselves uniquely able to escape the fate of other states felled by their debt, such as the Republic of Venice, Renaissance Genoa, or the Empire of Spain.
A Republican lawmaker wants to kill Madison's fledgling 4-year-old kindergarten program before it even begins.
Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, said Wednesday the state shouldn't encourage new 4K programs -- now in 85 percent of the state's school districts and with three times as many students as a decade ago -- because taxpayers can't afford them.
"We have a very difficult budget here," Grothman said in an interview. "Some of it is going to have to be solved by saying some of these massive expansions of government in the last 10 years cannot stand."
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad called Grothman's proposal "very troubling."
"I don't know what the 4-year-olds in Madison did to offend the senator," Nerad said. "There are plenty of studies that have indicated that it's a good idea to invest as early as possible."
Last month the Madison School Board approved a $12.2 million 4K program for next fall with registration beginning Feb. 7. Madison's program is projected to draw $10 million in extra state aid in 2014 when the state's funding formula accounts for the additional students. Overall this year, school districts are projected to collect $223 million in state aid and property taxes for 4K programs, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
It appears that redistributed state tax dollars for K-12 are destined to change due to a significant budget deficit, not to mention the significant growth in spending over the past two decades.
I spoke with a person active in State politics recently about 4K funding. Evidently, some lawmakers view this program as a method to push more tax dollars to the Districts.
America spends far more on education than countries like Germany, Japan, Australia, Ireland, and Italy, both as a percentage of its economy, and in absolute terms. Yet despite this lavish government support for education, college tuition in the U.S. is skyrocketing, reaching levels of $50,000 or more a year at some colleges, and colleges are effectively rewarded for increasing tuition by mushrooming federal financial-aid spending. Americans can't read or do math as well as the Japanese, even though America spends way more (half again more) on education than Japan does, as a percentage of income, according to the CIA World Fact Book.
In light of this, it is easy to see why some education experts like Neal McCluskey are floating the idea of "draconian education cuts" to shake up a rotten educational establishment.
When state schools Superintendent-elect Janet Barresi takes office, her first priority is going to be stepping up the difficulty and rigor in schools so that more kids are ready for college when they graduate.
Only 2.4 percent of students in Oklahoma's graduating class of 2009 scored in the upper tiers of national math exams, a ratio that places the state among recently industrialized nations such as Bulgaria, Uruguay and Serbia, according to a study released this month.
State schools Superintendent-elect Janet Barresi said the study, which also ranks Oklahoma among the worst 10 states in producing top-achieving math students, should be a wake-up call against the status quo.
"Let's quit making excuses," she said. "Let's accept it, and use it as a challenge, Oklahoma."
Germany's main school teaching body has called for classroom weigh-ins and the enforced removal of ultra-overweight pupils to combat rising obesity in society.
Josef Kraus, the DL teaching federation president, said: "When parents don't make sure their children eat healthily and get enough exercise, then it can be the beginning of child abuse in extreme cases." He said school doctors should take a more active role and conduct regular consultations and weight measurements of students. The should also report problem cases to authorities.
"When parental notices about overweight children are thrown to the wind, then youth services must be contacted and as a last resort there should be cuts to their parental benefits or welfare," Mr Kraus said.
His remarks follow the release of official figures which showed that 51 per cent of Germans are considered overweight. Sixty per cent of men and 43 per cent of women have a Body Mass Index (BMI) - a measure calculated by body weight and height - of more than 25, up from 56 per cent and 40 per cent respectively in 1999.
Local educators say purse strings could tighten at both the state and federal levels when new Republican lawmakers take office in January.
And that has some school officials concerned about funding and revenue limits.
Mike Blecha, who sits on the Green Bay School Board and serves as its legislative liaison, noted that state rules limit school revenue increases to $200 per student, down from $275 in 2008-09. That means a school board's ability to raise property taxes becomes limited.
Blecha said he's heard the limit could be reduced to as little as $100 per student. Small, rural districts or districts with declining enrollment could be forced to shut down if levy limits fall that low, he said.
The sign on the classroom wall prohibits the use of handheld communication devices, yet on this December morning all 28 students in Lori Hunt's algebra II class are texting on their cell phones. But these Middleton High School students are not a defiant bunch of teens.
With Hunt's blessing, they're using their cell phones to text answers to math problems. Every answer appears, anonymously, on a wall-mounted, interactive, electronic whiteboard all students can see.
For Hunt, it provides an instant way of knowing how many students understand the problem and can calculate the answer. For the students, it allows them to use a familiar technology to explore challenging new concepts.
Mississippi had a problem born of the age of soaring student testing and digital technology. High school students taking the state's end-of-year exams were using cellphones to text one another the answers.
With more than 100,000 students tested, proctors could not watch everyone -- not when some teenagers can text with their phones in their pockets.
So the state called in a company that turns technology against the cheats: it analyzes answer sheets by computer and flags those with so many of the same questions wrong or right that the chances of random agreement are astronomical. Copying is the almost certain explanation.
Since the company, Caveon Test Security, began working for Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent, said James Mason, director of the State Department of Education's Office of Student Assessment. "People know that if you cheat there is an extremely high chance you're going to get caught," Mr. Mason said.
Some of the biggest players in the Chapter 220 program will not accept new minority students for the coming school year, a move likely to continue the trend of declining participation in the school integration program.
School boards for Elmbrook, Menomonee Falls and Wauwatosa, which collectively enrolled more than a quarter of all Chapter 220 students last school year, have voted to not open up any new seats to the program in the 2011-'12 school year.
The action comes as districts have increasingly favored the state's open enrollment public school choice program as a way to attract out-of-district students - and increased state aid - to their schools.
"The reason is largely financially related," Elmbrook School District Superintendent Matt Gibson said.
While the money that districts collect for open enrollment students comes on top of the revenue limits allowed by the state, Chapter 220 aid does not raise extra revenue for school districts. Instead, the state aid that districts receive through Chapter 220 goes toward lowering district property taxes.
Want to know how much the University of South Carolina spends to mow the grass on the Horseshoe? What about how much Clemson University doles out to clean the carpet in its board room?
If legislation expected to be prefiled in the state House of Representatives passes, the answer to those questions and many, many others will be a few mouse clicks away for South Carolinians. The legislation, which will be called The Higher Education Transparency Act of 2011 and which was backed by House Speaker Bobby Harrell at a press conference Wednesday, will require that public colleges and universities post every penny of their expenditures online.
Much of the schools' spending is already posted on the Web, but Republican legislators have leaned on school officials to go further.
The spring election of 2011 is shaping up as one of the most exciting in years, with impressive fields of candidates for state Supreme Court, Dane County executive and mayor of Madison.
But that does not mean that there are enough candidates. Plenty of races for circuit judge, school board, city council and village and town government posts have attracted only incumbents. These positions form the fabric of local government. At a time when tough decisions have to be made about the scope and character of the operations these elected officials oversee, it's important that the best and brightest contenders step forward.
Luckily, Wisconsin maintains a low bar for getting on the ballot in local races.
Remember Norman Rockwell's stark painting of the little African-American girl being escorted into a New Orleans schoolhouse by two deputy U.S. marshals? Today that little girl, Ruby Bridges, is working to open a public charter school in that same school building, which will house a civil rights museum as well.
Wouldn't it be strange for a civil rights figure like Bridges to join a movement that was "accelerating re-segregation by race," as charter schools were characterized in a recent Miller-McCune.com article? Yet that's what some critics would have us believe, though more than a million black and Latino parents have chosen charters as a way of opening doors for their own children.
Sarah, Mitt and several tea party groups say the tax compromise with Barack Obama is a bad idea, sells out the GOP's anti-spending promises and, worst of all, helps you-know-who's re-election chances. But Newt, Mike and Tim think it's a decent deal. Far be it from me to interrupt the GOP's holiday spirit. Let us stipulate, however, that the furtive, ragged tax bill being let out the back door of a lame duck Congress proves--officially and conclusively--that tax policy in the United States has hit the wall.
A compelling, even frightening article in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal about a tax system that is a morass of extenders, extrusions, loopholes, credits and bubble-gum fixes ended with the story of a grievously ill cancer patient balancing the benefits of taking an experimental drug against the estate-tax benefits to his family of an early death.
They didn't seem to agree on anything during the gubernatorial election, but Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett is hoping he and Governor-elect Scott Walker can find common ground on at least one issue in 2011.
Both leaders want to rein in public employee unions - just not the same ones.
Walker, who has tangled with Milwaukee County unions as county executive, is gearing up for a clash with state workers, seeking wage and benefit cuts and threatening legislation to weaken or eliminate state unions' bargaining rights if they won't agree to concessions.
Barrett, meanwhile, wants Walker's help to change another law that gives Milwaukee police unions extra bargaining leverage. The mayor also wants to block the police and firefighters' unions from winning one of their top legislative priorities: abolishing residency requirements.
While most public employee unions backed Barrett, the Democratic nominee for governor, the Milwaukee Police Association and the Milwaukee Professional Firefighters Association endorsed Walker, the Republican. Now both unions' presidents accuse Barrett of seeking retribution for those endorsements, a charge he denies.
School officials across the country are revisiting "zero-tolerance" disciplinary policies under which children are sometimes arrested for profanity, talking back to teachers or adolescent behavior that once would have been resolved in meetings with parents. The reappraisals are all to the good given that those who get suspended or arrested are more likely to drop out and become entangled in the criminal justice system permanently.
The New York City Council clearly had this link in mind when it passed a new law earlier this week that will bring long overdue transparency to the school disciplinary process. Under the Student Safety Act, which takes effect in 90 days, the New York Police Department's school security division will be required to provide clear and comprehensive data that show how many students are arrested or issued summonses at school and why. School officials will also have to provide similarly detailed information on suspensions.
We all want more young people to attend college. Who would argue with that? Politicians and educators at all levels extol the obvious virtues, from enhanced earning potential to a greater satisfaction in life. One increasingly popular way to encourage college attendance is through dual enrollment, in which students take courses in high school for both high school and college credit.
In theory, dual enrollment enables high school students to accrue college credits for very little cost and imbues them with a sense of confidence that they can complete college work. If students can succeed in college classes while still in high school, conventional wisdom holds, they will be more likely to matriculate at the postsecondary level.
In Indiana, dual enrollment is encouraged at the highest levels, with state Education Secretary Tony Bennett maintaining that at least 25 percent of high school graduates should pass at least one Advanced Placement exam or International Baccalaureate exam, or earn at least three semester hours of college credit during high school.
In reality, though, dual enrollment may do more harm than good.
Caire believes the Madison community must first address its at-risk population in a radically different way to level the playing field before fundamental change can come.
"Madison schools don't know how to educate African Americans," says Caire. "It's not that they can't. Most of the teachers could, and some do, valiantly. But the system is not designed for that to happen."
The system is also not designed for the 215 annual school days and 5 p.m. end times that Madison Prep proposes. That, and the fact that he wants the school to choose teachers based on their specific skill sets and cultural backgrounds, is why Caire is seeking to proceed without teachers union involvement.
"Ultimately," he says, "the collective bargaining agreement dictates the operations of schools and teaching and learning in [the Madison school district]. Madison Prep will require much more autonomy."
Many aspects of Caire's proposed school seem rooted in his own life experience. Small class sizes, just like at St. James. Uniforms, just like the Navy. Majority African American and Latino kids, eliminating the isolation he grew up with. Meals at school and co-curricular activities rather than extracurricular, so that poor students are not singled out or left out.
Teachers the students can identify with. Boys only, in the hopes of fostering the sensitive, supportive male peer groups so critical to Caire's evolving sense of self over the years.
My daughter is with us for the holidays, having survived her first barrage of law school exams in California. The exams were longer and more difficult than anything I ever had as a graduate student in Chinese studies. But her professors allowed students to have notes with them. This got my attention because her boyfriend at a neighboring law school was forbidden to have notes in two of his exams.
At these two institutions dedicated to equality under the law, what my daughter did during exams at one could have been considered cheating if she attended the other. What are we to make of the uneven nature of such rules, just as unpredictable as those found in our public K-12 schools? Open-book exams are okay some places, not in others. Cooperating with friends on homework is encouraged by some teachers, denounced elsewhere as a sign of declining American moral fiber.
A school was at the centre of a patriotism row after the principal sent home permission slips allowing students to opt out of saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
The letter home sparked an outcry in Brookline, Massachusetts. Parents were asked to tick off whether or not they wanted their children to participate when the principal started reciting the pledge weekly over the school's public address system.
'It's PC ridiculousness,' said parent Sean Bielat. 'Remember when the presumption was that we were all good Americans and we all loved the country and we had no problem saying, "Yes, I pledge allegiance"?'
North Carolina high school students soon must take and pass two American history courses to graduate.
The State Board of Education approved Thursday a revised social studies curriculum for public schools that will expand study of U.S. history from one year to two to ensure more material is covered.
They called it the "Canada effect" - the phenomenon in which students from a string of states along the country's northern border regularly beat the rest of the nation on academic tests.
As recently as 1992, only three states - all from northern climates - had significantly higher average scores than Wisconsin in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. No states scored significantly better than Wisconsin in fourth-grade math national assessments.
By 2009, this effect was wiped out for Wisconsin's students. The state's fourth grade reading scores placed statistically ahead of only 12 states and the District of Columbia. On the fourth- and eighth-grade math tests, the state's students beat 26 states and the District of Columbia, results that could be considered slightly above average.
"We have lulled ourselves into thinking we're really, really good," said state Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), who will become chairman of the Senate Education Committee. "We're OK, but we need to get better because other states are doing more at improving."
With research showing the most important school factor in student performance is the effectiveness of classroom teachers, Wisconsin's political and education leaders have called louder than ever for improving the quality of the state's educators.
The last Sunday of the year and time for our first, perhaps annual, awards for noteworthy things that hapened in education around here in 2010.
Unsung Hero of the Year Award: Robert Kattman, director of the Office of Charter Schools at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The soft spoken former North Shore superintendent has been both supportive and demanding in building a roster of a dozen charter schools authorized by the UW Board of Regents. The list includes some of the best schools in Milwaukee, such as Milwaukee College Prep, Bruce Guadalupe, Seeds of Health Elementary, Woodlands School, Veritas High School. If the charter movement was like this nationwide, there would be far less controversy about these independent, publicly funded schools. Kattman is retiring at the end of the school year. Thanks for all your efforts.
The High Standards Start Here Award: State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers. Evers quickly signed up Wisconsin to be part of the "core standards" effort to bring coherence to the mish mash of what different states want students to learn. If the follow-through is good, it will raise Wisconsin's expectations and, one hopes, student performance in years to come.
Most Important Data of the Year Award: The urban school district results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This was the first time MPS took part and its students could be compared directly to those in 17 other central city school systems. The results were generally pretty distressing. Do we want our local education motto to be: "Thank God for Detroit - at least someone is worse than us"? The data should remain chastening and motivating to everyone involved in local education.
"People are very clearly concerned about the integrity of the public schools that their children attend in Germantown," said Mayor Sharon Goldsworthy.
She and a few other mayors are considering creating independent school systems in their cities. Goldsworthy said they'd have to overcome a state prohibition on Tennessee municipalities starting school systems.
"Everything needs to be examined," Goldsworthy said. "... There are an enormous number of questions and very few answers at the moment about any of this. Our responsibility as elected officials is to get those answers as quickly as possible so we can identify the best course of action for our community."
Is your library out of your favorite book? Would you like to take your book home for break? Want to read your favorite book on a plane ride or road trip? University of South Florida is making this very easy now. iTunes and USF have started Lit2Go:
a collaboration between the Florida Department of Education and the University of South Florida College of Education -- supports literacy by providing access to recordings of historically and culturally significant literature. The extensive collection of hundreds of audiobooks, stories, and poems, including classics such as Alice in Wonderland, Aesop's Fables, and A Tale of Two Cities -- all for free on iTunes.
Now there is no reason for not finishing your book report! Schools are making it increasingly easy to access information from several sources. It is a more efficient, a green way of teaching and learning, not to mention for free. The iTunes U world instantly expands your reach to knowledge and information. There are options to research by subject, school, and company, all at the tip of your fingers!
Gov.-elect Rick Scott's education team laid out reform ideas that would give parents state money to pick schools for their children and authority to remove them from a subpar teacher's class.
That theme echoes throughout the 20 sprawling pages of reform ideas that Gov.-elect Rick Scott's education team unveiled this week.
Parents should get state money to pick their own schools, public or private. Parents should decide what reform model is best to jump-start their children's school. Parents should be able to remove their child from an underperforming teacher's class.
``The parent is the ultimate accountability,'' said Patricia Levesque, a close advisor to former Gov. Jeb Bush and a leader of Scott's education transition team. ``They know what's best for their child. To substitute someone else's judgment . . . is wrong.''
There was something strange in The Washington Post a week ago. A chart on page A16, using data provided by the D.C. public school system, showed that in late summer and fall 2009, Spingarn High School had by far the lowest number of assaults, thefts, threats and other crimes. There were just six incidents in four months compared with an average of 31 in the other eight high schools assessed.
At that time, teachers at this allegedly safest of all regular D.C. high schools were reporting a rash of crimes and classroom intrusions. The situation became so intolerable that by January they had persuaded D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to replace the Spingarn principal.
How could the incidents being reported by security guards under school district rules be so different from what people at the school were experiencing? Why did Rhee ignore the data in changing the school's leadership and yet her successor, Kaya Henderson, used data from similar security incident reports last week to replace the principal at Dunbar High?
Cities across the nation are raising property taxes, largely citing rising pension and health-care costs for their employees and retirees.
In Pennsylvania, the township of Upper Moreland is bumping up property taxes for residents by 13.6% in 2011. Next door the city of Philadelphia this year increased the tax 9.9%. In New York, Saratoga Springs will collect 4.4% more in property taxes in 2011; Troy will increase taxes by 1.9%.
Property-tax increases aren't unusual, in part because the taxes are among the main sources of local revenue. But officials say more and larger increases are taking hold. "This year we have seen a dramatic increase in our cities and towns having to increase property taxes" for pensions and other expenses, said Jack Garner, executive director of the Pennsylvania League of Cities and Municipalities.
There is a major budget crunch for schools around southern Nevada. That is why some people are questioning whether teachers should be getting a bigger salary simply because they have a master's degree.
The U.S. Secretary of Education says there's little evidence students are getting any better education from teachers who have advanced degrees. Secretary Arne Duncan delivered a speech recently on how financially challenged districts could do more with less.
Teachers who have masters degrees typically earn $5,000 more in annual salary.
"We analyzed 20 systems from around the world all with improving but differing levels of performance and examined how each has achieved significant, sustained, and widespread gains in student outcomes, as measured by international and national assessments. The report was based on more than 200 interviews with stakeholders in school systems and an analysis of some 600 interventions they carried out two strands of research comprising what we believe is the most comprehensive database of global school system reform ever assembled. It identifies the reform elements replicable for school systems elsewhere, as well as those elements that are context specific, as they move from poor to fair to good to great to excellent performance.
Among other findings, the report shows that a school system can improve from any starting point and can become significantly more effective within six years. The research suggests that all improving systems implement similar sets of interventions to move from one particular performance level to the next, irrespective of culture, geography, politics, or history. A consistent cluster of interventions moves systems from poor to fair performance, a second cluster from fair to good performance, a third from good to great performance, and yet another from great to excellent performance. Although reaching each performance stage involves a common set of interventions, systems may sequence, time, and roll them out quite differently.
It's a holiday ritual as predictable as Santa showing up at your local mall: overheated rhetoric about the "War on Christmas." A lowlight this year was a feature on The O'Reilly Factor about a letter from the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union urging school districts to make holiday celebrations inclusive. Through O'Reilly's prism, the letter -- quoted selectively -- was an attempt to squelch Christmas. In reality, the letter just asked school districts to avoid celebrations focusing exclusively on a single religion. It was more common sense than state-coerced atheism.
Unfortunately, once you cut through the blather on cable news, there is a real, if much less discussed, problem in that public schools are skittish about teaching much about religion. Although there is little hard data, the consensus among those who study the issue is that to the extent world religions are taught, they are treated superficially, usually with the help of just a few textbook pages that have been heavily sanitized to avoid even the hint of controversy. And that's not good news if you believe a working knowledge of the world's religions and their history is an important aspect of a well-rounded education.
In contrast, several Asian countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore outperformed most other countries. China's Shanghai took the PISA test for the first time and ranked first in all three areas: reading, mathematics and science (The Jakarta Post, Dec. 9, 2010). The Chinese government has been lauded for its investment in human capital.
It is ironic that just as PISA is highly regarded as a prestigious measure and the world is impressed by Shanghai's achievement, insiders' perspectives reveal skeptical and critical thoughts of the results.
One critical response came from Jiang Xueqin, a deputy principal of Peking University High School and director of the International Division. Mr. Jiang is concerned that the "high scores of Shanghai's students are actually a sign of weakness".
In recent weeks, Vermont School boards have been putting together the budgets they'll submit to voters next year. This time around, though they were asked by the state to cut spending by an average of more than 2 percent. The cuts were needed to save $23 million as part of the Challenges for Change effort to close the overall state budget gap. But the results fell far short. Statewide, schools appeared to have made just over $4 million in cuts - far short of the $23 million.
Now the schools have a reprieve. Yesterday, Governor elect Peter Shumlin announced $19 million in federal stimulus money will go to the schools - which basically zeros out the needed cuts. But Vermont Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca says school districts will still face difficult budget decisions next year. And he suggests that, with student enrollment decreasing by 1 1/2% to 2% each year, districts should look at Act 153, the voluntary merger bill.
Language analysts, sifting through two centuries of words in the millions of books in Google Inc.'s growing digital library, found a new way to track the arc of fame, the effect of censorship, the spread of inventions and the explosive growth of new terms in the English-speaking world.
In research reported Thursday in the journal Science, the scientists at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Google and the Encyclopedia Britannica unveiled a database of two billion words and phrases drawn from 5.2 million books in Google's digital library published during the past 200 years. With this tool, researchers can measure trends through the language authors used and the names of people they mentioned.
It's the first time scholars have used Google's controversial trove of digital books for academic research, and the result was opened to the public online Thursday.
Two more groups have won state approval to sponsor charter schools in Minnesota.
Authorizers don't actually run charters but a new law requires them to be more involved in the fiscal and academic oversight of the schools they sponsor. It also requires every current authorizer to re-apply to maintain their status.
The two newly-approved groups are the Northfield School District and Audubon Center of the North Woods. Northfield currently sponsors two charter schools, while Audubon is the state's largest authorizer with 23.
One recent night, Mackenzie Stassel was cramming for a quiz in her advanced math course in Montgomery County. Her review of the complicated topics followed hours of other homework. Eventually she started to nod off at the table.
It was 11:15 p.m. Mackenzie is a sixth-grader.
There will be fewer such nights in the future for many Montgomery students.
Last month, Maryland's largest school system announced that it would significantly curtail its practice of pushing large numbers of elementary and middle school students to skip grade levels in math. Parents had questioned the payoff of acceleration; teachers had said students in even the most advanced classes were missing some basics.
Reason economics columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy appeared on Bloomberg TV last week to talk about education myths. We're spending ever-greater sums of money on historically high numbers of teachers per students, notes de Rugy, yet our high school graduates' test results have been absolutely flat. What can be done to help students, especially those trapped in the worst-performing schools?
The U.S. government fell deeper into the red in fiscal 2010 with net liabilities swelling more than $2 trillion as commitments on government debt and federal benefits rose, a U.S. Treasury report showed on Tuesday.
The Financial Report of the United States, which applies corporate-style accrual accounting methods to Washington, showed the government's liabilities exceeded assets by $13.473 trillion. That compared with a $11.456 trillion gap a year earlier.
Christmas Sweater Club Punished At Local High School
They call themselves the "Christmas Sweater Club" because they wear the craziest ones they can find. They also sing Christmas songs at school and try their best to spread Christmas cheer.
Now all 10 of them are in trouble because of what they did at their school.
"They said, 'maliciously maim students with the intent to injure.' And I don't think any of us here intentionally meant to injure anyone, or did," said Zakk Rhine, a junior at Battlefield High School.
The boys say they were just tossing small two-inch candy canes to fellow students as they entered school. The ones in plastic wrap that are so small they often break apart.
The Census is in. There are now 308.74 million Americans, an increase of 27 million, or 9.7%, since 2000. Americans are still multiplying, one of the best indicators that the country's prospects remain strong.
About 13 million of that increase were new immigrants. These newcomers brought energy, talent, entrepreneurial skills and a work ethic. Their continued arrival in such large numbers validates that the rest of the world continues to view the U.S. as a land of freedom and opportunity.
The Census figures also confirm that America is a nation in constant motion, with tens of millions hopping across state lines and changing residence since 2000. And more of them are moving into conservative, market-friendly red states than into progressive, public-sector heavy blue states.
In order the 10 states with the greatest population gains were Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Colorado and South Carolina. Their average population gain was 21%. In the fast-growing states, the average income tax rate is 4% versus 6.9% in the slowest growing states.
Hi, I'm Kathy. I'm from UW-Madison. Do you mind if I join you?"
Those words, or some variation, provided an introduction at gas stations, coffee shops, cafes and churches across small-town Wisconsin.
While those of us ensconced in Madison scratch our heads about why so many in Wisconsin appear to dislike or distrust us, associate professor Katherine Cramer Walsh ventured out to hear it first-hand. So how did people respond? They were uniformly friendly, she says, but bewildered as to why she was there. "You should have seen their faces," she says, smiling.
What she found is a big disconnect. For example: "When you ask, 'What does hard work mean to you? Who does hard work?' I would give examples like a waitress or someone who works in the lumber industry. Then I would say 'professor' and people would just laugh. Like, 'give me a break.'"
Many Dane County residents are facing higher property tax bills this month as the growth of new property hasn't kept up with higher government spending.
"We're in a falling value market," said David Worzala, Dane County treasurer. Taxpayers experienced similar conditions last year, but in this tax cycle "it's more pronounced," he said.
Before 2009, new construction and a growing tax base helped reduce the tax hit resulting from spending by schools, local governments and other taxing authorities.
The deadline for residents to pay at least half of their property taxes is Jan. 31.
In Dane County, bills cover municipal and county government, K-12 schools and Madison Area Technical College. Some municipalities add special charges for trash collection or recycling, improvements to streets or sidewalks, or unpaid bills.
School districts across the Green Bay and Appleton areas raised property taxes an average of 3.8 percent compared with last year, slightly higher than the 3.4 percent statewide average.
In Brown County school districts, increases range from 2.9 percent in De Pere and Pulaski to 12.3 percent in West De Pere, according to the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, a government watchdog group that crunched the tax numbers and released them this week. Only the Ashwaubenon district didn't increase its tax levy.
Each of the six districts based in Brown County is taxing to the limit allowed by the state this year.
"We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before."
This is the conclusion of a new paper published in Biology Letters, a high-powered journal from the UK's prestigious Royal Society. If its tone seems unusual, that's because its authors are children from Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. Aged between 8 and 10, the 25 children have just become the youngest scientists to ever be published in a Royal Society journal.
Their paper, based on fieldwork carried out in a local churchyard, describes how bumblebees can learn which flowers to forage from with more flexibility than anyone had thought. It's the culmination of a project called 'i, scientist', designed to get students to actually carry out scientific researchthemselves. The kids received some support from Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at UCL, and David Strudwick, Blackawton's head teacher. But the work is all their own.
The Dec 8 event involving 200 females from six Jeddah private high schools broke ministry rules against girls' sports in schools, a ministry official said.
"We don't have any regulations that say that it's OK for girls' schools to hold sports classes or training," said Ahmed Al-Zahrani, director of girls' education in Jeddah.
"This tournament was held by these schools, something that has now led us to know about their illegal activities," he said.
America won the moon race. Can it win the higher education race?
A smart and innovative strategy will make this goal attainable, but too many in Washington fail to recognize that private-sector colleges and universities - sometimes referred to as career colleges - are an essential part of the answer. Now educating 12 percent of higher education students, these schools are the game-changer when a game-changer is badly needed.
In California, private-sector colleges and universities play crucial roles in educating students. More than 340,000 students in the state, 9 percent overall, attend career colleges. Two-thirds of these students are minorities, and almost 80 percent receive financial aid. These students are being armed with the skills needed to meet the demands of the 21st century economy.
Georgia took steps to become a national leader in cyber education Thursday with the approval of new charter schools and funding that could bring the possibility of online school to the home of every student.
The Georgia Charter Schools Commission authorized a new class of charter schools to open this fall, including a K-12 "virtual campus," two K-8 schools and a middle school. Its decision to free up funding will enable two other cyber schools to start up as well.
After months of research, the commission agreed to increase funding for cyber schools from $3,400 to $5,800 per pupil - a figure below the national average of $6,500, but one that operators say they can live with.
University of California regents approved controversial rollbacks in pension and retiree health benefits Monday, including raising the earliest retirement age for future employees to 55, to help plug huge financial gaps in the university's plans.
The changes now face tough bargaining with the unions that represent about half of UC's 115,000 employees. Labor leaders said they are most upset about UC creating a two-tier workforce and contend that the changes would disproportionately affect blue-collar laborers who tend to retire earlier and with more health problems than faculty.
Under the proposals, employees hired after July 2013 would see the minimum age for early retirement rise from 50 to 55 and the age to receive maximum benefits increase from 60 to 65. In addition, all employees would pay higher premiums for post-retirement health plans.
In response to a recent letter received by the parents of the Rome School District, the New York State Education Department notified the district that Rome Free Academy has recently received the status of "in need of improvement" for the academic year 2010-2011. The improvement derives from the assessment results of the 2009-1010 academic year. While the district met the requirements for all students, those students with disabilities did not meet graduation requirements. This forced the group to lose Safe Harbor status, which has ultimately caused the improvement status for Rome Free Academy.
Within this letter, the district stated that due to the No Child Left Behind guidelines within the current status, parents may request their child to be transferred to another high school within the district -- yet for these parents, there is no other option.
While currently administrators and teachers are receiving collaborative instructional practice from trained literacy coaches, the graduation rate has not been positively affected by the curriculum. So the question is what is the district really trying to work on?
Struggling to drum up dissipating ad revenue and to stay afloat in the sea of cable news slime, most media organizations have resorted to sloshing around in the infotainment gutter for shock and schlock. No surprise then that the issue of school reform has played out with all the depth and journalistic standards of an Ali G. interview. And while it's had innumerable opportunities to unravel the eternal conundrum of public education through exhaustive research and nuanced reporting, the press has all but ignored its obligation to offer the public a sober, informed, balanced discourse on a topic with such critical short- and long-term import.
Instead, the school reform debate screeches to its ignoble crescendo. The media has gone all STORM WATCH on us, opting for a sensational script over substance, and emphasizing the fear factor by manufacturing predictable boogie men. For the most part, the American public has jumped onboard for yet another ride on the self-righteous victimhood express.
There sure are a lot of words used at Seattle Public Schools that have a special or specific meaning within the context of public K-12 education. The jargon of education. The professionals often use this jargon among themselves to speak precisely. At Seattle Public Schools the professionals often use this jargon to confuse or intimidate the public. The staff of Seattle Public Schools particularly like to MIS-use this jargon to confuse the public, or to tempt the public into mis-using the jargon to make them appear ignorant.
Of late, this trick has been practiced more by Dr. Cathy Thompson and Kathleen Vasquez than any other member of the staff.
A decade ago, almost any discussion about reforming the nation's public schools included vouchers. The idea of letting students use taxpayer dollars to attend private schools appealed to conservatives, who liked the notion of subjecting public schools to competition. Some Democratic mayors, frustrated with the slow pace of school improvement, also rallied behind vouchers.
Then, vouchers got overtaken by other ideas about how to shake up public schools. Unions vehemently opposed vouchers, arguing they would starve public schools of funding. Vouchers were left out of the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law, making it difficult for programs to gain a foothold in school districts. More recently, the Obama administration left vouchers out of its Race to the Top grant program, even as it endorsed other reforms such as charter schools and pay-for-performance plans for teachers.
Gov. Mike Rounds implied Tuesday that school districts could dig into their reserves to absorb proposed cuts to K-12 education funding.
In his final annual budget address, Rounds said the state faces a $75 million structural deficit and proposed unprecedented cuts to education, including a 5 percent reduction to state aid to school districts.
The education changes would result in $240 less per student to school districts, saving the state about $20 million.
House Minority Leader Bernie Hunhoff of Yankton predicted that the 5 percent cut will be modified by the time the final budget is presented, but any cut will hurt.
It looks like Big Brother wants to put an end to child care fraud in Wisconsin.
The state has approved a $1 million pilot program to install fingerprint scanners in child care centers to combat fraud in the Wisconsin Shares subsidy program. It's the kind of cutting-edge technology already in use at airports and some hospitals for security purposes.
Although many Americans are concerned about technology's encroaching threats to their privacy, that doesn't seem to apply when it comes to black children in Milwaukee.
The Wisconsin Shares program was ripped off for millions of dollars by some corrupt child care providers who used state funds meant for poor children and families to line their own pockets.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Pulitzer Prize-winning series "Cashing in on Kids" pulled the covers off much of the abuse, including shoddy oversight by state bureaucrats that allowed the scandal to happen.
Friday's IHE did a story featuring a report by Douglas Harris and Sara Goldrick-Rab that's well worth reading in its entirety. In a nutshell, it measures the 'productivity' of various programs, using what boils down to dollars-per-graduate. Among other things, it suggests that call centers to nudge students into attending class have great bang for the buck, but that Upward Bound and similar programs are wildly expensive for what they achieve.
The goal of the study -- which is entirely to the good -- is to encourage colleges to base resource allocation decisions on actual effectiveness, rather than on what sounds good or what has usually been done. The authors break out two-year and four-year sectors -- thank you -- and actually define their variables. (Notably, the productivity decline over the past forty years has been far more dramatic in the four-year sector than in the two-year sector.) Even better, they acknowledge that most of the research done on various programs are done on those programs in isolation, rather than in comparison with each other. If we're serious about dealing with limited resources, we have to acknowledge that money spent on program A is money not available to be spent on program B. It's not enough to show that a given program helps; it needs to help more than its alternatives would have.
This fall, work demands have put a serious crimp in my school meeting schedule -- and (to be honest) in my willingness to bang my head against the wall known as "public engagement" at Seattle Public Schools. But last Monday I decided it was time to get back into the ring -- or at least into the loop -- so after dinner (and a prophylactic rum cocktail) I headed down to South Lake High School to hear what Southeast Director Michael Tolley had to say about the District's recently released School Reports.
These reports represent the District's effort to track each school's progress on a variety of measures, from test scores to student absences to the teachers' feelings about their school's leadership. The schools have had annual reports before -- they're available online going back to 1998 -- but these new ones go into considerably more detail. They also include a one-page Improvement Plan for each school -- goals to raise achievement, or attendance, or whatever -- and a description of what the school is doing in order to reach those goals: instructional coaches, individual tutoring, more collaborative staff time, and so on. And every school has now been ranked on a five-point scale based on overall student performance and improvement on standardized tests, and the achievement gap between poor kids (those who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches) and everyone else.
An Eden Prairie school board vote on attendance zones may have broad impact on desegregation and neighborhood schools.
When Eden Prairie's seven school board members convene Tuesday night, the controversial decision they are set to make about redrawing school boundary lines will be of keen interest throughout the metro area.
Will they back a plan that will move 1,100 elementary students next fall to new schools, largely to reduce segregation in schools? Or will they scale back in response to a huge parental outcry and make fewer changes or nix the plan altogether?
Bloomington and other metro-area suburban school districts, which also face increasingly diverse student demographics, are watching Eden Prairie's move. Bloomington's school board chair attended Eden Prairie meetings to watch how feedback was handled.
Chicago children shouldn't have to compete for the chance to attend the city's best performing schools, mayoral candidate Carol Moseley Braun said Thursday.
And if she's elected, Braun said she plans to focus on improving neighborhood schools so parents won't have to send their kids to magnet and selective enrollment schools in other parts of town.
"It seems to me the opportunity for a quality education is not something we should have to compete for," Braun said.
"It ought to be available to every child in every neighborhood."
By late Friday, Patrice Robinson's favorite technology was Caller ID, a thin bit of insulation between her and dozens of arm-twisters wanting her ear.
"I've been inundated with e-mail and phone calls from high-ranking people on both sides," said the Memphis City Schools board member. "I am still deliberating.
"People keep calling with new information, then I'm over here. Then I get another call and I'm over there."
Robinson is one of three board members who said late last week that she was still undecided on whether to join four others committed to voting tonight for a resolution that would ask city voters if they want to surrender the MCS charter.
It comes as no surprise that Madison school districts are suffering. Public schools throughout the city struggle with a severe lack of state funding that only adds to the lack of authority figures--fueling the ideology of students who just don't give a shit. And when you combine this lack of resources and educational programs with a student attitude that cares little about achievement, you get the perfect recipe for a continual decrease in graduation rates.
After all, students who fail to complete their homework or who show respect for their teachers can reasonably argue that if the state doesn't show its support for education through monetary aid, why should they be expected to put in the extra effort? And while this argument lacks concrete support, a recent rise in poor behavior among middle school and high school students shows that they lust for learning and respect for fellow classmates is plummeting.
Valerie Ooka Pang has written a book about the unmet needs of Asian Pacific American children. She teach courses in multicultural education, social studies methods, curriculum & instruction, and social foundations. She is interested in culturally meaningful teaching.
Ed Kupka is taking a strong stand. As principal of Milwaukee's Bradley Tech High School, he wants to encourage the good ones, do something about the bad ones and make the school more successful.
I'm not talking about students, although that's been a hot subject. A recent gang fight at the school drew a massive police response, negative attention from Ald. Robert Donovan and new steps aimed at removing troublemakers from the school.
I'm talking about teachers. Kupka has taken a strong stand on removing teachers who he says are not succeeding in the classroom, so they can be replaced with teachers who can do better.
"I'm addicted to getting the best person in front of the students," he said. "It's the only way to get achievement up."
In an interview shortly before the fight, Kupka said that addressing ineffective performers on the staff was taking up much of his time. He thinks the school is making progress on that score, but setbacks last spring and summer were so serious that he considered quitting.
This report provides a detailed look at student performance on state tests and examines whether state-level results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) confirm the trends found on state tests. The report tracks data for all states and the District of Columbia in math and reading for grades 4, 8, and high school by student race, ethnicity, income, and gender from as early as 2002 through 2009, where three or more years of comparable data are available. Also available are 50 state profiles with detailed student achievement data and tables showing the performance of various student groups on 2009 state tests. Finally, also posted here are short video clips of CEP's President and CEO Jack Jennings explaining the main findings of this study.
We should offer every American family the good school promise-access to at least one effective school where most students are on grade level and make at least a year of progress. We should offer every American student best efforts at giving them a teacher that gives them a shot at making at least a one year gain.
In an EdWeek OpEd, The Brookings Brown Center Task Group on Teacher Quality makes the case:
A dip in state education aid will force many taxpayers to reach deeper into their pockets this year to help fund schools.
School districts across the Fox Cities raised property taxes by an average of 3.8 percent compared with last year, slightly higher than the 3.4 percent statewide average.
"Districts are kind of in a no-win situation," said Dale Knapp, a spokesman for Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, a government watchdog group that crunched the tax numbers and released them this week. "The tax levy is a function of what happens with state aid."
When aid drops, schools turn to the taxpayers to make up the difference.
Maybe the IRS actually knows what it is doing. With any luck, they can look at the overwhelming number of athletic departments that are not earning a profit and realize that removing the NCAA's tax-exempt status would only have a nominal return. Perhaps the IRS realizes that the nominal return that such a tax would generate would have such a sweeping effect on collegiate athletics that it may actually hurt schools more than it would help. Whether they realize this or do not want to overturn a long-lived precedent, the IRS has not fumbled its duty concerning the tax-exempt status of the NCAA. At this point, there is no reason to disrupt the current tax-exempt status of the NCAA, and there is no evidence that points to a change being necessary in the near future.
JEB BUSH and BOB WISE, a Democrat who was West Virginia governor from 2001-2005, unveil the "10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning," a "roadmap for local, state and federal officials to integrate digital learning in education. ... Technology has the power and scalability to customize education so each and every student learns in their own style at their own pace."
During a 40-year career in higher education, Stan Albrecht has seen his share of strategic plans emerge after interminable meetings and lots of sweat only to gather dust on the shelf.
The Utah State University president cautioned the Utah Board of Regents that its new 10-year road map -- hoped to pave Utah's way to a much more educated workforce -- might be destined for such a fate if the scope of its 52 recommendations is not narrowed.
On Thursday, the Regents approved the 100-page Higher Ed Utah 2020 Plan, crafted at the request of Gov. Gary Herbert, after months of meetings and consultations. The plan seeks to get more students into college and earning degrees -- currently less than 50 percent graduate -- while promoting the role of higher education in economic innovation and workforce development.
How? By expanding need-based aid, embracing instructional technology and conducting classes online, shoring up the community college mission at the state's regional universities, and subsidizing associate degree-seeking students, among dozens of other recommendations.
Some of Chris Christie's reform agenda has become law, but more work is left to be done -- including education reform, which the governor says is at the top of his agenda for 2011.
Christie discussed that and other topics Tuesday during his 17th town hall meeting at the Clinton Community Center on Halstead Street.
The governor said New Jerseyans are beginning to feel pride again in their state, and that there are some positive discussion topics for the public.
New Jersey has the highest tax burden in the nation, many anti-business regulations and an atmosphere where private-sector jobs are treated like the enemy, Christie said. But, he said, the Legislature is getting serious about passing his many reform initiatives, including property tax reform, education reform and the municipal tool kit.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has selected former New York City schools official Christopher Cerf to be his next commissioner of education, two sources close to the administration said.
Cerf will be nominated to lead a department that has been adrift since the sacking of its former commissioner, Bret Schundler, in the wake of the state's loss in a federal education grant. A spokeswoman for the governor would not confirm the selection.
Christie has spent the past year cutting school funding, tangling with teachers and superintendents, and trying to make New Jersey's schools do more with less. He has pointed to Newark and other cities as examples of school systems where more money has not led to education gains, leaving children "trapped" in failing schools.
Joel Klein, the outgoing chancellor of New York City schools, where Cerf served as a deputy chancellor until 2009, called Cerf "a man of enormous intellect, talent and deep understanding of K-12 education and would be a terrific leader."
UTLA leaders dispute criticisms from the mayor and others, but reiterate their firm opposition to furloughs, larger classes and use of students' test scores to evaluate teachers' performance.
The state's largest teachers union Wednesday fired an early salvo in contract negotiations, serving notice that it wouldn't accept pay cuts easily and that it won't consider linking teacher evaluations to student test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The afternoon news conference, at union headquarters in Koreatown, was a familiar exercise in rallying the rank and file. But it also marked a renewed effort to lead the public debate over school reform, coming shortly after L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa labeled United Teachers Los Angeles the primary obstacle to improving schools.
Gov.-elect Jerry Brown told education leaders in Los Angeles on Tuesday to "fasten your seat belt" for dramatic spending cuts to schools, while not rejecting their appeals for tax-revenue relief.
"This is really a huge challenge, unprecedented in my lifetime," the 72-year-old former governor said at UCLA, where he appeared with financial officials for his second budget forum in a week.
After speaking in generalities about California's budget crisis for months, Brown must make major decisions this week about the budget bill he will propose by the Jan. 10 constitutional deadline. He has estimated the deficit at as much as $28 billion over the next 18 months.
Brown has declined to say whether he plans ask voters to authorize a tax package, though many observers believe he will push for a special election to maintain higher vehicle, sales and income tax rates set to expire next year. He is also expected to propose shifting responsibility for some services to local governments.
California's budget gap may widen to $28.1 billion over 18 months, according to Governor-elect Jerry Brown, who takes charge of the most-populous U.S. state next month. A cash shortage may force the use of IOUs by July, Controller John Chiang said.
The deficit estimate takes into account a $2.7 billion drop in projected estate-tax receipts, and compares with the most recent forecast of a $25 billion gap for the period, Brown said today at a public meeting of state officials. The cash accounts may be short by $2.3 billion within eight months, Chiang said at the meeting in Sacramento.
"I don't want to say it, but this could mean IOUs and more tax-refund deferrals," Chiang said.
Our family is very proud of the fact that five of the seven of us has graduated from the University of Wisconsin System and the other two attended for some time. We all attended public schools in our youth. We are very pro-education. Jean was a teacher for many years.
But, times have changed in the last 20 years or so. Spending on education has skyrocketed. Quality has gone down. Kids are forced to mortgage half of their lives to graduate from college and it takes five years. MPS is a total disaster with only a small number of kids being able to read in the 10th grade. Many businessmen consider high school degrees worthless.
School budgets are bloated with administrators as salaries and benefits far exceed what the average taxpayer makes. The unions have little interest beyond themselves. If left to their own, kids would continue to come out dumber per national average than when they went into the system. All of the advertising during Green Bay Packer games will not change that.
A recent post featured the highest-paid high school teachers in Illinois. Here's an update, with a chart above that compares the highest paid high school teachers in Illinois to their highest paid Ph.D. counterparts in the same academic field at the main campus of the University of Illinois (salary database here).
A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge on Tuesday stuck to a tentative ruling that would change the "last hired, first fired" rules that control which teachers get laid off during budget cutbacks in the L.A. Unified School District.
For the most part, Judge William F. Highberger continued to side with parties on a settlement meant to protect schools from suffering high teacher turnover during layoffs. Under the tentative agreement, reached in October, the district would apply seniority rules campus by campus to distribute layoffs more evenly across the nation's second-largest school system. That way, schools that depended heavily on inexperienced teachers would not be decimated. In addition, up to 45 at-risk schools could be protected completely from layoffs, as part of a plan that links this protection to academic improvement.
New program gives Madison students a chance to avoid expulsion
In past years the Madison School District might have expelled more than a dozen students in the first quarter.
This year the number of expulsions in the first quarter -- zero.
The sharp reduction is the result of the district's new Phoenix program, an alternative to expulsion that district officials hope will allow students to focus on academics and improved behavior, rather than spend as long as a year-and-a-half falling behind their peers while disconnected from school services.
As of last week, 17 students who have committed expellable offenses were enrolled in the program. Rather than face an expulsion hearing, each has been given a second chance to continue learning in a classroom away from their peers. The district has expelled between 33 and 64 students a year in the last decade.
The football field at a public school here, in the second largest school district in the country, soon may be brought to students by Nike.
Facing another potential round of huge budget cuts, the Los Angeles school board unanimously approved a plan on Tuesday night to allow the district to seek corporate sponsorships as a way to get money to the schools.
The district is not the first to look for private dollars as a way to close public budget gaps -- districts in Sheboygan, Wis., and Midland, Tex., for example, have offered up naming rights for their stadiums for years. But the Los Angeles school district is by far the largest to do so, and officials say the plan could generate as much as $18 million for the schools.
Cuts to spending on education are likely to continue, Governor-elect Jerry Brown said Tuesday as he searches for ways to increase California's revenues to match its spending.
Faced with a $28.1 billion deficit for the next fiscal year, Brown is trying to give a crash-course to California voters about how disastrous that figure really is.
The self-described "happy warrior" appears headed down a path of asking voters to extend a handful of temporary tax increases, to raise other taxes and to accept more control over local affairs because cutting 20 to 25 percent from the budgets of state agencies won't alone solve the mess.
Arguing that Chicago Public Schools are "broken'' and that parents deserve a "choice,'' mayoral challenger James Meeks said Wednesday he would offer $4,500-a-year vouchers to 50,000 low-and-middle-income Chicago families to use toward private school tuition.
If he is elected mayor, Meeks said he would also offer full-day kindergarten and character education in all Chicago Public Schools and double the time spent on reading and math in first through third grades. Full-day kindergarten would be financed in part by cutting bonus pay for teachers with master's degrees.
The 90 minutes of daily reading time -- up from 45 minutes currently -- is designed to make certain that students read at a third-grade level by the time they finish third-grade.
Cell phones to be banned from Milwaukee's Bradley Tech
Cell phones will be banned from Bradley Tech High School when students return Jan. 3 in the aftermath of problems last month that resulted in the arrest of 18 people following a fight, Principal Edward M. Kupka said Wednesday.
At the second meeting of community leaders in two weeks to discuss how to improve conditions in and around the school, which sits in the heart of the Walker's Point community, Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Gregory Thornton reported that between four to six disruptive students have been reassigned to other educational facilities.
A second wave of students "who aren't focused around the theme of the school" also will be moved to other educational programs, he said.
And students who have to leave school early for a legitimate purpose will receive county bus passes instead of waiting for a yellow school bus, he said.
On Rick Scott's recent pre-take-office tour, Floridians got a peek at what issues his administration's agenda will be likely to favor. The results ranged from confusing to frightening, especially since the opposition party will be virtually powerless to stop him. Provided Scott's initiatives are supported by the Republican majority in the legislature, he will have the opportunity to make broad and sweeping changes and seems intent to do just that.
As with any political movement, I tend to look at who is pushing it, how it fits into their core ideology and what stands to be gained. In this spirit, the most troubling part about vouchers is that they seem to be most strongly favored by those who do not really believe in government funding of education in the first place. That's not to say that all supporters of such programs wish to abolish public education. Nonetheless, I still think that it is instructive to examine why those who do wish public education to suffer such a fate view vouchers as a vehicle toward that end.
Superintendent Daniel Nerad School Board President Maya Cole School Board Members Ed Hughes, James Howard, Lucy Matthiak,
Beth Moss, Marjorie Passman & Arlene Silveira, and
Student Representative Wyeth Jackson
Madison Metropolitan School District
545 W Dayton St
Madison WI 53703-1967
RE: Opposition to Single Sex Charter School
Dear Superintendent Nerad, President Cole, and School Board Members:
We are writing on behalf of the ACLU of Wisconsin to oppose the proposal for an all-male charter school in Madison. Single sex education is inadvisable as a policy matter, and it also raises significant legal concerns.
The performance problems for children of color in Madison public schools cross gender lines: it is not only African-American and Latino boys who are being failed by the system. Many students of color and low income students - girls as well as boys - are losing out. Further, there is no proof that separating girls from boys results in better-educated children. What's more, perpetuating gender stereotypes can do nothing more than short-change our children, limiting options for boys and girls alike. For these reasons, the ACLU of Wisconsin opposes the effort to open a single-sex, publicly-funded charter school in Madison.
To be clear: the ACLU does not oppose the idea of providing a public charter school with a rigorous academic program and supplemental resources as an alternative to existing school programs in the Madison district. And we strongly encourage efforts to ensure that programming is available to children in underserved communities. Were this an effort to provide an International Baccalaureate program to both boys and girls in Madison - such as the highly- rated, coeducational Rufus King High School in Milwaukee, whose students are predominantly low-income children of color - we would likely be applauding it.
The end-of-the-year Omnibus Appropriations bill includes approximately $8.3 billion and 6,714 earmarks.
Click here for a working database of all the earmarks included in the Omnibus Appropriations bill. It's important to note that the database only refers to disclosed earmarks, not the billions in undisclosed earmarks.
The Madison School District $500,000 earmark is in row 4380 of the .xls file. The description: Madison Metropolitan School District, Madison, WI, for educational programming and Elementary & Secondary Education (includes FIE) via the US Department of Education. Senator Kohl also supports a $20,000,000 Teach for America earmark (row 5497).
I wonder what the $500,000 earmark, if it is realized, will be used for and how it ended up in the $1,100,000,000,000 spending bill?
Recipient: Madison Metropolitan School District
Location: Madison
Amount Requested: $500,000
The AVID (Advancement via Individual Determination) [SIS Links] program supports high school students who complete a college preparatory path and enroll in college. The program uses "small learning communities" and a rigorous curriculum to prepare students for college. The program places particular priority on serving students in the "academic middle," who are capable of success in college with some additional supports. AVID currently serves 240 students and will use this federal funding to expand access to the program to 800 students in all four Madison Metropolitan School District high schools.
ouston ISD employees have lots of ideas for trimming the district's $1.6 billion budget, including requiring employees to share rooms when traveling, making school administrators teach one course per semester, eliminating extra pay for master's degrees and moving to a four-day work week.
The district has been soliciting cost-cutting ideas from employees in anticipation of the state Legislature making deep cuts to public education funding over the next two years. Just how deep? That's the billion-dollar question.
HISD's chief financial officer, Melinda Garrett, said the state budget shortfall is expected to be between $11 billion and $25 billion, but no one will know for sure until Texas Comptroller Susan Combs releases revenue numbers. That's expected to happen in January.
A new report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says students' gains in test scores is one of the strongest predictors of teacher effectiveness, apparently validating D.C.'s controversial teacher evaluation tool and drawing fire from union critics.
The preliminary findings of the Measures of Effective Teaching Project say that teachers' past ability to raise student performance on state exams is one of the biggest predictors that the teacher would continue to oversee big test gains, and is "among the strongest predictors of his or her students' achievement growth in other classes and academic years."
Teachers with these high "value-added scores" -- named for increasing a student's achievement level
-- were also more likely to increase students' grasp of math concepts and reading comprehension through writing practices.
A lot of attention is being given to the idea of school "turnarounds" lately - the concept of taking a poorly performing school and drastically changing the staff, curricula, or other elements in an effort to make it much better.
But a study out Tuesday underlines just how hard it is to actually turn around a failing school.
The study, "Are Bad Schools Immortal?," examined more than 2,000 of the worst-performing district and charter schools in 10 states over five years. It found that very few of them closed, and even fewer - about 1 percent - truly "turned around."
He stood out at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Mich., an experimental school light on structure that was mockingly called "Commie High," and at Brown, the Ivy League university known for giving students free rein, and where one of his inspirations was an education dean who espoused flexibility in teaching.
Today, Shael Polakow-Suransky is the chief accountability officer of the New York City Department of Education, a job that is as institutional as they come. He traffics in hard numbers, overseeing a system that assigns grades to schools based on complex and fixed formulas, in which success depends largely on how students score on a single test.
Black Friday set off the sale of trinkets, capes, and magic wands, and Michelle Rhee bought a few of the latter. Before Thanksgiving, I would have pegged her for a neoliberal overbearing contessa. After the edu-world lauded Washington, DC's unseating of Mayor Adrian Fenty, and in turn Ms. Rhee, even those who didn't follow education news the way DC residents and interested thought leaders did got a glance at the former chancellor for what she really was. After essentially negotiating away DC teachers' due process or equity in their latest ratified contract, we knew she'd still find a job to do. Little did I know it'd be as the 21st century Mr. Mistoffelees.
How she's been promoted as a students first education reform is definitely a work of prestidigitation and legerdemain. She'll defy examination and deceive you again.
Three area school districts were among only 14 statewide that received the highest marks under the Colorado Department of Education's new accreditation system, which places emphasis on academic growth and preparing students for college and careers.
Nine other districts in the Pikes Peak region, including and Falcon School District 49 and Woodland Park RE-2, received the second highest ranking of "accredited." Five area districts received the mid-level "accredited with improvement plan" designation: Colorado Springs School District 11, Fountain-Fort Carson School District 8, Widefield School District 3, Harrison School District 2 and Cripple Creek-Victor School District RE-1.
Dunbar High School Principal Stephen Jackson was fired at the end of the last school year by the private management group in charge of the school but put back in the job last week by interim D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson at the urging of parents, community leaders and teachers. Jackson seemed an unusually lively and energetic educator when I met him at the long-troubled Northwest Washington school a year ago. He may be the person who can finally straighten Dunbar out.
But the odds are against him because of the ingrown nature of the school's problems and the dispiriting message Henderson's decision sends to him and any other school leader she assigns to a low-performing school after this.
Given middle of the pack reading levels on PISA results, the National Journal asked the rediculous question, “what’s so awful about being average?” They seem to ignore that US math and science results are much worse and lag most of the developed world. As dumb as the prompt was, it got a few of us to write a response. Here’s mine.
Twenty years of prompting, investing, threatening and reforming have largely failed to dramatically improve education in American. There are pockets of excellence, but results from American schools are flatlined. While unions and school boards argue about contract minutes, the rest of the developed world passed us by in achievement, high school graduation and college completion rates.
Structural: The money just isn’t there (and annual increases are largely spoken for). The current trajectory of spending is simply not sustainable unless we’re prepared to made radical changes in policies, for example, affecting health care, senior citizens, or prisons. Whether or not we should make those changes is debatable. In many states all senior citizens get a break on property taxes, which are a key revenue source for schools. As the population ages this will ripple through public education budgets. Should these measures be means-tested for ability to pay? Perhaps. Given how politics works are they likely to be? Doubtful. Likewise, our correctional policies are a mess but most politicians are not lining up to fix them. So sure, today’s fiscal choices are just that, choices, but the implications of those decisions and prospects for change must be considered with an eye toward political and other realities realities. A second, related, structural constraint is how little discretionary money there is annually because of how much is tacked down for ongoing obligations. In practice this means that there are annual increases (excepting the last few years where in some places you’ve seen genuine reductions), which consume new money.
The Shanghai math (+1 SD) and science (+.75 SD) scores are almost a full SD above the OECD average of 500 (SD = 100). The top 10 percent of Shanghai math students are all above the 99th percentile for the US. See earlier post for links to Rindermann's work relating school achievement tests like TIMSS and PISA to national IQ estimates, and see here for earlier SD estimates using 2006 PISA data. (Finland has an anomalously low SD in the earlier data. A quick look at the 2009 data shows the following math SDs: Finland 82, USA 91, Korea 89, Japan 94, Germany 98, Shanghai 103, Singapore 104.)
Although Shanghai and Beijing are the richest cities in China, incomes are still quite low compared to the US. Average income in Shanghai is about $10k USD per annum, even PPP adjusted this is about $20k. People live very modestly by the standards of developed countries.
As noted in the comments, there are other places in China that score *higher* than Shanghai on college entrance exams or in math and science competitions. So while Shanghai is probably above the average in China, it isn't as exceptional as is perhaps implied in the Times article.
Taiwan has been moving to an American-style, less test-centric, educational system in the last decade. Educators and government officials (according to local media reports in the last 12 hours) are very concerned about the "low scores" achieved in the most recent PISA :-)
To see how individual states or ethnicities in the US score on PISA, see here and here.
NYTimes: ... PISA scores are on a scale, with 500 as the average. Two-thirds of students in participating countries score between 400 and 600. On the math test last year, students in Shanghai scored 600, in Singapore 562, in Germany 513, and in the United States 487.
In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and several other countries.
In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland, where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 — in 23rd place — with a performance indistinguishable from Poland, Ireland, Norway, France and several other countries.
The testing in Shanghai was carried out by an international contractor, working with Chinese authorities, and overseen by the Australian Council for Educational Research, a nonprofit testing group, said Andreas Schleicher, who directs the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s international educational testing program.
Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration, who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.
As the governor-elect prepares to take office, California's schools are confronted by a lack of funding that threatens to further harm pupils and a controversial reform movement that could dramatically reshape how classrooms are run.
As Gov.-elect Jerry Brown prepares to take office, major headwinds are buffeting the biggest component of his upcoming budget: California's schools. They are being confronted by a lack of funding that threatens to further harm pupils and a controversial reform movement that could dramatically reshape how classrooms are run.
Most immediate and pressing is the state's fiscal crisis -- a $28-billion gap is forecast for the next 18 months. How that will affect school districts already reeling from years of multibillion-dollar cuts will be the subject of Brown's second budget forum, which is scheduled for Tuesday in Los Angeles.
"Jerry Brown is entering office at a moment when the capacity of the system is weaker than any time in recent memory," said John Rogers, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at UCLA. "I worry we may be reaching a breaking point."
Current American education policy is built on these assumptions: The quality of American education has plummeted because our schools are filled with teachers who can't teach. Teachers' unions and contracts tie the hands of school administrators. And teachers' unions protect bad teachers. Here are a few reasons why these conclusions are leading our educational system in a bad direction.
First, these policies ignore the effects of poverty on educational outcomes. Given the increasing number of children growing up in poverty, we ignore its effects at our peril.
I know something about poverty and its effects because I grew up in an impoverished, single-parent home and attended a low-quality school through eighth grade. Despite those beginnings, I graduated from one of the top US law schools and am now a law professor. If I could make it, then poverty must not matter, right?
I only know of two K-12 schools that have come close to doing full 1-1 rollouts of iPads to their students. One is the Cedars School of Excellence outside of Glasgow, Scotland, whose 105-student deployment has captured most of the publicity due to the eloquence of its head of IT, Fraser Speirs. The one that gets less publicity is actually much more ambitious in many ways.
Saint Andrews School is a private school in Savannah, Georgia. It has deployed a total of 480 iPads to students, including one to all 440 students in the grades 1-12, and classroom sets for kindergarten and pre-kindergarten (so technically not 1:1, but pretty close).
Having this organization assess the source of their income and calling it objective is akin to hiring the teachers' union to review the effectiveness of teachers for the district, or hiring a textbook publishing company to rate the effectiveness of the district's curricula. While this arrangement struck one board member as preposterous, four members of the board felt it made perfect sense.
Leonia School District Superintendent Bernard Josefsberg determines spending plans and decides when schools are closed for snow. He translates complex education jargon for parents and visits classrooms to read with elementary students, many of whom he knows by name in a district of about 1,800 students.
In June, Josefsberg is retiring, in part because of a pay cap imposed by Gov. Chris Christie that is set to take effect in February after the current required period of public comment ends.
The cap links a superintendent's salary to the size of a district, limiting pay for the largest school systems to a maximum $175,000, the governor's salary.
In the race to replace Mayor Daley, Rahm Emanuel would like voters to be thinking about something other than those challenges to his residency, and he's talking about schools.
Sunday, he unveiled his plans for improving education in Chicago, includind giving principals more power over their individual schools, doubling the number of teacher training academies and getting parents more involved.
Emanuel wants parents to sign a contract with their child's teacher pledging to encourage learning at home.
"Our teachers simply cannot succeed without parents as partners. While government must do its part, it's no substitute for a committed parent," Emanuel said.
Monday, it's back to the residency challenge, when Emanuel and other witnesses will be called to testify at a Board of Elections hearing.
There's been plenty of buzz -- much of it positive -- surrounding a proposed single sex charter school aimed at improving the academic performance of Madison minority students. Yet a closer look at the financing projections for the Madison Preparatory Academy, starting with the $300,000 the proposal notes is coming from the Madison Community Foundation, raises some questions,
"I have no idea where they got that figure," says Kathleen Woit, president of the foundation, when asked about the funding. "No, we have not committed to that. We'll have to get this straightened out."
The preliminary proposal, presented to the Madison School Board's Planning and Development Committee Dec. 6, also notes that $1.35 million would be available in six grants of $225,000 through the state Department of Public Instruction's charter school federal start-up fund. That's more than twice what is allowable for a school of Madison Prep's size, and suggests the school would be receiving both implementation and planning grants in two of the four years the school is eligible for start-up money.
"It looks like they are double counting," says Robert Soldner, director of School Management Services for the Department of Public Instruction. Soldner says that DPI typically helps charters get up and running with several years of funding, starting with a planning grant the first year, an implementation grant the second year and extensions of the implementation grants possible in the next couple of years of operation. Charter schools are not eligible for planning and implementation grants at the same time.
The Chronicle had an interesting story in yesterday's paper (print-only until Tuesday) about the brain drain in the Oakland school district after the fifth grade.
At Lincoln Elementary School in Chinatown, the city's first public, non-charter school to win a National Blue Ribbon Award from the U.S. Department of Education, a staggering 77 percent of last year's fifth-graders left the district, up from 57 percent a few years ago.
Superintendent Tony Smith told Chronicle reporter Jill Tucker, whose son goes to Peralta Elementary in Rockridge (a school with the fifth-highest "leaving rate" in OUSD - 44 percent), that the loss of top students was one explanation for the drop-off in district test scores at the middle and high school level.
Educators at a small private Christian school in Olde Town Augusta are seeing results with a math curriculum imported from halfway around the world.
For the past three years, Heritage Academy has used Singapore Math as its basal math curriculum for kindergarten through sixth grade.
In the first year the school adopted Singapore Math, all of its kindergarten and first-grade pupils met or exceeded proficiency standards on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, as did 80 percent of second-graders.
In a more concerted effort to enhance the manner in which our students are taught to become contributing members of a global society, we would like our schools to emphasize:
The interconnectedness of the world's cultures, politics, and economics.
Recognizing, analyzing, and evaluating trends in global relationships.
Creative problem solving, critical thinking, and innovative thought processes.
Understanding issues from cultural perspectives other than our own.
Encouraging study and travel abroad.
Technical competence and the critical impact that technology has had in our world.
Technological innovation that can expand curriculum, opportunity, and our students' world view.
Outreach to the community for resources and expertise to further global awareness.
The role of world languages in preparing students for an international environment. Consideration of Chinese as a new curricular offering.
It is our hope that all students are touched by this initiative, in all courses and at all levels of our curriculum. We appreciate any innovation that can be brought to our students to achieve this goal.
In a speech to state leaders, the mayor brands United Teachers Los Angeles as an obstacle to reform as the city stands at 'a critical crossroads.'
With a hard-hitting speech that branded the city's teachers union as an unyielding obstruction to education reforms, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa set the stage this week for a new battle over control of the troubled Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest.
In a Sacramento address to state leaders, Villaraigosa -- himself a longtime teachers union employee before launching a career in public office -- declared that education in Los Angeles stands at "a critical crossroads," and he assailed United Teachers Los Angeles for resisting change.
During the last five years, the mayor said, union leaders have stood as "one unwavering roadblock to reform." He called for change in contentious areas such as tenure, teacher evaluations and seniority -- all volatile arenas in which teachers unions have balked at proposals for reform as eroding their rights.
Public employee unions look increasingly out of touch and may be forced to swallow wage and benefit cuts.
Too bad a ball-peen hammer wasn't handy. If so, leaders of the embattled Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association might have walloped themselves over the head. Instead, they did something even more self-destructive, suing Milwaukee Public Schools for Viagra coverage of its members.
Union president Mike Langyel gamely defends the suit, saying Viagra is used to treat a bona fide medical problem. But even liberal supporters winced at the timing.
Here was a financially strapped school system struggling with an anticipated layoff of almost 500 teachers, and the clueless union was demanding insurance coverage of a sexual aid that could cost taxpayers more than $700,000 a year.
California's massive 2011-12 budget shortfall won't be closed without big cuts to public education.
The likely result doesn't look pretty.
"Schools will become more and more like prisons and less and less like schools," said David Plank, a professor of education at Stanford University. "You'll have huge classes, restive young people and overworked teachers."
Sound drastic? So is the budget crisis.
Soon after Gov.-elect Jerry Brown is sworn in next month, he will have to present a budget for 2011-12, a year that likely will be worse than any that California schools have endured in modern history.
On Wednesday, Brown noted the budget deficit over the next 18 months is likely worse than previously reported. He released figures showing California stands to lose another $2.7 billion from potential changes to the federal estate tax, swelling the shortfall through June 2012 to $28.1 billion.
In defending his selection for schools chancellor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has called Cathleen P. Black, a publishing executive with no education experience, "exactly the right person for the job" and suggested that her skills as a manager were unrivaled.
Ms. Black, however, was not the first person the mayor asked to take the position. Mr. Bloomberg tried to persuade Geoffrey Canada, the prominent Harlem education leader and a friend of the mayor, to be chancellor, but Mr. Canada turned it down, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
The two people did not want to be identified because Mr. Bloomberg has sought to keep the process private.
Mr. Bloomberg has repeatedly declined to offer details about whom he consulted during the search process, or how he ultimately settled on Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines.
new one-of-a-kind charter school in the city of Madison could soon become a reality, but an error in crunching numbers may mean more of a burden for city taxpayers.
The error was found just a few weeks ago, and it could put taxpayers on the hook for an additional $380,000 over the next five years.
But proponents of the proposed Badger Rock charter school have been scrambling to find ways to trim costs. And despite the bigger budget numbers, they said they hope the Madison School Board sees the bigger picture and not just dollar signs.
The year-round, agriculture- and green-based school on Madison's southwest side would start with 50 students in sixth grade. The school would add grades seven and eight in the following two years, for a total of 150 students.
Support for the school has been great until what's being called a "hiccup" two weeks ago.
As part of the conditions that passed, the board must execute a contract with the school no later than April 1 to operate it for a five-year period. Board member Lucy Mathiak added a sentence saying the contract shall define the district's financial obligations for each of the five years and shall contain language limiting the district's financial liability. Mathiak's amendment passed 6-1.
It would be interesting to see how the funding/review/political model compares with the ill-fated Studio School proposal and, how current public schools might fare as a "startup" today.
The chief executive of McDonald's has described critics of the company who have tried to curtail the sale of Happy Meals aimed at children as "food police" and accused them of undermining parents in making decisions for their families.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Jim Skinner responded to last month's vote by the San Francisco board of supervisors to forbid restaurants from offering toys with meals unless the food complied with limits on calories, sodium, sugar and fat.
"We'll continue to sell Happy Meals," said Mr Skinner, in the face of a ban that does not become effective until December 2011. The new rule "really takes personal choice away from families who are more than capable of making their own decisions".
Pulling the parent trigger Parents want reform at Compton's McKinley Elementary. That's fine, but the process has flaws
If anyone has reason to overthrow the public school establishment, it's parents in the Compton Unified School District. Five of the district's 35 schools are listed among the worst 5% statewide. In July, an auditor reported that the schools were run to benefit adults more than students and that the district appeared incapable of fixing the problem. And the school board recently fired its superintendent for charging thousands of dollars of personal expenses to her district credit card.
So it's no great surprise that Compton Unified became the first school district targeted for the so-called parent trigger, which allows parents to force radical change at a particular school if 51% of them sign a petition. Among their options are replacing the school's management or most of its staff, or turning it into a charter school. Parents organized by the group Parent Revolution, the leading force behind the parent trigger movement, delivered their petition to district headquarters last week, demanding that McKinley Elementary School become part of the Celerity Education Group charter organization.
One suggestion Severson offered that hasn't gained much traction in the past is to have board members represent geographic areas rather than the entire city, more like the Milwaukee School Board.
Ruth Robarts, who served on the board for 10 years, said a consequence of at-large seats like those in Madison is that races are more expensive -- hers cost $20,000 -- and it becomes impossible to campaign door-to-door.
That means candidates rely on the endorsements of Madison Teachers Inc., which Robarts said has "almost overwhelming influence" on local board elections, and other groups, which then tout candidates' qualifications and get members out to vote.
"However, the big unknown in my mind is whether School Board campaigns would become much more parochial," she added, referring to district-based elections. "If so, would that lead to good trade-offs needing to happen to get things done or would it lead to political gridlock at this very local level?"
The Obama administration could not have set the stage for a better demonstration of the power and priorities of Wisconsin's teachers unions.
With its Race to the Top competition, the federal government dangled the prospect of a share of $4.35 billion for those states ready to enact reforms, especially related to improving teacher and principal performance.
Eyes on that prize, states launched plans tying teacher pay and promotions to student achievement, giving state officials more control over local schools and overhauling data tracking and assessment systems.
Then the game got tricky: Teachers unions had to be on board.
In the end, only 11 states and the District of Columbia ended up with money from the program this year. Wisconsin got nothing.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council had helped kill or watered down critical parts of the state's proposal, with the president of the teachers union attaching a letter to the application that one participant described as "grudging." In the end, only 12% of the union's local leaders endorsed a plan that might have brought in more than $250 million in school funding to Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council spent nearly twice as much as any other organization to lobby lawmakers in 2009, according to the Government Accountability Board.
The state's largest teachers union reported spending more than $1.5 million and 7,239 hours lobbying, almost twice as much as the Wisconsin Insurance Alliance, which spent the second-highest amount on lobbying in the state.
One aspect of the union's lobbying effort was largely successful, with the state Legislature repealing the 16-year-old qualified economic offer law that restricted teachers' pay and benefits.
Not all parents want to see the Parent Trigger Law pulled at McKinley Elementary School, according to Principal Fleming Robinson.
In a statement released Thursday, Robinson said despite recent outcry there are still a lot of parents who support the school and its administration, and a host of others have been misguided.
"Some have said they signed the petition but were harassed or signed under false pretenses, which included beautifying the school," Robinson said. "A lot of parents weren't given clear information on what the petition was for."
However, on Tuesday during a press conference where more than 50 parents, students, guardians and residents spoke before heading to Compton Unified School District headquarters to hand over a stack of parent-signed petitions, Elizabeth Hidalgo, the mother of a child attending McKinley, acknowledged that several parents were up in arms over their attempts and "have been spreading lies" about not receiving all the details.
Hundreds of students at Murry Bergtraum High School took a stand this week after being told they couldn't use the bathrooms at school.
Fed up with what some say are strict policies, crowds of angry teens rushed the Manhattan school's halls, creating chaos, reports CBS 2's Derrick Dennis.
It was literally a riot -- students crowded the hallways, screaming at the top of their lungs and protesting what they said was the principal's decision to close all the bathrooms to students.
"What happened was two students started fighting, and the principal got mad, and closed all the bathrooms, and then all the kids went crazy and just started a riot," one student said.
Study backs 'value-added' analysis of teacher effectiveness
Classroom effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging students' progress on standardized tests, Gates foundation study shows. Results come amid a national effort to reform teacher evaluations.
Teachers' effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging their students' progress on standardized tests, according to the preliminary findings of a large-scale study released Friday by leading education researchers.
The study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provides some of the strongest evidence to date of the validity of "value-added" analysis, whose accuracy has been hotly contested by teachers unions and some education experts who question the use of test scores to evaluate teachers.
The approach estimates a teacher's effectiveness by comparing his or her students' performance on standardized tests to their performance in previous years. It has been adopted around the country in cities including New York; Washington, D.C.; Houston; and soon, if local officials have their way, Los Angeles.
The $45-million Measures of Effective Teaching study is a groundbreaking effort to identify reliable gauges of teacher performance through an intensive look at 3,000 teachers in cities throughout the country. Ultimately, it will examine multiple approaches, including using sophisticated observation tools and teachers' assessments of their own performance
For two years, backed by a friendly Congress and flush with federal stimulus money, President Obama's administration enjoyed a relatively obstacle-free path for its education agenda, the focus of which is the $4 billion Race to the Top grant program.
But with Republican deficit hawks taking control of the House next month, Education Secretary Arne Duncan will no longer have billions of dollars to use at his discretion.
The administration is also having to recalibrate its goals for working with Congress to overhaul the main federal law on public schools. Fortunately for the administration, its ambitions for the law, the Bush-era No Child Left Behind effort, are shared by Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who will be the chairman of the House education committee.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appeared in Tampa, Fla. alongside the presidents of the two major teachers unions: Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Dennis Van Roekel of the National Education Association.
Praising teacher evaluation, tenure, and pay reforms pursued through a partnership among the local school district, union and the Gates Foundation, Duncan lobbed a message of conciliation into an often-overheated debate over the role of unions in school improvement efforts.
"I don't think any of us like it when something is imposed on us," Duncan said. "I think there is so much the country can learn from what's happening here. You have elevated the profession."
The news conference - held in Hillsborough County, where it now takes up to four years to earn tenure and teachers are paid, in part, according to how well their students perform on standardized tests - was intended to extend an olive branch to the teachers unions in recognition of an important, though increasingly embattled, Democratic Party constituency.
Today, The Boston Globe published the latest in a long series of special "All-Scholastics" 14-page (12x22-inch) supplements on good local high school athletes from a variety of sports. These celebrations are produced three times a year (42 pages) with lots of pictures and little bios and lists of all-stars from the Boston area.
Again this Fall, there was no room for any mention by The Boston Globe of any noteworthy academic achievement by local students at the high school level. Christiane Henrich of Marblehead HS, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, wrote a 7,360-word Emerson-prize-winning history research paper on the quality (good for the day) of U.S. Civil War medicine. It was published in the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students...No room in The Boston Globe for that to be mentioned. She is now at Stanford and doesn't mind, but I mind about all the Boston-area students who are fed a constant diet of praise for athletic achievement by their peers and at the same time are starved of any and all news of the academic achievements of their peers.
In fact, over the years I have published a good number of exemplary history papers by high school students from the Boston area and they did not and do not get mentioned in The Boston Globe, nor do the academic achievements of our high school students in foreign languages (e.g. National Latin Exam, etc.), AP subject tests in Calculus, Chemistry, European history or in any other field, receive any notice from the Globe.
International competitions reveal that we are below average in Reading, Math and Science. Perhaps we should just explain that we don't care about that stuff as much as we do about swimming, soccer, cross-country, football, golf, field hockey, and volleyball, because achievement by our high school students in those efforts are what we really like to pay attention to, (not that academic stuff), at least when it comes to The Boston Globe.
The Boston Globe (and its subscribers) are, in this way, sending a constant stream of clear messages (42 pages at a time in supplements, not to mention regular daily columns on HS sports) that in Boston (The Athens of America) what we care about is kids doing well in sports. If they do well in academics we don't think that is worth mentioning. Sick, sad, and self-destructive, but there we are.
---------------------------
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
Newsweek reports this week on Michelle Rhee's new project StudentsFirst, but I have been thinking a lot lately about the fact that, while our High School students have spent some 12,960 hours observing teachers [6 hours x 180 days x 12 years] and giving at least some of their attention to other aspects of school reform that affect them, no one seems to show any interest in actually talking with them to discover what they have learned.
Tony Wagner of Harvard did conduct a focus group for recent grads of a suburban high school he was working with, and he was surprised and intrigued by what he learned from them during the course of the conversation. But he tells me he only knows of three high schools in the whole country (of 20,000 +) which conduct such efforts to learn from students what they have noticed about their schools.
When I left my job at the Space & Information Systems Division of North American Aviation to accept a new job with Pan Am in the early 1960s, they gave me an exit interview to find out why I was leaving, but also to discover what I might offer by way of observations about my tasks and the job environment.
Our high schools, I feel it is safe to claim, do not offer their students exit interviews, either as they finish graduation or a few years later. We pass up the chance to harvest knowledge from those thousands of hours of classroom observation, and from their "hands-on" experience of the educational system in which we placed them for 12 years.
What could be the reasons for this vacuum in our curiosity about education? I believe it comes in part from our attitude that, after all, students are merely students, and that they will not become thinking human beings until long after they leave our buildings.
This is a really stupid attitude, in my view. After all, some of these students have managed calculus, chemistry, Chinese and European history. I know some who have written very very good 11,000- to 15,000-word history research papers. So it should be obvious to us, if we take a moment to think, that not only are they fully capable of noticing something about the the instruction and the other schooling processes they have experienced, but also that they are fully capable of reporting to us some of what they have learned, if we can convince them that we really want to know.
Now, someone may point out that half our college freshman drop out before their sophomore year, that a million of our HS graduates are in remedial courses every year when they get to college, and so on. I know that, so let's, at least initially, not talk to poorly-performing students. Instead, to get our feet wet, let's give serious interviews to the ones who will graduate summa cum laude from Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT and Harvard. You know, the ones who will get the Nobel Prizes one day. Surely it is not so hard to identify the ten most academically promising and thoughtful of our HS seniors each year, and, after graduation, at least ask them if they would be willing to share some of their observations and thoughts in a conversation with us.
This would give us a small first step, and a fresh one, on the way to putting Students First, and start to put an end to our really dumb neglect of this rich resource for helping us understand how to do our education jobs better for their younger peers.
I can only hope that Mr. Gates, with his hopes to improve teacher training, and Michelle Rhee, with her new push to pay attention to students for a change, are listening to this.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
As America starts to grapple with its out-of-control spending habits, we as a nation really should reckon with our education costs. Few federal education programs were targeted by President Obama's deficit-reduction commission, but that's because most school funding comes from the state and local levels. And that's where the big-time money problem is. According to a report issued jointly last week by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Budget Officers, when federal stimulus funds run out in 2011, states -- and, by extension, schools -- will tumble off a fiscal cliff, and even an economic upturn won't bring state funding back up to where it was a few years ago.
The problem, however, is not just the struggling economy. In 1970 America spent about $228 billion in today's dollars on public schools. In 2007 that figure was $583 billion. True, some of the increase can be traced back to growing enrollments, better programs, and improved services for special-education and other students, but much of the increase is just a lot of spending without a lot to show for it. And given all the various pressures on state budgets (including our aging population, health care costs and the substantial obligations states and school districts owe for pensions and benefits), the golden age of school spending is likely coming to an end.
Houston School board OKs creation of a school just for boys
No sagging pants and grungy T-shirts will be allowed at this new Houston school.
Neither will bad attitudes.
And neither will girls.
This school, approved by the Houston board of trustees Thursday, will open next fall with only male students. The campus will start with sixth- and ninth-graders, who will have to apply to attend, and will grow annually to become a full middle and high school.
The boys at this new school in Houston's Fifth Ward will have to wear blazers and ties. They will take advanced courses, learn a foreign language and- the biggest expectation -- go on to earn a college degree.
This will be the first all-boys school started directly by the Houston Independent School District, which last month announced plans to open an all-girls campus next year. The district has two other all-boys schools, but they are run by contractors and one is leaving HISD's umbrella to become a state charter school.
What education practices can high-performing nations learn from one another?
Learning With the World is an Asia Society initiative that focuses on common educational concerns worldwide, as well as international best-practice solutions. We work with education leaders from nations with the best and quickly improving education systems to discuss the key drivers of educational improvement and the lessons learned.
As the Madison School Board prepares to take a second shot Monday at approving an agriculture-themed charter school on Madison's South Side, board members remain divided on what was once thought to be a slam-dunk proposal.
"I'm sold on the concept; I'm not sold on the budget," board member Lucy Mathiak said Friday. "I don't see anyone being jolly about spending $700,000 a year for 50 kids."
Badger Rock Middle School, expected to open next fall with 50 sixth-graders mostly from the Sennett Middle School attendance area, has a projected budget shortfall of $43,000 for 2011-12, with a projected budget of $668,600. The gap is projected to grow to $134,000 in the charter school's third year, when it has 150 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders and is expected to cost $1.37 million to run.
On February 16,2010, MMSD received BRMS's Planning
Grant and Executive Summary of its proposed charter school. On August 16, 2010, the DPI approved the Planning Grant and provided BRMS with an award of $200,000.
(Please see communication from DPI attached as Appendix A).
The proposed charter school will be located on 4 acres of property on the grounds of the
Badger Resilience Center in South Madison. The designated site is adjacent to a 7 acre
Madison park that will also be used to foster BRMS' philosophy of cultural and
environmental sustainability. The site also currently has a working farm, a community
center, a cafe and a gardening and sustainability operation run by Growing Power.
In addition to the previously referenced planning grant, funding for BRMS, including a
school endowment, is being spearheaded by the Center for Resilient Cities. BRMS
reports that "close to a million dollars" has been committed to the project and these, and
future, funds are being provided by private contributors.
BRMS notes that the research-based instructional strategies upon which their pedagogy
will be established are Environmental-Based Education (EBE) and Place -Based
Education (PBE). As noted in BRMS Executive Summary, both EBE and PBE have
been subject to numerous research efforts and have demonstrated positive results for
involved students, and in particular, students at the middle school level. EBE in
particular is also consistent with PI 8.01 which mandates that "environmental education
objectives and activities shall be integrated into the kindergarten through grade 12
sequential curriculum plans." BRMS also proposes a "year-round" school which would
not increase the number of instructional days, but would lessen the traditional threemonth
summer break.
BRMS has established numerous partnerships with community agencies. These
agencies are detailed in the Executive Summary and Detailed Proposal (See
Appendices B and D)
President Barack Obama said Monday in a speech about education that this is "our generation's Sputnik moment."
My first question is: How many high school students around here know what Sputnik is?
My second question is: Do you think there are things to be learned from the educational success in countries that are doing better overall than the United States?
The release last week of results from testing of 15-year-olds around the world, including in most of the world's industrial nations, was one of the main factors underlying Obama's statement. American students showed a bit of improvement, but overall were in the middle of the pack. That means, among the 34 countries at the center of the study, the U.S. was 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math. The U.S. standings were in line with other results in recent years.
While the rankings from the Program for International Student Assessment got a lot of attention, a set of accompanying reports got little. Among those was one focused on lessons for the United States.
In defending his selection for schools chancellor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has called Cathleen P. Black, a publishing executive with no education experience, "exactly the right person for the job" and suggested that her skills as a manager were unrivaled.
Ms. Black, however, was not the first person the mayor asked to take the position. Mr. Bloomberg tried to persuade Geoffrey Canada, the prominent Harlem education leader and a friend of the mayor, to be chancellor, but Mr. Canada turned it down, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
The two people did not want to be identified because Mr. Bloomberg has sought to keep the process private.
Mr. Bloomberg has repeatedly declined to offer details about whom he consulted during the search process, or how he ultimately settled on Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines.
A Colorado state senator told New Jersey lawmakers considering ways to fix tenure Thursday about a new law he pushed to make such job protection a "badge of honor."
Mike Johnston gave the Senate education committee details of a law passed in spring that requires teachers to get three consecutive years of effective evaluations before they earn tenure, called non-probationary status there. If they have two consecutive years of poor evaluations, they go back on probation. Those teachers can get help to improve and might eventually earn back tenure. If they don't, a district can dismiss them.
The recent figures released by the state Department of Education, which show a statewide public high school dropout rate of 37 percent among African American students, is a symptom of a broader social malaise and not an accurate measure of one group's performance.
Because when you hear some of the stories of children living in big city, high-crime neighborhoods, you come to understand that steering clear of troubled streets is in itself a full-time job.
I spoke with four young African American men on Thursday, all of them dropouts who returned to school. They attend Dewey Academy, the continuation high school in Oakland, where the high school dropout rate hovers around 40 percent.
Preliminary Milwaukee Public Schools budget predictions for fiscal 2012 include a slight dip in student enrollment and the loss of more than 300 full-time jobs, primarily because of a drop in federal stimulus and education jobs money, according to an analysis by the district's budget office.
But the head of the School Board's budget committee said Wednesday that it's too early in the budgeting process for any financial predictions to carry much weight, mostly because nobody knows how much money will be available for schools in the next state budget under the new governor.
Terry Falk, chair of the board's Committee on Strategic Planning and Budget, said at a committee meeting Tuesday that even the district's budget forecast for next year is less predictable than it's been at this point in the past several budget cycles.
"Any prediction at this point is not worth the paper it's printed on," Falk said, noting that the administration can only make projections based on what it knows right now, and that all that could change quickly.
State agencies are requesting an additional $3.94 billion in state and federal money - a 6.2% increase - over the next two years to fund priorities such as health care and education.
But with the state already facing a massive deficit in the 2011-'13 budget, Governor-elect Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature are unlikely to fill many of those requests. The report on the $67.43 billion in requests over two years - most by agencies in Gov. Jim Doyle's administration -was released Thursday by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
The biggest share of the proposed increases would go to the state Department of Health Services for programs such as Medicaid health care for the poor - spending that Walker and other Republicans have pledged to rein in.
Probably the best teacher I ever had is a man I fondly call "Stein the Medievalist." He's a smart guy. He follows the news closely. He's an opera maven. He's multilingual. He's a full professor of language and literature at a fine university. He was my Latin teacher in college.
In our 30 years of friendship, we've generally found ourselves on the same side of any given civic or educational controversy. He still teaches me, and sometimes I even teach Stein, but when he, whom I have never known to forward such missives, forwarded to me a petition asking State of New York Education Commissioner David Steiner to deny Cathie Black the request for the waiver she would need to work as the head of the school system, I couldn't sign it.
I am the mother of three adolescent children. Each has attended NYC DOE (New York City Department of Education) schools. Two do so at present. Our family is deeply committed to public education, and two of my children have been, and are currently being well educated in DOE schools.
In the public appearances section of the meeting MGEA representative Kevin Mikelbank noted that in consideration of the status of the ongoing negotiations the teacher's union has suspended their "work to the contract" job action, and that teachers would now participate in activities such as writing student letters of recommendation.
After the remaining preliminaries, the board heard first from PMA financial consultants who perform a 5 year budget forcast for the district each year. This year's preliminary model assumes zero enrollment growth and $200/year increase in the revenue cap - in all likelyhood we will see a smaller increase. Even so, the preliminary projections show a deficit that increases $700K to $1M each of the next five years, and unless a miracle occurs in the state budget process it will quite probably be worse. Ugh.
The University of Wisconsin System argues its faculty and staff are in desperate need of pay raises in each of the next two years just so these in-demand folks can keep from falling further behind those at peer institutions.
Fiscal conservatives reflexively howl that those within the UW System simply don't understand the magnitude of the budgetary crisis facing Wisconsin and are out of touch for wanting more when everyone else is trying to make do with less.
The latest round of this perpetual battle took place Thursday afternoon at the Memorial Union when a Board of Regents committee voted unanimously to recommend most faculty and academic staff working across the UW System receive a 2 percent pay increase in each of the next two years. The decision by the regents' business, finance and audit committee to back the proposal from UW System President Kevin Reilly will almost certainly be approved by the full board Friday morning.
In a Newsweek article for November 28, 2010, Jonathan Alter, in the process of calling educational historian Diane Ravitch "jaundiced," and "the Whittaker Chambers of school reform," praises Bill Gates for his broad-minded views of the best way to evaluate teachers, including "student feedback," which Alter observes parenthetically, is "(surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom)..."
Now, who is it that could be surprised that students might be able to predict which teachers would be successful in the classroom, Mr. Alter? How could it be, he must assume, that young students, after their thousands of hours of classroom observations, might know something about what makes an effective teacher and who might do well at the job?
I find the combination of hubris, ignorance and condescension revealed by that parenthetical aside to be truly astonishing.
Recently Randi Weintgarten told Jay Mathews in an interview that in considering school reform it was important to start from the bottom up, that is with teachers.
Hasn't a single Edupundit or Union Leader noticed that "below" the teachers, if we want to start from the bottom up, are the students? You know, the ones who have always been there, observing and learning a lot about teachers, who they are, what they can do, and what it would take to make classrooms and schools do their job better. As John Shepard has pointed out to me: "Can we not--using W.C. Field's paraphrase--see the handwriting on the floor?"
But perhaps someone has indeed thought of asking them. Tony Wagner at Harvard conducted a focus group of recent graduates for a suburban high school and was quite surprised by much of what he learned, but when I asked him how many high schools he knew of which did conduct such inquiries to learn how they could improve, he said he only knew of three in the country.
We are not asking students, so they are not telling us, no surprise there. But perhaps we are not asking them because, don't you know, they are just kids. I know something about those kids because I was a teacher for ten years and for the last 23 I have been seeking out and publishing their serious academic expository writing. I know that some of my authors have graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, Princeton and Yale, that some of them have become Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and doctors, lawyers, and chiefs of various kinds. Why is it so easy for us to forget that every Nobel Prize winner was once a high school student sitting there as an interested observer, learning about teachers, classrooms and schools?
But we don't think to ask them. We don't benefit from their years of experience studying the education we are offering them. This stupidity on our part has resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars and centuries of person-years deployed on education reform without making use of any of the knowledge students regularly accumulate about what we are trying to reform. What a sad thoughtless waste of money and time!
Japanese car makers had the sense to allow workers on the assembly line to stop the line if they saw a defect that needed correction, and they have led the world in quality work.
While it is no doubt impossible for us even to imagine giving students the power to stop a teacher who was doing a terrible job, why don't we at least give some thought, with all our heavy thinkers and all our research budgets, to trying to discover at least
a tiny bit of what some of our more thoughtful students have observed over their decades in our schools?
We could actually consider asking for and even taking some small bit of their advice on how to educate them and their peers better. After all, we landed on the Moon within a decade, didn't we? And brought the astronauts safely home...surely we could ask a few students a few questions, and listen to the answers, couldn't we?
Seven school districts and 23 charter schools are joining Minnesota's alternative system for evaluating and paying teachers -- the signature education initiative under Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who leaves office next month.
Pawlenty on Wednesday announced the largest one-year expansion of the Q Comp program since it began in 2006. With the addition of the new schools next year, nearly a third of Minnesota students will be taught by a teacher in the program.
Also, the Minnesota Department of Education has begun uploading state-approved lessons for teachers and preschool through high school students to the iTunes web site in collaboration with Apple Inc., Pawlenty said.
f you want to get a sense of what's in store for the American workforce, just take a look at how our students match up against the rest of the world in math and science. After all, most of the professions within the U.S. economy that are growing -- healthcare, information technology, and biomedicine -- require extensive training in both subjects.
So how are we doing? Not well, at all.
American 15-year old students scored below average in math and were outperformed by 23 other countries and education systems, according to test results released Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment.
And they didn't do much better in science, ranking 19 among the lot of 65 participating countries and education systems (N.B. "educational systems" are individual cities within a country, like Shanghai).
Green Bay-area school districts are beginning to change long-standing bans on handheld technology, such as cell phones and iPods, after realizing they are increasingly part of students' everyday lives.
The Pulaski School District, for example, now encourages middle and high school students to bring their cell phones to class. They're also welcome to carry other electronic gadgets such as netbooks, which are a bit smaller than laptop computers; iPads, handheld tablet computers; or electronic-book readers.
Pulaski school leaders said they decided to drop a ban on cell phone use because it wasn't practical. Students own the gadgets, administrators say, so why not use them as classroom tools?
The Government Accountability Office has revised portions of a report it released last summer on recruiting practices in for-profit higher education, softening several examples from an undercover investigation but standing by its central finding that colleges had encouraged fraud and misled potential applicants.
The revisions have come as the Obama administration and senior Democratic lawmakers are pushing for tougher regulation of the industry. A Republican senator said the revisions called into question some of the conclusions in the report.
The original report, issued Aug. 4 in testimony to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, examined recruiting practices at 15 for-profit colleges, including campuses operated by the Apollo Group, Corinthian Colleges and The Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan unit.
Mom's admonishment still rings true today, with only minor adjustment: "Starving children in North Korea would be happy to have that beef and bean burrito."
Or, as it's known in the Madison School District, the least popular lunch among students this past October and a poster child for the dilemma faced by lunch ladies across this land of plenty: How to get children to eat things that are good for their bodies, not just pleasing to their tongues.
The irony in trying to solve this problem -- also known as a "blessing" in food-deprived parts of the world -- is so old as to be left unmentioned. I mention it here only as a reminder that in our free-flowing-capital-and-consumer-products global economy, we still can't manage to keep kids from starving to death.
In any case, my first reaction to the healthy choices conundrum was simple: Let them go hungry.
Governor-elect Scott Walker's campaign promise to lift the enrollment cap on Wisconsin's voucher and virtual schools could come to fruition soon, despite opposition from unions.
In an interview this week on the public affairs program "WisconsinEye," State Superintendent Tony Evers said that he is open to lifting the enrollment limits, something Republicans have pushed for in the face of resistance from unions and public school advocates who see the voucher program as draining resources from Milwaukee schools by diverting public funding to private voucher schools.
"I'm steeped in reality. I'm not sure if what I think makes a lot of difference," Evers said, alluding to the impending Republican control of the governor's office and both houses of the Legislature. "People have made clear what their positions are."
Removing the caps on virtual schools or the choice program would not "fundamentally change the way those programs operate, nor will it dramatically increase the enrollments," Evers said.
Texas Comptroller Susan Combs released a study Wednesday to help school districts and campuses identify cost-saving strategies schools can make without compromising academics.
The newly released study was required by House Bill 3 from the 2009 legislative session. It was conducted by researchers from the state's top institutions, including the University of Texas at Dallas, among industry experts.
The costs of Texas public education have increased significantly to nearly $55 billion, with per-pupil spending rising by 63 percent, Combs said, in a written letter. With cuts to state-funded budgets expected in the upcoming legislative session, school districts will need to operate more efficiently.
The Houston Independent School District is making above-average gains in student performance but isn't spending its money as efficiently as other districts, according to a new study released today by Texas Comptroller Susan Combs.
Houston ISD, the state's largest district, earned three stars. Dallas ISD, the second-largest district and the most comparable to Houston's, received two stars.
Statewide, 43 districts and charter school operators earned five stars. The list included Angleton, Clear Creek, Conroe, Cypress-Fairbanks, Friendswood, Katy and Pearland.
The Comptroller's office is leading the Financial Allocation Study for Texas (FAST) to examine how our school districts and campuses spend their money - and how this spending translates into student achievement. Our study is intended to identify cost-effective practices that promote academic progress.
In addition to presenting the FAST study findings, this website also allows you to run your own custom reports on school district finances and results. We hope that policymakers and the public alike will use this resource to see how our education dollars are working to prepare the next generation.
Much of the state's recurring deficit problems are due to short-term budget decisions made over the past 15 years. But revenue volatility has also played a role. During 1990-2000, annual growth in general purpose tax revenues (GPR) averaged 6.8%, and the average was still higher (7.0%) during 1995-2000. Even after the 2001 recession, state tax collections grew an average of 5.0% per year during 2003-2008. But that was followed by collections dropping 7.1% in 2008-09 and remaining stagnant the following year, despite tax increases.
How the 2011-13 budget ultimately fares depends in part on the revenue outlook. And the new forecast for 2010-13 shows tax revenues growing at annual (bars in graph above) and average (line) rates generally below the recent past. The table below provides forecast detail. Tax revenues are projected to grow 4.2% or less over the next biennium.
In its response to the Department of Public Instruction's request for information on its talented and gifted services, the Madison School District points out that the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) has recently updated its standards for TAG programming. Now, the District argues, the NAGC standards "actually serve as validation of the District's current practices," including West High School's claim that it meets the needs of talented and gifted students through differentiation within regular classrooms. We disagree.
The NAGC issued its revised standards in September, around the same time West High School area parents filed a complaint against the Madison School District for allowing West High to deny appropriate programming to academically gifted students. West has refused for years to provide alternatives to its regular core curriculum for 9th and 10th graders who demonstrate high performance capabilities in language arts and social studies.
If there's one theme that emerges from the ongoing audit of Houston ISD's magnet schools, it's inconsistency. An interim report [pdf] from Magnet Schools of America, released today, finds that the funding, quality, entrance criteria and student diversity vary from school to school. This is not ground-breaking news for those who have followed the magnet school discussions and media coverage over the last several years. An HISD committee that evaluated the magnet schools in 2006 drew similar conclusions.
The interim report doesn't name schools or cite specific data, but here are a few of the general points — which shouldn't necessarily be taken as gospel because three of the auditors noted that "it appeared as though they were observing a specially designed day rather than feeling this is the way we do things at the school every day." [Editor's translation: The schools were putting on a dog and pony show for the auditors.]
Cathleen P. Black, the schools chancellor designee, is not a gusher. She is not an over-talker. She is a firm shaker of hands, a professional-grade eye-contact-maker and active listener. During an hourlong visit to Public School 33 in Chelsea on Monday morning, Ms. Black missed no opportunity to smile and say hello to school employees, from the office assistants to the person she later called the safety adviser (safety officer, but O.K., she is still new). Making the classroom rounds, she chatted with the children about pyramids and pets and greeted, but did not exactly bowl over, the teachers.
"Teachers need good knees," she observed about midway through the visit, rising from the crouch she had been in while listening to some students talk about why they liked "Diary of a Wimpy Kid."
It is all new to Cathie Black: the knees, the numbers, the needs of the nation's largest school system, where two-thirds of the students are poor enough to qualify for free meals. The current chancellor, Joel I. Klein, grew up in a housing project; Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, acknowledged Monday that she had never set foot in one. She and her children attended private schools.
The increases depend, to some extent on property assessments (if the assessed value declines, tax rates generally increase more to compensate for the reduced tax base and support spending growth), but a quick look reveals City of Madison and Dane County taxes are up in the 6% range, MATC over 10% and the Madison School District in the 9% range. Much more on the Madison School District's 2010-2011 budget, here.
Two Madison School Board seats will be on the April, 2011 spring election ballot. They are currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman. I presume they are both seeking re-election, but I've not seen an announcement to that effect.
For months, there was nothing but enthusiastic buzz surrounding the proposal to start a green charter school in Madison. The organizers of Badger Rock Middle School have broad support throughout the community and have meticulously done their homework. The school district administration was enthusiastic about the school's focus on urban agriculture, and School Board members, who have the ultimate vote, were too.
Then, just days before the board was expected to give its final approval, the school district released new figures showing it would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to staff and operate the new school. This was a reversal from earlier projections that showed Badger Rock would bring no extra costs to the district.
In the current era of pinched budgets and dreary financial prospects, this revelation threw a monkey wrench into the process and caused the board to delay final consideration of the project until later this month.
"I had planned to come in here tonight to vote for this most innovative project," board member Marj Passman said during the Nov. 29 meeting. "But at the last minute the Badger Rock people and the board were both hit broadside with new information that raises a lot of last-minute questions."
The election of a tough-talking new teachers' union head here could complicate efforts to turn around the capital's struggling school system, just as the fragile national effort to overhaul public schools faces a change in educational leaders in this and two other big cities.
Officials who took over in the wake of Michelle Rhee's departure as chancellor of Washington's school system said Friday they might refine her signature policies, but promised not to backtrack on closing low-performing schools and evaluating teachers based on student test scores.
But they face a new player in Nathan Saunders, who ousted Washington Teachers' Union President George Parker in an election last week. Mr. Saunders said he wanted to overhaul the teacher evaluation system Ms. Rhee put into place, and would fight to retain many of the 737 teachers termed low-performing by the school district who could lose their jobs at the end of the school year.
Healthier lunches are coming with a heftier price tag as school districts struggle to get students to buy meals rich in green produce and whole grains yet short on sugar, fat and salt.
The dilemma has added urgency as Madison and Dane County parents become increasingly vocal in urging better food in the lunch line. Districts are getting creative, making pizzas with wheat crusts and low-fat cheese, for example. But that only goes so far, officials said.
"Try as we might, there are some kids who are not going to eat raw broccoli," said Robyn Wood, food services director for the Oregon School District, which ran a $50,000 deficit last school year in its $1.5 million lunch program. "They're not going to buy an apple over a cookie. We serve apples at the high school and kids leave campus and buy cookies."
The Madison School District has experienced a 35 percent reduction in revenue for its a la carte menu in the past five years after healthier options were introduced as part of a new wellness policy, said Food Services Director Frank Kelly.
The majority of children participating in organized team-sports don't meet the federal recommendation of one hour a day of moderate-to-vigorous exercise, according to a study released Monday.
Federal-government guidelines recommend children and teens get at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity each day. It is estimated that fewer than half of children and only about 10% of teenagers meet that goal.
Many parents might believe if their children participate in team sports, then they must be getting enough exercise. Researchers at San Diego State and the University of California, San Diego, showed that isn't necessarily the case.
The researchers looked at sports practices involving 200 children ranging in age from 7 to 14 years old, who were participants on a soccer, baseball or softball team in San Diego County. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was published online Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
One of the most important things a school district can do to improve student achievement is ensure that students have effective teachers. Recognizing that human resource management systems are often not up to the task, some urban school districts are reforming how they recruit, hire, develop, and retain teachers by streamlining processes and procedures and aligning them with the district's broader reform strategy.
This paper looks at how such reforms are playing out in two portfolio school districts: New York City and Washington, D.C. Though the districts' reform efforts differ, together they highlight four courses of action that portfolio--and perhaps traditional--districts can take to transform talent management from a bureaucratic staffing system into a core leadership function:
1. Assign talent strategy to a senior reform executive
2. Distinguish strategy from routine transactions
3. Redesign policies and practices to support flexibility and performance
There is a new trend in education and frankly, I don't like it.
Unfortunately, you don't have to be an educator to be at the helm of an educational system.
Years ago, it was impossible for an educator to rise to the top of the system without having established degrees and qualifications such as a PhD, classroom experience, administrative experience and academic hours in educational management.
The new sense in big city governments is to treat education less as a profession and more as bean counting. The thinking is to manage the process while the children, teachers and parents become peons.
Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research has issued two recent reports on the condition of public employee pension funds in California. The first identified a $425 billion funding shortfall for three state pension systems: the California Public Employees' Retirement System, California State Teachers' Retirement System, and the University of California Retirement System. The second report found a nearly $200 billion shortfall for local government pension systems.
Both reports focused on the overall financial health of pension systems in California but did not touch on retiree benefit levels. It's time to begin that conversation.
Discussing public employee retirement benefits is dangerous politically. So let's start with the legal status of benefits owed to public employees.
They manage budgets that stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars. They run organizations that rank among Home Depot and Kroger in terms of the number of people they employ locally. Perhaps most importantly, they are responsible for developing precious products, with the outcome impacting the future of the state and region.
Meet the metro school superintendent, a high-profile, well-compensated figurehead who's part of an elite -- but some say shrinking -- class of educators more often compared to corporate CEOs or celebrities than classroom teachers.
The role of these leaders is taking on a renewed relevance in metro Atlanta as three of the state's largest districts look to hire replacements in 2011. Those decisions will directly affect the lives of 250,000 students, 35,500 employees and countless others in the region, said Brad Bryant, state school chief.
Local attorney and former Wisconsin State Bar Association president Michelle Behnke spoke in favor of Madison Prep, saying both she and her now grown children attended Edgewood High School in preference over Madison public schools. "I am not a gambler," Behnke, who is black, said during her three minute appearance before the board. She noted that the statistics regarding academic success for minority students in Madison were so bleak that neither she nor her parents felt they could risk a public school education.
Steve Goldberg, representing CUNA Mutual, also testified in favor of the school, saying his organization was looking forward to being involved and supportive of Madison Prep.
According to Caire, extreme measures are needed to deal with the extreme problems facing area black and latino youth in public school settings, claiming that conventional efforts have not yielded significant results. Both the achievement gap and the incarceration rate for black males in Dane County are at the bottom of national statistics.
Caire believes Madison Prep could be an experimental laboratory for change, and that if successful it could be replicated across the Madison district and elsewhere.
"We've been trying various approaches for 30 or 40 years and it's still not working," he says.
The Urban League of Greater Madison's dramatic proposal for an all-male public charter school deserves open minds and fair consideration from the Madison School Board.
Don't dismiss this intriguing initiative just because the teachers union is automatically opposed. A new approach to helping more young black men get to college is justified, given the district's stark numbers:
Only 7 percent of black students who took the latest ACT college preparation test were ready for college.
Barely half of black students in Madison schools graduated in 2009.
Almost three-quarters of the 3,828 suspensions last school year were black students, who make up less than a quarter of the student body
Madison School District Leaders Learn More About Boys-Only Charter School
Madison Metropolitan School District leaders on Monday night learned more about a proposed boys-only charter school and heard from the public.
The school, which would have uniforms and be targeted toward minority students, would be the first of its kind in Wisconsin.
The idea is called Madison Prep, and it would be part of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The school's goal is for 100 percent higher education acceptance for its students, and to meet that goal it will have a longer school day and school year.
And while it's never been done here before, the person behind it said that's the idea. Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, said it's time to think out of the box to help children be more successful in school -- specifically black middle-school children.
The State of Illinois is still paying off billions in bills that it got from schools and social service providers last year. Arizona recently stopped paying for certain organ transplants for people in its Medicaid program. States are releasing prisoners early, more to cut expenses than to reward good behavior. And in Newark, the city laid off 13 percent of its police officers last week.
While next year could be even worse, there are bigger, longer-term risks, financial analysts say. Their fear is that even when the economy recovers, the shortfalls will not disappear, because many state and local governments have so much debt -- several trillion dollars' worth, with much of it off the books and largely hidden from view -- that it could overwhelm them in the next few years.
"It seems to me that crying wolf is probably a good thing to do at this point," said Felix Rohatyn, the financier who helped save New York City from bankruptcy in the 1970s.
Teachers can make their case about reform to policymakers
In the Nov. 28 Star, Matthew Tully contributed an insightful piece highlighting a significant disconnect between education reformers and those who will perhaps be most affected by reforms -- teachers ("Teachers hear something else in reform debate"). The article begs us to contemplate the forces underlying educators' distrust of state-directed education reforms. Teachers will be instrumental in implementation of these reforms. As such, the fracture between policymakers and practitioners demands our attention.
Tully captured the gestalt of the problem when noting that many good teachers think those of us pushing for education reform blame them for their schools' failures. We're not. We're actually making the opposite case: Good and great teachers are responsible for their schools' successes.
Principal Diana Oshiro of Myron B. Thompson Academy Public Charter School says she values "blind loyalty" and has hired several relatives -- including her sister and three nephews -- because she can count on them to do what she says.
Three out of four administrators at Thompson, one of the state's largest charter schools, are part of Oshiro's family. Her sister oversees the elementary school as vice principal and also works as a flight attendant.
Oshiro's nephew is the athletic director, although the school had no sports teams last year or this year, and he doesn't teach PE. He and his brother, the film teacher, were hired with just high school degrees, although public school teachers are supposed to have bachelor's degrees and teaching licenses.
A veteran educator, Oshiro was blunt when asked about her hiring practices at the online school, which has 517 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
The countywide graduation rate for African-American students also showed a dramatic improvement, going from 64 to 90 percent in the past five years, although individual district graduation rates still lag, including Madison's.
What's happened to cause this? United Way began focusing on school dropout and graduation rates in recent years, after an intensive study on what factors cause kids to drop out and fail to graduate. The charitable agency has directed more funding to groups that attack school problems with the goal to get more kids to stay in and finish school.
The superintendents at the meeting also cited other factors, including better tracking of students and creating opportunities for problem students to get another chance to earn their diplomas.
It's good to know that efforts to solve some of those nagging problems facing our schools are being addressed -- and getting results, besides.
The "what will she do next" guessing game came to an end this week when Florida's Republican Governor-elect Rick Scott named Michelle Rhee," the former chancellor of the District of Columbia school system, to an 18-member transition team on education.
Scott said the transition team would help him "find innovative ways to create a new education system for a new economy."
What Michelle brings to public education in Florida, according to Julie Young, President and Chief Executive Officer of Orlando-based Florida Virtual School (FLVS), "is a new perspective and drive for change."
"Michelle was controversial, but she has a clear passion for what is best for kids and making sure kids have the highest quality education and the highest quality teacher," said Young.
The last Talented and Gifted (TAG) Education Plan was adopted by the MMSD Board of Education in 1991. With state statute and policy reform, alignment with current District strategic planning, and a desire to utilize research in exemplary practice, approval of a comprehensive Talented and Gifted Plan has become a District priority.
This document is meant to be a guide as the Division aims to achieve its mission in alignment with the MMSD Strategic Plan, the State of Wisconsin statutes and administrative rules for gifted and talented education, and the National Association for Gifted Children standards.
There will be a review of the Plan, with status reports issued to the Board of Education, in January and June 2010. Adjustments to the Plan will be documented at that time.
Wisconsin State Statute 121.02(1) (t), and Administrative Rule PI 8.01(2)(t).2 require school districts to identify those students who give evidence of high performance capability as talented and gifted and provide those students with access to appropriate systematic and continuous instruction. The National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) standards complements the Wisconsin framework and provides a guide for quality educational programming.
The Plan below identifies the following categories as areas in need of improvement in MMSD Talented and Gifted Programming. The primary focus in developing this Plan has been in the areas of identification, programming, and professional development.
On June 14, 2010, the Board was presented with a Document entitled Disciplinary Alternatives: Phoenix Program.
That Document outlined the foundation for the current Phoenix Program, an alternative to expulsion that allows a student's expulsion recommendation to be held in abeyance while the student participates in a half-day program tailored to the student's academic, emotional and behavioral needs. At the time of presentation, the Board voted to implement the Phoenix Program.
The June 14, 2010 document did not provide all the details related to the Phoenix Program and contemplated that further details would be provided to the Board as the Program was implemented. This memo is intended to advise the Board of the current state of the Phoenix Program, provide further details of its operation and advise the Board of changes to prior practices that have been made in the process of implementing the Phoenix Program.
For ease of reference, this Update will follow the structure of the June 14, 2010 Document. Also for !he Board's reference the following documents are attached to this Update: Phoenix Program Participation Agreement, the "Knowledge" analysis form, and a chart that compares and contrasts the old practices versus the new practices.
Introduction
As the Board will recall, the Phoenix Program was recommended and adopted in order to provide an alternative toexpulsionforstudentswhocommittedcertainexpellableoffenses. Theintentoftheprogramistoprovide academic, social and emotional interventions to students who engage in certain behavior in order for students to remain connected to the school environment and improve their prosocial skills and not repeat the same or similar behavior.
Charter schools are public schools that have more freedom to innovate because they are exempt from many (but not all) policies that govern traditional public schools. There are more than 200 public charter schools in Wisconsin and two in Madison.
Charter schools employ fully qualified teachers and participate in statewide testing programs just like traditional public schools do.
Wisconsin has two kinds of charter schools: instrumentality (staff employed by a school district) and non-instrumentality (staff not employed by a school district, but by a nonprofit organization).
A child nutrition bill on its way to President Barack Obama -- and championed by the first lady -- gives the government power to limit school bake sales and other fundraisers that health advocates say sometimes replace wholesome meals in the lunchroom.
Republicans, notably Sarah Palin, and public school organizations decry the bill as an unnecessary intrusion on a common practice often used to raise money.
"This could be a real train wreck for school districts," Lucy Gettman of the National School Boards Association said Friday, a day after the House cleared the bill. "The federal government should not be in the business of regulating this kind of activity at the local level."
Gov. Chris Christie didn't mention Superintendent of Schools LeRoy Seitz in his town meeting speech Friday afternoon at the Morris County Public Safety Training Academy.
But it didn't take him long to get around to the subject.
When it was time for the audience to ask questions, Parsippany Township resident Hank Heller came to the microphone and asked if the board's approval of Seitz's contract made him consider stripping local school boards of their power.
"Since we've seen the results in Parsippany of home rule run amok with the superintendent's contract, any thought of changing home rule to county rule or state rule?'' asked Heller, who was first line at the event, which drew a crowd of more than 200.
Christie chuckled, then said, "All night, and the first question we get is about Lee Seitz.''
Ivelisse Cruz can barely watch the video footage from her first time teaching a math lesson.
The video shows Cruz, a first-semester sophomore at Alverno College at the time, hesitantly starting her lesson seated with a group of seventh-grade students around a small table at Fairview Charter School in Milwaukee. She doesn't quite explain what the focus of their math lesson will be, looks slightly uncertain and speaks in what she would later criticize as a monotone voice.
"It was terrible, I don't even know how these kids were even paying attention," Cruz, now in her senior year at Alverno, said as she watched the video.
Fast forward through three more semesters, learning the art of teaching and spending time working with students.
Now the video shows a more confident woman standing at the front of her class, reviewing her work with the students from the week before, forecasting what the next lesson will be, calling a student to stand beside her at an overhead projector to walk through a practice problem.
Consider this a thought that could change the way schools operate throughout the Milwaukee area:
Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us ...
Or, to put the 1970s Burger King jingle into education jargon:
Individualize and customize within a standardized system. (OK, that's not quite as catchy. )
The promise of Burger King was that they would come up with the best thing for you as an individual. You weren't just another customer. This would make your experience at Burger King more engaging and more successful. Yet you could count on consistent standards of quality in the outcomes.
Now replace all the food references with educational references and you get at a key to a campaign by area school leaders that aims to bring major change to the basic structures of schooling. They don't have small goals - the title of the report at the heart of their effort is Transforming Public Education: A Regional Call to Action.
In most American schools, teachers are evaluated by principals or other administrators who drop in for occasional classroom visits and fill out forms to rate their performance.
The result? More than 9 out of 10 teachers get top marks, according to a prominent study last year by the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group focusing on improving teacher quality.
Now Bill Gates, who in recent years has turned his attention and considerable fortune to improving American education, is investing $335 million through his foundation to overhaul the personnel departments of several big school systems. A big chunk of that money is financing research by dozens of social scientists and thousands of teachers to develop a better system for evaluating classroom instruction.
The effort will have enormous consequences for the movement to hold schools and educators more accountable for student achievement.
Twenty states are overhauling their teacher-evaluation systems, partly to fulfill plans set in motion by a $4 billion federal grant competition, and they are eagerly awaiting the research results.
Over the past eight years, I've been privileged to serve as chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, the nation's largest school district. Working with a mayor who courageously took responsibility for our schools, our department has made significant changes and progress. Along the way, I've learned some important lessons about what works in public education, what doesn't, and what (and who) are the biggest obstacles to the transformative changes we still need.
First, it is wrong to assert that students' poverty and family circumstances severely limit their educational potential. It's now proven that a child who does poorly with one teacher could have done very well with another. Take Harlem Success Academy, a charter school with all minority, mostly high-poverty students admitted by lottery. It performs as well as our gifted and talented schools that admit kids based solely on demanding tests. We also have many new small high schools that replaced large failing ones, and are now getting outsized results for poor children.
The 2002 American Community Survey, taken by the US Census Bureau, indicated that 52.7 percent of the American population has some sort of college education; however, only 27.2 percent of Americans actually continue their education long enough to obtain a college degree. These numbers seems pretty dismal when compared with countries like Finland and the Netherlands where the percentage of people with college degrees range from 34 to 40 percent. Fortunately, the number of people taking online classes continues to rise, increasing the percentage of people working towards obtaining a degree. When you take into consideration the benefits online classes offer it's easy to see why the popularity of online education has grown immensely over the past few years.
Throughout our nation's history, Americans have found the courage to do right by our children's future. Deep down, every American knows we face a moment of truth once again. We cannot play games or put off hard choices any longer. Without regard to party, we have a patriotic duty to keep the promise of America to give our children and grandchildren a better life.
Our challenge is clear and inescapable: America cannot be great if we go broke. Our businesses will not be able to grow and create jobs, and our workers will not be able to compete successfully for the jobs of the future without a plan to get this crushing debt burden off our backs.
Ever since the economic downturn, families across the country have huddled around kitchen tables, making tough choices about what they hold most dear and what they can learn to live without. They expect and deserve their leaders to do the same. The American people are counting on us to put politics aside, pull together not pull apart, and agree on a plan to live within our means and make America strong for the long haul.
As members of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, we spent the past eight months studying the same cold, hard facts. Together, we have reached these unavoidable conclusions: The problem is real. The solution will be painful. There is no easy way out. Everything must be on the table. And Washington must lead.
We come from different backgrounds, represent different regions, and belong to different parties, but we share a common belief that America's long-term fiscal gap is unsustainable and, if left unchecked, will see our children and grandchildren living in a poorer, weaker nation. In the words of Senator Tom Coburn, "We keep kicking the can down the road, and splashing the soup all over our grandchildren." Every modest sacrifice we refuse to make today only forces far greater sacrifices of hope and opportunity upon the next generation.
Over the course of our deliberations, the urgency of our mission has become all the more apparent. The contagion of debt that began in Greece and continues to sweep through Europe shows us clearly that no economy will be immune. If the U.S. does not put its house in order, the reckoning will be sure and the devastation severe.
The President and the leaders of both parties in both chambers of Congress asked us to address the nation's fiscal challenges in this decade and beyond. We have worked to offer an aggressive, fair, balanced, and bipartisan proposal - a proposal as serious as the problems we face. None of us likes every element of our plan, and each of us had to tolerate provisions we previously or presently oppose in order to reach a principled compromise. We were willing to put our differences aside to forge a plan because our nation will certainly be lost without one.
We do not pretend to have all the answers. We offer our plan as the starting point for a serious national conversation in which every citizen has an interest and all should have a say. Our leaders have a responsibility to level with Americans about the choices we face, and to enlist the ingenuity and determination of the American people in rising to the challenge.
Former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has joined the education transition team of Florida Gov.-elect Rick Scott (R), according to a statement from the Scott's office.
The full text of the statement, after the jump.
FORT LAUDERDALE, FL - Calling the members of his latest transition team "Champions for Achievement," Governor-elect Rick Scott announced an experienced and distinguished team of education experts, including nationally recognized education reformer, Michelle Rhee, to help him find innovative ways to create a new education system for a new economy.
As the newly hired "repurposer" of the Kansas City School District's closed schools, Shannon Jaax will try to do what no one has been able to do for a long time.
Her job: Lead a successful campaign to turn vacant school properties back into community assets.
Jaax, a lead planner with the city's planning department, inherits a landscape littered with decaying buildings, some of them having stood empty for more than a decade.
The effort takes on more urgency since the district has added 21 buildings to a closure list that now totals 35.
The district will be engaging all the community and city resources it can to make the process work, she said.
Sally Blount is getting down to business. As the newly appointed dean of the Kellogg school at Northwestern University near Chicago, the chic 48-year-old professor is taking the school back to its roots as one of the few top US business schools that focuses on teaching management rather than finance and economics.
Fast-talking and forthright, and a specialist in negotiation and behavioural decision-making, Prof Blount says she is perplexed about how MBAs have been hijacked by the finance industry.
On November 29, 2010, the Madison School District responded to a request for information from the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) about Madison's services for talented and gifted students.
The DPI initiated an audit of Madison's talented and gifted programming after West High School area parents filed a complaint on September 20, 2010, arguing that West refuses to provide appropriate programs for ninth and tenth grade students gifted in language arts and social studies. West requires all freshmen and sophomores to take regular core English and history courses, regardless of learning level.
(All three of Madison's other comprehensive high schools-East, LaFollette, and Memorial-provide advanced sections of core subjects before 11th grade. East and LaFollette offer advanced and/or honors sections starting in ninth grade, while Memorial offers English 10 honors and AP World History for tenth graders.)
As part of a Small Learning Community Initiative phased in over the past decade, West implemented a one-size-for-all English and social studies program to stop different groups of students from following different courses of study. Some groups had typically self-selected into rigorous, advanced levels while others seemed stuck in more basic or remedial levels. Administrators wanted to improve the quality of classroom experience and instruction for "all students" by mixing wide ranges of ability together in heterogeneous classrooms.
Bill Gates is raising his arm, bent at the elbow, in the direction of the ceiling. The point he's making is so important that he wants me and the pair of Gates Foundation staffers sitting in the hotel conference room in Louisville, Ky., to recognize the space between this thought and every lower-ranking argument. "If there's one thing that can be done for the country, one thing," Gates says, his normally modulated voice rising, "improving education rises so far above everything else!" He doesn't say what the "else" is--deficit reduction? containing Iran? free trade?--but they're way down toward the floor compared with the arm above that multibillion-dollar head. With the U.S. tumbling since 1995 from second in the world to 16th in college-graduation rates and to 24th place in math (for 15-year-olds), it was hard to argue the point. Our economic destiny is at stake.
Gates had just finished giving a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers in which he tried to explain how administrators could hope to raise student achievement in the face of tight budgets. The Microsoft founder went through what he sees as false solutions--furloughs, sharing textbooks--before focusing on the true "cost drivers": seniority-based pay and benefits for teachers rising faster than state revenues.
Seniority is the two-headed monster of education--it's expensive and harmful. Like master's degrees for teachers and smaller class sizes, seniority pay, Gates says, has "little correlation to student achievement." After exhaustive study, the Gates Foundation and other experts have learned that the only in-school factor that fully correlates is quality teaching, which seniority hardly guarantees. It's a moral issue. Who can defend a system where top teachers are laid off in a budget crunch for no other reason than that they're young?
In most states, pay and promotion of teachers are connected 100 percent to seniority. This is contrary to everything the world's second-richest man believes about business: "Is there any other part of the economy where someone says, 'Hey, how long have you been mowing lawns? ... I want to pay you more for that reason alone.' " Gates favors a system where pay and promotion are determined not just by improvement in student test scores (an idea savaged by teachers' unions) but by peer surveys, student feedback (surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom), video reviews, and evaluation by superiors. In this approach, seniority could be a factor, but not the only factor.
President Obama knows that guaranteed tenure and rigid seniority systems are a problem, but he's not yet willing to speak out against them. Even so, Gates gives Obama an A on education. The Race to the Top program, Gates says, is "more catalytic than anyone expected it to be" in spurring accountability and higher standards.
Gates hardly has all the answers: he spent $2 billion a decade ago breaking up big high schools into smaller ones and didn't get the results he'd hoped for. Today, he's too enamored of handheld devices for tracking student performance. They could end up as just another expensive, high-tech gimmick. But you've got to give Gates credit for devoting so much of his brain and fortune to this challenge. [BIG BIAS ALERT HERE!] His biggest adversary now is Diane Ravitch, a jaundiced former Education Department official under George H.W. Bush, who changed sides in the debate and now attacks Gates-funded programs in books and articles. Ravitch, the Whittaker Chambers of school reform, gives intellectual heft to the National Education Association's campaign to discredit even superb charter schools and trash intriguing reform ideas that may threaten its power. When I asked Gates about Ravitch, you could see the Micro-hard hombre who once steamrolled software competitors: "Does she like the status quo? Is she sticking up for decline? Does she really like 400-page [union] contracts? Does she think all those 'dropout factories' are lonely? If there's some other magic way to reduce the dropout rate, we're all ears." Gates understands that charters aren't a silver bullet, and that many don't perform. But he doesn't have patience for critics who spend their days tearing down KIPP schools and other models that produce results.
There's a backlash against the rich taking on school reform as a cause. Some liberals figure they must have an angle and are scapegoating teachers. But most of the wealthy people underwriting this long-delayed social movement for better performance are on the right track. [BIG BIAS ALERT HERE!] Like the rest of us, they know that if we don't fix education, we can kiss our future goodbye.
Jonathan Alter is also the author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One and The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.
Administrator, Board Office pays from $45,573.00 - $62,920.00
Manager, Board Office pays $68,474.00 - $94,578.00
Here's the scoop on the Administrator job:
This position is designed to provide a high level of staff support for the School Board Directors and the School Board Office. This position provides both secretarial and administrative services including: serving as the public representation of the Board office; serving as a liaison between the Directors and staff; providing School Board Directors with documents and other information they need prior to Board or Committee meetings; creating and maintaining a variety of databases, including historical policy archives and meeting archives; creating and maintaining a tracking system for Board Director requests for information from staff; creating and maintaining a tracking system for constituent correspondence with the Board; creating and maintaining the School Board, Policy, and Government Relations internal and external web pages; and ensuring that School Board meetings run smoothly and on time.
Stephanie Findley was not just some carpetbagger looking for a job when she decided to run for the Assembly earlier this year.
She had a job -- a few of them, actually. She worked as an office manager for Milwaukee District Council 48, a large and politically active labor group. She owned a small business, Fast & Accurate Business Solutions. She taught classes at the Spanish Center in Milwaukee and at Bryant & Stratton College.
A single mother who says she was already pregnant when she walked across the stage to get her Milwaukee Public High School degree some 20 years ago, Findley had overcome poverty and earned a master's degree from Cardinal Stritch. She was also active in the Democratic Party, was head of the City of Milwaukee's Election Commission and volunteered for too many organizations to count.
She was a 20-year resident of the 10th Assembly District, which has long been the province of retiring lawmaker Annette Polly Williams -- a woman many still call "the mother of school choice" -- when she decided to run for the seat herself. Findley, after all, had many of the same struggles and worries her neighbors did -- including the high cost of health care, taxes, and the quality of MPS schools.
The girls swim team won the state title, a first for Milton girls athletics. And an arbitrator said the district could switch health coverage away from the insurer owned by the teachers union. That'll save the district as much as a million bucks a year.
For a district with a $33 million budget, that's cheery. For the rest of the state, it means a tide may have turned.
It could mean the end to the costly market dominance of WEA Trust, the health insurer owned by the Wisconsin Education Association Council. Just under two-thirds of Wisconsin districts use WEA Trust, a puzzling preference since its coverage is so costly.
Districts that buy WEA Trust plans average $1,665 a month for family premiums, according to their state association, while those choosing other carriers average $1,466. The difference is greatest where taxpayers cover the whole premium.
By Chicago Public Schools' own reckoning, about a quarter of its elementary schools and more than 40 percent of its high schools are failing, according to internal documents obtained by the Tribune.
Each year, district officials score each school based on academic performance. Last year, they assigned grades A through F based on the numeric scores, and schools chief Ron Huberman talked of publicly releasing them so school and community members would know where they stood. But he never did.
An analysis of the grades shows that a disproportionate number of schools scored in the D range or worse, including 48 percent of elementaries and 68 percent of high schools.
In Kalamazoo, Mich., a program supported by a group of anonymous donors ensures that graduates of the city's public schools can attend college for free or at a big discount, depending on how many years they've spent in Kalamazoo Public Schools.
Now, a group of volunteers in Milwaukee is trying to replicate the Kalamazoo Promise, which has helped send 1,250 Kalamazoo graduates to college since the program was unveiled in 2005, according to the nonprofit's executive director.
The Milwaukee Promise initiative, which aims to provide post-secondary tuition for graduates of Milwaukee Public Schools, is at the beginning stages of its journey. Milwaukee Promise Inc. just became a nonprofit in August, and it still needs a permanent board of directors, a full-time director and funding.
But organizers said they've come far enough in the planning process to present the idea to stakeholders Monday at the Milwaukee County Cooperative Extension offices, 9501 W. Watertown Plank Road, Wauwatosa.
Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain.
African American and Latino boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve to their dreams and aspirations. Likewise, boys in general lag behind girls in most indicators of student achievement.
Research indicates that although boys of color have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein men of color find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young men of color will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep) will be established to serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men, particularly young men of color and those who desire a nurturing educational experience for young men.
Madison Prep's founders understand that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, lack of access to positive male role models and achievement-oriented peer groups, limited exposure to opportunity and culture outside their neighborhood or city, and a general lack of understanding - and in some cases fear - of Black and Latino boys among adults are major contributing factors to why so many young men are failing to achieve to their full potential. However, the Urban League of Greater Madison - the "founders" of Madison Prep - also understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to exclusively benefit boys.
Madison Prep will be a non-instrumentality charter school - authorized by the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education - that serves an all-male student body in grades 6-12. It will be open to all males residing in Dane County who apply, regardless of previous academic performance. The school will provide a world class secondary education for young men that prepares them for leadership, service, and success at a four-year college or university.
Madison Prep will employ seven Educational Strategies to achieve this mission: an all-male student body, the International Baccalaureate curriculum, a College Preparatory educational program, Harkness Teaching, an extended school day and year, mentoring and community support, and the "Prep Year."
Madison Prep will also use four key Operational Strategies in order to support the educational strategies: adequate staffing, target student population, appropriate facilities/location, and sufficient funding.
Eight Core Values and Four Leadership Dimensions will additionally serve as underpinnings for the success of Madison Prep and Madison Prep students. These Core Values - Excellence & Achievement, Accountability, Teamwork, Innovation, Global Perspective, Perseverance, Leading with Purpose, and Serving Others - will also root Madison Prep in the Educational Framework of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Four Leadership Dimensions - Personal, Team, Thought, and Results Leadership - will serve as criteria for student and staff evaluations.
Madison Prep's educational program will be bolstered by partnerships with businesses, government agencies, professional and membership associations, colleges and universities, and scholarship-providing organizations that have the capacity to bring talent, expertise and resources into the school community to benefit Madison Prep students, faculty, staff, and parents. Madison Prep will also host special activities to engage parents, family members, and the community in the education of their young men. Invitations will be extended to parents, community leaders, and experts to join young men at the Harkness Table to add to their learning and to learn with them.
Seed funding for the establishment of Madison Prep will come from public and private sources, including planning and implementation grants from charter school investment funds, charitable foundations, government agencies, and individuals. Ideally, Madison Prep will be located in a business or higher education environment with access to quality classroom, athletic and laboratory facilities or the ability to create such facilities.
The Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM or Urban League) will submit a Detailed Proposal for Madison Prep in 2011 to the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Board of Education to receive approval to open the school in 2012. If approved, the school will open in August 2012 serving 90 boys in grades 6 and 7. The school will grow by one grade level each year until it offers a full complement of secondary grades (6 -12). At maturity, Madison Prep will serve 315 students and graduate its first class of seniors in 2017-18.
In many ways, the outcome of this initiative will be a defining moment for our local public schools, particularly in terms of diffused governance, choice, a different curricular approach (potentially a movement away from the one size fits all model), economics and community engagement. If it does not happen in Madison, I suspect it will with a neighboring district.
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The Madison Prep Difference
Although it is clear that Madison Prep can and will support MMSD objectives, there is no doubt that Madison Prep will be unique. Madison Prep will be the only all-male public school option in Dane County serving young men when it opens in 2012. Furthermore, the school will be the only IB school in the city offering the full continuum of the IB Programme at the secondary level. Young men enrolled in Madison Prep in 6th grade will begin their education in the IB Middle Years Programme and continue in the curriculum until they move into the rigorous two- year Diploma Programme beginning in 11th grade, thereby increasing their likeliness of success. Finally, while MMSD offers after school activities and care, no school in the district offers a significant amount of additional instructional time through an extended school day and extended school year, as Madison Prep will.
In mathematics classrooms, generalization is an important part of the curriculum.
When students know how to generalize they can identify commonality across cases, extend their reasoning beyond the range in which it originated, and derive broader results from particular cases. But generalization remains difficult for students to do, and for teachers to support.
UW-Madison education professor Amy Ellis studies the processes that support students' productive generalizing in their math classrooms. She considers generalization a dynamic social process as well as an individual cognitive activity.
In a recent study she studied an 8th-grade math class during a 3-week unit on quadratic growth. The class sessions focused on relationships between the height and area of growing rectangles (see illustration). As they grew, the rectangles retained the same height-to-length ratio.
In the decade since educators launched a nationwide campaign to improve schools and stop students from dropping out, progress has been made, according to a new report, but more than 1 million public high school students failed to graduate with their class this year and 2 million attend so-called "dropout factory" schools where their chance of graduating is only 50-50.
Being able to read in third grade is an early indicator of whether a student will stay in school.
In the first half of the decade, at least one out of every four public high school students and almost 40 percent of minority students (defined as African-Americans, Hispanics and American Indians) did not successfully graduate with their class. In 2008, the high school graduation rate was about 75 percent, a three-point increase from 2001.
Students can lose interest in school early, according to education experts. Studies show that you can tell who is most at risk for dropping out from third grade reading scores. Half of all low-income fourth-graders who could not read on grade level were put on a "drop out" track, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
As soon as a doctor, lawyer, or plumber walks into any social setting, it seems as if they are the sole representatives of their respective professions. Can you help me treat this sore shoulder, sue the person that injured it, and unplug the drain under my sink? With all the press lately on education reform, most of which related to the hoopla enveloping the "Superman" film, I certainly become the local representative of both teachers and higher education most everywhere I go. Questions arise. What did you think of that latest Friedman column in The New York Times? How can my child transfer to a different public school? The kicker: What is wrong with our education system anyway?
The more questions I'm asked, the fewer answers reached than expected by both myself and others. It's fitting that I'm bringing this up around the holiday season because this is the time families are visited and new acquaintances are made. So, what do you do for a living? I teach teachers. Ah, so how do we get rid of all these crap teachers?
Prince George's County Executive-elect Rushern L. Baker III endorsed longer school days for the county's elementary and middle school students, who now have among the shortest instruction times in the state.
"You extend the days, we will talk about [funding] it," Baker told a gathering of school officials and incoming County Council members at Prince George's Community College Monday. "As a parent, I support this."
The average school day in Maryland is seven hours for elementary and middle schools, State Superintendent of Schools Nancy S. Grasmick said. In Prince George's, the school day is six hours and 15 minutes.
Neither Baker nor any of the officials estimated the cost of extending the school day in the county's 131 elementary schools, 29 middle schools and sevencombined elementary-middle schools.
As an unidentified first-year law student comes to grips with the reality of his situation--a likely $150,000 in debt by the time he graduates, with no guarantee of a legal job that will make it easy for him to repay this money--he is thinking about dropping out now.
Owing only $21,000 in law school debt at this point, he tells Above the Law, he would probably be better off to call it quits now. That way, he will not only be better off financially, with far less to repay, but happier, since he won't have to work as hard.
About four out of five responders to an ATL reader survey seeking input about what the 1L should do agree that dropping out is the best option.
But his focus on finances in analyzing the situation shows exactly what the problem is, says Brian Tannebaum in a response to the ATL post on his My Law License blog:
The House of Representatives today delayed a vote on the $4.5 billion child nutrition bill that would ban greasy food and sugary soft drinks from schools. The legislation has triggered criticism for its hefty price tag and new nutritional requirements that some say shouldn't come from the federal government.
The bill is expected to be brought up later this week.
The legislation has the support of the White House and first lady Michelle Obama, who has made childhood obesity a central focus.
The Senate bill, which passed with unanimous bipartisan consent in August, would expand eligibility for school lunch programs, establish nutrition standards for all school meals, and encourage schools to use locally produced food. It would also raise the reimbursement rate to six cents per meal, marking the first time in over 30 years that Congress has increased funding for school lunch programs.
"Caught in the hurricane of hormones," the Toronto Star began a 2008 story about students in the Canadian capital's middle schools. Suspended "between childhood and the adult world, pre-teens have been called the toughest to teach."
"The Bermuda triangle of education," former Louisiana superintendent Cecil Picard once termed middle schools. "Hormones are flying all over the place."
Indeed, you can't touch middle school without hearing about "raging hormones."
Says Diane Ross, a middle-school teacher for 17 years and for 13 more a teacher of education courses for licensure in Ohio, "If you are the warm, nurturing, motherly, grandmotherly type, you are made for early childhood education. If you love math or science or English, then you are the high school type. If you love bungee jumping, then you are the middle school type."
Even in professional journals you catch the drift of "middle-school madness." Mayhem in the Middle was a particularly provocative study by Cheri Pierson Yecke published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2005. American middle schools have become the places "where academic achievement goes to die," wrote Yecke.
FOR YEARS, POOR PERFORMANCE BY STUDENTS IN AMERICA RELATIVE TO THOSE IN OTHER COUNTRIES HAS BEEN EXPLAINED AWAY AS A CONSEQUENCE OF OUR NATIONWIDE DIVERSITY. BUT WHAT IF YOU LOOKED MORE CLOSELY, BREAKING DOWN OUR RESULTS BY STATE AND SEARCHING NOT FOR AN AVERAGE, BUT FOR EXCELLENCE?
Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two colleagues recently conducted an experiment to answer just such questions, ranking American states and foreign countries side by side. Like our recruiter, they looked specifically at the best and brightest in each place--the kids most likely to get good jobs in the future--using scores on standardized math tests as a proxy for educational achievement.
We've known for some time how this story ends nationwide: only 6 percent of U.S. students perform at the advanced-proficiency level in math, a share that lags behind kids in some 30 other countries, from the United Kingdom to Taiwan. But what happens when we break down the results? Do any individual U.S. states wind up near the top?
Incredibly, no. Even if we treat each state as its own country, not a single one makes it into the top dozen contenders on the list. The best performer is Massachusetts, ringing in at No. 17. Minnesota also makes it into the upper-middle tier, followed by Vermont, New Jersey, and Washington. And down it goes from there, all the way to Mississippi, whose students--by this measure at least--might as well be attending school in Thailand or Serbia.
ANUSHEK, WHO GREW UP outside Cleveland and graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1965, has the gentle voice and manner of Mr. Rogers, but he has spent the past 40 years calmly butchering conventional wisdom on education. In study after study, he has demonstrated that our assumptions about what works are almost always wrong. More money does not tend to lead to better results; smaller class sizes do not tend to improve learning. "Historically," he says, "reporters call me [when] the editor asks, 'What is the other side of this story?'"
Charter school management organizations (CMOs) have emerged as a popular means for bringing charter schooling to scale. Advocates credit CMOs with delivering a coherent model of charter schooling to a growing number of children across numerous sites. Skeptics have wondered whether CMOs constitute an effective management approach, whether they won't merely re-create the pathologies of school districts as they grow in size and scale, and whether they are well-suited to make use of new technological tools. In this forum, Robin Lake of the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF) CEO Kevin Hall discuss what we know about the strengths and frailties of CMOs, what the future holds, and what promising alternatives might be.
A controversial plan to open a Hebrew-immersion charter school in Bergen County might have its best chance at state approval this year as the Christie administration looks to expand school choice throughout the state.
The application for Shalom Academy -- thrice rejected by the state and opposed by local school administrators -- is also buoyed by the opening this year of a similar school in East Brunswick, which already has a waiting list for the next school year.
Single-gender classes in public schools have had a positive effect on students' performance, attitude and ambitions, according to a survey released Tuesday by the South Carolina Department of Education.
Two-thirds of about 7,000 students in South Carolina's single-gender programs who responded to the annual survey said the classes have improved their academic performance and classroom attitude, 79 percent reported increases in their classroom effort, and 83 percent said they were more likely to finish high school.
The survey also included responses from 1,120 of their parents and 760 teachers in 119 elementary, middle and high schools. Ninety-four percent of parents said their children were more likely to graduate from high school, and 85 percent of teachers saw increases in effort with school work.
After publishing essay on addiction to war, Charles Whittington must obtain psychological evaluation before returning to classes
By writing the paper, Charles Whittington thought he would confront the anxieties that had tormented him since he returned from war.
He knew it wasn't normal to dwell on the pleasure of sticking his knife between an enemy soldier's ribs. But by recording his words, maybe he'd begin to purge the fixation.
So Whittington, an Iraq veteran, submitted an essay on the allure of combat for his English class at the Community College of Baltimore County in Catonsville. He called war a drug and wrote that killing "is something that I do not just want but something I really need so I can feel like myself."
SEVEN YEARS AGO, Maria Goodloe-Johnson declined to apply for the job as superintendent of Seattle Public Schools and instead took the same job with the Charleston County School District in South Carolina. "The [Seattle] school board was very confused," she says. "And I wasn't interested in confusion." She won't get more specific than that when describing the district circa 2003, but it couldn't have been drastically different than the situation she inherited when she accepted the Seattle school district's top spot in 2007.
Attendance at South Seattle schools was sinking. The school board had adopted a new student assignment plan without any idea of how to implement it. Schools were teaching to vastly different standards. Heck, the district's computer system was so outdated, prospective teachers had no means for applying online for jobs at multiple schools at once. SPS lacked accountability and administrative oversight, and Goodloe-Johnson whipped out her ruler and started rapping knuckles almost immediately.
My high school alma mater, Waubonsie Valley High School, was diverse in every sense of the term, but the most striking difference I noticed was the vast disparity in achievement that existed within each classroom.
While some students graduated and went to top universities like MIT, Brown and UW-Madison, others continued to struggle with writing complete sentences or finishing an algebra test in their senior year. A handful of students did not receive the learning experience they needed to prepare them for the future.
This glaring achievement gap is present in the city of Madison--most notably in the African-American population--where only 52 percent of students graduated from high school in 2009.
Fortunately, Kaleem Caire of the Urban League is stepping up and proposing a way to increase graduation rates and overall academic achievement among Madison students.
Caire plans to build an all-male, mostly African-American charter school called Madison Prep for sixth through 12th graders. Madison Prep will take several departures from the normal school model that many students find sufficient, but will focus additional attention on students who need extra help--a necessary resource that is often lacking in Madison schools.
ALLOWING teachers, parents, charities and religious groups to open new schools funded by the state, but independent of local authorities, is a central plank of the government's plans for improving education in England. Despite the enthusiasm of the education secretary, Michael Gove, for such radical reform, take-up has been lacklustre: he has approved just 25 "free-school" proposals so far. Likewise his bid to encourage existing state schools to become academies--again, funded by the state but independent of local authorities--has failed to take off.
On November 24th Mr Gove unveiled his latest plan for curing ailing schools, this time by changing what is taught in them, and who does the teaching. He is thus revisiting the policy terrain on which the previous Labour government focused (arguing that "standards, not structures" were what mattered) until its final term in office.
Britain's best independent schools attract pupils from around the world. But most British families cannot afford the steep fees such schools charge. Just 7% of British children are educated privately; the rest attend state schools, where standards are generally much lower. The Labour government doubled school spending in real terms during its 13 years in power; despite the splurge, the attainment gap between the two systems has widened.
Eleven years ago, Florida chose sweeping reforms to improve the dire state of education affecting their children. Today, these changes are still paying dividends, and don't show signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Florida's graduation rate, once amongst the worst in America, has risen steadily over the past five years, capping off at 79 percent for the 2009-2010 school year. This is over ten percentage points more than in 2005-2006, when the rate held at 68.9, and a 20-point increase from Manhattan Institute estimates of the rate in 2000-2001. Over this span, the state has gone from straggling behind the national average to becoming an above-average performer when it comes to graduating their high school students.
Most encouraging, however, are the state's results when it comes to the matriculation of minority students. African-American and Hispanic students have made the strongest gains of any group since 2005-2006. These two groups have improved their rates by 13.1 and 13.3 percent, respectively, to become the driving force behind Florida's overall improvement. Comparatively, white students have only bettered their graduation rate by eight percent over the same time frame. Through the past decade, Florida has proven that the achievement gap can be conquered through dynamic solutions in the classroom.
There has been surprisingly little discussion about why Wisconsin did not win a Race to the Top grant. A look at the points awarded for each section of Wisconsin's application and the accompanying reviewer comments makes it clear that the failure to use student achievement data to inform decisions was the most important contributor to Wisconsin's loss. More aggressive use of these data would have put Wisconsin within striking distance of winning.
The irony of Wisconsin's loss is that its largest district, Milwaukee Public Schools, was one of the pioneers of the value-added movement. Ten years ago, it started work on a value-added model that has since spread to other cities and states, including some Race to the Top winners.
This reluctance to use data seems deeply ingrained in Wisconsin's education culture.
For example, the state defines "highly qualified teachers" in very traditional terms, such as degrees, certifications, courses taken, and years of experience. Unfortunately, most research has found little correlation between these traditional measures and student achievement gains, which Wisconsin ignores.
The greatest challenge facing America's schools today isn't the budget crisis, or standardized testing, or "teacher quality." It's the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom. How we as a country handle this challenge says a lot about our values and priorities, for good and ill. Unfortunately, the issue has become enmeshed in polarizing arguments about race, class, excellence, and equity. What's needed instead is some honest, frank discussion about the trade-offs associated with any possible solution.
U.S. students are all over the map in terms of achievement (see Figure 1). By the 4th grade, public-school children who score among the top 10 percent of students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are reading at least six grade levels above those in the bottom 10 percent. For a teacher with both types of students in her classroom, that means trying to challenge kids ready for middle-school work while at the same time helping others to decode. Even differences between students at the 25th and at the 75th percentiles are huge--at least three grade levels. So if you're a teacher, how the heck do you deal with that?
The Madison School Board on Monday delayed approval of an agriculture-themed charter school by two weeks after learning the school could cost the district about $318,000 more than previously thought.
The board had been told Badger Rock Middle School, estimated to cost $596,000 in the 2011-12 school year, would be cost-neutral, but that prediction was based on erroneous information provided by district officials earlier this year. Superintendent Dan Nerad apologized for the error during Monday night's board meeting.
Erik Kass, assistant superintendent for business services, said his staff told the planning team for Badger Rock in February that it could budget $596,000 for the school.
But the district failed to account for an additional $310,000 needed to create 3.9 new positions in the district to accommodate the new school. The district also determined the school's proposed utilities budget was $8,000 too low.
When I was a student, then faculty member, then administrator at private universities -- a mere 40+ years -- land-grant institutions were not front and center in my consciousness. Having now moved to a land-grant institution, I have concluded they are one of the most precious if not always most highly visible resources this nation has.
Our nation needs to broaden what "greatness" in a university means. At the very least, we need to expand our conception of greatness to a multidimensional notion, not just a notion of unidimensional rankings as appear in certain magazines. Land-grant institutions, contrary to some popular beliefs, are not merely about agricultural development, but rather, about changing the world in a positive, meaningful, and enduring way. Land-grant institutions perhaps best represent the very core of what greatness means in American society -- namely, equal opportunity for all and, through it, the chance to make our society and the world a better place in which to live.
K-12 curricula needs to be less expensive and of higher quality. Nearly all curricula used in schools and adopted by school districts is print based. The cost of printing keeps open source and small, innovative, for-profit projects from being widely available in print and thus, widely adopted by school districts. The fixed, static nature of print means writers can't get real time, detailed feedback on their work and can't change it to meet teacher's needs.
We make curricula free to create, drastically lowering the costs of production. We help developers make their curricula better by providing opportunities for teachers to give feedback on resources they use. By making curricula free to create and connecting developers to teachers, we lower costs and improve quality.
t's not often that Slow Lane can claim a scoop but I think I am the first to divulge the contents of a report that has just, rather mysteriously, arrived on my desk. It is called "The Future of BP" and it was commissioned by the UK government from Dr Stradivario Verdi, the noted entomologist and education tsar - until he was forced to step down from his position earlier this year because of damaging rumours about his relationship with a stag beetle.
Verdi calls not simply for a reorganisation of the company affected by a series of environmental and safety disasters culminating in the Deepwater Horizon spill but for a fundamental change in its philosophy. Amazingly, he suggests that BP in the future should be concerned not with making money for shareholders but with something he quaintly terms the public good. This would seem to imply a radical move away from environmentally damaging oil and gas exploration and refining into the development of renewable energy.
Only joking. This absurd caprice is, however, not really any more absurd, when you think about it, than the independent review of higher education and student finance commissioned by the UK government and chaired by the former chief executive of BP, Lord Browne - a businessman, not an educationalist.
How could he have spent much time in serious thought, research or discussion about the purposes of higher education when he was at the helm of one of the world's biggest corporations?
State schools Superintendent Tony Evers (left) says his proposed funding plan is a matter of fairness and transparency.
"Every child in the state of Wisconsin should be supported by some level of general aid," Evers said on Sunday's "UpFront with Mike Gousha," a statewide TV newsmagazine produced in conjunction with WisPolitics.com. "That's not the case now. It's a pure fairness issue."
His plan calls for a $420 million funding boost over two years that would allow the state to pitch in at least $3,000 for every student in each district.
Evers said the increase would represent the smallest bump in terms of dollars or percent that the department has asked for in the past decade. He disputed accounts that the plan was "dead on arrival" in next year's Republican-run Legislature and said he's gotten good response to at least talking about the concept.
He said the major concerns so far have been the price tag, but there has been support for the overall policy.
Evers said his goal with the plan is to reduce the complexity in the school funding formula, increase transparency in the way schools are funded and "nudge the system" away from using property values as the basis for funding schools.
James Sonnenberg has a request for Gregory Thornton, the new superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools: "Give me the best you have, to work with the children who need the most."
It's a logical request. Most business leaders put the most capable employees in the most demanding situations.
But it's also a very tough request, because, in general, that isn't the way it works in education, where quality flows uphill, away from the lowest-performing schools and students. As teachers build up experience, seniority and, experts generally say, competence, they head for higher-performing kids, higher-performing schools and, frequently, the suburbs.
Sonnenberg is the highly regarded principal of West Side Academy, an MPS kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school in a tough neighborhood, around N. 35th St. and W. Lisbon Ave. His pursuit of a strong teaching staff is one vignette in a story that runs deep in schools serving high-needs children all across the nation.
Sonnenberg has plenty of weight to put behind his quest for more star power on his teaching staff. Federal law calls for doing more to put good teachers in front of the kids most likely to falter. Research shows those children are likely to benefit the most from having star teachers. There is wide agreement that it is a worthy goal.
It's hard not to reflect carefully upon the Seattle Public School District's dramatic acknowledgement that a major data point used by parents, educators, school board members and others to highlight the district's quality is absolutely wrong. I have been thinking long and hard about this issue since it hit the newspaper last week. Without question, I have been one of the elected officials most guilty of perpetuating the (incorrect) data, and it doesn't feel good.
While there are some who will see a more cynical conspiracy, I see a profoundly troubling mistake that needs to be discussed openly and courageously in all corners of our community.
The real issue is obviously not that a mistake was made. The district's admission this week that a key piece of data is wildly inaccurate is more than an embarrassing glitch, it's a symbolic reflection of a more systematic challenge facing many elected boards statewide that have fiduciary obligations to oversee billions in tax dollars and policy but lack access to the professional, independent staff to do the job.
School districts across the state and nation are well versed in the inconsistent arrangement by which part-time, unpaid community leaders (who campaign for the job) are then expected to volunteer thousands of hours without the ability to get the answers to their tough questions that may run counter to professional staff interests. The real issue is that the district's administration didn't strive to aggressively correct the inaccuracy from day one. They need to ask themselves why and, hopefully, share the truth with the community.
f you only watch one video on my site, make it this one.
Are schools designed to help people learn? Are colleges and universities really institutions of higher education? Do students actually learn any science in science classes? Can skateboarding give us a better model for teaching and learning? Watch this video to find out.
At some point in the next couple months, members of the Madison School Board are almost certain to be in the unlucky position of having to decide whether to admit what is most fairly characterized as a colossal failure.
Approving a charter for Urban League of Greater Madison President Kaleem Caire's all-boy, mostly black, non-union Madison Preparatory Academy will make it clear that, when it comes to many black schoolchildren, teachers have failed to teach, parents have failed to parent, and the rest of us have failed to do anything about either.
Reject the charter and risk the false hope that comes from thinking that all these children need is another program and more "outreach." A tweak here and a tweak there and we can all just keep on keeping on. Never mind that the approach hasn't seemed to work so far, and that if past is prologue, we already know this story's end.
Caire's model would be a radical departure for Madison. The district's two existing charter schools -- Wright Middle School and Nuestro Mundo -- don't exactly trample on hallowed educational ground. They employ union teachers and have the same number of school days and teaching hours as any other non-charter and "broadly follow our district policies in the vast majority of ways," said district spokesman Ken Syke.
I want to thank Kaleem Caire for coming home to Madison and making positive changes. If anyone can make an all-male charter school happen here, he can. The statistics in the article may be alarming to some, but not as alarming to the students and parents who are living these statistics.
I support integration, but how can it be true integration when the education gaps are so large? Who is benefiting? In my eyes, true integration in the school system would support the same quality of education, the same achievement expectations, the same disciplinary measures and so on.
Numbers don't lie, and what they tell us is that we need to go another route to ensure educational success for black males. If that means opening a charter school to intervene, then let's do it!
Instead of the headline "All-male charter school a tough sell," imagine this one, "Loss to society: Madison schools graduated only 52 percent of black male students in 2009." Then the reaction to the Urban League's plan to start a charter school intended to boost minority achievement might have been different.
Reaction in the article discussed all the reasons why people will or should oppose the idea of an all-male charter school, despite its benefits. Let's not talk about why we should be aghast at the cultural performance disparities in Madison's schools. And let's not talk about what we lose as a society when almost half of all black males attending Madison schools fail to graduate.
The comments of John Matthews, head of the Madison teachers union, on charter schools are hyperbole. Saying that the Madison School Board will have no control is a cover for the union not having control.
We can't argue the importance of good teachers. But the idea that a degree in education, and a union membership, make you the only one capable of performing this role is specious. All of us are teachers, or have been taught meaningfully by individuals with teaching skills. Are we going to let successful teachers teach, or are we going to let their union dictate?
According to Carlo D'Este's book "Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War," Churchill, during a lull in his career, learned bricklaying. Hearing this, the British Trade Union Council, in a public relations gesture, offered him a Master's card.
Douglas Alexander:
Madison Urban League President Kaleem Caire applied for a charter school for males because only 52 percent of black males graduate in Madison schools, while black males are suspended significantly more than the majority white students.
Before anyone responds, they should answer two questions:
Rahm Emanuel made a campaign promise last week that if elected mayor, he would install a new math and English language curriculum in Chicago's public schools by the end of his first term.
Mr. Emanuel said the new curriculum would be geared toward equipping students with the skills to meet the "common core standards" that education officials in Illinois and more than 40 other states have adopted. In imposing the new standards, the state has left up to the districts the question of how to try to meet those standards.
"I want us, the city of Chicago, to be the first city to adopt the curriculum that teaches toward the common standards," he said in an interview with the Chicago News Cooperative. "Nobody has taken on the initiative."
The effort would better prepare high school graduates for college or the workplace, he said.
All elementary breakfasts include a choice of one main fare item, one fruit or 100 percent fruit juice and one milk choice plus an option for cereal with graham crackers.
Monday: Whole wheat cinnamon bun or yogurt with graham crackers.
Tuesday: Breakfast burrito or Zac Omega bar.
Wednesday: Breakfast pizza or muffin loaf with cheese.
Samuel Casey Carter is, in a way, the Tom Paine of the movement to raise school achievement in low-income neighborhoods. He coined the term "no excuses schools" for those run by people who think that no matter how bad their students' family lives, with great teaching they should be able to learn just as much as kids from affluent suburban homes.
His new book, "On Purpose: How Great School Cultures Form Strong Character," puts this in an even wider context. He profiles a dozen schools that, he says, have set high expectations for personal attitudes and behavior and created both good people and good students.
This time, only four of the 12 schools Carter profiles are in low-income communities. Nearly all schools in all communities need some fixing, he says. They need to nourish student character if they want young intellects to grow.
A few years ago, teachers at Ellis Middle School in Austin, Minn., might have said that their top students were easy to identify: they completed their homework and handed it in on time; were rarely tardy; sat in the front of the class; wrote legibly; and jumped at the chance to do extra-credit assignments.
But after poring over four years of data comparing semester grades with end-of-the-year test scores on state subject exams, the teachers at Ellis began to question whether they really knew who the smartest students were.
About 10 percent of the students who earned A's and B's in school stumbled during end-of-the-year exams. By contrast, about 10 percent of students who scraped along with C's, D's and even F's -- students who turned in homework late, never raised their hands and generally seemed turned off by school -- did better than their eager-to-please B+ classmates.
The Northville school board named five finalists for its upcoming superintendent vacancy. Public interviews for the candidates will be at 6 and 8 p.m. Monday and Tuesday and 6 p.m. Wednesday at Northville High School.
The candidates are Catherine Cost, assistant superintendent of Farmington Public Schools; William DeFrance, superintendent of Eaton Rapids Public Schools; Mary Kay Gallagher, assistant superintendent of Northville Public Schools; Shawn Lewis-Lakin, superintendent of Manchester Public Schools, and Joseph Redden, educational management consultant and former superintendent of Cobb County Schools in Georgia.
The candidates are vying to replace Leonard Rezmierski, who is retiring in June after 20 years as superintendent of the 7,300-student district.
The Innovative and Alternative Program Committee is charged with identifying alternative education and program needs and developing a plan to expand alternative programs and educational options. This will allow the district to articulate a direction and a plan for these types of programs which will be presentedto the Board of Education.
An open approach to alternative education models - an area Madison lags - is a good thing. A simple first step would be to address Janet Mertz's longstanding quest Credit for Non Madison School District Courses.
Students face a test as they walk in the doors of Waterloo East High School each morning.
Their clothes must meet the definition of a school uniform enforced by adults who stand guard at the building entrances.
No shirt collar? No dress pants or skirts? No entry.
The routine will be familiar to every public school student in Waterloo by next year, if district officials win a battle to become the first in Iowa to require school uniforms.
It will be a year-round middle school. And an urban farm. And a cafe with indoor and outdoor seating. And a neighborhood center. And an office space. And a home for small business.
Planners of the Resilience Research Center development have firmed up their vision and timeline for the nearly 4-acre parcel planned to start taking shape in January on the South Side, near the intersection of East Badger and Rimrock roads.
Now they're working with the city on a somewhat complicated task: Zone this!
"I don't know of many other projects that have this type of mix with commercial uses and a school on one site," said Heather Stouder of the city's planning division.
Attached is the final draft of the Superintendent evaluation document to be used for the summative or end -of-year evaluation to be voted on at the November 29 meeting. The document has two parts. The first part is the Superintendent of Schools Performance Expectations Standards Assessment, a rubric based on the following:
The Superintendent Position Description, adopted Sept. 21, 2009; and
Feedback from the formative (mid-year) evaluation for the Superintendent, July 2010
The second part of the evaluation involves feedback on the following elements:
The Superintendent goals, approved December 15, 2009;
Two elements from the additional evaluation framework identified by Mr. Howard: Diversity and Inclusion and Safety.
From the original draft sent to the Operational Support Committee on November 8, these are element numbers 3 and 4. In addition to approving a final version of the evaluation plan, the Board needs to discuss the date for evaluations to be submitted for compilation to the Board president and dates for a closed session meeting(s) to discuss the results. To complete the process by February, January 3, 2011 is the recommended date for submittal. January 10, 24, and 31 are possible meeting dates. During this period Board members also need to provide input on the Superintendent's goals for 2011.
If you have any questions, please email James or Beth.
MMSD has had a longstanding relationship with the University of Wisconsin- Madison in providing schools as sites for practicum and student teachers to learn throughout their two years in the School of Education. Each of these schools had an Instructional Resource Teacher who provided support to UW students as well as professional development for all school staff. The UW, school, and central office all shared costs of these positions.
Project Description: This agreement provides for the interchange of three teachers in an effort to further the goals of the Madison Professional Development School Partnership (PDS). The teachers will assume the duties and responsibilities of PDS Supervisors/ Coordinators for Memorial High School, West High School, and Midvale/Lincoln Elementary Schools. The teachers will provide assistance in curriculum development and evaluation to teachers at the identified schools; coordinate placement of practicum and student teachers assigned by UW-Madison; give workshops; hold regular seminars for practicum students, student teachers, and building teachers; and assist UW staff in research and curriculum development efforts involving the PDS program
Fairfax County is considering its most sweeping redistricting plan in several years as it seeks to balance booming enrollment at many elementary schools and the expected closure of one, Clifton Elementary.
The Southwestern Boundary Study, which the School Board authorized in September, contemplates four approaches to rebalancing populations within a school district that is growing swiftly but unevenly, with the heaviest growth along the Route 29 corridor through the heart of the county. The boundary changes, depending on what version of the plan is approved, could affect students in as many as 23 elementary schools.
"Some schools continue to be overcrowded and others are well under capacity. Neither is a good environment for learning," said Denise James, director of facilities planning services for Fairfax public schools.
I heard Jeb Bush give a talk a few months ago in Milwaukee about education policies that he promoted while he was governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. I should have taken notes, because I think I was listening to at least a few of the pages from the playbook that will be used by Scott Walker when he becomes governor of Wisconsin in about five weeks.
I'm betting that is particularly true for the system of giving every school in the state a grade - A to F - each year. It's a centerpiece of the "A+ Schools" program that Bush championed in Florida. He credits the grading system with being a key driver of rising test scores over the last decade.
In his campaign platform, Walker called for launching a grading system for Wisconsin schools. He hasn't spelled out details, but Florida is the primary example of such a system, and Walker is an admirer of Bush. Walker also will have strong Republican majorities in both houses of the Legislature, and I can't think of any reason he won't succeed in turning what he said he would do into reality in the not-at-all-distant future.
So let's look at Florida's grading system on the assumption it is a lot like what will be used here.
There's a new program at Des Moines East High School that requires students who skip classes to go to school on Saturday mornings.
The Des Moines Register reports that the new Saturday program started earlier this months. The program requires students to attend school from 8 to 11 a.m. on Saturday if they have five or more unexcused absences. The goal is for the students to make up for time lost from the classroom. Principal Dan Conner says students who don't come on Saturdays face discipline, including in-school suspension.
Michelle A. Rhee is no longer chancellor of D.C. schools, but her presence still looms large over a Washington Teachers' Union election that is entering its final contentious days.
President George Parker faces a stiff reelection challenge from Nathan Saunders, the union's general vice president, who contends that Parker was too pliant in his dealings with Rhee. He cites the collective bargaining agreement Parker negotiated with Rhee, one that weakens traditional seniority and other job protections for teachers. Union members approved the contract in June.
Saunders also pledges to pursue legal, legislative and lobbying efforts to undo Rhee's signature initiative, the new IMPACT evaluation system that links some teacher appraisals to student test scores and can trigger dismissals for educators who don't meet certain classroom performance criteria.
It's become obvious in recent years that charter schools, with their unique and innovative approach to student instruction, are a source of great promise for our nation's troubled public education system.
For years, our nation's powerful school-employee unions, like the AFT and the National Education Association, opposed the very concept of charter schools and pressured state governments to cap their numbers or shut them down altogether.
To save the West Chester Area School District a million dollars a year on transportation, some students will have to start the school day earlier next fall and many will have to walk farther to bus stops.
At one middle school, pupils will ride with high schoolers for the first time.
School board members and administrators defend the changes, approved this week, as needed to conserve money for classroom services. Some parents wonder whether the district is putting financial considerations ahead of children's welfare.
Let the belt-tightening - and the debate over what to cut - begin again.
Even after cutting millions of dollars this school year, the 11,817-student district is projecting a $6 million budget gap for next fiscal year, which will start July 1.
So the board voted unanimously Tuesday to eliminate some buses and fill others closer to capacity. School times were changed, more than 900 bus stops were tentatively eliminated, and some nonpublic-school routes that the district covers were merged with those of public school students. More than 950 children who walk less than a tenth of a mile to a bus stop would have a longer walk under the changes.
The 'highly qualified' gap No Child Left Behind mandates such teachers in all U.S. schools. A new study shows that little progress has been made in meeting that requirement.
While states and school districts hotly debate the issue of whether student test scores should be used to evaluate teachers, the nation has been virtually ignoring a more basic question: whether those teachers are even qualified in the first place. Too many of them aren't.
The No Child Left Behind Act mandated that all students be taught by "highly qualified" teachers. And although we disagree with many elements of that 2001 federal school reform act -- its rigidity, its use of the wrong measurements to assess student progress -- this provision always made more sense.
Among other things, a highly qualified teacher in the secondary schools is supposed to have expertise in the subject he or she teaches, whether that means having majored in the subject in college or having a credential to teach it. Ample research has found that students learn better when their teachers have such formal expertise. Yet a new report by the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving the educational lot of poor and minority students, shows that the problem is widespread and that little progress has been made.
Several San Francisco supervisors are proposing making members of the city's school board full-time workers with health benefits, a pension and salary of $50,000 each.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the four supervisors have put forth an amendment to the City Charter that would change the position from what is currently largely a volunteer job.
San Francisco's seven school board members get a $500 stipend, shared use of a district car and a life insurance policy, but no salary.
Is it any wonder that the government is besieged on all sides by the educational establishment, for it is falling into the trap of all previous governments for the past 30 years: blaming the teachers and the students for the ills of the nation (Bad teachers out, social mobility in: Gove outlines goals, 25 November).
Having been in the field of education as a teacher, deputy head of a large and successful comprehensive school and now an administration manager in another, I weep for teaching staff and children in this country. Teachers and state schools have been forced to obey the whims of successive administrations because they thought they knew better. Despite continual central interference, and constant change in examination systems, teachers delivered time and time again. Standards have improved, and teachers are somehow vilified for it instead of congratulated.
Now we have another set of Harrow, Eton, Westminster and Oxbridge boys who know better than the sensible, pragmatic and logical majority of headteachers, teachers and teaching assistants working out there in state schools up and down the country. This group of privileged career politicians now have the nerve to take us back to the 1950s. All secondary schools will be measured against each other in five subjects: English, maths, science, a foreign language and history or geography. All modular exams will be abolished in favour of one set of exams at the end. Well, isn't this progress! This is not suitable for all children; what about business, enterprise, design and technology skills? What about even giving a thought for the bottom 20%? What will happen to them? Do they care?
IT BEGAN with a traffic violation. Last March Jessica Colotl, a 21-year-old political-science major at Kennesaw State University, was arrested for "impeding the flow of traffic". Cobb County authorities, who participate in a federal immigration-law enforcement programme, found that Ms Colotl was in the country illegally. She had entered with her parents when she was 10. She graduated from high school with an A average, and wanted to become a lawyer. Instead she will probably be deported in the spring, after she graduates.
And if Tom Rice gets his way, there will be no more Jessica Colotls. In October Georgia's Board of Regents, which oversees the state's public universities, banned illegal immigrants from the state's five most popular universities, and said that they cannot be admitted to the other 30 ahead of qualified legal residents, having found 501 undocumented students among the 310,000 enrolled in Georgia's public universities. For Mr Rice, a Republican state representative, this was not enough; he pre-filed a bill with the state's Assembly that would ban all illegals from public universities. If it passes when the legislature convenes in January (and it stands a good chance), Georgia will join South Carolina as the only states with such a ban.
Texas lawmakers, more than ever, are looking for a way to get the most bang for the buck in education.
And they may have found it.
Complex ratings have been developed by the state comptroller's office and at least one private company that provide a look at how much money is really needed to provide Texas students with a good education.
Faced with a record budget shortfall, the state will most likely have to consider cuts to education spending. School superintendents say any reduction in funding will lead to teacher layoffs and cuts to instructional programs. They argue they need more money, not less.
That's why looking at the data may become important in the debate. The systems show not only where students have the best academic performance but which districts spend the least to achieve those results.
Brad Bernatek began his Broad Residency in Urban Education Cohort 2006 with Seattle Public Schools and became the chief honcho for accountability in 2008. From the Broad website:
Brad Bernatek serves [for now] as Director of Research, Evaluation and Assessment for Seattle Public Schools. In this role, Bernatek runs the department responsible for student statistics including enrollment, demographics, evaluation and standardized testing. During his Residency, Bernatek served the district as interim manager for research, evaluation and assessment and as special assistant to the chief operations officer.
When a new strategic plan was being put together in 2008 with the new superintendent, Maria Goodloe-Johnson (Broad Supt. Academy, Class of '03), the Broadies needed some really embarrassing piece of information about SPS that could be used to leverage the changes they wanted to initiate: ending the remains of the school integration plan killed by the Roberts Court in 2007, more testing, closing more schools, opening more corporate charters, longer school days, teacher pay and evaluations based on test scores, working to end tenure, and the bringing in Teach for America to replace professional faculty. In short, the disaster capitalists needed a disaster to bring about change before anyone could regain their composure.
David Steiner, the state education commissioner, has "serious concerns" about granting magazine executive Cathie Black the necessary waiver so that she can become the next New York City schools chancellor, according to a person familiar with his thinking.
The commissioner, however, would be more open to granting a waiver request if it includes a plan to pair Ms. Black with a strong deputy with educational experience, this person said.
Mr. Steiner "recognizes the leadership qualities" of Ms. Black, the person said, but education issues in New York City are so complex that when he "looks at this as a whole," his "initial inclination is to say no to the current waiver request," the person said.
A new poll released Tuesday from Quinnipiac University Polling Institute showed that 47% of city voters disapprove of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's appointment of Ms. Black, with 29% supporting the selection and 25% saying they are undecided. Voters with children in public schools disapprove of the appointment by an even higher margin, 62% to 25%.
More Hoosier schools are making progress toward state and federal student achievement standards, but high schools locally and across the state have failed to keep up with the gains made by elementary and middle schools, according to data released Tuesday by the Indiana Department of Education.
The problem with high schools boils down to "a combination of generally low performance and no significant improvement," Jeff Zaring, the department's chief of results and reform, told the State Board of Education.
As a result, the board voted to put three-quarters of Indiana's high schools into "academic watch" and "academic probation" categories based in part on standardized test scores and how they've changed over the past three years. Locally, that includes Henryville, Silver Creek, Borden, Clarksville, Charlestown, Jeffersonville, New Albany, North Harrison, Corydon Central and South Central high schools.
Everyone's talking about superintendent salary caps. The Record reports that the New Jersey Association of School Administrators filed a motion in State Superior Court claiming that just because Gov. Christie has proposed caps doesn't mean he can enforce them right now. The association also argues that Acting Commissioner Rochelle Hendricks "broke the law" by advising our 21 Executive County Superintendents to veto any contracts above the caps.
In other litigation, the Parsippany-Troy Hills School Board filed suit in the appellate division of Superior Court regarding the Morris County Executive County Superintendent's refusal to approve the new contract for Superintendent Le Roy Seitz, which will pay him $234,065 by the fifth year of the 5-year contract.
A new disciplinary program that stressed leniency has failed to rein in dozens of students who caused serious disruptions; kids who come to school or class late, or who have even threatened teachers, received minimal or no punishment, said a number of teachers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Some teachers have reported being assaulted by students.
Teachers have made hundreds of referrals of students for disciplinary measures, but, some teachers said, the administration does little if anything in the way of punishment.
After first denying any problem, school officials have said part of the program would be reviewed. This admission occurred after a meeting with the Central Falls police chief, Capt. Col. Joseph Moran III, who is also head of the Rhode Island Police Chiefs' Association.
Some teachers also said they are some of their colleagues have been threatened and/or disciplined by administrators for merely disagreeing with policy, and that they believe the administrators are using some of the cameras installed in the school to monitor them.
Madison Preparatory Academy School Board Presentation 12/6/2010
Kaleem Caire, via email:
The initial proposal for Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men will be presented to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education's Planning and Development Committee on MONDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2010 at 6:00pm in the McDaniels Auditorium of the Doyle Administration Building (545 West Dayton St., Madison 53703). The committee is chaired by Ms. Arlene Silveira (asilveira@madison.k12.wi.us). The Madison Prep proposal is the first agenda item for that evening's committee meeting so please be there at 6pm sharp. If you plan to provide public comment, please show up 15 minutes early (5:45pm) to sign-up!
Please show your support for Madison Prep by attending this meeting. Your presence in the audience is vital to demonstrating to the Board of Education the broad community support for Madison Prep. We look forward to you joining us for the very important milestone in Madison history!
The Mission
Madison Prep will provide a world class secondary education for young men that prepares them to think critically, communicate effectively, identify their purpose, and succeed in college, 21st century careers, leadership and life. For more information, see the attachments or contact Ms. Laura DeRoche at lderoche@ulgm.org.
Get Involved with Madison Prep
Curriculum & Instruction Team. This design team will develop a thorough understanding of the IB curriculum and define the curriculum of the school, including the core and non-core curriculum. They will also develop a thorough understanding of the Harkness teaching method, outline instructional best practices, and address teacher expectations and evaluation. Both teams will address special education and English Language Learners (ELL).
Governance, Leadership & Operation Team. This design team will help develop the school's operations plan, define the governing structure, and address the characteristics and expectations of the schools Head of School.
Facility Team. This team will be responsible for identify, planning, and securing a suitable facility for Madison Prep.
Budget, Finance & Fundraising Team. This team will be involved with developing Madison Prep's budget and fundraising plans, and will explore financing options for start-up, implementation, and the first four years of the school's operation."
Community Engagement & Support Team. This team will develop strategies and work to establish broad community support for Madison Prep, develop criteria for partnering with others, and establish partnerships that support teaching, learning, leadership, and community engagement.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the state should abolish a law requiring that all school chiefs in New York have at least three years' experience in schools and hold a professional certificate in educational leadership. These background requirements can't adequately assess whether a candidate is poised to lead the nation's largest school system, he said Tuesday.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg selected Cathie Black, a media executive with no education experience or credentials, to succeed Joel Klein as the city's schools chancellor. The mayor is seeking a waiver for Black's appointment from David Steiner, the state's education commissioner.
A panel advising Steiner on the decision was slated to meet Tuesday to discuss Black's qualifications and come up with a recommendation. The education commissioner is empowered to grant a waiver for "exceptionally qualified persons," according to state law.
Recent decisions by the California State University Board of Trustees and the University of California regents to increase student fees have been attacked by critics who insist that higher education subsidies are critical for California's economic growth and prosperity.
This is not true; the state's prosperity rests on public policies that encourage economic activity, not on heavy subsidies to higher education.
Moreover, artificially low fees attract some students to higher education who simply aren't suited to the academic rigors of a university. Ultimately, the presence of these lower-achieving students hurts those who are more academically inclined, as they end up in watered-down courses in which professors have to focus on bringing the low achievers along.
Two demographically similar and academically impressive local high schools - Northwood in Montgomery County and West Potomac in Fairfax County - have been debating grades. Both schools have been accused of letting too many students pass their courses without learning the material.
This is in line with what millions of Americans say about schools in general. But they disagree over whom to blame. Unmotivated students? Lazy teachers? Cowardly administrators? Short-sighted parents?
I wonder if there isn't a way for all of these people to resolve the dispute by offering school choices that would approach grading and teaching in different ways. I know it sounds chaotic, but bear with me.
Last week in this column, Northwood math teacher Dan Stephens said he can't motivate his students if his school district lets them pass his course even when they flunk the final exam, written by the county to set a standard for all schools. Contradictory county rules say the test may count as only 25 percent of the final grade.
I wanted to cry when I read about the recent widely publicized report from the Council of Great City Schools about the underachievement of African-American males in our schools. Its findings bear repeating: African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys; their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower; and black men represented just 5 percent of college students in 2008.
When I was the executive director of instruction and professional development for the New York City Public Schools, I grew keenly aware of the challenges schools face in educating African-American males. For many reasons, far too many boys don't get the support at home or in the community they need to thrive as adults. Instead, that job falls almost completely on their schools. And that means it comes down to their teachers.
Driven by the intense focus on accountability, schools and teachers used standardized test scores to help identify and address student weaknesses. Over time, these deficits began to define far too many students so that all we saw were their deficits - particularly for African-American males. As a result, we began losing sight of these young boys' gifts and, as a consequence, stifled their talents.
The Government's determination to repair Britain's educational system is becoming clearer by the day. This week, a White Paper will propose scrapping "bite-sized" GCSE examinations, which chop the qualification into modules that pupils can re-take in order to boost their grades. This move will cut the number of exams pupils have to sit - and, in doing so, increase academic rigour. That fact alone tells us something about Labour's wretched education policies: in the rest of the world, exams actually raise standards. In place of the dumbed-down courses will come GCSEs in which, to quote Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, pupils will be "examined on everything they have learnt at one time".
The White Paper will also address the gross devaluation of A-levels by cutting the number of modules; Ofsted inspections will focus more sharply on teaching standards; and trainee teachers will spend more time in the classroom and less in teacher training colleges in which tired, Left-wing theories of education hold sway.
This last proposal is extremely significant. Mr Gove's plans to improve education extend far beyond his championing of Free Schools. He aims to increase parental choice, restore discipline and ensure that lessons are devoted to academic subjects rather than politically correct children's entertainment. But introducing these reforms will be a huge challenge. They will not take root without the co-operation of this generation of teachers and the next.
He was the very model of a modern Morris County Republican. He wore a dark suit under a gray Chesterfield overcoat with a black velvet collar. Hair, cropped military style. When he flipped open his cell phone, its backlit screen broadcast the familiar, stylized symbol of the GOP elephant.
Yet Joseph Ricca, the young schools superintendent in East Hanover, had just told Gov. Chris Christie, a rising Republican star, to back off.
"I don't think any level of government, whether in Washington or Trenton, has the right to dictate what someone can and cannot earn," said Ricca after testifying before a state hearing on the governor's plan to cap the salaries of school chiefs.
The stairwell at East High School where an alleged sexual assault took place last week will soon be off limits to students except in emergencies, a Madison School District official said Tuesday.
The door at the top of the stairwell, which leads to a building exit, will be labeled as an emergency exit, and an alarm will sound if it is opened, security coordinator Luis Yudice said.
"We're talking about a comprehensive reassessment of building security at East," Yudice said. "This incident served as a reminder to other schools that we always need to be vigilant and alert."
The district also plans to add a sixth security officer to the school (other high schools have five), extra surveillance cameras and a visitor welcome center by January, as well as asking school staff to help patrol hallways.
"It would be completely crazy to roll out this 4K plan that is supposed to really, fundamentally be about preparing children, especially underprivileged, and not have the centers in the neighborhoods that most need the service," School Board member Lucy Mathiak said.
Deputy superintendent Sue Abplanalp, who is coordinating implementation of the program, acknowledged some students will have to travel outside their school attendance areas to attend the nearest 4K program, "but it's not a long drive, especially if they're in contiguous areas."
"We will make it work," Abplanalp said. "We're very creative."
The school district is conducting its own analysis of how the distribution of day care providers and existing elementary school space will mesh under the new program. Some alternative programs may have to move to other schools to make room, but no final decisions have been made, Abplanalp said.
Detailed information has not been shared with the Madison School Board and is not expected to be ready before the board votes Monday on granting final funding approval for the program. The approval must happen then because the district plans to share information with the public in December before enrollment starts in February, Abplanalp said.
Four out of 10 Wisconsin residents want state aid to elementary and secondary schools to be protected from spending cuts, but most don't realize school aid is the biggest expense in the state budget, according to a new poll.
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute telephone survey of 615 randomly selected Wisconsin adults last Monday through Wednesday revealed misperceptions about the state budget, which officials may need to correct as they grapple with the upcoming two-year budget, said George Lightbourn, president of the conservative think tank.
Thirty percent of those polled said they thought Medicaid insurance for lower income households was the top expense in the state budget; it actually ranks second by a large margin. Twenty-one percent picked the correct answer: aid for elementary and secondary schools.
Others who guessed the top expense incorrectly included 13% who picked transportation, 12% who picked aid to local government (shared revenue), and 10% who guessed higher education, all of which are considerably less expensive than aid to elementary and secondary schools.
The state faces a projected deficit of at least $2.2 billion in its upcoming two-year budget, assuming Governor-elect Scott Walker and lawmakers make spending cuts that have yet to happen - two more years of state employee furloughs, no pay raises, a virtual hiring freeze and belt tightening in state health programs, the Journal Sentinel reported Saturday.
Without that $1.1 billion in savings, the shortfall is projected at $3.3 billion.
I am writing simply to express my gratitude for your challenge of TFA. As a young teacher, committed to the teaching profession, hoping to make a career out of teaching in geographical areas where need is high, I had significant trouble finding a job in Baltimore City.
Even though I was fully certified, degreed in education, had student taught, and had ample years of educational experience under my belt, schools in one of America's most challenged school districts could not or would not hire me because I was not associated with a cohort program like TFA or our local Baltimore City Teacher Residency.
Because of the generosity of a caring and understanding principal, I was fortunate to find a job, though I had to fight for it. I am succeeding now and helping to close the achievement gap [in my classes] mostly due to my training and the fact that my commitment is to my students and to the profession and not to Wendy Kopp [founder of Teach for America].
Education Secretary Michael Gove's decision to end ring-fenced funding for school sports "quite frankly flew in the face" of the UK's commitment to a lasting sports legacy after the 2012 Olympic Games, Labour has claimed.
Shadow education secretary Andy Burnham said there was widespread disbelief over Mr Gove's £162 million cut in sports funding for English state schools.
And he seized on an Observer report that suggested Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Health Secretary Andrew Lansley had expressed concerns in Cabinet over the decision.
Mr Gove has insisted that overall spending in schools has increased and it is up to headteachers to decide their own priorities.
But Mr Burnham told Sky News' Sunday Live: "I remember the 1980s when school sports dried up and when I worked in government I was on a mission to rebuild it and that's what we've done in the last 10 years.
Every year, American schools pay more than $8.6 billion in bonuses to teachers with master's degrees, even though the idea that a higher degree makes a teacher more effective has been mostly debunked.
Despite more than a decade of research showing the money has little impact on student achievement, state lawmakers and other officials have been reluctant to tackle this popular way for teachers to earn more money.
That could soon change, as local school districts around the country grapple with shrinking budgets.
Just last week, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the economy has given the nation an opportunity to make dramatic improvements in the productivity of its education system and to do more of what works and less of what doesn't.
Duncan told the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday that master's degree bonuses are an example of spending money on something that doesn't work.
On Friday, billionaire Bill Gates took aim at school budgets and the master's degree bonus.
Atlanta schools Superintendent Beverly Hall's announcement that she will step aside when her contract ends June 30 comes at a time when the district is facing uncertainty on multiple fronts.
Feuding among city school board members, in which one faction of the board has sued the other over leadership changes, has caused the system's accrediting agency to say the board's capacity to govern is "in serious jeopardy."
The two sides have a court date Tuesday.
The system also faces two inquiries -- one by federal prosecutors, the other by special investigators appointed by Gov. Sonny Perdue -- into test cheating allegations that could bring criminal charges against school officials.
As the result of a related investigation, local officials reported more than 100 city educators to the state teacher certification body, although their cases are on hold until state investigators wrap up their work. That is expected to happen early next year.
A publicly funded school proposed by a Baptist pastor has gained support among School Board members despite objections by the district's administrators over the school's use of "a standard parochial curriculum with evangelical leanings."
The School Board is scheduled to vote Monday on whether to enter into contract negotiations with First Baptist Church Pastor Bruce Dunford over his plans to open Crossroads Academy as a charter school next school year.
The school would teach a traditional curriculum that includes more classical readings and would have a more structured discipline system than other public schools, Dunford said. The school also would support the values of a majority of the West Bend community, he said, in response to concerns that he's heard about bullying and a lack of modesty and morality in the public schools.
He said the school would be operated separately and not on the grounds of his church, where West Bend School Board member Tim Stepanski is a deacon. Unlike most charter schools in which staff is employed by the chartering district, Crossroads would be a so-called non-instrumentality charter school - one that employs its own staff and has more independence from the School Board on its curriculum and how it runs its day-to-day operations.
"I just simply believe the taxpayers, the parents of the community, should have options available to them," Dunford said. "There should be a quality education that conforms to the value standards, convictions, whatever you want to call it, of a large part of our community."
His battle with the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), over a proposed pay freeze and an increase in employee contributions to health benefits, has been particularly epic. "I came to Trenton ... and it's like coming to a new schoolyard," he says. "I looked around, and there were a bunch of people on the ground, all bloody and moaning, all beat up, and there was one person on the schoolyard standing ... When you see that one person standing up, that's the bully. And in New Jersey, that's the New Jersey teachers union." He has accused teachers of "ripping off" the state and treating their pupils like "drug mules" after some were sent home tasked with asking their parents how they would vote on the school budget. And the demonizing has worked. A November poll put Christie's in-state approval rating at 51 percent--30 points higher than the NJEA's.
Less than a year into his tenure, Christie is no longer just a popular governor; he has become a national Republican star. His focus on fiscal issues and his reluctance to wade into the culture wars--during his gubernatorial campaign, he declined Palin's offer to stump for him--have endeared him to members of the GOP's sane wing. "The breakthrough he's scoring in New Jersey is hugely promising," says David Frum, a conservative writer who fears that the Republican Party is being swallowed by the tea party. At the same time, Christie's combativeness has made him a popular figure with the tea party in a way that someone like Indiana governor Mitch Daniels--who's fought some of the same fiscal battles in his state but with the mien of an accountant--can only dream of. More than anything, Christie fills the longing, currently felt in all corners of the GOP (and beyond), for a stern taskmaster. "People just want to be treated like adults," Christie says. "They just want to be told the truth. They know we're in tough times, and they're willing to sacrifice. But they want shared sacrifice."
The North Carolina budget for the upcoming year is looming like a menacing storm cloud approaching on the horizon.
A funding hole of between $3 billion and $4 billion is anticipated.
Short of a rapid (and unexpected) economic turnaround that pumps more tax dollars into state coffers, it's a hole that will have to be closed.
It's how that hole will be closed, and the very nature of the state budget, that worries educators.
It ought to worry all of us.
For decades, North Carolina has made a quality public education system a priority, and indeed it's been the foundation of the state's economic policy as well. An educated citizenry is an educated work force, the coin of the realm for employers.
Education makes up the bulk of the state's budget. K-12 funding alone is the single biggest chunk of the budget, representing 35 percent of spending.
It looks like any other classroom inside Carrick High School, a sprawling structure that towers like a stone fortress over this working-class neighborhood on the city's south side. It's still dark out as 16 teachers and counselors - some clutching coffee or energy bars - sit in a circle, dissecting with brutal candor their students' performance.
In addition to their classroom duties, these teachers serve as advisers to every ninth- and 10th-grader in the school, and they show up 45 minutes before school starts each day to talk about where their students need to be. No punches are pulled; no feelings are spared.
As part of the Promise Readiness Corps, these teachers are eligible for financial bonuses.
In Pittsburgh, the Corps is one element of a new plan that overhauls the way the district hires, trains, evaluates, pays and dismisses teachers. Under a new performance-pay system, incoming district teachers whose students learn, on average, at 1.3 times their grade level can earn $100,000 a year within seven years of being hired.
Raising the quality of teaching in America has been a priority of President Barack Obama's administration, and reforms receiving the most attention right now include stronger teacher evaluation systems and financial incentives to attract, reward and retain quality educators.
Money for a populist ''boot camp'' is far better spent on teachers.
THERE is a crisis in public education and the policies of Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Premier John Brumby are making it worse. Both think that the growth of private schooling is a good thing because it promotes competition, which will improve the standards of state schools.
To this end, Gillard as education minister introduced the listing online of results of national student tests. This is designed to show up the poorest performing schools, which will motivate parents of government school students to select better performing schools for their children and pressure the teachers and the principals of the schools to shape up or ship out.
Politically, this approach presses the right button. It is popular because it targets state school teachers and their union, who are scapegoated for perceived failures in state education.
It's been a rough week in Madison schools, with the first degree sexual assault of a student in a stairwell at East High School and an alleged mugging at Jefferson Middle School.
The sexual assault occurred on Thursday afternoon, according to police reports. The 15-year-old victim knew the alleged assailant, also 15, and he was arrested and charged at school.
On Wednesday, two 13-year-old students at Jefferson allegedly mugged another student at his locker, grabbing him from behind and using force to try to steal his wallet. The police report noted that all three students fell to the floor. According to a letter sent to Jefferson parents on Friday, "the student yelled loudly, resisted the attempt and went immediately to report the incident. The students involved in the attempted theft were immediately identified and detained in the office."
The mugging was not reported to police until Thursday morning and Jefferson parents did not learn about the incident until two days after the incident. When police arrived at school on Thursday, they arrested two students in the attempted theft.
Parents at East were notified Thursday of the sexual assault.
Luis Yudice, Madison public schools safety chief, said it was unusual for police not to be notified as soon as the alleged strong arm robbery was reported to school officials.
A Madison East High School student has been arrested and charged on suspicion of sexually assaulting another student on school grounds this week.
Madison police said the 15-year-old boy was arrested on a charge of first-degree sexual assault on Thursday after a 15-year-old girl reported the incident.
Dan Nerad, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District, said while these cases are rare, they happen and it forces district officials to take a step back and look how this could have been prevented. Officials sent a letter home to parents to explain the incident and the district's next steps.
"We're going to work real hard to deal with it, we're going to work real hard to learn from it. We're going to work real hard to make any necessary changes after we have a change to review what all of these facts and circumstances are," Nerad said.
Nerad said that while there are things the district can do to prevent such incidents, he believes much more help is needed from the community. He said the fact that this type of activity has entered the school door should be a wake up call to society.
State education officials appear ready to move forward with their plan to establish a three-tier high school diploma system tied to student performance on state tests, and will start drafting changes to the regulations.
At a well-attended work session Thursday, the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education discussed the details of the plan, which differs significantly from the regulations the Regents approved in 2008.
Regent Colleen Callahan expressed concerns with the proposal, saying it places too much weight on the standardized tests, which were not designed to be high-stakes or to determine what kind of diploma a student receives.
"I'm worried about tests being the determining factor, as opposed to other parts of the system," Callahan said, a reference to grades and student portfolios or projects.
The phrase "ready to learn," frequently applied to young children, is rather odd when you stop to think about it, because the implication is that some kids aren't. Have you ever met a child who wasn't ready to learn -- or, for that matter, already learning like crazy? The term must mean something much more specific -- namely, that some children aren't yet able (or willing) to learn certain things or learn them in a certain way.
Specifically, it seems to be code for "prepared for traditional instruction." And yes, we'd have to concede that some kids are not ready to memorize their letters, numbers, and colors, or to practice academic skills on command. In fact, some children continue to resist for years since they'd rather be doing other kinds of learning. Can you blame them?
Then there's the question of when we expect children to be ready. Even if we narrow the notion of readiness to the acquisition of "phonemic awareness" as a prerequisite to reading in kindergarten or first grade, the concept is still iffy, but for different reasons.
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's administration on Friday told Republican Governor-elect Scott Walker that he would have to cope with a $2.2 billion deficit in the state's upcoming two-year budget, but this brighter-than-expected forecast contained more than $1 billion in hidden pain.
To arrive at the favorable estimate, the Doyle administration's estimate assumed that Walker and lawmakers would make spending cuts that have yet to actually happen - two more years of state employee furloughs, no pay raises, a virtual hiring freeze and belt tightening in state health programs. Without that $1.1 billion in savings, the state's projected shortfall rises to $3.3 billion - a significant increase over previous estimates that put the gap at between $2.7 billion and $3.1 billion.
The shortfall and the efforts to close it could affect everything from schools and health care to local governments and taxpayers.
The "revenue projections released Friday underscore what Governor-elect Walker has said for months - the state of Wisconsin is facing very serious budget challenges," Walker transition director John Hiller said in a statement. "Further, we believe that the true budget shortfall is much higher than indicated by the projections released today."
The AJC asked Attorney General Thurbert Baker to determine whether the district's denial in July of a request for the report was a criminal violation of the Georgia Open Records Act.
The newspaper's complaint calls the district's refusal to produce the report a "willful and premeditated violation."
"The purpose of the Open Records Act is to prevent government officials from burying information in this way," said Tom Clyde, an AJC attorney.
District spokesman Keith Bromery said Friday that officials were reviewing the complaint and would not comment.
The complaint comes amid federal and state probes into the falsification of hundreds of Atlanta students' scores, with dozens of GBI agents questioning teachers and administrators at schools across the district.
On the eve of a Board of Education meeting in February where the death knell was to sound for five schools, Ron Huberman, the chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, granted an 11th-hour reprieve.
The low enrollment and poor academic record at Paderewski Elementary had made the South Side school a target for closing, and its students were being sent to Mason Elementary, the only nearby school that had higher test scores. Mr. Huberman said he changed his mind after walking from Paderewski to Mason and discovering that students would have to cross a wide intersection of four streets, a situation he concluded was too dangerous.
Although the pardon for Paderewski might have been a relief for some teachers, parents and students, it did not address the problems at a low-performing, underutilized school. Other poorly performing schools are also being spared as resistance to closing them has grown, confronting the next mayor with a longstanding question: What can be done with neighborhood schools where enrollment is shrinking and academic improvement is slow?
The school board in a wealthy suburban county south of Denver is considering letting parents use public funds to send their children to private schools--or take classes with private teachers--in a bid to rethink public education.
The proposals on the table in Douglas County constitute a bold step toward outsourcing a segment of public education, and also raise questions about whether the district can afford to lose any public funds to private educators.
Already hit hard by state cutbacks, the local board has cut $90 million from the budget over three years, leaving some principals pleading for family donations to buy math workbooks and copy paper.
"This is novel and interesting--and bound to be controversial," said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative, educational think tank in Washington, D.C.
...
Douglas County School District board members are also considering letting students enrolled in public schools opt out of some classes in favor of district-approved alternatives offered at for-profit schools or by private-sector instructors. Students might skip high-school Spanish, for example, to take an advanced seminar in Chinese, or bypass physics to study with a rocket scientist, in person or online.
Another proposal under review calls for expanding publicly-funded services for families that home-school their children.
Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen said she is not sure which proposals she might support. But in a recent letter to parents of the district's 56,000 students, she said her leadership team "did not find the ideas alarming" and pledged the district would "set the stage for new thinking in education."
"These days, you can build a custom computer. You can get a custom latte at Starbucks," said board member Meghann Silverthorn. "Parents expect the same out of their educational system."
Colorado's Douglas County School District spends $8512.74 per student ($476,977,336 for 56,031 students in 2009). Madison spent $15,241 per student in 2009, a whopping $6,728.26, 79% more than the "wealthy Denver suburbs".
High school seniors in Massachusetts are ranked highest in the nation in reading and math ability, according to new test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The first state-specific results for Grade 12 in 2009 showed that Massachusetts students had the highest scaled score in both the reading and math exams. The Bay State was one of 11 states to participate in the pilot program for states to receive state-specific Grade 12 results.
In a ceremony at Medford High School, Governor Deval Patrick, surrounded by state education officials and hundreds of students, heralded the results as proof of the state's position as a leader in public education.
American Federation of Teachers president Rhonda "Randi" Weingarten has issued a statement slamming proposed cuts from the congressional deficit commission for not pushing shared sacrifice among the wealthy, but an AFT spokesman has told The Examiner that Weingarten will not be taking a paycut from the total $428,284 she received in salary and benefits during fiscal year 2010.
Weingarten wrote of the proposed budget cuts from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform:n
Bill Gates, the founder and former chairman of Microsoft, has made education-related philanthropy a major focus since stepping down from his day-to-day role in the company in 2008.
His new area of interest: helping solve schools' money problems. In a speech on Friday, Mr. Gates -- who is gaining considerable clout in education circles -- plans to urge the 50 state superintendents of education to take difficult steps to restructure the nation's public education budgets, which have come under severe pressure in the economic downturn.
He suggests they end teacher pay increases based on seniority and on master's degrees, which he says are unrelated to teachers' ability to raise student achievement. He also urges an end to efforts to reduce class sizes. Instead, he suggests rewarding the most effective teachers with higher pay for taking on larger classes or teaching in needy schools.
"Of course, restructuring pay systems is like kicking a beehive" -- but restructure them anyway, Mr. Gates plans to tell the superintendents in his talk to the Council of Chief State School Officers, which opens a convention in Louisville on Friday.
Now that the mid-term elections are over and we will have a new governor in Hartford, the question of what impact this will have on the Connecticut State Department of Education in terms of its leadership and direction for the future looms larger than ever.
At a time when public education is attempting to survive from the misguided principles of educational leaders who are not educators, such as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former chancellor Michelle Rhee of Washington, D.C, and Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City Public Schools, there appears to be a paucity of leadership from the Connecticut State Department of Education. We hear very little, for example, from State Department of Education officials concerning what is the appropriate role of testing in the education of Connecticut children. There is massive abuse from the high-stakes standardized testing mania in the country including in the State of Connecticut where standardized testing is being used to evaluate school districts and now it is being taken a step further to include the evaluation of teacher performance as well. It is a well known fact that politicians' use of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and now Race To The Top (RTTT) for political gain has become rampant. Yet, our own State Department of Education responsible for the education and well being of all students in Connecticut public schools remains mysteriously quiet on this crucial topic.
The issue was first raised earlier this week by Chris Spence, the director of education for the Toronto District School Board when he sent out this question ...
What kind of credentials do you need to run a school district? Especially a really big one? Is a degree in education a better predictor of a superintendent's success than, say, a track record of turning around distressed companies? These are hot questions in the education world right now. Last week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg surprised everyone (and that includes the senior leaders of his city's school system) by tapping publishing executive Cathleen Black to be the city's new school chancellor. By doing so, Bloomberg set in motion an arcane deliberation process. Because Black has not spent three years working in public schools -- in fact, her only education leadership experience consists of serving on an advisory board for a charter school in Harlem -- and because she also lacks the requisite 60 hours of graduate-school credits, she will need a waiver from the state in order to take charge of the city's 1,700 schools, 80,000 teachers and more than a million students.
It's understandable why some teachers and education advocates are objecting so vociferously to an outsider coming in to run such a massive system (though it should be noted that if the new chancellor pledged to undo the current reform efforts, many of these same people wouldn't care if Bloomberg had just hired Carrot Top as his new schools chief). If you've never worked in a school before, critics wonder, how can you oversee so many of them? But precisely because the New York district is so gargantuan, its chancellor needs a skill set far different from your average principal or teacher; the school system's annual budget of more than $21 billion exceeds the gross domestic product of nearly half the world's countries. Let me be clear, however, on two things: at this point, there's no way to tell if Black will be an effective leader of New York's mega-district. But what is lost in all the speculation about her is how outmoded -- and counterproductive -- American education's approach to credentials is in the first place.
A request by a Seattle parent to have the 1931 novel "Brave New World" removed from Seattle Public Schools' literature curricula will be considered -- and possibly decided -- at a Seattle School Board meeting Wednesday evening.
Parent Sarah Sense-Wilson has persuaded Nathan Hale High School administrators to drop the distopian Aldous Huxley novel from its Language Arts class, which her daughter took last year. But she has not been as successful in her attempts to have the book removed from literature curricula districtwide.
Having been denied by Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, Sense-Wilson will make her case this evening to the board, the final appeal under district rules.
Sense-Wilson, a Native American, said she and her daughter found the book offensive for its numerous uses of the word "savages."
When I was a kid my Uncle Robert, for whom I was named, used to say that blacks needed to "fight on all fronts, at home and abroad."
By that he meant that while it was critically important to fight against racial injustice and oppression, it was just as important to support, nurture and fight on behalf of one's family and community.
Uncle Robert (my father always called him Jim -- don't ask) died many years ago, but he came to mind as I was going over the dismal information in a new report about the tragic conditions confronting a large portion of America's black population, especially black males.
We know by now, of course, that the situation is grave. We know that more than a third of black children live in poverty; that more than 70 percent are born to unwed mothers; that by the time they reach their mid-30s, a majority of black men without a high school diploma has spent time in prison. We know all this, but no one seems to know how to turn things around. No one has been able to stop this steady plunge of young black Americans into a socioeconomic abyss.
MPS is in the throes of an alternative to suspensions - Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS.
According to the Milwaukee Public Schools, the goal of PBIS is to "reduce classroom disruptions and student suspensions through a schoolwide systematic three-tiered response-to-intervention (RTI) approach." PBIS looks like adults in the school community offering positive verbal redirection and modeling positive conduct. The point: to teach students about positive behavior.
Some of the nearly 100 MPS schools that use the PBIS system this academic year have reported successes. Fewer suspensions are being reported. That's good news, right? Superintendent Gregory Thornton believes that "Finding ways to keep students in school instead of suspending them improves their chances of learning and improving academically," which minimizes disruptions and keeps kids in class.
A showdown is developing between some local Boards of Education and Gov. Chris Christie, whose latest move to control school spending by capping superintendents' salaries is rankling some school board members.
Several local school boards -- still reeling from slashed state aid, staff layoffs and the pending 2% tax cap -- are considering striking back by amending or renegotiating their superintendents' contracts before an anticipated Feb. 7 deadline to get around the cap and keep their superintendents in place.
But the situation keeps changing.
On Monday, acting Education Commissioner Rochelle Hendricks warned the executive county superintendents -- who have the final say on any renegotiated contracts -- not to approve any new contracts before the Feb. 7 deadline and directed them to inventory all superintendent contracts in their counties. And the Morris County Executive Superintendent Kathleen Serafino followed suit, asking the Parsippany Board of Education to rescind its recently approved five-year contract extension for its superintendent. What will happen next is anyone's guess.
Municipal bonds had their biggest one-day sell-off yesterday since the height of the financial crisis, prompting some borrowers to delay financing plans.
The yields on triple A 10-year bonds rose 18 bps to 2.93 per cent, the largest one-day rise since October of 2008, according the MMD index, which is owned by Thomson Reuters.
Absolute yields, however, remain well below crisis-era levels.
The $2,800bn "muni" bond market where states and municipalities raise money has been under pressure over the past week amid a rise in the yields of benchmark US Treasury bonds, heavy bond sales and uncertainty about federal support for the market.
The market declines have made investors, who are mostly wealthy individuals benefiting from tax breaks on muni debt, nervous about an uptick in defaults. Munis historically have been a relatively safe place to invest, but budget deficits and underfunded public pensions have created widespread concern that local entities could struggle to pay their debts.
Seventy-one percent of charter school leaders surveyed for this study say they expect to leave their schools within five years. For the nation's 5,000 charter schools, this raises important questions. Who will be ready to take over? How will the school maintain its instructional program and culture from leader to leader? How does a school survive founder transitions? Where will new leaders come from and how can they be ready to lead existing schools?
The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington spent four years studying charter school teachers and leaders: CRPE's survey of 400 charter school leader respondents and fieldwork in 24 charter schools in California, Hawaii, and Texas has yielded important insights into these questions and the future of maturing charter schools.
CRPE's research finds that many charter schools are unprepared when it comes to leadership turnover. Only half of the charter school leaders surveyed for this study reported having succession plans in place, and many of those plans are weak. Though most school leaders affiliated with charter management organizations (CMOs) reported that their school had a succession plan, there was some confusion as to who would make final decisions--school leaders or CMO leaders. For the few schools with strong plans, two elements were common: the school leaders (all with prior business experience) had taken charge of future plans, and these schools were not in the midst of crisis.
This would ensure that areas with greater concentrations of low-income families receive more funding in their classrooms.
However, history shows that this isn't a winning formula. While students from poorer family backgrounds present challenges in the classroom, greater financial support hasn't led to better results in Wisconsin. Milwaukee has the highest concentration of free and reduced-price lunch students in the state, as well as one of the highest per-pupil expenditure figures, spending an average of $16,730 per child according to DPI data. Madison, a city with similar low-income population issues, spent $16,393 on each student in 2009.
Conversely, other areas dealing with diverse student populations have shown better returns on their educational investments with less expenditure. Wauwatosa and Green Bay have produced more positive results in the classroom despite spending less. The districts spent just $12,098 and $13,041, respectively, per student in 2009.
A panel of education experts has called for an overhaul of U.S. teacher-preparation programs, including a greater emphasis on classroom training as well as tougher admission and graduation standards for those hoping to teach in elementary and secondary classrooms.
The panel's sweeping recommendations, released Tuesday, urge teacher-training programs to operate more like medical schools, which rely heavily on clinical experience.
Teacher candidates should spend more time in classrooms learning to teach--and proving that they can boost student achievement--before they earn a license to teach kindergarten through twelfth grade, the panel said.
"We need large, bold, systemic changes," said James Cibulka, president of the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the group that convened the expert panel. "As a nation, we are expecting all of our students to perform at high levels, so it follows that we need to expect more of our teachers as they enter the classroom."
There are many suggestions that the best teachers have an obligation to teach in the worst schools. Perhaps they would be more likely to do so if they were granted a few privileges, such as the peremptory challenge available to lawyers in court trials....
PEREMPTORY CHALLENGES
Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
15 November 2010
The conductor pauses, waiting for the coughing to die down before he raises his baton. The surgeon looks over her team, making sure all are in place and ready to work, before she makes the first incision. The prosecuting attorney pauses to study the jury for a little while before making his opening statement.
All these highly trained people need certain conditions to be met before they can begin their vital work with the necessary confidence that it can be carried out well. If the audience is too noisy, the conductor must wait. If the team is not in their places, the surgeon will not begin. If the members of the jury have not been examined, the attorney will not have to present his case before them.
Only schoolteachers must start their classes in the absence of the calm and attention which are essential to the careful exchange of information and ideas. Only the schoolteacher must attempt the delicate surgery of attaching knowledge and removing ignorance, with no team to help. Only schoolteachers must accept all who are assigned to the class, without the benefit of the peremptory challenges the attorney may use to shape his audience, and give his case the benefit of the doubt.
The Sanskrit word for a teaching, sutra, is the source of the English word, suture, and indeed the stitching of learning to the understanding in young minds is a particularly delicate form of surgery. The teacher does not deal with meat, but with ideas and knowledge, attempting to remove misconceptions and provide truth. The teacher has to do this, not with one anaesthetized patient, and a team of five, but with twenty-five or thirty students and no help.
Those who attend concerts want to be quiet, so that they and their fellows can hear and appreciate the music. Those who come in for surgery want the doctor to have all the help she needs and to have her work under the very best possible conditions, because the outcome of the operation is vital to their interests. The legal system tries to weed out jurors with evident biases, and works in many ways to protect the process which allows both the prosecution and the defense to do their best within the law. The jury members have been made aware of the importance of their mission, and of their duty to attend and to decide with care.
Students, on the other hand, are constantly exposed to a fabulously rich popular culture which assures them that teachers are losers and so is anyone who takes the work of learning in school seriously. Too many single parents feel they have lost the power to influence their offspring, especially as they become adolescents, and many are in any case more concerned that their youngsters be happy and make friends, than that they respect and listen to their teachers, bring home a lot of homework, and do it in preparation for the serious academic work that awaits them the next day.
Students are led to believe that to reject authority and to neglect academic work are evidence of their independence, their rebellion against the dead hand of the older generation. We must of course make an exception here for those fortunate children, many but not all Asian, who reject this foolish idea, and instead apply themselves diligently to their studies, grateful for the effort of their teachers and for the magical opportunity of 12 years of free education.
But what they see as a privilege worthy of their very best efforts, many other students see as a burden, an wanted intrusion on their social and digital time of entertainment. A study of the Kaiser Foundation last year found that the average U.S. student spends more than six hours each day with some form, or combination of forms, of electronic entertainment, and the Indiana Study of High School Student Engagement studied 80,000 teenagers and found that 55% spent three hours or less each week on their homework and still managed to get As and Bs.
We hear stories about the seriousness of students in China and India, but we are inclined to ignore them, perhaps as the Romans discounted rumors about the Goths and the Visigoths until it was too late. We hear about our students doing more poorly in international academic competitions the longer they stay in school, but we prefer to think that our American character and our creativity will carry us through somehow, even as we can see with our own eyes how many of the things we use every day are "Made in China."
Part of the responsibility lies with our teachers in the schools, overburdened and unappreciated as they are. Their unions fight for better pay and working conditions, but say nothing about their academic work. Teachers, too, like lawyers, should demand peremptory challenges, so that they can say they will not be able to teach this one and that one, without damaging the work of the whole class. They, as much as the surgeons who are cutting meat, must be able to enforce close attention to the serious work of suturing learning in their classes. And like the conductor, they must be given the attention that is essential if the music of their teaching is to be heard and appreciated. Teachers who do not demand these conditions are simply saying that their academic work is not important enough to deserve such protections and conditions, and as a result, parents and students are encouraged to see it in the same light.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Bruce Baker. Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers and blogger at SchoolFinance101, looks at performance in 4th and 8th grade math of charter schools versus traditional public schools in NJ. In "Searching for Superguy in Jersey" he's created a statistical model for schools within urban centers and weighted achievement for free and reduced lunch rates, homelessness, rates, and student racial composition. His conclusion is fair and reasonable:
As you can see, there are plenty of charters and traditional public schools above the line, and below the line. The point here is by no means to bash charters. Rather, this is about being realistic about charters and more importantly realistic about the difficulty of truly overcoming the odds. It's not easy and any respectable charter school leader or teacher and any respectable traditional public school leader or teacher will likely confirm that. It's not about superguy. It's about hard work and sustained support; be it for charters or for traditional public schools.
Dr. Baker's scattergrams place both charters and non-charters at the high end of performance ("Beating the Odds") and low end ("Underperforming"). He also features Newark-specific scattergrams.
A readers sends on a link to OpenSecrets.org's novel compilation of the top political donors of the 2007-8 cycle, novel in that it combines state and federal spending.
The results are striking: The biggest spender over all was the National Education Association, the bigger national teachers union, with nearly all of its $53.6 million spent on the state level. Six more of the top ten were gambling interests, at least five of them backing Indian casinos, again mostly at the state level.
SEIU comes in fifth, the National Association of Realtors comes in sixth.
More parents in Southwest Washington are taking advantage of a federal law that allows them to transfer their kids out of failing schools.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act allows parents to bus their children from a "failing" school to another school at district expense.
More than 160 elementary students in the Longview and Kelso school districts are using the school choice provision of the law this year, The Daily News reported.
That's still a small percentage of the 5,510 students eligible to transfer in both school districts. But it's up sharply from the 24 Longview students who switched out of failing schools last year.
ssential background:
On 1-29-2010 the Superintendent received two memos from Eric M. Anderson, a Gates Data Fellow, in the Seattle Schools' Research, Evaluation, and Assessment division. Dr. Anderson is a real statistician and knows statistics well.
One of his two memos was more complete than the other. It analyzed 8 schools that someone else had given him to analyze. This memo was forwarded to the School Board on 2-02-2010. I shall refer to it as the Authentic Memo.
The other memo was not sent to the School Board. I refer to it as the Draft Memo, as it was less complete and was not sent to the school board.
The Superintendent claimed to have written the Action Report of 3-12-2010 using the Authentic Memo but this was untrue. She used the Draft Memo and thus deceived the Public and perhaps the Board as well.
Wisconsin Education Superintendent Seeks 2-4% annual increases in redistributed state tax dollars, introduction of a poverty formula and a shift in Property Tax Credits
Many links as the school finance jockeying begins, prior to Governor Scott Walker's January, 2011 inauguration. Wisconsin's $3,000,000,000 deficit (and top 10 debt position) makes it unlikely that the K-12 world will see any funding growth.
Evers plan relies on a 2 percent increase in school aid funding next year and a 4 percent increase the following year, a tough sell given the state's $3 billion deficit and the takeover of state government by Republicans, who have pledged budget cuts.
One major change calls for the transfer of about $900 million in property tax credits to general aid, which Evers said would make the system more transparent while having a negligible impact on property taxes. That's because the state imposes a limit on how much a district can raise its total revenue. An increase in state aid revenue would in most cases be offset by a decrease in the other primary revenue -- property taxes.
Thus the switch would mean school districts wouldn't have such large annual property tax increases compared to counties, cities and other municipalities, even though tax bills would remain virtually the same, said Todd Berry, executive director of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
"Distributing the money through the school aid formula, from a pure policy sense, is probably more equitable than distributing it in its current tax credit form," Berry said. "The money will tend to help districts that tend to be poorer or middle-of-the-road."
Inequities in the current system tend to punish public schools in areas like Madison and Wisconsin's northern lake districts because they have high property values combined with high poverty and special needs in their school populations. The current system doesn't account for differences in kids' needs when it doles out state aid.
Education policy makers as well as politicians on both sides of the aisle have talked school funding reform for over a dozen years but it's been a tough sell because most plans have created a system of winners and losers, pitting legislator against legislator, district against district.
Evers' plan, which calls for a 2 percent increase in school aid funding next year and a 4 percent increase the following year, as well as a transfer of about $900 million in property tax credits to general aid, addresses that issue of winners and losers. Over 90 percent of districts are receiving more funding under his proposal. But there aren't any district losers in Evers' plan, either, thanks to a provision that requests a tenth of a percent of the total state K-12 schools budget -- $7 million -- to apply to districts facing a revenue decline.
The following printout provides school district level information related to the impact of State Superintendent Evers' Fair Funding proposal.
Specifically, the attachment to this document shows what each school district is receiving from the state for the following programs: (1) 2010-11 Certified General Aid; (2) 2009-10 School Levy Tax Credit; and (3) 2010-11 High Poverty Aid.
This information is compared to the potential impact of the State Superintendent's Fair Funding proposal, which is proposed to be effective in 2012-13, as if it had applied to 2010-11.
Specifically, the Fair Funding Proposal contains the following provisions:
But the plan also asks for $420 million more over the next two years - a 2% increase in funding from the state for the 2011-'12 school year and 4% more for the following year - making it a tough sell in the Legislature.
State Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), who will co-chair the powerful Joint Finance Committee, said she considered the proposal pretty much dead on arrival in the state Legislature, which will be under Republican control next year, without further changes.
"I think those goals are very admirable," said Darling, who has been briefed on the plan. "But, you know, it's a $6 billion budget just for education alone and we don't have the new money. I think we have to do better with less. That's just where we are."
On Friday, Governor-elect Scott Walker said his office had only recently received the proposal from the DPI and he had not had time to delve into its details or to speak with Evers. He said he hoped to use his budget to introduce proposals that would help school districts to control their costs, such as freeing them from state mandates and allowing school boards to switch their employees to the state health plan.
he above shakedown is similar to but not the same as
Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer (Hardcover)
by Steven Malanga.
In his book Mr. Malanga speaks of how the Government has financed an entire "Cottage Industry of Activists" for causes that advocate for what he sees as the Shakedown of the American taxpayer. I see that he makes a strong case and do not disagree with him.
I think a similar case can be built around
Shakedown: The Current Conspiracy against the American Public School Parent, Student, and Teacher.
This shakedown is financed by foundations and other forces (often business related) that finance the faux grassroots organizations that pose as pushing for Better Public Schools, while neglecting the significant data that shows what they advocate for is very ill advised.
The Obama/Duncan "Race to the Top" is a perfect example of this Shakedown. It is founded on attempting to define problems and then mandate particular actions as the solutions to these problems. The real problem with "RttT" is that while the problems defined may in fact be real, unfortunately the changes advocated are NOT solutions.
It is not always pretty. It may resemble a beauty pageant or a paintball contest more than a government exercise to determine how to go about educating a generation of children. But despite the unusual secrecy surrounding New York City's recent search for a convention-defying schools chancellor, other cities have managed to get unorthodox results through more orthodox means.
San Diego chose a retired Navy admiral to head its schools after putting him and two other finalists on television to talk about their vision. Pittsburgh picked a former Massachusetts legislator, and Denver selected a former telecommunications executive and political adviser in Hong Kong -- after putting them through a very public hazing.
"Going through a process like this did not create any major concerns for me," Bill Kowba, the retired Navy admiral, said Friday. "As we came up through the ranks in the Navy, there was a very strong embedded tradition of leadership and accountability and the public calling for responsibility for your actions."
Wisconsin Gov.-elect Scott Walker hasn't seen the film "Waiting for Superman" yet, about America's struggling public school system. The demands of campaigning and now preparing to take office don't allow much time for movies.
But Walker did have "a good chat" with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan last week. "In many ways," Walker told the State Journal, "our ideas on reform follow a similar path."
That's encouraging because Walker has a huge opportunity to reshape our state's schools. The incoming GOP governor needs to think big and act boldly, just as the Democratic president's impressive education secretary has.
Duncan last month called the release of "Waiting for Superman," by director Davis Guggenheim, "a Rosa Parks moment." Duncan hopes the vital film -- now playing at Sundance Cinemas in Madison -- will spark discussion and action aimed at the incredibly serious challenges facing public education.
A group of San Francisco Unified School District administrators, including an associate superintendent, engaged in a long-running scheme to funnel district money into their personal bank accounts via nonprofit community organizations, according to internal documents.
The administrators worked out of the Student Support Services Department, which partners with community organizations to provide thousands of San Francisco students with health education, substance abuse counseling, violence prevention, after-school activities and other services.
The scandal has stunned San Francisco educators and thrown Student Support Services into turmoil at a time when the district faces a $113 million deficit. Some vital student services have been threatened as investigators comb through millions of dollars of transactions dating back at least four years.
The school board considered changing the program's status to "ongoing" at its meeting Tuesday and is now scheduled to vote on the matter Dec. 7. Before the program was approved in 2007, it sparked controversy with opponents arguing the district should offer foreign language classes to all elementary school students, not just some.
"There obviously was a lot of controversy when this program was adopted," Superintendent Kevin Skelly acknowledged Tuesday.
But district staff, program consultants, Ohlone Principal Bill Overton and others told the board the program has been largely successful, both with students' progress and the incorporation of the program into the Ohlone community. Skelly is recommending trustees change the program's status to "ongoing."
According to her study, for children to develop the math skills they'll need later on in school, it is essential that parents spend time teaching their children the value of numbers by using concrete examples -- instead of just repeating them out loud.
"Just about all 2-year-olds can rattle off the sequence from one to 10," Levine tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz. "But then, if you ask them to give you three objects ... they'll just grab a handful."
Norma Mortimer moves about her high school classroom with confidence born of 41 years' experience.
Directions to students are clear; she knows when to push for an answer and when to let a question hang.
The English teacher formerly taught music, composed and arranged marching band music, and performed at the Bristol Renaissance Faire.
"It all adds into what I bring to the classroom," she said.
Once every three years as a tenured teacher, performance evaluations provide her with feedback, something she looks forward to even though she knows she's not slipping.
Still, evaluations never flag what she considers her weakest area - teaching effectively when the class is in small groups. Last year, she never received her post-evaluation conference with the principal.
In the growing national debate on how to raise the quality of public school teaching in America, performance evaluations have become both a lightning rod and a sticking point.
Most evaluation systems in public schools provide little information to properly assess teachers' strengths and weaknesses. And because teachers are rarely dismissed over their performance, formal evaluations seldom carry much weight.
Wisconsin's next governor has promised big changes for schools and taxpayers - from tying teacher pay raises to performance and giving each school a letter grade to expanding alternatives to public schools and helping school districts cut costs.
But the first challenge facing Republican Scott Walker and the GOP-controlled Legislature next year is closing a $3 billion deficit in the state's general fund, 44 percent of which covers K-12 education.
"I don't think anybody is going to, in the short run, be able to solve the budget problems without cutting state funding for K-12," said Andrew Reschovsky, a UW-Madison economics professor. "The current situation is unsustainable in the long run. There really is a crisis in how we fund schools."
State Superintendent Tony Evers this week is expected to kick-start the school spending debate by announcing the details of his plan to reform the state's complex education funding formula. In June, he said his proposal would move away from distributing aid based on property values and take into account factors such as student poverty - a move that could help districts such as Madison with high property wealth but also a lot of poor students.
The state cut $284 million, or 2.6 percent, from school aid in the current budget, resulting in an 8 percent reduction for Madison. The state also reduced the amount districts could increase revenues from $275 per pupil to $200 per pupil, which helped keep a lid on property taxes but forced districts to make budget cuts.
Debates about education these days tend to center on familiar terms like charter schools and merit pay. Now a new fault line is emerging: "parent trigger."
Like many radical ideas, parent trigger originated in California, as an innovation of a liberal activist group called Parent Revolution. The average student in Los Angeles has only a 50% chance of graduating high school and a 10% chance of attending college. It's a crisis, says Parent Revolution leader Ben Austin, that calls for "an unabashed and unapologetic transfer of raw power from the defenders of the status quo"--education officials and teachers unions--"to the parents."
Parent trigger, which became California law in January, is meant to facilitate that transfer of power through community organizing. Under the law, if 51% of parents in a failing school sign a petition, they can trigger a forcible transformation of the school--either by inviting a charter operator to take it over, by forcing certain administrative changes, or by shutting it down outright.
Schools are eligible for triggering if they have failed to make "adequate yearly progress," according to state standards, for four consecutive years. Today 1,300 of California's 10,000 schools qualify.
Teacher pensions may not sound like a sexy or even high-profile issue, but keep reading: they're threatening the fiscal health of many states and could cost you -- yes, you -- thousands of dollars. And, like the savings-and-loan crisis at the end of the 1980s or the current housing-market mess, insiders see big trouble ahead in the next few years and are starting to sound warnings.
Today there is an almost $500 billion shortfall for funding teacher pensions, and that gap is growing. Why should you care? Because ultimately taxpayers are on the hook for that money. But the problem doesn't just end there. The way teacher pensions operate is badly suited to today's teacher workforce, where 30-year careers are no longer the norm. The current setup penalizes teachers who move between states, switch to private or public-charter schools that do not participate in the pension system or leave teaching altogether. Meanwhile, it becomes financial suicide for teachers to change careers after a certain point, even if they no longer want to teach or are not good at it.
(See 10 smarter ways to reach your retirement goals.)
But first, let's talk about the money. Teacher pensions are part of a larger set of benefits that states and cities offer public employees, including health care and pension programs for cops, garbage men and other public employees. The Pew Center on the States puts the total shortfall for these benefits at $1 trillion. You read that right: trillion with a t. Obviously, these are important benefits to offer, but the costs are out of hand.
Madison schools have the chance to be bold in helping Spanish-speaking students
For most people, including me and probably much of the education establishment, this child's future would not appear particularly bright.
But for those willing to peek through the other end of the looking glass, he's ripe for a talented and gifted program that values advanced, often in-born academic gifts, but might do a better job respecting the advanced, real-world skills of its poorer, less-stereotypically successful students.
Elias is bilingual, after all, which by itself would go a long way toward qualifying him for jobs the rest of us English-only Americans could never hope to get in our rapidly diversifying society: urban newspaper reporter, Spanish-language television executive, United Nations translator.
The Department of Education this week laid out a technology strategy to improve the U.S. educational system.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan released the National Education Technology Plan (NETP), which sets goals to achieve by 2015 for how technology can transform the way students learn.
New York City's public schools are dramatically better today than they were eight years ago, in large part thanks to the tireless work of Chancellor Joel Klein. But there's still a long way to go, and the city needs its next chancellor, Cathie Black, to chart a clear path forward, and quickly.
If Black wants to finish what Chancellor Klein started, she must work to make parents, teachers and the public feel invested in the process.
Chicago's Renaissance 2010 plan is an excellent example of this: It let the city's leaders explain to Chicogoans exactly what they hoped to accomplish, and then frame each reform, like closing schools, in the broader effort to improve the system. Mayor Cory Booker is starting a similar process in Newark.
But the key to Black's success -- and to school reform -- is how she addresses the five major challenges facing New York City's schools:
Hartland Arrowhead High School responds to Title IX complaint
Arrowhead High School will pay for girls lacrosse and alpine skiing programs following an investigation by the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, according to documents provided to the Journal Sentinel.
It was the second such major investigation into how the Waukesha County high school treats the athletic interests of boys and girls, protected under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, in the last four years.
According to an Oct. 29 letter from Jeffrey Turnbull with the OCR's Chicago office, the federal government concluded "that the District is not currently fully and effectively accommodating the interests and abilities of its girls."
The Los Angeles Times decided in August to publish "teacher effectiveness" ratings using "value-added" test scores, an action that not only did a disservice to teachers but also to the children of California. The Times reduced the definition of quality teaching to a simplistic equation: Good teachers produce good test scores.
There is a simple, intuitive appeal to that formulation, but study after study demonstrates that scores on state tests, even using value-added measurement, are affected by too many factors to support simplistic conclusions about individual teachers.
That is not simply our opinion. Every major professional association of education researchers has said so. The National Academies and the Economics Policy Institute have said so as well.
It’s with some amusement that I read the overheated debate about abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. For one thing, there is a vast difference between those who want to eliminate the federal role in education, and those who want to return ED to its former home in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. But since neither of those things is going to happen, I guess it doesn’t matter if they are lumped together.
On the other hand, there are those who think getting rid of ED would “destroy public education as we know it,” and that those abolitionists are “strange bedfellows in Crazy Town.” This attitude only demonstrates the hopelessness of the task. If talk of eliminating or downgrading a Cabinet department is beyond the pale, maybe the Postmaster General should should be returned to his spot.
Less federalism in education would certainly be welcome, from my perspective.
The Texas Education Agency has sent a conservator to the Houston school district to make sure it fixes problems in serving a group of students with disabilities.
The school district has come under state oversight after failing to correct multiple violations, such as not providing students with the instruction they were promised and giving too many children modified state exams.
The problems highlighted by the TEA focus only on the district's program for students with disabilities who are in the custody of residential facilities. Children who live in these private or state-run facilities -- which include group homes and residential treatment centers -- are away from their families. A 2005 court order requires the TEA to monitor how districts educate these children.
"Often times, these kids are so far away from their families that there's really no oversight if TEA isn't doing the job," said Maureen O'Connell, an attorney with the Southern Disability Law Center. O'Connell represented the children in the lawsuit brought against the TEA that led to the mandatory monitoring.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan unveiled the final version of the National Education Technology Plan on Tuesday -- proposals to use social networking, data collection and multi-media to get U.S. kids to learn more. According to Duncan, the plan -- almost two years in the making -- will help American education "transition to digital classrooms and transform learning" for the Facebook and IPhone generation and beyond.
As a middle school math teacher and a long-time union member, I had heard it all before. Dozens of "solutions du jour" have come and gone -- with little if any measurable improvement. I figured that this was one more attempt that was destined to fail.
As I read Duncan's speech about the plan, my skepticism evaporated. Not only could this plan prompt Democrats and Republicans in the incoming Congress to cross the aisle to focus on a crucial learning roadmap, but the plan -- and each of its five very specific goals -- makes sense!
We are pleased to share our first report, A Quality Teacher in Every Classroom: An Evaluation System that Works for California.
This report, one in a series to be released by ACT, examines teacher evaluation. We chose to begin here because we believe that without a common understanding of what constitutes teaching quality and how teachers should be evaluated, any further conversation about improving teaching will be inconsequential. The recommendations in this report are drawn from research, analysis of existing policies, input from academic experts, and our own experiences as promoters of quality teaching. This report offers our recommendations on making teacher evaluation a more useful tool to advance the quality of teaching across California.
If you want to leave a comment or ask a question about the report, please visit our InterACT blog.
In an earlier post, I provided my understanding of the background of the protest at West High about the proposal for changes in the District's high school curriculum. I explained how the proposal was an outgrowth of the work that has gone on at the high schools for the last few years under the auspices of a federal grant, known as the REaL grant (for Relationships, Engagement and Learning).
That proposal, which will affect all four of the District's comprehensive high schools and is now known as the High School Career and College Readiness Plan, has since evolved somewhat, partially in response to the feedback that has been received and partially as a consequence of thinking the proposals through a bit more.
Here is where things currently stand.
The high school proposal should start a conversation that could last for a few years regarding a long-term, systematic review of our curriculum and the way it is delivered to serve the interests of all learners. What's currently on the table is more limited in scope, though it is intended to serve as the foundation for later work.
The principal problem the proposal is meant to address is that we currently don't have any district-defined academic standards at the high school level. There is no established set of expectations for what skills students should be learning in each subject area each year. Since we don't have any basic expectations, we also don't have any specific and consistent goals for accelerated learning. A corollary of this is that we really don't have many ways to hold a teacher accountable for the level of learning that goes on in his or her classroom. Also, we lack a system of assessments that would let us know how our students are progressing through high school.
CT: How will you bring boys who are already behind a couple of years or more up to grade level so they are fully prepared for college?
KC: One, we will have a longer school day, a longer school year. They will start about 7:30 and end about 5 o'clock. Tutoring will be built into our school program. It will be built into each schedule based on your academic performance. We're going to use ability grouping to tackle kids who are severely behind, who need more education. We'll do that if we can afford it by requiring Saturday school for young people who really need even additional enrichment and so we're going to do whatever it takes so we make sure they get what they need.
CT: What kind of commitment will Madison Prep require of parents or guardians?
KC: They have to sign a participation contract. These are non-binding contracts but it will clearly spell out what their expectations are of us and our expectations are of them. Parents will be given a grade for participation on the child's report card. There are ways for ALL parents to be involved. You know, some people have asked, 'What will you do if parents won't show up to a child's performance review?' Literally, we'll go set up our tables outside their houses and it will be kind of embarrassing but we'll do it because we won't allow our kids to be left behind.
CT: You've said you'd like to see more flexibility and innovation. Does that mean you'd like to run this school without a union contract?
Many community college students do not engage in enough classroom activities that enhance their "broadly applicable thinking, reasoning and judgment skills," according to the latest Community College Survey of Student Engagement released today.
This year's release of the survey, now in its 10th year, draws from the responses of more than 400,000 community college students in 47 states, the Marshall Islands and the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and Ontario. In addition to the annual set of questions about their classroom and campus experiences, this year's respondents were asked specific questions about "deep learning" techniques -- defined as those "abilities that allow individuals to apply information, develop a coherent world view and interact in more meaningful ways."
The authors of this year's survey argue that the percentages of students who reported that they engaged "often or very often" in "deep learning" activities indicate that community colleges must do a better job of promoting them in the classroom if they hope to boost student performance.
Gov. Chris Christie today slammed Parsippany's school board for approving a salary for Superintendent LeRoy Seitz that is well above a cap set to take effect in a few months. But Christie was not sure if he could do anything to reverse the decision.
Christie, who was at a town hall meeting in Clifton, said the school board "cares more about whether a superintendent will take them out to lunch than protecting the taxpayers they were elected to serve," and that they ignore voters at their "political peril."
At a standing-room-only meeting Tuesday night, the board voted 6-2 to extend Seitz's contract by five years, with an average annual salary of $225,064. The contract was set to expire on July 1.
Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, is not a popular man among those who have spent their careers working in the school system--but, to judge by the reaction in the edu-blogosphere, any joy engendered by the announcement of his resignation was quickly extinguished when the identity of his successor became known. She is Cathie Black, a career magazine-industry executive with no work experience in education; in appointing her, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is showing that he doesn't trust educators, even those with reformist reputations, to run the school system. So the toxicity surrounding school reform isn't likely to disappear.
How Mayor Bloomberg feels about the school system isn't news anymore. What's most interesting about yesterday's announcement was not that Klein is leaving or that Black is replacing him, but that Klein is going to work for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to explore possibilities in education. Recently, two famous Wall Street short sellers, James Chanos and Steve Eisman, announced that they see a crash coming in the for-profit education sector, which is heavily dependent on online degrees paid for through federally guaranteed student loans. (For details, see the very viral PowerPoint and speech that Eisman delivered at an investment conference last May, called "Subprime Goes to College.") The shorts, and the Obama Administration, which is tightening student-loan eligibility, have driven down the prices of education stocks--including that of the Washington Post Company, which depends economically on Kaplan Inc., one of the leading for-profit education companies (and until recently the employer of Joel Klein's predecessor as New York schools chancellor, Harold Levy).
Education reformers tend to react to the ferocious opposition of the status quo in one of two ways: Either they fade away in resignation, or they become even more radical. Joel Klein did the latter, which is why he leaves New York City's 1,600 public schools and 1.1 million students better than he found them.
A Democrat without education experience when he became schools chancellor in 2002, Mr. Klein began as a mainstream reformer. Raise standards, end social promotion, hire better teachers, promote charter schools. But as he was mugged by the reality of the K-12 public school establishment, he began to appreciate that real improvement requires more than change at the margin.
Thus he led the fight for far more school choice by creating charter school clusters, as in Harlem, that are changing the local culture of failure. Kids from as far away as Buffalo will benefit from his fight to lift the state charter cap, which increased to 460 schools from 200. Mr. Klein helped to expose the "rubber rooms" that let bad teachers live for years on the taxpayer dime while doing no work. He gave schools grades from A to F and pushed to close the bad ones, and he fought for merit pay in return for ending teacher tenure.
Minneapolis Schools budget deficit could be double original estimate
Minneapolis school officials are warning of an even larger budget deficit next year than first expected.
District leaders had said next year's budget gap would exceed $20 million, but they now estimate it will be between $30 million and $45 million.
Peggy Ingison, the district's chief financial officer, said the deficits are the result of federal stimulus money that is running out, along with uncertain and likely less funding from the state and cuts are certain to affect classroom instruction and teaching jobs.
"We wouldn't be able to probably continue to totally protect the classroom with this level of cuts," Ingison said. "Neither will we be able to avoid, with such a significant portion of our budget related to wages and benefits, any staff reductions."
The College Board announced on Wednesday the revival of the Advanced Placement test in Italian, setting the stage for a renaissance in the study of the language of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci in U.S. high schools.
Italian teachers had feared nothing less than the demise of their discipline when the college-preparatory nonprofit organization eliminated AP Italian last year, saying the program was underfunded.
Wednesday's announcement signaled the success of a two-year lobbying campaign by advocates of Italian language and culture in U.S. schools. The turning point came when the Cuomo family, cast in the role of cultural ambassadors, secured a financial commitment from the Italian government.
"These things don't happen without that level of support. And we are very grateful to Prime Minister [Silvio] Berlusconi for that," said Margaret Cuomo, daughter of former New York governor Mario Cuomo and sister of Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo.
During his eight years at the helm of New York City public schools, Joel I. Klein emerged as one of the city's most divisive figures. On Tuesday, he announced that he would step out of the limelight to become an executive vice president responsible for education and technology at Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
In a telephone interview shortly after announcing his resignation, Mr. Klein reflected on his time leading the country's largest school system and the frustrations and triumphs of his tenure.
Here is a transcript of the interview, condensed and edited for space.
A Maryland legislative committee voted Monday to reject a new regulation requiring that half of teachers' evaluations be based on student progress, calling into question the future of a $250 million federal Race to the Top grant.
The move is a challenge to a core component of the education plan proposed by Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) and State Schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick in the spring. The federal money was awarded in part because Maryland promised that student progress would be such a large component of the evaluations, and President Obama has encouraged such changes.
But opponents of the policy, including the state's teachers unions, say that standardized tests are not designed to give information about teachers and that teachers should not be held responsible for outside factors that affect achievement.
Los Angeles Unified officials took a big step forward Tuesday toward launching a new controversial method to evaluate teachers based on the performance of their students.
The school board approved two consultant contracts to study and develop the new teacher evaluation method, with a combined cost of up to $4.5 million.
One consultant will develop ways to evaluate teachers based on the test performance of their students over time, called the "value-added" method. The other will help develop new guidelines and "best practices" for teachers.
The value-added method compares student performance from one year to the next to evaluate a teacher's abilities. It has been sharply criticized by some union leaders and experts as flawed and unfair, but applauded by others, including President Barack Obama.
Given today's economic difficulties, I thought I'd come to Pakistan to find Osama bin Laden, lug him back home in my duffel bag and declare him at American customs to pick up the $27 million reward.
More on that mission in a moment. First, another conundrum here in Pakistan:
The United States has provided $18 billion to Pakistan in aid since 9/11, yet Pakistan's government shelters the Afghan Taliban as it kills American soldiers and drains the American Treasury. Meanwhile, only 8 percent of Pakistanis have confidence in President Obama, according to the Pew Research Center. That's not even half as many as express confidence in bin Laden.
Meanwhile, Pakistan seeks postflood aid from Western taxpayers, yet barely taxes its own affluent citizens at home. And its feudal landholders have historically opposed good schools, for fear that poor Pakistanis -- if educated -- would object to oppression.
In Vancouver last winter, the United States proved its competitive spirit by winning more medals--gold, silver, and bronze--at the Winter Olympic Games than any other country, although the German member of our research team insists on pointing out that Canada and Germany both won more gold medals than the United States. But if there is some dispute about which Olympic medals to count, there is no question about American math performance: the United States does not deserve even a paper medal.
Maintaining our productivity as a nation depends importantly on developing a highly qualified cadre of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals. To realize that objective requires a system of schooling that produces students with advanced math and science skills. To see how well schools in the United States do at producing high-achieving math students, we compared the percentage of U.S. students in the high-school graduating Class of 2009 with advanced skills in mathematics to percentages of similarly high achievers in other countries.
Caire was one of four main presenters, the others being Madison schools superintendent Dan Nerad, the dean of the UW-Madison School of Education, and -- sure enough -- Madison Teachers Inc. union president Mike Lipp.
Nerad was o.k. He got off a good line: "Children are the future but we are our children's future." He even quoted Sitting Bull but on first reference made certain to use his actual Native American name. This IS Madison, after all.
UW Education Dean Julie Underwood was atrocious -- a firm defender of the status quo denouncing the "slashing" of school budgets, "negative ads," and demanding that the community become "public school advocates." I.E., the whole liberal litany.
Say, Dean Julie, how about the community become advocates for teaching children -- in other words, the goal -- instead of a one-size-fits-all, government-ordained delivery mechanism? Isn't competition the American way?
Union apologist Mike Lipp reminded me of Welcome Back Kotter -- looks and mien. He could be humorous (I am certain he is a good teacher) but he spent his allotted time on the glories of that holy grail of education: the union's collective bargaining agreement. I expected an ethereal light beam to shine down on this holy writ, which Lipp lamented that he did not bring with him. His other purpose was to defuse the powerhouse documentary, "Waiting for Superman."
Indeed, it was that indictment of public education's "failure factories" and the hidebound me-first teachers unions that prompted Tuesday evening's "conversation." I wrote about it, and Kaleem Caire, here.
When Lipp was finished he returned to his table next to union hired gun John Matthews. No sense in sitting with parents and taxpayers.
When it came time for the participants to respond, one parent said of the four presenters that only Kaleem Caire took to heart the evening's admonition to "keep students as the focus." I think that was a little unfair to Nerad, who deserves credit for opening this can of worms, but otherwise right on target.
Caire reported that only 7% of African-American students tested as college-ready on the ACT test. For Latinos, the percentage is 14. Those are 2010 statistics -- for Madison schools. In these schools, 2,800 suspensions were handed down to black students -- of a total black enrollment of 5,300 students!
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
How NOT to vote for school board & Who Does the Superintendent Report to
Last week, I voted for several people on the Montgomery County school board, one of the few times I ever thought about that body.
As an education writer, I try to stay away from school boards. I know that sounds odd, but over the years, I have found school board meetings to be as interesting, newsworthy and uplifting as visits to the dentist. I avoid them. I talk to teachers, principals, students and parents instead.
I feel guilty about that. School boards have a vital role in a democratic society. They are the link between us and our schools. If you have a complaint that the school system is not addressing, the school board is pretty much the only place to go. So why don't I make more of an effort to get to know its members?
The recent election reminded me of one reason. The public sources of information about school board members, such as news articles, voters guides and school district Web sites, rarely tell me the most important things to know about those being elected.
The most important decision school board members make is whom to hire as superintendent. Whether they vote for or against the superintendent's plans for improving schools is also crucial. Cities, including the District, have transferred that power over superintendents to mayors or city councils because their school boards were too distracted by political or personal feuds and failed to support even effective superintendents.
Young people should be assessed and moved through K-12 education at their own pace, after evaluations have determined competencies, rather than the current policy of advancing learners based primarily on seat time, according to a new report published yesterday.
The paper explores competency-based pathways, a necessary condition to realizing the potential of next generation learning. The report promotes a deeper understanding of K-12 education policies and practices for implementing student-centered learning through competency-based pathways through a scan of exemplars across the United States. Also touched on in the paper are the many explorations into next generation learning that are sweeping across the country, as well as the technological advancements that are opening up new student-centered, performance-based, "anytime, anywhere" educational opportunities.
Two months into the school year, Chicago Board of Education officials Tuesday were already estimating next school year's deficit at $700 million.
Plus, the State of Illinois now owes the Chicago Public Schools more money than it did in August, when CPS officials scraped together enough cost savings, last-minute revenues and rainy-day reserve fund-raiding to balance the system's budget.
I've never been accused of having any talent worth nurturing in an Advanced Placement class, although I'm sure there are some who would say I have a gift for irritating people. (Unfortunately, they don't give out Rhodes Scholarships for that.)
So feel free to take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt, or a healthy dose of sour grapes on my part, but I question the utility of the way we challenge the young brainiacs among us.
Diving deeply into physics or fine arts might make for good rocket scientists and concert pianists, but it would also seem inevitably to exclude a certain less intense, yet broader range of experiences and the people they include.
My new Facebook friends and perhaps the most courteous political insurgents ever, Madison West seniors Joaquin Selva and Jacob Fiksel, admitted to something along those lines when I ran into them Wednesday at the school district's Community Conversation on Education.
On Sunday, November 7, the Wisconsin State Journal featured a front-page article about the Madison School District's Talented and Gifted education services: "TAG, they're it." The story describes parents' frustration with the pace of reform since the Board of Education approved the new TAG Plan in August, 2009. It paints the TAG Plan as very ambitious and the parents as impatient-perhaps unreasonable-to expect such quick implementation.
The article includes a "Complaint Timeline" that starts with the approval of the TAG Plan, skips to the filing of the complaint on September 20, and proceeds from there to list the steps of the DPI audit.
Unfortunately, neither this timeline nor the WSJ article conveys the long history leading up to the parents' complaint. This story did not start with the 2009 TAG Plan. Rather, the 2009 TAG Plan came after almost two decades of the District violating State law for gifted education.
To provide better background, we would like to add more information and several key dates to the "Complaint Timeline."
November 2005: West High School administrators roll out their plan for English 10 at a PTSO meeting. Most of the 70 parents in attendance object to the school eliminating English electives and imposing a one-size-for-all curriculum on all students. Parents ask administrators to provide honors sections of English 10. They refuse. Parents ask administrators to evaluate and fix the problems with English 9 before implementing the same approach in 10th grade. They refuse. Parents appeal to the BOE to intervene; they remain silent. Meanwhile, parents have already been advocating for years to save the lone section of Accelerated Biology at West.
Hundreds of teachers, parents and students came together Tuesday night to discuss strategies -- which the Madison School District hopes to eventually act on -- to ensure quality education for all students.
Key ideas included hiring top teachers, encouraging parent involvement and meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse classroom.
"We are our children's future," said Superintendent Dan Nerad, adding strong children are essential for a strong community.
School officials who organized the event hoped the release of "Waiting for Superman," a documentary that examines the state of U.S. public education, would help spark conversation about improving the way students learn in Madison. Attendees were seated in small groups to brainstorm the successes and challenges of public education as well as improvements that need to be made.
The most critical factor in a child's education outside the home is the quality of the teacher at the front of his or her classroom. A great teacher can lift a struggling student. A mediocre teacher can set a child back months if not years.
So which Illinois education schools are producing great teachers? And which aren't?
The most disturbing finding: The state's largest producers of teachers -- Illinois State University and Northern Illinois University, -- earned poor marks. Illinois State, the report said, merited "exceptionally low grades in its undergraduate elementary and special education programs." Northern Illinois "did only slightly better, with weak grades in its undergraduate elementary and both its undergraduate and graduate special education program."
The California Academy of Mathematics and Science in south Los Angeles is one of the top high schools in the country, and senior Danial Ceasar is one of its top students, reports CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker. He's got an A average, and he's ambitious - he wants to be a psychiatrist.
"I'm looking at Berkeley and Stanford as my top schools," Danial said.
But here's a troubling sign of the times: achieving, black, male students like Danial are increasingly rare in America's schools.
"The overall academic achievement of African American males was appallingly low, not only in cities, but nationwide," said Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools.
According to a new study released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, by fourth grade only 12 percent of black male students read at or above grade level, while 38 percent of white males do. By eighth grade it falls to just 9 percent for black males, 33 percent for whites. Black male students are almost twice as likely as white males to drop out of school. And in some big American cities the dropout rate is around 50 percent.
High school students in Palo Alto will take their winter break next month knowing they'll have final exams waiting for them when they return, but a school board vote tonight may change that practice for future classes.
Palo Alto Unified School District trustees will decide whether to start the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years three days earlier than years past, allowing teachers to schedule exams before winter break instead of in mid-January. Students would start classes on Aug. 18 next year and Aug. 16 the following year.
"I think that high school students have for years expressed an interest in having finals before winter break," Superintendent Kevin Skelly said. "Many, if not most of the schools in our area, are having finals before winter break."
The proposal has split parents into different camps. The district had received nearly 430 e-mails on the controversial idea as of Oct. 26, the last time it discussed changing the school calendar.
t Seattle Public Schools, we truly believe in excellence for all. It's more than a saying; it's our commitment to this community and the name of our five-year strategic plan to ensure every child graduates ready for college, career and life.
Seattle Public Schools is providing detailed information on how each school, and the district overall, is performing. These reports also explain what we are doing to increase academic achievement and close the achievement gap in each school and across the district.
The second annual District Scorecard shows how our students are
performing across the district - from test scores to graduation rates. The Scorecard also shows how the district is performing operationally, in areas such as facilities, transportation and family satisfaction. District Scorecard
For the first time, we are issuing individual School Reports. We want to give parents, students and the community important information so we can all learn from and act on the data.
You can read about your school's academic growth, student climate, accountability, family and staff engagement, and overall school performance. We hope you also take time to read the narrative page,
On Tuesday morning, Seattle Public Schools will unveil detailed new reports on 82 of its schools, and a new ranking system that rates each school on a scale of 1-5 based largely on test scores and whether those scores are moving up or down.
The reports, which will be posted on the school district's website about 10 a.m., will give parents and the public more information than ever before on the city's public schools.
In addition to test scores, each school's report includes data about attendance rates, average class size, percent of high-school students taking college classes and much more. The schools also outline their goals for the year and how they plan to achieve them.
Early thoughts on Joel Klein, Cathie Black and education reform in New York Yor
New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein stepped down today after eight years on the job and will be replaced by Hearst chairwoman Cathie Black. In the coming days, we'll see many assessments of Klein's legacy; what's clear is that he succeeded in projecting an image of order, organization and improvement in the nation's largest public school system, which educates 1 million children and employs 80,000 teachers. Klein oversaw the establishment of about 100 new charter schools; broke up large comprehensive high schools into smaller, themed schools; and raised the on-time high school graduation rate to 60 percent from about 44 percent in the class of 2004.
What's less clear is how well-prepared the typical New York City public school grad is for higher education or the workplace; much of the district's proudly touted gains on state tests disappeared earlier this year when New York declared the tests too easy and recalibrated proficiency rates. On NAEP, the only national test of students' skills, New York City fourth-graders have improved modestly, but eighth-graders are stagnant.a
Two days after the election, Gov.-elect Scott Walker was greeted with wide smiles, warm handshakes and a standing ovation during a short stop at the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents meeting.
Walker returned the love by telling the regents gathered at UW-Madison that "this is truly one of the greatest university systems in the world, not just the country. It's an honor to be here today."
But he soon got down to business, making it clear that with the state's massive budget hole, university leaders would be asked to do more with less.
"It isn't just always about more money," Walker said, noting that leaders would need to be flexible, innovative and creative to get the most out of limited resources.
Some believe any more cuts in state funding to the UW System will do significant harm to its 13 universities and 13 two-year colleges, but UW System leaders would be wise to start preparing for the worst, says Noel Radomski.
From Washington to Trenton to Newark, political leaders from both parties - including President Barack Obama and Gov. Chris Christie -- are promoting charter schools as an answer to perceived public school failure. And the privately run but publicly funded schools receive support from some of the wealthiest and most famous people on the planet.
But a few activists based in Princeton -- some charter school parents -- and a Rutgers researcher want their voices heard above the cheerleading. They warn charters are not panaceas.
Three times a week, Van Hise Elementary fifth-grader Eve Sidikman and two fellow students from her school board a bus bound for GEMS, the Madison school district's "Growing Elementary Math Students" program for students whose math abilities are so high they aren't challenged in a standard classroom.
Eve's bus also makes the rounds to Randall and Thoreau before pulling up to the curb at Shorewood Elementary, where Eve and her GEMS classmates have a two-hour math session taught by a member of the district's Talented and Gifted staff.
"She teaches it in a creative and fun way," Eve, who was placed in GEMS after her mother sought out and paid for a national test that proved Eve was capable of acing eighth-grade math, said of her teacher. "I think she's preparing us for our middle school years well."
The Madison School district is grappling with how best to serve students deemed "Talented and Gifted," or TAG in district shorthand -- partly to stem a talent drain through open enrollment, partly to satisfy a vocal group of dissatisfied parents, and partly to find more Eves who don't necessarily have a family with the financial means, determination and know-how to capitalize on their student's untapped talents.
District critics say change is happening too slowly -- something Superintendent Dan Nerad admits -- and programs like GEMS are few and far between. Advocates also acknowledge, however, there is skepticism of gifted services among both the public and educators at a time when so many students fail to meet even minimal standards.
Having worked some 40 years in the business world, mostly abroad, with many leaders in business, politics and religion, I believe the most important ingredient for success is setting one or two ambitious, long-term goals that are routinely and publicly measured against the best in the world.
For Wisconsin, we only need two:
Raise our state's per capita income to 10 percent above Minnesota's by 2030.
In job and business creation over the next decade, Wisconsin is often predicted to be among the lowest 10 states. When I was a kid growing up in Madison, income in Wisconsin was some 10 percent higher than in Minnesota. Minnesota caught up to us in 1967, and now the average Minnesotan makes $4,500 more than the average Wisconsinite.
Lift the math, science and reading scores of all K-12, non-special education students in Wisconsin above world-class standards by 2030. (emphasis added)
Wisconsinites often believe we lose jobs because of lower wages elsewhere. In fact, it is often the abundance of skills (and subsidies and effort) that bring huge Intel research and development labs to Bangalore, Microsoft research centers to Beijing, and Advanced Micro Devices chip factories to Dresden.
Our educational standards are based relative to the United States. So even if we "successfully" accomplish all of our state educational goals, our kids would still be in the global minor leagues. How about targeting Finland and Singapore in math, South Korea and Japan in science, Canada in reading?
As the saying goes: "When one does not know where one is going, any road will do" (or not do).
Without clear scorecards, we citizens will have little ability to coerce and evaluate politicians and their excuses, rhetoric and laws from the right and left. If JFK had not set a "man on the moon" stretch target, would we have landed there? Do the Green Bay Packers have a chance at winning another Super Bowl if they never tack that goal to the locker room walls?
The Boston school system is churning out illiterate students whose only skills are to pass predictable standard tests
I DID not attend a graduation ceremony in 25 years as a Boston public high school teacher. This was my silent protest against a skillfully choreographed mockery of an authentic education - a charade by adults who, knowingly or unwittingly, played games with other people's children.
I knew that most of my students who walked across the stage, amidst the cheers, whistles, camera flashes, and shout-outs from parents, family, and friends, were not functionally literate. They were unable to perform the minimum skills necessary to negotiate society: reading the local newspapers, filling out a job application, or following basic written instructions; even fewer had achieved empowering literacy enabling them to closely read, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate text.
However, they were all college bound - the ultimate goal of our school's vision statement-- clutching knapsacks stuffed with our symbols of academic success: multiple college acceptances, a high school diploma; an official transcript indicating they had passed the MCAS test and had met all graduation requirements; several glowing letters of recommendation from teachers and guidance counselors; and one compelling personal statement, their college essay.
They walked across the stage into a world that was unaware of the truth that scorched my soul --the truth that became clear the first day I entered West Roxbury High School in 1979 (my first assignment as a provisional 12th grade English teacher): the young men and women I was responsible for coaching the last leg of their academic journey could not write a complete sentence, a cohesive paragraph, or a well-developed essay on a given topic. I remember my pain and anger at this revelation and my struggle to reconcile the reality before me with my own high school experience, which had enabled me to negotiate the world of words--oral and written--independently, with relative ease and confidence.
For the ensuing 30-plus years, I witnessed how the system churned out academically unprepared students who lacked the skills needed to negotiate the rigors of serious scholarship, or those skills necessary to move in and up the corporate world.
We instituted tests and assessments, such as the MCAS, that required little exercise in critical thinking, for which most of the students were carefully coached to "pass.'' Teachers, instructors, and administrators made the test the curriculum, taught to the test, drilled for the test, coached for the test, taught strategies to take the test, and gave generous rewards (pizza parties) for passing the test. Students practiced, studied for, and passed the test--but remained illiterate.
I also bear witness to my students' ability to acquire a passing grade for mediocre work. A's and B's were given simply for passing in assignments (quality not a factor), for behaving well in class, for regular attendance, for completing homework assignments that were given a check mark but never read.
In addition, I have been a victim of the subtle and overt pressure exerted by students, parents, administrators, guidance counselors, coaches, and colleagues to give undeserving students passing grades, especially at graduation time, when the "walk across the stage'' frenzy is at its peak.
When all else failed, there were strategies for churning out seemingly academically prepared students. These were the ways around the official requirements: loopholes such as MCAS waivers; returning or deftly transferring students to Special Needs Programs--a practice usually initiated by concerned parents who wanted to avoid meeting the regular education requirements or to gain access to "testing accommodations''; and, Credit Recovery, the computer program that enabled the stragglers, those who were left behind, to catch up to the frontrunners in the Race to the Stage. Students were allowed to take Credit Recovery as a substitute for the course they failed, and by passing with a C, recover their credits.
Nevertheless, this past June, in the final year of my teaching career, I chose to attend my first graduation at the urgings of my students--the ones whose desire to learn, to become better readers and writers, and whose unrelenting hard work earned them a spot on the graduation list--and the admonition of a close friend who warned that my refusal to attend was an act of selfishness, of not thinking about my students who deserved the honor and respect signified by my presence.
At the ceremony I chose to be happy, in spite of the gnawing realization that nothing had changed in 32 years. We had continued playing games with other people's children.
Junia Yearwood, a guest columnist, is a retired Boston Public Schools teacher who taught at English High for 25 years.
The New Mexico PreK evaluation, from the 2008-2009 school year, finds positive impacts from the state-funded prekindergarten program for young children, consistent with previous findings. With statistically significant increases observed in vocabulary, math, and literacy scores for children participating in New Mexico PreK, the authors find New Mexico PreK is helping prepare young children for later school success. The New Mexico PreK initiative began in 2005 and has expanded rapidly. From the beginning, the National Institute for Early Education Research has been evaluating the program using the regression-discontinuity approach.
New site provides financial literacy curricula for parents, students, and educators.
Our sister site GoCollege has given a great deal of attention to the current student loan crisis. The problem is actually a very simple one, easy access to loans has led naïve students to borrow significant sums of money as they pursue their college degree.
The problem is that too many students are borrowing far too much and thus are literally mortgaging their entire future. I recently highlighted my concerns with what is happening in my own state where students are leaving the state university with some of the highest average debt levels in the country.
Unfortunately, financial literacy is not a typical topic generally taught in public schools. Thus, educating children about money and the concept of using credit in a healthy manner still falls upon parents. In essence, this is a subject where every family must employ the home-schooling concept.
The budget agreement California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and lawmakers reached last month will have a "negative influence" on the credit of school districts more than on other parts of local government, Moody's Investors Service said.
School districts will face cash-flow problems because the state delayed or deferred subsidies they are owed, Moody's Senior Vice President Eric Hoffmann said in a report today. Counties and cities should be at less risk, he said.
Schwarzenegger signed the $86.6 billion budget Oct. 8 after lawmakers wrestled over an agreement for 100 days into the fiscal year, the longest the most populous U.S. state has ever gone without a spending plan. It eliminated a $19 billion deficit by cutting spending almost $8 billion, half of that from health and welfare programs administered by local governments. It also delayed paying more than $5 billion in subsidies to schools and community colleges.
"These new cross-fiscal year deferrals could particularly pose a challenge for school districts with narrow liquidity and outstanding tax and revenue anticipation notes due on June 30, the last day of their current fiscal year," Hoffman said in the report.
A lot of harsh words are thrown around during a campaign, and Gov.-elect Paul LePage was on the receiving end of many of them, particularly regarding his positions on education.
But now that the votes have been cast the rhetoric can die away. Although there is still considerable flesh that has to be added to the policy bones that LePage campaigned on, we like much of what he proposed in regards to education reform, which includes ideas that we have been championing for some time.
LePage supports public charter schools, funded from the same sources as traditional schools. Charter schools have a mixed track record, but the best ones serve as innovative laboratories for new approaches to teaching and learning.
They also offer school districts a way to pilot alternative programs, like schools that meet at night, during the weekend or combine with a vocational focus, which could bring dropouts back into education.
The most successful schools ignore government advice and set their own standards for effective teaching, according to a thinktank report published today.
The best schools have an "open culture", in which heads regularly pop into classrooms informally, the thinktank Reform says.
"The teachers view this as supportive rather than threatening ... the best schools foster an expectation and culture of perpetual improvement."
This change in culture leads to failing teachers either improving or leaving, the report says.
Being taught by a good teacher rather than a poor one improves a student's results by half a GCSE grade a subject, according to academic research quoted in the report.
The election is over, and yes, California has a new governor--well, actually a previous governor back for another turn.
Jerry Brown will return to the state's highest office but in a radically different political setting. Term limits, federal mandates, and tough requirements for raising taxes have created a political environment that makes it almost impossible for any governor to govern, yet that is what Brown must do.
Brown re-enters the office under conditions similar to those encountered by his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger: fiscal crisis. To some, this almost sounds like the boy who cried wolf--surely we must have solved the revenue and spending problem
by now.
But we haven't. Current projections show California about $15 billion in the red for the new fiscal year, perhaps more. This after several years of draconian cutbacks.
The big news from Tuesday's elections--the GOP's gains of 60-plus seats in the House, recapturing the majority that it lost in 2006--naturally makes one wonder about the divisions that the victories are likely to foment. Pundits are speculating on conflicts between the Tea Party and Republican regulars over spending; between the 25 remaining Blue Dog Democrats and the party's liberal leadership; and of course between the two parties over budgetary matters, which could lead to gridlock.
But another division is likely to compete for center stage in the next two years: the split between, on one side, California and New York--two states, deeply in debt, whose wealthy are beneficiaries of the global economy--and, on the other, the solvent states of the American interior that will be asked to bail them out. This geographic division will also pit the heartland's middle class and working class against the well-to-do of New York and California and their political allies in the public-sector unions.
It is worth looking at the data to see how Wisconsin compares with some other states. Here is the mathematics comparison with Minnesota.
The "state" results are the percent of students ranked as proficient on the state test with the current cut scores being used. The international percent was obtained by using the state results on NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) and this was mapped by comparing levels of problems to the level on TIMSS, (Trends in Mathematics and Science Study).
Grade 4 Mathematics Percent proficient
State International
Wisconsin 74 45
Minnesota 68 55
Massachusetts 49 63
No, the Massachusetts scores were not reversed here. Their cut score levels are set higher than the TIMSS levels.
It is time for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to redo the cut score levels to make them realistic. Parents in Wisconsin are mature enough to be told the truth about how well their children are doing.
Standing at the edge of a pond surrounded by her class of fourth-graders, Jasmine Zeppa filled a bucket with brown water and lectured her pupils on the science of observing and recording data. Many of the children seemed more interested in nearby geese, a passing jogger and the crunchy leaves underfoot.
Zeppa's own professor from St. Catherine University stood nearby and recorded video of it all.
"I think it went as well as it possibly could have, given her experience," the professor, Susan Gibbs Goetz, said. Her snap review: The 25-year-old Zeppa could have done a better job holding the students' attention, but did well building on past lessons.
Zeppa is among the first class of aspiring teachers who are getting ready for new, more demanding requirements to receive their teacher license. A new licensing system is being tested in 19 states that includes filming student teachers in their classroom and evaluating the video, also candidates must show they can prepare a lesson, tailor it to different levels of students and present it effectively.
The groups have been slow to come to terms with the push for reform. Some see them as obstacles to change, and even union sympathizers agree that their voice in the education debate has been muted.
Teachers unions have a well-deserved reputation for exercising political clout. With a nearly unparalleled ability to raise cash and organize their ranks, they have elected school boards, influenced legislation and helped set the public school agenda in major American cities for decades.
Now, that clout is in question.
A nationwide school reform movement with bipartisan support has collided head-on with unions over three ideas that labor has long resisted: expansion of charter schools, the introduction of merit pay for teachers and the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations.
Even the long-held protections and prerogatives conferred by seniority and tenure no longer seem sacrosanct.
The Houston Independent School District is holding ten public meetings during two days in November to gather feedback from parents and community members regarding the effectiveness of the district's special education program.
During the meetings, the public's input will be gathered on a series of questions which have been developed by the TEA to gather information on the effective operation and performance of special education programs throughout the State. The questions include:
One purpose of the Individuals with Disabilities with Education Act or IDEA is to strengthen the role of parents and ensure family participation in the education of their children. Within the context of the Houston Independent School District, how are parents involved in the educational process for their children?
A wave of change and reform has finally begun moving across American public education. Across the political spectrum from President Obama rightward, people now agree that our children must learn much more than they are learning now, and that major change is necessary to enable them to do so. Only the most selfish special interests still insist on defending the status quo.
Indiana has led the nation in many areas lately. Fiscal responsibility, a pro-growth business climate, property tax reduction and infrastructure are good examples, but we can make no such claim about K-12 education. Only one in three Hoosier eighth-graders is able to pass the national reading and math tests; if we compare their scores to those of children in foreign countries, they look even worse.
It's not that we have made no headway. We have doubled the number of our 5-year-olds with access to full-day kindergarten, although a quarter still do not have it. We have strengthened the ability of teachers and principals to maintain classroom discipline by immunizing them from lawsuits. We have ended the "social promotion" of third-graders who cannot read to the fourth grade and almost certain failure in high school and life.
US President Barack Obama's visit to India is set to start to an unprecedented wave of back-to-back, big-ticket international education deals over the coming week aimed at making India a global education destination. India will sign key education pacts with Canada on Tuesday and the UK on Thursday after finalising projects with Obama's delegation on Monday, top government sources confirmed.
"Don't forget that the US, UK and Canada are countries that Indians have traditionally thronged for education. It is indicative of India's role in the global education scenario today that they are coming to India virtually in back-to-back trips we have never witnessed before," a senior government official said. "These countries need us as much as we need them."
An educational earthquake aimed at improving the effectiveness of teachers is rumbling across the nation.
So far, the quake is only beginning to affect Wisconsin. But the tremors of change are already being felt here, and more are coming.
In the process, a new world of teaching is being built.
Nationwide, the federal government and giant philanthropies such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into underwriting work in dozens of states and cities on better ways to select teachers, monitor their work and pay them.
President Barack Obama has taken on teachers unions - traditionally partisan allies - over teacher improvement issues, while many Republicans, including Wisconsin Governor-elect Scott Walker, say they support reform in teachers' pay.
National leaders of teachers unions, long opposed to change, are willing to talk about once-taboo subjects such as making it easier to get weak teachers out of classrooms.
Multiple factors have ushered in this new era. First, it is now widely understood that not only are teachers the most important school-related factor in student learning, but that teacher effectiveness varies drastically. Second, the recession - and the resulting stimulus package - gave Obama a chance to launch large programs focused on increasing teacher effectiveness. Third, data about students and teachers has improved greatly, providing better tools for figuring out the success of many teachers on an individual basis.
Other columnists spend the dark winter months reconnecting with their loved ones before a cozy fire or a richly laden holiday feast. I use that time to fill a spreadsheet with the names of high schools and their ratios of college-level tests to graduating seniors.
It doesn't sound like much fun, but it is to me. Since 1997, when I devised a way to compare all U.S. high schools based how much they encouraged students to take challenging courses and tests, that has been my winter work. I have published the ranked list called America's Best High Schools, based on my Challenge Index, in the spring.
I am working on a new list now, with a few twists. First, it will no longer be sponsored by Newsweek magazine, but by the Washington Post, and this Web site, washingtonpost.com. The Washington Post Company, my employer for 39 years, just sold Newsweek, so I brought the list over here.
Second, I am going to include in the ranking calculations not only Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge tests, which are standardized exams that come at the end of college-level courses given in high school, but also the final exams of what are called dual enrollment or concurrent enrollment courses. These are courses given by local colleges to high school students. The students either come to the college campuses for a part of the day or have college professors or specially trained instructors conduct the courses at their high school.
So let's think out loud about what might lie ahead:
State aid to schools. It's hard to see how Republicans are going to keep their campaign promises and fund the same percentage of statewide costs for kindergarten through 12th grade. The state committed itself to paying two-thirds of those costs in the 1990s (under Republican Gov. Tommy G. Thompson). The current rate is a bit below that. But look for Walker to want to do something about this multibillion dollar annual spending. Reductions in state aid would translate into large increases in property taxes (that hardly seems likely, given the state of public opinion) or large cuts in school spending. That leads us to:
Teacher benefits. Look for a lot of action around this. Teachers are deeply defensive of their benefits, especially health insurance plans that are substantially above what almost anybody else has these days. But WEAC, the state teachers union, was among the biggest losers on Tuesday and has few friends in the Capitol now. There's been talk about trying to bring teachers into the state employees' health plan, which costs less than most teacher plans. Now is likely to be the time for doing that. Or maybe other ideas will surface.
Teachers contracts are negotiated locally, so the most powerful thing Republicans can do might be just to give local districts less money and let school officials and local unions figure out what to do about it. My guess is that the Milwaukee teachers union agreed recently to a new contract that goes until 2013, two years longer than the normal agreement, in hope of staving off more concessions at least for that long.
Alarmed by evidence that gay and lesbian students are common victims of schoolyard bullies, many school districts are bolstering their antiharassment rules with early lessons in tolerance, explaining that some children have "two moms" or will grow up to love members of the same sex.
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M. Scott Brauer for The New York Times
Mary Decker, left, Michael Gengler and Tess Dufrechou are members of the Helena High School Gay-Straight Alliance, which supported revisions to the sex education and antibullying curriculum in the school district in Helena, Mont.
The Curriculum
The school district in Helena, Mont., revised its new teaching guidelines on sex education and tolerance, after parents criticized them as being too explicit and an endorsement of homosexuality.
Among the original goals:
Grade 1: "Understand human beings can love people of the same gender and people of another gender."
Grade 5: "Understand that sexual intercourse includes but is not limited to vaginal, oral or anal penetration."
The final version eliminated those goals and added a vaguer one:
Grades K to 5: "Recognize that family structures differ."
The final version also added language emphasizing that same-sex marriage is illegal:
Grade 6: "In Montana, marriage is between a man and woman. Other states allow marriage between adults of the same gender."
But such efforts to teach acceptance of homosexuality, which have gained urgency after several well-publicized suicides by gay teenagers, are provoking new culture wars in some communities.
Many educators and rights advocates say that official prohibitions of slurs and taunts are most effective when combined with frank discussions, from kindergarten on, about diverse families and sexuality.
NEA sent out its first post-mortem to its members, staff and activists. It is pretty straightforward.
Education policy/ESEA Reauthorization:
The new Speaker of the House is expected to be Representative John Boehner (R-OH) and Representative John Kline (R-MN) is expected to serve as the Chair of the House Education and Labor Committee. Under their leadership, Republicans are likely to be more focused on local control of school systems and local decision making. This week, Representative Kline outlined broad-based priorities for education and employment policy, including "pursuing education reform that restores local control, empowers parents, lets teachers teach, and protects taxpayers." Representative Kline has also been a supporter of full funding for special education. Areas that NEA will be watching closely will include proposals for private school vouchers and increased support for charter schools.
Education Funding:
Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), a rising star in GOP who has burnished his credentials as a fiscal hawk is likely to serve as Chair of the House Budget Committee, while either Representative Hal Rogers (R-KY) or Representative Jerry Lewis (R-CA), past chairman of the Appropriations Committee, could serve as Appropriations Chair. Republicans are expected to push hard on spending and are likely to propose dramatic cuts to education and other domestic priorities. Already, would-be Speaker of the House John Boehner has proposed cutting all non-defense federal spending to FY2008 levels.
It was a forum held Wednesday by the Dane County League of Women Voters on "how changing demographics are affecting Dane County schools and human services," and the speakers -- Madison school superintendent Dan Nerad, Sun Prairie district administrator Tim Culver and Dane County director of Human Services Lynn Green -- aren't exactly right wingers.
But it's odd how the best of intentions can muddle a message, especially when it comes to race, and especially in Madison.
The panel was nothing if not well intentioned, not to mention extremely careful in its language.
Happy- and/or neutral-sounding words like "diversity" and "changing demographics" took the place of the more direct "black" or "Latino" or "poor." And while it was clear that these changing demographics meant higher rates of poverty and single-parent families, which in turn correlate with more problems in the schools or need for services, the panel chose not to identify them as problems. They were instead "challenges."
They were also careful to frame their remarks in a spirit of inclusiveness, and Nerad and Culver described efforts to inject "culturally relevant" instruction into their curriculums and to hire more minority teachers.
(I wondered how conservatives would respond to such efforts, widely applauded and rarely questioned in places as liberal as Madison. What does cultural relevancy have to do with learning the three Rs? Do you have to be black to teach a black child?)
The audience was provided with graphics showing student achievement rising during this period of increasing student poverty and diversity, but Nerad and Culver did not make a big deal of that in their remarks. Nerad said after the meeting that too much emphasis on the district's successes can invite criticism about areas where it isn't doing so well.
Even when gathering in Atlantic City, New Jersey's teachers can't get Gov. Chris Christie out of their minds.
For the past year, their largest union has been the prime target of Mr. Christie's wrath, a battle that has made him famous and the hero of Republicans across the country.
Mr. Christie extended that fight to the annual convention for the New Jersey Education Association, which represents 200,000 current and retired education workers, through his acting education commissioner, who informed the union this week that she would not attend the event.
The union says the education commissioner has never before failed to address one of its conventions.
When the Supreme Court took up a case about a school choice program in Arizona this week, Justice Elena Kagan said she had been "puzzling and puzzling" over it. Why, she asked the state's lawyer, instead of providing families with vouchers, is Arizona's program "so much more complicated and complex and unusual"?
The short answer is that the state's Constitution prohibits direct aid to private schools. A more important one is that the convolutions hide a problem we're not supposed to see. The program appears to be unconstitutional. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled, it appears to violate the First Amendment's establishment clause by disbursing state funds on the basis of religion.
Last year in Arizona, $52.1 million in scholarships helped support more than 27,500 students at private and parochial schools. The money came from letting people who owe state income taxes take a credit, up to $500. They can contribute the amount to 50 or so nonprofit tuition organizations that give money to parents who want to send their children to schools they serve.
Enclosed is an update report regarding the High School Career and College Readiness Plan. This plan is written as a complement to the first document entitled "Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success". The original document was intended to outline both a possible structure for organizing accelerated and preparatory courses for high school students. The original document was also intended to serve as an internal document outlining a planning process. Since, the dissemination of the "Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success" many questions and concerns have been expressed by a variety of stakeholders. Through feedback and questions brought forth by teachers, students, community members and the Board of Education it is understood that our original plan did not effectively communicate the rationale, scope, scale, and end outcomes as intended. The conversations that occurred as a result of the dissemination of the "Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success" have been at times difficult but they have also been the right conversations for us to have in order to move forward as a district. These conversations have highlighted the interconnectedness ofall grade levels, calling on us to proceed with a k-12 district wide curricular alignmentprocessinwhichhighschoolisembedded. hlordertomoreaccuratelycapturetheintentofouroriginal work we have renamed the plan High School Career and College Readiness to accurately reflect the intended goal; for all MMSD graduates will become self-determined learners able to access a wide array ofpost-secondary options. For these reasons, we have not included the original "Dual Pathways to Post-Secondary Success" plan in this report. Rather we have created this document to serve as bridge that more clearly articulates the history, rationale, data, work to date and next steps that are outlined in the original plan. Our Theory of Action, process
and end goals have not changed, but how we articulate this work has become more explicit, transparent and responsive. Weare in process ofcreating a more comprehensive plan to be shared with a broad range ofaudiences. We will share that plan with the Board of Education when finalized. We will also share periodic updates with the Board of Education. ill the meantime, the enclosed report serves to answer questions, concerns received to date and provide more detailed and accurate iuformation. Attached is the original document, unchanged.
Justices Revisit Use of Tax Credits for Religious Schools
The Supreme Court on Wednesday returned to a subject that produced a major and closely divided decision eight years ago: how far may the government go in aiding religious schools?
In 2002, in a 5-to-4 ruling, the court upheld a school voucher system in Cleveland that parents used almost exclusively to pay for religious schools.
Four new justices have joined the court since then, but there was nothing in Wednesday's arguments to suggest that the issue has become any less polarizing.
The program at issue on Wednesday gives Arizona taxpayers a dollar-for-dollar state tax credit of up to $500 for donations to private "student tuition organizations." The contributors may not designate their dependents as beneficiaries. The organizations are permitted to limit the scholarships they offer to schools of a given religion, and many do.
Since the January 2010 Board of Education update, the majority of focus of the Fine Arts Division in Curriculum and Assessment has been on recommendations regarding curriculum revisions, distribution ofequitable essential arts resources, and plans for a proposed fine arts programming financial planning team.
The Fine Arts Task Force Report contains three main areas. This updated report is organized around the recommendations from the Fine Arts Task Force, progress to date, and next steps in these three areas: Curriculum; Equity; and Long-Term Financial Planning.
Creation ofa multi-year funding pIan for arts education will be structured to provide adequate, sustained funding for MMSD students taking k-12 arts education courses, which will offer:
A sequence o f diverse, skill-based classes Expanded, equitable access to co-curricular opportunities Knowledge of and appreciation for world art forms
Developing Asia's rapidly expanding middle class is likely to assume the traditional role of the US and Europe as primary global consumers and help rebalance the global economy, says a new report on Asia's middle class from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The report, published in a special chapter of Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2010, the flagship annual statistical publication of the ADB, found that Asia's consumers spent an estimated $4.3 trillion (in 2005 purchasing power parity dollars), or about one-third of OECD consumption expenditure, in 2008 and by 2030 will likely spend $32 trillion, comprising about 43% of the worldwide consumption.
The special chapter, titled "The Rise of Asia's Middle Class", examines the rapid growth of Asia's middle class, how the poor advance to the middle class, factors that characterize the middle class, and pathways through which they become effective contributors to growth and poverty reduction in the region.
It is 8:30 a.m. at De La Salle Academy, a private school in Manhattan for academically talented poor children, and classical music is humming through a boom box that harks back to the 1980s.
Children are streaming up four flights of stairs and surrounding the school's founder and principal, Brother Brian Carty, like moths fluttering around a light. They want to tell him something. They want one of his bearhugs. They want to be in his orbit for a few minutes.
If the students' attraction to Brother Carty suggests that he is a teddy bear of an administrator, consider a few of his rules. Gossip is an expellable offense. Makeup -- even lip gloss -- is prohibited. Dating is outlawed.
ow much do election-year firewalls cost to build? For the state's largest teachers union, $1.57 million.
That's how much the Wisconsin Education Association Council said last week it will spend trying to make sure four Democratic state senators are re-elected - enough, WEAC hopes, to keep a Democratic majority in the 33-member state body.
Although there are 15 Democratic candidates running for the state Senate, and 80 Democrats running for the state Assembly, the latest WEAC report shows that the teachers union is placing what amounts to an "all in" bet on saving just four Democratic senators who are finishing their first terms.
In an Oct. 25 report to the Government Accountability Board, the 98,000-member union reported that it will independently:
• Spend the most - $440,044 - to try to re-elect Democratic Sen. Jim Sullivan of Wauwatosa in the 5th district. WEAC's pro-Sullivan spending will total $327,939; the remaining $112,105 will be used against Sullivan's Republican challenger, Republican Rep. Leah Vukmir, also from Wauwatosa.
Amazing and something to consider when school spending is discussed.
Two quick education-related comments on Tuesday's election outcomes in Wisconsin:
First, this was a banner outcome in the eyes of voucher and charter school leaders. Governor-elect Scott Walker is a long-time ally of those promoting the 20,000-plus-student private school voucher program in the city of Milwaukee, and he is a booster of charter schools both in Milwaukee and statewide. But just as important as Walker's win was the thumpingly strong victories for Republicans in both the Assembly and State Senate, which will now come under sizable Republican majorities.
What will result?
Let's assume it's good-bye to the 22,500-student cap on the voucher enrollment in Milwaukee. Will Walker and the Legislature expand the voucher program beyond the city, perhaps, for openers, to Racine? Will they open the doors wider for charter schools, for national charter-school operators to come into Wisconsin, and for more public bodies to be given the power to authorize charter schools? (Currently, UW-Milwaukee, Milwaukee City Hall, and UW-Parkside are the only ones authorized to do that, other than school boards.) Perhaps most important, what will the Republicans do about the per-student payments to voucher and charter schools? School leaders now are chafing under the impact of receiving less than $6,500 per student for each voucher student and less than $8,000 for each charter student. Will this be one of the very few spots where the Republicans increase the state's financial involvement? Pretty good chance the answer is yes to all of the above.
In Advanced Placement Nation, that version of America populated by high school students taking college-level AP courses and tests, Florida covers a huge portion of the map. The St. Petersburg Times points out the state is number one in the percentage of graduating seniors taking AP tests and number five in the percentage of seniors passing them.
So, Times reporter Ron Matus reveals, the newspaper decided to see if Florida was getting its money's worth for paying its students' AP testing fees, something only two other states do. The Times analysis concluded that the program was saving college families tens of millions of dollars they don't have to pay for college courses that AP exempts their students from taking. Whether taxpayers are also saving money is more difficult to determine, Matus said.
"Florida students passed 114,430 AP tests this year," Matus wrote, "up from 66,511 five years ago. Even assuming a fair chunk of those tests won't translate into credits, the Times estimates Florida families will save at least $40 million in tuition and fees."
Education officials expressed little surprise, and some frustration, that 11 of 13 area school districts and high schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress, according to the newly released Illinois State Report Cards.
"It's just a matter of time before every school is going to be on it," said Joel Estes, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for Galesburg School District 205, in response to his district's academic warning standing.
Estes said the district has been on the list for "quite some time" due to being a more diverse and larger district.
Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP, is determined by two standardized tests and is part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
Until recently, if you wanted to take Professor Rebecca Henderson's course in advanced strategy to understand the long-term roots of why some companies are unusually successful, you needed to be a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Ms. Henderson teaches at the Sloan School of Management. Admission to the Sloan School is extremely selective, and tuition fees are over $50,000 a year.
For the past two years, though, anyone with an Internet connection can follow Ms. Henderson's lectures online, where the lecture notes and course assignments are available free through M.I.T. OpenCourseWare. Why give away something with such a high market value?
"I put the course up because the president of M.I.T. asked us to," said Ms. Henderson. "My deep belief is that as academics we have a duty to disperse our ideas as far and as freely as possible."
Mary Lou Forward, executive director of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, a worldwide organization of about 250 academic institutions around the world, adds that universities get "global engagement" from posting courses online.
Fellow graduate students sometimes express shock at how little many undergraduates know about the structure and purpose of universities. It's not astonishing to me: I didn't understand the basic facts of academic life or the hierarchies and incentives universities present to faculty and students when I walked into Clark University at age 18. I learned most of what's expressed here through osmosis, implication, inference, discussion with professors, and random reading over seven years. Although most of it seems obvious now, as a freshman I was like a medieval peasant who conceived of the earth as the center of the universe; Copernicus' heliocentric[1] revolution hadn't reached me, and the much more accurate view of the universe discovered by later thinkers wasn't even a glimmer to me. Consequently, I'm writing this document to explain, as clearly and concisely as I can, how universities work and how you, a freshman or sophomore, can thrive in them.
The biggest difference between a university and a high school is that universities are designed to create new knowledge, while high schools are designed to disseminate existing knowledge. That means universities give you far greater autonomy and in turn expect far more from you in terms of intellectual curiosity, personal interest, and maturity.
Once a week, year six pupils at Ashmount Primary School in North London settle in front of their computers, put on their headsets and get ready for their math class. A few minutes later, their teachers come online thousands of kilometers away in the Indian state of Punjab.
Ashmount is one of three state schools in Britain that decided to outsource part of their teaching to India via the Internet. The service -- the first of its kind in Europe -- is offered by BrightSpark Education, a London-based company set up last year. BrightSpark employs and trains 100 teachers in India and puts them in touch with pupils in Britain through an interactive online tutoring program.
The feedback from pupils, the schools and parents is good so far, and BrightSpark said a dozen more schools, a charity and many more parents were interested in signing up for the lessons. The one-on-one sessions not only cost about half of what personal tutors in Britain charge but are also popular with pupils, who enjoy solving equations online, said Rebecca Stacey, an assistant head teacher at Ashmount.
Jamal Cooks, a San Francisco State University professor of education and former teacher, wrote the following piece for The Education Report, Katy Murphy's Oakland schools blog. Read more at www.ibabuzz.com/education. Follow her at Twitter.com/katymurphy.
LAST Monday, I went to a matinee to watch "Waiting for Superman." As a former teacher, director of after-school programs, coordinator of mentoring programs, and a professor of teacher education, I watched the movie intently and hung on every word. I am a public school educator, a public school product, and a public school advocate. I have spent 20 years working for and with students who have challenging home lives, come from rough neighborhoods, and lack some resources, but who want the same education as the next person.
In fact, my daughter will be starting kindergarten soon, and with the local public school's API scores under 800, I want public schools to work. However, there are some real facts that must be acknowledged before moving forward for equitable education for all students.
The movie made some interesting points about public schools and their teachers. It is true that some schools have been underpreparing young people for decades. The cursory tenure process for teachers needs to be revamped; it takes a typical university
On October 19, 2010, over 250 influential educators, policymakers, community, and business leaders from around California gathered in the heart of Silicon Valley to learn more about the innovative work of California's school districts, charter management organizations and education non-profits in using the power of data and technology to close the achievement gap.
General Sessions
The Power of Data and Technology to Close the Achievement Gap
• Arun Ramanathan, Executive Director, The Education Trust - West The Power of Data video
Learning from Other States: The Texas Student Data System
• Lori Fey, Policy Initiatives, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation PPT Presentation
Despite efforts to limit their availability, public elementary school students in the United States have more outlets to buy unhealthy beverages at school, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
Over a three-year period ending in 2009, more students could buy sweetened beverages like sodas, higher-fat milk and sports beverages from vending machines and school stores, they said. Such drinks are a major source of calories, and removing them from schools could help curb the nation's obesity epidemic.
"Elementary school students are still surrounded by a variety of unhealthy beverages while at school," said Lindsey Turner of the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose study appears in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
By capping school superintendents' salaries, the Christie administration maintains it can save $10 million in yearly salaries.
Synopsis: Three months after first proposing them, the Christie administration yesterday released the detailed regulations for capping superintendent salaries to no more than $175,000 for most districts, depending on enrollment.
What it means: The new regulations -- now slated to go into effect in February -- detail how the salary caps would be applied, as well as merit bonuses, which would be available to administrators who meet local board goals. There are few changes to what was first proposed, and the governor's office maintains that 70 percent of current superintendents would see their pay cut once current contracts expire, saving districts nearly $10 million in wages.
Interesting new detail: The merit bonuses -- which must be approved by the state -- lean toward quantitative measures, such as increases in student test scores or graduation rates. School boards could adopt up to three such goals for their superintendents, each worth a bonus equal to 3.3 percent of salary or a total of 10 percent. The boards could adopt no more than two qualitative goals, each equal to 2.5 percent of a superintendent's salary. In all cases, the bonuses would not be cumulative or applied to a superintendent's pension.
UC President Mark Yudof has released his recommendations for how he wants the University of California to change its employee retirement plan and eliminate a $12.9 billion unfunded liability.
In a letter to employees sent late Tuesday, Yudof laid out proposals to raise the minimum retirement age for future UC employees and reduce retiree health care benefits for existing employees.
The recommendations make UC's retirement plan a "more conservative pension plan than the State of California offers its employees," Yudof wrote in his letter to employees.
Under his proposals, employees hired by UC after July 1, 2013 would be eligible for retirement at age 55 (instead of age 50 for current employees) and could receive their maximum pension benefits at age 65 (instead of age 60 for current employees). Current employees would have less of their health care costs during retirement covered by the university, with costs being set by a graduated scale based on years of service and age at retirement. Current employees could remain on the existing retirement health care plan if on July 1, 2013, they have worked for UC for five years and their age and years of service together equal 50 or greater.
Five years ago, alarms sounded over America's rapidly falling stature in STEM education.
That's science, technology, engineering and math -- the keys to our nation's prosperity. But U.S. schools weren't keeping up in the fast-changing fields.
Governors dispatched task forces. New programs were launched. Foundations poured in funding. And schools started to make gains.
Now, however, signs are emerging that the momentum of the mid-2000s is slipping away, even as students' needs continue to grow.
First, get the data right. Then, hand it over to parents.
As soon as standardized evaluations become available for teachers in New Jersey, they should be made public -- with teacher names attached. That will force districts to make a priority of teacher quality.
Elsewhere, newspapers have filed Freedom of Information requests to get this data released. They're following in the footsteps of the Los Angeles Times, which recently published the names and "value-added" scores of about 6,000 L.A. teachers.
When it comes to our nation's future, millions of us will be glued to our television screens looking for clues from the election results. Not Roberto Huie. When it comes to America's future, this high school senior already knows his part: as a member of the West Point Class of 2015.
Mr. Huie may not be the kind of kid you think of when you think of our military academies. Part Latino, part African-American, he lives in a South Bronx neighborhood that belongs to the poorest congressional district in the nation. Nevertheless, he has two big things going for him: a mom raising him to be a man--and an all-boys public school teaching him what it means to be a leader.
All that converged yesterday morning on the second floor of the Eagle Academy for Young Men in the Bronx. There 50 of Mr. Huie's peers, drawn from the school's highest-performing students, were seated for what they--and Mr. Huie--all assumed would be another presentation from another college rep. Instead, they watched, captivated, as Army Maj. Michael Burns presented Mr. Huie with a letter from the superintendent of the United States Military Academy congratulating him on his appointment.
Members of the Atlanta school board were told Monday that their capacity to govern is "in serious jeopardy" and that staff from one of the nation's top accrediting agencies will be in the city school system next month for a formal review.
The decision by Mark Elgart, president and CEO of AdvancED, to send in a team for on-site interviews and investigation essentially formalizes a warning he gave last week that the board's infighting has put its accreditation at risk.
Three metro school districts -- with a combined nearly 200,000 public school students -- now are being reviewed by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) and its parent, AdvancED. SACS notified DeKalb County last week that it would conduct an on-site review before Feb. 1 over concerns about its operation. In 2008, SACS revoked Clayton County Schools accreditation, which has since been restored on a probationary basis.
As we all know by now, US President Barack Obama has not had a great first two years. His Republican critics have hammered him at every opportunity as an out-of-touch, anti-business, high-spending liberal. His greatest social mission - healthcare reform - has backfired. Elected on a promise of uniting the country, the divisions between Left and Right - or progressive and conservative, to use the American terminology - have instead solidified.
Education, however, has been an exception to the relentless criticism. Even prominent Right-wingers such as Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, and Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, have praised the President's approach to reforming schools. The Obama administration's centrepiece initiative has been Race to the Top, which allocated $4.35 billion
Tomorrow's whirlwind visit to London by Arne Duncan, Barack Obama's education secretary, could not have come at a better time for Michael Gove. Last week the secretary of state was besieged by discomfiting revelations about £500,000 of public money granted to the New Schools Network, the charity and company set up by one of his former advisers, 25-year-old Rachel Wolf, during which it emerged that no other organisation was asked to tender for the job of advising groups who want to set up new and "free" schools.
This week, then, in place of answering questions about transparency and accountability, Gove will be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with one of Obama's lieutenants - at Hackney's Mossbourne Academy in London, no less; the jewel in the crown of New Labour's education policy - and talk about the need to tackle educational inequalities, root out bad teachers, ill discipline and so on.
In fact the funding of the New Schools Network and the expected razzmatazz around Duncan's visit are all part of the same strategy: central planks in the frequently disingenuous war now being fought over the future of our school system, in which a seductive language of cultural radicalism and a powerful invective against educational inequality will increasingly be used to promote a further fragmented and multi-tiered system of education. Existing state provision is in effect being undermined by a mix of instant celebrity critics, a growing number of private providers and behind-the-scenes lobbyists, with the full if not always fully publicised support of the government.
At the end of this school year, Northwest Indiana schools on their fifth year of academic probation may face state takeover if the schools don't make gains on standardized test scores.
The Indiana State Board of Education is beginning to detail what a state takeover will look like. The options range from the state appointing a manager for the school to the school merging with a higher performing school. The schools could close, or the Indiana Department of Education could make more recommendations for improving the school.
Northwest Indiana has five schools that stand to be impacted if improvements aren't made: Gary's Roosevelt Career and Technical Academy, Hammond and Morton high schools, Calumet High School and East Chicago Central. Lake Station's Central Elementary also is on its fifth year of probation, but the Lake Station Community School Corp. is closing the school at the end of the year.
The CalSTRS board will consider cutting its investment forecast by a half a percentage point Friday, a move that could put more pressure on the Legislature to raise contributions to the teachers' pension fund by hundreds of millions of dollars.
The board, which blinked on the question in June, is scheduled to vote Friday on a staff recommendation to lower the forecast to 7.5 percent.
The less money CalSTRS expects to earn on its investments, the more it needs from the state, school districts and teachers to recover from huge losses of 2008.
Kindergarten teacher Marisa Martinez was tired of political promises, unfulfilled vows to restore California classrooms to their former glory. She despaired as she saw her beloved art and music disappear from the schools as money dried up, leaving teachers scrambling for pencils and paper. To Martinez, 41, paintbrushes and pianos weren't luxuries; they were necessities.
A professional musician as well as an educator at San Francisco's El Dorado Elementary School, she decided to take things into her own hands. With her own money, she created a CD of songs she sings to her predominantly low-income students, tunes with a bluegrass, folksy feel that address the basics of life and literacy with humor and joy. It's called "Chicken & ABC's." The project was both a labor of love and an artistic uprising against broken political promises from a frustrated and funny teacher who signs her e-mails, "With Love, chickens, Chihuahuas, children and Peace."
This certainly is an education for me," Gregory Thornton, superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, told School Board members as he watched them chew up the first controversial matter that has come before the board since Thornton took office July 1.
The issue involved was not the biggest one MPS will face. There are lots more difficult decisions coming up as the economic problems of the school system accelerate.
But the way the board majority came down on this issue definitely sent messages.
For some, such as union members, the main message was a reassuring one; for others, such as some MPS administrators and some business and civic leaders, the message was an alarming one.
The issue, in a nutshell: Thornton, who has emphasized the need to make MPS a well-run business, thought the system's leaders should find out what all the options are for the future of a food service operation that provides about 100,000 meals a day.
How committed to healthy choices is the Madison school district really?
At last month's Food for Thought Festival in Madison, Martha Pings attended a panel discussion titled "Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children." Among the panelists was Frank Kelly, director of food services for the Madison school district, who spoke of his desire to provide kids with nutritious food.
Two weeks later, Pings' daughter came home from O'Keeffe Middle School on Madison's east side with news that the cafeteria had a new a la carte option: a slushie machine.
The machine drew a backlash from Pings and other O'Keeffe parents, and last week was removed from the school at the request of the principal, Kay Enright (see article, 10/21/10). "I wish they would have asked me to begin with," says Enright, who agrees the slushies were not "a healthy addition to our menu of choices."
But there are larger issues here, as Pings, a member of Madison Families for Better Nutrition, related in a letter to school officials posted on the group's website.
1. It won't work. The measure promises to raise state education funding to the regional average and, presumably, improve public school results. Oklahoma's school funding and its results as measured in standardized test scores are embarrassingly low. But SQ 744 would increase spending without any attempt at reforming the school system. Spending more money for the same methods is sending good money after bad. Funding without reform is expensive and worthless at the same time.
2. It will raise your taxes, or you better hope it will. The measure's ballot title is frankly misleading, because it says it won't raise taxes. While there are no direct tax hikes in the initiative petition, implementing SQ 744 without a tax increase would result in an essential shutdown of all other state government services.
3. Without a tax increase, it will denude the rest of state government. The only alternative to raising taxes - and both may be necessary - would be horrifying cuts in every other function of state government. State prisons, the highway patrol, road maintenance, state health programs for the elderly and indigent, senior food programs and anything else you can think of that involves state government are already skin and bones because of the recession's impact on state spending. The more than $1 billion needed to fund SQ 744 in its first three years would quite simply destroy fundamental state government services.
GOVERNOR Christie has formed the Education Effectiveness Task force, a panel to consider using student performance and other factors in assessing teacher performance ("Christie forms panel on teaching," Page A-3, Oct. 29).
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Christie is currently popular because he offers simple-minded quick fixes. The operative word here is simple. His belief in magical charter schools is simple. Just like "Waiting for Superman," the recently released documentary movie that has become a promo for charter schools, he thinks schools are factories that can be measured for profit and loss. And he's fixated on the dollars in teachers' paychecks.
And like all good neo-cons from the Church of the Divine George W. Bush -- lest we forget Christie's pedigree -- he offers government by theory, which always selects only those facts that fit the theory.
For years now, a war has been brewing between two sides of the education world.
One side argues that standardized tests are necessary to evaluate teacher performance, and the other argues that these tests are an inadequate measure of the hard work that teachers pour into their classrooms.
With the recent release of the movie "Waiting for 'Superman,' " that war has spilled out of the classrooms and into the mainstream. And at the heart of this war is the commonly heard argument that standardized tests cause teachers to "teach to the test."
Higher Education Bubble Update; New York Daily News Calls It a "Government-Sanctioned Racket"
The College Board released new data this week on "Trends in College Pricing" for 2010, and reported that four-year public universities raised tuition this year by 8%, almost twice the 4.5% average increase for tuition at America's private universities. That differential follows a well-established pattern over the last decade of higher tuition increases at America's public universities than at private schools (see the chart above). Public university tuition has increased faster than private tuition in each of the last four years, and in eight out of the last nine years, by an average of 3% per year. As the chart above shows, the trajectory of college tuition in the U.S. is on a path that makes the recent housing bubble seem like a minor historical footnote by comparison.
In assessing the College Board data, a NY Times article "As College Fees Climb, Aid Does Too" finds some "good news," but only by reversing cause and effect:
Teacher evaluation is emerging as the central flash point in education policy debates. The recent controversy in Los Angeles over publication of teachers' student test score gains illustrates this. So does D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's reelection loss following his school chancellor's firing of 173 teachers who were rated "ineffective."
Both incidents drew national attention because they exemplify an approach to teacher effectiveness aggressively promoted by President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan -- both rhetorically and in the Race to the Top and I-3 grant programs. Teacher evaluation was the main focus of NBC's "Education Nation" coverage; one segment featured New Jersey Governor Chris Christie ranting over teacher unions' defensive stance on evaluation.
Teacher evaluation is controversial because it combines two elements new to education professionals and the public - quantifiable measurement of performance, and stakes like firing or public exposure. Teachers matter. But the core problem in public education is not identifying effective teachers. It's that our existing system does not produce effective teaching in sufficient scope, scale, regularity, or intensity.
When I tell people that I'm the founder of Uncommon Schools, a network of high-performing charter schools for low-income children, started in 1997, I often hear a skeptical response: "Admirable what you're trying, but you're cherry-picking your students. The average poor kid is doomed, right?"
I know a second grader--let's call him Hosea--who would seem to have drawn a doomed hand, born into the wrong ZIP Code in Newark, N.J., to a teen mom and an absent father. When his grandmother attended public school here in the 1970s, the district was dysfunctional and corrupt; by the 1990s, when his mom was in school, the state had "taken over," but the result was the same: abysmal test scores and sad outcomes. According to skeptics, Hosea has about a 1% chance of graduating from college.
But please don't tell any of this to Hosea! At 7:45 on a recent morning, he started the day singing the Oberlin College cheer. At North Star Academy's elementary school (which opened four years ago as part of our network), he sat with 225 other first, second and third graders in a giant circle, hands folded, backs straight, focused laser-like on their teacher, Julie Jackson.
Megan Morrison of Atwater has three kids and thinks a mom's perspective would fit well on her local school board in west-central Minnesota, so she's running. But she has no yard signs or that much of a campaign plan.
"I wrote one write-up about myself for one local paper that asked for it, and I went to one meet-the-candidate [event] in a small town next to us, so that's the amount of campaigning I've done," Morrison said.
Still, that should be plenty to guarantee a win Tuesday. Morrison's is the only name that will appear on ballots in the race for the Atwater-Cosmos-Grove City, or A.C.G.C., school board.
Voters across Minnesota will select school board members on Tuesday, but in some districts, there aren't enough candidates on the ballot to fill all the seats up for election.
"...Within a system that fails very few students, then, only those student who have high standards of their own--who have more stringent criteria for success and failure--will strive to do better than merely to pass their courses and graduate."
"...Third, there are important differences in how students view the causes of their successes and failures, and these differences in students' beliefs have important implications for how they actually perform in school. Successful students believe that their accomplishments are the result of hard work, and their failures the consequence of insufficient effort."
Beyond the Classroom, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, pp. 183-187
For nearly fifteen years now, educators and policy-makers have been engaged in a nationwide effort to solve the problem of low student achievement in America. In one blue-ribbon bipartisan commission report after another, the American public has been told that if we change how we organize our schools, how and what we teach in the classrooms, and how we select, train, and compensate our teachers, we will see improvements in our children's educational performance. In response to these reports, government agencies and private foundations have spent massive amounts of money on research designed to transform America's schools. Although we hear occasional success stories about a school here or a program there that has turned students' performance around, the competence of American students has not improved.
It is time we faced the music: fifteen years of school reform has not really accomplished anything. Today's students know less, and can do less, than their counterparts could twenty-five years ago. Our high school graduates are among the least intellectually competent in the industrialized world. Contrary to widespread claims that the low achievement of American students is not real--that it is merely a "statistical artifact"--systematic scientific evidence indicates quite compellingly that the problem of poor student achievement is genuine, substantial, and pervasive across ethnic, socioeconomic, and age groups.
The achievement problem we face in this country is due not to a drop in the intelligence or basic intellectual capability of our children, but to a widespread decline in children's interest in education and in their motivation to achieve in the classroom; it is a problem of attitude and effort, not ability. Two decades ago, a teacher in an average high school in this country could expect to have three or four "difficult" students in a class of thirty. Today, teachers in these same schools are expected to teach to classrooms in which nearly half of the students are uninterested. And only a very small proportion of the remaining half strives for excellence.
Given the findings of our study, it is not difficult to understand why so many students coast through school without devoting very much energy to schoolwork. As things stand, there is little reason for the majority of students to exert themselves any more than is necessary to avoid failing, being held back, or not graduating. Within an educational system in which all that counts is promotion to the next level--in which earning good grades is seen as equivalent to earning mediocre ones, and worse yet, in which actually learning something from school is seen as equivalent to not learning anything at all--students choose the path of least resistance. Getting by, rather than striving to succeed, has become the organizing principle behind student behavior in our schools. It is easy to point the finger at schools for creating this situation, but parents, employers, and the mass media have been significant participants in this process as well.
Our findings suggest that the sorry state of American student achievement is due more to the conditions of students' lives outside of school than it is to what takes place within school walls. In my view, the failure of the school reform movement to reverse the decline in achievement is due to its emphasis on reforming schools and classrooms, and its general disregard of the contributing factors that, while outside the boundaries of the school, are probably more influential. In this final chapter, I want to go beyond the findings of our study and discuss a series of steps America needs to take if we are to successfully address [solve] the problem of declining student achievement.
Although we did not intend our study to be a study of ethnicity and achievement, the striking and consistent ethnic differences in performance and behavior that we observed demand careful consideration, if only because they demonstrate that some students are able to achieve at high levels within American schools, whatever our schools' shortcomings may be. This does not mean, of course that our schools are free of problems, or that all students would be performing at high levels "if only" they behaved like their successful counterparts from other ethnic groups. Nevertheless, our findings do suggest that there may be something important to be learned by examining the behaviors and attitudes of students who are able to succeed within American schools as they currently exist, and that something other than deficiencies in our schools is contributing to America's achievement problem.
By identifying some of the factors that appear to contribute to the remarkable success of Asian students (and Asian immigrants in particular), or that impede success among African-American and Latino students (and especially among Latinos whose families have been living in the United States for some time), we were able to ask whether these same factors contribute to student achievement in all groups. That is, we asked whether the factors that seem to give an advantage to Asian students as a group are the same factors that facilitate student achievement in general, regardless of a youngster's ethnic background. The answer, for the most part, is yes.
Across all ethnic groups, working hard in school is a strong predictor of academic accomplishment. One clear reason for the relative levels of performance of the various ethnic groups is that Asian students devote relatively more effort to their studies, and Black and Latino youngsters relatively less. Compared with their peers, Asian youngsters spend twice as much time each week on homework and are significantly more engaged in the classroom. Students from other ethnic groups are more likely to cut class, less likely to pay attention, and less likely to value doing well in school. Black and Latino students are less likely to do the homework they are assigned than are White or Asian students.
Second, successful students are more likely than their peers to worry about the potential negative consequences of not getting a good education. Students need to believe that their performance in school genuinely matters in order to do well in the classroom, but students appear to be more strongly motivated by the desire to avoid failure than by actually striving for success. Because schools expect so little from students, however, it is easy for most of them to avoid failing without exerting much effort or expending much energy. Within a system that fails very few students, then, only those student who have high standards of their own--who have more stringent criteria for success and failure--will strive to do better than merely to pass their courses and graduate.
Asian students are far more likely to be worried about the possibility of not doing well in school and the implications of this for their future; this, then, is the second reason for their superior performance relative to other youngsters. Contrary to popular stereotype, African-American and Latino students are not especially pessimistic or cynical about the value of schooling, but, rather are unwisely optimistic about the repercussions of doing poorly in school. Either these students believe they can succeed without getting a good education or they have adopted this view as a way of compensating psychologically for their relatively weaker performance. In either case, though, their cavalier appraisal of the consequences of doing poorly in school is a serious liability.
Third, there are important differences in how students view the causes of their successes and failures, and these differences in students' beliefs have important implications for how they actually perform in school. Successful students believe that their accomplishments are the result of hard work, and their failures the consequence of insufficient effort. Unsuccessful students, in contrast, attribute success and failure to factors outside their own control, such as luck, innate ability, or the biases of teachers. The greater prevalence of the healthful attributional style we see among Asian students in this country is consistent with what other researchers have found in cross-cultural comparisons of individuals' beliefs about the origins of success. Americans, in general, place too much emphasis on the importance of native ability, and too little emphasis on the necessity of hard work. This set of views is hurting our children's achievement in school.
Regardless of ethnic background, success in school is highly correlated with being strongly engaged in school emotionally. The factors that contribute to the relative success of Asian students--hard work, high personal standards, anxiety about doing poorly, and the belief that success and failure are closely linked to the amount of effort one exerts--are keys to academic success in all groups of students. The superior performance of Asian students in American schools, then, is not mysterious, but explainable on the basis of their attitudes, values, and behavior.
Why Students Don't Write Research Papers in High School
Catherine Gewertz via Will Fitzhugh:
Those of you who lament the state of high school students' research and writing skills will be interested in a discussion that's been unfolding at the National Association of Scholars. It began a couple weeks ago with the publication of a previously undisclosed report on why students are not learning--let alone mastering-- the skills of crafting substantial research papers.
The report found that most social studies/history teachers never assign moderately long research papers. Most of the teachers--whose student loads often surpass 150--said they can't afford the time necessary to grade such papers.
This is hardly a new conversation. Consider the work done by Achieve and ACT on this issue, and the look Cincinnati took at it last year. And Will Fitzhugh, who was the driving force behind the recently disclosed paper, has been tirelessly advocating for rigorous high school research papers for years. A retired history teacher, he runs the Concord Review, the only journal that publishes high school students' history research papers, and blogs as well. (He sums up his views on the importance of research papers in this EdWeek commentary, from a few years ago, and more recently on The Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog.)
On a related note, another recent paper pinpointed a fragmented high school English curriculum and a neglect of close-reading skills as key explanations for teenagers' poor reading skills. That paper was written by one of the architects of Massachusetts' academic standards, former state board member Sandra Stotsky, and published by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW).
While the reflections on students' mastery of reading, writing and research skills are hardly new, they take on an interesting dimension (and more urgency, perhaps?) with the widespread adoption of common standards that envision a significant shift in how literacy skills are taught.
Among those teachers who do not assign research papers, the predominant factor is time. Namely, the time it takes to correct and grade the assigned papers and the time research papers can take away from other curriculum priorities.
The majority (82%) of teachers say it is difficult to find adequate time to devote to reading and grading the research papers they assign. Almost half (49%) of teachers say that is very difficult to find the time, one third (33%) say that it is somewhat difficult.
Underscoring that difficulty is that grading papers cuts into teacher's personal time--more than six in ten specify non-school time, or personal time, as the place where they grade papers. Specifically, one in five (20%) grades papers at home or outside of school, 10% do so on weekends and 15% on their own time, 8% say they use evenings or late nights, 3% use time in the early morning and 1% assign papers over a holiday or break.
Since time is such an important consideration, it is not surprising that teachers value the timeliness of paper submission. On a scale of one to ten, 70% ranked submitting the paper on time as a "9" or a "10." In terms of grading importance, timeliness is followed by the quality of written expression and a well-defined, important thesis or hypothesis.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Our time in office and in charge of the school system of Washington, D.C., is quickly drawing to an end. Monday is Michelle's last day as schools chancellor, and Mayor Fenty failed to win the Democratic primary last month. A new mayor will be elected next week.
During our nearly four years in office we pressed forward an aggressive educational reform agenda. We were determined to turn around D.C.'s public schools and to put children above the political fray, no matter what the ramifications might be for ourselves or other public officials. As both of us embark on the next stages of our careers, we believe it is important to explain what we did in Washington, to share the lessons of our experience, and to offer some thoughts on what the rest of the country might learn from our successes and our mistakes.
Public education in America, particularly in our most troubled urban neighborhoods, has been broken for a long time, and nowhere more so than in our nation's capital. When we took control of the public schools in 2007, the D.C. system was widely considered the lowest-performing and most dysfunctional in the country. Schools regularly failed to open on time for the new school year, due to leaking roofs and broken plumbing. Textbooks and supplies arrived months after classes began--if at all. In the 10 years before we came into office, the district had gone through six schools chiefs.
All community members are invited to participate in a Community Conversation on Education during which attendees can share - in small group discussions - their hopes and concerns for public education in Madison.
Join the Community Conversation on Education
Share your concerns and hopes for public education in Madison. Sponsors United Way of Dane County, Urban League of Greater Madison, Madison Teachers, Inc., Madison Metropolitan School District and UW-Madison School of Education have organized an evening of focus questions and small group discussion intended to elicit ideas for action.
When: Tuesday, November 9 • 6:30 - 8:30 PM
Where: CUNA Mutual Group Building • 5910 Mineral Point Road
Who: Parents/Guardians, Educators, High School Students, Community Members
To register, go to www.Madison4Education.org or call 663-1879.
Seating capacity is 200 so please register soon. It is not necessary to have seen the movie Waiting for Superman.
Transportation from a few specific sites will be available to registrants, as will be childcare and language interpretation. However, it's important to register to obtain these supports.
College costs a fortune. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money.
When a professor assigns you to send a blogger a list of vague and inane interview questions ("1. How did you get started in this field? 2. What type of training (education) does this field require? 3. What do you like best about your job? 4. what do you like least about your job?") I think you have an obligation to say, "Sir, I'm going to be in debt for ten years because of this degree. Perhaps you could give us an assignment that actually pushes us to solve interesting problems, overcome our fear or learn something that I could learn in no other way..."
When a professor spends hours in class going over concepts that are clearly covered in the textbook, I think you have an obligation to repeat the part about the debt and say, "perhaps you could assign this as homework and we could have an actual conversation in class..."
Major laws-more than 200 examples-passed by Congress from 1933 to the present
The partisan composition of each Congress, along with the presidential administration and the congressional leaders
The session dates of each Congress
Measures of legislative productivity, such as the number of bills introduced and passed
Information about women and African-Americans serving in Congress
Examples of documents and audiovisual materials related to legislation
The ability to add information to the timeline by using the "wiki" feature
Select the 88th Congress from the drop-down menu on the right.
Click the "expand" button under 1963 to see general information about the 88th.
To experience the multimedia potential for the site, click the "collapse" button for 1963 and the "expand" button for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at July 2, 1964.
Check out the rotating cube! You will see additional content-documents, photos, even a video of the presidential signing ceremony.
If you would like to contribute to the timeline, use the wiki component-just click on "wiki" on the rotating cube.
We know this first version of the Congressional Timeline will have some bugs to work out.
If you have suggestions, please contact me at fmackaman@dirksencenter.org. We'll do our best to respond and improve the timeline.
But for West High School teachers and students the "dual pathways" label sounded like the tracking model the school abandoned 15 years ago that created a lot of "low-level, non-rigorous classes with a lot of segregation by socio-economic status, which is pretty much racially," science department chairman Steve Pike said.
"If they had this document beforehand" Pike said of the document unveiled Friday, "it would have at least shown that there's a lot of questions and a lot of work that needed to be done."
West teachers aren't the only ones with concerns.
Peggy Ellerkamp, a librarian at LaFollette High School, said teachers there wonder how students in regular classes will be able to move into advanced classes, especially if regular courses become "more like a one-room schoolhouse" with embedded honors, regular, special education and English language learner students.
"I have a lot of questions about a lot of the details," Ellerkamp said. "I'm very pleased that there's more time for this to be worked through."
Jessica Hotz, a social studies teacher at East High School, is concerned that gearing classes to the Advanced Placement test could result in a "dumbing down of the curriculum." One proposed change in social studies would cram U.S. history into one year instead of the two years that East offers now, Hotz said.
She is D.C. schools chancellor for just one more day, but that didn't stop Michelle A. Rhee from issuing one last warning Thursday, this one to ineffective teachers and the undergraduate education programs that granted them degrees.
"Now we have a new teacher evaluation system where we know who's ineffective, minimally effective and highly effective," she told a hotel ballroom filled with educators attending a College Board forum. "We're going to back-map where they came from, which schools produced these people. And if you are producing ineffective or minimally effective teachers, we're going to send them back to you."
Parents fear the Atlanta school board fight is jeopardizing their children's future by putting the accreditation at risk, which could cost students access to the HOPE Scholarship and admission to college.
"There is a lot at stake here. These kids are working around the clock to better themselves and make the school shine," said Nancy Habif, who has five children in Atlanta public schools. "In the worse case scenario the kids who are busting their butts are not even going to have the HOPE Scholarship."
The school board fight over who should be in charge makes the schools look bad to college admission offices and blocks good news such as Grady High School's mock trial team winning the Empire International contest last weekend, Habif said "I don't think a lot of people out there understand that its not all bad," she said Thursday.
Civil libertarians are raising privacy concerns about a plan by Boston public schools to issue cards to students that could be used for a variety of services from riding the bus, to borrowing library books, to accessing meal programs.
Carol Rose, executive director of the state American Civil Liberties Union, says she's concerned that information from the cards' use could be used to track students, given to law enforcement agencies, or even for commercial purposes.
The Watertown Unified School District Board of Education approved a plan to spend a portion of federal funds given to the district this fall through the JOBS Bill during a regular monthly meeting Monday night at the Educational Service Center.
In August Congress passed the Education Jobs Funding Bill, which gave Wisconsin just under $180 million to be used in school districts across the state. The Watertown school district received $895,000 in federal money that is available to the district to spend over the next two years. These funds come with specific mandates on how and when it can be used. It cannot be used to supplement the district's budget and is specifically meant to employ people. Administrators have spent the past couple months deciding how to address key needs in the district while staying within the parameters of the funding regulations. The board approved the first phase of the funds totaling $408,130 during Monday night's meeting.
I graduated from the University of Manchester in 1987 with no debt. I paid no fees and received a maintenance grant to earn a degree in Politics and Modern History. If my seventeen year old son were to follow in my footsteps he would graduate with debts of at least £50,000 and were he to study in London that could rise to £90,000. In the space of a generation we have witnessed the destruction of the public university.
The Browne Report released on 12 October, and effectively rubber stamped in the savage public sector cuts announced yesterday, was simply the final nail in the coffin. Under the beguiling but misleading title Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education it effectively announced that university degrees are no longer considered a public good but a private investment. Accordingly, it is the individual student, not the public, who will pay its cost. Tuition fees will rise from £3,225 to a minimum of £6,000 rising to a potential ceiling of £12,000. State funding will fall from £3.5bn to just £700m - a total of 80% but a 100% cut in areas like the arts, humanities and social sciences that apparently have no public utility.
I started working in city-subsidized, Washington, DC child care centers in 1995 and I couldn't believe how depressing they were. Located in decrepit strip malls, strewn with broken glass outside, parents walked their toddlers into these small, overheated spaces. Television blaring, children sitting on the floor, staring blankly at Elmo, they looked abandoned. Teachers sat in the back on break, the smell of microwave popcorn choking the room. Children were crying from their cribs, others wandered aimlessly around the room, with little to do. There were few books, and the toys were old, many broken leftovers. I was appalled. I wasn't sure I could keep going back. But this was my job.
For nine years I ran an early learning arts and literacy program called Inner City-Inner Child, which took new books, artist teachers and professional development programs to the city's poorest child care centers. Washington's elite has never seen these parts of DC.
Great questions from Chad and quick airport answers:
1. How do you reconcile individualized and adaptive curriculum with a blanket dismissal of "let everyone do what they want?" Where should individualization and adaptation end? At standards?
Yes, do what you please ends at standards. As we pivot to personal digital learning, all students will have a unique/customized pathway but toward common ends. The Core is higher, but I wish it were even 'fewer and clearer.'
Could "the land of learn as you please" be a compromise between "the land of do as you please" and "the land of do what we tell you?"
I hope we can increasingly separate ends & means-tight on ends, loose on means. Digital learning is opening up a world of opportunity but it is currently bounded by the Bismarckian conception of factory schooling. Read more on 10 shifts that change everything.
Religion usually makes news in France when the state invokes its stern policy of "laïcité."
This is the country, as we read again and again, with laws that ban crucifixes and Islamic headscarves in state schools and outlaw the full-face Muslim veil in public streets.
Yet here I am sitting in the front row at a Catholic lycée surrounded by Muslims, Christians and non-believers, as the bishop of Versailles blesses the pupils and the building and reads to the new pupils from the gospel of Matthew: "You are the light of the world. ..."
The nation's unemployment rate is 9.6%, but it is 16.1% for blacks and an unconscionable 41% for black teens. Politicians continue to promote minimum-wage hikes that harm the job prospects of younger and less-skilled individuals, a disproportionate number of whom are black. Wal-Mart's attempts to open a store that would bring jobs and low-price goods to a depressed neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., have been thwarted repeatedly by labor unions. And the NAACP is issuing studies on the tea party movement?
Black children are funneled into the nation's worst public schools, where they underperform and often don't graduate. Black boys in eighth grade read at about the same level as white girls in fourth grade. The achievement gap persists through high school, where the average black student is graduating with an eighth-grade education--if the student graduates at all.
The situation has remained essentially unchanged for three decades. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have noted that just 2,000 of the nation's 20,000 high schools produce half of all dropouts, and nearly 50% of black kids attend one of these "dropout factories." But that hasn't stopped the Obama administration from phasing out a Washington, D.C., voucher program for low-income students that improved graduation rates. Still, the NAACP is worried about the tea party?
As part of an agreement between the NYC DoE and the UFT on the then new Teacher Data Initiative [TDI], a “Dear Colleague” letter was sent by Chancellor Klein to all New York City public school teachers in October 2008. According to the letter, the TDI was to be:
…a new tool to help teachers learn about their own strengths and opportunities for development …The teacher Data Reports are not to be used for evaluation purposes. That is, they won't be used in tenure determinations or the annual rating process.
A PARADOX of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be done. And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition, by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text conveying the information harder to read.
Dr Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three "species" of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features. This task was meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants could not draw on prior knowledge.
Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale). The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read.
The simple truth is that many families in this country don't put a high priority on education. After all, it takes 13 years to finish high school and another four years to earn a college degree. That's 17 years that parents must regularly cajole their children, and 17 years that they must feed, clothe and provide shelter without any return on their investment.
The problem with education in this country lies not with the children, but with the parents. If parents don't continually emphasize the importance of education, only the most self-motivated students will ultimately become independent of their families and the state.
Currently, the vast majority of funds allocated to education are for tuition, scholarships, lunches and books. Only a miniscule amount of money is being used to help parents become better parents.
UNIVERSITY tuition fees are political dynamite. Tony Blair's government first introduced upfront charges for students in Britain in 1998; they were replaced in England in 2004 with a scheme under which fees rose, but students could borrow the cost from the state and repay it once they were earning. That move proved even more contentious in Parliament than Mr Blair's decision to wage war on Iraq. A new proposal for graduates to pay even more for the education they have enjoyed could open a rift in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.
Demand for higher education is booming around the world; to help increase the supply, many countries, including Germany, Ireland and Spain, have begun charging students, as America has long done. In England (Scotland and Wales have separate regimes) a student beginning his studies this year must contribute £3,290 ($5,200) towards the annual cost of his education. The actual average cost is around £7,000: the state partially plugs the gap, and also lends students the money to pay their fees and living expenses. These loans currently carry no interest in real terms, and graduates do not begin repaying them until they are earning £15,000 a year or more.
I am proposing the Dolly Solution as an alternative to Charter Schools Secretary Arne Duncan's "Race to the Top" (AKA, Grovel for Lucre) reform initiative, which, if other federal education programs are any guide, is destined to end in a muddle of red tape, unfunded mandates, and unintended consequences.
The Dolly Solution refers to Dolly the Sheep, country-music superstar Dolly Parton's namesake, not to Ms. Parton's 2002 cover of Led Zepplin's "Stairway to Heaven." Dolly the Sheep, you may recall, emerged in 1996 from a surrogate ewe to become the first-ever cloned mammal.
What does cloning have to do with saving public education? Well, in three easy steps, it's the surest route for upgrading the quality of public education from a "C" average to "A+":
While San Francisco schools have been squeezing every dime out of their dwindling budgets, the city's school board has increased its own budget each of the past four years, spending more on travel to conferences, taking taxis around the city and paying for a board member's babysitter.
All told, the board has increased spending by 28 percent over the past four years, which includes the added cost of televising board meetings as well as increases in staff salaries and benefits, according to 600 pages of public records obtained by The Chronicle.
In each of those years, the board failed to stay within a set budget and dipped into the district's primary spending account to cover the difference.
A glimpse of how students were educated here in the late 1800s is located under the downtown water tower, just a half block off Main Street.
But there is another historic school in this village of 6,500 people that's getting more attention than the cream-colored brick District 1 School built between 1884 and 1889.
On Nov. 2, Mount Horeb School District voters will decide whether to spend $9.9 million to remodel the Primary Center, a three-level school building opened in 1918 with a maze of steps and two gigantic boilers. A second referendum question asks for $600,000 for a geothermal heating system.
The building has served generations of students and all grade levels. It was the high school before the current one was built in the 1960s and where Kurt Nowka, a 1977 Mount Horeb High School graduate, went to middle school. The brick building, which looks similar to West and East high schools in Madison, now is used by second- and third-grade students.
Once again I hear people asking "Why would a student want to get high school credit for classes taken in middle school?"
This may not surprise you, but you're not going to get a good answer to this question from someone who isn't interested in it or who thinks it ranges from pointless to being a bad idea. Yet that's who have been answering that question of late.
So, rather than their explanation, to graduate high school early, let me instead offer some better reasons.
1) Lighter course load when taking challenging classes. A high performing student might take as many as three or four AP classes as a senior. These classes are challenging and demanding classes. Wouldn't it be nice to have the option to not take two other classes at the same time so the student can devote more time to the AP classes?
SHOULD WE increase the number of hours and days students attend school each year?
The proposal has recently gained traction as educators, celebrities and a movie have embraced the concept.
Before his departure last month, former state Education Commissioner Bret Schundler expressed support for extended time, saying it has the potential to increase student achievement, especially in low-income districts. He made his comments at the Robert Treat Academy, one of the most successful charter schools in the state, with both an extended school day and year. And noted Washington, D.C., Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee recently called extended school days and years vital to improving urban student achievement.
Linda White and Amy Nowell both voted in 2002 to amend the Florida Constitution to limit the size of classes in the state's public schools.
The two now are on opposite sides when it comes to redefining those limits -- an issue that will be decided by Florida voters in the Nov. 2 general election. Their views mirror a statewide debate about whether to keep the class-size rules as they are or give school officials more flexibility to comply with them.
School officials say they desperately need the flexibility Amendment 8 would provide as students move in and out of classes during the year. Other Amendment 8 supporters say the original limits -- which they estimate will cost $350 million to $1 billion annually going forward -- are simply too expensive for the state to afford.
Critics, like the state teachers union and Florida PTA, say the smaller classes approved in 2002 are best for students and are workable if the Florida Legislature would only fund them properly as required by the original constitutional amendment.
France has seen the spectacle of school age protesters creating mayhem over pension reform. In her diary, a Paris schoolgirl recounts an extraordinary 10 days in her education.
Thursday Oct 14
Today 60 students from two nearby schools massed in front of my lycée, Edouard Branly, in Nogent-Sur-Marne in the east of Paris, shouting, dancing, and throwing stones. They pushed against the glass door until the bulky repair man keeping them shut could hold out no longer.
Then they stampeded in, throwing chairs and rubbish bins around, breaking a window and shoving a female English teacher, while yelling the names of their schools.
Finally they rushed towards a courtyard used by younger pupils - who were terrified by the mob, sobbing and shaking with fear. It took a long time to calm them down.
As I watched kids my own age, who I didn't know, trash my school I wondered what this had to do with retirement reform?
After a few minutes the horde left, thankfully ignoring me and my friends, and we slowly picked the chairs back up, hardly taking in what had just happened. Every year, there are blockades and there is trouble, but never as bad as this.
Monday, Oct 18
He says she's a "greedy thug" who uses children as "drug mules." She says he's a "bully" and a "liar" who's "obsessed with a vendetta."
Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey, and Barbara Keshishian, president of the state's teachers union, say they want to improve public schools. That's where agreement ends. In speeches, mailings and multi-million dollar TV ads, they've battled over teacher salaries, property taxes and federal education grants. They have met once, an encounter that ended when Mr. Christie threw Ms. Keshishian out of his office.
For Mr. Christie, 48 years old, the fight is part policy, part personality. He quickly has positioned himself as a politician in tune with an angry and impatient electorate, and he's already mentioned as a 2012 presidential candidate. He's well aware that the fate of his fight with the teachers union could determine his own. "If I wanted to be sure I'd be re-elected, I'd cozy up with the teachers union," he says in his ornate state office, decorated with Mets memorabilia and a signed guitar from Bruce Springsteen. "But I want far-reaching, not incremental, change."
The governor already has persuaded many voters on a fundamental point: New Jersey pays way too much for education. Mr. Christie's poll numbers dipped earlier after the teachers union began running TV commercials critical of him. But his numbers have rebounded in recent polls. Frederick Hess, education-policy director at the American Enterprise Institute, a think thank that pushes for market-oriented solutions, says a likely new crop of Republican governors who have promised to slash budgets and reform schools will be watching to see how Mr. Christie fares. "New Jersey is the canary in the coal mine," he says.
Education may not be the first thing that comes to voters' minds this year when they think of the Wisconsin governor's race, but maybe it should be.
After all, soon after the next governor raises his hand to take the oath of office, he is likely to immediately be confronted with the state's 2011-'13 biennial budget and a shortfall of about $3 billion.
Education now consumes more than half of the spending by the State of Wisconsin - school aid for kindergarten through 12th grades alone cost about $5 billion this year - even though the state's portion of education funding has fallen in the last two years and has needed help from federal stimulus dollars.
So, whoever voters select for the state's top spot could have a big effect on their neighborhood schools as well as on state taxing and spending.
"It's huge," Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, said about the school funding issue. "By mathematical definition, if the state has big financial problems, it has real implications for education."
It has been requested of Administration to put together possible scenarios for funding four year old kindergarten (4-k) through the use of Education Jobs Bill funding, Equity Reserves, Property Taxes, and any other sources of funding.
What you will find below are three distinct scenarios looking at how we may fund 4-k over the first 4 years. The focus is on the first 4 years, because the original projections put together by administration and subsequently by PMA through the forecasting model looked at the program beginning in the 2010-11 school year as year one, so we consequently only have projections going through the 2014-15 school year.
These projections will be updated as part of our work with the 5 year budget model ad hoc committee of the Board in the coming months.
All of the following scenarios we believe to be very conservative in terms of the number of students to be enrolled, and especially on projections for funding from the State of Wisconsin. These original projections from earlier this year, assumed MMSD would be losing 15% funding from the State of Wisconsin for the 2010-11, 2011-12, and 2012-13 budget years. As we have seen recently, we have lost less than the maximum state law allows (2010-11 reduction of approximately 8.4%). The funding scenarios are as follows:
Who Gets To Write Public-School History Textbooks?
A new fourth-grade Virginia history textbook was found to contain the dubious assertion that battalions of African-American soldiers fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. The textbook's author, who has written other textbooks and children's books like Oh Yuck!: The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty, says she found the information in question on the Internet. Can just anyone write a school history textbook?
Sort of. Anyone can write and publish a textbook, but before it gets handed out to public-school students, the book's content would have to be approved by several review committees. As long as the textbook is deemed to meet state-specified guidelines and cover the subject matter with accuracy and coherence, the author's pedigree can be of secondary importance. Textbook publishing is typically a collective endeavor, anyway. Publishers often contract with a handful of freelancers who have knowledge about specific subject areas. There's no particular qualification required for these freelancers: Anyone with a Ph.D. in a relevant field might be acceptable, for example, but so would a high-school teacher with a decent writing sample. In general, the publisher hires a more distinguished scholar as the main editor, who oversees the project and has final say over the content.
Finally, the document includes a statement on "fund equity", or the District's reserves (39,163,174.09 on June 30, 2010):
Statement on Fund Equity
In 1993 when the revenue cap law was enacted, the District budgeted funding to continue to increase the District's equity (fund balance) at the same proportion as the budget increase. The actual budget was constructed based on worst case assumptions for many of the non-controllable expenses. Using worst case budget assumptions allowed some room for unexpected increased expenditures above those projected without causing the expenditures to exceed revenues. Before the enactment of revenue caps this approach did not affect the District's ability to cpntinue to provide programming at the same levels as before. This was very sound budget practice and placed the District in an outstanding fiscal position.
After the revenue cap was enacted and until 1998 the District continued the same budgeting strategy. During these early years, continuing the increase in equity and using worse case budget assumptions was possible. It did not jeopardize the District's instructional programs because sufficient budget reductions were possible through increased operating efficiencies.
In 1998 it became clear that to continue to budget using the same assumptions would necessitate even larger budget cuts to programs than would be necessary if a more narrow approach to budgeting was used. The effect of using a realistic but best case set of budget assumptions for non-controllable expenses was to delay making reductions of critical District educational support programs for several years. However, it also placed the District in a position to have expenditures exceed revenues if the assumptions proved to be inaccurate and the projections were exceeded.
The District's SUbstantial equity made this approach possible without endangering the District's excellent fiscal position. The viability of the strategy has been borne out by our Aa1 bond rating from Moody's Rating Service and the continued excellence of our educational program.
As indicated in the annual audited financial report provided each year to the Board of Education, the District's expenditures exceeded revenue during the fiscal years 2002 through 2006. Our desire is always to balance the revenues and expenditures on a yearly basis. However, the excess expenses over revenues in those five years resulted solely from specific budgeted expenditures and revenues not meeting assumptions and projections used at the time of budget preparation. We did not add expenditures or staff. The district maintained its fiscal health. The equity was used as it was intended - to maintain the District's quality through difficult financial times.
We reached the point where the district's equity position could no longer support the aggressive approach. We rnanaged the 2008-09 and 2009-10 budget more aggressively, which resulted in an increase in equity. We also prepared the 2010-11 budget more conservatively, which will result in a positive affect to the District's equity at the end of this year.
Donna Williams Director of Budget, Planning & Accounting Services
Geoffrey Canada is adamant in his answer: People would succeed. They wouldn't give up, they would work harder, and, when it comes to schools, they wouldn't keep doing the same unsuccessful things over and over.
"When it's clear that failure won't be tolerated or accepted, you know what happens? People stop failing," Canada told more than 500 people Friday at the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee. He was the keynote speaker at a national conference of the Alliance for Children and Families, a Milwaukee-based organization for human services organizations.
Canada is the founder and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone, a birth-through-college set of programs focused on getting children in a 97-block area of New York's Harlem to earn college diplomas. He has become a national celebrity as a crusader for such efforts. He is featured in the new, controversial movie, "Waiting for 'Superman.' "
Canada said things Friday that would leave people from most anywhere on the political spectrum saying, no way, can't be done, he's crazy. Teachers, major politicians, rich people, low-income people - he said things all would dislike.
We have received a significant volume of questions and feedback regarding the plan for High School College and Career Readiness. We are in the process of reviewing and reflecting upon questions and feedback submitted to date. We are using this information to revise our original timeline. We will provide additional information as we move forward.
We will have an electronic format for gathering additional feedback in the near future.
Summary
High School Career And College Readiness Plan is a comprehensive plan outlining curricular reform for MMSD comprehensive high schools and a district-wide process that will end in significant curriculum reform. The rationale for developing this plan is based on five points:
Need for greater consistency across our comprehensive high schools.
Need to align our work to the ACT career and college readiness standards and common core standards.
Need to address our achievement gaps and to do so with a focus on rigor and acceleration of instruction.
Need to address loss of students through open enrollment.
Need to respond to issues regarding unequal access to accelerated courses in grades 9 and 10.
The plan is based on the following theory of action:
Putting a Price on Professors A battle in Texas over whether academic value can be measured in dollars and cents.
Carol Johnson took the podium of a lecture hall one recent morning to walk 79 students enrolled in an introductory biology course through diffusion, osmosis and the phospholipid bilayer of cell membranes.
A senior lecturer, Ms. Johnson has taught this class for years. Only recently, though, have administrators sought to quantify whether she is giving the taxpayers of Texas their money's worth.
A 265-page spreadsheet, released last month by the chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, amounted to a profit-and-loss statement for each faculty member, weighing annual salary against students taught, tuition generated, and research grants obtained.
Ms. Johnson came out very much in the black; in the period analyzed--fiscal year 2009--she netted the public university $279,617. Some of her colleagues weren't nearly so profitable. Newly hired assistant professor Charles Criscione, for instance, spent much of the year setting up a lab to research parasite genetics and ended up $45,305 in the red.
The head teacher of a school in New York is facing calls to resign after he sent out an error-strewn letter claiming that children did not need books, while he also recommended Wikipedia.
Andrew Buck, the principal of The Middle School for Art and Philosophy, Brooklyn, wrote to his teachers to defend the school's policy of not providing textbooks, which had been criticised by some parents.
His memo contained so many spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and non-sequiturs that a concerned member of staff passed it on to parents, who began handing out copies at the school gates.
Mr Buck, who is paid $130,000 (£83,000) a year, wrote: "Text books are the soup de jour, the *sine qua non*, the nut and bolts of teaching and learning in high school and college so to speak." However, he added, "just because student have a text book, doesn't mean she or she will be able to read it Additionally students can't use a text book to learn how to learn from a textbook.
"Are text books necessary? No. Are text books important? Yes. Can a teacher sufficiently teach a course without them? Yes, but conditionally."
As someone who enthusiastically supported Vince Gray during his successful primary bid to unseat incumbent Mayor Adrian Fenty this year, I can say that I joined many of my fellow Washingtonians in breathing a sigh of relief.
We would no longer have a Mayor who, when asked when the snow would be cleared from the streets earlier this year, gave the most tone-deaf answer imaginable by saying it would be gone when, " the temperature gets warm enough." A Mayor that when challenged by Gray to account for his failure in spending the $4.6 million authorized by the City Council to tackle D.C.'s 9.8 unemployment rate, lazily responded with, "the reality is, D.C. has always had higher unemployment rates than nationally." A Mayor that could not be bothered to attend a meeting on the city's lack of enforcement of its Living Wage Law. A Mayor that callously closed down homeless shelters and seemed intent on gentrifying the city to a point where D.C. would no longer look like D.C. We now have a Mayor that shows a genuine concern for the needs of the people especially its most vulnerable, as opposed to one that treats the common folk like plebeians for not recognizing what a brilliant Mayor they were so blessed to have. But the one decision that Fenty made during his four years in office of which I have come to now appreciate was his selection of Michelle Rhee as the Chancellor of D.C. schools.
Rhode Island's education commissioner said she's promising new checks on educators to determine if they can speak, write and read fluent English, however union leaders say the problem is being blown out of proportion.
The issue came to light this week after a Board of Regents meeting. Commissioner Deborah Gist said she learned about it when parents came to her with concerns.
"I think any Rhode Islander would have the same reaction I would have, which is to be truly stunned about this," Gist said.
The Oklahoma State Board of Education voted to wait on more information from the attorney general on what they can do to force districts to follow a law about scholarships for special needs children.
The Oklahoma State Board of Education took no action after spending more than a half-hour Thursday discussing four Tulsa-area school boards that have voted not to enforce a new state law.
House Bill 3393, also known as the Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarship program, allows the parents of special education students to receive scholarships from their public school to enroll their student in private school. The bill was signed into law during the last session and took effect Aug. 27.
The Union, Bixby, Broken Arrow and Jenks school districts have voted not to give scholarships to parents who have requested them, stating the law is in direct conflict with the Oklahoma Constitution.
magine if we designed the 21st-century American classroom to be a place where our kids could learn to think, calculate, and invent as well as the students in the top-performing countries around the world.
What would those spaces look like? Would students plug into mini-MRI machines to record the real-time development of their brains' executive functions? Would teachers be Nobel Prize winners, broadcasting through screens installed in the foreheads of robots that don't have tenure?
To find out, we don't have to travel through time. We could just travel through space. At the moment, there are thousands of schools around the world that work better than our own. They don't have many things in common. But they do seem to share a surprising aesthetic.
Classrooms in countries with the highest-performing students contain very little tech wizardry, generally speaking. They look, in fact, a lot like American ones--circa 1989 or 1959. Children sit at rows of desks, staring up at a teacher who stands in front of a well-worn chalkboard.
"In most of the highest-performing systems, technology is remarkably absent from classrooms," says Andreas Schleicher, a veteran education analyst for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development who spends much of his time visiting schools around the world to find out what they are doing right (or wrong). "I have no explanation why that is the case, but it does seem that those systems place their efforts primarily on pedagogical practice rather than digital gadgets."
The man likely to be Washington's next mayor doesn't want a school chief who won't cater to the teachers union. So Michelle Rhee resigned. But her loss to D.C. kids is a gain for students somewhere else.
That "somewhere else" might be New Jersey. Gov. Chris Christie has reportedly offered Washington school chancellor Rhee the job of state education commissioner.
Christie could do much worse. Rhee was hired in 2007 by current Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty, who lost to Vincent Gray in last month's Democratic mayoral primary. Her job was to reform the district's schools, where the per-pupil expenditure is near the top -- more than $20,000 a year -- while test scores are consistently among the lowest in the country, and she took it seriously.
Eighth-grader James Roll enjoys learning math, science, English and social studies through an online school that lets him learn at his own pace using a computer at home. But he says he likes the art and music classes at what he calls "real school" -- Kromrey Middle School in Middleton -- even more.
This year, Middleton launched its 21st Century eSchool. It's one of just a dozen virtual schools in Wisconsin, and the second in Dane County; last year the McFarland School District became the sponsoring district for the Wisconsin Virtual Academy (WIVA), which opened for the 2009-2010 school year with about 400 students and this year counts twice that many.
The two schools share several key elements: They offer a broad range of online courses, beginning at the kindergarten level and continuing all the way through high school, employ licensed Wisconsin teachers to oversee online learning, and require that students participate in mandatory testing each year.
......
Hughes' obvious irritation was fueled by recent open enrollment figures showing that Madison has lost more than 150 students to McFarland, both to the Wisconsin Virtual Academy and to McFarland bricks-and-mortar schools.
Hughes expanded on his frustration in a recent piece he wrote for his Ed Hughes School Blog: "Since we have to send about $6,800 per student to districts that receive our open enrollers, this means that we'll be cutting a (perhaps figurative) check in excess of $1,000,000 to the McFarland School District."
But McFarland Superintendent Scott Brown says his district is only getting $300 to $350 per student per year from the online school and says the Wisconsin Virtual Academy is not necessarily poaching students from the traditional classroom. "Schools like WIVA have brought a lot of students who may not have been under the tent of public education into school districts like ours.
More options for our children is great for them, parents, business, our communities and taxpayers.
With respect to Ed's post, providing alternative models at what appears to be substantially lower cost than Madison's annual $15K per student expenditures is good for all of us, particularly the students.
The Khan Academy is worth a visit.. Standing in front of new education models and more choices for our children is a losing proposition. Just yesterday, Apple, Inc. announced the end of hard drives for volume computers with the introduction of a flash memory based notebook. Certainly, hard drive manufacturers will be fighting over a smaller market, but, new opportunities are emerging. Some will take advantage of them, others won't. Education is no different.
What makes a great teacher? These days, one has to wonder.
As the pressure builds for public schools to perform better, teachers can seem the scapegoat, perceived as over the hill, out of touch with current subject matter, disinterested and weary.
So it was heartening to catch an invigorated teacher, Linda Mondel, 47, telling Lansing Sunrise Rotarians about her Fulbright scholarship to India. The Lansing School District teacher was vibrant, dynamic and imbued with enthusiasm. She had spent five weeks touring schools throughout the Asian country and would now, with the 14 others from across the U.S., prepare a teaching unit for American schools.
This woman was no slug. But there is more.
Last year she was the first teacher in the Lansing School District to earn national certification for rigorous testing and screening similar to programs for doctors and accountants. Now she is the media specialist at Pattengill Middle School.
OK, I'm pretty sure that it's safe to say that Detroit Public Schools emergency financial manager Robert Bobb has been a failure. He's screwed up the DPS transportation system, with results ranging from comical to pathetic. He's exacerbated problems among special-needs students. He's slashed school resources while spending on pricey consultants. He convinced voters to approve a $500-million construction bond even as his own demographers argued that enrollment would continue to plummet. And, of course, he's ballooned the very budget deficit that he was hired to eliminate. And yes, there was his yadayadayada about going to lame-duck politicians to get the state to absolve the DPS debt or else...but even that seems like so much of the same brand of smoke he's been blowing.
Sure, he's done all of this with an undeniable air of professionalism and charm -- but by every available measure, the man's tenure has been a flop. Meanwhile, come March, when his contract expires, it'll all be water under the Belle Isle Bridge. He's likely out of here, joining the lame duck governor who appointed him, and the district won't have a single gain to show for it.
Here's an all-too-familiar storyline about reform, from education to agricultural development: The reform has run its course, has not achieved its goals, and the reformers and other analysts speculate in policy briefs or opinion pages about what went wrong. The interesting thing is that the reform's flaws were usually evident from the beginning.
As someone who has lived through several periods of educational reform and has studied schools and taught for a long time, I see characteristics of the current reform movement, as powerful as it is, that could lead to unintended and undesirable consequences. But when reform is going strong it can become a closed ideological system, deaf to the cautionary tale.
The New York City school system announced Wednesday that it will release ratings for nearly 12,000 teachers based on student test scores, potentially giving the public an unprecedented window into the effectiveness of instructors at the nation's largest school district.
The move, which the city's teachers union said it would fight, is certain to escalate a national debate over how teachers should be evaluated and what role test scores should play in the process.
The release, planned for Friday, was prompted by requests from several news organizations and follows a series of Los Angeles Times stories in August that analyzed 6,000 elementary school teachers' effectiveness in raising students' math and English scores. It was the first time such data had been made public.
Union Plans to Try to Block Release of Teacher Ratings
The city's teachers' union said on Wednesday that it would request a restraining order to prevent education officials from releasing reports that rate thousands of city teachers based on how much progress students made on state standardized tests.
The release of the reports, if a judge does not block it, would propel New York City to the center of a national debate about how student test scores should be used to evaluate teachers and whether news media organizations should release the ratings of teachers to the public as a measure of their performance. The reports include the names of teachers and their schools.
The city's public school principals have received the reports for the past two years, and last year, they were instructed to use them in teacher evaluations and tenure decisions. But education officials have repeatedly refused to make the reports public because of an agreement with the teachers' union and because of concerns that their release could compromise student privacy. Several news media organizations, including The New York Times, requested their release.
As an undergraduate at Sacramento State, Ryan Stevens founded NoteUtopia in order to provide a mechanism for students to buy, sell, and share their university course notes. Stevens graduated last spring and NoteUtopia officially launched in August. But less than six weeks into the startup's history, NoteUtopia has received a cease-and-desist letter from the California State University system, charging that the company violates a provision of the state education code.
The provision in question dates back a decade and reads "no business, agency, or person, including, but not necessarily limited to, an enrolled student, shall prepare, cause to be prepared, give, sell, transfer, or otherwise distribute or publish, for any commercial purpose, any contemporaneous recording of an academic presentation in a classroom or equivalent site of instruction by an instructor of record. This prohibition applies to a recording made in any medium, including, but not necessarily limited to, handwritten or typewritten class notes."
Following the cease-and-desist letter, officials also emailed the students at all 23 universities in the Cal State system, warning them that selling their class notes online "including on the NoteUtopia website, is subject to discipline, up through and including expulsion from the university."
Like many people who follow education issues closely, I was curious to see Waiting for Superman, the limited-release documentary film that follows five students and their families in their quest to get the best education.
I finally had the chance this past weekend.
What I came away with was probably what Davis Googenheim, who directed this movie as well as An Inconvenient Truth back in 2004, intended: A sense of injustice at what these children are stuck with through no fault of their own, or their parents, other than the neighborhood in which they live.
We meet Anthony, a fifth-grader in Washington, D.C., who is being raised by his grandmother; Bianca, a kindergartner in Harlem, N.Y., being raised by her mother; Francisco, a first-grader in the Bronx, N.Y., being raised by his mother; Daisy, a fourth-grader in Los Angeles being raised by both parents; and Emily, an eighth-grader in the affluent Silicon Valley, Calif., also being raised by both parents.
With its accreditation under review, its former superintendent under indictment and many of its schools underperforming, DeKalb County is at a crossroads. The school board will face many challenges next year, including hiring a new superintendent to lead the system back to stability. School board candidates in the Nov. 2 general election tell us how they would deal with these challenges.
1. What qualities should the next superintendent of schools have?
2. How would you involve the communities in the school redistricting and closings process?
3. With the indictments of two top school officials and the current questions from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools about leadership of the district, what will you do to help restore credibility and confidence?
Here's a provision of the proposed Baltimore Teachers Union contract that escaped my notice but caught the eye of the editors of the Washington Post. The tentative agreement - voted down by the BTU rank-and-file - proposes a system by which teachers would be paid not strictly according to years and college credits, but by "achievement units" accumulated.
A teacher would receive 12 AUs for the highest grade on an evaluation and 1 AU for each college credit. But work your way to page 9 of the tentative agreement and you find a teacher is to be awarded 3 AUs annually for being a union building representative.
Today the foundation set up by billionaires Eli and Edythe Broad is giving away $2 million to urban school districts that have pursued education reform that they like. On Friday a Florida teacher is running 50 miles to raise money so that he and his fellow teachers don't have to spend their own money to buy paper and pencils, binders (1- and 2-inch), spiral notebooks, composition books and printer ink.
Together the two events show the perverted way schools are funded in 2010.
Very wealthy people are donating big private money to their own pet projects: charter schools, charter school management companies, teacher assessment systems. (The latest example is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to the Newark public schools, given with the provision that Zuckerberg, apparently an education reform expert, play a big role in determining success.)
What this means is that these philanthropists -- and not local communities -- are determining the course of the country's school reform efforts and which education research projects get funded. As Buffalo Public Schools Superintendent James A. Williams said in an interview: "They should come out and tell the truth. If they want to privatize public education, they should say so."
Andrew Reschovsky, an economist at UW-Madison's La Follette School of Public Affairs, is estimating the state budget deficit could balloon to $3.1 billion in the next biennium due to increases in the cost to provide public se
The state's highest court will rule in coming months on the tug-of-war over power and money that pits seven school districts against the state in a fight over local control. The case has already raised a question about fair play.
Ties between Supreme Court Justice David Nahmias and Mike Bowers, attorney for Gwinnett County Public Schools, the lead district in the case, have some in education circles asking about a possible conflict of interest. Bowers, a former Georgia attorney general, is Nahmias' election campaign committee's co-chairman and contributed $1,000 to his election bid on Aug. 1, finance disclosures show.
A committee Bowers chaired in 2009 recommended Nahmias, 46, the former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, for his seat on the state Supreme Court. Nahmias appeared on the short list of candidates the Judicial Nominating Commission sent to the governor when former Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears stepped down.
One in particular -- the addition of more AP classes will certainly not be a detriment in the college application process. However, the most selective colleges generally expect applicants to have taken the AP classes at their high school if they are available.
The idea that this new plan will promote segregation is particularly pernicious and about 180 degrees off the mark as far as the intent of the program goes.
Finally, the point of choosing a curriculum for our schools is to determine the best courses for our students to take, not the courses that teachers most want to teach. Students and their needs come first.
We have the most wonderfullest idea that has been created by our district administration this year, and it has had amusingly unforeseen consequences for Ms. Cornelius.
Here's the deal: the Powers That Be have revived the farcical "Leadership Cadre." What might this be, you ask? Well, remember that our district has an absolutely stellar record of hiring district employees for administration jobs-- and by stellar I imply events so rare as to be separated by light-years.
But wait! Let's get some teachers who have administrative certification-- and frankly, no hope in hell of actually being hired-- fill in when one of our peripatetic assistant principals gets to go jaunting off to a conference in Orlando or Bimini or Noo Yawk. Boom! Voila! "Leadership Cadre!" These chumps members of the Leadership Cadre will then garner administrative experience. Forget that whilst these ersatz nabobs are substitute nabobing, they will not be fulfilling the function for which they were hired and for which a school district exists: namely, teaching students. No; let the students eat substitutes!
Now, there is one particular dewy-eyed dreamer who leapt at this chance-- whom I will call "Bob," since "Sawed-Off Runt" seems far too brutal, if apropos. I can see the attraction of administration for Bob. He only puts eight grades in the gradebook per semester as it is, but if he becomes an AP he has figured out that that number will drop to zero. And that's less, right? (Did I mention Bob teaches math?)
Del. Kirk Cox and Gov. Bob McDonnell were a study in contrasts last week as they spoke to a commission tasked with recommending higher education reforms.
Cox, the second-ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, repeatedly warned his audience that money is scarce, and increased spending on public universities is a worthy goal when prosperity returns to the commonwealth.
McDonnell promised greater investment in the near term and rewards for universities that increase graduation rates and beef up science, engineering, math and technology majors. He later estimated new state aid could total between $30 million and $100 million next year. He was vague about the source.
On the 11-seat Rockinghom County Board of Education five seats are at-large spots, meaning residents of any part of the county can seek to fill them. This year, 10 people, including three incumbents, have filed for those five seats.
The incumbents:
Lorie McKinney
What sets you apart/qualifies you?
I feel that having children in our school system makes a big difference on how you look at things. I have a child in middle school and a child in elementary school. Plus I have family members in our system that range from kindergarten through 12th grade. I work with the public and receive a lot of information across the county on what is happening in our schools. I will always put the best interest of our children first.
How would you deal with an ever-tightening budget?
The current school board, along with our superintendent, has been looking at this for two years now. We have only hired when we could, due to state funding and the increase in classroom size from fourth to 12th grade due to new state standards. We are looking at every possible thing we can to keep from letting people go.
What's the No. 1 problem/priority in your mind for the schools right now?
Our budget; we can only hope and pray that our state does not take any more money from our schools.
It came as no surprise to District of Columbia residents when Michelle Rhee announced her resignation this week as chancellor of D.C. Public Schools. That her resignation (and tenure) made national news illustrates the depth of the education debates that she sparked. She leaves as her legacy the mass firings of teachers rated as minimally effective, increased emphasis on charter schools, and expanded use of standardized tests. Unafraid to publicly speak her mind, she has been alternately applauded or scorned by educators, depending on their views and positions in the broader educational system.
For education policymakers, how significant is Rhee's very public struggle with a major city's public school system? Does it help or hurt the debate to have a face and a name attached to it? Can educators take policy cues from her experience, or are the lessons to be learned largely about politics?
It hasn't been an easy week at Portland Public Schools. For the first time in nearly 30 years, the Portland School Board voted to close a high school campus. The school board also endorsed bringing needed changes to all our high schools, which will increase graduation rates, close the achievement gap and guarantee every Portland student a well-rounded education at any of our neighborhood schools.
This past week I heard from hundreds of people upset about the loss of their school. For me, proposing to close Marshall was a heart-wrenching decision, but a necessary one. A decade-long enrollment decline -- driven by Portland's changing demographics -- has drained more than 2,500 students from our high schools. Coupled with a shrinking state investment in education, we simply do not have the dollars to provide a rich, well-rounded high school education to students on all our current campuses.
Schools will be open in Maury County on Monday, but the system's future is uncertain as the school board and county commission continue to disagree on a budget.
School Board Chairman Shay Daniels and Director of Schools Eddie Hickman met with the county mayor and chairman of the Maury County Commission for about two hours Friday afternoon to discuss options for the district, Daniels said.
"We knew the commission was meeting on Monday so it makes sense for schools to be in session that day," Daniels said. "We hope the outcome of the commission meeting will allow us to use reserve fund money to balance our budget and move forward."
The Monday meeting, scheduled for 9 a.m., will mark the fifth time the Maury County Commission has seen the schools budget. The school board has submitted three different budgets at past meetings. The current budget proposal has been shot down twice.
California can't improve college completions without rethinking developmental education at its community colleges
California educates about one-quarter of all community college students in the nation, but large portions of community college students enter unprepared for college-level work. As a result, policy discussions in California and nationally are focusing increasingly on ways to improve student success in developmental or basic skills programs at community colleges.
State policymakers, community college system leaders, and local campus leaders and faculty all have a part to play in making this happen. Much of the work toward these objectives necessarily involves K-12 education as well.
This report sets out the issues involved, drawing heavily from a recent EdSource study that was commissioned by the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office to provide a deeper understanding of the system's challenges and opportunities related to developmental education. It also highlights recent state policy actions and the broader context within which those actions were taken.
When Memorial High School opened its doors last year for the immigration/migration project -- which helped students learn about their backgrounds -- officials were astonished when more than 400 people showed up.
So the school decided to do it again, and the recent open house for the event drew 677 people.
Besides the numbers and the interaction of the families at the night of the event, social studies teacher Kristin Voss likes the idea that students are sitting down to talk to family members and are learning something about their classmates as well.
The project has revealed "a handful of immigrants in classrooms" or the children of immigrants, Voss said.
The students discover information they never knew about family members, and a couple of students learned they had a common relative from the 1860s.
A packed audience watched failure after failure by generations of politicians, federal and state officials and public school teachers Saturday during a screening of "Waiting for Superman," a documentary film that won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
The screening, hosted by the Santa Cruz Education Foundation at the Nickelodeon Theatre, was followed by a short discussion by local educators.
"It's a powerful movie," former Assemblyman John Laird said after film concluded. "The issues are more complex than in some ways they were represented in the movie, but I'm hoping that it focuses everybody on this issue and brings people together toward improvements."
Monona Grove teachers receive the best post-retirement benefit package in Dane County, according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. Qualifying teachers may retire at 55 and receive district-covered health and dental insurance until age 70. They also receive a payout over three years based on their Social Security allowance.
Depending on projected health care costs, a 2009 retiree earning the maximum benefit would receive $281,000 to $421,000 in benefits, school boards association attorney Bob Butler said.
To retain those benefits over the years, the union has conceded short-term compensation increases, putting their salaries in the middle-to-bottom range compared with neighboring districts, Wollerman said. Gerlach said the healthy benefit package was put in place years ago to encourage retirements and attract new teachers.
The School District's contentious proposal breaks teachers into three groups: those 10 years away from retirement, new hires and everyone in between. The first group wouldn't be affected by the major changes. New teachers would receive $1,300 a year while employed toward a Health Reimbursement Account and no post-retirement payout. Teachers in the district that are more than 10 years from retirement would have their district health and dental benefits capped at retirement levels, lose coverage once eligible for Medicare and have their stipend capped at $50,000 total.
Gigot: So you said when you resigned this week that for reform to continue, the reformer had to leave. With respect, that seems a bit contradictory. Why did you feel you had to go?
Rhee: Well, the new presumptive mayor-elect in Washington, D.C., Vincent Gray, and I decided that the best thing to do for the city would be for me to step aside, because we really want to make sure that the entire city now can embrace the reform efforts. And certainly for some members of the community, to have me continue to be associated with the reforms was not going to allow them to do that. I asked my deputy chancellor to step in in my place. I asked my entire management team to stay in place through the end of the school year. And to be honest, I mean, those folks are the brains and the talent behind the reforms, and so I feel like, by doing this, it would allow the reforms to continue on, and they could do it in a way where the entire city could get behind it.
Gigot: OK, when you came to see us a few months ago, you had said that one of the secrets of your success was the support you had had from Mayor Adrian Fenty--that when you got into trouble, he always backed you up. Do you think the new mayor is going to back up your successor?
Rhee: Well, I think he has to. His commitment is not to roll back the clock and to continue the reforms as aggressive as we've been doing them over the last 3½ years. And in order to do that, you have to give your unequivocal support. My deputy has been working with me since day one. She knows what the political support looks like to get this work accomplished, and I don't think she's going to settle for anything less.
he majority of school districts in the Milwaukee area will get more money this school year from the state's largest pot for education but not enough to make up for losses they suffered last school year, according to data released Friday.
Thirty-seven of the 50 school districts in Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha counties will receive less state general aid in 2010-'11 than they did in the 2008-'09 school year, information from the state Department of Public Instruction shows. For seven of those districts, aid fell by at least one-fifth over that two-year period.
"We've been hit pretty hard the last couple of years," said Keith Marty, superintendent of the Menomonee Falls School District, where general aid from the state is expected to decline to $10.85 million for the current school year, about 27% less than what the school system received two years ago.
Under state-imposed revenue limits, school districts can make up aid losses by increasing their property tax levies. Some districts with large aid losses last year ended up with double-digit percentage levy increases to make up the difference. At least part of those increases can be offset by school levy credits that are sent to municipalities to help reduce residents' overall tax bills.
On Friday night, October 15th at Discovery World in Milwaukee, The Wisconsin Charter Schools Association (WCSA) announced the winners of annual awards in four categories, as well as two career achievement honorees:
Each year when I ask high schools around the country to fill out the form for my annual America's Best High Schools list, I try to add a question to illumine an issue on which there is little research. This was my extra question for 2010:
"May any student at your school enroll in AP American History or AP English Literature if they want to? (If not, we would like to know what qualifications they must have -- a certain GPA? a teacher's recommendation?)"
I just calculated the results. They suggest the widespread habit of restricting access to AP may be losing strength, although not fast enough to suit me or the AP teachers who have influenced me on this issue.
I am beginning to contact schools for the 2011 list. Any that haven't heard from me by Thanksgiving and think they qualify -- a school needs to have given as many AP, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests as it had graduating seniors -- should e-mail me at mathewsj@washpost.com.
This was written by Philadelphia Schools Supt. Arlene Ackerman. She was one of 16 big-city school district chiefs who signed onto a reform "manifesto" published in the Washington Post this week that was long on rhetoric and short on substance. It was initiated by New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and signed by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has since resigned, and 14 others.
Yesterday Ackerman told me that she had not seen the final version of the manifesto -- which views charter schools as a big answer to urban school failure, bashes teachers unions and supports market-driven "fixes" to schools -- and though an aide gave permission for her name to be added to it, she does not agree with it. Here is her statement.
By Arlene Ackerman
Some may feverishly await the arrival of Superman to resolve the problems that overwhelm our public education system, while others prefer to enlist with the personality of the day or prescribe to the scripted agenda of the hour. However, my preference, which remains unchanged for the past 42 years, has been to tackle school reform through collaborative efforts, with the start and end goal of providing quality educational opportunities for all children who attend public schools. Period.
IV. The Rollout of the Plan: The Plotlines Converge
I first heard indirectly about this new high school plan in the works sometime around the start of the school year in September. While the work on the development of the plan continued, the District's responses to the various sides interested in the issue of accelerated classes for 9th and 10th grade students at West was pretty much put on hold.
This was frustrating for everyone. The West parents decided they had waited long enough for a definitive response from the District and filed a complaint with DPI, charging that the lack of 9th and 10th grade accelerated classes at West violated state educational standards. I imagine the teachers at West most interested in this issue were frustrated as well. An additional complication was that West's Small Learning Communities grant coordinator, Heather Lott, moved from West to an administrative position in the Doyle building, which couldn't have helped communication with the West teachers.
The administration finally decided they had developed the Dual Pathways plan sufficiently that they could share it publicly. (Individual School Board members were provided an opportunity to meet individually with Dan Nerad and Pam Nash for a preview of the plan before it was publicly announced, and most of us took advantage of the opportunity.) Last Wednesday, October 13, the administration presented the plan at a meeting of high school department chairs, and described it later in the day at a meeting of the TAG Advisory Committee. On the administration side, the sense was that those meetings went pretty well.
Then came Thursday, and the issue blew up at West. I don't know how it happened, but some number of teachers were very upset about what they heard about the plan, and somehow or another they started telling students about how awful it was. I would like to learn of a reason why I shouldn't think that this was appallingly unprofessional behavior on the part of whatever West teachers took it upon themselves to stir up their students on the basis of erroneous and inflammatory information, but I haven't found such a reason yet.
School Board member Marj Passmon on the Proposed Madison High School Changes
via email:
It was the intention of the Administration to first introduce the plan to HS staff and administrators and get some input from them. If you read the Plan then you know that it never discusses anything relating to current electives or student options and, I, personally, would never vote for any plan that does.
Although I admire the students for their leadership and support of their school, both they and their teachers seem to have leaped to certain conclusions. I am not saying that this is a perfect plan and yes, there are elements that may need to be worked on but to immediately jump on it without asking any questions or presenting suggestions for improvement does not speak well of those who helped to spread rumors.
It is now up to MMSD Administrators to explain to the staff and students what this Plan is actually about and, perhaps then, the West Staff can have a more objective discussion with their classes.
Marj
-----------------------------------
Marjorie Passman
Madison Board of Education
mpassman@madison.k12.wi.us
After living beyond its means for decades and shifting its debt onto future generations, an entire society is seeing the bills come due earlier than expected. And Kelly Egan's students are about to pay the price.
Egan teaches high achievers in math and reading, a job that barely survived budget cuts last year - but the reprieve was short-lived. At the end of this school year, the position is almost certain to disappear along with dozens more in West Bend, adding to the hundreds of thousands of public employees nationwide whose employment has been cut short by the meanest economic downturn since the 1930s.
"Parents ask, 'What should we do with our children as the West Bend School District continues to cut and cut and cut programs,' " said Egan, a 20-year veteran who is likely to be reassigned to teach the regular curriculum.
For the first time since the Depression, virtually every strata of American government is caught in the same viselike squeeze: Cities, counties and states find themselves deep in debt and lacking rainy day reserves to tide them over in hard times. Even with federal stimulus funds, local governments are laying off police officers and teachers, closing firehouses and selling public assets. During the past two years, state and local governments nationwide have cut 242,000 jobs, and public schools have shed an additional 200,700, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The consensus among Edupundits is that teacher quality is the most important variable in student academic achievement.
I argue that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work.
Edupundits have chosen very complex subject matter for their investigations and reports. They study and write about dropouts, vouchers, textbooks, teacher selection and training, school governance, budgets, curricula in all subjects, union contracts, school management issues, and many many more.
Meanwhile, practically all of them fail to give any attention to the basic purpose of schools, which is to have students do academic work. Almost none of them seems inclined to look past the teacher to see if the students are, for instance, reading any nonfiction books or writing any term papers.
Of course all of the things they do pay attention to are vitally important, but without student academic work they mean very little. Now, I realize there are state standards in math and reading, and some states test for writing after a fashion, but no state standards ask if students have read a history book while they were in school or written a substantial research paper, and neither do the SAT, ACT, or NAEP tests.
As part of the curriculum review cycle to provide a systematic, ongoing method for the MMSD to update its curricular materials in each of the content areas, base line data is currently being acquired from each school, K-12in literacy. An additional goal ofthis review cycle is to provide all students with equitable access to research-and standards-based curricular materials and programs district wide.
Attached are matrixes that went to all schools seeking information about the Core Practices, Interventions, Assessments, and Resources in each ofthe buildings. Please note: these documents are a tool to gather information. It is NOT to evaluate buildings or individual teachers. Curriculum and Assessment will use the information provided to determine ways to better support the schools and more equitable ways.
This questionnaire is being distributed to the Instructional Resource Teachers at the elementary level, the Learning Coordinators at the middle level, and the Literacy Coaches at the high school leveL The intention is to gather information from a literacy expert who serves the entire school as the focus oftheirjob. We have also asked these staffmembers to confer with other literacy experts who work in their building: Read 180 teachers or six grade Literacy Coaches, for example. Once the information is shared with principals it will be returned day on Wednesday, October 27, 2010.
This gathering of information serves several initiatives within the strategic plan including better support the schools and more equitable ways.
Attached you will find the PMAIClient Checklist completed for your consideration as the Administrations recommendation for the parameters that will make up the 5 year budget projection. The major areas and comments about those areas are as follows:
EXPENDITURE ASSUMPTIONS
Projected %Salary Increase
These have been intentionally left blank, as the committee will need to have a conversation about how to handle these going forward. This section, along with the next section (Projected Benefits) comprise approximately 85% of the entire model projection. We will need to address the issue of how these line item projections could impact future negotiations with all employee groups.
Projected Benefits
We have worked with our Human Resources Department to provide the best possible projections at this point in time.
We have assumed an increase in WRS over the next 3 years of .6% and the assumed this would flatten out.
For Health Insurance, we have used a weighted average based upon the number of plans we have with each separate health plan, along with a projected increase for each plan.
General Fund Assumptions
Historically Administration has tied this increase to the annualized Consumer Pricing Index (CPI-U), which hovered around approximately 2%.
Currently through the month of August, 2010 the annualized CPI-U is at 1.1%. We are recommending that all consumable budgets be increased by 2% in order to allow schools and departments the ability to meet the increasing needs and price increases.
Utilities Assumptions
Administration has worked with Madison Gas and Electrict (MG&E), the City of Madison, and our independent natural gas consultant Select Energy to prepare the recommended rates of utility increase.
The Board of Education information requests from the August 9, 2010 Board meeting are listed in the attached document (Attachment A). The following are the information requests that have been addressed in the attached documents:
Staff age and experience - rationale and implications for these data. We do not have staff age by school yet, but we have staff experience by school.
Staff Experience by School - Elementary School (Attachment B-1)
Staff Experience by School - Middle School (Attachment B-2)
Staff Experience by School - High School (Attachment B-3)
Staff Experience by School - Other (Attachment B-4)
Average experience of teachers by school (Attachment C)
Teacher turnover by school and include all staff categories not just instructional and administrative; Le., custodial, clerical, technical. food service
September 30, 2010 Memo to Board of Education regarding Turnover Data (Attachment D-1) School Turnover Summary - Annual Report by Employee Group (Attachment D-2) School Turnover Summary - Annual Report by Location (Attachment D-3)
A final report will be completed by November 11 as part of a discussion at the regular Board of Education meeting on November 29.
Purpose: The purpose of this Data Retreat is to provide all BOE members with an update on the progress of 4K planning and the work of subcommittees with a recommendation to start 4K September, 2011.
Research Providing four year old kindergarten (4K) may be the district's next best tool to continue the trend of improving academic achievement for all students and continuing to close the achievement gap.
The quality of care and education that children receive in the early years of their lives is one of the most critical factors in their development. Empirical and anecdotal evidence clearly shows that nurturing environments with appropriate challenging activities have large and lasting effects on our children's school success, ability to get along with others, and emotional health. Such evidence also indicates that inadequate early childhoOd care and education increases the danger that at-risk children will grow up with problem behaviors that can lead to later crime and violence.
As some of you surely know, there is currently a national trend (supported by significant grant dollars) to increase access to AP courses. The DPI's "Blended Learning Innovations: Building a Pipeline for Equity and Access" is part of that trend.
The purpose of the grant is to close the race and SES based achievement gaps by increasing the number of AP courses in schools with high levels of poverty and by increasing the participation and success of poor and minority students in AP courses and testing. The MMSD is a partner in the grant.
Please note that both nationally (NAGC) and locally, AP has never been a focus of the "TAG" community. (On the contrary, those of us who worked on the MMSD TAG Plan advocated for consideration of an IB curriculum ... which is what's been proposed for the Madison Preparatory Academy.)
I imagine I am not the only one who would appreciate it if the District (and the press) would be clearer with the community about these points:
1) This high school proposal has been in the works for a long time. (Importantly, it has been in the works since well before the West DPI petition and complaint. The complaint may have sped up the rolling out of the plan, for better and worse, but it did not impact the content of the plan. As evidence, consider the second paragraph of the October 14 letter sent out to the West community: there is no mention whatsoever of 9th and 10th grade honors classes, which is the sole focus and request of the DPI complaint.)
2) The extent to which the DPI's "equity and access" AP grant is driving the content of the MMSD's high school proposal.
FOR more than half a century, Americans have fled the cities in their millions, heading away from crime and poverty towards better schools and safer neighbourhoods in the suburbs. Now poverty is catching up with them. According to two new reports from the Brookings Institution, over the past decade the number of poor people in the suburbs has jumped by a whopping 37.4% to 13.7m, compared with some 12.1m people below the poverty line in cities. Although poverty rates remain higher in the inner cities, the gap is narrowing.
Suburban areas largely escaped during earlier downturns, but not this time. Support groups say people are using safety-net programmes, such as food stamps or unemployment insurance, who have never applied for them before. They are often making tough choices. "It's mortgage or food," observes Paule Pachter of Long Island Cares, a non-profit group on Long Island, one of the first destinations to be populated by escapees from the city.
It was inevitable that Michelle Rhee, the District of Columbia's hard-driving schools chancellor, would resign after her boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, lost last month's Democratic primary. It was no secret that Ms. Rhee had a strained relationship with Vincent Gray, the presumptive mayor and chairman of the City Council.
Still, Ms. Rhee's departure is a loss for the nation's capital. It has unsettled middle-class parents who valued the strong, reform-minded leadership that was setting Washington's schools on the path back from failure. And it sent a tremor through the private foundations that provisionally committed nearly $80 million to support the school reforms that were started during Ms. Rhee's tenure.
After Mr. Gray's clashes with Ms. Rhee, it was good news that he said the right things after her resignation. He pledged to move ahead with the reform agenda, which has strengthened the city's teacher corps, remade a patronage-ridden central bureaucracy and raised math and reading scores. He said he would keep Ms. Rhee's senior staff on for the remainder of the school year and named her deputy and longtime associate, Kaya Henderson, the interim chancellor.
They agree on the need for more charter schools and see a property tax cap as an important tool to rein in school spending.
They part ways on consolidating school districts and differ greatly on how to reform public education.
Yes, Andrew M. Cuomo and Carl P. Paladino disagree as much as they agree, but, in the eyes of educators, what's more important is the candidates' lack of attention to education as a campaign issue.
"It doesn't seem a priority for either candidate," said Grand Island Superintendent Robert W. Christmann, who also heads the State Council of School Superintendents. "It seems to be getting short shrift."
In 2005 Dan Swinney, chairman of the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council, approached the Chicago Public Schools for help reviving manufacturing in Chicago. The result was Austin Polytechnical Academy, whose mission is to redefine vocational education in Chicago and beyond, and revive the city's manufacturing industry by educating the next generation of advanced manufacturers--part engineer and part machinist. Through a diverse curriculum, Polytech aims to prepare students for college but also encourages them to pursue careers in advanced manufacturing that do not require a four-year degree.
This year the school will be graduating its first senior class and Chicago News Cooperative reporter Meribah Knight is following three students, Deandre Joyce, Stran'ja Burge and Marquiese Travae Booker, as they navigate the academic year and carve out their future. Facing a school record of poor academic performance and a community rife with violence, poverty and unemployment, these honor students are determined to stay on track and come out on top. Her first story will be posted on our Web site tonight.
A PARADOX of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be done. And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition, by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text conveying the information harder to read.
Dr Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three "species" of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features. This task was meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants could not draw on prior knowledge.
Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale). The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read.
There are no superheroes coming to save the day for students in America's failing schools, cautions the heart-wrenching new documentary, "Waiting for 'Superman.' "
No superheroes, but students who want choices do face enemies. In fact, they -- well, their lawyers -- appeared before the state Supreme Court Tuesday.
I'm not talking about teachers unions, whom "Waiting" largely fingers as the obstacles to education reform. They are a huge impediment in some places but the situation's different in Georgia, and in any case the problem is much broader than that. It covers all those in the education establishment who put preserving their fiefdoms above giving students their best chance at a good education.
And if that doesn't sum up the school systems suing to overturn the law creating Georgia's Charter School Commission, I don't know what does.
Sitting cross-legged on the ground or perched high on stone sculptures outside the school, about a quarter of West High's 2,086 students staged a silent 37-minute sit-in Friday morning outside their building to protest a district proposal to revamp curriculum at the city's high schools.
The plan, unveiled to Madison School District teachers and parents this week, would offer students in each high school the chance to pick from advanced or regular classes in the core subjects of math, science, English and social studies. Students in the regular classes could also do additional work for honors credit.
Designed to help the district comply with new national academic standards, the proposal comes in the wake of a complaint filed against the district by parents in the West attendance area arguing the district fails to offer adequate programs for "talented and gifted" ninth and 10th grade students at West. The complaint has prompted an audit by the state Department of Public Instruction.
Okay, everyone, remember to breathe, and don't forget to read.
A draft copy of possible high school curriculum changes got what could be gently characterized as a turbulent response from staff and students at West High School. Within hours of the release of a proposal that would offer more advanced placement options in core level courses at local high schools, there was a furious reaction from staff and students at West, with rumors flying, petitions signed and social media organizing for a protest. All in all, the coordination and passion was pretty amazing and would have done a well-financed political campaign proud.
Wednesday and Thursday there was talk of a protest walk-out at West that generated interest from over 600 students. By Friday morning, the march had morphed into a silent sitdown on the school steps with what looked like 200 to 300 students at about 10:50 a.m. when I attended. There were also adult supporters on the street, a media presence and quite a few police cars, although the demonstration was quiet and respectful. (Somehow, I don't think the students I saw walking towards the Regent Market or sitting, smoking, on a stone wall several blocks from school, were part of the protest).
NAS Unearths Censored Study on High School Research Papers
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has published a long-buried study on the state of the history research paper in American high schools. The 2002 study sponsored by The Concord Review (TCR) went unpublished when its benefactor, the Albert Shanker Institute, found the results unflattering to high school teachers.
In commissioning the study, TCR founder Will Fitzhugh sought to find out why American high schools aren't doing a better job of teaching students to write--specifically, why so few teachers assign major research papers. 95 percent of teachers surveyed believed that research papers are important, but 62 percent never assigned extended-length essays.
According to the report, the biggest barriers to teachers are time and class size. Most teachers said that grading papers took too much personal time, and that not enough time was provided for this in the school day. Teachers surveyed taught an average of 80 students each. Assigning a 20-page paper then means having 1,600 pages to grade. The Concord Review urged high schools to support teachers by providing more time for them to grade papers.
Fitzhugh considered what may be lost if most high school history teachers never assign a long research paper:
It may very well mean that a majority of our high school students never read a complete nonfiction book on any subject before they graduate. They may also miss the experience of knowing a fair amount about some important topic--more, for instance, than anyone else in their class. They may also miss a fundamental step in their preparation for demanding college work.
"This is an important study, even eight years later," said Peter Wood, NAS president. "It sheds light on a problem that keeps getting worse and reverberates through college and employment. American high schools should take heed from this study to change their ways and make research paper-writing a priority." In an introduction to the study, Wood wrote, "[NAS's] interest in this is part of our broader goal of rebuilding the basis for genuine liberal arts education in the United States."
The National Association of Scholars advocates for higher education reform. To learn more about NAS, visit www.nas.org.
The Malibu Times sent a questionnaire to eight candidates running for four seats on the Board of Education for the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. They were given the same time frame to respond and were limited to 150 words per answer.
There is a feeling by many in Malibu that this city is an afterthought for school district officials. Why does this sentiment exist? What can be done to change this feeling?
This feeling is understandable. Although Santa Monica and Malibu are part of a unified school district, the vast majority of district students and voters come from Santa Monica. All current school board members are from Santa Monica, the central office is in Santa Monica and our two cities are 15 miles apart. If I am elected, I will work hard to change the feeling that Malibu is an "afterthought" and to ensure that Malibu families are heard and feel an integral part of the district.
As a school board member, I will meet regularly with Malibu parents and staff to listen and learn, and address the specific concerns of Malibu schools. I will also develop opportunities for district-wide shared educational and social experiences. Whether we live in Santa Monica or Malibu, we all share the same aspirations for our children and our schools.
Overall, my second year as a teacher has been ten times easier than my first year -- I am feeling confident and in control, even when I allow the students to take the wheel for a bit. It feels great! But there is one class that I'm still having trouble with.
My largest class happens to also contain about 15 of the most difficult students in the grade. While this means that my other classes are wonderful, devoid of any trouble-makers, this class reduced me to tears yesterday for the first time this year (although I would never actually cry in front of them, I saved it for later). Standing in that room, watching every single student talk without giving me a second thought, I felt like a newbie all over again. What if, I thought, this is how it's always going to be.
Today, I got back out there and managed to get them somewhat under control. Here's how.
1. I let my feelings out the night before.
Charter schools are all the rage these days. The public is increasingly smitten with them -- in this year's Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup education poll, 68% of respondents said they support charter schools, up from 42% in 2000 -- but few people know what charters are. When the education journal Education Next asked Americans some basic questions this summer about charter schools, such as whether they can charge tuition or hold religious services, fewer than 1 in 5 respondents knew the correct answer (which was no in both cases). The confusion is so pervasive that more than half of the teachers surveyed couldn't answer the questions correctly either.
Quick primer: Charters are public schools that generally operate independently of traditional school districts. Since 1992, they have grown in number from one in Minnesota to about 5,000 in 40 states and the District of Columbia. (Ten states don't have laws allowing charter schools.) Collectively, they serve about 1.6 million students, and an estimated 420,000 kids are on various waiting lists to get into them. By law, when more students apply to a charter than there are seats available, the school has to hold a lottery to determine who gets in.
Tanya Lawler was taken aback. Her daughter, returning from West High's homecoming dance on Sept. 25, mentioned that students were randomly selected to take a breath test as they arrived, to see if they'd been drinking.
While her daughter was not tested, Lawler considers this a "violation of Fourth Amendment rights" because officials lacked probable cause to suspect the people being tested. Her son attended La Follette's homecoming dance, held the same night, and reported that no testing was done there.
In fact, West is the only high school in Madison that has a formal written policy (PDF) regarding student dances, and the only one that randomly tests students as they enter using "a passive alcohol detection device." Students and a parent must sign a form agreeing to these rules.
Lawler, who doesn't remember this form, advised her daughter to refuse this test. "I would rather forfeit the price of the ticket and have her call me. I'd say, 'No, they're not going to violate your rights.'"
Maddy Winters knows what she wants. Yes to ballet, no to soccer, yes to astronomy, and definitely yes to hanging out with the older crowd of third and fourth graders on her block.
Just 3 years old, she begged to go to school, but the local public school just won't do for her parents, Mark Filippone and Marie Winters. In September, Maddy will be enrolled at the Philadelphia Free School, where she will continue to decide what she wants to do all day long.
The Free School, which plans to launch a pilot program in January in South Philadelphia for students ages 4 to 18, follows a democratic model of education, meaning no tests, no curriculum, no bells every 45 minutes, no separation into grades, and no teachers. The adults at the school will be called "staff" and be elected by the students each year. The students will also vote on the school's budget and serve on a judicial committee that deliberates on misbehaving peers.
The high-profile head of DC's schools exits, leaving an uncertain legacy. Will her successor follow through on her reforms--or forfeit millions in federal funds?
As expected, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee will announce Wednesday that she will step down after three years on the job.
Rhee's tenure was defined by school closings, teacher dismissals, and incremental student test score gains in one of the poorest-performing and most racially segregated school districts in the nation. A Teach for America veteran who had never before run a school district, Rhee became a national spokesperson for aggressive school reform, unafraid to voice her disdain--often in the media--for teachers unions and for concepts such as cooperation and community buy-in.
Few documentaries have had as profound an impact as 2006's An Inconvenient Truth. Davis Guggenheim's film about Al Gore's crusade to educate the public about global warming won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, helped Gore snag a Nobel Prize, and incited a culture-wide debate about the film's subject.
Guggenheim has worked extensively in television and narrative films. He worked as a producer and director on Deadwood and helmed the pilot for the recent Melrose Place remake, in addition to directing films like Gossip and Gracie, a docudrama based on the teenage years of Guggenheim's wife, actor Elisabeth Shue. But Guggenheim is best known as a muckraking documentarian whose ambitious, zeitgeist-capturing epics forthrightly address major social issues. Guggenheim has made headlines for his latest documentary, Waiting For Superman, an impassioned exploration of the failure of the American public-school system that has incited heated debate and attracted vitriolic attacks from teachers' unions for its less-than-flattering depiction of them and its evangelizing on behalf of charter schools. The A.V. Club recently spoke with the idealistic filmmaker about making movies about quagmires, being hated on by teachers, and whether President Obama is a cactus.
The A.V. Club: What's the relationship between your documentary about first-year teachers, The First Year, and Waiting For Superman?
The Minneapolis branch of the NAACP on Wednesday urged parents to consider pulling their children out of the Minneapolis School District in response to Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson's recommendation to close North High School.
Citing multiple school closures on the city's North Side and low test scores in those that remain, Minneapolis NAACP President Booker Hodges accused Johnson and school board members of failing to educate north Minneapolis' children, most of whom are black.
Hodges issued a statement calling for parents "who value their children's education or future [to] seriously consider other options for educating their children."
Verona High School students have been given the green light to text on their cell phones, groove to songs on their mp3 players and update their Facebook pages while strolling between classes, eating lunch and hanging out before and after school.
The school is the latest in Dane County to relax the rules and allow students to use personal electronic devices outside of the classroom. They join an increasing number of area high schools, including Belleville, DeForest, McFarland, Middleton, Oregon Sun Prairie and Stoughton, that have adopted similar policies.
"If you need to get your mom to bring something to school from home you don't have to hide in the bathroom (to make the call)," Maddie Hankard, a freshman at Verona High School, said in explaining the change.
Let's start with something we can all agree with: some of NJ's public schools are great and some stink. The worst schools are usually in the most impoverished urban areas. This disparity has remained unchanged through many different education commissioners and both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Another truism: we've recognized this fact for decades and have tried mightily to alleviate disparities through additional funding to impoverished districts. This has worked well in a few places and less well in many others.
And another: NJ is broke. We're spending as much as (or more than) residents can bear for public education. Increased state funding in our neediest districts is not an option.
Let's continue the truisms: New Jerseyans love their home rule. A Garden State school board and administration in a well-performing district is insular, circumscribed, a world unto itself. Our bulimic state government - scarfing down money and vomiting out regulations and mandates - merely increases a functional district's isolation and lack of shared responsibility to poor kids outside its wrought iron gates.
We sure hope the Madison School District is serious about pursuing more charter and specialty schools.
Superintendent Dan Nerad told the State Journal editorial board on Tuesday he plans to appoint a committee next month to study alternatives to traditional schools.
Giving parents and students more options and innovations will help keep more middle class families in the Madison district. At the same time, charter schools and their spin-offs in Madison have catered to a higher percentage of low-income and minority students. So they're not elitist.
Teaching students in new ways can boost student interest and effort while getting more parents involved in their children's educations -- a key ingredient for success. And if new approaches don't work, they can be shut down.
We are writing today to clarify the proposal for high school course offerings in the Madison Metropolitan School District. While discussion and questioning should be part of any change process, the discussion needs to center on factual information.
We have proposed that Advanced Placement offerings be increased in all of our high schools. We have also focused on making an embedded honors option available in 9th and 10th grade English and Social Studies next year and Math and Science the following year at all four high schools. We have also proposed increasing support to students who may not traditionally have participated in an honors or AP course so that rigorous opportunities can become part of every high school student's transcript.
What we have NOT proposed is the elimination of any electives at any of the high schools. Our current high school offerings vary quite widely across the district and we are striving to make good things available across all attendance areas. Nothing in the proposal prohibits a dynamite elective course from being shared and adopted across the city, in fact, some consistency of elective offerings would be welcomed.
The two pathways are groupings of courses. They are NOT a way to group students. Student and family choice is wide open. We are also proposing a set of assessments that will start in middle school to help inform families, students, and teachers about skills that students have that are strong and skills that need to be supported and improved. Those assessments will be given every year and are meant to be used to inform students and families about student progress and growth and to allow students and families to make informed decisions about future courses.
Please understand that students will still have choices. If they chose not to take an Advanced Placement course and wish to take an elective instead, that option remains.
We regret that incomplete information was used to make students and families upset. The proposal had, and still has the word "draft" on it. We look forward to productive conversations with all of you about ways in which we can now move forward.
Before I delve into the mess and the proposal, I think it is important to say that despite huge and inexcusable problems with the process, many unanswered questions and some real things of concern; there are some good things in the proposal. One part near the heart of the plan in particular is something I’ve been pushing for years: open access to advanced classes and programs with supports. In the language of the proposal:
Pathways open to all students. Students are originally identified by Advanced Placement requirements and other suggested guidelines such as EXPLORE /PLAN scores, GPA, past MS/HS performance and MS/HS Recommendation. however, all students would be able to enroll. Students not meeting suggested guidelines but wanting to enroll would receive additional supports (tutoring, skill development classes, AVID, etc.) to ensure success. (emphasis added and I would like to see it added in the implementation).
Right now there are great and at times irrational barriers in place. These need to go. I hope this does not get lost as the mess is cleaned up.
This is in four sections: The Mess; What Next?; The Plan: Unanswered Questions and Causes for Concern; and Final Thought.
arent of an early-entrance child: We live in a town where many parents, school board members, and teachers hold their kids back a grade in school so they can excel in sports. When such a choice appears to be an accepted norm, accelerating a young boy into school goes against the local culture. Some parents and teachers have tried to politely ask me if I've considered the implications of my son "always being the youngest." At first, I felt like I had to defend my son and our decision to them. Now, I simply state that "parents try to do what they feel is best for their child. We looked at the research and our child's readiness and made the decision. He's thriving in school and sports, too." If the well-meaning continue to inquire, I share my unique sports perspective: I went to college on a sports scholarship. Were sports important to me? Yes. However, being challenged in school to be a whole person was - and is - more important.
Early entrance to Kindergarten is one excellent option for some highly advanced children. It is the process by which a child enters Kindergarten earlier than he or she otherwise would have according to school or state decreed "cut-off dates." In Montana, our magical date is September 10th. If the child is five years old on or before September 10th of that year, he gets to go to Kindergarten. If he turns five on September 11th or later, he goes the next year.
The introduction of this volume details government spending on three early childhood programs - Early Head Start, Head Start, and home-visiting programs. Co-editors Ron Haskins and Steve Barnett also review enrollment in each type of program, review the contrasting papers presented on each program, and recommend policies designed to increase the returns on investment produced by these early childhood programs.
Michelle Rhee described her decision yesterday to step down as Washington, D.C., schools chancellor after 3½ years as "heartbreaking." We share the sentiment. That one of the nation's most talented school reformers was forced out does not bode well for students, or speak well of the man likely to become D.C.'s next mayor.
Ms. Rhee's patron was Mayor Adrian Fenty, who lost his bid for a second term to City Council Chairman Vincent Gray in a Democratic primary last month. In Washington, the Democratic primary winner is presumed to be the next mayor, and few believed that Mr. Gray would retain Ms. Rhee's services, especially since the teacher unions spent more than $1 million to elect Mr. Gray so that he would replace the chancellor.
The Washington Post reports that Ms. Rhee's resignation "won immediate support from the Washington Teachers' Union," a strong signal that her departure is a victory for the adults who run public education, not the kids in failing schools. Ms. Rhee's tenure was marked by improved test scores and putting the interests of students first. She closed underperforming schools, fired bad instructors, supported school vouchers for low-income families and opened charter schools. She also negotiated a new teachers contract that included merit pay and has become a model for other reform-minded educators and politicians in urban districts across the country.
Are school finance systems in the 50 states fair? Simply comparing overall funding levels won't answer that question, according to a groundbreaking report released today.
"Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card" posits that fairness depends not only on a sufficient level of funding for all students, but also the provision of additional resources to districts where there are more students with greater needs.
The National Report Card rates the 50 states on the basis of four separate, but interrelated, "fairness indicators" - funding level, funding distribution, state fiscal effort, and public school coverage. Using a more thorough statistical analysis, the report provides the most in-depth analysis to date of state education finance systems and school funding fairness across the nation.
The clock is ticking. Every second, it seems, someone in the world takes on more debt. The idea of a debt clock for an individual nation is familiar to anyone who has been to Times Square in New York, where the American public shortfall is revealed. Our clock shows the global figure for all (or almost all) government debts in dollar terms.
Does it matter? After all, world governments owe the money to their own citizens, not to the Martians. But the rising total is important for two reasons. First, when debt rises faster than economic output (as it has been doing in recent years), higher government debt implies more state interference in the economy and higher taxes in the future. Second, debt must be rolled over at regular intervals. This creates a recurring popularity test for individual governments, rather as reality TV show contestants face a public phone vote every week. Fail that vote, as the Greek government did in early 2010, and the country can be plunged into imminent crisis. So the higher the global government debt total, the greater the risk of fiscal crisis, and the bigger the economic impact such crises will have.
Candidates for superintendent discussed charter schools and bad teachers at a candidate forum.
LARAMIE -- Candidates for state superintendent discussed how they'd address standardized testing and bad teachers during a debate Tuesday at the University of Wyoming.
Former Cheyenne junior high assistant principal and Republican candidate Cindy Hill said Wyoming teachers need measures they can trust and academic leaders. State Senator and Democratic candidate Mike Massie said he believes that struggling teachers should get a year's worth of additional training and mentoring to get back on track. And if the plan isn't working, teachers should be fired no matter how long they've previously held their position.
Anytime the Maine media rains terms such as "taxes," "economy," "business climate" and "jobs," among others, upon the voters and taxpayers of Maine, Libby Mitchell runs for cover under her education umbrella. The fact, and it is fact, is that Maine is already among the nation's leaders in education spending.
Maine's population of approximately 1.5 million residents, like that of neighboring New Hampshire, is among the smallest in the nation, yet Maine's education spending ranks among the highest, ahead of many much larger states, and in the vicinity of the top 20 to 25 percent. Exact position may change incrementally from year to year; nevertheless, Maine is right up there. Do not take my word; go online, visit the Web and check it out yourself.
Maine's economy is just about non-existent. Five years ago, after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, it was Maine that had the worst economy in the U.S. During the 2010 primary season, the figure that was popular and which met no argument from any other politician was that Maine had gained just 65 jobs in the past decade.
Yes, the Maine economy is shedding jobs as fast as it is creating them. While the Maine economy may be somewhat better off at this time, it is in no position to foot Libby's brand of education spending.
West: TAG Complaint and Proposed High School Redesign Create Perfect Storm
The parent complaint to DPI over MMSD's failure to comply with WI laws on Talented and Gifted education have combined with administration's recent proposal to create more consistency across the four major high schools, to create a perfect storm of controversy at Madison West. Within the past 24 hours, allegations that the proposal eliminates all electives have spawned a number of calls and e-mails to the Board of Education, a FB page (Walk-out Against MMSD School Reform) promoting a student walk out on Friday, and a YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zgjee-GmGI created to protest the elimination of electives.
As a board member, I have a somewhat different take largely because I know that allegations that the proposal to standardize core high school curriculum is not a product of the DPI complaint. Anyone who has watched MMSD operate, would probably agree that nothing is put together that quickly (the complaint is less than a month old), especially when it involves a proposal.
I also just received the proposal a day or so ago. In full disclosure, I did not take advantage of the briefings conducted for board members who met with the superintendent and assistant superintendent individually or in pairs. I'm a certifiable pain in the neck and thought that any presentations should be made to the board as a whole in an open board or committee meeting, but that is just my issue.) I am just beginning to read and think through what is being proposed, so have no firm opinion yet.
There's been a great deal of misinformation and angry speculation flying around West High regarding the District's High School Curricular Reform proposal.
On Tuesday, District administrators unveiled their plan for high school curricular reform at meeting with nearly 200 educators from all four high schools. Several parents attended the subsequent TAG Advisory Committee meeting, during which they also revealed an overview of the plan to this group.
I attended the TAG Advisory meeting. As I understand it, this plan involves increasing the number of accelerated and AP courses and expanding access to these options.
When teachers at West got news of this plan, many were enraged at not being included in its development. Further, many concluded that the District plans to replace West's electives with AP courses. They've expressed their concerns to students in their classes, and kids are riled up. Students plan to stage a walk-out on Friday, during which they will walk down to the Doyle Building and deliver a petition to Superintendent Nerad protesting the proposed reforms.
We received the Open Enrollment numbers for this year and they provide much grist for thought. My first reaction is prompted by the fact that 158 MMSD students have open enrolled in the McFarland School District. Since we have to send about $6,800 per student to districts that receive our open enrollers, this means that we'll be cutting a (perhaps figurative) check in excess of $1,000,000 to the McFarland School District.
Since last year, McFarland has operated a virtual school. This year, according to Gayle Worland's article in last Sunday's State Journal, the virtual school has enrolled 813 students, and a grand total of 5 of them live in McFarland.
Actually, it is overly generous to say that McFarland "operates" the virtual school, known as Wisconsin Virtual Academy. More accurately, McFarland has contracted with a publicly-traded corporation, K12, Inc., to operate the charter school, through another organization called Four Lakes Education.
President Obama created a grant program to copy his block-by-block approach to ending poverty. The British government praised his charter schools as a model. And a new documentary opening across the country revolves around him: Geoffrey Canada, the magnetic Harlem Children's Zone leader with strong ideas about how American education should be fixed.
Last week, Mr. Canada was in Birmingham, England, addressing Prime Minister David Cameron and members of his Conservative Party about improving schools.
But back home and out of the spotlight, Mr. Canada and his charter schools have struggled with the same difficulties faced by other urban schools, even as they outspend them. After a rocky start several years ago typical of many new schools, Mr. Canada's two charter schools, featured as unqualified successes in "Waiting for 'Superman,' " the new documentary, again hit choppy waters this summer, when New York State made its exams harder to pass.
A drop-off occurred, in spite of private donations that keep class sizes small, allow for an extended school day and an 11-month school year, and offer students incentives for good performance like trips to the Galápagos Islands or Disney World.
The parent organization of the schools, the Harlem Children's Zone, enjoys substantial largess, much of it from Wall Street. While its cradle-to-college approach, which seeks to break the cycle of poverty for all 10,000 children in a 97-block zone of Harlem, may be breathtaking in scope, the jury is still out on its overall impact. And its cost -- around $16,000 per student in the classroom each year, as well as thousands of dollars in out-of-class spending -- has raised questions about its utility as a nationwide model.
$16,000 per student is close to Madison's roughly $15K / student annual spending.
Why don't more of our smartest, most accomplished college graduates want to become teachers?
People trying to improve education in this country have been talking a lot lately about boosting "teacher effectiveness." But nearly all such efforts focus on the teachers who are already in the classroom, instead of seeking to change the caliber of the people who enter teaching in the first place.
Three of the top-performing school systems in the world -- those in Finland, Singapore and South Korea -- take a different approach, recruiting 100 percent of their teachers from the top third of their high school and college students. Simply put, they don't take middling students and make them teachers. They tap their best people for the job.
Of course, academic achievement isn't the whole story in these countries. They screen would-be teachers for other important qualities, and they invest heavily in training teachers and in retaining them for their entire careers. But scholastic prowess comes first: You don't get through the classroom door in Finland, Singapore or South Korea without having distinguished yourself academically. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers scored among the top third of SAT and ACT test-takers back in high school. In high-poverty schools, that figure is just 14 percent.
In your first year as the commissioner of education in Rhode Island, you earned headlines for backing a plan to fire all the high-school teachers in the poorly performing district of Central Falls. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and even President Obama chimed in with support. Did the attention surprise you?
I think that just the visual for people was noticeable, and I think what exactly was happening was misunderstood. I think people seemed to feel that teachers were being blamed for the performance of the school, which was not the way we understood what was happening.
Perhaps overshadowed by the Central Falls controversy, you've put forth a dramatic reform agenda aimed at improving teacher quality. To help, you created a new evaluation system that requires an annual review of all teachers.
I think most professionals would be surprised to know [that annual reviews] weren't already in place. Professionalism is about being respected for the work that you do, being acknowledged for the work that you do, and being accountable for the work that you do. I meet teachers in our state all the time who are more than ready to be held accountable for their work and are very proud of the results that they're able to see with their students.
What's gotten the most attention is that evaluations will be primarily based on measures of student growth and achievement.
When Gov. John Baldacci last year cut $38 million in local education aid to help with a $400 million state budget shortfall, local school districts took it on the chin.
The move forced school districts to consider staff layoffs and program reductions. Later, with less state aid expected and the threat of another cut looming in fiscal year 2011, school districts were forced to consider more layoffs, reduced programing or both.
Education funding was spared in Baldacci's latest budget adjustment, but the governor warned that the budget he will recommend to the next governor will be well short of the education funding required by state law.
Currently, the state funds just over 42 percent. State law mandates 55 percent, although it hasn't met the requirement since the law was enacted in 2004. About half of the state's biennial $5.5 billion budget goes to education.
How to fix our schools" is the title of a manifesto published on Sunday, October 10, in The Washington Post by Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools, and fourteen other school superintendents across the country.
The Future Of Our Children
The piece starts off well enough:
"It's time for all of the adults - superintendents, educators, elected officials, labor unions and parents alike - to start acting like we are responsible for the future of our children. Because right now, across the country, kids are stuck in failing schools, just waiting for us to do something."
Who can disagree with that? The writers continue: "As President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their zip code or even their parents' income - it is the quality of their teacher."
If Education Reformers, like our own Superintendent Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson, believe that the most critical step we can take to improve our schools and improve outcomes for students is to identify and dismiss all of the bad teachers, then why don't we see them making a real effort to do that?
Why don't we see our superintendent speaking to principals regularly and emphatically about following the process to dismiss all of the teachers in their schools that everyone knows are ineffective? If this is so important then why isn't the superintendent following up with principals about how they are following up on the process to dismiss poor performing teachers? Why don't we hear about all of the pressure she is putting on principals to cull the staff?
Hey, if this were the primary determinant of student performance - as they claim to believe - then they need to start treating it that way. Even if it takes two years to dismiss a poor performing teacher, I would expect them all to be gone after three years - certainly after four. Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson has had three years and is now in her fourth. Why do we still have this problem - if not for her failure to address it?
In this fall's must-see documentary, "Waiting for 'Superman,' " Davis Guggenheim offers a critique of America's public school bureaucracy that's manipulative, simplistic and more than a little bit utopian.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Guggenheim's cause, the plight of children trapped in failing schools with lousy, union-protected teachers, is important enough to make his overzealousness forgivable. And his prescription -- more accountability for teachers and bureaucrats, and more choices for parents and kids -- deserves all the support his film promises to win for it.
But if propaganda has its virtues, it also has its limits. Guggenheim's movie, which follows five families through the brutal charter school lotteries that determine whether their kids will escape from public "dropout factories," stirs an entirely justified outrage at the system's unfairnesses and cruelties. This outrage needs to be supplemented, though, with a dose of realism about what education reformers can reasonably hope to accomplish, and what real choice and competition would ultimately involve.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee will announce Wednesday that she is resigning at the end of this month, bringing an abrupt end to a tenure that drew national acclaim but that also became a central issue in an election that sent her patron, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, to defeat.
Rhee survived three contentious years that made her a superstar of the education reform movement and one of the longest-serving school leaders in the city in two decades. Student test scores rose, and the teachers union accepted a contract that gave the chancellor sweeping powers to fire the lowest-performing among them.
But Rhee will leave with considerable unfinished business in her quest to improve teaching, close the worst schools and infuse a culture of excellence in a system that has been one of the nation's least effective at educating students.
The academic calendar is symbolic of how an institution values time. It pegs the community to set dates like enrollment and graduations; exam periods and study periods; and holidays and vacations. In my university's case, what is not contained in the calendar is more instructive than what it actually says. Like many non-modern societies, we take a more malleable approach to time and along with it, a less strict teaching regimen.
My University's academic calendar is a historical artifact from a former agrarian society that was dependent upon the young's labor for planting and harvesting. It begins in June and ends in March. Book-ending the semesters are Christian holidays (All Saints/Souls Day in November 1; and Lent in late March/early April). Apart from the requisite two-week holiday for Christmas and New Year (December), we also give way to numerous "public" holidays celebrating heroes and heroic events (about 7 national and 3 local), which under former President Arroyo's holiday economics scheme invariably were moved to Mondays (and inconveniently announced the week before the holiday!).
President Barack Obama says America must improve its education system to retain its world economic leadership. Among the ideas he floated in a September talk was extending the school year.
Sound familiar? It should because former Gov. Tommy Thompson sounded the same theme some 18 years ago. Better education would help Wisconsin young people get jobs in the 21st century, Thompson suggested.
A longer school year is unpopular in Wisconsin's important tourism industry, which has long held clout in the Legislature. That's why public schools in Wisconsin can't start in August as they do in some other states.
The tourism industry initially fought to delay any school start until after Labor Day. But that would mean in some years that schools couldn't open until Sept. 8. The University of Wisconsin, which also is affected by the state law, argued that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get a full semester completed before the Christmas break.
Not surprisingly, teachers unions fight hardest against reforms that change the way teachers are paid, especially when they introduce incentives for teachers to perform more effectively.
I don't doubt that unions tend to oppose merit pay, but the reasons are unclear. Profit-maximizing monopolists still suffer financially if they cut quality; the same should hold for unionized workers. Why not simply jack average wages 15% above the competitive level, and leave relative wages unchanged?
Caleb Carr was excited to return to classes this fall so he could use a school-issued cell phone -- not just to talk, but to learn.
Carr and his classmates at Lutheran High School South in Newport are taking advantage of a $42,000 program from GoKnow, a Dallas-based mobile education company founded in Ann Arbor that equips students with cell phones.
The phones rely on mobile applications that let students -- many of whom text faster than they write -- take notes, complete assignments and watch presentations from the palms of their hands.
"Homework's more fun with the phone," said Carr, a junior at the private school who was part of a student group that tested the phones this summer. "For a teenager to have a phone, it's a great privilege."
GoKnow is one of several mobile applications companies with Michigan connections trying to cash in on the mobile technology revolution, encouraging students and teachers to trade notebooks for smartphones they say help pupils learn better.
What the LA Seniority Settlement Does and Doesn't Do
There has been much concern that somehow the proposed LA Seniority Settlement is eliminating seniority. Lets be clear here - this settlement does not eliminate seniority either at the protected school sites or in the district. This settlement simply means that some schools would be protected from experiencing the mass layoff when budget cuts are required. These schools will not even be protected from cuts. When the district has a cut, say 5 percent of staff in the district, this settlement will mean that only 5 percent of teachers at a protected site can be cut. And, those teachers would be selected based on seniority. What will this mean for other schools at the district? It will mean that more senior teachers will be laid off in the wealthier parts of the district, but isn't that fair? And how will those layoff decisions be made? That's right, based on seniority. So, this settlement simply spreads the pain a little more evenly across the district, but still bases decisions on seniority. When there are budget cuts shouldn't all the schools in the district feel some impact on their teaching staff?
Now on the point of should their be broader reforms to teacher seniority policies. I think the answer is yes. But first, districts must have much better teacher evaluation systems in place. For example, I am a fan of the TAP model in which the teacher evaluation system includes at least 6 classroom observations a year by a combination of administrators and master teachers using an agreed upon evaluation rubric. These measures are combined with value-added assessments and other outcome based measures. Once there are more rigorous teacher evaluation systems, then that system can protect from arbitrary feelings of a principal.
The Green Bay School Board hopes to hear from the public this evening about a proposed $244.2 million spending plan for this school year.
A proposed 2010-11 budget for the Green Bay School District includes more money for capital improvements but reduces the number of teaching positions and scales back spending on technology.
Those cuts come despite a surplus of $5.8 million from last year.
Under the proposed $244.2 million budget for 2010-11, the district estimates the owner of a home valued at $100,000 would see about a $30 increase in the school portion of their property taxes, said Alan Wagner, assistant superintendent of business and finances.
The equalized property tax rate for school taxes would be $9.70 per $1,000 of equalized land value. That's up 63 cents -- or 6.9 percent -- from $9.07 per $1,000 of property value for 2009-10 under the budget proposal.
This afternoon, I received an outraged phone call from my sister. "A bunch of obnoxious and pushy parents are demanding West High offer more AP classes. They say West needs to improve talented and gifted classes. Can you believe it? I knew this would happen someday." Although my sister's characterization of these parents' complaints was less than completely accurate, her impressions and outrage will be shared with many members of my high school's community. This makes me both frustrated and concerned for my former school.
Madison West High School prides itself on its diversity, fine arts programs, and impressive academic achievements, and West prepared most of my classmates well for our college careers. The preparation, however, did not involve many AP classes. Some of my classmates took AP exams for subjects in which they had not had official AP classes, and they often scored well. But many of us took only an AP language exam or maybe an AP calculus test. Historically, West's teachers have resisted forgoing their own curricula in favor of those dictated by the College Board. And with instructional minutes treated like a precious commodity, I can see why many teachers don't want to sacrifice the six weeks of school after the AP exams to the severe senioritis that overcame my classmates and myself in the few AP classes I did take. I have great respect for my teachers' anti-AP position, and I think West is a better school for it. So whether or not these "obnoxious and pushy parents" are demanding AP classes for their gifted children, I share my sister's skepticism of changing West's curriculum to fit with that of the College Board.
"I'm grateful to the school board and transportation department who came together to reinstate the bus routes for my corridor. There's always room for improvement and it's early in the (school) year. I just moved to the county and I'm still trying to evaluate some things with the board."
Kenny Ruffin, Riverdale councilman
Grade: A-
"They've pretty much met most of the goals set for them by SACS. They're the board I would credit with helping restore Clayton County's school accreditation. The only thing that keeps me from giving them an A is that there's still a couple of members who still need to work toward working together cohesively for the benefit of the community."
Madison residents will have an opportunity to evaluate two school board seats in the April, 2011 election. Marj Passman and Ed Hughes currently occupy those positions. The City of Madison Clerk has posted candidate information here.
Here's a reminder for some Tulsa-area school board members: Your attorney is not your boss. So when he advises that you disregard state law, think twice. And think about that part of your oath as a school board member that requires you to uphold state law.
The blatant disregard with which school board members in Broken Arrow and Jenks acted last week in voting not to comply with a new state law is outrageous. Worse yet, several other school boards may follow suit.
At issue is the Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarship program, which allows children with special needs to attend private school at state expense. Doug Mann, attorney for the Broken Arrow and Jenks boards, advised board members not to pay the scholarships. He said the law is unconstitutional and paves the way for school vouchers.
My column on Charles Hebert Flowers High School requiring a 3.0 grade point average to take an Advanced Placement course, then dropping the rule after I asked about it, inspired many people who have been barred from AP and college prep courses to offer their stories. Here are two accounts from people who suffered because of the still widespread and wrongheaded view that only top students should be challenged. Carolyn Elefant is a lawyer in Washington. Evelyn Nolan is a retired teacher from Prince George's County, where Flowers High is located.
Proponents of State Question 744 are working hard and spending a good deal of money to get a square peg into a round hole. Advocates of SQ 744 don't seem to realize that the educational landscape has changed; they continue to see public education in one shape, with everyone else seeing another. Proponents of SQ 744 see dollars first; opponents see reform first.
Teachers know better than anyone the challenges brought on by poverty, absentee parents, English language learners, gangs, addiction, etc. In Oklahoma City we know it first hand -- our teachers are dedicated professionals because they do what most cannot or will not do, which is to work in an urban environment. Because of our firsthand knowledge, we know reform is an absolute must. While we cannot control some factors, there are many we can. The Oklahoma City American Federation of Teachers, long a proponent of reform, is leading the way to quality schools and improved student achievement.
Katharine Birbalsingh, 37, was ordered not to come into school on Thursday or Friday after making critical remarks before a speech by Education Secretary Michael Gove at the party conference in Birmingham on Tuesday.
Addressing the audience as a guest speaker, she gave a damning account of standards in schools, saying education had been "so dumbed down that even the children know it."
The board of governors at St Michael and All Angels Church of England Academy in Camberwell, south London, told Miss Birbalsingh to stay away from the school while they considered her position.
But the French teacher and deputy head has been told that she would be allowed to return to the classroom on Monday after parents voiced their support.
In her speech on Tuesday, Miss Birbalsingh told delegates of a "broken" system which "keeps poor children poor".
Gov. Chris Christie has said he strongly supports charter schools and recently spoke of his plans to ease the way for their expansion. That's great, but what's still missing is the money.
And it's all about the money. Without their fair share of state funding, charter schools will continue to struggle. They're public schools, but only get a portion of what a local district spends per student -- and, even worse, no public funding for facilities at all.
Charter schools allow for innovation and give parents a choice. Some are failing and should be shut down. But many are succeeding wildly and drawing huge waiting lists.
Money is their biggest handicap. Charter schools end up with less because they get none of the so-called "adjustment aid" the state gives out to districts. The disparity is greatest in places like Camden, Paterson or Jersey City, where district schools get the most adjustment aid.
A group of West High parents have filed a complaint concerning the perceived lack of sufficient gifted and talented programming as mandated by state statute.
A group of 50 parents in the West High School attendance area has asked state education officials to investigate whether the Madison School District is violating state law by denying high-achieving students access to the "talented and gifted" programming parents say they deserve.
In a Sept. 20 complaint to the state Department of Public Instruction made public Tuesday, the parent group argued that freshmen and sophomores at West have limited opportunities for advanced English, biology and social studies classes
I have heard similar complaints expressed by MG parents. (Some of which are addressed by recent changes to the high school science curriculum for freshman and sophomores. )
A small group of people you've probably never heard of spend $8 billion of your tax money each year, employ more than 90,000 people and set policies that affect 800,000 area schoolchildren.
Dr. Ricky A. Welkis is one of the few audience members at the sparsely attended Cobb county school board meeting in Marietta recently. Welkis is a school board candidate for post-6 in the upcoming election.
They are elected, but in some cases with fewer than 20 percent of voters casting ballots.
They are your school board members.
Metro Atlanta has some of the best and some of the worst.
There are patterns discernible in their bios: Most have college degrees; most get annual training; but a surprising 40 percent have had financial problems -- bankruptcies or liens -- even as they control multimillion-dollar and even billion-dollar budgets.
Recently, several metro Atlanta boards have presided over school systems in crisis. Often, those that do are accused of meddling at the schoolhouse.
School Board governance vs. administrative intransigence is a topic worth exploring, per Madison School Board member Lucy Mathiak's recent blog post. It appears, to this observer, that some board members prefer to go along with the status quo while a few others are trying to drive change.
I didn't expect that going to hear the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra of Venezuela rehearse and play at the Beethovenfest in Bonn would give me a new perspective, not just on Beethoven but also on wealth and poverty and the divide between the haves and have-nots. Many of the teenagers in this orchestra (a younger version of the better-known Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela) come from the poor barrios of Caracas: what we would call slums, lacking basic amenities and privacy.
No wonder the kids I spoke to were so impressed by what they called the "beautiful" city of Bonn, where the Porsches and Mercedes glide through wide and well-ordered avenues, but where, from the deathly silence that reigns on the streets, you might think an invisible plague had killed the inhabitants.
But these kids obviously have something. In fact, what they have impressed the respectable burghers of Bonn so much that 1,600 of them rose to their feet after a concert consisting of the Fifth Symphonies of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and then gave themselves up to delirious and quite un-middle-aged clapping and swaying as the orchestra launched into six encores.
It's neat to see my son, a first grader, get off his Chicago Public Schools bus when it drops him back home. It also reminds me of what's wrong with our education system.
Mayoral candidates should join me as the bus arrives about 2:45 p.m. That means he has been in school for, at most, five and a half hours. Chicago has the shortest school day of the 50 largest districts in the United States.
Ron Huberman, head of Chicago Public Schools, confirmed to me once that our school year is about seven weeks shorter than New York's.
The length of the school day is one of many topics being faced as education experiences another paroxysm of interest. It's partly due to "Waiting for Superman," a documentary about our flagging schools. Oprah Winfrey did two shows inspired by the movie, while NBC and MSNBC gave the subject a week of serious attention
The New York Times ran a story on September 30 about Singapore Math being used in some schools in the New York City area. Like many newspaper stories about Singapore Math, this one was no different. It described a program that strangely sounded like the math programs being promoted by reformers of math education, relying on the cherished staples of reform: manipulatives, open-ended problems, and classroom discussion of problems. The only thing the article didn't mention was that the students worked in small groups.
Those of us familiar with Singapore Math from having used it with our children are wondering just what program the article was describing. Spending a week on the numbers 1 and 2 in Kindergarten? Spending an entire 4th grade classroom period discussing the place value ramifications of the number 82,566? Well, maybe that did happen, but not because the Singapore Math books are structured that way. In fact, the books are noticeably short on explicit narrative instruction. The books provide pictures and worked out examples and excellent problems; the topics are ordered in a logical sequence so that material mastered in the various lessons builds upon itself and is used to advance to more complex applications. But what is assumed in Singapore is that teachers know how to teach the material--the teacher's manuals contain very little guidance. Thus, the decision to spend a week on the numbers 1 and 2 in kindergarten, or a whole class period discussing a single number is coming from the teachers, not the books.
The mistaken idea that gets repeated in many such articles is that Singapore Math differs from other programs by requiring or imparting a "deep understanding" and that such understanding comes about through a) manipulatives, b) pictures, and c) open-ended discussions. In fact, what the articles represent is what the schools are telling the reporters. What newspapers frequently do not realize when reporting on Singapore Math, is that when a school takes on such a program, it means going against what many teachers believe math education to be about; it is definitely not how they are trained in ed schools. The success of Singapore's programs relies in many ways on more traditional approaches to math education, such as explicit instruction and giving students many problems to solve, in some ways its very success represented a slap in the face to American math reformers, many of whom have worked hard to eliminate such techniques being used.
No education scholar in America throws an analytical knuckleball as well as David F. Labaree of Stanford University. You are reading along, enjoying the clarity of his prose and the depth of his research, thinking his argument is going one way when--whoops!--it breaks in another direction altogether.
It is dizzying, but in a fun way, like an intricate rollercoaster. In a recent book, for instance, Labaree showed that education schools like the one that employs him teach theories that have little to do with how schools work but--here comes the twist--that's okay because education school graduates ignore those courses once they start teaching.
He is at it again in his new book, "Someone Has To Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling." The book is only 280 pages long, but so rich in contrarian assaults on cherished American assumptions I cannot adequately summarize it. I will describe pieces of it instead, like the thrilling part where Labaree disembowels the argument for higher U.S. school standards made by Bob Compton, the high-tech entrepreneur who produced the film "Two Million Minutes" and completely skewered me once on cable TV.
Annapolis police are changing the way they share information with schools after it was revealed that a high school senior charged this week with assaulting of a fellow student faced similar charges months ago.
The 17 year old from Annapolis was charged Wednesday with attempted second-degree rape and related counts in a Sept. 29 sexual assault involving a 14-year-old girl outside Annapolis High School. He is awaiting trial on charges he raped another teenager in May.
Officials with several suburban school districts responded to their critics Thursday, claiming that they have no choice but to disobey a new law that calls for public schools to fund private school scholarships for special education students.
"We have taken this very courageous stand to try to get this law reviewed, not because we want to be sued or because we want to violate the law," Union Superintendent Cathy Burden said. "We have no way of getting it to the court system without drawing a line in the sand."
Burden will ask the Union school board on Monday to join the Broken Arrow and Jenks boards in approving measures that state that they do not intend to pay any parent who requests a Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarship.
We propose Chavez Elementary as the DLI site for the Memorial attendance area. Of all the elementary schools in this attendance area, Chavez student enrollment of Spanish-speaking English-language learners remained most consistent. This proposal reconunends that Chavez Elementary begin the 2011-2012 school year with two DLI classrooms, similar to Sandburg's DLI program which opened this school year with two DLI classrooms.
In addition, opening a DLI program at Cesar Chavez Elementary acknowledges the school's name sake, a Latino civil rights activist. The goals of DLI progrannning to develop cross-cultural understanding and bilingualism support Cesar Chavez' vision, and the MMSD strategic plan.
An Update on Madison's Proposed 4K Program Financing: Federal Stimulus Tax Dollars Replace Local Funds, District Proposes Increased Spending on Maintenance & Technology
As part of the Education Job Funds recommendation, we are recommending using approximately $4.2 million for funding the shortfall created by beginning this new program in 2011-12. This plan for funding 4-k will continue to have the assumption that property taxes will have to be used to support approximately $3.7 million of the start up costs for this program in 2011-12 as well. The use of these Education Job Funds if approved, creates an opportunity to utilize funds originally targeted for 4-k start up in a different way.
During the process of re-financing the district's Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) unfunded pension liability, the Board of Education approved a financing plan that prepared for the use of borrowed funds to support the 4-K start up (See next page). This structure effectively created budget capacity of approximately $4.2 million over the next three years. These funds were targeted originally to pay for a borrowed amount equal to $4.2 million to support the first year of 4-K, but the Federal Education Job Funds created an opportunity for MMSD to re-evaluate this decision.
Administration would propose the concept of utilizing these budget funds, originally meant to re-pay a 4-K borrow of approximately $4.2 million, to support Maintenance and Technology needs over the next two years. Under this idea, MMSD would move forward with borrowing funds as planned, but rather than using these funds to support 4-K, shift the purpose to meet technology and maintenance needs. Itwould be our intent to split these funds equally between these two areas, and work with the Board over the next 6 to 9 months to prioritize needs within these two areas.
Kudos to Gail Collins for highlighting the disastrous consequences of children's having to attend lotteries to learn whether they won a coveted spot in a charter school that might save them from becoming a statistical casualty of our ailing public school system.
"Waiting for Superman" is not the first film to give life to this issue, nor will it be the last. But Ms. Collins's anger is misplaced when she tells the charters to stop holding theatrical lottery drawings. Federal and state laws require charters to conduct lotteries. And if they were not public, can you imagine the phone calls from angry parents of rejected students demanding to see proof?
Families want to be able to exercise choice rather than be confined to the schools that we might have to wait another 30 years for a Superman to fix. Thanks to the charter idea, students are better served.
I thought the hula hoop was a fad when I was a kid, which is to say, I thought it would be gone in about a month. A half century later, hula hoops are still around.
I thought decentralization of decision making and budgeting for Milwaukee Public Schools a decade ago was a trend, which is to say, it was an important, lasting change in the educational landscape. Now, it's effectively gone. Just a fad.
Education history is filled with hot subjects of the moment - new ways to teach reading, new ways to handle misbehaving students, new ways to organize the school day. Teachers should stand in the front of the room. Teachers should stand in the back of the room. Teachers should wander around the room.
Most of these ideas leave the stage after a little while. You can make a lot of teachers roll their eyes just by mentioning some of them. Come back next year and we'll be doing things differently, they say.
I was once at a seminar for reporters and editors on fads, trends, and how to tell the difference. Everyone agreed fads go away quickly, trends stay, and you usually can't tell which is which until you wait them out. (I'm beginning to think this Internet thing is a trend, for example.)
So what about Michelle Rhee? The new Milwaukee Public Schools' reading program? The increasing and potent role of the federal government in shaping local education? "Waiting for Superman"? Response to Intervention?
A policy approved more than a decade ago designed to ensure kids were prepared for the next grade by passing a standardized test was eliminated Thursday by the State Board of Education because it contained exceptions and didn't appear to be effective.
The board agreed to end the requirement that students in third-, fifth- and eighth- grades pass end-of-grade tests to be promoted or end-of-course tests in five high school subjects to graduate. It was removed as the board agreed to approve five broad standards by which schools and teachers will be judged in coming years for student performance.
The testing requirement, which initially took effect in late 1999, was supposed to reduce "social promotion" -- students moving on to the next grade even if they hadn't mastered their grade-level subjects. Critics of the change at the time argued it would hurt minority students the most and the state lacked funding to give the students remedial help.
From a windowless basement office on Chicago's West Side, Greg White is trying to answer public education's $2 million-dollar question: What is the top priority for a school in Chicago's cash-strapped district?
The answer for Mr. White, chief executive of the LEARN Charter School Network -- which received two $1 million grants from Oprah Winfrey's Angel Network and the United States Department of Education last month -- is to open a fifth charter school in the network next fall. It is one of 10 charter schools in Chicago that Mr. White said he wanted to open in as many years, which would allow him to hire dozens of out-of-work teachers.
A month ago, those ambitious plans were in jeopardy. Chicago Public Schools approved a budget that cut district financing to charter schools by 6 percent, which could remove more than $400,000 from the network's budget this year. The two grants will cover the cost of opening the fifth school, Mr. White said.
A proposed agreement that would change how teachers are laid off in the nation's second-largest school district is being hailed as a landmark that could pave the way for changes in urban districts across the nation, but the city's teachers union said Wednesday that it had "serious concerns."
The settlement, which must be approved by a judge, would shield up to 45 underperforming schools from teacher layoffs for budget reasons. It also stipulates that vacancies be filled as quickly as possible, and contains a commitment to explore incentives, such as bonuses, to recruit and retain teachers and principals at poorly performing schools, with additional incentives if the school's academic performance improves.
The agreement stems from a lawsuit by American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California over teacher layoffs at three inner-city schools. The group had filed a class-action suit against the Los Angeles Unified School District in February, saying that mandated seniority-driven layoffs led to the three schools shedding some two-thirds of their teachers, which left students largely in the hands of substitutes.
The ACLU said students were being denied their state constitutional right to a fair and adequate education. It won a temporary injunction in May that prevented more layoffs of first- and second-year teachers who form the bulk of faculties at these schools in improverished areas, which more experienced teachers tend to avoid.
A 15-year-old student at West High School was arrested Friday for possession of a handgun, according to the Madison Police Department.
A letter sent to parents from principal Ed Holmes said a staff member received information that the student might be in possession of a gun, and contacted the Educational Resource Officer in the building. Police were called at about 11:45 a.m., and with their assistance, the officer located the student on Ash Street with the loaded .22 caliber handgun in his pocket and arrested him.
An Update on Madison Preparatory Academy: A Proposed International Baccalaureate Charter School
Kaleem Caire, via email:
October 8, 2010
Greetings Madison Prep.
It was so wonderful to have those of you who were able to join us for the information session Tuesday night (Oct 5) here at the Urban League. We appreciate you dedicating part of your evening to learning about Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men and we look forward to working with you on this very important project. You are receiving this email because you volunteered to join the team that is going to put Madison Prep on the map!
There are a few things we want to accomplish with this email:
1. Share information about the project management website that we've established to organize our communications and planning with regard to developing the school
2. Secure dates and times that you're are available to attend the first of your selected Design Team meeting(s)
3. Provide, as promised, background information on Madison Prep along with hyperlinks that will help you educate yourself on charter schools and components of the Madison Prep school design
Please SAVE this email as it contains a number of information resources that you will want to refer back to as we engage in planning Madison Prep. There is a lot of information here and we DO NOT expect you to read everything or learn it all at once. Take your time and enjoy the reading and learning. We will guide you through the process. J
PROJECT MANAGEMENT WEBSITE
Today, you will receive an email with a subject line that reads, "You're invited to join our project management and collaboration system." Please open this email. It will contain the information you need to sign up to access the Madison Prep Project Management Site. You will need to select a username and password. FYI, Basecamp is used by millions of people and companies to manage projects. You can learn more about basecamp by clicking here. Once in the site, you can click on the "help" button at the top, if necessary, to get a tutorial on how to use the site. It is fairly easy to figure out without the tutorial. If you have spam controls on your computer, please be sure to check your spam or junk mail box to look for emails and posting that we might make through Basecamp. Occasionally, postings will end up there. Please approve us as an email "sender" to you.
We have already posted the business plan for the original school (NextGen Prep) that is the same model as Madison Prep. We've also posted other important documents and have set a deadline of Friday, October 15, 2010 for you to review certain documents that have been posted. The calendar shown in Basecamp will include these assignments. Please email me or Ed Lee (elee@ulgm.org) if you have questions about using this site.
DATES FOR DESIGN TEAM MEETINGS
At the Interest Meeting we held on Tuesday (or in other conversation with us), you indicated a preference for getting involved in one of the following design teams. Please click on the name of the team below. You will be taken to www.doodle.com to identify your availability for these meetings. Please share your availability by Monday, October 11 at 12pm so that we can send out meeting notices that afternoon. We will address the dates and times of future meetings at the first meeting of each team. Please note, you do not need to be a "charter school" expert to be involved with this. You will have a lot of fun working towards developing a "high quality public charter school" and will learn in the process.
· Curriculum & Instruction Team. This design team will develop a thorough understanding of the IB curriculum and define the curriculum of the school, including the core and non-core curriculum. At least for the first meeting of this design team, Instructional strategies will be addressed as well. The Instruction team will develop a thorough understanding of the Harkness teaching method, outline instructional best practices, and address teacher expectations and evaluation. Both teams will address special education and English Language Learners (ELL). Additional details will be shared at the first meeting.
· Governance, Leadership & Operation Team. This design team will help develop the school's operations plan, define the governing structure, and address the characteristics and expectations of the schools Head of School. The Head of School will be the instructional leader and therefore, there will be some overlapping conversations that need to occur with the team that addresses instruction and quality teaching.
· Facility Team. This team will be responsible for identify, planning, and securing a suitable facility for Madison Prep.
· Budget, Finance & Fundraising Team. This team will be involved with developing Madison Prep's budget and fundraising plans, and will explore financing options for start-up, implementation, and the first four years of the school's operation."
· Community Engagement & Support Team. This team will develop strategies and work to establish broad community support for Madison Prep, develop criteria for partnering with others, and establish partnerships that support teaching, learning, leadership, and community engagement.
BACKGROUND ON MADISON PREPARATORY ACADEMY AND CHARTER SCHOOLS
There is a lot of good support and buzz growing around Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (charter school). To ensure you have the opportunity to familiarize yourself with charter schools and single gendered school models, we have listed internet resources below that you can visit and review. Just click on the hyperlinks.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men will be an all-male charter school that we intend to open in the Madison area in the fall of 2012. It will serve as a high quality school option for parents as well as a demonstration school for secondary education reform and improvement in Dane County. We want local teachers and schools to learn from Madison Prep, and will take steps
We have attached the two page executive summary again for your review along with a business plan for the school (that will be modified to fit Madison). Madison Prep was originally to be launched as a charter school in Washington, DC and Prince Georges County, Maryland in 2011 and 2013 under Next Generation, an organization I founded in Maryland with my wife and other partners in 2006.
ABOUT CHARTER SCHOOLS
In 2009, there were 5,043 charter schools in the United States compared to 33,740 private schools and 98,916 traditional public schools. Nationally, charter schools enrolled 1,536,079 students in 2009. According to the Wisconsin Charter School Association, there are more than 223 charter schools in Wisconsin serving more than 37,432 students. There are presently just two charter schools in Madison: James C. Wright Middle School on Madison's South side, founded in 1997 (originally as Madison Middle School 2000).
Until recently, other school districts in Wisconsin have been more open to charter schools. Appleton (14), Janesville (5), Kenosha (6), LaCrosse (4) and Milwaukee (66), Oshkosh (6), Sheboygan (7), Sparta (4), Stevens Point (7), and Waukesha (6) have authorized a significant number of public charter schools when considering the size of their total school district enrollments. However, recent enthusiasm around the formation of Badger Rock School is a sign that Madison area school districts could be more receptive to innovative charter school models that serve a specific community need and purpose. With your support and that of many others, we intend to make a very strong case for Madison Prep and why it's so desperately needed in our community.
Prior to being hired as President & CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM), I shared with our ULGM board that I would look to establish charter schools as a strategy to address the persistent underperformance and failure of our children attending Madison area schools. As we have engaged our community, listened to leaders, researched the issues, and evaluated the data, it is clear that Madison Prep is not only needed, but absolutely necessary.
SINGLE GENDERED PUBLIC SCHOOLS
As of June 2010, there were 540 public schools in the U.S. offering a single-gendered option, with 92 schools having an all-male or all-female enrollment and the rest operating single gendered classes or programs. There were 12 public schools in Wisconsin offering single gendered classes or classrooms (6 middle schools, 5 high schools, and one elementary school).
In 1936 the University of Iowa became the first school in the United States to offer a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in creative writing. Forty years later there were only a dozen such programs in the world. Today, according to an article in the current issue of Poets & Writers magazine entitled "The MFA Revolution," there are nearly 200 creative writing MFA programs worldwide, and at least 4,000 aspiring writers apply to these programs each year in the U.S. alone. "What is clear," the article concludes, "is that the burgeoning network of fully funded MFA programs is rapidly becoming the nation's largest-ever patronage system for young artists."
Whenever the words "patronage" and "artists" appear in the same sentence, questions must be asked. Is this mass patronage system a boon for American fiction, or is it a poison pill? Do creative writing programs nurture genuine talent, or are they spawning a torrent of technically accomplished books that are devoid of felt life? And more broadly: Just what good does schooling of any kind do for a writer?
In The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Mark McGurl points out the "seemingly banal" fact that virtually all contemporary American fiction writers have attended college. "In previous generations this would not likely have been the case," McGurl writes, "both because fewer individuals of any kind went to college before the postwar advent of mass higher education and because a college education was not yet perceived as an obvious...starting point for a career as a novelist. Rather, as the un-credentialled, or rather press-credentialled, example of the high school graduate Hemingway makes clear, the key supplementary institution for the novel until mid-century was journalism."
Speaking of Newark Public Schools, this past December the well-regarded organization called The New Teacher Project (of Widget Effect fame) partnered with Newark to evaluate the "impact of the school district's policies and practices...to build and maintain strong instructional teams." Here's the results:
1. Newark Public Schools sabotages its ability to hire high-quality teachers by not responding promptly to early applicants, especially in high-need subject areas. According to the report, teachers hired before June 1 for the coming school year are more likely to receive a "distinguished" evaluation rating, yet Newark waits until August and September to make most of its job offers. 73% of principals "have lost a desirable candidate because they could not make a timely offer."
2. While both teachers and administrators vastly prefer to have interviews before being moved from one school to another, "more than half of all administrators have been forced to accept a less desirable teacher candidate 'force-placed' by the Human Resources Department. "85% of principals have had a teacher placed into their school without an interview."
With school closings, declining enrollment and financial struggles putting Mesa Unified School District at a crossroads, parents packed a meeting this week to hear from the four candidates running for two seats on the governing board.
Close to 90 people attended the first Mesa Parent Advocates for Quality Schools (MPAQS) meeting of the school year on Tuesday. The two incumbents and two newcomers seeking seats on the board in the Nov. 2 election presented brief statements and answered audience questions.
Based on September enrollment figures, the district saw a 2,400-student decline from last school year. Five years ago, the start of the 2005 school year, there were 74,000 students in the district. Today, there are 64,817.
In January the current board voted to close a junior high school and moved smaller programs to that campus to free up other buildings for lease or sale.
Pennsylvania's auditor general said the state's charter school funding formula is seriously flawed.
Jack Wagner is now calling for a moratorium on new charter schools until the Rendell administration makes some changes.
It may cost $15,000 a year to educate each student in one public school and $10,000 in another, depending on taxes.
But any child from any district can go to a charter school. And that's where the charter school funding formula gets a little tricky.
"It becomes an equal playing field in terms of what the child can get," said Diane LaBelle, executive director, Lehigh Valley Charter High School for Performing Arts.
It may be an equal playing field for the kids, but...
President Obama's Education secretary, Arne Duncan, deserves credit for breaking the ice on a touchy topic in Washington: making sure schools of higher education that rely on tax dollars or their tax-free status are held accountable for their results.
Certainly, the nation's desire to reduce unemployment requires that graduates be fit for jobs and not overly burdened by student loans. One federal study found joblessness would drop by one-third if workers' skills matched the jobs that employers are currently offering.
Unfortunately, Mr. Duncan is being too timid.
His department is oddly focused on making sure that only career colleges, or the for-profit sector of higher ed, are graduating students into "gainful employment" and with lower debt. Duncan must also aim his sights on state-run universities and the private, nonprofit schools that likewise gulp up education subsidies.
Those schools, too, often overpromise, underperform, and leave graduates short on career prospects and deep in red ink. Just ask many recent law graduates or anyone with a new bachelor's degree in, say, sociology.
A legal complaint alleges that the Big Easy's schools discriminate against children with disabilities. What good is the charter revolution if it doesn't reach the students who are most in need?
New Orleans, where more than 70 percent of public schools will be independently chartered after this school year, has been placed on a pedestal as a shining model by education reformers. The new documentary Waiting for "Superman", which hopes to serve as a call to arms for education reform, devotes a page of its Web site to touting New Orleans's new citywide school-choice system.
Charter-school advocates such as Caroline Roemer Shirley, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools (LAPCS), are boasting of the success they've had in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when much of the population of New Orleans that might have opposed those policies was displaced from the city. "I don't think we need to wait for Superman," says Shirley. "It is happening today." National media outlets have similarly gushed over New Orleans, some going so far as to suggest that Katrina saved the public-education system in the city.
Teachers also have a pretty good deal in Illinois. They are 100% unionized. The rent seeking teachers' union curries favor with the Democrats. Democrats at every level of government do whatever the union wants.
The average teacher in the state of Illinois makes $61,402. Illinois teachers work around 176 days, 300 minutes, or 5 hours, per day. That's just over 35 weeks per year. On average, they make $348.88 per day, $1.16 per minute, or $69.60 per hour guaranteed. Teachers in Illinois work an average of 12 years. They can retire at age 55.
In order to find out what they really make though, you should take their pension benefits, net present value them and amortize them over their career. As of 2010, the average pension for an Illinois teacher is $43,164. It compounds annually for life at 3% per year.
Now it's time to do some math and make some assumptions. Assume that the lifespan of the teacher is no different than the average American, 78 years. If they start teaching at age 22, on average they will quit at 34. This means they will wait 21 years to collect their pension. The discount rate for the cash flows is a conservative 5%.
When you crunch all the numbers, the net present value of that pension is $290,756. Amortizing that over a twelve year career adds $24,229.64 to their average salary, making their actual salary before health benefits are added in a tidy $85,631.67, or $97.31 per hour.
If you compare and extrapolate that number to the private sector, it is interesting. Assume that you work an 8 hour day, 50 weeks a year. $194,620 bucks a year is what you would make! Most private sector jobs at that level work a lot more than an 8 hour day. Recently, private sector employment has not been as lucrative as public sector employment. For the first time in American history, it pays to be in the public sector.
Want to hear what Oakland's mayoral, city council and school board hopefuls have to say about public education in the city, and how they would support it? Or read what they say they would do to "attract and retain great teachers in every Oakland public school," advocate for students, and get Tony Smith's strategic plan off the ground?
Great Oakland Public Schools videotaped statements from 10 mayoral candidates and posted questionnaire answers from school board candidates. The organization also asked city council candidates questions about "a to g" requirements, the district's School Options policy, independently run charter schools, the November school parcel tax, and the role they'd play to help the city win federal grants, among others. The guide is set up so you can easily compare their answers.
Supervisors of all political stripes need to work together this budget cycle to give and take in ways that don't push up the property tax burden even higher than it's already heading.
The city is considering hiking its tax burden by close to $100 on the average Madison home. The Madison school district plans to hike its average bill by more than $200.
The Madison Area Technical College wants to up its average Madison bill by about $30 - plus the college is seeking additional dollars for a building referendum.
It all adds up to several hundred dollars of additional tax burden on ordinary people when they can least afford it. As Falk notes in her budget memo to county supervisors, more than 5,000 Dane County properties are already behind on their payments.
Watching Waiting for Superman last week left me exhausted. For too many years, education reformers have fought hard against the very injustices in the education system portrayed in the film. The good news, however, is that this newest declaration against the intolerable conditions of a broken public education system could finally call enough attention to the persistent problems to change things for the children whom we care so deeply about.
Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone, is interviewed throughout the film. Canada talks about his childhood and how disappointed he was to learn that there was no real Superman who would save him from the hardships of his own difficult childhood. His anecdote inspired the title of the movie.
The movie shows over and over again why ineffective teachers should be replaced with successful ones and how important that is to children's academic progress. Fighting against such commonsense ideas are the teachers unions, which oppose the teacher evaluation, merit pay, and firing of poor teachers.
I inadvertently kicked up a firestorm earlier this year in a profile I wrote about Judd Schemmel, Edgewood High School's energetic new president. The story's focus was the venerable Catholic institution's increased enrollment, its growing reputation for academic excellence and its improving finances.
Sounds like a positive take on this 130-year-old Madison institution, right?
Many Edgewood partisans didn't see it that way. In an offhand way, I mentioned that Edgewood had not, traditionally, had a reputation as an "academic powerhouse." I was not only thinking of the perceptions surrounding Edgewood when I attended high school in Madison in the late 1960s, but also the formidable reputations of public high schools West and Memorial when it comes to producing National Merit Scholar semifinalists, as well as perfect scores on the ACT and SAT college entrance examinations. And, I confess, I was also influenced by the aura surrounding Edgewood cast by its most famous graduate, the late "Saturday Night Live" comedian/wild man Chris Farley. Brilliant, yes. Academic? Not so much.
It turns out I had uttered fighting words, subject to heated interpretation in the story's comment section regarding just what was necessary to be known as an "academic powerhouse."
Some readers loyal to West High were angry, too. They were skeptical (to put it politely) about claims that Edgewood seniors were being accepted at elite universities, including Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford.
Clearly, the facts were beside the point. When I walked into the "academic powerhouse" buzz saw, it was all about the reputations -- the brands -- of Madison's high schools.
Yes, high schools have brands, just like cars or beer or blue jeans. High school brands are based not on advertising, but on their histories, demographics (specifically, class, race and money), curricula and cultures. Their brands contain stereotypes, of course, but they also include nuggets of truth. Analyzing perceptions of school culture this way can reveal an institution's real strengths and weaknesses. Understanding the emotional truth underneath the brand can help encourage and guide growth in a positive way, while mitigating some of the problems.
It's also fun -- but first you need to understand what the brand actually is.
The Manhattan Free School in East Harlem is not free, but the principal there practically is. Now in her third year, Pat Werner, a 57-year-old former literacy coach who logged 18 years in New York City public schools, accepted all of $3,000 in salary last year.
Few go into education for the money, but Ms. Werner's dedication to opening young people's minds might better be described as utopian than idealistic -- which is only appropriate at a private school where students do not receive grades, take tests or have to do anything, really, that they do not feel like doing.
For parents exhausted by New York's numbers-oriented, lottery-driven public school system or its hierarchical, hypercompetitive private schools, the Manhattan Free School represents another way to go: equally wacky, but at the opposite extreme.
A school like this, where a comic-book-making class is now offered but calculus is not, is not likely to drain applicants from Dalton. Operating on a $100,000 budget, the school, at Good Neighbor Presbyterian Church on East 106th Street, now has 23 students ages 5 to 18.
State statutes mandate that "each school board shall provide access to an appropriate program for pupils identified as gifted and talented." The DPI stipulates that this programming must be systematic and continuous, from kindergarten through grade 12. Madison schools have been out of compliance with these standards since 1990, the last time the DPI formally audited the District’s gifted educational services.
Recognizing this concern, Superintendent Dan Nerad has stated that "while some Madison schools serve gifted students effectively, there needs to be more consistency across the district."
"At the secondary level, the inconsistencies are glaring," said Raihala. "There are broad disparities among Madison's public high schools with regard to the number of honors, advanced/accelerated, and AP courses each one offers. Also, each school imposes different requirements and restrictions on students seeking advanced courses. Surprisingly, Madison's much touted West High School offers the fewest advanced course options for ninth and tenth graders. While the other schools offer various levels of English, science, and social science, Madison West requires all students to follow a standardized program of academic courses, regardless of their ability. This means that students with SAT/ACT scores already exceeding those of most West seniors (obtained via participation in the Northwestern University Midwest Area Talent Search program) must sit through the same courses as students working at basic and emerging proficiency levels."
Madison School Board member Marj Passman, briefly discusses curriculum, perception and school climate on WTDY radio yesterday (mp3 audio): "We must keep our talented and gifted in the District". The interviewer mentions "the tripling in transfers out of the district, even as the District posts higher college placement scores than other districts in the area". Marj responds: "and that's why I don't understand the perception people have that their children are not being challenged in the Madison schools". I will post the rest of the interview if someone finds it.
Gayle Worland:Parents file complaint over 'talented and gifted' school programming.
Paula S. Wallace co-founded the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1978 with her parents and her then-husband, taking out a $200,000 loan to buy the college's first building. Since then it has grown into one of the nation's largest art schools, and Ms. Wallace's pay has swelled: In 2008 her total compensation as president was $1,946,730, according to newly released tax documents.
That amount tops the compensation of all but a handful of college chiefs. But SCAD, a relatively pricey and prosperous art school, is smaller than universities that pay in that range.
Ms. Wallace, who is in her early 60s, became SCAD's president in 2000. Her total compensation package grew by about $1.5-million between 2008 and the previous reporting period, which was the 2007-8 fiscal year. College officials said $900,000 of that growth was related to an adjustment to the deferred compensation that SCAD set aside for the president's retirement pay.
Mr. Barr believes that the film has pulled back the curtain on a world that most Americans would otherwise not have seen -- the desperation of parents who struggle, often in vain, to get their children into better schools. (The Superman in the title refers to one charter school operator's childhood belief that the ghetto in which he lived might one day be rescued by the Man of Steel.)/I>
SEATTLE Public Schools is right to push for a better, more honest way of evaluating teachers, even at the risk of a strike.
Tense contract negotiations between the district and the Seattle Education Association underscore the enormous opportunity at stake. Both sides agree the current system used to judge teachers is weak and unreliable. Ineffective teachers are ignored or shuffled to other schools to become other parents' nightmare. Excellent teachers languish in a system that has no means to recognize or reward them.
The union leadership called for a few tweaks. But the district proposed a revamped system using student growth, as measured by test scores. Supporters of the status quo have tried to downplay the other forms of appraisal that would be used. They include student growth measurements selected by the teacher, principal observations of instruction and peer reviews. Also, student input at the high-school level.
The $122 million San Francisco schools spend on its 6,300 special education students fails to consistently address the needs of those children, too often needlessly segregating them in special classrooms and disproportionately diagnosing disabilities based on race, an independent audit found.
The auditors called the district's services outdated and counterproductive to the belief that all students can and should succeed in school and called for a massive rethinking of how disabled students are assigned to schools and how they are served when they get there.
Currently, many special education students are clustered in schools designated for specific disabilities, the auditors noted.
New fallout after word that Lee County School Superintendent Dr. James Browder will get more than $300,000 for leaving the district.
Dr. Browder's contract with the School Board was re-negotiated in 2008 to include a severance package if either party cut ties in the four-year deal. Now, as he's looking to end things early, we're learning he'll get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to pack up.
The latest contract states Browder's entitled to two years pay if either the School Board, or he, ends his superintendent run.
The Governor's Office of Student Achievement released interesting data on teacher retention in Georgia, showing the exodus out of the classroom is not that great.
The GOSA report includes teachers who leave the profession but return to the classroom later or take other education jobs. That broader view shows many more teachers staying in the field than had been assumed.
"This analysis is important because its findings clearly refute the long-held notion that half of Georgia's teachers leave the profession within five years," said GOSA executive director Kathleen Mathers. "Instead, by appropriately broadening the definition of retention, we've learned that nearly 75 percent of Georgia's new teachers remain in public education after five years."
he 5-4 split on the Atlanta Board of Education is getting wider with this letter to the community by the four-member faction opposed to the change in leadership:
Dear Concerned Atlanta Citizen:
Atlanta's native son, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Nobel Peace Prize Winner and graduate of tlanta Public School's Booker T. Washington High School) said, "I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good."
We four stand united in our opposition to the September 13 purported election of Khaatim Sheerer El as Chair and Yolanda Johnson as Vice Chair of the Atlanta School Board, not because we are interested in power for power's sake, but because we believe the election violated the law and is detrimental to the well-being of Atlanta's students. Moreover, we believe that this election and the behaviors linked with it, place student achievement secondary to personal agendas. We are concerned that this action will trigger an investigation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) of its accreditation of the Atlanta Public School System. Finally, we believe that even the perception of a dysfunctional Board will hinder the system's ability to attract and retain a quality Superintendent. That should be of utmost concern to all those who value the welfare of this city and its students.
The College Board hits back against critics who complain about the rising costs of higher education with a report that shows the economic benefits of college. Here are a couple of the charts that are being widely distributed.
What is missing from the analysis is the breakdown by private and public college. Does a $50,000 tuition education at Sarah Lawrence give you a better return than a state college?
The British International School of New York offers spacious waterfront classrooms, small computers encased in rubber for small people who tend to drop them, and a pool for the once-a-week swimming classes required for all students.
But there is nothing within its halls or on its Web site that indicates what differentiates British International from the teeming masses of expensive private schools in New York: It is run for profit.
It is one of a small number of large for-profit schools that have opened recently or plan to open in New York City next year. While they are a speck on the city's private-school landscape, for-profit schools are practically the only significant primary and secondary institutions to have started up in the last decade, and may represent the future of private-school growth.
June Jordan School for Equity has been touted as a shining star of San Francisco public high schools and a national example of how limiting enrollment and tailoring instruction to the needs of individuals can push struggling students into college.
The school, which opened seven years ago, boasts small class sizes and an adviser for every 16 students, plus a college counselor. June Jordan's funding of more than $11,000 for each of the 241 students, which comes from public and private sources, exceeds what most other district students get.
The school board loves it. So do many parents and students.
Students from poor families would feel the most pain if calls by Kentucky Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul and fellow Tea Party movement conservatives to abolish the U.S. Department of Education are successful, officials and policy experts say.
"Although federal funding makes up a comparatively small portion of the total funding for public (preschool-12th grade) education in Kentucky, many of our schools rely heavily on these monies to serve their most at-risk students," said Lisa Gross, spokeswoman with the Kentucky Department of Education.
States traditionally get 10 percent of their education dollars from the federal government -- $429 million in Kentucky, according to the state.
In Fayette County, that translates to $25 million, nearly 65 percent of which is used to help level the academic playing field for disadvantaged and challenged students through smaller class sizes, reading and math enrichment programs, and classroom assistants.
Yet another study, this one from Vanderbilt University's National Center on Performance Incentives (boy that's specific) in the Times.
The study released Tuesday by Vanderbilt University's National Center on Performance Incentives researchers found that students in classrooms where teachers received bonuses saw the same gains as the classes where educators got no incentive.
"I think most people agree today that the current way in which we compensate teachers is broken," said Matthew Springer, executive director of the Vanderbilt center and lead researcher on the study. "But we don't know what the better way is yet.
They state that 5-8th grade teachers in Nashville public schools over 3 years from 2007-2009 could make between $5k-$15K annually, depending on how their students tested.
A bit issue here as in a study in Florida is that you are talking about individual bonuses which tend to pit teachers against each other. Maybe merit pay would be better for team-based teaching or school-wide merit pay. Does merit pay make a mediocre teacher try harder? Can money alone do that or would a school/district need to add more professional development to kick it up?
Anyone who thinks America has academic talent to spare isn't paying attention.
We used to lead the world in the percentage of our population with college degrees. Now we're No. 14. Global competition is getting tougher, and having an educated work force is vital to our long-term prospects. To keep up, we're importing highly skilled immigrants from around the world. At the same time, however, we make it difficult for thousands of young people who grow up here to attend college and illegal for them to get jobs.
This status quo appears designed to create a permanent underclass and set back our nation's competitiveness.
Congress can fix this problem -- and enrich America's human capital -- by passing the DREAM Act. This legislation, which the Senate is due to consider Tuesday, would provide temporary residence for many undocumented kids brought to the United States as small children who have completed high school. It then offers a path to legal permanent status if they attend college or serve in the military.
ACT is committed to college and career readiness and success for all students and our latest research report, Mind the Gaps: How College Readiness Narrows Achievement Gaps in College Success, looks at the steps that can be taken to improve college and career readiness and success among underserved populations. As a nation we must close the achievement gap across racial/ethnic and family income groups. The data in this report shows the types of policies that work to improve college and career readiness and success.
Bankruptcy has become an acceptable and, in many cases, successful way for debt-burdened companies and consumers to get a fresh start. Airlines do it. Auto companies do it. Retailers do it. More than 1.6 million American households are expected to do it this year.
Buckling under crippling debts, state and local governments are unlikely to file for bankruptcy, but the alternatives could be worse, says WSJ's David Wessel.
But reneging on debts remains a rarity among U.S. state and municipal governments. Fewer than 250 of the nation's 89,000 local governmental units have filed for bankruptcy since 1980.
Recent close calls in Harrisburg, Pa., and Central Falls, R.I., spark predictions that the next phase of the financial crisis will be a tsunami of municipal bankruptcies and defaults. Muni-bond experts at rating agencies and bankruptcy lawyers assure us that isn't likely.
We've learned in the past few years to be skeptical of such assurances, but the experts probably are right on this one. Not because state and local finances are in good shape--they aren't--but because Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code, the one that applies to local governments, is so unwieldy.
In my week in New Hampshire, I missed a mutiny on the Atlanta Board of Education that resulted in a new chair, Khaatim Sherrer El, and vice chair, Yolanda Johnson.The pair replaces former leaders LaChandra Butler Burks and Cecily Harsch-Kinnane. (The takeover and a change in policy to make it easier to oust leadership are now under legal challenge so consider this the opening act to a long-running drama.)
I still wonder about the worth of school boards, created at a time when schools were smaller, more local and less important to the nation's viability. The APS board members behind the coup d'état contend that the move was necessary to restore public accountability, but I think it simply reflects a power scramble, as is the case with most of these fissures.
In my first jobs, I covered local government in several towns, including city councils, planning and zoning boards and school boards. Zoning boards were the most efficient. City councils were the most dramatic. School boards were the most divisive.
One of the many outrages perpetrated under the Reagan administration was the proposal to classify ketchup as a vegetable for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's subsidized school lunch program. If it weren't so sad for the kids who depended on school lunches for an integral part of their daily meals, it would have been funny.
The truth is, school-provided lunches have never been great. Who can forget overcooked canned vegetables and gray mystery meat?
As pendulums swing, that stuff was supplanted by fried and greasy hamburgers, pizza and tons of fattening junk food for our already overweight kids to consume. Well, there's a movement afoot to change all of that, and one of the epicenters of that movement is here in Wisconsin, in the small, southwestern city of Viroqua. A consortium of farmers, educators and high school kids is out to change the way students connect to food and the sourcing of food.
Change in education is coming, says State Superintendent Tony Evers - but we can't tell you exactly what that change will be until after November's elections.
Evers, speaking at his second annual State of Education address last week, discussed the work he's done in the past year as well as his intentions for the 2010-2011 school year. The address laid out the state's goals in areas like funding, graduation requirements, teacher certification, and standardized testing.
The speech expressed the superintendent's pride in Wisconsin's public schools, but also discussed his plans to improve education in the next year. These plans included:
A Teacher Quality Manifesto: What happens to bright teachers stuck in schools that don't have the right to hire by performance and build a culture of excellence? They quit.
The documentary "Waiting for 'Superman'" (hitting theaters this Friday) and President Obama's Race to the Top competition have focused the national education debate on one question: How can we ensure a quality teacher in every classroom?
So far the answer has centered on accountability: standards, testing, data and evaluations. Accountability is critical. Without it, children's lives are ruined, and as educators we should not be allowed to keep our jobs if students aren't learning.
But accountability alone misses a more fundamental issue. If we want to elevate teacher quality in our country, we need to stop treating teachers like industrial-era workers and start treating them like professionals.
For the last seven years at Harlem Village Academies, we've been obsessed with teacher quality. Our strategy from the start was to attract talented people, create an environment where they could develop into great teachers, and hold them accountable. We were confident the results would follow.
News that student loan debt, at $830 billion, exceeded credit card debt for the first time has sparked renewed interest in the financing of college and its implications for students. Largely ignored in the discussion, however, is the shadow debt, which consists of unorthodox methods of borrowing for college, including home equity loans and lines of credit, retirement account loans, credit card debt, and run-of-the-mill bank loans. Because these borrowing instruments often have many alternative uses, we have to rely on surveys to determine how much of the total amount borrowed in each category is devoted to paying for college. The most comprehensive such survey is conducted by Sallie Mae and Gallup. Their findings indicate that shadow debt adds just under $30 billion to the annual borrowing for higher education (see this link for more details on the calculation). As shown in the table below, when this is added to the $96 billion in college specific loans, we can conclude that Americans borrow roughly $126 billion a year to pay for college.
CAU_table.gifOf course, there are a number of caveats to this number. To begin with, this is at best a back of the envelope calculation, and better data would allow for a more accurate picture to be painted. In addition, some of this may not be borrowing in the normal sense of the term. For instance, some well off families may pay for tuition on a credit card to receive the rewards associated with their card, and then pay off the balance immediately. There is also the fact that some of the education borrowing is not used solely for education. I knew people who used student loan money to purchase a car, or a big screen TV, and even breast implants. At the same time, not counted are informal loans from family and friends. Thus, $126 billion is the best estimate we have for the amount of money that Americans borrow for college.
In 111 piercing minutes of film, Davis Guggenheim offers something that reams of foundation reports, endless pieces of bipartisan legislation and oceans of newspaper ink never have: a stunning liberal exposé of a system that consigns American children who most need a decent education to our most destructive public schools.
Nor does he exempt himself from this corrupt bargain. The man who produced both the Barack Obama short for the 2008 Democratic Convention and Al Gore's Academy Award-winning documentary about global warming offers an inconvenient truth of his own. Each morning, Mr. Guggenheim shows, he drives by three public schools until he gets to the nice private school where he deposits his own children. In so doing, he accuses himself of "betraying the ideals I thought I lived by."
His new film, "Waiting for 'Superman,'" is his own attempt to right that balance with a focus on those he calls "other people's children." At the Washington, D.C., premiere last Wednesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan called it "a Rosa Parks moment." New York Magazine suggests it might be "the Inconvenient Truth of education, an eye-opening, debate-defining, socially catalytic cultural artifact."
Pennsylvania's Tunkhannock Area School District has settled a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of NN, a student whose mobile phone was searched by her principal. The principal dug through several screens' worth of menus to discover some partial nude photos of NN, as well as a blurry full nude that NN had intended for her long-term boyfriend. This may or may not have been advisable, but I'm with NN and the ACLU: it wasn't the principal's place to go digging through her phone for the pix. And the principal certainly shouldn't have done what he did next: turn the photos over to the DA's office for criminal prosecution (you see, the principal believed that in taking pictures of herself, a minor, NN became a child pornographer).
The school district settled for $33K (which sounds like the ACLU's legal fees), and another suit against the DA remains ongoing. As a result of the settlement, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association is developing guidelines for searching students' phones.
Twenty-five years is not a particularly long time, even by American standards. A quarter-century is barely enough for a single generation to grow from infancy to adulthood--hardly an epoch in the annals of the republic. And yet in that blink of an eye, that snap of the fingers, the world can change on a multitude of levels.
Consider the shifts of the most recent quarter-century. In 1985, unless you were in the military, there were no cell phones, much less cell phones that took pictures. There were no iPods, no DVDs, and the first minivans were still under warranty. Some fixtures of American life have slipped beneath the waves since 1985--typewriters, card catalogs, long-distance bills--and we have grown accustomed to such new features as Google, bar codes, and Viagra.
From the technological to the pharmaceutical, these innovations are global in nature, but there have been equally impressive developments on the state level. Wisconsin has experienced transformative changes in the last quarter-century, tectonic shifts that have moved the state materially from its traditional base. Even 25 or 30 years ago, it was possible, if you didn't look too closely, to maintain an image of Wisconsin rooted in the 19th century. For decades there were nearly as many cows as people in the state, and the standard postcard of America's Dairyland was a bucolic scene of contented Holsteins grazing in spring-fed pastures under a clear blue sky.
It's hard to believe this is happening in America. Now, how far will Bill Gates go to fix it? Plus, the one-woman tornado at the center of a Washington, D.C., storm.
Today, our President & CEO, Kaleem Caire, was invited to participate in a taping of the Oprah Winfrey Show as a member of the studio audience for a town hall discussion Ms. Winfrey is having on education reform as a follow-up to her show yesterday on the critically acclaimed documentary, "Waiting for Superman." The film is directed by award winning filmmaker, David Guggenheim, the creative genius behind AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.
Ms. Winfrey has invited leaders in education, along with parents, community, business leaders, and students to discuss what needs to be done to fix America's public schools. The full format has not yet been shared but guests have also been invited to view a showing of Waiting for Superman Thursday evening at her studio. The show will air this Friday afternoon. If anything should change, we will let you know.
Considering just 7 percent of Madison's African American graduating seniors in the class of 2010 who completed the ACT college entrance exam were considered "college ready" by the test-maker (93 percent were deemed "not ready"), it is more important now than ever that the Urban League, our local school districts, local leaders, and other organizations move swiftly and deliberately to implement solutions that can move our children from low performance to high performance. It is even more important that we provide our children with schools that will prepare them to succeed in the economy of the future . With the right approaches, we believe our education community can get the job done!
We look forward to working with our partners at the United Way of Dane County, Madison Metropolitan School District, Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County, YMCA of Dane County, Madison Community Foundation, Great Lakes Higher Education, and many others to get our youth on the right track.
Whether it's this post or Oprah, today may be the first time you hear of the movie "Waiting for Superman" but it won't be the last. A flood of pissed-off parents, Charter Schools and reformers and deep-pocketed billionaires and millionaires will make sure of that.
But the other reason you'll keep hearing about this documentary on the state of America's public education system is that it's just a really great documentary.
I've never quite understood how the public school system of the wealthiest country in the world-one where every President pledges to "fix" education and one where education spending continually goes up-could be so intractably horrible. The problem seems too big, bloated, complex and confusing to even have a smart debate around, much less try to fix. Fortunately, since I'm not a parent, it's an issue where I can just throw up my hands, assume any politician saying they'll fix it is lying, and start saving for the private school I'll one day need when I do have kids.
Attracting and retaining top talent in US teaching: Only 23 percent of entering teachers come from the top third of their graduating class. What would it take to do better?
Helping teachers to lift student achievement more effectively has become a major theme in US education. Most efforts that are now in their early stages or being planned focus either on building the skills of teachers already in the classroom or on retaining the best and dismissing the least effective performers. The question of who should actually teach and how the nation's schools might attract more young people from the top tier of college graduates, as part of a systematic effort to improve teaching in the United States, has received comparatively little attention.
McKinsey's experience with school systems in more than 50 countries suggests that this is an important gap in the US debate. In a new report, Closing the talent gap: Attracting and retaining top-third graduates to careers in teaching, we review the experiences of the world's top-performing systems, in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea. These countries recruit 100 percent of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort. Along with strong training and good working conditions, this extraordinary selectivity is part of an integrated system that promotes the prestige of teaching--and has achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent of new teachers who come from the top third work in high-poverty schools, where attracting and retaining talented people is particularly difficult. The report asks what it would take to emulate nations that systematically recruit top students to teaching if the United States decided that it was worthwhile to do so.
When Adrian Fenty was elected as the mayor of Washington DC, he worked relentlessly to gain control of the DC school board. After all, the DC public schools cost so much more than your average public school and they were among the nation's worst performers. In 2007 he appointed Michelle Rhee as the Public School Chancellor, who immediately took some of the toughest actions one could imagine to turn around the schools, including mass principal and teacher firings, numerous school closures, strict accountability measures, and strong outreach to recruit new energetic teachers and lots more foundation funding for her school (and really district) "turnaround" efforts.
Above are just some of the magazine cover and lead article pictures of Michelle Rhee. These images speak volumes about attitudes on education reform, and perhaps some of the motivations of education reformers. Not all of it is pretty. They speak to the excitement about the possibilities for change--that's good. They say something about the urgency for reform--that is, too. But they also point to the view that kids are waiting for a "Superman" (as Geoffrey Canada has put). Some people are motivated by the need to be a warrior or savior of kids, and specially of kids who are disadvantaged. That can be good, but it can also be really self-righteous, easily pigeon-holed and needlessly divisive. It can also lead to a fawning view among fellow-travelers (see this Charlie Rose interview from 2008 and note Rose's questions and attitude).
ere is one of the great disconnects of our time: 60 percent of Wisconsin citizens rated the public schools in the state, with the exception of Milwaukee, as excellent or good. Two years ago, that number was even higher--just under 70 percent. People don't seem to believe anything is holding education back in Wisconsin. But there are times when fact interferes with perception and--bad news here--this is one of those times. When compared to 17 other large urban districts including Chicago and New York City, Milwaukee's students are in the back of the pack--only Detroit's students score lower in math and reading in fourth and eighth grades. Largely driven by the abysmal performance of many of Milwaukee's public schools, our state has the most persistent gap in achievement between black and white students in the country.
This isn't just a Milwaukee problem; it's a state problem. And the problems don't end there.
Wisconsin employs more than 50,000 teachers, at an annual cost of approximately $3.65 billion,1 and yet it has no common means of measuring teacher effectiveness. The majority of these teachers have a continuing contract, which is another word for tenure -- meaning, with few exceptions, they have that job for life if they want it. This might not be such a bad thing if teachers had to demonstrate their effectiveness in the classroom to get this lifelong contract--but they don't. To put this in context, is your job guaranteed for life? And if it is, did you have to prove your ability in your job to get it?
Somehow, it has come to pass that most teachers are immune from the realities of the workplace that every other citizen faces. Can you imagine another profession in which it is against the law to fire someone from their job because they are not achieving the desired outcome?
Tomorrow's taping of Georgia Public Broadcasting's "Prime Time Politics" focuses on education - which required a review of last week's joint appearance by two candidates for governor at an event sponsored by the Professional Association of Georgia Educators.
One thing the session made obvious: Public education may present the deepest philosophical difference between Democrat Roy Barnes and Republican Nathan Deal. It is a chicken-and-egg gap. They disagree on what comes first.
At last Thursday's forum, Barnes was very clear - and passionate - in his timeline. Education begets economic development, which begets jobs, he declared.
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race," Roberts wrote, "is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
But life has been anything but simple for school officials here. They have steadfastly - or stubbornly, depending on the point of view - tried to maintain integrated classrooms despite the court's command that officials not consider race when assigning children to schools.
Consultants were hired, lawyers retained, census data scrubbed, boundaries redrawn, more buses bought, more routes proposed, new school choices offered and more lawsuits defended.
Wisconsin faces a conundrum: Just when thestate and its citizens need a research universitymost to attract outside funding, fuel job growth, equip individuals to compete in a more knowledge-intensive labor market, and help spawn our own technology-intensive companies-- the state is finding it harder to fund the university. There is, however, a logical solution.
Precisely because research universities are able to create much more economic value in today's economy, they have the potential to be more self-reliant. This essay describes the value of a great research university to the state and the regulatory changes needed to enable the growth of that asset without imposing a greater burden on taxpayers.
The ability of UW -Madison to maximize its contribution to Wisconsin's economy will require a new partnership between the university, the state, students, and alumni. The state and university will need to reduce regulations and increase flexibility in order to reduce costs and improve quality and efficiency.
UW-Madison students and alumni, who, because of their skills and education, are among the main beneficiaries of the recent economic trends, will need to assume greater responsibility for the operating costs in the future through higher tuition and philanthropy. UW-Madison will need greater autonomy to set and retain tuition and manage enrollment, while being held accountable for preserving the core values of educational and research quality, access and affordability that are vital to a public university.
A Community College Transfer Initiative launched four years ago by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation greatly increased the volume of students transferring from community colleges to eight selective four-year colleges.
By supporting the transfer process at receiving schools, the initiative dramatically boosted community college transfers to some of the nation's most prestigious schools: Amherst College, Bucknell University, Cornell University, Mount Holyoke College, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina and the University of Southern California. A report on the initiative, "Partnerships that Promote Success," was released this month.
Among the eight schools, the initiative yielded 550 transfers in the 2007-08 academic year. By 2009-10, transfer enrollment had risen to 1,723.
The University of Michigan enrolled 1,104 community college transfers as of 2009-10; Mount Holyoke, 275; Berkeley, 245; Cornell, 113.
We need an improved, ongoing process to develop a five-year budget plan that focuses on key issues and considers worst-case possibilities. Encourage more participation of teachers & staff in decision-making.
We need to study post-secondary outcomes of all our students. Determine successful practices for meeting the needs of struggling students, high- achieving students, and students with special needs. Determine better student assessments and retaining more families. Study the approach at Shabazz (reaching students) especially when looking at transitions.
Improve the MMSD diversity situation. MMSD should recruit locally or within midwestern region. Success is measured by relationship to eLF data. White men should always help develop this goal.
Board and administration need to build a culture of accuracy and accountability. The board relies on administration for accurate information to make decisions. Board needs to make clear, respectful and timely requestsandexpectresults. Administrationneedstoacknowledge,clarify intent, check for accuracy, and respond with accurate, appropriate, complete datal information.
Program and Services Evaluations
Need to develop sound methods for evaluating programs and business services and implement plans to improve professional performance, evaluations could be external. Those evaluations should yield information and data that can be used to make decisions.
The Board discussed the issue. Individual members expressed concern about the 3% cap, suggesting that this wasn't the way for us to deal with the open enrollment issue. I was one of those who spoke against the proposal. The Board voted unanimously to support the other two proposed changes to WASB policy, but not the 3% cap. This amounted to a unanimous rejection of the 3% limit. (A video of the Board meeting can be found here. The WASB discussion begins about 48 minutes in.)
From the Board's perspective, the endorsement of the proposal regarding financial stability wasn't seen as one that had much bearing on our district. But we'd like support from other districts on our push for a fiscally neutral exchange of state dollars, and so we were willing to support proposals important to other districts, like this one, as a way of building a coalition for fresh consideration of open enrollment issues by the WASB.
The "financial stability" proposal certainly wasn't intended by us as a dagger to the heart of the open enrollment policy; I don't suppose that it was ever the intent of the legislators who supported the open enrollment statute that the policy could render school districts financially unstable.
The State Journal never reported that the Board rejected the 3% cap proposal. It ran letters to the editor on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday that all seemed premised on the assumption that we had in fact supported such a cap. The Wednesday letter said in part, "[T]he Madison School District's answer to its shortcomings is to build a Berlin wall, preventing students from leaving." From the Thursday letter, "Unfortunately, instead of looking inward to address the problems and issues causing flight from Madison schools, the School Board would rather maintain the status quo and use the coercive force of government to prevent its customers from fleeing for what they think is a better value." From Friday's letter: "So the way you stem the tide of students wanting to leave the Madison School District is to change the rules so that not so many can leave? That makes perfect Madison School Board logic." (The State Journal also ran a letter to the editor on Friday that was more supportive of the district.)
I'm glad Ed continues to write online. I continue to have reservations about the "financial stability" angle since it can be interpreted (assuming it becomes law.... what are the odds?) any way the Board deems necessary. Further, I agree with Ed that there are certainly more pressing matters at hand.
Abstract: An education gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers is something to which most Americans have become accustomed. But this racial division of education--and hence of prospects for the future-- is nothing less than tragic. The good news is that the racial divide in learning is a problem that can be fixed. Of course, it can only be fixed if education reform is approached in a common sense and innovative way. Continuing to repeat the largely failed national policies and ever-increasing spending of the past decades is surely not commonsense. One state, Florida, has demonstrated that meaningful academic improvement--for students of all races and economic backgrounds--is possible. In 1999, Florida enacted far-reaching K-12 education reform that includes public and private school choice, charter schools, virtual education, performance-based pay for teachers, grading of schools and districts, annual tests, curbing social promotion, and alternative teacher certification. As a result of parental choice, higher standards, accountability, and flexibility, Florida's Hispanic students are now outperforming or tied with the overall average for all students in 31 states. It is vital that national and state policymakers take the lessons of Florida's success to heart. The future of millions of American children depends on it.
For years, policymakers around the country have looked for ways to address the racial achievement gap in K-12 education. Despite significant increases in education spending at all levels and the federal government's ever-increasing role in education, national academic achievement has remained relatively flat, graduation rates have stagnated around 70 percent, and racial disparities persist. Many states have enacted policies to address racial disparities in academic achievement and attainment, but the changes have been largely piecemeal.
One state, however, has demonstrated that meaningful improvement is possible. In 1999, Florida enacted a series of far-reaching K-12 education reforms that have increased academic achievement for all students and substantially narrowed the racial achievement gap. Today, Florida's Hispanic and black students outscore many statewide reading averages for all students.
In 20 years, will Minnesota's public school system be among the best in the world, or will it be an also-ran? In 20 years, will Minnesota's next governor be remembered as a courageous visionary, or as a partisan who presided over the decline of our highly educated workforce?
Make no mistake: We are at a historic crossroads. The Minnesota Miracle, with its legacy of a world-class public school system and workforce, is on its way to becoming part of a bygone era. The world is ever more competitive, and a well-educated workforce is our only assurance that Minnesota will prosper in the future. Bumper-sticker slogans and rigid ideologies are no substitute for a well-informed and well-thought-out set of education policies. The next governor must rise above petty politics and the "reform du jour" in order to lead the state to higher ground.
All nine middle schools in the Tacoma School District now have something in common - their students were school uniforms.
The News Tribune says this fall Jason Lee Middle School became the last to require uniforms. Most schools require polo shirts or school-logo sweat shirts - some allow jeans, others don't.
Many parents say the uniforms make life easier - there's no drama about what to wear, costs are lower and there's no peer pressure to wear expensive, popular brands. Others say the uniforms limit the kids' personal freedom.
Open enrollment allows students to go to schools outside their district. If "school choice" and "vouchers" are the buzz words popping into your head right now, you're probably not alone. When the legislation passed in 1997, it was in the same ballpark as those two old Republican saws. Open enrollment supposedly introduces choice to the public education "marketplace," forcing districts to compete and get better.
Democrats typically see such policies as the first step toward balkanizing the public schools into the haves and have-nots, when they should be a hallmark of a society in which any kid can become president.
Open enrollment has not shown a particularly good light on Madison in recent years. More kids have been transferring out than in, with the net loss last year 435 students. The resolution the school board passed Monday calls on the state to allow districts to limit the students that could leave under open enrollment "if the school board believes the fiscal stability of the district is threatened."
Clearly, district leaders feel open enrollment is a fiscal threat; their analysis shows it created about a $2.7 million hole in the district budget last school year.
The California Department of Education issued a news release Monday touting 10 years of uninterrupted progress on the Academic Performance Index. By contrast, on the test that researchers use to evaluate real performance, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, California students' scores have been flat during that same time.
Why the big difference? The main test on which the API is based, the STAR, has never been secure, and teachers can teach to the exact questions on it, or even hand out the correct answers in test sessions that are not proctored by outside authorities. By contrast, the NAEP is a secure test, and because it carries no financial incentives, there is no motivation to game the system.
The Notebook gathered data including enrollment, student demographics, attendance, and test scores. You can sort through the information in an Excel sheet or view a PDF of the center spread of data from the print edition.
Key to data for District schools
SAT, PSSA scores: for 2009 from Pennsylvania Department of Education.
Graduation rates: Rates are as determined in 2009 for entering 9th graders from fall 2005, from School District of Philadelphia. Students are attributed to their 9th grade school.
All other data are reported by the School District of Philadelphia for the 2009-10 school year.
There's a lesson here for education reformers in other cities. Real education reform is disruptive. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. Beloved teachers lose their jobs. Neighborhood schools that have anchored communities are closed or reconstituted. But with the disruption comes a rebirth of education, a rising tide that lifts all parts of the community.
Education reformers need to make that case. They need to make it to the parents who have the largest stake in quality education: their children's futures. They need to make it not only to foundations and editorial writers but also to neighborhood leaders, small-business entrepreneurs, and ministers and their flocks. In other words, they need to make it to the people with whose support reform will not only succeed but take root.
Yesterday’s election results were devastating – devastating. Not for me, because I’ll be fine. And not even for Fenty, because he’ll be fine, too. It was devastating for the children of Washington, D.C.," Rhee said during the discussion. "The biggest tragedy that could come from [the] election results is if the lesson that people take from this is that we should pull back. … That is not the right lesson for this reform movement. We cannot retreat now. If anything, what the reform community needs to take out of yesterday’s election is: Now is the time to lean forward, be more aggressive, and be more adamant about what we’re doing.
Mayor Adrian Fenty staked his career on overhauling the District of Columbia's education system with Obama-style reforms -- closing dozens of failing schools and firing hundreds of teachers.
Then the teachers struck back.
Fenty's defeat this week -- due in no small part to community and teachers union resistance to his education push -- is emerging as a cautionary tale for education reformers, who fear that it could cause others to back away from aggressive reform programs swept into the mainstream by President Barack Obama's "Race to the Top."
His downfall, observers fret, serves notice to officeholders coast to coast that they could suffer Fenty's fate if they embark on that ambitious brand of school reform championed by Fenty and his controversial schools chief Michelle Rhee.
"This is a real wake-up call for the Obama administration," said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who studies teachers unions. "The emphasis on firing teachers which was central to Rhee's approach -- she stood in a picture on the cover of Time magazine with a broom. That doesn't seem to resonate with voters."
There is widespread awareness that there is a very substantial gap between the educational achievement of the White and the Black population in our nation, and that the gap is as old as the nation itself.
This report is about changes in the size of that gap, beginning with the first signs of a narrowing that occurred at the start of the last century, and continuing on to the end of the first decade of the present century. In tracking the gap in test scores, the report begins with the 1970s and 1980s, when the new National Assessment of Educational Progress began to give us our first national data on student achievement.
That period is important because it witnessed a substantial narrowing of the gap in the subjects of reading and mathematics. This period of progress in closing the achievement gap received much attention from some of the nation's top researchers, driven by the idea that perhaps we could learn some lessons that
could be repeated.
Next, there are the decades since the late 1980s, in which there has been no clear trend in the gap, or sustained period of change in the gap, one way or another. While there has been considerable investigation of the gap that remained, little advance in knowledge has occurred as attention was directed to alternating small declines and small gains, interspersed with periods of no change.
Paul Barton and Richard Coley drop back in time to the beginning of the 20th century when the gap in educational attainment started to narrow, and bring us to the startling and ironic conclusion that progress generally halted for those born around the mid-1960s, a time when landmark legislative victories heralded an end to racial discrimination. Had those things that were helping to close the gap stopped, or had they been overshadowed by new adversities that were not remedied by gaining equality before the law? Unfortunately, no comprehensive modeling by researchers is available that might identify and quantify the culprits, nor is it likely that there will ever be. The authors draw on the knowledge base that is available, from whatever schools of scholarship that have made relevant investigations, whether they be historians, or sociologists, or economists, or practitioners. Barton and Coley explore topics that remain sensitive in public discussion in their search for answers.
A lot of suspects are rounded up, and their pictures are posted for public view. Ultimately, readers will have to turn to their own good judgment. The report informs the judgments that have to be made, for there is no escaping the fact that failure to re-start progress is an unacceptable and dangerous prospect for the nation.
Michael T. Nettles.
Senior Vice President .
Policy Evaluation and Research Center
The nation's attention has been -- and remains -- riveted on the persistent Black-White gap in the achievement of our elementary and secondary school students. Each year when the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) releases "the nation's report card," the front-page news focuses on whether scores are rising or falling and whether the achievement gap is changing. Speculation is rife as to whether any change is some indication of either the success or failure of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and other efforts in our local-state-federal education system.
The nation's efforts to address the achievement gap have a long history. Expectations increased with the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision in 1954 and with passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, which focused on the inequality of school resources. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 spiked optimism for progress in education and in society at large. And most recently, NCLB was purposeful in its requirement to "disaggregate" the average achievement scores of state accountability programs to expose the inequality that had to be addressed.
This report is about understanding the periods of progress and the periods of stagnation in changes in the achievement gap that have occurred over the past several decades. We try to understand what might have contributed to the progress as well as probe the reasons that may account for the progress halting, in the hope of finding some clues and possible directions for moving forward in narrowing the achievement gap.
For instance, he's the only state elected official to actually and seriously float a proposal to repair the broken state funding system for schools. He promises the proposal for his "Funding for Our Future" will be ready to introduce to lawmakers this fall and will include details on its impact on the state's 424 school districts.
Evers also is interested in the potential of charter schools. Let's be open and supportive about education alternatives, he says, but mindful of what's already working well in public schools.
And he says qualified 11th and 12th graders should be allowed to move directly on to post-secondary education or training if they wish. Dual enrollment opportunites for high school age students attending college and technical schools will require a shift in thinking that shares turf and breaks down barriers, making seamless education -- pre-K through post-secondary -- a reality instead of some distant dream, according to Evers.
As to Evers' comments on teacher testing, he joins a national conversation that has been sparked, in part, by the Obama administration as well as research that shows the single universal element in improved student performance is teacher quality. We recently featured a story about concerns over teacher evaluation based on student performance and test scores, and the issue has been a potent topic elsewhere, as well.
The proof, as always, is in the pudding, or substance.
I think many ed reformers rightly say, "Kids can't wait." I agree.
There is nothing more depressing than realizing that any change that might be good will likely come AFTER your child ages out of elementary, middle or high school. Not to say that we don't do things for the greater good or the future greater good but as a parent, you want for your child now. Of course, we are told that change needs to happen now but the reality is what it might or might not produce in results is years off. (Which matters not to Bill Gates or President Obama because their children are in private schools.)
All this leads to wonder about our teachers and what this change will mean. A reader, Lendlees, passed on a link to a story that appeared in the LA Times about their teacher ratings. (You may recall that the LA Times got the classroom test scores for every single teacher in Los Angeles and published them in ranked order.)
Susan Troller notes that Wisconsin's oft criticized WKCE (on which Madison's value added assessment program is based) will be replaced - by 2014:
Evers also promised that the much maligned Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, used to test student proficiency in 3rd through 6th, 8th and 10th grades, is on its way out. By 2014, there will be a much better assessment of student proficiency to take its place, Evers says, and he should know. He's become a leading figure in the push for national core education standards, and for effective means for measuring student progress.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently claimed: "Districts around the country have literally been cutting for five, six, seven years in a row. And, many of them, you know, are through, you know, fat, through flesh and into bone ... ."
Really? They cut spending five to seven consecutive years?
Give me a break!
Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, writes that out of 14,000 school districts in the United States, just seven have cut their budgets seven years in a row. How about five years in a row? Just 87. That's a fraction of 1 percent in each case.
Duncan may be pandering to his constituency, or he may actually be fooled by how school districts (and other government agencies) talk about budget cuts. When normal people hear about a budget cut, we assume the amount of money to be spent is less than the previous year's allocation. But that's not what bureaucrats mean.
It's at the end of the Lynx light rail line off South Boulevard, a 7-year-old building near Pineville sprawled among a smattering of small houses. All but five students are African-American or Latino; 91 percent receive free or reduced-price lunches.
Yet it is the transformation inside that brought U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Gov. Bev Perdue to Sterling Elementary on Wednesday.
Three years ago, only 34.6 percent of Sterling's students passed end-of-grade reading tests. A year later, after a plan to improve poorly performing schools took effect, 58.9 percent passed. Math scores were more dramatic: 52.4 percent passed three years ago; 83.7 percent a year later.
Some quick one-liners from Hartland North Elementary School Principal Pat Thome can sum up the difference between his school now and one year ago.
"There's nobody over 3½ feet tall," he said. "I'm the only guy who comes to work, and there's 450 people wanting to give you a hug every day."
Over the summer, both elementary schools in the Hartland-Lakeside School District transitioned from serving students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade to serving half those grades. North got the students in pre-kindergarten through second grade while Hartland South Elementary School, less than two miles away, now has students in only third through fifth grades.
It's a structure that other southeastern Wisconsin school districts have studied - most recently the Whitnall School District - but few have adopted. Among the obstacles to such changes are concerns voiced by parents about losing their neighborhood schools and the addition of a transition between school buildings in the middle of a child's elementary years.
Madison public schools produced more National Merit Scholarship semifinalists than any other school district in the state again this year.
Thirty-nine students from Madison East, West, La Follette and Memorial high schools, along with 10 other Madison seniors who receive home schooling or attend Edgewood High or Abundant Life Christian School, are among 16,000 students nationwide to receive the honor. The semifinalists, who represent fewer than 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors, will continue to compete for some 8,400 National Merit scholarships worth more than $36 million to be announced next spring.
Tuesday's primary was a disaster for charter school proponents and their hedge fund backers. They funded three insurgent state Senate candidates, only to see them lose by huge margins to incumbents viewed as hostile to charter schools: Sen. Bill Perkins in Manhattan, Sen. Velmanette Montgomery in Brooklyn and Sen. Shirley Huntley in Queens.
"If you're going to make a statement, you have to either win or be competitive, because if you get crushed it sends the opposite message," one legislator says. "People are going to believe that this is a paper tiger."
Wall Street and the financial services industry made a similar gamble by investing in insurgent Reshma Saujani against Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who supported the sweeping financial regulation bill and won passage of credit card reforms that will curb banks' profits. Saujani raised more than $1.3 million but won only 19% of the vote in an Upper East Side district where support for Wall Street is thought to be greater than elsewhere.
A short time after approximately 150 teachers chanted at full volume last night that they wanted a contract NOW, Mayor Joseph C. O'Brien announced that the School Committee will ask the state Labor Relations Board to appoint a mediator.
The city's approximately 3,000 teachers have been without a contract since school started in fall 2009, and they filled last night's School Committee meeting to hear the union's president, Leonard A. Zalauskas, speak to the committee. "We are eager to participate in a solution, but we don't want to take a pay cut," he said.
He said teachers asked to work extended hours should be paid their same hourly rate, but noted that the group's demands are not all about money. The union, the Educational Association of Worcester, also wants a "safe and healthy learning environment" for its members, including environmental health and an effective disciplinary system for students, and a say in teachers' own professional development, he said.
The state health department is requesting $675 million more from state taxpayers in the next two-year budget to maintain services such as Wisconsin's health care programs for the poor, elderly and disabled, according to budget estimates released Thursday.
That figure, included in a budget request by the state Department of Health Services, shows how difficult it will be for the next governor to balance a budget that already faces a $2.7 billion projected shortfall over two years.
One of the chief reasons the state faces the steep increase in costs is because federal economic stimulus money for health care programs will dry up before the 2011-'13 budget starts July 1.
That scheduled decrease in funding would come even as high unemployment lingers, driving many families into poverty and keeping enrollment in the programs relatively high. State Health Services Secretary Karen Timberlake said the state needs to find a way to keep health care for those who need it.
"People need this program in a way many of them never expected to," she said.
But maintaining health programs at existing levels could cost even more than the $675 million increase over two years - a 16% jump - now projected in the budget request, which will be handled by the next governor and Legislature.
This evening the Dane County Board of Supervisors enthusiastically approved a resolution urging the Wisconsin Legislature to make comprehensive changes in the way schools are funded. The Board encouraged the Legislature to consider revenue sources other than the local property tax to support the diverse needs of students and school districts.
"I hear over and over again from Dane County residents that investing in education is a priority, said County Board Supervisor Melissa Sargent, District 18, the primary sponsor of the resolution. "However, people tell me they do not like the overreliance on property taxes to fund education - pitting homeowners against children," she added.
For the last 17 years, the state funding formula has produced annual shortfalls resulting in program cuts to schools. In 2009-2010, cuts in state aid resulted in a net loss of over $14 million in state support for students in Dane County, shifting the cost of education increasingly to property taxpayers. More and more districts are forced to rely on either program cuts or sometimes divisive referenda. In fact, voters rejected school referendums in five districts Tuesday, while just two were approved.
"The future of our children and our community is dependent on the development of an equitable system for funding public education; a system the recognizes the diverse needs of our children and does not put the funding burden on the backs of our taxpayers, said Madison Metropolitan School Board member Arlene Silvera. "I appreciate the leadership of the County Board in raising awareness of this critical need and in lobbying our state legislators to make this happen," she said.
State legislators can apparently decide to just not make the tough decisions that need to be made. School boards have a responsibility to keep our schools functioning and delivering the best education they can under the circumstances, knowing full well that those decisions will have a negative effect on the education of the children in their community.
Cavanaugh observed that the consensus that reform is needed has not led to action and pointed to the important role local governmental bodies can play in changing this by following the lead of the Dane County Board
"Legislators of all political stripes acknowledge that Wisconsin's system for funding public schools is broken. Yet, there doesn't appear to be the political will to address this very complicated issue. Perhaps they need a nudge from the various local units of government."
In passing this resolution, Dane County is taking the lead on a critical statewide issue. Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools (WAES) board member Thomas J. Mertz said that WAES thanked the Dane County Board and said that WAES will seek similar resolutions from communities around the state in the coming months.
"All around Wisconsin districts are hurting and we've been working hard to bring the need for reform to the attention of state officials," said WAES board member Thomas J. Mertz. "Hearing from local officials might do the trick," he concluded.
Nearly two months after the California School Boards Association faced public scrutiny over its top executive's pay, the non-profit released details this week of its severance agreement with Scott Plotkin.
CSBA paid $43,000 to cut ties with Plotkin and recognize him for "his long years of service" to the organization, according to a statement Tuesday by the CSBA board of directors.
Plotkin retired Sept. 1 after admitting to using a company credit card to withdraw cash at area casinos.
He earned $403,955 in 2009 -- much more than executive directors at similar nonprofits -- including nearly $75,000 in bonuses and other compensation.
CSBA is not a government agency but is indirectly funded by taxpayers. Much of its budget comes from membership dues and other fees paid by public school districts.
Teachers are seriously underpaid, but the public won't support paying the good teachers more without tools to evaluate them. Teachers ought to be leading the way in designing fair evaluation systems.
Linking teacher evaluation to pay is an increasingly hot button issue in Washington state and around the nation. Too much talk is about evaluation and too little about compensation. Sure, teacher evaluation is important. But it's the wagging tail, not the dog. Evaluation schemes won't attract and keep great people in front of the class unless positive evaluations bring meaningful financial rewards.
Teachers make an enormous difference in what children learn. Every parent knows teachers matter. Extensive scientific evidence backs up the importance of teachers to education outcomes. One oft-cited statistic is that a good teacher moves students up one-and-a-half grade levels in a single year. Students of a poor teacher learn only half a year's material.
To reward good teachers we need to identify them. Evaluation should focus on measuring what students learn and then associating student learning measurements with the teachers who taught them.
The state Board of Education took up the controversial issue of teacher evaluations Wednesday, unanimously voting to create an online database to share information about local, state and national efforts to measure educators' effectiveness.
The board also asked the Los Angeles, Long Beach and Fresno school districts to propose specific ways the state can support local efforts to create more meaningful evaluation tools, including the value-added method of using students' test scores to rate teacher performance.
"This is a huge step forward," said board member Ben Austin, who proposed the resolution at the Sacramento meeting. "Including value-added as a component is just common sense, if we take seriously the notion that education is about kids and not grownups."
The state Board of Education voted unanimously today to add the Helena-West Helena School District to the state's list of fiscally distressed districts.
The board took the action because of declining fund balances and internal control problems that were identified in an audit. Declining enrollment has reduced the state funding the district receives, but expenditures have not been reduced accordingly, state education officials said.
"From 2007 to 2010 they've lost about 564 students," said Bill Goff, the state Education Department's assistant commissioner fiscal and administrative services. "A $6,000 per student, that's about $3.4 million."
The state Department of Education notified the district in July that it would be recommended for fiscal distress status. The district did not appeal.
Superintendent Willie Williams told the board the district is working with a financial consultant to reorganize personnel and make other changes to reduce expenditures. He said the district also is addressing the audit findings, which included reimbursement to school board members for non-business-related travel, restaurant bills and alcoholic beverages.
What are the sticking points in the current negotiations?
Post-employment benefits and the salary-benefit package are two big items on which there is no agreement. Current post-employment benefits for teachers include a payment of a stipend (Teacher Emeritus Program (TEP)) which is equal to a teacher's highest annual salary and is paid out over a period of three years in equal installments. In addition to this and to the regular monthly pension benefit received by the teacher from WRS, full health insurance and the major share of the cost of dental insurance are paid by the District until the retired teacher reaches the age of 70. In the event of the death of the retiree prior to reaching the age of 70, the surviving spouse continues to be eligible for the District's group health insurance coverage until the date the retiree would have reached age 70 at the retiree's spouse expense.
The School Board's current proposal for post-employment benefits is proposal #6 in the Initial Board of Education Proposals to the Monona Grove Education Association (linked here). There is no corresponding initial or counter-proposal from the MGEA; its position is to maintain the existing benefits described in the previous paragraph.
The School Board's current salary and benefit package proposal is an increase of 3.9% for 2009-10 and 3.7% for 2010-11. The MGEA's current total package proposal is an increase of 5.4% for 2009-10 and 5.3% for 2010-11 and includes an average teacher salary increase of 4.2% for 2009-10 and 4.1% for 2010-11. These percentages reflect what's known as "cast forward" costing and do not include the cost of horizontal lane movement on the salary schedule or the post-employment benefit costs of retirees.
In the two years Madison has collected and shared value-added numbers, it has seen some patterns emerging in elementary school math learning. But when compared with other districts, such as Milwaukee, Kiefer says there's much less variation in the value- added scores of schools within the Madison district.
"You don't see the variation because we do a fairly good job at making sure all staff has the same professional development," he says.
Proponents of the value-added approach agree the data would be more useful if the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction were to establish a statewide value-added system. DPI is instead developing an assessment system to look at school-wide trends and improve instruction for individual students.
.....
But some question whether value-added data truly benefits all students, or is geared toward closing the gap between high- and low-performing students.
"Will the MMSD use new assessments...of students' progress to match instruction levels with demonstrated learning levels?" asks Lorie Raihala, a Madison parent who is part of a group seeking better programming for high-achieving ninth- and 10th-graders at West High School. "So far the district has not done this."
Others are leery of adding another measurement tool. David Wasserman, a teacher at Sennett Middle School and part of a planning group pushing to open Badger Rock Middle School, a green charter (see sidebar), made national news a few years ago when he refused to administer a mandatory statewide test. He still feels that a broad, student-centered evaluation model that takes multiple assessments into account gives the best picture.
"Assessment," he says, "shouldn't drive learning."
Give a round of applause to the Assembly for passing A-355, which makes the pilot Interdistrict School Choice program permanent. What's not to like? Kids in failing schools can cross district lines to attend a more successful school (see NJ Left Behind previous coverage here and here). And those more successful schools, according to a report from Rutgers, are almost unanimous in their support of the Program and their reports of its positive fiscal and educational impact.
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have made charter schools a big part of their reform agenda, but the pushback from unions has been fierce. Perhaps that explains why the new $10 billion federal teacher bailout will be dispensed in a way that discriminates against charters.
The Administration's initial guidance excluded many charter school teachers, even though charters are public schools. The Department of Education said money from the Education Jobs Fund could go only to teachers and others employed by a local education agency or school district.
"A charter school," says the department, "may not use Ed Jobs funds to pay for the compensation and benefits of employees of a charter management organization or an educational management organization who provide school-level educational and related services in the charter school." Many charter school teachers are employees of management firms rather than the school district, so the guidelines would have excluded more than 1,000 charters nationwide (serving around 400,000 students) from the cash.
Teachers and school district officials are bracing for what could be a bruising year of negotiations over new contracts for about 3,000 teachers.
Both sides say the weak economy and increasing financial pressures on schools will likely make contract talks more challenging in 2010-11 than in years past.
"It will be very difficult," said Paul Gottlieb, a negotiator for the Pennsylvania State Education Association. "The economic situation puts pressure on everybody on both sides."
Gottlieb is the PSEA representative for Octorara School District, one of four districts -- along with Warwick, Penn Manor and School District of Lancaster -- that soon will begin negotiations to replace or extend teacher contracts that expire at the end of the school year.
Teachers with Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13 and Lancaster County Career & Technology Center also are working under contracts that expire June 30, 2011.
Two other school districts -- Manheim Central and Solanco -- have been negotiating since last school year to replace or extend contracts that expired over the summer.
The Houston school board plans to vote Thursday on a stricter conflict of interest policy that would apply to all employees, rather than just higher-paid administrative staff. The proposal would forbid all employees from accepting any "gift, favor, loan, service, entertainment or anything of more than token value" from any HISD vendor or someone seeking to do business with the district. Allowed are coffee mugs, key chains, caps and other "trinkets."
Employees also are prohibited from accepting meals exceeding $100 in a year from any vendor or prospective vendor. Employees must report meals that exceed $50 per year. In addition, employees must report to the district any personal financial or business interests that "in any way creates a substantial conflict with the proper discharge of assigned duties and responsibilities or that creates a conflict with the best of the District."
HISD's current conflict of interest policy is similar except that it applies only to administrative employees above pay grade 14. (I'm checking with the district on that salary amount.) Ann Best, the district's chief human resources officer, told the school board Monday that the change was designed to ensure "that we're holding every single person accountable to the same standard."
A school district near Sacramento, Calif., is looking outside the box for new revenue sources in these harsh budget times. Elk Grove Unified has opened up its own Virtual Academy offering complete online curricula for grades kindergarten through 12.
Officials hope to attract home-school students and children from other districts, plus the state tax dollars that come with them. But this kind of online education is also raising some red flags.
Vincent Gray's victory in Washington, D.C.'s mayoral contest means an uncertain future the highest-profile figure in District politics: schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who became a national symbol of school reform.
Rhee was appointed by the current mayor, Adrian Fenty, and her overhaul of the education system became a main issue in the Fenty-Gray race. Last night's victory means that Gray, who faces no Republican opposition in heavily Democratic Washington, has a virtual lock on the November election.
She campaigned for Fenty, telling voters that a vote for him was a vote for her staying in her job. During the campaign, Gray said that if he won, he would talk to Rhee and consider whether they can work together, and early today promised to move forward with school reform. "Make no mistake: school reform will move forward in a Gray administration," Gray said.
The Pentagon needs to take prompt action to bring its spending under control to stave off the kind of "drastic" defence cuts afflicting Britain and Germany, according to Mike Mullen, the most senior US military official.
Referring to the 20 per cent or more cuts recently announced by America's key European allies, Admiral Mullen said the Pentagon only had a limited time in which to act before similar changes would be imposed upon the country, given the sharply rising level of US national debt.
"If we do not figure out how to manage ourselves inside this growing challenge [of fiscal austerity] then I do worry that it won't be too long before those kinds of cuts will be part of our future as well, and that would be very dangerous," Admiral Mullen said in a View from DC video interview with the Financial Times.
Is American higher education caught in the 21st century equivalent of the Dutch tulip mania? On February 3, 1636, the contract price of tulip bulbs traded in Haarlem collapsed. The prices for the fancier multi-colored varieties had been driven up to crazy heights by futures speculators. The reckoning that followed has, of course, become everyone's favorite metaphor for subsequent "bubbles"--those aberrations of the market in which people vastly overvalue a good because they believe its price will only continue to soar. We have had in recent memory a tech bubble and a real estate bubble, both on a scale to make seventeenth century Dutch tulips blush for shame.
Could American higher education be in the same fix? In the last few years an increasing number of observers speaking from distinct perspectives have converged on this idea. The outlines are simple. The price of attaining a college degree has skyrocketed while the rewards of attaining a college degree have slumped. Sooner or later, people will notice that they are being asked to spend a great deal of money for a meager result. If enough people notice this and consequently decide not to spend at comparable levels and to seek lower priced alternatives--daisies instead of tulips--the bubble will burst.
Defenders of the current system point to reasons why this won't happen. My own view is that we are indeed facing a bubble, but before turning to that prognosis, it helps to start with the counter-arguments. There are many in higher ed who see no bubble and who read the tulip leaves differently.
Wisconsin has showed little muscle when it comes to motivating students, teachers or schools to achieve ambitious academic goals.
Massachusetts provides a particularly striking comparison to Wisconsin. Just 15 to 20 years ago, Massachusetts and Wisconsin were fairly even. Since then, Massachusetts has moved forward substantially. The state has led the nation in reading and math scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress in recent years. A recent New York Times article said, "Many regard (Massachusetts) as having the nation's best education system." And Boston is widely regarded as a leader in tackling urban school issues.
So what explains the successes in Massachusetts and Boston?
There is nearly universal agreement that the key is "the grand bargain" struck in the Bay State's legislature in 1993. At heart, it was a simple deal: Give schools more money and demand better results.
A multibillion-dollar infusion of state aid to schools righted inequities between have- and have-not school districts. But along with the money came one of the nation's most rigorous sets of standards for what children were expected to learn, and a demanding state testing system, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS).
Cesar Chavez is not on the fall election ballot. Neither is Thomas Jefferson. And Texans will not actually get a say in the teaching of evolution in public schools or how to handle sex education.
Voters, however, will help shape the State Board of Education. And nearly everyone agrees that Texans are paying closer attention to the once low-profile board after the 15 members attracted state and national attention for their controversial pursuit of new science and social studies curriculum standards.
Two key contested races in the Nov. 2 general election will determine whether Texans prefer traditional values as seen by supporters of Republican incumbent Ken Mercer, of San Antonio, and candidate Marsha Farney, of Georgetown. Democrats in those races are looking for voters to reject what they call the politicization of education for nearly 5 million public school children.
The board in recent years has been divided largely among seven Republican social conservatives voting as a bloc, five Democrats and three Republicans often considered swing votes.
The scruffy rooftop basketball court of the Larchmont School, a small charter school packed into one floor of an 83-year-old building, offers a breathtaking view of the city's priciest new gem: the $578 million Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" said Larchmont's executive director Brian Johnson, gazing at the gleaming green rectangular structure surrounded by pristine athletic fields and rows of stately palm trees.
The new public-school complex has drawn criticism for its cost at a time when Los Angeles city schools have laid off thousands of teachers to help plug its $640 million budget gap.
From its birth in 1790, the District has inspired grand visions of a more perfect union among diverse peoples. Even the landscape has been infused with our common striving; a design by French architect Pierre L'Enfant intended "principally to connect each part of the city," as he put it, "by making the real distance less from place to place."
On the eve of Tuesday's Democratic primary in the District, I'd like to revisit one of the more compelling visions of what a city of knitted souls might look like. The question for voters: How do we get there?
From a commentary by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee that appeared in the Feb. 8 issue of Spotlight on Poverty and Education:
Anthony Priest is one of those personnel office surprises -- a 44-year-old just starting as a teacher. He has two degrees in engineering from Georgia Tech and a master's in business administration. He does marathons and triathlons. In 2008, he was project manager for the redevelopment of a 300,000-square-foot D.C. office building.
But he decided it would be more interesting to teach math, so he accepted an assignment at one of the most chaotic public schools in the region, Spingarn High in Northeast Washington. Since then, he says, he has had many adventures, including a first-hand look at the inspiring and results-oriented (at least to him) management practices of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee.
His first contact with Rhee concerned the broken lock on his classroom door. Spingarn has hall walkers, students and non-students who stroll its long corridors and rarely go to class. Every day they would open the door to Priest's classroom, walk in, and yell at his students or him. There were threats, thefts, even assaults. The school's security guards were ineffective. He asked the principal several times to have the door fixed so he that could control his students better.
Guggenheim at moments became emotional, choking up as he spoke about one of the girls, Daisy, he profiles in his latest film, "Waiting for Superman," which exposes the breakdown in American education.
"I've watched this movie 40 times and I watch Daisy in East Los Angeles and she's motivated, smart and her father works as a truck driver, while her mother cleans hospital rooms. She wants to be a doctor and her parents have hope. They believe that if they do their part that America will do its part."
At the core of "Superman" is whether America has the will and courage to face up to its spiraling public education system. While it has been generally accepted that education in America has faced a frightening decline, with statistics to back up that fear, Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth") hopes that the film will motivate people to believe that a crisis that may appear intractable can be reformed and improved despite the perception that it is a system stymied by entrenched paralysis.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Public workers' generous benefits come at a price State law makes it difficult to make any changes in health benefits without approval of the unions
The rich health benefits enjoyed by workers in the public sector are becoming an increasingly inviting target as cities, counties and school districts struggle with continual budget deficits.
The numbers explain why:
The Milwaukee Public Schools district spends as much as $26,846 a year to provide family coverage for a teacher. The City of Milwaukee spends a bit less than $21,000, and Milwaukee County spends $17,800 to $19,400. The state's cost is slightly less than $20,000 a year for employees in the Milwaukee area.
That's after subtracting the employee's share of the premium, which can range from nothing to $2,160 a year.
In contrast, family coverage from private and public employers costs $13,770 on average nationally and workers on average pay nearly $4,000 of that.
Several forces contribute to the gap between public and private sectors. For one, state law prohibits many public employees from striking and that prohibition comes at a price of ensuring fairness for those employees. In addition, many public workers accept lower salaries in exchange for generous health care benefits.
Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate, each have proposals to lower health benefit costs.
In Caire's mind, kids can't wait. Consider the data he cites from the ACT District Profile Report for the Madison Metropolitan School District's 2010 graduating class:
Of students taking the ACT, average test scores differed significantly between African Americans and white students:
English
Math
Reading
Science
Composite
African Americans
16.3
18.0
17.1
18.4
17.6
Caucasian/White
25.1
25.6
25.8
24.8
25.4
The percent of students meeting ACT College Readiness Benchmark Scores, broken out by ethnicity, for the 2010 graduating class seems more alarming:
Total Tested
English (18)
Math (22)
Reading (21)
Science (24)
All Students
1,122
81%
68%
71%
51%
African Americans
76
38%
24%
25%
9%
Caucasian/White
733
90%
77%
79%
60%
Hispanic
71
59%
39%
45%
18%
Asian/Pacific Isl.
119
67%
65%
61%
45%
Numbers like these fuel Caire's fire, and his vision for The Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men. "I'm amazed that [the primarily white leadership in the city] hasn't looked at this data and said, 'wow!' They have the power, but I don't think anyone has looked at this. So [once again], I'm the angry black man."
Caire understands the challenges that lie ahead. By November, he needs to formally propose the idea to the School Board, after which he will seek a planning grant from the Department of Public Instruction. He anticipates other hurdles along the way. Among them, a misconstrued conception. "Madison believes it's creative, but the reality is, it's not innovative." Will the community accept this idea, or sit back and wait, he wonders.
Second: The resources to do it. "We can survive largely on what the school system can give us [once we're up and running], but there's seed money you need to get to that point."
Third: The teacher's union response. "No one knows what that will be," Caire said. "The school board and district are so influenced by the teacher's union, which represents teachers. We represent kids. To me, it's not, 'teachers at all costs,' it's 'kids first.' We'll see where our philosophies line up." He added that the Urban League and those behind the Charter School idea are not at all opposed to the teacher's union, but the Prep School's design includes, for example, a school day longer than the teacher's contract allows. "This isn't about compensation," he said of the contract, "it's about commitment. We don't want red tape caught up in this, and we want to guarantee long-term success."
ONE ALSO OUGHT TO READ VERY CAREFULLY the report on COMPENSATION settlement negotiated! First and foremost, even a FREEZE on salary would NOT BE A TRUE FREEZE on compensation! While a freeze would impact an across the board increase in the salary schedule, it would NOT impact two other factors which INCREASE teacher compensation year-by-year.
First, the "seniority" or "experience" move on the salary schedule and second, the pay provided when "they hit continuing-education milestones." The Gazette article reports that about 57% of the teachers would get the longevity increase. There is no data cited on "continuing-education milestone" increases.
Where is the data about the significant increase in FRINGE BENEFITS for teachers with the increase in HEALTH INSURANCE COSTS for the District? The District is self-insured. The shocking announcement of $2 million in UNexpected costs with $1 million coming from the teacher COMPENSATION package in the new contract and $1 million coming from increase in costs for health insurance. Is this $1 million NOT an increase in TOTAL COMPENSATION for teachers? WHY is it NOT reported in the Gazette article? WHY has it NOT been clarified by the district? How much compensation increase is that for each teacher?
Recent research and media reports have raised serious concerns about teacher turnover rates in charter schools. But it isn't exactly clear why teacher turnover rates might be high in charter schools: is it a consequence of their less regulated labor market, or is it the types of students and neighborhoods where they tend to operate?
This study tracked the careers of 956 newly hired charter school teachers and 19,695 newly hired traditional public school teachers in Wisconsin between 1998 and 2006. Although not representative of the charter school sector overall, the study's analysis of Wisconsin's charter school sector provides some important clues about the nature of teacher turnover in charter schools: (1) high teacher turnover rates in Wisconsin's charter schools are mostly a function of teacher characteristics (young and inexperienced) and school contexts (poor and urban), rather than a "charter effect," and (2) teachers in Wisconsin's urban charter schools are less likely to leave their schools than similar teachers in urban traditional public schools.
To better understand teachers' motivations for leaving and staying, researchers turned to national data from the U.S. Department of Education's 1999-00 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and 2000-01 Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS). The SASS-TFS asked traditional public school teachers and charter school teachers who left their schools why they left. In response, teachers in both sectors pointed to a lack of administrative support, poor working conditions, and low salaries. However, compared to traditional public school teachers, charter school teachers were more likely to say that they left because of a lack of job security and the expansive nature of their work.
The recent news that the Philadelphia School District has seen its number of "persistently dangerous" schools drop by 20 percent should be cause for optimism. Disciplinary policy changes that I advocated while I was the state safe schools advocate, which were implemented with the strong support of Mayor Nutter and Superintendent Arlene Ackerman in 2008, may be having the hoped-for effect.
With most matters in the school district, however, every step forward is accompanied by at least one step backward. While the superintendent once stood up to members of the School Reform Commission who had long abetted the violence, she has since failed to back up her antiviolence policies with concrete action.
Ackerman's ham-handed reaction to the victimization of Asian students at South Philadelphia High School is only the most obvious example. Continued cuts in alternative education programs for disruptive students are equally disappointing, as was the elimination of order-enforcing "climate managers" in neighborhood schools that need more capable adults, not fewer.
It's hard for longtime observers of the district to believe the data and trust that it's turned the corner on violence, partly because we've been lied to before. The district has supposedly had a "zero tolerance" policy on violence since 2002, but it failed to expel anyone for any offense between 2005 and 2009. The district reported school violence was on the decline from 2001 to 2006, but The Inquirer found that it had vastly underreported the data.
D.C. schools officials detailed for the first time Friday how teachers can qualify for the performance-based pay increases that could vault them into the ranks of the country's best-paid public school educators.
The increases, which come in two forms, are targeted toward teachers who receive the best evaluations. The programs are voluntary, and teachers who participate give up certain job protections.
Those ranked highly effective may be eligible for as much as $25,000 in one-time bonuses, with the amount determined by student performance and other factors. Those ranked highly effective for two years in a row could see their base pay rise by as much as $26,000 a year.
The state faces a looming $2.7 billion budget shortfall, but that hasn't kept candidates for governor from piling on with what are likely to be hundreds of millions of dollars in new commitments to cut taxes or increase spending.
All the major candidates have put forward plans to rein in spending, but by making added pledges like tax cuts, the candidates are adding to the challenge they'll face as the state's top executive.
The most aggressive are the two Republican candidates, former U.S. Rep. Mark Neumann and Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker who, without specific figures, are promising hefty tax cuts in their first budget as governor and some possible increases in spending on roads and bridges.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democrat, has made more modest pledges totaling at least tens of millions of dollars in the form of targeted tax cuts and spending to create jobs. So far, he has offered the most detailed plans about his proposed spending cuts, although serious questions have been raised about some of that proposed saving.
America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution
As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.
When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.
Mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and beaming broadly, the Microsoft chairman Bill Gates looked every bit the benevolent businessman as he took the stage at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday evening, to help plug the education-reform documentary "Waiting for 'Superman.'" Mr. Gates appears in the film, and, with his wife Melinda, heads a foundation that has invested heavily in improvements to education. But his aw-shucks manner couldn't hide the fact that some of the proposals he tossed off on stage at the Winter Garden theater here were volatile stuff. "We're investing in building these evaluation systems," Mr. Gates said. He was referring to systems that would evaluate the performance of public school teachers, with an eye toward ending the current tenure system under which many teachers now work, and providing a way to weed out the worst teachers, while, perhaps, rewarding the best. He also mentioned, at least twice, changes to teacher pension systems.
I was never into the 1970s British TV series "Upstairs, Downstairs," where the big shots lived upstairs, the servants lived downstairs, and there was all this dramatic interaction. (I preferred the "Sesame Street" version, where one of the Muppets ran up and down the stairs, loudly proclaiming what he was doing.)
But it sure does seem like we're having vivid episodes of "Upstairs, Downstairs" when it comes to education now. An increasing and huge amount of the action is occurring upstairs, on the federal and state levels, while local control of schools by folks downstairs, like school board members, counts for less and less. The vitality of local control, a Wisconsin tradition for decades, is seeping away. And the staff downstairs - teachers, in other words - are feeling more than a bit put upon.
A few years ago, you would not have expected what is going on now. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan came close to succeeding in eliminating the U.S. Department of Education on the grounds that the federal government shouldn't have much role in that area. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton suggested national tests in reading and math so children across the country were measured by the same standards. The idea went nowhere.
He's got their attention, but only for a few minutes. A few precious minutes to teach in a position that is otherwise layers removed from teaching. Right now, these are his students.
The adults in the room are also intrigued. The new superintendent is an outsider leading a district where staff morale and student achievement are at an all-time low. He arrived on the heels of a fierce debate about mayoral control that polarized the city. His predecessors - including the last superintendent of eight years - have found little success. He's inherited reports that show the district's financial operations and human resource practices need serious improvement.
In addition, there's a $55 million hole in the budget, hundreds of teachers on layoff, 40,000 empty seats in mothballed buildings and a union committed to health care benefits the district can't afford. Teachers are working under a contract that expired in 2009.
And then there are the children. At Starms, all of them on the floor are black, like Thornton, and they are facing tremendous odds. The achievement gap in Wisconsin between white and black students is one of the highest in the nation. African-American fourth-graders in MPS have lower reading scores than their peers anywhere else in the country, even lower than kids in rural Mississippi or Alabama.
Debating education for the first time, Minnesota's three major candidates for governor on Friday differed significantly over how to repair what they described as an ailing system.
Republican Tom Emmer, using the occasion to disclose more of his overall budget plan, said he would hold education spending to existing levels and move funds used for child care programs to those that would prepare children for kindergarten. Emmer said he would delay repaying $1.4 billion owed to the state's public schools until 2014.
DFL candidate Mark Dayton, in contrast, pledged to increase education money every year as governor and repay the funds owed, while the Independence Party's Tom Horner stressed the need for innovation.
At Pomona College, a top-flight liberal arts school, this year's sticker price for tuition and fees is a hefty $38,394 (not including room and board). Even after adjusting for inflation, that comes to 2.9 times what Pomona was charging a generation ago, in 1980.
This kind of massive tuition increase is the norm. In New England, Williams College charges $41,434, or an inflation-adjusted 3.2 times what it did 30 years ago. USC's current tab of $41,022 is a 3.6 multiple of its 1980 bill.
Tuition at public universities, in a time of ailing state budgets, has risen at an even faster rate. The University of Illinois' current $13,658 is six times its 1980 rate after adjusting for inflation. San Jose State's $6,250 is a whopping 11 times more.
From the Ed.Gov Toolbox Executive Summary (C. Adelman)
"The academic intensity of the student's high school curriculum still counts more than anything else in precollegiate history in providing momentum toward completing a bachelor's degree. At the highest level of a 31-level scale describing this academic intensity (see Appendix F), one finds students who, through grade 12 in1992, had accumulated:
3.75 or more Carnegie units of English
3.75 or more Carnegie units of mathematics
highest mathematics of either calculus, precalculus, or trigonometry
2.5 or more Carnegie units of science or more than 2.0 Carnegie units of core
laboratory science (biology, chemistry, and physics)
more than 2.0 Carnegie Units of foreign languages
more than 2.0 Carnegie Units of history and social studies
1.0 or more Carnegie Units of computer science
more than one Advanced Placement course
no remedial English; no remedial mathematics
These are minimums. In fact, students who reached this level of academic curriculum intensity accumulated much more than these threshold criteria (see table F1), and 95 percent of these students earned bachelor's degrees (41 also percent earned master's, first professional, or doctoral degrees) by December 2000.
Provided that high schools offer these courses, students are encouraged or required to take them, and, in the case of electives, students choose to take them, just about everybody could accumulate this portfolio....."
--------------------
[How is it that the reading of complete nonfiction books (which will be asked for in college) and
the writing of serious research papers (which will be asked for in college), never seem to penetrate
these maxims about Recommended Curriculum for College and Career Readiness? (At least the International
Baccalaureate Curriculum requires an Extended Essay for the Diploma...)
The world wonders.
Will Fitzhugh
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Why is it that the last people listened to regarding problems in public education are the ones who deal with it on the front line day after day?
Chicago's Renaissance 2010 education plan came onto the charts back in 2004. Immediately, classroom teachers pointed out its many flaws. Were they listened to? Of course not. Instead, Mayor Richard M. Daley and now U.S. Secretary of Education -- then Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer -- Arne Duncan pushed ahead with a program that had come not from the educational community, but rather from the business community.
Lest anyone forget, that's the same business community that has demonstrated questionable wisdom in the world of finance, ultimately leading the United States into its current economic crisis.
Officials with Contra Costa County's Head Start program were frustrated. In order to meet federal requirements, they had to take attendance every hour.
These and other administrative tasks were taking up a lot of teachers' time - between one and three hours a day per teacher - and using up a lot of the program's limited funds.
We sympathize with their pain. An hourly attendance requirement is indeed burdensome, and it's a useless distraction from the very important work that Head Start does - preparing low-income preschoolers for school. But we can't support what those officials did next, which was to implement a microchip tracking program for those very young children.
Minister of Education, Science and Technology Lee Ju-ho said Friday he will give top priority to creating a fairer education environment for the second half of the Lee Myung-bak government.
"I believe every student should have an equal opportunity to learn. I am not talking about uniform equal society. I mean children from poor families also should have the chance to receive quality education," Lee said.
Mentioning the college admission system, the lawmaker-turned-minister said he plans to order an investigation into universities to confirm whether children of professors or school staff have been given special treatment in the process.
"In order to fix a holistic admission system at colleges, we need three important values: trust, fairness and the specialty of admissions officers. On top of this, we will seek student diversity," he said.
What is the primary reason you are running for this office?
Education is the most important thing a community provides for its youth to ensure that they grow up to be productive members of society. I am running for re-election because I want to continue to help shape and influence the quality of the educational experience of students in our schools. I want all children in our schools to graduate prepared to be productive, engaged and fulfilled citizens with viable options for their futures.
What will be your single most important priority if you get elected?
My most important priority is to ensure that we provide a quality educational experience for each of our students by continuing to improve student learning and engagement, within the constraint of maintaining our fiscal solvency. There may be different opinions about how to improve student learning and engagement, especially with limited resources. It's important that the values and concerns of all stakeholders-students, parents, staff (at all levels and in all functions), and community members-be considered as the district sets direction and aligns initiatives. We also need to acknowledge and work positively with the natural tension between district direction and site-based initiative.
The REAP Food Group will stage what sounds like a pretty daunting culinary challenge that should be fun to watch at its Food for Thought Festival at the end of September. On Saturday, Sept. 24, three local chefs will join three local school principals as kitchen collaborators, working together to plan and prepare a healthy, nutritious, child-friendly meal that will be judged by the harshest critics around: school age kids themselves.
And that's not all. The intrepid cooks must do it all on a budget, under a deadline and in front of an audience. School cooks would say it's almost as hard as what they face daily in the lunchroom.
"I know they will be hard on us," chef Steve Eriksen says of the young judges. Eriksen is one of the contestants and associate team leader for the kitchen at Madison's Whole Foods grocery store. "What you get out of children's mouths is brutal honesty."
But Eriksen says he has a secret weapon as he prepares for the competition: his 3-year-old daughter, Ella, who is a picky eater. "If we can make something that I think Ella will eat, any kid will like it," he says with a grin.
The suit alleges that more than 30 districts require students and their families to pay for books and other basic supplies that are supposed to be provided at no cost.
The suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges that more than 30 districts require students and their families to pay for basic supplies that are supposed to be provided at no cost. Districts cited in the lawsuit include Beverly Hills, Burbank and Long Beach.
The Los Angeles Unified School District was not named in the suit, although "we have heard anecdotal reports about Los Angeles," Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the ACLU of Southern California, said at a morning news conference.
I've been made aware of the entry on the School Info Systems site about La Follette student taking gun to school. That story has been retracted by madison.com and thus the story excerpt on the the SIS site is not supported any longer. It's our understanding that this madison.com story will remain retracted.
Thus we request that the story excerpt be pulled from the School Info Systems site.
Thank you.
I phoned (608) 252-6120 the Wisconsin State Journal (part of Capital Newspapers, which owns madison.com) and spoke with Jason (I did not ask his last name) today at about 2:20p.m. I asked about the status of this story [Dane County Case Number: 2010CF001460, Police call data via Crime Reports COMMUNITY POLICING 03 Sep 2010 1 BLOCK ASH ST Distance: 0 miles Identifier: 201000252977 Suspicious Vehicle Agency: City of Madison]. He spoke with another person, returned to the phone and said that a police officer phoned the reporter, Sandy Cullen and said the report she mentioned was incorrect. They then took the article down. I asked him to email me this summary, which I will post upon receipt.
The biggest opportunity we have is to "get more bang for our buck". The mp3 file includes an interesting discussion on Florida's approach to public information on school performance. Ladner also mentioned teacher certification reform, particularly in math & science.
Today the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) released a new book that provides a simple, direct way of comparing the effectiveness of public education in every state. I co-authored the Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress and Reform with Goldwater Institute Senior Fellow Dan Lips and school choice expert Andrew LeFevre. ALEC is distributing the book to state lawmakers across the country.
For the Report Card, we rank all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on student test scores and learning gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We focused in particular on the scores of low-income students who were not in special education programs from 2003 to 2009, the years in which all jurisdictions took the tests used by NAEP.
Our rankings give the same weight to overall performance (which states had the highest test scores) and overall gains (which states made the most progress over time). The table below shows the rankings:
Public schools across the nation, many facing budget shortfalls, have been charging students fees to use textbooks or to take required tests or courses.
Now a civil liberties group is suing California over those proliferating fees, arguing that the state has failed to protect the right to a free public education. Experts said it was the first case of its kind, and could tempt parents in other states to file similar suits.
In the suit, to be filed in a state court in Los Angeles on Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California names 35 school districts across California that list on their Web sites the fees their schools charge for courses including art, home economics and music, for Advanced Placement tests and for materials including gym uniforms.
Jonathan Narcisse, the Iowa Party candidate for governor, said Wednesday that parents and teachers, not the federal government, are the key to making Iowa schools great again.
Federal involvement in schools "has diminished the excellence of education in our state in general and placed in peril urban education in Iowa," Narcisse said.
His speech at Culture Inc., a Des Moines nonprofit youth program that emphasizes the arts, came less than a week after a state report showed a quarter of Iowa schools were labeled "in need of assistance," or failing, based on math and reading test scores under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Narcisse, 46, a former Des Moines school board member, blamed the federal law for a culture in which fearful teachers "teach to the test" and students are deprived of a "real education."
WASB Policy Modifications Related to Open Enrollment Recommended changes to the current WASB resolution on open enrollment (Policy 3.77):
Current f.: The options for the districts to limit the number of students leaving the school district under the open enrollment program, if the school board believes that number is large enough to threaten the viability of the district.
Proposed f.: The option for the districts to limit the number of students leaving the school district under the open enrollment program, if the school board believes the fiscal stability of the district is threatened.
Rationale - As school districts are confronted by a combination of revenue limits and declining state aid, fiscal issues are overriding attention paid to the educational programs offered to our children. The law originally limited open enrollment transfers to 3% of a district's total enrollment and was designed to provide parents with enrollment options for their students.
Now, districts lack the flexibility or capacity to adjust to large scale student population shifts. Districts already fiscally weakened by nearly two decades of revenue limits, and more recently, cuts to general state aids - particularly in small, rural districts - are left with the options of dissolving the district, or Draconian cuts to the educational program.
**********
Current i.: The WASB supports a clarification in state statutes to limit the number of students enrolling in nonreSident school districts to 10 percent of the resident district membership.
Proposed i.: The WASB supports limiting the number of students enrolling in nonresident school districts to 3 percent of the resident district membership.
Rationale - The law originally capped open enrollment to 3% of a district's total enrollment. This change returns control of open enrollment transfers to locally elected school board members. If districts choose to limit open enrollment transfers to less than 3%, correspondingly, a district would have to use the same method/policy for accepting students through open enrollment. **********
Proposed i: The WASB supports a fiscally neutral exchange of state dollars in open enrollment transfers.
Rationale - Current law requires that a sending district pay the receiving school district approximately $6,500. The $6,500 payment is the estimated statewide cost of educating a student; however, in practice this amount doesn't really reflect the costs of educating a student in the receiving district, or takes into account the loss of revenue to the sending district.
The law could be changed by lowering the dollar amount to $5,000, or the amount of state aid per pupil received by the sending district in the prior year, whichever is less.
While the WASB supports public school open enrollment, participation in the program should not be a fiscal hardship. The current state/nation fiscal climate and local economic circumstances confronted by school districts, has dramatically changed the fiscal equation and requires modifications to the state's open enrollment law.
Approved by the School Board of: Madison Metropolitan School District Date: 9/13/10
kt:4tf,s;:.C~ Signed: (Board President)
Recently, school districts across the state learned they were set to receive millions of dollars in federal funds to retain, rehire or hire new educational support staff. While this infusion of cash may seem appealing to districts that have had to lay off employees, the requirements on how this money can be used contain a potential trap that can ensnare district budgets in lingering deficits for years to come.
Specifically, the federal guidelines state that these one-time funds must be used to cover on-going expenditures - they can only be used for compensation, benefits and related expenses for school employees. That's exactly how structural deficits are built. To understand the potential pitfalls for schools, just look at the state's recent budget history.
A History of Deficits
State government has been mired in bad budgets for a decade now. It is a bipartisan problem that has been practiced by Democratic and Republican governors and legislatures alike.
Throughout the 1990s, the economy was strong and revenues consistently grew faster than had been projected when the budgets were put together. Budget surpluses were a regular occurrence. Politicians got complacent, creating costly new programs, confident that revenues would grow enough to cover their excess. There were always a few legislators, however, who warned that the day would come when the revenues stopped flowing as wildly as they were and the surpluses would vanish. The surpluses were one-time revenues that should never be used to pay for ongoing expenditures.
....
School Districts Beware
Now school districts across Wisconsin could fall into the same trap if they're not careful. Those federal dollars look promising now, but don't count on them being there again next year. Every employee that is rehired, every new employee hired with these federal dollars, faces the very real prospect of losing that job next year when the money runs out.
The state is broke. In our current budget, state support of schools was cut by more than $300 million and we still face a $1.2 billion deficit in 2011, so don't look for state government to fill the hole. The only other recourse is the property tax and in this economy when people all over Wisconsin are struggling to stay in their homes, that would be folly.
The history of state budgeting in the last decade should be a valuable history lesson for school boards and administrators all across Wisconsin - one-time money can never sustain ongoing spending. It will only lead to digging an ever-increasing hole of deficit year after year. It's time for government - and that includes school districts - to do what hard-working families across the state have already done. Face the facts. Make do with less.
The year-round program covers annual physical exams, primary care office visits at the assigned clinic, including visits when the child is sick, as well as some prescription medicines.
"It's a new program so I think I signed up 12 families probably in a couple weeks time at the end of school last year," she said.
The program starts with the school nurse in every school in the district. The nurse identifies students based on two main criteria: they don't have any health insurance and do not qualify for any state programs like Badger Care.
The nurse then forwards an application for the program to the health care provider that has been paired up with the school. The health care provider then contacts the student's parents.
The program is available to undocumented students. MMSD Superintendent Dan Nerad defends this decision by citing the U.S. Supreme Court case that requires schools to educate all children regardless of immigration status.
"These are children that have needs and we have an obligation to educate them both legally and ethically and morally but underscoring it's a legal obligation first and foremost for us," he said. "And when kids aren't well they need to be taken care of."
or public schools looking to improve their curricula, it's hard to argue with a free product.
That has proved to be a good thing for Web-based education company Everfi, which has raised $11 million in Series A financing from New Enterprise Associates and Eric Schmidt's TomorrowVentures, as well as angels including Michael Chasen, chief executive of Blackboard, which sells a learning management system.
Everfi provides Web-based learning programs for students, particularly in public schools, focusing on subjects that are not covered in traditional courses, such as nutrition and wellness, personal finance and student loan management.
The company's curriculum is different from the traditional textbook model because it includes 3-D animated gaming-oriented applications. For example, for a lesson about stocks, students virtually visit the New York Stock Exchange and learn how to make a trade, while for a section about student loans, students virtually go to a college campus and learn how to fill out forms and the like.
It is shocking to hear that almost no one in Seattle Public Schools had a job description, had regular performance reviews, or even had any set criteria for a performance review. That represents a grosteque failure of management at just about every level of District management, but primarily at the top. I don't know why people think that Raj Manhas was in any way capable, because the CACIEE final report was basically a catalog of his utter failure to fulfill any part of his responsibilities. Joseph Olchefske was no better, and John Stanford started the whole thing by failing/refusing to take on a quality assurance role when he de-centralized decision-making. I certainly appluad the Superintendent for introducing management to Seattle Public Schools. But the REAL focus of her Performance Management effort is schools. Not teachers and principals so much as schools taken a whole.
We've taken data from other federal reporting systems and compared it with the data found in USASpending.gov across three categories: Consistency, Completeness and Timeliness. How close are the reported dollar amounts to the yearly estimates? How many of the required fields are filled out in each record? And how long did it take the agency to report the money once it was allocated to a project?
"This has become known as the iPad class," Corey Angst, assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, told his students on their first day of class Aug. 24. "It's actually not...it's 'Project Management.'"
A member of Notre Dame's ePublishing Working Group, Angst is debuting the University's first and only class taught using Apple's new wireless tablet computer to replace traditional textbooks. The course is part of a unique, year-long Notre Dame study of eReaders, and Angst is conducting the first phase using iPads, which just went on sale to the public in April.
"One unique thing we are doing is conducting research on the iPad," Angst says. "We want to know whether students feel the iPads are useful and how they plan to use them. I want them to tell me, 'I found this great app that does such and such. I want this to be organic...We have an online Wiki discussion group where students can share their ideas."
The working group participants are from a broad array of colleges and departments, including the Mendoza College of Business, Notre Dame Law School, College of Arts and Letters, First Year of Studies, Hesburgh Libraries, Office of Information Technologies, Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore, Office of Sustainability, Notre Dame Press and Office of Institutional Equity.
THIS WEEK marks the start of the school year. Unfortunately, Massachusetts students are returning to classrooms that haven't changed much since their parents and grandparents attended. Meanwhile, students in other states are taking advantage of a learning opportunity that students here are denied -- online education.
Massachusetts should be in the forefront of using computers and the Internet to change where, when, and how students learn. We have the expertise to lead in virtual education, but the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has restricted school district efforts to introduce virtual schools.
The education reform act approved by the Legislature in January makes it easy for districts to create virtual schools. Of course, we don't envision a future in which online learning replaces brick-and-mortar public schools. Face-to-face peer contact and personal teacher mentoring will always be an important part of learning, especially at the lower grades. However, an increasing portion of learning can occur online with the support of peers and with less direct supervision by teachers. In the long run, this may be the only way to significantly expand learning time within the state's economic constraints.
Robert J. Samuelson, the Newsweek and Washington Post economics columnist, edited my first news story. We were both college sophomores. I was trying out for the student newspaper. He was already a seasoned reporter and editor on the staff. He tossed the typewritten sheets back to me and said to try again.
I did as I was told. I learned much from him during that first encounter, as I have continued to do during our long friendship. He enlightens me even on topics in my specialty, such as his latest column in the Post, "The failure of school reform."
With three seats open in this November's election for the Berryessa Union School District Board of Trustees, twice that number are vying to fill those spots.
The candidates, two of whom are incumbents, have a diverse range of experience with various accomplishments.
David Cohen
Cohen, 42, is a Berryessa school board member and has been since 2006. He is one of the candidates running as an incumbent this year.
With a second-grade daughter and 4-year-old son who will be entering the district next year, Cohen said he brings two valuable perspectives: that of a parent and previous school board member.
"The little bit of a difference is I've been on the board ... I've seen the pressure on people to make decisions," he said. But also Cohen's "children will be affected by the decisions made."
When Cohen joined the district four years ago he campaigned under a platform to make sure music, art and counselors were maintained since not all students learn the same way.
An armed altercation Friday outside West High School involving known and suspected members of two street gangs involved in an April homicide heightened concerns of possible retaliation, police and school officials said Tuesday.
Sgt. Amy Schwartz, who leads the Madison Police Department's Crime Prevention Gang Unit, said it is not known if members of the South Side Carnales gang went to the high school looking for members of the rival Clanton 14, or C-14 gang.
But staff at West and the city's three other main high schools and two middle schools were told Tuesday to determine if safety plans are needed for any students who might be at risk, said Luis Yudice, security coordinator for the Madison School District.
Police have not notified the School District of a specific threat against any student, Yudice said.
But authorities have been concerned about possible retaliation since the April 28 shooting death of Antonio Perez, 19, who police say founded Madison's C-14 gang several years ago while he was a high school student. Five people, who police say are associated with the South Side Carnales and MS-13 gangs, are charged in Perez's slaying. Two of them remain at large.
"But authorities have been concerned about possible retaliation since the April 28 shooting death of Antonio Perez, 19, who police say founded Madison's C-14 gang several years ago while he was a high school student."
For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.
"We have known these principles for some time, and it's intriguing that schools don't pick them up, or that people don't learn them by trial and error," said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken."
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are "visual learners" and others are auditory; some are "left-brain" students, others "right-brain." In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. "The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing," the researchers concluded.
Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. "We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere," said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book "Why Don't Students Like School?"
Yet in Newark's public schools, as in many other urban districts, our children's endless talent meets headfirst with a stultifying bureaucracy that too often extinguishes rather than ignites their genius. It is beset with rules that ignore the individual talents of school leaders and teachers.
Its primary features -- tenure, lockstep pay, and seniority -- deny the complexity and creativity of effective teaching and learning, implying that teachers and principals are little more than interchangeable assemblyline workers. These practices instill performance-blindness into the fabric of our schools, dishonoring the talent, commitment and effort of our many good teachers and principals, whose excellence is systematically unrecognized and thus underappreciated. This both disrespects the notion of education as a sophisticated profession and produces a system in which student achievement is peripheral to the day-to-day operations of schools.
Simply put, our children have no limits; our schools have too many.
The future for our children depends on revolutionary school reform, executed relentlessly. Our children can no longer afford tinkering around the edges. This reform must include at least four elements:
•Reform of tenure and collective bargaining, including eliminating tenure for principals and significantly restricting it for teachers.
Efforts to improve education in the U.S. has included financial incentives for high-performing teachers and programs have targeted middle- and high-school students, but a recent study found success in giving money to kids as young as third grade who scored well on standardized tests.
The pay-for-performance plan targeted third through sixth graders who took standardized tests in math, reading, writing, science, and social studies. The students could earn up to $100 -- $20 per score of Advanced in each test. Students who scored proficient were awarded $15 per test. In order to make sure the proceeds went directly to the students, payment was made in "Coshocton Children's Bucks," which could only be redeemed by kids for children's items. Participation in the program was randomized based on a lottery as specified by Robert Simpson, a local factory owner, who financed the effort.
The program showed generally positive results, with the biggest gains coming in math. Students who were eligible for the payments improved about 0.15 standard deviations, a statistically significant result. Though there were small improvements shown for other subject areas, the difference wasn't statistically significant.
I've been giving thought to the School Board elections next year. I might run. I say that not for anyone to comment on but because I'm musing out loud on it. There are many reasons NOT to run but I have one main reason TO run.
Accountability.
To this day, I am mystified over the number of people who run for office that don't believe they have to explain anything to voters AFTER they are elected. And I'm talking here about people whose work is not done with a vote (like the Mayor) but people who have to work in a group (City Council, School Board).
I truly doubt that these people get challenged on every single vote but I'm sure people ask on some. Why would they not respond? If asked, what data or information did you use to make this decision, why can't they answer in specific? Why wouldn't you be accountable to explain how you came to your decision?
Locally, the April, 2011 school board election features two seats, currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman.
When the Michigan Department of Education classified 41 schools in the Detroit Public Schools system as "failing" last month, I braced myself for a thunderous public outcry.
After all, it was only a few weeks ago that a very energized group descended on the Detroit City Council to loudly and angrily express themselves about education in Detroit. Surely these concerned citizens, having just voiced such a strong concern about education, would leap to action to demand that something be done to fix these "failing" schools now.
But that hasn't happened. The silence, as the old cliché goes, has been deafening.
Why would people who were so passionate and loud so recently remain silent about a report that shows our children are being severely shortchanged? Why would members of the school board who fought to preserve the status quo remain equally silent about such a devastating report?
After all, nothing is as important to our children's future as education. And nothing is more important to our future as a city than our young people.
This is an encouraging season for education reform, and the latest development is a bipartisan political breakout on vouchers in the unlikely state of Pennsylvania.
Last month, and to widespread surprise, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato came out in support of school vouchers for underprivileged kids. Mr. Onorato said that education "grants"--he avoided the term vouchers--"would give low-income families in academically distressed communities direct choices about which schools their children should attend."
Mr. Onorato's Republican opponent, state Attorney General Tom Corbett, is also a strong backer of education choice, which means that come November Pennsylvania voters will get to choose between two candidates who are on record in support of a statewide school voucher program.
Mr. Onorato, the Allegheny County Executive, adopted his new position at the urging of state lawmaker Tony Williams, a voucher proponent whom he defeated in a May primary. The speculation is that Mr. Onorato, who trails Mr. Corbett in the polls, is looking to attract financial support from pro-voucher businessmen who backed Mr. Williams in the primary.
The lawn is meticulously manicured, as if the groundskeeper's tools include a cuticle scissors. Classic brick buildings, a bell tolling the hour and concrete lion statues almost convince me that I'm at an East Coast college. But this is Lakeside School in Northeast Seattle.
This is where super-achievers went to school - Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Craig McCaw to name a few. Many of Seattle's affluent families send their kids here for a challenging private education. With an acceptance rate of 24 percent, Lakeside is the most elite private high school in the Northwest. This photo of Bliss Hall was taken before the current renovation project started.
So what was I doing there? Just wandering, and wondering if my children would have a better start in life if they went to private schools.
"As someone who has experienced both public schooling and private schooling, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind: sending your child to a private school is one of the best decisions you can make for him or her," says Peter Rasmussen, a recent Lakeside alumnus. "In retrospect, if my parents made me pay my tuition all by myself, I would have. That's how valuable a Lakeside education is."
Recall now the biblical phrase, "from whence comes my help?" It mentions looking up to the hills and Detroiters are doing just that.
They are looking to the Hills of Bloomfield, Auburn Hills, and Rochester Hills. They are looking to the rich green lawns of Troy, Sterling Heights, Farmington, and Gross Pointe. And yes, they are looking to their excellent schools too.
I have no doubt that this mother's prayers have been duplicated by thousands of Detroit parents. The results of the 2010 census will no doubt show that minority populations have increased in suburban cities and overall population in Detroit will yet again hit an all time low. So while they desperately scramble to enroll their children in charter schools and suburban schools of choice, parents still have their compass set due north. Way north.
This is the New Black Migration. And if school leaders cannot devise a way to make the city schools a viable option for parents who want the best for their children, it will be a migration whose tide will know no end.
Public education can benefit from more transparency. The disclosure of data on student achievement and teacher effectiveness can be a good thing -- for teachers, parents and American education.
"Too often our systems keep all of our teachers in the dark about the quality of their own work," Duncan told an audience in Little Rock, Ark. "In other fields, we talk about success constantly, with statistics and other measures to prove it. Why, in education, are we scared to talk about what success looks like?"
It seems a great many teachers have no such fear. Duncan noted that more than 2,000 Los Angeles teachers had called the Times last week to ask for their scores.
The concern has always been that achievement tests are not a reliable or complete measure of teacher eectiveness. It's a valid concern. Certainly, test scores are not a complete measure, and should never be used as such in decisions on hiring, firing or career advancement. Whether or not test scores can be a reliable, or fair, measure depends on how thorough and careful the analysis.
Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the seven continents or the governor of their state. He started wondering: What if I were in charge?
Three years later, Mr. Lee, at just 25, is getting a chance to find out. Today, Mr. Lee and five other teachers -- all veterans of Teach for America, a corps of college graduates who undergo five weeks of training and make a two-year commitment to teaching -- are running a public school here with 650 children from kindergarten through eighth grade.
As the doors opened on Thursday at Brick Avon Academy, they welcomed students not as novice teachers following orders from the central office, but as "teacher-leaders."
"This is a fantasy," Mr. Lee said. "It's six passionate people who came together and said: 'Enough is enough.' We're just tired of seeing failure."
When Marshall High School opens for the new school year Tuesday, it will have an almost entirely new teaching staff, a revamped curriculum and a $2 million infusion of federal money.
The students and teachers at Marshall--a hulking three-story building on the city's violent West Side known as much for its powerhouse basketball teams as its abysmal test scores--are among millions nationwide who will see changes this fall as part of President Barack Obama's push to overhaul K-12 public schools.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has used much of his $100 billion budget--almost twice what his recent predecessors had--to lure states into reshaping schools through programs such as Race to the Top and school transformations like the one Marshall is undergoing.
"Mainly, this is a year to lay a foundation for the long-term reforms that will get all students college-ready," said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, a nonpartisan group of state school chiefs.
American students' lack of knowledge about the world is unsettling.
According to surveys by National Geographic and Asia Society, young Americans are next to last in their knowledge of geography and current affairs compared to peers in eight other countries, and the overwhelming majority of college-bound seniors cannot find Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel on a world map.
Less than one half of today's high school students study a foreign language, and while a million study French, a language spoken by some 80 million worldwide, less than 75,000 study Chinese, a language spoken by some 1.3 billion. Minority students especially have little access to global topics taught in "higher performing" schools, ranging from languages and economics to exchanges, arts and cultural activities.
The typical teacher or supervisor is not prepared to address this gap: most educators have not taken any international courses and comparatively few participate in study abroad programs.
Schools: The Disaster Movie A debate has been raging over why our education system is failing. A new documentary by the director of An Inconvenient Truth throws fuel on the fire.
The Harlem-based educator and activist Geoffrey Canada first met the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim in 2008, when Canada was in Los Angeles raising money for the Children's Defense Fund, which he chairs. Guggenheim told Canada that he was making a documentary about the crisis in America's schools and implored him to be in it. Canada had heard this pitch before, more times than he could count, from a stream of camera-toting do-gooders whose movies were destined to be seen by audiences smaller than the crowd on a rainy night at a Brooklyn Cyclones game. Canada replied to Guggenheim as he had to all the others: with a smile, a nod, and a distracted "Call my office," which translated to "Buzz off."
Then Guggenheim mentioned another film he'd made--An Inconvenient Truth--and Canada snapped to attention. "I had absolutely seen it," Canada recalls, "and I was stunned because it was so powerful that my wife told me we couldn't burn incandescent bulbs anymore. She didn't become a zealot; she just realized that [climate change] was serious and we have to do something." Canada agreed to be interviewed by Guggenheim, but still had his doubts. "I honestly didn't think you could make a movie to get people to care about the kids who are most at risk."
Two years later, Guggenheim's new film, Waiting for "Superman," is set to open in New York and Los Angeles on September 24, with a national release soon to follow. It arrives after a triumphal debut at Sundance and months of buzz-building screenings around the country, all designed to foster the impression that Guggenheim has uncorked a kind of sequel: the Inconvenient Truth of education, an eye-opening, debate-defining, socially catalytic cultural artifact.
Everyone should see this film; Waiting for Superman. Madison's new Urban League President, Kaleem Caire hosted a screening of The Lottery last spring. (Thanks to Chan Stroman for correcting me on the movie name!)
The Ohio Department of Education grades schools each year. But, can parents be sure they are getting an accurate picture of their child's school?
The lines are blurred at best, and experts say it takes examining a school's results over time to enlarge the snapshot given by the state report cards.
Problem is, parents, educators and even state officials are sometimes caught relying too heavily on one specific area, be it how well students perform on a certain test or how a district performs with particular student groups, such as low income and minority.
The start of the school year brings another one of those nagging, often unquenchable worries of parenthood: How good will my child's teachers be? Teachers tend to have word-of-mouth reputations, of course. But it is hard to know how well those reputations match up with a teacher's actual abilities. Schools generally do not allow parents to see any part of a teacher's past evaluations, for instance. And there is nothing resembling a rigorous, Consumer Reports-like analysis of schools, let alone of individual teachers. For the most part, parents just have to hope for the best.
That, however, may be starting to change. A few months ago, a team of reporters at The Los Angeles Times and an education economist set out to create precisely such a consumer guide to education in Los Angeles. The reporters requested and received seven years of students' English and math elementary-school test scores from the school district. The economist then used a statistical technique called value-added analysis to see how much progress students had made, from one year to the next, under different third- through fifth-grade teachers. The variation was striking. Under some of the roughly 6,000 teachers, students made great strides year after year. Under others, often at the same school, students did not. The newspaper named a few teachers -- both stars and laggards -- and announced that it would release the approximate rankings for all teachers, along with their names.
The articles have caused an electric reaction. The president of the Los Angeles teachers union called for a boycott of the newspaper. But the union has also suggested it is willing to discuss whether such scores can become part of teachers' official evaluations. Meanwhile, more than 1,700 teachers have privately reviewed their scores online, and hundreds have left comments that will accompany them.
Doug, a longtime science teacher in Alaska, makes this observation:
"It is really interesting to me that President Obama can let BP take the lead in cleaning up the disaster in the Gulf, and yet teachers have got hedge fund managers, mayors, think tank policy wonks, billionaire vulture capitalists, and no real education experts, calling the shots on public school "reform," with Arne Duncan as department head, whose teaching experience comes from volunteering at his mom's after school program (He actually says this, as if it means something!) mouthing a bunch of nonsense about educating our way to a better economy and making education the civil rights issue of our generation. Well, no. The economy tanked because of a monumental failure of government to regulate the financial industry, and manufacturing long ago moved out of the country. And before we can talk about civil rights, we need to straighten out some things with health care, endless war, mass incarceration, racism and immigration, and state-sponsored torture.
When BP chief executive Tony Hayward appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Chairman Henry Waxman said the Committee reviewed 30,000 documents related to the oil disaster and found "no evidence that you (Hayward) paid any attention to the tremendous risks BP was taking." Likewise no one at the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, or the House and Senate education committees etc. is paying any attention to the tremendous risks the U. S. Department of Education is taking with its money bribes to the states.
Dr. Diane Ravitch is a polarizing figure in the education world. From 1991-1993, Ravitch served as Assistant Secretary of Education in President George H.W. Bush's administration. Originally a strong proponent of school choice, vouchers and high-stakes testing, her views have changed considerably. She argues for her change of heart and in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
It was recently announced that Dr. Ravitch will receive NEA's 2010 Friend of Education Award. CEA recently interviewed Dr. Ravitch about the role of teaching and learning in the age of accountability.
Let's say you were to walk into an elementary classroom in any school district ten years from now. If we stay on the present course set by NCLB, how will teaching and learning be different?
I think that there will be a great deal of drilling and teaching to the test. Most of the day will be spent on reading and mathematics. Kids will be encouraged to take lots and lots of test prep. This is happening now and I don't see any change in the foreseeable future. The secretary has said that 100 percent of all kids should be proficient. There doesn't seem to be an end date where this regime will conclude in victory. Now that so many states are tying teacher evaluation to test scores, it is predictable that we will have a system in which testing of basic skills is the basic purpose of education.
Detroit is the next city to throw away the administrative reins and open the doors for an all-teacher-led school. Serving pre-K through eighth grade and roughly 450 students, the Palmer Park Preparatory Academy (P3A) will open in Detroit Public Schools this fall-- sans principal--replacing the Barbara Jordan Elementary School, which closed in spring 2010 to become a turnaround school after being identified as low performing. The school, which DPS students and families will apply to, is modeled after similar schools in Boston, Milwaukee, Denver and Los Angeles. P3A will partner with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to form a robust, individualized curriculum.
The Detroit Public Schools teacher-led school development team with their reform partners, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Many teachers felt so passionately that they offered to sacrifice their tenure to prove they didn't fear the added responsibility of accountability, says Ann Crowley, DPS teacher and co-founder of the group Detroit Children First, an organization who had been vying for an all-teacher school for several years.
"Many excellent teachers felt they could get more for their children if they had a greater voice in the decisions that are made in their schools," says Crowley.
PARENTS seeking the best education for their offspring often look to ancient institutions. Small wonder that schools run by either the Catholic church or the Church of England are often high on their list. Almost a quarter of all children in the state system attend a religious school, most of them Anglican- or Catholic-run primary schools.
In his drive to give parents more choice in educating their children, Tony Blair raised the profile of church schools by encouraging existing ones to expand and new ones to set up shop. The former prime minister was also keen on incorporating other religions into the state system. The first state-funded Muslim and Sikh schools opened soon after he took power, and the first Hindu school in 2008.
Mr Blair's successors have lacked his zeal, but religious schools continue to flourish. One reason is that their pupils tend to do better than others in exams. In 2009, 57% of them at around age 16 passed national exams (GCSEs) with acceptable grades, including those in maths and English, compared with 51% at non-religious state schools.
In a ruling by California's chief justice nominee, a state appeals court has barred a school district from drug testing all students in extracurricular activities such as choir, the school band and Future Farmers of America.
The Shasta Union High School District in Northern California began the testing in 2008, saying the prospect of being disqualified from a favorite after-school activity would discourage youths from using drugs or alcohol.
The district noted that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that random drug tests of all students in extracurricular programs did not violate the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches.
At $578 million--or about $140,000 per student--the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wilshire is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city's Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores.
The K-12 complex isn't merely an overwrought paean to the nation's most celebrated liberal political family. It's a jarring reminder that money doesn't guarantee success--though it certainly beautifies failure.
The cluster of schools is situated on the premises of the old Ambassador Hotel where the New York senator and presidential candidate was shot in 1968. The school district insists that it chose the site not merely for sentimental reasons, but because it was the only space available in the area and the property was dirt cheap.
Whiteflame128, a participant in my Admissions 101 discussion group, described what happened when he graduated from a Fairfax County high school and showed up for college enrollment with an entire freshman year's worth of credit from Advanced Placement courses and tests. "My advisor had absolutely no idea what to do with my schedule at orientation," he said.
Many students have encountered this problem, some of them in just the last few weeks in this enrollment season. All those extra credits, from AP or International Baccalaureate, don't fit easily into the standard college schedule. They force newcomers to compete with second-year students for limited space in second-year courses. They aggravate the need to take less favored courses just to maintain full-time status. They waste time and money. What do to about this is hard to figure out. Most of the colleges seem to throw up their hands.
Admissions 101 participant grcxx3 said "my son and I were just caught off-guard about how difficult it would be to schedule classes for that first year." Grcxxe said the AP, IB or local college dual enrollment her son took in high school meant he was "coming in with 18-plus hours of credit, much of which [could exempt him from] common freshman classes (like freshman English) and basic general ed classes that are often taken during the first year"
In his most recent post he also hands me some ammo to fire back at him. He quotes an online letter to President Obama from a reader, Ira Socol. Socol is critical of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), as an example of the kind of charter school the president admires, and compares KIPP unfavorably---too rigid, too uncreative, too imperialist---to the Sidwell Friends School which Obama's daughters attend. This is reminiscent of a point made by the late, great Gerald W. Bracey at the beginning of the Obama administration.
Sadly, Socol makes the same mistake Jim has made many times. He cites as evidence for his views of teaching at KIPP and Sidwell some descriptions he found on their Web sites. Any good teacher would tell you that is no way to judge a school. Socol gives no indication he has ever spent time inside a KIPP school, or Sidwell. Neither has Jim, unless I have missed something. They are among the many KIPP critics who consider it sufficient to judge schools by what they read on the Internet.
I think they should visit the schools they write about and tell us what they see. All of the KIPP schools I know have an open door policy. There are 99 KIPP schools in 20 states and D.C., including one in each of the 20 largest cities except Phoenix. I have visited many KIPP schools and Sidwell. I think Socol, and Jim, will be surprised, once they get inside, at how little difference there is between the great teaching going on at both places.
The group, including the presidents of the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce and United Way of Greater L.A., urges the use of student test score data and more access to information about instructors for families.
A group of business and civic leaders is urging the Los Angeles school district and teachers union to quickly develop a new evaluation system that incorporates student test score data and gives families more access to information about instructors.
"This system should be transparent and the results of the teacher evaluations should be made available to parents," said a letter signed by former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, as well as the presidents of both the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce and United Way of Greater L.A., and 18 other people.
The civic group also endorsed including value-added analysis -- a statistical method that links student test scores to their teachers -- in teacher performance reviews and cited a Times series on the subject as one reason they decided to weigh in.
Interesting discussion on the teachers contract at the Daily Kos. From the thread (italics mine, bold theirs):
Wednesday afternoon the Seattle teachers' union (SEA) achieved a huge victory over the proponents of what is popularly (and erroneously) known as "education reform."
After many, many hours of hard negotiations, the SEA negotiators achieved a tentative contract with the district. What is remarkable about this contract is that:
Teachers' final evaluations will not depend on student test scores. * Teachers' jobs will not depend on student test scores.
Teachers' pay will not depend on student test scores.
This tentative agreement was reached despite intensive efforts by the Broad-Foundation-connected superintendent to insert test scores into all three of the above areas.
And actually, it is a real victory for the teachers (in terms of ridding themselves of what they did not want in the contract) and anyone who does not support the ed-reform push by wealthy foundations and the DOE.
In search of a quick fix to your school's dropout problem? This spring I visited a low performing high school AKA "dropout factory" that had recently made a lot of progress in improving its graduation rate. I wanted to know what it had been doing to improve. It turns out the biggest factor seemed to be their transition to a block schedule. I have not figured out if this is just a fad or is a trend, but I have since come across more and more high schools serving at risk students that have also recently made this transition. I had always thought that block scheduling was about providing more time for students in core subjects so that they could learn the material at a slower more in depth pass. It turns out that I was wrong and that in many cases the opposite might be happening.
Here is how it works. By redesigning the same number of instructional minutes in the school year, these high schools are able to move from offering students 6 courses a year to offering 8 courses a year. Now my initial assumption was that the school must adjust the total number of classes that a student needs to pass during his or her high school career in order to graduate. Not so. With the new block schedule, a student can simply fail more classes, and still graduate.
These include better infrastructure to support learning, new progression choices for Normal (Academic) students, new specialised schools for Normal (Technical) students, and an extension of the Integrated Programme to more schools .
A new medical school will start in 2013 and MOE will also fund a number of new places in new degree courses in NAFA and LASALLE.
Opening Remarks by Dr Ng Eng Hen at the National Day Rally Media Conference held at the MOE Function Room 31 August 2010.
Investing in All Learners, Creating New Opportunities and Pathways
Singapore's rapid progress has been made possible only through the sheer ability, tenacity and wits of its people.
We must nurture this critical human resource through education as it is our most precious asset. Singapore is fortunate to have a strong and respected education system and good teachers, which have resulted from persistent efforts in the last three decades.
The role of test scores in evaluating teachers is a prickly and complicated issue, which is why California has been avoiding the conversation for so long. Fortunately, that procrastination is no longer possible after The Times took the bold step of analyzing standardized test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District to see whether individual teachers appeared to be successful at raising their students' scores.
Given the current nationwide push to include test data in teacher evaluations, it was time to strip away the mystery about test scores and take a close look at what they are, what they show and don't show, and what teachers, administrators and the rest of us might learn from them. The Times' articles and online database rating nearly 6,000 elementary school teachers allow the examination to begin.
Another national magazine says Madison is one of the nation's best cities in which to raise a family.
That's something to celebrate.
But Kiplinger's, a monthly business and personal finance periodical, also raps ours city schools as "weak" in its latest edition.
That's troubling.
"Madison city schools are weak relative to the suburban schools," the magazine wrote in its analysis of the pros and cons of living here with children.
Really?
The magazine apparently used average test scores to reach its conclusion. By that single measure, yes, Dane County's suburban schools tend to do better.
But the city schools have more challenges - higher concentrations of students in poverty, more students who speak little or no English when they enroll, more students with special needs.
None of those factors should be excuses. Yet they are reality.
And Madison, in some ways, is ahead of the 'burbs. It consistently graduates some of the highest-achieving students in the state. It offers far more kinds of classes and clubs. Its diverse student population can help prepare children for an increasingly diverse world.
College Station's 2009-2010 budget was $93,718.470, supporting 9,712 students = $9,649.76 per student. . They also publish an annual check register, allowing interested citizens to review expenditures.
Madison's 2009-2010 budget was $370,287,471 for 24,295 students = $15,241 per student, 57.9% higher than College Station.
College Station's A and M Consolidated High School offers 22 AP classes while Madison East offers 12, Memorial 25 (8 of which are provided by Florida Virtual...), LaFollette 13 and West 8.
College Station's "student profile" notes that the District is 59.3% white, 31.4% are economically disadvantaged while 10.3% are in talented and gifted.
I went to McDonald's this weekend with the kids. We go to McDonald's to eat about once a week because it is a mile from the house and has an indoor play area. Our normal routine is to walk in to McDonald's, stand in line, order, stand around waiting for the order, sit down, eat and play.
On Sunday, this decades-old routine changed forever. When we walked in to McDonald's, an attractive woman in a suit greeted us and said, "Are you planning to visit the play area tonight?" The kids screamed, "Yeah!" "McDonald's has a new system that you can use to order your food right in the play area. Would you like to try it?" The kids screamed, "Yeah!"
The woman walks us over to a pair of kiosks in the play area. She starts to show me how the kiosks work and the kids scream, "We want to do it!" So I pull up a chair and the kids stand on it while the (extremely patient) woman in a suit walks the kids through the screens. David ordered his food, Irena ordered her food, I ordered my food. It's a simple system. Then it was time to pay. Interestingly, the kiosk only took cash in the form of bills. So I fed my bills into the machine. Then you take a little plastic number to set on your table and type the number in. The transaction is complete.
I take it that you think that nearly all of the value of schooling is signaling? I used to take that view too, but the accumulation of evidence that I've seen leads me to believe that isn't the case.
For one thing I find it very hard to believe that we would waste so many resources on a nearly unproductive enterprise. There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there trying to make money by selling cheaper, in time and money, versions of education and they aren't very successful. Mainstream schools have experimented with programmed learning, lectures on video, self-paced learning, etc. and none of the methods have caught on. Why wouldn't they if they worked?
Of course its hard to believe that reading novels and poems contributes much to ones productivity on the job. So how do I square curriculum content with my view that education is productive? Here goes:
1. Education isn't mainly about learning specific subject matter. Rather education is mainly about practicing the sort of self-discipline that is necessary to be productive in a modern work environment. High school allows you to practice showing up on time and doing what you are told. College allows you to practice and work out techniques that work for you that allow you to take on and complete on time complicated multi-part tasks in an environment where you have considerable freedom about how you spend your time. Some people may be more talented than others at this sort of thing (you come to mind as someone who is particularly talented at self-discipline), but this is also an acquired skill that one can develop with practice, and everyone needs to develop certain work habits that make one more productive at both types of tasks.
Kindle owners buy twice as many books as non-Kindle owners. Just one of the many signs that while the paper book is dead, the narrative will live on.
If you are saying to yourself, "That sounds horrible. I hope books do not go away," I ask you to consider the world's poorest and most remote kids.
The manufactured book stunts learning, especially for those children. The last thing these children should have are physical books. They are too costly, too heavy, fall out-of-date and are sharable only in some common and limited physical space.
A whole week of catharsis, yet the Garden State still agonizes over the loss of $400 million in Race To The Top money. Ex-Commissioner Bret Schundler is out on his keister -- amid calls for legislative hearings because of a botched question that pushed us into the losers' column by three points. (NJ came in 11th with 437.8 points; Ohio, the 10th of 10 winners, got 440.8.)
NJ Facebook Group: New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie's Pay Freeze
More pertinent is the NJ Department of Education's perceived ineptitude. During the presentation of our application to federal reviewers, five high-level DOE staffers were unable to conjure up basic fiscal information for 2008 and 2009, instead of the mistakenly/cravenly entered information on 2011. And that's after spending $500K on a consultant.
Was the incorrect answer a clerical error? Was it a ham-handed effort to elude accountability on state school aid cuts?
Final answer: it's irrelevant.
We didn't lose the Race To The Top by a grimace-inducing three points because of a whiffed answer valued at less than one-half percent of the total 500 points. We lost because our ambitious reform plans elicited lukewarm support from local school boards and superintendents (about half signed on) and ice-cold censure from NJEA affiliates.
For comparison's sake, New York State won and had buy-in from every local union president.
FOR decades, college fees have risen faster than Americans' ability to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students. The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding bed and board). Academic inflation makes most other kinds look modest by comparison. Students may not be getting a good deal in return
With U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan this week advocating for transparency for teacher evaluations that include, in part, standardized test scores, the National Education Association weighed in today, asking members how they'd like to be measured.
NEA staffer Kevin Hart asked teachers to reply on the union's Facebook page, and reported some interesting answers.
"They believe a well-designed process can help them improve at their jobs and will ultimately benefit students," Hart wrote on the union's NEA Today website. "But teachers believe any evaluation process should be fair, consistently applied, and take into account the realities of their profession."
Teachers told the secretary that faculty members love what they do and treat each other like family. Parents said their children feel comfortable in the welcoming school, and Superintendent Thomas Brennan thanked city officials for providing much needed resources for books and staff.
Duncan was at Bakersville, labeled a "persistently low-achieving school" by the state Department of Education, as part of his Courage in the Classroom tour throughout the state this week. On Monday, Duncan visited Keene State College, and on Tuesday afternoon, he headed to Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to talk to military families.
Did Bill Gates waste a billion dollars because he failed to understand the formula for the standard deviation of the mean? Howard Wainer makes the case in the entertaining Picturing the Uncertain World (first chapter with the Gates story free here). The Gates Foundation certainly spent a lot of money, along with many others, pushing for smaller schools and a lot of the push came because people jumped to the wrong conclusion when they discovered that the smallest schools were consistently among the best performing schools.
.......
States like North Carolina which reward schools for big performance gains without correcting for size end up rewarding small schools for random reasons. Worst yet, the focus on small schools may actually be counter-productive because large schools do have important advantages such as being able to offer more advanced classes and better facilities.
My Reasons for Optimism on Education: Across the country, new institutions like charter schools are disproving the old assumption that economic circumstances determine outcomes.
Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the latest winners of Race to the Top, the initiative he devised to leverage federal dollars to drive education reform at the state level. While no grant process is perfect, the competition drove a remarkable volume of new plans and even new laws designed to advance educational opportunity. Many states showed boldness--and I'm particularly excited that all 12 winning states mentioned Teach For America in their applications.
This fall marks Teach For America's 20th anniversary, and I have spent much of the summer reflecting on the sea change that has taken place in public education over the last two decades.
When we set out to recruit our first corps of teachers in 1990, it would be fair to say that there was no organized movement to ensure educational opportunity for all children in our nation. The prevailing assumption in most policy circles was that socioeconomic circumstances determined educational outcomes. Thus, it was unrealistic to expect teachers or schools to overcome the effects of poverty.
When Jaime Escalante led a class of East Los Angeles students to pass the AP calculus exam in 1982, the Educational Testing Service questioned the results, and Hollywood went on to make the hit movie "Stand and Deliver" about his success. Escalante was lionized as an outlier--not as someone whose example could be widely replicated.
All through the community, I have been hearing families express varying emotions about the beginning of a new school year this week. Some are glad for the relief from costly summer programs. Others are anxious about changes for their children who are moving from elementary to middle or middle to high school. One parent even shared how her daughter wakes up in the middle of the night asking questions about kindergarten.
At a recent United Way Days of Caring event in Middleton for more than 100 students from Madison-area Urban Ministry, Packers and Northport, lots of children expressed excitement over starting school again and appreciated the fun as well as the backpacks filled with school supplies that Middleton partners provided.
The schools where we send our children to learn and the people we ask to respect and teach them stir up a lot of emotions, just like an article about Wisconsin ACT scores stirred up a lot of emotions in me. ACT stands for American College Testing and the scores test are used to gain entrance into college, which translates for most Americans into an ability to live well economically or to become the institutionalized poor. Certainly the good news is that Wisconsin scored third in the nation and that Madison schools' scores went up slightly.
The bad news is when your look at the scores based on racial groups, once again in Madison, in Wisconsin and in the U.S., the scores of African-American students are the lowest.
The fight for teacher accountability is gaining traction around the country, and the latest evidence is that the unions are objecting to a newspaper bold enough to report . . . the news. That's the story out of Los Angeles, where on Sunday the Los Angeles Times published evaluations of some 6,000 city school teachers based on how well their students performed on standardized tests.
The paper is defending its publication of the database as a public service amid union boycott threats, and rightly so. Since 1990, K-12 education spending has grown by 191% and now consumes more than 40% of the state budget. The Cato Institute reports that L.A. spends almost $30,000 per pupil, including capital costs for school buildings, yet the high school graduation rate is 40.6%, the second worst among large school districts in the U.S.
After decades of measuring education results only by money spent, with little to show for it, parents are finally looking for an objective measure to judge teacher effectiveness. Taxpayers also deserve to know whether the money they're paying teachers is having any impact on learning or merely financing fat pay and pensions in return for mediocrity. The database generated 230,000 page views within hours of being published on the paper's website, so the public would appear to want this information.
Union leader A.J. Duffy of the United Teachers Los Angeles stupidly called for a boycott of the Times. Boycotts can be sensible things, but threatening to boycott a newspaper is like threatening to throw it into a briar patch. Hell, Duffy might as well have volunteered to sell Times subscriptions, door-to-door, as to threaten a boycott. Doesn't he understand that the UTLA has no constituency outside its own members and lip service from members of other Los Angeles unions? Even they know the UTLA stands between them and a good education for their children.
Duffy further grouched that the Times was "leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by ... a test." [Ellipsis in the original.] Gee, Mr. Duffy, aren't students judged by test results?
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten also knocked the Times for publishing the database that measures the performance of 6,000 elementary-school teachers. Weingarten went on to denounce the database as "incomplete data masked as comprehensive evaluations." Of course, had the Times analysis flattered teachers, Weingarten would be praising the results of the analysis.
Over half of Wisconsinites (51 percent) told us that they were paying either "a great deal" or "quite a bit" of attention to issues involving education. In national surveys, 38 percent of the American public as a whole. When asked about specific education reforms, moreover, Wisconsinites are as much as five times more likely to stake out a clear position either in support or opposition than is the American public. Assuming such differences aren't strictly an artifact of survey methodology, a possibility we will discuss, Wisconsinites seem to pay more attention to educational issues and revealed a greater willingness to offer their opinions on education and potential reforms. In other words, when it comes to education, the people of Wisconsin have strong views and that makes them different from the rest of the country.
Wisconsin residents reported higher levels of support for a variety of reforms--in particular vouchers, charter schools, online education, and merit pay--than does the nation as a whole. That said, opposition levels to these reforms were also as high or higher than the nation as a whole. Though they give their local schools slightly lower grades than does the American public, Wisconsin residents also claimed (correctly) that their students perform as well as or better than students in other states on standardized tests. And Wisconsin residents are just as enthusiastic about student accountability requirements as is the American public. And Wisconsinites have another thing in common with their fellow Americans: they vastly underestimate the actual amount of money that is spent each year on students in public schools.
There is another important element that can be taken from this poll. The divide between residents of Milwaukee and the rest of the state is deep. When asked about the quality of education in the state, Milwaukee residents offered significantly lower assessments than do residents statewide. In addition, city of Milwaukee residents distinguish themselves from other Wisconsinites for their higher levels of support for various education policy reforms.
Los Angeles school board members made their first public statements Tuesday about evaluating teachers partially by analyzing student test scores, with most saying that the current system needs to be reworked and some adding that parents deserve more information about their children's teachers.
"As a parent, I think I have a right to know," said board member Nury Martinez, who added that she did not believe that the general public should be able to see a teacher's entire review.
Martinez also acknowledged that the district has lagged in updating its evaluation system.
"I also believe this conversation has taken way too long. I think we're talking years and years and years," she said. "We need to get the ball moving here."
In "Steal This Movie, Too" (column, Aug. 25), Thomas L. Friedman is right to rejoice in those educators working from the bottom up.
I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed a career as a teaching artist in the Catskills and in New York City for many years. I see the really great teachers and administrators every day, and they have two important characteristics in common: they love and respect the children, and they love and are open to thought.
Everything else follows -- the expectations that the children really want to learn and will do well, the enthusiasm with which the educators seek out and bring new ideas to the classroom and are willing to listen to the students' theories, and the eagerness to bring others into the classroom to contribute other concepts. These educators should indeed be championed.
ALEC's 16th edition of the Report Card on American Education contains a comprehensive overview of educational achievement levels (performance and gains for low-income students) for the 50 states and the District of Columbia (see full report for complete methodology). The Report Card details what education policies states currently have in place and provides a roadmap for legislators to follow to bring about educational excellence in their state.
With its foreword written by the former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, this completely revised Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform examines the reforms enacted under his tenure and how Florida has risen from consistently earning near-bottom scores to ranking third in the country.
Search by name, position, school district or salary range to find what Missouri taxpayers pay the state's teachers, principals and other educators. The data is current as of July 2010. The data shown here is the data released by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Errors should be reported to individual school districts and/or DESE. Teacher salaries are influenced by years of experience and education. Some people are listed twice because they work part time at more than one school.
As students in the state's first online-only public school, they will log onto a computer and find out what books they need to read and what new skills they should master.
The Massachusetts Virtual Academy opens in Greenfield on Thursday, not only as the first in the state, but also as the first virtual school in New England to serve students from kindergarten through high school.
At virtual school, the students will take all of their classes online and have a learning coach make sure they complete their assignments. A parent could be certified, for instance, to be the learning coach.
The student can work anytime of day and some may never see their teachers in person.
Gov. Chris Christie on Wednesday launched an effort to turn around one of the country's worst-performing school systems, informing Newark's schools superintendent that his three-year contract would not be renewed when it expires next year.
No successor was named to fill the job held by Clifford B. Janey, who was chosen by Mr. Christie's predecessor, Jon Corzine, at a salary that tops $280,000 a year.
In delivering the news to Mr. Janey, Mr. Christie also sent out a message that Newark would be a battleground to test some of his education-reform ideas, which have met with resistance from the teachers union. Because it is controlled by the state and not a local school board or mayor, Newark's school system is one of the few that allows Mr. Christie to be especially forceful in pursuing his agenda.
"Newark can and will be a national model for education reform and excellence," the governor said in a statement. The city's students "simply cannot wait any longer," he said, adding that the new leadership "will move quickly, aggressively and with accountability" to make changes to the schools.
In fact, the changing face of Madison's school population comes up consistently in other interviews with public officials.
Police Chief Noble Wray commented recently that gang influences touch even some elementary schools, and Mayor Dave Cieslewicz expressed serious concern last week that the young families essential to the health and vitality of Madison are too often choosing to live outside the city based on perceptions of the city's schools.
Nerad says he saw the mayor's remarks, and agrees the challenge is real. While numbers for this fall will not be available for weeks, the number of students who live in Madison but leave the district for some alternative through "open enrollment" will likely continue to grow.
"For every one child that comes in there are two or three going out," Nerad says, a pattern he says he sees in other urban districts. "That is the challenge of quality urban districts touched geographically by quality suburban districts."
The number of "leavers" grew from 90 students as recently as 2000-01 to 613 last year, though the increase might be at least partly attributed to a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that greatly curtailed the ability of school districts to use race when deciding where students will go to school. In February 2008, the Madison School Board ended its long-standing practice of denying open enrollment requests if they would create a racial imbalance.
Two key reasons parents cited in a survey last year for moving children were the desire for better opportunities for gifted students and concerns about bullying and school safety. School Board member Lucy Mathiak told me last week that board members continue to hear those two concerns most often.
Nerad hears them too, and he says that while some Madison schools serve gifted students effectively, there needs to be more consistency across the district. On safety, he points to a recent district policy on bullying as evidence of focus on the problem, including emphasis on what he calls the "bystander" issue, in which witnesses need to report bullying in a way that has not happened often enough.
For all the vexing issues, though, Nerad says much is good about city schools and that perceptions are important. "Let's be careful not to stereotype the urban school district," he says. "There is a lot at stake here."
The significant property tax hike and ongoing budget issues may be fodder for the upcoming April, 2011 school board election, where seats currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman will be on the ballot.
Superintendent Nerad's statement on "ensuring that we have a stable middle class" is an important factor when considering K-12 tax and spending initiatives, particularly in the current "Great Recession" where housing values are flat or declining and the property tax appetite is increasing (The Tax Foundation, via TaxProf:
The Case-Shiller index, a popular measure of residential home values, shows a drop of almost 16% in home values across the country between 2007 and 2008. As property values fell, one might expect property tax collections to have fallen commensurately, but in most cases they did not.
Data on state and local taxes from the U.S. Census Bureau show that most states' property owners paid more in FY 2008 (July 1, 2007, through June 30, 2008) than they had the year before (see Table 1). Nationwide, property tax collections increased by more than 4%. In only four states were FY 2008's collections lower than in FY 2007: Michigan, South Carolina, Texas and Vermont. And in three states--Florida, Indiana and New Mexico--property tax collections rose more than 10%.
Stacey Wright had more than a dozen choices when it came to enrolling three of her children in an elementary school, from charters to magnets to traditional public schools in every corner of the city.
She chose Jefferson Elementary School, the brick St. Louis public school across the street. And for that, she may get $900.
For the first time, a local organization is offering parents a cash incentive to enroll their children at Jefferson. The money is limited to students who didn't attend the school last year. To get it, the kids must finish this semester with near-perfect attendance and receive no out-of-school suspensions; the parent must attend three PTO meetings. The program is being offered to families in three mixed-income housing complexes surrounding the school, where most of the students live.
Wright, an in-home caregiver, recently moved with her children to north St. Louis from Oxford, Miss. She's eager to get involved at Jefferson, located at Hogan and O'Fallon streets.
A growing number of school districts have adopted a system called value-added modeling to answer that question, provoking battles from Washington to Los Angeles -- with some saying it is an effective method for increasing teacher accountability, and others arguing that it can give an inaccurate picture of teachers' work.
The system calculates the value teachers add to their students' achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.
People who analyze the data, making a few statistical assumptions, can produce a list ranking teachers from best to worst.
Use of value-added modeling is exploding nationwide. Hundreds of school systems, including those in Chicago, New York and Washington, are already using it to measure the performance of schools or teachers. Many more are expected to join them, partly because the Obama administration has prodded states and districts to develop more effective teacher-evaluation systems than traditional classroom observation by administrators.
The Royal Society, Britain's science academy, is curious as to why British youngsters seem to be going off studying computing at school. The number of people studying the subject has fallen by a third over the past four years, which is odd, considering how much boilerplate we get from the great and the good about the importance of computer literacy in today's wired world.
The RS is getting together with teaching outfits and the Royal Academy of Engineering. They intend to investigate the problem and produce a report. As is compulsory for anything to do with science in modern, cash-strapped Britain, the RS worries dutifully that having fewer kids studying computing will damage Britain's economy. Maybe. But I want to defend computing not because a good computing curriculum might raise GDP by a few percentages points, but because the subject deserves on its own merits to be part of any modern, liberal education.
Full disclosure: your correspondent is a huge computer nerd, and has been ever since he was in short trousers. I'm familiar with the problem the RS describes: when I was at secondary school over a decade ago, our computing classes were terribly dull. In fact, they weren't really about computing at all. They were about the quirks of Word, how to make pretty charts in Excel and the importance of backing up your files, the sorts of things taught on computers-for-the-clueless courses like the European Computer Driving Licence. In fact, the analogy with a driving licence illustrates the point nicely: for me, the classes were rather like going on an automotive engineering course, only to find it was all about how to perform hill starts and three-point turns. From talking to today's teenagers, it seems little has changed.
I fully agree. We should not be so focused on teaching powerpoint, or word. Each student should know essential html and an understanding of how to solve problems with computers, and create new opportunities.
School became a full-time job for sixth-graders at two Oakland middle schools where students clocked in on the first day of school Monday at 8 a.m. and headed home at 5 p.m., about three hours later than other students in the district.
The new nine-hour school day might sound like an adolescent nightmare, but district officials hope that more time in class will help boost the test scores of students at United for Success Academy and Elmhurst Community Preparatory School, both considered by the state to be among the 188 worst schools in California.
But keeping students in class an extra three hours won't come cheap, costing the district up to $2,400 more per school year for each of the 270 or so sixth-graders attending the schools. A nonprofit organization will run the extended program.
New York City's standalone middle schools do a worse job educating students than schools that offer kindergarten through eighth grade under one roof, according to a new study to be released Wednesday by researchers at Columbia University.
On average, children who move up to middle school from a traditional city elementary school, which typically goes up to fifth grade, score about seven percentiles lower on standardized math tests in eighth grade than those who attend a K-8 school, says Jonah Rockoff, an associate professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Business who co-authored the study.
The disparity stems from the toll that changing to a new school takes on adolescents and differences in the sizes of grades, the study says. Typically, K-8 schools can fit fewer children in each grade than standalone middle schools.
"What we found bolsters the case for middle-school reform." says Mr. Rockoff, noting that there aren't significant differences in financial resources or single class sizes between the two types of schools. Standalone "middle schools, where kids are educated in larger groups, are not the best way to educate students in New York City."
The research culls data for city school children who started in grades three through eight during the 1998-99 school year and tracks them through the 2007-2008 school year, comparing test scores, attendance rates and parent evaluations. Of the student sample, 15,000 students attended a K-8 school versus 177,000 who attended a standalone middle school.
We examine the implications of separating students of different grade levels across schools for the purposes of educational production. Specifically, we find that moving students from elementary to middle school in 6th or 7th grade causes significant drops in academic achievement. These effects are large (about 0.15 standard deviations), present for both math and English, and persist through grade 8, the last year for which we have achievement data. The effects are similar for boys and girls, but stronger for students with low levels of initial achievement. We instrument for middle school attendance using the grade range of the school students attended in grade 3, and employ specifications that control for student fixed effects. This leaves only one potential source of bias--correlation between grade range of a student's grade 3 school and unobservable characteristics that cause decreases in achievement precisely when students are due to switch schools--which we view as highly unlikely. We find little evidence that placing public school students into middle schools during adolescence is cost-effective.
One of the most basic issues in the organization of public education is how to group students efficiently. Public schools in the U.S. have placed students of similar ages into grade levels since the mid-1800s, but grade configurations have varied considerably over time. At the start of the 20th century, most primary schools in the U.S. included students from kindergarten through grade 8, while the early 1900s saw the rise of the "junior high school," typically spanning grades 7-8 or 7-9 (Juvonen et al., 2004). More recently, school districts have shifted toward the use of "middle schools," which typically span grades 6-8 or 5-8.1 Interestingly, middle schools and junior high schools have never been popular among private schools.2
The impact of grade configuration has received little attention by economists relative to issues such as class size or teacher quality. There are a few studies which provide evidence that the transition to middle school is associated with a loss of academic achievement, elevated suspension rates, and reduced self esteem (Alspaugh (1998a, 1998b), Weiss and Kipnes, (2006), Byrnes and Ruby (2007), Cook et al. (2008)). There is also a large body of work by educational researchers and developmental psychologists documenting changes in attitudes and motivation as children enter adolescence (Eccles et al. (1984)), and some have hypothesized that instructional differences in middle schools contribute to these changes. However, these studies examine differences between middle school and elementary school students using cross-sectional data, and therefore are unable to reject the hypothesis that differences across students, rather than differences in grade configuration, are responsible for divergent educational outcomes.3
In this study, we use panel data in New York City to measure the effects of alternative grade configurations. Specifically, we focus on variation in achievement within students over time, and examine how student achievement is affected by movement into middle schools. Elementary schools in New York City typically serve students until grade 5 or grade 6, while a smaller portion extend through grade 8; thus most students move to a middle school in either grade 6 or grade 7, while some never move to a middle school. We find that achievement falls substantially (about 0.15 standard deviations in math and English) when students move to middle school, relative to their peers who do not move. Importantly, these negative effects persist through grade 8, the highest grade level on which test data are available.
Seeing as I am not paid to blog as part of my daily job, it's basically impossible for me to be even close to first out of the box on the issues of the day. Add to that being a parent of two small children (my most important job - right up there with being a husband) and that only adds to my sometimes frustration of not being able to weigh in on some of these issues quickly.
That said, here is my attempt to distill some key points and share my opinions -- add value, if you will -- to the debate that is raging as a result of the Los Angeles Times's decision to publish the value-added scores of individual teachers in the L.A. Unified School District.
First of all, let me address the issue at hand. I believe that the LA Times's decision to publish the value-added scores of individual teachers was irresponsible. Given what we know about the unreliability and variability in such scores and the likelihood that consumers of said scores will use them at face value without fully understanding all of the caveats, this was a dish that should have been sent back to the kitchen.
Although the LA Times is not a government or public entity, it does operate in the public sphere. And it has a responsibility as such an actor. Its decision to label LA teachers as 'effective' and 'ineffective' based on suspect value-added data alone is akin to an auditor secretly investigating a firm or agency without an engagement letter and publishing findings that may or may not hold water.
Frankly, I don't care what positive benefits this decision by the LA Times might have engendered. Yes, the district and the teachers union have agreed to begin negotiations on a new evaluation system. Top district officials have said they want at least 30% of a teacher's review to be based on value-added and have wisely said that the majority of the evaluations should depend on classroom observations. Such a development exonerates the LA Times, as some have argued. In my mind, any such benefits are purloined and come at the expense of sticking it -- rightly in some cases, certainly wrongly in others -- to individual teachers who mostly are trying their best.
Based on current education and social conditions, the fate of boys of color is uncertain.
Black boys are grossly over-represented among youth failing to achieve academic success, are at grave risk of dropping out of school before they reach 10th grade, are disproportionately represented among adjudicated and incarcerated youth, and are far less likely than their peers in other subgroups to achieve to their dreams and aspirations.
Research indicates that although black boys have high aspirations for academic and career success, their underperformance in school and lack of educational attainment undermine their career pursuits and the success they desire. This misalignment of aspirations and achievement is fueled by and perpetuates a set of social conditions wherein black males find themselves disproportionately represented among the unemployed and incarcerated. Without meaningful, targeted, and sustainable interventions and support systems, hundreds of thousands of young Black men will never realize their true potential and the cycle of high unemployment, fatherless homes, overcrowded jails, incarcerated talent, deferred dreams, and high rates of school failure will continue.
Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (aka Madison Prep) will be established to serve as a catalyst for change and opportunity among young men of color. Its founders understand that poverty, isolation, structural discrimination, lack of access to positive male role models and achievement-oriented peer groups, limited exposure to opportunity and culture outside their neighborhood or city, and a general lack of understanding - and in some cases fear - of black boys among adults are major contributing factors to why so many young men are failing to achieve to their full potential. However, the Urban League of Greater Madison - the "founders" of Madison Prep - also understand that these issues can be addressed by directly countering each issue with a positive, exciting, engaging, enriching, challenging, affirming and structured learning community designed to exclusively benefit boys.
Five years ago yesterday, the levees broke. Hurricane Katrina flooded roughly 80% of this city, causing nearly $100 billion in damage. The storm forced us to rebuild our homes, workplaces and many of our institutions--including our failing public education system.
But from the flood waters, the most market-driven public school system in the country has emerged. Education reformers across America should take notice: The model is working.
Citywide, the number of fourth-grade students who pass the state's standardized tests has jumped by almost a third--to 65% in 2010 from 49% in 2007. The passage rate among eighth-graders during the same period has improved at a similar clip, to 58% from 44%.
In high school, the transformation has been even more impressive. Since 2007, the percentage of students meeting the state's proficiency goals is up 44% for English and 45% for math. Schools have achieved this dramatic improvement despite serving a higher percentage of low-income students--84%--than they did before the storm. Many of these students missed months or even a whole year of school.
Public school districts in southeastern Wisconsin reported paying their top leaders an average salary of nearly $130,000 in the 2009-'10 school year, data released by the state Department of Public Instruction shows.
The average salary for the six-county region, which includes Kenosha, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Washington and Waukesha counties, represents a 7.4% increase over superintendent salaries two years before and more than 40% more than such positions averaged a decade ago.
Teacher pay for the same school districts rose 7.6%, on average, between the 2007-'08 and 2009-'10 school years. Over the previous 10 years, however, average teacher salaries in southeastern Wisconsin school districts increased by 29%, according to the state information.
The data from the DPI is reported by school districts every fall, meaning that it might not capture salary increases given retroactively after teacher contracts are settled, which is also when many districts approve administrative compensation packages.
For that reason, the Journal Sentinel compared salaries reported in 2009-'10, the first year of negotiations for a new teacher contract, with the salaries from two years before at a similar stage in negotiations. The 10-year comparison also should eliminate some of the year-to-year fluctuations caused by the self-reporting method employed by the state.
Madison has 45 employees earning greater than $100,000.00, Green Bay has 21 (Madison's Dan Nerad previously served as the Green Bay Superintendent), Milwaukee has 103, Racine 10, Waukesha 7 and Appleton 18. Madison spends $15,241 per student, according to the 2009-2010 Citizen's Budget.
Students are returning to school this week. But they're not heading back to class -- they're walking straight into a war zone. Our kids have become cannon fodder for two rival ideologies battling to control America's future.
In one camp are conservative Christians and their champion, the Texas State Board of Education; in the other are politically radical multiculturalists and their de facto champion, President Barack Obama. The two competing visions couldn't be more different. And the stakes couldn't be higher. Unfortunately, whichever side wins -- your kid ends up losing.
That's because this war is for the power to dictate what our children are taught -- and, by extension, how future generations of Americans will view the world. Long gone are the days when classrooms were for learning: now each side sees the public school system as a vast indoctrination camp in which future culture-warriors are trained. The problem is, two diametrically opposed philosophies are struggling for supremacy, and neither is willing to give an inch, so the end result is extremism, no matter which side temporarily comes out on top.
Both visions are grotesque and unacceptable -- and yet they are currently the only two choices on the national menu. Which shall it be, sir: Brainwashing Fricassee, or a Fried Ignorance Sandwich?
"In Madison, I can point to a long history of failure when it comes to educating African-American boys," says Caire, a Madison native and a graduate of West High School. He is blunt about the problems of many black students in Madison.
"We have one of the worst achievement gaps in the entire country. I'm not seeing a concrete plan to address that fact, even in a district that prides itself on innovative education. Well, here's a plan that's innovative, and that has elements that have been very successful elsewhere. I'd like to see it have a chance to change kids' lives here," says Caire, who is African-American and has extensive experience working on alternative educational models, particularly in Washington, D.C.
One of the most vexing problems in American education is the difference in how well minority students, especially African-American children, perform academically in comparison to their white peers. With standardized test scores for black children in Wisconsin trailing those from almost every other state in the nation, addressing the achievement gap is a top priority for educators in the Badger State. Although black students in Madison do slightly better academically than their counterparts in, say, Milwaukee, the comparison to their white peers locally creates a Madison achievement gap that is, as Caire points out, at the bottom of national rankings.
He's become a fan of same-sex education because it "eliminates a lot of distractions" and he says a supportive environment of high expectations has proven to be especially helpful for improving the academic performance of African-American boys.
Caire intends to bring the proposal for the boys-only charter prep school before the Madison School Board in October or November, then will seek a planning grant for the school from the state Department of Public Instruction in April, and if all goes according to the ambitious business plan, Madison Prep would open its doors in 2012 with 80 boys in grades 6 and 7.
Forty more sixth-graders would be accepted at the school in each subsequent year until all grades through senior high school are filled, with a total proposed enrollment of 280 students. A similar, same-sex school for girls would promptly follow, Caire says, opening in 2013.
Five things would make Madison Prep unique, Caire says, and he believes these options will intrigue parents and motivate students.
Fabulous.
It will be interesting to see how independent (from a governance and staffing perspective) this proposal is from the current Madison charter models. The more the better.
Last up, is "Next Steps for Future Board Development Meetings and Topics.' Board development is good and important, but with only 2/3 of the term left I hate to see too much time and energy devoted to Board Development.
I keep coming back to this. Every year about 1/3 of the time and energy is devoted to budget matters, that leaves 2/3 to try to make things better. Put it another way; it is September, budget season starts in January. Past time to get to work.
This just leaves the closed meeting on the Superintendent evaluation. Not much to add to what I wrote here. My big point is that almost all of this process should be public. I will repost the links to things that are public:
Charlie Mas continues to chronicle, in a similar manner to TJ, the Seattle School Board's activities.
In my view, the Madison School Board might spend time on:
Public Superintendent Review, including oversight of the principal and teacher review process. Done properly, this should improve teaching effectiveness over time. This process should include full implementation of Infinite Campus. Infinite Campus is a potentially powerful tool to evaluate many activities within the District.
Implement a 5 year budget.
Evaluate ongoing MMSD Programs for their effectiveness, particularly from a spending and staffing perspective.
Voters will have another chance to weigh in on the Madison School Board during the spring, 2011 election, when seats currently occupied by Ed Hughes and Marj Passman will be on the ballot. Those interested in running should contact the City of Madison Clerk's office.
Update: I received the draft Madison School Board ethics documents via a Barbara Lehman email (thanks):
Presently we do not have a policy that describes expectations regarding the performance of School Board members. The Committee developed this list on the basis of similar policies adopted by other Boards as well as our own discussion of what our expectations are for each other. The Committee members were able to reach consensus on these expectations fairly quickly.
Expectation No.4 refers to information requests. We realize that current MMSD Policy 1515 also refers to information requests, but our thinking was that the existing policy addresses the obligation of the superintendent to respond to information requests. We do not currently have a policy that addresses a Board member's obligation to exercise judgment in submitting information requests.
Expectation No. 10 is meant to convey that School Board members hold their positions 24-hours a day and have a responsibility to the Board always to avoid behavior that would cast the Board or the District in a poor light.
How might Number 10 affect an elected Board member's ability to disagree with District policies or activities?
These paragraphs are a modification from existing language. Although the overall intent appears to remain similar to existing policy, I recommend the existing language because I think it does a better job of expressly recognizing the competing interests between the "beliefstatements" and a Board Member's likely right, as an individual citizen (and perhaps as a candidate for office while simultaneously serving on the Board) to accept PAC contributions and or to make a statement regarding a candidate. Perhaps the langnage could make clear that no Board Member may purport to, or attempt to imply, that they are speaking for the School Board when making a statement in regard to a candidate for office. That is, they should be express that they are speaking in the individual capacity.
The Board functions most effectively when individual Board Members adhere to acceptable professional behavior. To promote acceptable conduct of the Board, Board Members should:
When my father graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1927, I am pretty sure it was not called "The Harvard Graduate School of Medical Education." People I know who got their degrees from Harvard Law School tell me that it was never, to their knowledge, called the "Harvard Graduate School of Legal Education." I think that the Harvard Business School does not routinely refer to itself as the "Harvard Graduate School of Business Education." Harvard College (this is my 50th reunion year) has never seen the need to call itself "The Harvard Undergraduate School of Academic Subjects," as far as I know. But the Harvard Education School, where I was informed, in the late 1960s, that I had been made a "Master of Education," (!?) calls itself the "Harvard Graduate School of Education." Perhaps that makes it a status step up from being called the Harvard Normal School, but the name is, in my view, a small symptom of a deeper problem there.
I had lunch in Cambridge yesterday with a man from Madagascar, who was bringing his daughter (one of The Concord Review's authors), for her first year at Harvard College. He asked me why there seemed to be so much emphasis in United States schools on nonacademic efforts by students (I assumed he was referring to things like art, band, drama, chorus, jazz ensemble, video workshop, sports of various kinds, community service, etc., etc.). Now you have to make allowances for a geophysicist from Madagascar. After all, on that large island, and indeed in the whole Southern Hemisphere, they think that June, July, and August are Winter months, for goodness' sake!
As I tried to explain to him the long tradition of anti-intellectualism in American life, and the widespread anti-academic attitudes and efforts of so many of our school Pundits, I thought again about the way the Harvard Education School defines its mission.
As you may know, I am very biased in favor of reading and writing, especially by high school students, and since 1987, I have published 912 exemplary history essays by secondary students from 39 countries in the only journal in the world for such work, so when I have failed to stir some interest in faculty at the Harvard Education School, it has disposed me to look closer at what they are interested in other than the exemplary academic work of students at the high school (or any other) level.
To be fair, there have been a few Harvard people who have taken an interest in my work. Harold Howe II wrote to fifteen foundations on my behalf (without success) and Theodore Sizer wrote the introduction to the first issue in the Fall of 1988, and served on my Board of Directors for several years. Recently, Tony Wagner has taken an interest, and, a very good friend, William Fitzsimmons, Harvard Dean of Admissions, got his doctorate there.
But what are the research interests of faculty at the Harvard Education School, if they don't include the academic work of students? I recommend that anyone who is curious about this odd phenomenon may review the interests of this graduate faculty by looking at their website, but here a few revealing examples:
"Dr. Ronald F. Ferguson is a Lecturer in Public Policy and Senior Research Associate at the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he has taught since 1983. His research publications cover issues in education policy, youth development programming, community development, economic consequences of skill disparities, and state and local economic development. For much of the past decade, Dr. Ferguson's research has focused on racial achievement gaps..."
"During the past two decades, [Howard] Gardner and colleagues have been involved in the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy; and the quality of interdisciplinary efforts in education. Since the mid-1990s, in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has directed the GoodWork Project, a study of work that is excellent, engaging, and ethical. More recently, with longtime Project Zero colleagues Lynn Barendsen and Wendy Fischman, he has conducted reflection sessions designed to enhance the understanding and incidence of good work among young people. With Carrie James, he is investigating trust in contemporary society and ethical dimensions entailed in the use of the new digital media. Underway are studies of effective collaboration among nonprofit institutions in education and of conceptions of quality in the contemporary era. In 2008 he delivered a set of three lectures at New York's Museum of Modern Art on the topic 'The True, The Beautiful, and the Good: Reconsiderations in a post-modern, digital era.'"
"Nancy Hill's area of research focuses on variations in parenting and family socialization practices across ethnic, socioeconomic status, and neighborhood contexts. In addition, her research focuses on demographic variations in the relations between family dynamics and children's school performance and other developmental outcomes. Recent and ongoing projects include Project PASS (Promoting Academic Success for Students), a longitudinal study between kindergarten and 4th grade examining family related predictors of children's early school performance; Project Alliance/Projecto Alianzo, a multiethnic, longitudinal study of parental involvement in education at the transition between elementary and middle school. She is the co-founder of the Study Group on Race, Culture, and Ethnicity, an interdisciplinary group of scientists who develop theory and methodology for defining and understanding the cultural context within diverse families. In addition to articles in peer-reviewed journals, she recently edited a book, African American Family Life: Ecological and Cultural Diversity (Guilford, 2005) and another edited volume is forthcoming (Family-School Relations during Adolescence: Linking Interdisciplinary Research, Policy and Practice; Teachers College Press)."
This is really a random sample and there are scores of faculty members in the School, studying all sort of things. If I were to summarize their work, I would suggest it tends toward research on poverty, race, culture, diversity, ethnicity, emotional and social disability, developmental psychology, school organization, "The True, the Beautiful, and the Good...in a post-modern, digital era," and the like, but as far as I can tell, no one there is interested in the academic study (by students) of Asian history, biology, calculus, chemistry, foreign languages, European history, physics, United States History, or any of the academic subjects many taxpayers think should be the main business of education in our schools.
Of course all the things they do study are important, and can be funded with grants, but how can the academic work of students in our schools be of no importance to these scholars? How can they have no interest in the academic subjects which occupy the time and efforts of the teachers and students in our schools?
Perhaps if they were interested in the main academic business of our schools, the place would have to change its name to something less pretentious, like the Harvard Education School?
===============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
It's a Wednesday morning, and Zenaida Tan is warming her students up with a little exercise in "Monster Math."
That's Tan's name for math problems with monstrously big numbers. While most third-graders are learning to multiply two digits by two digits, Tan makes her class practice with 10 digits by two -- just to show them it's not so different.
On this spring day, her students pick apart the problem on the board -- 7,850,437,826 x 56 -- with the enthusiasm of game show contestants, shouting out answers before Tan can ask a question. When she accidentally blocks their view, several stand up with their notebooks and walk across the room to get a better look.
The answer comes minutes later in a singsong unison: "Four hundred and thirty-nine billion, six hundred and twenty-four million...."
Congratulations, Tan tells them, for solving it con ganas. That's Spanish for "with gusto," a phrase she picked up from watching "Stand and Deliver," a favorite film of hers about the late Jaime Escalante, the remarkably successful math teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.
After serving on the Pajaro Valley Unified School District's Governing Board of Trustees since 2006, I've decided not to seek re-election. My years on the board have been an amazing experience, but it's time for me to step aside and allow a new community member the opportunity to offer his or her leadership to the school district.
As we head into the election season and what will certainly be a climate of overheated rhetoric about what's right and what's wrong with our school district and what ought to be done about it, I think it's appropriate to lay out the duties of a school board member for the sake of voters and those who seek to serve on the board.
The California School Board Association spells out the role of a school board member very clearly: School board members are locally elected public officials entrusted with governing a community's public schools.
Along with the superintendent, board members set the long-term vision for the district so students will reach their highest potential. Board members are responsible for maintaining an efficient structure of school district operations by employing the superintendent, setting policy for hiring other personnel, setting a direction for and adopting the curriculum, and establishing budget priorities. Board members ensure accountability by evaluating the superintendent and district policies as well as monitoring all aspect of the district's operations. School board members must
Santa Cruz County schools face major challenges in coming years. Just like most schools in California, local districts are faced with funding cuts, fewer staff members and more demands -- especially in educating students with limited English skills, many from disadvantaged socio-economic circumstances.
In addition, schools are trying to cope with ever increasing demands to raise standards and be more accountable to state and local government for results.
In the series, State of Our Schools, which concludes today, the Sentinel reports that local schools will be operating with fewer teachers, more students in classrooms, less support help and, in some districts, a shorter school year.
Clearly, most people in the county and state don't like to see school funding cut. The easiest answer is to simply restore the funding.
Change forces and market drivers (described in 3×5 revolution) are finally bringing the digital revolution to education. Online learning is creating new options for students. Blending online and onsite learning has the potential to improve learning and operating productivity. The digital learning revolution is creating 10 shifts int he way we learn (first explored in a 7/3 post)
1.Responsibility. Families are taking back responsibility for learning and choices in learning are exploding. In America, most states grant charters to nonprofit groups to operate independent schools. New York City closed 90 failing schools and invited community organization to assist in developing 400 new schools. Independently run government funded education is common in Europe, Scandinavia, and Chile. Low cost private schools provide educational options in India and Africa.
Higher learning choices are expanding; and while traditional college costs spiral higher, some new options like Open University are free, and some are very low cost. Competency-based programs like Western Governor's University give credit for demonstrated expertise. Straighter Line allows students to earn college credits on an accelerated basis for $99 per month.
2.Expectations. The standards movement, culminating in the Common Core,[iii] reflects American political consensus that all students should be eligible and prepared for higher learning--a monumental step for equity but with the unintended consequence of standardizing a 19th century version of schooling based on age cohorts, credit hours and bubble sheet tests.
Her oldest son "was advanced in math in fifth grade but having trouble," Brown said. "Things weren't being properly explained. We were frustrated. ... They just don't have enough time to give to the students in schools. There are so many students in the school and only one teacher."
Brown is part of a growing number of parents who have turned to homeschooling after more traditional education paths have presented challenges. "Our research shows that from about a decade ago until now, homeschooling has roughly doubled," said Brian Ray, president of the nonprofit National Home Education Research Institute.
Families turn to homeschooling for diverse reasons, Ray said.
"They want customized education, they want more time together, they want strong family ties and they want guided social interactions. Many also see it as their job to pass on social values, not the schools," said Ray, who estimated that the number of homeschooled children is growing 7 percent annually.
The increase in homeschooled students, has given rise to two major things: more educational resources for homeschoolers and more support for their parents.
For the past 120 days I have pored over economic reports, commerce data, home sales across America, stats on inflationary trends and sales tax reports by state (when they can be found). I've sorted the data by date published, then prioritized it by importance to the economy, and looked for correlations positive or negative.
But no matter how many times I read over the data, I can come to only one solid conclusion: We have now finished changing into a two-tiered economy.
This change didn't start with the downturn of the past two and a half years; instead, the completion of our segregation into two financial classes is what directly caused the downturn. No longer is the belief that "there's the 20 percent of the population that live in poverty and then there's the rest" a comfortably distant concept.
The discomfort line now divides those who "feel afraid" that they live in poverty-like circumstances, or soon will - even if they are gainfully employed - from "the rest." And instead of a 20/80 split, have-nots to haves, today it may well be 60/40.
The federal government's most recent debt expansion will provide K-12 districts with additional funds. Will these monies be used for:
Lots of fun, interesting stuff on the agenda for the September 1 Board meeting.
It begins with a work session on the Strategic Infrastructure and Maintenance Initiative. Give it a big fancy name like that and it creates the illusion that something's happening. Nothing is happening. Just as they do with students working below grade level, the District counts and tracks backlogged maintenance, but they don't actually do much about it. They will, however, produce a glorious powerpoint and lots of matrices and spreadsheets about the problem with no solution in sight.
The Legislative meeting opens with Public Testimony. It will probably be dominated, again, with people talking about the teachers' contract negotiation. Of course, since that contract isn't on the agenda, everyone who wants to talk about it can get bumped by people who want to talk about agenda items. If you can put together a group of 20 people who will sign up to speak to agenda items then you can freeze out all of the contract testimony.
Of the record $100 billion in federal education funds appropriated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009, Congress and President Obama set aside $5 billion to be awarded at the discretion of the Secretary of Education to states, districts, and consortia that develop robust education reform plans. The $5 billon is broken down as follows:
$4 billion - Race to the Top State Incentive Fund (individual states)
$650 million - Investing in Innovation or i3 Grants (local, regional collaborators)
$350 million - Race to the Top Assessment Grants (multi-state consortia)
In total, these funds represent less than 1% of the $600 billion (federal, state, and local funds) spent on U.S. public elementary and secondary schools.
This unprecedented infusion of federal education reform funds, coupled with unprecedented latitude afforded to a U.S. Secretary of Education, catapulted the Obama Administration to the role of top U.S. venture philanthropist in the education policy world.
Heidi Ramirez does not drink alcohol, except for one shot a year of bourbon in honor of President Harry Truman.
Truman, she says, was a great president, and he had a shot of bourbon every day. But obviously that's not the whole story.
Ramirez grew up in a large, low-income family in Amsterdam, a small city northwest of Albany, N.Y. She made it to Syracuse University, and won a prestigious Truman Scholarship, a program that is aimed at college juniors "with exceptional leadership potential" and an interest in public service.
So, a toast once a year to Truman. The scholarship paved the way for her to go on to Harvard, Stanford and jobs in which she worked with some of the most influential people in American education.
And then she came to Milwaukee, where, at 36 and with no experience teaching or administering a school, she immediately became one of the most influential people on the local education scene. She is chief academic officer of Milwaukee Public Schools, one of several outsiders brought into MPS this summer by new Superintendent Gregory Thornton.
If MPS' education problems could be solved by personal energy, we already would have everything licked. Thornton is an energetic person and Ramirez, if anything, surpasses him. She is so hard-driving, yet cheerful about what she is doing, that some people tell her she sounds giddy about her job. "I really am," she admits. "I feel so incredibly blessed to be part of the work. . . . I get to do work that I love and that I think really matters."
Cortines wants the method based on student test scores to count for at least 30% of instructor evaluations. But the teachers union must consent.
Revamping teacher evaluations with the goal of helping instructors improve has become an urgent priority in the nation's second-largest school district, Ramon C. Cortines, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said in an address to administrators Wednesday.
Cortines said the district will develop and adopt a "value added" method that determines teachers' and schools' effectiveness based on student test scores. And he told a packed Hollywood High School auditorium that he's committed to using these ratings for at least 30% of a teacher's evaluation. The plan would require the consent of the teachers union.
In a later interview, Cortines also said he was disappointed that California lost its bid Tuesday for $700 million in federal Race to the Top school improvement grants. L.A. Unified's share would have been $153 million.
There is an old myth that vampires cannot be seen in a mirror. A vampire has no real substance, the story goes, so light simply travels through him, rather than bouncing back and creating a reflection. That myth came to mind when Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project recently asked "who's a member of the 'blame the teacher' crowd?" and could not find a single person. Apparently Daly cannot see himself in a mirror.
If there was ever a question about the existence of the 'blame the teacher' crowd, it was surely put to rest by the response of many in the self-identified 'education reform' community to the prospect of a wave of teacher layoffs as schools re-opened for the 2010-11 school year. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation, Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, Wal-Mart Professor of Education Reform Jay Greene: the blogging boys of the educational right have told all who would listen that the education funding crisis and the prospect of massive layoffs was a good thing, and that the passage of the edu-jobs legislation mitigating those layoffs was the real disaster. With Lenin, they embrace the formula "better fewer, but better": public schools would be better off with fewer teachers. After all, what do teachers have to do with the education of students?
It will be at least 20 days before the Rhode Island Department of Education holds a hearing on a complaint protesting Woonsocket's mandatory school uniform policy, but free speech and other constitutional issues many see as central to the dispute will be on the back burner when it begins.
Lawyers for the Woonsocket Education Department and the American Civil Liberties Union have agreed to first take up some comparatively uncomplicated procedural issues that might end the dispute and delve into the constitutional questions only if necessary.
Their plans were were mapped out by lawyer John Dineen of the ACLU and Richard Ackerman, legal counsel for the WED, during a preliminary hearing at RIDE headquarters yesterday. Education Commissioner Deborah Gist appointed RIDE counsel Forrest Avila as hearing officer to preside over the dispute.
Dineen sat across from Ackerman and Woonsocket Schools Supt. Robert Gerardi at a long conference table as a half-dozen reporters from around the state listened during the session, which lasted about 20 minutes. No arguments were made and no witnesses were called.
Economists have discovered that the earning gap for college is even bigger because students are studying far less than previous generations. Midmorning asks if students are coming to college better prepared, or if the schools are complicit in lowering standards?
Change & Accountability: New Jersey Governor Fires Education Chief
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has fired his education commissioner, Bret D. Schundler, in the midst of a controversy over the state's failure to win a $400 million education grant, the governor's office announced Friday.
A clerical mistake in the state's grant application had led the state to come up short by just three points in the high-stakes competition, known as Race to the Top. Mr. Christie had defended his administration's actions on Wednesday, in part by insisting that Mr. Schundler had provided the correct information to federal reviewers in an interview two weeks ago.
But federal officials released a video on Thursday showing that Mr. Schundler and his administration had not provided the information when asked. Mr. Christie, asked later Thursday about the videotape in a radio interview, said he would be seriously disappointed if it turned out he had been misled.
These candidates have committed to support all children in all Milwaukee schools. Please help us show them that education reform supporters in Milwaukee recognize their efforts. With your help we can elect and re-elect committed leaders who will fight for real reform and support more quality options for children and their parents.
Please join us whether you can give $5, $50 or $500 to each candidate!
When: Monday August 30th, 2010
Where: The Capital Grille 310 West Wisconsin Avenue
Time: 5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Refreshments will be served.
Free Valet Parking Provided.
RSVP: Ptosha Davis, DFER WI, 414-630-6637 or dferwisconsin@gmail.com
Canada's point is that the only way to fix our schools is not with a Superman or a super-theory. No, it's with supermen and superwomen pushing super-hard to assemble what we know works: better-trained teachers working with the best methods under the best principals supported by more involved parents.
"One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist," Canada says in the film. "I read comic books and I just loved 'em ...'cause even in the depths of the ghetto you just thought, 'He's coming, I just don't know when, because he always shows up and he saves all the good people.' "
Then when he was in fourth or fifth grade, he asked, "Ma, do you think Superman is actually [real]?" She told him the truth: " 'Superman is not real.' I was like: 'He's not? What do you mean he's not?' 'No, he's not real.' And she thought I was crying because it's like Santa Claus is not real. And I was crying because there was no one ... coming with enough power to save us."
"Waiting for Superman" follows five kids and their parents who aspire to obtain a decent public education but have to enter a bingo-like lottery to get into a good charter school, because their home schools are miserable failures.
Guggenheim kicks off the film explaining that he was all for sending kids to their local public schools until "it was time to choose a school for my own children, and then reality set in. My feelings about public education didn't matter as much as my fear of sending them to a failing school. And so every morning, betraying the ideals I thought I lived by, I drive past three public schools as I take my kids to a private school. But I'm lucky. I have a choice. Other families pin their hopes to a bouncing ball, a hand pulling a card from a box or a computer that generates numbers in random sequence. Because when there's a great public school there aren't enough spaces, and so we do what's fair. We place our children and their future in the hands of luck."
It is intolerable that in America today a bouncing bingo ball should determine a kid's educational future, especially when there are plenty of schools that work and even more that are getting better. This movie is about the people trying to change that. The film's core thesis is that for too long our public school system was built to serve adults, not kids. For too long we underpaid and undervalued our teachers and compensated them instead by giving them union perks. Over decades, though, those perks accumulated to prevent reform in too many districts. The best ones are now reforming, and the worst are facing challenges from charters.
I am a mother of four children, two of whom are enrolled in Wisconsin Connections Academy, the state's public K-8 virtual school. My decision to do this was based on a number of factors. My oldest son, 6, is very bright and thoughtful, but has always had difficulty in social situations. He is easily overwhelmed by crowds and tends to withdraw, and I knew he would need help and extra attention to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. My daughter, 11, had been in the public school system from the beginning and was struggling as well. I knew that she was not getting the help she needed to keep up in math, for example. Also, the social stresses at school were affecting her self-esteem, and she was losing her desire to challenge herself. I began looking into virtual schools.
I have been a long-time supporter of public schools and a fierce advocate for involving parents as partners in education. Yet I also came to realize that bricks-and-mortar schools could only go so far toward individualized education. Virtual schools, like WCA, provide the perfect opportunity for children to receive personalized education. WCA provides a public school education using state-certified teachers who work directly with learning coaches to bring personalized instruction.
It is schooling at home, not home-schooling. While they sound similar, there is a huge difference. With WCA, I am the learning coach for my children, but they learn a state-certified curriculum, just like kids in bricks-and-mortar schools. They have desks, books and computers. We even have a Smart Board in our basement that we use on a regular basis. We go on field trips and have opportunities to meet other families who have similar stories about how they came to WCA.
I'll confess my initial gut reaction to the news that HISD plans to offer parents cash to show up to parent-teacher conferences and help their children study was righteous indignation. What a shame, I thought, that we've been reduced to paying parents to be engaged in their children's learning. I'd be insulted if someone were to greet my wife and me with a fistful of dollars when we show up at her pre-kindergarten open house tonight.
Obviously, many of our readers had the same reaction when we posted reporter Ericka Mellon's story to chron.com just after 1 p.m.
It took a reader going by the name of R_Dub just five minutes to fire the first shot:
"What a (expletive) discrace (sic)! HISD giving away money for grades. This is not teaching students anything other than how to manipulate the system or take advantage of others. Good job you idiots."
Similar comments have been streaming in at a clip of about one per minute.
It is, of course, essential that Oregon ensure the rigor and quality of online charter schools and demand financial and academic transparency from the private vendors operating these "virtual schools." But once the state is convinced that online students are receiving a quality education, why should it prevent other families from making the same choice?
The Oregon Board of Education recently spent several hours kicking this question around before concluding that parents should be allowed to choose online schools -- but only up to a point. A majority of board members supported parent choice only if there was a cap on how many students could leave an individual school district. In other words, parent choice for some, but not necessarily all.
We understand the issue: State money follows students, and in theory enough students might bail out of an individual school district that it would leave that district too financially weakened to serve its remaining students.
It's the start of another school year, and parents everywhere are asking themselves: Is my child's teacher any good? The Los Angeles Times recently attempted to answer that question for parents. Using a statistical technique known as "value added"--which estimates the contribution that a teacher made to a student's test-score gains from the beginning to the end of the school year--the paper analyzed the influence of third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade teachers on the math and reading scores of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The results suggest a wide variation in the quality of L.A.'s teachers. The paper promises a series of stories on this issue over the next several months.
The Times has admirably highlighted the importance of using data to evaluate teacher performance, confirming the findings of a wide and growing body of research. Studies show that the difference between a student's being assigned to a good or bad teacher can mean as much as a grade level's worth of learning over the course of a school year. While parents probably don't need studies to tell them who the best teachers are--such information is an open secret in most public schools--academic research helps underscore the inadequacy of the methods currently used to evaluate teacher performance. Even the nation's lowest-performing school districts routinely rate more than 95 percent of their teachers as satisfactory or higher.
No surprise that most of the assortment of supplemental school levies on the ballot had a tough time capturing the voter enthusiasm of past school-funding requests.
The state Legislature's abdication of its education-funding responsibility hit a low point this spring when lawmakers authorized some districts to ask voters in the August primary for additional funding beyond regular levies. The result was mixed: a supplemental levy in the Marysville School District failed, a similar request in Everett clings to life and two levies in the Edmonds and Northshore school districts passed narrowly.
Primaries are tough for funding requests anyway as voters go on vacation or lose interest midway down the ballot. More than anything, though, the levy results signal a noteworthy shift. People are pinching pennies. They don't love their children's schools any less, and I suspect most still agree education gets the best bang for public bucks. But the lingering scent of recession is forcing most of us down a new, more subdued path.
New report highlights the best and worst of Detroit's schools
WXYZ:
A new report by Excellent Schools Detroit is highlighting the best and worst Detroit's schools.
The report is a report card of sorts about almost every school in the city. It ranks the schools from best to worst based on MEAP test results for elementary and middle schools and ACT results for high schools.
The report is meant to be used as a guide for parents who want to find the best school for their children. The authors recommend parents examine the data on their child's current schools and then look at the data from other schools that they could attend.
Among the best elementary schools in Detroit are the private Cornerstone School - Nevada Primary and Martin Luther King Jr. Education Center Academy, a charter school. Also included are the Bates Academy and Chrysler, both of which have special admissions requirements.
I had the craziest dream last night, Louisiana, a state that is a leader on all the things that the administration says are priorities didn’t get Race to the Top funding…oh wait…
Big takeaways beyond the RTT issues below, are that the odds of seeing consistent and deep change across all Race to the Top winners got a lot longer with this round of selections. But the two fundamental questions basically remain the same and can’t be answered yet: How durable will the many RTT-inspired policy changes prove to be and will those changes actually improve student learning?
Earlier this year Massachusetts enacted a law that allowed districts to remove at least half the teachers and the principal at their lowest-performing schools. The school turnaround legislation aligned the state with the Obama administration's Race to the Top program incentives and a chance to collect a piece of the $3.4 billion in federal grant money.
From Washington this makes abundant good sense, a way to galvanize rapid and substantial change in schools for children who need it most.
In practice, on the ground, it is messy for the people most necessary for turning a school around -- the teachers -- and not always fair.
Often the decisions about which teachers will stay and which will go are made by new principals who may be very good, but don't know the old staff. "We had several good teachers asked to leave," said Heather Gorman, a fourth-grade teacher who will be staying at Blackstone Elementary here, where 38 of 50 teachers were removed. "Including my sister who's been a special-ed teacher 22 years."
Here at GeekDad we are fortunate to spend time reviewing and exploring the increasing number of applications design to entertain, educate and amuse our children. The sudden rise in accessible touch technology through smartphones and tablets combined with the business model provided through App Stores to developers has turned application development into a modern day equivalent of a gold rush. Everyone is out there, developing apps as quickly as possible - hoping to strike it rich with a well designed flatulence application - and consequently flooding the market with sub-standard applications that see them back up their tent and leave the electronic frontier as quickly as they came.
Consequently, there are a lot of apps for kids that are not well thought through, not developmentally appropriate, or simply way too generic! And, in my professional life and personal life having reviewed and played a lot of these games I think it is time to ask developers to start focusing on quality, rather than quantity.
The Obama administration will ask Congress for another $700-800m next year so it can continue its Race to the Top education reform scheme, says Arne Duncan, the US education secretary.
The scheme, which saw another 10 reforming states receive $3.4bn in funding on Tuesday, has proven wildly popular as many states face budget crises.
The Chicago Teachers Union on Tuesday accused Mayor Daley's handpicked school team of hiring "baby sitters" to provide "education on the cheap" -- online, after-school classes in reading and math that will extend one of the nation's shortest school days for 5,500 students.
"When the kids are tired and they want to go home and they don't want to do this any more, what happens? I'm a little concerned about how this plays out over an entire year," said union president Karen Lewis.
At a news conference at Walsh Elementary School, 2015 S. Peoria, Daley acknowledged that "some parents and teachers will not support" his efforts to use computerized learning to extend the school day.
But he argued that an extra 90 minutes a day would add up to 255 more hours a year. That's a 25 percent increase in a school day that pales by comparison to other major cities, he said.
"This is all about children and not about adults. . . . Education doesn't end at 2:45" p.m., the mayor said.
Schools CEO Ron Huberman added, "All of our efforts to expand the school day with the traditional work force were, unfortunately, rejected. This has been the mayor's push to say, 'Despite constraints, we must find a way to do this.' "
Virtual learning is an important and desirable part of the K-12 world.
Four months ago, Jamila Best was still in college. Two months ago, she started training to become a teacher. Monday morning, the 21-year-old will walk into a D.C. classroom, take a deep breath and dive into one of the most difficult assignments in public education.
Best is one of 4,500 Teach for America recruits placed in public schools this year after five weeks of summer preparation. The quickly expanding organization says that the fast track enables talented young instructors to be matched with schools that badly need them -- and the Obama administration agrees. This month, Teach for America won a $50 million federal grant that will help the program nearly double in the next four years.
But many educators and experts question the premise that teaching is best learned on the job and doesn't require extensive study beforehand. They wonder how Best and her peers will handle tough situations they will soon face. Best, with a Howard University degree in sociology and psychology, will teach students with disabilities at Cesar Chavez Parkside Middle School in Northeast Washington. She has none of the standard credentials for special education.
"I'm ready to go," Best said last week at the public charter school as she put finishing touches on her lesson plans. "The challenges will come."
Arne Duncan, US education secretary, tells Anna Fifield, the FT's US political correspondent, that the "Race to the Top" programme has led to a "quiet revolution" with 36 hard-up states implementing reforms simply in the hope of receiving federal funding. Despite opposition from teachers' unions, Mr Duncan says the administration will continue to push for change, although it will not raise the proportion of education funding that comes from the federal government.
A report released Tuesday ranks cities not in terms of best-performing schools but on their openness to outside ideas and education reform.
Education entrepreneurs - the sort of people who want to open a new charter school, or have an innovative way to get talented new teachers into schools - would do well to head to New Orleans. Or Washington or New York.
At least that's the judgment of "America's Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform: Attracting Entrepreneurs and Change Agents," a study released Tuesday that's attempting to rank cities in a new way. It doesn't look at how well their students perform, or even on the programs their districts have put in place, but on how welcoming they are to reforms and new ideas. The education version of the World Bank's annual ranking of the best countries for business, if you will.
Enter the education entrepreneur, a problem-solver who has developed a different and--it is to be hoped--better approach to teaching and learning, either inside or outside the traditional school system. He or she may provide, among other things, a novel form of brick and mortar teaching, an alternative version of teacher recruitment or training, or time-saving software and tools that make for more efficient instruction and surer learning. Which cities would welcome and support such problem-solvers by helping to bring their ideas to scale, improve their odds of success, and nurture their growth? Put another way, which cities have the most reform-friendly ecosystems?
To answer this question, analysts examined six domains that shape a jurisdiction's receptivity to education reform:
Human Capital: Entrepreneurs need access to a ready flow of talented individuals, whether to staff their own operations or fill the district's classrooms.
Financial Capital: A pipeline of flexible funding from private and/or public sources is vital for nonprofit organizations trying to break into a new market or scale up their operations.
Charter Environment: Charter schools are one of the primary entrees through which entrepreneurs can penetrate new markets, both as direct education providers and as consumers of other nontraditional goods and services.
Quality Control: Lest we unduly credit innovation per se, the study takes into account the quality- control metrics that appraise and guide entrepreneurial ventures.
District Environment: Because many nontraditional providers must contract with the district in order to work in the city, finding a district that is both open to nontraditional reforms and has the organiza- tional capacity to deal with them in a speedy and professional manner can make or break an entrepreneur's foray into a new market.
Municipal Environment: Beyond the school district, is the broader community open to, even eager for, nontraditional providers? Consider, for example, the stance of business leaders, the mayor, and the media.
Drawing on publicly available data, national and local survey data, and interviews with on-the-ground insiders, analysts devised a grading metric that rated each city on its individual and collective accom- plishments in each of these areas.
I have just returned from giving a three-day workshop on student history research papers for English and Social Studies teachers, both high school and middle school, in Collier Country, Florida.
They assessed and discussed four high school student research papers using the procedures of the National Writing Board. We went over some of the consequences for a million of our students each year who graduate from high school and are required to take (and pay for) non-credit remedial courses when they get to college.
I talked to them about the advantages students have if they have written a serious paper, like the International Baccalaureate Extended Essay, in high school, and the difficulties with both reading nonfiction books and writing term papers which students (and college graduates) have if they have not been asked to do those tasks in high school.
It was a diligent, pleasant and interesting group of teachers, and I was glad to have had the chance to meet with them for a few days. They seemed genuinely interested in having their students do serious papers and be better prepared for college (and career).
At lunch on the last day, however, I discovered that Florida is a "right to work" state, and that their local union is rather weak, so they each have six classes of 30 or more students (180 students). One teacher is being asked to teach seven classes this year, with 30 or more students in each (210).
After absorbing the fact of this shameful and irresponsible number of assigned students, I realized that if these teachers were to ask for the 20-page history research paper which is typical of the ones I publish in The Concord Review, they would have 3,600 pages to read, correct, and comment on when they were turned in, not to mention the extra hours guiding students through their research and writing efforts. The one teacher with 210 students would have 4,200 pages of papers presented to him at the end of term.
It made me both sad and angry that these willing teachers, who want their students to be prepared for higher education, have been given impossible working conditions which will most certainly prevent them from helping their students get ready for the academic reading and writing tasks which await them in college (and career).
Few education stories have excited me as much as the series on teacher assessment being done by reporters Jason Song, Jason Felch and Doug Smith of the Los Angeles Times. They have dug up a goldmine of data on the student test score gains of 6,000 individual elementary school teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, information that the district has refused to show to parents despite pleas from its staff to do so.
The latest story in the series, "L.A.'s leaders in learning," does many things that I think are crucial to improving American education, and fit what I have been trying to do calculating the level of challenge in high schools, nationally and in the Washington area, the last 12 years.
The latest Times story focuses on how schools as a whole, not individual teachers, are doing in raising achievement. That emphasis encourages schools to create team-like cultures in which everyone works to make everyone else better. The story buttresses the central point of the series--that schools that seem similar to parents trying to choose where to send their children look very different when unreported data like relative test score gains are revealed. It also shows in a dramatic way the uselessness of our usual means of rating schools. Those that have the highest test scores are considered the best, even though achievement measured that way reflects the average incomes of the parents far more than it does the quality of the teaching.
A football-field-sized lawn - lined with walks and trees - stretches from the street to a five-story, glass-front building in this otherwise scruffy neighborhood just west of downtown skyscrapers.
On the site of the Ambassador Hotel, known as the site of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in 1968, now sprawl 23 acres of elementary, middle and high school buildings which will serve the poorest, most congested, and diverse district of America's second-largest school system.
It's price tag of $578 million makes it the most expensive public school in American history and an easy target of criticism. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has laid off 3,000 teachers in the past two years and is cutting academic programs this year to close a $640 million budget gap.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan set an ambitious goal last year of overhauling 1,000 schools a year, using billions of dollars in federal stimulus money.
But that effort is off to an uneven start. Schools from Maine to California are starting the fall term with their overhaul plans postponed or in doubt because negotiations among federal regulators, state officials and local educators have led to delays and confusion.
In this sprawling district east of Los Angeles, for example, the authorities announced plans earlier this year to use the program to convert Pacific High, one of California's worst-performing schools, to a charter school, involving a comprehensive makeover.
The insulated cooler sits on the playground bench, untouched.
Beside it, elementary school teacher Alica Magolan waits out her lunch break. She doesn't have much appetite these days.
On one hand, she's fortunate: She was recalled after being laid off from her job teaching third-graders at Humboldt Park Elementary School in Bay View. But that uncertainty has been replaced by a new stress: teaching at a north side school with a different culture, to a new grade level, leading a subject in which she has no specialized background.
The learning curve is a hairpin turn. The stomachaches come nightly.
"I know that people are like, 'Well, you got a call, so you should be happy.' " Magolan said. "But I can't help it that I miss my school."
At 29, Magolan is one of many young teachers whose lives have changed dramatically since MPS sent layoff notices to 482 educators in June, almost twice the number of positions former superintendent William Andrekopoulos indicated the district would need to cut to balance the budget.
Suddenly jobless, fearing house payments and monthly bills, some on layoff accepted lower-paying educational positions elsewhere. A few landed highly competitive jobs in suburban public schools or other city schools. Some changed careers entirely.
Where is stimulus money for education going, and how much has been spent? Here's a new website that provides tracking for these significant, multi-billion dollar questions.
Kudos to the Education Writers Association for taking on this huge data gathering project, and to Bill and Melinda Gates who are funding it for the next two years.
When it comes to following the money, the flow of dollars is impressive: For example, Milwaukee has been allocated $202.6 million so far in stimulus money for its approximately 90,000 public school children; 58 percent, or $117.7 million, has been spent. Meanwhile, Madison has gotten $21.8 million in stimulus funds, and has spent around $12 million, or 55 percent for almost 25,000 students. I was also curious about smaller Dane County districts and their information is available too from Edmoney.org. For example: Sun Prairie, celebrating the grand public opening of its gorgeous new high school August 28 (go here for information about the festivities and school tours), has been awarded $6.6 million in stimulus funds and has spent $5.6 million of that. Middleton? $3.5 million awarded; $2.8 million spent. Verona? $4.9 million awarded; $4.3 spent.
Why would you study design if you weren't planning to become a designer? Especially if you were a high school student in a depressed rural area of the United States, like Bertie County, one of the poorest counties in North Carolina, where 80 percent of students live in poverty, and your best chance of employment will be a low-skilled job in agriculture or biotechnology.
Why indeed? Yet all 16 teenagers in the 11th grade at the School of Agriscience and Biotechnology at the Bertie Early College High School have committed to attending an experimental design course, Studio H, for three hours every day in the new school year. An abandoned car body shop behind the school has been converted into a classroom, studio and workshop for the course. By the end of it, the students will have designed a community project, a farmers' market to sell locally gown produce, and will then be paid to build it over the summer.
Because of Bertie County's poverty, "very few of these kids will become designers," said Emily Pilloton, founder of the humanitarian design group, Project H, who recently moved to Bertie County from San Francisco to run Studio H with Project H's project architect, Matthew Miller.
Superintendent Climate Locally and Elsewhere: Collier School Board candidates evaluate how to replace Dennis Thompson; An Update on the 2008 Madison Candidates?
Now that Collier County schools Superintendent Dennis Thompson's contract isn't getting renewed, the nine Collier School Board candidates have to think about what the next superintendent will be like.
After all, three of them will be involved in the selection of the next superintendent, which current board members agreed shouldn't start until after the November election.
The primary election is Tuesday.
While the candidates believe a search should start and include community input, they differ on the approach to that search.
District 5 candidate Mary Ellen Cash was the only candidate to recommend saving the money from a nationwide search by hiring from within the district or area.
"We have a lot of home-grown people with a lot of talent," she said.
Locally, the Madison School Board has held three meetings during the past two months on the Superintendent's (Dan Nerad) evaluation:
6/29 Superintendent Evaluation, 7/12 Evaluation of the Superintendent, 8/9 Evaluation of the Superintendent.
This definition of courage has become something of a theme for Obama's Education Department -- despite its reputation for gritty reform-mindedness. Earlier this summer, Maura Policelli, the department's senior adviser for external affairs, told state officials to stop worrying about funding and "to see how [stimulus] funds can help alleviate layoffs." She explained that this "require[s] some courage because it does involve the possible risk of investing in staff that you may not be able to retain in the 2011-12 school year." When one official asked what would happen if a state had "unspent [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] money after 2011," Policelli said: "You will be fired." Looks like courage is not just about spending, but about spending quickly.
All of this might be laughable if the feds weren't making it harder for states and school districts to prepare for rough seas ahead. When asked by the Associated Press what happens if districts use this money as a short-term fix and stand to get hammered next year, Duncan replied, "Well, we're focused right now, Donna, on this school year. . . . We're hopeful we'll be in a much better spot next year."
Well, while Duncan can hope to his heart's content, the reality is that things will get much worse for schools before they get better. Scott Pattison, the executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers, notes, "There are so many issues that go way beyond the current downturn. . . . This is an awful time for states fiscally, but they're even more worried about 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014." Property taxes account for about a third of school spending, but property-tax valuations tend to lag property values by three years -- which mean school districts are on the front end of a slide that's got several years to run. And, as the authors of a recent Rockefeller Institute report note, "Even if overall economic conditions continue to improve throughout 2010, fiscal recovery for the states historically lags behind a national economic turnaround and can be expected to do so in the aftermath of the recent recession."
So most of you may have heard that the LA Times is doing a huge multi-part story about teacher evaluation. One of the biggest parts is a listing of every single public school teacher and their classroom test scores (and the teachers are called out by name).
Though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.
Seeking to shed light on the problem, The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers -- something the district could do but has not.
The Times used a statistical approach known as value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students' progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student's performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.
Interestingly, the LA Times apparently had access to more than 50 elementary school classrooms. (Yes, I know it's public school but man, you can get pushback as a parent to sit in on a class so I'm amazed they got into so many.) And guess what, these journalists, who may or may not have ever attended a public school or have kids, made these observations:
Next month's opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools will be auspicious for a reason other than its both storied and infamous history as the former Ambassador Hotel, where the Democratic presidential contender was assassinated in 1968. With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation's most expensive public school ever.
The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of "Taj Mahal" schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities.
"There's no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the '70s where kids felt, 'Oh, back to jail,'" said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. "Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning."
Not everyone is similarly enthusiastic.
I remember hearing it somewhere.
What's that term again, oh yes, "free education."
Anyone can get a public education because it's free.
Really, because I just spent close to $90 at one of our fine local retailers picking up a few of those last minute mandated items for that free education.
Obviously when you're talking about parochial or private schools, there is a degree of tuition associated with that choice. But the public school system is supposed to be something that we pay taxes to cover.
And yet each year, I see a rack of flyers for each school within a one-hour radius with lots of small lettering detailing every item the students must have to attend the public schools to acquire their free public education.
Since Andie was in 6th grade - she'll be entering 8th grade Sept. 1 - the Smith family has used Infinite Campus, an electronic data system that gives parents access to information about how students are doing in school. It often provides more information than the typical middle school student brings home and it helps parents know from week-to-week what's going on in the classroom. Madison, like most other Dane County school districts, has been using some form of electronic communication system for the last several years.
"I don't have to ask to look at her planner anymore," says Smith. "And, her group of teachers at Toki wrote a weekly newsletter last year that I could read online. When your kids get into middle school, they've got more classes, and parents generally have fewer connections with the teachers so I really appreciate the way it works."
For the first time this year, Smith, like the rest of the parents and guardians of the approximately 24,000 students in the Madison Metropolitan School District, is using the online system to enroll her children in class. She also has a son, Sam, who will be a 5th grader at Chavez Elementary this fall. District officials hope that giving parents a password and user ID at the enrollment stage will expand the number of parents using Infinite Campus. A primary goal is to help increase communication ties between home and school, which is a proven way to engage kids and boost academic achievement.
But whether all parents will take to the system remains to be seen. Despite the boom in electronic communication, there are plenty of homes without computers, especially in urban school districts like Madison where poverty levels are rising. The extent to which teachers will buy in is also unclear. Teachers are required to post report cards and attendance online, but things like test scores, assignments and quizzes will be discretionary.
Abstract
Annual student testing may make it possible to measure the contributions to student achievement made by individual teachers. But would these "teacher value added" measures help to improve student achievement? I consider the statistical validity, purposes, and costs of teacher value-added policies. Many of the key assumptions of teacher value added are rejected by empirical evidence. However, the assumption violations may not be severe, and value-added measures still seem to contain useful information. I also compare teacher value-added accountability with three main policy alternatives: teacher credentials, school value-added accountability, and formative uses of test data. I argue that using teacher value-added measures is likely to increase student achievement more efficiently than a teacher credentials-only strategy but may not be the most cost-effective policy overall. Resolving this issue will require a new research and policy agenda that goes beyond analysis of assumptions and statistical properties and focuses on the effects of actual policy alternatives.
6. CONCLUSION
A great deal of attention has been paid recently to the statistical assumptions of VAMs, and many of the most important papers are contained in the present volume. The assumptions about the role of past achievement in affecting current achievement (Assumption No. 2) and the lack of variation in teacher effects across student types (Assumption No. 4) seem least problematic. However, unobserved differences are likely to be important, and it is unclear whether the student fixed effects models, or any other models, really account for them (Assumption No. 3). The test scale is also a problem and will likely remain so because the assumptions underlying the scales are untestable. There is relatively little evidence on how administration and teamwork affect teachers (Assumption No. 1).
D.C. schools open their doors Monday morning for the start of a new year, and charter parents and advocates say a new problem is compounding an old one.
This school year, the D.C. Healthy Schools Act mandating new feeding and physical-education policies takes effect. But charter schools are scrambling to meet some requirements of the new law, which says schools must feed students locally produced fruits and vegetables and offer students overall healthier meals. The act also raises the bar on physical fitness.
"The majority of charter schools are going in commercial buildings," said Robert Cane, executive director of the advocacy group Friends of Choice in Urban Schools. (FOCUS). "We support good food and exercise, but charter schools have scrambled to meet requirements."
Charter and traditional schools often lack cafeterias, and most charters lack green space for children to play or hold gym classes. Many don't have a swimming pool, gymnasium, football field, tennis court or a track course.
As usual, New Jersey leads the nation. Today, rather than Snooki showing the country a new level of reality t.v. debauchery, we have the Garden State itself becoming the first state of the union ever charged with violating federal securities laws.
According to the SEC release, New Jersey failed to disclose in 79 state bond offerings between 2001 and 2007 (totaling $26 billlion) that two public employee pension funds were underfunded. According to the SEC, the failure to disclose masked
the fact that New Jersey was unable to make contributions to [the pension funds] without raising taxes, cutting other services or otherwise affecting its budget. As a result, investors were not provided adequate information to evaluate the state's ability to fund the pensions or assess their impact on the state's financial condition.
Given that this post is about securities law from a securities law professor, I should note that Ma Gerding is a New Jersey state employee.
New Jersey is a special state in many ways, but my gut instincts tell me this SEC action is just the vanguard of a coming wave of state and municipal securities litigation. We have all the ingredients for an epidemic:
Start out with the dire budget situation of states and municipalities squeezed by the financial crisis.
So you want to know if the teacher your child has for the new school year is the star you're hoping for. How do you find out?
Well, you can ask around. Often even grade school kids will give you the word. But what you hear informally might be on the mark and might be baloney. Isn't there some way to get a good answer?
Um, not really. You want a handle on how your kid is doing, there's plenty of data. You want information on students in the school or the school district, no problem.
But teachers? If they had meaningful evaluation reports, the reports would be confidential. And you can be quite confident they don't have evaluations like that - across the U.S., and certainly in Wisconsin, the large majority of teachers get superficial and almost always favorable evaluations based on brief visits by an administrator to their classrooms, research shows. The evaluations are of almost no use in actually guiding teachers to improve.
Many school parents question the value of today's homework assignments. They rightly wonder whether their children are getting the education they need in order to succeed in college. For the most part, they are well-meaning parents who were educated from the 1950's through the 1970's in a different style--a style derided by the current power elite in graduate schools of education and school administration. They describe the schoolroom remembered by today's parents as: sitting in rows, facing front, listening passively to a teacher who talked to the blackboard, "memorizing by rote", and thinking uncritically. In today's classrooms, students are given a minimal amount of instruction, and instead are presented with a question--say a math problem--told to form groups and work out an approach to solving the problem. Or if not a math problem, they are told to discuss an aspect of a book they are reading. Homework assignments are often art projects, in which students must construct dioramas of the climactic event of a story they read, or decorate a tissue box with German phrases to help them learn the language, or put together a family tree with photographs and label each with the Spanish term for their place in the family.
In Raising a Left-brain Child in a Right-brain World, Katharine Beals explores today's classrooms and describes in detail why this approach is particularly destructive and ineffective for students who are shy, awkward, introspective, linear and analytic thinkers. She is careful to explain that her use of the term "left brained" is her way of categorizing students who are linear thinkers--who process information by learning one thing at a time thoroughly before moving on to the next. (I use the term in the same fashion in this review.)
A particularly powerful passage at the beginning of the book describes the difficulties that left-brained children face and provides a stark and disturbing contrast with the traditional classrooms that the parents of these children remember:
Making matters worse is how today's informal discussions favor multiple solutions, personal opinions, and personal connections over single correct answers. In previous generations the best answer, exerting an absolute veto power, favored the studious over the merely charismatic; how that there is no best answer, extroversion is king. ... To fully appreciate the degree to which today's classrooms challenge our children, we should consider how they might have fared in more traditional schools. Imagine how much more at ease they might be in general, and how their attitudes toward school might improve, if they enjoyed the privacy of quietly listening to teachers lecture instead of having to talk to classmates. ...Imagine if they could read to themselves instead of to a group, do math problems on their own, and find, in the classroom, a safe haven from school yard dynamics. (p. 23)
Douglas Harris, associate professor of educational policy and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, is a cautious advocate of these measures, but points out that concerns about teaching to the test could be heightened if teachers, as well as principals and school districts, are evaluated based on test results. "Teacher can generate high value-added measures by drilling the test over and over," Harris said.
If these measures catch on, they could also encourage more teachers to cheat. "If we start to place a lot of weight on these things, [you] have to expect some degree of malfeasance," said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. "You want the benefits to outweigh the costs, and you want to police it in a smart way."
Will the benefits outweigh the costs? "That's the big unknown," Michael Hansen, a researcher in the Urban Institute's Education Policy Center in Washington, D.C., wrote in an email. "What is known is that the way most districts currently hire, evaluate, and pay teachers is misaligned with the public goal of increasing overall student learning."
The National Council on Teacher Quality, an Ed Reform organization posing as a think tank, has issued another report on Seattle. This one explores the proposals discussed in the negotiations over the teachers' contract.
I have reviewed their report and found it to be a mixed bag.
I agree with the District and the NCTQ regarding teacher assignment.
I, too, would like to see principals have more authority to determine who works in their schools. I support the District proposal to eliminate super-seniority privileges and the forced placement of any teacher in any school. I also support mutual consent hiring for all teachers regardless of the reason a teacher is transferring schools or when the position is being filled. Under such a system, excessed teachers would be able to remain in the displaced pool for a limited amount of time while they search for a new position: 12 months for teachers on a continuing contract; 6 months for teachers on a provisional contract. After this period, they would be subject to layoffs. If teachers cannot find a principal in the District willing to hire them, then they don't work here anymore.
Fewer than one percent of Oregon students are enrolled in online public schools. But for nearly five years, the funding, quality and financial management of these virtual schools have been dominating conversation in State Capitol hearing rooms and school district board rooms.
In Oregon, education dollars follow the students. And this issue pits parent choice against school district stability.
Initially, each of six members of the state board suggested slightly different solutions. After nearly three hours of discussion, however, most board members said they would support parent choice but only if there was a cap on how many students could leave an individual school district.
"Parents should have the option to transfer," said board chairwoman Brenda Frank. "I don't believe the district has all the answers. But I think there just needs to be a gate."
It has been said that victory is sweetest when you've known defeat. Yesterday's Commission ruling sure felt sweet! Thanks to the energized efforts of Georgia parents, school choice reigns supreme for our 9th grade students. The state school board ruled 8-2 in favor of adding ninth grade to the Georgia Cyber Academy. This decision allowed 660 GCA ninth graders to begin classes on September 7.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution's Aileen Dodd was there to cover the story live. She writes, "After the outcries of parents and the embarrassment of having two approved cyber schools call off August openings, leaders of the Georgia Charter Schools Commission admitted that they may have low-balled the cost of virtual public education. The board has agreed to rethink its figures."
The premise of this book is enticingly simple . It presents two solutions to two prevalent problems in education . The first is the vast amount of content required to be taught because of various state standards, and how one can thread that maze and "teach for understanding ." That is, how can educators get students to apply what they've learned to new and unfamiliar problems? The second is the diverse nature of today's classrooms, the result of heterogeneous grouping of students of different abilities . How does an educator differentiate instruction to accommodate such diversity in a single classroom?
I read this book in a math teaching methods class a few years ago . One event in that class stands out regarding this textbook . In a chapter on assessing understanding, a chart presents examples of "Inauthentic versus Authentic Work" (p . 68) . For example, "Solve contrived problems" is listed as inauthentic; "Solve 'real world' prob- lems" is listed as authentic . The black-and-white nature of the dis- tinctions on the chart bothered me, so when the teacher asked if we had any comments, I said that calling certain practices "inauthentic" is not only pejorative but misleading . Since the chart listed "Practice decontextualized skills" as inauthentic and "Interpret literature" as authentic, I asked the teacher, "Do you really think that learning to read is an inauthentic skill?"
She replied that she didn't really know about issues related to reading . Keeping it on the math level, I then asked why the authors automatically assumed that a word problem that might be contrived didn't involve "authentic" mathematical concepts . She answered with a blank stare and the words "Let's move on ."
That incident remains in my mind because it is emblematic of the educational doctrine that pervades schools of education as well as this book . The doctrine holds that mastery of facts and attaining procedural fluency in subjects like mathematics amounts to mind- numbing "drill and kill" exercises that ultimately stifle creativity and critical thinking . It also embodies the belief that critical thinking skills can be taught .
In a discussion of what constitutes "understanding," the authors state that a student's ability to apply what he or she has learned does not necessarily represent understanding . "When we call for an appli- cation we do not mean a mechanical response or mindless 'plug-in' of a memorized formula . Rather, we ask students to transfer--to use what they know in a new situation" (p . 67) . In terms of math and other subjects that involve attaining procedural fluency, employing worked examples as scaffolding for tackling more-complex prob- lems is not something that these authors see as leading to any kind of understanding . That a mastery of fundamentals provides the foun- dation for the creativity they seek is lost in their quest to get stu- dents performing authentic work from the start
The Los Angeles Unified School District will ask labor unions to adopt a new approach to teacher evaluations that would judge instructors partly by their ability to raise students' test scores -- a sudden and fundamental change in how the nation's second-largest district assesses its educators.
The teachers union has for years staunchly resisted using student test data in instructors' reviews.
The district's actions come in response to a Times article on teacher effectiveness. The article was based on an analysis, called "value-added," which measures teachers by analyzing their students' performance on standardized tests. The approach has been embraced by education reformers as a way to bring objectivity to teacher evaluations.
Local school districts have started to grade teachers based on student test scores, but the early results suggest the effort deserves an incomplete.
The new type of teacher evaluations make use of the standardized tests that have become an annual rite for American public-school students. The tests mainly have been used to measure the progress of students and schools, but with some statistical finesse they can be transformed into a lens for identifying which teachers are producing the best test results.
At least, that's the hope among some education experts. But the performance numbers that have emerged from these studies rely on a flawed statistical approach.
One perplexing finding: A large proportion of teachers who rate highly one year fall to the bottom of the charts the next year. For example, in a group of elementary-school math teachers who ranked in the top 20% in five Florida counties early last decade, more than three in five didn't stay in the top quintile the following year, according to a study published last year in the journal Education Finance and Policy.
A tragic crisis of enormous magnitude is facing black boys and men in America.
Parental neglect, racial discrimination and an orgy of self-destructive behavior have left an extraordinary portion of the black male population in an ever-deepening pit of social and economic degradation.
The Schott Foundation for Public Education tells us in a new report that the on-time high school graduation rate for black males in 2008 was an abysmal 47 percent, and even worse in several major urban areas -- for example, 28 percent in New York City.
The astronomical jobless rates for black men in inner-city neighborhoods are both mind-boggling and heartbreaking. There are many areas where virtually no one has a legitimate job.
WRITING about the same analysis of Los Angeles public school teachers my colleague referenced yesterday, Matthew Yglesias points to the NAEP mathematics 8th-grade test rankings of different major-city public-school systems, which shows Los Angeles performing below average for black, hispanic, and Asian/Pacific Islander students, as well as for low-income students. Los Angeles did okay with middle-class white students. This reminded me of something I learned a couple of months ago: there are other, perhaps better ways of categorising students than race and income, for the purpose of deciding whether they are being well served by their schools. Specifically, parents' educational attainment. Taking parents' educational attainment as a baseline is a very effective way to measure whether a "good" school is really doing a standout job of educating its kids, or whether it's simply benefiting from a student population that has a head start.
This is largely how the Netherlands' educational inspectorate (Onderwijsinspectie) has been measuring student baselines for the purposes of evaluating schools since 2006. How they got to this measurement is an interesting story, as Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske of Duke University explain in this paper. First, starting 25 years ago the Dutch instituted a system of funding schools based on "weighting" students: students who came from backgrounds presumed to be educationally disadvantaged got more funding, and schools with large populations of "weighted" students ended up with more resources to try and make up the disparities. Initially, the high weights were given to children from immigrant backgrounds, or to children of poor native Dutch parents with very low educational attainment. But as Dutch politics became more right-wing in the 2000s, the idea of giving more funding to children of immigrants than to children of native Dutch parents became unpopular. Hence the idea of weighting children chiefly according to parents' educational attainment, which was amenable to both right- and left-wing parties: it still tends to weight children from immigrant backgrounds more heavily, unless their parents are wealthy, highly-educated immigrants, in which case they probably didn't need the extra help anyway. It also directs more resources to children of native Dutch parents from underprivileged backgrounds, and it defuses some of the racial tensions over school funding.
Enrollment at America's leading universities has been increasing dramatically, rising nearly 15 percent between 1993 and 2007. But unlike almost every other growing industry, higher education has not become more efficient. Instead, universities now have more administrative employees and spend more on administration to educate each student. In short, universities are suffering from "administrative bloat," expanding the resources devoted to administration significantly faster than spending on instruction, research and service.
Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America's leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent. Arizona State University, for example, increased the number of administrators per 100 students by 94 percent during this period while actually reducing the number of employees engaged in instruction, research and service by 2 percent. Nearly half of all full-time employees at Arizona State University are administrators.
A significant reason for the administrative bloat is that students pay only a small portion of administrative costs. The lion's share of university resources comes from the federal and state governments, as well as private gifts and fees for non-educational services. The large and increasing rate of government subsidy for higher education facilitates administrative bloat by insulating students from the costs. Reducing government subsidies would do much to make universities more efficient.
State governments usually sell bonds as a way to raise money to fund specific projects. They borrow from investors with the promise to repay the debt later, plus interest. As a protection to investors, all bond issuers, state governments included, are required to provide investors with the information necessary for investors to make an informed decision regarding the level of risk associated with the investment.
New Jersey sold over $26 billion in bonds between 2001 and 2007, but the SEC charged that the state failed to inform investors that the state has not been fully funding its pension funds and cannot fully fund them in the future without raising taxes or cutting spending, which could impact the state's ability to repay these bonds. According to the SEC, New Jersey's
It is always news to me when I hear or read something good about the Newark school system, so I took notice when the Schott Foundation for Public Education released a new study saying that both that city, and the state of New Jersey, lead the nation in the percent of black male students graduating from high school.
Schott's report focused on the abysmal national graduation rate for black males, only 47 percent in the 2007-08 school year, but it heralded the New Jersey results, and gave credit to that state's heavy spending and innovative measures to raise graduation rates for everyone.
It said New Jersey had a graduation rate for black males of 69 percent in 2007-08, with the next closest states being Maryland (55 percent), California (54 percent) and Pennsylvania (53 percent). In Newark, the graduation rate for black males was 76 percent. The other school districts nearest that level were Fort Bend, Tex. (68 percent), Baltimore County, Md. (67 percent) and Montgomery County, Md. (65 percent). The list only included states with more than 100,000 black male students and districts with more than 10,000 black male students.
But Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, urges the L.A. Times not to publish a database showing how teachers may have influenced students' standardized test scores.
The head of the American Federation of Teachers said Wednesday that she believed parents have a right to know how well their children's teachers are rated on employee evaluations, but strongly disagreed with The Times' decision to publish data showing how individual teachers may have influenced the standardized test scores of students.
Such data should be considered only as part of a well-rounded evaluation of a teacher's performance, Randi Weingarten said, and then should be available only to the teacher, his or her principal, and individual parents. It is wrong, she said, to make such information widely available to the public.
A quarter-century ago, the nation was transfixed by this question: " Where's the beef?"
Now, the question we should be asking ourselves about our nation's schools is this: " Where's the rigor?" Or, "Where's the academic beef?"
Concerns about the lack of rigor in U.S. schools were renewed recently, when new data were published on how prepared - or not - U.S. high school students are for college. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Stephanie Banchero said, "New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level [college] courses."
The story, as reported by many outlets, was that the average ACT score has fallen slightly since 2007. But the real story - and the one that Banchero focused on - is that the vast majority of our high school graduates aren't ready for college or a career. And this holds true even when they follow a supposedly "rigorous" course of study, taking four years of English and three years each of math, science and social studies.
It turns out that much of what U.S. schools offer is "rigorous" in name only. Said differently, a distinct lack of academic rigor is de rigueur.
UW researchers have found that despite the spoken commitment of state officials and lawmakers, teachers in math and science earn less than other high-school instructors.
Researchers at the University of Washington have found that despite the spoken commitment of state officials and lawmakers, math and science teachers earn less than other high-school instructors.
The way Washington and many other states pay teachers -- with more money going to those with more years of experience and graduate degrees -- has led to the uneven salaries.
Jobs that pay better at nearby high-tech companies may also be a contributing factor, because math and science teachers may be recruited away before they have a chance to reach the higher rungs on the pay ladder, said Jim Simpkins, a researcher on the report, with Marguerite Roza and Cristina Sepe.
Washington State recently passed a law (House Bill 2621) intending to accelerate the teaching and learning of math and science. However, in the two subject areas the state seeks to prioritize, this analysis finds that nineteen of the thirty largest districts in the state spend less per math or science teacher than for teachers in other subjects.
Existing salary schedules are part of the problem. By not allowing any differential compensation for math and science teachers, and instead basing compensation only on longevity and graduate credits, the wage system works to create the uneven salaries.
The analysis finds that in twenty-five of the thirty largest districts, math and science teachers had fewer years of teaching experience due to higher turnover--an indication that labor market forces do indeed vary with subject matter expertise. The subject-neutral salary schedule works to ignore these differences.
Life expectancy at birth ranges from 80 years in Hawaii to 72 in Washington, DC; and from 83 in Japan to 40 in Swaziland. In vitro fertilisation is available in some regions of the UK within months; in others it takes years. Fill in your own example here, because it is now a commonplace that the price, availability and quality of anything from a nursing home to a good education will vary depending on where you live.
I am not sure whether the British complain more about this than anyone else, but we have developed our own term to describe it: the "postcode lottery". For community-minded gamblers there is actually a real postcode lottery, in which prizes are shared between winning ticket-holders and those fortunate enough to have homes on the same street. But for most Britons, the term is a lazy shorthand for the fact that where you live affects what you get.
There is a glaring problem with this phrase: while the ticket that gets pulled out of the tombola is chosen at random, the postcodes where you and I live are not. We aren't serfs. If we want to move and we can afford to move, we can move.
I live in Hackney, a London borough where crime is high and the schools are poor. If I had a few spare million, perhaps I would move to Hampstead or Chelsea. I do not. People who shop at Harrods expect better food than those who shop at Tesco. Ferraris are faster and sexier than Fords. There are many words to describe this state of affairs, but "lottery" is not the one I would choose.
Harford makes an excellent point. It is clearly futile to impose one size fits all approaches, particularly in education. We, as a society are far better off with a diverse governance (many smaller schools/districts/charters/vouchers) and curricular environment.
Seattle opens next front in education reform effort
Seattle Public Schools administrators are fighting a battle for schoolchildren across the state.
The district has decided to go to the mat over teacher performance evaluations. District officials want teachers to be judged based in part on their students' academic growth.
The union says the proposal is a no-go. With the school year fast approaching, a strike could be in the offing.
The Seattle Education Association would rather stick to a previous compromise: an evaluation system that would put teachers who rate "basic" or "unsatisfactory" at risk of dismissal.
What a radical notion - that teacher performance should dictate a teacher's career prospects. Such is what qualifies as "historic change" - union officials' words - in public education.
The district's proposal is also rather modest contrary to the union's characterizations.
Students of Verona High School, cast aside your name tags; you are no longer subject to the tyranny of instant identification.
Conceding defeat after only a year, school officials have abandoned a requirement that students wear their ID cards. Compliance with the rule had never reached more than 85 percent.
Eighty-five percent is pretty good in most things, but we're dealing with identity here. Would you trust an online retailer that could protect your credit card number only 85 percent of the time? Airport screening that stopped 85 percent of the people on the terrorist watch list?
Of course, forcing students to wear their IDs isn't meant to thwart a terrorist plot, and while the IDs are used to check out books at the library and get on the bus, adorning yourselves with them is not necessary to do either of those things.
Before Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005, Orleans Parish public schools were failing miserably. After the storm shut down the public school system completely, there was little reason to be optimistic.
But then something amazing happened.
The state of Louisiana took control over most of the schools in the district and has been chartering those schools ever since. This fall, more than 70 percent of the students in New Orleans will attend charter schools. (Check out reason.tv's Katrina's Silver Lining to learn more about the New Orleans charter school revolution.)
And then in 2008, Louisiana enacted the Student Scholarship for Educational Excellence Program, a pilot voucher program designed to allow students in failing schools to attend private schools in the area.
The charter-school movement appears to be catching up to the teachers union in political giving to Albany.
With the help of hedge-fund managers and other Wall Street financiers, charter-school advocates gave more than $600,000 to Albany political candidates and party committees since January, according to the latest campaign filings. That's more than twice as much as in prior reporting periods, according to allies of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run.
Pro-charter donations appear to have surpassed the $500,000 or so that candidates raised from teachers unions during the six-month period.
Families in the most affluent New York City school districts, including the Upper East and Upper West sides, file more claims than other parts of the city seeking reimbursement of their children's private-school tuition, according to Department of Education data.
The department last year spent $116 million in tuition and legal expenses to cover special-education students whose parents sued the DOE alleging that their public-school options were not appropriate. The number is more than double three years ago, and the costs are expected to continue to rise.
Parents have been helped by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that strengthened their legal position to sue school districts. The most recent case was last summer.
"No one begrudges parents the right to send their children to private school," said Michael Best, general counsel at the DOE. "But this system was not intended as a way for private school parents to get the taxpayers to fund their children's tuition."
Teachers, by the numbers A team of Times reporters is giving the public its first glimpse of some surprising findings on teachers and their performance in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has done an admirable job of collecting useful data about its teachers -- which ones have the classroom magic that makes students learn and which ones annually let their students down. Yet it has never used that valuable information to analyze what successful teachers have in common, so that others can learn from them, or to let less effective teachers know how they're doing.
For the record: This editorial says the federal Race to the Top grant program pushed states to make students' test scores count for half or more of a teacher's performance evaluation. Although the program has encouraged this by awarding its first grants to states that promised to do so, it has not formally required it.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday that parents have a right to know if their children's teachers are effective, endorsing the public release of information about how well individual teachers fare at raising their students' test scores.
"What's there to hide?" Duncan said in an interview one day after The Times published an analysis of teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest school system. "In education, we've been scared to talk about success."
Duncan's comments mark the first time the Obama administration has expressed support for a public airing of information about teacher performance -- a move that is sure to fan the already fierce debate over how to better evaluate teachers.
Spurred by the administration, school districts around the country have moved to adopt "value added" measures, a statistical approach that relies on standardized test scores to measure student learning. Critics, including many teachers unions and some policy experts, say the method is based on flawed tests that don't measure the more intangible benefits of good teaching and lead to a narrow curriculum. In Los Angeles, the teachers union has called public disclosure of the results "dangerous" and "irresponsible."
With less than a week before school starts, the California Department of Education released the results of the 2010 Standardized Testing and Reporting Program tests.
As I looked at the numbers, I was encouraged as well as concerned.
There was growth in students scoring proficient or above in some grades and declines in others. Looking at the Sierra Sands Unified School District results, I was really tickled to see across-the-board growth at the high-school level. While gains were not overly dramatic, the results show movement in the right direction.
I was also pleased to see growth in the Trona Joint Unified School District elementary grades. This is a good sign, because the elementary school is in program improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind. I hope this growth is a sign of things to come.
With the economic outlook weakening, they argue that big deficits are looming for the next academic year and that they need to preserve the funds to prevent future layoffs. Los Angeles, for example, is projecting a $280 million budget shortfall next year that could threaten more jobs.
"You've got this herculean task to deal with next year's deficit," said Lydia L. Ramos, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest after New York City. "So if there's a way that you can lessen the blow for next year," she said, "we feel like it would be responsible to try to do that."
The district laid off 682 teachers and counselors and about 2,000 support workers this spring and was not sure it would be able to hire any of them back with the stimulus money. The district says it could be forced to cut 4,500 more people next year.
There's already plenty of chatter about Sunday's LA Times article on the value-added scores of LAUSD teachers, and certainly more to come (comments blowing up here). With access to seven years of math and English scores for hundreds of thousands of 3rd through 5th grade students (under California Public Records Act), the Times hired RAND researcher Richard Buddin to conduct a value-added analysis on LAUSD teachers. Over the next few weeks, and likely beyond that, the Times promises to publish the findings of this analysis in articles and via a full database. For thousands of LAUSD teachers, this means they should expect to see their names and scores in their morning paper. For parents and the rest of the public, it means they will have more information about public school teachers' performance than ever before.
The Board, first and foremost, are the elected representatives of the public, but this Board doesn't represent the public at all. This Board doesn't raise the public's concerns, doesn't relay the public's wishes, and doesn't voice the public perspective. I almost never hear the Board members talk about the public or their constituents saying "People are concerned about.." or "People want..." or "People see it this way...".
The Board doesn't voice the public perspective and certainly doesn't advocate for it. Worse, the Board doesn't advocate for the public to have a voice for themselves. The Board is no champion of community engagement. The Board regularly approves motions with inadequate community engagement and regularly approves motions with NO community engagement. The Board hasn't demanded improved engagement from anyone and hasn't even demanded that the staff provide the community engagement that they promised to do. The Board's own community engagement is just about the worst of any workgroup in the District. Their primary community engagement practice is testimony at Board meetings and they never respond to the people who come and speak to them there.
But Daly returned home from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and headed straight to the local community college for more classes.
Community colleges in the Washington region are doing brisk business this summer with students from four-year universities. The students are taking advantage of increasingly flexible transfer policies to load up on cheap, convenient credits that will help them graduate more quickly and at a lower expense.
Prince George's Community College enrolled 136 students from four-year colleges this summer, nearly double last year's number. Tidewater Community College in Virginia has 2,150 four-year college students, up 14 percent. Montgomery College has 3,100 four-year college students, about one-quarter of its summer enrollment. No comparison with last year's enrollment was available.
We brag about how well Wisconsin students do on the ACT, and this is certainly good. But about 30 states have higher cut scores than Wisconsin when it comes to identifying National Merit Scholars, which means that their top 1% of students taking the test score higher than our top 1% do. (We in the MMSD are justly proud of our inordinate number of National Merit semi-finalists, but if - heaven forbid - MMSD were to be plopped down in the middle of Illinois, our number of semi-finalists would go down, perhaps significantly so. Illinois students need a higher score on the PSAT to be designated a National Merit semi-finalist than Wisconsin students do.)
I asked a few people who know about such things and received this response:
The critical cut score for identifying National Merit Semifinalist varies from state to state depending on the number of students who took the test and how well those students did on the test. In 2009, a score of 207 would put a student amongst the top 1% of test takers in Wisconsin and qualify them as a National Merit Semifinalist. However this score would not be high enough to qualify the student as a semifinalist in 36 other states or the District of Columbia.
The September opening of New Jersey's first Hebrew-language charter school is being challenged over claims it hasn't met enrollment requirements.
The East Brunswick school board this week asked an appeals court to temporarily block Hatikvah International Academy Charter School's final charter, saying the school's enrollment doesn't meet charter-school regulations and that Hatikvah's failure to provide enrollment information makes it difficult for the district to plan for the school year. The motion follows an earlier complaint by the school board to the state's education commissioner, Bret Schundler.
State officials declined to comment on the pending case. "The charter school met requirements when its application was approved," said a Department of Education spokesman, Alan Guenther. Hatikvah received its final charter from the education commissioner on July 6. New Jersey code requires charter schools to verify 90% of enrollment by June 30; in the case of Hatikvah, that would have been 97 of its 108-student capacity.
Under pressure from state public health officials, the professors behind UC Berkeley's controversial plan to genetically test incoming freshmen and transfer students said Thursday they will scale back the program so that participants will not receive personal results from their DNA samples.
The university raised the ire of genetic watchdog and privacy groups in May when it first launched "Bring Your Genes to Cal." The voluntary program is believed to be the largest genetic testing project at a U.S. university.
The 5,500 incoming freshman and transfer students for the fall semester received testing kits in the mail and were asked to submit cheek swabs of their DNA to kick off a yearly exercise to involve the new students in a common educational experience centered on a theme. This year's theme is personalized medicine.
Students were to receive personal information about three of their genes - those related to the ability to break down lactose, metabolize alcohol and absorb folates. This information was to be the basis of lectures and discussions on such topics as the ethical, social and legal interpretations of genetic testing.
But what was meant to be a group educational exercise turned into a lesson for the university on the politics and policy of medical testing.
Assembly hearing
The program was the subject of a state Assembly committee hearing on Tuesday in Sacramento. On Wednesday, officials from the state Department of Public Health said the university must use certified laboratories that meet specific standards, rather than the campus labs, if the school planned to release individualized test results, identified only by barcodes, to students.
"The California Department of Public Health made the determination that what we're doing isn't really actual research or education; that what we're doing is providing medical information, conducting a test," said Dr. Mark Schlissel, dean of biological sciences at UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science and a professor of molecular and cell biology.
Schlissel said he disagreed with that assessment, but said the university will comply with state regulators. UC officials have asked the Department of Public Health to provide legal authority for its interpretation.
The university still plans to analyze the DNA samples in a campus research lab, but students will not have access to their personal results. Instead, the test results will be presented in aggregate to students during lectures and panel discussions this fall.
Schlissel said the controversy and intervention by state regulators has raised interesting questions for the discussions. "Who has authority to tell an individual what they're allowed to know about themselves?" he said. "I don't know the answer to that."
About 700 students have already submitted their samples.
Critics' concerns
Critics had raised questions about how the genetic information, even seemingly innocuous, could be misinterpreted or misused. For example, students who learn they metabolize alcohol well may mistakenly think they can overindulge without consequence.
Jeremy Gruber, who testified at Tuesday's hearing before the Assembly Committee on Higher Education in his role as president of the Council for Responsible Genetics, still has lingering concerns about how the samples will be handled and whether students had the proper amount of information before offering consent to provide them.
"The fact it required the intervention of the Department of Public Health before they would act in the best interest of their students is absolutely appalling," he said.
UC Berkeley officials have said the university will incinerate the samples after they are tested in the next few weeks. Jesse Reynolds, policy analyst at the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, had opposed the university's program primarily over privacy concerns and what he considered the lack of research into the implications of such a mass experiment.
He said restricting students from receiving information about their personal genetics essentially cancels the "personalized medicine" aspect of the program. He said that although students signed consent forms to participate as part of submitting their DNA samples, he is concerned they have now signed consent forms for what is to be a different program.
"Genetic testing in general and personalized medicine specifically are likely to be an increasing part of our lives," Reynolds said. "More education is certainly needed, but this was not the way to go about it."
President Barack Obama and Congress rescued the nation's financially-strapped schools last week with a new stimulus bill that includes $10 billion in emergency aid for education.
At least that's the simple, heroic story the president and fellow Democrats tried to tell.
The truth, however, is far more complex and far less heroic. Consider:
While schools will benefit from the additional money, many school districts, including Madison's, are concerned about the requirements for how the money can be spent. The bill's lack of flexibility may penalize schools that made tough budget decisions and reward schools that took the easiest way out of fiscal problems.
In 1983, a presidential commission issued the landmark report "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform." The report warned that despite an increase in spending, the U.S. public education system was at risk of failure "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today," the report declared, "we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein often quotes the commission before discussing how U.S. schools have fared since it issued its report. Despite nearly doubling per capita spending on education over the past few decades, American 15-year olds fared dismally in standardized math tests given in 2000, placing 18th out of 27 member countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Six years later, the U.S. had slipped to 25th out of 30. If Americans have been fighting against mediocrity in education since 1983, they are losing the battle.
What could turn things around? At a recent event that I organized at the Columbia Business School, Klein opened with his harsh assessment of the situation, and researchers offered some stark options for getting American education back on track. We could find drastically better ways of training teachers or improve our hiring practices so we're bringing aboard better teachers in the first place. Barring these improvements, the only option left is firing low-performing teachers--who have traditionally had lifetime tenure--en masse.
Teachers in 75 districts who settled contracts in the first half of the year will see an average raise of 2.03 percent for the 2010-11 school year, the association said. That's the lowest pay increase in the more than 30 years the group has kept track -- and doesn't include an additional 18 districts that broke into contracts to freeze salaries.
Association spokesman Frank Belluscio said the chief factor was the $1.3 billion in state education aid cut since January, leaving many districts faced with a choice: cut pay or see colleagues fired and positions frozen.
The state Senate Education Committee will meet on Monday to discuss a measure that would revamp New Jersey's charter school regulation system.
State Education Commissioner Bret D. Schundler, who supports the expansion of charter schools, is scheduled to attend the hearing to outline the Christie administration's priorities regarding education in New Jersey.
The meeting will also focus on bill S-2198, a measure sponsored by Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex) and Senator Sandra Bolden Cunningham (D-Hudson), which would enable Rutgers University to authorize charter schools. The bill is designed to expedite the approval of charter school applications, and permit the authorization of special purpose charter schools.
Who's teaching L.A.'s kids? A Times "Value Added" analysis, using data largely ignored by LAUSD, looks at which educators help students learn, and which hold them back.
The fifth-graders at Broadous Elementary School come from the same world -- the poorest corner of the San Fernando Valley, a Pacoima neighborhood framed by two freeways where some have lost friends to the stray bullets of rival gangs.
Many are the sons and daughters of Latino immigrants who never finished high school, hard-working parents who keep a respectful distance and trust educators to do what's best.
The students study the same lessons. They are often on the same chapter of the same book.
Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the other down the hall. The difference has almost nothing to do with the size of the class, the students or their parents.
It's their teachers.
With Miguel Aguilar, students consistently have made striking gains on state standardized tests, many of them vaulting from the bottom third of students in Los Angeles schools to well above average, according to a Times analysis. John Smith's pupils next door have started out slightly ahead of Aguilar's but by the end of the year have been far behind.
Education in South Korea is a paradox, where two big truths clash. Koreans are incredibly keen, and on many measures do very well. Yet nobody - students, parents, teachers or the authorities - is happy. And now battles are raging, on everything from testing and elitism to teachers' politics, free school meals and corporal punishment.
Let's start with the positive. I'm a bit skeptical when Koreans tell you how their Confucian heritage values learning. In theory yes, yet for centuries hardly anyone got to study except a tiny male scholar elite. Modern education - girls not excluded - only arrived with Christian missionaries in the late 19th century. Mass schooling for all is newer still. As recently as 1945, when Japan's harsh 40-year rule ended, less than a quarter of Korean adults (22%) were literate.
They've certainly made up for lost time since. South Korea's first rulers were no democrats, but they knew that so resource-poor a country needed human capital to develop. Hence even after a terrible war in 1950-53 and despite being poorer than much of Africa - yes, really - at that stage, under Syngman Rhee (1948-1960) primary education was vastly expanded. General Park Chung-hee (1961-1979) extended this to secondary and vocational schooling. By 1987, when South Koreans wrested back democracy from another general (Chun Doo-hwan), one third of high school-leavers went on to higher education: more than in the UK at that time.
New Jersey School Boards Association is reporting that recent teacher contract settlements have dropped sharply since January, with annual salary increases averaging 2.03% since January and 1.58% from April to June.
The latter figure includes, according to the press release,
23 districts where teachers have agreed to a wage freeze for the 2010-2011 school year. Overall, since January, 42 teachers' groups have agreed to a one-year pay freeze for the 2010-2011 school year, and an additional 43 districts have agreed to other givebacks and concessions.
CHILDREN can be tender souls. Pitch them a sob story and they often swallow it whole. Reflect the harsh reality outside the school gates, however, and they develop sophisticated strategies for making hard choices. That, at least, is the early experience of an initiative to teach philanthropy to young teenagers.
Two years ago the Big Give, an organisation which collates information about 6,000 charities worldwide in an attempt to foster philanthropy, asked the fee-paying Dragon School in Oxford to run a pilot programme. It gave the school £1,250 to donate to charity and asked 13-year-old pupils to decide where the money should go.
Noting that far more students attend charter schools in Philadelphia than are enrolled in the state's second-largest school district, a group has formed to represent city charters.
Founders of Philadelphia Charters for Excellence say they want to publicize the successes of charter schools and reassure the public that most of the 74 charters are not being investigated for possible corruption.
The organization requires member schools to meet strict ethical standards and plans to create a website to help parents compare the performance of charter schools.
The nonprofit organization was scheduled to be announced Friday.
"There are 74 of us, and in a typical school district with 74 schools, there would be a public-relations representative," said Jurate Krokys, chief executive officer of Independence Charter School in Center City and the group's vice president. "The idea is to be a resource about charter schools in Philadelphia."
The group's mission statement calls it "an alliance of high-performing public charter schools committed to creating a path toward academic and personal excellence for all students."
Minutes before the Badger Rock Middle School planning team presented its final proposal to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education Thursday, supporters received news that they had been awarded a planning grant from the Department of Public Instruction in the amount of $200,000.
The proposed Badger Rock Middle School, which would open in the fall of 2011 on Madison's south side, would be a year-round charter school and be part of a larger Resilience Research Center project spearheaded by the Madison-based Center for Resilient Cities.
The Resilience Research Center project is designed to be a four-acre campus with a working farm, a neighborhood center, café, adjacent city park and the proposed school.
What Can Parents Expect To See in English Language Arts Classrooms After Common Core's Standards Begin To Be Implemented? A Worst Case Scenario--But Probably Not Far from Reality
In June 2010, the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) offered the nation two sets of English language arts standards: one set called "college and career readiness anchor standards," and the other, grade-level standards that build towards these anchor standards. With few exceptions, both sets of standards consist of content-empty and culture-free generic skills. Why are they so bereft of substantive content? In large part because they reflect a faulty diagnosis of why many American students are unprepared for authentic college-level work. The misdiagnosis comes from CCSSI's reliance on the results of ACT surveys to guide the development of its standards.
Several years ago, ACT surveyed thousands of post-secondary instructors to find out what they saw as the chief problems in their freshman students. Not surprisingly, the chief complaint was that high school graduates cannot understand the college texts they are assigned to read. Without an explanation for its reasoning, ACT leaped to two conclusions: (1) college students are not expected to read enough complex texts when they are in high school; and (2) they are not given enough instruction in strategies or skills for reading complex texts in high school.
The Seattle Public Schools administration is proposing to tie teacher evaluations and employment to student test scores -- a bone of contention in current negotiations with the Seattle Education Association. Guest columnists Pat Bailey and Robert Femiano, past union board members, argue that the district's approach is wrong.
The Seattle school district is proposing to tie teacher evaluations and employment to student test scores.
The current teacher evaluation includes student growth as a factor but the district wants an easier path and quicker time frames for teacher dismissals. The district officials' plan is to use test scores to fire those teachers they claim are responsible for the poverty and racial academic gaps and reward those with high improvements in scores. History shows this carrot-and-stick approach not only fails to reduce the achievement gap but is ultimately unhealthy for good teaching.
One result of high-stakes testing is clear: The inordinate focus on test scores narrows what is taught. Diane Ravitch's "The death and life of the great American school system" documents this and other unintended consequences. In order to keep their jobs, teachers will teach and re-teach to the test. Lost are the arts, music, PE, civics, science and even recess. Early-childhood experts point to rich school environments as crucial to healthy development, so who wants to cause the opposite?
We have this thing called Algebra I that exists in very different forms, even within the same school.
That's her admirably candid response to the results of pilot tests of Algebra I and Biology, which demonstrates the gap in proficiency between poor and wealthy students. "On the biology test, just a quarter of the students in the poorest districts were proficient, compared with more than 80 percent in the wealthiest." For Algebra I, "75 percent of students in the poorest districts were deemed "below basic," while that number was 11 percent in the richest districts."
In other words, 75% of NJ's poor students failed both the biology test and the algebra test while only 20% of NJ's wealthy students failed biology and 11% failed algebra. Odds are high, based on Alberti's comment, that the vast majority of the poor students passed their coursework in spite of lack of proficiency.
With fall classes around the corner, San Francisco's Marin Preparatory School has had a bigger challenge than most grammar institutions: coping with its headmaster's abrupt departure and losing half the incoming first-grade class to his new rival school.
So far, the resignation of Ed Walters in May appears to have had a galvanizing effect on Marin Prep. All three of the school's kindergarten teachers stayed, and the four incoming first-graders remaining from a class of a dozen have been joined by at least three new classmates. In addition to the six students who went to the rival school, two of last year's kindergarteners moved this year to schools elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Marin Prep--which started as just a single kindergarten class in 2009--now has four classes including kindergarten, "junior" kindergarten--which acts as a bridge between preschool and kindergarten in some schools--and first grade, totaling 33 students. Eventually, the school in San Francisco's Castro district plans to grow to a K-8 campus with as many as 250 students.
"The reality is a school is much more than one person," says Melinda Kanter-Levy, co-founder of the Marin Day Schools system, a company that runs preschools and child-care centers and that established Marin Prep.
Even as the Obama administration promotes charter schools as a way to help raise the academic performance of the nation's students, half of Chicago's charter schools have been running deficits in recent years, an analysis of financial and budget documents shows, calling into question their financial viability.
On Monday, Chicago Public Schools released a bare-bones budget that included a cut of about 6 percent in per-pupil financing for charter schools -- to $5,771 from $6,117 per pupil for elementary school students and to $7,213 from $7,647 per pupil for high school students. The cuts are a result of shrinking tax revenue and lagging support from the strapped state government. The city's 71 charter schools, which enrolled 33,000 students last year and expect to enroll another 10,000 in the 2010-11 school year, stand to lose $15 million under the cuts.
It is difficult to compare the cuts with those that are being made at traditional schools because those schools do not receive money on a per-pupil basis, but district officials said they tried to make the amount of cuts comparable to those being made at traditional schools.
On Monday 100,000 students started school as Chicago Public Schools moves toward a year-round schedule for all its schools.
"Ultimately, we want all our schools to become year-round and we welcome more schools to do so," Ron Huberman, chief executive officer for CPS, told the Defender. "We do not mandate that schools operate year round. It is voluntary and up to the principals, parents and community."
Year-round public schools are classified as Track E schools and students who attend these schools generally have better attendance and perform better on standardize tests, Huberman added.
"We will continue to push for more Track E schools," explained Huberman. "Track E schools offer a safer environment and reduces the amount of time teachers have to spend reviewing work with students to get them caught up after the summer break."
Hunching over her notebook at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Sharasha Croslen struggled to figure out what to do with the algebra problem in front of her: x2 + 2x - 8 = 0.
It was a question every ninth grader is expected to be able to answer. (For those who have erased the ninth grade from memory, the answer is at the end of the article.) But even though Ms. Croslen managed to complete three years of math and graduate from high school, she did not know how to solve for x.
"It's incredibly frustrating," she said during a break from her remedial math course, where she has spent the last several weeks reviewing arithmetic and algebra. "I know this is stuff I should know, but either I didn't learn it or I forgot it all already."
Congress is showering schools with $10 billion to bring back teachers who've been laid off. States are rushing to submit their applications to qualify for this unexpected summer windfall for school districts. The Education Department estimates the measure will save 160,000 jobs. The GOP says it's a gift to teachers' unions.
So do school districts that spend more money per pupil perform better? I checked out the financial figures for the 2007-08* school year in Texas and found that more money per pupil doesn't necessarily make a school better. Of the top 10 school districts and charter schools that spent more money in operating expenses per student, one held the state's highest rating, "exemplary;" three were "recognized;" and the remaining six were "academically acceptable." (Go to the jump for a list of these schools).
Carroll ISD, an exemplary school district, spent $8,301 per student, compared to $9,446 per student in the academically-acceptable Dallas ISD.
In 2010, with the blessing and encouragement of the nation's president and secretary of education, we are establishing "common-core standards" to address the historical claim that our public schools are failures. In the 1890s, a similar lament was voiced by the group known as the Committee of Ten:
"When college professors endeavor to teach chemistry, physics, botany, zoology, meteorology, or geology to persons of 18 or 20 years of age, they discover that in most instances new habits of observing, reflecting, and recording have to be painfully acquired by the students--habits which they should have acquired in early childhood."
"The Fight Over Education in Washington" (editorial, July 31) says "teachers unions and other forces of the status quo" are trying to discredit the Obama education initiative, Race to the Top.
There is nothing "retrograde" about objecting to the pernicious effect standardized assessment has had on our children, schools and a generation of teachers. And there is nothing "reform"-minded about a policy -- begun under President George W. Bush and adapted by the current administration -- that reinforces those negative consequences.
In their annual review of the district leader, board members gave Elia high marks for her leadership, policy-making, organization, management, values and ethics.
Her total score was 282, just two points shy of outstanding and the same score as the previous school year.
Board members applauded Elia's efforts in landing a $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Board members also said Elia was "much more open minded to suggestions ... '' while adding, "she needs to listen more.''
The future of education technology is one where schools continually outsource the activities they're not as good at to focus on their specialty, educating the leaders of tomorrow. At its core, this is simply the law of comparative advantage: the ability of a party (individual or firm) to produce a particular good or service at a lower opportunity cost than another party (per Wikipedia). Basically, if someone does something better than you can, you should allow them to do it for you so you can focus on your specialty. This results in "gains from trade".
The future of education technology will benefit from such gains. The internet enables schools to gain efficiencies by outsourcing what they can't do as well to dedicated technologists, allowing more innovative education technology to flow into schools at a lower cost.
We're already seeing this take place. While developing the LearnBoost Gradebook, we spoke to numerous schools (public and charter) about their technology needs. These were the most common situations we found:
Schools are loyal to their current technology provider despite expensive and inadequate software solutions. Legacy systems and entrenched interests generate steep switching costs and make it difficult to reach a consensus among stakeholders.
Schools are spending too much money outsourcing their data management to a Student Information System (SIS) provider.
As legislators and lobbyists congratulate themselves on the 2300 pages of legalese drafted to reform Wall Street banks and the financial services industry, not one paragraph addresses a major reason why the meltdown occurred: how American consumers learn to manage money. According to several mortgage banking studies, nearly 70 percent of the victims of foreclosure admit they did not understand the terms of the deal they signed or the long-term impact on their lives.
Congress had plenty of chances to address this problem. More than 30 bills focused on financial literacy have been introduced since 2006. All of them died in Senate or House committees. None were included in this recent reform bill.
Money, like sex, is supposed to be taught at home but in a 2008 Charles Schwab study, 69% of parents interviewed reported they were more prepared to discuss sex than money with their children.
Last week I noted that Fordham had offered up the Gadfly as a platform for an argument, made by guest columnist Eugenia Kemble, that the next logical step after establishing national standards is a single national curriculum.
Well, my post has drawn a sharp response from Kemble. Of course, she disagrees with me on the substance (the merits of a national curriculum and the badness of teachers' unions) but that goes without saying. More interestingly, she accuses me of not addressing her argument on the merits, but only being concerned with the significance of her piece having appeared in the Gadfly. The indictment has two counts. First, she accuses me of not offering an argument for my position that "common" standards adopted by the states are really "federal" standards (i.e. controlled by the federal government.) Second, she accuses me of practicing "guilt by association" by insinuating that if Checker publishes a union piece, he must embrace the entire union agenda.
To the second count I plead not guilty. I didn't insinuate that Checker agrees with the unions about everything. I insinuated that his position in favor of national standards was having the effect - whether intended or not - of advancing the unions' agenda in one respect. And that the appearance of Kemble's piece in the Gadfly clearly demonstrates that those of us who have been saying this all along were right. And I stand by that insinuation.
The shadow schools secretary and his ilk think of themselves as opponents of fascism in its various forms. They are mistaken.
The British parliament last month passed the Academies Act, allowing parents to start tax-funded schools free from local-authority control. Ed Balls, the shadow education secretary, does not like the act. He fears it will create "social apartheid" in education.
Most people agree that South Africa's apartheid laws were abominable. But, after Mr. Balls's remark, I am not sure we all agree on what was wrong with them. My objection, which I had thought to be universal, is that apartheid limited people's freedom of association. To take but one outrageous example, it was illegal for a black and a white to marry each other.
But this cannot be what Mr. Balls thinks was wrong with South Africa's racial apartheid because the social separation that might result from parent-run schools would be voluntary. The Academies Act does not force parents to start schools, it allows them to. Unlike South Africa's apartheid laws, it does not limit freedom of association but expands it.
It's not clear whether salary caps that Gov. Chris Christie wants for New Jersey's school superintendents would apply to private schools funded with tax dollars.
An analysis by The Record newspaper found more than 60 administrators for the state's 171 private special education schools earn more than the $175,000 cap.
None of the state's special education private schools had more than 460 students last year.
Education Department spokesman Alan Guenther said the rules still are being drafted and will be presented in September, but the governor's spokesman indicated that the cap should be consistent for all state-paid school administrator salaries.
Pay levels at special private schools are controlled by the state because most of the money the schools make is from tuition paid by the public schools that send students.
For the 2009-10 school year, the state Education Department capped compensation for administrators at private special education schools at $215,000 no matter how many students there were.
WHEREAS, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) has worked to develop a long-term strategic plan for the district that will build upon the Declaration of Beliefs and Visions, will provide a road map for our future, and will transform our district into the top public school system in the nation; and
WHEREAS, the purpose of this long-term Strategic Direction is to provide clarity around our priorities of Placing an Effective Teacher in Every Classroom, Having an Effective Principal in Every School, Instituting Rigorous Instructional Standards, Ensuring Data-Driven Decisions and Accountability, and a Culture of Trust through Action; and
WHEREAS, the development of our long-term strategic plan, which began in February 2010, included diagnostic research to understand the current state of the district across various critical areas such as student achievement and organizational effectiveness to ensure the best ideas were being considered in the planning process. That process helped define the core initiatives for HISD's transformation; and
WHEREAS, several months of community stakeholder engagement was included in the research process, including input from parents, teachers, principals, students, the business community, nonprofit partners, and the broader community. The feedback derived from the community-engagement process has guided the design of the overall Strategic Direction.
NOW THEREFORE, be it resolved that HISD and the Board of Education believe the key overarching strategies indicated above will help HISD achieve its goals set forth in the long-term Strategic Direction to become the best school district in America.
Foreclosures make headlines. They are a big focus of the media's attention as the troubled economy continues to dominate the news. But even where banks aren't taking over properties, the collapse of the real estate market is having profound effects on local politics and county and city policymaking.
Here in Northwestern Montana, one needs only look at the situation happening on the shores of stunning Flathead Lake to see the housing crisis will continue to haunt communities for years to come. Residents along the largest natural freshwater lake west of the Mississippi had watched as property values climb throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
Fueled by many out-of-staters looking for a second home with views of the glacier-carved Mission Mountains and only miles from Glacier National Park, property reappraisals including land and home soared to as much as $10,000 per foot of shoreline along the lake.
Earlier this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released state-by-state employment data for the month of June. While national totals had already been released for June, this is the first look at June data for individual states. The national data had shown a very slight increase in private sector employment, compared with May, and slight continued declines in state and local government employment (see Figure 1). This is broadly consistent with past recessions, in which state and local government employment has been far more stable than private sector employment, and in fact rarely declined at all. As in past recessions, state and local government employment changes tend to lag responses in the private sector.
California has long been a destination for those seeking a better place to live. For most of its history, the state enacted sensible policies that created one of the wealthiest and most innovative economies in human history. California realized the American dream but better, fostering a huge middle class that, for the most part, owned their homes, sent their kids to public schools, and found meaningful work connected to the state's amazingly diverse, innovative economy.
Recently, though, the dream has been evaporating. Between 2003 and 2007, California state and local government spending grew 31 percent, even as the state's population grew just 5 percent. The overall tax burden as a percentage of state income, once middling among the states, has risen to the sixth-highest in the nation, says the Tax Foundation. Since 1990, according to an analysis by California Lutheran University, the state's share of overall U.S. employment has dropped a remarkable 10 percent. When the state economy has done well, it has usually been the result of asset inflation--first during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, and then during the housing boom, which was responsible for nearly half of all jobs created earlier in this decade.
In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty-four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study time occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, for students who worked and those who did not, within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that are most relevant to education and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at postsecondary institutions in the United States.
Key points in this Outlook:
Study time for full-time students at four-year colleges in the United States fell from twenty-four hours per week in 1961 to fourteen hours per week in 2003, and the decline is not explained by changes over time in student work status, parental education, major choice, or the type of institution students attended.
Evidence that declines in study time result from improvements in education technology is slim. A more plausible explanation is that achievement standards have fallen.
Longitudinal data indicate that students who study more in college earn more in the long run.
Twenty of our public schools in the Fairbanks area made "Adequate Yearly Progress" in the past year, while 15 did not.
But as in previous years, it is impossible to say exactly what this means about the quality of education in any of those schools. The state education department released the details last week.
Statewide, 203 schools failed to make adequate progress, while 302 made the mark.
As a means of judging educational achievement, the process used to determined AYP in Alaska has always been inadequate. For some of our schools, there is real significance in either a positive or a negative rating. For others, there is not.
The DREAM Act is back in the news. President Obama referred to it in his immigration speech at the American University on July 1. Groups of high school and college students have been marching and getting arrested for it all summer. Sen. Dick Durbin supported a Capitol Hill demonstration on it on July 20. Pollster Celinda Lake said at a Brookings Institute immigration panel in May: "How can anyone be against it?" [See who supports Durbin.]
So do you know what the DREAM Act is exactly?
Durbin describes it as "a narrowly tailored, bipartisan bill that would provide immigration relief to a select group of students who grew up in the United States but are prevented from pursuing their dreams by current immigration law".
President Obama said he supports it because it would "stop punishing innocent young people for the actions of their parents by denying them the chance to stay here and earn an education and contribute their talents to build the country where they've grown up."
Merit pay is an issue that highlights the culture clash between the new breed of educational reformers and the traditional education establishment that finds its foundation in teachers and their unions.
Educational reformers nowadays frequently come to education as an avocation after successful business careers. These reformers, like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, believe that our approach to education can be improved if we import the sort of approaches to quality and innovation that have proved effective in the business world.
So, for example, let's figure out what's the single most important school-based variable in determining student achievement. Research indicates that it's the quality of the teacher. Well then, let's evaluate teachers in a way that lets us assess that quality, let's put in place professional development that will allow our teachers to enhance that quality, and let's have compensation systems that allow us to reward that quality.
Unlike many who take courses during UW-Madison's summer session, Peter Owen hasn't spent any hot evenings catching up on his studies while sipping a cold beer on the Memorial Union Terrace.
Owen is a 24-year-old first lieutenant stationed in Iraq with the 724th Engineer Battalion of the Wisconsin Army National Guard. So instead of sitting near the shore of Lake Mendota while finishing coursework, he's knocked off some required readings and listened to recorded lectures on an MP3 player while seated in the back of a military transport aircraft waiting to take off on another mission.
"I have really enjoyed the opportunity to keep working toward my degree while deployed," Owen, who is taking a foreign policy history course from UW-Madison professor Jeremi Suri, says in an e-mail interview. Owen was a graduate student at Valparaiso University pursuing a masters in International Commerce and Policy prior to being deployed.
Welcome to the modern world of "distance education," a field that incorporates various styles of teaching and a range of technologies to deliver education to students who aren't sitting in a traditional classroom. While evolving technology continues to drastically change how people communicate, get their news and make purchases, it's generally having a less dramatic impact on how higher education is delivered -- at least at a place like UW-Madison, where just 2.5 percent of all credit hours are taken through distance education courses.
The Apollo 20 Math Fellows Program is a one-year Urban Education Fellowship Program located in Houston, Texas.
The Houston Independent School District (HISD) is looking for dynamic college graduates to commit one year to improving the academic achievement of inner-city students. You will tutor five pairs of middle- or high-school students in math, every day, for the whole school year. You will have the opportunity to build close relationships with each of your students, and the chance to make a significant impact on their lives. This program is unique in that it is the first large-scale tutoring program integrated into the students' school day that has ever been launched in an urban public school district. With your help, Houston can become a leading innovator in the urban education field.
No, it's not physical books like Nicholas Negroponte -- instead, Gates thinks the idea of young adults having to go to universities in order to get an education is going to go away relatively soon. Well, provided they're self-motivated learners.
"Five years from now on the web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world," Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. "It will be better than any single university," he continued.
He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it's an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.
He made sure to say that educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning.
But college needs to be less "place-based," according to Gates. Well, except for the parties, he joked.
Statewide increases in teacher compensation contracts are on track to be the lowest in more than a decade following last year's changes in state school district financing.
Based on 160 settled contracts out of 425 school districts, the average increase in compensation packages -- including salary and benefits -- is 3.75 percent, according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
Annual increases last dipped below 4 percent in 1999 and have averaged 4.13 percent since 1993, when the state first imposed revenue limits and introduced the so-called qualified economic offer (QEO) provision, which allowed districts to offer a 3.8 percent package increase instead of going to arbitration. The QEO was repealed in the state biennial budget approved last year, though revenue limits remain in place to keep property tax increases in check.
By another measure, the Wisconsin Educators Association Council, the state's largest teachers union, reported teacher salaries are on pace to increase about 2 percent. That doesn't include benefits and certain assumptions about longevity raises. The increase is slightly less than the 2.3 percent annual average since 1993 and would be the lowest since 2003.
As the Iowa governor's race takes shape, some of the sharpest differences have been about the state's education system, which accounts for roughly 60 percent of Iowa's $5.3 billion budget.
Both Democratic Gov. Chet Culver and Republican Terry Branstad said education will be a priority, but they have made it clear that they favor different approaches for the state's elementary and secondary schools. In fact, a key difference relates to children who haven't even started kindergarten.
Culver speaks repeatedly about his success in making state-paid preschool available to nearly every 4-year-old in the state.
Based on the numbers, Carstens Elementary School on Detroit's East Side should have closed by now. The building is 95 years old, and its enrollment last year fell to 234 from 719 a decade earlier, making it one of the fastest-shrinking schools in district history.
In the spring, Carstens was on a preliminary list of 45 schools targeted for closure by Robert C. Bobb, the state-appointed executive in charge of stabilizing the finances of Detroit Public Schools, and his team of accountants, planners and demographers.
But a deeper dive into the neighborhood changed their minds. Carstens, they discovered, was one of the few public institutions within miles. It also served as a health clinic, a seven-day-a-week recreation center and a food pantry. Closing Carstens, they concluded, would effectively turn off the lights on the whole neighborhood.
The Irving school district missed achieving a "recognized" rating in the recently released state accountability ratings because the completion rates for black students fell 1 percentage point short of the standard.
The ratings showed an 84 percent completion rate for black students, short of the required 85 percent. Completion rates represent students who graduated or continued high school rather than dropping out. The district kept the "academically acceptable" rating it has maintained since 2004.
Earlier this year Massachusetts enacted a law that allowed districts to remove at least half the teachers and the principal at their lowest-performing schools. The school turnaround legislation aligned the state with the Obama administration's Race to the Top program incentives and a chance to collect a piece of the $3.4 billion in federal grant money.
From Washington this makes abundant good sense, a way to galvanize rapid and substantial change in schools for children who need it most.
In practice, on the ground, it is messy for the people most necessary for turning a school around -- the teachers -- and not always fair.
Often the decisions about which teachers will stay and which will go are made by new principals who may be very good, but don't know the old staff. "We had several good teachers asked to leave," said Heather Gorman, a fourth-grade teacher who will be staying at Blackstone Elementary here, where 38 of 50 teachers were removed. "Including my sister who's been a special-ed teacher 22 years."
It is with dismay that I listen to the relentless attacks against public school teachers and their unions. Let's set the record straight. Teachers' unions lead the way in educational reform initiatives, fighting for our teachers to have the resources, materials and support necessary to deliver high quality instruction to America's students.
I am proud of the work United Teachers of Dade has done to mobilize the public to vote for and support Florida's Class Size Amendment. Charter and private schools brag about their small class sizes because of the individualized attention their students receive. We are forced to fight for appropriate class sizes for the students in our public schools.
I am proud of our members who organized with parents to insist that our schools maintain physical education, the arts, music, world languages and bilingual education. I am proud that our School Board took a position opposing Senate Bill 6 after the members of United Teachers of Dade made them aware of the destructive measures of this piece of legislation, an assault against the teachers and students in our public schools.
St. Cloud residents will vote in two elections Tuesday to narrow down candidates for school board seats.
For the first time in St. Cloud history, two of the candidates are Somali. One is running in a primary election that will narrow down the candidates from seven to six to get in the general election in November, while the other is running in a special election (that will narrow the candidates from three to two to replace a resigning school board member.
Hassan Yussuf has been living in St. Cloud since 2001. He has been closely following the problems that the St. Cloud school district has faced in recent months. The U.S. Department of Education is investigating allegations that school administrators ignored complaints of racial harassment. And in June, the superintendent resigned with one year remaining on his contract. The superintendent said he couldn't deal with the school district politics anymore. Yussuf said he's concerned about what he sees in the district.
Superintendent Nerad, President Cole and Members of the Board,
Please accept this detailed proposal for Badger Rock Middle School, a project based charter school proposed for South Madison, which focuses on cultural and environmental sustainability. As you know, our charter school concept is part of the larger Resilience Research Center project spearheaded by the Madison based Center for Resilient Cities (CRC), bringing urban agriculture, community wellness,sustainability and alternative energy education to South Madison and the MMSD community.
We are proud of the work we have been able to accomplish to date and the extraordinary encouragement and support we have gotten from the neighborhood, business and non-profit community, local and national funders, and MMSD staff and Board. We are confident that Badger Rock Middle School, with its small class size, collaborative approach, stewardship and civic engagement model, will increase student achievement, strengthen relationships and learning outcomes for all students who attend, while also offering unparalleled opportunities for all MMSD students and faculty to make use of the resources, curriculum and facility.
Our stellar team of educators, community supporters, funders and business leaders continues to expand. Our curriculum team has created models for best practices with new templates for core curriculum areas. Our building and design team has been working collaboratively with architects Hoffman LLC, the Center for Resilient Cities and MMSD staff on building and site plans. In addition, outreach teams have been working with neighborhood leaders and community members, and our governance team has been actively recruiting a terrific team for the governing board and our fundraising team has been working hard to bring local and national donors to the project. In short, we've got great momentum and have only begun to scratch the surface of what this school and project could become.
We are submitting the proposal with a budget neutral scenario for MMSD and also want to assure you that we are raising funds to cover any contingencies that might arise so that additional monies from MMSD will not be needed. Our planning grant from DP! has recently been approved, seeding the school $175,000 in planning grant monies immediately, with another $175, 000 to arrive before the school opens in August 2011.
We ask for your full support of this proposal and the creation of Badger Rock Middle School. BRMS will surely be a centerpiece and shining star of MMSD for years to come.
The Board of Education adopted Equity Policy 9001 on June 2, 2008 (http://boeweb.madison.k12.wi.us/policies/9001). The policy incorporates recommendations from the Equity Task Force and charges MMSD administration with developing an annual report of the extent to which progress is being made towards eliminating gaps in access, opportunities and achievement for all students. The Equity Task Force recommendations also requested annual data on the distribution of resources (budget, staff, programs, and facilities) by school.
On September 29, 2009, the Board of Education adopted a new strategic plan which established strategic priorities and objectives for the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Equity Task Force report and resulting Equity Policy 9001 were considered in the development of the strategic plan. This Annual Equity Report aligns the equity policy with priorities established in the strategic plan and reports equity progress using the same benchmarks as those used in the strategic plan.
School districts across Texas are paying tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for private tutoring that has a mixed track record of improving student test scores.
Even districts that want to stop footing the bill to ineffective providers are not allowed. The No Child Left Behind law guarantees free tutoring to low-income students who attend schools that repeatedly miss federal academic targets. Parents get to pick the tutoring provider from a state-approved list that has grown to more than 200 for-profit and nonprofit entities.
Since the law went into effect in 2002, Texas has never removed a provider from its list despite complaints from school districts and the state's own evaluation that found seven of the eight tutoring companies studied had no significant impact on student achievement.
With the latest federal school ratings released last week, districts are preparing to send letters to parents from about 140 under-performing schools about the tutoring options. At the same time, officials with some of the state's largest urban districts, including Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth, are calling for tougher standards for the tutoring providers.
The White House, concerned about the country's lagging college-graduation rates, is pushing a plan aimed at helping an additional eight million young adults earn college degrees in the next decade.
In a speech at the University of Texas at Austin on Monday, President Barack Obama will tout a series of measures, many implemented over the past year, designed to put more Americans through college, according to White House officials.
Teacher Donald Hawkins shouts enthusiastically to his 3- and 4-year-old students: "Can you name any animals that hop?"
The answers trickle in from the sleepy but smiling youngsters: a kangaroo, a frog, a rabbit. They decide to mimic the frog. It's 9:30ish in the morning inside Browne Education Campus's comfortably warm gymnasium in Northeast Washington. Fast-tempoed music gets the kids in the mood to hop, and off they go, rhythmically squatting and bouncing across the room. When the music stops, the children rise, a little more awake.
"Are you ready?" Hawkins yells. "I can't hear you!"
In the next year or so, the market for statins may get a further boost.
The National Cholesterol Education Program, the group that drafted the 2001 and 2004 guidelines on statin use, is expected to update its treatment recommendations. In doing so, the group will decide whether to suggest the broad use of statins for healthy patients with high readings of a marker for inflammation called C-reactive protein.
If the group does urge statins for these healthy individuals, at least 6.5 million new patients could sign up for long-term statin use.
The Senate on Thursday approved a long-awaited child nutrition act that intends to feed more hungry kids and make school food more nutritious, and it provides for $4.5 billion over the next decade to make that happen.
Called the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, it passed the Senate unanimously and now moves on to the House, where passage is also expected. National child nutrition programs are set to expire Sept. 30.
The legislation will expand the number of low-income children who are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals, largely by streamlining the paperwork required to receive the meals. And it will expand a program to provide after-school meals to at-risk children.
On a Tuesday morning in February, Soheila Ahmad's first-grade class at Imagine Southeast Public Charter School has just finished language arts. The 12 children -- all boys, all African American -- are tidying up their desks.
There are no windows in this basement room, but one wall, the backdrop for posters, is painted sky blue.
"I need the cleanup crew here," shouts Ahmad, a 23-year-old first-time teacher, sweeping her arm around the central area of the class, where a few books lie scattered on the blue rug, and six blue beanbag chairs are arranged in a reading circle. Three boys hop to it, hoisting and heaving the beanbags into a pile against the far wall. A fourth boy collects the books and reshelves them. It is 10:30 a.m. and time for math.
"Let's practice counting by 10s to 100," Ahmad says.
An official who oversees school building projects in Ohio abused his authority in handing out construction contracts, the state watchdog said in a Thursday report.
Ohio School Facilities Commission chief Richard Murray gave unions favored status and joined labor representatives in "arm-twisting sessions" with local school districts, according to the report by Inspector General Tom Charles.
The report also says Murray backed a union-friendly project-labor agreement worth $37 million that would result in payments to a union to which Murray still belongs and to his former union employer, Laborers-Employers Cooperation and Education Trust, known as LECET. The work would take place at the Ohio Schools for the Deaf and Blind, which are under the direct control of Murray's commission.
The world leadership qualities of the United States, once so prevalent, are fading faster than the polar ice caps.
We once set the standard for industrial might, for the advanced state of our physical infrastructure, and for the quality of our citizens' lives. All are experiencing significant decline.
The latest dismal news on the leadership front comes from the College Board, which tells us that the U.S., once the world's leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations.
At a time when a college education is needed more than ever to establish and maintain a middle-class standard of living, America's young people are moving in exactly the wrong direction. A well-educated population also is crucially important if the U.S. is to succeed in an increasingly competitive global environment.
Internet companies such as Facebook and Google have come in for repeated criticism in Germany, where the government has concerns about what they do with users' data. Now one state, worried about the amount of information young people reveal online, plans to teach school pupils how to keep a low profile on the web.
Many of Facebook's 2 million users in Germany are young people who might not give a second thought to posting pictures of themselves and their friends skinny-dipping or passed out at parties. Unfortunately, being casual with one's data also has its risks. After all, potential employers also know how to use social networking tools.
Now the government of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, recognizing that young people are not always aware of the dangers of revealing personal information on the Internet, is planning to teach school students how to deal with the Internet and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
"Our goal is to convey that the Internet doesn't only offer chances and opportunities, but also has risks that students should understand in order to exercise autonomy with regards to digital media," said North Rhine-Westphalia's media minister, Angelica Schwall-Düren, in an interview with the Thursday edition of the regional newspaper WAZ.
Natalie Randolph is scheduled to start workouts Friday at Coolidge Senior High School in Washington, D.C. She spent Thursday observing the Washington Redskins' training camp.
Early on in Beverly L. Hall's 11-year tenure as superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, she figured that the academic gains she intended to make with the city's mostly poor, black students would face skepticism.
"I knew the day would come when people would question, was the progress real?" she said in an interview last week.
So Dr. Hall took a risk, signing up for a trial program to track and compare urban school districts. Since then, Atlanta has made the highest gains in the program in reading and among the highest in math, making it a national model and Dr. Hall a star in the education field.
But that has not insulated her from a cheating scandal that initially threatened to engulf two-thirds of the district's 84 schools. Even after an independent investigation recently found that the problem was much less widespread, critics have called for her resignation and attacked the investigation's credibility.
DeKalb County school board members insist they are not heading down the same path as Clayton County and will salvage the district's accreditation.
"I'm not concerned about us losing accreditation," board chairman Tom Bowen said Friday. "There will have to be a lot of back and forth with [the accrediting agency] and non-compliance on our part. I don't see that happening."
But many of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools' concerns about DeKalb mirror the questions the agency had about Clayton two years ago, which led to its losing accreditation.
On Friday, the DeKalb board announced that it received an extension to answer SACS questions about hiring practices, training, conflict of interest, nepotism, procurement policies, the superintendent search and other areas.
The fact that the feds are bailing out schools and preventing reform doesn’t come as much of a surprise. But what is shocking is how the Senate bill proposes to pay for this extra $26 billion — cuts in food stamps. That’s right, we are literally going to take food out of the mouths of hungry people in order to keep upper-middle class teachers fully employed with their gold-plated pensions and health benefits.
I have been an educator and education advocate in Oakland, California for almost two decades, and I have spent those decades working towards the achievement of those four words. In California, an Academic Performance Index of 800 is the minimum score for a school to be considered good. In 1999, Oakland operated 42 "red" schools, schools with API scores of less than 500. 38 of those "red" schools sat firmly in what we call the "flatlands" of Oakland, the area occupied by predominantly low-income communities of color. At that time, there was only one charter public school, struggling as well. In 1999, Oakland Unified was widely considered one of the worst school districts in the country.
In response to this crisis, families across the flatlands mobilized to demand reforms that supported small, autonomous, new schools and more rigorous curriculum in all schools. New and bold leadership responded to this call and brought school and principal accountability, greater autonomy over school budgets and programs, student-based budgeting, an options policy for ALL families, and a policy to close failing schools and replace them with new schools.
In 2010, the Oakland public school landscape has been dramatically altered. From 2003 to 2007, Oakland Unified closed 18 failing schools and replaced them with 26 new schools, most with carefully-selected staffs, new program designs, and greater autonomies. The district created a culture of accountability and performance, used data strategically, and focused on rigorous standards-aligned instruction. Oakland Unified has been the most improved urban school district in California for five consecutive years, and today, there are only 5 "red" schools.
The advice, leaked to The Sunday Telegraph, is the latest blow for Mr Gove as he battles against the fallout from his botched announcement last month in which he axed more than 700 projects.
At least two local authorities - Sandwell and Nottingham City Council - are known to be preparing possible legal challenges, and several other councils may follow in moves which could see the taxpayer facing payouts totalling hundreds of millions of pounds.
With an additional $30,000,000 to come to Marc Tucker's NCEE from the USED's "competition" for assessment consortia grants, his hare-brained scheme for enticing high school sophomores or juniors deemed "college-ready" by the results of the Cambridge University-adapted "Board" exams that he plans to pilot in 10 states (including Massachusetts now) comes closer to reality. The problems are not only with this scheme (and the exams NCEE will use to determine "college-readiness") but also with the coursework NCEE's America's Choice is busy preparing to sell to our high schools to prepare students for these "Board" exams. (Try to find some good examples of the reading and math items and figure out their academic level.)
First, some background. NCEE's scheme was originally financed by a $1,500,000 pilot grant from the Gates Foundation. It will now benefit from a sweetheart deal of $30,000,000–all taxpayers' money. Having Gates pay for both NCEE's start-up and the development of Common Core standards certainly helped America's Choice to put its key people on Common Core's ELA and mathematics standards development and draft-writing committees to ensure that they came up with the readiness standards Gates had paid for and wanted NCEE to use. NCEE has a completely free hand to "align" its "Board" exams exactly how it pleases with Common Core's "college-readiness" level and to set passing scores exactly where it wants, since the passing score must be consistent across piloting states.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee garnered big local headlines and national attention July 23 when she announced that she had fired 241 teachers, including 165 who received poor evaluations under a tough new assessment system that for the first time held some educators accountable for student test scores.
It turns out that the story is a bit more complicated, and Rhee is facing accusations from the Washington Teachers' Union that she inflated the figures to burnish her image as a take-no-prisoners schools leader.
The number of teachers fired for scores in the "ineffective" range on the IMPACT evaluation system is 76, or fewer than half of the 165 originally cited, according to data presented by the District to the union last week. The rest of the 165, school officials acknowledge, were educators judged "minimally effective" who had lost their positions in the school system because of enrollment declines or program changes at their schools mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
In the spring of 2008, the Denver public school system needed to plug a $400 million hole in its pension fund. Bankers at JPMorgan Chase offered what seemed to be a perfect solution.
The bankers said that the school system could raise $750 million in an exotic transaction that would eliminate the pension gap and save tens of millions of dollars annually in debt costs -- money that could be plowed back into Denver's classrooms, starved in recent years for funds.
To members of the Denver Board of Education, it sounded ideal. It was complex, involving several different financial institutions and transactions. But Michael F. Bennet, now a United States senator from Colorado who was superintendent of the school system at the time, and Thomas Boasberg, then the system's chief operating officer, persuaded the seven-person board of the deal's advantages, according to interviews with its members.
Seattle Public Schools wants teacher evaluations and student performance joined at the hip, but the teachers' union is taking issue with how the district plans to fuse those two factors.
A proposal that would tie teacher evaluations to student growth prompted a 2,000-word refutation e-mail from the Seattle Education Association earlier this week, a sign of friction in ongoing contract negotiations.
"Their mechanized system is one of minimal rewards and automated punishments," union leaders wrote to members Wednesday.
That statement was sent in response to an e-mail teachers received this week from public schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson. She detailed how the school plans to roll out parts of its bargaining proposal -- specifically factors related to how teachers' performances are evaluated.
The district is proposing an four-tier evaluation system that would roll out over two years. Teachers who chose to be evaluated base on to "student growth outcomes and peer and student feedback" would be eligible for perks, including an immediate 1 percent pay increase, eligibility for stipends and other forms of "targeted support."
The district's recent decision to provide professional development time for middle and high school teachers through an early release time for students on Wednesdays is part of this focus, according to Wachtel. The district has sponsored an early release time for elementary school teachers since 1976.
She admits there isn't any data yet to prove whether coaching is a good use of resources when it comes to improving student achievement.
"Anecdotally we're hearing good things from a number of our schools, but it's still pretty early to see many specific changes," she says. "It takes consistency, and practice, to change the way you teach. It's not easy for anyone; I think it has to be an ongoing effort."
I believe it is inevitable that we will see more "teacher evaluation" programs. What they actually do and whether they are used is of course, another question.
Ideally, every school's website should include a teacher's profile page, with their CV, blog and social network links, course syllabus and curriculum notes. Active use of a student information system such as PowerSchool, or Infinite Campus, among others, including all assignments, feedback, periodic communication, syllabus, tests and notes would further provide useful information to parents and students.
Congress took a decisive step Wednesday toward finalizing a $26 billion bill offering aid to states, a surprise win for Democrats keen to demonstrate they're taking action on an economy showing signs of weakness.
The bill, designed to prevent teacher layoffs and help states with their Medicaid payments, comes after months of foot dragging by Congress. Lawmakers have proven reluctant to spend money on everything from stimulus projects to additional unemployment insurance, amid increasing voter concern about the size of the U.S. budget deficit.
But Wednesday's action, which won the support of two Republicans, suggests members of Congress are sufficiently concerned about the mixed signals from the economy that they're willing to approve narrow spending bills, particularly those with political resonance ahead of this year's midterm elections.
Wednesday's 61-38 vote in the Senate overcame a filibuster and made final passage in the Senate likely as soon as Thursday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) responded by taking the rare move of calling House members back from their summer recess next week to pass the bill and send it to the desk of President Barack Obama.
Madison schools plan to give middle and high school teachers an hour of "professional collaboration time" on Wednesday afternoons starting this fall. The goal is to let teachers meet in groups to share ideas and improve their instruction.
We're all for boosting performance and results.
But the logistics of this new policy, announced just weeks before the start of school, are troubling.
For starters, Madison elementary schools already release their students early on Mondays to give teachers time to collaborate. That means a lot of parents will now have to juggle two early release days rather than one.
The district's recent decision to provide professional development time for middle and high school teachers through an early release time for students on Wednesdays is part of this focus, according to Wachtel. The district has sponsored an early release time for elementary school teachers since 1976.
She admits there isn't any data yet to prove whether coaching is a good use of resources when it comes to improving student achievement.
"Anecdotally we're hearing good things from a number of our schools, but it's still pretty early to see many specific changes," she says. "It takes consistency, and practice, to change the way you teach. It's not easy for anyone; I think it has to be an ongoing effort."
Progress seen over several decades in narrowing the educational achievement gap between black and white students has remained stalled for 20 years, according to data analyzed in a new report.
Called "The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped," the report by the Educational Testing Service examines periods of progress and stagnation since 1910 in closing the achievement gap.
Anybody who thinks that the achievement gap will be closed by throwing more standardized test scores at kids and without addressing health and social issues should read the report and think again.
The report, written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley of ETS's Policy Information Center, uses data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to show that there was a steady narrowing of the achievement gap from the 1970s until the late 1980s. Scores essentially remained the same since then.
It's another sign of private money shaking up public education in the District: A $5.5 million gift will dramatically help expand a network of high-performing charter schools in the city, with a goal of more than doubling the number of students enrolled by 2015.
The grant by Venture Philanthropy Partners, a nonprofit organization using the principles of venture-capital investment to help children from low-income families in the Washington region, will fund Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools. The grant is to be announced Monday.
"VPP recognized our ability to impact not just the students we have, but the students throughout D.C.," said Allison Fansler, president and chief operating officer of KIPP DC. "We want to set a high bar for what's possible."
Stop me if you've heard this one: How is the MPS budget situation like the BP oil spill?
In the same way that BP has needed both to place a temporary cap on the well and drill a relief well to shut down the leak permanently, MPS--and Wisconsin's public schools generally--needs immediate help as well as a significant revision to the school funding formula that can provide long-term stability and relief.
The immediate help can come in a couple of different ways. One is through work by some members of Congress to get additional emergency funds to states to address school budget shortfalls and rehire laid-off teachers. (Wisconsin, you are probably are not surprised to learn, is hardly alone in having a school funding crisis.) This one-time payment would offset some of the disappearing stimulus funds and hold back the flood of the estimated 300,000 teacher layoffs expected for the fall nationwide.
The amendment's prognosis is poor, with a deficit-conscious Congress anxious about too much more spending.
For many years, critics of the SAT have cited a verbal question involving the word "regatta" as an example of how the test may favor wealthier test-takers, who also are more likely to be white. It's been a long time since the regatta question was used -- and the College Board now has in place a detailed process for testing all questions and potential questions, designed to weed out questions that may favor one group of students over another.
But a major new research project -- led by a scholar who favors standardized testing -- has just concluded that the methods used by the College Board (and just about every other testing entity for either admissions or employment testing) are seriously flawed. While the new research doesn't conclude that the tests are biased, it says that they could be -- and that the existing methods of detection wouldn't reveal that.
There appears to be a lot of support, right now, among politicians, the media, and rest of the "opinion-making" class, for Education Reform.
I understand that. The Education Reform movement has a lot of very attractive bumper-sticker type slogans that appear to make a lot of very good sense. Who wouldn't be in favor of firing bad teachers? We've all had a bad teacher who should be fired - haven't we? Even if you haven't had a bad teacher, you've heard the horror stories about them. Who doesn't think accountability is a good thing? Who wouldn't support innovation and choice? It all sounds really good and worthy of our support. Morover, anyone who opposes it, such as teachers' unions, must be doing so for their own selfish purposes.
It's only when people go past the bumper-stick slogans, get past the anectdotes and myths, and begin to consider the realities that the elements of this vaunted Education Reform start to break down.
Reading the blog of the mildly mysterious G.F. Brandenburg, I gathered a clue to why the reports there are so easy to read for geezers like me who squint a lot at computer screens. Brandenburg reveals in passing that he retired as a D.C. teacher recently, so he is likely not too far from my age cohort, and understands us deeply.
Bless him, and not just for the amazing clarity of his written words. He is savage toward D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, whom I highly regard. But there is no substitute for his analysis of what is happening with D.C. achievement scores, and the ways they are being used for various political purposes.
Here is his deft analysis of what has happened to elementary scores, which have gone up, and then down, in the Rhee era:
Contrary to the spin put on things by [D.C. Mayor Adrian] Fenty and Rhee, at the elementary level, virtually all of the increases on DC-CAS scores over the past 4 years happened during the period '07 to '08. And it so happens that 2006 was the first year that DCPS switched to using the DC-CAS as its major standardized test, instead of using the Stanford-9 (also known as the SAT-9). That was under superintendent Janey.
A year or two ago, I received this e-mail. The writer was upset with me for arguing that school principals should have the power to fire teachers who do not perform. As numerous educators have told me, union protections being what they are, dumping a teacher -- even a bad one -- is an almost impossible task.
My correspondent, a teacher, took issue with my desire to see that changed, noting that without those protections, she'd be at the mercy of some boss who decided one day to fire her.
In other words, she'd be just like the rest of us. The lady's detachment from the reality most workers live with struck me as a telling clue as to why our education system frequently fails to educate. When you can't get fired for doing bad work, what's your impetus for doing good?
Educators in the Marshall School District properly determined that a student with a genetic disease was no longer eligible for special education and related services, a federal appeals court has ruled.
The decision by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, released Monday, reversed a lower court's ruling that relied heavily on a doctor's opinion and discounted the testimony of the student's special education gym teacher.
Barbara Sramek, Marshall superintendent, said the ruling's implications extend far beyond one school district.
"This was not about money, it was about principle," she said. "Ultimately, it reinforces the value of educators and professional development."
Higher education may be heading for a reckoning. For a long time, despite the occasional charge of liberal dogma on campus or of a watered-down curriculum, people tended to think the best of the college and university they attended. Perhaps they attributed their career success or that of their friends to a diploma. Or they felt moved by a particular professor or class. Or they received treatment at a university hospital or otherwise profited from university-based scientific research. Or they just loved March Madness.
Recently, though, a new public skepticism has surfaced, with galling facts to back it up. Over the past 30 years, the average cost of college tuition and fees has risen 250% for private schools and nearly 300% for public schools (in constant dollars). The salaries of professors have also risen much faster than those of other occupations. At Stanford, to take but one example, the salaries of full professors have leapt 58% in constant dollars since the mid-1980s. College presidents do even better. From 1992 to 2008, NYU's presidential salary climbed to $1.27 million from $443,000. By 2008, a dozen presidents had passed the million-dollar mark.
Meanwhile, tenured and tenure-track professors spend ever less time with students. In 1975, 43% of college teachers were classified as "contingent"--that is, they were temporary instructors and graduate students; today that rate is 70%. Colleges boast of high faculty-to-student ratios, but in practice most courses have a part-timer at the podium.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district's financial condition @17:30) when considering a District's ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated..... "we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment" and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn."
This past week the NAACP, the National Urban League and other civil-rights groups collectively condemned charter schools. Claiming to speak for minority Americans, the organizations expressed "reservations" about the Obama administration's "extensive reliance on charter schools." They specifically voiced concern about "the overrepresentation of charter schools in low-income and predominantly minority communities."
Someone should remind these leaders who they represent. The truth is that support for charters among ordinary African-Americans and Hispanics is strong and has only increased dramatically in the past two years. Opposition along the lines expressed by the NAACP and the Urban League is articulated by a small minority.
We know this because we've asked. For the past four years, Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance, together with the journal Education Next, has surveyed a nationally representative cross-section of some 3,000 Americans about a variety of education policy issues. In 2010, we included extra samples of public-school teachers and all those living in zip codes where a charter school is located.
President Barack Obama on Thursday delivered a fresh call to hold teachers accountable for student achievement, defending his administration against complaints from unions, civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers.
These groups, usually backers of the president, have objected to the administration's Race to the Top program, which seeks to drive change at the local level through a competition for $4.3 billion in federal grants.
To qualify for funding, states are encouraged to promote charter schools and tie teacher pay to performance. Unions have questioned both goals.
Mr. Obama, defending his administration's approach in a speech before the National Urban League, said teachers should be well paid, supported and treated like professionals but those who fail should be replaced.
Talandra Jennings and Infinity Gamble couldn't contain their excitement as the 11-year-olds showed off the zucchini picked from the East High Youth Farm on a recent morning.
It was the first vegetable harvested from their section of the farm, which consists of a number of gardens in an area next to Kennedy Elementary School. The two girls, who will be sixth graders at O'Keeffe Middle School, are working at the East High Youth Farm, which is a hands-on science and vocational program focused on sustainable agriculture and service learning.
"We help plant. We help wood chip and sometimes we trellis tomatoes and we harvest," Talandra said. "I'm out here doing something instead of being a couch potato."
As encouraging as it is to see California in the running to win a Race to the Top grant for its schools, we can't help wondering how great a price the state will pay for the possibility of receiving as much as $700 million.
The U.S. Department of Education announced last week that California is one of 19 finalists in the second round of grant applications. Should it succeed -- and the odds are decent, because officials say that more than half the finalists will receive grants -- many of California's neediest schools will receive infusions of new money. Even so, we see this potential win as mixed news.
Kai Ryssdal: State education officials around the country are having a busy day. Today's a key deadline in the Obama Administration's Race to the Top. That's the $4 billion pot of federal money that states can get -- get, if they agree to certain policy changes. One of those changes -- and this is today's deadline -- is to sign on to a national set of common curriculum standards. That could bring the education marketplace from widely fractured and segmented with dozens of different standardsinto something resembling coherent.
Christopher Swanson is the vice president for research and development at Education Week. Welcome to the program.
Christopher Swanson: Glad to be here.
Ryssdal: It's a mistake to talk about a national education market, I suppose, but this drive to get some uniform core curriculum standards does kind of change the market dynamic for things like testing and textbooks, doesn't it?
I had lunch this summer with a prospective graduate student at the evangelical college where I teach. I will call him John because that happens to be his name. John has done well academically at a public university. Nevertheless, as often happens, he said that he was looking forward to coming to a Christian university, and then launched into a story of religious discrimination.
John had been a straight-A student until he enrolled in English writing. The assignment was an "opinion" piece and the required theme was "traditional marriage." John is a Southern Baptist and he felt it was his duty to give his honest opinion and explain how it was grounded in his faith. The professor was annoyed that John claimed the support of the Bible for his views, scribbling in the margin, "Which Bible would that be?" On the very same page, John's phrase, "Christians who read the Bible," provoked the same retort, "Would that be the Aramaic Bible, the Greek Bible, or the Hebrew Bible?" (What could the point of this be? Did the professor want John to imagine that while the Greek text might support his view of traditional marriage, the Aramaic version did not?) The paper was rejected as a "sermon," and given an F, with the words, "I reject your dogmatism," written at the bottom by way of explanation.
The following was sent this morning from NEA headquarters in Washington, DC:
Subject: URGENT REQUEST FOR MEMBER MOBILIZATION TODAY
Message from John Stocks
Deputy Executive Director
National Education Association
Senator Harry Reid has filed for a cloture vote on the Reid / Murray amendment to H.R. 1586 scheduled for today @ 5:30pm. This amendment contains the Ed Jobs and Federal Medical Assistance (FMAP) appropriations we have been fighting for all year. Senator Reid is determined to get an up or down vote on these issues before they recess.
Senator Reid has asked us to mobilize as much support as possible in support of his effort to pass FMAP and Ed Jobs today.
With a Senate vote slated for Monday evening, the White House shows signs of a late-breaking push behind a $26.1 billion aid package to help state and local governments cope with revenue shortfalls due to the continuing housing crisis and slow economic recovery.
Last year's recovery act helped fill the gap, but as the stimulus funds run out, Democrats fear more state layoffs, beginning with teachers just months before November elections. Cash-strapped governors are promised $16.1 billion to pay Medicaid bills next year and ease their budget situation; another $10 billion in education assistance would go to school boards to help with teacher hiring -- a top priority for Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
"There is a tremendous amount at stake here," Duncan told POLITICO. And even with the House gone until mid-September, he insisted that Senate passage would give local school boards "a real sense of hope" that federal dollars will be coming in time to avoid layoffs impacting tens of thousands of teachers.
People with autism are often socially isolated, but the Madison public schools are nationally known for including children with disabilities in regular classes. Now, as a high school junior, Garner, 17, has added his little twist to many lives.
He likes to memorize plane, train and bus routes, and in middle school during a citywide scavenger hunt, he was so good that classmates nicknamed him "GPS-man." He is not one of the fastest on the high school cross-country team, but he runs like no other. "Garner enjoys running with other kids, as opposed to past them," said Casey Hopp, his coach.
Garner's on the swim team, too, and gets rides to practice with a teammate, Michael Salerno. On cold mornings, no one wants to be first in the water, so Garner thinks it's a riot to splash everyone with a colossal cannonball. "They get angry," the coach, Paul Eckerle, said. "Then they see it's Garner, and he gets away with it. And that's how practice begins."
A handwriting program called "Handwriting Without Tears"
(at http://www.hwtears.com -- see model-samples at
http://www.hwtears.com/files/HWT_Alphabet.pdf ) has begun aggressively lobbying to make every detail of its own particular instructional method and writing styles legallly *required* as the sole method in all USA schools, by piggybacking on current White House efforts to create and impose a detailed national curriculum for all USA schools.
The founder of HWTears, Jan Olsen, began announced this publicly 7 years ago (that her firm would eventually be doing this) during her organization's training and recruitment workshops.. People unaffiliated with her program tried to warn others in the handwriting field, but almost nobody thought Jan Olsen meant it.
Specifics:
HWTears has created, and is fully funding and operating, an innocuous-sounding Washington lobby-group called "Handwriting Standards" at http://www.handwritingstandards.com (note the teeny-tiny copyright notice at the bottom of the page, to see which handwriting program owns that lobby-group!)
The lobbyists' web-site is designed to sound neutral on the surface, but if you dig deeper and actually read their proposed standards, these are verbatim quotes of particular details of the HWTears teaching sequence and even stylistic features and they are very closely tied in with the HWTears.com web-site's own descriptions of the same endeavor -- to the point that, if the "Handwriting Standards" lobbyists succeed, no other program but HWTears will conform with the details of teaching method/style that their lobbyists are trying to have written into law.
In other words: the proposed national standards for school handwriting tie in very closely with HWTears program sequence, to the point that they are basically a step-by-step, practically verbatim summary of specifically that program's sequence/curriculum/practices.
Of special note: the proposed standards' stylistic requirements (which are HWTears requirements) mean that the program would make it illegal to teach certain programs that have been popular homeschooling choices for many years.
For example, all the cursive-first programs that so many homeschoolers are using (such as Abeka) would be forbidden (because the proposed standards require print first and cursive later) and so would be all the Italic programs (such as Getty-Dubay) that are also widely popular homeschooling choices (because the proposed standards for cursive require 100% joined and looped cursive, as well as specifically cursive-stle capitals, which Getty-Dubay and the other Italic programs do not use. Therefore, these and many other successful programs would not be allowed).
Therefore, if the lobby-group wins it will affect many of the people who are receiving this letter (and who are -- I hope -- sharing it with their children and passing it on to others of like mind). It would affect anyone who uses a program that would be banned by this not-so-neutral "standards" organization.
(There are 200+ handwriting programs in the USA -- with a few strokes of the pen, 199+ of them would be criminalized. Ethical concerns therefore come into play.)
If you care even a little bit about this, e-mail me at handwritingrepair@gmail.com (subject-line should include the words "lobby" and "handwriting") and/or phone me at 518-482-6763 (Albany, NY) to decide what we must do, and how. We must act now.
I have my own favorite handwriting program -- it's the one I designed -- and I don't hide that fact (see my signature below!) ... but I'd never try to get the other programs outlawed. A handwriting program must stand or fall on its own merits, not because Big Brother tells you what your handwriting (or our students' handwritings) should look like.
Please send this letter to everyone whom you would like informed on this issue. If the lobby leads to a bill, we must prevent the bill from becoming a law.
Yours for better letters, Kate Gladstone http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
and the World Handwriting Contest
6-B Weis Road, Albany, NY 12208-1942
518/482-6763 - handwritingrepair@gmail.com
The founder of HWTears, Jan Olsen, began announced this publicly 7
years ago (that her firm would eventually be doing this) during her
organization's training and recruitment workshops.. People
unaffiliated with her program tried to warn others in the handwriting
field, but almost nobody thought Jan Olsen meant it.
Specifics:
HWTears has created, and is fully funding and operating, an
innocuous-sounding Washington lobby-group called "Handwriting
Standards" at http://www.handwritingstandards.com (note the teeny-tiny
copyright notice at the bottom of the page, to see which handwriting
program owns that lobby-group!)
The lobbyists' web-site is designed to sound neutral on the surface,
but if you dig deeper and actually read their proposed standards,
these are verbatim quotes of particular details of the HWTears
teaching sequence and even stylistic features
and they are very closely tied in with the HWTears.com web-site's own
descriptions of the same endeavor --
to the point that, if the "Handwriting Standards" lobbyists succeed,
no other program but HWTears will conform with the details of teaching
method/style that their lobbyists are trying to have written into law.
In other words: the proposed national standards for school handwriting tie in very closely with HWTears program sequence, to the point that they are basically a step-by-step, practically verbatim summary of specifically that program's sequence/curriculum/practices.
Of special note: the proposed standards' stylistic requirements (which are HWTears requirements) mean that the program would make it illegal to teach certain programs that have been popular homeschooling choices for many years.
For example, all the cursive-first programs that so many homeschoolers are using (such as Abeka) would be forbidden (because the proposed standards require print first and cursive later) and so would be all the Italic programs (such as Getty-Dubay) that are also widely popular homeschooling choices (because the proposed standards for cursive require 100% joined and looped cursive, as well as specifically cursive-stle capitals, which Getty-Dubay and the other Italic programs do not use. Therefore, these and many other successful programs would not be allowed).
Therefore, if the lobby-group wins it will affect many of the people who are receiving this letter (and who are -- I hope -- sharing it with their children and passing it on to others of like mind). It would affect anyone who uses a program that would be banned by this not-so-neutral "standards" organization.
(There are 200+ handwriting programs in the USA -- with a few strokes of the pen, 199+ of them would be criminalized. Ethical concerns therefore come into play.)
If you care even a little bit about this, e-mail me at handwritingrepair@gmail.com (subject-line should include the words "lobby" and "handwriting") and/or phone me at 518-482-6763 (Albany, NY) to decide what we must do, and how. We must act now.
I have my own favorite handwriting program -- it's the one I designed -- and I don't hide that fact (see my signature below!) ... but I'd never try to get the other programs outlawed. A handwriting program must stand or fall on its own merits, not because Big Brother tells you what your handwriting (or our students' handwritings) should look like.
Please send this letter to everyone whom you would like informed on this issue. If the lobby leads to a bill, we must prevent the bill from becoming a law.
Yours for better letters, Kate Gladstone http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
and the World Handwriting Contest
6-B Weis Road, Albany, NY 12208-1942
518/482-6763 - handwritingrepair@gmail.com
I read with great interest Laura V. Berthiaume's July 25 Local Opinions commentary, "Who really controls the Montgomery schools," about the Montgomery County Board of Education's relationship with its superintendent and staff. While there are many differences between our systems, Ms. Berthiaume succinctly captured a core shared tension when she wrote: "In the balance of power between the board of education and the bureaucracy, the superintendent and his staff hold all the cards. They outwit, outlast and outplay."
State leaders keep throwing Wisconsin's broken school financing system into the too-hard-to-fix pile.
There's so much money involved, and so many powerful interests, that just about any attempt to force change faces fierce criticism and a slim chance of success.
Yet that's what leadership is about: Pulling people together, usually in the middle of the political spectrum, to find workable solutions.
State Superintendent of Schools Tony Evers just stepped up to try to provide some of that leadership on the vexing issue of how to pay for schools. Evers wants to change, in ways big and small, how Wisconsin distributes billions of dollars in state aid to schools each year.
Some of his ideas merit consideration. Others are less convincing. And some are missing.
A Tory minister has publicly attacked the education secretary over his beleaguered academies expansion plans, it emerged tonight.
Theresa Villiers, the junior transport minister, has written a furious letter to Michael Gove, the education secretary, for turning down a school's application to become an academy in her constituency.
Gove has said all schools rated outstanding by inspectors will be fast-tracked to become academies - schools run outside of local authority control - if they wish.
But despite being outstanding, Ravenscroft school in Barnet, north London, has had its academy application rejected by the government.
America's recession is exposing societal fault lines, as various groups fight over increasingly smaller pieces of the pie. Tensions are particularly flaring between government workers and employees of private businesses.
David Walker, the U.S. comptroller appointed by President Bill Clinton who continued in the role under George Bush, on Friday gave a bracing indictment of the pension and salary benefits being rewarded to government workers at the federal, state and local level. Walker said that public sector workers are growing prosperous on the back of private sector workers.
"There is a huge gap. State and local plans on average ... are much more lucrative than typical plans for employees. State and local government employees, on average, have greater job security than people in the private sector. And state and local government employees, in the middle of government, in many cases make more money than their private sector counterparts," Walker said during a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. According to Pew numbers provided by the Chamber, the budget gap to cover state employees' benefits totals $1 trillion.
Newly released U.S. census figures show that Wisconsin, often derided by its own residents as a "tax hell," stayed out of the top 10 highest tax states for the third consecutive year in 2008, the year of the latest available data.
State and local taxes claimed 11.8% of total state personal income, landing the Badger State 13th among the 50 states, and slipping a notch from No. 14 a year earlier, according to an analysis of census data from the Madison-based Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
When New York state education officials recalibrated test scores this week, hundreds of New York City schools suddenly had vastly fewer children who could be termed "proficient" in math and English.
For many schools, the higher bar had barely an effect. For others, it was a devastating blow, revealing a much larger chasm between the city's academic haves and have-nots.
Overall, the country's largest school system lost a lot of ground. Last year, nearly 70% of students were considered proficient in English. Now, only 42% are. In math, 54% of city children scored proficient this year, down from 82%.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, stressed this week that the only thing that changed was the definition of "proficient," and that the gains that New York City students have made since they took over control of schools--as evidenced by performance on national tests--are real.
I am a veteran of the math wars. I was there in 1995 when the shiny new California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) test told graders to award a higher score to a student who incorrectly answered a math problem about planting trees - but wrote an enthusiastic essay - than to a student who got the answer right, but with no essay.
The genius responsible for that math question explained that her goal was to present eighth-graders with "an intentionally ambiguous problem in which no one pattern can be considered the absolute answer." Gov. Pete Wilson's education czar, Maureen DiMarco, promptly dubbed new-new math "fuzzy crap."
I was there in 1997, when a trendy second-grade math textbook featured a lesson called "fantasy lunch," which instructed students to draw their fantasy lunch on paper, cut out the food and place their drawings into a bag.
The math is simple: California schools have less money than most other states, but their teachers are the most highly paid in the nation.
Per pupil spending, on the other hand, trails the national average by about $2,500.
Until the financially troubled state government finds more money to invest in its public schools, which make up more than half of its general fund spending, something has to give.
School budgeting has become a zero-sum game.
California school districts spend more than half of their dollars on teacher pay and benefits. In better times, when education funding rose each year to keep pace with the cost of living, so did salaries. But the state now gives schools less money for each student than it did
Spending in California classrooms declined as a percentage of total education spending over a recent five-year period, even as total school funding increased, according to a Pepperdine University study released Wednesday.
More of the funding increase went to administrators, clerks and technical staff and less to teachers, textbooks, materials and teacher aides, the study found. It was partially funded by a California Chamber of Commerce foundation.
Total K-12 spending increased by $10 billion over the five-year period ending June 30, 2009, from $45.6 billion to $55.6 billion statewide. It rose at a rate greater than the increase in inflation or personal income, according to the study. Yet researchers found that classroom spending dipped from 59 percent of education funding to 57.8 percent over the five years.
The report mentions that California's average per student expenditure is just under $10,000 annually. Madison's 2009/2010 per student spending was $15,241 ($370,287,471 budget / 24,295 students).
Powerful interest groups have paralyzed China's macro-economic policy, with ominous long-term consequences. Local governments consider high land prices their lifeline. State-owned enterprises don't want interest rates to rise. Exporters are vehemently against currency appreciation. China's macro policies have been reduced to psychotherapy, relying on sound bites and small technical moves to scare speculators. In the meantime, inflation continues to pick up momentum. Unless the central government bites the bullet and makes choices, the economy might experience a disruptive adjustment in the foreseeable future.
The first key point is that local governments have become dependent on the property sector for revenue as profits from manufacturing decline and spending needs to rise. Attracting industry has been the main means of economic development and fiscal revenue for two decades. Coastal provinces grew rich by nurturing export-oriented industries. But the economics has changed in the past five years. Rising costs have sharply curtailed manufacturers' profits, and most local governments now offer subsidies to attract industries. The real revenue has shifted to property.
The dependency on high land prices for property tax revenue is certainly not unique to China. Madison's 2010-2011 budget will increase property taxes by about 10%, due to spending growth, declining redistributed state tax dollars and a decline in local property values.
The State Board of Education is voting Monday on adopting national K-12 curriculum standards in a package that includes an obese, unteachable eighth-grade math course.
Back in May 2009, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, State Board of Education President Ted Mitchell and Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell pledged to adopt the then-not-yet-created national curriculum standards only if they "meet or exceed our own."
The pledge these public officials took was wise and honorable. California has K-12 academic-content standards that are widely praised as the best in the nation. For example, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found on July 21 that California's standards in both English and mathematics are the absolute best in the nation and better than the national standards. Clearly, Fordham's expert reviewers did not agree with the calls we sometimes hear that we must ditch our standards because they are inadequate.
Charter schools were the main topic at Palm Springs Unified School District's board of education meeting on Tuesday.
A school dedicated to abused, neglected and foster children asked to set up in the district, while union members protested the language in Cielo Vista's charter, which was amended on Tuesday.
The Father's Heart Charter School made its first presentation to the board on Tuesday, asking to open a school for 25 students at Father's Heart Ranch in Desert Hot Springs.
The ranch serves 6- to 15-year-old boys who have been abused, whose parents are in jail or who are in foster care.
Most of the boys attend district schools, but they often are in trouble regularly and fail academically.
"In traditional schools, it's just really hard for teachers to be able to accommodate what these kids need," said Susanne Coie, a consultant with Charter Schools Development Center.
It's a simple question, isn't it? The Board Directors, if asked, all claim (rather indignantly) that they DO enforce policy. The state auditor says they don't. I can't find any evidence that indicates that the Board enforces policy. More than that, I can't even think of HOW the Board enforces policy.
No Board member alone can speak for the Board. So no Board member, on their own, can direct the superintendent to do anything. So if an individual Board member, such as Director Martin-Morris, were to discover that a policy, such as Policy B61.00 which requires the superintendent to provide annual reports on District programs, wasn't being followed because there is no report on the Spectrum program, what could he do about it? I suppose he could ask the superintendent, pretty please, to provide the report, but what if she didn't? He could not, on his own, compel her compliance with the policy.
If the Board, as a group, wanted to enforce a policy, such as Policy C54.00 which requires the superintendent to get input from the community before assigning a principal to an alternative school, they would have to meet to do it. Any meeting of a quorum of Board members would be subject to the Open Meetings Act, and would require the posting of an agenda in advance and minutes afterward. There are no minutes from any meeting that describe the Board as taking action to enforce policies.
New York City principals are getting tougher: They denied tenure or continued the probation of a record 11% of teachers in the school year just ended, according to Department of Education data released Thursday.
Five years ago, less than 1% of teachers found themselves in the same predicament. Principals this year also gave hundreds more teachers "unsatisfactory" ratings.
The results come amid a push by schools chancellor Joel Klein for greater teacher accountability and a harder stance on tenure. In a letter to teachers in February, he said tenure had become "an expectation more than an honor." He had also called on principals for the first time to consider student test scores when making tenure decisions, and the latest results show that they did.
"Our principals are retaining top teachers and they are dismissing low-performing teachers," said John White, a deputy chancellor. "They are doing it as part of a culture shift of using evidence of student learning."
"This transformation is both essential and urgent if we are to accelerate achievement for all children and accomplish the goals of Imagine 2014," she said in a statement, referring to the district's five-year improvement plan.
Regional office facilities, which generally served as buffers between schools and the central office, will reopen this fall as parent- and family-resource centers designed to provide support services for parents.
Along with the changes to the regional offices, Ackerman has appointed three associate superintendents.
Tomas Hanna, Ackerman's former chief of staff who was recently given the job of associate superintendent of academics, will serve as the associate superintendent of academic support.
David Weiner, former chief of accountability, will become the associate superintendent of academics and curriculum.
According to the school board, Notter needs to improve his communication with staff members and the general public; improve relations with the teachers union in Broward and cut administrative costs. "With all the complications we went through, I believe it is a fair and valid assessment of how the superintendent worked with the board, worked with his leadership team to do the right thing for our children," said Notter.
Mike Ritzius works with students at the Integrated Studies Program, a project-based pilot program inside the Camden County Technical School, in New Jersey. Students work to master state content with the help of teacher-advisors and project-management applications, primarily Project Foundry.
Chad: Would you please describe your school for us?
Mike: The Integrated Studies Program (ISP) is a pilot at Camden County Technical School (CCTS). The school as a whole is a county-wide technical school, serving 32 sending districts with the largest being the city of Camden, NJ. The majority of the students come from challenging socio-economic situations, making the entire school eligible for Title 1 funds. Students choose to come to CCTS to pursue a trade but recently, the district has been adding more professionally minded career areas. As a whole, the district delivers content through very traditional means.
The ISP approach is 180 degrees different from the rest of the school. The program was piloted in the 2009-2010 school year with five advisors and 100 students, now down to 87. The attrition rate for the rest of the district is 27% due mostly to the high mobility of the student body and the rigorous demands of CCTS as a whole when compared to the larger sending districts.
And now Bronson has turned his fertile imagination to the act of creativity itself. In a Newsweek cover story early this month, Bronson and his co-author Merryman write about the crisis of creativity now affecting American schools and children. According to Bronson, the results of creativity tests for American kids has been falling since 1990 - a particularly worrying statistic given that these test scores have been rising over the past twenty years in most other industrialized countries around the world.
So it was a real honor to have Po come into the Techcrunch.TV studio last week to talk about Silicon Valley creativity, its role in the broader economy, his own creativity and why, exactly, there's a creativity crisis today in American schools. This may be the single most important issue facing not only the American economy, but also our culture and society. And there are few, if any, writers around today who can discuss creativity with the same erudition, imagination and wit as Po Bronson.
Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jerry Brown unveiled an education reform plan Wednesday that calls for a wholesale restructuring of California's public school system, from changing the way schools are funded to revamping the state's higher education system.
The eight-page plan touches upon the major issues facing the state's education system, from the increasing cost of college to the state's dismal dropout rate. Some of the proposals, such as changing the way schools are funded, would take years. Brown urged patience.
"There is no silver bullet that will fix everything," he wrote. "Education improvement takes time, persistence and a systematic approach."
The big question in the final days of Alabama's runoff election for the GOP gubernatorial nomination isn't just who is going to win the tight race between Bradley Byrne and Robert Bentley. It's the mystery of who's behind a largely bogus TV ad attacking Byrne.
A group calling itself the "Conservative Coalition for Alabama" is airing an ad that falsely accuses Byrne of a host of offenses. It says Byrne "took a 500 percent pay raise" (that's misleading); steered government contracts to "cronies" (there's no evidence of that); lost millions of dollars in the state's prepaid college savings plan (so did nearly all other state plans); and ran up the taxpayers' tab drinking "expensive wines" (false) and traveling in "style" (not entirely true).
Byrne suspects that the Conservative Coalition is a front group for the Alabama Education Association. He has good reason. AEA Executive Director Paul Hubbert (who also is co-chairman of the state Democratic party) admitted that he used "True Republican PAC" as a front group to attack Byrne during the June 1 primary fight.
It's true, in a sense, that all that happened Wednesday was the state reported test scores using a higher cut-score. It was just like they'd moved the goalpost further down the field, one Buffalo educator (and apparent football fan) explained. More kids failed because they graded the tests harder.
But a lot more happened than that.
As State Education Commissioner David Steiner explained at the state's press conference, the state tests have not simply become too easy. They have become bad tests.
They have been assessing only a very narrow band of state standards and virtually ignoring the rest of the state curriculum. They have repeated questions from year to year, making it easy to game the tests. And they do not reflect what students need to succeed in college and careers.
That is going to change. Over the next three years, the tests will become longer. They will test more material, have more open-ended questions and require more writing. They will aim to assess not whether students learned "test-taking tricks," in Steiner's words, but whether they can apply knowledge and explain their answers. By 2014-15 the goal is that our state tests will be able to tell students honestly if they are on track to succeed in college and beyond.
Students in Sun Prairie are preparing to enter a new state-of-the-art high school this year, but some residents of the city are upset with the amount their taxes could go up.
There's no doubt Sun Prairie has been growing. School district enrollment has gone from nearly 4,800 to almost 6,800 in 10 years, WISC-TV reported.
Now, the district has a high school to fit those students, but the taxpayers will be footing the bill.
Teacher Scott Kloehn's chemistry room just got a lot more high-tech with one of the many interactive whiteboards that are now in every Sun Prairie High School classroom.
"My job is to educate my kids the best way possible with the best means possible, and if that means using the technology in my room that I'll have easy access to, it's certainly what, as a good teacher, I'm going to go ahead and do," said Kloehn.
I received some interesting news recently from two Washington area high schools, Washington-Lee in Arlington County and the Friendship Collegiate Academy in the District. W-L, as it is often called, is a regular public school. Friendship is a public charter school. About 34 percent of the W-L students are low-income. That figure is twice as high, 70 percent, at Friendship.
W-L graduates about 400 seniors a year, Friendship about 250. They both have dedicated teachers and ambitious programs to give as many students as possible exposure to college-level courses. W-L has both Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses. Friendship also has AP, plus access to a significant number of University of Maryland and University of District of Columbia courses.
Friendship has fewer affluent, college-educated families than W-L does. (Arlington, where W-L is, has just been declared by the Brookings Institution as having the largest portion of adults with bachelor's degrees, 68 percent, of any U.S. county.) Friendship students mostly come from D.C. schools with standards not as high as those in Arlington. So they start high school, on average, at a lower level.
A state appeals court strengthened the authority of local school boards over charter schools Monday by making it harder for California education officials to approve statewide charters with campuses in multiple counties.
Charter schools are publicly funded and tuition-free but operate independently of local school districts and their union contracts, though districts are supposed to monitor their performance. They have been proliferating both in California and nationwide.
State law allows the state Board of Education, appointed by the governor, to let a company establish charter schools in far-flung counties without local approval or monitoring. Groups of school boards, administrators and teachers claimed the board was overstepping its authority, and on Monday, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco agreed.
In August 1818, Thomas Jefferson authored a report for the Virginia Legislature that laid out the topics to be included in the curriculum of his newly founded University of Virginia. Like so many foundational documents, Jefferson's report resonated with such clear and specific language that it serves to this day as an accurate summation of his educational vision -- and a blueprint upon which his intellectual heirs may continue to build.
Massachusetts, like Virginia, is among the great pioneers in American education, from Colonial times to the present. But last week's decision by the state Board of Education to adopt national Common Core standards is an object lesson in how not to pursue education reform. It's stuff that would have driven Jefferson to laughter or scorn, and should provoke nothing less among Massachusetts taxpayers.
What was approved, and how, make clear that this state's educational leaders need refresher courses in the pursuit of educational excellence.
Erasing years of academic progress, state education officials on Wednesday acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of children had been misled into believing they were proficient in English and math, when in fact they were not.
The bar for what it means to be "proficient" has now been set substantially higher. For instance, last year more than 77% of New York state students in grades three through eight reached proficiency in state English exams. Under the new standards, only 53% were considered proficient this year. The difference amounts to nearly 300,000 students across the state.
"We are facing the hard truth that the gains in the past were simply not as advertised," said Merryl Tisch, the chancellor of the state Board of Regents, during a news conference announcing the new standards.
In New York City, the number of students scoring proficient in English fell to 42% this year from 69% in 2009. In math, 54% of city children scored proficient this year, down from 82%.
The huge drops across the state raised questions about how much of the academic gains touted in the past several years were an illusion.
The latest state audit of Seattle Public Schools didn't tell me anything I didn't already know: The district is stuck in a culture of lax indifference when it comes to taxpayers' money.
Despite the last decade's phalanx of highly paid budget and money managers overseeing the district, few inroads have been made in transforming this culture.
Let's start with the audit's biggest discovery for the 2008-09 school year. The district overpaid at least 83 employees to the tune of $228,860. The district says the number of accidentally overpaid employees could be as high as 144.
Repayment plans have been set up for most of the employees. But others left the district, requiring costly measures, including collection agencies, to recover the money. Expect this debacle to reverberate as tax implications and impacts to the state retirement system unfold.
If Education Secretary Arne Duncan has his way, kids would be spending a lot more time at school -- and a three-month summer would be a thing of the past.
Duncan joked with attendees at a luncheon at the National Press Club Tuesday in Washington that he would like schools to stay open 13 months out of the year. Then he told the audience of over 100 that he seriously supports longer school hours.
"In all seriousness, I think schools should be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 11-12 months of the year," Duncan said. "This is not just more of the same. There would be a whole variety of after-school programs. Obviously academics would be at the heart of that. But you top it off with dancing, art, drama, music, yearbook, robotics, activities for older siblings and parents, ESL classes."
He continued by explaining that the American school calendar is antiquated and must be modified so that American students can compete at the highest levels internationally.
The nation's education czar joined a growing chorus of public officials who believe residents should decide whether Detroit Public Schools is placed under the mayor's control.
For that to happen, however, the City Council has to place the question on the November ballot. The council will weigh the matter during its meeting today.
On the eve of the meeting, and a week after Gov. Jennifer Granholm supported such a move, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he also favored the ballot initiative, said a spokesman.
"We don't see it for every city," said spokesman Peter Cunningham. "But Detroit has struggled for a long time."
At the same time, the school district awaits a state Supreme Court ruling on city funding of schools, and may face a possible referendum on who will pay for schools.
If the funding issue goes to the voters this fall, expect a campaign for funding led by the school board, Williams said.
"I think most people understand in order to reduce crime, we are going to have to invest in education," she said. "You can pay now or pay later. It's a lot less expensive to educate a child than to pay a year for a person in the criminal justice system."
Wednesday early release set for Madison middle, high schools
Susan Troller:
Hey Madison parents, teachers and students, get ready for some changes.
I wrote about a letter sent to teachers several weeks ago, but snags in transporation had the plan still tentative until today.
Now it's official: A plan for teacher collaboration at the Madison middle and high school levels beginning this fall will alter daily and weekly schedules for all eleven local middle schools and four high schools.
The most immediate change will be early release most Wednesdays for both high school and middle school students; middle school classes (except at Wright Middle School) will end on Wednesdays at 1:37 p.m. School will end at Wright at 2:15 p.m.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the finalists for $3.4 billion in funding during a speech to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Those finalists were Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Washington, D.C.
This was Wisconsin's final chance to win a piece of the $4.35 billion education reform competition, unless a proposed third round of $1.35 billion in 2011 is approved.
Gov. Jim Doyle criticized the federal government's system for reviewing state applications, while several outside groups criticized Wisconsin for passing weak reform efforts or failing to show it could dramatically change the course of the troubled Milwaukee Public Schools.
"With the blind judging system used by the federal government, it's hard to know how the applications were scored, but it's pretty clear that the quality of a state's education system was not taken into account," Doyle said in a statement. "The states in the upper Midwest - Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan - are nationally recognized as having the best education systems in the country, and not a single one was a finalist in either round for Race to the Top funding," he said.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan was being too modest when he said in a speech Tuesday at the National Press Club that the Obama administration is playing a "modest role" in sparking a "quiet" revolution in education.
There is nothing modest about the administration's role in driving reform, and there is nothing "quiet" about the change process, not in Washington or in state legislatures that rushed to change laws for a chance to win federal dollars.
The administration is Bigfoot, driving change with billions of dollars in the Race to the Top competition. In fact, Race to the Top, which started with $4.35 billion, is doling out the largest pot of discretionary federal education money ever. How's that for modest?
Duncan announced the finalists for Round 2 -- 18 states and the District of Columbia -- each of which will send teams to Washinton, D.C., in August to explain why they deserve to be on top.
As the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, the superintendent brought in to revive New Orleans' troubled public schools is bidding farewell after turning many of the schools into charters. Before his departure, Paul Vallas speaks with John Merrow about where things stand with the city's school reform efforts.
JOHN MERROW: For Paul Vallas, the veteran superintendent Louisiana hired in 2007 to do the job, the pressure was on.
PAUL VALLAS, superintendent, Recovery School District of Louisiana: We need to move now. We need to start building buildings now. We need to modernize those classrooms now.
JOHN MERROW: Almost from the time he arrived in New Orleans, Paul Vallas began making promises, talking publicly about all the big changes he intended to make in the schools. Well, it's been three years. Time for Paul Vallas' report card.
PAUL PASTOREK, Louisiana State Superintendent of Education: I give Paul very high marks.
JOHN MERROW: State Superintendent Paul Pastorek hired Paul Vallas.
PAUL PASTOREK: If you would tell people five years ago what is happening today, no one would have believed it was possible.
Donald Trump is not the only one who knows how to get attention with the words, "You're fired." Michelle Rhee, chancellor for the District of Columbia schools, has just done a pretty nifty job of it herself.
On Friday, Ms. Rhee fired 241 teachers--roughly 6% of the total--mostly for scoring too low on a teacher evaluation that measures their performance against student achievement. Another 737 teachers and other school-based staff were put on notice that they had been rated "minimally effective." Unless these people improve, they too face the boot.
The mass dismissals follow a landmark agreement Ms. Rhee negotiated with the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) at the end of June. The quid pro quo was this: Good teachers would get more money (including a 21.6% pay increase through 2012 and opportunities for merit pay). In exchange, bad teachers could be shown the door.
At the time, many gave the teachers union credit for approving this deal. Here's how another New York-based newspaper described the contract:
At one school district in New Jersey, "D" now stands for for "dropped."
Starting this September, middle and high school students in Mount Olive won't be getting D's anymore -- because the board has dropped that letter from its grade system. Now, any score below 70 percent is an F.
The move passed the the Mount Olive School board in an 8-1 vote Monday.
Superintendent Larrie Reynolds, who proposed the new policy last month, says it will raise the bar for Mount Olive students.
"I'm tired of kids coming to school and not learning and getting credit for it," Reynolds told the Daily Record. "We intend to be the beacon of excellence in Morris County, and to do that, we have to fix it."
The group today reported that pre-tax profits were £94m in the first half compared with a loss of £7m in the same period in 2009. Sales at the group climbed to £2.34bn from £2.14bn.
"The 2010 finish line isn't yet in sight, but this is as good a start to our years as I've seen," chief executive Marjorie Scardino said. "That boosts our confidence in the full year, enabling us to brighten our outlook and raise our guidance."
mention on what was going on in the contract talks between SPS and SEA. I received this e-mail from the SEA. I post without comment.
SEA Bargaining Update July 23, 2010
SEA and District Far Apart in Negotiations
Dear Michael,
Your SEA Negotiations Team met with the District team on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. We continue to be far apart on issues that you have told us matter most to you. The district is holding fast to their major proposals on:
• tying student growth based on MAP scores, MSP scores, and end-of-course assessments to certificated employees evaluations;
• use of evaluations as the lead factor in reduction in force, as opposed to strict seniority.
There has been very little to no movement on what you have told us are your two most important issues:
Respondents focus their brief on arguing that no reasonable school board would adopt "inquiry-based" high school mathematics textbooks instead of "direct instruction" textbooks. There are "dueling experts" and other conflicting evidence regarding the best available material for teaching high school math, and the Seattle School Board ("the Board") gave due consideration to both sides of the debate before reaching its quasi legislative decision to adopt the Discovering series and other textbooks on a 4-3 vote.
The trial court erred by substituting its judgment for the Board's in determining how much weight to place on the conflicting evidence. Several of the "facts" alleged in the Brief of Respondents ("BR") are inaccurate, misleading, or lack any citation to the record in violation of RAP l0.3(a)(4). The Court should have an accurate view of the facts in the record to decide the important legal issues in this case. The Board is, therefore, compelled to correct any misimpressions that could arise from an unwary reading of respondents' characterization of the facts.
A tussle over the Jersey City schools superintendent's $280,000-a-year contract is headed for a showdown involving New Jersey's education commissioner, putting a spotlight on one of the state's most troubled school districts.
Charles Epps has been superintendent for the past 10 years. Twenty-six of his 37 schools failed last year to make "adequate yearly progress," according to federal standards, and one middle school---where only 32% of children are proficient in English and 25% proficient in math--has fallen short of the federal goal nine years straight.
Late last month, the local school board voted to forgo an outside search for a new superintendent and to begin negotiating a new three-year contract with Mr. Epps. That enraged some local activists, who have filed a petition with the state to overturn the board's vote.
"There's a window of opportunity to stop rewarding failure," said Steven Fulop, a Jersey City council member who is helping to spearhead the opposition. "Nobody in their right mind would rehire someone who has failing performance without even a cursory look at who else is out there." The petition accuses the school board of failing to give 30 days' notice and opportunity for the public to voice their opinions before the vote.
New Jersey's largest school district will create a special enterprise zone for education in September, bringing together seven low-performing schools for an ambitious program of education and social services provided through a coalition of colleges and community groups led by New York University.
The Newark schools -- Central High School and six elementary and middle schools -- will be part of a Global Village School Zone stretching across a poor, crime-ridden swath of the city known as the Central Ward. The zone is modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone, a successful network of charter schools and social service programs, and represents the latest in a growing number of partnerships between urban school districts and colleges.
While the Newark zone will remain part of the city's long-troubled school system, which has been under state control since 1995, its schools will be largely freed from district regulations and will be allowed to operate like independent charter schools. Decisions about daily operations and policies will be turned over to committees of principals, teachers, parents, college educators and community leaders, and the schools will be allowed to modify their curriculum to address the needs of students.
The recent layoff of 80 police officers in Oakland could be the harbinger of things to come as government officials find that public employee pension deals made when the stock market was booming are helping bust their budgets today.
"It's regrettable, but we had no choice," said City Council President Jane Brunner of the layoffs that were Oakland's response to a growing public pension crisis.
Forced to make a $30.5 million budget cut - Brunner said that's more than the city's discretionary spending - Oakland had asked police officers to pay 9 percent of their salaries toward their pensions and accept a later retirement age for new hires.
California's public school system has finally found itself at the top of a list. According to a new report, its academic standards are the highest in the country. But in less than two weeks, California's State Board of Education will vote on whether or not to swap them out for new national standards-and there may be good reason to do so.
California's academic rigor may be high, but its student proficiency rates still trail behind many states with less stringent standards. Consider the state of Maryland. According to a study released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank, Maryland's standards are less rigorous than California's. But a separate report by Education Week ranked Maryland first in the country for overall quality, with high marks for the indicators that measure academic achievement and a student's success from school to the workforce.
Supporters of the switch to the Obama administration's so-called "Common Core Standards," including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, say that the new framework makes more sense because it focuses on building critical grade skills and abilities rather than touching on a long list of academic materials.
A more rigorous high school curriculum is paying off in better college entrance scores for state students.
Michigan's tough, new high school curriculum is passing the test. Scores for state high school students on the Michigan Merit Examination, which includes the ACT, climbed by half a percentage point, meaning students will enter college better prepared.
The results, released Thursday by the Michigan Department of Education, show high school students have improved their ACT scores for the third year in a row.
The steady improvement, from an average score of 18.8 in 2008 to 19.3 this year, demonstrates the rigorous high school graduation requirements adopted in 2006 are gradually paying off.
Four prominent Pennsylvania Republicans are earning more than a combined $1 million a year as directors on three boards connected with the Milton Hershey School, one of the state's wealthiest charities and the nation's largest residential school for disadvantaged children.
LeRoy Zimmerman, a former two-term attorney general who has headed the charity since 2006, earned the most, $499,996, according to the group's latest tax filing with the Internal Revenue Service.
The others are:
James Nevels, a Philadelphia investment manager, who was compensated $325,359 on two Hershey-related boards.
Former Gov. Tom Ridge, who is earning $200,000 a year on the Hershey Co. board.
Lynn Swann, former gubernatorial candidate and Pittsburgh Steeler star, who is making $100,000 a year on the board of the company that operates Hersheypark.
The Madison School District will ask for proof of age when registering students who live with people other than their parents or guardians or those who are 18 years or older and are enrolling themselves for school.
The district disclosed the new procedure -- which goes into effect next month for the 2010-11 school year -- in a statement to the State Journal dated July 23 and received Monday.
Ivan Mateo-Lozenzo, 21, was enrolled at Middleton High School as 18-year-old junior Arain Gutierrez at the time of the shooting. Middleton officials have said Mateo-Lozenzo, who police have identified as an illegal immigrant from Veracruz, Mexico, had transferred from Madison's West High School.
Few U.S. citizens would agree to cutting special education funds. After all, students with an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) obviously learn differently and need increased time and attention from educators in order to ensure they are attending to and learning the academic standards. However, another group of students who learn differently and need time and attention to guide their learning of the academic standards are being denied this year. These are the gifted students.
According to the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) Policy Insider, the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee met to draft the Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 budget for the Department of Education. Although the budget has increased 3.2% since FY 2010, the budget completely eliminates the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Student program. "The 20 year-old Javits program is the only federal program that supports the unique learning needs of America's three million students with gifts and talents."
Portland schools may not feel an immediate impact from the loss of the Javits Program. However, this program provides scholarships to the disadvantaged gifted student and research support in the area of effective instructional practices for these students who learn differently than their peers.
People in other big-city school districts around the country have a hard time thinking of Portland Public Schools as a truly urban district.
Not only is Portland tiny (47,000 students, compared with 700,000 in Los Angeles), but only 43 percent of its students are poor (in Chicago, 85 percent are). A majority are white (in Philadelphia, 13 percent are). What's more, middle- and upper-income professionals in Portland do something their counterparts in Detroit, L.A. or Washington, D.C., rarely consider: They send their children to central-city public schools.
But there is one way in which our small, mostly white, heavily middle-class school system is statistically right in line with some of the grittiest urban districts in the nation: A shockingly low share of Portland's high school students earn diplomas.
As The Oregonian reported on the front page recently, just 53 percent of Portland's high school students graduate in four years.
Portland's 2010-2011 budget is $653,796,298 = $13,910.55 per student. Madison spent $15,241 per student during the 2009/2010 budget.
In his much-discussed recent Wall Street Journal op ed, Virginia Senator James Webb makes some good points about affirmative action and race, but also some key mistakes and omissions. On the plus side, Webb's article highlights the contradictions between the "diversity" and compensatory justice rationales for affirmative action. He also correctly suggests that slavery and segregation inflicted considerable harm on southern whites as well as blacks; it is therefore a mistake to view these injustices as primarily a transfer of ill-gotten wealth from one race to another. On the negative side, Webb is very unclear as to his own position on affirmative action. He also seems to blame racism and the historic economic backwardness of the South on the machinations of a small elite. The reality was more complicated. Low-income southern whites were often much more supportive of racism and segregation than economic elites were, and Jim Crow might have been less virulent without their support.
I. Competing Rationales for Affirmative Action.
One of Webb's best points is that affirmative action has resulted in preferences for groups that cannot claim to be victims of massive, systematic injustices inflicted in the United States:
Over the last several months I have been in many meetings with HR and L&D professionals talking about the enormous power of formalized informal learning. As we walk through out enterprise learning framework and talk with people about the need to expand their concept of training, I am reminded of the work we did back in 2003 and 2004 when I wrote The Blended Learning Book® (which is just as important to understand today as ever before).
Here are a few of the jewels I want to remind everyone to consider.
Voters will chose among them during the November general election to address Rockingham County Schools' biggest issues and opportunities. These include an expected tough budget in 2011-12, academic performance and technology in schools.
The candidates:
Corey Brannock, 32, of Eden, works as a wastewater treatment plant operator in Mayodan.
He has never run for elected office but decided to after volunteering at Central Elementary and witnessing crowded classrooms and stressed teachers.
"I just want to know if I can help change that," he said about his decision to file. "I'm just trying to make a difference."
Thanks to a dual credit program at her high school, Casey Hahney, of Hammond, was able to transfer her credits and enroll at Ivy Tech Community College Northwest.
Dual credit is designed for high school juniors and seniors, enabling them to earn college credits while fulfilling high school requirements.
Educators say dual credit may not mean that students will finish college in less than four years but it may reduce the number of students finishing in six years.
Local colleges and universities recently reported six-year graduation rates in 2008 well below 50 percent, also less than the national average of 55.9 percent.
Not every high school graduate will go on to college. But for those who do, a basic high school diploma may not give them the preparation they need. Dual credit classes range from English to anatomy or engineering. It saves times and money, and gives students a leg up, helping to prepare them for a successful college career.
The first finding of the Audit Report is "The Seattle School District did not comply with state law on recording meeting minutes and making them available to the public". Id., p. 6. The auditor found: "We determined the Board did not record minutes at retreats and workshops in the 2008 - 2009 school year. Id. These retreats and workshops were held to discuss the budget, student assignment boundaries, school closures and strategic planning". [Emphasis Supplied] Id., p. 6. The school board's decisions regarding student assignment boundaries and school closures are the subject of the Commissioner's ruling denying review in the Briggs and Ovalles discretionary review proceedings and in this original action.
The Auditor described the effect of these violations to be: "When minutes of special meetings are not promptly recorded, information on Board discussions is not made available to the public". Id., p. 6. The Auditor recommended "the District establish procedures to ensure that meeting minutes are promptly recorded and made available to the public." Id., p. 6. The District's response was: "The District concurs with the finding and the requirement under OPMA that any meeting of the quorum of the board members to discuss district business is to be treated as a special or regular meeting of the OPMA." Id. p. 6. Thus, the school board admits the Transcripts of Evidence in the Ovalles and Briggs appeals contains no minutes of the discussions relating to student assignments and school closures, even though the law required otherwise. Additionally, there is no indication of what evidence the school board actually considered with regard to the school closures and the new student assignment plan at retreats and workshops devoted to these specific decisions.
The fifth finding of the Auditor's Report was: "5. The School Board and District Management have not implemented sufficient policies and controls to ensure the District complies with state laws, its own policies, or addresses concerns raised in prior audits". Id., p. 25. In a section entitled "description of the condition" the report states: "In all the
areas we examined we found lax or non-existent controls in District operations. ..." Id., p. 25. With regard to the Open Meetings Act the Auditor noted continuing violations of state law and that "the District did not develop policies and procedures to adequately address prior audit recommendations." Id, at p. 27.
Time is on my side, the Rolling Stones sang in the 1960s.
Seems like it was. They're still rich and famous four decades later.
But what about millions of school kids, especially those on the short end of educational good fortune? What if time - namely, too little of it in constructive educational situations - is working against them?
The way time is and is not used to give kids valuable educational experience is a good subject here at the height of the summer, when a large number of kids, especially those with the biggest challenges in school, are likely going backward educationally.
"Summer learning loss" is the term for the well-documented problem of kids coming back to school around Labor Day with erosion in their skills.
Should something be done about the classic school schedule - 180 days a year, usually not more than seven hours from the time a student walks in the door until dismissal, with 10 weeks or more off in the summer?
The current calendar became the norm more than a century ago, and many trace its origins to an economy that leaned heavily toward agriculture. Kids were needed to help out during the growing season.
Since the start of American public schools, both well-meaning and not so well-meaning people have tried to reform them. Movements have ranged from the introduction of "teaching machines" to the current political cry for increased testing, market-model accountability and school choice.
Until recently, most reform efforts have been relatively benign, with no serious threat to the concept of public education. That was changed during the George W. Bush administration and it continues under President Obama. His plans are punitive, counter-productive to real reform and insidious in intent. They do pose serious threats to the very existence of the American public school system.
Fresh from his hard-earned, well-deserved victories in health-care reform and financial regulation, Obama is now redirecting his energy toward education reform. This time, though, he is acting on bad advice, misinformation about education and denial of valid research that rebuts the plan he supports. Race to the Top (RTTT) is the name of President Obama's plan, spearheaded by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Under it, states submit an application to the federal government with their "best blueprint" for reform. Duncan has devised a model for the states to follow that's composed of several elements, each given a point value. The total number of points possible, if all criteria are met, is 500.
The model includes provisions for taking over "failing schools" and encouraging the establishment of charter schools, many of which are funded by such organizations as the self-serving Gates Foundation. Recent national studies have found no significant difference between the education students receive in charter schools and public schools -- but the studies are ignored.
"From the first sentence of the article, it was apparent that this was another education-bashing Tribune editorial, thinly disguised as a news story," Swanson wrote in a letter to members.
The state's public worker unions are at war with Gov. Chris Christie, but they have not ramped up their political spending.
The New Jersey Education Association's political action committee spent $234,788 in the first half of this year, according to reports released today by the state Election Law Enforcement Commission. At this point last year, when there were far more state-level political races, the union had spent $426,200. This year, the NJEA has raised $797,841 and has $1.2 million on hand.
The PAC for New Jersey's largest state workers union, the Communications Workers of America, has taken in $77,000 so far this year and has spent $78,169, the reports show.
College students study a lot less now than in the 1960s, yet they get better grades.
For students, these trends must seem like marvelous developments. But they raise questions about both declining rigor and potential grade inflation in higher education.
In a forthcoming study in the journal Economic Inquiry, economist Philip Babcock finds the trends linked. As Babcock related in an e-mail, when the instructor "chooses to grade more strictly, students put in a lot more effort." And when the professor gives easy A's, students expend less effort.
The finding relates to an earlier study, cited in a previous post here, showing that professors who get high ratings from their students tend to teach those students less. (The minimal effort required in those classes apparently fuels the professor's popularity.)
Babcock, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, reviewed two sets of research literature that document crisscrossing trends.
When David Brewer III was on the outs - but had not yet been ousted - as superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, he appointed Ramon Cortines as senior deputy superintendent. It was a bogus title, and everyone knew it.
Cortines had decades more experience than Brewer, a former Navy admiral who had never worked in a school district before. Cortines had been Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's deputy mayor of education and head of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools. Before that he had run some of the nation's largest districts, including New York and L.A. Unified. So, who was whose deputy?
The arrangement was a way for the district to have a competent leader while the Board of Education figured out a graceful exit for Brewer. Eight months later, in January 2009, the transition was formalized.
Wisconsin's approach to funding schools relies on a confusing and frequently misunderstood formula under which the state picks up the bulk of costs while capping how much districts can collect in state aid and local property taxes combined.
Districts have complained the caps, which are based largely on the number of students a district has, have not kept pace with expenses. In recent years, the state has reduced its share of aid to schools from two-thirds of total costs to slightly less than that, forcing districts to choose between two unpopular options: Cutting programs and services or raising property taxes.
MMSD is one of the most expensive public school districts in the state (per pupil spending is highest among the largest school districts). It has been for decades. However, the annual rate of increase in per pupil spending has been very close to the Wisconsin average. While per pupil spending for the average Wisconsin public school district has increased at an annual rate of 5.10%, it has increased by an annual rate of 5.25% in MMSD (see table below). That MMSD costs have risen more should be no surprise, because of cost of living, the loss of students to the growing suburbs (subsidized by state taxes), and the relative portion of special education needs and classroom support needs have risen significantly.
The "great recession" has certainly affected many organizations, including public school districts via slower tax collection growth and flat or reduced property values (which further increases taxes, such as the 2010-2011 Madison School District budget, which will raise them by about 10%).
On Thursday at 10:30 AM an appeal of the Superintendent's one-year contract extension to June 30, 2013 will be filed at the King County Courthouse.
At 1:30 PM filings initiating the recall and discharge of each of five Seattle School Directors will be filed at the King County Elections Office. Directors Sundquist, Maier, Martin-Morris, Carr, and DeBell are the subjects of these five recalls. Directors Smith-Blum and Patu are not subjects of recall.
If you wish to volunteer to collect signatures...
please contact: .. dempsey_dan@yahoo.com
using the subject line "RECALL".
We expect to receive authorization to begin collecting signatures within 30 days of initial filing. Signatures will be gathered from voters registered in the City of Seattle. We hope that most voters will choose to sign all 5 petitions. Approximately 32,000 valid signatures will be needed for each director to bring about a recall election. A 180 day maximum for signature gathering is allowed and the election is scheduled 45 to 60 days after the required number of signatures has been submitted and verified.
A new study has claimed that good school leadership is critical to good education.
Researchers Kyla Wahlstrom and Karen Seashore Louis from the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development and Kenneth Leithwood and Stephen Anderson from the University of Toronto, have broad implications for the understanding of how leadership affects learning across the United States.
"Leadership is important because it sets the conditions and the expectations in the school that there will be excellent instruction and there will be a culture of ongoing learning for the educators and for the students in the school," said Wahlstrom.
A proposal from Gov. Chris Christie to overhaul teacher contract negotiations has gained support from management while further angering the state teachers union.
As part of his proposed toolkit to reduce property taxes statewide, Christie is calling for the move back to allowing "last offer/best offer" in negotiations. The system would allow Boards of Education to unilaterally impose a contract on a local union in the event negotiations broke down. The system was allowed in New Jersey until banned by law in 2003.
Frank Belluscio, a spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association, said the proposal would provide assistance to school boards by allowing them to impose final offers when negotiations drag on. Current policy allows boards and teachers unions to go to a binding arbitration, which Christie and municipal leaders have said resulted in larger compensation awards to unions.
Associations representing state teachers and school boards have expressed opposition to a proposal in Gov. Chris Christie's property tax toolkit to increase state oversight to contracts negotiated between school districts and local unions.
The proposal would set a four point criteria for county executive superintendents of schools to review local contracts, with the governor's goal to keep property taxes below the two percent cap Christie signed into law earlier this month.
The criteria, as outlined in a preliminary proposal to the New Jersey School Boards Association from the governor's office earlier this month, would include county executive superintendents reviewing all contracts that have the total compensation and benefits exceeding the cap, did not allow subcontracting of such services as food and maintenance, did not allow employee contributions to health benefits and did not set a minimum number of instructional hours and days. The proposal was drafted when the cap was the two and a half percent constitutional amendment and not the two percent statutory cap, Christie negotiated with the legislature.
"SCHOOL reform chaos?" asked a frowning satchel depicted on posters plastered around Hamburg. "No thank you." The sorrowful satchel was the mascot of a citizens' rebellion against a proposed school restructuring in the city-state. Voters rejected the plan in a referendum on July 18th. The stinging defeat for Hamburg's government, a novel coalition between the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Green Party, has national consequences, as it may make the CDU-Green alliance a less appealing model for a future federal government. Ole von Beust, Hamburg's mayor, announced his resignation before the result, saying he had done the job for long enough. He is the sixth CDU premier to leave office this year. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who leads the CDU, must now promote a new generation of leaders.
More important are the implications for schools. Hamburg's plan was a bold attempt to correct a German practice that many think is both unjust and an obstacle to learning. In most states, after just four years of primary school children are streamed into one of several types of secondary school: clever kids attend Gymnasien, middling ones Realschulen and the slowest learners Hauptschulen, which are supposed to prepare them for trades. (A few go to Gesamtschulen, which serve all sorts.) Early selection may be one reason why the educational achievement of German children is linked more closely to that of their parents than in almost any other rich country. Children at the bottom often face low-wage drudgery or the dole.
Numerologists may have to be called in to explain the historic magnitude of the year 2010. After 60 years of doubling down on their spending, 2010 became the year governments from Greece to California hit the wall. (That Athens became the symbol of the democracies' compulsion to spend themselves into oblivion is an eeriness we'd rather not ponder.)
In the distant future, some U.S. historian in kindergarten today will write about Congressman David Obey's contribution to the splitting apart of American liberalism's assumptions about the purpose of government. Mr. Obey of Wisconsin is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, the spenders. People have said for years that government robs Peter to pay Paul. Now brother is ripping off brother. Mr. Obey plans to send $10 billion to school districts to avoid teacher layoffs and will pay for it in part by taking money from several school reform programs, such as Race to the Top.
Brian Rodriguez, a history teacher at Alameda's Encinal High School, once taught at the old Elmhurst Middle School in East Oakland. Though he left the Oakland school district, he's still teaching lots of Oakland kids. He worries that a "witch hunt" for out-of-district transfers is about to happen. -Katy
I have taught at Encinal High School in Alameda since the 1996-97 school year, when I left Oakland following the teacher strike. I left reluctantly, because I loved teaching at Elmhurst Middle School, but like many union reps, I was the subject of illegal disciplinary action following the month-long teacher's strike and left in disgust.
To my delight, I still was able to teach many Oakland students who also left OUSD following the strike, and to work with fine educators who left then, too. It's estimated that 400 out-of-district students attend Alameda schools.
Three decades after the Supreme Court ruled that immigration violations cannot be used as a basis to deny children equal access to a public school education, one in five school districts in New York State is routinely requiring a child's immigration papers as a prerequisite to enrollment, or asking parents for information that only lawful immigrants can provide.
The New York Civil Liberties Union, which culled a list of 139 such districts from hundreds of registration forms and instructions posted online, has not found any children turned away for lack of immigration paperwork. But it warned in a letter to the state's education commissioner on Wednesday that the requirements listed by many registrars, however free of discriminatory intent, "will inevitably discourage families from enrolling in school for fear that they would be reported to federal immigration authorities."
For months, the group has been pushing the State Education Department to stop the practices, which range from what the advocates consider unintentional barriers, like requiring a Social Security number, to those the letter called "blatantly discriminatory," like one demanding that noncitizen children show a "resident alien card," with the warning that "if the card is expired, it will not be accepted."
Adding to a drumbeat of concern about the nation's dismal college-completion rates, the College Board warned Thursday that the growing gap between the United States and other countries threatens to undermine American economic competitiveness.
The United States used to lead the world in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Now it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.
"The growing education deficit is no less a threat to our nation's long-term well-being than the current fiscal crisis," Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, warned at a meeting on Capitol Hill of education leaders and policy makers, where he released a report detailing the problem and recommending how to fix it. "To improve our college completion rates, we must think 'P-16' and improve education from preschool through higher education."
Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker proposed a plan he says would potentially save school districts and local units of government more than $300 million in health care costs.
Walker, a Republican candidate for governor, said his proposal would allow local units of government to switch from health plans that have high premiums to the state's lower-cost employee health plan.
Walker said his proposal could save school districts $68 million and local governments up to $242 million annually in health care costs.
He cautioned, however, that the savings estimate for local units of government is impossible to estimate because there is no central database of what municipalities pay for health care. To make his projections, he used data of the potential savings at school districts and applied those figures to the state's more than 200,000 local public employees.
Walker said the biggest reduction would come from Milwaukee Public Schools, which he said could realize $20 million a year in savings.
Locally, the Madison School District's use of WPS has long been controversial due to its high cost versus alternatives, such as GHC, among others.
In the school district where I teach, we do a moderate amount of within-grade-level ability-grouping with our students, particularly in reading and math. Occasionally I hear a teacher bemoan this practice as "tracking," despite the fact that the groups are rather flexible and, particularly in reading, the students are re-grouped often (every few weeks) according to their learning needs. It is not "tracking" in the way groupings were created decades ago in our district in which students were irreversibly placed into, or rather locked into, a track. These are flexible groupings far more than they are tracks.
Ironically, the grade-level, whole-class groupings apparently preferred by these teachers who bemoan ability-grouping are the most restrictive form of tracking, that by age. For a century (-ish), schools have "tracked" students based on when they were born, not based on what they are ready and able to learn. "Born between September 1, 2003, and August 31, 2004? You belong to the Class of 2022." That is how it works in nearly every school in our country. It's tracking by age, but no one calls it that.
Of course, many teachers, especially those of us in the realm of gifted education, recognize that age-tracking (particularly in the absence of any differentiation) does little to help schools meet the learning needs of gifted and advanced learners who are academically years ahead of their age-peers.
The story about Provost Academy and the rise of online learning initiatives in South Carolina should be a pretty good indicator of the benefit that alternative learning methods have for today's youth. Here is a stretch of text from the story. You can read the whole story online by visiting the site. Everyone has his or her own learning style.
Washington's mother, Alice Peterson, said she knew her daughter was headed down the wrong path.
"I might have been in jail and she might have been in the funeral home somewhere," Peterson said.
Instead, the cousins heard about Provost Academy, a free public online high school for South Carolina residents. They meet at Refuge Outreach Ministry in Lake City to take their lessons.
An overhaul in the admissions process for Chicago's selective public schools had little impact on overall diversity, but individual buildings show much more variance -- in some cases growing more segregated for the 2010-11 school year, CPS officials said Tuesday.
Chicago Public Schools chief Ron Huberman cautioned that the data are very preliminary and could change when the school year starts. Among other things, a budget crisis may force cuts in transportation to and from these schools, which could prompt enrollment changes.
He conceded that some schools are losing diversity.
California typically lands at or near the bottom in virtually every measure of public school performance nationally, but the academic content taught to the state's schoolchildren is second to none, according to a study released Tuesday. That status has left the Golden State with a conundrum. To be more competitive for federal Race to the Top funds, the state must adopt common standards in English, math and other subjects to be in sync with most other states.
But that would mean replacing the academic standards that were recognized in the study conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a think tank based in Ohio.
Critics are concerned the national standards could dumb down California classrooms, discarding the state's superior academic framework adopted 13 years ago for students from kindergarten through high school.
Reading and math learning goals for Hawaii public schools are "mediocre" and "often vague," says a new national report that gives the state a "C" for its educational standards.
But the report points out that when Hawaii adopts common national standards in the 2011 school year, its standards will improve. The report gives the national standards a B-plus for English and an A-minus for math.
"Hawaii has raised the bar by adopting the common core," said Michael Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which was scheduled to release its standards report today. "There are going to be much higher expectations."
More of the funding increase went to administrators, clerks and technical staff and less to teachers, textbooks, materials and teacher aides, the study found. It was partially funded by a California Chamber of Commerce foundation.
Total K-12 spending increased by $10 billion over the five-year period ending June 30, 2009, from $45.6 billion to $55.6 billion statewide. It rose at a rate greater than the increase in inflation or personal income, according to the study. Yet researchers found that classroom spending dipped from 59 percent of education funding to 57.8 percent over the five years.
Spending on teacher salaries and benefits dropped from 50 percent of statewide spending to 48 percent over the same period. Spending on administrators and supervisors, staff travel and conferences all increased faster than teachers' pay.
The report mentions that California's average per student expenditure is just under $10,000 annually. Madison's 2009/2010 per student spending was $15,241 ($370,287,471 budget / 24,295 students).
he K-12 academic standards in English language arts (ELA) and math produced last month by the Common Core State Standards Initiative are clearer and more rigorous than today's ELA standards in 37 states and today's math standards in 39 states, according to the Fordham Institute's newest study. In 33 of those states, the Common Core bests both ELA and math standards. Yet California, Indiana and the District of Columbia have ELA standards that are clearly superior to those of the Common Core. And nearly a dozen states have ELA or math standards in the same league as Common Core. Read on to find out more and see how your state fared.
As Massachusetts nears decision time on adopting national education standards, the Boston Herald takes state leaders to task for their support of the Common Core standards, which some analysts say are inferior to current state standards. But fear not, says Education Secretary Paul Reville. If the national standards are inferior, the Bay State can change them. "We will continue to be in the driver's seat."
If only national standardizers -- many of whom truly want high standards and tough accountability -- would look a little further than the ends of their beaks.
The charter-school movement appears to be catching up to the teachers union in political giving to Albany.
With the help of hedge-fund managers and other Wall Street financiers, charter-school advocates gave more than $600,000 to Albany political candidates and party committees since January, according to the latest campaign filings. That's more than twice as much as in prior reporting periods, according to allies of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run.
Pro-charter donations appear to have surpassed the $500,000 or so that candidates raised from teachers unions during the six-month period.
We know that Massachusetts students scored below the national average on SATs in the early 1990s and barely broke the top 10 on national assessments. We know that Massachusetts students have become the best students in the nation on these same assessments, and are among the best "nations" in math and science.
We know that implementing standards in Massachusetts took years of public debate and hard work, and, spending over $90 billion since 1993 on K-12 education, that it came at no small cost to the Commonwealth and its communities.
We know that there are ways to improve our current standards and our performance across all demographics and geographies of the Commonwealth.
We know that our education reforms distinguish us from the rest of the country and are critical to business and job creation.
We know that having state flexibility allows us to improve faster than the rest of the nation and to make adjustments that are good for the people and children of Massachusetts.
Americans have never had national education standards. Goals for what public schools should teach are set by state and local school boards. Their members are often elected.
But some Americans say the lack of national standards is wrong in a competitive global economy. Former president Bill Clinton said it was as if somehow school boards "could legislate differences in algebra or math or reading."
President George W. Bush and Congress expanded federal intervention. His education law, still in effect, required states to show yearly progress in student learning as measured by the states' own tests.
Seattle Public Schools has a number of slogans. Among them is "Every School a Quality School". The District claims to be working towards this goal, but the District has no definition of a Quality School, so those claims lack credibility. Rather than clucking at the District for not having a definition of a Quality School, our time would be more productively used helping them to find one.
What is a Quality School? We need to be clear that we separate the idea of a Quality School from the students in the school. If we were to rely on student achievement, for example, as our definition of a Quality School, then we might conclude that Bryant is good school and that Hawthorne is a struggling school. But does anyone believe that if the Hawthorne students were all transferred to Bryant and if the Bryant students were all transferred to Hawthorne that the outcomes for the students would be much different? Would the Hawthorne students suddenly start to achieve because they are now at a good school and the Bryant students suddenly start to under-perform because they are now at a struggling school? I doubt it.
With the latest batch of charter-school approvals likely to be announced soon by the state Department of Education, some state lawmakers are beginning a push for a bill that could expand the alternative public schools' movement in New Jersey.
The proposal would permit Rutgers University to approve charter schools, in addition to the Department of Education. It also would end deadlines for organizers to apply for charters, allowing applications to be filed at any time and requiring decisions on them within five months.
The proposal would also expand the types of charter schools allowed in New Jersey, allowing virtual or e-charter schools, charter schools with students of only one gender and charter schools catering to students with behavioral needs or disorders, such as autism.
The legislation is sponsored by five Democrats but seems likely to receive a warm welcome from pro-charter Republican Gov. Chris Christie and his education commissioner, Bret Schundler, who helped found a Jersey City charter school in the 1990s.
A majority of Northwest Indiana schools districts fell behind the state's average in the percentage of dollars spent in the classroom, according to an annual school expenditures report released by the state's Office of Management and Budget this month.
But at least seven school districts were above the state average of 58 percent. Gary Community School Corp. was among the highest in the region with 66 percent of its overall budget tied to student achievement compared to other operational and overhead expenses, such as salaries and costs for transportation and construction.
Lake Station Community Schools and the School City of Hammond routed 65 percent and 63 percent to district classrooms, respectively, during the 2008-2009 school year.
Those numbers include teacher salaries, textbooks as well as guidance counselors, social workers and other expenses tied to instructional support. While the state average is comparable to previous years, Indiana lags 5 percentage points behind the national average. Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett challenged school districts to not only meet the national average but to push more dollars to classrooms than any other state.
This is the second in a series of essays by Gelernter commissioned by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The German translation was published on June 22nd ("Ein Geist aus Software").
DAVID GELERNTER is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies (New Haven). His research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Nicholas Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer communication systems worldwide. He is the author of Mirror Worlds, and Drawing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber.
Victory Schools Inc., a for-profit charter-school operator, has hired away New York City's charter-schools chief and is considering converting into a nonprofit.
Michael Duffy, the director of the Department of Education's Charter School Office, will join Victory, according to representatives for both the DOE and the company. Victory helps manage 16 charter schools with 7,000 students in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.
Mr. Duffy, whose title hasn't yet been decided, is widely credited for accelerating charter-school growth in the city. He couldn't be reached for comment.
The future of Victory has been the subject of interest since the spring, when the New York legislature passed a law that essentially prevents for-profit charter schools from growing. The law, which also doubled the number of charter schools allowed in the state, said no more than 10% of the state's charter schools can be for-profit. Victory operates nine such schools in the state.
The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, apprehensive about a new state law that allows public schools to operate almost entirely in cyberspace, will consider imposing limits on the growth of these "virtual schools,'' much to the dismay of supporters.
The goal of the proposed regulations, which the board is scheduled to vote on tomorrow, is to allow some experimentation in Massachusetts with these kinds of schools, while not allowing them to grow unfettered without knowing what works and what doesn't, said Jeff Wulfson, an associate education commissioner.
Among the proposed limits: capping enrollment at each virtual school at 500 students and requiring at least 25 percent of those students to reside in the school district that is operating the virtual school, according to the proposed regulations.
"We're trying to find the right balance,'' Wulfson said.
New York State education officials acknowledged on Monday that their standardized exams had become easier to pass over the last four years and said they would recalibrate the scoring for tests taken this spring, which is almost certain to mean thousands more students will fail.
While scores spiked significantly across the state at every grade level, there were no similar gains on other measurements, including national exams, they said.
"The only possible conclusion is that something strange has happened to our test," David M. Steiner, the education commissioner, said during a Board of Regents meeting in Albany. "The word 'proficient' should tell you something, and right now that is not the case on our state tests."
When Kim Lecus heard that the Fritsche Middle School program would move into Bay View High School in the fall of 2010, she immediately was concerned about the impact on her daughter, who just finished seventh grade at Fritsche.
The emerging middle/high model at Bay View may offer student Lindsey Lecus a greater variety of accelerated courses, but in her mother's eyes, it comes with a serious price: the mixing of vulnerable adolescents with older teenagers.
The Milwaukee School Board has approved an increasing number of sixth through 12th grade schools in the city. Board members think it will improve the transition for students from middle to high school and will consolidate space in the district.
The "best" way to serve children in the delicate and hormonally charged years between ages 11 and 13 - something national researchers have wrestled with for years - is still unclear. Underscoring that point is Milwaukee, where the emergence of more 6-12 schools is coming just a few years after former superintendent William Andrekopoulos championed moving middle schoolers in with elementary students in K-8 schools.
Of all the vows made at the coalition's May marriage, one stood out: the vow for a new politics. Out, so it seemed, was the divisive tub-thumping positioning, along with the legislate-first-think-later style of government. In its place was the prospect of cross-party public administration which was deliberative, consultative and calm. No Conservative seemed more in tune with the new times than Michael Gove. What a shame, then, that the same Mr Gove was yesterday defending a decision to ram schools reforms through without full parliamentary scrutiny on the basis that Labour had once displayed similar haste.
The education secretary's bill will allow schools to turn themselves into academies without consulting the council. Where the issue is the removal of extra-parliamentary consultation it is surely especially important for ministers to provide the time for a thoroughgoing consultation with parliament itself. Yet instead of a white paper, which invites responses on detailed proposals and gives the select committee time to get its teeth into principles, we have a bill which may be law before Mr Gove has even met that committee. And instead of line-by-line scrutiny in a standing committee - with scope to consider representations, and time for parliamentary alliances to be formed - the detailed drafting of the law will be finessed on the floor of the House, a procedure ordinarily reserved for responding to emergencies.
The decision to switch to neighborhood schools has been a divisive one in Wake County, and although the school board has already voted to shift to the new model, groups like "Great Schools In Wake" said they will still plan to have a presence and a voice at the meetings as the board hashes out the specifics of the new policy.
"Give our input and have some influence," said Yevonne Brannon with the Great Schools in Wake Coaltion. "I still hope, think, there's room for negotiation and still hope there's room for reconsideration."
That's the hope for many who oppose neighborhood schools. It's also why the NAACP will hold a protest before the meeting in down town Raleigh Tuesday morning. The organization will call school board leaders to stop what they say is segregation and promote diversity.
I know that I'm inviting trouble with this, but something that Reader wrote in a comment on another thread piqued my interest. I would like to discuss only a narrow question. Please don't expand the discussion.
Writing about Everyday Math and Singapore, Reader wrote: "The fact is, the newer curricula stress more problem solving and discovery. That is, it's doing more than a lot of older curricula."
Here's my question: can problem-solving be taught?
I mean this in the nicest possible way and I don't have an answer myself. I'm not sure, I'm asking. Can people be taught or trained in problem-solving techniques or is it a talent that some people just natively have more than others? Problem solving requires a certain amount of creativity, doesn't it? It can require a flexibility of perspective, curiosity, persistence, and pattern recognition. Can these things be taught or trained?
BUDGETS across the state and nation are being slashed, forcing education leaders to confront economic shortfalls unseen in recent memory and make do with less.
One area especially hard hit by the cuts is professional development -- the process by which we ensure our educators are well equipped to meet constantly evolving demands of helping students succeed. Often overlooked, high-quality professional learning is indispensable in generating the outcomes -- like better test scores and higher graduation rates -- that should be expected of our schools.
Absent high-quality professional learning and support for professional growth, the ability of teachers to meet new challenges becomes compromised and their practices habitual. This makes it more difficult to achieve higher outcomes and is not what we want for our teachers or students.
It's been a tough year for the Detroit Board of Education.
So tough, it appears nobody wants the job.
The Detroit News reported this weekend that not a single candidate has filed to run for two open seats on the 11-member board. As a result, the race will not appear on the city's Aug. 3 primary ballot.
But really, can you blame potential candidates for seeking other opportunities?
The popularity of the board hit perhaps an all-time low last month when then-president Otis Mathis resigned amid allegations he fondled himself during meetings with Superintendent Theresa Gueyser. He's since been charged criminally.
New Jersey's defined benefit pension systems are underfunded by more than $170 billion, an amount equivalent to 44 percent of gross state product (GSP) and 328 percent of the state's explicit government debt. Depending on market conditions, the state will begin to run out of money to pay benefits between 2013 and 2019. The state's five defined benefit pension plans cover over 770,000 workers, and more than a quarter million retirees depend on state pensions paying out almost $6 billion per year in benefits. Nationwide, state pensions are underfunded by as much as $3 trillion, approximately 20 percent of America's annual output.
This path is not sustainable. In order to avert a fiscal crisis and ensure that future state employees have dependable retirement savings, New Jersey should follow the lead of the federal government and the private sector and move from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution pensions. While significant liabilities will remain, the first step to addressing the pension crisis is capping existing liabilities and providing new employees with more sustainable retirement options.
But signing Wisconsin on to the nationwide standards campaign may trump all of those. Wisconsin's current standards for what children should learn have been criticized in several national analyses as weak, compared with what other states have. The common core is regarded as more specific and more focused on what students really should master.
Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the generally conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, is a big backer of the new standards. "There is no doubt whatsoever in Wisconsin's case that the state would be better off with the common core standards than what it has today," he said in a phone interview.
But standards are one thing. Making them mean something is another. Evers said that will be a major focus for him ahead.
"How are we going to make this happen in the classrooms of Wisconsin?" he asked.
The answer hinges on making the coming state testing system a meaningful way of measuring whether students have learned what they are supposed to learn. And that means teaching them the skills and abilities in the standards.
Does that mean Wisconsin will, despite its history, end up with statewide curricula in reading and math? Probably not, if you mean something the state orders local schools to do. But probably yes in terms of making recommendations that many schools are likely to accept.
"We will have a model curriculum, no question," Evers said. He said more school districts are looking to DPI already for answers because, with the financial crunches they are in, they don't have the capacity to research good curriculum choices.
Educational statistics expert Joseph Hawkins, one of my guides to the mysteries of test assessment, is impatient with the way the Montgomery County Public School system, as he puts it, "is always telling the world how better it is than everyone else." He finds flaws in its latest celebration of college success by county graduates, particularly minorities.
As a senior study director with the Rockville-based research firm Westat, Hawkins' critique has regional and national importance because it deals with the National Student Clearinghouse. This little-known information source may become the way school raters like me decide which school families and taxpayers are getting their money's worth and which aren't.
The clearinghouse has a database of more than 93 million students in more than 3,300 colleges and universities. It originally specialized in verifying student enrollment for loan companies. Now it tells high schools how their alums are doing.
Yeah, sure, says Hawkins, but "data from the Clearinghouse is not completely accurate, especially if social security numbers for students are not obtained." Also, he says, some of the numbers Montgomery County brags about don't look so good when compared to others.
A handful of administrators at the University of California are spearheading an effort to create an ambitious online educational program for undergraduates. The idea is that UC could become the first top-tier American university to offer a bachelor's degree over the Internet. It's a thought-provoking, fascinating and innovative concept. It's also a highly risky experiment.
Online education has a place - even in the university system. For students, it's impossible to beat the convenience and the accessibility of online learning. For workers, it can be a great way to expand their knowledge base without having to leave their jobs. Corporations, small businesses, even traffic schools - all of these institutions have shown that there's a positive place for online education in our society.
But that doesn't mean that the UC should jump into the fray.
Almost every state has been slashing budgets trying to balance expenses with shrinking revenues. A few governors have asked for creative ways to stretch education funding while improving learning and operating productivity. Here's a few ideas:
Promote blended learning
Require all students to take at least one online course each year of high school and negotiate a 10-20% discount with multiple online providers and give students/schools options.
Provide statewide access to multiple online learning providers and reimburse at 80% of traditional schools (with performance incentives for serving challenging populations).
Encourage K-8 schools to adopt a Rocketship-style schedule with 25% of student time in a computer learning lab and a tiered staffing model that makes long day/year affordable. A loan program to upgrade to a 1:3 computer ratio would support adoption of a blended model could be repaid out of savings.
The debate over control of Detroit Public Schools is intensifying. Last week three important events happened.
First, the elected school board selected community activist Elena Herrada to join them. Herrada brings vision and passion to the board and a long history of working on behalf of the community.
Second, citizens under the name of We the People testified before the Detroit City Council, objecting to the very idea of mayoral control of the schools.
Finally, Council President Charles Pugh, who appears to be at least willing to listen to new thinking, indicated to Rochelle Riley that he is not necessarily in favor of mayoral control.
The Mayor's effort to seize control of public schools is wrongheaded and dangerous. It is part of a larger scheme, backed by corporate interests, to destroy the democratic responsibilities of public education and to make money off the bodies of our children while limiting their minds.
This is a life's work," says Jay Kenton, the Oregon University System's vice chancellor for finance and administration. "I've been working to change this for 30 years."Flexibility for higher ed.
"This" is not Oregonians' understanding of the importance of a national-class higher education system, why some states regard their universities as economic engines, why it's a problem to be among the lowest higher-ed-funding states in the country. Changing that could be more than a life's work; it could take at least until Oregon State wins a Rose Bowl.
Kenton's goal, expressed in a proposal from the State Board of Higher Education earlier this month, is to loosen the Legislature's control over the state universities' budgets, control that has not lightened an ounce while the state's fiscal contribution has become almost weightless.
I was contacted by a reporter working on a story for Gannett News Service about the economy and its impact on public schools. At my kids' former school (AS#1) we got hit with the triple whammies of the budget cuts, drop in enrollment, and a decline in parent involvement, so I feel that my experience isn't exactly typical. I thought this blog would be a great place to get a broad response. Here is a modified version of the email the reporter sent me (edited to fit a public forum). If you'd rather contact the reporter directly to give a quotable account of your experience, you can email me at megan_mcblog@yahoo.com.
So I like to check in regularly with other blogs. I look at LEV's blog, the Alliance's blog and Harium's blog. One interesting thing I've noticed is that, when challenged or asked about information on their threads, you can rarely get an answer. Charlie asks a lot of pertinent questions in a respectful, albeit blunt, manner and rarely gets an answer. Harium does occasionally but most of his replies are that he supports the staff. I noticed that when Charlie started asking questions at LEV, there stopped being replies.
So what are these people afraid of? I can get Harium being busy and not able to reply to everything (but then, why have a blog?). But LEV and the Alliance say they want to engage and talk and yet there's silence. I think there are two issues.
The grants were approved during a special meeting Wednesday so schools could implement sweeping reforms this summer, state schools Superintendent Sandy Garrett said.
"This could really be transformative for urban districts," Garrett said.
Oklahoma City Public Schools received $12.1 million for three schools: U.S. Grant High School, Douglass Middle School and F.D. Moon Elementary School.
Tulsa Public Schools received $22.6 million for six schools: Clinton and Gilcrease middle schools, and Central, East Central, Nathan Hale and Will Rogers high schools.
And Crutcho Elementary School in northeast Oklahoma County will receive $2.24 million.
This week, State House News broke a story on the "cozy relationship" between Health Care for All and the Patrick Administration. HCFA is an effective organization, but when an HCFA official writes to the state's Insurance Commissioner: "If you expect to do anything 'newsworthy' [on insurance premium caps], can we be helpful with our blog or media at all?" well, then you have to take their positions with a brimming cup of salt.
Surrogate relationships are very much a fact of life in a state where one party is dominant, like Massachusetts. Next up to bat in this age-old game, Education Commissioner Mitch Chester and Secretary Paul Reville. In anticipation of the important debate over whether to adopt weaker K-12 national standards, they have to all appearances lined up their surrogates.
Via two trade organizations, the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the Obama Administration and the Gates Foundation have decided to get all states to "voluntarily" adopt national standards. They are working closely with longtime national standards advocates, such as Achieve, Inc., and are funded with tens of millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation. As Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution notes in an article by Nick Anderson of the Washington Post:
It's been two years since Bill Gates left his day-to-day role at Microsoft (MSFT) to concentrate on supervising the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation--and his new enterprise is booming. Headquartered in a converted check-processing center in Seattle's Eastlake neighborhood, the 10-year-old foundation plans to move into a 900,000-square-foot campus and visitors' center near the city's Space Needle next spring. The Gates Foundation opened a London office this year; it also has offices in Washington, Delhi, and Beijing, and 830 employees around the world, up from about 500 in 2008. With assets of $33.9 billion as of Dec. 31, 2009, and America's two richest people--Gates and Warren Buffett--as trustees, the foundation plans to spend $3 billion in the next five to seven years on education. If there's such a thing as a charity behemoth, the Gates Foundation is it.
While its efforts in global health are widely applauded, its record in America's schools has been more controversial. Starting in 2000, the Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its first big project, trying to revitalize U.S. high schools by making them smaller, only to discover that student body size has little effect on achievement.
School may be out for the summer, but the topic of education reform has certainly not gone on vacation. Both nationwide and right here at home there are several different ideas on the table that, if implemented, could go a long way tdsoward improving educational outcomes for our students.
Under the guidance of Governor Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin was once a nationwide leader in educational innovation. Unfortunately, bold, reform-minded leadership has been absent from the Governor's office for the last eight years. The most recent failures of Governor Jim Doyle and legislative Democrats were their unsuccessful efforts to grab federal Race to the Top dollars and their blundering attempt at a mayoral takeover of the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Usually we look to our nation's capital for examples of how not to do business, but the new collective bargaining agreement Washington D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee struck with her teachers' union is just the sort of thing we need here in Milwaukee. The contract includes teacher pay for performance, lessens the weight of seniority if layoffs become necessary and ends "job for life" tenure for ineffective teachers.
Another reform MPS sorely needs is the elimination of the teacher residency requirement, a completely arbitrary barrier that discourages quality educators from teaching at MPS. Only two of the nation's fifty largest school systems, Milwaukee and Chicago, still require its teachers to live within the city limits. No other school district in Wisconsin has a residency requirement.
As always, there will be some who maintain the cure for all that ails K-12 public education is just to keep throwing more money at it. There are some holes in that logic. First, one need look no further than MPS for an example of high spending and low results. Second, aid to public schools is already the biggest chunk of the state budget by far and spending per pupil is over $11,000. Even if simply putting a lot more money into the system were the answer, the state doesn't have it and taxpayers are already stretched to the limit.
he total federal budget for 2010 came in at just a hair under $3.6 trillion. In some weird sort of perspective that means $800 million equals less than three hundredths of one percent (.00022 percent) of the total amount. So why is Education Secretary Arne Duncan fighting so hard to keep it?
According to media reports, the $800 million comes out of his "Race to the Top" and other education reform programs to help offset a $10 billion package to protect education jobs in the House supplemental appropriations bill, which includes $33 billion for the wars.
Leading House Democrats proposed the offset in response to public school teachers who oppose some of the provisions of the "Race to the Top" program.
While they appreciate the administration's commitment to educate, teachers say the "Race to the Top" reforms specifically emphasize testing and school privatization over a needed bigger commitment to professional development and financial support for ailing schools. Under the reform, teachers argue, schools are forced to teach to tests or face closure and mass firings of school personnel.
A Department of Education investigation into the drowning of sixth grader Nicole Suriel during a class trip to Long Beach slammed Columbia Secondary School for poor planning that led to the tragedy. The beach had numerous signs noting there were no lifeguards on duty; there were three adults supervising the 24 students. The DOE fired first-year teacher Erin Bailey and disciplined assistant principal Andrew Stillman and Principal Jose Maldonado-Rivera.
The Daily News runs down some of the findings, including how "Assistant Principal Andrew Stillman decided at the last minute not to go, staying behind to do administrative work. Bailey's boyfriend - former teacher Joseph Garnevicus, 28 - went in Stillman's place, but couldn't swim." Also, "There weren't specific permission slips, just 'blanket' slips from the start of the year that didn't include swimming." The "blanket slips" were only for trips in Manhattan; instead of issuing a permission slip to parents, Stillman simply emailed them, "We're headed to the beach tomorrow."
Calling education "the civil rights issue of our generation," U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Wednesday issued a national challenge for whole communities to get involved in improving public education.
"The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve it in the classroom," Duncan told NAACP delegates meeting in Kansas City for the group's annual convention.
"This is not just a moral obligation; it is our economic imperative," he said. "Everyone has a responsibility. Every one can step up. Education is our national mission. Education is our best hope."
He said community leaders "must be at the table when decisions are made about how to improve struggling schools."
The Obama administration is making $4 billion available to improve the 5 percent worst-performing schools in the country, Duncan said.
New research paints a decidedly mixed picture when it comes to mandatory drug testing for high school students trying out for sports or other extracurricular activities: While testing seems to reduce self-reported drug use in the short term, it has virtually no effect on teens' plans to use drugs in the future.
A U.S. Department of Education study, out today, surveyed students at 36 high schools that got federal grants to do drug testing. Half of the schools had already begun testing for marijuana, amphetamines and other drugs; the other half had not.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie proposed salary caps on public school superintendents to help rein in the highest property taxes in the U.S., a move he said may slice pay for 70 percent of the top district administrators.
Christie, 47, announced the limit today as part of a package to control rising real estate tax bills. The proposal would cut salaries for 366 school superintendents when their current contracts expire, the governor's office said in a statement.
More than 50 school administrators had base salaries of $200,000 or more last year, the state Education Department reported last month. The governor's salary is $175,000.
The government signalled the biggest shakeup of Britain's universities in a generation today, with a blueprint for higher education in which the highest-earning graduates would pay extra taxes to fund degrees, private universities would flourish and struggling institutions would be allowed to fail.
Vince Cable, the cabinet minister responsible for higher education, also raised the prospect of quotas to ensure state school pupils were guaranteed places at Britain's best universities, breaking the private school stranglehold on Oxbridge.
Comparing the existing system of tuition fees to a "poll tax" that graduates paid regardless of their income, the skills secretary argued it was fairer for people to pay according to their earning power.
He said: "It surely can't be right that a teacher or care worker or research scientist is expected to pay the same graduate contribution as a top commercial lawyer or surgeon or City analyst whose graduate premium is so much bigger."
In the days following his inauguration, President Obama included a package of educational reforms in his stimulus bill that offered states financial incentives to make dramatic improvements in their education systems. About 10% of the $100 billion allocated for education was used to create competitive grants. States could only win them by drafting comprehensive and aggressive plans to, for example, adopt higher academic standards, turn around chronically low-performing schools, and redesign teacher evaluation and compensation systems.
Although it has received much less attention than health care and financial regulatory reform, this measure may ultimately be one of Mr. Obama's most profound and lasting achievements. In just one year, we've already seen more reforms proposed and enacted around the country than in the preceding decade.
Yet on July 1, with little warning, the House of Representatives watered down these reform efforts by approving an amendment to the emergency supplemental appropriations bill, proposed by Rep. David Obey (D., Wis.). It takes away $800 million that has already been committed to three critical parts of the president's education reform package--Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and the Charter Schools Program. This breaks a promise to the states, districts and schools that are doing the most important work in America. The funds are to be redirected to a $10 billion "Edujobs" bill to prevent teacher layoffs.
In many third-grade classrooms in California, students are taught -- briefly -- about obtuse and acute angles. They have no way to comprehend this lesson fully. Their math training so far hasn't taught them the concepts involved. They haven't learned what a degree is or that a circle has 360 of them. They haven't learned division, so they can't divide 360 by 4 to determine that a right angle is 90 degrees, and thus understand that an acute angle is less than 90 degrees and an obtuse angle more.
It makes no pedagogical sense, but California's academic standards call for third-graders to at least be exposed to the subject, and because angles might be on the standardized state test at the end of the year, exposed they are.
Now, that might change. In June, a yearlong joint initiative by 48 states produced a set of uniform but voluntary educational standards in English and math. Urged on by the Obama administration, the initiative's main purpose was to encourage states with low academic standards to bring their expectations into line with those of other states. Twenty states have already adopted the standards; 28 more, including California, are considering them. Texas and Alaska are the only states that declined to participate in the project.
Rural schools are being left out of pivotal policy changes being tried out in the nation's education system, say some rural advocates, and that goes for reform experiments bankrolled with private dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
"The [Gates] Foundation funded work around smaller schools in mostly urban places--a sort of ironic phenomenon, given the consolidation of rural schools. And they funded some early-college initiatives in places like rural Appalachian Ohio," said Caitlin Howley, senior manager, education and research, for ICF International in Charleston, W.Va., an educational research firm. "But I don't think rural is part of what they've been thinking about."
A Washington Post report this week tracked the influence of some $650 million the Gates Foundation has pledged for key reforms in the nation's schools in the past two and one-half years. The story also noted the close relationship between the Gates Foundation and the Obama administration (a number of Gates Foundation employees have assumed key roles in the administration) as well as similarities in the educational priorities pushed by Gates and the Obama White House.
A Times article this week described the stiff competition among graduates from top colleges for jobs with Teach for America. "Teach for America has become an elite brand that will help build a résumé, whether or not the person stays in teaching," writes Michael Winerip, the On Education columnist for The Times.
But, Mr. Winerip noted, the 20-year-old program has gotten mixed reviews from education experts, who complain that the recruits do not stay long enough to gain the experience to make them effective teachers. T.F.A.'s proponents point out that the poorest schools don't attract the top career teachers to begin with. Does Teach for America's popularity among top students raise the status of the teaching profession? Or is there a risk that it makes teaching seem more like a personal steppingstone, rather than a lifetime career?
Kate Simpson is a full-time English professor at the Middletown, Va., campus of Lord Fairfax Community College. She saw my column about Prince George's County history teacher Doris Burton lamenting the decline of research skills in high school, as changing state and local course requirements and grading difficulties made required long essays a thing of the past.
So Simpson gave her freshman English students a writing assignment.
Simpson noted my complaint that few American high-schoolers, except those in International Baccalaureate programs, were ever asked to do a research project as long as 4,000 words. Was I right or wrong? Did her students feel prepared for college writing? The timing was good because her classes had just finished a three-week research writing project in which they had to cite sources, do outlines, write and revise drafts.
She said she discovered that 40 percent of her 115 students thought that their high schools had not prepared them for college-level writing. Only 23 percent thought they had those writing skills. Other responses were mixed.
Will Fitzhugh has been discussing this issue for decades....
Taking online college courses is, to many, like eating at McDonald's: convenient, fast and filling. You may not get filet mignon, but afterward you're just as full.
Now the University of California wants to jump into online education for undergraduates, hoping to become the nation's first top-tier research institution to offer a bachelor's degree over the Internet comparable in quality to its prestigious campus program.
"We want to do a highly selective, fully online, credit-bearing program on a large scale - and that has not been done," said UC Berkeley law school Dean Christopher Edley, who is leading the effort.
The Obama Administration is successfully orchestrating one of the largest federal overreaches into education policy since the Great Society programs of the mid-1960s. If this news is coming as a surprise, it's because the Administration is maneuvering outside of normal legislative procedure, by way of Trojan-horse programs such as Race to the Top and the suggestive power of their "blueprint" to reauthorize No Child Left Behind.
The Administration's push for national standards and tests, which is moving quickly, is an historic federal overreach. By August 2, 2010, states must submit "evidence of having adopted common standards" in order to increase their chances of winning a Race to the Top grant. For states not enticed by the $4.35 billion grant competition, the Administration has already laid the groundwork in their blueprint for tying the $14.5 billion in Title I funding for low-income districts to the adoption of national standards--a deal that states will likely be unable to turn down.
The objectives of the drug-testing trial scheme in Tai Po schools were made abundantly clear at the outset. It was meant to strengthen the resolve of students to stay away from drugs. With the support of their parents, more than 12,400 students have joined the scheme voluntarily to make that pledge. Now they are in a better position to say "no" to their peers when tempted to try drugs.
The scheme is also meant to assist students troubled by drugs and to motivate them to seek help. Since the scheme was announced last summer, the Counselling Centres for Psychotropic Substances Abusers serving Tai Po have received some 80 self-referral cases involving youngsters, more than double the number over the same period in the previous year.
The League of Education Voters is trying to co-opt dissent by creating a campaign called Education Revolution and using a lot of incendiary language and images, but not taking any action.
It got me thinking about what the Revolution really is or should be. Help me clarify my thinking on this.
I think that the Revolution is about re-defining and re-purposing the District's central functions and responsibilities. The change will come when the role of the central administration is defined. What do we want the District's central administration to do? And what DON'T we want them to do?
Ideally, the District's headquarters will take responsibility for everything that isn't better decided at the school building level. They should relieve the school staff of those duties. They should:
1) Provide centralized services when those services are commodities and can achieve economies of scale. For example, HR functions, facilities maintenance, data warehousing, contracting, food service, procurement, accounting, and transportation.
A proposed sex education program that teaches fifth graders the different ways people have intercourse and first graders about gay love has infuriated parents and forced the school board to take a closer look at the issue.
Helena school trustees were swamped Tuesday night at a hearing that left many of the hundreds of parents in attendance standing outside a packed board room. They urged the school board in this city nestled in the Rocky Mountains to take the sex education program back to the drawing board.
The proposed 62-page document covers a broad health and nutrition education program and took two years to draft. But it is the small portion dealing with sexual education that has drawn the ire of many in the community who feel it is being pushed forward despite its obvious controversial nature.
Most people I've spoken with about California's school finance system, regardless of their political views, seem to think it's a mess. The researchers on the Governor's Committee on Education Excellence described it as "the most complex in the country, lacking an underlying rationale and transparency."
Mike Kirst, the Stanford University education Professor Emeritus I interviewed today, said he wouldn't even call it a system. He called it "an accretion of incremental actions that don't fit together and that make no sense."
Will the courts finally force the deadlocked state Legislature to overhaul the formulas and regulations that dictate how California allocates money to its schools (and how much)? The nonprofit Public Advocates law firm hopes so. It filed suit today in Alameda Superior Court on behalf of a coalition of advocacy groups, students and parents, saying the status quo denies students the right to a meaningful education.
Interesting article in last week's Times about the Superintendent over in Bellevue. First, she's never been a superintendent before; Bellevue got to her come from her consulting business in California. Two, she says she's doing this one gig and then going back to consulting. (She was allowed to still keep that job as president something that seems to bother some. The State Auditor found no issue with her hiring of a colleague to work as an education consultant.)
What makes her most interesting is this:
The first-time superintendent is engaged in a bold move to change the teaching culture in a district that has already gained a reputation for excellence, with all five of its high schools regularly winning national acclaim.
But it's that very reputation, the school board believes, that has masked an important failure: reaching students at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in a district that's far more diverse than many may realize.
Cudeiro believes a philosophy she honed over eight years of consulting work could close the divide.
There's a scene from the legendary HBO show The Wire that I think about when I consider this increasingly divisive issue of mayoral control of Detroit Public Schools: In the scene (which I decided against posting here because it's graphic), young drug runner Namond is urged by his friend and fellow dealer Michael to confront a kid who has run off with Namond's drugs. When Namond and Michael find the young thief, the kid starts to insult the obviously intimidated Namond. Michael steps in and beats the kid bloody.
"Take ya pack," Michael then says to Namond, motioning for him to retrieve his stolen drugs from boy. But Namond, who never wanted to be a dealer in the first place, recoils and rushes off into the night, leaving Michael and the drugs behind. "I don't want it," he sobs as he scurries away.
If DPS is the coveted "pack," Bing reminds me of Namond. Everyone else may think this is worth battling over and some may be egging him on to take over the troubled Detroit school district. But it seems that deep down, the mayor doesn't want it.
The credit scores of millions more Americans are sinking to new lows.
Figures provided by FICO Inc. show that 25.5 percent of consumers -- nearly 43.4 million people -- now have a credit score of 599 or below, marking them as poor risks for lenders. It's unlikely they will be able to get credit cards, auto loans or mortgages under the tighter lending standards banks now use.
Because consumers relied so heavily on debt to fuel their spending in recent years, their restricted access to credit is one reason for the slow economic recovery.
"I don't get paid for loan applications, I get paid for closings," said Ritch Workman, a Melbourne, Fla., mortgage broker. "I have plenty of business, but I'm struggling to stay open."
On a rainy May morning in 2008, my research team assembled at the Italian Community Center in downtown Milwaukee for focus-group sessions with the parents of students enrolled in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
After a long morning of listening to parents vent about the aspects of their children's schools that disappointed them, the tone of the meeting suddenly changed when we concluded with an "open mike" session.
"We may complain a lot about our children's schools," one of the parents told us, "but please, please, please don't take our school choice away."
Parents like this concerned mother have played a starring role in the long-running policy debate over the school-choice program, which enables parents to select a school for their child other than the assigned neighborhood public school. Charter schools, for example, offer choices within the public school system. School-choice programs like Milwaukee's notably include private schools and are often called voucher programs.
It is just minutes before the bell rings to end Tom Schalmo's eighth-grade reading class at Milwaukee's Burbank Elementary School, and the first-year teacher is trying hard to keep the 29 kids in his room focused.
He is reviewing the answers to a test on the book Holes by Louis Sachar. But a warm breeze floats through the window, carrying the sounds of kids on the playground three stories below. Schalmo's students are restless, and he has to tell them to "Sit down" repeatedly. He does it firmly, without saying "Please," and without raising his voice.
A tall, gangly kid in the second row keeps getting to his feet and edging toward the door. In the third row, another boy and a girl poke and slap at each other. Schalmo holds his hand up and says in a flat, warning tone, "Five, four, three..." The kids settle.
"These grades are important to you," he says, holding a handful of test papers aloft.
"I have recorded them. Now pay attention."
The students take turns answering the questions aloud, until Schalmo asks what offense Kissin' Kate Barlow had committed that caused her to be cursed. The answer: "She kissed a Negro." This causes about half the class -- the black kids -- to burst into giggles.
Public schools in most areas of the U.S. are caught in the vise of declining revenues and rising costs.
Policymakers talk about innovating to do more with less, but to date no one knows what that looks like in education. The truth is that dramatically more productive schooling models simply have not emerged in the last two decades, even amidst cost pressures that drove spending up faster than inflation or GDP.
While education differs in important ways from other service sectors, improvement in productivity in other economic sectors may hold important lessons for understanding how the education system can become more efficient and effective.
This paper first explores the past and future outlook for education absent productivity gains. The authors then discuss several areas in which labor-intensive businesses have improved productivity: information technology, deregulation, redefinition of the product, increased efficiency in the supply chain, investments by key beneficiaries, production process innovations, carefully defined workforce policies, and organizational change. They conclude with a five-step agenda for finding the cure for Baumol's* disease in public education.
*In the 1960s, economist William Baumol observed that productivity (defined as the quantity of product per dollar expended) in the labor-intensive services sector lagged behind manufacturing. Because labor-intensive services must compete with other parts of the economy for workers, yet cannot cut staffing without reducing output, costs rise constantly. This phenomenon, of rising costs without commensurate increases in output, has been labeled Baumol's cost disease.
In his first address to Congress in February 2009, when the nation teetered on the brink of economic collapse, President Obama declared that "dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country--and this country needs and values the talents of every American." Since then, the administration has made a major commitment to increasing America's high school graduation rate, which was once the highest in the developed world and is now among the lowest. Leading researchers now agree that 25 to 30 percent of students who enroll in American high schools fail to graduate. In many of the country's largest urban school districts, such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Indianapolis, the dropout rate is as high as 60 percent, and rates are similarly high in many rural areas. A generation ago, high school dropouts could still join the military, or get work on assembly lines, and had a fair chance of finding their way in the world. President Obama does not exaggerate when he implies that today's America has little use for dropouts and cannot expect to flourish so long as their numbers remain so high.
The administration has proposed nearly $1 billion in its latest budget specifically for the dropout problem. And it has already put $7.4 billion on the table, including its famous Race to the Top grants, which states and districts can get only if they agree to overhaul their worst-performing high schools. These are the 2,000 or so high schools that Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan refer to as "dropout factories"--schools that graduate fewer than 60 percent of their students and account for more than half the nation's dropouts.
This level of financial commitment to fixing America's underperforming high schools is unprecedented. The 1983 Nation at Risk report, which marked the start of the modern era of education reform, did not so much as mention the dropout problem even as it called for higher graduation requirements. Between 1988 and 1995, only eighty-nine school districts won federal grants for dropout prevention programs. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 applied mostly to grades three through eight. While it nominally required states to hold high schools accountable for dropout rates, it ended up allowing them to lowball the problem. Generally, the thought among educational reformers has been to concentrate on preschool and grade school education, and hope that success there would result in better student performance in high school.
Canadians, particularly those of conservative persuasion, love to compare Canada with the United States, which has a lot to learn in the key area of K-12 education. As the United States struggles with mounting deficits and debt, Americans would be well served to look north if they want to raise student performance while saving money. Canadians would be equally well served to understand their own success and expand it.
Little known to most Canadians is how well the country's students perform on international tests, particularly when compared to the United States. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an internationally standardized test administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Every three years PISA tests 15-year-olds in reading; mathematical and scientific literacy; and general competencies -- that is, how well students apply the knowledge and skills they have learned at school to real-life problems.
The San Diego Unified District Board of Education will be voting Tuesday, July 13th, at 5pm in the evening to place a temporary parcel tax up for voter approval on the November ballot. While this move on the surface is a response to the "funding cliff" that public education systems state-wide are facing as Federal stimulus dollars expire next year, the reality is that much larger stakes are in play here.
The school district is facing the prospect of $127 million in projected cuts for the school year beginning in September 2011 after cutting more than $370 million from its budget over the last four years. They have tentatively proposed a long list of budget reductions, from eliminating librarians and counselors to halving the school day for kindergartners. More than 1,400 employees - ten per cent of school district employees - will be facing layoffs if those cuts become reality.
This is a devastating day for children and public education in New Jersey. On the heels of more than $1.3 billion in cuts to public education, the Legislature and the governor have put an ill-conceived and shortsighted policy in place that will prevent our public schools from ever climbing out of the hole that has been dug for them by the state.
An understandable reaction, if a bit histrionic. The hole we're in doesn't have a lot to do with any sort of property tax cap, but to an expensive, inefficient, and unsustainable public school system.
School may be out for the summer, but the topic of education reform certainly has not gone on vacation. Both nationwide and here at home, there are several different ideas on the table that, if implemented, could go a long way toward improving educational outcomes for our students.
Under the guidance of Gov. Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin was once a nationwide leader in educational innovation. Unfortunately, bold, reform-minded leadership has been absent from the governor's office for the past eight years. The most recent failures of Gov. Jim Doyle and legislative Democrats were their unsuccessful efforts to grab federal Race to the Top dollars and their blundering attempt at a mayoral takeover of the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Usually, we look to our nation's capital for examples of how not to do business, but the new collective bargaining agreement Washington, D.C., School Chancellor Michelle Rhee struck with her teachers union is just the sort of thing we need in Milwaukee. The contract includes pay for performance, lessens the weight of seniority if layoffs become necessary and ends "job for life" tenure for ineffective teachers.
Another reform MPS sorely needs is the elimination of the teacher residency requirement, an arbitrary barrier that discourages some quality educators from teaching at MPS. Only two of the nation's 50 largest school systems, Milwaukee and Chicago, still require its teachers to live within the city limits. No other school district in Wisconsin has a residency requirement.
At-risk children who depend on Head Start should not have their futures jeopardized by a study that leaves many questions unanswered or by decision-makers who seem to be ignoring the study's very first conclusion: Head Start children outperformed the control group "on every measure of children's preschool experiences."
Head Start's value has been affirmed by people who experience the outcomes. Just ask police chiefs who know that people who began in Head Start commit fewer crimes and go to jail less often. Just ask school administrators. For example, Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland recently found that kindergarteners with special needs who had been in Head Start needed 3.7 hours of special education per week on average, versus 9.8 hours for non-Head Start children -- a huge financial saving.
A friend who teaches at a well-known eastern university told me recently that plagiarism was turning him into a cop. He begins the semester collecting evidence, in the form of an in-class essay that gives him a sense of how well students think and write. He looks back at the samples later when students turn in papers that feature their own, less-than-perfect prose alongside expertly written passages lifted verbatim from the Web.
"I have to assume that in every class, someone will do it," he said. "It doesn't stop them if you say, 'This is plagiarism. I won't accept it.' I have to tell them that it is a failing offense and could lead me to file a complaint with the university, which could lead to them being put on probation or being asked to leave."
Not everyone who gets caught knows enough about what they did to be remorseful. Recently, for example, a student who plagiarized a sizable chunk of a paper essentially told my friend to keep his shirt on, that what he'd done was no big deal. Beyond that, the student said, he would be ashamed to go home to the family with an F.
The co-chairs of President Obama's debt and deficit commission offered an ominous assessment of the nation's fiscal future here Sunday, calling current budgetary trends a cancer "that will destroy the country from within" unless checked by tough action in Washington.
The two leaders -- former Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under former President Bill Clinton -- sought to build support for the work of the commission, whose recommendations due later this year are likely to spark a fierce political debate in Congress.
"There are many who hope we fail," Simpson said at the closing session of the National Governors Association meeting. He called the 18-member commission "good people with deep, deep differences" who know the odds of success "are rather harrowing."
The Obama administration is pressuring Congress to spend $23 billion to rehire the more than 100,000 teachers who have been laid off across the country. Before Congress succumbs, it should know about the unfolding fiasco in Milwaukee. Wisconsin is a microcosm of the union intransigence that's fueling the school funding crisis in so many cities and states and leading to so many pink slips. It also shows why a federal bailout is a mistake.
Because of declining tax collections and falling enrollment, Milwaukee's school board announced in June that 428 teachers were losing their jobs--including Megan Sampson, who was just awarded a teacher-of-the-year prize. Yet the teachers union, the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, had it within its power to avert almost all of the layoffs.
The average pay for a Milwaukee school teacher is $56,000, which is hardly excessive. Benefits are another matter. According to a new study by the MacIver Institute, a state think tank, the cost of health and pension benefits now exceeds $40,000 a year per teacher--bringing total compensation to $100,500.
When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to "diversity" you know they are talking first and foremost about race. More specifically, they are talking about blacks. A diverse college campus is understood as one that has a student body that -- at a minimum -- is 5 to 7 percent black (i.e., equivalent to roughly half the proportion of blacks in the general population). A college or university that is only one, two, or three percent black would not be considered "diverse" by college administrators regardless of how demographically diverse its student body might be in other ways. The blacks in question need not be African Americans -- indeed at many of the most competitive colleges today, including many Ivy League schools, an estimated 40-50 percent of those categorized as black are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of such immigrants.
As a secondary meaning "diversity" can also encompass Hispanics, who together with blacks are often subsumed by college administrators and admissions officers under the single race category "underrepresented minorities." Most colleges and universities seeking "diversity" seek a similar proportion of Hispanics in their student body as blacks (since blacks and Hispanics are about equal in number in the general population), though meeting the black diversity goal usually has a much higher priority than meeting the Hispanic one.
Asians, unlike blacks and Hispanics, receive no boost in admissions. Indeed, the opposite is often the case, as the quota-like mentality that leads college administrators to conclude they may have "too many" Asians. Despite the much lower number of Asians in the general high-school population, high-achieving Asian students -- those, for instance, with SAT scores in the high 700s -- are much more numerous than comparably high-achieving blacks and Hispanics, often by a factor of ten or more. Thinking as they do in racial balancing and racial quota terms, college admissions officers at the most competitive institutions almost always set the bar for admitting Asians far above that for Hispanics and even farther above that for admitting blacks.
As the population of Muslims in the United States continues to grow, so too does the number of Islamic schools serving Muslim families across the nation.
American Muslims see these schools as a way to provide their children with a combination of good, mainstream education and training in the essentials of their faith. But critics fear some of these schools might expose Muslim children to radical Islamist views.
Religious education
Education has always been very important to the Muslim community in the United States. And like many other families, Muslim parents have educational options. They can send their children to secular, county-administered public schools or private academies while providing religious training at home or on weekends.
The corruption and mismanagement storm that hit Detroit Public Schools has been likened, on occasion, to Hurricane Katrina and its impact on New Orleans' schools.
So it shouldn't be surprising that Michigan Superintendent of Public Instruction Mike Flanagan has been meeting with New Orleans education officials as he plans to open a new statewide school district in 2011 for Michigan's poorest performing schools.
But what Flanagan discovered while analyzing schools was that an academic hurricane had hit more than Detroit.
Over at least the next year, the state will distribute about $119 million in federal funds to schools across the state, not just in Detroit, to improve academic performance.
It still looks like a happy, thriving school: child-size chairs in the cafeteria, yellow buses in the parking lot, a marquee sign that declares "Tomorrow's Leaders Begin Here."
But unless things change before next month, this city is going to close its top-ranked school, Nichols Elementary, to save about $400,000 a year -- less than 1 percent of the school district's $50 million budget. Worse than that, say residents of the poor and largely black east side of Biloxi, the neighborhood is losing one of its chief sources of pride and cohesion.
The question of whether closing the school is an act of fiscal prudence or discrimination has become an explosive subject in Biloxi, reopening age-old racial divides. Nearly 90 percent of the school's students are black or Asian, while the four School Board members who voted in April for the closing are white.
The core question for those who want the district to improve should always be the same -- will this help kids learn better? Unfortunately, the evidence says the answer to that question is most likely "no" when it comes to moving away from K-8 schools.
We don't need no edukashon - so you will be pleased to know that I am thinking about opening my own school.
After all, I only need to write 500 words (shorter than this piece) to apply to do so.
My school will have its own 'special' ethos. We can do it in one of those fashionable 'pop-up' shops or really any old unused building.
And we won't have to bother with that dreary old national curriculum.
As I haven't the time or the inclination to bother with employment law, management, recruiting teachers, CRB checks, admin or training anyone, I will probably have to get some kind of firm to sort it all out and pay them a fee.
Still, sounds great, doesn't it? My free school.
From the start, the governor served notice that he saw the public employees' unions as a central part of the state's problems, and that he meant to take them on. His first day in office, he signed an executive order, later struck down in court, to limit their ability to finance campaigns. The first bills he signed limited spending on pensions and benefits. He relished months of verbal sparring with the teachers' union, and analysts say he got the upper hand.
Mr. Christie said there was no plan to put the unions front and center, though some of his aides say privately that it was quite intentional.
But on controlling local government spending and taxes, he acknowledged that "yes, absolutely," there was a political strategy to doing things in a particular order. The governor's budget reduced school aid, leading to predictions that districts would raise property taxes. He blamed the teachers' union for any increases and proposed capping property tax increases. Now he is using that cap as leverage for a package of bills, which has met union opposition, to help towns and school districts control spending.
Alneada Biggers, Harvard class of 2010, was amazed this past year when she discovered that getting into the nation's top law schools and grad programs could be easier than being accepted for a starting teaching job with Teach for America.
Ms. Biggers says that of 15 to 20 Harvard friends who applied to Teach for America, only three or four got in. "This wasn't last minute -- a lot applied in August 2009, they'd been student leaders and volunteered," Ms. Biggers said. She says one of her closest friends wanted to do Teach for America, but was rejected and had to "settle" for University of Virginia Law School.
Will Cullen, Villanova '10, had a friend who was rejected and instead will be a Fulbright scholar. Julianne Carlson, a new graduate of Yale -- where a record 18 percent of seniors applied to Teach for America -- says she knows a half dozen "amazing" classmates who were rejected, although the number is probably higher. "People are reluctant to tell you because of the stigma of not getting in," Ms. Carlson said.
Across the country, public education is in the midst of a quiet revolution. States are embracing voluntary national standards for English and math, while schools are paying teachers based on student performance.
It's an agenda propelled in part by a flood of money from a billionaire prep-school graduate best known for his software empire: Bill Gates.
In the past 2 1/2 years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged more than $650 million to schools, public agencies and other groups that buy into its main education priorities.
The largest awards are powering experiments in teacher evaluation and performance pay. The Pittsburgh school district landed $40 million, Los Angeles charter schools $60 million and the Memphis schools $90 million. The Hillsborough County district, which includes Tampa, won the biggest grant: $100 million. That has set the nation's eighth-largest school system on a quest to reshape its 15,000-member teaching corps by rewarding student achievement instead of seniority.
The Washington State Auditor told the district this week it has problems managing its money. They're the same problems he's told them about before. The school board oversees the district. And auditors for the state say it's time for board members to get more involved.
Carr: "To the State Auditors' point, we have work to do. And they're right: we do."
Sherry Carr chairs the audit and finance committee of the Seattle School Board. She says the board needs to do more to make sure problems that are found in audits don't pop up again.
Carr: "We haven't always had the check in prior to the start of the next audit. So, I think that's the key."
Washington State Auditor's Office:
The Washington State Auditor's Office released an audit report this week about the Seattle School District's accountability with public resources, laws and regulations.
We found the School Board and the District's executive management:
* Must improve oversight of District operations.
* Are not as familiar with state and federal law as the public would expect.
We identified instances of misappropriation and areas that are susceptible to misappropriation. We also found the School Board delegated authority to the Superintendent to create specific procedures to govern day-to-day District operations.
The Board does not evaluate these procedures to determine if they are effective and appropriate. Consequently, we identified 12 findings in this report and in our federal single audit and financial statement report.
Seattle Public Schools establishes rigorous process for addressing financial year 2008-09 audit findings.
As part of the Washington State Auditor's Office annual audit process, an Accountability Audit of Seattle Public Schools was issued on July 6, 2010. The audit's emphasis on the need for continued improvement of internal controls and District policies for accountability is consistent with multi-year efforts under way at Seattle Public Schools to strengthen financial management.
"Because we are deeply committed to being good stewards of the public's resources, we take the information in this audit very seriously," said Superintendent Maria L. Goodloe-Johnson, Ph.D. "We acknowledge the need to take specific corrective actions noted in the report. It is a key priority to implement appropriate control and accountability measures, with specific consequences, for situations in which policies are not followed."
The School Board will work closely with the Superintendent to ensure corrections are made. "We understand and accept the State Auditor's findings," said School Board Director Sherry Carr, chair of the Board's Audit and Finance Committee. "We accept responsibility to ensure needed internal controls are established to improve accountability in Seattle Public Schools, and we will hold ourselves accountable to the public as the work progresses."
I'm going to post something on this in the next few days.
I recall a BOE discussion where Ed argued that there are things that should be left to the Administration (inferring limits on the BOE's oversight and ability to ask questions). I am writing to obtain your thoughts on this, particularly in light of:
a) ongoing budget and accounting issues (how many years has this been discussed?), and
b) the lack of substantive program review to date (is 6 years really appropriate, given reading and math requirements of many Madison students?).
I'd like to post your responses, particularly in light of the proposed Administrative re-org and how that may or may not address these and other matters.
I received the following from Lucy Mathiak:
A GENERAL NOTE: There is a cottage industry ginning up books and articles on board "best practices." The current wisdom, mostly generated by retired superintendents, is that boards should not trouble themselves with little things like financial management, human resources, or operations. Rather, they should focus on "student achievement." But what that means, and the assumption that financial, HR, and other decisions have NO impact on achievement, remain highly problematical.
At the end of the day, much of the "best practices" looks a lot like the role proposed for the Milwaukee School Board when the state proposed mayoral control last year. Under that scenario, the board would focus on public relations and, a distant second, expulsions. But that would be a violation of state statute on the roles and responsibilities of boards of education.
I tend to take my guidance from board policy, which refers back to state statute without providing details; I am a detail person so went back to the full text. When we are sworn into office, we swear to uphold these policies and statutes:
Board policy:
"The BOARD shall have the possession, care, control, and management of the property and affairs of the school district with the responsibilities and duties as detailed in Wisconsin Statutes 118.001, 120.12, 120.13, 120.14, 120.15, 120.16, 120.17, 120.18, 120.21, 120.40, 120.41, 120.42, 120.43, and 120.44."
Because board policy does not elaborate what is IN those statutes, the details can be lost unless one takes a look at "the rules." Here are some of the more interesting (to me) sections from WI Statute 120:
120.12 School board duties.
The school board of a common or union high school district shall:
(1)MANAGEMENT OF SCHOOL DISTRICT.
Subject to the authority vested in the annual meeting and to the authority and possession specifically given to other school district officers, have thepossession, care, control and management of the property andaffairs of the school district, except for property of the school dis-trict used for public library purposes under s. 43.52.
(2)GENERAL SUPERVISION. Visit and examine the schools ofthe school district, advise the school teachers and administrative staff regarding the instruction, government and progress of the pupils and exercise general supervision over such schools.
(3)TAX FOR OPERATION AND MAINTENANCE.
(a) On or before November 1, determine the amount necessary to be raised to operate and maintain the schools of the school district and public library facilities operated by the school district under s. 43.52, if the annual meeting has not voted a tax sufficient for such purposes for the school year.
(5)REPAIR OF SCHOOL BUILDINGS.
Keep the school buildings and grounds in good repair, suitably equipped and in safe and sanitary condition at all times. The school board shall establish an annual building maintenance schedule.
(14)COURSE OF STUDY.
Determine the school course of study.
(17)UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SYSTEM TUITION.
Pay the tuition of any pupil enrolled in the school district and attending an institution within the University of Wisconsin System if the pupil is not participating in the program under s. 118.55, the course the pupil is attending at the university is not offered in the school district and the pupil will receive high school credit for the course.
Ed Hughes:
Thanks for contacting us. Can you be a bit more specific about what you are looking for? A general statement about the appropriate line between administration and Board responsibilities? Something more specific about budgeting and accounting, or specific program reviews? And if so, what? I confess that I haven't followed whatever is going on with the Seatte school board.
My followup:
I am looking for your views on BOE responsibilities vis a vis the Administration, staff and the community.
Two timely specifics, certainly are:
a) ongoing budget problems, such as the maintenance referendum spending, and
b) curricular matters such as reading programs, which, despite decades of annual multi-million dollar expenditures have failed to "move the needle".
The Seattle District's "problems managing its money" matter apparently prompted more Board involvement.
Finally, I do recall a BOE discussion where you argued in favor of limits on Administrative oversight. Does my memory serve?
Best wishes,
Jim
Marj Passman:
Here is the answer to your question on Evaluation which also touches on the Board's ultimate role as the final arbiter on District Policy.
Part of the Strategic Plan, and, one of the Superintendants goals that he gave the Board last year, was the need to develop a "District Evaluation Protocol". The Board actually initiated this by asking for a Study of our Reading Program last February. This protocol was sent to the Board this week and seems to be a timely and much needed document.
Each curricular area would rotate through a seven year cycle of examination. In addition, the Board of Education would review annually a list of proposed evaluations. There will be routine reports and updates to the Board while the process continues and, of course, a final report. At any time the Board can make suggestions as to what should be evaluated and can make changes in the process as they see fit. In other words, the Board will certainly be working within its powers as Overseer of MMSD.
This Protocol should be on the MMSD web site and I recommend reading it in
depth.
I am particularly pleased with the inclusion of "perception" - interviews, surveys with parents and teachers. I have been leery of just masses of data analysis predetermining the success or failure of children. Our children must not be reduced to dots on a chart. Tests must be given but many of our students are succeeding in spite of their test scores.
I have a problem with a 7 year cycle and would prefer a shorter one. We need to know sooner rather than later if a program is working or failing. I will bring this up at Monday's Board meeting.
I will be voting for this Protocol but will spend more time this weekend studying it before my final vote.
Bill Gates sure is a popular guy. He is appearing this afternoon at the national conference of the American Federation of Teachers in Seattle, after having recently been the keynote speaker at the annual National Charter School convention.
Just this week, Warren Buffett announced he was giving an additional $1.6 billion to the Gates Foundation, which already had a $35 billion endowment; by far the largest in the nation.
In the past eight years, the foundation has spent nearly $4 billion promoting his personal education agenda; at first providing subsidies to districts that would agree to close down large neighborhood high schools and start small schools in their place; and now encouraging the rapid and widespread proliferation of charter schools. Gates also is aggressively promoting efforts to create programs that link teacher evaluation and compensation to standardized test scores.
By four years from now, either the teachers unions or the pack of education policies that are hot these days is going to be a lot less relevant. The American education world doesn't seem big enough for both of them.
Frankly, I don't know if I'm right about that, but it is certainly an interesting prediction to consider, given what is happening nationally and locally.
It would seem smart to bet on the teachers unions - they're still pretty strong, they're politically powerful, and their bargaining rights are established by law. Education fads come and go, but unions stay on.
But there are some reasons to bet the other way.
The overall economic troubles of the nation, the rapidly escalating financial problems facing school systems, and the popularity of ideas union leaders generally hate, such as factoring student performance into teachers' pay, are putting unions on the defensive in ways similar to what has happened in other sectors of the economy.
Whatever the future, the collision between teachers unions and the forces of change is pretty amazing. For one thing, it pits Democrats against Democrats in a battle that may have major repercussions on the 2012 presidential race.
The recommendation by the Santa Clara County civil grand jury to consolidate school districts is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking long overdue in this county. The report suggests that aligning K-8 districts with high school districts would improve education and produce savings in the neighborhood of 7 percent, or $51 million annually. That's a lot of teachers and specialists at a time when cutbacks are threatening irreparable harm to our students.
The recommendations are a good start for schools, but the same thing needs to be done in other service areas in the Bay Area. For example, Santa Clara County has 11 local police departments plus the Sheriff's Office, and seven fire departments plus the Santa Clara County Fire Department. Why, in a mostly urban, compact environment, must we endure such duplication? The answer is we shouldn't.
Reasons offered for school consolidation are equally valid for police and fire departments. To quote the grand jury report, "The current organization [of school districts] is an outgrowth of the county's origins. Until the 1960s, the county was largely a collection of agricultural communities separated by miles of open space. "... The communities have become small cities, San Jose has become a large city, and the open land has disappeared.
The head of Atlanta Public Schools promised an impartial inquiry into reports of cheating on state achievement tests. Recusing herself, Superintendent Beverly Hall declared the investigation would be conducted by "a respected outside organization."
Five months later, the investigation remains incomplete, and questions have emerged that challenge its independence.
The "blue-ribbon" commission appointed to oversee the investigation is populated with business executives and others who have done business with the school district or who have other civic or social ties to the district or to Hall.
One of the firms chosen to run the inquiry also is a school district vendor, having collected $1.7 million for other work performed as recently as 2008.
What They're Doing After Harvard: Teach for America now attracts 12% of all Ivy League seniors. The program's founder explains why it beats working on Wall Street.
In the spring of 1989 Wendy Kopp was a senior at Princeton University who had her sights set on being a New York City school teacher. But without a graduate degree in education or a traditional teacher certification, it was nearly impossible to break into the system. So she applied for a job at Morgan Stanley instead.
Thinking back to the bureaucratic hurdles of getting a job in a public school, Ms. Kopp tells me it "seemed more intimidating than starting Teach for America." Which is exactly what she did as soon as she graduated.
What began as a senior thesis paper has since grown into a $180 million organization that this fall will send 4,500 of the best college graduates in the country to 100 of the lowest-performing urban and rural school districts. A few months ago, Teach for America (TFA) received an applicant pool that Morgan Stanley recruiters would drool over. Their 46,000 applicants included 12% of all Ivy League seniors, 7% of the graduating class of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and 6% from U.C. Berkeley. A quarter of all black seniors at Ivy League schools and a fifth of Latinos applied to be teachers in the 2010 corps. It is, I'm told by some recent grads, one of the coolest things you can do after college.
Evaluation of the Madison School District Superintendent
Madison School Board. The Board of Education will evaluate Superintendent Dan Nerad Monday evening, during a closed session according to the online agenda.
Dan was hired in 2008, after a long tenure as Superintendent of the Green Bay public schools.
We come not to praise or bury LeBron James, but only to note that by moving to Miami he's going to save a bundle on taxes. We'll take the King of ESPN's word that he's jumping to the Miami Heat from the Cleveland Cavaliers mainly for basketball reasons, but it is also true that Florida has no income tax. The rate in Akron, Ohio is a little over 7%
Mr. James figures to earn close to $100 million in salary over five seasons in Miami. According to an analysis by Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University, Mr. James's net present value tax savings on his salary are between $6 million and $8 million by living in Miami versus his home town of Akron. Professional athletes do have to pay other state taxes for the dates they play in visiting team arenas, but most of Mr. James's considerable endorsement income would be taxed at Florida rates.
The tax comparisons looked even worse for two other teams in the LeBron bidding, the New York Knicks and New Jersey Nets. The New York Post estimated that New York City and state taxes of 12.85% on high income earners would have taken more than $12 million from Mr. James. New Jersey's rate is nearly 9%. Both of those teams are lousy, but it can't help their free-agent sales pitch to start out $9 billion to $12 billion in the after-tax hole.
The annual report - which includes revisions to the formula used to categorize spending - shows that statewide schools spent 57.8 percent of their funding on student instructional expenditures in the 2008-09 school year.
This is also known as the percentage of dollars going to the classroom.
"I encourage school board members, administrators, teachers and citizens across the state to closely examine the way dollars are currently allocated and evaluate whether their budgets truly put students first," Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett said. "I will only be satisfied once we have driven every possible dollar toward increasing student achievement and success."
The state's yawning budget hole has swelled to $2.5 billion, underscoring the massive challenge that awaits the next governor and Legislature, a new report shows.
The projections by the Legislature's non-partisan budget office show the expected shortfall for the 2011-2013 budget has grown by $462 million from the just over $2 billion that was expected a year ago.
The Madison School District released a memorandum on expected redistributed state tax dollars last week 119K PDF. Superintendent Dan Nerad:
As you can see over the past five years, equalization aid for MMSD has been slightly erratic, increasing for two years and then decreasing drastically over the past 2 years as the State of Wisconsin removed $147 million of funding from the equalization aid formula.
The 2009-10 school year was the first time over the last 10 years that MMSD saw a maximum decrease in funding from the State of Wisconsin, which statutorily is set at 15%, For MMSD this was a decrease in the State's connnitment to public education in Madison of over $9.2 million when compared with funds received in 2008-09.
When planning for the 20I0-11 school year budget, Administration openly planned for another reduction in equalization aid funding of 15% or approximately $7.8 million. The early aid estimate that was released on July I, 2010 shows MMSD in a better situation than was first projected through the budget process for one reason. The breakdown ofequalization aid for MMSD in 2010-11 as projected by the DPI is as follows:
American colleges are spending a declining share of their budgets on instruction and more on administration and recreational facilities for students, according to a study of college costs released Friday.
The report, based on government data, documents a growing stratification of wealth across America's system of higher education.
At the top of the pyramid are private colleges and universities, which educate a small portion of the nation's students, while public universities and community colleges, where tuitions are rising most rapidly, serve greater numbers and have fewer resources.
The study of revenues and spending trends of American institutions of higher education from 1998 through 2008 traces how the patterns at elite private institutions like Harvard and Amherst differed from sprawling public universities like Ohio State and community colleges like Alabama Southern.
a. developing a theory of action to guide how central office leaders and principals work together to improve instructional leadership and to provide support to schools.
b. designing and implementing school cluster support teams with a focus on developing a common understanding of quality instruction and in developing stronger relationships between central office leaders and principals that are focused on growing principal instructional leadership.
This project began when the Board of Education approved the contract with Durrant Engineering in April of2009. Durrant was hired to provide a full condition assessment of all school district buildings to identify long and short-term repair needs.
The vision of this project was to deliver to the school district a living database that would aid in the budgeting and planning process into the future.
The study focused primarily on all engineering systems and equipment, but also included an in-depth study of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) issues our school district faces. The study didn't include roofing projects, as that work has already been completed and is continually updated on an annual basis. For the assessment, trained professional engineers visited every site within the school district, evaluating systems and conditions, while also taking actual photographs to integrate into the report. This work transitioned into a grading system that has become part of the database delivered to the school district for future planning.
All of the information gathered and organized into the database format provides a lot of functionality for the school district moving forward.
Each item has actual digital photos attached for reference, cost ranges are summarized for each item, and the ability to sort the information in various ways are examples o f the functionality of the database.
Four individuals from Durrant Engineering will be present to provide a more in-depth review of the work that was completed. This presentation will also include a demonstration ofthe database that was created to show the functionality provided to the district with this tool.
D. Describe the action requested of the BOE - Administration is looking for the Board of Education to accept the maintenance project study with the database which is the planning tool to be used for future maintenance projects.
......
Next Steps - It is the intent of Administration to work toward creating a multi-year project plan, along with projected funds necessary to implement this plan each year. This work will begin upon approval by the Board ofthe information and data within the database, and will become important work of the new Director for the division of Building Services. Our goal is to return to the Board in May/June 2011 to present this multi-year plan with projected sources of funding.
Attached is the report summarizing progress after the first year from the community organizations receiving funding from the Madison Metropolitan School District. Also attached are the full end-of-year status reports from each organization, except the Urban League; their report will be provided in August. MMSD funding is now ended for . / African-American Ethnic Academy, Inc. . / Kajsiab House ./ Urban League of Greater Madison: Project Bootstrap 21st Century Careers Program
Funding, at this point, will continue for one more year for the other nine community organizations.
"Fund 80" taxes (and spending) may increase beyond State of Wisconsin school district limits. Fund 80 spending growth has long been a source of controversy.
The Star-Ledger reports that 2,900 NJ high school seniors failed the Alternative High School Assessment, the replacement for the long-discredited Special Review Assessment, which almost no one failed. The AHSA, which replaced the SRA just this year, is administered to students who failed the traditional assessment (the HSPA) three times.
The reason for the change in passage rate - 96% for the SRA and now about 36% for the AHSA (8,000 kids took it) is due to the change in scoring. The SRA was scored by the teachers within the child's district who administered the test. The AHSA is scored by Measurement, Inc., an outside vendor.
Efforts by one of Metro Detroit's largest suburban school districts to recruit more minority teachers and administrators have renewed debate over the use of race in hiring decisions.
A recent directive in the Plymouth-Canton Community Schools urges administrators to scan resumes for "cues" that applicants are from a minority racial group. Tip-offs can include job-seekers' residence, college attendance, fraternity or church membership and employment history.
Nearly a quarter of Plymouth-Canton's nearly 19,000 students are minorities, compared with less than 3 percent of its educational staff. District officials say they want to close that gap while hiring the most-qualified candidates.
Before hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005, New Orleans had one of the worst performing public school districts in the nation. Katrina forced nearly a million people to leave their homes and caused almost $100 billion in damages. To an already failing public school system, the storm seemed to provide the final deathblow. But then something amazing happened. In the wake of Katrina, education reformers decided to seize the opportunity and start fresh with a system based on choice.
Most Americans would not pay higher taxes for specific public services in their states, but they are more supportive of paying for education and staffing law enforcement than supporting state employees and entitlement programs.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Adults shows that only 19% would be willing to pay higher taxes to avoid layoffs of state employees. Sixty-nine percent (69%) say they would not be willing to pay more in taxes for this reason. Another 11% are undecided.
Adults feel similarly when it comes to funding entitlement programs. Twenty-two percent (22%) would pay higher taxes to prevent cuts in entitlement programs for low-income Americans. Sixty-three percent (63%) say they would not pay more to keep these programs afloat. Another 15% are undecided.
This is because it would begin the undoing of a policy disaster dating back to 1999. That was when the Democratic legislature and the then governor, Gray Davis, a Democrat elected with union support, thanked the unions by giving state workers pension increases of between 20% and 50%. Many highway-patrol officers, for example, were allowed to retire at 50 with 90% of their final salary. All told, California now has probably the most generous public-sector benefits in the country.
That, however, is not what outrages Mr Schwarzenegger, a Republican, or his brainy economic adviser David Crane, a Democrat. Rather, it is that the pension plans--above all the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), the largest such scheme in America--pretended that this generosity would not cost anything. In 1999 the dotcom bubble was still inflating, and the plans' actuaries predicted that their retirement funds would gain enough value to pay the increased pensions. By implication, they assumed that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would reach 25,000 in 2009 and 28m in 2099. It is currently at around 10,300.
The governor will be expected to reverse the financial tsunami that forced local school districts to lay off teachers, shorten the school year and eliminate academic programs. He or she will play a major role in updating the popular HOPE scholarship, as falling revenues jeopardize its future. The governor will also help decide hot-button issues, such as whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to attend the state's public colleges.
While education leaders -- such as the state superintendent, State Board of Education and State Board of Regents -- set policies and make decisions that affect the state's public schools and colleges, the governor wields enormous power and influence over the quality of education in Georgia.
The gubernatorial candidates agreed education was either the No. 1 issue or just behind jobs and economic development.
As state and local budgets collapse around the country, the axe is coming down on teachers. One, two, three hundred thousands layoffs in schools from coast to coast.
The axe is falling first on younger teachers who would be - should be - the next generation of American educators. And of course, fewer teachers means bigger classes alongside less of much else: band, sports, languages, labs ... you name it.
Since the small schools movement in the '90s, the Bay Area has been something of a petri dish for alternative academics in K-12 education. Oakland, for example, boasts 34 charter schools of various themes and sizes (as well as graduation rates), the first of which was founded in 1993. But until now, Berkeley hasn't joined the experiment.
Now, to the outcry of some community members and the cheers of others, Berkeley will open its first charter schools, after a proposal for the schools was approved by the Board of Education last month. With a starting budget of just over $3 million, the Revolutionary Education and Learning Movement middle and high schools will open in the fall of 2011. REALM seeks to integrate alternative ways of learning into its curricula, including computer programming, game design and other technology-based projects.
Something's not right about this school funding reform stuff. State Superintendent Tony Evers last month introduced "Fair Funding for Our Future," which is supposed to "make it fairer for districts [and] provide them with more financial stability"
... so that every Wisconsin child can graduate ready to succeed in further education and the workplace....Fair, sustainable, and transparent funding also requires education leaders at all levels to commit to investing taxpayer dollars in programs that show results.
Evers - and many others - seem to be honing in on the bucks when it's much more critically important to hone in on that "showing results" part.
Heritage does great work on countering the "Education Spending Fallacy," i.e., that more money means better performance. The latest piece countered Paul Krugman's plea to throw more money at the system.
Today's Star-Ledger looks at the increasing cost of educating children with special needs in out-of-district placements, and districts' efforts to create in-district classrooms. Fact from the article: Bedminster's Somerset Hills Learning Institute for autistic children costs more than $116,000 per student this year.
Here's another fact (not from the article): New Jersey classifies children as eligible for special education services at a higher rate than any other state in the country. In fact 18%, almost 1 in 5, of our children are diagnosed with either learning disabilities or other handicaps. To round out the picture, we classify minority children at a much higher rate than white kids. From a 2007 report from the Harvard School of Education:
It was final exam day in Anthony Skokna's classroom, and his students scanned textbooks and old exams for inspiration as they scribbled answers.
Such assistance was standard practice in Skokna's economics class, but on this June day it was not enough. Halfway through the period, one student asked the teacher outright for the answer to a true/false question. Skokna complied, and a flood of questions and answers ensued like some twisted game show.
"Skok, you might get your job back," yelled one excited student. "It look like we're learning."
Announcing the move, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, described the Building Schools for the Future programme as bureaucratic and wasteful, saying that in some cases schools had taken longer to build than an airport in Hong Kong.
He accused the last Labour government of failing to fund the £55 billion scheme, which was due to see new classrooms and other buildings constructed at more than 700 schools.
The announcement came as Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, announced a further £1.5 billion in cuts, including £1 billion from the Department of Education.
Labour had been relying on "unrealistic" end of year underspending to fund projects including the school building programme, creating a "black hole" which Mr Gove said the new Coalition Government would not allow to continue.
The last time documentary film director Davis Guggenheim was in the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton, he was asking Al Gore to be in his new movie about global warming.
"An Inconvenient Truth" won Guggenheim an Academy Award and put Gore on the fast track for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Guggenheim, 46, now had the Hollywood clout to pursue any project he wanted. He chose to take on the country's public school system.
Back at the Ritz-Carlton, the director was just starting the promotional tour of his new film, "Waiting for Superman," a documentary that follows five families who reject the assigned path into an inferior public school and embark on a quest to gain admission into quality public schools - all public charter schools, including Summit Preparatory Charter High School in Redwood City.
Guggenheim, who sends his own children to private school, takes on the teachers unions, bureaucracy and a status quo that denies children the opportunity a public education is supposed to give them.
One way rural school districts in Minnesota try to save money is by sharing superintendents, usually with one person becoming the leader of two districts.
But a man in southern Minnesota is getting ready to become the superintendent of three districts, and officials say he probably won't be the last to take on so many districts.
Jerry Reshetar has been the superintendent of the Lyle School District since 1999. The town sits right on the Minnesota-Iowa border and its school has about 230 or so students. The district had already been working on sharing resources with two nearby districts, Glenville-Emmons and Grand Meadow.
"We don't have charter schools. So let's put that over there, and let's talk about something else. How about kids being successful, how about kids being challenged? How about providing interventions to close the achievement gap?"
Okay. Let's talk about those things.
How about kids being successful and challenged? Under Dr. Goodloe-Johnson's administration, what changes have we seen? On the good side we have seen more AP classes in the high schools that didn't have many before. We have certainly seen more students taking AP classes. That's in the high schools. What have we seen in K-8? More schools have been designated as ALOs, but there is no quality assurance so we don't know if there is anything there beyond the official designation. That's particularly true with Spectrum programs.
It's not unusual for government agencies with budget problems to start outsourcing services to private industry.
Computer maintenance, prison management, landscaping -- all are among the services that state or local bureaucrats have handed off to private firms over the years.
What about college education? It turns out that California is trying to outsource our public higher education system to the for-profit college industry. What is surprising is that this is happening without any evidence that the affected students would be well served.
The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida.
No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could disguise a student's speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice outside.
The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen -- using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later -- is easy to spot.
Scratch paper is allowed -- but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later.
When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student's real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence.
However, a new study of what parents from the nation's sixth largest metropolitan area want for their children's education tilts favorably to a growing national preference for private and charter schools.
"This trend has developed in the face of evidence that many charters perform no better than district schools and of a constant drumbeat of news reports and investigations regarding alleged and proven improprieties in the way charters operate," the report's authors say.
So why are an estimated 420 million students on waiting lists for charter schools?
Frustration with the struggling direction and results of traditional public schools is a leading cause.
A comprehensive new study from The Pew Charitable Trusts' Philadelphia Research Initiative finds that K-12 education in Philadelphia is undergoing a sweeping transformation that has given parents a new array of choices about where to send their children to school but has left families thinking they still do not have enough quality options.
The study, "Philadelphia's Changing Schools and What Parents Want from Them," finds that the three largest educational systems in the city--traditional public schools, charter schools and Catholic schools--have changed dramatically in size and composition during the past decade. Only one of them, the charter schools, has been growing. Indeed, charters, which have been in existence for only 13 years, now have more students than the Catholic school system.
Germany's left has its own tales of abuse. One of the goals of the German 1968 movement was the sexual liberation of children. For some, this meant overcoming all sexual inhibitions, creating a climate in which even pedophilia was considered progressive.
In the spring of 1970, Ursula Besser found an unfamiliar briefcase in front of her apartment door. It wasn't that unusual, in those days, for people to leave things at her door or drop smaller items into her letter slot. She was, after all, a member of the Berlin state parliament for the conservative Christian Democrats. Sometimes Besser called the police to examine a suspicious package; she was careful to always apologize to the neighbors for the commotion.
The students had proclaimed a revolution, and Besser, the widow of an officer, belonged to those forces in the city that were sharply opposed to the radical changes of the day. Three years earlier, when she was a newly elected member of the Berlin state parliament, the CDU had appointed Besser, a Ph.D. in philology, to the education committee. She quickly acquired a reputation for being both direct and combative.
The briefcase contained a stack of paper -- the typewritten daily reports on educational work at an after-school center in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood, where up to 15 children aged 8 to 14 were taken care of during the afternoon. The first report was dated Aug. 13, 1969, and the last one was written on Jan. 14, 1970.
At South Philadelphia High School on Dec. 3, when the school dissolved in racial violence, the community-relations liaison not once, but twice, put herself in harm's way protecting Asian American students from being pummeled by rampaging mobs.
Seven students were hospitalized, though not one of the charges Sutton-Lawson so vigorously defended.
Citizens sent her thank-you cards. Elected officials offered commendations. Business leaders presented gift certificates.
The Philadelphia School District, she says, did virtually nothing.
Two weeks ago, Sutton-Lawson received the ultimate indignity. She was laid off.
"I was totally shocked. I felt like I was trying to make a difference in that school," says Sutton-Lawson, 58, who worked with students who were pregnant and new mothers. "I got nervous. I got sick inside. I got scared about losing my health insurance."
Earlier this week I hopped on the Red Line in the middle of the afternoon to attend a screening of the education reform documentary Waiting for Superman at the Gallery Place movie theater downtown. It's a resonant, skillfully made film, a pitch-perfect representation of education reform in 2010. And arguably the most striking aspect was the near-total absence of No Child Left Behind, which is mentioned only in passing as one more failed federal plan.
This reinforced an idea that's been nagging me for a while now: Some time in the last two or three years, we moved into the post-NCLB era of education reform.
It didn't used to be that way. When I began working on education policy full-time in the early 2000's, the center of gravity in education reform sat with the coalition of civil rights advocates, business leaders, and reform-minded governors of both parties who pushed NCLB through Congress in 2001. To find that same hum of ideas and influence today, you'd head straight for the annual New Schools Venture Fund Summit and its confluence of charter school operators, TFA alumni, urban reformers, philanthropies, and various related "edupreneurs." It's a different world with a different mindset, and this has real implications for public schools.
Forget about students spending one year in each grade, with the entire class learning the same skills at the same time. Districts from Alaska to Maine are taking a different route.
Instead of simply moving kids from one grade to the next as they get older, schools are grouping students by ability. Once they master a subject, they move up a level. This practice has been around for decades, but was generally used on a smaller scale, in individual grades, subjects or schools.
Now, in the latest effort to transform the bedraggled Kansas City, Mo. schools, the district is about to become what reform experts say is the largest one to try the approach. Starting this fall officials will begin switching 17,000 students to the new system to turnaround trailing schools and increase abysmal tests scores.
I hope the White House is paying attention to the latest annual Congressional Budget Office Long-Term Budget Outlook, which offers a truly frightening picture of the scale of America's national debt, with huge implications for the country's future prosperity. According to the non-partisan CBO, "the federal government has been recording the largest budget deficits, as a share of the economy, since the end of World War II":
As a result of those deficits, the amount of federal debt held by the public has surged. At the end of 2008, that debt equaled 40 percent of the nation's annual economic output (as measured by gross domestic product, or GDP), a little above the 40 year average of 36 percent. Since then, large budget deficits have caused debt held by the public to shoot upward; the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that federal debt will reach 62 percent of GDP by the end of this year--the highest percentage since shortly after World War II.
Just three days after returning to Beijing from New York, I had to leave again, this time to a series of conferences in Torino, Italy, so it is hard to do much writing for my blog, especially since I won't spend my free time in the hotel when there is so damned much food out here that urgently needs sampling. Still, I did want to write a hurried note about a topic of conversation that came up a lot while I was in the US and even more here in Italy.
For the next several years, as Keynes reminded us in the 1930s, savings is not going to be a virtue for the world economy. It is more likely to be a vice. In order to regain growth the world desperately needs less savings and more private consumption, but I think it is not going to get nearly enough to generate growth. Why? Because in all the major economies the banking systems are largely insolvent, or about to become so, and desperately need to rebuild capital. For reasons I discuss below, this will have a large adverse impact on private consumption.
Let's go through the major banking systems. First, the crisis started in the US and, perhaps as a consequence, US banks have already identified a lot of their problem loans and have been the most diligent about rebuilding their capital bases. They nonetheless still have a long ways to go, even though a large part of the bad loan problem was directly or indirectly transferred to the US government. By the way, transferring bad loans to the government may be good for the banks but will have the same adverse impact on consumption. I try to explain why below.
Here's a good quick read: Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America (Teachers College, 2009), Allan Collins & Richard Halverson. Doug's post on three evolutions reminded me of chapter 6 of Rethinking: The Three Eras of Education. With some additions here's a summary of the current industrial-era education, what was before, and what's next.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Wisconsin State and Local Debt Rose Faster Than Federal Debt During 1990-2009 Average Annual Increase in State Debt, 7.8%; Local Debt, 7.3%
State and local debt in Wisconsin grew faster than federal debt over the last 19 years. State debt rose 316%, an average of 7.8% per year, from $2.71 billion in 1990 to $11.25 billion in 2009. Local general obligation debt was up 284%, a 7.3% average, from $3.41 billion in 1989 to $13.1 billion in 2008. Federal debt held by the public averaged annual increases of 6.2% per year for a total increase of 212.8% from 1990 through 2009. The figures come from a new study from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX), a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization dedicated to citizen education.
Governments borrow for many reasons, including buildings, roads, sewers, and environmental cleanup. However, WISTAX researchers found that about 40% of the state increase was due to $1.6 billion of tobacco bonds issued in fiscal 2002 that were funded by a stream of payments from tobacco companies, as well as $1.8 billion in appropriation bonds issued in fiscal 2004 to pay unfunded state pension and sick-leave liabilities. The tobacco bonds were issued to help balance the 2001-03 state budget. The bonds were refinanced in fiscal 2009, generating an additional $300 million that was used to balance the 2008-09 general fund. Originally expected to be paid off in 2018, the refinanced bonds will not be paid off until 2029.
t is time to end the childhood obesity epidemic once and for all.
Obesity decreases a child's quality of life and longevity. It contributes to a host of medical conditions and costs our country millions each year. Childhood obesity is preventable and our country should take responsibility for helping all children achieve a healthy weight.
My proposal will guarantee that no child will be obese by the time they graduate from high school. This will be accomplished by simply holding schools as well as health and physical education teachers accountable for insuring that all students reach or maintain a healthy weight before graduating high school.
Before I begin, let's address all the naysayers whose excuses will be endless.
Dane County African American Community Forum on Thursday, July 8
via a Kaleem Caire email:
Greetings.
We want to remind you that the Urban League of Greater Madison is hosting a forum with members of Dane County's African American community on Thursday, July 8, 2010 from 5:30pm - 7:30pm CST at our new headquarters (2222 South Park Street, Madison 53713) to discuss ways the Urban League can support the education and employment needs and aspirations of African American children, youth, and adults in greater Madison. We would like to hear the African American community's opinions and ideas about strategies the Urban League can pursue to dramatically:
· Increase the academic achievement, high school graduation, and college goings rates of African American children and youth;
· decrease poverty rates and increase the number of African American adults who are employed and moving into the middle class; and
· increase the number of African Americans who are serving and employed in leadership roles in Dane County's public and private sector.
If you have not already RSVP'd, please contact Ms. Isheena Murphy of the Urban League at 608-729-1200 or via email at imurphy@ulgm.org. We will serve light refreshments and begin promptly at 5:30pm CST.
We look forward to listening, learning, and helping to manifest opportunity for all in Dane County.
________________________________________ Kaleem Caire
President & CEO
Urban League of Greater Madison
2222 South Park Street, Suite 200
Madison, WI 53713
Main: 608-729-1200
Assistant: 608-729-1249
Fax: 608-729-1205
Email: kcaire@ulgm.org
Internet: www.ulgm.org
Facebook:
For decades, parents have shelled out a real estate premium to take advantage of Alameda public schools, spending more money for rent or a mortgage for the peace of mind that comes with solid standardized test scores and a seat at the school down the block.
That's what Heather Genschmer did.
She wanted her son Myles, 3, to have the public school experience she had as a child, one filled with art, music, gifted programs, field trips, sports and high-quality academics.
Alameda's enrollment was 9,612 in 2009/2010. Spending was 92,010,693 in 2009/2010 = $9,572 per student. Locally, Madison spent $15,241 per student, based on the 2009/2010 Citizen's budget ($370,287,471 expenditures for 24,295 students), 37% more than Alameda.
This is despite ex-chief inspector of UK schools, Chris Woodhead, estimating some 15,000 are not up to the job.
Some bad teachers are moved between schools, rather than having their competency challenged, it has emerged.
Teaching unions dispute the claims. The General Teaching Council for England, which investigates complaints, says the number of poor teachers is "not clear".
However, the GTC admits the suggestion that the 18 struck off represented the total number of incompetent teachers in the system is not credible.
Two years ago, its chief executive Keith Bartley said there could be as many as 17,000 "substandard" teachers among the 500,000 registered teachers in the UK.
According to a front-page story in the local daily, the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) could lay off as many as 482 teachers, mostly young staff, "while other large districts are predicting far fewer cuts." Rhetorical explanations for why this is happening abound. But published statistics point to concrete reasons for the pending actions.
Rhetorical reasons
Key political players in the controversy offered quick explanations for the layoffs. The MPS school board president cited union reluctance to switch to lower-cost health insurance. Union leaders blamed inadequate state and federal funding. And young teachers complained they were laid off "because of experience, and not performance." Most union contracts have seniority provisions requiring that the last teacher hired--often a young teacher--is the first fired.
NBI 6 - "NEA shall seek a cease and desist agreement from AFT instructing its local Affiliates in Alabama to stop their attempted raids each year."
NBI 20 - "NEA requests Arne Duncan and the Department of Education to immediately implement the decade old recommendation that the 'achievement levels' of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) not be published this year.
We education watchers are gradually waking up to the fact that a very small but growing number of educators are using Advanced Placement, originally designed for only the best high schools, as a shock treatment to improve instruction at some of our worst high schools.
This is not, to say the least, a well-understood trend. Some of the smartest AP people in the country do not like it. Others do. I think it has great potential benefits, but it is too soon to draw solid conclusions. So I have appointed myself the unofficial scorekeeper for such schools, and have created a special category for them -- what I call the Catching Up schools -- in my annual Challenge Index ratings. This includes my ranked list of all public high schools in the Washington area, published in The Washington Post, and a separate list of schools nationally that have the highest AP test participation rates, best known as America's Best High Schools in Newsweek.com.
I am giving this such attention because when I have looked at schools using this wild approach, it seems to be working for them. Students and parents like the challenge and don't care if they are unlikely to pass many of the tests. The teachers are energized. The fears of critics that using AP with low-performing students will create false expectations and low self esteem seem unfounded.
There's good news for American education. About three-quarters of residents -- 74% -- know the U.S. declared its independence from Great Britain in 1776. The bad news for the academic system -- 26% do not. This 26% includes one-fifth who are unsure and 6% who thought the U.S. separated from another nation. That begs the question, "From where do the latter think the U.S. achieved its independence?" Among the countries mentioned are France, China, Japan, Mexico, and Spain.
It is agreed, then, that bad eating habits are a government problem. Up to now, you would have been forgiven for thinking that all social ills are to be cured by television presenters. Then this week, the Health Secretary took Jamie Oliver and his well-intentioned - if sadly ineffective - efforts to reform school dinners to task. Take-up of meals is down, argued Andrew Lansley, suggesting that Jamie's formula for school dinner reform is not working. I would suggest Andrew Lansley aims his guns in a different direction.
Oliver has often talked of his frustration and, indeed, has even burst into tears at the refusal of sinners to convert to his way of eating, or stay faithful afterwards. But their diets are not his fault, or his responsibility. He valiantly highlighted an important issue. Millions watched; the previous government made a lot of the right noises, but they never ran with Oliver's campaign.
STG Overview
School Turnaround is a dramatic intervention in a low-performing school that both produces significant achievement gains within two years and prepares the school for long-term transformation into a high-performance organization.
The School Turnaround Group (STG) believes that the problem of chronically failing schools is massive, and therefore cannot be addressed by either incremental change within districts, or by completely abandoning the existing school system. Instead, we advocate a hybrid approach, creating carve-out "Partnership Zones" of low-performing schools that remain within the district but offer more flexible operating conditions.
Kudzu? Who dares compare Wisconsin's education policies to kudzu?
Christopher Brown, a professor in curriculum and instruction at the University of Texas at Austin, that's who.
Kudzu is a plant that originated in Asia. Agriculture officials in the U.S. encouraged its use, starting in the 1930s, as a low cost way to stem soil erosion. But, especially in the South, it spread rapidly and far beyond intended areas. It became regarded as a weed.
Hmm. Launched with good intentions, appealing as an easy option, it grew rapidly and accomplished little. That sums up Brown's analysis of Wisconsin education policy from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. In his observations there lie major lessons for those who want to raise the expectations of students in Wisconsin and see more students meet those expectations.
Someone recently pointed me to Brown's analysis, which started as a doctoral dissertation while he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison a few years ago. Just the title of the version published in 2008 in the academic journal Educational Policy made me laugh - and wince:
For more than 40 years, Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the third-ranking member of the House, has been a fiery and highly effective legislator. Any history of how the country avoided another depression must include Obey, who shepherded the $787 billion Recovery Act through Congress last year with great skill (and no earmarks). He has been an inspiring antiwar liberal dating back to Vietnam and a rare man of conscience in Washington.
But Obey, who is retiring at the end of the year, is in danger of going out as a water carrier for the teachers' unions--the man who gutted President Obama's signature program on education, Race to the Top.
At issue is a $10 billion bill (down from $23 billion) to help states prevent devastating teacher layoffs. (The House approved the bill after this column was written on Thursday.) Without the money, we'll see larger class size, four-day school weeks in more areas, and about 100,000 lost jobs, which in turn will strain services and harm the economy. As if the politics weren't byzantine enough, the anti-layoff money has been attached to a bill funding the war in Afghanistan. This was meant to make it easier to win the support of war supporters, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now has to deal with House liberals who like the money for teachers, but not for the war.
"We are a fiscal poster child for what not to do," said Ralph Martire of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a liberal-leaning policy group in Illinois. "We make California look as if it's run by penurious accountants who sit in rooms trying to put together an honest budget all day."
The state pension system is a money sinkhole and the most immediate threat. The governor and legislature have shortchanged the pensions since the mid-1990s, taking payment "holidays" with alarming regularity.
The state's last elected governor, Rod R. Blagojevich, is on trial for racketeering and extortion. But in 2003, he persuaded the legislature to let him float $10 billion in 30-year bonds and use the proceeds for two years of pension payments.
That gamble backfired and wound up costing the state many billions of dollars. Illinois reports that it has $62.4 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, although many experts place that liability tens of billions of dollars higher.
The preliminary budget for the 2010-11 school year was passed without any discussion by the Somerset Board of Education at its June 21 meeting.
In a discussion with District Administrator Randy Rosburg following the meeting, he said the board has good intentions with its next budget.
The preliminary budget that was passed included a tax levy that would increase from $8.049 million to $8.097 million, an increase of six-tenths of a percent. Rosburg said it is the board's intent to keep working on the budget.
"We should be able to go forward and maintain the same mil rate and same budget," Rosburg said.
There are several variables that have not been set yet that make it impossible for the board and administration to be more firm with their numbers.
The first of those unknowns is enrollment. State funding is based on each school district's enrollment on the third Friday in September.
Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb says he has a balanced budget for next year, but many parents are angry that the district's deficit is growing.
Detroit public school students are enjoying summer vacation. Their thoughts are likely far from the classroom, but when they return in the fall, there will be budget related changes such as school closings, teacher layoffs and larger class sizes -- up to 38 students for grades six through twelve.
"That's based on cuts across the administrative areas, a great deal of sacrifice on the part of our employees, our bargaining units, our teachers," said DPS spokesperson Steve Wasko.
A state appellate court ruled unanimously on Thursday that New York City must keep open 19 schools it wanted to close for poor performance, blocking one of the Bloomberg administration's signature efforts to improve the educational system.
The ruling, by the Appellate Division, First Department, in Manhattan, upheld a lower court finding that the city's Education Department did not comply with the 2009 state law on mayoral control of the city schools because it failed to adequately notify the public about the ramifications of the closings.
Because many eighth graders assumed the schools would be closed and the Education Department discouraged them from attending the schools, few applied. Some of the schools could begin September with just a few dozen freshmen. School officials said they expected enrollment to grow with students who move into the city, but the number will still likely be far smaller than in past years.
In a close vote Thursday night, the Board of Education approved a one-year contract extension for schools Superintendent Joshua Starr.
The agreement increases the remaining two years on Starr's current contract to three, and provides no salary increase in the current year, with pay bumps to $220,000 in 2011-12 and $225,000 in 2012-13, Board of Education President Jackie Heftman said. Starr currently earns a base salary of $215,000.
In addition, the contact calls for the Board of Education to reimburse Starr on a portion of his retirement contributions and eliminates his use of a city vehicle in favor of a $600 monthly transportation stipend. It also allows the board to terminate Starr's employment at any time upon a majority vote.
Starr, who had pushed for the extension, said he was pleased with the outcome. He has said he will move his family from Brooklyn, N.Y. and enroll his two children in Stamford schools if the contract was granted.
The recession is forcing states to raise taxes and cut budgets, including education budgets, which is a wildly stupid national policy both on short-term economic grounds and in terms of investing in future human capital. The responses to this crisis have been maddeningly short-sighted. On the right, and even the center, you have self-styled deficit hawks cheering state-level Hooverism. (The Washington Post editorial page opposes any federal aid to cushion education firings unless states first overhaul their hiring practices, which is of course impossible in that time frame.)
Now on the left you're seeing an equally maddening response. House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey proposes to fund money for saving teachers by cutting back funding for the Obama administration's wildly effective "Race to the Top" program, which provides incentives to states that reform their education policy. Obey's spokesman explains:
"Mr. Obey has said, 'When a ship is sinking, you don't worry about redesigning a room, you worry about keeping it afloat,' " Brachman said. "He is not opposed to education reform. But he believes that keeping teachers on the job is an important step."
The district is inviting bidders to run poorly performing and new campuses with 35,000 students. More than 80 groups submitted letters of intent for new or low-achieving schools for fall 2011.
The nation's second-largest school system is once again inviting bidders to take over poorly performing and new campuses, in a school-control process that is, once again, pitting teachers and their union against independently operated charter schools, most of which are nonunion.
Teachers working for the Los Angeles Unified School District put in bids for every school. And charters are vying for all but one.
At stake is the education of more than 35,000 students who will attend those schools.
Trying to put the finishing touches on a series of education policy victories in the recently concluded legislative session, Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed into law a hotly debated plan to let local schools seek waivers from a range of state rules and regulations.
But as soon as the ink was dry on House Bill 1368, one of the state's major teachers unions delivered on its promise to challenge the act as unconstitutional.
The teachers group wants a Baton Rouge district court to rule that the Legislature cannot abdicate its law-making authority by effectively allowing the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to pick and choose which laws local schools have to follow.
The new program topped Jindal's K-12 education agenda for the session that ended June 21. The governor pitched waivers as a way to give schools more flexibility, much like public charter schools that have proliferated in New Orleans and elsewhere since Hurricane Katrina.
The alphabet soup of college admissions is getting more complicated as the International Baccalaureate, or I.B., grows in popularity as an alternative to the better-known Advanced Placement program.
The College Board's A.P. program, which offers a long menu of single-subject courses, is still by far the most common option for giving students a head start on college work, and a potential edge in admissions.
The lesser-known I.B., a two-year curriculum developed in the 1960s at an international school in Switzerland, first took hold in the United States in private schools. But it is now offered in more than 700 American high schools -- more than 90 percent of them public schools -- and almost 200 more have begun the long certification process.
What happens when you force kids to eat healthy food at school? They find a way to down junk food anyway. That's what the U.K.'s health minister is accusing celebrity chef Jamie Oliver of causing with his attempt to rid cafeterias of unhealthy lunches. (via Wellness)
Oliver is best known in the U.S. for his show Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, in which he attempted to get a West Virginia town to eat more healthfully. He had previously started a program in the U.K. called School Dinners, with a similar goal. Unfortunately, the result may not have worked out as planned. Wellness sums it up:
Calling the Fenty administration's approach to education reform "shortsighted, narrow and sometimes secretive," D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray unveiled a blueprint Thursday to guide education policy if he is elected mayor.
The plan promises more transparency, funding equity for public charter schools, tax credits for early-childhood programs and greater support for the city's neighborhood high schools.
Educators, students and supporters filled the library at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public charter high school in Southeast, where Gray outlined an ambitious plan and tried to further distinguish himself from Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who has made public schools one of his priorities.
Gray, who is challenging Fenty for the Democratic nomination for mayor, said he gives "tremendous credit" to Fenty for calling attention to the need for education reform. But "what we've learned over the past three years is that it's not enough to have mayoral control. What we need, ladies and gentlemen, is mayoral leadership," he said to hearty applause.
President Barack Obama's education-overhaul agenda was dealt its first major setback after the U.S. House of Representatives diverted money from charter schools, teacher merit pay and the Race to the Top competition to help fund a jobs bill that would stave off teacher layoffs.
Even a last-minute veto threat by Mr. Obama late Thursday couldn't prevent the diversion of $800 million, including a $500 million cut from Race to the Top, the president's showcase initiative that rewards states for adopting innovative education redesigns.
Officials with the U.S. Department of Education vowed Friday to keep the president's education agenda intact and find other places to make budget trims.
"We're grateful they passed a jobs bills but not at the expense of the reform efforts we need for our long-term economic interests," said Peter Cunningham, spokesman for the Education Department.
It is difficult to see the governance and spending approaches of the past addressing the curricular, teacher and student challenges of today, much less tomorrow.
Things have changed since Caire was raised by an aunt across the street from Penn Park at a time when adults didn't hesitate to scold neighborhood kids who got out of line, and parents took on second jobs to make ends meet. Today, there is more "hard core" poverty, more crime, and much less sense of place, says Caire, who still can recite which families lived up Fisher Street and down Taft.
The supportive community of his boyhood began disappearing in the 1980s, as young parents moved in from Chicago to escape poverty and could not find the training and jobs they needed, Caire says. People started to lose their way. In a speech this month to the Madison Downtown Rotary, Caire said he has counted 56 black males he knew growing up that ended up incarcerated. "Most of 'em, you would never have seen it coming."
Caire, once a consultant on minority education for the state and advocate for voucher schools, left Madison a decade ago and worked with such national nonprofit organizations as the Black Alliance for Educational Options and Fight for Children. Later he worked for discount retailer Target Corp., where he was a fast-rising executive, he says, until he realized his heart wasn't in capitalism, despite the excellent managerial mentoring he received.
The sense of community that nurtured his youth has disappeared in cities across the country, Caire remarks. So he's not trying to recreate the South Madison of the past, but rather to build connections that will ground people from throughout Madison in the community and inform the Urban League's programs.
Caire recently attended the Madison Premiere of "The Lottery", a film which highlights the battle between bureaucratic school districts, teacher unions and students (and parents).
Charter schools are not the magic bullet that will transform urban minority public schools. As you peel away layers of the charter onion, the inevitable problems come to the surface.
Locke High School in Los Angeles has been touted as a charter school miracle. I wish it were true, but it's not. In 2008, Locke was notorious as one of the worst failing schools in the United States. It had a high crime rate and a low graduate rate, the opposite of what schools should be. At one point a race riot involving 600 students made the national news.
According to The New York Times, two years after a charter school group named Green Dot, which also operates a charter school in the Bronx, took over management of the school, gang violence was down, attendance was improved, and performance on standardized tests was inching up. The school has become one of the number one stops on the charter school reform bandwagon tour, as corporate and government "education reformers," including federal Department of Education bigwigs, get photo-ops in its newly tree lined courtyard and issue pronouncements about how wonderful everything has become.
This animation is for a startling documentary called, "Waiting For 'Superman'" that highlights some very serious issues in America today and it made us feel good to make it.
Wisconsin Democrat Representative Tammy Baldwin votes with David Obey to Reduce Race to the Top Funding and Support Teacher Union Request to Avoid Layoffs
The education measure provoked fierce debate, especially because it would reduce by $500 million the award money available to three dozen states that have submitted proposals in Round 2 of the Obama initiative, the Race to the Top competition.
To become law, the legislation needs Senate approval. The White House said in a statement that if the final bill included cuts to education reforms, Mr. Obama would most likely veto it.
"It would be short-sighted to weaken funding for these reforms," the White House said.
Using stimulus money voted on last year, the Department of Education awarded $500 million to Tennessee and $100 million to Delaware in March, and has promised to distribute the $3.4 billion that remains among additional winning states this year. The House bill would reduce the money available to $2.9 billion.
Teachers' unions lobbied for weeks for federal money to avert what the administration estimates could be hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs.
Several dozen charter school and other advocacy groups lobbied fiercely against cutting Race to the Top, which rewards states promising to overhaul teacher evaluation systems and shake up school systems in other ways.
School committee members across the state will now also have to attend six hours of training each year on how to perform their community responsibilities.
Bill sponsor Sen. Hanna M. Gallo, D-Cranston, said the legislation's genesis came from "a lot of people expressing concern that not all school committee members are aware of all the [educational] issues they should."
Issues, such as how schools are financed, labor relations, teacher-performance evaluations, strategic planning and opening meetings laws that require members do their business in public, will be addressed.
"They need to be educated," said Gallo. "It's a big responsibility being on the school committee. It's our children, our students and our future, and we have to make sure we do the job to the best of our ability."
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
For a time in the mid-2000s, small schools were booming. They were supposed to transform the large, failing American high school, to engage students and boost their achievement to ready them for college.
But the results have been mixed, national and local research shows. Students at small high schools were more likely to graduate, have positive relationships with their teachers, and feel safer. Still, they did no better on standardized tests than did their peers at big schools.
In Philadelphia, where 26 of the 32 small high schools have been opened or made smaller in the last seven years, some schools have thrived. Their presence has transformed the high school mix.
Among the district's current 63 high schools, the 32 small schools enroll roughly a quarter of the 48,000 total enrollment. The rest attend large neighborhood high schools.
On Monday, June 21st, we filed our "Brief of Respondent" in the School District appeal of Judge Spector's decision. (Sorry to be late in posting it to this blog; our attorney left town after sending me hard copy, but neglected to email an electronic version of the document we filed.) A link to the brief can be found in the left-hand column, below, under "Legal Documents in Textbook Appeal."
There's no new information, either in the District's brief or our response. You might notice that, rather than acknowledge the catalog of unrelated miscellany in the Seattle Public School District's brief, our attorney, Keith Scully, chose to essentially restate our original case, upon which Judge Spector ruled favorably. He did emphasize certain statements which pertained to claims in the District's brief.
I think Keith has, once again, done a masterful job.
School Superintendent Carol R. Johnson will tap a charter school management organization to run one of the district's low-achieving middle schools, a first for the state, under a plan she will present tonight to the Boston School Committee.
Johnson has not decided which middle school would be overseen by Unlocking Potential Inc., a new Boston nonprofit management organization founded by a former charter school principal.
A key part of the proposal calls for converting the middle school into an in-district charter school, which would enable the management organization to operate under greater freedom from the teacher union's contract as it overhauls programs, dismisses teachers, and makes other changes.
Detroit's ailing public schools suffered an unexpected setback Thursday when the district announced its budget deficit would balloon in the fiscal year beginning Thursday.
The news comes despite deep cut backs by an emergency financial manager hired by the Michigan governor last year to repair the system's finances.
The district, which serves about 84,000 students--half the population of 10 years ago--is projecting the deficit to rise 66% to $363 million from the fiscal year that ended Wednesday.
The district also has lost per-pupil state funding as its student population dwindles. And the state budget, pressured by Michigan's economic woes, also cut funding by several hundred dollars per pupil in the past year.
Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates said Tuesday that charter schools can revolutionize education, but that the charter school movement also must hold itself accountable for low-performing schools.
"We need breakthroughs," Gates said at the National Charter Schools Conference in Chicago. "And your charters are showing that breakthroughs are possible."
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been a big player in the school reform movement, spending about $200 million a year on grants to elementary and secondary education. Gates said charter schools and their ability to innovate are a key part of the foundation's education strategy.
"I really think that charters have the potential to revolutionize the way students are educated," Gates said.
Charter schools receive taxpayer money but have more freedom than traditional public schools to map out how they'll meet federal education benchmarks.
Charter schools receive a lot of well-deserved attention this time of year when they appear to be performing miracles. But what about the ones that don't?
The Obama administration believes, as did the Bush administration, in taking harsh action against "failing" schools, such as firing staff, closing the school or turning over control to the state or private charters.
Much of the news has been encouraging, especially in schools where graduates outnumber dropouts for a change.
It was exciting to hear that Urban Prep Academies, a charter school on Chicago's South Side, is sending 100 percent of this year's 107 graduates to college. That's particularly impressive for a school where only 4 percent of its original 150 students were reading at or above grade level when it opened four years ago.
One should not under-estimate the impact of the DC school voucher program on student achievement. According to the official announcement and the executive summary of the report, school vouchers lifted high school graduation rates but it could not be conclusively determined that it had a positive impact on student achievement.
Something about those findings sounds like a bell striking thirteen. Not only is the clock wrong, but the mechanism seems out of whack. How can more students graduate from private schools if they weren't learning more? Are expectations so low in the private sector that any one can graduate?
Peering beneath the press release and the executive summary into the bowels of the study itself one can get some, if not all the answers, to these questions.
Let's begin with the most important--and perfectly uncontested--result: If one uses a voucher to go to school, the impact on the percentage of students with a high school diploma increases by 21 percentage points (Table 3-5), an effect size of no less than 0.46 standard deviations. Seventy percent of those who were not offered a school voucher made it through high school. That is close to the national average in high school graduation rates among those entering 9th grade four years earlier. As compared to that 70 percent rate among those who wanted a voucher but didn't get one, 91 percent of those who used vouchers to go to private school eventually received a high school diploma.
After five rounds of meetings, the Branchburg teachers union and the board of education have declared an impasse, saying they could not come to an agreement on a salary freeze and a switch to the state's public health insurance plan.
A state moderator will now preside over negotiations. If an agreement cannot be reached over both, the school board will have to come up with those savings elsewhere because the school board budgeted the salary freeze already, and the Township Committee included the health insurance plan in its recommendations when it decided the school board needs to cut $1.5 million from its budget.
Tensions over these negotiations bubbled over on Thursday, June 24, at the same time that the school board approved new cuts that bring the number of laid-off school employees to approximately 55.
An increasing number of California school districts are edging closer to financial insolvency, state officials reported Tuesday.
One immediate effect has been the layoff of teachers -- probably in the thousands, although neither state officials nor the California Teachers Assn. has final numbers.
Since the beginning of 2010, the number of school systems that may be "unable to meet future financial obligations" has increased by 38%, according to the state Department of Education.
"Schools on this list are now forced to make terrible decisions to cut programs and services that students need or face bankruptcy," said state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell.
Greg Royer ranks among the state's top-paid employees, with a salary of $304,000. But that's just part of his income. For nearly seven years, he's also collected an annual pension of $105,000.
Royer, the vice president for business and finance at Washington State University, tops a long list of college administrative staff members who've been able to boost their incomes by up to 60 percent by exploiting a loophole in state retirement laws.
A Seattle Times investigation has found that at least 40 university or community-college employees retired and were rehired within weeks, often returning to the same job without the position ever being advertised. That has allowed them to double dip by collecting both a salary and a pension.
The pattern of quickie retirements has continued despite the Legislature's efforts to crack down.
Lanyon, Grams, and fellow Hawthorne teachers Julie Olsen and Abby Miller received a grant from the national nonprofit Fund for Teachers that allowed them to travel to Harlem to learn about the art, music, poetry, literary history and drama of this hub of African-American life. They all agree that they now have a new appreciation for the richness of black culture and its profound impact on American life and culture as a whole.
For these four, plus a dozen more local educators whose travel was covered by a couple of additional grants, the experience was part of a wider effort to help them better teach in what's known as a culturally relevant way.
"Culturally relevant practice" is a relatively new movement in education that recognizes that learning, for all of us, is related to our cultural background and what we know from our daily living. Research shows that effectively bridging the gaps between a teacher's background and student's experience can improve academic performance.
Andreal Davis is one of two district administrators in charge of helping to create culturally relevant practices in local classrooms. A former elementary school teacher at Lincoln, Davis, who is black, now helps colleagues recognize that different groups of children bring their different backgrounds, expectations and even communication styles to the classroom.
She says teachers sometimes need help learning to translate different ways their students learn, or what kind of interactions make sense to different groups of children.
"Communication styles for all of us can vary a great deal. It can be like the difference between listening to conventional music, or listening to jazz, where the narrative doesn't just go in a straight line," she explains. "If that flow is what you're used to, it's what you know how to follow in a conversation, or in a class."
Given Hawthorne's demographics -- 70 percent of the students are poor, with a diverse population that includes 18 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Asian, 32 percent black and 28 percent white -- the school has respectable, rising test scores.
People who saw the recent Madison screening of The Lottery saw another part of the Harlem world: the battle between the traditional public school system and charters, specifically the Harlem Success Academy.
The $10,259 average nationally was a 6.1 percent increase over 2006-07, the Census Bureau said. New York's spending went up 7.4 percent over the two years. Public education is the single largest category of all state and local spending.
New York's per-student spending was highest in 2006-07 too at $15,981 per student, compared to an average of $9,666 across the country.
Eighteen states and the District of Columbia spent more than $10,259 and 32 spent less in the 2007-08 school year. States that came close to New York that year included New Jersey ($16,491 per student) and Alaska ($14,630). At the other end of the spectrum were Utah ($5,765), Idaho ($6,931) and Arizona ($7,608).
Charter management organizations (CMOs), nonprofit entities that directly manage public charter schools, are a significant force in today's public K-12 charter school landscape.
CMOs were developed to solve serious problems limiting the numbers and quality of charter schools. The CMO model is meant to meld the benefits of school districts--including economies of scale, collaboration among similar schools, and support structures--with the autonomies and entrepreneurial drive of the charter sector.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the major philanthropies funding charter schools invested heavily in CMOs and similar organizations, spending an estimated total of $500 million between 1999 and 2009. Ultimately, those who invest in CMOs want to achieve a significantly higher number of high-quality schools in the charter school sector. Their investments in CMO growth have been targeted to specific urban school districts that have been considered difficult, if not impossible, to reform.
When the State Education Department announced five years ago that all students would soon be required to pass five tests to earn high school diplomas in New York, officials applauded themselves for raising standards.
The new requirements do not take full effect until the class of 2012 graduates. What is clear is that if they were in place today, New York City's graduation rate would almost certainly drop after years of climbing steadily.
What is not so evident, educators and testing experts say, is whether the higher bar will inspire students and schools to greatness, or merely make them lean more heavily on test-taking strategies. Nor is there agreement on whether it will actually make a difference in how students perform in high school and beyond.
Students in Texas must get the grades they earn and not an inflated score on report cards under a new state law that bans minimum grade policies, a judge decided Monday in a ruling that backed arguments from state education officials.
Eleven school districts sued Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott over his interpretation of the law, which he said should apply to class assignments and report cards. The districts, most of them in the Houston area, said it should only apply to classroom assignments.
Some districts have long had policies that establish minimum grades of 50, 60 or even 70. That means if a student failed and earned a zero, his or her grade would be automatically brought up to the minimum score.
I'm going to turn 60 soon and my job title at Marquette Law School these days is "senior fellow," so I have a disposition to respect seniority. Especially when other things are equal, you should earn some standing by dint of long service.
But do you think Trevor Hoffman should be sent out to pitch the ninth inning for the Brewers just because he has seniority over everyone else on the team? Of course not. Put in the best pitcher.
I may be in a minority, but I regard baseball as a game, as entertainment.
Education is not a game. It's as crucial a matter as any facing Milwaukee.
So why don't schools follow this simple lesson from sports: You stand your best chance of winning when you field your best players?
Milwaukee is well on its way this summer to a vivid lesson in seniority in action. Milwaukee Public Schools administrators have given layoff notices to 482 teachers, as well as 816 other employees.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
This Wednesday from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at Brent Elementary School at 301 North Carolina Ave. SE, the D.C. public schools will hold a chancellor's forum on how to add useful learning to your child's summer. Several groups, such as the D.C. Public Library, the University of the District of Columbia Science and Engineering Center, and even Madame Tussaud's, will have booths about their summer programs.
But the District, like other urban districts, will have a summer school that includes only about a fifth of its students. Many people laugh that off: Who in their right mind wants to go to summer school? Give the poor kids a break.
State and local tax burdens vary greatly from state to state. New Hampshire, for instance, has no income or sales tax -- but its neighbor Vermont has both. Fiscal conservatives say New Hampshire's long history of low taxes has forced the state to keep spending in line. But New Hampshire residents say that tradition of fiscal austerity has exacted a price on the state's schools.
NAEP 4th grade average math scale score: New Hampshire: 251; Wisconsin 244; Vermont 248, Massachusetts 252, Minnesota 249, Iowa 243. Low income: New Hampshire: 237; Wisconsin 229; Vermont 235, Massachusetts 237, Minnesota 234, Iowa 232.
NAEP 4th grade average reading scale score (national average is 220): New Hampshire: 229; Wisconsin 220; Vermont 229, Massachusetts 234, Minnesota 223, Iowa 221. Low income (national average is 206): New Hampshire: 213; Wisconsin 202; Vermont 215, Massachusetts 215, Minnesota 203, Iowa 208.
NAEP 8th grade average reading scale score (national average is 262): New Hampshire: 271; Wisconsin 266; Vermont 272, Massachusetts 274, Minnesota 271, Iowa 265. Low income (national average is 249): New Hampshire: 257; Wisconsin 249; Vermont 260, Massachusetts 254, Minnesota 252, Iowa 253.
A proposed audit of West Virginia's education spending enjoys widespread support, but that may not make its undertaking any less tricky.
Officials have yet to decide who would conduct the in-depth review, or even how to authorize it. Then there's the scope. An estimated 14 cents of every dollar spent by the state goes to public education, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.
The American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia included an audit in its wish list for next month's special legislative session focused on education.
"We are not aware of any recent or ongoing investigation regarding the spending practices by governmental departments, agencies and boards of education funded with public education dollars and whether the funds are being used for the intended purpose," the group said in its outline of the proposal, one of eight it wants lawmakers to consider.
The windows to Beckman Middle School are boarded and the grass has turned into weeds, but Taiwane Payne sees potential for the school that the Gary Community School Corp. closed and is now selling.
Payne came to an open house at the shuttered school on Thursday eager to see if it would be an ideal building for his not-for-profit venture. Payne wants to revitalize a Gary school into a technical center that would teach the unemployed green technology.
But that's as long as the price is right.
"It's up to the city of Gary and the school corporation not to try to get as much money out of them as possible," Payne said. "It would be great to see the building being used and not abandoned."
From the outside, Payne surmised Beckman, which closed in 2004, would need some work.
"I need to get in and find out exactly what needs to be done," Payne said pulling on his work gloves and carrying an industrial flashlight.
Gary Community Schools is in the process of selling 11 of its vacant school buildings, but Gov. Mitch Daniels thinks some of the structures should be given to charter schools.
Every so often, Aalim Moody, 5, and his twin sister, Aalima, break into a kind of secret code, chatting in a language their father does not understand.
Walking along Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, they make out the lettering on kosher food shops and yeshiva buses, showing off all they learn at the Hebrew Language Academy Charter School in Midwood, where they both attend kindergarten.
Ask Aalim his favorite song and he will happily belt out:
"Eretz Yisrael sheli yaffa v'gam porachat!" -- My land of Israel is beautiful and blossoming! -- and then he continues in Hebrew:
There will be no valedictory speech at Jericho High School's graduation on Sunday. With seven seniors laying claim to the title by compiling A-plus averages, no one wanted to sit through a solid half-hour of inspirational quotations and sappy memories.
Instead, the seven will perform a 10-minute skit titled "2010: A Jericho Odyssey," about their collective experience at this high-achieving Long Island high school, finishing up with 30 seconds each to say a few words to their classmates and families.
"When did we start saying that we should limit the honors so only one person gets the glory?" asked Joe Prisinzano, the Jericho principal.
For students and their parents, the wait for FCAT scores has been endless.
Results of this year's writing tests were due in April, but the state Department of Education has yet to release them.
The same goes for the reading, math and science scores that the state had expected to release by late May for fourth graders through high school juniors. So far, only third graders have received their math and reading results.
Even with the DOE finally planning to issue the scores early next week, people want to know: What went wrong?
The answer centers on Pearson Plc., a giant London-based media and education company that last year won a $254 million, multiyear contract with the state to handle Florida's high-stakes standardized test.
As recently as 2008, Locke High School here was one of the nation's worst failing schools, and drew national attention for its hallway beatings, bathroom rapes and rooftop parties held by gangs. For every student who graduated, four others dropped out.
Now, two years after a charter school group took over, gang violence is sharply down, fewer students are dropping out, and test scores have inched upward. Newly planted olive trees in Locke's central plaza have helped transform the school's concrete quadrangle into a place where students congregate and do homework.
"It's changed a lot," said Leslie Maya, a senior. "Before, kids were ditching school, you'd see constant fights, the lunches were nasty, the garden looked disgusting. Now there's security, the garden looks prettier, the teachers help us more."
In the last couple weeks, we've seen the dispiriting spectacle of layoff notices going to nearly 500 Milwaukee Public Schools teachers. This includes some excellent ones let go simply because they have less seniority. This will mean even bigger average class sizes - and further declines in quality - for a district already struggling badly. And a clear culprit is the teachers union.
The union has always been more concerned about its veteran teachers, more worried about pensions than starting salaries for new teachers. Union officials have argued that this "career ladder" will attract new teachers, but that's nonsense: What twentysomething teacher is thinking about a retirement that is at least 30 years away? Milwaukee teachers were already part of the excellent state pension system, yet back in the late 1990s, the union successfully pushed for an unneeded, supplementary plan that used local tax dollars to sweeten the pension for a select group of long-term teachers.
MPS officials argue that none of the recent layoffs would have been necessary if the union would agree to switch from its Aetna insurance plan to a lower-cost plan offered through United Healthcare. This could save the district some $48 million, enough to prevent any job layoffs for teachers, school board president Michael Bonds claims. "I'm not aware of any place in the nation that pays 100 percent of teachers' health care benefits and doesn't require a contribution from those who choose to take a more expensive plan," Bonds told the press.
This isn't actually about vouchers. It's about a new government report (pdf) on a school vouchers program in Washington, D.C., that reveals just how perversely narrow our view of "student achievement" has become.
Issued this week by the Education Department, the report is the final evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program ordered by Congress.
The program was the first federally funded private school voucher program in the country. Since 2004, more than 3,700 students -- most of them black or Hispanic -- have been awarded scholarships, each worth up to $7,500 tuition. Since Congress refused to reauthorize the program, no new students are being accepted.
The new evaluation of the program is remarkable for how it describes student achievement. It says: "There is no conclusive evidence that the OSP affected student achievement."
What is student achievement? In this report it is all about standardized test scores. The evaluation says:
"On average, after at least four years students who were offered (or used) scholarships had reading and math test scores that were statistically similar to those who were not offered scholarships."
I wonder how much was spent per student in the voucher schools vs the traditional public districts?
Somewhat related: Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold voted to kill the DC Voucher program, along with the Democrat majority.
America needs to make "fundamental, dramatic change" to the kind of education called for in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Friday in a meeting with local educators in Mill Valley.
The nation's education chief said the federal government should reward rather than punish struggling schools, that it should support art, music and physical education classes in addition to math and science and that it should encourage reforms that come from the local level, rather than imposing them from on high.
"The law needs to be less punitive. Right now, there are 50 ways for schools to fail for every way there is for them to succeed," Duncan said. "And we have to make sure students have a more well-rounded education, not just in high school, but in the first and second grade."
But Duncan had few specific examples of those changes, which he outlined before a crowd of Marin and Sonoma teachers, administrators and school board members at an event hosted by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, at Tamalpais High School.
He's the head of education for the entire United States and he's calling all black men to the front- of the classroom- that is.
This fall, Education Secretary Arne Duncan plans on touring historically black colleges and universities in hopes of increasing the number of black men teaching in America's public schools- which is currently less than 2 percent.
Is placing black men in the classroom the answer to solving some of the problems in the black community such as gang violence, high school drop out rates, and fatherless homes? Secretary Duncan thinks so. Do you agree, or disagree?
Look at this video and tell me where the hell are the teachers? WHOEVER the principal is at this school (video is from '07) needs to be fired. The teacher should be fired as well. Look closely at the 2:26 mark of this video clip and see the teacher (or some adult) sitting up against some counter watching this ish. Is this man getting thrills watching these adolescent, Black Kids grind on each other? No excuse MPS, this is why WE cannot read, write or do math with any competency at many of the public schools.
Google announced today that it was moving domains for its encrypted search from https://www.google.com to https://encrypted.google.com.
In May Google launched an encrypted version of its Web search, allowing users to enable a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection to encrypt their information as they searched.
As ReadWriteWeb reported, this move ran afoul of some school districts' web filtering requirements, forcing them to possibly block access to other parts of the Google secure domain.
"The devil is in the details, obviously," Paul Hauffe, director of business services in the Neenah Joint School District, said Friday. "And how will it affect one district versus another, and what actually is the change going to be? We're keeping an eye on it."
Wisconsin education leaders on Thursday praised the proposed plan, which would do away with $900 million in property tax credits for homeowners and instead give the money directly to schools.
Name-calling going on in the city belies reality that education budgets being slashed across Western Canada
For weeks now there has been an entertaining fight going on between the Vancouver School Board and the B.C. Education Ministry. It has often devolved into petty name-calling. There have been public tears, accusations and counter-accusations.
The public doesn't quite know who to believe.
Boards in B.C. have to balance their budgets by law. The Vancouver board says it has a $17-million shortfall, mostly because the province doesn't give it enough money to operate. Balancing its budget will mean closing schools, the board chair has said, which will be a blow to many parents and their children.
The government blames the problem on the incompetence of the board. It remains to be seen just how long Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid will allow the current group of trustees to continue running the show.
Actor Richard Dreyfuss wants students to take on a project bigger than "Jaws."
Dreyfuss, speaking Thursday in Lexington to the annual Student Congress of the Henry Clay Center for Statesmanship, told about 60 students and teachers from around the country that improving civics education in schools is the way to save American democracy.
The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that Dreyfuss, 62, said, "We have to learn how to use the tools given to us in 1787" in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The draft standards were released in March and CCSSI allowed the public to submit comments on the draft via their website. Over 10,000 comments were received. The U.S. Coalition for World Class Math was one of the commenter's and I had a hand in drafting comments. We were concerned with the draft standards' use of the word "understand" and pointed out that the use of this verb results in an interpretation by different people for different purposes. I am pleased to see that the final version of the standards has greatly reduced the use of the word "understand", but I remain concerned that 1) it still is used for some standards, resulting in the same problems we raised in our comments, and 2) the word "understand" in some instances has been replaced with "explain".
I am not against teaching students the conceptual underpinnings of procedures. I do not believe, however, that it is necessary to require students to then be able to recite the reasons why a particular procedure or algorithm works; i.e., to provide justification. At lower grade levels, some students will understand such explanations, but many will not. And even those who do may have trouble articulating the reasons. The key is whether they understand how such procedure is to be applied, and what the particular procedure represents. For example, does a student know how to figure out how many 2/3 ounce servings of yogurt are in a ¾ ounce container? If the student knows that the solution is to divide ¾ by 2/3, that should provide evidence that the student understands what fractional division means, without having to ask them to explain what the relationship is between multiplication and division and to show why the "invert and multiply" rule works each and every time.
Charles Leadbeater went looking for radical new forms of education -- and found them in the slums of Rio and Kibera, where some of the world's poorest kids are finding transformative new ways to learn. And this informal, disruptive new kind of school, he says, is what all schools need to become.
A few years ago a "contemporary artist" named Judi Werthein made headlines when she distributed specially designed and equipped sneakers to Mexicans waiting to cross the U. S. border. She called her piece "Brinco," from the Spanish word for "jump." Sneakers are also apt here. Ms. Werthein's shoes--equipped with a compass, map, flashlight, and medication--were intended to assist people engaging in illegal immigration.
Dipti Desai, who directs the art education program at New York University's Steinhardt School, thinks that "Brinco" should be studied in America's art classrooms. At the National Art Education Association (NAEA) convention in April, she praised contemporary artists who use "a wide range of practices" to criticize U. S. immigration policy. If like-minded NAEA members can persuade Congress, your children may soon be studying works like "Brinco" in school.
The school levy credit shows up as a reduction on property tax bills mailed in December, and killing it would be difficult politically.
But according to Dale Knapp of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, the proposal would simply move money around and would have little effect on the problems schools face.
"Some districts will pay less, some will pay slightly more, but the schools will be in the same boat they were before," he said.
The state uses the school levy tax credit to help reduce property taxes that provide local money for schools. It was created in 1996 and it has grown by more than 400 percent since.
Evers stressed that putting the tax credit money into the aid formula, then redistributing it to schools under a reworked formula, would not result in a net increase statewide in property taxes. It would, however, mean higher or lower taxes for individuals, depending on their school district.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg just spent 20 minutes speaking with New York Times' chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. at the New York Forum.
Following are some of the highlights from that conversation:
- The government's first job is to promote economic activity. Give people the ability to enjoy life, keep food on plate, roof on head.
- The big problem NY State faces is that its number one industry is finance. Washington has forgotten that the economic engine for the United States is finance. Nothing works without it. Credit derivative swaps don't sound good, so the government decided to go after the banks. That is potentially very damaging to the country. If you want to create jobs you have to have banks willing to provide loans. You can't have it both ways.
Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame has shown that, when teacher's pay is linked to the the performance of their students on standardized tests, they are prone to cheat -- I mean the teacher's cheat. Levitt's data from Chicago suggest that about 5% of teachers cheated to get bonuses and other goodies. A recent New York Times article shows that this problem persists, and tells a rather discouraging story of a principal from Georgia who "erased bubbles on the multiple-choice answer sheets and filled in the right answers." And if you look check out the Freakonomics blog, there is evidence that Australian teachers cheat too.
The kind of pressures that educators face aren't just financial incentives (although that alone is plenty of pressure as many systems reward only the top performers no matter how well everyone else does), they also risk being fired, demoted, or their schools may lose accreditation, be put on probation, and in some cases, closed for poor performance
The Times article offers an interesting quote that has implications beyond education:
Improving public education remains the top goal of Mayor Karl Dean as his administration and the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce begin work on a new five-year economic development plan.
Education is the key to bringing higher-paying technology jobs to Nashville, a key focus of the so-called Partnership 2020 initiative outlined at a chamber gathering Monday afternoon.
It's a new take on the program the city and the chamber first launched in 1990, which most recently has been known as Partnership 2010 and has been credited with bringing more than 600 new companies to the area over those two decades.
"Our focus has changed," the mayor said before addressing chamber members. "There will be more of an emphasis on facets of our economy such as music, where a lot of the technology jobs will be created. But education is the single biggest thing we need to get right."
Committing a future board to making cuts -- particularly when this is an election year -- was difficult for some trustees to swallow, but the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board passed a balanced budget late Tuesday night.
Weary applause broke out after the final vote was tallied and board chair Cathy Curry declared the process over for another year.
"Superintendent Clarke, your blood pressure can go right back down to normal levels," she joked.
With the public school board facing a $14.9-million deficit, it was Michael Clarke, the board's chief financial
officer, who devised a two-year plan that would see trustees approve some cuts for the 2010-2011 school year and some for the following year.
Otherwise, Clarke said, a year from now, the board could face even tougher challenges and have less money to address them.
But with a school board election in the fall and fears the proposed cuts could cause unnecessary grief for the public, some trustees opposed the idea of a two-year plan.
The Ottawa-Carleton proposed budget was C$731,100,000 for 67,511 students (C$10,829/student). Madison spends US$15,241 per student.
Chancellor Angela Merkel roundly rebuffed U.S. President Barack Obama's call for Germans to aid the global recovery by spending more and relying less on exports, even as she warned that Europe's own financial crisis is far from over.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in her Berlin chancellery, an unapologetic Ms. Merkel said the nations that share the beleaguered euro have merely bought some time to fix the flaws in their monetary union. She called on the Group of 20 industrial and developing nations meeting in Toronto this weekend to send a signal that tougher financial-market regulation is on its way to dispel the impression that momentum is fading amid resistance by big banks.
She took aim at an idea voiced by France, the U.S. and others that Germany could help global producers by spurring its persistently weak consumer demand. The latest call came in a letter last Friday from Mr. Obama to the G-20, in which he asked big exporters--Germany, China and Japan--to rebalance global demand by boosting consumer spending rather than exports.
For the second time in two years, Moody's Investors Service has downgraded the credit rating of the Waukesha School District, the latest time after the School Board voted to not allocate any money toward a $47.5 million debt owed to a European bank.
According to a Moody's report, the amount owed represents about 35% of the district's annual operating budget.
As a rule, lower credit ratings translate into higher interest rates for borrowing. However, Waukesha School Board President Daniel Warren said Monday that the credit rating drop should not have an immediate effect.
"When Moody's does a downgrade, it primarily affects long-term borrowing, and we don't have any long-term borrowing on our horizon," he said.
The A1 rating given to the district, which has a substantial tax base and relatively wealthy residents, is the lowest rating given by the service to school districts in the state, according to information from Moody's Investors Service.
Warren said his board decided not to allocate any money toward resolving the debt to DEPFA Bank because "the school district was not in a position to afford an additional $48 million in next year's budget."
Madison's current Assistant Superintendent for Business Services, Erik Kass, previously worked for the Waukesha School District.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Education issued its final evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program -- aka school vouchers.
To review, the federally funded voucher program is on life support. The Democratic Congress has thus far resisted attempts to reauthorize the program. The Obama administration last year budgeted enough money to allow current voucher holders to complete their high school educations, but not enough to allow new applicants; Congress has maintained that approach since.
So will the study move the ball? Here's what it found: (a) "There is no conclusive evidence that the [voucher program] affected student achievement." (b) The program "significantly improved students' chances of graduating from high school" -- by 12 percent. And (c), the program "raised parents', but not students', ratings of school safety and satisfaction."
An initial glance at those results -- no rise in test scores, but a significant rise in graduation rates -- would fall into the category of mixed results. And mixed results, given the heated political climate under which the voucher program operates, means plenty of room for spin.
Although the district is still waiting on numbers from the tax assessor's office, the final tally was based on increasing the millage rate by 1 mill.
"This has been the must difficult budget year that I've ever seen," said Superintendent Cindy Loe.
The board is expected to tentatively adopt the millage rate at 11 a.m. Tuesday at the district's administrative center. It will then hold three public hearings: on July 6 at 11 a.m. at the administrative center and at 6 p.m. at Dunwoody Springs Elementary Charter School in Sandy Springs; and 10:30 a.m. July 15 at the administrative center.
Does differential access to computer technology at home compound the educational disparities between rich and poor? Would a program of government provision of computers to early secondary school students reduce these disparities? The authors use administrative data on North Carolina public school students to corroborate earlier surveys that document broad racial and socioeconomic gaps in home computer access and use. Using within‐student variation in home computer access, and across‐ ZIP code variation in the timing of the introduction of high‐speed internet service, the authors demonstrate that the introduction of home computer technology is associated with modest but statistically significant and persistent negative impacts on student math and reading test scores. Further evidence suggests that providing universal access to home computers and high‐speed internet access would broaden, rather than narrow, math and reading achievement gaps.
Is this a wise investment of public funds? Very little evidence exists to support a positive relationship between student computer access at home and academic outcomes.
The Department of Education released the final report of the evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program today. The major finding of this report, and it is MAJOR, is that students who were randomly selected to receive vouchers had an 82% graduation rate. That's 12 percentage points higher than the students who didn't receive vouchers. Students who actually used their vouchers had graduation rates that were 21% higher. Even better, the subgroup of students who received vouchers and came from designated Schools in Need of Improvement (SINI schools) had graduation rates that were 13 percentage points higher than the same subgroup of students who weren't offered vouchers-and the effect was 20 percentage points higher for the SINI students who used their vouchers!
This is a huge finding. The sorry state of graduation rates, especially for disadvantaged students, has been the single largest indicator that America's schools are failing to give every student an equal chance at success in life. Graduating high school is associated with a number of critical life outcomes, ranging from lifetime earnings to incarceration rates. And, despite countless efforts and attempts at reform, changing the dismal state of graduation rates has been an uphill battle.
Of course, the uphill battle will continue. As most are aware, Congress voted to kill the DC voucher program last year, despite evidence that the program had significantly improved reading achievement for students who received scholarships. That evidence didn't count for much when faced with opposition from teachers' unions.
In the Advanced Learning work session there was a slide that showed the growth of AP and IB in the District. It is true that many more students are taking AP classes than ever before. But it doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means.
Take, for example, Roosevelt High School. At Roosevelt about half of the 10th grade students used to take AP European History. This is typically the first AP available to students, one of the few open to 10th grade students on the typical pathway. The class is challenging for 10th grade students and the fact that about half of the students took it is a testament to Roosevelt's academic strength. The other half of the students took a history class similar to the one that students all across district and the state take in the 10th grade.
Early last Monday , while I was still in bed and wondering why the "Today" show had gotten so tabloidish, I was slammed on my washingtonpost.com blog by a reader who did not like my column about Doris Jackson, the principal at Wakefield High School in Arlington County.
It wasn't Jackson who bothered the commenter, but my praise of the school's strong performance on Advanced Placement tests. He had a complaint that has often puzzled me: Hispanic students who take AP Spanish, and the schools that let them, are getting away with something, he suggested.
"It is because of the Internet that we know that about half the students in Wakefield are Hispanic," he said. "We also know that the AP test that they are taking, which has falsely massaged these stats, is the Spanish Advanced Placement test. Take away that fabrication of academic performance, and the true percentage of AP tests passed plummets."
What's one sure-fire way to stress out parents? Shorten the school day.
And that's exactly what the Madison school district is proposing, starting next year, for grades six to 12. According to a letter recently sent to middle school staff by Pam Nash, the district's assistant superintendent of secondary schools, ending school early on Wednesdays would allow time for teachers to meet to discuss professional practices and share ideas for helping students succeed in school.
"I am pleased to announce that as a result of your hard work, investment and commitment, as well as the support of central administration and Metro busing, together we will implement Professional Collaboration Time for the 10-11 school year!" Nash wrote enthusiastically.
Despite Nash's letter, district administrators appeared to backpedal on Monday on whether the plan is actually a done deal. Thus far there has not been public discussion of the proposal, and some teachers are expressing reservations.
Some middle school teachers, however, who also happen to be parents in the district, say they have some serious concerns about shortening the day for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. Not only will there be less time spent on academics each week, they say, but the additional unsupervised hours will pose a problem for parents already struggling to keep tabs on their adolescent kids.
This expenditure appears to continue the trend of increased adult to adult expenditures, which, in this case, is at the expense of classroom (adult to student) time.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
During a debate last February in Tallahassee on a proposal to expand a scholarship program that allows poor children to go to private schools, state Sen. Frederica Wilson decried the legislation.
"We're taking children out of the public schools and making them weaker," the Miami Democrat said. "This is not America."
A recent study by a highly regarded Northwestern University researcher shows how wrong Wilson was. Florida voters are fortunate that the Legislature passed the bill and Gov. Charlie Crist signed it into law.
The study found public schools' performance improved when they were faced with the possibility of losing students to private schools.
One thing that remains murky to me is how accountable the state Charter Schools Commission - which a Fulton County judge recently ruled is constitutional - is for the schools that it approves over the objections of local boards of education. The commission is here in Atlanta, but it is approving schools across the state.
As the authorizer of the schools, how is the commission held accountable if one goes bad or if parents are unhappy and can't go to the local school board to complain since the local folks had nothing to do with the school's approval?
At a media briefing earlier this year, Charter Schools Commission member Jennifer Rippner surprised me when I asked whether parents of students in a commission charter school could ultimately turn to the charter commission with complaints that they felt were not being dealt with by the school itself or its board of directors.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Neumann is proposing to get rid of state certification for teachers as part of an education reform plan.
Neumann also is proposing a series of incentives that will encourage private schools and public charter schools to compete with and replace failing public schools.
Neumann is outlining his plans during news conferences in Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay.
In a phone interview, he said the state should provide suggested qualifications for educators, but actual hiring decisions should be left up to local school boards, superintendents and principals.
Neumann acknowledges that many of his proposals would need approval from the Legislature.
The San Francisco school board will face the unsavory task Tuesday of approving a budget that cuts virtually every program offered to the city's schoolchildren.
Art would be cut. Music too. Counselors. Physical education. Books. Summer school. Teachers. Custodians. Administrators.
All cut by a little or a lot.
The 444-page budget document up for a vote Tuesday, the board's last meeting before summer break, has been months in the works as district officials struggled to figure out how to balance the books despite a $113 million budget shortfall expected over the next two years.
"It's not a good budget," said board member Rachel Norton. "How could you say that cutting 20 percent of the programs is a good budget? But it really could have been so much worse."
The $578 million spending plan includes $255 million in restricted money that has to be spent on specific programs, including special education, school meals and facilities. The rest pays for salaries and the day-to-day costs of educating the district's nearly 50,000 students and running its 105 schools, 34 preschool sites and nine charter schools.
In the Legislature, Porter chaired key education committees and proved to be a quick study who mastered the intricacies of complex legislation. As then-Gov. Zell Miller's floor leader, he sponsored the HOPE scholarship bill that has paid college tuition for Georgia students and funded voluntary pre-kindergarten programs.
Last year, Porter popped into a third-grade classroom at Saxon Heights Elementary School when he saw a teacher giving a lesson on Thurgood Marshall. Porter, a longtime lawmaker, newspaper publisher and lawyer, sat down and observed before finally asking, "May I?"
With the teacher's permission, he then recounted the life and times of the groundbreaking NAACP lawyer and first African-American to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice
A meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), the highest advisory body in the sector, here Saturday formed consensus on a bill for an apex regulator, considered a panel to remove hurdles to implemeting the right to education act and decided on a common curriculum for science and mathematics students across the country.
In a step ahead towards creating an apex regulator for higher education, a broad consensus on the issue appeared for the first time among the states.
"There is a broad consensus, not just on the structure but also on the purpose of the bill," Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal said.
I plan to write in more detail about why I dislike the tradition of explaining property tax levy changes in terms of the impact on the owner of a house assessed at a value of $250,000. The editorial in this morning's State Journal is evidence of how reliance on the $250,000 house trope can lead to mischief.
Here are the third and fourth paragraphs of the editorial:
"The Madison School Board just agreed to a preliminary budget that will increase the district's tax on a $250,000 home by about 9 percent to $2,770. The board was dealt a difficult hand by the state. But it didn't do nearly enough to trim spending.
"Madison Area Technical College is similarly poised to jack up its tax bite by about 8 percent to $348. MATC is at least dealing with higher enrollment. But the 8 percent jump follows a similar increase last year. And MATC is now laying the groundwork for a big building referendum."
I'm glad Ed is writing online. Two Madison School Board seats are open during the spring, 2011 election: the two currently occupied by Ed and Marj Passman.
Nearly one out of every three public school superintendents in Greater Cincinnati collect taxpayer-subsidized pensions while continuing to work.
This legal practice of "retiring" - thereby triggering pension benefits - and then returning to work within days at a handsome salary has become widespread among top local schools executives in recent years.
Occasionally, the deals make news, as it did for Kevin Bright in Mason and Gary Gellert in North College Hill, two relatively recent "retire-rehires."
But dozens of other superintendents across the state have simply agreed to a deal with a friendly school board with little fanfare. They're members in an exclusive club of superintendents who retire and return to their same job or rotate to another school district after signing lucrative contracts.
An analysis by Ohio's eight largest newspapers found:
When New Jersey agreed last year to give Newark teachers a 5% raise for working an extra four days, the union announced the news in a memo that included two dollar signs in large type and declared: "no health benefits give-back!!"
One year later, the Newark Teachers Union is back at the negotiating table--and this time things may not work out so favorably. Gov. Chris Christie earlier this year implored taxpayers to vote down local budgets that did not freeze teacher pay. Because the Newark schools are controlled by the state, it is one of the few teacher contracts over which Mr. Christie actually has veto power.
Newark Teachers Union Head Supports Merit Pay, Open to Abolishing Seniority
"Certainly, a 4.9% raise is out of the question," said Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the governor. He said the administration "has established clear guidelines" for the contract negotiations between the state-appointed Newark superintendent and the union of more than 5,000 teachers.
Colorado education officials have been ignoring a law intended to "flag" the arrests of teachers and then alert all school districts and charter schools across the state, a Coloradoan investigation has found.
The 2008 law requires the Colorado Department of Education to issue an alert every time a licensed educator is ar-rested. The arrest information is provided by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
But a Coloradoan investigation shows CDE officials have largely ignored the law since it was passed, arguing that they didn't have enough money to implement it. Within days of the Coloradoan inquiring about the situation, CDE officials said they planned to start following the law. They couldn't provide a specific timeline.
The publicly financed lobby for New Jersey's school boards is spending millions to renovate its headquarters, even as local districts face massive state aid cuts, defeated budgets and construction proposals, and pending teacher layoffs
The New Jersey School Boards Association collects more than $7 million a year from 588 member districts, which are legally required to join. It has socked away so much in dues and conference fees -- $12.3 million, an amount greater than the group's annual operating budget -- that it is paying cash for the improvements.
It also paid $1.6 million in cash for 10 suburban acres where it had hoped to build an $18 million conference center. But the board abandoned that plan and put the land back on the market.
The most recent projected cost for the headquarter's renovations was $6.3 million. But that figure could grow an additional $600,000 to $1 million, as the contractor decides whether to fix or replace the building's walls of glass windows, officials said. In the meantime, its 70 employees -- including five lobbyists paid to influence legislation -- are working in leased office space.
As a classroom teacher with 30+ years experience, I just completed the absolute worst year in the classroom I have ever endured (and it was NOT the fault of my students--they were great).
"This year I was told what to teach, when to teach, how to teach, how long to teach, who to teach, who not to teach, and how often to test. My students were assessed with easily more than 120 tests of one shape or another within the first 6 months of the school year.
"My ability to make decisions about what is best for my students was taken away by an overzealous attempt to impose 'consistency' within my grade group. My school hired an outside consultant who threatened us with our jobs, demanded that everyone comply, and required us to submit data on test results on a weekly basis. If your class didn't do well, you were certainly going to be in trouble.
"In addition, my class was visited at least twice a month by the consultant, two superintendents, principal, assistant principal, reading coach, math coach, and sometimes even more people. If I was not teaching exactly what they wanted to see, I was in trouble.
I asked Madison's 3 Superintendent candidates in 2008 if they believed in either "hiring the best teachers" and essentially setting them free, or a "top down" approach to teaching. Madison continues to expand adult to adult spending ("coaches", "professional development").
Governor-in-Waiting Andrew Cuomo loves how lame duck Governor David Paterson has grown a set of balls and has rammed through nearly half the state budget through the piecemeal passage of budget extenders -- daring any legislator who votes no to be accused of voting to shut down state government.
The state fiscal year is nearly one-quarter over -- and there's still no adopted state budget. Governor Paterson has twice rammed through extenders to keep the state government operating -- and incorporated components of his budget proposal each time. Next up, supposedly, is the diciest and arguably most important part of the budget; education. On Fred Dicker's radio show on Friday, Andrew Cuomo suggested that the Governor embed a property tax cap in the next budget extender. What's that about? A property tax cap has nothing to do with the state budget. A bit of advice to the wanna-be Governor: take the job of being governor seriously. I serve on a school board in Westchester County -- and we've taken a look at the cost of state mandates on our budget (ergo our school tax burden) and in the aggregate they total over 15% of our entire school budget. Neither the Governor nor the legislature seems to be able to deal with rolling back state mandates (the unfunded costs for which get pushed down to local municipalities and school districts). That's hard. Advocating for a property tax cap? That's easy.
Otis Mathis, the president of the Detroit Board of Education, was accused of fondling himself for 20 minutes in a meeting with the system's superintendent and quit right after the incident, but now is seeking to take back his resignation, the Detroit Free Press reports.
In this article, the newspaper says that board Vice President Anthony Adams plans to move ahead and post the vacancy.
Superintendent Teresa N. Gueyser filed a detailed complaint addressed to Adams about Mathis, saying he used a handkerchief while masturbating in front of her the entire time she was speaking.
Her complaint says that she has witnessed other unacceptable acts by Mathis and that she had informed him some time ago to have no physical contact with her, including handshaking.
How about this for strong medicine to improve a school: Ask every teacher and administrator to turn in resignations. Tell them they can reapply for their jobs, but there's going to be higher expectations from now on. Hire back less than half of the staff. Revamp the academic program extensively.
I've rarely heard of it actually happening around the country, and never around here. Until now:
"It's a new day," the message board outside St. Joan Antida High School, the 300-student, all-girls Catholic school at 1341 N. Cass St., says. It certainly is.
It's been a difficult few years for the 56-year-old school. Enrollment declined from close to the building's capacity of 400 to about 300. Competition increased from other private schools, charter schools and even suburban public schools.
The level of academic success at St. Joan Antida wasn't much different than in Milwaukee Public Schools, which means it wasn't very good.
Some students who enrolled were far behind grade level and the school wasn't doing well in accelerating their achievement. The student body had become much less diverse - higher-income and white students had just about all departed, 90% of the students qualified for publicly funded school vouchers, and the student body was about evenly split between African-American and Hispanic.
People involved in the school say discussions about making major changes go back several years. Some teachers at the non-unionized school were not renewed, and there were some other efforts to improve. But the results didn't amount to much.
In the past few days, we have heard much sound sense from the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, about schools reform. But here is what the Prime Minister had to say, and it is worth quoting at length: "No one will be able to veto parents starting new schools or new providers coming in, simply on the basis that there are local surplus places. The role of the LEA [local education authority] will change fundamentally. There will be relentless focus on failing schools to turn them round. Ofsted will continue to measure performance, albeit with a lighter touch. But otherwise the schools will be accountable not to government at the centre or locally, but to parents, with the creativity and enterprise of the teachers and school leaders set free."
The PM continued: "Where parents are dissatisfied, they need a range of good schools to choose from; or where there is no such choice, [to be] able to take the remedy into their own hands. Where business, the voluntary sector, philanthropy, which in every other field is an increasing part of our national life, want to play a key role in education, and schools want them to, they can. Where local employers feel local schools aren't meeting local skill needs, they can get involved. The system is being empowered to make change. The centre will provide the resources and enable local change-makers to work the change. We will set the framework and make the rules necessary for fairness. Where there is chronic failure, we will intervene. But the state's role will be strategic; as the system evolves, its hand will be lifted, except to help where help is needed."
Planning laws are being torn up so that hundreds of parents can set up their own schools in shops and houses, the education secretary, Michael Gove, announced today. Gove said at least 750 groups of teachers, parents and charities had expressed an interest in establishing the schools that will be run as academies.
Applications to set up the schools opened today. The plan, a flagship Tory education policy, is modelled on Sweden's free schools and charter schools in the US.
Teachers argue it would strip existing schools of much-needed cash and increase social segregation. They say only middle class parents would start their own schools. The man in charge of Sweden's schools, Per Thulberg, has said free schools do not improve standards.
Gove said the amount spent per pupil would stay the same and the policy would reduce the attainment gap between rich and poor pupils. Planning laws and regulations were being rewritten to make it far easier for the schools to be established, he said.
The Brookfield Board of Education plans to adopt an updated strategic plan this summer that, according to its chairman, Mike Fenton, will be, among other things, "paying closer attention to technology" and "changes in the world."
Assistant Superintendent of Schools Genie Slone told the school board at its regular meeting Wednesday night that longtime school district consultant Jack Devine, an instructor at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, has been coordinating discussions with a committee that is updating the strategic plan for the next five years.
The committee includes staff members, local residents, students, as well as two school board members, Jane Miller and Mr. Fenton.
Mr. Fenton said in an interview after the meeting that the plan is updated every five years and is a valuable document that provides direction in how the school board makes decisions.
"It is part of how we formulate the budget every year," he said.
School officials in Mounds View will decide next week whether to get rid of class rank for graduating seniors. If they do, they'll join a handful of other public school districts who have made the switch in recent years, and who say it might help some students get into college.
More than 400 seniors from Mounds View High School got their diplomas last week during commencement ceremonies. The school doesn't list a valedictorian -- but rather reconizes the top 10 ranking graduates during the ceremony.
That part of commencement might be gone next year, if the Mounds View School Board votes next Tuesday to ditch class rank. Class rank compares one student's grade point average with that of his or her classmates.
Principal Julie Wikelius says the top of each class at Mounds View is compacted. Plenty of students earn good grades in honors and advanced classes, which creates a tight battle for the top-ranking GPA.
oday's roundtable was organized in collaboration with TiE Delhi, and had a special emphasis on the online education sector with three out of the five entrepreneurs presenting education businesses.
Ankur Mehra and his associate Aditya started off by introducing GuruVantage. Ankur and Aditya have determined that training managers at various Indian companies need help with vetting the quality, methodology and infrastructures of various training institutes, training vendors and such.
Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.
he New Jersey Education Association, the state's largest teachers' labor group, has been railing against Gov. Chris Christie's ideas for revamping the state's education system, particularly merit pay and tying teacher's evaluations to student test scores. (See related stories from The Journal on teacher absences and contract negotiations.) But the president of the Newark Teachers Union thinks those ideas aren't so bad. It could be because he is, like Gov. Christie, a Republican. Whatever the reason, Joseph Del Grosso shares his views on what are some contentious issues in education:
WSJ: What do you think of merit pay?
Del Grosso: I think it's good. We would have to negotiate it.
WSJ: Would you tie merit pay to student test scores?
DG: Absolutely. It has to be part of it. It can't be tied to a single test score, but it has to be part of it. It can't live without it. If that's not part of the equation we'd be fooling ourselves.
WSJ: What are some other elements that you would use to determine merit pay?
Poor attendance has been plaguing the beleaguered Newark schools--but the teachers are the ones missing class.
Nearly half of all Newark teachers took at least two weeks of sick leave last year, and more than a quarter of them took three weeks or more off.
The district instituted an attendance-improvement program in October, but even so about 7% of the district's teachers are absent on an average day, nearly twice the urban-district average of 4%, said Valerie Merritt, a spokeswoman for the system.
With more than 40,000 students, Newark represents one of the largest and most vexing school systems in the Northeast. The district was taken over by the state in 1995 and since then has seen three state-appointed superintendents and little change in student performance
Some Georgia students will be able to log on to a home computer and attend high school in their pajamas this fall.
The Georgia Charter Schools Commission on Friday approved the state's first virtual charter high schools, opening the door for kids across the state to have a full k-12 experience online.
The two statewide virtual campuses, Kaplan Academy of Georgia, for students in grades 4-12, and the Provost Academy Georgia high school, will expand choice for families of gifted, struggling and special needs students who want the flexibility of learning at their own pace. Virtual schools provide the curriculum, the teachers and, for those who qualify, the computers , too, for free.
Kaplan and Provost follow the state's first and largest virtual charter, Georgia Cyber Academy, a K-8 cyberschool of 5,000 , in serving public school students online.
"I think it is going to be a wonderful opportunity, especially for kids who have some very unique special needs," said Ben Scafidi, state charter commission chairman. "These virtual schools are a lifeline to them."
HISD is working to develop a long-term strategic plan for the district that will build upon the Declaration of Beliefs and Visions and provide a road map for our future. The purpose of this strategic direction is to provide clarity around our priorities of Placing an Effective Teacher in Every Classroom, Supporting the Principal as the CEO, Developing Central Standards, Ensuring Accountability, and Cultivating Stakeholder Commitment. We believe these key, overarching strategies will help HISD achieve its goals and become the best school district in America.
To develop our long-term Strategic Direction, we are working with a in a six-month effort that started in February, 2010 and will culminate in August with the release of the final plan. The first step involved a diagnostic research effort to understand the current state of the district across a number of critical dimensions such as student achievement and organizational effectiveness. It also included analyzing other transformation efforts within HISD and across the country to ensure that the best ideas are being considered in our planning process. We have also started to gather input from members of Team HISD and we will continue to do so over the next several months. Click here to view the preliminary findings (.pdf)
True transformation does not happen overnight and cannot happen without the participation of every member of Team HISD. For this process to be authentic and meaningful, HISD needs all of you -parents, teachers, principals, students, the business community, nonprofit partners, and broader community members- to be fully engaged.
As promised, I will respond directly to people who objected to my earlier posts critiquing the charter school movement.
On June 14, The New York Times ran a front-page article about kindergarten children at the Clara E. Coleman Elementary School from Glen Rock, New Jersey who are learning about the principles of engineering through hands-on activities before they even know how to read. Their task was to design housing that would protect the three little pigs from the big, bad, wolf.
This was a wonderful project, in a wonderful classroom, with an excellent teacher, in an affluent suburban school district. Pictures that accompanied the article showed that the children in this class and school are almost all white. According to real estate estimates and the 2000 census report, in the borough of Glen Rock, about twenty miles from New York City, the medium household income was over $100,000 a year, about 60% of adults are college graduates, houses sell for about $500,000, and the population was 90% White, 6% Asian, 3% Latino, and 2% African American. For the High School graduating classes of 2004 through 2006, over 95% of students indicated that they would move on to a two-year or four-year college.
SARAH ZANDER and Ashley Jacobsen are like many teenage girls. Sarah likes soccer. Ashley was captain of her school's team of cheerleaders this year. They are also earning good money as nursing assistants at a retirement home. Sarah plans to become a registered nurse. Ashley may become a pharmacologist. Their futures look sunny. Yet both are products of what is arguably America's most sneered-at high-school programme: vocational training.
Vocational education has been so disparaged that its few advocates have resorted to giving it a new name: "career and technical education" (CTE). Academic courses that prepare students for getting into universities, by contrast, are seen as the key to higher wages and global prowess. Last month the National Governors Association proposed standards to make students "college and career ready". But a few states, districts and think-tanks favour a radical notion. In America's quest to raise wages and compete internationally, CTE may be not a hindrance but a help.
Four of the 27 new charter schools opening in New York City this fall have ties with religious organizations, although leaders assert curriculum and instruction will be secular.
Supporters say the new schools are a welcome addition amid overcrowded classrooms and heightened demand for charters, especially in neighborhoods with low-performing schools. But the development blurs the line between church and state, and also calls into question the distinction between public education and private groups, an issue with which charter schools already contend.
Four pastors are involved in starting charter schools, which receive public funding but can be privately run.
The Rev. A.R. Bernard's Brooklyn-based nondenominational Christian Cultural Center boasts a membership of 33,000, with 5,000 coming to services on any given Sunday. Now, 120 kindergarteners and first-graders will be attending Monday through Friday as it opens a charter school called the Culture Arts Academy Charter School at Spring Creek. The charter school will share the same building--but on a different floor--as the private school Mr. Bernard previously founded, Brooklyn Preparatory School.
Scot, looks like the Son of Stimulus, although stalled, is still on the agenda in Washington. You know, the plan to bail out local and state units of government with another boatload of "one time" money. Predictably, they are dressing this up as the salvation of "teachers" and will use the inflated figure of 300,000 teachers whose will be canned if this bloat doesn't pass. But all it means is the federalization of local and state deficits, which will only accelerate our descent into Greece-like insolvency. At some point this ridiculous spending spree has to stop, because it has already exceeded our ability to pay. But, I know, "It's for the kids!"
Ross Actually, I'd say "It's for our future.'' Thousands of Wisconsin teachers are facing layoffs, and students from all across the state could be forced into larger classes with less personal attention, fewer course choices and even cuts to instructional time. This responsible education funding plan would provide badly needed support in Wisconsin to save or create 6,100 jobs. Education has to be a top priority. After decades of underfunding at the hands of Republican administration and failed promises made through ``No Child Left Behind,'' we have a simple choice: Support education and our children, or give up on this country's future greatness.
Recess will be one of the topics on today's The Conversation starting at noon. Call in if you have thoughts, 543-KUOW. Here's their report on it. Interesting finding:
Another big difference between the schools is that at Thornton Creek, most of the students are white and middle-class. At Dunlap, nearly all of the students are black, Latino or Asian and from low-income families.
That corresponds to what KUOW found when we surveyed recess times across the Seattle school district. For instance, we looked at the 15 highest-poverty and lowest--poverty schools. Kids at the low-poverty schools average 16 minutes more recess than kids at the high-poverty schools. That amounts to about one whole recess more.
And amount of recess?
Dornfeld: "A lot of schools in the district give kids 45 minutes to an hour of recess every single day. Is that something that you see as realistic for this school?"
THE state of Illinois has a rather crude way of coping with its ballooning budget deficit. It stops paying bills. Already, it has failed to pay more than $5 billion-worth. State legislators are paying their own office rent to avoid eviction. Schools and public universities are having their budgets cut.
Illinois owes Shore Community Services, a non-profit agency in suburban Chicago, some $1.6m for services to the mentally disabled. The agency has had to lay off a dozen staff. Jerry Gulley, the executive director, says his outfit's line of credit could be exhausted soon. The bank will not accept the state's IOUs as collateral. "That's how sad it is," shrugs Mr Gulley.
It's beginning to look a lot like another lump of coal will land on local property taxpayers just before the holidays in December.
That's when tax bills go out to mailboxes. And so far, the tax burden is shaping up to soar at a rate far out of scale with ordinary people's ability to pay.
The Madison School Board just agreed to a preliminary budget that will increase the district's tax on a $250,000 home by about 9 percent to $2,770. The board was dealt a difficult hand by the state. But it didn't do nearly enough to trim spending.
Madison Area Technical College is similarly poised to jack up its tax bite by 9 percent to $348. MATC is at least dealing with higher enrollment. But the 9 percent jump follows a nearly 8 percent increase last year. And MATC is now laying the groundwork for a big building referendum.
If you pop into a toilet on the Seattle waterfront this summer, you might see over-flowing bins. The reason? A polite notice explains that "because of 2010 budget reductions", the Seattle government can no longer afford to "service this comfort station" each day. Hence the dirt.
Investors would do well to take note. In recent months, America's fiscal mess has assumed a rather surreal air. On paper, the country's federal-level deficit and debt numbers certainly look very scary. But in practical terms, the impact of those ever-swelling zeroes still seems distinctly abstract.
Jacob Greber:
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the U.S. may soon face higher borrowing costs on its swelling debt and called for a "tectonic shift" in fiscal policy to contain borrowing.
"Perceptions of a large U.S. borrowing capacity are misleading," and current long-term bond yields are masking America's debt challenge, Greenspan wrote in an opinion piece posted on the Wall Street Journal's website. "Long-term rate increases can emerge with unexpected suddenness," such as the 4 percentage point surge over four months in 1979-80, he said.
I attended my first Chicago Board of Education meeting in decades Tuesday and my first Chicago Public Schools kindergarten graduation the next morning. The inadequacies of the former were underscored by the inspiration of the latter.
The board reaffirmed the existing teachers contract, guaranteeing a generous 4 percent raise negotiated by the weak-kneed duo of Mayor Richard M. Daley and Arne Duncan, then the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools and now the United States secretary of education. The board thus eliminated the chance of a strike in the fall as it also gave Mr. Duncan's successor, Ron Huberman the power to perhaps lay off teachers and raise the number of students in classrooms.
"Door Open to 35 in a Class," declared a Chicago Sun-Times headline, reflecting the prime concern of what essentially is a superficial debate.
In fact, the meeting itself might as well have been choreographed by the Goodman Theatre, given all the role-playing.
After years of failed attempts, Rhode Island finally has a statewide school-financing formula, its first in two decades.
The complex formula, which was developed by the state Department of Education and researchers at Brown University, goes into effect for the 2011-12 school year and is intended to redistribute about $705 million a year in direct aid to school districts, charter and state-operated schools -- without adding a lot of new money to the system.
Critics have been quick to point out that the formula creates a new system of winners and losers, giving more state aid to districts where student enrollments have increased or that serve high numbers of low-income students, while cutting districts that have lost students or serve fewer poor students.
I missed the report from KUOW reporter, Phyllis Fletcher, so I looked it up. Guess what? The Superintendent has this to say:
Goodloe-Johnson: "They don't really get the opportunity to see the humane person that I am as it relates to children, and that I've committed my life to this work. And I don't think they get to see that, which I'm gonna work on, because they don't really know me. They know the Superintendent, the CEO of a business. And our business is about children. But they really don't know me as a person and as a mom."
So much can be said about these comments. I always get scared when I hear that education is a business but now Dr. G-J says children are her business. Great. And frankly, I don't want to know her as a person or a mom. I don't need to know the School Board that way to know if they are doing their jobs and I don't need that from her.
A growing chorus of state and federal policymakers, large foundations, and business leaders across the country are calling for states to adopt a common, rigorous body of college- and career-ready skills and knowledge in English and mathematics that all K-12 students will be expected to master by the time they graduate.
This report looks at the history of efforts to create common education standards, in particular the Common Core State Standards Initiative. It also describes factors California may consider when deciding whether to adopt them.
Highlights:
The Common Core is the latest effort to create rigorous, common academic standards among states
California is supporting the concept of common standards, but state law calls for further review and leaves the adoption decision to the State Board of Education
Issues surrounding the adoption include the quality of the Common Core standards and their relationship to the state's current standards as well as costs and other implementation concerns
Common Core or not, California might decide to review its current standards and expectations for students
On January 7, 2010, the Governor signed into law Senate Bill X5 1 (Steinberg). The bill calls for California's academic content standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics to be examined against the Common Core Standards that were released in final form on June 2, 2010. The bill also calls for the establishment of the California Academic Content Standards Commission. The Governor and Legislature have made the required appointments to the commission.
The five candidates for Oklahoma's superintendent of schools were asked Wednesday how they would reform education in a state that ranks near the bottom of the nation for funding and also lags behind in the number of college graduates.
All agreed the state's education system is in need of change, but differed in their vision of a successful system.
Democrat Jerry Combrink said after 30 years as the superintendent of two school districts in rural southeastern Oklahoma, he knows students need options, and not every student is going to college.
"I believe that we need to prepare students for the future they want. Develop a two-track system ... so students who are not going to college are not diluting the teaching efforts of the students who are."
His opponent in the July 26 primary, state Sen. Susan Paddack, D-Ada, said the state needs a strategic plan that will use test results to track improvements and failures.
This high school graduation season, millions of young adults from around the country will celebrate their achievements and prepare to begin the next chapter in their lives. For many, setting out into the "real world" also means taking on new financial responsibilities. Capital One Financial Corporation (COF 42.16, -0.21, -0.49%) recently surveyed high school seniors to see how prepared they are to manage finances on their own. The survey shows that while many students are uncertain about their ability to manage their banking and personal finances, those who have had financial education -- both in the classroom and through conversations at home -- are significantly more confident about their personal finance skills and knowledge.
One troubling statistic shows that nearly half (45 percent) of all high school seniors polled say they are unsure or unprepared to manage their own banking and personal finances. However, of the students surveyed who have taken a personal finance class (30 percent of the sample), 75 percent said they feel prepared to manage their finances. In addition, two thirds (66 percent) of students who have taken a personal finance class rate themselves as "highly" or "very" knowledgeable about personal finance, compared to only 30 percent of students with no financial education course who show the same level of confidence in their skills.
The idea that only a few people in a room are smart and the rest have a lot to prove is on trial this week in camp designed to change hearts and minds and eventually the culture of Memphis City Schools.
It all comes down to some simple brain theory, which 15 middle schoolers are soaking up at Douglass Elementary and five other city schools.
"Smart is not just something you are but something you get," says Barbara Logan, director of School Services and Training at the Efficacy Institute in Waltham, Mass.
With $1.1 million this year from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant to Memphis City Schools, Efficacy plans to train several hundred "student envoys" responsible for preaching the gospel of discipline and self-esteem, and delivering the message that smart isn't by chance.
Could the adoption of common core standards lead to substantial academic gains, even if somehow developed and kept at a high level in some imaginary Federal Reserve type fortress of political solitude and kept safe from the great national dummy down?
I ran NAEP numbers for all 50 states and the District of Columbia and calculated the total gains on the main NAEP exams (4th and 8th grade Reading and Math) for the period that all states have been taking NAEP (2003-2009). In order to minimize educational and socio-economic differences, I compared the scores of non-special program (ELL, IEP) children eligible for a free or reduced price lunch.
I then ranked those 50 states, and the table below presents the Top 10, along with the total grades by year for the strength of state proficiency standards as measured by Paul Peterson. Peterson judges state assessments by comparing scores on the state exam to those on NAEP.
This paper analyzes the flow of state pension benefit payments relative to asset levels and contributions. Assuming future state contributions fund the full present value of new benefits, many state systems will run out of money in 10-20 years if some attempt is not made to improve the funding of liabilities that have already been accrued. The expected shortfalls raise the possibility that the federal government will be faced with a decision as to whether to bail out states driven to insolvency by their pension programs.
Facing an estimated $427 million FY 2011 deficit, the Chicago Board of Education gave CPS CEO Ron Huberman emergency power to raise class sizes and lay-off almost 3,000 public school teachers. The schools' chief has not agreed to follow through with that plan quite yet. Instead, he's offering a "menu of possible concessions" to the Chicago Teachers Union and its new president-elect, Karen Lewis. Neither side will disclose what's on the list, although Lewis told the Reader's Hunter Clauss that she's hoping to survey her members this summer to find out exactly where they are willing to budge. "These official actions were partly procedural, and partly a way for Huberman and the board to publicly and skillfully back the teachers union into a corner," adds Catalyst's Sarah Karp.
In several print and television interviews yesterday morning, Lewis offered Huberman some alternative ways to trim costs. The new president set her sights on the city's contracts with consultants, which she said cost $300 million per year. She also discussed trimming the central office payroll and eliminating a $60 million program that provides curriculum packages and coaching to high schools. But to get a clear sense of the Daley administration's priorities, and find out where waste might exist, Lewis stressed that the budgeting process needs to be considerably more transparent to teachers and parents alike.
It took repeated Freedom of Information Act requests, for example, for the city to post basic payroll information online. And they've ignored consistent appeals to provide serious internal data on the effect of the city's tax increment financing system (TIF) on schools. From her acceptance speech this weekend (watch it here):
EdWeek Maps is the only place to find comparable, reliable, readily accessible data on graduation rates and other indicators for every school district and high school in the country.
The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center is proud to present this powerful online mapping tool to help the public, policymakers, and educational leaders combat the nation's graduation crisis. EdWeek Maps is the only place to find comparable, reliable data on graduation rates for every school district and high school in the country.
This Web-based application allows users to easily map out graduation rates by zooming in on any of the nation's individual school districts. Users can then access detailed information for that district or any of its high schools.
I do suggest one idea that I think has some promise: eliminate individual grades, and let students compete against other schools in academic competitions.
This idea is far from original. Rather, it comes from the eminent sociologist James Coleman. Coleman observed the striking fact that while students regularly cheer for their school's football or basketball team, they will poke fun or jeer at other students who study too hard or who are too eager in class: "the boy who goes all-out scholastically is scorned and rebuked for working too hard; the athlete who fails to go all-out is scorned and rebuked for not giving his all."
But this is odd, is it not? Why are attitudes toward academics and athletics so different? Sports are more fun than classwork, of course, but that does not explain why success would actually be discouraged in class.
Coleman's explanation was disarmingly simple: The students on the athletic teams are not competing against other students from their own school. Instead, they are competing against another school. And when they win a game, they bring glory to their fellow students, who get to feel like they too are victors, if only vicariously.
But the students in the same class are competing against each other for grades and for the teacher's attention. Naturally, that competition gives rise to resentment against other children who are too successful (just as students will hate the football team from a cross-town rival).....
A maintenance referendum may well be a tougher sell this time around than it was when back-to-back, five-year maintenance referendums were approved in 1999 and 2005. Not only do voters feel pinched by the ongoing recession, but taxpayers are facing a likely $225 hike in property taxes this year as part of the effort to balance the Madison schools budget, which took a heavy hit in reduced state aid.
Community support could also be compromised because a growing number of Madison School Board members have become frustrated by what they say is the district's reluctance to adequately account for how maintenance dollars have been spent.
As chair of the School Board's finance and operations committee, Lucy Mathiak has persistently asked for a complete accounting of maintenance jobs funded through the 2005 referendum. The minutes from a March 2009 committee meeting confirm that district administrators said they were working on such a report but Mathiak says the information she's received so far has been less than clear.
"Trying to get this information through two administrations, and then trying to figure it out, is exhausting. The whole thing is a mess. I'm not, by any means, the first board member to ask these kind of questions regarding accountability," Mathiak says. "You ask for straightforward documentation and you don't get it, or when it comes it's a data dump that's almost impossible to understand."
That lack of transparency might make it more difficult for other School Board members to get on board with another referendum.
"We have a responsibility to provide an accurate record of what happened with the funding," says board member Arlene Silveira, who has supported all other school referendums. "I think people understand that other projects may come up and there may be changes from the original plan, but you do need to tell them what was done and what wasn't done and why. It affects (the district's) credibility in the community."
For seventh-grader Kyle Scarpa, budget strains affecting schools across the country are hitting where it hurts.
In the wake of the worst recession in more than half a century, many communities find themselves with no choice but to cut funding for education. In Downe Township, N.J., the cuts are hitting where it hurts.
In addition to freezing wages and jettisoning its librarian, the school he attends here in southern New Jersey will cancel his after-school remedial math and literacy classes. His teacher believes the tutoring helped him build confidence and get his average grade up to a C from a D.
"He could fall through the cracks," says teacher Rose Garrison, noting that Kyle is among four kids in her class having trouble keeping up. "When you're teaching exponents and you have kids who don't know the multiplication tables, how are you going to teach them?"
The struggles at Downe Township School illustrate the challenges public schools face across America as a convergence of factors--ravaged state and local finances, tapped-out taxpayers and a reform push by the Obama administration--force wrenching change. As the school year winds down, educators are grasping for new ways to do more with less, and to remedy an embarrassing reality: Despite spending more per student than the average developed country, U.S. schools perform below average in core subjects such as math and reading.
The American university, like the nation's other major social institutions -- government, banks, the media, health care -- was created for an industrial society. Buffeted by dramatic changes in demography, the economy, technology, and globalization, all these institutions function less well than they once did. In today's international information economy, they appear to be broken and must be refitted for a world transformed.
At the university, the clash between old and new is manifest in profound differences between institutions of higher education and the students they enroll. Today's traditional undergraduates, aged 18 to 25, are digital natives. They grew up in a world of computers, Internet, cell phones, MP3 players, and social networking.
States significantly increased buy-in from local teachers' unions in round two of the Race to the Top competition, but made far less progress in enlisting districts or expanding the number of students affected by the states' education reform plans.
Those patterns emerged from an Education Week analysis of applications from 29 states and the District of Columbia, all of which entered both rounds of the $4 billion federal grant contest.
Although the changes made in applications from the first to the second round varied widely from state to state, union buy-in increased on average by 22 percentage points, with states such as Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin making big leaps.
At the same time, the overall level of district support and students affected in the 30 applications barely budged, mostly owing to California's loss of support from about 500 districts representing nearly 2 million students. That negated progress other states made in improving buy-in.
The rise, and rise, of Seattle schools: The Seattle Public Schools are undergoing dramatic changes. However, the story is not one of doom and gloom but of steady progress.
THERE is much to be optimistic about as Seattle Public Schools transform into an urban model of education quality and accessibility.
Dramatic change doesn't happen by tinkering around the edges. Nor is Seattle's thrust occurring in isolation. It is part of a welcome push by urban school districts across the country to improve access to good teaching, strong curriculum and better school resources.
The work under way is most visible in Seattle's shift from a costly open-choice system to a neighborhood assignment plan. Families got that they were exchanging choice -- which worked for a lucky few -- for a cheaper, simpler and fairer way to access schools and programs.
Making improvements in the middle of a deep recession required Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson and her team to aggressively leverage millions of dollars from credible organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and federal school-improvement grants.
Wholly appropriate, and much appreciated, is Seattle's civic and business organizations' willingness to fill a recession-driven vacuum in education funding. This kind of support has allowed the district to continue key improvements, including professional development for all principals and teachers and increasing popular programs such as foreign-language immersion and advanced classes.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania conducted two external analyses of the performance of Harlem Success Academy Charter School (HSA) 2008-9 3rd graders on the New York State Test in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics. The first analysis was based on a comparison of the performance of 2006-7 first graders (who became the 2008-9 3rd graders) who were chosen through a random selection lottery process to attend HSA, and remained in HSA through the 3rd grade, relative to those who were not admitted by lottery to attend HSA and remained in New York City public schools. The second analysis compared the same HSA 3rd graders to 3rd graders in geographically proximate and demographically comparable New York City public schools. Student results were compared separately for ELA and mathematics using ordinary least squares regression and controlling for student gender, age, and special education status. The results indicated that HSA 3rd graders performed statistically significantly better than did either the randomized comparison group or the students in the demographically similar schools. More specifically, attendance at HSA was associated with 34-59 additional scale score points (depending on test subject) for non-special education students, after adjusting for differences in student demographic characteristics. Described another way, these results represent between 13-19 percent higher test performance associated with attending Harlem Success Academy.
The Harlem Success Academy Charter School (HSA) opened its doors in August 2006. The school, located in Harlem Community School District 3 of New York City at 118th street and Lenox Avenue, is currently a K-4 school that intends to add a grade each year as students matriculate until it is a full K-8 school. HSA is one of four existing Harlem Success Academies founded by the Success Charter Network. Over the next ten years, the Success Charter Network plans to expand the network to 40 schools.
Students are admitted into HSA through an annual lottery which randomly selects students to attend the school from the pool of applicants. Any student who lives in New York City can apply to HSA and the school uses the lottery process to determine who will attend the school. Since the school has documented both the students who applied to HSA and were accepted through the lottery, as well as those who applied and were not selected, these conditions make for an experimental study of the impact of HSA on student learning outcomes.
Newly minted Nevada senate candidate Sharron Angle is a kook. That's what Sen. Harry Reid's people are telling reporters. ABC, CNN, and other outlets seem to agree, noting that Mrs. Angle wants to shutter the federal Department of Education, get the U.S. out of the U.N., phase out Social Security, and eliminate the IRS.
We haven't yet heard her explanations of these positions -- many of which can be justified in the proper context. It's certainly possible that she is a little eccentric (that prison massage program doesn't pass the smell test). But this much is certain: It is not kooky to favor the elimination of the Department of Education. That this proposal is routinely labeled "extremist" is a reminder of the one-way ratchet that operates in government. Enshrine something in a federal agency and it becomes sacrosanct. Democrats cheerlead for federal programs because they are the party of government, and Republicans quietly go along because they're afraid.
But if Republicans know how to argue for smaller government -- as Gov. Chris Christie is demonstrating in New Jersey -- they need not be intimidated. There are hundreds of federal programs that could be eliminated tomorrow with only the happiest consequences for the nation. And yes, the whole Department of Education could be scrapped. It vacuums up money and produces ... what exactly?
Even though the Supreme Court ordered a ban on the administration of corporal punishment to children almost a decade ago, it is shocking that schools across the country continue to adhere to the philosophy of 'spare the rod and spoil the child'. The tragic case of Rouvanjit Rawla once again highlights this point. Rouvanjit, who was a student of Kolkata's prestigious La Martiniere School for Boys, committed suicide after he was caned by his school principal and allegedly by four other teachers as well. What is truly despicable is that the school principal has no regrets about the incident and has admitted as much to the school's board of governors and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights investigating the case. This reflects a perverse streak among certain educators who have no qualms about using their position of authority to inflict physical torture on children. The problem is symptomatic of a virulent mindset within the education system that sees corporal punishment as a legitimate means to discipline students and build character. In reality all it does is promote a culture of violence.
There is perhaps no greater debate in America than the one surrounding taxes, whether it is at the national, state, or local level. While taxes serve the important purpose of funding government programs, they also bear quite a burden on taxpayers. For example, property taxes account for the majority of revenue for local governments across the country.1 Pennsylvania is no different. In 2000, property taxes accounted for nearly $10 billion of revenue in Pennsylvania, which was 30 percent of total local government revenues and 70 percent of all local government tax revenues.2
Property taxes accounted for an even larger piece of the pie when it came to school districts: approximately 85 percent of the total tax revenues for Pennsylvania school districts in 2000.3 Nearly half of all school district revenue came from the collection of property taxes.4 Only counties relied more heavily on property taxes as a source of revenue.5
The state‟s heavy reliance on property taxes by school districts hit the wallets of Pennsylvania taxpayers and led to several attempts by legislators to harness the spending.6 The most recent attempt was Act 1 of 2006.7 Act 1 attempts to do what other legislation failed to do: provide property tax relief to all Pennsylvanians, but it, too, falls short of its mark.8
Although it was enacted more than three years ago, the Act still plays a prominent role today. Less than two years ago, homeowners started reaping the benefits of Act 1 when the first reduction in property tax bills occurred.9 Last fall, taxpayers could have faced another referendum on their ballots, asking whether they favor increasing the local income tax to offset a decrease in property tax.10 Officials faulted public confusion for the last referendum overwhelmingly failing across the Commonwealth.11 Also, last year‟s budget impasse resulted in new legislation that could significantly alter property tax relief in the future.12
The charter school's popular director resigned abruptly at mid-year. One third of the faculty vowed not to return next year. E-mail allegations of poor management and failed communication clogged the in-boxes of parents, teachers and board members.
And that's just in Excelsior Academy's first year.
The K-8 charter school in Erda -- Tooele County's first charter -- has had a rocky start.
So do many charter schools, which have to find or build a school house, navigate state laws and recruit a board and staff, typically with limited funds and expertise. The public schools receive money from the state for each pupil they enroll at the same rate as other public schools, but must raise funds for other expenses.
New schools often face opposition from parents and teachers when they don't function as expected.
Consider just a few of the questions whose answers might help a community's leaders and citizens make better decisions about how to improve their schools:
What has been said and written about school start times in districts with comparable demographics and financial resources, but better student test scores?
What is the relationship between student test scores and systems for electing school board members in comparable school districts?
How do superintendent contracts vary in comparable districts?
Parents, teachers, administrators, and taxpayers have legitimate reasons to ask questions like these. But it has been incredibly hard for them to do so. One reason is that much public information remains locked in the file cabinets of America's more than 14,000 school districts. Another is that even if the information is posted to school websites, it may be posted in ways, such as a scanned document, that Internet search engines cannot read. Public information that should be available instantaneously and at no cost, like so much other information now available via search engines, instead takes hundreds of work-lifetimes and a fortune to gather--if it can be gathered at all.
In a class full of aspiring engineers, the big bad wolf had to do more than just huff and puff to blow down the three little pigs' house.
To start, he needed to get past a voice-activated security gate, find a hidden door and negotiate a few other traps in a house that a pair of kindergartners here imagined for the pigs -- and then pieced together from index cards, paper cups, wood sticks and pipe cleaners.
"Excellent engineering," their teacher, Mary Morrow, told them one day early this month.
All 300 students at Clara E. Coleman Elementary School are learning the A B C's of engineering this year, even those who cannot yet spell e-n-g-i-n-e-e-r-i-n-g. The high-performing Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a $100,000 redesign of the science curriculum.
While school systems are cutting jobs or furloughing teachers to shore up withering budgets, Atlanta Public Schools has spent more than twice as much money per student on travel as most other metro districts.
Atlanta spent more than $1.4 million on travel in 2008-09, the latest year from which complete data was available. That works out to $28.77 per student, far higher than neighboring DeKalb County and more than double per pupil what Clayton, Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties spent on travel, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found.
And Atlanta was slated to spend even more in 2009-2010 -- about $1.8 million, a 28 percent jump.
Atlanta public school officials say travel is important so teachers can get the training they need and bring new skills and insights to the classroom. Much of the travel represents teachers going to education conferences, district officials said.
For young teachers looking to get their first gig after graduating from education school, times are tough.
In New York City, the Success Charter network advertised 135 openings; it received 8,453 resumes in response. In Westchester, a school announced seven openings. More than 3,000 candidates responded.
New York isn't alone: School districts across the country, faced with budget shortfalls, have put a freeze on hiring any new educators. This is bad news for newly minted teachers entering the work force.
There is a silver lining, however: This glut of new educators gives administrators a golden opportunity to revamp rules protecting bad teachers.
Reformers can take advantage of this surplus of labor by pointing out that anyone who doesn't like new rules that will improve the nation's quality of education can quickly be replaced by those who will play ball.
Ravitch was assistant secretary of education in the administration of George H.W. Bush and a board member of various right-wing think tanks, who has now become a leading critic of the market-based school "reform" that has been embraced by both Democrats and Republicans. Ravitch is "still looking" for an elected official to take a stand against these changes, but opposition is more likely to come from below. One encouraging piece of news is the landslide victory this week of the Caucus Of Rank-and-file Educators in the election for the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union. --PG
As a part of the economic stimulus package of January 2009 -- you may have heard of it -- the federal government created a $100 billion education fund for states that were willing to take bold action to reform and improve their schools.
The fund, known as Race to the Top, is having the desired effect in many places. With state budgets in dire shape across the nation, it has provided a real incentive for states to look for ways to innovate in order to address real problems in the educational system -- failing schools, bureaucratic deadlock, the achievement gap between rich and poor students.
In Wisconsin, though, what it has inspired is something more like a few pro-forma changes and half-hearted applications.
Wisconsin ranked in the bottom half of all the states that applied for Race to the Top funding in the first round in March. (The federal government placed our state's application 26th out of 41 states and the District of Columbia that applied.)
Ten years after Wisconsin overhauled its licensure system for public school educators, the first big wave of teachers is set to advance under the rules - and reports are mixed on whether the change has made a difference.
Expectations for the new licensure regulations were high when they were first approved in 2000. In addition to requiring that teachers pass basic knowledge and skills tests and receive mentors for their first year in the profession, the rules also provided that teachers would have to demonstrate they had grown enough in their careers to attain a "professional" license.
For some beginning teachers, the new rules have been stressful additions to the start of an unfamiliar career with many bugs still left to be worked out. Others say they appreciate that they could set their own teaching goals and pursue related professional development activities while also reflecting on their experiences.
"I think teachers who really take the process seriously and do it with fidelity - they choose a goal that they really believe in and they want to achieve - that's fine, that's good, it serves its purpose," said Judy Gundry, a citywide mentor for educators with initial teaching licenses in Milwaukee Public Schools.
For public employee unions - those representing police, firefighters, teachers, prison guards and agency workers of all kinds at the state and local levels - these are the worst of times.
Despite record high membership and dues, and years of unparalleled clout in state capitols, public-sector unions find themselves on the defensive, desperately trying to hold onto past gains in the face of a skeptical press and angry voters. So far has the zeitgeist shifted against them that on one recent weekend, government employees were the butt of a "Saturday Night Live" skit, and the next day, a New York Times Magazine cover article proclaimed "The Teachers' Unions' Last Stand."
Public unions' traditional strength - the ability to finance their members' rising pay and benefits through tax increases - has become a liability. Although private-sector unions always have had to worry that consumers will resist rising prices for their goods, public sector unions have benefited from the fact that taxpayers can't choose - they are, in effect, "captive consumers."
More than 160 teachers in Houston ISD's under-performing middle and high schools weren't offered jobs at those campuses next year, the district announced Friday evening. The decision affects staffing at nine schools targeted in Superintendent Terry Grier's "Apollo 20" reform plan.
Of the 600 teachers at those schools last year, 358 -- or 60 percent -- learned on Friday that the district wants them to return to help with the improvement efforts. But the district is forcing 162 teachers, or 27 percent of the staff, out of those schools. The administration made the decisions based on "an exhaustive data-driven evaluation" of the teachers, according to the news release, which didn't specify what data were used.
An additional 80 teachers at the targeted schools previously had decided to retire, resign or transfer to other campuses, according to HISD. "In some cases, teachers opted not to stay due to a personal conflict with the longer school year and longer school day schedules of the Apollo schools," the news release said.
Each year, Newsweek picks the best high schools in the country based on how hard school staffs work to challenge students with advanced placement college-level courses and tests. Just over 1600 schools--only six percent of all the public schools in the U.S.--made the list.
This year rankings have some fantastic new interactive features. We've teamed up with a data company called Factual to create individual profile pages for each school where students and faculty can comment and contribute. (For more information about how the rankings were calculated, see our FAQ.)
Mostly Milwaukee area high schools such as Rufus King (318) made the list. The only non-southeast Wisconsin high schools to make the list was Marshfield (370) and Eau Claire Memorial (1116). Marshfield High School offers 29 AP classes while Milwaukee Rufus King offers 0 and Eau Claire Memorial offers 14, via AP Course Ledger.
Colorado is changing the rules for how teachers earn and keep the sweeping job protections known as tenure, long considered a political sacred cow around the country.
Many education reform advocates consider tenure to be one of the biggest obstacles to improving America's schools because it makes removing mediocre or even incompetent teachers difficult. Teacher unions, meanwhile, have steadfastly defended tenure for decades.
Colorado's legislature changed tenure rules despite opposition from the state's largest teacher's union, a longtime ally of majority Democrats. Gov. Bill Ritter, also a Democrat, signed the bill into law last month.
After the bill survived a filibuster attempt and passed a key House vote, Democratic Rep. Nancy Todd, a 25-year teacher who opposed the measure, broke into tears.
"I don't question your motives," an emotional Todd said to the bill's proponents. "But I do want you to hear my heart because my heart is speaking for over 40,000 teachers in the state of Colorado who have been given the message that it is all up to them."
While other states have tried to modify tenure, Colorado's law was the boldest education reform in recent memory, according to Kate Walsh, the president of the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, which promotes changing the way teachers are recruited and retained, including holding tenured teachers accountable with annual reviews.
I. Introduction
A. Title or topic - District Evaluation Protocol - The presentation is in response to the need to provide timely and prioritized information to the Board of Education around programs and interventions used within the District. The report describes a recommended approach to formalizing the program evaluation process within the District.
B. Presenters Kurt Kiefer - Chief Information Office/Director of Research and Evaluation Lisa Wachtel- Executive Director of Teaching & Learning Steve Hartley - Chief of Staff
C. Background information - As part of the strategic plan it was determined that priority must be given to systematically collect data around programs and services provided within the district. The purposes for such information vary from determining program and intervention effectiveness for specific student outcomes, to customer satisfaction, to cost effectiveness analyses. In addition, at the December 2009 Board meeting the issue of conducting program evaluation in specific curricular areas was discussed. This report provides specific recommendations on how to coordinate such investigations and studies.
D. Action requested - The administration is requesting that the Board approve this protocol such that it becomes the model by which priority is established for conducting curricular, program, and intervention evaluations into the future.
II. Summary of Current Information
A. Synthesis of the topic· School districts are expected to continuously improve student achievement and ensure the effective use of resources. Evaluation is the means by which school systems determine the degree to which schools, programs, departments, and staff meet their goals as defined by their roles and responsibilities. It involves the collection of data that is then transformed into useful results to inform decisions. In particular, program evaluation is commonly defined as the systematic assessment of the operation and/or outcomes of a program, compared to a set of explicit or implicit standards as a means of contributing to the improvement of the program.
Program evaluation is a process. The first step to evaluating a program is to have a clear understanding of why the evaluation is being conducted in the first place. Focusing the evaluation helps an evaluator identify the most crucial questions and how those questions can be realistically answered given the context of the program and resources available. With a firm understanding of programs and/or activities that might be evaluated, evaluators consider who is affected by the program (stakeholders) and who might receive and or use information resulting from the evaluation (audiences). It is critical that the administration work with the
Evaluating the effectiveness of Madison School District expenditures on curriculum (such as math and reading recovery) along with professional development (adult to adult programs) has long been discussed by some Board and community members.
In perhaps President Obama's most stealth campaign to date, the federal government has been slowly tightening its grip on the education sector to little fanfare. Rather than working through the democratic legislative process, this Administration has circumvented Congress to enact an ill-conceived education agenda that will weaken accountability, reduce transparency and minimize choice while only adding to the national deficit.
For close to four decades, the federal government has operated under the seemingly simple premise that increased spending on education will translate into academic achievement. This line of thinking has resulted in inflation-adjusted
href="http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2008/09/Does-Spending-More-on-Education-Improve-Academic-Achievement">federal expenditures on education increasing 138 percent since 1985. Per-pupil expenditures have ballooned to
href="http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/05/Creating-a-Crisis-Schools-Gain-Staff-Not-Educational-Achievement">over $11,000 per student, and are even higher in most urban areas including the District of Columbia where the government spends
href="http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2009/02/DC-Opportunity-Scholarship-Program-Study-Supports-Expansion">$14,500 on each child. Billions upon billions of dollars have been poured into our public school system because the federal government, backed by powerful teachers unions, is convinced that it is best suited to administer our country's education system. Unfortunately,
href="http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2008/09/Does-Spending-More-on-Education-Improve-Academic-Achievement">this approach has been a miserable failure.>
Under enormous pressure to reform, the nation's public schools are spending millions of dollars each year on gadgets from text-messaging devices to interactive whiteboards that technology companies promise can raise student performance.
Driving the boom is a surge in federal funding for such products, the industry's aggressive marketing and an idea axiomatic in the world of education reform: that to prepare students kids for the 21st century, schools must embrace the technologies that are the media of modern life.
Increasingly, though, another view is emerging: that the money schools spend on instructional gizmos isn't necessarily making things better, just different. Many academics question industry-backed studies linking improved test scores to their products. And some go further. They argue that the most ubiquitous device-of-the-future, the whiteboard -- essentially a giant interactive computer screen that is usurping blackboards in classrooms across America -- locks teachers into a 19th-century lecture style of instruction counter to the more collaborative small-group models that many reformers favor.
Opportunity at the Top, a great report from Public Impact, points out that it's great teachers that close achievement gaps but that all current efforts will fall well short of ensuring that all US students see the benefits.
The problem is that we're trying to solve the wrong problem-there's just no way to make the batch-print model work well for all kids. Batch processing age-cohorts in groups of 25 (or more) kids through print curriculum with one teacher has lots of limitations. The Public Agenda report shows it's mathematically impossible to put a great teacher in every room and even if we did some kids would be behind while other kids were ahead.
Even the accompanying 3x For All report falls short of the answer because it is rooted in teacher-centric delivery. The solution is a blended learning environment with tiered staffing that leverages great teachers across hundreds of kids. If personalized digital learning made up 1/3 of the elementary day and 2/3 of the secondary day, school staffing patterns can be adjusted to include a variety of learning professionals-some on site and some remote.
Wood Communications has offered to work with the District to assist us in assessing the need for and the actual development of an engagement and communications plan.
Should funds for the development of this plan be needed, Wood Communications has agreed to raise these funds privately resulting in no District dollars being utilized.
During June's Superintendent's Announcements and Reports, I will communicate my intent to move forward to work with Wood Communications on an engagement and communications plan. This will also allow the Board to provide input on this work. Attached to this memorandum is a letter from James Wood detailing the first step this firm would take in determining the need for a plan of this nature.
Please let me know if you have any questions on this.
Houston ISD Superintendent Terry Grier has eliminated the position of manager of magnet programs. That means Dottie Bonner, who held the job since March 2002, is out. She submitted her letter of resignation effective Aug. 31, according to the district.
Grier instead has created a higher-level position, an assistant superintendent over school choice. Lupita Hinojosa, the former executive principal over the Wheatley High School feeder pattern, has been named to the post.
We know that changing anything related to magnets puts parents on edge, especially after former HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra's failed attempt to reduce busing to the specialty schools. A quick Internet search shows that magnet transportation also was a hot topic in Grier's former district, San Diego Unified. The school board there voted in spring 2009 to eliminate busing to magnets to save money but reversed the decision after parent outcry, according to Voice of San Diego.
I talked to Grier this morning about what happened in San Diego, and he said the decision to end busing to magnet schools was the school board's, not his. "(Deputy Superintendent) Chuck Morris and I counseled and advised and recommended that they not do this -- that it would destroy the magnet program -- but they did anyway."
Just when it looked like things were quieting down at troubled Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, the place that became famous when all of the teachers were fired and then rehired, there's a new controversy.
One of the two newly named co-principals was approved by the Central Falls Board of Trustees this week even though his resumé said that math scores at his former school were much higher than they really were, according to the Providence Journal.
Let's review: In March, all of the teachers and other educators at the only high school in Central Falls, Rhode Island's smallest and poorest city, were fired so that the school could be restructured with a new staff.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised Superintendent Frances Gallo for firing all of the educators in the building, and President Obama said it showed "a sense of accountability."
Madison School District Board of Education Progress Report--March through June 2010
Maya Cole, Board President & Beth Moss Board Vice-President, Via email:
The 2009-10 school year is over, and the Board is wrapping up a very busy spring 2010. After several months of hard work, the Board finalized the preliminary 2010-11 budget on June 1. For the second year in a row, the state legislature decreased the amount of per pupil state aid by 15%. This decrease in revenue, coupled with a decrease in property values in the Madison Metropolitan School District, created a much larger than usual budget shortfall. This year is different because unlike previous years when the Board of Education was not allowed to raise property taxes to cover the shortfall, this year the state gave the Board the authority to raise taxes by an extreme amount. The Board and administration have worked hard to mitigate the tax impact while preserving programs in our schools.
2010-11 Budget Details:
The Board approved a preliminary budget of $360,131,948 after creating savings of over $13 million across all departments in the district. This budget represents a decrease of over $10 million from 2009-10. The final tax impact on a home of average value ($250k) is $225. The Board made reductions that did not directly affect instruction in the classroom, avoiding mass teacher lay-offs as experienced by many districts around the country and state.
Other State action:
The School Age Guarantee for Education (SAGE) Act was changed from funding K-3 class sizes of 15:1 to 18:1. The Board is considering how to handle this change in state funding.
Race to the Top is a competitive grant program run through the federal government. The state of Wisconsin applied for Race to the Top funding in round 1 and was denied. The Board approved the application for the second round of funding. Federal money will be awarded to states that qualify and the MMSD could receive $8,239,396.
Board of Education Election:
Thank you for 6 years of service and good luck to Johnny Winston, Jr. Taking his seat is James Howard, an economist with the Forest Service and MMSD parent. New Board officers are Maya Cole, president, Beth Moss, vice president, Ed Hughes, clerk, and James Howard, treasurer.
Sarah Maslin, our student representative from West High School, will be off to Yale University in the fall. Thank you for your service and good luck, Sarah! Congratulations to Wyeth Jackson, also from West, who won the election for student representative to the Board of Education. Jessica Brooke from La Follette will return as Student Senate president and alternate to the BOE Student Representative.
Other news:
In April the board received the following reports:
The Facility Assessment Report, a compilation of district maintenance needs over the next 5 years.
The Board of Education/Superintendent Communication Plan, providing a template for reports to the Board.
The District Reorganization Plan, a plan to restructure the administration and professional development department of the district.
The Board held a public hearing on the proposed budget at UW Space Place. In addition, the School Food Initiative Committee and the 4-K Advisory Committee met.
In May the Strategic Planning Steering Committee met. Stakeholders reviewed accomplishments achieved thus far and discussed and reprioritized action steps for the next year. A second public hearing on the budget was also held in May.
In June the Board finalized the Preliminary Budget after a statutory public hearing. During committee meetings on June 7, the ReAL grant team presented action plans for each of the large high schools and gave the Board an update on the ReAL grant and the Wallace grant. The four high schools have collaborated for the past two years to improve engagement and achievement at our high schools. The Student Services and Code of Conduct/Expulsions Committee presented a proposal for a new code of conduct and abeyance, with an emphasis on restorative justice.
Congratulations and good luck to all graduates! Have a safe and restful summer break.
Technical Services has planned to replace our Eudora student email system since 2008 and identified this as Activity 50 in the June 2010 Technology Plan, approved by the Board of Education. Consideration has also been given to replacing our GroupWise staff email system since instability of the web version ofthis system became a problem beginning in October 2009. Demands on our staff email system have always been greater due to our need for highly secure, robust and reliable local and remote access, shared calendaring, and integration with an archival system allowing for a seven year retention. This has been a complicated system and is core to many critical business and legal functions ofthe District.
An request for proposals (RFP) for alternatives to replace our student email, with the caveat that our staff email might be considered as well, was released in fall 2009, generating responses from nine vendors, representing 11 products. Both Microsoft's Live@edu and Google's Gmail have been final contenders for student email and following product reviews in March by 13 teachers, six technical staffand four administrators, consensus built around migrating both student and staff email to Gmail. In addition to email, Google Apps for Education includes access to a wide variety ofGoogle tools including Docs (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, fonus) and Google calendar.
Financial considerations:
Moving to Gmail for both students and staff will enable free email account hosting and cost $67,320/yr for the use ofPostini for staff email archiving. We will continue to use Novell's ZenWorks for desktop application maintenance, at a cost of $28,000/yr through the 2010-2011 fiscal year. This approach would cost $95,320/yr. Discussion around creating and maintaining Gmail accounts from Infinite Campus and Lawson, as well as migrating staff calendars and live email accounts has not concluded whether consulting help will be required, although discussions with other school districts suggest we may not need external assistance. Should technical assistance be required we would hire consulting support on a time and materials basis, for this help.
If instead, the District stayed with GroupWise bundled with ZenWorks, Novell's annual maintenance would be $54,378/yr. Continuing use our current staff email archive product would cost $29,300/yr. This approach would cost $83,678/yr, an annual savings ofless than $12,000. However, this approach will continue to require growth in data storage and requires an estimated 0.5 FTE allocation to maintain.
In response to the questions raised at the June 7 meeting of the Performance and Achievement Committee, the following information is shared in hopes ofclarifying proposed changes to the Student Code of Conduct:
Will there be a more specific definition ofbullying than the one that currently exists in the Explanation of Conduct Rules and Terms?
The following definition comes from the draft Anti-Bullying & Anti-Harassment Protocol and it, or a similar definition, will be brought forward with the version of the revised Code for which Board approval will be sought in July:
Bullying is the intentional action by an individual or group of individuals to infiict physical, emotional or mental suffering on another individual or group of individuals when there is an imbalance of real or perceived power. Harassing and bullying behavior includes any electronic, written, verbal or physical act or conduct toward an individual which creates an objectively hostile or offensive environment that meets one or more of the following conditions:
Places the individual in reasonable fear of harm to one self or one's property
Has a detrimental effect on the individual's personal, physical or mental health
Has a detrimental effect on the individual's academic performance
Has the effect of interfering with the individual's ability to participate in or benefit from any curricular, extracurricular, recreational, or any other activity provided by the school
Has the intent to intimidate, annoy or alarm another individual in a manner likely to cause annoyance or harm without legitimate purpose
Has personal contact with another individual with the intent to threaten, intimidate or alarm that individual without legitimate purpose
Monona Grove School Superintendent Craig Gerlach is not a happy camper these days, and the source of his displeasure is the ongoing job action by the Monona Grove Education Association.
As previously reported, the teachers are "working the contract," meaning they refuse to take part in school-related activities that are not specifically required.
It is a tactic the union has employed successfully in the past when contract negotiations have stalled, as they are as of this writing.
How so? Gerlach gave an example: At the Fine Arts Awards ceremony at the high school, teachers refused to come, so the kids wound up passing out the awards to each other.
"I've been getting a number of phone calls from parents," he said, "and I don't know what to say. This is all relatively new to me."
I started covering education reform in 1983, with the release of the "Nation at Risk" report. In those days everybody had some idea for how we should reorganize the schools or change the curriculum--cut school size, cut class size, create vouchers, create charters, get back to basics, do less basics, increase local control, increase the federal role.
Some of the reforms seemed promising, but the results were disappointing, and tangential to the core issue: the relationship between teacher and student. It is mushy to say so, but people learn from people they love.
Today, aided by the realization that teacher quality is what matters most, a new cadre of reformers have come on the scene, many of them bred within the ranks of Teach for America. These are stubborn, data-driven types with a low tolerance for bullshit. The reform environment they find themselves in is both softhearted and hardheaded. They put big emphasis on the teaching relationship, but are absolutely Patton-esque when it comes to dismantling anything that interferes with that relationship. This includes union rules that protect bad and mediocre teachers, teacher contracts that prevent us from determining which educators are good and which need help, and state and federal laws that either impede reform or dump money into the ancien régime.
I have long considered high school drop-outs not only the least soluble of our education problems but the least clear. School districts have traditionally fudged the numbers, reporting their drop-out rates as only 5 or 6 percent, a grossly deceptive one-year rate.
The National Governors Association and other policymakers, ashamed of this charade, have put an end to it. Everyone is switching to a four-year drop-out rate, the percentage of ninth-graders (about 31 percent nationally) who do not receive diplomas four years later. The improved data has not only raised the level of the debate but also made possible a new report with some unnerving revelations about graduation rates.
My wife made the mistake of letting me go with her to her office last Sunday to catch up on work. While there I read the new Education Week report, "Graduation by the Numbers: Putting Data to Work for Student Success," and kept squealing at one statistical surprise after another. I insisted on reading each one to her, delaying her efforts to get back outside on a nice weekend day.
When his budget for pencils, paper, and other essential supplies was cut by a third this school year, the principal of Combee Elementary School worried children would suffer.
Then, a local church stepped in and "adopted" the school. The First Baptist Church at the Mall stocked a resource room with $5,000 worth of supplies. It now caters spaghetti dinners at evening school events, buys sneakers for poor students, and sends in math and English tutors.
The principal is delighted. So are church pastors. "We have inroads into public schools that we had not had before," says Pastor Dave McClamma. "By befriending the students, we have the opportunity to visit homes to talk to parents about Jesus Christ."
Short on money for everything from math workbooks to microscope slides, public schools across the nation are seeking corporate and charitable sponsors, promising them marketing opportunities and access to students in exchange for desperately needed donations.
Detroit Public Schools will be awarding $25,000 in Target gift cards to parents, incentives to get them to submit contact information to the district.
The contact information - which includes up-to-date phone numbers, e-mail addresses and home addresses - will be used as part of a strategy to retain students and to have ongoing communications with parents about district and school news, school closing information and emergencies.
A showdown is looming over whether commitments made to retirees by government pension funds can be scaled back in dire economic times.
Facing shortfalls, some public pension funds are responding by paring back payouts pledged to retired workers. Earlier this year, pension funds in Colorado and Minnesota curtailed annual cost-of-living increases.
"No matter how draconian you got on the new hires, you ran out of money" if you didn't cut benefits to current retirees, said Meredith Williams, chief executive of the Colorado Public Employees' Retirement Association, with $34.2 billion in assets.
The new national standards are too timid to recommend that high school students read complete history (or other nonfiction) books, or that high school students should write serious research papers, like the Extended Essays required for the International Baccalaureate Diploma.
Even the College Board, when it put together "101 books for the college-bound student" included only four or five nonfiction books, and none was a history book like Battle Cry of Freedom, or Washington's Crossing.
For several reasons it has become taboo to discuss asking our students to read complete nonfiction books and write substantial term papers. Not sure why...
In fact, since the early days of Achieve's efforts on standards, no one has taken a stand in recommending serious history research papers for high school students, and nonfiction books have never made the cut either.
Since 1987 or so it has seemed just sensible to me that, as long as colleges do assign history and other nonfiction books on their reading lists, and they also assign research papers, perhaps high school students should read a nonfiction book and write a term paper each year, to get in academic shape, as it were.
After all, in helping students prepare for college math, many high schools offer calculus. For college science, high school students can get ready with biology, chemistry and physics courses. To get ready for college literature courses, students read good novels and Shakespeare plays. Students can study languages and government and even engineering and statistics in their high schools, but they aren't reading nonfiction books and they aren't writing research papers.
The English departments, who are in charge of reading and writing in the high schools, tend to assign novels, poetry, and plays rather than nonfiction books, and they have little interest in asking for serious research papers either.
For 23 years, I have been publishing exemplary history research papers by high school students from near and far [39 countries so far], and it gradually became clearer to me that perhaps most high school students were not being asked to write them.
In 2002, with a grant from the Shanker Institute, I was able to commission (the only) study of the assignment of history term papers in U.S. public high schools, and we found that most students were not being asked to do them. This helped to explain why, even though The Concord Review is the only journal in the world to publish such academic papers, more than 19,000 of the 20,000 U.S. public high schools never submitted one.
The nonfiction readings suggested in the new national standards, such as The Declaration of Independence, Letter From Birmingham Jail, and one chapter from The Federalist Papers, would not tax high school students for more than an hour, much less time than they now spend on Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and the like. What would the equivalent be for college preparation in math: long division? decimals?
High school graduates who arrive at college without ever having read a complete nonfiction book or written a serious term paper, even if they are not in remedial courses (and more than one million are each year, according to the Diploma to Nowhere report), start way behind their IB and private school peers academically, when it comes to reading and writing at the college level.
Having national standards which would send our high school graduates off to higher education with no experience of real term papers and no complete nonfiction books doesn't seem the right way to make it likely that they will ever get through to graduation.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 http://www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
The staff of Normandy Crossing Elementary School outside Houston eagerly awaited the results of state achievement tests this spring. For the principal and assistant principal, high scores could buoy their careers at a time when success is increasingly measured by such tests. For fifth-grade math and science teachers, the rewards were more tangible: a bonus of $2,850.
But when the results came back, some seemed too good to be true. Indeed, after an investigation by the Galena Park Independent School District, the principal, assistant principal and three teachers resigned May 24 in a scandal over test tampering.
The district said the educators had distributed a detailed study guide after stealing a look at the state science test by "tubing" it -- squeezing a test booklet, without breaking its paper seal, to form an open tube so that questions inside could be seen and used in the guide. The district invalidated students' scores.
Of all the forms of academic cheating, none may be as startling as educators tampering with children's standardized tests. But investigations in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Virginia and elsewhere this year have pointed to cheating by educators. Experts say the phenomenon is increasing as the stakes over standardized testing ratchet higher -- including, most recently, taking student progress on tests into consideration in teachers' performance reviews.
The warning the Verona Area School District issued Wednesday night comes about six weeks after the fatal shooting of Antonio Perez on Madison's East Side. Madison police have said they believe the slaying was gang-related.
Police in Madison, Middleton and Verona have been on alert for potential gang retaliation since Perez was killed in April 28. Authorities said the threat of violence between the Clanton 14 gang and the Carnales gang has been on their radar.
Verona Area School District Superintendent Dean Gorrell explained Thursday that it was his decision, and not by direction of law enforcement, that a warning on the threat of violence was announced Wednesday night.
The Board has two work sessions scheduled for this month.
The first, today, Thursday June 10 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm, will be on Math. No agenda details are available but there is sure to be a powerpoint and it is sure to appear on the District web site soon. I have to believe that the Board is looking for a report on the implementation of the curricular alignment, the implementation of the Theory of Action from the High School textbook adoption, and some update on student academic progress in math.
Next week, on Wednesday, June 16, from 4:00pm to 5:30pm, will be a Board Work Session on Advanced Learning. I honestly cannot imagine what the District staff will have to report
With a little tweaking "The Lottery" would fit nicely into the marketing materials for the Harlem Success Academy, a public charter school founded by Eva Moskowitz, a former New York City councilwoman. On one level, this heart-tugging documentary recounts the experiences of four children competing in the academy's annual intake lottery. On another, it's a passionate positioning of charter schools as the saviors of public education.
Though infinitely classier -- and easier on the eyes -- than "Cartel," the recent documentary exploring public education, this latest charter-school commercial is no less one-sided. Virtually relinquishing the floor to Ms. Moskowitz (who delights in vilifying the "thuggish" tactics of the United Federation of Teachers) and her supporters, the director, Madeleine Sackler, captures a smidgen of naysayers in mostly unflattering lights. Ignoring critical issues like financial transparency, Ms. Sackler sells her viewpoint with four admirable, striving families, each of whose tots could charm the fleas off a junkyard dog.
Over at Flypaper Mike Petrilli has finally tried to address the problems we've raised regarding national standards. Despite Mike's best efforts, I'm afraid that national standards and assessments still sound like a really bad idea.
I raised doubts about the rigor and soundness of the proposed national standards, citing the fact that many credible experts have denounced them as lousy. His response is simply to repeat that Fordham has given the standards good grades and thinks the latest revisions have been positive. This is not a substantive response; it is simply a reiteration of their initial position.
Why should we find Fordham's grading of the proposed national standards any more credible than that of the experts who have denounced the standards? The fact that Fordham issued a report with letter grades is just a marketing exercise for Fordham's opinion. There is nothing scientific or rigorous about Fordham hand-picking their friends experts to repeat the opinion Fordham already holds -- especially when we know from past experience that Fordham might exclude experts or change the grades if it does not come out the way they want.
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing announced that he is ready to take control of Detroit's failing schools. He endorsed petition efforts underway to put mayoral control on the November ballot, but evidence suggests that the effort might be an uphill electoral battle.
Detroit's schools suffer a litany of challenges. Its students have the lowest NAEP scores of any urban district. There has been a precipitous decline in enrollment over the last decade and a budget deficit in the hundreds of millions prompted Governor Granholm to appoint "emergency financial manager" Robert Bobb in March 2009 to command control of the district's cash.
Despite these pressing issues, only 4% of Detroit residents feel that the schools are the biggest problem facing the city, a statistic that, though disheartening, is fairly unsurprising considering that the city was named one of the ten most dangerous in the world by CNN this year and that unemployment hovers somewhere around 25%. Voters have other things on their minds, but getting their attention won't be the biggest obstacle to mayoral control. History will.
The banks got their federal bailout. So did the automakers.
Now North Carolina public-school children are asking if they will get theirs. Only their congressman knows for sure.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was in North Carolina last week with a warning from the Obama administration and education supporters across the country. If Congress does not provide a bailout of state school budgets, as many as 300,000 teachers nationwide, 10,000 of them in North Carolina, could be laid off before the start of the next school term.
North Carolina legislators are so certain that the federal government won't allow such a catastrophe that they have already written a lot of unappropriated federal money into the budget for the fiscal year that begins on July 1. But they are being optimistic in doing so.
Following is a message from the Superintendent and VAHS Administration. Please address any inquiries to VAHS Administration or Dr. Gorrell.
Through our contacts with the Dane County Gang Task Force we have recieved information that indicates in the coming days the VAHS campus or Verona Hometown Days are possible locations for an altercation between two rival gangs. These gangs are the Clanton 14 gang and the Carnales gang. These are the two gangs alleged to have connections with the murder of Antonio Perez last month.
Given this information the following security measures will be put in place immediately:
Tomorrow and Friday we will have an additional VPD Officer stationed on campus working with Officer Truscott. Also, regular VPD patrol officers will be in the area patrolling both the VAHS campus and the neighboring residential area in their squad cars.
Members of the administrative team will also be out patrolling the interior and exterior of the buildings throughout the day. Special attention will be paid to monitoring the two designated K-Wing and two designated main building entrances. All other entrances are to be kept closed and locked. This too will be monitored by the VPD and HS administration.
Given current information the Administrative team, in consultation with our partners in law enforcement, believes that these are prudent preventative steps. If additional information becomes available we will alter this plan accordingly. We ask all staff members to do their usual stellar job of remaining vigilant and reporting anything of concern to the Administrative Team at once.
Keeping staff informed is a priority and more information will be provided if and when it becomes available.
Thank You,
Dr. Gorrell
Ms. Hammen
Ms. Williams
Mr. Murphy
Mr. Boehm
It's a well-known fact that there's a severe gender imbalance in undergraduate college populations: about 57 percent of undergrads these days are female and only 43 percent male, the culmination of a trend over the past few decades in which significantly fewer young men than young women either graduate from high school or enroll in college. It's also a well-known fact---at least among college admissions officers---that many private institutions have tried to close the gender gap by quietly relaxing admissions standards for male applicants, essentially practicing affirmative action for young men. What they're doing is perfectly legal, even under Title IX, the 1972 federal law that bans sex discrimination by institutions of higher learning receiving federal funds. Title IX contains an exemption that specifically allows private colleges that aren't professional or technical institutions to prefer one sex over the other in undergraduate admissions. Militant feminists and principled opponents of affirmative action might complain about the discrimination against women that Title IX permits, but for many second- and third-tier liberal arts colleges lacking male educational magnets such as engineering and business programs, the exemption may be a lifesaver, preventing those smaller and less prestigious schools from turning into de facto women's colleges that few young people of either sex might want to attend.
Now, however, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has decided to turn over this rock carefully set in place by admissions committees. The commission launched an investigation last fall into the extent of male preferences in admissions decisions at 19 various institutions of higher learning. These include public universities (where such preferences are illegal under Title IX); elite private institutions such as Georgetown and Johns Hopkins; smaller liberal arts schools (Gettysburg College, with 2,600 undergraduates, is on the list); religious schools (the Jesuit-run University of Richmond and Messiah College in Grantham, Pa.); and historically black Virginia Union University, also in Richmond. On May 14 the commission's general counsel, David P. Blackwood, announced that four of the 19 schools--Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Gettysburg, and Messiah---had raised legal issues concerning compliance with the commission's subpoenas, and that Virginia Union, while responding politely, had not complied in any way. Blackwood said that the commission might have to ask the Justice Department for help in obtaining admissions data from Virginia Union.
This is the second in a series of interviews with thought leaders in education reform. Today we interview former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise about personalized learning, equity and policy changes that will enable a better system for our students.
What is the vision for personalized learning?
For personalized learning, it's delivering high-quality content to children and students wherever they live. I mean, whatever their conditions, their life situations, their educaiton surroundings. It's being able to customize education so that we engage each student where they want to be, and make it as relevant as possible to them.
Personalization to me is the sense of making sure there is a personal graduation plan for every student, making sure a direct relationship bteween at least one adult in the building and one student.
Even if you are using data...there is data that immediately is picking up whether they are increasing absences, etc...and someone is charged with intervening. How do we take what is a largely impersonal experience, to using technology that is actually helping education become a more personal experience.
We our now entering the second round of "Race to the Top." State legislatures are busy worshiping at the alter of "charter schools" in order to establish their eligibility.
The radio, television, and print ads show a very unlikely and powerful coalition supporting the demand for new charter schools - Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, JP Morgan, assorted hedge funds, Michael "Moneybags" Bloomberg, Joel "Clueless" Klein, and Reverend Al Sharpton. The impression they are trying to give is that everybody whose opinion we trust thinks it is a good idea and that the teachers and their evil union want to block reform that will benefit our children.
On May 27, 2010, JP Morgan Chase ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times with the headline The Way Forward, Investing in Our Children's Future. It cost the bank approximately $180,000. This is the same JP Morgan Chase that received a $25 billion bailout from Congress as part of the federal Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Just because the bank can't manage its own affairs, does not mean it shouldn't manage ours.
Boston school officials this week will unveil a more stringent residency policy for students applying to the city's three exam schools, responding to growing concerns that out-of-towners are improperly gaining admission.
Currently, nonresidents can take the entrance exam for those schools; they must establish residency shortly before admission decisions are made.
"It's a fairly significant change,'' said Rachel Skerritt, chief of staff for Superintendent Carol R. Johnson. "We want to make sure students who have access to the stellar education at the exam schools live in the city.''
You can say what you like about B.C. comptroller-general Cheryl Wenezenki-Yolland, at least if you can pronounce her name. But she sure knows how to shake things up.
Last fall, this steely mother of two blasted bloated management at TransLink and excessive executive compensation at B.C. Ferries, drawing cries of outrage from high-priced boss David Hahn.
Now, Wenezenki-Yolland has drawn equal if not greater howls of indignation by ripping into the Vancouver School Board. And the report she released Friday on the trustees' management ability, or lack of it, has had board chairwoman Patti Bacchus on the verge of tears.
The Perry Preschool was the idea of a man named David Weikart. He was a school system administrator in the small city of Ypsilanti, Michigan back in the late 1950s. When he took the job, he was shocked to discover how many poor African-American children were doing badly in school. A lot of them were being assigned to special education classes, getting held back, and failing to graduate from high school.
Weikart wanted to do something about it, but school officials did not share his enthusiasm. They didn't want him changing things, messing around in their schools.
So rather than change the schools, Weikart decided to invent a new kind of school - a pre-school for 3- and 4-year-olds. His hope was that preschool could boost children's IQs.
This was a radical notion. Most people believed everyone was born with a certain amount of intelligence, a quotient, and it never changed. They had faith in IQ tests to measure intelligence. And they thought intelligence mattered a lot, that it was the key to success in school, and life.
It's 7:15 on a chilly spring morning kids from all over New Orleans are coming in by the bus load to KIPP Central City Academy and Primary. A group of sixth graders is hanging outside, waiting for the bell to ring. So I ask them what they think about their school. Three of the boys say they like it just fine. The fourth one, Troy Picard, is not a fan.
"No, their rules are just too strict for me," says Picard, prompting a quick rebuttal from his friend Carl Lacoste.
"Troy, I disagree what you said about strict rules," Lacoste says. "The only rules we have are work hard and be nice."
"But a lot of other rules fall under that category," Picard says.
Students aren't the only ones with rules. Jonathan Bertch, who runs the business side of things at KIPP Central City, says adults at the school have rules, too. The main one is "no excuses." As in: All those excuses you hear about why inner city kids can't succeed? Out the window.
Spurred by state budget crunches and an angry public mood, Republican and some Democratic leaders are focusing with increasing intensity on public workers and the unions that represent them, casting them as overpaid obstacles to good government and demanding cuts in their often-generous benefits.
Unlike past battles over the high cost of labor, this time pitched battles over wages and pensions are being waged from Sacramento to Springfield to New York City and the conflict is marked by its bipartisan tone, with public employee unions emerging as an intransigent public enemy number one in cities and state capitals across the country.
They're the whipping boys for a new generation of governors who, thanks to a tanking economy and an assist from editorial boards, feel freer than ever to make political targets out of what was once a protected liberal class of teachers, cops, and other public servants.
Attention, children in Milwaukee Public Schools: Your Reading Adventure Awaits!
It has lots of stories! It wants you to write out answers to lots of questions about what goes on in the stories!
It has lists of spelling words! It will teach you the difference between common nouns and proper nouns! How to use proofreading marks! What to learn from the sequence of vowels and consonants in words!
It has a fair amount of phonics-related skill building, but it's not as strong on that as some phonics-oriented people would like!
It will require you to do a lot of work, if you're going to succeed! It's not easy! I stumbled during an exercise in a fifth-grade reading book on matching English words to their foreign language roots, and I thought I was smarter than a fifth-grader!
In Harlem--as elsewhere in this city, state, and nation--there is a sharply rising struggle between teachers' unions and black parents.
That dispute is over parental choice of schools, especially in regards to publicly financed charter schools which can, and usually do, refuse to recognize teachers' unions. Geoffrey Canada, whose Harlem Children's Zone is nationally known for making charter schools a working part of the community, recently sent out a rallying cry to black parents everywhere when he said, "Nobody's coming. Nobody is going to save our children. You have to save your own children."
In Harlem, where thousands of parents apply for charter schools on civil rights grounds, State Senator Bill Perkins--whose civil liberties record I've previously praised in this column--is in danger of losing his seat because of his fierce opposition to charter schools. The UFT contributes to his campaigns. His opponent, Basil Smikle--who has worked for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Bill Clinton Foundation, and, unfortunately, Michael Bloomberg--says: "Education has galvanized the community."
1833: Founding of Kalamazoo College, Michigan's oldest college campus.
1874: Kalamazoo paves the way for tax-funded education in Michigan when the state Supreme Court affirms Kalamazoo's right to levy taxes to operate a public high school.
1896: Kalamazoo Public Library is among the first 10 in the country, and the second in Michigan after Detroit, to create a children's section with its own librarian.
1903: Founding of Western Michigan University, now one of the 50 largest universities in the country.
1906: Kalamazoo Central High School creates state's first high school marching band.
1920: Kalamazoo Central becomes the country's second high school with a drama class and opens Chenery Auditorium, one of the largest high school auditoriums of that era.
1958: Kalamazoo College creates its study-abroad program, one of the first in the country.
Democratic candidate for governor Tom Barrett wants to get rid of the offices of the secretary of state and the state treasurer as part of a plan he says would cut more than $1 billion from Wisconsin's budget.
Barrett said some of the savings could be achieved every year, while other cuts -- such as eliminating those constitutional offices, an uncertain and arduous process -- would represent one-time savings.
At a news conference outside the state Capitol on Monday, Barrett said his plans would include steps like combining workers statewide into pools to purchase lower-cost health insurance, cracking down on Medicaid fraud and other financial crimes, and cutting prisoner health care costs.
He also called for "right-sizing" the state employee work force but did not say if that would involve layoffs or simply not filling vacant jobs.
Barrett called it his plan for "putting Madison on a diet."
8%: Gross U.S. public debt as a share of annual economic output.
There's little doubt that the U.S. needs to get its mounting debts under control. But at what point do they become a clear and present danger?
By some measures, we're reaching that point about now. As of Friday, our total national debt - the sum of all outstanding IOUs issued by the U.S. Treasury - stood at a bit more than $13 trillion, or almost 90% of our projected gross domestic product for 2010.
The 90% level is significant, because recent research by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff suggests that once a developed nation's debt crosses it, its annual economic growth tends to be about one percentage point lower. At a time when economists are saying it could take years for the U.S. to bring unemployment back down to pre-recession levels, that percentage point could make a big difference.
Jay Gould, a 19th-century railroad tycoon and unrepentant rapscallion, said he was a Democrat when in Democratic districts and a Republican when in Republican districts but that he was always for the Erie Railroad. Gould, emblematic of Gilded Age rapaciousness, was called a robber baron. What should we call people whose defining constancy is that they are always for unionized public employees? Call them Democrats.
This week, when Congress returns from its Memorial Day recess, many Democrats, having gone an eternity -- more than a week -- without spending billions of their constituents' money, will try to make up for lost time by sending another $23 billion to states to prevent teachers from being laid off. The alternative to this "desperately" needed bailout, says Education Secretary Arne Duncan, is "catastrophe." Amazing. Just 16 months ago, in the stimulus legislation, Congress shoveled about $100 billion to education, including $48 billion in direct aid to states. According to a University of Washington study, this saved more than 342,000 teaching and school staff positions -- about 5.5 percent of all the positions in America's 15,000 school systems.
The federal component of education spending on kindergarten through 12th grade, the quintessential state and local responsibility, has doubled since 2000, to 15 percent. Now the supposed emergency, and states' dependency, may be becoming routine and perpetual.
A good friend of mine, James, has an interview this morning. It is quite important. If he is successful, it will mean quite a lot in the future. If he fails, he will certainly be at a disadvantage.
Given the importance of doing well, he has spent some time preparing and rehearsing answers to practice questions. What he wears to the interview has been carefully thought out as first impressions are very important. There is a lot riding on the 15 minutes he will spend being questioned.
James, however, is not taking this very seriously. I am confident that he does not have the faintest idea how important this is. In fact, it is fairly likely that he will not even realise that he has to do an interview at all until he is right there in the room.
James is two years old. His interview is for the purpose of whether he will get into primary school, in a couple of years. There is nothing particularly special about the school he is applying to; its admission policies are the same as a lot of schools in Hong Kong.
I have been known to produce pieces of pure fiction in this column from time to time, but I am not making this up. This actually happens. Schools really employ people to interview two-year-olds and make a decision about each toddler's academic future.
Mr Green, speaking at the Hay Festival on the Welsh borders on Saturday, said it would be of particular relevance to those who would grow up to become part of the sub-prime market.
"Part of the answer lies in financial literacy education in schools," said Mr Green, promoting his 2009 book Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World.
"I really don't think it's wise in the circumstances of modern life to have people come out of the school system into working life or, sadly, often not working life, without the very basics of financial literacy."
Mr Green, who has been chairman of HSBC since 2005, and is also an ordained priest, was keen to stress that there was a social imperative for banking services to be open to those on lower incomes.
However, he said some forms of lending were unacceptable, citing 110pc mortgages, and said those at the bottom end of the market may not have had proper understanding or access to information when taking out such loans.
Almost 78 percent of the district's 13,816 students are of Hispanic or Latino origin. About 54 percent of them are English-language learners. The district, which sprawls over the foothills in east San Jose, is more working class than middle class.
It's tempting to view a district like Alum Rock as indicative of the challenges California will face in educating the next generation of children, but it might be better to view it as an opportunity. California's educational system desperately needs to adapt to both a 21st century economy and the state's shifting demographics. We can't afford to fail the next generation of students. So how will California's educational system adapt to meet their needs?
Math and language arts standards likely will become more rigorous in Utah schools.
As part of a widespread movement toward common academic goals, the Utah Board of Education gave preliminary approval Friday to a new set of language arts and mathematics standards for children in grades K-12, developed for a group of 48 states, two territories and the District of Columbia. If the plan gains final approval in August, state officials plan to overhaul Utah's language arts and math curricula over the next five years to reflect the new goals, which are more ambitious in some ways than Utah's current ones, said Brenda Hales, state associate superintendent.
"They are high standards," said state Superintendent Larry Shumway. "They are high and they are rigorous. I don't have any doubt they will be a step forward for us as a state."
'What's funny," says Madeleine Sackler, "is that I'm not really a political person." Yet the petite 27-year-old is the force behind "The Lottery"--an explosive new documentary about the battle over the future of public education opening nationwide this Tuesday.
In the spring of 2008, Ms. Sackler, then a freelance film editor, caught a segment on the local news about New York's biggest lottery. It wasn't the Powerball. It was a chance for 475 lucky kids to get into one of the city's best charter schools (publicly funded schools that aren't subject to union rules).
"I was blown away by the number of parents that were there," Ms. Sackler tells me over coffee on Manhattan's Upper West Side, recalling the thousands of people packed into the Harlem Armory that day for the drawing. "I wanted to know why so many parents were entering their kids into the lottery and what it would mean for them." And so Ms. Sackler did what any aspiring filmmaker would do: She grabbed her camera.
Her initial aim was simple. "Going into the film I was excited just to tell a story," she says. "A vérité film, a really beautiful, independent story about four families that you wouldn't know otherwise" in the months leading up to the lottery for the Harlem Success Academy.
It's been widely reported that the Arizona Department of Education has begun working to remove teachers whose English-language skills are viewed as inadequate. According to press reports, the evaluators aim (among other things) to remove teachers with "accents", which probably means Spanish accents in most cases. Casey Stegall, "Arizona Seeks to Reassign Heavily Accented Teachers", Fox News 5/22/2010, wrote:
After passing the nation's toughest state immigration enforcement law, Arizona's school officials are now cracking down on teachers with heavy accents.
A consortium of school districts including: Belleville, Middelton Cross Plains, Mt. Horeb, Oregon, McFarland, Verona Area, Madison and Wisconsin Heights are actively and energetically seeking partnerships with business, academic and manufacturing sectors in the Dane County region in an effort to create and staff what is referred to as The Global Academy. The Global Academy will be a hybrid secondary / post-secondary learning environment designed primarily for high school juniors and seniors from the consortium districts. The Global Academy will provide specialized and advanced training in the following areas that culminate in two year or four year degrees: Architecture and Construction, HealthScience, InformationTechnology, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
Rationale:
Regional, national and global need for specialized and advanced skills, along with growing competition for jobs that require those skills from advanced and developing countries is changing the curriculum landscape for high schools in the United States. In Wisconsin, public high schools are making valiant efforts to respond to this need, but struggle to do so given revenue caps and shrinking budgets. Neighboring school districts produce similar programs that are barely sustainable and represent an inefficient duplication of programs and services. A consortium of school districts providing specialized and advanced programs, pooling resources, talent and students is a much more viable and sustainable method ofproviding educational programs that prepare students for 21st Century career opportunities. Additionally, partnering with business, manufacturing and academic sectors will add expertise, latest trend information and greatly increased opportunities for obtaining certifications, advanced standing and credits in institutions of higher learning.
The district has developed over time a very detailed Student Code of Conduct that clearly outlines student misbehavior and prescribes suspension and expulsion as the specific responses for some misbehavior. While the current code is clear regarding which misbehaviors require suspension and a recommendation for expulsion, it does not offer administrators a sufficient array of options that can be used to intervene in order to support behavior change in students when suspension and expulsion are not an appropriate consequence.
Current research shows that a reactive model in the absence of positive, proactive strategies is ineffective. As an evidence-based national model that has recently been adopted at the state level in Wisconsin, Positive Behavior Supports (PBS) provides the mechanism for schools to shift to data driven decision making and practices grounded in a tiered approach that emphasizes teaching, modeling and reinforcing pro-social skills and behavior. Many districts across the country are developing Codes of Conduct that align with the PBS Model.
As all elementary, middle and high schools move toward full implementation of Positive Behavior Supports (PBS), it is important that the Code of Conduct is aligned with the PBS model which is grounded in teaching appropriate behaviors to students and acknowledging students for learning and exhibiting positive behavior. PBS provides a framework for defining and teaching in positive terms what is expected from students as behavior expectations that are defined only by
Appendix LLL-12-11 June 14,2010
III.
rules and "what not to do" provide an inadequate understanding for students and families.
The proposed Code o f Conduct represents a step toward improved alignment with the PBS model and reflects a shift in thinking from an approach that relies heavily on rules, consequences and reactive practices to an approach that provides a multi-tiered, progressive continuum of interventions to address a wide range of student behavior. While the current code is used primarily by administrators to determine which misbehaviors are appropriate for suspension and expulsion, the proposed code would also be used by teachers and other staff to determine which behaviors they are expected to handle in the classroom and which behaviors should be referred to the administrator or designee. It will provide all staff with multiple options in three (3) categories of intervention: Education, Restoration and Restriction (see details in attached chart). In addition, the proposed code presented in 'chart form' would be used as a teaching tool to give students a visual picture o f the increasing severity o f behaviors and the increasing intensity of interventions and consequences that result from engaging in inappropriate behaviors.
The District has developed overtime, an extensive and very clear expulsion process, that is compliant with state and federal law, that focuses on procedure and is based on zero tolerance for some behaviors, In the 2007/08 school year, 198 students were recommended for expulsion with 64 actually being expelled. In the 2008/09, 182 students were recommended for expulsion with 44 actually being expelled.
Students are expelled from two to three semesters depending on the violation with an option to apply for early readmission after one semester if conditions are met. Approximately 72% of the students meet early readmission conditions and retum after one semester. Currently, no services are provided to regular education students who are expelled, Expelled special education students are entitled to receive Disciplinary Free Appropriate Public Education services.
Concems have been raised by members of the Board of Education, MMSD staff and community about the zero tolerance model, lack of services to expelled students and the significant disruption caused in the lives of these students, families and neighborhoods when students are expelled.
Approval is being sought for the implementation of an abeyance option, the Phoenix Program, including the budget, to be implemented at the beginning of the 2010/11 school year,
District administration, along with school leadership and school staff; have examined the research that shows thatfundamental change in education can only be accomplished by creating the opportunity for teachers to talk with one another regarding their instructional practice. The central theme and approach for REaL has heen to improve and enhance instructional practice through collaboration in order to increase student achievement. Special attention has been paid to ensure the work is done in a cross - district, interdepartmental and collaborative manner. Central to the work, are district and school based discussions focused on what skills and knowledge students need to know and be able to do, in order to be prepared for post-secondary education and work. Systemized discussions regarding curriculum aligmnent, course offerings, assessment systems, behavioral expectations and 21 st century skills are occurring across all four high schools and at the district level.
Collaborative professional development has been established to ensure that the work capitalizes on the expertise of current staff, furthers best practices that are already occurring within the MMSD high school classrooms, and enhances the skills of individuals at all levels from administration to classroom teachers needed. Our work to date has laid the foundation for further and more in-depth work to occur.
Since March of 2010, MMSD district and school staff has completed the following work to move the goals of the REaL Grant forward. Specific accomplishments aligning to REaL grant goals are listed below.
REaL Grant Goal 1: Improve Student Achievement for all students
Accomplishment I: Completed year 2 of professional development for Department Chairpersons to become instructional leaders. The work will continue this summer with the first ever Department Chairperson and Assistant Principal Summer Institute to focus on leading and fostering teacher collaboration in order to improve student achievement.
Accomplishment 2: Continued with planning for implementing the ACT Career and College Readiness Standards and the EP AS system. Visited with area districts to see the
impact of effective implementation the EP AS system in order to ensure successful implementation within MMSD.
Accomplishment 3: Piloted the implementation of the EXPLORE test at Memorial, Sherman and with 9th grade AVID students at all four comprehensive high schools.
Accomplishment 4: This summer, in partnership with Monona Grove High School and Association of Wisconsin School Administrators (AWSA), MMSD will host the Aligned by Design: Aligning High School and Middle School English, Science, Math and Social Studies Courses to College/Career Readiness Skills. To be attended by teams of MMSD high school and middle school staff in July of 2010.
Accomplishment 5: Continued focused planning and development of a master communication system for the possible implementation of early release Professional Collaboration Time at MMSD High Schools. Schools have developed plans for effective teaming structures and accountability measures.
Accomplishment 6: District English leadership team developed recommendations for essential understandings in the areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening for 9th and 10th grades. Following this successful model, similar work will occur in Math, Science and Social studies.
First, Obama and the education secretary, Arne Duncan, set up a contest. They put down $4.5 billion in Race to the Top money. They issued some general guidelines about what kind of reforms states would have to adopt to get the money. And then they fired the starting gun.
Reformers in at least 23 states have passed reform laws in hopes of getting some of the dough. Some of the state laws represent incremental progress and some represent substantial change. The administration has hung tough, demanding real reform in exchange for dollars. Over all, there's been a tremendous amount of movement in a brief time.
This is not heavy-handed Washington command-and-control. This is Washington energizing diverse communities of reformers, locality by locality, and giving them more leverage in their struggles against the defenders of the status quo.
Second, the Obama administration used the power of the presidency to break through partisan gridlock. Over the past decade, teacher unions and their allies have become proficient in beating back Republican demands for more charters, accountability and choice. But Obama has swung behind a series of bipartisan reformers who are also confronting union rigidity.
In Rhode Island, the Central Falls superintendent, Frances Gallo, fired all the teachers at one failing school. The unions fought back. Obama sided with Gallo, sending shock waves nationwide. If the president had the guts to confront a sacred Democratic interest group in order to jolt a failing school, then change was truly in the air. Gallo got the concessions she needed to try to improve that school.
Daniel A. Domenech arrived in Fairfax County 13 years ago as the new schools superintendent.
He was a former elementary school teacher with a reputation for raising achievement for low-income students. But he had to prove himself, fast, in difficult circumstances. Many Fairfax schools, particularly in the Route 1 corridor, were doing worse than the county average in math and reading, and many parents did not want to hear about it.
Domenech launched Project Excel, identifying 20 elementary schools as low-performing and giving them more class time and money to improve. But at community forums, people asked him why he was stigmatizing schools full of good people trying their best. Domenech shook his head. "If you are satisfied with the education your kids are getting, this is fine," he said. "But I'm not."
When he left seven years later, many Excel schools had turned around, and Domenech was a national figure, eventually becoming executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. Now his successor, School Superintendent Jack D. Dale, faces his own crisis: deep budget cuts that have ended the Excel program that made Domenech's reputation. I asked the former superintendent how he felt about that.
The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) is a model merit pay* program being replicated all across the country. TAP awards teachers performance bonuses of $1-6,000 based on their impact on student achievement and observations in classrooms. Additionally, TAP selects master teachers to serve as mentors to less-experienced or struggling peers, and the mentors are eligible for $7-15,000 bonuses. It's a promising model that's likely to receive a significant boost from President Obama's increase in funding for the federal Teacher Incentive Fund.
Yet, recent research on TAP's implementation in Chicago schools found it to have no impact on student achievement or teacher retention. Some people are hailing this as the failure of the entire idea of compensating teachers for their observed performance, but let's slow down a little bit and consider the Chicago findings alongside the results of another large-scale merit pay evaluations, notably, the one for Denver's ProComp. Unlike TAP, teachers participating in ProComp were more likely to stay in their school and did improve learning outcomes for children.
The biggest lesson to learn from these evaluations is that not all experiments in merit pay are created equal. Unlike TAP, the option to participate in ProComp is available to individual teachers, so there's likely to be greater evidence of teachers selecting into the option that fits them best. Similarly, because all incoming teachers are part of ProComp, Denver may attract different types of teachers who want to work there. This is exactly what happened: the greatest changes attributable to ProComp manifest because of the composition of the teaching workforce, not because individuals have a particular incentive in a given year.
The lack of nation-wide education standards has long been a key difference between US schools and those of most other developed countries, many of which score higher on international comparisons.
To help make sure schoolchildren around the country are learning the same grade-by-grade information necessary for success in college and life after high school, Wisconsin's schools chief Wednesday formally committed the state to adopting a set of national education standards.
The long-awaited Common Core State Standards for English and math, released Wednesday, define the knowledge and skills children should be learning from kindergarten through graduation, a move intended to put the United States on par with other developed countries and to make it easier to compare test scores from state to state.
"These standards are aligned with college and career expectations, will ensure academic consistency throughout the state and across other states that adopt them, and have been benchmarked against international standards for high-performing countries," state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers said in a news release Wednesday.
Wisconsin already had pledged to support the common standards. A draft report released in March solicited public comment on the standards, which were subsequently tweaked before the final document was released Wednesday.
School choice option including both voucher and neo-voucher options like tuition tax credit funded scholarship programs have become increasingly prevalent in recent years (Howell, Peterson, Wolf and Campbell, 2006). One popular argument for school choice policies is that public schools will improve the education they offer when faced with competition for students. Because state funds are tied to student enrollment, losing students to private schools
constitutes a financial loss to public schools. If schools face the threat of losing students and the state funds attached to those students--to private schools, they should be incentivized to cultivate customer (i.e., parental) satisfaction by operating more efficiently and improving on the outcomes valued by students and parents (Friedman, 1962).
Alternatively, vouchers may have unintended negative effects on public schools if they draw away the most involved families from public schools and the monitoring of those schools diminishes, allowing schools to reduce effort put into educating students (McMillan, 2004).1
It is notoriously difficult to gauge the competitive effects of private schools on public
school performance because private school supply and public school performance affect each other dynamically (Dee, 1998; McEwan, 2000). In cross-section, the relationship between private school supply and public school performance could plausibly be either upward-biased or downward-biased. On the one hand, private schools may disproportionately locate in communities with low-quality public schools. In such a case, the estimated relationship between private school penetration and public school performance would be downward-biased. On the other hand, if private schools locate in areas with high valuation of educational quality, then the
Pressure for quick fixes can outweigh research evidence when ministers set schools policy, according to a study of three decades of education initiatives.
Media pressure and political expediency are more likely to influence decision making, says a report from the CfBT education charity.
The report draws upon interviews with former ministers and civil servants.
It calls for the setting up of an independent chief education officer to give objective advice.
The report, Instinct or Reason, due to be published next week, examines the pressures that have shaped education policy since the late-1970s, across Conservative and Labour administrations.
Yes ter day, I wrote about just a few of the rea sons I am opposed to summer home work. Of course that doesn't mean I am opposed to read ing for plea sure, learn ing for plea sure, or pur su ing one's pas sions. I'm just opposed to the school send ing home the same kind of work it sends home dur ing the school year - work that is mostly an after thought, is busywork, and doesn't engage a student.
Before you resign your self to sum mer home work, though, make sure that your school is com ply ing with all poli cies and guidelines.
Take a few min utes and check your school's pol icy. You might be surprised to find that it for bids sum mer home work. If it does, just give your school prin ci pal a friendly call and remind her/him of the pol icy. But if your school pol icy doesn't pro hibit sum mer home work, don't stop there. Be sure to check the dis trict and state guide lines as well.
A group representing governors and state school chiefs laid out a detailed blueprint Wednesday of the skills students should learn at each grade level, reinvigorating the battle over what some see as an attempt to usurp local control of schools.
Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia have signed on to the concept of common standards but haven't promised to adopt them. If they do, it could trigger wide-scale changes to state tests, textbooks and teacher-education programs nationwide.
The Common Core State Standards detail the math and language-arts knowledge children should master to prepare them for college and the work force.
The blueprint doesn't tell teachers exactly what to teach or how to teach but lays out broad goals for student achievement. Kindergartners, for example, should know how to count to 100 by tens, and eighth-graders should be able to determine an author's point of view. Currently, each state sets its own academic benchmarks, and the rigor varies widely.
School districts around the country are planning massive layoffs as they struggle to bridge big budget deficits.
And as they select which teachers go and which ones stay, many can only use one factor as their guide: seniority. Many districts will have to cast out effective teachers, because local contracts and even state laws require it.
Like many of his counterparts around the country, Cleveland schools CEO Eugene Sanders is facing a monster $54 million spending gap.
According to Sanders, there's no room left to trim, and he may have to shed more than 500 teachers. He says that when he sent out pink slips earlier this year, he had no flexibility.
The crisis in U.S. public education is beginning to read like something out of the theater of the absurd.
Now they are getting rid of summer school.
The Associated Press reported Sunday: "Across the country, districts are cutting summer school because it's just too expensive to keep. The cuts started when the recession began and have worsened, affecting more children and more essential programs that help struggling students." A survey found that over one third of the school districts in the country are looking at cutting out summer school starting this fall. And who are the students who will be hit hardest by this move? "Experts say studies show summer break tends to widen the achievement gap between poor students and their more affluent peers whose parents can more easily afford things like educational vacations, camps and sports teams," said AP.
"Most people generally think summer is a great time for kids to be kids, a time for something different, a time for all kinds of exploration and enrichment," Ron Fairchild, chief executive officer of the National Summer Learning Association, told the news agency. "Our mythology about summer learning really runs counter to the reality of what this really is like for kids in low-income communities and for their families when this faucet of public support shuts off."
Crawford Lewis was the leading man for DeKalb County's school system. But when it comes to the accusations in his indictment last week, he appeared to be more of a supporting character to the woman who ran the district's construction program.
In a 127-page indictment handed down Wednesday, Lewis is portrayed as a superintendent who turned a blind eye to violations of district policy and state law, compromising himself for little in return.
If Lewis was a secondary figure, his former chief operating officer, Patricia "Pat" Reid, has been painted as the star of this unfolding drama -- a construction expert who duped school board members and steered work to her husband.
Reid's husband at the time, Tucker architect Tony Pope, is depicted as a businessman ready to get a bigger piece of the pie. Their 2005 marriage was annulled in April, but prior to that Reid was known as Pat Pope.
A few weeks ago my friend's 8-year-old came home all excited, waving a letter from school about a test called the Scholastic Reading Inventory.
Not only did the little boy have test results showing he'd scored well above the third-grade level (no surprise to anyone who knows this avid reader), he also had a list of recommended books. Number one on the list: Arctic Dreams. Number two: A Clockwork Orange.
A Clockwork Orange?
His mom gently took the list away and scanned the titles before explaining that she would not be getting a dystopian novel about ultraviolence for her third-grader (or, for that matter, most of the other recommended books, including Guns of August, Left for Dead, and Kafka's Metamorphosis). Then she called her son's school, Shorewood Elementary, to ask what was going on.
President Barack Obama's signature education initiative has encouraged the overhaul of state laws governing charter schools, teacher evaluations and student-testing systems.
But ahead of the Tuesday deadline for states to apply for the second phase of Race to the Top, some education reformers were complaining the changes have not been as bold or widespread as expected.
"It's the dog that didn't bark," said Andy Smarick, a former education department official under George W. Bush who supports the initiative. "I don't want to underplay what has happened, but we have not seen revolutionary changes from coast to coast."
Madison's public school budget process is lurching to a preliminary close tonight -- final numbers will be available in October after the state revenue picture is clear and district enrollment will be set. Tonight there's a public meeting at 5 p.m. at the Doyle Building for last minute pleas and entreaties, 545 West Dayton St., followed by a School Board workshop session, which is likely to include some additional budget amendments from board members. Current projections suggest there will be an increase of about $225 property tax increase on the average $250,000 home.
It's been a particularly painful process this time around, as illustrated by a recent e-mail I got. It came from one of my favorite teachers and said that due to some of the recent budget amendments, the Madison school district's elementary school health offices would no longer be able to provide band-aids for teachers to use in their classrooms. Instead, children would be required to bring them from home with other supplies, like tissues or crayons.
Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke to the Madison Rotary Club on "What Wisconsin's Public Education Model Needs to Learn from General Motors Before it is too late." 7MB mp3 audio (the audio quality is not great, but you can hear the talk if you turn up the volume!).
Zimman's talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin's K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district's financial condition @17:30) when considering a District's ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated..... "we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment" and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn."
The "unschooling" movement of the 1970s featured open classrooms, in which children studied what they were most interested in, when they felt ready. That was followed by today's back-to-basics, early-start model, in which students complete math worksheets in kindergarten and are supposed to take algebra by eighth grade at the latest. Under the "whole language" philosophy of the 1980s, children were expected to learn to read by having books read to them. By the late 1990s, reading lessons were dominated by phonics, with little time spent on the joys of what reading is all about -- unlocking the world of stories and information.
A little more than a decade ago, educators bore no responsibility for their students' failure; it was considered the fault of the students, their parents and unequal social circumstances. Now schools are held liable for whether students learn, regardless of the students' lack of effort or previous preparation, and are held solely accountable for reaching unrealistic goals of achievement.
No wonder schools have a chronic case of educational whiplash. If there's a single aspect of schooling that ought to end, it's the decades of abrupt and destructive swings from one extreme to another. There is no magic in the magic-bullet approach to learning. Charters are neither evil nor saviors; they can be a useful complement to public schools, but they have not blazed a sure-fire path to student achievement. Decreeing that all students will be proficient in math and reading by 2014 hasn't moved us dramatically closer to the mark.
Diffused governance, is, in my view, the best way forward. This means that communities should offer a combination of public, private, virtual, charter and voucher options. A diversity of K-12 approaches insures that a one size fits all race to the bottom does not prevail. I was very disappointed to recently learn that Wisconsin's Democrat Senator Russ Feingold voted to kill the Washington, DC voucher program. No K-12 approach is perfect, but eliminating that option for the poorest members of our society is simply unpalatable.
Somewhat related Lee Bergquist and Erin Richards: Wisconsin Governor Candidate Mark Neumann taps public funds for private schools
Republican businessman Mark Neumann started his first taxpayer-funded school with 49 students, and in eight years enrollment has mushroomed to nearly 1,000 students in four schools.
Neumann, a candidate for governor who preaches smaller government and fiscal conservatism, has used his entrepreneurial skills to tap private and public funds - including federal stimulus dollars - to start schools in poor neighborhoods.
The former member of the U.S. House operates three religious-based schools in Milwaukee, a fourth nonreligious school in Phoenix and has plans to build clusters of schools across the country.
The Nashotah businessman is part of a growing national movement from the private sector that is providing poor neighborhoods an alternative to traditional public schools.
There are signs the schools are achieving one of their primary goals of getting students into post-secondary schools.
When the kindergartners at the Brooklyn School of Inquiry, one of New York City's schools for gifted students, form neat boy-girl rows for the start of recess, the lines of girls reach well beyond the lines of boys.
A similar imbalance exists at gifted schools in East Harlem, where almost three-fifths of the students at TAG Young Scholars are girls, and the Lower East Side, where Alec Kulakowski, a seventh grader at New Explorations in Science and Technology and Math, considered his status as part of the school's second sex and remarked, "It's kind of weird and stuff."
Weird or not, the disparity at the three schools is not all that different from the gender makeup at similar programs across the city: though the school system over all is 51 percent male, its gifted classrooms generally have more girls.
Nearly four dozen public and private schools in Indiana are offering Chinese language instruction for credit as part of an effort to make Mandarin Chinese the next world language.
Many of the programs are taught by Chinese educators through a collaboration between the College Board and Hanban, a government-funded organization affiliated with the Chinese Education Ministry.
Since 2006, China has sent more than 325 "guest teachers" to work in U.S. schools to help launch Chinese language programs. The teachers can stay for three years, then reapply to stay for another three years.
Bret Schundler is like no education commissioner the state has ever had. He's not an educator, but a businessman and a politician. He is more of an advocate for private schools than for public schools. He is a true believer in parental choice, something he deems "a human right."
And, in the midst of an ugly fight between his governor and the state's largest teachers union, his spokesman refers to New Jersey schools as "wretched" -- just when they led the nation in a countrywide test of educational achievement.
Okay, so he repudiated the word "wretched" when legislators and educators protested -- but what does he really think of the public schools he is constitutionally sworn to support?
That's not an easy question to answer, even after sitting with Schundler for three hours and talking about the schools.
Qualcom technologist Marie Bjerede wonders if the top-down reform model doesn't work, why there's not more iterative development:
In the software world, we address this dilemma through an iterative development model. That is, we assume that when we are thinking about what users might need or how they will use our product, we will get some things wrong. So we code up some simple end-to-end functionality, throw it out for people to use, and then improve it iteratively based on feedback from our users. This feedback may be explicit, in the form of questions and requests, or implicit, based on our observations of how the software is used. It may well be automated, in the way Google instruments the applications we use and modifies them based on how we engage.
This approach is often best for application development and is related to the lean capitalization approach to building a business that usually works best these days. But it's tough to do in schools. Here's a few of the reasons
For many, saving for retirement is a difficult process even during the best of times. And in 2009, according to a recent survey from Wells Fargo, 20% of pre-retirees have reduced funding to their retirement savings. Many who once thought they were secure are now forced to delay their retirement plans by several years. What's even more troubling is that 41% of women and 32% of men now believe they will have to work after retirement just to make ends meet. Considering that saving $1 million will only amount to about $40,000 per year for the average retiree (assuming you stick to a widely accepted rule of thumb that says you should limit your withdrawals to 4% of your savings during your first year in retirement), it's easy to understand why retirement has become almost a luxury. Below, Kiplinger.com examines the cost of retirement.
ith the Washita Heights School District out of money and no help apparent on the horizon, Superintendent Steve Richert went before the school board and told its members he needed to lose his job -- because the district would have to be shut down.
The district's already precarious financial situation became untenable when state appropriations began to be cut as legislators scrambled to make up a $669 million budget hole for the current fiscal year. Richert worked the numbers and determined his school district -- which served the tiny Washita County towns of Corn and Colony -- would run out of money by May 1.
The western Oklahoma district was able to finish out the school year, barely, and now has been consolidated with neighboring Cordell, leaving Richert to wrap up Washita Heights' remaining business by June 30.
"Technically and legally, Washita Heights is a memory right now," Richert said Wednesday, sitting in his office. "We no longer exist."
My wife often starts a book by reading the last few pages. I think this is cheating. It spoils any surprises the author might have planted there. She suggests, when I say this out loud, that she is better able to appreciate the writer's craft if she knows where the story is going.
But I yielded to the temptation to do the same when I read the table of contents of Harvard political scientist Paul E. Peterson's intriguing new book, "Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning." It is an analytical history of key American school reformers, from Mann to John Dewey to Martin Luther King Jr. to Al Shanker to Bill Bennett to James S. Coleman. I knew about those guys, but the last chapter discussed someone I never heard of, Julie Young, chief executive officer of the Florida Virtual School.
Peterson is always a delight to read. Even his research papers shine. I enjoyed the entire book. But I read first his take on Young and the rise of new technology because it was a topic I yearned to understand. I have read the paeons to the wonders of computers in classrooms, but I don't see them doing much in the urban schools I care about. The 21st century schools movement in particular seems to me too much about selling software and too little about teaching kids.
A reporter asked me "what went wrong with the small schools idea?" It's odd question because all the networks developing highly effective new schools--KIPP, Achievement First, Success Network, Green Dot, Alliance and dozens more--still use the tried and true rule of thumb of 100 students per grade.
The better question is "what went wrong with the big schools idea?" The 50-year experiment with mega-high schools of 1,500-4,500 students had disastrous results especially for low income students. The combination of anonymity and a proliferation of low expectation courses set up the results we see today: one third of American students drop out and one third graduate unprepared for college or careers.
Fixing this problem has proven vexing. The one difference between good schools and bad schools is everything--structure, schedule, curriculum, instruction, culture, and connections with families and community. That makes turnarounds, especially at the high school level, really difficult. Layer on top of that outdated employment contracts and revolving door leadership and you have a national Gordian knot.
For nearly three decades, California's largest teachers union has all but handpicked the candidate who went on to win the race for state superintendent of public instruction.
It was pretty much a given for the candidate: Get the California Teachers Association's campaign cash, gain the support of most other education groups in the state and win the race.
This year is different.
In a packed field of 12 candidates, three have emerged as the top contenders for the nonpartisan job. All three are Democrats, two of whom are splitting the support of the education establishment, and a third who has attracted support of non-establishment education reformers.
The three include former South Bay schools superintendent Larry Aceves; state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles; and Assemblyman Tom Torlakson, D-Antioch
POLITICIANS around the world love to promise better education systems. Proposals for reform come in many flavours. Some tout the benefits of more competition among schools; others aim to train more teachers and reduce class sizes. Still others plump for elaborate after-school programmes or for linking teachers' pay to how well pupils do.
A relatively recent addition to this menu is the idea of paying students directly for performance. Boosters argue that pupils may fail to invest enough time and effort into education because the gains--better jobs and higher incomes--are nebulous and distant. Cash payments, on the other hand, reward good performance immediately. Link payments to test results or graduation rates, the argument goes, and test scores should increase and drop-out rates decline. Two new papers* describe the effect of such schemes in Israel and America. Their results will disappoint those who hope for a silver bullet. But they also suggest that cash payments may have their uses in some situations.
Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Victor Lavy of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem studied high-school students in 40 Israeli schools where few pupils went on to get their school-leaving certificate (the Bagrut). In half the schools students were offered a chance to earn nearly $1,450 if they passed all the tests and got the certificate. The economists found that completion rates in "payment schools" increased by about a third--but only for girls and mainly for those who needed to do only a tiny bit more to graduate.
California middle-and high schoolers will have to find another way to quench their thirst during lunch, other than those brightly-colored, sugar-sweetened sports drinks.
On Thursday, the California Senate passed Senate Bill: 1255, which prohibits the sale of sugar-sweetened sports drinks in public middle and high schools as part of an effort to combat childhood obesity, according to the Ventura County Star.
"Studies have shown weight gain is connected to consuming sports drinks, and I applaud the California Senate for taking action to help prevent childhood obesity," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R-Calif., said in a press release. Schwarzenegger sponsored the bill, which was authored by Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles.
An original 32-ounce Gatorade has four servings per container, with 14 grams of sugar, meaning consumers are taking in 56 grams of sugar if they drink one regular-size bottle. It contains no fruit juice.
Like all human beings, educators accept rules and procedures that make sense to them, even when academic types wave data in their faces proving they are wrong. That appears to be the case with one of the most powerful and widespread practices in Washington area high schools -- the extra grade point for college-level courses.
Thousands of students are taking panicked breaths wondering whether what I am about to reveal will incinerate their grade-point averages, keep them out of any college anyone has heard of and consign them to a life of begging for dollar bills like that scruffy guy on Lynn Street south of Key Bridge.
A new study shows that grade weighting for Advanced Placement courses is unnecessary. Schools have been promising students 3 grade points (usually given for a B) if they get a C in an AP course so they will not be frightened away by its college-level demands. It turns out, however, they will take AP with or without extra credit.
Madison Schools' 2010-2011 Budget Amendments: Task Force Spending Moratorium, Increase consulting, travel and Professional Development Spending
The Madison School Board meets Tuesday evening, June 1, 2010 to discuss the 2010-2011 budget. A few proposed budget amendments were posted recently:
Lucy Mathiak: Task Force Funding Moratorium [57K PDF]:
I recommend that we place a moratorium on all funding for implementation of task force recommendations, with two exceptions:
1) Funding for middle school teachers to take UW-Madison courses designed to provide algebraic concepts, reasoning, and other content for middle school math teachers who are not proficient in upper level mathematics content. (up to $67,000) [Math Task Force]
2) Funding for fine arts teachers to work over the summer to develop a curriculum guide that is aligned to the recommendations of the Fine Arts Task Force and with state standards. (up to $20,000)
.....
This is just one example. The recent correspondence from teachers and community members regarding the difficulties in producing a quality fine arts curriculum guide point to similar issues in that curricular area. It is impossible to produce change in an organization that is not willing to change. As such, it is hard to rationalize continued funding for initiatives with little or no relationship to the task forces' findings and recommendations at a time when resources are scarce.
The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) recently released its report on "Teachers' Use of Educational Technology in U.S. Public Schools: 2009." While 97% of those teachers surveyed said they had access to computers in the classroom, the ratio of computer to student was more than 5 to 1. And while 94% of teachers responding indicated they used the Internet often, most of them - 66% - said they used it for "research."
But Internet technology has done more than make research easier and more timely for teachers and students. Educators are using the real-time Web for a variety of innovative purposes, both in and out of the schoolroom.
The Real-Time Web in the Classroom
It may be cliche to emphasis the world wide aspect of the Web, but Internet technologies have lowered the proverbial walls of the classroom, giving students access to information that far surpasses the print-bound copies of encyclopedias and periodicals that were once the standard for K-12 research projects. As technology-educator Steven Anderson argues, these technologies "really make the world smaller for our students and show them that they can find the answers they need if we equip them with the tools and resources do to so." But in addition to simply making information more accessible, real-time technologies including Twitter, Skype, and Google Wave have shaped the types of lessons teachers can create and the types of projects they can task their students.
The exam was simple yet devilish, consisting of a single noun ("water," for instance, or "bias") that applicants had three hours somehow to spin into a coherent essay. An admissions requirement for All Souls College here, it was meant to test intellectual agility, but sometimes seemed to test only the ability to sound brilliant while saying not much of anything.
"An exercise in showmanship to avoid answering the question," is the way the historian Robin Briggs describes his essay on "innocence" in 1964, a tour de force effort that began with the opening chords of Wagner's "Das Rheingold" and then brought in, among other things, the flawed heroes of Stendhal and the horrors of the prisoner-of-war camp in the William Golding novel "Free Fall."
No longer will other allusion-deploying Oxford youths have the chance to demonstrate the acrobatic flexibility of their intellect in quite the same way. All Souls, part of Oxford University, recently decided, with some regret, to scrap the one-word exam.
Basil Smikle Jr. has a lot of ideas about how to address Harlem's most vexing problems, from crime to housing to underemployement, but his biggest asset as he runs for state Senate against Bill Perkins may be that he supports charter schools.
Mr. Perkins, a two-term legislator from Harlem, has outraged the charter-school community with his vocal opposition of the schools.
During a hearing on charter schools that he organized in April, Mr. Perkins said that because so many of the schools serve predominantly African-American and Hispanic children, "there is concern that charters are creating a de facto re-segregationist educational policy in New York City," Mr. Perkins said.
On Wednesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan tried to publicly shore-up support for the $23 billion "Education Jobs Fund" being considered by Congress. Flanked by union heads Dennis Van Roekel (President, National Education Association) and Randi Weingarten (President, American Federation of Teachers) and Representatives Dave Obey (D-WI) and George Miller (D-CA), Secretary Duncan pleaded for additional taxpayers dollars:
School boards and state legislatures are finalizing their education budgets for the upcoming school year and many face tough choices about whether to retain teachers and continue programs that are vital to their ability to provide a world-class education for their students. We must act quickly and responsibly to provide schools the resources they need so they don't have to make choices that would not be in the best interests of their students and teachers.
More high schools dropping class ranking Elmbrook schools are latest to cite college admission concerns
Amy Hetzner:
A 3.5 grade-point average is enough to qualify a student for honor roll and be considered above a B-plus average at Brookfield East High School, but it might not be enough to put a student among the top third of the class.
That's one of the reasons why sophomores at the school say they won't be sad when class rank is eliminated from high school transcripts and report cards in two years.
"We get good grades, but we don't get credit for it," said Alison Kent, a sophomore at Brookfield East. "You can have a 3.5 or higher and it looks terrible."
Nearly a decade after some of the state's top-performing high schools began dropping class rank from their students' transcripts, more are following their lead.
The Elmbrook School Board voted this month to end reporting class rank on high school transcripts and student report cards in the 2011-'12 school year. The school boards for Nicolet and Mequon-Thiensville will consider whether to enact similar measures this summer.
Under plans unveiled by Michael Gove last week, the school system in England and Wales will be radically overhauled. Some will break away from local government control. Elsewhere, other new schools will be created by parents. Here, experts discuss whether this shake-up will benefit those who matter most - our children
His fake diamond earring, only just small enough to meet school rules, is gleaming in the May sunshine. Under a tough exterior, over-long, frayed trousers and a shambling walk, is a sensitive teenager coping with a lot. Shane tells me that his girlfriend has run off with his best friend, he is not getting on with his dad's new "bird", he is looking after his seven-year-old brother who is depressed and To Kill a Mocking Bird is just "bare" hard.
This student and 80 like him have been subjected to a carefully choreographed series of interventions - one-to-one mentoring, Saturday school, motivational assemblies, extra revision classes - at the London comprehensive where I work, to try to get them to the magic number of five good GCSEs.
Simon Jenkins is right to be critical of the way in which the education proposals in the Queen's speech will further undermine local government (Comment, 26 May). However, that is the least of the problems inherent in the expansion of academies and the proposed introduction of Swedish-style "free" schools. What we will see, if the Treasury does not sabotage these expensive proposals, is more and more outsourcing of public education to private, profit-driven companies.
If this could be shown to be an effective means of raising overall standards, it might be a price worth paying, but all the evidence is to the contrary.
A Tale of Two Students In middle school, Ivan and Laura shared a brief romance and a knack for trouble. Then they parted ways. Now he is college-bound and she isn't. How different schools shaped their paths.
In middle school, Ivan Cantera ran with a Latino gang; Laura Corro was a spunky teen. At age 13, they shared their first kiss. Both made it a habit to skip class. In high school, they went their separate ways.
This fall, Ivan will enter the University of Oklahoma, armed with a prestigious scholarship. "I want to be the first Hispanic governor of Oklahoma," declares the clean-cut 18-year-old, standing on the steps of Santa Fe South High School, the charter school in the heart of this city's Hispanic enclave that he says put him on a new path.
Laura, who is 17, rose to senior class president at Capitol Hill High School, a large public school in the same neighborhood. But after scraping together enough credits to graduate, Laura isn't sure where she's headed. She never took college entrance exams.
The divergent paths taken by Laura and Ivan were shaped by many forces, but their schools played a striking role. Capitol Hill and Santa Fe South both serve the same poor, Hispanic population. Both comply with federal guidelines and meet state requirements for standardized exams and curriculum. Santa Fe South enrolls about 490 high school students, while Capitol Hill has nearly 900.
At Santa Fe South, the school day is 45 minutes longer; graduation requirements are more rigorous (four years of math, science and social studies compared with three at public schools); and there is a tough attendance
From the recent apocalyptic pronouncements of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and others, you may think our schools are selling their last bits of chalk and playground sand to employ mere skeleton crews of teachers and staff. The truth is "apocalypse not."
Yes, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten last week warned that, without a huge infusion of federal cash, public schools face "draconian cuts." And the American Association of School Administrators declared a few weeks ago that without a bailout, job losses "would deal a devastating blow to public education."
Then there's Duncan's warning, while making the TV-news rounds last week, of educational "catastrophe" if a federal rescue isn't forthcoming. And now the National Education Association has launched something called "Speak Up for Education & Kids" -- a campaign to get people to call their congressmen and demand a handout for education.
The scaremongering is producing results. House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wisc.) is planning to put $23 billion to save education jobs in a supplemental spending package. The move appears to have widespread Democratic support.
The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Education has reaffirmed a recommendation that the department should consider sanctions for the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, one of the nation's major regional accrediting organizations. In a report this week, the Office of Inspector General issued its final recommendations stemming from a 2009 examination of the commission's standards for measuring credit hours and program length, and affirmed its earlier critique that the commission had been too lax in its standards for determining the amount of credit a student receives for course work.
The Higher Learning Commission accredits more than 1,000 institutions in 19 states. The Office of Inspector General completed similar reports for two other regional accreditors late last year but did not suggest any sanctions for those organizations.
Possible sanctions against an accreditor include limiting, suspending, or terminating its recognition by the secretary of education as a reliable authority for determining the quality of education at the institutions it accredits. Colleges need accreditation from a federally recognized agency in order to be eligible to participate in the federal student-aid programs.
I think it's fair to say that most people know we're in the midst of an educational emergency. Just this week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told CNN, "There isn't one urban school district in the country--Chicago, L.A., New York, D.C., Philly, Baltimore--there's not one urban system yet where the dropout rate is low enough and the graduation rate is high enough." And for those people who work in the school system, no issue has come to represent the struggle to save public education more than the fight over charter schools. For the sake of clarity, let me just note that a charter school is one which uses public funds to run a school that is managed privately, thus giving them the freedom to experiment as well as hire nonunion teachers. Charters such as the Harlem Children's Zone HCZ in New York have longer school days (and a longer school year) with kids often required to come in Saturdays to work with tutors. The most successful charter schools (and they are not all the same in either quality or mission) have produced stunning results. At the Harlem Success Academy, 100 percent of third graders passed their state math exam and 95 percent passed the state English exam.
At Saturday's rally in Trenton, teachers wondered when the Earth started spinning in the other direction.
"It's like we woke up one morning and the world had changed," said Linda Mirabelli, a music teacher in Livingston. "We were liked and respected, and now, overnight, people have turned against us."
How did it happen? That's easy: One bad decision, one stupid miscalculation: An overwhelming majority of teachers refused to accept a pay freeze. They could have won taxpayers' eternal gratitude, but instead demanded their negotiated raises and fought against contributing a dime toward budget-breaking health insurance benefits. Teachers could have pitched in, but they dug in.
They thumbed their noses at taxpayers, who have lost their jobs, had their pay cut, gone bankrupt and fallen into foreclosure. As taxpayers made less, teachers demanded more. You do that, you become a villain. Fast. It doesn't matter how many stars Junior gets on his book report.
Teachers listened to their overpaid brain trust, the architects of this disastrous public relations strategy. Together, NJEA president Barbara Keshishian, executive director Vincent Giordano and spokesman Steve Wollmer earn more than a million dollars.
Keshishian, who has been outmaneuvered by the governor at every turn, earns $256,450 annually. Giordano, with salary and deferred compensation, earned $550,203 in 2009, and Wollmer makes $300,000.
Who says you get what you pay for? Union members are shelling out a lot of money for lousy representation. They should stage a coup. Instead they joined hands at Saturday's You-And-Me-Against-The-World rally and tried to convince each other they're doing the right thing.
Sarae White is an all-too-typical student in Philadelphia -- she stopped going to school last year, and was on her way to becoming one more dropout.
"The teachers didn't care, the students didn't care," White said. "Nobody cared, so why should I?"
In Philadelphia, the country's sixth largest school district, about one of every three students fails to graduate -- about the national average. CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker reports that of the 4 million students who enter high school every year, one million of them will drop out before graduation. That's 7,000 every school day -- one dropout every 26 seconds.
Michael Piscal, Headmaster of View Park Prep Charter School in Los Angeles said, "It's not working for teachers, it's not working for students -- it's not working for society.
The Chicago Public Schools is a system so broke it can't afford sophomore sports, wants assistant coaches to work for free, and has summoned hundreds of teachers to the principal's office to let them know they'll be laid off over the summer. But it can still afford to pay 133 central office officials more than $100,000 a year.
That's what budget reform looks like to schools CEO Ron Huberman.
About two months ago, when Huberman and the Board of Education cut sophomore sports, they said the district, roughly $900 million in the red, could only afford to let freshmen, juniors, and seniors play after-school sports--even after laying off dozens of well paid administrators.
It irked me that a city so rich it could afford to shower subsidies on profitable corporations such as United Airlines and MillerCoors to the tune of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars couldn't afford to let sophomores play.
So I decided to do a little digging. After spending hours plowing through the 350-page 2009-2010 CPS budget, I discovered that contrary to cutting wages at the central office, Huberman and the board had given raises to scores of top bureaucrats.
The Funding Disparity: Now and Then
In 2005, a group of researchers associated with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute examined the comparative funding of charter schools in the broader context of educational finance. The goal of that study, which used data from the 2002- 2002-03 school year, was to determine whether and to what extent there were differences in the financial resources provided to charter schools when compared to public school districts in the same states. These researchers used data from 18 states across the United States, and released their results in the report "Charter School Funding: Inequity's Next Frontier." The results of this first study demonstrated a clear pattern of inequity in charter school funding. Across the states included in the study, the per pupil funding gap was $1,801 per pupil, or 21.7 percent of district funding. The funding disparity was most severe in the study's 27 focus districts, many of them urban, where charter schools received $2,256, or 23.5 percent less funding per pupil compared to the school districts in which they were located. The researchers identified lower local funding as the primary source of this fiscal gap, particularly with respect to capital investment.
Every state school in England will be allowed to apply to become an academy - a school funded by the state but independent from local authorities. That leaves them free to set their curriculum and run themselves as they see fit. In practice, however, anything too unconventional will attract a bad rating from Ofsted, the schools watchdog. Fears that this academic freedom could, for example, lead to the teaching of Creationism as a factual discipline can therefore be largely allayed.
Hasn't this all been done already by Labour?
Yes, but the policy was limited. Only 203 academies were established under Labour out of a possible 3,100 secondary schools. The last government mainly invited bids from schools in deprived areas, arguing that this was where radical changes such as the creation of academies were most needed. But Michael Gove, the Conservative education secretary, said on Wednesday he expected the bulk of secondaries to become academies eventually. He has also invited applications from primaries, which were disbarred by Labour from bidding for academy status.
Last week I visited the Carpe Diem charter school in Yuma Arizona. Yuma is off the beaten path, in far western Arizona near the borders of California and Mexico.
Carpe Diem is a 6-12 school with 240 students. A value added analysis of test scores found that they have the biggest gains in the state of Arizona. Their math results are really off the chart, with some grades averaging at the 98th percentile on Terra Nova.
Carpe Diem is a hybrid model school, rotating kids between self-paced instruction on the computer and classroom instruction. Their building is laid out with one large computer lab, with classroom space in the back. They had 240 students working on computers when I walked in, and you could have heard a pin drop.
Carpe Diem has successfully substituted technology for labor. With 6 grade levels and 240 students they have only 1 math teacher and one aide who focuses on math. Covering 6-12 and 240 students and getting the best results with a demographically challenging student body = no problem for Carpe Diem. Their founder, Rick Ogston, told me they use less staff than a typical model, and have cash reserves in the bank despite relatively low per pupil funding in AZ. They have never received support from philanthropic foundations, making due with state funding, but their model seems like it could be brought to scale with the right investment.
After years of frustration over school taxes, New Jersey residents turned out in record numbers last month to reject 58 percent of their school districts' budget proposals -- sounding an unmistakable call to arms that echoed across the country.
But in the weeks since, many of the 316 defeated budgets have been adopted with few, if any, changes by town councils, where members risked thwarting the will of voters -- and incurring their wrath -- rather than cut sports, lay off teachers or increase class sizes.
In Ridgewood, an affluent village in Bergen County known for its schools, the Council whittled $100,000 from the proposed $84.9 million budget, or 0.1 percent. Average savings to taxpayers: $12 per year.
If Seattle Public Schools didn't have enough financial problems already, it now has a few of its own making.
The latest audit of the state's largest school district says the district overpaid employees by at least $335,000 in the 2008-09 school year, made several mistakes in its financial statements, and continues to claim more Native American students than it can document.
District officials called the errors unacceptable and pledged to fix them, while at the same time saying that it brought most of them to the auditor's attention and that they are a very small part of the district's budget.
The overpayment of salaries, for example, represents a small fraction of 1 percent of the district's $558 million budget, said Duggan Harmon, the district's executive director of finance.
Harmon also said none of the problems will add to the $27 million in expenses that the district already is planning to cut from its budget for the 2010-11 school year.
South Orange County is a suburban paradise is southern California. The climate is unbeatable, the surfing is great and the public schools are performing well. But not everything is perfect in the Capistrano Unified School District.
In April 2010, 2,200 teachers went on strike for three days after the school board imposed a 10 percent pay cut. The children who attended school during the strike had to walk past their teachers who, instead of preparing for class, were marching in front of the school with picket signs reading "It's not about the money" and "We'd rather be teaching."
Some parents honked in support of the union as they drove by. Other parents were frustrated by union members who were unwilling to work out a compromise with a district that is facing a $34 million budget deficit. Lots of parents talked about using the strike as "a teaching moment."
Are you worried that we are passing our debt on to future generations? Well, you need not worry.
Before this recession it appeared that absent action, the government's long-term commitments would become a problem in a few decades. I believe the government response to the recession has created budgetary stress sufficient to bring about the crisis much sooner. Our generation -- not our grandchildren's -- will have to deal with the consequences.
According to the Bank for International Settlements, the United States' structural deficit -- the amount of our deficit adjusted for the economic cycle -- has increased from 3.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2007 to 9.2 percent in 2010. This does not take into account the very large liabilities the government has taken on by socializing losses in the housing market. We have not seen the bills for bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and even more so the Federal Housing Administration, which is issuing government-guaranteed loans to non-creditworthy borrowers on terms easier than anything offered during the housing bubble. Government accounting is done on a cash basis, so promises to pay in the future -- whether Social Security benefits or loan guarantees -- do not count in the budget until the money goes out the door.
A good percentage of the structural increase in the deficit is because last year's "stimulus" was not stimulus in the traditional sense. Rather than a one-time injection of spending to replace a cyclical reduction in private demand, the vast majority of the stimulus has been a permanent increase in the base level of government spending -- including spending on federal jobs. How different is the government today from what General Motors was a decade ago? Government employees are expensive and difficult to fire. Bloomberg News reported that from the last peak businesses have let go 8.5 million people, or 7.4 percent of the work force, while local governments have cut only 141,000 workers, or less than 1 percent.
I've not seen any updates on Susan Troller's April, 12, 2010 question: "Where did the money go?" It would seem that proper resolution of this matter would inform the public with respect to future spending and tax increases.
Is Seattle Schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson in for a drubbing tomorrow?
The school board will hear a report from a local consulting company that summarizes what individual board members have said about the superintendent in one-on-one interviews, as well as what Goodloe-Johnson has said about herself.
The report will be used for a formal evaluation of the superintendent and will help determine whether she gets a raise and an additional bonus. It will also influence whether her contract, which runs through 2012, is extended.
If the report is anything like a recent community group's survey, Goodloe-Johnson is in trouble.
Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore who helped broker the contract agreement between D.C. schools and its teachers union, had strong words for those who wanting to improve education. "Stop demonizing the unions," he told an education roundtable convened Wednesday at the Aspen Institute. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan quickly seconded his message. I couldn't help wondering if the two had happened to catch Monday night's final episode of "Law & Order."
The program, centered on a frantic search to find a blogger threatening to assault a New York City high school, deals with some of the thorny issues of school management and reform. The program's title, "The Rubber Room," comes from the real-life temporary reassignment centers where New York City teachers who are facing disciplinary action are sent. For those who are less avid "Law & Order" fans and missed the show, detectives first suspect a deranged student, but it turns out the blogger, called Moot, is a teacher who had been sent to a rubber room after he was falsely accused of molesting a student.
Academy status will become the norm for state secondary schools, the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, forecast yesterday.
Mr Gove revealed he had written to every state school head in England - primary, secondary and special - urging them to consider putting in a bid for academy status.
If they take up his offer, it would bring to an end 108 years of local authorities running the vast majority of state schools. Mr Gove predicted that secondary schools would initially be more interested in taking up the offer than primaries. "I anticipate that's likely to be the case [for academy status to be the norm for secondary schools]," he added. "However, I'm not putting a time limit on it. It's up to the schools to decide."
Guess how long it is before the state of New York runs out of cash? Less than a week, according to the state's comptroller.
On June 1, New York is due to send $3.8 billion in aid to local school districts, including $2.1 billion that was supposed to be paid in March but not sent for lack of funds. Yet New York is still $1 billion short. This could affect school operations, the solvency of any business that sells goods or services to the state, the paychecks of state workers, and ultimately home values.
At the state capitol in Albany, you wouldn't sense there's a crisis. The state senate still meets only half a work-week, Monday evening through Wednesday. Meanwhile, Democratic legislators (in the majority) are shuttling back and forth between Albany and the Democratic Party's state nominating convention at the Rye Town Hilton in Westchester County, 150 miles away.
The crowded meeting rooms and festooned ballrooms are where you'll find the action. Legislators are securing their nominations for another two-year term. Never mind that legislative malpractice is to blame for the cash running out.a
Lesley Surman, a 42-year-old housewife and mother of three - "working class and proud of it" - wants to set up a new secondary school in the west Yorkshire village of Birkenshaw.
Mrs Surman is no fantasist. She is part of a group of about 60 activists trying to establish the school in 2013 because she harbours doubts about the alternatives available to local parents. "We want to get back to core values, pastoral care and a school where you celebrate winning." Instead of offering "beauty therapy and mechanics" - vocational subjects increasingly offered in the state sector - she would prefer a focus on nine or so academic subjects, including science and history.
The answer to her problems could lie several hundred miles across the North Sea. Tomorrow's Queen's Speech, outlining the ruling coalition's legislative priorities, is expected to use Sweden's "free schools" as a model for an overhaul of the English education system, making it easier for parents and teachers to create privately run but state-funded primary and secondary schools.
"Free" in the sense of independent, these private establishments were introduced in 1995 to provide greater choice for parents unable to afford the fees for Sweden's tiny (now even tinier) privately funded sector. Underpinning the policy of the country's centre-right government was the free-market principle that competition would raise standards in all schools as state institutions were forced to work harder to keep up.
The government has similar hopes for England (Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are responsible for their own education policies) - where, in spite of large numbers of private, fee-charging, schools, 93 per cent of children are state educated.
"Legislation will be introduced to...give teachers greater freedom over the curriculum and allow new providers to run state schools."
The purpose of the Bill is to:
Give full effect to the range of programmes envisaged in the Coalition agreement.
The main benefits of the Bill will be:
To give all schools greater freedom over the curriculum
To improve school accountability
To take action to tackle bureaucracy
To improve behaviour in schools
The main elements of the Bill are:
To provide schools with the freedoms to deliver an excellent education in the way they see fit.
To reform Ofsted and other accountability frameworks to ensure that head teachers are held properly accountable for the core educational goals of attainment and closing the gap between rich and poor.
To introduce a slimmer curriculum giving more space for teachers to decide how to teach.
To introduce a reading test for 6 year olds to make sure that young children are learning and to identify problems early.
To give teachers and head teachers the powers to improve behaviour and tackle bullying.
We expect standards across the education sector to rise through the creation of more Academies and giving more freedom to head teachers and teachers. We will also ensure that money follows pupils, and introduce a 'pupil premium' so that more money follows the poorest pupils.
Alameda voters embark today on a monthlong, mail-only election to decide whether taxes will be raised to support public schools. Both sides describe the outcome as Armageddon for the quiet island city.
Measure E is a parcel tax that would give Alameda some of the highest school taxes in the Bay Area: Homeowners would pay $659 a year and business owners would owe up to $9,500 annually per parcel.
If it passes, many small business owners, already struggling with the recession, say they'll be forced to close, stripping Alameda of its mom-and-pop charm. If the measure fails, the district's superintendent warns that half the schools in town would close.
"If this doesn't pass, all bets are off in Alameda," said Encinal High School Principal Mike Cooper, a fifth-generation Alamedan. "We're watching the collapse of public education. We've been trying to make this work, but something's got to give."
Madison School District: Strategic Plan Update Meeting
The Madison School District is holding an update to their Strategic Planning Process this week. A number of documents have been distributed, including:
K-12 school districts that lay off teachers by seniority, a policy known as "last in, first out," disproportionately affect the programs and students in their poorer and more minority schools than in their wealthier, less minority counterparts.
Looking at the 15 largest districts in California, researchers at the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that teachers at risk of layoffs are indeed concentrated in schools with more poor and minority students.
In these districts, if seniority-based layoffs are applied for teachers with up to two years' experience, highest-poverty schools would lose some 30 percent more teachers than wealthier schools, and highest-minority schools would lose 60 percent more teachers than would schools with the fewest minority students.
Thousands of New York City's strongest teachers are in danger of losing their jobs--with no consideration given to their talent, only how long they've been teaching. And the real losers will be children, says Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.
When the principal at P.S. 40 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, talks about the impact on students of one of her best teachers, Malvola Lewis, her eyes fill with tears.
After growing up in homeless shelters, Lewis earned an education degree from Brooklyn College and returned to her old neighborhood to teach at P.S. 40, a historically hard-to-staff school. Now she's one of the school's strongest teachers; her students are making more progress than almost any other class in the school. And they love her.
Lewis is a terrific teacher. Despite her exceptional work, though, she (and thousands of teachers like her) may be laid off shortly because of antiquated seniority rules in New York City. The real losers will be children.
Teachers are professionals, and they deserve to be treated the way professionals in almost every other line of work are: evaluated based upon their work.
The District's Appeal Brief is in -- A link to the appeal is shown on the lower left.
The Seattle School District's first brief in its appeal of Judge Spector's decision was filed on Friday. To me, it is not surprising that its arguments are weak. I don't think we could ever have scored this unprecedented victory had our case not been extremely well founded. Nonetheless, one can't predict what the appeals panel will rule.
Basically, the brief restates the district's original contention that, because the specified process was followed, any decision made by the board, (I might add -- regardless of how it flouted overwhelming evidence) must stand. Also, the brief misstates and misinterprets many aspects of our case. One of the most egregious examples is the contention that the court overstepped its authority by making a decision on curriculum. Not so - the court simply remanded the board's decision back to the board on the basis of the lack of evidence to support the decision.
We have 30 days to file our response brief (by June 21), and SPS has 15 days after (by July 6) to file its rebuttal. Our attorney tells me that a hearing will be scheduled after all briefs have been filed.
Lately, when Cheryl Gismonde logs onto her Facebook account, she often finds messages that veer wildly from the usual array of restaurant recommendations and photos of other people's children.
A recent post from one of her friends reads: "Burlington County has 39 school districts!! So let's figure the average Super makes $150K, maybe an assistant at $100K, and a Business Administrator at $90K. That's approx. $13 million and some of these Supers have districts with just 2-3 schools. Entirely too much $$ wasted on positions that arent hands-on with the ki. . .ds."
Similar messages are being posted by friends and fellow parents from around South Jersey on an almost daily basis, said Gismonde, a mother of three living in Cherry Hill.
"People are starting to get angry. They're asking why we need to give up teachers when we're floating another $50,000 to an administrator," she said. "People are posting this person's salary and that person's salary. It's getting pretty crazy."
With public schools across New Jersey facing historic budget cuts next school year, taxpayers - and the governor's office - are turning their attention to the matter of school administrator pay.
The average salary for a superintendent in New Jersey is $154,409, about $9,000 above the national average but below that of other states in the region, according a 2008 report commissioned by the New Jersey Association of School Administrators (NJASA).
The AJC examined the oft-made charge that schools are not cutting many high-salaried central office while they slash and burn their way through the teacher ranks. Turns out it's true.
The AJC analysis found that while metro school districts have laid off "central office staff," most of those cuts are lower-salaried jobs, not high-paid administrators. (Many of these folks function as cabinets to the superintendents, and I think few leaders ever want to get rid of their personal posses.)
In the story, central office staffs are defended as behind-the-scenes lifelines, who help and support schools. But are these folks in "adviser" and "expert" roles any real help to teachers and students? Or do a lot of people at the top only put more pressure on the bottom?
More than 1,000 public school administrators in metro Atlanta earn more than $100,000 a year, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution review of school salary data shows.
The review shows that Atlanta Public Schools, the smallest of metro Atlanta's major school districts, has the highest administrative costs. Cobb County, while having the second-largest student population in the state, has one of the smallest central-office staffs and some of the lowest costs. DeKalb schools have more people making $100,000-plus a year than any district.
The AJC analysis comes as metro school districts are laying off more than 1,500 teachers, increasing class sizes and cutting budgets by tens of millions of dollars. While districts say they are also cutting "central office staff," most of those cuts are lower-salaried jobs, not high-paid administrators.
Stuart Bennett, executive director of the Georgia Association of Educational Leaders, says central office pay is not out of line.
"I don't think they've just pulled these salaries out of thin air," he said. "A lot of districts have done salary studies with private industry. It looks like a lot of people are making those salaries, but we have a couple of districts whose budgets are around a billion dollars."
On average in Georgia, the central office accounts for 5 percent of a district's operating budget. In metro Atlanta, that average increases to 6 percent. But Atlanta Public Schools spends nearly 10 percent of its budget on administration.
And then there were two. Friday's abrupt withdrawal by Robert Schiller from consideration as Polk County school superintendent leaves two candidates to replace Gail McKinzie, who will retire near year's end.
It also leaves in its wake a big divide between Polk Businesses for World Class Education - which pledged $50,000 to assure a nationwide search for a replacement - and the School Board. The board meets Tuesday to make a selection and to hear a plea from Polk Businesses' Hunt Berryman, who said the entire process should begin anew.
"The whole thing is a sham and a shame," Berryman said. He's particularly upset at School Board member Frank O'Reilly, who asked Schiller if he'd ever applied for another superintendent's position in Florida.
KEY QUESTION
When Schiller said yes (15 years ago in Palm Beach County), O'Reilly asked a follow-up: "Never applied in Pinellas County?"
Schiller replied, "No, not that I can recall." Caught by an Internet search (the information was on the St. Petersburg Times' website), Schiller later told O'Reilly he should have asked the question "in private."
The future of charter schools in New York hangs on negotiations between City Hall and teachers union President Michael Mulgrew. This is perverse.
The United Federation of Teachers is fighting to limit the growth of charters even as the state's application for as much as $700 million in federal Race to the Top money demands letting the number of schools expand.
Mulgrew's strategy has been to give the nod to upping the charter cap while trying to make it all but impossible for a sponsor to open one of these privately run, publicly funded academies. For example, by creating barriers to moving a charter into unused space in a public school building.
Although the city's charter schools have almost universally racked up amazing achievement gains, the UFT resists them because most are not unionized. And the more successful charters have become, the greater the resistance has grown
The Houston Independent School District is in the midst of developing a long-term strategic plan that will provide a road map for the future as the district strives to become the best public school system in the nation. To ensure that all key stakeholders are engaged and involved in this process, HISD is inviting any member of the Houston community to give their input at an open discussion on Monday, May 24, from 6:00-7:30 p.m. at the Hattie Mae White Educational Support Center's board auditorium (4440 West 18th Street).
To develop a long-term Strategic Direction, HISD is working with the Apollo Consulting Group in a six-month effort that started in February 2010 and will culminate in August with the release of a final plan. The goal is to create a set of core initiatives and key strategies that will allow HISD to build upon the beliefs and visions established by the HISD Board of Education and to provide the children of Houston with the highest quality of primary and secondary education.
Over the past two months, HISD has been gathering input from members of Team HISD, as well as from parents and members of the Houston community, including faith-based groups, non-profit agencies, businesses, and local and state leaders. After analyzing feedback and conducting diagnostic research, a number of core initiatives have emerged. They include placing an effective teacher in every classroom, supporting the principal as the CEO, developing rigorous instructional standards and support, ensuring data driven accountability, and cultivating a culture of trust through action.
"True transformation cannot happen overnight and it cannot happen without the input from everyone at Team HISD and those in our community who hold a stake in the education of Houston's children," says Superintendent of Schools Terry B. Grier. "In order for it to be meaningful, we need everyone to lend their voice to the process and help us shape the future direction of HISD."
The Detroit school board and its emergency financial manager battled over money and power in two Wayne County Circuit Court cases on Friday.
Irene Nordé, a math administrator for the Detroit Public Schools, testified Friday that state appointee Robert Bobb made changes to the curriculum that put students in jeopardy of not being able to pass standardized tests.
That's because, she said, teachers have been instructed to focus on remediation, rather than moving students forward.
Nordé was subpoenaed by attorneys for the school board, which alleges that Bobb is violating state law by making academic decisions and not consulting with the board on financial plans as required by law.
Bobb refuted Nordé's claim. "We'll let the data speak for itself," he said, referring to test scores.
The case, which will continue for another six to eight weeks, could determine who has authority over much-needed reform in a school district where students received the lowest scores on 2009 national math and reading tests.
Summer vacation for Hawaii's schoolchildren starts on Wednesday. About 170,000 young people will be hitting the beach, the mall, grandma's house, the sofa -- all the places they have already been spending most Fridays for nearly the entire school year. Seventeen school days were sliced out of their educations by a series of school-closing teacher furloughs to help close a nearly $1 billion state budget gap.
The furloughs were rightly deplored by parents and denounced by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and showed Hawaii's political and education establishment at its worst. When the first "furlough Friday" happened last October, we didn't imagine that Hawaii -- which has one statewide school district with a lackluster record of achievement -- would slouch through the rest of the school year without getting its kids back in their seats.
Mike Lipp is athletic director at Madison's West High School. Previously, he was a science teacher at the school for 20 years, and coached swimming, soccer and baseball. He also was a science teacher in DeForest for 15 years.
Lipp, 59, this month began a one-year term as president of the teacher unit of Madison Teachers Inc., the union that represents teachers, related professionals and school support personnel. His grandmother and father-in-law were union members and he was in the United Auto Workers during a summer when he was a graduate student.
In your personal finances, what would you do if your expenses exceeded your revenue?
That happens in several levels, when you get a mortgage or when you get a car loan. I have never bought a car with cash. ... Personally, you can operate in the red but governments have to operate in the black. It's a funny system.
Some 2009 Email Messages to Comments @ the Madison School District
These two documents [1MB .txt or 2MB PDF] include some email messages sent to "comments@madison.k12.wi.us" from 1/1/2009 through September, 2009.
I requested the messages via an open records request out of concerns expressed to me that public communications to this email address were not always making their way to our elected representatives on the Madison Board of Education. Another email address has since been created for direct public communication to the Board of education: board@madison.k12.wi.us
There has been extensive back and forth on the scope of the District's response along with the time, effort and expense required to comply with this request. I am thankful for the extensive assistance I received with this request.
I finally am appreciative of Attorney Dan Mallin's fulfillment (a few items remain to be vetted) and response, included below:
As we last discussed, attached are several hundreds of pages of e-mails (with non-MMSD emails shortened for privacy purposes) that:
(1) Are not SPAM / commercial solicitations / organizational messages directed to "school districts" generally
(2) Are not Pupil Records
(3) Are not auto-generated system messages (out of office; undeliverable, etc.)
(4) Are not inquiries from MMSD employees about how to access their work email via the web when the web site changed (which e-mails typically contained their home email address)
(5) Are not technical web-site related inquiries (e.g., this link is broken, etc.)
(6) Are not random employment inquiries / applications from people who didn't know to contact the Human Resources department and instead used the comments address (e.g., I'm a teacher and will be moving to Madison, what job's are open?).
(7) Are not geneology-related inquiries about relatives and/or long-lost friends/teachers/etc.
(8) Are not messages that seek basic and routine information that would be handled clerically(e.g., please tell me where I can find this form; how do I get a flyer approved for distribution; what school is ____ address assigned to; when is summer school enrollment, etc.)
Some of the above may have still slipped in, but the goal was to keep copying costs as low as possible. Once all of the e-mails within your original request were read to determine content, it took over 2 hours to isolate the attached messages electronically from the larger pool that also included obvious pupil records, but you've been more than patient with this process and you have made reasonable concessions that saved time for the District in other ways, and there will be no additional copying charge assessed.
It would be good public policy to post all communications sent to the District. Such a simple effort may answer many questions and provide a useful look at our K-12 environment.
I am indebted to Chan Stroman Roll for her never ending assistance on this and other matters.
Related: Vivek Wadhwa: The Open Gov Initiative: Enabling Techies to Solve Government Problems
While grandma flips through photo albums on her sleek iPad, government agencies (and most corporations) process mission-critical transactions on cumbersome web-based front ends that function by tricking mainframes into thinking that they are connected to CRT terminals. These systems are written in computer languages like Assembler and COBOL, and cost a fortune to maintain. I've written about California's legacy systems and the billions of dollars that are wasted on maintaining these. Given the short tenure of government officials, lobbying by entrenched government contractors, and slow pace of change in the enterprise-computing world, I'm not optimistic that much will change - even in the next decade. But there is hope on another front: the Open Government Initiative. This provides entrepreneurs with the data and with the APIs they need to solve problems themselves. They don't need to wait for the government to modernize its legacy systems; they can simply build their own apps.
One absolutely great thing that the folks at CPPS did was to include every single comment. There are pages of them so it takes awhile to read. But it is valuable reading because you start seeing a theme to them even as each one differs somewhat in its issue.
What did people say? If I had to sum it up, it would be two things. One, there is almost zero feeling that Dr. Goodloe-Johnson listens to parents. There were several comments that applauded her strong stance (which many others thought autocratic) or the changes she has made in the district . I didn't see one comment saying she was approachable or was someone who collaborates well with the community.
Two, is the overwhelming sense that she is hurting the district, either through her lack of ability to engage/motivate/inspire and/or the amount of churn that she has caused in the district with not a lot to show for it in terms of results.
During the past year, academic experts, educators, and policy makers have waged a confusing and largely invisible war over the content and quality of Common Core's proposed high school exit and grade-level standards. Some critics see little or no value to national standards, explaining why local or state control is necessary for real innovations in education and why "one size doesn't fit all" applies as strongly to the school curriculum as it does to the clothing industry. On the other hand, some supporters believe so strongly in the idea of national standards that they appear willing to accept Common Core's standards no matter how inferior they may be to the best sets of state or international standards so long as they are better than most states' standards. In contrast, others who believe that national standards may have value have found earlier drafts incapable of making American students competitive with those in the highest-achieving countries. No one knows whether Common Core's standards will raise student achievement in all performance categories, simply preserve an unacceptable academic status quo, or actually reduce the percentage of high-achieving high school students in states that adopt them.
All these alternatives are possible because of the lack of clarity about what readiness for college and workplace means - the key concept driving the current movement for national standards - and what the implications of this concept are for high school graduation requirements in each state and for current admission and/or placement requirements in its post-secondary institutions. There has been a striking lack of public discussion about the definition of college readiness (e.g., for what kind of college, for what majors, for what kind of credit-bearing freshman courses) and whether workplace readiness is similar to college readiness. According to Common Core's own draft writers, these college readiness standards are aimed at community colleges, trade schools, and other non-selective colleges, although Common Core hasn't said so explicitly.
A new study comparing reading skills of fourth- and eighth-grade children in 18 urban school systems once again places Milwaukee Public Schools near the bottom of the ladder, a pattern of underachievement that gave voice to worries Thursday about the future of Milwaukee's children and calls - yet again - for a greater sense of urgency to improve.
In a set of national reading tests, Milwaukee's fourth-graders outperformed only Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia, while its eighth-graders outperformed only Detroit, Fresno, Calif., and Washington, D.C., according to the results of the Trial Urban District Assessment, a special project of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a periodic national assessment, often referred to as the Nation's Report Card, that allows for state-to-state comparisons in core academic subjects. The urban district study isolates scores among a number of the country's high-minority, high-poverty school systems to better compare how those students are doing.
All of the voluntary participants in the program are from cities with populations of at least 250,000, ranging from districts serving Fresno, Calif., and Louisville, Ky., to those in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.
This is the first time that Milwaukee Public Schools participated in the reading tests for the urban districts. Last year, results from the math tests also carried bad news for MPS, which did better than only Detroit at the eighth-grade level.
Under the state's new math curriculum, lower scores plus a quicker pace of instruction equal greater anxiety for both students and their teachers.
"In my classes, I have 60 kids and only 17 are passing. You know how stressful that is on me?" said Donna Aker, a veteran math teacher at South Gwinnett High School.
It's a problem common to many metro Atlanta schools. Nearly one in five ninth-graders in metro Atlanta last year got an F in Math I -- the first year of the state's new math curriculum in high school.
The math failure rate was more than double that experienced by the same group of kids in the eighth grade the year before.
For virtually every school district in the country teacher pay depends upon a teacher's years of experience (steps) and some measure of educational attainment (columns). Harrison School District Two in Colorado made national news when it announced their new salary schedule which moves away from the step and column approach. There proposal appears to be a perfectly rational and balanced approach. See the charts below for more details. The district will conduct evaluations, incorporate outcomes, and consider level of educational experience. This data will annually be assessed to determine whether a teacher advances to the next pay level gets a raise, or advances to the next job description (gets a promotion). Presumably over time, teachers would receive a cost of living adjustment even if they stay at the same salary tier. Teachers will initially be placed on thin the new salary tiers with plenty of room to grow. If a teacher receives three consecutive poor evaluations, the teacher can go down a level.
What is shocking to anyone who doesn't work in education, is that this a major innovation in teacher compensation. Prior to working for Education Sector, I worked for state government ( for the Legislature in California), and had basically the same type of salary structure being implemented by Harrison. Annually, I was reviewed, and based on the review of the work that I had done that year and an evaluation of my superior, I would either advance a tier or two (we had a few more tiers than this system). Over time, the super stars advanced a little faster than others, the generally effective staff advanced, but more slowly, and a few would remain at the same pay level for several years, and then many of them would decide this was not the profession for them.
The progressive decline of students' ability in English worries me as a secondary school teacher. Do people know students are no longer formally tested in grammar?
Instead, it would appear that our curriculum is leaning toward encouraging students to be more creative and expressive. I would argue that this can be beneficial as long as students have a basic understanding of the foundation in the language.
A glaringly clear example of this going wrong is when Chinese medium of instruction students, who cannot demonstrate a clear understanding of the tenses, are asked to have a group discussion about a book or film.
Nevada has recently been considering whether to change the way its state education agency is run. The governor has asked for the state superintendent to be part of the cabinet and for the power to name the state school chief. The legislature has turned down this request with a political argument, arguing the governor would have too much power under such an arrangement.
Today is a pretty big day for anyone who cares about school funding in California. This morning a broad coalition of people and organizations--individual students and parents, nine school districts (including SFUSD!), the state PTA, the California School Boards Association (CSBA) and the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA)--announced that a school funding adequacy lawsuit has been filed against the state.
The lawsuit, Robles-Wong v. California, requests that the current education finance system be declared unconstitutional and that the state be required to establish a school finance system that provides all students an equal opportunity to meet the academic goals set by the State.
Government as Innovation Catalyst The $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" education program is showing how government can successfully drive systemwide innovation
The best use of government is as a catalyst for social system innovation. Yes, that's right: "Innovation bureaucrat" need not be an oxymoron. Leaders should get the innovation reaction started--and then get out of the way.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is showing how it can be done. The "Race to the Top" program offers $4 billion in grants to states committed to reforming their education systems. Duncan outlined a clear goal of restoring the U.S. as a world leader in preparing students to succeed in college and the workplace and announced the first grants on Mar. 29, 2010--$100 million for Delaware and $500 million for Tennessee.
A number of sectors of the economy appear to be bouncing back. Housing starts, home foreclosures and job creation all show movement in the right direction. But the fiscal situation in most states will not improve for quite some time. And, for public schools, the coming year promises to be the worst yet of the economic downturn.
Years of budget cuts in the vast majority of school districts already have taken their toll, with sharp reductions in after-school programs, academic enrichment and other so-called extras. Most states have exhausted their federal stimulus funds, and many states long ago tapped out their financial reserves. School districts now are cutting into bone, eliminating classroom teachers and core academic offerings like foreign languages.
According to a survey of more than 80% of school districts by the American Association of School Administrators, 275,000 teachers and other school staff will receive pink slips. It's not that these schools will educate fewer children, or that students won't need the personnel and programs that will be cut. But the cuts could rob an entire generation of students of the well-rounded education they need and deserve. Class sizes will swell, and students will lose important classes and programs, such as art, music, physical education, Advanced Placement classes, and counseling and intervention programs for those who need the most help.
If educators want to shrink the number of students who drop out of high school each year, they must greatly increase the number who can read proficiently by the time they're in fourth grade, a key non-profit children's advocacy group says in a new report.
"The bottom line is that if we don't get dramatically more children on track as proficient readers, the United States will lose a growing and essential proportion of its human capital to poverty," the authors say.
Ralph Smith, the foundation's executive vice president, says recent research shows that dropouts "don't just happen in high school" but that students give clear indications as early as elementary school that they're on a "glide path" to dropping out. Among the clearest signs: difficulty reading and understanding basic work that becomes more detail-oriented around fourth grade.
In my wildest dreams, I never thought I would say that it is time for this community to support the Waukesha School Board. Currently, the Waukesha School Board and the Education Association of Waukesha are seeking arbitration over the latest contract negotiations due to a $5.7 million dollar discrepancy in salary and benefits between the two sides.
A little history is in order here. The qualified economic offer and revenue caps passed the state Legislature back in the early '90s due to the ever increasing burden of salaries and Cadillac benefits placed on school district budgets and taxpayers. The QEO was designed to limit salary and benefit increases to 3.8 percent to avoid arbitration. Acknowledging that the QEO and revenue caps (the control on school spending) were out of line, the state Legislature eliminated the QEO. This was to help school boards limit or eliminate budget reductions seen every year.
There are several items in dispute between the EAW and the Waukesha School Board: restoring the insurance back to the WEA Trust (the state teachers-owned health insurance), reinstating and making permanent early retirement language and total compensation calculations.
First, the insurance. Traditionally the district has had to use WEA Trust for the teacher's Cadillac insurance plan. There were minimal outof-pocket expenses to the employee, no contribution to the cost and a whopping $21,000-plus price tag (family plan). For the 2007-09 contract, the board successfully worked in a premium contribution of $20 for a single plan and $40 for a family plan per month from the employee. In addition, a $250/500 outof-pocket was added. The current school board proposal is looking to change this in the new contract to $500 single/$1000 family and a 10 percent premium contribution. These changes reflect what is really happening in the private sector today.
How to increase union membership among non-government workers? Legislate it - and include it as a non-fiscal policy item in your state's massive budget bill.
Just what the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its supporters did in 2008. And just what the SEIU did in earlier years, first establishing a pilot referral program in Dane County.
The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign provides the "follow-the-money" history: In 2002,"four SEIU locals made over $750,000 in independent expenditures, mostly on behalf of Dem primary candidate (and not coincidentally, Dane County Executive) Kathleen Falk. Eight SEIU locals inside and outside Wisconsin contributed another $190,000+, with "most of the contributions" going to Falk.
In 2004, SEIU locals contributed $17,500 to Governor Jim Doyle, not up for reelection that year. In 2006, the SEIU Political Education and Action Fund (SEIU PEA) made independent expenditures of $36,651 on behalf of Doyle. They also joined with AFSCME in sponsoring issue ads targeting Doyle opponent Mark Green, with plans to spend about $500,000.
We hear a lot of talk about the importance of educational achievement and the knee-buckling costs of college. What if you could get kids to complete two years of college by the time they finish high school?
That is happening in New York City. I had breakfast a few weeks ago with Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, to talk about Bard High School Early College, a school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that gives highly motivated students the opportunity to earn both a high school diploma and a two-year associate of arts degree in the four years that are usually devoted to just high school.
When these kids sail into college, they are fully prepared to handle the course loads of sophomores or juniors. Essentially, the students complete their high school education by the end of the 10th grade and spend the 11th and 12th grades mastering a rigorous two-year college curriculum.
The school, a fascinating collaboration between Bard College and the city's Department of Education, was founded in 2001 as a way of dealing, at least in part, with the systemic failures of the education system. American kids drop out of high school at a rate of one every 26 seconds. And, as Dr. Botstein noted, completion rates at community colleges have been extremely disappointing.
Education reform is "moving into prime time," writes Steven Brill in the Times Magazine article "The Teachers' Unions' Last Stand." He looks at how Race to the Top, the charter-school movement and other factors are coming together to overhaul public education in the United States -- and why teachers' unions are resisting many of these reforms.
...[Race to the Top] has turned a relatively modest federal program (the $4.3 billion budget represents less than 1 percent of all federal, state and local education spending) into high-yield leverage that could end up overshadowing health care reform in its impact and that is already upending traditional Democratic Party politics. The activity set off by the contest has enabled [the school-reform network New Leaders for New Schools] to press as never before its frontal challenge to the teachers' unions: they argue that a country that spends more per pupil than any other but whose student performance ranks in the bottom third among developed nations isn't failing its children for lack of resources but for lack of trained, motivated, accountable talent at the front of the class.
If a state mandates that every school reduce class sizes, will students learn more? Since reducing class size is very expensive, that is a question state legislatures are asking themselves at a time when fiscal deficits are looming nearly everywhere. To that question, a just released study of the Florida Class Size Amendment says "No." Telling schools they must reduce class size yields no benefit, it reports.
Florida is an interesting place to explore this issue, because students there have been improving at a faster rate than any other state in the union, according to Matt Ladner at the Goldwater Institute. Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Ladner shows that student performance in 4th and 8th grade reading and math has leaped forward in Florida while it has remained stagnant in many other states.
Some have attributed the spectacular Florida gains to the state's accountability system, its Just Read initiative, or the state's school choice programs. But others have attributed the Florida gains to an amendment to the Florida Constitution, adopted by the voters in 2002, which requires every school district to reduce its average class size. To fulfill the purposes of the amendment, the Florida state legislature has in recent years allocated state funds that must be used for class size reduction in those districts not yet at the limit. The remaining districts have received comparable amounts to be used for any educational purpose they see fit.
Less than a month after signing the nation's toughest law on illegal immigration, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona has again upset the state's large Hispanic population, signing a bill aimed at ending ethnic studies in Tucson schools.
Under the law signed on Tuesday, any school district that offers classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups, advocate ethnic solidarity or promote resentment of a race or a class of people would risk losing 10 percent of its state financing.
"Governor Brewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people," Paul Senseman, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement on Thursday.
Judy Burns, president of the governing board of the Tucson schools, said the district's ethnic studies courses did not violate any of the provisions of the new law and would be continued because they were valuable to the students.
During the angry debate over teacher pay, little has been said about the higher salaries of New Jersey school administrators. On the contrary, Gov. Chris Christie praises many of them for taking wage freezes while most teachers are refusing.
Don't expect that to last long.
"I'm sure that at some point the governor is going to push obviously with administrators as well," said Boonton superintendent Christine Johnson, singled out by Christie for freezing her salary. "I would think that writing is on the wall."
One reason: six-figure salaries are common among administrators, who include superintendents, assistant superintendents and principals. A Star-Ledger analysis of data from the state Department of Education for 2008-09 found:
The median salary for full-time school administrators in New Jersey -- the salary figure that half of them exceed, and half do not -- was $113,083.
In more than 425 districts, the median salary for an administrator was at least $100,000. Less than 2 percent of teachers -- 1.6 percent -- made $100,000 or more.
Christie's $175,000 salary is less than the pay of 235 school administrators from 184 districts.
A 2008 report commissioned by the New Jersey Association of School Administrators found the average superintendent salary in New Jersey was $154,409, about $9,000 higher than the national average. That compared with $152,782 in New York and $146,906 in Connecticut.
A school district that gained the support of President Barack Obama for promoting accountability after it fired all its teachers from a struggling school announced on Sunday it had reached an agreement with the union to return the current staffers to their jobs.
The two sides said a transformation plan for Central Falls High School for the coming school year would allow the roughly 87 teachers, guidance counselors, librarians and other staffers who were to lose their jobs at the end of this year to return without having to reapply. More than 700 people had already applied for the positions.
The agreement calls for a longer school day, more after-school tutoring and other changes.
"What this means is that they have come to an agreement about a reform effort and that will change the quality" of the education program at Central Falls, said Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist, who applauded both sides for working together.
Itzie Duarte is glad her children are enrolled in the West Valley School District. But she is far from happy with the school board's decision to move fifth-graders to the middle school this fall.
"A fifth-grader isn't mentally capable of being in a school where there is no recess," said Duarte, who will have one child entering kindergarten and another entering third grade. "If we need the space, turn the middle school into an elementary school."
But district officials say next year's grade reconfiguration - which includes sending ninth-graders to the old high school - is needed to help with overcrowding.
Much of the growth is in the elementary schools. In the past three years, about 300 additional students - including about 60 this year - have entered the district.
The middle school, officials added, is built to accommodate students traveling throughout the building and is not designed for instructing young children.
As an education policy analyst, I am very concerned about the quality of education our children are receiving. My research has led me to conclude that the key impediment to improving public education is not lack of money, but the organizational structure of public schools. Private schools in Washington and public charter schools in other states are given the advantage of operating free of public education's centralized and highly regulated superstructure. As a result, private and public charter schools can better direct resources to the classroom, more reliably place effective teachers in every classroom, and offer better life prospects to children through higher-quality education. Cutting central bureaucracies and putting qualified principals in charge of their schools would help make sure that education dollars actually reach the classroom.
Teachers in Seattle receive an average of $70,850 in total salary (base pay and other pay), plus average insurance benefits of $9,855. These figures apply to a ten-month work year.
Teachers in Seattle public schools can earn up to $88,463 in total base and other pay for a ten-month work year, or $98,318 including benefits.
Seattle Schools employ 371 people as "educational staff associates," who receive an average of $76,339 for a ten-month year, or $86,194 including benefits.
Seattle Schools employs 193 non-teachers, mostly senior administrators, who each receive more than $100,000 in total pay.
Though shrouded in the overly formal language of district documents, new amendments to the proposed 2010-'11 Milwaukee Public Schools budget signal an ultimatum to unions from the Milwaukee School Board: Accept changes to your health care and be open to a furlough, or watch your colleagues be laid off next year.
In a Strategic Planning and Budget Committee meeting Thursday night that carried into Friday morning, the board got its first chance to discuss and act on amendments to the administration's proposed $1.3 billion budget, which calls for an estimated 150 to 200 teacher layoffs and hundreds of other staff job eliminations.
Amendments that direct changes to the health-care plan and the implementation of furloughs would require an agreement with labor unions that represent certain employees. But the board's amendments could set the ball in motion for those discussions.
One of those included restoring about a third of the positions set to be eliminated for teachers, paraprofessionals and general education aides, but only if those bargaining units - namely, the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association - agree to accept the less expensive health care plan.
Despite Lansing politicians touting projected savings through the school employee retirement incentive plan that passed the Legislature Friday, some area school officials say the measure leaves unanswered questions and they wonder how much of a savings it truly will hold for their districts.
"We've just taken a major step in the right direction to provide support for schools around the state," said Republican Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop of Rochester. The bill passed the Republican-led Senate by a 21-14 vote and the Democratic House, 56-45.
Proponents of the legislation, which the governor says she will sign, contend it could save school systems more than $670 million in the next fiscal year.
But that will depend on how many of the 57,000 school employees eligible to retire actually choose to do so. They must decide by Sept. 1.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he's taller than Barack Obama and has a better jump shot than Sen. John McCain but stopped short of challenging the commander-in-chief's own skills on the court.
Duncan, speaking Saturday to University of Wisconsin-Madison spring graduates at the Kohl Center, joked about his credentials over other notable speakers, referencing a student newspaper article chiding officials for taking so long to invite someone with "somewhat" the same speaking prowess as the president, who spoke at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor two weeks ago.
Like most graduation speeches this spring, Duncan referenced the tough job market facing graduates but offered advice for adapting to the new age of employment. He spoke at one of UW's five ceremonies that add up to about 6,000 graduates this spring.
"Rather than telling you about time-honored truths, I want to talk about skillfully managing uncertainty and serendipity as the defining elements of the 21st century education," Duncan said. "It's not just knowledge and subject mastery; your ability to adapt, be creative and pursue your passion will determine how you fare in the job market."
Citing the "hallmarks of a great progressive education," Duncan told graduates they need to focus on their ability to work both independently and in teams and be creative in a global job market.
Welcome to the new age of school autonomy and teacher freedom.
At least that is what has been promised: fewer directives and targets, less guidance and prescription.
However, there are conflicting messages on English education policy from the new coalition government.
They can be summed up by two consecutive sentences in the "coalition agreement", which has become the working handbook for the new government.
First, it promises that all schools will have "greater freedom over the curriculum". Then, it adds that all schools will be held "properly accountable".
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a revised spending plan Friday that pegged the state's budget shortfall at $19.1 billion and called for deep cuts to welfare and health programs--but no tax increases--to close the gap.
The new shortfall estimate is higher than the previous projection of $18.6 billion partly because the state collected less tax revenue than expected in April for the 2009 tax year. Court decisions challenging some of Mr. Schwarzenegger's cuts also added to the budget gap.
This will be the third straight year that Mr. Schwarzenegger has proposed deep spending cuts. Tax revenue in California has plunged because of the collapse of the real-estate and financial markets. Legislators closed a $60 billion budget gap last year, but not before state officials had to issue IOUs to creditors to keep the state solvent.
A bill introduced this month in Congress would put the federal and state governments in the business of tracking how fat, or skinny, American children are.
States receiving federal grants provided for in the bill would be required to annually track the Body Mass Index of all children ages 2 through 18. The grant-receiving states would be required to mandate that all health care providers in the state determine the Body Mass Index of all their patients in the 2-to-18 age bracket and then report that information to the state government. The state government, in turn, would be required to report the information to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for analysis.
The Healthy Choices Act--introduced by Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee--would establish and fund a wide range of programs and regulations aimed at reducing obesity rates by such means as putting nutritional labels on the front of food products, subsidizing businesses that provide fresh fruits and vegetables, and collecting BMI measurements of patients and counseling those that are overweight or obese.
Madison School District Online Survey: "Embedded Honors" High School Courses
via a kind reader's email. The survey is apparently available via the District's "Infinite Campus" system:
1. The Embedded Honors option provided work that was challenging for my child.
o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
2. Please provide an explanation to Question 1.
(empty box)
3. The Embedded Honors work allowed my child to go more in-depth into the content of the course.
o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
4. Please provide an explanation to Question 3.
(empty box)
5. For Embedded Honors, my child had to do more work than other students.
o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
6. For Embedded Honors, my child had to do more challenging work than other students.
o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
7. Mark the following learning options that were part of your child's experience in the Embedded Honors for this corse.
o extension opportunities of class activities
o class discussions and labs to enhance my learning
o flexible pace of instruction
o access to right level of challenge in coursework
o opportunities to focus on my personal interests
o independent work (projects)
o opportunities to demonstrate my knowledge
o opportunities to explore a field of study
o additional reading assignments
o more challenging reading assignments
o additional writing assignments
o helpful teacher feedback on my work
o activities with other Embedded Honors students
o more higher-level thinking, less memorization
8. My child benefited from the Embedded Honors option for the course(s) for which he/she took, compared to courses without Embedded Honors.
o Strongly disagree
o Disagree
o Neither agree nor disagree
o Agree
o Strongly agree
Unique Schools Serving Unique Students (Robin Lake, editor) offers a pioneering look at the role of charter schools in meeting the needs of special education students. The book addresses choices made at the intersection of two very important policy arenas in education: special education and charter schools.
Drawing lessons from parent surveys and case studies, this volume poses and addresses a number of important questions that have received limited attention to date: How many students with disabilities attend charter schools? How do parents choose schools for their children with special needs and how satisfied are they with their choices? What innovations are coming out of the charter school sector that might be models for public education writ large? Finally, what challenges and opportunities do charter schools bring to special education?
Thanks largely to the efforts of President Obama, more Americans are paying attention to education reform. In Wisconsin, many people were forced out of their comfort zone (we are pleased about ranking either #1 or #2 in ACT scores) when the Obama administration snubbed our request for federal "Race to the Top" money.
Just as the public is coming to understand the vulnerability of the Wisconsin economy, they are beginning to see the vulnerability of our K-12 school system. Dropouts are up, test scores are down, and we have never spent more on education. Increasingly, people are beginning to demand more performance from their education dollar.
In education, like so many aspects of our lives, we look for success stories. Today's rock star of education reform is the diminutive head of the Washington D.C. schools, Michelle Rhee. She is shaking up the world of education based on her passion around one simple concept; performance. Enabled by changes in federal and city laws, Rhee has put in place a teacher evaluation system, 50% of which is based on teachers' impact on student learning. Using this tool, Rhee laid off dozens of teachers. If they were not performing, they were gone.
The need to succeed at teaching children is at the basic core of everything we do in Madison schools.
So why did the very society that depends on us to educate their most precious beings, their children, come to be so apprehensive about us? How did this happen? When did our state Legislature and many of our fellow citizens decide that an increase and/or a change in public financing of education was not in their interest?
Perhaps we all need to calm down and ask ourselves the very basic question of why we have public schools. The following tenets are a good start:
1. To provide universal access to free education.
2. To guarantee equal opportunities for all children.
3. To unify a diverse population.
4. To prepare people for citizenship in a democratic society.
5. To prepare people to become economically self-sufficient.
6. To improve social conditions.
7. To pass knowledge from one generation to the next.
8. To share the accumulated wisdom of the ages.
9. To instill in our young people a love for a lifetime of learning.
10. To bring a richness and depth to life.
Many Americans have either forgotten, disregard, or no longer view public schools as needed to achieve the above. Some, not all, view the public schools in a much more narrow and self-indulgent way -- "What are the public schools going to do for me and my child?" -- and do not look at what the schools so richly provide for everyone in a democratic society.
There are many reasons that public education institutions face credibility challenges, including:
Having said that, there are certainly some remarkable people teaching our children, in many cases resisting curriculum reduction schemes and going the extra mile. In my view, our vital public school climate would be far richer and, overall, more effective with less bureaucracy, more charters (diffused governance) and a more open collaborative approach with nearby education institutions.
Madison taxpayers have long supported spending policies far above those of many other communities. The current economic situation requires a hard look at all expenditures, particularly those that cannot be seen as effective for the core school mission: educating our children. Reading scores would be a great place to start.
New Madison School Board Governance: Maya Cole is President & Beth Moss Vice President
Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting included a shifting of the chairs as Maya Cole succeeds Arlene Silveira as President and Beth Moss steps in for Lucy Mathiak as Vice President. Best wishes.
"We have failed our African American kids, and hence we have failed our schools and all our kids... efforts at reform have been a joke. Its time for outrage". - Neil Heinen Editorial -
March 30, 2010
Hello,
Dane County Transition School is sponsoring a Speak Out, the invitation is attached [PDF]. We are hoping those (students, parents, community members, educators...) who are passionate use this opportunity to voice their thoughts, ideas, and/or concerns for the need for more educational alternatives.
We are having the television stations, and the newspapers cover the Speak Out.
We are asking anyone who would like to speak to RSVP so we can order enough t-shirts, and plan the time accordingly.
Looking forward to seeing you at the Speak Out!
Judy & DCTS Community
* We have also attached a true story about two sisters; one who attends DCTS, and the other who...
Sisters-Two Different Journeys... One Given the Opportunity to Succeed...One Not...
A student approached me and said that she had a sudden revelation the evening before. She could not discuss this revelation in a public space, and requested that we talk in private. Her brows were slightly furrowed, but she had energy about her; like she had discovered her dream career, or that she had fallen in love with the boy next door. When we sat down in a small classroom, alone, I realized that she was not going to tell me about the love of her life, or that she wanted to travel the world to discover her spirituality; no, she was going to tell me something bad.
The dark side of a teacher's career is getting to know the bad things about kids. In many circumstances, these bad things aren't pleasant; they make us feel uncomfortable, angry, sad, or depressed. Nevertheless, it is our duty to not just instruct students on mathematics and science, but to be role models; or, individuals who understand and listen to other people. What may have been a revelation to this student, or a sudden explanation for so many things that have gone wrong in her life, was not parallel to my own feelings on the matter. Hearing the news that this student, Sara, remembered that she had been sexually abused as a child by a close family member, was completely disheartening. Her younger sister, Teresa, was also a victim of this heinous act.
According to the American Psychological Association Commission on Violence and Youth, "children and youths suffer more victimization than do adults in virtually every category, including physical abuse, sibling assault, bullying, sexual abuse, and rape." In addition to this statistic, "long term effects of child abuse include fear, anxiety, depression, anger, hostility, inappropriate sexual behavior, poor self esteem, tendency toward substance abuse and difficulty with close relationships." (Browne & Finkelhor).
Despite Sara's realization that many of her troubles in life may be results of being a victim of sexual abuse as a child, she has made a lot of progress. Sara was given the opportunity to attend an alternative school, DCTS, for 2.5 years. During her time at DCTS, Sara has learned a variety of skills, from academics to social and emotional growth. She is now employed at a nursing home, is planning on earning her C.N.A license, and is taking the steps to enroll in college. Her sister, on the other hand, is in a different place. Teresa has been expelled from her home district 3 times; each expulsion occurred for different reasons. Teresa is currently not going to school, and her district has refused her access to the alternative school of her choice. Both Sara and Teresa have struggled with self-esteem issues (that at times were self-destructive), drug and alcohol abuse, cutting, and have experienced bouts of psychological symptoms related to depression. The difference between these girls is that there is no difference. Both were brought up in the same home, and experienced the same trauma. Both endured hardships related to their childhood. The difference lies in the system; Teresa has been denied the right to be educated in an environment deemed safe by her. Teresa deserves to learn, grow, and become a productive person; she deserves the right to attend an alternative school like DCTS. While Sara has learned to grow from trauma, Teresa is being pushed further into a dark, desolate hole.
It is shameful that our society forgets to place an emphasis on the needs of students; we say that we do, but when it comes down to it, we don't. We don't allow our students to learn from their mistakes, to learn how to be strong people, to learn how to advocate for themselves. The educational system has victimized Teresa in the same way that she was victimized as a child; she does not have a choice, does not have a voice, and her opinion is stifled. The miraculous thing about Teresa is that she has hope, a personality, and motivation. She is fighting the district to give her the school placement she deserves. The devastating factor is that Teresa has to keep fighting for something that our country perceives as a given right: an education.
Under President Obama's new $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, states can compete for funds by creating programs that improve the quality of their schools. The idea of rewarding school reform initiatives is good, but one-time grants from the federal government will not improve our public education system by itself.
Why? Because the $400 million grant Pennsylvania now seeks represents less than half of 1% of the $23 billion spent annually in my state's public school system. Given the thousands of dollars already being spent per student, an additional $56 per child will be insignificant--unless it is accompanied by comprehensive school-choice reform.
Pennsylvania should adopt reform based on the same premise as the Race to the Top initiative: that competition for taxpayer dollars improves the quality of education.
Mr. Williams is a state senator from Pennsylvania and a candidate in the May 18 Democratic primary for governor.
"I hope we will criticize the many reform ideas that rest upon false assumptions about the differences between "us" (especially middle- and upper-class whites) and "them" ... spouted by folks ... whose solutions support the continuation of schools with a test-prep curriculum and military/prison-style behavioral norms ... I want all kids to have a chance to go to schools of the sort where Arne Duncan and President Obama send their own kids." - Deborah Meier
If you're interested in public education, take a look at this exchange between reknowned inner-city principal and writer Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch, author most recently of The Death and Life of the Great American School System. It's a terrific back-and-forth. Meier, by the way, had this to say about the selection of Arne Duncan in a discussion that occurred right after he was picked:
School district officials are stubbornly refusing to say.
Nor will they disclose if the district followed its own policies for screening new students when (or if) Mateo-Lozenzo enrolled at West using a fake name and age.
Police say Mateo-Lozenzo pulled the trigger in the shooting death of gang rival Antonio Perez, 19, on Madison's East Side late last month.
Mateo-Lozenzo was an illegal immigrant from Mexico. But that's not the central issue here because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that school districts can't withhold public education because of immigration status.
NJEA's website has a new feature: an analysis NJ's RTTT application. While its censorious tone is no surprise, there's a few factual misrepresentations. As a public service, we offer these annotations.
1) The proposal will call "for more and more testing, in all subject areas, in all grades." Actually, the DOE is most likely going to eliminate statewide assessments in all grades except for 4th, 8th, 11th. New district assessments will be web-based and easily integrated into classroom instruction. (By the way, anyone want to figure out how much time and money was spent on developing our new grade 3, 5,6,7, and 9 assessments?)
2) "while NJEA was vilified for weeks by Christie when the poorly conceived and hastily written Phase RTTT application was rejected by the Obama Administration, Schundler told reporters he didn't think NJEA's support was central to approval in Phase II." Actually, Schundler is echoing U.S. Ed Sec. Arne Duncan, who has explained that he prefers strong reforms without buy-in over weak reforms with union support.
On May 11, the UFT, NYSUT and the State Education Department reached a new agreement -- subject to legislative approval -- to create a teacher evaluation and improvement plan. Under the new agreement, which would take effect in September 2011, the evaluation process will be more objective, be based mostly on qualitative measures and limit the role of test scores.
How will the teacher evaluation system change?
The current evaluation system doesn't work for us as a profession. It is totally subjective and too dependent on the whims of administrators. The new system, which would move us forward as a profession, will establish specific criteria that incorporate multiple measures of evaluating teacher performance. The new system embeds professional development in the evaluation system. Teacher evaluation was never meant to be a gotcha system. It was supposed to allow teachers to grow and develop professionally throughout their careers.
The 34 schools deemed Minnesota's persistently lowest performing are working with state officials on plans to turn them around.
Each school stands to gain a lot of money for that effort. But the leaders of some of those schools say they don't want to be on the list, no matter how much money they stand to receive.
A prime example is tranquil Butterfield School, which stands across the street from a poultry processing plant. Every now and then, a chicken escapes from the plant, and crosses the road to wander through the school hallways.
Under President Obama's new $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, states can compete for funds by creating programs that improve the quality of their schools. The idea of rewarding school reform initiatives is good, but one-time grants from the federal government will not improve our public education system by itself.
Why? Because the $400 million grant Pennsylvania now seeks represents less than half of 1% of the $23 billion spent annually in my state's public school system. Given the thousands of dollars already being spent per student, an additional $56 per child will be insignificant--unless it is accompanied by comprehensive school-choice reform.
Pennsylvania should adopt reform based on the same premise as the Race to the Top initiative: that competition for taxpayer dollars improves the quality of education.
Let's suppose you have spent your career as a professor at an American education school, training future teachers. Then suppose that your state decided that teachers could get certified without attending an education school at all.
That's called "alternative certification," and most of my school of education colleagues are outraged by it.
I take a different view. These new routes into teaching could transform the profession, by attracting the type of student that has eluded education schools for far too long. We should extend an olive branch to our competitors, instead of circling the wagons against them.
The biggest challenger at the moment is Teach for America (TFA), which recruits graduating seniors, mostly from elite colleges, and places them as teachers in public schools following a five-week training course. Last year, a whopping 11% of all Ivy League seniors applied to TFA. It was the No. 1 employer at several other top colleges, including Georgetown and the University of Chicago.
Over the past 40 years or so, child advocates have given a good amount of lip service to the view that adults, especially educators, should respect children's "individual differences."
In theory, this recognizes the fact that every trait is distributed in the general population in a manner represented by the bell-shaped curve. Whether the issue is general intelligence, sociability, optimism, musical aptitude, artistic ability, or mechanical skill (to mention but a few), relatively few people are "gifted" and relatively few people are disadvantaged.
Whatever the characteristic, most folks are statistically "normal." That is, they possess an adequate amount, enough to get by.
People gifted in more than a couple of areas are rare, and people gifted in one area but lacking in another are not unusual. A person with outstanding musical aptitude, for example, may be noticeably lacking in social skills, and a person with outstanding verbal skills may be mechanically inept.
Four of the Mt. Diablo school district's lowest-achieving schools will present their plans Tuesday for boosting student performance by applying for federal grants of up to $2 million a year to reform their campuses.
"It really could be an opportunity to make big changes," said Tom Carman, principal of Bel Air Elementary in Bay Point, among the schools that will apply for the money.
"A lot of what the teachers are going to be talking about is looking at data and finding out the best way to teach 'x, y or z,'" said Carman, who will retire this year. "So, we're going to be better educators."
Six district schools landed on that state's list of low-achieving campuses, identified as testing among the bottom 5 percent statewide.
After nearly five weeks of interagency finger-pointing and discord, District officials announced late Monday that they have found a way to finance the proposed teachers contract, paving the way for a vote by union rank-and-file on the $140 million pact.
Appearing together on the steps of the John A. Wilson Building on Monday evening, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and District Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi said they had devised a $38.8 million package of budget cuts and reallocations to close the $10.7 million funding gap in the contract and $28 million in projected overspending in other parts of the school budget.
The funding package delivers exactly what Gandhi had insisted upon in D.C. Council testimony and private deliberations with Rhee and Fenty before he would certify the pact as fiscally sound: a contract funded exclusively by public funds available without condition.
In the 19th century, Illinois was the land of Lincoln. In the 20th, it was the birthplace of Ronald Reagan. In the 21st, Illinois has given us a new breed of Republican: Roger Eddy.
Mr. Eddy is what they call a downstater, an assemblyman who serves an east-central Illinois district hugging the Indiana border. His day job turns out to be in government as well, as a public schools superintendent.
Last week Mr. Eddy became the face of the Republican failure to get a voucher bill through the Illinois assembly. The bill had passed the Senate. Yet despite being pushed by a remarkable coalition involving fellow Republicans, a free-market state think tank, and a prominent African-American leader, only 25 Republicans in the House voted yes. That was 12 votes short. Mr. Eddy was one of 23 Republicans who killed it by voting no.
"Last week was a missed opportunity for children in Chicago's worst and most overcrowded schools, and it was a missed opportunity for Republicans," says Collin Hitt, who handles education issues for the Illinois Policy Institute. "It's not often that a minority Republican party has the chance to advance cornerstone policy with key African-American support. The good news is that the legislation remains alive, and this bill has another chance."
Middleton, WI Superintendent Message to Parents & Guardians on Enrollment Policies (in light of a recent Student's arrest on murder charges)
via a kind reader:
Dear Parents and Guardians,
Last week we informed you of the heightened security measure at Middleton High School due to the gang-related homicide in Madison. The Middleton High School student involved in the incident was last seen in Texas and police do not believe he will return to the Madison area. As a result, security will be back to normal at the high school on Monday.
You have also likely seen the news in the media regarding the true identity and age of the student involved in the incident. The individual attending Middleton High School as Arain Gutierrez was later identified by police as 21-year old Ivan Mateo-Lozenzo. Once we were made aware of the suspect's identity and age we immediately began to investigate how he was enrolled at Middleton High School. Federal privacy laws prevent us from releasing the specific information or documents that are provided for an individual student. It does appear that our enrollment policies and procedures were correctly followed for his admission to our school district. To enroll in our school district the following must be provided for the student:
- A completed enrollment form
- Proof of residency in our district, such as a MGE or Alliant Energy bill, a signed apartment lease or accepted offer to purchase a home
- Proof of age is asked for but only required for children entering kindergarten
- Immunization record, if available
- Transfer of records request from the previous school district, if applicable
We also rely on information in the Wisconsin Student Locator system. This is a database with information on every student who has attended public school in Wisconsin. Arain Gutierrez was in this system as he previously attended Madison West High School before coming to Middleton. School districts throughout the state use this database to transfer student information from one district to another for thousands of students. There would be no reason to question the legitimacy of a student name or date of birth. We also have no record of an adult ever falsifying documents to gain entrance in our school district as a minor.
As a result of this incident, we are reviewing our current policies and procedures to determine what, if any, changes will be made to our enrollment process. We also continue to work with law enforcement to assess the impact this student may have had on others in the school district. The security of our schools is our highest priority. We will continue to take all measures to ensure the safety of our students and staff.
At 12:03:50 on 05/10/10 firefighters were dispatched for fire alarm at West high school.
On location, students had evacuated. Staff directed firefighters to a bathroom on the 3rd floor of the building where rolls of toilet paper had been burned.
Strobes were operating; alarm had been silenced. Firefighters found a moderate haze of smoke in the area and there was an odor of burned plastics. The fire was out, the toilet roll dispenser was smoldering and melted.
A fan was used from Engine 4 to start clearing the smoke.
The fire had been reported to a staff member by a student. The staff member used an extinguisher to put the fire out. Another student had been attempting to extinguish the fire with water from the sink.
April 26
1 Block Ash St.
Identifier: 201000110451
Time: 15:00
Battery (under general heading "Assault")
The fight outside the school last week was:
April 28
Chadbourne Av and Ash St
Identifier: 201000112346
Time: 12:47 (lunchtime)
Fight Call (under general heading "Disorder")
----------------
April 20
1 Block Ash St. (looks like this one was in the school)
Identifier: 201000104558
Time: 13:31
Battery (Assault)
April 28
Chadbourne and Allen
Identifier: 201000112447
Time: 14:35
Battery (Assault)
User's may wish to search local high school addresses on the crimereports.com website. The site supports date range searching. You must enter an address and enter a date range (see below) as the site only links to zip code area searches. The data is provided by the City of Madison, UW-Madison and the Madison Police Department. I don't know if all incidents are provided to this site.
The reform efforts at Sam Houston High School, once the worst-ranked campus in Texas, have drawn high-profile praise, from Gov. Rick Perry to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
"Sam Houston is proof that positive change is possible," Perry said at a celebratory news conference in October. "After six years of underperformance, this school has not only met state standards, it is now a recognized campus."
Perry is correct: Sam Houston last year did break its streak of "academically unacceptable" ratings from the state, but that is only part of the statistical picture. Duncan's visit last month to Sam Houston -- where he applauded the turnaround efforts -- has reignited debate about the high school's transformation: Is it the success story that Houston ISD and elected officials claim?
The answer is complicated. But in the final analysis, one thing is clear: Despite an improvement in student test scores, Sam Houston benefited from the state's easier rating system last year.
In the summer of 2008, the Houston Independent School District was under orders from Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott to make major changes at Sam Houston, which was the longest-running unacceptable school in the state. State guidelines required HISD to replace the principal and rename the school. In addition, at least 75 percent of the teaching staff had to be replaced, and half the students were supposed to be new.
The Madison and Middleton-Cross Plains school districts are reviewing their enrollment policies after a 21-year-old man who police said shot and killed a rival gang member successfully enrolled this fall as a Middleton High School student under an alias.
"As a result of this incident, we are reviewing our current policies and procedures to determine what, if any, changes will be made to our enrollment process," said district spokeswoman Michelle Larson.
Middleton records show the man, Ivan Mateo-Lozenzo, had previously attended West High School in Madison. But Madison district officials last week would not confirm he ever attended the school.
Still, Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad said the district will review its enrollment policies.
"I cannot tell you where this will lead, but we will have conversations about it," Nerad said.
Leaders and backers of the handful of high-energy "no excuses" schools in Milwaukee are launching efforts aimed at tripling the number of children attending such schools in the city.
The goal proclaimed by leaders of four efforts that have sprung up almost simultaneously is to raise the number of students in such demanding schools from about 6,000 now to 20,000 by 2020.
If the efforts succeed, they will dramatically change the education landscape in Milwaukee and, backers hope, make widespread the high achievement levels of the schools that are at the center of the new effort.
But for the effort to succeed, major political, institutional and financial hurdles will need to be jumped. People on both sides of the longstanding, giant chasm between partisans for Milwaukee Public Schools and partisans for charter schools and private voucher schools will need to cooperate and focus on matters of improving the quality of education where they might actually find common ground.
In any profession, you need a flow of ideas so the conversation around any particular subject doesn't become stale. But we also need a common understanding of the profession's fundamentals. For example, who wouldn't want our doctors and pilots to understand the basics of medicine and flying? If they don't, we're all in a heap of trouble.
A new National Council of Teacher Quality study suggests that Texas education schools are approaching the heap-of-trouble designation in teaching fundamentals. The report takes a look at 67 schools across the state in such areas as preparing teachers to instruct students in math and reading.
The study finds that the only consistency among them is their inconsistency.
The district faced a $3 million revenue shortfall for the coming fiscal year when it began. The board elected to cover the shortage by taking $2 million out of the district's $5.5 million fund balance and the remaining $1 million through spending cuts.
"Every decision at this point is tougher than the last," superintendent Paul Durand told the board as it began weighing the fate of historically popular and successful programs and student activities.
Most of the cuts came $2,000 or $3,000 at a time from a list of programs prepared by district administrators.
Challenged to find a way to reduce the music budget without doing away with fourth-grade orchestra, music department staff and district principals managed to trim more than $13,000 by cutting travel and other expenses from the marching and pep band programs. The savings still put the marching bands on the street for local parades and the Minnesota State Fair and puts the pep band in the stands for sporting events.
We now have, I suggest, an analogous risk from the widespread application of "the evidence-based techniques and processes of literacy instruction, k-12." At least one major foundation and one very old and influential college for teachers are now promoting what I have described as "guidelines, parameters, checklists, techniques, rubrics, processes and the like, as props to substitute for students' absent motivation to describe or express in writing something that they have learned."
Most of these literacy experts are psychologists and educators, rather than historians or authors of literature. Samuel Johnson, an 18th century author some may remember, once wrote that "an author will turn over half a library to produce one book." A recent major foundation report suggests that Dr. Johnson didn't know what he was talking about when it comes to adolescents:
"Some educators feel that the 'adolescent literacy crisis' can be resolved simply by having adolescents read more books. This idea is based on the misconception that the source of the problem is 'illiteracy.' The truth is that adolescents--even those who have already 'learned how to read'--need systematic support to learn how to 'read to learn' across a wide variety of contexts and content." So, no need for adolescents to read books, just give them lots of literacy kudzu classes in "rubrics, guidelines, parameters, checklists, techniques, and processes..."
Other literacy kudzu specialists also suggest that reading books is not so important, instead that: (to quote a recent Washington Post article by Psychologist Dolores Perin of Teachers College, Columbia) "many students cannot learn well from a content curriculum because they have difficulty reading assigned text and fulfilling subject-area writing assignments. Secondary content teachers need to understand literacy processes and become aware of evidence-based reading and writing techniques to promote learners' understanding of the content material being taught. Extended school-based professional development should be provided through collaborations between literacy and content-area specialists."
E.D. Hirsch has called this "technique" philosophy of literacy instruction, "How-To-Ism" and says that it quite uselessly tries to substitute methods and skills for the knowledge that students must have in order to read well and often, and to write on academic subjects in school.
Literacy Kudzu has been with us for a long time, but it has received new fertilizer from large private foundation and now federal standards grants which will only help it choke, where it can, attention to the reading of complete books and the writing of serious academic papers by the students in our schools.
Writing in Insidehighereducation.com, Lisa Roney recently said: "But let me also point out that the rise of Composition Studies over the past 30 or 40 years does not seem to have led to a populace that writes better."
Educrat Professors and Educrat Psychologists who have, perhaps, missed learning much about history and literature during their own educations, and have not made any obvious attempt to study their value in their education research, of course fall back on what they feel they can do: teach processes, skills, methods, rubrics, parameters, and techniques of literacy instruction. Their efforts, wherever they are successful, will be a disaster, in my view, for teachers and students who care about academic writing and about history and literature in the schools.
In a recent issue of Harvard Magazine an alum wrote: "Dad ( a professional writer) used to tell us what he felt was the best advice he ever had on good writing. One of his professors was the legendary Charles Townsend Copeland, A.B. 1882, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Copeland didn't collect themes and grade them. Rather, he made an appointment with each student to come to his quarters in Hollis Hall to read his theme and receive comments from the Master..."Dad started reading his offering and heard occasional groans and sighs of anguish from various locations in the (room). Finally, Copeland said in pained tones, 'Stop, Mr. Duncan, stop.' Dad stopped. After several seconds of deep silence, Copeland asked, 'Mr. Duncan, what are you trying to say?' Dad explained what he was trying to say. Said Copeland, 'Why didn't you write it down?'"
This is the sort of advice, completely foreign to the literacy kudzu community, which understands that in writing one first must have something to say (knowledge) and then one must work to express that knowledge so it may be understood. That may not play to the literacy kudzu community's perception of their strengths, but it has a lot more to do with academic reading and writing than anything they are working to inflict on our teachers and students.
I hope they, including the foundations and the university consultant world, may before too long pause to re-consider their approach to literacy instruction, before we experience the damage from this pest-weed which they are presently, perhaps unwittingly, in the method-technique-process of spreading in our schools.
Duncan Orders Study of Restrictive Transfer Policies
The Chronicle:
Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education, has asked the National Center for Education Statistics and the Office of Postsecondary Education to conduct a study of "restrictive" policies that make it more difficult for students to transfer credits from one institution to another. Higher-education experts have argued that loosening such policies would help the nation reach President Obama's goal of increasing the number of college graduates.
Illinois lawmakers were in disarray Thursday as they groped for stopgap measures to address a $13 billion deficit equaling nearly half of the state's general-fund revenue.
The state faces one of the nation's worst budget crises, spilled over in part from the broader national economic crunch, and its current bond ratings lag only California's. But the confusion in the legislature indicates that serious steps to fix state finances won't be taken until after the November elections--if then.
Most states have addressed or still face gaps in their budgets totaling $196 billion for fiscal year 2010, while tax revenue declined in the final quarter of 2009 in 39 of the states for which data is available.
Illinois lawmakers have little appetite for drastic spending cuts. An income-tax increase proposed by Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn is going nowhere. Even temporary steps, such as borrowing to make pension payments, have stalled. Illinois is months late on many of its bills and has no plan for catching up.
The legislature may push the problem to the governor's office by granting Mr. Quinn emergency budget powers and adjourning Friday, about three weeks earlier than usual. A bill under consideration in the state House would give Mr. Quinn greater leeway to shift money among state funds and to require agencies to set aside part of their budgets now in case of future cuts.
The hastened retirement of thousands of Michigan teachers and other school employees hung in the balance Thursday, but lawmakers again failed to agree on legislation to allow it.
That pushed a possible agreement on a retirement incentive plan to next week at the earliest, leaving school districts and teachers wondering how -- or if -- they would cope with a summer surge of retirements and new hires.
And it left unresolved a $415-million shortfall next year in the state School Aid Fund that largely pays for public schools. The retirement plan could save school districts more than $680 million next year, and $3.1 billion over 10 years. School employees who don't retire would pay an additional 3% of wages into the retirement system.
The Great Depression did not have too many silver linings, but it did change the way Americans thought about education, clearly for the better. In 1930, only 30 percent of teenagers graduated from high school. By 1940, after a decade in which there often was nothing better to do than stay in school, the number had jumped to 50 percent. The Depression didn't just make Americans tougher. It made them smarter.
In the years that followed, these newly skilled workers helped create an economic colossus. They were the factory workers, office clerks and managers who built up General Motors, U.S. Steel, R.C.A. and I.B.M. So when our own Great Recession began more than two years ago, it was reasonable to hope that something similar, if less extreme, might take place.
Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is more than doubling the number of senior managers who oversee the city's 123 public schools, a move intended to put more muscle behind her efforts to raise teacher quality and student achievement.
Openings for 13 new "instructional superintendents" were posted on the D.C. schools Web site last week, at annual salaries of $120,000 to $150,000. Instructional superintendents directly supervise school principals, overseeing academic performance while troubleshooting personnel and student discipline issues.
The move comes as the school system deals with serious budget pressures. Rhee and District Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi continue to search for an additional $10.7 million to fully fund the proposed $135.6 million teachers' contract. Rhee also faces, according to Gandhi, about $30 million in projected overspending, some of it produced by salaries of school-based special education aides, overtime and severance payments.
"Lunch Bunch is no longer," district spokeswoman Liz Margolis said in an e-mail to AnnArbor.com. "It will be discussed among staff and some parents and be reworked. It has a valuable goal of assisting children who are not performing well on the MEAP, and this effort will continue."
Dicken Principal Mike Madison drew criticism from parents following his decision last week to take members of the African-American Lunch Bunch on a field trip to hear a black rocket scientist at the University of Michigan speak. Only black students were invited on the trip.
After the trip, classmates who were excluded booed those who went. Madison went into the class, and parents have complained he berated the students. District officials have said he was just having a "passionate" discussion about race issues.
A growing number of school districts are trying to break up concentrations of poverty on their campuses by taking students' family income into consideration in school assignments.
Some of the districts replaced race with socioeconomic status as a determining indicator after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that using race as the primary factor in assigning students to schools violates the Constitution. Other districts that take family income into account never included race as a factor.
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
These lines from Romeo and Juliet are often quoted to indicate the triviality of naming. But anyone who has read or seen the play through to its end knows that the names Montague and Capulet indicate a complex web of family relationships and enmities that end up bringing about the tragic deaths of our protagonists.
Lore also has it that Shakespeare's lines were perhaps a coy slam against the Rose Theatre, a rival of his own Globe Theatre, and that with these lines he was poking fun at the stench caused by less-than-sanitary arrangements at the Rose.
Rep. Joy Hearn (D-Dist. 66, Barrington, East Providence) is cosponsoring legislation developed by the Department of Education to enact a formula that will determine each school district's state funding. She said education aid from the state must be equitable, predictable and reflect the needs of students and their communities.
The legislation (2010-H 8094), which was introduced Wednesday, May 5 by House Finance Chairman Steven M. Costantino, would put an end to Rhode Island's status as the only state without a statewide education funding formula, where state aid is usually based on the previous year's amount and does not reflect changes in districts' student populations and needs.
"School funding is far too important for the state to be apportioning it arbitrarily or politically. Rhode Island has limited funding. We aren't spending it wisely if we aren't carefully sending it where the students and the needs are today. This formula will help the state get the most value for its education dollar while finally treating students equitably," said Rep. Hearn, who has pushed for the formula throughout her freshman term in the Rhode Island General Assembly.
The release of every new national literacy report is a cause for the heart to sink.
Although there are small gains here and there, the reading and writing levels among our nation's schoolchildren are very low for an advanced industrial society (now an information society) that not only provides twelve years of publicly-funded education but requires postsecondary course work.
The educational system is rich in its teaching workforce. Most teachers are dedicated to the needs of children, and willing to work in the trenches where it really matters.
However, these strengths are often undermined by a lack of understanding of the reading and writing process, and strategies to teach students how to perform the intricate procedures needed to comprehend written text and produce meaningful writing.
The Obama administration's proposal for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, A Blueprint for Reform, is on the right track in its literacy goals.
a href="http://www.nje3.org/blitz/crisisandhope.pdf">Yesterday’s conference at Princeton University,“Crisis and Hope: Transforming America’s Urban Schools,” featured a star-studded roster of speakers: Ed. Comm. Bret Schundler, Martin Perez (President of the Latino Leadership Alliance of NJ), Rev. Reginald Jackson (Black Ministers Council of NJ), Dr. Marcus Winters of The Manhattan Institute, Dana Rone, Joe Williams (Democrats for Education Reform), Dr. Marc Porter Magee (ConnCan), Lisa Graham Keegan (Former Superintendent of the State of Arizona), Ryan Hill (Founder of TEAM Charter Schools), Patricia Bombelyn (Co-Counsel for the plaintiffs in Crawford v. Davy). The conference was sponsored by Excellent Education for Everyone, Citizens for Successful Schools, and
Greece is only the beginning. The world's leading economies have long lived beyond their means, and the financial crisis caused government debt to swell dramatically. Now the bill is coming due, but not all countries will be able to pay it. By SPIEGEL staff.
Savvas Robolis is one of Greece's most distinguished economics professors. He advises cabinet ministers and union bosses. He is also a successful author and a frequent guest on the country's highest-rated talk shows. But for several days now, it has been clear to Robolis, 64, the elder statesman of Greece's left-wing academia, that he no longer has any influence.
His opposite number, Poul Thomsen, the Danish chief negotiator for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is currently something of a chief debt inspector in the virtually bankrupt Mediterranean country. He recently took three-quarters of an hour to meet with Robolis and Giannis Panagopoulos, the president of the powerful trade union confederation GSEE. At 9 a.m. on Tuesday of last week, the men met behind closed doors in a conference room in the basement of the Grande Bretagne, a luxury hotel in Athens. The mood, says Robolis, was "icy."
A rift has developed between teachers' unions over a controversial bill that aims to improve teacher effectiveness.
The American Federation of Teachers Colorado signed onto Sen. Michael Johnston's, D-Denver, Senate Bill 191 yesterday, arguing that amendments expected to be introduced today in the House Education Committee send the bill in a "new direction."
The amendments include providing for a due process system in which teachers would be able to appeal evaluations that result in an educator being returned to probationary status; providing laid off teachers with preference in rehiring; and providing for a system in which two teachers would provide input on so-called "mutual consent" hiring decisions when a teacher applies to transfer between schools.
But the state's largest teachers' union, the Colorado Education Association, which represents about 40,000 teachers, does not put much stock in the approval given by the AFT of Colorado. They argue that the AFT Colorado is a much smaller union that represents mostly Douglas County teachers, and therefore does not have the interest of teachers across the state in mind.
One of the two states chosen by Education Secretary Arne Duncan as a winner in the first round of the $4 billion Race to the Top competition has academic standards that earned the grade of 'F' in a new study by Harvard University researchers, while the other state got a 'C minus.'
The Education Next report by researchers Paul E. Peterson and Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadón also shows that standards in most states remain far below the proficiency standard set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP is known as the nation's report card because it tests students across the country by the same measure and is considered the testing gold standard. States have their own individual student assessments designed to test students' knowledge of state academic standards, which are all different.
The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind--creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people--artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers--will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys." --Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind
I remember when my twins entered kindergarten at our community public school. All of the parents were invited to the school for an introductory presentation on the teachers' goals for learning in the upcoming year. Everything sounded wonderful. The 25 children in the classroom would be organized into small groups. Creating art would introduce them to science and math concepts. They would be exposed to different cultures by learning songs in different languages. Time would be allotted for daily storytelling followed by discussion. The teachers described an interdisciplinary, imaginative and stimulating year ahead, complete with field trips and physical, active play.
While listening to the teachers' presentation at my twins' school, I had a moment of clarity: The kindergarten classroom is the design studio. All of the learning activities that take place inside the kindergarten classroom are freakishly similar to the everyday environment of my design studio in the "real world." In an architectural design studio, we work as an interdisciplinary global team to solve the complex problems of the built environment in a variety of different cultural contexts. We do this most effectively through storytelling--sharing personal experiences--with the support of digital media and tools. A variety of activities--reflective and collaborative, right-brain and left-brain--happen simultaneously in an open environment. Like the design studio, the kindergarten environment places human interaction above all else.
Just over a week. That's all the time the Colorado state house has to get a controversial education bill to the Governor's office-- or to stop it.
The legislative session is set to end next Wednesday.
Teachers aren't very happy with the bill many are saying will only help students.
"What we're out to ensure is that every child across Colorado has access to the most effective teachers and principals possible," said Lindsay Neil with Stand for Children Colorado.
But is eliminating teacher tenure the answer?
A spokesman for District 51 teachers says 'No.'
"It's not fair," Jim Smyth with the Mesa Valley Education Association.
As DeKalb County's school system is cutting $115 million from its budget, it's looking to hire a public relations firm to help improve the troubled district's image.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned that the school board is soliciting bids for a company to provide "professional communication services" starting on July 1.
"The district is looking to retain a public relations specialist to be used as needed in critical situations which go beyond what a public school system is equipped to handle," board Chairman Tom Bowen told the AJC on Tuesday. "All large organizations, including school districts, need to be able to quickly and properly communicate critical information internally to employees and externally to the public."
There are five education directors who have all been laid off. The elimination of their positions are part of the reduction of central administration staff and expenses. Please, dry your eyes. Their jobs will be slightly re-defined and brought back. It is disingenuous of the Superintendent to claim that the jobs were cut in the first place.
Right now the five Education Director positions include one for high schools, one for middle schools and K-8s, and three for elementaries. My understanding is that when the jobs come back they will be re-organized geographically instead. So there will be an Education Director for West Seattle, for the south-end, for the Central Region, and two for the north-end. The divisions are likely to be along the lines of the old middle school regions.
Personally, I think this is a stupid idea. How can we believe that there is parity across the District if the people responsible for it are regionalized? Will you believe that the north-end schools and the south-end schools offer similar academic opportunities if they don't share administrators? In addition, the issues of high schools are sufficiently different from those of middle schools and elementary schools that specialization is called for. Right now there is one person to turn to for high school credit or high school graduation issues. To whom will they turn in future?
To show good faith, teachers throughout New Jersey needed to agree to a wage freeze as proposed by Gov. Chris Christie. It's time the New Jersey Education Association started functioning less like a labor union and more like a professional organization committed to partnering with school districts to improve the quality of education and reduce wasteful spending.
However, teachers are only part of the education system. As someone who has worked with numerous school administrators and board of education members, I know many have big egos and lack the qualifications to fulfill the requirements of their respective positions.
THE latest evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the oldest and most extensive system of vouchers and charter schools in America, came out last month, and most advocates of school choice were disheartened by the results.
The evaluation by the School Choice Demonstration Project, a national research group that matched more than 3,000 students from the choice program and from regular public schools, found that pupils in the choice program generally had "achievement growth rates that are comparable" to similar Milwaukee public-school students. This is just one of several evaluations of school choice programs that have failed to show major improvements in test scores, but the size and age of the Milwaukee program, combined with the rigor of the study, make these results hard to explain away.
So let's not try to explain them away. Why not instead finally acknowledge that standardized test scores are a terrible way to decide whether one school is better than another? This is true whether the reform in question is vouchers, charter schools, increased school accountability, smaller class sizes, better pay for all teachers, bonuses for good teachers, firing of bad teachers -- measured by changes in test scores, each has failed to live up to its hype.
Murray wants to be clear that he still favors choice, but not to improve test scores. Instead, he favors choice because it satisfies the diversity of preferences about how schools teach and what they teach. Standardized test scores impose a uniform concept of higher achievement on students, and so cannot capture the improved satisfaction of the diversity of tastes that choice can more efficiently satisfy.
There is a kernel of truth in Murray's argument. We should support school choice simply because it allows us the liberty of providing our children with the kind of education that we prefer.
"Serious reform like Escalante's cannot be accomplished single-handedly in one isolated classroom; it requires change throughout a department and even in neighboring schools."
In real life, though, Escalante didn't teach the calculus course until his fifth year. In his first attempt, five students completed the course and two passed the AP test. A critic might write "just five students" or "only two," though anyone familiar with both the difficulty of the exam and the extent of math deficiencies in an underperforming school recognizes this as a laudable feat.
Still, it took Escalante eight years to build the math program that achieved what "Stand and Deliver" shows: a class of 18 who pass with flying colors. During this time, he convinced the principal, Henry Gradillas, to raise the school's math requirements; he designed a pipeline of courses to prepare Garfield's students for AP calculus; he became department head and hand-selected top teachers for his feeder courses; he and Gradillas even influenced the area junior high schools to offer algebra. In other words, to achieve his AP students' success, he transformed the school's math department. Escalante himself emphasized in interviews that no student went the way of the film's Angel: from basic math in one year to AP calculus in the next.
The top line tracks the real compensation of all state and local government workers-wages and benefits, adjusted for inflation. The lower line tracks the real compensation of all private sector workers. The data comes from the Employment Cost Index data published by the BLS.
The chart shows that public and private sector pay rose in parallel from 2001 to 2004. Then the lines diverged. Since early 2005, public sector pay has risen by 5% in real terms. Meanwhile, private sector pay has been flat.
An innovative study of 17 schools along the East Coast suggests that putting literacy coaches in schools can help boost students' reading skills by as much as 32 percent over three years.
The study, which was presented here on May 1 during the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, is as notable for its methods as for its results. It's among the first of what many scholars hope will be a new generation of studies that offer solid clues not only to what works but also when, under what conditions, and to some extent, why.
The study finds that reading gains are greatest in schools where teachers receive a larger amount of coaching. It also finds that the amount of coaching that teachers receive varies widely and is influenced by an array of factors, including relationships among staff members and how teachers envision their roles.
Ed Note: Aaron Moore was the winner of the National Financial Capability Challenge, an awards program announced in December by Treasury Secretary Geithner and Education Secretary Duncan, designed to promote financial education among high school students across the country. He has made several speaking engagements and national media appearances discussing the topic of financial literacy and serves as the president of Future Business Leaders of America for the state of Maryland. He will enter Villanova University in the fall to study Business Administration.
Students are given opportunities and choices; I was given an opportunity like no other, to speak at the Treasury Department along side of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. From beginning to end I was engaged, enlightened, and excited. The halls of the Treasury truly represented what it means to be American, full of marble, wood, and gold, the building materials of our founding fathers.
The PI had an interesting story this morning about an incident at Washington Middle School in early April. Apparently 3 students were expelled for 15-days for aiming/having a toy gun at school. However, none of the staff told the Seattle Police School Emphasis Officer about the incident and she found out when she saw one student riding a bike during school hours. He told her about the expulsion.
From the story:
In an April 21 meeting with a school staff member, in which the officer asked why she was not contacted and the incident was not reported, the staff member did not have an answer, according to a police incident report. About 15 minutes later, the staff member "stated to me it wasn't reported because 'it was a clear, plastic gun and not used with malice,'" School Emphasis Officer Erin Rodriguez wrote in the report.
Madison School board votes to save jobs, but doesn't finalize budget yet; $250,000 home to see a $224.46 increase in property taxes, above the $2186.35 paid in 2009 (roughly 10%)
The owner of a $250,000 Madison home would pay $224.46 more in school property taxes next winter under a budget still under discussion by the Madison School Board.
In what many -- including three board members -- thought would be a wrap-up Tuesday night of the board's two-month process to close an initial $30 million budget gap, the board voted to save most of the district jobs still on the chopping block, largely with the help of $794,491 in employee health insurance savings.
But it left several items on the table until a final vote on the preliminary budget June 1, including:
A Madison home assessed at $257,000 paid 2186.35 in Madison School District taxes last year. A $224.46 increase is about 10%......
No disrespect intended towards the 71,000 members of the facebook page "New Jersey Teachers United Against Gov. Christie's Pay Freeze," but the zeitgeist of NJ seems to be in step with Gov. Christie, Ed Sec Schundler, and the New Jersey School Boards Association's call for local unions to agree to salary concessions. A recent Rasmussen poll showed that only 28% of New Jersey residents oppose pay freezes, not to mention that school budgets failed two weeks ago at an unprecedented rate; however, 2/3 of school districts that won salary freezes won budget approval. (Here's a complete list).
There is no doubt a cadre of teachers out that who would happily accept pay freezes, especially with the added incentive that agreements signed within the month will delay implementation of the 1.5% base pay contribution towards health benefits. (Translation: a one-year pay freeze adopted before May 22nd is really a 1.5% pay increase.) However, we're starting to hear reports of districts where local union leadership is bypassing membership and declining to put such an agreement to a vote. One example: in Bridgewater-Raritan Regional School District, a large Somerset County district with a 1,360 member teacher union, the president of BREA explained to the Star-Ledger why he didn't allow a formal vote after the School Board asked for one: "We truly believe that the executive committee(s) has a handle on how members feel. We talked to people and teachers and we listened."
As California's public schools have increasingly poured attention and resources into the state's struggling students, high academic learners - the so-called gifted students - have been getting the short shrift, a policy decision that some worry could leave the United States at a competitive disadvantage.
Critics see courses tailored for exceptional students as elitist and not much of an issue when compared with the vast number of students who are lagging grades behind their peers or dropping out of school. But a growing chorus of parents and advocates is asking the contentious question: What about the smart kids?
"We have countries like India, Singapore, China, and they realize the future productivity of their country is an investment in their intellectual and creative resources," said gifted education expert Joseph Renzulli.
Agricultural establishment fighting back at movement.
From Pennsylvania church ladies to Iowa dairymen, the locavore, small-is-good, organic food movement born in Northern California has penetrated America's heartland, where it is waging a pitchfork rebellion, much of it on the Internet, against the agricultural establishment.
After long dismissing the new food movement as a San Francisco annoyance, the establishment is fighting back.
"Alice should drown in her own waters," said High Plains Journal's Larry Dreiling of Berkeley food guru Alice Waters.
The Instructional Technology Council recently released a report on the trends in distance education and online learning at community colleges. Among its findings: Enrollment in distance education courses increased by over 20%, while overall community college enrollment increased by less than 2%. Clearly online learning offers many opportunities to students, teachers and academic institutions. But what are the opportunities for entrepreneurs?
The Case for OpenCourseWare
Of course, entrepreneurs can benefit themselves from taking online classes. As Bill Gates said in a recent speech at M.I.T., he's a "super happy user" of the university's OpenCourseWare program, which offers free online courses, noting that he "retook physics" along with over a dozen of the other online offerings. Gates praised OpenCourseWare for offering a blend of the best of video technology, professional instruction and testing, and argued that accreditation too should be separated from place-based learning. Gates stated that "What's been done so far has had very modest funding. This is an area we need more resources, more bright minds, and certainly one that I want to see how the foundation could make a contribution to this."
As a former administrator, I have had the good fortune to visit a significant number of classrooms over the years. Because I have been witness to bad or indifferent teaching, there has always been a special feeling of excitement during those times I was able to witness the talents of a true professional at work in the classroom. It also has encouraged me to be reflective on my years in the classroom.
Having begun teaching in the 1970's at the high school level, my approach in the early years was very traditional. My classroom would have been best described as teacher-centered and my organizational skills combined with my ability to relate to students created a room that earned me high marks from my administrators.
In the early nineties though, it became increasingly clear that my methods were growing less popular with students. In addition, I found myself less and less successful on the most important element, student achievement. My classroom was well-managed and discipline issues seldom arose, but my students seemed to be losing interest in the subjects that I taught.
Journalist-turned-documentarian Bob Bowdon saw something very wrong with the New Jersey public education system. More than $400,000 of public money was earmarked for each classroom, yet an alarming rate of students were not proficient in reading or math.
Once he dug deeper, Bowdon found a flawed system that embraced cronyism, squandered money and frowned upon alternative education options such as charter schools. Bowdon spent three years pointing his camera at New Jersey administrators, teachers, unions, students and parents and the result is the documentary "The Cartel," opening at Kendall Square in Cambridge today. The film focuses on his home state of New Jersey, but Bowdon assures it is a case study likely evident across the country. As the film points out, in 12 percent of U.S. schools, less than 60 percent of freshmen make it to senior year.
Q: Did you ever think you'd be a documentary filmmaker?
A: Well, it wasn't some sort of lifelong dream. I got a film certificate from New York University, but it really wasn't to become a filmmaker. This issue wasn't well covered by traditional media. Education is an emerging national disaster and that story needed long-form treatment.
New York City teachers get 10 sick days during their 184-day school year, and most stick to that number. But 20% of teachers take more than that amount -- and a small percentage take 30 or more days off, according to Department of Education figures.
The data show that for some of the poorest districts, like the South Bronx and Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, more than 20% of the teachers are out two weeks or more during the school year. The teachers union cautions that the absence data includes all types of absences, including things like professional development and jury duty over which teachers have no control. And not all poor districts have high-absentee teachers.
Still, in districts like the one that contains the Upper East Side, the percentage of teachers absent two weeks or more is below the average.
The Wall Street Journal, attack dog for the righteous marketplace, apostle of "bang for the buck" for civil servants, and conscience of the all-day businessman's lunch for dividends gluttons, decried in an April 28 piece the alleged statistic that public school teachers tend to exhaust their annual ten-day "sick bank," especially in poorer areas of the city.
They suspect that teachers' claim of sickness is often a ploy and mask for their contemptuous attitude towards professional duty. They see teachers who get sick as slackers who if they cared about kids would have immune systems better able to repel microbes. They plainly feel that unions are the enablers of teachers' audacity.
Perhaps it's true about teachers burning through their ten days over ten months. But a fragment of truth without context is no truth at all, but as an instrument to exploit the public's gullibility, it's more serviceable than an out and out lie.
Art From the Start The current rage in education is STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. But creative types are working valiantly to turn STEM into STEAM - with the A standing for the arts. At the Boston Arts Academy, for instance, the arts are infused in every subject. While creative pursuits are often the first to go when budgets are cut, this high school continues to innovate as it engages students through the arts. The ninth grade just wrapped up a unit on African civilization with a multimedia celebration called "Africa Lives." The students got their hands dirty. And they mastered the material.
"High school shouldn't be a preparation for life," says co-headmaster Linda Nathan. "It should be life."
Nathan is not alone in her belief that the arts foster deep learning. Young Audiences of Massachusetts, a nonprofit that brings artists into schools, is inaugurating an arts integration program at the Salemwood Elementary School in Malden this fall. Visiting artists will help teachers incorporate the arts into the literacy and social studies curriculums. If the pilot program takes off, Young Audiences hopes to make it a model for other Extended Learning Time schools like Salemwood. Explains executive director Diane Michalowski Freedland: "We need to think big."
Closing arguments were expected on Monday morning in federal court in Philadelphia in a redistricting lawsuit brought against the Lower Merion School District.
US District Judge Michael Baylson is hearing from both sides on Monday and says he will render a quick verdict, although he says that decision may not come on Monday.
Nine parents from South Ardmore are suing the school district alleging that Lower Merion used race as a factor in a redistricting plan.
As school systems grapple with almost certain budget cuts, they should passionately resist taking significant bites out of programs that challenge bright students to reach higher.
New Hanover County school officials are considering cuts to the county's program for academically gifted students as one way to cope with a dire budget outlook. One proposal, if adopted, would force small schools to share gifted-education teachers. A few years ago, the board took the bold step of insisting that each school have its own specialized teacher for students identified as Academically and Intellectually Gifted (AIG, not to be confused with the bailed-out insurance giant).
Parents and some teachers naturally fear that changes could affect the quality and the reach of gifted education.
No Child Left Behind and other accountability mandates focus mainly on bringing all students to an acceptable minimum level. When a teacher's time is consumed with bringing students up to grade level, often the quick learners go unchallenged.
Dr. Mary Sue Coleman, president of the prestigious University of Michigan, Dr. Teresa Sullivan, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball, dean of the School of Education, faculty, students, family, and friends of the graduating class of 2010. I am most grateful and honored to address the 2010 graduating class on the 88th commencement celebration of the school of education. I applaud you for your tenacity, endurance, stamina, and perseverance in commanding the intellectual rigor, knowledge, and skills to fulfill the requirements for the degree that you are about to receive. This commencement celebration culminates the final milestone of a long and arduous journey in preparation for your career as educators, practitioners, researchers, analysts, and advocates in the field of education. When the jubilation of this moment ends, and the last farewell is bided, brace yourself for the dawning challenges that tomorrow holds for you in the practice of your profession. The struggle and fortitude to mold, shape, cultivate, motivate, and invigorate young inquiring minds are surmountable challenges that you must endure to guarantee our children the right of passage to a well-rounded education. I know you are eager with anticipation and enthusiasm to meet the challenges of helping our children reach their greatest potential in mastering the art, science, knowledge, and skills of learning. Your zeal, passion, and ardent interest to make a difference in meeting the educational needs of children are admirable; and, I laud you for choosing a career path in education. Allow me to be among the first to congratulate you for your dedication, preparation, and commitment to tackle the myriad of problems that plague our educational system. This commencement exercise serves to remind you of your accomplishments and the challenges in the field of education that await you.
There's a Shakespearean echo in the reform-minded pronouncements about education emanating from the media these days.
"Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers," urged a headline in the March 15 issue of Newsweek. A secondary headline observed: "In no other profession are workers so insulated from accountability." Another thundered: "Bad Teachers: Reform Them or Retire Them?" The story pondered whether "educators are born or made."
Although I'm a teacher, I can't claim to know the answer to that question. But it does remind me of the moment in "Henry VI" in which Jack Cade, a pretender to the throne, boasts about the utopia he'll create if he becomes king, saying he'll slash the price of bread and encourage the drinking of beer.
A Republican lawmaker put out a news release at the end of this year's legislative session boasting that lawmakers approved more local control and funding flexibility for schools.
Just try to convince members of your local school board that's the case.
In the wake of a $297 million reduction in education spending statewide, school districts struggle to cut costs without laying off teachers, eliminating programs or shuttering schools. But the minimal leeway they once enjoyed is gone - stripped along with the small percentage of local property tax levy they controlled and handed over to the state in exchange for an increase in the sales-tax rate.
"What local control?" quips Diana Showalter, superintendent of Manchester Community Schools. "When the state assumed control of the general fund, they took control of the major financial source for the schools. ... When we can't control our own destiny through the collection of property taxes, we are setting ourselves up for a difficult time."
Gov. Jim Doyle and the Democratic-run Legislature failed to overhaul an outdated and unfair school financing system. And they made school budgets harder to balance in the future by lifting limits on teacher pay hikes. Even with Sen. Mark Miller, D-Madison, and Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, chairing the state budget committee, Madison schools were stung by a huge and unforeseen cut in state aid.
Wisconsin was out of shape and finished way behind the pack in the first round of President Barack Obama's "Race to the Top" competition, which is steering billions of dollars for education innovation to other states.
Despite Doyle's best efforts, the Legislature also failed to shake up failing Milwaukee Public Schools. A meager bill giving the state schools superintendent some additional but limited power to force change in Milwaukee saves our leaders from an "F."
"Seeing that the status quo is untenable, countries are embarking on fiscal consolidation plans. In the United States, the aim is to bring the total federal budget deficit down from 11% to 4% of GDP by 2015. In the United Kingdom, the consolidation plan envisages reducing budget deficits by 1.3 percentage points of GDP each year from 2010 to 2013 (see eg OECD (2009a)).
"To examine the long-run implications of a gradual fiscal adjustment similar to the ones being proposed, we project the debt ratio assuming that the primary balance improves by 1 percentage point of GDP in each year for five years starting in 2012. The results are presented as the green line in Graph 4. Although such an adjustment path would slow the rate of debt accumulation compared with our baseline scenario, it would leave several major industrial economies with substantial debt ratios in the next decade.
"This suggests that consolidations along the lines currently being discussed will not be sufficient to ensure that debt levels remain within reasonable bounds over the next several decades.
"An alternative to traditional spending cuts and revenue increases is to change the promises that are as yet unmet. Here, that means embarking on the politically treacherous task of cutting future age-related liabilities. With this possibility in mind, we construct a third scenario that combines gradual fiscal improvement with a freezing of age-related spending-to-GDP at the projected level for 2011. The blue line in Graph 4 shows the consequences of this draconian policy. Given its severity, the result is no surprise: what was a rising debt/GDP ratio reverses course and starts heading down in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands. In several others, the policy yields a significant slowdown in debt accumulation. Interestingly, in France, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States, even this policy is not sufficient to bring rising debt under contro
[And yet, many countries, including the US, will have to contemplate something along these lines. We simply cannot fund entitlement growth at expected levels. Note that in the US, even by "draconian" estimates, debt-to-GDP still grows to 200% in 30 years. That shows you just how out of whack our entitlement programs are.
Sidebar: This also means that if we - the US - decide as a matter of national policy that we do indeed want these entitlements, it will most likely mean a substantial VAT tax, as we will need vast sums to cover the costs, but with that will come slower growth.]
I was at a meeting of Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools people yesterday. Some of the people there were amazed at the hundreds of Madisonians who came out to tell the Board of Education that they preferred tax increases to further cuts. Some of the people were also perplexed that with this kind of support the Board of Education is cutting and considering cutting at the levels they are. I'm perplexed too. I'm also disappointed.
We'll likely not see significant increases in redistributed state and federal tax dollars for K-12. This means that additional spending growth will depend on local property tax increases, a challenging topic given current taxes.
What worries investors now is whether the Greeks will stand for it. Will Greek society resist the imposition of savage cuts in salaries and public services, and will the government's efforts to reform the public administration and improve tax collection (while raising taxes) actually work?
The answer at this point is that nobody knows. On the plus side, the current Greek government is led by the left-wing PASOK party. The trade unions and civil service unions not only support PASOK; in a very real way they are the party. Although the party's leader George Papandreou is something of a Tony Blair style 'third way' politician who is more comfortable at Davos than in a union hall, the party itself is one of Europe's more old fashioned left wing political groups, where chain-smoking dependency theorists debate the shifting fortunes of the international class war. The protesters are protesting decisions made by their own political leadership; this may help keep a lid on things. If a conservative government had proposed these cuts, Greece would be much nearer to some kind of explosion.
On the minus side, the cuts are genuinely harsh, with pay cuts for civil servants of about 15% and the total package of government spending cuts set at 10 percent of GDP. (In the United States, that would amount to federal and state budget cuts totaling more than $1.4 trillion, almost one quarter of the total spending of all state and local governments plus the federal government combined.) The impact on Greek lifestyles will be even more severe; spending cuts that severe will almost certainly deepen Greece's recession. Many Greeks stand to lose their jobs and, as credit conditions tighten, may face losing their homes and businesses as well.
In the world of education, it was the equivalent of the cool kids' table in the cafeteria.
Executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McKinsey consultants and scholars from Stanford and Harvard mingled at an invitation-only meeting of the New Schools Venture Fund at a luxury hotel in Pasadena, Calif. Founded by investors who helped start Google and Amazon, this philanthropy seeks to raise the academic achievement of poor black and Hispanic students, largely through charter schools.
Many of those at the meeting last May had worried that the Obama administration would reflect the general hostility of teachers' unions toward charters, publicly financed schools that are independently run and free to experiment in classrooms. But all doubts were dispelled when the image of Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, filled a large video screen from Washington. He pledged to combine "your ideas with our dollars" from the federal government. "What you have created," he said, "is a real movement."
Reading the information released Thursday about the Milwaukee Public Schools budget for next year, with its grim warnings about hundreds of job cuts and swelling benefit costs, my mind wandered.
I had a vision of the new governor of Wisconsin unveiling his budget proposals in February and deciding (this is the most fanciful part) that he was going to break with established positions of whichever political party he represents. He decided to give a speech to the Legislature like this:
•
Folks, we need to stop posturing, and we all know that's one of our most striking talents here in the Capitol. Man, the legislators the last two years should have made commercials for Posturepedic. Lots of talk, little dealing with the real issues. No more, people. Things are too serious.
From Superior to Kenosha - and especially in Milwaukee - we've got a really deep education problem. That goes in some serious ways for just plain education. But it goes especially for paying for education. If the school system in your hometown isn't financially broken, it's under huge stress and it's going to be broken soon. Show me figures that say I'm wrong.
The National Council on Teacher Quality has come out with an assessment of how Texas' schools of education prepare instructors for the classroom. The bottom line is some of our schools need a lot of work.
In this Viewpoints piece, David Chard, dean of SMU's Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development, is honest about the shortcomings of his program, which actually does okay on this survey. As we talk here about quality teachers, I hope we have more voices like Chard's saying this is what we need to do to improve. Better that, than defensive reactions.
Not very many -- if you believe the principals' evaluations, which even teachers concede aren't very good. The Houston school board heard a presentation Thursday from the New Teacher Project, and it included some fascinating data -- from HISD's own records and from surveys of teachers and principals. One slide (No. 14 below) particularly stood out: It showed that only 3.4 percent of teachers in the Houston Independent School District were rated "below expectations" or "unsatisfactory" on any domain on their appraisals between the 2005-06 school year and last school year. Looking at the domain ratings on all the evaluations from that time period, only 1 percent were below proficient.
The Boston Globe may be forgiven for printing such a heretical claim, because it is trying to give a "voice" to young people, and the high school student may not be aware that his suggestion goes against the settled wisdom of the vast majority of U.S. Edupundits.
Our Edupundits are in substantial agreement, often repeated, that "the principal variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality." I have nowhere found much interest in my own argument that the principal variable in student academic achievement is student academic work.
Yet here is a high school Senior, writing that: "students seem to socialize more than they should. In hallways, stairwells, and bathrooms, students sit and talk to their friends after the late bell rang for classes." He adds that: "My friends agree that new teachers alone are not going to solve the problems at Burke [Jeremiah Burke High School in Boston is one of 35 schools in the state that is asking its staff to re-apply for their jobs]. Jussara Sequeira, a Junior, said: "Some of us students are not trying hard enough and I don't think the school's teachers should pay the consequences."
Paul Zoch, a high school Latin teacher, in Doomed to Fail [2004] points out that: "the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education. That being the accepted wisdom, students are free to do nothing more than wait for the teachers to create success for them. Education reform literature rarely contains the thought that our students are primarily failing because they do not study enough." Another heretic!
Many thanks to Paul Zoch, Diane Ravitch, Chrismaldy Morgado, and Jussara Sequeira for pointing out the egregious folly of leaving student effort out of the analysis of those things which make for academic success in the schools.
It is hard to understand how so many Edupundits miss this essential sine qua non of good learning outcomes for our schools. One possibility is that their view is so lofty and unfocused that they never take the academic work of mere students into account.
Tony Wagner at Harvard has found that only three high schools in the country, for instance, ever sit down in a focus group with their graduates and ask them for their thoughts about their education while they were at the school.
This still does not completely explain why students' academic responsibility gets so routinely overlooked in all the multi-billion-dollar efforts at school reform.
Paul Zoch writes: "In reading about Japanese education, one is repeatedly struck by the expectation that the students must work hard for success, in contrast to the United States, where the teacher is expected to work hard to find a way for the students to succeed...Effort and self-discipline are considered by the Japanese to be essential bases for accomplishment. Lack of achievement, then, is attributed to the failure to work hard."
What chance is there that the voices of Chirsmaldy Morgado and Jussara Sequeira will be heard in their call for more student academic effort in Boston high schools? It is hard to say. So much attention and concern, on the part of parents and the rest of us, seems to be on whether our students have friends and are having a good time in school, rather than whether they are working as hard as they can academically. It is far easier to blame teachers if student academic achievement is too low.
If we listened to those two public high school students, we should surely inform our students at the start of every school year, that they have the responsibility to pay attention, do their homework, read books and write papers, and in general give their very best efforts to making the most out of the free public education which has been provided them. Let's tell them that their academic success is their job. It is up to them how much they learn and how much they grow in competence through their own work in school.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
ithin the 242 pages of Diane Ravitch's lightning rod of a book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," there appear exactly three references to Catholic education. Which makes sense, given that Ms. Ravitch is addressing and deploring recent efforts to reform public schools with extensive testing and increasing privatization.
Yet what subtly informs both her critique and her recommendations for improving public schools is, in significant measure, her long study of and admiration for Roman Catholic education, especially in serving low-income black and Hispanic students.
In that respect, Ms. Ravitch and her book offer evidence of how some public-education scholars and reformers have been learning from what Catholic education is doing right. What one might call the Catholic-school model is perhaps the most unappreciated influence on the nation's public-education debate.
Bob Braun at the Star-Ledger writes of renowned education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond’s lecture in New Brunswick this week in which she lauds New Jersey’s success in closing the achievement gap among White, Black, and Hispanic students. “She listed measures of success in New Jersey — higher graduation rates, higher test scores, higher national rankings. Darling-Hammond drew gasps of appreciation by noting that, on one national exam, the average scores of black and Latino students in New Jersey were as high as the average scores of all students in her home state, California.”
Let’s put aside graduation rates for the moment (though just for the moment) and look more closely at the data that Darling-Hammond cites. There’s only one national test that NJ and California students take: the National Assessment of Educational Progress, fondly known as the NAEP. And while it’s true that average scores in California for all 4th and 8th graders (the two age groups tested by NAEP) are comparable to average scores for Black and Latino students in NJ, there’s one piece of data missing from Dr. Darling-Hammond's analysis: 53% of California’s students are eligible for free and reduced lunch, the metric for establishing economic disadvantage.
Bill Gates is amazed at what he sees happening at KIPP charter schools. Bill has no idea those same things happen at Francis Lewis High School, and countless other public schools, each and every day. Because Bill believes in the very same “reforms” that have caused Francis Lewis, my school, to balloon to 250 percent capacity, he surreptitiously funded the Learn NY campaign to preserve mayoral control (in practice, mayoral dictatorship). So I don’t trust him, and I don’t think he knows much about education, despite the millions he throws around imposing his pet projects on us. Still, I withheld judgment when he sent his new program to my school. I did not participate, but I said nothing to those who chose otherwise.
The Measures of Effective Teaching program, sponsored by the Gates Foundation, is now at my school and many others across the city. Teachers were told this study would show what worked and did not work in the classroom. They hoped it would give them ideas on how to reach their students more effectively. How long should you pause after posing a question? Did certain seat arrangements promote more interaction? Is group work always more effective than lecturing?
When Deborah Gist became commissioner of Rhode Island schools in 2009, she pledged to make every decision in the best interests of children -- something we've heard before and rarely seen happen. Then she started doing it.
At first, no one outside Rhode Island noticed. Gist, 43, announced that staffing decisions would be based on teacher qualifications, not seniority. She also launched a new evaluation system in which teachers get annual reviews -- an idea practiced in only 15 other states. When she learned that Rhode Island's teacher-training programs had one of the lowest test-score requirements for entrance, she found out which state set the bar the highest -- then raised Rhode Island's one point above it.
The Madison School Board on Monday could discuss reopening the district's 2009-11 teacher contract to institute a salary freeze estimated to save about $3.5 million.
And some board members who said they oppose renegotiating the current contract said they are open to the idea of asking for a pay freeze for teachers when bargaining begins again next year for the 2011-13 school years.
"I think it's a small chance of it happening, but I definitely would support re-opening it," said newly elected board member James Howard, referring to the current two-year contract that the district and Madison Teachers Inc. settled last October after months of talks. "I think teachers and everyone else have to play their part in this."
Bill Gross is used to buying bonds in multibillion-dollar batches. But when it comes to U.S. Treasury bills, he's getting nervous. Gross, a founder of the investment giant Pimco, is so concerned about America's national debt that he has started unloading some of his holdings of U.S. government bonds in favor of bonds from such countries as Germany, Canada and France.
Gross is a bottom-line kind of guy; he doesn't seem to care if the debt is the fault of Republicans or Democrats, the Bush tax cuts or the Obama stimulus. He's simply worried that Washington's habit of spending today the money it hopes to collect tomorrow is getting worse and worse. It even has elements of a Ponzi scheme, Gross told me.
"In order to pay the interest and the bill when it comes due, we'll simply have to issue more IOUs. That, to me, is Ponzi-like," Gross said. "It's a game that can never be finished."
New research shows that rather than being totally devoted to one goal at a time, the human brain can distribute two goals to different hemispheres to keep them both in mind--if it perceives a worthy reward for doing so
The human brain is considered to be pretty quick, but it lacks many of qualities of a super-efficient computer. For instance, we have trouble switching between tasks and cannot seem to actually do more than one thing at a time. So despite the increasing options--and demands--to multitask, our brains seem to have trouble keeping tabs on many activities at once.
A new study, however, illustrates how the brain can simultaneously keep track of two separate goals, even while it is busy performing a task related to one of the aims, hinting that the mind might be better at multitasking than previously thought.
"This is the first time we observe in the brain concurrent representations of distinct rewards," Etienne Koechlin, director of the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm) in Paris and coauthor of the new study, wrote in an email to ScientificAmerican.com.
I have to at least give credit the WSJ for continuing to keep education front and center of their Sunday opinion section. This last Sunday, under the headline "Protect kids from cuts" the WSJ takes on the issue of closing the remaining Madison SD budget gap and editorializes for a pay freeze for teaching staff. Although the current budget situation probably makes reducing compensation for staff in one way or another inevitable, I don't think that devaluing the teaching profession can be construed as "Protecting kids". After all, the number one factor in educational outcomes is the placement of a highly qualified teacher in front of each class.
Attracting quality teachers means we have to be sure it is rewarding profession, so balancing the budget through reductions in teacher compensation is in the long term unsustainable. If the current situation was a one or two year problem then a freeze might serve as a bridge to recovery, and although I don't know the Madison situation I'm pretty sure their problems are similar to ours: shortfalls that extend year after year for the foreseeable future. The article notes that the Madison teachers receive the "standard" 1% raise this year. This year that seems inappropriate, but the fact that the same 1% is the "standard" every year since 1993 is also a problem.
I don't think that 1% annual raises have been "standard since 1993". I would certainly like to see a substantive change in teacher compensation, replacing the current one size fits all approach.
Here is an excerpt from the article in this morning's State Journal that deserves comment: Matthews said it was worth looking at whether layoffs can be avoided, but he was less optimistic about finding ways to achieve that.
He said MTI's policy is that members have to have decent wages, even if it means some jobs are lost.
The last teachers contract provided a 1 percent increase in wage scales for each of the past two years. This year's salary and benefits increase, including raises for seniority or advanced degrees, was projected at 4.9 percent, or $8.48 million. Teachers' salaries range from $29,324 to $74,380.
"The young teachers are really hurting," Matthews said, adding that the district is having difficulty attracting teachers because of its starting pay.
Mr. Matthews states that young teachers are really hurting. I assume by "young" he means "recently-hired." On a state-wide basis, the starting salary for Madison's teachers ranks lower, relatively speaking, than its salaries for more experienced teachers. Compared to other teacher pay scales in the state, Madison's scale seems weighted relatively more toward the more-experienced teachers and less toward starting teachers. This has to be a consequence of the union's bargaining strategy - the union must have bargained over the years for more money at the top and less at the bottom, again relatively speaking. The union is entitled to follow whatever strategy it wants, but it is disingenuous for Mr. Matthews to justify an apparent reluctance to consider different bargaining approaches on the basis of their possible impact on "young teachers."
According to the article, Mr. Matthews also stated that "the district is having trouble attracting teachers because of its starting pay." Can this possibly be true? Here's an excerpt from Jason Shepard's top-notch article in Isthmus last week, "Even with a UW degree, landing a job in Madison isn't easy. For every hire made by the Madison district, five applicants are rejected. June Glennon, the district's employment manager, says more than 1,200 people have applied for teaching jobs next year."
At $2,000 to $3,000 to replace a single toilet, and the same to repair a leaky faucet, it's no surprise some Madison School Board members are suffering sticker shock when it comes to a new facility report on short- and long-term maintenance needs for Madison's public schools.
In fact, Lucy Mathiak, board vice president, wonders if the numbers can even be trusted. "It makes me feel like I'm channeling Bill Proxmire when he challenged the costs on Pentagon toilets," she says, referring to the late U.S. senator from Wisconsin. "Frankly, getting this information cost us a lot of money and, to say the least, I'm underwhelmed with the product."
The estimates, though, might not be entirely out of whack with commercial repairs.
While swapping out an old toilet or sink at home could cost $500 or less, such a repair in an institutional or industrial setting might run upward of a couple thousand dollars, particularly if there were hazardous materials involved, or extensive tile or plumbing rework, experts say.
For years there has been broad disparity among the four MMSD high schools in the number of honors, advanced/accelerated, and AP courses each one offers. In contrast to East and LaFollette, for instance, West requires all students, regardless of learning level or demonstrated competence, to take standard academic core courses in 9th and 10th grade. There has also been wide discrepancy in the requirements and restrictions each school imposes on students who seek to participate in existing advanced course options.
Parents of children at West have long called on administrators to address this inequity by increasing opportunities for advanced, accelerated instruction. Last year Superintendent Dan Nerad affirmed the goal of bringing consistency to the opportunities offered to students across the District. Accordingly, the Talented and Gifted Education Plan includes five Action Steps specifically geared toward bringing consistency and increasing student participation in advanced courses across MMSD high schools. This effort was supposed to inform the MMSD master course list for the 2010/11 school year. Though District administrators say they have begun internal conversations about this disparity, next year's course offerings again remain the same.
Please consider what levels of English, science, and social studies each MMSD high school offers its respective 9th and 10th graders for the 2010-11 school year, and what measures each school uses to determine students' eligibility for advanced or honors level courses.
Teachers union officials strongly opposed recommendations made to the Los Angeles school board Tuesday that call for using student test score data to evaluate instructors.
The suggestions came from a task force comprising Los Angeles Unified School District administrators, principals, teachers and union leaders that was created shortly before The Times published a series of articles last May examining the difficulties in firing and evaluating teachers.
The task force made several proposals, including giving more money to high-performing teachers willing to work in hard-to-staff schools, waiting up to four years before granting tenure to teachers and requiring principals and local superintendents to vouch for an instructor before they receive tenure, and revamping the evaluation process to include student test scores and parent and teacher feedback.
This Fordham Institute study finds that the typical charter school in America today lacks the autonomy it needs to succeed, once state, authorizer, and other impositions are considered. Though the average state earns an encouraging B+ for the freedom its charter law confers upon schools, individual state grades in this sphere range from A to F. Authorizer contracts add another layer of restrictions that, on average, drop schools' autonomy grade to B-. (Federal policy and other state and local statutes likely push it down further.) School districts are particularly restrictive authorizers. The study was conducted by Public Impact.
A minor bill aimed at improving Milwaukee's failing schools barely passed the Legislature last week during the final day of session.
It was a weak and fallback response to the terrible problem of countless Milwaukee children falling behind their peers in reading and math and failing to earn diplomas.
What the Legislature should have done is give Milwaukee's mayor the power to appoint the urban district's school chief. That could have prompted swift, bold change with clear accountability for results.
Gov. Jim Doyle had championed mayoral appointment as the best way to shake up Milwaukee's failing schools and save more children from academic ruin.
A couple weeks ago Scott Walker proudly released Milwaukee County's budget numbers, which showed the county with a surplus, after a deficit had been projected at the beginning of the year.
Not to be beaten (unless there's a metal pipe around) Tom Barrett released the city of Milwaukee's numbers today:
Student performance would be the biggest factor in teacher evaluations under draft regulations proposed Tuesday by the Maryland Board of Education.
The new regulations could set the stage for a conflict between education officials and the state's teachers unions.
All of the state's public schools would be required to make student progress, as measured by standardized tests and other means, account for at least 50 percent of teacher and principal evaluations by 2012. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have pressed educators to give student performance more weight in teacher evaluations.
Maryland education officials have said the 50 percent figure is important in showing the state's commitment to Obama's education priorities, which could help it qualify for as much as $250 million in federal aid through the Race to the Top competition.
Madison School Board members used a secret straw poll, conducted via e-mail, to guide their deliberations over how to close a nearly $30 million budget hole for next year.
The move has raised questions about whether the board violated the state open meetings law by coming to agreement on decisions before taking a public vote.
"In my opinion it violates the spirit of the open-meeting procedures, if not the exact letter," said Peter Fox, executive director of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association.
But board president Arlene Silveira defended the process, saying the board sought to make its handling of the 2010-11 budget as transparent as possible. With more than 200 potential budget cuts proposed by district administrators, the board needed a way to streamline the process of reviewing the cuts, she said.
But there's another line Christie likes to use to describe the fiscal situation he inherited: "The day of reckoning is here." It's difficult to argue his point. While nearly all states are in deep fiscal trouble, New Jersey is in deeper than most. Its deficit amounts to 37 percent of the entire state budget. Christie has responded by proposing to slash billions of dollars in state spending on everything from aid to municipalities to the normally sacrosanct K-12 education system. More than 1,300 state government positions would be eliminated.
The governor's proposal -- and his unapologetic defense of it -- have made him a villain to mayors, teachers, superintendents and other public employees. But Christie, perhaps more than any other governor these days, has captured the imagination of conservatives who admire his eagerness to take on powerful public employee unions. Many Republicans believe that Christie's tough stance on spending is hitting exactly the right political note in a major election year marked by anti-government anger and Tea Party activism.
Indeed, with the governorships of 37 states up for grabs in November -- and state finances not expected to improve much anytime soon -- Christie's budget-cutting quest and all the hot rhetoric both for and against it may amount to much more than political theater. It may be a preview of how some new Republican governors will lead in states they win this year. In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Tom Corbett, the front-runner to become the GOP's candidate for governor, says he's been paying close attention to what's going on in the state next door. Chris Christie, he told Stateline in an interview, "has made a very good example."
It is difficult to see growth in redistributed state and federal tax dollars for K-12 organizations over the next few years.
I watched him campaign last year. His message was simple: he vowed to cut spending and red tape. He also stressed that he was not Jon Corzine, the unpopular Democratic governor. Mr Corzine, for his part, emphasised that Mr Christie was a) a Republican and b) fat. The first argument alone would usually be enough to win an election in New Jersey. But last year was a bad time to be a) an incumbent or b) a former boss of Goldman Sachs, and Gov. Corzine was both.
I wondered at the time if Mr Christie meant what he said about doing painful things to rescue New Jersey from its deep pit of debt. It seems that he did. In no time at all, he plugged a short-term budget gap by slashing spending. He has also set his sights on the outlandish benefits enjoyed by some public-sector workers, citing as an example a 49 year old retiree who paid $124,000 towards his retirement benefits and expects to get back $3.8m.
He proposed to balance the budget for fiscal 2011 by cutting a third from projected outlays. He suggested that teachers' pay be frozen, rather than raised by 4-5%, and that they contribute a small amount (1.5% of salary) towards their health benefits.
About 600 people attended Monday's rescheduled Grand Rapids Board of Education meeting, with nearly 50 registering days in advance to question the board about proposed changes, including a controversial shift to online instruction at the city's high schools.
But Wes Viersen said he came to answer the board's questions about online classes. The Creston High School senior considers himself an expert in online courses, having completed 14 this year -- a feat he said he could verify with the transcript in his pocket.
"Overall, the quality of E2020 is horrible," Viersen told the board. "I completed courses, but I did not get an adequate education."
With Monday's actions, the board still has about $5.6 million to deal with - either through cuts, property tax increases, or a combination of the two - when it meets again next week to finalize the district's preliminary budget for 2010-11. So far, the board has made about $10.6 million in cuts and approved a levy increase of $12.7 million, a tax hike of $141.76 for the owner of a $250,000 Madison home.
In an evening of cost shifting, the board voted to apply $1,437,820 in overestimated health care insurance costs to save 17.8 positions for Reading Recovery teachers, who focus on the district's lowest-performing readers. That measure passed 5-2, with board members Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak voting no. The district is undergoing a review of its reading programs and Cole questioned whether it makes sense to retain Reading Recovery, which she said has a 42 percent success rate.
Vermont will not seek millions of dollars in a federal grant program aimed at improving failing schools, joining a handful of states in dropping out of the "Race to the Top" program despite strapped budgets.
The competitive grant requires states to link teacher pay to student performance and invest in charter schools, which would require policy and legislative changes in Vermont, commissioner Armando Vilaseca said Monday.
After spending hundreds of hours reviewing the application and program, the state will not apply, Vilaseca said.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has vowed to press states to remake the 5,000 or so chronically failing schools that account for about half of the nation's dropouts and usually serve -- or more to the point fail to serve -- the poorest children. A $4 billion school improvement fund is intended to give states the help and the incentive to turn these schools around.
Piecemeal plans that evaporate once the grant money is spent won't do the job. Only comprehensive, districtwide approaches deserve to be financed.
The clamor over the state's estimated $13 billion budget deficit --and concerns over jobs and spending that prompted the protests -- tends to drown out discussion of an issue that economists identify as perhaps the biggest long-term threat to Illinois's financial health: The state's shortfall of at least $61 billion in pension funding and the lack of any realistic plan to catch up.
In fact, the state's pension troubles are even more dire than the official figures would indicate, according to a review of pension data and other economic studies by the Chicago News Cooperative. Illinois, which sold $3.47 billion in securities so it could make its required contribution to pension funds this year, is laying plans to sell at least $4.6 billion more to meet its obligations for fiscal 2011 -- a move that is likely to jolt financial markets and many investors who thought years would pass before the state tried another sale of notes to cover its pension costs. Taxpayers ultimately will bear the burden as the need to pay for the bonds strains the state budget and threatens spending in other areas.
From Thatcher to Major, and from Blair to Brown, the most heated arguments about education have turned on the question of choice. The election of 2010 is no different, but this time it is hard to concentrate on the debate, because of the distracting background din of the steel being sharpened for the savage years ahead. The row over fees for state nurseries which has now beset the Conservatives is a more instructive guide to what the next few years have in stall than any of the choice agendas we are being asked to choose from.
The Conservatives' Michael Gove has long argued the best way to raise standards in general - and most particularly in deprived places - is to enable disgruntled parents to walk away from failing local authorities and establish schools of their own. Regarded by Mr Gove as a natural extension of Tony Blair's academy programme, the plan is inspired by an 18-year old experiment in Sweden. And, until recently, the most pertinent questions related to the Swedish evidence. Initially positive signs have recently been overshadowed by the nation slipping down the educational league, and growing fears that gains in its free schools may have come at the expense of other institutions. As the scale of the post-election retrenchment becomes clearer, however, the really big question is the one acutely posed yesterday by a top Conservative councillor. Although Kent's leader, Paul Carter, later "clarified" that he supported the party line, his query about where the cash will come from still demands an answer.
A storm is brewing in teacher training in America. It involves a generational change that we education writers don't deal with much, but is more important than No Child Left Behind or the Race to the Top grants or other stuff we devote space to. Our urban public schools have many teachers in their twenties and thirties who are more impatient with low standards and more determined to raise student achievement than previous generations of inner city educators, having seen some good examples. But they don't know what exactly to do.
This new cohort is frustrated with traditional teacher training. They think most education schools are too fond of theory (favorite ed school philosopher John Dewey died in 1952 before many of their parents were born) and too casual about preparing them for the practical challenges of teaching impoverished children.
We recently highlighted Markham middle school, a low performing schools in Los Angeles, in a report on low performing school improvement. Now Markham has become the flashpoint of the debate in California to overhaul teacher seniority policies. Governor Schwarzenegger recently visited Markham to highlight the problems at this school which unfortunately became a victim of seniority staffing policies (See related story). As part of a fresh start restructuring of the school, a non-profit organization established by the Mayor let all of the teachers at Markham go, rehired some of them, but mainly hired new young teachers to staff the school. The goals was to model the school after successful charter schools in the district like Green Dot. Unfortunately the school was still subject to the district's collective bargaining agreement. So when the LA Unified faced a budget problem, it laid off over half of the staff at Markham in the summer of 2009, and has yet to be able to backfill those positions. The school is also part of a lawsuit by the ACLU to stop LAUSD from doing further harm at Markham and school like it.
Earlier this spring, the a task force created by LA's superintendent, Ramon Cortines and chaired by Ted Mitchell, CEO of New Schools and chair of the State Board of Education (and my old boss), developed a set of recommendations to overhaul the district's teacher and administrator policies including evaluation, seniority, tenure, differentiated compensation and career pathways. The report is worth a look. But, part of what this group determined was that there needed to be several changes in state law to allow them to implement the changes proposed.
The Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) is to be implemented in secondary schools across Scotland in August.
But there have been union threats of disruption over the controversial, planned changes.
The changes, already in place in primary schools, are designed to give teachers more freedom and make lessons less prescriptive.
Mr Russell said: "Head teachers are at the heart of any successful school.
To ace the state standardized tests, which begin on Monday, Public School 172 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, finds money for coaches in writing, reading and math. Teachers keep detailed notes on each child, writing down weaknesses and encouraging them to repeat tasks. There is after-school help and Saturday school.
But at the start of this school year, seven or eight students were still falling behind. So the school hired a speech therapist who could analyze why they and other students stumbled in language. A psychologist produced detailed assessments and recommendations. A dental clinic staffed by Lutheran Medical Center opened an office just off the fourth-grade classrooms, diagnosing toothaches, a possible source of distraction, and providing free cleanings.
Perfection may seem a quixotic goal in New York City, where children enter school from every imaginable background and ability level. But on the tests, P.S. 172, also called the Beacon School of Excellence, is coming close -- even though 80 percent of its students are poor enough to qualify for free lunch, nearly a quarter receive special education services, and many among its predominately Hispanic population do not speak English at home.
Some 25 years ago, a quasi-country quartet calling themselves "The Girls Next Door" had a moderate hit with a ditty about how "love will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no love." Which is fine as far as it goes, but doesn't explain why the fool thing has been going through my head for the last week or so.
Then I did some translating. First off, I remembered all the times I was told (also about 25 years ago) that God is love. So, by substitution, the aphorism became "God will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no God." Which seems likely to be true, although I claim no particular expertise in these matters.
And then I remembered a T-shirt I saw a while back -- "I believe in God, but I spell it Nature." (Not sure whether that's a quote or not. Doesn't really matter.) Substituting again, we arrive at "Nature will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no Nature." Which seems like a pretty clear expression of the precautionary principle as applied to climate change.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has vowed to press states to remake the 5,000 or so chronically failing schools that account for about half of the nation's dropouts and usually serve -- or more to the point fail to serve -- the poorest children. A $4 billion school improvement fund is intended to give states the help and the incentive to turn these schools around.
Piecemeal plans that evaporate once the grant money is spent won't do the job. Only comprehensive, districtwide approaches deserve to be financed.
Local administrators -- and the Department of Education in Washington -- should be paying close attention to what is happening in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system.
Two years ago, district administrators adopted an innovative staffing system intended to put the best principals in the most troubled schools -- and give them the autonomy they need to succeed. While Charlotte was already one of the highest-performing urban systems in the country, it has made progress since then.
The Obama administration's signature education initiative has incited tense showdowns in states across the country as unions and state officials feud over strategies to compete for $3.4 billion in federal funding.
The skirmishes come as states jockey for cash under the administration's Race to the Top program, which seeks to reward states that are pushing to overhaul their education systems.
Applications for the second round are due by June 1, with winners to be chosen in September. Of the 40 states that submitted applications in the first round, only 16 were picked as finalists.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan ramped up pressure on the unions last month when he cited the advantage of union cooperation in picking just two states--Delaware and Tennessee--as winners in the competition's first round. Those states will share $600 million.
First, Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee announces that an extra $34 million is available in the D.C. schools budget for teacher pay raises. Two days later, Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi declares that not only is most of it nonexistent but also that Rhee is running a projected $30 million over budget in her central office operation.
Within hours, Rhee says an unspecified $29 million has been "identified" to fund the raises.
How this happened, why and how it will be resolved still isn't clear. Rhee and Gandhi are saving most of their answers for scheduled testimony before the D.C. Council on Friday. Hanging in the balance is the fate of the District's $140 million tentative agreement with the Washington Teachers' Union, which is contingent on Gandhi's certification that the pact is financially sound.
Teachers unions need a hug. After all, they're having a really bad year.
So bad that their members are lashing out - blasting Education Secretary Arne Duncan after he questioned the effectiveness of teachers colleges, criticizing President Barack Obama for his approach to education reform, etc.
In fact, teachers are getting so flustered that they're contradicting themselves. It's acceptable for teachers to distinguish good students from bad students. But it's outrageous for administrators to do the same with teachers. In contract negotiations, teachers like being part of a collective. But when an underperforming Rhode Island school district fired more than 70 educators at once, teachers complained about being judged collectively. When a student succeeds, teachers claim credit for a job well-done. When a student fails, it's the parents who catch the blame for falling down on the job.
I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the 2010 Wisconsin Solo & Ensemble Festival. It is a true delight to enjoy the results of student and teacher practice, dedication and perseverance.
I very much appreciate the extra effort provided by some teachers on behalf of our children.
I thought about those teachers today when I received an email from a reader asking why I continue to publish this site. This reader referred to ongoing school bureaucratic intransigence on reading, particularly in light of the poor results (Alan Borsuk raises the specter of a looming Wisconsin "reading war").
I'll respond briefly here.
Many years ago, I had a Vietnam Vet as my high school government teacher. This guy, took what was probably an easy A for many and turned it into a superb, challenging class. He drilled the constitution, Bill of Rights, Federalist Papers and the revolutionary climate into our brains.
Some more than others.
I don't have the ability to stop earmark, spending or lobbying excesses in Washington, nor at the State, or perhaps even local levels. I do have the opportunity to help, in a very small way, provide a communication system (blog, rss and enewsletter) for those interested in K-12 matters, including our $400M+ Madison School District. There is much to do and I am grateful for those parents, citizens, teachers and administrators who are trying very hard to provide a better education for our children.
It is always a treat to see professionals who go the extra mile. I am thankful for such wonderful, generous people. Saturday's WSMA event was a timely reminder of the many special people around our children.
What about Wisconsin? Wisconsin kids overall came in at the U.S. average on the NAEP scores. But Wisconsin's position has been slipping. Many other states have higher overall scores and improving scores, while Wisconsin scores have stayed flat.
Steven Dykstra of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition, an organization that advocates for phonics programs, points out something that should give us pause: If you break down the new fourth-grade reading data by race and ethnic grouping, as well as by economic standing (kids who get free or reduced price meals and kids who don't), Wisconsin kids trail the nation in every category. The differences are not significant in some, but even white students from Wisconsin score below the national average for white children.
(So how does Wisconsin overall still tie the national average? To be candid, the answer is because Wisconsin has a higher percentage of white students, the group that scores the highest, than many other states.)
Governance: Madison School Board Members Proposed 2010-2011 Budget Amendments: Cole, Hughes, Mathiak, Moss & Silveira. Reading Recovery, Teaching & Learning, "Value Added Assessment" based on WKCE on the Chopping Block
Well worth reading, particularly Maya Cole's suggestions on Reading Recovery (60% to 42%: Madison School District's Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags "National Average": Administration seeks to continue its use) spending, Administrative compensation comparison, a proposal to eliminate the District's public information position, Ed Hughes suggestion to eliminate the District's lobbyist (Madison is the only District in the state with a lobbyist), trade salary increases for jobs, Lucy Mathiak's recommendations vis a vis Teaching & Learning, the elimination of the "expulsion navigator position", reduction of Administrative travel to fund Instructional Resource Teachers, Arlene Silveira's recommendation to reduce supply spending in an effort to fund elementary school coaches and a $200,000 reduction in consultant spending. Details via the following links:
Well, while folks are talking about having the public kibbitz on school district labor contracts, I suppose we can't help having comments on the Superintendent's contract as well. The Board will soon take up the matter of the Superintendent's annual performance review and action on her contract.
How has the Superintendent done?
I suppose the only proper way to answer that question would be to review her performance relative to her job description and the performance expectations for her that were established and defined in advance. These performance expectations should, of course, all be objectively measurable outcomes. That is, after all, her definition of accountability.
Peter Borock, 23, is in his second year teaching history at Health Opportunities High School in the South Bronx. It could be his last.
With New York City schools planning for up to 8,500 layoffs, new teachers like Mr. Borock, and half a dozen others at his school, could be some of the ones most likely to be let go. That has led the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, into a high-stakes battle with the teachers' union to overturn seniority rules that have been in place for decades.
Facing the likelihood of the largest number of layoffs in more than a generation, Mr. Klein and his counterparts around the country say that the rules, which require that the most recently hired teachers be the first to lose their jobs, are anachronistic. In an era of accountability, they say, the rules will upend their efforts of the last few years to recruit new teachers, improve teacher performance and reward those who do best.
When the energy executive Dennis Bakke retired with a fortune from the AES Corporation, the company he co-founded, he and his wife, Eileen, decided to direct their attention and money to education.
Mrs. Bakke, a former teacher, said she had been interested in education since the summer she was a 12-year-old and, together with a friend, opened the Humpty Dumpty Day School, charging $2 a week in "tuition" to parents of the children attending. Mr. Bakke was eager to experiment with applying business strategies and discipline to public schools.
The Bakkes became part of the nation's new crop of education entrepreneurs, founding a commercial charter school company called Imagine Schools. Beginning with one failed charter school company they acquired in 2004, they have built an organization that has contracts with 71 schools in 11 states and the District of Columbia. Imagine is now the largest commercial manager of charter schools in the country.
Nothing is forcing Montana, one of only two states to boast a budget surplus, to cut costs.
Nothing, that is, except its voluble governor, Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat and deficit hawk.
"Four years ago, when most states were awash in cash and new revenues were rolling in, I didn't allow the Legislature to spend it or commit it," Mr. Schweitzer said. "I vetoed more than 40 bills."
He also has vigilantly cut costs, but by January, he said, he had "exhausted all the easy ideas." So he turned for help to his constituents. He featured a pink piggy bank on his Web site and invited them to click on it and submit their ideas for trimming state expenses.
The Montana Accountability Project attracted more than 1,000 suggestions that included placing sensors in state buildings to turn lights off, switching to a four-day workweek for state employees, abolishing the death sentence and reducing the cost of appeals.
Hundreds of Orange County teachers were walking picket lines Thursday, the first day of a strike protesting pay and benefits cuts in the Capistrano Unified School District.
Schools in the 51,000-student district remained open, but most after-school activities and sports events were canceled.
Scores of substitute teachers were hurriedly brought in to preside over classrooms with lesson plans that included enrichment activities in line with state education standards. But there were reports that some students were leaving campuses because there were too few substitutes.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Democrat Controlled Assembly & Senate pass Bill that Reduces Madison's SAGE Funding by $2M; District must be prepared for More Redistributed State Tax Dollar Changes
A bill that Madison School District officials say could take state funding from the district passed the state Senate on Thursday without changes and is headed to the desk of Gov. Jim Doyle.
The measure would increase the maximum class size in schools receiving funding under the Student Achievement Guarantee in Education program. The limit would become 18 students per class, up from the current maximum of 15, which would make SAGE more affordable for some school districts.
4K proponents have argued that the "State" will pay for this service over time. Clearly, counting on redistributed State tax dollars should be done with a measure of caution.
"The Review embodies Will Fitzhugh's idea about how to get students thinking and writing. In supporting him, you would be helping a person who is building what should and can become a national education treasure." Albert Shanker, 1993
"What is called for is an Intel-like response from the business and philanthropic community to put The Concord Review on a level footing with a reasonable time horizon." Denis P. Doyle, 2010
Denis Doyle:
With recent NAEP results (holding steady) and the RTTT announcements (DE and TN are the two finalists in this round) everyone's eye continues to focus on the persistent problem of low academic achievement in math and English Language Arts. And that's too bad; it's time for a change.
Instead of looking exclusively at the "problem," it's time to see the promise a solution holds. It's time to "backward map" from the desired objective--universal literacy--to step-by-step solutions. Achieving true literacy--reading, writing, listening and speaking with skill and insight--is, as Confucius said, a journey of a thousand miles; we must begin with a single step. Let's begin at the end and work our way backwards.
How might we do that? Little noted and not long remembered is the high end of the literacy scale, high flyers, youngsters who distinguish themselves by the quality of their work. By way of illustration, young math and science high flyers have the Intel Talent Search to reward them with great fanfare, newspaper headlines and hard cash (the first place winner gets a $100,000 scholarship) and runners-up get scholarships worth more than $500,000 in total.
That's as it should be; the modern era is defined by science, technology and engineering, and it is appropriate to highlight achievement in these fields, both as a reward for success and an incentive to others.
But so too should ELA receive public fanfare, attention and rewards. In particular, exemplary writing skills should be encouraged, rewarded and showcased.
It was the Council for Basic Education's great insight that ELA and math are the generative subjects from which all other knowledge flows. Without a command of these two "languages" we are mute. Neither math nor English is more important than the other; they are equally important.
Indeed, there is a duality in literacy and math which is noteworthy--each subject is pursued for its own sake and at the same time each one is instrumental. Literacy serves its own purpose as the fount of the examined life while it serves larger social and economic purposes as a medium of communication. No wonder it's greatest expression is honored with the Nobel Prize.
What is called for is a Junior Nobel, for younger writers, something like the Intel Talent Search for literary excellence. In the mean time we are lucky enough to have The Concord Review. Lucky because its editor and founder, Will Fitzhugh, labors mightily as a one-man show without surcease (and without financial support). We are all in his debt.
Before considering ways to discharge our obligation, what, you might wonder, is The Concord Review?
I quote from their web site: "The Concord Review, Inc., was founded in March 1987 to recognize and to publish exemplary history essays by high school students in the English-speaking world. With the 81st issue (Spring 2010), 890 research papers (average 5,500 words, with endnotes and bibliography) have been published from authors in forty-four states and thirty-seven other countries. The Concord Review remains the only quarterly journal in the world to publish the academic work of secondary students." (see www.tcr.org)
Lest anyone doubt the importance of this undertaking, permit me to offer a few unsolicited testimonials. The first is from former Boston University President John Silber, "I believe The Concord Review is one of the most imaginative, creative, and supportive initiatives in public education. It is a wonderful incentive to high school students to take scholarship and writing seriously."
The other is from former AFT President Al Shanker: "The Review also has a vital message for teachers. American education suffers from an impoverishment of standards at all levels. We see that when we look at what is expected of students in other industrialized nations and at what they achieve. Could American students achieve at that level? Of course, but our teachers often have a hard time knowing exactly what they can expect of their students or even what a first-rate essay looks like. The Concord Review sets a high but realistic standard; and it could be invaluable for teachers trying to recalibrate their own standards of excellence."
Can an enterprise which numbers among its friends and admirers people as diverse as John Silber and Al Shanker deserve anything less than the best?
What is called for is an Intel-like response from the business and philanthropic community to put TCR on a level footing with a reasonable time horizon. Will Fitzhugh has been doing this on his own for 22 years (he's now 73) and TCR deserves a more secure home (and future) of its own.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
What if we prepared teachers the same way we prepare doctors?
As school reformers lurch toward more innovative ways for training classroom teachers, this idea is getting a lot of attention. A handful of teacher "residency programs" based on the medical residency model already exist. Boston was one of the first to create one in 2003.
Tom Payzant had been Boston Public Schools superintendent when he founded the Boston Teacher Residency program. Payzant, who now teaches at Harvard University, says the city desperately needed to attract more talented teachers, especially for hard-to-fill positions like math, science and special education. But it wasn't just about the numbers, Payzant says. It was about the quality of teachers coming out of colleges of education.
Minnesota lawmakers felt their Race to the Top application was adversely affected by insufficient teacher union buy-in. So they heeded the union's repeated calls for "a seat at the table" by giving Education Minnesota President Tom Dooher, well, a seat at the table. Unfortunately, it was a seat at the legislators' table during a committee hearing and Dooher is not only the union president, but a registered lobbyist.
Republican state Rep. Mark Buesgens said it was "like having Vito Corleone watching over his foot soldiers."
The Democrats said the meeting was a working group and not a full committee hearing, so Dooher's presence at the legislators' table was not a breach of protocol. However, the Minnesota House voted 128-2 yesterday to bar lobbyists and executive branch members from sitting at the committee table with lawmakers during official meetings.
THE general election due in Britain on May 6th is not the one David Cameron was chosen to fight. The opposition Conservatives made him their leader in 2005 after a barnstorming speech delivered without notes to their annual conference. His pitch: that he could persuade the electorate to trust him with public services and offer tax cuts too, by "sharing the proceeds of growth". It was a formula worthy of an earlier young, centrist, opposition politician: Tony Blair, who in 1997 led Labour to victory after 18 years of Conservative rule.
Now there is nothing to share: taxes will have to rise and public spending fall. But still Mr Cameron is reprising Mr Blair. In 1997 Mr Blair memorably said that his priorities were "education, education, education". In the run-up to this election, education reform is the main, perhaps the only, broad and deeply thought-out proposal from his self-styled heir.
The Bellevue School Board adopted a traditionalist-favored math curriculum last week, and the superintendent revealed her final budget-cutting recommendations on Tuesday, making April a pivotal month for the school district.
Regarding math, the school board voted 3-0 on April 13 to adopt the Holt series, snubbing an inquiry-based Discovering curriculum that had math purists and many district parents up in arms.
Board members Paul Mills, Peter Bentley, and Michael Murphy voted in favor of the Holt textbooks. Chris Marks, Karen Clark, Judy Bushnell and Cudiero were not present.
The math decision fell in line with a recommendation from the district's textbook-adoption committee, which favored Holt over Discovering.
Today's Wall Street Journal:
The election results are obviously a big setback for the Democratic Party-government union alliance that has ruled Trenton for the past decade. So far, Governor Christie is winning the spending debate. The lesson for other governors is that opposition from public-employee unions is not insurmountable if you can articulate to voters what's at stake.
Joseph Marbach, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Seton Hall:
I think the governor was very successful in ... portraying the teachers union as out of touch with what's going on with working families. The voters are more aligned with his position... I think it ... gives him continued momentum to continue to rein in costs.
Montgomery County teachers and school system leaders signed an agreement Tuesday that calls for test scores and other student performance data to "factor strongly" in one-third of every teacher's evaluation, saying theirs is the first school system in Maryland to specify how much that data will count as a factor in teacher ratings.
The teachers and administrators acted in response to a new state law that allows student test scores to be used as a "significant" component of teacher evaluations. The law is part of Maryland's proposal for federal education aid under President Obama's $4 billion "Race to the Top" competition. Maryland is seeking as much as $250 million in the contest, which awards money to states whose applications show the strongest commitment to the president's education reform agenda.
Test scores have been a part of Montgomery's decade-old Teacher Professional Growth System, just as they factor into teacher evaluations in many other school districts. But Race to the Top has put school systems under pressure to place test scores front and center in those evaluations and to quantify their role in rating teachers.
They're the kind of obscenity-laced schoolyard taunts that could get a student suspended.
But the target of this tirade is New Jersey's Gov. Chris Christie -- and the perpetrators are the state's teachers, irate over his calls for salary freezes and funding cuts for schools.
In Facebook messages visible to the world -- not to mention their students -- the teachers have called Christie fat, compared him to a genocidal dictator and wished he was dead. The postings are often riddled with bad grammar and misspellings.
"Never trust a fat f...," read one profane post on the Facebook page, "New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie's Pay Freeze," which has some 69,000 fans, many of them teachers.
"How do you spell A-- hole? C-H-R-I-S C-H-R-I-S-T-I-E," read another.
A top education official in the Obama administration sat in San Francisco's Marshall Elementary School cafeteria taking notes Monday as parents, teachers and administrators recited a recipe for what it takes to turn around a struggling school.
The main ingredients included quality teachers, involved parents and a supportive principal mixed perhaps with a new dual-immersion language program. Time must be allowed to let it all take hold.
It is the kind of formula federal officials would love to see in place at schools across the country. Too many schools are failing year after year with no end in sight, said U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Tony Miller.
The Houston school district has scheduled meetings to discuss with parents its plans for reforming Lee, Jones, Kashmere and possibly Sharpstown high schools. HISD Superintendent Terry Grier and his staff presented the plans, which include extending the school day and year and offering students small-group tutoring, at a school board workshop last week. District officials plan to implement the changes this coming school year, so the turnaround is fast -- and the parent meetings are just around the corner. After columnist Lisa Falkenberg got a tip about the upcoming meeting at Lee from a peeved state lawmaker, I asked the district for a list of all the meetings. It took a day to get it, but here it is:
Children enrolled in Los Angeles Universal Preschool programs made significant improvements in the social and emotional skills needed to do well in kindergarten, according to a study released Monday. The gains were especially pronounced for English language learners, the study showed.
The findings confirmed observations of preschool teachers that children attending high-quality programs are better prepared for kindergarten. For the first time, the study provided data to back up those observations, officials with the nonprofit preschool organization said.
"This is unique because there's very little research in terms of cognitive progression in the preschool years," said Celia C. Ayala, chief operating officer for Los Angeles Universal Preschool. "We know there are differences, we see the differences, but this gives us a way to assess improvements."
The Obama administration is throwing out a Bush-era policy under the Title IX gender equity law that critics said made it easy for schools and colleges to avoid offering equal opportunities for women in athletics.
Title IX, passed in 1972, required schools to use a comprehensive evaluation to decide whether females were being given equal opportunity to participate.
In 2005, under then President George W. Bush, a new policy allowed schools to use a simple survey of women as its evaluation, and to combine non-responses with negative responses. Critics said gave institutions an easy way to avoid providing equal athletic opportunities for females.
Diane Ravitch was one of the architects of No Child Left Behind, but in her new book she now admits that it isn't working, and is in fact helping kill the kind of education she advocates. She continues to believe that the American public schools do a poor job, and that we can build a much more successful system of public education.
I agree with her on the first point. She's dead wrong on the second. We can't build a better system.
That's not a cry of despair, it's a statement of fact. There is never going to be a national school system much better than what we have now. It may get worse, but it won't get much better.
We could build a better school system by the simple expedient of abolishing the Department of Education. Some of us thought we could manage that when Reagan was swept into office, but the liberal establishment with the support of the teachers unions wouldn't permit that: and Reagan needed Congressional support for his defense measures. Some of us remember that when Reagan took office, only ten years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States looked to be in bad shape, with too many overseas commitments -- what Walter Lippman called drafts on our power -- and too little actual power, either military or diplomatic. The military needed a big shakeup and buildup, we needed to look into our overseas commitments, financial reforms were desperately needed, and the liberals, knowing all this, were willing to help -- provided that they got their share of liberal programs. The Department of Education was one of their bastions, and they would fight to the death -- or at least to the death of the Republic -- to prevent it from being abolished.
Less centralization, including the breakup of big districts would be a great step forward.
New Jersey voters took a stand on school spending and property taxes Tuesday, rejecting 260 of 479 school budgets across 19 counties, according to unofficial results in statewide school elections.
In the proposed state budget he unveiled last month, Gov. Chris Christie slashed $820 million in aid to school districts and urged voters to defeat budgets if teachers in their schools did not agree to one-year wage freezes. The salvo ignited a heated debate with the state's largest teachers union.
Christie said the cuts were necessary to help plug an $11 billion state budget gap.
In many districts Tuesday, the governor made himself heard as 54 percent of the spending plans were rejected, according to unofficial returns. If the trend continues, it would mark the most budget defeats in New Jersey since 1976, when 56 percent failed. Typically, voters approve more than 70 percent of the school budgets.
Last fall, Michelle Rhee, the tough-minded and creative schools chancellor in Washington, laid off 266 teachers, citing a budget crunch. She has since reported finding a budget surplus. The city's teachers' union, which challenged the layoffs unsuccessfully last fall, has now asked a judge to review them again. The atmosphere has grown increasingly toxic.
Some of Ms. Rhee's critics have implausibly suggested that she might have withheld information to justify the layoffs. It would be terrible for the city's children if the dispute reached a point where it upended the innovative union contract that Ms. Rhee and union leaders provisionally agreed to earlier this month.
The contract, which changes the terms under which teachers are paid and evaluated, could pave the way for better schools for the District of Columbia's students and could become a model for agreements between school districts and teachers' unions around the country.
The state budget once again appears to be in flux. The Governor has promised no cuts to education. But education leaders have disputed this claim and are once again faced with significant program reductions. The governor's May Revise will provide additional details on how the public school districts will fare in 2010-2011. Our panelists will address the impact of the budget on education from multiple perspectives.
Moderator
John Fensterwald, Writer of The Educated Guess and Journalist in Residence at Silicon Valley Education Foundation
On April 20, the San Francisco Board of Education will convene a policy discussion to discuss the Superintendent's plans for our 10 schools labeled "persistently underperforming" by the state of California.
This list was created as part of the state's efforts to qualify for Race to the Top. It designates five percent of the state's schools as failing, and prescribes one of four turnaround models for districts to take. There's no choice in the matter, though it's unclear under state law when these actions would have to be taken. If, however, a district wants to apply for Federal funds to help implement one of the turnaround models, it must submit a plan in the next few weeks--and begin the work within six months.
I am not crazy about any of the turnaround models. They assume that school leaders are so stupid that--D'oh! We never thought of replacing principals! We never thought of reconstitution (which we tried in this district and which failed, miserably)! Charter schools! Wow! (Even though charter schools have as mixed a record as traditional public schools--no miracles here.) School closure! (How does closing a school affect the achievement of its former students, exactly?)
In short, the Race to the Top 500-point rating system presents a patina of scientific objectivity, but in truth masks a subjective and somewhat random process.
This competition was a trial run for Secretary Duncan of a policy approach he hopes to make permanent. The Obama administration has proposed that formula-driven Title I funding16 be frozen at its present level, without future adjustment for inflation, and that increases in federal education spending be devoted entirely to a new collection of competitive grants, some of which have similar requirements to RTT, and some of which, as indicated above, attempt to create incentives for initiatives not included in RTT. Because such a reduction in real Title I funding would further exacerbate state fiscal crises, and because this trial run of a competitive system has proven to have little credibility, the administration should rethink its approach to federal education aid and its relationship to school improvement.
Yet for now, the Department of Education proposes to go through an identical process for judging a second round of applications by July. States that lost in the March competition have been invited to re-apply, and several are doing so, again investing time and expense to re-do their applications. Experts in these states are likely to spend many hours studying the review process employed in March, so they can recommend small changes in their states' applica- tions to exploit the quirks of the Department's rating system. Such gaming is unlikely to reflect an actual improvement in the education policies of applicant states.
So I was just thinking about the progress on the Strategic Plan. I know I shouldn't. It only serves to upset and frustrate me. Nevertheless...
Focusing just on the primary themes and elements of the Plan, it still doesn't look good.
1. Ensuring Excellence in Every Classroom
1A. Adopt an aligned curriculum in math and science
They haven't done this. They're nowhere with regard to science; I don't think they've even gotten started. They're not much further along with math. They have standardized the textbooks (for the most part), and they have posted pacing guides, but there's no evidence that they have aligned the curriculum. In fact, it doesn't appear that they have any ability to align the curriculum, that they even know how to align curriculum, or that they know what aligned curriculum would look like. After making bold statements on PowerPoints and paying millions to vendors, they appear to be completely adrift.
1B. Develop districtwide assessments in math and reading
This is a reference to the MAP, but it isn't districtwide yet and teachers either don't know how to use the results or simply aren't choosing to use them. There were supposed to be a lot of other common assessments, but there's no evidence to suggest that they are either in use or useful. Mostly this was an excuse to funnel millions to a vendor for a data warehouse which isn't ready yet and will be of questionable utility when it is ready.
Legislators trying to help save a generation of Milwaukee children from lives of poverty and unemployment want to add a new law to the books in Madison this week.
They should, if they want to make a real difference, also delete one.
Part of the new education bill passed by the Senate the other day, and now being considered by the Assembly, calls for rigorous, annual teacher performance evaluations - something that many districts all across America already supposedly administer.
But not really.
Last year, the New Teacher Project researched teacher evaluations in 12 districts, both big and small, across the country. Methods and frequency of evaluation differed from district to district, but one thing was found to be strikingly similar. Virtually all teachers in the districts studied are told over and over and over again that they are either good or great. In districts that use binary rating systems, for instance, (generally "satisfactory" and "unsatisfactory" categories are used) more than 99% of teachers are given the "satisfactory" designation, according to the researchers.
One of my education reporting maxims is that principals of schools in troubled districts never seek me out. Journalists are poison to them. We only want to write about bad stuff. Anything they say can be held against them.
So I was surprised when Charlie Thomas, principal of Crossland High School in Prince George's County, began sending me emails. His school has been one of the worst in a low-performing district for a long time. But Thomas, who arrived in 2004, was trying to improve his school and was willing even to deal with a fault-finding columnist if it would help. Nearly 66 percent of his students were low-income, but he was not going to let that slow him down.
I confess he has gotten my attention with some unusual moves. For instance, he quickly discovered that close to 800 of his 1,800 students were still in the ninth grade. "I asked for a list of every ninth grade student that was 16 years old or older with a grade point average of less than 1.0 [a D average]," he told me. The list had 330 names. Some had been there four or five years.
Roland Fryer is an economist at Harvard University who had an idea for a straightforward method of getting kids at urban schools more engaged: Pay 'em.
Four reward schemes were tried in four different cities, each in a randomized control trial lasting one year. The results are reported in Time magazine this week.
New York City: Students were promised pay for higher standardized test scores. There was no effect.
Chicago: Students were paid for higher grades. The rewards prompted higher attendance rates and higher grades, but standardized test scores were not improved.
Washington, D.C.: Students were rewarded for improved behaviors such as good attendance, refraining from fighting, and so on. There was a modest improvement on standardized test scores.
Not long ago education schools had a virtual monopoly on the teaching profession. They dictated how and when people became teachers by offering coursework, arranging apprenticeships and granting master's degrees.
But now those schools are feeling under siege. Officials in Washington, D.C., and New York State, where some of the best-known education schools are located, have stepped up criticisms that the schools are still too focused on theory and not enough on the craft of effective teaching.
In an ever-tightening job market, their graduates are competing with the products of alternative programs like Teach for America, which puts recent college graduates into teaching jobs without previous teaching experience or education coursework.
And this week, the New York State Board of Regents could deliver the biggest blow. It will vote on whether to greatly expand the role of the alternative organizations by allowing them to create their own master's degree programs. At the extreme, the proposal could make education schools extraneous.
There are a number of people who believe that the District intentionally cultivates confusion around the definitions of the terms "curriculum", "materials", "content", and "Standards". The misuse of these terms on official District documents and by District staff is exactly the sort of thing that supports this suspicion. The misuse of these terms detracts from transparency and community engagement. This example is particularly egregious because it speaks to an adoption. These actions do NOT adopt a curriculum, only materials.
One by one, mothers stepped forward to face Alameda County Superior Court Judge Cecilia Castellanos and explain why their children have repeatedly failed to show up to elementary school.
One mom said she couldn't find her son's school. Another blamed traffic. One said her son was repeatedly tardy to class because he had difficulty opening his locker.
To each, Judge Castellanos said, "That's not an excuse," and ordered them back to truancy court for a follow-up.
Many people get too excited about the latest hot education innovation. They lose their sense of perspective. It has happened even to me once or twice. When we wander off like that, we need someone with a sharp intellect and strong character to pull us back to reality.
One such person is Paul T. Hill, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and John and Marguerite Corbally Professor at the University of Washington Bothell. He has written a short, wise book, "Learning As We Go: Why School Choice is Worth the Wait," which provides the clearest explanations I have seen for why independent public charter schools need more time to develop. Hill believes it is worth waiting for charters to make what he thinks will be widespread positive impact on the quality of education. He thinks they are more promising than a renewed fondness for strengthening bureaucracy and standardizing instruction that seems to be bubbling in some foundations and national advocacy groups.
Hill makes five simple points and more or less devotes a chapter to each. Here is what he says, with some fussing and worrying by me. If you want to add your ideas to these, or explain why these are nonsense, the comments box below awaits.
A heated debate surrounding merit pay for teachers has existed for decades in the United States, where since the 1920s public schools began awarding compensation primarily according to title and years of experience rather than performance.
Political leaders such as President Barack Obama and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have recently expressed support for the notion of merit pay for teachers. In March 2009, Obama said that teachers should be treated "like the professionals they are while also being held more accountable. Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools."
This has reinvigorated the debate, with many groups staking out positions on either side. The National Education Association, for example, has opposed merit pay, while the United Federation of Teachers, at least in part, seems to support the idea.
Here is a summary of questions and pro and con responses within the debate.
Since 2001, spending by local towns across New Jersey has risen by 70 percent, with average 4 percent raises for teachers each year playing a major role in the increases. During that same period, property taxes have risen by 56 percent.
You don't need to be a math major to know that you can't pay for a 70 percent spending hike with "only" a 56 percent increase in tax revenues. So how did towns make up the difference?
Answer: Trenton.
For many towns and school districts, the revenue gap was filled in with state aid. And that state aid has come largely from income taxes and other fees.
But then came the recession and the sharp drop in incomes - and income taxes.
And then came Chris Christie, handily beating the well-funded, union-backed incumbent Democratic governor, Jon Corzine.
Corzine did not lose because he wasn't smart enough or because he did not have enough campaign cash of his own. He lost because voters no longer had confidence that he could deliver on his promise to find ways to cut spending and deliver some measure of property tax relief.
There's new evidence the deep national recession has taken a toll on Madison: the value of all real estate dropped by 3.1 percent for 2010, the first decrease in at least 35 years, according to data released by the city Friday.
Falling values do more than reduce the net wealth of property owners. Along with a slowdown in construction, they mean that under current tax rates, fewer dollars will be available to fund the rising costs of city, school and other public services 2011.
"There can't be new spending. We're going to have to cut where we can," Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said in a phone interview from a transit research tour in the Netherlands. "Despite that, there will be considerable pressure on taxes."
Local government units have been living off of parcel and assessed value growth for decades. This change has significant taxpayer implications...
Back in the Paleolithic period, when men and women wore their Sunday best, classroom decorum was unquestioned; the relationship between professor and student was based on a set of unspoken rules. One wonders what their reaction would be to an e-mail message I received from a student: hey prof, owt late last nite .... am sic today. pls emal cls notes. yah thatd b great. thx see u.
I teach a course in public speaking at Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York, in which students give speeches ranging from how to clean a trumpet to solar energy. My job is to show them how to arrange their thoughts, use language to its best advantage and, most important, perform in front of an audience without fear.
I spoke with the Superintendent Friday regarding the proposed reorganization. The conversation occurred subsequent to an email I sent to the School Board regarding Administrative cost growth and the proposed reduction in Superintendent direct reports.
I inquired about the reduction in direct reports, the addition of a Chief Learning Officer, or Deputy Superintendent and the apparent increased costs of this change. Mr. Nerad said that he would email updated budget numbers Monday (he said Friday that there would be cost savings). With respect to the change in direct reports, he said that the District surveyed other large Wisconsin Schools and found that those Superintendents typically had 6 to 8, maybe 9 direct reports. He also reminded me that the District formerly had a Deputy Superintendent. Art Rainwater served in that position prior to his boss, Cheryl Wilhoyte's demise. He discussed a number of reasons for the proposed changes, largely to eliminate management silos and support the District's strategic plan. He also referenced a proposed reduction in Teaching & Learning staff.
I mentioned Administrative costs vis a vis the current financial climate.
I will post the budget numbers and any related information upon receipt.
Finally, I ran into a wonderful MMSD teacher this weekend. I mentioned my recent conversation with the Superintendent. This teacher asked if I "set him straight" on the "dumbing down of the Madison School District"?
That's a good question. This teacher believes that we should be learning from Geoffrey Canada's efforts with respect to the achievement gap, particularly his high expectations. Much more on the Harlem Children's Zone here.
'I said all during the campaign last year that I was going to govern as if I was a one-termer," explains New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on a visit this week to the Journal's editorial board. "And everybody felt that it was just stuff you say during a campaign to sound good. I think after the first 12 weeks, given the stuff I've done, they figure: 'He's just crazy enough to do it.'"
Call it crazy, or just call it sensible: Mr. Christie is on a mission to make New Jersey competitive once again in the contest to attract people and capital. During last fall's campaign, while his opponent obliquely criticized Mr. Christie's size, some Republicans worried that their candidate was squishy--that he wasn't serious about cutting spending and reining in taxes. Turns out they were wrong.
Listen to Mr. Christie's take on the state of his state: "We are, I think, the failed experiment in America--the best example of a failed experiment in America--on taxes and bigger government. Over the last eight years, New Jersey increased taxes and fees 115 times." New Jersey's residents now suffer under the nation's highest tax burden. Yet the tax hikes haven't come close to matching increases in spending. Mr. Christie recently introduced a $29.3 billion state budget to eliminate a projected $11 billion deficit for fiscal year 2011.
But the New York Times story demands a bit more discussion. (Plus it buries the lede…check out the Shalvey quote)
In the story Linda Darling Hammond points out that the Stanford school takes all kids. Sure, but so do many other public schools (including some in the community including Aspire Public Schools, a network of public charters established by a former CA school superintendent) that have better results. More on that below. That uncomfortable reality also makes Diane Ravitch’s quote in the story really curious. This situation doesn’t illustrate much about the debate about schools and poverty overall, but it does again show that there are big differences among schools serving similar kids and that powerful and intentional instruction matters.
Recently I visited a history class at a local, low-performing high school where students read in turn from the autobiography of a famous American. The teacher was bright and quick. He interrupted often with comments and questions. The 18 sophomores and juniors seemed to be into it, but it was such an old-fashioned--and I suspect to some educators elementary--approach for that I decided to see what other educators thought of it.
I love spending time in classrooms, listening and watching. Often I see something new and surprising, or sometimes old and surprising like one young English teacher diagramming sentences. Was round robin reading (what educators usually call the read aloud technique I witnessed) bad or good? Was it a time-wasting throwback or a useful way to involve every student?
Yes and yes, teachers told me. That is the problem judging the way teachers teach. It all depends on the circumstances, the students, the object of the lesson, the style of the instructor and the judge. Read these and tell me who is right:
Before each tournament, Sam Crichton, a senior on the Wake Forest debate team, meticulously stocks a half-dozen Rubbermaid tubs with computer printouts. Each sheet of paper -- perhaps 5,000 total -- summarizes the argument in, say, a presidential speech or op-ed piece. These "cards" have been sorted into manila files, grouped into brown accordion folders, stacked into the tubs and labeled by argument type: affirmatives, disadvantages, counterplans, critiques, case arguments/negatives, backfiles.
There are 50 tubs for the entire Wake Forest team -- a traveling library of debate research. With the aid of all those pages of argumentation, debaters can summon up well-reasoned, highly specific points about nuclear disarmament, this year's topic for college policy debaters. What if an affirmative team contends that nuclear armament has hurt Africa? What if a negative team cites Heidegger to bolster its response?
"There's a strange comfort in reading off a sheet of paper," Mr. Crichton says. "Having all of this paper may seem like a form of chaos, but to me it actually seems more organized."
At 83, Marian C. Diamond has been teaching anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley, for 50 years. Her class is so popular that it's difficult for students to get in, though she holds court at the campus's largest lecture hall, with room for 736.
She begins by opening a colorful hatbox. Dressed in an elegant suit and scarf with her hair swept back into a chig non, Professor Diamond pulls on a pair of latex gloves and reveals the box's contents: a human brain. It is in alcohol, she says, "because alcohol will preserve the brain. Need I say more?" The students laugh as they take this in. She has the room in the palm of her hands.
Professor Diamond is one of the tweedy celebrities of cyberspace. Videos of her anatomy course, Integrative Biology 131, have been viewed nearly 1.5 million times on YouTube, where they have been available since 2005 to anyone with an Internet connection. Some of the world's foremost scholars are up there for viewing, tuition free. From Yale, you can tune into an economics class by a professor with his own home-price index, Robert Shiller, or a course by the Milton scholar John Rogers. The undisputed rock star academic is Walter H. G. Lewin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who flies across the room to demonstrate that a pendulum swings no faster or slower when there is an added mass (Professor Lewin) hanging at the end.
Why homeschool? Maybe to brush up for an exam, get a sense of what a college is like, or just to learn. In the articles listed below, writers who know the fields weigh in on some of the highlights of free education.
Every school should provide opportunities for their students to take advantage of online courses. They are a great complement to traditional teaching, and a way to reduce or eliminate local curriculum creation expenditures.
With a one-day teacher strike looming in Oakland, a fact-finding report released Thursday gave both the district and the teachers union some ammunition in the bitter battle over a new labor contract.
The report, a required step following failed contract negotiations, validated the district's claims of financial desperation, but it also gave a nod to the Oakland Education Association's claims of relatively low teacher pay and need for small class sizes.
It urged both sides to get over the past - a history mired in fiscal mismanagement and bitterness.
Contract negotiations began this week between Seattle Public Schools and the teachers union, and the atmosphere is already getting testy--but not between the parties you might expect. Seattle Education Association president Olga Addae is peeved over a new coalition led by the non-profit Alliance for Education that is trying to muscle in on the talks.
Although technically no one else is allowed at the bargaining table besides the union and the district, the "Our Schools Coalition" last week launched a campaign to influence the process by unveiling a list of nine proposed changes it would like to see in the new contract--all of which are aimed at supporting good teachers and weeding out the bad.
While the group's ideas are not necessarily new, its effort to influence the negotiations is. And the coalition may have the political clout to do just that.
Minnesota lawmakers approved legislation that increases punishment for bringing weapons to school while going a little easier on fake guns and BB guns.
The bill, from Rep. Sandra Peterson, DFL-New Hope, passed the House 111-18 on Thursday.
It would punish bringing dangerous weapons onto school property with a sentence of up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $10,000 or both. That's more than double the current prison sentence and twice the maximum current fine.
Gov. Charlie Crist has vetoed the Jeb Bush-backed, controversial SB6. The education bill would have eliminated tenure for newly hired teachers, and would have tied a portion of teachers' salaries to test score results.
"I say we must start over. This bill has negatively affected the morale of our parents, teachers and students," Crist said.
The bill was opposed by many teachers and school boards, including Miami-Dade's. About 25 percent of county teachers called out "sick" on Monday to protest the bill.
The biology professor at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge gives brief quizzes at the beginning of every class, to assure attendance and to make sure students are doing the reading. On her tests, she doesn't use a curve, as she believes that students must achieve mastery of the subject matter, not just achieve more mastery than the worst students in the course. For multiple choice questions, she gives 10 possible answers, not the expected 4, as she doesn't want students to get very far with guessing.
Students in introductory biology don't need to worry about meeting her standards anymore. LSU removed her from teaching, mid-semester, and raised the grades of students in the class. In so doing, the university's administration has set off a debate about grade inflation, due process and a professor's right to set standards in her own course.
To Homberger and her supporters, the university's action has violated principles of academic freedom and weakened the faculty.
To all the other fiscal travails facing this country's states and largest cities, now add their pension obligations, which are far greater than they may realize or are willing to admit. This paper focuses on the crisis in funding teachers' pensions, because education is often the largest program area in state budgets, making it an obvious target for cuts.
Although it is generally acknowledged that education is the foundation of every modern society's future prosperity, schools unfortunately will have to compete with retirees for scarce dollars. This competition is uneven, because retirees have a legal claim on promised pension benefits that supersedes schools' budgetary needs. Consequently, Americans can look forward to higher taxes and cuts in services, resulting in fewer teachers, bigger classes, and facilities that are allowed to deteriorate. In several states, these developments have already arrived.
The crux of the problem is the gap between assets and liabilities affecting the fifty-nine pension funds that cover most public school teachers in America. Some of these are general state-employee pension funds, while others cover only teachers. Among the findings of our study of these funds:
Over the past few days, four former MPS superintendents have met in two public forums to share the lessons they have learned about running the state's largest school district. In both forums a recurring theme was Howard Fuller's contention that: "I was in charge, but I wasn't in control."
His meaning, with which the other former superintendents generally agreed, was that the labor contracts with the teachers and principals unions constrained his ability to make dramatic changes in the district. The implication was that the district's new superintendent, Gregory Thornton, would find it similarly difficult to improve outcomes under the current labor-management dynamic.
Whether this perception is accurate or not with regard to MPS, a new, still tentative, labor agreement in the Washington D.C. school district provides an example of a superintendent turning labor negotiating on its head. The D.C. superintendent, Michelle Rhee, has received much national press over the past two years as she pushed for a new paradigm of how, and how much, teachers are paid in D.C.
WARNING: This blog post is utterly simple and obvious. There are some life phenomena, events, and trends that are widely recognized and accepted by most people as just plain Truth. (Majority perception isn't always right, but it often is.) The argument that follows needs no regressions, 5-page data sets, or integration symbols.
This is a fact: Smart, ambitious people are rarely choosing K-12 teaching as a career these days.
Consider that, in 2007, among high school seniors who took the SAT and intended to major in education, the average scores were a dismal 480 in Critical Reading, 483 in Mathematics, and 476 in Writing. Compare those scores with the average scores of students intending to become engineers--524, 579, and 510. Or to students intending to enter the fields of communications and journalism: 523, 501, 519. Also consider that the most competitive, elite colleges and universities, like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, aren't offering undergraduate majors in teaching or education.
For almost a decade, No Child Left Behind has tested and labeled our kids and our schools. We know you care about your students, and we are eager to let Washington know just what you think about NCLB. Please take a few minutes to complete the following survey so we can let your representatives know exactly how this legislation has affected you and your students, and how it needs to be changed.
This is the introductory text to a new survey the National Education Association is using to ostensibly guage where its members stand on ESEA reauthorization.
But this "survey" is hardly a survey. C'mon.
Although the NEA claims to be eager to "let Washington know just what [its member-teachers] think about NCLB," tools like this only serve to tell teachers what the NEA thinks they should think. This all-too-short, multiple-choice-only survey begins by using the rotten brand "NCLB" in the introduction to inflame the survey-taker. Next, it asks only two questions about the survey-taker's identity: role and zip code.
A mind-numbing barrage of random television clips and trash-talking heads, "The Cartel" purports to be a documentary about the American public school system. In reality, however, it's a bludgeoning rant against a single state -- New Jersey -- which it presents as a closed loop of Mercedes-owning administrators, obstructive teachers' unions and corrupt school boards.
Blithely extrapolating nationally, the writer and director, Bob Bowdon, concludes that increased financing for public schools is unlikely to raise reading scores but is almost certain to raise the luxury-car quotient in administrator parking lots. To illustrate, Mr. Bowdon rattles off a laundry list of outrages -- like a missing $1 billion from a school construction budget -- and provides a clumsy montage of newspaper headlines detailing administrative graft.
The evidence may be verifiable (and even depressingly familiar), but its complex underpinnings are given short shrift. Instead Mr. Bowdon, a New Jersey-based television reporter, employs an exposé-style narration lousy with ad hominems and emotional coercion. In one particularly egregious scene he parks his camera in front of a weeping child who has just failed to win a coveted spot in a charter-school lottery -- another tiny victim of public school hell. Later, confronted with the president of the New Jersey Education Association, Mr. Bowdon performs the rhetorical equivalent of poking a lion with a stick and running away.
For many educators across the state, the Republican-led Legislature's proposed overhaul of Florida schools is inspiring a wave of deja vu.
Florida's last dramatic education shift in 1999 was also pushed by former Gov. Jeb Bush. It, too, was hurried through the legislative process by Republican leaders who used buzz words like accountability and performance measurements. Both efforts saw teacher unions and Democrats square off against big business and conservatives.
But, this time, critics said, it is worse. This time it is personal.
``They are going after the individual classroom teacher,'' said Ceresta Smith, a Miami Language Arts teacher who drove to Tallahassee Wednesday to beg Gov. Charlie Crist to veto the legislation, which would link teacher pay and recertification to student learning gains.
It's a good thing Madison is a full of certified smarty-pants. It takes a high level of smarts just to comprehend the complex and shifting budget situation faced by the Madison school district. Even some school board members have a hard time making sense of it.
"I've never seen anything quite like this," says Lucy Mathiak, the board's vice president, of the process by which the district has presented information about its proposed $372.8 million budget this year. "When you have the health and welfare of schools on the line, I feel like I have to ask for answers. It's not a comfortable position."
Frustrated, Mathiak first raised questions about how the district came to its projected $30 million budget hole in her School Daze blog. She notes, first of all, that the gap was closer to $18 million, presuming the board exercises its existing ability to raise taxes, as approved by voters in a 2008 referendum: "This means that the draconian school closings and massive staff layoffs reported earlier are unlikely to happen."
But even if that gap is plugged, new ones are opening up. Recently the district was told by a consultant that it needs to do $85.7 million in repairs to existing buildings over the next five years, well beyond the $4 million a year it budgets to this end.
Rep. John Kline (R-MN), the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee's senior Republican member, today warned sensitive student information could be at risk through vast data warehouses that collect private, personally identifiable information on school children. The committee heard testimony on the risks to students' personal information during a hearing on data collection in the K-12 education system.
"Today's hearing reinforces the need for federal, state, and local policymakers to ensure sensitive personal information about our children is safeguarded, and student and family privacy rights are protected. Efforts to collect vast troves of information on our students, tracking them from cradle to career, raise serious concerns," said Kline. "Information on student performance, while important to a child's success in the classroom and ensuring we have the best teachers serving in our schools, should not supersede our responsibility to protect a student's personal information."
The committee heard testimony from Professor Joel Reidenberg, academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at the Fordham University School of Law, who shared his research into security weaknesses in current state-based data systems and the potential that state data warehouses could be commandeered to create an unprecedented federal tracking system for maintaining private student information.
Local foodies are cheering the news that Wisconsin lawmakers this week passed legislation that will help bring local farm products to school lunchrooms.
The Assembly passed AB 746, which creates a statewide council to coordinate the process of selling Wisconsin-grown products to schools. The Senate concurred on the Farm-to-School initiative which is cheering news to Wisconsin farmers and advocates for more fresh foods on school menus.
Meanwhile, a newly released report from chef Beth Collins and Lunch Lessons about Madison's school meal program says the Madison school district's food service facilities, staff and organization pose no barriers to putting healthier, less processed food on kids' plates at school. But district budget woes and time constraints, plus the lack of a well-focused plan, still pose significant hurdles to upgrading what kids eat at school.
Milwaukee's incoming schools leader will focus on improving student achievement, creating more efficient and effective district operations, and partnering with parents, businesses and community members when he takes the reins of the state's largest public school system in July.
That's according to Gregory Thornton, Milwaukee Public Schools' superintendent-in-waiting, who for the first time in public Tuesday began laying out his plan for improvement and hinting at the changes those inside and outside the system can expect to see over the next few years.
"I'm excited because I think Milwaukee is at a very key place," Thornton said. "I think we're at a tipping point . . . I believe we need to tip this thing in a way that young people can be successful."
Thornton's discussion was part of a Newsmaker Luncheon hosted by the Milwaukee Press Club at the downtown Newsroom Pub. He answered questions from a panel of local journalists as well as audience members.
From the start, Thornton said, he will have to do "some housekeeping" in the district. Change will happen, he said, and those standing in the way will not be encouraged to stick around.
The latest report on Michigan's charter schools, to be presented to the state Board of Education today, does not compare the performance of charter students to those in traditional public schools -- a controversial practice done in past years.
In previous years, the annual report compared test scores in all charter schools with the average score of 20 traditional (and mostly low-performing) districts in which about 75% of Michigan charter schools are located. By that measure, charter schools do better.
The new 33-page annual report, created by the Michigan Department of Education and Michigan State University, explores topics including student performance and profiles. The report also recommends giving the department more authority over charter schools and a small increase in funding to pay for that.
Schools in standard operating debt don't have to close, but they must follow certain spending rules aimed at improving their fiscal standing.
This year's 11 districts in standard operating debt is a small decrease from the previous year's number and it continues a mostly downward trend since 2001, when 45 districts had that label. This year's tally is also the lowest number of schools to be in standards operating debt since the state started keeping track in 1990.
Interesting development in Indiana regarding Race To The Top: the State Superintendent, Tony Bennett, has written a letter to the president of the Indiana State Teachers Association explaining that because union buy-in is so important to wining the federal competition, "I ask for your unequivocal agreement to the following proposals." If the Union won't support Indiana's RTTT application then Indiana won't even bother applying for the next round in June. (Hat tip: Flypaper.)
Mr. Bennett goes on to stipulate that the application will only be submitted if ISTA agrees to support a requirement that 51% of teacher evaluations be based on student growth data, and new legislation that uses teacher evaluations to inform tenure and compensation decisions. The Union must submit a "strong letter of support and a recommendation that local associations sign on in support."
Milwaukee Public Schools can be turned around, but it will need a strong, visionary leader to chart a course of action and stick to it despite the pressures of special interests, the School Board and political forces, several former MPS superintendents said Monday night.
During a public forum hosted by the Marquette University Law School, four former leaders of the state's largest public school system spoke with relative candor about their past leadership experiences and the challenges they see ahead for the district at a time when MPS is about to accept a new superintendent.
Panelists Robert Peterkin (superintendent from 1988 to '91), Howard Fuller (1991-'95), Barbara Horton (1997) and Spence Korte (1999-2002) broke tradition with the silence on MPS issues that those who leave the top post generally adhere to and shared frustrations they encountered with a bureaucracy that too willingly accepts mediocrity and makes it hard to reward success.
They also made clear that Milwaukee should look to cities and states that have had success over the past 10 to 15 years in raising achievement levels for students.
"You cannot tell me it can't be done - there are no unteachable children," said Fuller, who after his superintendency became an advocate for choice schools as leader of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette.
By using asset growth projection rates similar to what are required for private pension plans, the study found that Wisconsin's retirement system would be considered only 78% funded. In addition, an analysis that takes into account recent stock market activity drops it to 72% funding, according to the report.
"We think this is more accurate than the stated market value of assets," said Josh Barro, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-author of the report, which was released Tuesday.
Pension plans that are not adequately funded could lead to higher property taxes or take resources away from the classrooms, Barro said. "Pension obligations are not some big ethereal thing," he said.
When I was a student at Cambridge University, I was told that term time was for attending lectures and socializing, at Oxford and Cambridge, and vacation time was for reading lots of books (a reading period). When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, (this is my 50th reunion year), we were given a formal Reading Period before exams, to help us catch up on semester reading assignments and prepare for finals.
If we would like to expect high school teachers of English and History to work with their students on the sort of serious research paper from which they will learn a lot on their own, and which will prepare them for college term papers, we have to give teachers a Reading Period, too, but we don't, so many don't assign such papers, and the majority of our public high school students now go on to college unprepared for college writing and panicked when their first assignments come down.
Laura Arandes, when she was a Freshman at Harvard, was shocked at the newacademic writing expectations, because at her public high school in Southern California she had never been asked to write more than a five-paragraph essay. She wrote me that:
I thought a required freshman writing course was meant to introduce us to college paper-writing. To ease us into the more rigorous scholastic environment we had so recently entered. In reality, the course was a refresher for most of the other students in the class. At a high-level academic institution, too many of the students come from private schools that have realized that it would be an academic failure on their parts to send their students to college without experience with longer papers, research environments, exposure to non-fiction literature, and knowledge of bibliographic techniques. And they're right. It is a failure, one being perpetrated by too many public high schools across the nation.
It took me two years to gain a working knowledge of paper-writing, to get to a point where I was constructing arguments and using evidence to support them. I read pamphlets and books on the mechanics of writing college papers, but the reality is simple: you only learn how to write papers by WRITING them. So here I am, about to graduate, with a GPA much lower than it should be and no real way to explain to graduate schools and recruiting companies that I spent my first semesters just scraping by. And the amount of determination, energy and devotion it took to scrape by isn't easily quantified and demonstrable.
A survey of college professors done a couple of years ago by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 90% of them thought the students they were seeing were not very well prepared in reading, doing research, and writing.
The Diploma to Nowhere report from 2008 found that more than one million of our high school graduates, with diploma and college acceptances in hand, are put into remedial courses when they arrive at college. The California State College people reported at a conference in Philadelphia last fall that 47% of their Freshman were in remedial writing courses. I asked the Director of Composition at Stanford if they had any remedial writing courses, and she told me that, no, all Freshman had to take a composition course.
So, what is the matter with all those public high school English and History teachers, that they are not preparing our graduates for college writing tasks? Many public high school teachers have five classes of thirty students each. With 150 students, if the teacher assigns a 20-page paper, she/he will have 3,000 pages of student research and writing to read, consider and correct when they come in. If she/he takes an hour on each paper, that would require 150 hours, or 30 days at five hours a day.
Even teachers who do a lot of their preparation and correcting after regular school hours, at night and on the weekends, do not have 150 hours to go over research papers. As a result, they do not assign them, students do not learn how to do the reading and writing required, and colleges (and students) complain when students arrive unprepared.
A sensible solution, it seems to me, would be to provide a Reading Period of perhaps eight school days for History and English teachers to do the necessary work to prepare their students for serious academic papers. This will seem excessive and unmanageable to administrators, but not, perhaps, if they consider the extra time already allotted in our public high schools for other things, like band practice, layup drills for basketball, yearbook, concerts, football and baseball practice, and on and on and on, when it comes to non-academic purposes.
If we do give the necessary time for teachers of English and History to work with their students on research papers, and to evaluate their work, I believe our students will learn how to read complete nonfiction books and to write serious term papers, but if we continue to expect the impossible of our teachers, they will continue to ask less academically of their students than they can do, and students will continue to suffer the consequences.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
These days that doesn't sound like much, does it? We're getting to the point where raising an alarm about ONE TRILLION DOLLARS is a little like holding the world to ransom for a measly million.
A federal judge Tuesday ordered a rural county in southwestern Mississippi to stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county's only majority-white school, the U.S. Justice Department announced.
The order, issued by Senior Judge Tom S. Lee of the U.S. District Court of Southern Mississippi, came after Justice Department civil rights division lawyers moved to enforce a 1970 desegregation case against the state and Walthall County.
Known as Mississippi's cream pitcher for its dairy farms and bordering Louisiana 80 miles north of New Orleans, Walthall County has a population of about 15,000 people that includes about 54 percent white residents and 45 percent African American residents, according to the U.S. Census.
I have a great deal of respect for Larry Cuban and his important work, but this blog post on Michelle Rhee reads like boilerplate applied to a situation that it doesn't fit.
For starters, when you actually read the new contract you'll see that Rhee didn't compromise a lot away, she basically got everything she wanted - including tenure reform. If there is a lesson in the contact timeline and resolution it's far less about compromise than about fortitude. Cuban says that the teachers got the raises they wanted. OK, sure. But Rhee wanted those, too!
The AFT's Randi Weingarten deserves a great deal of credit (which so far she hasn't gotten in the media in my view**) for signing a contract that effectively ends tenure and addresses layoffs in a respectful but cost-sustainable form, but the spin that this was a give and take deal evaporates when you actually read the document. It's precedent setting in some key ways.*
Second, I don't know where Cuban gets his 5 percent figure on the number of ineffective teachers in D.C.'s schools but while the percent can certainly be overstated in the public debate you're hard pressed to find anyone with firsthand experience in the D.C. schools or around them who does not peg that number higher. I was a charter trustee in D.C. for seven years and have spent a lot of time in both sector's of the city's public schools and would place that figure higher than 5 percent in a lot of the city's charter schools, too, by the way. This just isn't something the field does well yet.
Despite the 2008 referendum which so many of us worked so hard to pass, state actions and inaction have once again placed the quality of our public schools in jeopardy. It is time to stand up for our schools (again).
On Sunday April 18th at 1:00 pm at Warner Park Community Recreation Center - 1625 Northport Dr. - the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will hold their second Public Hearing on the 2010-11 district budget. The Board needs to hear from the community that we value education and are willing to pay to keep our schools strong. Progressive Dane urges community members to attend and make their voices heard.
Even if you don't want to speak at the meeting, you can attend register with positive message. If you can't make on Sunday, the Board can be contacted at board@madison.k12.wi.us.
Twenty percent over five years is the best we're ever going to do. Yes, there are problems, but let's sign and move on.
Private donors such as the Walton Family Foundation are not to be trusted. They'll be gone, along with their money, the moment Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee leaves.
The deal is a trap, because it does nothing to limit the IMPACT evaluation system, which is a disaster, or to protect teachers from the kind of layoffs Rhee instigated last October.
This, in paraphrase, is some of the conversation among teachers over the tentative contract agreement announced last week. If District Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi certifies the funding commitments of the four foundation donors as sound, the Washington Teachers' Union (WTU) will mail out ballots to begin a two-week voting period. This week, WTU president George Parker begins a series of informational meetings for teachers to discuss the proposed deal. The sessions, which all start at 4:30 p.m., will be Tuesday at McKinley High School, Thursday at Woodrow Wilson, Monday, April 19, at Ballou and Wednesday, April 21, at Spingarn.
At Adelphi Elementary School, students peel away from their classrooms twice a week for tutorials in reading and math. Clusters of five or six children will shuffle into a book closet, a hallway, a computer lab or any place teachers can fit a few empty chairs for 45 minutes of catch-up lessons or enrichment.
Such all-out efforts helped this Prince George's County school win a national award this year for steep gains in test scores. But the federal anti-poverty program that funds the academic drive at Adelphi represents a model of education reform -- spreading aid to states based on population and need -- that is fast going out of fashion.
President Obama aims to reinvent the Education Department as a venture capitalist for school reform, investing more in schools with innovative ideas. The Title I program, which supports Adelphi and thousands of other schools in low-income areas based on formulas of need, is not facing extinction. But Obama would freeze the core of that program even as he sends billions of dollars to states that harmonize their policies with his.
Yesterday I attended the premier showing of A Right Denied produced by Bob Compton who also produced 2 Million Minutes and few other related documentaries about education systems in the US and the world.
In between watching the Masters or the Yankees lose a few ballgames this weekend, please review this information and in particular, the attached 240 slide PPT presentation prepared by Whitney Tilson who is featured in A Right Denied. Whitney's research and factual data took a few years to compile and is the basis for the documentary. I have been following Whitney's work closely for a few years and if you asked me if I could have dinner with any one person in America today who would it be; my answer (after my wife of course) Whitney Tilson. Please review his material and feel free to share this with those you know.
While the achievement gap among racial groups and the sad inequities based solely one's zip code are illustrated, so is the decline in the U.S. education system on a whole - the data is alarming.
Some select pieces from the PPT slides (5.5MB PDF):
Why hasn't additional money resulted in improved results?
Teacher quality has been falling rapidly over the past few decades
Our school systems have become more bureaucratic and unaccountable
As a nation, have been so rich for so long that we have become lazy and complacent. Our youth are spending more time watching TV, listening to iPods, playing video games (up 25% in the last four years), going to sporting events, etc. rather than studying hard. These two pictures capture what's happening in China vs. the U.S. (see slide number 15).
Americans watch more than twice as much TV as any other country. (Watching the Masters or Baseball is exempt however.)
Achievement Gap #1 - We are falling behind all economic competitors.
15-year-olds trail almost all other OECD countries in Math and Science.
Our High School graduation rate lags nearly all OECD countries.
US is among the leaders in college participation but ranks in the bottom half or college completion.
The college completion rate in the US has stagnated and our competitors have surpassed us.
American students score highly in self-confidence. 72% agree or strongly agree; "I get good marks in Mathematics", yet we are near the bottom internationally in mathematics.
Achievement Gap #2 - Academic achievement of low-Income, minority students is dramatically lower than their more affluent peers. You already know this but, did you know;
The black-white achievement gap is already one year in kindergarten?
The majority of Black and Latino 4th graders struggle to read a simple children's book.
The achievement gap widens the longer students are in school.
Black and Latino 12th graders read and do math at the same level as white 8th graders.
Massachusetts and NYC have made great strides in math the past six years.
Very few children from low-income households are graduating from any four-year college, and this has stayed consistent for the past 40 years.
74% of students at elite colleges are from the top quartile of households and only 9% are from the bottom half of households.
Even the better high school graduates today are alarmingly unprepared for college. Close to half need remedial courses.
Two general approaches to fixing our schools
Improve the current system and create alternatives to the current system. Adopt both strategies.
Too many school systems today are dominated by the "Three Pillars of Mediocrity."
Lifetime Tenure
Lockstep Pay
System Drive by seniority (not merit)
Teacher Quality and Effectiveness. Teacher quality has been declining for decades. College seniors who plan to go into education have very low test scores.
Teacher certification has little impact on student achievement.
Please review the trailer http://www.2mminutes.com/films/ and the slide presentation attached which I know you will appreciate. I would encourage you to purchase the CD too or you can borrow mine if you like, I also have 2 Million Minutes and 2 Million Minutes: The 21st Century Solution.
Hell hath no fury like a teacher's union scorned. To close a $10.7 billion budget deficit, New Jersey's Republican Governor Chris Christie last month proposed slashing education by $820 million, an equivalent to a 5% cut for each school district. That follows on the heels of an across-the-board pay freeze.
Not happy is the Bergen County Education Association, which sent a letter to 17,000 members asking them to pray for the governor's death. The letter offers a sample prayer that begins: "Dear Lord, this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. . . . I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor."
Today, State Representative Tamara Grigsby (D-Milwaukee) joined other education supporters to announce a new education reform proposal designed to increase supports for Milwaukee Public Schools and its democratically-elected school board. Grigsby issued the following statement regarding today's activities:
"If this compromise were about mayoral takeover, I would not be here in support of it today. Over the past year, much of the debate surrounding MPS has been about who runs the schools, rather than the quality of education being given to our children. Now that the debate surrounding takeover has come to an end, I'm glad that so many different stakeholders have been able to join together to find common ground with the best interests of Milwaukee's children in mind.
"This compromise is not about a change in governance, nor is it about school control. This compromise is about support for our schools and providing a consistent, quality education for our children. For education to improve, MPS needs more community support, more district support, and more state support. You will not find a takeover of any sort in this legislation. Instead, this proposal puts in place important policies designed to support and strengthen Milwaukee Public Schools and maintain its democratically-elected, empowered school board.
The president of a state teachers union left a meeting Monday with Gov. Chris Christie after refusing to fire a local president who wrote a memo that joked about the governor's death, further escalating a rift that began before Christie's election.
Christie spokesman Mike Drewniak said the governor wants Bergen County teachers union head Joe Coppola fired for his "irresponsible" memo. The memo from the Bergen County Education Association to its locals included a closing prayer that read:
"Dear Lord this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor."
"We still have the big stuff ahead, some of the harder discussions," School Board President Arlene Silveira said. "So it's good to get some of these items off the table."
Superintendent Dan Nerad started the budget discussion Monday with the news that more than nine full-time jobs for bilingual resource specialists had been double-counted in budget estimates, allowing the board to remove $632,670 in expenses for those duplicate positions.
Also, the rise in employee health insurance costs for the 2010-11 school year had been overestimated, resulting in costs that are $1.4 million less than projected, Nerad said.
Cristin Frodella, a senior marketing manager for education at Google, says this is not a strategy to make money.
"We give it away for free now," Frodella says. "We plan to always give it away for free. You know, Google actually started in the education world, and so we'd like to continue to support education. And we think this is a great way for us to support it."
No ads, no charge -- what's the catch?
"That's a very good question. The answer isn't entirely clear," says Christian Csar, a senior computer science major at Yale University.
He says he was troubled when he heard that Yale was planning to migrate student e-mail to Google. "There are some distinct privacy concerns because Google now has complete access to your e-mail in order to show it to you," he says.
Frodella says students shouldn't worry. "The school owns all of the student's private data. We are not looking at it. The school owns all of it," Frodella says.
Sandra Stotsky and I have pieces in today's Arkansas Democrat Gazette on the current national standards push. We take slightly different approaches -- Sandy thinks national standards are a good idea in general but the current draft has bad standards, while I think national standards are a bad idea altogether. But we end up with the same policy recommendation -- the current national standards push should be stopped. I've reproduced both pieces below:
One Size Fits None
by Jay P. Greene
The Obama administration and Gates Foundation are orchestrating an effort to get every state to adopt a set of national standards for public elementary and secondary schools.
These standards describe what students should learn in each subject in each grade. Eventually these standards can be used to develop national high-stakes tests, which will shape the curriculum in every school.
On July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson charted the course for a new nation: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Abraham Lincoln declared that we were "a new nation, conceived in Liberty" and "the last best hope of earth." Ronald Reagan observed: "Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than any other place on earth."
I recently watched Al Sharpton on the Stephen Colbert show talk about how education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. He discussed his collaboration with Newt Gingrich to promote education reforms. Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich? That's an interesting coupling.
And I thought of all the interesting volunteers who come together at School on Wheels to tutor a homeless child. Why do they do this? For some it's because they recognize the vulnerability and difficulty of being a homeless student. For others, it's the opportunity to give back to those they consider less fortunate. For most, however, it's the understanding that education is the one sure path out of poverty and the cycle of homelessness. In Los Angeles County, we have a 60% graduation rate, well below the national average of 70%. And not only is the poverty rate in L.A. County higher than the nation as a whole, but we are the homeless capital of the nation.
Homelessness is extreme poverty. A serious illness or the loss of a job can leave anyone in extreme poverty. And when kids become homeless, their education suffers immensely.
New York Governor David Paterson wants to reduce state aid to local school districts next year by 5% to address the state's $9.2 billion budget deficit, and state educators are complaining that the cuts could result in teacher layoffs. Maybe so, but the reality in New York and other states is that teacher hires in recent years have far outpaced student enrollment.
A new report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy found that New York public schools added 15,000 teachers between 2000 and 2009, even though enrollment fell by 121,000 students over the same period. New York City, home to the nation's largest school system, added 7,000 teachers and 4,000 nonteaching professionals (guidance counselors, administrators, nurses) even as its enrollment was decreasing by 63,000 kids, according to state data.
Teachers unions prefer fewer students per class because it means more dues-paying jobs, but the evidence that it improves academic outcomes is thin. In any case, the Empire Center report found that "by national standards, class sizes in New York were small even before the further staff expansion of the past nine years." In 2008 New York's pupil-teacher ratio was 13.1, the eighth lowest among the 50 states, and its per-pupil spending ($16,000) leads the nation.
Proposed Madison School District Maintenance Referendum: 1999, 2005 and 2010 Documents
The Madison School District is considering another maintenance referendum ($85M?). The documents below provide a list of completed (1999, 2005) and planned projects (2010+). The reader may wish to review and compare the lists:
In the midst of an interesting memo defending President Obama’s decision to propose level funding Title I for next year, Raegan Miller of the Center for American Progress raises the point that many states and school districts don’t need increased Title I money because they are still receiving additional stimulus dollars. That’s a good point and makes a lot of sense–no need to spend more when there are already federal funds available.
But while the stimulus funds may be enough to justify flat-funding Title I for next year, it also hints at some important looming questions in all levels of federal education spending—what to do when the stimulus money expires.
As Miller notes, school districts and states still have some remaining funds from the $10 billion provided for Title I in the stimulus that would supplement the flat funded level of $14.49 billion for Title I. According to Jennifer Cohen, my former colleague at the New America Foundation, only about 24 percent of Title I stimulus funds had been disbursed by March 5. Coupled with the fact that up to 15 percent of the $10 billion can be reserved for the 2011 fiscal year, this increases the likelihood that states will still have a decent amount of money to use.
Win or lose with healthcare "reform", there is another socialist crisis looming, thanks to the Obama administration, but one that most conservatives and many libertarians will not only go along with but actually applaud, until it is forever too late. The battle over our schools has been being lost for nearly a decade and with the help of conservatives who do not understand how The late Senator Edward Kennedy and the current Pelosi ally, U.S. Representative George Miller pulled one over on Bush and the GOP with No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The defining impact of NCLB was not what it imposed on the nation's public schools but that it opened the door to direct Federal control of one of the most intimately local institutions in American history and culture (Will, 2007). That Federal control of the schools is precisely why Democrats who railed against the law for its first four years did not overturn it after taking control of Congress in 2007, when the law first came up for renewal. Democrats may not like details within NCLB but they apparently like the idea of federal control of the schools more than they dislike the current law, considering that they have left NCLB unchanged until Obama has proposed his "Blueprint for Education" (Turner, D). Many of the same people who bitterly opposed Obama on healthcare will now jump through all his various hoops to help him further take over the nation's schools on a federal level by accepting his shiny false lure of blaming education's ills on so-called "bad" teachers (Navarrette). The proof of the falsehood in the lure to punish "bad" teachers is in which states won first approval under Obama's first canary in the coal mine for federal takeover of the schools, also known as Race To The Top; states whose teachers unions agreed to the so-called reforms (Anderson & Turque).
Disappointment was widespread last month when Minnesota failed to make the list of finalists for federal Race to the Top education funds. For a state accustomed to being a national leader in education, it was a rude awakening to be bested by winners Delaware and Tennessee and eight other finalists.
Still, the poor showing can be the kick in the teeth Minnesota needs to jump-start educational reforms, and it should serve as a wake-up call for a teachers union that has wielded too much power in preserving the status quo. Minnesota lost points in the competition for poor plans to produce better educators and close the achievement gap, and for not having more support from its teachers unions.
Ze'ev Wurman and Sandra Stotsky, in their opinion piece ("Grade 10 Diploma Not a Wise Idea," Insight, April 4) misrepresented our proposals.
They suggest that the State Consortium on Board Examination Systems is proposing to send all of the high school students in our states to community colleges at the age of 16. Not so.
We offer the option of going to community college after the sophomore year in high school to students who pass exams showing they can do college-level work. But students who pass these exams could stay in high school to take a career and technical program or a program designed to prepare them for admission to selective colleges. High schools would be obligated to give students who don't pass their exams additional instruction in the areas in which they are weak, so they could succeed the next time they take the exam.
Granite School District has proposed a policy on banning faculty from becoming friends on Facebook with students. If the policy is passed, it will be the first of its kind in the entire state. The proposed policy applies to all employees in the District. "I think it's very good because I think it's a check and balance on the Facebook," said Helen Mellen, teacher at Olympus High School. "I think they get out of hand. They can become very dangerous."
Some students at school will not deny the dangers of getting to know their teachers better on Facebook, but a few students feel the social networking site has helped them in contacting their teachers.
"Even if they do make the policy, I could see teachers getting away with it," said student Gavin Salisbury. "Last week I turned in an assignment over Facebook, I at least told the teacher over Facebook that my assignment was in his e-mail, so the assignment was on time because of Facebook."
When thinking about all the services provided by federal, state and local governments, 75% of voters nationwide say the average American should pay no more than 20% of their income in taxes. However, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that most voters (55%) believe the average American actually pays 30% or more of their income in taxes.
Sixty-six percent (66%) believe that America is overtaxed. Only 25% disagree.
Lower income voters are more likely than others to believe the nation is overtaxed.
Not surprisingly, the tax issue provokes a wide gap between the Political Class and Mainstream Americans. Eighty-one percent (81%) of Mainstream American voters believe the nation is overtaxed, while 74% of those in the Political Class disagree (see more about the Political Class and Mainstream Americans).
In the approved Plan to Align the Work of the Administration to the District's Mission and Strategic Plan, the Reorganization Plan, it states "For all revised or newly created positions, job descriptions will be developed and submitted to the Board of Education for approval."
On the April 12, 2010 Regular Meeting agenda - Superintendent's Announcements and Reports - I am seeking action on four position descriptions representing three new positions as a result of the approved reorganization plan and one revised description. These include:
Deputy Superintendent / Chief Learning Officer
Director Professional Development Director
Early and Extended Learning
Executive Director - Curriculum and Assessment
Action on these position descriptions is being sought at this time in order to allow the newly created positions to be posted in as timely a manner as possible.
When additional existing position descriptions are revised, as a result of the reorganization plan, they will be submitted to the Board for review and approval. Please let me know if you have any questions on these position descriptions.
The Deputy Superintendent / Chief Learning Officer adds a layer between the current Superintendent, Dan Nerad and a number of positions that formerly reported to him:
The Deputy Superintendent/Chief Learning Officer provides leadership in the ongoing development, implementation and (curriculum, instructional and responsible for the improvement of all learner-related programs within the all assigned administrators
Supervises:
Assistant Superintendents-Elementary and Executive Director of Educational Services Executive Director of Curriculum and Ksse:,snm Executive Director of Student Services Director of Professional Development Coordinator-Grants and Fund Development Executive Assistant
Key legislators and major players in Wisconsin's education scene are close to agreement on a package of ideas aimed at invigorating efforts to improve low performing schools, particularly in Milwaukee.
The focus of the proposal is on giving Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public instruction, an array of new tools for taking on the problems of the schools in the state that get the weakest results.
According to a draft of the proposal, when it comes to low-performing schools, Evers would have powers to order school boards to change how principals are hired and fired; how teachers are assigned; how teachers and principals are evaluated, including the use of student performance data; and how curriculum and training of teachers is handled.
"There's a large consensus of people who are around this," State Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) said. "That's exciting."
Evers said, "We feel confident we have a good, meaningful piece of legislation." He said it had been "an amazing few weeks" as prospects for a major education reform package this year went from bleak to energized. He said conversations, including a session Wednesday at the Capitol with many of the major players, had involved hard conversations in which people had given ground on stands they had taken previously.
"I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder how we could have tolerated anything so primitive."
- John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, "No Easy Victories" (1968)
Education reform is in the air and taking root in thousands of classrooms across the country. From overhauling No Child Left Behind to closing poorly performing schools and raising student expectations, the push for change is powerful. Yet, the space where most learning takes place--the school and classroom--has changed little over the last 200 years.
Even before students set foot in a classroom, most schools still are built like factories: long hallways, lined with metal lockers, transport students to identical, self-contained classrooms. School designers call these hallways "double-loaded corridors." The factory model of control and direct instruction still pervades most new schools. If we are to have thorough-going school reform, we must change the design model, too, starting with the place students first enter the school.
Two years ago, Indian Prairie School District 204 was building state-of-the art schools and athletic facilities. For years, new homes regularly had been added to the tax rolls, which kept dollars rolling in. Administrators in the district covering south and west Naperville decided to expand kindergarten to a full school day.
In the older neighborhoods to the north and east, Naperville School District 203 was enlarging its older schools rather than building new ones. Although the district spent more per pupil than its southern neighbors, kindergarten remained a half-day program, which didn't sit well with some parents.
But in recent weeks, District 204 approved plans to cut 145 teachers and $21.4 million out of next year's budget, while its neighbors in District 203 made small budget adjustments that left the educational program largely intact.
No wonder a Race to the Top that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan hyped as education's "moon shot" is beginning to look like a wet firecracker. The Obama administration said the competition would be transparent, yet anonymous judges evaluated 40 states' applications behind closed doors. The administration said it would reward innovation, yet gaining assent from change-averse teacher unions gave the two winning states the edge, not bold new options for students and parents.
In the final analysis, the race may have a good effect if it finally convinces education patrons and stewards that "Waiting for Superman" (to borrow from Davis Guggenheim's brilliant documentary about deeply flawed public education) is an exercise in futility. The only way to reform education is from the bottom up.
Sweden has the right idea in letting public money follow children to the independent or public schools of their choice, thus sparking a competition that actually enhances quality for all.
Merit pay for teachers based on genuine, verifiable student learning would be a good thing. But the bill the Legislature finalized early Friday morning has too many holes in it, takes away local control and doesn't pay for the changes it orders.
Gov. Crist has said he might veto the bill, and that's exactly what he should do.
The bill requires local school districts to hire, fire and pay teachers according to how well students do on end-of-course exams in all subjects. But those tests don't exist yet. So how can teachers and students know they'll be valid when they go into effect in 2014? The Legislature says the state Department of Education will take care of the details.
That would be more reassuring if the state had a better track record on the FCAT. For a decade Florida has corrupted an otherwise useful test by putting way too much weight on it. Entire schools and districts are graded on a high-stakes test that doesn't even cover most subjects.
Critics of the Obama administration's signature education initiative have been breathing fire since it was announced that only Delaware and Tennessee had won first-round grants under the program, known as Race to the Top. Politicians from some losing states have denounced the well-designed scoring system under which the 16 finalists were evaluated. Others have thrown up their hands, suggesting that retooling applications for the next round is more trouble than it's worth.
Plenty of states will line up for the remaining $3.4 billion. But even if the program ended today, it already has had a huge, beneficial effect on the education reform effort, especially at the state and local levels.
This blog was created in late 2006 in order to "vent" my frustration over the huge debt bubble and what I perceived to be the risks it posed to the global economy. In summary, I claimed that the economy had become hooked on debt to create additional GDP growth - or "growth" in quotation marks - and that the finance "tail" was wagging the real economy "dog".
Soon thereafter, the bubble burst - first in the U.S. and then everywhere else. What followed was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And we are still in the midst of it, albeit in ever-mutating form, so today's post is meant as a tour d'horizon, a quick summary of how I see things shaping up today.
I believe all that has happened so far is The Great Debt Bailout. Governments and central banks have issued trillions in new government-backed debt, some to replace private debt gone bad (bailouts for billionaires) and some to finance massive budget deficits (pennies for penniless). It is a policy mishmash produced by the combination of (a) Bernankean revulsion to monetary deflation and (b) Keynesian aversion to economic recession.
As School Districts consider property tax increases to address spending growth and flat or reduced redistributed state and federal tax dollars, it may well be useful to keep local goodwill in reserve for future funding challenges.
THROUGHOUT the torturous contract talks between D.C. schools and teachers, Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee vowed she would not agree to anything that didn't further her efforts at reform. The innovative agreement announced Wednesday is evidence of that resolve -- and also of a gutsy willingness by local and national union leaders to make the changes that are needed if D.C. children are to do better in school.
Ms. Rhee and officials of the Washington Teachers' Union reached an accord -- subject to ratification by the full membership and approval by the D.C. Council -- that would provide base salary increases of 21 percent over five years. In return, school officials would get important tools to reward teachers who do well with children and hold accountable those who don't. This includes a performance-based bonus system to be instituted in the fall, greater autonomy in assigning teachers and better means of getting rid of teachers unable to produce results.
As fourth-grade teacher Abel Varney introduced a lesson on negative and positive integers, all eyes in his Sabin Elementary classroom were upon him -- including the unblinking lens of a high-tech camera.
The camera recorded Varney's every move and utterance and captured the reactions of every child in the room -- images that will be examined by researchers in a national study trying to figure out what makes effective teaching.
Varney is one of 176 teachers from 17 Denver schools who signed up to have their lessons analyzed during a two-year project funded by a $878,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Of course not. Because the new result, taken in isolation from other information, simply says that after two years, the voucher students are making learning improvements about the same as public school students. The scores for the voucher students are higher, but the difference is not statistically certain.
However, let's plug that into the larger universe of information. We know - from the very same research project - that vouchers are improving education in Milwaukee public schools. The positive incentives of competition and the improved matching of student needs to school strengths are causing public schools to deliver a better education.
Gov. Chris Christie is trying to solve New Jersey's chronic bud get problems by cutting spending, including state aid to local schools. But the state's powerful teacher unions and many school boards are balking -- claiming that this will either drive up local property taxes or result in devastating cuts to school services.
In fact, there's plenty of fat to cut. For proof, just take a close look at the recent hiring and spending patterns of Jersey's school districts: Both hiring and spending have risen far faster than can be justified by the mild growth in enrollment. Thus, most should have plenty of room to cut spending without major impact.
Given the state's chronic budget woes, the schools' hiring spree defies logic. Since 2001, just as budget problems began in earnest, public-school enrollment in Jersey has risen by less than 3 percent, or slightly more than 36,000 students. But total school hiring (full-time employees and equivalents) has jumped by 14 percent, or nearly 28,000 employees, according to federal Census statistics.
Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is not on Facebook or Twitter, but she wants to use the power of the Internet to get young people interested in civics.
"Two-thirds of Internet users under the age of 30 have a - whatever this is - social-networking profile," the feisty 80-year-old said in a speech at New York Law School Tuesday.
"We need to bring civics education into the 21st century."
O'Connor, who retired in 2006, said she knows young people are using sites such as Twitter and Facebook to swap political views - and the medium could be harnessed for other messages.
Teachers in the Hillsboro School District may see even more students in each classroom next school year as the district seeks to cut the budget without "decimating" programs.
The school district's budget committee, a mix of citizens and board members, took its first look at the funding "highlights" for 2010-'11 and it wasn't good news.
"The best scenario is unhappiness," said Sam Heiney, budget member.
Projecting a continued shortfall in state education funding, the district is considering plans to maintain staff levels. Enrollment, however, is expected to increase by 1 percent, which could bump up class sizes from the current average of 27.
Failing schools are a drain on the state's already sluggish economy and require wholesale transformation, not just minor tinkering, state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist told lawmakers Wednesday in a speech on education reform.
Gist, whose reform efforts led to the firings of all teachers and staff at one of the state's worst-performing schools, said test scores in the state need vast improvement, the graduation rate must grow and too few high school graduates -- just more than half -- are heading directly to college.
Improving schools is critical to the economy in Rhode Island, a state with nearly 13 percent unemployment, since students who drop out will struggle and be a cost to society, Gist said in an address to the General Assembly.
"We cannot thrive in a knowledge-based marketplace if 45 percent of our high-school students cannot do math and 39 percent cannot do science at the very basic level," said Gist, who is in her first year as commissioner of elementary and secondary education.
The commissioner annually addresses the Legislature.
The U.S. must start to prepare for challenges posed by an aging population with a credible plan to gradually reduce a soaring public debt, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday.
Health spending is set to increase over the long term as the U.S. population grows older, posing challenges to the country's already strained finances, the Fed chief warned.
Meanwhile, Fed Bank of New York President William Dudley said Wednesday that the damage caused by financial-market bubbles should bring about a sea change in the way the central bank acts, with the Fed needing to move toward active efforts to reign in financial market excess.
"There is little doubt that asset bubbles exist and they occur fairly frequently," and when they burst the economy frequently suffers, Mr. Dudley said. While it can be difficult to discern the existence of a financial-market bubble, "uncertainty is not grounds for inaction" on the part of central bankers, Mr. Dudley said.
AS THE Obama administration spreads enthusiasm about a proposal to replace a patchwork of state education standards with national ones, it might also heed a cautionary tale. In the 1990s California too established rigorous standards. "We thought they were the highest," up there with those of Massachusetts and Indiana, says Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think-tank in Washington, DC. But California never translated those standards into results. Its public schools are, with some exceptions, awful. Moreover, the state's fiscal crisis is about to make them even worse.
California's 8th-graders (14-year-olds), for example, ranked 46th in maths last year. Only Alabama, Mississippi and the District of Columbia did worse. California also sends a smaller share of its high-school graduates to college than all but three other states. One of its roughly 1,000 school districts, Los Angeles Unified, which happens to be the second-largest in the country, has just become the first to be investigated by the federal Office for Civil Rights about whether it adequately teaches pupils who have little or no English.
Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist who is trying to reform education, blames a combination of California's dysfunctional governance, with "elected school boards made up of wannabes and unions", and the fact that the state's teachers' union is both more powerful and "more regressive" than elsewhere. The California Teachers Association (CTA) is the biggest lobby in the state, having spent some $210m in the past decade--more than any other group-- to intervene in California's politics.
Predictions are always perilous. Many of us recall the hearty enthusiasm of the Bowen report of 1989, which assured prospective graduate students that they would find "a substantial excess demand for faculty in the arts and sciences" when they earned their degrees in the mid-1990s. Of course, they did not.
Moral: Avoid confident assertions about the future of the academic job market in the humanities (or in any other field). It may be that our current dilemma is another episode in a longish cyclical history. It may also be, as I rather pessimistically suspect, that something more serious is going on.
My reason is that just about all of the key drivers are simultaneously pointed in the wrong direction. Full-time tenured and tenure-track jobs in the humanities are endangered by half a dozen trends, most of them long-term.
In his ongoing look at efforts to turn around ailing schools in New Orleans and Washington, D.C. John Merrow reports on the use of alternative school programs in Louisiana and progress on negotiations between a teachers union and public schools in the nation's capital.
JIM LEHRER: The "NewsHour"'s special correspondent for education, John Merrow, has been tracking changes in the public schools of New Orleans and Washington, D.C., two cities that are being watched nationally.
We begin in New Orleans tonight. John looks at alternative schools for students with behavior and academic problems.
JOHN MERROW: When school superintendent Paul Vallas arrived in New Orleans three years ago, he faced a tough challenge: how to educate students who are way behind academically or who have gotten in trouble with the law.
This school, Booker T. Washington, was designed for teenagers who are performing at an elementary school level. Although three-fourths of students in Vallas' district are at least one grade level behind, here, the problem is extreme.
Has anyone been watching Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution? I have and I have to say that Jamie is truly inspiring. He's got so much passion and drive. I wish I had a pinky's worth of his. If you're not familiar with Jamie, he has a long career that I believe started with his simple cooking show The Naked Chef. Since then he's revolutionized the British school lunch program and is now on to America's unhealthiest city to continue the revolution.
So just what is so bad about school lunches? Well, this is certainly not a new topic for The Green Mama, but it's important because kids are the future and habits are created when we're young. This is the first generation that is not expected to live longer than their parents due mostly to obesity. One in three Illinois children is overweight or obese and according to the Community Food Security Commission, 1 in 3 children will develop type 2 diabetes. It's heartbreaking.
Had an encouraging conversation at College Board this morning about the potential for a new AP assessment system that would allow several testing times each year (eventually many times or anytime) and reduced reliance on the end of course assessment but considering a 'book of work' during the course taking period.
The reason this would be a breakthrough is that this country could double the number of AP courses taken by expanding online offerings. Districts could double the number of courses offered, ensure instructional quality, and reduce costs by moving all AP online (or a blend of online and onsite). This would best be facilitated by 1) eliminating seat time requirements, 2) adding flexibility to certification requirements, and 3) making it easier to take the test when a student is ready.
For parents and politicians hungry for better schools, the idea of paying teachers more if their students perform better can seem as basic as adding two and two or spelling "cat."
Yet just a handful of schools and districts around the country use such strategies. In some states, the idea is effectively illegal.
That could all be changing as the federal government wields billions of dollars in grants to lure states and school districts to try the idea. The money is persuading lawmakers around the country, while highlighting the complex problems surrounding pay-for-performance systems.
Some teachers, like Trenise Duvernay, who teaches math at Alice M. Harte Charter School outside of New Orleans, want to be rewarded for helping students succeed. Duvernay is eligible for $2,000 a year or more in merit bonuses based on how well her students perform in classroom observations and on achievement tests.
Loudoun County officials approved a $1.4 billion annual budget Tuesday that includes a property tax increase and a 2.5 percent cut in school system funding.
The county Board of Supervisors adopted a tax rate of $1.30 per $100 of assessed value, a 4.4 percent increase over this year's rate. Ben Mays, deputy chief financial officer for the county, said the average tax bill for homeowners should go up only about 2.5 percent because of declining property values. The average commercial tax bill could fall by that amount because property values in that category have dropped even more, he said.
Earlier in the year, the county had proposed a tax rate of $1.40 per $100 of assessed value but scaled back after an outpouring of e-mails from taxpayers who cited economic distress brought on by the recession. Under the approved fiscal 2011 budget plan, the county will cut about 75 full-time positions, 50 of which are currently unfilled, Mays said.
One of Washington, D.C.'s angriest, most bitter disputes may be coming to an end. After more than two years of wrangling, District of Columbia schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the city's teachers union have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract.
The deal could become a model for school reform around the country.
It comes after a protracted, three-year dispute that got so nasty, few thought it would ever be resolved. Rhee and union officials made key concessions that once seemed unattainable, but it was worth it, Rhee said at a hastily arranged news conference.
"We've had one goal since [starting the job as chancellor], and that is to build a school system that ensures that every child in this city, regardless of where they live, has the opportunity to obtain an excellent education through our public school system," Rhee said.
I generally have a great deal of sympathy for regular schmoes who look inordinately like famous people. Through no fault of their own, they walk through life being judged on what they are not (the famous person), rather than what they are (a working stiff that is sick of being told he looks like Jim from "The Office.")
Imagine if you were the guy who works at Kinko's who looks sort of like Matt Damon. (Trust me, this is going somewhere.) People don't notice that you may be better looking than your average guy - they only judge you on how far you fall short of looking like Jason Bourne. (After all, if you looked exactly like Matt Damon, you probably wouldn't be working at Kinko's. Staples, maybe - but certainly not Kinko's.)
On Wednesday of this week, the results of a longitudinal study of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) were released. The study, mandated by a state law enacted in 2006 and conducted by researchers at the University of Arkansas, is an attempt to compare student achievement in the Choice program in Milwaukee to similar students in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).
The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an interesting article ($) earlier this week about the use of online graders located in other countries both to ease the burden of scoring papers for professors and because teaching assistants were not offering quality feedback. The piece mainly focuses on graders from EduMetry, a Virginia-based company, which are providing this service for business students at the University of Houston, though one can easily imagine that there are schools across the country trying similar programs:
Last week marked a historic time for the public school system as President Obama and Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, announced that they were drafting a blueprint to "overhaul" the No Child Left Behind policy and improve the quality of the nation's schools - exactly what the current policy left behind. Though they are only in the planning process, this is the one of the greatest and most desirable moves the White House has made to date - even more so than healthcare reform.
In Fla., we are all too familiar with the No Child Left Behind policy, specifically with the creation of the FCAT and other standardized tests that are supposed to be used to gauge students' knowledge and education. "Supposed to" is the key phrase here. According to teachers' complaints, the FCAT has forced teachers to teach only for the test. As a result, students are learning to perform well on the test when they should be learning the material.
Wisconsin students continued to make steady gains in math proficiency in 2009-'10, boasting their best performance in five years, even as reading scores remained flat over that same time period, according to statewide test results released Wednesday.
Yet even though the overall proportion of students deemed proficient or advanced in math increased to 77.3% on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations from 72.8% in 2005-'06, the share of students considered at least proficient in 10th grade - the highest grade tested - decreased in that time.
The share of Wisconsin 10th-graders who scored proficient or advanced in math was 69.8% this school year, compared with 71.6% five years ago.
Meanwhile, reading proficiency remained almost constant, with 81.6% of students considered proficient or advanced on this year's test vs. 81.7% in 2005-'06, when the current version of the WKCE first was implemented.
A dozen governors, led by Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado, sat with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a hotel ballroom in Washington a few weeks back, praising his vision and gushing with enthusiasm over a $4 billion grant competition they hoped could land their states a jackpot of hundreds of millions of dollars.
But for many of those governors, the contest lost some sizzle last week, when Mr. Duncan awarded money to only two states -- Delaware and Tennessee.
Colorado, which had hoped to win $377 million, ended in 14th place. Now Mr. Ritter says the scoring by anonymous judges seemed inscrutable, some Coloradans view the contest as federal intrusion and the governor has not decided whether to reapply for the second round.
Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program scored at similar levels as their peers not participating in the school choice program, according to a study released Wednesday.
Researchers from the University of Arkansas and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study, presented their findings at UW-Madison. The study also found that Milwaukee Public Schools are doing better than expected when compared with other urban school districts.
The reports released Wednesday represent the midway point of a five-year study of the oldest and largest public voucher program in the United States, which provides funding for more than 20,000 students to attend private schools in Milwaukee.
The comparison between students in private voucher schools and those in public schools was made two years after large panels of students in the program and students in the Milwaukee public school system had been carefully matched to each other.
Minnesota was hoping for $330 million in grants, which go to states deemed innovative in their school policies. In the next round, Minnesota can't get more than $175 million.
Pawlenty wants more latitude to let experts become teachers without going through traditional routes, to reassign teachers based on effectiveness and to more closely link teacher pay to student performance.
Democratic state Rep. Mindy Greiling said the alternative licensure proposal has a better shot than the others.
Part of our disagreement centers around differing views regarding the math content knowledge one needs to be a highly-qualified middle school math teacher. As a scientist married to a mathematician, I don't believe that taking a couple of math ed courses on how to teach the content of middle school mathematics provides sufficient knowledge of mathematics to be a truly effective teacher of the subject. Our middle school foreign language teachers didn't simply take a couple of ed courses in how to teach their subject at the middle school level; rather, most of them also MAJORED or, at least, minored in the subject in college. Why aren't we requiring the same breathe and depth of content knowledge for our middle school mathematics teachers? Do you really believe mastery of the middle school mathematics curriculum and how to teach it is sufficient content knowledge for teachers teaching math? What happens when students ask questions that aren't answered in the teachers' manual? What happens when students desire to know how the material they are studying relates to higher-level mathematics and other subjects such as science and engineering?
The MMSD has been waiting a long time already to have math-qualified teachers teaching mathematics in our middle schools. Many countries around the world whose students outperform US students in mathematics only hire teachers who majored in the subject to teach it. Other school districts in the US are taking advantage of the current recession with high unemployment to hire and train people who know and love mathematics, but don't yet know how to teach it to others.
Wisconsin students can count on one hand the number of times they'll still have to take the math section -- or any section -- of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, the annual weeklong test whose results for 2009-10 were scheduled to be released Wednesday.
That's because the WKCE is expected to give way in a few years to tests based on new national academic standards proposed last month that could become final this spring.
The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and all 50 U.S. states except Alaska and Texas in the fall signed on to the development of the Common Core State Standards for math and English, which spell out what the nation's public schoolchildren should be taught from kindergarten through high school.
When the final standards are unveiled, probably in late May, Wisconsin likely will adopt them, said Sue Grady, executive assistant to the state school superintendent.
For nearly an hour, no one speaks a word of English in this first-grade math class.
Not the teacher, Ying Ying Wu, who talks energetically in Mandarin's songlike tones.
Not the students -- 6- and 7-year-olds who seem to follow along fine, even though only one speaks Mandarin at home.
Even the math test has been translated, by Wu, into Chinese characters.
At Beacon Hill International School, many students learn a second language along with their ABCs by spending half of each school day immersed in Mandarin Chinese or Spanish.
In Round 1 of Race to the Top, the U.S. Department of Education delivered on its promise to hold states to a high bar for reform. Only 2 states out of 16 finalists and 41 total applicants were selected for awards: Delaware and Tennessee.
These states won because they outlined bold, comprehensive visions of reform and demonstrated the ability to make them a reality. Statewide teacher effectiveness policies were the foundation for their success. They focused on putting effective teachers in every classroom and giving teachers the critical feedback and support they need to do their best work. They shifted to evaluation systems that improve their ability to recognize great teachers and respond to poor performance. Together they set a new benchmark for reform that Round 2 applicants must meet in order to win.
This analysis offers a close look at the scoring of the Round 1 finalists. It refutes some of the most common myths about Race to the Top and offers important lessons for states applying for the $3.4 billion in funding that remains available in Round 2.
At the same time, it examines scoring deficiencies that the Department of Education must address. While these issues did not result in a lowering of the bar for Round 1 winners, they could mean the difference between winning and losing for states applying in Round 2.
A few data points: according to the last School Report Card, there were over 800 freshman at Trenton Central. However, so many kids drop out (24.7% of White students) that there were only 440 seniors left last year. 51.6% of these students failed the language arts HSPA and a stunning 79.5% failed the math HSPA. 43% of the student body was suspended during the 2008-2009 school year. Total cost per pupil is $16,843. 4.4% enrolled in an Advanced Placement class; the state average is 19%. Average SAT scores are 364 Math and 369 Verbal.
Florida's education reform bills would mean more money -- not less -- for public-school teachers, says Rep. John Legg, R-Port Richey.
"This bill (HB7189) does not affect retirement, it does not cut salaries, it does not eliminate tenure for current teachers," Legg told a packed meeting of the House Education Policy Council on Monday.
Instead, Legg said, a new performance-based pay program would bring "value-added" components to setting salaries.
Effective July 1, 2014, school districts would be required to reward "effective" or "highly effective" teachers "on top of base pay," Legg said. Half of those ratings would be based on student learning gains, with the remaining 50 percent tied to other factors, subject to collective bargaining agreements.
Since 1999, districts have been under orders from the state Department of Education to implement pay scales "primarily" linked to academic performance. The reform bills define "primarily" as 50 percent and order districts to earmark 5 percent of funding for performance pay. Statewide, that 5 percent share currently amounts to $900 million annually.
Two economists who work 2,274 miles away have identified the essence of parenthood in the Washington area since 1995. It turns out we have been spending all that time with our older children -- chauffeuring, applauding, coordinating, correcting, planning, obsessing -- because we have a deep need to beat the other stressed-out parents in getting our kids into good colleges.
The researchers are Garey and Valerie A. Ramey, a married couple at the University of California-San Diego. They have done the hyper-active parent thing themselves and have a son at Stanford University to show for it. They also admit that most of this exhaustive parenting is done not by men but by women, including, by her own account, Ms. Ramey herself. To sum up, college-graduate soccer moms are trying to outdo all the other soccer moms to get their children into a good school so their daughters can repeat the cycle with their own children.
Diane Ravitch's new book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education" has been burning up the charts. Ravitch has been ubiquitous, writing op-eds in support of her book, doing lectures and interviews all over the place, and being reviewed in all sorts of high-profile venues.
As an overall matter, the book says little, if anything, that is actually new on the subjects of testing and choice. What Ravitch is really selling with this book is the story of her personal and ideological conversion. Not so long ago, she was writing articles like "In Defense of Testing," or "The Right Thing: Why Liberals Should Be Pro-Choice," a lengthy article in The New Republic that remains one of the most passionate and eloquent defenses of school choice and vouchers in particular. Now she seems to be a diehard opponent of these things. But she's not saying anything that other diehard opponents haven't already said countless times.
Recently, the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a group of 48 states organized by the nation's governors and chief state school officers, released draft K-12 education standards in English and mathematics.
As a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I know that common education standards are essential for producing the educated work force America needs to remain globally competitive. Good standards alone are not enough, but without them decisions about such things as curricula, instructional materials and tests are haphazard. It is no wonder that educational quality varies so widely among states.
English and math standards have so far mostly been set without empirical evidence or attention as to whether students were learning what they needed for college and the workplace. College educators and employers were hardly ever part of the discussion, even though they knew best what the real world would demand of high school graduates. Luckily, about five years ago, states began to raise the bar so that their standards would reflect college- and career-ready expectations.
India's United Progressive Alliance government has come out with a landmark legislation making education a fundamental right for all children between the ages six and 14. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, was first introduced in the Indian Parliament way back in 2002.
It took more than seven years for this act -- which makes access to education a fundamental right -- to be notified after much debate in and outside the Parliament. The importance of the legislation can be gauged from the fact that there are nearly 300 million Indians below the age of 15, many of whom belong to poor families that can ill-afford the high cost of primary education.
There are about 10 million children in the targetted age group who are today not in school, but working in factories, farms and other places, often in abysmal condition, and helping their parents make both ends meet. It remains to be seen how many of these children can be brought back to classes.
The effectiveness of the landmark measure will depend on how state governments will ensure its implementation. Education falls under the concurrent list in the Indian Constitution and states have a major responsibility in ensuring access, especially to primary education. While many of the southern and western states have a better track record, those in the north and east have been laggards. Guaranteeing free education to millions of children -- and making it legally enforceable -- will also cost a lot of money. The federal government led by the Congress Party has asserted that funding would not be a problem. Estimates are that a whopping $40 billion will be needed over the next five years and the government has promised a mere $5.5 billion to states during this period.
Antonio Villaraigosa, the handsome high-voltage mayor of Los Angeles, really comes alive when recalling his start in local politics--as a labor organizer agitating for reform inside decrepit and overcrowded schools. "I cut my teeth working for the union. I cultivated these young teachers who had come to these schools to change the world," he said, brimming with pride.
Back in 1989, one of those teachers, Joshua Pechthalt, joined Villaraigosa for a rally downtown in Exposition Park. Pechthalt remembers his charismatic young friend pumping up the crowd. "Antonio was the master of ceremonies who had parents and teachers on their feet," recalled Pechthalt, now vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). "When we see each other, to this day, we give each other a hug."
The Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday will consider amending a new policy that limits the ability of students who live in the district to attend school elsewhere, a contentious issue expected to draw scores of parents to the afternoon meeting.
In February, Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines moved to limit the types of permits issued to families seeking attendance in other districts, allowing exemptions only for students whose parents work within the boundaries of the other school district and for students who would complete fifth, eighth or 12th grades next year.
Last year, L.A. Unified granted permission to more than 12,200 students to enroll in 99 other districts, including Torrance, Culver City and Santa Monica-Malibu. Cortines estimates that the district is losing $51 million in state per-pupil funding, money that could help to close a $640-million budget shortfall.
The reports on growth, school switching, testing, integration and other measures of the 20-year-old program will be released by the evaluation team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Room 313 of the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St., from 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
The evaluation team includes professor John Witte of UW-Madison's La Follette School of Public Affairs; Patrick Wolf, Jeffery Dean, Jonathan Mills and Brian Kisida, all of the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas; Joshua Cowen of the University of Kentucky; David Fleming of Furman University; Meghan Condon of UW-Madison; and Thomas Stewart of Qwaku & Associates.
The Wisconsin Legislature authorized the evaluation in 2005 to learn how well the program, the oldest and largest urban educational voucher program in the United States, is working. The maximum voucher amount in 2007-08 was $6,607, and approximately 20,000 children used vouchers to attend secular or religious private schools.
The general purposes of the evaluation are to analyze the effectiveness of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in terms of longitudinal student achievement growth and grade attainment, drop-out rates and high school graduation rates. The former will be primarily accomplished by measuring and estimating student growth in achievement as measured by the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations in math and reading in grades three through eight during a five-year period.
It explores two different approaches to math; one is representative of the fuzzy math side of things, and the other is in the traditionalist camp. I make it clear what side I'm on. I talk about how the fuzzy side uses what I call a "separate path" in which students are given open ended and ill posed problems as a means to teach them how to apply prior knowledge in new situations. I present two different problems, one representing each camp.
The math may prove challenging for some readers, though high school math teachers should have no problems with it.
Much has been written about the debate on how best to teach math to students in K-12--a debate often referred to as the "math wars". I have written much about it myself, and since the debate shows no signs of easing, I continue to have reasons to keep writing about it. While the debate is complex, the following two math problems provide a glimpse of two opposing sides:
Problem 1: How many boxes would be needed to pack and ship one million books collected in a school-based book drive? In this problem the size of the books is unknown and varied, and the size of the boxes is not stated.
Problem 2: Two boys canoeing on a lake hit a rock where the lake joins a river. One boy is injured and it is critical to get a doctor to him as quickly as possible. Two doctors live nearby: one up-river and the other across the lake, both equidistant from the boys. The unhurt boy has to fetch a doctor and return to the spot. Is it quicker for him to row up the river and back, or go across the lake and back, assuming he rows at the same constant rate of speed in both cases?
The first problem is representative of a thought-world inhabited by education schools and much of the education establishment. The second problem is held in disdain by the same, but favored by a group of educators and math oriented people who for lack of a better term are called "traditionalists".
Imagine if a school were to spend more per pupil on ceramics electives than core science classes. What if a district were to push more funding to wealthy neighborhoods than to impoverished ones? Such policies would provoke outrage. Yet these schools and districts are real.
Today's taxpayers spend almost $9,000 per pupil, roughly double what they spent 30 years ago, and educational achievement doesn't seem to be improving. With the movement toward holding schools and districts accountable for student outcomes, we might think that officials can precisely track how much they are spending per student, per program, per school. But considering the patchwork that is school finance--federal block funding, foundation grants, earmarks, set-asides, and union mandates--funds can easily be diverted from where they are most needed.
College students are known for their ability to survive on instant noodles, toast and a shoestring budget. But recently, some students in Ireland have gotten particularly desperate. "I have heard from students who have lived on biscuits stolen from the chaplaincy in their college for a week, students who have lived in their cars for months," says Hugh Sullivan, education officer at the Union of Students in Ireland, a group that advocates on the behalf of over 250,000 students around the country.
The reason? Over the past 15 years, fees at Irish universities that cover the cost of registration, exams and student services have gone from the equivalent of $240 per student to nearly $2,000. On top of that, the government cut funding to universities by 5% last year and Sullivan expects another 5% cut this year. "It's a time of famine," Sullivan says, adding that even though students don't show up in the country's grim unemployment rate (currently 13.1%), they have become the hidden victim of the recent financial crisis. "The last thing you eat is your seeds."
Whitney Tilson and True South Studios present A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine Education Reform. Education reformer Whitney Tilson gives the most in-depth exploration ever committed to film of the twin achievement gaps that threaten our nation's future: between the U.S. and our economic competitors, and between low-income, minority students and their more affluent peers. After spending more than two decades on the front lines, witnessing first-hand public education's shocking failures and remarkable successes, Mr. Tilson was inspired to assemble a powerful and at times unsettling presentation about the twin achievement gaps and what must be done to address them. He utilizes the latest data and research to paint the most detailed portrait of American public education ever committed to film. More importantly, he presents us with a way forward so our nation can deliver on its promise to all of its children and ensure its long-term future.
University of Wisconsin System leaders are crafting a plan to boost the number of degrees the schools award each year by 30% over the next 15 years, a move that would make the universities even more of an engine that makes the state's economy attractive for businesses.
The goal is to boost the percentage of Wisconsin residents who have college degrees or some professional certificate from a university or college. To meet it, the schools would have to confer 33,700 degrees in 2025, up from today's rate of about 26,000 a year. If the universities meet the goal, they will award 80,000 more degrees over the next 15 years than they would otherwise.
UWM would be a major player in the plan, UW System President Kevin Reilly said. Officials could announce as early as Monday how many additional degrees the urban campus would produce under the plan.
Meeting the goal would come at an up-front cost for the state, Reilly said. The universities would have to make the case to state lawmakers to reverse a long-term trend in which a shrinking share of the budget for the campuses comes from the state. Reilly also said the state would have to help increase faculty salaries, which lag behind salaries at peer universities in other states.
WENDY KOPP proposed the idea for creating a national teacher corps in her undergraduate senior thesis at Princeton University in 1989. She then did just that, creating Teach For America (TFA) shortly after graduation. Ms Kopp tells the remarkable story behind the early days of the organisation in her book "One Day, All Children...". Today TFA attracts many of the brightest college graduates to teach in America's neediest communities. In the most recent school year, the organisation placed some 7,300 corps members in schools across the country. They join nearly 17,000 TFA alumni, many of whom have become leaders in the education-reform movement. We close out education week by asking Ms Kopp about TFA's success and what lessons it holds for America's public-education system.
DiA: You have done a lot of research on the characteristics of successful TFA teachers. What is the magic formula and do you think it holds for non-TFA teachers as well?
Ms Kopp: We have found that the most successful teachers in low-income communities operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of where their students will be performing at the end of the year that many believe to be unrealistic. They invest their students in working harder than they ever have to reach that vision, maximise their classroom time in a goal-oriented manner through purposeful planning and effective execution, reflect constantly on their progress to improve their performance over time, and do whatever it takes to overcome the many challenges they face.
It follows that the characteristics our research has shown to differentiate our most successful teachers are leadership characteristics--perseverance in the face of challenges, the ability to influence and motivate others, organisational ability, problem-solving ability. All of our insights around successful teaching have come from our work in the nation's most economically disadvantaged communities so I can't say that this is the approach or that these are the characteristics that differentiate successful teachers elsewhere.
The recent disclosure that African-American fourth-graders in Wisconsin have the worst reading skills in the entire country came as a shock to many Milwaukeeans.
Keisha Arnold wasn't among them.
Her 10-year-old son has experienced reading problems and poor grades at his Milwaukee school for some time. Arnold has been frustrated with her inability to find a way to address the problem.
"I just don't understand why he can't seem to get the help he needs," said Arnold, 28, a single parent who returned to Milwaukee a few years ago after living in Phoenix.
When she returned to her hometown, she enrolled her son in a local charter school. "I didn't want him to go to MPS because I didn't think he'd get a good education there," she explained.
But it didn't take long for Arnold to recognize that deficiencies in her son's reading and math skills were not being addressed.
She met with his teachers and sought additional tutoring, but her son's grades failed to improve.
IN 1971, a young black lawyer brought up in rural North Carolina under Jim Crow laws argued on behalf of a boy from Charlotte called James Swann before the United States Supreme Court. In that case, Swann v Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the court held that school districts may use busing, quotas and other such methods to ensure integration. Nearly 40 years later that same lawyer, Julius Chambers, stood once again before nine people, this time the Wake County board of education, and this time as a concerned citizen rather than an advocate, to plead a case: that the county ought to retain its programme of assigning pupils to schools based on levels of family income. His suit failed: on March 23rd the board voted 5-4 to abandon that policy.
That vote ended a decade-long experiment. In 2000 Wake County's school board decided to integrate its schools by income level rather than race. No more than 40% of students at any one school should be receiving free or subsidised lunches (which are given to children from poor families). Evidence dating back more than 40 years shows that schools with too great a concentration of poor pupils are undesirable. Teachers do not stay, and poor pupils tend to perform worse when they are put with others who are poor.
The New York Times education writer, Winnie Hu, had no trouble in Saturday's paper distinguishing some of NJ’s wealthy and high-performing school districts from our poor, low-performing ones: Cresskill, Montclair, Ridgewood, Millburn, Westfield, West Windsor-Plainsboro and Glen Ridge, she writes, “have long attracted families because they offer some of the best public education in the state. But now many of these top school systems are preparing to reduce the academic and extracurricular opportunities that have long set them apart.”
“Have long set them apart.” It’s an irony-free description of NJ’s educational inequity despite decades of Abbott compensation and the hard line of accountability etched from No Child Left Behind legislation. Among are 591 school districts (and 566 municipalities) are intractably poor, failing schools. Leveling the playing field in NJ is a quixotic task. Sword-yielding education reformers tilt at the windmills of an inculcated culture of disparity with little appreciable difference in student achievement. We can’t cure poverty; we can’t break down district barriers unless we find the cohones to desegregate and move to county-wide districts, an unlikely scenario. School choice is an embryonic concept with a long, slow learning curve (although the DOE just received 36 charter applications, a new record).
In February, the national press reported on a pilot program that will give high school sophomores in eight states a chance to earn a diploma and head straight to credit-bearing math and English courses at a state college. To do so, they will have to take special course work and can try to pass academic tests known as board exams as early as grade 10.
The idea of a grade 10 diploma is the latest brainchild of the National Center on Education and the Economy, the originator of the unsuccessful school-to-work initiative in the 1990s. The project is funded by the Gates Foundation, which has abandoned its initiative to create small high schools as a way to get more low-achieving students through high school.
The center's so-called fast-track approach ups the ante and aims to get at-risk students out of high school and into college - and supposedly on a quick credit-bearing path to a degree. It also aims to get bright high school students into college sooner for supposedly better course work. However, the center's proposed 10th-grade "diploma" is the wrong answer to the wrong problem for three groups of students: those with a strong academic orientation, those without it but who are willing to stay in school and those who drop out.
It was a Race to the Top, but Colorado, amazingly, finished close to the bottom.
Of the 16 finalists for President Obama's cash giveaway for education reform, only New York and Washington, D.C. -- areas with some of the country's worst schools -- finished below Colorado. It was an embarrassing plummet for a state whose bid just a year ago looked so promising.
Colorado had been at the forefront of education reform since Gov. Roy Romer ushered in CSAPs and then-state lawmaker Bill Owens pushed for charter schools. Even Denver Public Schools for the past five years have been incubators for what are now emerging as national reforms.
This was Colorado's race to lose. And we did.
Obama dangled $4.35 billion in front of states to spur them into developing innovative education-reform plans. But Colorado's plan lacked ambition, bold ideas and statewide impact. It also failed to build great teachers and leaders, according to the Obama administration's scoring system.
Six years ago, the then-principal of a small primary school in Sheung Wan was fired with enthusiasm for two key government policies - small-class teaching and integrated education for children with special needs.
Leung Wai-ming ploughed HK$1 million of his money into San Wui Commercial Society School to employ extra teachers and buy state-of-the-art materials and equipment for special needs teaching.
But I want to focus on the most interesting contributor to the volume, a Texas economist named Kristin Klopfenstein who is author or co-author of two chapters and one of the four editors of the book. She has become the most articulate and knowledgeable critic of using AP to raise achievement in low-income schools, a movement I have been supporting for a quarter of a century, I decided to call her up, discuss our differences and report what she had to say.
Klopfenstein is an associate professor of economics at Texas Christian University, currently on leave to work as a senior researcher at the Texas Schools Project at the University of Texas-Dallas. In the new book, she is the sole author of a chapter that argues that people who say AP saves taxpayer money and reduces time to college graduation are wrong. Since I am not one of those people, I didn't ask her about that chapter, but about a chapter of which she is the lead author, with Mississippi State University economist M. Kathleen Thomas as co-author, entitled "Advanced Placement Participation: Evaluating the Policies of States and Colleges."
Klopfenstein has spent many years looking at AP in public schools, aided by a terrific state data base in Texas that follows students from grade school into college. Other researchers in Texas and California have produced studies that suggest that taking AP courses and exams in high school leads to more success in college than avoiding or being barred from AP, as happens with most college-bound students. Klopfenstein told me those studies should not be given great weight because they show correlation, not causation.
Massachusetts did not receive Race to the Top school funding but state education officials say they plan to reapply for the grant.
Pres. Barack Obama established the Race to the Top program last summer for states to compete for $4.35 billion in grant funding to pursue education overhauls and innovative reform.
Of the initial 40 states to qualify, Massachusetts was named one of 16 finalists. Early this week, the U.S. Department of Education announced Delaware and Tennessee were the only winners.
The program states winners would be chosen simply on the state's readiness to rework their education system.
Superintendent Lincoln Lynch said Massachusetts might have been passed up since the achievement gap here may not be as great as in other states. As a finalist, however, Massachusetts will have the opportunity to reapply in for a second round of funding in June.
The kids weren't buying it. One girl gave the Gov a quiz on the state Constitution. After first noting that the state Constitution provides for "a thorough and efficient system of free public schools," the student noted the school board was likely to make drastic budget cuts. She then asked: "What does it mean if the superintendent and the school board say the budget they approved cannot provide for that thorough and efficient system?"
Wow, I thought, these kids are sharp -- a lot sharper than their governor, it turned out.
The girl had made a point of repeating, as if to a dull student, that in our Constitution the adjectives "thorough and efficient" modify the noun "system." This is a key legal point. For a moment there, I wondered if the kids had been reading the Rutgers Law Journal. I'm thinking of the excellent article by legal scholar Peter Mazzei in which he traced the language back to New Jersey's 1873 constitutional convention, at which time it clearly implied equal distribution of state aid to all school districts.
As for the Gov, he hadn't done his homework. Christie responded that "we have two constitutional issues at conflict here. One is the constitutional obligation to balance and the budget and the other is the constitutional obligation to provide a thorough and efficient education."
Twenty years after technology began transforming every other sector, there is finally enough movement on a sufficient number of fronts--15 to be precise--that, despite resilience, everything will change. New and better learning options are inevitable, but progress will be uneven by state/country and leadership dependent.
The 5 Drivers. These Web 2.0 forces are benefiting the learning sector, emerging economies, as well as every other sector:
More broadband: increasingly ubiquitous high speed Internet access is enabling a world of engaging content including video, multiplayer games, simulations, and video conferencing.
Cheap access devices: netbooks, tablets, and smart phones have dropped below the $100 per year ownership level enabling one-to-one computing solutions.
Powerful application development platforms: rapid application development and viral adoption have radically reduced cost and increased speed of bringing solutions to market.
Adaptive content: personalized news (iGoogle), networks (Facebook), purchasing (Amazon), and virtual environments (World of Warcraft) have created a 'my way' mindset that will eventually eliminate the common slog through print.
Platforms: Apple's iPhone illustrates the elegant bundling of an application, purchasing, and delivery platform.
Delaware's surprising first-place finish in a fierce battle for federal school-reform dollars highlights a tension in President Obama's education agenda: He favors big change, but he also prizes peace with the labor unions that sometimes resist his goals.
Obama often has challenged unions, even voicing support last month for a Rhode Island school board's vote to fire all the teachers at a struggling high school. But his administration built the $4 billion Race to the Top contest in a way that rewarded applications crafted in consultation with labor leaders.
The announcement that Delaware had won about $100 million highlighted that all of the state's teachers unions backed the plan for tougher teacher evaluations linked to student achievement. In second-place Tennessee, which won about $500 million, 93 percent of unions were on board.
As a teacher at Noelani Elementary School, Katie Nakamura says she believes any person who works directly with students is essential, including librarians, who can serve as a valuable resource to help children.
"Every day that another person can help a child is an essential part of that child's growth, and every day that we fail to touch a child is a waste of what we, as educators and school employees, seek to achieve," Nakamura said in an e-mail.
Gov. Linda Lingle sees it differently.
Librarians are among the educational system employees who were included on a list of "nonessential" workers released by the Lingle administration this week.
Determining which workers are "essential" and "nonessential" is at the heart of a $30 million difference between two plans aimed at ending Furlough Fridays for public school students.
Two weeks ago Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said he wanted to tackle the disparity in how students of different races with discipline problems are treated in public schools.
Earlier this month, the Civil Rights Division of his federal agency informed Delaware's largest school district that it is opening an investigation involving the same issue.
Then on Monday, Duncan announced that Delaware is one of two first-round winners in the federal Race To the Top education reform competition. It now has $100 million to spend on strengthening standards and assessment, supporting quality educators, developing data systems to better measure student performance, and turning around failing schools.
A lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles teachers union to block the city's school district from giving new campuses to charter schools was denied Friday by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge.
The suit was filed in December on behalf of United Teachers Los Angeles as a result of the Los Angeles Unified School District's controversial school reform plan, which sought to turn over 30 campuses to bidders from inside and outside the district, including charter school organizations.
The lawsuit claimed that L.A. Unified could not allow charter operators to take over new campuses unless 50% of the district's permanent teachers petitioned for it. Charters are independently managed public schools and are generally nonunion.
The legal process went forward, and the school board voted to give teacher-led groups control of 22 of the campuses; four were awarded to charters.
The school budget is an opportunity for the board and the administration to financially describe the academic aspirations for all children. It's the means for a district to implement and follow through on its strategic plan. In strategic plans we find the vision and scope for delivering the educational program. The budget must articulate this vision for academic excellence.
It is imperative that each school district, each year, re-examine all of its revenue sources and expenditures. School districts are primarily funded by local real estate taxes. In Dallastown, nearly 78 percent of revenue sources come from local sources -- 85 percent of which are local real estate taxes. State sources make up about 21 percent; federal and other sources make up the remai
Your schools are not what they once were. Last week you were named one of only four states to have its fourth-grade reading scores decline on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the nation's report card.
This is sad news, but it shouldn't come as any great surprise: Iowa's scores have been flat for nearly two decades. In 1992, you trailed only four states in fourth-grade reading. You now trail 25, including Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming.
It might be tempting to blame your declining scores on changing demographics, and that's fair to some extent, but you haven't had the same influx of minority students that your neighbor Minnesota has, for example, even though their scores have risen much faster than yours.
Gov. Chris Christie Wednesday sent letters to the heads of the statewide teachers union and the state school boards' association urging them to have local union leaders and school boards agree on pay freezes, an action that would provide a school district with more state aid.
The governor sent the letters to New Jersey Education Association President Barbara Keshishian and New Jersey School Boards Association Director Maria Bilik.
"The additional state aid to those districts that make the right choice and join in the shared sacrifice will ensure that more teachers stay in their jobs, more students will be able to participate in extracurricular activities, and protect educational services,'' Christie said. "While it is not the easy choice, it is the right choice and it shows we put New Jersey's children first."
Milwaukee Public Schools today provided some response to the not-so-much-progress progress report recently issued by an independent expert who's overseeing the implementation of an educational improvement plan in the district.
In a letter, MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and School Board President Michael Bonds tell Alan Coulter, the independent expert, that it's unfortunate his report doesn't "accurately reflect the incredible efforts underway by the District" and that it seems he has been "factually deprived of pertinent information" regarding MPS' progress.
In an e-mail today, Roseann St. Aubin, district spokeswoman, also said there appears to be a communication problem between the Department of Public Instruction in Madison and Coulter in New Orleans.
But, she also said that Coulter is required to do these progress reports under the settlement agreement between Disability Rights Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and that MPS is not a party to this settlement.
Some pundits, reflecting on the looming U.S. budget deficits, claim that Americans are vastly undertaxed compared with other major nations. I was wondering, to what extent is that true?
The most common metric for answering this question is taxes as a percentage of GDP. However, high tax rates tend to depress GDP. Looking at taxes as a percentage of GDP may mislead us into thinking we can increase tax revenue more than we actually can. For some purposes, a better statistic may be taxes per person, which we can compute using this piece of advanced mathematics:
A New Maintenance Referendum? The latest Madison School District Facilities Review
Madison School District Administration [2.3MB PDF]:
The 2010 Facility Assessment identifies $85,753,506 of immediate maintenance needs. It does not address items that have been traditionally handled through our work order system and the annual operating budget. This includes items such as floor tile, carpeting, casework, ceilings tile, painting, wall treatments, minor fencing projects, grounds maintenance and window treatments. The Facility Assessment includes projects divided into specific areas
Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, Building Envelope, gym floors, interior doors, high school athletic fields.
Roofing
Pavement
Playgrounds
In previous years, all projects were prioritized in order to insure life safety items took precedence over other items like parking lots. It is now necessary to spread funding over multiple trade areas in order to prevent one area from becoming excessively deteriorated. The 2010 Facility Assessment recommends funding all areas offacility needs annually, at varying levels, according to the condition assigned.
The document projects that the Madison School District's tax on a "typical" $250,000 home will increase from $2,545.00 in 2009-2010 to $3,545 in 2014-2015, a 39% increase over 6 years. Significant.
The District's total property tax levy grew from $158,646,124 (1998-1999) to $234,240,964 (2009-2010); a 47.6% increase over that 11 year period.
The proposed 2010-2011 budget increases property taxes by 11.8% to $261,929,543
1) Impact of State's finance on MMSD finances and budget projections
We utilized two separate papers from the legislative fiscal bureau (attached) and a presentation given by Andrew Reschovsky to provide detail to the board of education. Unfortunately projections at this point in time are showing a shortfall for the 2011-13 biennial budget of approximately $2.3 million. Without knowing if there will be another stabilization type package to help ease this burden, chances are funding for education and many other State funded programs will be looked at for possible reduction.
Professional development is the manner with which we all learn and grow in our profession. The needs of our students continue to grow and change. The expectations of teachers continue to develop. Larry Wilson once said, "Our options are to learn the new game, the rules, the roles of the participants, and how the rewards are distributed, or to continue practicing our present skills and become the best players in a game that is no longer being played." Just as we expect doctors, lawyers, and other professions to be current on the latest research and methods, our teachers need to continue developing their skills through professional development.
"Professional development is the key to the success of a school." (Holler, Callender & Skinner, 2007)
"One of the most cost-effective methods for making significant gains in student performance on standardized tests is providing teachers with better content knowledge and instructional methods to enhance the curriculum." (Holler, Callender & Skinner, 2007)
"In the history of education, no improvement effort has ever succeeded in the absence of thoughtfully planned and well-implemented professional development." (Guskey & Yoon, 2009)
'A school culture that invites deep and sustained professional learning will have a powerful impact on student achievement." (Brandt, 2003)
According to research, high-quality teaching has about five times more statistical effect than most feasible reductions in class size (Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine as cited in Frank & Miles, 2007).
"We have a rich, untapped pool oftalent in the millions ofmediocre teachers that are currently in the classroom. Rather than dismiss them, we need to help them grow. If we could move two million teachers from 'mediocre talent' to even 'mediocre- strong', it would have an incredible effect on student outcomes... Rather than focusing on punishing bad schools and teachers, we need to develop a culture of development and growth." (Scott, 2010.)
In the 1980s, when I was teaching history at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, one day there was a faculty meeting during which some of my colleagues put on a skit about one of our most intractable problems: students wandering in the hallways during classes. One person played the principal, another the hall monitor, and others the guidance counselor, the vice-principal, and I can't remember who else from the staff. One teacher played the student who had been in the halls.
They did a good job on the acting and the lines were good, but as it went on, I noticed something a bit odd. Everyone had a part and things to say, but the only passive member of the show was the student, who had nothing much to say or do.
I notice a parallel to this in the majority of discussions about education reform these days. With some exceptions, including Carol Jago, Diane Ravitch, Paul Zoch, and me, edupundits seem occupied with just about everything except what students do academically.
There is a lot of discussion of what teachers do, and what superintendents, curriculum coordinators, principals, financial officers, mayors, legislators, and so on, do, but the actual academic work of students gets very little attention.
This observation was reinforced for me when the TCR Institute did a study in 2002 of the assignment of serious term papers in U.S. public high schools. It was the first (and last) study of its kind, and it found that the majority of HS students are not being asked to do the sort of academic writing they need to work on to prepare themselves for college (and career).
In the last eight years, I have sought funds for a study of the assignment of complete nonfiction books in U.S. public high schools, but no one seems interested. Of course, many billions have been spent since 2002 on school reinvention and reorganization, assessment plans, teacher selection, training and retention, and so on, but again, the academic work of the students (the principal mission of schools) is "more honored in the breach than the observance."
My perspective on this is necessarily a bottom-up, Lower Education one. I publish the serious research papers of high school students of history. Most of the 20,000+ U.S. public high schools never send me one, which is not a great surprise, because most history departments, other than in IB schools, do not assign research papers.
But it gives me a curiosity over the neglect of student work which does not seem to be present in those whose focus is at a Higher Level in education. Those who live on the Public Policy level of Education Punditry can not see far enough Down or focus closely enough on the activity of schools to find out whether our HS students are reading history books and writing term papers.
I believe this is because foundation people, consultants, education professors, public policy experts, and their tribes mostly talk to each other, not to students or even to teachers, who are so far far beneath them. They hold conferences, and symposia, and they write papers and books about what needs to be done in education, but from almost none of them come suggestions that involve the academic reading and writing our students should be doing.
Of course what teachers do is vastly important, as well as very difficult to influence, but surely it cannot be that much more important than what students do.
Naturally, we should design curricula rich in knowledge, but if they don't include serious independent academic work by students, the burden will still be on the teacher, and many too many students can slide through under it and arrive in college ready for their remedial classes in reading, math and writing, as more than a million do now each year.
Tony Wagner, the only person I know at the Harvard Education School who is interested in student work, did a focus group with some graduates of a high school he was working with, and they all said they wished they had been given more serious work in academic writing while they were in the high school. I asked him how many schools he knows of which take the time to hold focus groups with their recent graduates to get feedback from them on their level of academic preparation in school, and he said he only knew of three high schools in the country which did it.
We do need improvements in all the things the edupundits are working on, and the foundations and our governments are spending billions on. But if we continue to lack curiosity about and to ignore what students are doing academically, I feel sure all that money will continue to be wasted, as it has been so many many times in the past.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
Rhode Island's new education boss told a large crowd of Bristol and Warren residents last Thursday night that their towns have gotten a great deal for nearly two decades, but it's time to settle up. The message was frustrating and disappointing to many in attendance.
Department of Education Commissioner Deborah Gist confirmed that a proposed funding formula would slash into the Bristol Warren Regional School District's revenue stream each year for the next 10 years, escalating to a $9.1 million reduction by 2020. Her message was delivered to a large crowd packed into the Mt. Hope High School auditorium to hear her speak.
Half the reduction is elimination of a regionalization "bonus" that has been given to the school district each year since the two towns merged their school systems in the early 1990s. Ms. Gist said the state simply does not have the resources to continue to fund the district at the level it has been. However, Ms. Gist offered one small carrot -- she said the state would help pay for students requiring a high level of specialized services.
According to Ms. Gist, the proposed funding formula would distribute enough funds to each district so all can adhere to the Basic Education Plan, an outline of standards Rhode Island students must achieve.
Educating the poor is more than just a numbers game, says Shukla Bose. She tells the story of her groundbreaking Parikrma Humanity Foundation, which brings hope to India's slums by looking past the daunting statistics and focusing on treating each child as an individual.
Washington has historically talked tough about requiring the states to reform their school systems in exchange for federal aid, and then caved in to the status quo when it came time to enforce the deal. The Obama administration broke with that tradition this week.
It announced that only two states -- Delaware and Tennessee -- would receive first-round grants under the $4.3 billion Race to the Top initiative, which is intended to support ambitious school reforms at the state and local levels. The remaining states will need to retool their applications and raise their sights or risk being shut out of the next round.
That includes New York State, which ranked a sad 15th out of 16 finalists.
Citing "the need to protect public interest," the board decided to name Kotowski on Tuesday afternoon during an emergency meeting in Sacramento. She will have veto power over the Salinas district's board of trustees until the state appoints a permanent trustee -- and outlines his or her responsibilities and power -- in May.
"My immediate goal is establish stability and prepare the District for an effective community meeting with the State Board of Education on April 14," Kotowski said Tuesday. "This will be done by focusing all efforts on teaching and learning in the classrooms of the District."
In March, the board assigned a state trustee to oversee two school districts in Monterey County: Greenfield Union and Alisal Union. The decision came after the districts chronically failed to meet academic standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act. The state board also found that problems "managing adult relationships" were ruining the districts' ability to improve student achievement.
Even if you don't live in Florida, you should pay attention to what is going on there.
Teachers, parents and even students in the Sunshine State call it the "Education Debacle." And they are no longer sitting quietly, hoping that common sense will magically prevail with state legislators seemingly intent on passing legislation affectionately called a "hammer" on the teaching profession by its sponsor.
They are taking to the streets, literally and digitally, to transmit their horror over legislation that would end teacher job security, increase student testing and tie teacher pay to student test scores. It also prohibits school districts from taking into account experience, professional credentials or advanced degrees in teacher evaluation and pay.
Sitting before a computer in the library at Wauwatosa West High School, senior Ricky Porter clicks his mouse and moves a squiggly web of multicolored lines across a computerized map speckled with red and blue dots.
Move one line wrong and an elected representative whose district he has redrawn will stand up in protest, a warning that Porter's new map might not be able to pass an imaginary state legislature, governor and court review. But if he gets his lines just right and manages to please all the incumbents, while staying on the right side of the law, his mission is complete.
The Redistricting Game played by Porter and classmates in his American Public Policy class at West is one of a number of new online and video games that offer educational experiences for schools and teachers willing to experiment. Porter's teacher, Chris Lazarski, who also plans to use a game named Peacemaker to teach students about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said such games give students chances to interact and solve problems in a way with which they're comfortable.
This is precisely the art of leadership practiced by Seattle Public Schools. Think of all of the imaginary future things they have promised in exchange for real things in the present. Then remember how few (if any) of the imaginary future things ever materialized.
When dealing with the public, the real thing they want in the present is usually your willingness to accept a change that is unacceptable and the imaginary thing in the future is some action that will mitigate the damage done by the change.
For example, if the APP community won't kick up too much of a fuss over the split of the program, then the District will deliver an aligned, written, taught and tested curriculum concurrent with the split. The APP community didn't oppose the split, but the District never delivered - and now clearly never will deliver - the promised curriculum.
Wisconsin had 8.2% fewer state and local government employees per capita than the national average in 2008. The state had 50.35 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees for every 1,000 state residents vs. 54.82 for the U.S. and ranked 41st nationally, according to a new study from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX). The study, "Wisconsin's Public Workforce," details public employment and pay using 2008 Census figures, the most recent available. WISTAX is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to public policy research and education.
The study also compares public employee salaries and total compensation (salaries plus benefits) at the state and local levels. The average salary for a Wisconsin state employee was $53,703, 4.3% higher than the national average ($51,507). State salaries here were above those in Michigan but below salaries in Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. When estimated benefits were added to salaries, total compensation averaged $71,000. That was 5.9% above the national average, but still below Iowa and Minnesota.
Teenagers in the San Diego Unified School District will no longer need parental consent to leave campus for private medical appointments, including pregnancy, abortion, drug and suicide counseling.
The school board unanimously adopted the revised policy Tuesday night to comply with state law.
HEY THERE, talented recent university graduate! I'd like to offer you a job in an extremely challenging and rewarding field. The pay is based almost entirely on performance metrics--you know, what they used to call "commission" in the old days. The better you do, the more you earn! Of course the worse you do, the less you earn, but don't focus on that--you're a winner, you'll do great. We can offer you a five-year contract to start. By "contract" I mean we'll let you work for us, if things work out, but we can of course fire you at any time. And after that you'll have solid contracts! Each contract lasts one year, and we can decide to let you go at the end if you're not performing up to our standards. And by that time, you'll be earning...well, actually, you'll be paid at exactly the same rate as when you started out. We're prohibited by law from paying you more just because you've worked for us longer. If, however, you want to go get qualified in some new technical field or obtain an advanced degree, then...we can't raise your pay either. We basically just pay you a flat standardized commission depending on how well you perform on the mission.
President Barack Obama has made education reform a signature issue of his administration, and the sweeping changes in how school systems are evaluated by the federal government announced over the weekend appear to go a long way toward achieving that goal.
Mr. Obama wants to revise the criteria for judging student achievement away from a strict reliance on standardized testing and toward a system that measures not only how much progress students make during the school year but also how well prepared they are for college and the workplace when they graduate from high school.
The Obama administration sent up a bright yellow warning flag Monday to states vying for billions of dollars in federal education funds intended to encourage school reform efforts. Of the 40 states that entered the first round of the Race to the Top competition in January, only 16 were named as finalists last month, and of those only two states -- Delaware and Tennessee -- actually ended up winning part of the federal largesse this week. Delaware was awarded $102 million, while Tennessee got just more than $500 million.
In rejecting the bids of big states such as Florida, New York and Illinois, all of which had been considered strong contenders for the prize, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a powerful signal that the feds won't be satisfied by half-measures grudgingly adopted by state lawmakers without strong support from local teachers unions. The message was that everybody needs to get behind meaningful reform.
The results of this first round of judging should be sobering to anyone who believed that all Maryland had to do was wave around its No. 1 ranking in Education Week to walk away with a big pile of federal money. More than a dozen states with stronger education reform credentials than Maryland were shut out, and this state surely would have been as well had it not belately recognized how unprepared it was to compete seriously.
A reader signing in as "suegjoyce" recently posted a comment on this blog describing her visit to a KIPP middle school "in the Delta." KIPP is the Knowledge Is Power Program, the most successful charter school network in the country and the subject of my most recent book. I was pleased to see suegjoyce's comment, since I have been urging readers curious about KIPP to ignore the myths they read on the Internet and instead visit a KIPP school. The vast majority of people I have encountered online with negative opinions of KIPP give no indication that they have ever been inside one of those schools, so she was setting a good example.
She had some critical things to say. She was not specific about which KIPP middle school she visited, but only one has the word "Delta" in its title, the KIPP Delta College Preparatory School in Helena-West Helena, Ark. So I asked Scott Shirey, executive director of the KIPP schools in that area, to respond. Neither Scott nor I know how to reach suegjoyce, but if she sees this and has more to say, I would be delighted to post her thoughts prominently on the blog.
Many educators greatly admire the wide range of human achievements over the millennia and want their students to know about them. However, there are those, like the Dean of the Education School at a major east coast university, who told me that: "The myth of individual greatness is a myth." Translated, I suppose that might be rendered: "Individual greatness is a myth (squared)."
Why is it that so many of our teachers and others in education are, as it were, in the "clay feet" business, anxious to have our students know that human beings who accomplished wonderful things also had flaws, like the rest of us? As they emphasize the flaws, trying to encourage students to believe that they are just fine the way they are now, with their self-esteem and perhaps a couple of the multiple intelligences, they seem to teach that there is no need for them to seek out challenges or to emulate the great men and women who have gone before.
One of the first major problems with this, apart from its essential mendacity, is that it deprives students of the knowledge and understanding of what these people have accomplished in spite of their human failings. So that helps students remain ignorant as well as with less ambition.
It is undeniable, of course, that Washington had false teeth, sometimes lost his temper, and wanted to be a leader (sin of ambition). Jefferson, in addition to his accomplishments, including the Declaration of Independence, the University of Virginia, the Louisiana Purchase and some other things, may or may not have been too close to his wife's half-sister after his wife died. Hamilton, while he may have helped get the nation on its feet, loved a woman or women to whom he was not married, and it is rumored that nice old world-class scientist Benjamin Franklin was also fond of women (shocking!).
The volume of information about the large and small failings is great, almost enough to allow educators so inclined to spend enough time on them almost to exclude an equal quantity of magnificent individual achievements. Perhaps for an educator who was in the bottom of his graduating class, it may be some comfort to focus on the faults of great individuals, so that his own modest accomplishments may grow in comparison?
In any case, even the new national standards for reading include only short "informational texts" which pretty much guarantees for the students of educators who follow them that they will have very little understanding of the difficulties overcome and the greatness achieved by so many of their fellow human beings over time.
Alfred North Whitehead wrote that: "Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness." What Education School did he go to, I wonder?
Peter Gibbon, author of a book on heroes, regularly visits our high schools in an effort to counter this mania for the denigration of wonderful human beings, past and present.
Surely it would be worth our while to look again at the advantages of teaching our students of history about the many many people worthy of their admiration, however small their instructor may appear by comparison.
Malvolio was seriously misled in his take on the meaning of the message he was given, that: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them," but his author, the greatest playwright in the English language, surely deserves, as do thousands of others, the attention of our students, even if he did leave the second-best bed to his wife in his will.
Let us give some thought to the motivation and competence of those among our educators who, whether they are leftovers of the American Red Guards of the 1960s or not, wish to advise our students of history especially, not to "trust anyone over thirty."
After all, in order to serve our students well, even educators should consider growing up after a while, shouldn't they?
==============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
SALLY BLOUNT, unveiled today as the new dean of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, describes her appointment as a return to her intellectual home. The school was where, as a PhD student, she did much of her work in the fields of psychology and economics.
But other than a sense of going back to her roots, the main reason she was drawn to Kellogg, she says, is its reputation as a collaborative institution. "I am a middle child," she explains. "So it's in my DNA, this collaborative approach."
Collaborative leadership is a model whose time appears to have come in business as well as business education. The days of the imperial CEO bestriding an organisation, browbeating the company with the force of his personality, became suddenly unfashionable at around the same time that sub-prime mortgages did. But, perhaps unusually for academia, which can be famous for its backbiting, teamwork has long been a characteristic of Kellogg.
Michigan can harness innovation as a way to do more with less in K-12 education, even though that challenge may seem overwhelming. At a time when new investments in our K-12 system are not likely, Michigan must face the daunting task of improving student achievement and increasing graduation rates with fewer financial resources.
To date, K-12 education has yet to realize the full potential of using online learning to improve how educators teach and how students learn. Nearly every sector of our economy is now turning to information and communications technologies to reduce costs and improve efficiencies. Education is not alone in its need to manage scarce resources, maintain relevance and succeed in today's new global economy.
Research has shown online learning is academically effective and can provide meaningful alternatives for students who have a need for greater flexibility with their education due to individual learning styles, health conditions, employment responsibilities, lack of success with traditional school environments, or desire to be working early at the college level. Online learning needs to be part of the broader policy discussion related to restructuring public education during this prolonged budget crisis. Economic arguments in addition to the latest research on student learning support this position.
Deep within America's collective consciousness, there is a little red schoolhouse. Inside, obedient children sit in rows, eagerly absorbing lessons as a kind, wise teacher writes on the blackboard. Shiny apples are offered as tokens of respect and gratitude.
The reality of American education is often quite different. Beige classrooms are filled with note-passers and texters, who casually ignore teachers struggling to make it to the end of the 50-minute period. Smart kids are bored, and slower kids are left behind. Anxiety about standardized tests is high, and scores are consistently low. National surveys find that parents despair over the quality of education in the United States -- and they're right to, as test results confirm again and again.
But just as most Americans disapprove of congressional shenanigans while harboring some affection for their own representative, parents tend to say that their child's teacher is pretty good. Most people have mixed feelings about their own school days, but our national romance with teachers is deep and long-standing. Which is why the idea of kids staring at computers instead of teachers makes parents and politicians extremely nervous.
New Jersey Newsroom has reprinted NJEA President Keshishian's editorial on how Gov. Christie's call to local bargaining units to accept pay freezes is merely a way to distract voters from focusing on his non-renewal of the "millionaire's tax." The piece is then followed by comments, including this one from a NJ public school teacher.
It's become a common lament this session among lobbyists and journalists and other Annapolis insiders: not much is happening.
Perhaps, but in case anyone missed it, two bills with major implications for Maryland education policy cleared the Senate on Wednesday without much fanfare.
One would gradually raise the state's dropout age from 16 to 18. The other would create a new tax credit with the hope of stemming the tide of Catholic school closures. Debate over both measures has been heavily colored by concerns over the state's fiscal situation. Neither has made it through the House.
Wisconsin's application for a share of $4.35 billion in federal education grants scored in the bottom half of 41 applicants, earning the equivalent of a C-minus grade by government reviewers.
The state's score sheet and the accompanying reviewer comments were released Monday after U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan revealed that Tennessee and Delaware won funding from the first phase of the Race to the Top competition, qualifying them for $500 million and $100 million, respectively, over the next four years.
All of the reviewers noted that few local teachers union leaders in Wisconsin had supported the state's application, and one noted that the statewide teachers union's support seemed "tepid." That was far short of expectations for competitive applications.
"Because teachers will play such a key role in the implementation of these efforts, their support is essential," one of Wisconsin's reviewers wrote in an evaluation of the state's application.
It was an off-the-record conversation early last summer with a major figure in education politics in Wisconsin. I suggested that if a serious move was made to put the Milwaukee Public Schools under mayoral control, the outcome would be decided by a few specific people.
"Gwen Moore?" the source suggested.
No, but what an interesting thought. And it pointed to several key reasons that the proposal, when it came a couple months later from Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, faltered from the start, never picked up momentum, and soon became a dead idea walking.
When Moore, the popular congresswoman who is influential among Milwaukee's African Americans, promptly came out against mayoral control, her decision pointed to three major flaws in the Doyle-Barrett plan:
*** There is almost no evidence that Doyle and Barrett prepared a strategy for building support for the idea before they went public. Was the fight even worth instigating if it had garnered so little support over the preceding years, and there was so little evidence anything had changed?
The changeover to Google as Yale's e-mail provider has been put on hold.
Information Technology Services has decided to postpone the University's move from the Horde Webmail service to Google Apps for Education, a suite of communication and collaboration tools for universities, pending a University-wide review process to seek input from faculty and students. After a series of meetings with faculty and administrators in February, ITS officials decided to put the move on hold, Deputy Provost for Science and Technology Steven Girvin said.
"There were enough concerns expressed by faculty that we felt more consultation and input from the community was necessary," he said in an e-mail to the News.
The idea to switch to Google Apps for Education -- which includes popular programs such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs -- arose during an ITS internal meeting around Christmas, computer science professor Michael Fischer said. After ITS notified faculty members and administrators of the plan in February, several expressed reservations about the move, and ITS officials decided to convene a committee to discuss the situation.
Google has been at the center of a number of recent controversies relating to privacy, security and intellectual property issues. The introduction of the Google Buzz social networking service in February, which automatically allowed Gmail users to view the contacts of members in their address books, raised concerns among privacy advocates. [White House Deputy CTO's ties with Google revealed via Buzz]
While I strongly support pervasive high speed networks, I don't agree with the District's advocacy, in this case. They should, simultaneously, link to privacy concerns, such as those expressed at Yale, regarding Google's services.
In an effort to save money and save face, the Madison School Board has nixed its plans to launch a "positive branding" effort for the school district.
Board members voted unanimously earlier this month to shelve the idea of hiring a marketing firm to help sing the district's praises at a budgeted cost of $43,000 per year for two years. The vote took place during a discusssion of the district's looming budget deficit for the 2010-11 school year, at the time estimated at close to $30 million.
"If we're looking at as many millions of dollars in cuts as we are, it's a little much to ask the community to pay more property tax so that we can publicize our school district," School Board member Marj Passman said during the meeting.
Video Answers to Budget Questions
Answers from Superintendent Dan Nerad and Asst. Supt. for Business Services Erik Kass
Recorded on March 24
At their meeting on March 22, the Board of Education took actions related to the 2010-11 budget. What did they do regarding their use of taxing authority?
When I travelled to Sweden to report on their school system, I took some company - the Conservative party's policy document Raising the Bar, Closing the Gap - its action plan for raising standards in schools, creating more good school places and making opportunity more equal.
It describes an educational utopia, a land where new schools can open up anywhere to meet parental demand. Even better, the increased competition for pupils forces standards up. The blueprint is based on similar reforms introduced in Sweden in 1992 as part of a sweeping New Labour-style reform programme to give more choice in public services.
I thought it was really good that I could choose the new school. I had a choice
Mimmi Kindstrom
There are now more than 1,100 such schools in Sweden, funded by the state, but operated independently.
I visited one of them. Kallskollen was one of the very first to be set up when the Swedish education system went from being one of the most centrally controlled, to being one of the most liberal.
"Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning" (Belknap Press, 336 pages, $25.95) by Paul E. Peterson: Education reformers have left the essential teacher-pupil relationship untouched for more than a century, fighting instead for changes outside the classroom: desegregation, teacher pay hikes, funding equality, increased testing, vouchers and changes in curriculum.
Harvard University government professor Paul Peterson argues that although many of those efforts have been well-intentioned, even noble, American schools haven't kept pace with changes in society. And they're just not very good.
In a compelling and enlightening narrative, "Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning," Peterson traces a variety of reform movements by profiling their leaders or other key players. Horace Mann fostered public schools nationwide, creating a global model in the 19th century; in the early 1900s, John Dewey pushed for education that respected children as individuals and erased social strata; the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in leading the civil rights movement, forced schools to start doing as courts and legislators told them; Albert Shanker pushed for better pay and conditions for teachers; a series of "rights" reformers tried to improve quality across the board, while a series of scholars measuring their work found precious little benefit, and that led to the "adequacy" and choice movements, including the push for publicly funded vouchers and charter schools, which together involve less than 10 percent of U.S. schoolchildren.
An Oklahoma senator complained that federal rules on teacher credentials had driven thousands of experienced educators out of rural schools. A North Carolina lawmaker complained that formulas for distributing federal education money favored big-city districts at the expense of poor students in small towns.
And a senator from Alaska wanted to know how school-turnaround strategies based on firing ineffective instructors would work in a remote village on the Bering Sea that she said already had tremendous teacher turnover.
Lawmakers who represent rural areas told Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a hearing Wednesday that the No Child Left Behind law, as well as the Obama administration's blueprint for overhauling it, failed to take sufficiently into account the problems of rural schools, and their nine million students.
A Chicago Public Schools policy that dramatically increased science requirements did not help students learn more science and actually may have hurt their college prospects, according to a new report from the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago.
The science policy was part of a larger CPS initiative to expose all students to a college-preparatory curriculum by increasing course requirements across a range of subjects.
Though CPS high school students took and passed more college-prep science courses under the new policy, overall performance in science classes did not improve, with five of every six students earning Cs or lower. College-going rates declined significantly among graduates with a B average or better in science, and they dipped for all students when researchers controlled for changes in student characteristics over time.
Those of us who wallow in educational jargon have all heard the term "authentic." It seems to mean lessons that connect to the real world, like a physics class visiting a nuclear power plant or an English class performing a play by Edward Albee.
But like all fashionable terms, its meaning can evolve, or be distorted, depending on your point of view. I often use it to describe the powerful effect of telling Advanced Placement students in inner city schools that they are preparing for the same exam that kids in the richest school in the suburbs are taking. That makes their studies seem more authentic. Am I misusing the word?
How do you use it? Is it important in schools? Or is it just another buzz word gone bad?
I raise this intriguing issue, which had not occurred to me before, because of an email from Carl Rosin, an English and interdisciplinary/gifted class teacher at Radnor High School, 12 miles west of Philadelphia:
[Note: this unpublished paper was originally drafted in 2004 with Jim Shelton and draws heavily from the work of Paul Hill, Michael Barber, Michael Fullan, Kim Smith. Posting today, with a few updates, was inspired by a panel discussion yesterday including Paul Hill, Steve Adamowski, Garth Harries, Dacia Toll, and Andy Moffit]
The most important challenge in America today is creating systems of schools that work for all students, particularly low income and historically underserved groups. The goal of helping all students achieve at high levels is now decades old. We've made slow but steady progress in elementary literacy but secondary achievement levels and graduation rates remain stagnant. Hundreds of schools are helping most students achieve at high levels, but they remain largely random acts of innovation and heroic leadership. Few if any public school districts have achieved uniformly high performance and attainment levels. Building systems of schools that break the cycle of poverty and close the achievement/attainment gap remains critical to our economy, society and democracy.
Meg Diaz pulled together a chart (which I will post later on) that shows some of the "foundation, institutions and private donor contributions to SPS for 2009-2010"). It's quite interesting reading to see how much some PTAs raise. There are some schools that have real money going through them like McGilvra PTA, $252,558 for a staffing grant, Laurelhurst PTA with $161,000, JSIS PTA, $280,000, Salmon Bay PTA $101,000). New School Foundation gave South Shore $1.2M.
Hey, bless all these people for raising this money and donating it.
But a lot of this says "PTA Supplemental Staffing". Again, the PTA is not there to backfill staff or fix buildings and it is very sad that this is what is happening. (I know at least one school that does not allow this because of the worry of it being sustainable and I'm sure it is quite a heavy worry for parents to keep up this level of fundraising.) Given that this is happening, I'm a little surprised at how little engagement and respect parents receive given that kind of support and largesse.
Like its predecessor, the Obama Administration is focusing its education policy on fixing failed schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls for a "dramatic overhaul" of "dropout factories, where 50, 60, 70 percent of students" don't graduate. The intentions are good, but a new study shows that school turnarounds have a dismal record that doesn't warrant more reform effort.
"Much of the rhetoric on turnarounds is pie in the sky--more wishful thinking than a realistic assessment of what school reform can actually accomplish," writes Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution. "It can be done but the odds are daunting" and "examples of large-scale, system-wide turnarounds are nonexistent."
Mr. Loveless looked at 1,100 schools in California and compared test scores from 1989 and 2009. "Of schools in the bottom quartile in 1989--the state's lowest performers--nearly two-thirds (63.4 percent) scored in the bottom quartile again in 2009," he writes. "The odds of a bottom quartile school's rising to the top quartile were about one in seventy (1.4 percent)." Of schools in the bottom 10% in 1989, only 3.5% reached the state average after 20 years.
Conversely, the best schools tended to remain that way. Sixty-three percent of the top performers in 1989 were still at the top in 2009, while only 2.4% had fallen to the bottom. School achievement, or lack thereof, is remarkably persistent, and California's worst schools were all the subject of numerous reform attempts in "finance, governance, curriculum, instruction, and assessment," writes Mr. Loveless, a former California public school teacher.
Every job is a technology job. Technology is baked into each aspect of work. Social media means that everyone in an organization is a communicator, everyone is a salesperson.
As the technical infrastructure continues an inexorable movement towards a service, sourced from without, skills to utilize technology higher up the value chain will be the only ones that pay a professional wage. Just as the word processor replaced the secretary, lightweight authoring tools and social media publishing platforms will replace Web and media specialists for all but the highest fidelity (and revenue generating) tasks.
I'm not saying the media and Web jobs will disappear, rather we will all be expected to create multimedia work in digital format and share / interact with digital tools. Today's NYTimes reporter who writes, but also podcasts and creates short videos, (think David Pogue), provides a glimpse into all of our futures.
What would you choose as the 10 competencies that every college graduate must bring to the job market?
Maxine Kilcrease's stint as the head of the Iowa Association of School Boards began one year ago with her breaking down and crying during a mock job interview, and it ended Thursday when she was fired for alleged misconduct.
Just 10 months ago, the association's directors praised Kilcrease for her "experience in financial management."
On Friday, a different board president denounced Kilcrease for misleading the board about finances, raising her salary to $367,000 without board approval and circumventing bidding requirements for purchases.
Black fourth-graders in Wisconsin are bringing up the rear in national reading tests for the nation's schoolchildren, according to a recent government report.
This news has led to another round of the usual handwringing, head-shaking and general consternation about the state of public education in cities like Milwaukee, where the largest population of black students lives.
For many, the main concern about failing black students is the assumption many won't be able to contribute productively to society because of their lack of reading skills. In that event, some fear, failing black students will eventually end up behind bars.
If that happens, some will have their education continue with people like James Patterson.
Patterson is an education specialist with the Racine Youthful Offender Correctional Facility, where inmates 15 to 24 are held for various juvenile and adult offenses. During their time at the facility, many inmates attend classes and work toward earning a high school equivalency diploma.
Milwaukee, in the strongly revised opinion of Diane Ravitch, is almost a textbook example for showing that the prediction that the tide of school choice will lift all educational boats is wrong.
"One might wonder about how much (Milwaukee Public Schools) is coming apart at the seams because of the competition," Ravitch said in a telephone conversation. "The competition was supposed to make things better."
A few years ago, Ravitch was a prominent voice for that latter sentiment. But in a way that has caused a stir in education circles nationwide, she now has come down emphatically in the opposite camp when it comes to private school vouchers, charter schools and the testing-based accountability regimen that is at the heart of the No Child Left Behind education law.
Those ideas just haven't worked, she argues in "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education." It is time to return to emphasizing better curriculum and instruction as the key to better success, she says, and it is time for emphasizing the needs of the mainstream of public school students.
Under public pressure from Gov. Chris Christie to renegotiate contracts with local school boards and being accused by him as part of the problem of high education costs and not part of the solution, the 200,000-member state teachers' union criticized him in return Friday.
"The choice could not be more stark: tax cuts for millionaires, or full school funding for New Jersey kids,'' Keshishian said. "Just a few weeks into his term Governor Christie has staked out his position, slashing nearly $1.5 billion from state aid to schools and higher education.
"At the same time, he has rejected out of hand any consideration of reinstating a very modest tax on the very wealthiest New Jersey residents, those making more than $400,000 per year,'' she said. "Last year, that surcharge generated nearly $1 billion in revenue for the state, enough to close much of the hole that his reckless budget opened in local school budgets.''
Today's idea: Though diversity training has been widely embraced by corporate America, there's little evidence so far that it works, sociologists find.
Work | In The Boston Globe, Drake Bennett reports on studies by researchers at Princeton, Yale, Columbia and elsewhere finding little empirical support for the idea that diversity training programs change attitudes or behavior. He describes one wide-ranging survey of more than 800 companies that points to what doesn't work, and what might:
Some training programs were more effective than others: Voluntary programs were better than mandatory ones, and those that focused on the threat of bias and harassment lawsuits were worse than those that did not. But even the better programs led only to marginal changes. And those that were mandatory or discussed lawsuits -- the vast majority of the programs the researchers examined -- slightly reduced the number of women and minorities in management. Required training and legalistic training both make people resentful, the authors suggest, and likely to rebel against what they've heard.
It's never easy closing a school, but sometimes it needs to happen if policymakers take accountability issues seriously. District school closures, particularly outside New York City, are rare. By contrast, the unique accountability and oversight of charter schools is integral to the bargain they make, which includes the ultimate accountability of closing their doors for underperformance.
This has always been the case for charter schools, of which eight have been closed since 2004, when the initial schools first came up for their five-year charter renewal (another conversion charter was revoked in 2001).
In some instances, it's a close call whether or not to close a charter school. Like any school, charters can make mistakes and need more time to implement corrections to show better academic results. Charter school authorizers have typically granted additional time in the form of a short-term renewal of their charters. In most cases, short-term renewals were just the right approach, as these charters took the extra time to show better results to earn them a subsequent full five-year renewal.
A 'culture' of hugging that reportedly got out of control led an Oregon middle school principal to outlaw the displays of affection, Oregonlive.com reported.
After students would "scream and run down the hallway and jump into each other's arms," the school decided enough was enough and have halted hugs as well as other behaviors deemed detrimental to teaching and learning, Oregonlive.com reported.
"Teaching to the test" means teaching real skills.
In a week dominated by health care, President Barack Obama released a set of education proposals that break with ideals once articulated by Robert F. Kennedy.
Kennedy's view was that accountability is essential to educating every child. He expressed this view in 1965, while supporting an education reform initiative, saying "I do not think money in and of itself is necessarily the answer" to educational excellence. Instead, he hailed "good faith . . . effort to hold educators responsive to their constituencies and to make educational achievement the touchstone of success."
But rather than raising standards, the Obama administration is now proposing to gut No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) accountability framework. Enacted in 2002, NCLB requires that every school be held responsible for student achievement. Under the new proposal, up to 90% of schools can escape responsibility. Only 5% of the lowest-performing schools will be required to take action to raise poor test scores. And another 5% will be given a vague "warning" to shape up, but it is not yet clear what will happen if they don't.
Five principals at the helm of struggling San Francisco schools will be forced within the next few weeks to make a gut-wrenching choice: Fight for their jobs - a battle that could cost their schools millions of dollars - or leave.
Last week, the principals found out their sites had been placed on the state's list of schools that are persistently the lowest-performing. Statewide, 188 schools are on the list, and each one can qualify for up to $2 million annually in federal grants for the next three years. But in exchange, they must undergo a major overhaul, starting with naming a new principal.
The schools have less than five months to come up with a reform plan, apply for the funding, and put everything in place by the first day of school in the fall.
Parents with students in the lowest-performing elementary schools in Chicago could obtain vouchers to move their children into better-performing private schools under a plan that passed the Illinois Senate on Thursday.
The voucher legislation pushed by Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) passed 33-20, with three voting present, could affect thousands of children in the lowest-performing 10 percent of city schools. It now moves to the House.
"By passing this bill, we'll give 22,000 kids an opportunity to have a choice on whether or not they'll continue in their failing school or go to another non-public school within the city of Chicago," Meeks said.
"Just as we came up with and passed charter schools to help children, now is an opportunity to pass this bill so we can help more children escape the dismal realities of Chicago's public schools," Meeks said.
Why do Democrats put their least loyal Senator in charge of one of their highest profile issues? Michelle Obama started her government-wide "Let's Move" program to improve children's health and nutrition, but Blanche Lincoln's the author of the Senate child nutrition bill that just passed out of the Senate Agriculture Committee yesterday. And Blanche Lincoln is no Michelle Obama. She's not even as progressive as Barack Obama, who called for $10 billion in new money over 10 years for child nutrition, a number Lincoln reduced by more than half.
To put that in easier to understand terms, Obama's proposal would have given up to $.18 in addition funds to each child's school lunch. Lincoln's bill gives each lunch $.06. Compare that to the School Nutrition Association's request to raise the current $2.68 "reimbursement rate" (the amount the federal government reimburses schools for each free lunch served to a low income child) by $.35 just to keep the quality of the lunches the same and make up for schools' current budgetary shortfall. School lunch reformer Ann Cooper calls for an extra $1 per lunch to actually make lunches healthy. So any amount under $.35 is no reform at all, and Lincoln gave us $.06.
When President Obama's Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, was the head of Chicago's Public Schools, his office kept a list of powerful, well-connected people who asked for help getting certain children into the city's best public schools. The list--long kept confidential--was disclosed this week by the Chicago Tribune. We speak with the Chicago Tribune reporter who broke the story and with two Chicago organizers about Duncan and his aggressive plan to expand charter schools. [includes rush transcript]
JUAN GONZALEZ: When President Obama's Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, was the head of Chicago's Public Schools, his office kept a list of powerful, well-connected people who asked for help getting certain children into the city's best public schools. The list--long held confidential--was disclosed this week by the Chicago Tribune.
The paper reports that the nearly forty pages of logs show admissions requests from twenty-five aldermen, Mayor Daley's office, the state House Speaker, the state attorney general, the former White House social secretary, and a former United States senator. The log noted "AD"--initials for Arne Duncan--as the person requesting help for ten students and a co-requestor about forty times.
A spokesman for Duncan denied any wrongdoing and said Duncan used the list, not to dole out rewards to insiders, but to shield principals from political interference.
AMY GOODMAN: Duncan was chief executive of the Chicago schools, the nation's third-largest school system, from 2001 to 2009. During that time, he oversaw implementation of a program known as Renaissance 2010. The program's aim was to close sixty schools and replace them with more than 100 charter schools. Now as President Obama's Education Secretary, Duncan is overseeing a push by the administration to aggressively expand charter schools across the country.
Superintendent Frances Gallo combed the classrooms of embattled Central Falls High School. Teachers and students were gone for the day. Gallo was hunting for a particular item: an effigy of President Obama.
She hoped the rumor of its existence wasn't true.
Gallo had fired all the high school teachers just a month earlier, igniting an educational maelstrom in Rhode Island's smallest and poorest community while winning praise from the president.
The teachers union lampooned her; hate mail flooded her inbox. For weeks, she'd prayed every morning for the soul of the man who wrote: "I wish cancer on your children and their children and that you live long enough to see them die."
It was one thing to take barbs from opponents -- another thing altogether if the division was infecting classrooms. Teachers assured the superintendent that the school battle wasn't seeping into lesson plans. So, when CNN asked her about the rumor of the effigy, Gallo took it upon herself to get to the bottom of it.
Last month's wholesale firing of 74 teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island exemplified America's rising anti-teacher sentiment. Both President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised Superintendent Frances Gallo's decision, and Newsweek writers Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert called the firings a "notable breakthrough."
This is an excerpt from my commentary in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, "War on teachers escalates". Please click here to read the entire article. You can respond or provide feedback by clicking on the comment button below.
Illinois state senators are considering a measure already in place in other states that would allow school districts to convert to a four-day week, the Chicago Tribune writes.
State House members already have approved the plan, designed to help rural school districts save money, the paper said. California, Colorado and Arizona have adopted similar plans, the paper reported.
"We would save $100,000 or more a school year ... (if we) run the buses one less day a week," Mark Janesky, superintendent of the Jamaica School District, told the Tribune. "I turn the heat off an extra day a week. Your cafeteria is open one day less a week."
America's classroom culture wars broke out again this week after a vote by the Texas Board of Education to rewrite the standards for high school social studies courses in the largest single US market for textbooks.
A conservative group on the board voted through revisions that opponents said would challenge the Founding Fathers' belief in the separation of church and state, play up Republican leadership and play down negative connotations about the word "capitalist" by replacing it with talk of the "free-enterprise society".
The dispute has sparked headlines around the country about a "Texas textbook massacre". It was featured by Jon Stewart, Comedy Central late-night television satirist, under the caption "Don't mess with textbooks", a reference to the state's old "Don't mess with Texas" bumper stickers.
For the publishing industry, however, the news is both wearily familiar and a sign of how much the textbook business has changed. Battles over subjects from evolution to Civil War history have become almost annual events, not least in Texas.
I can't pinpoint the moment the Obama administration went wrong on the subject of education. But I can pinpoint the moment when it demonstrated it can't be taken seriously.
I can't pinpoint the moment when the Obama administration went wrong on the subject of education. But I can pinpoint the moment when it demonstrated that it can't be taken seriously.
It happened on Monday, March 15, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan was expounding to reporters about revising the No Child Left Behind law. The new policy, he asserted, "is going to revolutionize education in our country."
No, it's not. We have been at the task of education for a long time, and one thing we know is that you cannot revolutionize it. The American system of schooling is vast, complicated, self-protective, slow to change and even slower to improve.
On these points, No Child Left Behind, or NCLB, leaves no doubt. It was inaugurated with grand promises eight years ago. "As of this hour, America's schools will be on a new path of reform, and a new path of results," exulted President George W. Bush upon signing it.
HEALTH reform was supposed to be the crowning achievement of Barack Obama's first year as president. Instead it has riled Republicans, alienated leftists and exhausted everyone else. However, on March 15th Mr Obama presented Congress with a plan that ought to have a greater chance of support: reforming No Child Left Behind (NCLB), America's main federal education programme. Everyone agrees that America's public schools are floundering, and NCLB is widely considered to have failed.
NCLB, enacted in 2002, transformed education policy. It gave the federal government a crucial role in education, forcing states to set standards and hold their schools accountable for meeting them. Schools that failed to make progress would face financial sanctions. All students were to be proficient in reading and maths by 2014. George Bush championed the law; Congress supported it wholeheartedly.
ana T. Bedden, 43, will begin his new job as Irving school superintendent in July.
Bedden currently leads the Richmond County School System in Augusta, Ga. He's also worked in school districts in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The Florida native makes history as Irving's first black superintendent. He replaces Jack Singley, who led the district for 21 years.
Bedden has signed a three-year contract with the district at a base salary of $244,400.
Bedden answered questions in a telephone interview Wednesday. Here are excerpts from the discussion.
One challenge in Irving is a lack of parental involvement. How will you address this?
I try to be inclusive. Who's at the table so a community can feel they have a voice? We have to look at how we go about engagement. Are we always asking them to come to us, or do we take opportunities to go to them where they feel comfortable? It's creating access, but it's also educating.
Some St. Cloud students start their school day before the dawn
Tim Post:
At 6:30 or 7:00 each morning, you may just be rolling out of bed or finishing up that first cup of coffee. But some students at St. Cloud Technical and Community College have already been in their first class of the day.
Because of a demand for courses in the health sciences, the school now offers a 6:30 a.m. anatomy course.
It's part of a nationwide trend. Because of skyrocketing enrollment, community colleges are scheduling classes at unusual times to squeeze more students in.
Things move quickly during Liz Burand's 6:30 a.m. physiology and anatomy course. She begins her pre-dawn class with a short quiz, then moves into a brief discussion about the cross-section of cells featured on the test.
After that, Burand runs a video showing an up-close, and rather gory, throat surgery.
Madison voters will soon be put to a test, perhaps one of the more important ones they've faced in recent years. On April 6, they'll get to decide who will fill an open seat on the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education during its biggest financial crisis.
It's apt, then, that the opposing candidates -- James Howard and Tom Farley -- also be put to the test. We gave them a series of essay questions on a range of pertinent topics, from how they'd cut the school budget to challenges they've faced with their own children in Madison schools.
Their answers, lightly edited for length and style, follow.
Isthmus: What are two specific programs you would suggest cutting or policies you would suggest changing due to ongoing budget challenges, and why?
Howard: In Wisconsin, for 17 years, since 1993, we have had a school funding plan that caps a school district's annual revenue increase at 2.1%, although the actual cost to run a school district has averaged 4% during those years. Secondly, the state of Wisconsin is supposed to pay two-thirds of the cost of schools. This has never happened. So I'd suggest lifting the revenue caps and legislating complete state funding of public education.
Farley: Certainly, the state's funding formulas and current economic cycles have had a major effect on this current budget crisis. However, budget challenges will be "ongoing" until the district addresses our own systemic issues. Policies regarding talented and gifted students should be based on national best practices. We should also address length of school year and school day, which are far too limiting and lag other countries.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Personal Income Drops in 42 US States, 2.5% in Wisconsin; Not a great time to raise taxes
Sara Murray:
Personal income in 42 states fell in 2009, the Commerce Department said Thursday.
Nevada's 4.8% plunge was the steepest, as construction and tourism industries took a beating. Also hit hard: Wyoming, where incomes fell 3.9%.
Incomes stayed flat in two states and rose in six and the District of Columbia. West Virginia had the best showing with a 2.1% increase. In Maine, Kentucky and Hawaii, increased government benefits, such as unemployment insurance and Social Security, offset drops in earnings and property values.
Nationally, personal income from wages, dividends, rent, retirement plans and government benefits declined 1.7% last year, unadjusted for inflation. One bright spot: As the economy recovered, personal income was up in all 50 states in the fourth quarter compared with the third. Connecticut, again, had the highest per capita income of the 50 states at $54,397 in 2009. Mississippi ranked lowest at $30,103.
More importantly, what a loss of young talent for our state.
Wisconsin must do better when it comes to teaching students - especially black students - to read.
Black fourth-graders in Wisconsin just posted the lowest reading scores among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Only 9 percent of black fourth-graders in Wisconsin performed at or above the proficient level. That compares to 38 percent of white fourth-graders, itself a discouraging number.
Those percentages increase to 38 percent for blacks and 75 percent for whites when fourth-graders who can read at a "basic" level are included.
The teen court at Dorsey High School is one of 17 in Los Angeles County where students decide the cases of first-time juvenile offenders. The idea is to steer them away from more serious offenses.
The jury's decision on the 15-year-old scofflaw was swift and unanimous: Guilty. Then the 12 jurors moved on to the question of what consequences the vandal should face for his actions.
"I kinda wanna go pretty hard," volunteered one juror in a hooded sweat shirt and basketball shorts, gesturing with his arms. "He's reckless!"
A fellow juror, standing with arms crossed and head cocked, was a little more sympathetic.
"He's struggling," she says. "He doesn't have friends, so being the class clown is an easy way to make friends."
The defendant was convicted of misdemeanor vandalism for turning on the emergency showers in his middle school's science lab on a dare. The flooding did more than $2,000 in damage.
Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott ordered the closure Thursday of a small school district near Houston that has been plagued by years of poor performance on state academic tests.
Kendleton ISD, a 78-student district southwest of Houston that serves elementary students through the sixth grade, is scheduled to be annexed July 1 to the neighboring Lamar Consolidated school district. Scott's order is pending approval by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Kendleton received state ratings of "academically unacceptable" for the last four years, most recently due to poor performance on the writing portion of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Previously, the ratings were caused by poor performance in reading, math and science.
In the State of Illinois, 65% of all education funding comes via property taxes. The state, meanwhile, contributes a measly 28%. Illinois' contribution ranks one of the lowest rates in the nation. Yet, Illinois is still $853.5 Million in arrears to school districts around the state.
Property Tax funding of school districts has long been a controversial issue. The biggest argument, against this method of funding, is that poorer communities must pay higher property taxes in order to meet the minimum cost of educating a student than the affluent ones. Each year, the state must establish a funding "foundation level". From that baseline and depending on property values, communities rely on different tax rates, along with expected state aid to arrive at the minimum cost of educating a student. This year that cost was determined to be $6,119 per pupil.
Doubling down on dubious bets is characteristic of compulsive gamblers and federal education policy.
The nation was essentially without such policy for grades K through 12, and better off for that, until 1965. In that year of liberals living exuberantly, they produced the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Now yet another president has announced yet another plan to fix education. His aspiration has a discouraging pedigree.
In 1983, three years after Jimmy Carter paid his debt to teachers' unions by creating the Education Department, a national commission declared America "a nation at risk": "If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." So in 1984, Ronald Reagan decreed improvements.
With all of this talk about Performance Management I thought it would be a good time to review the Performance of the Board Directors and the Board as a whole. I know that the Board does their own self-assessment, but I can't find it. Besides, it is impossible for anyone to hold themselves accountable. I simply have no faith in self-policing.
For accountability purposes we need some objectively measurable outcomes for the Board job.
The Board job, as I have often written, has three components.
First is to serve as the elected representatives of the public. This includes:
In a major shift, the salaries of Florida's 167,000 teachers could soon be tied to student test scores, rather than seniority and education level.
The state Senate on Wednesday approved a controversial bill by a 21-17 vote to dismantle teacher tenure, a decades-old system in which educators' pay is based on years of experience and whether they earn upper-level degrees.
New teachers hired after July 1 would work on one-year contracts and face dismissal if their students did not show learning gains on end-of-year exams for two years in any five-year period. For them, job security would be based soley on two factors: standardized scores and job reviews by principals. Existing teachers would have future pay raises tied to student scores and reviews but would keep their current job security.
"It takes a sledgehammer to the teaching profession," Sen. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, said Wednesday.
Stanford is training a new type of engineer for a fast-changing world and James Plummer wants to get the word out that students needn't be a total techie to apply.
"We're looking for kids who think of the world in terms of finding solutions to big problems, like global warming, international development, the environment," Plummer, dean of the School of Engineering, said in an interview. "We want to attract students ... who might have a wider world view" than those in the traditional math- and science-laden programs featured at the nation's top technical schools.
"We are not - and should not be - a technical institute," Plummer told the university's Faculty Senate last month. "If (students) come here, they can take advantage of all the other pieces of this campus, which are equally as good as the School of Engineering."
The approach has advantages when recruiting the kind of students Stanford wants, Plummer said. But it has also brought the engineering school some grief, both from the professional group that accredits it and from the employers who hire the graduates.
The Fordham Institute's expert reviewers have analyzed the draft Common Core K-12 education standards (made public on March 10) according to rigorous criteria. Their analyses lead to a grade of A- for the draft mathematics standards and B for those in Eng
Two weeks ago, American education approached a possible turning point, when the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) released drafts of proposed new academic standards in English language arts and math for kindergarten through high school. Already the object of much interest--and some controversy--these are standards that, once revised and finalized, will be candidates for adoption by individual states in place of those they're now using.
For months before they were made public, the "Common Core" standards were much discussed. Between now and April 2--the end of the public comment period on this draft--there will be plenty more. That is a healthy thing, both because the more thoughtful scrutiny these drafts receive, the better the final product is apt to be, and because the only way for these standards ever to gain traction in our far- flung, highly-decentralized, and loosely-coupled public education system is if peo- ple from all walks of life--parents, educators, employers, public officials, scholars, etc.--take part in reading, commenting, and shaping the final product.
But ought they gain traction? We think so. Assuming this draft only improves in the process of revision, the Common Core represents a rare opportunity for American K-12 education to re-boot. A chance to set forth, across state lines, a clear, ambi- tious, and actionable depiction of the essential skills, competencies, and knowledge that our young people should acquire in school and possess by the time they gradu- ate. Most big modern nations--including our allies and competitors--already have something like this for their education systems. If the U.S. does it well and if--this is a big if--the huge amount of work needed to operationalize these standards is earnestly undertaken in the months and years to follow, this country could find itself with far-better educated citizens than it has today. Many more of them will be "college- and career-ready" and that means the country as a whole will be stronger, safer, and more competitive.
The nation's students are mired at a basic level of reading in fourth and eighth grades, their achievement in recent years largely stagnant, according to a federal report Wednesday that suggests a dwindling academic payoff from the landmark No Child Left Behind law.
But reading performance has climbed in D.C. elementary schools, a significant counterpoint to the national trend, even though the city's scores remain far below average.
The report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that fourth-grade reading scores stalled after the law took effect in 2002, rose modestly in 2007, then stalled again in 2009. Eighth-grade scores showed a slight uptick since 2007 -- 1 point on a scale of 500 -- but no gain over the seven-year span when President George W. Bush's program for school reform was in high gear.
Less than five months after Detroit voters passed a $500.5 million school construction plan, nearly half of the 18 schools that were to be rebuilt or renovated are now headed for closure or plans for them have been altered.
The changes have outraged some supporters of the Proposal S bond who say they feel cheated for voting for a plan they were told would mean new construction or renovation in their neighborhood, but instead their schools will be shuttered as soon as this summer, according to the facilities plan released this week by Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools.
"It's a slap in the face to the community," said Tia Shepherd, whose children's schools, Cooley High School and Bethune Academy, were slated for $17 million in upgrades but now are closing. "Our community got shortchanged twice."
The proposed overhaul of No Child Left Behind is prompting concern from the Wyoming teachers' union.
President Barack Obama last week announced his administration would revamp the federal education law, officially known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), during an upcoming re-authorization process. The Wyoming Education Association sees the rewrite as both promising and troubling.
"The blueprint earns a grade of incomplete," WEA President Kathryn Valido said. "There are a lot of areas that need to be re-thought. There are some pieces in it that are a step in the right direction, but the overemphasis on one or two test scores to determine the effectiveness of a teacher or a school doesn't make sense."
When Parkview Superintendent Steve Lutzke talks to fellow superintendents, the question isn't, "Are you going to referendum?"
The question is, "When are you going to referendum?"
Declining enrollments and increasing costs that exceed revenue limits plague the Orfordville-based Parkview School District and its neighbor to the west, Brodhead. The results are referendums in both districts April 6 asking voters for permission to exceed state revenue caps.
"They have a lot of company," said John Ashley, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
Parkview and Brodhead join 34 other districts in the state planning 48 referendums on next month's ballot. Of those, 26 referendums are to exceed revenue caps.
Thanks to Julie for the alert about Rep. Reuven Carlyle blog thread about the so-called PTA tax that the district is levying on funds raised by PTAs (3.3%). The district hasn't even publicly announced this but it has been confirmed by several school principals. Shame on the district for not even having the courage of their convictions to publicly say this.
The latest scorecard gauging how well Wisconsin's students read compared with their classmates in other states showed little change from previous years, but the rest of the nation's fourth-graders have been catching up and Wisconsin's black students now rank behind those in every other state.
"Holding steady is not good enough," state schools Superintendent Tony Evers said about the results. "Despite increasing poverty that has a negative impact on student learning, we must do more to improve the reading achievement of all students in Wisconsin."
Across decades of interviewing candidates for the Madison School Board, the members of The Capital Times editorial board have talked with dozens of able contenders -- and a few not-so-able ones.
We have endorsed liberals and conservatives, friends and foes of the teachers union, veteran board members and newcomers -- always in response to a basic question: Which candidate would make the most valuable contribution to the seven-member board that sets the direction for what has been, is and we hope will always remain one of the finest urban school districts in the nation?
With this history providing a sense of perspective, we can say without a doubt that we have rarely if ever encountered a first-time candidate as impressive as James Howard.
James Howard is best prepared for the challenging job of serving on the Madison School Board.
Voters should support him in the April 6 election.
Howard, 56, a research economist, says he's trained and committed to analyzing data before making decisions. He'll bring that strong trait to a School Board that has sometimes let emotion get the best of it.
A good example is the difficult issue of consolidating schools with low enrollments to save money during tight times. The School Board backed down from its smart vote in 2007 to consolidate elementary schools on the Near East Side.
School administrators are staring down a triple-barreled threat.
State aid for schools is frozen. Minnesota is borrowing more than $2 billion in funding promised to schools to help balance the books, forcing districts to dip into their reserves and take out loans. And lawmakers still need to fill in an additional $1 billion shortfall.
So does that mean school districts should have more authority to raise property taxes without voter approval? Some education leaders believe so. The notion has been batted around for years but never gained traction.
"In any other year, I would be horrified by the idea," said Rep. Mindy Greiling, DFL-Roseville. "But I will consider this as a short-term solution. Education funding should be from the state. But schools need a lifeline right now."
The legislation lets the public see the workings of teams that identify threats of violence at colleges and universities.
The workings of college and university threat assessment teams would be opened to the public after violent incidents under a compromise bill passed by the General Assembly.
The compromise came after weeks of negotiations between legislators and open government advocates and now goes to Gov. Bob McDonnell, who is expected to act on it before April 21. The governor may sign, veto or amend the bill.
"It's a good outcome for everyone," Virginia Press Association Executive Director Ginger Stanley said of the legislation.
Even in a year of notable failures-from the stimulus to health care reform-the collapse of efforts to reform the Milwaukee Public Schools stands out as an epic flop. As veteran education reporter Alan J. Borsuk writes in our cover story, the stars seemingly were aligned for a mayoral takeover of the dysfunctional system.
"[Y]ou had the president of the United States, the secretary of education, the governor of Wisconsin and the mayor of Milwaukee-all Democrats-coming down firmly for what they wanted to see happen in the Democratic-controlled Wisconsin Legislature.
"And they didn't prevail."
The debate over the mayoral takeover, writes Borsuk, "could have been a real chance to discuss how to energize the deeply troubled MPS system. It could have been a catalyst for re-energizing the whole subject of improving education in Milwaukee. "Instead, it became a plodding tour of why things don't change easily in Milwaukee...."
Amid a sea of moms and dads wearing T-shirts declaring themselves "Proud charter parents" and kids waving handmade signs that read, "I am College Bound," Daniel Clark grabbed a microphone at P.S. 92 in Harlem earlier this month and told the more than 150 people gathered for a Department of Education hearing that his son Daniel Jr. and four friends now proudly call themselves the "Geek Five."
Mr. Clark says his son was a "super slacker" before he arrived at the Democracy Prep charter school two and half years ago. But the eighth grader "now goes around telling everyone he's going to be mayor--and he believes it."
Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, whose image has been frayed by a series of high-profile news controversies, is turning to former White House communications director and veteran Democratic media consultant Anita Dunn for help.
A D.C. schools spokeswoman confirmed Friday that the agency is negotiating a contract with Dunn's firm, Squier Knapp Dunn. The objective is to more effectively handle the heavy load of local and national news media attention that Rhee attracts and to help roll out major stories to greater strategic advantage. The spokeswoman said Dunn has devoted time to District school issues but would not elaborate.
A few months back, I wrote here at "Teacher Magazine" about RTI ("Response to Intervention") and its possible implications for and adaptations for gifted students. The response to that post has been really interesting and I've enjoyed hearing from so many of you about how RTI is being adapted to included the gifted population in your schools. I wanted to take a moment today to post a couple updates for you regarding happenings since I last wrote about the topic.
First, ASCD contacted me a couple months ago wanting to interview me about RTI and Gifted Education. The transcript of the interview is now available online and includes some great new links at the bottom with relevant RTI/GT information.
Robert Bobb's vision for radically restructuring Detroit's failing education system is validated by the decision of Kansas City to shutter half of its schools.
Bobb intends to tear apart the Detroit Public Schools and rebuild the district on a foundation of small, nimble schools that are responsive to the needs of all children and fully accountable for how students perform. Everything will change, from how schools are managed to how teachers teach, and schools that don't perform will be quickly shut down.
His proposals are raising howls from the special interests that benefit from keeping things as they are, as well as from some parents who aren't willing to endure the sacrifice -- closed schools and more rigorous standards -- to make the changes possible.
Whether it's the contentious multi-year negotiations over the teachers contract in Washington, D.C., or the debates in many states over competing for Race to the Top funds, teachers contracts are at the center of the education reform debate today. Once of interest only to education insiders, contract issues and calls for reform are now widespread. High profile editorial boards at major newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal regularly weigh-in on the topic. Articles in magazines like The New Yorker detail the effects of various contract provisions and processes.1 National voices as diverse as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are calling for more flexibility in how teachers are hired, fired, evaluated, and paid.
Despite increasing attention to contract reform, the public often has no idea what a typical teachers contract looks like. Although they are public documents, most contracts are not easily found on the Web sites of school districts or teachers unions; newspapers and local media do not publish them (and often offer only cursory coverage of the issues being discussed during collective bargaining negotiations).2 Meanwhile, those negotiations are often held out of public view, and the deals cut late at night. The documents themselves can be cumbersome, lawyerly, heavily influenced by side agreements and addendums, and generally hard for non-experts to figure out.
Queen Elizabeth may seem ancient to school children, but did she really invent the telephone? Ten percent of British students think so, according to a survey of science knowledge. They also believe Sir Isaac Newton discovered fire, and Luke Skywalker was the first person on the moon.
It's not just the British. While on travel recently, a seatmate (probably 30) asked me where Denver and Chicago were on the map (we were flying to Denver). Another seatmate some time later mentioned that their retail business deals with many citizens who don't know the difference between horizontal and vertical...
The Obama Administration wants to revise the No Child Left Behind education law, which is understandable because the law has flaws. But it's too bad many of the proposed fixes would weaken the statute and undermine the Administration's twin goal of raising state education standards.
Some of the White House proposals make sense, such as the push for more charter schools that can focus on the specific needs of their student populations by operating outside of collective bargaining agreements. We also like using student test scores to measure an instructor's effectiveness and influence teacher pay. Both reforms are strongly opposed by the teachers unions, and Team Obama deserves credit for putting children ahead of the National Education Association.
Other parts of its proposal leave us scratching our heads. The Administration wants to junk NCLB's requirement that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014 and replace it with an equally unrealistic goal of making all kids "college ready" by 2020. By this thinking, it's impossible to teach every kid to read at grade level within the next three years, but getting all of them ready for higher education six years later is doable.
This morning the Obama Administration officially released its proposal for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka, No Child Left Behind). The proposal is a mixed bag, and still one with a gaping hole in the bottom.
Among some generally positive things, the proposal would eliminate NCLB's ridiculous annual-yearly-progress and "proficiency" requirements, which have driven states to constantly change standards and tests to avoid having to help students achieve real proficiency. It would also end many of the myriad, wasteful categorical programs that infest the ESEA, though it's a pipedream to think members of Congress will actually give up all of their pet, vote-buying programs.
On the negative side of the register, the proposed reauthorization would force all states to either sign onto national mathematics and language-arts standards, or get a state college to certify their standards as "college and career ready." It would also set a goal of all students being college and career ready by 2020. But setting a single, national standard makes no logical sense because all kids have different needs and abilities; no one curriculum will ever optimally serve but a tiny minority of students.
Issaquah and Sammamish are home to a well educated population, many of which are employed in professional and high tech occupations. Thus, it is surprising that the Issaquah School District administration is doing everything possible to place very poor math books in its schools.
Tomorrow (Wednesday, March 24) night the Issaquah School Board will vote on the administration's recommendation for the Discovering Math series in their high schools. These are very poor math texts:
(1) Found to be "unsound" by mathematicians hired the State Board of Education.
(2) Found to be inferior to a more traditional series (Holt) by pilot tests by the Bellevue School District
(3) That have been rejected by Bellevue, Lake Washington, North Shore, and Shoreline (to name only a few)
(4) Whose selection by the Seattle School District was found to be arbitrary and capricious by King County Judge Spector.
(5) That are classic, weak, inquiry or "reform" math textbooks that stress group work, student investigations, and calculator use over the acquisition of key math skills.
The pattern of an increasing number of open enrollment transfer applications continued this spring. As of March, 18, 2010 there were 765 unique resident MMSD students applying to attend non-MMSD districts and schools. The ratio of number of leaver applications to enterer applications is now 5:1.
It is important to note that not all applications result in students actually changing their district or school of enrollment. For example, for the 2009-10 school year although 402 new open enrollment students were approved by both MMSD and the non-resident districts to attend the non-resident district, only 199 actually were enrolled in the non-resident district on the third Friday September 2009 membership count date. Still, the trend has been upward in the number of students leaving the district.
America's nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation's teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores--things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. "Let's be honest," darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University's Teachers College last February. "What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?" It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation's teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)--self-actualization, following one's joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity--but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in "constructing one's own knowledge," or "contextualized knowledge." Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to "professionalize" teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats' pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in "Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education" that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
As with most education classes, the title of Professor Nelson's course doesn't give a clear sense of what it is about. Unfortunately, Professor Nelson doesn't either. The semester began, she said in a pre-class interview, by "building a community, rich of talk, in which students look at what they themselves are doing by in-class writing." On this, the third meeting of the semester, Professor Nelson said that she would be "getting the students to develop the subtext of what they're doing." I would soon discover why Professor Nelson was so vague.
"Developing the subtext" turns out to involve a chain reaction of solipsistic moments. After taking attendance and--most admirably--quickly checking the students' weekly handwriting practice, Professor Nelson begins the main work of the day: generating feather-light "texts," both written and oral, for immediate group analysis. She asks the students to write for seven minutes on each of three questions; "What excites me about teaching?" "What concerns me about teaching?" and then, the moment that brands this class as hopelessly steeped in the Anything But Knowledge credo: "What was it like to do this writing?"
This last question triggers a quickening volley of self-reflexive turns. After the students read aloud their predictable reflections on teaching, Professor Nelson asks: "What are you hearing?" A young man states the obvious: "Everyone seems to be reflecting on what their anxieties are." This is too straightforward an answer. Professor Nelson translates into ed-speak: "So writing gave you permission to think on paper about what's there." Ed-speak dresses up the most mundane processes in dramatic terminology--one doesn't just write, one is "given permission to think on paper"; one doesn't converse, one "negotiates meaning." Then, like a champion tennis player finishing off a set, Nelson reaches for the ultimate level of self-reflexivity and drives it home: "What was it like to listen to each other's responses?"
The self-reflection isn't over yet, however. The class next moves into small groups--along with in-class writing, the most pervasive gimmick in progressive classrooms today--to discuss a set of student-teaching guidelines. After ten minutes, Nelson interrupts the by-now lively and largely off-topic conversations, and asks: "Let's talk about how you felt in these small groups." The students are picking up ed-speak. "It shifted the comfort zone," reveals one. "It was just acceptance; I felt the vibe going through the group." Another adds: "I felt really comfortable; I had trust there." Nelson senses a "teachable moment." "Let's talk about that," she interjects. "We are building trust in this class; we are learning how to work with each other."
Now, let us note what this class was not: it was not about how to keep the attention of eight-year-olds or plan a lesson or make the Pilgrims real to first-graders. It did not, in other words, contain any material (with the exception of the student-teacher guidelines) from the outside world. Instead, it continuously spun its own subject matter out of itself. Like a relationship that consists of obsessively analyzing the relationship, the only content of the course was the course itself.
How did such navel-gazing come to be central to teacher education? It is the almost inevitable consequence of the Anything But Knowledge doctrine, born in a burst of quintessentially American anti-intellectual fervor in the wake of World War I. Educators within the federal government and at Columbia's Teachers College issued a clarion call to schools: cast off the traditional academic curriculum and start preparing young people for the demands of modern life. America is a forward-looking country, they boasted; what need have we for such impractical disciplines as Greek, Latin, and higher math? Instead, let the students then flooding the schools take such useful courses as family membership, hygiene, and the worthy use of leisure time. "Life adjustment," not wisdom or learning, was to be the goal of education.
The early decades of this century forged the central educational fallacy of our time: that one can think without having anything to think about. Knowledge is changing too fast to be transmitted usefully to students, argued William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College, the most influential American educator of the century; instead of teaching children dead facts and figures, schools should teach them "critical thinking," he wrote in 1925. What matters is not what you know, but whether you know how to look it up, so that you can be a "lifelong learner."
Two final doctrines rounded out the indelible legacy of progressivism. First, Harold Rugg's The Child-Centered School (1928) shifted the locus of power in the classroom from the teacher to the student. In a child-centered class, the child determines what he wants to learn. Forcing children into an existing curriculum inhibits their self-actualization, Rugg argued, just as forcing them into neat rows of chairs and desks inhibits their creativity. The teacher becomes an enabler, an advisor; not, heaven forbid, the transmitter of a pre-existing body of ideas, texts, or worst of all, facts. In today's jargon, the child should "construct" his own knowledge rather than passively receive it. Bu the late 1920s, students were moving their chairs around to form groups of "active learners" pursuing their own individual interests, and, instead of a curriculum, the student-centered classroom followed just one principle: "activity leading to further activity without badness," in Kilpatrick's words. Today's educators still present these seven-decades-old practices as cutting-edge.
As E.D. Hirsch observes, the child-centered doctrines grew out of the romantic idealization of children. If the child was, in Wordsworth's words, a "Mighty Prophet! Seer Blest!" then who needs teachers? But the Mighty Prophet emerged from student-centered schools ever more ignorant and incurious as the schools became more vacuous. By the 1940s and 1950s, schools were offering classes in how to put on nail polish and how to act on a date. The notion that learning should push students out of their narrow world had been lost.
The final cornerstone of progressive theory was the disdain for report cards and objective tests of knowledge. These inhibit authentic learning, Kilpatrick argued; and he carried the day, to the eternal joy of students everywhere.
The foregoing doctrines are complete bunk, but bunk that has survived virtually unchanged to the present. The notion that one can teach "metacognitive" thinking in the abstract is senseless. Students need to learn something to learn how to learn at all. The claim that prior knowledge is superfluous because one can always look it up, preferably on the Internet, is equally senseless. Effective research depends on preexisting knowledge. Moreover, if you don't know in what century the atomic bomb was dropped without rushing to an encyclopedia, you cannot fully participate in society. Lastly, Kilpatrick's influential assertion that knowledge was changing too fast to be taught presupposes a blinkered definition of knowledge that excludes the great works and enterprises of the past.
The rejection of testing rests on premises as flawed as the push for "critical thinking skills." Progressives argue that if tests exist, then teachers will "teach to the test"--a bad thing, in their view. But why would "teaching to a test" that asked for, say, the causes of the [U.S.] Civil War be bad for students? Additionally, progressives complain that testing provokes rote memorization--again, a bad thing. One of the most tragically influential education professors today, Columbia's Linda Darling-Hammond, director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, an advocacy group for increased teacher "professionalization," gives a telling example of what she considers a criminally bad test in her hackneyed 1997 brief for progressive education, The Right to Learn. She points disdainfully to the following question from the 1995 New York State Regents Exam in biology (required for high school graduation) as "a rote recall of isolated facts and vocabulary terms": "The tissue which conducts organic food through a vascular plant is composed of: (1) Cambium cells; (2) Xylem cells; (3) Phloem cells; (4) Epidermal cells."
Only a know-nothing could be offended by so innocent a question. It never occurs to Darling-Hammond that there may be a joy in mastering the parts of a plant or the organelles of a cell, and that such memorization constitutes learning. Moreover, when, in the progressives' view, will a student ever be held accountable for such knowledge? Does Darling-Hammond believe that a student can pursue a career in, say, molecular biology or in medicine without it? And how else will that learning be demonstrated, if not in a test? But of course such testing will produce unequal results, and that is the real target of Darling-Hammond's animus.
Once you dismiss real knowledge as the goal of education, you have to find something else to do. That's why the Anything But Knowledge doctrine leads directly to Professor Nelson's odd course. In thousands of education schools across the country, teachers are generating little moments of meaning, which they then subject to instant replay. Educators call this "constructing knowledge," a fatuous label for something that is neither construction nor knowledge but mere game-playing. Teacher educators, though, posses a primitive relationship to words. They believe that if they just label something "critical thinking" or "community-building," these activities will magically occur...
The Anything But Knowledge credo leaves education professors and their acolytes free to concentrate on more pressing matters than how to teach the facts of history or the rules of sentence construction. "Community-building" is one of their most urgent concerns. Teacher educators conceive of their classes as sites of profound political engagement, out of which the new egalitarian order will emerge. A case in point is Columbia's required class, "Teaching English in Diverse Social and Cultural Contexts," taught by Professor Barbara Tenney (a pseudonym). "I want to work at a very conscious level with you to build community in this class," Tenney tells her attentive students on the first day of the semester this spring. "You can do it consciously, and you ought to do it in your own classes." Community-building starts by making nameplates for our desks. Then we all find a partner to interview about each other's "identity." Over the course of the semester, each student will conduct two more "identity" interviews with different partners. After the interview, the inevitable self-reflexive moment arrives, when Tenney asks: "How did it work?" This is a sign that we are on our way to "constructing knowledge."...
All this artificial "community-building," however gratifying to the professors, has nothing to do with learning. Learning is ultimately a solitary activity: we have only one brain, and at some point we must exercise it in private. One could learn an immense amount about Schubert's lieder or calculus without ever knowing the name of one's seatmate. Such a view is heresy to the education establishment, determined, as Rita Kramer has noted, to eradicate any opportunity for individual accomplishment, with its sinister risk of superior achievement. For the educrats, the group is the irreducible unit of learning. Fueling this principle is the gap in achievement between whites and Asians, on the one hand, and other minorities on the other. Unwilling to adopt the discipline and teaching practices that would help reduce the gap, the education establishment tries to conceal it under group projects....
The consequences of the Anything But Knowledge credo for intellectual standards have been dire. Education professors are remarkably casual when it comes to determining whether their students actually know anything, rarely asking them, for example, what can you tell us about the American Revolution? The ed schools incorrectly presume that students have learned everything they need to know in their other or previous college courses, and that the teacher certification exam will screen out people who didn't.
Even if college education were reliably rigorous and comprehensive, education majors aren't the students most likely to profit from it. Nationally, undergraduate education majors have lower SAT and ACT scores than students in any other program of study. Only 16 percent of education majors scored in the top quartile of 1992-1993 graduates, compared with 33 percent of humanities majors. Education majors were overrepresented in the bottom quartile, at 30 percent. In New York City, many education majors have an uncertain command of English--I saw one education student at City College repeatedly write "choce" for "choice"-- and appear altogether ill at ease in a classroom. To presume anything about this population without a rigorous content exit exam is unwarranted.
The laissez-faire attitude toward student knowledge rests on "principled" grounds, as well as on see-no-evil inertia. Many education professors embrace the facile post-structuralist view that knowledge is always political. "An education program can't have content [knowledge] specifics," explains Migdalia Romero, chair of Hunter College's Department of Curriculum and Teaching, "because then you have a point of view. Once you define exactly what finite knowledge is, it becomes a perspective." The notion that culture could possess a pre-political common store of texts and idea is anathema to the modern academic.
The most powerful dodge regurgitates William Heard Kilpatrick's classic "critical thinking" scam. Asked whether a future teacher should know the date of the 1812 war, Professor Romero replied: "Teaching and learning is not about dates, facts, and figures, but about developing critical thinking." When pressed if there were not some core facts that a teacher or student should know, she valiantly held her ground. "There are two ways of looking at teaching and learning," she replied. "Either you are imparting knowledge, giving an absolute knowledge base, or teaching and learning is about dialogue, a dialogue that helps to internalize and to raise questions." Though she offered the disclaimer "of course you need both," Romero added that teachers don't have to know everything, because they can always look things up....
Disregard for language runs deep in the teacher education profession, so much so that ed school professors tolerate glaring language deficiencies in schoolchildren. Last January, Manhattan's Park West High School shut down for a day, so that its faculty could bone up on progressive pedagogy. One of the more popular staff development seminars ws "Using Journals and Learning Logs." The presenters--two Park West teachers and a representative from the New York City Writing Project, an anti-grammar initiative run by the Lehman College's Education School--proudly passed around their students' journal writing, including the following representative entry on "Matriarchys v. pratiarchys [sic]": "The different between Matriarchys and patriarchys is that when the mother is in charge of the house. sometime the children do whatever they want. But sometimes the mother can do both roll as mother and as a father too and they can do it very good." A more personal entry described how the author met her boyfriend: "He said you are so kind I said you noticed and then he hit me on my head. I made-believe I was crying and when he came naire me I slaped him right in his head and than I ran...to my grandparients home and he was right behind me. Thats when he asked did I have a boyfriend."
The ubiquitous journal-writing cult holds that such writing should go uncorrected. Fortunately, some Park West teachers bridled at the notion. "At some point, the students go into the job market, and they're not being judged 'holistically,'" protested a black teacher, responding to the invocation of the state's "holistic" model for grading writing. Another teacher bemoaned the Board of Ed's failure to provide guidance on teaching grammar. "My kids are graduating without skills," he lamented.
Such views, however, were decidedly in the minority. "Grammar is related to purpose," soothed the Lehman College representative, educrat code for the proposition that asking students to write grammatically on topics they are not personally "invested in" is unrealistic. A Park West presenter burst out with a more direct explanation for his chilling indifference to student incompetence. "I'm not going to spend my life doing error diagnosis! I'm not going to spend my weekend on that!" Correcting papers used to be part of the necessary drudgery of a teacher's job. No more, with the advent of enlightened views about "self-expression" and "writing with intentionality."
However easygoing the educational establishment is regarding future teachers' knowledge of history, literature, and science, there is one topic that it assiduously monitors: their awareness of racism. To many teacher educators, such an awareness is the most important tool a young teacher can bring to the classroom. It cannot be developed too early. Rosa, a bouncy and enthusiastic junior at Hunter College, has completed only her first semester of education courses, but already she has mastered the most important lesson: American is a racist, imperialist country, most like, say, Nazi Germany. "We are lied to by the very institutions we have come to trust," she recalls from her first-semester reading. "It's all government that's inventing these lies, such as Western heritage."
The source of Rosa's newfound wisdom, Donald Macedo's Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know, is an execrable book by any measure. But given its target audience--impressionable education students--it comes close to being a crime. Widely assigned at Hunter, and in use in approximately 150 education schools nationally, it is an illiterate, barbarically ignorant Marxist-inspired screed against America. Macedo opens his first chapter, "Literacy for Stupidification: The Pedagogy of Big Lies," with a quote from Hitler and quickly segues to Ronald Reagan: "While busily calling out slogans from their patriotic vocabulary memory warehouse, these same Americans dutifully vote...for Ronald Reagan...giving him a landslide victory...These same voters ascended [sic] to Bush's morally high-minded call to apply international laws against Saddam Hussein's tyranny and his invasion of Kuwait." Standing against this wave of ignorance and imperialism is a lone 12-year-old from Boston, whom Macedo celebrates for his courageous refusal to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
What does any of this have to do with teaching? Everything, it turns out. In the 1960s, educational progressivism took on an explicitly political cast: schools were to fight institutional racism and redistribute power. Today, Columbia's Teachers College holds workshops on cultural and political "oppression," in which students role-play ways to "usurp the existing power structure," and the New York State Regents happily call teachers "the ultimate change agents." To be a change agent, one must first learn to "critique" the existing social structure. Hence, the assignment of such propaganda as Macedo's book.
But Macedo is just one of the political tracts that Hunter force-fed the innocent Rosa in her first semester. She also learned about the evils of traditional children's stories from the education radical Herbert Kohl. In Should We Burn Babar? Kohl weighs the case for and against the dearly beloved children's classic, Babar the Elephant, noting in passing that it prevented him from "questioning the patriarchy earlier." He decides--but let Rosa expound the meaning of Kohl's book: "[Babar]'s like a children's book, right? [But] there's an underlying meaning about colonialism, about like colonialism, and is it OK, it's really like it's OK, but it's like really offensive to the people." Better burn Babar now!...
Though the current diversity battle cry is "All students can learn," the educationists continually lower expectations of what they should learn. No longer are students expected to learn all their multiplication tables in the third grade, as has been traditional. But while American educators come up with various theories about fixed cognitive phases to explain why our children should go slow, other nationalities trounce us. Sometimes, we're trounced in our own backyards, causing cognitive dissonance in local teachers.
A young student at Teachers College named Susan describes incredulously a Korean-run preschool in Queens. To her horror, the school, the Holy Mountain School, violates every progressive tenet: rather than being "student-centered" and allowing each child to do whatever he chooses, the school imposes a curriculum on the children, based on the alphabet. "Each week, the children get a different letter," Susan recalls grimly. Such an approach violates "whole language" doctrine, which holds that students can't "grasp the [alphabetic] symbols without the whole word or the meaning or any context in their lives." In Susan's words, Holy Mountain's further infractions include teaching its wildly international students only in English and failing to provide an "anti-bias multicultural curriculum." The result? By the end of preschool the children learn English and are writing words. Here is the true belief in the ability of all children to learn, for it is backed up by action....
Given progressive education's dismal record, all New Yorkers should tremble at what the Regents have in store for the state. The state's teacher education establishment, led by Columbia's Linda Darling-Hammond, has persuaded the Regents to make its monopoly on teacher credentialing total. Starting in 2003, according to the Regents plan steaming inexorably toward adoption, all teacher candidates must pass through an education school to be admitted to a classroom. We know, alas, what will happen to them there.
This power grab will be a disaster for children. By making ed school inescapable, the Regents will drive away every last educated adult who may not be willing to sit still for its foolishness but who could bring to the classroom unusual knowledge or experience. The nation's elite private schools are full of such people, and parents eagerly proffer tens of thousands of dollars to give their children the benefit of such skill and wisdom.
Amazingly, even the Regents, among the nation's most addled education bodies, sporadically acknowledge what works in the classroom. A Task Force on Teaching paper cites some of the factors that allow other countries to wallop us routinely in international tests: a high amount of lesson content (in other words, teacher-centered, not student-centered, learning), individual tracking of students, and a coherent curriculum. The state should cling steadfastly to its momentary insight, at odds with its usual policies, and discard its foolish plan to enshrine Anything But Knowledge as its sole education dogma. Instead of permanently establishing the teacher education status quo, it should search tirelessly for alternatives and for potential teachers with a firm grasp of subject matter and basic skills. Otherwise ed school claptrap will continue to stunt the intellectual growth of the Empire State's children.
[Heather Mac Donald graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and earned an M.A. at Cambridge University. She holds the J.D. degree from Stanford Law School, and is a John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal]
"Teach by Example"
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The fallout from Clayton County schools' recent meltdown, in all likelihood, will drift down on Georgia's 179 other boards of education this summer.
Lawmakers are nearing final approval of a bill that would set minimum ethics standards for local school boards and empower the governor, in some cases, to remove members who can't adhere to them. It would take effect July 1.
The measure is a response to the Clayton school system being stripped of accreditation in 2008 over ethical breaches by several board members.
They met behind closed doors and berated staff in public. One worked behind the scenes to fire her son's football coach. Several aligned themselves with competing teachers' groups and voted along union lines.
Supercool School, which allows anyone to create an online learning environment for which they can charge students, says it has a $450 million dollar total addressable market opportunity in the U.S. alone, with over two million potential customers.
Supercool founder Steli Efti told me what he's trying to create is the Ning of Education, allowing anyone to build their own educational site.
"We provide a white label platform that allows everyone to create and customize an online school," he said in an email. "The platform allows for social learning and real-time virtual classrooms and can be turned into a business by monetizing content and courses online."
In February 2009, with some 600,000 education jobs threatened by the worst fiscal downturn in decades, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) allocated about $100 billion to states. Topping the list of ARRA's goals was saving and creating jobs. Since then, states have had to provide quarterly estimates of ARRA-funded jobs, and yet these reports stop far short of telling the whole story on whether the stimulus plan is meeting its job goals. Some have voiced methodological concerns, and many have acknowledged that identifying those jobs paid for by ARRA funds does not imply that the jobs were indeed saved or created.
The larger question that has been left unanswered, however, is whether ARRA has indeed worked to stabilize education employment from what otherwise might have been heavy losses in the current fiscal environment. Or for some, a parallel question is whether ARRA has prompted states to grow their education workforce, thereby making them more vulnerable to a "funding cliff" with larger layoffs when ARRA ends. Answering these questions requires evidence of the greater trend in total K-12 jobs, not just the trends in ARRA-funded jobs.
The world's five biggest AAA-rated states are all at risk of soaring debt costs and will have to implement austerity plans that threaten "social cohnesion", according to a report on sovereign debt by Moody's.
The US rating agency said the US, the UK, Germany, France, and Spain are walking a tightrope as they try to bring public finances under control without nipping recovery in the bud. It warned of "substantial execution risk" in withdrawal of stimulus.
"Growth alone will not resolve an increasingly complicated debt equation. Preserving debt affordability at levels consistent with AAA ratings will invariably require fiscal adjustments of a magnitude that, in some cases, will test social cohesion," said Pierre Cailleteau, the chief author.
"We are not talking about revolution, but the severity of the crisis will force governments to make painful choices that expose weaknesses in society," he said.
If countries tighten too soon, they risk stifling recovery and making maters worse by eroding tax revenues: yet waiting too is "no less risky" as it would test market patience. "At the current elevated debt levels, a rise in the government's cost of funding can very quickly render debt much less affordable."
Among piles of paperwork and shelves crowded with books on edu-topics, David Elliott's office at Coe Elementary is crammed with pictures of baseball teams he has coached, crayoned drawings, and letters with childish handwriting careening all over the page. There's a lot of stuff that he is going to need to haul out of here at the end of June when he moves to become principal at Queen Anne Elementary.
Elliott concedes that a recent shift in focus at this soon-to-open school, coupled with a lack of publicity, has a lot of parents scratching their heads about whether or not to enroll their child in this so called "Option School." And time is running out -- the Open Enrollment period will come to a close on March 31st. To that end, Elliott sat down with me earlier this week (full disclosure: my kids go to Coe Elementary) to discuss this new venture he is heading up. Elliot's answers to my questions are in italics.
At first Seattle Public Schools said that Queen Anne Elementary was going to be a Montessori school. Now it is going to have a "technology" focus. How did that change come about?
The Kansas City, Mo., district is closing nearly half its campuses after 10 years of dwindling student population. It's what happens when a district loses support of the public it is meant to serve.
During the warm months, when students at Westport High School got too hot, they cooled down by moving to one of the many vacant classrooms on campus. It was one of the advantages of having 400 students assigned to a school that could hold 1,200.
The downside became apparent last week, though, when the Kansas City school board voted to close Westport and 25 other schools -- nearly half of the district's campuses.
Big-city districts shutter schools all the time. Cities such as Denver and Portland, Ore., have seen childless young families repopulate their urban cores and have adjusted accordingly.
But what is happening in Kansas City is different in scale than anywhere else in the country. It's an extreme example of what happens when a school system loses the support of the public it's meant to serve.
Last week's column, full of practical suggestions on how to limit cheating, did not seem controversial to me. Many teachers sent their own ideas. Many recommended small adjustments, such as having the questions in different order for different students, to hinder copying.
So I was surprised to hear from Erich Martel, an Advanced Placement U.S. History teacher at Wilson High School in the District, that his principal, Peter Cahall, was critical of him doing that.
Martel's classroom, 18 by 25 feet, feels like shoebox to him. Some days he squeezes in 30 students, plus himself. That is 15 square feet per student, which Martel has been told is well below the district standard of 25 square feet. The cramped conditions led to a disagreement when Cahall assessed Martel's work under the school district's IMPACT teacher evaluation system.
The data, as Ravitch says, disappoints on other fronts, too--not least in failing to confirm high hopes for charter schools, whose freedom from union rules was supposed to make them success stories. To the shock of many (including Ravitch), they haven't been. And this isn't just according to researchers sympathetic to labor. A 2003 national study by the Department of Education (under George W. Bush) found that charter schools performed, on average, no better than traditional public schools. (The study was initially suppressed because it hadn't reached the desired conclusions.) Another study by two Stanford economists, financed by the Walton Family and Eli and Edythe Broad foundations (staunch charter supporters), involved an enormous sample, 70 percent of all charter students. It found that an astonishing 83 percent of charter schools were either no better or actually worse than traditional public schools serving similar populations. Indeed, the authors concluded that bad charter schools outnumber good ones by a ratio of roughly 2 to 1.
Obviously, some high-visibility success stories exist, such as the chain run by the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, which I've previously discussed here. But these are the decided exceptions, not the rule. And there's no evidence that a majority of eligible families are taking advantage of charters, good or bad. "While advocates of choice"--again, Ravitch included--"were certain that most families wanted only the chance to escape their neighborhood school, the first five years of NCLB demonstrated the opposite," she writes. In California, for example, less than 1 percent of students in failing schools actually sought a transfer. In Colorado, less than 2 percent did. If all this seems a little counterintuitive, Ravitch would be the first to agree. That's why she supported charters in the first place. But the evidence in their favor, she insists, simply hasn't materialized.
Lake Wobegon has nothing on the UW-Madison School of Education. All of the children in Garrison Keillor's fictional Minnesota town are "above average." Well, in the School of Education they're all A students.
The 1,400 or so kids in the teacher-training department soared to a dizzying 3.91 grade point average on a four-point scale in the spring 2009 semester.
This was par for the course, so to speak. The eight departments in Education (see below) had an aggregate 3.69 grade point average, next to Pharmacy the highest among the UW's schools. Scrolling through the Registrar's online grade records is a discombobulating experience, if you hold to an old-school belief that average kids get C's and only the really high performers score A's.
Much like a modern-day middle school honors assembly, everybody's a winner at the UW School of Education. In its Department of Curriculum and Instruction (that's the teacher-training program), 96% of the undergraduates who received letter grades collected A's and a handful of A/B's. No fluke, another survey taken 12 years ago found almost exactly the same percentage.
A host of questions are prompted by the appearance of such brilliance. Can all these apprentice teachers really be that smart? Is there no difference in their abilities? Why do the grades of education majors far outstrip the grades of students in the physical sciences and mathematics? (Take a look at the chart below.)
Here's how my formal education began: On a September morning in 1957, my mother and I walked the block and a half to 53rd Street School on Milwaukee's northwest side. We went to the school office, she filled out some forms, said goodbye and "see you at lunch." Here was another Kozak for the Milwaukee Public Schools to educate.
There was, of course, no choice, which made the entire process much simpler. Since we weren't Catholic, the parochial alternative wasn't an option, and if there were any private schools in Milwaukee at the time (there was one), I'm sure my parents never considered it.
There was good reason for my parents' carefree attitude. The public school system in Milwaukee circa 1957 was first-rate. The teachers were committed professionals. The curriculum had not changed appreciably since my parents' day. They were satisfied with their experience and found the public schools perfectly adequate for their children.
One by one the preschoolers washed their hands after having their milk and snacks and sat on a rug, waiting for teacher Jill Dunlop 001 ? 0008.00 00001to introduce the letter of the day.
Using a Hippopotamus hand puppet, Dunlop sounded out the letter "h" and asked the five children, ages 3 to 5, to each identify words such as house, horse and hammer from various pictures on her easel. The abilities of the children ranged from 4-year-old Emma, who can write her name, to 3-year-old Kimberly, a native Spanish speaker who is so painfully shy she doesn't speak a word during the 2 1/2 hour class.
At Butler's Aaron Decker School, these preschoolers are learning to become students three days a week this year, down from five days last year. Local voters rejected the school budget last year, forcing cuts, including the preschool program. Federal stimulus funding was used to restore the limited program, so it's unclear if the program will survive next year.
"We're trying to hold on as much as we can. Three days is better than no days," said Virginia Scala, Decker's principal.
It is easy to get drawn into the union-management aspects of public education and forget that the schools are there for the kids. What the kids need are stars in the classroom: great teachers.
With that in mind, the public should support the effort by Hartford school leaders to change from a system of district-wide teacher seniority to one of school-based seniority.
The city's Board of Education voted Tuesday to ask the State Board of Education to step in and change this contractual guarantee. The state board has the authority to intervene in low-achieving schools to alter a union contract, but to date has never done so.
Under the current rules, the least experienced teachers are the first to be laid off and can be "bumped" by more experienced teachers from any school in the district. This can result in a disruptive shuffle of teachers among various schools.
Supporters of the proposed change say this endangers the quality of specialty schools, where particular themes or methods require teachers to have special qualifications or training.
The D.C. Public charter school board (Pcsb) has produced a detailed annual performance report for each school under its oversight since 1999. Each school report provides a school profile, including enrollment, attendance and discipline, demographic, graduation and college acceptance data; a review of the Pcsb's evaluations of each school's academic, financial, compliance and governance performance, as well as board actions; test data, and each school's self- described unique accomplishments. the reports are intended to be a resource for consumer decision-making and public accountability. the notes on page 5 and 6 explain each section of the school performance report and the source of the data, as appropriate.
the 2009 school Performance reports include data collected during the 2008-2009 school year. as the sole chartering authority in Washington, D.C., the D.C. Public charter school board remains committed to its role as a partner in the city-wide effort to raise student academic achievement and improve public education in D.c., by providing families with quality public charter school options.
Before the debate:
24% FOR 43% AGAINST 33% UNDECIDED
After the debate:
25% FOR 68% AGAINST 7% UNDECIDED
Robert Rozenkranz: Thank you all very much for coming. It's my pleasure to welcome you. My job in these evenings is to frame the debate. And we thought this one would be interesting because it seems like unions would be acting in their own self interest and in the interest of their members. In the context of public education, this might mean fighting to have the highest number of dues paying members at the highest possible levels of pay and benefits. With the greatest possible jobs security. It implies resistance to technological innovation, to charter schools, to measuring and rewarding merit and to dismissals for almost any reason at all. Qualifications, defined as degrees from teacher's colleges, trump subject matter expertise. Seniority trumps classroom performance. Individual teachers, perhaps the overwhelming majority of them do care about their students but the union's job is to advocate for teachers, not for education. But is that a reason to blame teachers unions for failing schools? The right way to think about this is to hold all other variables constant. Failing schools are often in failing neighborhoods where crime and drugs are common and two parent families are rare. Children may not be taught at home to restrain their impulses or to work now for rewards in the future, or the value and importance of education. Even the most able students might find it hard to progress in classrooms dominated by students of lesser ability who may be disinterested at best and disruptive at worse. In these difficult conditions, maybe teachers know better than remote administrators what their students need and the unions give them an effective voice. Maybe unions do have their own agenda. But is that really the problem? Is there strong statistical evidence that incentive pay improves classroom performance? Or is that charter schools produce better results? Or that strong unions spell weak educational outcomes, holding everything else constant? That it seems to us is the correct way to frame tonight's debate, why we expect it will give you ample reason to think twice.
Alabama's prepaid college tuition plan appears unable to pay tuition beyond the fall semester of 2011 and still have enough money to provide refunds to the 44,000 participants, administrators said.
For leaders of the Save Alabama PACT parents group, that creates the need for the Legislature to find a solution in the current legislative session.
Patti Lambert of Decatur, the group's co-founder, said she would prefer a solution in the Statehouse rather than the courthouse, but members may have no choice but to join a handful of parents who have already sued the state to demand the program keep its promise of full tuition.
"I suspect we will be forced to. We are certainly not going to wait until we have no room to maneuver," Lambert said in an interview Tuesday.
Gregory Thornton wants to fly pretty much below the radar right now.
The incoming superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools says he doesn't take over until July 1, he doesn't want to interfere with the current superintendent, William Andrekopoulos, and he's just beginning to know the people and issues in his visits to Milwaukee. So he doesn't want to get too specific or out front with what he wants to do with his new job.
But talk to him for 75 minutes in a private room at a cafe and you begin to see where he wants to go, and it includes places that might please some who didn't favor him being hired and displease some who did.
In short: If you like what Michael Bonds is doing as president of the School Board, there's a strong chance you'll like Thornton.
Bonds has become a strong force within MPS in the year since he became head of the nine-member board. He is assertive, firm and smart politically. He wants the board to have more power over MPS, and that's happening. He was at the center of the fight to stop Gov. Jim Doyle and Mayor Tom Barrett's bid to switch to mayoral control of MPS, and he's winning.
President Obama is proposing a massive rewrite of the No Child Left Behind policy. But many teachers are skeptical. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, says the president's plan gives teachers full responsibility but no authority.
Kids in China already attend school 41 days a year more than students in the U.S. Now, schools across the country are cutting back to four-day weeks. Chester E. Finn Jr. on how to build a smarter education system.
"He who labors diligently need never despair, for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor." --Menander
How many days a year did the future Alexander the Great study with Aristotle? Did Socrates teach Plato on Saturdays as well as weekdays? During summer's heat and winter's chill?
Though such details remain shrouded in mystery, historians have unearthed some information about education in ancient times. Spartans famously put their children through a rigorous public education system, although the focus was on military training rather than reading and writing. Students in Mesopotamia attended their schools from sunrise to sunset.
In the face of budget shortfalls, school districts in many parts of the United States today are moving toward four-day weeks. This is despite evidence that longer school weeks and years can improve academic performance. Schoolchildren in China attend school 41 days a year more than most young Americans--and receive 30% more hours of instruction. Schools in Singapore operate 40 weeks a year. Saturday classes are the norm in Korea and other Asian countries--and Japanese authorities are having second thoughts about their 1998 decision to cease Saturday-morning instruction. This additional time spent learning is one big reason that youngsters from many Asian nations routinely out-score their American counterparts on international tests of science and math.
How has the United States responded to this global challenge in education? We continue to lower our standards. While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a major step in education reform, it has inadvertently created a system where states continue to lower the expectations bar. In 2007, only 18% of Mississippi students scored proficient in the standardized national reading test. However, 88% scored proficient in the standardized state reading test. While Mississippi can be considered an extreme, a Department of Education report acknowledged, "state-defined proficiency standards are often far lower than proficiency standards on the NAEP." While under this system test scores have improved slightly, our student's education level has remained constant. As states are under enormous pressure to show improvements in test scores, standards are lowered. While politicians avoid future trouble, our children inherit it.
Even our once seemingly monopoly on higher education has eroded in recent years. While ranking 2nd in the world in older adults with a college diploma, the U.S. has slipped to 8th in the world in young adults with a college diploma. As other countries continue to provide numerous incentives for their students to attend universities, the United States seems content in allowing higher education to climb ever higher out of the reach of ordinary Americans. Furthermore, China and other Asian countries have created a higher education system that is far more useful in equipping its students with the needs to survive in a 21st century economy. More than 50 percent of undergraduate degrees awarded in China are in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, compared to just 16 percent in the United States. While we are focused on creating litigators and lawyers, China and our competitors are creating the entrepreneurs and engineers of the future.
Even before the current recession hit, the competitive challenges of a global economy were putting ever more pressure on the economic development efforts mounted by state governments across the country.
States that once could dangle their low costs of doing business to lure industry from other states have suddenly faced competition from even lower-cost places such as China and Southeast Asia. Many have been scrambling to catch up with ever-growing packages of tax incentives and grants - so much so that critics have fretted about "an economic war between the states," as the organization Good Jobs Now calls it.
But while states scramble, the ground has shifted beneath them. The economic development contest is changing.
Traditional economic development efforts have focused on leveraging money, in one guise or another. Some states had lower costs and lower taxes to brag about - money. Some emphasized helping new industry by improving roads and water and sewers - money. Some tried to make up for high costs by offering various grants and tax breaks - in other words, money.
ccountability is a mantra of the charter school movement. Students sign pledges at some schools to do their homework, and teachers owe their jobs to students' gains on tests.
Attrition rates have been criticized, but Mr. Jean-Baptiste said, "We attract more than the amount of students we lose."
But as New York State moves to shut down an 11-year-old charter school in Albany, whose test scores it acknowledges beat the city's public schools last year, it is apparent that holding schools themselves accountable is not always so easy, or bloodless, as numbers on a page.
The principal, teachers and families of the New Covenant school have mounted a furious defense, citing rising achievement as well as their fears for the loss of a safe harbor from chaotic homes and streets, where teachers deliver homework to parents who are in jail to keep them involved, and the dean of students chases gang members from a nearby park.
In a continuing overhaul of one of the most troubled school systems in the nation, officials in Detroit on Wednesday announced a plan to close 45 of 172 public schools at the end of the academic year. The move is the latest in a string of efforts aimed at rescuing an academically failing district in the midst of a financial crisis.
Detroit has closed more than 100 schools since 2004, yet still has more than 50,000 excess seats throughout the system.
Robert C. Bobb, the emergency manager appointed last year by Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm to take control of the schools, proposed the closings, which would eliminate as many as 2,100 jobs, in the face of a deficit expected to peak at $316.6 million and a dwindling student population.
Only 3 percent of Detroit fourth graders were proficient in math on the last National Assessment of Educational Progress, an annual test of basic skills. The district is the largest in Michigan, with 87,000 students, most of whom are poor and black.
AMERICAN public education, a perennial whipping boy for both the political right and left, is once again making news in ways that show how difficult it will be to cure what ails the nation's schools.
Only last week, President Obama declared that every high school graduate must be fully prepared for college or a job (who knew?) and called for significant changes in the No Child Left Behind law. In Kansas City, Mo., officials voted to close nearly half the public schools there to save money. And the Texas Board of Education approved a new social studies curriculum playing down the separation of church and state and even eliminating Thomas Jefferson -- the author of that malignant phrase, "wall of separation" -- from a list of revolutionary writers.
Each of these seemingly unrelated developments is part of a crazy quilt created by one of America's most cherished and unexamined traditions: local and state control of public education. Schooling had been naturally decentralized in the Colonial era -- with Puritan New England having a huge head start on the other colonies by the late 1600s -- and, in deference to the de facto system of community control already in place, the Constitution made no mention of education. No one in either party today has the courage to say it, but what made sense for a sparsely settled continent at the dawn of the Republic is ill suited to the needs of a 21st-century nation competing in a global economy.
Doors are expected to shut on more than a quarter of Detroit's 172 public schools in June as the district fights through steadily declining enrollment and a budget deficit of more than $219 million, an emergency financial manager said Wednesday.
Three aging, traditional and underpopulated high schools would be among the 44 proposed closures. Another six schools are to be closed in June 2011, followed by seven more a year later, emergency financial manager Robert Bobb said Wednesday. This summer's closings also include a support building.
The proposed closures are part of a $1 billion, five-year plan to shrink a struggling school district while improving education, test scores and student safety in a city whose population has declined with each decade. The 2010 U.S. Census is expected to show that fewer than 900,000 people now live in Detroit.
Hoping for lower property taxes? Head south. A 2009 Tax Foundation ranking shows that the 10 states with the lowest property taxes are all in the South. The homeowners there pay, on average, less than $1,000 a year in property taxes, while those in the East can pay more than six times as much.
A Tax Foundation map of states (pictured) shows 16 states, highlighted in blue, where residents pay in property taxes 1.2% or greater of their home's value. The 19 white states fall between 0.65% and 1.20%, while the 15 yellow states pay the least.a
I cannot believe that a Democratic administration will let this injustice of killing D.C. vouchers stand.
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked me to become one of the founding members of the newly formed U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, African-Americans drank at separate water fountains and our schools were segregated. A decade later, when people came together to march against these injustices, the idea that a black man could ever be elected president of the United States was still something for dreamers. My experience with that great movement gives me a particular appreciation for the historic importance of the presidency of Barack Obama--and the new dreams that his example will inspire in our young.
If Martin Luther King Jr. told me once, he told me a hundred times that the key to solving our country's race problem is plain as day: Find decent schools for our kids. So I was especially heartened to hear Education Secretary Arne Duncan repeatedly call education the "civil rights issue of our generation." Millions of our children--disproportionately poor and minority--remain trapped in failing public schools that condemn them to lives on the fringe of the American Dream.
Pretty good free online K-12 learning options exist in most states, so why aren't more students learning online? There are more than 2 million students learning online and that's growing by more than 30% annually, but there are five significant barriers to more rapid adoption:
Babysitting: Don't underestimate the custodial aspect of school--it's nice to have a place to send the kids every day. Homeschooling continues to grow aided by online learning but will never exceed 10% because most folks don't want their kids around all day every day or just can't afford to stay home.
Money & Jobs: At the request of employee groups, the Louisiana state board recently rejected three high quality virtual charter applications. Districts don't want to lose enrollment revenue and unions don't want to lose jobs.
Tradition: Layers of policies stand in the way of learning online starting with seat time requirements--butts in seats for 180 hours with a locally certificated teacher plowing through an adopted textbook.
There are likely many opportunities to offer online learning options for our students, particularly in tight budget times.
On my blog, washingtonpost.com/class-struggle, I gush over my many genius ideas, worthy of the Nobel Prize for education writing if there was one. Here is a sample from last month:
"Why not take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a new essay exam that measures analysis and critical thinking, and apply it to high schools? Some colleges give it to all of their freshmen, and then again to that class when they are seniors, and see how much value their professors at that college have added. We could do the same for high schools, with maybe a somewhat less strenuous version."
Readers usually ignore these eruptions of ego. But after I posted that idea, a young man named Chris Jackson e-mailed me that his organization had thought of it four years ago and had it up and running. Very cheeky, I thought, but also intriguing. I never thought anyone would try such a daring concept. If your high school's seniors didn't score much better than your freshmen, what would you do? What schools would have the courage to put themselves to that test or, even worse, quantify the level of their failure, as the program does?
Rhode Island's Central Falls High School faces a world of problems. Not quite half of the freshmen class of 2005 went on to graduate last year. A little more than half of the juniors passed a state reading test. In math, just 7 percent passed.
Superintendent Frances Gallo asked her teachers to step up, to help her turn around their failing school. She asked them to teach 25 minutes more each day. She asked them to tutor the kids, to eat lunch once a week with the kids, to spend more time learning how to teach effectively.
She also offered to increase their pay. Teachers at Central Falls do well: $72,000 to $78,000 a year. Gallo offered them a $3,400 bump.
When the bare-knuckled brawl over health-care reform finally wraps up, and the Obama Administration pivots to less divisive topics, education reform may be one of the few issues capable of drawing bipartisan support. The Obama Administration's proposed overhaul of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) could resonate with Republicans, many of whom have been disappointed with the results of George W. Bush's signature education initiative. Obama's blueprint, which was sent to Congress March 15, sets forth an ambitious national standard --that by 2020, all students graduate high school ready for college or a career -- but leaves the specifics on how to achieve this goal up to state and local authorities. "Yes, we set a high bar," President Obama said in his weekly radio address. "But we also provide educators the flexibility to reach it."
With more than 1 million high school students dropping out every year and the U.S. lagging behind many of its competitors on achievement benchmarks, no one can argue with the need to better prepare students for college and beyond. NCLB, which earned broad bipartisan majorities when the legislation passed in 2002, has drawn praise for shining a light on achievement gaps by forcing the nation's 99,000 public schools to disaggregate student data. But the legislation's emphasis on accountability and standardized testing has had some unintended results. By requiring schools to demonstrate adequate yearly progress -- toward a goal of 100% proficiency in reading and math by 2014 -- Bush's landmark bill has led many districts to narrow their curricula and some states to lower their standards in order to meet annual targets.
Here's the bottom line: it is now mathematically impossible for school districts to sustain annual salary increases of 4-5% and fully subsidized health benefits, historically the proud mantle swaddling NJEA's wide shoulders. Call it a sea change, call it a paradigm shift, call it a zero-sum game, call it (if you're Barbara Keshishian, NJEA Pres.) a "political vendetta." The times they have a-changed.
Where does this leave local school boards and NJEA affiliates? So much depends on whether local bargaining units are able to exercise some autonomy and collaborate with school district officials on producing agreements that are fair to teachers and within legislative fiscal constraints. Will locals be able to disentangle themselves from the lockstep of NJEA's directives? Is there hope that public education in Jersey can have a relatively healthy adjustment to a new fiscal austerity, a shared vision, a new kind of calculus in assessing appropriate compensation?
Many organizations, public and private, are using this period of change to evaluate their major services and determine the effectiveness of all expenditures. Public school districts are no different. It will be interesting to see how this plays out locally.
So what does this mean? Well, assuming that the board will use its levying authority under the referendum and the state funding formula, the gap is smaller than the reported (and internalized) $30 million. It is probably more like the $17 million in state aid cuts plus the $1.2 million in budget items for which there is no funding source. Or, by higher math, c. $18.2 million BEFORE the board makes its budget adjustments and amendments. (This process will take place between now and the final vote on May 4, and will likely involve a combination of cuts recommended by administration and cuts proposed by the board.)
This means that the draconian school closings and massive staff layoffs reported earlier are unlikely to happen. Indeed, the board added one cut to the list at Monday's meeting when it voted to cut $43,000 in funding budgeted to produce a communication plan.
Class divisions fuel furor over a plan to close college-prep academy in the eastern Sierra Nevada. 'The situation has unleashed pandemonium,' says the district's superintendent.
When Eastern Sierra Unified School District Supt. Don Clark stared down a projected budget deficit, he did what school administrators across the nation have had to do: consider laying off teachers and closing campuses.
But that decision, in a rural district sprawled along U.S. 395 between the snowy Sierra and the deserts of Nevada, has exposed deep resentments between parents of students in traditional high schools and those with teenagers in a college-prep academy designed for high achievers.
The trouble started a week ago when Clark announced that the district, facing a budget shortfall of $1.8 million, was considering laying off more than a dozen teachers and closing the 15-year-old Eastern Sierra Academy, among other measures.
Princeton Township Public Schools offers a template on what will most likely occur across many districts on the heels of Gov. Christie's budget: an effort by school boards to cajole local unions into accepting contract concessions. With cuts of up to 5% of total school budgets, increases in health benefits, and annual salary increases ranging in the mid-4%, there's no other way to find the money. Other costs - supplies, utilities, transportation - are not fungible.
A few quick facts about Princeton, a 3,500-student school district with sky-high test scores. The annual cost per pupil there is $18,340 compared to a state average of $15,168. (These are 2008-2009 figures from the state database.) The median teacher salary is $69,829 plus benefits. The state median salary is $59,545 plus benefits. Costs of benefits in Princeton come to 23% of each teacher's salary.
It has been, for some time now, the District's contention that they are working to "make every school a quality school". This is a significant goal of the Strategic Plan, "Excellence for All", and a pre-requisite for the New Student Assignment Plan.
So one might wonder how the District defines a "quality school". In fact, many more than one might wonder about it. The entire freakin' city might wonder about it. Well, they can just go on wondering because the District doesn't have an answer.
That's right. They have been ostensibly working for two years now towards a goal that they have not defined. Although the District defines accountability as having objectively measurable goals and insists that everyone is accountable, there are no objectively measurable goals tied to the definition of a "quality school". This would appear to be an intentional effort to evade accountability. Not only are there no objectively measurable goals, there are no metrics, no benchmarks, and no assessments. Nice, eh?
Congratulations to the panel of teachers, administrators and parents who put together groundbreaking proposals on smarter ways to hire, pay, evaluate and fire teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Improbable as it is that many of the proposals will be adopted by the school board, which is heavily influenced by the teachers union, they have opened a conversation sought by parents and school reformers, and that conversation is unlikely to be silenced until major changes are made.
We have long supported some of these recommendations: Not allowing seniority to rule which teachers are laid off. Expanding the probationary period before teachers get tenure. Including test scores and parent and student opinions in teacher evaluations. Paying more for excellent teachers who are willing to work in low-performing schools.
Those who wonder why California was excluded from the first round of federal Race to the Top grants would do well to examine their own commentary for clues. It is typical of editorials and other articles on this topic to speak in general terms -- to throw out noble-sounding phrases that, in the end, don't offer specifics. The Times' March 4 editorial, "Another setback for California schools," reflects this kind of commentary.
Take, for example, The Times' assertion that "district administrators, not union contracts," should determine teacher assignments in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Really? If you were a teacher, would you completely trust administrators to always make good assignment decisions? The same people who inspired the term "dance of the lemons" as incompetent (and sometimes criminal) administrators were transferred from one school to another by their downtown buddies? Would you want to be forced to an overcrowded school terrorized by crime and violence, hobbled by a lack of supplies and a crumbling infrastructure, in a neighborhood beset by a multitude of social ills, with only a district administrator to count on for support and security? Most administrators are talented, committed and fair, but too many are none of those things.
In a week dominated by health care, President Barack Obama released a set of education proposals that break with ideals once articulated by Robert F. Kennedy.
Kennedy's view was that accountability is essential to educating every child. He expressed this view in 1965, while supporting an education reform initiative, saying "I do not think money in and of itself is necessarily the answer" to educational excellence. Instead, he hailed "good faith . . . effort to hold educators responsive to their constituencies and to make educational achievement the touchstone of success."
But rather than raising standards, the Obama administration is now proposing to gut No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) accountability framework. Enacted in 2002, NCLB requires that every school be held responsible for student achievement. Under the new proposal, up to 90% of schools can escape responsibility. Only 5% of the lowest-performing schools will be required to take action to raise poor test scores. And another 5% will be given a vague "warning" to shape up, but it is not yet clear what will happen if they don't.
Students: Take a look at some of the changes to the Texas curriculum, and then at a passage from your own American history or government textbook. Considering word choice and the inclusion and treatment of leaders and movements, what values and ideas do you think it conveys? What connotations do the terms used have for you? Tell us what ideas you think are expressed in how your textbook is written.
Adults, please note: Though, of course, anyone can be a "student" at any age, we ask that adults respect the intent of the Student Opinion question and refrain from posting here. There are many other places on the NYTimes.com site for adults to post, while this is the only place that explicitly invites the voices of young people.
Math textbooks are an area ripe for this type of inquiry.
THE good news is that more Texans are paying attention to social-studies lessons than ever before. The bad news is that they suddenly have cause. On March 12th, the state board of education voted for a series of changes to the state's history and social-sciences curricula. The changes look small enough--a word here and there, a new name included, maybe a different way of phrasing an issue. But the overall effect, if the changes are approved in May, will to be to yank public education to the right.
The board alluded to the controversial amendments in a polite press release: "All those who died at the Alamo will be discussed in seventh grade Texas history classes. Hip hop will not be part of the official curriculum standards." The most dramatic change is that Thomas Jefferson has gotten the boot. The conservatives on the board deemed him to be a suspiciously secular figure. The new guidelines would pay more fond attention to their favoured presidents, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Phyllis Schlafly and the National Rifle Association are in. So are the Black Panthers.
Some of the oddest changes concern economics. Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek will join Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and Karl Marx. And the board decided that references to "capitalism" and the "free market" should be changed to say "free enterprise", because capitalism has a bad reputation at the moment. That decision is almost inexplicable. Capitalism has been through a rough patch, but surely the term itself is no more inflammatory than free enterprise.
an Madison afford a new School Board member who requires time to understand the issues, study the research, or develop a good relationship with board members and union leaders? These are all certainly desirable objectives, and over time it is important that they occur. Yet these are exceptional times for Madison and its public school system.
The federal government has demanded that educational leaders in every community must start demonstrating a willingness to challenge the status quo, seek innovative solutions, and begin executing change management efforts. Only those school districts that show a willingness to radically alter their approaches to education, in order to achieve real results, will be supported and funded. The time has come to bring that level of leadership to the Madison School Board.
Management of the Madison School District cannot continue operating in its present form, or under its current philosophies. We have called for additional funding and referendums to increase taxes, and this has not produced the promised results. Clearly, it is not lack of money that hinders our education system; it is the system itself. That needs to change.
James Howard: We must make cuts, but not in classroom
As parents, teachers, taxpayers and voters evaluate the financial woes our Madison public schools face, there are several key points to keep in mind.
First, the taxpayers in our district have been very generous by passing several referendums that have helped close the gap between what schools can spend and what it really costs to educate our kids. However, due to the depressed economy voters are focused on direct family financial impacts and less on the indirect costs that result from any decline in quality of our public schools. Since the district is currently operating under a three-year recurring referendum, it would be a lot to ask of taxpayers to vote yes on a new referendum.
That means we must look elsewhere for answers on how to close what might be a gap of as much as $30 million. Let me be very clear as to where I wouldn't look: the classroom. We need to protect learning by keeping class sizes small; by funding initiatives that help at-risk children perform up to grade level in basic subjects; and by funding those things that make Madison schools so special, like programs in the arts and athletics.
A group of parents is gathering information from Madison-area community members about whether or not parents would like to see another high school option in the area and, if so, what it might look like. Would it be an independent school or a charter school? Would it be a math and science academy, a performing arts school, an Expeditionary Learning school, or something else?
If you would like to share your ideas, wish list, or perspective, please join us for what is likely to be a stimulating conversation about possibilities. A discussion will take place Thursday evening, March 25th, at 7 p.m. at Wingra School (3200 Monroe St.). Please feel welcome to bring neighbors, family members, etc. who would like to participate.
Note: Wingra has very generously offered space for this conversation to take place. This is not a Wingra-sponsored event, nor is it a discussion about Wingra starting a high school.
Monday's story from Susan Troller about standardized tests explains how large school districts like Madison and Milwaukee are interested in what small Monona Grove is doing because its program offers much more detailed results than the standard Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam (WKCE) and delivers them far more quickly. But it's also interesting to consider how Monona Grove might be in the vanguard of national changes in how students are taught and tested.
On Monday, President Barack Obama sent a blueprint to Congress for an overhaul of No Child Left Behind, the 2001 law pushed by President George W. Bush that ties federal funding to students' standardized test results. Annual testing would still be required under Obama's plan, but one major focus would change from meeting narrow grade-by-grade benchmarks and move toward achieving a common set of skills needed for life after high school, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
In preparation for the New Schools Summit, following are a few thoughts for a great group.
Acknowledging the difficulty of penetrating the complex decentralized maze of US public education, a New Schools regular asked a dinner gathering of notable reformers last week if education innovation was an oxymoron.
After a few laughs and couple hopeful responses, a former urban deputy superintendent dampened enthusiasm by reminding us not to underestimate the power of resistance from elaborate political bulwarks. Barriers to edupreneurs clearly deflect talent and investment from the sector.
Charter schools emerged in the 90's as an entry point that allowed edupreneurs to open mission-designed new schools, then to create mission-designed school networks. Kim Smith created New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF) to create an edupreneurial ecoysystem around schools, tools, and talent. NSVF supported the most important work in education over the last decade.
The D.C. voucher program's future appeared limited Tuesday after the Senate voted down a measure that would have reopened the initiative to new students.
The voucher program, which since 2004 has provided low-income D.C. students with as much as $7,500 in scholarships to attend private schools, has foundered in the Democratic-controlled Congress. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have signaled their opposition to the program, instead advocating charter schools as alternatives to poorly performing conventional public schools.
Tuesday's 55 to 42 vote was widely seen as one of the final chances for the program to be extended beyond the students who are already currently enrolled. Funding will continue for current students until they graduate high school, but has been cut off to new students for a year.
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) introduced an amendment to a reauthorization bill for the Federal Aviation Administration that would have extended the voucher program for five years and funded it at $20 million a year, opening it to new students. The Senate killed Lieberman's attempt to amend a different bill earlier this month.
Instead of cutting what could be almost 400 teaching positions in Milwaukee Public Schools next year to balance the budget, the Milwaukee Board of School Directors could instead eliminate all athletics, the entire 3- and 4-year-old kindergarten program or all the school nurses, according to a new list of non-mandatory programs released by the district's central office.
Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said he has not recommended that the board cut any of the attention-grabbing, discretionary programs on the list - such as the $10 million the district spends to bus high school students around the city, or the $12 million it spends to fund art, music, foreign language and class-size reduction programs at the high schools. But, he said, it's important to make the board aware of non-mandatory areas it can trim or cut altogether.
The School Board will discuss the list of items included on the superintendent's informational report at a budget work session Thursday. Some of the items on the list include
In recent years, high schools that are configured to provide students the opportunity to earn both a high-school diploma and a college associate's degree or up two years of credit toward a bachelor's degree have grown in popularity. The Early College High School Initiative, a private partnership made up of 13 member organizations, has started or redesigned more than 200 such schools since 2002. In addition, the National Center on Education and the Economy is spearheading a similar initiative. Dozens of public schools in eight states next fall will adopt a program that lets 10th-grade students test out of high school and go to community college. The first generation of these schools targeted low-income, minority students who were likely to be the first in their family to attend college.
We looked at Pleasantville High School last week in the context of Diane Ravitch's new book, chosen at random among the cohort of segregated, impoverished, and failing Jersey schools. Coincidentally this challenged Abbott district made non-bloggy headlines s a day later because at that week's Board meeting Pleasantville Superintendent Gloria Grantham blasted away at teachers to the consternation of her Board, The Press of Atlantic City reports,
Grantham spoke at length Tuesday night about the benefits teachers get - vacation days, free health coverage, free professional development - and the effort they owe their students.
"This is not to hurt anyone, this is just to present the facts. We have got to do a better balancing act between what our students receive and what our adults receive," Grantham said. "They're benefiting pretty well from the opportunity to teach in our high school."
For years, many people, including politicians and unions, have complained that Rhode Island is the only state without a school-funding formula. The public's distrust of the legislature, however, has made it difficult to proceed. Not without reason, people feared that vast amounts of money would be simply siphoned away, without accountability, to benefit teachers unions and other powerful interests, not students.
But now there seems hope that Rhode Island can move beyond such cynicism. State Education Commissioner Deborah Gist and the state Board of Regents have approved a plan more focused on students. The formula is now before the General Assembly.
Under their plan, state school-aid dollars would "follow the students" -- even to charter schools, public institutions that operate outside the red tape of standard schools and are sometimes anathema to teachers unions.
For the fifth consecutive year, Inside Higher Ed presents its Academic Performance Tournament - a unique look at what the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I Men's Basketball Tournament would look like if teams advanced based solely on their outcomes in the classroom.
The winners were determined using the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate, a nationally comparable score that gives points to teams whose players stay in good academic standing and remain enrolled from semester to semester. When teams had the same Academic Progress Rates, the tie was broken using the NCAA's Graduation Success Rate - which, unlike the federal rate, considers transfers and does not punish teams whose athletes leave college before graduation if they leave in good academic standing.
The $2 Trillion Hole: Promised pensions benefits for public-sector employees represent a massive overhang that threatens the financial future of many cities and states.
LIKE A CALIFORNIA WILDFIRE, populist rage burns over bloated executive compensation and unrepentant avarice on Wall Street.
Deserving as these targets may or may not be, most Americans have ignored at their own peril a far bigger pocket of privilege -- the lush pensions that the 23 million active and retired state and local public employees, from cops and garbage collectors to city managers and teachers, have wangled from taxpayers.
Some 80% of these public employees are beneficiaries of defined-benefit plans under which monthly pension payments are guaranteed, no matter how stocks and other volatile assets backing the retirement plans perform. In contrast, most of the taxpayers footing the bill for these public-employee benefits (participants' contributions to these plans are typically modest) have been pushed by their employers into far less munificent defined-contribution plans and suffered the additional indignity of seeing their 401(k) accounts shrivel in the recent bear market in stocks.
And defined-contribution plans, unlike public pensions, have no protection against inflation. It's just too bad: Maybe some seniors will have to switch from filet mignon to dog food.
What should we do about the computer hackers at Winston Churchill High School in Montgomery County who changed dozens of grades? What is the solution to student cheating in general?
Research suggests that rising pressure to get into good colleges has led students to cut corners. One study cited by the Educational Testing Service said only about 20 percent of college students in the 1940s said they had cheated in high school, and the proportion is four times as large today.
Deemphasize the college race, some experts say, and much of this nonsense will go away. I have written for many years about research showing that adult success really doesn't depend on the prestige of one's alma mater. But that approach to easing cheating isn't going to get us far. Competition is too much a part of American culture. Also, college pressure tends to affect only the top 20 percent of students who seek selective schools (it's a higher percentage in the affluent Washington area) and not students who cheat for other reasons, such as laziness or boredom.
Although public schools are usually the biggest item in state and local budgets, spending figures provided by public school officials and reported in the media often leave out major costs of education and thus understate what is actually spent.
To document the phenomenon, this paper reviews district budgets and state records for the nation's five largest metro areas and the District of Columbia. It reveals that, on average, per-pupil spending in these areas is 44 percent higher than officially reported.
Real spending per pupil ranges from a low of nearly $12,000 in the Phoenix area schools to a high of nearly $27,000 in the New York metro area. The gap between real and reported per-pupil spending ranges from a low of 23 percent in the Chicago area to a high of 90 percent in the Los Angeles metro region.
To put public school spending in perspective, we compare it to estimated total expenditures in local private schools. We find that, in the areas studied, public schools are spending 93 percent more than the estimated median private school.
Moody's Investor Service, the credit rating agency, will fire a warning shot at the US on Monday, saying that unless the country gets public finances into better shape than the Obama administration projects there would be "downward pressure" on its triple A credit rating.
Examining the administration's outlook for the federal budget deficit, the agency said: "If such a trajectory were to materialise, there would at some point be downward pressure on the triple A rating of the federal government."
It projects that the federal borrowing is so high that the interest payments on government debt will grow to more than 15 per cent of government revenues, about the same by the end of the decade as the previous 1980s peak.
This time the servicing burden would be harder to reverse, however, because it would not be caused by high interest rates but by high debt levels.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last week that the Obama Administration will ramp up investigations of civil rights infractions in school districts, which might sound well and good. What it means in practice, however, is that his Office of Civil Rights (OCR) will revert to the Clinton Administration policy of equating statistical disparity with discrimination, which is troubling.
OCR oversees Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by race, color or national origin in public schools and colleges that receive federal funding. In a speech last week, Mr. Duncan said that "in the last decade"--that's short for the Bush years--"the Office for Civil Rights has not been as vigilant as it should have been in combating racial and gender discrimination." He cited statistics showing that white students are more likely than their black peers to take Advanced Placement classes and less likely to be expelled from school.
Therefore, Mr. Duncan said, OCR "will collect and monitor data on equity." He added that the department will also conduct compliance reviews "to ensure that all students have equal access to educational opportunities" and to determine "whether districts and schools are disciplining students without regard to skin color."
What Stuck? What faded? As an EdReformer, it's interesting to think about the investment of time and money with a little hindsight.
Seven years ago, Caprice Young chaired the LAUSD board. She went on to run the California charter association and is now CEO of KCDL, a leading virtual education provider. About her work as a board member in LA, Caprice observed that :
Buildings and charters stuck,
Reading and arts programs didn't.
When Caprice was elected, LA was about 200,000 seats short. The board she chaired initiated one of the largest building projects in the world--a $19 billion ten year effort. Those buildings, for good or bad, will mark the LA landscape for a generation to come.
The governor's $29.3 billion budget will shave $2.9 billion off state spending from last year, about a 9 percent drop. The cuts include reductions in aid to municipalities and school districts, said two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement.
Unlike the current 4 percent limit, the new "hard" 2.5 percent cap on municipal, school and county property tax levies would be all-encompassing, without exceptions for such essentials as rising health insurance or debt payments. The tax could be raised higher only if local voters grant their approval in referendums. The state also would be constitutionally barred from increasing its own spending on direct state services by more than 2.5 percent per year.
Also, I see a problem in the president using the achievement gap as a measure of schools in his suggested revisions. This could mean that a wonderfully diverse school like T.C. Williams High in Alexandria, a recent subject on this blog, would be motivated to ignore its best students, who want to get even better, and focus all its money and time on those at the bottom of the achievement scale so they can narrow the gap. That is not a good idea, and I hope the president will get it out of his proposal.
Test early, test often, and make sure the results you get are meaningful to students, teachers and parents.
Although that may sound simple, in the last three years it's become a mantra in the Monona Grove School District that's helping all middle and high school students increase their skills, whether they're heading to college or a career. The program, based on using ACT-related tests, is helping to establish the suburban Dane County district as a leader in educational innovation in Wisconsin.
In fact, Monona Grove recently hosted a half-day session for administrators and board members from Milwaukee and Madison who were interested in learning more about Monona Grove's experiences and how the school community is responding to the program. In a pilot program this spring in Madison, students in eighth grade at Sherman Middle School will take ACT's Explore test for younger students. At Memorial, freshmen will take the Explore test.
Known primarily as a college entrance examination, ACT Inc. also provides a battery of other tests for younger students. Monona Grove is using these tests -- the Explore tests for grades 8 and 9, and the Plan tests for grades 10 and 11 -- to paint an annual picture of each student's academic skills and what he or she needs to focus on to be ready to take on the challenges of post-secondary education or the work force. The tests are given midway through the first semester, and results are ready a month later.
"We're very, very interested in what Monona Grove is doing," says Pam Nash, assistant superintendent for secondary education for the Madison district. "We've heard our state is looking at ACT as a possible replacement for the WKCE (Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam), and the intrinsic reliability of the ACT is well known. The WKCE is so unrelated to the students. The scores come in so late, it's not useful.
The Madison School District's "Value Added Assessment" program uses data from the oft-criticized WKCE.
One key to the successful small high schools, almost without exception, is that they grew from the ground up. They weren't created by some order from above. The people involved in launching the school knew what they wanted, were willing to do the hugely demanding work of making the school a reality and committed to continually working on improving what they did.
Montessori High fits that description. A charter school staffed by MPS employees, it is led by three teachers with no conventional principal. It is one of just a handful of Montessori high school programs in the U.S., and an even smaller number that combine the Montessori style of learning, with emphasis on individual development, with rigorous International Baccalaureate courses.
The environment in the school is somewhat casual, but serious. For example, 10 couches set the atmosphere for Chip Johnston's history class, where the lively discussion on a recent morning dealt with reacting to the statement, "Liberty means responsibility." Overall at the school, there is a strong emphasis on arts, on projects involving real-world issues, and on working with partners or in small groups.
Two extraordinary things happened in the world of education recently. Taken together, they're powerful confirmation of just how precipitously the teachers' unions are declining in power and influence. Yet I can see a very plausible outcome in which we conservatives fumble the ball on the one yard line -- and hand them back their power.
First, a Rhode Island school district decided it was fed up with chronic failure at one of the state's (and probably the country's) worst schools, and announced it would fire every single teacher at the school. In an industry where pretty much nobody ever gets fired for anything, that was an earthquake.
Then something even more amazing occurred: President Obama gave the firings an unambiguous endorsement. Noting that only 7 percent of the school's 11th graders pass the state math test, he remarked: "If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability."
Count the Dodgeland School District in central Dodge County as among those that have closed schools in outlying communities. Voters in 2001 approved a $17 million referendum to construct one school facility on Juneau's south side to house all of the district's students from kindergarten through 12th grade.
That meant closing a middle school in Reeseville and an elementary school in Lowell. An elementary school in Clyman had closed in the late 1990s, according to Superintendent Annette Thompson.
She said trying to adequately fund the previous school arrangement in today's fiscal environment would be difficult. The change has been for the better.
"It was a hard transition, but we recognized that to be the most cost-effective, we needed a facility that meets the needs of all students," Thompson said. "I think we're moving in a really positive direction."
Two recent New York Times articles have described opposition to the thriving charter school movement in Harlem. An influential state senator, Bill Perkins, whose district has nearly 20 charter schools, is trying to block their expansion. Some public schools in the neighborhood are also fighting back, marketing themselves to compete with the charters.
This is a New York battle, but charter schools -- a cornerstone of the Obama administration's education strategy -- are facing resistance across the country, as they become more popular and as traditional public schools compete for money. The education scholar Diane Ravitch, once a booster of the movement, is now an outspoken critic.
What is causing the push-back on charter schools, beyond the local issues involved ? Critics say they are skimming off the best students, leaving the regular schools to deal with the rest? Is that a fair point?
In the United States, the education debate has been framed as a zero-sum game. But a look at Finland, whose schools rank No. 1 in global surveys, shows that a national commitment to education can neutralize political debates over school reform.
Last spring, Timo Jaatinen, a Finnish high school teacher living in Virginia, was surfing Internet job boards looking for a position in his home country. After a few phone interviews, Jaatinen was offered a spot as an English and Swedish teacher at Alppila Upper Secondary School in Helsinki, a popular general education high school with a reputation for attracting students interested in the arts.
"The principal said, 'This job is yours,'" remembered Jaatinen, one of those young, dynamic teachers who you'd guess teenagers instinctively respect. "And then she said, 'Do you want to go to Rome?'"
Jaatinen was lucky. Alppila had scored well on the city of Helsinki's educational benchmarks for the 2007-2008 school year, and all the school's teachers were rewarded with modest salary bonuses and a free Italian vacation, to which new teachers were also invited. Jaatinen headed back to Finland to begin his new job and claim his trip.
Featured speakers at the conference include Greg Richmond, President and founding board member of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and establisher of the Chicago Public School District's Charter Schools Office; Ursula Wright, the Chief Operating Officer for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; Sarah Archibald of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at UW-Madison and the Value-Added Research Center; and Richard Halverson, an associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Also speaking at the Conference will be:
State Senator John Lehman (D-Racine), Chair Senate Education Committee
State Senator Luther Olsen (R-Berlin), Ranking Minority Member, Senate Education
State Representative Sondy Pope-Roberts (D-Middleton), Chair, Assembly Education Committee
State Representative Brett Davis (R-Oregon), Ranking Minority Member, Assembly Education
The Conference will feature interactive sessions; hands-on examples of innovative learning in classrooms; networking; a coaching room open throughout the conference; and keynote speakers that highlight the importance of quality in and around each classroom, and the impact that quality has on the learning of students everywhere. More details are attached.
Thank you for your consideration and your help in getting word out! If you would like to attend on a press pass, please let me know and I will have one in your name at the registration area.
Madison School District's 2009-2010 Citizen's Budget Released ($421,333,692 Gross Expenditures, $370,287,471 Net); an Increase of $2,917,912 from the preliminary $418,415,780 2009-2010 Budget
Attached to this memorandum you will find the final version of the 2009-10 Citizen's Budget. The Citizen's Budget is intended to present financial information to the community in a format that is more easily understood. The first report groups expenditures into categories outlined as follows:
In-School Operations
Curriculum & Teacher Development & Support
Facilities, Other Than Debt Service
Transportation
Food Service
Business Services
Human Resources
General Administration
Debt Service
District-Wide
MSCR
The second report associates revenue sources with the specific expenditure area they are meant to support. In those areas where revenues are dedicated for a specific purpose(ie. Food Services) the actual amount is represented. In many areas of the budget, revenues had to be prorated to expenditures based on the percentage that each specific expenditure bears of the total expenditure budget. It is also important to explain that property tax funds made up the difference between expenditures and all other sources of revenues. The revenues were broken out into categories as follows:
Local Non-Tax Revenue
Equalized & Categorical State Aid
Direct Federal Aid
Direct State Aid
Property Taxes
Both reports combined represent the 2009-10 Citizen's Budget.
I'm glad to see this useful document finally available for the 2009-2010 school year. Thanks to the Madison School Board members who pushed for its release.
President Obama outlined his own education vision Saturday, one that he hopes will replace the punitive elements of the sweeping No Child Left Behind Act and give schools more flexibility in bringing students up to speed. To convey the new focus, the law will get a new name, although it has not been announced. (I am sure a few of you will have some pithy suggestions.)
The president and Ed Secretary Arne Duncan have clearly heard the cries from the classrooms where teachers complained that they were teaching to the tests in a futile attempt to meet impossible and overly rigid standards. Details are few right now, but the president did outline a new direction that is supposed to be kinder, fairer and more realistic.
I am not sure that teachers will agree that the plan is more realistic and fairer as it still seems to have high expectations that schools will make strides with all students.
President Barack Obama unveiled his plan for a sweeping overhaul of the nation's school system Saturday, proposing changes he says would shift emphasis from teaching to the test to a more nuanced assessment of judging school and student progress.
On Monday, Obama will submit his blueprint for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind law to Congress, and he's given lawmakers a powerful incentive to take up the bill this year--his budget proposal includes a $1 billion bonus should new legislation land on his desk this year.
Obama's proposal would toss out the core of the Bush-era law, which calls for across-the-board proficiency from all students in reading and math by 2014, and instead emphasize revamped assessment tools that link teacher evaluations to student progress, and a goal of having students career and college ready upon graduation.
I'm excited for the opportunity to "debate." The term violates my traditional sensibilities, but I'll try to get over it. What resolution should we discuss? Resolved: "The problem with education is teachers," as one online headline for your story read. Resolved: "The best way to deal with underperforming teachers is to fire them." Resolved: "Much of the ability to teach is innate," as the lead story in your package declares.
My reporting for The New York Times Magazine turned up counter-arguments to each of these declarations. But it also turned up many facts that appear in your story. Here are some premises we can probably agree on: The quality of teaching plays a major role in determining whether children learn. An upsetting number of teachers are not helping children learn as much as we want them to. A smaller group of teachers are actively impeding learning. It is insanely difficult to fire these bad teachers, and the teaching profession at large is an insanely isolated one in which it is not unusual for the only people who ever observe the professional at work to be 9 years old.
That said, the overwhelming conclusion of my reporting is that efforts to change this picture must go beyond simply firing the lowest performers. One reason is just plain money. Firing employees--in many professions, not just teaching--brings a lot of legal hurdles and therefore costs a lot of money. The bill is especially high for firing teachers; to fire underperforming teachers in New York City, Chancellor Joel Klein invested $1 million a year in a fleet of fancy attorneys tasked solely with this responsibility. In the two years the project has gone on so far, the city only fired three teachers charged with incompetence.
To encourage high school students to tackle tougher academic classes, many schools assign bonus points to grades in Advanced Placement or honors courses. But schools' policies on whether students should receive a grade-point boost and by how much are all over the map.
My local public school district, for instance, used to add an extra third of a grade-point to students' AP course grades while the private high school on the other side of town would bump up students' grades by a full letter grade.
Since students from both schools would be applying to many of the same colleges, and essentially competing with one another, it didn't seem fair to me that the private school kids should get such a generous grade boost.
That's why I was heartened to come across a new study by a Harvard University researcher that takes a more systematic look at the practice of high school grade-weighting.
He found that for every increasing level of rigor in high school science, students' college course grades rose by an average of 2.4 points on a 100- point scale, where an A is 95 points and a B is worth 85 points and so on. In other words, the college grade for the former AP chemistry student would be expected to be 2.4 points higher than that of the typical student who took honors chemistry in high school. And the honors students' college grade, in turn, would be 2.4 points higher than that of the student who took regular chemistry.
Translating those numbers, and some other calculations, to a typical high school 1-to-4-point grade scale, Sadler estimates that students taking an honors science class in high school ought to get an extra half a point for their trouble, and that a B in an AP science course ought to be counted as an A for the purpose of high school grade-point averages.
The football players at Calvin Coolidge Senior High School, Mayor Adrian Fenty and a room full of cheering staff needed only one word to describe her: coach.
Natalie Randolph, a 29-year-old biology and environmental sciences teacher, was introduced Friday as the coach of the school's Coolidge Colts. She's believed to be the nation's only female head coach of a high school varsity football team.
"While I'm proud to be part of what this all means," Randolph said, "being female has nothing to do with it. I love football. I love football, I love teaching, I love these kids. My being female has nothing to do with my support and respect for my players on the field and in the classroom."
The news conference drew the kind of attention usually reserved for the Washington Redskins and was delayed nearly two hours so Fenty, who is up for re-election this year, could be there and proclaim "Natalie Randolph Day" in the city.
The Obama administration will ask Congress to toss out the two-tiered pass/fail school rating system of the No Child Left Behind education law and replace it with one that labels schools one of three ways: high-performing, needs improvement or chronically low-performing, according to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
President Obama announced the change Saturday during his weekly radio address, saying the administration plan sets "an ambitious goal: all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career - no matter who you are or where you come from. Achieving this goal will be difficult. It will take time. And it will require the skills, talents, and dedication of many: principals, teachers, parents, students. But this effort is essential for our children and for our country."
In a briefing Friday, Duncan told reporters he will give the high performers both freedom and financial incentives to stay that way.
"We want to get out of their way," Duncan said. "But we also want to learn from them."
The countries that have left the United States behind in math and science education have one thing in common: They offer the same high education standards -- often the same curriculum -- from one end of the nation to the other. The United States relies on a generally mediocre patchwork of standards that vary, not just from state to state, but often from district to district. A child's education depends primarily on ZIP code.
That could eventually change if the states adopt the new rigorous standards proposed last week by the National Governors Association and a group representing state school superintendents. The proposal lays out clear, ambitious goals for what children should learn year to year and could change curriculums, tests and teacher training.
Among the 10 organizations to which President Obama donated his Nobel Prize Award are the United Negro College Fund, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the Appalachian Leadership and Education Foundation, the American Indian College Fund, and the Posse Foundation.
What do those groups -- each of which is receiving $125,000 of the total $1.4 million that he received -- have in common?
They all work to help underserved populations of young people get ready to attend and be successful in college.
Obama has said repeatedly that his education goal is to make sure that every child has a quality education and the opportunity to graduate from college -- and he displayed his commitment to that with his own award money.
Yet his education policies to this point cannot ever reach this goal. Nor can they do what he promised during the presidential campaign: Stop high-stakes standardized testing from driving our public education system.
In Saturday's address, Obama called for Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which in 2002 became known as the No Child Left Behind Act.
With a goal of having every child read at grade level by 2014, No Child Left Behind has been criticized by current Education Secretary Arne Duncan as "utopian" and as failing to properly reward schools for progress. One change under his proposed legislative blueprint, Obama said, would be that schools that perform well would be rewarded, while underperforming schools would face tough consequences.
A focus on education reform may be a politically astute move for the president and fellow Democrats in Congress, some of whom face difficult elections in the fall. Education reform, unlike financial regulatory reform or new environmental laws, is a kitchen-table issue that many Americans support.
"The announcement's timing suggests Obama is looking beyond the health care proposal that still lingers in Congress, has delayed the president's international trip next week, and threatens his party's electoral prospects in November," writes the Associated Press.
Gov. Jim Doyle has dropped his broad proposal, and state lawmakers aren't forwarding any of their own ideas for fixing the system.
Once again our leaders have lobbed this festering problem onto the "too hard to fix" pile. Consequently, Wisconsin remains stuck with a funding system that's outdated and unfair.
Wisconsin's next governor needs to make this huge issue a priority during the fall campaign, with specific plans voters can assess.
The state's "three-legged stool" of school financing -- revenue caps, two-thirds state funding, and limits on teacher raises -- has fallen over because state leaders kicked out two of the legs.
In his 2010 State of the Schools address, Houston Independent School District Superintendent Terry Grier commented on the district's relationship with the public charter schools we founded more than a decade ago, YES Prep and KIPP. Grier referred to the relationship as a partnership as well as a competition, stating that HISD is ready to "get busy" in order to ensure parents are not leaving failing HISD schools to attend YES Prep, KIPP or other high-performing charters in Houston. We could not be more pleased to hear these comments from Grier. In fact, we've been hoping for many years that our existence would indeed result in this type of relationship with HISD and a superintendent ready to "get busy" and compete. The recent changes that Grier and the board have implemented regarding a longer calendar and focus on human capital show that they are committed to this idea.
YES Prep and KIPP were both born inside HISD in the mid-1990s when we were both classroom teachers in underserved communities in search of a better way to educate our students. We had a number of theories we wanted to test about what it would take to educate our students in a way that would allow them to compete with students from our city's very best schools. What we learned in those early years was that for us to have the freedom to be experimental, nimble and fleet-footed, for us to be able to make sometimes unorthodox decisions in the best interest of our students, we would need to leave HISD's political bureaucracy to operate as independent public charter schools.
A record number of the 142 million tax returns filed in 2008 resulted in no tax payment, according to a Tax Foundation analysis of IRS data. That means the tax filers got back every dollar that had been withheld from their paychecks, and often more. Roughly 51.6 million tax returns, or 36.3 percent, were filed by such "nonpayers," people whose exemptions, deductions and credits wiped out any federal income tax due.
A family of four earning more than $50,000 can have no income tax liability after taking the standard deduction and the child tax credit.
If the nation's education system finally makes a meaningful turn for the better, March 10 may very well mark the turning point.
On Wednesday, two influential organizations of state leaders -- the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers -- released drafts of new "common core" academic standards for American schools, covering English and math from kindergarten through 12th grade. The standards are intended -- if states embrace them, teachers teach them and children study hard -- to prepare tomorrow's young people to be "college- and career-ready" by the end of high school and to help the U.S. become more internationally competitive.
A closely related development will soon occur, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan unveils a program that will let states compete for up to $350 million in federal funds to develop new tests "aligned" with the new standards.
High school students would have an extra hour to sleep on Tuesday mornings next year under a plan being considered by the Madison School District and the teachers union.
Officials are in negotiations to make Tuesdays a "late start" day for students at East, West, Memorial and possibly La Follette High Schools in 2010-11 to give teachers a morning hour to collaborate with colleagues.
"Collaboration among professionals is like cross-fertilization," John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., said Thursday. The weekly sessions could give teachers a chance to discuss "what is a better way to approach a subject, a concept, what works with this kid and his individual learning style, etc."
I don't know what job the members of the school board came to do. I don't know what job they think they are doing. But I do know what job they aren't doing: they aren't doing the Board job.
The Board job begins with serving as the elected representatives of the public. But the Board members aren't representing the public's voice in Seattle Public Schools. They certainly aren't advocating for the public's perspective. We know that they aren't because if they were, we would hear them begin their sentences with the words: "My constituents want... " and they don't. We don't hear them say "My constituents want equitable access to language immersion programs." or "My constituents want equitable access to Montessori programs." or "My constituents want access to a real Spectrum program for their Spectrum-eligible children." or "My constituents want reduced class sizes." We aren't hearing that. And we sure aren't hearing them follow these statements with "So let's make it happen for them."
In a provocative Detroit News column, columnist Laura Berman describes the troubling case of Detroit school board president Otis Mathis. Mathis appears to be a decent man admired by his colleagues. He is fair and open. He can also barely construct a sentence, as Berman shows by sharing his e-mails.
One Mathis example that she provides:
If you saw Sunday's Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason's he gave for closing school to many empty seats.
Mathis does not deny his writing problems or his weak education record and speaks openly with Berman about them. He says his own struggles and deficiencies don't disqualify him from leading a school system that shares many of those same struggles and shortcomings on an epic scale.
Facing low enrollment and a $50 million budget deficit, the Kansas City Board of Education announced on Wednesday that it would close almost half of the city's public schools. The "Right-Size" plan will mean closing 28 of the city's 61 schools and eliminating 700 out of 3,000 jobs.
National education experts have said that the Kansas City schools were not responding to demographic changes and academic failure. District officials say the closings will improve achievement by allowing the system to focus its resources.
How much does school size matter? And what are the lessons learned from Kansas City?
Faced with a deficit and troubled school system, Kansas City's Board of Education voted to close 28 out of 61 schools. Barbara Shelley, columnist for the Kansas City Star, talks with Kai Ryssdal about what led to the decision and its impact.
TEXT OF INTERVIEW
KAI RYSSDAL: The board of education in Kansas City, Mo., took a vote last night on how to save their city's long-troubled school system. It was close. But by the end of the evening a plan to shut down 28 of the district's 61 schools and lay off 700 people did pass. The vote was 5-4. The district says the plan should cut $50 million from the budget.
Barbara Shelley is a columnist for the Kansas City Star. She's been writing about schools there and the city itself for quite a while. Barb, it's good to have you with us.
BARBARA SHELLEY: Good to be here.
RYSSDAL: What's the reaction in town today after this announcement?
SHELLEY: Well, I think you have two different reactions. You have the reaction from people that are going to be directly affected. And that's the families and the teachers and the students. And there's a lot of anguish in that group. You have another reaction from I would say business types and people that see this as a hope that a smaller, more streamlined school district will mean better performance and a better academic potential for the district.
Big front page story in the WaPo todayabout a debate over getting rid of congressional "earmarks" for for-profit entities. But is the problem that for-profits can get earmarks or that the earmark process is just not very meritorious in its selection regardless of the tax status of the recipient? Plenty of for-profits will continue to get federal money through a variety of avenues. Meanwhile, not every non-profit is a model of efficiency, virtue, or effectiveness.
In K-12, and education more generally, we have a similar problem when it comes to thinking about quality.
Fifteen special interest groups including casino operators, drug firms and unions for teachers and public employees spent more than $1 billion during the last decade trying to influence California public officials and voters, the state's watchdog agency reported today.
The money went for lobbying, campaign contributions to state politicians and ballot measure campaigns to get voters to advance the groups' agendas, according to the report by the state Fair Political Practices Commission.
``This tsunami of special interest spending drowns out the voices of average voters, and intimidates political opponents and elected officials alike,'' said Commission Chairman Ross Johnson, a former state senator.
If you are a parent in cities such as Bellevue, Issaquah or Seattle, your kids are being short-changed--being provided an inferior math education that could cripple their future aspirations--and you need to act. This blog will tell the story of an unresponsive and wrong-headed educational bureaucracies that are dead set on continuing in the current direction. And it will tell the story of how this disaster can be turned around. Parent or not, your future depends on dealing with the problem.
Let me provide you with a view from the battlefield of the math "wars", including some information that is generally not known publicly, or has been actively suppressed by the educational establishment. Of lawsuits and locking parents out of decision making.
I know that some of you would rather that I only talk about weather, but the future of my discipline and of our highly technological society depends on mathematically literate students. Increasingly, I am finding bright students unable to complete a major in atmospheric sciences. All their lives they wanted to be a meteorologist and problems with math had ended their dreams. Most of them had excellent math grades in high school. I have talked in the past about problems with reform or discovery math; an unproven ideology-based instructional approach in vogue among the educational establishment. An approach based on student's "discovering" math principles, group learning, heavy use of calculators, lack of practice and skills building, and heavy use of superficial "spiraling" of subject matter. As I have noted before in this blog, there is no competent research that shows that this approach works and plenty to show that it doesn't. But I have covered much of this already in earlier blogs.
The Kansas City Board of Education voted Wednesday night to close almost half of the city's public schools, accepting a sweeping and contentious plan to shrink the system in the face of dwindling enrollment, budget cuts and a $50 million deficit.
In a 5-to-4 vote, the members endorsed the Right-Size plan, proposed by the schools superintendent, John Covington, to close 28 of the city's 61 schools and cut 700 of 3,000 jobs, including those of 285 teachers. The closings are expected to save $50 million, erasing the deficit from the $300 million budget.
"We must make sacrifices," said board member Joel Pelofsky, speaking in favor of the plan before the vote. "Unite in favor of our children."
Starting as early as this fall, every Hillsborough County schoolteacher will be subject to ratings by his or her peers.
The School Board on Tuesday unanimously approved the move as part of a reform effort under way to improve schools through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The board's vote dedicates $360,000 to an online training course for the peer evaluation system that, by 2013, will help determine whether teachers qualify for tenure or merit pay.
Within a month or so, teachers will be able to see how the system works in real life. The optional six-hour course by national teacher evaluation expert Charlotte Danielson includes an overview and video clips from actual classrooms where similar evaluations have been used.
Developing a set of core content standards to prepare high school students with the academic foundation and skills necessary to succeed on any college campus is the goal of a new initiative at the University of Oregon.
Specifically targeted are the subject areas of mathematics and English, as well as a set of career-oriented two-year certificate programs.
David T. Conley, a professor of education and founder and chief executive officer of the non-profit Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC), will lead the ambitious project, which is partially funded by a $794,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Seattle-based foundation announced in February a $19.5 million package of 15 grants to develop and launch new instructional tools and assessments to assure college readiness across the nation. Other support for the UO project comes from the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association as part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
Shopping blues: Top tax 12%. Chicago's 10.25% highest big-city rate. More Internet tax fights loom.
While President Obama's push to raise federal income taxes for the wealthy gets lots of attention, the continuing upward creep in the sales tax rates imposed by state and local governments has gotten less notice.
But Vertex Inc., which calculates sales tax for Internet sellers, reports that the average general sales tax rate nationwide reached 8.629% at the end of 2009, the highest since the Berwyn, Pa., company started tracking data in 1982. That was up a nickel on a taxable $100 purchase from a year earlier and up nearly 40 cents for the decade. The highest sales tax rate in the country now stands at 12%.
During 2009 seven states and the District of Columbia raised sales tax rates, with one jurisdiction--North Carolina--actually doing it twice. Only four states hiked rates in 2008 and only one in 2007. Given state budget problems, the 2009 state sales tax increases aren't surprising. States have also been raising income tax rates on the wealthy and on corporations and boosting excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco. With states now facing record budget shortfalls, more tax increases seem likely.
There has been discussion regarding the shift of school additional school spending to the sales tax.
The U.S. Education Department is planning to examine the Los Angeles Unified School District's low achieving English-language learning program to determine whether those students are being denied a fair education.
The department's Office for Civil Rights will investigate whether the nation's second-largest school district is complying with federal civil rights laws with regard to English-language learners, who comprise about a third of the district's 688,000 pupils, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The inquiry was sparked by the low academic achievement of the district's English learners. Only 3 percent are proficient in high-school math and English.
Problems in LAUSD's English-language learning program were highlighted last fall in a study by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute.
As part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), the draft K-12 standards are now available for public comment. These draft standards, developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and experts, seek to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare our children for college and the workforce.
Governors and state commissioners of education from 48 states, 2 territories and the District of Columbia committed to developing a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. This is a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
The NGA Center and CCSSO have received feedback from national organizations representing, but not limited to teachers, postsecondary education (including community colleges), civil rights groups, English language learners, and students with disabilities. These standards are now open for public comment until Friday, April 2.
The nation's governors and state school chiefs will propose standards Wednesday for what students should learn in English and math, from kindergarten through high school, a crucial step in President Obama's campaign to raise academic standards across the country.
The blueprint aims to replace a hodgepodge of state benchmarks with common standards. The president has aggressively encouraged the states' action as a key to improving troubled schools and keeping the nation competitive. Instituting new academic standards would reverberate in textbooks, curriculum, teacher training and student learning from coast to coast.
Fourth-graders, for example, would be expected to explain major differences between poetry and prose and to refer to such elements as stanza, verse, rhythm and meter when writing or speaking about a poem. Eighth-graders would be expected to use linear equations to solve for an unknown and explain a proof of the Pythagorean theorem on properties of a right triangle -- cornerstones of algebra and geometry.
"It's hugely significant," said Michael Cohen, a former Clinton education official, who is president of the standards advocacy organization Achieve. "The states recognize they ought to have very consistent expectations for what their students should learn."
After a rowdy, four-hour meeting last month, the Jordan School District Board is considering tightening its policy on public comments.
A proposal for tonight's Board of Education meeting would make a number of changes to the district's rules regarding public participation at board meetings, including limiting the time spent on comments. At the last board meeting, hundreds of people showed up to protest a proposal to lay off 500 workers, including 250 teachers. The board's regular agenda was suspended to make time for four hours of comment.
"It cannot continue to do that every meeting, or the district will come to a halt," Jordan spokeswoman Melinda Colton wrote in an e-mail, noting that people also can chime in via letters, e-mails and phone calls. "The board feels it needs to restore decorum to its board meetings. Their meetings are meetings held in public, not public hearings."
Robin Frodge, president of the Jordan Education Association, said she hopes the board keeps in mind the importance of public input. "One of the primary purposes for public meetings is to conduct business in front of the public and to also take public response on board actions," Frodge said.
Buried on the Department of Education's website is a page that lists per pupil spending on a school-wide, district-wide, and system-wide basis. Using this information, as well as expense data from the 2007-2008 audits and the recent Independent Budget Office report, we compared spending by charter schools and traditional public schools that are located in the same building.
We found that charter schools spent $365 less per pupil than their co-located traditional public schools in 2007-2008. You can see our calculations in a workbook here.
At first glance, the right-sizing of the Kansas City School District just feels wrong.
It feels wrong to close more schools in struggling neighborhoods, to punish scholars with longer bus rides home, to let teachers go with little more than "we wish we didn't have to," to take beautiful buildings that stood for community and put boards in their windows, to ask families to bear the burden of a solution after years of school boards -- which now include myself -- failing to fix the problems. In the storm of controversy, it is easy to overlook what is right in the journey we are on.
Beyond all that may feel wrong, there is so much that is right in our district and with the right-sizing plan. We should celebrate that our superintendent has led a thoughtful, data-driven, six-month, three-stage process to arrive at the plan.
Notes on the Alliance for Education Teacher Quality Survey
Melissa Westbrook:
just finally got around to looking over the Alliance for Education survey called "Teaching Quality Community Survey". What were they thinking? (Sorry to be a little late to this party but I was out of town last week.) I'm not going to even provide a link. I answered every question "don't know" so I could read through the whole thing.
Just from a survey standpoint, it's a mess. There are multiple values in questions starting with the very first one. It's about (1) redesigning the salary schedule AND (2) eliminating coursework incentives AND (3) "reallocating pay to target the district's challenges and priorities." What?!? You can't write a survey question like that.
Question two has a classic "leading the reader" form using phrases like "redouble efforts" and "as attempted by the current superintendent". How does the reader know this actually DID happen? Also, the "latest" negotiations haven't even formally started; is the district showing its hand here?
And it goes on and on. "Gather teacher data so that teachers are equitably distributed among schools." So elsewhere they want to eliminate pay for more education for teachers but at the same time in this question they want to spread the number of teachers who do have more education more equitably among the schools?
LOCAL SCHOOL officials say everything is on the table when it comes to cutting the budget, but there are some measures that would be a bit less painful.
For instance, the Savannah-Chatham Board of Education should consider a temporary increase in class sizes.
While the state last year increased class size regulations marginally, the local system remains, on average, about two or three students below those limits. There is more leeway in elementary schools, with class sizes closer to state limits in the middle and upper grades.
More students per class will likely mean more stress on educators. However, this move can be easily undone when the economy (and school tax revenue) improves.
Superintendent Thomas Lockamy said that out of the system's roughly 3,200 teaching positions, some 300 to 400 come vacant at the end of each year through resignations or retirement.
Rafaela Espinal held her first poolside chat last summer, offering cheese, crackers and apple cider to draw people to hear her pitch.
She keeps a handful of brochures in her purse, and also gives a few to her daughter before she leaves for school each morning. She painted signs on the windows of her Chrysler minivan, turning it into a mobile advertisement.
It is all an effort to build awareness for her product, which is not new, but is in need of an image makeover: a public school in Harlem.
As charter schools have grown around the country, both in number and in popularity, public school principals like Ms. Espinal are being forced to compete for bodies or risk having their schools closed. So among their many challenges, some of these principals, who had never given much thought to attracting students, have been spending considerable time toiling over ways to market their schools. They are revamping school logos, encouraging students and teachers to wear T-shirts emblazoned with the new designs. They emphasize their after-school programs as an alternative to the extended days at many charter schools. A few have worked with professional marketing firms to create sophisticated Web sites and blogs.
The reason, spokesman Adam Collins said Monday, is that focus shifted to pursuing federal stimulus money for education and a lack of interest from state lawmakers in the proposal.
But the top leaders of the Senate and Assembly and the chairs of their education committees said Doyle never put forward a bill or detailed specifics for them to evaluate and that the last contact from his aides on the issue was about a year ago.
"More finger-pointing on education reforms from the administration without a proposal that has strong public support isn't going to help Wisconsin students," Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker (D-Weston) said in a statement.
The news amounts to the latest setback for the Democratic governor as he seeks to build on his legacy before the Legislature finishes its regular business April 22. Fellow Democrats in the Legislature already have rejected Doyle's plans to put the mayor in charge of the Milwaukee Public Schools and have called for changes to a sweeping proposal to limit greenhouse gases and boost renewable energy.
A small but growing number of school districts across the country are moving to a four-day week, in a shift they hope will help close gaping budget holes and stave off teacher layoffs, but that critics fear could hurt students' education.
State legislators and local school boards are giving administrators greater flexibility to set their academic calendars, making the four-day slate possible. But education experts say little research exists to show the impact of shortened weeks on learning. The missed hours are typically made up by lengthening remaining school days.
Of the nearly 15,000-plus districts nationwide, more than 100 in at least 17 states currently use the four-day system, according to data culled from the Education Commission of the States. Dozens of other districts are contemplating making the change in the next year--a shift that is apt to create new challenges for working parents as well as thousands of school employees.
The heightened interest in an abbreviated school week comes as the Obama administration prepares to plow $4.35 billion in extra federal funds into underperforming schools. The administration has been advocating for a stronger school system in a bid to make the U.S. more academically competitive on a global basis.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday the federal government will become more vigilant to make sure students have equal access and opportunity to everything ranging from college prep classes to science and engineering programs.
"We are going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement," Duncan said on a historic Selma bridge to commemorate the 45th anniversary of a bloody confrontation between voting rights demonstrators and state troopers.
Duncan said the department also will issue a series of guidelines to public schools and colleges addressing fairness and equity issues.
"The truth is that, in the last decade, the office for civil rights has not been as vigilant as it should be. That is about to change," Duncan said.
Duncan spoke to a crowd about 400 people on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in observance of "Bloody Sunday," the day in 1965 when several hundred civil rights protesters were beaten by state troopers as they crossed the span over the Alabama River, bound for Montgomery.
Dan has been working hard snooping around in the RCW. It's pretty amazing what you can find in there if you look.
Here's what he found: RCW 28A.320.015
School boards of directors -- Powers -- Notice of adoption of policy.
(1) The board of directors of each school district may exercise the following:
(a) The broad discretionary power to determine and adopt written policies not in conflict with other law that provide for the development and implementation of programs, activities, services, or practices that the board determines will:
(i) Promote the education and daily physical activity of kindergarten through twelfth grade students in the public schools; or
(ii) Promote the effective, efficient, or safe management and operation of the school district;
(b) Such powers as are expressly authorized by law; and
(c) Such powers as are necessarily or fairly implied in the powers expressly authorized by law.
(2) Before adopting a policy under subsection (1)(a) of this section, the school district board of directors shall comply with the notice requirements of the open public meetings act, chapter 42.30 RCW, and shall in addition include in that notice a statement that sets forth or reasonably describes the proposed policy. The board of directors shall provide a reasonable opportunity for public written and oral comment and consideration of the comment by the board of directors.
The state's largest teachers union ripped into a proposed overhaul of teacher contracts Monday, saying the bill represented an effort to score political points instead of serious education reform.
"It attacks the very people who work in our school system each and every day as opposed to giving them the resources that are needed to succeed," said Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, at a news conference called to slam the proposal from Sen. John Thrasher, R-St. Augustine.
Thrasher's bill, filed last week, would base half of a teacher's salary on student performance while extending to five years the period during which a new teacher can be fired at the end of each school year without cause.
It would also dismantle teacher tenure in the three counties, including Duval County, where it exists as well as other employment protections in other parts of the state. In most parts of the state, teachers can obtain a "professional service contract" after three or four years and can only be fired for cause.
Zachary Dupland was a kindergartner at Menasha's Gegan Elementary School when his parents split up. His dad, Eric Dupland, moved to Appleton. His mom, Tauna Carson, moved to Neenah.
As part of their custody agreement, however, they opted to keep Zachary, now a third-grader, at a school in Menasha by applying for open enrollment.
His parents felt no reason existed to uproot him from his friends and teachers, at least until middle school.
"We wanted to avoid any more dramatic changes in his life," Eric Dupland said.
"This option has been wonderful for us," Carson said. "It has allowed us to do just what we need to do for Zachary."
ittle Johnny can't read or write because, in government schools, the interests of teachers' unions prevail over the interests of children. Unions may be beneficial to educators, but they are indifferent -- if not hostile -- to the intellectual development of children.
But education reformers nationwide are celebrating a rare victory for the kids. Last month in Rhode Island, Superintendant Frances Gallo fired the entire staff of Central Falls High School -- a total of 93 people. The grateful citizens of Central Falls have erected a billboard in Gallo's honor. Rightly so. Gallo, Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist and the Central Falls school board (which approved the firings on a 5-2 vote) are an inspiration to the public school reform movement.
Central Falls High is one of the worst schools in Rhode Island. Only 45 percent of the students are proficient in reading, 29 percent in writing and, incredibly, only 4 percent in math. Compare those abysmal numbers to Rhode Island's (somewhat less embarrassing) statewide averages in the same subjects: 69, 42 and 27 percent, respectively. Furthermore, half of the students at Central Falls are failing every subject, and the school's graduation rate is 48 percent.
Only teachers' unions could defend such a spectacular failure. Several hundred bused-in, placard-waving educators and their union representatives showed up in Central Falls hours before the firings. "We are behind Central Falls teachers," proclaimed Mark Bostic of the American Federation of Teachers, "and we will be here as long as it takes to get justice." But on Tuesday, the Central Falls union publicly pledged to support Gallo's reforms, and she said she's willing to negotiate.
When hundreds of parents went to Albany last month to rally for charter schools, they were greeted by a parade of politicians offering encouragement and promises.
But when Bill Perkins, the state senator from Harlem who represents many of the parents, took the stage, they drowned him out with boos.
Some parents confronted him later in the vestibule outside the Senate chamber, demanding that he meet with them that afternoon and chanting "Move Bill, get out the way, get out the way," before he could even speak.
As advocates of charter schools, including the Bloomberg administration, try to persuade legislators to lift the limit on the number of such schools in the state, no one is as likely to stand in their way as Mr. Perkins, whose district encompasses nearly 20 charter schools. Several more are planned next year.
The comment came from Stuka at 8:44pm on Thursday, March 4. I won't quote all of it, but I absolutely want to share this part:
The fundamental problem with the public sector is not lack of taxes but lack of performance monitoring and improvement over time. Witness the public school system for evidence of the failure to monitor the quality of teachers, of teaching performance, of student performance, and of school performance. Same with the criminal-justice system: who is monitoring the quality of inmates produced by our prisons? The quality of justice by our judges and prosecutors? and the quality of policing by our police departments?
Unfortunately, we don't pay for outcomes, but for staffing levels at fixed salary levels. A secondary effect of good government seems to be sometimes adequate government. Maybe we ought to reward for performance instead. That will happen only when compensation is tied to performance and not taking up space in a bureaucracy until the bureaucrat can collect a pension for enduring the bureaucracy, a feat that may be quite difficult and challenging, but in and of itself, produces no output that citizens value.
I highly value the services that government intends to provide (unlike many Republicans), but am unwilling to pay (unlike many Democrats) for monopolistic and ineffective government bureaucracies that have no handle on how to be effective and efficient in what they're doing. This leaves me in a quandry since the demand for services is unceasing and the inertia of ineffective government is entrenched. Mostly I try to vote for anything that smacks of actual reward for performance, and vote against anything that looks like hoggish behavior (as in pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered).
The article was written by UW-Madison graduate Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, an associate professor of computer science at Furman University. Rojstaczer is a retired professor of geophysics at Duke University and the creator of GradeInflation.com, a website that tracks grading trends.
The report analyzes decades of grading patters at American four-year institutions and notes that "grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level. The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private. Relative to other schools, public commuter and engineering schools grade harshly. Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade."
Amidst the Race to the Top excitement this week, an important story may have gotten lost in the buzz. On Wednesday, my colleague Jamie Davies O'Leary, a 27 year-old Princeton grad, liberal Democrat, and Teach For America alumna described her surprise bookshop encounter with former Weatherman and lefty school reformer Bill Ayers.
If Bill Ayers and Fred and Mike Klonsky were 22 again, they would be signing up for Teach For America. The whole thing is worth reading (it's a great story) but note this passage in particular, about Ayers' talk:
[Ayers] answered a young woman's question about New York Teaching Fellows and Teach For America with a diatribe about how such programs can't fix public education and consist of a bunch of ivy leaguers and white missionaries more interested in a resume boost than in helping students. Whoa.
And:
As someone who read Savage Inequalities years ago and attribute my decision to become a teacher partially to the social justice message, I almost felt embarrassed. But that was before I learned a bit of context, nuance, data, and evidence surrounding education policy debates. It's as if Bill Ayers hasn't been on the planet for the last two decades.
Almost as soon as Jamie's essay was posted, the Klonsky brothers (Fred and Mike--both longtime friends and associates of Ayers, both involved in progressive education causes) went after her. Fred posted a missive titled, "File under misguided sense of one's own importance." Mike tweeted that her depiction of the encounter was a "fantasy."
If you don't think the police in New York City need to be reined in, consider the way the cops and their agents are treating youngsters in the city's schools.
In March 2009, a girl and a boy in the sixth grade at the Hunts Point School in the Bronx were fooling around and each drew a line on the other's desk with an erasable marker. The teacher told them to erase the lines, and the kids went to get tissues. This blew up into a major offense when school safety officers became involved.
The safety officers, who have been accused in many instances of mistreating children, are peace officers assigned to the schools. They wear uniforms, work for the New York Police Department and have the power to detain, search, handcuff and arrest students. They do not carry guns.
In this case, the officers seized the two pupils and handcuffed them. Before long, an armed police officer showed up to question the youngsters. The girl asked for her mother and began to cry. Tears were no defense in the minds of the brave New York City law enforcers surrounding this errant child. They were determined to keep the city safe from sixth graders armed with Magic Markers.
ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager -- desperate, in some cases -- for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students' strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn't reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he'd seen before: "a dispiriting exercise in good people failing," as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.
But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers' instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn't have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.
Yet when we speak of "entitlements," or more precisely, against them, the first thing we face is public sector entitlements -- in Canada as in every other western or quasi-western country. The troubles the Greeks are now experiencing with their civil service, which is in a position to bring the country to a halt, is a warning for the road ahead.
And forget Greece, look at California. There one may see in clear North American daylight what a vast unspeakable public bankruptcy looks like. It was not an inevitable thing. Gentle reader need only compare, candidly, California with Texas -- which is flourishing, and whose voters know why. Economic decline is a choice, not a fate, and it has everything to do with big, intrusive government.
Said reader and I could argue till death about the numbers, playing selectively with the statistics; yet what is obvious remains obvious. Among the games at which I am most inclined to sneer, is the percentage of almost any published budget that is assigned to "administrative costs" -- in departments that are essentially all administration.
To no great surprise, Wisconsin will not be one of the handful of states leading a national push to transform public education.
President Barack Obama announced Thursday that Wisconsin failed to survive even a preliminary round of competition for billions of dollars in federal innovation grants.
It's a huge disappointment - especially since Obama came to Madison last fall to officially launch the nationwide effort, which he calls a "Race to the Top."
It's not yet clear why Wisconsin didn't make the cut. That's because the U.S. Department of Education hasn't released our state's scores and comments from the judges.
Yet Gov. Jim Doyle's criticism Thursday of the entrenched Milwaukee School Board and reform-averse state lawmakers was dead-on. The Legislature's failure to shake up the failing Milwaukee public school district had to hurt our state's bid for as much as $254 million in Race to the Top funds.
At the same time, Rep. Brett Davis' criticism of Doyle and the Democratic-run Legislature for kowtowing to the big teachers union was equally apt. The Wisconsin Education Association Council has long resisted big changes in public education, including pay for performance. And the teachers union spent more - by far - on lobbying last year than any other special interest group at the state Capitol.
One of the reasons I place Google ads on this site (they generate very little money) is to periodically observe what type of advertisements their algorithms place around the content. I found this ad supporting a Brodhead referendum interesting, in that it links directly to the District's website. The link includes "doubleclick" tracking logic.
Perhaps the District is paying for the ad campaign from their operating funds, or an advocacy group is funding it?
But changing benefits is, of course, a matter for labor negotiations, and the unions, particularly the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association, don't want to change what they have.
Union's response
Mike Langyel, president of the MTEA, said in a lengthy telephone conversation that the union just does not accept that there would be any savings by shifting more, if not all, employees to the lower cost plan. He called the notion that money could be saved this way "a fantasy" and accused Bonds and Superintendent William Andrekopoulos of engaging in "a theatrical production" aimed at making teachers scapegoats for MPS' problems.
He said teachers earned their health insurance by accepting lower wage increases, going back more than 20 years, and members feel strongly about the Aetna plan. Langyel also questioned the honesty of the administration's cost figures, although he did not give any specific instance that he believed was wrong.
"This is a calculated attempt by this administration to provide false choices," Langyel said. "This will not solve the funding problems of this district one bit. . . . The needs of this district are not going to be met on the backs of those people who are already sacrificing to be Milwaukee teachers."
Langyel said that if all MPS employees were on the HMO plan, that would drive up the costs of that plan to a point that might eliminate the claimed savings. MPS administrators agree that the actual results of such a switch are not known and most likely would be less than the simple calculation that yielded the $47 million figure. Many older employees with higher health care costs are now on the Aetna plan, for one thing. But they do not agree there would be no savings.
Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.
Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.
Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.
These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
One of the first high-profile examples of President Obama's public education reforms comes from Rhode Island, a participant in Race to the Top (RttT).
Superintendent Frances Gallo, overseeing the persistently failing Central Falls High School, decided to fire all the school's teachers after the teacher union proved to be the road block to reform. The superintendent was set to initiate an intervention program at the high school which involved many changes including a longer school day, lunch with the students, and more after school tutoring. The union rejected the proposal because there was not enough monetary compensation attached. Because the intervention plan was refused, the superintendent had to resort to a different model of school reform - the turnaround model -- which involves firing the majority of the faculty and staff. Deborah Gist, Rhode Island's new education commissioner approved the turnaround model for the school.
Zina McGowan-Thomas, the energetic public information officer for St. Mary's County public schools, sends me many announcements and news releases that I am tempted to delete, as I do most e-mails from local school districts. I know this is a bad idea, because sometimes you will find, in the smallest bulletin, something astonishing, like such as the e-mail she sent me a few weeks ago about the Chesapeake Public Charter School.
She told me and her long list of contacts that the school was about to have an open house. Ho-hum. All schools have open houses. Wait a minute: McGowan-Thomas works for a public school district with 27 schools and 17,000 students. Her job is to spread information about them, not a charter school. To most public school employees in the United States, charter schools are the enemy. Finding McGowan-Thomas promoting a charter school event is like seeing your local post office displaying a FedEx poster.
Charter schools are independent public schools that use tax dollars but do not have to follow a lot of school district rules. They can have different hours, different textbooks, different teaching methods and whatever else appeals to the teachers and parents who have gotten permission to set them up.
Teachers call for engaging curriculum, supportive leadership, clear standards common across states in survey by Scholastic Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Scholastic Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today released Primary Sources: America's Teachers on America's Schools, a landmark report presenting the results of a national survey of more than 40,000 public school teachers in grades pre-K to 12. The survey reveals that, while teachers have high expectations for their students, they overwhelmingly agree that too many students are leaving unprepared for success beyond high school. Primary Sources reveals teachers' thoughtful, nuanced views on issues at the heart of education reform - from performance pay and standardized tests to academic standards and teacher evaluation. Teacher responses reveal five powerful solutions to raise student achievement.
"Teachers are a critical part of preparing our children for the future, and their voices are an essential addition to the national debate on education," said Margery Mayer, Executive Vice President and President, Scholastic Education. "At Scholastic, we work daily with teachers and we know that they have powerful ideas on how best to tackle the challenges facing our schools. Since teachers are the frontline of delivering education in the classroom, the reform movement will not succeed without their active support. Primary Sources is a step in ensuring that teachers' voices are a part of this important conversation."
A Rhode Island school board's decision to fire the entire faculty of a poorly performing school, and President Obama's endorsement of the action, has stirred a storm of reaction nationwide, with teachers condemning it as an insult and conservatives hailing it as a watershed moment of school accountability.
The decision by school authorities in Central Falls to fire the 93 teachers and staff members has assumed special significance because hundreds of other school districts across the nation could face similarly hard choices in coming weeks, as a $3.5 billion federal school turnaround program kicks into gear.
While there is fierce disagreement over whether the firings were good or bad, there is widespread agreement that the decision would have lasting ripples on the nation's education debate -- especially because Mr. Obama seized on the move to show his eagerness to take bold action to improve failing schools filled with poor students.
"This is the first example of tough love under the Obama regime, and that's what makes it significant," said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, an educational research and advocacy organization.
Among the many controversies surrounding the Knowledge Is Power Program, the nation's most successful charter school network, is the suggestion that KIPP scores look good because their weakest students drop out. A new and unusually careful survey has found that in the case of at least one KIPP school, that's not true.
Last year I wrote a book, "Work Hard. Be Nice," about KIPP co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg. I promised readers who think this makes me biased that I would mention this in future columns on KIPP. I don't think I'm biased, but I am obsessed. I think KIPP--and schools like it--are the most interesting phenomenon to emerge in public education in my lifetime. I make sure that all important developments in KIPPland--both good and bad--are reported here.
The new study, "Who Benefits From KIPP," [[[this link is to a page that makes you pay for the report. The link to the report directly for free is http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/5311, but I could not copy and paste it. Yet the WSJ managed to use it as a link in a blog post. Maybe our experts can figure this out.]]]was done by Joshua D. Angrist, Parag A. Pathak and Christopher R. Walters of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Susan M. Dynarski of the University of Michigan and Thomas J. Kane of Harvard University, for the National Bureau of Economic Research. It is the first to use a randomized control group method to determine the effects of KIPP's long school days, energetic teaching and strong work ethic on fifth- through eighth-graders.
How appropriate that, as one of the biggest education protests in history unfurled across the state, California's application for a Race to the Top school reform grant was rejected by federal officials. Could there possibly be a louder wake-up call?
Given the chaos and infighting that muddied the state's halting attempt to qualify for Race to the Top, the rejection is no surprise. But if education funding continues to decline, and if turf battles continue to prevent real reform, it's not just students who will suffer. California's greatness is at risk.
For much of the late 20th century, our public schools, colleges and universities were the envy of the nation, driving an economic boom that made the Golden State a global power. It's no coincidence that this happened when taxpayers' commitment to education was at its zenith.
That support has been declining for years, and the results are alarming.
Community colleges are required to accept everyone, but next fall, they'll turn away some 200,000 students because they can't afford to offer enough classes. With unemployment around 12 percent, what will those students -- with only a high school diploma -- do while waiting for a spot on campus?
Los Angeles schools did not undergo the transformation we had expected from the Public School Choice initiative, which in its first year opened more than 30 new or underperforming public schools to outside management. Top-notch charter operators applied for relatively few schools and then were removed from the running at the last minute. The school board once again mired itself in political maneuvers instead of putting students first.
What transformation there was came, more surprisingly, from the teachers. They agreed to allow and create more pilot schools, which are similar to charter schools but employ district personnel. They formed partnerships and, with the help of their union, United Teachers Los Angeles, drew up their own, often strong applications for revamping schools. It would be wrong to underestimate the effort and skills needed to pull this off. The time frame was short and the list of requirements long. Unlike charter operators, which submit such applications as a matter of course, the teachers had no particular background for this work. They met with parents who have long fumed that the schools discourage their participation. They listened. They responded.
This is a tremendous step in a school district where, too often, teachers and their union have not been the agents of change but impediments to it. In fact, had the process worked as it was supposed to, the reform initiative would have served as a much stronger application for federal Race to the Top funds than anything the Legislature came up with.
President Barack Obama's budget will lead to deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, the CBO estimated Friday.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said President Barack Obama's budget would lead to annual deficits averaging nearly $1 trillion for the next decade.
The estimates are for larger deficits than the budget shortfalls expected by the White House.
Annual deficits under Obama's budget plan would be about $976 billion from 2011 through 2020, according to a CBO analysis of Obama's plan released Friday.
Try "tax gap" or "revenue problem." These are terms that Superintendent Dan Nerad -- who is slated to offer his budget recommendations to the School Board on March 8 -- and other school district players are starting to use to describe the financial troubles the district is facing.
What's commonly been defined as the district's budget gap in the past -- the difference between the cost to continue existing programs and salaries and what the district is allowed to tax under state revenue caps -- is actually $1.2 million. That's the amount the district would still have to cut if the board were willing to tax to the maximum amount allowed under the state revenue limits. (And in past years, Madison and almost every other district in the state have taxed to the limit.) But if you add in the drop in revenue from the state -- about $17 million for the 2010-2011 budget -- the gap grows to $18.2 million.
It's fair to ask then, what makes up the other $11.6 million that the administration calls the $29.8 million 2010-2011 budget gap? In a rather unorthodox manner, Nerad and company are including two other figures: $4 million in levying authority the district was granted through the 2008 referendum and $7.6 million in levying authority within the revenue limit formula.
Confused? You're not alone. It's got many folks scratching their heads. But the bottom line is this: Although the district has the authority to raise property taxes up to $312 on an average $250,000 home, it's unlikely the board would want to reap that amount of revenue ($11.6 million) from increased taxes. Large property tax hikes -- never popular -- are particularly painful in the current economy.
Madison school administrators laid out a grim list of possible cuts big and small Friday that School Board members can use as a starting point to solve a nearly $30 million hole in next year's budget.
The options range from the politically painless -- restructuring debt, cutting postage costs -- to the always explosive teacher layoffs and school closings.
But the school-closing option, which would close Lake View, Lindbergh and Mendota elementary schools on the city's North Side as part of a consolidation plan, already appears to be a nonstarter. A majority of board members said they won't go there.
"It's dead in the water for me," said Lucy Mathiak, board vice president.
President Arlene Silveira said the option is not on the table for her, either. Ditto for board members Marj Passman and Maya Cole, who said she immediately crossed out the option with a red pen.
Board members could decide to raise taxes enough to cover almost all of the $30 million, or they could opt to not raise taxes at all and cut $30 million. Neither option is considered palatable to board members or most residents, so some combination of the two is expected.
Seniors will have to "show evidence of their writing" in order to graduate, beginning with the class of 2013, Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron will announce Thursday.
"All students are expected to work on their writing both in general courses and in their concentration," Bergeron wrote in an e-mail to be sent to students Thursday. Sophomores will have to reflect on their writing in their concentration forms, according to the letter.
The changes come out of recommendations from the Task Force on Undergraduate Education, Bergeron told The Herald. Based on the findings of an external review and discussions with faculty and academic committees, the College Writing Advisory Board and the College Curriculum Council collaborated on a new, clearer delineation of the expectations of writing at Brown, she said.
Bergeron's letter ends with a statement on writing, explaining why it is an important skill for all graduates. "Writing is not only a medium through which we communicate and persuade; it is also a means for expanding our capacities to think clearly," she wrote.
When all the teachers were fired from Central Falls High School last week in a sweeping effort at school reform, their superintendent gave them a taste of the accountability President Barack Obama says is necessary.
It is a strategy that has been used elsewhere, such as in Chicago and Los Angeles. But while there have been some improvements in test scores, schools where most teachers have been replaced still grapple with problems of poverty and discipline. Even advocates of the approach say firing a teaching staff is just one of several crucial steps that must be taken to turn around a school.
Central Falls teachers have appealed the firings and both they and the administration are now indicating a willingness to go back to the table to avoid mass firings. Teachers say wholesale firings unfairly target instructors who work with impoverished children who have been neglected for years.
"We believe the teachers have been scapegoated here," American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said of the Central Falls firings this week.
That's a real quote. The speaker is Asbury Park School District's new superintendent Denise Lowe, who says that "major changes have to be made to the schools or the school district will cease to exist, " according to the Asbury Park Press. Enrollment is dropping because students are leaving for parochial schools and charter schools, so she's put together a five-year plan to improve achievement.
She's got her work cut out for her. Asbury Park High School, for example, with 478 kids, has a 45.7% mobility rate. (The state average is 9.6%.) 72% of students failed the 11th grade HSPA test in language arts and 86.1% failed the math portion. Average SAT scores are 325 in math and 330 in verbal. Attendance rates in 9th grade are 83%. A whopping 64.6% of kids never pass the HSPA and end up taking the Special Review Assessment, a back-door-to-diploma-route that is impossible to fail. The total comparative cost per pupil? $24,428. (DOE data here.)
The East Providence School Committee can step off the main stage. Their formerly astounding move to cut teacher pay and increase benefit co-pays is no longer the most dramatic school administration move in the state.
Sure, it got a little national attention. But did the president talk about it?
No.
But he had something to say about the situation in Central Falls this week, where the entire high school teaching staff was recently fired by the superintendent. It is not easy to make this long story short, but here goes: The snowball that resulted in the firings rolled downhill from Washington, DC to Central Falls. President Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, asked the states to identify their lowest-performing schools. RI Education Commissioner Deborah Gist did just that. Her list included Central Falls High School, where barely half of the students graduate and hardly any of them can pass the math standards tests. She told the superintendent there to implement one of four federally mandated changes. The superintendent chose to negotiate a plan in which teachers would spend more time with the students outside of class and do a couple weeks of training in the summer.
The Jordan School Board is asking a state judge to rule on how seniority must be calculated for its employees as it plans to lay off about 500 staff members and educators.
Without clarification about how seniority should be considered, the district could face liability in numerous potential lawsuits, the 3rd District Court complaint said. It names the Jordan Education Association (JEA) and the Jordan Classified Education Association, and has been assigned to Judge Joseph Fratto.
Whatever the judge determines could well decide who among Jordan's teachers would be most vulnerable to layoffs.
The Jordan board, in the face of a projected $30 million shortfall, has decided to cut about 500 jobs, including 200 to 250 teachers. When terminating workers, school districts in Utah must abide by a "last in, first out" policy that provides job security to those with the most seniority.
The board now plans to eliminate employees in each school based on the number of years they have worked for the district. In other words, the jobs of those teachers with the least district seniority in each school would be at risk.
When state Sen. James Meeks asks fellow Democrats to give education vouchers to kids who attend some of the worst schools in Chicago, the legislators often tell him they don't want to divert dollars from public education.
Meeks' response: "If the public schools are not doing their job, why do you want to continue to reward them with money?"
Good question.
We have yet to hear a good answer.
Meeks is trying valiantly to shake up the status quo in public education, and we stand with him in that effort. He is pushing a solid plan to create a voucher program for Chicago. The Senate's executive subcommittee on education is set to discuss the bill on Wednesday.
More than a dozen states have formed an alliance to battle dismal college completion rates and figure out how to get more students to follow through and earn their diplomas.
Stan Jones, Indiana's former commissioner for higher education, is leading the effort with about $12 million in startup money from several national nonprofits including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
About one in every two Americans who start college never finish, said Jones, who founded Complete College America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, last year.
The U.S. has focused on access to higher education for the past several decades, and states need to turn their focus toward how many students actually graduate after they get in, even if it means using a funding structure that is based on degree completion instead of attendance, Jones said Tuesday.
I think it is very difficult for a person who lives in a community to know whether, in fact, his educational system is what it should be, whether if you compare his community to a neighboring community they are doing everything they should be, whether the people that are operating the educational system in a state or local community are as good as they should be.
... I wonder if we couldn't have some kind of system of reporting ... through some testing system that would be established [by] which the people at the local community would know periodically ... what progress had been made."
A national survey of more than 40,000 public school teachers suggests that while higher salaries are far more likely than performance pay to help keep top talent in the classroom, supportive leadership trumps financial incentives.
The survey, funded by a philanthropy active in education reform, also shows that teachers have mixed feelings about proposals for new academic standards: Slightly more than half think that establishing common standards across all states would have a strong or very strong impact on student achievement, but two-thirds believe the rigor of standards in their own state is "about right."
The survey, to be released Wednesday, was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with the publisher Scholastic Inc. Harris Interactive canvassed the teachers via telephone and online questionnaires from March 2009 to June 2009, as the Obama administration was developing strategies to promote higher standards and more sophisticated use of test data to improve achievement and reward effective teachers.
I wish to take issue with some of the assumptions made by the four teachers who were interviewed concerning the Gates Foundation grant ("Teachers in transition," Views, Feb. 28).
It was said several times that good parenting is essential for children's success in school. Not true! My two brothers and I grew up in a totally dysfunctional home, filled with constant criticism, hatred, anger, punishment, a mostly absent father, and one in which our mother constantly set us one against the other. There were no books, no magazines, no art on the walls and certainly no love or encouragement. Never once did we hear, "I'm proud of you!" or "Good job!"
We should have been poster children for not succeeding in school, but we weren't. Today, my older brother is a medical doctor. My younger brother has two master's degrees and is a life-long learner with a huge book collection. I started and completed my BA in English at age 25, with two toddlers to care for and no help from anyone, graduated in three years and had a successful career. We all still read voraciously.
NJEA President Barbara Keshishian has a news release out today slamming Gov. Christie's seizure of $475 million in local district surplus accounts. Add to that a possible 15% cut in state aid, she intones, and it's a "doomsday scenario for families" which will have "a devastating impact next fall, with many [districts] forced to lay off teachers and staff, cut academic programs or raise taxes."
Fair enough. Local school districts are frantically calculating draconian cuts to accommodate projected shortfalls. But here's the missing link in her jeremiad: those cuts are driven less by loss of surplus and state aid than by payroll and benefits increases radically out of sync with economic realities and private sector compensation. However, the solution's pretty simple: NJEA should direct its local affiliates to proffer a one-year freeze on salaries, and encourage small contributions to health benefits.
Here's an example. District A has a budget of $50 million. Typically 75% of those costs are payroll and benefits, or $37.5 million. If NJEA would exercise meaningful leadership and promote flat salaries for one year, those lay-offs, academic cuts, and tax raises would be almost entirely mitigated.
Last week I attended Education Industry Days in a hotel between the AFT and the NEA-a bit ironic, don't you think?. On the opening day, the front page of the USA Today reported that public sector union members now outnumber private sector members-we are well protected from ourselves.
The once respected scholar Diane Ravitch has joined the unions in monopoly protection-no choice, no market, no testing. She nearly made me crash my car in Phoenix this morning during her ridiculous back-to-the future NPR interview suggesting a return to free-for-all teach what-ever-however past. A former conservative, she now shuns markets, choice, testing-basically everything necessary to drive performance at scale. Hard to follow the logic of how her proposals would make things better for low income kids.
If you care about equality and excellence, see Education Equality Project and their case for accountability. Folks like Ravitch complain about accountability but don't offer an alternative that has a reliable chance for making this significantly better for low income kids.
Many states have made measurable progress in recent years toward the elusive goal of college readiness, according to a new report by the nonprofit Achieve.
Maryland, Virginia and the District have made more progress than some, but less than most. Each state has achieved only one of five college-readiness goals identified in the report.
"What started off as isolated efforts among a few states five years ago has produced a national consensus: All students should receive a quality education that prepares them to succeed in college, career and life," said Mike Cohen, Achieve's president, in a release.
Achieve's fifth annual "Closing the Expectations Gap" report finds that the majority of states, 31, now have high school standards in English and mathematics that align with the expectations of colleges and business. (Meaning that collegiate and business officials were involved in drafting the standards and approved the final product.) In 2005, by contrast, only three states had such standards.
Four additional states: new Hampshire, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Wyoming reported plans to administer college and career ready assessments, although their plans are not yet developed enough to include in the table on page 16.
Government-run, union-controlled education is as antiquated in 21st Century America as a mimeograph machine and as outdated as the New Deal.
The entire history of this great country is choice -- except in the all-important field of education, wherein one size shall fit all.
Imagine an America restricted to one mobile cell phone provider, one television station, never mind cable or satellite, one car insurance company -- that is the government-monopoly education system.
Confreres, here is change you can believe in. In the previous blog, I engaged in a colloquy with the delusional Matt Logan, who encourages us law and order types to volunteer for school breakfast. I'm game, but think we'd be welcome?
Imagine the Blaska Man grabbing the empty belt loop of a gangsta wannabe and saying, "Time-out, young fella."
The kid would laugh at my time out as they laugh at the teachers' time outs and the squire of Stately Blaska Manor would be brought up on charges of belt-loop grabbing with intent to instill values.
Australian Education Union president Angelo Gavrielatos says they're also disappointed because there should have been more teacher involvement in the curriculum's development.
Mr Gavrielatos says a curriculum document alone won't improve educational outcomes and what teachers need are more resources.
A startling ebb tide has been building in recent days across the Milwaukee Public Schools system, as principals and school councils make plans for next year.
Schools losing two teachers. Six teachers. A dozen teachers. More cuts in music, gym and art teachers, as well as librarians. Class sizes increasing - some principals say they are facing 25 or 30 in first-grade classes, with no aides for the teachers. High school classes that could reach 50 or more in some high schools. ("That's not a classroom, that's a lecture hall," one principal said.)
Here's one important part of that tide: New Leaders for New Schools will not launch a new class this summer to be trained as principals in MPS.
New Leaders is one of the hot acts in American education. Like Teach for America, the New Teacher Project and a few similar efforts, it is a hard-driving effort to bring talent into administrative and teaching positions in urban schools across the country.
Across the nation, districts are only enduring the first phase of what is likely a several-year stretch of tough budgets. Why? First, property taxes account for so much of school spending, residential real estate prices are only now bottoming, commercial properties will be falling into 2011, and states adjust valuation on a rolling basis. This means the impact of the real estate bubble likely won't fully play out until 2014 or so. Second, thus far, districts have been cushioned by more than $100 billion in stimulus funds. Third, going forward, K-12 is going to be competing with demands for Medicaid, transportation, public safety, and higher education--all of which have been squeezed and will be hungry for fresh dollars when the economy recovers. And, fourth, massively underfunded state and local pension plans will require states to redirect dollars from operations. All of this means that the funding "cliff" looming in 2010 to 2011 is steeper and likely to be with us longer than most district leaders have publicly acknowledged.
Early responses to this situation have been inadequate, to put it mildly. Districts first took out the scalpel and turned up thermostats, delayed textbook purchases, and reduced maintenance. Now they're boosting class sizes, raising fees, and zeroing out support staff and freshmen athletics. It's going to take a lot more for districts to thrive in their new fiscal reality. It would behoove them to take a page from the playbook of new Kansas City Superintendent John Covington.
When Lindsey Lecus heads to the library for her literature studies class at Fritsche Middle School, she checks the assignments posted by her teacher in Maine and may enter a discussion forum with a classmate in Switzerland.
It's the second online English class Lecus has taken thanks to Fritsche's partnership with an international provider of online courses, and the seventh-grader said she likes the fact that she can work ahead of the traditional curriculum and earn credits toward high school.
In Milwaukee and elsewhere, more middle and high schools are starting to offer online classes to students during the day in place of one or more face-to-face classes.
Fully virtual schools in Wisconsin continue to attract students who pursue their entire educations through the Internet, but adding online classes to the options students have during a traditional school day is a trend that may combine the best of both worlds.
Advocates say students learn to work independently and can take harder courses in preparation for college while also getting in-school support from teachers and peers.
When Rosemarie Wilson moved her family to a wealthy suburb of Raleigh a couple of years ago, the biggest attraction was the prestige of the local public schools. Then she started talking to neighbors.
Don't believe the hype, they warned. Many were considering private schools. All pointed to an unusual desegregation policy, begun in 2000, in which some children from wealthy neighborhoods were bused to schools in poorer areas, and vice versa, to create economically diverse classrooms.
"Children from the 450 houses in our subdivision were being bused all across the city," said Ms. Wilson, for whom the final affront was a proposal by the Wake County Board of Education to send her two daughters to schools 17 miles from home.
So she vented her anger at the polls, helping elect four new Republican-backed education board members last fall. Now in the majority, those board members are trying to make good on campaign promises to end Wake's nationally recognized income-based busing policy.
In September of 2009, Washington, DC, schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee laid off nearly 400 teachers, citing a serious shortfall in funds for the DC school system. The move, coming as it did after Washington hired more than 900 new teachers in the summer of 2009, made jaws drop -- some in outrage, some in awe. But the controversy was due only partly to the fact that Rhee axed jobs so close on the heels of a hiring spree; she also took full advantage of a clause in DC regulation that made "school needs," not seniority, the determining factor in who would be laid off.
Approve of Rhee's move or not, the highly scrutinized and controversial layoffs spotlight an important question: what factors should be considered when school districts must decide who will stay and who will go?
In the past year, cash-strapped districts have been handing out pink slips by the hundreds, and some, by the thousands. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that nearly 60,000 teachers were laid off in 2009. State budget gaps and deficit projections, with federal stimulus funding already spent, suggest more of the same for 2010. Some observers expect current cuts to come faster even than those of the 1970s, when the baby boom generation waned, emptying out schools across the country.
I have an uncle who was for years a Chicago public school teacher. Passionate and articulate about his subject, biology, Arnie cared a great deal about whether the kids learned in his class.
But here's the disturbing thing he recalls about his career:
In the years that his classes were filled with kids from poor, broken homes who didn't eat or sleep with any regularity, he worried that he wasn't nearly as effective as he wanted to be. He reached some of the kids, sometimes, with some material, but not enough to his liking, no matter what he did or how hard he tried.
When he changed schools and suddenly was teaching kids from middle-class families who valued education, he instantly became a brilliant teacher. His students progressed at a fast clip, and everything he did seemed to work.
What some school reformers seem to forget is that the kids' circumstances outside school affect their class performance: how much they eat, how much they sleep, how many words they heard when they were young, how many books were made available to them, the abilities and the disabilities with which they were born, etc.
Idaho schools will likely make do with 7.5 percent less in total funding next year, according to a plan that includes reducing salaries for first-year teachers.
The Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee aims to give schools $128 million less in fiscal year 2011 than they're getting this year from all funding sources. State general fund spending is due to drop 1.4 percent, to $1.21 billion.
In November of 2008 the district was given voter approval for a three year operating referendum: $5 million in 2009-2010, $4 million in 2010-2011, and $4 million in 2011-2012, The approved operating referendum has a shared cost plan between property tax payers and the district.
During the fall adoption of the 2009-2010 budget the Board of Education worked to reduce the impact for property tax payers by eliminating costs, implementing new revenues, and utilizing fund balance (see Appendix A). The Wisconsin State 2009-2011 budget impacted the district funding significantly in the fall of2009-2010 and will again have an impact on the 2010-2011 projections.
The district and PMA Financial Network, Inc, have worked to prepare a five year financial forecast beginning with the 2010-2011 budget year, which is attached in pgs 1-2.
2010-2011 Projection Assumptions:
The following items are included in the Budget Projection:
1. The budget holds resources in place and maintains programs and services.
2. October enrollment projections
3. Salary and Benefits - Teacher salary projections are based on their current settlement, and all other units are at a projected increase consistent with recent contract settlements.
4. Supplies & Materials - A 1% (~$275,000) projection was applied to supply and material budgets each year
5. Revenues - The district utilized revenue limit and equalization aid calculations based on the 2009-2011 State Budget. All other revenues remained constant.
6. Grants - Only Entitlement Grants are included in the forecasted budget. Example ARRA funds are not included as they are· not sustainable funds.
7. Debt - The forecast includes a projection for the WRS refinancing as of January 26th Attached on pgs 3-4 is a current Debt Schedule for the District which includes thecurrently restructured debt and the estimated WRS refinanced debt.
8. The 4-k program revenues, expenditures and enrollment have been added to the
projections beginning in 2011-2012.
Introduction and Overview
1. Background and Overview Daniel A. Nerad, Superintendent of Schools
Prior to the fall of 2008, MMSD high schools functioned as four separate autonomous high schools, with minimal focus on working collaboratively across the district to address student educational needs.
In 2008 MMSD received a Federal Smaller Learning Communities for $5.3 million dollars over a five year period. The purpose of that grant is to support the large changes necessary to:
Increase student achievement for all students.
Increase and improve student to student relationships and student to adult relationships.
Improve post-secondary outcomes for all students.
District administration, along with school leadership and school staff, have examined the research that shows that fundamental change in education can only be accomplished by creating the opportunity for teachers to talk with one another regarding their instructional practice. The central theme and approach for REaL has been to improve and enhance instructional practice through collaboration in order to increase stndent achievement. Special attention has been paid to ensure the work is done in a cross - district, interdepartmental and collaborative manner. Central to the work, are district and school based discussions focused on what skills and knowledge students need to know and be able to do, in order to be prepared for post-secondary education and work. Systemized discussions regarding curriculum aligll1nent, course offerings, assessment systems, behavioral expectations and 21 st century skills are occurring across all four high schools and at the district level.
Collaborative professional development has been established to ensure that the work capitalizes on the expertise of current staff, furthers best practices that are already occurring within the MMSD high school classrooms, and enhances the skills of individuals at all levels from administration to classroom teachers needed. Our work to date has laid the foundation for further and more in-depth work to occur.
While we are at the formative stages of our work, evidence shows that success is occurring at the school level. Feedback from principals indicates that district meetings, school buildings and classrooms are feeling more collaborative and positive, there is increased participation by teachers in school based decisions, and school climate has improved as evidenced by a significant reduction in behavior referrals.
This report provides a summary of the REaL Grant since fall of2008 and includes:
1. Work completed across all four high schools.
2. School specific work completed.
3. District work completed.
4. REaL evaluation
5. Future implications
In addition the following attachments are included:
1. Individual REaL School Action Plans for 09-10
2. REaL District Action for 09-10
3. ACT EP AS Overview and Implementation Plan
4. AVID Overview
5. Templates used for curriculum and course alignment
6. Individual Learning Plan summary and implementation plan
7. National Student Clearninghouse StudentTracker System
8. Student Action Research example questions
2. Presenters
Pam Nash, Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Schools
Darwin Hernandez, East High School AVID Student
Jaquise Gardner, La Follette High School AVID Student
Mary Kelley, East High School
Joe Gothard, La Follette High School
Bruce Dahmen, Memorial High School
Ed Holmes, West High School
Melody Marpohl, West High School ESL Teacher
3. Action requested of the BOE
The report is an update, providing information on progress of MMSD High Schools and district initiatives in meeting grant goals and outlines future directions for MMSD High schools and district initiatives based on work completed to date.
MMSD has contracted with an outside evaluator, Bruce King, UW-Madison. Below are the initial observations submitted by Mr. King:
The REaL evaluation will ultimately report on the extent of progress toward the three main grant goals. Yearly work focuses on major REaL activities at or across the high schools through both qualitative and quantitative methods and provides schools and the district with formative evaluation and feedback. During the first two years ofthe project, the evaluation is also collecting baseline data to inform summative reports in later years of the grant. We can make several observations about implementation ofthe grant goals across the district.
These include:
Observation 1: Professional development experiences have been goal oriented and focused. On a recent survey of the staff at the four high schools, 80% of responding teachers reported that their professional development experiences in 2009-10 were closely connected to the schools' improvement plans. In addition, the focus of these efforts is similar to the kinds of experiences that have led to changes in student achievement at other highly successful schools (e.g., Universal Design, instructional leadership, and literacy across the curriculum).
Observation 2: Teacher collaboration is a focal point for REaL grant professional development. However, teachers don't have enough time to meet together, and Professional Collaboration Time (PCT) will be an important structure to help sustain professional development over time.
Observation 3: School and district facilitators have increased their capacity to lead collaborative, site-based professional development. In order for teachers to collaborate better, skills in facilitation and group processes should continue to be enhanced.
Observation 4: Implementing EP AS is a positive step for increasing post-secondary access and creating a common assessment program for all students.
Observation 5: There has been improved attention to and focus on key initiatives. Over two- thirds ofteachers completing the survey believed that the focus of their current initiatives addresses the needs of students in their classroom. At the same time, a persisting dilemma is prioritizing and doing a few things well rather than implementing too many initiatives at once.
Observation 6: One of the important focus areas is building capacity for instructional leadership, work carried out in conjunction with the Wallace project's UW Educational Leadership faculty. Progress on this front has varied across the four schools.
Observation 7: District offices are working together more collaboratively than in the past, both with each other and the high schools, in support of the grant goals.
Is it likely that the four high schools will be significantly different in four more years?
Given the focus on cultivating teacher leadership that has guided the grant from the outset, the likelihood is strong that staff will embrace the work energetically as their capacity increases. At the same time, the ultimate success ofthe grant will depend on whether teachers, administrators, anddistrict personnel continue to focus on improving instruction and assessment practices to deliver a rigorous core curriculum for all and on nurturing truly smaller environments where students are known well.
It's absurd to believe anyone wants ineffective teachers in any classroom.
So when President Barack Obama, in a speech last fall at Madison's Wright Middle School, called for "moving bad teachers out of the classroom, once they've been given an opportunity to do it right," the remark drew enormous applause. Such a pledge is integral to the president's commitment to strengthen public education.
But this part of Obama's Race to the Top agenda for schools has occasioned much nervousness. Educators and policymakers, school boards and school communities have questions and genuine concern about what it means. What, exactly, is a bad teacher, and how, specifically, do you go about removing him or her from a classroom?
Many other questions follow. Do we have a "bad teacher" problem in Madison? Does the current evaluation system allow Madison to employ teachers who don't make the grade? Is our system broken and does it need Obama's fix?
A look into the issue reveals a system that is far from perfect or transparent. But Madison school board President Arlene Silveira agrees it's an issue that must be addressed.
The Florida State DOE posted (leaked) the January 13th confidential draft of the Common Core Standards in their Race to the Top Application. Thank you Florida!
In April 2008, The Orange County Register published a bombshell of an investigation about a license plate program for California government workers and their families. Drivers of nearly 1 million cars and light trucks--out of a total 22 million vehicles registered statewide--were protected by a "shield" in the state records system between their license plate numbers and their home addresses. There were, the newspaper found, great practical benefits to this secrecy.
"Vehicles with protected license plates can run through dozens of intersections controlled by red light cameras with impunity," the Register's Jennifer Muir reported. "Parking citations issued to vehicles with protected plates are often dismissed because the process necessary to pierce the shield is too cumbersome. Some patrol officers let drivers with protected plates off with a warning because the plates signal that drivers are 'one of their own' or related to someone who is."
The plate program started in 1978 with the seemingly unobjectionable purpose of protecting the personal addresses of officials who deal directly with criminals. Police argued that the bad guys could call the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), get addresses for officers, and use the information to harm them or their family members. There was no rash of such incidents, only the possibility that they could take place.
The Portland School Board this morning unanimously approved a three-year contract between Portland Public Schools and the district's nearly 4,000 teachers.
The new contract gives teachers a 2 percent cost-of-living pay increase in 2008-09 and in 2010-11. For 2009-10, teachers will receive no pay raise. The district gained the ability to extend the student day, which means additional support and tutoring classes could be available to kids before or after school.
"The important message is that we're trying to balance the challenges of the economy with being fair to our teachers," board co-chair Trudy Sargent said after the vote, "and I think the 0 percent cola in the current year, which has been a really tough year for everybody ... that was an important place to balance the budget and teachers were willing to sacrifice in that year."
Added schools Supt. Carole Smith: "We hit a sweet spot of being able to both protect services to students and reflect the tough economic times that we're in."
The Portland School Board voted unanimously Saturday to approve a three-year contract between Portland Public Schools and the Portland Association of Teachers, ending a negotiation that has stretched on for more than a year and a half.
"This agreement allows us to live within our means," said Portland School Board co-chair Trudy Sargent in a prepared statement Saturday. She said it garners two goals: It "increases instructional time for students and honors the good work of educators in Portland Public Schools," Sargent said.
Key details of the approved contract agreement include:
The Board of Education has shown concern with current levels of participation among staff, parents, and students in the use of the Infinite Campus student information system. This concern comes despite many efforts to engage the stakeholders with various professional development opportunities and promotional campaigns over the past three years. In December 2009, the Board was provided a summary from a staff survey conducted on the topic explaining why staff had been reluctant to use the teacher tools. That report is found as an attachment to this report (see Attachment 1).
A survey of Wisconsin school districts was completed to determine the standards for teacher use of student information system technologies in the state. The survey gathered information about the use of grade book, lesson planners, and parent and student portals. Responses were collected and analyzed from over 20 Wisconsin districts. Nearly all responding districts report either a requirement for online grade book use, or have close to 100 percent participation. (See Attachment 2).
Describe the action requested of the BOE
The administration is requesting that the Board of Education take action in support of the proposed action steps to enhance the overall use of the teacher and portal tools among our stakeholders.
The proposed time line for full teacher use of grade level appropriate Infinite Campus teacher tools is: High school teachers - 2011-2012 End of 4th Quarter, Middle school teachers - 2010-2011 End of 4th Quarter, Elementary school teachers - End of 4th Quarter, 2011-2012 (calendar feature only)
Fascinating tone. I support the Board's efforts to substantially increase usage of this system. If it cannot be used across all teachers, the system should be abandoned as the District, parents and stakeholders end up paying at least twice in terms of cost and time due to duplicate processes and systems.
The system of excluding badly behaved pupils from school should be abolished because it punishes the most vulnerable children, a major new report on education has concluded, writes Anushka Asthana.
The study, by the thinktank Demos, says that difficult children are being pushed out of schools too often and finds that exclusions do not solve behavioural problems. Instead, they are linked to very poor results and in three out of four cases relate to children with special educational needs who should receive additional support. The report finds that 27% of children with autism have been excluded from school.
Sonia Sodha, co-author of the report, said: "Most other countries do not permanently exclude children from school in the same way we do. Instead of helping these children, we are punishing and then banishing them."
The report comes as figures from the Conservatives show that 1,000 pupils are excluded or suspended for physical and verbal assaults every day. Speaking at the Tory party spring conference, Michael Gove, shadow children's secretary, promised that in power he would make it easier for teachers to remove violent and disruptive pupils.
N SOFT, southern countries, snow is enough to close schools. In Sweden--a place that lives by the maxim that "There is no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes"--fresh snow is a cue to send 18-month-olds into the playground, tottering around in snowsuits and bobble hats. It is an impressive sight at any time. But it is particularly striking in a Stockholm playground filled with Somali toddlers, squeaking as they queue for sledge-rides.
The playground belongs to Karin Danielsson, a headmistress in Tensta, a Stockholm suburb with a large immigrant population. Mrs Danielsson calls her municipal preschool "a school for democracy". In keeping with Swedish mores, even young children may choose which activities to join or where to play. All pupils' opinions are heard, but they are then taught that the group's wishes must also be heeded.
Swedes take preschool seriously. Though education is not compulsory until seven, more than 80% of two-year-olds are enrolled in preschool, and many begin earlier. Among European countries only Denmark has higher enrolment rates at that age.
Mark H. Ingraham Dean Emeritus, College of Letters & Science, University of Wisconsin
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin [Click to view this 23MB PDF "book"]:
Contents
Preface
Part I Liberal Education
The Omnivorous Mind 3
Given May 16, 1962, to the University of Wisconsin Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Republished from The Speech Teacher of September 1962.
Truth-An Insufficient Goal 17
The Keniston Lecture for 1964 at the University of Michi- gan; March 17, 1964. Republished from the Michigan Quarterly Review of July 1964.
On the Adjective "Common" 31
An editorial for the February 1967 Review of the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Letters, and Sciences, February 23, 1967.
Part II Educational Policy
Super Sleep-A Form of Academic Somnambulism 37
First given as retiring address as President of A.A. U.P . This much revised version was given to the Madison Literary Club, March 12, 1940.
No, We Can't; He Has a Committee Meeting 57
Madison Literary Club; May 11, 1953.
Is There a Heaven and a Hell for Colleges? 70
Commencement address, Hiram College; June 8, 1958.
The College of Letters and Science 79
Talk given to the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin, May 3, 1958.
Some Half Truths About the American Undergraduate 84
Orientation conference for Whitney-Fulbright Visiting Scholars. Sarah Lawrence College, September 6, 1962.
Maps Versus Blueprints 94
Honors Convocation, University of Wisconsin, May 18, 1973.
Part III To Students
A Talk to Freshmen 103
University of Wisconsin; September 18, 1951
Choice: The Limitation and the Expression of Freedom 112
Honors Convocation, University of Wisconsin; June 17, 1955. Republished from the Wisconsin Alumnus.
"The Good is Oft Interred with Their Bones" 121
Commencement, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh; Janu- ary 19, 1968.
Talk at Honors Convocation at Ripon College
Talk at Honors Convocation at Ripon College 129
April 9, 1969
The Framework of Opportunity 136
Thanksgiving Address, University of Wisconsin; November, 1947
Part IV A Little Fun
Food from a Masculine Point of View 149
Madison Literary Club; November 11, 1946
On Telling and Reading Stories to Children 165
Attic Angel Tower, Madison, Wisconsin; March 6, 1978
Three Limericks 179
Fragments 181
a. From an address given to the University oF Wyoming Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, April 26, 1965
b. A comment
Part V Somewhat Personal
Letter of Resignation from Deanship 185
April 5, 1961
Retirement Dinner Talk 188
May 24, 1966
Thanks to Richard Askey for extensive assistance with this digitized book. Clusty Search Mark Ingraham.
Parent Feedback on the Madison School District's "Branding" Expenditures
via a kind reader's email: Parent Diane Harrington:
Dear Board Members, Dr. Nerad, and Madison Alders,
My 11-year-old and I visited John Muir Elementary for basketball practice one recent evening. Their gym has banners noting that for several years they've been named a "School of Excellence."
Ben's school, Orchard Ridge Elementary, had just been dubbed a "School of Promise."
Which school would YOU rather go to?
But Ben didn't need a marketing effort to tell him which school was which; he knows some John Muir kids. Ben, too, would like to go to a school where kids are expected to learn and to behave instead of just encouraged to.
Just like those banners, the very idea of your upcoming, $86,000 "branding" effort isn't fooling anyone.
You don't need to improve your image. You need to improve your schools.
Stop condescending to children, to parents and to the public. Skip the silly labels and the PR plans.
Instead, just do your #^%* job. (If you need help filling in that blank, head to ORE or Toki. Plenty of kids - some as young as kindergarten - use several colorful words in the hallways, classrooms, lunchroom and playground without even a second look, much less disciplinary action, from a teacher or principal.)
Create an environment that strives for excellence, not mediocrity. Guide children to go above and beyond, rather than considering your job done once they've met the minimum requirements.
Until then, it's all too obvious that any effort to "cultivate relationships with community partners" is just what you're branding it: marketing. It's just about as meaningless as that "promise" label on ORE or the "honor roll" that my 13-year-old and half the Toki seventh graders are on.
P.S. At my neighborhood association's annual Winter Social earlier tonight, one parent of a soon-to-be-elementary-age child begged me to tell him there was some way to get a voucher so he could avoid sending his daughter to ORE. His family can't afford private school. Another parent told me her soon-to-be-elementary-age kids definitely (whew!) were going to St. Maria Goretti instead of ORE. A friend - even though her son was finishing up at ORE this year - pulled her daughter out after kindergarten (yes, to send her to Goretti), because the atmosphere at ORE is just too destructive and her child wasn't learning anything. These people aren't going to be fooled by a branding effort. And you're only fooling yourselves (and wasting taxpayer money) if you think otherwise.
Top issues mentioned include a lack of challenging academics and out-of-control behavior problems. Families are leaving because of real experience in the schools, not "bad press" or "street corner stories."
High academic standards: High academic standards are based on the principle that all students can learn. Raising expectations for what students are required to learn in the classroom will better prepare students for success. Standards in core subjects must be raised to meet international benchmarks to ensure American students can compete with their peers around the globe.
Standardized measurement: To provide an accurate depiction of where our students are, annual standardized testing must be continued and expanded in all 50 states. Measuring whether students are learning a year's worth of knowledge in a year's time is essential for building on progress, rewarding success and correcting failures. To accurately measure progress, modern data and information systems should be utilized, and there must be maximum transparency across the board.
Data-driven accountability: Holding schools accountable for student achievement - measured objectively with data such as annual standardized tests and graduation rates - improves the quality of an education system. Success and learning gains no longer go unnoticed and problems are no longer ignored, resulting in efforts to effectively narrow achievement gaps.
Standing outside a snow-covered garden at Nature's Classroom Institute, teacher Dave Oyama poses a question to the group of bundled-up elementary-school children from Milwaukee:
"Though it's not in use right now, this garden is organic. Does anyone know what organic means?"
Brows furrow. A few mittens go up. One child guesses "healthy." Another thinks the word means "whole grains."
On their second day at the Nature's Classroom Institute, a residential environmental science school near Mukwonago, the children from Craig Montessori School are in the middle of a lesson that looks different than their traditional classroom work in the city.
As members of a pilot project between Milwaukee Public Schools and the nonprofit institute, the 25 students from Craig are the first from MPS to stay at the facility on 600 picturesque acres in northeastern Walworth County.
The students' tuition from Feb. 16-19 was funded by an anonymous $6,000 grant from a Chicago donor, but organizers hope that the pilot will prompt fund raising to allow more city students to participate next years.
If they hadn't been mostly shut out of bids to run a slew of new L.A. Unified campuses, the groups might have demonstrated how they handle students with challenging needs.
Los Angeles school officials lost a chance this week to test whether the booming charter movement can take on all the problems of the district's traditional, and often troubled, schools.
On Tuesday, the Board of Education denied proposals from three major charter organizations that had sought to run newly built neighborhood schools, which would have included substantial numbers of limited-English speakers, special education students, foster children and low-income families.
That is exactly the population that charter schools have been criticized for not sufficiently reaching.
Charters are independently managed and exempt from some rules that govern traditional schools. They're also schools of choice -- campuses that parents seek and select. And researchers have found that charters enroll fewer students with more challenging, and often more expensive, needs.
Virginia officials are moving to sharply limit an alternative testing program that many schools in the Washington suburbs use to measure the abilities of special education students who traditionally have fared poorly on the state's Standards of Learning exams.
The effort by state lawmakers and education officials targets "portfolio" tests, which have helped increase passing rates at many schools by allowing students to avoid the multiple choice tests in favor of more flexible, individually tailored assessments. Critics have said that the alternative tests undermine Virginia's widely praised accountability system and overstate the progress districts are making in closing achievement gaps between racial groups.
It's not just Lower Merion!: Bronx school watches unwitting students via Webcam
Holly Otterbein
In this week's A Million Stories, we explored the messy Webcam scandal that's going down at Lower Merion School District. The district insists that it only peered through students' Webcams in order to find lost or stolen laptops, and did so using a security software called LANrev. Insanely enough, Douglas Young, the district's spokesperson, told us that it wasn't the only school district using such software: "The software feature isn't just utilized in this school district," says Young. "It's utilized by other school districts and organizations." (He said he couldn't name any offhand.)
For those who believe that performance pay and charter schools pose a threat to public education and that a cult of testing and accountability has hijacked school reform, an unlikely national spokeswoman has emerged.
Diane Ravitch, an education historian, now renounces many of the market-oriented policies she promoted as a former federal education official with close ties to Democrats and Republicans. In large part because of her change of heart, Ravitch's critique of the reform ideas that prevail in government, philanthropies and think tanks is reverberating in the world of education.
"In choosing his education agenda, President Obama sided with the economists and the corporate-style reformers," Ravitch writes in her book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," circulating in advance of its general release Tuesday.
She stoutly defends teachers unions, questions the value of standardized test data and calls the president's affinity for independently operated charter schools "puzzling."
Last night's Panel for Educational Policy meeting was the second in as many months to be packed to the gills with parents and teachers passionately pleading their case.
But this time it was charter school parents, not teachers and parents at closing district schools, who drove to the meeting in busloads.
"What we are pleading for this evening is space," Trevor Alfred, a parent at Explore Empower Charter School, told the panel. "We deserve it."
At first blush, the level of passion, and sometimes anger, directed towards the panel could seem odd. Although 16 school space proposals were up for a vote, the board had never voted down a city proposal, and none of the charter school proposals on the agenda yesterday was defeated.
Josephine Norwood, a Bronzeville mother of three Chicago public school students, has rebounded from two rounds of school closings that displaced her children from their schools. As she watched the Board of Education approve another set of schools for closing or turnaround last week, Mrs. Norwood had a simple question: Can Chicago Public Schools officials promise that the new schools will be better?
"If this process could guarantee the child the best and they would benefit from the school closing, then maybe it is a positive thing," Mrs. Norwood said. But she spoke out last week, along with many others, about the need for more transparency and proof that the disruptions are warranted.
As the public schools system entered its annual process of selecting schools for closing or turnarounds, parents, teachers and community groups leveled criticism at school officials for the lack of communication with the communities involved and questioned data from the central office that does not match the reality in the schools. Some also pleaded for the district to delay any action until the corrective measures taken at the lowest-performing schools -- the wholesale turnover of administrators and teachers -- could be better evaluated and a comprehensive plan for school facilities could be developed by a new task force.
Technology director Bill Herman has migrated the district's email over to Google. Our new email addresses are firstname.lastname@mgschools.net. You can still continue to use the old addresses so the change should be transparent from the outside. The change is motivated by a desire to provide a more reliable system with less maintenance and support.
The following administrative processes are currently being utilized to provide administrative leadership within the district:
Superintendent's Management Team Comprised of the Superintendent and department administrators, this team meets weekly and serves as the major decision making body of the administration.
Strategic Plan Monitoring and Support The Superintendent meets monthly with administrators with lead responsibility for the five priority strategies within the Strategic Plan.
Superintendents-Assistant Superintendents, Chief of Staff and Executive Director, Human Resources The Superintendent meets weekly with the Assistant Superintendents, Chief of Staff and Executive Director of Human Resources to discuss key operational issues.
Board Liaison Team The Board Liaison Team, consisting of designated administrators, meets three times a month to coordinate Board agenda planning and preparation. District Learning Council The District Learning Council consists of curriculum, instruction and assessment related administrators and teacher leaders. This council meets bi-weekly to discuss major instructional issues in the district and provides coordination across related departments.
Department Meetings Administrators assigned to each department meet as needed.
Principal Meetings Assistant Superintendents meet minimally one time per month with all principals
Committee Meetings There are numerous administrative/staff committees that meet as specific tasks require.
General Strengths of the Current Administrative Structure
The strengths of the current administrative structure within the district are as follows:
The basic structure of our district has been in place for many years. As a result, the current department structure is known by many and has predictable ways of operating.There exist needed checks and balances within the current system, given the relative equal status of the departments, with each department leader along with the Assistant Superintendents and Chief of Staff directly reporting to the Superintendent of Schools.
General Weaknesses of the Current Administrative Structure
The weaknesses of the current administrative structure within the district are as follows:
The degree to which the mission-work of the district, teaching and learning, is central to the function of administration is of concern especially in the way professional development is addressed without a departmental focus.
Traditional organizational structures, while having a degree of predictability, can become bureaucratically laden and can lack inventiveness and the means to encourage participation in decision making.
Organizational Principles
In addition to the mission, belief statements and parameters, the following organizational principles serve as a guide for reviewing and defining the administrative structure and administrative processes within the district.
The district will be organized in a manner to best serve the mission of the district .and to support key district strategies to accomplish the mission.
Leadership decisions will be filtered through the lens of our mission.
Central service functions will be organized to support teaching and learning at the schools and should foster supportive relationships between schools and central service functions.
The district's organizational structure must have coherence on a preK-12 basis and must address the successful transition of students within the district.
The district will be structured to maximize inter-division and intra-division collaboration and cooperation.
The district's organizational structure must have an orientation toward being of service to stakeholders, internally and externally.
The district must be organized in a manner that allows for ongoing public engagement
and stakeholder input.
To meet the district's mission, the district will embrace the principles of learning organizations, effective schools, participative and distributive leadership and teamwork.
The district will make better use of data for decision making, analyzing issues, improving district operations, developing improvement plans and evaluating district efforts.
The need for continuous improvement will be emphasized in our leadership work.
Ongoing development and annual evaluation of district leaders is essential.
Leadership Needs
Given these organizational principles, as well as a review of the current administrative structure and administrative processes within the district, the following needs exist. In addition, in the development of this plan, input was sought from all administrators during the annual leadership retreat, individual Management Team members and individual members of the Board of Education. These needs were specifically referenced in identifying the recommended changes in our administrative structure and related administrative processes that are found in this report.
There is a need to better align the administrative structure to the district's mission and Strategic Plan and to place greater priority on the mission-work of our organization (improved achievement for all students and the elimination of achievement gaps).
From an administrative perspective, the mission-work of our district is mainly delivered through teaching and learning and leadership work being done in our schools. Central service functions must act in support of this work. In addition, central service functions are needed to ensure constancy of focus and direction for the district.
New processes are needed to allow for stakeholder engagement and input and to create greater inter-department and division collaboration and cooperation
The mission of the district must be central to decisions made in the district.
The organizational structure must support PreK -12 articulation and coordination needs within the district.
Leadership work must embody principles of contemporary learning organizations, effective school practices, participative and distributive leadership and teamwork. Included in this will be a focus on the purposeful use ofteacher leadership, support for our schools and a focus on positive culture within the district.
There must be an enhanced focus on the use of data in our improvement and related accountability efforts.
There is a need to unifonnly implement school and department improvement plans and to change administrative supervision and evaluation plans based on research in the field and on the need for continuous improvement of all schools, departments and all individual administrators.
In addition, as this plan was constructed there was a focus on ensuring, over the next couple of years, that the plan was sustainable from a financial point of view.
As a rookie mom, I used to be shocked when another parent expressed horror about a teacher I thought was a superstar. No more. The fact is that your kids' results will vary with teachers, just as they do with pills, diets and exercise regimens.
Nonetheless, we all want our kids to have at least a few excellent teachers along the way, so it's tempting to buy into hype about value-added measures (VAM) as a way to separate the excellent from the horrifying, or least the better from the worse.
It's so tempting that VAM is likely to be part of a reauthorized No Child Left Behind. The problem is, researchers urge caution because of the same kinds of varied results featured in playground conversations.
Value-added measures use test scores to track the growth of individual students as they progress through the grades and see how much "value" a teacher has added.
Mr Kennedy said that next week they would announce the cuts from the Central Administration budget. He said they needed to be at $6M and are at $5.4 so far. Kay said that in Meg's report that there had been growth in Central Administration and if we grew by $7M, shouldn't we be cutting $12M? Kennedy said he would get to that later in the meeting (but I don't remember it happening). There was some discussion again about how the coaches had been inproperly coded by OSPI standards.
Michael again said that the district needs to have transparency in these kinds of budget issues (coding and labeling and sorting) because of the confusion it causes. He said we can't have internal accounting that differs from external accounting.
Kay asked about comparing our Central office numbers with other districts but the answer was that it was too difficult to do because of the differences. (That didn't seem to stop the State Auditor two years ago - I'll have to send that report to Kay.)
(According to the report, both Viewlands and Rainier View Elementaries will have ELL and Special Ed programs.)
As design issues get worked out on the Edgewater Hotel expansion project, some local school board members are raising concerns about city tax money being used on the redevelopment.
Much of the focus on the Edgewater development so far has been on the design of the building. But what might affect residents more is the city financing for the project, WISC-TV reported.
The Kaiser Foundation, in its January 2010 report on the use of electronic entertainment media by U.S. students, aged 8-18, found that, on average, these young people are spending more than seven hours a day (53 hours a week) with such (digital) amusements.
For some, this would call into question whether students have time to read the nonfiction books and to write the research papers they will need to work on to get themselves ready for college and careers, not to mention the homework for their other courses.
For the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, however, the problem appears to be that we are not paying enough attention to the possible present and future connections between digital media and learning, so they have decided to invest $50,000,000 in grants to explore that relationship.
One recent two-year grant, "for $650,000 to study the effect of digital media on young people's ethical development and to develop curricula for parents and teachers," went to the Harvard Education School, which has distinguished itself for, among other things, seeming to have no one on its faculty with any research or teaching interest in the actual academic work of high school students, for example in chemistry, history, economics, physics, foreign languages, calculus, and the like.
The Harvard Ed School faculty do show real interest in poverty, disability, psychological problems, race, gender, ethnicity, and the development of moral character, so they may take to this idea of studying the relation between electronic media and student ethics. A visit to the Harvard Ed School website, and a review of the research interests of the faculty would prove enlightening to anyone who thought, for some odd reason, that they might be paying attention to the academic work of students in the schools.
Whether Harvard will conclude that seven hours a day doesn't help much with the ethical development of students or not, one could certainly wish that they would discover that spending a lot of their time on digital media does very little for student preparation for college academic work that is at all demanding, not to mention the actual work of their careers, unless they are in the digital entertainment fields, of course.
The National Writing Project, which regularly has received $26,000,000 each year in federal grants for many years to help thousands of teachers feel more comfortable writing about themselves, has now received $1.1 million in grants from the MacArthur Foundation, presumably so that they may now direct some of their efforts to helping students use digital media to write about themselves as well.
Perhaps someone should point out, to MacArthur, the National Writing Project, the Harvard Ed School, and anyone else involved in this egregious folly and waste of money, that our students already spend a great deal of their time each and every day writing and talking about themselves with their friends, using a variety of electronic media.
In fact, it is generally the case that the students (without any grants) are already instructing any of their teachers who are interested in the use of a variety of electronic media.
But like folks in any other self-sustaining educational enterprise, those conversing on the uses of digital media in learning about digital media need a chance to talk about what they are doing, whether it is harmful to serious academic progress for our students or not, so MacArthur has also granted to "the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (in Monterey, California) $2,140,000 to build the field of Digital Media and Learning through a new journal, conferences, and convenings (over five years)."
The MacArthur Foundation website has a list of scores more large grants for these projects in digital media studies and digital learning (it is not clear, of course, what "digital learning" actually means, if anything).
This very expensive and time-consuming distraction from any effort to advance respectable common standards for the actual academic work of students in our nation's schools must be enjoyable, both for those giving out the $50 million, and, I suppose, for those receiving it, but the chances are good that their efforts will only help to make the college and career readiness of our high school students an even more distant goal.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog
ne of the most firmly entrenched academic practices centers upon the use of textbooks as the fundamental drivers of curricula. Ultra-expensive, these items represent one of the largest costs for public school systems as well as those attending college.
As the digital age continues to work its way into the stuffy world of academics, there are clear indications that textbooks are gradually being phased out in many areas of the country. The sheer volume of resources available on the net is leading many school districts to create and share their own materials.
Macmillan, considered one of the largest players in that old, conservative world, apparently has now also seen the "handwriting on the wall." The company recently announced it will offer academics an entirely new format: DynamicBooks.
The mass firing of teachers at a Rhode Island high school this week is hardly new: For nearly two decades, states and school districts have been "reconstituting" staffs at struggling public schools.
But Tuesday's move by Central Falls, R.I., Superintendent Frances Gallo to remove all 74 teachers, administrators and counselors at the district's only high school may be the first tangible result of an aggressive push by the Obama administration to get tough on school accountability -- and may signal a more fraught relationship between teachers unions and Democratic leaders.
"This may be one school in one town, but it represents a much bigger phenomenon," says Andy Smarick of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C., education think tank. "Thanks to years of work battling the achievement gap and the elevation of reform-minded education leaders, we may finally be getting serious about the nation's lowest-performing schools."
In some quarters I'm viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I've spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures. The other half I've spent representing individuals (and on occasion organizations and companies) in the criminal justice system.
These two seemingly disparate halves of my professional life are, in fact, quite closely related: The respective cultures of the college campus and of the federal government have each thrived on the notion that language is meant not to express one's true thoughts, intentions and expectations, but, instead, to cover them up. As a result, the tyrannies that I began to encounter in the mid-1980s in both academia and the federal criminal courts shared this major characteristic: It was impossible to know when one was transgressing the rules, because the rules were suddenly being expressed in language that no one could understand.
In his 1946 linguistic critique, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that one must "let meaning choose the word, not the other way around." By largely ignoring this truism, administrators and legislators who craft imprecise regulations have given their particular enforcement arms---campus disciplinary staff and federal government prosecutors---enormous and grotesquely unfair power.
You would think that raising standards and pushing for an extending day and year would be a great time to embrace a couple thousand entrepreneurial organizations that specialize in targeted tutoring and compelling after-school learning. You would think that a disruptive effort to fix or replace the lowest performing schools would be accompanied by an insurance policy of direct support for low income students that have been trapped in low performing schools. You would think that 500,000 low income minority students receiving targeted tutoring sounded like a good idea. However, Supplemental Educational Service (SES) providers are getting the message that they are not needed; more specifically, they are getting the message that school districts want the $3b Title 1 set aside back.
Maybe we just got off on the wrong foot; SES was inserted as what seemed like punishment in a progression of interventions in NCLB and, a result, most districts didn't do much to market these extended learning opportunities. Where districts embraced SES providers as partners in student success, tailored solutions worked well for schools, kids, and parents.
The Bloomberg administration has made getting rid of inadequate teachers a linchpin of its efforts to improve city schools. But in the two years since the Education Department began an intensive effort to root out such teachers from the more than 55,000 who have tenure, officials have managed to fire only three for incompetence.
Ten others whom the department charged with incompetence settled their cases by resigning or retiring, and nine agreed to pay fines of a few thousand dollars or take classes, or both, so they could keep their jobs. One teacher lost his job before his case was decided, after the department called immigration officials and his visa was revoked. The cases of more than 50 others are awaiting arbitration.
Lawyers for the department said an additional 418 teachers had left the system after finding out that they could face charges of incompetence. Because no formal charges were brought in these cases, the number is hard to corroborate; officials from the teachers' union said they doubted it was that high.
In education, there's a lot up in the air right now: standards, testing, employment practices, budgets, student technology, online learning, and federal policy. It's conceivable that if we took advantage of the uncertainty, a few places could emerge with a better and cheaper education system. Here's three pivot points that could anchor next generation systems:
1. Merit Badges: the goal of college and career readiness and development Common Core standards will require most states, district to make lots of course and curriculum. States could use the opportunity to replace the 100 year old seat time and credit system with a new merit badge system--a bundle of assessments would be used to demonstrate learning of a bundle of competencies. Take ratios and fractions as an example; a merit badge would describe what students need to know and a combination of ways they can show it including content-embedded assessment (e.g., game score), performance assessment (e.g., project), adaptive assessment (e.g., online quiz), and an end of unit test. Mastery-based learning and merit badge evidence would replace grades and courses as the primary mechanism to mark student progress.
Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has fired 10 D.C. teachers for administering corporal punishment and two for sexual misconduct since July 2007, according to a report she submitted to D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray.
Another 28 teachers served suspensions of as long as 10 days for administering corporal punishment, defined by District law as the use or attempted use of force against a student as punishment or discipline.
The report, sent to Gray (D) on Feb. 12, does not include names and offers only fragmentary descriptions of the incidents. Most involve grabbing, shoving, slapping, scratching or arm-twisting. One teacher drew a five-day suspension for putting a student in a closet and turning the lights off in February 2008. A case of spanking in November 2007 resulted in a teacher's dismissal and reinstatement after a hearing officer's decision. An instructor who threatened students with a knife if they misbehaved received a one-day suspension.
A clothing swap for families that doubles as a PTO meeting.
Free transportation, child care and translators so more parents can participate in after-school functions.
Madison schools are doing a lot to draw more parents - especially minority and low-income parents - into their children's educations. And much of the credit goes to creative parent leaders and teachers.
The stepped-up effort is encouraging and should continue in Madison and across Wisconsin.
The more parents of all backgrounds spend time at their children's schools, the more likely their children will engage and succeed.
The Beloit School District is facing a $1.5 million budget shortfall, but teachers are offering their help by taking days off.
The Beloit Education Association, which is the teacher's union in the district, previously agreed to open its contract if state aid decreased from one year to the next.
"We went back to the table and worked out a voluntary settlement with the district regarding furlough days and salary reductions for those furlough days," said Tim Verda, president of the Beloit Education Association.
The teacher's union is going beyond a pay freeze by offering to take one furlough day this year and two next year.
The school district said it will result in a savings of $658,000.
For entertainment value read the Discovering Math Q&A in this article in the Seattle Times. The Discovering Math guy (1) doesn't always answer the question asked, (2) answers but doesn't address the topic properly - see the question on if Discovering Math is "mathematically unsound" and (3) sounds like he works for the district.
Here's one example:
The Discovering books have been criticized by parents, but they've been the top pick of a couple of districts in our area, including Seattle and Issaquah. Any thoughts on why the textbooks seem to be more popular with educators than with parents?
Ryan: I think because (parents) lack familiarity -- this doesn't look like what I was taught. I don't know how you get students to a place where more is required of them by repeating things that have been done in the past. That's not how we move forward in life.
A Vote to Fire All Teachers at a Failing High School
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. -- A plan to dismiss the entire faculty and staff of the only public high school in this small city just west of the Massachusetts border was approved Tuesday night at an emotional public meeting of the school board.
When the teachers failed to adopt a 'transformation' plan that included a modest lengthening of the day, the superintendent shifted to Plan B, what federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) call Turnaround, which requires that at least 50% of the staff be replaced. Under Rhode Island law, teachers must be notified of the potential for nonrenewal by March 20, hence the board vote and notices. All the teachers will have the opportunity to reapply, up to half will be rehired.
The hysteria is now reverberating on CNN and papers around the country. Central Falls may be an early example but there are thousands to come. As I began reporting in October, SIG will cause widespread urban disruption. But we'll all need to be cautious to use language carefully and differentiate between 'firing all the teachers' and notifying them of the requirement to reapply for their positions.
Last Wednesday, Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke to the Madison Rotary Club on "What Wisconsin's Public Education Model Needs to Learn from General Motors Before it is too late." 7MB mp3 audio (the audio quality is not great, but you can hear the talk if you turn up the volume!).
Zimman's talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin's K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
It helps explain why the teachers got precisely what they wanted from the Democratic-run Legislature and governor's office in the last state budget: repeal of state limits on teacher compensation.
It also shows why reforming public education - to require more accountability and innovation - won't be easy. The teachers union has resisted pay for performance, something commonplace in most professions, and frowned on innovative charter schools. State leaders will need to stand up to the union if public education is to be transformed.
Best way to guarantee a financially stress-free retirement in Wisconsin?
Work for the government.
State public employees - such as public school teachers and state and city workers - on average receive hundreds of dollars more per month in retirement than higher-paid employees in the private sector, according to a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.
Even as the state has lost 140,000 jobs and one-eighth of its manufacturing workforce during the recession, public employees' benefits have been protected. Those statistics prompted the institute to commission the report, said George Lightbourn, the president of the conservative think tank.
According to the report, an employee covered by the Wisconsin Retirement System who earns $48,000 a year would retire with an estimated monthly benefit of $1,712 from the system.
In contrast, a private sector employee who earned $70,000 a year would get an estimated $1,301 a month in retirement - or $411 less per month than the lower-paid public sector retiree, said Joan Gucciardi, a Milwaukee-area actuary with more than 40 years of experience who spent nine months preparing the report.
Gucciardi said she was surprised to learn that most public school teachers and others covered by the state retirement system don't pay what's called the employee contribution - about half of the 11.2% or more of their salary that's deposited into their pension fund accounts each year. While state law makes that share negotiable, nearly all public employees in Wisconsin get it paid for them.
He tells the National Governors Assn. that states will be required to help students be 'college- and career-ready.'
Reporting from Washington - Decrying shortcomings of the No Child Left Behind Act, President Obama on Monday pledged to make American students more competitive in the global economy by encouraging higher state standards for primary and secondary education.
Students in the United States lag by several crucial measures, Obama told a gathering of the nation's governors at the White House, with eighth-graders ranking ninth in the world in math and 11th in science.
"In response to assessments like these, some states have upped their game," Obama said, pointing to Massachusetts, where eighth-graders are tied for first in science around the world. "Some states have actually done the opposite, and between 2005 and 2007, under No Child Left Behind, 11 states actually lowered their standards in math."
The current school funding crisis has a lot of people talking about raising taxes, creating new taxes or closing so-called tax loopholes, to provide more revenue for Michigan's K-12 school districts.
We at Education Action Group Foundation don't pretend to be experts on school funding, particularly on a statewide level. But we do know that local school districts are forced to spend a great deal of money on unnecessary labor costs, at a time when they can least afford it.
We don't believe the state has the moral right to ask taxpayers for another dime for education until it helps local school districts free themselves from crippling labor expenses.
To support our argument, we spent a few weeks examining 25 teacher contracts from districts throughout Michigan, carefully choosing schools of various size and geographic location. We found countless examples of contractual expenses that are questionable in the current economic environment.
Our study is by no means scientific. It simply offers a sampling of the type of expenses that schools are forced to deal with by the state's teachers unions. We believe Michigan residents will be surprised to learn how some of their tax dollars are spent.
n the pantheon of unpopular moves by school superintendents, perhaps none rivals what John Covington wants to do.
Faced with declining enrollment and a $50 million budget shortfall, the Kansas City, Mo., schools chief wants the school board to close as many as 31 of the city's 61 schools and lay off one-fourth of its employees -- including 285 teachers.
Covington wants it done by the time school starts in fall. A vote could come in March.
"The bottom line is the quality of education we're offering children in Kansas City is not good enough," he says. "One reason it's not good enough is that we've tried to spread our resources over far too many schools."
Closing schools in shrinking urban districts is nothing new: It's happening in dozens of cities, including Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Memphis, San Antonio and Washington, D.C. But the scope of Covington's plan sets it apart from even the most cash-strapped school districts.
Two computer security experts, Aaron Rhodes and a man known by his pseudonym Stryde Hax, put together an eye-opening and well-researched attack on both the Lower Merion High School that's been accused of spying on students and the software that was used to do it. In the process, they reveal some disturbing school policies regarding the use of the laptops, and the unnerving nature of the software itself.
The writers scoured forum activity, blog posts, and publicity videos made by one Mike Perbix, the Harriton High School technical security staffer who was in charge of the use of LANRev, the software in question. They also hunted down comments from some of the more tech-savvy members of the student body, who revealed some pretty startling policies regarding the laptops.
The main points: the school-supplied (and monitored) MacBooks were required for certain classes; the included Webcams could not be disabled; the laptops could not be "jailbroken" to circumvent the security measures (and any attempt could result in expulsion); and possession of a personal computer, meaning one other than the school-supplied MacBook, was forbidden and subject to confiscation. One example, from a student:
Folklore says that George Washington was known for never telling a lie. But as the United States marks its first president's birthday, a new poll indicates that 74 percent of the public thinks the father of our country did lie to the public while he served as president - an indication that Americans think that the government has been broken for a very, very long time.
The CNN/Opinion Corporation survey was released Monday, the 278th anniversary of Washington's birth.
Three quarters of people questioned in the survey think that modern-day federal officials are not honest, a figure that is essentially unchanged since 1994. But the poll suggests that Americans think the problem of dishonesty is not a new one.
When Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars unveiled a cost-cutting measure this month that would have made the high school senior year optional, perhaps no one in the state Capitol Building was more surprised than 18-year-old Jake Trimble, who already opted out of the second half of senior year just weeks earlier.
He has spent the past month working at the Capitol as an unpaid intern for the state Democratic Party's communications team, designing posters and writing scripts for legislators' robocalls. Trimble graduated in January, one semester early, from the nearby Academy of Math Engineering and Science (AMES).
"I'm very happy to not be in high school anymore," says Trimble, who proudly reports that he's "not rotting in my parents' basement." Actually, when the legislative session ends next month, he'll move on to another internship (this one paid) as a lab assistant at the University of Utah's Orthopedic Center.
Trimble is part of a small but growing group of students -- most of them academically advanced and, as a result, a tad restless -- who are tinkering with their senior year. A few observers say the quiet experiment has the potential to reinvent high school altogether.
Walking toward the audience wearing a dark blue suit and tie, James Howard explained that he doesn't have all the answers to big issues facing Madison's schools.
"I won't stand here and tell you I know the best way. But we do have to make sure we protect learning," said Howard, 56, a contender for Madison school board, at a candidate forum on Sunday. "$30 million is a heck of a deficit. Have you written you r congress people? We really need to come up with a different funding source."
Tom Farley and James Howard are vying for school board Seat 4, being vacated by Johnny Winston. It is the only contested seat of three on the April 6 ballot.
Following a brief presentation from uncontested candidates Maya Cole and Beth Moss, Howard and Farley answered questions posed by forum organizers from Progressive Dane and submitted questions from an audience of about 50 at Wright Middle School. One key area of inquiry was how the candidates would go about solving an anticipated $30 million budget hole next year.
An Interview with Eagle School Co-Founder Mary Olsky
It was a pleasure to meet and visit with Fitchburg's Eagle School Co-Founder Mary Olsky recently.
We discussed a wide variety of topics, including Eagle's History (founded in 1982), curricular rigor, the importance of good textbooks and critical student thinking. I also found it interesting to hear Mary's perspective on public / private schools and her hope, in 1982, that that the Madison School District would take over (and apply its lessons) Eagle School. Of course, it did not turn out that way.
Finally, Mary mentioned the term "high school" a number of times, along with $20,000,000. I suspect we'll see a high school at some point. It will take a significant effort.
Thanks to Laurie Frost for arranging this interview.
Will Fitzhugh...has been fighting for more non-fiction for years: Help pick non-fiction for schools
Jay Matthews:
It wasn't until I was in my fifties that I realized how restricted my high school reading lists had been, and how little they had changed for my three children. They were enthusiastic readers, as my wife and I were. But all, or almost all, of the required books for either generation were fiction.
I am not dismissing the delights of Twain, Crane, Buck, Saroyan and Wilder, all of which I read in high school. But I think I would also have enjoyed Theodore H. White, John Hersey, Barbara Tuchman and Bruce Catton if they had been assigned.
Maybe that's changing. Maybe rebellious teens these days are fleeing Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen, and Baldwin, or whoever is on the 12th grade English list, and furtively reading Malcolm Gladwell, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and other non-fiction stars.
Sadly, no.
The Renaissance Learning company released a list of what 4.6 million students read in the 2008-2009 school year, based on its Accelerated Reader program that encourages children to choose their own books. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter has given way to the hormonal allure of Stephenie Meyer's teen vampire books, but both school and non-school books are still almost all fiction.
When I ask local school districts why this is, some get defensive and insist they do require non-fiction. But the only title that comes up with any frequency is Night, Elie Wiesel's story of his boyhood in the Holocaust. It is one of only two nonfiction works to appear in the top 20 of Accelerated Reader's list of books read by high schoolers. The other is 'A Child Called 'It,' Dave Pelzer's account of his alleged abuse as a child by his alcoholic mother.
Will Fitzhugh, whose Concord Review quarterly publishes research papers by high school students, has been fighting for more non-fiction for years. I agree with him that high school English departments' allegiance to novels leads impressionable students to think, incorrectly, that non-fiction is a bore. That in turn makes them prefer fiction writing assignments to anything that could be described by that dreaded word "research."
A relatively new trend in student writing is called "creative nonfiction." It makes Fitzhugh shudder. "It allows high school students (mostly girls) to complete writing assignments and participate in 'essay contests' by writing about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, as well as more existential questions such as 'How do I look?' and 'What should I wear to school?'" he said in a 2008 essay for EducationNews.org.
Educators say non-fiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend. It requires more factual knowledge, beyond fiction's simple truths of love, hate, passion and remorse. So we have a pathetic cycle. Students don't know enough about the real world because they don't read non-fiction and they can't read non-fiction because they don't know enough about the real world.
Educational theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr. insists this is what keeps many students from acquiring the communication skills they need for successful lives. "Language mastery is not some abstract skill," he said in his latest book, The Making of Americans. "It depends on possessing broad general knowledge shared by other competent people within the language community."
I think we can help. Post comments here, or send an email to mathewsj@washpost.com, with non-fiction titles that would appeal to teens. I will discuss your choices in a future column. I can see why students hate writing research papers when their history and science reading has been confined to the flaccid prose of their textbooks. But what if they first read Longitude by Dava Sobel or A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar? What magical exploration of reality would you add to your favorite teenager's reading list?
Los Angeles' Board of Education voted Tuesday to hand over some of its public schools to charter school operators and teachers groups, part of an unusual experiment.
The city's Board of Education voted Tuesday to hand over some of its public schools to charter school operators and teachers groups, part of an unusual experiment to see whether outsiders will have better luck improving student achievement in the nation's second-largest school district.
But most of the 30 campuses, some with more than one school, were awarded to teachers and administrators employed by the school district. The board awarded four schools to charter groups, and two schools to a group led by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The majority of the schools were awarded to teachers' groups. The board's vote was a blow to charter advocates and a boost to teachers in the city's divided education community.
Hundreds of parents, teachers and charter school advocates had gathered outside school board offices all day, and packed the board room during the five-hour meeting.
Why haven't schools of choice yet achieved a broader appeal? Publicly funded school choice programs--charter schools in forty-three states and vouchers in a few localities--have for the most part been qualified successes. Yet the rhetoric of choice supporters promised much more effective schools and an era of innovation that has not come to pass. In Learning as We Go: Why School Choice Is Worth the Wait, Paul T. Hill examines the real-world factors that can complicate, delay, and in some instances interfere with the positive cause-and-effect relationships identified by the theories behind school choice.
Hill explains why schools of choice haven't yet achieved a broader appeal and details the key factors--including politics, policy, and regulation--that explain the delay. The author then suggests changes in public policy along with philanthropic investment that could overcome barriers and increase the rate of progress toward full operation of what he calls the "virtuous cycle" stimulated by school choice.
Marching orders bellowed from across the state Senate president's balcony on Monday, jolting the union members nestled in the public gallery.
They had to get out -- now. Too noisy. Too crowded. The beefy sergeant-at-arms did not seem to care that some people had secured those seats hours earlier.
"That's everybody," he said, his arms shooing them toward the exits.
A brigade of public employee union leaders, hoping to defeat four pension "reform" bills with a last-minute show of force, also found little sympathy or patience downstairs at the door to the Senate chambers. A "Vote No!" chant was quickly doused. Officials herded them along the wall. An irritated state trooper snapped at one protester perceived to be a little too loud.
Public employee unions, whose money and muscle once earned them a permanent access to Trenton's inner sanctums of power, are being told to leave their business cards at the door. They once roamed the State House halls, feared and respected; now they are subjected to aggressive crowd control.
Arundhati Jayarao, Middle and High School Chemistry and Physics, Virginia; Sarah Yue, High School Chemistry, California; Kirk Janowiak, High School Biology and Environmental Science, Indiana; Ben Van Dusen, High School Physics, Oregon; Mark Greenman, High School Physics, Massachusetts; and John Moore, High School Environmental Science, New Jersey.
Moderated By: Kent Hughes, Director, Program on America and the Global Economy.
The Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellows offer a unique perspective on U.S. schools and educational policymaking; they have been chosen by the Department of Energy to spend a fellowship year in congressional or executive offices based on their excellence in teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics(STEM) subjects in K-12 schools. The Fellows will discuss how to achieve national standards that are benchmarked to the world's best and how higher standards will affect changes in curricula.
Deborah Kenny talks a lot about passion -- the passion for teaching, for reading and for learning. She has it. She wants all of her teachers to have it. Above all, she wants her students to have it.
Ms. Kenny has created three phenomenally successful charter schools in Harlem and is in the process of creating more. She's gotten a great deal of national attention. But for all the talk about improving schools in this country, she thinks we tend to miss the point more often than not.
There is an overemphasis on "the program elements," she said, "things like curriculum and class size and school size and the longer day." She understood in 2001, when she was planning the first of the schools that have come to be known as the Harlem Village Academies, that none of those program elements were nearly as important as the quality of the teaching in the schools.
"If you had an amazing teacher who was talented and passionate and given the freedom and support to teach well," she said, "that was just 100 times more important than anything else."
The next time Lower Merion school administrators want to talk to students and parents about their laptop-camera controversy, they will have to get a lawyer's blessing.
Not from their own lawyers, but the ones suing them on behalf of a Harriton High sophomore who claims the school invaded his home and his privacy by remotely snapping his image with the camera on his school-provided laptop.
The unusual order, signed by a federal judge yesterday, means those running the elite Lower Merion School District can't say a word about the laptop cameras or any other issues in the suit without giving the other side a copy of what they want to say - plus six hours' notice.
Such communication limits are commonplace in class-action litigation, but rare in the context of a school district at the center of what's become a nationwide controversy.
Teacher Seniority Rules Challenged With Tens of Thousands of Layoffs Looming, Government Officials and Parents Want to Change the 'Last in, First out' System
Teacher seniority rules are meeting resistance from government officials and parents as a wave of layoffs is hitting public schools and driving newer teachers out of classrooms.
In a majority of the country's school districts, teacher layoffs are handled on a "last in, first out" basis. Critics of seniority rules worry that many effective and talented teachers who have been hired in recent years will lose their jobs.
Unions say that seniority rules are the only objective way to carry out layoffs, and that they protect teachers from the whims and bias of managers, who might fire effective teachers they don't like.
This year, because of cuts in state aid to New York City, the city could be facing a loss of about 8,500 teacher jobs out of a total of 80,000. The last time the nation's largest school system laid off a teacher was 1976.
If New York City is forced to lay off some of the more than 30,000 new teachers it has hired in the past five years, it is "going to be catastrophic," said Joel Klein, chancellor of the city's school system. "We're going to be losing a lot of great new teachers that we hired" in recent years, the chancellor said.
It's time for schools to focus on the widening gap in reading and writing skills that leaves so many boys unprepared for success in college or vocational training.
As a volunteer in my daughter's kindergarten class, I was asked to help children write a "story" (a few words) to illustrate their pictures. Only one girl needed my writing help; only one boy could write for himself. Nearly all the boys seemed to be a full year behind nearly all the girls in their ability to pay attention, follow directions, control frustrations, sit still, handle a pencil or crayon and do what used to be considered first-grade work.
As reading and writing are pushed down to earlier ages, boys are struggling harder to meet higher expectations, writes Richard Whitmire, a former USA Today reporter, in Why Boys Fail.
"Each year since 1988 the gap between boys' and girls' reading skills has widened a bit more," Whitmire writes. Boys aren't wired for early verbal skills -- and teachers aren't trained in "boy-friendly" techniques to help them catch up.
In Wisconsin, we have always been proud of our strong education system. New demands and technology are changing the way we prepare our children to enter the 21st century workforce. We must ensure that our state's education system remains a national leader by providing our children with the skills that are needed to compete in a global economy.
It has been proven that not every child learns the same way. In fact, some students learn best outside of the traditional bricks-and-mortar school setting. For these children, virtual schools have come to fill an educational need. Virtual schools involve long-distance learning that use computers and Internet connections. These schools employ vigorous and challenging curricula along with regular interaction with state-certified teachers.
However, virtual schools were nearly wiped out in 2007 due to a court challenge by WEAC, the state's teachers union.
In response, in the last legislative session I led the charge to ensure that virtual schools remain an option for Wisconsin's parents and children. A bipartisan compromise was reached to keep the schools open but included a cap of 5,250 students requested by critics until a legislative audit could be conducted.
Senior House Republicans and Democrats recently announced a new bi-partisan effort to re-authorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It's a good sign for some real progress, both for education specifically and Washington in general, but there's been no word on whether the Senate is so inclined. The "proposals" put forward so far by the Department of Education and at yesterday's announcement are light on details, so this post is my attempt at rectifying some of the major issues around No Child Left Behind.
No More Pass/ Fail
One of the more frequent criticisms of the law concerns its binary pass/ fail system. If a school fails to meet a single academic benchmarks in a single grade in a single subject by a single sub-group of students, it is said to not meet "adequate yearly progress," or AYP. If it does not meet AYP for multiple years in a row, the school is subject to a series of consequences that become more punitive the more years it misses targets.
The strengths of this arrangement came from protecting under-served populations. Because a school would be held accountable for all groups of students, it focused much more attention on achievement gaps and did not let a school hide its problems educating important sub-groups behind school-wide averages.
For Milwaukee Public Schools, the financial crisis that many of us have been warning about is here. As principals get their initial budgets, they are faced with cutting teachers; larger class sizes; the loss of specialty teachers such as those in art, music, physical education; and the lost of librarians. Perversely, schools that have the best student achievement are often the hardest hit, since the middle-class students attracted to these schools bring less aid with them.
While many other school systems (and other government units) are also facing cuts brought on by exploding health care costs and the weak economy, MPS has been particularly hard hit. And much of the MPS pain is self-inflicted. Next year, MPS is facing a 77% fringe benefit rate, meaning that the cost to the district of an employee is 77% more than that employee's pay. If the unfunded liability for retiree benefits were correctly included, the fringe benefit rate would rise to almost 104%, meaning that the cost to the school district of an employee is more than twice that employee's pay.
The biggest factor in the exploding benefits cost is the cost of health care. MPS offers two plans, one of which costs MPS twice as much per employee as the other. Yet because MPS pays the full cost of the plans, there is no incentive for employees to pick the less-expensive plan. Employees can retire at age 55 and continue to have MPS pay for their health insurance at the rate it did when they retired. Pensions have an employer and an employee contribution, but MPS pays both parts.
As Trenton lawmakers gave first approval Thursday to a group of bills to reform the state's public-worker pension and benefits systems, Sen. Jim Whelan, D-Atlantic, tackled the teachers unions, telling them their case for strong state pensions was out-of-date.
Shortly before committee members voted to approve three bills and a constitutional resolution, Whelan, who teaches in the Atlantic City school district, told hundreds of assembled public workers -- including dozens of teachers -- that state workers should no longer claim they needed large pensions to make up for low pay.
"I'm of a generation that that was true for," Whelan said at a hearing of the Senate State Government, Wagering, Tourism and Historic Preservation Committee that he chairs.
"Quite bluntly, when I began teaching -- almost 100 years ago, not quite -- we made lousy money, and you were always going to make lousy money. That was true whether you were a teacher, a cop, a fireman, any public employees across the board. We were underpaid," he said.
Overall, lobbying organizations reported spending $36.2 million in 2009, a 5.2 percent increase from the first half of the previous legislative session.
The 2009 report analyzes the activities of 746 lobbying principals and 750 registered lobbyists.
"Not only is Wisconsin's lobbying law strong, but information about lobbying activities is easy to use online," said Kevin J. Kennedy, director and general counsel of the G.A.B. "The law requires disclosure and prohibits gifts to lawmakers. The Board's Eye on Lobbying online database allows the public to keep track of lobbying activities at the Capitol without leaving home."
The most lobbied bill in 2009 was the AB 138, regarding appointment of the secretary of the Natural Resources Board. Organizations reported spending 2,923 hours attempting to influence legislators on that bill.
Chicago Public Schools' controversial process of closing, consolidating and turning around schools will receive new scrutiny this week.
The City Council's Education Committee will hold a hearing Monday on a resolution to impose a one-year moratorium on any such changes, and the Chicago Board of Education is scheduled to vote Wednesday on proposals to close two schools, consolidate two others, turn around five and phase out one. Turnarounds involve replacing new teachers, principals, and other staff while the student body remains intact.
"The process -- from recommendation to the Board of Education vote -- is probably no more than a month," said Alderman Pat Dowell (3rd Ward), who co-sponsored the resolution in response to complaints of too little community involvement. "That's unfair."
Teachers and staff members in the Stowe School District have set an example for the rest of the state by agreeing to go without a pay increase built into their contract to help preserve programs and positions threatened by tough economic times.
The teachers and staff agreed to forgo a 5.25 percent raise, shaving about $240,000 from the proposed $9.7 million budget. That was enough to save a list of athletic and academic programs, as well as save jobs in the school district.
People tasked with balancing a public budget in the midst of the worst economic downturnin a generation often talk about making difficult decisions. Those who feel the impact of reduced budgets often are quick to argue why their interests deserve to be spared. This is a phenomenon seen from the halls of the Statehouse to budgets meetings in communities throughout the state.
The Stowe teachers took a different tack, choosing to give something up so their colleagues could keep their jobs, and students could keep their classes and teams.
I attended Harium's Community meeting and the 43rd Dems meeting (partial) yesterday. Here are some updates (add on if you attended either or Michael DeBell's meeting).
We covered a fair amount of ground with Harium but a lot on the math ruling/outcomes. Here's what he said:
the Board will decide what will happen from the math ruling. I asked Harium about who would be doing what because of how the phrasing the district used in their press release - "In addition to any action the School Board may take, the district expects to appeal this decision." It made it sound like the district (1) might do something different from the Board and (2) the district had already decided what they would do. Harium said they misspoke and it was probably the heat of the moment.
He seems to feel the judge erred. He said they did follow the WAC rules which is what she should have been ruling on but didn't. I probably should go back and look at the complete ruling but it seems like not going by the WAC would open her decision up to be reversed so why would she have done it? He said the issue was that there are statewide consequences to this ruling and that Issaquah and Bellevue (or Lake Washington?) are doing math adoptions and this ruling is troubling. I gently let Harium know that the Board needs to follow the law, needs to be transparent in their decision-making and the district needs to have balanced adoption committees or else this could happen again. No matter how the district or the Board feel, the judge did not throw out the case, did not rule against the plaintiffs but found for them. The ball is in the Board's court and they need to consider this going forward with other decisions.
On my show last night -- which re-runs at 10pm tonight on FBN -- I said that Washington DC gives voucher schools $7,500 per student, but DC's public schools cost twice that much: $15,000.
The $15,000 number has been cited by congressmen and newspapers like the WSJ and the Denver Post. It comes from the the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Census.
Unfortunately, it's also wrong. Or at least very misleading, since it ignores major sources of spending. As CATO Education scholar Andrew Coulson explains:
DC also has a "state" level bureaucracy that spends nearly $200 million annually on k-12 programs, and the city spends another $275 million or so on school construction, school facilities modernization, and other so-called "capital" projects.
But those aren't included in the regular spending figures.
Locally, the Madison School District has 24,295 students and a 2009/2010 budget of $418,415,780. $17,222 per student. The DC budget morass illustrates the necessity of K-12 budget clarity in all cases, including Madison.
L.A. Unified's teachers' union organized protests today and for next week against school district administrators. The union is upset that the superintendent has tentatively allowed outside groups to assume control of new and low-performing campuses.
The school district received 85 proposals to run three dozen campuses. Teachers, charter school companies and other nonprofits crafted the plans. The superintendent is recommending teacher and district-written plans for more than half the schools. Outside groups could run another quarter of the schools.
A teacher, parent and student vote earlier this month favored the teacher plans. A nonprofit run by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa received the recommendation to run Carver Middle School.
Kirsten Ellis, a teacher there, doesn't like the idea. "We demand that the school board and the superintendent adhere to and follow the vote of the people, instead of throwing it out and ignoring it."
A rich history. Energetic, sweet students, including several kindergartners who spontaneously gave me hugs. Teachers and administrators who want to succeed. A good building. I enjoyed my visit to Harambee Community School, and I'd like to feel bad about what the school is facing now.
But I don't.
Harambee faces its end, after 40 years. And it's hard to reach any conclusion other than that it is the fault of leaders of the school.
If efforts to bring more quality to Milwaukee schools are going to mean anything, a central pillar has to be accountability or, to put it another way, taking a firm line on schools that don't measure up, be they voucher, charter, or conventional public schools.
In a tough love sort of way, if Harambee closes after this school year, this probably will be a success for those saying high-needs children need better than what they are getting.
A law passed by the Legislature in 2006 was perfectly clear: To stay in Milwaukee's private school voucher program and receive large sums of money from the state, a school had to get accredited by Dec. 31, 2009.
Three and a half years later, it was Dec. 31, 2009, and every school that was covered by the requirement had either succeeded or closed, except one: Harambee.
The New Jersey Education Association makes it easy to conclude that most public school teachers in New Jersey are lousy or mediocre. They must be, because they're willing to settle for the same pay the lazy, unprepared and uninspiring slug in the chaotic classroom across the hall is getting.
The NJEA -- the union for most of New Jersey's public school teachers -- refused to back the state's application for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid because the Rise to the Top program demands that teachers tie their pay to measurable student performance.
President Obama has endorsed merit pay, but the NJEA, as expected, has come up with many reasons why this is a bad idea. Of course it won't propose its own merit-pay formula, because the NJEA is against any form of merit pay.
The union doesn't want teacher pay tied to testing because a teacher could be penalized if "a kid was up all night playing video games" or "didn't have breakfast," NJEA president Barbara Keshishian recently told The Star-Ledger editorial board. That's a silly argument, because no one would suggest tying a salary to a single test, but those are the kinds of silly arguments the NJEA makes.
Which brings us to this next item, one with twist and turns not completely understandable at this point, but certainly not held up by people like myself as a model of how to "get the job properly done" -- to use Herbert's words.
Diane Ravitch, an intellectual on education policy, difficult to pigeonhole politically (appointed to public office by both G.H.W. Bush and Clinton), but best described as an independent, co-writes a blog with Deborah Meier that some of our readers may be familiar with called "Bridging Differences." This past week she highlighted a possibly disturbing development in the Race to the Top competition program of the Department of Education, that dangles $4.3 billion to the states with a possible $1.3 billion to follow. Ravitch's critique suggests that this competition is not run by pragmatists, but rather by ideologues who are led by the Bill Gates Foundation.
If this election had been held five years ago, the department would be insisting on small schools, but because Gates has already tried and discarded that approach, the department is promoting the new Gates remedies: charter schools, privatization, and evaluating teachers by student test scores.
Two of the top lieutenants of the Gates Foundation were placed in charge of the competition by Secretary Arne Duncan. Both have backgrounds as leaders in organisations dedicated to creating privately managed schools that operate with public money.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
I suspect that Duncan and many others are trying to significantly change the adult to student process, rather than simply pumping more money into the current K-12 monopoly structures.
They are to be commended for this.
Will there be waste, fraud and abuse? Certainly. Will there be waste fraud and abuse if the funds are spent on traditional K-12 District organizations? Of course. John Stossel notes that when one puts together the numbers, Washington, DC's schools spend $26,000 per student, while they provide $7,500 to the voucher schools.....
The Verona school board narrowly approved a new Mandarin immersion charter school on a 4-3 vote recently These citizen initiatives offer some hope for new opportunities for our children. I hope we see more of this.
Finally, all of this presents an interesting contrast to what appears to be the Madison School District Administration's ongoing "same service" governance approach.
It wasn't until I was in my 50s that I realized how restricted my high school reading lists had been and how little they had changed for my three children. They were enthusiastic readers, as my wife and I were. But all, or almost all, of the required books for both generations were fiction.
I am not dismissing the delights of Twain, Crane, Buck, Saroyan and Wilder, all of which I read in high school. But I think I also would have enjoyed Theodore H. White, John Hersey, Barbara Tuchman and Bruce Catton if they had been assigned.
Could that be changing? Maybe rebellious teens these days are fleeing Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen and Baldwin, or whoever is on the 12th grade English list, and furtively reading Malcolm Gladwell, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and other nonfiction stars.
Sadly, no. The Renaissance Learning company released a list of what 4.6 million students read in the 2008-09 school year, based on its Accelerated Reader program, which encourages children to choose their own books. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter has given way to the hormonal allure of Stephenie Meyer's teen vampire books, but both school and non-school books are still almost all fiction.
Thinking about the Cost of Educating Students via the Madison School District, Virtual Schools and a Madison School Board Member Ed Hughes email to State Senator Fred Risser
Madison School Board member Ed Hughes sent me an e-mail pointing out another vexing problem with Wisconsin's school funding system and how it penalizes the Madison district, which I've written about in the past. Hughes notes in his e-mail "This particular wrinkle of the state school financing system is truly nuts."
Hughes is incensed that the IQ Academy, a virtual school operated by the Waukesha district, gets over $6000 in state aid for poaching students from the Madison district while total state aid for educating a student in a real school here at home is $3400. Waukesha makes a profit of about $500 per student at the expense of taxpayers here, Hughes says. And that's including profits going to the national corporate IQ Academy that supplies the school's programming.
The complete text of Ed Hughes letter to Senator Risser:
Sen. Risser:
As if we needed one, here is another reason to be outraged by our state school financing system:
This week's issue of Isthmus carries a full page ad on page 2. It is sponsored by "IQ Academy Wisconsin," which is described as a "tuition-free, online middle and high school program of the School District of Waukesha, WI." The ad invites our Madison students to open-enroll in their "thriving learning community."
What's in it for Waukesha? A report on virtual charter schools by the State Fiscal Bureau, released this week, sheds some light on this. The Madison school district gets a little more than $2,000 in general state aid for each of our students. If you include categorical aids and everything else from the state, the amount goes up to about $3,400/student.
However, if Waukesha (or any other school district) is successful in poaching one of our students, it will qualify for an additional $6,007 in state aid. (That was actually the amount for the 2007-08 school year, that last year for which data was available for the Fiscal Bureau report.) As it was explained to me by the author of the Fiscal Bureau report, this $6,007 figure is made up of some combination of additional state aid and a transfer of property taxes paid by our district residents to Waukesha.
So the state financing system will provide nearly double the amount of aid to a virtual charter school associated with another school district to educate a Madison student than it will provide to the Madison school district to educate the same student in an actual school, with you know, bricks and mortar and a gym and cafeteria and the rest.
The report also states that the Waukesha virtual school spends about $5,500 per student. So for each additional student it enrolls, the Waukesha district makes at least a $500 profit. (It's actually more than that, since the incremental cost of educating one additional student is less than the average cost for the district.) This does not count the profit earned by the private corporation that sells the on-line programming to Waukesha.
The legislature has created a system that sets up very strong incentives for a school district to contract with some corporate on-line operation, open up a virtual charter school, and set about trying to poach other districts' students. Grantsburg, for example, has a virtual charter school that serves not a single resident of the Grantsburg school district. What a great policy.
By the way, Waukesha claims in its Isthmus ad that "Since 2004, IQ Academy Wisconsin students have consistently out-performed state-wide and district averages on the WKCE and ACT tests." I didn't check the WKCE scores, but last year 29.3% of the IQ Academy 12th graders took the ACT test and had an average composite score of 22.9. In the Madison school district, 56.6% of 12th graders took the test and the district average composite score was 24.0.
I understand that you are probably tired of hearing from local school board members complaining about the state's school funding system. But the enormous disparity between what the state will provide to a virtual charter school for enrolling a student living in Madison, as compared to what it will provide the Madison school district to educate the same student, is so utterly wrong-headed as to be almost beyond belief.
Ed Hughes
An interesting side note: the Madison Metropolitan School District's current business manager, Erik Kass, was instrumental to helping to keep Waukesha's virtual high school open and collecting a surplus when he was the business manager for that district.
I found the following comments interesting:
An interesting note is that the complainers never talked about which system more effectively taught students.
Then again, it has never really been about the students.
The "Great Recession" has pushed many organizations to seek more effective methods of accomplishing their goals. It would seem that virtual learning and cooperation with nearby higher education institutions would be ideal methods to provide more adult to student services at reduced cost, rather than emphasizing growing adult to adult spending.
Nearly six months after the state announced it was scrapping its annual test for public school students, efforts to replace it with a new assessment are on hold and state officials now estimate it will take at least three years to make the switch.
The reason for the delay is tied to what is happening in the national education scene.
Wisconsin is among the 48 states that have signed onto the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which expects to complete work on grade-by-grade expectations for students in English and math by early spring. Once that is done, the anticipation is that the state will adopt the new standards, using them to help craft the new statewide test.
Wisconsin officials also are planning to compete for part of $350 million that the U.S. Education Department plans to award in the fall to state consortiums for test development.
"What's a court doing making a decision on math textbooks and curriculum?" This question and its associated harrumphs on various education blogs and online newspapers came in reaction to the February 4, 2010 ruling from the Superior court of King County that the Seattle school board's adoption of a discovery type math curriculum for high school was "arbitrary and capricious".
In fact, the court did not rule on the textbook or curriculum. Rather, it ruled on the school board's process of decision making--more accurately, the lack thereof. The court ordered the school board to revisit the decision. Judge Julie Spector found that the school board ignored key evidence--like the declaration from the state's Board of Education that the discovery math series under consideration was "mathematically unsound", the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction not recommending the curriculum and last but not least, information given to the board by citizens in public testimony.
The decision is an important one because it highlights what parents have known for a long time: School boards generally do what they want to do, evidence be damned. Discovery type math programs are adopted despite parent protests, despite evidence of experts and--judging by the case in Seattle--despite findings from the State Board of Education and the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
I have been exchanging emails with Gabe Rose, communications director of something called the Parent Revolution in my home state, California. Rose and his organization are part of a movement that has, to my open-mouthed amazement, persuaded the state government to give parents the power to close or change the leadership of low-performing public schools.
It sounds great. It has many parents excited. It could shake up the state educational establishment, including the education department, school boards and teacher unions. They could use some shaking up.
Yet I can't shake my feeling it is a bad idea, a confusing distraction that will bring parents more frustration, not less, and do little to improve their children's educations.
A fresh, educational reform is sweeping the U.S. and leaving Vermont in the Jurassic period of traditional public schools. What is this reform and why haven't many MMU students heard of this?
The terms public school and private school are terms that are familiar to all of us. There is nothing foreign to us about the concept (or the practice) of public schools. Something that is not so familiar is the idea of a charter school. Many MMU teens have no idea what a charter school even is. An interviewed sophomore asked if charter schools were "private schools that public people went to," that student was by far closer than most MMU students. There has been a fast-paced change in education over the past several years and while many states have jumped on the bandwagon, Vermont hasn't even come close. That change is the development of charter schools.
The U.S .Charter Schools website defines charter schools as "innovative public schools providing choices for families and greater accountability for results." In other words, they are schools that have been granted a charter exempting themselves from selective state or local rules, while still adhering to the basic educational laws. Their purpose is to build strong communities, to focus on the kids and their needs as well as the make sure each child has the access to a quality education.
After years of complaints from parents, the San Francisco Unified School District has just taken a serious step toward revamping its well-meaning but labyrinthine student-assignment system, which decides the educational homes for tens of thousands of children.
The current system -- designed to meet the terms of a settlement in a long-fought federal desegregation case -- involves a complicated computer algorithm that creates student "profiles," using various economic and educational factors, with the aim of sending students of different backgrounds to the same schools.
It has resulted instead in more segregation and has aggravated parents to a point where efforts to manipulate the system have become endemic.
This month, the school district rolled out a new plan. It is designed to more closely consider proximity between a student's home and classroom. It is to be applied to every child headed for kindergarten.
Sitting on the desk of the secretary of education are dozens of ideas bold enough to finally start solving our country's education crisis. They are contained in applications by 40 states and the District of Columbia for grants from the Race to the Top fund, a $4.35 billion piece of the stimulus package designed to dramatically improve student achievement.
Congress established strong guidelines to guarantee that states spend Race to the Top money on audacious reforms. Many states responded with equal fortitude, submitting proposals to radically improve how they use data or to adopt college- and career-ready standards -- concepts that used to be considered third rails in the world of education. Never before has this country had such an opportunity to remake the way we teach young people.
One reason I am so optimistic about these developments is because, after decades of diffuse reform efforts, they all zero in on the most important ingredient of a great education: effective teachers. The key to helping students learn is making sure that every child has an effective teacher every single year.
The government-school establishment has said the same thing for decades: Education is too important to leave to the competitive market. If we really want to help our kids, we must focus more resources on the government schools.
But despite this mantra, the focus is on something other than the kids. When The Washington Post asked George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, about the voucher program there, he said: "Parents are voting with their feet. ... As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we'll have teachers to represent."
How revealing is that?
Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.
Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student -- more than $200,000 per classroom. It's not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else? I'll explore those questions on my Fox Business program tomorrow night at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again Friday at 10 p.m.).
The people who test students internationally told us that two factors predict a country's educational success: Do the schools have the autonomy to experiment, and do parents have a choice?
Locally, the Madison School District has 24,295 students and a 2009/2010 budget of $418,415,780. $17,222 per student.
School Supt. Frances Gallo and the city's teachers union gave conflicting accounts Thursday of how talks to reform the struggling Central Falls High School broke down last week, leading to the dramatic decision to fire the entire staff.
Gallo said she offered the high school's 74 teachers "100-percent job security" for the 2010-11 school year, if they'd agree to her six conditions to transform the low-performing school.
But teachers union President Jane Sessums said that while the issue of job security certainly came up in negotiations, Gallo never promised to protect every job.
In the wake of their failure to reach agreement, Gallo mailed letters Thursday afternoon to every teacher at Central Falls High School informing them that she is recommending their termination at the end of the current school year. The school district's Board of Trustees will vote on Gallo's recommendation Feb. 23.
The lure of $4 billion in federal funding at a time of fiscal peril has driven state after state toward school reforms long considered politically unlikely, undoable or unthinkable. This week, Maryland provided the latest surprise: Gov. Martin O'Malley, who is seeking union support for reelection, proposed tighter rules for teachers to qualify for tenure and opened the door to broader use of test scores to evaluate them.
Many teachers view such policies with deep skepticism despite a national movement to overhaul public education's seniority system. Until recently, there was no reason to think Maryland would join the movement because the state has high-performing public schools and strong unions. O'Malley (D) initially hesitated to propose any changes. But the governor shifted course, hoping to boost Maryland's chances at snaring as much as $250 million in President Obama's Race to the Top competition.
"Who fights money?" asked Clara Floyd, president of the Maryland State Education Association, a teachers union.
The contest has catalyzed action from coast to coast to expand charter schools, lay the groundwork for teacher performance pay, revise employee evaluation methods and even consider the first common academic standards. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), also seeking reelection, said it added up to too much federal intrusion in local affairs and pulled his state out of the competition. But O'Malley aims for Maryland to apply in June.
Commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the report is one of four that will eventually be released in order to study how the schools have multiplied, who is attending them, who is teaching in them, and whether they're succeeding. The Gates Foundation popularized and funded the small schools movement in New York, fueling the growth of nearly 200 small schools with a $150 million investment.
A New-York based research group, MDRC, conducted the report, which does not look at the schools' academic record -- that analysis will come out in spring -- but focuses on the schools' enrollment and demographics.
One of the report's key findings is that the small schools are seeing modest demand from students.
Have your kids ever gotten an A for work that you, or they, didn't think was worthwhile? Something like that happened recently with Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Education historian and New York University Professor Diane Ravitch gave him an A for effectiveness at getting buy-in for linking teacher evaluations to student test scores and a D- for pushing bad ideas. I would forgo the A and lower the grade to an F for pushing ideas that are destructive.
Why destructive? At first blush, rewarding teachers for higher student test scores seems reasonable to many people. The second and third blushes are the problem.
New regulations impacting Milwaukee school choice program: School closures up, number of new schools down
The Public Policy Forum, via a kind reader's email:
Between the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, fewer new schools joined the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) than ever before. In addition, 14 MPCP schools closed and another three schools merged--the most year-over- year closures the program has seen (Chart 1).
In this 12th edition of the Public Policy Forum's annual census of MPCP schools, we find 112 schools are participating in the choice program, enrolling 21,062 students using taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers. The number of full-time equivalent students using vouchers is greater than in any other year of the program's 19-year history; however, there are fewer schools participating today than earlier this decade (Chart 2, page 2).
The decline in the number of new schools and the increase in the number of closed schools are likely due to new state regulations governing the program. These regulations require schools new to the program to obtain pre-accreditation before opening and require existing schools to become accredited within three years of joining the program.
Throughout this decade, the average number of schools new to the program had been 11 per year. Under the new pre- accreditation requirement, 19 schools applied for pre-accreditation, but just three were approved. Another 38 schools had previously indicated to state regulators an intent to participate in the program in 2009-2010, but did not apply for pre -accreditation. The pre-accreditation process is conducted by the Institute for the Transformation of Learning (ITL) at Marquette University.
Will Morton was a happy, creative and enthusiastic child until he went to kindergarten.
As his classmates sounded out letters, and began reading words and simple sentences, he fell behind. His teacher was perplexed by Will's lack of progress because he was clearly bright and had plenty of exposure to books and language at home. And his parents were worried, because Will's older brother and sister had learned to read easily.
"We knew nothing about reading problems because we hadn't ever had any experience with them, but I remember wondering in kindergarten if he was dyslexic because he seemed to have trouble recognizing letters and associating them with sounds," says Chris Morton, Will's mother. "His teacher told us not to worry, that it was a little developmental delay and we needed to give him time and he'd be fine."
But she was wrong, experts on dyslexia say.
Students like Will - who have persistent trouble reading because the neural pathways in their brains do not decode letters and sounds in the ways that make reading and writing natural - need specific help, they say, and the sooner the better. Without that kind of help, they will never catch up, and even if they manage to disguise their different learning style, they are likely to continue to struggle with reading, spelling, language and sometimes with math; in short, they won't ever achieve their full intellectual potential.
Deborah Gist: Chasm: Seniority is no longer a way in which teachers will be selected and assigned in our state. I sent a letter to all superintendents last fall to remind them that the Basic Education Program Regulation in going in effect this summer, and seniority policies would be inconsistent with that regulation. Unfortunately, state statute requires that layoffs be done on a "first in, first out" policy. Legislation would be required to change that, and I would wholeheartedly support it if it were introduced. I will do whatever is necessary to ensure that the very highest quality teacher is in every classroom in our state.
Deborah Gist: I can't imagine how any district or school leader could interpret my words or actions to be anything other than ensuring the top quality, so "change for change's sake" would be contradictory to that.
Bob: Please run for governor. I love your go getter attitude!
Deborah Gist: I appreciate your support very much. Make sure to keep watching and hold me accountable for results!
Parent: As a parent of 2 children, I know how crucial parent involvement is. Has anyone looked at educating the parents of the kids of these failing schools? You can replace the teachers....and you can give new teachers incentives to change things around. But this is a band aid. Teachers are blamed for too many problems. They can't be expected to solve the problems of society. Teachers have many many challenges these days- more so than 25 years ago. Kis and parents need to take responsibility for on education. Just look at math grades around the state. Kids don't know how to deal with fractions because they don't know how to tell time on an analgoue clock. But the teachers are blamed. Let's take a look at the real problems. Educate the kids - the parents- look around the country at other programs. Please don't make this mistake.
Deborah Gist: Parent involvement is important, and supportive, engaged parents are important partners in a child's education. Fortunately, we know that great teaching can overcome those instances when children have parents who are unable to provide that level of support. I don't blame teachers, but I do hold them accountable for results. I also hold myself and everyone on my team accountable.
Matt: Will you apologize for repeatedly saying that "we recruit the majority of our teachers from the bottom third of high school students going to college"? The studies that you cite do not back this up.
Deborah Gist: Matt: As a traditionally trained teacher, I know this is difficult to hear. I don't like it either. Unfortunately, it is true. While there are many extraordinarily intelligent educators throughout Rhode Island and our country, the US--unlike other high performing countries--recruits our teachers from the lowest performers in our secondary schools based on SAT scores and other performance data.
Deborah Gist: If you have a source that shows otherwise, I'd love to see that. I'm always open to learning new resources. So, I'd be happy for you to share that.
The September 1994 issue of NEA Today, the monthly newspaper published by the National Education Association, reports the "resolutions" adopted by delegates to their 1994 Representative Assembly. Below is a small sampling from the 302 resolutions that were passed this year. (One of the resolutions listed is not among those adopted by the NEA. See if you can figure out which one it is.)
Arbor Day Education
Repatriation of Native American Remains
Left-Handed Students
Professionalism and Accountability
Genocide
Competency Testing and Evaluation
World Hunger
Statehood for the District of Columbia
Violence Against and Exploitation of Asian/Pacific Islanders
The resolution that didn't make it is "Professionalism and Accountability".
According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.
If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. I don't know about you, but I often have the laptop in the room while I'm getting dressed, having private discussions with my family, and so on. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students' clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.
A major part of Gov. Bob Riley's final year agenda, the legalization of charter schools, has been killed by the Alabama Legislature.
The Senate Finance and Taxation-Education Committee voted 13-4 Wednesday to kill the Senate version of Riley's charter school bill. The House Education Appropriations Committee voted 13-2 last week to kill the House version of the bill.
"I would pretty much conclude it has no chance for the rest of the session," a proponent, state Superintendent Joe Morton, said after the vote Wednesday.
An opponent, teacher lobbyist Paul Hubbert, agreed the issue is gone "for this year," but he said it may be back after the 2010 state elections.
The Milpitas Unified School District is preparing for the next in the series of continuing shock waves that has been hitting education hard and rippling throughout California.
The latest response comes after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget proposal, which could widen the deficit from $1.5 million to nearly $7 million if passed, in the 2011-12 school year for the Milpitas Unified School District alone.
District staff is advancing plans to garner enough support to pass a parcel tax expected to bring in $1.4 million to $1.6 million annually for five years, if passed in the June election. But even if this passes, the district will still be left with a large hole to fill.
Gov. Bob McDonnell wants to fill a $2 billion budget shortfall by eliminating more than 500 jobs over three years, instituting 10 furlough days for state workers and slashing services for children and the sick.
But he proposes no new taxes, and he is electing to keep the $950 million-a-year car-tax break for localities.
The governor also wants to spare higher education from further cuts and seeks to restore some of former Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's proposed cuts to public safety.
Schools and health care -- the largest parts of the state's general fund budget -- take heavy hits under McDonnell's plan, with reductions of $731 million to public education over the two-year budget period, and more than $300 million to health-care programs.
"All the cuts give me heartburn," McDonnell said at a news conference. "All of them were difficult because I know that behind every cut there is a Virginian . . . that might be affected."
Less than half of California school districts and only about a quarter of teacher unions have promised to make key education reforms required for the state to win $700 million in competitive federal grants, officials said Wednesday.
Only 41 percent of school districts and 60 percent of eligible charter schools signed on for changes needed to participate in the Obama administration's Race to the Top contest in which states can win extra federal funding to ease the impact of steep budget cuts.
Still, state education officials were hopeful California would be among the states chosen in April to share about $4.35 billion. Officials note that districts agreeing to the reforms represent 58 percent of the state's public school students and almost 61 percent of students from low-income families.
"We're very pleased with the turnout," said Hilary McLean, spokeswoman for the California Department of Education. "We think we have a very strong application. We're competitive."
This new analysis by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute finds that more than 1.7 million American children attend what we've dubbed "private public schools" -- public schools that serve virtually no poor students. In some metropolitan areas, as many as one in six public-school students -- and one in four white youngsters -- attends such schools, of which the U.S. has about 2,800. Read on to see whether there's one in your neighborhood.
State and federal leaders are touting charter schools as key to education reform, but advocates say the movement needs more public funding to grow in New Jersey.
"It's politically expedient to talk about charter schools," said Rex Shaw, lead person at the Teaneck Community Charter School. "But show me the money."
Governor Christie has been a vocal supporter of the schools, which act independently of local districts even though they are publicly financed. But his office was mum on whether more money would be available to spur the movement.
At their best, charters serve as laboratories for innovation -- trying new approaches without the restraints of union rules and administrative orthodoxy.
But the schools have been slow to catch on in most of New Jersey -- hampered by a lack of money and interest in a state where the public schools generally are considered good. Nearly 80 percent of the 68 charters now operating are in urban areas where the local districts are struggling, if not failing.
In recent years, the Hamilton Township School District has set about silently taking in relatives of board of education members and high-ranking administrators, with the district serving as a paying home-away-from-home-until-retirement home. There, kin can gently labor beneath a motto borrowing on the formula E=mc², "Everything is Relative," and bond with one another in an exclusive patronage pool. A family welfare system is in the making.
Privately, I have wanted this stealth project to fail. My mindset is not entirely propriety-driven; like a lot of people, I am tempted to bend principle to become principal. Other forces at work are envy and money. I am unrelated to any board member or administrator, so I can't enjoy the relative benefits. I am also a taxpayer in the district and have to shoulder its costs. I am a double loser -- no money coming into my pocket all the while money is being emptied from it.
Nevertheless, I feel compelled to express publicly my admiration of the district's ability to engineer its version of relativity into a family support system . A greater utopia I am hard-pressed to imagine. Let me offer supporting facts. In 2003, only one of the nine members of the board had any relatives working in the district. He had three, so he might be regarded as a pioneer of the project. By 2008, five members were relative-on-board, with a total of seven employed in the district. In 2009, while the number of members with family in-district dropped to four, the total of employed relatives remained at six. Meanwhile, the superintendent and two assistants were also nurturing the value of paid family togetherness. In 2003, they contributed five relatives to the district; by 2009, the number had doubled to 10.
In his blockbuster best-selling book, writer Malcolm Gladwell identified a phenomenon called ―the tipping point.‖ This point marks the level at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable and something happens that, in either large or small measure, turns the world on its axis. For those who have been working to improve education, it appears that the tipping point may have finally arrived.
Currently, K-12 education in the United States is dealing with three major crises, each of which on its own is capable of wreaking havoc on schools and communities around the nation, but together are an all-out perfect storm. Simultaneously, the U.S. education system is facing
global skill demands vs. educational attainment;
the funding cliff;
and a looming teacher shortage.
These three factors have brought our education system to a point where the need for change and innovation is no longer something to be researched and discussed. We must do what people have done for centuries and turn crisis into opportunity, somehow making progress in the face of enormous challenges.
Sally made 500 gingerbread men. She sold 3/4 of them and gave away 2/5 of the remainder. How many did she give away?
This was one of the homework questions in Craig Parsley's fifth-grade class. The kids are showing their answers on the overhead projector. They are in a fun mood, using class nicknames. First up is "Crackle," a boy. The class hears from "Caveman," "Annapurna," "Shortcut" and "Fred," a girl.
Each has drawn a ruler with segments labeled by number -- on the problem above, "3/4," "2/5" and "500." Below the ruler is some arithmetic and an answer.
"Who has this as a single mathematical expression? Who has the guts?" Parsley asks. No one, yet -- but they will.
This is not the way math is taught in other Seattle public schools. It is Singapore Math, adopted from the Asian city-state whose kids test at the top of the world. Since the 2007-08 year, Singapore Math has been taught at Schmitz Park Elementary in West Seattle -- and only there in the district.
In the war over school math -- in which a judge recently ordered Seattle Public Schools to redo its choice of high-school math -- Schmitz Park is a redoubt or, it hopes, a beachhead. North Beach is a redoubt for Saxon Math, a traditional program. Both schools have permission to be different. The rest of the district's elementary schools use Everyday Math, a curriculum influenced by the constructivist or reform methods.
A new teacher contract in the Memphis City Schools district includes a 2 percent raise this year, and a 1 percent raise next year for the largest union in the district.
Although the raises are the smallest teachers have received in several decades, the deal was overwhelmingly approved by the membership.
"Nobody is going to turn down a 2 percent raise. Shelby County (teachers) got nothing," said Stephanie Fitzgerald, president of the Memphis Education Association.
MEA has more than 6,000 members, including principals and librarians.
The school board approved the agreement Monday night.
Recently New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced a freeze on spending and said pensions and benefits are the major driver of spending increases at all levels of government. He citied two examples of retired public employees. A 49-year-old retiree, who paid $124,000 toward retirement pension and health benefits, will get $3.3 million in pension payments and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits -- $3.8 million on a $120,000 investment. A retired teacher who paid $62,000 toward her pension and nothing for full family medical, dental and vision coverage, will collect $1.4 million in pension and $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime.
I decided to check his math using the Saucon Valley School District teacher contract as a model. I assumed a teacher hired at age 24 at $40,000 would work 30 years and get an average pay increase of 4 percent a year (quite conservative) and contribute 7.5 percent of salary to the state retirement system. Retiring at 54, the teacher's total pension contribution would be $168,255. Assuming the teacher lived to 85 and got health benefits until Medicare eligible, he or she would collect about $3.4 million after retiring. Not a bad return. If the annual raise were 5 percent, the teacher would get a return of $4.2 million on an investment of $199,317.
KC District parents, students make pitch to keep their schools open Read more: KC District parents, students make pitch to keep their schools open & Interesting Comments
For many of the 400 people who came out to defend their schools from Kansas City's chopping block Tuesday night, this was their first time for one of these hearings.
Not for those from McCoy Elementary.
They'd been through this before, most recently a year ago. And the school's supporters were back again in their orange shirts with their neighbors, teachers and a popular principal.
"It's the best school on the planet -- McCoy," 7-year-old Edwin Lopez declared to a round of cheers.
With the district pushing its longest list of possible closings ever, McCoy supporters know it will be hard for the school to escape one more time.
But as Superintendent John Covington and his staff started the community tour Tuesday night, he left everyone in the crowd with some hope that his plan to close half of the district's 60 schools could change. He also left them with the reality that many of their schools will be closed.
The President and Secretary deserve credit for advancing the teacher quality agenda-a tough thing for democrats to do. Some of the credit for that goes to Jon Schnur and DFER. Because we don't have very good predictive techniques, it's important to watch teachers in their first few years, keep the best, and ask 10-20% or so that don't appear cut out for teaching to find a new job. Historically, 99% of teachers have been granted lifetime employment. The idiocy of this policy is finally coming to light. Two examples follow.
NY Chancellor Joel Klein wrote a candid piece for the NY Daily Post which ran with the headline: Get Incompetent Teachers Off the Payroll:
Friedman (1962) argued that a free market in which schools compete based upon their reputation would lead to an efficient supply of educational services. This paper explores this issue by building a tractable model in which rational individuals go to school and accumulate skill valued in a perfectly competitive labor market. To this it adds one ingredient: school reputation in the spirit of Holmstrom (1982). The first result is that if schools cannot select students based upon their ability, then a free market is indeed efficient and encourages entry by high productivity schools. However, if schools are allowed to select on ability, then competition leads to stratification by parental income, increased transmission of income inequality, and reduced student effort--in some cases lowering the accumulation of skill. The model accounts for several (sometimes puzzling) findings in the educational literature, and implies that national standardized testing can play a key role in enhancing learning.
Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.
Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but other subjects like science and history.
The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, Finland, England, France and Singapore.
The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and one of its goals is to reduce the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college. More than a million college freshmen across America must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree.
"That's a central problem we're trying to address, the enormous failure rate of these kids when they go to the open admission colleges," said Marc S. Tucker, president of the center, a Washington-based nonprofit. "We've looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you'll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon."
A school superintendent in Rhode Island is trying to fix an abysmally bad school system.
Her plan calls for teachers at a local high school to work 25 minutes longer per day, each lunch with students once in a while, and help with tutoring. The teachers' union has refused to accept these apparently onerous demands.
After learning of the union's position, School Supt. Frances Gallo notified the state that she was switching to an alternative she was hoping to avoid: firing the entire staff at Central Falls High School. In total, about 100 teachers, administrators and assistants will lose their jobs.
Gallo blamed the union's "callous disregard" for the situation, saying union leaders "knew full well what would happen" if they rejected the six conditions Gallo said were crucial to improving the school. The conditions are adding 25 minutes to the school day, providing tutoring on a rotating schedule before and after school, eating lunch with students once a week, submitting to more rigorous evaluations, attending weekly after-school planning sessions with other teachers and participating in two weeks of training in the summer.
The high school's 74 teachers will receive letters during school vacation advising them to attend a Feb. 22 meeting where each will be handed a termination notice that takes effect for the 2010-'11 school year, Gallo said.
State Sen. James T. Meeks, D-Chicago, one of the most influential voices in the city's black community, recently stood before a group of mostly white, free-market conservatives to passionately plead for their support.
It was an unlikely meeting of the minds at an Illinois Policy Institute lunch session, but when Meeks was finished, he had his audience cheering. Might this be the launch of a political alliance that would unshackle Chicago kids from the tyranny, dangers and incompetence of Chicago Public Schools?
Meeks, pastor of Salem Baptist Church, was pitching Senate Bill 2494, his proposed Illinois School Choice Program Act that would give vouchers to students in the worst public schools to attend non-public schools of their choice.
Meeks, a recent voucher convert, came to talk political reality: Legislation that would free children from their bondage would be hard for African-American lawmakers to oppose. Combined with the support of Republican voucher supporters, they might be able to create a coalition that could make vouchers available for the first time in Illinois.
My guest is cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, professor at the University of Virginia and author of "Why Don't Students Like School?"
By Daniel Willingham
I have recently written about the problems in trying to use student achievement data to measure teachers' effectiveness.
But that doesn't mean that I think teachers' effectiveness should not be measured.
Indeed, I think it's essential that it is.
People focus on just one of the uses to which measurement of teachers could be put: rewarding the successful and firing the unsuccessful. But if you're interested in improving the practice of teaching, you must have a method of measuring teachers' effectiveness.
After five years of getting nowhere with Los Angeles Unified officials, fed-up parents in Sunland-Tujunga are using a new state law to force change at a long-troubled middle school.
Parents and community members say problems at Mount Gleason Middle School, which has been on a federal list of under-performing campuses for a dozen years, go beyond failing test scores.
"There is an unsafe atmosphere at this school that is spilling over into the community...," said Lydia Grant, a resident and parent of a former Mount Gleason student. "People are tired of it and we want to see change."
Thanks to new legislation, known as the "parent trigger" law, they're able to do something about it.
Rhode Island education officials are pushing an expansion of charter schools as a way to boost innovation and quality.
Education Commissioner Deborah Gist said her goal is to have excellent schools for all children, whether it's a charter school or regular school.
Gist and other charter school supporters want to change a law that limits the number of state charter schools to 20 and says a maximum of 4 percent of the state's students can attend them. That's about 6,000 students.
Right now, Rhode Island has 13 charter schools with 3,200 students and 3,600 student on waiting lists.
Gist plans to testify in favor of removing the cap when lawmakers reconvene later this month.
Here is an open letter which I sent last night to Edie Harding, Executive Director of the State Board of Education. Under the letter I have paraphrased her reply; below that is my response to her.
I am responding to your comment today in the Seattle Times:
' "It's long been established that in our state, the local board is always the prime decision-maker on curriculum." ....the Seattle decision was "a surprise, and if I were the Seattle School Board, I would -- well, I might take issue with the judge," she added.'
Having been one of the plaintiffs in the recent textbook appeal in Seattle, I'm well aware that School Boards make curriculum decisions. However, Ms. Harding, what recourse do you suggest to parents when School Boards abdicate their decision making power - refusing to consider voluminous, compelling, evidence from parents and community members, and instead give school administrators carte blanch to turn math education in directions that are unacceptable to informed parents and community members?
A Clayton State University education professor says the recipe has been in place for a while for CRCT cheating with the main ingredient being the pressure on schools to reach artificial and questionable goals.
Here is an opinion piece by Mari Ann Roberts, assistant professor in Clayton State University's department of teacher education:
I like to cook so I'm going to share a recipe with you.
Take one flawed underfunded federal education improvement act, like NCLB,
add increasing pressure on individual schools to meet "Adequate Yearly Progress,"
include some inane expectations that teachers can work miracles,
sprinkle liberally with furlough days, suspended raises, and budget cuts dating back to 2003 that will total more than $2.8 billion through the fiscal year ending next June.
And what do you get? Whatever it is, it can't be good.
Covington and other officials announced on Saturday that up to 31 of the district's schools could close, including Westport High School and possibly Northeast High School. The central office at 12th and McGee streets also will be for sale.
The proposed reductions are fiscally sound and clearly necessary. The schools on average are operating at only half capacity. The months-long decision-making process evaluated each school's age, costs, efficiency and durability, as well as the best transfer possibilities for students to get a good education.
Covington and his administrative team deserve high marks so far for involving the public in the decision process, beginning last year. Parents, students, district workers, and business, faith, civic and community leaders were invited to "Right Sizing the District" forums.
The Los Angeles Unified School District board was expected to vote Tuesday on whether to put a parcel tax on the June 8 ballot that would help ease its budget crisis.
If approved by two-thirds of voters, the $100 per-parcel tax increase would generate $92.5 million per year for schools over four years, the Daily News reported Saturday.
Low-income seniors would be exempt from the property tax, and none of the money would fund administrators' salaries.
The income would go toward limiting class size increases, reducing teacher layoffs, and maintaining vocational and job training programs.
"The bottom line is the district is in desperate straits," said Judith Perez, president of Associated Administrators Los Angeles. "There is just no way to come up with this money through cuts."
The third- and fourth-graders at Sharon Elementary know where the veggies in their soup come from because they've visited the farms. They know the nutritional value of the carrots, onions and cabbage because they've studied them in class, and they know how they're grown because they've nurtured them in raised beds out back.
The 105-student school is part of the National Farm to School Network, aimed at getting healthier meals into school cafeterias, teaching kids about agriculture and nutrition and supporting local farmers.
About 40 states have farm-to-school programs, but Vermont is a leader in incorporating all three missions into its programs.
"Vermont has really taken it on in quite the most holistic way and not just in a couple of school districts, but statewide," said Anupama Joshi, director of the Farm to School program, based at the Center for Food and Justice at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
Vermont might be a step ahead of other states because a nonprofit partnership called Vermont FEED already had been working to get local foods into schools.
Anthony J. Tata was an Army brigadier general in northeast Afghanistan's Kunar Province in April 2006 when a Taliban rocket slammed into a primary school in Asadabad, killing seven children and wounding 34.
The vicious attack and others like it by the Taliban left him with a thought: "It struck me at the time that if the enemy of my enemy is education, then perhaps that's a second act for me."
Three years later, Tata began his second act by accepting Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's offer to become chief operating officer for D.C. public schools, a newly created post that places him in charge of purchasing, food service, technology and other support areas.
After a 28-year career that took him to Kosovo, Macedonia, Panama, the Philippines and the international agency charged with thwarting improvised explosive devices, Tata's mission is to help bring the District's notorious school bureaucracy to heel.
Brent Elementary principal Cheryl Wilhoyte was mentioned in this article. Wilhoyte is a former Superintendent of the Madison School District.
The proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars would chip away at Utah's $700-million shortfall. He's since offered a toned-down version: Just make senior year optional.
Reporting from Denver - At Utah's West Jordan High School, the halls have swirled lately with debate over the merits of 12th grade:
Is it a waste of time? Are students ready for the real world at 17?
For student body president J.D. Williams, 18, the answer to both questions is a resounding no. "I need this year," he said, adding that most of his classmates feel the same way.
The sudden buzz over the relative value of senior year stems from a recent proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars that Utah make a dent in its budget gap by eliminating the 12th grade.
Congratulations to Kansas City School District Superintendent John Covington.
He's just take the courageous and correct step of saying the district needs to shutter more than two dozen schools in the ever-shrinking district.
From 74,000 students about 40 years ago to 17,000 now, the district has no reason to continue to operate so many buildings at less than 50 percent capacity.
Covington, however, also must get rid of a proportionate number of administrators at the downtown office building, which has been bloated with staff for many years.
If more than 200 teachers are going to receive pink slips in closed buildings, the downtown administrators should share in the pain.
or decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
The years after 1976 have seen school teaching change beyond recognition. The curriculum has become more uniform, inspection is much tighter and more prescriptive, and targets and league tables are the principal drivers of school improvement. Lazy teachers and ineffective schools have been tackled under this centralising imperative.
However, concerns are now heard that the new focus on league tables is narrowing the quality and breadth of education. Universities and employers often feel that schools are very effective in instructing their pupils in how to get top marks, but are less impressive at teaching them how to think.
A report that Maryland students ranked first in the nation in the percentages of high school seniors taking and passing Advanced Placement exams comes just as Gov. Martin O'Malley is set to announce his legislative proposals for making the state more competitive for millions of dollars in new federal education funds. But it's too early for congratulations just yet. Maryland's high ranking on the AP exams masks glaring disparities between the state's best- and worst-performing school districts, and the legislative package the governor is proposing will need to be scrutinized closely on key elements, notably those involving charter schools, where the state still needs to demonstrate its commitment to education reform.
It's a sign of definite progress that Governor O'Malley, who recently bristled at the notion that Maryland was ill-prepared to compete for federal school dollars under the nationwide Race to the Top program, has been working with teachers unions in recent weeks to get their agreement on legislation to reform the state's educational system.
The governor's package would extend the minimum time teachers are required to serve before being awarded tenure from two years to three, a change that would bring Maryland more in line with the rest of the nation; 38 states already require teachers to work at least three years before getting tenure, and eight states require more than that.
Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines proposed Friday cutting six days from the school year to help reduce an estimated $640-million deficit and avoid the need for widespread layoffs in the nation's second-largest school system.
The move, announced by news release Friday evening, would save the district $90 million and could spare up to 5,000 jobs, Cortines said. The alternative to this drastic action, he said, would be to let the district go bankrupt.
"Do I think [this] is good education policy? No," he said. "But we are in a real crisis."
Cortines has repeatedly said that he did not want to shorten the school year. This is the first time in recent history that a Los Angeles school superintendent has made such a suggestion.
Superintendent Beverly Hall told a national audience of educators about Atlanta schools' steady strides forward at a conference in Phoenix Wednesday.
But back home that same day, Georgia officials were unveiling findings that call into question how much of that progress was real.
Hall is at the high point of her career, basking in national accolades for a dramatic turnaround of the city's schools -- with rising state test scores cited as key evidence. Those scores are suddenly in doubt.
More than two-thirds of Atlanta's public elementary and middle schools face investigations into cheating after the state unveiled a statewide analysis of suspicious erasures on standardized tests. Atlanta had more schools flagged than any other district. In one school, nearly 90 percent of classrooms are under scrutiny.
Seventeen days ago, Jessica Deibel stood in front of the Milwaukee School Board, accepting praise for her accomplishments. Superintendent William Andrekopoulos gave her a plaque. Each board member shook her hand.
Deibel and only seven other teachers in Milwaukee Public Schools were recognized for receiving in the past year national board certification, a prestigious credential for teachers.
Congratulations, Ms. Deibel. And now you're going to be bounced out of your job.
The school you love - where you send your own children - is taking it on the chin as the financial picture of MPS takes major steps into deeper financial distress. The staff will shrink at this little school where student achievement exceeds city averages by wide margins. Class size will go up sharply. Time with music, art and gym teachers will be reduced or eliminated.
Even with your new certification, the product of months of work, you have the least seniority in this small school and you will be the first one required to leave, Ms. Deibel.
"It was kind of like a slap in the face," Deibel said of the recognition at the School Board meeting. "Here's your reward, but you can't stay here."
Kansas City Superintendent John Covington this afternoon unveiled his sweeping plan to close half of the district's schools, redistribute grade levels and sell the downtown central office.
Covington presented his proposal to the school board in advance of a series of forums next week where the community will get to weigh in on what would be the largest swath of closures in district history, as well as a major reorganization.
"Folks, it's going to hurt," Covington told an overflow audience. "It's going to be painful, but if we work together, we're going to get through it."
Covington wants to be able to complete the public debate and present a final plan for a vote by the board at its Feb. 24 meeting.
The board and the community have a lot to digest over the next 10 days.
The proposal calls for:
•29 to 31 of the district's 60 schools would close, including Westport High and Central Middle.
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
The plan was offered under a state mandate to fix the school, which has among Rhode Island's worst test scores and graduation rates.
The plan included six conditions such as adding 25 minutes to the day and providing tutoring outside school hours.
The added work didn't come with much extra pay and the teachers union refused to accept it.
Superintendent Frances Gallo blasted the union's "callous disregard" for the situation. She said the school's 74 teachers will be fired, effective next school year.
Senate Majority Leader Barbara Buonoon Gov. Christie's plan to force school districts to use surpluses in lieu of state aid when that money would typically go back to residents in the form of property tax relief: "It's a solution to the budget crisis that falls disproportionately on the backs of middle-class homeowners, which is something I can't support." Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney: "So much for a handshake. Governing by executive order and keeping plans secret until the last minute is not bipartisanship.''
Assembly Education Committee Chairman Patrick J. Diegnan, Jr. on Christie's plans to cut state aid to schools: "Democrats were able last year to increase school aid even as we slashed the state budget, so Gov. Christie's plan to cut resources for our schools and children is the wrong approach for our state. New Jerseyans have long had a shared commitment to the nearly 1.5 million children in our public schools, but Gov. Christie's approach steers us in a different direction."
During the recent National School Boards Association conference in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talked about revising the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001."
Such reforms could change the school accountability measures that we have had in public education for nearly a decade. Under "No Child Left Behind," individual school progress is determined by student achievement on reading and math tests.
These tests are different in each state, based on state standards and linked to statewide curriculum. Tests are used to identify achievement gaps among groups and evaluate schools based on annual testing of all students who must show proficiency in reading and math by 2014.
"No Child Left Behind" legislation expired in 2007-08. Congress kept the measure going by approving annual appropriations for K-12 education. However, in 2010, the Obama administration is asking Congress for reauthorization, not of the "No Child Left Behind Act," but of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965."
Detroit Public Schools challenged by high-quality charter schools From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20100211/OPINION01/2110342/Editorial--Detroit-Public-Schools-challenged-by-high-quality-charter-schools#ixzz0fNPgbPTI
The evolution of charter schools and education in Detroit is no more sharply illustrated than by these facts: It was Gov. Jennifer Granholm who went to Houston to convince the phenomenally successful YES academies to open a school in Detroit, and it was the Detroit Public Schools that sold YES the school building where it will begin holding classes this fall.
Six years ago, Granholm stood in the schoolhouse door with the Detroit Federation of Teachers and said no to an expansion of charters in the city. Since then, the high performance of the city's best charter schools, the continued deterioration of the Detroit Public Schools and the demand from parents for alternative education choices has changed attitudes about charters. DPS, under the leadership of Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, now welcomes the competition from charters as an impetus to improve its schools.
In fact, Bobb sold YES the old Winship Elementary School on the city's northwest side to use as a home for the new academy, serving grades 6-12.
Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines earned more than $150,000 last year for serving on the board of one of the nation's leading educational publishing companies, a firm with more than $16 million in contracts with the school district over the last five years.
Scholastic Inc. provides the main reading intervention curriculum for the Los Angeles Unified School District, a program that is part of the company's fast-growing educational technology business.
Cortines has disclosed his relationship with the New York-based company, and officials say he has avoided any decisions on Scholastic contracts.
Cortines' role, however, has generated criticism among some former senior officials and current employees. They said the corporate tie creates an appearance of impropriety.
Uniformed police delivered a school budget meeting flyer door-to-door in Monona on Feb. 11. The flyer encouraged public attendance at a school district hearing that night to discuss the possible consolidation of Monona's pre-kindergarten through second grade Maywood Elementary School with the community's third through sixth grade Winnequah Elementary. It was signed by Monona mayor, Robb Kahl.
Depending on one's perspective, it was either a waste of taxpayer money and an embarrassing move by Kahl or a necessary means of getting important news to citizens who haven't gotten enough information on potential school budget cuts, especially when it comes to the possibility of closing the beloved Maywood school. Both points of view are represented in dozens of comments on Monona School Board Vice President Peter Sobol's blog.
Writing Instruction in Massachusetts: Commonwealth's Students Making Gains, Still Need Improvement
BOSTON - Writing Instruction in Massachusetts [1.3MB PDF], published today by Pioneer Institute, underscores the fact that despite 17 years of education reform and first-in-the-nation performance on standardized tests, many Massachusetts middle school students are still not on the trajectory to be prepared for writing in a work or post-secondary education environment.
The study is authored by Alison L. Fraser, president of Practical Policy, with a foreword by Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review, who, since 1987, has published over 800 history research papers by high school students from around the world.
Writing Instruction finds that Massachusetts' students have improved, with 45 percent of eighth graders writing at or above the 'Proficient' level on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress test. In comparison, only 31 percent of eighth graders scored at or above 'Proficient' in 1998. The paper ascribes Massachusetts' success in improving writing skills to adherence to MCAS standards and the state's nation-leading state curriculum frameworks. It also suggests that strengthening the standards will help the state address the 55 percent of eighth graders who still score in the "needs improvement" or below categories.
According to a report on a 2004 survey of 120 major American businesses affiliated with the Business Roundtable, remedying writing deficiencies on the job costs corporations nearly $3.1 billion annually. Writing, according to the National Writing Commission's report Writing: A Ticket to Work...Or a Ticket Out, is a "threshold skill" in the modern world. Being able to write effectively and coherently is a pathway to both hiring and promotion in today's job market.
"While we should be pleased that trends show Massachusetts students have improved their writing skills, the data shows that we need renewed focus to complete the task of readying them for this important skill," says Jim Stergios, executive director of Pioneer Institute. "Before we even think about altering academic standards, whether through state or federal efforts, we need to recommit to such basics."
The study notes that if the failure to learn to write well is pervasive in Massachusetts, one should look first to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) designed to measure mastery of those frameworks. Analysis completed in December 2009 by a member of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education found that nearly all of the skills that the 21st Century Skills Task Force identified as important, such as effective written communication, are already embedded in the state's academic standards guiding principles.
Writing Instruction in Massachusetts has these additional findings:
The Poor Alignment Between State Writing Standards and Teaching Methods: In large measure, prospective teachers are instructed in how to promote the use of various "writing processes," typically for experience-based writing. Therefore, without the knowledge to teach different approaches to writing, teachers often fall back on the vagaries of the process approach or formulaic methods of instruction learned in high school.
The Importance of Reading to the Writing Curriculum: As Professor E.D. Hirsch describes, core knowledge and cultural literacy means a familiarity with a common core of knowledge, gleaned from well-rounded reading in the liberal arts, gives students, and other writers, a common language through which to communicate with their audience.
A Better Way Must Be Found: School districts and teachers can more effectively help students develop their own voices and ideas across multiple subjects by focusing on knowledge- and skill-building, rather than the self-centeredness of approaches such as the Writer's Workshop. Direct instruction, as opposed to the group-centered and collaborative methods emphasized in many classrooms today, focuses teachers and students on building those skills that research has shown have the greatest impact on student writing.
"Broadening one's knowledge base strengthens comprehension, improves vocabulary and creates the civic and global awareness that is so important in this century," writes Fraser. "In other words, in order to be a good writer, students should have ideas and information to write about."
A 2006 Pioneer report, Aligning District Curricula with State Frameworks, has demonstrated that the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks are not fully aligned with district-level curriculum and are not being taught effectively in many classrooms. The key is clear, sequenced instruction, combined with the reading of quality non-fiction, which will give students access to information about which to write. Students need experience reading, analyzing, and writing about informational and content-rich texts, ultimately preparing them for college and career success.
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Pioneer Institute is an independent, non-partisan, privately funded research organization that seeks to change the intellectual climate in the Commonwealth by supporting scholarship that tests marked solutions against the conventional wisdom of more governmental involvement in Massachusetts public policy issues.
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
School districts can take steps to level out salary inequities caused by maldistributions of teachers, according to researchers at the University of Washington.
It is a well-known fact that within districts, higher-paid teachers with more experience congregate in the more affluent schools, while poorer schools have less-experienced, lower-paid teachers.
If, as has been proposed, the federal Title I program closes a loophole in its "comparability" provision, districts would have no choice but to address the problem.
According to Marguerite Roza and Sarah Yatsko at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, districts have four "salary reallocation" options that can erase the imbalance and work to close the spending gap, without reassigning the more experienced teachers.
Georgia education officials ordered investigations on Thursday at 191 schools across the state where they had found evidence of tampering on answer sheets for the state's standardized achievement test.
The inquiry flagged any school that had an abnormal number of erasures on answer sheets where the answers were changed from wrong to right, suggesting deliberate interference by teachers, principals or other administrators.
Experts said it could become one of the largest cheating scandals in the era of widespread standardized testing.
"This is the biggest erasure problem I've ever seen," said Gregory J. Cizek, a testing expert at the University of North Carolina who has studied cheating. "This doesn't suggest that it was just kids randomly changing their answers, it suggests a pattern of unethical behavior on the part of either kids or educators."
An early "snapshot" analysis of 23 state budgets using federal education stimulus dollars indicates that short-term benefits could result in less spending on schools over the long term in some states.
In the case of 13 of the 23 states they examined, education spending as a share of state budgets declined during the infusion of the federal stimulus money via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
"A key concern emerging in this analysis is the notion that while the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF) was intended to 'protect' state education spending (and did likely result in short-term stabilization), the longterm effect could be the opposite," according to the brief. "For states where education's share of the state budget shrank during SFSF, we might anticipate that restoring education's previous share could be difficult."
Marshall High School wins L.A. Unified's Academic Decathlon
Nicole Santa Cruz:
Marshall High School beat out 63 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District in the annual Academic Decathlon, district officials announced Thursday night.
Anastasya Lloyd-Damnjanovic was the highest-scoring individual student, with 8,933 points.
The decathlon tests students' knowledge in a variety of areas, including history. This year's focus was the French Revolution.
Marshall first won a national championship in 1987. Since then, the district has won 15 state and 10 national competitions.
West High School in Torrance won the Los Angeles County Academic Decathlon for the second year in a row, county officials announced Thursday.
Milwaukee Public Schools has failed to fulfill multiple elements of its state-ordered educational improvement plan, according to newly released documents from the state Department of Public Instruction that detail why the district is at risk of losing millions of dollars of federal funding.
Though the main standoff between the state and its largest district continues to be a disagreement over how MPS imposes remedies of an ongoing special education lawsuit, the new documents specify where MPS hasn't met other state orders, including literacy instruction, identifying students who need extra help or special services, and tracking newly hired, first-year teachers and teachers hired on emergency licenses.
The district's lack of compliance with what are known formally as "corrective action requirements" - imposed by the state because MPS repeatedly has missed yearly academic progress targets - is what led Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers last week to initiate the process of withholding up to $175 million in federal dollars.
Legally, the greatest leverage Evers can exert against a poorly performing district under the federal No Child Left Behind law is to withhold federal dollars. To take that action, he said, he first had to issue notice to MPS and allow the district to request a hearing.
When I interviewed Mayor Tom Barrett about his proposal to take over MPS last August, he insisted it was no power grab.
It was all about the kids, Mayor Barrett said. He believed the change was the right thing. He acknowledged that the plan was controversial but the legislative session in Madison would be over by the end of the year and, one way or another, we'd all move on by 2010.
Well here it is February, and we're still talking about it. The Democratic leaders in the state legislature show no interest in bringing the plan to a vote, and there's little evidence the bill would pass.
In an apparent change of heart, Mayor Barrett continues to push the idea. With his experience in Madison and Washington, you'd expect Barrett to know how to count and to know when to stop pushing for a piece of legislation that doesn't have enough votes.
But Barrett is also running for statewide office, and he appears to believe this issue will play well with voters across Wisconsin. It gives him the opportunity to run against type and show that he's willing to take on the teachers union, usually a reliable supporter of Democrats, in support of a popular initiative.
At tonight's listening session several people talked about the structural deficit problem: the fact that due to the state funding formula, we are looking at a deficit that grows by a million dollars each year for as far as the projections go. As Craig mentioned, our revenues increase by about 2% a year (less than inflation) while our expenses go up by more than 4% per year. This is the real problem that makes the issues brought up today look like child's play. Several people asked us to consider the long term, a sentiment I couldn't agree with more. Others asked us to consider an operating referendum to avoid cuts. I agree that given the current situation we will need to consider this as we move forward. But an operating referendum alone can't solve this problem - the deficit is not a one time or short term issue.
A while ago someone asked for my long term plan for solving the structural deficit. I've given this a lot of thought, and I have to say there is no magic bullet for this, I haven't heard anyone on the board or administration articulate any specific ideas that get us out of this situation. What we need more than anything is else is good ideas.
Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, trying to salvage something from a lost week, has asked teachers to report to school Friday for a scheduled day of professional development. Rhee increased funding and time devoted to helping educators lift their game. So, ice and drifting snow not withstanding, PD is on. Here is her just-released letter to teachers:
Dear DCPS Teachers,
We have decided to proceed with Friday's professional development day as planned. One of the key messages I hear from teachers at the listening sessions I do at schools across the city is that we need to do more to support you in our work. The district-wide professional development days are a key opportunity to do exactly that. Because we have such a limited number of these days, and because the worst of the weather has passed, I have decided to move forward with the scheduled activities tomorrow.
Consolidating public school districts in Kansas could save millions of taxpayer dollars, although not enough to solve the state's budget crisis this year, according to a new report released Monday.
Kansas has 293 school districts and last forced consolidation in the 1960s when the state overhauled education governance. Since then, legislators have relied on districts to decide for themselves when it's time to merge, offering a few financial incentives to ease the process.
In its report, the Legislative Division of Post Audit (2.6MB PDF, supplemental District level data) looked at methods that would reduce the number of districts to either 266 or 152.
The first scenario - in which the state would have 50 fewer public school buildings and 230 fewer teachers and administrators - would save $18 million. Auditors said the consolidation could happen among districts that already split grade levels, such as one that has the elementary school and the other the high school.
On an April morning last year, more than 200 juniors took their seats at Marshall High School for the Prairie State Achievement Examination, a measure of whether their school had prepared them to meet basic state learning standards.
When the results came in for Marshall, only three students had met the standards for the math part of the test. Eighteen had passed the reading part. No students had exceeded state standards in reading or math.
The test results were but one indication of a high school in trouble. For years, many Marshall students have been ill prepared to enter college or the job market, and the school's long history is also marked by frustration and failures that often have little to do with math or reading.
The dismal statistics have made Marshall a target for turnaround in the next school year, along with Phillips High School and three elementary schools. Turnaround is an intervention promoted by the Obama administration that involves firing a school's current staff, committing resources in the form of building upgrades and new curriculums, and training new teachers.
The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.
HOW SHOULD WE characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn't be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.
The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.
1) Last year's federal stimulus bill included $100 billion for education to mitigate the effects of the recession. This money was intended to last for two years but some states used up all the money this year. The New York Times reports that even though Ed Sec Arne Duncan "repeatedly warned states and districts to avoid spending the money in ways that could lead to dislocations when the gush of federal money came to an end," some states disregarded that advice. New Jersey is part of that club. The Times piece quotes our very own Dr. Bruce Baker of Rutgers who predicts that "States are going to face a huge problem because they'll have to find some way to replace these billions, either with cuts to their K-12 systems or by finding alternative revenues." Bottom line: we spent more this year because we imprudently allocated federal funds and spent it all in one shot.
2) Teachers' annual salary increases continued at an unabated 4.5% or so. Some districts reported slightly lower settlements - about a 4.3% range - but not enough to make a difference. Health benefits packages also saw big hikes and 86% of school employees in Jersey make no contributions.
The Madison School District is facing a $30 million budget hole for 2010-11, a dilemma that could force school board members this spring to order massive cuts in programs, dramatically raise property taxes, or impose a combination of both.
District officials will unveil a list of possible cuts -- which could include layoffs -- next month, with public hearings to follow.
"This is a big number," School Board President Arlene Silveira said. "So we have to look at how we do business, we have to look at efficiencies, we have to look at our overall budget, and we are going to have to make hard decisions. We are in a horrible situation right now, and we do have to look at all options."
Even with the maximum hike in school property taxes -- $28.6 million, or a jump of $312.50 for the owner of a $250,000 Madison home -- the district would have to close a $1.2 million budget gap, thanks in part to a 15 percent drop in state aid it had to swallow in 2009-10 and expects again for 2010-11.
The district, with a current budget of about $360 million, expects to receive $43.7 million from the state for 2010-11, which would be the lowest sum in 13 years, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, and down from a high of $60.7 million in 2008-09. The district is receiving $51.5 million from the state for the current school year.
I'm not sure where the $360 million number came from. Board member Ed Hughes mentioned a $432,764,707 2010-2011 budget number. The 2009-2010 budget, according to a an October, 2009 District document was $418,415,780. The last "Citizen's budget" number was $339,685,844 in 2007-2008 and $333,101,865 in 2006-2007.
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker - and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member - believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
Educators across the United States continue to enable a wider and more ethnically diverse proportion of students to achieve success in AP®. Significant inequities remain, however, which can result in traditionally underserved students not receiving the type of AP opportunities that can best prepare them for college success. The 6th Annual AP Report to the Nation uses a combination of state, national and AP Program data to provide each U.S. state with the context it can use to celebrate its successes, understand its unique challenges, and set meaningful and data-driven goals to prepare more students for success in college.
Houston-area school districts spend tens of millions of dollars a year on teachers with advanced degrees that studies show don't produce better student achievement.
But with money tight, a handful of districts are considering ditching the traditional salary bump for teachers with master's degrees in favor of pay based more on student learning. The Houston Independent School District and the top-rated YES Prep charter school chain are among those looking to experiment.
"I would like us to look with our teachers and see whether or not those dollars could be spent in a more productive way," HISD Superintendent Terry Grier said.
HISD estimates that the extra payout for teachers with a master's or a doctorate is costing taxpayers about $7.8 million this school year. Grier suggested that the money might be better spent to pay teachers more for taking on leadership roles or to bolster the district's bonus plan tied to student test scores.
Texas lawmakers stopped mandating higher salaries for teachers with advanced degrees in 1984, but many districts continue the practice. The number of teachers with master's degrees statewide has grown over the last four years, though the percentage has dropped slightly to 20.9.
Keeping traditional school libraries up to date is costly, with the constant need to acquire new books and to find space to store them. Yet for all that trouble, students roam the stacks less and less because they find it so much more efficient to work online. One school, Cushing Academy, made news last fall when it announced that it would give away most of its 20,000 books and transform its library into a digital center.
Do schools need to maintain traditional libraries? What are the educational consequences of having students read less on the printed page and more on the Web?
The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act has imposed specific accountability and reporting requirements on states. The NCLB reports present school-, district-, and state-level information in those areas mandated by NCLB, which are as follows: status regarding Adequate Yearly Progress; information on highly qualified teachers; attendance and dropout data; and assessment data that has incorporated all of the conditions mandated under NCLB for meeting federally approved proficiency levels.
The results displayed on NCLB Reports are based on the state assessment data with the NCLB conditions applied. Additionally, the NCLB data incorporates the data appeals submitted by districts/schools that have been granted by the NJDOE. Therefore, the data in the NCLB Reports may be different from the data displayed on the NJ School Report Cards.
Before being ordered by Gov. Rick Perry not to compete for a chunk of the $4.3 billion "Race to the Top" federal grants for public schools, staffers at the Texas Education Agency had put in more than 800 hours preparing an application.
Inquiring minds, including my colleague Ericka Mellon, wanted to look at what our employees had proposed and filed requests for copies of the draft under the Texas Public Information Act.
But TEA Commissioner Robert Scott, a Perry loyalist, ordered agency attorneys to appeal to the attorney general, asking that the work be declared a state secret.
The Public Information Act states that all documents produced with the taxpayers' money are public with certain specific exceptions
So what exception is the TEA citing?
The exception that information can be kept from the public if its release "would give advantage to a competitor or bidder."
Why shouldn't local school boards have the option of allowing charter schools in their districts if they feel it can help serve students better?
A group of legislators in the House Education Appropriations Committee not only rejected that option, but didn't allow other members of the House to even vote on it.
They rejected the charter schools possibility outright. With it they also rejected the possibility of millions of dollars in federal assistance for education.
For a state that can use every cent and more to improve education, this wasn't a wise choice.
The $ 4 billion dollars in federal money will be spent, but the likelihood of part of it being spent for our students is now diminished, since part of the criteria for getting the money is charter schools being an option in your state.
Spurred by a succession of reports pointing to the importance of algebra as a gateway to college, educators and policymakers embraced "algebra for all" policies in the 1990s and began working to ensure that students take the subject by 9th grade or earlier.
A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past the algebra hump has proved difficult and has failed, some of the time, to yield the kinds of payoffs educators seek.
Among the newer findings:
• An analysis using longitudinal statewide data on students in Arkansas and Texas found that, for the lowest-scoring 8th graders, even making it one course past Algebra 2 might not be enough to help them become "college and career ready" by the end of high school.
• An evaluation of the Chicago public schools' efforts to boost algebra coursetaking found that, although more students completed the course by 9th grade as a result of the policy, failure rates increased, grades dropped slightly, test scores did not improve, and students were no more likely to attend college when they left the system.
When teachers Bryan Grau and Debora Gil R. Casado pitched an idea in 2002 to start a charter school in Madison that would teach classes in both English and Spanish, they ran into resistance from school administrators and their own union. Grau and his cohorts were asked to come up with a detailed budget for their proposal, but he says they got little help with that complex task. He recalls one meeting in particular with Roger Price, the district's director of financial services.
"We asked for general help. He said he would provide answers to our specific questions. We asked where to begin and again he said he would answer our specific questions. That's the way it went."
Ruth Robarts, who was on the Madison School Board at the time, confirms that there was strong resistance from officials under the former administration to the creation of Nuestro Mundo, which finally got the green light and is now a successful program that is being replicated in schools around the district.
"First they would explain how the existing programs offered through the district were already doing a better job than this proposal, and then they would show how the proposal could never work," says Robarts. "There seemed to be a defensiveness towards these innovative ideas, as if they meant the district programs were somehow lacking."
The Madison School District "has historically been one of the most hostile environments in the state for charter schools, especially under Superintendent Rainwater," adds John Gee, executive director of the Wisconsin Association of Charter Schools.
Virtual charter schools are publicly funded nonsectarian schools that are exempt from many regulations that apply to traditional public schools and that offer the majority of their classes online. They began operating in Wisconsin during the 2002-03 school year. Pupils typically attend from their homes and communicate with teachers using e-mail, by telephone, or in online discussions. During the 2007-08 school year, 15 virtual charter schools enrolled 2,951 pupils. Most were high schools.
A Wisconsin Court of Appeals ruling in December 2007 prevented the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) from providing state aid payments to a virtual charter school through the open enrollment program, which allows pupils to attend public schools outside of their school districts of residence. 2007 Wisconsin Act 222, which was enacted to address concerns raised in the lawsuit, also required us to address a number of topics related to virtual charter schools. Therefore, we evaluated:
enrollment trends, including the potential effects of a limit on open enrollment in virtual charter schools that was enacted in 2007 Wisconsin Act 222;
virtual charter school operations, including attendance requirements, opportunities for social development and interaction, and the provision of special education and related services;
funding and expenditures, including the fiscal effects of open enrollment on "sending" and "receiving" districts;
teaching in virtual charter schools, including teacher licensing and pupil-teacher interaction; and
academic achievement, including test scores and other measures, as well as pupils', parents', and teachers' satisfaction with virtual charter schools.
IT WAS never reasonable to expect that Barack Obama's budget proposal, delivered to Congress on February 1st, would do much to bring down America's vast deficit in the near term. True, the economy has returned to growth. But a big part of that consists of restocking after a savage downturn that has left inventories depleted. Consumers are still struggling with the collapse in the values of their homes and other assets. And unemployment stands at a stubborn 10%: the administration forecasts see only a fractional fall in joblessness this year.
Unlike other rich countries, America lacks the "automatic stabilisers" that kick in during times of recession to help boost demand. Unemployment benefit is extremely limited. Most states are legally barred from running deficits, so when their revenues fall in times of recession they make painful cuts, firing workers and ending programmes--thus exacerbating the downturn rather than offsetting it. Only the federal government can fill the demand gap, and if it is too parsimonious and the recession returns, the deficit would get much worse.
Ask about the signature achievements of George W. Bush's eight years as president, and the No Child Left Behind Act is certain to be high on the list. The 2002 law made accountability a watchword in public school education. It aimed to evaluate the nation's elementary and secondary schools based on student test scores and to hold schools, teachers and administrators to account for their success or failure in moving students to achieve proficiency targets for the classroom.
The law, which has been the subject of much debate and criticism from the start, is up for reauthorization this year. President Obama has made clear his intent to reshape the legislation and the federal role in public education. Not clear yet is what precisely he intends to do.
No Child Left Behind has been criticized fiercely for its heavy emphasis on yearly testing and the rating of schools as successes or failures on the basis of test scores. For teachers and school officials, one of the most contentious of the law's requirements is that schools be able to show, from the test scores, that every student group is making adequate yearly progress, AYP. Repeated failure to make AYP results in penalties that include shutting down schools.
The law also set a deadline: that students be proficient in math and English by 2014, a goal Obama's secretary of education, Arne Duncan, recently described as utopian.
State Superintendent Tony Evers
Department of Public Instruction
125 S. Webster Street
PO Box 7841
Madison, WI 53707-7841
Dear Superintendent Evers:
I am contacting you regarding your Notice of Decision dated February 4, 2010 issued to the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) which would potentially eliminate the $175 million in federal funds received for services to low-income children through the Title I program. In your press statement, you indicated that you had a legal responsibility to the children of Milwaukee and that you were using the only tool allowed under state law to ensure these federal funds are used effectively to improve MPS. Not only I am deeply perplexed by the timing of this notice, but I'm equally concemed over the use of your authority to withhold federal dollars to "speed up change" in MPS. I find your efforts to be disingenuous.
President Obama's Race to the Top (RttT) state competition has brought charter schools to the forefront of public education reform. Additionally, charter schools are prominent in Obama's 2011 proposed budget - increasing funding for charter schools and an extra $1.8 billion toward Supporting Student Success (which focuses on Promise Neighborhoods, of which charter schools are the central focus).
RttT relies heavily on charter schools as a tool for reform, awarding more points to states which enable charter school creation than to those which do not:
Choices without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards
Erica Frankenberg, Genevieve Siegel‐Hawley, and Jia Wang [1.4MB PDF] :
Seven years after the Civil Rights Project first documented extensive patterns of charter school segregation, the charter sector continues to stratify students by race, class and possibly language. This study is released at a time of mounting federal pressure to expand charter schools, despite on-going and accumulating evidence of charter school segregation.
Our analysis of the 40 states, the District of Columbia, and several dozen metropolitan areas with large enrollments of charter school students reveals that charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation. While examples of truly diverse charter schools exist, our data show that these schools are not reflective of broader charter trends.
Four major themes emerge from this analysis of federal data. First, while charter schools are increasing in number and size, charter school enrollment presently accounts for only 2.5% of all public school students. Despite federal pressure to increase charter schools--based on the notion that charter schools are superior to traditional public schools, in spite of no conclusive evidence in support of that claim--charter school enrollment remains concentrated in just five states.
Second, we show that charter schools, in many ways, have more extensive segregation than other public schools. Charter schools attract a higher percentage of black students than traditional public schools, in part because they tend to be located in urban areas. As a result, charter school enrollment patterns display high levels of minority segregation, trends that are particularly severe for black students.
A decade ago, most Seattle-area high schools offered just a handful of rigorous classes that provided a way to earn college credit while supercharging a transcript. And only students with top grades were allowed to sign up.
But in 10 years, the intensive, fast-paced Advanced Placement (AP) classes have skyrocketed in this state.
In 2008, fully one-quarter of Washington public-school seniors took at least one AP test during their high-school years, compared with 10 percent in 1997. In some schools, almost every student takes an AP class in junior or senior year.
And other schools around the state are moving fast to add AP classes and expand participation, in part because college admissions officials say the demanding classes do a good job of preparing students for higher education.
Many schools are encouraging all students -- not just the high achievers, but also average students and even those who struggle -- to take AP classes or enroll in other rigorous programs such as the International Baccalaureate (IB).
Yong Zhao is back in receptive Seattle this week preaching his gospel of edu-innovation. The anti-standards, pro-creativity Zhao is a Chinese-born prof at Michigan State. Here's his thesis in a nutshell:
In my new book Catching Up or Leading the Way, I mostly focus on issues facing education in the United States noting that the current education reform efforts, with their emphasis on standards, testing, and outcome-based (read test score-based) accountability, are unlikely to make Americans "globally competitive."
Zhao and I like the same schools and probably share a similar vision for what a good education looks like and the benefits it provides students. We both agree that bad standards and tests badly applied is bad for kids.
But his anti-standards mantra strikes me as a bit irresponsible in the sense that he doesn't grapple with accountability. We have NCLB because states were not fulfilling the good school promise--they ignored generations of chronic failure. The Department of Education is now grappling with a new accountability framework, one that is tight on goals and loose on means.
The few dozen nonresident eighth-graders who won't be going to Beverly High as planned say they're left in limbo, not sure where to enroll or how they'll adjust to new academic and social standards.
Taylor Short said the last few weeks have been like walking through a fog, unable to see what's ahead. The Beverly Vista Elementary eighth-grader has no idea where she'll enroll next year. She wonders whether she'll stay in touch with her best friends and feels let down by adults.
David Yona, a top athlete at El Rodeo Elementary, said he had been looking forward to the summer, when sports teams condition and train. Sadness sets in when he thinks about the fun he will probably miss before he starts his freshman year in the fall.
Although Taylor and David live outside the Beverly Hills Unified School District, they have attended its schools for years on special permits. The district's Board of Education voted last month not to renew permits for the eighth-graders and other elementary students. They allowed high school students to continue through graduation.
The district is changing the way it funds schools, declining state money based on student attendance and instead using property-tax revenue. Board members argued that Beverly Hills taxpayers should not subsidize education for nonresidents.
I realized, talking in office hours with a couple of my law students, that they did not really understand what is meant by the phrase "borrowing from our children" -- as we often hear it raised or referenced these days in budget, deficit, and other policy debates. These are bright students who have often taken some economics, but haven't necessarily learned to think through common economic tropes in current arguments. So it hadn't really occurred to them to ask, what does it mean to "borrow from our children"? The children who mostly don't yet exist, and in any case don't have any money from which to borrow.
As soon as it's put that way, it is obvious that what we actually mean is, we will borrow today from people who do have money -- and who are willing to forego consumption today, presumably in China and the rest of Asia -- and our children will repay the principal and interest. We have internalized the consumption (er, investment? -ed.) currently and externalized the repayment. It might be more accurate to say that we have exercised an option with regards to the future -- we are the holders and they the involuntary writers of an option. But the fundamental public policy point is that in order to engage in this borrowing exercise today, even if we are going to "put" the repayment to our children, someone today has to be willing to give up consumption now and lend us those resources today.
Seated with a classmate at a table near the Whitnall High School library, freshman Josh Kelly stumbles into trouble with some of his make-up work for history class.
"There's this artist in the Middle Ages, and I don't know how to spell his name," Josh says as teacher Andrew Baumann comes over quickly to help.
"Oh, Giotto . . . frescoes," Baumann replies, bending over the teenager's textbook. "He basically invented all these new techniques that people after him started using in the Renaissance."
While Baumann is a social studies teacher, he's not technically Josh's social studies teacher. Instead, he's one of two full-time faculty members who staff the school's academic support center, an all-day service where students can come for tutoring, to complete projects or to make up assignments and tests.
It's one of several solutions that high schools have come up with to provide students with more academic help during the school day, as opposed to trying to compete with work, sports and other activities that commonly lure teenagers outside of the school hours.
The year after Whitnall's center started in 2006, Germantown High School initiated one of its own.
Today, it serves between 90 and 120 students a day - enough that Germantown's Academic Support Center teacher, Cindy Collins, had to come up with a new 15-minute pass system to ensure she wasn't turning students away. She also depends on volunteers from the school's junior and senior classes to provide tutoring in easier subjects that freshmen might grapple with during the center's busy times.
Ron Huberman, the chief executive of Chicago's public schools, is looking to hire a "Culture of Calm" coordinator to improve conditions in schools deemed most at risk for student violence.
The coordinator would work closely with principals on resolving conflicts, providing better emotional support for students, and improving discipline and attendance. The job could pay up to $90,000.
This unprecedented finding shows school boards and district administration that they need to consider evidence when making decisions. The voice of the community has been upheld by law, but the Seattle School district indicated they plan to appeal, demonstrating the typical arrogant, wasteful practices which necessitated the lawsuit in the first place.
Concerned individuals in Seattle and across the country need to speak up now, and let Seattle administration know that it's time to move forward and refocus on the students, rather than defend a past mistake.
The ruling states:
"The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering Series."
I attended a presentation on Friday by Dr. Rob Stein, principal (and alum) of Manual High School in Denver. Manual HS has been designated an "Innovation School" with approval from its staff and the local & state school boards, which means they, by Colorado state law, can deviate from district and state regulations (but not federal). They are not a charter school - all of their staff are district employees.
Denver's central bureaucracy and expenditures sounded similar to Seattle's. He showed a picture of Denver's policy manuals: thousands of pages occupying an entire shelf. Some were downright comical but illustrative of the dysfunction in public schools. For example, their 98 page union agreement includes "Article 15-1-1: Each school will have a desk and a chair for each teacher, except in unusual circumstances." He was quick to point out that the union is not to blame, but it's symptomatic of a breakdown in trust in a system no longer optimized for student education. He showed the Denver schools org chart with dozens of arrows pointing to all of the folks that a typical principal needs to answer to. He estimated 80+ hours a week just to respond to the emails. More importantly, he calculated $4,157 per student to pay for central staff despite a fuzzy connection to specific student learning in his school.
Precious Holt, a 12th grader with dangly earrings and a SpongeBob pillow, climbs on the yellow school bus and promptly falls asleep for the hour-plus ride to Sandhills Community College.
When the bus arrives, she checks in with a guidance counselor and heads off to a day of college classes, blending with older classmates until 4 p.m., when she and the other seniors from SandHoke Early College High School gather for the ride home.
There is a payoff for the long bus rides: The 48 SandHoke seniors are in a fast-track program that allows them to earn their high-school diploma and up to two years of college credit in five years -- completely free.
Until recently, most programs like this were aimed at affluent, overachieving students -- a way to keep them challenged and give them a head start on college work. But the goal is quite different at SandHoke, which enrolls only students whose parents do not have college degrees.
Here, and at North Carolina's other 70 early-college schools, the goal is to keep at-risk students in school by eliminating the divide between high school and college.
"We don't want the kids who will do well if you drop them in Timbuktu," said Lakisha Rice, the principal. "We want the ones who need our kind of small setting."
Gov. Chris Christie and lawmakers of both parties will unveil a series of sweeping pension and benefit reforms Monday that could affect every public employee in New Jersey while saving the state billions of dollars, according to four officials with direct knowledge of the plan.
The proposals would require workers and retirees at all levels of government and local school districts to contribute to their own health care costs, ban part-time workers at the state and local levels from participating in the underfunded state pension system, cap sick leave payouts for all public employees and constitutionally require the state to fully fund its pension obligations each year.
Details of the four-bill package to be introduced Monday were provided to The Star-Ledger on the condition of anonymity because the four officials were not authorized to speak in advance.
The proposals go further than several past efforts at reining in taxpayer-funded pension and benefit costs, and if enacted would represent a major early victory for the new Republican governor and Democrats who control the state Legislature. But supporters anticipate an angry response from public employee and teachers unions that wield considerable power throughout the state -- though lawmakers argue rank-and-file workers would have safer pensions than before.
Christie's office declined to comment, as did top Democrats and Republicans involved in crafting the bills.
All sides had made their feelings clear last month, when Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) announced the upper house's intentions to fix a system that would otherwise "go bankrupt." Lawmakers of both parties pledged their support, with Christie saying "bipartisan action is critical to reforming a broken pension and benefits system."
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan call their $4 billion program of education reform grants the Race to the Top. A more accurate title would be the Race to Washington, because their program culminates a stunning decade in which school policy decisions have been wrested from local and state control to become matters of federal oversight. With the possible exception of Texas - where Gov. Rick Perry is resisting federal education grants with all their strings - no state has been left behind in the race to federalize education.
It's easy to miss this important power shift because few of us notice, much less worry about, constitutional processes during a crisis. But, as presidential Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste" because, he continued, it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before. And that's precisely what is happening in education as we complete a transfer of money and power to Washington to oversee our schools, in violation of the 10th Amendment, a couple of hundred years of history and common sense.
There is a disturbing pattern of Washington using crises to consolidate power. First we declare war on a problem, which shifts things into crisis mode. Remember the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on illiteracy, the war on terror? Now we have a war on underperforming schools, so naturally Washington needs to step in and nationalize standards and tests.
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The leader of the country's largest university thinks it's time to re-examine how professors are awarded tenure, a type of job-for-life protection virtually unknown outside academia.
Ohio State University President Gordon Gee says the traditional formula that rewards publishing in scholarly journals over excellence in teaching and other contributions is outdated and too often favors the quantity of a professor's output over quality.
"Someone should gain recognition at the university for writing the great American novel or for discovering the cure for cancer," he told The Associated Press. "In a very complex world, you can no longer expect everyone to be great at everything."
Plenty of people have raised the issue over the years, but Gee is one of the few American college presidents with the reputation and political prowess -- not to mention the golden touch at fundraising -- who might be able to begin the transformation.
Still, some professors are already skeptical.
Last year, Seattle Public Schools adopted the Discovering math series despite valiant opposition from parents and math professionals, despite poor assessments of the Discovering series' rigor and adherence to the new state math standards, and despite the fact that OSPI did NOT ultimately recommend the Discovering math series.
In response, three people filed a lawsuit, saying that Seattle didn't have sufficient supporting evidence for its adoption, and also that the Discovering series was associated with an INCREASE in achievement gaps.
Recently, a judge agreed with the plaintiffs and - while stopping short of telling Seattle to cease and desist in their adoption - told Seattle to revisit its adoption. The district can continue to use the Discovering series, and Seattle administrators have stated their clear intention to do so.
Nevertheless, the court decision is momentous. It sets a precedent for districts across the country. When board members can't justify their adoption decisions, the people now have legal recourse.
You can bet that the state Department of Public Instruction won't carry out its threat to withhold a bazillion dollars from Milwaukee Public Schools because MPS is not showing as much urgency as desired about making changes. (What in the world would make DPI think that?)
That doesn't mean the threat is not an important matter and that it isn't part of developments that could have a real impact. DPI leaders might be able to turn this into a way to force MPS to take more energetic steps, especially around special education and struggling students of all kinds.
The fact that DPI has the power to make a threat like this illustrates forcefully the changing picture of power when it comes to MPS. In fact, assuming a contract is signed in the next few days with Gregory Thornton, the School Board's choice to be the new MPS superintendent, he will be only one of a roster of chief executives over aspects of Milwaukee schools, as I see it.
Here's a guide to some of the folks at the center of the action these days:
The outlook for new teachers is dim this year, prompting Chandler school officials to limit their recruiting efforts to science, math and special-education teachers for the first time.
Although other teachers are not being turned away, the Chandler Unified School Districts is focusing on hard-to-fill science, math and special-education teaching jobs for its Feb. 18 recruiting fair.
"This is our first year . . . . . we're not having a general recruitment fair because of there are fewer needs, fewer positions openings than in the past," said Laura Nook, the district's human-resources director.
The district doesn't yet know how many new teachers it will need next school year. Demand depends on student enrollment, the number of returning teachers and whether the Arizona Legislature again cuts K-12 funding to balance the state budget.
A King County Superior Court judge today ruled the state does not provide ample funding for basic education then directed the Legislature to establish the cost of providing all Washington children with a basic education and establish how it will fully fund such education with stable and dependable state sources.
In his oral ruling this morning in McCleary v. State, also known as the "Basic Education case," King County Superior Court Judge John Erlick also indicated the state's 2009 education funding measure (HB 2261) could be a means to satisfy this direction. The court e-mailed the entire 73-page ruling to counsel immediately following the hearing.
"Judge Erlick rightly recognizes in his ruling the Legislature's authority to set education funding policy," said Attorney General Rob McKenna. "The Legislature took positive steps with its 2009 education funding reform efforts, and we understand the decision to suggest those reforms could be the basis for progress in this case.
Last week the Capital Times ran a story about how Tom Hardin, the head coach of forensics and drama at James Madison Memorial High School, plans to retire from coaching at the end of the season. There was even a follow up blog by the Capitol Times reacting to the discussion of the story.
As an assistant coach for Memorial forensics and debate program for several years, I read the paper and the comments in the online version with a more critical eye than others. It's worthwhile to point out that I am extremely biased on this issue. Tom Hardin and Tim Scheffler taught me how to be a speech and debate coach and gave me a job that supported me throughout my post secondary education.
My responses to the news and comments are as follows:
Opponents of a controversial sex ed bill passed by Wisconsin legislators last week warn that if Gov. Jim Doyle signs the bill into law as he has promised, some local school districts will stage a revolt against the measure by ignoring it or dropping their human growth and development curriculum entirely.
"Did the state in its zeal to impose its own way even think about the consequences? Because a lot of districts are just going to just walk," predicts Matt Sande, director of legislation at Pro-Life Wisconsin.
The proposed new law would require any Wisconsin public school district that offers a course in human growth and development -- or sexual education -- to teach students about sexually transmitted diseases and methods of safe sex, including contraception. Under current law districts can choose to provide only instruction focusing on abstinence or chastity.
The proposed new law doesn't require school districts to offer such courses at all, however. School districts can drop their sex ed classes completely rather than comply, which is what Julaine Appling, president of Wisconsin Family Action, says her organization will encourage them to do in upcoming mailings. "This is a Planned Parenthood dream come true," Appling says about the bill. "They have taken options away from local school districts. Now the choice is something Madison says is best or to have no human growth and development classes at all, which, quite honestly, is the better choice."
In an action that's likely to be repeated across the state, the West Bend School District is preparing to take contract negotiations with its teachers to arbitration, potentially among the first districts to do so since the Legislature removed teacher salary controls that held sway in Wisconsin for 16 years.
District negotiators and representatives for the West Bend Education Association have their first mediation session scheduled for next week, the first step they need to take before they can proceed to binding arbitration.
Administrators say they would prefer being able to resolve their issues with the teachers union by settling a contract through the mediation process. But they also say they are willing to go to arbitration if needed.
"We're not afraid of it," said Bill Bracken, labor relations coordinator for Davis & Kuelthau, which is representing the school district.
Other districts apparently aren't afraid either. At least a couple of school districts outside southeastern Wisconsin are getting ready to certify their final offers after already going through the mediation process, indicating binding arbitration is probable, said Scott Mikesh, a staff attorney with the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
On Friday, the Elmbrook School District and its teachers union announced they were filing for mediation help in their contract negotiations, although Assistant Superintendent Christine Hedstrom said the two sides were not filing for help with the state and won't automatically go to arbitration if they reach deadlock.
In my recent post, Race to the Top?: Part I, I described the academic achievement rat race in which students near the top of the educational food chain strive maniacally to win (or at least finish). I argued that the emphasis on testing by former President Bush's No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) and continued with President Obama's Race to the Top initiative (RTTT) has only exacerbated the problem better characterized by the title of the powerful new documentary by Vicki Abeles, Race to Nowhere. This post, in contrast, explores how RTTT impacts those students and schools at the other end of the educational food chain, those who are just trying to survive in the turbulent sea of American public education.
The first mistake that this administration made was to call education reform a race. Races connote winners and losers. Yet, we need to ensure that all our students and schools are winners. I think a more appropriate name for this initiative is "Climb to the Top" because the focus should be on how to get to the top.
The administration's second mistake was to continue Bush's initial mistake of focusing on testing; instead of being a tool for education reform, testing has morphed into the end-all, be-all of said reform. Yes, assessment is essential for determining the effectiveness of programs such as RTTT, aimed at achieving something as ethereal and elusive as education reform or the more tangible goal of closing the education and economic gaps between the haves and have-nots. At the same time, improved test scores should not be the ultimate objective of education reform.
THIS MATTER having come on for hearing, and the Court having considered the pleadings, administrative record, and argument in this matter, the Court hereby enters the following Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Order:
FINDINGS OF FACT
1. On May 6, 2009, in a 4-3 vote, the Seattle School District Board of Directors chose the Discovering Series as the District's high school basic math materials.
a. A recommendation from the District's Selection Committee;
b. A January, 2009 report from the Washington State Office of Public Instruction ranking High School math textbooks, listing a series by the Holt Company as number one, and the Discovering Series as number two;
c. A March 11, 2009, report from the Washington State Board of Education finding that the Discovering Series was "mathematically unsound";
d. An April 8, 2009 School Board Action Report authored by the Superintendent;
e. The May 6, 2009 recommendation of the OSPI recommending only the Holt Series, and not recommending the Discovering Series;
f. WASL scores showing an achievement gap between racial groups;
g. WASL scores from an experiment with a different inquiry-based math text at Cleveland and Garfield High Schools, showing that W ASL scores overall declined using the inquiry-based math texts, and dropped significantly for English Language Learners, including a 0% pass rate at one high school;
h. The National Math Achievement Panel (NMAP) Report;
1. Citizen comments and expert reports criticizing the effectiveness of inquiry-based math and the Discovering Series;
J. Parent reports of difficulty teaching their children using the Discovering Series and inquiry-based math;
k. Other evidence in the Administrative Record;
I. One Board member also considered the ability of her own child to learn math using the Discovering Series.
3. The court finds that the Discovering Series IS an inquiry-based math program.
4. The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there IS insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering Series.
CONCLUSIONS OF LAW
I. The court has jurisdiction under RCW 28A.645.010 to evaluate the Board's decision for whether it is arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to law;
2. The Board's selection of the Discovering Series was arbitrary;
3. The Board's selection of the Discovering Series was capricious;
4. This court has the authority to remand the Board's decision for further review;
5. Any Conclusion of Law which is more appropriately characterized as a
Finding of Fact is adopted as such, and any Finding of Fact more appropriately
characterized as a Conclusion of Law is adopted as such.
ORDER
IT IS HEREBY ORDERED:
The decision of the Board to adopt the Discovering Series is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Judge Julie Spector today announced her finding of "arbitrary and capricious" in the Seattle School Board's May 6 vote to adopt the Discovering Math series of high school texts despite insufficient evidence of the series' effectiveness.
Judge Spector's decision states, "The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering series."
Plaintiffs DaZanne Porter, an African American and mother of a 9th-grade student in Seattle Public Schools, Martha McLaren, retired Seattle math teacher and grandparent of a Seattle Public Schools fifth grader, and Cliff Mass, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, had filed their appeal of the Board's controversial decision on June 5th, 2009. The hearing was held on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
The number of students taking Advanced Placement tests hit a record high last year, but the portion who fail the exams -- particularly in the South -- is rising as well, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Students last year took a record 2.9 million exams through the AP program, which challenges high school students with college-level courses. Passing the exams (a score of 3 or higher on the point scale of 1 to 5) may earn students early college credits, depending on a college's criteria.
The findings about the failure rates raise questions about whether schools are pushing millions of students into AP courses without adequate preparation -- and whether a race for higher standards means schools are not training enough teachers to deliver the high-level material.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is expected to travel to Alabama next month to help Gov. Bob Riley persuade lawmakers to pass legislation allowing charter schools, Riley said Wednesday.
"As a Republican I've always pushed for charter schools . . . but when I say it, it doesn't have the legitimacy and credibility that the secretary of education and president of the United States has," Riley said after meeting with Duncan Wednesday afternoon in Washington.
President Obama's administration is preparing to hand out more than $4 billion to help states improve their public schools, and those without charter schools -- like Alabama --- are at a competitive disadvantage for the money.
In a valiant attempt to defuse the ideological conflicts between the reformist and traditionalist wings of the liberal education wonketariat, Matthew Yglesias argues that this disagreement is not not ideological at all. Rather, it is an artifact of past decisions about educational structure:
Take, for example, the hot issue of teacher compensation. The traditionalist view is that teachers should get paid more for having more years of experience and also for having more degrees. The reform view is that teachers should get paid more for having demonstrated efficacy in raising student test scores. This is an important debate, but I think it's really not an ideological debate at all. I think the only reason it's taken on an ideological air is that unions have a view on the matter and people do have ideological opinions about unions in general. But if we found a place where for decades teachers had been paid based on demonstrated efficacy in raising student test scores, then veteran teachers and union leaders would probably be people who liked that system and didn't want to change to a degree-based system. Because unions are controversial, this would take on a certain left-right ideological atmosphere but it's all very contingent.
This is a very interesting thesis, but ultimately I think it's wrong. There is a reason that unions kill merit pay, and it's not because they just happened to solidify in an era when merit pay was out of fashion.
Twelve central Ohio schools are among the worst 5 percent statewide.
Their academic struggles mean they are eligible to receive federal money to help them transform or start over. A list of these schools was released yesterday by the Ohio Department of Education.
Six Columbus City Schools buildings are on the list of the worst-off, as are four in Cleveland and 16 in Cincinnati. Several charter schools -- six of them in central Ohio -- also made the "top" rung on the list.
"No one is going to like the fact that they're on this list," said Mark Real, who heads the Columbus-based nonprofit KidsOhio, which studies education issues. He's been monitoring stimulus-related spending and improvement programs. "But this is not just a 'label and leave it' approach. These schools are in for some pretty intensive care."
These schools all have a large number of poor students and have been mired in academic difficulties for several years.
Wisconsin's Superintendent of Public Instruction took the first formal step Thursday toward withholding millions of dollars from Milwaukee Public Schools because of the district's failure to show progress on improvement actions ordered by the state.
Superintendent Tony Evers officially notified the district that he would seek to "reduce to zero" all administrative funds and defer all programmatic funds that MPS currently receives to serve low-income children, unless the district could prove that it's made progress in key areas of its corrective action plan.
"I don't believe appropriate progress has been made in benchmark areas," Evers said in an interview. "I can't stand by and wait any longer."
The state issued corrective action orders to MPS last summer because of the district's failure to make adequate yearly progress on state test scores for five consecutive years under the No Child Left Behind law.
There's not much young blood in the Warwick school system and according to a top administrator - that's costly.
There are currently 1,051 teachers in the Warwick School Department. Out of those teachers, 865 - or 82 percent of the department - rank in the top three "steps".
All things considered, those highest paid teachers earned an average of $75,400 last year - according to Rosemary Healey, the school department's Director of Compliance. That number represents compensation but excludes benefits such as health care and pensions.
Those 865 teachers earned a combined pay of $65,220,792.36. The school department's total budget this fiscal year, which runs from July 1 until June 30 of this year, is just under $170 million.
The number includes a teacher's base pay, longevity, and stipends paid to teachers for having attained various educational achievements - including a Master's Degree or Doctorate, or advanced certifications.
We have received several letters over the last few days. I am posting here all of them for which I have received the author's permission for your review. I had to reformat them for this forum, so i apologize if anything got mangled in the process:
I am writing to urge you to keep 4th grade strings and specifically Jill Jensen on board in our schools. I know how difficult and painful the process of making budget cuts is--if anything, we would all like to see more programs available to our kids, let alone cut what we already have. I am fairly new to Monona, having moved here a year and a half ago, and have been extremely impressed by the 4th and 5th grade performances organized by Jill. It is obvious that she puts in many extra hours and goes far above and beyond her duties as a classroom teacher, because it is one thing--and hard enough--to teach a group of kids the mechanics involved in learning to read and perform music. It is another thing entirely to connect with children so closely and so well as to inspire obvious the joy and enthusiasm for performing that I have seen bursting forth in every one of their concerts that I have attended.
The Asbury Park Press slams the Marlboro Board of Education for taking a hard line with the local teachers union during contract negotiations and then, apparently, folding after two years of an escalating impasse. If only it were that simple.
Here's how it works in N.J.: as the end of a typically-three-year contract approaches, a school board, represented by an attorney, and the local NJEA chapter, represented by NJEA reps, exchange proposals and proceed with negotiating everything from minor changes in contract language to salary increases and contributions (or not) to health benefits. If the two sides reach an impasse (usually once they hit salary and benefits, but sometimes over a seemingly insurmountable semantic technicality), they call in a state-appointed mediator who proposes a compromise. If one or both sides reject the compromise, they go to a state-appointed fact-finder who recommends a settlement. (Here's Marlboro's fact-finder's report.) If that doesn't work, they go to someone called a super conciliator, who writes up a lengthy resolution to the impasse. None of these interventions are binding.
A bill that would prohibit school districts from paying the salaries of teachers who leave the classroom to engage in union activities cleared its first legislative hurdle Tuesday.
Several Utah school districts now pay a portion of their local union presidents' salaries even though they no longer teach, and the union pays the rest of their salaries according to contract agreements. Sen. Margaret Dayton's bill, SB77, would prohibit districts from paying those on association leave and require that if a teacher or employee leaves "regular school responsibilities" for association or union duties that the employee, association or union reimburse the district for that time.
Dayton said the bill is about "keeping taxpayer dollars allocated for education in the classroom."
Others, however, opposed the bill, saying the decision should be left up to local districts. Local union presidents have said that many of their duties, such as representing teachers on district committees and resolving conflicts, benefit both the union and the district.
"The functions [they] carry out are things the district would have to have people do or reassign staff to do," said Susan Kuziak, of the Utah Education Association.
Late last week I had an interesting telephone conversation with D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. She called with a comment on a post in which I suggested she be more careful of her public words--like her statement that some of the teachers she fired hit or had sex with kids--in order to make sure she stays in her job and applies her considerable skills and knowledge to fixing our failing school system.
I suggested she apologize for offending teachers with her words so that we could get past this point and back to helping kids.
She said, in essence, that she is not going to do that. She said she wished that the Fast Company magazine item that sparked the controversy had included her statement that many of the teachers she had to fire for budget reasons were good people. But, she said, she was not going to compromise her methods or her beliefs. Some teachers did hit kids and have sex with kids, she said. She thought that was something people should know. It was important to root out such behaviors.
She had taken the chancellor job, which she did not seek, with the understanding she would do things her way. She had seen many big city superintendents do the more conventional thing, watch their words and try not to offend. She thinks that approach has not been successful.
On Feb. 1, President Obama vowed to toss out the nation's current school accountability system and replace it with a more balanced scorecard of school performance that looks at student growth and school progress.
I love the idea. Mr. Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have repeatedly criticized the No Child Left Behind Act for keeping the "goals loose but the steps tight." On their watch, both men aspire to introduce a new law that keeps the "goals tight but the steps loose."
With that more flexible standard in mind, I have a scorecard to propose: the ABC's of School Success. It provides both structure and freedom by identifying five universal measurement categories -- Achievement, Balance, Climate, Democratic Practices and Equity -- and letting individual schools chose which data points to track under each category.
1. ACHIEVEMENT
If there is a bottom line in schools today, it's that educators must do whatever it takes to help close the achievement gap and improve student learning. To do so effectively and fully, schools must expand their measures for determining student achievement. After all, "achievement" isn't only about student test scores; it's also about other factors. The following are all critical to achievement:
I got a call the other day from the head football coach at one of the larger state universities.
He said, after the usual greetings, "I've got some real problems."
"Like what?" I asked.
"The players I am getting now are out of shape, they don't know how to block or tackle, then can't read the playbook and they can't follow their assignments."
"That does sound bad. What is your record this season?"
"The teams we play seem to have similar problems, so all our games are pretty sad affairs, ending in scoreless ties."
"Also," he told me, "During breaks in practice, most of them are text-messaging their friends, and almost half of them just drop out of college after a year or two !"
"Have you talked to any of the high school coaches who send you players?"
"No, I don't know them."
"Have you visited any of the high school games or practices?"
"No, I really don't have time for that sort of thing."
"Well, have you heard there is a big new push for Common National Athletic Standards?"
"No, but do you think that will help solve my problems? Are they really specific this time, for a change?"
"Absolutely," I said. "They want to require high school students, before they graduate, to be able to do five sit-ups, five pushups, and to run 100 yards without stopping. They also recommend that students spend at least an hour a week playing catch with a ball!"
"That is a start, I guess, but I don't think it will help me much with my problem. My U.S. players have just not been prepared at all for college football. I have a couple of immigrant kids, from Asia and Eastern Europe, who are in good shape, have been well coached at the secondary level, and they have a degree of motivation to learn and determination to do their best that puts too many of our local kids to shame."
"Well," I said, "what do you think of the idea of getting to know some of the coaches at the high schools which are sending you players, and letting them know the problems that you are having?"
"I could do that, I guess, but I don't know any of them, and we never meet, and I am really too busy at my level, when it comes down to it, to make that effort."
[If we were talking about college history professors, this would not be fiction. They do complain about the basic knowledge of their students, and their inability to read books and write term papers. But like their fictional coaching counterpart, they never talk to high school history teachers (they don't know any), they never visit their classrooms, and they satisfy themselves with criticizing the students they get from the admissions office. Their interest in National Common Academic Standards does not extend to their suggesting that high school students should read complete nonfiction books and write a serious research paper every year. In short, they, like the fictional head coach, don't really care if students are so poorly prepared for college that half of them drop out, and that most of them do not arrive on campus prepared to do college work. They are really too busy, you see...]
===========
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Madison School District 2010-2011 Budget: Comments in a Vacuum?
TJ Mertz comments on Monday evening's Madison School Board 2010-2011 budget discussion (video - the budget discussion begins about 170 minutes into the meeting). The discussion largely covered potential property tax increases. However and unfortunately, I've not seen a document that includes total revenue projections for 2010-2011.
Property tax revenue is one part of the MMSD's budget picture. State and Federal redistributed tax dollars are another big part. The now dead "citizens budget" was a useful effort to provide more transparency to the public. I hope that the Board pushes for a complete picture before any further substantive budget discussions. Finally, the Administration promised program reviews as part of the "Strategic Planning Process" and the recent referendum ("breathing room"). The documents released to date do not include any substantive program review budget items.
Ed Hughes (about 190 minutes): "it is worth noting that evening if we taxed to the max and I don't think we'll do that, the total expenditures for the school District will be less than we were projecting during the referendum". The documents published, as far as I can tell, on the school board's website do not reflect 2010-2011 total spending.
Links to Madison School District spending since 2007 (the referendum Ed mentioned was in 2008)
It would be great to see a year over year spending comparison from the District, including future projections.
Further, the recent "State of the District" document [566K PDF] includes only the "instructional" portion of the District's budget. There are no references to the $418,415,780 total budget number provided in the October 26, 2009 "Budget Amendment and Tax Levy Adoption document [1.1MB PDF]. Given the organization's mission and the fact that it is a taxpayer supported and governed entity, the document should include a simple "citizen's budget" financial summary. The budget numbers remind me of current Madison School Board member Ed Hughes' very useful 2005 quote:
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker - and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member - believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
In my view, while some things within our local public schools have become a bit more transparent (open enrollment, fine arts, math, TAG), others, unfortunately, like the budget, have become much less. This is not good.
Ed, Lucy and Arlene thankfully mentioned that the Board needs to have the full picture before proceeding.
January 15, 2010 Dear Secretary Duncan:
On behalf of Wisconsin's school children, we are pleased to present to you our application for the US Department of Education's Race to the Top program. We were honored when President Obama traveled to Wisconsin to announce his vision for this vital program and we are ready to accept the President's challenge to make education America's mission.
We are proud of the steps we are taking to align our assessments with high standards, foster effective teachers and leaders, raise student achievement and transform our lowest performing schools. Over the last several months Wisconsin has pushed an educational reform agenda that has brought together over 430 Wisconsin school districts and charter schools together around these central themes.
Race to the Top funding will be instrumental in supporting and accelerating Wisconsin's education agenda. While Wisconsin has great students, parents, teachers and leaders we recognize that more must be done to ensure that our students are prepared to compete in a global economy. The strong application presented to you today does just that.
Wisconsin's application contains aggressive goals supported by a comprehensive plan. These goals are targeted at not only high performing schools and students but also address our lowest performers. For example, over the next four years Wisconsin, with your support, is on track to:
Ensure all of our children are proficient in math and reading.
Drastically reduce the number of high school dropouts.
Increase the high school graduation growth rate for Native American, African American and Hispanic students.
Significantly increase the annual growth in college entrance in 2010 and maintain that level of growth over the next four years.
Drastically cut our achievement gap.
These goals are supported by a comprehensive plan with a high degree of accountability. Our plan is focused on research proven advancements that tackle many of the challenges facing Wisconsin schools. Advancements such as the following:
Raising standards -- joined consortium with 48 other states to develop and adopt internationally benchmarked standards.
More useful assessments -- changes to our testing process to provide more meaningful information to teachers and parents.
Expanded data systems -- including the ability to tie students to teachers so that we can ultimately learn what works and what doesn't in education.
More support for teachers -- both for new teachers through mentoring and for other teachers through coaching.
Increased capacity at the state and regional level to assist with instructional improvement efforts including providing training for coaches and mentors.
An emphasis on providing additional supports, particularly in early childhood and middle school to high school transition, to ensure that Wisconsin narrows its achievement gap and raises overall achievement.
Turning around our lowest performing schools -- enhancing the capacity for Milwaukee Public Schools and the state to support that effort; contracting out to external organizations with research-proven track records where appropriate.
Providing wraparound services, complimenting school efforts in specific neighborhoods in Milwaukee to get low income children the supports necessary to succeed within and outside the school yard.
Investing in STEM -- Building off our currently successful Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology efforts to ensure that more students have access to high-quality STEM courses and training.
The agenda that you have before you is one that builds on our great successes yet recognizes that we can and must do more to ensure our children are prepared for success. We appreciate your consideration of Wisconsin's strong commitment to this mission. We look forward to joining President Obama and you in America's Race to the Top.
Sincerely, Jim Doyle
Governor
Tony Evers
State Superintendent
Stanford's successful effort to exempt itself from Santa Clara County's new rules on underage drinking has put a focus on the university's growing effort to curb alcohol abuse on campus.
The county's new ordinance, which took effect last year, makes it easier for police to cite anyone hosting a party where underage drinking occurs. It can mean a fine of up to $1,000 plus costs anytime the police are called in.
About 95 percent of Stanford's 6,600 undergraduates, many of them younger than 21, live on campus in university-owned housing. As the landlord, the school could have found itself facing plenty of potential liability under the new county rules.
But the financial question didn't play a role in the university's attempt to persuade county officials to free Stanford from the regulations, said Jean McCown, the school's director of community relations.
IT IS HARD to square the words of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten with the actions of many of her union's officials. Even as Ms. Weingarten issues stirring calls for new ways of thinking, labor leaders in places such as New York use their political muscle to block important reforms. Perhaps they don't think that she means business, or maybe they don't care; either way, it is the interests of students that are being harmed.
The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the AFT affiliate that represents teachers in New York City, led the opposition to legislation favored by Gov. David A. Paterson (D) that would have lifted the state's cap on charter schools. Mr. Paterson, backed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, had hoped to better position the state for up to $700 million in federal education dollars. The Obama administration has made clear that states that deny parents choice in where their children go to school by limiting the growth of these increasingly popular independent public schools will be penalized in the national competition for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funds.
y husband decided to send me a couple of links to various STEM articles which then led me to even more interesting links. If you are interested in this subject from a state and national level, here are some links. Happy reading!
Apparently, Ohio is waaay ahead on this stuff so many of this articles are about different projects in that state.
From Government Technology magazine, an article about a new STEM school in Ohio.
From the University of Cincinnati (a key sponsor of a lot of these schools), an article about FUSION (Furthering Urban STEM Innovation, Outreach and New Research).
So what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.
Imagine, for instance, a third-grade classroom that was free of the laundry list of goals currently harnessing our teachers and students, and that was devoted instead to just a few narrowly defined and deeply focused goals.
In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.
Children would also spend an hour a day writing things that have actual meaning to them -- stories, newspaper articles, captions for cartoons, letters to one another. People write best when they use writing to think and to communicate, rather than to get a good grade.
The woman being tapped to run the Minneapolis School District will take part in four meetings this week to meet the community.
Bernadeia Johnson has been an administrator in Minneapolis for a few years - most recently as deputy superintendent. These meetings will be the first time she faces the public as the only candidate for the top job after current superintendent Bill Green retires in June.
The school board announced earlier this month that Johnson was its only candidate for the job. She had long been considered a leading candidate, but the move still surprised some people for its suddenness. It means Minneapolis won't conduct a national search or even consider a list of a few semi-finalists, as St. Paul did last year.
In the brave new world of data-driven education reform, most states have learned how to talk the talk. Start with "global competitiveness," add in some "longitudinal data" and "transparency," garnish with "accountability" and serve.
But far fewer states are committed to more than the language of reform -- a reality made clear by the applications submitted last week to President Obama's Race to the Top grant program.
Race to the Top is the crown jewel of the Obama administration's education reform agenda and the largest-ever discretionary federal grant program for public schools. (In his State of the Union address this week, the president proposed adding an additional $1.4 billion to the pot of $4.35 billion.) The hope is that fiscally strapped states will make changes to ineffective policies and present comprehensive reform plans to be competitive for grants of up to $700 million. Indeed, Education Secretary Arne Duncan says that around a dozen states have changed laws or policies in response to the program thus far.
Voters Tuesday will choose reform plans for 30 Los Angeles-area schools in an election like no other.
For one thing, the voting age could dip to 14. Undocumented residents are welcome. Some people will get multiple votes. Ballot stuffing is expected.
And did we mention that each contestant will actually be competing in seven simultaneous elections? And that the results could be meaningless?
Whoever said democracy is messy could have been thinking of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The subject of the election is singular: Groups inside and outside the school system are competing to run 12 persistently low-performing schools and 18 new campuses. The purpose of the balloting is for different voting blocs to select their favored bidder. Each bloc will be tallied separately, including parents, high school students and school employees.
Jim: What's the best, most effective education model these days? Obviously, there are traditional schools. There are virtual schools. There are chartered schools. There are magnets. And then there's the complete open-enrollment thing. Milwaukee has it, where the kids can go wherever they want, public or private, and the taxes follow.
Ellie: [32:52] I think there's no one best model from the standpoint of those models that you just named. [32:59] What is important within any one of those models is that a key player in making that education available to your child believes that no matter how good the curriculum, no matter how good the model, the children they are about to serve are different, that children are not alike.
[33:30] And that they will have to make differences in the curriculum and in the way the learning takes place for different children.
[33:45] And I have experienced that myself. I've served on the boards of several private schools here in the city, and I have given that message: "This may be an excellent curriculum, and I believe it's an excellent curriculum. But that's not enough."
[34:05] You cannot just sit this curriculum down in front of every child in the classroom and say, "We're going to turn the pages at the same time, and we're going to write the answers in the same way." It does not work that way. You must believe in individually paced education.
[34:24] And that's why I say the WCATY model cannot change. If it's going to accomplish what I set out for WCATY to do, it must be accelerated from the nature of most of the curriculum that exists out there for kids today.
Thanks to Rick Kiley for arranging this conversation.
The university had hoped that other institutions would follow its lead in making it harder for students to earn an A. “But the idea never took hold beyond Princeton's walls,” Ms. Foderaro writes, adding: “with the job market not what it once was, even for Ivy Leaguers, Princetonians are complaining that the campaign against bulked-up G.P.A.'s may be coming at their expense.”
How much tougher is it to earn an A at Princeton? The percentage of grades in the A range fell below40 percent last year, compared to nearly 50 percent in 2004, when the policy was adopted.
Virtual schooling can be an educational choice with particular benefits for some students with disabilities. The recent study "Serving Students with Disabilities in State-level Virtual K-12 Public School Programs" by Eve Müller, Ph.D., published in September 2009 by the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE)'s Project Forum, and funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs, surveyed state education agencies nationwide regarding their virtual K-12 public school programs:
Eleven states described one or more benefits associated with serving students with disabilities in virtual K-12 public school programs. These include:
Q: The governor's advisory panels made a number of recommendations, including a possible freeze on the salaries of teachers and other public employees. Given that contracts are involved, could this be done?
BYRNE: We have to get over this attitude of "not on my back." We have to get it across that everybody has to make sacrifices in order to make this work. It's not going to if all hell breaks loose every time you try to eliminate one fireman. It's not going to be easy.
KEAN: I don't think people yet have an understanding of how bad things are.
Comprehending a $10 billion-$12 billion deficit in a $30 billion budget is difficult, if not impossible. Everybody is going to be making sacrifices, not just scattered employees.
BYRNE: It's nice being in Washington for a day, where the talk is in trillions.
Q: Politically speaking, is taking on the teachers and state employees a fight worth considering simply because of the message it sends?
KEAN: We haven't any choice. We have wonderful public employees, but they get paid more than anybody in the country in similar positions. We simply can't afford to do that anymore.
BYRNE: People think this is a minor problem, and it isn't.
KEAN: In previous years, governors and legislators have been able to paper over the problem. They've done so irresponsibly, by increasing debt to much more than it ought to be. Now this is coming home to roost, and we've all got to deal with it.
BYRNE: And that will include cutting things that are dear to our hearts, and that's tough.
The state's budget mess is a ticking time bomb and now Illinois residents can watch as it explodes.
A Web site launched by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago displays a ticker that counts up Illinois' debt. On Friday evening, the number was around $128,586,300,000 and swiftly on the rise.
The Web site IllinoisIsBroke.com keeps track of the state's growing deficit.
The civic committee isn't in the business of political endorsements, so don't ask them who those candidates are. However, President Eden Martin said he hopes voters take a better look at the individuals running for office.
"If there's a kind of public irritation that becomes strong enough, I think there would be enough support for fundamental reforms," Martin said.
Martin blamed changes to the pension system in 1995 that put Illinois on a path toward bankruptcy. To fix the problem, the committee proposes the state reform pensions so they are comparable to the private sector, meaning fewer benefits, a later retirement age and a less generous cost-of-living adjustment.
But Martin knows that's no easy task and understands why some politicians prefer the status quo.
The Obama administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of President Bush's signature education law, No Child Left Behind, and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law's 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.
Educators who have been briefed by administration officials said the proposals for changes in the main law governing the federal role in public schools would eliminate or rework many of the provisions that teachers' unions, associations of principals, school boards and other groups have found most objectionable.
Yet the administration is not planning to abandon the law's commitments to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and to encouraging teacher quality.
Significantly, said those who have been briefed, the White House wants to change federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students. The well-worn formulas for distributing tens of billions of dollars in federal aid have, for decades, been a mainstay of the annual budgeting process in the nation's 14,000 school districts.
The housing boom has left the sprawling school district based in this former rail town on the Little Miami River with gleaming new buildings and a dilemma over how to keep them funded.
Three times in the past 15 months, voters have rejected levies that would have kept the Little Miami School District in the black. Each time, the district fell further behind and had to ask for more. On Tuesday, voters will face the biggest request yet--a new real-estate tax that amounts to $519 per $100,000 of assessed value, nearly twice the rate rejected in November.
Backers say the levy, combined with already deep cuts, is the only way to prevent a fiscal emergency that would force a state takeover of the schools. "It's the downturn of an entire community. People are going to start looking at moving and your property value is going to go through the floor," said Julie Salmons Perelman, a 44-year-old part-time veterinary technician with three children in the schools, who sat stuffing bags filled with campaign literature one morning last week.
Bill Nicholson, 54, a longtime opponent of the levies, calls the rising requests in the face of repeated rejections "insanity." In the past, he has argued on behalf of people with fixed incomes, but he recently lost his own job as a consultant in the perfume industry. "How can I cut a budget of zero" to pay more taxes, he asked.
A number of years ago, curious about the ownership of student work produced in a class, I asked a lawyer friend who specializes in art and design copyright law if schools had the right to reproduce student work in their recruitment publicity without the students' permission. He informed me that the student, despite advice from faculty who may have shaped the work, owns the work and that written permission must be secured before it could be reproduced. He also said such works could be considered student records and recruitment results in some benefit to the institution that exceeds any reading of the "fair use" practices of educational institutions (i.e. those that might be applied to the use of lecture slides for a class).
This reading of the law is at odds with the prevailing opinion of many schools that the student would not have produced work of a particular quality under his or her own resources, and therefore, that faculty have some "ownership rights" in the output of any class. Since that time I have been very careful to ask students first about any public use of their work, even in lectures I give at other schools, and I always credit the work with their names and give students the details on the presentation venues for their resumes. My lawyer friend told me that statements in college catalogs claiming that the institution retains ownership of work produced in a class wouldn't hold up in court; unless the maker is an employee of the institution/company or has signed away rights through some explicit agreement, ownership is retained by the maker. Other attorneys may have different interpretations, and I don't profess to be a legal expert, but the ownership of work produced by students is certainly something to think about.
My column last week about how to reveal the secrets of which teacher is getting the best Advanced Placement results received many more comments than I expected. This was, I thought, a topic only for insiders, AP obsessives like me. I forgot, once again, that college-level exams have become a rite of passage for at least a third of American high schoolers, with that proportion increasing every year.
The column provided links to the several local school districts that have posted the subject-by-subject AP results for each school. I was shocked that any were doing it, since five years ago when I asked about this, few school officials had given it much thought. Since the AP tests are written and graded by outside experts, a teacher who does not challenge his students in class is likely to have lots of low scores on that school report, which until now hardly anyone had a chance to see.
Many thought I glossed over the effects of opening up AP courses to anyone who wants to get a useful taste of college trauma, sort of like camping in the back yard before your dad takes you to the Sierras. Enough mediocre students have enrolled in AP, and a similar program International Baccalaureate, to lower average scores even in the classes of the best teachers.
Nokia and education company Pearson have formed a joint venture in China dubbed Beijing Mobiledu Technologies to grow MobilEdu, the wireless education service that the Finnish mobile giant launched in China back in 2007.
Mobiledu is a mobile service that essentially provides English-language learning materials and other educational content, from a variety of content providers, directly to mobile phones.
Customers can access the content through an application preloaded on new Nokia handsets, or by visiting the service's mobile website and most other WAP portals in China.
According to Nokia, Mobiledu has attracted 20 million subscribers in China so far, with 1.5 million people actively using the service each month. According to the press release and by mouth of John Fallon, Chief Executive of Pearson's International Education business, China is the world's largest mobile phone market and the country with the largest number of people learning English.
There are many ways to learn, not all of them require traditional methods or expensive "professional development".
This document provides grade level standards for mathematics in grades K-8, and high school standards organized under the headings of the College and Career Readiness Standards in Mathematics. Students reaching the readiness level described in that document (adjusted in response to feedback) will be prepared for non-remedial college mathematics courses and for training programs for career-level jobs. Recognizing that most students and parents have higher aspirations, and that ready for college is not the same as ready for mathematics-intensive majors and careers, we have included in this document standards going beyond the readiness level. Most students will cover these additional standards. Students who want the option of entering STEM fields will reach the readiness level by grade 10 or 11 and take precalculus or calculus before graduating from high school. Other students will go beyond readiness through statistics to college. Other pathways can be designed and available as long as they include the readiness level. The final draft of the K-12 standards will indicate which concepts and skills are needed to reach the readiness level and which go beyond. We welcome feedback from states on where that line should be drawn.
English Language Learners in Mathematics Classrooms
English language learners (ELLs) must be held to the same high standards expected of students who are already proficient in English. However, because these students are acquiring English language proficiency and content area knowledge concurrently, some students will require additional time and all will require appropriate instructional support and aligned assessments.
ELLs are a heterogeneous group with differences in ethnic background, first language, socio-economic status, quality of prior schooling, and levels of English language proficiency. Effectively educating these students requires adjusting instruction and assessment in ways that consider these factors. For example ELLs who are literate in a first language that shares cognates with English can apply first-language vocabulary knowledge when reading in English; likewise ELLs with high levels of schooling can bring to bear conceptual knowledge developed in their first language when reading in a second language. On the other hand, ELLs with limited or interrupted schooling will need to acquire background knowledge prerequisite to educational tasks at hand. As they become acculturated to US schools, ELLs who are newcomers will need sufficiently scaffolded instruction and assessments to make sense of content delivered in a second language and display this content knowledge.
A draft of grade-by-grade common standards is undergoing significant revisions in response to feedback that the outline of what students should master is confusing and insufficiently user-friendly.
Writing groups convened by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association are at work on what they say will be a leaner, better-organized, and easier-to-understand version than the 200-plus-page set that has been circulating among governors, scholars, education groups, teams of state education officials, and others for review in recent weeks. The first public draft of the standards, which was originally intended for a December release but was postponed until January, is now expected by mid-February.
A "Value Added" Report for the Madison School District
Kurt Kiefer:
Attached are the most recent results from our MMSD value added analysis project, and effort in which we are collaborating with the Wisconsin center for Educational Research Value Added Research Center (WCERVARC). These data include the two-year models for both the 2006-2008 and 2005-2007 school year spans.
This allows us in a single report to view value added performance for consecutive intervals of time and thereby begin to identify trends. Obviously, it is a trend pattern that will provide the greatest insights into best practices in our schools.
As it relates to results, there do seem to be some patterns emerging among elementary schools especially in regard to mathematics. As for middle schools, the variation across schools is once again - as it was last year with the first set of value added results - remarkably narrow, i.e., schools perform very similar to each other, statistically speaking.
Also included in this report are attachments that show the type of information used with our school principals and staff in their professional development sessions focused on how to interpret and use the data meaningfully. The feedback from the sessions has been very positive.
Table E1 presents value added at the school level for 28 elementary schools in Madison Metropolitan School District. Values added are presented for two overlapping time periods; the period between the November 2005 to November 2007 WKCE administrations, and the more recent period between the November 2006 and November 2008 WKCE. This presents value added as a two-year moving average to increase precision and avoid overinterpretation of trends. Value added is measured in reading and math.
VA is equal to the school's value added. It is equal to the number ofextra points students at a school scored on the WKCE relative to observationally similar students across the district A school with a zero value added is an average school in terms of value added. Students at a school with a value added of 3 scored 3 points higher on the WKCE on average than observationally similar students at other schools.
Std. Err. is the standard error ofthe school's value added. Because schools have only a finite number of students, value added (and any other school-level statistic) is measured with some error. Although it is impossible to ascertain the sign of measurement error, we can measure its likely magnitude by using its standard error. This makes it possible to create a plausible range for a school's true value added. In particular, a school's measured value added plus or minus 1.96 standard errors provides a 95 percent confidence interval for a school's true value added.
N is the number of students used to measure value added. It covers students whose WKCE scores can be matched from one year to the next.
So should we, as Paul Krugman suggests, spend another trillion in stimulus if it helps growth? No, because, as I have written for a very long time, and will focus on in future weeks, increased deficits and rising debt-to-GDP is a long-term losing proposition. It simply puts off what will be a reckoning that will be even worse, with yet higher debt levels. You cannot borrow your way out of a debt crisis.
This Time Is Different
While I was in Europe, and flying back, I had the great pleasure of reading This Time is Different, by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, on my new Kindle, courtesy of Fred Fern.
I am going to be writing about and quoting from this book for several weeks. It is a very important work, as it gives us the first really comprehensive analysis of financial crises. I highlighted more pages than in any book in recent memory (easy to do on the Kindle, and even easier to find the highlights). Rather than offering up theories on how to deal with the current financial crisis, the authors show us what happened in over 250 historical crises in 66 countries. And they offer some very clear ideas on how this current crisis might play out. Sadly, the lesson is not a happy one. There are no good endings once you start down a deleveraging path. As I have been writing for several years, we now are faced with choosing from among several bad choices, some being worse than others. This Time is Different offers up some ideas as to which are the worst choices.
If you are a serious student of economics, you should read this book. If you want to get a sense of the problems we face, the authors conveniently summarize the situation in chapters 13-16, purposefully allowing people to get the main points without drilling into the mountain of details they provide. Get the book at a 45% discount at Amazon.com.
Buy it with the excellent book I am now reading, Wall Street Revalued, and get free shipping.
This report summarizes data on the use of Infinite Campus teacher tools and the Parent and Student Portal. Data come from a survey conducted among all teachers responsible for students within the Infinite Campus system and an analysis of the Infinite Campus data base. Below are highlights from the report.
About half of all middle and high school teachers responsible for providing grades to students are using the grade book tool.
Grade book use has declined over the past year at the middle school level due to the introduction of standards- based grading. In addition to the change in grading approach, the grade book tool in Infinite Campus does not handle standards-based grading as efficiently as traditional grading.
Lesson Planner and Grade book use is most common among World Languages, Physical Education, and Science teachers and less common among fine arts and language arts/reading teachers.
Grade book and other tool use is most common among teachers with less than three years of teaching experience.
Seventy percent of teachers responding to the survey within these years of experience category report using the tools compared with about half of all other experience categories.
Most of the other teacher tools within Infinite Campus, e.g., Messenger, Newsletters, reports, etc., are not being used due to a lack o!familiarity with them.
Many teachers expressed interest in learning about how they can use other digital tools such as the Moodie leaming management system, blogs, wikis, and Drupal web pages.
About one third of parents with high school stUdents use the Infinite Campus Parent Portal. Slightly less than 30 percent of parents of middle school students use the Portal. Having just been introduced to elementary schools this fall, slightly more that ten percent of parents of students at this level use the Portal.
Parents of white students are more likely to use the Portal than are parents of students within other racial/ethnic subgroups.
About half of all high school students have used the Portal at one time this school year. About one in five middle school students have used the Portal this year.
Variation in student portal use is wide across the middle and high schools.
Follow up is planned during January 2010 with staff on how we can address some of the issues related to enhancing the use olthese tools among staff, parents, and stUdents. This report is scheduled to be provided to the Board of Education in February 2010.
In November of 2008 the district was given voter approval for a three year operating referendum: $5 million in 2009-2010, $4 million in 2010-2011, and $4 million in 2011-2012. The approved operating referendum has a shared cost plan between property tax payers and the district.
During the fall adoption of the 2009-2010 budget the Board of Education worked to reduce the impact for property tax payers by eliminating costs and utilizing fund balance. The State 2009- 2011 budget impacted the district funding significantly in the fall of 2009-2010 and will again have an impact on the 2010-2011 projections.
The district and PMA Financial Network, Inc., worked to prepare a financial forecast for 2010- 2011.
The $3.8 trillion budget blueprint President Obama plans to submit to Congress on Monday calls for billions of dollars in new spending to combat persistently high unemployment and bolster a battered middle class. But it also would slash funding for hundreds of programs and raise taxes on banks and the wealthy to help rein in soaring budget deficits, according to congressional sources and others with knowledge of the document.
To put people back to work, Obama proposes to spend about $100 billion immediately on a jobs bill that would include tax cuts for small businesses, social safety net programs and aid to state and local governments. To reduce deficits, he would impose new fees on some of the nation's largest banks and permit a range of tax cuts to expire for families earning more than $250,000 a year, in addition to freezing non-security spending for three years.
Despite those efforts, the White House expects the annual gap between spending and revenue to approach a record $1.6 trillion this year as the government continues to dig out from the worst recession in more than a generation, according to congressional sources. The red ink would recede to $1.3 trillion in 2011, but remain persistently high for years to come under Obama's policies.
British education may be down in the dumps over government spending prospects, but in the US the picture is rather different.
This week President Barack Obama announced a big cash boost for schools and for university students.
In his state of the union address, President Obama announced a $4bn (£2.5bn) increase in federal spending on elementary and secondary schools.
That is a rise of over six per cent, one of the biggest rises for years.
He also announced an even bigger cash increase in student aid to provide more federal grants for poor students and to ease the impact of student debt repayment.
In future, graduates in the US will be "forgiven" their outstanding federal loan debt after 20 years or, if they enter public service, after 10 years.
Last year Seattle Public Schools selected new, "inquiry-based" math textbooks. Now there's a lawsuit against the district over the Discovering Mathematics series of textbooks.
Do you have a child in school who is using the new textbooks? What is your experience with inquiry-based math education? KUOW's Ross Reynolds is planning a show on Wednesday, February 3 in the 12 o'clock hour. We'd like to hear from you by Wednesday morning. Share your experience with KUOW by filling out the form below, or call 206.221.3663.
I think I have about as good a handle as anyone on the reasons to feel depressed about the Milwaukee school situation. I've been giving talks to groups around the city fairly often lately. I jokingly refer to it as my Spreading Gloom tour.
But at heart, I still am optimistic. Why?
Because I've had the privilege of visiting some schools lately that offer hope. There are too few of them, but they exist. You find them in the Milwaukee Public Schools system, among the private schools supported by public vouchers, and among the charter schools that operate outside MPS. I expect to feature some of them in upcoming columns.
Because there is ample reason to believe that other urban school systems are doing better than Milwaukee. Every school district that is dominated by children coming from impoverished settings has big struggles. But other cities are showing more success and exhibiting more energy than we are, and I don't know any convincing reason why Milwaukee needs to be behind the pack so often. Certainly, this could be changed if we did the right things.
Because things have to get better in terms of the educational success of kids for the city, the metropolitan area and even the state to thrive, and I somehow think awareness of that will eventually create enough pressure to bring improvement.
And - my specific subject for today - because of a new book.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans" because it forced the community to take steps to improve low-performing public schools, according to excerpts from the transcript of a television interview made public Friday afternoon.
The excerpts, e-mailed to reporters, quoted Duncan as giving an evaluation of the effect of the 2005 hurricane on the city's schools.
Martin was quoted as saying to Duncan: "What's amazing is New Orleans was devastated because of Hurricane Katrina, but because everything was wiped out, in essence, you are building from ground zero to change the dynamics of education in that city."
The Green Bay Area Public School District is losing students to open enrollment by a three-to-one ratio. Now, during a pivotal few weeks, it's launching a major multi-media campaign.
Statewide, applications for open enrollment begin Monday and run through the first part of February.
For school districts everywhere, it's a critical time to keep -- and gain -- students.
The Green Bay district is wasting no time in getting its message out. From the classroom to your TV screen, it's an all-out multi-media blitz to highlight the district during a very vulnerable few weeks.
Beginning Monday, a TV ad hits the airwaves advertising what the Green Bay school district says it can offer current and potential students.
One area of the federal government that could see more money is education as the president is proposing to spend as much as $4 billion more nationally next year on schools.
With state funding at a standstill and facing possible cuts, the prospect of any new money for schools gives the federal government more power in setting the terms.
Even $4 billion more from the federal government will not change the fact that the nation's schools get a lion's share of their money from their states.
But state budgets are pinched -- Minnesota's deficit tops a billion dollars - and that's just for the remaining five months on this current fiscal year.
The Lakeville district's budget is 80 percent state money, and Superintendent Gary Amoroso predicts that portion will stay flat for at least four years. Even as costs for things like health care and teacher pay keep increasing.
A story in last week's Shepherd Express claimed that Wall Street hedge managers are part of a secret conspiracy favoring mayoral takeover of Milwaukee Public Schools in order to privatize the schools. It's complete nonsense, the sort of fake news that any smart reader will see through.
The key people pushing for mayoral takeover of the schools has been no secret: It includes Gov. Jim Doyle, Mayor Tom Barrett, Common Council President Willie Hines and a
number of Milwaukee-area Democratic legislators, including state Sens. Lena Taylor and Jeff Plale and state Reps. Jason Fields and Rep. Jon Richards. None of them have offered any support for privatization in their statements. Nor does the proposed legislation have any language that would in any way privatize the schools.
MR. ALLEN: Welcome to POLITICO's video series: "Inside Obama's Washington." I'm Mike Allen, Chief White House Correspondent, and we're here at the Education Department with its leader, Arne Duncan. Mr. Secretary, thank you for having us in.
SECRETARY DUNCAN: Well, thanks for the opportunity. Good to see you.
MR. ALLEN: The President has announced a freeze for a big slice of spending. How's that going to affect education?
SECRETARY DUNCAN: Well, education's always been a priority for the President, so we feel very, very good about where we're going to net out. We're always going to make tough choices, and things that aren't working, we're going to stop investing in. But things that are working, we want to continue to push very hard.
MR. ALLEN: And what's an example of something where you believe you can pull back, something that's not working?
SECRETARY DUNCAN: Well, the budget will be forthcoming next week, but there will be a number of things where if we're not seeing the results we want for children, we think we have a moral obligation not to just perpetuate the status quo, but to invest scarce, scarce dollars in those priorities that are really making a difference in students' lives.
So you think you can run a Los Angeles school? Make your case. You've got 10 minutes.
Would-be school operators are taking part in a kind of Los Angeles Unified School District reality contest, presenting proposals this month at forums on campuses across the district.
It's the next step in an unfolding process through which groups inside and outside the system are bidding to operate 12 low-performing schools and 18 new campuses, serving some 40,000 students.
The Board of Education approved the strategy in August, and the winners for each school will be chosen before March.
Amid intense competition, the bidders are determined to add popular support to their portfolios. Parents will vote for their favorite bidders, although their choices won't be binding on district officials.
At Jefferson High south of downtown, at least 400 people braved last week's storms to hear staff members offer their plans for revamping the campus. They are competing against L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's team.
Public flagship universities provide excellence to students who cannot afford high-quality private institutions. Yet many of these universities direct aid to wealthy students who will attend college without it. Meantime, many high-achieving minority and poor students wind up in lesser institutions or do not attend college at all. In fact, some low-income students who literally cannot afford to attend college without a grant must find a way to finance the equivalent of 70 percent of their family's annual income. Some flagships are stepping up to the challenge and focusing on access and success. An account of their performance and progress appears at the end of this report.
This Dallas suburb, a wealthy enclave known for its top-notch schools, is struggling to integrate a flood of poor, minority students.
In a battle mirrored in other districts across the U.S., parents here have been fighting for months over which public high school their kids will attend: one under construction in an affluent corner of the Plano Independent School District, or an older school several miles away in the city's more diverse downtown.
Last month, the district's school board angered many parents when it created a Pac-Man-shaped zone that placed their children in the downtown school for grades nine and 10 instead of in the newer, closer campus.
The downtown school has the highest proportion of poor students of all high schools in the district; many are Hispanic and African-American.
"We want to go to our neighborhood school," said Kelly McBrayer, a white, 48-year-old stay-at-home mother of three who lives near the site of the new high school.
I am one of the three plaintiffs in the math textbook appeal. I am also the white grandmother of an SPS fifth grader, and a retired SPS math teacher.
Mr. Westneat grants that the textbooks we are opposing may be "lousy," but he faults us for citing their disproportionate effect on ethnic, racial, and other minorities. He states that we can't prove this claim. I disagree, and West Seattle Dan has posted voluminous statistics in response to the column. They support our claim that inquiry-based texts, which have now accrued a sizable track record, are generally associated with declining achievement among most students and with a widening achievement gap between middle class whites and minorities.
We've brought race and ethnicity (as well as economic status) into this appeal because there is ample evidence that it is a factor. True, this is not the 80's, and true, in my 10 years of experience teaching in Seattle Schools, I found no evidence that people of color are less capable than whites of being outstanding learners. However, in my 30+ years as a parent and grandparent of SPS students and my years as a teacher, I've developed deep, broad, awareness of the ways that centuries of societally mandated racism play out in our classrooms, even in this era of Barack Obama's presidency.
When the Obama administration first proposed having states duke it out for a share of a $4 billion education-reform fund, critics expected the whole enterprise to either be largely ignored or dissolve into political infighting. But instead, the Race to the Top competition has proved so successful in motivating states to accelerate their education-reform efforts that the administration has new plans to offer such competitions on an annual basis. President Obama will also announce tonight that the Department of Education will be offering a new competition to push states to create more and better preschool programs. During a briefing Tuesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that the country doesn't "need any more studies" to prove that high-quality preschool education can significantly close the achievement gap between rich and poor. Instead, he said, the country just needs to offer such programs to more kids. The president "wants to dramatically increase access and give kids a level playing field," Duncan said. "If kids don't come to school ready to learn and ready to read, it's very tough for even the best kindergarten teachers to close that gap." During the presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly promised that he would expand early education programs but has focused little attention on the issue during his first year.
Michelle Rhee, the tough-talking D.C. schools chancellor, is used to taking her lumps from the press, the teachers' unions, and city politicians as she tries to overhaul one of the nation's worst public-school systems. But this week she's been under siege after a controversial quote about teachers molesting students made it into print. Rhee is fighting back, but the whole episode highlights a bigger problem in districts all over the country: why can't a school system fire teachers who abuse kids or don't bother showing up for work? In D.C., as in many other cities with "progressive" employee discipline procedures, school officials can suspend such teachers but can't terminate them.
The latest uproar began with the publication of a short "update" item in the Feb. 1 issue of Fast Company, in which Rhee seemed to say that the 266 teachers laid off last fall during the system's budget crunch had histories of abusing students, corporal punishment, and chronic absenteeism: "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school. Why wouldn't we take those things into consideration?" Rhee is quoted as saying.
Sex offenders who prey on children strike fear into the hearts of parents. That does not make it any easier to find a balance between protecting the community against these heinous crimes and upholding the rights of offenders who have paid their debt to society. One of these rights is privacy, which is key to a fair chance of rehabilitation. Reconciling this conflict is one reason Hong Kong has yet to follow other jurisdictions in maintaining a confidential sex offenders' register that can be accessed by employers of people who work with children.
Meanwhile, the Education Bureau's power to deregister teachers provides a degree of protection because no one can teach in our schools without a valid registration certificate or permit. Parents are entitled to assurance that this screens out applicants who pose a known risk. It is disappointing therefore that the bureau has declined an opportunity to give it, without infringing privacy. It has refused our request to simply say how many of at least 31 teachers and classroom assistants known to have committed sexual offences in the past 10 years are still registered and how many are working in schools. As a result, lawmakers, parent and child protection groups have rightly raised concerns about the vetting procedures.
How sweeping education reforms signed into law Monday will be implemented in Michigan remains unclear to area school officials.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm on Monday signed reforms that make it easier to close failing schools, link teacher pay to performance and hold school administrators accountable. The bills also raise the dropout age from 16 to 18, starting with the Class of 2016; allow up to 32 more charter schools to open each year; give professionals from areas other than education an alternative way to become teachers, and allow for cyber-schools to educate students who have dropped out online.
State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said up to 200 low-performing schools could end up under state control as a result of the new laws.
The legislation is part of Michigan's effort to win money from the Obama administration's Race to the Top competition tied to education reform. Michigan could get up to $400 million if it's among the winners.
Local school boards and unions now face a Thursday deadline to sign a "Memorandum of Understanding" that indicates their support for the reforms. The memorandums are to be included with the state's Race to the Top application. School districts where the board and union do not sign an agreement risk losing their share of the money.
That's what was argued Tuesday in a Seattle courtroom. Not overtly racist in that a book of equations and problem sets contains hatred or intolerance of others. But that its existence -- its adoption for use in Seattle classrooms -- is keeping some folks down.
"We're on untested ground here," admitted Keith Scully.
He's the attorney who advanced this theory in a lawsuit challenging Seattle Public Schools' choice of the Discovering series of math textbooks last year.
The appeal was brought by a handful of Seattle residents, including UW atmospheric-sciences professor Cliff Mass. It says Seattle's new math books -- and a "fuzzy" curriculum they represent -- are harmful enough to racial and other minorities that they violate the state constitution's guarantee of an equal education.
It also says the School Board's choice of the books was arbitrary.
Mostly, Mass just says the new textbooks stink. For everyone. But he believes they will widen the achievement gap between whites and some minority groups, specifically blacks and students with limited English skills.
President Obama is apparently about to tell the nation he wants to freeze federal spending for three years in several areas, including education. I like the idea. I would also support cutting back entitlement payments for financially secure geezers like me, and find ways for everyone to make some sacrifices for our country.
I can hear the objections. We can't fix our economy by shortchanging our kids. They are our future. True, but we don't have much evidence that spending more money on their schooling has had much effect on what they have learned. The most exciting and productive schools I have studied are driven by ideas, not bucks. If they need money for special projects, they find it. But the power of their teaching comes from the freedom they are allowed to help with their students, as a team, in ways that make the most sense to them.
More money often prevents that from happening. It has strings that force teachers to do stuff, and spend time on paperwork, that doesn't work for them. The recent history of the stimulus funds used for education makes this clear.
Thousands of protesters showed up at New York City's Brooklyn Technical High School on January 26 to protest against the closing and reorganization of 19 public schools. Three hundred parents, teachers, students, and local politicians testified that the closings were arbitrary and ignored the struggles and successes taking place in these buildings. The hearing went on until after 2:30 in the morning, when the Panel for Educational Policy, whose majority is appointed by Mayor Michael "Money Bags" Bloomberg, did exactly what it planned to do at the start; it voted to rubber stamp the closings.
The panel's decision will mean phasing out six comprehensive high schools, including Jamaica and Beach Channel in Queens, Paul Robeson and William Maxwell in Brooklyn, and Alfred Smith and Christopher Columbus in the Bronx. This is part of Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein's campaign to replace the comprehensive high schools with small mini-schools and charters. Since 2002, Bloomberg/Klein has closed, or is in the process of closing, over ninety schools. What the Mayor and Chancellor were unable to explain was why if smaller schools are the panacea for educational problems six of the schools being closed in this round were small high schools created in previous rounds of school reorganization.
Here's a Spark's Notes version of Gov. Christie's Education Subcommittee Report, which constitutes a list of recommendations to improve public education in N.J. Some are considered "early action," i.e., to be completed within 90 days. The rest have a whopping 6 months for completion. Okay: maybe it's more of a wish list, but it gives any reader a clear sense of Christie and Schundler's agenda.
We've divided these 17 pages of pre-K through 12th grade recommendations (there's another 8 on higher education) into 3 basic categories: School Finance, School Reform, and NJ DOE Oversight.
Today Cliff Mass and I, (DaZanne Porter had to be at a training in Yakima) accompanied by Dan Dempsey and Jim W, had our hearing in Judge Julie Spector's King County Superior Courtroom; the event was everything we hoped for, and more. Judge Spector asked excellent questions and said that she hopes to announce a decision by Friday, February 12th.
The hearing started on time at 8:30 AM with several members of the Press Corps present, including KIRO TV, KPLU radio, Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times, and at least 3 others. I know the number because, at the end, Cliff, our attorney, Keith Scully, and I were interviewed; there were five microphones and three cameras pointed towards us at one point.
The hearing was brief; we were done by 9:15. Keith began by presenting our case very clearly and eloquently. Our two main lines of reasoning are, 1) that the vote to adopt Discovering was arbitrary and capricious because of the board's failure to take notice of a plethora of testimony, data, and other information which raised red flags about the efficacy of the Discovering series, and 2) the vote violated the equal education rights of the minority groups who have been shown, through WASL scores, to be disadvantaged by inquiry based instruction.
Realistically, both of these arguments are difficult to prove: "arbitrary and capricious" is historically a very, very difficult proof, and while Keith's civil rights argument was quite compelling, there is no legal precedent for applying the law to this situation.
The School District's attorney, Shannon McMinimee, did her best, saying that the board followed correct procedure, the content of the books is not relevant to the appeal, the books do not represent inquiry-based learning but a "balanced" approach, textbooks are merely tools, etc., etc. She even denigrated the WASL - a new angle in this case. In rebuttal, Keith was terrific, we all agreed. He quoted the introduction of the three texts, which made it crystal clear that these books are about "exploration." I'm blanking on other details of his rebuttal, but it was crisp and effective. Keith was extremely effective, IMHO. Hopefully, Dan, James, and Cliff can recall more details of the rebuttal.
A lawsuit challenging the Seattle School District's math curriculum went to trial Monday in King County Superior Court.
A group of parents and teachers say the "Discovering Math" series adopted last year does a poor job, especially with minority students who are seeing an achievement gap widen.
A spokeswoman for the Seattle School District, Teresa Wippel, says it has no comment on pending litigation.
KOMO-TV reports the district has already spent $1.2 million on Discovering Math books and teacher training.
On Tuesday, January 26th, at 8:30 AM, King County Superior Court Judge Julie Spector will consider an appeal by a group of Seattle residents (including yours truly) regarding the selection by Seattle Public Schools of the Discovering Math series in their high schools. Although this issue is coming to a head in Seattle it influences all of you in profound ways.
In this appeal we provide clear evidence that the Discovery Math approach worsens the achievement gap between minority/disadvantaged students and their peers. We show that the Board and District failed to consider key evidence and voluminous testimony, and acted arbitrarily and capriciously by choosing a teaching method that was demonstrated to produce a stagnant or increasing achievement gap. We request that the Seattle Schools rescind their decision and re-open the textbook consideration for high school.
A week ago, President Obama announced that he is planning to spend $4.4 billion on his Race to the Top education program. If you missed the news, don't kick yourself. Obama's entire education reform plan had been largely overshadowed by the yearlong health care debate, the economy, Afghanistan and other big-ticket news items.
It's unfortunate, since this may be the most impressive reform his administration has accomplished in the past year.
Obama announced Race to the Top in July. The program awards grant money to states on a competitive basis, based on their implementing education reforms that include assessment standards, turning around worst-performing schools, and recruiting and rewarding quality teachers.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has met with education leaders throughout the country, working tirelessly to get state education leaders and providers, legislators, reform groups, unions and others to support reforms that will bring true accountability and competition to our nation's public school systems.
Unfettered by inside-the-beltway partisan politics, President Obama indisputably has affected more change in the nation's education policies in his first year in office than any President in modern history.
The boost that the Administration's Race to the Top initiative - which was accompanied by a record $100 billion increase in general federal aid to education - has given state and local education reform efforts is the Administration's biggest domestic policy success of 2009 - all without yet expending a dime of the $5 billion Race to the Top fund.
What's more, while not a single Republican Congressman and only 3 Republican Senators voted for the economic and education reform stimulus package last February, the policy initiatives that Obama and Secretary Duncan put forth have since been embraced through both words and action by state and local elected officials in both parties across the ideological and geographical spectrum.
These accomplishments reflect campaign promises kept - in recognition of the relationship between education reform, jobs, and economic growth - to make education one of three key components of a long-term U.S. economic recovery strategy (the other two being energy and health care which obviously, and to say the least, have not fared as well), an augur well for the work on education reform that is yet to come.
Some effects are immediate - for example, more than a hundred thousand slots have already opened to parents across the country who want to choose a high quality public charter school for their children. Others, such as changes in state academic standards to ensure that students are college and career ready, the development of better tests, more rigorous qualification criteria and better pay for teachers, and fundamental overhauls of chronically failing schools, will pay dividends later this year, and over the next several.
Here is an interesting op-ed piece by a tenured professor of biology at Piedmont College, Robert H. Wainberg. He is alarmed because he has been told by former students who are now teachers that some schools no longer hold Honors Day to recognize the accomplishments of above average and exemplary students so they don't hurt the feelings of kids who don't earn awards.
This piece will appear in the paper on the education page Monday. Enjoy.
By Robert H.Wainberg:
I have been a professor of Biology and Biochemistry at a regional college for over two decades. Sadly, I have noticed a continual deterioration in the performance of my students during this time. In part I have attributed it to the poor study habits of the last few generations (X, XX and now XXX) who have relied too heavily on technology in lieu of thinking for themselves.
In fact, the basics are no longer taught in our schools because they are considered to be "too hard," not because they are archaic or antiquated. For example, students are no longer required to learn the multiplication or division tables since they direct access to calculators in their phones.
Handwriting script and calligraphy are now in danger of extinction since computers use printed letters. A report I recently read disturbingly admitted that many of our standardized tests used for college admission or various professional schools (MCAT, LSAT and GRE) have to manipulate their normal bell-shaped curves to obtain the higher averages of decadtudenes ago.
What we fail to realize is that the concept of "survival of the fittest" still applies even within the realm of technology. There will always be those who are more "adapted" to the full potential of its use while others will be stalled at the level of downloading music or playing games.
President Barack Obama intends to propose a three-year freeze in spending that accounts for one-sixth of the federal budget--a move meant to quell rising voter concern over the deficit but whose practical impact will be muted.
To attack the $1.4 trillion deficit, the White House will propose a three-year freeze on discretionary spending unrelated to the military, veterans, homeland security and international affairs, according to senior administration officials. Also untouched are big entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
The freeze would affect $447 billion in spending, or 17% of the total federal budget, and would likely be overtaken by growth in the untouched areas of discretionary spending. It's designed to save $250 billion over the coming decade, compared to what would have been spent had this area been allowed to rise along with inflation.
The administration officials said the cap won't be imposed across the board. Some areas would see cuts while others, including education and investments related to job creation, would realize increases.
A gritty industrial patch of a blue-collar Chicago suburb seems an unlikely setting for the pioneering curriculum at Morton Alternative High School. The program, which combines intensive psychotherapy with conventional studies to help gang members and emotionally troubled teenagers finish school, has reported promising results and has attracted the notice of educators nationwide.
Morton Alternative High School is the last chance for students who are expelled from Morton East High School and Morton West.
Dr. Mark Smaller, a Chicago psychoanalyst, started the program at Morton Alternative three-and-a-half years ago as a contrast to schools that take a strict disciplinary approach to youths with behavioral problems. Dr. Smaller and his team of social workers conduct weekly group and individual therapy sessions to help students deal with emotional problems and social pressures common to life in neighborhoods where families struggle with job losses, crime, violence and immigration issues.
Morton Alternative in Cicero is the last chance for students who are expelled from Morton East and Morton West High Schools. An average of about 100 students are at the school at any one time -- those judged to have some chance for improvement -- though they come and go throughout the academic year.
After his Oscar-winning "An Inconvenient Truth" spotlighted climate change, Davis Guggenheim is hoping to do for the US public education system what he did for the environment.
Guggenheim's new film, "Waiting for Superman," is vying for honors in the Sundance Film Festival's US documentary competition, and offers a searing look at the problems facing schools and colleges in the United States.
Like the Oscar-winning "An Inconvenient Truth," Guggenheim's film utilizes graphs and animated charts intercut with interviews with students and educators to illustrate the sector's woes.
In classrooms across Wisconsin, students learn mathematics, reading, social studies, art, science, and other subjects through integrated projects that show great promise for increased academic achievement. The catch: the collaboration between students and teachers often involves multiple academic subjects, which can present licensing issues for school districts.
"There is no question that parents and students want innovative programs," said State Superintendent Tony Evers. "The reality of some of today's educational approaches requires that we look at our licensing regulations to increase flexibility and expand routes to certification to ensure that these programs are taught by highly qualified teachers."
Trying to address a major ethnic and racial achievement gap, the school could divert funds from before- and after-school science labs filled mostly with white students. The plan has sparked debate.
Aaron Glimme's Advanced Placement chemistry students straggle in, sleepy. It is 7:30 a.m. at Berkeley High School. The day doesn't officially begin for another hour. They pull on safety goggles, measure out t-butyl alcohol and try to determine the molar mass of an unknown substance by measuring how much its freezing point decreases.
In the last school year, 82% of Berkeley's AP chemistry students passed the rigorous exam, which gives college credit for high school work. The national passing rate is 55.2%. The school's AP biology and physics students are even more successful.
Most districts would not argue with such a record, but Berkeley High's science labs are embroiled in a debate over scarce resources with overtones of race, class and politics.
Campus leadership has proposed cutting before- and after-school labs -- decreasing science instruction by 20% to 40% -- and using that money to fund "equity" programs for struggling students in an effort to close one of the widest racial and ethnic achievement gaps in the state.
As I mentioned previously, for the past couple of months I have been part of a coalition group to form a joint values statement for parents/community groups to give to the School Board, district and SEA. The groups include Campana Quetzel, Seattle Council PTSA, Successful Schools in Action, CPPS, Stand for Children, the Alliance for Education and others. Organized by the League of Education Voters (our leader is Kelly Munn of LEV), we sought to create a streamlined document that is simple and basic.
Here's a link to that document, "Give Every Child a Great Education: A Community Value Statement in Support of Public Schools". We will have, at this writing, shown the document to nearly all the Board members, SEA leaders and school district leaders.
Here is a link to the district's opening remarks about the negotiations.
Since we're talking about school choice--and the role of the teachers' unions not only in preventing needed reform, but in keeping parents from choosing to place their kids in good schools that are good fits for them--check out the trailer above.
The story of teachers' union intransigence when it comes to the extremely time-sensitive matter of kids' futures urgently needs to be told. And finally, with films like this one and like The Cartel (which attracted a nasty, tellingly defensive hit piece from the New Jersey Education Association), that story is beginning to be told.
More than 30 teachers and classroom assistants have been convicted of sex offences in the past 10 years - but the Education Bureau will not say if they are still working in the city's schools.
Since January 1, 2000, at least 31 staff have been convicted of offences ranging from indecent assault of their pupils to secretly filming girls getting undressed for a dance class.
The catalogue of convictions and the names of the offenders was compiled by the Sunday Morning Post (SEHK: 0583, announcements, news) and presented to the Education Bureau, which was asked what action had been taken against the offenders.
But the bureau, responsible for registering teachers and advising schools on vetting prospective staff, refused to say how many of the 31 were still registered as teachers and how many were working in schools.
A spokeswoman also refused to explain why it would not release the information to the public. She did say 13 teachers were deregistered from 2006 to 2008 and seven of these had been convicted of sex offences.
The Superintendent's State of the District presentation is posted on-line (and here), for those of you who aren't able to make it to the presentation.Or those who can't wait until tomorrow!
The timing and content are interesting, from my perspective because:
The nearby Verona School District just approved a Mandarin immersion charter school on a 4-3 vote. (Watch the discussion here). Madison lags in such expanded "adult to student" learning opportunities. Madison seems to be expanding "adult to adult" spending on "coaches" and "professional development". I'd rather see an emphasis on hiring great teachers and eliminating the administrative overhead associated with growing "adult to adult" expenditures.
I read with interest Alec Russell's recent lunch with FW de Klerk. de Klerk opened the door to South Africa's governance revolution by freeing Nelson Mandela in 1990:
History is moving rather fast in South Africa. In June the country hosts football's World Cup, as if in ultimate endorsement of its post-apartheid progress. Yet on February 2 1990, when the recently inaugurated state President de Klerk stood up to deliver the annual opening address to the white-dominated parliament, such a prospect was unthinkable. The townships were in ferment; many apartheid laws were still on the books; and expectations of the balding, supposedly cautious Afrikaner were low.
How wrong conventional wisdom was. De Klerk's address drew a line under 350 years of white rule in Africa, a narrative that began in the 17th century with the arrival of the first settlers in the Cape. Yet only a handful of senior party members knew of his intentions.
I sense that the Madison School Board and the Community are ready for new, substantive adult to student initiatives, while eliminating those that simply consume cash in the District's $418,415,780 2009-2010 budget ($17,222 per student).
The "State of the District" document [566K PDF] includes only the "instructional" portion of the District's budget. There are no references to the $418,415,780 total budget number provided in the October 26, 2009 "Budget Amendment and Tax Levy Adoption document [1.1MB PDF]. Given the organization's mission and the fact that it is a taxpayer supported and governed entity, the document should include a simple "citizen's budget" financial summary. The budget numbers remind me of current Madison School Board member Ed Hughes' very useful 2005 quote:
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker - and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member - believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
In my view, while some things within our local public schools have become a bit more transparent (open enrollment, fine arts, math, TAG), others, unfortunately, like the budget, have become much less. This is not good.
A new financial reality. I don't see significant new funds for K-12 given the exploding federal deficit, state spending and debt issues and Madison's property tax climate. Ideally, the District will operate like many organizations, families and individuals and try to most effectively use the resources it has. The recent Reading Recovery report is informative.
I think Dan Nerad sits on a wonderful opportunity. The community is incredibly supportive of our schools, spending far more per student than most school Districts (quite a bit more than his former Green Bay home) and providing a large base of volunteers. Madison enjoys access to an academic powerhouse: the University of Wisconsin and proximity to MATC and Edgewood College. Yet, District has long been quite insular (see Janet Mertz's never ending efforts to address this issue), taking a "we know best approach" to many topics via close ties to the UW-Madison School of Education and its own curriculum creation business, the Department of Teaching and Learning.
In summary, I'm hoping for a "de Klerk" moment Monday evening. What are the odds?
Picture a Milwaukee Public Schools high school that college-bound students are clamoring to attend. The school has grown from 100 to 1,000 in six years. Its program is rigorous, its test scores are strong. Hundreds are on a waiting list for admission for next year.
You might think MPS leaders would look at the meteoric rise of Ronald Wilson Reagan College Preparatory School on the far south side and say, "Terrific! This is an opportunity. What can we do to satisfy the obviously huge appetite for what this program has to offer?"
Or, if you were perhaps a bit more cynical, you might think MPS leaders would look at the Reagan situation and say: "OK, who screwed up? Who allowed this school to grow so fast? Can we get a lot of these parents to switch their kids to other high schools where - for some reason - there is no waiting list?"
Reagan arguably has provided the biggest shot in the arm that MPS has gotten in the last decade or so. It provides a rigorous International Baccalaureate program for all its students - "We have one vision, one mission, one focus - IB," says Julia D'Amato, the principal and chief driver behind Reagan's success. Reagan is working with other MPS schools to develop a kindergarten through high school IB continuum in MPS.
But in recent months, Reagan has had to fend off an attempt to cap its enrollment and it has been ordered to reduce sharply the number of students next fall who do not fall into the special education category. Reagan leaders clearly feel frustrated by how much work is going into protecting their success from MPS leaders.
"All the buzzwords that are supposed to make a successful school, that's what we have here," says Mary Ellen McCormick-Mervis, one of the school's administrators. "If we're doing everything right, why not help us?"
When Gov. Jim Doyle announced last April that $366 million in federal stimulus money was headed for Wisconsin schools, the stated goal from Washington was to help children with disabilities and at-risk students in poor schools -- "while stimulating the economy."
But it's unclear if the almost $12 million distributed to the Madison School District, with a third of that going to teacher training and coaching, will accomplish those goals.
"I think at the end of this period we will have spent a lot of money and I don't know what we'll have to show for it," said Lucy Mathiak, vice president of the Madison School Board. "Professional development is a really nice thing, but how do you even measure the in-class result?"
About $1 million of the Madison district's $11.7 million in stimulus money will buy technology for schools, welcomed by school officials. Programs for students with behavioral and mental health needs will be beefed up as well, and the district estimates about 40 new short-term jobs will be created.
The most interesting session I attended concered Kewaskum schools program they call "People over programs". I have long noted that compared to the private sector, school district management structures are very weak - the Kewaskum program deals with this problem by focusing on high professional standards for their staff. I was encouraged to see an alternative model that acknowledges this issue and attempts to address the problem directly.
Along similar lines I hear a presentation from the Janesville schools - they are working with a management consulting firm (that is donating their services) to develop standards of professionalism and accountability in management. The Superintendents evaluation is published on the district website with progress toward specific measurable goals.
I also attended a session with ideas about using incentives with HRA's to reduce health insurance costs, and a session about district consolidation - I think that looking at collaborative or consolidated support services with neighboring district might be a way to save money.
SOUTH AFRICA spends a bigger share of its GDP on education than any other country on the continent. Yet its results are among the worst. Fifteen years after apartheid was buried, black children continue to receive an education that is vastly inferior to most of their white peers. Instead of ending inequality, as the ruling African National Congress (ANC) promised, the country's schools are perpetuating it.
For Graeme Bloch, an education expert at the Development Bank of Southern Africa, his country's education system is a "national disaster". He says around 80% of schools are "dysfunctional". Half of all pupils drop out before taking their final "matric" exams. Only 15% get good enough marks to get into university. Of those who do get in, barely half end up with a degree. South Africa regularly comes bottom or near the bottom in international literacy, numeracy and science tests.
University heads increasingly complain about students totally unprepared for higher education. Employers bemoan a dearth of skilled manpower, yet--by some measures--one in three South Africans has no job. A study of first-year students by Higher Education South Africa, the universities' representative body, found only half the 2009 intake to be proficient in "academic literacy" and barely a quarter in "quantitative literacy", while no more than 7% were deemed to have the necessary mathematics skills.
Dear Members of Our Community, The mission of the Madison Metropolitan School District is as follows:
Our mission is to cultivate the potential in every student to thrive as a global citizen by inspiring a love of learning and civic engagement, by challenging and supporting every student to achieve academic excellence, and by embracing the full richness and diversity of our community.
A year ago, a group of community and school staff members committed time to develop a revised Strategic Plan for the school district. As part of this, our mission statement was revised. This plan was approved by the Board of Education in September 2009 and will be reviewed and updated annually. For the foreseeable future, the plan will serve as our road map to know if we are making a difference relative to important student learning outcomes and to the future of our community. To make the most difference, we must continue to partner with you, our community. We are indeed very fortunate to be able to educate our children in a very supportive, caring community.
As a school district, our highest priority must be on our work related to teaching and learning. For our students and the community's children to become proficient learners and caring and contributing members of society, we must remain steadfast in this commitment.
Related to our mission, we have also identified the following belief statements as a district:
We believe that excellent public education is necessary for ensuring a democratic society.
Webelieveintheabilitiesofeveryindividualinourcommunityandthevalueof their life experiences.
We believe in an inclusive community in which all have the right to contribute.
Webelievewehaveacollectiveresponsibilitytocreateandsustainasafe environment that is respectful, engaging, vibrant and culturally responsive.
We believe in continuous improvement in formed by critical evaluation and reflection.
We believe that resources are critical to education and we are responsible for their equitable and effective use.
Webelieveinculturallyrelevanteducationthatprovidestheknowledgeandskills to meet the global challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century.
Purpose of this report
The purpose of this State of the District Report is to provide important information about our District to our community and to share future priorities.
Trying to make sense of the 2009-10 education budget and a year when everything went topsy turvey?
This 20-page report looks at how California got to this point and leads you through the cuts, funding delays, and policy changes that lawmakers implemented in 2009 to address a state budget crisis that just kept getting worse. It also explains the impact on local education agencies, including the changed rules around many K-12 programs such as Class Size Reduction.
Some key messages from the report:
California has struggled with creating sound state budgets since the early 2000s, so the national economic downturn hit the state particularly hard.
K-12 spending cuts have been a major part of the budget solutions and were accompanied by substantive changes in how education funds are allocated, including some new flexibility.
Local school agencies must absorb funding cuts, address cash flow challenges, and plan carefully in order to avoid insolvency.
Going forward, Californians may either have to accept the "new normal" of continued education reductions or push for schools to be exempted from further cuts as another bad year begins.
CBS 2's Mike Flannery recently received a little one-on-one time with Mayor Daley when he interviewed the mayor while riding along in his town car. The crux of the interview was about the future of Northerly Island and if a casino would be built there, to which Daley replied, "It's strictly a park, always will be; because it belongs to the people." He also reiterated comments from his verbal spat with Han Solo last week, saying that he's "very proud" of his decision to bulldoze Meigs Field to create Northerly Island and that it was all part of the Burnham Plan. When asked if he felt it was one of his major accomplishments, Daley responded, "No. No, I think the schools are."
Thousands of public schools stopped teaching foreign languages in the last decade, according to a government-financed survey -- dismal news for a nation that needs more linguists to conduct its global business and diplomacy.
But another contrary trend has educators and policy makers abuzz: a rush by schools in all parts of America to offer instruction in Chinese.
Some schools are paying for Chinese classes on their own, but hundreds are getting some help. The Chinese government is sending teachers from China to schools all over the world -- and paying part of their salaries.
At a time of tight budgets, many American schools are finding that offer too good to refuse.
In Massillon, Ohio, south of Cleveland, Jackson High School started its Chinese program in the fall of 2007 with 20 students and now has 80, said Parthena Draggett, who directs Jackson's world languages department.
That is close to a third of all schools in the District. Such schools will be required to adopt one of four drastic reform strategies approved by the US Department of Education.
** UW-Madison is receiving nearly $18,000 from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute -- which One Wisconsin Now calls a "conservative think tank" -- for the polling project to cover a part of Goldstein's salary.
** Poll results showed a 46.6 percent to 42.4 percent statewide opposition to private school vouchers. However, due to political concerns, it appears WPRI President George Lightbourn was able to keep these numbers from being played up. In the end, references to statewide opposition to private school vouchers were not used in a press release touting the poll. Instead, a press release talking about the poll results put out on the UW-Madison website included only figures from Milwaukee County, where the majority supported vouchers.
"This is a lesson about the credibility and the trustworthiness of materials produced by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute," Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now, says in the press release. "If polling results don't fit its pro-voucher agenda, then those polling results are erased from the final analysis. Most unfortunately, the UW is now tied directly to this manipulation to serve the political agenda of WPRI."
One Wisconsin Now does extensive voter data collection and mining for certain candidates.
Tom Farley Jr., the brother of the late comedian Chris Farley, is emerging as perhaps the oddest candidate for local public office since Will Sandstrom.
First there was the confusion he caused in announcing on Twitter last September that he was running for lieutenant governor as a Republican. He later backtracked, saying he was merely considering the idea, a claim undercut by the words he'd used: "I'm in." (His announcement of candidacy has apparently been unTwittered.)
Farley later announced his candidacy for Madison school board; he's running for an open seat against James Howard, an economist with the Forest Products Laboratory. Commenting on the Advocating on Madison Public Schools (AMPS) blog, Farley sought to distance himself from the notion that he is a Republican merely because he announced his plans to run for office as one.
"Civil War Medicine" paper published in the Winter 2009 Issue of The Concord Review
Before crafting my research paper on U.S. Civil War Medicine, I had never composed a piece of non-fiction literature beyond six or seven pages. Twenty pages seemed to be an unconquerable length. I remember the dread that filled me as my A.P. United States History teacher, Mrs. Melissa Humphrey, handed out the assignment for the twenty-page research paper. She also passed around copies of The Concord Review as examples of research papers done well. For us, the first deadline was only a few weeks away. We had to have a thesis. It was then that I truly realized the depth of this academic adventure. My job was not to simply report on some topic in U.S. history; I had to prove something. I had to create an arguable thesis and defend it. I was overwhelmed.
I put the assignment in the back of my mind for about a week. Then, I began to think seriously about what I could possibly want to write about. I brainstormed a list of all times in U.S. history that fascinate me, ranging from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement. Finally, I settled on Civil War medicine because of my plans to pursue a career in medicine. I figured this would be a great opportunity to gather more knowledge on my potential future profession.
Simply choosing a topic was not enough, though. I needed a thesis. So I began to search through books and online databases for any information about Civil War medicine. I gathered so much information that my head was spinning. I realized I had to narrow down my topic, and that this would be done by creating a specific, arguable thesis. Sifting through all the data and historical articles, I noticed that Civil War medicine was not as atrocious as I had always believed it to be. I had my thesis. I wanted to defend Civil War medicine by placing it in its own historical context, something many fail to do when evaluating it with a modern eye.
A few weeks later, approved thesis in hand, I stepped into the Tufts University library, the alma mater of my mother. The battle plan: gather enough materials, particularly primary sources, to prove my thesis. The enemy: the massive amounts of possibly valuable literature. I had never previously encountered the problem of finding books so specialized that they didn't end up being helpful for my thesis nor had I ever been presented with so many options that I had to narrow down from thirty to a mere fifteen books. Actually, I had never left a library before with so many books.
For the next few months, the books populated the floor of my room. Every weekend, I methodically tackled the volumes, plastering them with Post-it notes. The deadline for the detailed outline and annotated bibliography loomed. I continued reading and researching, fascinated by all I was learning. In fact, I was so fascinated that I felt justified using it as my excuse to delay synthesizing all of my information into an outline. With thousands of pages of reading under my belt, I finally tackled the seven-page map for my twenty-page journey. That was easily the hardest part of the entire process. Once the course was charted, all I had to do was follow it. Of course, it was under construction the entire way, and detours were taken, but the course of the trip turned out much like the map.
I thought printing out the twenty-page academic undertaking, binding it, and handing it in was the greatest feeling I had ever experienced from a scholastic endeavor. I remember being overjoyed that day. I remember sleeping so soundly. I remember the day as sunny. I'm not sure if it actually was...
Clearly, I was thinking small. I had no idea what my grade would be. At that point, I did not even care. I had finished the paper. I considered that a tremendous accomplishment. Eventually, the graded research papers were handed back. What had previously been my greatest academic feeling was surpassed. The grade on my paper was a 99%. I was overjoyed and thrilled that I had not only completed such a tremendous task but had completed it pretty darn well. I thought that was the greatest feeling.
I still needed to think bigger. I submitted my paper to The Concord Review on a whim this summer. I remember Mrs. Humphrey showing us the journals and praising their quality. She is a tough teacher, and I thought since she had liked my paper so much I should give The Concord Review a go. I was not counting on being published. I knew my chances were slim, and I knew I was competing with students from around the world.
This November, I received a letter in the mail from Will Fitzhugh, the founder of The Concord Review. My paper was selected to be published in the Winter 2009 issue. That was the greatest feeling. I am a seventeen-year-old public high school student. I am also a seventeen-year-old published author. People work their whole lives to make it to this point. I feel so honored to have this recognition at my age. My hard work paid off far beyond where I thought it would. Thank you, Mr. Fitzhugh, for recognizing the true value of academic achievement and for reminding me why I love to learn.
Milwaukee's Michael Bond's Letter to Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle on Race to the Top & Governance
Michael Bonds, President, Milwaukee Board of School Directors [1.3MB PDF]:
January 18, 2010
Governor Jim Doyle
Office of the Governor
115 East State Capitol
Madison, WI 53702
Dear Governor Doyle:
As President of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors, I am writing to express my disappointment with your cynical statement regarding Wisconsin's Race to the Top (RTT) application. In your release, you predict that the application will fail because it does not include mayoral control of the Milwaukee Public Schools District (MPS). You also argue that the Legislature's refusal to adopt your mayoral control proposal in Milwaukee will cost other school districts millions of dollars.
Since mayoral control is not a requirement for Race To the Top dollars, your statement can only be interpreted as a political attempt to tum the rest of the state against MPS and to intimidate legislators who oppose mayoral control into supporting your proposal.
National pro-privatization organizations led by former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel education reporter Joe Williams and backed by Wall Street hedge fund managers are emerging as a driving force behind the mayoral takeover of the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).
Williams is the executive director of the affiliated groups named Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and Education Reform Now (ERN), based in New York City. ERN has a nine-month-old chapter in Wisconsin, and DFER has branches in Wisconsin, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and New Jersey.
The Wisconsin state director of both groups, Katy Venskus, has been lobbying in support of the pro-mayoral takeover Senate Bill 405, authored by state Sen. Lena Taylor and state Rep. Pedro Colon.
Venskus also has organized a group of Milwaukee business leaders--including Julia Taylor of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, Tim Sheehy of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and Tim Sullivan of Bucyrus International--to push for a mayor-appointed superintendent of MPS with enhanced executive powers.
The State Board of Education voted on Tuesday to support Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca's campaign to sharply reduce the number of school districts in Vermont.
The board avoided setting a specific number of school districts. But it made it clear that it backs the idea of reducing the present 290 local school districts to a much smaller number of larger, regional districts.
President Obama announced plans yesterday to expand the Race to the Top education program, which invites states to apply for slices of a $4 billion pie of additional school funding. Last year Obama launched the program with two major messages: (1) We need to locate effective teachers by studying student data, and (2) we need better standards to keep some states (ahem, Mississippi) from setting their education bar so low that they gut the word "standard" of all meaning.
In future iterations, Race to the Top will allow not only states, but also individual districts, to apply for additional federal funding. This change makes sense for two reasons. The first is wholly practical. Most school funding comes from local property taxes, and accordingly education policies, and their success, can vary dramatically on a district-by-district basis within a state. The second reason this makes sense for the administration is more political. Appealing to individual districts provides a way to circumvent governors like Texas's Rick Perry who don't want to accept additional education funds.
*** Keep School on Dedicated Path in Meeting Goals
*** Get Teachers and Students to Know Each Other
*** Move All Students Toward Success
*** Have Strong School Leaders and Governing Boards
*** Support and Train Good Teachers
*** Create Small School for Connectedness and Community
*** Continually Measure Student Progress
*** Work to Create Parental Involvement
*** Get Around the Obstacles
A lot of the success in a school depends on intangibles, says Marcia Spector who heads Seeds of Health in Milwaukee. Energy, drive, a genuine commitment to high goals, working hard, and a street-smart sense of how to work with kids, how to work the bureaucracy, and how to run the school are all important. Yes, it is hard work, but it's worth it. In fact, it's actually fun, says Spector.
A new Mandarin Chinese immersion charter school will open this fall in Verona.
The Verona school board voted 4-3 on Monday night to approve the school, making it the first of its kind in the state.
The school will be called the Verona Area International School. It will have two halftime teachers, one who teaches only in English and the other who teaches only in Mandarin. Math, science and some social-science classes would be taught in the Chinese language. Students will spend half the day learning in English and half in Mandarin Chinese.
Grover is not real sanguine with current education policy ideas, such as Mayor Tom Barrett's bid for a takeover of Milwaukee public schools. Fundamentally, smaller school districts (500 kids) should be the goal, and structural changes will never trump upbringing and parental involvement in their children's education, he said.
"The difference between the kid headed to a Milwaukee school and one in Whitefish Bay is what they bring to the school house door," he said. "The aspiration level of the parents is key. They want the best for their kids."
As for the contest to succeed Jim Doyle as governor in 2010, Grover isn't sure Barrett can be tough enough but suggests he'd be an improvement.
"Jim Doyle started out life at third base and thought he hit a triple," Grover said, using an aphorism to denote "an elitist west side (Madison) upbringing."
"Barrett is absolutely a decent human being. I have the feeling he won't be as aggressive as he will need to be. He's almost like Barack (Obama) ...'Let us reason together.'"
Smaller districts certainly make sense, including places like Madison.
Kudos to the country's two newest governors, Republicans Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who have tapped strong school choice advocates to head their state education departments.
Last week, Mr. McDonnell chose Gerald Robinson to become Virginia's next Secretary of Education. Mr. Robinson currently heads the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a national nonprofit that backs charter schools and performance pay for teachers. Meanwhile, Mr. Christie has picked former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler to serve as his state's next education commissioner. Mr. Schundler is an unabashed supporter of using education vouchers and charter schools to improve the plight of urban school districts.
This is good news for all school children in both states, but it's especially auspicious for low-income kids stuck in failing schools who have the most to gain from a state education official who is unafraid to shake up the establishment. Virginia has a grand total of three charter schools, one of the lowest numbers in the nation. New Jersey spends more money per pupil than all but two states, yet test scores in Newark and Jersey City are among the worst in the country.
The advisory committee Gov. Haley Barbour appointed to study K-12 school consolidation voted Monday to hire an outside consulting firm, using $72,000 in private funds from unnamed sources.
Bringing on board a Denver-based firm that specializes in public education systems and policies will allow the committee to have data-driven discussions as opposed to ones mired in emotion and politics, said Johnny Franklin, Barbour's education policy adviser.
Committee Chairman Aubrey Patterson, the CEO of BancorpSouth Inc., said he did not have permission to release the names of the one individual and two organizations that have agreed to pay the contract with Augenblick, Palaich and Associates Inc.
He described the donors as "interested supporters of public education" and would not say where the donors were from.
Monday's meeting at the Capitol marked the initial gathering for the Commission on Mississippi Education Structure appointed in late December to study the best way to go about consolidating the state's 152 districts.
Colorado education officials will unveil a reform proposal today that asks for $380 million in federal Race to the Top funding, but they are missing a key plank regarding teacher evaluations that will likely give other states a leg up in the contest.
Months of work have led to a nearly 150-page plan that touches on nearly everything, including incentives for top teachers, resources focused on failing schools and sharing data across the state.
But while Colorado's application vows to address such issues as teacher performance, tenure and dismissal through a commission born today of an executive order from Gov. Bill Ritter, other states with more advanced teacher-tracking systems have put their evaluation plans into law.
Colorado began the competition as a front-runner, but analysts say the lack of guidelines for tenure and dismissal will likely hurt the state's chances at being among the first chosen for a share of the $4.35 billion program. As many as 45 states nationwide are revamping their K-12 systems to compete for hundreds of millions in stimulus dollars that will be granted in two rounds of competition.
Lt. Gov. Barbara O'Brien has spearheaded Colorado's Race to the Top effort and said she would rather have the support of teachers and their union than forge ahead with a plan that schools are unhappy with.
New York, home of the nation's largest school district, is on the verge of rejecting key components of the White House's education effort amid a state fight over charter schools.
The Democratic-led legislature, with heavy backing from teachers' unions, is behind a law that critics, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, say will curb the growth of charter schools.
Tuesday is the deadline for states to submit initial bids for a slice of the $4.35 billion that is up for grabs under the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" competition, which is intended to coax policy concessions such as opening charter schools and getting approval of merit-pay systems through stubborn legislatures.
Late Monday, New York Governor David A. Paterson and lawmakers were negotiating a compromise to salvage the state's application for the first phase of the contest. Although it is seen as unlikely that Albany leaders will strike a compromise by the deadline, it is expected that New York will submit a bid either way.
The maximum amount that New York could win is $700 million and it is unclear if program's financial lure will be enough to forge a breakthrough.
We argue about testing in the US, but the focus on and stakes related to testing is much higher in China and India where the tip of the human funnel is the 12th grade exam; to a large life options hang in the balance. In the US, there are lots of options and second chances; not so in India and China. As a result, the singular secondary focus is marks leading to success on the exit exam.
Yesterday, I visited an expensive private school in Hyderabad. The International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program looked familiar and rich. I dropped in on a primary teacher staff meeting that was informed by student work.
However, it was a different picture in the middle grades where the school abandoned IB for the Cambridge curriculum. Students sat in rows quietly plowing through workbooks while teachers sat at their desk. It was among the most stifling middle grade programs I've ever seen.
Anote of gratitude is due Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe for ordering the immediate firing of Matthew Kim after a tortuous seven-year saga. This wasn't the first time that Yaffe tried to inject common sense into the absurdly difficult and expensive task of ridding classrooms of teachers who don't belong there. His previous decision to allow the Los Angeles Unified School District to fire Kim, issued in July, was ignored by the panel that has authority over contested teacher dismissals.
The Kim fiasco is a reminder of just how many thousands of dollars and costly lawyers and innumerable court appearances are currently required to fire incompetent or otherwise troublesome teachers. And, adding insult to injury, Kim has been paid his full salary and benefits since 2003 while doing no work for the district.
So we find it a heartening coincidence that on the same day Yaffe ordered Kim's firing, the president of the American Federation of Teachers called for new procedures making it easier to remove bad teachers. Randi Weingarten, who has been one of the more progressive teachers union leaders, said the AFT would develop a proposal, with the project overseen by Kenneth R. Feinberg, the federal government's "pay czar" on executive compensation.
As New York finalizes its application for the federal Race to the Top program, a proposal to end the cap on the number of charter schools has been promoted as key to our success in getting these new federal funds. But promoters of this proposal are ignoring two other critical issues: The small role that charter schools play in the Race to the Top application, and the fact that city charters are not serving a representative sample of our neediest students.
Despite the heated rhetoric from charter proponents, the fact is that the charter cap accounts for only eight of the 500 points New York can earn on its Race to the Top application.
What's more, Race to the Top guidelines state that charter schools should "serve student populations that are similar to local district student populations, especially relative to high-need students." But the evidence is clear that New York's charter schools are actually becoming a separate and unequal branch of public education.
Mulgrew is the president of the United Federation of Teachers.
President Obama and his aides, like their predecessors in the administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney, are attempting to force states to comply with rigid federal standards in order to qualify for so-called "Race to the Top" stimulus funds.
During a visit to Madison last November, President Obama outlined the $4.35 billion program in great detail and Gov. Jim Doyle quickly embraced its agenda. The Doyle administration is going after $254 million in Race to the Top money, and Wisconsin schools, which have suffered sharp cuts in promised state funding, could use it.
But the money comes with strings attached. To qualify for the money, states are pressuring school districts to agree to abide by the new standards. Last Monday, the Madison School Board voted 5-1 to do so.
In fairness, many of the requirements are good ones. But tailoring education policy to fit agendas set in Washington is a bad approach. And it is especially bad when school districts with traditions of excellence start trimming their sails and altering their approaches in order to satisfy the whims of distant bureaucrats.
As Illinois jockeys for position as a leader in education reform with a $500 million application for Race to the Top money, the state's inability to pay current bills makes educators skeptical of Illinois's capacity to take on such new initiatives.
One major concern is that should Illinois succeed in the national competition for Race to the Top money, it might not have the ability to finance the long-term costs of any new programs once the federal money has been spent.
A $4.35 billion federal grant competition, Race to the Top, intends to reward states that promote innovations in education. While new money would seem to be a boon for Illinois schools, educators who have seen other programs ramp up only to be shut down are concerned about it happening again.
State Representative. Suzanne Bassi, a Republican from suburban Chicago who sits on the House appropriations committee for education, said she feared what would happen to any new Race to the Top programs in a few years.
"The federal funds run out, and we all of sudden can't do anything about it," Ms. Bassi said. "Then it falls on individual districts, and the taxpayers foot the bill.
Perhaps with business organizations behind it, a significant increase in the state's investment in education from kindergarten through college could gain some traction in the Florida Legislature.
Certainly without it, there is virtually no likelihood that lawmakers in an election year will find the courage to search for ways -- not all of them monetary -- to improve public education, and therefore our state's chances for the future.
An educated population and an accomplished work force are the underpinnings of a state where, as the Florida Council of 100 and Florida Chamber of Commerce expressed in a report last week, the American dream can be successfully carried out. Where better, asked Council of 100 Chair Susan Story "than in the state of Florida?"
Both Gov. Charlie Crist and former Gov. Jeb Bush put their stamp of approval on what was described at its unveiling Thursday as the "education wish list" of these two significant Florida business groups. Last year, the two joined with education leaders to get more money for higher education, even though the Legislature went in the opposite direction, cutting $150 million from our universities. Again this year budget committees are asking universities to be prepared for across-the-board cuts as high as 10 percent, in keeping with a budget shortfall of as much as $3 billion.
The recommendations from these groups, which are coincidentally against most tax or fee increases and lifting sales-tax exemptions, include tougher graduation standards at the pre-K-12 level, virtual elimination of teacher tenure and a constitutional amendment legalizing vouchers.
Last year's stimulus legislation (American Recovery and Recovery Act of 2009, a/k/a "ARRA") provides a one-time boost (to be spent for the 2009-10 and 2010-2011 school years) in federal funding for students with disabilities in elementary and secondary schools under IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act), Part B.
According to the State of Wisconsin's stimulus tracker web site, IDEA Special Education Grants to the states under ARRA totaled $11.3 billion (for context, "regular" IDEA Part B appropriations were $11.51 billion in 2009 and in 2010, according to the New America Foundation's 2010 Education Appropriations Guide). Wisconsin has received ARRA IDEA Part B funding of $208.2 million, with $6.199 million to the Madison Metropolitan School District.
The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers' union, has been working hard to distance itself from its competitor, the National Education Association, which tends to resist sensible reforms.
The shortcomings of evaluations were laid out last year in an eye-opening study by a New York research group, the New Teacher Project. Where they can be said to exist at all, evaluations are typically short, pro forma and almost universally positive. Poorly trained evaluators visit the classroom once or twice for observations that last for a total of an hour or less. Nearly every teacher passes and the overwhelming majority of teachers receive top ratings. Yet more than half the teachers surveyed said they knew a tenured teacher who deserved to be dismissed for poor performance.
oth Gov. David Paterson and the state Legislature need to be shown the woodshed. The so-called Race to the Top federal education initiative that we're being rushed into accepting by the governor would lift the cap on the number of charter schools in this state and in the process throw teachers under the bus for the failures of inner-city public education. It's another chuckleheaded set of directives from Washington. The big Bush push, No Child Left Behind, left a lot of kids behind, and school districts and even states that became disenchanted with education policy that never matched funding for the mandates involved. Race to the Top is headed for the same dust heap, but not before we pay through the nose for it.
And once again New York is panting to go along with the feds because of extra stimulus money available, up $700 million possibly, maybe, if we're one of the winners of the race. On the other hand and by way of perspective, we spend more than $20 billion a year in this state on public education. So essentially we're giving up our right to set our own policy, as flawed as it is, for a short-term handout. How New York of us.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sends to the White House this week a colorful pastiche of education fixes, hoping to score $700 million in federal dollars. Sacramento's plan echoes Washington's own reform strategy - built on President Obama's surprising faith in market remedies for the ills facing schools.
Oddly mimicking Reagan's game plan of a generation ago, Sacramento's agenda relies on market competition by seeding more charter schools, allowing parents to shutter lousy schools and rewarding teachers who boost student performance.
"This is about parental choice in public education," said state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, a chief architect of the bipartisan plan.
Even more notable, efforts by educators at nearby Johns Hopkins University to replicate the school's gains in dozens of other locations have also met with some success. Slowly, the network of Talent Development High Schools is helping student groups that often seem most at risk.
But good news at the high school level is unusual. Despite vigorous calls for change and a host of major reform efforts, encouraging results have been scarce. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores - considered the "Nation's Report Card" - tend to be stagnant for high-schoolers, even when they rise for elementary school students.
Only about half of low-income and minority students in US high schools graduate, and many of those who do are unprepared for college. The isolated examples of success often fail when administrators or education reformers try to reproduce them on a large scale.
Teachers hate this idea because they know that teachers are not solely responsible for their students' scores. The students bear some responsibility, as do their families, for whether students do well or poorly on tests. District leaders bear some responsibility, depending on the resources they provide to schools. Teachers also are aware that the tests are not the only measure of what happens in their classrooms and that even the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that we need better tests. There is a fairly sizable body of research demonstrating that test scores are affected by many factors beyond the teachers' control.
I was surprised too when I read the headlines and the press accounts.
A requirement to negotiate plans to overhaul Iowa's lowest-performing schools with teacher unions prompted the Davenport School District to abandon its support of state efforts to nab a portion of $4.3 billion in federal funds, its top leader said today.
Julio Almanza, Davenport superintendent, said the Iowa Department of Education went beyond federal rules in its application for up to $175 million of federal Race to the Top dollars by requiring districts with state-identified low-performing schools to agree with teacher unions on plans to overhaul them.
Currently, school boards and administrators have the sole authority to make those decisions.
"What you are going to have is unions determining intervention models for schools," Almanza said. "If you can't reach an agreement (with the union), the district loses money for the school. There are no penalties for anyone else, and the kids lose."
The Iowa Department of Education also excluded parents, students and the community from the decision-making process, which goes against the intent of U.S. Department of Education, Almanza said.
Members of the public got their first chance Thursday to listen to and ask questions of the man likely to become the next superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, during back-to-back interviews Thursday at the district office.
The contenders - Robert Alfaro, Stacy Scott and Gregory Thornton - all hail from outside Milwaukee, all have served in a variety of administrative posts in large and smaller districts, and all say that MPS can significantly improve its quality of instruction.
No candidate revealed specific knowledge about Milwaukee's issues, or specific thoughts on how to solve its challenges, and most of the discussion steered toward generalities: supporting good teachers, making room for the arts, encouraging communication with parents.
A community stakeholder group that included Mayor Tom Barrett interviewed the candidates in closed session Thursday afternoon, and the full School Board was scheduled to interview the candidates again in closed session Thursday night.
Before the end of the month, the School Board will take a final vote so that the new superintendent can be named by Feb. 1, Board President Michael Bonds said.
2010 Madison School Board Election Notes and Links
A number of folks have asked why, like 2009, there are two uncontested seats in this spring's Madison School Board election. Incumbents Maya Cole and Beth Moss are running unopposed while the open seat, vacated by the retiring Johnny Winston, Jr. is now contested: Tom Farley (TJ Mertz and Robert Godfrey have posted on Farley's travails, along with Isthmus) after some nomination signature issues and an internal fracas over the School District lawyer's role in the race, faces James Howard [website].
I think we've seen a drop on the ongoing, very small amount of school board activism because:
The current board is, in my view, doing a much better job overseeing the District than a few years ago.
There are a number of issues that have been simmering for awhile, including TAG, Fine Arts, Math and Equity.
Finally, with respect to the Howard / Farley contest, I look forward to the race. I had the opportunity to get to know James Howard during the District's 2009 strategic planning meetings. I support his candidacy.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan entered some of the most contentious debates in college sports on Thursday when, in a speech at the N.C.A.A. convention, he called for stricter consequences for college teams that do not graduate their athletes and said the N.B.A.'s age-minimum policy sets up young athletes for failure.
"Why do we allow the N.C.A.A, why do we allow universities, why do we allow sports to be tainted when the vast majority of coaches and athletic directors are striving to instill the right values?" said Duncan, who was a co-captain of his Harvard basketball team and played in an Australian professional league from 1987 until 1991.
He said his time as a college athlete was one of the most valuable periods of his life, but feared the N.B.A.'s age rule, which requires that a player be at least 19 years old and at least one year removed from high school before entering the league, does a disservice to athletes.
According to the Florida Department of Education, Manatee High School was not a place parents should have wanted to send their children in 2006. The Bradenton-based school received a "D" rating on the state's A-F scale of academic performance that year while failing to meet federal No Child Left Behind proficiency standards for the fourth year in a row. At the same time, Boca Raton Community High School was flying high, having just earned its second straight "A" rating and being named among the best high schools in the country by Newsweek magazine.
But while Manatee got dismal marks from state and federal accountability schemes, it was actually quite successful in a number of important ways. It graduated a higher percentage of its students than Boca Raton and sent almost the same percentage of its graduates off to college. Once they arrived on college campuses, Manatee graduates earned higher grades and fewer of them failed remedial, not-for-credit math and English courses than their Boca Raton peers.
In other words, D-rated Manatee was arguably doing a better job at achieving the ultimate goal of high school: preparing students to succeed in college and careers. But because Florida's accountability systems didn't measure college and career success in 2006, nobody knew.
On August 27, 2009, State Superintendent Tony Evers stated that the State of Wisconsin would eliminate the current WKCE to move to a Balanced System of Assessment. In his statement, the State Superintendent said the following:
New assessments at the elementary and middle school level will likely be computer- based with multiple opportunities to benchmark student progress during the school year. This type of assessment tool allows for immediate and detailed information about student understanding and facilitates the teachers' ability to re-teach or accelerate classroom instruction. At the high school level, the WKCE will be replaced by assessments that provide more information on college and workforce readiness.
By March 2010, the US Department of Education intends to announce a $350 million grant competition that would support one or more applications from a consortia of states working to develop high quality state assessments. The WI DPI is currently in conversation with other states regarding forming consortia to apply for this federal funding.
In September, 2009, the School Administrators Alliance formed a Project Team to make recommendations regarding the future of state assessment in Wisconsin. The Project Team has met and outlined recommendations what school and district administrators believe can transform Wisconsin's state assessment system into a powerful tool to support student learning.
Criteria Underlying the Recommendations:
Wisconsin's new assessment system must be one that has the following characteristics:
Benchmarked to skills and knowledge for college and career readiness • Measures student achievement and growth of all students
Relevant to students, parents, teachers and external stakeholders
Provides timely feedback that adds value to the learning process • Efficient to administer
Aligned with and supportive of each school district's teaching and learning
Advances the State's vision of a balanced assessment system
In the early 1960s, I was fortunate enough to work for a while at the Space and Information Systems Division of North American Aviation in Downey, California, which was building the command modules for the Apollo Program. I was quite impressed by the fact that, although I was basically a glorified clerk, when I left the company to work for Pan American World Airways, they invited me in for an exit interview.
The interviewer asked me about the details of my job--what I liked and didn't like about it. He asked me if the pay and benefits were satisfactory, and whether my immediate boss had done a good job in supervising me or not (he was an Annapolis graduate and had done a first-rate job). The general goal of the interview seemed to be to find out why I was leaving and if there was anything they could do to keep an employee like me in the future. This took place in the middle of a very high-pressure and a multi-billion dollar effort to get to the moon before the end of the decade. North American Aviation also had the contract for the Saturn 5 rocket at their Rocketdyne division. But they made the time to talk to me when I left.
Tony Wagner of Harvard, in his book, The Global Achievement Gap (2008), reports on a focus group he held for recent graduates "of one of the most highly-regarded public high schools," to ask them about their recollections of their experience of the school. This was a kind of exit interview two or three years later. When he asked them what they wished they had received, but didn't, in school, they said:
"More time on writing!" came an immediate reply. I asked how many agreed with this, and all twelve hands shot up into the air. And this was a high school nationally known for its excellent writing program! "Research skills," another student offered and went on to explain: "In high school, I mostly did 'cut and paste' for my research projects. When I got to college, I had no idea how to formulate a good research question and then really go through a lot of material."
This was of particular interest to me, because of my conviction that the majority of U.S. public high school students now graduate without ever having read a complete nonfiction book or written a serious research paper. When I asked Mr. Wagner if he knew of other high schools which conducted focus groups or interviews with recent graduates, he said he only knew of three.
I would suggest that this is a practice which could be of great benefit to all our public high schools. Without too much extra time and effort, they could both interview each Senior, after she/he had finished all their exams, and ask what they thought of their academic experience, their teachers, and so forth. In addition, schools could hold at least one focus group each year with perhaps a dozen recent graduates who could compare their college demands with the preparation they had received in their high schools.
Lack of curiosity inevitably leads to lack of knowledge, and it is to be lamented that our high schools seem, in practice, not to wonder what their graduates actually think of the education they have provided, and to what extent and in what ways their high school academic work prepared or did not prepare them for their work in college. Mr. Wagner points out that:
Forty percent of all students who enter college must take remedial courses...and perhaps one of every two students who start college never complete any kind of postsecondary degree.
The Great Schools Project, in its report Diploma to Nowhere in the Summer of 2008, said that more than one million of our high school graduates are in remedial classes each year when they get to college, and the California State Colleges reported in November of 2009 that 47% of their freshmen are now in remedial English classes.
As national concern slowly grows beyond high school dropouts to include college "flameouts" as well, it might be time to consider the benefits of the ample knowledge available from students if they are allowed to participate in exit interviews and focus groups at the high school which was responsible for getting them ready to succeed academically in college and at work.
==============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Participation in Head Start has positive effects on children's learning while they are in the program, but most of the advantage they gain disappears by the end of 1st grade, a federal impact study of Head Start programs says.
A large-scale randomized control study of nearly 5,000 children released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this week shows that a group of children who entered Head Start at age 4 benefited from a year in the program, particularly in learning language and literacy. Benefits included learning vocabulary, letter-word recognition, spelling, color identification, and letter naming, compared with children of the same age in a control group who didn't attend Head Start.
Benefits for children who entered Head Start at age 3 were even stronger. By the end of Head Start, the group that had entered at age 3 showed gains in most of the language and learning areas that the 4-year-old group had, but also showed benefits in learning math, pre-writing skills, and perceptual motor skills.
After some prodding, yesterday the Obama administration released the long-overdue first grade evaluation of the federal Head Start program. As expected, the results show that the $7 billion per year program provides little benefit to children - and great expense to taxpayers.
The evaluation, which was mandated by Congress during the 1998 reauthorization of the program, found little impact on student well-being. After collecting data on more than 5,000 three and four-year-old children randomly assigned to either a Head Start or a non Head Start control group, the Department of Health and Human Services found "few sustained benefits". From the report:
A day after it was released, here’s a roundup of how the mainstream media are covering the HHS study showing that America’s $100 billion plus investment in Head Start is a failure:
Okay. There was one exception. According to Google News, one non-blog — with a print version no less — covered this story so far. The NY Times? The Washington Post? Nope: The World, a Christian news magazine. And they actually did their homework, linking to this recent and highly relevant review of the research on pre-K program impacts.
Wisconsin received an above-average grade for overall educational quality, although it ranked toward the bottom of the nation in efforts to improve schools by establishing grade-level academic standards and holding schools accountable, according to a report released Thursday.
The annual "Quality Counts" report, by national trade publication Education Week, gave the Badger state a C-plus for the overall status of its schools and improvement efforts. That was slightly higher than the grade given to the nation - a C - and ranked the state 16th among all the states and the District of Columbia.
Wisconsin fared best in the annual report for its school finance system and in a category the publication calls "chance for success," which measures factors from employment rates to kindergarten enrollment in states. The state was ranked ninth and 11th, respectively, in those areas, drawing B grades in each.
The state's lowest ranking came in the area of standards, assessments and accountability, with a C grade placing it 42nd in a category where 20 other states received grades of A or A-minus.
Hundreds of students attending Beverly Hills schools will have to find new campuses in the fall after a unanimous school board vote late Tuesday ended special permits for many children who live outside the city.
Following more than four hours of debate that lasted until almost midnight, the board agreed to allow all current high school students to continue applying for permits each year, an action that won applause from a packed, emotional but civil crowd at Beverly Hills High.
Seventh graders will be allowed to graduate from middle school next year. But students in elementary school and eighth grade will not be allowed to return to district schools for the 2010-2011 academic year unless their families move into the city.
Students, parents and lawmakers lobbied Wednesday for more diversity in Texas' social studies curriculum, before the state board of education adopts new classroom standards that will determine how history is taught for the next decade.
In more than six hours of public testimony, dozens of people took their chance to help shape the way millions of Texas school children learn topics from the Roman Empire to the entrepreneurial success of billionaire Bill Gates.
The public hearing sets up a tentative vote Thursday on the new standards. But, as usual in votes before the conservative-led board, the wide-reaching guidelines are full of potential ideological flashpoints.
The Los Angeles school district paid $200 million more in salaries than it budgeted last year even as it laid off 2,000 teachers and hundreds of other employees, according to an internal audit.
Auditors so far have unearthed no wrongdoing, but officials are puzzled, concerned and perhaps even a little embarrassed.
"We've been in the process of cleaning it up," said L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, who said his staff is verifying the size of the discrepancy and will, over time, determine how much relates to incomplete accounting and how much to something more serious.
The issue emerged in an audit, completed in December, on the arcane subject of "position control."
Bold plans for a new kind of middle school in Madison deserve encouragement and strong consideration.
The proposed Badger Rock Middle School on the South Side would run year-round with green-themed lessons in hands-on gardens and orchards.
The unusual school would still teach core subjects such as English and math. But about 120 students would learn amid a working farm, local business and neighborhood sustainability center.
Money is tight in this difficult economy. And the Madison School Board just committed to launching an expensive 4-year-old kindergarten program in 2011.
But organizers say Badger Rock wouldn't cost the district additional dollars because private donors will pay for the school facility.
Every American leader, from Barack Obama to Arnold Schwarzenegger, would agree that if there's one lifelong lesson to be learned from the implosion of the housing market, it is that before you sign on the dotted line, you'd better know what you're getting yourself into. You'd better ask clarifying questions. You'd better read the fine print. And you'd better make absolutely sure that there are no hidden clauses or trap doors that take you and those dependent on you to the dog house.
While our local districts are comprised of well intentioned, highly educated and reflective leaders who are doing their best to find resources to fill the budget shortfall, we are perplexed that some districts agreed to submit a "Memorandum Of Understanding" with the Governor's Office to participate in California's application for the federal Race to the Top (RTTT) competitive grant program. Many of our local teachers' associations hope that since more than half (60%) of school systems in California did not sign on to the State's MOU, that there is change in the RTTT program language so that district leaders, teachers, parents and stakeholders can work together with their local districts to come up with solutions that are based in research-supported strategies for all.
Earlier this month the governor signed California's RTTT legislation that includes: promoting national education standards, using test scores to evaluate and compensate teachers and principals, lifting a cap on charter schools, and allowing parents to transfer their children out of the state's lowest performing schools -- while providing no provision for transportation costs -- leaving this last piece a true hollow victory for parents.
The state Board of Education today heard from a bipartisan panel of experts as they prepare a series of recommendations to rectify the state's school funding issues.
I asked Head of the Class readers for suggestions to help solve Michigan's school funding issues, and folks earned straight A's.
I'll round up these suggestions and send them off to my friends at the state Education Department. Meanwhile, I'll share some of the best here. Not saying I agree with everything readers submitted, but some thoughtful -- and thought-provoking -- responses.
This came from Lord Nelson:
"The state and schools must get on the same fiscal year calendar. This has been a major problem for years.
Morning folks, I am running this op-ed on the Monday education page that I assemble each week for the AJC. Written by UGA professor William G. Wraga, it raises some interesting questions about whether the charter school movement has been co-opted by privatization proponents.
By William G. Wraga
The original intent of charter schools, to increase the professional autonomy of teachers so they could explore innovative ways to educate children and youth, has given way to other agendas that have grafted onto the movement.
Increasingly, charter school policies have been influenced by market ideology that treats the movement as a vehicle for privatizing public schools.
State of the Madison School District Presentation by Superintendent Dan Nerad 1/25/2010
via a kind reader's email:
A State of the District presentation will be made by Superintendent
Daniel Nerad to the community at a Board of Education meeting on Monday, January 25 at 5:30 p.m. in the library of Wright Middle School, 1717 Fish Hatchery Rd. The presentation will be the meeting's sole agenda item.
All community members are welcome to attend.
The presentation will provide an overview of important information and data regarding the Madison School District - including student achievement - and future areas of focus.
The visually-supported talk will be followed by a short period for questions from those in attendance.
The speech and Q&A period will be televised live on MMSD-TV Cable Channels 96/993 and streaming live on the web at www.mmsd.tv. It will
also be available for replay the following day at the same web site.
For more information, contact:
Ken Syke, 663-1903 or ksyke@madison.k12.wi.us , or
Joe Quick, 663-1902 or jquick@madison.k12.wi.us
Ken Syke
Public Information
Madison School District
voice 608 663 1903; cell 608 575 6682; fax 608 204 0342
First the good: This is an important acknowledgement from Weingarten and one with some big implications. She deserves credit for that. For a long time the union line on all this has been that it’s not hard to rid the field of low-performers, the problem is lousy administrators and a blame the teachers mindset. This isn’t all wrong by the way, administrators are not just chompin’ at the bit to rid schools of under-performing teachers. The problems are systemic ones. But by laying this on the table Weingarten is opening the door on that conversation more than a crack and pulling the rug out from under a lot of folks. That’s important. By calling the process “glacial” the genie is out of the bottle, perhaps more than Weingarten herself may realize.
In addition, bringing in Kenneth Feinberg is important. He demonstrated an ability for reasonableness in thorny situations. And because he has no aspirations within education he has no reason to pull any punches. Perhaps most importantly, with Feinberg you get the sense that if this is all a big ruse, that will become clear. He doesn’t seem like someone with a lot of patience for misdirection plays and so forth. In other words, involving him increases the accountability.
Ray Pinney over at New Jersey School Boards Association predicts that “moving the school board member elections to November, along with eliminating the vote on the school budget (if the budget is at or below cap), will occur in the next legislative session.” The benefits: moving school budgets to the Fall buys times for the Legislature to “find a solution to the budget crisis”; voter turnout will increase; it's cheaper than holding a separate April election. The deficits: “board members are concerned about the encroachment of party politics in a nonpartisan arena of education.”
The Record also chimes in, listing many of the same benefits as Pinney but painting NJEA as the loser if the bill passes through the Legislature:
Critics, including the New Jersey Education Association and state School Boards Association, worry that it will turn school board elections into partisan affairs. Officially, elected school boards are not affiliated with any political party. School board elections are supposed to focus on educational issues, not party dominance, these critics argue.
Maybe so. But currently, the teachers union appears to have more financial involvement than political parties do in school board elections, according to a report by the state Election Law Enforcement Commission. Statewide, about 9 percent of school board campaign contributions were from political parties, compared to 40 percent from donors with ties to the NJEA, the commission found in 2002.
In Winnie-the-Pooh, there is a significant moment when the bear is asked whether he wants honey or condensed milk with his bread. He replies "both". You can get away with this sort of thing if you are a much loved character in children's literature. But it is more problematic when great nations start behaving in a childish fashion. When Americans are asked what they want - lower taxes, more lavish social spending or the world's best-funded military machine - their collective answer tends to be "all of the above".
The result is that the US is piling up debt. A budget deficit of about 12 per cent of gross domestic product is understandable as a short-term reaction to a huge financial crisis. What should worry Americans is that, with entitlement spending set to surge, there is no credible plan to bring the budget deficit under control over the medium term.
The US has formidable strengths that will allow its government to be profligate for far longer than other nations could get away with. But if the US keeps running huge deficits, sooner or later the country will start flirting with bankruptcy. Oddly, it might be best if the crisis came sooner rather than later. For a surprising number of countries, running out of money has been the prelude to national renewal.
The two biggest and most beneficial geopolitical stories of the past 30 years - the spread of democracy and of globalisation - were driven by a succession of states finding their coffers empty.
The Los Angeles Board of Education Tuesday will consider new policies aimed at both assisting charters and holding them more accountable for their performance. The regulations, about a year in the making, include key provisions on conflicts of interest and services for disabled students that are opposed by the association that represents charter schools.
The number of charter schools is expected to increase sharply, partly as a result of a school board strategy that lets charter operators bid to take control of struggling traditional campuses as well as 50 new ones scheduled to open. Charter operators as well as groups of teachers are to submit final bids today for the first group of 30 campuses.
Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal Monday announced that there would be a vast change in education policy making of the government in 2010.
'You will see a paradigm shift in education policies. It will be an epochal year,' he said.
Describing the year 2010 as very important for his ministry, Sibal said that researchers and faculty would be given a stake in the system to boost higher education and research which are vital for a nation's development.
A law adopting statewide high school exams for graduation took effect in Pennsylvania on Saturday, with the goal of ensuring that students leaving high school are prepared for college and the workplace. But critics say the requirement has been so watered down that it is unlikely to have major impact.
The situation in Pennsylvania mirrors what has happened in many of the 26 states that have adopted high school exit exams. As deadlines approached for schools to start making passage of the exams a requirement for graduation, and practice tests indicated that large numbers of students would fail, many states softened standards, delayed the requirement or added alternative paths to a diploma.
People who have studied the exams, which affect two-thirds of the nation's public school students, say they often fall short of officials' ambitious goals.
"The real pattern in states has been that the standards are lowered so much that the exams end up not benefiting students who pass them while still hurting the students who fail them," said John Robert Warren, an expert on exit exams and a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
The one approach that Follow Through found had worked, Direct Instruction, was created by Siegfried Engelmann, who has written more than 100 curricula for reading, spelling, math, science, and other subjects. Engelmann dates DI's inception to an experiment he performed at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in the summer of 1964. He took two groups of three- to five-year-olds--one white and affluent, one black and poor--and tried to teach them "sophisticated patterns of reasoning. . . . things that Piaget said couldn't be taught before the age of formal operations--around 11 or 12." These things included concepts like relative direction (A is north of B but south of C) and the behavior of light entering and leaving a mirror. Both groups learned what Piaget said they couldn't at their age. But to Engelmann's consternation, the affluent kids learned faster. He traced the difference to a severe language deficit in the African-American group (the deficit that Hart and Risley later quantified) and resolved to figure out how to overcome it.
Engelmann and two colleagues, Carl Bereiter and Jean Osborn, went on to open a half-day preschool for poor children in Champaign-Urbana that dramatically accelerated learning even in the most verbally deprived four-year-olds. Children who entered the preschool not knowing the meaning of "under," "over," or "Stand up!" went into kindergarten reading and doing math at a second-grade level. Engelmann found (and others later confirmed) that the mean IQ for the group jumped from 96 to 121. In effect, the Bereiter-Engelmann preschool proved that efforts to close the achievement gap could begin years earlier than most educators had thought possible. The effects lasted, at a minimum, until second grade--and likely longer, though studies on the longer-term effects weren't performed.
I would also like to see the Administration's much discussed "program/curricular review" implemented prior to adding 4K.
Finally, I think it is likely that redistributed state tax programs to K-12 will decrease, given the State's spending growth and deficit problems. The financial crunch is an opportunity to rethink spending and determine where the dollars are best used for our children. I recommend a reduction in money spent for "adults to talk with other adults".
Board member Beth Moss proposed that 4K begin in 2010. This motion was supported by Marj Passman and Ed Hughes (Ed's spouse, Ann Brickson is on the Board of the Goodman Center, a possible 4K partner). Maya Cole, Lucy Mathiak and Arlene Silveira voted no on a 2010 start. The Board then voted 5-1 (with Ed Hughes voting no) for a 2011 launch pending further discussions on paying for it. Retiring Board member Johnny Winston, Jr. was absent.
I appreciate the thoughtful discussion on this topic, particularly the concern over how it will be financed. Our Federal Government, and perhaps, the State, would simply plow ahead and let our grandchildren continue to pay the growing bill.
"I'm going to say it's the hardest decision I've made on the board," said board member Marj Passman, who along with board members Beth Moss and Ed Hughes voted to implement four-year-old kindergarten in 2010. "To me this is extremely difficult. We have to have 4K. I want it. The question is when."
But board president Arlene Silveira argued the district's finances were too unclear to implement four-year-old kindergarten -- estimated to serve 1,573 students with a free, half-day educational program -- this fall.
"I'm very supportive of four-year-old kindergarten," she said. "It's the financing that gives me the most unrest."
Silveira voted against implementation in the fall, as did Lucy Mathiak and Maya Cole. Board member Johnny Winston, Jr. was absent.
On a second vote the board voted 5-1 to approve 4K for 2011-12. Hughes voted against starting the program in 2011-12, saying it should begin as soon as possible.
The plan will begin in September 2011. Initially, the board considered a measure to start in 2010, but a vote on that plan was deadlocked 3-3. A second motion to postpone the beginning until the 2011-2012 school year passed by a 5-1 vote.
The board didn't outline any of the financing as yet. District spokesman Ken Syke said that they're working on 2010 budget first before planning for the 2011 one.
The board's decision could have a large impact on the district and taxpayers as the new program would bring in federal funds.
This is the first real commitment from MMSD to establish comprehensive early childhood education.
What they don't have yet is a plan to pay for it.
It would've cost about $12.2 million to start 4k this fall, according to Eric Kass, assistant superintendent for business services.
About $4.5 million would come from existing educational service funds, $4.2 million from a loan, and about $3.5 million would be generated thru a property tax increase.
Some board members said they were uncomfortable approving a funding plan for 4k, because there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the district's budget as a whole.
Members first deadlocked in a three-to-three tie on whether to start 4-K this fall, then voted five-to-one to implement it the following year.
The cost this year would have been more than $12 million. The decision to delay implementation is due to serious budget problems facing the Madison District.
Nearly 1600 4-year-old students are expected to participate in the half-day kindergarten program.
The Board of Education is urged to vote NO on the proposal to implement 4-year old Kindergarten in the foreseeable future. In behalf of the public, we cite the following support for taking this action of reject the proposal:
The Board and Administration Has failed to conduct complete due diligence with respect to recognizing the community delivery of programs and services. There are existing bona fide entities, and potential future entities, with capacities to conduct these programs
Is not recognizing that the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Wisconsin authorizes the provision of public education for grades K-12, not including pre-K or 4-year old kindergarten
Has not demonstrated the district capacity, or the responsibility, to manage effectively the funding support that it has been getting for existing K-12 programs and services. The district does not meet existing K-12 needs and it cannot get different results by continuing to do business as usual, with the 'same service' budget year-after-year-after-year
Massachusetts enjoys a history as an educational leader dating to the early days of our country. The 1993 Education Reform Act positioned Massachusetts at the forefront of school reform and produced gains in student learning that are the envy of every other state. Now, the Obama administration's Race to the Top program gives Massachusetts another chance to lead, this time by fully integrating public charter schools into the fabric of the commonwealth's education system.
Charter schools are public schools open to all students. They're accountable for their performance and overseen by the state, which has closed down lower performing charters even when these schools outperformed nearby traditional public schools. But unlike traditional public schools, charters have autonomy and flexibility. For example, they can reward their best teachers and fire low performers. This autonomy--not the red herring of funding--is why charter schools are so contentious.
Across the country the experience with charter schools is mixed. Charter schooling is producing amazing schools, many among the best in America. At the same time, the openness of the charter sector is also creating some quality problems. Charter quality varies state by state and owes a great deal to different state polices.
Much has been written about how two education reform bills signed into law last week might affect California's chances of qualifying for federal Race to the Top funds.
As important as that funding is, the new laws' significance goes much deeper. It signals that the balance of power in education is shifting away from teachers unions and toward parents, where it belongs.
The "parent trigger," a controversial element of the legislation, is the best evidence of this turning point.
The concept was developed by the grass-roots group Parent Revolution in the Los Angeles Unified School District. If a majority of parents in a failing school petitions for an overhaul, the district must do something -- replace administrators, convert to a charter school or make other major reforms.
By law, tenured California teachers can convert their school to a charter if a majority of them vote for it, and that has happened dozens of times. But teachers unions and other groups opposed giving parents the same right. One group called it the "lynch mob" provision -- an odd choice of words, given that it would empower parents primarily in minority communities where failing schools abound.
The greatest revolution in education in the United States today is taking place in Los Angeles. It is the mandate of the Los Angeles Unified School District School Board to convert almost a third of its schools either to charter schools, the public schools of choice that are the one shining light in an otherwise dysfunctional system, or other alternatives such as magnet schools. The change is not only a mighty one for the state's largest school district, but in time it could double the number of public schools of choice in California.
What is remarkable is not just the magnitude of this earth-shaking change, but the complete shift of the paradigm about how we think about public education. The driving force behind this revolution is Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is not only a Democrat but also a former organizer for the United Teachers of Los Angeles, Los Angeles teachers' union. Villaraigosa took his nontraditional stand because, as he noted, LAUSD was racked with violence and plagued with a dropout rate of 50 percent, and showed no signs of improving.
A couple of things – first, the Neenah Schools contract settlement – I read the Post-Crescent account Friday and interpreted the recent deal as a total 4.4% over two years. No.
I talked with Neenah School District HR folks and the increase is an average 4.4% per year. Wow. Where are they going to get that kind of money? (December 29: Teacher cuts, not pay freezes recommended) And as much to the point, how will other districts in the area afford that?
As many of you know, if a school district (or municipality) can’t come to terms with their union(s), they can choose to go to arbitration – where neutral arbitrators decide which party’s last offer is best. That “best” includes which offer may be closest to other settlements in the area. And thanks to your legislators and mine, the state budget passed last June (yup, policy in the budget – imagine) says arbitrators are no longer required (point 3) to take local economic conditions or a district’s ability to pay into consideration.
Do you see a referendum and higher property taxes coming?
Race to the Top Dollars Several Wisconsin school districts are considering not applying for Race to the Top (RTTT) dollars.
With the governor urging action, the New York Legislature is considering lifting the cap on the number of charter schools in the state.
This has presented Michael Mulgrew, the new president of New York City's teachers union, with a choice: stand with the reformers, straddle the line or go to the mattresses against change.
He has chosen what's behind door No. 3.
In fact, despite the emergence of a powerful new national reform consensus led by President Obama, Mulgrew is consistently proving himself to be a bare-knuckled trench-fighter - a throwback to the muscle-flexing union leaders of the distant past.
Witness the evolution. In 1998, the UFT was one of the chief opponents of the original charter-school law. But in subsequent years, Mulgrew's predecessor, Randi Weingarten, repositioned it as a progressive union that did not fear charters and, in fact, embraced them. Weingarten's boldest move in this regard was her decision to open two UFT charter schools.
Charter tackles middle school challenges with young faculties and a no-nonsense attitude
Howard Blume:
At Lakeview Charter Academy, inexperienced teachers have strong support and high expectations.
Eleazar and Nora Gonzalez decided to send their son Daniel to Lakeview Charter Academy because, they said, large public middle schools have a reputation for gangs and drugs. They also worried about academics.
So they warmed to the no-nonsense welcomings issued at the first monthly parents night.
"It will be a miracle the day I don't give homework because home is to review," Alexandra Aceves, 25, announced, in English and Spanish, to the Gonzalez family and others crowded into a second-floor classroom.
The scene exemplified the characteristics of the 10 schools operated by Partnerships to Uplift Communities, a locally based charter management organization that, like others in Los Angeles, has focused on serving low-income minority communities. It has taken on, in particular, the thorny challenge of middle schools, especially in the Latino neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley and downtown.
DATE: January 11, 2010
TO: MMSD Board of Education
FROM: Active Citizens for Education
RE: 4-year old Kindergarten
Race to the Top
I am Don Severson representing Active Citizens for Education.
The Board of Education is urged to vote NO on the proposal to implement 4-year old Kindergarten in the foreseeable future. In behalf of the public, we cite the following support for taking this action of reject the proposal:
The Board and Administration Has failed to conduct complete due diligence with respect to recognizing the community delivery of programs and services. There are existing bona fide entities, and potential future entities, with capacities to conduct these programs
Is not recognizing that the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Wisconsin authorizes the provision of public education for grades K-12, not including pre-K or 4-year old kindergarten
Has not demonstrated the district capacity, or the responsibility, to manage effectively the funding support that it has been getting for existing K-12 programs and services. The district does not meet existing K-12 needs and it cannot get different results by continuing to do business as usual, with the 'same service' budget year-after-year-after-year
Will abrogate your fiduciary responsibility by violating the public trust and promises made to refrain from starting new programs in exchange for support of the "community partnership" urged for passing the recent referendum to raise the revenue caps
To reiterate, vote NO for District implementation of 4-K.
The Board of Education is urged to vote NO to signing the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the State of Wisconsin as part of an application for funding through the U.S. Department of Education ACT "Race to the Top" (RttT).
In behalf of the public we cite the following support for taking this action to reject the signing the RttT MOU: The Board and Administration
Does not have complete information as to the requirements, criteria, expectations and definitions of terms of the MOU or its material Exhibits; therefore, there has been serious inhibitors in time, effort and due diligence to examine, understand and discuss the significant implications and consequences of pursuing such funding
Does not have an understanding through the conduct of interactive discussions regarding the roles and relationships of the Board of Education, the Administration and the union regarding the requirements of the MOU as well as any subsequent implications for planning, implementation, evaluation and results for receiving the funding
Must understand that the Board of Education, and the Board alone by a majority vote, is the only authority which can bind the District in any action regarding the MOU and subsequent work plan. District participation cannot be authorized by the Board if such participation is contingent on actual or implied approval, now or in the future, of any other parties (i.e., District Administration and/or union)
Does not have an understanding of its personnel capacity or collective will to establish needs, priorities and accountabilities for undertaking such an enormous and complicated "sea change" in the ways in which the district conducts its business in the delivery of programs and services as appears to be expected for the use any RttT funding authorized for the District
Must also understand and be prepared for the penalties and reimbursements due to the state and federal governments for failure to comply with the provisions attached to any authorized funding, including expected results
To reiterate, vote NO for District approval for the MOU and application for funding through the RttT.
Standardized tests show that the highest-performing charters push low-income black and Latino youth to higher levels of achievement.
At their best, charter schools in Los Angeles shatter the conventional wisdom that skin color and family income are the greatest predictors of academic success.
Setting standards high and wringing long hours out of students and teachers, the highest-performing charters push low-income black and Latino youth to levels of achievement, as measured by standardized tests, more typical of affluent, suburban students.
If such schools were the norm, any debate over the value of charters would be moot. But there is no typical charter. They adhere to no single vision and vary widely in quality.
That said, a Times analysis showed that, overall, L.A. charter schools deliver higher test scores than traditional public schools. But charters lag well behind L.A. Unified's network of magnet schools.
Although charter schools come under withering criticism from some quarters, Ohio parents apparently aren't listening.
A new state Department of Education report shows that charter-school enrollment is up 8 percent this year, while the number attending traditional Ohio schools has fallen.
Currently, 89,000 students attend 332 charter schools statewide. At the same time, enrollment in traditional public schools has dropped slightly to 1.75 million students.
In Greater Cincinnati, 32 charter schools enroll more than 9,000 students. Enrollment increases mirror the state trend.
T.C.P. World Academy's enrollment increased from 389 last year to 410 students this year.
"We always have a waiting list," said Superintendent/Principal Karen French, who attributed the enrollment increase to performance results and word of mouth.
The Cincinnati College Preparatory Academy enrollment numbers are at about 700 students now, compared with nearly 650 last year.
My plan to attend the first public hearing on the controversial mayoral takeover plan for Milwaukee Public Schools was both simple and practical.
Get there late after all the speech-making and political posturing was over.
The hearing at MPS' central office at 5225 W. Vliet was scheduled to start at 10 a.m. Tuesday. As a veteran of countless public hearings during my career, I knew even if the room was packed with citizens, there would likely be a series of preliminary statements by various politicians and bureaucrats before members of the public got the chance at the microphone.
I figured arriving about an hour after the scheduled start would work just fine.
As it turned out, this was the kind of public hearing where most of the public had to wait for all of the elected officials in the room to have their say first.
he city's charter schools are providing a bigger boost to students' reading and math performance than are traditional public schools, according to a new study.
The study -- by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University -- is the second in four months showing positive results for the city's charter schools. It comes as proponents of the publicly funded, privately run schools are urgently pushing officials to lift the state's charter school cap above 200.
New York's application for as much as $700 million in federal aid under a competition known as Race to the Top -- which looks favorably on states that support charter school growth -- is due by Jan. 19.
But the money comes with a catch: The district must come up with $100 million from other sources to finish the job.
Where to get the money in a sparse economy remains a question, leaving some district leaders defensive while others shrug.
"We don't have $100 million," acknowledges school board member Dorthea Edgecomb.
One thing is for certain: There is give in a district budget that runs about $3 billion a year, so administrators are confident they can shift money from other programs to initiatives prescribed in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant.
Among the possible sources:
•$16 million over three years to create a computer lab to prepare for the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test to move online.
Enrollment is up, and overall, standardized test scores outshine those at traditional campuses. Even the L.A. Unified board has eased its resistance.
Over the last decade, a quiet revolution took root in the nation's second-largest school district.
Fueled by money and emboldened by clout from some of the city's most powerful figures, charter schools began a period of explosive growth that has challenged the status quo in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Today, Los Angeles is home to more than 160 charter schools, far more than any other U.S. city. Charter enrollment is up nearly 19% this year from last, while enrollment in traditional L.A. public schools is down. And a once-hostile school board has become increasingly charter-friendly, despite resistance from the teachers union. In September, the board agreed to let charters bid on potentially hundreds of existing campuses and on all 50 of its planned new schools.
Charter schools now are challenging L.A. Unified from without and within. Not only are charter school operators such as Green Dot Public Schools and ICEF Public Schools opening new schools that compete head-to-head with L.A. Unified, but the district's own schools are showing increasing interest in jumping ship by converting to charter status.
Charter public schools have existed in Massachusetts since 1995, after enabling legislation was included in the landmark Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA) of 1993. Originally conceived as laboratories for educational innovation1 that could offer choice for families and competition for traditional district schools, charters are public schools that may not discriminate as to whom they accept. In fact, aside from their often superior levels of academic achievement2, charter public schools differ from their district counterparts in only one major way: they enjoy some freedoms and autonomies that district schools do not in exchange for being subject to additional accountability requirements.
In Massachusetts, any group or individual can apply to establish and run a charter public school.3 Charters are authorized by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), and if the BESE approves an application for a charter school, the school is established based upon a contract, or charter, which outlines its performance goals and the standards to which it will be held.4 Once established, all charter public schools in Massachusetts are subject to a review by the authorizer, which takes place at least once every five years. If, during that review, it is found that a charter public school is not meeting the terms of its charter or failing to live up to requirements for academic progress set by the state and federal governments, the authorizer may close the school.5 These are the additional accountability requirements to which charter public schools are held.
Teach for America, a corps of recent college graduates who sign up to teach in some of the nation's most troubled schools, has become a campus phenomenon, drawing huge numbers of applicants willing to commit two years of their lives.
Do Teachers Need Education Degrees?
But a new study has found that their dedication to improving society at large does not necessarily extend beyond their Teach for America service.
In areas like voting, charitable giving and civic engagement, graduates of the program lag behind those who were accepted but declined and those who dropped out before completing their two years, according to Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, who conducted the study with a colleague, Cynthia Brandt.
The reasons for the lower rates of civic involvement, Professor McAdam said, include not only exhaustion and burnout, but also disillusionment with Teach for America's approach to the issue of educational inequity, among other factors.
The study, "Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Youth Service: The Puzzling Case of Teach for America," is the first of its kind to explore what happens to participants after they leave the program. It was done at the suggestion of Wendy Kopp, Teach for America's founder and president, who disagrees with the findings. Ms. Kopp had read an earlier study by Professor McAdam that found that participants in Freedom Summer -- the 10 weeks in 1964 when civil rights advocates, many of them college students, went to Mississippi to register black voters -- had become more politically active.
Quality Counts 2010 explores the widening national debate over common academic standards. Join the report's authors for an in-depth discussion of what they discovered through their research and reporting, as well as the EPE Research Center's annual updates in four key areas of education policy and performance.
I share my colleague Bill Turque's well-earned skepticism about reports of an agreement on a D.C. teacher's contract, but Washington Teachers' Union chief George Parker's encouraging public statement about the negotiations is one more sign that D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's job is safe-- for now.
There are smart people around town, and in the country (Rhee remains the most interesting story in U.S. education circles), who thought the D.C. Council criticism and teachers union legal action against her would end her tenure when she laid off 266 teachers and staff in October. But I ran into a council member at a holiday gathering last week who agreed with me that she has successfully ridden the crisis out.
So what's next? I can confidently predict she will be in trouble again. She is essentially attempting to charterize a public school system---give individual principals the same powers that charter school leaders have to hire and fire their teachers and create education teams that focus intensely on raising student achievement. No other major urban school system has had a leader with such an agenda before. She threatens many strongly held views about how schools should be run, and she isn't that diplomatic in going about it.
In his brilliant and distressing essay on the cruelties of English boarding school life in the 1910s, "Such, Such Were the Joys," George Orwell devoted a few lines to the prevailing attitudes toward feeding children. A boy's appetite was seen as "a sort of morbid growth which should be kept in check as much as possible." At Orwell's school, St. Cyprian's, the food was therefore not only unappetizing but calorically insufficient; students were often told "that it is healthy to get up from a meal feeling as hungry as when you sat down." Only a generation earlier, school meals began with "a slab of unsweetened suet pudding, which, it was frankly said, broke the boys' appetites." Orwell described sneaking, terrified, down to the kitchen in the middle of the night for a slice or two of stale bread to dull the hunger pains. His contemporaries at public school had it better, and worse: so long as their parents gave them pocket money to buy eggs, sausages, and sardines from street vendors, they scrounged enough food to get through the day.
This spirit of tut-tut character building through patronizing if affectionate deprivation comes off as thoroughly British, but for a time the attitude spanned the Atlantic. In 1906, one American principal opposed the growing enthusiasm for a school lunch program by warning: "If you attempt to take hardship and suffering out of their lives by smoothing the pathway of life for these children, you weaken their character, and by so doing, you sin against the children themselves and, through them, against society." Let them starve a little, went the thinking--it won't kill them, and it's better than getting fat on sweets.
Some of the most contentious areas of the new legislation include the option to close failing schools, convert them to charter schools or replace the principal and half the staff. Parents could exercise greater power within the public school system, with the possibility of moving children in the lowest-performing schools elsewhere or petition to turn around a chronically failing school.
The transfer option would be available to parents of children at the worst 1,000 schools. Parental petitions would be limited to 75 schools.
However, the implementation of any reforms is hazy, as the federal guidelines for the program cite broad goals, such as "making improvements in teacher effectiveness."
Mekeel assured the board members that supporting the state's application would not bind the district to accept the funds, if California is selected as a recipient.
"You'll have another decision to make before we're actually involved in this," he said.
The legislation package also provides a method for linking teacher evaluations to student performance -- an aspect arousing the fury of educators statewide.
Eight years after President George W. Bush signed the bill that branded an era of school reform, the education world is wondering when President Obama will seek to rewrite the No Child Left Behind law.
Obama officials, who for months have been on a "listening and learning" tour, are expected at some point to propose a framework for the successor to a law that is two years overdue for reauthorization. Time is growing short if the president aims for action before midterm elections that could weaken Democratic majorities in Congress.
As the eighth anniversary of the law's enactment passed quietly Friday -- an occasion that Bush marked throughout his presidency as a domestic policy milestone -- the regimen of standardized testing and school accountability remains intact.
Every year from grades three through eight, and at least once in high school, students must take reading and math exams. Every year, public schools are rated on the progress they make toward the law's goal of universal proficiency by 2014. And every year, states label more schools as falling short and impose sanctions on them, including shakeups and shutdowns.
Since Friday is the day for lists on The Sheet, here is one showing the 10 most important education policy issues for 2010, as determined by the non-profit American Association of State Colleges and Universities. I have shortened the analysis; for a fuller one, click here.
1) Fiscal Crises Facing States
The biggest force behind much of the policy action that will occur in 2010 is the quarter-trillion-dollar collective deficit that has devastated states' budgets in the past 24 months. Public colleges and universities throughout most of the country are slicing and dicing budgets because state governments have lowered--dramatically in some cases--public funding. This has been most obvious in California, where tuition increases are the highest ever and where enrollment caps have kept ten of thousands of students out of classrooms.
Fewer than half of the state's school districts have reached deals on new contracts with their teachers and the remaining have until the end of next week to do so.
The deadline comes as districts grapple with the possibility that the state might cut funding in coming months. Gov. Pawlenty is also pressuring districts to hold down raises.
Sandy Skaar, president of the union that represents the 2,800 teachers in Anoka-Hennepin, the state's largest school district, is clearly relieved to have reached a deal.
"I've been doing bargaining now for 12 years, and this was clearly the most difficult round of bargaining I've ever experienced," Skaar said.
Union members and the school board are expected to ratify the deal next week. In a district that's already cut millions of dollars and closed schools to trim costs, union leadership agreed to a contract that includes no salary increases.
The headline on the January print issue cover is meant to be provocative ["Will School Reform Fail?"]. I hope it's not predictive. The notion of failure might come as a surprise to those who follow the crucially important challenge of improving America's public education system. News over the past few years has been encouraging: more rigorous standards, a burgeoning charter school movement, private money and public talent focusing on a growing consensus about what works. And there are great suc cess stories--some of which we tell in this issue. But they are mostly on an indi vidual basis. Yes, the 100 best high schools we highlight are extra ordinary institutions. But America has 22,000 public high schools, and too many of them are dreadful. The good news is that there seems to be general agree ment among policymakers on how to make things bet ter. The logjam of inertia has been broken, with broad acceptance of the need for ambitious national standards and ways to measure account ability of schools and teachers; the need to train, deploy, and reward bet ter teachers--while moving bad ones out--and the value of competition. At last, some big-city mayors have as sumed the burden of fixing their schools and have struggled to cut through union and board-of-ed bu reaucracies. On the national level, Arne Duncan, the education secre tary, has an unprecedented pot of money to implement change and showcase best practices. This should be a moment of great promise.
Based on local news reports, it appears that a growing number of states are putting together bold plans in order to better position themselves for Race to the Top grants. But in a number of places, unions are erecting serious obstacles. For instance, in Florida, Minnesota, and Michigan, state union officials are discouraging their local affiliates from supporting the plans because of elements the union finds objectionable, such as merit pay programs and efforts to use student performance gains in teacher evaluations. In New Jersey, the union is slamming the state's application.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his department place a premium on collaboration, so states gain points in the Race to the Top scoring when they show that stakeholders from across the state support the proposal. That's certainly a reasonable inclination--wider buy-in suggests a greater chance at successful implementation.
My Dec. 10 column about that troublesome Washington area gifted child, future billionaire Warren Buffett, said our schools are never going to help such kids much. I said the gifted designation was often arbitrary and should be disposed of. Instead, we ought to find ways to let all kids explore their talents.
This produced a flood of comments on my blog. Many readers thought I was callous and daft. "Unfortunately, eliminating the label generally means that the schools give up doing anything for advanced learners," wrote a reader signing in as EduCrazy. Another commenter, CrimsonWife, said "if educators are fine with giving special attention and services to kids who are far out of the mainstream on the low end of the spectrum, why is it so controversial to provide specialized services to kids who are far out of the mainstream on the high end?"
What's up With Implementation of the Arts Task Force Recommendations - Who Knows
I have similar concerns about "meaningful" implementation of the fine arts task force recommendations. The task force presented its recommendations to the School Board in October 2008, which were based in large part on input from more than 1,000 respondents to a survey. It was another 7 months before administration recommendations were ready for the School Board, and its been another 6 months since then without any communication to the community or staff about: a) brief summary of what the School Board approved (which could have been as simple as posting the cover letter), b) what's underway, etc. Anything at a Board meeting can be tracked down on the website, but that's not what I'm talking about. There are plenty of electronic media that allow for efficient, appropriate communication to many people in the district and in the community, allowing for on-going communication and engagement. Some of the current issues might be mitigated, so further delays do not occur. Also, there already is a blog in the arts area that is rarely used.
Afterall, one of our School Board members, Lucy Mathiak, has a full-time job (in addition to being a school board member) as well as having a lot of other life stuff on her plate and she's developed a blog. It wouldn't be appropriate for administrators to comment as she does if they are wearing their administrator hats, but concise, factual information would be helpful. I mentioned this to the Superintendent when I met with him in November. He said he thought this was a good idea and ought to take place - haven't seen it yet; hope to soon, though.
In the meantime, I'm concerned about the implementation of one of the most important aspects of the task force's recommendations - multi-year educational and financial strategic plan for the arts, which members felt needed to be undertaken after the School Board's approval and in parallel with implementation of other efforts. Why was this so important to the task force? Members felt to sustain arts education in this economic environment, such an effort was critical.
From the task force's perspective, a successful effort in this area would involve the community and would not be a solo district effort. As a former member and co-chair of the task force, I've heard nothing about this. I am well aware of the tight staffing and resources, but there are multiple ways to approach this. Also, in my meetings with administrative staff over the summer that included my co-chair, Anne Katz, we all agreed this was not appropriate for Teaching and Learning whose work and professional experience is in the area of curriculum. Certainly, curriculum is an important piece, but is not the entire, long-term big picture for arts education. Also, there is no need to wait on specific curriculum plans before moving forward with the longer-term effort. They are very, very different and all the curriculum work won't mean much if the bigger picture effort is not undertaken in a timely manner. When the task force began it's work, this was a critical issue. It's even more critical now.
Does anyone have information about what's underway, meaningful opportunities for community and teacher engagement (vs. the typical opportunities for drive by input - if you don't comment as we drive by, you must not care or tacitly approve of what's being done is how I've heard the Teaching and Learning approach described to me and I partially experienced personally). I so hope not, because there are many knowledgable teaching professionals.
I know the topic of this thread was talented and gifted, but there are many similar "non-content" issues between the two topics. I'm hoping to address my experiences and my perspectives on arts education issues in the district in separate posts in the near future.
Nearly two years ago, Spanish teacher Emily Mueller was dismayed to learn that her charter high school, Northtown Academy in Chicago, was asking teachers to teach six classes instead of five.
There was no real discussion between teachers and administrators about alternative solutions, according to Mueller. There was no pay increase attached to the increased workload, either. The unilateral, unpaid workload increase "just didn't seem sustainable," she says.
But Mueller didn't want to leave the school, one of three chartered by an organization called Chicago International Charter School and operated by an organization called Civitas Schools. So she and a handful of colleagues did something that only a few charter school teachers have done: they began the long, difficult, but ultimately successful push to join the Illinois Federation of Teachers and negotiate a contract that now represents roughly 140 teachers at the three schools.
Rochester's teachers won't receive cost-of-living raises for two years but can still receive pay bumps for experience and continuing their education, under a two-year contract approved Tuesday.
The Rochester School Board ratified the 2009-2011 teachers contract Tuesday night. Nearly 60 percent of Rochester's 1,160 teachers approved the deal on Monday. The deal freezes the teacher's salary schedule for two years.
Rochester Education Association President Kit Hawkins said the teacher's union didn't want to approve raises, only to watch budget cuts take away more of their peers and more programming. The school district will need to cut $4.5 million next year, and the soft freeze will save the district some money compared to projections.
Rochester public schools cut more than $9 million last year.
"We need to feed our families and pay our bills like everyone else, but we also understand we're in a recession and the district is in grave financial (condition)," Hawkins said.
Berkeley High School sophomore Razan Qatami glanced at the wall clock in her advanced biology lab class and frowned. At 4:15 p.m., she still had about 10 more minutes before she was done for the day.
While most high school science classes incorporate labs into regular class time, Berkeley High requires most of its students to attend labs before or after school in the so-called zero or seventh periods.
That means showing up at 7:30 a.m. to, say, dissect frogs, or staying until 4:30 p.m. - additional class time that not surprisingly costs additional money.
School administrators would like to see that money spread around, specifically to help struggling students, and have proposed cutting out the supplementary lab classes.
Qatami would love to see those early and late labs discontinued.
TEACHERS UNIONS and state education officials may disagree over how to turn around failing schools, especially if it involves overhauling labor contracts. But both sides should be able to agree on one thing: Massachusetts students would benefit greatly from the infusion of $250 million in federal grant money.
A fierce competition is underway among more than 30 states for dollars from the Race to the Top program, an education initiative included in last year's stimulus bill. Applications are due Jan. 19, and those with the best chance of success will include statements of support signed by superintendents, school committee members, and heads of teachers unions. The unions will be the hardest to enlist. Scores of local union leaders across the state are waiting for signals from the Massachusetts Teachers Association and the state chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. And these union heads are waiting to hear more today from state education officials about how the grant application might affect their members.
Special-Ed Funds Redirected School Districts Shift Millions of Dollars to General Needs After Getting Stimulus Cash
Anne Marie Chaker:
Florida's Broward County Public Schools saved as many as 900 jobs this school year. Nevada's Clark County School District just added more math and tutoring programs. And in Connecticut's Bloomfield Public Schools, eight elementary- and middle-school teachers were spared from layoffs.
These cash-strapped districts covered the costs using a boost in funding intended for special education, drawing an outcry from parents and advocates of special-needs children.
A provision in federal law allows some school districts to spend millions of dollars of special-education money elsewhere, and a government report indicates many more districts plan to take advantage of the provision.
School administrators say shifting the money allows them to save jobs and valuable programs that benefit a wide range of students.
"We absolutely need this," said James Notter, superintendent of the Broward County Public Schools, the sixth-largest district in the country. He said the provision is "an absolute salvation for us," because the $32 million reduced from the local budget for special education allows him to save between 600 and 900 jobs that would likely have disappeared this school year.
The US public pension system faces a higher-than-expected shortfall of more than $2,000bn that will increase pressure on many states' strained finances and crimp economic growth, according to the chairman of New Jersey's pension fund.
The estimate by Orin Kramer will fuel investors' concerns over the deteriorating financial health of US states after the recession. "State and local governments are correctly perceived to be in serious difficulty," Mr Kramer told the Financial Times.
"If you factor in the reality of these unfunded promises, their deficits will rise exponentially."
Estimates of aggregate funding requirement of the US pension system have ranged between $400bn and $500bn, but Mr Kramer's analysis concluded that public funds would need to find more than $2,000bn to meet future pension obligations.
It could be the hardest $100 million the Hillsborough County School Board ever spent.
Members were in a festive mood Tuesday, nearly two months after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation picked the district to carry out a seven-year reform to boost teacher effectiveness. But by the end of their first workshop to discuss the plan, their feet were firmly on the ground.
"This is the largest single education grant in the history of the foundation," said senior Gates program officer Don Shalvey, describing Hillsborough's plan as a national model. "(But) we also think every organization has within it a flaw that could be fatal."
Dozens of speakers passionately disagreed about how to fix Milwaukee Public Schools during a daylong state Senate hearing Tuesday, with the only consensus being that a solution is unlikely to come soon in Madison.
Several hundred people packed the auditorium at MPS' central office to testify before the Senate Education Committee on a bill that would give the city's mayor more power over Milwaukee Public Schools and a separate measure that would allow the state's school superintendent to more easily intervene in failing schools in Wisconsin.
Like the Milwaukee legislators who have split over the mayoral-control legislation, members of the public at the hearing were fairly evenly divided about whether allowing the mayor, rather than the School Board, to appoint MPS' superintendent was necessary to improve academic performance in the school system or a step backward for democratic representation.
"How in the world does excluding parents from selecting their school leadership encourage them to participate in the education of their children?" Milwaukee resident Mike Rosen said.
Former Milwaukee School Board member Jeanette Mitchell said, however, that she supported mayoral control because it would give education a bigger platform in the city. She exhorted legislators to work together to reach a compromise to help students succeed in city schools.
Three uncontested candidates will run for three-year terms on the Madison school board in April.
Incumbents Beth Moss and Maya Cole are running for school board Seats 3 and 5, respectively. James Howard is running for Seat 4, currently held by Johnny Winston, Jr., who announced in November that he would not seek a third term.
Thomas Farley, director of the nonprofit Chris Farley Foundation and an expected candidate for Seat 4, filed two of the three necessary documents to get his name on the ballot, said Adam Gallagher, deputy clerk for the City Clerk's office. However, candidates also must file a minimum of 100 signatures of electors who reside in the Madison school district, and only 94 of signatures gathered by Farley by Tuesday's 5 p.m. deadline met that criteria, Gallagher said.
When it comes to education, Americans may disagree on most of the details, but they do agree on one point: Today's system is in need of an overhaul. Despite huge hikes in federal, state and local spending on schools in recent decades, policymakers, education advocates and experts, parents, employers and educators concur: The nation's children need better preparation for 21st century life and careers.
Whatever the system's good points and whatever its faults, there is strong agreement on the need to revamp for a new decade and radically changing job markets. With unemployment at 10%, many jobs go unfilled because of a shortage of skilled workers. Higher education costs more than too many people can afford and keeps rising much faster than inflation. And too many youngsters are left behind by a system that can't keep up with changing needs.
It's the end of the decade, a perfect time to take stock of how the cost of living, vis-à-vis public institutions, has changed. So Watchdog has tabulated the costs of more than 20 basic services, most provided or regulated by government.
In each case, we sought cost amounts effective Jan. 1 for four years: 1990, 2000, 2005 and 2010. We then tabulated the percentage increases over 10- and 20-year spans.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' online inflation calculator, $1 in 1990 was worth $1.32 in 2000 and $1.65 in 2009; $1 in 2000 was worth $1.26 in 2009. So the rate of inflation was 65% from 1990 to 2009, and 26% from 2000 to 2009.
Few of the fees and charges we tracked stayed within those ranges. And besides the mill rates used to calculate property taxes (which are offset by increases in assessed value), only one measure showed a decline: the rate and per-customer cost of natural gas. MGE spokesman Steve Kraus attributes this to falling demand.
Bill Lueders notes that Madison School District property taxes are up 83.9% since 1989 and 21.6% since 1999.
Ten years ago, deep in the Rio Grande Valley, two 23-year-old Teach for America teachers opened an after-school tutoring program. Through sheer force of will, the program became a public charter school, housed on the second floor of a local church. Eventually, that school became a cluster of 12 schools, serving kids from Colonias -- communities so impoverished that some lack potable water.
IDEA College Prep graduated its first high school class in 2007 with 100 percent of the seniors headed to college. Last month, U.S. News and World Report ranked it No. 13 among America's public high schools.
"It's not magical resources," IDEA Principal Jeremy Beard told me. "It's the thinking around the problem. I have no control over what goes in on in the kids' Colonia. But we can create a culture. Kids here feel part of a family, part of a team, part of something special."
I have worked in education for most of the past 17 years, as a first-grade teacher, as an education lawyer and, currently, for Teach for America. I used to be married to the D.C. schools chancellor. And the views expressed here are mine alone. I tell the IDEA story because too often when we look at the sorry state of public education (on the most recent international benchmark exam conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment, U.S. high schoolers ranked 25th out of 30 industrialized nations in math and 24th in science) we believe the results are driven by factors beyond our control, such as funding and families. This leads to lethargy, which leads to inaction, which perpetuates a broken system that contributes to our economic decline.
Schools these days focus mostly on preparing students for tests of reading and math, but during lunchtime at Kenmoor Middle School in Landover, the youngsters sitting in a small circle were tackling the really deep questions: Ethics. Fairness. How to split dessert.
All three issues turned up as the seventh- and eighth-graders in the Philosophy Club tackled the question of the day: "Imagine that you are babysitting a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old. The parents have left some treats for dessert: two bananas, a lollipop and an ice cream bar. The parents' instructions are to allow each child to choose one treat. Unfortunately, both kids want the ice cream bar. How can you distribute the goods fairly?"
Someone suggested that they split the ice cream bar in half, but other students had other ideas.
Sometimes it is the smartest, most concerned policymakers who do the most harm to schools. My favorite recent example is the Healthy Schools Act, a bill introduced by D.C. council member Mary M. Cheh and Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray two weeks ago.
Cheh and Gray are good people trying to address a national epidemic of childhood obesity and insufficient physical activity. In Cheh's press release she notes that 18 percent of D.C. high school students are obese, 70 percent fail to meet the U.S. Centers for Disease Control recommended levels of physical activity and 84 percent do not attend physical education classes daily. It is their solution that troubles me.
I am unqualified to comment on the food parts of the bill. I have never written about nutrition. I would be embarrassed to reveal the amount of crackers, cookies and ice cream I eat each day. I can only wonder how D.C. will pay for the required fresh produce from local growers in all schools, and how they will get students to eat it.
The bill's physical education requirements are its worst part-- a nifty-sounding reform that many of the District's best principals and teachers will declare one of the dumbest ideas they ever heard.
How sweeping education reforms signed into law Monday will be implemented in Michigan remains unclear to area school officials.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm on Monday signed reforms that make it easier to close failing schools, link teacher pay to performance and hold school administrators accountable. The bills also raise the dropout age from 16 to 18, starting with the Class of 2016; allow up to 32 more charter schools to open each year; give professionals from areas other than education an alternative way to become teachers, and allow for cyber-schools to educate students who have dropped out online.
State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said up to 200 low-performing schools could end up under state control as a result of the new laws.
The legislation is part of Michigan's effort to win money from the Obama administration's Race to the Top competition tied to education reform. Michigan could get up to $400 million if it's among the winners.
Local school boards and unions now face a Thursday deadline to sign a "Memorandum of Understanding" that indicates their support for the reforms. The memorandums are to be included with the state's Race to the Top application. School districts where the board and union do not sign an agreement risk losing their share of the money.
With growing appeals for changes in New York's charter school law, prominent elected officials joined the United Federation of Teachers today in a call for major reforms which would ensure that charter schools become public schools in the fullest meaning of the term -- not private schools supported with public funds.
State Senator John Sampson, leader of the Senate's majority Democratic Conference, and New York City Comptroller John Liu joined UFT President Michael Mulgrew in this call. State Senators Eric Schneiderman and Toby Stavisky and State Assembly members Michael Benedetto, Alan Maisel, Jose Peralta, Adam Clayton Powell, IV and Linda Rosenthal were present and participating in the call.
Among the proposed changes are:
a mandate for charter schools to serve the same proportion of the neediest students as the local community district in which they are located;
America's teachers' colleges are facing some pressure to reinvent themselves.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been leading the assault, with a series of speeches calling for better teacher training. Duncan says it's crucial that education schools revamp their curricula so they can help replace a wave of baby boomers who will soon retire from teaching.
One university is trying to rebuild its teacher-training program from the ground up.
At the University of Michigan School of Education, Dean Deborah Ball and her faculty have taken apart their training program and reassembled it, trying to figure out what skills teachers really need.
Katie Westin, a senior at the University of Michigan and a student teacher, says that when she compares notes with teachers-in-training at other schools, it's clear that her program is more hands-on.
"We expect people to be reliably able to carry out that work. We don't seem to have that same level of expectation or requirement around teaching," Ball says.
By the time the first bell rings at Brookfield Central High School, most of the students in Room 22 are immersed in college-level vector equations, reviewing for their final exam on the Friday before Christmas.
Senior Lea Gulotta, however, looks on the bright side of waking early every morning for the past semester so she can take a Calculus 3 class taught at the school by a college professor.
"We get to sleep in for a month," she said, noting that the regular high school semester won't end until mid-January.
There's another positive to Brookfield Central's agreement with the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha continuing education department, which brought the advanced mathematics class to the high school this year as part of the state's youth options program. Under youth options, school districts pick up the costs of courses at Wisconsin colleges if they don't have similar offerings available to students.
Instead of seeing students spend extra time commuting and attending class on a college campus, the arrangement placed the professor in the high school to teach 11 students who had completed advanced-placement calculus as juniors. Two of the students in the class come from the Elmbrook School District's other high school, Brookfield East.
Elmbrook pays UW-Waukesha the same tuition that it would pay if its students chose to attend the college campus on their own, she said.
TWO years ago, during lunch with a second-grade teacher in the Chicago area, I mentioned that I was going to substitute teach. The teacher -- I'll call him Dan -- started into a story about his own experience with a substitute, which is easily summarized: Dan left a lesson plan; the sub didn't follow it. So, he ended by asking, how hard can substitute teaching be?
I smiled, said nothing and bit into my Reuben.
Over the next two years, I would learn -- as I subbed once a week for a variety of classes, including kindergarten, sixth grade, middle-school social studies, high-school chemistry, phys ed, art, Spanish, and English as a second language -- that Dan's story is standard teacher fare. Last time I heard it, though, I didn't bite my sandwich or my tongue.
As much as I became frustrated by the lack of training and support, I was most angered by how many days teachers were out of their classrooms. Nationwide, 5.2 percent of teachers are absent on any given day, a rate three times as high as that of professionals outside teaching and more than one and a half times as high as that of teachers in Britain. Teachers in America are most likely to be absent on Fridays, followed by Mondays.
This means that children have substitute teachers for nearly a year of their kindergarten-through-12th-grade education. Taxpayers shell out $4 billion a year for subs.
I subbed for many legitimately ill teachers and for many attending educational conferences. But my first assignment was to fill in for a sixth-grade teacher who went to a home-and-garden show. My last was for a first-grade teacher who said she needed a mental health day because her class was so difficult.
An overwhelming majority of teachers are convinced that creativity can be applied to every domain of knowledge and that everyone can be creative. They also subscribe to the idea that creativity is a fundamental skill to be developed in schools, even if they are more ambiguous about how it can be taught, and less sure still about how it can be assessed.
Survey respondents were asked to express their opinion about how they view creativity, as a general concept as well as in the school context, on a scale of 5 ranging from 'strongly agree' to 'strongly disagree'. The results are displayed in Figure 1.
Literature reports that very often people, including teachers, refer to creativity as being related exclusively to artistic or musical performances, as springing from natural talent, and as being the characteristic of a genius. These myths about creativity stifle the creative potential of students and create barriers to fostering creativity in schools.
To a large extent, the teachers that took part in our survey have an understanding of creativity which goes against such myths. Almost all teachers who took part in the survey are convinced that creativity can be applied to every domain of knowledge (95,5%) , and to every school subject. More than 60% are even strongly convinced of this. They confirm this view very clearly by disagreeing to a large extent with a statement restricting creativity to the realm of artistic and cultural expression (85%).
More minority students need to be lured into the sciences. One program has been a resounding success.
At most universities, freshman chemistry, a class I've taught for nearly 40 years, is the first course students take on the road to a career in the health professions or the biological or physical sciences. It's a tough course, and for many students it's the obstacle that keeps them from majoring in science. This is particularly true for minority students.
In 2005, more than two-thirds of the American scientific workforce was composed of white males. But by 2050, white males will make up less than one-fourth of the population. If the pipeline fails to produce qualified nonwhite scientists, we will, in effect, be competing against the rest of the world with one hand tied behind our backs.
We've been able to survive for the last several decades in large measure because of the "brain drain" -- the fact that the most able students from other countries, particularly China and India, have come here to study science at our best universities and, in many cases, have stayed to become key players in our scientific endeavors.
It was Deadline Day at YES Prep North Central, the day college applications were supposed to be finished, the day essays, personal statements and a seemingly endless series of forms needed to be slipped into white envelopes, ready for submission.
The day the school's first graduating class would take one leap closer to college.
The seniors inside Room A121 were sprinting, scurrying and stumbling to the finish line. They hunched over plastic banquet tables, brows furrowed and eyed fixed on the screens of Dell laptop computers. Keyboards clattered, papers rustled and sighs swept across the room like waves of nervous energy.
There is a lot of talk about education reform, but let's face it: True education reform takes place once the classroom door closes. A recent report by the National Council on Teacher Quality ("Human Capital in Seattle Public Schools") reinforces this point. The most effective education reform begins and ends in the classroom. Nothing we do at the state level can replace the value of a superior teacher.
So what is the measurement of a premier educator? It's more than just a student's test scores.
The best teachers value their students as individuals. Danyell Laughlin, an English teacher in Silverdale, works tirelessly to show students that each one "of them is valuable and has valuable things to share." Every child is a priority, and because that child is valued, that child values learning.
Our best teachers foster a respect for self and others, a love for learning, and a child's capacity to dream and achieve those dreams.
The best teachers also believe that each and every child can learn. Their belief in their students is contagious.
Statistically, no. A good teacher is easy to find if you check their SAT scores, their resumes and then see if their students' standardized test scores beat the average and close the gap. But a really good teacher--one that isn't just perfect on paper, but is also effective in the classroom--is harder to seek out. No one can pinpoint what exactly makes a good teacher, if not their results from the students.
So the search begins. The Gates Foundation, a large proponent for education reform, has dedicated $2.6 million towards finding what exactly makes a good, effective teacher. The study, called the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET), will last two years, beginning with the 2009 school year, with the goal to figure out how to measure the effectiveness of a teacher without having to rely on the performance results from the students' standardized test scores.
This study is going beyond just measuring test scores. They realize that it is going to be hard to take into consideration what all a teacher does in the classroom. They've upped the ante by asking for volunteer teachers to sign up their classrooms to be observed by way of videotape, their students' test scores and also by taking test themselves.
As five Wisconsin school districts face increased pressure to return millions of dollars in loans, the $200 million in investments they undertook with money from that debt are almost entirely without value and unlikely to pay back when they mature in 2013, according to representatives for the districts.
The districts said in a statement to the Journal Sentinel that one of the investments had stopped paying interest two months ago after a dramatic decline in value. The statement did not indicate which investment had ceased paying interest, but one of the schools' attorneys, Stephen Kravit, had earlier identified it as an investment devised by the Royal Bank of Canada known as Sentinel Limited Series 2.
The five districts involved - Kenosha, Kimberly, Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee and Whitefish Bay - invested $115 million in Sentinel 2 through trusts, using a combination of existing assets or borrowed money.
The $10 million invested by Whitefish Bay and $5 million by Kimberly were the entire amounts they invested in complicated transactions undertaken in 2006 on the advice of bankers from Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Inc. The West Allis-West Milwaukee and Waukesha districts invested $40 million each in Sentinel 2 and Kenosha invested $20 million.
Madison's Assistant Superintendent for Business Services, Erik Kass, formerly worked for the Waukesha School District.
I am still receiving e-mails about my Nov. 23 column on Dan Goldfarb, the first teacher to share with me the results of an evaluation under the new D.C. teacher assessment plan, IMPACT.
Goldfarb was not happy with his score, 2.3 out of a possible 4 points. He said the rules forced his evaluator to focus on trivia, such as whether he had been -- to quote the IMPACT guidelines -- "affirming (verbally or in writing) student effort or the connection between hard work and achievement." He said the evaluator told his principal of his complaints about the program and about D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, violating confidentiality.
Goldfarb had legitimate gripes. But his evaluation was a tiny sample of this innovative attempt to rate teachers. When I sought evaluations from teachers not as opposed to IMPACT, several said they would send theirs, but so far only one has.
That evaluation differed from Goldfarb's in intriguing ways. The score was almost perfect, 3.92 out of 4. The analysis, however, seemed somewhat out of sync with the thinking behind the program.
The state Senate's Education Committee will hold a public hearing at the Milwaukee Public Schools central office, 5225 W. Vliet St., at 10 a.m. Tuesday to hear people's thoughts about proposals to change the way MPS is governed.
Some people - Gov. Jim Doyle and some legislators - seem to think this hearing is a significant step toward legislative action. I'm dubious, for two reasons:
1. Count me as one who thinks the prospects are not good for action in the Legislature on any major changes, especially the idea of giving control of MPS to Milwaukee's mayor. The Democratic legislative leaders made that clear by not even taking up proposals in December. Republicans aren't in the mood to help Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democratic candidate for governor. (Today's political trivia question: How many members of the Senate Education Committee are from Milwaukee? Zero.)
2. I'm tired of the political posturing, on all sides, about change in MPS. With a few exceptions, so little of it is attached to real commitment to doing better. And so much of it pays little attention to the facts, with ideology, belief or just plain incorrect statements trumping careful, focused use of real, live facts.
Madison School District's Infinite Campus Teacher Tool and Parent/Student Portal Report: Approximately 2/3 of Middle and High School Parents don't use it
This report summarizes data on the use of Infinite Campus teacher tools and the Parent and Student Portal. Data come from a survey conducted among all teachers responsible for students within the Infinite Campus system and an analysis of the Infinite Campus data base. Below are highlights from the report.
About half of all middle and high school teachers responsible for providing grades to students are using the grade book tool.
Grade book use has declined over the past year at the middle school level due to the introduction of standards- based grading. In addition to the change in grading approach, the grade book tool in Infinite Campus does not handle standards-based grading as efficiently as traditional grading.
Lesson Planner and Grade book use is most common among World Languages, Physical Education, and Science teachers and less common among fine arts and language arts/reading teachers.
Grade book and other tool use is most common among teachers with less than three years of teaching experience. Seventy percent ofteachers responding to the survey within these years of experience category report using the tools compared with about half of all other experience categories.
Most of the other teacher tools within Infinite Campus, e.g., Messenger, Newsletters, reports, etc., are not being used due to a lack of familiarity with them.
Many teachers expressed interest in learning about how they can use other digital tools such as the Moodie learning management system, blogs, wikis, and Drupal web pages.
About one third of parents with high school students use the Infinite Campus Parent Portal. Slightly less than 30 percent of parents of middle school students use the Portal.
Having just been introduced to elementary schools this fall, slightly more that ten percent of parents of students at this level use the Portal.
Parents of white students are more likely to use the Portal than are parents of students within other racial/ethnic subgroups.
About half of all high school students have used the Portal at one time this school year.
About one in five middle school students have used the Portal this year.
Variation in student portal use is wide across the middle and high schools.
Follow up is planned during January 2010 with staff on how we can address some ofthe issues related to enhancing the use of these tools among staff, parents, and students.
This report is scheduled to be provided to the Board of Education in February 2010.
The Board ofEducation over the past two months has received information relative to the programdesignofa4-kprogramandsomebudgetscenariosrelativetothe4-kprogram. The budget scenarios showed the Community Model Option where the community providers provided to the district the amount necessary to support their programs and two concepts for allowing this fee to decrease.
Over the past month, administration and the community providers have met to discuss the amount to be brought forward as a fee per child for the community early childhood centers. The amount within your packet reflects that amount the early childhood community has asked ofthe district.
Information Contained in your packet: Budget Impact:
The budget impact sheet is reflective of all costs associated with the operation ofa community based model for four-year-old kindergarten. This model reflects the latest numbers proposed by the community for the per child reimbursement, along with an escalator of 3% each year. The model also reflects the latest information from the DPI, that shows we are currently not likely to be eligible to receive the 4-k startup grants with the State of Wisconsin budget. These numbers show a negative budget balance of $4,188,069 in year 1 and a negative budget balance of $243,046in year two, for a total two year negative balanceof $4,431,115. This becomes the target for further information within your packet relative to "Financing Options" for 4-k.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has vowed to protect funding for teachers and classroom supplies as she prepares to cut the system's overall budget by $22 million because of shrinking tax revenue and the end of one-time federal stimulus spending.
The fiscal 2011 budget, which begins in October, is projected to shrink from $779 million to $757 million. Spending would fall most sharply in the "school support category," including security, food service and after-school programs. Rhee's central office would also face cuts.
But Rhee said this week that financial constraints won't limit her efforts to transform historically poor academic performance in the 45,000-student system.
"Obviously financial times like this make things tough, but no, they won't stop us from being successful," Rhee said in an e-mail Thursday.
I spent the morning in a U.S. Department of Education technical-assistance planning seminar on Race to the Top, and have picked up a lot of interesting tidbits. Many states are in attendance--including Hawaii, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Tennessee (including education commissioner Tim Webb), just to name a few. Interestingly, Texas is also in attendance, I'm told.
The seminar will continue well into the afternoon, but so far, here are the insights I've picked up about this $4 billion competition:
Race to the Top Director Joanne Weiss emphasized that there will be a lot of losers in Phase 1 of the application, so states shouldn't worry if they want to wait until the second round of competition. "We promise there will be plenty of money left in Phase 2," she said.
Attached are the revised performance measures we will use to help monitor progress in meeting the Strategic Objectives Action Steps. Goals for the WKCE scores remained at 100% success rate as that is the requirement in No Child Left Behind legislation. Other goal areas were reduced to 95% as the target.
Identification Criteria - Several action steps within Goal 1 are based on the need for a clearly defined criteria and process to identify students as talented and gifted. The Talented and Gifted (TAG) Division staff has established and confirmed identification criteria including: 1) consideration of students' levels of academic performance; 2) grade level performance data employing the historical two-year above grade level as a marker; and 3) consideration of several student data sources, including input and information from teachers and family. Work will continue into the spring semester to incorporate these data sources to create a student profile and, pending individual student performance level indicators, a Differentiated Education Plan (DEP) for students.
Monitoring Model - TAG staff continues work with the Research and Evaluation Department to create a model for student data analysis to aid in identification. These models will be research- based and provide the information needed to make identification, programming, and additional diagnostic decisions pertaining to individual students. It has been determined that the Student Intervention Monitoring System (SIMS) can be used as the tracking and reporting system. It currently containing much of the student information needed, including assessment and other data from Infinite Campus, that will make up the student profile component of a TAG student report. T AG staff will use SIMS in the current form to develop student profiles and Differentiated Education Plans (DEPs). Next steps include customizing reports in SIMS to meet future documentation/Plan development needs=
Why would Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, running for governor, continue an apparently losing fight on a controversial local issue that doesn't gain him any votes statewide while tearing apart his political base at home?
Barrett's attempt to seize control of Milwaukee Public Schools from the elected School Board failed to muster enough support in the Legislature recently to even bring up the issue after Gov. Jim Doyle called a special session. The Legislature adjourned without discussing mayoral control.
Meanwhile, the Milwaukee School Board, under the leadership of President Michael Bonds, has narrowed its national search for a new superintendent down to three finalists -- two African-Americans and a Latino -- all with experience in urban school districts.
Extending an olive branch, Bonds invited Barrett to personally interview the three finalists and make a recommendation to the board.
He also named Barrett to a community panel advising the board on the selection. The diverse committee includes Alphonso Thurman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee dean of education, state Rep. Annette Polly Williams, former Mayor Marvin Pratt, private philanthropist Julia Uihlein and prominent Latino, Hmong, American Indian and union leaders.
On Monday, the Board of Education will have a presentation by the planning group that is proposing an environmentally-focused project-based charter middle school. The Badger Rock Middle School is the first charter proposal to come before the board since the Studio School debacle a few years back. From what we are hearing in the community, it is not likely to be the last (more on that later).
Proposed Charter: Badger Rock Middle School
What we will be deciding now: The board will be asked to approve the group's initial proposal, which will form the basis of a planning grant application to the Department of Public Instruction. If the planning grant is awarded, the group will carry out additional work necessary to develop and design the charter school in greater detail, and develop a proposal that would come before the board requesting approval of the creation of the school and its charter.
Fifteen years ago, the National Education Commission on Time and Learning explained that the American school calendar of 180 six-hour days stands as the "design flaw" of our education system, for schools could not be expected to enable children to achieve high standards within the confines of the antiquated schedule. Today, a small but growing number of schools have begun to overcome this "flaw" by operating with school days substantially longer than the six-hour norm and, in many cases, a calendar that exceeds the standard 180 days.
The National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL), with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has produced this groundbreaking report on the state of what can be called "expanded- time schools." Through this effort, NCTL has helped to define and bring together this previously unidentified category of schools, while still recog- nizing the considerable diversity among this group. Extracting and analyzing information from NCTL's newly created database of over 650 schools that feature an expanded day and/or year, this report describes the various trends emerging among these schools, including issues related to costs, time use and student outcomes. The searchable database is available on our website, www.timeandlearning.org.
"Academic standards were raised" They were? Where? How? By whom? I didn't see anyone raising any standards this year.
"The Legislature amended the Basic Education Act, a giant leap forward in an 18-year education-reform effort." Yes, they voted for it, but they didn't fund it and they are now in Court saying that they are already fulfilling their obligation to funding education, so they are denying it. The amended act is lip service - hardly a step forward, let alone a giant leap.
They said that the delay in making high stakes math and science tests a graduation requirement was a gaffe. No, the gaffe has been miseducating students in math and science for the past ten years. These tests were supposed to be used to hold adults accountable, not students. Where are the adults who have suffered negative consequences for these failures? Why punish the students, the people with the least power to influence the system?
Career academies are a time-tested model for improving academic achievement readying students for both college and careers, and engaging the world outside of school in the work of reforming them. As lawmakers work to craft policies that will dramatically improve American public education, career academies should be recognized for their effectiveness and included in reform efforts.
Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.
The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.
Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.
Science teachers were understandably horrified by the proposal. "The majority of the science department believes that this major policy decision affecting the entire student body, the faculty, and the community has been made without any notification, without a hearing," said Mardi Sicular-Mertens, the senior member of Berkeley High School's science department, at last week's school board meeting.
They're not quite gambling halls or casinos, but public schools might have to get a Games of Chance License from the state if they want to continue some of their fundraisers.
According to a new proposal, which will be voted on later this month, schools cannot hold raffles, such as 50-50s or Chinese auctions, unless they have the license from the state Racing and Wagering Board, which also involves getting an ID number and filling out numerous forms.
The changes, updated yesterday, followed an earlier proposal that banned raffles all together. The policy, along with parents' concerns, was outlined in an Advance story on Monday.
City officials said the policy was originally written by the Department of Education's legal department, but once they realized the impact it would have on PTAs, raffles were approved once again.
This state does well in schooling better-off suburban children. But it fails low-income children, who are mostly concentrated in city schools. Poor students in the fourth and eighth grades in Connecticut score three grade levels below their more comfortable peers -- the worst achievement gap in the nation -- even though this state is among the highest per-pupil spenders in the nation.
Connecticut's goals for the next decade, starting in 2011, should be to end that terrible distinction and reach the No. 1 spot on "the nation's report card," the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Gov.-elect Dan Malloy's choice of education commissioner will be critical.
The legislature and Board of Education made commendable strides in 2010 by increasing pre-K funding and adding more rigorous high school graduation requirements in math, science and languages, among other things.
The end of the year is a time to count blessings. Let's start with the underappreciated fact that the Washington area is the best place in the country for children to both learn the mysteries of science, math, English and history, and to become comfortable with stark differences in race and culture.
I've looked all over the country for schools--particularly high schools--that have a critical mass of committed parents and educators of various backgrounds who are determined to create a lively learning environment for every child. It was hard to find that when I lived in Pasadena, Calif., which was still reeling from massive white flight after a desegregation fight. It wasn't much better when we moved to Westchester County, N.Y., where schools were very short of minorities and low-income people.
Coming to Washington, it took time to see the difference. As usual, everyone complained about public education. That's an American pastime. But the more high schools I visited here, the more I realized this was---at least relatively speaking-- the Shangri-la of American education. There were more schools in one place than I had ever seen that fit my profile---well-mixed, well-run, with families committed to strong instruction. They shrugged off neighbors who, betraying unexamined biases, wondered how they could send their kids to THOSE schools.
CAL has completed a comprehensive survey of K-12 foreign language programs nationwide, describing how our schools are meeting the need for language instruction to prepare global citizens. For comparative purposes, the survey has collected statistical data in 1987, 1997, and 2008. Elementary and secondary schools from a nationally representative sample of more the 5,000 public and private schools completed a questionnaire during the 2007-2008 school year. The 2008 survey results complement and enhance the field's existing knowledge base regarding foreign language instruction and enrollment in the United States.
The report of the survey, Foreign Language Teaching in U.S. Schools: Results of a National Survey, provides detailed information on current patterns and shifts over the past 20 years in languages and programs offered, enrollment in language programs, curricula, assessment, and teaching materials, qualifications, and trainings, as well as reactions to national reform issues such as the national foreign language standards and the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. The survey results revealed that foreign language instruction remained relatively stable at the high school level over the past decade but decreased substantially in elementary and middle schools. Moreover, only a small percentage of the elementary and middle schools not teaching languages planned to implement a language program within the next two years. The findings indicate a serious disconnect between the national call to educate world citizens with high-level language skills and the current state of foreign language instruction in schools across the country. This report contains complete survey results, along with recommendations on developing rigorous long sequence (K-12 programs whose goals are for students to achieve high levels of language proficiency, and are of interest to anyone interested in increasing language capacity in the United States. 2009.
My colleague Nick Anderson, the Post's national education reporter, has done a wonderfully balanced and nuanced job of answering a question I am often asked: If Arne Duncan is such a hotshot education secretary, then why are the Chicago schools he once led so bad?
Anderson's front page story Tuesday provides all the relevant facts---disappointing test score gains, watered-down Illinois state standards, Duncan turnaround projects that didn't work. But he also puts it in context, showing where Duncan forced some improvements and how daunting Chicago's problems are.
He also makes it clear that you can't expect anyone to transform our urban school systems in a big way quickly. The improvements that occur are always on the margins. Those districts will never rise to the level of their suburban neighbors. But you can see Duncan has been working at this very hard for many years, and (if you look at what he has actually said rather than what sloppy writers like me have suggested) he has been honest about how far his home town still needs to go.
Policymakers have grappled in recent years with strategies for improving the effectiveness of the teaching workforce, particularly that segment serving students in poverty. There is a growing consensus that state and district systems for attracting, evaluating, developing, compensating, and retaining effective teachers are in need of a major overhaul. Three polls find that inexperienced teachers are open to reforms to one of these systems--compensation systems.
A number of promising compensation reform programs have shown that changes in payment structures often include upgrades to other systems as well, such as those needed for evaluating and developing teachers. It is unclear whether inexperienced teachers will continue to support differentiated compensation as they become more experienced, but these findings indicate that the time is ripe for targeting differentiated compensation to new teachers at the federal, state, and district level.
Targeting these new teachers is critical. Reforming the profession in ways that appeal to them could help increase the retention rates of the effective teachers in this group. Several forms of differentiated compensation reward the most effective teachers, hopefully increasing the proportion of highly effective teachers in the profession. And it is likely that these teachers will be more supportive of differentiated compensation as veterans if they have a positive experience with it early on in their career. If districts want to reform compensation systems more broadly, it is important that they eventually have veterans on board with these reforms.
David Steiner, New York's new education commissioner, gave a stirring address last week about where he hopes to lead public education in this state. He's setting his sights very high, and both his message and his method are laudable. The State Education Department has needed an effective communicator at the top.
"Teaching well is a deeply complex professional activity," Steiner told the Board..
Thirteen-year-old Kayla Savage was failing math. Like many of her classmates in middle school, she hated the subject. Stuck in a large seventh-grade class with a teacher who had little time to offer individual help, Kayla was lost among rational numbers and polynomials.
Her frustration led to a phobia of math, an all-too-common affliction that often starts in middle school and threatens to derail students' future math studies in high school and chances for college.
Kayla is like thousands of students across America who struggle with math. The struggle in California is borne out by this grim U.S. Education Department statistic: Students in California rank 40th in eighth-grade math, a critical year in math learning that sets the path for math success in high school and beyond.
In Santa Clara County, only about 39 percent of eighth-graders meet the California standard for Algebra I proficiency. One study showed that less than one-third of eighth-graders have the skills or interest to pursue a math or science career. Yet these careers are the drivers of our future.
The decade began with ambitious plans for raising the bar on public education and student achievement.
After winning office as the nation's 43rd president, George W. Bush introduced a federal program, dubbed No Child Left Behind, aimed at improving education through higher standards and greater accountability.
For the better part of the decade, educators and school administrators worked diligently to implement the program and meet its expectations.
More recently, however, a recession of historic proportions has taken a heavy toll on the public school system, prompting deep budget cuts, and in some cases, a rethinking of what schools will offer.
"Our future depends on our ability to prepare the next generation for success in the hyper-competitive global economy," said Jack O'Connell, state superintendent of public instruction. "In order to deliver the quality education our students need, we must get off this budget roller coaster and find a stable, long-term solution to education funding. Our future depends on it."
Soon after Arne Duncan left his job as schools chief here to become one of the most powerful U.S. education secretaries ever, his former students sat for federal achievement tests. This month, the mathematics report card was delivered: Chicago trailed several cities in performance and progress made over six years.
Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.
The federal readout is just one measure of Duncan's record as chief executive of the nation's third-largest system. Others show advances on various fronts. But the new math scores signal that Chicago is nowhere near the head of the pack in urban school improvement, even though Duncan often cites the successes of his tenure as he crusades to fix public education.
Congress completed the fiscal year 2010 appropriations process on Dec. 13, 2009, finalizing annual funding for nearly all federal education programs through September 2010 at $63.7 billion, up $1.1 billion from the prior year, excluding economic stimulus funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Making sense of the federal education budget and the appropriations process can be a frustrating task for education advocates, state and local policymakers, the media, and the public. The now concluded fiscal year 2010 appropriations process is no exception.
This issue brief is intended to be a helpful guide to the appropriations process and recently enacted fiscal year 2010 education funding. It includes an analysis of funding for major education programs and a timeline of the 2010 appropriations process. It also includes exclusive tables comparing 2010 funding to prior years, the president's budget request, and funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
"The research around early reading intervention illuminates the complex decision making required to meet individual student literacy needs. There seems to be no one right answer, no quick fix for success. While recent research brings up questions as to the cost/benefit of Reading Recovery, what other supports and options are available? One thing is certain, alternative interventions must be in place prior to removing current systems." Summary, "Reading Recovery: A Synthesis of Research, Data Analysis and Recommendations," Madison Metropolitan School District Report to the Board of Education, December, 2009.
How well are we teaching our children to read?
The "Annual Measurable Objectives" under No Child Left Behind for Wisconsin call for all students to achieve reading levels of proficient or better under the WKCE by the 2013-14 school year. Benchmarks toward that goal are phased in over time. The current intermediate goal (ending this school year) is 74%. (Put another way, the percentage of students who are below proficient should not exceed 26%.) The goals move up to 80.5% in 2010-11, 87% in 2011-12, and 93.5% in 2012-13.
71.7% of MMSD 3rd graders scored at or above the proficient level on last year's (November 2008) WKCE reading assessment (this and the rest of the WKCE data cited here are from the DPI web site). This did not quite meet the 74% Annual Measurable Objective. We should be concerned that achievement levels are going down even as achievement targets are going up:
The Annual Measurable Objectives also apply to demographic subgroups, including economically disadvantaged students. Economically disadvantaged students—whose futures are almost wholly dependent on the ability of their schools to teach them to read—and their achievement levels deserve particular attention.
How well are we teaching our children from low-income families to read?
Can we continue to explain/excuse/blame poverty rates for this failure?
What should we do to acknowledge and address this crisis?
Budget Shortfall: The district is facing a budget shortfall of $15M for FY 2010-11 just to cover normal operating expenses. This deficit grows even larger when additional budget increases are considered for new Instructional programming tied to the District's Strategic Plan and employee raises. The district is now contemplating various budget reduction proposals to assist in closing the budget gap for FY 2010-11. The District would like to obtain your input and feedback to the proposals that are currently being considered.
The Efficiency Study: In August 2008, the Board of Trustees commissioned an efficiency study that was conducted in May 2009. The study recommended a number of cost savings proposals to assist the District in making budgetary cuts. The District implemented nearly a quarter of the proposed recommendations from the report. A number of the proposals were rejected due to the severity of impact that would have occurred at local schools. Please click on the link: Budget Survey.
Austin Public School (APS) District and the Austin Education Association announced Wednesday that they have reached a contract agreement.
The agreement includes no salary increases and no changes to insurance for the duration of the contract -- the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 years. Approximately 85 percent of association members voted this week. Of voters, 91 percent voted yes to ratify the new contract.>
When it rained in northern Minnesota a few weeks ago, water leaked into a room in Blackduck High School where students had stored art projects just a few hours earlier. Every project was damaged.
The school district is considering asking voters to approve higher taxes to raise $500,000 to repair the roof. But Superintendent Bob Doetsch is sure that voters would only agree to pay more if they're convinced the district has done everything possible to save money.
To cut costs, the rural Blackduck, Warroad and Ogilvie school districts decided four months ago to implement a four-day school week as did the MACCRAY district did last year. The four districts say the change hasn't solved their budget woes, but the shorter week helped. That's attracted the attention of school officials elsewhere in Minnesota who are considering the change.
The Chicago public schools' response to a recent court desegregation ruling -- a plan to use students' social and economic profiles instead of race to achieve classroom diversity -- is raising fears that it will undermine the district's slow and incremental progress on racial diversity.
Chicago schools, like the city itself, are hardly a model of racial integration. But a Chicago News Cooperative analysis of school data shows the district has made modest gains in the magnet, gifted, classical and selective-enrollment schools, where, for nearly 30 years, race has been used as an admission criterion. Those advances may be imperiled in the wake of court rulings that have prompted Chicago Public Schools to look for factors other than race when assigning students to such schools.
Nationwide, court rulings have prompted school districts to seek creative ways to diversify classrooms without using a student's race as a factor. In Chicago, school officials last week moved ahead with their own experiment.
Instead of race as an admissions factor, they now will use socioeconomic data from the student's neighborhood -- income, education levels, single-parent households, owner-occupied homes and the use of language other than English as the primary tongue -- in placing children in selective-enrollment schools.
With the radio playing softly in the background and munching on spoonfuls of noodles and cheese, Maria Vespa sat at her family's kitchen counter to take her geography mid-term on a recent afternoon.
The 15-year-old stared intently at her computer screen as test questions popped up. She'd study each for a minute, take another bite of lunch and click on an answer. When she got stumped, she pulled out her notebook.
"That's one of the great things about online school," Maria said. "You get to use your notes when you're taking tests."
Another great thing about online school: instant grades. A few moments after Maria answered the last test question, her score popped up.
"I got a B," she said. "I would have loved an A, but a B is still pretty good."
Kim Marshall's December 16 EdWeek commentary attempts to "demolish the argument for individual merit pay." He makes good points that suggest that individual bonuses based solely on value-added test scores are not a good idea. He suggests, instead, team-based bonuses and more pay for master teachers.
There's an alternative in between that most big organizations and it works like this:
In collaboration with peers and a manager, a Personal Performance Plan, sets out objectives for the year. For a teacher these objectives may include several objective assessments, but would also include team contributions, and a personal growth plan.
A pool for merit increases is set based on the financial health of the organization and cost of living (let's assume an annual target of 2.5%)
Quarterly conversations about performance are summarized in a year end document.
Merit increases would range from 0% for teachers that accomplished few objectives and 5% for teachers that exceeded expectations.
Bay State Gov. Deval Patrick stopped by the South Shore Charter Public School on Friday (Dec. 18), where he held an on-location cabinet meeting and used the opportunity to talk up his education reform bill.
Patrick and his cabinet met with the students and staff at the charter school and talked with Pru Goodale, the school's executive director, about the school's initiatives to diversify education through various programs.
"The South Shore Charter School is helping students thrive and opening up worlds of opportunity for them," Patrick said. "All children deserve the same chance at a world-class education and that's what our reform package will give them."
With competing plans for governing the Milwaukee Public Schools now petering out in Madison, I'm suggesting a modest compromise that gives each side something it wants.
First, give the Mayor of Milwaukee the ability to appoint the MPS Superintendent. The superintendent would be confirmed by the Common Council, and after confirmation, would serve at the pleasure of the mayor.
At last nights board meeting former Winnequah Principal Patty McGuinness presented the results of the 4k-8 study commissioned by the board last summer. The report detailed the costs of implementing 4k-8 grade configurations in each community. The proposed configuration would require significant changes to Winnequah school to accomodate programming for Monona 3-8th grade students and some changes to Glacial Drumlin to shift CG 4th graders into the building.
The report (I'll link it here when it is up on the district website) was very thorough, and I found it a useful exercise to see all the costs and factors that go into making a school laid out in one place. It is worth a read on that basis. One issue identified from the study was that the scheduling wouldn't work with the current encore staff and additional staffing would be required. These additional requirements hadn't been worked out, but they would add to the costs included the study.
Southeastern Wisconsin could benefit economically by increasing the quality of early childhood education centers, but doing so presents a daunting tradeoff: more than doubling the expense of caring for infants and young children up to age 5.
A three-year study by Public Policy Forum researchers released Tuesday found that a system of high-quality early childhood education programs would cost about $11,500 per child, per year.
In the current system, child care providers are estimated to spend about $5,625 per child annually.
The new report relies on research showing a correlation between high-quality early learning experiences and higher rates of achievement in school, especially for disadvantaged children.
The analysis for policy-makers includes the economic pros and cons of maintaining the status quo, funding a variety of mid-level improvements and implementing a high-quality system of early childhood education across southeastern Wisconsin, said Anneliese Dickman, research director at the Public Policy Forum.
Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations. As pressure increases on teachers unions to mend their ways and become better partners in school reform, the bar for what constitutes meaningful change seems to be getting lower.
In October, the New Haven (Conn.) Federation of Teachers agreed to a new labor agreement that was hailed by both American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as a breakthrough and national model. Yet the contract was actually a set of promises and processes to potentially undertake reforms after more discussion and mutual agreement.
Maybe the union was playing for time to make more reform-oriented deals away from the crucible of a labor negotiation. Critics were not buying it and argued the entire thing was a ploy. We'll know who was right by next summer.
But the real revolution, tucked away in the Race to the Top guidelines released by the Department of Education last month, is that high school has a new mission. No longer is it enough just to graduate students, or even prepare them for college. Schools must now show how they increase both college enrollment and the number of students who complete at least a year of college. In other words, high schools must now focus on grade 13.
To be sure, this shift is long overdue. It has been a generation since a high school diploma was a ticket to success. Today, the difference in earning power between a high school graduate and someone who's finished eighth grade has shrunk to nil. And students themselves know, better even than their parents or teachers, according to a recent poll conducted by Deloitte, that the main mission of high school is preparation for college.
Still, this shift will be seismic for our nation's high schools, because it will require gathering a great deal of information, and using it. And at the moment, high school principals know virtually nothing about what becomes of their graduates. Most don't even know whether their students make it to college at all.
In what he described as a "leap of faith," Mayor Luke Ravenstahl of Pittsburgh agreed on Monday to shelve his plans for the nation's first tax on college tuition in exchange for an increase in voluntary contributions from local colleges and universities to the city.
City officials said the mayor also had a promise from university officials to help lobby state lawmakers in Harrisburg for changes to enable the city to raise certain taxes and fees.
"This is a leap of faith for us all; the future of our city and of our citizens is riding on it," Mr. Ravenstahl said. "But it is a leap of faith that, if successful, will result in the revenue, $15 million annually, that Pittsburgh needs to solve our legacy cost problem."
City and university officials declined to offer details about the commitment, but at a joint news conference on Monday morning, officials from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University said they had pledged to make larger voluntary donations to the city than they did from 2005 to 2007. In addition, some local corporations, including the insurer Highmark, are contributing additional money.
When the Stoughton Area School District shuttered its Yahara Elementary School last June because of declining enrollments, shrinking funds and a failed school referendum in 2005-06, the total $1 million cost savings was meant to help balance the district's books into the next decade.
But despite that move, plus 68 staff layoffs and reduced bus routes in recent years, the district now faces another gap -- of $3 million over the next three years -- and the school board is considering taking a referendum to voters in April.
"The sense was that we would be okay for the 2010-11 school year," former Yahara principal Cheryl Price, now principal of the new Sandhill Elementary School, said of Yahara's closing. "They knew that this was one fix. But we thought we had a couple of years" without having to make more drastic cuts.
Those cuts could range from more staff reductions, increasing class sizes, raising athletic fees and eliminating talented and gifted programming.
No studies of Reading Recovery® that fall within the scope of the English Language Learners (ELL) review protocol meet What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards. The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Reading Recovery® on ELL.
Reading Recovery® is a short-term tutoring intervention designed to serve the lowest-achieving (bottom 20%) first-grade students. The goals of Reading Recovery® include: promoting literacy skills; reducing the number of first-grade students who are struggling to read; and preventing long-term reading difficulties. Reading Recovery® supplements classroom teaching with one-to-one tutoring sessions, generally conducted as pull-out sessions during the school day. The tutoring, which is conducted by trained Reading Recovery® teachers, takes place for 30 minutes a day over a period of 12 to 20 weeks.
An arbitrator recently released recommendations to help end an impasse over the current school year's contract between the Calvert County Board of Education and the teachers union.
At issue are the terms of the third year of the teachers' three-year contract. The board suggests a 0.5 percent cost-of-living adjustment, but the Calvert Education Association wants a 4.5 percent increase.
M. David Vaughn of the American Arbitration Association met with a member of the board and the union and recommended that the teachers receive a one-time payment of 1 percent of salary and that a sick leave bank be established.
The board and the teachers are working under the assumptions that all step increases would remain, and a 1.1 percent lump sum increase was included for employees at the highest tiers of the pay scale.
My former Post colleague Tracy Thompson has two daughters in a Washington area school district. I promised not to say which one. It doesn't matter, because the issue she raises involves all high-tech schools, of which we have many.
People aren't using the new Web features designed to help families. Is it because parents like me are technophobes? Not entirely. The reluctant participants who concern Thompson are teachers.
Both of Thompson's kids have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. They have trouble getting their work done. Her school district, like several in the area, has Web sites on which parents can see their children's assignments. That way, they cannot be fooled by sly evasions when they ask their children, sitting in front of the TV, whether they have any homework.
Thompson was delighted to discover the Web homework schedules when her older daughter was a sixth-grader. Disappointment followed, she said, when "I found out only about half of her teachers used it. Some teachers were weeks behind in updating the info. My older daughter is off to high school next year and has matured amazingly over the past three years, so I don't have to worry that much about her stuff anymore. But now my younger daughter is in third grade, and I am in my second year of trying to get her teachers to use the Web."
The district received an initial solicitation from the state DPI regarding "Race to the top" funds. The race to the top funds will be divided into two parts, with half of the funds going to districts that agree to implement programs in 5 areas outlined in the memorandum:
As Michigan school districts fight to cope with state cuts, urban districts have a fallback their suburban and rural counterparts are less likely to get: direct grants from the federal stimulus package.
Schools in low-income areas such as Detroit, Grand Rapids and Flint are getting direct grants from the Recovery Act that easily exceed the cuts of at least $165 per student districts will lose in state aid this fiscal year.
Wealthier suburban districts are getting far less direct help from the stimulus package. That leaves them with fewer sources to tap to avoid teacher layoffs and program cuts that some districts could see starting in January.
Detroit schools are "aggressively pursuing" the Recovery Act cash, spokesman Steven Wasko said. The district expects to receive roughly $800 million over more than two years from all sources of the broad program, including money that could help the district reduce class sizes and build or remodel schools.
Enough talk about recalling Detroit Federation of Teachers president Keith Johnson, the first president the union has had in a long time who is dealing with the reality of a broke district and broken economy.
In the wake of the DFT ratifying its contract with the district, a minority of unhappy teachers has called for Johnson's head.
To that vocal minority, let me say two things:
$219 million.
84,000 children.
The first is the school district's deficit. The second is the number of children who should be at the forefront of all of our thoughts and efforts.
Mathews: I loved your book, as you saw in my review last week. It is the best book ever written about the 21st century skills movement. But why were you so hard on Advanced Placement? There are many AP teachers who think the program is terrific for the typical schools where they work (you focused on some of the tiny upper crust schools that are a different issue) and who are trying to do everything you and I want them to do. Why not see AP (and IB, which is pretty near exactly what you want) as a great platform for change rather than the enemy?
Conrad Farner is like a guy with a beautiful home and an ugly checkbook.
It's impossible to escape the irony as the superintendent of Greenfield schools conducts a tour of the community's high school, where the finishing touches are being put on a $48.5 million overhaul that has turned a building that was literally sinking into the ground and, in serious ways, falling apart, into a showcase.
Handsome classrooms, a spacious gym, great theater, terrific swimming pool, a set of new athletic fields. It's an impressive setting for the 1,200 students (22% of them not from Greenfield, by the way). Only a few parts of the old high school were kept while the new structure was built around it.
But the subject of our conversation is Farner's strong warnings that the actual work of education in Greenfield schools is being cut, year by year, in ways that are taking a serious toll.
And, he argues, unless something changes quickly in the way Wisconsin funds schools, Greenfield - along with numerous districts across the state - will reach a point where it will simply not be able to pay its bills or will have to go back to voters seeking operating money beyond the state-set limits.
The district budget this year "is not even close to what our students need," he said in a presentation to the Greenfield School Board before the budget was adopted. He has a list of 122 positions or services that have been eliminated or reduced since 2002-'03.
Some of them are pretty minor. Some of them are matters of doing business smarter and more efficiently. But some of them affect kids in ways that really matter - fewer teaching specialists, fewer counselors, fewer extra-curricular activities. The ratio of students to teachers has risen in Greenfield from 13.8 in 2004-'05 to 15.9 this year, a sizable jump.
At the December 16, 2009 general membership meeting, Madison Board of Education Member Beth Moss and County Board Supervisors John Hendrick, Al Matano, Kyle Richmond and Barbara Vedder were enthusiastically endorsed for re-election.
The waiting is finally over for some of the District of Columbia's most ambitious school children and their parents. Democrats in Congress voted to kill the District's Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides 1,700 disadvantaged kids with vouchers worth up to $7,500 per year to attend a private school.
On Sunday the Senate approved a spending bill that phases out funding for the five-year-old program. Several prominent Senators this week sent a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid pleading for a reconsideration. Signed by Independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman, Democrats Robert Byrd and Dianne Feinstein, and Republicans Susan Collins and John Ensign, it asked to save a program that has "provided a lifeline to many low-income students in the District of Columbia." President Obama signed the bill Thursday.
The program's popularity has generated long waiting lists. A federal evaluation earlier this year said the mostly black and Hispanic participants are making significant academic gains and narrowing the achievement gap. But for the teachers unions, this just can't happen. The National Education Association instructed Democratic lawmakers to kill it.
I am keeping my weekly Extra Credit column alive on this blog with occasional answers to reader questions, the format of that column I did for many years in the Extras before they died. This teacher, Michael Feinberg (no relation to the co-founder of the KIPP schools with the same name), sent me a copy of an intriguing letter about physics he sent to the Montgomery County school superintendent, and agreed to let me get an answer and use it here.
Dear Dr. Weast:
I am a retired MCPS teacher; I taught Physics at both Kennedy H.S. and Whitman H.S. until the time that I retired in 2005. After retirement I have, on occasion, tutored Physics students.
When the 9th grade Physics curriculum was introduced I opposed it on the grounds that Physics should be taught at a higher mathematical level. While tutoring students in both grades 9 and 11/12 I see that this is true; students in 11th grade learn rigorous Physics with mathematical applications while students in 9th grade usually do descriptive worksheets. I believe that it unfair that students in 9 th grade receive the same honors credit for what is promoted as the same curriculum but is not the same.
Ninety cameras will be installed outside Fenger and 39 other Chicago Public high schools to stop what Mayor Daley called the ugly "epidemic of children killing children," thanks to a $2.25 million gift from the banking giant that employs the mayor's brother.
Last year, a bloody weekend for CPS students prompted Daley to link 4,844 cameras inside schools and 1,437 exterior school cameras to police districts, squad cars and the 911 center. Until that time, real-time video from school cameras was accessible only to school security.
Thanks to J.P. Morgan Chase, where William Daley serves as Midwest chairman, 40 more high schools will get exterior cameras. They include Fenger, where 16-year-old Derrion Albert was beaten to death in September during a brawl captured on videotape and played around the world.
Another camera will be installed outside Walter H. Dyett High School, 555 E. 51st St., where two students have been murdered this year.
President Barack Obama spoke at Wright Middle School in Madison last month and urged our nation to make improving K-12 education a national priority.
The president underscored the critical link between improving education and our nation's future economy. He called for our schools to push all students to achieve at higher levels.
The president also spoke about our need to raise the bar for student achievement and to close existing achievement gaps. He is offering the states $4.35 billion in competitive "Race to the Top" grants to try to spur improvement.
His call for reform comes at a critical time for our schools. Our graduates face an increasingly competitive world. The future of our state rests on our ability to prepare our students with the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed.
In recent years, however, the real struggle in Wisconsin has been in maintaining the quality public school system created by previous generations. Our public schools operate under a financial system that chokes reform and chips away at quality.
Underwood's School of Education has a close relationship with the Madison School District via grants and other interactions. Former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater now works for the School along with former Administrator Jack Jorgenson. Underwood attended the 2008 Madison Superintendent candidate public appearances.
It is a chance L.A. Unified all but squanders, according to interviews with more than 75 teachers and administrators, analyses of district data over the last several years, and internal and independent studies. Among the findings:
Nearly all probationary teachers receive a passing grade on evaluations. Fewer than 2% are denied tenure.
The reviews are so lacking in rigor as to be meaningless, many instructors say. Before a teacher gets tenure, school administrators are required to conduct only a single, pre-announced classroom visit per year. About half the observations last 30 minutes or less. Principals are rarely held responsible for how they perform the reviews.
The district's evaluation of teachers does not take into account whether students are learning. Principals are not required to consider testing data, student work or grades. L.A. Unified, like other districts in California, essentially ignores a state law that since the 1970s has required districts to weigh pupil progress in assessing teachers and administrators.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls himself a big fan of National Board Certification for Teachers. "What if every child had a chance to be taught by a National Board Certified teacher? I think the difference it would make in our students' lives woul
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls himself a big fan of National Board Certification for Teachers.
"What if every child had a chance to be taught by a National Board Certified teacher? I think the difference it would make in our students' lives would be extraordinary," he said recently.
Unfortunately, every child doesn't have that chance. In fact, most don't. But a growing number of teachers nationally and in Alabama are becoming board certified.
Nationally, more than 82,000 teachers are board certified, with nearly 8,900 joining the ranks this year. Alabama has 233 newly certified teachers, bringing the state's total to 1,781, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards announced Wednesday. Alabama ranks 11th nationally in the number of teachers board certified this year, and 13th in the total number of certified teachers.
I applaud the work of the Board of Education in their efforts to downsize the district's infrastructure. During my service on the board, I learned how difficult that process can be when various factions of the community come before the board pleading to save their favorite schools. In fact, many current board members have campaigned for their buildings in the past. They cited educational studies praising the positive influences of small neighborhood schools and how important it was to maintain the configuration at that time. It appears they have now come to realize instead that what they once called warehousing of students does not lead to an adverse learning environment and that larger schools can indeed contribute to student success. That observation is supported by their decision to replace the plan that placed 400 students in each of six buildings to one that has three buildings with approximately 500 students and three with many fewer students.
Now the public is being asked to spend millions on four buildings Ridge Mills, John Joy, Denti and Gansevoort. I suggest that the board reconsider the proposition and look to renovate three buildings. Instead of closing Ridge Mills, they could close both Ridge Mills and John Joy that currently serve a total of 481 students. The combination would still be smaller in size than either Denti or Bellamy (about 500 and 485 students, respectively). The board can renovate either one of the closed buildings and reopen it to provide adequate space for their students and result in one less building for the district to maintain.
Parents would be able to yank their children out of failing schools and ask any other school in the state to admit them under a compromise bill approved Thursday by the state Senate.
That change and other proposals are part of the state's plan to compete for President Obama's Race to the Top grants - up to $4.3 billion for all states and as much as $700 million for California alone.
States have until next month to apply for the federal grants, but political fighting over how to make California as competitive as possible has killed two competing proposals and left little time before the Jan. 19 application deadline.
To qualify, states have been asked to demonstrate a commitment to education reform. Under the bill, California would establish specific plans for failing schools, including closing a school, dismissing the principal and up to half of the teachers, or allowing the school to become a charter school.
Without discussion, the Milwaukee School Board voted 7-0 Thursday night to make condoms available at many of the city's high schools, paving the way to make Milwaukee Public Schools one of the relatively few districts in the nation to provide contraception to students.
The communicable disease prevention program, as the district calls it, could be in place as soon as the 2010-'11 school year.
The proposal sparked some opposition after being made public Dec. 2, but the board approved the condom distribution without much dissent. Comments from the public are not allowed at board meetings and a board committee had voted 5-0 on Dec. 9 to recommend adopting the program.
The condoms will be available free of charge, but only to students in high schools that have school nurses and only after students request them at the nurse's office, according to a fact sheet circulated by the school district. Up to two condoms will be distributed at a time.
Thursday's vote does not authorize funding for the program, but the district has said it will not use taxpayer money to buy condoms and instead will seek other sources of funding.
With 809, California leads the nation in the number of charter schools. In less than 20 years, the education activists have started nearly 5,000 of these institutions, which are publicly financed and free for students to attend but independently operated.
They are two of the clearest reasons to be both discouraged and hopeful about public education in Tampa Bay. The wide disparities in passing rates for Advanced Placement exams, often within the same high school, indicate a failure by district superintendents and school principals to hold teachers accountable for performance. Looking forward, a $100 million grant to Hillsborough schools by the Gates Foundation offers a wonderful opportunity to improve teacher training and match salaries to more sophisticated measures of performance. The bold experimentation in Hillsborough could show the way to address the sorts of shortcomings exposed by the analysis of AP exams.
There are more immediate steps that can be taken to address a system that rewards schools for increasing the number of students taking AP exams but ignores teachers with ridiculously low exam passing rates. The state should proceed with plans to put more weight on passing rates in evaluating high schools. The schools should re-examine their policies that encourage even unprepared students to take college-level AP classes. Students should be challenged with rigorous courses, but it is a disservice to admit those who have virtually no chance to grasp the material well enough to pass the exam. That is a waste of time and taxpayers' money.
Wisconsin Race to the Top: Governor/DPI Letter and "Memorandum of Understanding"
via a kind reader's email; Letter from Governor Doyle and Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers [107K PDF]:
We are excited to invite you to participate in Wisconsin's Race to the Top application to the federal government. Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama and Congress provided $4 billion in competitive grant funding to states that move forward with innovations and reform in education.
Earlier this fall, at our request, the Wisconsin Legislature passed bills to make Wisconsin both eligible and more competitive for the Race to the Top grants. Now our local school district leaders - school board members, superintendents, principals, teachers, and other staff - need to prepare their district for participation in Wisconsin's grant application. Enclosed is the Race to the Top district memorandum of understanding (MOU) that the federal government requires participating districts to sign as part of the state's Race to the Top grant application. The MOU provides a framework of collaboration between districts and the state articulating the specific roles and responsibilities necessary to implement an approved Race to the Top district grant.
The MOU is divided into two parts - Exhibit I and Exhibit II. To receive any Race to the Top funding, a district must agree to the activities in Exhibit I. Districts that agree to Exhibit I are eligible, if they so choose, to participate in Exhibit II. In Exhibit II districts will receive additional funding for participating in the additional activities. Exhibit I is included in this information and Exhibit II will be forthcoming in the very near future.
My guest today is Donalyn Miller, a sixth-grade language arts teacher in Texas and literacy expert. She is the author of "The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child," and writes about literacy for teachermagazine.org.
By Donalyn Miller
A recent Carnegie Mellon University research study indicates that children engaged in a 100-hour intensive reading remediation program improved both their reading ability and the white matter connections in their brains.
While the study shows promise for educators and clinicians who work with developing readers, one casual mention in the study stood out for me-- the 25 children designated as "excellent readers" in the control group still outperformed the 35 third and fifth graders who participated in the remediation program.
The widespread belief that some readers possess an innate gift, like artists or athletes, sells many children short. I often hear parents claim, "Well, my child is just not a reader," as if the reading fairy passed over their child while handing out the good stuff.
Previous research has found that male high school athletes experience better outcomes than non-athletes, including higher educational attainment, employment rates, and wages. However, students self-select into athletics so these may be selection effects rather than causal effects. To address this issue, I examine Title IX which provides a unique quasi- experiment in female athletic participation. Between 1972 and 1978 U.S. high schools rapidly increased their female athletic participation rates--to approximately the same level as their male athletic participation rates--in order to comply with Title IX. This paper uses variation in the level of boys' athletic participation across states before Title IX as an instrument for the change in girls' athletic participation over the 1970s. Analyzing differences in outcomes for both the pre- and post-Title IX cohorts across states, I find that a 10-percentage point rise in state-level female sports participation generates a 1 percentage point increase in female college attendance and a 1 to 2 percentage point rise in female labor force participation. Furthermore, greater opportunities to play sports leads to greater female participation in previously male-dominated occupations, particularly for high-skill occupations.
Let me tell you about my recent trip to Sacramento. It is a story about why we need a revolution.
Earlier this month, Senate leaders introduced a "parent trigger" into California's "Race to the Top" education reform legislation.
Under the policy, parents at a systemically failing school could circulate a petition calling for change. If 51% of the parents signed it, the school would be converted to a charter school or reconstituted by the school district, with a new staff and new ways of operating. The concept recognized a truth that school officials often discount: Parents are in the best position to make decisions about what's right for their kids.
Last week, the parent trigger legislation moved to the Assembly Education Committee, chaired by Assemblywoman Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica). Thousands of parents sent letters, made calls, staged protests and showed up to testify before her committee about the importance of parents taking back power over our schools.
I don't mean this as a criticism of my talented colleague Bill Turque. He was reporting the news, as usual. But I did not like the focus of his otherwise irreproachable Sunday story on the achievement gap not narrowing in the D.C. schools.
Turque was letting us know that despite the growth in D.C. math scores, the gap between black and white students had gotten larger for fourth-graders. This was an important topic in education circles, so he had to report it.
But I think the achievement gap is useless as a measure of school improvement, and we would be much better writing about how much each ethnic group, each school, each child is improving, or not improving. Our gap fixation puts us in a very awkward position.
You see it. It's simple. It forces us to hope that white kids, or middle class kids, or high achieving kids, don't improve.
We have extended our Early Bird registration rate for the Green Schools National Conference to January 15th. We are encouraging everyone to register early as space is limited for this ground breaking green schools event.
Purchase Orders are now being accepted so you can lock in the lower rate now and pay later. Low rates are also being offered for groups of 4 or more from one school / organization.
Registration Questions?
Email: greenschoolsconf@continue.uoregon.edu or call 1.800.280.6218 between 9am-5pm Pacific Coast Time.
We have received exciting commitments from two of our featured speakers.
TOM FEEGEL, Author of "Green My Parents" and the mastermind behind "Earth Hour & Live Earth". Tom is continuously making positive contributions for educators, students and parents in the green schools movement.
MICHAEL STONE, Author of "Smart By Nature: Schooling for Sustainability." He is Senior Editor at the Center for Ecoliteracy. Michael coedited "Ecological Literacy" and was managing editor of "Whole Earth" magazine.
Plan to attend the GREEN SCHOOLS NATIONAL CONFERENCE on October 24-26, 2010 in Minneapolis, MN.
The Wauwatosa School Board has ratified a contract that will give steep pay raises to the district's most experienced teachers while also winning an important concession for the district with a change in retiree health insurance benefits.
The agreement, approved by the board on Monday and by the Wauwatosa Education Association on Friday, increases teachers' salaries and benefits by 4.76% this school year and by 4.25% in the following year. The top pay for the most experienced teachers will increase by more than 8% to $74,030. Teachers with doctorate degrees can receive annual stipends of $1,415.
With the agreement, district officials were able to accomplish a goal by getting teacher approval to change health insurance benefits for future retirees. While teachers now receive health insurance after they retire based on the number of years they have worked for the district, teachers hired after July 2010 will be awarded stipends tied to their final salaries with which they can pay for their health insurance, said Daniel Chanen, Wauwatosa's director of human resources.
With a concussion, there is no obvious injury - no blood, no swelling, no arm at an awkward angle.
Coaches and athletic trainers have to look for subtle signs from an athlete, such as a shake of the head, a vacant expression or a long pause before a football player lines up for the next play.
Until the past few years, a student athlete in Mesquite might have gone back into the game after a quick assessment. But that's changing as officials realize how common concussions are and how profound their effects can be over time.
"If a kid suffers a concussion in Mesquite, they are going to miss a minimum of two weeks," said Bucky Taylor, Mesquite High School's head athletic trainer.
A bill that would give the state schools chief more power to fix chronically low-performing schools might improve education in Milwaukee and circumvent the fractious debate over mayoral control, said the chairman of the Senate Education Committee on Tuesday.
Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine) said the education committee took executive action Tuesday to introduce the bill, which Lehman requested be tweaked from an earlier version to zero in on the state superintendent's attention to a handful of schools in MPS.
A similar bill that passed the Assembly's education committee earlier this fall was not as specific about what qualified as a low-performing school.
"The state superintendent powers bill has not seen the same kind of 'draw a line and plant your feet firmly in the sand and don't move' that mayoral control has seen," Lehman said. "The state superintendent powers bill is more about turning to thoughtful public policy on this to see what we can do for Milwaukee Public Schools."
As Seattle Public Schools released new details about its latest transformation plan for perpetually-troubled Cleveland High School over the past week, there's been a collective eye roll among some teachers there.
"I've been here for 15 years and every other year we do this," says math teacher David Fisher, referring to a long string of ballyhooed overhauls that the Beacon Hill school has embarked on at the behest of the district.
One thing is different: The district is promising to pour money into this reinvention of Cleveland as the School of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). It proposes to spend more than $4 million over the first three years, according to a report at last Wednesday's school board meeting by Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson. That's a lot of money for a school that is already up and running. (See the breakdown of spending on page 8 of this pdf.)
[Milwaukee...] Wisconsin State Senator Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) proclaims that if her bill giving the mayor of Milwaukee control of Milwaukee's Public Schools comes up in Special Session this week, it will pass the State Senate.
"I believe if the bill comes to the floor in the Senate, it's going to pass," Taylor said in an exclusive interview with the MacIver News Service. "I don't hesitate on that."
Taylor's bill, co-authored by Rep. Pedro Colon, (D-Milwaukee) is the result of a compromise between legislative supporters, the mayor and the governor. It grants the mayor authority over MPS and allows him him to pick the superintendent. City residents would still be allowed to elect the school board, but many of its powers would be transferred to the superintendent. Current Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett originally wanted the ability to appoint the school board himself.
Some of Taylor's Democratic colleagues from Milwaukee are opposed to her proposal. Two of them, Milwaukee Senator Spencer Coggs and Representative Tamara Grigsby, recently announced their own proposal, which would allow the mayor more say in MPS, but their plan stops short of handing over full control of the district. The Coggs-Grigsby plan has the support of the teachers' union and several prominent community activists.
My wife was enjoying a quiet flight back to Washington after a week off in California when I, sitting next to her, started thrashing around. I was reading a book, but in a way that any person would find disturbing. I was marking and remarking pages. I was filling margins with unreadable scrawls. I was flipping back and forth. I was talking to myself: "Whoa! No! Yes!"
My habit is to write on the last page, next to the inside of the back cover, any column ideas that come to me from a book. The last page of my copy of Wagner's book is a maze of my jottings. I have been making fun of the 21st century skills movement as a high-cost, high-level, often incomprehensible conversation among people who have forgotten to explain what it means to teachers.
Public schools across the country are trying to figure out how to manage with shrinking budgets. School districts are increasing class size, firing teachers, and cutting art programs and field trips. Some districts have gone as far to try a four-day school week.
School districts can save money by parking their buses for three days.
Last week, the four-day week was a hot topic in Oklahoma media as the state now has four districts that have dropped a day from the traditional school week. Mostly rural school systems in at least 10 other states have made the switch to save money: Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Arkansas, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming, according to the LA Times.
The increasing number of districts changing over to the new schedule is no surprise. Last year, the American Association of School Administrators surveyed school boards and found that 1 in 7 boards nationwide was considering whether to drop a day, according to Time.
San Francisco Unified School District is not a district that has considered the four-day schedule. "In my year on the board, the idea of a four-day school week has never even been remotely mentioned as an option," says board member Rachel Norton. "In fact, I'd be shocked to hear if it had ever been mentioned in recent memory! To my mind, the four-day school week would be tremendously difficult for families, and I can't imagine that teachers and other school staff would consider cutting a day of school to be a good option, not when all of the research says that more, rather than less, school is what our children need."
The Milwaukee School Board has spent 20 years ignoring a "fiscal time bomb" in the form of generous and unfunded health insurance benefits for retired MPS teachers and staff that will cost the district $5 billion by 2016, according to a new report by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.
On Monday, the president of the conservative institute that conducted the report, George Lightbourn, said the study raises serious questions about the School Board's ability to provide financial oversight of the district and that it lends support to changing the governance structure of MPS.
The report comes in the same week that the Legislature is expected to convene a special session to consider a bill that would give the Milwaukee mayor power to appoint a superintendent and authority over the district's budget.
"Even if the mayor took over (the school system), the mayor would have to deal with this thing," Lightbourn said. "But it's more likely that somebody who has a different approach to this might actually look at this and if nothing else say: 'We have to slow down these costs.' "
Over the past year alone, the public debt of the United States rose sharply from 41 to 53 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Under reasonable assumptions, the debt is projected to grow steadily, reaching 85 percent of GDP by 2018, 100 percent by 2022, and 200 percent in 2038.
However, before the debt reached such high levels, the United States would almost certainly experience a debt- driven crisis--something previously viewed as almost unfathomable in the world's largest economy. The crisis could unfold gradually or it could happen suddenly, but with great costs either way. The tipping point is impossible to predict, but the United States is already hearing con- cerns about its fiscal management from some of its largest creditors, and the country is uncomfortably vulnerable to shifts in confidence around the world.
Wisconsin ranks 10th amongst the States in State-Local debt service. Exploding debt levels mean that it is highly unlikely school districts will see significant new revenues. Like many organizations, they must change and spend precious dollars where most needed and automate elsewhere (virtual learning tools are a natural, as this post demonstrates).
Improving teacher effectiveness is hgh on the list of most education reformers in colorado, as it is nationally. Effective teaching in the elementary years is of vital importance to ensure not only that children master fundamental skills, but that performance gaps narrow rather than widen beyond repair. We now know that disadvantaged students can catch up academically with their more advantaged peers if they have great elementary teachers several years in a row.
It is for these reasons that the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a nonpartisan research and advocacy group dedicated to the systemic reform of the teaching profession, evaluates the adequacy of preparation provided by undergraduate education schools. These programs produce 70 percent of our nation's teachers. We think it is crucial to focus specifically on the quality of preparation of future elementary teachers in the core subjects of reading and mathematics.
Teacher preparation programs, or "ed schools" as they are more commonly known, do not now, nor have they ever, enjoyed a particularly positive reputation. Further, there is a growing body of research demonstrating that teacher preparation does not matter all that much and that a teacher with very little training can be as effective as a teacher who has had a lot of preparation. As a result, many education reformers are proposing that the solution to achieving better teacher quality is simply to attract more talented people into teaching, given that their preparation does not really matter.
In several significant ways, we respectfully disagree. NCTQ is deeply committed to high-quality formal teacher preparation, but, importantly, we are not defenders of the status quo. We also do not believe that it is a realistic strategy to fuel a profession with three million members nationally by only attracting more elite students. Yes, we need to be much more selective about who gets into teaching, and we strenuously advocate for that goal. But even smart people can become better teachers, particularly of young children, if they are provided with purposeful and systematic preparation.
NCTQ has issued two national reports on the reading and mathematics preparation of elementary teachers in undergraduate education schools. The first, What Education Schools Aren't Teaching about Reading and What Elementary Teachers Aren't Learning was released in May 2006.1 The second, No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America's Education Schools, followed just over two years later.2 These reports provide the methodological foundations for this analysis of teacher preparation in every undergraduate program in Colorado.
What wouldn't California do for $700 million right now? That's not a rhetorical question. With U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan parceling out more than $4 billion to states that conform to his vision of school reform, California's Legislature is just one of dozens that are frantically revamping their states' education systems for some of that cash. Should California succeed, its share would be somewhere between $350 million and $700 million.
To obtain the money, Sacramento must pass legislation that would serve as the basis for an application. This has given Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a perfect opportunity to push for more parent choice and fewer restrictions on charter schools, while the teachers unions have pushed an agenda that would handcuff the charter movement. There is some merit to both sides' proposals -- charter schools should be more accountable, and parents should have more say in the education process -- but they have been poorly executed in ways that could have negative repercussions. Applications for Duncan's "Race to the Top" grants are due in January, so who has time for a thoughtful debate?
Today, all available data indicates that students of color are "much more likely than white students to fall behind in math and science courses, drop-out, and much less likely to graduate from high school, acquire a college or advanced degree, or earn a middle-class living." Even though data cites numerous factors contributing to the achievement gap, it failed to include the most important factors such as lack of culture-inclusive curriculum, and lack of teachers' knowledge, skills, and desire to teach non-European contributions and accomplishments in all areas of human endeavor to all learners, especially to students of color.
In my opinion, the achievement gap cannot be closed until we close the knowledge gap about various ethnic groups we teach. The gap will persist as long as we continue teaching the way we have been teaching for nearly 400 years.
The neediest students in California high schools are being taught by the least prepared teachers, a new study shows.
Fewer than half the principals in high-poverty schools said their teachers had the skills to encourage critical thinking and problem-solving among their students, while more than two-thirds of their counterparts in wealthier communities said their teachers possessed those abilities, the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning said in a study being released today.
The nonprofit center also found that teachers in the lowest-performing schools are more than twice as likely as those in the highest-achieving schools to be working without at least a preliminary credential.
The center's study, "The Status of the Teaching Profession 2009," is the latest to show that the most disadvantaged students don't have access to the same quality of teaching as those in more affluent, high-achieving schools.
The number of outside applicants being offered a seat would drop at nearly every Chicago magnet school next year under new admissions criteria to be voted on Wednesday, according to a Tribune analysis.
By giving greater priority to siblings of current students and applicants who live within 1 1/2 miles of each magnet school, the policy could reduce the offers extended to other applicants by about 14 percent overall.
In some schools, the reduction is far greater. At Drummond Elementary, where the acceptance rate hovers around 3 percent, offers to students outside the neighborhood would drop almost 55 percent. At Black Magnet on the South Side, where just 1 in 10 students is accepted, 32 percent of the offers would dry up.
Some observers say the policy will undermine the essence of magnets, which were created nearly 30 years ago to integrate schools in the nation's most segregated large city. By raising the number of students from the neighborhood who can attend, magnets once meant for all public school kids would increasingly become de facto neighborhood schools.
Vista school trustees are seeking reimbursement from the teachers union for about $128,000 in salary payments made to the union's president over the past three years.
Under a 1995 agreement, the Vista Unified School District has been paying for the union president's salary, even though that person is on leave from the classroom. In exchange, the union has paid the salary of a replacement teacher, who invariably is on a lower pay scale. As a result, the school district has paid more money to the union than the union has returned to the district.
A court decision last year found that state education laws require school district unions to reimburse school districts for all salary payments they make to union presidents on leave from the classroom, said Myrna Vallely, assistant superintendent for human resources at Vista Unified.
I am a proud graduate of Montgomery's public schools, and my progression from the railroad tracks in west Montgomery to the halls of Congress proves that education can transform lives. As governor I will do everything in my power to build a public school system that gives our children the chance to cross the bridge that I have walked.
The next governor of Alabama will need to launch a decade-long effort to revitalize public education. In a century where Alabama's workers must compete globally, we can no longer afford to sit near the bottom of national categories that rank college affordability and high school graduation rates. We cannot be afraid of reform and we cannot dismiss the possibility that new ideas can work.
I will make it a priority to strengthen Alabama's nationally recognized early learning programs. Our pre-kindergarten program is an Alabama success story, and many more children in our state should have access to it. Similarly, the Alabama Reading Initiative, which helped produce the biggest jump in fourth-grade reading performance in the country, must be broadened to reach middle school and above.
"More time on writing!" came an immediate reply. I asked how many agreed with this, and all twelve hands shot up into the air. And this was a high school nationally known for its excellent writing program! "Research skills," another student offered and went on to explain: "In high school, I mostly did 'cut and paste' for my research projects. When I got to college, I had no idea how to formulate a good research question and then really go through a lot of material."
Tony Wagner
The Global Achievement Gap
New York: Basic Books 2008, p. 101-102
College Ready?
A few years ago, I was asked by the leaders of one of the most highly regarded public high schools in New England to help them with a project. They wanted to start a program to combine the teaching of English and history because they thought that such a program would give their graduates an edge in college--and more than 90 percent of their students went on to college. They thought that teaching the two subjects together would help students gain a deeper understanding of both the history and literature of an era. Yet when I asked them how they knew that this would be the most important improvement they might make in their academic program, they were stumped. They'd just assumed that this innovation would be helpful to students.
Personally, I think interdisciplinary studies make a great deal of sense, but I also know that schools have very limited time and resources for change and so must choose their school and curriculum improvement priorities with great care. I proposed that we conduct a focus group with students who'd graduated from the high school three to five years prior, in which I would ask alums what might have helped them be better prepared for college--a question rarely asked by either private or public high schools. The group readily agreed, though, and worked to identify and invite a representative sample population of former students who would be willing to meet for a couple of hours when they were back at home during their winter break.
The group included students who attended state colleges and elite universities. My first question to them was this: "Looking back, what about your high school experience did you find most engaging or helpful to you?" (I would ask the question differently today: "In what ways were you most well prepared by high school?") At any rate, they found
the topic quite engaging and talked enthusiastically and at length about their high school experiences.
Extracurricular activities such as clubs, school yearbooks, and so on topped the list of what they had found most engaging in high school. Next came friends--there were no cliques in this small school, they claimed, and so everyone got along well. Sports were high on the list as well: Because the school was small, nearly everyone got a good deal of playing time.
"What about academics?" I asked.
"Most of our teachers were usually available after school to help us when we needed it," one young man replied. Several nodded in agreement, and the the room fell silent.
"But what about classes?" I pressed.
"You have to understand, " a student who was in his last year at an elite university explained to me somewhat impatiently. "Except for math, you start over in all your courses in college--we didn't need any of the stuff we'd studied in high school."
There was a buzz of agreement around the table. Then another students said, with a smile: "Which is a good thing because you'd forgotten all the stuff you'd memorized for the test a week later anyway!" The room erupted in laughter.
I was dumbfounded, not sure what to say next. Finally, I asked: "So, how might your class time have been better spent--what would have better prepared you for college?"
"More time on writing!" came an immediate reply. I asked how many agreed with this, and all twelve hands shot up into the air. And this was a high school nationally known for its excellent writing program! "Research skills," another student offered and went on to explain: "In high school, I mostly did 'cut and paste' for my research projects. When I got to college, I had no idea how to formulate a good research question and then really go through a lot of material."
============
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
The Washington, D.C., public school system, with its high dropout rates and low test scores, has long been a national embarrassment. But things seem to be improving under maverick Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. So it's curious that the White House hasn't done more to support her reform efforts, especially since they track so closely with the Obama Administration's own stated education goals.
New student test scores released by the U.S. Department of Education last week showed that Washington's fourth-graders made the largest gains in math among big city school systems in the past two years. D.C.'s eighth-graders increased their math proficiency at a faster rate than all other big cities save San Diego. Washington still has a long way to go, but it's no longer the city with the lowest marks, a distinction that now belongs to Detroit.
Before Ms. Rhee's arrival, the nation's capital went through six superintendents in 10 years. Since taking over as Chancellor in 2007, Ms. Rhee has replaced ineffective principals, laid off instructors based on "quality, not by seniority" and shuttered failing schools. These actions have angered teacher unions to the point of bringing (unsuccessful) lawsuits, yet academic outcomes are clearly improving.
With the last of the official announcements of the schools targeted for closure by Chancellor Klein, the final grim toll can be tallied. An unprecedented twenty-one schools have been told that the Department of Education will begin their phase out in September 2010. Fifteen of those schools -- a completely disproportionate number -- were high schools.*
With this wide swath of devastation, there can be no illusion that this is a process based on an educational calculus. The evidence simply tells a very different story: the Chancellor could not close significant numbers of Elementary and Middle Schools, once 97% of them scored A and B on School Progress Reports that so heavily weighted the wildly inflated and broken state exams. So Klein decided that to reach his targets, he would close high schools in much larger numbers. Among the high schools slated for closure are schools which are in good standing with the New York State Education Department and schools which are meeting their Annual Yearly Progress benchmarks under No Child Left Behind, as well as a school which just received the school-wide bonus. The list includes schools which never received a School Progress grade lower than C, and schools which actually improved on every measure in the School Progress Reports.
Why take a machete to New York City public high schools in this way? The reason is not difficult to decipher. The Chancellor needs a great deal of space in public school buildings to pursue his political and ideological agenda of creating and supporting new charter schools and new DoE schools. Since it had become politically untenable to create that space by closing large numbers of elementary and middle schools, the space would have to be found in high schools.
A handful of states have moved to restrict or regulate school staff members who restrain or seclude hard-to-handle children against their will in the wake of abuses exposed by congressional investigators seven months ago. But many more states have done little or nothing, advocates say.
"There has been a lot of attention, a lot of advocacy, a lot of family members involved, but it's slow going," says Jane Hudson, an attorney for the National Disability Rights Network, based in Washington, D.C.
Many states still have no rules in place to address how and when school staff can restrain and seclude children, says Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. So he and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., also on the committee, are pushing legislation to set federal rules.
"Without a federal standard to set the bar, it's the Wild West," Miller says. "We believe the right approach is a balanced one that provides federal guidance to states but still allows states the flexibility to tailor their regulations to their specific needs."
Reading Recovery Discussed at the 12/7/2009 Madison School Board Meeting and Administration Followup
Click for a Reading Recovery Data Summary from Madison's Elementary Schools. December 2009
Madison School Board 24MB mp3 audio file. Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad's December 10, 2009 memorandum [311K PDF] to the board in response to the 12/7/2009 meeting:
Attached to this memo are several items related to further explanation of the reason why full implementation is more effective for Reading Recovery and what will happen to the schools who would no longer receive Reading Recovery as part of the administrative recommendation. There are three options for your review:
Option I: Continue serving the 23 schools with modifications.
Option II: Reading Recovery Full Implementation at Title I schools and Non-Title I Schools.
Option III: Serving some students in all or a majority of schools, not just the 23 schools who are currently served.
The first attachment is a one-page overview summary ofthe MMSD Comprehensive Literacy Model. It explains the Balanced Literacy Model used in all MMSD elementary schools. It also provides an explanation of the wrap around services to support each school through the use of an Instructional Resource Teacher as well as Tier II and Tier III interventions common in all schools.
The second attachment shows the detailed K-5 Title I Reading Curriculum Description in which MMSD uses four programs in Title I schools: Rock and Read, Reading Recovery, Apprenticeship, and Soar to Success. As part of our recommendation, professional development will be provided in all elementary schools to enable all teachers to use these programs. Beginning in Kindergarten, the four instructional interventions support and develop students' reading and writing skills in order to meet grade level proficiency with a focus on the most intensive and individualized wrap around support in Kindergarten and I" Grade with follow up support through fifth grade.
Currently these interventions are almost solely used in Title I schools.
The third attachment contains three sheets - the frrst for Reading Recovery Full Implementation at Title I schools, the second for No Reading Recovery - at Title I Schools, and the third for No Reading Recovery and No Title I eligibility. In this model we would intensify Reading Recovery in a limited number of schools (14 schools) and provide professional development to support teachers in providing small group interventions to struggling students.
The fourth attachment is a chart of all schools, students at risk and students with the highest probability of success in Reading Recovery for the 2009-10 school year. This chart may be used if Reading Recovery would be distributed based on student eligibility (districtwide lowest 20% of students in f rst grade) and school eligibility (based on the highest number of students in need per school).
Option I: Leave Reading Recovery as it currently is, in the 23 schools, but target students more strategically and make sure readiness is in place before the Reading Recovery intervention.
At the most recent meeting on Dec. 7, the school board heard a final presentation from New Century School's site council. Developments with New Century's charter renewal are reaching a critical point, since we need approval from the school board by early January to participate in kindergarten recruitment. New Century is one of Wisconsin's oldest charter schools (established in May 1995), and our school community is fighting for the charter's continued existence. It's been a challenging journey.
Click "video" for the December 7, 2009 meeting and look for "D", the New Century Presentation. Interestingly, "E" is a presentation on a proposed Chinese immersion charter school.
Unfortunately, Madison lacks significant charter activity, something which, in my view, would be very beneficial to the community, students and parents.
So far this school year, the approximately 100 school districts that have reached agreements with their teachers have average settlements that increase salaries and benefits by 3.75%, according to Bob Butler, staff counsel for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. That compares with an average total compensation increase of 4.11% for teachers in the 2008-'09 school year.
Given that settlements tend to go down the longer negotiations take, Butler said the average increases for 2009-'10 and 2010-'11 are likely to be below what they have been in the past and what was considered a minimum settlement under the QEO law.
The recession, even in growing and financially stable districts, is the main reason behind the settlement drops, Butler said. Even though the Legislature removed the QEO salary restrictions, it left revenue limits in place so that any increase in teacher compensation almost certainly means staff cuts, he said.
In addition, facing pressure from taxpayers, some school districts, such as Whitnall, refused to enact a tax levy up to their state-imposed revenue limits this year.
"We have seen such a drastic reduction in the amount of money we have coming in from the state, it would have been hard to settle at 3.8% even if the QEO still stood there," Whitnall School Board President Bill Osterndorf said.
As many as three-quarters of state schools are failing to push their brightest pupils because teachers are reluctant to promote 'elitism', an Ofsted study says today.
Many teachers are not convinced of the importance of providing more challenging tasks for their gifted and talented pupils.
Bright youngsters told inspectors they were forced to ask for harder work. Others were resentful at being dragooned into 'mentoring' weaker pupils.
In nearly three-quarters of 26 schools studied, pupils designated as being academically gifted or talented in sport or the arts were 'not a priority', Ofsted found.
Teachers feared that a focus on the brightest pupils would 'undermine the school's efforts to improve the attainment and progress of all other groups of pupils'.
I give William Andrekopoulos credit - the school superintendent has invited outside scrutiny of what's going on in Milwaukee Public Schools, and he hasn't flinched when that has brought bad news time after time.
He says it takes courage to do this, and, especially compared with the mealy-mouthed way lots of executives in public and private businesses act, he's right.
"If you don't put the truth on the table . . . there will never be a sense of urgency to improve," he said in a phone conversation. He said he wants his successor - whom the School Board is on pace to pick soon - to have a clear understanding of what the score is.
So here's some of the score:
In 2006, Andrekopoulos invites the Council of the Great City Schools, a professional organization for big city school administrators, to assess the education program in MPS. The result: A report that is strongly critical, saying efforts in city schools are a hodgepodge of practices, many of them weak. The report also says there is a pervasive lack of urgency about getting better results in MPS.
School property tax levies for 2009-10 are up 6.0%, from $4.28 billion last year to $4.54 billion this year, according to the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX), a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. The rise in school taxes exceeded last year's increase of 5.2%, due principally to state budget cuts in aid to K-12 schools.
According to WISTAX, tax changes ranged from increases of 41.2% in Seneca and 32.8% in Gilmanton to reductions of more than 19% in Ladysmith and Sharon J1. However, increases larger than those in prior years were the norm, and 116 districts (27%) of the state's 425 districts had increases of 10% or more. In another 151 districts, levies were up between 5% and 10%. Only 42 districts cut property taxes.
"Although state budget reductions and tighter school revenue limits have made the headlines," noted WISTAX President Todd A. Berry, "the more telling stories are coming from budget details."
For example, schools raised their general fund levies more than 8%, well above the overall 6% increase. They pared back the overall increases by retiring or refinancing debt and by rearranging expenditures formerly charged to a little-known fund exempt from state revenue limits: fund 80, or the community services fund. This fall, 78 of 425 districts trimmed community service levies that fund such items as community recreation and adult classes; 10 districts eliminated the tax altogether. These actions served to reduce what would otherwise have been an 8.2% tax increase.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett would have more power over the Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent and budget than nearly any other U.S. mayor holds over a big-city school system, under a bill the Legislature is to consider Wednesday.
"If they go ahead with the present plan, it will make for one of the most powerful education mayors in the country," said Joe Viteritti, a professor of public policy at Hunter College who led a commission to study mayoral control in New York City and has edited a book, "When Mayors Take Charge."
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee), would allow the mayor to appoint the superintendent without confirmation by the School Board or Common Council, and would let the superintendent set the school budget and tax levy without a vote by the board or council.
Elected School Board members - who now select the superintendent and approve the budget - would be limited to an advisory role on the budget and would control only such functions as student discipline, community outreach and adult recreation.
Nick Gillespie pointed earlier to the latest evidence that federal workers have long since lapped their private sector benefactors in salary and job growth, in addition to their traditional advantages in job security and benefits. (Fun fact! Back in February 2008, before Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and George W. Bush's disaster socialism, The New York Times reported that Dubya was "in line to be the first president since World War II to preside over an economy in which federal government employment rose more rapidly than employment in the private sector.")
Here's an anecdotal sign that conventional wisdom is turning against those who are using the guaranteed revenue stream of tax dollars to pad their paychecks and pensions: A scathing piece from L.A. Times metro columnist Steve Lopez. Excerpt:
A reader sent me a posting for an executive secretary position at the [Department of Water and Power], and the salary range is $68,089 to $97,864, with great benefits. [...]
I checked with the personnel department and found that the same position in other city departments starts at $54,000 and ranges up to $72,000.
Something big needs to happen with Milwaukee Public Schools to boost student performance and graduation rates.
And Gov. Jim Doyle's push to give the city's mayor more influence is worth a shot.
The Legislature should accept Doyle's call for a special floor session this week to change how Milwaukee chooses its school superintendent.
Doyle wants the city's mayor, rather than the Milwaukee School Board, to appoint the superintendent. In addition, Senate Bill 405 would give the superintendent more power over the district's budget, contracts and staff.
If city voters didn't like the results by 2017, they could change back to the current system through a binding referendum.
The Legislature is already planning to meet this week to OK tougher drunken driving laws. So it can easily take up SB 405 as well. The bill needs quick action to help Wisconsin compete for federal "Race to the Top" innovation grants.
A flood of emails Monday resisting my suggestion of longer school days to raise achievement leads me to wonder if parts of the regular school day could be put to better use. Is the typical raucous high school lunch period, in an overcrowded and sometimes dangerous cafeteria, really necessary? My colleague Jenna Johnson wrote last week of imaginative principals letting students avoid the cafeteria in favor of staying in classrooms to catch up with work or having club meetings. Can lunch become a time for stress-free learning, rather than Lord of the Flies with tile floors?
Okay, I confess I have long considered lunch a waste of time. I avoided the cafeteria during high school. My favorite lunch was eating a sandwich in a classroom while convening the student court, of which I was chief justice, so we could sanction some miscreant for stealing corn nuts from the vending machine. (I heard a radio ad for that classmate's business when I was home recently---he has become a successful attorney.) At the office these days I stay in my cubicle and have crackers and fruit juice, maybe a cookie if somebody has brought them from home.
We looked at more than 21,000 public high schools in 48 states and the District of Columbia. The following are the 100 schools that performed the best in our three-step America's Best High Schools ranking analysis.
Kenneth Terrell:
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., the top school in U.S. News & World Report's America's Best High Schools rankings, is designed to challenge students. A course load of offerings that include DNA science, neurology, and quantum physics would seem to be more than enough to meet that goal. But students and the faculty felt those classes weren't enough, so they decided to tackle another big question: What are the social responsibilities of educated people? Over the course of the school year, students are exploring social responsibility through projects of their own design, ranging from getting school supplies for students with cerebral palsy in Shanghai to persuading their classmates to use handkerchiefs to reduce paper waste. The One Question project demonstrates the way "TJ," as it's referred to by students and teachers, encourages the wide-ranging interests of its students.
"None of our students has the same passion," says TJ Principal Evan Glazer. "But having a passion is widely accepted and embraced."
This enthusiasm has placed TJ at the top of the America's Best High Schools ranking for each of the three years that U.S. News has ranked high schools. U.S. News uses a three-step process that analyzes first how schools are educating all of their students, then their minority and disadvantaged students, and finally their collegebound students based on student scores on statewide tests, Advanced Placement tests, and International Baccalaureate tests.
Lt. Governor John Cherry this afternoon proposed using Michigan's water supply to fund its education system.
More specifically, businesses that make a profit by selling Michigan's water should pay a fee of 10 cents per bottle. That money, in turn, could replace the recently-dismantled Promise Scholarship, Cherry said.
He said the state's two most precious natural resources -- its people and its water -- are being depleted.
"We are losing one resource -- our talented work force and the energy of our young people, and we are giving away another resource -- our water -- for free," he said. "You don't need a PhD in mathematics to know this is a terrible equation."
"It's time for the bottlers to pay their water bill, just like you and I do," he said.
Cherry was speaking at the University of Michigan on a panel discussing the 2004 report that made 19 recommendations on education reform in Michigan.
Like many other principals across the city, Edward Tom has developed something of a nervous habit. Each morning, when he switches on his computer at the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics, he checks to make sure his school has the same amount of money it had the night before.
Mr. Tom is not a principal one would normally suspect of anxiety. Eighty-three percent of the students in the senior class at his small South Bronx high school graduated this spring, well above the 52 percent borough average. More than three-quarters of them enrolled in four-year colleges, winning $3 million in scholarships.
"These are the students people said couldn't learn," Mr. Tom, who has been principal since the school opened in 2005, said proudly.
But budget cuts are coming, even if it is too soon to say exactly when and how much. Most city agencies have been asked to submit plans for cost savings; the Department of Education has been asked to prepare for a 1.5 percent midyear cut and a 4 percent cut for next autumn's entering class.
While it is not known how much individual schools will be asked to shave, principals like Mr. Tom are preparing for the worst. It is part of their role, since 2007, of managing a large portion of their own operating budgets.
In a majority of schools around the country mobile phones/devices are locked away or 'banned' from use as they are perceived as a distraction or danger. The premise of this study is to see how mobile technologies can be used as a tool for learning within schools, by both staff and students.
30 students have been given the loan of an iPhone 3GS until then end of the academic year. They will be able to use these devices as part of their every day lessons in school and use them in whichever way they feel will aid their learning, working closely with their teachers. The increasing availability of 'apps' (applications) on these phones means that a wealth of possibilities may be accessed, and the group involved in the study will meet at regular intervals to share ideas on how they are being used as well as look at their regular attainment to see if, in reality, and change in learning can be monitored.
Union-represented teachers in the Pulaski County School District stayed home Thursday to protest a school board decision to end recognition of their union.
All 39 schools in the 18,000-student district remained open, with substitute teachers and parent volunteers filling in for the absent teachers, Acting Superintendent Rob McGill said.
"Our first priority was getting students in the classrooms, getting substitutes or volunteers in the classrooms and proper supervision for the students," McGill said.
"I've had no phone calls as far as schools saying (they are) overwhelmed and can't handle the situation," he added.
Of the district's 1,380 teachers, 690 were out Thursday, exactly half. About a dozen teachers are out on a typical day, McGill said.
Eighty percent of Wisconsin school districts offer 4-year-old kindergarten (4K), educational programming that has been growing throughout the state.
Sixteen school districts opened 4K programs this year. The 333 districts that provide 4K programs are serving 38,075 children, an enrollment increase of more than 4,000 from last year. Of the districts providing 4K, 101 do so through the community approach, which blends public and private resources to allow more options for the care and education of all 4-year-olds.
Licensed teachers provide instruction for all public school district 4K programs. In the community approach, some districts provide a licensed 4K teacher in a private child care setting, some contract with Head Start or the child care setting for the licensed teachers, and others bring child care into the licensed 4K public school program or mesh licensed 4K services with a Head Start program. Wisconsin is one of the nation's leading models for combining educational and community care services for 4-year-olds.
Board of Education Progress Report, December, 2009
Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira, via email:
4-Year-Old Kindergarten (4K): The Board received updates from the community-based 4K planning committee in the areas of: 1) logistics; 2) curriculum; 3) public/community relations; 4) family outreach/involvement; 5) funding. The Board voted to have the District continue to work with the community in planning for 4K with an anticipated start date of September 2010, pending the determination of the availability of the resources necessary to support the new program. A presentation on financial resources will be made to the Board in December.
Financial Audit: As required by state statute, the MMSD hires an independent audit firm to perform an audit of our annual financial statements and review our compliance with federal program requirements. The audit looks at the financial operations of the District. This audit was completed by Clifton Gunderson LLP. The Board received the audit report and a summary from Clifton Gunderson.
When asked what the summary message was that we could share with the community, the response was that the District is in a very sound financial position. Results of operations for 2009 were very positive with $10M added to fund balance. The fund balance is critical to the operation of the District and the cash-flow of the District. We were pleased with the audit outcome.
Math Task Force: The Board approved the administrative response to the 13 recommendations listed in the MMSD Math Task Force Report. The recommendations focused on middle school math specialists; district-wide curricular consistency; achievement gap; assessment; teacher collaboration; parent/community communication; balanced math approach; addressing failing grades in algebra; and algebra in 8th grade. The Board also asked for regular updates on the progress of plan implementation. The Task Force Report is located on the District's web site.
Enrollment Data: The Board reviewed the enrollment data and projections for the District. One area that stood out was the overcrowding in some of the elementary schools in the La Follette attendance area. The Long Range Planning Committee is starting a series of meetings to study the overcrowding in this area and to develop recommendations for the Board on how to address this issue. It is anticipated that recommendations will be brought back to the Board in February. The Board will have the final say on how to deal with the overcrowding issues.
If you have any questions/comments, please let us know. board@madison.k12.wi.us
What are the implications of "tracking," or grouping students into separate classes based on their achievement? Many schools have moved away from this practice and reduced the number of subject-area courses offered in a given grade. In this new Thomas B. Fordham Institute report, Brookings scholar Tom Loveless examines tracking and detracking in Massachusetts middle schools, with particular focus on changes that have occurred over time and their implications for high-achieving students. Among the report's key findings: detracked schools have fewer advanced students in mathematics than tracked schools. The report also finds that detracking is more popular in schools serving disadvantaged populations.
A new report out today makes the case that students do better in school when they are separated into groups based on their achievement.
Loveless found that de-tracked schools have fewer advanced students in math than do tracked schools--and that de-tracking is more popular in schools that serve disadvantaged students.
By 2011, if the states stick to their policy guns, all eighth graders in California and Minnesota will be required to take algebra. Other states are all but certain to follow. Assuming these courses hold water, some youngsters will dive in majestically and then ascend gracefully to the surface, breathing easily. Others, however, will smack their bellies, sink to the bottom and/or come up gasping. Clearly, the architects of this policy have the best of intentions. In recent years, the conventional wisdom of American K-12 education has declared algebra to be a "gatekeeper" to future educational and career success. One can scarcely fault policy makers for insisting that every youngster pass through that gate, lest too many find their futures constrained. It's also well known that placing students in remedial classes rarely ends up doing them a favor, especially in light of evi- dence that low-performing students may learn more in heterogeneous classrooms.
Yet common sense must ask whether all eighth graders are truly prepared to succeed in algebra class. That precise question was posed in a recent study by Brookings scholar Tom Loveless (The 2008 Brown Center Report on American Education), who is also the author of the present study. He found that over a quarter of low-performing math students--those scoring in the bottom 10 percent on NAEP--were enrolled in advanced math courses in 2005. Since these "misplaced" students are ill-pre- pared for the curricular challenges that lie ahead, Loveless warned, pushing an "algebra for all" policy on them could further endanger their already-precarious chances of success.
When American education produced this situation by abolishing low-level tracks and courses, did people really believe that such seemingly simple--and well-meanin --changes in policy and school organization would magically transform struggling learners into middling or high-achieving ones? And were they oblivious to the effects that such alterations might have on youngsters who were al- ready high-performing?
Andreal Davis - Madison School District Instructional Resource Teacher for Cultural Relevance, via a kind reader's email:
Communalism is the concept that the duty to one's family and social group is more important that individual rights and privileges. On November 4, 2009 I personally experienced this concept through President Barack Obama's visit to James Coleman Wright Middle School.
The experience began with my 12 year old son, Ari Davis, being selected to lead the Pledge of Allegiance during the ceremony. Minutes after being informed of this special occasion, I was invited to attend the event as a member of the Madison Metropolitan School District staff. Thus, I attended the ceremony wearing two hats, one as a parent and the other as an educator.
On the day of this event, several of us anxiously awaited - for more than four hours - the arrival of President Obama. During this period I experienced first hand the spirit of communalism. A recap of my educational career began to unfold in the parking lot as I held conversations with past and current MMSD colleagues. As I entered Wright Middle School I had the opportunity to interact with students I had taught at Lincoln Elementary. This allowed me to see some products of my work by listening to their thought provoking reactions to the President's impending visit.
America has tried many strategies over the decades to reverse the slow, steady decline in its public schools. Few of these have delivered real results. The "classrooms without walls" of the 1970s, for example, were supposed to open students' minds to creativity and curiosity. It worked for some kids, but too many others ended up merely distracted. In the '90s, school vouchers--publicly financed scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools--were praised as a way to give families choices and pressure schools to improve. Vouchers helped a fraction of families across the country but didn't instigate any real change. The 2002 No Child Left Behind requirements were supposed to guarantee that every kid learned at least the "three R" basics. English and math scores for elementary students did inch up, but the scores of average American high schoolers on international science and math tests continued to sink. The United States currently ranks 17th in science and 24th in math, near the bottom of the developed world.
Now President Obama has launched the Race to the Top campaign to improve schools by holding students to higher standards, paying bonuses to teachers whose students excel, and replacing the worst schools with supposedly nimbler and more intimate charter schools. This time will be different, he insists, because he's only going to promote strategies proven to help students, and he's going to reward the winners of his reform race with prize money from a stimulus fund of at least $4 billion, a slice of the more than $100 billion he set aside for education in the stimulus bill.
You can't say it more plainly than that so I reprinted the headline from this NY Times article.
Apparently NYC already uses test scores as a factor in teacher/principal bonus pay (yes, they have that too), for the grade a school gets (A-F) and for which schools are closed because of poor performance. A lot of this effort is to get Race to the Top money.
The article suggests that the Mayor (he just won his third term despite having said he would follow the law that he couldn't run again - he got that changed) may put forth his political capital to take on the teachers union.
And from the article of interest to us:
"The mayor also said the state should allow teacher layoffs based on performance rather than seniority, as they are now."
ducation reform advocates have been cheered by the election of Chris Christie as New Jersey's next governor. A key plank of his education plan is creating more high-quality public charter schools -- a goal shared with the administration of President Obama.
Since the first charter school law was passed in 1991, the movement has enjoyed bipartisan support at the federal and state levels. Now, in part because of the emphasis on charters in the administration's "Race to the Top" competition, we're seeing a firestorm of renewed interest in many states.
As Carlos Lejnieks, chairman of the a, rightly says, we need to move charters "from mediocre to good; from good to great; and from great to growth." The good news is that New Jersey has assets to build from and is already doing some things right.
From Ryan Hill and Steve Adubato in Newark to Gloria Bonilla-Santiago in Camden, some of the nation's leading charter leaders are in New Jersey. In terms of policy, there is no statewide "cap" on the number of charter schools that can be created; the New Jersey Department of Education has created a reasonably rigorous process for approving new charters while adding greater numbers of new schools in recent years; and the statewide public school-finance reforms enacted in 2008 helped establish a more level playing field for charters that had suffered huge disadvantages under the previous funding program.
We have a simple message to newly elected Dallas schools trustees Bernadette Nutall and Bruce Parrott: The politicking is over; now it's time to manage a school district.
This urging is not to be taken lightly. DISD is making academic progress and beginning to put its battered financial house in order; it must continue to improve in those directions.
Tuesday's runoff elections give us both hope and cause to pause. Nutall, District 9 trustee, has constructively criticized the school board and administration. We anticipate that she will responsibly hold DISD administration, including Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, accountable to trustees and, ultimately, to taxpayers, parents and students. We recommended her in this race because she's done strong work in the district as a school-community liaison and brings a grassroots understanding of the issues facing DISD.
However, we're less certain about Parrott, whose campaign in District 3 consisted of mostly unfocused critiques of DISD, Hinojosa and board incumbents. The new trustee, whose style we've found to be potentially combative and unproductive, must deliver more. While we did not recommend him in this election, we hope he proves our concerns unfounded.
Charter schools reached a new milestone this year. According to the Center for Education Reform, more than 5,000 charters are now operating in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Considering that the first charter didn't open until 1992, and that these innovative schools have faced outright hostility from teachers unions and the education bureaucracy, their growth is a rare gleam of hope for American public schools.
More than 1.5 million students now attend charters, an 11% increase from a year ago. That's only about 3% of all public school students, but the number has more than quadrupled in the past decade. And it would be much higher if the supply of charter schools was meeting the demand. As of June, an estimated 365,000 kids were on waiting lists.
4k is really exciting, since it provides a great opportunity for four year olds to get a head start with learning before they get to kindergarten. It's also a promising step towards eliminating the achievment gap. Right now, we're smooting out some rough edges-- deciding whether to start with all of the buildings and teachers, or whether to "phase in," starting with 1/3 or 2/3 the amount of resources, and then increase it in the next few years.
However, though there's still some negotiating to go, the 4k plan seems to be on its way. Another issue that involved a lot of intense discussion was the district's Reading Recovery Program.
Reading Recovery is a program for first grade students who are really struggling with reading. Targeted at the lowest 20% reading level students, Reading Recovery provides very intense one-on-one training every day which, when continued throughout the year, has very good national results of getting kids back on track.
However, in the last few years, RR in the MMSD has had less success than the national average (42% students finish the program versus around 60% nationally). This lead the district to worry and evaluate the program. At our meeting, we discussed schools that had experienced success with reading recoverey, and other ones that had not. The team that evaluated the program has recommended "full implementation" of reading recovery at schools with the most needy children, which would hopefully increase the success rate at those schools. However, due to limited resources, Reading Recovery can not be implemented at every school.
Troy Shaw (Focus On Diversity) held a panel discussion 3 years ago to discuss something similar to a MPS Takeover. Look at who was on the panel then... interesting how long this issue has been on the table. Dr. Onick tells the audience exactly what he believes should be done with underperforming schools... shut 'em down.
Robust Advanced Placement programs are often seen as a seal of quality for high schools. And in its quest for excellence, Texas has seen an explosion of the classes that offer the promise and prestige of college credit.
But the latest data show Texas high school students fail more than half of the college-level exams, and their performance trails national averages.
Some say Texas failure rates are higher because more students from an increasingly diverse pool take AP classes here. But high failure rates from some of the Dallas area's elite campuses raise questions about whether our most advantaged high school students are prepared for college work.
It is far past the time for California to step up and reform its education system. As a state, our schools were once the fourth-highest in the nation in reading and math. Now, we now rank below 40. In science, our students were once proudly some of the highest in the nation and now they are now some of the lowest.
This is simply unacceptable.
We have to reform the way we educate our children and, thanks to the Obama administration, we have a chance to do just that.
Thanks to the Race to the Top funds - $4.35 billion worth of competitive grants - states have the opportunity to compete for these funds that are intended to "encourage and reward states that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform." Essentially, the White House and Department of Education have issued a challenge to states - come up with a workable plan to fix your failing schools and they will reward you with funding.
Citing low Milwaukee Public Schools' scores on a new national assessment, Gov. Jim Doyle called for a special legislative session for Dec. 16 to give the Milwaukee mayor the power to appoint the school superintendent.
That's the same day lawmakers hope to pass a bill to toughen drunken driving laws.
Doyle for weeks has pushed for the change to help secure a share of $4.35 billion in federal Race to the Top funds. But he faces strong opposition from some of his fellow Democrats who control the Legislature.
"I am calling a special session of the Legislature because we must act now to drive real change that improves students' performance, month after month and year after year," Doyle said in a statement. "The children at Milwaukee Public Schools are counting on the adults around them to prepare them for success."
But opponents of the plan said they will continue to fight the measure.
"It is disappointing that Gov. Doyle has decided to ignore the will of Milwaukee's citizens and continue his push for a mayoral takeover of Milwaukee Public Schools," Rep. Tamara Grigsby (D-Milwaukee) said in a statement. "MPS needs serious reform, but the top-down approach for which he advocates lacks the level of community engagement and consideration that any proposal of this magnitude requires."
Childs Walker's article "Poor, minority students lose ground in college, study says" (Dec. 4) was quite chilling for anyone who has watched the demise of our public school system. The thinking seems to be that if minorities can't pass tests than the tests must be too difficult and should be made easier. That has become American education's mindset and has produced high school graduates who can't read, write, do basic math or think for themselves. It is much easier to dumb down education than to address the real problems of lack of parenting skills and inadequate teaching methods.
Of course America will be at a competitive disadvantage; while the rest of the world is raising educational standards, we are focused on making sure minority testing and graduate percentage rates are as high as non-minorities no matter how closing the gap is achieved.
New Jersey's laws governing charter schools received a "C" from a Washington, D.C. non-profit group that ranked the statutes governing charter schools across the nation.
The Center for Education Reform, which advocates for charter schools and school choice, found New Jersey's laws fell right in the middle -- 17th strongest -- among the 40 states and districts that allow charter schools.
Only three places received an "A": California, Minnesota and the District of Columbia. And only 13 of 40 states have strong laws that do not require revision, according to the report released today.
The Obama administration's Department of Education recently launched what I believe will become its most expensive, most lamentable, and most avoidable folly. Declaring that, "as a country, we all need to get into the turnaround business," Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the availability of $3.5 billion in School Improvement Grants.
Years of research have clearly demonstrated that efforts to fix our most persistently failing schools seldom work. Moreover, turnarounds in other fields and industries have the same distressing track record. (This Education Next article fully discusses this matter.)
If the secretary's declaration were merely rhetorical, it would only demonstrate a lack of appreciation for the sad history of turnarounds. But it's entirely more worrisome than that. During a speech at the 2009 National Charter Schools Conference, Duncan encouraged the nation's best charter school operators to move away from their magnificent core competency--starting new schools for disadvantaged students--and get into the turnaround business. If they unwisely take him up on the offer, the opportunity costs could be staggering.
And of course, there is the matter of money. At $3.5 billion, this grant program is mammoth, meaning we are about to spend an enormous sum of money on a line of work with a remarkable track record of failure. Exacerbating the problem, the final guidelines allow for tepid interventions (the "transformation" model) to qualify as a turnaround attempt. While districts could choose to pursue more radical activities, history teaches us that few will.
After-school programs at De Anza Elementary in Baldwin Park keep students, faculty and even families focused on education.
The bell signaling the end of the school day at De Anza Elementary in Baldwin Park rang more than an hour ago. But hundreds of students are still at school, studying vocabulary, practicing math and completing homework under the supervision of teachers.
With the help of state grants, federal funds and teacher volunteers, nearly half of De Anza's students spend extra hours every week learning at school -- hours well beyond the traditional school day.
"Until six o'clock at night, you would think we're still in session," said Principal Christine Simmons. "Seeing the campus so alive like that, and seeing the parents and students so excited, just makes me and all the teachers want to work harder."
The result, according to the state Department of Education, is a dramatic improvement in student achievement.
I attended the Cleveland STEM Community Meeting on December 4 with my wife and 8th grade daughter.
First, the important parts.
My daughter is excited about the program. To her it looks like a good mix of the academic challenge of Garfield with the more personalized instruction (and project-based learning) of NOVA. She got most excited when she saw a list of the possible classes in the Global Health Academy.
My wife and I are much more confident about the probability that the program will actually be there and that it will be something like what has been advertised.
There was a pretty good crowd of people there - I'd say about forty to fifty (not counting staff).
The folks from Cleveland who were there are excited about the program and have a very clear picture of the idea - the project-based learning, the integration of technology, the alignment between classes, the extended school day and accelerated schedule, etc.
The STEM program looks real and, to us, it looks good. They still have some things to work out. The schedule is inspired, but needs some tinkering. They haven't figured out how to get the student:computer ratio to the promised 1:1. They are still missing a lot of the curricular elements - they haven't found the puzzle pieces but they know what they have to look like.
No evidence anywhere shows that merit-pay systems, aimed at individual teachers, improve education. Incentives to groups of teachers are effective, but not individuals.
In education "merit pay" means that a school or district decides what "merit" means -- usually certain gains in test scores -- and dangles financial bonuses to entice individual teachers to work harder.
Intuitively, it sounds like it could work.
But in a 1998 Harvard Business Review, Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote an excellent essay called "Six dangerous myths about pay." He blames economic theory for creating the myth "that individual incentive pay drives creativity and productivity, and that people are primarily motivated by money.... Despite the evident popularity of this practice, the problems with individual merit pay are numerous and well documented. It has been shown to undermine teamwork, encourage employees to focus on the short term, and lead people to link compensation to political skills and ingratiating personalities rather than to performance."
He's talking about the private sector, so imagine the boondoggle it becomes in the public sector.
I wanted to write about why that couple that crashed the President's first state dinner should be strung up and publicly flogged for days on end. But editorial rejected it because they wanted to me write something about the LSAT.
So then I offered to write an analysis of why our failure to punish a couple who crash a President's state dinner in hopes of landing a Bravo reality show indicates that the post WWII American empire is dead, dead, dead. That was rejected by editorial on grounds that it was the same as the first story (which it kind of was, but still), and because they wanted something about the LSAT.
Instead, I've been "asked" to write a piece far more complicated, which will inevitably be rife with speculation and controversy. Thus, I wade into the sordid issue of averaging LSAT scores.
Once upon a time, law schools used the average of your LSAT scores in the admissions process, and none of us even bothered to ask why.
Boos and jeers filled Cobo Hall this afternoon as Detroit Public Schools teachers reacted to details in a proposed contract agreement with the district.
Teachers loaning the district $10,000 each over two years with deductions taken from their paychecks.
A base salary increase of 1% in the third year of the three-year contract.
Increase in health insurance costs.
Plus a plethora of school reforms that include a peer evaluation process.
Teachers union president Keith Johnson told the crowd that the contract may not be exactly what they want but the alternative is to have the district declare bankruptcy, possibly leaving many of them unemployed.
"I cannot, I will not gamble, play Russian roulette, call the bluff of the district," Johnson said.
Minnesotans deserve to have the funds they provide for education used in the most effective way possible.
The story in the Nov. 29 Star Tribune, "Charter program is 'out of control'," raised issues that should concern everyone who cares about high quality public education and careful use of tax dollars.
As a citizen, taxpayer, educator and executive director of the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools, I am saddened and disappointed that some people look for ways around both the letter and the spirit of the law, some companies charge exorbitant fees, and some individuals use their offices to personally profit from transactions involving public funds.
Thankfully, such conduct is not the norm -- but an examination is needed into the policies and practices that allow these aberrations to occur.
The demonstration, which took place near the Mission Viejo Mall, drew more than 300 people, according to organizers of the event. It marked the latest in a series of actions highlighting teachers' dissatisfaction with contract negotiations and the school board.
Capistrano Unified needs to slash about $25 million from its 2010-11 budget, board officials have said. They have suggested cutting teachers' pay by 10% and making the decrease retroactive to July by deducting it from upcoming paychecks.
"These are difficult times for all institutions, not just school districts," said trustee Anna Bryson. "We have to work with the money that we have, and that keeps getting smaller."
Vicki Soderberg, president of the Capistrano Unified Education Assn., which represents some 2,200 teachers, said the proposed salary decrease would be dire.
District aims to pay some operating costs from a bond
The Oakland County district wants to shift about $2 million of its annual operating costs into a capital rebuilding program financed by a $169.1-million bond. The money would be used to fund capital improvements that reduce energy bills and save maintenance expenses that are paid from the district's operating costs.
State education experts say Berkley is on the right path.
"A district's operating fund is almost 100% controlled by what the state allocates," while a rebuilding program is "100% supported by local taxpayers," said David Martell, executive director of the Michigan School Business Officials.
"It's obvious that future funding from the state is going to be constrained," Martell said.
By slicing operating costs, a district puts more spending under local control, "and that makes sense in today's economic climate," agreed Michigan Department of Education spokeswoman Jan Ellis.
In her last job in the Air Force, Tammie Langley gave prospective pilots and navigators an introduction to aeronautics. Four years later, Ms. Langley is in a different sort of classroom, teaching sixth graders in North Carolina everything from reading to math.
The settings may be radically different, but Ms. Langley said the transition from teaching 22-year-olds to teaching 11- or 12-year-olds had been fairly seamless. "Either way, you still have to kind of wipe their noses a bit and kick them in the behind every now and then," said Ms. Langley, who is in her second year at Kannapolis Intermediate School, about 25 miles north of Charlotte.
Ms. Langley, 36, became a schoolteacher in large part because of Troops to Teachers, a federal program that, over 15 years, has helped about 12,000 former service members transition into second careers in the classroom. Now, a bipartisan group in Congress is hoping to expand the program to allow more veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to sign up, while also increasing the number of places in which they could find employment.
Not all of the veterans who enter the classroom with the help of Troops to Teachers, some of whom are up to a generation older than teachers starting right out of college, share Ms. Langley's background in formal instruction. But the program's supporters and participants say that military service in general provides the sort of discipline and life experiences that translate well to teaching.
I got an advance look at the first count of U.S. public schools that have significantly expanded learning time. The report, released Monday by the National Center on Time & Learning, reveals that a surprisingly large number -- 655 -- give students an average of 25 percent more time than the standard 6 1/2 hours a day, 180 days a year. But I was disappointed that only about 160 in that group are regular public schools.
The District has 18 schools on the list, more than in all but 10 states. But they are charter public schools. The majority of D.C. children are in regular schools. They have not had a chance to see what a big jump in learning time might do for them.
The Washington area suburbs are also disappointing. Maryland has only two schools on the list, both charters in Baltimore. One -- the KIPP Ujima Village Academy -- has cut back its hours under union pressure to pay teachers the standard hourly rate for the extra time. The only Virginia schools on the list are the two An Achievable Dream schools set up by the Newport News school district to help impoverished students.
I like longer school days because I have seen them help bring significant increases in achievement in several charter school networks, including Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, YES and KIPP. Most important are their great teachers, the flame of learning. But increased time is the fuel.
MMSD Fine Arts Coordinator Julie Palkowski is the author of the featured article in the latest edition of the Wisconsin School Musician magazine. Partnerships across our community enhance the opportunities for MMSD students. Making the Most of the Concert Festival Experience is a case study of the collaborative project among the MMSD, the Overture Center for the Arts and the Wisconsin Music Educators Association that occurred this past April.
According to Google, the MMSD is the fifth most popular searched item in the Madison area. Google broke down the top search terms by city in its Zeitgeist 2009 survey. Google counted searches in 31 US cities to compile the list of the most popular searches unique to specific cities. Looking for something to do on a cold winter's evening? Why not consider a concert at one of our high schools, or a middle school choral performance. The MMSD calendar of events lists a wide range of no-cost potential family activities to beat the recession blues!
Attached to this memorandum is detailed costing information relative to the implementation of four-year-old kindergarten. We have attempted to be as inclusive as possible in identifying the various costs involved in implementing this program.
Each of the identified options includes cost estimates involving all three program models that have previously been discussed. The first option includes the specific cost requests provided to us by representatives from the community providers. The remaining options include the same costing information for Model I programs (programs in district schools) but vary for Model II and III programs (programs in community-based early learning centers). These options vary in the following ways:
For District Option 1, we have used a 1:10 staffing ratio instead of a 1:8.5 staffing ratio that was submitted by representatives from the community providers.
For District Option 2, we have used a three-year phase-in for the reimbursement to local providers.
For District Option 3, we have used both a 1:10 ratio and a three-year phase-in for reimbursement to local providers.
For District Option 4, we have used both a 1:10 ratio and a two-year phase-in for the reimbursement to local providers.
The District options with a 1:10 ratio were created because this was the staffing ratio that was recommended by the 4K planning committee and is the ratio needed for local accreditation. All Modell costing(in District schools) is based on a 1:15 ratio with the understanding that additional special education and bilingual support to the classroom is provided. The District options employing a two- or three-year phase-in of the
Plenty of folks, including members of the Denver Post editorial board, have been pretty disapproving of new Denver Public Schools board member Andrea Merida in the days since she had herself secretly sworn in hours before a Monday-night board meeting so she could vote on controversial school reforms at the session, highlighted in the video above. Critics have called the move "shameful," "embarrassing" and "unprofessional."
This reaction mirrored the responses in the DPS administration building's fourth-floor cafeteria, where meeting-goers were sent to watch the proceedings on TV once the boardroom was full. There were lots of raised eyebrows and whispers of "Oh-no-she-didn't!" when Merida took her seat.
The move allowed Merida to vote against the most high-profile reform, the turnaround plan for low-performing Lake Middle School. However, it took that privilege away from eight-year board member Michelle Moss, who Merida was scheduled to replace and who left the meeting in tears.
Finally tonight: overhauling the nation's schools.
A report today says, most states will apply for their share of federal stimulus money tied to education reform.
The NewsHour's special correspondent for education, John Merrow, offers some historical context on the latest reform efforts.
U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There we go. It's done.
JOHN MERROW: The stimulus bill the president signed in February included a new $4.3 billion fund for public schools.
BARACK OBAMA: This is one of the largest investments in education reform in American history. And rather than divvying it up and handing it out, we are letting states and school districts compete for it.
JOHN MERROW: This is where the money will be handed out, at the U.S. Department of Education. It sets the rules for what it's calling the Race to the Top.
Arne Duncan is the new secretary of education.
ARNE DUNCAN: Really, what I'm trying to do, can we make the Department of Education not the driver of compliance, not the driver of bureaucracy, but the engine of innovation?
Michigan lawmakers are in such a frenzy to qualify for up to $400 million in one-time money for schools from President Barack Obama's Race to the Top program that they're rushing through complex changes to the state's education structure in a matter of weeks.
Yet they can't agree on how to keep school districts from getting hit by cuts of roughly $300 to $600 per student that have administrators contemplating laying off teachers, closing schools and eliminating busing, among other cost-saving moves.
They could be debating the positives and negatives of a proposal suggested recently by state Rep. Alma Wheeler Smith, a Democratic gubernatorial hopeful, to trim some business tax exemptions and use the money to roll back a business tax surcharge and plug the $500 million hole in the state's education fund.
They could be looking for ways to restore after-school and preschool programs, both of which have been proven to help students learn and improve test scores, or the college scholarships that encouraged high school students to do better in school.
Michelle Lukacs grew up in Mequon and worked as a teacher in Milwaukee. Then she was a teacher and guidance counselor in Jefferson. She got a school principal's license through a program at Edgewood College in Madison.
She moved back to Milwaukee and decided to open a school as part of the publicly funded private school voucher program. She called it Atlas Preparatory Academy because she liked the image of Atlas holding the whole world up and because it was the name of a refrigeration company her husband owns.
On the first day of classes in September 2001, Atlas had 23 students in leased space in an old school building at 2911 S. 32nd St.
This September, Atlas had 814 students, a growth of 3,439% over eight years. It now uses three buildings on the south side and has grown, grade by grade, to be a full kindergarten through 12th-grade program.
Atlas' growth is explosive, even within the continually growing, nationally significant voucher program. Voucher enrollment over the same period has roughly doubled from 10,882 in September 2001 to 21,062 this fall.
The Atlas story underscores an interesting trend: The number of voucher schools in recent years has leveled off, and this year, fell significantly. But the total number of students using vouchers to attend private schools in the city has gone up, and a few schools have become particular powerhouses, at least when it comes to enrollment.
State Representative Mark Pocan met with the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education on Monday, November 30 to discuss "K-12 Funding in Wisconsin and the Impact of the State Budget on School District Finances." (State Senator Mark Miller, who was also expected, was ill, Liz Stevens from his office attended in his stead). The short version of what transpired is that although Pocan brought Bob Lang and Dave Loppnow from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau as support, they were unable to "shut the lions' mouths" and the Board got a few nips in. Beyond that, Pocan explained the intent and context of the budget "fix," emphasized the importance of addressing revenue issues, gave some thoughts on school finance reform, defended parts of his record and more-or-less split the blame for everything bad between Governor Jim Doyle and the economy.
I have to give Pocan some credit and respect for facing the lions and for being very forthright and forthcoming. I'll even go beyond that and say that when he was talking about what can and should be done and why, he showed understanding and that he cared. It was words, not actions, and I want action from my State Rep.. But at least he didn't shut the door on action. Let's help him open that door (more on that below, but think Penny for Kids).
For me, the greatest national security crisis in the United States is the crisis in education. We are turning out new generations of Americans who are whizzes at video games and may be capable of tweeting 24 hours a day but are nowhere near ready to cope with the great challenges of the 21st century.
An American kid drops out of high school at an average rate of one every 26 seconds. In some large urban districts, only half of the students ever graduate. Of the kids who manage to get through high school, only about a third are ready to move on to a four-year college.
It's no secret that American youngsters are doing poorly in school at a time when intellectual achievement in an increasingly globalized world is more important than ever. International tests have shown American kids to be falling well behind their peers in many other industrialized countries, and that will only get worse if radical education reforms on a large scale are not put in place soon.
Consider the demographics. The ethnic groups with the worst outcomes in school are African-Americans and Hispanics. The achievement gaps between these groups and their white and Asian-American peers are already large in kindergarten and only grow as the school years pass. These are the youngsters least ready right now to travel the 21st-century road to a successful life.
EVER since the cap on the number of children who could be awarded top grades in their GCSE exams was abolished in 1988, the proportion of pupils attaining these heights has relentlessly increased. This week that inexorable progress was revealed to be illusory. Three separate studies showed how Britain is failing its schoolchildren--and shortchanging the country in the process.
All rich countries rightly expect their young people to be literate and numerate by the time they leave school. Some aspire to loftier goals such as scientific prowess, fluency in a foreign language and a rough grasp of history. In a report released on December 1st, Reform, a think-tank, pointed out the poverty of Britain's ambitions for its children.
Students at 16 are required to take just three academic subjects--English, maths and science--and many study no others. Even if they leave school with vocational qualifications too, they are ill placed to better themselves. Employers consistently value the ability to think above skills that can be learned on the job, and universities that accept students with vocational qualifications do so only after admissions tutors have reassured themselves that the young person in front of them is no dullard. Allowing pupils to choose vocational courses over academic ones--indeed, encouraging it, as vocational qualifications are treated in published school-league tables as if they were worth twice as much as academic ones--does no favours to children from deprived backgrounds. Instead it segregates the workforce and impairs social mobility. Bad at any time, this is appalling now that globalisation has increased competition in the workplace.
Prince William County school officials unveiled a plan Wednesday night to offer bonuses to teachers and administrators in high-performing schools that serve poor or challenging students.
The plan, if approved by the school board later this month, will be submitted to the federal government for possible funding and could begin as early as next school year.
Prince William, the state's second-largest school system, is one of scores across the country that are developing pay proposals tied to student performance thanks to new federal dollars and fresh interest from the nation's top education officials.
"We had talked about merit pay or performance pay informally over time. But when the Obama administration again came out and recommended those kinds of approaches . . . I just felt like it was time to stop talking about it and start moving forward," said School Board member Grant E. Lattin (Occoquan), who asked officials to put together a plan last spring.
60% to 42%: Madison School District's Reading Recovery Effectiveness Lags "National Average": Administration seeks to continue its use
via a kind reader's email: Sue Abplanalp, Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Education, Lisa Wachtel, Executive Director, Teaching & Learning, Mary Jo Ziegler, Language Arts/Reading Coordinator, Teaching & Learning, Jennie Allen, Title I, Ellie Schneider, Reading Recovery Teacher Leader [2.6MB PDF]:
Background The Board of Education requested a thorough and neutral review of the Madison Metropolitan School District's (MMSD) Reading Recovery program, In response to the Board request, this packet contains a review of Reading Recovery and related research, Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Reading Recovery student data analysis, and a matrix summarizing three options for improving early literacy intervention. Below please find a summary of the comprehensive research contained in the Board of Education packet. It is our intent to provide the Board of Education with the research and data analysis in order to facilitate discussion and action toward improved effectiveness of early literacy instruction in MMSD.
Reading Recovery Program Description The Reading Recovery Program is an intensive literacy intervention program based on the work of Dr. Marie Clay in New Zealand in the 1970's, Reading Recovery is a short-term, intensive literacy intervention for the lowest performing first grade students. Reading Recovery serves two purposes, First, it accelerates the literacy learning of our most at-risk first graders, thus narrowing the achievement gap. Second, it identifies children who may need a long-term intervention, offering systematic observation and analysis to support recommendations for further action.
The Reading Recovery program consists of an approximately 20-week intervention period of one-to-one support from a highly trained Reading Recovery teacher. This Reading Recovery instruction is in addition to classroom literacy instruction delivered by the classroom teacher during the 90-minute literacy block. The program goal is to provide the lowest performing first grade students with effective reading and writing strategies allowing the child to perform within the average range of a typical first grade classroom after a successful intervention period. A successful intervention period allows the child to be "discontinued" from the Reading Recovery program and to function proficiently in regular classroom literacy instruction.
Reading Recovery Program Improvement Efforts The national Reading Recovery data reports the discontinued rate for first grade students at 60%. In 2008-09, the discontinued rate for MMSD students was 42% of the students who received Reading Recovery. The Madison Metropolitan School District has conducted extensive reviews of Reading Recovery every three to four years. In an effort to increase the discontinued rate of Reading Recovery students, MMSD worked to improve the program's success through three phases.
In her column, Belmore also emphasized the 80 percent of the children who are doing well, but she provided additional statistics indicating that test scores are improving at the five target schools. Thus she argued that the best thing is to stick with the current program rather than use the Reading First money.
Belmore has provided a lesson in the selective use of statistics. It's true that third grade reading scores improved at the schools between 1998 and 2004. However, at Hawthorne, scores have been flat (not improving) since 2000; at Glendale, flat since 2001; at Midvale/ Lincoln, flat since 2002; and at Orchard Ridge they have improved since 2002 - bringing them back to slightly higher than where they were in 2001.
In short, these schools are not making steady upward progress, at least as measured by this test.
Belmore's attitude is that the current program is working at these schools and that the percentage of advanced/proficient readers will eventually reach the districtwide success level. But what happens to the children who have reading problems now? The school district seems to be writing them off.
So why did the school district give the money back? Belmore provided a clue when she said that continuing to take part in the program would mean incrementally ceding control over how reading is taught in Madison's schools (Capital Times, Oct 16). In other words, Reading First is a push down the slippery slope toward federal control over public education.
Thanks to Jason Shepard for highlighting comments of UW Psychology Professor Mark Seidenberg at the Dec. 13 Madison School Board meeting in his article, Not all good news on reading. Dr. Seidenberg asked important questions following the administrations presentation on the reading program. One question was whether the district should measure the effectiveness of its reading program by the percentages of third-graders scoring at proficient or advanced on the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test (WRCT). He suggested that the scores may be improving because the tests arent that rigorous.
I have reflected on his comment and decided that he is correct.
Using success on the WRCT as our measurement of student achievement likely overstates the reading skills of our students. The WRCT---like the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) given in major subject areas in fourth, eighth and tenth grades--- measures student performance against standards developed in Wisconsin. The more teaching in Wisconsin schools aims at success on the WRCT or WKCE, the more likely it is that student scores will improve. If the tests provide an accurate, objective assessment of reading skills, then rising percentages of students who score at the proficient and advanced levels would mean that more children are reaching desirable reading competence.
I'm glad Jason Shepard questions MMSD's public display of self-congratulation over third grade reading test scores. It isn't that MMSD ought not be proud of progress made as measured by fewer African American students testing at the basic and minimal levels. But there is still a sigificant gap between white students and students of color--a fact easily lost in the headlines. Balanced Literacy, the district's preferred approach to reading instruction, works well for most kids. Yet there are kids who would do a lot better in a program that emphasizes explicit phonics instruction, like the one offered at Lapham and in some special education classrooms. Kids (arguably too many) are referred to special education because they have not learned to read with balanced literacy and are not lucky enough to land in the extraordinarily expensive Reading Recovery program that serves a very small number of students in one-on-on instruction. (I have witnessed Reading Recovery teachers reject children from their program because they would not receive the necessary support from home.)
Though the scripted lessons typical of most direct instruction programs are offensive to many teachers (and is one reason given that the district rejected the Reading First grant) the irony is that an elementary science program (Foss) that the district is now pushing is also scripted as is Reading Recovery and Everyday Math, all elementary curricula blessed by the district.
I wonder if we might close the achievement gap further if teachers in the district were encouraged to use an approach to reading that emphasizes explicit and systematic phonics instruction for those kids who need it. Maybe we'd have fewer kids in special education and more children of color scoring in the proficient and advanced levels of the third grade reading test.
Standards and common assessments were introduced 15 years ago. KIPP took the expectations expressed by state tests seriously and made numerous process improvements to the old model of school. At the middle school I visited Monday, 100% of the Kipsters had passed the state math test.
This KIPP school gives uniform weekly quizzes in every state tested subject and relentlessly evaluates the data from every classroom and student. The school only hires new teachers, trains them on data-driven instruction, and expects hard work (e.g., to go along with their bonus plan, a sign in the principal's office read, "New Incentive Plan: Work or Get Fired")
This is the best of the batch-print model. Kids sit obediently in rows in classrooms of 25 students. One teacher per subject per grade yields direct accountability for results. Their homegrown curriculum is mostly worksheets. Quizzes are paper based. Scores are tabulated on a spreadsheet. No fancy learning management system at work here--they just figure out what the state wants, teach it and test it. They are fantastic executors--a critical innovation in a sector that is commonly sloppy and uneven in delivery.
I'm not used to seeing good ideas coming out of Prince George's County, Md., the most troublesome of the Washington area's suburban school districts. When superintendent John Deasy, a very creative educator, left Prince George's last year for the big bucks and power of the Gates Foundation, the district's reputation took another blow. But my colleague Nelson Hernandez reveals that Deasy left behind him a remarkably clever plan for teacher and principal bonuses, something those of us uncertain about this latest hot fad should be watching carefully for the next few years.
Deasy's chosen successor, Bill Hite, has preserved the FIRST (Financial Incentive Rewards for Supervisors and Teachers) plan and announced the initial round of $1.1 million in bonuses. The money went to 279 employees in 12 schools, the teacher bonuses averaging around $5,000 each.
What I find most appealing about FIRST is that it is voluntary---only teachers who want to participate have to. (For principals, the choice part is trickier, since they have to do the special evaluations for their participating teachers even if they don't want to try for the money themselves.) Also, for those of us who don't like the idea of bonuses based on an individual teacher's success in raising test scores, FIRST puts more emphasis on other factors.
Gov. Jack Markell's administration today announced planned changes in education policy designed to help Delaware compete for a $75 million federal education grant.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan plans to award a portion of the $4 billion federal Race to the Top Fund early next year - and again in 2011 - to states willing to undertake changes in the way schools are run.
Markell wants to help Delaware's chances of receiving the grant by improving student readiness, ensuring teacher quality, effectively using student data and turning around the state's lowest-performing schools.
"This is as important as anything we could possibly do to advance our state," Markell said.
Duncan hasn't said how many states he expects to win a chunk of the money, but has indicated that only states that lead the way in education reform will have a chance. Based on its student population size, Delaware could receive up to $75 million.
To improve the quality of Delaware schools and better prepare Delaware students for college, work and life, the Governor and the Department of Education have created an education reform action plan that represents the input of more than 100 participants, including teachers, administrators, the business community, parents, the disabilities community, higher education leaders, and legislators over the course of several months.
"This action plan [78K PDF] focuses on four specific goals to help ensure that Delaware schools are world-class - improving student readiness, ensuring teacher quality, effectively using student data, and turning around persistently low-performing schools," said Delaware's Secretary of Education Lillian Lowery. "It is a plan that takes bold steps and was built from months of discussion from everyone who has a stake in the strength and success of our public schools."
The Secretary and the Governor will be attending community forums in local districts to discuss the plan in depth and how the plan aligns with efforts to compete with the federal Race to the Top competition for additional federal dollars to invest in public schools.
In the category of "it makes you wonder," the student newspaper at Montgomery Blair High School reports that bathrooms on the second and third floors are now being locked during lunch.
Why? The school has a security shortage and couldn't figure out a better way to deal with it.
The story, in silverchips.online says that the Alex Bae, president of the Student Government Association met with Principal Darryl Williams on Monday, and that the principal said he hopes the situation can be fixed soon.
Apparently, the story says, the bathrooms were closed during lunch because students abuse their bathroom privileges. Acts of vandalism occur during lunch and kids hide out in the bathroom to avoid going to class.
Milwaukee Public Schools' health officials want to make condoms freely available to students in many of the district's high schools, as part of an effort to combat the health risks that sexually transmitted infections and other communicable diseases pose to young people.
If the proposal wins the support of the School Board, the new policy could take effect as early as next school year, making MPS one of a few districts in the nation that provide contraception to students.
Kathleen Murphy, the district's health coordinator, said that data continues to show that middle and high school students are engaging in sex frequently and at younger ages, and that youth - especially those of color - are disproportionately affected when it comes to sexually transmitted infections.
She called on lawmakers to approve by the end of December legislation to give the state more power to intervene in academically failing school districts, increase the number of "high quality" charter schools, merit pay for teachers and alternative certification for teachers without education degrees.
Those changes are among the criteria the federal government will use to award $4.3 billion in grants to states to improve schools academically.
Earlier today, the Senate Education Committee approved legislation that would create more charter schools, enable state takeover of failing schools and allow alternative certification of teachers.
The House is expected to consider similar legislation.
During a recent City Council committee hearing, charter-school operators from across the city described their efforts to provide high-quality, safe, accessible educational options for Philadelphia families. Many had been waiting for years to get approval to expand, even as they accommodated students without reimbursement by the school district and kept waiting lists in the hundreds. Others talked about being held to higher standards than district-run schools.
During the same hearing, Philadelphia schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman spoke of the district's support for charter schools. It's time for the School Reform Commission to back up this assertion with clear action.
As the SRC considers amending its charter- school policy to significantly limit charter schools' ability to expand their enrollment or change their grade configurations, it should demonstrate genuine support for charter schools in several ways. First, it should do away with the district's proposal to restrict charter school expansion to once or twice every five years, and even then only if they "demonstrate [a] unique or innovative idea that the district is not currently providing."
The Nov. 22 Sunday Register editorial advocates tying teacher evaluation to test scores. Such action would intensify the role of high-stakes tests in education reform. The editorial seems very much in tune with the Race to the Top policy of the Obama administration, and cites U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in support.
In contrast, the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Academy of Science sent a very strongly worded 13-page letter last month to Duncan citing concerns about current Race to the Top policies, with particular reference to the use of test scores. The letter specifically cites student-growth models used to evaluate teachers and principals as a practice not ready for implementation.
Anyone who has ever had to go to Saturday School knows the grind: Arrive at 9 in the morning, spend three hours sitting at a table looking as if you're doing something productive, take the usual 15-minute break and, of course, scoff at the random troublemaker who tries to set the clock ahead an hour so everyone can leave early.
I'm all too familiar with this routine. During my 17th hour of my sixth session in Room 201 at Las Lomas High School on a Saturday morning, a thought struck me: How is this type of punishment possibly going to help me not disrupt class and not get more tardies in the future? Obviously, this method is not completely working for me because I've had a total of six Saturday Schools in my two years at Las Lomas.
Maybe Saturday School is a wake-up call to some impolite students, but it's not enough. Fear doesn't seem to solve the problem. Acknowledges Associate Principal Mark Uhrenholt, "As the year goes on, there will be more repeat offenders."
Most discussions about school attendance focus on students. Now, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants to talk about teachers.
Duncan has made teacher attendance one of the measures to determine which low-achieving schools receive federal improvement funds. So, for the first time, the federal government will collect data on how many days teachers miss classes each year.
The reason is simple: Research shows that students suffer a small, but significant decline in academic performance as a result of teacher absences.
In addition, the nation's public schools pay a big price -- as much as $4 billion a year according to the National Center for Education Statistics -- to hire substitutes to fill in for absent staff.
When he was CEO of Chicago public schools, Duncan was dismayed to discover that the system was spending more than $10 million a year on substitute teachers. He tangled with the teacher unions when he added teacher attendance data to school scorecards.
Madison's achievement gap -- driven in large part by how well white students perform on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam -- is significant compared to other urban districts in the state with high minority populations. White students here perform significantly better on the annual tests than students in Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha and Beloit and scores for Madison's black students are somewhat better than in Milwaukee or Racine. But black students' scores in Madison are lower than Kenosha's and, among younger students, lower than Beloit's, too.
The point spread between the scores of Madison's white and black sophomore students on the WKCE's 2008 math test was a whopping 50 points: 80 percent of the white students taking the test scored in the advanced and proficient categories while just 30 percent of the black students scored in those categories. It's a better performance than in Milwaukee, where just 19 percent of black students scored in the advanced and proficient categories, or Racine, where 23 percent did, but it lags behind Kenosha's 38 percent. None of the scores are worth celebrating.
Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Education Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a nationally known expert whose work has often explored issues related to the achievement gap. He says racism, overt or inadvertent, may make school feel like a hostile environment for black students, and that it needs to be recognized as a potential factor in the achievement gap.
"It would be naive to say it doesn't exist, and that it's not a problem for a certain number of students," Gamoran says. He cites disproportionate disciplinary actions and high numbers of black students referred to special education, as indicators of potential unequal treatment by race.
Green, who attended Madison's public schools, says when black students are treated unfairly it's a powerful disincentive to become engaged, and that contributes to the achievement gap.
"There's plenty of unequal treatment that happens at school," says Green who, while in high school at La Follette, wrote a weekly, award-winning column about the achievement gap for the Simpson Street Free Press that helped her land a trip to the White House and a meeting with Laura Bush.
"From the earliest grades, I saw African-American males especially get sent out of the classroom for the very same thing that gets a white student a little slap on the wrist from some teachers," she says. "It's definitely a problem."
It manifests itself in students who check out, she says. "It's easy to live only in the present, think that you've got better things to do than worry about school. I mean, it's awfully easy to decide there's nothing more important than hanging out with your friends."
But Green advocates a doctrine of personal responsibility. She encourages fellow minority students to focus on academic ambitions, starting with good attendance in class and following through with homework. She also counsels students to take challenging courses and find a strong peer group.
"The bottom line, though, is that no one's going to get you where you're going except you," she says
"Is this level of recklessness something a citizen should even have to contemplate?" asked Lubar, the founder and chairman of Milwaukee investment firm Lubar & Co. In an April 2008 speech, Lubar said Milwaukee County government was such a mess it wouldn't work even "if Jesus was the county executive and Moses chaired the board of supervisors."
The current system favors elected officials, public employees and unions, he said Tuesday.
"There are a lot of reasons why the unions and others who want power and want control are going to fight this," Lubar said. He said change would be difficult, but insisted that a radical overhaul of county government was possible. He called for the election of a governor and legislators who support the overhaul as the best way to bring about the change.
Lubar also endorsed mayoral control of Milwaukee Public Schools, saying he supported the plan advocated by Barrett and Gov. Jim Doyle to give the Milwaukee mayor the power to appoint the MPS superintendent.
Marshall is among a team of educators, scholars and school administrators collaborating to develop a national K-12 standard for English-language arts and mathematics.
"The reason for the initiative is that we have 50 states and 50 sets of standards, which means that a student in Mississippi isn't necessarily learning the same kind of things as students in Georgia," Marshall said.
Marshall said students in each state are learning on different levels largely because of notions of equality, access and mobility.
The set of standards provides a better understanding of what is expected of both teachers and students. Though curriculums will not be regulated, there will be a criteria for what needs to be taught.
"The standards are more statements of what students should know and be able to do, not how they are going to learn," Marshall said.
To succeed in this new global age, our students need a high level of proficiency in the English Language Arts. The ability of schools to develop such proficiency in students requires the kind of fewer, clearer and higher common core ELA standards that the Common Core State Standards Initiative is constructing. Moreover, benchmarking these standards to exemplary ELA standards from other countries appropriately sets expectations for student performance at a world-class level.
As the comment period ends, we would like to urge that the final common core ELA standards ensure that our students learn not just from the world but about the world. Internationally benchmarked standards will ensure that U.S. students are globally comparable, but not globally competent or globally competitive. For the latter, common core ELA standards must explicitly call out the knowledge and skills that enable students to effectively read, write, listen and speak within the global context for which they will be prepared, or be passed by, in the 21st century. English language arts offers students the chance to deepen their insight into other cultures, effectively gather and weigh information from across the world, and learn how to create and communicate knowledge for multiple purposes and audiences. To support students' development of the English language skills required in a global economic and civic environment, we urge the English Language Arts Work Group to consider integrating within the common core ELA standards the following essential skills.
My sense is, at the end of the day, these initiatives will simply increase power at the school administrative level while substantially reducing local school board governance. I understand why these things are happening, but have great doubts that our exploding federalism will address curricular issues in a substantive manner. I continue to believe that local, diffused governance via charters and other models presents a far better model than a monolith.
IN THE long list of problems that plague American education, one is primary: what should students learn? For decades, however, this question has baffled people. In an education system run by the 50 states, success is in the eye of the beholder. Mississippi has different expectations for pupils than Massachusetts does. America as a whole has fallen behind. In a ranking of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialised countries in 2006, American teenagers came a dismal 21st in science and 25th in maths.
Now there is a new drive to set national standards. Arne Duncan, the education secretary, is offering more than $4 billion in total to states that pursue certain reforms--in particular, adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to compete in a global economy. This gives urgency to an effort already under way: the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) are in the midst of drafting common standards.
Monday afternoon, I had the opportunity to respond to Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the Board of Regents, and David Steiner, the New York State Commissioner of Education, as they talked about the future of P-16 education in New York State at the Phyllis L. Kossoff Policy Lecture at Teachers College, Columbia University. I wasn't sure what they'd say, so prepared some remarks responding to the proposals regarding teacher education in New York State that the Commissioner presented to the Board of Regents a few weeks ago. For the handful of readers who might be interested, here's what I wrote. (Due to time constraints, I didn't say all of this at the event.) Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner Steiner were quite willing to hear and engage with the critiques that my colleague Lin Goodwin and I offered, and I look forward to continuing this conversation with them.
It's no surprise that the State Education Department and the Board of Regents have taken up the cause of ensuring an equitable distribution of highly-qualified teachers across New York State. The key justification for such a goal is the fact that the K-12 education system is shortchanging our children. Although some students are highly successful, many more are not, and the problems are concentrated in urban school systems serving large numbers of poor children of color.
If that's the problem, is improving the education of teachers the solution? It's certainly part of the solution, given what we know about the centrality of teaching to student learning. But it's by no means the entire solution, as a great many other forces shape student outcomes. For example, a great teacher can't compensate for a child coming to school hungry, and great teaching of an out-of-date curriculum only results in great mastery of out-of-date knowledge. I trust that Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner Steiner are not seduced by claims that the single most important determinant of a child's achievement is the quality of his or her teachers, because that's simply not true. Family background continues to be the dominant factor. But the quality of teachers is, at least in theory, something that is manipulable via education policy initiatives, and it's a lot more tractable than addressing the fact that one in five children under the age of 18 in New York State live below the poverty line.
Despite lagging state budgets, 2010 will be a year of great progress in American education. Here's the 10 biggest developments of the year ahead:
Race to the Top awards will be made in two phases to about 18 states and will set the standard for excellence in state policy. About 30 states will make significant policy changes in preparation for application or after being rejected.
Common Core will be adopted by almost everyone except the Republic of Texas and will lay the groundwork for a new generation of content and assessment
While not likely to pass in 2010, a framework for ESEA (that looks a lot like RttT) will emerge with an improved accountability and student support system
Many fine people, including President Obama, are trying to make public schools better, but I don't see much progress. Cities like New York, reporting impressive achievement gains, seem to have trouble with their data. The results from great charter schools are neutralized by the results from bad ones. New ideas are everywhere, but most are bloodless, hard to understand, difficult to visualize.
Here is one idea that is starkly different: Mr. President, you have to be the Grim Reaper, the Terminator. Get out there and start closing schools that don't work. I know a way you can do it that will win applause from everybody.
The trick here is that I do NOT want you to close regular public schools. There are plenty of them that are doing a terrible job -- too many, actually, for even a president to tackle. As a constitutional scholar, you know you don't have the power to shut them down anyway. That's the job of the states and cities.
But there is now this peculiar kind of public school called a charter school. It uses tax dollars, but is independent of school district rules. There are only 5,000 of them in the country, compared to more than 90,000 regular public schools.
The beautiful part of my plan is that you have been a huge charter school supporter. In your signature speech on school reform, delivered March 10 in Washington, you celebrated charters that gave creative educators "broad leeway to innovate." But you also said "any expansion of charter schools must not result in the spread of mediocrity, but in the advancement of excellence." To do that, you said, we should "close charter schools that aren't working."
Students from around the world are coming in dramatically increasing numbers to the Buffalo area to study at local schools.
Many are refugees from war-torn countries who arrive with few possessions, but with the hope that the United States is the land of opportunity.
Others spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend local high schools and colleges in order to advance their studies and careers.
In the Buffalo Public Schools, students whose first language is something other than English now represent nearly 10 percent of the district's total enrollment. Those 3,277 students speak 65 different languages.
The University at Buffalo has 4,539 international students, or 16.7 percent of campus enrollment. They come from more than 100 countries, and outnumber U.S. students from outside New York State.
After losing a court challenge, several teachers laid off from D.C. public schools are now criticizing the union for not being proactive enough in helping them keep their jobs.
Crystal Proctor is one of several teachers who say union lawyers were not well prepared in court when they argued in favor of reinstating the more than 250 teachers. "We don't think that the legal representation was competent," says Proctor. "Watching our attorney perform, it was laughable. It was ridiculous."
Another teacher Natasha Mason says she didn't get replies when she sent emails to her union representative. She says she's gotten "nothing" out of her membership. "I'm totally disappointed," says Mason. "It's a pity we've been paying all this money into people to protect us and represent us and to stand up for what our rights are none of it has been done."
While channel surfing on Thanksgiving morning, I found a school board association meeting where a famous prof was railing on standards and testing with lots of applause from the audience (in a state contemplating delaying college-ready math and science standards until 2015). I agreed with many of his assertions like "America is still best at encouraging differences and entrepreneurship" and "we want to teach everything." He went to deride standards, testing and a system where everything was "reduced to a single number." Since lots of my friends are in his camp and want to pitch No Child Left Behind and add more services, it reminded me of why we have NCLB and what the new version should look like.
The primary reason we have a federal law like NCLB is that school boards (and state boards) allowed generations of chronic failure. They cut bad employment deals and asked for more money when things didn't go well. Teachers that could went to the suburbs. Most low income and minority kids were getting left behind. Anyone committed to equity could see things had to change.
NCLB reflected a consensus that 1) measurement and transparency would help us understand the problem, 2) that a basic template for school accountability would ensure that things would get better for underserved students, and 3) the federal government should play a bigger role in ensuring equity and excellence.
Few girls who play sports in suburban Philadelphia would recognize Robert H. Landau, but many coaches and athletic directors know that spotting him in the bleachers could spell trouble.
With a sharp tongue, a refusal to compromise and a well-honed sense of injustice, Landau is that familiar breed of community activist with a knack for pushing public officials over the edge. His specialty is girls' sports, and his targets are usually wealthy public schools from the Main Line suburbs that pride themselves on being progressive and fair in offering a rich array of opportunities.
No slight to girls is too small for Landau to take on. His victories range from the momentous to the less obvious, like forcing his daughters' school district to provide more athletic choices, pressuring leagues to showcase their title games and getting a school mascot to perform at their games.
Landau's complaint against Haverford High School -- over issues like publicity for and scheduling of boys' and girls' basketball games -- has upset even those who would otherwise support him.
Since the rise of the Internet, we have been able to more easily track political spending. The Center for Responsive Politics has led the way in documenting and accounting for all the different ways money is spent on federal campaigns. Alas, tracking similar spending at the state level has been more of a hit-or-miss proposition. Disclosure laws vary from state to state, and electronic reporting of results has been sporadic.
Until now. CRP joined forces with the National Institute on Money in State Politics to produce the first comprehensive report of political spending at both the state and national levels. The organizations combined spending on candidates, parties and ballot initiatives to come up with a total for each of the nation's special interest groups. The results should give pause to those who think the biggest political spenders must be Big Oil, Wal-Mart and the pharmaceutical, banking and tobacco industries.
By far the largest political spender for the 2007-08 election cycle was the National Education Association, with more than $56.3 million in contributions. The teachers' union outdistanced the second-place group by more than $12 million.
Believe it or not, the report understates NEA's spending, since it places political expenditures made in concert with the American Federation of Teachers in a separate category. "NEA AFT' ranked 123rd in the nation, contributing more than $3.3 million to campaigns in Colorado, Florida and Oregon. (AFT ranked 25th with almost $13.8 million in contributions.)
Just to put this in perspective, America's two teachers' unions outspent AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, General Electric, Chevron, Pfizer, Morgan Stanley, Lockheed Martin, FedEx, Boeing, Merrill Lynch, Exxon Mobil, Lehman Brothers, and the Walt Disney Corporation, combined.
First, it was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Later it became No Child Left Behind in 2002.
But with the Obama administration now in the White House, talk of a new rewrite of the law has already begun. Education Secretary Arne Duncan addressed the issue publicly in September, calling for changes to the landmark law during a speech to education leaders.
Just don't expect to call the next version No Child Left Behind.
"We're going to change the name of the bill," said Justin Hamilton, a spokesman of the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C. "That was the previous administration's name for it. That was their bill, not ours."
Though nothing definitive has been announced, the department is already in discussions about re-authorizing the law in a different form, Hamilton said. Duncan has spent much of his tenure so far traveling the country to gather input, he added.
Minnesota's charter school movement, which sparked a national rethinking of public schooling nearly two decades ago, has been infected by an out-of-control financing system fueled by junk bonds, insider fees and lax oversight.
State law prohibits charter schools from owning property, but consultants have found a legal loophole, allowing proponents to use millions of dollars in public money to build schools even though the properties remain in the hands of private nonprofit corporations.
The key to making it all work is the state's lease aid program, which was created 11 years ago to help spur competition in public education by offering rental assistance to groups promoting alternatives to district schools. In the beginning, many charters were located in dumpy strip malls and received no real-estate grants.
igh-stakes testing is a bullet train barreling through education reform; you're either on the train, on the sidelines, or waving your hands in frantic protest, only to be run over.
Last week's education speech by emboldened New York City Mayor-for-Life Bloomberg (who just dropped nine-figures of his own cash on his re-election bid) is depressing news to people on the ground in schools. Conducting the Testing Express, Bloomberg announced:
"As [Secretary of Education] Arne [Duncan] had said a number of times, 'A state can't enter Race to the Top if it prohibits schools from using student achievement data to evaluate teachers and that's why California just repealed its prohibition on doing so.'
A story on National Public Radio's Web site about MySpace and Facebook recently quoted students from the Urban School of San Francisco.
I teach at Urban, and what stung me was its description as "an elite private school." As a journalist and teacher, this kind of thing gets under my skin.
With tuition at $30,800 a year, it's inevitable that Urban will be stereotyped as a prep school for smarties who exist in a parallel universe of privilege. But as someone who has spent several years teaching in public schools, I also know that California's per-pupil spending rate of $7,571 a year - watch out, Mississippi, we're racing you to the bottom - doesn't provide even the basics, let alone enough for a truly decent education. My hometown of Milwaukee spends twice as much, and still only 46 percent of high school students graduate. The fact is that we could and probably should be spending four times as much on public education as we do now.
At Urban, I'm rarely impressed by excess, just by thoughtful teaching, the resources to support it and kids who work so hard that I sometimes have to tell them to slow down. But stereotypes persist. When I got my job at Urban, a friend who works at a community college promptly checked my delight. "Isn't that the fancy private school in the Haight?" she asked. "How nice for you."
Reading and math are two of the three "basics" of education, writing being the third. Those not proficient in these areas will be left behind in a society where there is a rapidly dwindling demand for "unskilled labor."
That's why a recent study by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance is so encouraging. The group tracked test results of Wisconsin students who took a statewide exam as third-graders in the 2005-06 school year, and then charted that class as they were tested again as sixth-graders last school year.
The good news is that students at 52 percent of Wisconsin schools improved their proficiency ratings in both reading and math. Eau Claire, Altoona, Chippewa Falls and Menomonie were among the schools whose students improved in both areas as they progressed from third to sixth grade. Other area schools' improvements were almost off the charts: Augusta students' scores improved by 24.4 points in reading and 17.5 in math. Colfax, Cornell, Bruce and Somerset in our area also improved by double digits in both subjects.
Critics of standardized tests sometimes warn against taking too much from the results because they say education is about more than memorizing information. But reading and math are pretty straightforward. Either you can read and comprehend information, or you can't. And either you have mastered the building blocks of math and can solve problems successfully, or you can't. Any "teaching to the test" in reading and math can only be a good thing.
As President Obama pushes for more charter schools, the education world craves a report card on an experiment nearly two decades old. How are these independent public schools doing? The safest and perhaps most accurate reply -- it depends -- leaves many unsatisfied.
Margaret Raymond, director of Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes, reported in June that most charter schools deliver academic results that are worse or no better than student accomplishments in regular public schools. She relied on test data from 15 states (not including Maryland or Virginia) and the District.
Parents for Public Schools is recruiting Pine Belt parents to attend a free, two-day leadership institute this spring designed to help parents better understand public education.
"Most of the time, they do not understand the language or acronyms used in education," said Victoria Peters, a parent coach with the organization who works in the Pine Belt.
"We know parents have something to say, but the reason we don't hear them is because they don't know what to say to give feedback."
The institute is sponsored by Parents for Public Schools, a national organization based in Jackson that promotes parent involvement and leadership in schools. It will be held Feb. 26-27, March 26-27 and April 16-17 at the Hilton in Jackson. The deadline to apply is Dec. 14.
Peters said 30 parents will be selected to attend a variety of interactive workshops and breakout sessions.
Parents not only lambasted the proposed changes, but they also turned on one another, accusing opponents of selfishly thinking only about their own children.
"This school-vs.-school and neighborhood-vs.-neighborhood thing saddened me," trustee Brad Shanklin said at a board meeting this month.
District officials recently put forth a new set of changes partly designed to quell the anger. And they will find out Tuesday whether they have succeeded.
That's when residents will have a chance to speak publicly about the latest proposal. The district will host a similar meeting the next night in Spanish. School board members are expected to vote on the boundary changes Dec. 15.
New boundaries are needed to balance student enrollment across Plano ISD after more families moved into the district's eastern side.
When Liz Fitzgerald realized her son and daughter were forced to read books in math class while the other children caught up, she had them moved into gifted classes at their suburban elementary school.
Just 100 miles down the road in Taliaferro County, that wouldn't have been an option. All the gifted classes were canceled because of budget cuts.
Such disparities exist in every state, according to a new report by the National Association for Gifted Children that blames low federal funding and a focus on low-performing students.
The report, "State of the States in Gifted Education," hits at a basic element of the federal government's focus on education: Most of its money and effort goes into helping low-performing, poor and minority students achieve basic proficiency. It largely ignores the idea of helping gifted kids reach their highest potential, leaving those tasks to states and local school districts.
The masters of education With the Gates Foundation grant in hand, Memphis City Schools will funnel incentives to develop the best and brightest teachers and seed the system with role models
Kimberly Hamilton arrives and leaves work in the dark so often, custodians at Winchester Elementary School are on alert not to lock her in or out.
"If I leave at 5 o'clock, someone's putting a hand to my forehead to see if I have a fever," she says, laughing at the absurdity, but serious about the hours it takes to move children from barely proficient to mastery.
She teaches her third-graders to get along with others, be good citizens, live in a violent society and dream for the future.
The $90 million grant the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded this month to Memphis City Schools to improve the effectiveness of its teachers offers Hamilton the biggest one-time raise she could ever hope for in public education, going from the $49,000 she earned last year to the $75,000 base pay proposed for the district's most talented teachers.
There's more drama than learning in local education as we "flASHback" on the week's news that amused and confused:
• The Board of Education and teachers union question whether $50 million offered by Gov. Linda Lingle is enough to reopen public schools on "furlough Fridays." That's the old "no can do" spirit that made our schools what they are.
• U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is sending an aide to Hawai'i to meet state education leaders and visit schools. If he wants to visit on Friday, it'll cost him $160 million to open the doors.
• Kids from lower-income families may lose out on preschool because of state plans to quadruple costs. They've left behind as many K-12 children as they can, so they're moving down to the nursery schools.
Suzanne Tecza had spent a year redesigning the library at Middle School 126 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, including colorful new furniture and elaborate murals of leafy trees. So when her principal decided this year to give the space to the charter high schools that share the building, Ms. Tecza was furious.
"It's not fair to our students," she said of the decision, which gives the charter students access to the room for most of the day. "It's depriving them of a fully functioning library, something they deserve."
In Red Hook, Brooklyn, teachers at Public School 15 said they avoid walking their students past rooms being used by the PAVE Academy Charter School, fearing that they will envy those students for their sparkling-clean classrooms and computers. On the Lower East Side, the Girls Preparatory Charter School was forced to turn away 50 students it had hoped to accept because it was unable to find more room in the Public School 188 building.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made charter schools one of his third-term priorities, and that means that in New York, battles and resentment over space -- already a way of life -- will become even more common. He and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have allowed nearly two-thirds of the city's 99 charter schools to move into public school buildings, officials expect two dozen charter schools to open next fall, and the mayor has said he will push the Legislature to allow him to add 100 more in the next four years.
Bill Clinton may have invented triangulation - the art of finding a "third way" out of a policy dilemma - but U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is practicing it to make desperately needed improvements in K-12 education. Unfortunately, his promotion of value-added education through "Race to the Top" grants to states could be thrown under the bus by powerful teachers' unions that view reforms more for how they affect pay and job security than whether they improve student learning.
The traditional view of education holds that it is more process than product. Educators design a process, hire teachers and administrators to run it, put students through it and consider it a success. The focus is on the inputs - how much can we spend, what curriculum shall we use, what class size is best - with very little on measuring outputs, whether students actually learn. The popular surveys of America's best schools and colleges reinforce this, measuring resources and reputation, not results. As they say, Harvard University has good graduates because it admits strong applicants, not necessarily because of what happens in the educational process.
In the last decade, the federal No Child Left Behind program has ushered in a new era of testing and accountability, seeking to shift the focus to outcomes. But this more businesslike approach does not always fit a people-centered field such as education. Some students test well, and others do not. Some schools serve a disproportionately high number of students who are not well prepared. Even in good schools, a system driven by testing and accountability incentivizes teaching to the test, neglecting other important and interesting ways to engage and educate students. As a result, policymakers and educators have been ambivalent, at best, about the No Child Left Behind regime.
Milwaukee Public Schools will spend some $4 million in federal stimulus money over two years to support a major parental involvement program in 35 schools
First of four parts
Lennise Crampton, a 40-year-old Milwaukee mother of eight, sometimes wonders how her children would have performed in school if she'd known how to be a better parent from the start.
A single mother until she married this year, Crampton usually managed decent meals and clothing and getting her kids to class. It was up to the school, she thought, to handle the education part.
Then in December of 2005, a representative from Lloyd Street School marched up to Crampton's door and asked her to participate in a program that improves relationships between teachers, schools and families.
Crampton started coming to weekly meetings at Lloyd, where her two youngest attended. She learned about training she could get as a low-income parent. She learned how to engage in her children's academics at home and how to advocate for their needs at school.
"These little ones get the best of the best now," she said. "If it applies to my children's academics, I'm on it."
New York City joined a national trend in 1998 when it put the police in charge of school security. The consensus is that public schools are now safe. But juvenile justice advocates across the country are rightly worried about policies under which children are sometimes arrested and criminalized for behavior that once was dealt with by principals or guidance counselors working with a student's parents.
Children who are singled out for arrest and suspension are at greater risk of dropping out and becoming permanently entangled with the criminal justice system. It is especially troubling that these children tend to be disproportionately black and Hispanic, and often have emotional problems or learning disabilities.
School officials in several cities have identified overpolicing as a problem in itself. The New York City Council has taken a first cut at the problem by drafting a bill, the Student Safety Act, that would bring badly needed accountability and transparency to the issue.
The draft bill would require police and education officials to file regular reports that would show how suspensions and other sanctions affect minority children, children with disabilities and other vulnerable groups. Detailed reports from the Police Department would show which students were arrested or issued summonses and why, so that lawmakers could get a sense of where overpolicing might be a problem.
Time for a status report on all the different ways Milwaukee children can use public money to pay for their kindergarten through 12th grade education:
Private school voucher program enrollment: Up almost 5% from a year ago, just as it has been up every year for more than a decade.
City kids going to suburban public schools using the state's "open enrollment" law: Up almost 11%, just as it has been up every year for about a decade.
Enrollment in charter schools given permission to operate by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee or Milwaukee's City Hall: Up more than 19% and up substantially from a few years ago.
Enrollment of minority students from the city into suburban schools using the state's voluntary racial desegregation law, known as Chapter 220: Up almost 5%, although the long-term trend has been downward.
Enrollment in what you can think of as the conventional Milwaukee Public Schools system: Down, but by less than 1%, which is better than other recent years. Mainstream MPS enrollment has been slipping every year and went under 80,000 a year ago for the first time in many years.
With all the controversy in recent months around whether to overhaul the way MPS is run, the half dozen other routes that Milwaukee children have for getting publicly funded education have been almost entirely out of the spotlight. But Milwaukee remains a place where the term "school choice" shapes the educational landscape in hugely important ways.
An interesting document found its way to my inbox over the weekend. It was a PowerPoint presentation of an analysis done by the New Jersey Education Association, regarding its efforts to re-elect Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine.
The document can be found at NEAexposed.com.
Citing "Electile Dysfunction," meaning the polls were telling them that voters, including teachers, weren't as enthusiastic about Corzine as they would like, the union's Director of Government Relations, Ginger Gold Schnitzer, proposed a double-dose remedy: "A robust member-to-member campaign," followed by "an independent communications campaign to inoculate the public."
The first dose of the union's plan was to appeal to its members. The radical community organizer Saul Alinsky taught the NEA that the trick to "organizing people is to appeal to their self-interest." Thus, the union promoted Corzine's pro-union "accomplishments," like investing $3 billion into public pensions, increasing school funding, increasing school construction, expanded pre-kindergarten programs, opposition to vouchers, and free medical benefits for teacher for life.
Oddly, the union didn't cite any accomplishment that actually helped students.
It's lunchtime at Patuxent High School in Southern Maryland, but it looks and sounds more like recess.
Students lounge in hallways and classrooms with sack lunches and trays of food. They play Frisbee, get dating advice from teachers, hold club meetings, cram for afternoon quizzes, play video games or catch up on sleep.
Two years ago, Patuxent Principal Nancy Highsmith released students from the confines of the cafeteria and replaced the multiple 30-minute lunch periods with one hour-long, schoolwide lunch. With some creative scheduling class time has remained the same, she said, and the middle-of-the-day burst of freedom has increased club participation, taught time management skills and given stressed-out students time to chill.
But there's an ulterior motive: raising test scores, grades and graduation rates.
School districts across Minnesota are agreeing to terms with teachers at a slower pace than during the last contract cycle.
State law requires every Minnesota school district to be on the same schedule for teachers contracts. The next contract deadline is January 15th, about seven weeks away.
Tom Dooher, president of the Education Minnesota teachers' union, said 61 of the state's 339 districts have reached agreements. At this time two years ago, 82 districts had deals in place. Dooher said the bad economy and uncertain state funding are slowing the pace.
"The teachers are very sensitive to the economy and understand," Dooher said. "Each locality is different; they've got a little different amount of money. So I think the locals are very aware of that and they're just trying to get a fair and equitable settlement. I don't think they're asking for anything outrageous, from what I've seen."
Even with the economy, Dooher said all contracts approved so far either keep salaries flat or include increases - none have included salary cuts.
Michigan public schools in financial straits and failing to make headway in their efforts to wring more revenue out of Lansing could consider this idea: asking local voters to approve a school operating millage.
Although seldom sought since voters approved the statewide school funding overhaul called Proposal A in 1994, public schools can legally seek more money from local property owners if they do so collectively. The limit they can ask for is 3 mills ($1 for every $1,000 of taxable property value), levied across an intermediate or regional school district. In most instances, that means countywide.
The reason that few so-called enhancement-millage elections have been held since '94 is that getting countywide approval for a tax hike is difficult. Schools would share the revenue raised based on how many students their schools have.
Ron Fuller, superintendent of the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency, said schools won't know if voters might go along unless they ask. He represents one of the very few areas to win an enhancement-millage election in 2005.
In dropping their opposition to student test scores being used in teachers' performance evaluations, Nevada's teachers unions appear to be essentially adopting a compromise by the Obama administration.
While it earlier emphasized that student achievement data need to be linked with teacher performance evaluations, the Obama administration has since softened its tone after months of taking policy input from the public.
Student performance data, such as test scores, now should be considered along with as other performance measures, such as observation-based assessments and a teacher's demonstration of leadership, according to a new policy announcement.
The U.S. Department of Education published its standards for teacher evaluations on Nov. 12 as part of the application criteria for the Race To the Top Funds, a $4 billion pool of competitive grants intended to spur educational reform at the local level.
Facing possible closure because of flagging enrollment , Verona's New Century charter school is proposing to become Dane County's first "green," or environmentally-focused, charter school.
The move, which must be approved by the district's board, illustrates the challenges facing charter schools across the state: to find an academic niche that will continually attract students.
"Having a (charter school) choice means a lot to parents," said Kristina Navarro-Haffner, who has a first-grader at New Century. "We really want to be that option for parents and help the Verona School District bring in more people."
In the last two years, a few charter schools -- public schools given autonomy from their district in exchange for strict accountability -- have changed their focus to attract students, said John Gee, executive director of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. A lack of performance or non-compliance with state requirements to be a charter school led to the dissolution of 15 charter schools prior to this year, he said, leaving a total of 206 in the state and 10 in Dane County.
Pamela Krys, who moved to Woodland Hills a year ago, made a confession during a school fair this month at Sutter Middle School in Canoga Park.
"I don't understand the points," she said, referring to one aspect of the application process for magnet programs. "They don't do points in Florida."
Understanding the points system is just one of the complications surrounding school choice in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Although its "choices" website is improving, the school system provides no central location -- online or off -- to help parents manage all their options if they don't want their children to attend their neighborhood school.
Separate programs have different application forms, processes and deadlines. Nor does the district supply some key information, such as student test scores for most magnets. Budget cuts led to the cancellation of districtwide magnet fairs, although some regional administrators have staged smaller events.
The Rochester, N.Y., public schools do a fine job. Their leaders often have great ideas. But according to Rochester school board member Mike Reno, they are talking about doing something to their Advanced Placement courses that could be troublesome, even though I once thought it was a good idea. (Some people who know me say that is the very definition of a bad idea.)
Here is what Reno revealed in an email to me:
"Our district, in an effort to increase AP participation, is proposing to lower the grading scale for AP classes. The idea is based on the notion that kids in Rochester don't want to take AP classes because they are afraid that the tougher work will lead to a lower grade, and they don't want to damage their GPA for fear it will harm their college entrance chances. The district's logic suggests by that lowering the grading scale, students will have a better chance of getting a better grade, and therefore be more willing to take the class.
"This is not their brainchild. They claim other districts are doing it. They are calling it internal weighting. They believe this is a better approach than grade weighting, where an A in an AP class would be worth, say, 5.0 instead of 4.0. The district argues that colleges strip off weighted grades, whereas an internal weight benefits the student during college entrance. (I believe grade weighting has value when calculating class ranking, vals, sals, top scholars, etc, but think colleges are free to recalculate anything they'd like). Am a crazy to think this is a bunch of nonsense?"
"Civics education has been all but removed from our schools," she often remarks. "Too many people do not understand how our political system works. We are currently failing in that endeavor."
O'Connor cites examples in which Americans could name a judge on "American Idol," but couldn't name a single justice on the Supreme Court or the three branches of government.
She's calling attention to an extremely important problem in the U.S. All too many American citizens don't understand the country's democratic system and why it's crucial to the future of that democracy to stay informed and participate. The Founding Fathers, after all, counted on the citizenry to be the republic's caretaker and that's a major reason why they felt so strongly about education.
Unfortunately, schools over the years have been saddled with teaching just about everything but civics, history and the arts. The heralded No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, has forced schools to drop meaningful civics classes so that teachers can "teach to the test," consisting primarily of math and reading. And now that the Obama administration wants to tie teachers' pay and promotions to those tests, classes on citizenship will continue to get the short end of the stick.
I'm glad Dave Zweifel raised this issue. I hope he remains active on curricular issues, which, in my view are not simply driven by No Child Left Behind.
Salary costs have jumped in Louisiana's education department, even as the number of full-time employees dropped, and the number of people drawing six-figure paychecks has more than doubled in the two years since Paul Pastorek took charge of the agency.
Payroll at the Department of Education grew by $8 million -- 21 percent -- after Pastorek became state superintendent of education in 2007, an Associated Press review of salary data shows.
Pastorek says the pay is needed to attract and keep the best talent. But with huge state budget shortfalls predicted for several years, the salary boosts have irked some lawmakers, already bristling about Pastorek's own hefty pay increases.
"I just don't, along with many of my colleagues, feel like we can put a lot of money into administration so this guy can go out and pay big salaries and not (put the money) into the classroom for the kids," said state Rep. Jim Fannin, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
A New Orleans lawyer and former general counsel for NASA, Pastorek had been on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education for eight years when he was named superintendent in March 2007. He replaced Cecil Picard, who died after a decade in the post.
When Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman walks the halls of the city's schools and peers into classrooms, he can often guess whether the class he's watching is gifted.
"Standing at the door, looking through the glass, you can tell what kind of class it is" by looking at the colors of the students, he said. "It shouldn't be that way."
Alexandria is a majority-minority school system, except in its gifted program. White students, 25 percent of the total enrollment, are 58 percent of those labeled "gifted." Hispanics and African Americans, 25 and 40 percent of enrollment, respectively, account for about 10 and 20 percent of those in gifted classes.
Sherman, at the helm for a little more than a year, is bringing fresh attention to equity issues that have long confounded the small urban school system, where half of the 11,000 students live in poverty.
The Obama Administration's education rhetoric, with its emphasis on charter schools and evaluating teachers based on student performance, has won plaudits from school reformers--and from us. But this month the Department of Education laid out in detail the eligibility requirements for states seeking federal grant money, and it looks like the praise may have been premature.
In the spring, when the White House announced its $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" initiative to improve K-12 schooling, President Obama said, "Any state that makes it unlawful to link student progress to teacher evaluations will have to change its ways to compete for a grant." Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters, "states that don't have charter school laws, or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools, will jeopardize their application."
The Administration appears to be retreating on both requirements. The final Race to the Top regulations allow states to use "multiple measures," including peer reviews, to evaluate instructors. This means states that prohibit student test data from being used to measure a teacher's performance may be eligible for the federal funds, even though the President clearly said that they wouldn't be.
Dan Goldfarb, a 51-year-old history teacher at the Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, says his first encounter with an evaluator under the District's new IMPACT system for assessing teachers did not go well. Goldfarb does not claim to be an objective observer. He doesn't like the new system. He doesn't like how it is being implemented by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee.
But he is willing to reveal what the evaluator said to him, give me a copy of his evaluation and expose himself to what I expect will be an unhappy reaction from his principal and other D.C. school officials. So here goes. I think we learn more from small individual cases than big multi-variant studies. Goldfarb hit some bumps that deserve attention.
The assessment by his evaluator (the official title is Master Educator) occurred on Sept 25. The evaluator had never taught the subject Goldfarb was teaching, Advanced Placement U.S. History. "My 'Master Educator' has taught AP Government," Goldfarb said. "Is there a difference? I would think so."
The fact that Goldbarb has an AP class at the city's only academic magnet school suggests that his supervisors determined long ago he was a good teacher. He is also, by his own description, not afraid to speak up. But he said he respects his principal, Anita Berger, who has had a long and successful career at the school, and will go along with the changes demanded by IMPACT because she has asked him to do so.
A lesson in incompetence: How 1 in 3 schools fails to provide adequate teaching Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1230668/How-1-3-schools-fails-provide-adequate-teaching.html#ixzz0Xsqow7u6
The federal appeals court in Philadelphia has upheld a New Jersey school district's ban on religious songs during the Christmas holiday season.
In their ruling, three judges of the Third Circuit of Appeals noted that such songs were once common in public schools, but that times have changed.
Michael Stratechuk sued the Maplewood-South Orange School District in 2004, saying the ban violated his two children's First Amendment's freedom of worship rights.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the city has found a loophole to a state law enabling it to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. The mayor says the city will start using student test scores to evaluate teachers coming up for tenure this year. Speaking at an education event in Washington, DC today, Bloomberg said his lawyers have determined that a state law barring such evaluations only applies to teachers hired after July 2008. That means teachers hired in 2007, now coming up for tenure, can be evaluated with test scores.
Bloomberg took part in a panel discussion on education reform with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, sponsored by the liberal think tank The Center for American Progress. He urged the state legislature to lift the cap on charter schools and to end rules requiring principals to lay off the least senior teachers in times of budget cuts. He said these steps would make the state more competitive for federal grants rewarding school reforms.
Faced with a federal lawsuit alleging gender discrimination, the Elmbrook School District has reversed an earlier decision and will allow students from both its high schools to join a girls ice hockey cooperative.
Brookfield Central High School freshman Morgan Hollowell and her father, James, sued the School District last month after it refused to join a cooperative with other school districts to offer girls ice hockey, even though the district participates in a similar cooperative for boys ice hockey.
At the time, Elmbrook Superintendent Matt Gibson said the district chose not to join the girls cooperative because too few students were interested in playing the sport and it would be difficult for the district to supervise.
How can we be sure that the students are learning the curriculum? If students who are working below grade level do not get any intervention, then they will not be ready and able to succeed with the grade level curriculum. There will be no vertical alignment for them. They will continue to just get passed along and they won't do any better. Where are the interventions needed to make curricular alignment successful? You will be told that the District is working on them, but they are NOT in place. Without them, Curricular Alignment is doomed. Note that we have always needed these interventions. Needing these interventions is nothing new, yet we have not been able to reliably provide them. What has changed that assures us that we will be able to reliably do what we have never been able to do before? There will be references to the MAP testing to identify the under-performing students. Okay, good. But how can we be assured that the identified students will get the necessary services?
There are some interesting accountability comments to this post.
Preparation: John Robert Wooden, revered and very successful basketball coach at UCLA, used to tell his players: "If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail."
and,
Premise: The majority of U.S. public high school students now graduate without ever having read a single (1) complete nonfiction book, or written one (1) serious (e.g. 4,000+ words, with endnotes and bibliography) research paper.
and,
Elitism" is making the best form of education available to only a few. The democratic ideal of education is to make the best form of education available to all. The democratic ideal is not achieved, and elitism is not defeated, by making the best form of education available to almost nobody.
Kieran Egan, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia
Doris Burton taught U.S. history in Prince George's County for 27 years. She had her students write 3,000-word term papers. She guided them step by step: first an outline, then note cards, a bibliography, a draft and then the final paper. They were graded at each stage.
A typical paper was often little more than what Burton describes as "a regurgitated version of the encyclopedia." She stopped requiring them for her regular history students and assigned them just to seniors heading for college. The social studies and English departments tried to organize coordinated term paper assignments for all, but state and district course requirements left no room. "As time went by," Burton said, "even the better seniors' writing skills deteriorated, and the assignment was frustrating for them to write and torture for me to read." Before her retirement in 1998, she said, "I dropped the long-paper assignment and went to shorter and shorter and, eventually, no paper at all."
Rigorous research and writing instruction have never reached most high-schoolers. I thought I had terrific English and history teachers in the 1960s, but I just realized, counting up their writing assignments, that they, too, avoided anything very challenging. Only a few students, in public and private schools, ever get a chance to go deep and write long on a subject that intrigues them.
We are beginning to see, in the howls of exasperation from college introductory course professors and their students, how high a price we are paying for this. It isn't just college students who are hurt. Studies show research skills are vital for high school graduates looking for good jobs or trade school slots.
Students who have been forced to do well-researched essays tell me those were the most satisfying academic experiences of their high school years. Christin Roach, a 2001 graduate of Mount Vernon High School in Fairfax County, glowed when she described the work she put into her 4,000-word report, "The Unconstitutional Presidential Impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton." It taught her the skills that led to her earning a joint degree in journalism and political science at Boston University.
Her project was part of the International Baccalaureate program at Mount Vernon. More than 20 Washington area public high schools, and a few private ones, have IB programs. But only a few dozen students at most at each school write the 4,000-word papers to get the full IB diploma. Take away IB and a few selective private schools, and well-organized research projects largely disappear from the high school landscape.
The leading U.S. proponent of more research work for the nation's teens is Will Fitzhugh, who has been publishing high school student papers in his Concord Review journal since 1987. In 2002, he persuaded the Albert Shanker Institute to fund a study of research paper writing by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut. The results were as bleak as he expected. Sixty-two percent of the 400 high school history teachers surveyed never assigned a paper as long as 3,000 words, and 27.percent never assigned anything as long as 2,000 words.
They had no time to assign, monitor, correct and grade such papers, they said. If they assigned long projects, they could not insist on the many revisions needed to teach students the meaning of college-level work. So most new undergraduates check into their freshman courses unclear on the form and language required for academic research.
The colleges aren't great at filling the gap. A new book by Seton Hall University scholar Rebecca D. Cox, "The College Fear Factor," painfully exposes students wallowing in ignorance, and professors not understanding why. Only about half survive this torture and graduate.
Why not junk some of the high school history requirements in favor of one solid month devoted to one long paper, with students bringing in their work, step by step, every day? Doris Burton and her colleagues couldn't get their students to focus, but they had little support above. If we want our students to be proud of what they did in high school, we have to insist that they do it, and no longer assume they will somehow learn it in college. By Jay Mathews | November 18, 2009; 10:00 PM ET
News that a Rhode Island teachers union has won a $200,000 union-funded grant to develop teacher evaluations can't help but stir fears that the fox wants to guard the henhouse. Public-employee unions, after all, are in the business of promoting their own economic interests, which do not always coincide with the interests of students.
Yet it appears to be welcome news that the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, under Marcia Reback, will be working to help develop some standards for weeding out sub-par teachers early on in their careers.
"The union is tired of being portrayed as a protector of bad teachers," Ms. Reback said.
In a sense, the unions do have an economic interest in promoting higher standards in their profession, since that tends to build public support for giving teachers greater financial rewards. And early in their career is an excellent time to evaluate fairly whether teachers can truly cut the mustard. Under Ms. Reback's proposal, unions would work closely with administrators to develop a proposed system of evaluations.
This report provides information on the Fiscal Health Analysis of the State's school districts performed by the Local Government Audit Division of the Office of the State Auditor (OSA). The Fiscal Health Analysis provides a set of financial indicators for each school district that may be used by the Colorado Department of Education (CDE), school districts, local government officials, and citizens to evaluate the financial health of Colorado's school districts. These financial indicators can warn of financial stress that may require examination and remedial action by the appropriate parties.
In Colorado, 178 school districts provide public education to more than 800,000 children enrolled in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12). Funding for each school district's total program is provided first by local sources of revenue, primarily through a property tax levy to finance the district's local share. The General Assembly provides additional funding to supplement local revenue in order to fully fund the district's program. This additional funding is based on a formula that considers, in part, the school district's annual pupil count, as well as the district's local share of revenues. In Fiscal Year 2008, the General Assembly provided more than $3 billion to school districts as the state share of districts' total program funding.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of California's Public Schools Accountability Act, an early legislative triumph of then-Gov. Gray Davis. While some good things have come out of the law, the act has failed in its two key missions: to inform parents and the public about the true performance of schools and students, and to impose widespread tough consequences on failing or underperforming schools.
In contrast to funding-focused measures, such as Proposition 98, the act commendably sought to spotlight school and student outcomes, especially results on the state's standardized tests. While many educators complain about this emphasis on student testing, the real problem turned out to be how the act uses test scores to measure school performance.
The act uses the Academic Performance Index, or API, to measure the performance of schools. Based on student results on the state's California Standards Tests, the API calculates a score on a scale of 200 to 1,000 for every school, with the state designating 800 as the target to which all schools should strive to achieve.
For decades, policy makers have talked about significantly improving public education. The problem has been clear: one-third of public school children fail to graduate, there are embarrassing achievement gaps between middle-class children and poor and minority children, and the gap between our students and those in other countries threatens to undermine our economic competitiveness. Yet for the better part of a quarter century, urgent calls for change have seldom translated into improved public schools.
Now, however, President Barack Obama has launched "Race to the Top," a competition that is parceling out $4.35 billion in new education funding to states that are committed to real reform. This program offers us an opportunity to finally move the ball forward.
To that end Mr. Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are pushing states toward meaningful change. Mr. Duncan has even stumped for reform alongside former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Yet the administration must continue to hang tough on two critical issues: performance standards and competition.
Already the administration is being pressured to dilute the program's requirement that states adopt performance pay for teachers and to weaken its support for charter schools. If the president does not remain firm on standards, the whole endeavor will be just another example of great rhetoric and poor reform.
The Mississippi Department of Education has been warning school districts and the public for months that the new, tougher accountability ratings were going to stun some people.
The previous accountability system had lulled schools and parents into thinking their students' academic performance was better than it actually was. For the most part, the old system compared how Mississippi students performed academically in relation to students in other parts of the state. The new system compares how they perform in relation to students around the country.
As a result, there are a lot fewer superior schools and districts in Mississippi and a lot more that are failing or close to it. It's not that the public schools in the state have gotten worse. It's just that they and the public are getting a truer picture of really how they stack up nationally.
In Greenwood and Leflore County, the first year's ratings, which were released Monday, are disappointing. Both districts have been listed as "At Risk of Failing," the third lowest of the seven accountability levels. Although Greenwood officials say they feel their rating is undeservedly low and are pursuing an appeal, even if the district moves up a notch to "Academic Watch," that's still not good enough.
Between the two school districts, only three schools out of 13 are rated "Successful" (the third highest ranking) or better. One of those, T.Y. Fleming in Minter City, was shut down this year because of low enrollment.
Speaking at Collin College in Plano, Hutchison said that her plan includes better use of technology in the classroom, recruiting and retaining quality teachers, curbing the state's dropout rate and helping local school districts become more efficient.
"We need more innovation, more efficiency and more accountability," Hutchison said.
Hutchison, who is battling Rick Perry the Republican nomination for governor in the March primary, tied improvements in Texas schools to the state's economic fate.
"Our labor force in Texas stands to suffer the most by this stagnation," she said. "If we decline to treat education investment as economic investment, then our foundation for job creation will erode within."
A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a class-action lawsuit against the Madison School District over a student transfer policy the district has since re-written.
U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb wrote in a 36-page decision that the district was following state law - a law that was later determined to be unconstitutional - when it implemented its policy for assuring that open enrollment transfers did not create racial imbalances at schools.
Crabb wrote that a municipality like the school district cannot be held liable under federal law for trying to implement a state mandate when it has no other policy choices. State or federal law is responsible for any wrongdoing, she wrote.
Madison attorney Michael Fox, who is representing the class, which he estimated to be 200 to 300 people, said the decision will be appealed to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The law in this area is unsettled, he said, and federal judicial circuits around the U.S. disagree on it.
In this case, a white East High School student, identified in court documents as "N.N.," applied for transfer to either Waunakee or Monona Grove in 2007. The district denied her application because it said her departure from East would have caused the school's minority student percentage to increase.
How Connecticut Can Fix its Dysfunctional Education spending system to Reward success, Incentivize Choice and Boost Student Achievement
ConnCAN and education research firm Public Impact today (Nov. 23, 2009) released a groundbreaking report [1MB PDF] tracing the flow of funds through Connecticut's public schools and offering a more rational system that will close that state's yawning achievement gap.
Please visit ConnCAN's website www.conncan.org to download the report The Tab.
I was very fortunate to be provided an advance copy which I read over the weekend. It is truly groundbreaking in every sense of the word. I can not encourage you enough to please take the time to read this extremely well done, thorough report.
Doug
p.s. For your convenience, I've attached the PDF file of The Tab, but please also visit ConnCAN's web site!
Alex Johnston:
ConnCAN runs on big ideas. We launched our organization almost five years ago with a mission to do nothing less than offer every Connecticut child access to a great public school.
Living in the state with the nation's largest achievement gap is too unsettling to tolerate plodding, incremental change. When more than 90 percent of fifth graders in wealthy Ridgefield can read at or above grade level but only 31 percent of Bridgeport kids can, there's no time to dally. We demand breakthrough success.
ConnCAN has grown into a force: an education advocacy group powered by thousands of advocates who share our impatience. We proved the power of our movement through our hugely successful 2009 'Mind the Gaps' legislative campaign. The campaign made real gains in data transparency, teacher effectiveness and funding for Connecticut's excellent public charter schools.
But the campaign also illustrated the unsustainable way we pay for our public schools. Consider this tale: In 2008, Hartford asked Achieve- ment First to bring one of its excellent charter schools to the city. The Achievement First Hartford Academy opened its doors to kindergarten, first and fifth grade students, with plans to add one grade each year as these students advanced until the school was completed. Because charter schools are funded on their own line item in the state budget, the school will need more money each year to support this natural grade growth. This jewel of a school became a growing line item in the midst of the Great Recession and an easy target.
A final reminder for my school reform webinar, which will be from 5:00-6:30pm tomorrow (Tuesday). To join, go to: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/join/345183977 and enter meeting ID: 345-183-977. If you wish to use your phone for the audio, the call-in number is 215-383-1003 and the access code is 345-183-977.
Here, where suburb meets desert, students are clambering amid the cacti to dig soil samples and take notes on flora and fauna. In an old movie complex in nearby Chandler, others are dissecting a Renaissance tract on human nature. On a South Phoenix campus with a National Football League connection, still others are learning how to pass a basket of bread and help a lady into her chair.
These are just three charter schools among a multitude in the most wide-open public education market in America.
Arizona's flourishing charter school movement underscores the popular appeal of unfettered school choice and the creativity of some educational entrepreneurs. But the state also offers a cautionary lesson as President Obama pushes to dismantle barriers to charter schools elsewhere: It is difficult to promote quantity and quality at the same time.
Under a 1994 law that strongly favors charter schools, 500 of them operate in this state, teaching more than 100,000 students. Those totals account for a quarter of Arizona's public schools and a tenth of its public school enrollment, giving charters here a larger market share than in any other state.
Dan Goldfarb, a 51-year-old history teacher at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, says his first encounter with an evaluator under the District's new IMPACT system for assessing teachers did not go well. Goldfarb does not claim to be an objective observer. He doesn't like the new system or how Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is implementing it.
He was willing to reveal what the evaluator said to him, give me a copy of his evaluation and expose himself to what I expect will be an unhappy reaction from his principal and other D.C. school officials. So here goes. Goldfarb hit some bumps that deserve attention.
The assessment by his evaluator (the official title is "master educator") occurred Sept. 25. The fact that Goldfarb has an AP class at the city's only academic magnet school suggests that his supervisors determined long ago that he is a good teacher. He is also, by his own description, not afraid to speak up. But he said he respects his principal, Anita Berger, who has had a long and successful career at the school, and will go along with the changes demanded by IMPACT because she has asked him to do so.
To improve science and mathematics education for American children, the White House is recruiting Elmo and Big Bird, video game programmers and thousands of scientists.
President Obama will announce a campaign Monday to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to spend money, time and volunteer effort to encourage students, especially in middle and high school, to pursue science, technology, engineering and math, officials say.
The campaign, called Educate to Innovate, will focus mainly on activities outside the classroom. For example, Discovery Communications has promised to use two hours of the afternoon schedule on its Science Channel cable network for commercial-free programming geared toward middle school students.
Science and engineering societies are promising to provide volunteers to work with students in the classroom, culminating in a National Lab Day in May.
Omar Masis doesn't want to get a teaching license just for himself. He also wants to do it for the preschoolers he sees every day at Blair Elementary School in Waukesha.
For two years now, he has been leading a class full of youngsters through lessons that focus on building their vocabularies and improving motor skills. But, with a background in agricultural engineering instead of education, he has been doing so on an emergency teaching permit sustained by six credits of education classes a year.
Now he's ready to make the leap to become a credentialed teacher.
"There's something in me that tells me I need a formal education so I can help these kids and improve my teaching style," said Masis, a native of Nicaragua who also has worked as a teacher's aide in Waukesha. "I can do better."
Before, Masis might have had to go elsewhere to fulfill his new dream.
But a recent decision by the Milwaukee Teacher Education Center, one of the largest certification programs in the state for college graduates who want to become teachers, means he can stay in Waukesha.
After more than a dozen years of working to place teachers in hard-to-fill classrooms in Milwaukee Public Schools, MTEC has opened its program to work with other public school districts.
Imagine you are a parent with a child in fifth grade in an inner-city public school. One day your child comes home and reports that the teacher taught a lesson in class about the evils of U.S. military intervention in Latin America.
You also learn that after school the teacher took the children to a rally protesting U.S. military aid to the Contras, who were then opposing the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
The children made placards with slogans such as:
"Let them run their land!" "Help Central America, dont kill them." "Give the Nicaraguans their freedom."
Your child reports that the teacher encouraged the students to write about their day of protest in the class magazine and had high praise for the child who wrote the following description of the rally:
"On a rainy Tuesday in April some of the students from our class went to protest against the contras. The people in Central America are poor and bombed on their heads."
A fantasy? An invention of some conspiracy-minded right-wing organization? Not at all. It happened exactly as described at a bilingual Milwaukee public school called La Escuela Fratney. The teacher who took the fifth-graders to the protest rally and indoctrinated them in international leftist politics is Robert Peterson.
Virtual schools, viewed skeptically by the educational establishment, have a champion in this veteran teacher.
Kathy Hennings starts her day like any other Wisconsin public school teacher: She's up, coiffed, appropriately dressed and ready to go.
And then she starts her commute: down the hall in her Cedarburg home from the kitchen to her office. She sits down in front of a bank of two linked computers, and starts going through the 20-plus emails she receives each day from the parents of her students.
Then she and her students settle down for another day of learning--21st-century style--in the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, one of 14 Internet-based online charter schools in Wisconsin.
Hennings has 75 students: 30 first-graders and 45 second-graders. They live in rural areas, villages, towns and big cities all across Wisconsin, from Superior to Stevens Point, from Hudson to Milwaukee.
I recently was invited to attend a presentation in Washington, D.C., by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of its 2009 education "Leaders and Laggards" report to the U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
This report was a cooperative effort of the U.S. Chamber, the Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. The report is a state-by-state "report card" on education innovation. Education innovation is described by the report as "Discarding policies that no longer serve students while creating opportunities for smart, entrepreneurial problem-solvers to help children learn."
The report graded state schools on seven criteria: school management, finance, hiring and evaluation of staff, removing ineffective teachers, data collection, pipeline to post-secondary education, and technology. West Virginia received an overall grade of D+, however, ranked first in the nation on technology, measured by student per Internet-connected computer.
No state received an overall grade higher than a C+, and although West Virginia was ranked in the bottom quarter of states, there were 11 states ranked below us. Virginia, Oklahoma and Texas ranked overall the highest, and Kansas, Montana and Nebraska were at the bottom of the rankings.
As principal of Custer High School, Kathy Bonds often faces criticism for having one of the most notoriously rough schools in the city.
Many of her students live in poverty, return at night to homeless shelters, commit severe crimes or deal with a staggering number of mental, emotional and physical disabilities.
Look at the numbers, Bonds says: 30.8% of her students are classified as special education, a main reason that performance at her school continues to suffer.
The Milwaukee School Board appeared to agree with the spirit of that assessment last week when it voted to even out the distribution of special education students within the city's high schools.
As part of the approved recommendation, the board directed the administration to immediately begin making sure all schools are equipped to serve a wide range of student needs. Members also directed the administration to establish a target range of special education students, and to help schools with very high or low special education populations come closer to that target range.
Do you believe in the American dream -- the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools -- at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus.
In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U's College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of "the American Dream" in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace -- and be prepared to teach our state's kids -- the task force's own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.
The task group is part of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, a multiyear project to change the way future teachers are trained at the U's flagship campus. The initiative is premised, in part, on the conviction that Minnesota teachers' lack of "cultural competence" contributes to the poor academic performance of the state's minority students. Last spring, it charged the task group with coming up with recommendations to change this. In January, planners will review the recommendations and decide how to proceed.
When times get tough, teachers' salaries are the last thing school districts should cut, local educators say.
"If you're going to recruit and maintain the best, then you have to provide that environment. That includes compensation to some degree that supports that," Belleville District 118 Superintendent Matt Klosterman said. "We're going to hire the best of the best and create an environment that supports them while they're here."
Educators argue that quality instruction comes at a cost, but that cost is an investment in the community's future since teachers are responsible for preparing our young people for the future. They said school districts look at several factors to determine that cost when hiring teachers, all the while trying to remain competitive with neighboring districts' offers.
But critics say that school administrators sometimes throw more money at teachers than necessary.
For example, figures obtained by the News-Democrat for nine local school districts that signed new teachers contracts this summer show:
* A Belleville District 118 social studies teacher makes almost $80,000 a year.
* An O'Fallon District 203 family and consumer sciences teacher makes more than $100,000.
* A Granite City gym teacher makes $86,000.
* An East St. Louis first-grade teacher makes nearly $76,000 this school year.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Thursday announced its biggest education donation in a decade, $290 million, in support of three school districts and five charter groups working to transform how teachers are evaluated and how they get tenure.
A separate $45 million research initiative will study 3,700 classroom teachers in six cities, including New York, seeking to answer the question that has puzzled investigators for decades: What, exactly, makes a good teacher effective?
The twin projects represent a rethinking of the foundation's education strategy, previously focused largely on smaller grants intended to remake troubled American high schools. With these new, larger grants, the foundation is seeking to transform teacher management policies in four cities in hopes that the innovations can spread.
The foundation committed $100 million to the Hillsborough County, Fla., schools; $90 million to the Memphis schools; $40 million to the Pittsburgh public schools. Some $60 million will go to five charter management organizations based in Los Angeles: Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, Inner City Education Foundation and Partnerships to Uplift Communities Schools.
Now that the Gates foundation is "rethinking" its previous "small learning community" grants, will local thinking change on the same?
In my view, we as a community should do everything we can to hire (and pay) the best teachers. That does, as the Gates Foundation recognizes via this grant, require changes to the current UAW teacher union model.....
The school principal, Jeannette M. DiBella, strolls down the hall and peeks inside a math classroom. All is quiet. The teacher sits at his desk at the back of the room looking down at his notes. Each students sits at a desk at work on books and papers (they look like 8th or 9th Graders). Everything appears orderly and proper.
DiBella doesn't move on, though.
"Are they taking a test?" she whispers.
The teacher answers that the students are doing independent study to ensure that they are "ready for the next week." DiBella begins to wander the rows, asking the teacher with a grin, "Are you sure that's what they're doing?"
One student turns to look up at her as she approaches--a sure sign of uncertainty.
Today's ed page has a startling story by my colleague Michael Alison Chandler on the rapid spread---and resulting score inflation---of portfolio exams in Virginia. These are collections of classwork of students with learning disabilities or insufficient English. They substitute for the usual state multiple choice tests in assessing those students' progress, and the progress of their school. At one Fairfax County elementary school, Chandler reports, the reading passing rate for English learners has gone from 52 to 94 percent and for special education students 34 to 100 percent in the two years this system has been in place. Sound fishy to you? It does to me, but I think it is going to force some interesting and likely beneficial changes.
I am NOT saying the teachers who compile their students' portfolios and the educators (who don't usually know the students) who grade them are trying to deceive us. I am sure they are doing their best to be fair and accurate. But it is difficult for empathetic human beings like educators to resist the temptation to err on the side of generosity when assessing students, particularly when we are talking about those struggling with disadvantages.
It is clear to me, and I suspect to most readers, that this system inflates achievement scores. Of course, so has the assessment system we have been using in schools since the beginning of public education---teachers grading their own students' work. We seem to have prospered as a nation despite giving many struggling students a break on their report cards. I don't think portfolios used in this limited way are going to ruin the effort to set strong national standards, but I think it is going to give a big push to the idea of introducing independent inspectors to assess the effectiveness of schools and teachers.
Calling charter schools a "fad" that takes money away from public schools, teachers union boss Paul Hubbert said he will fight Gov. Bob Riley's proposal to bring them to Alabama.
Riley told the Press-Register on Tuesday that he would like the Alabama Legislature to pass a law enabling the creation of charter schools. It's the only way, he said, that Alabama will be able to compete against other states for $4.35 billion in education funds that President Barack Obama is giving out as part of his Race to the Top campaign.
But Hubbert, who holds influence as executive secretary of the Alabama Education Association, said Thursday that he'll fight any charter proposal.
"I intend to oppose it strongly," Hubbert said. "I think it's wrong and I think it will hurt far more than help.
"It would absolutely take money from the public schools and put it in a charter school, which basically operates like a private school," Hubbert said.
Yesterday, at the Washington State School Directors' Association (WSSDA) conference at the Westin in downtown Seattle, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn announced his new plans for math and science graduation requirements to an audience of over 1,000 statewide school board members.
Dorn, elected as a reformer last year, said it was necessary to postpone stricter graduation requirements for math until the class of 2015, and all graduation requirements for science until the class of 2017, to give students and teachers appropriate time to adjust to pending reforms.
For math graduation requirements until 2015, Dorn is okay with giving students a fall back option of earning two credits of math after tenth grade in order to graduate (a choice that is set to disappear in 2013) in place of passing a set of exams. Reformers want the scheduled changes--getting rid of the additional course work graduation option--to kick in for the class of 2013. They want students to have to pass either a state exam or two end-of-course exams to graduate starting in 2013--without Dorn's fallback.
For 2015 and onward, Dorn offered a two-tier proposal: Students either meet the proficiency level in two end-of-course exams or students meet the basic level in the exams and earn four math credits. Students who don't meet the basic level in the exams have the option of retesting with a comprehensive exam or using state-approved alternatives such as the SAT.
As far as the science graduation requirement, Dorn proposed postponing any requirements until the class of 2017, and replacing the current comprehensive assessment with end-of-course assessments in physical and life sciences. The 2010 legislature (starting this January) is supposed to define the science requirements.
nter professor Kenneth K. Wong of Brown University in Providence, R.I., lead author of the 2007 book "The Education Mayor: Improving America's Schools." It was the fullest examination to date of the range of ways mayors have become involved in school governance in dozens of cities across the United States.
The book was generally favorable to well-executed mayoral involvement, broadly saying mayoral control creates a political environment for stronger decision making about improving schools. But the conclusions on academic impact were more tepid - Wong and his associates said there were improvements in reading and in math in many cases, but that, overall, getting the mayor involved didn't help and sometimes harmed efforts to close the achievement gaps between have and have-not students.
Both supporters and critics of mayoral control have cited things in the book as supporting their side.
Wong was more assertive about the merits of mayoral control than he was in the book. "Mayoral control has a statistically significant positive effect on student achievement in reading and math at both elementary and high school grades," he said.
Mayoral control, he said, eliminates the "nobody's in charge culture" that leads to many school systems just keeping on doing things the way they've been done, even though they aren't succeeding overall. With a clear point of power, there is clear accountability and motivation to make needed changes, he said.
The Obama administration says it wants to remake public education around the principle that the best teachers should be promoted and rewarded, regardless of seniority.
And a brawl over just that idea is now playing out in the shadow of the White House.
The chancellor of Washington's school system, Michelle Rhee, is wrestling with one of the most expensive, worst performing school systems in the country. The dropout rate has hit 40%, and the cost per student is $14,000 a year. Buildings are crumbling and thousands of parents have abandoned the system, which serves about 45,000 students.
Ms. Rhee is trying to reduce what she believes to be a bloated school management and wrest more control over the district's affairs from the powerful local teachers' union. She has replaced principals, laid off teachers and closed underperforming schools.
She has also challenged what she feels is one of the biggest impediments to improvement: tenure, or strong job protections for teachers. The idea is to promise teachers much richer salaries, as well as performance bonuses, if they give up tenure. Good performers would be rewarded, poor performers gotten rid of.
The governing board of the University of California approved a $2,500 student fee increase Thursday after two days of tense campus protests across the state.
The vote by the Board of Regents in a windowless University of California, Los Angeles, meeting room took place as the drone of protesters could be heard from a plaza outside. Scores of police in riot gear guarded the building.
The 32 percent increase will push the cost of an undergraduate education at California's premier public schools to over $10,000 a year by next fall, about triple the cost of a decade ago. The fees, the equivalent of tuition, do not include the cost of housing, board and books.
"Our hand has been forced," UC President Mark Yudof told reporters after the vote. "When you don't have any money, you don't have any money."
More Idaho high school students should go to college.
They need more rigorous math and science instruction.
And the state needs to find more highly qualified teachers -- those who have degrees in the subjects they are teaching.
Those are among several recommendations expected to be unveiled Wednesday by a group of Idaho business leaders, parents and educators as a way for Idaho to provide a high-quality, cost-effective education.
The group, called the Education Alliance of Idaho, was formed after Gov. Butch Otter challenged business leaders in 2007 to look for ways to improve education in Idaho. Otter will introduce the alliance and the report at a news conference Wednesday morning.
The four broad goals and 17 recommendations are aimed at improving Idaho's educational quality as compared to the rest of the country, said Guy Hurlbutt, Alliance chairman.
A proposal that high school students graduate with up to 30 college credits goes back to plans offered by state schools Superintendent Tom Luna since he took office in 2007 to increase availability of college credits in high schools as a way to help kids get a leg up on higher education and save some money.
Demanding more rigor in high school math and science dates back to high school reform pushed by the State Board of Education earlier this decade. Then, the board succeeded in adding an additional year of math and science to high school graduation credits, beginning with the class of 2013.
Nor is the alliance's work the first shot at reform in Idaho public schools.
African Americans represent 26 percent of the state's 1.2 million students but 12 percent of those in gifted education programs. Hispanics are 9 percent of the state's schoolchildren, but 5 percent of gifted students.
"Virginia is proud of both the high standards of our educational system and the wealth of diversity in our communities. . . . It's critical we assess any disproportionate barriers . . . so we can ensure students of all backgrounds have the opportunity to participate," Kaine said in a release.
NAACP officials have urged Kaine in recent months to address racial and ethnic disparities in new regulations for gifted education that he is expected to sign in the next few weeks. Some said a study does not go far enough to address their concerns.
Teacher pensions consume a substantial portion of school budgets. If relatively generous pensions help attract effective teachers, the expense might be justified. But new evidence suggests that current pension systems, by concentrating benefits on teachers who spend their entire careers in a single state and penalizing mobile teachers, may exacerbate the challenge of attracting to teaching young workers, who change jobs and move more often than did previous generations.
The design of teacher pension plans is a timely concern: like other public pension plans, those for teachers are becoming more costly. Employer contributions to pension funds tack on a larger percentage of earnings for public school teachers than for private-sector managers and professionals, and this gap is widening (see "Teacher Retirement Benefits," research, Spring 2009, Figure 1). Those data do not yet reflect the impact of the stock market decline since 2007: the drop in the value of pension funds means further increases in employer contributions will be required to fund promised benefits. As fiscal concerns force states to reevaluate the costs of teacher pension plans, officials might also consider the plans' consequences for teacher quality.
Lynbrook Elementary School, which serves one of the poorest communities in Fairfax County, seems to be a model for reform. Three years ago, the Springfield school failed to meet state testing goals in English. Since then, it has charted double-digit gains in passing rates for every one of its closely monitored racial and ethnic groups of students.
But the success at Lynbrook and other schools throughout the state is not only due to better teaching. More and more, students who have struggled to pass Virginia's Standards of Learning exams are taking different tests.
The trend dates to 2007, when federal officials approved an alternative assessment after the Fairfax School Board threatened to defy a mandate to give multiple-choice reading tests to students who were destined to fail -- students who, like many at Lynbrook, were just beginning to learn English.
DFER Reforming Education Speaker Series: Lessons for Milwaukee - Jon Schnur
via a Katy Venskus email:
Through out the fall of 2009 Democrats for Education Reform will bring to Milwaukee national education leaders with a proven record of reform in urban districts. Our speakers will offer new perspectives and experience with what works and what does not in a challenging urban district.
We are pleased to invite you to the second installment in this series featuring one of the most powerful national voices on education reform:
As CEO and Co-founder of New Leaders for New Schools, Jon works with the NLNS team and community to accomplish their mission- driving high levels of learning and achievement for every child by attracting, preparing, and supporting the next generation of outstanding principals for our nation's urban schools. From September 2008 to June 2009, Jon served as an advisor to Barack Obama's Presidential campaign, a member of the Presidential Transition Team, and a Senior Advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Jon also served as Special Assistant to Secretary of Education Richard Riley, President Clinton's White House Associate Director for Educational Policy, and Senior Advisor on Education to Vice President Gore. He developed national educational policies on teacher and principal quality, after-school programs, district reform, charter schools, and preschools.
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [40K PDF]:
Two graduates from Marshfield High School have been named Advanced Placement Scholars for Wisconsin. This is the third year that both scholars have been from the Marshfield School District. The College Board Advanced Placement (AP) Program recognized Kara Faciszewski and Stephen Nordin as 2009 State AP Scholars from Wisconsin for their performance on Advanced Placement exams. This is the 19th year that the organization has granted State AP Scholar Awards. The distinction goes to one male and one female student from each state and the District of Columbia with grades of three or higher on the greatest number of AP exams, and then the highest average score (at least 3.5) on all AP exams taken. For 2009, 109 students nationwide received AP Scholar Awards.
STUDENTS at National Defence University in Washington, DC, were recently given a model of the economy and told to fix the budget. To get the federal debt down, they jacked up taxes and slashed spending. The economy promptly tanked, sending the debt to higher levels than before. The lesson: "You'll never get re-elected and you may do more harm than good," concluded Eric Bee, an air-force colonel who took part in the exercise.
This is the ugly arithmetic of America's public finances. Recession and aggressive fiscal stimulus have hugely swollen the federal deficit. Stimulus was essential to cushion a collapse in private demand. In spite of that, the economy has barely emerged from recession and unemployment is still rising, feeding speculation that more stimulus is needed. Yet at the same time voters are growing alarmed at the tide of red ink, and it may be only a matter of time before markets do, too.
On current policies the federal deficit, which hit a post-war high of 10% of GDP in the fiscal year that has just ended, will fall to 4.2% by 2014 and will then head steadily higher. Aides to Barack Obama know this is unacceptable. With a new budget due in February, government departments are said to be preparing to tighten their belts. Meanwhile an advisory committee, chaired by Paul Volcker, who used to head the Federal Reserve, will report to the president in early December on options for tweaking the tax system, though not how to raise much more revenue from it.
Chicken Little is alive and seemingly employed as a finance analyst or reporter for an education interest group. If one relies on newspaper headlines for education funding information, one might conclude that America's schools suffer from a perpetual fiscal crisis, every year perched precariously on the brink of financial ruin, never knowing whether there will be sufficient funding to continue operating. Budgetary shortfalls, school district bankruptcies, teacher and administrator layoffs, hiring and salary freezes, pension system defaults, shorter school years, ever-larger classes, faculty furloughs, fewer course electives, reduced field trips, foregone or curtailed athletics, outdated textbooks, teachers having to make do with fewer supplies, cuts in school maintenance, and other tales of fiscal woe inevitably captivate the news media, particularly during the late-spring and summer budget and appropriations seasons.
Yet somehow, as the budget-planning cycle concludes and schools open their doors in the late summer and fall, virtually all classrooms have instructors, teachers receive their paychecks and use their health plans, athletic teams play, and textbooks are distributed. Regrettably, this story is seldom accorded the same media attention as are the prospects of budget reductions and teacher layoffs.
Wisconsin school districts' property tax levies will rise an average of 7.16% statewide for the current school year, according to new information from the state Department of Public Instruction.
Although a drop in state aid to public schools helped drive up property taxes in some areas, increased statewide restrictions on allowable per-pupil revenue as well as local decisions to keep the lid on potential tax increases kept the average levy from going higher.
In fact, this school year's average increase is less than the average rise for school districts in 2007-'08. In the Milwaukee area, the average increase was about 5%.
Levy increases varied widely from one district to another for 2009-'10, with the Seneca School District posting the highest - a 41% increase in its portion of property taxes.
The Seneca levy spike was due to a new voter-approved operational tax increase and a 15% drop in state aid, said David Boland, superintendent of the small southwestern Wisconsin school system.
The original proposal for almost a 50% tax increase was voted down in the district's annual meeting, as was a much smaller increase, he said.
Boland said the district's expenses were pretty much set by the time the state finalized its budget and he learned the district would be receiving dramatically less in state aid.
"When it was done that late, there was no way to prepare," he said. "We're the same as a lot of other districts."
Bumper stickers are like tattoos for cars. They're gaudy, mighty tough to get off and, no matter how hard they try, rarely inspiring. We don't need goofy "coexist" decals to inform us that the person doing a mean 45 MPH in the passing lane is against religion-fueled hatred and wars. Of course that guy's against war. He's driving a Saturn Ion.
And we've just about had it up to here -- lower jaw area -- with those wretched honor roll notifications. "Oh really, Mrs. Johnson? Tommy's getting straight A's in middle school?" Somebody call NASA. Or, if nothing else, call B.S. Just wait 'til he starts listening to rap music.
But parents, as a species, aren't rational beings. After all, if they were, they would've put you up for adoption. Instead, they foolishly assume their child is The Great White Hope, with equal parts of Jim Brown, Barack Obama and Jesus Christ mixed in -- although, interestingly, none of them are white. In Madison, this wide-eyed parental belief that their genes will save the world is best represented by discussions surrounding programming for gifted youngsters.
As reported Monday in the Wisconsin State Journal, some area parents are becoming increasingly frustrated with the Madison school district's weak implementation of TAG programming. TAG, which stands for "talented and gifted," is class instruction designed to challenge more advanced students, and forever lost its credibility when it became loosely associated with a canned body spray. According to the article, the school district currently has eight and a half positions devoted to pushing TAG programming forward, and that's simply not enough to spawn effective change.
Fortunately, it's not necessary, especially when dealing with elementary and middle school students. Try and tell 9-year-olds they're gifted; they'll listen, but only after a good nose-picking and two minutes of straight laughter stemming from a joke that incorporated the word "butt."
Fascinating. The TAG initiative, from my perspective, ideally should lead to increased rigor for all students. That is obviously a contentious topic.....
Education should be the top national priority ahead of health care, the economy and climate change, according to Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) Chief Executive John Chambers.
Education should be an issue that brings together Democrats and Republicans at a time when they can agree on little else, Chambers said. He helped present the findings of an education-focused task force at the WSJ CEO Council conference Tuesday.
The task force determined that the government should form a national council for an educated work force, linking together the secretaries of education, labor and commerce, said Accenture Ltd. (ACN) Chief Executive William Green.
"We don't have a national agenda to be tops in the world in education," Green said. "On every measure, we're slipping."
Indeed, countries are doing a better job of preparing their children for the global work force, Chambers said.
AT&T Inc. (T) Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said that the talent pool coming out high schools is getting diluted.
"Parents need to recognize that their children are falling behind," he said.
Two years ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute came together to grade the states on school performance. In that first Leaders and Laggards report, we found much to applaud but even more that requires urgent improvement. In this follow-up report, we turn our attention to the future, looking not at how states are performing today, but at what they are doing to prepare themselves for the challenges that lie ahead. Thus, some states with positive academic results receive poor grades on our measures of innovation, while others with lackluster scholarly achievement nevertheless earn high marks for policies that are creating an entrepreneurial culture in their schools. We chose this focus because, regardless of current academic accomplishment in each state, we believe innovative educational practices are vital to laying the groundwork for continuous and transformational change.
And change is essential. Put bluntly, we believe our education system needs to be reinvented. After decades of political inaction and ineffective reforms, our schools consistently produce students unready for the rigors of the modern workplace. The lack of preparedness is staggering. Roughly one in three eighth graders is proficient in reading. Most high schools graduate little more than two-thirds of their students on time. And even the students who do receive a high school diploma lack adequate skills: More than 33% of first-year college students require remediation in either math or English.
There were a lot of things I was anxious about when I came out of the School of Ed. One was the switch from being the graded to the being the grader. It was really an odd sensation to grade someone else's work in black and white. All that time spent at a liberal undergraduate school attending vegan potluck dinners, talking about how terrible judging people can be, and now I was being paid to judge people every day.
It gets easier with time. At first you might pour over your grades for a very long time, thinking about how many points a student really deserves based on their effort and the demonstration of their comprehension of an idea. You might come up with rubrics for the littlest assignments to ensure fairness and award points to papers only after covering up their authors. A lot of that will disappear under the shear workload that is grading. Really, looking at students' work takes forever! A very good friend of mine back in Kansas has over 150 students on her rosters. Think about it: you assign a two page paper in all of your classes and all of a sudden you have a 300 page novel to tear apart, comment on, revise and turn back to its many authors. Who has time for that?
In addition to time, it's really difficult to do any kind of grading if things are going poorly in the first year of teaching. It's unfair to fail all of the students for not learning if you've not grabbed hold of the reigns and taken control of the class. While the vast majority of the students who failed my class last year were making very poor decisions that led to that failure, fewer would have done so poorly if I'd been able to give them the structure and support they needed. How many? Who knows.
A majority of city and suburban residents oppose giving Milwaukee's mayor control over the Milwaukee Public Schools, according to a survey released Tuesday.
The People Speak Poll also found support for a high-speed rail system and a regional parks district; opposition to a regional transit authority and gasoline tax increases; and deep divisions on other transportation and government finance issues.
Among the four counties surveyed, Milwaukee County residents were the only ones who thought their county government was on the wrong track. Milwaukee city residents were about evenly split on the question of whether the city was on the right or wrong track, while suburbanites voiced a more negative view of the city's direction.
Mayor Tom Barrett and Gov. Jim Doyle have been pressing the Legislature to approve a bill that would give the mayor the power to hire and fire the MPS superintendent, along with ultimate authority over the school district's budget and labor negotiations. They say the step is needed to improve student performance, following the lead of several other major U.S. cities.
But opponents object to taking power away from the elected School Board. A competing proposal would give the mayor the power to veto the School Board's superintendent choice and budget decisions, but would let the board override those vetoes.
As you may recall I was wondering how come the district had no results (by grade or school or district) for the PSAT given last fall to 9th, 10th and 11th graders. Bob Vaughn in Advanced Learning told me they had too much on their plate to get it done.
Joy Stevens, the Public Records officer said this:
I am writing in response to your email below requesting PSAT test results. In doing so, I learned that the test results that we receive are in a format that cannot be easily incorporated into our information, which would allow us to release statistical information without violating individual student confidentiality. I am looking into whether it would be possible to redact or remove student identification from the results we get from the College Boards and/or extract statistical totals.
I also placed a call to Boeing and got a very nice guy who was puzzled but said that they were expecting a report by Dec. 31. He got back to me on Friday and said he got a report and that the district said they would be releasing the results shortly.
An unlikely opponent has joined the mounting opposition against a bill in the state Senate this afternoon that would expand the number of charter schools.
The Massachusetts Association of Charter Public Schools said today the bill could actually stifle the growth of charter schools because of changes made to the legislation last Friday in the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
Those changes would pull first-year funding for all new charter schools from the state's general education fund known as Chapter 70 and would create a new budget line for those costs, which the association fears could make it more vulnerable to line-item budget cutting.
Another change made by the committee would require that the first three new charter schools approved each year to be located in a district that ranks in the bottom 10 percent in MCAS scores. Given that the state only approves two or three applications a year, the association said the requirement would make it virtually impossible to open new charter schools in other parts of the state.
The parents of exceptionally bright students in Madison schools waited 18 years for a plan to raise the academic bar for their children. But now, they're really getting impatient.
Approved by the Madison school board in August, the district's new three-year plan for talented and gifted ("TAG") students already is raising questions from parents about focus and speed. The district's TAG staff, they note, consists of only 8.5 positions in a district of 24,622 students - and three of those positions are vacant.
"Change of a large system takes time," said Chris Gomez Schmidt, the mother of three young children who serves on the district's advisory committee for talented and gifted students. "But I think there's a lot of families within the system who are frustrated when they see that their students' needs are not being met. I think that families don't feel like they have a lot of time to wait."
The district's talented and gifted plan, which replaces a 1991 document, will be spelled out for the public Tuesday night in a community forum from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Hamilton Middle School, 4801 Waukesha St. The forum is meant to make the reforms understandable and "transparent" to the public, said Lisa Wachtel, executive director for teaching and learning for the district.
We hate to say it, but don't be misled by headlines. The biggest headline in education circles last week was that the Ford Foundation is making a whopping $100 million grant "to transform secondary education in the nation's most disadvantaged schools."
Our eyes raced to see which piece of the vibrant school-reform movement Ford was going to support. Would it be America's 4,600 charters schools, many outperforming their traditional school peers and some even closing the race gap? Maybe it would be Teach for America, busting at the seams and turning down Ivy League applicants by the hundreds. Or, who knows, maybe Ford's really on the leading edge, and would want to support voucher programs in cities like Washington.
Would you believe the recipients of Ford's largesse are the teachers unions? Yup. The folks at Ford are giving new meaning to the word "retro."
Ballyhooing the $100 million, the foundation's president Luis Ubinas said, "Improving our schools, and giving the most vulnerable young people real educational opportunities, benefits all of us. With this initiative we want to shake up the conversations surrounding school reform and help spur some truly imaginative thinking and partnerships."
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett's entrance into the race for Wisconsin Governor means many things; but perhaps most importantly, it means the death of the plan to have the mayor take over the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett continues to downplay his interest in a mayoral takeover, saying "I'm not interested in a power grab." But his call for a privately-funded assessment of the district marked a new activism on the mayor's part, reflecting the growing national movement toward putting mayors in charge of their city's schools.
In the last decade and a half at least a dozen of the nation's largest school districts have been handed over to mayoral control, most notably in Boston, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Philadelphia's schools are run by a board jointly appointed by the mayor and the governor.
The campaign for universal preschool education in the United States has gained great momentum. Precisely as strategists intended, many Americans have come to believe that pre-kindergarten is a good and necessary thing for government to provide, even that not providing it will cruelly deprive our youngest residents of their birthrights, blight their educational futures, and dim their life prospects. Yet a troubling contradiction bordering on dishonesty casts a shadow over today's mighty push for universal pre-K education in America (see "Preschool Puzzle," forum, Fall 2008).
The principal intellectual and moral argument that advocates make--and for which I have considerable sympathy--is similar to that of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) backers: giving needy kids a boost up the ladder of educational and later-life success by narrowing the achievement gaps that now trap too many of them on the lower rungs. Serious pursuit of that objective would entail intensive, educationally sophisticated programs, starting early in a child's life, perhaps even before birth, and enlisting and assisting the child's parents from day one.
Yet the programmatic and political strategy embraced by today's pre-K advocates is altogether different. They seek to furnish relatively skimpy preschool services to all 4 million of our nation's four-year-olds (and then, of course, all 4 million three-year-olds), preferably under the aegis of the public schools.
The School Board meeting for votes on both the new SAP boundaries and the levies is this Wednesday, the 18th at 6 p.m. You can sign up to speak starting tomorrow at 8 am by:
calling 252-0040 or e-mailing boardagenda@seattleschools.org
Here's we are, almost to zero hour. I don't want to disappoint anyone but I'm not sure I believe any amendments will come forward. I think only a broad-based one like the "soft" boundaries one (allowing anyone within a block of a school to have access even if it isn't their attendance area school) or the "one-time" option (which would allow anyone within, say, 3 blocks of a non-attendance area school to make the one-time choice to commit to that school). Those would not require moving boundaries. But I think the Board will say they just can't at this point. (And that's why I do not like staff saying, "Oh yes, the Board can do anything up until the vote.")
Please let us know if you attended Director Carr or De Bell's community meeting yesterday. I heard from someone who attended Director Carr's that there were a couple of issues. One, that when parents pressed about amendments, Sherry said it was too late because of staff issues. Two, that many parents were pressing for changes based on personal issues for their children. However, this person did end with this:
"Either way, we'll work to make our kids' school the best it can be."
Open enrollment has become part of the educational path that many families in the Boulder Valley School District follow, and this year officials have made some changes to the application process to make it both easier and greener.
For the first time, parents can file a request for their child to attend a Boulder Valley school outside their neighborhood on the district's Web site, eliminating the need for applicants to pick up a paper form and drive it to the Boulder Valley Education Center. The online application will mirror the hard-copy version, allowing parents to choose their top choices and explain their reasoning.
"It will be more convenient, faster and it will mean that a person will not need to drop it by the education center," said district assessment director Jonathan Dings. "We think this will save paper and gas, in an effort to be as green as we can in this process."
Parents still will have the option of filling out a paper application and dropping it off, if that works best for them, Dings said. But, he said, the district is "hopeful that we will have a great deal of participation" in the inaugural online program.
"We know that if the product works well, a whole lot more people will try it," he said.
Open enrollment is a statewide option that allows families to send their kids to schools outside their neighborhoods. The option plays a substantial role in how Boulder Valley students are placed, Dings said.
A few months ago Tim Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, assured a group of Chinese students in Beijing that their country's US dollar investments were in good hands. "Chinese assets are very safe," Mr Geithner said. His comments brought the house down.
White House officials will be hoping that Barack Obama can avoid a similar loss of face on Monday when he meets a group of students in Shanghai for the set piece "town hall" that has become the US president's signature event.
The chances are that he will. But no amount of dexterity can disguise the fact that Mr Obama's visit to China crystallises a big shift in the global centre of gravity over the past few years. Just a decade ago Bill Clinton persuaded Capitol Hill that China's membership of the World Trade Organisation would strengthen the forces of democracy within China.
Today, almost nobody in Washington even tries to make that case. Subsequent developments in China - and elsewhere - make it hard to sustain the argument that economic liberalisation leads necessarily to political liberty. More importantly, the US no longer has the luxury of being able to play teacher to China's student (not that China ever took instruction).
It's difficult to see significant increases in K-12 spending over the next few years.
I sympathize with those who might not be comfortable with the latest plan to rid our schools of at-risk kids. Several educators across the country, including Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman, have decided not to call them that anymore. Henceforth they will be known as "at-promise" children.
"We use the term 'at-promise' in Alexandria City Public Schools to describe children who have the potential to achieve at a higher rate than they are currently achieving," Sherman said in a July 23 op-ed in the Alexandria Gazette Packet. "Really, all children are at-promise, because we, as educators, have made a promise to each and every child that we will work toward higher achievement for all."
Cathy David, Alexandria schools deputy superintendent, explained at a School Board meeting last December: "The previous 'at-risk' model was a deficit model that identified and categorized children by criteria such as low income, special education, ethnicity or English language proficiency, with the assumption that if the criteria fit the child, then the child must have some sort of deficit. The 'at-promise' model comes from strengths."
Give me some adjectives to describe your school, the visitor asked a couple of dozen eighth-graders at the Hmong American Peace Academy one morning last week.
Peaceful, one volunteered.
Dependable, another said.
Successful.
Educational.
Fair.
Respectful.
Hard.
Supportive.
Show me a school where kids volunteer a list like that, and I'll show you a bright spot on Milwaukee's educational landscape. Which is exactly the case with this school, popularly known as HAPA.
Entering its sixth year, HAPA has a kindergarten through eighth-grade enrollment of 435, nearly twice the number when the doors first opened in 2004. That's not counting another 60 in a partner high school, International Peace Academy, that is in its second year and just beginning to grow.
On a wall near that eighth-grade classroom, charts list the attendance each day, classroom by classroom. Most of the entries read: "100%." Overall attendance is not only higher than the Milwaukee Public Schools average, it is higher than the state average.
The Wisconsin Charter Schools Association (WCSA) has announced the winners of annual awards in four categories, as well as three career achievement honorees:
An unlikely trio explored several Baltimore schools Friday as part of an effort to highlight education reform and challenges, and called on Maryland to give charter schools more autonomy.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich repeatedly emphasized the need for changes to the state's charter school law, which he called "too restrictive," as he, the Rev. Al Sharpton and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan toured three city schools and spoke with students, administrators and others about their schools - and what sets them apart.
"I hope that everybody in Maryland will call the governor, will call the legislators, and will let them know that if they want every child in Baltimore to have the chance to have a quality education ... they have to reform the charter school law," Gingrich said, standing with Duncan and Sharpton at Hampstead Hill Academy, a neighborhood charter. "If you have the ability to shape resources, to shape people, to focus time on the students, you really can have a dramatic impact. But to do that, you have to have a more flexible, a more creative charter law."
Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person's trash is transformed into another's treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.
While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.
"To the extent that school district resources are used, then I think it's fair to ask whether the district should share in the proceeds," said Robert N. Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents.
The marketplace for educational tips and tricks is too new to have generated policies or guidelines in most places. In Fairfax County, Va., officials had been studying the issue when they discovered this fall that a former football coach was selling his playbook and instructional DVDs online for $197; they investigated but let him keep selling.
Trying to fix academic problems in high school by adding more credit requirements would likely result in one thing for certain: more cost to educate, due to a need to hire more staff to teach 20 percent more classes ["Boost credits to ensure high-school grads are ready to succeed," Opinion, guest commentary, Nov. 12].
There are many school districts in this state that already have 24-credit programs, and they aren't preparing kids for graduation. In fact, Washington state is now 43rd in the nation in high-school completion.
Writer Trish Millines Dziko is so right when she stated we are not preparing kids for adulthood. Why? Our secondary schools, unlike those in most of the rest of the world, are more social halls than places of learning.
In a 20-credit school, you can obtain all of the credits and courses you need to gain admission to the most competitive colleges in this country.
What is needed is a much more serious, focused, deliberate approach to secondary schools by educators, parents and students.
Dual Language Immersion (DLI): The Board approved the expansion of our DLI program into our 4 attendance areas at specified schools at the elementary/middle school levels. We are still studying high school models. DLI is a program where children are taught in both Spanish and English. DLI programs are currently at Nuestro Mundo and Leopold Elementary Schools. Next year our first middle school program will be at Sennett.
Cultural Relevance: The Board received an update on our Cultural Relevance initiatives. This is included in the strategic plan as a Strategic Objective in Curriculum. The District has a number of new/expanding projects in this area. Of note is a pilot created at Mendota and Falk Elementary Schools. Staff are collaborating with UW-Madison faculty for professional development in: African American language development; family involvement; black communications; classroom management; teaching from principles; culturally relevant literacy principles.
School Food Committee: This committee was formed to look at possible options for our food service operations. The district is bringing in an expert (Ann Cooper) in transitioning food service programs. Early next year she will come to Madison to look at our operations and provide a cost estimate for a feasibility study of the MMSD.
Budget: The Board approved our final budget and set the tax levy in October. Summary:
Total levy: $234,240,964 (3.49% increase)
Tax rate: $10.18 (3.77% increase)
Impact on $250,000 home: $92.83
Going into the meeting, the proposed tax rate was $10.40 with the impact on a $250,000 home of $147.50. Aware of the difficult economic times facing our community, the Board approved 6 budget amendments designed to decrease these numbers to the approved numbers. As part of our effort to decrease property taxes, the Board voted to freeze "non-essential" maintenance spending by deferring or foregoing $3,080,000 in maintenance referendum tax levy spending in 2009-10. By doing so, we were able to decrease the tax impact on the average home by $33.16. What does this mean for the schools? We will continue to make essential repairs using existing maintenance funds or other existing district resources. We have already spent 91% of the maintenance referendum that passed 5 years ago. We will evaluate and prioritize the remaining "non-essential" maintenance projects on the list, and will make funding decisions on an as needed basis using a different source of funding.
Lighthouse Project: The Board and Superintendent are participating in the Lighthouse Project. A study focused on behavior of school boards/superintendents in high-achieving school districts. Our participation in this project over the next 6 months will focus on the 7 conditions of school renewal: 1) Shared leadership; 2) Continuous improvement and shared decision-making; 3) Ability to create/sustain initiatives; 4) Supportive workplace for staff; 5) Staff development; 6) Support for school sites through data/information; 7) Community involvement.
H1N1 Activities: We received a presentation on the district's H1N1 Pandemic Response Plan. The plan focused on 1) Education on H1N1; 2) Vaccination clinics; 3) Student/staff absences; 4) Supporting school operations; 5) Supporting students. An incredible amount of planning and communication went into the development of this plan and the district is now ready to deal with anything that comes our way as a result of H1N1.
If you have any questions/comments, please let us know.
To seek a share of $4.5 billion in federal "Race to the Top" funding for public education, the Legislature passed a recent bill that among other things allows teachers to be evaluated, though not disciplined or fired, based on their students' test scores.
However, to improve the state's chances of receiving the most grant money possible, the Legislature is contemplating other changes to existing law. A bill in the Assembly to grant the state Superintendent of Public Instruction the power to take corrective action in failing schools and school districts is one such proposal.
The bill would give the state superintendent the power to implement new curriculum, expand school hours, add individual learning plans for pupils, make personnel changes and adopt accountability measures to monitor the school district's finances.
I am running for School Board because I care about the success of our children. I want our schools to be even better. I strongly believe that in order for our community to be successful we need to support "ALL THE KIDS ALL THE TIME."
At the same, I understand the importance of maintaining fiscal responsibility to taxpayers. As an economist with over 35 years of experience I know it is critical to analyze and evaluate the economic impact of decisions.
My Priorities
High expectations for all students
Raise educational standards
Narrow the achievement gap
Base school curriculum, wellness and safety decisions on research
Ensure fiscal responsibility to taxpayers
Improve communication between teachers, parents, district administrators and the community
Press Release:
--PRESS RELEASE--
Today James Howard officially announced his candidacy for the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education. Mr. Howard is a candidate for Seat 4 which is currently held by retiring Board member Johnny Winston, Jr.
"I'm announcing my candidacy with great excitement," said Mr. Howard. "I care deeply about the success of our children. I strongly believe that in order for our community to have continued success we absolutely must support 'ALL THE KIDS, ALL THE TIME.' I want to work to ensure that happens."
Mr. Howard, an economist and scientist at the Forest Products Laboratory, has been active in education and community matters for many years. He served on the MMSD Strategic Planning Committee, the East Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force, and was co-chair of Community and Schools Together (CAST), the school referendum support group. He has also served on the South Madison Economic Development Committee and the Town of Madison Economic Development Committee.
In making this announcement, Mr. Howard thanked Mr. Winston for his many years of dedicated public service to Madison's children and community. "Mr. Johnny Winston, Jr. has been a leader on the board and in our Madison community. It will be a challenge for any newly elected board member to maintain the high standards that he exemplified," said Mr. Howard.
Mr. Howard has identified as his Board priorities: ensuring high expectations for all students, raising educational standards; narrowing the achievement gap; basing school curriculum, wellness and safety decisions on research; ensuring fiscal responsibility to taxpayers; improving communication between teachers, parents, district administrators and the community; and improving state funding of public schools.
He and his wife, Kathryn, have three children. His adult daughter is a UW Madison senior studying abroad in Kenya, his son attends Sherman Middle School, and his youngest daughter attends Emerson elementary.
Seattle Race Based School Assignment Policy Legal & Community Issues
via a kind reader's email:
The case was brought by Seattle parents who challenged the use of race in assigning students to schools, arguing it violated the Constitution's right of equal protection. The ruling was celebrated by those who favor color-blind policies, but criticized by civil rights groups as a further erosion of Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that outlawed school segregation."
The results of this lawsuit in the Seattle Public School district are very discouraging, especially the disparity in income, race and available resources between "south end" and "north end" schools. A new school assignment plan currently being implemented for 2010-2011 will only relegate neighborhoods of color to the poorest schools in the district. The blog http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/, while mostly dealing with "north end" problems like APP programs and such, the fact that children will be forced into neighborhood schools is dividing an already divided district. Rainier Beach High School, for instance, demographic data indicates Caucasians at less than 7% and an African American at more than 65%, a graduation rate of 37% and test scores at the bottom of the barrel.
I got to the last page of the last icon-shattering piece Gerald W. Bracey will ever write, and felt sad and empty. As usual, he had skewered--with great erudition and insight--some of my fondest beliefs about how to improve schools. As a consequence, my thinking and writing about these issues will (I hope) be better next time. But who is going to do that for me in the future?
Jerry Bracey, the nation's leading critic of unexamined assumptions in education, died Oct. 20 at age 69, apparently in his sleep, in his new home in beautiful Port Townsend, Wash. This was a shock to everyone who knew him because, although he had prostate cancer, it did not seem to have slowed him down.
The last person to receive one of his infamous emails questioning the ancestry and sanity of the recipient should frame the thing and put it on a wall. I don't know anyone else in our community of education wonks who matched him in passion, honesty and wit. The 2009 edition of the Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education proves it.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been widely held in high regard since he was appointed in January, but no honeymoon lasts forever. Mr. Duncan's came to an abrupt end earlier this week when he issued long-awaited rules that the states must follow to apply for his $4.3 billion discretionary fund, known as the Race to the Top Fund, and the second round of federal financing under the $49 billion federal stimulus package known as the state fiscal stabilization fund.
....
The language in the application reflects timidity at the White House and in Congress, where some voices wanted to delay the fight over this issue until next year when Congress will likely reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The language also reflects the sometimes excessive influence of boutique alternative certification programs, which want to keep doors open for teachers who might be shut out under traditional criteria.
I had a good chat with U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan this morning at his office. He had other important duties, but I would not let him go until he addressed each and every one of the questions sent in by readers last night and this morning. (Sorry, I missed questions that came in after 8:30 a.m. I had to get going. You know what D.C. traffic is like in the rain.) Here is what he said. I think most of his answers can be summed up as "we're handing out $4.35 billion in stimulus funds for innovation, and if we do it properly we will help solve a lot of problems."
From mhallet1: Ask him how he is coming on national Algebra I standards.
Duncan said that was the job of the group of 48 states and the Districts working to produce common standards. He said he is following their progress with great interest, but at the moment it is a state, not a federal, project.
From nicheVC: Disclosure: I spent the first 15 years of my career as an education practitioner, the last 10 investing in and discerning how the private sector might bring innovation and efficacy to the same.
On the same day the federal government flicked a green light for states to apply for $4 billion in competitive education reform grants, the fate of two of Gov. Jim Doyle's key initiatives remained uncertain.
The U.S. Department of Education finalized the application Thursday for the Race to the Top program and the criteria it will use to assess reform efforts from states, especially in the areas of standards and assessments, data systems, recruiting and rewarding good teachers and principals, and turning around low-performing schools.
Two reform proposals that Doyle says are crucial for Wisconsin to compete for funding - giving Milwaukee's mayor the power to hire and fire the superintendent, and giving the state superintendent of public instruction more power to intervene in persistently poor-performing schools - are struggling to gain traction in the Legislature.
Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker (D-Weston) said Thursday that he believes the state can receive Race to the Top money without changing the governance of MPS and giving more power to the state schools chief. He expressed skepticism about the plan for mayoral control.
"This process needs to have community buy-in," Decker said in a news conference in his Capitol office. "This is a big takeover. . . . A lot of us are apprehensive at this point of just slam-dunking anything."
As for the state superintendent's powers, Decker said he was reluctant to give a statewide elected official that much authority to intervene in a local school district.
This message is to inform you that I will not be seeking re-election for a third term on the Madison School Board, Seat #4.
For six years, it has been my honor to serve our community as an elected member of the Madison Board of Education. Thank you for your confidence in electing me in 2004 and 2007.
During my tenure on the board, I had the pleasure of serving as the President, Vice President, Treasurer and Clerk. I also served on many committees including Long Range Planning, Partnerships, Finance and Operations and currently Student Achievement and Performance Monitoring. Serving in these roles and on these committees gave me a well rounded outlook on the district and helped shape a collective vision that assisted me in my decision making.
In addition to serving within the capacities of the school board, I was able to reach out to our community and listen to their views. With your help, we were able to build a new school to alleviate overcrowding, develop strong partnerships and complete many district maintenance projects. Lastly, being elected to the school board afforded me the opportunity to listen to parents, students and community members and assist them in identifying an appropriate district staff member or service that would help meet their needs.
Despite less than desirable financial constraints, I believe the MMSD's future is brighter because of the development of a 4 year old kindergarten program, implementation of the district's new strategic plan and school board members that work in collaboration with each other, the superintendent, the district staff, and its stakeholders. I thank all of my school board colleagues both current and former, for their knowledge, skills and their service.
Although, I leave the Madison School Board, I will continue to be actively involved in our community as a member of organizations such as the 100 Black Men of Madison's Backpacks for Success event, Sable Flames, Inc. Scholarship Committee and other community groups that help make Madison a better place to live for everyone. I am also the proud parent of a current kindergartener so I will continue to be a proud supporter of the Madison Metropolitan School District and public education for many years to come.
Again, thank you for giving me the honor of serving our community.
To even be eligible for the funds, however, Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had said that Wisconsin would have to repeal its "firewall" law that banned the use of student scores in teacher evaluations.
In his remarks, Obama acknowledged that eliminating the law was controversial in some places but said it was a necessary first step toward bringing a new accountability to classrooms, especially with struggling students.
Normally, that would be a message the Wisconsin Association of School Boards would be eager to hear. But instead, the so-called firewall reform bill passed by the Legislature is a failure in the group's eyes because it doesn't allow school districts to use student test scores to discipline or dismiss a teacher whose performance doesn't measure up.
"While the wording of the legislation might meet the letter of the law, we don't think it really addresses its spirit," says Dan Rossmiller, a spokesman for the school boards association.
And because the new law requires collective bargaining over any teacher evaluation plan that includes student test scores, Rossmiller says the school boards association believes the requirement would make the process too unwieldy. "We think it will make it harder to use test scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness, not easier," he adds. "For that reason, I don't think we'll be recommending that school districts try to develop evaluation plans for teachers that include using test scores."
But Mary Bell, president of WEAC, says the new firewall reform law's most important purpose is to improve teacher effectiveness and that a focus on using data in a punitive way misses the point.
Wisconsin residents should brace for more tax increases and service cuts, based on an analysis that rated the state's budget predicament among the 10 worst in the country.
The rise in unemployment and a steep drop in revenues from 2008 to 2009 suggest a dire future for a state that has struggled to fill perennial budget shortfalls, according to the Pew Center on the States and its report, "Beyond California: States in Fiscal Peril."
The top-10 ranking puts Wisconsin in a dubious group with California, a state that issued IOUs to contractors earlier this year. Wisconsin is ranked ninth-worst, tied with Illinois.
"A challenging mix of economic, political and money-management factors have pushed California to the brink of insolvency," said Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States. "But while California often takes the spotlight, other states are facing hardships just as daunting."
States will slow the country's climb out of the recession if they turn to tax increases or drastic spending cuts to balance their budgets, Urahn said. At a minimum, the shortfalls will lead to more furloughs of state workers, higher college tuition fees and less support for social services.
We've blogged several times about Roland Fryer's research on education and the black-white achievement gap. Now Fryer thinks he has identified one system that successfully closes the gap. His new working paper, with co-author Will Dobbie, analyzes both the high-quality charter schools and the comprehensive community programs of the Harlem Children's Zone (which was chronicled in Paul Tough's excellent bookWhatever It Takes), with hopeful results: "Harlem Children's Zone is enormously effective at increasing the achievement of the poorest minority children. Taken at face value, the effects in middle school are enough to reverse the black-white achievement gap in mathematics and reduce it in English Language Arts. The effects in elementary school close the racial achievement gap in both subjects." Fryer and Dobbie attribute the program's success to the high-quality schools or the combination of high-quality schools and community programs but find that community investments alone cannot close the gap. "The HCZ model demonstrates", the authors conclude, "that the right cocktail of investments can be successful."
Gov.-elect Christopher J. Christie reiterated many of the themes of his campaign in an appearance at a suburban New Jersey high school yesterday, and offered glimpses of his personal life at the end of the campaign trail.
Christie told a crowd of hundreds of students at Steinert High School in Hamilton, Mercer County, that his priorities were cutting taxes and government spending.
Asked by a student how he defeated Gov. Corzine - who had the advantages of wealth and the support of national Democrats, including President Obama - Christie said, "I have absolutely no idea."
Christie, who was joined by Lt. Gov.-elect Kim Guadagno and a handful of state lawmakers from the region, told students he wanted them to be able to afford to build lives in New Jersey as they grow older. Christie has four children, the eldest a teenager who now asks to be dropped off behind school so the new security detail following the family does not draw too much attention.
In a meeting with reporters after the event, Christie promised tough negotiations with labor unions representing teachers and state workers. He said the New Jersey Education Association, which represents teachers and opposes many of the urban education ideas he has backed, "has been a strong advocate for the status quo."
"They need to get realistic about the fact that change is coming," Christie said.
In dealing with state workers, Christie said he would be fair, but added, pointedly, "I'm not going to be a pushover, and that's going to be a change."
When negotiating with state workers' unions, Christie said, he and Guadagno "are there to represent the taxpayers."
Corzine was often criticized as being too close to unions.
D.C. Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi named a new interim school system CFO Tuesday. Noel Bravo, a former senior budget adviser to Mayor Anthony A. Williams, replaces Noah Wepman, who resigned or was fired, depending on who you ask.
Bravo is walking into what has become one of District government's most punishing posts. Wepman's departure marks the second time on Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's watch that the school system's top fiscal officer has left in the wake of questions about the transparency of the agency's budget process.
Wepman and his predecessor, Pamela Graham, took different paths to the exit sign. But both ultimately discovered that trying to keep the numbers straight under Rhee's high-velocity attempt at transformation can be dangerous to your career health.
Part of the peril is structural. A congressional directive from the financial control board era gives the District's independent chief financial officer, not the head of the school system, power over spending. The set up put Wepman and Graham in a difficult position from the start: answering to Gandhi but facing enormous pressure to say "yes" to a chancellor given virtual carte blanche by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty to fix the schools.
Humans are fallible and have a tendency to repeat past failures. Education is no exception. The pendulum of reform has had its swing back and forth over the decades with minimal progress. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is taking the bull by the horns, purporting that the very teachers, who have entrusted him as their chief, are not to be trusted to do the proper job without close supervision, re-training, and additional monetary rewards. He calls for scrutiny, an uphauling of current educational institutions by employing a trace back system that will mark the culprit, the raison d'etre for the failure of our children.
Duncan's tough, paternal scolding sends a clear message: teachers beware.
Revolutionary or some of the same? The 4.35 billion Race to the Top reform resonates a familiar cadence, the mantra of the Bush administration and No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the gotcha mentality that fails to consider a teacher's moral intentions, or the common good. Certainly, within education, there exists a few bad apples, as in any profession. Yet, the majority of teachers choose the field of teaching for the intrinsic rewards rather than the monetary rewards.
Our failing schools reflect , more likely, a society gone amuck, an evolution of insidious issues that have seeped into the classroom, rather than inept teachers.Yet, Duncan argues that it is the teachers that are ill prepared and failing our students.
Critics who agree, suspected soft bigotry, low expectations, or inept teachers, are coming out in droves and applauding Duncan's reform as brilliant. Ruben Navarrette, in his article entitled "An Apple for the Secretary" (San Diego Union-Tribune, 10/28/09), argues that the "trace back" method is "groundbreaking stuff" and will finally flesh out the culprits. He points to Louisiana, currently using the trace back theory: students in grades 4-9 with low scores are traced back to teachers and the teachers are then traced back to the institutions that trained them. The state then provides the institution with information and "urges schools to improve."
BY promising basic information on the performance of our schools, Education Minister, Julia Gillard has landed a blow for common sense and for parents.
For too long, the argument about whether national testing on literacy and numeracy should even be done, let alone published, has been deadlocked.
Education experts, state education departments, teachers and their professional bodies, have long resisted the move arguing that such comparisons were worse than meaningless, they would be misleading.
The argument went that there were many more elements to the education of a young person than simply teaching he or she to read, write, and add up - the so called three "Rs". But while this argument may be true, it has never been a convincing argument against gathering good information on those things that can be measured well, and then providing it freely.
Acknowledging the "whole person" objective of school education, Ms Gillard says a fundamental prerequisite to becoming a productive community member is basic literacy and numeracy.
ndia's Congress-led government is undertaking a radical overhaul of the country's higher education system that will include legislation allowing foreign universities to operate in the country, the human resource development minister said on Monday.
Kapil Sibal, one of the most energetic reformers in the cabinet assembled after May's parliamentary election, said the administration intends to establish a new legal framework to unshackle India's universities, currently controlled by a huge, rigid and highly centralised bureaucracy in New Delhi.
"World class institutions can't be built overnight, but that doesn't mean we can't lay the foundations for world class universities over the next five to 10 years," Mr Sibal told executives at the Indian Economic Forum. "We have no time. This should have happened 15 years ago."
Mr Sibal said the government plans to introduce the foreign education bill, which would open the higher education sector to foreign participation, in the upcoming parliament session.
Politicians seem to have temporary set aside the debate about improving our schools, but you can bet that when the issue rises again, one solution will be raised, over and over: Improving student/teacher ratios--that is, hiring more teachers. But is it really a silver bullet for increasing results? What sort of results can we expect?
The graph above offers a few clues--but unraveling them takes a bit of explanation. The crucial point being: Adding teachers might improve student performance relative to past results, but it's a weak lever for effecting aggregate improvements.
So, let's dig into the graph. Each of the lines--colored in blue or green--represents data from a single state. To the left is that state's student/teacher ratio; to the right is that state's average SAT score.
The graph looks sort of confusing at first, but it actually does a pretty good job at showing that student/teacher ratios and SAT scores aren't closely related. If they were highly correlated, you'd expect to see lines with slopes all at a 45-degree angle (whether sloping up or down). But as you can see, they're actually a tangle. The states with the highest SAT achievement have relatively low student/teacher ratios--but those ratios alone don't account for their performance, since plenty of other states have similar ratios but don't score nearly as well.
The Palo Alto Unified School District would spend an extra $740 on benefits for each of its employees under proposed contracts the school board is to review tonight.
The proposed 2009-2013 contracts do not give raises beyond scheduled "step-and-ladder" annual increases, and aim to lessen the impact of a $1.3 million rise in health care costs through such measures as increasing co-pays for doctor's visits and giving retirees incentives to opt out of the district's health care coverage.
Without those cuts, the district would have to contribute "significantly higher" amounts for benefits, said Scott Bowers, assistant superintendent for human resources.
A longer school day can help improve student test scores, closing the achievement gap. But critics question the cost of those additional hours.
Going to school from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. may sound like a student's nightmare, but Sydney Shaw, a seventh-grader at the Alain Locke Charter Academy on Chicago's West Side, has come to like it - as well as the extra 20 or so days that she's in class a year.
"I'm sure every kid at this school says bad things about the schedule sometimes," says Sydney, who was at school on Columbus Day, when most Chicago schools had a holiday. "But deep down, we all know it's for our benefit."
Finding ways to give kids more classroom time, through longer hours, a longer school year, or both, is getting more attention. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan support a lengthier timetable. Many education reformers agree that more time at school is a key step.
Charter schools like Alain Locke and KIPP schools (a network of some 80 schools that are often lauded for their success with at-risk students) have made big gains in closing gaps in student achievement, partly through expanded schedules. Other schools have been making strides, too - notably in Massachusetts and in the New Orleans system.
Several hundred Portland Public Schools teachers gathered outside Monday night's school board meeting to protest contract talks that have dragged on since before June 2008, when the teachers' contract expired.
Their chanting outside delayed the meeting's start time -- then threatened to overpower the opening minutes. As school board chairwoman Trudy Sargent pounded the gavel to start the meeting around 7:15 pm, hundreds of teachers who had poured into the room shouted her down. "We are P-A-T" -- the Portland Association of Teachers union -- they cheered.
Union president Rebecca Levison was then given a few minutes to address the board. She said teachers didn't feel respected by the district, which is asking teachers to take five furlough days and a retroactive cost-of-living increase only in the first year of the two-year contract. (All PPS employees are being asked to take five furlough days to help cover a statewide budget shortfall, but other labor groups already got their COLA.) Levison also mentioned WW's story from two weeks ago about the surplus sale that got rid of school supplies. She cited the story as an example of PPS not looking out for teachers.
The two speakers who followed Levison were the human equivalents of one-two punches. Curtis Wilson, a second grade teacher at Sitton K-8 School, used to be a PPS custodian until he and all of his coworkers were outsourced in a move later found to be illegal. After he was let go in 2002, he returned to school to become a teacher. This year, he said, he "began to doubt the choice."
Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl plans to propose a 1 percent college-education privilege tax to council today, in a move that's likely to set off a fight with the city's schools of higher learning.
College and university representatives met with the mayor on Wednesday and argued against the tax, which would be assessed on a college student's tuition. It technically would not be a levy on the students or their schools, but rather on the privilege of getting a higher education in Pittsburgh.
"They weren't pleased to hear that this was an option we were pursuing," Mr. Ravenstahl said. But he said he is ready for "a fight, or a battle, if you will," if that's what it takes to plug a $15 million gap in his 2010 budget and help the struggling Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.
"We don't believe that [1 percent] is too burdensome on college students," Mr. Ravenstahl said. "The city taxpayers are paying for the services that are provided to those college students," including police, building inspection and fire service, he said. "The students have a role to play."
Judge Chris Freese sided with the family of Kaleb Drew, who argued that the boy's yellow Labrador retriever is a service animal allowed in schools under Illinois law. They say the dog is similar to a seeing-eye dog for the blind and is trained to help Kaleb deal with his disabilities, keeping him safe and calm in class.
The Villa Grove school district had opposed the dog's presence and argued that it isn't a true service animal.
The case and a separate lawsuit involving an autistic boy in southwestern Illinois are the first challenges to an Illinois law allowing service animals in schools.
Authorities in both school districts have said that the needs of the autistic boys must be balanced against other children who have allergies or fear the animals.
Kaleb Drew's dog, Chewey, has accompanied him to school since August under court order, pending the judge's final ruling Tuesday on the family's lawsuit against the school district.
Similar lawsuits have been filed on behalf of autistic children in other states, including California and Pennsylvania.
Rob Meyer can't help but get excited when he hears President Barack Obama talking about the need for states to start measuring whether their teachers, schools and districts are doing enough to help students succeed.
"What he's talking about is what we are doing," says Meyer, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Value-Added Research Center.
If states hope to secure a piece of Obama's $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" stimulus money, they'll have to commit to using research data to evaluate student progress and the effectiveness of teachers, schools and districts.
Crunching numbers and producing statistical models that measure these things is what Meyer and his staff of 50 educators, researchers and various stakeholders do at the Value-Added Research Center, which was founded in 2004. These so-called "value-added" models of evaluation are designed to measure the contributions teachers and schools make to student academic growth. This method not only looks at standardized test results, but also uses statistical models to take into account a range of factors that might affect scores - including a student's race, English language ability, family income and parental education level.
"What the value-added model is designed to do is measure the effect and contribution of the educational unit on a student, whether it's a classroom, a team of teachers, a school or a program," says Meyer. Most other evaluation systems currently in use simply hold schools accountable for how many students at a single point in time are rated proficient on state tests.
Much more on "value added assessment" here, along with the oft-criticized WKCE test, the soft foundation of much of this local work.
An Alabama High School Makes Literacy a Schoolwide Job An Alabama school that is seen as a national model shows how to teach reading and writing in every subject.
[and the wordless picture books have been a big hit, too!!...Will Fitzhugh]
"The staff cobbled together an approach that incorporates methods and materials used with younger children, such as art projects and wordless picture books, into high-school-level instruction. The idea is to use engaging activities and easy-to-access materials as door-openers to more complex subject matter.
The result is a high school that 'looks more like an elementary school,' Mr. Ledbetter said, because teachers find that letting students sketch, cut out, or fold their ideas seems to work well."
Catherine Gewertz:
The sheep's-brain dissections are going rather well. Scalpels in hand, high school students are slicing away at the preserved organs and buzzing about what they find. It's obvious that this lesson has riveted their interest. What's not so obvious is that it has been as much about literacy as about science.
In preparing for her class in human anatomy and physiology to perform the dissections, Karen Stewart had the students read articles on the brain's structure and use computer-presentation software to share what they learned. She used "guided notetaking" strategies, explicitly teaching the teenagers how to read the materials and take notes on key scientific concepts. She reinforced those ideas with more articles chosen to grab their interest, such as one on how chocolate affects the brain.
The class also watched and discussed a recent episode of the hit television show "Grey's Anatomy," about a patient with an injury to one side of the brain. The students' work is graded not just on their grasp of the science, but also on the quality of their research and writing about it.
Ms. Stewart isn't the only teacher who weaves literacy instruction into classes here at Buckhorn High School. It pops up on every corridor. A teacher of Spanish shows his students a self-portrait of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and asks what cues it conveys about her culture. A physical education teacher brings his class to the school library to study body mass. And a mathematics teacher burrows into the Latin roots of that discipline's vocabulary to help students see their related meanings, and uses "concept maps"--visual depictions of ideas--to help them grasp an idea's steps or parts.
Literacy is shot through everything at this 1,350-student Alabama school in a former cotton field 10 miles south of the Tennessee state line. It's been an obsession for a decade, ever since school leaders tested their students and found that one-third of the entering freshmen were reading at or below the 7th grade level, many at the 4th or 5th grade level.
"Those numbers completely changed my professional life," said Sarah Fanning, who oversees curriculum and instruction at Buckhorn High. "I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. Each of those numbers had a face, and that face went to bed with me at night."
'Relentless From the Beginning'
The Buckhorn staff immersed itself in figuring out how to improve student learning by boosting literacy skills in all subjects, something few high schools do now, and even fewer were doing then. That work has made the school a national model. Hosting visitors and making presentations--including at a White House conference in 2006--have become routine parts of its staff members' schedules.
Adolescent-literacy work such as that at Buckhorn High is taking on a rising profile nationally, as educators search for ways to improve student achievement. Increasingly, scholars urge teachers to abandon the "inoculation" model of literacy, which holds that K-3 students "learn to read," and older students "read to learn." Older students are in dire need of sophisticated reading and writing instruction tailored to each discipline, those scholars say, and without it, they risk being unable to access more-complex material. The Carnegie Corporation of New York recently released a report urging that adolescent literacy become a national priority. ("Literacy Woes Put in Focus," Sept. 23, 2009.)
Selected literacy resources at Buckhorn High School:
Professional Reading
Reading Reminders, Jim Burke
Deeper Reading, Kelly Gallagher
Content Area Reading, Richard R. Vacca and Jo Anne L. Vacca
I Read It, But I Don't Get It, Cris Tovani
Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Cris Tovani
Wordless Picture Books
Anno's Journey, Mitsumasa Anno
Free Fall, David Wiesner
Tuesday, David Wiesner
Freight Train, Donald Crews
Zoom, Istvan Banyai
Content-Area Picture Books and Graphic Novels
Chester Comix series, Bentley Boyd
Just Plain Fancy, Patricia Polacco
Harlem, Walter Dean Myers
The Greedy Triangle, Marilyn Burns
High-Interest, Easy-to-Understand Books for Adolescents
A Child Called "It," Dave Pelzer
Hole in My Life, Jack Gantos
Crank, Ellen Hopkins
Burned, Ellen Hopkins
The "Twilight Saga" collection, Stephenie Meyer
The "Soundings" and "Currents" series, Orca Publishing
The Bluford High series, Townsend Press
Source: Buckhorn High School
"We've seen a lot of focus on early literacy, but more recently people are saying, 'Wait a minute, what about kids in the upper grades?'" said Karen Wood, who focuses on adolescent literacy as a professor of literacy education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
"The days are passing by rather rapidly of middle and high school teachers' being able to say, 'Either you get the content or you don't.' I think we are starting to see a greater acceptance of the need for this," Ms. Wood said. "And it has to be a whole-school responsibility, not just something that's put off on teachers."
Sherrill W. Parris is the assistant state superintendent of education who oversees the 11-year-old Alabama Reading Initiative. Buckhorn High, she says, was on the leading edge of the state's adolescent-literacy work by enlisting in the project in its second year, 1999. It was one of the few high schools to do so.
"They have been relentless from the beginning," she said.
In Search of Expertise
When Buckhorn joined the reading initiative, its teachers and top administrators attended the state's two-week summer workshop, and were inspired by its vision of literacy instruction across the content areas. But they quickly saw they would have little guidance in putting the vision into action.
"We called the state department of education and said, 'Can you recommend some good books or programs?' and they said, 'No, but if you find some, call us,'" recalled Tommy Ledbetter, who has been Buckhorn's principal for 28 years.
Ms. Fanning said the state paid for a reading coach that first year, but Buckhorn "didn't know enough then to know how to use her."
The state program's fluctuating funding and focus, and a shortage of expertise in guiding middle and high schools, have meant that adolescent literacy has not received the consistent support in Alabama that originators of the initiative would have liked, Ms. Parris said.
On its own, Buckhorn's staff scoured the field for expertise. Gradually, they assembled a list of authors such as Kelly Gallagher and Cris Tovani, whose theories and strategies seemed to click, and who became their shining stars. ("Kelly Gallagher is our Brad Pitt," quipped Buckhorn English teacher Tracy Wilson.)
Higher Scores
Buckhorn High School has exceeded county and state averages on Alabama's 10th grade writing test. SOURCE: Alabama Department of Education
The staff cobbled together an approach that incorporates methods and materials used with younger children, such as art projects and wordless picture books, into high-school-level instruction. The idea is to use engaging activities and easy-to-access materials as door-openers to more complex subject matter.
The result is a high school that "looks more like an elementary school," Mr. Ledbetter said, because teachers find that letting students sketch, cut out, or fold their ideas seems to work well.
Colorful student work lines the school's walls and dangles from its ceilings. In one poster, a math student drew a picture of himself next to a streetlamp, and described his reasoning in deciding how to calculate its height. He included the calculation and the answer.
On a "word wall" in an English classroom, a student didn't simply write the definition of the word "ostracize." To show its meaning, he insisted that his teacher hang it several inches away from the wall, as if it had been rejected by the other words.
That teacher, Donna Taylor, said she was a skeptic when school leaders began emphasizing visual and artistic depictions of ideas a decade ago.
"It seemed kind of elementary," said Ms. Taylor, who's been teaching for 17 years. "I thought, hey, I'm a high school teacher--we need to be preparing [students] for college, doing serious, deep work, one step away from a bachelor's degree. But once I saw how this visual stuff helps the kids learn, I was on board."
Avoiding 'Assumicide'
Will Culpepper is just such a student. "It's hard for me to understand something when I write it down or read it, but if I do a picture or hands-on stuff with it, I can get it better," said the 16-year-old junior.
Teachers use a variety of strategies to build comprehension. Recognizing that many students are intimidated by vast gray stretches on textbook pages, English teacher Tracy Wilson uses shorter articles or excerpts to teach the same content. That builds students' knowledge and confidence to tackle the full versions, she says.
Taking a cue from math teachers, she uses "talk-alouds," stopping frequently as the class reads a fiction passage to discuss what is happening. Instead of only writing definitions of vocabulary words, her students often make "foldables," colorful projects with sections that open to show a word's meaning, context, origin, and use.
Math teacher Carrie Bates asks students to explain their problem-solving reasoning, in class and in homework. When a student struggles, she finds that simple picture books, like The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns, can work wonders to get a concept across. Then she can build more-complex understanding onto that.
Buckhorn teachers try to avoid committing what Kelly Gallagher calls "assumicide": assuming students have the skills to access the content. They explicitly teach those skills.
Ms. Wilson walks her students through ways to get clues about meaning from context, helping them deduce from the sentence "the phlox is blooming in the garden," for instance, that phlox is a flower.
Career and technical education teacher Connie Mask helps her students get the most from their textbooks, acquainting them with the table of contents and the index, and explaining the significance of photographs and captions. "This was stuff I just thought students knew how to do," she said.
Each week, the teachers work on specific literacy strategies. One week, it's using graphic organizers or Venn diagrams to help students understand content. Another week, it's building students' retelling and summarizing skills or practicing guided-reading techniques.
A good chunk of teachers' weekly professional development focuses on such strategies as well. And in an ongoing "book group," they tackle tomes by literacy experts. Teachers also spend a lot of time scrutinizing data from state and school tests to see how their instruction needs adjusting.
Social studies teacher Jenny Barrett says she didn't used to think her job description included teaching literacy skills. But now she sees that she has to help her students learn how to spot places in the textbook to mark with Post-its, understand the common roots of words like "oligarchy" and "monarchy," and draw pictures of ideas when that helps them understand. She also has learned strategies like breaking text into "chunks" to help students parse the meanings.
Librarian's Key Role
School librarian Wendy Stephens has played a key role in Buckhorn's literacy work, revamping the library's holdings in support of both students and teachers. She helped Ms. Barrett expand the list of materials she uses, such as picture books and comic books, for instance, and works closely with her on a project in which students research aspects of Thomas L. Friedman's The World Is Flat, such as globalization or outsourcing, and make videos about them.
Ms. Stephens has built up collections that typically are popular with boys, such as manga, or Japanese cartoon, magazines, books by Edgar Allan Poe, and a series of books by Dave Pelzer recounting his abuse as a child. For girls, she makes sure to stock the "Twilight Saga" by Stephenie Meyer, and works by Maya Angelou and Ellen Hopkins.
She added wordless picture books, which many teachers use to help students construct storylines in various subjects, and content-area comic books.
Expanding the library's pop fiction collection required a shift in attitude, Ms. Stephens said.
"I had to put aside my own bias," she said recently in the school's large, airy library. "Sure, I thought everyone should be reading Hemingway. But I just want to increase their fluency."
It seems to be working. The number of books checked out of the library has soared from fewer than 200 a month when Ms. Stephens took over in 2003 to more than 1,600. About a dozen students come in early for a book group, and she has set up computer-based videoconferences for students with favorite authors.
Measuring the impact of the literacy work at Buckhorn High isn't easy, since the school no longer uses the standardized test it used in 1998. It does outpace the 19,000-student Madison County district and the state in the proportion of students who score proficient on the reading portion of the state graduation exam, but only by a small margin. (Ninety-eight to 100 percent of Buckhorn's students have been passing in recent years; statewide, the percentage is in the mid- to high 90s.)
The school's proficiency scores on the state's 10th grade writing test are significantly better than district or state averages.
Ms. Fanning points in particular to the fact that one-quarter or more of Buckhorn's freshmen enter as "struggling readers"--two or more grade levels behind--but nearly every student passes the graduation exam by 12th grade.
"We think we are really making a difference here," she said.
Coverage of pathways to college and careers is underwritten in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Vol. 29, Issue 10, Pages 20-23
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Those unfortunate people in the District may worry about the quality of their teachers, and wait anxiously for the results of the school system's controversial new evaluation of classroom techniques and test score improvement. But those of us in the Washington area suburbs don't have to worry because we already know that close to 100 percent of our teachers are entirely satisfactory. How? Our school districts say so.
I asked suburban school officials to share the latest results from their teacher evaluations, which are usually done by principals and subject specialists. Here are the percentages of teachers rated satisfactory, in some cases called meeting or exceeding the standard: Alexandria 99 percent, Calvert 99.8 percent, Charles 98.4 percent, Culpeper 97 percent, Fairfax 99.1 percent, Falls Church 99.55 percent, Loudoun 99 percent, Montgomery 95 percent, Prince George's 95.56 percent, and Prince William 98.3 percent.
Anne Arundel, Arlington, Fauquier and Howard, and Manassas City say they don't collect such data. Carroll says it is doing it for the first time and hasn't finished yet.
Those numbers in the high 90s sound good, but they don't impress some advocates of better teaching. Near perfect teacher evaluation passing rates are common throughout the country.
One reason why D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has launched her complex IMPACT evaluation of the District's teachers is that the research and training organization she founded, the New Teacher Project, is a sworn enemy of those standard evaluation systems. Since teacher ratings in most districts are as discerning as peewee soccer award night, with everyone getting a trophy, why bother?
proposal before Massachusetts lawmakers aimed at protecting students who voice religious views at public schools is being assailed by advocates of separation of church and state, who say it forces religion on people.
Critics also argue it would open a backdoor for teaching creationism.
But the bill's sponsors say opponents are misreading the measure. They say it would simply ensure the existing free speech rights of religious students that are sometimes neglected at schools around the country. "What we're trying to do with this bill is create an even playing field,'' said Evelyn Reilly of the Massachusetts Family Institute, which wrote the bill.
The bill has bipartisan backing and is pending before the Legislature's Joint Committee on Education.
Governor Jim Doyle today signed into law Senate Bills 370, 371, 372 and 373, which take the first steps toward reforming education in Wisconsin and ensuring every student has a chance to succeed. Governor Doyle signed the laws at Wright Middle School just days after President Obama visited the school to call for states to make significant education reform. The bills take important steps to align Wisconsin with federal education reform goals laid out by the President and position Wisconsin to compete for Race to the Top funds.
"I want to thank state legislative leaders for acting swiftly to take these critical first steps toward major education reform," Governor Doyle said. "We are really proud of our state's great schools but we know we have to step it up and strive to reach the highest levels. We must continue moving forward reforms that put our students first and answer President Obama's challenge to race to the top."
The Governor will continue to work closely with the Legislature to move forward reform efforts to create clear lines of accountability at Milwaukee Public Schools, strengthen the State Superintendent's ability to turn around struggling schools and raise math and science standards so every student can compete in the global economy.
A reader mentioned that the Madison School District's budget, has, in the past been approved by the City's "Board of Estimates". A return to this practice has its pros and cons. However, it may actually improve financial transparency, which, in my view has declined recently. Susan Troller's recent MMSD budget article mentions a $350M 2009/2010 budget while the District's budget site does not include the November, 2009 budget update 1.1MB PDF, which mentions a $418,415,780 2009/2010 Budget ($412,219,577 2008/2009 and $399,835,904 in 2007/2008).
When President Barack Obama spoke to education groups on the campaign trail, he said he didn't believe in the false choices currently offered by the education debate. He didn't believe that it was a choice between supporting unions or supporting charters. He didn't believe it was about striving for either equity or excellence.
Instead, Obama reiterated that this moment in education is about moving beyond ideology and moving toward results. What matters is not whether a kid goes to a charter school or a district school or a magnet school; what matters is they go to a good school. What matters is not whether a child has a union teacher or a non-union teacher; what matters is that every child has an effective teacher.
The recent DPS school board elections have been miscast as a referendum on the false choice Obama sought to dispel. In the aftermath, it is important to focus on what has actually driven both Denver and Colorado's educational improvements in recent years and how that illuminates the road ahead.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been the perfect national symbol of this clear-eyed pragmatism, with a relentless focus on results. Long before he was a Cabinet member, Duncan found himself caught in a classic version of this false choice Obama dismissed. There were two competing groups of educators that released their own set of principles to guide the Obama presidency. One group was backed by "reformers" who insisted that the system needed radical changes to make sure we recruited, retained and released educators based on merit. The other was backed by a set of "union leaders" who argued that we must attend to the out-of-school variables that impact learning, including more counseling, support services and professional development.
The State Journal's call for more charter schools in the editorial welcoming the president to Madison was a bit off the mark.
A charter school is not an end in itself - it's a means to achieve an end. If there are impediments to learning that we're unable to address, or opportunities for improvement that we're unable to provide through our neighborhood schools, then a charter could be an effective way to address the issue
For example, I'd be interested in a charter proposal designed to attack our achievement gap by providing a more intense academic focus in a longer school day and longer school year for students who are behind. But if a charter idea lacks that sort of vital justification, then for me there's insufficient reason to deviate from our traditional neighborhood school approach.
The same is true for the school district's recently-adopted strategic plan. More charter schools is not a goal, it's a strategy. If charters can be an effective means of achieving our goals of improving academic outcomes for all students and ensuring student engagement and effective student support, for example, we should and likely will consider them.
As I understood the president's remarks at Wright, this approach is consistent with the laudable goals he described.
Founded in 1993 as Madison Middle School 2000, the school alleviated crowding in the West High School attendance area and served as a hopeful sign to the ethnically diverse South Side, which lacked a middle school. The school moved to its building at 1717 Fish Hatchery Road (Panoramic view) in 1997 and was renamed for the late Rev. James C. Wright, a prominent local black pastor and civil rights leader.
The school's early years were marred by lax discipline, high staff turnover, the resignation of the original principal and clashes among parents and teachers over governance. Stability arrived in 1998 with Ed Holmes, whose six-year tenure as principal earned praise from many parents and students.
"I would characterize (Wright) as one of the district's grand experiments," said Holmes, now West High principal.
As a charter school, students choose it; no one is assigned there. Enrollment is capped at 255, and classes rarely exceed 20 students. The school's mission stresses civic engagement, social action and multicultural pride.
TMD has obtained an internal memo sent from Sen. Taylor (1.5MB PDF) to other state representatives (dated 11/5/09 7:35 pm) seeking their co-sponsorship for the MPS Takeover legislation. This memo not only asks for co-sponsorship, but it provides specific details of the upcoming (draft) legislation. This is what the public has been waiting for... details!
Beloved, one thing you will continue to read from me is the mantra follow the money. This entire reform gets down to one thing, money... more specifically, Race To The Top federal grants. State governors must apply for the grant and that is where this all begins with Doyle. Did you know that 50% of any grant received must be given to local educational agencies (LEAs), including public charter schools identified as LEAs under State law? I guess you won't see many preachers in Milwaukee opposing this Takeover since their schools stand to benefit financially. Where did Doyle have that press conference in Milwaukee last week?
Let me back this thing up for you quickly. Some of you still are wondering what gives? Jump down the worm hole with me again just for a second... President Obama and Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) aka the Stimulus Package (2/17/09). Inside this legislation is approximately $4.3 billion set aside for states that implement education reform targeted to increase student achievement, closing achievement gaps, improving graduation rates and preparation for success in college/careers. Follow the money family...
A reader mentioned that the governance changes may apply to other Wisconsin Districts, perhaps rendering local boards as simple wallflowers....
The total identified in the Priority 1 Recommended Budget is $284,925.
We are continuing to plan in the areas of:
implementing Individual Learning Plans,
using ACT Standards as part of assessments,
supporting technology,
program evaluation, and
a possible expulsion abeyance options pilot for second semester.
Budget recommendations for these areas will come to the Board at a later date.
More:
The electronic based ILP (Individual Learning Plan) developed in collaboration with University of Wisconsin staff to meet the unique needs ofthe MMSD. The ILP will be based off of the WisCareers platform which will interface with Infinite Campus, the District's information management system.
Identify a subgroup of the ILP Action Team to create an ILP implementation plan that includes a mechanism for feedback and evaluation (e.g., Survey instruments, external evaluation conducted by the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research).
The only way President Barack Obama could have been any more indirect about his message on Wednesday in a speech at a middle school in Madison was by giving it in another state.
He never mentioned Milwaukee, he barely mentioned Wisconsin. It might seem hard to be boring when you're talking about giving away billions of dollars to places that shake up their education systems, but Obama succeeded, so much so that a Washington Post story described his speech as "turgid."
And yet, there was a very pointed message in there, aimed right at Wisconsin and Milwaukee. How do I know? Arne Duncan told me so.
Being president may mean rarely being able to say what's really on your mind, but, in a telephone interview after the speech, the outspoken secretary of education was more than willing to tread almost all the places his boss didn't want to go.
In short, the message of the visit was: Get with the program, Wisconsin.
In the spirit of generosity I've been thanking the gods that private school teachers' salaries are not connected to students' standardized test scores. Else Malia Obama's science teacher at the Sidwell Friends School might have lost her job faster than you can say "grade inflation."
On November 3, 2009, the one-year anniversary of his election, President Obama, speaking at a middle school in Madison, Wisconsin, told his audience that First Daughter Malia had recently come home from school with a 73 on a science test, but after renewed educational vigor she aced her next test. This was the same day President Obama reiterated his call for public school teachers' merit pay to be based in part on student performance on standardized tests.
After numbing my students with No Child Left Behind tests for the past seven years, I can now depend on Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to turn it all around.
But Secretary Duncan's not going to hand over any federal grant money willy-nilly. No sir. No money changes hands until the states beat down those all-powerful teacher unions (and if you want to see how powerful teacher unions are, just drive by your local public school and check out the cars in the faculty parking lot. The Cash for Clunkers program rejected my 1997 Toyota Corolla and most of my colleagues' cars as well)
Elected leaders, educators, parents and students need to get these tasks done. The future of Wisconsin and our nation is at stake.
Obama didn't sugar coat what needs to occur. He talked tough about closing failing schools and firing bad teachers. He told parents and students they were more responsible than anyone for student success, which hinges on high expectations and follow-through.
Yet the "educator in chief" also offered reassurance and rewards, including a chance to win hundreds of millions of dollars in competitive grants.
It's time to act.
A day after Obama's visit to Wright Middle School on Madison's South Side, the Wisconsin Legislature barely approved a bill allowing student test scores to be used in teacher evaluations - something Obama specifically called for. Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan had called Wisconsin's ban on tying teachers to test data "ridiculous."
Representatives of five would-be virtual charter schools will file into the administrative towers of the Georgia Department of Education today to pitch their brand of public education, which lets students study at home computers in their pajamas.
Some contenders will come with national representatives from education management companies touting their records of student achievement in other states. Some will rely on the moms and dads who sit on the boards of petitioning schools to make their case.
If they're successful, they stand to be funded just as any other Georgia public school. Some state officials, however, aren't ready to prop open the door of school choice and let more cyber campuses in without first doing more homework on the subject.
The Common Core blog, which shares my distrust of the 21st century skills movement, is warning about the appointment of Apple executive Karen Cator as head of the U.S. Education Department's Office of Education Technology. I don't know Cator. Common Core says she once chaired the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the movement's leading organization, and might push their agenda in Washington. I think the partnership is led by well-intentioned people, but so far they have done a lousy job showing how their approach will improve schools.
My recent column about a book by two partnership leaders made this case in more detail. Lynne Munson and James Elias, who wrote the Common Core post about Cator, seem to think she would use her new job to divert more education dollars to technology companies and forget about giving students a deep and balanced education.
The No Child Left Behind Act is up for renewal. It costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars every year but the Obama administration is giving its reauthorization less serious attention than most people pay to their phone bill. Families facing tight budgets actually consider cancelling a service that doesn't benefit them. ("Do I really need a landline if I already have a cell phone?") But ending federal involvement in k-12 schooling is not something that education secretary Arne Duncan is even willing to talk about.
Here are three good reasons why we need to have that conversation:
First, we have little to show for the nearly $2 trillion dollars spent on federal education programs since 1965. As the chart demonstrates, federal education spending per pupil has nearly tripled since 1970 in real, inflation-adjusted dollars -- but achievement has barely budged. In fact, the only subject in which achievement at the end of high school has changed by more than 1 percent is science, and it has gotten worse.
This overall average masks some tiny gains for minority children, such as a 3 to 5 percent rise in the scores of African American 17-year-olds. But even these modest improvements can't be attributed to federal spending. Almost all of the gain occurred between 1980 and 1988, a period during which federal spending per pupil actually fell. And the scores of African American 17-year-olds have declined in the twenty years since, even as federal spending has shot through the roof.
The Wisconsin Legislature passed a series of education reform bills designed to make the state compete for nearly $4.5 billion in federal stimulus money.
The Assembly voted 47 to 46 in favor of the reform bills around 3 a.m. on Friday morning after a long closed door meeting among Democrats. The Senate approved the measures earlier on Thursday.
The action came after President Barack Obama came to Madison on Wednesday to tout the Race to the Top grant program.
One of the bills would create a system to track student data from preschool through college. A second bill would tie teacher evaluation to student performance on standardized tests. Another bill would require all charter schools to be created under federal guidelines. The last bill would move grants awarded to Milwaukee Public Schools for student achievement to move from Department of Administration to Department of Public Instruction control.
The bills remove a prohibition in state law from using student test data to evaluate teachers.
Even with it removed, teachers could not be disciplined or removed based on student test scores. And the teacher evaluation process would have to be part of collective bargaining.
Republicans argued that means most schools won't even attempt to use the test data when evaluating teachers. Attempts by them to alter the bill were defeated by Democrats.
Senate Republicans expressed concern about the teacher evaluation portion, saying collective bargaining could become a hurdle to the Race to the Top guidelines and that teachers should also be disciplined or fired based on standardized testing results, not only rewarded.
"(Obama) said we have to be bold in holding people accountable for the achievement of our schools. Well, trust me, if we pass this legislation requiring mandatory negotiations we're not bold, we're a joke," said Sen. Luther Olson, R-Ripon.
Four education bills aimed at bolstering the state's application for federal Race to the Top funds were also moved through the Legislature. In the Assembly, passage of a bill allowing the use of student performance on standardized tests to be used in evaluating teachers. Republicans objected to the bill because they say it requires school districts to negotiate how the data is used in the teacher evaluations and would tie the hands of administrators who seek to discipline or dismiss poor performing teachers.
The bill barely passed the Assembly on a 47-46 vote.
The Assembly session wrapped up at about 4 a.m.
It will be interesting to see how these bills look, in terms of special interest influence, once Governor Doyle signs them. I do - possibly - like the student data tracking from preschool through college. Of course, the evaluations may be weak and the content may change rendering the results useless. We'll see.
In related news, Madison School Board Vice President Lucy Mathiak again raised the issue of evaluating math curriculum effectiveness via University of Wisconsin System entrance exam results and college placement at the 11/2/2009 Madison School Board meeting. This request has fallen on deaf ears within the MMSD Administration for some time. [Madison School Board Math Discussion 40MB mp3 audio (Documents and links).]
Two developments in public education converged near the turn of the century to bring rare prominence to the issue of teacher policy. First, several researchers reported with confidence that teachers are the single most important school-level factor in students' learning. Although schools could not influence the prior experience or socioeconomic status of a student, they could decide who the child's teachers would be, and those decisions would have long-term consequences for students' academic success. Meanwhile, school officials faced the challenge of replacing an enormous cohort of retiring veterans with new teachers. The demand for teachers in low-income schools was especially great.
Recognizing this pressing need for new, effective teachers, policy makers and administrators began to adopt strategies for recruiting, hiring, supporting, motivating, assessing, and compensating the best possible individuals. Their efforts succeeded in highlighting for the public the importance of teachers. Over the past decade, however, this sharpened focus on the individual teacher has eclipsed the role that the school as an organization can and must play in enhancing the quality and effectiveness of teachers and teaching. As a result, teachers are getting less support than they should and schools are less successful than they might be.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has released "Redesigning Teacher Pay," the second volume in its series on Alternative Teacher Compensation Systems. The Ford Foundation provided support for the report, which takes on the debate over performance-based pay systems for public school teachers, an approach that aims to better serve students and academic goals. The foundation funded the research and collaboration of EPI's leading scholars as part of our reform work in education and scholarship.
Published in Education Week (subscription required): October 13, 2009
The current movement for paying teachers based on how well they teach, rather than how long they've been on the job, represents at least the fourth wave of national interest in performance-pay plans, two scholars say in a new book.
When, if ever, has a president of the United States inserted himself as directly into a legislative issue in Wisconsin as President Barack Obama is doing by visiting Madison on Wednesday? Obama's visit to a middle school a couple miles from the State Capitol will focus on education - and it comes as Gov. Jim Doyle and others are ramping up their push for a series of educational reforms, including giving much of the power over Milwaukee Public Schools to Milwaukee's mayor.
Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who will be with him, are firm supporters of many of the ideas being incorporated into the legislative package. Wisconsin clearly has to make changes such as these if it wants a decent chance at a share of the $5 billion in the Race to the Top money and other incentive funds Obama and Duncan will distribute over the next couple years.
It appears highly likely a special session of the Legislature will be called in November to consider the education proposals. The outcome is not clear.
Join the Green Charter Schools Network as an organization member and we'll send you a FREE copy of SMART By NATURE. Click organization membership form.
"Smart by Nature is must reading for teachers, school administrators, parents, and the concerned public," writes leading environmental educator David W. Orr. "It is an encyclopedia of good ideas, principles, and case studies of some of the most exciting developments in education."
The Green Charter Schools Network and River Crossing Environmental Charter School are featured in Smart By Nature. "We're all concerned about the environment and sustainability," says Jim McGrath, GCSNet President. "That's why we're doing it -- because, really, what could be more important than preparing young people for a sustainable future."
Helen Lovejoy is more than a minister's wife. She is an icon, the yellow-faced bulldog behind one of society's most enduringly annoying mantras:
Won't somebody please think of the children?
In Milwaukee, this cry often falls on deaf ears. The Milwaukee Public School system is less an educational structure than it is a punch line on fail blog. Students are performing far below expected levels, resources are few, and ultimately too few people are thinking about the children.
Fortunately, Gov. Doyle decided to step in. Knowing there needed to be a change in MPS, and potentially motivated by a larger desire to make Wisconsin attractive for the Obama administration's Race To The Top grants, Doyle announced a bill that would take significant authority away from the school board and put it in the hands of Milwaukee's mayor. These powers, which include the ability to select the superintendent and set the annual tax levy, should not be taken lightly, and one would hope a busy mayor would find adequate time to thoroughly look at the city's public school system. After all, if you have time to lose a fight at a state fair, you can budget a few days to deal with education.
New Jersey's next governor, making his first post-Election Day appearance at a thriving charter school in the state's largest city, renewed a campaign pledge to reform urban education.
Chris Christie, speaking to grade-schoolers in green uniforms who addressed him as "Governor Chris," used the event at the Robert Treat Academy in Newark's North Ward to demonstrate his commitment to improving education and reducing crime in New Jersey's cities.
"When I had to decide what I was going to do with my day, the day I was elected governor, there was no place else I wanted to be than here with all of you," Christie said. "And I knew, because I was just elected yesterday, that all these people would come," he said referring to the reporters and photographers who ringed the podium in the school's auditorium.
The visit was also politically symbolic for the Republican governor-elect: the school was founded by Essex County Democratic Party boss Steve Adubato Sr.
A hoarse and worn-looking Christie was joined by Adubato, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo Jr., also Democrats. Christie said he was sending a message that his new administration would encourage bipartisan cooperation but is not afraid to fight for his principles.
Booker seemed eager to accept Christie's offer.
"Politics is over," said the mayor, who campaigned hard for Gov. Jon Corzine. "I've got to find partners for progress."
In 2008-2009, 78 percent of schools identified eligible students by using government records of which households already receive aid like food stamps. Use of the so-called direct certification method, the most efficient way to enroll school children in subsidized lunch programs, was up 11 percentage points from the previous year, according to the report, which is being delivered to Congress on Tuesday. A copy was obtained by The Associated Press.
Direct certification helps eliminate the lengthy application process for free meals.
Despite the overall improvement, the report shows a wide disparity in performance from state to state. The top four states - Alaska, Delaware, New York and Tennessee - all directly enrolled more than 90 percent of students from households that receive food stamps.
And no one, not even its members, would argue with that.
The fracturing of the Pawtucket School Department's governing body has been a gradual one, its members tell The Valley Breeze, but they say last Wednesday's special meeting, when members argued loudly over everything from rules of order to a lawsuit against the city, "marked a new low" in basic civility.
Member Jim Chellel, who would later be unanimously elected new chairman of the School Committee, was forced to pound his gavel early and often, while even the man who controls the microphone soundboard was having trouble mitigating the eruptions as his fingers danced over the volume controls.
Despite all the arguing, School Committee members still found the time last Wednesday to move forward with a number of big-ticket items, including approving by a 4-3 vote a Caruolo lawsuit against the city of Pawtucket and its taxpayers seeking more than $4 million in additional funds.
Declaring there should be "no excuse for mediocrity" in public schools, President Obama on Wednesday pledged to push for recruitment of better teachers, better pay for those who succeed and dismissal of those who let their students down.
When principals are trying to determine which teachers are doing well, he said, they should be able to consider student performance as part of the evaluation.
And when schools are failing, "they should be shut down," Obama said. "But when innovative public schools are succeeding, they shouldn't be stifled, they should be supported."
The president's tough words came as Obama spoke to students and teachers at a charter middle school in Wisconsin's capital, Madison. But as he announced the criteria by which states can win grants from his Department of Education's $4.35-billion "Race to the Top" fund, Obama spelled out standards that depart from conventional Democratic dogma.
For one thing, Obama called for the abolition of "firewall" rules, which prevent many schools from judging teacher performance based on student performance.
The Department of Education will be accepting proposals for projects aimed at four reform areas:
To reverse the pervasive dumbing-down of academic standards and assessments by states, Race to the Top winners need to work toward adopting common, internationally bench marked K-12 standards that prepare students for success in college and careers.
To close the data gap -- which now handcuffs districts from tracking growth in student learning and improving classroom instruction -- states will need to monitor advances in student achievement and identify effective instructional practices.
To boost the quality of teachers and principals, especially in high-poverty schools and hard-to-staff subjects, states and districts should be able to identify effective teachers and principals -- and have strategies for rewarding and retaining more top-notch teachers and improving or replacing ones who aren't up to the job.
Finally, to turn around the lowest-performing schools, states and districts must be ready to institute far-reaching reforms, from replacing staff and leadership to changing the school culture
There is one issue standing in the way for Wisconsin: a state law that prevents standardized test results from being used to evaluate teachers, which makes WI ineligible for "Race to the Top" funds. A bill in the legislature aims to repeal that law.
Q Secretary Duncan, can you articulate why it's important to link student achievement data with teacher performance, and also why it's important to lift these caps on the charter schools?
SECRETARY DUNCAN: I'll take one at a time. On the first one -- it's amazing, I always use the California example because California is a big state -- California has 300,000 teachers -- 300,000 teachers. The top 10 percent, the top 30,000 teachers in California, would be world-class, would be among the best teachers in the world. The bottom 10 percent in California, the bottom 30,000, probably need to find another line of work, another profession. And nobody can tell you of those 300,000 teachers who's in what category. There's no recognition.
And so what I fundamentally believe is that great teaching matters and we need to be able to identify those teachers who routinely are making an extraordinary difference in students' lives. And to say that teaching has no impact on student performance, on student achievement, just absolutely makes no sense to me. It absolutely degrades the profession.
So the counterargument -- so right now as a country basically zero percent of student achievement relates to teacher evaluation. I think that's a problem. I also think 100 percent -- if all you do is look at a test score to evaluate a teacher, I think that's a problem. So zero is a problem; 100 is a problem. As a country, we're here, we're trying to move to a middle point where you would evaluate teachers on multiple measures -- that's really important -- not just on a single test score, but, yes, student achievement would be a part of what you look at in evaluating a teacher.
And so whether it's an individual teacher, whether it's a school, whether it's a school district, whether it's a state, the whole thing as a country we need to do is we need to accelerate the rate of change. We have to get better faster. And there are teachers every single year -- just to give you an illustration -- there are teachers every single year where the average child in their class is gaining two years of growth -- two years of growth per year of instruction. That is herculean work. Those teachers are the unsung heroes in our society. And nobody can tell you who those teachers are.
There are some schools that do that, not just one miraculous teacher or one miraculous student. There are schools that year after year produce students that are showing extraordinary gains. Shouldn't we know that? Isn't that something valuable? Shouldn't we be learning from them?
And the flip side of it, if you have teachers or schools where students are falling further and further behind each year, I think we need to know that as well. And so we just want to have an open, honest conversation, but at the end of the day, teachers should never be evaluated on a single test score. I want to be absolutely clear there should always be multiple measures. But student achievement has to be a piece of what teachers are evaluated on.
And there's a recent study that came out, The New Teacher Project, that talked about this Widget Effect where 99 percent of teachers were rated as superior. It's not reality.
On your second point, on charter caps, I've been really clear I'm not a fan of charter schools, I'm a fan of good charter schools. And what we need in this country is just more good schools. We need more good elementary, more good middle, more good high schools. No second grader knows whether they're going to a charter school, or a gifted school, or traditional school, or magnet school. They know, does my teacher care about me? Am I safe? Is there high expectations? Does the principal know who I am?
We need more good schools. And where you have -- where you have good charters, we need to replicate them and to learn from them and to grow. Where you have bad charters, we need to close them down and hold them accountable. And so this is not let a thousand flowers bloom, this is trying to take what is being successful and grow.
And what I would say is if something is working, if you reduce -- we talked about the graduation rate, if you're doing something to reduce the dropout rate and increase the graduation rate, would you put a cap on that strategy? Would you ever say that we're going to cap the number of students who can take AP classes this year? We're going to limit the number of kids who take -- we're going to limit the number of kids that graduate? We would never do that.
So if something is working, if that innovation is helping us get better, why would you put an artificial cap on it? So let's let that innovation flourish, but at the same time actually have a high bar and hold folks accountable.
So I was a big fan of successful charter schools in Chicago when I was a superintendent there, but I also closed three charter schools for academic failure. And you need both. Good charters are a big piece of the answer. Bad charters perpetuate the status quo and we need to challenge that.
Despite an ailing economy, Madison School Board members were guardedly optimistic last spring as they put together the district's preliminary 2009-2010 budget. The community had overwhelmingly passed a referendum the previous fall that allowed the district to exceed state revenue caps, providing an extra $13 million to the district through 2012.
As a result, the board was anticipating a rare year where public school programs and services were not on the chopping block and was looking forward to crafting a budget with minimal property tax increases. Initial projections worked out to a $2.50 increase on an average $250,000 Madison home on this year's tax bill.
For once, it looked as if both parents and taxpayers would be happy with the budget, a rare scenario in Wisconsin where school spending formulas and revenue caps often seem tailor-made to pit taxpayers against school advocates.
But the preliminary budget plan the Madison district drew up and approved in May predated the news that Wisconsin's revenue situation was far worse than predicted. The result was a steep reduction in what the state's 438 school districts would get from Wisconsin's general school aid fund. The drop in general school aid amounted to $149 million, or 3 percent.
These cuts, however, would not be shared equally across every district, and the formula used was particularly unkind to Madison, which overnight saw a gaping hole of more than $9 million, a drop in aid not seen by any other district in the state.
"We were so happy last spring. In retrospect, it was really kind of pitiful," says Lucy Mathiak, vice president of Madison's School Board. The mood was decidedly more downbeat, she notes, in late October when the board gave its final approval to the $350 million 2009-2010 school district budget.
I'm glad Susan mentioned the District's total spending. While such budget changes are difficult, many public and private organizations are facing revenue challenges. The Madison School District has long spent more per student than most Districts in Wisconsin and has enjoyed annual revenue growth of around 5.25% over the past 20+ years - despite state imposed "revenue caps" and flat enrollment.
Some can argue that more should be spent. In my view, the District MUST complete the oft discussed program review as soon as possible and determine how effective its expenditures are. Board Vice President Lucy Mathiak again raised the issue of evaluating math curriculum effectiveness via University of Wisconsin System entrance exam results and college placement. This request has fallen on deaf ears within the MMSD Administration for some time. [Madison School Board Math Discussion 40MB mp3 audio (Documents and links).] I very much appreciate Lucy's comments. The District's extensive use of Reading Recovery should also be evaluated in terms of effectiveness and student skills. The District should be planning for a tighter budget climate in this, the Great Recession.
Finally, I found Marj Passman's comments in the article interesting:
"I understand that the economy is terrible, but for years we heard that the reason we had this school funding mess was because we had Republicans in charge who were basically content with the status quo," says board member Marj Passman. "I had expected so much change and leadership on school funding issues with a Democratic governor and a Democratic Legislature. Honestly, we've got Rep. Pocan and Sen. Miller as co-chairs of the Joint Finance Committee and Democratic majorities in both houses! Frankly, it's been a huge disappointment. I'd love to see that little beer tax raised and have it go to education."
In my view, we're much better off with "divided" government. The current Governor and legislative majority's budget included a poor change to the arbitration rules between school districts and teacher unions:
To make matters more dire, the long-term legislative proposal specifically exempts school district arbitrations from the requirement that arbitrators consider and give the greatest weight to revenue limits and local economic conditions. While arbitrators would continue to give these two factors paramount consideration when deciding cases for all other local governments, the importance of fiscal limits and local economic conditions would be specifically diminished for school district arbitration.
State officials changed the way the TDEC "value added" and "achievement" report card scores were calculated this year.
"Because we have been on an aggressive path to improvement with the Tennessee Diploma Project," Education Commissioner Timothy Webb said, "it was necessary to utilize this transition year to change our calculation methods and more accurately demonstrate student progress in an effort to pursue higher standards."
Officials changed the baseline year used to compare student scores and achievement, and they've implemented a new grading scale that could see previously high A marks lowered to the B or C level, according to a TDEC release.
Referring to the scoring changes, Knox County Schools spokesperson Melissa Copelan, in a news release, said, "This makes comparison of the 2009 Report Card data with previous years' scores not possible or valid."
Arne Duncan is the latest in a splendid crop of U.S. education secretaries over the last few decades. The ones I have known best include, in alphabetical order: Bill Bennett, Rod Paige, Dick Riley and Margaret Spellings--all fine people who care about kids and understand the issues. But I wish all of them had not spent valuable time trying to deal with the painfully slow pace and often politically-addled reasoning of national education policy. Their best work for kids, in my view, happened when they were NOT education secretary. So let's abolish the office and get that talent back where it belongs, where school change really happens, in our states and cities.
Secretary Duncan is going to reject this idea immediately, and I know why. He took the job because his friend the president needed him. Both are from Chicago, and know how much that city has struggled to improve its schools. The president, I suspect, thought that Duncan, the former chief of the Chicago public schools, could use all he had learned there to raise achievement for students across the country.
It sounds great, but it was the same thought that led previous presidents to appoint those previous fine education secretaries to their posts. How much good did that do? Test scores for elementary and middle school students have come up a bit in the last couple of decades, but not enough to get excited about. High school scores are still flat. If national education policy had made a big jump forward, I would say we should continue to fill this job, but that hasn't happened either. I think the No Child Left Behind law, supported by both parties, was an improvement over previous federal policies, but it was only copying what several states had already done to make schools accountable and identify schools that needed extra help.
Duncan will never admit this, but I am betting that soon he will realize, if he hasn't already, that he had the potential to do much more for students when he was running the Chicago schools. He was able to make vital decisions like appointing principals, rather than push papers and give speeches in his new Washington gig.
Opponents of school choice are running out of excuses as evidence continues to roll in about the positive impact of charter schools.
Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby recently found that poor urban children who attend a charter school from kindergarten through 8th grade can close the learning gap with affluent suburban kids by 86% in reading and 66% in math. And now Marcus Winters, who follows education for the Manhattan Institute, has released a paper showing that even students who don't attend a charter school benefit academically when their public school is exposed to charter competition.
Mr. Winters focuses on New York City public school students in grades 3 through 8. "For every one percent of a public school's students who leave for a charter," concludes Mr. Winters, "reading proficiency among those who remain increases by about 0.02 standard deviations, a small but not insignificant number, in view of the widely held suspicion that the impact on local public schools . . . would be negative." It tuns out that traditional public schools respond to competition in a way that benefits their students.
Bennett says instead of assuming people will pick teaching careers and stay for life, schools could consider front-loading pay for beginning teachers to lure more people in, while also instituting closer evaluations for those rookie teachers to make sure they're qualified.
The Professional Standards Board is scheduled to discuss Bennett's call to license teachers based on non-school experience at its November 18 meeting. Bennett says he expects the board to make some changes to the details of the plan, but says he hopes for final approval before year's end.
You could lure new talent with competitive pay and support. Give teachers the power to evaluate each other's work. Reward those who perform, and fire those who don't.
It could spark a seismic change in the nation's schools, or prompt a backlash that alters nothing.
With a little luck, the Hillsborough County Public Schools will soon embark on a seven year, $202 million journey to find out. The district would join a national effort to improve teacher effectiveness, the one factor experts say makes the biggest difference in a student's success or failure.
Officials worry about cost overruns, dissension from teachers and their union, and other glitches which have doomed similar efforts across the nation. But success would create a generation of great teachers, and bolster the district's reputation as a laboratory for educational reform./em>
Teachers, historically, have had to fight for respect in a society that placed a lower premium on teaching. From its origins, teaching has been held as a lowly position held by unskilled clergy and masters (mostly men) who, as long as they could recite the Bible, were equipped. Those that couldn't do, taught. As a matter of fact, not too long ago, before unions fought for higher pay, teaching was the one of the lowest paid professions.
Currently, in Connecticut, along with other states across the country, we have raised the bar, and set the highest standards for our teachers. Susan Engel suggests otherwise. In an article in the New York Times entitled "Teach Your Teachers Well" (11/01/09), she agrees with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's reform that in order to have good schools "we need great teachers." Engel goes onto say that "once we have a better pool of graduate students, we need to train them differently than we did in the past." Engels calls for a more rigorous teacher preparation program with a 3.5 GPA minimum requirement and an "intensive application process."
The implication is that our failing schools are due to dumb teachers teaching the students. As she states: "weaker students are in the less intellectually rigorous programs and the ones training to become teachers."
Before the 19th century, teachers didn't require a license to teach. Today, we have increased standards, dramatically, yet, oddly enough, our students are failing to make the grade. It's hard to believe that we were better off just teaching the Bible.
Wisconsin schools could use student test scores to evaluate teachers, but they still couldn't use the information to discipline or fire them under a bill moving quickly through the Legislature.
Lawmakers must remove a ban on using test scores in evaluations for Wisconsin to compete for about $4.5 billion in Race to the Top stimulus money for education. Race to the Top is intended to improve student achievement, boost the performance of minority students and raise graduation rates.
Republicans and the Wisconsin Association of School Boards say Doyle and Democrats who control the Legislature are still giving teachers too much deference even as they work to qualify the state for the program.
Wisconsin and Nevada are the only states that don't allow test results to be used to evaluate teachers. A similar prohibition in New York expires next year, and California removed its ban earlier this year to compete for the federal stimulus money.
Doyle and Democratic lawmakers are moving quickly to get Wisconsin's ban removed with a vote this week. There is urgency because applications for the Race to the Top money will likely be due in a couple of months and the Legislature ends its session for the year on Thursday.
Doyle supports a proposal that would lift Wisconsin's restriction on tying test scores with teacher evaluations. However, it would keep in place a ban on using the scores to fire, suspend or discipline a teacher.
In the last half of the 19th century, many inventors pursued the dream of building an airplane. Duds and crashes were frequent and skeptics numerous. Only a decade before the Wright brothers' 1903 flight, British physicist and engineer Lord Kelvin had declared that "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." American educators are similarly scrambling to create a teacher evaluation system that will raise the level of instruction and student achievement in the same reliable way that modern jetliners take us home for Thanksgiving. They have not been very successful.
Many smart teachers have concluded the idea is a loser. They are artists, they say, whose work cannot be reduced to numbers for placement, pay and promotion.
Still, many people are trying to be teacher assessment's answer to Wilbur and Orville Wright. Take, for instance, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and a team of educators led by Jason Kamras, the 2005 national teacher of the year. You can find their IMPACT plan, the result of input from more than 500 D.C. educators, by clicking on the "Teaching and Learning" tab|http://dcps.dc.gov.
Will it crash and burn? Many think so. George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers' Union, said "it takes the art of teaching and turns it into bean counting."
I have been sending the plan to experts around the country, however, and they are more optimistic than I expected.
ARNE DUNCAN, the secretary of education, recently called for sweeping changes to the way we select and train teachers. He's right. If we really want good schools, we need to create a critical mass of great teachers. And if we want smart, passionate people to become these great educators, we have to attract them with excellent programs and train them properly in the substance and practice of teaching.
Our best universities have, paradoxically, typically looked down their noses at education, as if it were intellectually inferior. The result is that the strongest students are often in colleges that have no interest in education, while the most inspiring professors aren't working with students who want to teach. This means that comparatively weaker students in less intellectually rigorous programs are the ones preparing to become teachers.
So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray. If education was a good enough topic for Plato, John Dewey and William James, it should be good enough for 21st-century college professors.
These new teacher programs should be selective, requiring a 3.5 undergraduate grade point average and an intensive application process. But they should also be free of charge, and admission should include a stipend for the first three years of teaching in a public school.
Once we have a better pool of graduate students, we need to train them differently from how we have in the past. Too often, teaching students spend their time studying specific instructional programs and learning how to handle mechanics like making lesson plans. These skills, while useful, are not what will transform a promising student into a good teacher.
Barb Williams is a teacher at Madison's Hamilton Middle School.
Madison School Board Members on President Obama and Education Secretary Duncan's 11/4/2009 Wright Middle School Visit
The elected Madison School Board will be present at Wednesday's visit and rightfully so. There will be plenty of other politicians, but these people truly deserve a bit of time in the spotlight.
Love them or loath them, we should all be thankful for the time and effort our board members devote to that most important public expenditure: public schools. It is truly an essential but thankless job. I believe boardmembers are paid $4,000 annually.
I emailed our board and asked for a quote prior to the President's arrival. Four responded thus far:
"How exciting for our students at Wright. To meet the president of the United States is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I hope his visit awakens the civic responsibility in all who attend".
We're honored by the President's visit. I'm pleased that the visit will shine a positive light on the great work the Principal Nancy Evans and her staff have been doing at Wright, and that we're able to provide Wright students with a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
If the President is able to find the time to visit one of our Madison schools, I hope that any Madison parents who have questions about what's best for their kids will similarly make the effort to visit their neighborhood schools and see for themselves what we have to offer.
The President's visit to a Madison school is an honor for our entire community. Nancy Evans, her staff, students, and the Wright Middle School families deserve to be recognized for their success in creating and maintaining a school community worthy of the President's attention. This is an experience that none of us will forget, and we should be extremely proud that we have been chosen to host a presidential speech on education.
President Obama and I may not always agree about what is best for education
but I am very grateful that he has returned the importance of education to
center stage. It is an honor to have been invited to meet him.
It will be interesting to observe the Board when and if President Obama discusses mayoral control of schools in Milwaukee, as Alexander Russo muses.
Former Portland Superintendent Vicki Phillips, now director of education for the Gates Foundation, didn't break any news in her speech to big city school board members and superintendents in Portland last week.
Instead, she reinterated what she and others already have said about Gates' version 2.0 of fixing American high schools: Essentially, it's all about the teacher.
The Gates Foundation first tried to improve students' readiness for college and decrease the dropout rate by getting high schools to morph into smaller, more personalized academies. It poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort, but ultimately, it didn't work.
Gates and Phillips now openly admit: School structure is not the key. (Parents and educators in Portland Public School make use that same line about Phillips' main, and unfinished, initiative while in PPS: creating K-8 schools in place of middle schools.)
So, the foundation now plans to pour at least half a billion dollars into a teacher quality initiative.
It will sponsor rigorous research to help determine which qualities or skills that a teacher exhibits translate into the greatest gains in student learning, so that school districts can identify, recruit and retain the best performers. And it will award millions to several pioneering urban districts that agree to hire, place, train and pay teachers differently, with much more weight given to helping ensure that students get highly effective teachers, particularly students in greatest academic need.
When Kathy Patterson learned about Thursday's D.C. Council hearing, during which Chairman Vincent C. Gray and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee pelted each other with accusations of law-breaking and secret meetings, she had one immediate reaction.
"Here we go again," said Patterson, a former council member and chairwoman of its education committee. It looked as if another attempt at public school reform was disintegrating in a hail of recriminations and rhetoric, with Rhee destined to join Franklin L. Smith, Lt. Gen. Julius Becton, Arlene Ackerman, Paul L. Vance and Clifford B. Janey, the school leaders who preceded her in the past two decades.
It was supposed to be different this time. The 2007 legislation that disbanded the old D.C. Board of Education and gave control of the school system to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) was designed to minimize the push-and-pull of ward politics, making a single executive accountable. But Thursday's hearing vividly illustrated that no legislation can completely account for the mix of personalities who come together to execute it.
In a new report contrasting proficiency scores on state exams to federal tests, Georgia comes across as a very easy grader.
"States are setting the bar too low," said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in response to the release Thursday of the study "Mapping State Proficiency Standards onto NAEP Scales: 2005-2007."
The federal study compares proficiency standards of states using the results of the National Assessment of Education Progress -- often called the Nation's Report Card -- as the common yardstick.
A national test given to select students in every state, NAEP is the only nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas.
Because students across the nation take the same NAEP assessment, state-to-state comparisons can be made.
When Kathy Patterson learned about Thursday's D.C. Council hearing, during which Chairman Vincent C. Gray and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee pelted each other with accusations of law-breaking and secret meetings, she had one immediate reaction.
"Here we go again," said Patterson, a former council member and chairwoman of its education committee. It looked as if another attempt at public school reform was disintegrating in a hail of recriminations and rhetoric, with Rhee destined to join Franklin L. Smith, Lt. Gen. Julius Becton, Arlene Ackerman, Paul L. Vance and Clifford B. Janey, the school leaders who preceded her in the past two decades.
It was supposed to be different this time. The 2007 legislation that disbanded the old D.C. Board of Education and gave control of the school system to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) was designed to minimize the push-and-pull of ward politics, making a single executive accountable. But Thursday's hearing vividly illustrated that no legislation can completely account for the mix of personalities who come together to execute it.
The state has plenty of money and resources. What we've been lacking is a real-world discussion about how we distribute them.
California is rich. Even in the midst of a drought, we have lots of water, and in the midst of a recession, we have lots of money. The problem is one of distribution, not of actual scarcity.
This is the usual problem of the United States, which is not just the richest and most powerful nation on Earth now, but on Earth ever, and one of the most blessed in terms of natural resources. We just collectively make loopy decisions about how to distribute the money and water, and we could make other decisions. Whether or not those priorities will change, we could at least have a reality-based conversation about them.
Take water. My friend Derek Hitchcock, a biologist working to restore the Yuba River, likes to say that California is still a place of abundance. He recently showed me a Pacific Institute report and other documents to bolster his point. They show that about 80% of the state's water goes to agriculture, not to people, and half of that goes to four crops -- cotton, rice, alfalfa and pasturage (irrigated grazing land) -- that produce less than 1% of the state's wealth. Forty percent of the state's water. Less than 1% of its income. Meanwhile, we Californians are told the drought means that ordinary households should cut back -- and probably most should -- but the lion's share of water never went to us in the first place, and we should know it.
Wisconsin schools could use student test scores to evaluate teachers, but they still couldn't use the information to discipline or fire them under a bill moving quickly through the Legislature.
Lawmakers must remove a ban on using test scores in evaluations for Wisconsin to compete for about $4.5 billion in Race to the Top stimulus money for education. Race to the Top is intended to improve student achievement, boost the performance of minority students and raise graduation rates.
Republicans and the Wisconsin Association of School Boards say Doyle and Democrats who control the Legislature are still giving teachers too much deference even as they work to qualify the state for the program.
Wisconsin and Nevada are the only states that don't allow test results to be used to evaluate teachers. A similar prohibition in New York expires next year, and California removed its ban earlier this year to compete for the federal stimulus money.
Doyle and Democratic lawmakers are moving quickly to get Wisconsin's ban removed with a vote this week. There is urgency because applications for the Race to the Top money will likely be due in a couple of months and the Legislature ends its session for the year on Thursday.
Doyle supports a proposal that would lift Wisconsin's restriction on tying test scores with teacher evaluations. However, it would keep in place a ban on using the scores to fire, suspend or discipline a teacher.
A suggestion for a follow-up piece would be not only who Picks the School Board, but also to examine how do candidates get on the ballot. For example in Connecticut, School Board candidates come through the local political ranks yet we always hear, "politics don't belong on the Board of Education".
Then there is another issue of strategically running just enough candidates and thereby severely limiting voter choice. In my town for example there are six BOE candidates and five seats to be filled; that is an 83% chance of winning a BOE seat based on shear numbers and no other factor --- is that an election? Voters are not even provided the opportunity to vote a poor performing member off the board under this archaic method. FYI, running just enough candidates is a very well thought out strategy by the local political parties to avoid cannibalizing votes with more candidates to ultimately win Board control which is the end game; but remember, politics don't belong a the BOE.
There will be a legislative bill re-introduced for a second time in February allowing Connecticut towns to have non-partison BOE elections, if they so choose. FYI, approximately 90% of all BOE's nationally are non-partisan and all candidates run as petition candidates.
According to a new national report, South Carolina student achievement standards are among the highest in the nation.
The report said many states declare students to have achieved grade-level mastery of reading and math when the children have not, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the U.S. Department of Education. [Complete Report 3MB PDF.]
The agency compared state achievement standards to the standards behind the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The report, which was released Thursday, said many states deemed children to be proficient or on grade level based on state standards when those students would rate "below basic," meaning lacking even partial mastery, in reading and math under the NAEP standards.
State standards vary significantly from state to state, according to the report. But South Carolina standards measured among the highest.
In 15 states the standards a student had to meet to score proficient on state reading tests for eighth-graders were not as high as the standards to score basic on NAEP, according to the report. But South Carolina standards for eighth-grade reading were the highest in the nation.
A good teacher equals a good school year. Not always, but far more often than not. Ask any parents of an elementary-grade child how the school year is going, and it won't be long before you'll hear them rave about - or bemoan - the teacher their child has been assigned to. There are teachers who are duds, who can find a way to drain the fun out of a unit on dinosaurs for second-graders. And there those with a gift for reaching the eighth-grader slouched in the back of the classroom with a penchant for eye rolling. These teachers can bring to life to Poe's fascination with the dead, or deliver just the right contemporary analogy to make sense of the War of 1812.
Nearly everyone can probably recall a teacher who lit their passion for poetry or who was able to help them connect all the dots in a seemingly incomprehensible algebra formula. We know that individual teachers can make a huge difference.
But public schools in America have been bent on ignoring the obvious: Almost nothing about the way we hire, evaluate, pay, or assign teachers to classrooms is designed to operate with that goal in mind. Most teachers receive only cursory performance evaluations, with virtually every teacher graded highly. We use a one-size-for-all salary structure, in which the only factors used in raises are teachers' higher-education credentials and number of years in the system, neither of which is strongly linked to their effectiveness. And we often let seniority, rather than merit, drive decisions about where a teacher is placed. It is in many ways an industrial model that treats teachers as identical, interchangeable parts, when we know that they are not.
Notes and Links: President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan Visit Madison's Wright Middle School (one of two Charter Schools in Madison).
Background
President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan will visit Madison's Wright Middle School Wednesday, November 4, 2009, purportedly to give an education speech. The visit may also be related to the 2010 Wisconsin Governor's race. The Democrat party currently (as of 11/1/2009) has no major announced candidate. Wednesday's event may include a formal candidacy announcement by Milwaukee Mayor, and former gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett. UPDATE: Alexander Russo writes that the visit is indeed about Barrett and possible legislation to give the Milwaukee Mayor control of the schools.
I'm certain that a number of local politicians will not miss the opportunity to be seen with the President. Retiring Democrat Governor Jim Doyle, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers, Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk (Falk has run for Governor and Attorney General in the past) and Madison School Superintendent Dan Nerad are likely to be part of the event. Senator Russ Feingold's seat is on the fall, 2010 ballot so I would not be surprised to see him at Wright Middle School as well.
"Nuestro Mundo, Inc. is a non-profit organization that was established in response to the commitment of its founders to provide educational, cultural and social opportunities for Madison's ever-expanding Latino community." The dual immersion school lives because the community and several School Board members overcame District Administration opposition. Former Madison School Board member Ruth Robarts commented in 2005:
The Madison Board of Education rarely rejects the recommendations of Superintendent Rainwater. I recall only two times that we have explicitly rejected his views. One was the vote to authorize Nuestro Mundo Community School as a charter school. The other was when we gave the go-ahead for a new Wexford Ridge Community Center on the campus of Memorial High School.
Here's how things happen when the superintendent opposes the Board's proposed action.
Those interested in a quick look at the state of Madison's public schools should review Superintendent Dan Nerad's proposed District performance measures. This document presents a wide variety of metrics on the District's current performance, from advanced course "participation" to the percentage of students earning a "C" in all courses and suspension rates, among others.
Education Hot Topics
Finally, I hope President Obama mentions a number of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's recent hot topics, including:
Denver is to reform in the way teachers are paid what Milwaukee is to private school vouchers: It's the place that's broken a lot of new ground and been a magnet for national attention.
With the likelihood that the Wisconsin Legislature will take important steps in the next few weeks that will substantially increase the prospects for changing the classic system for teacher salaries, here's some advice for Wisconsin from Brad Jupp, a central architect of the Denver system:
"The most important thing to do is not to be so cautious that you don't move forward," Jupp said. "Breaking the barrier doesn't kill you."
Nationwide for almost a century, salaries of teachers have been set almost entirely by how many years a person has taught and whether the person has a master's degree or certain amounts of college credits beyond a bachelor's degree. Research has pretty firmly established that there is little, if any, correlation between teaching quality and those traditional measurements.
The political appeal of changing the way teachers are paid is huge now. The idea of paying good teachers more than bad teachers or using pay as an incentive to improve educational results has become popular across the political spectrum. President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit Madison this week to speak on education, and you can bet he will hit on this point.
American schools have struggled for decades to close what's called the 'minority achievement gap' -- the lower average test scores, grades and college attendance rates among black and Latino students.
Typically, schools place children who are falling behind in remedial classes, to help them catch up. But some schools are finding that grouping students by ability, also known as tracking or leveling, causes more problems than it solves.
Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J., is a well-funded school that is roughly 60 percent black and 40 percent white. The kids mix easily and are friendly with one another. But when the bell rings, students go their separate ways.
Teacher Noel Cooperberg's repeat algebra class last year consisted of all minority kids who had flunked the previous year. There were only about a dozen students because the school keeps lower-level classes small to try to boost success. But a group of girls sitting in the middle never so much as picked up a pencil, and they often disrupted the class. It was a different scene from Cooperberg's honors-level pre-calculus class, which had three times as many students -- most of them white.
These two classes are pretty typical for the school. Lower-level classes -- called levels two and three -- are overwhelmingly black, while higher-level four and five are mostly white. Students are assigned to these levels by a combination of grades, test scores and teacher recommendations.
Kennedy worked closely with President Bush on the flawed and deeply unpopular No Child Left Behind Act. Like a packaged-goods company with a tainted product, the Obama administration has left that name behind and now calls its program the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, LBJ's original title in 1965. But the accountability-and-standards movement Kennedy and Bush launched is essential, and Obama has moved much faster than expected to advance it. He and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are showing some Chicago muscle and giving states a "choice" right out of The Untouchables: lift your caps on the number of innovative charter schools allowed and your prohibitions on holding teachers accountable for whether kids learn--or lose a chance for some of Obama's $5 billion "Race to the Top" money. Massachusetts recently lifted its charter cap and nearly a dozen other states are scampering to comply. Now that's hardball we can believe in.
This issue cleaves the Democratic Party. On one side are Obama and the reformers, who point out that we now have a good idea of what works: KIPP and other "no excuses" charter models boast 80 percent graduation rates in America's roughest neighborhoods, nearly twice the norm. On the other side are the teachers' unions and their incrementalist enablers in the political class. They talk a good game about education but make up phony excuses for opposing real reform and accountability.
Providing four year old kindergarten (4K) may be the district's next best tool to continue the trend of improving academic achievement for all students and continuing to close the achievement gap.
The quality of care and education that children receive in the early years of their lives is one of the most critical factors in their development. Empirical and anecdotal evidence clearly shows that nurturing environments with appropriate challenging activities have large and lasting effects on our children's school success, ability to get along with others, and emotional health. Such evidence also indicates that inadequate early childhood care and education increases the danger that at-risk children will grow up with problem behaviors that can lead to later crime and violence.
Background/Charge On February 9, 2009, the Board of Education asked the Superintendent to reconvene staff, and community members to begin planning for a collaborative 4K program in the Madison Metropolitan School District. The committee was directed to develop recommendations and timelines to present to the BOE.
Process Membership is attached and was generated by the AFSCME Child Care Representatives with membership growing as the months proceeded. Kathy Hubbard began facilitation and Jim Moeser is currently facilitating the committee work. Throughout the months of meeting, membership and attendance has been constantly high with energy and enthusiasm the same. The matrix presented in this packet includes a brief overview of the five committees below.
Perhaps the District might implement these initiatives first - and evaluate their effectiveness prior to expanding the organization (and budget) for 4K.
In a surprise move, Gov. Paterson said yesterday he doesn't plan to push for changes to state laws that experts have warned could jeopardize New York's chances of raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal education aid.
Federal officials have highlighted two state laws in particular -- one limiting the number of charter schools to 200 and another prohibiting the use of student test scores in determining whether a teacher deserves tenure -- as potential barriers to the state's bid for a share of the $4.3 billion competitive pot, known as Race to the Top.
While legislation was introduced last week to enhance New York's standing by scrapping those laws, a spokeswoman for Paterson -- who has supported charter schools in the past -- said the governor would not be among its boosters.
"At this time, we believe New York state is eligible for Race to the Top funds and that legislative changes are currently not needed," said the spokeswoman, Marissa Shorenstein.
Attached to this memo are several items related to enrollments, both actual and projections, as well as school capacities. We also include data on the enrollment data for students on the basis of their residence. Additional enrollment data will be provided in summary for the Board of Education at the December meeting.
The first attachment is a one-page overview summary of the past five years of enrollment history, the current year enrollment, and five years of projected enrollment by grade level. Overall, enrollment is generally flat for the district as a whole. However, the projections begin to show a slight increase starting in 2012-13 into 2014-15 at which time we will have increased enrollment to its highest level over the past ten years. By level, elementary and middle schools will continue to see increases in enrollment during the next five years whereas high schools will decline in enrollment.
The second attachment shows the detailed K-12 enrollment history and projections for each school. Historical data go back to the 1989-90 school year. Projections are through 2014-15. Projection years are boldfaced. The precision of projections at a school level and for specific grade levels within a school are less accurate when compared to the district as a whole. Furthermore, projections are much less reliable for later years in the projection timeline. Also, the worksheet reflects various program and boundary changes that were implemented and this accounts for some large shifts within schools and programs from one year to the next.
The third attachment contains two sheets - one for elementary and one for middle and high combined - and details the maximum capacities for each school, the current enrollment and capacity percentage, and the projected 2014-15 enrollment and capacity percentage. The sheets are organized by attendance area. Summaries are provided for levels. From the data, it appears elementary schools that have long term capacity constraints include Gompers,.Lake View, Sandburg, Allis/Nuestro Mundo, Kennedy, Orchard Ridge, and Van Hise. However, the schools that share a building with a middle school have access to other space. Among middle schools, Jefferson Middle School is the only school that may experience capacity concerns. None of the high schools are expected to have capacity issues for the foreseeable future.
The initial program in biomedicine would include courses in the principles of biomedical sciences; human body systems; medical interventions; and science research. The classes likely would be taught by high school teachers, but would incorporate business and academic experts to help teach, offer apprenticeships and career placement.
The academy's location won't be decided until leaders know how many students are interested in the program. However, one possibility is holding classes at MATC's West campus in the former Famous Footwear building, Reis said.
Students - organizers hope about 150 - would travel from their respective high schools to Madison's Far West Side every day for the courses, which would be part of the academy's two-year programs. Depending on the interest in the biomedical class, three sections would be taught during the day and possibly one in the evening, Reis said.
Offering a night class would maximize the use of the facility and offer some flexibility to students who live farther outside of Madison, he said.
Verona, Middleton Cross-Plains, Belleville, McFarland, Mount Horeb, Oregon, Wisconsin Heights and Madison school districts have agreed to participate in the academy.
D.C. SCHOOLS Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee stands accused, it seems, of trying to manage her budget in a way that will do the least harm to students. Not a crime, you might think -- unless, like Ms. Rhee's accusers on the D.C. Council, you are more interested in scoring political points than in hearing what she is doing for children.
Ms. Rhee was called before the council Thursday to explain the layoffs of 388 employees, including 266 teachers and other educators. She provided convincing evidence of the budget pressures leading to this month's reduction in force. She offered solid reasons for the hiring of some 900 teachers last spring and summer, and held out an olive branch to the council -- saying she never intended to blame it for the layoffs. She made clear that her goal was to save summer school as an option for as many children as possible.
This, by the way, was no secret; we referred to Ms. Rhee's efforts to save summer school on these pages Sept. 23. It might help, in fact, if council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) got on the phone when Ms. Rhee called. It's also clear, in the opinion of budget experts we consulted, that Ms. Rhee has the authority to cut now, with plans to restore summer school, as long as she submits a reprogramming later. So exclamations of surprise at her plans and accusations of law-breaking have little credibility.
Discussing these data is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, use of the WKCE does not instill much confidence, from my perspective. via "Some States Drop Testing Bar" by John Hechinger.
Because during contract negotiations in Stamford, Connecticut, someone might notice that the average teacher salary is about $80,000.
Because in Brevard County, Florida, someone might notice that more than $5 million designated for the employee health care trust fund was spent on an 8.5 percent teacher pay raise.
Because in Hawaii, someone might wonder if getting rid of school on Fridays is really that great of an idea.
Because in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, someone might suggest that the union is filing multiple grievances to get negotiating leverage.
Because across America, someone might actually get to read the New Haven teacher contract before deciding how reformy it is. In the meantime, you can see that the New Haven Federation of Teachers didn’t emphasize the same areas as Randi Weingarten, Arne Duncan and the New York Times when discussing the contract internally.
A new federal study shows that nearly a third of the states lowered their academic proficiency standards in recent years, a step that helps schools stay ahead of sanctions under the No Child Left Behind law. But lowering standards also confuses parents about how children's achievement compares with those in other states and countries.
The study, released Thursday, was the first by the federal Department of Education's research arm to use a statistical comparison between federal and state tests to analyze whether states had changed their testing standards.
It found that 15 states lowered their proficiency standards in fourth- or eighth-grade reading or math from 2005 to 2007. Three states, Maine, Oklahoma and Wyoming, lowered standards in both subjects at both grade levels, the study said.
Eight states increased the rigor of their standards in one or both subjects and grades. Some states raised standards in one subject but lowered them in another, including New York, which raised the rigor of its fourth-grade-math standard but lowered the standard in eighth-grade reading, the study said.
President Obama's November 4, 2009 Madison Destination: Wright Middle School?
President Obama's "education" speech, due to be delivered in Madison on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 may, perhaps be given at Wright Middle School. It is a (rare) charter school located in Madison. Obama and Education Secretary (and former Chicago Superintendent) have been promoting structural change within our public schools. Wright, a Charter School, was birthed via a "Madison Middle School 2000" initiative along with the desire to place a new middle school on Madison's south side. Local biotech behemoth Promega offered land for the school in Fitchburg, which the District turned down (that land and initiative became Eagle School).
Eleven-year-old Clayton Lundstrom couldn't wait for sixth grade, the year he'd get to spend three days hiking, identifying plants and singing songs around a bonfire in the Cascade Mountains with his classmates. The trip to the Cispus Learning Center has been a rite of passage for sixth-graders in his Washington state district for almost 20 years.
But earlier this year, the Tumwater School District yanked funding for it, and unless the Parent Teacher Association can raise enough money, Clayton's class will stay home. "I've been waiting to go to Cispus basically since first grade," Clayton says.
As schools across the country face massive budget cuts and parents face their own financial shortfalls, field trips are getting canceled in droves. More than one in six schools plans to eliminate trips this year, according to a survey by the American Association of School Administrators. That's up from 9% last year. By next school year, one in four schools will need to cut field trips, according to the survey.
Even when trips aren't canceled, there often are downgrades. After budget cuts in Eau Claire, Wisc., the Northstar Middle School couldn't pay for the eighth-grade trip to Minneapolis to see a performance of "A Christmas Carol" at the landmark Guthrie Theater, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. Instead, the students will go to the local movie theater to see the Disney 3-D movie version of the Charles Dickens classic.
AND what was the Minotaur? The ten-year-olds scribble their answer onto tiny whiteboards and hold them up for the teacher to see. Once each has got a nod, they repeat together: "half-man, half-bull."
By the time these fifth-graders at the BASIS school in Scottsdale, Arizona, reach 8th grade they will have the option of taking Advanced Placement (AP) exams, standardised nationally to test high-school students at college level. By the 9th grade, they must do so. As a result, says Michael Block, the school's co-founder, our students are "two years ahead of Arizona and California schools and one year ahead of the east coast."
But that, he emphasises, is not the yardstick he and his wife Olga use. Instead, their two BASIS schools, one in Tucson and this one in suburban Phoenix, explicitly compete with the best schools in the world--South Korea's in maths, say, or Finland's in classics.
They had the idea after Olga Block came to Arizona from her native Czech Republic, looked for a school for her daughter and was horrified by the mediocrity and low expectations at American public schools. So they decided to "establish a world-standard school in the desert," says Mr Block. They started the Tucson campus in 1998 and added the Scottsdale one recently.
Education reformers are intensifying their push to bring charter schools to West Virginia as parents, teachers and lawmakers ready themselves for another round of legislative battles aimed at improving the state's school system.
Charter schools advocates are stepping up their lobbying efforts by running advertisements and polling West Virginians on their thoughts about charters, which are private-style public schools. The state's powerful teachers unions helped kill a charter school proposal earlier this year.
"We hope to change that conversation a bit," said Tim McClung, a member of the group that calls itself West Virginians for Education Reform
To help do that, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools started polling state residents Wednesday night to gauge their reaction to charter schools, McClung said.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan presided over the closing of dozens of failing schools when he was chief executive of the Chicago public schools from 2001 until last December. In his new post, he has drawn on those experiences, putting school turnaround efforts at the center of the nation's education reform agenda.
Now a study by researchers at the University of Chicago concludes that most students in schools that closed in the first five years of Mr. Duncan's tenure in Chicago saw little benefit.
"Most students who transferred out of closing schools re-enrolled in schools that were academically weak," says the report, which was done by the university's Consortium on Chicago School Research.
Furthermore, the disruptions of routines in schools scheduled to be closed appeared to hurt student learning in the months after the closing was announced, the researchers found.
The reading scores of students in schools designated for closing "showed a loss of about six weeks of learning" on standardized tests in the months after the closing announcement, the report said. Math scores declined somewhat less, it said.
Public charter schools'
presence in K-12 schooling continues to grow, according to the latest Top 10 Charter Communities by Market Share report by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. In fact, charters now enroll more than one in five public school students in 14 communities - including major cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and Kansas City.
Demand remains strongest in urban areas - and as a result, charter "market share" is growing rapidly in cities and adjacent suburbs, even while the overall number of students remains a modest portion of nationwide enrollment.
"Charter schools are working at scale in a growing number of American cities," according to Nelson Smith, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. "Chartering is becoming well-established as a key component of the public education delivery system," he added.
Everyone is chattering about this full-page ad the AFT took out in this morning's Washington Post. I work in this space and am quite familiar with all the protagonists and the issues and it took me a minute to make sense of the point of the ad. Maybe I'm stupid or needed more coffee but it was really busy and the punchline is buried in two unchecked boxes on the lower right. So I'm not sure it's going to move the casual observer to action - or even to an opinion. It needs a clearer message but it's probably hard to get that message on paper without giving away the game.
Leaving aside technical deficiencies, clearly the strategy is to appear reasonable everywhere else in order to box in Michelle Rhee in D.C. But there are two problems with that strategy. First, at the elite level people get what's going on (increasingly the press, too) so the whole thing is sort of over before it even started and that plan only works if they can make this stuff real elsewhere and the clock is ticking on that. Meanwhile, even those frustrated with aspects of Rhee's style and tactics are still sympathetic to what she's trying to do and the obstacles to that. Second, and more basically, outside of big reform initiatives with lessons I don't think Michelle Rhee really cares about what's happening elsewhere and she'll hold her ground. She responds to different incentives like the rest of us but peer pressure isn't one of them.
Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist, who has made teacher quality the cornerstone of her three-month-old administration, is raising the score that aspiring teachers must achieve on a basic skills test required for admission to all of the state's teacher training programs.
Currently, Rhode Island's "cut score" ranks among the lowest in the nation, alongside Mississippi and Guam. Gist wants to raise it to the highest.
"Teacher quality is the single most important factor for student success in school," Gist said. "This is a first step in raising our expectations across the board for our educators and our system."
Gist says she intends to transform "the entire career span of a teacher," including who is allowed to train to become a teacher, the rigor of the programs, mentoring of new teachers, support and training for veteran teachers, and the reward of higher pay for high performance.
"We need to look at how we improve at every point along the span," Gist said. "Looking at teacher cut scores before they ever get accepted to a preparation program is a way to safeguard the early gate."
Gist and her staff reviewed other states' cut scores and found Virginia's to be the highest in reading, math and writing. Gist set Rhode Island's score one point higher than Virginia's in each subject, saying she wants to make Rhode Island's education system the envy of the nation.
"I have the utmost confidence that Rhode Island's future teachers are capable of this kind of performance," she said.
Perhaps one day we'll have such actions in Wisconsin...
At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration's approach to education reform: "We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn't work." Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal "Race to the Top" initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored one state reform that has proven to work, as well as the education thinker whose ideas inspired it. The state is Massachusetts, and the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
The "Massachusetts miracle," in which Bay State students' soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature's passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch's legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch's ideas and urge other states to do the same.
Hirsch draws his insights from well outside traditional education scholarship. He started out studying chemistry at Cornell University but, mesmerized by Nabokov's lectures on Russian literature, switched his major to English. Hirsch did his graduate studies at Yale, one of the citadels in the 1950s of the New Criticism, which argued that the intent of an author, the reader's subjective response, and the text's historical background were largely irrelevant to a critical analysis of the text itself. But by the time Hirsch wrote his doctoral dissertation--on Wordsworth--he was already breaking with the New Critics. "I came to see that the text alone is not enough," Hirsch said to me recently at his Charlottesville, Virginia, home. "The unspoken--that is, relevant background knowledge--is absolutely crucial in reading a text." Hirsch's big work of literary theory in his early academic career, Validity in Interpretation, reflected this shift in thinking. After publishing several more well-received scholarly books and articles, he received an endowed professorship and became chairman of the English department at the University of Virginia.
A Study of Elementary and Secondary School State Reporting Systems
Following the No Child Left Behind mandate to improve school quality, there has been a growing trend among state departments of education to establish statewide longitudinal databases of personally identifiable information for all K-12 children within a state in order to track progress and change over time. This trend is accompanied by a movement to create uniform data collection systems so that each state's student data systems are interoperable with one another. This Study examines the privacy concerns implicated by these trends.
The Study reports on the results of a survey of all fifty states and finds that state educational databases across the country ignore key privacy protections for the nation's K-12 children. The Study finds that large amounts of personally identifiable data and sensitive personal information about children are stored by the state departments of education in electronic warehouses or for the states by third party vendors. These data warehouses typically lack adequate privacy protections, such as clear access and use restrictions and data retention policies, are often not compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, and leave K-12 children unprotected from data misuse, improper data release, and data breaches. The Study provides recommendations for best practices and legislative reform to address these privacy problems.
Mayor James Doyle has declared he's in the city's school superintendent search process, a move that is not sitting well with some School Committee members.
Doyle told members of the School Committee in an Oct. 15 letter, "I have decided to organize a search committee that will represent the entire community.
"The purpose of this search committee is to assist and advise the School Committee in the task of securing the best possible candidate to serve as Pawtucket's next superintendent."
Acting School Committee Chairman James Chellel told The Valley Breeze he planned to sit down with Doyle during the early part of this week as he tries to avoid a showdown over whether Doyle's administration or the School Committee has the authority to set up a search committee.
"I want to show that we're working together on this, but I do have reservations about the mayor taking this over," said Chellel.
There's no question that selecting a new superintendent falls under the purview of the School Committee, said Chellel, but the questions of who should set up the parameters of the search to find outgoing Superintendent Hans Dellith's replacement are a little more fuzzy.
"I've asked our legal counsel for an opinion on it," he said.
Gov. Jim Doyle is expressing confidence that key components of a package of education reforms he's proposed will make it through the Legislature this fall.
On Sunday's "UpFront with Mike Gousha" Doyle said a number of the proposals, designed to position the state to capture federal "Race to the Top" funds for educational improvement, will be introduced this week.
"We really are focused on getting the job done," Doyle said.
Doyle held open the possibility of calling a special session if it were needed. The Legislature's fall floor session ends next week. Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker said in an interview with WisPolitics.com last week that a special session may be possible.
The reforms include allowing student test scores to be used in teacher evaluation, increasing the length of school days or the school year and tracking individual student achievement, among other measures.
School districts are trying to find a balance between cuts in state funding and paying the bills, but the state budget crunch is ultimately leading to school districts raising taxes for homeowners.
When the state cut aid to schools, districts got the option of raising property taxes to make up the difference. But while they can raise taxes to make up whatever they're losing in state aid, not all districts are.
The Sun Prairie School District said it has plenty going for it -- a number of new schools in a few years and a new high school coming soon, but that it's not immune to budget woes.
"We've got a reduction in state aid. We've got increasing numbers of students and we have the debt the voters approved three years ago to build the new high school," said Tim Culver, Sun Prairie School District administrator.
Sun Prairie was in a similar situation as many Dane County districts. It could have raised the tax levy there to 14.4 percent, but instead it's raising it to 7.7 percent, which is a $142 increase for the average $200,000 home.
"What we're trying to do is balance out that we want the best education possible for kids, but people have to be willing to pay for the education too," said Culver.
Madison school board leaders are revising a budget plan that lowers their property tax increase but defers millions of dollars in maintenance.
Leaders are looking to lower the previously agreed upon property tax hike by about $50 dollars per homeowner: from $147 on a $250,000 home, to $92.83 on a $250,000 home.
To accomplish that, members took from a few funds, and decided they would not levy the remaining balance on a 2005 maintenance referendum: that equaling out to almost $3 million dollars.
School board members had to compensate for the loss of $12-million dollars in state funding.
The loss of funding for the maintenance referendum didn't come without discussion. Board member Beth Moss hoped to levy just enough to pay for $1.4 million dollars of roof maintenance.
Moss says, "The maintenance doesn't go away... You can put it off, but putting it off usually only makes it worse."
On the list for repairs, a boiler at Marquette Elementary, and more efficient windows at Shorewood Elementary.
Most budget changes passed 7-0, with the exception of the deferred maintenance, which passed 5-2 with Beth Moss and Ed Hughes voting against it. Moss's school board seat is up for election on April 6, 2010. I emailed Beth last weekend, along with Maya Cole and Johnny Winston, Jr. to see if they plan to run for re-election.
According to the Virginia Department of Education, the drop-out rate for Charlottesville high school students is 13 percent.
How would you address this question? What measures would you recommend, specifically, to lower the rate?
As of last year, the state is calculating the dropout rate in a new, more accurate manner than in prior years, tracking individual students starting in ninth grade. Obviously the factors leading to a student's high school success or failure start much earlier than ninth grade; therefore it is impossible to defeat the dropout problem even over several years of making all the right moves educationally. Moreover, because the educational needs of all children start at birth, every positive educational change will ultimately increase his or her chances of remaining in school.
Ned Michie
As a public school division, we take all comers regardless of aptitude, educational background, grade level, or other circumstance. While every school division has a set of challenges, Charlottesville's student population presents a particularly unusual array of educational challenges for a small division.
On the one hand, we have a large number of children who will go on to the finest universities and become doctors, lawyers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and captains of industry. We ensure that these students stay challenged by providing an excellent gifted education program, honors classes, and about 20 AP and dual enrollment courses. On the other end of the spectrum, we have many children with great educational needs. For example, about 10 percent of our students use English as a second language (with about 50 different native languages). Half were refugees arriving with little or no knowledge of English; many had no education even in their own countries. Charlottesville also has a large number of group homes and, sadly, still has a significant population of economically disadvantaged families whose children are statistically at risk educationally.
The Davenport School Board approved a state-required special education delivery plan Monday to the disappointment of one member who said it was a missed opportunity.
The board approved the plan 6-1, with Timothy Tupper voting against it.
"We had a real opportunity with this document to really look at our process and procedures, and we didn't do that," Tupper said during discussion of the plan. "I hoped we would look at our delivery of services to see how we (could) do it better."
The plan moves the district away from teaching special needs students in seclusion. Instead, general education teachers will work with special education students in a regular classroom setting. The special education service delivery plan, recently required by the Iowa Department of Education, defines how schools meet the educational needs of students.
About 30 teachers were involved in the delivery plan and public input was sought, Betty Long, director of exceptional education and federal programming, told the board. Most public input was received via e-mail.
Memphis City Schools administrators haven't spent the money, but they're counting on nearly $100 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve the effectiveness of the district's teachers.
In fact, the district is investing $720,000 for a consultant to help make MCS Gates grant-ready.
U.S. Sen. Bill Frist may also tap the wealth of the Microsoft founder to help put together a statewide reform plan for Tennessee that would address teaching and school governance issues.
Not just at the district and state level, however, is the influence of America's richest education reformer being felt.
The reform-minded Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who's preparing to hand out $4.3 billion in stimulus money for public education improvement projects across the country, has two former Gates employees among his inner circle.
Volume One, Number One
The Concord Review, Fall 1988
Theodore Sizer: Professor of Education, Brown University Author, Horace's Compromise, Horace's School Chairman, Coalition of Essential Schools
Americans shamefully underestimate their adolescents. With often misdirected generosity, we offer them all sorts of opportunities and, at least for middle-class and affluent youths, the time and resources to take advantage of them.
We ask little in return. We expect little, and the young people sense this, and relax. The genially superficial is tolerated, save in areas where the high school students themselves have some control, in inter-scholastic athletics, sometimes in their part-time work, almost always in their socializing.
At least if and when they reflect about it, adolescents have cause to resent us old folks. We do not signal clear standards for many important areas of their lives, and we deny them the respect of high expectations. In a word, we are careless about them, and, not surprisingly, many are thus careless about themselves. "Me take on such a difficult and responsible task?" they query, "I'm just a kid!"
All sorts of young Americans are capable of solid, imaginative scholarship, and they exhibit it for us when we give them both the opportunity and a clear measure of the standard expected. Presented with this opportunity, young folk respond. The Concord Review is such an opportunity, a place for fine scholarship to be exhibited, to be exposed to that most exquisite of scholarly tests, wide publication.
The prospect of "exhibition" is provocative. I must show publicly that I know, that I have ideas, and that I can defend them resourcefully. My competence is not merely an affair between me and a soulless grading machine in Princeton, New Jersey. It is a very public act.
The Concord Review is, for the History-inclined high school student, what the best of secondary school theatre and music performances, athletics, and (in some respects) science fairs are, for their aficionados. It is a testing ground, and one of elegant style, taste and standards. The Review does not undersell students. It respects them. And in such respect is the fuel for excellence.
================
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
About a month ago, Deidra Hewitt, who lives in Denver, North Carolina, where she has two children in a public elementary school, wrote about how the school required her to sign off on her children's homework more than 400 times a year. Today, she writes about what happened after she wrote to the school Superintendent to tell him about the policy. Read the background here.
Advocacy Can Make a Difference
by Deidra Hewitt
I emailed a letter to the school Superintendent and the Board of Education, regarding the "sign or your child will be punished" policies, that I find so offensive. The Superintendent contacted me for a meeting. I was really pleased with the outcome of this encounter. The Superintendent of Schools completely agreed with me, about parent signatures being voluntary. He was against children being held accountable for parent behavior. He indicated that changes were in the works. Starting at the county level, he advised me that the "accountability agreements" were being phased out, and that they will be gone next year. He stated that he is actively searching for ways to engage parents of disadvantaged students. He agrees that countless signatures do not accomplish this goal. He is prepared to investigate the objectives of requests for parent signatures, and certify that signatures are voluntary.
Teachers routinely use test scores to help them evaluate their students.
Wisconsin schools should similarly use student test results to help them evaluate teachers.
Every other state except Nevada allows this.
Wisconsin should, too.
And if we don't, our state won't be eligible for any of the $4.5 billion in "Race to the Top" grants President Barack Obama plans to award starting next year.
That's how important this reform is to the Democratic president.
Gov. Jim Doyle announced last week he'll push to repeal a Wisconsin law preventing schools from using tests to help evaluate teacher performance.
The Legislature needs to move fast to nix this law because Wisconsin has only a few months to submit an application for some of the $4.5 billion in federal innovation grants.
On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, Sesame Workshop with Google and Common Sense Media are sponsoring Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age, a conference of 200 thought leaders who will come together to discuss solutions to the literacy and dropout problems facing the nation. This blog focuses on the dropout crisis; the one yesterday focused on the literacy problems.
The dropout crisis is bigger than you might have guessed. While in some areas it has improved somewhat in the last year, in the country as a whole the problem is growing. Almost fifty percent of students in the fifty largest American cities drop out of high school. In some cities, there is over a seventy percent drop out rate.
A major consequence of the dropout rate is an increase in crime and and the prison rate. We spend more to keep prisoners in jail than we do to educate our students. Typical per-prisoner expenses run from $20,000-$50,000 per year while typical per pupil expenditures run from $7,000 to $20,000, averaging $9,000. This discrepancy needs to be addressed now and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is trying to promote change through incentives in the $100 billion education stimulus package.
Contracts have helped tone down the hyper-sexed dance floor at some campuses, giving students clear guidelines on what's acceptable and what's not.
Downey High School sent its homecoming queen packing, crown and all, after she was seen making sexually suggestive moves on the dance floor a few years back. Aliso Niguel High School Principal Charles Salter made good on a threat to cancel school dances in 2006 as officials there and elsewhere fretted over how to deal with freaking, grinding and other provocative dances.
Their solution: Fight explicit teen dancing with an equal dose of explicitness. Downey and Aliso Niguel are among the first schools to draft "dance contracts," binding agreements that parents and students must sign before a teenager can step onto the dance floor.
Administrators say the graphic descriptions in the contracts leave little room for arguments over interpretation and put everyone on notice about appropriate behavior.
The prom09contract.pdf, for example, specifies "no touching breasts, buttocks or genitals. No straddling each others' legs. Both feet on the floor." Students get two warnings about sexually suggestive behavior before being booted without a refund and barred from other dances.
At a recent India-China book launch, where human resource development minister Kapil Sibal was present, I made it a point to highlight the comparative picture between India and China in the education sector. This is a crucial sector for emerging economies attempting to achieve inclusive and rapid growth. Moreover, as several recent studies have brought out, returns on skill formation and higher education, which are already substantial, continue to rise as the world increasingly takes on the attributes of a knowledge economy. By the way, the book by Mohan Guruswamy and Zorawar Daulet Singh titled Chasing the Dragon is well worth a read for all those interested in finding out the distance we have to cover to catch up with China.
India's adult literacy is 61 per cent compared with China's 91 per cent. Expenditure on education as a percentage of total public expenditure is 10.7 per cent and 12.8 per cent, respectively. China has 708 researchers per million population compared with 19 in India. In 1990, publications by Indians in journals were 50 per cent higher but in 2008, Chinese publications outnumbered Indian ones by two to one. In 1985, the number of PhDs in science and engineering in India were 4,007 and 125 in China, but by 2004, China had 14,858 PhDs, while we had increased the number to only 6,318. In 2007, Indians filed 35,000 patents compared with 245,161 in China.
After days of frantic blogging on the latest D.C. schools crisis and trading speculation with interested readers, I find it refreshing to visit three educators who are making major changes in two of the city's lowest-performing high schools. Unlike me and many of the people I exchange comments with, they know what they are talking about.
George Leonard, 57, chief executive officer of the Friends of Bedford group from New York; Chief Financial Officer Bevon Thompson, 35; and Chief Operating Officer Niaka Gaston, 34, sit around a table in the basement of the District's Dunbar High School. The school was so dark and filthy when they first saw it that they cringe at the memory.
Dunbar and Coolidge high schools, both educational disaster areas, are under the command of their consulting company. D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee handed them the keys to the two schools because of the rigor and high graduation rates they brought to a small public high school, the Bedford Academy, in a low-income neighborhood of Brooklyn.
The problem is well-known: The U.S. lags far behind other developed countries at the K-12 level in terms of measured performance in math and science courses.
What can be done to change that? The Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray posed that question to three experts: Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education; Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania; and Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, who was also a member of the Obama administration transition team working on education issues.
Here are edited excerpts of their discussion: It's the Teachers
ALAN MURRAY: What will it take to get the American system up to the level of some of the other developed countries in terms of math and science education?
JOEL KLEIN: The most important thing is to bring to K-12 education college graduates who excel in math and science. Those countries that are doing best are recruiting their K-12 teachers from the top third of their college graduates. America is recruiting our teachers generally from the bottom third, and when you go into our high-needs communities, we're clearly underserving them.
MR. MURRAY: How do you explain that? It doesn't seem to be a function of money. We spend more than any of these other countries.
MR. KLEIN: We spend it irrationally. My favorite example is, I pay teachers, basically, based on length of service and a few courses that they take. And I can't by contract pay math and science teachers more than I would pay other teachers in the system, even though at different price points I could attract very different people. We've got to use the money we have much more wisely, attract talent, reward excellence.
The real secretary of education, the joke goes, is Bill Gates.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been the biggest player by far in the school reform movement, spending around $200 million a year on grants to elementary and secondary education.
Now the foundation is taking unprecedented steps to influence education policy, spending millions to influence how the federal government distributes $5 billion in grants to overhaul public schools.
The federal dollars are unprecedented, too.
President Barack Obama persuaded Congress to give him the money as part of the economic stimulus so he could try new ideas to fix an education system that most agree is failing. The foundation is offering $250,000 apiece to help states apply, so long as they agree with the foundation's approach.
Obama and the Gates Foundation share some goals that not everyone embraces: paying teachers based on student test scores, among other measures of achievement; charter schools that operate independently of local school boards; and a set of common academic standards adopted by every state.
How will tonight's property tax increase vote play out on April 6, 2010? Three Madison School Board seats will be on the ballot that day. The seats are currently occupied by:
I emailed Beth, Johnny and Maya recently to see if they plan to seek re-election in the April 6, 2010 election. I will publish any responses received.
What issues might be on voters minds in five months?:
The District's $418,415,780 2009/2010 budget [1.1MB PDF] ($412,219,577 2008/2009 and $399,835,904 in 2007/2008) and recent property tax increases (the decline in Wisconsin K-12 spending growth - after years of substantial increases is a factor), but dealing with less is a reality for many citizens.
Dropping a bombshell on the teachers' unions, state Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist ordered school superintendents to abolish the practice of assigning teachers based on how many years they have in the school system.
On Friday, the unions said they were blindsided by Gist's announcement, adding that the commissioner made no attempt to confer with labor before going public with the decision.
"We're going to court," said Marcia Reback, president of the Federation of Teachers. "I'm startled that there was no conversation with the unions about this. I'm startled there were no public hearings, and I'm startled at the content. This narrows the scope of collective bargaining."
There has been a mantra of sorts going around education circles over the past few years: "Nothing matters more to a child's education than good teachers." Anyone who's ever had a Ms. Green or a Mr. Miller whom they remember fondly instinctively knows this to be true. And while "Who's teaching my kid?" is an important question for parents to ask, there may be an equally essential (and rarely remarked upon) question -- "Who's teaching my kid's teachers?"
On Thursday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to Columbia University's Teachers College, the oldest teacher-training school in the nation, and delivered a speech blasting the education schools that have trained the majority of the 3.2 million teachers working in U.S. public schools today. "By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom," he said to an audience of teaching students who listened with more curiosity than ire -- this was Columbia University after all, and they knew Duncan wasn't talking to them. It was a damning, but not unprecedented, assessment of teacher colleges, which have long been the stepchildren of the American university system and a frequent target of education reformers' scorn over the past quarter-century.
An effort has been launched in the state Capitol to give the state schools superintendent broader authority to turn around struggling schools and position Wisconsin to better compete for millions of dollars in federal education grants.
Little fanfare has accompanied potential legislative changes that would allow the superintendent of public instruction to order curriculum and personnel changes in chronically failing schools. It didn't even make the news release for Gov. Jim Doyle's three-city announcement on Monday of educational changes he is seeking to help Wisconsin qualify for some of the $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funds from the U.S. Department of Education.
State Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine), chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said the idea of giving the state superintendent "super-duper powers" has attracted support from legislators and educational interest groups since it first surfaced earlier this month.
"There's getting to be general agreement around these interventions," he said.
Prior to any expansion of the Wisconsin DPI's powers, I'd like to see them implement a usable and rigorous assessment system to replace the oft-criticized WKCE.
Perhaps, this is simply politics chasing new federal tax dollars....
Distance learning has broken into the mainstream of higher education. But at the campus level, many colleges still know precious little about how best to organize online programs, whether those programs are profitable, and how they compare to face-to-face instruction in terms of quality.
That is what Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, concludes in a study released today in conjunction with the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications.
The study, based on a survey of senior officials at 182 U.S. public and private nonprofit colleges, found that 45 percent of respondents said their institution did not know whether their online programs were making money. Forty-five percent said they had reorganized the management of their online programs in the last two years, with 52 percent anticipating a reshuffling within the next two years. And while a strong majority of the administrators surveyed said they believed the quality of online education was comparable to classroom learning, about half said that at their colleges the professors are in charge of assessing whether that is true.
Of the four candidates vying for those spots, three have served -- or are serving -- on the school board. Two are incumbents. Two are retired. One taught in the district for 30 years. Another taught in the district for just over eight.
All of them identify several key issues -- making tough budget decisions, implementing the new Measurements of Student Progress and High School Proficiency exams, and coordinating upcoming construction projects, specifically replacing Eisenhower High School, modernizing Davis High School and renovating six other schools.
The construction will be paid for through a 20-year, $114 million bond measure approved by taxpayers in May.
Supreme Court strikes down law that has blocked children from attending English-language schools.
For thousands of francophone and immigrant parents in Quebec who want to send their children to English public schools but are barred from the system, a Supreme Court ruling Thursday seemed to offer hope.
"This is really wonderful news, it's a great decision," said Virender Singh Jamwal, one of the 25 parents who fought in court for seven years for the right to send their kids to school in English.
But in its attempt to reach a rare compromise in Quebec's volatile language politics, the court may have managed to prick nationalist sentiment without doing much to protect Mr. Jamwal's educational preference.
In a 7-0 decision, the court struck down a law known as Bill 104 that, since 2002, has blocked some 8,000 children in Montreal alone from attending English-language schools.
The benefits of electronic school textbooks are compelling. They cost half as much as ordinary books, are easy to locate and manage, can be quickly kept up to date, are environmentally responsible and do not risk a child's physical well-being when carried in number in a backpack. Unsurprisingly, school boards and districts the world over are speedily adopting them. But such attributes are not so impressive to a Hong Kong government working group, which after a year of study, has recommended a cautious, go-slow, approach.
Among the group's key suggestions are launching a three-year "promoting e-learning" pilot scheme in up to 30 of our city's 1,060 schools and giving a one-off grant to buy resources. The conclusions are at vast odds with those drawn by the governor of the US state of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in June launched a digital textbook initiative in the name of cutting costs and keeping learning material fresh and relevant. Students are being given free electronic readers, and publishers pushed to quickly make books available. California is by no means at the cutting edge; there are some Hong Kong schools already using the technology.
A SCHOOL headmaster once observed that he would regularly consult his prefects on the running of the establishment. When he agreed with them, he would allow their views to prevail. It was only when they disagreed that he had to impose his will. On October 19th the schools secretary, Ed Balls, closed a consultation, the outcome of which he seems to have decided already. Legislation will be introduced to force parents wishing to educate their children at home to register with the state and undergo regular inspections.
Mr Balls says he is worried that children who do not attend school risk being abused by those looking after them. An earlier review by Graham Badman, a former head of children's services in Kent who is now based at London University's Institute of Education, found that in some areas a disconcertingly high proportion of home-schooled children were known to social services--ie, cause for concern.
No one is sure how many children in Britain are taught at home. York Consulting, a management outfit, put the figure at 20,000 in 2007. It could actually be more than 50,000, reckons Mike Fortune-Wood, who runs a support service for parents educating their children at home, and the total may be rising by 10% a year.
All colleges and graduate schools of education must do a better job of preparing future teachers for the classroom, Arne Duncan, secretary of education, said in a speech Thursday. Many leaders of teacher education programs said they agreed with his comments, but it was hard to find any who said they thought his criticisms applied to their institutions.
"By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom," he told an audience of faculty members, students and teachers at Teachers College of Columbia University. "America's university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change -- not evolutionary tinkering."
Duncan's speech bore down on the colleges and graduate schools that prepare more than half the teachers in U.S. primary and secondary schools -- 60 percent of whom, by one count, entered the classroom feeling unprepared for the challenges that lay ahead -- and called on those programs to introduce more in-the-classroom training and better tracking of teacher performance and student outcomes.
Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and former dean of Teachers College, said the speech "threw a lifeline to university-based teacher education programs" as more states and school districts are turning to other kinds of teacher certification programs to get bodies to the blackboard.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm today ordered a $212 million additional cut from the state's public schools, citing worsening tax revenues.
That cut of $127 per pupil comes on top of a $165-per-pupil reduction (which was about a 2.3% cut for most districts) they'll see under a new, 2009-10 budget for K-12 schools Granholm signed Monday.
"This is not someting I want to be doing at all, but I do want to fix the problem," she said in a news conference. She said she did it today to give schools time to adjust their budgets.
The order, called a proration notice, takes effect in 30 days unless the Legislature puts more money in the pot. Granholm had said earlier this week that another cut was coming, but the suddenness still caught people off guard.
Schools are squeezed by the state's economic crunch. Sales tax revenue, which continues to come in below the projections of state economists, are a major source of school funding. About 70% of funding for the state's 552 school districts and 232 public school academies comes from the state in the form of sales and property tax collections with a lesser amount from the state's general fund.
This election season, with so much money pouring into the King County executive race and the media attention given to the Seattle mayor's race, School Board races have received far fewer eyes.
But with a new student assignment plan, Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson's five-year strategic plan starting to take off and a $34 million budget gap, this election is as important as ever for the board.
District 5
In the District 5 race, Seattleites have the choice between Mary Bass, an eight-year board member known as the dissenting voice on the board and Kay Smith-Blum, a businesswoman and fundraiser with big ideas that could be challenging to implement.
Smith-Blum won the primary with 42 percent of the vote; Bass got nearly 36 percent. Smith-Blum has raised five times as much money: $52,000 compared to Bass' $10,000.
Bass, who unsuccessfully fought the reform math curriculum that was passed 4-3 in this year, said she is "proud of my long track record of fighting failures." Her battles include the $34 million budget collapse when she recently joined the council in 2002 and fighting the race tiebreaker, she said.
Smith-Blum appears to have energy, a knack for fundraising and passion for both early education and extending the school day with more cultural and arts programs. She said she established the first-ever Annual Fund for Montlake Elementary in 1991, helping raise $300,000 in five years.
A task force formed by the Legislature to improve underperforming schools has decided to take on the touchy subject of school district consolidation.
During a recent hearing of the task force, the story was told of an agency in the 1980s that had advocated Mississippi's 152 school districts be consolidated into 82, basically along county lines. The task force was told, perhaps jokingly, that the agency was eliminated by the Legislature the next session.
Senate Education Chair Videt Carmichael, R-Meridian, the co-chair of the task force, responded, also perhaps jokingly, "I think I might disappear if consolidation happened in some of my school districts."
For years, an array of groups has touted the virtue of school consolidation as a way to save money and increase efficiency in the public schools. The only problem has been finding agreement on how to do it.
"It's been my observation everybody wants to consolidate everybody else's district, but not their own," said House Education Committee Chair Cecil Brown, D-Jackson, the other co-chair of the task force.
A statewide education reform commission headed by former U.S. Sen. Bill Frist issued its final recommendations today, with a goal of moving Tennessee to the top of the Southern states in K-12 education.
Search report cards
"The very simple goal is to make Tennessee - us, our kids - the best in the South in five years," Frist said at a State Capitol event unveiling the report. "It's a challenging, ambitious goal but it can be done."
The recommendations of the bipartisan "State Collaborative on Reforming Education," or SCORE, which Frist established early this year, includes 60 specific recommendations that revolve around four key "strategies:"
** Embracing the higher graduation standards that are about to go into effect as part of the Tennessee Diploma Project that aims at both raising standards and graduating more students. There has been some fear that when the impact of the more rigorous standards are felt, there will be political pressure on legislators to scale them back.
** Cultivating stronger school leaders, including superintendents and teachers.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan called this morning for states to link student test data not only back to teachers, but also to the programs that trained them. New York State education officials said they are already working on it.
Speaking to a packed auditorium at Columbia University, Duncan criticized education schools for failing to graduate classroom-ready teachers. He said there needs to be a way to determine which programs are working.
"It's a simple but obvious idea," Duncan said. "Colleges of education and district officials ought to know which teacher preparation programs are effective and which need fixing. The power of competition and disclosure can be a powerful tonic for programs stuck in the past."
Duncan said he will use the competitive stimulus package funds known as the "Race to the Top" program to pressure states to use student data to evaluate teacher preparation programs.
What the coverage leaves out is that Duncan won't be anywhere near the first to tout the importance of teaching or lament the sad state of teacher prep programs. Or the first to mention Alverno, Emporia State, residency programs, the Levine report.
In addition, there are precious few real details in Duncan's speech about what if any means the Secretary is going to try and use to make ed schools change their evil ways. He mentions changes will come as part of NCLB reauthorization, but that's a long way off. He mentions teacher quality partnership grants, but that's less than $200M. No bold specifics like rating ed schools based on graduates' performance or longevity, or limiting Pell grant eligibility to ed schools that meet certain performance characteristics.
To Duncan's credit, he notes that this is a quality problem, not a teacher shortage, and that alt cert programs train fewer than 10K candidates a year (out of 200K overall).But it's just a speech. A very nice, somewhat long, quote-laden speech that someone finally sent me this morning. In other words, in thiss balloon-boy era, it's news! The text of the speech is below. See for yourself.
"By almost any standard, many, if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom," Duncan said today in a speech at Columbia University in New York.
Duncan said hundreds of teachers have told him their colleges didn't provide enough hands-on classroom training or instruct them in the use of data to improve student learning. He also cited a 2006 report by Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia's Teachers College, in which 61 percent of educators surveyed said their colleges didn't offer enough instruction to prepare them for the classroom.
The nation's 95,000 public schools will have to hire as many as 1 million educators in the next five years as teachers and principals from the so-called baby-boom generation retire, according to Education Department projections. More than half of the new teachers will have been trained at education colleges, Duncan said.
While Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today called for the reform of college programs that educate
teachers, Center for Education Reform president Jeanne Allen said that Duncan must back up his rhetoric with strong provisions regarding teacher quality at the federal level. Allen recently released guidance to the federal government urging tough regulations on federal funds used for state teacher quality efforts.
In response to Duncan's speech today at Columbia University's Teachers College, Allen praised the Education Secretary's demand for revolutionary changes to the way that colleges of education prepare educators, saying that his remarks should serve as a wake up call to teacher unions, education bureaucrats, and entrenched special interests who would block data-driven performance reviews of teachers in an effort to monitor teacher quality throughout their careers.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
Since April, the school district has had to pony up the $1.5 million monthly cost of the lunch program for low-income students after state inspectors on a surprise visit found violations they deemed so serious and recurring that they cut off the flow of federal reimbursements.
The violations had nothing to do with the quality of food being served, but stem from the school district's inability to follow bureaucratic rules governing the federally subsidized National School Lunch Program, which is administered by the state.
To ensure no child goes without a lunch, the district, meanwhile, has spent more than $11 million, money it will get back once city schools show they can follow the rules - something district officials have been working on since the inspection.
Mayor Dave Bing called on Detroiters to support Proposal S, the $500 million school bond proposal that he said will bring jobs and life into city neighborhoods.
Flanked by Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, Bing said Detroit children deserve modern school buildings and the city can't pass by the opportunity to take advantage of one-time federal stimulus dollars to borrow money at zero- and low-interest rates for school construction and renovation.
"This is real shot in the arm for the city of Detroit and for the children of the city of Detroit," Bing said.
Thousands of working parents in Hawaii are scrambling to make childcare arrangements ahead of the closure on Friday of all public schools, in a bid by the state's education authorities to cut costs.
All 256 of Hawaii's public schools will be closed in the first of 17 "furlough Fridays" that will see a drastic cut in school time for up to 171,000 children. The reduction of the school week from five to four days will last for at least the next two years.
The furloughs are the most draconian measure yet taken in the US, where the recession has forced many states to slash public services. At least 25 states have forced teachers to take unpaid days off, but most of the cuts have fallen on holidays or on preparation days rather than on actual school days.
New statistics show that U.S. students are struggling to learn basic math. The 2009 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in math, a test given every two years to fourth- and eighth-graders nationwide, were released this week. Although average overall scores have doubled since the NAEP was introduced in 1990, results have completely flat-lined among fourth-graders, and the achievement gap between white and black students isn't narrowing.
The New York Times notes that such trends could be linked to the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, in prepared remarks circulating in advance of a speech Thursday, accuses many of the nation's schools of education of doing "a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom."
My colleague Nick Anderson, on the national education beat, and I found the advance text a meaty read.
Duncan's speech, to be delivered at Columbia University, goes further than any other I can remember from an education secretary in ripping into the failure of education schools to ready teachers for the challenges of the day, particularly the demand for academic growth in all students.
Duncan's speech points out two major deficiencies in education school teaching with which most critics would agree: They do a bad job teaching students how to manage disruptive classrooms, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, and they don't offer much in the way of training new teachers how to use data to improve their classroom results.
The excerpts of the speech we were given, however, did not appear to address one part of the classroom management problem that is often raised when successful teachers explain how they learned to keep students in order. These teachers often say they learned by doing, by facing a class alone without help, trying one thing after another until something worked for them. Education school deans have been critical of the Teach for America program, which pushes recent college graduates into classrooms with only a few weeks training, but teachers who have survived that toss-them-into-the-water approach say it works better than class management classes at their teacher's colleges.
With Maryland facing a $2 billion budget shortfall next year, Gov. Martin O'Malley warned the chiefs of the state's school systems Tuesday of hard times ahead, and the Senate president told them that they were "going to have to start taking a portion of the hit."
Speaking in Annapolis to a gathering of the Public School Superintendents Association of Maryland, O'Malley (D) urged the heads of the county's 24 school jurisdictions to find ways to save money but maintain the quality that earned the state a No. 1 ranking in a national survey by the Education Week trade newspaper.
O'Malley's cost-saving suggestions included creating a school building design that could be used across the state, buying furniture from the state prison industry and installing solar panels on roofs to generate energy.
But he offered few specifics about what cuts the superintendents might expect in state funding even as he repeatedly stressed the challenge of chopping $2 billion from a $13 billion budget.
Memphis City Schools has signed short-term contracts worth $1.4 million with several consultants, including a local public relations agency, as the district moves toward merit pay for teachers and getting rid of those who miss the mark.
Supt. Kriner Cash quickly raised the capital from donors, including the Hyde Family Foundations, so work could begin Oct. 1.
The PR firm CS, on Union Avenue, got a $152,000 contract through June 30. The agency's main job will be communicating with teachers, making sure the district's message is clear and consistent, potentially warding off union strife.
The contracts are a prelude to a seven-year teacher improvement plan the district hopes to accomplish with nearly $100 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates will announce the winners of its national grants in early November. Memphis is one of five finalists.
Cash does not want to wait, saying Tuesday that "a lull in work like this can become the devil's playground.
Two out of five of America's 4 million K-12 teachers appear disheartened and disappointed about their jobs, while others express a variety of reasons for contentment with teaching and their current school environments, new research by Public Agenda and Learning Point Associates shows.
The nationwide study, "Teaching for a Living: How Teachers See the Profession Today," whose results are being reported here for the first time, offers a comprehensive and nuanced look at how teachers differ in their perspectives on their profession, why they entered teaching, the atmosphere and leadership in their schools, the problems they face, their students and student outcomes, and ideas for reform. Taking a closer look at the nation's teacher corps based on educators' attitudes and motivations for teaching provides some notable implications for how to identify, retain, and support the most effective teachers, according to the researchers.
This portrait of American teachers, completed in time for the beginning of the 2009-10 school year, presents a new means for appraising the state of the profession at a time when school reform, approaches to teaching, and student achievement remain high on the nation's agenda. It also comes as billions of economic-stimulus dollars pour into America's schools focused on ensuring that effective teachers are distributed among all schools, and Congress will have to consider reauthorization or modification of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act., the nearly 8-year-old latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
The District of Columbia's embattled school-voucher program, which lawmakers appeared to have killed earlier this year, looks like it could still survive.
Congress voted in March not to fund the program, which provides certificates to pay for recipients' private-school tuition, after the current school year. But after months of pro-voucher rallies, a television-advertising campaign and statements of support by local political leaders, backers say they are more confident about its prospects. Even some Democrats, many of whom have opposed voucher efforts, have been supportive.
At a congressional hearing last month, Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and vocal critic of the program who heads the subcommittee that controls its funding, said he was open to supporting its continuation if certain changes were made. They include requiring voucher recipients to take the same achievement tests as public-school students.
The senator's comments were a "really positive sign," said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, a group that supports vouchers and charter schools -- public schools that can bypass many regulations that govern their traditional counterparts. "It's clear the momentum is coming our way," added Kevin Chavous, a former Washington city councilman who has appeared in television ads supporting the voucher plan, known as the Opportunity Scholarship Program.
In a move he says is meant to re-energize support for public education, Gov. Steve Beshear announced Monday the creation of a task force charged with developing a unified vision of what Kentucky schools need to offer to better prepare students for the 21st century.
"Our world has changed dramatically since the reforms of 1990," Beshear said, during a press conference at Louisville Male High School, where he discussed the Transforming Education in Kentucky initiative. "We must now turn our focus to the future and again to our schools to ensure that our strategies and programs are designed to meet the challenges of the 21st century."
Not all embraced Beshear's task force, which is suppose to spend the next year developing recommendations on how to improve education in the state.
In a letter to the governor, Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville, said he believed the task force "is duplicative" of education efforts already underway.
"I respectfully submit that it is past time for your administration to move beyond discussion and to immediate action," Williams said, noting that topics on the task force's agenda are already being discussed by legislative committees or have been the subject of legislative bills. "...These issues cannot be put off another year."
The reassuring comment came from a crowd of seventh-grade boys at Velma Hamilton Middle School as I prepared to eat my first school lunch in more than 40 years.
They politely made room for me at the front of a line that circled the cafeteria/multipurpose room, nodding enthusiastically as I took the salad. As a former food writer and restaurant critic newly returned to covering topics about children and education, I wanted to experience firsthand school lunches at Madison's elementary, middle and high schools. Madison, like communities across the nation, is re-evaluating school meals with an eye toward making them more nutritious and appealing.
The taco salad featured finely shredded lettuce, providing a reasonably crisp bed for a mound of mildly seasoned ground beef; a dab of sour cream, a small plastic container of salsa and a small package of salty, tortilla chips completed the spread. It was the most popular purchased lunch option that day, although a majority of Hamilton's sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders appeared to have brought their own lunches. With a half-pint of milk, the meal cost $3.30 (adult full-price middle school lunch). I'd probably give it a grade of C+ or B-.
President Barack Obama's top education aide said Friday that now is educators' "moment to shine" thanks to an unprecedented federal investment in school reform contained in February's economic stimulus package.
Speaking to a convention of state school board members from throughout the country at the Hyatt Regency, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he has more money than all his predecessors combined to encourage fundamental changes to American schools.
"If something's working at two schools, and they want to take it to 10, this is the opportunity," Duncan said. "This is the time to think big, and wherever resources have been the constraint, we're trying to fundamentally break through."
Union leaders asked the D.C. Council on Friday for an investigation into the layoffs of 266 teachers and staff members, including an independent audit of the school system's decision to hire 934 educators this spring and summer.
Officials of unions representing teachers, principals and other public school personnel assailed the Oct. 2 dismissals as an attempt by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to winnow veteran instructors from the system. They said the 934 hires were far in excess of what was necessary to fill job openings and were used to create a budget crisis to justify the firings.
"There seems to be an attitude in this administration that it doesn't care about breaking the rules," said Washington Teachers' Union President George Parker.
Rhee has said that the layoffs were necessary to help address a $43.9 million shortfall in the 2010 public school budget. The gap was created in part, Rhee has said, by the council's decision to cut $20.7 million at the end of July because of declining revenue projections.
A skirmish between powerful teachers' unions and President Barack Obama over nearly $5 billion in education spending is shaping up as a preview of the battle to come over No Child Left Behind in Congress early next year.
But the tables are turned: now the unions are worried that Obama, a Democratic ally, is going to be just as tough on them as President George W. Bush, a longtime foe.
The dispute adds teachers' unions to a growing list of key Democratic constituencies that have been frustrated by Obama's lunges toward the political middle, along with gay-rights activists upset Obama won't lift the ban on gays in the military, and Latino officials who say Obama is slow-walking immigration reform.
So far, both the unions and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have tried to avoid a full-on collision, and the unions are showing new flexibility in accepting previously unheard-of moves like stricter teacher evaluations.
But they're also making it clear they'll only go so far with Obama, who was booed at two teachers' union conventions when he was a candidate.
If the State of Wisconsin wins federal stimulus dollars to help local districts lengthen their school days or their school year, Madison could be open to keeping kids in school for more learning time, according to Madison schools superintendent Dan Nerad.
Nerad's comments followed an announcement Monday by Gov. Jim Doyle, who promoted the idea of longer school days when laying out a plan for the state's application for a piece of $4.5 billion in federal education stimulus dollars known as "Race to the Top" funds.
Governors and educators across the country are waiting for the U.S. Department of Education to release "Race to the Top" guidelines this fall. States will then be on a fast track to apply for funds, said Doyle, whose other priorities for Wisconsin include overhauling student testing, making student test scores a factor in teacher evaluations, creating new data systems to track student and teacher performance, and changing the state aid funding formula so districts have more flexibility under caps limiting how many tax dollars they can collect.
"What I'm laying out today are the directions we're taking in this application," Doyle said. Teams from the governor's office and the state Department of Instruction are working on the plans, but haven't yet calculated how many dollars Wisconsin will request, he said.
I hope the local school district does not use these short term, borrowed funds for operating expenses....
Gov. Jim Doyle said Monday the state must give control of Milwaukee schools to the mayor to put in a "good faith" application for federal economic stimulus funds.
He and state school Superintendent Tony Evers also said the state should tie teacher pay to student performance and give districts incentives to lengthen the school day or school year, particularly for students who need extra help.
Doyle said the education reforms he and Evers are advocating would require the steady push only a mayor can provide. Otherwise, school policy could "vacillate from year to year" with changes on the School Board, he said.
More than $2.3 million in federal economic stimulus grants have gone to eight Tampa Bay area cosmetology and massage schools to pay tuition for the hairdressers, masseuses and nail technicians of tomorrow.
That's swell news for those who see the beauty trades as a way to gain a firmer footing in the job market. But is there truly demand for more beauty school graduates at bay area salons?
Not really, said Monica Ponce, owner of Muse The Salon in Tampa.
"Instead of encouraging more people to go to beauty schools," Ponce said, "they should probably help the stylists who are unemployed."
Some area salons are hiring in this economy, but even industry lobbyists say beauty school is rarely a ticket to a thriving career.
Only 1 to 2 percent of beauty school graduates will be working in the field five years from graduation, said Bonnie Poole, treasurer of the Florida Cosmetology Association.
In a report to be released on Monday the nonprofit Center for Arts Education found that New York City high schools with the highest graduation rates also offered students the most access to arts education. The report, which analyzed data collected by the city's Education Department from more than 200 schools over two years, reported that schools ranked in the top third by graduation rates offered students the most access to arts education and resources, while schools in the bottom third offered the least access and fewest resources. Among other findings, schools in the top third typically hired 40 percent more certified arts teachers and offered 40 percent more classrooms dedicated to coursework in the arts than bottom-ranked schools. They were also more likely to offer students a chance to participate in or attend arts activities and performances. The full report is at caenyc.org.
The dread of high school algebra is lost here amid the blue glow of computer screens and the clickety-clack of keyboards.
A fanfare plays from a speaker as a student passes a chapter test. Nearby, a classmate watches a video lecture on ratios. Another works out an equation in her notebook before clicking on a multiple-choice answer on her screen.
Their teacher at Agoura High School, Russell Stephans, sits at the back of the room, watching as scores pop up in real time on his computer grade sheet. One student has passed a level, the data shows; another is retaking a quiz.
"Whoever thought this up makes life so much easier," Stephans says with a chuckle.
The Fairfax County School Board is bracing for the most dramatic reduction in services in more than 20 years as it attempts to bridge a projected $176 million budget shortfall with cuts that could extend to closing schools, increasing class size, ending summer school, discontinuing most full-day kindergarten classes and eliminating foreign language instruction in elementary schools.
Superintendent Jack D. Dale will not present a formal budget proposal until January, but school officials are releasing a list of potential cuts because they want to give the public the earliest possible look at the severity of this year's deficit. "What we are trying to get people to understand is, you are all at risk this time," said board member Jane K. Strauss (Dranesville), the budget chairwoman.
Board members say that classrooms are already strained from adjustments made over the past two years, including consecutive increases in class sizes.
The current budget is $18 million less than last year's, and the school system has grown by about 5,000 students. Federal stimulus money helped offset even deeper cuts, but the school board still eliminated nearly 800 positions and reduced many program budgets.
This year, programs will probably be discontinued, said school board chairman Kathy L. Smith (Sully). "There is no trimming around the edges anymore," she said.
In Fairfax, the projected $176 million shortfall assumes 2,000 new students, no increase in county funding and no pay increase for teachers or other staff. If approved, it would mean a second year of salary freezes.
Fairfax County Schools Approved 2009-2010 Approved Budget [8.9MB PDF]
It will be interesting to see the Madison School District's "final" 2009/2010 budget, which will be reviewed and voted on by the local school board soon. The budget has, in the past, increased as the year progresses. The 2007/8 budget was $339,685,844; 2008/9 was $368,012,286, and the 2009/10 preliminary budget was 367,912,077, according to the MMSD "Financials" PDF Document).
Brady Tynen needed to find out which states have the largest concentrations of people with mixed American Indian-African American ancestry. The Stillwater Junior High ninth-grader could have pored through the U.S. Census database, noted the appropriate percentage, ranked the states in a list and tried to divine some trend.
Then again, his geography class is just 50 minutes long, and Tynen needed to repeat Wednesday's exercise two more times for different groups.
Thankfully, the Census website can show the information on a map with the press of a few buttons. In mere minutes, Tynen could tell that the group he was looking at is concentrated in the eastern U.S., particularly southern states like Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia.
"Maps are a good way to find out all sorts of things," he said. "It'd be kind of hard if you didn't have a map because maps organize your data."
The exercise gave students in Sara Damon's ninth-grade Advanced Placement geography class a taste of a technology called geographic information systems (GIS). GIS is simply technology that merges data with maps. Something as basic as Google Maps can be considered GIS because it links a map to data, in that case street addresses.
Stillwater high school offers 17 Advanced Placement classes, according to the AP Course Audit Website.
Politicians and pundits are using results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests to say our kids are falling behind the rest of the world, so maybe we should get some PISA practice. Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, a member of the U.S. advisory board to PISA, offered this sample question for 15-year-olds from the mathematics literacy section of the exam:
For a rock concert a rectangular field of size 100m by 50m was reserved for the audience. The concert was completely sold out and the field was full with all the fans standing. Which one of the following is likely to be the best estimate of the total number of people attending the concert?
For years, schools and students have been judged on raw standardized test scores. Experts say this approach is flawed because they tend to reflect socioeconomic levels more than learning.
The "value-added" approach attempts to level the playing field by focusing on growth rather than achievement. Using a statistical analysis of test scores, it tracks an individual student's improvement year to year, and uses that progress to estimate the effectiveness of teachers, principals and schools.
Academics have also used the approach to test many assumptions about what matters in schools. Scholars are still puzzling over what makes for a great teacher or school, but their results challenge orthodox assumptions like these:
All teachers are equal. For decades, schools have treated teachers like interchangeable parts. Value-added results suggest there are sharp differences in teachers' effectiveness.
t's easy to see why United Teachers Los Angeles doesn't like the new Public School Choice policy at L.A. Unified, which allows outside groups to apply to take over about 250 new or underperforming schools. Those groups are likely to include a large number of charter school operators that would hire their own teachers rather than sign a contract with the teachers union.
What's less understandable is why UTLA would minimize its chances of keeping some of the schools within the district, along with their union jobs. Yet that's what appears to be happening. A rift has developed within the union's leadership over whether to allow more so-called pilot schools, and if so, how many and under what conditions. Pilot schools are similar to charter schools, except that they remain within L.A. Unified, staffed by the district's union employees. The staff is given more independence to make instructional and budgeting decisions in exchange for greater accountability and "thin contracts," which contain fewer of the prescriptive work rules that can stultify progress.
No one could argue that the Cambridge Primary Review, the biggest report on primary schools for over 40 years, isn't a weighty-looking document. Six years to complete, 600 pages long, one of its main arguments is that British children are starting school far too early, around the four-year mark.
Terrible, cries the report. In the manner of most European countries, children should be starting school at around six years old, in Finland's case, seven. Thereby enabling Britain to catch up in terms of child literacy, numeracy, and well-being. All of which sounds extremely exciting for British education. What a shame they forgot to factor in British parents.
Even today, when there is a report like this, we seem automatically to revert to a template of idealised British family life, circa 1955 (Mummy in her pinny, happily baking jam tarts; Daddy arriving home with his brolly) that has no bearing on modern reality.
Exchange the 1950s fantasy for parents who both have to work, and have other children to sort out. Parents, who already have to pick up, clean up, organise, and juggle, to the point where they feel as though they are trapped within a slow-motion nervous breakdown. And this is the middle class, relatively do-able, version. Into this engorged ready-to-blow scenario they want to introduce the concept of up to two to three years less primary schooling? Are they insane?
Students entering Vincent High School will be subjected to a metal detector on a daily basis in the wake of widespread fighting at the school, Milwaukee Public Schools officials said Friday.
Superintendent William Andrekopoulos confirmed Friday that Matthew Boswell, principal of Northwest Secondary School, has been appointed Vincent principal, replacing Alvin Baldwin, who is being reassigned to an elementary school.
Andrekopoulos also said two additional support staff members would be brought to Vincent to aid the administration. Three of the four assistant principals at the school also have been replaced, according to MPS officials.
Andrekopoulos said he was moved to make leadership changes after a visit to Vincent this week. He said he was struck in particular when he observed the presence of 17 adults supervising the cafeteria and not one of them was talking with students.
"I want to make sure we build a positive climate" at the school, he said.
Andrekopoulos spoke at a news conference Friday at district offices, capping off a volatile week at Vincent that began with a spate of fights and ended with some 100 students on suspension. He said eight of those students were suspected of behavior so serious that they'd be given a hearing at MPS' central office.
It was three years ago that 15-year-old Eric Hainstock entered Weston High School with a 22-caliber pistol and a 20-gauge shotgun.
Within a few short minutes, Principal John Klang confronted Hainstock, trying to protect his school's students and staff.
After a brief struggle, Klang was shot three times. He died later that day.
Debate continues on exactly what Hainstock intended to do - get the school's attention for the help he needed, or execute a fatalistic death wish for himself and his school.
What is clear is Hainstock had been bullied.
He was bullied by his father who, he says, treated him like a slave and refused to let him wash. At school and after school, he claimed he was bullied by as many as 30 of his fellow classmates. He says he snapped.
We can't know how much of this is true or how much it contributed to the tragedy in Weston. What we do know is that nearly a third of America's school children say they've been the victims of bullying - or been bullies themselves - or both.
We know bullying can destroy a student's self-esteem and ability to learn. We know it can ruin students for the rest of their lives. It can ruin families and ruin schools.
We know it's a problem among girls and boys. We know it can be mental bullying as well as physical. We know it can border on torture for the young minds that are the victims of it.
It's a problem that affects us all. As such, it's a problem we must all help solve.
That's why we're partners with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, which just launched its curriculum to help teachers cope with bullying in their classrooms, halls and playgrounds.
The DPI curriculum, called "Time to Act - Time to React," is a set of lesson plans to help teachers identify bullies and bullying and to teach their students how to deal with it.
The WEA Trust, a not-for-profit group health insurance company that insures many of Wisconsin's public school employees, paid for the printing of 1,200 sets of the curricula (one for grades 3-5, another for grades 6-8), and a free, interactive DVD available to teachers in any public grade school and public middle school.
This isn't a state mandate. It's not a requirement. It's a helping hand for teachers who feel they need the extra help to keep their students safe.
The problem is clear. So are the goals.
We, along with a large coalition of groups including those with a focus on schools, mental health, law enforcement and child advocacy, are supporting this effort to help keep our schools safe and healthy.
That's important for insurance companies that feel good mental health is important to a healthy body.
That's important for the wife of a murdered husband whose life was abruptly ended by a young boy out of control.
We're encouraging teachers to use the new curriculum. We're encouraging parents to be aware of what is happening with their children at school. This curriculum is a step in making teachers' and children's lives safer today and tomorrow.
Sue Klang is the wife of John Klang, the Weston High School principal killed trying to wrestle a pistol away from a troubled 15-year-old student on Sept. 29, 2006. Evert is executive director of the WEA Trust, Wisconsin's largest provider of group health insurance for Wisconsin school districts.
As if NAFTA's dismantling of America's manufacturing base and corporate destruction of the middle class isn't enough to challenge the needs of the country's national security, now we have a systematic assault on the nation's educational system.
In Michigan, it is the dumbing down of needed math standards to compete globally; at the national level, it is the drying up of funds used to harness the talent of young people who cannot afford an elitist entitlement system that's cost-prohibitive for many.
The common thread of lost manufacturing jobs, a dying middle class and an impaired educational system that promotes inferior curriculum and economic exclusion all serve to undermine the well-being and national security of the country in ways that hostile external elements could never match. The hypocrisy of weakening America while extolling patriotism is a calculated deviousness that, for the sake of the country and the working class, must be challenged.
A recent survey of college professors by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that nearly 90% thought that the students they teach were not very well prepared in reading, doing research and academic writing by their high schools.
At the same time, many college admissions officers ask students for 500-word "personal statements," which have become known as "college essays," and many high school English department spend a lot of their writing instruction on this sort of effort.
History departments and English departments are assigning fewer and fewer term papers, so it is not surprising that lots of students are arriving in college not knowing how to do research or write academic papers.
Why is it that college admissions officers and college professors seem to be working at cross purposes when it comes to student writing? College professors want students to be able to write serious research papers when they are assigned in their history, economics, political science, etc., classes, but that is not the message that is going out to high school applicants from the college admissions offices.
Most of the attention, if not all, in the college counseling offices at the secondary level is on what it will take to gain students admission to colleges, not on whether, for example, they have the academic knowledge and skills to graduate from college. That is someone else's concern. Recently the Gates Foundation has taken up the challenge of trying to find out why students drop out of community colleges in such large numbers.
But in the college admissions world, at the Higher and Lower Education levels, the attention, when it comes to writing, is on the short personal statement to accompany the application. There are several reasons for such a dumbed-down requirement. Admissions officers are too busy, for the most part, to read academic papers by students, and they like to have some personal information by the student to give them a more personal feeling for the applicant. The fact that there is a huge industry of "personal essay" coaches and tutors doesn't seem to give them pause.
With this requirement in place, it becomes the task of the English Department at the high school level to teach students even more about how to write about themselves in 500 words or less. Such writing requires no reading or research of course, which makes it a lot easier (and more dumbed-down).
Meanwhile, students who receive the International Baccalaureate Diploma continue to meet the requirement for the Extended Essay of 4,000-5,000 words, and they, like those published in The Concord Review, arrive in college miles ahead of their "personal statement" peers who have no idea how to write a college term paper.
Part of the problem lies with the Higher Education Faculty, which almost never takes any part in the admissions process, but leaves the 500-word personal essay in place--but then they complain that the students they get can't read, do research, or write very well.
As I have said many times, college coaches routinely take a personal interest in the athletic admissions requirements for the high school students they recruit for their teams, because they need to know if they can play or not, but college professors pay no attention at all, either general or personal, to the academic admissions requirements for the high school students they will see in their classes.
Thus the admissions department at the college and the college faculty work at cross purposes, as the admissions department pursues their interest in the short personal essay, while the college faculty members do nothing to encourage the sort of serious academic writing (and reading) they say they wish the students who come to them had done in high school.
Perhaps college professors might take another look at the reading and writing requirements put out by the admissions offices at their own colleges and universities.
They might even begin to influence the high schools to raise their standards for academic reading and writing, and, in the process, find that they have better-prepared students to take advantage of their teaching, and more students would actually have a chance to complete the work at the colleges to which they are admitted.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Terry Grier, former superintendent of San Diego schools, encountered union opposition when he tried to use the novel method. His fight offers a peek at a brewing national debate.
When Terry Grier was hired to run San Diego Unified School District in January 2008, he hoped to bring with him a revolutionary tool that had never been tried in a large California school system.
Its name -- "value-added" -- sounded innocuous enough. But this number-crunching approach threatened to upend many traditional notions of what worked and what didn't in the nation's classrooms.
It was novel because rather than using tests to take a snapshot of overall student achievement, it used scores to track each pupil's academic progress from year to year. What made it incendiary, however, was its potential to single out the best and worst teachers in a nation that currently gives virtually all teachers a passing grade.
In previous jobs in the South, Grier had used the method as a basis for removing underperforming principals, denying ineffective teachers tenure and rewarding the best educators with additional pay.
In California, where powerful teachers unions have been especially protective of tenure and resistant to merit pay, Grier had a more modest goal: to find out if students in the San Diego district's poorest schools had equal access to effective instructors.
Gov. Bill Richardson released his budget counterproposal on Saturday afternoon, just as the Senate was discussing the constitutionality of his proclamation convening the special session. Richardson's proposal contains 1.5 percent cuts to education--as long as those cuts don't affect classrooms.
Richardson said he wouldn't consider tax increases during the special session, but that he would consider a tax revenue package during the regular session in January.
"I have made adjustments to my original budget proposal to reflect our new budget realities," Richardson said in his statement. "... I have made it very clear to legislators that any cuts to education must be minimal and not affect our classrooms, kids and teachers."
Alan Coulter is working on a short list of goals for students in Milwaukee Public Schools:
A very large majority of them should get good, professional and prompt help learning reading, especially if they're struggling.
The same with math.
The same with behavior problems - good, professional and prompt responses for those acting out too often, getting suspended too often, disrupting classes and so on.
Think about what the impact would be if those goals were met.
Coulter is holding a lever that may make a lot of that happen in the next several years. A nationally recognized expert in special education and a professor at the Louisiana State University Health Science Center in New Orleans, he now carries the title of "independent expert" for implementation of a court order dealing with special education services in MPS.
That means he's the lead figure in making MPS change on some crucial fronts because the court order goes well beyond special education to the overall way Milwaukee schools deal with students who aren't on grade level or who are misbehaving frequently. With the backing of the state Department of Public Instruction and the court, Coulter and Alisia Moutry, a former MPS official who is his on-the-ground staff person in Milwaukee, carry a lot of weight now.
A showdown between the White House and the powerful teachers' unions looks, for the moment, a little less likely.
This week in New Haven, Conn., the local teachers union agreed, in a 21-1 vote, to changes widely resisted by unions elsewhere, including tough performance evaluations and fewer job protections for bad teachers.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as the unions, said the New Haven contract could be repeated in other school districts.
Kim Torello, left, and Karen Lavorgna, teachers in New Haven, Conn., discuss the contract that was ratified by their union this week. Terms included tough performance evaluations and fewer job protections.
"I rarely say that something is a model or a template for something else, but this is both," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who helped broker the New Haven deal.
"This shows a willingness to go into areas that used to be seen as untouchable," Mr. Duncan said.
His cause for optimism is this: If teachers' unions start showing flexibility in other cities, the administration's high-stakes push to boost graduation rates and improve test scores at public schools could get a lot easier. That might even spare the administration an unwanted fight with a labor force that gave Mr. Obama a big lift in his election.
For more than two years, school district consolidation has been a contentious issue in Maine.
Opponents argue that it has been an ill-conceived, hastily put together and poorly implemented law that has not achieved its goals. Proponents maintain that it represents much-needed reform and is an effective step toward reducing the cost of education in Maine. Question 3 on the Nov. 3 ballot gives voters a chance to weigh those opposing views and decide whether to repeal the law. The question asks: "Do you want to repeal the 2007 law on school district consolidation and restore the laws previously in effect?"
The law, enacted in 2007, attempted to reduce the number of school districts in Maine from 290 to 80, but as of July 2009, there were still 218 districts remaining in the state.
Voters in more than 100 districts, largely in rural areas, rejected reorganization plans despite the penalty they faced through the loss of state education subsidies.
When Michael was in kindergarten, he missed more than 80 days of school. He was not ill and no one from Michael's family ever called to say why he was not attending school.
When I was elected district attorney, I learned that 5,500 students in San Francisco were habitually truant and - shockingly - 44 percent of the truant students were in elementary school. That is when I partnered with the San Francisco Unified School District to combat school truancy. At the time, many asked why the city's chief prosecutor was concerned with the problem of school attendance. The answer was simple, and as our partnership now enters its fourth year, the reason remains the same: a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime.
Despite his young age, Michael's truancy makes him far more likely to be arrested or fall victim to a crime later in life. In San Francisco, over 94 percent of all homicide victims under the age of 25 are high school dropouts. Statewide, two-thirds of prison inmates are high school dropouts.
The Broward Teachers Union accused the school district Thursday of blocking hundreds of e-mails sent by school employees to School Board members since March -- without board members' knowledge.
The union says e-mails about teacher raises, use of federal stimulus money and employee contract negotiations never made it to board members' in-boxes -- or to their junk e-mail folders. Instead, they were filed away on a server and never read.
BTU lawyers sent Board Chairwoman Maureen Dinnen and board attorney Edward Marko a letter Thursday asking the district to stop blocking e-mails and threatening to sue if they don't do so by Oct. 26.
The letter argues blocking e-mails violates the sender's and the receiver's constitutional rights under U.S. and Florida laws.
Superintendent Jim Notter said district attorneys were reviewing BTU's letter. He questioned its timing, with the district in the throes of negotiating a contract with the union. BTU has asked for an average 4 percent pay increase. The district isn't offering any raise, but has offered to pick up the difference in employee health insurance.
``Unfortunately we're back in a position where it's adversarial,'' Notter said.
Charter schools have no bigger fan than President Barack Obama.
The federal government gave Wisconsin $86 million on Thursday to help launch and sustain more charter schools across the state.
State schools chief Tony Evers said $5 million will go to two dozen school districts this year, with the rest of the money distributed over five years.
Madison, to no surprise, wasn't on Thursday's winner list. And don't expect any of the $86 million for planning and implementing new strategies for public education to be heading Madison's way.
That's because the Madison School Board continues to resist Obama's call for more charter schools. The latest evidence is the School Board's refusal to even mention the words "charter school" in its strategic action plans.
In sharp contrast, Obama can hardly say a word about public education without touting charters as key to sparking innovation and engaging disadvantaged students.
Obama visited a New Orleans charter school Thursday (and raised money that evening in San Francisco at a $34K per couple dinner) and is preparing to shower billions on states to experiment with new educational strategies. But states that limit charter growth will not be eligible for the money.
I am in favor of a diffused governance model here. I think improvement is more likely via smaller organizations (charters, magnets, whatever). The failed Madison Studio School initiative illustrates the challenges that lie ahead.
Many universities now have pay freezes or even nominal pay cuts. Under the circumstances, several professors have told me that there's little point in doing faculty evaluations. If there's zero - or negative - money for raises, why bother saying who's doing well and who's not?
It amazes me how much these remarks take for granted. Suppose a department is 5% over-budget. It may be obvious that it needs to cut total compensation by 5%, but it isn't obvious that any particular professor's salary needs to be cut by 5%. If raises can depend on performance, so can cuts! If a chairman normally gives a 0% raise to his worst performer, and a 5% raise to his best performer, why not respond to fiscal austerity by simply changing the range from -7.5% to -.2.5%?
I agree with Bryan's argument, though I suspect many of my fellow academics won't. One possible objection is that the criteria for evaluating "merit" in academia are too subjective. But academic departments already have merit criteria for making hiring and promotion decisions. If our criteria are good enough to decide whether or not someone deserves to be hired or offered lifelong employment, they should be good enough to make much less consequential judgments on whether a given scholar should get a 3% pay cut as opposed to 1%. A department that lacks good criteria for evaluating merit ought to get some pronto - whether it intends to base pay cuts on them or not.
A devastating attack on what is taught in primary schools is delivered today by the biggest inquiry into the sector for more than 40 years.
Too much stress is being placed on the three Rs, imposing a curriculum on primary school pupils that is "even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools", it says. The inquiry is recommending sweeping changes to stop children being left disenchanted by schooling at an early age.
Tests for 11-year-olds and league tables based on them should be scrapped, and instead children should be assessed in every subject they take at 11.
The report is heavily critical of successive Conservative and Labour governments for dictating to teachers how they should do their jobs. Professor Alexander cites "more than one" Labour education secretary saying that primary schools should be teaching children to "read, write and add up properly" - leaving the rest of education to secondary schools. "It is not good enough to say we want high standards in the basics but we just have to take our chance with the rest," said Professor Alexander.
The Democratic Party has battled for universal health care this year, and over the decades it has admirably led the fight against poverty -- except in the one way that would have the greatest impact.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
On the Ground
Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.
Good schools constitute a far more potent weapon against poverty than welfare, food stamps or housing subsidies. Yet, cowed by teachers' unions, Democrats have too often resisted reform and stood by as generations of disadvantaged children have been cemented into an underclass by third-rate schools.
President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are trying to change that -- and one test for the Democrats will be whether they embrace administration reforms that teachers' unions are already sniping at.
It's difficult to improve failing schools when you can't create alternatives such as charter schools and can't remove inept or abusive teachers. In New York City, for example, unions ordinarily prevent teachers from being dismissed for incompetence -- so the schools must pay failed teachers their full salaries to sit year after year doing nothing in centers called "rubber rooms."
A devastating article in The New Yorker by Steven Brill examined how New York City tried to dismiss a fifth-grade teacher for failing to correct student work, follow the curriculum, manage the class or even fill out report cards. The teacher claimed that she was being punished for union activity, but an independent observer approved by the union confirmed the allegations and declared the teacher incompetent. The school system's lawyer put it best: "These children were abused in stealth."
In the past few weeks Milwaukee has had numerous town hall meetings, panel discussions, and presentations regarding the idea of school district governance reform. At issue is whether the mayor of Milwaukee should be in charge of the Milwaukee Public Schools, rather than an independent board of directors.
At each of these meetings, accountability has been thrown about as both an argument for and against a mayoral take-over of the district. Perhaps a mayor elected in a higher turn-out citywide election would provide more accountability; or maybe losing the opportunity to elect a school board representative would disenfranchise certain voters, diluting accountability.
In Pittsburgh, civic leaders, parents, and citizens decided to stop talking about accountability and actually implement it. A local nonprofit group, A+ Schools: Pittsburgh’s Community Alliance for Public Education, started an initiative called "Board Watch" last winter. The idea is quite simple: send volunteers to attend every board and committee meeting and have them report to the public whether the board is being effective in meeting the district's strategic goals.
Oregon, more than any other state, relies on its residents' income tax payments for revenue, while its northern neighbor, Washington, depends more heavily than any other state on sales taxes, according to a new 50-state analysis of state finances.
The analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation uses newly released U.S. Census Bureau data about state and local government finances in fiscal year 2007 (the latest year for which statistics are available) to break down each state's tax revenue sources and group states by which taxes they rely on most. The report combines state and local taxes for the sake of comparison because "what some states accomplish with local taxes is accomplished in other states with state-level taxes."
States that rely too heavily on one tax are vulnerable to revenue fluctuations that can be especially harmful during recessions. In Oregon, for instance, where individual income taxes account for 44.1 percent of total government tax revenue, lawmakers this year were slammed by a huge revenue decline as employment -- and personal income -- decreased. That has resulted in major spending cuts and is forcing some school districts to resort to four-day weeks.
With states jockeying for extra school dollars from the economic stimulus, Education Secretary Arne Duncan reminded them Tuesday the point is to help kids do better.
Cash-strapped states are competing for $5 billion in grants from the economic stimulus for changes the Obama administration wants, such as charter schools and teacher pay based on student performance.
"It's really not about the money _ it's about pushing a strong reform agenda that's going to improve student achievement," Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press.
States can't even apply for the money yet. Still, nine states have changed their laws or made budget decisions to improve their standing. The latest is California, where a bill was signed Sunday allowing student test scores to be used to evaluate teachers.
Duncan said the moves are encouraging. Still, he said states will have to do more than make promises.
"We're going to invest in those states that aren't just talking the talk but that are walking the walk," he said. "If folks are doing this to chase money, it's for the wrong reasons."
Community activists said the recent murder of a Fenger High School honor student exposes a problem many teens face every day: safe passage to and from school.
"I wonder how many more teens will be murdered while coming home from school," said Leonardo D. Gilbert, a Local School Council member in the Roseland community. "All this kid was trying to do was go home and it cost him his life. If we are going to save our children from violence we must make sure children have a safe way home from school."
According to Chicago police, Derrion Albert, 16, was murdered after school on Sept. 24 while waiting for a bus to go home.
"He was not in a gang but in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Michael Shields, a retired Chicago police officer who now works as director of security for Chicago Public Schools.
Mayor Richard Riordan, your disappointment in the progress of educational reform in the Los Angeles Unified School District, after all you've done as mayor and secretary of education under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was palpable in your Oct. 12 Times Op-Ed article, "Course outline for the LAUSD." This lack of progress breaks my heart too.
At the risk of seeming presumptuous, may I make a suggestion to you and to educational reformers everywhere -- a suggestion that is based on experience, common sense and research?
I was an urban public high school English teacher for many years. I tried hard: I took courses in teaching reading and writing; I prepared for classes; I graded research papers on vacations; I won grants for my schools; I won teacher of the year awards; I got advanced degrees; I supported reform.
Michelle Rhee's senior staff meeting has all the ceremony of lunchtime in the teachers' lounge. News is exchanged. Ideas tumble around. Rhee sits at the head of the table but doesn't run the meeting or even take the conversational lead. Staffers talk over her as often as she talks over them. If consensus is the goal, the ball is far upfield.
But then, Rhee wades in with, "Here's what I think," or "What I don't want," or "This is crap," or "I want someone to figure this out," or "I'm gonna tell you what we're gonna do; we can talk about how we're gonna do it." And that is that. Next order of business, please.
Rhee's style--as steely as the sound of her peekaboo high heels on a linoleum-tile hallway--has angered much of Washington, D.C., and baffled the rest since she arrived as schools chancellor in June 2007. But it is also helping her gain control of a school system that has defied management for decades: that hasn't kept records, patched windows, met budgets, delivered books, returned phone calls, followed court orders, checked teachers' credentials, or, for years on end, opened school on schedule in the fall.
On an scathing attack, Sir Terry said that Tesco is the largest private employer in the country and therefore depends on high standards in schools.
"Sadly, despite all the money that has been spent, standards are still woefully low in too many schools. Employers like us are often left to pick up the pieces."
He added that too many educational agencies and bodies hamper the work of teachers in the classroom.
"One thing that government could do is to simplify the structure of our education system. From my perspective there are too many agencies and bodies, often issuing reams of instructions to teachers, who then get distracted from the task at hand: teaching children.
"At Tesco we try to keep paperwork to a minimum; instructions simple; structures flat; and - above all - we trust the people on the ground. I am not saying that retail is like education, merely that my experience tells me that when it comes to the number of people you have in the back office, 'less is more'," he said. Sir Terry was speaking at the Institute of Grocery Distribution's annual conference in London.
A kind reader forward this Dutch student curriculum statement:
Lievemaria.nl was een initiatief dat begin 2006 opgezet is door alle wiskunde en natuurkunde studieverenigingen van Nederland. Naar aanleiding van deze actie heeft toenmalig minister Maria van der Hoeven op dinsdag 24 januari 2006 haar plannen met betrekking tot aanpassen van de Tweede Fase aangepast
(Bekijk het nieuwste persbericht, de e-mailconversatie met een medewerker van de minister, het tentamen dat de Kamerleden voorgeschoteld kregen, lees de echte brief (pdf) of de korte versie hieronder)
Wij zijn boos. Wij merken dat wij het universitair niveau eigenlijk niet aankunnen. Er treden dagelijks situaties op waarbij we merken dat we te weinig wiskunde op de middelbare school hebben gehad. Daarom moeten wij nu bijspijkercursussen volgen, of zelfs stoppen met onze studie. Wij horen het geklaag van onze docenten, maar wat kunnen wij eraan doen? Wij zouden willen dat we meer wiskunde hadden gehad op de middelbare school.
Nu bent u bezig om het onderwijs te vernieuwen. Goed idee! Maar we hoorden dat u van plan bent om nòg minder wiskunde te geven. Als u dat doorzet, dan kunnen de nieuwe studenten straks helemaal niets meer begrijpen! Het lijkt ons een beter idee om juist méér wiskunde te geven!
With states jockeying for extra school dollars from the economic stimulus, Education Secretary Arne Duncan reminded them Tuesday the point is to help kids do better.
Cash-strapped states are competing for $5 billion in grants from the economic stimulus for changes the Obama administration wants, such as charter schools and teacher pay based on student performance.
"It's really not about the money -- it's about pushing a strong reform agenda that's going to improve student achievement," Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press.
States can't even apply for the money yet. Still, nine states have changed their laws or made budget decisions to improve their standing. The latest is California, where a bill was signed Sunday allowing student test scores to be used to evaluate teachers.
Duncan said the moves are encouraging. Still, he said states will have to do more than make promises.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says paying public school teachers based on their performance is his "highest priority," and he plans to dole out hundreds of millions of dollars to states and school systems that embrace the idea. In the District of Columbia, Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has made such reform a cornerstone of her agenda -- and a backdrop to her recent move to lay off 229 teachers in response to budget cuts. But school reformers have been trying unsuccessfully to introduce performance pay in public education for decades. If today's reformers want to break the deadlock, they're going to have to let go of several myths hanging over the debate:
1. Merit pay has a strong track record.
The logic of performance pay is compelling: Paying teachers based on the college credits they've amassed and the years they've taught -- a practice introduced in the 1920s to counter salary disparities between male and female teachers -- means bad teachers draw the same paychecks as good ones. That, in turn, seemingly makes it tougher to recruit and retain talented teachers, meaning students end up with inferior instructors. No surprise, then, that people have been pushing merit pay for a long time: "Every effort must be made to devise ways to reward teachers according to their ability without opening the school door to unfair personnel practices," a commission urged President Dwight Eisenhower in 1955.
All the people participating already knew that dropping out is a bad idea. He needed to invite those prison inmates, those who are unemployed, and those in poverty for the input about what would have been most helpful to have met their needs when they were in school. That's where the answers are.
My own middle school once held annual forums with our students who had gone on to high school, and we purposely wanted to talk, not with just the A-students, but with the C students and the D-minus students. We asked them what we as a middle school could have done better in hopes of finding insights for our continual improvement.
A teacher or counselor can make his/her best "argument" to a young person that his/her life will be more successful if he/she stays in school, but that young person may drop out anyway. We need that person's input by hindsight as to what we all could have done better in the face of what the rest of us see as common sense but, nevertheless, led to a decision for which that dropout was still on his/her own responsibility.
Bennett further cites that Indiana is "raising the bar for every student" through academic standards. While we must always analyze what we expect our students to learn and continuously try to measure their success, raising standards for the sake of raising standards will not save students who are failing in school. That would be akin to requiring students to pass a test on algebra who haven't learned to multiply and divide or requiring students with limited English or learning disabilities to test at the same standards at a chonological age while saying we need, as Bennett said, "targeted, individualized improvement plans for these students."
There seems to be a contradiction here. The state has an ISTEP test that it keeps tweaking and changing, giving little comparison to previous results although those comparisons are made anyway and schools are graded in an apples-and-oranges world. Give the test some time.
Nothing the candidates said during tonight's mayoral debate was more surprising than the Rev. Billy Talen's spirited heckling, but a few choice comments were made about the city's schools and mayoral control.
Right out of the gate, Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched into a list of comparisons between the Department of Education during the last eight years and the Board of Education during the time that Comptroller Bill Thompson was president. He recited graduation statistics, said that schools are safer today than they were in the 1990s, and boasted about test scores increases.
Thompson said it was ironic that Bloomberg was holding him accountable for the city's schools when the mayor has repeatedly said that no one had control over the Board of Education.
"He pointed out, under the old Board of Education, no one was in charge. The mayor, the board, the chancellor, so many people were in charge, no one was in charge, so it's ironic that he would try and distort facts and information, try and change the past, to say that I was the person who was in charge of the Board of Education. Nothing could be further from the truth."
The forces lined up against D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee -- angry teachers, grumpy D.C. Council members, the nation's top teachers' union leader quarterbacking the opposition -- are essentially asking one question: Why can't you behave more like that nice Arne Duncan?
Indeed, with his aw-shucks humility and his anecdotes about playing b-ball with the president, Duncan has undeniable charm. That charm was honed in Chicago, where he never played in-your-face politics and never publicly suggested there was widespread incompetence among the teaching force, qualities that contributed to President Obama's tapping him to be U.S. secretary of education.
By contrast, Rhee appeared on the cover of Time wielding a broom to symbolically sweep incompetence out of her public schools. Yikes.
But there's a reason Rhee plays hardball: She has no choice.
As a presidential aspirant last year, Barack Obama gained the support of the National Education Association -- and the scorn of school choice activists -- when he declared his skepticism of the school choice and accountability measures in the No Child Left Behind Act. Then in the early months of this year, the newly-elected president further pleased teachers unions when he tacitly allowed congressional Democrats to shutter the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Plan, the school voucher program that helps 1,716 Washington students attend private schools -- even though he avoided sending his own children to D.C.'s abysmal public schools.
Declared Cato Institute Director Andrew Coulson this past May in the Washington Post: "[Obama] has sacrificed a program he knows to be efficient and successful in order to appease the public school employee unions."
Wisconsin taxes as a percentage of personal income are 12th highest nationwide and greater than any of its neighbors, according to a new report.
The Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance report was based on U.S. Census Bureau data from 2007, the most recent year available.
While the tax burden has been steady in recent years, the president of the independent Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance said Monday he expects it to get worse given recent tax increases and slowed growth in personal income.
During the earlier part of the decade, personal income in Wisconsin grew faster than the national average while taxes increased less, said Todd Berry, president of the alliance.
However, Wisconsin faced a record state budget shortfall this year as tax revenue took a dive during the recession. That resulted in the Legislature approving about $3 billion in tax increases to be collected by mid-2011. That doesn't count local property taxes, which also are expected to increase by hundreds of millions of dollars.
On Friday, Detroit Public School officials said Robert Bobb, 61, the DPS emergency financial manager plans to spend $40 million for consulting fees.
The fees will be spent in an ongoing effort to conduct internal financial audits to root out waste and corruption in Detroit Public Schools.
In March, Gov. Jennifer Granholm appointed Bobb to clean up the district's deficit estimated to be at $259 million.
However union leaders say they unhappy about the money that is going to spent on advisers since there has been approximately 2,500 layoffs since summer.
Bobb said finding costs savings is critical to improving the district's finances and said he doesn't want to lose one cent that should be given to classrooms.
Palo Alto Unified school district's Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) provides educational opportunities that recognize the performance capabilities of gifted students as well as addresses the unique needs and differences associated with having these abilities. The goals of Gifted and Talented Education can be defined as follows:
To provide students with opportunities for learning that maximize each students' abilities.
To assist and encourage students to acquire skills and understanding at advanced academic and creative levels.
To aid students in expanding their abilities to communicate and apply their ideas effectively.
To engender an enthusiasm for learning.
Program Model
In elementary and middle school, the program model for GATE is differentiation within the mainstream classroom. In 2001, new legislation called for a change in GATE education. Rather than pull children from class for a different curriculum, all differentiation takes place within the context of standards-based instruction in the regular classroom. Teachers enrich and extend the core curriculum for gifted students by differentiating instruction, content, and process. Through differentiated assignments developed to meet their academic and intellectual needs, GATE students are able to explore and expand to their maximum potential. These differentiated curricular opportunities are available to all students, not just those who are formally identified. In middle school, students also have access to the Renzulli Learning System to allow them to individualize their education based on their needs, interests and creative abilities and to explore the curriculum in greater depth and complexity. Advanced math courses are available for the first time in 7th grade and continue through 12th grade. In high school, gifted students are able to take advanced, honors, and advanced placement courses in a wide variety of subjects.
AS EDUCATION reform moves forward, Boston Teachers Union president Richard Stutman says he wants an inclusive process. Testifying at a recent State House hearing, Stutman told the Legislature's Joint Committee on Education that "the solution to better school lies in working with us, not in working against us.'' But no collaborative spirit is evident in the union's resistance to bringing the acclaimed Teach for America program to Boston or creating more pilot schools.
Teach for America trains new college graduates who weren't education majors to work as teachers in urban and rural districts, generally in hard-to-fill areas such as math, science, and special education. The school system opened itself up to union criticism by signing an agreement with Teach for America that could be construed to give its teachers more job security than union teachers, offering Teach for America recruits two years of employment while regular recruits can be laid off after one. The School Committee has pledged to rectify the discrepancy.
In theory, a quick settlement could be a model for the kind of cooperation Stutman says he wants. But the union has a more basic, and less justifiable, objection: It maintains that laid-off teachers should be retrained for empty positions - even if, in practice, the laid-off teachers aren't cut out for the vacancies.
W hen Mark Yudof addressed the Uni versity of Califor nia's board of regents recently, what would have normally been a quiet gathering turned into a circus.
Fourteen people were arrested after protesting against cuts in the funding of the UC network, which includes UCLA, Berkeley and San Diego and business schools such as Haas , the Anderson School of Management and the Rady School of Management.
As California grapples with a budget crisis that has affected all public services, the UC system has been asked to absorb a funding shortfall of more than $800m. Student protests on a scale unseen since the anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s have been held at Berkeley, while other protests have been held at UCLA and UC Irvine.
Mr Yudof, the president of the UC system, told the regents that steep tuition fee rises were un-avoidable. "What we cannot do is surrender to the greatest enemy of the University of California, which is mediocrity. We have to stabilise our situation and then we can build [again]."
All across Wisconsin, schools received boxes and boxes of stuff they didn't want last week.
Unfortunately, they were about the most important deliveries they'll get this year: Hundreds of thousands of test booklets for the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam, the state's annual standardized test.
The testing window, one of the biggest events in every school year, is about to open. More than 400,000 students in third through eighth grade, as well as in 10th grade, will be tested in either two or five subjects in coming weeks, with a handful of schools starting this week and the large majority doing the testing in November.
It's the test everyone loves to hate. It takes up large amounts of time and disrupts schedules for days on end. There are widespread complaints about what is actually tested. The test yields almost nothing that is useful to teachers in shaping the way they educate students. It's often a public relations problem and sometimes a nightmare if a school's scores are low or sometimes even just not better than the prior year.
Furthermore, the test is dying a slow death, and everyone knows it.
Just to be contrary, let's say something good about the WKCE. For all its flaws, it's the only broad scale accountability tool we've got in this state. It succeeds in putting a lot of heat on schools across the state, and many of them need it.
And the test scores are actually a pretty good reflection of student achievement in a school - which is to say, I've never heard of a school with low scores that could make a convincing case that the kids were actually doing well and the scores were off base.
But the state testing system is moving toward an overhaul, and for good reasons.
Coming on the heels of the state's unprecedented budget crisis, the federal stimulus--also known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)--first received attention in California as a source of extra, much needed funding for schools.
In the months since, it has become increasingly clear that the reforms it embodies could have a bigger and more lasting impact than the nearly $8 billion it is providing to public K-12 education in the state.
The education components of the federal stimulus place a strong emphasis on four reform areas:
Zachary Christie is a six-year old student in Newark, Delaware who is facing 45 days in reform school because he brought his new Cub Scout eating utensil to school for lunch. The utensil includes a knife, and this violates the school's brainlessly, robotically enforced zero-tolerance policy on "weapons on school property."
Critics contend that zero-tolerance policies like those in the Christina district have led to sharp increases in suspensions and expulsions, often putting children on the streets or in other places where their behavior only worsens, and that the policies undermine the ability of school officials to use common sense in handling minor infractions.
"Something has to change," said Dodi Herbert, whose 13-year old son, Kyle, was suspended in May and ordered to attend the Christina district's reform school for 45 days after another student dropped a pocket knife in his lap. School officials declined to comment on the case for reasons of privacy.
A complex maze that used to determine what school students attended has been streamlined into an uncomplicated rule: students' addresses determine their school.
Students entering kindergarten, sixth grade and ninth grade in the 2010-11 year will be assigned to a school near their home. Students in other grades will remain at their current schools, an appropriate grandfathering that minimizes disruptions.
Many families won't notice a difference. For others, this plan is a huge change. Families living on Queen Anne and in Magnolia have long asked for a neighborhood high school so students weren't bused across the city. They're being assigned to one of the best: Ballard High School.
This shift is the correct route forward. After the district ended bussing for integration purposes, it veered into an expensive and convoluted open choice system. Families could choose any school they wanted but the result was a lack of predictability and stability. Most troubling, the system weighed heavily against less savvy families who were unable to navigate the application process.
These comments are excerpted from a Sept. 16 panel discussion on education and workforce preparation at Santa Clara University. The event, Projections 2010: Leadership California, was hosted by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
Moderator, Marshall Kilduff, Chronicle editorial writer: With a lot of bad news in education, including test scores, declining financial support, what would you do?
Mayor Gavin Newsom: I'll tell you what we've done in San Francisco. I believe not just in public-private partnerships. I believe in public-public partnerships. ... The City and County of San Francisco does not run its school district ... but, nonetheless, we've taken some responsibility to addressing the needs of our public-school kids by building a partnership. ... We focus on universal preschool. We've created a framework, a partnership, that guarantees the opportunity of a four-year college education for every single sixth-grader. It's those partnerships that I'm arguing for.
Aart J. De Geus, CEO, Synopsys: If I look at it as if I were the CEO of education of California, I would look at a company (in terms of), "What are the resources? What are the results? And what is the management system?" I'd say, "Well, let's look at the CEO of the educational system." There is no CEO of the educational system. I know there are commissioners, and whatever they're called, but, to be a CEO, you need to have both responsibility and power.
I want to love Michelle Rhee -- really, I do -- but she makes it so hard sometimes.
The D.C. schools chancellor has made it especially difficult this month with her layoffs of 229 teachers and 159 other staff workers. She picked a spectacularly bad time, just as the school year was shifting into high gear. She also mishandled the theatrics in such a way that she enraged the unions and D.C. Council even more than she usually does.
As a result, labor and political tensions simmering in the city over Rhee's reforms since she arrived in 2007 boiled over last week. The spillage might jeopardize her whole project and poses a significant challenge for her patron, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), as he seeks reelection next year.
The uproar is regrettable because the city and the region have a strong interest in seeing Rhee succeed. She is the first leader of the D.C. schools in recent memory who seems sufficiently tough and determined to fix the shockingly poor school performance that we've tolerated complacently for decades.
Let's review the record to examine the plausibility of those charges.
More than 14 months ago , Ms. Rhee offered a contract to Washington's teachers that was unprecedented in its largess. The proposal would have provided teachers with, at a minimum, a 28 percent pay raise over five years, plus $10,000 in bonuses. They would have had to give up nothing in the way of job security to obtain the raise. All Ms. Rhee asked in return was the freedom to offer, on a voluntary basis, even more money to a subset of teachers, if they would agree to have their compensation linked to performance. Their evaluation would have been based on a number of factors, including, but not limited to, the improvement their students showed from the beginning of the school year to the end. Ms. Rhee -- who has been branded anti-teacher -- wanted to make the District's teachers among the highest paid in America, and she had managed to raise private funds to make it possible.
Washington's teachers might well have welcomed this generous offer -- who wouldn't? -- but we don't know because Mr. Parker and other union leaders never allowed them to vote on a proposed contract. Labor law barred Ms. Rhee from directly explaining to teachers what she had in mind. At one point, it seemed that Mr. Parker and Ms. Rhee were close to an agreement, but then the national leadership stepped in. Since Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, involved herself, another 10 months have passed, and Washington's teachers remain without a contract. Talks are said to be continuing.
A snowflake is small. But a blizzard of snowflakes can bury a house.
You can view your looming property tax bill in similar ways.
A single tax increase by one local unit of government might seem negligible.
Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, for example, is proposing a $38 increase on the county's portion of the average local property tax bill in Madison for 2010. That's an increase of only a few dollars a month.
But that $38 represents a 6.5 percent increase at a time when most people's wages are relatively flat or falling. And that $38 pushes the county's portion of the average property tax bill in Madison to $626.
That oft-used refrain soon may have new meaning. Earlier this month, President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan proposed extending the school day, lengthening the school year and adding Saturday classes. Their laudable goal is to prepare the next generation for adulthood in an increasingly complex world.
Is this the way to do it? For at least one group of students, the answer is no. Based on studies I have read, the dropout rate for gifted students is between 5 and 20 percent.
What scourge is stealing so many of our smartest kids? Extreme debilitating boredom coupled with agile minds that can't let them patiently wait for the end of class. If we lengthen their classroom hours, how many gifted kids are likely to stay?
To understand how boredom feels to these kids, imagine making a school's fastest runner sit in a chair next to the track all day, every day, while her teammates are racing past her. Imagine her frustration. Imagine how she's going to feel about running after a few days of that. Most likely, she'll walk off the field and never turn back. By dropping out, that's what these lost gifted children do. Many of the boys leave to get a job. Many of the girls leave pregnant.
Teacher Kristin Bretch snaps instructions to her young charges, reading words from her teacher's guide, pacing in front of the white board like a drill sergeant.
"We're on word three: 'belt.' Spell 'belt,' everyone."
The pupils are second- and third-graders, almost all poor and many of whom could barely speak English when they arrived in Kansas City as refugees from countries like Burundi and Sudan, Vietnam and Somalia. They reply, almost shouting, in unison.
B-E-L-T. Belt.
Here, at the Della Lamb Charter Elementary School, these lessons go on for 227 days, compared with the average 180 days of most U.S. school districts.
The reason is clear:
"To make us smarter. To give us better brains," said Abdirihman Akil, age 9.
Exactly, said President Barack Obama. He and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have reiterated support for the idea of adding hours to the school day to boost academic achievement and compete with other nations.
The state budget that Gov. Rendell signed last night ensured that almost all school districts would get funding increases over last year.
The level of spending for education, the largest single item in the overall $27.8 billion budget and more than a third of the total, had been a point of contention between Rendell and many Republicans during the months-long standoff. But in the end, the agreement appeared to provide something for everyone.
"In a year where there is so much pain, with the economy the worst in anybody's memory, to be anything but happy about this budget would be foolish," Timothy Allwein, assistant executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said yesterday.
All school districts would get a hike of at least 2 percent in basic education funding, Pennsylvania's main subsidy to schools.
Statewide, the total K-12 increase, including federal funding, would be about $250 million over last year's level. Much of that would go to less wealthy districts.
"The school districts I've talked to are glad that they can now get down to implementing the programs they had planned on," Allwein said.
On the National Key Result Areas, the deputy premier said there were four areas that touched on education.
The first was on efforts for all children to attend pre-school from the present 63 per cent only. Starting next year, he said new schools would be built, starting with 378 classrooms, and in three years, all children would be able to attend pre-school.
"From our research, we found that pre-school is very important and we want to make it possible for everyone to send their children."
Secondly, Muhyiddin said it was the government's target that all children could read and count by the time they were in Year Three.
"We will identify weak students in Year One itself and provide special classes for them to ensure they are not left behind," he said.
The third area was to identify 100 schools in the next three years to be converted into high performance schools. These schools, Muhyiddin said, would cater for excellent students and receive additional assistance from the government.
At a time when taxpayers are struggling in this destabilizing recession and most are not seeing wage gains, the Appleton Area School District (AASD) has proposed a budget that increases the tax levy by 9.7%.
At a time when the state budget is suffering billion dollar deficits, when the state has cut its support of AASD, when enrollment has declined by 220 students, and when inflation is 0%, still the district's total budget increased by over $3 million (from $176 million to $179 million)!
The district's budget increase is primarily fueled by employee compensation increases, including an 8.2% increase in health care benefits - for a benefit plan that is already a Cadillac. Cost reductions could most certainly be achieved via increased efforts to decrease utilization and increased premium participation (school employees pay only 5% of their health insurance premium that for a family is almost $20,000 a year) and/or simply putting the very costly health insurance program out to bid. As it is now, the union dictates that the health insurance must be carried by an arm of WEAC.
In addition, though the budget reflects a wage freeze for administration employees, no such offer has been forthcoming from the teachers union.
Cultural and academic education shouldn't be separate and unequal, Alaska Commissioner of Education Larry LeDoux said on Wednesday.
"We can prepare kids to engage in any career they have a dream for and still be conversant in their language and their culture," he said.
LeDoux was speaking as part of an education panel at the 97th annual Grand Camp Convention of the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood. It's a convention in which education needs for the Native population features prominently: The theme is "Wooch.éen; Gu dángahl: Yes We Can! Cultural Unity through Education and Communication."
ANB President Brad Fluetsch also mentioned the gap between cultural and academic education, giving the example of harvesting a seal.
"To us, it's cultural education, but to the university, it's biology credits," he said.
LeDoux said the department is planning cultural training for new teachers, though it does not yet have funding. Seventy percent of Alaska teachers come from out of state, he said.
One thing for which the department does have funding is hiring a director of rural education, which LeDoux said will happen "any day now."
Milwaukee Public Schools could borrow up to $53.1 million interest-free to create new science and engineering laboratories, build a community learning center and repair aging schools, under a plan backed Wednesday by a Common Council committee.
If the plan wins final approval from the full council, federal stimulus dollars would pay the interest on the bonds and property taxes would be used to repay the principal. The School Board has voted to seek up to $53.1 million of the $72.1 million maximum that the federal government authorized for MPS borrowing, but the city issues school bonds.
Wednesday's vote by the council's Finance & Personnel Committee calls for the council to give preliminary approval Tuesday to borrowing the money without a referendum. Further action would be needed to issue the bonds. Mayor Tom Barrett plans to recommend a bond issue of about $48 million, said his chief of staff, Patrick Curley.
Michelle Nate, chief financial officer for MPS, said the ability to borrow at free or extremely low interest rates would allow the district to spend about $30 million on maintenance projects that have been put off for years.
"It's like any major expense (for a homeowner)," Nate said. "You know you need a new roof, but you put it off until you can afford it."
Today's speech showed a party committed to micro-managing schools, using policies that have no empirical backing
Michael Gove delivered a speech at the Conservative party conference which played to the prejudices of his audience. His oration was peppered again and again with talk of how the Labour party has failed the country in creating schools which lack discipline and high standards and fail to make our children literate or patriotic. Funnily enough though, he failed to mention that the academy that he felt was a beacon shining in a world of dross was in fact created by the Labour party.
Throughout his speech, he referred to the Labour initiative of academies as a panacea for our educational ills. If in power, the Tories would enable any school to become an academy. In this sense, this flagship policy is no different from Labour's.
Since Labor Day, County Exec Kathleen Falk has been calling it "the toughest budget since the Great Depression". Her mouthpiece, Josh Wescott, echoes the depression line, and adds another cliché - "the perfect storm" of declining revenues. Falk has proposed a 7.9% property tax increase and is hoping for a 3 percent wage cut from county employees.
Mayor Cieslewicz calls his plan "a budget for hard times", and says "the primary theme is steadiness". He's proposed the lowest spending increase in the past fifteen years. His operating budget will increase taxes 3.8% on the average Madison home. He's hoping other city employees will join the firefighters, who've agreed to no raises for two years, and then 3% at the end of the two-year period.
Following the recent incident of youth violence in Chicago, the Obama administration dispatched two Cabinet officials, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, to deal with the issue. Duncan says the issue is a national one -- not just urban or rural or suburban.
Reducing Crime, Violence, Disproportionate Black Incarceration Rates and Prison/Jail Overcrowding Through Education Reform of MPS
Q: Why as a top law enforcement official have you continually been outspoken on the failure of K-12 public education in Milwaukee?
For the seven years that I have been Sheriff of Milwaukee County, I have been outspoken on the research-proven nexus between school failure, violent crime and criminal behavior; between school failure and disproportionate minority incarceration rates; and between school failure and jail and prison overcrowding. The connection is clear and that's why I have had from day one a sense of urgency about the need to fundamentally improve K-12 public education in Milwaukee--and that means Milwaukee Public Schools.
If we're ever going to solve the problems of poverty, crime, violence, disproportionate minority incarceration rates and jail and prison overcrowding, no remedy is more important than dramatically improving MPS.
The head of Prince George's County schools vowed Tuesday night to "dramatically improve student achievement" as he said that the county had showed strong academic gains.
In his first State of the Schools address since becoming superintendent this year, William R. Hite Jr. said the system should try to "make every child in Prince George's County smarter." He spoke for greater accountability for teachers, more prekindergarten classes, better customer service and alternatives for students who aren't succeeding.
In recent years, Prince George's has experimented in some schools with a pay-for-performance model that offers bonuses to excellent teachers, and Hite said Tuesday that effective teachers can make significant differences.
"We cannot construct a definition [of teacher effectiveness] that does not include student performance as one of the indicators," Hite said.
The new chief officer of the public schools here, Ron Huberman, a former police officer and transit executive with a passion for data analysis, has a plan to stop the killings of the city's public school students. And it does not have to do with guns or security guards. It has to do with statistics and probability.
The plan comes too late for Derrion Albert, the 16-year-old who was beaten to death recently with wood planks after getting caught on his way home between two rival South Side gangs, neither of which he was a member, the police said.
The killing, captured on cellphone video and broadcast on YouTube, among other places, has once again caused widespread grief over a seemingly intractable problem here. Derrion, a football player on the honor roll, was the third youth to die violently this academic year -- and the 67th since the beginning of the 2007-8 school year. And hundreds of others have survived shootings or severe beatings on their way to and from school.
Fewer U.S. high schools and middle schools are selling candy and salty snacks to students, the federal government said in a report released Monday.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report was based on a survey of public schools in 34 states that compared results from 2006 to 2008. The study didn't report the total number of schools that have changed. Instead, it looked at the proportion of schools in each state.
It found that the median proportion of high schools and middle schools that sell sugary or salty snacks dropped to 36% from 54%. The share of schools that sell soda and artificial fruit drinks fell to 37% from 62%.
Three years after calling for a reordering of elementary and middle school math curricula, the nation's largest group of math teachers is urging a new approach to high school instruction, one that aims to build students' ability to choose and apply the most effective problem-solving techniques, in the classroom and in life.
Cultivating those skills will make math more useful, and more meaningful, to students, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics argues in a document scheduled for release this week.
"Focus in High School Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense Making" is a follow-up to the NCTM's 2006 document, "Curriculum Focal Points," which offered grade-by-grade content standards in math for prekindergarten through 8th grade. "Focal Points" won general praise in math circles, even from some of the NCTM's strongest critics.
The high school document has both a different purpose and a different structure. It is not a suggested set of content standards, but rather a framework that attempts to show how skills that the NCTM considers essential--reasoning and sense-making--can be promoted across high school math.
"Portfolio school districts are promising new developments but they still have big problems to solve," is how Dr. Paul Hill describes reforms in the four big cities being studied by his team at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), University of Washington Bothell.
In New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, school officials are revamping the traditional school district model: from being an operator of a uniform set of schools and related services to being a holder of a diverse portfolio of schools, each meant to meet a particular need, and all subject to evaluation in light of evidence.
"A portfolio district is built for continuous improvement via expansion and imitation of the highest-performing schools, closure and replacement of the lowest-performing, and constant search for new ideas," says Hill. "So far we've found that each city is taking a different approach to developing their portfolio. By the end of our study (in 2011), we think this will tell us a lot more about this approach to public education."
New York City - gave schools freedom over hiring and use of funds in return for accepting performance-based accountability and by adopting pupil-based funding of schools citywide.
September 17 is Constitution Day, marking the day 222 years ago in Philadelphia when the Constitution of the United States was signed. Legend has it that a woman asked Benjamin Franklin, as he was leaving the constitutional convention, what sort of government had been created. Franklin's reply: "A republic, if you can keep it."
A major justification for supporting a system of public schools has been the promotion of a general diffusion of civic knowledge necessary for a well-informed citizenry. America's founders, hoping to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," knew that our system of ordered liberty would endure only if its citizens understood the nation's guiding principles. The endurance of American liberty, the founders believed, depends upon a broad knowledge of the nation's history and an understanding of its institutions.
Charles N. Quigley, writing for the Progressive Policy Institute, once explained the critical nature of civic knowledge: "From this nation's earliest days, leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams recognized that even the well-designed institutions are not sufficient to maintain a free society. Ultimately, a vibrant democracy must rely on the knowledge, skill, and virtues of its citizens and their elected officials. Education that imparts that knowledge and skill and fosters those virtues is essential to the preservation and improvement of American constitutional democracy and civic life.
"The goal of education in civics and government is informed, responsible participation in political life by citizens committed to the fundamental values and principles of American constitutional democracy."1
For its part, the State of Oklahoma also lays out the goals of social studies education. According to the state's academic standards: "Oklahoma schools teach social studies in Kindergarten through Grade 12. ... However it is presented, social studies as a field of study incorporates many disciplines in an integrated fashion, and is designed to promote civic competence. Civic competence is the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required of students to be able to assume 'the office of citizen,' as Thomas Jefferson called it.
eachers punished for speaking out. Principals fired for trying to do the right thing. Union leaders defending the indefensible. Bureaucrats blocking new charter schools. These are just some of the people we meet in The Cartel. The film also introduces us to teens who can't read, parents desperate for change, and teachers struggling to launch stable alternative schools for inner city kids who want to learn. We witness the tears of a little girl denied a coveted charter school spot, and we share the triumph of a Camden homeschool's first graduating class.
Together, these people and their stories offer an unforgettable look at how a widespread national crisis manifests itself in the educational failures and frustrations of individual communities. They also underscore what happens when our schools don't do their job. "These are real children whose lives are being destroyed," director Bob Bowdon explains.
The Cartel shows us our educational system like we've never seen it before. Behind every dropout factory, we discover, lurks a powerful, entrenched, and self-serving cartel. But The Cartel doesn't just describe the problem. Balancing local storylines against interviews with education experts such as Clint Bolick (former president of Alliance for School Choice), Gerard Robinson (president of Black Alliance for Educational Options), and Chester Finn (president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute), The Cartel explores what dedicated parents, committed teachers, clear-eyed officials, and tireless reformers are doing to make our schools better for our kids.
BETWEEN classes at Fenger High School, on the far South Side of Chicago, hundreds of students churn through the halls. Elizabeth Dozier, the new principal, keeps a watchful eye. "Let's go, gentlemen!" she shouts. "Let's go to class!" Ms Dozier wears a two-way radio to deal with problems the minute they arise. One is small: the girls' toilets have no paper towels. One is bigger: there's a brawl upstairs. It's not to be ignored: on September 24th an honour-roll student was beaten to death near Fenger, swept up in senseless violence.
For an idea of the task confronting Arne Duncan, Barack Obama's education secretary, Fenger is a good place to start. The school lies closer to Indiana's mills than Chicago's Magnificent Mile. From 2006 to 2008 fewer than 3% of pupils met Illinois's meagre standards of achievement. But this year everything is supposed to change. The Chicago school district chose Fenger as a "turnaround". Old teachers have been sacked and new programmes put in place. Fenger faces formidable odds. But if Mr Duncan has his way, the school's transformation will be the start of a larger shift.
New Superintendent Terry Grier wasn't shy about sharing his opinions at his first workshop with the school board last week.
On technology in HISD: "I think we are very, very far behind in technology for a district our size." I'd expect Grier to push for major technology upgrades in the district, but could he fund them without another bond referendum? In San Diego, Grier oversaw the passage of a bond that included funding for a one-to-one technology package, where every classroom will get
a laptop for every student, an interactive white board, digital cameras and an audio system. Research hasn't always supported the give-every-kid-a-laptop approach, but perhaps HISD can learn from the San Diego experiment.
On principals: Grier said the district has to change how it selects and interviews principals. He said his staff recently brought him a few candidates to interview and he wasn't pleased with the quality. After that, he said he basically told his staff, "If you can't bring me better principals to interview, don't bring them." Just because a candidate is popular with a school board member or the community doesn't mean that person can lead, Grier said. Ouch! Read here about the so-called Haberman interview process Grier implemented in Guilford County (and perhaps in San Diego too).
Ohio appears well-positioned to win a share of $4 billion in federal education money, but the state's budget problems and limits on charter schools could prove costly.
Although education officials believe Ohio can meet the requirements for funding, the most creative proposals will win out. "We have to think innovatively," said Scott Blake, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education.
Blake's department is preparing the state's application for the federal aid. Called "Race to the Top," the money was set aside to create rigorous academic standards, data systems for measuring student success, tougher teacher evaluations, and to turn around low-performing schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is paying for private firms to help Ohio and 15 other states prepare their grant applications.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said the Obama administration wants to reward states willing to commit to significant education initiatives, including tax-funded, privately operated charter schools that have been controversial in Ohio and elsewhere.
"I think, based on outside evaluations that have been done by the Gates Foundation and others, Ohio is fairly well positioned for Race to the Top dollars," said Terry Ryan, vice president for Ohio programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Dayton.
Anyone who wants to appreciate how strong a grip high school has on the American imagination -- and how clueless some school districts are about this -- should consider the story of Drew Gamblin, a 16-year-old student at Howard High School in Ellicott City.
Drew, a child so gifted he taught himself to write at age 3, craves a high school education and all that comes with it -- debate team, music, drama and senior prom.
After a series of inexplicable decisions by Howard County school officials, such as requiring him to stay in a Howard High algebra class he had already mastered, his parents decided to home-school him and put him in college classes. But Drew insisted on his high school dream.
So he is back at Howard, although it's not clear what grade he is in, and the school district is making it hard to enjoy what the school has to offer. He is being forced to take a world history course he already took at Howard Community College and a junior-year English course he took at home, as well as classes in other subjects he has studied.
A Milwaukee-area middle school. Two boys playing around, nothing terrible, but things get a bit too rough. One of them tears the sleeve of the other one's shirt. Not such a big deal - except the shirt belonged to the boy's late father. It carried a lot of emotion for him.
The boy goes to pieces. He ends up in front of the principal.
The principal has an idea: Save the shirt. Convert it to short sleeves.
The principal goes to the school's family and consumer education teacher (OK, they were called home economics teachers in my day). She's only in the building part of the day, she doesn't teach sewing, she doesn't have the boy in class or even know him. But maybe she'll do it.
She does it - that evening, on her own time, the way lots of teachers do out-of-the-way things for their kids, or even for kids they don't directly teach.
The shirt is saved. The emotions are treated with dignity. By the next day, the boy again has this renewed memento of his father.
Earlier this year Robert Chanin, the recently retired general counsel for the National Education Association, discussed the effectiveness of teachers unions at a gathering in San Diego:
Despite what some of us would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children. And it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child.
NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.
You can see that portion of his 20 minute speech here:
Ben Chavis: "The Democrats have it wrong, guys," Chavis said Friday at a forum hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington. "We have screwed up the public school systems."
Although a Democrat, Ben Chavis, the former principal of the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, is an unlikely advocate for the education reform plan backed by President Obama.
Chavis bucks the conventions typically associated with his party's education platform, which is generally union-friendly.
"The Democrats have it wrong, guys," Chavis said Friday at a forum hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington. "We have screwed up the public school systems."
When he took over one of Oakland's worst-performing charter schools, he emphasized the importance of standardized test scores, shamelessly ousted teachers he considered substandard, and employed military-style discipline on his students.
Now, based on California's Academic Performance Index, only four middle schools in California perform better than his Oakland charter school, where 81 percent of kids are classified as low-income.
It is this style of teaching accountability that the Obama administration seeks to employ - much to the chagrin of unions - with Race to the Top, a competitive grant program for schools that the White House unveiled in July.
As thousands of laid off California teachers sit out the school year, educators are worried about the long-term effect of losing so many teachers. Some instructors are considering leaving the state or even the profession, and if history is any indication, fewer young people will pursue careers in teaching.
"The pipeline issue is one of the most significant challenges that we're dealing with, with the layoff situation or the pink-slipping," said Margaret Gaston, executive director of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, a Santa Cruz-based nonprofit focused on strengthening California's teacher workforce.
Faced with severe budget cuts, school districts last spring issued more than 27,000 pink slips. Although many of those teachers were eventually rehired by school districts, thousands are still out of work, existing on a combination of unemployment benefits, their savings, spouses' wages and substitute teaching income when possible.
Hundreds of teachers, social workers, librarians and superintendents made clear in a series of hearings across the state last week the challenges that face the next Virginia governor: Overworked teachers. Shorter library hours. Longer bus routes. Bigger class sizes.
"Virginia is 37th in the nation in per pupil state spending. That is a sad fact," said Jim Livingston, a math teacher from Prince William County, speaking Wednesday night before members of the state Board of Education at West Potomac High School in the Alexandria section of Fairfax County. "Further cuts in funding will make it all but impossible to provide the children of the commonwealth" with a high-quality education.
Both gubernatorial candidates have vowed to improve the public schools by raising teacher salaries and strengthening math and science instruction. Robert F. McDonnell (R) wants to increase the number of charter schools and institute a performance pay system to reward successful teachers. State Sen. R. Creigh Deeds (D-Bath) hopes to continue expanding access to pre-kindergarten and create a college scholarship program for students who pledge two years to public service.
A longer school year for American students? It would be the ideal reality if the Obama administration has its way.
Earlier this year, according to the Associated Press, President Obama said that, while an unpopular idea, longer school days and longer school years are necessary to deal with the challenges of a new century.
Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, recently told the Associated Press that America's "school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today."
"Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30% longer than our students here," Secretary Duncan said. "I want to just level the playing field."
While students in other countries might spend more days in school, students in America, on average, spend more hours in school each year, the Associated Press reported.
Dr. Gary Richards, superintendent of schools, said he doesn't necessarily agree with the President.
There shall be no cupcakes. No chocolate cake and no carrot cake. According to New York City's latest regulations, not even zucchini bread makes the cut.
In an effort to limit how much sugar and fat students put in their bellies at school, the Education Department has effectively banned most bake sales, the lucrative if not quite healthy fund-raising tool for generations of teams and clubs.
The change is part of a new wellness policy that also limits what can be sold in vending machines and student-run stores, which use profits to help finance activities like pep rallies and proms. The elaborate rules were outlined in a three-page memo issued at the end of June, but in the new school year, principals and parents are just beginning to, well, digest them.
My colleague Bill Turque has a terrific story today about D.C. Schools Chancellor MIchelle Rhee's plan to evaluate the effectiveness of her teachers and get rid of those who are not helping students learn.
The idea is full of risks. Rhee's plan to evaluate each teacher's class at the beginning of the year, based on prior test scores and other factors, and set a reasonable mark for their improvement, has not, as far as I can tell, ever been tried before on this scale.
There is only one reason why I think it has a reasonable chance of success, and his name is Jason Kamras. He is now Rhee's deputy for human capital, an unusual title, but I sort of understand what it means.
Turque said Kamras "led the effort to revamp the District's system" for assessing teachers. If Kamras were just another headquarters paper pusher, I would predict doom for his plan.
But he is one of the best teachers in the country. Long ago, I once spent a few days getting his life story and checking him out with other great teachers I know. He taught math at Sousa Middle School in the District, and also offered a photography class for those students, most of them from low-income families.
Quick: Which newspaper in recent editorials called teachers unions "indefensible" and a barrier to reform? You'd be excused for guessing one of the conservative outlets, but it was that bastion of liberalism, the New York Times. A month ago, The New Yorker--yes, The New Yorker--published a scathing piece on the problems with New York City's "rubber room," a union-negotiated arrangement that lets incompetent teachers while away the day at full salary while doing nothing. The piece quoted a principal saying that union leader Randi Weingarten "would protect a dead body in the classroom."
Things only got worse for the unions this past week. A Washington Post editorial about charter schools carried this sarcastic headline: "Poor children learn. Teachers unions are not pleased." And the Times weighed in again Monday, calling a national teachers union "aggressively hidebound."
In recent months, the press has not merely been harsh on unions--it has championed some controversial school reformers. Washington's schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who won't win any popularity contests among teachers, enjoys unwavering support from the Post editorial page for her plans to institute merit pay and abolish tenure.
When education pundits like me talk about the Ben Chavis. He is very different from us data-sifting eggheads. It is not an exaggeration to call him a wild man. He delights in upbraiding lazy students, outraging inattentive teachers and making wrong-headed visitors to the school wish they had stayed home. He has the independent spirit of someone who had a successful career in construction, teaching and business before the then-woebegone AIPCS board asked him to rescue the school. He didn't need the job. He did it mostly as a favor to fellow Native Americans--he was born into a Lumbee Indian family of sharecroppers in North Carolina--and as a challenge. He has many of the habits of some of the best educators I know--a wicked sense of humor, a weakness for shocking the conventionally wise and a deep love of children, particularly those who have had difficult lives. I was not initially surprised when I read his new autobiography, "Crazy Like A Fox: One Principal's Triumph in the Inner City," written with Carey Blakely, a teacher and administrator who helped him launch the American Indian Public High School. His story was much like those of other ground-breaking educators I have known.">American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, Calif., the conversation is always about the middle school's leader, Ben Chavis. He is very different from us data-sifting eggheads. It is not an exaggeration to call him a wild man. He delights in upbraiding lazy students, outraging inattentive teachers and making wrong-headed visitors to the school wish they had stayed home.
He has the independent spirit of someone who had a successful career in construction, teaching and business before the then-woebegone AIPCS board asked him to rescue the school. He didn't need the job. He did it mostly as a favor to fellow Native Americans--he was born into a Lumbee Indian family of sharecroppers in North Carolina--and as a challenge. He has many of the habits of some of the best educators I know--a wicked sense of humor, a weakness for shocking the conventionally wise and a deep love of children, particularly those who have had difficult lives.
I was not initially surprised when I read his new autobiography, "Crazy Like A Fox: One Principal's Triumph in the Inner City," written with Carey Blakely, a teacher and administrator who helped him launch the American Indian Public High School. His story was much like those of other ground-breaking educators I have known.
The increasing use of smart drugs or "nootropics," to boost academic performance, could mean that exam students will face routine doping tests in future, suggests an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
Despite raising many dilemmas about the legitimacy of chemically enhanced academic performance, these drugs will be near impossible to ban, says Vince Cakic of the Department of Psychology, University of Sydney.
He draws several parallels with doping in competitive sports, where it is suggested that "95%" of elite athletes have used performance enhancing drugs.
"It is apparent that the failures and inconsistencies inherent in anti doping policy in sport will be mirrored in academia unless a reasonable and realistic approach to the issue of nootropics is adopted," he claims.
As I point out in the following, unpublished letter to the editor, that is what we in the business call "a lie:"
It's unfortunate that officials of a taxpayer-funded university felt the need to deceive in order to get more taxpayer dough, but that's what UC Berkeley's Robert Birgeneau and Frank Yeary did. Writing about the supposedly dire financial straits of public higher education ("Rescuing Our Public Universities," September 27), Birgeneau and Yeary lamented decades of "material and progressive disinvestment by states in higher education." But there's been no such disinvestment, at least over the last quarter-century. According to inflation-adjusted data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers, in 1983 state and local expenditures per public-college pupil totaled $6,478. In 2008 they hit $7,059. At the same time, public-college enrollment ballooned from under 8 million students to over 10 million. That translates into anything but a "disinvestment" in the public ivory tower, no matter what its penthouse residents may say.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. The term "cut" is often used when referring to a reduction in the annual increase in education spending.
More on Singapore Math & The Madison School District
Next week's Madison School Board agenda includes a number of pages [PDF] regarding the purchase of Singapore Math materials for elementary schools. Recent activity on this front included the purchase of workbooks without textbooks.
Inflation Adjusted United States Federal Spending Per Pupil & Achievement of 17 Year Olds, % Change since 1970
Andrew Coulson, via a kind reader's email:
The debate over No Child Left Behind re-authorization is upon us.
Except it isn't.
In his recent speech kicking off the discussion, education secretary Arne Duncan asked not whether the central federal education law should be reauthorized, he merely asked how.
Let's step back a bit, and examine why we should end federal intervention in (and spending on) our nation's schools... in one thousand words or less:
With the Obama administration trying to turn around failing schools, the nation's largest teachers' union will ask its local bargaining units to waive contract language that might hamper school districts from staffing troubled schools with highly qualified teachers.
For the National Education Association, the announcement represents a major shift away from some of its traditional stands regarding teacher staffing. Some observers, however, expressed caution about whether it will result in significant change.
School administrators long have complained that collective-bargaining pacts often require them to fill job openings based on seniority, leading experienced teachers to transfer out of low-performing, high-poverty schools as soon as they can find an opening elsewhere in a district. Many union agreements also bar districts from using merit pay or other incentives to persuade their best teachers to staff these schools.
As a result, students in such schools are more likely to be taught by teachers who have little experience or expertise in their field. Four out of 10 classes in high-poverty schools are taught by out-of-field teachers, more than double the rate found in more affluent schools, according to a 2008 study by the Education Trust, a research and advocacy group that focuses on low-income schools.
Annual 'Count Day' Determines How Much State Money Schools Will Get; a Test for District's Emergency Financial Manager
Public school districts across Michigan mobilized Wednesday to boost attendance for Count Day, the annual fall roll call that largely determines how much money each district receives under the state's per-pupil funding system.
Students in Detroit were treated to free meals, ice-cream parties, T-shirts, celebrity visits and a chance to win iPods and a plasma-screen TV -- just for showing up for class.
Districts received an average of $7,810 per student last year, but that could decline by more than $200 a pupil this year as Michigan looks to close a $1.7 billion budget hole. Every student in class Wednesday represented funding for the school year.
The stakes were especially high for the Detroit Public Schools, where Wednesday's carnival atmosphere masked grim financial realities. Enrollment has plummeted roughly 50% in the past decade, contributing to a $259 million deficit this year that has put the district on the brink of bankruptcy.
The results of the count will serve as the first report card for Robert C. Bobb, the district's state-appointed emergency financial manager, who is hoping to stave off bankruptcy and stabilize enrollment. Detroit schools this summer launched a $500,000 campaign aimed at keeping students that included ads by Bill Cosby.
"No, wait!" Abigail said. "I'm not finished!" She was bent low over her clipboard, a stubby pencil in her hand, slowly scratching out the letters in the book's title, one by one: T H E. . . .
"Abigail, we're waiting!" Jocelyn said, staring forcefully at her classmate. Henry, sitting next to her, sighed dramatically.
"I'm going as fast as I can!" Abigail said, looking harried. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and plowed ahead: V E R Y. . . .
The three children were seated at their classroom's listening center, where their assignment was to leaf through a book together while listening on headphones to a CD with the voice of a teacher reading it aloud. The book in question was lying on the table in front of Jocelyn, and every few seconds, Abigail would jump up and lean over Jocelyn to peer at the cover, checking what came next in the title. Then she would dive back to the paper on her clipboard, and her pencil would carefully shape yet another letter: H U N. . . .
In the wake of a study finding charter schools help close the student achievement gap, Mayor Michael Bloomberg today announced a series of steps to expand and otherwise bolster charter schools in the city. (We're not sure why this announcement came from his campaign and not the mayor's office or the education department but it did.)
Much of the plan suggests proposals that charter proponents have sought for a while: lifting the cap on the number of charter schools, giving the schools chancellor the power to grant charters (an authority that now rests with the State Board of Regents) and streamlining the charter review process.
But the statement also provides additional evidence of the mutual back scratching between the Bloomberg administration and the Harlem Children's Zone and its founder, Geoffrey Canada.
In the Southeast section of Washington, a public boarding school sits on four compact acres, enclosed by an eight-foot-high black metal fence. Behind the fence, the modern buildings of the SEED School are well scrubbed and soaked in prep-school culture. Pennants from Dartmouth, Swarthmore and Spelman decorate the hallways. Words that might appear on the next SAT -- "daedal," "holus-bolus," "calamari" -- are taped to bathroom and dorm walls. And inside the cafeteria hang 11-by-15-inch framed photos of SEED grads in caps and gowns, laughing, clutching diplomas.
Beyond the fence, the scene is a different one. Despite some recent development, Southeast's Ward 7, where SEED is located, and neighboring Ward 8, remain the most impoverished parts of the city, with more than their share of tired liquor stores and low-slung public housing. In all of Ward 7, the 70,000 residents have just one sit-down restaurant, a Denny's.
A few days ago, President Obama talked about increasing the length of the school day and school year. Before I even had a chance to fashion a response in my head, I received this piece from K, who has been teaching science at a small independent college for over a decade and has written for this blog before here. She spends her leisure time learning from her three young boys. You can read more of her random thoughts at her blog, raisingthewreckingcrew.
A College Teacher's Response to President Obama's Idea of Lengthening the School Day
by K, A College Teacher
President Obama advocates increasing the length of the school day and the length of the school year. More School: Obama Would Curtail Summer Vacation.
There are many problems with this.
President Obama seems to be arguing: if something isn't working, what we really need is more of it. It just plain doesn't make sense. While some countries provide more learning in more time, there are other nations that make better use of less time and have better student outcomes.
The USA's largest teachers union will encourage local chapters to ignore contract provisions that in the past have kept school districts' best teachers out of schools that serve mostly poor and minority students.
Testifying Tuesday before the House education committee, National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel said the union, which represents about 3.2 million teachers and other workers, will ask local affiliates to draw up memoranda of understanding with local school districts that would "waive any contract language that prohibits staffing high-needs schools with great teachers."
Van Roekel said the move is part of the union's "Priority Schools" campaign that will also encourage "the most accomplished teachers-members" to start their teaching careers in high-needs schools, remain there or transfer there.
In the past, NEA has come under fire from critics for supporting contracts that allow experienced teachers with more seniority to transfer to schools that serve more middle-class children.
The Obama administration has set a goal of turning around 5,000 failing schools in the next five years, supported by an expected $3 billion in stimulus funds and $2 billion in the 2009 and 2010 budgets. Known in education circles and beyond as an aggressive agent of change, Barr has been in talks with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about how to boost failing schools and whether Green Dot's methods can serve as a blueprint for fixing schools across the country.
It was these same failing schools that inspired Barr to start Green Dot. Having known hard times in his youth, including some time as a foster child, Barr was drawn to improving schools for disenfranchised youth.
After working in politics for many years (and cofounding Rock the Vote), he began researching the push to wire all schools with technology. He saw a map that used green dots to represent schools with the necessary infrastructure to be wired and red dots for schools that lacked that foundation. Barr had the vision that every school should be a green dot, and thus began his crusade.
Green Dot consists of 19 small charter high schools in Los Angeles -- several of which were formerly part of Watts's infamous Locke High School, which Green Dot, in an unprecedented coup, broke down into smaller schools. In addition, Green Dot New York finished its first year last June.
FOR all its grand central squares and lively cultural scene, the Belgian port of Antwerp is not always a happy town. Flemish old-timers share its gritty streets with Arabs, Africans, Asians and, in the diamond district, Hasidic Jews. Race relations are not easy: in the latest local elections, a third of the vote went to Vlaams Belang, an anti-immigrant, far-right Flemish nationalist party. The handsome stone bulk of the Royal Atheneum, a once-elite state school with a 200-year history, has produced legendary free-thinkers and radicals in its day. Now, however, it is enjoying unhappy fame: as the centre of an experiment in multiculturalism wrecked by intolerance. The story defies neat conclusions.
In September 2001 Karin Heremans became headmistress of the Atheneum, which has students of 45 nationalities. The September 11th attacks on America came ten days after she took charge, and her schoolyard became the scene of "very intense" arguments. Ms Heremans responded by working hard to turn her school into a place of "active pluralism". A project about Darwin was led by science teachers but backed by a dialogue among the school's religious instructors. A local composer wrote a work with Christian, Jewish and Muslim passages for pupils to sing. There were debates on sexuality and elections. A fashion show saw girls invited to wear Muslim headscarves, or not: one teenager wore half a scarf to symbolise indecision.
In France Muslim headscarves, along with all ostentatious religious symbols, have been banned at state schools since 2004. It helps that France has a record of separating religion from the state going back more than a century (even a Christmas nativity play would be unthinkable at a French state school).
The national mathematics conference on Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) had a strong Madison School District presence, with teachers there as presenters and attendees.
MMSD teachers involved with the Expanding Math Knowledge grant had the opportunity to attend the conference this summer in San Diego. EMK was a two-year grant funded by the WI Dept. of Public Instruction. The MMSD Dept. of Teaching and Learning collaborated with the UW-Madison College of Education to provide continued and expanded math education for approximately 40 teachers in grades 3-5.
t's a complex story out of Massachusetts with a simple payoff: The state secretary of education wants charter school authorizations to be based on political considerations, and not on their educational merits.
It begins with reporter Patrick Anderson of the Gloucester Daily Times using a public records request to find a February 5 e-mail from Secretary of Education Paul Reville, Gov. Deval Patrick's school adviser, to Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester. Gov. Patrick, like many other governors, found religion in charter schools soon after the Obama administration made them a centerpiece of Race to the Top funding. But which charter school applications would be approved, and which rejected, seems to be less of an academic concern and more of a matter of political pressure. Here's the full text of the e-mail:
Mitchell,
Hope all's well and warm in AZ. I appreciated our talk today and your openness and flexibility. This situation presents one of those painful dilemmas. In addition to being a no-win situation, it forces us into a political cul de sac where we could be permanently trapped. Our reality is that we have to show some sympathy in this group of charters or we'll get permanently labeled as hostile and they will cripple us with a number of key moderate allies like the Globe and the Boston Foundation. Frankly, I'd rather fight for the kids in the Waltham situation, but it sounds like you can't find a solid basis for standing behind that one. I'm not inclined to push Worcester, so that leaves Gloucester. My inclination is to think that you, I and the Governor all need to send at least one positive signal in this batch, and I gather that you think the best candidate is Gloucester. Can you see your way clear to supporting it? Would you want to do the financial trigger even in light of likely stimulus aid?
With the release of a study showing New York's charter schools are a big success - a study chock-full of stubborn facts - critics of charter schools in New York ought to be learning a lesson.
That's wishful thinking; the critics are simply adjusting their talking points to ignore a reckoning with the increasingly persuasive reality that charter schools are good for kids.
The most important finding of the new study - led by Prof. Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University, in collaboration with colleagues from the Wharton School and the National Bureau of Economic Research - is that "a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86% of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66% of the achievement gap in English," with students attending for shorter periods of time realizing "commensurately smaller" gains.
Spending more, adding extracurricular activities and increasing the percentage of students deemed advanced on state tests could help Wisconsin school districts that want to attract more students through the state's open enrollment program.
Those are some of the main conclusions of a new study examining student transfers between 2003 and 2007 under the state's public school choice program. [Open Enrollment SIS links.]
"There's a lot of surveys saying parents want this or they want that, but when they actually have to take their kid and drive them to school, that reveals what they really want in a school district," said David Welsch, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lead author of the study, which is slated for publication in the Economics of Education Review.
Under the state's open enrollment program, which has been in effect for more than a decade and now serves more than 28,000 students, students can attend any public school district in Wisconsin so long as there is room and they provide their own transportation. State aid - nearly $6,500 this school year - accompanies each open enrollment transfer.
One of the most striking findings in the recent study was that students were more likely to transfer from districts with higher property values and lower tax rates to districts that spend more per pupil. For every $100 difference in spending per student, a higher-spending district could expect about 1.7% more incoming transfers.
On July 11, Brian Betts, principal of the District's Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson, was at Dulles International Airport about to leave for a vacation in Spain. He was feeling good. His first year running a school whose students struggle with poverty and neighborhood strife had gone well, he thought. Quarterly test results were encouraging. Attendance was up. Parents were happy. Some of his staff had gone so far as to enroll their children at Shaw.
His cellphone rang. "Principal Betts? This is Chancellor Rhee."
"Hi, chancellor," he said.
"I wanted you to know that I am looking at the DC-CAS scores," the D.C. schools chancellor said, "and you're not going to be happy."
LAST week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan acknowledged standardized tests are flawed measures of student progress. But the problem is not so much the tests themselves -- it's the people scoring them.
Many people remember those tests as lots of multiple-choice questions answered by marking bubbles with a No. 2 pencil, but today's exams nearly always include the sort of "open ended" items where students fill up the blank pages of a test booklet with their own thoughts and words. On many tests today, a good number of points come from such open-ended items, and that's where the real trouble begins.
Multiple-choice items are scored by machines, but open-ended items are scored by subjective humans who are prone to errors. I know because I was one of them. In 1994, I was a graduate student looking for part-time work. After a five-minute interview I got the job of scoring fourth-grade, state-wide reading comprehension tests. The for-profit testing company that hired me paid almost $8 an hour, not bad money for me at the time.
One of the tests I scored had students read a passage about bicycle safety. They were then instructed to draw a poster that illustrated a rule that was indicated in the text. We would award one point for a poster that included a correct rule and zero for a drawing that did not.
Maybe this is the biggest problem facing Milwaukee Public Schools: A panel of national experts ripped reading programs overall in the city, saying they were ineffective, out of date, uncoordinated, led by teachers who were inadequately prepared and who were really doing nothing much to help struggling readers.
We're talking about reading. Reading. The core skill for success in just about any part of education and in life beyond school. A sore point for MPS for at least a couple decades. Last year, 40% of MPS 10th-graders rated as proficient in reading in state tests, a number in line with a string of prior years.
"The status quo will need to be changed - sometimes dramatically," said the report from a three-person review team brought in by the state Department of Public Instruction as part of its efforts under federal law to push change in MPS. The report was issued last December, calling for an overhaul of the way reading is taught in MPS - the curriculum used, the way teachers are trained, the way the whole subject is handled from top to bottom.
Since then, an MPS work group was named. The work group got an extension on the time it had to give a draft plan to the DPI. The draft plan was submitted. DPI officials gave some feedback. MPS officials revised their plan. DPI officials took awhile to respond with requests for more changes. It's late September now. A plan has not been approved. There's a meeting scheduled in early October.
With sound ideas and a commitment to rigorously monitor the states' progress, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has revitalized the school-reform effort that had lost most of its momentum by the closing days of the Bush administration.
His power to press for reforms was dramatically enhanced earlier this year when Congress gave him control of $4.3 billion in grant money -- the Race to the Top fund -- that is to be disbursed to the states on a competitive basis. Mr. Duncan will need to resist political pressure and special pleadings and reward only the states that are committed to effective and clearly measurable reform.
Mr. Duncan's exhortations, and the promise of so much cash, have already persuaded eight states to adopt measures favorable to charter schools, which Mr. Duncan rightly sees as crucial in the fight to turn around failing schools.
To be eligible for the money, every state must also show how student performance will be factored into their systems for evaluating teachers. And Mr. Duncan has asked the states to come up with plausible plans to turn around failing schools -- so-called dropout factories -- and to better serve minority students.
OPPONENTS OF charter schools are going to have to come up with a new excuse: They can't claim any longer that these non-traditional public schools don't succeed. A rigorous new study of charter schools in New York City demolishes the argument that charter schools outperform traditional public schools only because they get the "best students." This evidence should spur states to change policies that inhibit charter-school growth. It also should cause traditional schools to emulate practices that produce these remarkable results.
The study, led by Stanford University economics professor Caroline M. Hoxby, compared the progress of students who won a lottery to enroll in a charter school against those who lost and ended up in traditional schools. The study found that charter school students scored higher on state math and reading tests. The longer they stayed in charters, the likelier they were to earn New York state's Regents diploma for high-achieving students.
Most stunning was the impact that the charters had on shrinking the achievement gap between minority and white students. "On average," the study found, "a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the 'Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap' in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English." Researchers were careful not to draw conclusions, but they highlighted a correlation to practices such as a longer school day, performance pay for teachers, more time spent on English and effective discipline policies.
It's easy to feel a bit sorry for Madison school officials as they grapple with ways to close a $12 million gap in state funding.
"It sounds like this came out of left field, so I don't think anyone can be faulted for not imagining that something like this could happen," says Chan Stroman, a Madison parent with one child attending elementary school and two at a virtual school.
But feelings may change in December, school watchers say, when tax bills land in mailboxes and everyone starts to feel the pain.
The district proposes hiking property taxes -- $82.50 for owners of $250,000 homes. This and other solutions stress a school-community partnership, a balance between educational responsibility and fiscal fitness that has become the hallmark of superintendent Dan Nerad's administration.
Indeed, it's hard to talk about the current financial situation facing Madison's schools without hearing an opinion on how Nerad, who began his tenure in July 2008, is managing the situation.
Madison spends about 10% more per student than Dan Nerad's former District - Green Bay. Madison's student / staff ratio is about 7, while Green Bay's is 8. It will be interesting to see what, if any substantive program reviews occur locally, something that the New Superintendent and Board have promised to do. Details here.
The property tax burden falls on area homeowners more heavily than almost anywhere else in the nation.
In fewer than 2 percent of counties in the U.S. do property taxes take a bigger bite out of homeowners' incomes than they do in Atlantic County.
The chief reason is that, as reported earlier this week, New Jersey has the highest property taxes in the nation, according to the Tax Foundation in Washington, D.C. And in southern New Jersey, incomes are significantly lower than in the northern part of the state.
So while area residents can at least be glad that their taxes are not as high as in northern New Jersey - which has six counties among the top 10 most taxed in the nation - relatively high property taxes locally consume a big share of income.
Atlantic County, for example, has the 15th highest property tax burden out of 776 U.S. counties with populations of at least 65,000, according to the Tax Foundation. The median county homeowner must pay 6.8 percent of annual income to cover property tax.
All of the region's counties are in the top 15 percent - and most much higher - for property taxes paid and percentage of income required to pay the taxes.
Oakland campus caters to refugees, immigrants The international high school provides an alternative to newcomers, some of whom have never been in a classroom
Samuel Kanwea showed up for what should have been his freshman year in high school illiterate, malnourished and exhausted from years of living in a refugee camp in Ivory Coast. His family had never been able to afford the luxury of education, so he spent his early teenage years collecting firewood and selling fish.
When the Liberian refugee started school in Oakland at the age of 17, it was the first time he had set foot in a classroom.
"Everyone was speaking English and it confused me," said Kanwea, a lanky student with a wide smile. "And I felt scared because I think that I was the only one who didn't know how to read."
New immigrants and refugees have long posed challenges for educators in the United States, but Kanwea and others like him present unique problems because they are often strangers to traditional schools. Academic issues are only one facet of their adjustment. Not only must educators teach them English and move them toward graduation, but they also must counsel many students grappling with the trauma of wars, persecution or poverty.
While most school districts in California place newcomers directly into traditional campuses or short-term English-language programs, Oakland Unified School District offers them an alternative campus -- and the option to stay there until graduation. The Oakland International High School opened in 2007 to educate the city's recent refugees and immigrants, and now enrolls about 220 students from around the world, including from Yemen, Mongolia, Russia, Ghana and Honduras.
School officials don't take it lightly when a student brings a knife to campus.
But when they draw no distinction between a Bowie and a bread knife, discipline can go awry.
This year, schools throughout North Texas are implementing a new state law that ends such "zero tolerance" policies. Under House Bill 171, administrators now must consider mitigating factors such as intent and self-defense when doling out punishment.
That's welcome news for Robert Hess, whose son Taylor was briefly expelled from L.D. Bell High School in Hurst after a bread knife fell out of a 20-year-old cutlery set bound for Goodwill, and was found in his truck bed on campus.
"That certainly would have saved us an awful lot of trouble," said Hess, who holds no ill will toward school administrators over the 2002 incident. "They were bound by their own rules that they had written to dole out this ridiculous punishment, which was one year in alternative education."
Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxbyreleased yesterday an update to her 2007 study of charter schools in New York City.1 In the study, she compares the state examination results of students enrolled in the City's charter schools (i.e. those students "lotteried-in") to the results for those students who applied to a charter but were not selected for admission (i.e. the "lotteried-out"). In many respects, this is a good approach as it aims to account for the possibility that charters enroll more motivated families and that it is this motivation, rather than any particular charter school effect, that is the cause of stronger student achievement.
Hoxby's findings are encouraging: by the third grade, the average charter school student was 5.8 points ahead of the lotteried-out counterpart in math and was 5.3 points ahead in English Language Arts.2 As Hoxby follows students' achievement from 2001 to 2008, she also finds that the average charter school student gained 3.6 more points each year in math and 2.4 more points each year in ELA. For an average charter student continuously enrolled in grades four through eight, the effect is larger with annual gains of 5.0 points in math and 3.6 in ELA above the performance of the lotteried-out student. (Last year, nine charters enrolled students across all of these grades.)
To put this in some context, Hoxby explains that the difference between a student not meeting standard and meeting standard is about 31 points in math and 44 points in ELA. She also points out that, on average, students in neighboring and affluent Scarsdale typically out-perform students in New York City by 35 to 40 points. In this context, Hoxby claims that the compounded gains for an average student continuously enrolled in third to eighth grade in a charter nearly closes the "Harlem-to-Scarsdale" achievement gap and implies -- going outside of her dataset -- that the trend will continue.
The single biggest problem in American education is that no one agrees on why we educate. Faced with this lack of consensus, policy makers define good education as higher test scores. But higher test scores are not a definition of good education. Students can get higher scores in reading and mathematics yet remain completely ignorant of science, the arts, civics, history, literature and foreign languages.
Why do we educate? We educate because we want citizens who are capable of taking responsibility for their lives and for our democracy. We want citizens who understand how their government works, who are knowledgeable about the history of their nation and other nations. We need citizens who are thoroughly educated in science. We need people who can communicate in other languages. We must ensure that every young person has the chance to engage in the arts.
But because of our narrow-minded utilitarianism, we have forgotten what good education is.
DIANE RAVITCH
Ravitch is a historian. Her book ''The Death and Life of the Great American School System'' will be published in February.
Do Away With B.A.
Discredit the bachelor's degree as a job credential. It does not signify the acquisition of a liberal education. It does not even tell an employer that the graduate can put together a logical and syntactically correct argument. It serves as rough and unreliable evidence of a degree of intelligence and perseverance -- that's it. Yet across much of the job market, young people can't get their foot in the door without that magic piece of paper.
As President Obama promotes community colleges, he could transform the national conversation about higher education if he acknowledges the B.A. has become meaningless. Then perhaps three reforms can begin: community colleges and their online counterparts will become places to teach and learn without any reference to the bachelor's degree; the status associated with the bachelor's degree will be lessened; and colleges will be forced to demonstrate just what their expensive four-year undergraduate programs do better, not in theory but in practice.
CHARLES MURRAY
Murray is the W. H. Brady scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of ''Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality."
Over the past two days we have been able to learn more about this situation and would like to provide you with some additional information. The song was one of eight skits performed during a February 2009 program that included second grade classes. Parents attended the program which took place on February 27, 2009. The other skits in the program included Groundhog Day, Chinese New Year, Abraham Lincoln, Valentine's Day, George Washington, Mardi Gras, and Dental Health Month. The song about President Obama was in recognition of Black History Month. We have been informed that the lyrics of the song were sent home with the children in advance of the assembly, which was the teacher's normal procedure. There were no concerns or complaints prior to, during, or after the program.
On March 23, 2009, an author visited the Young School as part of the school's Women's History Month recognition. As is usual procedure, parents were notified prior to the visit and invited to attend. The author presented two assemblies during which she read from two of her books. She also met with the Teen Book Club at our high school and did an evening book signing for parents and children. The author was accompanied by two individuals. After the first assembly on March 23rd, the class that performed the song at the February assembly about President Obama provided a special performance for the author, since one of the books she wrote was about Barack Obama. We were informed by a representative of the author that one of the individuals who accompanied the author video recorded the performance. School staff had no knowledge of the recording.
Charter schools are not a panacea for our education problems. The recent study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University concludes that disadvantaged students who attended charter schools in New York City for nine years, from kindergarten through eighth grade, can close most of what she calls the "Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap." Hoxby does not say how many students completed nine years in a charter school - a key detail, as the city had only about a dozen small charters in 2000.
The results are impressive, but they are not typical of charter schools across the nation.
Nationally there are about 4,600 charter schools enrolling 1.4 million students. They run the gamut from excellent to abysmal. Even their most ardent supporters recognize that they vary widely in quality. Chester Finn, whose Thomas B. Fordham Institute sponsors charter schools in Ohio, wrote, "Some of the best schools I've ever been in are charter schools, some of which are blowing the lid off test scores in such vexed communities as Boston, New York and Chicago. And some of the worst - and flakiest - schools I've ever been in are charter schools."
Gone are the cheery promises of earlier city leaders about how Detroit is on the way back. How some new project downtown is surely just the first sign of a renaissance afoot. How things are not so bad.
Instead, Dave Bing, Detroit's mayor of five months, delivers grim news by the day.
Detroit's bus service will be cut, he said, and 230 city workers will be laid off next week. Those layoffs are among more than 400 since he took office, and more are possible.
Within a week, he is expected to announce how he will -- through elimination, consolidation, outsourcing -- shrink a city bureaucracy built for an earlier, booming Motor City.
"We've got to focus on being the best 900,000 populated city that we can be and stop thinking about 'We can turn the clock back to the 1950s and '60s,' " he said, referring to a time when the city, still the 11th most populous in the nation, was nearly twice as big. "That era is gone."
The report, by former WH Smith chief executive Richard Handover, has been seen by BBC One's Politics Show.
It claims civil servants and head teachers appear to have no idea what value for money means and calls for 40,000 teaching assistant jobs to go.
Schools Secretary Ed Balls has said £2bn could be cut from his department.
However, last week, he appeared to rule out the sort of job losses proposed by Mr Handover.
W hen Michelle Rhee was a teenager -- long before anyone imagined she would ever spend her career trying to turn America's inner-city public schools into something more like the elite private school she attended back in Ohio -- she was a stellar student, a good field hockey player and a kind, caring friend. But she already had the mouth for which she has become infamous. She said what was on her mind, even if it stung. Finally, one day, her mother had just had it with her daughter's blunt, even brusque, manner. Inza Rhee said to Michelle, "What is wrong with you? You just don't care what people think of you!"
We say we are buying a house. But for most of us parents, the house is not the whole story. It is the local public school we are investing in, and sometimes it can be a very daunting financial and personal decision.
In the early 1990s, when my journalist wife was making what seemed to me big bucks as a television producer, we could afford to live in Scarsdale, N.Y. That village's public schools cost us about as much in real estate taxes as the tuition at the private schools our kids had attended in Pasadena, Calif. Fortunately, we got what we paid for in Scarsdale. That is not always the case.
How do parents evaluate the schools their children may attend and escape the heartbreak of buying a great house that turns out to be in the attendance zone of a flawed school? Here are 10 ways to make the right choice, in descending importance. Feel free to re-prioritize them based on your personal tendencies:
1. Go with your gut. This sounds unscientific, but I don't care. After you have analyzed all the data and had the conversations outlined below, you still have to make a decision. Consider how you react emotionally to a school. Consult your viscera. If you're not feeling it, don't send your kids there. They will sense you have doubts at a time when they need to believe that this is the place for them.
SINCE Labour came to power in 1997 proclaiming education its priority, one grand policy after another has foundered. Schools were told to run themselves--but forbidden to do the things that matter most, such as paying good teachers more. Parents were encouraged to choose schools--but with too few attractive ones to choose from, many were rejected by the schools they selected. They were urged to lobby local government for new schools--but were largely ignored when they did so. A total of two "parent-promoted" schools actually opened.
The opposition Conservatives, who are on course to form the next government, will be making much of their own grand plans for schools at their party conference beginning on October 4th. Citing Sweden's "free-school" reforms of the 1990s as their model, they say they will smash the state's monopoly by funding new schools, to be run by charities or groups of parents, as generously as state ones. Michael Gove, their schools spokesman, reckons that 220,000 new places--as many as 500 schools--might be made available during their first term in office. The policy could see new suppliers responding to demand, innovating and competing to drive up standards. It could be a revolution.
Or it could be another almighty flop. Among the pessimists is Anders Hultin, an architect of Sweden's reforms and co-founder of Kunskapsskolan, the country's largest chain of free schools. He now works for GEMS, a Dubai-based chain of commercial schools operating in nine countries, including Britain. Of Sweden's 1,000-odd free schools, three-quarters are run for profit, he points out--but the Tories, afraid of the charge that they plan to hand little children over to big business, would ban schools from making profits. "I think it is a tactical decision," says Mr Hultin. "But it will surely mean fewer schools opening."
If you own a home or business in Wisconsin, you already know your property taxes are high.
But now it's official.
So let's keep the pressure on government at all levels to try to ease the burden.
Wisconsin has the ninth highest property tax in the nation, a nonprofit research group reported this week. The Tax Foundation, based in Washington, D.C., used new Census Bureau data to rank the best and worst real estate tax burdens across the country.
Wisconsin's median property tax last year was $2,963, compared to the national median of $1,897, the group reported.
When home values are factored in, Wisconsin moves up the list to fourth highest among the 50 states. By this measure, our burden is almost twice as heavy as the national median.
Wisconsin's two largest taxes, the income tax and property tax, generate more than $15 billion for state and local governments.
In 2008, income tax collections totalled $6.71 billion. At 3.3% of personal income, Wisconsin's income tax collections ranked 10th highest nationally. On a per capita basis ($1,137), the Badger state was 13th.
Recent income tax law changes reduced the capital gains exclusion from 60% in 2008 to 30% in 2009 and added a fifth tax bracket (7.75%). In 2008, the top tax rate was 6.75%
Madison School District & Madison Teachers Union Reach Tentative Agreement: 3.93% Increase Year 1, 3.99% Year 2; Base Rate $33,242 Year 1, $33,575 Year 2: Requires 50% MTI 4K Members and will "Review the content and frequency of report cards"
The Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison Teachers Inc. reached a tentative agreement Tuesday evening on the terms and conditions of a new two-year Collective Bargaining Agreement for MTI's 2,600 member teacher bargaining unit. Negotiations began April 15.
The Contract, for July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2011, needs ratification from both the Board of Education and MTI. The Union will hold its ratification meeting on Wednesday, October 14, beginning at 7:00 p.m. at the Alliant Energy Center, Dane County Forum. The Board of Education will tentatively take up the proposal in a special meeting on October 19 at 5:00 p.m.
Terms of the Contract include:
2009-2010 2010-11
Base Salary Raise - 1.00% Base Salary Raise - 1.00%
Total Increase Including Benefits - 3.93% Total Increase Including Benefits - 3.99%
Bachelor's Degree Base Rate $33,242 Bachelor's Degree Base Rate $33,575
A key part of this bargain involved working with the providers of long term disability insurance and health insurance. Meetings between MTI Executive Director John Matthews and District Superintendent Dan Nerad and representatives of WPS and GHC, the insurance carriers agreed to a rate increase for the second year of the Contract not to exceed that of the first year. In return, the District and MTI agreed to add to the plans a voluntary health risk assessment for teachers. The long term disability insurance provider reduced its rates by nearly 25%. The insurance cost reductions over the two years of the contract term amount to roughly $1.88 million, were then applied to increase wages, thus reducing new funds to accomplish this.
The new salary schedule increase at 1% per cell, inclusive of Social Security and WRS, amount to roughly $3.04 million. Roughly 62% of the salary increase, including Social Security and WRS, was made possible by the referenced insurance savings.
Key contract provisions include:
Inclusion in the Contract of criteria to enable salary schedule progression by one working toward the newly created State teacher licensure, PI 34. Under the new Contract provision, one can earn professional advancement credits for work required by PI 34.
Additive pay regarding National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, i.e. an alternative for bargaining unit professionals who are not teachers (nurses, social workers, psychologists, et al) by achieving the newly created Master Educator's License.
The ability after retirement for one to use their Retirement Insurance Account for insurance plans other than those specified in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. This will enable one to purchase coverage specific to a geographic area, if they so choose, or they may continue coverage with GHC or WPS - the current health insurance providers.
For elementary teachers, the frequency and duration of meetings has been clarified, as have several issues involving planning time. All elementary teachers and all elementary principals will receive a joint letter from Matthews and Nerad explaining these Contract provisions.
For high school teachers who volunteer for building supervision, there is now an option to enable one to receive compensation, rather than compensatory time for the service. And there is a definition of what "class period" is for determining compensation or compensatory time.
For elementary and middle school teachers, MTI and the District will appoint a joint committee for each to study and recommend the content and frequency of report cards.
For elementary specials (e.g. art, music) teachers, the parties agreed to end the class and a half, which will mean that class sizes for specials will be similar to the class size for elementary classroom teachers.
For coaches, and all others compensated on the extra duty compensation schedule, the additive percentage paid, which was frozen due to the State imposed revenue controls, will be restored.
School year calendars were agreed to through 2012-2013.
Also, MTI and the District agreed to a definite five-year exemption to the Contract work assignment clause to enable the District to assist with funding of a community-based 4-year-old kindergarten programs, provided the number of said 4-K teachers is no greater than the number of District employed 4-K teachers, and provided such does not cause bargaining unit members to be affected by adverse actions such as lay off, surplus and reduction of hours/contract percentage, due to the District's establishment of, and continuance of, community based [Model III] 4-K programs. (See note below.)
MTI Executive Director John Matthews said that he was glad that the parties were able to successfully resolve several matters which were raised in negotiations. In all, 67 Contract provisions were amended or created in this year's bargaining.
Superintendent Daniel Nerad said, "I am very pleased that we have reached this tentative agreement after an extensive period of bargaining. We have addressed a significant number of contract language related items. A key example lies in the area of elementary planning time. Of greatest significance to the District is an agreement over language that would allow for the implementation of a four-year-old kindergarten program."
"Also, in working with MTI we have been able to provide a salary increase, in part, as a result of reductions in health care costs. I appreciate working with John Matthews in accomplishing these insurance savings. I look forward to presenting this tentative agreement to the Board of Education in the near future."
John Matthews said, "But the economic provisions do not adequately reward those who have made the Madison schools among the best in the country. With the State usurping local control as regards to school funding, this is a matter that the State must fix; there is nothing local school boards can do, given the State's heavy hand. The State must realize that their funding formula for education is inadequate, and that it is causing the dissolution of the great education once available to Wisconsin children. That must be fixed and it is up to the Governor and the Legislators to do it."
For more information and to coordinate interviews, contact:
MMSD: Ken Syke, 663-1903 or Joe Quick, 663-1902
MTI: John Matthews, 257-0491
There are three models for how 4-K instruction is delivered, i.e., where and by whom:
Model I - in a school district site and by district-employed teachers
Model II - in preschool/child care centers and by district-employed teachers
Model III - in preschool/child care centers and by center-employed teachers
We education writers receive many books in the mail with terrible titles, real slumber-time stuff. Here are some on my bookshelf: "Learning and Understanding: Improving Advanced Study of Mathematics and Science in U.S. High Schools";| "Rethinking High School Graduation Rates & Trends"; and "SREB Fact Book on Higher Education."
Those volumes proved to be pretty good, as evidenced by the fact that I didn't throw them out. I mention this because on top of that stack is a new book that sets the record for largest gap between quality of work and liveliness of title.
I'm glad I did. It is enlightening, maddening, hopeful, frustrating and amazingly informative, all in just 411 pages. I don't like admitting this, but it even changed my mind on a hot issue, the connection between U.S. schools and U.S. economic success.
I probably would have read "Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses" cq that serial comma eventually, because Hanushek is one of the bad boy economists who have been providing some of the most provocative education research. I don't know Lindseth, an attorney and national expert on school finance law, but the chapters on that subject were very good, and comprehensible, so he also deserves some credit.
To the surprise of many educators who campaigned last year for change in the White House, the Obama administration's first recipe for school reform relies heavily on Bush-era ingredients and adds others that make unions gag.
Standardized testing, school accountability, performance pay, charter schools -- all are integral to President Obama's $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" grant competition to spur innovation. None is a typical Democratic crowd-pleaser.
Labor leaders, parsing the Education Department's fine print, call the proposal little more than a dressed-up version of the No Child Left Behind law enacted seven years ago under Obama's Republican predecessor.
"It looks like the only strategies they have are charter schools and measurement," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. "That's Bush III." Weingarten, who praises Obama for massive federal aid to help schools through the recession, said her 1.4 million-member union is engaged in "a constructive but tart dialogue" with the administration about reform.
At the March 24th Board of Education meeting, Superintendent Vital proposed to the Board that together they begin a Master Plan process, to be completed by December. The result of the process will be a detailed plan that will provide the district a clear road map for decision-making over the next several years.
Our school district faces many challenges ahead, and important and difficult decisions about facilities, programs and staffing will have to be made. These decisions will impact all of our community so it is imperative that students, families, and staff - as well as the overall Alameda community - participate in the Master Plan process and face these challenges together.
The Route Out of Minnesota's Fiscal Crisis: "We Can Change 'the Way We Do Things'"
A response limited to cutting-and-taxing would destroy Minnesota. To offset the disadvantages of our cold, remote location we sell a quality state at a high but reasonable price. This is a fragile balance. We could easily lose what attracts people to come here and to stay. And the fight would poison our politics; tear the state apart.
We do a pretty good job upgrading our physical infrastructure. And we do think about productivity in the private economy. But we lack a program for productivity in the public sector.
The action plans start on page 30. The Board had requested additional support information. The Administration has added performance measures for each of the strategies. In addition, the plans are cross-referenced to the top critical issues that you identified as a group in your strategic planning meetings. The Board had also asked for a review of the wording for clarity and to lessen the use of educational jargon; a review of priorites to lessen the number of priorities one in the first year; and identification of the connections between various action items as well as connections to oterh plans presented to and/or approved by the Board.
The Board has a meeting scheduled for September 29 at 6:00pm to review/discuss the action plans. If you have any comments prior to that meeting, you can reply on the web or send me an email. I will ensure the Board sees your comments.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best regards,
Arlene
Letter from Madison School Board members Ed Hughes and Marj Passman on the revised Strategic Plan:
This Tuesday evening, September 29, the School Board will be having a last and, hopefully, final discussion on the Strategic Plan.
Even though the plan has evolved somewhat since our initial meetings, we think that you will find that it represents the spirit and essence of all your efforts.
You may share your views with the Board, Tuesday at 6:00 P.M., in the Doyle Auditorium.
'Creaming" is the word critics of charter schools think ends the debate over education choice. The charge has long been that charters get better results by cherry-picking the best students from standard public schools. Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economist, found a way to reliably examine this alleged bias, and the results are breakthrough news for charter advocates.
Her new study, "How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement," shows that charter students, typically from more disadvantaged families in places like Harlem, perform almost as well as students in affluent suburbs like Scarsdale. Because there are more applicants than spaces, New York admits charter students with a lottery system. The study nullifies any self-selection bias by comparing students who attend charters only with those who applied for admission through the lottery, but did not get in. "Lottery-based studies," notes Ms. Hoxby, "are scientific and more reliable."
According to the study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, New York charter applicants are more likely than the average New York family to be black, poor and living in homes with adults who possess fewer education credentials. But positive results already begin to emerge by the third grade: The average charter student is scoring 5.8 points higher than his lotteried-out peers in math and 5.3 points higher in English. In grades four through eight, the charter student jumps ahead by 5 more points each year in math and 3.6 points each year in English.
IN YESTERDAY'S Link exchange, I linked to a Henry Farrell post on the economics of 3D-movies, in which Mr Farrell quoted an old piece of his:
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book [Tyler Cowen's "http://www.amazon.com/Good-Plenty-Creative-Successes-American/dp/0691120420/thebel-20">Good and Plenty"] is one that goes on a tangent from Cowen's main argument - his discussion of how changes in the ability of producers to enforce copyright are likely to affect cultural production. Here, he argues that the likely consequences will differ dramatically from art form to art form. Simplifying a little, he adapts Walter Benjamin to argue that there is likely to be a big difference between art forms that rely heavily on their "aura," and art forms that can be transformed into information without losing much of their cultural content. The former are likely to continue to do well - they aren't fundamentally challenged by the Internet. In contrast, forms of art which can be translated into information without losing much of their content are likely to see substantial changes, thanks to competition from file sharing services. Over time, we may see "the symbolic and informational" functions of art [becoming] increasingly separate," as the Internet offers pure information, and other outlets invest more heavily in providing an "aura" and accompanying benefits of status that will make consumers more willing to pay for art (because it is being produced in a prestigious concert hall, exhibited in a museum etc).
I think this is a very nice insight that is likely to prove true. It's not always so easy to determine what kinds of what forms of expression fall into which category, however. I believe that many newspaper producers long believed that the "aura" of reading the newspaper--having the physical item in one's hands--was an important part of news consumption. This may have been true to some extent, but the advantages of information digitisation overwhelmed the aura, with obvious consequences.
The first official draft of proposed national educational standards was released on Monday, a joint project of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The curriculum guidelines detail math and English skills that all students should have by the end of high school. Forty-eight states (Texas and Alaska are the holdouts) have signed on to the effort, called the Common Core Standards Initiative, to write the standards. This is one step on a long road: there is a 30-day comment period, and then the panel convened by the governors association will work on grade-by-grade standards from kindergarten onward.
What are some strengths and weaknesses of the new proposal? What are the obstacles to adopting common curriculum standards? Should this be a national goal, or should education reform efforts be directed elsewhere?
For the last seven or eight years, I have been trying to get funding for a study of the assignment of complete nonfiction (i.e. history) books in U.S. public high schools. No one seems to be interested in such a study, but I have come to believe, from anecdotes and interviews, that the majority of our public high school students now graduate without ever having read a single complete nonfiction book, which would seem to be a handicap for them as they encounter college reading lists in subjects other than literature.
I am told that students in history classes do read excerpts, but those are a pale shadow of the complete work, and they do not discover, unless they read on their own, the difference between an excerpt and the sweep of an entire book.
For example, if high school students hear anything about Harry Truman, they are usually asked to decide whether his decision to drop the atomic bomb was right or wrong.
They miss anything about what he did when he was their age or younger. David McCullough worked on his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Truman for ten years, and here is an excerpt about HST when he was ten:
"For his tenth birthday, in the spring of 1894, his mother presented him with a set of large illustrated volumes grandly titled in gold leaf Great Men and Famous Women. He would later count the moment as one of life's turning points." p. 43
and in high school: "He grew dutifully, conspicuously studious, spending long afternoons in the town library, watched over by a white plaster bust of Ben Franklin. Housed in two rooms adjacent to the high school, the library contained perhaps two thousand volumes. Harry and Charlie Ross vowed to read all of them, encyclopedias included, and both later claimed to have succeeded...History became a passion, as he worked his way through a shelf of standard works on ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome...'Reading history, to me, was far more than a romantic adventure. It was solid instruction and wise teaching which I somehow felt I wanted and needed.' He decided, he said, that men make history, otherwise there would be no history. History did not make the man, he was quite certain." p. 58
Most of our high school students would have no idea that Harry Truman worked on the small family farm from 1906 to 1914:
"Harry learned to drive an Emerson gang plow, two plows on a three-wheeled frame pulled by four horses. The trick was to see that each horse pulled his part of the load. With an early start, he found, he could do five acres in a ten-hour day"...."Every day was work, never-ending work, and Harry did 'everything there was to do'--hoeing corn and potatoes in the burning heat of summer, haying, doctoring horses, repairing equipment, sharpening hoes and scythes, mending fences...Harry's 'real love' was the hogs, which he gave such names as 'Mud,' 'Rats,' and 'Carrie Nation.' Harry also kept the books...." pp. 74, 75
Perhaps this time on the farm toughed him for his job as commander of artillery Battery 'D' in World War I: "Harry called in the other noncommissioned officers and told them it was up to them to straighten things out. 'I didn't come here to get along with you,' he said. 'You've got to get along with me. And if there of you who can't, speak up right now, and I'll bust you right back now.' There was no mistaking his tone. No one doubted he meant exactly what he said. After that, as Harry remembered, 'We got along.' But a private named Floyd Ricketts also remembered the food improving noticeably and that Captain Truman took a personal interest in the men and would talk to them in a way most officers wouldn't." pp. 117-118
And in the United States Senate, investigating waste, fraud and abuse: "Its formal title was the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, but from the start it was spoken of almost exclusively as the Truman Committee...'Looks like I'll get something done,' Harry wrote to Bess."..."His proposal, as even his critics acknowledged, was a masterstroke. He had set himself a task fraught with risk--since inevitably it would lead to conflict with some of the most powerful, willful people in the capital, including the President--but again as in France, as so often in his life, the great thing was to prove equal to the task." p. 259
All of these quotes are from David McCullough's Truman, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. The book is 992 pages long and there are some other great 'excerpts' in it, of course. My point is to show a bit of how much our high school students might miss in trying to understand the man who made the decision to drop the atomic bomb if they don't read the whole book. Some will say 992 pages is too much for high school students, who have work and sports and extracurricular activities as well as 5-6 hours a day of electronic entertainment already. I would just argue that if students now can take calculus and chemistry, and in some cases, even Chinese, they ought to be able to spend as much time on a complete nonfiction book as they do at football or basketball practice, even if their reading of a complete book is spread out over several weeks. Reading a complete nonfiction (history) book will not only help to prepare them for college (nonfiction) reading lists, it will also give them a more complete glimpse into one of our Presidents, and after reading, for example, Truman, they should have a better understanding of why someone like David McCullough thought writing it was worth ten years of his life, and why the Pulitzer committee thought it should receive their prize.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
n advisory panel unveiled a proposal yesterday that details the math and English skills every student ought to have by the end of high school, the first step toward what advocates hope will become common standards that help the United States regain world academic leadership.
Discuss
COMMENTS (11)
In math, for example, students would be able to solve systems of equations; find and interpret rates of change; and adapt probability models to solve real-world problems.
In English language arts, they would be able to analyze how specific word choices shape the meaning and tone of a text; develop a style and tone of writing appropriate to a task, purpose and audience; and respond constructively to advance a discussion and build on the input of others.
The proposal, posted at www.corestandards.org, was drafted over the summer by a group that included specialists affiliated with organizations that oversee the SAT and ACT college admissions tests, as well as Achieve Inc., a nonprofit standards advocacy group based in Washington.
New York City students who win a lottery to enroll in charter schools outperform those who don't win spots and go on to attend traditional schools, according to new research to be released Tuesday.
The study, led by Stanford University economics Prof. Caroline Hoxby, is likely to fire up the movement to push states and school districts to expand charter schools -- one of the centerpieces of President Barack Obama's education strategy.
Among students who had spent their academic careers in charter schools, the average eighth grader in Ms. Hoxby's study had a state mathematics test score of 680, compared with 650 for those in traditional schools. The tests are generally scored on a roughly 500 to 800 scale, with 650 representing proficiency.
Ms. Hoxby's study found that the charter-school students, who tend to come from poor and disadvantaged families, scored almost as well as students in the affluent Scarsdale school district in the suburbs north of the city. The English test results showed a similar pattern. The study also found students were more likely to earn a state Regents diploma, given to higher-achieving students, the longer they attended charter schools.
Students who entered lotteries and won spots in New York City charter schools performed better on state exams than students who entered the same lotteries but did not secure charter school seats, according to a study by a Stanford University economist being released Tuesday.
Charter schools, which are privately run but publicly financed, have been faring well on standardized tests in recent years. But skeptics have discounted their success by accusing them of "creaming" the best students, saying that the most motivated students and engaged parents are the ones who apply for the spots.
The study's methodology addresses that issue by comparing charter school students with students of traditional schools who applied for charter spots but did not get them. Most of the city's 99 charter schools admit students by lottery.
The report is part of a multiyear study examining the performance of charter schools in New York City by Caroline M. Hoxby, a Stanford economist who has written extensively about her research on charter schools and vouchers.
Experts convened by the nation's governors and state schools chiefs on Monday proposed a set of math and English skills students should master before high school graduation, the first step toward what advocates hope will become common standards driving instruction in classrooms from coast to coast.
The proposal aims to lift expectations for students beyond current standards, which vary widely from state to state, and establish for the first time an effective national consensus on core academic goals to help the United States keep pace with global competitors. Such agreement has proven elusive in the past because of a long tradition of local control over standards, testing and curriculum.
In math, the proposal envisions that students would be able to solve systems of equations; find and interpret rates of change; and adapt probability models to solve real-world problems. In English language arts, they would be able to analyze how word choices shape the meaning and tone of a text; develop a style and tone of writing appropriate to a task and audience; and respond constructively to advance a discussion and build on the input of others.
This fall I will be starting my 41st year as a professor at a so co-called "Public Ivy" institution. Some of my colleagues ask me if I'll ever retire. Whenever I give my stock response -- "They'll have to carry me out of here in a box, and bury me on the main university green before I retire" -- my colleagues look at me as if I'm crazy. Perhaps from their perspective I am, but from my own view, I'm very sane. I love the life of academe, in spite of its irritating intellectual rigidities, its sometimes lethal, passive-aggressive competitiveness, its deeply entrenched resistance to change, and, worst of all, its over-the-top superiority complex. Still, I'm here to shout to the world that academe has been good to me, and I consider myself lucky to be a professor. But it is my teaching that fills me up the most, and it is my teaching that has provided the lasting memories.
The past few years I've been reading a lot about teaching and learning as preparation for writing a book on how to help students create meaning both inside and outside the classroom. Most of the work I've read, with a few remarkable exceptions, resounds with critique, regrets, complaints, settling old scores with some perceived enemy, and, worst of all, with belligerent put-downs of millennial and quarterlife students. For many of these authors, today's college students are lazy, preoccupied, unmotivated, poorly prepared, distracted, politically correct, and, above all, "entitled." In a word, students today are "unteachable."
These scholars go on to say that if the academy is to save itself, it must return to the older ideals of a reduced elective curriculum, a stringent, no-prisoners-taken grading policy, an uncompromising commitment to the tried-and-true academic research methodologies, and, most of all, a no-nonsense, lecture-only, close-textual-analysis, stick-to-the-facts/research approach to reading and writing. "Rigor" is the catchword for these writers. Sadly, in the aftermath, "rigor mortis" could very well become, if it hasn't already, the catchword for students.
The District shall provide appropriate educational services for "gifted and talented children" who give evidence of high performance capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, musical, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic areas, and who require learning opportunities or experiences not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop such capabilities. These educational experiences will be provided at each school through site-developed programs, which are in alignment with the mission of the District's Gifted Education Plan and goals of that plan.
magine if, in a strange twist, Michigan was holding up the city of Detroit's progress.
It would be a shocking, right? After all, for decades the state's business and civic establishments and chattering classes (myself included) have blathered on about how Detroit and its schools and its dysfunctional leadership have dragged down the economic growth of the state and metropolitan region and harmed their social viability and global reputation. It's a painfully true statement, except now there's an exception to that rule.
To the surprise of many, Detroit could be held back by the state when it comes to educational progress, or at least the strategic policymaking needed to make that happen.
While the Detroit Public Schools' emergency financial manager Robert Bobb and his impressive administration appear to be well-prepared to compete for President Barack Obama's Race to the Top competitive education stimulus money, Lansing is stuck in an ideological battle, threatening to risk Michigan's application to win hundreds of millions for Michigan schools. Just six months ago, the opposite seemed to be true. Detroit was mired in a self-created swamp of corruption and low performance. Michigan, meanwhile, led by progressive state Superintendent Mike Flanagan, was putting itself in position to woo U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who has more money at his disposal to transform American education than any other education secretary has in decades, if ever.
he federal government said Friday that it had dropped all charges against the exiled Hmong military leader Gen. Vang Pao, who had been accused of plotting to overthrow the Communist government in his native Laos.
The announcement came after a grand jury in Sacramento issued a new indictment on Thursday against a dozen men accused of conspiring to give money, arms and other support to insurgents in Laos, and violations of the Neutrality Act.
Ten of the 12 defendants, all of whom live in California, had been charged in a 2007 indictment that named Gen. Vang Pao, as a ringleader in the plot. The new indictment replaces the previous one.
That too many young people come out of high school ill-prepared for college or the work force is little disputed. The questions of why that's so and how to fix the situation, however, have too often resulted in finger pointing, with many college faculty members complaining that high schools are asking too little of their students and high school officials saying that colleges send mixed signals about what they want students to be able to do.
The stagnation and even deterioration created by that logjam has contributed to the situation in which the United States now finds itself: sliding down the list of countries in the proportion of young adults with college credentials, prompting President Obama and others to propose investing tens of billions of dollars to get more people into and out of college. But despite a lot of talk, the "holy grail" solution to the preparation problem -- better aligning high school and college curriculums so that more students leave K-12 ready to do college work or with work-ready skills -- has often seemed out of reach.
Today represents a milestone, though, for a potential breakthrough that could have major implications for higher education. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association have released common standards for core curriculums in mathematics and reading and writing that, because of a confluence of events, could create a set of widely embraced national (but not federal) standards for what high school students need to know to be "college ready" or to have the skills to enter the work force. (Comments are invited through October 21.)
"I keep hearing about how administrators and teachers and everybody to blame, but I'm not hearing a word about parents in the community." There was applause from the back of the room.
She spoke about her experience when her son was bullied, and administrators did their best, but when she approached parents about their children's behavior, she was immediately ostracized. "I was shunned from their circle, the PTO, everything else, and I felt that message loud and clear," she said. She spoke of a woman she had heard of who was happy that her daughter made the slut list, because it ensured that she was popular, and other parents complaining about having to shop for camouflage one weekend, the clothes certain freshman girls had been instructed to wear. "Where are your brains?" Ms. Pasternak asked.
"I'm really speaking to you guys as a community, yes you should put together a task force," she said. "But why do let these people dominate our community? We shouldn't. We should say you're wrong, your kids are not the popular ones and you are definitely not popular." (People laughed at that.)
The Madison School Board has clamped down on just who can and cannot advertise through the school district's backpack mail system, a change that has some parents feeling relieved - less "junk mail" for the recycling bin - and others worried they're missing out.
Tucked in a folder, backpack mail, which regularly heads home with Madison's elementary school students, still includes school announcements, notes from the teacher, field-trip permission slips and perhaps bills for unpaid lunch accounts. And plenty of ads for nonprofits such as the YMCA, Children's Theater of Madison and Madison Youth Choirs remain.
But gone are the fliers touting for-profit offerings, such as private tutoring, after-school care, music lessons, karate classes, ballet lessons and kid-friendly commercial gyms.
The policy change adopted last month stems from concerns that a growing amount of backpack mail was taking too much staff time, said School Board president Arlene Silveira.
Whether education is best provided by the public or private sector should cease to be an ideological issue, with decisions made purely on the basis of which is the best quality and most cost-effective option, says the World Bank's lead education economist.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Harry Patrinos, co-author of The Role and Impact of Public-Private Partnerships in Education, a report published by the World Bank, said that he believes there is a much greater role for business in education generally, subject to strict conditions.
Mr Patrinos said that, despite Britain pioneering public-private partnerships (PPPs) to build new school infrastructure under schemes such as the Private Finance Initiative over the past decade, real progress will only be made when private suppliers are allowed to hire and fire teachers and manage schools themselves.
"Education is a social investment, as well as a private investment. There is and will always be a government responsibility, but that doesn't have to mean ownership of schools," he said.
At age 3, Aurora Ghere began to read. Now 6, she delves into books that are usually fifth-grade fare, recently finishing "The Call of the Wild'' and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.''
She can also, her mother boasts, count to 1,000.
When the Gheres lived in Maryland, a screening in her school district identified Aurora as a gifted child.
But Green Meadow School in Maynard, where Aurora is in first grade, lacks programs geared toward gifted children. Though administrators have been supportive of Aurora's needs, her mother thinks schools in her town and elsewhere should do more.
"We could care less if our children got into Harvard or MIT,'' said Ghere. "We just want them to love school. School should be a joy.''
The annual Superintendent evaluation should serve as a positive, objective process for promoting the goals, values, and progress of the district. It is based on the Superintendent's job description and is one tool used by the Superintendent/Board Leadership Team for informed change and continued improvement of the district.
The Board will identify and approve a timeline for the formal evaluation to review the performance of the Superintendent and the Board/Superintendent Leadership Team on an annual basis. The Board will identify the following under the timeline: a date for the formal evaluation meeting, a date for the end-of-year progress report meeting, a due date for the interim progress report from the Superintendent, a date for a Board/Superintendent Leadership and a date for the end-of-year progress meeting.
WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) led its 10 p.m. news one night a few weeks ago with a story that the Milwaukee School Board had voted to spend up to $250,000 to fight the idea of giving control of the school system to Mayor Tom Barrett.
In the report, board member Tim Petersons told people who support the idea, "You're calling people who voted for us incapable of making the right decisions." And board member Larry Miller said, "We will resist the anti-democratic nature of this declaration."
But democracy is an interesting subject when it comes to the School Board. In reality, Petersons won his first race for the board in 2007 as the only person on the ballot from a district covering the northwest side. Miller was the only person on the ballot when he won his first bid in April in a district covering much of the east side and near south side.
Voter turnout in the election in April, which included hotly contested races for the state superintendent of public instruction and a seat on the state Supreme Court, was just less than 10% citywide. In the February primary election, which included two contested School Board primaries, turnout was 4.3%.
When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed merit pay for teachers and lifting the cap on charter schools, the head of the California NAACP stood by his side.
And when the Los Angeles school board voted to approve a plan that could turn over a third of its schools to private operators, Latino members and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa led the charge.
The nation's public school teachers are feeling the squeeze from all sides these days, and some of the heat is coming from unlikely sources: minorities and longtime Democratic allies.
One of them is President Barack Obama, who is irking teachers by suggesting that student test scores be used to judge the success of educators.
The pressure is particularly intense in California, where U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the state has "lost its way" with public schools.
In an attempt to improve California's schools, the Obama administration is threatening to withhold federal stimulus money if the Golden State does not rescind a state law that prevents the state from tying test scores to teacher performance.
Tucked away in an $87 billion higher education bill that passed the House last week was a broad new federal initiative aimed not at benefiting college students, but at raising quality in the early learning and care programs that serve children from birth through age 5.
The initiative, the Early Learning Challenge Fund, would channel $8 billion over eight years to states with plans to improve standards, training and oversight of programs serving infants, toddlers and preschoolers.
The Senate is expected to pass similar legislation this fall, giving President Obama, who proposed the Challenge Fund during the presidential campaign, a bill to sign in December.
Experts describe the current array of programs serving young children and their families nationwide as a hodgepodge of efforts with little coordination or coherence. Financing comes from a shifting mix of private, local, state and federal money. Programs are run out of storefronts and churches, homes and Head Start centers, public schools and other facilities. Quality is uneven, with some offering stimulating activities, play and instruction but others providing little more than a room and a television.
Oshkosh teachers received annual salary raises that averaged more than 3 percent per school year over the past five years, according to an analysis by The Northwestern.
The analysis examined the salaries of 420 full-time teachers who were continuously employed by the Oshkosh Area School District from 2004 to 2008 and did not have significant changes in duties, which would skew salary increases.
The results show those teachers received raises averaging 4.4 percent in 2008 for an average salary of $52,171. That doesn't account for the value of their benefits, which average another $35,800.
In the past five years, the teachers' average pay, excluding benefits, increased 16 percent, from $44,884 to $52,171 due to "step" increases in pay that are given based on experience and professional development. That represents an average annual raise of 3.06 percent at a time when teachers' unions argued that state bargaining rules stagnated salary increases.
Teacher pay and benefits are likely to come under more scrutiny as Wisconsin struggles with a growing $6.6 billion budget deficit, which could force the state to further cut aids to local schools, forcing more of the funding burden to local property tax payers. Gov. Jim Doyle's budget also contains a provision to repeal the state's Qualified Economic Offer rule, which allows school boards to avoid contract arbitration by offering a 3.8 percent salary and benefit increase.
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction statewide value added project results (Including the Madison & Milwaukee Public Schools)
Kurt Kiefer, Madison School District Chief Information Officer [150K PDF]:
Attached is a summary of the results form a recently completed research project conducted by The Value Added Research center (VARC) within the UW-Madison Wisconsin Center for Educational Research (WCER). Dr. Rob Meyer and Dr. Mike Christian will be on hand at the September 14 Board of Education meeting to review these findings.
The study was commissioned by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI). Both the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) were district participants. The purpose of the study was to determine the feasibility of a statewide value added statistical model and the development of state reporting and analysis prototypes. We are pleased with the results in that this creates yet one more vehicle through which we may benchmark our district and school performance.
At the September 14, 2009 Board meeting we will also share plans for continued professional development with our principals and staff around value added during the upcoming school year.
In November we plan to return to the Board with another presentation on the 2008-09 results that are to include additional methods of reporting data developed by VARC in conjunction with MPS and the DPI. We will also share progress with the professional development efforts.
I have no doubt our system for certifying teachers is broken. On Aug. 24, I wrote||http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2009/08/_am_not_a_big.html about a first-rate Prince George's County teacher who was nearly fired because of official confusion over his certification credits. These are courses he must take to keep his job, but the people in charge had given him conflicting information about how many, and which, courses he needed. Since then, scores of educators have sent me their own horror stories---some of which I collected in another column on Sept. 7.
What do we do about this? Many readers have sent their ideas. But it's not going to be easy. Injecting common sense into the process threatens the way our education schools teach and the way our school districts hire. Those powerful interest groups show little willingness to change. But the acidic frustrations expressed by people who contacted me are, thankfully, corroding the resistance to innovation.
The first school in America with a teaching philosophy based on game design opens in downtown Manhattan next month, and the mission statement promises to employ the "design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students."
Quest to Learn is the brainchild of NYC non-profit Institute of Play, and with funding from the Parson's School of Design and a number of independent donors like the Gates Foundation the school promises to instruct students "through an innovative pedagogy that immerses students in differentiated, challenge-based contexts," acknowledging that "game design and systems thinking [are] key literacies of the 21st century."
What that means in common English is that students will ditch chalkboards and class periods in favor of a laptop in every classroom and four 90-minute "domain" blocks centered around the study of a new concept or idea. Some examples cited in a recent Economist article include "Sports for the Mind" (game vernacular and design,) "The Way Things Work" (basic science) and "Codeworlds" (a fusion of English and math.)
D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray angrily accused the Fenty administration Thursday of seeking to "scapegoat" the council for impending public school budget cuts announced this week and called the reductions a pretext for firing unionized teachers.
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee announced late Wednesday that the District would be forced to lay off teachers as part of an estimated $30 million to $40 million cut in the $770 million public school budget for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. They said the reductions are needed to close a spending gap created when the council approved a round of cuts to the city budget July 31.
Gray (D), who has left open the possibility of an election challenge to Fenty next year, said the mayor and chancellor were attempting to deflect responsibility for cuts in a budget that the mayor signed last month without any mention of possible teacher layoffs.
Surely if we can raise our academic standards for math and science, then, with a little attention and effort, we can restore the importance of literacy in our public high schools. Reading is the path to knowledge and writing is the way to make knowledge one's own.
For many years, Lucy Calkins, described once in Education Week as "the Moses of reading and writing in American education" has made her major contributions to the dumbing down of writing in our schools. She once wrote to me that: "I teach writing, I don't get into content that much." This dedication to contentless writing has spread, in part through her influence, into thousands and thousands of classrooms, where "personal" writing has been blended with images, photos, and emails to become one of the very most anti-academic and anti-intellectual elements of the education we now offer our children, K-12.
In 2004, the College Board's National Commission on Writing in the Schools issued a call for more attention to writing in the schools, and it offered an example of the sort of high school writing "that shows how powerfully our students can express their emotions":
"The time has come to fight back and we are. By supporting our leaders and each other, we are stronger than ever. We will never forget those who died, nor will we forgive those who took them from us."
Or look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the supposed gold standard for evaluating academic achievement in U.S. schools, as measured and reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. In its 2002 writing assessment, in which 77 percent of 12th graders scored "Basic" or "Below Basic," NAEP scored the following student response "Excellent." The prompt called for a brief review of a book worth preserving. In a discussion of Herman Hesse's Demian, in which the main character grows up, the student wrote,
"High school is a wonderful time of self-discovery, where teens bond with several groups of friends, try different foods, fashions, classes and experiences, both good and bad. The end result in May of senior year is a mature and confident adult, ready to enter the next stage of life."
It is obvious that this "Excellent" high school writer is expressing more of his views on his own high school experience than on anything Herman Hesse might have had in mind, but that still allows this American student writer to score very high on the NAEP assessment of writing.
This year, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has released a breakthrough report on writing called "Writing in the 21st Century," which informs us, among other things, that:
"Writing has never been accorded the cultural respect or the support that reading has enjoyed, in part because through reading, society could control its citizens, whereas through writing, citizens might exercise their own control."
So it has become clear to NCTE that Milton's Areopagitica, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and all those other arguments for free speech and free access to information, failed to warn us that, while it is all right for a society to provide protection for writing, reading is only a dangerous means of social control, and should be avoided at all costs. As Houston Baker warned more broadly when he was head of the Modern Language Association, "reading and writing are tools of oppression."
The 2009 NCTE report goes on to inform us, somewhat inconsistently, that:
"Reading-in part because of its central location in family and church life-tended to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth, while writing, by way of contrast, was associated with unpleasantness-with unsatisfying work and episodes of despair-and thus evoked a good deal of ambivalence."
So while, on the one hand, reading is a dangerous method for social control, and on the other hand, in contrast with writing, it is said to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth, writing is associated with unpleasantness, which would, naturally, be news to Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackery, George Eliot, and countless other authors who made it their life's work to provide feelings of intimacy and warmth, among other things, to countless readers over the centuries.
But the NCTE report has more to teach us:
"Writing has historically and inexorably been linked to testing."
Testing, the way to determine whether one has learned the tasks to be mastered, is, needless to say, not a good thing in the NCTE world. This odd and narrow "link to testing" might seem a bit far-fetched to all the historians and others whose writing has enriched our lives.
So, how does NCTE propose to free writing from its unhappy association with testing, episodes of despair, and so on? By encouraging students to do what they are doing already: texting, twitting, emailing, sending notes, sending photos, and the like-only this time it will be part of the high school "writing" curriculum. In other words, instead of NCTE encouraging educators to lift kids out of the crib, it wants them to jump in with them.
NCTE goes on to lament that: "In school and out, writing required a good deal of labor." NCTE has no doubt skipped over the advice: Labor Omnia Vincit, and has apparently come to believe that hard work and enjoyment are somehow incompatible.
To relieve our writing students of the necessity of doing the kind of hard work that is essential for success in all other human occupations, "in school and out," NCTE wants to develop "new models of composing" that will change our students from mere writers to "Citizen Composers."
This recipe for damage only adds to the harm already done, for example in high school English departments, by a truncated focus on personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, which for most students guarantees that they will move on to college or work unable to write a serious research paper or even a good strong informative memo that makes sense and can be read by others.
Many high school English department focus on preparing their students for the 500-word "essays" about their personal lives that most college admissions departments ask for these days.
According to a survey done by the Chronicle of Higher Education, 90% of college professors think that most high school students who come to them are not well prepared in reading, research or academic writing. That may possibly be because far too few of our high schools challenge their students to do any nonfiction reading or academic expository writing, including the sort of research papers which require, after all, research.
While we do challenge many high school students to take AP Chemistry, AP Biology, AP European History, and Calculus, Chinese and Physics, when it comes to the sort of writing controlled by the English department, and recommended as "21st Century Writing" by the National Council for Teachers of English, the standards are as low as they would be if the Math department limited its students to decimals and fractions and never let them try Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, or Calculus.
Even a program for gifted students, for instance the grandaddy of them all, the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, which has very challenging summer programs in the sciences for students, when it comes to writing, it sponsors a contest for "Creative Nonfiction," which turns out to be only short diary entries by these very able students. They could challenge students to produce good history or literature research papers, but they don't.
Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our public high schools today.
There are some exceptions. Since 1987, I have published 846 [868] exemplary history research papers by high school students from 44 states and 35 other countries. Their average length has been about 5,500 words, although in a recent [Spring 2009] issue (#77), the average length of the papers, including endnotes and bibliography, was 7,927 words.
Many of the American authors come from independent schools like Andover, Atlanta International School, Deerfield, Exeter, Groton, National Cathedral School, Polytechnic, St. Albans, Sidwell Friends School and the like. But many have also come from public high school students. Some of these students have done independent studies, hoping to be published in The Concord Review, but some very good papers have been IB Extended Essays and some have come even from students of AP teachers who do assign serious research papers, even though the College Board has no interest in them.
The Diploma to Nowhere report from Strong American Schools last summer says that more than one million U.S. high school graduates are in remedial courses in colleges each year, and if a student needs a remedial course or two, they are less likely to graduate from college.
The poor academic reading and writing skills of entering freshmen at our colleges and universities are acknowledged to be commonplace, but no one seems to have been able to increase the importance of serious writing or nonfiction reading in the high schools. The English department and the professional organizations are satisfied with preventing high school students from learning how to do research papers, so they continue to graduate students who are incompetent in academic expository writing, and unprepared for college work.
Not one of the new state academic standards asks whether students have read a single nonfiction book in high school or written a single serious research paper. All the attention is on what can be easily tested and quantified, so the skills of academic reading and writing are left out, and our students pay the price for this neglect.
In 1776, Edward Gibbon, in the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote about the importance of academic reading and writing:
"...But all this well-laboured system of German antiquities is annihilated by a single fact, too well attested to admit of any doubt, and of too decisive a nature to leave room for any reply. The Germans, in the age of Tacitus [56-120AD], were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge and reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses, but very little, his fellow-labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce that, without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life...."
No doubt he would be as appalled as our college professors are now to see the incompetence of our high school graduates who have not been asked to read and write before college.
Surely if we can raise our academic standards for math and science, then, with a little attention and effort, we can restore the importance of literacy in our public high schools. Reading is the path to knowledge and writing is the way to make knowledge one's own. If we continue to ignore them as we do now, it will not be good for our economy, or for any of the "useful and agreeable arts of life" for our students.
Will Fitzhugh is Editor of The Concord Review and has written and lectured extensively on the assessment of writing and writing skills. He can be reached at: 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts USA, by phone at 978-443-0022; or 800-331-5007, and his website and e-mail are: www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
IN UNDERTAKING reform of D.C. schools, officials two years ago wisely prescribed a limited role for the school board. Sentimentality about the city's first elected body protected it from elimination, but officials recognized its absolute failure in serving the interests of children. Yet already the D.C. Council seems to want to give the board more prominence.
The council, returning from summer break next week, will try to override Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's Aug. 26 veto of budget language appropriating nearly $1 million to the State Board of Education. It was the second time the mayor vetoed the measure because of fears that increased autonomy could lead to the board meddling in school operations. Five votes are needed to sustain the mayor's veto, and unfortunately, it appears that some council members are buying the notion that this is a minor matter that won't threaten Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's reforms. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D), proponent of the change who is also mulling a challenge to Mr. Fenty next year, argues that the board's role in setting citywide educational standards and policy is not being enlarged.
THE LATEST fad to sweep K-12 education is called "21st-Century Skills.'' States - including Massachusetts - are adding them to their learning standards, with the expectation that students will master skills such as cooperative learning and critical thinking and therefore be better able to compete for jobs in the global economy. Inevitably, putting a priority on skills pushes other subjects, including history, literature, and the arts, to the margins. But skill-centered, knowledge-free education has never worked.
The same ideas proposed today by the 21st-Century Skills movement were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues across the 20th century. In 1911, the dean of the education school at Stanford called on his fellow educators to abandon their antiquated academic ideals and adapt education to the real life and real needs of students.
In 1916, a federal government report scoffed at academic education as lacking relevance. The report's author said black children should "learn to do by doing,'' which he considered to be the modern, scientific approach to education.
An unwelcome bonus culture is creeping into head teachers' pay, diverting funds from the classroom, a teachers' leader is warning.
Head of the ATL union Dr. Mary Bousted is critical of what she says are highly paid school leadership roles which have little to do with children's education.
Every pound of bonus paid above school leadership pay scale was a pound less for books and equipment, she says.
The government said the level of pay should reflect heads' responsibilities.
'Super duper heads'
Some school governing bodies have advertised six figure salaries to attract good candidates to run schools and others are reported to have offered golden hellos.
Speaking at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers fringe at the TUC Congress in Liverpool, Dr Bousted said her union did not object to heads being paid a fair wage for a demanding and increasingly insecure job.
Last time Hugo started screwing with the schools, he got himself a coup attempt in response. Since then he's spent a ton of time and money and police effort to try and eliminate all such enemies.
A new August law shoved through the rubber-stamp Parliament "already has the opposition talking of civil disobedience."
Naturally, this will be an American plot, because any such spontaneous popular civil disobedience could ONLY come as a result of American meddling, and not the bad actions of dictators nor their fed-up and brutalized citizens.
Teaching will be structured now according to "Bolivarian doctrine." Hmm, sounds promising all right. The ruling socialist party will run all the schools through their community store fronts known as "communal councils." The central gov will directly determine who gets into college and will take control of the training of teachers.
Minority kids try to enter a school. Angry adults scream at them and try to block their path.
Little Rock, 1957?
Try New York City, 2009.
That was the shocking scene last week at a Harlem building shared by a traditional public school, PS 123, and a charter school, Harlem Success Academy 2.
Charter schools are public schools -- but they're mostly free of burdensome union rules. And they regularly outperform traditional schools, which is why parents are desperate to get their kids into charters.
And why it was ironic to see protesters (mostly teachers-union members) handing out flyers decrying the supposedly "separate and unequal" system that charters create.
Two of Minnesota's three largest school districts will spend a lot of time in coming months looking for new leadership.
St. Paul will replace Superintendent Meria Carstarphen, who left this summer, and Minneapolis is replacing Bill Green, who will step down after this year, when his contract ends.
Each district will try to find the best person, but they'll also have to figure out what to pay and how that compensation will be structured.
Seattle Public Schools may do away with a nearly decade-old requirement that all students earn a C average to graduate, and an even-older policy that athletes maintain a C average to play on school teams.
If the School Board approves recommendations endorsed by Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, as well as most district high-school principals and counselors, a D average will be good enough to earn a high-school diploma. Student athletes would need to pass five of six classes with D grades or better.
District officials understand there are concerns about relaxing standards at a time when everyone from President Obama on down is pushing for higher expectations for U.S. students.
And when surveyed by the district last year, a majority of Seattle parents and students preferred to keep the C-average requirement.
But district officials, who plan to talk about the proposal at a School Board meeting tonight, insist they're not watering down expectations, and the change would mirror what most other districts require.
September 13, 2009
At about 7:00 p.m. tonight, the KEA and KSD bargaining teams reached a tentative agreement. As part of our agreement, both sides agreed that neither side would discuss specific details of the Tentative Agreements until the KEA Leadership has the opportunity to present the Tentative Agreements to their members for ratification. The KEA leadership will present the contract terms to its members at 7:30 a.m., Monday, September 14, at Kentlake High School.
Superintendent Vargas commented, "On behalf the KSD Board of Directors, I want to congratulate and thank the two bargaining teams for their tremendous effort and success during this most challenging time. We are excited about moving forward together with our Kent Education Association partners and our entire school community. Our focus is students and their success--they are the reason we are here."
September 12, 2009
The KSD and KEA bargaining teams have been negotiating throughout today and this evening. The teams have exchanged proposals as they work to achieve resolution.
The proposals are displayed in the menu to the right. The process is ongoing. Please continue to monitor this website for updates.
The page includes links to numerous school district proposals along with a Judge's order.
California's chance to receive hundreds of millions of federal educational dollars may rest heavily on an obscure and long-neglected piece of education infrastructure: a statewide data system that tracks students, teachers and administrators year to year.
Such education systems are expensive, complex and do not win elections for politicians. But experts say they are essential to learn how much of the nearly $60 billion that California spends on K-12 education makes a difference, a fact that student achievement tests only hint at.
Last month, California rolled out the first component, a student database known as CalPADS. It will eventually make it possible to measure what works and what doesn't in classrooms throughout the state. The second major component, a teacher and administrator database known as CalTIDES, will not come online until 2011.
After months of whispers about an expensive new assessment program being considered by the Huberman administration, here is -- thanks to several friends of the blog -- a bit of hard information.
They're going with Scantron, it's going to be computer-adaptive (more on that later), there was a "thorough" RFP process, and they're rolling it out starting with elementary schools first (this fall).
It had been derided as a committee of puppets, a rubber-stamp board with no clear power or purpose. So when word came from Albany over the summer that the Panel for Educational Policy would have greater power over the New York City schools, some thought things might be different.
The old days, however, did not seem far behind at the panel's first meeting of the school year on Monday: The "ayes" were nearly unanimous, and friction was virtually nonexistent.
Last month, lawmakers broadened the board's powers when they renewed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's control of the schools, giving the panel oversight over contracts and school closings.
Nearly a month into the school year and teachers in several Front Range districts are still working without a contract.
"We have more locals that have not been able to settle than is typical for this time of year," said Deborah Fallin, spokeswoman for the Colorado Education Association. "Usually, most of the contracts are settled before school starts."
Colorado teachers have not waged a strike for 15 years -- since Denver teachers struck for five days in 1994.
No one expects a strike this year, but teachers unions from Pueblo to Greeley are battling their districts over contract offers they say are unfair.
Districts say they have less money this year, citing plummeting state revenues and an overall financial crisis.
Take two schools with failing test scores and students who are below the poverty line, and add two passionate principals to the equation.
It might not equal complete success, but for Chicago's Nash Elementary School and Harvard Park Elementary School in Springfield, Ill., the principals' incredible dedication and persistence helped to turn their schools around.
Principals Tresa Dunbar and Kerry Purcell are the subjects of the new documentary The Principal Story. The documentary explores how the two principals, Purcell with six years of experience and Dunbar with only two years, go about inspiring their staffs, their students and themselves to improve conditions and test results in their schools.
"If you want to turn around troubled schools, schools that are challenged, school that have a majority of low-income students, you really need strong leadership," said Tod Lending, the film's executive producer and co-director, who followed Dunbar and Purcell for a full school year. Lending received a grant from the Wallace Foundation to document the challenges faced by school principals in America.
At the two schools, at least 95 percent of students are at or below the poverty line. At the beginning of the documentary, each of the principals was leading a school that faced tremendous disciplinary problems, including poor attendance and failing test scores.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is launching a campaign to encourage schools, hospitals, jails and other institutions to buy food from local producers. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has been trying to get Americans to eat more fruit and vegetables as a way to combat obesity. The campaign also aims to provide income for small farms and boost the economies in rural areas.
Several Dallas ISD magnet campuses are among the best public schools in Texas, based on a new set of rankings that considers everything from test scores to class sizes to graduation rates.
In prior years, Children at Risk ranked only schools in the Houston area, but expanded to the rest of the state this year.
Many organizations try to pinpoint top campuses, including Newsweek's list of the nation's best high schools, the state's school rating system and a host of education think tank reports. The Children at Risk study ranks Texas elementary, middle and high school campuses based on more measures than most.
For example, Newsweek picks the best high schools solely on the number of students who take Advanced Placement exams. The state determines quality based on test scores and dropout rates.
The Hillsborough County school district is in line for a grant that could top $100 million and fund a program school officials hope would ensure almost every student in America graduates from high school.
"We believe we have it," Hillsborough schools Superintendent MaryEllen Elia said last week.
If so, it would be "the largest grant ever given to a public school district," she said.
The district signed off last week on a memorandum of understanding with the Seattle-based foundation -- the last step before final confirmation, Elia said. Foundation spokesman Chris Williams said it is possible all five finalists will receive money from the Empowering Effective Teachers grant, but award amounts have not been set.
Give Mr. Obama credit for much of what he said, and continues to say, about educational reform. In rhetorical defiance of that major Democratic Party constituency, America's unionized schoolteachers, Mr. Obama deserves credit for talking a good game on merit pay, charter schools, and breaking down the "tenure" barrier that bars removal of ineffective educators.
Unfortunately, in a now familiar pattern, Mr. Obama does not fare as well when one examines his actual actions, in contrast to his rhetoric.
If Mr. Obama favors innovation designed to increase competition and the range of educational options, particularly for underprivileged kids, why on earth did he stand silent on the sidelines last winter as senators from his own party took the fledgling, highly celebrated Washington, D.C., voucher program out behind the barn and shot it?
What does it mean to be a Democrat when it comes to education? Does it mean you stand for sticking pretty much to the way things are now, except for adding more money? Or does it mean calling for some big changes in the way things are done?
Those aren't just philosophical questions. They point to one of the most interesting and significant things to watch as the political thunderstorms build over Milwaukee Public Schools, the state Capitol and the national education world.
In the debate over mayoral takeover of MPS, so far, it's Gov. Jim Doyle and Mayor Tom Barrett against an array of Milwaukee political and community figures. Almost all of the people on both sides are Democrats.
Use of student performance data in evaluating teachers is almost sure to be a hot issue in the fall session of the Legislature. It's a good bet Doyle will be on one side and the teachers unions on the other. Again, all Democrats.
The nationwide push for performance pay for teachers, for more charter schools, and for stiffer accountability - it's President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan doing the pushing, with resistance from the education establishment, especially teachers unions. And almost all of the cast are Democrats.
Several university professors in Puerto Rico are protesting a decision to ban five books from the curriculum at public high schools in the U.S. territory because of coarse language.
The Spanish-language books previously were read as part of the 11th grade curriculum, but proofreaders this year alerted education officials about "coarse" slang, including references to genitalia in "Mejor te lo cuento: antologia personal," by Juan Antonio Ramos.
Also among the banned books is the novel "Aura" by Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, one of Latin America's most prominent contemporary writers. The other four authors affected are from Puerto Rico.
Magali Garcia Ramis, a communications professor at the University of Puerto Rico, expressed concern Saturday about how books are being evaluated by the island's Department of Education.
"This kind of mentality rejects everything that is art and only associates sexuality with inappropriateness," Garcia Ramis said.
Department of Education spokesman Alan Obrador could not be reached, and the Puerto Rico Teachers Association also was unavailable.
Host Scott Simon speaks with Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Reverend Al Sharpton about President Obama's health care speech to Congress, U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst and their upcoming education reform tour. The duo has joined forces with Education Secretary Arne Duncan to push cities to fix failing schools. The tour will make stops in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Baltimore.
This site continues to mention math curricula challenges from time to time, and as long as I am around, and have community math experiences, it will continue to do so.
I try to visit Madison's wonderful Farmer's Market weekly. This past weekend, I purchased some fabulous raspberries from an older Hmong couple. Their raspberries are the best. Unfortunately, while I made my purchase, they asked how much change I was due, something I saw repeated with other buyers. They periodically have a younger person around to handle the transactions, or a calculator.
Purchasing tickets at high school sporting events presents yet another opportunity to evaluate high schooler's basic, but ESSENTIAL math skills. A Dane County teenager could not make change from $10 for three $2 tickets recently. I have experienced this at local retail establishments as well.
Unfortunately, the "Discovery" approach to math does not appear work....
Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.
The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we'll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a "University of Phoenix" joke.
This doesn't just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.
K-12 spending will not continue to increase at the rate it has over the past twenty years (5.25% annually in the case of the Madison School District). Online education provides many useful learning opportunities for our students. While it is certainly not the "be all and end all", virtual learning can be used to supplement and provide more opportunities for all students. Staff can be redeployed where most effective (The budget pinch, flat enrollment despite a growing metropolitan area along with emerging learning opportunities are two major reasons that the Madison School District must review current programs for their academic and financial efficiency. Reading recovery and reform math are two useful examples).
IN Edgemont, a high-performing Westchester school district, children as young as 7 could recite colors and days of the week in Spanish, but few if any learned to really converse, read or write. So this fall, the district canceled the Spanish lessons offered twice weekly at its two elementary schools since 2003, deciding the time and resources -- an estimated $175,000 a year -- could be better spent on other subjects.
The software replaced three teachers.
Class consolidation in Yonkers resulted in the loss of four foreign-language teaching positions, and budget cuts have cost Arlington, N.Y., its seventh-grade German program, and Danbury, Conn., several sections of middle school French and Spanish.
And in New Jersey, the Ridgewood district is replacing its three elementary school Spanish teachers with Rosetta Stone, an interactive computer program that cost $70,000, less than half their combined salaries.
"There's never a replacement for a teacher in the classroom," said Debra Anderson, a Ridgewood spokeswoman. "But this was a good solution in view of the financial constraints."
aplan Virtual Education (KVE) today announced partnerships with three school
districts to launch part- and full-time online learning options for students
throughout Glades, Polk and Miami-Dade counties this fall. Last year, the
Florida Legislature required school districts to offer full-time virtual
programs starting during the 2009-10 school year. The virtual public school
options will provide middle and high school students with a variety of online
courses that feature individualized instruction and an engaging curriculum.
The partnerships will provide online learning alternatives for:
* Sixth through 12th grade students in the Glades County School District
* Sixth through 12th grade students in the Miami-Dade County Public School
District
* High school students in the Polk County Public School District
"Kaplan Virtual Education is excited to offer Florida students an education
solution that provides rigorous, high-quality courses that can be tailored to
meet their unique needs and prepare them for success in the 21st century," said
Charles Thornburgh, president of Kaplan Virtual Education. "Through these
partnerships, students can get one-on-one attention from teachers, take
advantage of engaging learning tools and study virtually anywhere at any time
via the Internet."
was intrigued by a story on the front page of the Post Aug. 9 Written by my colleague Robin Givhan, it focused on a White House internship program for D.C. students that included a recent high school graduate named Clayton Armstrong. Despite his background, he had won the prestigious summer job and a place in the freshman class at the University of Arizona.
The article was so good I wanted to know more. I wondered how Armstrong acquired his obvious academic skills, given that he had graduated from Ballou High School. D.C. has some fine public high schools, but most are bad, and Ballou in my view is the worst. It is part of what is the worst, or next to worst (Detroit is in the running) urban school district in the country.
This year, only 23 percent of Ballou students reached proficiency or above on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests. As far as I can tell, no Ballou student has ever passed an Advanced Placement test.
"The more students are able to do in research and writing in high school, the more they've got a nice leg up."
At the mere mention of research papers, Kelly Cronin's usually highly motivated Summit Country Day Upper School students turn listless. Some groan. The Hyde Park Catholic school requires all high school students to write lengthy research papers each year on history, religion or literature.
Cronin's sophomores write history papers. They pick a topic in late September and by May they'll have visited libraries, pawed through card catalogs, and plumbed non-fiction books and scholarly articles.
They'll turn in 200 or so index cards of notes. They'll write and revise about 15 pages.
Cronin gladly grades 35 or more papers with such titles as "The Role of the Catholic Church in European Witchcraft Trials'' and "Star Trek Reflected in President Johnson's Great Society.''
"It's time-consuming," she says. "It takes over your life. But I'm not married, and I don't have any kids."
But most high school teachers aren't like Cronin and most schools aren't like Summit. At many high schools across the country, the in-depth research paper is dying or dead, education experts say, victims of testing and time constraints.
Juniors and seniors still get English papers, says Anne Flick, a specialist in gifted education in Springfield Township. "But in my day, that was 15 or 20 pages. Nowadays, it's five."
High school teachers, averaging 150 to 180 students, can't take an hour to grade each long paper, Cronin said.
The assignment may not be necessary, says Tiffany Coy, an assistant principal at Oak Hills High in Bridgetown. "Research tells you it's not necessarily the length; it's the skills you develop," she said.
But some educators disagree.
"Students come to college with no experience in writing papers, to the continual frustration of their professors," said William Fitzhugh, a former high school teacher who publishes The Concord Review, a quarterly in Massachusetts that selects and publishes some of the nation's best high school papers. [from 36 countries so far]
"If we want students to be able to read and understand college books and to write research papers there, then we must give students a chance to learn how to do that in a rigorous college preparatory program. That is not happening," he said.
Teachers see the problem. Fitzhugh's organization commissioned a national study of 400 randomly selected high school teachers in 2002 that showed:
-95% believe research papers, especially history papers, are important.
-62% said they no longer assign even 12-page papers.
-81% never assign 5,000-word or more papers.
Cronin and others blame the testing culture. Standardized tests, the ACT and SAT, don't require research or lengthy writing. And Advanced Placement puts pressures on teachers and students to pass year-end tests for college credit, although some courses do include essays.
"The emphasis on testing in this country has stifled writing," Cronin wrote in EducationNews.org. "TV pundits want to talk about the latest survey that shows what percentage of high school students can't put the Civil War in the correct decade. States want to grade schools and teachers based on tests that often just want rote memorization."
Angela Castleman, who heads the English department at Simon Kenton High in Independence, agrees to an extent. Teachers are assigning writing to help students get into college, but "our greater mission is to prepare them for what's ahead" once in college, she said.
Students think nothing of texting hundreds of words a day to friends but balk at writing thousands for a research paper--until college.
Achieve Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based education reform group, surveyed nearly 1,500 high school graduates and 300 college instructors in 2005. Among graduates at college:
-56% felt they left high school with inadequate work and study habits.
-35% felt they left with gaps in writing.
-40% felt they left with gaps in research skills.
Among college instructors, 62 percent were dissatisfied with high school grads' writing and 50 percent with their research skills, Achieve's study found.
"We may gripe and we may whine, but we know we need to do" research papers, said Melissa Ng, a Summit junior.
Bobby Deye, a junior at Xavier University, said he learned writing at a private high school in Florida, beginning with five pages on the Bermuda Triangle.
Now, facing his first 20-page paper in theology, he wishes he had been challenged more.
At the University of Cincinnati, most of the 3,000 freshmen take an English placement test and land in English Composition classes, said Joyce Malek, director of the program at UC's McMicken College of Arts and Sciences.
"I can't fault the K-12 schools," she said, "because we don't get enough writing across in the curriculum at the university level either...The more students are able to do in research and writing in high school, the more they've got a nice leg up."
Until Sharon Draper left teaching to write books in 1997, she was known at Walnut Hills for assigning 10-page papers. Students wore "I survived the Draper Paper" T-shirts.
Now, despite access to computers and software that make papers easier to write and footnote, students are writing fewer pages, she said, but they can still learn to locate and use scholarly sources and structure their notes and writing.
"If I were king of education, all seniors would have to know how to do a research paper," Draper said.
At Miami University, freshmen come with a wide range of skills, said Martin P. Johnson, an assistant history professor. Generally, they'll get assigned long research papers later in college, he said.
But it's up to professors to motivate them, he said.
"Students often display strong knowledge and analysis," he said. "When they do not, I think it is likely more a question of how hard they have worked more than not being ready or prepared in a general way to be able to do the work.
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
The full impact of the global economic crisis on higher-education systems is still unclear, but as national economies struggle to recover their footing and unemployment levels remain high, "the incentives for individuals to stay on in education are likely to rise over the next years," says a new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The report, "Education at a Glance 2009: OECD Indicators," is the latest in an annual series that analyzes data on the education systems in the group's 30 member countries, which include many European democracies, as well as Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Turkey, and the United States.
Even with signs that the U.S. economy might be stirring, this is a strained Labor Day for the many Americans who are going without raises, and whose hours are being cut at the same time that they are asked to take heavier workloads -- and especially for those who are without employment.
Teachers find themselves in all these categories, across the nation and right here, where the dire financial condition of the Los Angeles Unified School District has led to layoffs or demotions from regular teaching to substitute, and where class sizes will be larger and other cutbacks will reduce salaries. On a bigger scale, the unions that brought teachers better pay, benefits and job security find themselves at a tipping point, their power under threat in ways that seemed barely possible a few years ago.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose 2005 proposal to modify teacher tenure was brought down by the full-on might of the California Teachers Assn., is now calling for a change in state law that would allow teachers' performance reviews to be linked to test scores. And there is barely a political peep to be heard about it; the Obama administration has demanded such changes if California is to receive a share of new education funding. Obama and his Education secretary, Arne Duncan, openly admire high-performing charter schools and reform-minded superintendents such as Michelle Rhee of Washington, who is working to revamp tenure rules there.
You're in third grade, back to school in Texas. Shoes are too tight. Your new shirt is scratchy. And the strange kid sitting next to you -- how's he going to get that pencil out of his nose?
The teachers tell you to file into the gym. They turn on a television. Here comes President Obama. Boorrrrrring. Do you have to listen to this? Is there some kinda test afterward?
Some people in your part of the country didn't want you to hear the president of the United States. It's indoctrination. Socialism. Cult of personality. Stuff you'll learn about on cable news shows.
"This is something you'd expect to see in North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq," says Oklahoma State Senator Steve Russell.
Obama starts talking. He says, "If you quit on school, you're not just quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country."
And then he says, "No one is born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work."
John, the new board of education president, had just proposed that we move "Old Business" to the beginning of our meetings.
I had spent roughly a year-and-a-half arguing that it made no sense to put Old Business at the end of each school board meeting, which usually arrived about 10pm, the third hour of these star chambers of modern public education. By then, most people, including the lone reporter, had gone home. That, of course, was the point: Old Business was dirty laundry, things not done. Why flaunt it?
I had gotten nowhere with my arguments because my colleagues on the school board thought I was the devil. I was the infamous "rogue" board member, the person that school board associations give seminars about. Not a team player. The local paper wrote an editorial about me that prompted a friend, after church, to remark, "I've seen kinder things said about murderers."
In fact, I had slipped on to the school board as a write-in candidate, after a stealth, two-day campaign waged only by email.
Yesterday President Barack Obama delivered a pep talk to America's schoolchildren. The president owes a separate speech to America's parents. They deserve some straight talk on the state of our public schools.
According to the just released Education Next poll put out by the Hoover Institution, public assessment of schools has fallen to the lowest level recorded since Americans were first asked to grade schools in 1981. Just 18% of those surveyed gave schools a grade of an A or a B, down from 30% reported by a Gallup poll as recently as 2005.
No less than 25% of those polled by Education Next gave the schools either an F or a D. (In 2005, only 20% gave schools such low marks.)
Beginning in 2002, the grades awarded to schools by the public spurted upward from the doldrums into which they had fallen during the 1990s. Apparently the enactment of No Child Left Behind gave people a sense that schools were improving. But those days are gone. That federal law has lost its luster and nothing else has taken its place.
Specific, detailed, universally-accepted national standards in education are so vital that we have now had them for many decades--in high school sports. Athletics are so important in our systems of secondary education that it is no surprise that we have never settled for the kind of vague general-ability standards that have prevailed for so long in high school academic aptitude tests. If athletic standards were evaluated in the way the SAT measures general academic ability, for example, there would be tests of "general physical fitness" rather than the impressive suite of detailed measures we now use in high school sports.
The tests that we require in football, basketball, track and other sports are not called assessments, but rather games and meets, but they test the participants' ability to "do" sports in great detail--detail which can be duly communicated to college coaches interested in whether the athletes can perform in a particular sport.
These two different worlds of standards and assessment--athletics and academics--live comfortably side-by-side in our schools, usually without anyone questioning their very different sets of expectations, measures, and rewards.
The things our students have to know when they participate in various athletic activities are universally known and accepted. The things they have to do to be successful in various sports are also universally known and accepted across the country.
The fact that this is not the case for our academic expectations, standards, and rewards for students is the reason there has been so much attention drawn to the problem, at least since the Nation at Risk Report of 1983.
At the moment there are large efforts and expenditures being brought to bear, by the Department of Education, the Education Commission of the States, the Council of Chief State School Officers, many state governments, and others, for the development of academic National Standards for the United States.
There has been, and will continue to be, a lot of controversy over what novels students of English should read, what names, dates and issues history students should be familiar with, what languages, if any, our students should know, and what levels of math and science we can expect of our high school graduates.
The Diploma to Nowhere Report, released by the Strong American Schools Project in the summer of 2008, pointed out that more than one million of our high school graduates are enrolled in remedial courses each year when they get to the colleges which have accepted them. It seems reasonable to assume that the colleges that accepted them had some way of assessing whether those students were ready for the academic work at college, but perhaps the tools for such assessment were not up to the universal standards available for measuring athletic competence.
One area in which academic assessment is especially weak, in my view, is in determining high school students' readiness for college research papers. The Concord Review did a national study of the assignment of research papers in U.S. public high schools which found that, while 95% of teachers surveyed said research papers were important, or very important, 81% did not assign the kind that would help students get ready for college work. Most of the teachers said they just didn't have the time to spend on that with students.
Imagine the shock if we discovered that our student football players were not able to block or tackle, in spite of general agreement on their importance, or that our basketball players could not dribble, pass, or shoot baskets with any degree of competence, and, if, when surveyed, our high school coaches said that they were sorry that they just didn't have time to work on that with their athletes.
Whatever is decided about National Standards for the particular knowledge which all our students should have when they leave school, I hope that there is some realization that learning to do one research paper, of the kind required for every International Baccalaureate Diploma now, should be an essential part of the new standards.
If so, then we come to the problem of assessing, not just the ability of students to write a 500-word "personal essay" for college admissions officers, or to perform the 25-minute display of "writing-on-demand" featured in the SAT writing test and the NAEP assessment of writing, but their work on an actual term paper.
As with our serious assessments in sports, there are no easy shortcuts to an independent assessment of the research papers of our secondary students. Since 1998, the National Writing Board, on a small scale, has produced three-page reports on research papers by high school students from 31 states and two Canadian provinces. Each report has two Readers, and each Reader spends, on average, one hour to read and write their evaluation of each paper. Contrast this with the 30 papers-an-hour assessments of the SAT writing test. The National Writing Board process is time-consuming, but it is, in my biased view, one serious way to assess performance on this basic task that every student will encounter in college.
This city's school district is the second largest in the nation, with nearly 700,000 students. But it has far fewer dollars per student than other major urban districts. Overcrowding and teacher turnover are among the worst in the country.
As new city schools Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines prepares on Wednesday to start his first full year at the helm, his strategy for a turnaround is to emphasize those very points.
By shining a spotlight on some of the most egregious failings of the city's schools, Mr. Cortines said he hopes to create enough transparency, embarrassment and even outrage to break a logjam among the school board, city leadership and local teachers union that has stymied past attempts at change.
Mr. Cortines also wants to break a taboo against evaluating teachers' performance and has threatened to reorganize the city's worst schools. "I want this district to be data-driven and transparent about everything," he said. "That means that sometimes we're not going to look so good. But let me tell you, if we're going to improve, we need to know where we are."
As the city's students return to school on Wednesday, thousands will enter classrooms led by a teacher that the Department of Education has deemed low performing on internal reports. But in a sign of how complicated and controversial the reports are, many teachers never received them, and there are no plans to release them to parents.
The reports use standardized test scores to monitor how much teachers have helped students improve from one year to the next and whether they are successful with particular groups of children, such as boys or those who have struggled for years.
During the last school year, education officials distributed some 12,000 reports that considered how well teachers did in educating students, producing a report for any teacher who taught fourth through eighth grade for the last two years. The reports put New York at the center of a national debate over ways to measure the effectiveness of individual teachers and the role that test scores should play in the evaluations.
Over these next few weeks, 56 million American kids will start kindergarten through 12th grade. Even before an assignment or test is handed out, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has a grade for the system: B.
"We've stagnated," Mr. Duncan says of the U.S. educational system. "Other countries have passed us by."
Few dispute that. An evaluation by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked the United States 18th among 36 countries in secondary education. Almost 25 percent of U.S. students fail to graduate from high school on time; in South Korea, it's 7 percent.
More money, in the absence of structural reform (in my mind, more charters to start with) will not work. Two useful articles here and here.
Charter schools, already seeing a surge in students, are getting attention from another group - private investors.
Entertainment Properties Inc., known mostly for sinking its money into movie theaters and wineries, recently bought 22 locations from charter school operator Imagine Schools for about $170 million. The real estate investment trust acts as landlord, while Imagine operates the schools and is using the investment to expand its chain of 74 locations.
"They really are an effective source of long-term financing that we can rely on and enables us to do what we're best at, which is running schools, and do what they're best at, which is long-term real estate ownership," said Barry Sharp, chief financial officer for Arlington, Va.-based Imagine. "It's a good fit."
Charter school supporters hope the move by Kansas City-based Entertainment Properties is the first of many such partnerships as they deal with increased interest from parents but not more money to build or expand their facilities.
If public schools were baseball teams, says Sam Chaltain, Americans wouldn't have a clue who should be in the playoffs.
That's because our current rating system relies heavily on a single set of test scores for nearly 50 million students, showing how a sample of them perform on a one-day math or reading test each spring.
To Chaltain, director of the Washington-based think tank Forum for Education & Democracy, that's like picking playoff teams based on one game's box score.
As Congress gears up to reauthorize No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2002 law that spells out how federal, state and local governments rate schools and spend billions of dollars, Chaltain is leading a new and unlikely campaign to shift the USA's education conversation away from one-day tests and toward a larger one, focused on "powerful learning and highly effective teaching."
High school principals Peter Cahall of Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C., and Walter Jackson of Alief Taylor High School in Houston, take NPR inside a day in the life of their job. They talk about the challenges of wearing many hats to provide visionary and practical leadership for their school.
The back-to-school packets sent to all 7,800 students here in this hamlet on Long Island's North Shore grew thicker each year with dozens of pages of notices, fliers and forms -- adding up to more than $12,000 in postage alone last year.
Students at Commack High School on Long Island. The Commack School District has limited mailings and put back-to-school packets on its Web site.
But this year, amid a lingering recession and increasing online activity, school officials decided to stop the madness. Teachers and principals were given strict instructions: Limit mailings to a single, first-class envelope per student -- and post the overflow on the district's Web site, in a newly created back-to-school section. The savings: $9,000 in stamps plus $12,000 in salaries for clerks who used to spend up to two weeks assembling the packets.
And, for parents like Debra Miller, a shrinking pile of paperwork to keep up with.
"Since the kids have been in school, there's never been a pile less than 12 inches high on my kitchen counter," said Mrs. Miller, a mother of two, who shoves the unsightly pile into a cabinet when she has company. "I can never get out from under the pile, and I'm not alone. We all talk about it."
Iwas flooded with e-mails after my Aug. 24 column on high school teacher Jonathan Keiler. Prince George's County officials said he was going to lose his certification because he had not taken enough education school courses, even though he had a law degree and was the only person at his school with the highly regarded National Board Certification. Shortly after I told county and state officials that I was going to write about Keiler's situation, he was told that he had enough courses after all.
That change of tune was maddening to the teachers who wrote me. So were what they considered the uselessness of many education courses they were required to take and the faulty information they often received about the advanced training they did or didn't need. I learned much from them. Here is a sampling:
"I'm a 17-year science teacher in Montgomery County. I was actually fired two years ago for not having the 'right' Advanced Professional Certificate (APC) credits. The online credits I was told would be accepted were denied. I later managed to complete the required credits online from the University of Phoenix -- which was extremely lame but easy to do and is recognized by Montgomery County -- in less than three weeks. By then the deadline had run out and I was fired from my job but rehired as a long-term substitute. Demoralizing to say the least. Financially I took a very big hit."
Would we be so eager to embrace a "choose your own math" or "choose your own history" class?
The answer is no. We expect that students learn the curriculum in those courses whether or not they are "into it." Literature is no different, and literature courses shouldn't be treated as glorified book clubs.
By allowing students to bypass difficult texts or texts that don't seem to relate to their contemporary lives in favor of "Captain Underpants," teachers miss a valuable opportunity to teach them that real scholastic and intellectual growth often comes when we are most challenged and least comfortable.
The secretary of education is on fire. He's running up and down a makeshift basketball court in a Kentucky parking lot and has just executed one of those rare flashy moves that also manage to be completely functional: a behind-the-back, no-look pass to a teammate, who cuts backdoor for an easy layup. Moments later, he drains a fadeaway jumper with an opponent dead in his face.
On some weekends, when the rest of Washington is on the back nine or a racquetball court, Arne Duncan (whose first name is pronounced Are-knee) can be found playing in three-on-three street-ball tournaments across the nation. On a muggy, overcast Saturday in late July, while 50 Cent's "I Get Money" blares from a set of speakers, the former head of the Chicago Public Schools pounds the blacktop, alternating between playing intensely and walking off to take calls on his BlackBerry. Almost none of the other ballers know who the white dude with the salt-and-pepper hair is, and even fewer expect him to last long in the tournament. And yet his team goes on to win every game (20-10, 20-6, 18-9, 20-11, 20-10, etc.) and eventually the grand prize of $10,000.
That may sound like a lot of money--Duncan plans to give his share to charity--but it's chump change compared with the kind of cash he gets to play with at work. The economic-stimulus bill passed by Congress in February included $100 billion in new education spending. Of that total, Duncan has $5 billion in discretionary funding. That money alone makes him the most powerful Education Secretary ever. "I had very little--in the single-digit millions," says Margaret Spellings, Duncan's predecessor. "That's millions, with an m."
About a decade ago, this newspaper ran a series of articles about the problems facing public education. In those stories, three reporters, myself included, each spent a day following typical fourth-grade students in three different school districts.
In one classroom, the teacher asked students about a spinnaker, and a young man answered by explaining he had seen the sailing ship on a trip to Turkey. In another classroom, when a teacher asked what was the first thing they smelled when they went to the movies, the students fell silent. When the teacher exclaimed, ''popcorn,'' we learned many of the students had yet to step into a theater.
Students arrive at the doorsteps of schools each day burdened with backpacks and often varied experiences and economic backgrounds. They are at different learning levels, and for this reason, it is difficult to fairly assess just how much teaching is going on in individual classrooms and buildings and across districts.
During the same period these articles were appearing, the charter-school movement was starting in Ohio. The early advocates for these quasi-public schools pointed to the poor results in urban districts like Akron and especially Cleveland and proudly proclaimed they could teach these failing children better and cheaper.
Choice alone for parents and students was not the early driving force to start charter schools, and don't let anyone tell you differently. Choice would come later, when the promises to teach cheaper and better were less than fulfilled
After a Milwaukee School Board vote that created a new accountability office, the superintendent and two board members said the restructuring won't improve the efficiency of the bureaucracy and may hurt the district's chances of securing a high-flying new superintendent.
Superintendent William Andrekopoulos strongly opposed the accountability services office proposal, led by School Board President Michael Bonds. Andrekopoulos told the School Board Thursday that it creates a difficult-to-lead "bifurcated system" and takes away from the superintendent key powers, such as heading charter schools and governmental lobbying efforts. He added the plan was not discussed openly with the public or district employees who would be affected.
Changing the district's organization was based on "fundamental misunderstandings of the existing system" and would "distract from the current efforts to improve the district's financial and educational position," he said.
The board approved the new office and job description of its leader Thursday night in a 5-2 vote, with members Jeff Spence and Bruce Thompson opposed and Tim Petersons voting "present." David Voeltner was absent from the special board meeting.
The mathematics committee of the junior high schools of Madison has been meeting regularly for four rears with one intention in mind -- to improve the mathematics program of the junior high school. After experimenting with three programs in the 7th grade, the Seeing Through Mathematics series, Books 1 and 2, were recommended for adoption and approved in May of 1963.
The sincerity of the eminently qualified professional mathematicians under Dr. Buck's chairmanship was recognized by both the administration and the committee as calling for reconsideration of the committee's decisions over the past three years relative to the choice of Seeing Through Mathematics 1, 2 and 3.
Conversely, the support of the Scott, Foresman and. Company mathematics program and its instruction philosophy, as evidenced by numerous adoptions throughout the country and the pilot studies carried out in the Madison Public Schoolsvindicated that equitable treatment of those holding diametric viewpoints should be given. It was decided that the interests of the students to be taught would be best served through a hearing of both sides before reconsideration.
A special meeting of the Junior High School. Mathematics committee was held on June 10, 1965.
Meeting 1. Presentations were made by Dr. R. C. Buck, Dr. Richard Askey, and Dr. Walter Rudin of the University of Wisconsin Mathematics Department, and Dr. J. B. Rosen, chairman-elect of the University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department.
The presentations emphasized the speakers' major criticism of the Seeing Through Mathematics series -- "that these books completely distort the ideas and spirit of modern mathematics, and do not give students a good preparation for future mathematics courses. Examples were used to show that from the speakers' points of view the emphasis in Seeing Through Mathematics is wrong. They indicated they felt the language overly pedantic, and the mathematics of the textbooks was described as pseudo-mathematics. However, it was pointed out that the choice of topics was good the content was acceptable (except for individual instances), and the treatment was consistent. A question and answer session tollowed the presentations.
..........
After careful consideration of all points of view, the committee unanimously recommended:
that the University of Wisconsin Mathematics and Education Departments be invited to participate with our Curriculum Department in developing end carrying out a program to evaluate the effectiveness of the Seeing Through Mathematics series and, if possible, other "modern" mathematics series in Madison and other school districts in Wisconsin;
that the committee reaffirm its decision to recommend the use of Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 3, and Algebra: Its Elements and structure, Book 1, in grade nine with Seeing Through Mathematics, Book 1 and 2 in grades seven and eight, and that the Department of Curriculum Developnent of the Madison Public Schools continue its study, its evaluation, and its revision of the mathematics curriculum; and
that en in-service program be requested for all junior high school mathematics teachers. (Details to follow in a later bulletin).
If there is one bright spot in the state's dismal funding of schools this year, it's that the Legislature is finally paying attention to long-standing and truly nonsensical disparities in the way that money is distributed.
There is no particular pattern to the inequities, except that a handful of the wealthiest school districts receive far more money per student than others, and the differences have nothing to do with what those districts' relative needs are. Rather, the crazy quilt of funding relies on outdated formulas that made little sense when they were devised and make even less sense now.
The Los Angeles and Inglewood school districts, for instance, have similar populations and educational challenges. Yet Inglewood received $1,400 less per student in 2007-08, the last year for which figures are available. And the relatively affluent Capistrano Unified School District in south Orange County got $1,000 less than that, while the well-off Laguna Beach schools received $3,000 more than Inglewood.
The state Department of Education will conduct field studies of an online version of the Hawai'i State Assessment at every school, with plans to replace the paper and pencil test in 2011.
Once the online version of the assessment is fully rolled out in the 2010-11 school year, officials say the testing window will increase from two weeks to nearly eight months, and teachers will be able to administer the test up to three times per student.
The assessment is the state's measurement under No Child Left Behind. Only the best of the three scores will count toward a school's annual NCLB status, known commonly as "adequate yearly progress."
Modeled after the online Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, superintendent Patricia Hamamoto said administering the Hawai'i assessment by computer will allow teachers to get immediate feedback on how their students are understanding math, reading and science standards. It will also allow teachers to see where students might need more help.
I'VE finally got round to reading Steven Brill's piece in last week's New Yorker about incompetent teachers in New York. It's a brilliant but infuriating description of how hard it is to improve schools because the unions make it so hard to get rid of bad teachers and replace them with good ones.
Brill visits the "Rubber Room", where teachers whose principals want to sack them sit around doing nothing for years, still drawing their salaries, until arbitrators hear their cases. One interviewee, who is earning more than $100,000 a year for twiddling her thumbs, offers one of the most amusingly outlandish theories I have heard in a while:
Before Bloomberg and Klein [the mayor and schools chancellor, who are trying to introduce a hint of meritocracy to New York's schools], "there was no such thing as incompetence," says Brandi Scheiner. She adds:
A Tennessee School Board Association recommendation that would allow school boards to restrict the use of cameras and video recorders from board meetings found little support from the members of the Loudon County School Board on Thursday night.
During a review of TSBA's proposed policy changes, board members and residents expressed their concerns about the policy. Some were concerned that the Nashville-based TSBA's suggested policy was unconstitutional.
"I can't believe you're getting such bad legal advice," said Loudon resident Shirley Harrison.
Pat Hunter, a Loudon County activist who has recently posted video clips of school board members and other county officials on her Web site, said she was concerned about taxpayer money being used to fund TSBA.
State government finances are a wreck. The drop in tax receipts is the worst in a half century. Fewer than 10 states ended the last fiscal year with significant reserves, and three-fourths have deficits exceeding 10% of their budgets. Only an emergency infusion of printed federal funny money is keeping most state boats afloat right now.
Most governors I've talked to are so busy bailing that they haven't checked the long-range forecast. What the radar tells me is that we ain't seen nothin' yet. What we are being hit by isn't a tropical storm that will come and go, with sunshine soon to follow. It's much more likely that we're facing a near permanent reduction in state tax revenues that will require us to reduce the size and scope of our state governments. And the time to prepare for this new reality is already at hand.
The coming state government reset will be particularly wrenching after the happy binge that preceded this recession. During the last decade, states increased their spending by an average of 6% per year, gusting to 8% during 2007-08. Much of the government institutions built up in those years will now have to be dismantled.
In decades past, education in California was a top priority for government, and the state's schools were "the cutting edge of the American Dream." Today, spending per pupil in the state has fallen to 47th in the country. Due to deep budget cuts, California school districts have been laying off teachers, expanding class sizes, closing some schools, and canceling bus service and summer school programs.
As for future funding of public education--the state of California is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. The current dilemma stems from a provision in California's Education Code that can be interpreted as ruling out the use by state officials of test scores to evaluate teacher performance and compensation. On the one hand, the Obama administration has informed state officials that this provision represents an unacceptable "firewall between students and teacher data" and must be removed if California is to be eligible to receive an educational grant from the administration's $4.35 billion Race to the Top stimulus fund. On the other hand, California teachers are making it clear through their unions that the use by state government of student test scores to evaluate teachers would be detrimental to education and is an idea that must be rejected.
Taking up this issue has been the Senate Committee on Education, which held a hearing on Aug. 26 chaired by Senator Gloria Romero. The Committee is considering amending California law to ensure that the state qualifies for federal funding. "It is my goal," Romero says, "to do everything possible to ensure that the Golden State has access to precious federal dollars that can help provide our students the best possible education."
With the vast majority of New York City schools receiving A's and B's on the progress reports released this week, Education Department officials said Thursday that they expected to adjust the grading system, in effect ensuring that more schools would receive lower grades next year.
In fact, school officials who helped create the system said they never meant it to be one that would have so many schools earning the highest marks.
"We are going to raise the bar," said Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief accountability officer for the department. He said that while he would want to see a wider distribution of the grades, "At the same time, when we set clear goals and schools meet them, they need to be recognized and rewarded for that."
The huge increase in the number of top marks on the city report cards -- 97 percent of schools received an A or B, up from 79 percent in 2008 -- was driven by broad gains on state standardized tests in math and English. This year, the number of students who met state standards jumped to 82 percent in math, compared with 74 percent last year. In English, 69 percent of students passed, up from 58 percent.
District officials revealed Thursday that they commissioned an investigation last summer into possible cheating at 26 public and public charter schools where reading and math proficiency on 2008 standardized tests increased markedly.
The probe, an analysis of incorrect student answers that were erased and changed to correct answers, found "anomalies" at some of the schools that administered the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS) test. But officials called the investigation, conducted by the test's publisher, CTB McGraw-Hill, "ultimately inconclusive."
District officials did not name the schools that were investigated, and they did not release a copy of the CTB McGraw-Hill report, which was requested by The Washington Post on May 29 under the Freedom of Information Act. Officials also offered no explanation for the interval between the conclusion of the investigation in March and their decision to disclose it at a news conference called by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) on Thursday.
Anyone who has ever walked the halls of a middle school knows the hormones are hopping and the social drama is intense.
Growing evidence also suggests boys and girls learn best in different ways.
That's why experimenting with same-sex schools and classes is a welcome trend in Wisconsin. If pilot programs in Beaver Dam and a handful of other districts can boost the attention and achievement of both sexes, more schools should consider separating the girls from the boys in targeted grades and subjects.
Beaver Dam educators are separating sixth-graders into two single-gender classrooms for math, science and English this fall. Other classes such as physical education will still be coed.
Educators in Beaver Dam and elsewhere plan to analyze and compare test scores as well as attendance, discipline and behavioral referrals. Results will be vital in determining whether to continue or expand the effort.
School districts from Maryland to Texas are fielding angry complaints from parents opposed to President Barack Obama's back-to-school address Tuesday - forcing districts to find ways to shield students from the speech as conservative opposition to Obama spills into the nation's classrooms.
The White House says Obama's address is a sort of pep talk for the nation's schoolchildren. But conservative commentators have criticized Obama for trying to "indoctrinate" students to his liberal beliefs, and some parents call it an improper mix of politics and education.
"The gist is, 'I want to see what the president has to say before you expose it to my child.' Another said, 'This is Marxist propaganda.' They are very hostile," said Patricia O'Neill, a Democrat who is vice president of the Montgomery County School Board, in a district that borders Washington, D.C. "I think it's disturbing that people don't want to hear the president, but we live in a diverse society."
The White House moved Thursday to quell the controversy. First it revised an Education Department lesson plan that drew the ire of conservatives because it called for students to write letters about how they can help the president.
When Barack Obama won Florida last November -- the first Democrat to take the Sunshine State since FDR -- many saw it as a sign of centrist GOP Governor Charlie Crist's moderating influence. But lately, Florida's disgruntled Republicans aren't looking very moderate. This week, in fact, the peninsula's GOP registered arguably the loudest outcry over the education speech President Obama plans to deliver to U.S. primary and secondary students via webcast and C-Span next Tuesday. In perhaps the most over-the-top performance, state Republican Chairman Jim Greer called it an attempt to use "our children to spread liberal propaganda" and "President Obama's socialist ideology."
Thanks in large part to the Administration's ham-handed advance work, the strident conservative anger that erupted this summer over health-care reform has shifted from town halls to school halls. On the surface, Obama's intentions for Tuesday seem nothing more threatening than a presidential pep talk about taking education seriously. But some ill-advised prep material from the Education Department -- like suggestions that teachers have students write letters on "how to help the President" and recommendations that those pupils read his books -- has left the door ajar (and that's all it seems to take these days) for Republican charges that Obama "wants to indoctrinate our kids," as Clara Dean, GOP chairwoman of Florida's Collier County, puts it. (Read Joe Klein on Barack Obama's August to forget.)
WHEN the poet William Wordsworth declared that "the Child is father of the Man", he meant that the gifts of childhood endow adults with some of their finest qualities. And many governments, these days, feel that the path to happiness for society as a whole lies through spending on the welfare of its youngest members: their health, education and general well-being. A report* from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a rich-country think-tank, scrutinises these efforts and asks if the aim is being achieved.
With its stress on quantifiable facts, the spirit of the OECD report differs from one by UNICEF, the UN children's agency, in 2007 which made waves by saying children in Britain did badly. UNICEF relied too much on asking youngsters how they felt (did they have "kind and helpful" schoolmates?); the new study stresses meatier things like vaccination and test scores.
With equal rigour, the OECD avoids a single index of child welfare in its 30 member states. Instead, after sifting hundreds of variables, the researchers settled on 21 that coalesce into six categories: material well-being; housing and environment; educational well-being; health and safety; risky behaviour; and quality of school life. Then they ranked countries six times.
Here's the latest exhibit on how polarized the country is and how much distrust exists of President Obama.
He plans what seems like a simple speech to students around the country on Tuesday to encourage them to do well in school.
But some Republicans are objecting to the back-to-school message, asserting that Obama wants to indoctrinate students.
Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer said in a statement that he is "absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology" and "liberal propaganda."
Wednesday, after the White House announced the speech, the Department of Education followed up with a letter to school principals and a lesson plan.
Critics pointed to the part of the lesson plan that originally recommended having students "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president."
The Department of Education has now changed their supplementary materials on President Obama's upcoming address to schoolchildren on the importance of education -- eliminating a phrase that some conservatives, such as the Florida GOP, happened to have been bashing as evidence of socialist indoctrination in our schools.
In a set of bullet points listed under a heading, "Extension of the Speech," one of the points used to say: "Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals."
However, that bullet point now reads as follows: "Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short‐term and long‐term education goals. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals."
om Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, put out his own statement, with an education-oriented critique of the speech and its lesson plans.
Here's a snippet from his statement:
The White House materials call for a worshipful, rather than critical approach to this speech. For example, the White House communication calls for the students to have 'notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on the board),' and for the students to discuss 'how will he inspire us,' among other things. ...In general, in keeping with good education practice, students should be taught to read and think critically about statements coming from politicians and historical figures.
Just as it quickly became impossible to have a rationale discussion about health care as August wore on, we could be heading that way on education. If you haven't heard (don't get cable news?), President Obama plans to give a speech to the nation's schoolchildren next week. To accompany it the Department of Education prepared a - gasp - study guide with some ideas for how teachers can use the speech as a, dare I say it, teachable moment.
Conservatives are screaming that this is unprecedented and amounts to indoctrination and a violation of the federal prohibition on involvement in local curricular decisions. Even the usually level-headed Rick Hess has run to the ramparts. We're getting lectured on indoctrination by the same people who paid national commentators to covertly promote their agenda.
Please. Enough. The only thing this episode shows is how thoroughly broken our politics are. Let's take the two "issues" in turn.
The speech, which will be broadcast live from Wakefield High School in Arlington County, was planned as an inspirational message "entirely about encouraging kids to work hard and stay in school," said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent a letter to principals nationwide encouraging them to show it.
But the announcement of the speech prompted a frenzied response from some conservatives, who called it an attempt to indoctrinate students, not motivate them.
Although Eisenhower is commonly remembered for a farewell address that raised concerns about the "military-industrial complex," his letter offers an equally important -- and relevant -- warning: to beware the danger posed by those seeking freedom from the "mental stress and burden" of democracy.
The story began in 1958, when Eisenhower received a letter from Robert Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran. Biggs told the president that he "felt from your recent speeches the feeling of hedging and a little uncertainty." He added, "We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth."
Eisenhower could have discarded Biggs's note or sent a canned response. But he didn't. He composed a thoughtful reply. After enduring Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who had smeared his old colleague Gen. George C. Marshall as a Communist sympathizer, and having guarded the Republican Party against the newly emergent radical right John Birch Society, which labeled him and much of his cabinet Soviet agents, the president perhaps welcomed the opportunity to expound on his vision of the open society.
"I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed," Eisenhower wrote on Feb. 10, 1959. "Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy debate is the breath of life."
Critical thinking is good for kids and good for society.
I attended a recent Russ Feingold lunch [mp3 audio]. He spoke on a wide range of issues and commendably, took many open forum questions (unlike many elected officials), including mine "How will history view our exploding federalism?". A fellow luncheon guest asked about Obama's use of "Czar's" (operating outside of Senate review and confirmation). Feingold rightly criticized this strategy, which undermines the Constitution.
I would generally not pay much attention to this, but for a friends recent comment that his daughter's elementary school (Madison School District) teacher assigned six Obama coloring projects last spring.
President Obama's plan to speak to America's schoolchildren next Tuesday has some Republicans in an uproar. "As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology," thunders Jim Greer, chairman of Florida's Republican Party, in a press release. "President Obama has turned to American's children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American's [sic] youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves." Columnists who spy a conspiracy behind every Democrat are also spreading alarm.
This is overwrought, to say the least. According to the Education Department's Web site, Mr. Obama "will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning"--hardly the stuff of the Communist Manifesto or even the Democratic Party platform. America's children are not so vulnerable that we need to slap an NC-17 rating on Presidential speeches. Given how many minority children struggle in school, a pep talk from the first African-American President could even do some good.
On the other hand, the Department of Education goes a little too far in its lesson plans for teachers to use in conjunction with the speech--especially the one for grades 7 through 12. Before the speech, teachers are urged to use "notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on board) from President Obama's speeches about education" and to "brainstorm" with students about the question "How will he inspire us?" Suggested topics for postspeech discussion include "What resonated with you from President Obama's speech?" and "What is President Obama inspiring you to do?"
As Milwaukee students return to school this week, their first lesson might be to learn a new phrase so they don't feel out of the loop.
Just like teenagers are known to create new words for their social networking sites, the adults in charge of making decisions about the future of Milwaukee Public Schools have upgraded their lingo, too.
Take note: It's not being called a "takeover" of MPS anymore; it's being called "mayoral governance."
(I know; it doesn't quite roll off the tongue the same way, does it?)
Mayor Tom Barrett says the new verbiage is the latest attempt to find a less-imposing description of a controversial education initiative that has been attempted by several other public school districts nationally.
With discussions on the topic heating up among social, business and civic groups, it seemed a name change was in order.
"Words do carry connotations," Barrett said during an interview. "For some people, takeover sounded nefarious."
The owner of a $250,000 Madison home would pay $82.50 more in school property taxes this year under a proposal by city schools superintendent Dan Nerad that seeks to partially cover a projected $9.2 million cut in general state aids to the district.
That's $80 more than estimated under a preliminary 2009-10 district budget approved by the school board in May, when the board expected state cuts to be less severe.
The tax increase would cover only a portion of the state cut. School officials said the remaining gap would be bridged through cost-saving measures that do not directly affect students.
"Am I comfortable or happy?" with the district's proposal, said Arlene Silveira, school board president. "No. But the whole (budget) situation doesn't make me comfortable or happy. I appreciate that there are ways that we can deal with this gap without really cutting programs and without putting too much of a burden back on our community."
The Madison district's $350 million budget for the current school year won't be final until the school board votes on it in late October. Officials are awaiting final student counts in late September, which figure into the amount of aid each district receives from the state.
..
"In terms of where we are in this economy and where we are in public education, you need to be realistic," said [Erik] Kass. "You need to be conservative, and you need to realize there are things that are going to pop up during the year. But I think you also need to be cognizant of the fact that you're being a steward of public resources, and you need to utilize those resources to provide a service that the public is giving you the money to provide."
The Madison School District shared their data with the group and they decided when their next two meetings would be. Compton made some interesting/borderline comments and they have an interesting discussion about race and how housing patterns affect the schools. There was a powerpoint presentation with lots of information, without a handout, so I tried to capture it the best I could.
GETTING STARTED
The meeting was moved from the Mayor's office to Room 260 across the street. The meeting started 5 minutes late with Brian Munson, Marj Passman, Mark Clear, Judy Compton, Dave Porterfield, Brian Solomon and Marsha Rummel were the quorum. Judy Olson absent, but joined them later. City staff of Bill Clingan, Mark Olinger, Ray Harmon and Helen Dietzler. Kurt Keifer from the School District was here to present. (Bill Clingan is a former Madison School Board member. He was defeated a few years ago by Lawrie Kobza.
A few interesting notes:
Clear asks if this reflects white flight, or if this just reflects the communities changing demographics. He wants to know how much is in and out migration. Kiefer says they look more at private and parochial school attendance as portion of Dane County and MMSD. Our enrollment hasn't changed as a percentage. There has been an increased activity in open enrollment - and those numbers have gone up from 200 to 400 kids in the last 8 - 10 years. He says the bigger factor is that they manage their enrollment to their capacities in the private and parochial schools. Even with virtual schools, not much changes. The bigger factor is the housing transition in Metropolitan area. Prime development is happening in other districts
......
Kiefer says smaller learning communities is what they are striving for in high schools. Kiefer says the smaller learning initiative - there is a correlation in decrease in drop out rate with the program. Compton asks about minority and Caucasian level in free lunch. She would like to see that.
.......
Kiefer says that Midvale population is not going up despite the fact that they have the highest proportion of single detached units in Midvale - they are small houses and affordable, but also highest proportion of kids going to private and parochial schools. He says it was because of access because to parochial schools are located there. Kiefer says they think the area is changing, that the Hilldale area has been an attractor for families as well as Sequoya Commons. Family and school friendly areas and he tells the city to "Keep doing that". He is hopeful that Hill Farms changes will be good as well.
A groundbreaking plan to open 51 new Los Angeles schools and 200 existing ones to possible outside control has Randy Palisoc feeling as if salvation is just steps away. A new $54-million campus he covets is rising a block from where his award-winning charter school operates in a rented church.
Palisoc is among many with big dreams since the Los Angeles Board of Education approved its landmark school control resolution last week. The management of about a fourth of all district schools could be up for grabs.
As a result, leading charter school operators anticipate accelerated growth for their organizations and better facilities for some current schools. An 11-school nonprofit group controlled by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is eyeing a new high school south of downtown and may bid for more existing campuses. Momentum is building for internal district proposals.
And even the powerful teachers union, which vigorously opposed the plan, is preparing to take part.
The Minneapolis school district has finished updating a wide-ranging overhaul plan that will close several schools and change the way students are transported.
The district first proposed the plan in April and is presenting a final version to school board members Tuesday night. A final vote is expected in about three weeks.
The effort, called "Changing School Options," addresses a number of aspects of how the district is run -- from transportation to curriculum to which programs and school buildings remain in use. The aim is to save millions of dollars but also make instruction more equitable throughout the district.
The original plan called for closing schools, returning some magnet schools to regular community schools, and changing busing options for students. It was tabled a week after it was proposed because Superintendent Bill Green said the votes weren't there to assure passage by the board. The new plan still proposes many of the same changes but has been altered in ways some board members found crucial to assuring their vote.
For board chair Tom Madden, the new plan includes more details on issues like attendance boundaries. "Parents can now look at it and see exactly how they fit into the plan, and they couldn't do that before," he said.
The Midland Public Schools has created a Q & A sheet for parents and students curious about the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme.
Q: What is the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme?
A: The IB Diploma Programme is a comprehensive and challenging pre-university curriculum for juniors and seniors recognized worldwide.
Q: What exactly does the Diploma Programme involve?
A: The IB Diploma Programme requires students to take six IB classes, three for one year (SL - standard level), and three for two (HL - higher level). Students will also take the Theory of Knowledge (TOK) class, and log 150 hours of Creativity/Action/ Service (CAS), which essentially is service to community, involvement in activities and participation in various school-based extracurricular programs. In addition, they will conduct an individual research project culminating in a paper of not more than 4,000 words.
Q: What options are available for my student?
A: Students must take part in all aspects of the IB Diploma Programme in order to earn an IB Diploma. Students may also select individual IB courses and earn IB certificates in those classes. Or, students may sign-up for an IB class, partake in all of the curricular requirements, and earn no IB certificate or diploma since their assessments will not be sent out for external scoring. The IB diploma is separate from the MPS diploma.
Q: What classes will be offered?
A: MPS will offer courses in each curricular area: English - World Literature 1 & 2, Second Language - French, German or Spanish, Science - Physics 1 & 2, Math - Math Studies 1 & 2 (Advanced Algebra & Pre-Calculus) and Math HL 1 & 2 (Advanced Algebra-Trigonometry & AP Calculus BC), Social Studies - History of the Americas & World Topics, and The Arts - Studio Art and Musical Perspectives. In addition, Psychology may count under either Social Studies or The Arts, as will the Business courses of Marketing Management and Entrepreneurship. TOK will be at the core.
To work, the 21st century skills movement will require keen attention to curriculum, teacher quality, and assessment.
A growing number of business leaders, politicians, and educators are united around the idea that students need "21st century skills" to be successful today. It's exciting to believe that we live in times that are so revolutionary that they demand new and different abilities. But in fact, the skills students need in the 21st century are not new.
Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history, from the development of early tools, to agricultural advancements, to the invention of vaccines, to land and sea exploration. Such skills as information literacy and global awareness are not new, at least not among the elites in different societies. The need for mastery of different kinds of knowledge, ranging from facts to complex analysis? Not new either. In The Republic, Plato wrote about four distinct levels of intellect. Perhaps at the time, these were considered "3rd century BCE skills"?
What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills. Many U.S. students are taught these skills--those who are fortunate enough to attend highly effective schools or at least encounter great teachers--but it's a matter of chance rather than the deliberate design of our school system. Today we cannot afford a system in which receiving a high-quality education is akin to a game of bingo. If we are to have a more equitable and effective public education system, skills that have been the province of the few must become universal.
Though the survey itself was not made available to EIA, the union's collective bargaining and member advocacy department has been briefing union activists on its findings throughout 2009. I have posted a link to the relevant information on EIA's Declassified page. The report included statistics such as the average health insurance premium paid in 2007 by NEA members was $603 for employee-only coverage - about 12.6% of the total cost. Eight affiliates reported members paid nothing.
NEA commissioned the polling firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner to learn member and officer attitudes about health care reform. Most of those surveyed were concerned about the system, but satisfied with their own health care. NEA members were also more favorably disposed towards government health care programs than the average American.
Still, the survey found that NEA members were "split on whether government or employers should provide health care" and that a "Massachusetts-style proposal [is] susceptible to arguments against it."
Three factors have conjoined this month to make education reform in Wisconsin a real possibility in the next year and a half:
The announcement by Gov. Jim Doyle not to seek re-election but serve out his term.
The tragic, but courageous incident involving Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a promoter of education reform in Wisconsin's largest city.
The potential of qualifying for new federal education dollars.
The logjam created by the state teachers union's political activities -- which contribute millions of dollars per election year almost entirely on behalf of Democrats -- has led over the past 15 years to no educational policies put forward by Democrats or Republicans.
Some individual legislators have had proposals, but they have not gone far in the legislative process.
The political ground rules in Madison have been too crassly partisan on both sides of the aisle. It goes like this: If the Democrats control Madison, Wisconsin Education Association Council gets what it wants. If Republicans control Madison, WEAC gets nothing that it wants.
This is disheartening to the many people across the political spectrum who want reform and progress.
The newly aligned stars offer a chance to break the logjam. Doyle lacks the need for WEAC because he is not running again. Barrett's popularity has surged after he was injured when he came to the aid of a woman threatened by a pipe-wielding attacker. And the federal aid is a carrot.
Reformers have been helped by President Barack Obama's secretary of education, who called one Wisconsin law on education "ridiculous." That law currently makes Wisconsin ineligible for its share of $4 billion of federal education money.
Wisconsin now has a chance to take advantage of this alignment to make dramatic fixes to the Milwaukee public school system, change Wisconsin law so teachers can be at least partially evaluated by student test scores, and make long overdue changes in K-12 educational funding formulas.
The funding formulas currently in place will, with no doubt, increase property taxes, increase class sizes, and increase teacher layoffs.
One more entity needs to get its star aligned -- the state Legislature. The Democrats do need WEAC in 2010. But I believe there are good people in the Legislature who, I hope, will grab this moment.
The goal of public education is clear and simple: improve student achievement. There are three major items that accomplish this:
Better family structure and parental involvement in schools.
Adequate funding -- without involving students in the unpopular reliance on property taxes, the most unpopular tax of all. Think about it, the funding of our prisons does not involve the property tax wars, but paying to educate our children does.
Appreciated teachers who continue to stimulate students to improve and are evaluated and rewarded for outstanding performance.
These times for reform do not come often.
Cullen, former state Senate majority leader, is a member of the Janesville School Board.
Several letters to the editor on Aug. 24 ("A New Initiative on Education") express concern that greater reliance on standardized tests for students will, in one writer's words, leave "little room for passion, creativity or intellect."
This possibility could occur, but with wise guidelines from Education Secretary Arne Duncan, this need not occur. The main purpose of standardized testing should be to assess the yearly advancement (or lack thereof) of individual students, not to punish teachers.
Students cannot learn if they are not taught at the level at which they are functioning. It is haphazard to teach "Romeo and Juliet" to a ninth-grade student who is reading on a fifth-grade level.
For educators to stick their collective heads into the sand is foolhardy. Educators must come out of the Dark Ages, use test results for diagnostic purposes and then teach students with precision and creativity.
Private schools without religious affiliation spend almost twice as much per student as their public and Catholic counterparts and more than double that of other Christian schools nationwide, according to a new study.
In the Washington area, there are about 330 private schools with enrollments above 50 students, according to Education Department data. Two-thirds have some religious affiliation, and a quarter are members of non-Catholic Christian school associations. Although it is not surprising that some private schools spend more per student than public and faith-based schools, just how much more has not previously been documented.
"There are a lot of urban legends that drive the policy discussions," said Bruce D. Baker, a professor at Rutgers University and the author of the study. He said that private schools tend to be costlier than the commonly accepted figures in policy debates, especially conversations about school vouchers.
The secular private schools analyzed in the study spent $20,100 on each student in the 2007-08 school year vs. $10,100 in public schools. Nonparochial Catholic schools tended to spend roughly the same as public schools. (Parochial schools were not included in the study because their tax data are not publicly available and because their finances are so tied to those of the Catholic Church.) Members of two of the largest associations of Christian schools spent $7,100 -- several thousand dollars less per student than their public peers.
Since being confirmed by the Senate this year, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been rolling out an aggressive plan to overhaul the nation's lagging public school systems. It is time, in his words, for "fundamental reform."
Congress, at President Barack Obama's urging, is putting billions of stimulus dollars into education. It is a stunning amount of money, and this is a time like none other for American schools.
The nation has a high-school dropout rate of 30 percent, Duncan said, and those who graduate are behind students in other nations. With American students competing for jobs in a world economy, it is important they have the best education possible.
"As the president has said many times, we have to educate our way to a better economy," Duncan said Wednesday in a meeting with the Las Vegas Sun's editorial board.
As the former chief executive of the public school system in Chicago, Duncan understands the variety of issues facing education, including public safety concerns and money woes. He understands the need for change and wants to upend the status quo. Duncan has put together a broad array of plans that, if implemented, could significantly improve schools. To wit:
A well-rounded education. The emphasis under the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration's hallmark education policy, was standardized testing that covered a few subjects. Principals and teachers across the country, consequently, "teach to the test." The result often has been a limited curriculum. Duncan wants to see children receive a well-rounded education including physical education, art and music. He said he wants public school students "to have the opportunities private school students have always had."
A new Texas law that could double the amount of academic credit high-school athletes receive for playing sports is stoking a long-standing debate in the Lone Star State about whether athletics should count the same as schoolwork.
Texas is unusual in that high-school sports aren't completely extracurricular. The state has long allowed students who are members of sports teams to take one athletics class during a normal school day, a period that can be filled with anything from watching game films and weight lifting to sitting in study hall.
The state formerly permitted high schoolers to apply only two credits -- or two years' worth -- of athletics classes toward the 26 credits needed to graduate. But a law passed by the Texas legislature in May effectively increased the number of such credits that can apply toward the degree to four.
Coaches and athletic directors welcomed the change, which they had sought from the Texas Board of Education for the past two years.
"We think it's a good idea to allow parents and kids to have some flexibility," said Robert Young, athletic director at Klein Independent School District.
The Texas State Teachers Association also supported the increase in athletics credits, saying it gives students more opportunities to take classes that interest them the most.
The Philadelphia School District should move quickly to fix flaws in the expulsion process of its zero-tolerance discipline policy.
The district had not expelled any students in the four years prior to Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman's arrival. But officials recommended 156 expulsions last school year. An expulsion can last for up to a year.
The School Reform Commission recently voted to expel 65 students, and at least 25 cases are in the pipeline.
A "no-nonsense" disciplinary policy is long overdue in a school system where students and staff often feel unsafe. But a backlog in expulsion cases left dozens of students in limbo for months. That is unacceptable.
These lengthy delays deny students due process and can unfairly harm innocent students waiting for a hearing. If the system is ill-equipped to handle the high volume of expulsion cases, then it needs to be fixed.
A parent of an Olney West High School student said her son spent five months at an alternative disciplinary school waiting for a hearing in which he was eventually exonerated. By then, he had missed most of his senior year.
The Education Law Center says suspended students facing possible expulsion should get a hearing within 10 days. The district contends it is not required to meet that timeline. OK, but it has to do better than have students miss most of an academic year before their case is heard.
The Obama administration laid down an appropriately tough line in late July when it released preliminary rules for the $4.3 billion pot of money known as the Race to the Top Fund. The administration rightly sees it as a way to spur reform by rewarding states that embrace high standards and bypassing those that do not.
Federal regulations are often modified in line with criticisms that arise during the legally mandated comment period. But Education Secretary Arne Duncan will need to hold firm against the likes of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, and others who are predictably clinging to the status quo.
The administration plan would award grants based on how well state applications cover several topic areas. States must, for example, submit plausible plans for improving teacher effectiveness, equalizing teacher quality across rich and poor schools. They must also show how they would turn around failing schools.
That's what state Superintendent Mike Flanagan asked school leaders to do in coming up with plans to reimagine how kids are educated. He said it's necessary to produce better-educated students who are more prepared to compete with their peers around the world.
This reimagine process has the potential to radically transform education in Michigan, where a quarter of students fail to graduate high school on time. Student achievement has seen only modest gains in some subjects, and has actually worsened in others. A troubling 40% of high school students failed the reading portion of the Michigan Merit Exam the last two years.
The reimagine plans could help Michigan win a slice of more than $4 billion in federal funds pledged for states with promising plans to innovate education.
Proposals so far reflect an array of ideas. For instance, students would be able to take college courses at their high school in Fitzgerald Public Schools in Warren. And in Oxford, students will be fluent in Spanish or Mandarin Chinese by the eighth grade -- and start learning a stringed instrument in kindergarten.
It's not easy being E. D. Hirsch, Jr. If the inventive 81-year-old had been a business leader or politician or even a school superintendent, his fight to give U.S. children rich lessons in their shared history and culture would have made him a hero among his peers. Instead, he chose to be an English professor, at the unlucky moment when academic fashion declared the American common heritage to be bunk and made people like Hirsch into pariahs.
In this intriguing, irresistible book, Hirsch tells of life as the odd man out at the University of Virginia. Twelve years ago, for instance, he decided to give a course at the university's education school. As a bestselling author and leader of a national movement to improve elementary school teaching, he thought students would flock to hear him. Instead, he rarely got more than 10 a year. Be grateful for that many, one student told him. They had all been warned by the education faculty not to have anything to do with someone demanding that all students take prescribed courses in world and American history.
It is startling to realize, as we consider the legacy of Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, that this very liberal, very partisan Democrat was key to the consensus that has unified the two parties on education policy for the last two decades.
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I was slow to pick up on this. It wasn't until I looked carefully at the presidential candidate positions in 2000 that I understood how much the two parties agreed on how to make public schools better. George W. Bush and Al Gore were very different people, but their education platforms, once you got past their favorite wedge issue, vouchers, were nearly identical. Both wanted to use test scores to make schools accountable for improving achievement. If Gore had gotten to the White House, he would have produced a law similar to No Child Left Behind.
For some time I have attributed this to the good sense of education experts on both sides of the aisle. The people guiding the candidates on this issue have seen what works in schools, particularly in low income neighborhoods, and have rescued their parties from the kind of anti-testing rhetoric that was so popular with teacher union leaders.
In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: "Children are fragile. Handle with care." It's a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city's five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day--which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school--typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city's contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved--the process is often endless--they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.
"You can never appreciate how irrational the system is until you've lived with it," says Joel Klein, the city's schools chancellor, who was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg seven years ago.
Neither the Mayor nor the chancellor is popular in the Rubber Room. "Before Bloomberg and Klein took over, there was no such thing as incompetence," Brandi Scheiner, standing just under the Manhattan Rubber Room's "Handle with Care" poster, said recently. Scheiner, who is fifty-six, talks with a raspy Queens accent. Suspended with pay from her job as an elementary-school teacher, she earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, and she is, she said, "entitled to every penny of it." She has been in the Rubber Room for two years. Like most others I encountered there, Scheiner said that she got into teaching because she "loves children."
"Before Bloomberg and Klein, everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own," Scheiner said. "There was no need to push anyone out." Like ninety-seven per cent of all teachers in the pre-Bloomberg days, she was given tenure after her third year of teaching, and then, like ninety-nine per cent of all teachers before 2002, she received a satisfactory rating each year.
It's not a total coincidence that, on the day after the Los Angeles Unified school board passed the first major reform to turn around its lowest-performing campuses, the Obama administration announced that it would target billions of federal dollars to districts that reconfigured their persistently failing schools.
From the start, board Vice President Yolie Flores Aguilar said her reform initiative was inspired by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan's "Race to the Top" campaign, which will funnel stimulus money to troubled schools that commit to transforming their operations. Passed by the board Tuesday, Flores Aguilar's resolution allows district and outside groups to submit competing proposals for operating 50 new schools, as well as up to 200 schools that have failed to meet federal improvement goals for several years.
The signs of a new era were visible at L.A. Unified headquarters even before the vote. Thousands of parents representing both sides crowded into the building and filled the streets outside, a level of involvement too rarely seen in debates over local schools. And though the usual amount of posturing took place on the dais, there was a greater openness among board members about the role of labor unions in reform attempts.
While the mayor and his staff were conspicuously absent, other government institutions were well represented: Madison School Board president Arlene Silveira (middle aged white female) and members Beth Moss, Maya Cole, Marge Passman, Ed Hughes, and three school principals (all middle aged, white, of varying genders). Police Captain Jay Lengfeld (middle aged, white, male) and neighborhood officers Justine Harris (young white female) and John Amos (middle aged white male) attended. So did County Sheriff Dave Mahoney (middle aged white male), which impressed me greatly. As well as a number of alders and county board members, including Ald. Jed Sanborn and Supv. Diane Hesselbein (young white male and female, respectively), who told me she danced with my brother Mike (older white male) at a function in the Dells. (Ald. Pham-Remmele [older asian female] was called away to visit her seriously ill and aging mother [even older asian female] in California.) Did not see The Kathleen. Here's who else wasn't there: Bicycle Boy (young, white and stupid)!
The people speak
The very first "citizen" to speak was an Orchard Ridge older white male whom I did not recognize. The fellow bordered on racism when he said "the complexion" of the neighborhood had changed. Perhaps it was just an unfortunate choice of words. "Put the problem people somewhere else," he demanded. But he was the only person who spoke that way Wednesday night at Falk.
On the other extreme was Lisa Kass (older white female) who (wouldn't you know it?) is a school teacher. "Just because someone is different doesn't mean people are bad," she said, demonstrating a flair for tautologies. Other than the first speaker (arguably), no one alleged different.
Here is the most racist thing your host can say: Let's have two sets of behavior, one for one race and a lesser standard for another race. That is separate but unequal!
Then Kass (she teaches our children?) committed the sin of moral equivalence. One of the Bill of Rights prohibits loud noise after 10 p.m. weekdays and 11 p.m. weekends.
"Where is the prohibition against leaf blowers at 7:30 in the morning?" she demanded.
Hey, for my money, add it to the list. Pisses me off, too. Still, it is hard to see 200 people taking an hour and a half out of a weekday evening to bitch about leaf blowers and lawn mowers -- either in Green Tree or Allied Drive. Hey, at least the blowers and mowers are keeping their properties tidy! Or, is "neat" now prima facie evidence of racism?
Yes, leaf-blowing in the early morning is inconsiderate and annoying but yelling the M-F word is inconsiderate, annoying, obscene, morally offensive, and disturbing.
Then Ms. Kass hand-slapped her seatmate Florenzo Cribbs (young black male), president of Allied Drive-Dunn's Marsh neighborhood. Prior to the event Cribbs encouraged his e-mail list to attend the meeting. "DON'T LET THE PROWER STRUCTOR THAT ALLOWED THE PROBLEWS CREAT THE RULES FOR TRY TO FIX THE PROBLEMS."
In a startling acknowledgment that the Los Angeles school system cannot improve enough schools on its own, the city Board of Education approved a plan Tuesday that could turn over 250 campuses -- including 50 new multimillion-dollar facilities -- to charter groups and other outside operators.
The plan, approved on a 6-1 vote, gives Supt. Ramon C. Cortines the power to recommend the best option to run some of the worst-performing schools in the city as well as the newest campuses. Board member Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte dissented.
The vote occurred after a tense, nearly four-hour debate during which supporters characterized the resolution as a moral imperative. Foes called it illegal, illogical and improper.
The action signals a historic turning point for the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has struggled for decades to boost student achievement. District officials and others have said their ability to achieve more than incremental progress is hindered by the powerful teachers union, whose contract makes it nearly impossible to fire ineffective tenured teachers. Union leaders blame a district bureaucracy that they say fails to include teachers in "top-down reforms."
School lunch is back on the U.S. policy menu for the first time in decades, thanks to President Barack Obama's drive to make school food more nutritious and healthy.
Like any reform effort in Washington these days, the school lunch overhaul is vulnerable to a growing government deficit. But some companies and investors are getting in the game early with small projects that could some day grow into big business catering to millions of school children.
The U.S. government pays much of the bill for school food. Efforts to replace the processed and nutrition-poor foods still on many student lunch trays come with a higher price tag that many schools cannot afford. Businesses can help close the gap.
U.S. natural foods grocer Whole Foods Market Inc (WFMI.O) has teamed with Chef Ann Cooper -- best known for her high-profile partnership with Chef Alice Waters at Berkeley Unified School District -- to launch the Lunch Box project (thelunchbox.org/), an expanding online guidebook to help school "lunch ladies" serve healthier food.
A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college's composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?
I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues -- racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.
As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research. Now I have received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which last week issued its latest white paper, "What Will They Learn? A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation's Leading Colleges and Universities."
Milwaukee Public Schools should create a new accountability services office that can provide the district with much-needed transparency, oversight and an annual fiscal review, Milwaukee School Board President Michael Bonds said Tuesday.
Bonds' proposal to comprehensively reform the school system's financial operations isn't directly related to the issue of who should run MPS, but the announcement came on the heels of a news conference he joined at City Hall this week to oppose letting Mayor Tom Barrett appoint members of the School Board and choose the next superintendent.
Gov. Jim Doyle and Barrett this month made public their plans for the mayor to appoint the School Board and pick the superintendent of MPS.
After the news conference at City Hall, local and state political leaders started taking sides: opposing mayoral control on the grounds that it's undemocratic, or supporting Barrett and mayoral control because a long-failing district needs an overhaul.
Milwaukee Ald. Tony Zielinski said the mayoral control plan was aimed at taking away voter rights, and he's been joined in opposition by School Board members Terry Falk and Annie Woodward, state Reps. Christine Sinicki and Annette Polly Williams, both Milwaukee Democrats, as well as members of the NAACP, Milwaukee Innercity Congregations Allied for Hope, the LGBT community and the Service Employees International Union.
A record 116 Ohio school districts have been rated excellent and overall student achievement returned to a 10-year high last year, but the statewide graduation rate fell to its lowest in five years, the state's latest rankings show.
Data released Tuesday show that more schools and districts were rated effective or higher. However, test scores in the fifth and eighth grades -- entry points to middle and high schools -- failed to meet targets in reading, math, science and social studies. The statewide graduation rate for the previous year also fell to 84.6 percent.
And the Youngstown schools descended into academic emergency, the first district to receive the state's lowest ranking since the 2004-05 school year. A special distress commission will be dispatched to the Steel Belt city to help administrators on the problem.
About 15 charter schools could be closed for failing to meet state academic performance standards, said state Superintendent Deborah Delisle.
The rankings will serve as a benchmark for judging the success of an overhaul of the state's ailing public school system that Gov. Ted Strickland championed in his January State of the State address and during this spring's state budget-writing process.
I am not a big fan of merit pay for high-performing teachers unless the entire school staff is rewarded. But I have no doubt that our current teacher pay upgrade and certification system, based largely on education school credits, is dumb and should be changed.
You disagree? Then let me introduce you to Jonathan Keiler, a social studies teacher at Bowie High School in Prince George's County, where school starts Monday.
It is difficult to argue that Keiler, 49, is anything but one of his county's best teachers. He is the only member of the Bowie High faculty with National Board Certification, having passed a competitive series of tests of his classroom skills that has become a gold standard for American educators. He has a bachelor's degree in philosophy and history from Salisbury University and a law degree from Washington and Lee University. He served four years as an Army Judge Advocate General officer, then was a partner in a private law firm in Bethesda until, as he puts it, he "got sick of law and became a social studies teacher at my alma mater."
He teaches a survey course called Practical Law, as well as Advanced Placement World History and AP Art History. More students signed up for his classes this year than he had periods to teach them. He coaches Bowie's Mock Trial team, the most successful in the county. He has published articles on military history and law in several magazines.
The hallways of Kewaskum High School were hushed, with only the odd staff member quietly shuffling down its corridors, while the school's field house rang with the sound of more than 130 student voices.
"V-I-C-T-O-R-Y, that's our freshman battle cry!" groups of ninth-graders chanted from the bleachers.
With almost a week to go before the start of the school year, nearly three-quarters of Kewaskum High's freshman class has chosen to spend the next few days learning about its new school. Freshmen will look for their lockers, track down classroom teachers and meet or reacquaint themselves with their classmates.
And, hopefully, they will get a head start on what educators consider the most important year of high school.
"If you talk to any high school principal, what they're going to tell you is that when a kid is most likely to fail is in that freshman year," Kewaskum High School Principal Christine Horbas said. "So to get them off on the right foot, I think, is very, very important."
Many schools hold orientation nights or freshman-only times on the first day of school. Kewaskum tried some of those ideas, too, before launching a full warm-up week this year.
The extra time means Kewaskum can hold more fun activities for the ninth-graders - such as teaching them school cheers or playing four-way tug-of-war - as well as refresh skills such as writing exam answers and making measurements.
Back in the mid-1990s, the idea of the mayor taking over Milwaukee Public Schools was occasionally floated, but never got anywhere because Mayor John Norquist was seen as overbearing, too eager to amass more power. No one has ever made the same accusation of his successor.
Indeed, when Tom Barrett first ran for mayor in 2004, he proposed such a governance change, and in the face of criticism, backed off within two days. "I don't want to be the piñata on this issue," he told me at the time.
In the last couple years, Barrett has gotten increasing pressure, from the business community, from local community activists, from Gov. Jim Doyle, to take over the schools. But he kept dragging his feet. Perhaps the final convincer was U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who has offered the carrot of federal funding for Milwaukee Public Schools should that happen. If a governance change was ever going to happen, the time to do so was clearly now.
Under the proposed change, the mayor would directly appoint the MPS superintendent, and would appoint school board members, with Common Council approval. The idea is being attacked, with the same bizarre argument offered over and over.
With the new school year set to begin next week, it's time for a back-to-school quiz.
Not for students. This one is for parents with children in Milwaukee Public Schools or anyone concerned about the future of MPS.
In the past few weeks, the future of MPS has been widely debated due to a blockbuster announcement about a plan to take over control of MPS from the Milwaukee School Board and give it to the mayor of Milwaukee.
Under this plan, endorsed by both Gov. Jim Doyle and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, the Milwaukee School Board would become an appointed body rather than an elected one and the responsibility for choosing the next superintendent would lie with the mayor instead of School Board members.
This kind of thing has been attempted in other cities, with no clear track record of success or failure. But just the fact that Barrett, Doyle and others even floated this trial balloon suggests they think it's an idea whose time has come. Which raises the question:
How much do people know about their Milwaukee School Board? Get your No. 2 pencils ready:
In 1997, the Lewisville school district moved its ninth-graders into a separate school as a short-term solution to overcrowding at Lewisville High School.
But the temporary move turned permanent when officials discovered some unexpected benefits from giving freshmen a school of their own: test scores and attendance improved while disciplinary problems and even teen pregnancy rates dropped - from 40 in 1996 to zero the next year.
Today, Killough Lewisville High School North - the district's ninth-grade center that opened in 2005 - is one of LISD's crowning jewels. It achieved an exemplary rating from the Texas Education Agency and was named the No. 1 public high school in the state three years ago by Texas Monthly magazine.
It's been so successful, in fact, that Lewisville school officials are now making plans to create ninth-grade centers for Hebron, Flower Mound and Marcus high schools.
But at the same time they're replicating the ninth-grade model throughout the district, school officials plan to add sophomores to the mix at Killough - a move that has upset parents who feel that the school should remain a freshman haven.
"The ninth-grade center has been great for Lewisville. It's been such a success," said Susan Arthur, whose daughter will attend Killough this year. "We don't understand why they've taken it away."
cation in the Shreveport-Bossier City area is on the dawn of a new era, but barriers at the local and state levels could stifle the potential for improvement, new local education leaders said.
"What education will look like in 10 to 15 years will not be recognizable to many of us because of the ways it will be delivered and ways we will be cooperating," said Centenary College President B. David Rowe. "The ones who don't cooperate, the ones who don't change, the ones who don't collaborate will be left behind."
Rowe, Caddo schools Superintendent Gerald Dawkins, Bossier schools Superintendent D.C. Machen and Bossier Parish Community College Chancellor Jim Henderson are among the area's newest educational leaders. Between them, they are responsible for educating about 70,000 students.
They all have vast experiences in education from working with the state's technical and community colleges to more than 30 years in the same local school system. All four leaders, however, are relatively new to their positions -- ranging from a few weeks to about one year on the job.
Lowe and Behold The controversial (Texas) State Board of Education has a new chair. Here's how she can keep it from becoming the State Board of Embarrassment.
The State Board of Education is the most dysfunctional agency in Texas government. This is quite an achievement, considering the competition: the Texas Department of Insurance, which allows the highest home insurance rates in the land; the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which changes names every few years but not its polluter-friendly policies; the Public Utility Commission, whose chairman, responding to a petition this summer to prohibit electric utilities from disconnecting low-income and elderly customers until the heat wave broke, argued that it wasn't really unusually hot. And let us not forget the Texas Department of Transportation, which can't abide the idea of a highway without a tollbooth on it.
But there is nothing like the idiosyncratic, bitterly divided SBOE, whose fifteen elected members are charged with overseeing public education in Texas. They decide what Texas schoolchildren are supposed to learn. They establish statewide curriculum standards. They determine whether textbooks include the required material. They set graduation requirements. They are responsible for investing the Permanent School Fund, the endowment for the public schools. They accept or reject requests to establish innovative charter schools. At least, that's what the SBOE is supposed to do. What it has really done, for two decades or more, is argue incessantly over peripheral issues: the theory of evolution, sex education, role models for women.
For the past sixty years, the board has been composed of people from the education community: school board members, teachers, administrators. They have operated in relative obscurity and discharged their duties in a routine way. About the only time the SBOE made news was when critics like Mel and Norma Gabler, of Longview, began showing up at meetings to complain that textbooks under consideration had a liberal, anti-Christian point of view. But by the nineties, a new group of conservatives, many motivated by their religious beliefs, targeted the board for a takeover. They have been so successful that today they are the majority faction, and the SBOE has become the front line of the culture wars in Texas.
The graduates of a radical bilingual education program at Alicia R. Chacón International, in El Paso, would have no trouble reading either of these headlines. What can they teach the rest of us about the future of Texas?
On (En) a warm spring morning in east El Paso, I watched a science teacher named Yvette Garcia wrap duct tape around the wrists of one of her best students. We were in a tidy lab room on the first floor of Del Valle High School, in the Ysleta Independent School District, about two miles from the border in a valley once covered with cotton and onion fields but long since swallowed up by the sprawl of El Paso. Garcia taped a second student around the ankles, bound a third around the elbows, and so on, until she had temporarily handicapped a half-dozen giggling teenagers, whom she then cheerfully goaded into a footrace followed by a peanut-eating contest. It was a demonstration of the scientific concept of genetic mutation--or at least I think it was. The lab was taught entirely in Spanish, and my limited skills didn't allow me to follow a discussion of an advanced academic concept. But these kids could grasp the lesson equally well in Spanish or in English, because they had been taught--most of them since elementary school--using a cutting-edge bilingual education program known as dual language.
In traditional bilingual classes, learning English is the top priority. The ultimate aim is to move kids out of non-English-speaking classrooms as quickly as possible. Students in dual language classes, on the other hand, are encouraged to keep their first language as they learn a second. And Ysleta's program, called two-way dual language, is even more radical, because kids who speak only English are also encouraged to enroll. Everyone sits in the same classroom. Spanish-speaking kids are expected to help the English speakers in the early grades, which are taught mostly in Spanish. As more and more English is introduced into the classes, the roles are reversed. Even the teachers admit it can look like chaos to an outsider. "Dual language classes are very loud," said Steven Vizcaino, who was an early student in the program and who graduated from Del Valle High in June. "Everyone is talking to everyone."
Venezuelan police have fired teargas to stop thousands of protesters against a new education law from breaking past a security cordon in the capital Caracas.
Protesters accuse the government of President Hugo Chavez of indoctrinating children into backing socialist values.
Health officials said dozens of people were treated for minor injuries.
Rallies for and against the law, which passed last week, have been held for over a week. Last Friday's protests also met a tough response from police.
Elsewhere in the capital on Sunday, thousands of Chavez supporters held a counter-rally.
They say the new law will give everyone equal access to education, regardless of their economic position.
'Bolivarian Doctrine'
The government says changes to the law - which among other things, broadens state control over schools and makes the education system secular - were long overdue.
But the Catholic Church and university authorities in Venezuela have opposed the law.
In 2007, fresh out of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Chris Turk snagged a coveted spot with the elite Teach For America program, landing here at Cherry Hill Elementary/Middle School in a blue-collar neighborhood at the city's southern tip. For the past two years, he has taught middle-school social studies.
One recent afternoon, during a five-week "life skills" summer-school course, Turk tells his five students that their final project, a movie about what they've learned, has a blockbuster budget: $70.
"We can go big here," he says. "We can go grand."
He might as well be talking about the high-profile program that brought him here.
Despite a lingering recession, state budget crises and widespread teacher hiring slowdowns, Teach For America (TFA) has grown steadily, delighting supporters and giving critics a bad case of heartburn as it expands to new cities and builds a formidable alumni base of young people willing to teach for two years in some of the USA's toughest public schools.
Here's a dispatch from my colleague Nick Anderson on the national education beat:
The nation's largest teachers union sharply attacked President Obama's most significant school improvement initiative on Friday evening, saying that it puts too much emphasis on a "narrow agenda" centered on charter schools and echoes the Bush administration's "top-down approach" to reform.
The National Education Association's criticism of Obama's $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" initiative came nearly a month after the president unveiled the competitive grant program, meant to spur states to move toward teacher performance pay; lift caps on independently operated, publicly funded charter schools; and take other steps to shake up school systems.
The NEA's statement to the Department of Education came a week before the end of the public-comment period on the administration's proposal, and it reflected deep divisions over the White House's education agenda within a constituency largely loyal to the Democratic Party.
Most students try not to think about school during the summer. But a number of them took to the streets on a sweltering August day to talk up public education to people who might normally enroll their children in private or parochial schools.
Clad in T-shirts promoting "The Choice," about 100 students, parents and administrators went door-to-door on a recent Saturday, asking Richmond homeowners to give their neighborhood schools a second look. Joining them was Virginia's first lady Anne Holton, a product of city schools.
The $50,000 campaign by a school system still trying to rebound from a long history of racial segregation and white flight is an example of efforts under way in several cities to retain students. School districts are highlighting improvements to halt declining head counts so they can retain their funding, especially in light of drastic state budget cuts.
"People are still stuck with perceptions of yesteryear, and are not really aware of what we have to offer today," Richmond Superintendent Yvonne Brandon said. "It's not perfect, but be a part of the solution and become invested now."
Like other urban school districts, Richmond, where 88 percent of students are black, 7 percent are white, and 71 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, has struggled on many fronts.
Two leading Latino organizations voiced support for the takeover of Milwaukee Public Schools proposed by Gov. Jim Doyle and Mayor Tom Barrett, while nearly 150 people rallied against the plan Friday at a north side church.
Darryl D. Morin, Wisconsin director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said his organization spent the last two years holding seminars on local educational issues and decided to endorse the proposal after evaluating various options.
But he also called for a mandatory reauthorization for the takeover so that voters could determine whether the new system is working.
"There's an educational crisis in Milwaukee, and the primary question is how long will we wait," he said. "It's time to rise up together and say now is the time. Milwaukee can't afford to fail its future."
He was joined by Maria Monreal-Cameron, president and CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin, who said the city stands at a crossroads.
"We need to try something different because the current educational system is broken, and we need to fix it," she said.
Their endorsement of the proposed takeover is the first organized public support for the plan, which has drawn fire from many, including School Board President Michael Bonds.
The state's powerful teachers unions criticize the governor's sweeping proposals, including merit pay for teachers. The plan would help qualify the state for Obama administration funds.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called on legislators Thursday to adopt sweeping education reforms that would dramatically reshape California's public education system and qualify the state for competitive federal school funding.
The governor's proposed legislation, to be considered during a special session that ends by Oct. 5, was met almost immediately by criticism from the powerful state teacher unions, which called Schwarzenegger's plans rushed and unnecessary.
While Schwarzenegger's goal is to boost California's chances to qualify for $4.35 billion in federal grants, known as "Race to the Top," many of his proposals go far beyond those needed for eligibility, and embrace the Obama administration's key education reform proposals.
Schwarzenegger's reforms include:
Adopting a merit pay system that would reward effective teachers and give them incentives to work at low-performing campuses;
Abolishing the current cap on the number of charter schools that can open every year;
Forcing school districts to shut down or reconstitute the lowest-performing schools or turn them over to charter schools' independent management;
Allowing students at low-performing campuses to transfer to a school of their choosing;
Requiring school districts to consider student test data when evaluating teachers, something the federal government believes is prohibited under state law.
The lack of sustained leadership has plagued the Washington, DC public school system for decades. Our nation's capital, home to fifty thousand students, boasts one of the worst school districts in the country. Two thirds of students are far behind in reading, in math, three quarters.
In June 2007 new mayor Adrian Fenty assumed control of the ailing school system, firing the incumbent superintendent and replacing him with Michelle Rhee. Some questioned her lack of experience managing a public school system. Others felt she was exactly what was needed - a change agent from outside the district. In July the city council unanimously voted her in. Since then she has plotted a deliberate, and frequently controversial, course.
This series follows Michelle Rhee's attempts to reform one of the most challenged school districts in America. Can Rhee provide a model of reform for the entire country, delivering on her promise of an excellent education for every child?
Madison school district parents dissatisfied with local schools got a boost after a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision which trumped state law and made it easier for students living in the district to attend schools in other districts, a practice known as open enrollment.
The case was brought by Seattle parents who challenged the use of race in assigning students to schools, arguing it violated the Constitution's right of equal protection. The ruling was celebrated by those who favor color-blind policies, but criticized by civil rights groups as a further erosion of Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that outlawed school segregation.
Last year it became easier in Madison, and in school districts across the country, for white students to transfer even if it meant increasing the district's racial imbalance.
After a flood of local students left the district last year, Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad decided to investigate why.
"We had an interest in knowing ideas from people that had made the decision for open enrollment," Nerad says. "We are attempting to learn from those experiences to see if there are some things as a school district that we can constructively do to address those concerns."
To that end, the district surveyed households of district residents who left Madison schools and transferred to another district for the 2008-09 school year to find out why the families left. The majority of parents who took their kids out of the Madison school district last year under open enrollment said they did so for what the district classifies as "environmental reasons": violence, gangs, drugs and negative peer pressure. Other reasons were all over the map. Many cited crowded classrooms and curriculum that wasn't challenging enough.
Only a few responses pointed directly to white flight.
Yesterday a two year contract agreement with city firefighters was ratified by the union membership. It's a good deal for both the union and the city and its taxpayers. The agreement, which still needs to be approved by the City Council, calls for what is essentially a two year pay freeze with a modest 3% increase at the end of the contract period in 2011.
Other levels of government are using furloughs (which are essentially pay cuts) and layoffs to cut their budgets, but I think the city should take a different approach. After all, the city provides many basic direct services that will have a very noticeable impact for our customers if they are cut back. We can't shut down the fire department or the police department for one day a month. We can't just not pick up the garbage for a week. It's far better for our residents if we can manage our way through these tough budget years while keeping our city staff intact to the greatest extent that we can. But if we're going to do that, then we'll need cooperation from our unions on wage and benefit settlements.
That kind of cooperation is exactly what we got from Local 311. The firefighters gave us a responsible start to negotiations with the other dozen unions that represent city employees. I said from the start of this recession that we need to approach our challenges with the understanding that we're all in this together. This settlement is a very strong indication that we're moving in that direction.
The Madison School District (Board member Johnny Winston, Jr. is a firefighter) and Madison Teachers Union are still working on a new contract. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
There are at least two interesting challenges to an agreement this year:
To make matters more dire, the long-term legislative proposal specifically exempts school district arbitrations from the requirement that arbitrators consider and give the greatest weight to
revenue limits and local economic conditions. While arbitrators would continue to give these two factors paramount consideration when deciding cases for all other local governments, the importance of fiscal limits and local economic conditions would be specifically diminished for school district arbitration.
As the dust settles around the new state budget, partisan disagreement continues over the boost that unions - particularly education unions - got by making it easier for them to sign up thousands of new members and by repealing the 3.8% annual limit on teachers' pay raises.
The provisions passed because Democrats, who got control of the Legislature for the first time in 14 years, partnered with Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle to advance changes the governor and unions had been pushing for years.
Unions traditionally help elect Democratic politicians. The largest teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, spent about $2.1 million before last November's elections, with much of that backing Democrats.
Most of the labor-related provisions in the budget were added to provide people with "good, family-supporting jobs," said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison), co-chairman of the Legislature's Finance Committee.
"The idea that we're shifting back to the worker, rather than just big business and management, that's part of what Democrats are about," Pocan said.
It also helped that the two top Democratic legislators, Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan of Janesville and Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker of Weston, are veteran labor leaders.
Under pressure from state standards-based reform and No Child Left Behind, and with increasing competition from schools of choice, urban school districts are looking for ways to offer a high-performing mix of schools that meet the diverse needs of their communities.
Many districts see themselves as portfolio managers, operating some schools in the traditional way, hiring independent groups to run other schools, and holding all schools accountable under the same performance standards.
Portfolio management requires school districts to do three things they were not designed to do: judge the performance of individual schools, decide which are effective enough to continue supporting, and decide whether to shore up struggling schools or create new ones. Districts currently adopting a portfolio strategy, partially or fully, include New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, Philadelphia, Hartford, and the District of Columbia. Many other districts are considering the strategy.
Performance Management in Portfolio School Districts provides ideas for portfolio school districts and others that are trying to manage schools for performance. Based on studies of other government agencies and businesses that have shifted from inputs- to performance-based accountability, this report:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced this morning a special legislative session focusing on education that he hopes will establish merit pay for teachers, allow students at low-performing schools to transfer to other campuses and use data to track students and educators.
The governor also wants the legislature to abolish a law that bars the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations. Under federal guidelines, states that prohibit the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers cannot apply for $4.35 billion in education stimulus money known as Race to the Top funding.
Some California educational leaders have said federal officials are misinterpreting state law, but Schwarzenegger vowed to do everything necessary to make sure California qualifies for the federal funding.
"This is an incredible opportunity for our students and our schools," he said at a press conference in Sacramento.
Not all of Schwarzenegger's proposals apparently would have to be passed by the Legislature to be implemented, but the governor said he hoped state lawmakers could finish their work by early October so the state could meet the deadline to apply for federal funds.
Classes in District public schools start Monday, and 216 students are hoping they won't have to go back. About 70 parents, children and activists joined Thursday in front of the U.S. Department of Education to encourage Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to award vouchers to help the students pay for private school.
The students, who were offered vouchers worth as much as $7,500 toward tuition from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program this spring before Duncan rescinded them in the face of the program's uncertain future, were left to find placements in public and charter schools. Some families have complained that by the time the vouchers were rolled back, there were few spots available at competitive public schools.
"We're hoping that Secretary Duncan is going to look out the window so he can see how strongly the parents support it," said Virginia Walden Ford, executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice, one of the groups that organized the protest. "They just put families into a bad situation."
If you're thinking about going into teaching, take heed of this message from Katherine Merseth, a senior lecturer and director of the teacher education program at Harvard University: "The dirty little secret about schools of education is that they have been the cash cows of universities for many, many years, and it's time to say, 'Show us what you can do, or get out of the business.'"
Merseth, who spoke at an event in Washington, D.C., this week as part of a panel about how to improve teacher quality, was not trashing her employer, to be sure. Nor was she discouraging aspiring teachers from going to graduate school. Merseth was taking aim at institutions that produce ill-prepared teachers and yet insist on holding a monopoly in awarding teaching degrees. "It's high time that we broke up the cartel," she said. "We need to hold graduate schools of education more accountable." Merseth says that of the 1,300 graduate teacher training programs in the country, about 100 or so are adequately preparing teachers and "the others could be shut down tomorrow."
In 1995, I was sure that the explosion of the web would result in a good deal of online learning competition -- and fast. I may have been right about the first but not the second. It took a dozen years for online learning to get big and competitive, but it is finally a force to be reckoned with. Next month there will be close to two million students learning online at home and at school.
Back then I was superintendent in Federal Way Washington, between Seattle and Tacoma. We were a founding district in Microsoft's Anytime Anywhere Learning initiative and began rolling out laptop programs to all of our secondary schools. The brave new world of education blending the best of online and onsite learning seemed right around the corner.
In September 1996, we opened the Internet Academy, the nation's first K-12 virtual school. It was a bootstrapped operation; a group of intrepid teachers staying a day ahead of the kids and testing the application of the state's seat time requirements.
Enrollment quickly grew to over 1,000 students with about half new to public education (i.e., home and private school students) with an even split between students seeking acceleration and those seeking credit recovery. For most of a decade, Internet Academy had Washington's virtual space to itself.
Online public charter schools (or virtual schools) are charter schools under contract with a school board in which all or a portion of the instruction is provided through means of the Internet, and the pupils enrolled in and instructional staff employed by the school are geographically remote from each other.
Virtual schools have become an incredibly popular option throughout the country. In Wisconsin, thousands of families from Green Bay to Lancaster, from Racine to Rhinelander and other communities in every county in the state, have chosen to enroll their children in these unique and innovative public schools. School districts across Wisconsin (including those in Grantsburg, Appleton, Monroe, Fredonia, Waukesha and McFarland) currently offer or are exploring this option.
But in Wisconsin, even though online public charter schools are successful and embraced by parents, teachers and administrators alike, access to this innovation is rationed.
Federal law first insisted in 1975 that public schools educate disabled students. Since then, the portion of students receiving special education services has increased 64%. Today, 13.5% of all public school students have been diagnosed with a disability. Special education, it turns out, is no longer particularly special at all.
Taxpayers pay a substantial price for the growth in special education. In New York state, for instance, in 2007, the average special education student cost $14,413 more to educate than a regular-enrollment student.
What has produced such rapid growth in the percentage of American students identified as disabled? Don't worry--it's not "something in the water."
Better means of identification explain part of special education's expansion. However, a growing body of research points to a less benign cause: Schools see a financial incentive to designate low-achieving students as disabled, while they may not actually be disabled at all.
The contract was approved 727-236, with one ballot thrown out.
The Grand Rapids Board of Education has a special meeting to consider the contract at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday at the district's administration building, 1331 Franklin St. SE.
After informational meetings last week, several teachers said they were frustrated the pact includes no retroactive salary increase for the two years they worked without a contract and a modest 2 percent salary raise for the coming school year.
Many are also dismayed the contract does not cap class sizes, language they say claim they sought to include.
Holding out billions of dollars as a potential windfall, the Obama administration is persuading state after state to rewrite education laws to open the door to more charter schools and expand the use of student test scores for judging teachers.
That aggressive use of economic stimulus money by Education Secretary Arne Duncan is provoking heated debates over the uses of standardized testing and the proper federal role in education, issues that flared frequently during President George W. Bush's enforcement of his signature education law, called No Child Left Behind.
A recent case is California, where legislative leaders are vowing to do anything necessary, including rewriting a law that prohibits the use of student scores in teacher evaluations, to ensure that the state is eligible for a chunk of the $4.3 billion the federal Education Department will soon award to a dozen or so states. The law had strong backing from the state teachers union.
Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Tennessee and several other states have moved to bring their laws or policies into line with President Obama's school improvement agenda.
School choice advocates are gearing up for a final push this week to try to get U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to reverse his decision to rescind scholarships for 216 low-income District students.
The advocates, led by D.C. Parents for School Choice and DC Children First, are planning radio, newspaper and Internet ads. The advocates, who have formed www.savethe216.com, are also holding a vigil at noon Thursday outside the U.S. Department of Education.
The campaign, billed as a major escalation of their efforts, is designed to get Duncan to reinstate the scholarships before the school year begins.
"Time is truly running out for Secretary Duncan to reverse his disastrous decision and to save these 216 children," said former Ward 7 D.C. Council member Kevin Chavous, a Democrat who is heading up efforts to save the students' scholarships. "Scholarship money is already available for the 216 students and there is no law or regulation preventing them from accessing these scholarships. Secretary Duncan needs to show the nation that this administration is serious about reforming education."
NEA affiliates in California and Wisconsin seem to have different attitudes about their state laws banning student data being used to evaluate teachers. The Obama administration has been insisting that those laws be eliminated or altered before the states can be eligible for Race to the Top funds.
As scores of Ohioans are seeing their paychecks frozen, cut or taken away, pressure is mounting on teachers unions and school administrators who continue enjoying healthy raises to share in the sacrifice.
While 60 percent of schools are getting a cut in state aid over the next two years, and the rest will see annual increases of less than 1 percent, pay raises for teachers top 5 percent in some districts once all the automatic pay bumps are included.
In light of state workers and many other government-paid employees already taking concessions, such raises are getting the attention of weary taxpayers in many school districts, particularly those asking voters to approve higher taxes.
State Superintendent Deborah Delisle told The Dispatch that it's time for "a reality check in every single community to see what we are able to sustain."
School finance reform should be at the top of Gov. Jim Doyle's to-do list before he leaves office.
Reform won't be easy.
Yet fixing the state's broken system of paying for public education has always been a monumental task. That's why so many politicians -- Democrats and Republicans -- have largely ignored it for so long.
Doyle, who announced Monday he won't seek a third term, has advantages in pressing for major change now, even if he's viewed as a lame duck.
The Democratic governor won't have to fear the political repercussions of reform because he's leaving anyway. And his fellow Democrats who control the Legislature might be happy to let Doyle take ownership of the thorny and complicated issue. Then Doyle can be the fall guy if special and local interests balk at difficult yet necessary state decisions.
Public schools in the U.S. have added professional marketing to their back-to-school shopping lists.
Financially struggling urban districts are trying to win back students fleeing to charter schools, private schools and suburban districts that offer open enrollment. Administrators say they are working hard to improve academics -- but it can't hurt to burnish their image as well.
A bus in Washington, D.C., carries an ad for the city's public schools, which have seen enrollment plunge from nearly 150,000 students in 1970 to less than 50,000 last year. The district spent $100,000 this spring on a campaign that also included radio spots in an effort to win back students who have left public schools. The ads include quotes from students who say they are glad they stayed in public school.
So they are recording radio ads, filming TV infomercials and buying address lists for direct-mail campaigns. Other efforts, by both districts and individual schools, call for catering Mexican dinners for potential students, making sales pitches at churches and hiring branding experts to redesign logos.
"Schools are really getting that they can't just expect students to show up any more," said Lisa Relou, who directs marketing efforts for the Denver Public Schools. "They have to go out and recruit."
Administrators working on the public-relations push say the potential returns are high. State funding for public schools is based on attendance, so each new student brings more money, typically $5,000 to $8,000 per head. In addition, schools with small enrollments are at constant risk of being shuttered in this recession, and full classrooms help.
Some districts also hope a better image will entice more local business sponsorship and persuade voters to support school levies and bond issues
Substance, such as a rigorous curriculum, strong school leadership, extensive education options (languages, arts, science and math, among others) will always be better than simple pr/marketing/advertising efforts. General Motors tried re-brand their business repeatedly over the past few decades.
Critics of public education love to point fingers. But condemning teachers unions ("Pay Your Teachers Well," Review & Outlook, Aug. 3) is not only counterproductive to reform, it aims at the wrong target.
School improvement is only possible with the buy-in of teachers, whose collective voices are brought together by their unions. And many unions, notably the two you single out, have initiated a number of successful reforms.
The Baltimore Teachers Union has been deeply involved in efforts to strengthen teaching and learning in city schools, where students have posted double-digit gains the past several years. We are pleased that improvements also are taking place at the KIPP school you highlight. Contrary to your assertion, the union seeks only to have KIPP honor its agreement to pay teachers for their time worked. No other extended-day school in Baltimore has refused to do so.
The new program would help meet the needs of students through better identification and enrichment.
Lorie Raihala had planned for her kids to attend public school -- but over the years, the lack of programming for talented and gifted students proved too frustrating.
"We tried very hard for six years to make it work for them, and we're very supportive of the public school system, so we really wanted it to work," Raihala said. But it affected their emotional well-being, that their needs weren't being met in the classroom."
So Raihala's children moved to a private school. And Raihala joined a group of parents pushing for a commitment by the Madison School District to improve programming for its talented and gifted, or TAG, students.
That group will score a victory Monday night when a plan drafted by the district that would overhaul how TAG students are identified and supported through their school careers comes before the Madison School Board. The three-year plan would replace current TAG policy, which has been out of compliance with state statutes since 1990.
A multimillion-dollar budget shortfall means major decisions are afoot for Madison Metropolitan School District officials.
The district's school board is getting a first look this week at how to deal with a budget massively in the red, and Superintendent Dan Nerad gave a breakdown on Friday on the proposal being put forward.
Overall the district is facing a $12 million shortfall in the next school year. Nerad said that he has a plan to address it. He said he thinks the proposal will affect learning and taxpayers as little as possible.
Nerad said he has had his staff hard at work scouring the district budget, trying to find out how to mitigate two major changes in state funding. The first is a nearly $3 million drop in the revenue cap and the second is a 15-percent cut in state aid.
"We're really pushing to say what's out there, where can we make these budget decisions and I'm looking from this point forward and I've been here for a year, and we feel real good about these options," Nerad said.
To cover the loss in revenue cap funding, district officials are contemplating taking $300,000 from its contingency fund and adjusting budget amounts for elementary teachers' salaries and substitute teacher days. The district came in under budget in the new teachers hired this year and fewer sub days have been used, WISC-TV reported.
The voluntary school drug test would go ahead in Tai Po as scheduled at the end of the year despite reservations about it in various sectors, the chief secretary said yesterday.
Speaking after attending an anti-drug seminar for secondary teachers in Kowloon, Henry Tang Ying-yen said he had heard the community's different opinions about the plan.
"Our current goal is still to have [the pilot project] launched at the end of the year," he said. "We still have plenty of time ... when we can discuss details of the programme and how to improve it."
His comment came a day after the Professional Teachers' Union said schools should have more flexibility over when and how to conduct the drug-testing programme.
Three youth groups - the Youth Union, the Hong Kong Christian Institute and Ytalk! - have accused the government of not planning the scheme properly and urged students in Tai Po to boycott it. Social workers and the Catholic Church have also raised concerns about the programme, saying more resources should be deployed for it.
Mr Tang said: "We are serious about the scheme and will allocate an appropriate level of resources so it can be carried out successfully."
Deputy Education Secretary Betty Ip Tsang Chui-hing told yesterday's seminar she believed many students and parents supported the test.
The decision by Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett last week to push for giving Barrett control of some major aspects of Milwaukee Public Schools will prompt a historic, intense and almost surely messy test of the body politic of the city and the state when it comes to education issues.
Here's an early guide on what to watch for when it comes to body parts and their role in the debate:
• Spine: Any major change in the status quo around here takes a lot of backbone - this is Milwaukee, after all. Making a change as controversial as this will take an especially large amount of determination. Are Doyle and Barrett willing to put that much of their spines into this fight?
Are opponents such as the Milwaukee teachers union sufficiently determined to fight a powerful list of backers, including not only Doyle and Barrett but major business leaders, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and state school superintendent Tony Evers?
President Obama recently announced a $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" fund that he and Education Secretary Arne Duncan will use, among other things, to "reward states that come together and adopt a common set of standards and assessments." Duncan has championed uniform national standards as a key to educational improvement since taking office. "If we accomplish one thing in the coming years," he said back in February, "it should be to eliminate the extreme variation in standards across America."
That goal now seems within reach.
Both the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers recently stepped forward to lead the charge, and 46 states are already behind them. The day may soon come when every student in the country is expected to master the same material at the same age.
For only the second time in 13 years, Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk said she won't be able to hold property tax growth to her self-imposed index.
Coupled with the value of existing Dane County residential property this year dropping $700 million, or 2 percent, that means homeowners may see a higher county property tax increase than usual.
County property tax increases have been relatively low in recent years because of the county's tremendous growth and Falk's practice of increasing the property tax levy by the rate of population growth plus inflation. But the index for next year would be based on inflation of 0.75 percent and population growth of 0.44 percent, or 1.19 percent -- "the lowest in recent memory," Falk wrote to the County Board.
If she stuck to the limit, the total tax levy would increase $1.4 million. But next year, Human Services faces $2 million in state cuts and the Sheriff's Office costs $1 million more just to maintain services.
Gov. Jim Doyle and Mayor Tom Barrett both said for the first time Thursday that achieving significant reform in Milwaukee Public Schools would require the mayor to lead the school system and select the next superintendent.
Mayoral control of the school system - a tactic that experts say has improved the academic and fiscal performance of some other urban districts - has been hinted at in Milwaukee since late spring, but wasn't formally endorsed until Doyle did so Thursday in an interview with a member of the Journal Sentinel's editorial board.
In addition to selecting the superintendent, Barrett said, the mayor should also appoint the School Board. Doyle did not commit to that but indicated he was open to new ways for the School Board to operate.
If done correctly, he added, changes to the governance of MPS could bring significant benefits to the district.
The comments from Doyle and Barrett, which were supported by state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, set off immediate criticism from Milwaukee School Board President Michael Bonds.
The state Board of Education on Thursday approved proposed new tests to measure Pennsylvania students' competence to graduate from high school.
The 14-2 vote clears the way for months of regulatory review of the proposed Keystone Exams, including scrutiny by the Legislature, where critics still could block the new requirements if they can muster majority support in both houses.
The Keystone Exams, developed after two years of discussion and revision, would replace the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests now administered in the 11th grade.
Students would take the exams on specific subjects as they complete their course work throughout their high school years , generally grades nine through 12. The scores would count as at least one-third of their final grade.
Proponents say the Keystones would more effectively measure student progress toward meeting statewide academic standards, reducing district-to-district discrepancies evident under the present system, while allowing local districts to substitute their own tests with state approval.
Five employees of the Detroit public school system were charged Wednesday with multiple felonies as part of an investigation into alleged corruption and the loss of tens of millions of dollars in school funds.
The charges come as the Detroit Public Schools is struggling with an estimated budget deficit of $259 million and weighing a potential bankruptcy filing.
Zuma Press
Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, shown last week, is expected to decide this month whether to make a bankruptcy filing.
Kym Worthy, the prosecutor for Wayne County, announced the charges Wednesday. If convicted, the accused could face decades of jail time because Michigan law allows harsh penalties for public officials found guilty of wrongdoing.
The allegations include eight felony embezzlement charges against a district administrative staffer and a high-school teacher's aide who together allegedly embezzled more than $50,000. Another clerical worker at an elementary school was charged with writing checks and withdrawing roughly $25,000 of the district's money. The smallest alleged crime was related to a food-services employee accused of stealing more than $400 of lunch money at another elementary school.
Andrea Byrd, mother of two boys, had enough with her son's school. After she and her older son, Andrae, moved from Mississippi to Memphis a year ago, the formerly straight-A student "started dumbing himself down," she says, to fit in with the other boys at his new school.
"I needed to get my child into a school where there were high expectations," Ms. Byrd says. A charter school had recently opened nearby, but the 34-year-old single mom hesitated over getting an application since Tennessee law required her son to either be considered low-performing--which he wasn't--or attend a low-performing school--which he didn't--in order to get in. But all that changed a few weeks ago, when the state enacted a law for charter schools to also include students from low-income families. Two weeks ago, Ms. Byrd went into the Power Center Academy for an application. Later that same day, she got a call to say Andrae had been accepted.
The U.S. Education Department is engaged in a high-pressure campaign to get states to lift limits on charter schools through a $4 billion education fund, Race to the Top, that encourages more charters as one of the criteria for states to qualify for a piece of the pie. A total of 40 states and the District of Columbia permit charter schools.
In charts and text, the grant application says several times that only 30 percent of the district's 13,000 teachers are "effective." Which means that 70 percent must be "ineffective." Last week, Laura Green of The Post reported those percentages. Of course, teachers have been outraged.
In a "Management Letter" to employees, Superintendent Art Johnson blamed the media. He said it was "unfortunate" that The Post article "left teachers to believe that 70 percent of PBSD teachers are ineffective." He said that conclusion was based on a statistic in the application "which indicated that only 30 percent of PBSD reading and math teachers taught students who achieved MORE than a year's growth in the same year."
Dr. Johnson's blame-shifting is disingenuous. His explanation of the statistics is not in the Gates application, so Ms. Green could not have reported it based on that document. Rather than blame The Post, Dr. Johnson should have accepted responsibility for the confusion and moved on.
And now, we will move on - to the proposal itself. The remainder of the district's application contains remarkable candor and worthy goals. It also hints at - but does not nail down - how to achieve those goals. The foundation's money and a hefty chunk from the district would help provide those specifics.
A big goal is to close racial achievement gaps. The graduation rate for white students is 87 percent, but it's 20 points lower for Hispanics and 30 points lower for African-Americans - in a majority-minority district.
Mike Bloomberg's comments at Monday's press conference announcing plans to extend a test-based promotion policy to grades four and six were eerily reminiscent of Arne Duncan's and Joel Klein's reactions to two reports on social promotion released by the Consortium on Chicago School Research in 2004. The Chicago Consortium, an independent research group studying Chicago schools, examined the effects of promotional gates at the third-, sixth- and eighth-grade levels. (I reviewed one of the draft reports at the request of the Consortium.) The findings were unequivocal: Test-based retention did not alter the achievement trajectories of third-graders, and sixth-graders who were retained had lower achievement growth than similar low-achieving students who were promoted. Implementing the eighth-grade promotional gate reduced overall dropout rates slightly, but clearly lowered the likelihood of high school graduation for very low achievers and students who were already overage for grade at the time they reached the gate.
David Herszenhorn, writing in the New York Times at the time, described a Chicago press conference releasing the reports. He quoted Arne Duncan, then the chief executive of the Chicago public schools, as saying, "Common sense tells you that ending social promotion has contributed to higher test scores and lower dropout rates over the last eight years ... I am absolutely convinced in my heart, it's the right thing to do." Herszenhorn delicately noted that Duncan made claims about the promotional policies that were not supported by the two reports. "While the report drew no such conclusion," he wrote, "[Duncan] credited the tough promotion rules for improvements in the system as a whole, including better overall test scores, higher graduation and attendance rates and a lower overall dropout rate."
In the same article, Herszenhorn suggested that NYC Chancellor Joel Klein had "seemed to push aside the findings." He cited a statement by Klein that, "The Chicago study strongly supports our view that effective early grade interventions are key to ending social promotion and preparing students for the hard work they will encounter in later grades." Klein's statement was patently false: the Chicago studies didn't examine early grade interventions. Rather, authors Jenny Nagaoka and Melissa Roderick pointed out that a great many students in Chicago were struggling well before the third-grade promotional gate, suggesting the desirability of early intervention with struggling students.
"You're finally going to begin to see some innovation in teacher compensation."
-- Gov. Jim Doyle
It's about time.
For too long, Wisconsin public school teachers have earned their pay based on years of service and advanced degrees.
Their performance wasn't a factor.
Finally, it appears, that's going to change, thanks to pressure from President Barack Obama and his reform-minded Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Obama recently announced $4.35 billion in competitive grants for states that propose innovative ways to improve student achievement, especially among disadvantaged students. But to qualify for Obama's "Race to the Top" grants, states must allow local school districts to use student test scores in evaluating teachers -- something Wisconsin law now bans.
Duncan recently called Wisconsin's law "simply ridiculous." And Rep. Brett Davis, R-Oregon, and Sen. Randy Hopper, R-Fond du Lac, introduced legislation Tuesday to repeal the state's silly ban on pay for performance.
No one is suggesting that testing be the only factor in evaluating teachers. Moreover, the focus should be on student progress over time -- not a single test. School districts should compare student performance at the beginning of a school year with their performance at the end to help gauge the effectiveness of teachers and teaching techniques.
The first of what will surely be many, many sighs emitted by school children here came at about 10:30 a.m. Wednesday from a serious 7-year-old, Sullivan Saliby, as he buckled his seat belt in a brand new school bus.
That's right, his seat belt.
Sullivan and his sister, Emily, 12, were recruited along with Keaton Eichman, 14, and Kaleb Eichman, 19, to try out the first full-size seat-belt-equipped bus in a Wisconsin school district. The Janesville School District took delivery Wednesday of five school buses, purchased via Van Galder Bus Co.
The buses, Saf-T-Liner C2 models from the Thomas Bus Co. in North Carolina, are the rolling result of an 18-month effort to bring seat belts to school buses in Janesville. Whether the rest of the fleet of more than 30 full-size buses will eventually be similarly equipped has not been decided. Seat belts are not required on full-size school buses.
To maintain the competitiveness of America's workforce and ensure that U.S. students are prepared to succeed in college, states increasingly are recognizing the importance of offering a rigorous, common education curriculum that includes Advancement Placement (AP) courses. A new report from the NGA Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) titled Raising Rigor, Getting Results: Lessons Learned from AP Expansion, has demonstrated that it is possible for states to raise rigor and get results at scale by increasing student access to AP courses.
The report looks at the efforts of six states--Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Nevada and Wisconsin--that received funding as part of the NGA Center's Advanced Placement Expansion project toincrease the participation of minority and low-income students in AP courses at 51 pilot high schools in rural and urban school districts.
"Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of smart, ambitious students have the ability, but lack the opportunity, to get a head start on college through AP courses," said John Thomasian, director of the NGA Center. "With nearly two-thirds of jobs in 2014 expected to require at least some college, this report demonstrates that increasing students' participation in challenging coursework bolsters their ability to compete in a highly skilled, 21st century workforce."
Madison East High School ranked "19th in this list of increases in enrollment by pilot school"
Last Wednesday, Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke to the Madison Rotary Club on "What Wisconsin's Public Education Model Needs to Learn from General Motors Before it is too late." 7MB mp3 audio (the audio quality is not great, but you can hear the talk if you turn up the volume!).
Zimman's talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin's K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.
"Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk - the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It's as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands." Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI's vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the "impossibility" of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars ("Similar to GM"; "worry" about the children given this situation).
Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district's financial condition @17:30) when considering a District's ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated..... "we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment" and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn."
In light of this talk, It has been fascinating to watch (and participate in) the intersection of:
Dan Nerad and Erik Kass, our somewhat new Superintendent and Director of Business Services, and
the Administration, and local organizations that receive funding via our school system ("Fund 80", among others)
Several years ago, former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater remarked that "sometimes I think we have 25,000 school districts, one for each child".
I found Monday evening's school board meeting interesting, and perhaps indicative of the issues Zimman noted recently. Our public schools have an always challenging task of trying to support the growing range of wants, needs and desires for our 24,180 students, staff members, teachers, administrators, taxpayers and parents. Monday's topics included:
the proposed Talented and Gifted Plan (with an interesting discussion on how many TAG staff members have training in this area vs those who work in other areas such as special education [45MB mp3 audio file]), and two, seamingly small items on the agenda that identify future initiatives (or, in the case of elementary math, continuing the "reform" model that has been in place for some time):
I've not mentioned the potential addition of 4K, high school redesign or other topics that bubble up from time to time.
In my layperson's view, taking Zimman's talk to heart, our public schools should dramatically shrink their primary goals and focus on only the most essential topics (student achievement?). In Madison's case, get out of the curriculum creation business and embrace online learning opportunities for those students who can excel in that space while devoting staff to the kids who need them most. I would also like to see more opportunities for our students at MATC, the UW, Edgewood College and other nearby institutions. Bellevue (WA) College has a "running start" program for the local high school. Chart via Whitney Tilson.
Richard Zimman closed his talk with these words (@27 minutes): "Simply throwing more money at schools to continue as they are now is not the answer. We cannot afford more of the same with just a bigger price tag".
General Motors as formerly constituted is dead. What remains is a much smaller organization beholden to Washington. We'll see how that plays out. The Madison School District enjoys significant financial, community and parental assets. I hope the Administration does just a few things well.
Painting online textbooks as a boon to student achievement and school district coffers, state Education Secretary Glen Thomas announced today that 10 free digital high school math and science textbooks are ready to be used in California classrooms.
The likelihood of students tapping them when schools open in a couple of weeks is slim, because of school districts' textbook-adoption policies and teacher training needs, but Thomas said the move marks the first step in something that will revolutionize education in California.
"This is a groundbreaking initiative," he told more than 100 representatives of schools, technology companies and others gathered at the Orange County Department of Education. "We think that technology is one of the ways to reform and improve education."
Widespread layoffs caused by tight school budgets are forcing thousands of teachers out of the classroom, in some cases, permanently. Many are taking other jobs or considering changing careers, even as they anxiously hope to be recalled.
When school begins this month, as many as 100,000 of last year's teachers won't have jobs, resulting in an overall drop in education jobs in the U.S., estimates Carmen Quesada, director of field operations for the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union.
That's a jolt to people drawn to teaching in part for its recession-proof reputation. The number of people working in local education has increased every year since 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That streak is now in jeopardy: Local schools employed fewer people overall, including nonteachers, in July, the latest month available, than in July 2008. The majority of the layoffs have involved nontenure teaching positions, with cuts determined by seniority.
Judith Franco is among those affected. She taught typing and business technology at Westglades Middle School in Parkland, Fla., for two years before being laid off in June--one of 394 teachers laid off by the Broward County Public Schools.
When a proposal for a public boarding school in Milwaukee failed to win financial support from state lawmakers this summer, the concept of a college preparatory boarding school for local, urban teens appeared dead.
But now, Milwaukee Board of School Directors President Michael Bonds is reviving the idea, with a twist:
He wants to open a boarding school for 150 high school students next fall that would operate as a charter school by an organization other than MPS. The district would provide funding for the day school, while the charter school would handle the costs of supervision and instruction outside of normal academic hours.
"It's an opportunity to provide at-risk kids an environment that's conducive to learning," Bonds said. "We would have to put out a (request) to see what kinds of proposals are out there. There may be models of boarding schools that are feasible academically and economically."
Members of the School Board's Innovation/School Reform committee will vote on Bonds' boarding school resolution Tuesday. It would put the board on record for supporting the idea and ask for outside proposals.
The board met 7/22 to discuss district goals for the coming year. The tentative goals, which we will be discussing at Wednesday's board meeting are currently:
1) Achieve measureable increase in student achievement in core academic areas using these assessments: DIBELS, MAP , WKCE, EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT.
2) Develop measures ot assess student achievement in Encore areas and electives.
3) Align curriculum, instruction and assessment wiht standards/skill in core academic areas as defined by DIBELS, MAP , WKCE, EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT.
4) Close the achievement gaps with attention to race, ethnicity and socio economic status, using measureable assessments provide DIBELS, MAP , WKCE, EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT and reduce disproportionality with regard to placement of minority students in special edcuation.
To be a successful principal, Julia D'Amato says, you need to be "a 29-baller."
That's someone who can juggle 29 balls at the same time, not dropping any of them. That's what it feels like to run a school, says D'Amato, principal of Reagan High School, the south side school she has led from birth in 2003 to the top bracket of Milwaukee high schools now.
It's hard to find people who can juggle like that.
And it's hard for Milwaukee Public Schools to find top-notch people to lead approximately 200 schools.
As a new school year approaches, MPS is struggling with creating a strong, stable corps of principals. How so?
More than 20% of elementary and kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools have someone different at the helm now than a year ago, and turnover in recent years has, in general, been high. MPS officials say there are 58 principals with three years of experience or less, almost one-third of the total.
$11,654,078 Additional Madison School District Spending Via the Federal Taxes & US Treasury Borrowing ("Stimulus")
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad [838K PDF]:
As part of Federal Stimulus funding iliat will be made available the district will receive American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds to be used over a two year period.
These funds are in IDEA, IDEA EC and Title 1.
Program Costs/FundingiConsultation Service Employment Contract
The district has prepared a two year funding proposal along with a budget analysis for 2009-10 and 2010-11 for each of the sources for your review. The proposal amounts are as follows:
IDEA - $6,199,552
IDEA EC - $293,082
Title I - $5,161,444
Salary Savings
The funding proposals would increase FTE's and include funding sources during the two year period of the ARRA funds
The proposal includes quite a bit of professional development, such as $400,000 for dual language immersion, $1.48M for 4K staff and $456,000 for 4K furniture and $100,000 for talented & gifted assessment.
Plan B, without 4K spending, includes $1,150,000 for professional development in the following areas: Topics include universal design, differentiation, mental health,
inclusive practices, autism, and quality IEPs.
The 2009-11 State of Wisconsin Biennial budget created two issues for the Madison Metropolitan School District as it relates to the 2009-10 budget. The two main issues are from a reduction in the amount of revenue the school district is projected to receive in 2009-10 and a reduction in the amount of state aid the school district is projected to receive in 2009-10.
The amount of revenue the district is projected to lose amounts to $2,810,851 for the 2009-10 school year compared to the preliminary budget approved by the board of education, This amount is due to the decrease in numerous categorical aids the school district receives annually and the reduction of the per pupil increase from $275 per child to $200 per child.
The amount of state aid the school district is projected to lose is in 2009-10 is approximately $9.2 million, Under current revenue limit laws, for every dollar of state aid lost, the school district would have the ability to increase taxes by that same amount. Over the past month, administration has worked to mitigate the tax impact due to the loss in state aid.
An educational dream pitched by three Hall County teachers takes flight Monday when 120 students and six teachers come together for the first day of school at the da Vinci Academy.
The pilot program provides innovative learning opportunities for gifted students with a penchant for the arts and sciences. But that's only half of the reason it's making a splash with educators across the Southeast. The program also will operate at about 60 percent to 70 percent of the cost per student compared to a traditional middle school, Hall County school Superintendent Will Schofield said.
Though states have made unprecedented cuts to public school funds, educators are trying to make the most of every penny while pushing programs that engage students and get results.
Schofield said the da Vinci Academy is a great example of how schools can do more with less.
"I think it truly is some Renaissance thinking is these difficult times," he said. "It's the exciting side of chaotic and difficult times.
That's when you see the best in people and that's when you see the worst in people, and I think what we're seeing is the best in terms of innovative thinking, new ways of doing something that we've done the same way for a long time.
MMSD has begun a three-year implementation plan to achieve an equitable and balanced mathematics program at tbe elementary level. The plan was developed and refined through collaboration with teachers, Instructional Resource Teachers and principals over the course of the past several years. The plan includes the materials described below (details via this 64K PDF),
MMSD has provided all Title I schools with the Primary Mathematics (Singapore) workbooks and Extra Practice workbooks for the 2009-2010 school year. All manipulatives have been ordered for Title I schools over tbe past two years and are in place. Non-Title I schools have been and will continue to use ELM funds to purchase tbe student components for the implementation of a balanced mathematics classroom.
At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers' science lectures.
Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for "digital sections" of several English, history and science classes. And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create -- and share -- lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.
Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions -- or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.
"Kids are wired differently these days," said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. "They're digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.
Public school systems, like cross-country teams, are only as good as their slowest runners.
Oregon has to remember that as it toes the starting line in the Race for the Top, a competition for $4 billion in stimulus money the Obama administration is offering to states that demonstrate they are ready to adopt serious school reforms, and run with them.
As hard as it is to admit, that doesn't sound much like Oregon. This is a state where the Democratic Legislature, urged on by the state teachers union, just passed a law blocking the expansion of popular virtual charter schools. It's a place where charter schools, performance pay for teachers and other reforms strongly supported by President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are disdained by most of the educational establishment.
Yes, there are Oregon schools, and some entire districts, doing creative, impressive things. The Oregonian's Betsy Hammond last week described the tremendous effort by teachers and administrators that led Clackamas High School to become the largest high school in Oregon to reach every federal performance target. There are many other pioneering, innovative efforts in places such as Redmond, Forest Grove, Sherwood, Beaverton and Tillamook
The Milwaukee School Board took its stand last week on how it will play Superintendent Draw, the big-time game of poker coming up for Milwaukee schools:
With a lot of money in the pot and the usual players at the table.
But the politics and atmosphere surrounding the search for a school chief could be overshadowed by an even bigger and more colorful game: MPS Hold 'Em, in which the battle is over who calls the shots when it comes to directing the state's largest and most challenging school system.
MPS Hold 'Em has been brewing for months, particularly since the release of a consultant's report in April that described MPS as a poorly run business. That triggered talk of a mayoral takeover of MPS or other changes in the system.
Now it is shaping up that MPS Hold 'Em will either come to a head soon or the game will cease for at least the foreseeable future.
Why is MPS Hold 'Em linked to Superintendent Draw? Two reasons:
The New York Post patted its own back today, hard, for helping the state renew the mayor's control of the public schools. The surprising thing is that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined in, thanking the newspaper, owned by the ambitious Rupert Murdoch, for its "leadership" and "thoughtfulness."
New York City newspapers have a proud tradition of waging campaigns both on and off the editorial page, and then congratulating themselves when they hit their marks. But having a cabinet member for a sitting president join the cheering is more unusual.
"I think that must be out of context, that Arne Duncan is giving the Post credit for mayoral control," the president of the principals' union, Ernest Logan, said when I called to ask his impression.
Richard Colvin, who directs the Hechinger Institute for education journalism at Columbia University, said he found the whole news story baffling. "It reads like nothing I've ever seen. It reads like the worst kind of back-patting, self-congratulatory press release that has no perspective whatsoever," he said.
Kudos and thanks to the Madison School District Board of Education and Superintendent Dan Nerad for their support of arts education opportunities for all students, with additional thanks to members of the Arts Education Task Force.
The task force of art teachers and citizens has worked since 2007 with Board members and administrative and teaching staff on a plan that supports, enhances and sustains arts education in Madison's public schools. The Board approved the plan on July 20.
In adopting the plan, the Board showed support of the arts as a priority for a quality public education.
The process took hard work by committee members, administrative and teaching staff and input from over 1,000 community members who have been thoughtful, inquisitive and dedicated to nurturing students' talent and creativity through the arts. These plans will move forward with leadership, support and a strong partnership between the district and the community.
We are proud to live in a community with educational leaders who understand that arts and creativity are essential components of a 21st century education.
[She] recently completed a Master's degree in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For her Master's thesis project, she interviewed and surveyed MMSD middle school teachers about the first semester of implementation of standards-based grading. Ms. Hagen is a National Board Certified Teacher of Spanish, which she taught at the high school and middle school levels in Bloomington, Indiana, and Chantilly, Virginia, for eight years.
First Year Implementation Issues and Continual Improvement Efforts [300K PDF] by Teaching & Learning Director Lisa Wachtel.
Survey responses & comments [1.4MB PDF] by Melissa Sherfinski, who is working on her PhD. at the University of Wisconsin School of Education
Proposed Madison School District Talented & Gifted Plan
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad's memo [100K PDF] on the Proposed Talented & Gifted Plan [1.2MB PDF]:
Background Wisconsin Administrative Rule 8.01 (2)(t)2 states that each school district shall establish a plan and designate a person to coordinate the gifted and talented program. The previous Talented and Gifted (TAG) Plan approved by the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Board was in 1991. 2008-09 highlighted several independent yet related events which served to underscore both the urgency of and District-wide benefit for an updated Plan. Among the events that converged to result in the need to update the Talented and Gifted Plan were:
Superintendent Dr. Daniel Nerad was hired in July 2008. Dr. Nerad recognized the need for addressing the issues related to Talented and Gifted programming;
The last TAG Plan (1991) approved by the District was found by the DPI to be out of compliance;
An increase in open enrollment leaving the District spurred conversation regarding strategies to attract and retain students;
Families leaving the District were surveyed to gather information regarding their reasons for leaving MMSD. A desire for improved Talented and Gifted programming was one of several emerging themes; and
A new Strategic Plan was developed through extensive community involvement. The Strategic Plan clearly demands a rigorous and challenging education for all students.
Process In response to the events described above, the Superintendent charged the Teaching & Learning TAG Division to develop a process to create an updated Plan. The TAG Division met on a regular basis to define major areas for improvement in alignment with the National Association for Gifted Children standards. A Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee comprised of 30 members was convened in early spring. This group met five times between February and June to provide input and critique the evolving draft. The Superintendent and TAG Coordinator hosted a community input session on March 26. Senior Management, Instructional Council and Principals reviewed drafts and provided input. In order to ensure a timely and high quality Plan, a subcommittee of the Talented and Gifted Advisory Committee was invited to continue to work with TAG staff to complete the Plan during June and July.
There have been significant challenges in the process leading to the development of the enclosed plan. These challenges include communication, changes in leadership and an evolving level of District and community trust in MMSD's commitment to providing high quality education for all stUdents. Overcoming these challenges is an on-going process, one captured in the language of the plan with respect to continual improvement. Although there are aspects of current MMSD talented and gifted programming that are sound and valued, the need for overall structural improvements and re-vitalization is recognized byal!.
In addition to the TAG Division staff, we sincerely appreciate the members of the TAG Advisory Committee for their extraordinary gift of time and dedication toward creating this plan. Special recognition goes to TAG Advisory Subcommittee members Kerry Berns, Bettine Lipman, Laurie Frost, Chris Gomez Schmidt and Carole Trone for their continuing support and input through the final draft of this plan.
MMSD Strategic Planning The enclosed TAG Plan aligns, supports and strengthens important aspects of the Strategic Plan. In particular, the TAG Plan undergirds District-wide efforts to: enhance assessments to guide appropriate levels of instruction; accelerate learning for all students; embed differentiation as core practice in all classrooms; and map and develop a comprehensive and articulated curriculum K-12 in order to increase curricular rigor for all students.
Executive Plan Summary Based upon the framework set forth by the National Association for Gifted and Children standards and areas identified by MMSD for improvement, eight key goal areas addressed in this Plan are:
Goal 1. Comprehensive Identification Process. Develop and maintain an equitable and inclusive identification process for students who exhibit gifted characteristics in the 5 domains.
Action Steps -Expand repertoire of assessment tools and improve use and implementation of existing tools. Ensure identification process is non-biased and serves to equitably identify students from underserved populations
Goal 2. Programming Options for Identified Students. Design and implement a continuum of systematic and continuous K-12 curricula and programming options in the five domains of giftedness in order to meet individual student needs.
Action Steps -Increase curricular rigor in all classes and increase advanced course options at the secondary level. Develop District-wide consistent grouping practices.
Goal 3. Individualized Student Planning. Develop and maintain a Differentiated Education Plan (DEP) for each identified student that systematically records assessments and plans.
Action Steps -Design a DEP with expanding capability for each TAG domain and corresponding program options.
Goal 4. Socio-emotional Support. Develop and maintain a system for meeting the socio-emotional needs of identified students.
Action Steps -Research, develop and collaboratively pilot non-academic supports to address the socio-emotional needs of identified students including underserved populations.
Goal 5. Professional Development. Facilitate the design and implement professional development opportunities for teachers, administrators and staff to support research-based best practices, expand the knowledge of current talented and gifted research and Wisconsin state laws and dispel misconceptions about talented and gifted education and students.
Action Steps -Facilitate collaborative professional development for target audiences including administrators and teacher leaders at all levels.
Goal 6. Use of Available Technology -Expand relevant technological capabilities to increase ease and efficiency of identification, creation and maintenance of DEP's and monitoring program accountability.
Action Steps -In collaboration with Research and Evaluation, design and implement an electronic DEP to interface with student data.
Goal 7. Consistent and Effective Communication Develop and maintain consistent and effective systems for communicating about talented and gifted education throughout the District and community.
Action Steps -Design Resource Guide, enhance web-based communications and provide regular updates to target audiences.
Goal 8. On-going Program Evaluation -Conduct an on-going evaluation to ensure program effectiveness and program alignment with the MMSD Strategic Plan, State of Wisconsin statutes and administrative rules and the National Association for Gifted Children standards.
Action Steps -Design an evaluation process to determine quality and effectiveness of TAG programming. Provide review and updates to target audiences at specified intervals.
Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Dan Nerad said he will look at all available candidates, including an interim candidate, as school starts in 26 days.
Harris was the third principal at East High School since the spring of 2002, when the late Milt McPike retired after 23 years there.
Two lucky accidents served to take this education out of the realms of the ordinary.
First, the Perse had, years earlier, been home to a remarkable teacher of English who had invented something called the "mummery system." The English classrooms had as a result been converted into mummeries--small theatres complete with stages, costumes, lights, and sound. Four mornings a week, half the class would perform scenes from Shakespeare while the other half would watch and then critique. On some of these days, we would instead have to recite poems or engage in debates with our classmates. On the fifth day we would discuss other readings or study grammar. I owe much to those many hours of oral presentations--it gave me the skills I would one day use in the Oxford Union Society, and a life-long ease with the demands of public speaking. More importantly, acting Shakespeare gave us a familiarity with those plays that went well beyond what was available through reading alone.
The second piece of luck was our history teacher, one "Charlie T," a gentleman of indeterminate age, whose grimy ancient gown trailing halfway down his torn tweed jacket belied a mind of brittle precision, extraordinary passion, and relentlessly demanding standards. Only once in the seven years in which I studied with Mr. T. did I see him use notes (during a lecture on some military campaigns in Turkey). His memory for detail rivaled any I have ever encountered, and his ability to weave these details into compelling accounts left an indelible impression. Several of Mr. T.'s students would later become noted historians--one of international renown. While my pre-O level years--marred by dyslexia--passed with no sign of academic distinction, Charlie T.'s teaching produced a hint of better to come.
The agreement between teachers and management at the North Central Charter Essential School is similar to one that may be found at almost any traditional public school. There is a salary scale with lanes and steps, and stipends for extra duties. Some teachers serve as representatives for the larger group in a "collaborative bargaining process."
Absent from the school's teachers' employee handbook, however, is a clause that gives veteran teachers job protection. "Professional status," more commonly known as tenure, doesn't exist there. Everyone is an employee at will, and a teacher of 10 years can be dismissed as easily as a first-year educator.
"If a teacher is not a fit, we have to be honest about that," said Patricia May, principal of the Fitchburg school. "That's not working for anybody."
Having no union affiliations appears to be working for the area's charter schools. Despite a full-court press from the state's second largest teachers union, charter schools in Central Massachusetts haven't hopped onto the union bandwagon. Statewide, only one charter school has signed up with the American Federation of Teachers in the two years the organization has been approaching charters, which are publicly financed but operate outside of school districts.
Milwaukee Public Schools is not complying with civil rights law in effectively teaching English to Spanish-speaking students, according to a federal complaint filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens of Wisconsin.
The complaint, filed at the Office of Civil Rights in the U. S. Department of Education office in Chicago, claims MPS and the Milwaukee School Board are not complying with the Civil Rights Act.
The district receives federal funds for teaching English to students who speak another language, and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that school districts must help such students overcome language barriers so they can succeed in all of their classes, said Darryl Morin, state director of LULAC.
"LULAC of Wisconsin has serious concerns regarding the education theory, programming and resources allocated to these efforts at MPS," he said.
Morin said MPS has used uncertified and unqualified teachers in the program.
The U.S. Department of Education confirmed that its Office of Civil Rights has received the complaint. Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the department in Washington, D.C., said the office is evaluating the complaint to determine whether an investigation is appropriate. The evaluation process should take about a month, he said.
MPS spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said district officials can't comment because they just received the complaint Tuesday and have not reviewed it.
Washington, D.C.'s public school system has 45,000 students and an abysmal dropout rate of about 50%, typical of large cities. With a goal to remedy this dropout "catastrophe" (Gen. Colin Powell's term), while being constrained by a tight economy, D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee is looking to--in her words--"leverage opportunities for the greatest change."
To this end, Rhee believes that one of the best investments that D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) has made in the past year is its partnership with City Year DC. In 2008/09, City Year corps members proved themselves in a pilot program in 4 of Washington's most challenging elementary schools.
Jeff Franco, Executive Director of City Year DC explained that "we offered to help the Chancellor to solve her worst headaches." After rigorous training, corps members coached, tutored, and mentored children in grades K to 2, and successfully demonstrated that they could help improve children's reading ability. This achievement will be instrumental in changing the life trajectory of these kids--ultimately increasing the likelihood that they will graduate from high school, go to college, and later, earn greater incomes.
"I've been thrilled with the results of this first year," Rhee told me. So thrilled that she and Franco plan a "feeder pattern" strategy to have corps members continue working with these same children all through elementary school, middle school, and high school, while also expanding City Year's involvement with additional schools. The end game: reduce the dropout rate.
As part of the program's ongoing series focusing on education, host Michel Martin talks to Kavitha Cardoza, a reporter for NPR member station WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C.
Cardoza explains a significant development in the education world: recent test scores of public school children in the nation's capital notably surpassed their charter school counterparts, adding yet another layer to the national debate on the value of charter schools vs. public schools.
ver since candidate Barack Obama began promoting the concept of performance pay in 2007, the National Education Association has labored to generate a coherent strategy to stay ahead of the issue. The union realizes a consistent "no, no, no" may be satisfying and direct, but is harmful to its public image and its relationship with moderate Democrats and Republicans alike.
Last year, NEA assigned its teacher quality department to visit six locations that had established alternative compensation models and to interview union officers, members and staff to determine the lessons and pitfalls of various approaches. The results were compiled in a 51-page report (labeled "Not For External Distribution" and "intended for NEA leaders and staff only") titled Alternative Compensation Models and Our Members. I have uploaded the document to EIA's Declassified page.
The six locations were the local school districts of Denver and Eagle County, Colorado, Hamilton County, Tennessee, Helena, Montana, and Manitowoc, Wisconsin, along with the state of Minnesota, which has its statewide Q Comp program.
Reactions to the programs were all over the map, with some teachers loving the new system and others hating it, but a few common sentiments were expressed. The most important of these was the lack of simplicity. Many teachers didn't understand exactly how their pay or bonuses were being generated and were forced to trust the district administrators to correctly apply and compute the pay. This is problematic for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is knowing how much should be in your check each pay period. This complexity makes the clarity of the traditional salary schedule more appealing by comparison.
Sue Duncan has taught poor kids at her after-school center on Chicago's South Side for 48 years. She says her son Arne spent seven days a week there as he was growing up.
"It was absolutely formative," Arne Duncan, 44, said of working with his mother. He learned that "kids from totally dysfunctional home situations, total poverty, can do extraordinarily well if we give them a chance."
What he absorbed matters because Duncan is now U.S. education secretary, in charge of improving a public school system that ranks below those of other developed nations in some studies. He's armed with $100 billion in stimulus money from his friend, President Barack Obama, more than twice the budget of any of his predecessors.
"We want to put unprecedented resources out there, but the tradeoff is unprecedented reform," said Duncan, who ran Chicago's public schools before taking on the U.S. job in January. He said in an interview he wants to "fundamentally change the status quo" by raising academic standards, holding states and schools more accountable, and luring "the best and the brightest" into teaching.
The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation's plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.
The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
Other figures in an Associated Press analysis underscore the recession's impact: Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.
The last time the government's revenues were this bleak, the year was 1932 in the midst of the Depression.
"Our tax system is already inadequate to support the promises our government has made," said Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury Department official in the Reagan administration who is now vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
While there aren't any figures for this year, property tax delinquencies have been on a steep climb the last few years, WISC-TV reported.
Delinquencies increased 11 percent in 2006, 34 percent in 2007 and 45 percent in 2008, where there is now more than $16 million in unpaid taxes in the county.
"It affects us in that we have to be sure that we have enough resources to cover county operations throughout the year even though those funds aren't here. And we do that, we are able to do that, but 40 percent increases over time become unsustainable," said Dane County Treasurer David Worzala.
"I can see that there are probably some people that either lost their jobs or were laid off, they're going to have a harder time paying their taxes," said Ken Baldinus, who was paying his taxes Thursday. "But I'm retired, so we budget as we go."
Big portions of those bills must go to school districts and the state. Worzala said the county is concerned about the rise in delinquencies because if the jumps continue the county could run into a cash flow issue in paying bills.
Resolution of the Madison School District - Madison Teachers, Inc. contract and the District's $12M budget deficit will be a challenge in light of the declining tax base. Having said that, local schools have seen annual revenue increases for decades, largely through redistributed state and to a degree federal tax dollars (not as much as some would like) despite flat enrollment. That growth has stopped with the decline in State tax receipts and expenditures. Madison School District revenues are also affected by the growth in outbound open enrollment (ie, every student that leaves costs the organization money, conversely, programs that might attract students would, potentially, generate more revenues).
"If we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated workforce." Few would object to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's explanation of why Washington is funneling $100 billion to schools and universities as part of February's giant stimulus package. Indeed, other countries are following suit, with Britain, Germany, Canada, China, and others making new education funding part of their anticrisis strategies.
What's far less clear is that this money is going where it's most needed--or likely to have the greatest social and economic payoff. In Germany, the bulk of nearly €10 billion in new school spending is being used to renovate buildings--a bonanza for construction companies and popular with parents and teachers, but unlikely to have much effect on the quality of German graduates. In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown is pushing for more PCs and Web access in schools--another policy that's popular but considered irrelevant by educators. In the United States, a July audit by the Government Accountability Office found that schools were not using the stimulus money to boost student achievement, as promised by Duncan, but to fund their general budgets. And in still other countries, governments are using money to help build new world-class universities--projects that a World Bank study in July warned risk bleeding resources away from more desperately needed areas. "I'm not sure that the people making these decisions even realize the trade-offs involved," says Jamil Salmi, author of the study.
That's particularly unfortunate today, given the economic stakes. According to an April report by McKinsey, the United States' GDP would have been 9 to 16 percent--or $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion--higher in 2008 had U.S. high-school graduates attained the average skills of their peers in Canada, Finland, or South Korea. This fall, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will unveil a similar study in Paris detailing the losses suffered by other laggards. Andreas Schleicher, author of the OECD study, says that "in a whole row of countries, the economic losses of educational underperformance are significantly higher than the costs of the financial crisis." What's worse, he says, countries pay the price for their mistakes year after year.
Will Oregon be among the recipients of the Race to the Top Fund, $4 billion in stimulus package money that the Obama administration has set aside to encourage new ways of teaching?
Lost in the clatter of the health-care debate, President Obama quietly launched his plan to transform America's schools in late July. Fed up with sluggish learning gains and stubborn gaps in achievement between rich and poor kids, the administration has leveraged the stimulus package to create several well-endowed venture funds aimed at entrepreneurial states, school districts and nonprofits eager to test new ways of teaching.
The grand prize is the Race to the Top Fund, $4 billion being dangled in front of perhaps as few as a dozen states. The prospect of being among this elite group of innovators has unleashed a cascade of legislation across the country as lawmakers scrambled to align state laws with the Obama vision. Already the fund has altered the K-12 landscape before it's awarded a single dollar.
School districts faced with large budget gaps could avoid some or all teacher layoffs by rolling back salaries. While this option may not work for all districts, a new analysis shows that district officials--and teachers unions--could both serve students and teachers by trimming classroom pay.
Marguerite Roza based her analysis on the fact that 93 percent of school districts in the U.S. negotiate and structure teacher-pay according to a fixed salary schedule, consisting of annual as well as step increases. Step increases average 3.16 percent a year. The annual increase for the salary schedules she calculated at the average Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the 1997--2007 period at 2.87 percent. The total for the two, at 6.03 percent, may not make sense this year, says Roza.
In a simple chart, she provides five possible decision-options showing how, if salaries are rolled back, fewer teachers get laid off and class sizes increase by fewer students.
Gov. Jim Doyle is planning a series of education reforms designed to boost student achievement and help the state compete for billions of dollars in federal school improvement grants.
The changes include better tracking of student performance, using test data to help evaluate teachers and raising high school graduation requirements.
"We're going to be working very hard in my administration with the Legislature, with educators in the state, to put together really, I think, a transformational application that will help Wisconsin education for years to come," Doyle said in a recent interview.
But it's unclear whether the state would even qualify for the federal money -- part of a $4.35 billion program dubbed "Race to the Top" -- because of a state law that bars using student test scores to evaluate teachers.
Draft rules for the program prohibit states that have such laws in place from receiving the money. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week called Wisconsin's law "ridiculous."
Make sure teachers' raises aren't jeopardized by the cuts. Check.
Pretend property taxes won't go up. Check.
Begin dismantling Wisconsin's School Choice Program. Check.
Jeopardize Wisconsin's eligibility for new federal education funding. Check.
This is the state of public education in Wisconsin under the leadership of self-proclaimed education governor Jim Doyle and Democrat majorities in the state Senate and Assembly.
Governor Doyle and Democrat lawmakers wrote a state budget that cuts school funding $294 million, raises property taxes $1.5 billion, repeals the Qualified Economic Offer, says local school boards can't consider the recession, job loss rates, and property values when negotiating teacher compensation and makes politically-motivated changes to the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (School Choice).
Now the governor shrugs off reports that Wisconsin won't be eligible to participate in the Obama Administration's Race to the Top grant program, while Democrat lawmakers remain predictably silent. Approximately $4.35 billion will be doled out to states with plans for reforming public education. Under the proposed application guidelines released by the United States Department of Education last week, only Wisconsin, New York and California would be barred from receiving federal funds.
For the last 14 years, a summer program has found a way to make learning about a particular area of science fun while also exposing elementary and middle school students to blacks who have made a difference in that field.
This year, flight was the theme for the program, called a Celebration of Life. In general, about two-thirds of those in attendance are returning participants like Synovia Knox, who also had four siblings who attended.
"Each year I would leave wanting to be someone else," said Knox, who has attended since third grade. "They just make everyone seem so interesting."
The program, which is held during the morning for two weeks, is divided into two sessions -- one for students entering grades three through five and another for students going into grades six through eight. A total of 28 students attended this year and the organizers hope the numbers will grow, said Barbara Bielec, who helps run the Celebration of Life as the K-12 program coordinator for the BioPharmaceutical Technology Center Institute.
The federal government talks tough about requiring the states to improve schools in exchange for education aid. Then it caves in to political pressure and rewards mediocrity when it's time to enforce the bargain. As a result, the country has yet to achieve many of the desperately needed reforms laid out in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 and other laws dating back to the 1990's.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is ready to break with that tradition as he prepares to distribute the $4.3 billion discretionary pot of money known as the Race to the Top Fund. States that have dragged their feet or actively resisted school reform in the past are screaming about the rigorous but as yet preliminary criteria by which their grant applications will be judged.
President Obama gave fair notice of this shift in a speech earlier this year, when he talked about pressuring the states to do better by the country's 50 million schoolchildren. But Mr. Duncan will need cover from the White House to weather the storm.
The long and detailed list of criteria just released by the administration includes a fine-grained evaluation process under which states get points for reforms they have made and points for changes they promise to make -- and conditional funding that can be revoked if they don't make them. The process finally allows the federal government to reward states that have made progress and to bypass slackers.
Like most people, I want to eat rich desserts, but do not want to get fat. I want to enjoy a secure retirement, but I do not want to save towards it. I want lower taxes, and I also want better public services. Of course I do. It would be odd if I did not. Irrationality does not lie in wanting inconsistent things. Irrationality is being unwilling to make choices between inconsistent things.
There was a time when crowds would wait for hours for a once in a lifetime opportunity to see and hear William Gladstone. But technology has steadily increased possibilities for the public to participate in the political process. It has not, however, created a corresponding increase in the time the public wants to devote to the political process. If anything, the opposite: by offering so many other ways to spend leisure time and by spreading prosperity, the modern age has reduced the intensity of public commitment to politics.
Many people take the view that more avenues for participation make democracy more real. They are excited by the opportunities offered by the internet: Barack Obama was elected after a campaign that made extensive use of computers and mobile phones. Our leaders blog and twitter, receive online petitions and e-mails, consult focus groups and monitor opinion polls. If the measure of democracy is the frequency of communication between politicians and their voters, then society is steadily becoming more democratic.
But these developments do not make society better governed. If these methods of participation are extensive, they are also superficial. If democracy is about delivering what the electorate wants, it is not clear that policies that respond to every angry headline in the Daily Mail achieve that result. Popular esteem for politicians and public approval of political decisions have declined, not increased. When Winston Churchill was advised to keep his ear to the ground, he commented that the public would not have much respect for leaders observed in that position. Politicians planning appearances on YouTube might reflect on his advice.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, seeking to stanch declining enrollment and the exodus of students to the District's fast-growing charter schools, announced Tuesday that 13 public schools will launch plans for specialized programs in science and technology, arts and languages.
Theme-based schools are a widely employed educational idea, and the District has several specialty high schools, including Duke Ellington School of the Arts, McKinley Technology High School and School Without Walls.
What makes Rhee's proposal different is that the "catalyst schools" will remain neighborhood schools open to all eligible students without an application or other admissions requirements. Eaton Elementary, for example, will remain the school for its Northwest D.C. neighborhood but will also develop a Chinese language and culture program.
Rhee said D.C. families should not have to look far from home to find innovative school options for their children.
Due to your interest in the public education, I am writing to update you on the outcome of the 2009 State Budget and how it will impact K-12 Education in Wisconsin.
Despite the financial difficulties that the state finds itself in, a number of programs in this budget will have a positive and lasting effect on public education. The high point of the budget this year is the repeal of the Qualified Economic Offer (QEO). Since the QEO was passed, teacher pay has lost more than 7% to inflation and fallen even further behind in per capita income. Wisconsin has long prided itself in having a top-notch public education system, yet we have lost countless qualified educators over this law. The elimination of the QEO removes one obstacle toward ensuring that our children have access to the best educators possible.
Other items of note in this budget include additional funding for the expansion of Four-Year-Old Kindergarten programs; increases in aid for high-poverty districts; and additional grant funding to improve school safety efforts.
Unfortunately, the reduction in available state funding resulted in some cuts in school aids. However, I was pleased that overall funding for public education was maintained at a reasonable level under current circumstances, ensuring that we are able to give Wisconsin students the best resources possible. Funding education is an investment in the future of Wisconsin.
Thank you for your continued support of public education in Wisconsin. If I can ever be of assistance to you, please do not hesitate to contact my office.
At the end of my last blog, I said that in my next post I would show why so-called "school reform" has become another empty abstraction, a slogan for politicians. I said I would demonstrate why there is no chance that real school reform will ever happen in Chicago. Here are half a dozen reasons:
(1) For 50 years we -- the public, the critics of education, the education establishment itself -- have known that schooling is in deep trouble, and not just public instruction in ghetto schools. Yet no substantive reforms have been carried out.
Everything has been proposed, everything tried -- several times. The latest cure-all promises tough, real action and painless, revolutionary, unprecedented, serendipitous, timely benefits. Its results have proven to be mixed -- and puny.
The more we talk, the greater the uncertainty about what to do grows. The more ideas put forward, the more difficult practical action becomes. The more we "innovate," the more resistant and hardened the problems of removing ignorance become.
"If you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments, if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom, if you turn around failing schools, your state can win a 'Race to the Top' grant that will not only help students out-compete workers around the world, but let them fulfill their God-given potential," President Obama said.
Some reforms are controversial.
The reforms touted by the Obama administration have supporters and detractors.
California, New York and Wisconsin have laws against tying teacher pay to how their students perform in class. Teacher unions, which are organizations with teacher members that use collective bargaining to get better pay and benefits, are also wary of teacher pay reform.
"The devil really is in the details. On the issues where you have differences, you try to work those out," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told the Washington Post.
As head of schools in Chicago, Secretary Duncan started a program that paid some teachers according to how their students performed to see if it worked.
A Rescue Plan for College Composition and High-School English
By Michael B. Prince:
The new administration in Washington promises fresh resources for our failing school systems. The need is great. Yet at a time when every penny counts, we had better be sure that new investments in education don't chase after bad pedagogical ideas.
I propose a rescue plan for high-school English and college composition that costs little, apart from a shift in dominant ideas. For the sake of convenience and discussion, the rescue plan reduces complex matters to three concrete steps.
First, don't trust the SAT Reasoning Test, especially the writing section of that test, as a college diagnostic, and don't allow the writing test to influence the goals of high-school English.
The news last year that Baylor University paid its already admitted students to retake the SAT in order to raise the school's ranking in U.S. News and World Report would be funny if it weren't so sad. The test is a failure.
Even the manufacturer of the SAT admits that the new test, which includes writing, is no better than the old test, which didn't. As The Boston Globe reported on June 18, 2008: "The New York-based College Board, which owns the test, released the study yesterday showing that the current SAT rated 0.53 on a measure of predictive ability, compared with 0.52 for the previous version. A result of 1 would mean the test perfectly predicts college performance. Revising the SAT 'did not substantially change' its capacity to foretell first-year college grades, the research found."
How could this happen? College professors frequently ask their students to write. Shouldn't a test that includes actual writing tell us more about scholastic aptitude than a test that doesn't? Yes, unless the test asks students to do something categorically different from what college professors generally ask their students to do. Is that the problem with the SAT? You be the judge.
The following essay question appeared on the December 2007 SAT. It was reprinted on the College Board's Web site as a model for high-school students to practice; it was subsequently disseminated by high schools and SAT-prep Web sites. The question runs as follows:
"Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.
"'Our determination to pursue truth by setting up a fight between two sides leads us to believe that every issue has two sides--no more, no less. If we know both sides of an issue, all of the relevant information will emerge, and the best case will be made for each side. But this process does not always lead to the truth. Often the truth is somewhere in the complex middle, not the oversimplified extremes.'
"[Adapted from Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture]
"Assignment:
"Should people choose one of two opposing sides of an issue, or is the truth usually found 'in the middle'? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations."
Take a stand on where truth is found and support it with reasons. Could anything be more straightforward? Here is a question that promises not to exclude a single thinking student based on cultural bias. No reading imposes itself to the advantage of some students and detriment of others. There are no instructions about writing correctly, proofreading, and the like, and graders are advised to play down surface errors. The prompt threatens no one and nothing, least of all standard operating procedures in high-school English and college composition, where the brief argument essay is the coin of the realm. As the Globe article reports, "the College Board had said the SAT changes were meant to make the test 'more closely aligned with current high-school curricula.'"
Yes, and that's exactly the problem: The College Board bought stock in the ideas it was supposed to regulate.
Most college professors--especially those outside the humanities--would view the SAT essay prompt as significantly unlike their own writing assignments. First and foremost, we ask students to read. Though we may not say so directly, we also expect students to weave faithful renditions of other writers' ideas into their own papers. A student who can whip up an argument about where truth is located is not necessarily a student who can read Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (or any other challenging text) with understanding sufficient to frame an intelligent response. The SAT writing test fails for the simple reason that it ignores reading comprehension, overrates argument, and plays down grammar and prose mechanics. My advice: Toss the test; upgrade the skills it neglects.
But that's not enough. We owe it to our students to trace the influences shaping this failed test. My second remedy for high-school English and college composition is also inexpensive: to examine the assumptions of the critical-thinking movement, which underlie the SAT essay prompt and the field of composition generally--indeed, to think critically, about critical thinking.
Consider the question more closely. What does it ask our students to do? State and support an opinion about how the truth is discovered. This is a question about the methodology of inquiry. Is a dialectical procedure taking in opposing viewpoints a good way to locate the truth? Or does this dialectical procedure cause an oversimplified focus on extreme views at the expense of more nuanced positions in between?
Those of us who pursued advanced degrees in the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s will be familiar with the assumption behind the question: Humanistic confidence in the value of dialogue is naïve in contrast to a more strenuous exercise of critical reason. The question unmasks the pretensions of dialogue and invites students to apply their critical-thinking skills reflexively to think about thinking. You might assume a standardized test administered to millions of high-school juniors and seniors would be an odd place to rehearse an old theoretical battle, long since won by the anti-humanist camp. Yet the critical thinking, reading, and writing movement is obsessed with the process of thinking, and we see that fascination visited upon our students here. The theory seems to be that students become more literate, better able to succeed in school and profession, when they learn rhetorical techniques of critical analysis and reflect on their own thinking processes.
What if it has all been a huge mistake?
The assumptions of the critical-thinking movement have had a deleterious effect on college composition and its forced imitator, high-school English. Anyone concerned with the fate of English composition should know that the fourth edition (1996) of the best-selling and often-imitated Ways of Reading, by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, begins this way:
"Reading involves a fair measure of push and shove. You make your mark on a book and it makes its mark on you. Reading is not simply a matter of hanging back and waiting for a piece, or its author, to tell you what the writing has to say. In fact, one of the difficult things about reading is that the pages before you will begin to speak only when the authors are silent and you begin to speak in their place, sometimes for them--doing their work, continuing their projects--and sometimes for yourself, following your own agenda...We have not mentioned finding information or locating an author's purpose or identifying main ideas, useful though these skills are, because the purpose of reading in our book is to offer you occasions to imagine other ways of reading."
Note the order: Students make their mark on the book before it has made its mark on them. The priority is response, not understanding. Note how dismissively the authors treat "useful" skills as opposed to "occasions to imagine other ways of reading." The portentous repetition of the book's title signals its iconic status for the movement.
Let's say our students actually learn what we teach them. What result might we expect from their taking to heart this kind of aggressive constructivism mixed with promise of empowerment? Might not the elixir produce habits of fast judgment from little evidence, of looking away from challenging texts in order to opine--habits, in other words, that predict failure instead of success in academic and professional writing?
High-school systems have had little choice but to follow the movement's strong dictates about what "ready for college" means. To grasp the consequences in a nutshell, just consult one of the most successful suppliers of ideas and texts for K-12 education, America's Choice. According to its promotional material, this nonprofit organization provides thousands of schools across America with "a coherent, comprehensive [educational] design that offers exceptional instructional materials and strategies with first-rate coaching and professional development." For ninth-grade English, America's Choice distributes a rhetoric to teach argumentation. It is divided into two multistage, process-based units. The first asks students to read six biographical sketches with the knowledge that all of the people need an immediate heart transplant, and there's only one heart to go around. Who gets the heart? The second unit excerpts chapters from a popular college textbook, Andrea Lunsford and John Ruszkiewicz's aptly named Everything's an Argument, in order to teach ninth-graders how to critique advertisements.
The ideas standing behind both the SAT essay examination and the critical-thinking textbooks received their most powerful institutional formulation in 2000, when the Council of Writing Program Administrators issued a proclamation describing "the common knowledge, skills, and attitudes sought by first-year composition programs in American postsecondary education." The purpose of the document was to consolidate existing practice and regulate the teaching of composition throughout America. The first three stated goals are as follows:
"Rhetorical Knowledge
"By the end of first-year composition, students should:
Focus on a purpose.
Respond to the needs of different audiences.
Respond appropriately to different kinds of rhetorical situations.
Use conventions of format and structure appropriate to the rhetorical situation.
Adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality.
Understand how genres shape reading and writing.
Write in several genres.
"Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing
"By the end of first-year composition, students should:
Use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating.
Understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources.
Integrate their own ideas with those of others.
Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power.
"Processes
"By the end of first-year composition, students should:
Be aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text.
Develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading.
Understand writing as an open process that permits writers to use later invention and rethinking to revise their work.
Understand the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.
Learn to critique their own and others' works.
Learn to balance the advantages of relying on others with the responsibility of doing their part.
Use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences."
Many of those goals are worthy in themselves. Consider their net effect, however. Taken together, they load composition/rhetoric with an elaborate vocabulary for describing itself. The group statement does not say that these theoretical and pedagogical ideas should stand in the background, informing practice. They should be among the topics of study. They are what composition/rhetoric is about. Process becomes its own product; rhetorical knowledge trumps content knowledge; critical thinking geared to ideological critique of texts and images replaces open inquiry and accumulation of knowledge through reading and experiment. The omissions are also glaring: not a word about the quality of readings, or the modest work of arriving at an accurate idea of the meaning of texts. Although the fourth outcome goal, "Knowledge of Conventions," lists "control such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling," grammar is a subheading of a subheading, as it is for the critical-thinking movement generally.
Just as critical thinking has passed into policy without losing its rakish edge, so the practices it proscribes--grammar, imitation, précis writing, explication, recitation, reading great works in their entirety--have quietly dropped from view. I urge those charged with leading us out of our educational deficit to consider that ideas long dominant in composition and rhetoric may be detrimental.
I mean no disrespect to those in the trenches teaching high-school English and college composition. Their work is as essential to our schools as it is undervalued in society. But we need to face the possibility that the failure of the SAT essay examination is the canary in the coal mine alerting us to a discrepancy between the skills being emphasized in high-school English and college composition, and the skills most in need in college courses and in all professions. Lisa Delpit has made this same point in defense of students on the margins. She was one of the first to point out a deep confusion among well-intentioned educators who thought they were taking their students' side by lowering expectations, watering down reading lists, ignoring the basics, and emphasizing "process" as much as "product." In The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children (1988), Delpit says the following about process pedagogy:
"Although the problem is not necessarily in the method, in some instances adherents of process approaches to writing create situations in which students ultimately find themselves accountable for knowing a set of rules about which no one has ever directly informed them. Teachers do students no service to suggest, even implicitly, that 'product' is not important. In this country, students will be judged on their product...and that product, based as it is on specific codes of a particular culture, is more readily produced when the directives of how to produce it are made explicit."
Like most educators, Delpit accepts the idea that teachers should present assignments in a coherent way, building from easier to more difficult tasks ("the problem is not necessarily in the method"). However, she objects to current theories of process as undemocratic. They focus too much attention on the way and not enough on the destination (see the seven bullet points after "Processes" in the proclamation above). Supposedly idealistic and egalitarian, process pedagogy enacts the snobbery of those who climb the educational ladder, and then denounce ladders as hierarchical.
That brings me to the third inexpensive change that faculty and administrators can make to foster the success of their high-school English and college composition programs. In addition to ignoring the SAT and re-examining the tenets of critical thinking in composition, I urge all concerned to grasp the continuing relevance of practices that critical thinking dismisses as teacher-centered and traditional. I refer to imitation-based pedagogies that view students less as budding cultural critics and more as apprentices to a craft.
The idea of "craft" is meant to invoke common sense. What are the ordinary ways that ordinary people learn to install a water heater, shoot a free throw, play a musical instrument, perform a dance routine, or conduct an experiment? Answer that question, and you will have your own justification for applying the practices of grammar, recitation, paraphrase, summary, explication, and imitation to the teaching of writing. In The Creative Habit, the dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp puts the point this way:
"The great painters are incomparable draftsmen. They also know how to mix their own paint, grind it, put in the fixative; no task is too small to be worthy of their attention. The great composers are usually dazzling musicians...A great chef can chop and dice better than anyone in the kitchen. The best fashion designers are invariably virtuosos with a needle and thread...The best writers are well-read people. They have the richest appreciation of words, the biggest vocabularies, the keenest ear for language. They also know their grammar. Words and language are their tools, and they have learned how to use them."
So-called basic skills are the muscle and sinew of the best academic writing. Less glamorous than critique, perhaps, they provide the foundation on which any plausible critical interpretation stands. Depriving students of those basics in a rush to make them critical doesn't make sense.
Once high schools and colleges make the changes suggested above, they will be free to uncouple the teaching of writing from the vocabulary of rhetorical analysis. Process will not substitute for content.
What, then, should writing courses be about? Enlightened instructors and administrators will respond that they should be about what all other college courses are about--not writing itself, but a learnable body of information: literature, art history, biology, political science, or any other substantial topic that furthers a students' real education. Yes, there are rhetorical strategies that good writers know and weak writers lack, but those are best taught in every class, by faculty members who themselves have mastered not only a body of knowledge but also the skills for writing publishable work and sharing those skills with apprentices to their craft.
Michael B. Prince is an associate professor of English at Boston University, where he directed the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program from 2000 to 2008.
Join me at the REACH Awards Day next Wed 8/5; Education Reform's Moon Shot; A $4B Push for Better Schools; Taken to school: Obama funding plan must force Legislature to accept education reforms; President Obama Discusses New 'Race to the Top' Program
1) I hope you can join me a week from Wednesday at the REACH Awards Day from 10-12:30 on Aug. 5th at the Chase branch on 39th and Broadway (see full invite at the end of this email).
REACH (Rewarding Achievement; www.reachnyc.org) is a pay-for-performance initiative that aims to improve the college readiness of low-income students at 31 inner-city high schools in New York by rewarding them with up to $1,000 for each Advanced Placement exam they pass. I founded it, with funding from the Pershing Square Foundation and support from the Council of Urban Professionals.
This past year was the first full year of the program and I'm delighted to report very substantial gains in the overall number of students passing AP exams at the 31 schools, and an even bigger gain among African-American and Latino students (exact numbers will be released at the event). As a result, more than 1,000 student have earned nearly $1 MILLION in REACH Scholar Awards! Next Wednesday, the students will come to pick up their checks, Joel Klein will be the highlight of the press conference at 11am, and there will be a ton of media. I hope to see you there! You can RSVP to REACH@nycup.org.
2) STOP THE PRESSES!!! Last Friday will go down in history, I believe, as a key tipping point moment in the decades-long effort to improve our K-12 educational system. President Obama and Sec. Duncan both appeared at a press conference to announce the formal launch of the Race to the Top fund (KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg also spoke and rocked the house!). Other than not being there on vouchers, Obama and Duncan are hitting ALL of the right notes, which, backed with HUGE dollars, will no doubt result in seismic shifts in educational policy across the country.
Under Race to the Top guidelines, states seeking funds will be pressed to implement four core interconnected reforms.
-- To reverse the pervasive dumbing-down of academic standards and assessments by states, Race to the Top winners need to work toward adopting common, internationally benchmarked K-12 standards that prepare students for success in college and careers.
-- To close the data gap -- which now handcuffs districts from tracking growth in student learning and improving classroom instruction -- states will need to monitor advances in student achievement and identify effective instructional practices.
-- To boost the quality of teachers and principals, especially in high-poverty schools and hard-to-staff subjects, states and districts should be able to identify effective teachers and principals -- and have strategies for rewarding and retaining more top-notch teachers and improving or replacing ones who aren't up to the job.
-- Finally, to turn around the lowest-performing schools, states and districts must be ready to institute far-reaching reforms, from replacing staff and leadership to changing the school culture.
The Race to the Top program marks a new federal partnership in education reform with states, districts and unions to accelerate change and boost achievement. Yet the program is also a competition through which states can increase or decrease their odds of winning federal support. For example, states that limit alternative routes to certification for teachers and principals, or cap the number of charter schools, will be at a competitive disadvantage. And states that explicitly prohibit linking data on achievement or student growth to principal and teacher evaluations will be ineligible for reform dollars until they change their laws.
President Obama is leaning hard on the nation's schools, using the promise of more than $4 billion in federal aid -- and the threat of withholding it -- to strong-arm the education establishment to accept more charter schools and performance pay for teachers.
The pressure campaign has been underway for months as Education Secretary Arne Duncan travels the country delivering a blunt message to state officials who have resisted change for decades: Embrace reform or risk being shut out.
"What we're saying here is, if you can't decide to change these practices, we're not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we're not going to send those dollars there," Obama said in an Oval Office interview Wednesday. "And we're counting on the fact that, ultimately, this is an incentive, this is a challenge for people who do want to change."
On Friday, Obama will officially announce the "Race to the Top," a competition for $4.35 billion in grants. He wants states to use funds to ease limits on charter schools, tie teacher pay to student achievement and move for the first time toward common academic standards. It is part of a broader effort to improve school achievement with a $100 billion increase in education funding, more money for community colleges and an increase in Pell Grants for college students.
President Obama launched a competition Friday for $4.35 billion in federal education funds, urging states to ease restrictions on charter schools, link teacher pay to student achievement and adopt common national academic standards to be eligible for the money.
In a speech at the Education Department, Obama joined Education Secretary Arne Duncan in announcing draft criteria for the "Race to the Top" fund, which the administration is billing as the "largest-ever federal investment in education reform."
"America will not succeed in the 21st century unless we do a far better job of educating our sons and daughters," Obama said. "In a world where countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow, the future belongs to the nation that best educates its people."
Acknowledging that "our education system is falling short," he said that for years, "we've talked these problems to death . . . while doing all too little to solve them." Now, he said, he is challenging the nation's governors, schools boards, teachers, parents, students and others to meet "a few key benchmarks for reform" in order to compete for and win Race to the Top grants.
"That race starts today," Obama said. He pledged that "this competition will not be based on politics or ideology or the preferences of a particular interest group" but on "whether a state is ready to do what works."
5) As an example of the impact this will likely have at the state level, here's an editorial in today's NY Daily News:
President Obama has dealt a much-deserved slap to lawmakers in New York and other states who kowtow to teachers unions:
They must get rid of anti-reform limits on holding teachers accountable and opening charter schools, or they will kiss hundreds of millions in federal education grants goodbye.
The choice for Albany could not be clearer: Repeal those now.
The Legislature was dead wrong when it voted last year to bar school officials from even looking at students' test scores when deciding whether a teacher is effective enough to get tenure.
The Legislature was also wrong to cap how many privately operated, publicly funded charters schools could open across the state - first at 100, then at a still-too-stingy 200.
Albany enacted both laws at the behest of teachers unions, which bathe legislators in campaign cash. Union members recoil at being held accountable for progress - or lack thereof - in their classrooms as measured by the objective standards of tests. The unions have also battled charters because they are mostly nonunion and consistently get better results with less money.
But Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are demanding that kids' needs come first. Unveiling a $4.35 billion grant program last week, Duncan warned that states that cap charter schools will put themselves at a "competitive disadvantage" for funding. And schools that block the use of test data in evaluating teachers will be flatly ineligible.
And Duncan made plain his attitude toward New York in a speech last month, saying:
"Believe it or not, several states, including New York, Wisconsin and California, have laws that create a firewall between students and teacher data. I think that's simply ridiculous. We need to know what is and is not working and why."
This gives Albany lawmakers a huge financial incentive to do the right thing.
It's an offer they must not refuse.
Q And one more question on this. You say you want to work with teachers unions and not impose a program on them. But there are critics who say, well, if you work with the teachers unions, those are the same entities that are obstacles to reform. How can you work with them and reform at the same time?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, I mean, I think that there is a cynical view, oftentimes ideologically driven, that says teachers unions inherently are going to be opposed to reform in our school system. I just don't believe that, maybe because my sister is a teacher and I know how hard she works and how deeply she cares about her kids.
I think teachers, understandably, in the past have been suspicious of reform measures that seem to make them into a scapegoat and don't take into account the extraordinary challenges that they face day in, day out -- everything from having to dig into their own pocket to buy school supplies, to not having the kinds of support services for kids who may have trouble outside of the classroom, to bureaucratic rules that get in the way of them teaching creatively.
So there are a whole range of very legitimate concerns that teachers have. And what we want to do is to assume that teachers want to see kids succeed, solicit their best ideas, and then shape and craft reforms that have their buy-in and have their ownership, because that's going to -- there's going to be greater success.
Now -- but I want to be realistic. There are going to be elements within the teachers union where they're just resistant to change because people inherently are resistant to change. Teachers aren't any different from any politicians or corporate CEOs. There are going to be certain habits that have been built up that they don't want to change.
And what we're saying here is if you can't decide to change these practices, we're not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we're not going to send those dollars there.
And we're counting on the fact that, ultimately, this is an incentive, this is a challenge for people who do want to change.
I think it's important to note, just in terms of the politics of it, the same notion that somehow teachers unions would not accept reform -- the fact is, is that we got this passed. And you've got national teachers unions, both the NEA and the AFT, that have been consulted even as we've been putting this together.
Andrew Delbanco effectively describes the tragedy that is unfolding at American universities: after a generation of expanding of opportunity, both private and public colleges are increasingly out of reach of the lower classes ["The Universities in Trouble," NYR, May 14]. Unfortunately, Delbanco avoids the solution that is sitting right before him: free higher education. That's the way most of the civilized world deals with the cost of higher education. And we have past and present examples in our own nation of providing free higher education--the GI Bill, CUNY, California's community colleges, Georgia's HOPE scholarships. My father went from immigrant to soldier to Ph.D. in the space of a decade, thanks to the GI Bill.
Would this be insanely expensive? The total cost of sending every single public university undergraduate to college for a year (that group makes up 75 percent of the total college enrollment) was $39.36 billion in 2006-2007. That's not chicken feed, but it's less than the bailout amount for two large banks, or the cost of three or four months in Iraq.
Historically, the District of Columbia has struggled to improve the educational opportunities available to students living in the nation's capital. Over the past decade, District residents have witnessed signifi cant changes in the D.C. education system. New reforms have included the creation of nearly sixty public charter schools on approximately ninety campuses; Mayor Adrian Fenty and Chancellor Michelle Rhee's overhaul of the traditional public school system; and the creation of the federal D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.
As policymakers in District government and on Capitol Hill consider the future of these and other education reform initiatives, attention should be paid to the views of D.C. citizens. In July 2009, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice commissioned Braun Research, Inc. to conduct a statistically representative survey of 1,001 registered voters in the District of Columbia.
Why conduct a survey on education issues in the District of Columbia? Why now?
This is a critical moment for the District and its residents. With so many proposals being suggested in the public domain - to initiate, expand, scale back, or eliminate programs and policies - it can be dizzying to policy wonks and casual observers alike. We hope that this survey can bring a pause for perspective. Each of the organizations endorsing this survey's fi eldwork felt it was important to take a step back and refl ect on the wishes of
D.C. citizens regarding their city's education system.
Madison School District Strategic Planning Update, with Links
Madison Board of Education President Arlene Silveira, via email:
TO: MMSD Strategic Planning Committee
Good afternoon,
I am writing to provide you with a Board update on the MMSD strategic plan. Before getting into details, I again want to thank you for all of the time and effort you put into development of the plan. It is appreciated.
On July 21, the Board of Education held our second meeting to review the strategic planning document that you, our community-based strategic planning committee, submitted. The Board unanimously approved the following components of the new strategic plan. The mission, beliefs and parameters were approved with no changes to the plan you submitted. Some language in the strategic objectives was modified for clarity and completeness.
Running Start provides academically motivated students an opportunity to take college courses as part of their high school education.
Students may take just one class per quarter, or take all of their courses on the BC campus. If you are eligible for the program, you will earn both high school and college credit for the classes you take.
Classes taken on the college campus as part of the Running Start program are limited to "college level" courses (most classes numbered 100 or above qualify).
Tuition is paid for by the school district. Books, class related fees and transportation are the responsibility of the student.
Running Start was created by the Washington State Legislature in 1990 and is available at all community and technical colleges in the State of Washington.
WIBA's Mitch Henck Discusses the Madison School District's Budget with Don Severson
24MB mp3 audio file. Mitch and Don discuss the Madison School District's $12M budget deficit, caused by a decline in redistributed tax dollars from the State of Wisconsin and generally flat enrollment. Topics include: Fund 80, health care costs, four year old kindergarten, staffing, property taxes (which may increase to make up for the reduced state tax dollar funding).
Madison School District Board President Arlene Silveira sent this message to local Alders Saturday:
Good afternoon,
Below is an update of the MMSD budget situation.
As you know, the biennial budget was signed into law at the end of June. The budget had numerous provisions that will effect the future of public education that include:
Repeal of the Qualified Economic Offer (QEO)
Decrease in funding for public education by the state of approximately $14720million
Decrease in the per pupil increase associated with revenue limits
The repeal of the QEO will potentially impact future settlements for salries and benefits. The decrease in funding for public education by the state creates the need for a tax increase conversation in order to sustain current programs. The decrease in the revenue limit formula will cause MMSD to face more reductions in programs and services for the next 2 years at a minimum.
Reduction in revenue: $2.8 million (decrease in the per pupil increase from $275 to $200/pupil)
Total decrease: projected to to be $12 million
Last May, the Madison Board of Education passed a preliminary 2009-10 budget that maintained programs and services with a modest property tax increase. The groundwork for our budget was laid last fall when the Board pledged our commitment to community partnership and the community responded by supporting a referendum that allowed us to exceed revenue caps to stabilize funding for our schools. Two months later, with programs and staff in place for next year, we find ourselves faced with State funding cuts far exceeding our worst fears.
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
We are in this position in part because Wisconsin's school funding formulas are so complicated that the legislature and supporting agencies did not accurately predict the budget's impact on school districts. State aid to Madison and many other districts was cut by 15%. In practical terms, coupled with additional State cuts of $2.8 million, MMSD is saddled with State budget reductions of $12 million this year.
This grim situation is a result of a poor economy, outdated information used by the legislature, and a Department of Public Instruction policy that penalizes the district for receiving one-time income (TIF closing in Madison). Federal stimulus funds will, at best, delay cuts for one year. We are left with a gaping budget deficit when many fiscal decisions for the upcoming school year cannot be reversed.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?
We are working on strategies and options and are looking carefully at the numbers to ensure our solutions do not create new problems. We will evaluate options for dealing with the budget in early August.
To repair our budget, we are working with legislators and the DPI to appeal decisions that have placed us in this position. We continue to look for changes in resource management to find additional cost reductions. We are seeking ways to offset the impact of school property tax increases if we need to increase our levy.
At the same time, we pledge that we will not pass the full cost of the cuts along as increased property taxes. We will not resort to massive layoffs of teachers and support staff, t he deadline having passed to legally reduce our staff under union contracts.
I will be back in touch after our August meeting when we have made decisions on our path forward.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Arlene Silveira
Madison Board of Education
608-516-8981
Students registering for fall classes this summer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will see a 30% increase in the number of online classes, but the convenience comes with a price: as much as $275 per course on top of regular tuition.
University officials say the increase is part of a strategy to boost enrollment and revenue by meeting a growing demand for the online format, which appeals to students who commute, work full time or have families.
But the move is also a way for UWM to pass more of its costs to students at a time when it faces a $20 million budget cut over the next two years that will be only partially offset by a tuition increase.
The trend toward online courses raises two key questions at a time when UWM students are registering for fall classes: Will the shift in scheduling mean more local students have to take the pricier online courses, and where does the money raised by the online fees go?
The pricing of online courses varies by college, but the fees particularly frustrate some undergraduates in the College of Letters and Science, which charges $275 above regular tuition for each online course.
By way of introduction, I am neither mathematician nor mathematics teacher, but I majored in math and have used it throughout my career, especially in the last 17 years as an analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. My love of and facility with math is due to good teaching and good textbooks. The teachers I had in primary and secondary school provided explicit instruction and answered students' questions; they also posed challenging problems that required us to apply what we had learned. The textbooks I used also contained explanations of the material with examples that showed every step of the problem solving process.
I fully expected the same for my daughter, but after seeing what passed for mathematics in her elementary school, I became increasingly distressed over how math is currently taught in many schools.
Optimistically believing that I could make a difference in at least a few students' lives, I decided to teach math when I retire. I enrolled in education school about two years ago, and have only a 15-week student teaching requirement to go. Although I had a fairly good idea of what I was in for with respect to educational theories, I was still dismayed at what I found in my mathematics education courses.
In class after class, I have heard that when students discover material for themselves, they supposedly learn it more deeply than when it is taught directly. Similarly, I have heard that although direct instruction is effective in helping students learn and use algorithms, it is allegedly ineffective in helping students develop mathematical thinking. Throughout these courses, a general belief has prevailed that answering students' questions and providing explicit instruction are "handing it to the student" and preventing them from "constructing their own knowledge"--to use the appropriate terminology. Overall, however, I have found that there is general confusion about what "discovery learning" actually means. I hope to make clear in this article what it means, and to identify effective and ineffective methods to foster learning through discovery.
David Page says the problem is that parents are on their own. Teachers have a union. So do principals. School board members get to vote plans up or down and top administrators make decisions in the salmon-pink offices of San Diego Unified.
But parents are often too intimidated to speak up or too star-struck with school staffers to question them, Page said. Education is a world loaded with its own numbing lingo -- categorical funding, supplement not supplant, program improvement -- and it seems overwhelming to understand it, let alone to fight it.
"They think, 'They make six figures and they're educated. Who am I to second guess them?'" Page said.
Yet Page has done just that. If parents at the poorer schools in San Diego Unified did have a union, he might be their leader, with all the fans and foes that entails. Seventeen years after the father of six first walked into a parents' meeting at Ross Elementary in Kearny Mesa, unsure of his rights and unfamiliar with the jargon, Page has become a human encyclopedia on the rules that govern funds for disadvantaged kids and a dogged fighter for parents in communities sometimes left out of decisions.
He is one of the few parents across the state that jets to Sacramento for meetings of the state Board of Education, pores over complex regulations on education spending, and explains it all to befuddled parents at the school district committee that oversees funds for children in poverty, which he has led for six years. Page also leads the nonprofit California Association of Compensatory Education and sits on the board of the Family Area Network, which advises the state on parent involvement.
Dissatisfied with long hours, churning turnover and, in some cases, lower pay than instructors at other public schools, an increasing number of teachers at charter schools are unionizing.
Labor organizing that began two years ago at seven charter schools in Florida has proliferated over the last year to at least a dozen more charters from Massachusetts and New York to California and Oregon.
Charter schools, which are publicly financed but managed by groups separate from school districts, have been a mainstay of the education reform movement and widely embraced by parents. Because most of the nation's 4,600 charter schools operate without unions, they have been freer to innovate, their advocates say, allowing them to lengthen the class day, dismiss underperforming teachers at will, and experiment with merit pay and other changes that are often banned by work rules governing traditional public schools.
"Charter schools have been too successful for the unions to ignore," said Elizabeth D. Purvis, executive director of the Chicago International Charter School, where teachers voted last month to unionize 3 of its 12 campuses.
President Obama has been especially assertive in championing charter schools. On Friday, he and the education secretary, Arne Duncan, announced a competition for $4.35 billion in federal financing for states that ease restrictions on charter schools and adopt some charter-like standards for other schools -- like linking teacher pay to student achievement.
If you wanted to gain good standing with some guy giving away a mountain of money, you would probably be alarmed if you heard him use that language publicly about you.
You'd have choices at that point. You could get upset and tell him to keep his stupid money. You could try to convince him that you weren't ridiculous without really changing your ways. Or you could change your ways.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is that guy right now. Wisconsin is who he's talking about. And it's certainly clear that only the third option is going to please him. He wants change.
The immediate subject is $4.35 billion that Duncan and the education department will be awarding to states this year and next. Called the Race to the Top program, the goal is to help states that are leading the way in innovation and commitment to improving achievement, particularly among low-income and minority students.
President Barack Obama and Duncan on Friday unveiled proposed rules on how the money will be awarded. One of the firmest: "To be eligible under this program, a state must not have any legal, statutory or regulatory barriers to linking student achievement or student growth data to teachers for the purpose of teacher and principal evaluation."
Wisconsin is one of the few states that have such a rule, right there in state law.
Or, as Duncan put it in a New York Times interview: "Believe it or not, several states, including New York, Wisconsin and California, have laws that create a firewall between students and teacher data. I think that's simply ridiculous. We need to know what is and is not working and why."
At 50, Paula Lopez Crespin doesn't fit the Teach for America demographic of high-achieving college senior. The program rarely draws adults eligible for AARP membership. In fact, just 2 percent of recruits are over 30.
But what Ms. Crespin lacks in youth, she makes up for in optimism, idealism and what those in Teach for America call "relentless pursuit of results." Ms. Crespin beat out tens of thousands of applicants to get where she is: fresh off her first year teaching math and science at Cole Arts and Science Academy in a gang-riddled section of Denver.
Many friends thought she was crazy to give up a career in banking for a $32,000 pay cut teaching in an urban elementary school. But the real insanity, Ms. Crespin insists, would have been remaining in a job she "just couldn't stomach anymore," and surrendering a dream of doing "something meaningful with my life."
These days, crazy never looked so normal. Teaching has always been a top choice for a second career. Of the 60,000 new teachers hired last year, more than half came from another line of work, according to the National Center for Education Information. Most bypassed traditional teacher education (for career changers, a two-year master's degree) for fast-track programs like Teach for America. But unemployment, actual or feared, is now causing professionals who dismissed teaching early on to think better of its security, flexibility (summers off, the chance to be home with children) and pension. Four of Ms. Crespin's colleagues at Cole are career changers, ages 46 to 54, including a former information technology executive and a psychologist.
Teach for America, the teacher-training program that has evolved into a Peace Corps alternative for a generation bred on public service, is highly competitive and becoming more so: this year, a record 35,178 applied -- a 42 percent increase over 2008 -- to fill 4,100 slots. Eleven percent of all new Ivy League graduates applied.
As the dust settles around the new state budget, partisan disagreement continues over the boost that unions - particularly education unions - got by making it easier for them to sign up thousands of new members and by repealing the 3.8% annual limit on teachers' pay raises.
The provisions passed because Democrats, who got control of the Legislature for the first time in 14 years, partnered with Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle to advance changes the governor and unions had been pushing for years.
Unions traditionally help elect Democratic politicians. The largest teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, spent about $2.1 million before last November's elections, with much of that backing Democrats.
Most of the labor-related provisions in the budget were added to provide people with "good, family-supporting jobs," said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison), co-chairman of the Legislature's Finance Committee.
"The idea that we're shifting back to the worker, rather than just big business and management, that's part of what Democrats are about," Pocan said.
It also helped that the two top Democratic legislators, Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan of Janesville and Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker of Weston, are veteran labor leaders.
Sheridan is the former president of a Janesville union for General Motors; Decker was a union bricklayer when he was elected president of the Central Wisconsin Building Trades.
In a statement, Sheridan said Assembly Democrats focused on giving workers struggling through the recession "an opportunity to negotiate for better working circumstances or wages." They also made sure the budget included tax breaks to help businesses create and protect jobs, he said.
Republican leaders say taxpayers will be the ultimate losers, when they must pay public employees higher wages and better benefits.
Republicans also say Doyle and Democratic legislative leaders approved the changes to thank unions for their campaign cash and endorsements before last November's elections. The Democrats also are laying groundwork to win support heading into the 2010 elections, GOP lawmakers say.
To make matters more dire, the long-term legislative proposal specifically exempts school district arbitrations from the requirement that arbitrators consider and give the greatest weight to
revenue limits and local economic conditions. While arbitrators would continue to give these two factors paramount consideration when deciding cases for all other local governments, the importance of fiscal limits and local economic conditions would be specifically diminished for school district arbitration.
This is obviously the kind of thing frequently seen in Washington.... It would be interesting to see the players (and money) behind this legislation. In related local news, the Madison School District and the local teacher union have yet to agree to a new contract. Perhaps this arbitration change plays a role in the process?
The District's struggling public school system has made significant progress during two years of mayoral control, but lack of planning and transparency has hindered some reforms, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported Thursday.
The report, requested by the Senate subcommittee that oversees District affairs, praised Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee for "bold steps" taken to close under-enrolled schools, improve test scores and develop teachers' skills and methods of monitoring their performance.
But Cornelia M. Ashby, director of education and workforce issues for GAO, told the Senate subcommittee that "some false steps" had hampered efforts to transform the system, which serves 45,000 students in 128 schools.
Yet try to find any mention of charter schools in the Madison School District's new strategic plan and you'll feel like you're reading a "Where's Waldo?" book. You almost need a magnifying lens to find the one fleeting reference in the entire 85-page document. And the words "charter school" are completely absent from the strategic plan's lengthy and important calls for action.
It's more evidence that much of liberal Madison clings to an outdated phobia of charter schools. And that attitude needs to change.
Nearly 10 percent of Wisconsin's public schools are charters. That ranks Wisconsin among the top five states. Yet Madison is below the national average of 5 percent.
Charter schools are public schools free from many regulations to try new things. Parents also tend to have more say.
Yet charters are held accountable for achievement and can easily be shut down by sponsoring districts if they don't produce results within a handful of years.
One well-known Madison charter school is Nuestro Mundo, meaning "Our World" in Spanish. It immerses kindergartners, no matter their native language, in Spanish. English is slowly added until, by fifth grade, all students are bilingual. My daughter attends Nuestro Mundo.
It was a battle to get this charter school approved. But Nuestro Mundo's popularity and success have led the district to replicate its dual-language curriculum at a second school without a charter.
The School Board has shot down at least two charter school proposals in recent years, including one for a "Studio School" emphasizing arts and technology.
Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira told me Friday she supports adding charter schools to the district's action plans in at least two places: under a call for more "innovative school structures," and as part of a similar goal seeking heightened attention to "diverse learning styles."
I agree. I believe that diffused governance, in other words a substantive move away from the current top down, largely "one size fits all" governance model within the Madison public schools is essential.
Most of Chicago's students drop out or fail. The vast majority of Chicago's elementary
and high schools do not prepare their students for success in college and beyond.
There is a general perception that Chicago's public schools have been gradually
improving over time. However, recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS
elementary students who meet standards on State assessments appear to be due to
changes in the tests made by the Illinois State Board of Education, rather than real
improvements in student learning.
At the elementary level, State assessment standards have been so weakened that most
of the 8th graders who "meet" these standards have little chance to succeed in high
school or to be ready for college. While there has been modest improvement in real
student learning in Chicago's elementary schools, these gains dissipate in high school.
The performance of Chicago's high schools is abysmal--with about half the students
dropping out of the non-selective-enrollment schools, and more than 70% of 11th
grade students failing to meet State standards. The trend has remained essentially flat
over the past several years. The relatively high-performing students are concentrated
in a few magnet/selective enrollment high schools. In the regular neighborhood high
schools, which serve the vast preponderance of students, almost no students are
prepared to succeed in college.
In order to drive real improvement in CPS and fairly report performance to the public, a credible source of information on student achievement is essential. Within CPS
today, no such source exists. CPS and the State should use rigorous national
standardized tests. Also, the Board of Education should designate an independent
auditor with responsibility for ensuring that published reports regarding student
achievement in CPS are accurate, timely and distributed to families and stakeholders
in an easily understood format.
Efforts to provide meaningful school choices to Chicago's families must be aggressively
pursued--including expanding the number of charter and contract schools in
Chicago. Most of these schools outperform the traditional schools that their students
would otherwise have attended; and the choices that they offer parents will help spur
all schools in CPS to improve.
Am I optimistic that they can avoid it . . . ? I am not." That's what retired judge Ray Graves said this week when asked whether the Detroit public schools, which he is advising, would be forced into bankruptcy. Facing violence, a shrinking student body, and graduating just one out of every four students who enter the ninth grade on time, the city's schools have been stumbling for years. Now they face a seemingly insurmountable deficit and are expected to file for bankruptcy protection at about the time that students should be settling down in a new school year.
As embarrassing as such a filing would be, it also may be the only thing that can force the kinds of changes Detroit schools need--as the financial turmoil is just the latest manifestation of a system in terminal decline.
Detroit is like many urban school districts--large, unwieldy and bureaucratic, with a powerful union that makes the system unable to adapt to changing circumstances and that until very recently had an indulgent political class that insulated it from reform. That insulation came in two forms. The first was neglect. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick spent several years distracted by a scandal stemming from his affair with a staffer. He resigned last year, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, and was sentenced to four months in jail. Had he been an effective mayor, he might have also been a powerful advocate for students.
EVEN among left-wingers, few talk about banning independent schools nowadays. There are craftier ways of overhauling the education system to fight privilege. One of them hit the headlines this week when the Charity Commission published its first "public-benefit" assessment, including five private schools among its chosen charitable specimens. Two--Highfield Priory in Lancashire and S. Anselm's in Derbyshire--failed the tough new requirement to show that they are helping the general public. The schools have a year to come up with a plan to get on track, or risk being taken over or closed down.
For centuries education has been considered a charitable activity, with no questions asked. In 2006 the rules were changed. Under the Charities Act of that year, schools are no longer entitled to the tax breaks that charitable status confers simply because they provide teaching. Instead, they have to demonstrate that they are actively benefiting the public. It has fallen to the regulator to interpret and apply the law: the commission says charities that charge fees, such as private schools, must ensure that "people in poverty" can use their services. The two schools that the commission flunked did not provide those who cannot afford the fees "sufficient opportunity to benefit".
U.S. education secretary is expected to withhold millions of dollars in education stimulus money if the state doesn't comply with his demand.
California could lose out on millions of federal education dollars unless legislators change a law that prevents it from using student test scores to measure teachers' performance, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is expected to announce in a speech today.
California has among the worst records of any state in collecting and using data to evaluate teachers and schools.
Moreover, a 2006 law that created a teacher database explicitly prohibited the use of student test scores to hold teachers accountable on a statewide basis, although it did not mention local districts.
Only a few of the state's nearly 1,000 districts evaluate teachers by using their students' scores, though a dozen more are considering such moves, according to state officials. Los Angeles Unified, the state's largest, does not grade teachers based on student performance.
Data-driven school reform is a major focus of the Obama administration's education policies.
President Barack Obama is set to announce on Friday a competition for $4 billion in federal grants to improve academic achievement in U.S. schools, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Obama wants states to use funds from the competition, dubbed the "Race to the Top," to ease limits on so-called charter schools, link teacher pay to student achievement and move toward common U.S. academic standards, the Post said.
Charter schools receive public funding but generally are exempt from some state or local rules and regulations. They are operated as an alternative to traditional public schools.
"What we're saying here is, if you can't decide to change these practices, we're not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we're not going to send those dollars there," Obama told the Post in an interview.
"States and Provinces and curricula around the world track students by age. This practice is so common that we do not think of it as tracking. With few exceptions, a six year old must go into first grade even if that six year old is not ready or was ready for the grade one year earlier" (Usiskin 98)
Introduction
One of the many challenges facing schools is the decision on how to allocate students to classrooms. Research confirms the empirical observations of many parents and educators that students learn at greatly varying rates (Walberg 1988). These different learning rates are explained by (among other things) differing learning styles, aptitudes and levels of motivation (NECTL 1994). Unfortunately for visions of "equal outcomes," due to differences in understanding, among other things, these differences in learning rates tend to increase as the child moves through the educational system (Arlin, 1984, P. 67). Given the wide variations in knowledge, motivation, and aptitude, schools must choose methods of allocating students to classes, and curriculum to classes and students.
Unfortunately, school administrators face not only conflicting messages in regard to the educational implications of various decisions, but significant pressure to base decisions either partly or mainly on nonacademic factors(1) (Oakes 1994 a, b and Hastings, 1992 for example). Hastings declares ability grouping to be wrong as a "philosophic absolute" and declares its use to be "totally unacceptable." The National Education Commission on Time and Learning, on the other hand, labels the act of providing the same amount of learning time to students who need varying amounts "inherently unequal" (94). They state "If we provide all students with the same amount of instructional time, we virtually guarantee inequality of achievement" (emphasis in original). The Draft for "Standards 2000' from the NCTM (NCTM 98) calls for increased equity by exposing all students, not just the elite, to challenging mathematics. There is no apparent awareness that many students do not find existing materials, whether consistent with the 1989 standards or not, challenging.
Governors and state commissioners of education from across the country committed to joining a state-led process to develop a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. These standards will be research and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked, aligned with college and work expectations and include rigorous content and skills. The NGA Center and CCSSO are coordinating the process to develop these standards and have created an expert validation committee to provide an independent review of the common core state standards, as well as the grade-by-grade standards. The college and career ready standards are expected to be completed in July 2009. The grade-by-grade standards work is expected to be completed in December 2009.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has called Detroit's schools a "national disgrace." The system suffers from budget deficits, corruption and a falling student population. Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, the official who will decide whether the school system will file for bankruptcy protection by the end of the summer, discusses the financial state of the Detroit Public School system.
The Cleveland school district continues to plan for new elementary schools in blighted neighborhoods where enrollment has plunged, threatening to chew up state construction money that could be used in more stable parts of town, an analysis shows.
Enrollment is dropping faster than projected in some neighborhoods, primarily on the East Side. If construction continues, taxpayers could wind up paying for more school space than is needed, according to a report released today by the Bond Accountability Commission. The group monitors the one-third local share of a $1.5 billion construction and renovation program.
The analysis by commission administrator James Darr assumes that more than 25 schools not scheduled for work will close. If the buildings remain open, the surplus of space will soar, he said.
Darr called on the district to promptly shrink or eliminate schools where necessary.
On July 21, the Board unanimously approved the following components of the new strategic plan.
Mission
Beliefs
Parameters
Strategic Objectives
We have not yet approved any of the action plans.
New Mission: Our mission is to cultivate the potential in every student to thrive as a global citizen by inspiring a love of learning and civic engagement, by challenging and supporting every student to achieve academic excellence, and by embracing the full richness and diversity of our community.
Strategic Objectives:
Student
We will ensure that all students reach their highest potential and we will eliminate achievement gaps where they exist. To do this, we will prepare every student for kindergarten, raise the bar for all students, create meaningful student-adult relationships, and provide student-centered programs and supports that lead to prepared graduates.
Curriculum
To improve academic outcomes for all students and to ensure student engagement and student support, we will strengthen comprehensive curriculum, instruction and assessment systems in the District.
Staff
We will implement a formal system to support and inspire continuous development of effective teaching and leadership skills of all staff who serve to engage and support our diverse student body while furthering development of programs that target the recruitment and retention of staff members who reflect the cultural composition of our student body.
Resource/Capacity
We will rigorously evaluate programs, services and personnel through a collaborative, data-driven process to prioritize and allocate resources effectively and equitably, and rigorously pursue the resources necessary to achieve our mission.
Organization/Systems
We will promote, encourage, and maintain systems of practice that will create safe and productive learning and work environments that will unify and strengthen our schools, programs, departments and services as well as the District as a whole.
Next steps:
We did not approve any action plans. We went around the table and listed our priority areas and the Administration will develop action plans to support those areas and bring them back to the Board in August. There will be plenty of opportunity for discussion around the action plans brought forward. We have structured our process this way to ensure we keep moving forward as the plan is Important for setting the future direction of the District.
Some Minnesota school districts may have to go into debt to pay for the rising cost of health care for their retired employees.
Local Minnesota governments have until October to sell bonds -- without a public referendum -- to help pay for retired employees' health care. But with the economy in the tank, some people are unhappy about paying higher property taxes to fund someone else's health benefits.
The retirees' health policy costs fall under something accountants call OPEB -- Other than Pension Employee Benefits. OPEB obligations, especially for health care, are really starting to put the squeeze on school districts statewide.
"We're actually paying for a larger number of retirees, from a pot that is generated by a smaller number of students," said Robert Belluzzo, superintendent of the Hibbing school district.
In that district, $1 of every $5 of its budget goes to retiree benefits, primarily for health care. Meanwhile, Belluzzo says the retiree pool keeps growing.
"The number of retiree health insurance plans is more than the number of active insurance plans that we have," said Belluzzo.
Who Will Congress Put First? Children or Teachers Unions?; Testing Tactics Helped Fuel D.C. School Gains; Why Cory Booker Likes Being Mayor of Newark; No Ordinary Success; Gates Says He Is Outraged by Arrest at Cambridge Home
3) A wise comment in response to one of my recent emails:
Petrilli is right on the money - I can't tell you how many times I've heard certain reformers denigrate "higher order thinking" and "problem solving" as just more union code words for an anti-accountability agenda. The problem is, when they insist that all that matters is basic skills and proficiency tests, they sound ridiculous to parents and teachers, and that limits their effectiveness. Basic skills, just because they're easily tested, are NOT all that matter, and our pursuit of more and more accountability needs to not be accompanied by a dumbing down of the accountability systems so we can have an easier time measuring and can make an argument against those who inappropriately assert that everything is unmeasurable.
4) A great blog post following the recent death of Frank McCourt, the author of Angela's Ashes, who taught in NYC public schools for decades before becoming an author:
Frank McCourt was my English teacher in my senior year at Stuyvesant (class of '74). He introduced us to African literature such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, which sounded even more dramatic in his thick brogue.
When one student asked why we should read this book, what possible use would it be to us in our lives, he answered, "You will read it for the same reason your parents waste their money on your piano lessons. So you won't be a boring little shyte the rest of your life."
It was the most honest answer to such a question I ever heard from any teacher. Whenever the question came to my head about any subject thereafter I fondly remembered Mr. McCourt and resolved not to be a boring little shyte.
The test for Congress is whether to allow Obama and Duncan to continue their efforts with adequate funding - which is being processed right now - and the follow-on to the NCLB, probably to be introduced in January.
Republicans, if they're as serious about school reform as they've claimed for years, ought to rally to the cause because, as Duncan said in a speech in June, "we're convinced that with unprecedented resources must come unprecedented reform.
"Just simply investing in the status quo isn't going to get us where we need to go."
But Democrats may be a bigger problem - especially those beholden to the teachers unions. Some appropriators have cast a skeptical eye on Duncan's efforts to expand charter school funding, foster performance pay, get student test data tied to teachers and teachers colleges, fire persistently bad teachers and close bad schools.
Ultimately, the question for Members of Congress is, are you working to give America's children, especially poor children, a chance to thrive and compete in the world, or to protect industrial-era work rules for union members? Members should be judged on the choice that they make.
I'm quoted briefly:
After Duncan's speech, education blogger Whitney Tilson wrote, "This is a seminal event - an education secretary in a DEMOCRATIC administration went in front of the most important union in the country, that used to OWN the Democratic party and told them a whole lotta things they DIDN'T want to hear.
"This is the equivalent of Dick Cheney speaking at the NRA and espousing gun control."
When Mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced the continued growth of standardized test scores for District students Monday, he hailed it as "powerful evidence of the incredible work being done by teachers, principals and most importantly our students."
What Fenty did not say was that the two-year improvement in District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System results -- including an average of nearly 15 percentage points in the pass rates on elementary reading and math tests -- was also the product of a strategy that relied on improved statistical housekeeping.
These include intensive test preparation targeted to a narrow group of students on the cusp of proficient, or passing, scores, and "cleaning the rosters" of students ineligible to take the tests -- and also likely to pull the numbers down.
Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee described some of these approaches as the pursuit of "low-hanging fruit."
The initiatives are neither novel nor improper. They've been in the toolboxes of urban school leaders since the inception of the No Child Left Behind Act. The law requires schools to show annual progress toward a goal of all students passing reading and math tests by 2014.
Rhee, who says she would like to see the law amended to emphasize year-to-year academic growth, said this week that much of what she had done was a matter of common sense.
"In our first year, we found that certain basic things were not happening," she said.
"There were actions we took to ensure we were maximizing our potential to be successful."
However, this article does raise important truths that not all progress is always what it appears. Here's a quote from David Simon, the creator of one of my all-time favorite TV shows, The Wire, in an interview with Bill Moyers:
You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is.
7) A nice article in Time about Cory Booker. Under his leadership, there's been amazing progress in crime fighting -- now he needs control of the schools (whose budget is roughly 50% larger than the entire city budget) to make a similar impact there:
Whether the cameras, Booker's patrols or the Policing 101 measures instituted by McCarthy -- moving more officers to night and weekend shifts, when, get this, crime is more likely to happen -- were most responsible for the turnaround, the results are stunning. Murders dropped 36% in Newark -- from 105 to 67 -- from 2006 to 2008. Shooting incidents dropped 41%. Rapes fell 30%, and auto thefts 26%. Newark went 43 days without a homicide in early 2008, the city's longest such stretch in 48 years. In the first quarter of this year, Newark had its lowest number of homicides since 1959.
How much can schools improve the life prospects of children growing up in poor neighborhoods? This question has divided the education community since at least the 1960s, when a group of researchers led by James Coleman attempted to quantify the extent to which segregation hurt black children. Coleman concluded that differences in family background had a greater impact on student achievement than did differences in school quality.
. The professor who has spent much of his life studying race in America said he has come to feel like a case study.
"There are one million black men in jail in this country and last Thursday I was one of them," he said in an exclusive interview with The Washington Post Tuesday morning. "This is outrageous and that this is how poor black men across the country are treated everyday in the criminal justice system. It's one thing to write about it, but altogether another to experience it."
He was still outraged but he said he has had time to take a step back and will now apply the scholarship that has been his life's work to the issue of race in the criminal justice system.
Gates was arrested Thursday at his home near Harvard University after trying to force open the locked front door. The charge of disorderly conduct was dropped this afternoon, the Cambridge police department said in a news release. The department called the arrest "regrettable and unfortunate."
According to the initial police report Gates accused police officers at the scene of being racist and said repeatedly, "This is what happens to black men in America."
Police came to Gates's home to investigate a possible break-in about 12:40 p.m. on Thursday. The department's report said Gates was arrested "after exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior" at his home. Officers said they tried to calm Gates, who responded, "You don't know who you're messing with."
Sykes: The Milwaukee Public Schools have been an educational and fiscal disaster for a long time. Is it time to blow up MPS? Is it time to consider a state takeover?
Walker: It's time to do something dramatic. Whether or not it's a state takeover--Tommy Thompson talked about that a decade ago. An alternative would be to break it up into smaller districts. When you start talking about anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 kids, it becomes very difficult for anybody to get their hands around it.
I would lift the lid entirely on school choice. I would allow schools throughout the county to [participate]. Take Thomas Moore, which has a very successful program, but can't currently operate [as a choice school] because part of its property is in St. Francis. I would allow for expansion, and I would lift some of the limits on charter schools,
Neumann: There is dramatic change needed in education. What's going on in policy in Madison right now is that more rules, regulations and red tape are being thrown at our choice and charter schools so that less and less dollars get to the classroom. They're tying the hands of the innovative people in education. We need to expand the opportunity in choice and charter schools.
Based on your experience working in a traditional public school serving primarily low-income and/or minority students, what percentage of the teachers you worked with were (the numbers in the three boxes must add up to 100):
Good/great (you would be happy to have your child in the class)
Fair, but improvement is possible (you would have reservations having your child in the class)
Horrible and unlikely to ever improve (you would NEVER permit your child to be in the class)
46 people responded and here were the results:
Good/great: 20%
Fair: 35%
Horrible: 45%
This is obviously a very skewed group of mostly TFA teachers in the worst schools, but nevertheless I'm shocked that the horrible number is so high. If this figure is even close to being right, then the problem is even bigger than I thought. I'll have to think about the implications of this, but one obvious one is the enormous importance of changing union contracts (and other factors) that make it impossible to remove horrible teachers -- and let's be clear, everyone knows who they are. There may be some tough calls regarding whether to keep certain teachers in the "fair" category, but horrible ones who are unlikely to ever improve need to find another line of work -- but, esp in this economy, they will fight to the death to keep their very nice jobs...
2) Here's a comment from one person who responded to the survey:
Good/great: 50%
Fair: 30%
Horrible: 20%
I taught in NYC for 5 years, from 2002-2007; I taught 5th grade, all subjects, and I was not TFA, but was NYCTF. One quibble with your survey and its framing: I would not want my daughter in any classroom in my school, regardless of the teacher quality. The curriculum (Teacher's College reading and writing; Everyday Math, virtually zero science, social studies, art and music) was either bad or nonexistent, and the social environment (harsh, chaotic) was not fit for any child. I agree that teacher quality is huge, but it's not enough to overcome all other problems. Great schools are great schools when all or most of the moving parts (teachers, administrators, curriculum, accountability, environment, seriousness of purpose, parental involvement, et al) are working. Planes can fly if they lose an engine, even two. They can't fly on one. At least not for very long.
he New York City comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., released a report on Tuesday suggesting that the city's graduation rates were inflated, saying he had found instances where it appeared schools had wrongly changed student grades and improperly awarded credit.
But Mr. Thompson, a candidate for mayor, did not point to any conclusive evidence of manipulation, saying only that a lack of oversight coupled with intense pressure to push up graduation rates created the potential for abuse. And he acknowledged that, by and large, the schools examined in his audit were awarding diplomas only to students who had met graduation requirements.
Still, Mr. Thompson cautioned, the city was not monitoring students records scrupulously enough, and the record-keeping system was disorganized and prone to inaccuracy.
"The mayor's managerial style has created an incentive for schools to graduate students whether or not they have met the requirements," Mr. Thompson said at a news conference on Tuesday. "A New York City high school diploma is supposed to represent one standard."
The U.S. must improve its educational standing in the world by rewarding effective teaching and by developing better, universal measures of performance for students and teachers, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said Tuesday.
Speaking at the National Conference of State Legislatures' annual legislative summit, Gates told hundreds of lawmakers how federal stimulus money should be used to spark educational innovation, spread best practices and improve accountability.
Gates, one of the world's richest men, has been a longtime critic of American public schools and has used philanthropy to advocate for a better educational system.
U.S. schools lag their international counterparts because of "old beliefs and bad habits," and it's not clear how to get them back on track without uniform achievement standards, he said.
If you don't like Jerry D. Weast, superintendent of schools in Montgomery County, do not take the new book "Leading for Equity: The Pursuit of Excellence in Montgomery County Public Schools" to the beach for your summer reading. Your resulting heart attack will frighten other vacationers and bring sorrow to your family.
Still, for those of us who like Weast, or take a neutral stance toward the aggressive school leader, it is a fascinating read. The authors, Harvard Business School experts Stacey M. Childress and David A. Thomas and national business and education authority Denis P. Doyle, look at Montgomery's remarkable success in raising student achievement as if they were analyzing Wal-Mart's marketing triumphs. It is all about process. People who deal with this sort of stuff in their own jobs will be intrigued.
I, however, write about teachers, and I am not quite as thrilled with the book as the folks hanging around the business school's soda machine might be. Let me take you through its key chapter, "Six Lessons from the Montgomery County Journey and a New Call to Action," to show what I mean.
I pause here for a brief pep talk. Please, please read the summary titles of the six lessons below without giving up and moving over to John Kelly's column. I realize that Kelly is always good, and these titles are almost impenetrable. But that is part of my point.
A board authorized by the state Legislature to control the entry of schools into Milwaukee's controversial private school voucher program is beginning its life with a powerful statement that it will stop any school it doesn't think is prepared to provide a quality education from getting off the ground.
The New Schools Approval Board, part of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University, voted last week to give a green light to only three new voucher schools for this fall. Each of them involves an existing education program that has not received public voucher payments previously.
The board stopped 16 schools from opening, generally start-up operations that were on track to meet the requirements for opening that existed prior to this year.
Leaders of some of those organizations were angered by the decisions and say they will meet soon to consider further action, such as a lawsuit. The new state law provides no appeals process for decisions by the New Schools Approval Board.
Three schools will be the smallest number of new voucher participants in years. In the past five years, there have been between eight and 15 new schools in the voucher program each September. Combined with the closing of other schools, the total number of participating schools has stayed in the range of 120 to 125.
Singapore Math Workbook Only Purchase Discussion (No textbooks or teacher guides) at the Madison School Board
26MB mp3 audio file. Marj Passman, Lucy Mathiak and Maya Cole raised a number of questions regarding the purchase of $69K worth of Singapore Math Workbooks (using Federal tax dollars via "Title 1") without textbooks or teacher's guides at Monday evening's Board Meeting. The purchase proceeded, via a 5-2 vote. Ed Hughes and Beth Moss supported the Administration's request, along with three other board members.
Detroit's public-school system, beset by massive deficits and widespread corruption, is on the brink of following local icons GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy court.
A decision on whether to file for protection under federal bankruptcy laws will be made by the end of summer, according to Robert Bobb, Detroit Public Schools' emergency financial manager. Such a filing would be unprecedented in the U.S. Although a few major urban school districts have come close, none has gone through with a bankruptcy, according to legal and education experts.
But in Detroit -- where U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan dubbed the school system a "national disgrace" this spring -- lawmakers and bankruptcy experts see few alternatives, given the deep financial challenges confronting the district and the state.
"Am I optimistic that they can avoid it...? I am not," says Ray Graves, a retired bankruptcy judge who has been advising Mr. Bobb in recent weeks.
As with General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, bankruptcy may not be the worst thing for Detroit's schools. A filing under Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code, which covers public entities like school districts and municipalities, would allow the district to put major creditors such as textbook publishers, private bus operators and DTE Energy, the local gas-and-electric utility, in line for payment. It also would give Mr. Bobb broad latitude to tear up union contracts without protracted negotiations.
But a filing also could hurt the district's debt rating and ability to float bonds.
Our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has been on a "listening tour" where he's done most of the talking. He advocates, repeatedly, that mayors should take control of urban schools. Obviously he cannot take an honest look at his own accomplishments under this governance system or--he'd have to shut up.
The usual rationale a mayoral power grab is it brings more accountability and a clear line of authority. School boards are generally elected in off years and few people vote, allowing special interest groups (usually education unions, some claim) to essentially rig the elections. School boards are fractious and try to micromanage. They are amateurs and prisoners of deeply rooted school bureaucracies.
But do mayors do better? Depends on how you feel about democracy. The Spring 2009 issue of Rethinking Schools, said that, as Daley's man, Duncan "has shown himself to be the central messenger, manager and staunch defender of corporate involvement in, and privatization of, public schools, closing schools in low-income neighborhoods of color with little community input, limiting local democratic control, undermining the teachers union and promoting competitive merit pay for teachers."
The most important corporate involvement involves the 132-year-old Commercial Club of Chicago. Yet that organization recently published Still Left Behind, slamming Chicago's public schools as awful and that the reforms they've endured were designed to make the adults running the schools look good, not improve the lives of children. You could say the Club stabbed Arne in the back except that they did it upfront in the open, without once mentioning Duncan's name. The Club report backs up its case with many data.
Seattle, WA, July 20, 2009 -- In this recessionary climate of depressed revenues and budget cuts for education, school districts across the U.S. "would be foolhardy" not to rethink paying teachers for master's degrees, according to a new report out today.
"On average, master's degrees in education bear no relation to student achievement," say education researchers Marguerite Roza and Raegen Miller in their short paper, Separation of Degrees: State-By-State Analysis of Teacher Compensation for Master's Degrees.
The brief was produced jointly by the Center on Reinventing Public Education and the Center for American Progress.
"During this time of fiscal stringency, it should raise eyebrows when a state automatically allocates such large sums of the average per-pupil expenditure in a manner that is not even suspected of promoting higher levels of student achievement," say the authors.
In hard dollars, this means New York state spends an extra $416 per student (for a total of $1.121 billion a year) just because 78 percent of its teachers hold master's degrees. In Washington state, the analogous numbers are $319 per pupil (or $330 million a year total) for the 56 percent of its teachers with a master's. These expenditures, respectively, represent 2.78 percent and 3.30 percent of the total federal, state, and local money devoted to education in each state.
Roza and Miller chart these numbers for each state and suggest that the money now committed to the master's bump in pay could be better spent, writing that: "Teaching candidates with salient and meaningful master's degrees should be given preferential attention when competing for jobs, all else being equal. A master's degree in engineering, for example, should be construed as evidence that a candidate possesses a deep understanding of a subject matter that is relevant to teaching mathematics or science."
The authors acknowledge that changing long-established pay practices and contractual schedules will not be easy. But they argue that from a strategic point of view, this master's bump in pay "makes little sense because these monies could be channeled into teacher compensation in ways that lead to improved student performance."
Seeing the issue in the context of how a financial crisis can inspire education reform focused on benefiting students, Roza and Miller conclude:
"In the fiscal climate ahead, school systems serious about improving results for students will have no choice but to reconsider their long-automated ways of spending money, uncover how much money is at stake, and compare current ways of spending to alternative ones with greater potential to benefit students."
Separation of Degrees: State-By-State Analysis of Teacher Compensation for Master's Degrees is available at www.crpe.org. This is the fourth "Rapid Response" brief in the $CHOOLS IN CRISIS: MAKING ENDS MEET series, designed to bring relevant fiscal analyses to policymakers amidst the current economic crisis.
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Marguerite Roza is a Senior Scholar at the Center on Reinventing Public Education and a Research Associate Professor at the University of Washington College of Education.
Raegen T. Miller is Associate Director for Education Research at the Center for American Progress. As a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, he was affiliated with the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
The Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell engages in independent research and policy analysis on a range of K-12 public education reform issues, including choice & charters, finance & productivity, teachers, urban district reform, leadership, and state & federal reform.
The Center for American Progress is a think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action.
First, thank you Jim Z for posting the responses to our questions. I should note that we did not get answers to ALL of our questions. I am uploading the PDF that I sent with my questions in case you are interested in the full set. I apologize for the size of the document - I took the PDF, added notes and highlighting where I was requesting answers, and saved only the pages that were marked up. There are 25 pages in all.
Also, I found the following text while looking for something on the web in my day job. I liked the formulation, so am passing it along:
To meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, our students need not only knowledge, but also the skills to use that knowledge, the responsibilities associated with using it and practice in the integration of that knowledge in new and complex ways.
When President Obama chose Arne Duncan to lead the Education Department, he cited Mr. Duncan's success as head of Chicago's public school system from 2001 to 2008. But a new education study suggests that those academic gains aren't what they seemed. The study also helps explain why big-city education reform is unlikely to occur without school choice.
Mr. Obama noted in December that "in just seven years, Arne's boosted elementary test scores here in Chicago from 38% of students meeting the standard to 67%" and that "the dropout rate has gone down every year he's been in charge." But according to "Still Left Behind," a report [158K PDF] by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, a majority of Chicago public school students still drop out or fail to graduate with their class. Moreover, "recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS elementary students who meet standards on state assessments appear to be due to changes in the tests . . . rather than real improvements in student learning."
Our point here isn't to pick on Mr. Duncan, but to illuminate the ease with which tests can give the illusion of achievement. Under the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, states must test annually in grades 3 through 8 and achieve 100% proficiency by 2014. But the law gives states wide latitude to craft their own exams and to define math and reading proficiency. So state tests vary widely in rigor, and some have lowered passing scores and made other changes that give a false impression of academic success.
The new Chicago report explains that most of the improvement in elementary test scores came after the Illinois Standards Achievement Test was altered in 2006 to comply with NCLB. "State and local school officials knew that the new test and procedures made it easier for students throughout the state -- and throughout Chicago -- to obtain higher marks," says the report.
Every two years the State of Wisconsin goes through a process to finalize a two year budget for all governmental programs. This biennial budget process is the source of the State's commitment to public education here in Wisconsin, historically driven by legislative guidance to adhere to two-thirds funding.
The two-thirds funding has changed over recent years, but for the most part the State of Wisconsin was able to continue annual increases to public education in an attempt to keep up with rising costs within this sector.
The biennial budget was sigued into law near the end of June by Governor Jim Doyle after various proposals and with relatively few vetoes. This budget has numerous provisions that will effect the future of public education that include:
Decrease in funding for public education by the state of approximately $147 million
Decrease in the per pupil increase associated with revenue limits
Each of these provisions can and Will have a very unique impact on :MMSD over the years to come. The repeal of the QEO will potentially impact future settlements for salaries and benefits. The decrease in funding for public education by the state is projected to create the need for a tax increase conversation in order to sustain current programs. The decrease in the revenue limit formula will cause MMSD to face more reductions in programs and services fur the next two years at a minimum.
Many public and private organizations are dealing with this issue. It is perhaps a time to make lemonade out of lemons. In the MMSD's case, getting out of the curriculum creation business (teaching & learning) and placing a renewed focus on hiring the most qualified teachers and letting them run.
A phony interpretation of Chicago Public Schools' academic progress isn't the only beast threatening your local schools. For decades now, in every school district with a fireplug, a Walgreens, and a crooked alderman, the test scores of white children have been higher than those of black youngsters. The monster is called the achievement GAP. It slithers into your school even when the black and white students are sitting right next to each other in the same classroom. Furthermore, black middle-class students cannot escape its wrath because the GAP tracks them down even when their parents escape to the suburbs or move uptown.
Boring but important: The stupidly named National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP) exams, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics, the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Education (whew!), reports that the national GAP has narrowed for 9 to 13 year olds in math and reading since 1978, but remains unchanged for the last ten years. But there are isolated pockets of small success where the gap narrowed a bit.
4th Grade Reading: Three states reduced the GAP (1990-2007) -Delaware, Florida, & New Jersey.
Since Franklin Roosevelt's 1933 victory, working familes have been the heart of the Democratic Party. Except for African-Americans, Obama did not win the party's heart in his primary contest with Hillary Clinton. He won with the support of affluent social liberals, well-educated youthful volunteers and superior financial support from the corporate sector.
The public schools' policies of President Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan so far suggest this middle-class feeling that in spite of all his gifts Mr. Obama may lack the common touch or grounding in everyday reality may be right.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's agenda seems designed to alienate middle-class teachers and parents who depend on public schools. His school reform proposals lack a well-grounded sense of why schools fail. His agenda includes the following:
The idea that it's enough to simply "find what works, adopt it, and spread it around," notes scientist/blogger Allison over at Kitchen Table Math is an example of what physicist Richard Feynman called "Cargo Cult Science":
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
"Cargo Cult education seems to be all the rage in lots of communities," Allison notes. "Sure, districts could just start grabbing lessons from high performing schools but that won't make the students suddenly read or write. Unless they understand what's underneath the 'lessons of the high performing school' then it won't matter."
In his campaign for turning around the nation's worst public schools, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan this morning called for a cadre of "warrior principals."
Speaking to principals from across the country, Mr. Duncan said that without strong leaders, any effort to dramatically transform the thousands of public schools that have failed for decades would be futile. He challenged the leaders to "take on the toughest job in America."
"We need a team of warrior principals to leave the easier places and go into the most underserved communities with a chance to build a new team," Mr. Duncan said to the roughly 350 principals who are in Washington this week for the annual meeting of the National Association of Elementary School Principals and National Association of Secondary School Principals. Mr. Duncan said he would need to enlist about 1,000 principals a year, over the next five years.
The secretary has been pushing hard for turning around thousands of failing schools, and has already implored other groups of educators, including the charter school movement, to get involved in that work. Mr. Duncan also asked the principals to work on fixing the "broken" teacher evaluation system by developing evaluations that are "fair, thoughtful, but meaningful."
The State Board of Education has made a minor revision in the high school math credit requirements.
During a meeting in Gig Harbor on Friday, the board gave students more flexibility in their choices for high school math.
The board decided earlier that beginning with the class of 2013, high school students will be required to earn three credits of math to earn a diploma.
When the requirement was changed, the state rule said students who took a high school level math class without credit as an eighth grader were required to repeat that same course for credit in high school.
Washington, D.C., Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is pushing forward with her efforts to turn around the local school system. Those efforts have thrust Rhee's agenda onto a national stage, as educators across the country grapple with struggling school districts. Rhee discusses her work, which includes recently narrowing an achievement gap between white and minority students.
When Mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced the continued growth of standardized test scores for District students Monday, he hailed it as "powerful evidence of the incredible work being done by teachers, principals and most importantly our students."
What Fenty did not say was that the two-year improvement in District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System results -- including an average of nearly 15 percentage points in the pass rates on elementary reading and math tests -- was also the product of a strategy that relied on improved statistical housekeeping.
These include intensive test preparation targeted to a narrow group of students on the cusp of proficient, or passing, scores, and "cleaning the rosters" of students ineligible to take the tests -- and also likely to pull the numbers down.
Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee described some of these approaches as the pursuit of "low-hanging fruit."
History is a book-based discipline. We read books, we write books, we promote and tenure people on the basis of books, and at national meetings we gather around book exhibits. But we don't teach our graduate students how to write books.
It's an odd omission. We view statistics, geographic-information systems, languages, oral-history techniques, paleography, and other methodologies as worthy of attention in doctoral study--but not serious writing. Yet careers rise and fall on the basis of what we publish.
It may be that the scientific model of the grant-supported article is becoming more dominant, or that the simple production of data has become a sufficient justification for scholarship. Surely one reason is that research seminars offer enough time to compose an essay or a journal article but not a book, or even a book chapter. Perhaps an obsession with historiography has blocked interest in historical writing as literature, or the belief has arisen that the best way to meet the challenges of postmodern literary criticism is to deny its claims altogether, particularly since the contamination of memoir by fictional devices has tainted the whole question of applying "literary" techniques, borrowed from fiction, to nonfiction sources.
It may be simply that most of us don't know how to teach writing--real writing, which is to say, finding the means to express what we want to say. Instead we defer to the off-the-shelf formulas of the favored journals and the thesis-evidence-conclusion style of traditional dissertations. We take students' ideas for books and turn them into dissertations, and then expect them to magically reconvert them back into the books that originally motivated their imaginations and that their subsequent careers will require. While at least some historians are keen to unpack prose, few are eager to teach how to pack it properly in the first place. Whatever the reasons, serious writing isn't taught. There isn't even an accepted name for it.
Over the years my curiosity about that tendency ripened into concern. Then, a few years ago, while visiting at Australian National University, I was asked to lead a seminar on writing. That inspired me to offer a graduate course at my own institution on the theory and practice of making texts do what their writers wished. It would be English for historians, just as we might offer statistics for ecologists or chemistry for geologists. It's been the best teaching experience of my career.
Initially I thought most of the students who enrolled would come from history; almost none of them did. Instead, my students came from biology, anthropology, journalism, English, geography, communications, and undeclared majors who strolled in more or less off the streets. The only historian who took it did so as an override in defiance of her program of study. What all of the students shared was a desire to write better, and generally to write something other than the oft-cribbed, formulaic prose required of their disciplines.
We meet once a week for three hours. Class size matters: The structure of the course doesn't work with fewer than four or more than 10 students. The first 80 minutes or so we discuss the assigned readings--sometimes a book, sometimes essays or sample sections--that illustrate the topic of the day, such as voice, designing, plotting, character, setting, figures of speech, editing, scaling, and so on. We break for 10 to 15 minutes and then turn to the weekly writing exercises. That is where the rubber hits the road.
Each week students electronically submit an exercise of 300 to 600 words on an assigned topic. I select four and post them to the course Web page, and we discuss them intensively. Course evaluations, both formal and informal, are unanimous that this is the most valuable part of the course. To establish the style of the discussion, I use the first class session to demonstrate with a piece or two of my own writing.
Why not evaluate more than four selections? We simply haven't the time, or the concentration. We're exhausted. I try to vary the selections so the same students aren't always showcased. I pick those who did well, those who struggled, and those who wrote interesting or instructive pieces. There is something we can learn from each of them.
However much we might argue that writing requires self-editing and an ability to see ourselves as other readers might, putting words on paper is personal and anxiety inducing. I try to calm students with two strategies for our in-class discussions.
First, the students whose work is selected for us to evaluate in the classroom are anonymous. I post their work only as "Text 1," "Text 2," and so on. Over time, everyone pretty much knows who submitted what, yet the artifice is convenient, and it even allows the authors to comment on their own work. From time to time I throw in something I've written just to keep everyone guessing.
Second, students are graded according to whether they attend class and submit the required exercises. They can miss one without an excuse and still get an A. They don't have to fret over whether a submission is "good enough": If it's submitted on time and to the correct specs, it is.
In the past I had tried to teach writing within the context of a research seminar. The students were terrified. If they did not write well enough, they feared their transcript would suffer; and, just as worrisome, they stood to "lose" a potentially publishable article, which would also diminish their emerging CV. With my graduate course on writing, they have the chance to experiment and, for many, to undergo a literary detox program as they struggle to find their own voice and try to purge the awkward styling they've often inherited from their disciplines that leaves them tripping over their syntactical shoelaces. Rehab can take several months, but their grade won't suffer if they are dutiful with submissions and discussions. That kind of discipline is itself something a writing course should cultivate.
How do we discuss the writing? Pointedly, and gently. My role is not that of instructor so much as editor. We ask, What is this piece about? What is the writer trying to do? And how might we assist him or her in doing it? Then we often step back and ask more generally: What other techniques and strategies might get at this topic? The point is not that the submission is right or wrong, but that there are always many ways to express an idea, and we can use the particular submission before us to explore a range of possible approaches.
That there are always alternatives is the guiding directive of the course. Figuring out how to say what you want without making things up, or leaving things out that need to be in, is where literary imagination comes into play. Aesthetic closure is our duty to art, thematic closure our duty to scholarship, and reconciling style and substance is what the course is about. Who then determines what is the best solution in the end? The writer.
For me, the biggest challenge in teaching a course like this is getting students engaged in the difficult task of analyzing the exercises. I have to push them. They have to learn that a few casual comments of the "I like this a lot" or "This doesn't work for me" variety won't do. They have to analyze why and how it works or not. Many simply don't know how to read for craft. That's the purpose of the assigned readings, which are full of examples. And that's why I need to demonstrate a style by tackling (fairly critically) some writing of my own.
Another problem is that students tend to look to me to offer a "solution" to each exercise. I do comment; we are all expected to join in the discussion. But the trick is to put the burden on them to undertake the heavy editing. Some students do that much better than others, and some classes take to it more readily. The catalyst seems to be having a self-confident and generous student, usually older, who injects a calming presence. So far I've been lucky to have one of those each time I've taught the course.
The deeper institutional issue is granting credit to graduate students for such a course. While there is widespread dismay over poor writing, especially by historians, "good writing" seems to mean, for many faculty members, that "You need to write in the style I like," or "I want to do less copy editing." The idea that writing is an exercise in literary imagination--that it requires thinking about voice, about designing and framing, about diction, about the potential uses of character and setting and plot--is not widely accepted. Too many academics think "good writing" merely means using the active voice, not confusing "its" and "it's," and getting from thesis to conclusion as painlessly as possible.
For some scholarly writing, the prevailing formulas are sufficient, and part of good writing is recognizing when they work. Yet they often falter when confronted with new ideas, and learning how to adapt traditional templates to the actual requirements of the material and the enthusiasms of the writer is a craft that can be learned, and even taught.
Without departmental support, however, writing with literary imagination is not only difficult to teach but detrimental to graduate students because they will not get credited for the work nor be allowed by dissertation committees to use what they have learned. Before writing can be taught seriously to graduate students in history, their professors will have to agree on what good writing means, decide that it matters, and accept themes as well as theses. Before we can educate students about good writing, we may have to re-educate their teachers.
Stephen J. Pyne is a professor at Arizona State University and the author of Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction.
Holly Bates, an eight-year-old Florida girl, has such bad allergies that being near nuts or nut-based products--or even being near someone who has recently eaten nuts--can trigger anaphylactic shock. With peanut peril ubiquitous, young Holly is not enrolled in a traditional public school; instead, she attends Florida Connections Academy, a full-time "virtual" school that she accesses from her home computer. Her mother, a former public school teacher, loves the program. "The curriculum is unbelievable," she told the Tampa Tribune in 2007. "It would astound you, the progress these children make."
The Sunshine State is something of a virtual education pioneer. Since the 2003-04 school year, Florida has partnered with two for-profit companies--Connections Academy and K12 Inc.--to provide pupils with the option of attending school online, full-time, for free. But years before that, Florida was promoting other types of virtual education. Florida Virtual School is a statewide program that allows students to take individual courses online, often in subjects not offered at their local school, like Latin or Macroeconomics. It began in 1997 as a small grant-based project with just 77 course enrollments. Today, Florida Virtual School is its own school district and has an annual budget near $100 million. In the 2008-09 school year, according to Education Next, some "84,000 students will complete 168,000 half-credit courses, a ten-fold increase since 2002-03." A newly-minted Florida Virtual School Connections Academy, announced in August 2008, will further expand online learning options and access.
What drew you to working in the education field and what path did you take to end up where you are now?
I was in college during the LA riots of 1992, and seeing how quickly our society could pull apart at the seams really made me want to focus on addressing the underlying inequalities that produce such fragile ties in the first place. I was doing a lot of work with Habitat for Humanity in inner city Boston at the time, and that in turn led me to focus my undergrad studies on affordable housing and the politics of exclusionary zoning in the suburbs of Boston. After a diversion to grad school overseas, I landed back in New Haven, Connecticut for a stint of couch-surfing with friends while I finished up a doctoral dissertation on the impact of government funding on non-profit housing providers. I then took all that book learning and put it to the test by signing on to the management team that was charged with turning around the New Haven Housing Authority from the brink of receivership. It just so happened that one of those friends whose couch I'd been staying on was Dacia Toll, the founder of the Achievement First network of charter schools--and so I got a unique perspective on the incredible power of these schools to transform their students' lives because so many of her kids were coming right out of the very same housing developments that I was managing. Rewarding as it was to help the housing authority's residents reclaim their communities from years of neglect, once I began to appreciate how powerful schools could be in turning the cycle of poverty on its head, I was hooked.
And so about five years ago I was fortunate to connect with ConnCAN's founding Board Chair, Jon Sackler. Together with an array of business, community and higher education leaders we founded ConnCAN on the premise that we need more than pockets of excellence to close Connecticut's worst-in-the-nation achievement gap. We need statewide policies that allow educational innovations like Teach for America or Dacia's schools to spread far and wide. And those policies will never be enacted unless we create the political will for them by building a movement of education reformers. We've been at it ever since, from the early days when it was just me and my dog working out of my house to today, when we've got a fantastic team of ten, and we're well on our way to building a powerful, statewide movement for education reform.
Half of the 616 Illinois students who received preferential treatment from 2005 to 2009 graduated from just 22 high schools, all but one in the metro area. Highland Park High had the most kids on the list, with Loyola Academy coming in second. There were only 25 kids on the clout list from CPS schools.
Charter Schools Gain in Stimulus Scramble Cash-Strapped States, Districts Signal Expansion of Public-Education Alternative Despite Some Teachers' Strong Opposition
Some cash-strapped states and school districts are signaling a major expansion of charter schools to tap $5 billion in federal stimulus funds, despite strong opposition from some teachers unions.
Charter schools are typically non-unionized, publicly funded alternative schools that have been widely promoted by conservatives as a needed dose of competition in public education.
Last month, the Louisiana legislature voted to eliminate that state's cap on new charter schools. The Tennessee legislature recently passed a bill expanding charter schools after U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan personally lobbied Democrats who had been blocking it. And the Rhode Island legislature reversed a plan to eliminate funding for new charters after Mr. Duncan warned such a move could hurt the state's chances for grant money.
The most striking example may be in Massachusetts. Gov. Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino -- both Democrats with histories of strong labor support -- are proposing new state laws that would give them broader power to overhaul troubled schools, open more charter schools and revamp collective-bargaining agreements.
Mr. Menino, who oversees the Boston schools, wants Massachusetts communities to be able to transform traditional public schools into district-controlled charter schools and link teachers' pay to performance.
Formerly a charter-school critic, Mr. Menino said he is fed up with opposition from the Boston Teachers Union. "I'm just tired of it," he said. "We're losing kids."
Last August, administrators at Northwest Missouri State University handed 19-year-old Darren Finney a Sony Corp. electronic-book Reader. The assignment for him and 200 other students: Use e-textbooks for studying, instead of heavy hardback texts.
At first, Mr. Finney worried about dropping the glass and metal device as he read. But eventually, the sophomore came to like the Reader. Its keyword search function, he says, was "easier than flipping through the pages of a regular book." Dozens of other participants, however, dropped out of the program, complaining that the e-texts were awkward and inconvenient.
Nationwide, universities, high schools and elementary schools are launching initiatives like the one at Northwest Missouri State, testing whether electronic texts that can be viewed on e-book readers or on laptop computers can cut costs and improve learning.
This fall, Amazon.com Inc. is sponsoring a pilot program for its large-screen Kindle DX e-reader with hundreds of students across seven colleges, including Princeton University and University of Virginia. Meanwhile, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to bring digital math and science textbooks to California's secondary schools as early as this fall. (Heavy old books, the governor says, are useful as weights for arm curls.)
The first things you need to know about cyberbullying are that it's not an epidemic and it's not killing our children. Yes, it's probably one of the more widespread youth risks on the Internet and yes there are some well publicized cases of cyberbullying victims who have committed suicide, but let's look at this in context.
Bullying has always been a problem among adolescents and, sadly, so has suicide. In the few known cases of suicide after cyberbullying, there are other contributing factors. That's not to diminish the tragedy or suggest that the cyberbullying didn't play a role but--as with all online youth risk, we need to look at what else was going on in the child's life. Even when a suicide or other tragic event doesn't occur, cyberbullying is often accompanied by a pattern of offline bullying and sometimes there are other issues including long-term depression, problems at home, and self-esteem issues. And the most famous case of "cyberbullying"--the tragic suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier--was far from typical. Cyberbullying is almost always peer to peer, but this was a case of an adult (the mom of one of Megan's peers) being accused of seeking revenge on a child who had allegedly bullied her own child.
ON A sweltering day in Alexander City, Alabama, summer school was in full swing. Two girls were reading "Julius Caesar" as two others wrestled with maths. A boy worked his way through a psychology quiz, and a teacher monitored an online discussion with students from around the state: Was Napoleon the last enlightened despot or the first modern dictator?
This is not a traditional classroom scene, but it has become common enough in Alabama. The state has many small, rural schools. Because of their size, and the relative scarcity of specialised teachers, course offerings have been limited. Students might have had to choose between chemistry or physics, or stop after two years of Spanish. But thanks to an innovative experiment with online education, the picture has changed dramatically.
In 2005 the governor, Bob Riley, announced a pilot programme called Alabama Connecting Classrooms Educators and Students Statewide, or ACCESS. The idea was to use internet and videoconferencing technology to link students in one town to teachers in another. It was something of a pet cause for Mr Riley, who comes from a rural county himself. He was especially keen that students should have a chance to learn Chinese.
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Joe Morton, the state superintendent of schools, points to the number of black students taking AP courses. In 2003, according to the College Board, just 4.5% of Alabama's successful AP students (those who passed the subject exam) were black. In 2008 the number was up to 7.1%. There is still a staggering gap--almost a third of the state's students are black--but the improvement in Alabama was the largest in the country over that period. "That makes it all worthwhile right there," says Mr Morton.
Independent public schools may be getting a chance in the Bay State
MASSACHUSETTS ranks at or near the top of national measures of how well schoolchildren do at reading and mathematics. A leader in early-years education, it is also applauded for its vocational, technical and agriculture schools. Still, there are problems. The disparity between students in affluent districts and those in low-income urban ones is shocking. In the Concord/Carlisle school district, for instance, 92% of students graduated from high-school on time and planned to attend a four-year college or university in 2007, compared with just 12.8% in Holyoke, one of the poorest cities in the state.
Many states have turned to charter schools (self-governing publicly-funded schools) to close achievement gaps like that, but charters are a tricky subject in Massachusetts even though the few they do have, such as Boston Collegiate, are among the best in the country. Unions abhor them while the school boards that run most public schools fear losing power and funding. Politicians have been unwilling to take on Massachusetts's mighty unions.
Last year Deval Patrick, the self-styled "education governor" of the state, unveiled a 55-point plan to overhaul the state's education system. The governor's package includes the introduction of three types of "readiness schools" to turn around poorly performing districts. Like charters, they will have greater flexibility, autonomy and will be held accountable for their results. But they will not be fully independent, remaining under the control of local school boards. Mr Patrick will introduce a bill authorising these schools later this month. One sort would have an external partner, such as a university, while another would be teacher-led.
Connecticut is another Northern state where achievement gaps are larger than in states across the South, the federal study shows. That is partly because white students in Connecticut score above the national average, but also because blacks there score lower, on average, than blacks elsewhere".
This validates my personal belief, and something that I have been saying for several years now, that Connecticut does not have great public schools, rather, it has one of if not the highest percentages of households with 4-year and advanced college degrees (CT, NJ and MA are always at the top of this list). This high percentage of well educated households makes Connecticut's public schools look good -- it is the household that is the difference maker, not the public schools. To prove my point, why is it that not one DRG B school does not outperform just one DRG A school?...or just one DRG C school out perform just one DRG B school?...makes no sense if the school were in fact the difference maker. DRG = Demographic Reference Group which is how the Dept. of Ed. here in CT groups all of its school districts to rate performance and other statistical data. It is generally rated by median household income but size of the community and other socioeconomic factors are part of the equation too. A = the most wealthy communities (also the "best" schools) and it goes down form there.
...it is all about socio-economics not how great Connecticut's public schools are, which they are not.
Connecticut's high-performing, public charter schools are making a difference, and that is an objective statement based on proven data.
We should do everything in our powers to embrace the proven Achievement First (Amistad Academy) model and replicate it far and wide. Why it is being stiff-armed by our legislators and the teachers union is simply bewildering. But then again both have proven to put their interests (political careers and pay checks) first and Connecticut's children second -- the teachers union is particularly good at that.
Despite unprecedented efforts to improve minority achievement in the past decade, the gap between black and white students remains frustratingly wide, according to an Education Department report released Tuesday.
There is good news in the report: Reading and math scores are improving for black students across the country. But because white students are also improving, the disparity between blacks and whites has lessened only slightly.
On average, the gap narrowed by about 7 points from 1992 to 2007, so that black students scored about 28 points behind white students on a 500-point scale.
A new report from the U.S. Education Department shows black students are scoring better in math and reading, but not enough to close a nationwide gap between them and white students.
The study also shows Minnesota has one of the nation's largest achievement gaps, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think.
The study looked at fourth and eighth-grade math and reading scores from a nationwide achievement test called the NAEP.
The test is scored on a 500-point scale. Of the students the study looked at, black students scored 26-to-31 points below white students in reading and math.
The study concludes that every state still has an achievement gap, but at least that gap isn't getting any bigger. Fifteen states saw their gap shrink on fourth-grade math, but not a single state has narrowed the gap in eighth-grade reading.
The disparity, though, is not caused by black students getting worse. Scores for blacks continue to improve, but they're also improving for white students. Researchers note it's hard to close the gap when everyone is improving.
Minnesota, meanwhile, has one of the nation's largest achievement gaps. But again, that's not necessarily because blacks are slipping, according to Jim Angermeyr, the head of research for Bloomington schools.
There is a lot of talk in California right now about how the budget crisis will affect education investments, and I write investments very deliberately because education spending is a form of investment that is supposed to yield future returns. It's evident that we'll have to deal with the budget hole by cutting education spending rather dramatically, in fact it is absolutely unavoidable because education spending is about 50% of the state budget and when you include all of the other initiative mandated spending, the state government controls less than 20% of the actual budget... with a $26b hole in the budget the state could cut every dollar spent on things not mandated by voters and there would still be a deficit.
Okay, so we're going to have a less generously funded school system, a system that already competes for last place in the country in terms of educational quality. There is also the reality that we will dramatically reduce our funding for community colleges and at the same time raise fees, a reality for the California State University system and the University of California system.
While we are going through this fiscal realignment is it not also appropriate to ask what we are getting out of our education system? K-12 is a basket case and parents with economic means opt out of the system while those on lower income tiers are effectively denied something every child deserves, a quality education.
Maryland's public schools are teaching mathematics in such a way that many graduates cannot be placed in entry-level college math classes because they do not have a grasp of the basics, according to education experts and professors.
College math professors say there is a gap between what is taught in the state's high schools and what is needed in college. Many schools have de-emphasized drilling students in basic math, such as multiplication and division, they say.
"We have hordes of students who come in and have forgotten their basic arithmetic," said Donna McKusick, dean for developmental education at the Community College of Baltimore County. College professors say students are taught too early to rely on calculators. "You say, 'What is seven times seven?' and they don't know," McKusick said.
Ninety-eight percent of Baltimore students signing up for classes at Baltimore City Community College had to pay for remedial classes to learn the material that should have been covered in high school. Across Maryland, 49 percent of the state's high school graduates take remedial classes in college before they can take classes for credit.
Wonk alert! I'm posting additional background information on the community college initiative that President Obama announced today, along with a link to the Council of Economic Advisers report, out Monday, called Preparing the Workers of Today for the Jobs of Tomorrow.
The name of Obama's proposal: The American Graduation Initiative
The cost: see what I've underlined below.
The four main features:
It's not just Madison schools getting hit with a much bigger cut in state aid than expected.
Middleton-Cross Plains is in the same leaky boat. So are schools in Adams-Friendship, Green Lake, Markesan, Montello, Princeton, Westfield and Wisconsin Dells.
State lawmakers had said no school district in Wisconsin should experience a state aid cut of more than 10 percent, under the state budget just signed into law.
But more than 90 school districts, including all of those listed above, just learned they're facing cuts greater than 15 percent. In addition, school districts including Lodi and Cambridge are facing cuts of more than 12 percent.
It's a stunning blow to local schools.
In Madison, it means the worst-case scenario of a 10 percent cut of $6 million next school year just became a much bigger reduction of more than $9 million.
That's likely to trigger higher local property taxes and cuts to instruction -- despite last fall's referendum that was supposed to steady Madison schools for three years.
via a TJ Mertz and Jackie Woodruff email: July 15, 2009
The school referendum approved overwhelmingly by Madison Metropolitan School District voters in November 2008 was based on a "Partnership Plan" that promised to maintain educational quality, initiate a community-wide strategic planning process, and mitigate the impact on property tax-payers in a variety of ways.
While the school district remains committed to the principles of this Partnership Plan, with the uncertain economy many things have changed since November. Most significantly, the recently enacted state budget has left MMSD facing what now looks like a $9 million reduction in state aid as well as requiring an almost $3 million reduction in expenditures for the 2009-10 school year.
As the MMSD Board of Education seeks ways to address the shortfalls created by the state budget, Community and Schools Together (CAST) believes it is important that the community recognize that this problem was created by state officials, not local decisions. The reductions in revenues and in funding for targeted programs (via categorical aids) will impact every district in the state. Madison is one of about 100 districts that have had their general state aid cut by 15%, but almost all districts are experiencing significant reductions in state support and will be contemplating higher than anticipated property tax increases.
These cuts come after 16 years of inadequate funding, annual cuts in most districts as well as reductions of the state's portion of education costs in recent years. This recent state budget moves us further away from the sustainable, equitable and adequate educational investments that are needed to keep Madison and Wisconsin strong and competitive.
It is also important that the community understand that the tax and revenue projections in the Partnership Plan and those used in the preliminary district budget passed in May were good projections made in good faith based on the best available information. That preliminary budget strengthened education and held property tax mil rate increase to 1¢ (far below the 11¢ increase anticipated prior to the referendum).
In the coming months the Board of Education must find ways to meet the shortfalls created by the state budget. There are no good choices.
These choices involve some combination re-budgeting and re-allocating, potential new cuts, use of the district's recently growing fund balance, temporarily employing targeted stimulus monies, or increasing the local tax levy. CAST urges the Board to retain their commitment to quality education and community involvement. We also ask the community to take advantage of opportunities to let all our state and local elected officials know that Madison values education.
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Community and Schools Together (CAST) is a grass roots organization dedicated to securing sustainable, adequate and equitable public education investments in Madison and Wisconsin.
(Contact) CAST Co-Chairs:
Thomas J. Mertz - 608-255-1542, Carol Carstensen - 608-255-8441, Troy Dassler -- 608-241-5183
"Lessons for Failing Schools" (editorial, July 6) says Education Secretary Arne Duncan, with a $100 billion educational stimulus fund at his disposal, is right to focus on transforming 5,000 low-performing schools that account for the majority of minority dropouts. But if it were that easy -- just a matter of spending money -- the country would have probably done it long ago.
What we are facing is more than a school problem caused by the schools alone. It is a pervasive set of problems in some minority communities, including fatherless households, teenage dropout mothers, drugs and a culture that disparages education, along with some incredibly poor teaching.
The first thing Mr. Duncan should do is to ensure that minority children and their families who really want to do well and are trying hard get the opportunity to escape to charter and other schools so they aren't dragged down by the mass failures we are witnessing in public urban education.
When it comes to choosing the foods we eat, we have so many choices that it often becomes confusing. As Americans, we are blessed with almost every kind of food imaginable, available right next door at the supermarket. There are, however, some very specific foods that help improve athletic performance. The foods listed below are particular important to keep in your diet. The following foods, in alphabetical order, provide premium fuel for the active athlete.
Wisconsin lags behind the rest of the nation in closing the achievement gap between black and white students, according to a U.S. Department of Education report released Tuesday.
Based on data from 2007, the National Assessment of Education Progress study shows some academic improvement among black and white students nationwide, with the gap in test scores between the two groups narrowing in a number of states. Wisconsin stands out as the only state with a racial achievement gap wider than the national average in all four categories measured: math for grades four and eight, and reading for grades four and eight.
Scores among black Wisconsin students were lower than their national peers in all four categories. White students in Wisconsin scored slightly above the national average in math, but below the national average for reading in grade four. The largest gap between white and black Wisconsin students was in math at grade eight, with a 45-point difference between their test scores on a 0-500 point scale.
.......
Closing the achievement gap is important to the Madison School District, said district spokesman Ken Syke.
"It's not a zero-sum situation," Syke said. "As we work to raise the achievement level of students of color, we still work as educators to continue to raise the achievement level of students who are not of color. It's not like if you're pouring resources into one you're not pouring resources into the other."
The fight over school curriculum in Texas, recently focused on biology, has entered a new arena, with a brewing debate over how much of the Bible belongs in American history classrooms.
The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state's social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.
Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to put the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion front-and-center in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.
In the recent Tom Hanks/Ron Howard film "Angels & Demons," science sets the stage for destruction and chaos. A canister of antimatter has been stolen from CERN -- the European Organization for Nuclear Research -- and hidden in the Vatican, set to explode right as a new pope is about to be selected.
Striving to make these details as realistic as possible on screen, Howard and his film crew visited CERN, used one of its physicists as a science consultant, and devoted meticulous care to designing the antimatter canister that Hanks' character, Robert Langdon, and his sexy scientist colleague, Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), wind up searching for.
But there was nothing they could do about the gigantic impossibility at the center of the plot. While the high-energy proton collisions generated at CERN do occasionally produce minute quantities of antimatter -- particles with the opposite electrical charge as protons and electrons, but the same mass, which can in turn be combined into atoms like antihydrogen -- it's not remotely enough to power a bomb. As CERN quips on a Web site devoted to "Angels & Demons," antimatter "would be very dangerous if we could make a few grams of it, but this would take us billions of years."
Almost like being tagged with a barcode, at some point schoolchildren in Georgia will receive a unique number that tracks their test scores and other data from the moment they enter kindergarten until they've graduated.
Such a data system, which would update nightly, school officials say, may sound like a pipe dream. In fact, if the state wants a crack at a huge pot of additional stimulus money from the U.S. Department of Education, that system must one day become a reality.
The money, $4 billion total in what Education Secretary Arne Duncan has dubbed the "Race to the Top" fund, will be distributed next year at Duncan's discretion.
A strong data system is one of four measures the secretary will use in awarding the grants. The others are creating international academic standards, turning around low-performing schools and teacher quality.
Because of the sums of money involved, and because the grants will only go to a few states, the Race to the Top represents a potentially enormous payoff.
The amount of the grants or how they will be distributed is unknown at this point.
Fifteen years ago, when I discovered that many good high schools prevented average students from taking demanding courses, I thought it was a fluke, a mistake that would soon be rectified.
I had spent much time inside schools that did the opposite. They worked hard to persuade students to take challenging classes and tests, such as Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge, so students would be ready for the shock of their first semester at college, which most average students attend. The results were good. Why didn't all schools do that?
I still don't have a satisfactory answer. It always comes up this time of year because of my annual rankings of public high schools for Newsweek, which is based on schools' efforts to challenge average kids as measured by participation in AP, IB and Cambridge tests.
Many school superintendents and principals who run schools that restrict access to those college-level courses and tests have disappointing results on the Newsweek list. Some of them object to my methodology. It is clear from my conversations with them that they are smart and compassionate people.
What about a 2 Year Salary Freeze for K-12 Educators?
UW-system public educators not only have a 2 year freeze but a reduction of just over 3% via furloughs. WHY would K-12 public educators by exempt?! The QEO has been REPEALED effective IMMEDIATELY this month!
FULL DISCLOSURE! Yes, I know some readers are going to be pointing the finger at me asserting: YOU hypocrite! YOU were a member of WEAC and JEA from 1971 through your retirement in June 2000. TRUE! I was a member of WEAC and JEA through the WI K-12 public education funding formula (QEO, State Revenue Cap, 2/3 aid) from its inception (1993-95 WI State Budget) through my retirement in June 2000. I served as the Co-chair of the Joint Legislative Committee representing the JEA from January 1998 through June 2000. I am very PROUD of the work which the Joint Legislative Committee did to study the issues of K-12 public education funding in WI and the recommendations which were issued in September 1998 with the goal of influencing the fall 1998 elections. The Joint Legislative Committee became a very effective advocate for effective reform of the K-12 public education funding formula in WI. The Committee was directly involved in the organization of the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools through co-chair, Virginia Wyss, President of the Janesville Board of Education. Virginia continues to be actively involved in the leadership of WAES. (WAES - URL: http://www.excellentschools.org)
In the coming year New York State will play a leading role in the movement to set one high national standard for all our school children. We will look to raise the bar to require that all students leave high school not only proficient on state tests - but ready for higher education.
But it won't be enough to simply raise standards and hope for the best. We also need to do a much better job preparing our teachers. After all, study after study confirms that teacher quality is the single most important factor in boosting student performance that is under the control of schools.
In cases when our students aren't learning, we must start to question, among other things, the preparation of their teachers.
Improving the quality of teaching in New York will mean partnering with the institutions that train our classroom instructors - SUNY 23%, CUNY 11% and independent colleges 66%.
So how are we going to know if Chicago's public schools are succeeding?
Mayor Richard Daley and school officials boasted this week that Chicago kids' performance on state standardized tests edged higher in all categories and all grades this year. One snapshot: 76.2 percent of 8th graders met or exceeded standards on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test.
But we've known for some time now that nobody can put much faith in the ISAT. In 2006, state education officials significantly changed the test. Like magic, the test results took a leap.
What really happened: Illinois responded to pressure from the federal No Child Left Behind law by deciding it was simpler to make the tests easier than make the kids smarter.
The Obama administration and The Post are fascinated with charter schools [editorial, July 5], but charters do not make sense for Virginia. Maybe charter schools are needed in the District or Chicago, but in Virginia they are a solution looking for a problem.
The first question to consider is whether charter schools actually work. A recent study by the Rand Corp. suggests that they produce about the same results as traditional public schools.
Charter schools haven't flourished in Virginia because our school boards already have the autonomy to create specialty schools. In the Richmond area alone we have schools that specialize in the arts; engineering; communication; languages; the humanities; technology; international studies; leadership and government; global economics; the military; science and mathematics; and technology. We have governor's schools, magnet schools and centers for the gifted, and the list goes on and on. Virginia school boards, unlike those in states where charters have proliferated, don't need charter legislation to allow flexibility and innovation. Our school boards have great autonomy and flexibility. They are free to innovate, and they do.
Welcome to Education Sector's online discussion of teachers' work and teachers unions. Last year, we released results from a survey of public school teachers, Waiting to Be Won Over: Teachers Speak on the Profession, Unions, and Reform, which revealed a mix of opinions about the role of unions in school reform. Teachers believe unions are essential, the survey found, particularly for safeguarding jobs. But the survey also found teachers to be surprisingly open to change, and to the idea that unions should drive rather than resist reform. So what does this mean for the future of teachers unions? To delve into this further, we have assembled a group of current and recent teachers from different kinds of schools, different parts of the country, and with different views on this question.
Briefly, they are, Laura Bornfreund, a former Florida teacher who now works for Common Core, an organization focused on the liberal arts in education; Julie Eisenband, a teacher and adviser at SAGE Academy Charter School in Brooklyn Park, Minn.; Arthur Goldstein, who teaches English as a Second Language at Francis Lewis High School in Queens, N.Y.; Caitlin Hollister, a third-grade teacher from Boston Public Schools; and Bruce William Smith from Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles. Education policy expert Paul T. Hill from the Center on Reinventing Public Education is also joining us to provided national context and to discuss research he has done on teachers unions and charter schools. (Panelist biographies here.)
Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb announced Friday that he has hired four educational management companies to turn around 17 of the worst-performing high schools in the district, a move that marks what leaders say is the largest public school district overhaul of its kind in the nation.
"We have not been making the grade," Bobb said at a press conference at Central High School.
School board members expressed shock and dismay Friday -- just one day after they rolled out their own academic plan that they've asked Bobb to fund. Some accused Bobb of overstepping his bounds as a financial manager by launching an academic plan that will affect 20,000 students in three-quarters of the district's high schools without the board's knowledge.
The board was charged with working on the academics, while Gov. Jennifer Granholm brought in Bobb to work on the finances for a year.
"We have asked Robert Bobb to do a very difficult job and he needs the authority to do it right," said Granholm's spokeswoman Liz Boyd, noting Bobb is not overstepping his role. "He doesn't need to be micromanaged."
The district signed multiyear contracts with four out-of-state companies that will be funded through $20 million in federal stimulus dollars. The aim is to improve student achievement, discipline, respect, safety and graduation rates, district officials said.
The panel created this spring by the Legislature is soliciting advice through July 15 on the key issues it should tackle.
From there, the task force plans to produce a report on high school assessments and accountability. Preliminary recommendations could be out this fall, and the goal is to deliver a final report to the state education commissioner and lawmakers by year's end.
Catharine Bellinger, a Princeton sophomore who has plans to start a campus journal on education policy.
I suggested she practice with a topic provocative enough to get her in trouble, a good place for all writers to be. My question to her, inspired by her experiences in the D.C. schools, is: "Should middle class parents send their kids to KIPP?"
I have written a great deal about that successful network of public charter schools, known for raising the achievement of low-income students in our poorest urban and rural neighborhoods. I am hearing from some middle-class parents who would like some of that teaching for their own children. Here is Bellinger's take on whether that will work. Her email address is cbelling@princeton.edu. Let her, and me, know what you think.
By Catharine Bellinger">:
But after some discussion the board voted to abolish the standing committees (Curriculum, Policy and Business Services) and instead move to two meetings of the entire board each month. Concerns were mostly expressed about the inefficient use of staff time under the current system.
My feeling is that we risk distancing ourselves from the community and will have diminished working relationships with the administrators. My observation has been that the board's best work gets done at the committee level as items well vetted in committee tend to be broadly supported by the board. I am worried about the efficiency of trying to work out the details on issues with the larger group, this issue already came up tonight when it was suggested we would need a special policy committee to work through several pending policy issues.
Madison School District: Private/Parochial, Open Enrollment Leave, Open Enrollment Enter, Home Based Parent Surveys
Kurt Kiefer, MMSD Chief Information Officer [1.3MB PDF]:
This memo is a summary of the results from the surveys completed during the past school year with various parent groups whose children reside within the MMSD attendance area but receive certain alternative education options. Also included are results of the survey conducted with non-residents who attend MMSD schools via the Open Enrollment program (Le., Open Enrollment Enter).
Background
Groups were surveys representing households whose students were enrolled in one of four different educational settings: MMSD resident students attending private/parochial schools, MMSD resident students attending other public schools via the Open Enrollment program, non-resident students attending MMSD schools via the Open Enrollment program, and MMSD resident students provided home based instruction.
The surveys were conducted between December 2008 and February 2009. The surveys were mailed to households or they could complete the survey online. Two mailings were conducted - the initial mailing to all households and a second to non-respondents as a reminder request. Total group sizes and responses are provided below.
This document will be discussed at Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting.
UPDATE:
Complete survey results can be found here [250K PDF]
When Father Hesburgh throws down ... How can we know when the tide of respectable opinion has decisively turned against the teachers' unions? When a panel that includes Father Hesburgh, Birch Bayh. Bill Bradley, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Roger Wilkins goes medieval on them, saying their resistance to reforms designed to hold schools accountable has hurt "disadvantaged students" and led to "calcified systems in which talented people are deterred from applying or staying as teachers ..."
The unions have battled against the principle that schools and education agencies should be held accountable for the academic progress of their students. They have sought to water down the standards adopted by states to reflect what students should know and be able to do. They have attacked assessments designed to measure the progress of schools, seeking to localize decisions about test content so that the performance of students in one school or community cannot be compared with others. They have resisted innovative ways-such as growth models-to assess student performance.
In their attack on education reform, the national unions have often been unconstrained by considerations of propriety and fairness. They have sought to inject weakening amendments in appropriations bills, hoping that they would prevail if no hearings were held and the public was unaware of their efforts. They have used the courts to launch an attack on education reform, employing arguments that could imperil many federal assistance programs going back to the New Deal. They have failed to inform their own members of the content of federal reform laws.
Faced with the most drastic budget cuts ever to the state's public education system, the Board of Education approved a plan yesterday that includes about $117 million in yet-to-be negotiated labor savings — from potential pay cuts to furloughs of teachers and administrators.
The plan, which trims a total of $227 million from the $1.8 billion school system budget, includes a 5 percent across-the-board cut to school-level programs, a reduction of part-time workers and slashing of school-level funding.
Several board members said the plan is certain to have repercussions on teaching and learning.
"There is nobody in this room who wants to do what we're about to do. But the fiscal reality is such that we have to do this," said board member John Penebacker.
The recent job market reminds me of when I finished my doctorate in the mid-1990s. Though the market was not as saturated then, it definitely was not conducive to finding a job. I applied to more than 100 colleges and universities, garnering only a phone interview at one college, where I happened to know two people on the search committee. I made it to a final cut of 10, but no further.
However, I knew that I wanted to teach, so I adjusted my plans and applied for positions at independent high schools (also known as "private schools," but they do not care for that designation). For those struggling in this job market, I would suggest that this path has numerous benefits and few drawbacks, especially for someone beginning a career.
First, independent schools have talented, often highly motivated students. At the first school I worked at, I taught sophomores and juniors, not in Advanced Placement classes or even Honors classes. The sophomores read The Scarlet Letter, among other works, and the curriculum for the juniors included Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, Macbeth, Jane Eyre, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Heart of Darkness, and the British Romantic poets. Teachers assigned works such as Moby-Dick to their classes, and none of us were disappointed in the students' responses to the level of difficulty. In fact, we had to move through Heart of Darkness quickly, as the end of the semester was approaching, and neither of my junior classes complained about the pace or load for what is a difficult read for the college sophomores I now teach in a non-majors course at a four-year, liberal arts university.
The California Teachers Assn. unveiled a television ad Thursday attacking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for his proposal to suspend Proposition 98, the law that sets funding guarantees for schools.
Schwarzenegger last week proposed reducing the guarantee by $3 billion for the coming fiscal year to help address the state's $26.3-billion deficit.
The well-funded union, which has turned public opinion against the governor in the past, focuses its commercial on Schwarzenegger's failure in 2005 to repay money he had promised to return after suspending the guarantee the year before. "He said he was sorry," the ad says. "He said never again. . . . And now Schwarzenegger says he'll break the minimum guarantee to our schools again."
Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said the governor would not be dissuaded.
The Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellowship seeks to attract talented, committed individuals with backgrounds in the STEM fields--science, technology, engineering, and mathematics--into teaching in high-need Indiana high schools. Learn more...
Funded through a $10 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, the Fellowship offers rigorous disciplinary and pedagogical preparation, extensive clinical experience, and ongoing mentoring. Eligible applicants include current undergraduates, recent college graduates, midcareer professionals, and retirees who have majored in, or had careers in, STEM fields.
Transportation is clearly a consideration to be factored into any discussion of school choice. Yet we know very little about how much it matters in family’s decisions about their children’s school, and almost nothing about how much of a barrier it is to school choice, especially for low-income families. How far does the average family want their child to travel to school? Would they be as comfortable letting their younger children travel as far as they might a middle or high school student? What transportation options are available to low-income families? These are the kinds of questions we tried to address in this study, in order to obtain meaningful data to help shape school transportation policy.
This project first surveyed the landscape of transportation and school choices. It examined the density of large districts in the U.S. The project team contacted large school districts to find out their policies on transportation and choice, then examined district budgets to see how much they actually spend on transportation. Most importantly, the project surveyed families in two cities—Denver and Washington, D.C.—to find out their travel patterns and school choice options. The study breaks down that data, collected from households earning less than $75,000 in annual income, to determine how much transportation is a barrier to choice.
As part of the first major revision of teacher education requirements in 10 years, i nstitutions seeking the NCATE seal of approval must either demonstrate that they are on track to reach an "excellent" level of performance, rather than remain at an "acceptable level," or make transformative changes in key areas, such as:
strengthening the clinical focus of their programs to better prepare educators to meet the needs of today's P-12 students and foster increases in student learning
demonstrating the impact of their programs and graduates on P-12 student learning
increasing knowledge about what works in teacher education to improve P-12 student learning, using a research and development strategy to build better knowledge and help institutions use that knowledge to improve programs, and
addressing critical needs of schools, such as recruiting talented teachers and bolstering teacher retention.
The new accreditation strategy, approved by the NCATE Executive Board last month, creates two alternative pathways to accreditation. The Continuous Improvement track raises the target level of performance beyond the "acceptable" level. The second pathway, the Transformation Initiative track, encourages institutions to build the base of evidence in the field about what works in teacher preparation and help the P-12 schools they serve address major challenges, from raising student achievement to retaining teachers.
Will Judge Sonia Sotomayor's life experience, including attending a private Catholic school, lead to an uncomfortable conclusion--that government-supported school choice is just?
The Obama administration has made Judge Sonia Sotomayor's life story a central part of her introduction to the nation as a Supreme Court nominee. The administration has focused attention on her inspiring, only-in-America path from public housing through elite institutions of higher education to the top of the legal profession.
......
Consequently, we might expect to see these experiences clearly reflected in their positions on three contemporary issues.
First, President Obama ought to be a vigorous defender of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers to low-income students in the nation's capital so they can attend private schools.
Second, the president should be expected to act forcefully to save America's urban Catholic and other faith-based schools, which are disappearing at a rapid pace, robbing disadvantaged families of desperately needed private education options.
Third, we should expect Judge Sotomayor to decide in favor of school choice programs while on the bench.
In practice, however, there appears to be a limit to the influence of personal experience. President Obama failed to stand up for the D.C. voucher program, and Democratic congressional leaders went after it with a vengeance. If his 2010 budget is adopted, no new students will be allowed into the program, and it will slowly wither away. Similarly, while his Department of Education has $100 billion in stimulus funding for America's schools, neither he nor Education Secretary Arne Duncan has uttered a word about preserving faith-based urban schools.
For seven months, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the media have bombarded us with tales of how Duncan dramatically boosted student achievement as leader of Chicago Public Schools. Based on two new independent analyses, Duncan's real impact appears to have been near zero.
The usual evidence presented for Duncan's success is the rise in the pass rate of elementary and middle school students on Illinois' own ISAT test. But state tests like the ISAT are notoriously unreliable (they tend to be corrupted by teaching to the test and subject to periodic "realignments" in which the passing grade is lowered or the test content is eased). In January, the Schools Matter blog argued that exactly such a realignment had occurred in 2006.
So to get a reliable measure of Duncan's impact, I pulled up the 4th and 8th grade math and reading scores for Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- a test that is much less susceptible to massaging by states and districts. I then compared the score changes in Chicago to those for all students in Large Central Cities around the nation, and tested if the small differences between them were statistically significant. Not one of them is even remotely significant at even the loosest accepted measure of significance (the p < 0.1 level). Chicago students did no better than those in similar districts around the nation between 2002/2003 and 2007, a period covering virtually all of Duncan's tenure in Chicago.
Advanced Placement classes do not begin at Science Park High School until September, but Cristiana De Oliveira will spend many a summer day sitting behind a desk in A.P. calculus for five hours rather than lounging by a swimming pool.
Cristiana is one of 335 students signed up for Newark's new A.P. Summer Institute, in which A.P. courses in calculus, biology, United States history and English language and literature each get an intensive two-week introduction, paid for with $300,000 in federal grants.
Intended to help increase enrollment in the special courses as well as student performance, the new program, which starts on Monday, is expected to reach more than half the students taking Advanced Placement classes this fall in the 40,000-student Newark school district.
"We're in a stressful environment in school, and if we can start now, it will be a lot easier," said Cristiana, 17, a senior who will be getting up at 6:30 a.m. and riding two public buses to reach the high school for the summer program.
Homeowners across the country are challenging their property tax bills in droves as the value of their homes drop, threatening local governments with another big drain on their budgets.
The requests are coming in record numbers, from owners of $10 million estates and one-bedroom bungalows, from residents of the high-tax enclaves surrounding New York City, and from taxpayers in the Rust Belt and states like Arizona, Florida and California, where whole towns have been devastated by the housing bust.
"It's worthy of a Dickens story," said Gus Kramer, the assessor in Contra Costa County, Calif., outside San Francisco. "These people are desperate. They know their home's gone down in value. They've watched their neighborhoods being boarded up. They literally stand in there and say: 'When can I have my refund check? I need to feed my family. I need to pay my electric bill.' "
Mr. Duncan has said from the start that he wants the states to transform about 5,000 of the lowest-performing schools, not in a piecemeal fashion but with bold policies that have an impact right away. The argument in favor of a tightly focused effort aimed at these schools is compelling. We now know, for example, that about 12 percent of the nation's high schools account for half the country's dropouts generally -- and almost three-quarters of minority dropouts. A plan that fixed these schools, raising high school graduation and college-going rates, would pay enormous dividends for the country as a whole.
Mr. Duncan can use his burgeoning discretionary budget to reward states that take the initiative in this area. But Congress could push the reform effort further and faster by granting the education department's request for two changes in federal education law. The first would be to come up with new federal school improvement money and require the states to focus 40 percent of it on the lowest-performing middle and high schools. The second change would allow the secretary to directly finance charter-school operators that have already produced high-quality schools.
ucation Secretary Arne Duncan recently answered questions about his goals and relationship with the business community. An edited transcript:
QWhy include business in the policy debate about public education?
AWe all need to work together on this stuff, business leaders and educators. Everyone's mutual interests are absolutely aligned.
QBusiness leaders want reform but don't want to pay for it, right?
ANo; there's been unbelievable generosity, not just in resources but in ideas. We've had a great relationship with the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable. I've met with a number of CEOs.
When I first met him a dozen years ago, Mike Durso struck me as an okay principal. He didn't say much about himself, but his school, Springbrook High in Silver Spring, was well-run. The students liked him. He had been around a long time, another good sign.
It took some time to realize how badly he had deceived me. His adopted persona, good ol' boy administrator, hid something more important. I began looking for clues to how amazing Durso was, what an impact he was having on the region with his phenomenal eye for talent, while he pretended to be like everybody else, just getting through the day.
When the surgery was over, the worst of the aftermath survived, and the tumor gone, Tony Evers met with his oncologist, Linn Khuu.
"You know, you've been given a second chance," she told him. "Go do something great."
Evers felt a bit insulted at first. He thought he had worked hard and done good things for years. For one thing, he had been deputy state superintendent of public instruction for almost seven years at that point.
Then he decided she was right.
Now, Evers said, he would tell people who went through what he went through, "If you do get a second chance, make the most of it."
At 11 a.m. Monday, Evers, 57, will show what he is doing to make the most of it. He will be sworn in as Wisconsin's 26th superintendent of public instruction - and almost surely the first without an esophagus.
Within months of being told he had a form of cancer that generally has low survival rates, Evers decided to undertake a race for statewide office.
"Once you get over a hurdle, it does make you a bit more fearless," he said in an interview last week.
In her weekly "What Matters Most" newspaper column, Randi Weingarten recently bid the Big Apple farewell. Ms. Weingarten has been elevated to president of the national American Federation of Teachers from head of its New York City affiliate, and she had some notable parting words: "One of the most rewarding (and exhausting) things about working in public education in New York City is that it is the best laboratory in the world for trying new things."
Well, it could be, if it weren't for Ms. Weingarten's union. Since taking over in 1998, she has done everything she could to block significant reforms to New York's public schools. Take her opposition to charter schools. She resisted raising the state cap on charters from 100 unless the union could organize them. (She lost and the cap now is 200.)
Wisconsin education officials are aiming to move into the national mainstream by setting firmer standards for what children should learn in school and finding better ways to measure achievement.
Wisconsin built a reputation in recent years for having loosely written state standards. The state was viewed as setting the bar about as low as anywhere in the country in determining if students were proficient, and taking too rosy an approach to deciding whether schools were getting adequate results.
Several national groups, some of them with conservative orientations but others harder to peg politically, criticized the state for its softness.
The report from the Diploma Project, issued last week, says that in revising its statement of what students are expected to learn in English and math, "Wisconsin has taken an important step to better prepare young people for success in post-secondary education and in their careers."
We make frequent use of the influence of their high school peers on many of our students. We have peer counseling programs and even peer discipline systems, in some cases. We show students the artistic abilities of their peers in exhibitions, concerts, plays, recitals, and the like.
Most obviously, we put before our high school students the athletic skills and performances of their peers in a very wide range of meets, matches, and games, some of which, of course, are better attended than others.
While some high schools still have just one valedictorian, fellow students have little or no idea what sort of academic work the student who is first in her class has done. Academic scholarships may be announced, but it is quite impossible for peers to see the academic work for which the scholarship has been awarded. Here again, the contrast with athletics is clear.
We show high school students the artistic, athletic, and other examples of the outstanding efforts and accomplishments of their peers without seeming to worry that such examples will send their peers into unmanageable depressions or cause them to give up their own efforts to do their best.
When it comes to academic achievements, on the other hand, we do seem to worry that they will have a harmful effect if they are shown to other students. I am not quite sure how that attitude got its hold on us, but I do have some comments from authors whose papers I have published, on their reaction to seeing the exemplary academic work of their peers:
"When a former history teacher first lent me a copy of The Concord Review, I was inspired by the careful scholarship crafted by other young people. Although I have always loved history passionately, I was used to writing history papers that were essentially glorified book reports...As I began to research the Ladies' Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task...In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come."
North Central High School (IN) Class of 2005
"The opportunity that The Concord Review presented drove me to rewrite and revise my paper to emulate its high standards. Your journal truly provides an extraordinary opportunity and positive motivation for high school students to undertake extensive research and academic writing, experiences that ease the transition from high school to college."
Thomas Worthington High School (OH) Class of 2008
"Thank you for selecting my essay regarding Augustus Caesar and his rule of the Roman Republic for publication in the Spring 2009 issue of The Concord Review. I am both delighted and honored to know that this essay will be of some use to readers around the world. The process of researching and writing this paper for my IB Diploma was truly enjoyable and it is my hope that it will inspire other students to undertake their own research projects on historical topics."
Old Scona Academic High School, Edmonton, Alberta, (Canada) Class of 2008
"In the end, working on that history paper, inspired by the high standard set by The Concord Review, reinvigorated my interest not only in history, but also in writing, reading and the rest of the humanities. I am now more confident in my writing ability, and I do not shy from difficult academic challenges. My academic and intellectual life was truly altered by my experience with that paper, and the Review played no small role! Without the Review, I would not have put so much work into the paper. I would not have had the heart to revise so thoroughly."
Isidore Newman School (LA) Class of 2003
"At CRLHS, a much-beloved history teacher suggested to me that I consider writing for The Concord Review, a publication that I had previously heard of, but knew little about. He proposed, and I agreed, that it would be an opportunity for me to pursue more independent work, something that I longed for, and hone my writing and research skills in a project of considerably broader scope than anything I had undertaken up to that point."
Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School (MA) Class of 2003
Now, whenever a counterintuitive result--like this enthusiasm for a challenge--is found, there is always an attempt to limit the damage to our preconceptions. "This is only a tiny fringe group (of trouble-makers, nerds, etc.)" or "most of our high school students would not respond with interest to the exemplary academic work of their peers." The problem with those arguments is that we really don't know enough. We haven't actually tried to see what would happen if we presented our high school students with good academic work done by their more diligent peers. Perhaps we should consider giving that experiment a serious try. I have, as it happens, some good high school academic work to use as examples in such a trial...
When a citizen taxpayer group, the CRG Network, posted online a database of all invoices paid by Milwaukee Public Schools a few months ago, it brought some amount of criticism of specific items - how much had been spent on food for meetings and parent events, on iPods for student prizes and so on.
But it also led some MPS officials, such as finance chief Michelle Nate, to say the system ought to post the data itself since it's all public information.
Despite almost 50 years of large and accelerating efforts to improve the school achievement of African-American students, the gap between their achievement and that of whites and Asians remains about as large as ever.
Yet proposals for what to do about it seem basically unchanged: Spend more money and divert existing money to reduce class size and train teachers better, have more students take a rigorous college prep curriculum, work on improving self-esteem, eliminate ability-grouped classes, use cooperative-learning techniques, and reassign top teachers to schools with a high percentage of African-American students.
I have become especially doubtful about whether those approaches will work better in the future than they have in the past when I read this report from the trenches. Usually, we hear only from politicians and education leaders (who also are politicians) spouting lofty rhetoric. Occasionally, we hear of a promising program, but which never turns out to be scalable. Or we see a Hollywood movie about some amazing teacher.
We rarely, however, hear from a more typical teacher who, day to day, teaches low-achieving African-American kids. So it was with interest that I read this truly depressing account from a teacher. I've edited out a couple of unnecessarily snarky sentences, which are irrelevant to the issue. Nonetheless the essay is long yet, I believe, worth your time.)
When the Online School for Girls flickers to life this fall on computer screens across the country, students will take part in an unusual experiment that joins two trends: girls-only schooling and online teaching.
A consortium that includes the 108-year-old Holton-Arms School in Bethesda is driving the project, in the belief that girls can benefit from an Internet curriculum tailored just to them.
"There's been a lot of research done on how girls learn differently with technology than boys," said Brad Rathgeber, Holton-Arms's director of technology. "Part of this is a little bit of theory that we're trying to put in practice to see if it really does play out."
For now, the online collaboration will allow the four participating schools -- Holton-Arms, Harpeth Hall in Nashville, Westover School in Middlebury, Conn., and Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio -- to offer classes that would not have generated enough student interest or teacher support in any one school. When the classes open to the public a year later, the educators hope that students around the world -- including homeschoolers and girls at coed schools -- will be able to take part in a version of the girls' school experience. And they want to prove that single-sex online education works. They can't find anyone who has done anything similar.
On a recent visit to Cody High School in southwestern Detroit, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan reiterated one of his key talking points on how to improve the nation's underachieving urban public school districts: Put mayors in charge of big-city public schools.
Transferring authority over urban school districts from school boards and superintendents to mayors, Duncan explained in March at the Mayors' National Forum on Education in Washington, D.C., will ensure greater stability in the leadership of school districts. Duncan pointed out that mayors usually hold office longer than the average school superintendent.
The secretary of education also said that mayors make stronger leaders at the helm of public schools.
Mike Klonsky has some strong words for Jay Mathews on his recent column about unions and charter schools. In the piece, Jay argues that union demands might swamp the progress that one Baltimore KIPP school has shown under the direction of KIPP founder Jason Botel.
In his blog Small Talk, Klonsky, an educator and activist, argues Mathews is ignoring the difficult conditions many KIPP teachers work under:
chools specialize in math, science or the arts. Some are Afro-centric, others are religious. They are publicly funded but operate independently of local schools boards and, often, teacher unions.
They all make up the growing charter school movement that the Obama administration would like to see flourish.
"The charter movement is absolutely one of the most profound changes in American education, bringing new options to underserved communities and introducing competition and innovation into the education system," Education Secretary Arne Duncan told attendees at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools' annual conference last week.
Parents who've complained for years about having little input under mayoral control of schools, have even less power under the resurrected Board of Education.
They say they have been left with fewer avenues for involvement, including the loss of their Community Education Councils, which expired with mayoral control.
"We had no power when we were authorized, what power will we have now?" said Queens CEC 26 head Robert Caloras.
He plans to file a formal complaint over the appointment of a deputy mayor to represent Queens on the Board of Ed.
He said the appointment of Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott to the seven-member board was a conflict of interest, since he works for the mayor.
Maybe it was brought on by lean times. Or maybe long-simmering angst about the state of Seattle schools is finally boiling over on its own.
But the decision this month to lay off 165 of Seattle schools' newest teachers in a "last hired, first fired" manner has got some of liberal Seattle suddenly sounding more like a conservative red state.
More than 600 school parents have signed an online petition, at supportgreatteachers.com, that calls out the teachers union for causing "great distress and upheaval" in the schools. At issue is the policy of choosing who gets laid off solely by seniority.
"Wake up and see how union refusal to consider merit is damaging the profession and our kids," wrote one parent.
"We want the best teachers, not the oldest, teaching our kids," wrote another.
"Teacher unions are an anachronism," said another.
IF I could change public education, here's what I'd do first: reward the best teachers with higher pay and stature, and fire the worst teachers, because they shouldn't be in the classroom.
My children have gone through a total of 16 years of public schooling in New Jersey. Over the years, I've seen outstanding teachers, and outstandingly bad ones. Our kids have had teachers who introduced them to everything under the sun, and made every day different and fascinating. Some of our daughter's teachers gave up their lunch and stayed late to help her find her way through the maze of math. Two of our son's teachers comforted him when traumatic events laid him low. My daughter's sixth-grade teacher made students feel like real scientists; her language arts teacher covered everyone's papers with useful suggestions. These people put everything they have into teaching. They light sparks that stay lit for years.
But we've also seen teachers who put dents in our children's spirits, day after day, teachers who barely taught anything at all, who, I suspect, chose the profession because they wanted summers off.
My father used to come home from his post office job railing about co-workers who didn't do their share of the work, but couldn't be fired. Watching bad teachers fail to do their jobs, I'm even angrier than he was. How can anyone justify protecting the jobs of teachers who:
As a Seattle community, we can and must speak up to improve the effectiveness of every school, in every neighborhood.
We, the undersigned, ask our leaders to do the following:
1. Delay the immediate assignment of replacement teachers until the effects of attrition and retirement are understood. Keep successful teams intact.
2. In the new contract between the teachers' association and the school district, change the layoff policy to prioritize effectiveness. Put in place a system that promotes, rewards and protects teamwork, expertise, best teaching practices and each site's unique programmatic needs.
3. Ensure that all kids have consistent access to highly effective teachers.
4. Give our principals the tools they need to support and retain effective teachers within their individual schools.
A newly constituted Los Angeles school board took its first action Wednesday by giving up control of its largest campus, allowing Birmingham High to convert itself into a charter.
The action, which took place after Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called for a "revolution" in city schools, followed months of bitter infighting at the school in the Lake Balboa section of the San Fernando Valley, and was a blow to teachers union leaders and others who had advocated the simultaneous creation of a union-sponsored school on the Birmingham campus. The charter will begin its first school year Aug. 19.
New board members Steve Zimmer and Nury Martinez admitted being unprepared to vote on the issue, which stirred deep passions among teachers, parents and students. Zimmer said he felt as though he were "on my Star Trek maiden voyage," and Martinez complained that she had been briefed about the months-long saga only the day before. Zimmer ultimately abstained, while Martinez joined four other board members in voting for the charter.
Trustee Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte dissented, saying she supported the concept but wanted more time to heal the wounds on the campus and prepare plans for the union-backed school.
To answer the question I'm sure you all have: Yes. Teachers booed and hissed during some of the performance-pay portions of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's speech. And they weren't overwhelmingly happy with the talk of reform to seniority and tenure systems, either.
But some of the stories I've seen around the Web on the speech are billing this as "tough love" for the teachers' unions. There was some of that, sure, but President Barack Obama and Duncan clearly telegraphed their intentions to push hard on these issues in the stimulus legislation, and that passed months ago.
So there was an element to this whole proceeding that came off as a little bit rehearsed to me. I wonder if Duncan had prepared his seemingly ad-libbed line for when the booing started: "You can boo; just don't throw any shoes, please." And I'm pretty sure most of the delegates had gotten their vocal chords ready, too.
To me, the biggest news out of the speech is that the administration is increasingly emphasizing student achievement as one measure of teacher pay or evaluation, although not the only measure. That is a big issue, and it's one that helped sink congressional attempts to renew the No Child Left Behind Act in 2007.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan challenged members of the National Education Association Thursday to stop resisting the idea of linking teacher pay to student achievement.
It was Duncan's first speech at the union's annual meeting, a gathering at which President Barack Obama was booed when he mentioned the idea of performance pay last year. By contrast, Duncan drew raucous applause and only a smattering of boos.
"I came here today to challenge you to think differently about the role of unions in public education," Duncan told the 3.2 million-member union in San Diego.
"It's not enough to focus only on issues like job security, tenure, compensation, and evaluation," he said. "You must become full partners and leaders in education reform. You must be willing to change."
In a vote preceded by outbursts from board members, the Montgomery County Board of Education on Wednesday selected Barbara Thompson as Montgomery's new superintendent.
The board voted 4-3 along racial lines to offer the job to Thompson, who currently serves as superintendent of New Glarus Public Schools in Wisconsin.
Black board members Mary Briers, Eleanor Dawkins, Robert Porterfield and Beverly Ross voted for Thompson. Voting against her were white members Charlotte Meadows, Heather Sellers and Melissa Snowden, who all wanted to continue the search process.
Thompson was the lone finalist for the job after Samantha Ingram, superintendent of Fairfield County Schools in South Carolina, withdrew on Monday.
Ross, chairwoman of the school board, said she called Thompson shortly after the vote and Thompson accepted the job.
"I am excited that she's excited about coming here," Ross said. "She was already talking about how to get our test scores up."
Thompson, in a phone interview from her house in Wisconsin, said she and the board in the next few days should begin working out the details of her contract, which include salary negotiations.
The right and wrong ways to get more poor youngsters into the world's great universities
LOTS of rich people and crummy state schools, especially in the big cities where well-off folk tend to live: these common features of America and Britain help explain the prominence in both countries of an elite tier of private schools. Mostly old, some with fat endowments, places like Eton, Harrow and Phillips Exeter have done extraordinarily well. Fees at independent schools have doubled in real terms over the past 25 years and waiting lists have lengthened. Even in the recession, they are proving surprisingly resilient (see article). A few parents are pulling out, but most are soldiering on and plenty more are clamouring to get their children in.
Row, row together
All sorts of class-based conspiracy theories exist to explain the success of such institutions, but the main reason why they thrive in a more meritocratic world is something much more pragmatic: their ability to get people into elite universities. For Britain and America also have the world's best universities. Look at any of the global rankings and not only do the Ivy League and Oxbridge monopolise the top of the tree, British and (especially) American colleges dominate most of the leading 100 places. This summer graduates will struggle to find jobs, so a degree from a world-famous name like Berkeley or the London School of Economics will be even more valuable than usual. The main asset of the private schools is their reputation for getting children into those good universities.
Today’s lesson comes courtesy of Bernadette Marso, president of the Leominster Education Association in Massachusetts. Her members just voted down, by a 305-47 margin, a five-year, $856,000 grant from the Advanced Placement Training and Award Program. The program, among other things, pays teachers of Advanced Placement courses bonus money “if they successfully recruit more students to take AP courses and if the students perform well on the end-of-the-year AP exam.”
Some district officials and parents complained about the union decision because the bonuses were just one part of the program, which includes professional development and a subsidy to offset the AP exam fee for the students. But the union stood firmly opposed.
“We understand that some people will not understand the vote, but we confronted this from a union perspective,” Marso said. “We have a fair and equitable contract with the district, and to have a third party come in and start paying certain teachers more money than other hard-working teachers goes against what a union is all about.”
It will be interesting to see how the Madison School District's contract negotiations play out with respect to community 4K partners and other curriculuar issues.
"Education is all about continued improvement, and the status quo is not satisfactory," Evers told the audience at a WisPolitics.com luncheon Tuesday at the Madison Club.
In addition to guiding local schools as they navigate state cuts and an influx of federal stimulus funding, Evers is promoting a single federal test and an overhaul of accountability and assessment standards for public education. Under the new system, which Evers said would be formed quickly over the next few months, the state will be able to consistently measure other educational categories aside from test scores.
The test score measurement mandates under the federal No Child Left Behind law drew criticism from Evers for their incomplete picture of education, but he said the federal standard has done educators "a tremendous favor" by showing disparities between performance of white and non-white students.
He also called for a national standard of testing and curriculum, which he said 46 states had backed. He said that Wisconsin isn't able to truly compare its educational growth to other districts and states because 50 different tests are being administered annually. He also called the current system “economically irrational.”
"Public education, even though it's a state responsibility, is a national endeavor, and we have to view it as such," Evers said. "By doing this, we're going to make our system more transparent."
Perhaps nothing will test the new state accountability system as much as Milwaukee. Evers went to great lengths to discuss the “magic” that teachers work with many less fortunate students in the state’s largest school district, but recognized a graduation rate that, despite increasing to about 70 percent, lags well behind the state average.
It just can't be a very good sign that when someone raises serious questions about one of the liveliest and controversial issues in our field those questions are ignored or distorted and caricatured. I've heard Checker Finn's new book on pre-kindergarten education referred to as an anti-pre-k book (it's not), an intemperate attack on the pre-k movement (it's critical, sure, but let's assume they're not as vulnerable as the kids they serve), or dismissed as simply too conservative to be taken seriously by the field (again it's not).
That doesn't mean it's a flawless book. Sara Mead has engaged with it and points out some problems with the analysis (in particular Finn overstates current participation levels - especially from a quality standpoint - and that's no small thing given his underlying point) and she also rounds up the other writing on it. But in general there hasn't been a lot of discussion of Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut's points about current program coordination, costs and how to think about costs, quality, and universality. These are not small matters; they cut to the heart of what is likely to be a massive public investment in an important strategy to improve outcomes for economically disadvantaged youngsters.
Teaching science in a school district that for years paid little attention to it will cost $10 million for textbooks alone over the next six years.
The city school board approved the expense Monday night, and also OK'd $2.1 million for more print and Web-based reading materials for students in pre-K through third grade.
Half of the district's students are held back at least one year by the time they are in third grade because they cannot read well enough.
The effects, district officials say, show up in low graduation rates and high dropout and incarceration rates, costing the city millions a year in lost productivity alone and millions more in prison and jail costs.
Since the federal No Child Left Behind mandate was passed in 2002, science has gotten short shrift here because it is not one of the subjects covered under the state exams. Instead, teachers have focused on math and reading, often doubling up class periods to give students a bigger dose of what they must know to pass.
Will that leave either schools or taxpayers wobbly? Will the last leg fall, too?
In any case, Wisconsin's old order for how to fund schools is coming to an end, and what comes next remains to be decided, perhaps two years from now when the next state budget is adopted. Pressure for an overhaul is growing, even as economic realities are providing strong pressure to hold down budgets.
When Gov. Jim Doyle signed the state budget for 2009-'11 on Monday, the leg of the stool known as the qualified economic offer fell away. The QEO meant school districts had the option of capping increases in teachers' pay and benefits to 3.8% a year.
A second leg - the state's commitment to fund two-thirds of general operations of public schools - has been weakening over the past six years. It looks as if it now will be the state's commitment to fund something over 60% of school costs but not the full two-thirds.
That will leave only the third leg - revenue caps - in force. There will still be limits on how much school districts can collect in state aid and property taxes combined, a rule that will keep total spending growth restricted in general, but with widely varying impacts on property tax increases.
The three-legged stool was created in the mid-1990s, when Republican Tommy Thompson was governor. The goal was to put brakes on rapidly rising property taxes by increasing state aid, while holding down increases in overall spending through revenue caps and the threat of QEOs.
Online learning has definite advantages over face-to-face instruction when it comes to teaching and learning, according to a new meta-analysis released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education.
The study found that students who took all or part of their instruction online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through face-to-face instruction. Further, those who took "blended" courses -- those that combine elements of online learning and face-to-face instruction -- appeared to do best of all. That finding could be significant as many colleges report that blended instruction is among the fastest-growing types of enrollment.
The Education Department examined all kinds of instruction, and found that the number of valid analyses of elementary and secondary education was too small to have much confidence in the results. But the positive results appeared consistent (and statistically significant) for all types of higher education, undergraduate and graduate, across a range of disciplines, the study said.
A meta-analysis is one that takes all of the existing studies and looks at them for patterns and conclusions that can be drawn from the accumulation of evidence.
The proposal to scrap the exam has been called "controversial" because it has divided education leaders from their usual allies in the Legislature.
While Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg say it's not fair to ask our students to risk giving up their diplomas as a result of state budget cuts, many education leaders fear dismantling a centerpiece of California's educational accountability system that was finally implemented just three years ago after years of delay.
But the debate over the exam, a budget line item that represents less than one-third of 0.001 of a percent of the budget shortfall, distracts from the more important "test" by which the state budget should be judged: the effect it will have on our children and on California's future. By just about any measure, the budget on the table in Sacramento now receives a failing grade.
Don't look to the Supreme Court to set school rules, only to clarify them when officials have abdicated that responsibility, Chief Justice John Roberts said Saturday.
At a judicial conference, Roberts was asked how school administrators should interpret seemingly conflicting messages from the court in two recent decisions, including one Thursday that said Arizona officials conducted an unconstitutional strip-search of a teenage girl. In 2007, the justices sided with an Alaska high school principal, ruling that administrators could restrict student speech if it appears to advocate illegal drug use.
Roberts told the audience there was no conflict in the court's rulings, just clarity intended to deal with narrow issues that surface from government actions.
"You can't expect to get a whole list of regulations from the Supreme Court. That would be bad," Roberts said. "We wouldn't do a good job at it."
As we approach the end of the first decade of the first century of the third millennium of the Christian Era, the corporate members of the new and influential Partnership for 21st Century Skills have begun to look beyond and behind and beneath their earlier commitment to the education of our students in critical thinking, collaborative problem solving, and global awareness.
It has become obvious to industry leaders that more fundamental than all these new student skills for success in the business world is really Critical Likability. While it may be useful for new employees to know that the world is round, and that solving problems is sometimes easier if others provide help, and that real thinking is superior to not thinking at all, these all pale in importance to whether other people like you or not.
Being a great communicator is important, and reading and writing have received some support from the 21st Century leaders, but those are not of much value if no one likes you and no one wants to hear what you have to say, whether oral or written.
Critical Likability, it must be understood, goes far beyond mere popularity in school, although they share some essential tools and characteristics. Future employees must learn, while they are in school, the basic lessons of smiling, personal hygiene (including the control of bad breath and the release of hydrogen sulfide gas), grooming, table manners, the correct handshake, and at least the basics of dressing for success.
At a more advanced level students should be taught to listen, empathize, seem to agree, laugh, hug (only where clearly appropriate), tell jokes, drink (where and when culturally appropriate), play a social sport (like golf), and generally to be likable in the most efficient and effective senses of that word.
Everyone knows that while space in the curriculum must be arranged for instruction in these Critical Likability skills, that will take some time, and, at least for the immediate future, there will still be courses in history, literature, math, science, languages and all that. In fact, it is generally acknowledged that at least math and science can make a contribution to Critical Employability in our modern economy.
Some of this work is still in the planning stages, as the Seven Techniques of Critical Likability are being developed and forged into new curricula. But the work is underway.
As always there will be rearguard efforts to retard progress in teaching these Critical Likability skills to students. Teachers and conservatives educators will fight to defend the sciences and humanities as necessary to leading the good life, and to preparing students for success in college. But if a person is truly likable, "with a shoeshine and a smile," as Willy Loman used to say, they can make at least part of their way in the business world, no matter how ignorant they are of anything beyond the work of their employer. Cultural literacy may be fine for some people, but Critical Likability is what we want for all of America's future 21st Century employees.
Academic subjects and intellectual work will still be provided in our education system of course, but this is a new century, and new ideas are needed in this Post-Recession economy. Some students will probably always be willing to read nonfiction books and to write serious academic research papers, and some teachers will want to help them with that, and surely room can be found somewhere in our economy, and even in our government, for people who do that sort of thing.
Nevertheless, Americans have always been noted for their high likability skills. People in other countries have often noted that while Americans may be ignorant and thoughtless, they are at least likable, and we should be sure not to give up that important advantage, even as other countries like China, India, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan (CHIKSAT) gradually bury us economically, by means of the complete and rigorous academic schooling they are now requiring millions of their students to complete.
If the 20th century proves to be the last and only American Century, and even if other countries stop lending us their money to prop us up, at least we will slide back behind other nations and other cultures with a nice (likable) smile on our faces...
Sometime last year, while negotiating a teacher contract for the KIPP Ujima Village charter middle school in Baltimore, founder Jason Botel pointed out that his students, mostly from low- income families, had earned the city's highest public school test scores three years in a row. If the union insisted on increasing overtime pay, he said, the school could not afford the extra instruction time that was a key to its success, and student achievement would suffer.
Botel says a union official replied: "That's not our problem."
Such stories heat the blood of union critics. It is, they contend, a sign of how unions dumb down public education by focusing on salaries, not learning.
Baltimore Teachers Union President Marietta English, who was at the meeting, denied Botel's account. But, she added, teacher salaries and working conditions are her priority as a negotiator. I think the union leader is right.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that's what they want to do.
Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its "rubber rooms"--off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.
The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues --pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.
"You just basically sit there for eight hours," said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-2005. "I saw several near-fights. 'This is my seat.' 'I've been sitting here for six months.' That sort of thing."
Ramos was an assistant principal in East Harlem when he was accused of lying at a hearing on whether to suspend a student. Ramos denied the allegation but quit before his case was resolved and took a job in California.
Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.
"It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract," spokeswoman Ann Forte said.
City officials said that they make teachers report to a rubber room instead of sending they home because the union contract requires that they be allowed to continue in their jobs in some fashion while their cases are being heard. The contract does not permit them to be given other work.
Ron Davis, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, said the union and the Department of Education reached an agreement last year to try to reduce the amount of time educators spend in reassignment centers, but progress has been slow.
"No one wants teachers who don't belong in the classroom. However, we cannot neglect the teachers' rights to due process," Davis said. The union represents more than 228,000 employees, including nearly 90,000 teachers.
Many teachers say they are being punished because they ran afoul of a vindictive boss or because they blew the whistle when somebody fudged test scores.
"The principal wants you out, you're gone," said Michael Thomas, a high school math teacher who has been in a reassignment center for 14 months after accusing an assistant principal of tinkering with test results.
City education officials deny teachers are unfairly targeted but say there has been an effort under Mayor Michael Bloomberg to get incompetents out of the classroom. "There's been a push to report anything that you see wrong," Forte said.
Some other school systems likewise pay teachers to do nothing.
The Los Angeles district, the nation's second-largest school system with 620,000 students, behind New York's 1.1 million, said it has 178 teachers and other staff members who are being "housed" while they wait for misconduct charges to be resolved.
Similarly, Mimi Shapiro, who is now retired, said she was assigned to sit in what Philadelphia calls a "cluster office." "They just sit you in a room in a hard chair," she said, "and you just sit."
Teacher advocates say New York's rubber rooms are more extensive than anything that exists elsewhere.
Teachers awaiting disciplinary hearings around the nation typically are sent home, with or without pay, Karen Horwitz, a former Chicago-area teacher who founded the National Association for the Prevention of Teacher Abuse. Some districts find non-classroom work-- office duties, for example--for teachers accused of misconduct.
New York City's reassignment centers have existed since the late 1990s, Forte said. But the number of employees assigned to them has ballooned since Bloomberg won more control over the schools in 2002. Most of those sent to rubber rooms are teachers; others are assistant principals, social workers, psychologists and secretaries.
Once their hearings are over, they are either sent back to the classroom or fired. But because their cases are heard by 23 arbitrators who work only five days a month, stints of two or three years in a rubber room are common, and some teachers have been there for five or six.
The nickname refers to the padded cells of old insane asylums. Some teachers say that is fitting, since some of the inhabitants are unstable and don't belong in the classroom. They add that being in a rubber room itself is bad for your mental health.
"Most people in that room are depressed," said Jennifer Saunders, a high school teacher who was in a reassignment center from 2005 to 2008. Saunders said she was charged with petty infractions in an effort to get rid of her: "I was charged with having a student sit in my class with a hat on, singing."
The rubber rooms are monitored, some more strictly than others, teachers said.
"There was a bar across the street," Saunders said. "Teachers would sneak out and hang out there for hours."
Judith Cohen, an art teacher who has been in a rubber room near Madison Square Garden for three years, said she passes the time by painting watercolors of her fellow detainees.
"The day just seemed to crawl by until I started painting," Cohen said, adding that others read, play dominoes or sleep. Cohen said she was charged with using abusive language when a girl cut her with scissors.
Some sell real estate, earn graduate degrees or teach each other yoga and tai chi.
David Suker, who has been in a Brooklyn reassignment center for three months, said he has used the time to plan summer trips to Alaska, Cape Cod and Costa Rica. Suker said he was falsely accused of throwing a girl's test sign-up form in the garbage during an argument.
"It's sort of peaceful knowing that you're going to work to do nothing," he said.
Philip Nobile is a journalist who has written for New York Magazine and the Village Voice and is known for his scathing criticism of public figures. A teacher at Brooklyn's Cobble Hill School of American Studies, Nobile was assigned to a rubber room in 2007, "supposedly for pushing a boy while I was breaking up a fight." He contends the school system is retaliating against him for exposing wrongdoing.
He is spending his time working on his case and writing magazine articles and a novel.
"This is what happens to political prisoners throughout history," he said, alluding to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. "They put us in prison and we write our 'Letter From the Birmingham Jail.'"
In the late '90s, software entrepreneur John Zitzner was pretty close to being bankrupt. Yet within six months -- in one of those typical "holy crap" dotcom-era stories -- Zitzner had sold his company and become "a very modest millionaire." Fantastic. And in one of those typical "What do I do with all this money?" stories, he decided to help make the world a better place -- specifically by co-founding a charter school in Cleveland. (Read TIME's report: "How to Raise the Standard in America's Schools.")
That was three summers ago. Fast-forward to last Monday, when Zitzner was in the audience in Washington as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appealed to a gathering of charter-school operators to "adapt your educational model to turning around our lowest-performing schools." For months now, Duncan has talked about closing 5,000 -- or about 5% -- of the nation's lowest-performing public schools. By throwing down the gauntlet to charter schools, Duncan is challenging an industry that has become very proficient at opening up brand-new schools, but has very little experience in going into a preexisting school and turning those kids from low performers into high-quality students. But Zitzner, whose Entrepreneurship Preparatory has about 200 students in grades 6 to 8, can't wait to dive in. In the past three years his students have gone from fairly abysmal test results to scoring in the top quartile on the Ohio standardized test, and he doesn't see why that model can't be replicated among other underperforming students. "Charter-school people are entrepreneurs -- we like challenges, and this industry needs people who can make order out of chaos."
Tom Menino, the longtime Democratic mayor of this city, is not known for rocking the boat or for eloquence. But earlier this month he stunned many in the city when he gave a powerful speech about school reform.
The speech took aim at the lack of progress in dozens of low-performing, inner-city Boston public schools, many of which have not met adequate yearly progress for five years running.
"To get the results we seek -- at the speed we want -- we must make transformative changes that boost achievement for students, improve quality choices for parents, and increase opportunities for teachers," Mr. Menino said. "We need to empower our educators to quickly innovate and implement what works." With that, Mr. Menino abandoned nearly two decades of personal opposition to nonunion charter schools, which have been bitterly resisted by Massachusetts teachers unions and their political allies. "I believe that the increased flexibility that charters provide can . . . help us close the achievement gap," he declared.
Washington--Ten moderate Senate Democrats today sent a letter to President Barack Obama voicing support for his key education goals and pledging to "lend our voices to the debate as proponents of education reform."
The letter was initiated by Senators Evan Bayh (D-IN), Tom Carper (D-DE), and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), leaders of the Senate Moderate Dems Working Group, and signed by seven of their moderate colleagues.
"As legislators, we believe we must embrace promising new approaches to education policy if we are to prepare our children to fill the jobs of the future," they wrote to President Obama. "By 2016, four out of every 10 new American jobs will require at least some advanced education or training. To retain our global economic leadership, we share your sense of urgency in moving an education reform agenda through Congress."
Saying that "now is the time to explore new paths and reject stale thinking," the moderate Democrats commended President Obama for his focus on teacher quality and noted a recent report by McKinsey and Company that highlights the achievement gaps that persist among various economic, regional and racial backgrounds in the United States and the gaps between American students and their peers in other industrialized nations. Based on this report, the senators noted that "had the United States closed the gap in education achievement with better-performing nations like Finland, Iceland, and Poland, our GDP could have been up to $2.3 trillion higher last year."
The senators expressed support for new pay-for-performance teacher incentives and expansions of effective public charter schools. They also endorsed the Obama administration's desire to extend student learning time to stay globally competitive and called for investments in state-of-the-art data systems so school systems can track student performance across grades, schools, towns and teachers.
Other signatories on the letter include Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Mark Warner (D-VA) and Herb Kohl (D-WI).
"Our nation must confront the growing challenges of an increasingly competitive global economy: an outdated health care system in need of reform, an energy policy requiring an overhaul, and an economy still on the road to recovery," the 10 senators wrote. "We will not be equal to the extraordinary task before us without a public school system that offers our children the tools needed to reach their potential."
The text of the letter to President Obama is below. Click here for a signed copy.
June 25th, 2009
The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President:
There is no issue more intricately connected to the future prosperity of our nation than the quality of our public schools. While the latest data show that elementary school students have made promising gains in reading and math, academic achievement is far too low for too many students and over 1.2 million students drop out of high school every year.
As members of the Moderate Democrats Working Group in the United States Senate, we are writing to offer our cooperation in developing legislation to enact a number of ambitious, innovative proposals in your education reform agenda. We plan to lend our voices to the debate as proponents of education reform as we move through this year's appropriations process and reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
We are committed to addressing the educational achievement gaps that persist among groups of various economic, regional and racial backgrounds and between the United States and other industrialized nations. These achievement gaps have imposed "the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession" on our country, according to a recent report by McKinsey & Company. Had the United States closed the gap in education achievement with better-performing nations like Finland, Iceland, and Poland, our GDP could have been up to $2.3 trillion higher last year, the report finds.
Solving today's economic challenges means creating new jobs and investing in the growth industries of tomorrow. As legislators, we believe we must embrace promising new approaches to education policy if we are to prepare our children to fill the jobs of the future. By 2016, four out of every 10 new American jobs will require at least some advanced education or training. To retain our global economic leadership, we share your sense of urgency in moving an education reform agenda through Congress.
We support action on a number of education reform proposals put forth in your Fiscal Year 2010 budget proposal. We commend you for the emphasis you have placed on teacher quality. Every teacher touches the lives of countless children, and every adult remembers their favorite teachers and the impact they had. The research confirms what our intuition tells us: nothing has a greater impact on outcomes in the classroom than the quality of our teachers. We must do more to recruit, prepare and reward outstanding teachers, and part of that means overhauling the way we compensate them. Most professions recognize and reward better performance with better pay, but teacher compensation is based almost exclusively on degree attainment and years of service.
We therefore share your support for dedicating increased resources to the Teacher Incentive Fund, which will spur states to develop new ways to identify and retain excellent teachers and attract new talent to the profession. We believe that resources from this fund should support states and districts that recognize student achievement to be the most important indicator of an educator's performance. We look forward to working collaboratively with teachers to develop these new compensation systems--a critical ingredient to their success.
Second, we support expanding the number of effective public charter schools. Like traditional public schools, charter schools vary greatly in quality. We should encourage the replication of the highest-performing public charters and ensure real accountability measures for those who oversee them. We all have charter schools in our states that have demonstrated--through innovative and student-centered approaches--that every child can learn, regardless of socio-economic background. Conversely, charter schools that consistently fail our children should be shut down.
Third, we support your Administration's desire to extend student learning time. The American school year is based on the old agrarian calendar, which gave children two months off to help work on the family farm. Students lose an average of 2.6 months of grade-level equivalency in math skills over the summer --a phenomenon referred to as the "summer slide." While American boys and girls slide, students in China receive an additional 40 days of classroom instruction. We cannot expect to compete with emerging nations when we devote less time to educating our next generation.
Fourth, we believe our education reform agenda should be driven by accurate information, which will require the development of state-of-the-art data systems. Many schools, educators and policymakers currently lack information critical to informed decision-making. We must invest in new data systems that track individual student performance across grades, schools, towns and teachers. Such systems will allow us to examine the pedagogical background of our most successful teachers and find new ways to support that training. Our goal is to achieve the capacity to view, with the click of a button, the path every child has taken through their academic life, linking their achievements and setbacks to every school and classroom they pass through.
We have no illusions that the road to education reform will be free of obstacles. However, we pledge to work in the Senate to lead the fight for accountability and high standards for all students. Every child can learn, and expectations matter. We should endeavor to fulfill the potential of all of our young people, not merely those born to greater privilege. While there are many practical steps we can and must take to strengthen our nation's education policy, now is the time to explore new paths and reject stale thinking. Our country's economic well-being depends upon the quality of the education our children are receiving in classrooms across America today.
Our nation must confront the growing challenges of an increasingly competitive global economy: an outdated health care system in need of reform, an energy policy requiring an overhaul, and an economy still on the road to recovery. We will not be equal to the extraordinary task before us without a public school system that offers our children the tools needed to reach their potential. We thank you for leading us down the path to education reform and stand ready to contribute our ideas and energy as we work together to enact an agenda for change.
The Rhode Island House Finance Committee budget unveiled last week slashed $1.5 million for two new charter schools in Central Falls and Cumberland, both of which would serve minority students.
This is a tough year, and cuts must be made. But slashing these funds -- a tiny part of a proposed $7.76 billion budget -- makes little sense, given that freezing out charter schools would put in jeopardy federal aid under the Race to the Top Program, a $5 billion Washington initiative that rewards innovation in education. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said on Monday that Rhode Island may be putting itself at "at a huge competitive disadvantage" for the money.
Innovation in education may be why the two charters, the Mayoral Academy and the Segue Institute for Learning, were spurned. Teachers unions testified against the proposed Mayoral Academy for fear that it would threaten their economic interests, since the school would be permitted to hire and fire teachers without union red tape. A similar school in Harlem has done wonders in helping minority students achieve at a level comparable with students in excellent suburban schools.
Every year, Jay Mathews compiles The Challenge Index, a ranking of schools based on a simple formula - the number of AP, IB, and other college-level tests given out at any given high school divided by the total number of graduating seniors from that school year. The index is not meant to be comprehensive but to give parents, teachers, and students an idea of how much a high school challenges its students.
This week, the blog Schools Matter featured an essay by user teacherken calling foul on Jay's index. Teacherken, who says he is a high school AP U.S. Government and Politics teacher and actually graded AP tests this year, makes a case against The Challenge Index, arguing that schools challenge students in many more ways than just through AP and IB tests:
To make classes more manageable, administrators have enrolled some especially challenging students in Locke 4, an academy whose Opportunities program consists of three classrooms set aside for students who are doing poorly or displaying serious behavior problems. The program also accepts students returning after being convicted of crimes.
On a recent Monday, 14 students sat in an Opportunities class with one teacher and an aide -- Green Dot wanted especially small adult-to-student ratios for these youths. The posted class rules were simple: Stay seated during class; complete all of your work; be polite and respectful.
These expectations failed to achieve traction with several students, including a recently arriving freshman.
"Do you need help?" the teacher asked him.
"You need help," he retorted, looking around for admiration from his peers. "You know, lady, I don't like you."
The group was assigned to organize an essay on juvenile justice after reviewing case studies of four young offenders. If students actually write the essay, they'll get extra credit.
One table over from the ninth-grader, a wiry boy with slicked-back hair said he had landed in Locke 4 after punching a school security guard. He considers gang membership necessary to survive: "That's almost part of life."
Then he paused and offered something close to an endorsement of the new Locke: "Other schools, you have your enemies all the time. In this school everybody gets along. People talk to Bloods and Crips."
RACE AND ACHIEVEMENT
Rigor Recommendation: Develop a clear, consistent operational/working definition of rigor to be used at ETHS.
Supporting Detail:
Communicate the definition of rigor to all ETHS stakeholders. (Means of communication to include, e.g., ETHS website/newsletters and displaying definition of rigor in every classroom and in other locations.)
Ensure a common understanding of rigor by other means, including providing opportunities for all ETHS stakeholders to discuss and better understand the meaning of rigor and what it entails in different ETHS departments, the different expectations associated with rigor by different ETHS stakeholders, and the varying responsibilities of ETHS stakeholders to ensure that rigor is experience by students.
Identify the components of a rigorous classroom and provide illustrations thereof for each ETHS department, including curriculum/assignments, instructional techniques, behavioral expectations, and classroom dynamics/interaction.
Ensure that rigor is provided and experienced in ETHS classrooms by means of classroom observations conducted by outside experts andlor by other appropriate means.
Create and utilize diagnostics to monitor/assess the extent to which rigor actually is being provided at ETHS, to enable teachers to improve the rigor of their classes, and to identify areas where other improvement(s) may be needed. Such diagnostics should include, e. g., assessments that teachers can use in their classrooms to evaluate students' experience of rigor and other questionnaires to be completed by students.
resident Obama, in his May 21 speech at the National Archives Museum in Washington said that "we can defeat Al Qaeda ...if we stay true to who we are...anchored in our timeless ideals." A much more somber note, however, was in a warning by retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter the day before at Georgetown University Law Center.
Deeply concerned at how little knowledge Americans have of how this republic works, Justice Souter cited as an example that the majorities of the public can't name -- according to surveys -- the three branches of government.
Who we are, Souter continued, "can be lost, it is being lost, it is lost, if it is not understood." What is needed, he said, "is the restoration of the self-identity of the American people. ... When I was a kid in the eighth and ninth grades, everybody took civics. That's no longer true. (Former Justice) Sandra Day O'Connor says 50 percent of schools teach neither history nor civics." Justice Souter continued that when he was in school, "civics was as dull as dishwater, but we knew the structure of government."
This alert to the citizenry was almost entirely ignored by the press.
Admirably, O'Connor is trying to engage students in learning who they are as Americans through her Web site: Our Courts - 21st Century Civics (www.ourcourts.org). The site asks students what part of government they would most want to be a part of. And she invites teachers to click and "find lesson plans that fit your classroom needs."
"I'm sure the civil libertarians will object to some kind of biometric card -- although . . . there'll be all kinds of protections -- but we're going to have to do it. It's the only way," Schumer said. "The American people will never accept immigration reform unless they truly believe their government is committed to ending future illegal immigration."
School-aid shift: Democrats added a shift in school-aid funding that would guarantee that no district loses more than 10% of state aid. The shift would give the Madison School District up to $1.8 million more, and take about that much from five Milwaukee-area suburban districts - Elmbrook, Oconomowoc, Mequon-Thiensville, Fox Point-Bayside and Nicolet.
QEO: The committee adopted a Senate-backed plan for an immediate repeal of the qualified economic offer system of limiting teachers' pay raises. Doyle and the Assembly proposed a delay of the repeal until the 2010-'11 school year. Teachers have long complained that the QEO has unfairly kept salaries low; others say it keeps property taxes in check.
It will be interesting to see how the shift of money for Madison, at the expense of others plays out as state politics inevitably change...
When it opened its doors in 2006, Philadelphia's School of the Future (SOF) was touted as a high school that would revolutionize education: It would teach at-risk students critical 21st-century skills needed for college and the work force by emphasizing project-based learning, technology, and community involvement. But three years, three superintendents, four principals, and countless problems later, experts at a May 28 panel discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) agreed: The Microsoft-inspired project has been a failure so far.
Microsoft points to the school's rapid turnover in leadership as the key reason for this failure, but other observers question why the company did not take a more active role in translating its vision for the school into reality. Regardless of where the responsibility lies, the project's failure to date offers several cautionary lessons in school reform--and panelists wondered if the school could use these lessons to succeed in the future.
After working for the federal government in Washington, DC for two years, I was excited to move back to the Midwest. Returning to study public policy and law, I specifically came to learn more about state's rights from the practical, decent state of Wisconsin. This past year I kept a close eye on state news, even more so as the biennial budget process began. How does Wisconsin make the biennial budget? What does the final budget look like?
The Legislative Reference Bureau seems like a better place to start than the federal level Schoolhouse Rock tutorial. The process of creating the Wisconsin budget is fairly simple - it follows the general legislative process, except in this case the process begins with the Governor. As the chief executive for the state, the Governor collects agencies' estimates on their expenses. Once the Governor matches budget priorities to the expected revenues, the Joint Finance Committee takes the proposal to amend, review, and debate in a small committee. Once voted on by members of the joint committee, each chamber gets a chance to amend, review, and vote on the budget.
So the process itself doesn't sound too complicated - what about the length of the timeline? Perhaps showing my age, this is the first state budget I've followed. The process is clearly not meant to proceed quickly. The purpose of going slowly no doubt comes from the size of the task, compiling all state agencies' budgets and crafting budget priorities. Why force deliberation? I would imagine (and hope) slowing the process would limit rash decisions and promote a rational and well-justified budget. The biennial budget has long-ranging impacts, so the proposal usually is given plenty of time.
Waters and Obey have had an ongoing dispute about an earmark for a public school employment training center in Los Angeles that was named after Waters when she was a state representative.
Obey rejected that earmark as violating policies against so-called "monuments to me." Waters revised her request to go to the school district's whole adult employment training program, so the district could decide whether the money would go to the school named after Waters.
Thursday was the committee markup of the spending bill that would include the earmark, and Obey let it be known that the earmark would be denied. She approached him and complained.
The U.S. Supreme Court took a major step toward ending a 17-year legal battle today, deciding Arizona has done enough to help students who haven't learned to speak, read or write English.
The justices reversed the decision of the lower courts and sent the case, known as Flores vs. Arizona, back with instructions to consider improvements the state has made in the way schools teach English learners.
"This is a major step to stop federal trial judges from micromanaging state education systems," said state schools superintendent Tom Horne, who asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the case. "This affirms that important value that we the people control our government and our elected representatives and not ruled over by an aristocracy of lifetime federal judges."
The Supreme Court decided the lower courts concentrated too narrowly on how much the state spent to help language learners and allowed that increases in overall school funding could be considered as a boost to help schools take the appropriate action called for in federal law.
The decision did not weaken Equal Education Opportunity Act of 1974, as some civil rights attorneys feared. But the justices' said simply complying with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 did help to satisfy the requirements in the 1974 law to "take appropriate action" to help students overcome language barriers.
Charles J. Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 245-247
Ironically, "outcomes" were first raised to prominence by leaders of the conservative educational reform movement of the 1980s. Championed by Chester E. Finn, Jr. among others, reformers argued that the obsession with inputs (dollars spent, books bought, staff hired) focused on the wrong end of the educational pipeline. Reformers insisted that schools could be made more effective and accountable by shifting emphasis to outcomes (what children actually learned). Finn's emphasis on outcomes was designed explicitly to make schools more accountable by creating specific and verifiable educational objectives in subjects like math, science, history, geography, and English. In retrospect, the intellectual debate over accountability was won by the conservatives. Indeed, conservatives were so successful in advancing their case that the term "outcomes" has become a virtually irresistible tool for academic reform.
The irony is that, in practice, the educational philosophies known as Outcome Based Education have little if anything in common with those original goals. To the contrary, OBE--with its hostility to competition, traditional measures of progress, and to academic disciplines in general--can more accurately be described as part of a counterreformation, a reaction against those attempts to make schools more accountable and effective. The OBE being sold to schools represents, in effect, a semantic hijacking.
"The conservative education reform of the 1980s wanted to focus on outcomes (i.e. knowledge gained) instead of inputs (i.e. dollars spent)," notes former Education Secretary William Bennett. "The aim was to ensure greater accountability. What the education establishment has done is to appropriate the term but change the intent." [emphasis added] Central to this semantic hijacking is OBE's shift of outcomes from cognitive knowledge to goals centering on values, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings. As an example of a rigorous cognitive outcome (the sort the original reformers had in mind), Bennett cites the Advanced Placement Examinations, which give students credit for courses based on their knowledge and proficiency in a subject area, rather than on their accumulated "seat-time" in a classroom.
In contrast, OBE programs are less interested in whether students know the origins of the Civil War or the author of The Tempest than whether students have met such outcomes as "establishing priorities to balance multiple life roles" (a goal in Pennsylvania) or "positive self-concept" (a goal in Kentucky). Where the original reformers aimed at accountability, OBE makes it difficult if not impossible to objectively measure and compare educational progress. In large part, this is because instead of clearly stated, verifiable outcomes, OBE goals are often diffuse, fuzzy, and ill-defined--loaded with educationist jargon like "holistic learning," "whole-child development," and "interpersonal competencies."
Where original reformers emphasized schools that work, OBE is experimental. Despite the enthusiasm of educationists and policymakers for OBE, researchers from the University of Minnesota concluded that "research documenting its effects is fairly rare." At the state level, it was difficult to find any documentation of whether OBE worked or not and the information that was available was largely subjective. Professor Jean King of the University of Minnesota's College of Education describes support for the implementation of OBE as being "almost like a religion--that you believe in this and if you believe in it hard enough, it will be true." And finally, where the original reformers saw an emphasis on outcomes as a way to return to educational basics, OBE has become, in Bennett's words, "a Trojan Horse for social engineering, an elementary and secondary school version of the kind of 'politically correct' thinking that has infected our colleges and universities."
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"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Separately, Pearson said it will also buy a 17% stake in TutorVista, a Bangalore-based online tutoring company that links Indian tutors with U.S. students.
TutorVista will issue new shares to Pearson as part of its third round of fundraising. It has already received funding from Manipal Educational and Medical Group and private equity fund LightSpeed Venture Partners.
Pearson says its stake in TutorVista will strengthen its position as a supplier of education tools in the U.S., TutorVista's core market.
AMERICA'S universities are the best in the world, but the kindest verdict on its schools is "could do better". It spends enough on them--around the rich-world average of 3.8% of GDP--but its pupils do poorly in tests of reading, writing and mathematics, and too many drop out before completing school. Teaching attracts few ambitious and able graduates; school leaders have little autonomy. The solution, to free-marketeers, seems obvious. Give taxpayers' money not to a state-run monopoly, but to independent schools.
Since Minnesota started the experiment in 1991, most states have introduced independent, or charter, schools in some form. Evaluations have been broadly positive, but their enemies, including the politically powerful teachers' unions, can fairly claim that more research is needed. Do charter schools' pupils do better at tests because they have been coached intensively at the expense of a broad education? Do charters mean the most motivated students cluster in a few schools, to the detriment of the majority? Do they kick out--or coax out--the toughest to teach?
A persistent gap in academic achievement between children in the United States and their counterparts in other countries deprived the US economy of as much as $2.3 trillion in economic output in 2008, McKinsey research finds.1 Moreover, each of the long-standing achievement gaps among US students of differing ethnic origins, income levels, and school systems represents hundreds of billions of dollars in unrealized economic gains. Together, these disturbing gaps underscore the staggering economic and social cost of underutilized human potential. Yet they also create room for hope by suggesting that the widespread application of best practices could secure a better, more equitable education for the country's children--along with substantial economic gains.
How has educational achievement changed in the United States since 1983, when the publication of the seminal US government report A Nation at Risk2 sounded the alarm about the "rising tide of mediocrity" in American schools? To learn the answer, we interviewed leading educational researchers around the world, assessed the landscape of academic research and educational-achievement data, and built an economic model that allowed us to examine the relationships among educational achievement (represented by standardized test scores), the earnings potential of workers, and GDP.
We made three noteworthy assumptions: test scores are the best available measure of educational achievement; educational achievement and attainment (including milestones such as graduation rates) are key drivers in hiring and are positively correlated with earnings; and labor markets will hire available workers with higher skills and education. While these assumptions admittedly simplify the socioeconomic complexities and uncertainties, they allowed us to draw meaningful conclusions about the economic impact of educational gaps in the United States.
As the Obama administration pushes for more charter schools, a teachers' union is pushing for a bigger role in them.
It's a new development for the charter school movement, a small but growing -- and controversial -- effort to create new, more autonomous public schools, usually in cities where traditional schools have failed.
On Tuesday in New York, the United Federation of Teachers expects to formalize a contract with teachers at Green Dot New York Charter School in the Bronx, a high school run by Green Dot, a nonprofit group that operates charter schools. Ten other New York charter schools are unionized.
And last week in Chicago, teachers voted to unionize three Chicago International Charter School campuses run by Civitas, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan made a point of talking about unions in a speech Monday in Washington to a national charter school conference.
Every three years, the Program for International Student Assessment ranks the education levels of 15-year-olds around the world. The most recent test, in 2006, brought back results from 30 industrialized nations that were hardly inspiring for U.S. teachers and parents. American students' science scores lagged behind those of their counterparts in 20 countries, including Finland, Japan, Germany and Belgium. The numbers from the math test were even worse: The U.S. came in 25th. The "rising tide of mediocrity" in American schools -- famously so described in 1983 by a government report called "A Nation at Risk" -- would now appear to be about chin-high.
In response to "A Nation at Risk," Terry Moe and John Chubb in 1990 published "Politics, Markets and America's Schools," which identified special-interest groups -- mainly teachers unions -- as the culprits in preventing the reforms urged in the report. Now Messrs. Moe and Chubb have returned to the subject with "Liberating Learning," a more optimistic sequel. The authors believe there exists a magic bullet that is capable of shattering the unions' political power and, at last, bringing the sort of reform and excellence to U.S. K-12 education that might make U.S. students competitive with Finnish teenagers. The ammunition? Technology.
First the banks; then the automobile companies, and now the schools. Planet Unicorn's most entertaining experiment, the United States, has truly fallen down the rabbit hole. All three are failed industries run by weak, overpaid, and disingenuous charlatans disguised as experts. Thank goodness for the occasional Bernie Madoff, or we'd never have any fun at all. At least the phony finance guys go to jail now and then, and most of us enjoyed watching the General Motors clod get kicked off the island after flying to Washington D.C. on a private jet to beg for taxpayer money, but amazingly the man in charge of the nation's worse urban school system gets promoted and is now in charge of all of our public schools. That is Lewis B. Carroll math to be sure, but it is the only arithmetic we have.
If Arne Duncan accomplished anything in Chicago besides avoiding the potholes in Hyde Park, it was the establishment of a handful of charter schools. The core value of the charter school is its freedom from union structure and restrictions. However, just last week the teachers at the three campuses of the Chicago International Charter School (CICS), voted to unionize. There were rumors and reports of increasing teacher workloads, larger and larger class sizes, and high personnel turnover in the magic kingdom of the charter schools. Furthermore, there is a bill sitting on the governor's desk that would make it easier for charters to go union. Duncan's school reform may have the same effect on us as Chinese food; we'll be hungry again in an hour.
Curiously, the day after the CICS voted in the union, Arne was in town at the Hyatt Regency as a guest of an educational policy group. Inside the hotel they probably gave him an award for his wonderful achievements in education, while outside, C.O.R.E., Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (a really scary name), was demonstrating against his wonderfulness. The Chicago teachers in the C.O.R.E. picket line were protesting the process by which a worm public school becomes a butterfly charter institution. Apparently the larvae stage is called: TURNAROUND.
In high schools in and around Washington, artificial turf is becoming an athletic status symbol.
Synthetic ballfields can be found at 10 public high schools in the District, seven in Anne Arundel County, four in Fairfax County and three in Arlington County. They have been installed at T.C. Williams High in Alexandria, Richard Montgomery High in Rockville, North Point High in Waldorf and a host of private and parochial schools. This summer and over the next school year, several more high schools will get artificial turf: Chesapeake and Old Mill in Anne Arundel, Lee in Fairfax, Bell-Lincoln in the District, and Walter Johnson and Montgomery Blair in Montgomery.
In most communities, the prospect of replacing real grass with plastic fiber and bits of shredded tire has prevailed with support from coaches and athletic boosters and little public dissent. But debate has emerged in Montgomery over such matters as how the turf deals were structured and whether tire crumbs from the fields might contaminate property nearby.
By a 6 to 3 vote, the court settled an emotional and contentious issue that has divided frustrated parents and financially strapped school officials, often ending in legal battles. In writing the opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens said Congress intended for the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act to provide an appropriate educational experience for all children, no matter whether they had ever received special-education services from a school system.
The issue has emerged as one of the fastest-growing components of local education budgets, threatening to "seriously deplete public education funds," according to a brief filed by the nation's urban school districts.
Local school systems in the Washington area spend millions of dollars each year on private school reimbursement. And the D.C. public schools allocated $7.5 million of this year's $783 million budget just for the legal costs of hearing officers or judges to decide whether the system can provide appropriate services for children with disabilities.
The plan was produced after nearly a year of work that involved hundreds of school representatives and community members.
The board earlier this year approved one change posed in the plan: staggered start times for elementary and secondary schools.
The suggested changes that the board will consider tonight include alternative schools for high school and middle school, and flagging at-risk students and tracking their progress through school electronically.
The plan also calls for the district to hire several more middle-school counselors, a public relations director and a grant writer. It outlines the creation of several new mentoring programs, including a School Within a School model that puts 25 at-risk pupils with one teacher as they move from middle school to high school.
The gym at Eberhart Elementary School is bright and spacious -- with high ceilings, several basketball hoops, even a large, colorful climbing wall.
But for much of the day, the gym doubles as a cafeteria where the school's 1,800-plus students are offered breakfast and lunch.
There's another gym on the fourth floor, but it's so old it has basketball hoops attached to ladders. Time and space limitations mean each class gets physical education just once a week for 40 minutes.
In the fight against childhood obesity, getting kids moving is one of the most effective ways to combat the problem. But only Illinois and Massachusetts require P.E. classes for all kids in kindergarten through 12th grade. And, as Eberhart's example shows, even those requirements sometimes are not enough.
"I understand the funding issue. I understand the space issue," said Betty Hale, one of two P.E. teachers at Eberhart. But "our children are getting shortchanged."
As a parent of three kids in public schools and as a legislator who has been fighting overreliance on the FCAT for almost a decade, I know overemphasis of the FCAT is doing more damage than good.
First, the problem is not that we have an FCAT -- but that we overemphasize it to the exclusion of other things that matter. The FCAT is the sole organizing principle of our school system. Because a school's grade is only indexed to how many students reach minimal competence in two or three subjects, minimal competence in a few subjects becomes the only metric our school system cares about.
How many parents want ''minimal competence'' as their kids' goal?
Performance in other subjects -- foreign languages, history, civics, higher-level courses -- does not raise a school's grade, so they are ignored. And forget about electives like art, music and subjects that make learning fuller. In Florida's underfunded school system, principles of triage leave those noncore subjects as mere afterthoughts -- if they are thought about at all.
Second, a June 2 Herald editorial, Schools offer a lesson in frugality, pointed to improvement in FCAT scores and Florida's ''top 10'' ranking as proof we can get by without real investment in education. That is incorrect. The editorial came close to drinking the Kool-Aid. The FCAT is no longer ''norm referenced,'' so we can no longer compare ourselves to students' performance in other states. If you do compare us to kids in other states taking SATs and ACTs, Florida's performance is almost always close to dead last -- and has gotten worse since the arrival of the heralded FCAT.
Hawaii conjures up images of palm-fringed beaches and tropical tranquility, but when Gail Awakuni joined James Campbell High School as principal in 2000, it was a place of gang fights, hoodlums and educational failure. The 2,000-pupil comprehensive school was bottom in the state.
"We had violence, the highest non-graduation rate of the state, the highest pregnancy rate, the highest number of dropouts," she says. "In our freshman class, 350 were being detained: they weren't being promoted from ninth to 10th grade. It was out of control."
Yet by 2007, Ms Awakuni and her staff had pushed graduation rates up from 86.4 per cent in 1999 to 98.9 per cent and the numbers going on to post-high school education from 57 per cent to 74 per cent. The amount earned by students in scholarships at colleges and universities soared from US$600,000 to US$7.3 million in the same period.
"This year has been record-breaking," says Ms Awakuni. "One pupil gained a perfect 800 out of 800 in the United States-wide colleges admissions test in maths, another got 760 and a third pupil got 750 in the verbal test."
Campbell High, which has pupils aged 15 to 18, earned Breakthrough School status in 2004 and Ms Awakuni, who reorganised the school into smaller learning communities, was awarded National Principal of the Year in 2004-5.
Newspaper reporters, a group to which I belonged until recently, usually don't write about old reports, unless of course the documents have been suppressed for years by nefarious government minions. If a reporter tells her editor she has found a neat piece of research from 2007 in the bottom of her drawer, the editor will tell her it isn't news and advise that she put a calendar in her cubicle.
I know. The title is sleep-inducing. But for the millions of people who care about community colleges -- including the nearly half of all U.S. college students who attend them -- it is a must-read.
State schools Superintendent-elect Tony Evers has named Michael Thompson, of Sun Prairie, as his deputy state superintendent.
Thompson, currently executive assistant at the Department of Public Instruction, holds a master's degree and doctorate in educational administration from UW-Madison.
Evers will be inaugurated July 6, at Hi-Mount Elementary School in Milwaukee, which he said was a symbolic location meant to bring "a singular focus to both the successes and challenges facing public education, not only in Milwaukee, but throughout the state."
Jennifer Thayer, currently director of curriculum and instruction for the Monroe School District, has been named as assistant state superintendent in the Division for Reading and Student Achievement. Evers' other cabinet members will include Sue Grady, executive assistant; and assistant state superintendents Richard Grobschmidt, Libraries, Technology and Community Learning; Deborah Mahaffey, Academic Excellence; Brian Pahnke, Finance and Management; and Carolyn Stanford Taylor, Learning Support: Equity and Advocacy.
Back in 2004, I did a story for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that found Milwaukee Public Schools was spending 51 cents on benefits for every dollar spent on salaries in 2003. That was projected to increase to 55 cents in 2004. Recently, JS reporter Alan Borsuk did a story noting (toward the back) that MPS was now up to 60 cents on benefits for every dollar in salary and this was expected to increase to 63 cents next year.
That's a mind-blowing trend. If it continues - and it will, unless major changes are made in its benefits structure - MPS will be forced to gut its staff, impose annual double-digit tax increases or both. The heart of the problem is health care: The plan for employees has few cost controls. And the plan for retirees (many
of whom get lifetime health insurance) is funded on a "pay-as-you-go" basis. The latter is an actuarial nightmare: Each year there are more retirees covered by the health insurance and ever-higher premiums, but the system hasn't put any money aside to pay for this growth, as a government pension plan normally does. So the costs have started to mushroom.
"Revolutionize Curriculum"? - Madison School's Proposed Strategic Plan
I supported use of the term "revolutionize curriculum" as part of the proposed Madison School District Strategic Plan. The words contained in the document can likely be used to support any number of initiatives.
I believe, in this day and age, we should strive to hire the best teachers (with content knowledge) available and let them do their jobs. One school district employee could certainly support an online knowledge network. Madison has no shortage of curricular assets, including the UW Math Department, History, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering, Sports and Languages. MATC, Edgewood College, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Whitewater and Northern Illinois are additional nearby resources.
Let us end the school year with congratulations to Yolimar Maldonado, Lizbeth Fernandez and Nikki Hill, all finishing their sophomore year at Milwaukee Hamilton High School.
To Kenyon Turner, a freshman who went to Bay View and then Community High School; Myha Truss, an eighth-grader at Roosevelt Middle School of the Arts; and Tyrece Toliver, a seventh-grader at the Milwaukee Education Center. And to dozens of other students in Milwaukee Public Schools, of whom this can be said:
They made strong progress this year in improving their reading, jumping ahead more than a grade, and, in some cases, several grades.
It wasn't easy, either for them or for their teachers.
And it wasn't cheap - MPS spent $3.2 million for 38 teachers to work in the reading improvement program this year, and that alone comes to more than $1,500 per student.
You could have a very substantial conversation about why they each were far behind grade level in reading going into the school year. None is a special education student. And almost all of them were still behind grade level at the end of the year, even with all the progress they made.
Nonetheless, applaud their success.
A program called Read 180 was the vehicle the students rode to better reading. It offers a strongly structured program, sessions on each student's level doing computer-led exercises in spelling and vocabulary, and strong, sometimes one-on-one involvement with a teacher.
It would be interest to compare Read 180's costs with another program: Reading Recovery.
Replacing large, poor-performing high schools with smaller schools in New York City has led to lower attendance and graduation rates at other large high schools, which have struggled to accommodate influxes of high-needs students, according to a report to be released on Wednesday.
Small schools, which cap enrollment at several hundred students and boast themes like environmental science and the performing arts, have emerged as a hallmark of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's education reform efforts. Over the past seven years, the city has closed more than two dozen large comprehensive high schools, which typically enroll thousands of students, and replaced them with smaller schools, which are supposed to foster more intimate relationships and higher student achievement.
The report, conducted by researchers at the New School's Center for New York City Affairs, does not dispute the success of small schools in improving graduation rates of needy students. But it argues that the city should do more to support comprehensive high schools, which have been saddled with large numbers of the high-needs students who do not enroll at small schools.
The 18-month study examined 34 large high schools and found that 14 of them had decreases in attendance and graduation rates from 2003 to 2008, when the number of small schools in the city multiplied.
AT Seattle Public Schools, our primary goal is to provide an education that prepares each student to graduate from high school ready for college, careers and life.
Elliot Ransom, a National Merit scholar from Ballard High School, plans to study engineering; Kenny Setiao dropped out of Cleveland High School, but returned to receive a scholarship to South Seattle Community College; and Nicole Davis won the prestigious National Merit Scholarship. The graduation of these and thousands of other students from Seattle Public Schools is a critical measure of our success as educators.
If college-ready graduation for all students is the goal, how do we get there? First, we have to admit that what we have been doing is not working for all students. Today, almost four in 10 students in Seattle don't graduate on time. In today's world, the benefits of postsecondary education have never been greater.
Second, we must recognize that getting ready for college starts long before students enter ninth grade. When students meet critical milestones -- entering kindergarten ready to learn, reading at grade level in third grade, taking algebra in eighth grade, and passing the WASL in 10th grade -- they are more likely to make it to graduation day. Our strategic plan [636K PDF], called Excellence for All, is our guide to reach this goal.
Interested readers might have a look at this Fall, 2005 Forum on Poverty organized by Rafael Gomez (audio/video). Former Madison School Board member Ray Allen participated. Ray mentioned that his daughter was repeatedly offered free breakfasts, even though she was fed at home prior to being dropped off at school. The event is worth checking out.
I had an opportunity to have lunch with Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad last summer. Prior to that meeting, I asked a number of teachers and principals what I should pass along. One of the comments I received is particularly relevant to Madison's proposed Strategic Plan:
Curriculum: greater rigor
Discipline: a higher bar, much higher bar, consistent expectations district wide, a willingness to wrestle with the negative impact of poverty on the habits of mind of our students and favor pragmatic over ideological solutions
Teacher inservice: at present these are insultingly infantile
Leadership: attract smart principals that are more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, mindful of the superintendent's "inner circle" and their closeness to or distance from the front lines (the classrooms)
I know these are general, but they are each so glaringly needy of our attention and problem solving efforts.
Are funds for education being spent wisely? Not according to United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who, in a broad-based interview with THE Journal June 12, stressed the importance of thinking differently about how we invest resources. "What [superintendents] do with the new money misses the point. What we really want to do is have folks rethink existing resources as well. And what I would argue in lots of places is that existing resources are not being spent as wisely as they could," he told THE Journal at a meeting held at the U.S. Department of Education's offices.
And this goes for technology. As "unprecedented money is being distributed to education," the Department has stressed wise investments that acknowledge the one-time nature of funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). Guidelines from the Department for all these funds point out the "funding cliff," and note, "These funds should be invested in ways that do not result in unsustainable continuing commitments after the funding expires."
The New York State Assembly is expected to pass a bill this week that would extend, and improve, Mayor Michael Bloomberg's direct control of New York City's school system. The legislation extends the powers that have allowed Mr. Bloomberg to bring order to a school system that was once known mainly for patronage and gridlock. It also allows for greater transparency and more input from parents and communities.
It would preserve the mayor's right to appoint a majority of the members of the board that advises him on school matters. But it also calls for several changes that would make that board slightly more independent and give it more of a voice in the policy-making process.
Mr. Bloomberg, for example, would be required to appoint parents to at least two of the eight seats that he controls on the 13-member board. Currently, the school system's chancellor, who serves at the mayor's pleasure, leads the board. The board would instead elect its own chairman. The board also would have broader powers and responsibilities, including greater authority over some procurement contracts. It would be required to hold well-publicized meetings at least once a month. In another step for accountability, the bill gives the city comptroller and the city's Independent Budget Office the authority to examine scores, dropout rates and other data.
Despite the fact that American students enjoy higher average family incomes and per-pupil funding, they consistently rank near the bottom in international examinations of high school achievement. Many researchers point to the United States' poor practices of recruiting, training, compensating, and retaining teachers. The highest-achieving countries tend to recruit their teachers from the top 5 percent of university graduates; however, on average, American K-12 schools recruit from the bottom third.
A growing body of research in the United States demonstrates that teacher quality makes a profound difference in student learning. Judging schools on a value-added basis, by measuring academic growth over time, reveals a profound need to attract high-quality teachers into American classrooms in large numbers. Students learning from three highly effective instructors in three successive grades learn 50 percent more than students who have three consecutive ineffective instructors. These results are consistent across subjects and occur after controlling for student factors. Teacher quality is 10 to 20 times more important than variation in average class sizes, within the observable range. Unfortunately, though, poor human resource practices lead high-quality teachers to cluster in leafy suburbs, far from the children most in need.
Harold O. Levy suggested five disparate ways to improve the educational system in America's schools. Only one of his suggestions, however, even remotely touched on the most fundamental aspect of this daunting challenge: improving our youngest students' reading skills as a means of instilling self-confidence and an interest in learning.
This is something that can be addressed now, without the major financing and structural changes needed to truly reform the system.
Gather up a group of eighth-graders, pop in a CD of George Gershwin's seminal Rhapsody in Blue and turn up the volume. Then ask: In those first few seconds, what keening, soaring, note-bending instrument do you hear?
When the federal government put this question to thousands of eighth-graders in 1997, only about half knew it was a clarinet. When they tried again last year, the results were the same.
If that newspaper thinks Stamford has taken too long to get rid of academic tracks for K-12 students, how would they report on the complete dominance of athletic tracking in schools all over the country? Not only does such athletic tracking take place in all our schools, but there is, at present, no real movement to eliminate it, unbelievable as that may seem.
Athletes in our school sports programs are routinely tracked into groups of students with similar ability, presumably to make their success in various sports matches, games, and contests more likely. But so far no attention is paid to the damage to the self-esteem of those student athletes whose lack of ability and coordination doom them to the lower athletic tracks, and even, in many cases, may deprive them of membership on school teams altogether.
It is also an open secret that many of our school athletic teams ignore diversity entirely, and make no effort to be sure that, for example, Asians and Caucasians are included, in proportion to their numbers in the general population, in football, basketball, and track teams. Athletic ability and success are allowed to overwhelm other important measures, and this must be taken into account in any serious Athletic Untracking effort.
In Stamford, some parents are opposed to the elimination of academic tracking, and have threatened to enroll their children in private schools. This problem would no doubt also arise in any serious Athletic Untracking program which could be introduced. Parents who spend money on private coaches for their children would not stand by and see the playing time of their young athletes cut back or even lost by any program to make all school sports teams composed of mixed-ability athletes.
The New York Times reports that "Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, said research is showing that all students benefit from mixed-ability classes."
Perhaps it will be argued that all athletes benefit from mixed-ability teams as well, but many would predict not only plenty of losing seasons for any schools which eliminate Athletic Tracking programs, but also very poor scholarship prospects for the best athletes who are involved in them. Just as students who are capable of excellent academic work are often sacrificed to the dream of an academic (Woebegone) world in which all are equal, so student athletes will find their skills and performance severely degraded by any Athletic Untracking program.
Nevertheless, when educators are more committed to diversity and equality of outcomes in classrooms than they are in academic achievement, they have eliminated academic tracking and set up mixed-ability classrooms.
Surely athletic directors and coaches can be made to see the supreme importance of some new diversity and equity initiatives as well, and persuaded, at the risk of losing their jobs, to develop and provide non-tracked athletic programs for our mixed-ability student athletes. After all, winning games may be fun, but, in the long run, people can be led to realize that being politically correct is much more worthwhile than real achievement in any endeavor in our public schools. As the Dean of a major School of Education recently informed me: "The myth of individual greatness is a myth." [sic] The time for the elimination of Athletic Tracking has now arrived!
Sixth graders at Cloonan Middle School here are assigned numbers based on their previous year’s standardized test scores — zeros indicate the highest performers, ones the middle, twos the lowest — that determine their academic classes for the next three years.
But this longstanding system for tracking children by academic ability for more effective teaching evolved into an uncomfortable caste system in which students were largely segregated by race and socioeconomic background, both inside and outside classrooms. Black and Hispanic students, for example, make up 46 percent of this year’s sixth grade, but are 78 percent of the twos and 7 percent of the zeros.
So in an unusual experiment, Cloonan mixed up its sixth-grade science and social studies classes last month, combining zeros and ones with twos. These mixed-ability classes have reported fewer behavior problems and better grades for struggling students, but have also drawn complaints of boredom from some high-performing students who say they are not learning as much.
The results illustrate the challenge facing this 15,000-student district just outside New York City, which is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Stamford sorted students into as many as 15 different levels; the current system of three to five levels at each of four middle schools will be replaced this fall by a two-tiered model, in which the top quarter of sixth graders will be enrolled in honors classes, the rest in college-prep classes. (A fifth middle school is a magnet school and has no tracking.)
The image of Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee on newsstands nationwide was causing an uproar among teachers, parents and other constituents. So D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray had to ask her, as she sat in his cavernous, wood-paneled office in December: "Michelle, why would you agree to be photographed with a broom on the cover of Time magazine?"
And he had a follow-up: "What does it get you, to constantly bash those you're trying to get to help you?"
Rhee explained that most of the shoot for the Dec. 8 issue involved images of her with children. The idea for the broom, which she gripped while standing stern-faced in front of a blackboard, came up near the end, she said, according to Gray's version of their meeting. She told Gray that it wasn't her first choice for the cover but that the decision wasn't hers. Gray wasn't satisfied.
"Why did you let the picture be taken in the first place?"
In her quest to upend and transform the District's long-broken school system, Rhee has acquired a sometimes-painful education of her own. The lessons, in many respects, tell the story of her tenure as her second school year draws to a close Monday: that money isn't everything; that political and corporate leaders need to be stroked, even if you don't work for them; that the best-intentioned reforms can trigger unintended consequences; and that national celebrity can create trouble at home.
've spent the last few months looking at marketing textbooks. I'm assuming that they are fairly representative of textbooks in general, and since this is a topic I'm interested in, it seemed like a good area to focus on.
As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.
They are expensive. $50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house. This is absurd on its face. There's no serious insight or leap in pedagogy involved in writing a standard textbook. That's what makes it standard. It's hard, but it shouldn't make you a millionaire.
They don't make change. Textbooks have very little narrative. They don't take you from a place of ignorance to a place of insight. Instead, even the best marketing textbooks surround you with a fairly non-connected series of vocabulary words, oversimplified problems and random examples.
They're out of date and don't match the course. The 2009-2010 edition of the MKTG textbook, which is the hippest I could find, has no entries in the index for Google, Twitter, or even Permission Marketing.
They don't sell the topic. Textbooks today are a lot more colorful and breezy than they used to be, but they are far from engaging or inspirational. No one puts down a textbook and says, "yes, this is what I want to do!"
This graphic, from Boeing's Current Market Outlook (2009-2028) provides a very useful look at the changes our children are facing. The Asia Pacific region is forecast to take delivery of more airplanes than North America, with Europe close behind. We should substantively consider whether the current systems, curriculum and organizations, largely created in the Frederick Taylor model over 100 years ago, are up to the challenge....
Locally, the Madison School District's Proposed Strategic Plan will be discussed Monday evening.
To a significant degree talented and gifted students in our schools are under-served. These students are often left to do it on their own, particularly if that talent is in only one or two areas. Finally, there is something being done about that. Not only is the Global Academy going to be a reality, but surprise beyond belief, eight area school districts, including Madison, are actually cooperating and going to be part of the Global Academy. The presentation and discussion will focus on
What is the rationale and data to support this educational experience?
What school districts are involved and how will it be financed?
What students will be served by the Academy? How will students be selected?
What will be the curriculum and methodology for instruction?
Will these students be prepared for post high school education and work?
Will there be partnerships with MATC, other colleges and universities, community persons and organizations?
How will the students relate with their home schools?
Thanks to Jeff Henriques for recording this event.
Mathematics teachers in one coastal Connecticut school district were frustrated with students' inability to retain what they learned in Algebra I and apply it to Algebra II, so they decided to approach high school mathematics instruction in a new way. The teachers shrank the number of topics covered in each course by about half and published their custom-made curriculum online last fall, the New York Times reports.
The new curriculum's lessons were written by Westport, Conn., teachers and sent to HeyMath! of India, a company that adds graphics, animation, and sound to the lessons before posting them on the Web. But teachers say the new curriculum is as much about bringing classroom instruction into the digital age as it is about having the opportunity to teach students fewer concepts in greater depth.
Westport's decision to rewrite its math curriculum is part of a growing trend to re-evaluate "mile-wide, inch-deep" instruction. In 2006, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics pushed for more basic math skills instruction, and two years later a federal panel of investigators appointed by then President George W. Bush also urged schools to whittle down their elementary and middle school math curricula.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan threw his weight Wednesday behind a Text"common" education standard for all of America's schoolchildren, saying the current state-by-state system has produced uneven results in which some students "are totally, inadequately prepared to go into a competitive university, let alone graduate."
Mr. Duncan, who has been on a cross-country "listening tour" in preparation for submitting revisions for the No Child Left Behind Act, says he's encountered support for the idea of a national standard. "Teachers have been really positive on this idea of common standards," he said at a Monitor-sponsored breakfast for reporters. "That has played much better with teachers than I thought it would."
Gov. Sarah Palin has opted out of an effort to develop national education standards for reading and math curricula, a decision that has riled some but satisfied other Alaskan education officials, the Anchorage Daily News reports.
Forty-six states have agreed to help create the Common Core State Standards Initiative, an effort to allow states to compare their students' academic progress at each grade level using a single rubric. Alaska joins Missouri, South Carolina, and Texas on the shortlist of states that have bowed out of the attempt to form what many believe education in the United States has lacked for too long: a common denominator.
Carol Comeau, superintendent of the Anchorage School District, said she was disappointed in Palin's decision. Alaska's pupils have a right to know how they measure up against their peers in other parts of the country, Comeau said. The Anchorage School District serves nearly half of Alaska's 120,000 public school students.
Until recently, the young-adult fiction section at your local bookstore was a sea of nubile midriffs set against pink and turquoise backgrounds. Today's landscape features haunted girls staring out from dark or washed-out covers. Current young-adult best sellers include one suicide, one deadly car wreck, one life-threatening case of anorexia and one dystopian universe in which children fight to the death. Somewhere along the line our teenagers have become connoisseurs of disaster.
Jay Asher's "Thirteen Reasons Why," which is narrated by a dead girl, came out in March 2007 and remains on the bestseller list in hardcover. The book is the account of a fragile freshman named Hannah Baker who kills herself by overdosing on pills and sends audiotapes to the 13 people she holds responsible for making her miserable in the last year of her life. There may be parents who are alarmed that their 12-year-olds are reading about suicide, or librarians who want to keep the book off the shelves, but the story is clearly connecting with its audience--the book has sold over 200,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan.
For those young readers who find death by pill overdose inadequately gruesome, there's Gayle Forman's "If I Stay," which takes as its subject a disfiguring car wreck. The book has sold a robust 17,000 copies in its first two months on sale, and was optioned by Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the film "Twilight." The story follows an appealing cellist named Mia who goes on a drive to a bookstore with her unusually sympathetic ex-punk-rocker parents. When a truck barrels into their Buick, Mia hovers ghost-like over the scene. She sees her family's bodies crushed, then watches on as her own mangled body is bagged and rushed to the hospital. Lingering somewhere between this world and the next, Mia must decide whether to join her parents in the afterlife or go it alone in the real world. The brilliance of the book is the simplicity with which it captures the fundamental dilemma of adolescence: How does one separate from one's parents and forge an independent identity?
In a classroom with walls lined with bright pictures, Erin Conway's third- and fourth-grade students are working on mathematical word problems. For the first time in their relatively short educational careers, the problems are in English.
"I think I know the answer," a student tells Conway. But then he gives her the wrong answer.
"It's not that hard," Conway says, repeating the question to him in Spanish. The second time the student tells Conway the right answer.
The classroom looks the same as other third-grade classrooms. The top of the black chalkboard is bordered with the alphabet in cursive. Each number on the clock has its handwritten digital equivalent next to it. The student desks with attached chairs open up to reveal school supplies.
But the population of Conway's classroom makes it different. All of her 16 students are native Spanish speakers, in what's called a transitional education program.
As kindergartners at Leopold Elementary, on Madison's west side, the students were placed in classrooms where 90% of their academic instruction was given in Spanish and 10% in English. In second grade, 80% of their instruction was in Spanish and 20% in English.
The Obama Administration's $100 billion in "stimulus" for schools has mostly been a free lunch -- the cash dispensed by formula in return for vague promises of reform. So we were glad to hear that Education Secretary Arne Duncan is now planning to spend some of that money to press states on charter schools.
"States that don't have charter school laws, or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools, will jeopardize their application" for some $5 billion in federal grant money, Mr. Duncan said in a conference call with reporters this week. "Simply put, they put themselves at a competitive disadvantage for the largest pool of discretionary dollars states have ever had access to."
Charter schools improve public education by giving parents options and forcing schools to compete for students and resources. For low-income minority families, these schools are often the only chance at a decent education. Charters are nonetheless opposed by teachers unions and others who like the status quo, no matter how badly it's serving students. As a result, 10 states lack laws that allow charter schools (see nearby table), and 26 others cap charter enrollment.
To his credit, Mr. Duncan singled out some of the worst anticharter states. "Maine is one of 10 states without a charter schools law, but the state legislature has tabled a bill to create one," he said. "Tennessee has not moved on a bill to lift enrollment restrictions. Indiana's legislature is considering putting a moratorium on new charter schools. These actions are restricting reform, not encouraging it."
June means the end of high school and the start of summer. Perhaps there will be jobs or other chores, but, as James Russell Lowell wrote in The Vision of Sir Launfal, "what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days..."
Those rare June days are full of mild air, sunshine, leisure, and time, at last, for student to pick up that absorbing nonfiction book for which there has been no place in their high school curriculum.
Why is it that so many, if not most, of our high school graduates arrive in college without ever having read a single complete nonfiction book in high school, so that when they confront their college reading lists, full of such books, they are somewhat at sea?
The main reason is that the English department controls reading in most schools, and for most of them the only reading of interest is fiction, so that is all that students are asked to read.
For the boys, and now the girls too, who may soon serve in the military, and are interested in military history, they have to read the military history books they will enjoy on their own, after school or, better, in the summer. All the students who would love history books on any topic would do well to pick them up in the summer, when their other assignments, of fiction books and the like, cannot interfere.
The story of the world's work and the issues that trouble the world now (and in the past) can only be found in nonfiction books, and for students who can see the time coming when they will be responsible for the work of the world, those are the books which they should read, and have time to read, mainly in the summer months.
Summer reading of nonfiction books also means that when they return to their history, economics, sociology, and even their science and English classes in the fall, they will bring a more substantial and more nuanced understanding of the world they will be studying, with the benefit of the knowledge and appreciation they have gained in their nonfiction reading over the summer.
For those who are concerned with "Summer Loss"--the observed decline in student knowledge and skill over the summer months--the reading of nonfiction books brings a double benefit. The habit and the skill of reading significant material are refreshed and reinforced in that way, and knowledge is gained rather than drained away over the summer. And in addition, engagement with serious topics confirms young people in their primary role as students rather than "just kids" as they read over the summer.
Adults still buy and read a lot of nonfiction books, even in these days of the Internet/Web and Television, and students will have a much better chance of taking part in adult conversations over the summer if they are reading books too.
The objection will surely be raised in some quarters that reading nonfiction books in the summer is too much like work. One answer that could be offered is that, as reported in Diploma to Nowhere, more than a million of our high school graduates every year, who are accepted at colleges, are required to take remedial courses because they have not worked hard enough to be ready for regular courses. The problem then may actually be that our high schools are too much fun and not enough work and we give our diplomas to far too many "fools" as a result.
Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, cites K. Anders Ericsson's research on the difference between amateur and professional pianists, and writes: "Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top musical school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't just work harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder."
We see those who labor constantly to relieve our students from working too hard academically. They worry about stress, strain, overwork, joyless lives, etc. But that only seems to apply to academics. When it comes to sports, there is nearly universal satisfaction with young athletes who dedicate themselves to their fitness and the skills needed for their sport(s) not only after school, but during the summer as well.
While reading nonfiction books in the summer has not yet been widely accepted or required, high school athletes are expected to run, lift weights, stretch, and shoot hoops (or whatever it takes for their sports) as often in the summer as they can find the time. Perhaps if we applied the seriousness with which we take sports for young people to their pursuit of academic achievement, we would find more students reading complete nonfiction books in the summer and fewer needing remedial courses later.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Last fall, high-school senior Duane Wilson started getting Ds on assignments in his Advanced Placement history, psychology and literature classes. Like a smoke detector sensing fire, a school computer sounded an alarm.
The Edline system used by the Montgomery County, Md., Public Schools emailed each poor grade to his mother as soon as teachers logged it in. Coretta Brunton, Duane's mother, sat her son down for a stern talk. Duane hit the books and began earning Bs. He is headed to Atlanta's Morehouse College in the fall.
If it hadn't been for the tracking system, says the 17-year-old, "I might have failed and I wouldn't be going to college next year."
Montgomery County has made progress in improving the lagging academic performance of African-American and Hispanic students. See data.
Montgomery spends $47 million a year on technology like Edline. It is at the vanguard of what is known as the "data-driven" movement in U.S. education -- an approach that builds on the heavy testing of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law. Using district-issued Palm Pilots, for instance, teachers can pull up detailed snapshots of each student's progress on tests and other measures of proficiency.
The high-tech strategy, which uses intensified assessments and the real-time collection of test scores, grades and other data to identify problems and speed up interventions, has just received a huge boost from President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
In the year that the Waukesha School District laid off all but one staff member devoted to gifted and talented education, identification of students for the gifted program dropped 29%, according to an audit by the state Department of Public Instruction.
Nominations of students for the gifted program dropped even more -- by 65% -- in the 2007-'08 school year. This followed a school year in which nominations and identifications already were down from the year before.
At the time they made the GT staff cuts, Waukesha school board members said they hoped that regular classroom teachers would take on the task of providing special programming for gifted students, as required by state law.
But district officials acknowledge difficulty without speciality staff.
"Any time you have budget reductions it is going to have an effect," Ben Hunsanger, Waukesha's new GT coordinator, said in an e-mail. "There was a drop in GT identifications because we lost GT resource teachers. The GT student population also lost direct resources as a result of the staffing reductions."
hese were not multiple-choice tests that computers grade in seconds. They were thick "portfolio" tests representing a year's worth of student worksheets, quizzes and activities. The time-intensive evaluations have proliferated in recent years in response to the testing requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The District and many states, including Maryland and Virginia, use portfolios for students with serious cognitive disabilities. But Virginia has gone much further, expanding their use for students with learning disabilities or beginning English skills. Statewide, the number of math and reading portfolios submitted for such students nearly doubled in a year, from 15,400 in 2006-07 to more than 30,000 in 2007-08, and state officials predict another jump this school year.
Portfolios have long been used for in-depth evaluations because they can gauge more skills and higher-order thinking. Many educators say the year-long portfolios are a fairer way to measure what some students know than a one-day snapshot.
"We all learn differently," said Patrick K. Murphy, assistant superintendent for accountability in Fairfax schools and Arlington County's incoming superintendent. "We also have to recognize there are different ways people can show proficiency beyond a multiple-choice test."
ut when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.
American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour's-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.
Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe's mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month's-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, "summer learning loss". This pedagogical understretch is exacerbating social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance.
Education reform will go nowhere until the states are forced to revamp corrupt teacher evaluation systems that rate a vast majority of teachers as "excellent," even in schools where children learn nothing. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was right to require the states that participate in the school stabilization fund, which is part of the federal education stimulus program, to show -- finally -- how student achievement is weighted in teacher evaluations. The states have long resisted such accountability, and Mr. Duncan will need to press them hard to ensure they live up to their commitment.
A startling new report from a nonpartisan New York research group known as The New Teacher Project lays out the scope of the problem. The study, titled "The Widget Effect," is based on surveys of more than 16,000 teachers and administrators in four states: Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois and Ohio.
The first problem it identifies is that evaluation sessions are often short, infrequent and pro forma -- typically two or fewer classroom observations totaling 60 minutes or less. The administrators who perform them are rarely trained to do the evaluations and are under intense pressure from colleagues not to be critical. Not surprisingly, nearly every teacher passes, and an overwhelming majority receives top ratings.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan knows there are dire problems with the U.S. school system. He sees no other issue as more pressing, and calls it "the civil rights issue of our generation."
Duncan shares his plan for a complete overhaul of the public schools.
"Textbooks are outdated, in my opinion," said the film-star-turned-politician. "For so many years, we've been trying to teach exactly the same way. Our children get their information from the internet, downloaded on to their iPods, and in Twitter feeds to their phones. Basically, kids feel as comfortable with their electronic devices as I was with my pencils and crayons
"So why are California's school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?"
State officials said textbooks typically cost between $75 (£46) and $100, far more than their digital equivalents.
A spokesman for Pearson said it has been planning for the switch from printed text to digital for a decade, but conceded that the company will collect less money per unit from digital sales. The company added the move would allow it to save money on printing and distribution costs.
I have been a slow, but generally pleased user of electronic books (stanza, kindle and open source) on my iphone. It is time to transition and save money....
Matthew Garrahan & Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson have more:
"But our students still learn from instructional materials in formats made possible by Gutenberg's printing press. It's nonsensical - and expensive - to look to traditional hard-bound books when information is so readily available in electronic form."
However, with California facing a record $24bn budget deficit the state could struggle with high start-up costs - particularly as Mr Schwarzenegger has pledged to make digital text books available to each of the state's 2m students.
"The main practicality is that until students have full and equal access to computers, this would be very difficult to phase in," wrote Citigroup analysts in a research note.
The state is one of the biggest purchasers of school textbooks in the world so the transition to digital learning could have big implications for publishers, such as Pearson, owner of the Financial Times.
Madison School Board OK's 1 More Year of Infinite Campus, with More Oversite
Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting included approval of another year of Infinite Campus along with (and this is quite important) a motion requiring that within six months, administration document use of IC and identify barriers to use where they exist, with the purpose of achieving 100% implementation by the end of 2012 or sooner.
Successful implementation of this student and parent information portal across all schools and teachers should be job one before any additional initiatives are attempted.
I spend much time with aggressive Advanced Placement teachers. They tell me, quite often, that students must be stretched beyond their assumed capabilities. Whenever I try to pass on this advice, however, I become a target for ridicule and disbelief from readers.
Here comes more of that stuff. Newsweek unveils this week my annual rankings of America's Top High Schools, with a new twist that skeptics will find even less congenial.
The latest list, to appear on newsweek.com, will include about 1,500 schools that have reached a high standard of participation on college-level AP, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests. The bad news is they represent less than 6 percent of U.S. public high schools. The good news is that 73 percent of Washington area schools are on the list. The interesting news is that some of those schools have begun to require AP courses and tests for all students, even those who struggle in class.
The nation's 4,500 charter schools, free to bend tradition in the name of innovation, are credited with some of the biggest leaps in education reform.
Waiting lists are getting longer. Enrollment has doubled. President Barack Obama wants more of the taxpayer-supported alternative schools as a way to restore America's worldwide education standing.
But in Iowa, charter schools have drawn attention for what's missing. The movement never took off, despite a $4.2 million infusion of federal money and a special law.
Of 10 schools that opened in the past five years, two have dropped their charters. Eight schools are left. Some resemble their traditional public school counterparts, despite their license to break the mold.
An Ohio school district says it uncovered a cheating scheme so pervasive that it had to cancel graduation ceremonies for its 60 seniors -- but will still mail their diplomas.
A senior at Centerburg High School accessed teachers' computers, found tests, printed them and distributed them to classmates, administrators said.
Graduation was canceled because so many seniors either cheated or knew about the cheating but failed to report it, said officials of the Centerburg School District.
Superintendent Dorothy Holden said the district had to take a stand and let students know that cheating can't be tolerated.
"I am alarmed that our kids can think that in society it's OK to cheat, it's a big prank, it's OK to turn away and not be a whistle-blower, not come forth," Holden said.
City University president Way Kuo came from a science background, but has a keen interest in educational work. When he was in the United States, he spent a lot of time on educational research despite his busy school administrative duties.
Professor Kuo recently published Clarifying Some Myths of Teaching and Research (Clusty), which he jointly penned with education psychologist Mark E Troy, detailing the results of a study on 10,000 students and 400 teachers.
The study explores the relationship between research work and quality of teaching, and explodes - or confirms - certain myths within education circles, as the book title suggests.
Kuo was invited by the Hong Kong University Graduates Association to give a speech on his new book, and many interesting education- related issues were raised during the talk.
One of the questions concerned whether scholars who engage in research work perform worse in teaching, and whether class size affects teaching performance.
AMERICAN education was once the best in the world. But today, our private and public universities are losing their competitive edge to foreign institutions, they are losing the advertising wars to for-profit colleges and they are losing control over their own admissions because of an ill-conceived ranking system. With the recession causing big state budget cuts, the situation in higher education has turned critical. Here are a few radical ideas to improve matters.
Raise the age of compulsory education. Twenty-six states require children to attend school until age 16, the rest until 17 or 18, but we should ensure that all children stay in school until age 19. Simply completing high school no longer provides students with an education sufficient for them to compete in the 21st-century economy. So every child should receive a year of post-secondary education.
The benefits of an extra year of schooling are beyond question: high school graduates can earn more than dropouts, have better health, more stable lives and a longer life expectancy. College graduates do even better. Just as we are moving toward a longer school day (where is it written that learning should end at 3 p.m.?) and a longer school year (does anyone really believe pupils need a three-month summer vacation?), so we should move to a longer school career.
The settlement was tentatively approved by board members last month on the heels of a March ruling by the Colorado Court of Appeals that the previous School Board violated the state's Open Meetings Law by not properly announcing the intention of its executive session at a Jan. 8, 2007, meeting. As a result of the ruling and settlement offer, the district will pay $50,000 of the newspaper's attorney fees and release the transcripts from the illegal meeting.
The motion to accept the settlement offer was approved 4-1 on Monday, with a couple of board members expressing satisfaction that the lawsuit is now behind them. Board member John DeVincentis was the only dissenting vote, but he wasn't the only one displeased with the outcome.
"education is the dullest of subjects," Jacques Barzun wrote in the very first sentence of his astonishingly fresh 1945 classic, Teacher in America. Barzun de- spised the idea of "professional educators" who focus on "methods" instead of subject matter. He loved teachers, but knew they "are born, not made," and that most teachers' colleges teach the wrong stuff.
Cut to 2009, when Barack Obama thinks education is the most exciting of subjects. Even so, Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, get Barzun. They understand that the key to fixing education is better teaching, and the key to better teaching is figuring out who can teach and who can't.
Just as Obama has leverage over the auto industry to impose tough fuel--economy standards, he now has at least some leverage over the education industry to impose teacher-effectiveness standards. The question is whether he will be able to use it, or will he get swallowed by what's known as the Blob, the collection of educrats and politicians who claim to support reform but remain fiercely committed to the status quo.
Teacher effectiveness-say it three times. Last week a group called the New Teacher Project released a report titled "The Widget Effect" that argues that teachers are viewed as indistinguishable widgets-states and districts are "indifferent to variations in teacher performance"-and notes that more than 99 percent of teachers are rated satisfactory. The whole country is like Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon, except all the teachers are above average, too.
Even when stats are reliable, they may not tell the whole picture. Aldritt pointed to the example of testing results, which may indicate more about success in teaching to a test than in overall education.
The irony of the poor survey results is that, at least according to Mr. Aldritt and independent statisticians, U.K. stats are generally reliable. He says the main problem comes in the beginning and end of the process -- "deciding which statistics should be published, and explaining how they should be used."
However, the authority will have to reserve judgment until it begins issuing its assessments, in the next month or so. And recent statistical snafus elsewhere illustrate that getting the basic numbers right isn't always easy. A government audit of South Korean statistics found that farms with thousands of chickens were reported as lacking the birds, and that unclaimed dead bodies weren't being included in death counts. A spokesman for the National Statistics Office said the office is gathering relevant documents to determine how to punish those at fault.
The possible cuts come on top of other proposed changes to school finance, including ending an effective 3.8 percent cap on teacher pay and benefits in July 2010.
"I think you can argue that this is the worst state budget for public schools in a generation," said Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, who said a few districts may have to consider closing.
UW-Madison economist Andy Reschovsky said the Madison School District could see a net cut in aid of $4.1 million, or 4.6 percent, possibly forcing program cuts, teacher layoffs and big increases in property taxes. His analysis, which is less precise when looking at any single district, suggests the falling aid could set up Madison schools to raise property taxes by up to 7 percent.
Stimulus math
Over the next two years, the state would cut direct aid to schools by nearly $300 million under a budget proposal that still must be approved by the Assembly and Senate and signed by Doyle. Over that period, the federal government is expected to pump $350 million in stimulus money directly into schools through two main streams. The money would mainly have to be used to help poor and special education students.
Doyle's budget director, Dave Schmiedicke, noted the budget uses some additional stimulus money and $55 million in state money not included in Reschovsky's analysis to offset part of the increase in property taxes.
Related: Wisconsin K-12 Tax and Spending Growth: 1988-2007
Illinois has joined a growing list of states that favor common learning guidelines for math and English, a movement that could lead to national testing and what supporters say is a better way for teachers and parents to gauge whether students are improving and measuring up on a nationwide level.
With a deadline for signing onto the idea Wednesday, officials hope to move quickly and have set December as a target for mapping out grade-by-grade standards from kindergarten through senior year.
The initiative would represent a dramatic departure from the past, by ending the current patchwork of state-set expectations and exams that vary widely in rigor. It also could save millions of dollars in redundant tests at a time when governments are struggling with budget deficits.
Backers believe that the groundswell of state support -- together with the endorsement of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and a promise of stimulus funds to bankroll the project -- may spell success where past efforts have failed.
Although many high school students do realize it, they all should be helped to understand that their education is not all about them, their feelings, their life experiences, their original ideas, their hopes, their goals, their friends, and so on.
While it is clear that Chemistry, Physics, Chinese, and Calculus are not about them, when it comes to history and literature, the line is more blurred. And as long as many writing contests and college admissions officers want to hear more about their personal lives, too many students will make the mistake of assuming the most important things for them to learn and talk about in their youth are "Me, Myself, and Me."
Promoters of Young Adult Fiction seem to want to persuade our students that the books they should read, if not directly about their own lives, are at least about the lives of people their own age, with problems and preoccupations like theirs. Why should they read War and Peace or Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice when they have never been to Russia or England? Why should they read Battle Cry of Freedom when the American Civil War probably happened years before they were even born? Why should they read Miracle at Philadelphia when there is no love interest, or The Path Between the Seas when they are probably not that interested in construction projects at the moment?
Almost universally, college admissions officers ask not to see an applicant's most serious Extended Essay or history research paper, to give an indication of their academic prowess, but rather they want to read a "personal essay" about the applicant's home and personal life (in 500 words or less).
Teen Magazines like Teen Voices and Teen People also celebrate Teen Life in a sadly solipsistic way, as though teens could hardly be expected to take an interest in the world around them, and its history, even though before too long they will be responsible for it.
Even the most Senior gifted program in the United States, the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, which finds some of the most academically promising young people we have, and offers them challenging programs in Physics, Math, and the like, when it comes to writing, it asks them to compose "Creative Nonfiction" about the events and emotions of their daily lives, if you can believe that.
The saddest thing, to me, is that I know young people really do want to grow up, and to learn a lot about their inheritance and the world around them, and they do look forward to developing the competence to allow them to shoulder the work of the world and give it their best effort.
So why do we insist on infantilizing them with this incessant effort to turn their interests back in on themselves? Partly the cause is the enormous, multi-billion-dollar Teen market, which requires them to stay focused on themselves, their looks, their gear, their friends and their little shrunken community of Teen Life. If teens were encouraged to pursue their natural desires to grow up, what would happen to the Teen Market? Disaster.
In addition, too many teachers are afraid to help their students confront the pressure to be self-involved, and to allow them to face the challenges of preparing for the adult world. Some teachers, themselves, are more comfortable in the Teen World than they think they would be "out there" in the Adult World, and that inclines them to blunt the challenges they could offer to their students, most of whom will indeed seek an opportunity to venture into that out-of-school world themselves.
We all tend to try to influence those we teach to be like us, and if we are careful students and diligent thinkers as teachers, that is not all bad. But we surely should neither want nor expect all our students to become schoolteachers working with young people. We should keep that in mind and be willing to encourage our students to engage with the "Best that has been said and thought," to help them prepare themselves for the adulthood they will very soon achieve.
For those who love students, it is always hard to see them walk out the door at the end of the school year, and also hard when they don't even say goodbye. But we must remember that for them, they are not leaving us, so much as arriving eagerly into the world beyond the classroom, and while we have them with us, we should keep that goal of theirs in mind, and refuse to join with those who, for whatever reason, want to keep our young people immature, and thinking mostly about themselves, for as long as possible.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
New research at the University of Florida predicts more public school students in kindergarten through 12th grade will take classes online, have longer school days and more of them in the next decade. Academic performance should improve and schools could save money.
While distance education over the Internet is already widespread at colleges and universities, UF educational technology researchers are offering some of the first hard evidence documenting the potential cost-savings of virtual schooling in K-12 schools.
"Policymakers and educators have proposed expanding learning time in elementary through high school grades as a way to improve students' academic performance, but online coursework hasn't been on their radar. This should change as we make school and school district leaders more aware of the potential cost savings that virtual schooling offers," said Catherine Cavanaugh, associate professor at the University of Florida's College of Education. "Over the next decade, we expect an explosion in the use of virtual schooling as a seamless synthesis between the traditional classroom and online learning."
Leaving "No Child Left Behind" does not depend on more teachers or more money, but selfless children
via email:
It's time to move away from "differentiated curriculum" which is really segregated learning, to student-centered cooperative education.
It's time to embrace what the children have to teach our world: their cooperative, creative, and compassionate spirit.
It's a shame we continue to spend more money to prevent children from sharing learning and ideas with each other and our world.
Us adults would stand to learn much on how to alleviate economic woes, if we cooperated with the regenerative spirit that children keep trying to impart in our world.
I've been a sub for a while in this district that continues to bow down to parents who care only about self-serving educational models while exploiting resources, schools, and our community.
Some Mesquite high school students could skip the last week of school next year while others get intensive academic help under a program that could be approved tonight.
Students who pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and their classes would attend class for fewer days, essentially earning extra days of summer vacation.
High school students who haven't passed both would attend the full year and receive intensive help while the other students are off. Those still behind after the end of the school year would go to summer school.
"It just seems like a great opportunity to work with a smaller number of students who may have some more intensive needs," said Jeannie Stone, a district administrator who has been investigating the program.
The school board is expected to adopt the plan, known as the optional flexible year program, at its regular meeting. If approved, Mesquite would be one of the larger districts in the state to use the program
The School Improvement Committee has spent this year investigating academic support models in other schools to begin to develop an effective model for West High School. The committee visited Memorial High School, Evanston High School, Wheeling High School, and New Trier High School, in IL. Some of the common themes that were discovered, especially in the Illinois schools, were as follows:
Many schools have an identified academic team who intervene with struggling students. These teams of support people have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. The students are regularly monitored, they develop both short and long term goals and the students develop meaningful relationships with an adult in the building. The academic support team has regular communication with teaching staff and makes recommendations for student support.
There are mandatory study tables in each academic content areas where students are directed to go if they are receiving a D or F in any given course.
Students who are skill deficient are identified in 8th grade and are provided with a summer program designed to prepare them for high school, enhanced English and Math instruction in 9th grade, and creative scheduling that allows for students to catch up to grade level.
Some schools have a family liaison person who is able to make meaningful connections in the community and with parents. After school homework centers are thriving.
Social privileges are used as incentives for students to keep their grades up.
Recommendations from the SIP Committee
Design more creative use of academic support allocation to better meet the needs of struggling students.
Create an intervention team with specific role definition for each team member.
Design and implement an after school homework center that will be available for all students, not just those struggling academically.
Design and implement student centers and tables that meet specific academic and time needs (after school, lunch, etc.)
Identify a key staff person to serve in a specialized family liaison role.
Develop a clear intervention scaffold that is easy for staff to interpret and use.
Design and implement enhanced Math and English interventions for skill deficient students.
Despite efforts to more equitably distribute teachers, School District data obtained by the Notebook this spring show that schools with the highest concentration of poverty still have the most teacher turnover and the lowest percentages of highly qualified and experienced teachers.
Differences are most striking at middle schools and high schools. For instance, at high schools where more than 85 percent of the students live below the poverty line, nearly one in three teachers is not highly qualified and one in five has two or fewer years of experience. In the highest-poverty middle schools, nearly one in three teachers has two years or less of experience.
The same pattern is true for teacher retention and turnover - higher rates of poverty correlate with higher rates of turnover. Again, the differences are most striking in middle schools. Many schools lose 30 to 40 percent of their teachers or more each year.
When states and counties cut their budgets, school districts usually lose funding. And of course, that's happening across the country right now. I'm sure there's plenty of screaming at school board and PTA meetings, but some schools and communities are focusing their energy in a different way. They're raising the money themselves.
Case in point: Coralwood School in Decatur, Georgia. Coralwood is a cool school for several reasons. It's the only public school in Georgia dedicated to special needs children 3-6 years old. The kids with special needs learn in classrooms together with other children.
Plus, Coralwood has its own foundation with a Director of Development whose full-time job is to raise money for the school from the community. That's pretty unusual. Most schools or districts rely on parent volunteers to do fundraising. Even the most dedicated parents don't have time to do the job properly.
But they're off base in implying that alternative certification programs such as the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, proposed in SB 175, will mean more students won't have effective teachers.
Research has shown otherwise.
A recent study in "Education Next" showed states with genuine alternative certification programs see higher test scores and more minority teachers. A Brookings Institute study from 2006 showed that teachers who have come through colleges of education are no more effective than teachers who come through an alternative certification program or no certification program at all.
In addition, ABCTE's rigorous teacher preparation program includes nearly 200 hours of workshops on topics such as pedagogy and classroom assessment. Our exams are difficult, with only 40 percent of candidates passing on the first try. As a result, our teacher retention rate is 85 percent after three years, compared to less than 65 percent for traditional certification routes.
I understand Hewson and Knuth's motivation for suggesting that an alternative to traditional certification may not produce great teachers. That philosophy is good for their employer, but not -- as research has shown -- any better for students.
/-- David Saba, president, ABCTE, Washington, D.C./
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says states will hurt their chance to compete for millions of federal stimulus dollars if they fail to embrace innovations like charter schools.
Duncan was responding to a question about Tennessee, where Democratic state lawmakers have blocked an effort to let more kids into charter schools. President Barack Obama wants to expand the number of charter schools.
An Email to Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad on Math Teacher Hiring Criteria
Thanks much for taking the time from your busy schedule to respond to our letter below. I am delighted to note your serious interest in the topic of how to obtain middle school teachers who are highly qualified to teach mathematics to the MMSD's students so that all might succeed. We are all in agreement with the District's laudable goal of having all students complete algebra I/geometry or integrated algebra I/geometry by the end of 10th grade. One essential component necessary for achieving this goal is having teachers who are highly competent to teach 6th- through 8th-grade mathematics to our students so they will be well prepared for high school-level mathematics when they arrive in high school.
The primary point on which we seem to disagree is how best to obtain such highly qualified middle school math teachers. It is my strong belief that the MMSD will never succeed in fully staffing all of our middle schools with excellent math teachers, especially in a timely manner, if the primary mechanism for doing so is to provide additional, voluntary math ed opportunities to the District's K-8 generalists who are currently teaching mathematics in our middle schools. The District currently has a small number of math-certified middle school teachers. It undoubtedly has some additional K-8 generalists who already are or could readily become terrific middle school math teachers with a couple of hundred hours of additional math ed training. However, I sincerely doubt we could ever train dozens of additional K-8 generalists to the level of content knowledge necessary to be outstanding middle school math teachers so that ALL of our middle school students could be taught mathematics by such teachers.
Part of our disagreement centers around differing views regarding the math content knowledge one needs to be a highly-qualified middle school math teacher. As a scientist married to a mathematician, I don't believe that taking a couple of math ed courses on how to teach the content of middle school mathematics provides sufficient knowledge of mathematics to be a truly effective teacher of the subject. Our middle school foreign language teachers didn't simply take a couple of ed courses in how to teach their subject at the middle school level; rather, most of them also MAJORED or, at least, minored in the subject in college. Why aren't we requiring the same breathe and depth of content knowledge for our middle school mathematics teachers? Do you really believe mastery of the middle school mathematics curriculum and how to teach it is sufficient content knowledge for teachers teaching math? What happens when students ask questions that aren't answered in the teachers' manual? What happens when students desire to know how the material they are studying relates to higher-level mathematics and other subjects such as science and engineering?
The MMSD has been waiting a long time already to have math-qualified teachers teaching mathematics in our middle schools. Many countries around the world whose students outperform US students in mathematics only hire teachers who majored in the subject to teach it. Other school districts in the US are taking advantage of the current recession with high unemployment to hire and train people who know and love mathematics, but don't yet know how to teach it to others. For example, see http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE54L2W120090522
If Madison continues to wait, we will miss out on this opportunity and yet another generation of middle schoolers will be struggling to success in high school.
The MMSD has a long history of taking many, many year to resolve most issues. For example, the issue of students receiving high school credit for non-MMSD courses has been waiting 8 years and counting! It has taken multiple years for the District's math task force to be formed, meet, write its report, and have its recommendations discussed. For the sake of the District's students, we need many more math-qualified middle school teachers NOW. Please act ASAP, giving serious consideration to our proposal below. Thanks.
Maybe it was brought on by lean times. Or maybe long-simmering angst about the state of Seattle schools is finally boiling over on its own.
But the decision this month to lay off 165 of Seattle schools' newest teachers in a "last hired, first fired" manner has got some of liberal Seattle suddenly sounding more like a conservative red state.
More than 600 school parents have signed an online petition, at supportgreatteachers.com, that calls out the teachers union for causing "great distress and upheaval" in the schools. At issue is the policy of choosing who gets laid off solely by seniority.
"Wake up and see how union refusal to consider merit is damaging the profession and our kids," wrote one parent.
"We want the best teachers, not the oldest, teaching our kids," wrote another.
"Teacher unions are an anachronism," said another.
The organizers of the petition are a group of parents called Community and Parents for Public Schools. They agree what they're doing is very un-Seattle.
Thousands of teachers poured into Detroit's Cobo Center Tuesday morning, waving homemade school flags and buzzing with excitement. They were so geared up, they seemed as if they were the ones who are supposed to graduate from school this spring.
The 6,000-plus crowd came to an unprecedented rally to discuss major reforms to their teacher union contract, a move that is necessary to radically overhaul Detroit schools for the sake of the city's children.
This could not have happened even a few months ago. But things are moving forward swiftly -- and positively -- in Detroit public education for the first time in decades.
Public health advocates and the fast-food industry are preparing to go head-to-head over proposed federal legislation that would require restaurants to post calorie counts alongside prices. A patchwork of such laws at the state level have been enacted in recent years, and the restaurant industry has countered with proposing federal legislation on the issue - but public health advocates say the industry's proposed solution is too weak.
Attached to this e-mail is the Proposed Strategic Plan and a cover memorandum to the Board of Education. We invite all of you to the June 15 Special Board of Education meeting at 6:00 p.m. The Plan, along with a way to respond, is on the district's website (www.mmsd.org) on the home page, under Hot Topics. This is the direct link:
After Bethany Martin graduated from high school here last June, she was surprised when the local community college told her that she had to retake classes like basic composition, for no college credit. Each remedial course costs her $350, more than a week's pay from her job at a Chick-fil-A restaurant.
Ms. Martin blames chaotic high school classes. "The kids just took over," she recalls. But her college instructors say that even well-run high school courses often fail to teach what students need to know in college. They say that Ms. Martin's senior English class, for instance, focused on literature, but little on writing.
Like Ms. Martin, more than a million college freshmen across the nation must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree. Poorly run public schools are a part of the problem, but so is a disconnect between high schools and colleges.
"We need to better align what we expect somebody to be able to do to graduate high school with what we expect them to do in college," said Billie A. Unger, the dean at Ms. Martin's school, Blue Ridge Community and Technical College, who oversees "developmental" classes, a nice word for remedial. "If I'm to be a pro football player, and you teach me basketball all through school, I'll end up in developmental sports," she said.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spent billions of dollars exploring the idea that smaller high schools might result in higher graduation rates and better test scores. Instead, it found that the key to better education is not necessarily smaller schools but more effective teachers.
Some people might cringe while recounting how much money the foundation spent figuring this out. But the foundation's new CEO, Jeff Raikes, smiles and uses it as an example to explain that the charity has the money to try things that might fail.
"Almost by definition, good philanthropy means we're going to have to do some risky things, some speculative things to try and see what works and what doesn't," Raikes said Wednesday during an interview with The Associated Press.
The foundation's new "learner-in-chief" has spent the nine months since he was named CEO studying the operation, traveling around the world and figuring out how to balance the pressures of the economic downturn with the growing needs of people in developing nations.
The former Microsoft Corp. executive, who turns 51 on Friday, joined the foundation as its second CEO after Patty Stonesifer, another former Microsoft executive, announced her retirement and his friends Bill and Melinda Gates talked Raikes out of retiring.
For a decade and a half, the state's teachers union has been hammering away at Republican state lawmakers for failing to repeal the Qualified Economic Offer law (QEO), which essentially allowed school districts to grant a 3.8% increase in salary and benefits to teachers without going to arbitration.
In the state budget he submitted in February, Governor Jim Doyle proposed repealing the QEO. Since Democrats hold both houses of the Legislature, it seemed to be a sure thing that they would go along with Doyle's suggestion.
But then yesterday, a funny thing happened. WEAC, the state's largest teachers' union, offered up a "compromise" plan to the Legislature instead of simply doing away with the QEO.
Your first question is probably obvious: "Exactly with whom are they compromising?" They own the Wisconsin Legislature. They can get whatever they want - why would they feel the need to "compromise" with anyone, seeing as the thing they have hated most for 15 years is a couple of votes from being history? And who exactly represents the taxpayers in this "compromise?"
The "compromise" they offered essentially delays repeal of the QEO for one year. So they've been ripping on Republicans for years for not eliminating the QEO, but then when it comes time to actually do it, they want to push it off for a year - when they have the votes to eliminate it immediately.
What they've done is put into writing what most others have realized over the years - the QEO is actually a pretty good deal, especially in a bad economy. They have recognized that if you pull away the QEO now, they could end up with a lot less than a 3.8% pay and benefits increase. In tough economic times, it's a floor rather than a ceiling - ask any of the 128,000 private sector workers who have lost their jobs in Wisconsin in the past year if they'd settle for a guaranteed 3.8% increase.
Superintendent Dan Nerad's Response to "Action Needed, Please Sign on.... Math Teacher Hiring in the Madison School District"
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad via email:
Dr. Mertz-
Thank you for sharing your thoughts regarding this critical issue in our middle schools. We will continue to follow the conversation and legislative process regarding hiring Teach for America and Math for America candidates. We have similar concerns to those laid out by UW Professors Hewson and Knuth (http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/forum/451220). In particular they stated, "Although subject-matter knowledge is essential to good teaching, the knowledge required for teaching is significantly different from that used by math and science professionals." This may mean that this will not be a cost effective or efficient solution to a more complex problem than many believe it to be. These candidates very well may need the same professional learning opportunities that we are working with the UW to create for our current staff. The leading researchers on this topic are Ball, Bass and Hill from the University of Michigan. More information on their work can be found at (http://sitemaker.umich.edu/lmt/home). We are committed to improving the experience our students have in our mathematics class and will strive to hire the most qualified teachers and continue to strengthen our existing staff.
The Wisconsin Legislature's Joint Finance Committee on Wednesday night is debating the allocation of state money for schools.
With cuts in state school aid and caps on how much schools may raise taxes both on the agenda, some schools are preparing for the worst and considering drastic measures such as consolidation.
The cuts come at a time when many schools have been begging for school funding formula changes. Now they're looking at possible cuts of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Two rural school districts in Marquette County said that giving students a quality education is becoming increasingly difficult in tough budget times.
"We have been making some significant cuts over a period of time. I've been in this district for five years and during that time we've been reducing our budget by about $250,000 a year on average, and that's a significant amount of money," said Westfield District Administrator Roger Schmidt.
Westfield schools have cut back on staff, among other changes.
he WEAC memo urges JFC members to support the governor's original recommendation to repeal the QEO. But in lieu of that, the memo offers the alternative of keeping the QEO in place until July 1, 2010, and provide a one-year "hiatus" on interest arbitration proceedings for resolving contract issues.
Administrators still have concerns that changes to arbitration proposed by the governor will lead to unmanageable compensation increases. Doyle's proposals would de-emphasize school district revenues in arbitration with employees.
The WEAC memo urges the committee members to keep these modifications intact.
WEAC lobbyist Dan Burkhalter said the alternative was offered as districts deal with a tough economic climate.
It would keep management from being able to impose arbitration in the first year without a union's consent, Burkhalter said.. If a contract would go to arbitration in the first year, the contract would be settled under the new arbitration rules under the compromise offered by WEAC.
Burkhalter said the reaction of lawmakers was positive to the compromise, but he didn't know what the committee would ultimately put forward.
The School Performance Report is the annual "report card" that is required under Wisconsin law (Wi.Stat.115.38) to be compiled and published for each public school and public school district. DPI's recent announcement (noted here) that selected School Performance Report information will now be available online at the DPI web site is a step in the right direction, but this important tool for school accountability and information for parents and the public has yet to reach its full potential, due to inconsistent compliance with the requirements of the reporting law.
The School Performance Report has been required since 1991. The items that are to be included in each report are (emphases added):
(a) Indicators of academic achievement, including the performance of pupils on the tests administered under s. 121.02 (1) (r) and the performance of pupils, by subject area, on the statewide assessment examinations administered under s. 118.30.
(b) 1. Other indicators of school and school district performance, including dropout, attendance, retention in grade and graduation rates; percentage of habitual truants, as defined in s. 118.16 (1) (a); percentage of pupils participating in extracurricular and community activities and advanced placement courses; percentage of graduates enrolled in postsecondary educational programs; and percentage of graduates entering the workforce.
2. The numbers of suspensions and expulsions; the reasons for which pupils are suspended or expelled, reported according to categories specified by the state superintendent; the length of time for which pupils are expelled, reported according to categories specified by the state superintendent; whether pupils return to school after their expulsion; the educational programs and services, if any, provided to pupils during their expulsions, reported according to categories specified by the state superintendent; the schools attended by pupils who are suspended or expelled; and the grade, sex and ethnicity of pupils who are suspended or expelled and whether the pupils are children with disabilities, as defined in s. 115.76 (5).
(c) Staffing and financial data information, as determined by the state superintendent, not to exceed 10 items. The state superintendent may not request a school board to provide information solely for the purpose of including the information in the report under this paragraph.
(d) The number and percentage of resident pupils attending a course in a nonresident school district under s. 118.52, the number of nonresident pupils attending a course in the school district under s. 118.52, and the courses taken by those pupils.
(e) The method of reading instruction used in the school district and the textbook series used to teach reading in the school district.
It should be noted (and is acknowledged by DPI) that the School Performance Report information on the DPI site does not cover all of these items.
In 2005, the statute was amended to require that parents be alerted to the existence and availability of the report and given the opportunity to request a copy, and to require that each school district with a web site post the report on its web site (amended language italicized below):
Annually by January 1, each school board shall notify the parent or guardian of each pupil enrolled in the school district of the right to request a school and school district performance report under this subsection. Annually by May [amended from January] 1, each school board shall, upon request, distribute to the parent or guardian of each pupil enrolled in the school district, including pupils enrolled in charter schools located in the school district, or give to each pupil to bring home to his or her parent or guardian, a school and school district performance report that includes the information specified by the state superintendent under sub. (1). The report shall also include a comparison of the school district's performance under sub. (1) (a) and (b) with the performance of other school districts in the same athletic conference under sub. (1) (a) and (b). If the school district maintains an Internet site, the report shall be made available to the public at that site.
This information, if fully compiled and made available as intended by the statute, could be a valuable resource to parents and the public (answering, perhaps, some of the questions in this discussion). There may be parents who are unaware that this "report card" exists, and would benefit from receiving the notice that the statute requires. For parents without access to the Internet, the right to request a hard copy of the report may be their only access to this information.
Districts who do not post their School Performance Reports on their web sites may do well to follow the example of the Kenosha School District, which does a good job of highlighting its School Performance Reports (including drop-down menus by school) on the home page of its web site.
Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: "Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature."
"I must have been asked about that a hundred times in China. I was asked at every single meeting about our purchases of Treasuries. That seemed to be the principal preoccupation of those that were invested with their surpluses mostly in the United States," he told the Wall Street Journal.
His recent trip to the Far East appears to have been a stark reminder that Asia's "Confucian" culture of right action does not look kindly on the insouciant policy of printing money by Anglo-Saxons.
Mr Fisher, the Fed's leading hawk, was a fierce opponent of the original decision to buy Treasury debt, fearing that it would lead to a blurring of the line between fiscal and monetary policy – and could all too easily degenerate into Argentine-style financing of uncontrolled spending.
However, he agreed that the Fed was forced to take emergency action after the financial system "literally fell apart".
Nor, he added was there much risk of inflation taking off yet. The Dallas Fed uses a "trim mean" method based on 180 prices that excludes extreme moves and is widely admired for accuracy.
Wisconsin's statewide test given to hundreds of thousands of students each year deserves a poor grade for its own performance.
The test has some of the weakest standards in the nation.
The test takes far too long to process.
The Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination also fails to compare student proficiency at the beginning of a school year with proficiency at the end of the same academic year.
All of that needs to change, as recommended last week in reports by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative study group in Hartland.
Join the Green Charter Schools Network in supporting the development of schools with environment-focused educational programs and practices. "The Real Wealth of the Nation" by Tia Nelson, daughter of Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, describes the Network's beginnings and mission. Please complete and return the GCSNet membership form.
Thank You !
Senn Brown, Executive Director *
Green Charter Schools Network
5426 Greening Lane, Madison, WI 53705
Tel: 608-238-7491 Email: senn@greencharterschools.org
Web: www.greencharterschools.org
* Founding Executive Secretary (2000 - 2007), Wisconsin Charter Schools Association
They are younger than their predecessors, have less experience in the classroom and are, most often, responsible for far fewer students. But their salaries are higher and they have greater freedom over hiring and budgets, handling a host of responsibilities formerly shouldered by their supervisors.
Among the most striking transformations of New York's public school system since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took charge in 2002 is that of the role of principal, once the province of middle-aged teachers promoted through the ranks, now often filled by young graduates of top colleges.
"I wanted to change the old system," Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said in an interview. "New leadership is a powerful way to do that."
One of Mr. Klein's proudest achievements is luring promising candidates to the toughest schools by providing more autonomy in exchange for accountability through test scores and other data.
But an analysis by The New York Times of the city's signature report-card system shows that schools run by graduates of the celebrated New York City Leadership Academy -- which the mayor created and helped raise more than $80 million for -- have not done as well as those led by experienced principals or new principals who came through traditional routes.
Before D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) took over the city's public schools two years ago, he paid a visit here to learn about a school system at the center of urban education reform.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) had taken charge of the 1.1 million-student system in 2002, naming a litigator with little professional education experience to turn it around.
In seven years as schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein has emphasized accountability and school choice. He has granted principals more autonomy and money in exchange for results, piloted a performance-based teacher compensation plan and raised millions of dollars in private funds to support his initiatives, including $100 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create smaller, more personalized high schools.
When Maryland's high school class of 2009 graduates next month, it will become the first in the state to prove it can solve an equation such as 12x + 84 =252. (Answer: 14.)
But state officials still don't know the value of another variable: the number of students who won't pass exams in algebra, English, biology and government for a new graduation requirement. As of March, about 4,000 of 58,000 seniors statewide hadn't passed the High School Assessments or met an alternative academic standard. This is the first year that seniors have been required to meet the testing standard.
State and local officials predict that graduation rates will remain roughly the same and that only a handful of seniors will be denied a diploma based on the HSA requirement.
When the Elvehjem Elementary School parents who raised $200,000 for a playground outside the school last year started looking for a new fundraising project, they thought of the teacher on the itty-bitty chair.
She's someone like Julie Fitzpatrick, a first-grade teacher at Elvehjem who uses a nearly decade-old classroom computer to track attendance, fill out report cards and answer parents' e-mails. The bulky monitor and sluggish hard drive sit on a desk sized for the 6- and 7-year-olds who also use the terminal, one of two PCs in Fitzpatrick's room.
Even if the teacher wanted to bring more modern equipment from home, like a laptop, she couldn't access the Internet with it. There's no wireless connection.
"I go in to take my son to his first day of school, and I see these two ancient-looking computers with floppy disc drives," said Brian Johnson, vice-president of operations for a Madison high-tech firm and a parent in the group LVM Dreams Big Technology, which hopes to raise $20,000 this summer to buy the school some of the latest classroom tools: document cameras that can project computer and other images on a screen, an interactive "whiteboard" called a Smart Board, and a message board with an LCD screen at the school entrance to announce the day's activities. They hope to come up with another $5,000 for grants aimed at teachers wanting to try new technologies.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan believes we have what amounts to a "once-in-a-couple-of-generations opportunity" to "push a very, very strong reform agenda" for the nation's schools. His view is based, in part, on the Obama administration's intention to spend billions of additional dollars on public education, though Duncan acknowledges that money alone is not the answer. He also says the country has arrived at a moment when we have the necessary political will to make tough changes.
Not least of the problems that must be addressed can be found in America's high schools, where, Duncan said in a speech last week, "Our expectations for our teenagers in this country are far too low."
In fact, change has never come easily to America's approximately 23,800 public high schools. Since the alarming report A Nation at Risk was published in 1983, we have had "wave after wave of reform"- and little progress, according to Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution.
As of this week, total US debt is $11.3 trillion and rising rapidly. The Obama
Administration projects that to rise another $1.85 trillion in 2009 (13% of
GDP) and yet another $1.4 trillion in 2010. The Congressional Budget Office
projects almost $10 trillion in additional debt from 2010 through 2019. Just
last January the 2009 deficit was estimated at "only" $1.2 trillion. Things
have gone downhill fast.
But there is reason to be concerned about those estimates, too. The CBO assumes a
rather robust recovery in 2010, with growth springing back to 3.8% and then up
to 4.5% in 2011. Interestingly, they project unemployment of 8.8% for this year
(we are already at 8.9% and rising every month) and that it will rise to 9%
next year. It will be a strange recovery indeed where the economy is roaring along
at 4% and unemployment isn't falling. (You can see their spreadsheets and all
the details if you take your blood pressure medicine first, at
www.cbo.gov.)
Just a few quick thoughts. This year the proposed administration plan is to borrow 50% of every dollar spent. The CBO projects than nominal GDP will grow by about 50% over the next 10 years (which is historically reasonable), but also that revenues will double, which suggests massive tax increases in relation to GDP. Interestingly, the International Monetary Fund says growth next year will be tepid at best (more below). The deficit in 2010 is almost 10% of GDP. The average proposed deficit is almost a $1 trillion average for the next ten years. Ten years from now, the deficit is projected to be $1.2 trillion. And that is if government costs do not go up and inflation only averages 1.1% for the next six years.
After Irace got his termination papers in June from JPMorgan Chase, he called "Brother K."
Brother Kenneth Hoagland, the principal at Kellenberg, a private Catholic institution, taught Irace at Chaminade High School in Mineola, New York.
Hoagland called Irace in for an interview in August, when he needed a replacement for a math instructor on leave. A month later, the former trader was teaching quadratic equations and factoring to freshmen in five 40-minute periods of algebra a day. He enrolled in refresher math classes at Nassau Community College, sometimes learning subjects a day or two ahead of the kids. This semester, he's teaching sixth-graders measurements and percentages.
Conditioning Drills
Seated at wooden desks, 21 to 39 in each class, they get excited when he flashes the animated math adventures of a robot named Moby onto a classroom projector. After school, Irace, now 198 pounds (90 kilograms), puts a whistle on a yellow cord around his neck and runs girls through conditioning drills as an assistant coach for the lacrosse team. The extra coaching stipend runs $1,000 to $2,000 for the season.
Colorado is making it easier for schools to offer teens a chance to earn an associate's degree while still in high school, a move backers say could help lower the dropout rate and help the state win millions in extra federal stimulus money.
Gov. Bill Ritter signed House Bill 1319 into law along with eight other education bills on Thursday at a high school called the Middle College of Denver.
It's one of a half dozen high schools around the state where students take career classes and earn college credit at nearby community colleges.
Ritter urged the students, packed into the school cafeteria along with lawmakers and education officials, to tell their siblings and friends about the program, which he said would help keep more students in school.
State education officials believe it's the first statewide program of its kind in the nation.
"None of this is really about us. This is about you," Ritter said before sitting down to sign the bills.
Fairfax County students can expect larger classes, new bell schedules and higher parking fees next year, all part of a $2.2 billion budget the School Board unanimously approved last night. The plan also freezes salaries for teachers and staff.
The spending plan for the region's largest school system accounts for 5,000 more students but is $18 million and 800 positions lighter than this year's budget.
The Fairfax Board of Supervisors froze funding for the 169,000-student system, but an infusion of $50 million in federal stimulus money helped stave off deeper cuts. More than half of that will be spent on special education or high-poverty schools.
Still, school officials said the spending plan increases burdens on teachers and reduces the quality of education that families expect from a world-class system.
"We are at a tipping point," said School Board budget chairman Phillip A. Niedzielski-Eichner (Providence). "If we are not careful we will pass it and realize we have done some permanent damage."
The scourge of teachers surveys the desolation of learning
"SACK the useless teachers!" ran the headline above an interview with Chris Woodhead in 1994. And the newly appointed chief inspector of schools grew no more emollient on the job. Naming and shaming bad schools and teachers would raise standards ("I personally respond to threats"); educational research was "an irrelevance and a distraction"; schools didn't need more money, but to jettison progressive teaching methods. After becoming prime minister, Tony Blair kept the Conservative appointee on as part of the attempt to persuade middle England that New Labour was not in hock to the unions. When Mr Woodhead finally resigned in 2000, after clashing repeatedly with David Blunkett, the education secretary of the day, many schools threw staffroom parties.
Now the scourge of trendy teachers is back, and as intemperate as ever. In "A Desolation of Learning", a book published on May 22nd, Mr Woodhead surveys state schools in England and sees a wasteland. The national curriculum intended to ensure that all children learned the basics has become a "solipsistic daydream". The inspectorate he used to lead is no longer an impartial arbiter but a partisan thought-police, "arguably the most lethal part" of the system. Government oversees "bloated bureaucracies and frenzied initiatives", and the opposition Tories can be as "sanctimoniously utopian" as New Labour.
In MA, teachers have state-mandated professional development points or (PDPs) that they must compile every year. Naturally, the Massachusetts Teacher's Association (MTA), the state's largest teachers' union, is also a big professional development provider. Below, is a listing of their professional development workshop offerings (link included). [From Jamie Gass, Pioneer Institute]
Top 10 Best Teacher Union Professional Development offerings:
Effective Advocacy: Grievance Processing (PDP)
This workshop will focus on how to use the grievance procedure as an orderly process for resolving contract disputes. Participants will be actively engaged in a comprehensive review of the grievance process, from the "what" and "why" to the "how" and "when." They will leave the session with an understanding of how to write and process grievances in the steps prior to arbitration. The three-hour morning session will focus on procedural and substantive concerns relative to the grievance process and will introduce the filing process. In the one-and-one-halfhour afternoon session, participants will investigate, write up and present grievances.
Lessons through Balloon Twisting (PDP)
There are life lessons to be learned when making a balloon animal, and there may be several academic ones as well. Participants in this workshop will learn to make at least two animals and learn some lessons together.
Union Response to Advanced Placement Grants (PDP)
Has your district applied for an Advanced Placement grant? Will it do so in the future? Did you know that the grants include payments for test scores? This session will provide straight talk about what the AP grants require and strategies on how to best enforce your contract rights.
Easy Tie-Dye (PDP)
Travel back in time to the 1960s and 1970s while creating a groovy tie-dyed T-shirt to awe your friends and family. Mood rings optional. Easy tie-dye methods will be tried, a lesson plan will be provided and student examples will be shared. Bring your T-shirts, socks, vests and shorts, and we will tie-dye up a storm!
Two Teacher Unions - One Cause
Two Teacher Unions - One Cause This workshop will focus on the MTA and AFT Massachusetts collaboratively working together to improve conditions for our students and our members. Come and find out what we have done so far, some issues of the day and where we will go from here to make things better. Participants are asked to bring their curiosity and a sense of humor.
Use Your Noodle (PDP & PTP)
Get inspired and learn fun new teaching approaches to motivate students to think outside the box. Participants will experience hands-on improvisational theater skills and games for the classroom, explore how the dynamic Use Your Noodle "design challenge" curriculum gets K-8 students thinking critically and take home the curriculum for free!
MTA's Lens on Beacon Hill (PDP)
MTA lobbyists will provide an update on the impact of the economic crisis on the association's legislative agenda. The presenters will discuss strategies that locals can implement to advance an agenda concerning state revenues, Chapter 70 preK-12 funding, public higher education funding and the retiree COL A. They also will talk about how to fight cuts in local aid and attacks on collective bargaining, which are affecting every constituency within the MTA as this tsunami-like budget crisis continues to unfold.
Native American Bead Weaving (PDP)
In this workshop, participants will learn something about the tradition of Native American beading. They will use math concepts to graph several designs, make simple and inexpensive wood looms suitable for classroom use and learn how to use the loom and the graphed designs to "sew" seed beads to create wristbands.
The Power of Embracing Diversity (PDP)
What is the power of embracing diversity? How does it affect professional and personal growth? The Sun Poem, with its powerful diversity message, has been introduced in schools across Massachusetts since 1987. Now it has been introduced at colleges and universities in 40 states. This interactive workshop - through a DVD presentation of the story of The Sun Poem, interactive dialogue and exercises - will empower participants with a deeper understanding of diversity.
Performance Evaluation: How the Union Can Effectively Help the Teacher in Trouble (PDP)
This workshop is geared to union officers, grievance representatives and building representatives who may find themselves working with a teacher whose performance is found wanting by a supervisor. Your job as the union representative is to be an advocate for the teacher and to protect the integrity of the evaluation procedure. You will leave this workshop with powerful tools to ensure that the negotiated evaluation system is being used fairly and that any improvement plan is constructed so that both the teacher and the evaluator are held accountable.
Residents of a rural community near Yosemite National Park have overwhelmingly voted to recall all five members of the local school board after a group of high school students launched a campaign to unseat them, election officials said Wednesday
Unofficial results show the Big Oak Flat-Groveland Unified School District school board was recalled by more than a 2-to-1 margin, and a slate of new candidates was elected to replace them, the Tuolumne County Elections Department said.
The department had not finished counting ballots Wednesday, but it's unlikely the election results would change, an elections official said.
"It was a lot of work, but it was totally worth it. Our school district can finally get back on track," said Elise Vallotton, 18, a senior at Tioga High School who helped lead the recall effort. "We knew we needed to get people in there who could make the right decisions."
The recall of an entire school board is uncommon and possibly unprecedented in California, said Brittany McKannay, a spokeswoman for California School Boards Association.
Tracking and Inequality: New Directions for Research and Practice Presentation by UW School of Education Professor Adam Gamoran
via a kind reader's email:
Good afternoon. We'd like to invite you to Memorial High tomorrow afternoon for a discussion hosted by our Equity Team. Professor Adam Gamoran, Interim Dean of the UW School of Education, will be presenting paper titled Tracking and Inequality: New Directions for Research and Practice. His article is attached. We will begin at 4:15pm and should end around:15pm, and we'll meet in the Wisconsin Neighborhood Center, which is in the Southwest corner of the building. Please park on the Mineral Point Rd. side of the building, and enter through the doors closest to Gammon Rd. There will signs to direct you from there. Have a good week, and we hope to see you tomorrow afternoon...Jay
Jay Affeldt
James Madison Memorial High School
Professional Development School Coordinator
Project REAL SLC Grant Coordinator
201 South Gammon Road
Madison, WI 53717
jaffeldt@madison.k12.wi.us
608-442-2203 fax
608-663-6182 office
"Upper caucasia" is not the nicest name for one of Washington, D.C.'s "nicest" areas. Situated west of Rock Creek Park and just south of tony Bethesda, Maryland, are a number of neighborhoods -- Chevy Chase, Friendship Heights, Tenleytown -- that offer suburban- style living with an urban address. In a city that is 55 percent black and 17 percent poor, the residents here are, for the most part, white and wealthy.
Most children in this area attend private school, despite the presence of several well-regarded public options. So it was hardly a surprise last November when self-segregated Upper Caucasia erupted into turf wars as the Obamas toured elite preparatory academies, seeking a school appropriate for the first daughters. They settled, predictably, on Sidwell Friends, Chelsea Clinton's alma mater.
But a month later, another prominent family's search for a school went largely unnoticed. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan moved with his family from Chicago, where he had been chief executive officer of the city's public schools, to Arlington, Virginia. High-quality suburban public schools were "why we chose" to live in Arlington, Duncan told Science magazine in March. "It was the determining factor."
Madison School District Superintendent Dan Nerad appeared recently on WIBA 1310 radio's "Outreach" program. Listen to the conversation via this 20MB mp3 audio file.
President Obama has pledged to spend $10 billion more a year on "zero to five" education, and his 2010 budget makes a $2 billion "down payment" on that commitment. (Billions more are already in the "stimulus" package.) Any number of congressional leaders want more preschool, as do dozens of governors. Not to mention the National Education Association and the megabucks Pew Charitable Trusts, which is underwriting national and state-level advocacy campaigns on behalf of universal pre-kindergarten. At least three states are already on board.
Underlying all this activity and interest is the proposition that government -- state and federal -- should pay for at least a year of preschool for every American 4-year-old. One rationale is to boost overall educational achievement. Another is to close school-readiness gaps between the haves and have-nots.
Almost nobody is against it. Yet everybody should pause before embracing it.
By law public schools in Wisconsin must administer a rigid, comprehensive set of tests. In the fall of every school year students are tested in reading, math, language, science and social studies. Test results from each district and each school are posted on the Internet, passed along to the federal government to comply with No Child Left Behind requirements and are made available to parents. In an era where measurable student performance is essential, it is expected that Wisconsin’s elaborate system of testing will tell us how Wisconsin students are performing. Unfortunately the testing required by Wisconsin state law is not very good.
The purpose of state standards and state-mandated testing is to increase academic achievement. Does Wisconsin’s elaborate system of testing advance this goal? From every quarter the answer is a clear no. That is the consensus of independent, third-party evaluators. Wisconsin’s massive testing program has come under fire from the U.S. Department of Education which said that Wisconsin testing failed to adequately evaluate the content laid out in the state’s own standards. Further, a joint report issued by the independent Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association performed a detailed evaluation of testing in every state and ranked Wisconsin 42nd in the nation. The Fordham Institute gave Wisconsin’s testing a grade of “D-minus.”
Perhaps even more troublesome is that many Wisconsin school districts find the testing system inadequate. Over 68% of Wisconsin school districts that responded to a survey said they purchase additional testing to do what the state testing is supposed to do. These districts are well ahead of the state in understanding the importance of timely, rigorous testing.
This report lays out the thirty-year history of testing in Wisconsin and the criticism of the current testing requirement. It is the first of two reports to be issued regarding Wisconsin’s testing program. The second report will show how a new approach to testing will not only meet the standards that parents, teachers and the public expect, but will also allow teachers and policy makers to use testing to actually increase the achievement of Wisconsin’s children.
But perhaps as early as the 2010-'11 school year, things will be different:
Changes are expected in the state standards for what students are supposed to learn in various grades and subjects. The primary goal of the WKCE is to measure how well students overall are doing in meeting those standards. But Mike Thompson, executive assistant to the state superintendent of public instruction, said new standards for English language arts and math should be ready by the end of this year.
As the policy institute studies note, the existing standards have been criticized in several national studies for being among the weakest in the U.S.
The tests themselves will be altered in keeping with the new standards. Just how is not known, and one key component won't be clear until perhaps sometime in 2010, the No Child Left Behind Act could be revised. What goes into the new education law will have a big impact on testing in every state.
The way tests are given will change. There is wide agreement that the wave of the future is to do tests online, which would greatly speed up the process of scoring tests and making the results known. The lag of five months or more now before WKCE scores are released aggravates all involved.
The policy institute studies called for online testing, and the DPI's Thompson agrees it is coming. Delays have largely been due to practical questions of how to give that many tests on computers in Wisconsin schools and the whole matter of dealing with the data involved.
Also changing will be the way performance is judged.
Now, Wisconsin and most states measure which category of proficiency each student falls into, based on their answers. Reaching the level labeled "proficient" is the central goal.
Ernando Minghine would have enjoyed having time to listen to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan talk about the U.S. school system and Detroit Public Schools during a stop last week.
But Minghine, superintendent of Westwood Community Schools, was swamped with a to-do list that included:
Hiring a high school principal.
Finishing months of work in pursuit of a New Tech high school.
Hiring another instructor from China to add to the three he has already teaching Mandarin in grade and middle schools.
Expanding the district's Cyber High School -- which started in February and has been such a hit that the school with 180 students is growing to 500 this fall.
As Duncan made stops at a school in Detroit and Cobo Center, conversing with new Mayor Dave Bing, Gov. Jennifer Granholm and others and sharing his thoughts about the state of Detroit Public Schools, Minghine wished he could have listened in and talked with the education secretary about his district.
Smart, particularly the Mandarin offering in grade and middle schools along with the cyber options.
Politics often produces strange bedfellows. But yesterday, on the 55th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that integrated the nation's schools, when former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich shared the stage at a boisterous rally in front of the White House with the Rev. Al Sharpton, even Gingrich called the two the "Original Odd Couple."
What unites the conservative Gingrich and the liberal Sharpton, Gingrich said, is the urgent mission to close the persistent achievement gap that divides students along racial and socioeconomic lines and to make educational equality the civil rights issue of the 21st century.
"I know it's possible to educate every child from every background," Gingrich said to loud applause from the largely African American crowd that had come to Washington in 70 buses from 22 cities. "We're not telling you what the answer is. But we're telling you to keep changing until you find a solution."
eorgia is in a race to the top and, in many respects, we're leading the way.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced recently that $5 billion in grants are being made available to states that -- in his words -- adopt "college and career-ready internationally benchmarked standards" and "state of the art data collection systems, assessments and curricula to meet these higher standards."
To me, it sounds like Secretary Duncan was reading straight from our Strategic Plan. For six years, Georgia has been focused on implementing a world-class curriculum, raising expectations and using quality data to make decisions. We have received high marks for the policies and standards we've put in place from groups across the nation.
But the journey to "the top" is not always smooth and raising standards is not easy. The truth is that the material that Georgia students are learning today is more rigorous than it has ever been and, consequently, the assessments they are taking are more difficult.
Over the past few years, we've seen the pass rates on our state tests -- like the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests and End of Course Tests -- drop in the first year we've implemented our new curriculum and given the new state exams. This is to be expected: Whenever you raise the bar, there's going to be a temporary drop in the number of people that can reach that bar. That's true in any situation.
Emulating a controversial practice at many colleges, two high-achieving public school districts in California are giving preference to the children of alumni.
The programs vary slightly, but leaders of both districts say they hope to raise money by forging closer ties with alumni who may be priced out of their hometowns as well as with grandparents who still live there. In each district, nonresident legacy students will make up a tiny percentage of the student population, officials said.
"I'm taking a page out of the university or college playbook," said Steve Fenton, a Beverly Hills Unified trustee. "Alumni are the lifeline for any academic institution."
Critics argue that such policies are antithetical to American public education.
Inclusive schools are places where children and young adults of all abilities, races, and cultures share learning environments that build upon their strengths while supporting their diverse needs.
Utilizing inclusive practices, school staff create flexible goals, methods, materials, and assessments that accommodate the interests and needs of all of their learners. Inclusive schools also allow for the development of authentic relationships between students with and without identified differences.
The MMSD's Dept. of Educational Services is committed to building the capacity of school district staff to provide inclusive educational practices. To address this departmental priority, school district staff have been provided with two unique opportunities to further develop their knowledge and skills in this area.
First of all, in honor of Inclusive Schools Week (December, 2008), the Department provided a year-long opportunity for schools to highlight the accomplishments of educators, families and communities in promoting inclusive schools.
Gov. Jim Doyle said Friday that falling tax collections will force him to propose new cuts of up to 5% in state spending for public schools and aid to local governments.
Aid to public schools has been Doyle's top priority during his 6 1/2 years as governor, and Friday was the first time he said it will have to be reduced.
"There are going to have to be cuts in school aids," Doyle said when he signed a bill rewriting state unemployment compensation laws so that the state can capture federal stimulus funds.
Aid cuts like those envisioned by Doyle could cost Milwaukee Public Schools - the state's largest district - more than $20 million. The cut would cost other districts anywhere from several thousand dollars to several million dollars.
At the same time, Doyle said his plan would include levy limits on districts, which would prevent them from recouping all of the cuts through higher property taxes.
This year, state aid for public schools totals $5.17 billion, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. A 5% cut would cost schools about $258 million, although they are getting federal stimulus money, Doyle noted.
However, the state pledge to provide two-thirds of schools revenues in 1996-97 changed the budget landscape. By 2006-07, state-tax support for the UW System had almost doubled during Ihe 25 years prior. However, inflation (CPI, up 115%). school aids/credits (320%). and overall slate GPR expenditures (222%) rose more.
New Milwaukee School Board President Michael Bonds said Friday he will continue to push for major structural changes in the central office of Milwaukee Public Schools, despite the board balking at his plans.
A meeting on the budget for next year that ended at 2:45 a.m. Friday showed Bonds is nowhere near prevailing with his ideas - and that no major change in either specific matters or the culture of the organization is likely to come quickly or easily.
Things went so poorly for 20 amendments that Bonds had submitted to the $1.2 billion budget proposal from Superintendent William Andrekopoulos that even Bonds didn't vote for one of his own proposals. On two others, his was the only vote in favor.
"We have a status quo board at this point," Bonds said afterward. "I don't think much was accomplished."
But other board members clearly believed that a lot of Bonds' ideas were wrong or counterproductive. Bonds has been calling for major change since he was elected board president April 28.
The mythologizing of Arne Duncan is moving along at a pretty fast past. Bernie Noven alerted me to this adulatory article from the London Economist and urged me to respond using some of the recent data about Arne's record here in Chicago, saying that people "out there" have no idea about the reaiity here in Chicago. Here's what I sent.
"Golden Boy" Arne Duncan is a pleasant fellow who held the position of Chicago Executive Officer (CEO) of the Chicago Public Schools for seven years without losing his cool.
He's so cool, in fact, that butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.
As a long-time Chicago public school parent advocate, I have had a front row seat at the Arne Duncan show. When Mayor Richard Daley appointed Mr. Duncan to replace Paul Vallas in 2001, there was a palpable sense of relief across the city. The new CEO's Opie-from-Mayberry modesty was a soothing antidote to the previous six years spent with a CEO who could suck the oxygen out of a room.
We soon discovered, however, that Mr. Duncan simply provided a more complaisant and - more importantly - a more compliant cover for City Hall's machinations.
The contracts of 33 principals will not be renewed, Detroit Public Schools officials announced this afternoon.The district also is reassigning more than two dozen school principals.
Robert Bobb, the district's emergency financial manager, said additionally, the district will conduct a full scale national search for 10 principal positions, district officials said.
Bobb told The Detroit News Thursday that he plans to change the operation of the district's school by giving its principals more autonomy and authority over finances and school budgets.
The Monona Grove School District is considering busing some of Cottage Grove's youngest students to Monona to help ease space problems in the district.
District leaders are quick to say such a change isn't likely: Parents want to keep their children in their neighborhood schools, and busing students is costly.
But the possibility has been left in the mix to illustrate the breadth of options being considered to resolve crowding in Cottage Grove's two elementary schools.
"This is something I was hoping to get off the table, but I think there was enough concern of the committee that the community have an understanding that we're really looking outside the box," said Monona Grove Superintendent Craig Gerlach. "This (option) is certainly outside the box."
Third Grade Mathematics in Hong Kong and Massachusetts Why Massachusetts Students, the Best in the U.S., Lag Behind
Best-in-the-World Students of Hong Kong
Higher expectations for achievement and greater exposure to more difficult and complex mathematics are among the major difference between Hong Kong, home of the world’s top-performing 4th grade math students, and Massachusetts, which is the highest scoring state on the U.S. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), according to a report by the American Institutes for Research (AIR).
While Massachusetts 4th grade students achieved a respectable fourth place when compared with countries taking the 2007 Grade 4 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS-4), Hong Kong students outperformed the Bay State 4th graders in numerous categories.
The Hong Kong performance advantage over Massachusetts was especially large in the percentage of its students achieving at the very highest level. For example, 40 percent of Hong Kong students achieved at the advanced TIMSS level, compared with only 22 percent of Massachusetts students.
To help understand why Hong Kong students outperform Massachusetts students, the AIR study identified differences between the items on Hong Kong’s and Massachusetts’ internal mathematics assessments administered in the spring of grade 3 in 2007 to gather insight into the relative mathematical expectations in Hong Kong and Massachusetts.
The AIR report found that the Hong Kong assessment contained more difficult items, especially in the core areas of numbers and measurement, than the Massachusetts assessment.
“The more rigorous problems on the Hong Kong assessment demonstrate that, even at Grade 3, deep conceptual understanding and the capacity to apply foundational mathematical concepts in multistep, real-world situations can be taught successfully,” said Steven Leinwand, Principal Research Analyst at AIR and co-author of the report.
As those of us in the newspaper business have discovered to our misfortune, productive original thinking is hard, and rare. Even after the Internet began nibble at our toes, we couldn’t come up with a way to do our jobs that would keep us from losing a leg or two, maybe more.
The same is true of original thought in education, but good ideas about schools are more common than people might imagine. My latest example is Sande Caton, a Delaware high school science teacher who has come up with a simple but smart solution to the ongoing battle between Advanced Placement and honors courses for our nation’s teenagers.
Caton revealed her method in an online comment to one of my recent columns on this blog. Her timing is good. In early June, newsweek.com will unveil the new Newsweek Top High Schools list, its annual ranking of the best 1,500 public high schools. Newsweek uses a rating formula I invented in the 1990s. Many readers think this method, called the Challenge Index, has helped AP push honors courses out of our schools. Here comes Caton with a way to make everyone happy.
Many high schools used to offer juniors and seniors a choice of a regular, an honors or an AP course in popular subjects like history or English. In recent years some have removed the honors options, saying they can’t staff three different courses. They feel honors students should be taking the more challenging AP courses anyway. My suggestion, offered with no hope of it ever being accepted, was to remove not the honors option, but the regular option. In my experience, regular students were capable of handling honors or even AP courses if well taught. Why confine them to a regular class taught to the lowest standard?
Transparency is powerful and President Obama has rightly made it a pillar of his administration's approach to policymaking. But transparency also offers the seductive promise of an easy way out for policymakers. It can trap proponents of various policy proposals in an intellectual cul de sac because it becomes easy to see information as sufficient to drive reform rather than just as a predicate for change. The risk is especially potent when proponents are convinced of the obviousness of the changes they seek.
We've seen this repeatedly with federal education policy. The Bush administration assumed the federal No Child Left Behind law would produce a tidal wave of student and school performance data that would swamp opposition to school improvement efforts. Seven years later the political resistance to education reform is as potent as ever and former Bush aides now acknowledge placing too much faith in the power of information.
In 1997, Congress tried unsuccessfully to increase accountability for colleges of education and teacher training programs by requiring them to report more data about outcomes. "Congress asked colleges of education to take stock of quality issues, but instead the colleges mostly whitewashed the problem," says Ross Weiner, a senior adviser at The Education Trust. No Child Left Behind also required states and school districts to issue better report cards about educational performance. There, too, evasion rather than aggressive efforts are the norm.
That summarizes a meeting Tuesday evening involving Mayor Tom Barrett, state Secretary of Administration Michael Morgan and the Milwaukee School Board on what to do in the aftermath of a consultant's report that criticized the business culture of Milwaukee Public Schools and said MPS could save up to $103 million a year by changing practices.
All the participants agreed that MPS faces daunting financial problems, getting worse over the next several years, if there are not major changes in the way money comes in and is spent. There also was agreement that everyone - the state, the city, MPS and others - needs to work together to improve the financial picture and to improve academic outcomes overall.
Gov. Jim Doyle and Barrett sought the report after becoming concerned about trends in MPS, including continuing low test scores overall and large property tax increases in recent years.
A week ago, Barrett and Doyle did not come to meet with board members and did not send representatives, causing some members, particularly budget committee chairman Terry Falk, to criticize them. But for this special meeting of the board, Barrett was there, Doyle sent Morgan, and everyone acted diplomatically.
Action Needed, Please Sign on.... Math Teacher Hiring in the Madison School District
via a kind reader's email: Janet Mertz and Gabi Meyer have written a letter about new math hires that they would like you to sign on to. Please send your name, your school(s), and any relevant identifying information or affiliation to:
To address as quickly as possible the MMSD's need for more middle school teachers with outstanding content knowledge of mathematics, we, the undersigned, urge you to consider filling any vacancies that occur in the District's middle schools for the coming academic year with applicants who majored in the mathematical sciences or related fields (e.g., statistics, computer science, physics) in college, but may be currently deficient in teaching pedagogy. You might advertise nationally in appropriate places that applications from such candidates would be welcome. In recent years, many outstanding graduates with such backgrounds went into the computing, consulting, and financial industries. However, in the current economic climate, such jobs are much less available, especially to new college graduates. Thus, jobs in the teaching profession may be viewed much more favorably now by folks trained in the mathematical sciences despite the significantly lower salary. One indication of this is the fact that applications to Teach for America were up 42% this year. Teach for America had to reject over 30,000 applicants this spring, including hundreds of graduates from UW-Madison, due to the limited numbers they can train and place. Undoubtedly, some of these applicants were math majors who would be happy to live in Madison. Math for America, a similar program that only accepts people who majored in the mathematical sciences, likely also had to turn away large numbers of outstanding applicants. Possibly, the MMSD could contact Teach for America and Math for America inquiring whether there might be a mechanism by which your advertisement for middle school math teachers could be forwarded to some of the best of their rejects. As these programs do, the MMSD could provide these new hires with a crash course in teaching pedagogy over the summer before they commence work in the fall. They could be hired conditionally subject to completing all of the requirements for state teacher certification within 2 years and a commitment to teach in the MMSD for at least 3-5 years.
While the District's proposal to provide additional content knowledge to dozens of its current middle school teachers of mathematics might gradually improve the delivery of mathematics to the District's students, it would take numerous years to implement, involve considerable additional expense, and may still not totally solve the long-term need for math-qualified teachers, especially in view of the continuing wave of retirements. The coincidence of baby boomer retirements with the current severe economic recession provides a rare opportunity to fill our middle schools now with outstanding mathematics teachers for decades to come, doing so at much lower cost to the District since one would be hiring new, B.A.-level teachers rather than retraining experienced, M.A.-level ones. Thus, we urge you to act on this proposal within the next few weeks, in possible.
It is interesting to note that state law provides that "A school board that employs a person who holds a professional teaching permit shall ensure that no regularly licensed teacher is removed from his or her position as a result of the employment of persons holding permits."
The Senate's most outspoken supporter of the D.C. voucher initiative orchestrated more than two hours of uniformly glowing testimony for the program at a committee hearing yesterday and said the dissenting voices he invited turned him down.
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, is pushing for reauthorization of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides up to $7,500 a year in federally funded tuition to 1,700 D.C. children from low-income families to attend private schools.
Congressional Democrats, supported by teachers unions and other liberal education groups that generally oppose using public money for private education, included language in the recent omnibus spending bill that would end the program in 2010. Last week, President Obama proposed continuing the scholarships so the students currently receiving money can finish high school. The program would be closed to new students.
Lieberman wants to fully revive the program and said yesterday that he has a commitment from Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) to bring the matter to the floor for debate and a vote this year.
Madison's only dual-language immersion school, Nuestro Mundo, has been popular with parents and students, but initial low test scores have been a concern. New test results, however, show that students at the east side elementary school are quickly showing improvement in math and reading.
The improved scores are not only important within the confines of Nuestro Mundo, where Principal Javier Bolivar says the school's biggest challenge is to prove that its students can learn proficiently while speaking two languages, but to the school district as a whole. Two more dual-language immersion programs have been approved and are due to open in the next year.
"We are gaining," says Bolivar of the encouraging test scores. "Even if we are gaining one point, it means we are doing what we are supposed to be doing and we are closing the achievement gap."
A public charter school inside Allis Elementary School at 4201 Buckeye Road, Nuestro Mundo started with a kindergarten class in 2004 and has added one grade per year. The school's first kindergartners are now fourth-graders who took the Wisconsin Knowledge Concepts Examination for the first time last school year. Third grade is the first year for state testing.
Back when he was on the city council for the District of Columbia, attorney Kevin Chavous would occasionally run into fellow Democrats concerned about the state of the USA's urban schools.
They were open to a lot of ideas, but most Democrats have historically rejected taxpayer-supported private-school vouchers, saying they drain precious cash from needy public schools. Chavous, who served from 1992 to 2005, openly supported vouchers. He would ask others why they didn't.
"Several of them would whisper to me, 'I'm with you, but I can't come out in front,' " Chavous says.
That was then.
While vouchers will likely never be the clarion call of Democrats, they're beginning to make inroads among a group of young black lawmakers, mayors and school officials who have split with party and teachers union orthodoxy on school reform. The group includes Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and former Washington, D.C., mayor Anthony Williams.
Emergency financial manager Robert Bobb said the plan takes aim at more than just the district's $305-million deficit and has the potential to boost student achievement. Many of the remaining buildings will be fixed up with federal funds.
Most of the closures were expected, although 10 buildings not on the list in April were added to the chopping block. Four schools once slated to close were spared.
Bobb made it clear that everything is on the table when it comes to fixing the 40 schools in need of restructuring. That means anything from replacing staff to changing curriculum to making them charter schools. He said some of the restructured schools could be turned over to a private school-management company.
"The students and the parents deserve better from the school district," Bobb said. "We can no longer afford to let our children linger in underperforming schools."
The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.
That's why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: "The attached study has changed my life as a scientist."
Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children's Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Children's Zone schools, but weren't selected.
They found that the Harlem Children's Zone schools produced "enormous" gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.
Sometime in the spring of 2007, Don Bubolz of Vesper didn't like what he heard at a meeting of the Wisconsin Rapids School Board.
He filed an open records request on April 16 of that year seeking the release of all e-mail messages sent to and from the accounts of five teachers in the district, for a period of about six weeks. At the time, he told the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune that he wanted to find out -- and wanted school administrators to know -- whether the teachers were "doing their job the way it's supposed to be done."
The district superintendent indicated he would release the e-mails. The Wisconsin Education Association Council, representing the five teachers, filed an injunction to block their release.
The case made its way through trial court, and last month the Appeals Court certified it for consideration by the state Supreme Court. The appeals court said that there is no existing legal guideline in Wisconsin about whether personal e-mails constitute public records. If it chooses to rule on the case, then, the Supreme Court's decision would have far-reaching implications.
California teenagers may be spared having to lug back-breaking loads of textbooks to school under a proposal that would make it easier for campuses to use electronic instructional material.
Allowing high schools greater freedom to spend state money on software to put textbooks on laptops and other electronic devices was backed by the Los Angeles Unified School District and approved Monday by the state Senate.
The Assembly will consider the proposal, drafted by state Sen. Elaine Alquist (D-Santa Clara). "Today's K-12 students represent the first generation to have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cameras, cellphones and all the other gadgets of the digital age," Alquist said after the 36-0 Senate vote.
"Today's students are no longer the students of blackboards and chalk."
California law limits how school districts can use state funds for instructional materials, requiring them to purchase enough textbooks for all students before spending money on electronic material.
As a result, some districts have purchased materials in both book form and software or have refrained from buying software, Alquist said.
I've read a number of ebooks on my iPhone while on travel. The benefit: light and easy to carry. Downside: it is still quite a different experience, but the text is certainly readable. This is certainly the future, particularly as the small devices become more powerful.
Even though spasms of intense violence erupt on campuses occasionally and linger in the social consciousness, violence at schools across the country has been decreasing for a number of years.
That doesn't necessarily mean schools are safe havens. Consider:
-- Eighty-six percent of public schools in 2005-06 reported that one or more violent incidents, thefts of items valued at $10 or greater or other crimes had occurred -- a rate of 46 crimes per 1,000 enrolled students.
-- Almost a third of students ages 12 to 18 reported being bullied inside school.
-- Nearly a quarter of teenagers reported the presence of gangs at their schools.
With a wad of budget amendments, Michael Bonds, the new president of the Milwaukee School Board, will push this week for what he labels "a major restructuring" of the MPS central office.
"There's a lot of fat and waste in the district - a lot," Bonds said in an interview. He said approving his budget ideas would "signal to the public that the board is serious about addressing the finance issue."
Action on Bonds' proposals is likely to provide some of a list of major moments this week in the fast-moving drama over charting the way the school system is controlled and what direction it is headed.
Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett are expected to announce early in the week the members of an advisory committee that they want to get involved in MPS matters. Although the group will have no legal authority, its creation may turn out to be a significant step toward Doyle and Barrett involving themselves in school issues in ways not seen before.
And Barrett and a representative of Doyle are expected to meet with the School Board in an open session Tuesday to discuss the repercussions of a consultant's report the governor and mayor released last month that was strongly critical of the business culture of MPS. The report said as much as $103 million a year could be saved if MPS made better decisions.
Bonds has hit the ground running in less than two weeks as the board's leader. He met last week with Barrett and the incoming state superintendent of public instruction, Tony Evers, and he has said there will be big changes in the way the 85,000-student system is run, many of them in line with the consultant's report.
Four ambitious candidates will be making the rounds today at Madison high schools -- giving stump speeches, outlining their platforms and extending a teenaged handshake to anyone who's interested.
Jonathan Delgado, a sophomore at East High School, Sarah Maslin, a junior at West, and Nathan Powell, a junior at Memorial, are in a three-way race for the position of student liaison to the Madison School Board, a job that entails rounding up and representing the opinions of the district's 25,000 students.
The most ambitious US presidency in living memory hardly needs to extend its list of tasks, you might think. Yet the country's long-term economic prospects turn on something that is all too easy to neglect, just as it has been neglected in the past. The US is failing calamitously in primary and secondary education. The average quality of its workforce is falling, and its schools are adding to the problem rather than mitigating it.
Much of what ails the country - including growing economic inequality - can be traced to this source. Politicians recognise the fact, and prate about it endlessly. Barack Obama puts improving the schools alongside health reform and alternative energy whenever he lays out his long-term goals.
The trouble is, fixing the schools is not something that a crisis ever forces you to do. The consequences of a third-rate education system creep up on you and, experience shows, can be tolerated indefinitely. Many vested interests prefer it that way. Talk about the issue and move on is the line of least political resistance.
Just how badly is the US school system failing? A new study by McKinsey bravely attempts to come up with some numbers - and its estimates, though arrived at conservatively, are pretty startling*.
According to the Programme for International Student Assessment, a long-term comparison project from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the US lags far behind the industrial-country average in a standardised measure of maths and science skills among 15-year-olds. It sits among low-achievers such as Portugal and Italy, and way behind the best performers, such as South Korea, Finland, Canada and the Netherlands. It scores worse than the UK, which is about average on both measures.
If you had $100 billion to fix our schools, what would you do? A surprisingly smart list of suggestions for the education portion of the federal stimulus money is circulating in the education policy world. A group of experts claims authorship. I don't believe committees are capable of good ideas, so I doubt the alleged origins of the list. But let's put that aside for a moment and see what they've got.
Better yet, why not come up with our own ideas? My column seeking cheap ways to improve education yielded interesting results. By contrast, think of what we could do if we had enough money to buy the contract of every great quarterback: guarantee the Redskins a Super Bowl victory. Many expensive school-fixing schemes proved just as insane and just as useless. But Barack Obama is president, and we are supposed to be hopeful.
Two of California's smaller education unions, unwilling to wait for voters to decide May 19 whether to authorize more than $9 billion in education funds, sued the governor Friday to force the state to pay money they say is owed to schools and to clarify the law so schools can count on funds in the future.
"We're filing this suit to make it clear that the state owes this money to schools and community colleges," said Marty Hittleman, president of the California Federation of Teachers, representing about 100,000 educators in schools and community colleges.
The 37,000-member Service Employees International Union local that represents janitors, clerks, bus drivers, and other school workers also joined the suit, filed in San Francisco Superior Court.
The Post asked education and political experts to assess the president's plan for D.C. students. Below are contributions from Andrew J. Rotherham, Dick Durbin, Tom Davis, Randi Weingarten, Michelle Rhee, Michael Bennet, Lanny J. Davis, Margaret Spellings, Andrew J. Coulson, Ed Rogers, Michael J. Petrilli, Anthony A. Williams, Joseph E. Robert Jr., Harold Ford Jr. and Lisa Schiffren.
Fresh air and sunshine stream from large windows into the brightly painted basement of Jennifer Schmitt's two-story home where she teaches seven students ranging from first to seventh grade a geometry lesson. Later the students scatter to separate whiteboard-topped tables to work puzzles or to pillow-padded nooks to read.
"Scholars, listen up!" Schmitt said as she gathered the students back together after a break to resume their studies.
It's 8:30 a.m. and the "Schmitt Academy" is in full swing.
Schmitt's students are either home schooled or take classes online through one of the state's several "virtual schools." They go to Schmitt -- a certified teacher whose two youngest children attend a virtual school -- for lessons in math and language arts.
Her operation, now in its fifth year, demonstrates the growing popularity of classrooms that go beyond the traditional brick and mortar.
The Milwaukee Public Schools teachers union has rejected a proposal that would lengthen the school day and pay teachers for the extra time with federal economic stimulus money, says Superintendent William Andrekopoulos.
The MPS chief said Thursday night that the union rejected adding 25 minutes to the school day for teaching math at all elementary and kindergarten-through-eighth grade schools. The union also rejected a proposal that would give all teachers six additional hours a month to work on improving programs in their schools. In both cases, teachers would have been paid for the additional time in line with their hourly rate of pay.
Tom Morgan, executive director of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, insisted Friday that there are better ways to improve education than lengthening the school day.
"We've taken a consistent view that doing the same thing longer is going to produce the same results," said Morgan of the idea to add 25 minutes a day.
Speaking to School Board members at a budget meeting Thursday night, Andrekopoulos called the union decisions "unfortunate" and "disturbing."
Earlier this week, MPS budget officials painted a picture for School Board members that is fast getting uglier when it comes to the $1.2 billion MPS budget and in which there is a dispute over how best to spend tens of millions of dollars in stimulus money.
No matter what happens in the special election May 19, California's government finances will remain a mess. It took years of mismanagement and economic misfortune for the state to dig itself into this hole, and it is going to take many years to climb out of it.
As the climbing begins, the state needs to make fundamental changes in the way it collects and spends the taxpayers' money. Otherwise, the next generation of lawmakers will repeat the same old mistakes as their predecessors.
Proposition 1A, with its rainy-day fund, would be one improvement, requiring lawmakers to set money aside in good times to cushion the blow of the next downturn. A bipartisan commission that has been studying the tax system will soon release its recommendations on how to make California's revenue collections fairer and more stable. That could also improve things.
If there was any doubt that education analyst Gerald W. Bracey doesn't play favorites, that's gone now. After excoriating the Bush administration and its education officials for eight years, after canvassing his neighborhood, donating his own money and voting for Barack Obama for president, Bracey is giving the new president just what he gave the old one -- unrelenting grief.
In a speech to the American Educational Research Association in San Diego last month on "countering the fearmongers about American public schools," Bracey added to his list of non-truthtellers President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. "Obama and Duncan seem to be following the long-established line that you can get away with saying just about anything you choose about public schools and no one will call you on it," Bracey said. "People will believe anything you say about public education as long as it's bad."
Bracey and I disagree on many issues, but I have long been one of his most appreciative readers, dating back to the days when I knew him only as a sharp-witted writer whose pieces occasionally appeared in The Washington Post's Outlook section. When I came back to Washington to cover local schools, I introduced myself to Bracey, who was then living in Northern Virginia, and wrote a piece about him and his long battle to persuade policymakers, political candidates and journalists to stop exaggerating our educational problems to win themselves appropriations, votes and attention. He lost at least one job because of his writing. Instead of using his doctorate in educational psychology to get a cushy university or think tank job, he has devoted his life to setting us straight, in his less financially secure role as freelance writer, author and speaker.
Steve Barr stood in the breezeway at Alain Leroy Locke High School, at the edge of the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, on a February morning. He's more than six feet tall, with white-gray hair that's perpetually unkempt, and the bulk of an ex-jock. Beside him was Ramon Cortines--neat, in a trim suit--the Los Angeles Unified School District's new superintendent. Cortines had to be thinking about last May, when, as a senior deputy superintendent, he had visited under very different circumstances. That was when a tangle between two rival cliques near an outdoor vending machine turned into a fight that spread to every corner of the schoolyard. Police sent more than a dozen squad cars and surged across the campus in riot gear, as teachers grabbed kids on the margins and whisked them into locked classrooms.
The school's test scores had been among the worst in the state. In recent years, seventy-five per cent of incoming freshmen had dropped out. Only about three per cent graduated with enough credits to apply to a California state university. Two years ago, Barr had asked L.A.U.S.D. to give his charter-school-management organization, Green Dot Public Schools, control of Locke, and let him help the district turn it around. When the district refused, Green Dot became the first charter group in the country to seize a high school in a hostile takeover. ("He's a revolutionary," Nelson Smith, the president and C.E.O. of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said.) Locke reopened in September, four months after the riot, as a half-dozen Green Dot schools.
FOR all of the hype that preceded the Tea Parties, the first protest to win some sort of concession from Barack Obama's administration may have been the protests against the end of Washington's school-voucher programme. A month ago, the programme's funding was shamefully struck from the president's proposed budget. This prompted libertarian and liberal groups to fight back, culminating in a protest yesterday. And today comes news of a compromise of sorts:
President Obama will propose setting aside enough money for all 1,716 students in the District's voucher program to continue receiving grants for private school tuition until they graduate from high school, but he would allow no new students to join the program.
Actually, that's not much of a compromise. That's more of a cover-up. Let's remember that Mr Obama, who sends his own children to private school, made the following promise during his inaugural address:
The teacher whom the Los Angeles school district has spent seven years and nearly $2 million trying to fire spoke publicly for the first time Wednesday, saying he did not sexually harass students and is the target of discrimination.
Matthew Kim, a former special education teacher at Grant High School in Van Nuys, had declined to speak to The Times numerous times over the last several months. But his mother, Cecilia, contacted the newspaper Wednesday after publication of a story that highlighted her son's case. Family members were angry and charged that the article has embarrassed them, and they wanted to tell their side of the story.
We passed the 2009-2010 Madison public school district budget last night. This was the second year in a row that we were able to reallocate to avoid ugly ugly cuts.
This was the first year that we moved to undo damage by reallocating money to put back beginning of the year "Ready Set Goal" parent-teacher conferences AND stop doubling up our art, music, gym, and computer classes through "class and a half." Both items were cuts from past years that were absolute disasters for elementary students.
We expect to receive the strategic planning report in June, and it will inform planning for the 2010-11 budget as we move forward this coming year. In the meantime, we are waiting to hear how the state budget will impact school finance. And we are continuing work to modernize and refine the ways that we work with resources to find additional ways to strengthen our schools.
For many years, Lucy Calkins, described once in Education Week as "the Moses of reading and writing in American education" has made her major contributions to the dumbing down of writing in our schools. She once wrote to me that: "I teach writing, I don't get into content that much." This dedication to contentless writing has spread, in part through her influence, into thousands and thousands of classrooms, where "personal" writing has been blended with images, photos, and emails to become one of the very most anti-academic and anti-intellectual elements of the education we now offer our children, K-12.
In 2004, the College Board's National Commission on Writing in the Schools issued a call for more attention to writing in the schools, and it offered an example of the sort of high school writing "that shows how powerfully our students can express their emotions":
"The time has come to fight back and we are. By supporting our leaders and each other, we are stronger than ever. We will never forget those who died, nor will we forgive those who took them from us."
Or look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the supposed gold standard for evaluating academic achievement in U.S. schools, as measured and reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. In its 2002 writing assessment, in which 77 percent of 12th graders scored "Basic" or "Below Basic," NAEP scored the following student response "Excellent." The prompt called for a brief review of a book worth preserving. In a discussion of Herman Hesse's Demian, in which the main character grows up, the student wrote,
"High school is a wonderful time of self-discovery, where teens bond with several groups of friends, try different foods, fashions, classes and experiences, both good and bad. The end result in May of senior year is a mature and confident adult, ready to enter the next stage of life."
It is obvious that this "Excellent" high school writer is expressing more of his views on his own high school experience than on anything Herman Hesse might have had in mind, but that still allows this American student writer to score very high on the NAEP assessment of writing.
This year, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has released a breakthrough report on writing called "Writing in the 21st Century," which informs us, among other things, that:
"Writing has never been accorded the cultural respect or the support that reading has enjoyed, in part because through reading, society could control its citizens, whereas through writing, citizens might exercise their own control."
So it has become clear to NCTE that Milton's Areopagitica, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and all those other arguments for free speech and free access to information, failed to warn us that, while it is all right for a society to provide protection for writing, reading is only a dangerous means of social control, and should be avoided at all costs. As Houston Baker warned more broadly when he was head of the Modern Language Association, "reading and writing are tools of oppression."
The 2009 NCTE report goes on to inform us, somewhat inconsistently, that:
"Reading--in part because of its central location in family and church life--tended to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth, while writing, by way of contrast, was associated with unpleasantness--with unsatisfying work and episodes of despair--and thus evoked a good deal of ambivalence."
So while, on the one hand, reading is a dangerous method for social control, and on the other hand, in contrast with writing, it is said to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth, writing is associated with unpleasantness, which would, naturally, be news to Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackery, George Eliot, and countless other authors who made it their life's work to provide feelings of intimacy and warmth, among other things, to countless readers over the centuries.
But the NCTE report has more to teach us:
"Writing has historically and inexorably been linked to testing."
Testing, the way to determine whether one has learned the tasks to be mastered, is, needless to say, not a good thing in the NCTE world. This odd and narrow "link to testing" might seem a bit far-fetched to all the historians and others whose writing has enriched our lives.
So, how does NCTE propose to free writing from its unhappy association with testing, episodes of despair, and so on? By encouraging students to do what they are doing already: texting, twitting, emailing, sending notes, sending photos, and the like--only this time it will be part of the high school "writing" curriculum. In other words, instead of NCTE encouraging educators to lift kids out of the crib, it wants them to jump in with them.
NCTE goes on to lament that: "In school and out, writing required a good deal of labor." NCTE has no doubt skipped over the advice: Labor Omnia Vincit, and has apparently come to believe that hard work and enjoyment are somehow incompatible.
To relieve our writing students of the necessity of doing the kind of hard work that is essential for success in all other human occupations, "in school and out," NCTE wants to develop "new models of composing" that will change our students from mere writers to "Citizen Composers."
This recipe for damage only adds to the harm already done, for example in high school English departments, by a truncated focus on personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, which for most students guarantees that they will move on to college or work unable to write a serious research paper or even a good strong informative memo that makes sense and can be read by others.
Many high school English department focus on preparing their students for the 500-word "essays" about their personal lives that most college admissions departments ask for these days.
According to a survey done by the Chronicle of Higher Education, 90% of college professors think that most high school students who come to them are not well prepared in reading, research or academic writing. That may possibly be because far too few of our high schools challenge their students to do any nonfiction reading or academic expository writing, including the sort of research papers which require, after all, research.
While we do challenge many high school students to take AP Chemistry, AP Biology, AP European History, and Calculus, Chinese and Physics, when it comes to the sort of writing controlled by the English department, and recommended as "21st Century Writing" by the National Council for Teachers of English, the standards are as low as they would be if the Math department limited its students to decimals and fractions and never let them try Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, or Calculus.
Even a program for gifted students, for instance the grandaddy of them all, the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, which has very challenging summer programs in the sciences for students, when it comes to writing, it sponsors a contest for "Creative Nonfiction," which turns out to be only short diary entries by these very able students. They could challenge students to produce good history or literature research papers, but they don't.
Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our public high schools today.
There are some exceptions. Since 1987, I have published 846 exemplary history research papers by high school students from 44 states and 35 other countries. Their average length has been about 5,500 words, although in the most recent issue (#77), the average length of the papers, including endnotes and bibliography, was 7,297 words.
Many of the American authors come from independent schools like Andover, Atlanta International School, Deerfield, Exeter, Groton, National Cathedral School, Polytechnic, St. Albans, Sidwell Friends School and the like. But many have also come from public high school students. Some of these students have done independent studies, hoping to be published in The Concord Review, but some very good papers have been IB Extended Essays and some have come even from students of AP teachers who do assign serious research papers, even though the College Board has no interest in them.
The Diploma to Nowhere report from Strong American Schools last summer says that more than one million U.S. high school graduates are in remedial courses in colleges each year, and if a student needs a remedial course or two, they are less likely to graduate from college.
The poor academic reading and writing skills of entering freshmen at our colleges and universities are acknowledged to be commonplace, but no one seems to have been able to increase the importance of serious writing or nonfiction reading in the high schools. The English department and the professional organizations are satisfied with preventing high school students from learning how to do research papers, so they continue to graduate students who are incompetent in academic expository writing, and unprepared for college work.
Not one of the new state academic standards asks whether students have read a single nonfiction book in high school or written a single serious research paper. All the attention is on what can be easily tested and quantified, so the skills of academic reading and writing are left out, and our students pay the price for this neglect.
In 1776, Edward Gibbon, in the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote about the importance of academic reading and writing:
"...But all this well-laboured system of German antiquities is annihilated by a single fact, too well attested to admit of any doubt, and of too decisive a nature to leave room for any reply. The Germans, in the age of Tacitus [56-120AD], were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge and reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses, but very little, his fellow-labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce that, without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life...."
No doubt he would be as appalled as our college professors are now to see the incompetence of our high school graduates who have not been asked to read and write before college.
Surely if we can raise our academic standards for math and science, then, with a little attention and effort, we can restore the importance of literacy in our public high schools. Reading is the path to knowledge and writing is the way to make knowledge one's own. If we continue to ignore them as we do now, it will not be good for our economy, or for any of the "useful and agreeable arts of life" for our students.
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Will Fitzhugh is Editor of The Concord Review and has written and lectured extensively on the assessment of writing and writing skills. He can be reached at: 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts USA, by phone at 978-443-0022; 800-331-5007, and his website and e-mail are: www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
New Mexico Journal of Reading
Spring 2009 Volume XIX, No. 3
As the nation's second-largest school district considers mass layoffs to deal with a budget deficit, it continues to pay about $10 million a year to about 160 instructors and others who are forbidden to enter a classroom.
The Los Angeles Unified School District employees earn salaries while misconduct complaints against them are reviewed.
Last month, the school board voted to lay off as many as 2,400 teachers and 2,000 other personnel to deal with a $596 million budget shortfall for the upcoming school year.
Matthew Kim, a special education teacher, was removed from Grant High School in Van Nuys in 2002 amid allegations that he improperly touched female students. The board voted to fire him in 2003 but he has challenged the decision in both administrative hearings and court.
Is a change in management enough to transform some of the worst schools in the country? Paul Vallas seems to think so, which might explain why the New Orleans superintendent is one of the biggest cheerleaders for charter schools. Because charter schools are free from district control and often from teacher unions, they have the power to hire and fire, choose the curriculum, and set student rules.
Over half of Vallas' schools are now charters, and most of them are outperforming traditionally-run schools in New Orleans. But Vallas wants to 'charterize' the entire district, even though there's evidence that charters may be abusing their freedom.
A report last week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- widely known as the "Nation's Report Card" -- shows that total education spending per pupil has doubled since 1971.
Yet overall test results for our high school seniors remain unchanged.
In effect, we're spending twice as much money to achieve the same results as more than 35 years ago.
If that isn't sad enough, consider these additional facts gleaned from various news stories over the past few weeks:
• A headline from the Wall Street Journal on April 23: "Demand for Charter Schools is High, Seats are Few."
President Obama will propose setting aside enough money for all 1,716 students in the District's voucher program to continue receiving grants for private school tuition until they graduate from high school, but he would allow no new students to join the program, administration officials said yesterday.
The proposal, to be released in budget documents today, is an attempt to navigate a middle way on a contentious issue. School choice advocates, including Republicans and many low-income families, say the program gives poor children better access to quality education. Teachers unions and other education groups active in the Democratic Party regard vouchers as a drain on public education that benefits relatively few students, and they say the students don't achieve at appreciably higher levels at their new schools.
Much of our education funding is wasted on bureaucracy. The money never actually makes it into the classroom in the form of books, computers, supplies, or even salaries for better teachers. Weighted student formula changes that. Using weighted student formula's decentralized system, education funds are attached to each student and the students can take that money directly to the public school of their choice.
At least 15 major school districts have moved to this system of backpack funding. Reason Foundation's new Weighted Student Formula Yearbook examines how the budgeting system is being implemented in each of these places and, based on the real-world data, offers a series of "best practices" that other districts and states can follow to improve the quality of their schools.
In places where parents have school choice and districts empower their principals and teachers we are seeing increased learning and better test scores. The results from districts using student-based funding are very promising. Prior to 2008, less than half of Hartford, Connecticut's education money made it to the classroom. Now, over 70 percent makes it there. As a result, the district's schools posted the largest gains, over three times the average increase, on the state's Mastery Tests in 2007-08.
I didn't see many other reporters Tuesday in the narrow, second-floor meeting room of the Phoenix Park Hotel in the District. A U.S. senator's party switch and new National Assessment of Educational Progress data were a bigger draw. But in the long term, the news conference at the hotel might prove a milestone in public education. It isn't often you see a leading teachers union announce it is taking money from what many of its members consider the enemy: corporate billionaires who have been bankrolling the largely nonunion charter school movement.
Of course, it might turn out to be just another publicity stunt. But the people gathered, and what they said, impressed me.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, unveiled the first union-led, private foundation-supported effort to provide grants to AFT unions nationwide to develop and implement what she called "bold education innovations in public schools." The advisory board of the AFT Innovation Fund includes celebrities of my education wonk world: former Cleveland schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett, Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, Harvard professor Susan Moore Johnson and even Caroline Kennedy, well known for other reasons but identified at the conference as an important fundraiser for New York schools.
Some metro Atlanta public high schools that don't grade rigorously produce more graduates lacking the basic English and math skills needed for college, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found.
Many graduates of those high schools are sent to freshmen remedial classes to learn what high school didn't teach them. As many as a third or more college-bound graduates from some high schools need the extra instruction.
Problems with classroom grading came to light in a February state study that showed some high schools regularly awarded good marks to students who failed state tests in the same subject.
The AJC found that metro high schools where classroom grading appeared lax or out-of-step with state standards tended to have higher rates of students who took remedial classes. And at dozens of high schools, most graduates who received the B average needed for a state HOPE scholarship lost it in college after a few years.
Unprepared high-school graduates are a growing problem for the public university system, where remedial students are concentrated in two-year colleges.
Statewide, the remedial rate has climbed to 1 in 4 first-year students after dropping in the 1990s, said Chancellor Erroll Davis Jr. of the University System of Georgia. The cost to the system: $25 million a year.
Students such as Brandon Curry, 20, a graduate of Redan High in DeKalb County, said they were surprised to learn decent high school grades don't always translate into college success.
Washington, D.C.'s school voucher program for low-income kids isn't dead yet. But the Obama Administration seems awfully eager to expedite its demise.
About 1,700 kids currently receive $7,500 vouchers to attend private schools under the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and 99% of them are black or Hispanic. The program is a huge hit with parents -- there are four applicants for every available scholarship -- and the latest Department of Education evaluation showed significant academic gains.
Nevertheless, Congress voted in March to phase out the program after the 2009-10 school year unless it is reauthorized by Congress and the D.C. City Council. The Senate is scheduled to hold hearings on the program this month, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has promised proponents floor time to make their case. So why is Education Secretary Arne Duncan proceeding as if the program's demise is a fait accompli?
Mr. Duncan is not only preventing new scholarships from being awarded but also rescinding scholarship offers that were made to children admitted for next year. In effect, he wants to end a successful program before Congress has an opportunity to consider reauthorizing it. This is not what you'd expect from an education reformer, and several Democrats in Congress have written him to protest.
The most recent research from the U.S. Department of Education shows that American 15-year-olds are behind their International counterparts when it comes to problem solving and math literacy.
The report showed the U.S. ranks 24th out of 29 nations.
But a math program, gaining in popularity, is trying to change that.
The program is called Everyday Math.
Lori Rusch is a fourth grade teacher at Middleton's Elm Lawn Elementary. This year she teaches an advanced math class.
On Monday, students in Rusch's class were mastering fractions and percentages.
But her students began learning fractions and percentages in first grade.
"We've been incredibly successful with it," said Middleton's curriculum director George Marvoulis. "Our students on all of our comparative assessments like WKCE, Explorer Plan, ACT, our students score higher in math than any other subject area so we've been very pleased."
According to Marvoulis, Middleton was one of the first school districts in the nation to use the Everyday Math program in 1994.
"The concept is kind of a toolbox of different tools they can use to solve a problem," explained Marvoulis.
PLEDGES are shrinking to aspirations; aspirations are quietly evaporating; no more hoodies are being hugged or huskies stroked (or was it the other way around?). The sunny Californian Conservatism that David Cameron once espoused has been darkened by the crunch. His promise of a happier tomorrow now hangs on a few upbeat policies. Chief among them is education reform--which could make Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, among the most privileged and pressured members of a future Tory government.
Ed Balls, his counterpart in the cabinet, is an equally important figure for Labour, before and after the next general election. Ire over public services often focuses on bad hospitals: death is more heart-wrenching than illiteracy. But pound for pound (and there have been a lot of them), Labour's education spending has been less rewarding than its health splurge. It falls to Mr Balls to defend its record on what Tony Blair proclaimed his main priority--and to soften the recession's impact on teenagers and soothe a rumbling moral panic about harm done by and to children.
Under the measure, the school board would gradually transition from seven appointed members to six elected and three appointed members. The current school board believes the bill is too vague and that the transition will be difficult. But the bill clearly outlines the proposed changes, and only a couple of minor details need to be worked out.
Contrary to the board's objection, the difficulty of the transition would likely be minimal. In order for three board members' terms to end on June 30, 2011, one board member's term would be lengthened by a year, and another's would be shortened. On July 1, 2011, three elected board members would take office along with two appointed members. The board members in office on July 1, 2011 would serve for four years, and in the next election cycle six members would be elected.
So the school board's vocal opposition is misleading. Why should these minor issues prevent Harford County's constituents from influencing how their tax dollars are spent on their children's education? Despite prior bills, Harford County is one of the last counties in which voters cannot elect school board members.
I didn't see many other reporters Tuesday in the narrow, second-floor meeting room of the Phoenix Park Hotel in the District. A U.S. senator's party switch and new National Assessment of Educational Progress data were a bigger draw. But in the long term, the news conference at the hotel might prove a milestone in public education. It isn't often you see a leading teachers union announce it is taking money from what many of its members consider the enemy: corporate billionaires who have been bankrolling the largely nonunion charter school movement.
Of course, it might turn out to be just another publicity stunt. But the people gathered, and what they said, impressed me.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, unveiled the first union-led, private foundation-supported effort to provide grants to AFT unions nationwide to develop and implement what she called "bold education innovations in public schools." The advisory board of the AFT Innovation Fund includes celebrities of my education wonk world: former Cleveland schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett, Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, Harvard professor Susan Moore Johnson and even Caroline Kennedy, well known for other reasons but identified at the conference as an important fundraiser for New York schools.
A funny thing has been happening to some of that widely heralded federal education money. It has fallen off the bus on the way to school. At least a few cash-strapped local governments upon notification of the federal input have eliminated an equal amount from their own budgets, hardly what the Obama administration had in mind for the $100 billion aimed at vastly improving the nation's schools.
While the practice is not general and there are strict rules about the use of the federal bucks as part of the economic recovery effort, local and state officials are being forced to reduce manpower in vital services like fire and police. The temptation to relieve some of that pressure and to prevent teacher layoffs seems overwhelming and likely to grow.
For instance, the local press here recently reported that Loudon County in the nearby Virginia suburbs was a case in point. Upon hearing that the county would receive more than $11 million in new school money from Uncle Sam, the county's supervisors slashed $7.3 million from the regular school budget. According to the reports, the board also has made it clear that schools might have to give more local money back if there were other federal contributions. Similar actions have been taken elsewhere and Arne Duncan, the new secretary of Education, has warned of strong reprisals if this abuse of the president's intentions is not stopped.
A Times investigation finds the process so arduous that many principals don't even try, except in the very worst cases. Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare.
The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see.
He had just explained to Polanco and his history classmates at Virgil Middle School in Koreatown why he had been absent: He had been in the hospital after an attempt at suicide.
Polanco looked at the cuts and said they "were weak," according to witness accounts in documents filed with the state. "Carve deeper next time," he was said to have told the boy.
"Look," Polanco allegedly said, "you can't even kill yourself."
The boy's classmates joined in, with one advising how to cut a main artery, according to the witnesses.
he state Board of Regents, which oversees public schools in the state among its duties, has a lot on its plate at the moment. There is the problem of the crippled state finances and their impact on local schools. There is the arrival of a new education secretary, Arne Duncan, who not only is handing out stimulus money but is looking for national school reform.
And then there is the regents' task of choosing a commissioner to replace Richard Mills, who is leaving the job this summer, a leader who changed the conversation about public school performance by championing consistent, measurable standards in academic fundamentals.
The value of a measuring process based almost entirely on standardized tests was often questioned, but test scores did show with great clarity the disparity between urban and suburban schools.
The 4K steering committee had four meetings reviewing prior history, leaming from other districts, and looking at what needs to be accomplished prior to start up. At the last meeting we came to consensus on a time-line. As a result, the steering committee is recommending that the Board of Education make a commitment in May to begin 4K no later than fall, 2010.
The next 4K meeting is tentatively scheduled for Monday, May 11, from 9:30 to 11:30, site to be determined. At this meeting we will divide into working subcommittees focused around the Tasks Ahead piece developed in previous meetings. Attached is a list of the tasks.
The steering committee is a terrific group of individuals to work with and there is no lack of enthusiasm and passion for this initiative.
The 2008-09 school year marked the fourth consecutive year in which testing in grades 3 through 8 and 10 was conducted in fulfillment of the federal No Child left Behind law. The Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exams (WKCE) is a criterion-referenced test (CRT) where a student's performance is compared to a specific set of learning standard outcomes. The WKCE-CRT includes testing in all seven grade levels reading and math and in grades 4, 8 and 10 additional testing in language arts, science and social studies. Just under 12,400 MMSD students participated in this year's WKCE-CRT.
Under NClB, schools are required to test 95% of their full academic year (FAY) students in reading and math. Madison's test participation rates exceeded 95% in all grade levels. Grades 3 through 8 achieved 99% test participation or higher while the District's 10th graders reached 98% in test participation.
In general, performance was relatively unchanged in the two academic areas tested across the seven grade levels. In reading, across the seven grades tested four grade levels had an increase in the percentage of students scoring at the proficient or higher performance categories compared with the previous year while three grades showed a decline in the percentage. In math, three grades increased proficient or higher performance, three grades declined, and one remained the same.
The changing demographics of the district affect the overall aggregate achievement data. As the district has experienced a greater proportion of students from subgroups which are at a disadvantage in testing, e.g., non-native English speakers, or English language learners (Ells), the overall district averages have correspondingly declined. Other subgroups which traditionally perform well on student achievement tests, i.e., non-low income students and white students, continue to perform very high relative to statewide peer groups. Therefore, it is important disaggregate the data to interpret and understand the district results.
What happens when you have a law that's supposed to improve performance among the nation's school children but instead it creates confusion, lowers expectations and can result in a "dummying down" of state standards?
That's what a panel of educational experts is trying to address with a plan to incorporate common academic standards. They are urging Congress to support a state-led initiative to develop more-uniform, clear and integrated standards that reflect both the global marketplace and Americans' mobility within the country.
Under the 2002 No Child Left Behind law (PL 107-110), states set their own standards -- resulting in what Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls a "dummying down" of state standards in order to meet benchmarks set by the law.
Those who advocate for common standards contend that a system of variable expectations -- ones that are often too low -- leads American students to underperform when compared with their peers in Finland or China. President Obama called for common standards in a March 10 speech, and Duncan has said he would use a portion of a $5 billion "Race to the Top" fund under his discretion to reward states working toward that goal.
The panel -- which included Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers; former North Carolina Gov. James B. Hunt Jr.; and Dave Levin, founder of the KIPP charter schools -- testified April 29 at a House Education and Labor Committee hearing.
More than a decade ago, when I began investigating the odd uses of Advanced Placement courses and tests in our high schools, I tried to find out why AP participation was so much lower than I expected in my neighborhood public school, Walt Whitman High of Bethesda. At least one high school in neighboring D.C., and many more in suburban Maryland, had higher participation rates than Whitman, even though it was often called the best school in the state.
That is how I stumbled on what I call the Mt. Olympus syndrome. There were, I discovered from talking to students, a few AP teachers at that school who didn’t want to deal with average students. One of them actively discouraged juniors who were getting less than an A in a prerequisite course from taking his AP course when they were seniors. He only wanted students who were going to get a 5, the equivalent of an A on the three-hour college-level AP exam, where a score of 3 and above could earn college credit. That test, like all AP exams, was written and graded by outside experts, mostly high school and college instructors. The only way that teacher thought he could control the number of 5s was to make sure only top quality students--the academic gods of the Whitman High pantheon--were allowed into his course.
New Milwaukee School Board President Michael Bonds took a stand Wednesday in support of major changes in the direction of Milwaukee Public Schools, calling for a hiring freeze in the central office, more school closings and less busing.
Bonds said MPS could save millions of dollars by taking a series of steps, including some similar to what was in a stinging consultant's report done for Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.
Bonds said he was sending letters to Doyle and Barrett, asking for weekly meetings with them or their representatives to develop a unified effort to improve education in Milwaukee. He also held out the prospect of involvement by city and state representatives in MPS decision-making.
He said MPS should not seek or expect more money from the state, both because it is not realistic and because the district needs to do more to control its own spending.
"I still think we have millions in unrealized efficiencies," he said.
Since 1994, Wisconsin school districts have operated under state-imposed revenue limits and the associated qualified economic offer (QEO) law.
Revenue limits have helped reduce school property tax increases to less than 5% per year from more than 9% annually prior to the caps.
The limits have had \aried impacts on school districts, with growing districts experiencing the largest revenue gains. Low-spending districts prior to the caps have seen the largest per student gains.
The QEO law has helped school districts keep compensation costs somewhat in line with revenue limits. However, since benefits are given more weight, teacher salary increases have slowed.
Since 1994. Wisconsin school districts have operated under slate-imposed revenue limits, which arc tied to inflation and enrollments. The associated qualified economic offer (QEO) law limits staff compensation increases to about 4% annually. With declining student counts, fluctuations in stale school aid. and various concerns over teacher pay. revenue limits and the QEO have attracted increasing debate.
The governor, in his proposed 2009-11 state budget, recommends eliminating the QEO. I le has also talked about providing ways for school districts to move away from revenue limits. This report does not address these specific proposals. Rather, it seeks to help inform discussions by examining the history of revenue limits and the QEO, legislative attempts to fix various issues, and the impacts of limits on schools, educators, and taxpayers.
THE REVENUE LIMIT LAW
School districts collect revenue from a variety of sources. The two largest sources are the property tax and state general (or equalization) aid, General aid is distributed based on district property wealth and spending. Combined, these two revenue sources account for about 75% of an average district's funding. The remainder is a combination of student fees, federal aid. and state categorical aids. such as those for special education and transportation.
The revenue limit law was implemented in 1994 (1993-94 school year) and caps the amount districts can collect from property taxes and general aid combined. It does not restrict student fees, federal aid. or state categorical aid. A district's revenue limit is determined by its prior-year cap, an inflation factor, and enrollments. There is an exception to the limit law for districts defined as "low-revenue." Currently, districts with per student revenues less than S9.000 are allowed to increase their revenues to that level.
Background
While Wisconsin's revenue limit law began in 1994. its roots date back to several teacher strikes in the early 1970s, culminating with the 1974 Hortonville strike during which 86 teachers were fired. That strike gained national attention.
: Public schools across Wisconsin expect a critical shortage of math and science teachers in the next few years. Supply is not keeping up with demand.
That's why the Legislature should approve Senate Bill 175. This sensible proposal would lure more math and science professionals into classrooms by creating a shorter and less expensive route to a teaching license for anyone with a college degree.
SB 175 also could attract more black men into the teaching profession to serve as role models in urban schools -- a key selling point for Rep. Jason Fields, D-Milwaukee, who is part of a bipartisan group of sponsors.
Computing skills will be put on an equal footing with literacy and numeracy in an overhaul of primary education that aims to slim down the curriculum - but not lose the basics.
Children will be taught to read using internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo in the first few years of school, it is announced.
Pupils in English primary schools will learn to write with keyboards, use spellcheckers and insert internet "hyperlinks" into text before their 11th birthday under the most significant reform of timetables since the National Curriculum was introduced in 1988.
The review by Sir Jim Rose, former head of inspections at Ofsted, also recommends the use of Google Earth in geography lessons, spreadsheets to calculate budgets in maths, online archives to research local history and video conferencing software for joint language lessons with schools overseas.
Sir Jim insisted the changes would not replace come at the expense of traditional teaching, saying: "We cannot sidestep the basics".
He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We've let the curriculum become too fat. We need to give teachers the opportunity to be more flexible."
His report, which will be accepted in full by ministers, also proposes more IT training for teachers to keep them ahead of "computer savvy pupils".
Google (and other search engine) users should be aware of the many privacy issues associated with these services. Willem Buiter:
Google is to privacy and respect for intellectual property rights what the Taliban are to women's rights and civil liberties: a daunting threat that must be fought relentlessly by all those who value privacy and the right to exercise, within the limits of the law, control over the uses made by others of their intellectual property. The internet search engine company should be regulated rigorously, defanged and if necessary, broken up or put out of business. It would not be missed.
In a nutshell, Google promotes copyright theft and voyeurism and lays the foundations for corporate or even official Big Brotherism.
Google, with about 50 per cent of the global internet search market, is the latest in a distinguished line of IT abusive monopolists. The first was IBM, which was brought to heel partly by a forty-year long antitrust regulation (which ended in 1996) and partly by the rise of Microsoft.
In 2002-2003, 1 million students participated in AP by taking at least one exam. Five years later, nearly 1.6 million did—a 50+ percent increase. But is growth all good? Might there be a downside? Are ill prepared students eroding the quality of the program? Perhaps harming the best and brightest? To find out, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute commissioned the Farkas Duffett Research Group to survey AP teachers in public high schools across the country. Perhaps not surprisingly, the AP program remains very popular with its teachers. But there are signs that the move toward “open door” access to AP is starting to cause concern. Read the report to learn more.
A survey of more than 1,000 teachers of Advanced Placement courses in American high schools has found that more than half are concerned that the program’s effectiveness is being threatened as districts loosen restrictions on who can take such rigorous courses and as students flock to them to polish their résumés.
The study, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an educational research and advocacy organization, noted the sharp growth in the A.P. program’s popularity. The number of high school students who took at least one college-level A.P. course increased by 45 percent, to 1.6 million from 1.1 million, from the school year ended 2004 to that ended 2008.
The number of A.P. exams those students took — with hopes, in part, of gaining exemption from some college class work, depending on how well they scored — increased by 50 percent, to 2.7 million.>Dane County, WI High School AP course offering comparison.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan tells us that "School Reform Means Doing What's Best for Kids" (op-ed, April 22). His cry for "doing what's best for kids" rings a bit hollow when he failed to do what is best for the 1,700 low-income kids in Washington, D.C. who were counting on him. Those kids were given a lifeline -- a voucher to escape schools that continually failed them, schools in a district to which neither Mr. Duncan nor his boss would send their own children. When crunch time arrived, politics trumped educational freedom, at least when it came to poor, inner-city kids in the District of Columbia.
Mr. Duncan speaks eloquently about how the public education establishment must change. He correctly says "we need a culture of accountability in America's education system if we want to be the best in the world." But what greater accountability can there be than that which comes from customers exercising free choices? True accountability in education will only come about when all parents are empowered to choose what they deem is best for their own children, not just those, like President Obama, Mr. Duncan, and most readers of the Wall Street Journal, who have financial means. So my question is, "When will the Obamas, Duncans, et. al. stand up for low-income parents so that they, too, can make choices that are best for their kids?"
bout 15 local child care centers are likely to host the Waukesha School District's new half-day, 4-year-old kindergarten program next year, a district curriculum and instruction coordinator said.
Deb Wells, the district coordinator for the new 4-K program and coordinator for kindergarten and elementary social studies, said her staff is conducting site visits at 15 or 16 community child care sites in Waukesha to determine that they meet high standards for 4-K instruction.
Wells said that about 20 community sites applied to be a part of the program.
Of the 15 or 16 they've settled on, Wells said, the district will likely work with most if not all of them.
Across Wisconsin, educators like Hensgen are part of a growing chorus to reassess the way the state assesses students. Currently, teachers and districts wait five months for WKCE results, so they have little time to react to the findings and adjust their curriculum. The tests eat into a week of class time and are based on standards that, critics say, are too low to give parents and teachers a clear picture of how students measure up globally.
"It's widely agreed that the WKCE is a really lousy test that measures lame standards," said Phil McDade, a departing member of the Monona Grove School Board. "The bigger issue to me in Wisconsin is that there's a sense of self-satisfaction with our school districts, that we're doing fine, that we're Lake Wobegon, that everybody here's above average."
The Department of Public Instruction commissioned a state task force on the issue last fall and is reviewing the group's recommendations, said Michael Thompson, executive assistant to the state superintendent of schools. The state's current testing contract lasts at least another two years.
This is an era of "NO Values" - that is confirmed! Ten years have passed since 1998 and the medium-of-instruction pendulum is swinging again. From one side to the other, or rather, back to square one, although the government refuses to admit the fact and gives the latest policy move a beautiful name: "fine-tuning". Yet, who will feel fine? The Education Bureau? Parents? Teachers? Students?
While the community is deeply involved in the discussion about the so-called labelling effect that could be caused by the fine-tuning policy, what has made the pendulum swing back remains a complete mystery. No one will be interested in the mystery, they will be too busy getting their surfboards ready for the tide to turn again.
However, this mysterious force is pushing our community into an era without beliefs and values. The issue of teaching language should not be considered as something solely related to education, it should be viewed and discussed from a wider angle. It is, in fact, demonstrating how our government formulates and adjusts its public policies.
Let us have a look at the Education Bureau's proposal. The officials are now suggesting that teachers hold a grade six in the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), considered appropriate to be able to conduct a lesson in English in the future.
What is IELTS? According to the official webpage www.ielts.org) , it is an internationally recognised English test measuring the ability of a student to communicate in English across all four language skills - listening, reading, writing and speaking - for people who intend to study or work where English is the language of communication.
Just like TOEFL, this is an English benchmarking test for students who wish to further their studies overseas and for people who are applying for migration to an English-speaking country.
How is a person's English-speaking capacity evaluated in IELTS? The oral test consists of two sections. The five-minute section one is a general "getting-to-know-the-candidate" part with common questions such as: "Do you enjoy studying English?" Section two is a two-minute monologue, with the candidate asked to give a presentation on a set topic based on information given on a cue card.
Clearly, the test has nothing to do with English teaching - the results of IELTS are unable to tell a person's ability to conduct a secondary school English lesson.
What makes Education Bureau officials believe so confidently that a non-English teacher holding a grade six in IELTS would be competent to deliver a lesson in biology or geography? Up until now we have not seen any evidence or research to support such a belief. Obviously the government owes the public an explanation.
In terms of command of English, what does grade six in IELTS stand for? In Australia, if a student wants to further his or her studies at a graduate school, a grade eight in IELTS is a must. In Hong Kong, both City and Baptist universities consider IELTS grade six equivalent to grade E in the Hong Kong AS-level Use of English examination. Would the public believe a teacher holding a grade E in Use of English capable of teaching a general subject such as chemistry and liberal studies in fluent English? I am afraid only someone who is ignorant of the exam requirements and content would say "yes".
Does the government know this? Beyond doubt, nearly all officials themselves should have gone through this system and exam themselves some years ago.
Either the government did not know what level of language proficiency an IELTS grade six represented. If so, it means that our officials are ignorant and are not making policy decisions in a professional way. There again, what if the officials did know what an IELTS grade six stood for when they designed the fine-tuning policy?
This is a question we should all ask, and it is why professional teachers and principals are against the proposed fine-tuning policy.
Ten years ago, without giving the public any research findings, the government told secondary schools that code-mixing was something very bad for students and had to be abandoned. Similarly, we have not seen any research to explain why there should be some schools allowed to cling to English teaching, while the government ruled that mother-tongue should be the best teaching language in the classroom.
Couldn't the government foresee that such an odd policy - telling the public that English-medium schools were admitting better students - would harm the fundamental spirit of mother-tongue education at that time?
Now, a generation of students has gone and the government tells the public it is time the pendulum swung back to the original side. Again, no theories, no research and no long-term plans are available to support such a move.
What can we learn from this? The fine-tuning policy move awakes all of us to the fact that we are living in an era of no beliefs and values. We are simply struggling in the ripples of political waves. Our government is not making sensible decisions based on any schools of thought or other rational considerations; it is a machine operating on political concerns.
Where have all our professional beliefs, values and practices gone? Long gone with the political monsoons.
May God bless our children - the future pillars of Hong Kong!
Jonathan Lai Ping-wah.
Alumnus principal of Lee Kau Yan Memorial School, Kowloon (a Chinese middle school since 1964).
Master of Public Administration, University of Hong Kong.
Master of Language Studies, Baptist University.
Bachelor of Arts (Chinese and English), Chinese University.
Teacher's Certificate (special education), Hong Kong Institute of Education.
At a growing number of middle schools and high schools across the country, students no longer receive failing marks when they fail. Instead, they get an "H" -- for "held" -- on their report cards, and they're given a chance to rectify their poor performance without tanking the entire semester.
Educators in schools from Costa Mesa, Calif., to Maynard, Mass., are also employing a policy known in school hallways as ZAP -- or "Zeros Aren't Permitted" -- which gives students an opportunity to finish the homework they neglected to do on time.
While administrators and teachers say the policies provide hope for underperforming students, critics say that lowering or altering education standards is not the answer. They point to case studies in Grand Rapids, Mich., where public high schools are using the "H" grading system this year and, according to reports, only 16 percent of first-semester "H" grades became passing grades in the second semester.
St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman often says that education is the key to many things that make a city successful, including economic development, crime fighting and neighborhood stability.
"Every mayor has to make education their Number 1 priority," he says.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan takes it one step further -- he wants more big-city mayors to follow the lead of Michael Bloomberg in New York City and take over their cities' school systems to help improve their leadership and stability.
"Where you've seen real progress in the sense of innovation, guess what the common denominator is?" Duncan asked. "Mayoral control."
That said, could the mayors take over the schools here?
If you wanted to help a Martian understand this sliver of the planet in Rockland County, you might do two things.
First, you would take him (or her or it) to the cavernous Foodmart International on the main drag, Route 59.
The shoppers chatter in the broad, chilly aisles in every language under the sun. The wares include Cuban bread, Thai jasmine rice, Vietnamese chili-garlic sauce, Chinese kidney and liver herb extract, Haitian sugar, Salvadoran pickled vegetables, Honduran cream, Malaysian papaya pudding -- like the provisions for some modern ark.
Then, you would head a mile or so down the road toward Monsey, where you would see gaggles of observant Jews in traditional garb walking on the street, pushing strollers, popping into shops offering kosher pizza, falafel and ice cream.
This would be helpful in understanding not just this area, but disputes along sensitive cultural fault lines that are playing out in several suburban communities. In fact, the East Ramapo school district here is going through the same drama as the district in Lawrence, on Long Island.
Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett warned Friday that it "defies common sense" to consider a large increase in property taxes for Milwaukee Public Schools for next year and said they will hold MPS leaders accountable if there is such an increase.
They did not spell out exactly what they meant by accountable, but their sharp statement came as the two consider supporting major changes in the way MPS is run, including a possible mayoral takeover of the system. It also came shortly before they name a commission to oversee putting into action a consultant's report that said MPS could save millions of dollars if it operated like a well-run business.
The governor and mayor were reacting to Thursday's release of a proposed budget for MPS by Superintendent William Andrekopoulos. The proposal did not include a projection for property taxes for next year - that won't come for months - but it did include a statement that it was likely there would be "a significant property tax increase." Some MPS leaders have suggested it could be 10% or more.
The reaction also came the same day incoming state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers told the state Assembly's Education Reform Committee that he intends to appoint a "federal funds trustee" to oversee how MPS spends tens of millions of dollars of federal economic stimulus money.
Doyle and Barrett jointly issued a brief statement about the MPS property tax picture:
This recent meeting was once again facilitated by Dr. Keith Marty, Superintendent of the Menomonee Falls school district. Non-MMSD attendance was somewhat lower than the initial 2.5 day session.
The Minnesota House has passed an education finance bill that would hold state funding for public schools flat over the next two years.
The vote Thursday night was 85-48. With the state facing a $4.6 billion budget deficit, House Democrats say the bill provides dependable funding in difficult times. But Republicans argue that schools need more.
The House K-12 bill maintains current state funding for education by using federal economic stimulus money, as well as delayed payments to school districts and property tax accounting shifts, to offset spending cuts.
DFL Rep. Mindy Greiling of Roseville, chair of the House K-12 Education Finance Division, said the bill holds the ship steady until the state reaches calmer economic waters. Greiling said the bill lays the groundwork for a new school finance system that would begin ramping up funding levels in 2014.
"Education is something that even in the hard times we should prioritize," Greiling said. "And that's what this bill does. Because building a workforce that's ready to compete in a global economy has always been and must remain a Minnesota priority.
I am ignorant of many things, but I think I know charter schools, particularly what makes the best ones successful. I have a new book out on that subject. I discuss the issue often in this column. For instance, in a recent piece I sifted reader reaction and concluded the best name for our highest-achieving charters is No Excuses schools, because their teachers believe their students' impoverished backgrounds are no barrier to learning.
But here comes Steven F. Wilson, one of the savviest of charter school scholars, making me look dumb. He has revealed an important facet of No Excuses schools that never occurred to me. I tried to cover my embarrassment when I read his American Enterprise Institute paper, "Success at Scale in Charter Schooling."
Earth Day is one thing, but for Milwaukee Public Schools high school students, Wednesday was also ACT day.
For the first time, every junior in MPS was given the opportunity to take the ACT college entrance exam for free and on a normal school day. MPS officials said indications were that a very large percentage of them did that.
Terry Falk, the School Board member who initiated the plan, said his goal was to get more students, teachers and administrators to take college-readiness more seriously.
"In the long run, it's about holding kids to higher standards," he said.
Falk said he also hoped the step would lead state and local school officials to pay more attention to the performance of students beyond the point early in 10th grade when they take the last round of state standardized tests.
Falk and other MPS officials said the testing Wednesday went smoothly.
Divided on whether to adopt a recommended new high school textbook program Wednesday, the Seattle Public Schools Board of Directors postponed voting on the issue until next month.
The reason? The attending directors, indicating how they planned to vote, split 3-3 on Wednesday. Director Cheryl Chow, who was absent while traveling, could be the tie-breaker at the board's May 6 meeting.
"This is one of the few times when we have the opportunity to change the direction when it comes to the school district's instruction," board President Michael DeBell said.
No official vote took place, but DeBell said he planned to vote against the math-adoption motion.
Up for approval was a policy that would overhaul the Seattle school district's math program by adopting new textbooks, standardizing its curriculum and renaming its classes. The Integrated Math 2 classes, for example, would become Advanced Algebra, said Anna-Maria de la Fuente, the district's K-12 mathematics program coordinator.
A Seattle Public Schools math committee, after about six months of investigation and debate, recommended a textbook program called Discovering Mathematics for all of the district's math classes, except for statistics.
Policies that give parents the ability to exercise private-school choice continue to proliferate across the country. In 2009, 14 states and Washington, D.C., are offering school voucher or education tax-credit programs that help parents send their children to private schools. During the 2007 and 2008 legislative sessions, 44 states introduced school-choice legislation.[1] In 2008, private-school-choice policies were enacted or expanded in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Utah[2]--made possible by increasing bipartisan support for school choice.[3]
On Capitol Hill, however, progress in expanding parental choice in education remains slow. Recent Congresses have not implemented policies to expand private-school choice. In 2009, the 111th Congress has already approved legislative action that threatens to phase out the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), a federal initiative that currently helps 1,700 disadvantaged children attend private schools in the nation's capital.
Congress's Own School Choices
At the same time, many Members of Congress who oppose private-school-choice policies for their fellow citizens exercise school choice in their own lives. Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), the chief architect of the language that threatens to end the OSP, for instance, sends his children to private school[4] and attended private school himself.[5]
NEW SURVEY shows that 38 percent of members of Congress have sent their children to private school. About 20 percent themselves attended private school, nearly twice the rate of the general public. Nothing wrong with those numbers; no one should be faulted for personal decisions made in the best interests of loved ones. Wouldn't it be nice, though, if Congress extended similar consideration to low-income D.C. parents desperate to keep their sons and daughters in good schools?
The latest Heritage Foundation study of lawmakers' educational choices comes amid escalating efforts to kill the federally funded D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that helps 1,700 disadvantaged children attend private schools. Congress cut funding beyond the 2009-10 school year unless the program, which provides vouchers of up to $7,500, gets new federal and local approvals. Education Secretary Arne Duncan cited that uncertainty as the reason for his recent decision to rescind scholarship offers to 200 new students. Senate hearings on the program's future are set for this spring, and opponents -- chiefly school union officials -- are pulling out all the stops as they lobby their Democratic allies.
Michelle Rhee, a national firebrand for education reform, urged Colorado educators and lawmakers Thursday night to continue their efforts to change the state of education.
Rhee -- chancellor of Washington, D.C., schools who closed 23 schools in her first year, fired 36 principals and proposed paying more money to good teachers and firing the bad ones -- spoke at a meeting of the Democrats for Education Reform in the auditorium of the Denver Newspaper Agency building.
The standing-room-only crowd included Lt. Gov. Barbara O'Brien, state Senate President Peter Groff and U.S. Rep. Jared Polis.
"We have public schools so that every kid can have an equal shot in life," Rhee said. "That is not the reality for children in Washington, D.C., today or many children in urban cities today. That is the biggest social injustice imaginable."
Rhee said radical changes are necessary. "Unless we do something massive about this right now, unless we are willing to turn the system on its head . . . then all of the ideals of this country are actually hollow," she said.
President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and most members of Congress have never known the sense of desperation that LaTasha Bennett feels.
Bennett is one of hundreds of Washington, D.C., parents who recently opened a letter from the U.S. Department of Education with devastating news: Her child was no longer eligible to receive a private-school scholarship for the upcoming school year. This sent Bennett and other parents scrambling to find their children spots in good public schools -- a challenge in a city where few students read at grade level and barely half graduate from high school.
President and Mrs. Obama faced the same problem when they moved to the District in January, but they were able to afford a private school for their daughters. And for Secretary Duncan and his wife, finding a good school was a top concern when deciding where to live in the D.C. area. They wound up choosing Arlington, Va., a community with good public schools. Duncan recently told Science magazine: "My family has given up so much so that I could have the opportunity to serve; I didn't want to try to save the country's children and our educational system and jeopardize my own children's education."
He has ladled a trillion or so dollars ("or so" is today's shorthand for "give or take a few hundreds of billions") hither and yon, but while ladling he has, or thinks he has, saved about $15 million by killing, or trying to kill, a tiny program that this year is enabling about 1,715 D.C. children (90 percent black, 9 percent Hispanic) to escape from the District's failing public schools and enroll in private schools.
The District's mayor and school superintendent support the program. But the president has vowed to kill programs that "don't work." He has looked high and low and -- lo and behold -- has found one. By uncanny coincidence, it is detested by the teachers unions that gave approximately four times $15 million to Democratic candidates and liberal causes last year.
Not content with seeing the program set to die after the 2009-10 school year, Education Secretary Arne Duncan (former head of Chicago's school system, which never enrolled an Obama child) gratuitously dashed even the limited hopes of another 200 children and their parents. Duncan, who has sensibly chosen to live with his wife and two children in Virginia rather than in the District, rescinded the scholarships already awarded to those children for the final year of the program, beginning in September. He was, you understand, thinking only of the children and their parents: He would spare them the turmoil of being forced by, well, Duncan and other Democrats to return to terrible public schools after a tantalizing one-year taste of something better. Call that compassionate liberalism.
Detroit's public schools are under the microscope -- and a new state-appointed emergency financial manger is addressing a $300 million deficit. In the month Robert Bobb has been on the job, he has proposed closing up to 50 schools in the next two years.
National standards have long been the third rail of education politics. The right chokes on the word national, with its implication that the feds will trample on the states' traditional authority over public schools. And the left chokes on the word standards, with the intimations of assessments and testing that accompany it. The result is a K-12 education system in the U.S. that is burdened by an incoherent jumble of state and local curriculum standards, assessment tools, tests, texts and teaching materials. Even worse, many states have bumbled into a race to the bottom as they define their local standards downward in order to pretend to satisfy federal demands by showing that their students are proficient.
It's time to take another look. Without national standards for what our students should learn, it will be hard for the U.S. to succeed in the 21st century economy. Today's wacky patchwork makes it difficult to assess which methods work best or how to hold teachers and schools accountable. Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope that the politics surrounding national standards has become a little less contentious. A growing coalition of reformers -- from civil rights activist Al Sharpton to Georgia Republican governor Sonny Perdue -- believe that some form of common standards is necessary to achieve a wide array of other education reforms, including merit pay for good teachers and the expansion of the role of public charter schools. (See pictures of inside a public boarding school.)
The idea of "common schools" that adopt the same curriculum and standards isn't new. It first arose in the 1840s, largely owing to the influence of the reformer Horace Mann. But the U.S. Constitution leaves public education to the states, and the states devolve much of the authority to local school districts, of which there are now more than 13,000 in the U.S. The Federal Government provides less than 9% of the funding for K-12 schools. That is why it has proved impossible thus far to create common curriculum standards nationwide. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush summoned the nation's governors to Charlottesville, Va., to attempt a standards-based approach to school reform. The result was only a vague endorsement of "voluntary national standards," which never gained much traction. In 1994, President Bill Clinton got federal money for standards-based reform, but the effort remained in the hands of the states, leading to a wildly varying hodgepodge of expectations for -- as well as ideological battles over -- math and English curriculums.
As states and school districts across America begin drawing down the first $44 billion in education funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, they should bear in mind the core levers of change under the law. In order to drive reform, we will require an honest assessment by states of key issues like teacher quality, student performance, college-readiness and the number of charter schools. We'll also have a strategy to address low-performing schools and provide incentives to compel improvement.
When stakeholders -- from parents and business leaders to elected officials -- understand that standards vary dramatically across states and many high-school graduates are unprepared for college or work, they will demand change. In fact, dozens of states are already independently working toward higher standards in education. Union leaders have also signed on.
When parents recognize which schools are failing to educate their children, they will demand more effective options for their kids. They won't care whether they are charters, non-charters or some other model. As President Barack Obama has called for, states should eliminate restrictions that limit the growth of excellent charter schools, move forward in improving or restructuring chronically failing schools, and hold all schools accountable for results.
McKinsey's report, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools, examines the dimensions and economic impact of the education achievement gap. While much controversy exists on the causes of the gap and on what the nation should do to address it, the full range of the achievement gap's character and consequences has been poorly understood.
This report examines the dimensions of four distinct gaps in education: (1) between the United States and other nations, (2) between black and Latino students and white students, (3) between students of different income levels, and (4) between similar students schooled in different systems or regions.
The report finds that the underutilization of human potential as reflected in the achievement gap is extremely costly. Existing gaps impose the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession—one substantially larger than the deep recession the country is currently experiencing. For individuals, avoidable shortfalls in academic achievement impose heavy and often tragic consequences via lower earnings, poor health, and higher rates of incarceration.
As The Economist's education correspondent, I've been invited by Economist Conferences, one of the businesses in the Economist group, to chair a conference in New York entitled "Global Education 2020". It's just one day, but if I'm going to make the trip from London, I may as well stay longer and visit some schools. Those in the city's poor neighbourhoods have long been known for having serious problems--violence, astronomical drop-out rates and abysmal standards of achievement--but in the last few years exciting things have been happening under Joel Klein, the chancellor of the city 's department of education, and I want to see some of the success stories with my own eyes.
Monday morning, and I'm off to Starbucks on 93rd and Broadway to meet Wendy Kopp, the Princeton graduate who in 1990 founded Teach for America (TFA), a non-profit organisation that recruits top-notch graduates from elite institutions and gets them to teach for two years in struggling state schools in poor areas. I know the basics already--TFA been widely copied, including in England. But I quickly realise that I've misunderstood TFA's true purpose.
All three are tired. Their classrooms are not much like the rest of the school where they work, and their heroic efforts are only supported by Chester and each other, not by their co-workers. "The first year was unbelievably bad," one tells me. "So many years with low expectations meant a lot of resistance from the kids. Eventually they saw the power and the growth they were capable of--but during the first few months we were just butting heads every day."
"It is clear from the research that the extra spending is simply not delivering value for money," Geoff Mawdsley, director of Reform Scotland, said. "Put another way, billions of pounds have been spent in the last decade to little or no effect."
While spending per pupil has risen from £2,092 to £4,638 at primary level and from £3,194 to £6,326 at secondary schools, the proportion of those gaining five good grades at the end of fourth year has fallen from 47 per cent to 46 per cent.
Reform Scotland also claimed that data it had obtained showed that pupils in England who had been lagging behind Scotland in 1998 are now ahead, with the number achieving equivalent grades rising from 36 per cent to 48 per cent.
The Scottish education system has long been regarded as among the best in the world, but the report claims that this view is now a myth.
Mr Mawdsley called on the Scottish government to publish more information about pupils' performance. "Using the measure of the pupils attaining five good grades by S4, including maths and English, would be a good start," he said.
Madison School Board Rejects Teaching & Learning Expansion; an Interesting Discussion
One of the most interesting things I've observed in my years of local school interaction is the extensive amount of pedagogical and content development that taxpayers fund within the Madison School District. I've always found this unusual, given the proximity of the University of Wisconsin, MATC and Edgewood College, among other, nearby Institutions of Higher Education.
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator's office to phase out our "accelerated" course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined "success" as merely producing "fewer failures." Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?
The fact the Madison's Teaching & Learning Department did not get what they want tonight is significant, perhaps the first time this has ever happened with respect to Math. I appreciate and am proud of the Madison School Board's willingness to consider and discuss these important issues. Each Board member offered comments on this matter including: Lucy Mathiak, who pointed out that it would be far less expensive to simply take courses at the UW-Madison (about 1000 for three credits plus books) than spend $150K annually in Teaching & Learning. Marj Passman noted that the Math Task Force report emphasized content knowledge improvement and that is where the focus should be while Maya Cole noted that teacher participation is voluntary. Voluntary participation is a problem, as we've seen with the deployment of an online grading and scheduling system for teachers, students and parents.
Several years ago, the late Ted Widerski introduced himself at an event. He mentioned that he learned something every week from this site and the weekly eNewsletter. I was (and am) surprised at Ted's comments. I asked if the MMSD had an internal "Knowledge Network", like www.schoolinfosystem.org, but oriented around curriculum for teachers? "No".
It would seem that, given the tremendous local and online resources available today, Teaching & Learning's sole reason for existence should be to organize and communicate information and opportunities for our teaching staff via the web, email, sms, videoconference, blogs, newsletters and the like. There is certainly no need to spend money on curriculum creation.
California State Schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell spoke to the annual EdSource Forum in Irvine today (April 17).
O'Connell, who holds a nonpartisan office, began his speech with political partisanship:
President Obama won a mandate for change that has placed him in a position to cause a massive shift in the way our government operates and in the manner in which it serves the needs of its citizens....
In just the first few months of this Administration, I can easily and confidently say that we have seen a dramatic shift in the willingness of this White House to be a partner to states -- this is a welcome difference from the previous Administration....
There was more, but you get the general idea.
O'Connell then went on to identify "four key areas" that the Obama administration wants states to concentrate on:
The first question I have is in the first paragraph. "One aspect of the balanced approach is represented in the four block approach to structuring mathematics lessons. The four blocks include Problem Solving, Number Work, Fluency and Maintenance and Inspecting Equations." There is a missing comma, since it is not clear whether Maintenance goes with the previous word or the last two. However, in either case, "Inspecting Equations" is a strange phrase to use. I am not sure what it means, and when a mathematician who has read extensively in school mathematics does not understand a phrase, something is wrong. You might ask Brian Sniff, who seems to have written this report based on one comment he made at the Monday meeting, what he means by this.
In the next paragraph, there are the following statements about the math program used in MMSD. "The new edition [of Connected Math Project] includes a greater emphasis on practice problems similar to those in traditional middle and high school textbooks. The new edition still remains focused on problem-centered instruction that promotes deep conceptual understanding." First, I dislike inflated language. It usually is an illustration of a lack of knowledge. We cannot hope for "deep conceptual understanding", in school mathematics, and Connected Math falls far short of what we want students to learn and understand in many ways. There are many examples which could be given and a few are mentioned in a letter I sent to the chair of a committee which gave an award to two of the developers of Connected Mathematics Project. Much of my letter to Phil Daro is given below.
The final paragraph for Recommendation 11 deals with high school mathematics. When asked about the state standards, Brian Sniff remarked that they were being rewritten, but that the changes seem to be minimal. He is on the high school rewrite committee, and I hope he is incorrect about the changes since significant changes should be made. We now have a serious report from the National Mathematics Advisory Panel which was asked to report on algebra. In addition to comments on what is needed to prepare students for algebra, which should have an impact on both elementary and middle school mathematics, there is a good description of what algebra in high school should contain. Some of the books used in MMSD do not have the needed algebra. In addition, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has published Curriculum Focal Points for grades PK-8 which should be used for further details in these grades. Neither of these reports was mentioned in the response you were sent.
I have pointed out errors and omissions in Connected Mathematics and Discovering Advanced Algebra to Sniff, and suggested that teachers be informed about these problems and given suggestions for how to work around them. You might ask him what has been sent to teachers about rational numbers and repeating decimals in Connected Math and the geometric series in Discovering Advanced Algebra. I wrote the principal author of Connected Math about their treatment of repeating decimals in the first edition, in 2000 and 2002. Nothing was changed in the second version. It is still a very poor treatment. I will send separately a paper I gave at a meeting in Lisbon last November. It deals with the help teachers should be given, and how inadequate it frequently is.
The National Mathematics Advisory Panel recommended that the geometric series should be done in first year algebra, since it is not hard to derive the sum of a finite geometric series and it has many interesting applications. In Discovering Advanced Geometry, the sum of this series is stated but not derived. What understanding is this giving students?
There never has been a serious public discussion about the direction of mathematics education in the Madison Schools. There should be. There was a committee set up to report and the part which surprised me most was the survey of elementary school teachers, who reported that most of them did not use a textbook as a primary resource. Decades ago my daughter went through a year at Cherokee with a teacher developed program in math. It was a disaster. I wonder about the results mentioned in a Capital Times article on the charter school Nuestro Mundo. Here are the result on WKCE Third Grade tests.
Percentage scoring proficient or advanced in reading
Total
White
Hispanic
Nuestro Mundo
70
74
46
Madison School District
72
88
47
Percentage scoring proficient or advanced in math
Total
White
Hispanic
Nuestro Mundo
49
63
15
Madison School District
72
87
52
Both the reading and math tests were given in English. In every other study I have seen about schools like Nuestro Mundo, the math score relative to the district score is much closer than the reading score is to the district average. Does the math staff at MMSD have an explanation for this dramatic difference?
Here is most of my letter to Phil Daro mentioned above. If you have any questions about what I have written, please feel free to contact me. My phone number is 233-7900.
Richard Askey
Recently I read the announcement of the prizes awarded by ISDDE. The Connected Math award singled out two of their books. The 8th grade book, "Say It With Symbols", had the following written about it:
Say It With Symbols tackles the development of robust fluency in symbolic manipulation (always a high priority) by focusing on "making sense with symbols" at every stage. Work on interpreting symbolic expressions leads on to creating equivalent expressions and thus to sense-making solution of linear and quadratic equations, and to modeling.
Let us look at a little of this book. There is some work on factoring quadratics, but clearly not enough for students to become fluent with it. The quadratic formula is stated but not proven, nor is there a proof (much less a motivated one) in the Teacher's Guide. Completing the square is never mentioned. There are a couple of problems like the following: Page 51 in Second Edition. [I can give comments on the First Edition if that is what you used, but I am giving them a break and using the Second. It has been through even more use than the first, but still has a lot of flaws.]
44. You can write quadratic expressions in factored and expanded forms. Which form would you use for each of the following? Explain. c. To find the line of symmetry for a quadratic relationship Answer: The line of symmetry is a vertical line perpendicular to the x-axis through a point with an x-coordinate half way between the x-intercepts. The factored form can be used to find this point. How about the case when the factors are not real? y=x^2+2x+2. There is still a line of symmetry, but without complex numbers, which few will treat in eighth grade, factoring does not work. Of course one can make it work by subtracting a constant, but this is a book for students who are just learning algebra. Whenever the word "Explain" is used in a question, I look to see what the explanation is. There is no reason given for why half way between the intercepts gives the line of symmetry. A explanation can be given using either form, but the authors do not do this. I can give you many examples where the "Explain" answer in the Teacher's Guide is far from an explanation, and sometimes is wrong.
Part d asks how to find the coordinates of the maximum or minimum point for a quadratic relationship. Here completing the square is clearly the better method at this stage, if one is aiming for the very important goal of fluency in symbolic manipulation, but that is not their goal. They seemingly never make the vital step of changing variables in an expression. There were many places where this could have been introduced and then used to give mathematical closure at the level they deal with, but it is not there.
Let us skip to the end of this book. There is an introduction to tests for divisibility in problem 9 on page 77 and problem 10 on the same page for divisibility by 2 and 4. The answers in the Teacher's Guide are reasonable. Then in problem 41 the problem of divisibility by 3 is considered. The answer pulls out the idea of changing 100a + 10b + c to 99a + a + 9b + b + c and then writes this to get the usual criteria. What is missing is an explanation for why one does this. One looks for the closest numbers to 100 and to 10 which can be divided by 3, which mimics the argument in divisibility by 2 and 4. The teachers will not know this, nor know that this can be extended to divisibility by 11 by a similar argument, although unlike the case of 3 and 9, the step from 11 to 99 to 1001 is only easy for 11 and 99. Before seeing how this extends one cannot just divide 1001 by 11, but write 1001 as 990 + 11. This extends. This is what should be in the Teacher's Guide. One recommendation from the National Mathematics Advisory Panel is that instruction should not be either entirely "student-centered" or "teacher-directed". The problem should have been given with some explanation about how divisibility by 2, 4, and 5 works, and then after remarking that divisibility by 3 cannot come from just looking at the last digit, ask the students to figure out what the closest number to 10 is which is divisible by 3, and then the closest number to 100 which is divisible by 3, and to use this information to try to find a simple test for divisibility by 3.
Let us consider the last problem. Judy thinks she knows a quick way to square any number whose last digit is 5. (Example 25) Look at the digit to the left of 5. Multiply it by the number that is one greater than this number. (example 2*3=6) Write the product followed by 25. This is the square of the number. Try this squaring method on two other numbers that end in 5. Explain why this method works. [Explanation: Students may find it easiest to explain why this method works by forming an equation [sic] to represent the value of any number ending in five, such as (10x+5), where x can be any whole number. Then a student taking the square of this value they [sic] will get (10x+5)(10x+5)=100x^2+100x+25)=100. [The 100 is only part of what should be there. It should be 100x(x+1) + 25.] This equation represents Judy's method of finding the square. [The word "equation" is wrong. They mean "expression".]
If they are going to let x be any whole number, then Judy's method is wrong, since she said to look at the digit to the left of 5, and multiply it by the number that is one greater than this number. So 125^2 would be the same as 25^2, or with careless reading, the same as 2*13 with 25 appended. This is not symbolic fluency in the textbook.
The next to the last problem dealt with divisibility by 6, and the correct statement is given in the Teacher's Guide, but the argument pulls out heavy machinery in the form of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra when it is not needed. However, the related problem of assuming that a number is divisible by 2 and by 4 (rather than 2 and 3) does not imply it is divisible by 8 is missing. That is a mistake since students at this age will often not see the difference.
I have yet to talk to a high school teacher who thought that students who have had Connected Mathematics Project are better at symbolic calculations than those they had had earlier before CMP was introduced. Some, but not all, say the students have better conceptual understanding. Thus I find it strange that fluency in symbolic skills is singled out as a strength of CMP. Have you read the books which were mentioned?
In other areas, such as geometry, CMP has few if any of the problems which are common in East Asian countries, to help students learn how to solve multistep problems, including quite a few nice problems where auxiliary lines need to be drawn. I have books from Nigeria which have better geometry problems than CMP does. You should know this if what I found on the web is correct, that you are helping develop a middle school program based on Japanese models. Instead of giving CMP an award, it would have been much better to have read the first edition carefully and made constructive suggestions about how to improve it. It needs a lot of improvement.
Even under the best of economic circumstances, tax season is a tense time for American households. The number of hours we collectively spend working on our returns is probably a lot more than government agencies claim.
The burden in financial terms is even greater: A recent independent survey found that the average American's total federal, state and local tax bill roughly equals his or her entire earnings from January 1 up until right before tax day.
Now imagine that tax bill doubling over time.
In recent years, the federal government has spent more money than it takes in at an increasing rate. Total federal debt almost doubled during President George W. Bush's administration and, as much as we needed some stimulus spending to boost the economy, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office now estimates total debt levels could almost double again over the next eight years based on the budget recently outlined by President Obama.
Regardless of what politicians tell you, any additional accumulations of debt are, absent dramatic reductions in the size and role of government, basically deferred tax increases. Remember the old saw? "You can pay me now or you can pay me later, with interest."
To help put things in perspective, the Peterson Foundation calculated the federal government accumulated $56.4 trillion in total liabilities and unfunded promises for Medicare and Social Security as of September 30, 2008. The numbers used to calculate this figure come directly from the audited financial statements of the U.S. government.
Editor's Note: David M. Walker served as comptroller general of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office from 1998 to 2008. He is now president and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
On a related note, the Madison School Board will be discussing an "Update on planning regarding funds that MMSD may be eligible to receive under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act".
Madison School District Math Program: Proposal to Increase Teacher Training and Teaching & Learning Staff
Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting will discuss a proposal to increase math teacher training and add staff to the Teaching & Learning Department. 215K PDF.
Interestingly, the latest document includes these words:
MMSD Teaching & Learning Staff and local Institute of Higher Education (IHE) Faculty work collaboratively to design a two-year professional development program aimed at deepening the mathematical content knowledge of MMSD middle school mathematics...
It is unusual to not mention the University of Wisconsin School of Education in these documents.... The UW-Madison School of Education has had a significant role in many Madison School District curriculum initiatives.
Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman was less than a week into the job, greeting parents outside an elementary school, when he was first asked how he planned to fix the middle schools.
Last night came his answer: through a massive overhaul.
Sherman, seven months into his tenure, presented a plan for restructuring the city's two middle schools, which have never met federal benchmarks and which, he said, contribute to Alexandria's dropout rate being among the highest in the area.
Locally and across the nation, middle schools have generally been regarded as the problem child for school systems, marking the turbulent teenage years in which test scores and enthusiasm drop. In response, school systems have begun getting creative and investing more resources into those grade levels. The District school system, for example, has a program that pays students for their performance, and Montgomery County schools have committed to a three-year, $10 million plan to accelerate curriculum, train teachers and improve the leadership structure.
Sherman's plan, which he presented to the Alexandria School Board last night, calls for splitting the two middle schools into five smaller ones, each with its own principal and staff. The change would not cost the school system more, he said, adding that staff would be reallocated. If the board approves the plan, the new structure will be in place in time for the next school year.
It is important to note that this work must be approved (and perhaps modified) by the school board, then, of course, implemented by the Administration.
I don’t think it would be possible to make things any more confusing for Milwaukee parents. Their children have become political pawns in a political chess match and it will surprise no one to learn that this group of poor, minority parents is being treated quite shabbily.
The politics that these people are caught up in is being run out of the State Capitol. Governor Doyle went out of his way to tuck a decidedly non-fiscal item into his budget that stands to affect all school choice children. Specifically, he added a long list of regulatory requirements that the schools participating in the Milwaukee’s school choice program would have to follow. Governor Doyle’s list of regulations is torn directly out of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association play book. After all, MTEA worked hard to deliver a totally Democrat state government and they expect a pay off for their effort. And to the glee of MTEA, Governor Doyle delivered.
Lest anyone be deceived, the aim of MTEA has always been to shut down the private school choice program. They want to get all of the kids back into public schools. Their hope is that these new regulations the Governor put in his budget will make it onerous enough for the choice schools that they will be forced to opt out of the choice program. There is logic to the MTEA reasoning given that choice schools operate on tiny budgets that are already strained.
On education policy, appeasement is about as ineffective as it is in foreign affairs. Many proponents of school choice, especially Democrats, have tried to appease teachers unions by limiting their support to charter schools while opposing private school vouchers. They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools from political destruction.
But these reformers are starting to learn that appeasement on vouchers only whets unions appetites for eliminating all meaningful types of choice. With voucher programs facing termination in Washington, D.C., and heavy regulation in Milwaukee, the teachers unions have now set their sights on charter schools. Despite their proclamations about supporting charters, the actions of unions and their allies in state and national politics belie their rhetoric.
In New York, for example, the unions have backed a new budget that effectively cuts $51.5 million from charter-school funding, even as district-school spending can continue to increase thanks to local taxes and stimulus money that the charters lack. New York charters already receive less money per pupil than their district school counterparts; now they will receive even less.
Unions are also seeking to strangle charter schools with red tape. New York already has the "card check" unionization procedure for teachers that replaces secret ballots with public arm-twisting. And the teachers unions appear to have collected enough cards to unionize the teachers at two highly successful charter schools in New York City. If unions force charters to enter into collective bargaining, one can only imagine how those schools will be able to maintain the flexible work rules that allow them to succeed.
Simply put, many of the critiques that Severson complains are not happening are in fact very much alive in school board debate, whether it comes to what needs to happen to improve the math curriculum to the reviews and changes in fiscal practice that are making it possible to close the spending gap without further trashing programs. I guess that Don was napping during the three meetings when the discussions were underway?
Or, I may be wrong. This may not be a manipulation of the truth for political purposes. You be the judge - watch the video - and see whether nothing is being done on significant issues as Severson asserts.
Four weeks ago, I did a column arguing the mayor should take over Milwaukee Public Schools. I didn't get much from readers disputing my reasoning. Rather, I was told by some insiders that the issue was moot because Tom Barrett doesn't want to take over the schools.
Wrong. He's interested, and that's what last week's report on the finances of MPS was really all about. Coverage by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel went into great depth on the minutia of money that could be saved (which was less impressive than it sounds) while underplaying the real game plan: to lay the groundwork for a governance change.
Barrett is a consensus builder who never moves quickly. He has methodically traveled to Chicago and Washington, D.C., to learn about how a mayoral takeover worked there. He met with President Barack Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, who supports this kind of governance change. "It's no secret Barrett has met with these people," says his chief of staff, Pat Curley. "You have to look at whether the current model (for MPS) works."
There's pressure on Barrett from the business community to do something about MPS to ensure that graduates have the skills needed to function in the workplace. Last week's report by McKinsey & Co. was paid for by the Bader, Bradley, Argosy, Northwestern Mutual Life and Greater Milwaukee foundations, which range from liberal to conservative to centrist in their views, but all have businesspeople on their boards. The first paragraph of the report notes that the economic future of Milwaukee depends on the ability of the schools "to prepare well-educated, highly trained and skilled graduates."
The state Board of Education approved a controversial report on charter schools Tuesday, but it agreed to search for a better comparison for next year's report.
The Free Press raised questions about the report in advance of the meeting, noting that charter schools' scores are more likely to fall short of the test scores of the districts in which they sit.
The Michigan Department of Education's annual report to the Legislature compares all charters to 20 school districts that contain 75% of the state's charter schools. By that measure, charter schools generally outperformed traditional public schools.
It's Thursday afternoon at Madison's Nuestro Mundo Elementary School and teacher Christina Amberson, "Maestra Cristina" to her kindergarten students, speaks in rapid-fire Spanish. If you didn't know better, you would assume Spanish was Amberson's native language. But her impeccable Spanish is a product of many years of studying and teaching abroad in a number of Spanish-speaking countries.
Children respond only in Spanish. The only time they speak English is when English-speaking children are sitting together at tables. If Amberson overhears, she reminds them to use their Spanish.
Amberson's kindergartners -- a nearly even mix of native Spanish speakers and native English speakers -- seem more confident with their language than a typical student in a high school or college Spanish class.
Everything posted on the dual-language immersion school's bulletin boards or blackboards is in Spanish except for a little section of photos and articles about "El Presidente Barack Obama."
Elizabeth Burmaster, the outgoing state superintendent of public instruction, on Tuesday emphasized the need for a united effort to make quick, major changes to MPS but for the first time hinted that she could use broad powers to make improvements unilaterally if needed.
She said changes in the district's business operations are also needed.
Burmaster said an MPS-improvement plan should be set by July and implemented by the start of the 2009-'10 school year. She leaves office July 6, but her successor, Tony Evers, is expected to pursue a similar course and some of what she called for is in line with relatively tough stands on MPS that Evers took during his campaign leading up to last week's election.
President Obama recently electrified the school reform community by calling for the growth of charter schools while ensuring that they are held to the highest standards of accountability.
His announcement represented a watershed moment for the charter school movement, because it confirmed that the political establishment has finally recognized what hundreds of thousands of California parents have long known: that the charter school movement is the most important school reform effort of our time.
Charter schools also offer the greatest hope for reforming public education in Los Angeles. The data coming in is simply irrefutable: More than 70 percent of charter schools in Los Angeles outperform their nearby district public schools. This past week, 10 of Los Angeles's 12 recently recognized California Distinguished Schools were charter schools. On a statewide level, 12 of the state's 15 highest-performing public schools serving low-income students are charter schools.
Can you still call it “stimulus” funding if it’s being used for a purpose no more stimulating that maintaining the status quo?
The obvious answer, being shouted from schoolhouse rooftops by superintendents and the Texas Democratic congressional delegation, is no.
But that’s in large part what lawmakers are in the process of doing with federal stimulus dollars meant for Texas schools.
It’s a kind of switcheroo in which state Senate budget-writers cleaned out the state’s main public school fund, and one for school technology, sprinkled the dollars elsewhere in the budget, and then replenished the state school funds with about $2 billion in federal stimulus money.
In elementary math, that would be one, minus one, plus one equals one. In terms of state schools funding, Texas schoolchildren gain zero.
The Senate, led by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Senate Finance Chair Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, approved the budget. It’s expected to be considered by the full House Friday.
Some argue the maneuver is a fiscally conservative, forward-thinking method of protecting the state’s rainy day fund this session so we’ll have about $9 billion of it next session to deal with whatever budget calamities arise.
The attached report provides information about the PBIS model and referral information from each of the middle schools.
The data for this report comes from both information that has been entered in to Infinite Campus and school based alternate data collection system, Documenting behavior referrals is inconsistent across middle schools both in terms of what is recorded and where it is recorded.
This is an issue we will address as we move forward,
Also included in the report is a variety of "tools" recommended for use by the PBIS network and examples of how these tools are being used in the schools, One of the tools included for each school is the Self-Assessment Survey School Wide System Analysis, Each staff member at an individual school has been given the opportunity to rate if they feel that various systems in their school are in place, A fully implementing school will have scores at 80% or above on all scales, This tool is used to assist schools in future planning, pointing out areas of need as well as strength,
Another tool included is "Tier Analysis", The goal is to have the following percentages represented at an individual school:
Tier 1 - Universal systems (students receiving 0-1 behavior referral, and needing only universal supports) = 80-90% of students
Tier 2 - Secondary systems (students receiving 2-5 behavioral referrals and needing some form of secondary intervention) = 5-10% of students
Tier 3 - Tertiary systems (students receiving 6+ behavioral referrals and needing some form of tertiary intervention) = 1-5 % of students
As schools reach high fidelity implementation levels at each tier, further training and support is provided at the following tier next more intensive tier.
The report includes data from all Madison middle schools.
The carnage at Columbine High on April 20, 1999, prompted a swift and aggressive response around the U.S.
Hundreds of millions of dollars flooded into schools after two seniors stalked the halls of Columbine in trench coats, killing 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide in the school library.
The money -- federal, state and local -- bought metal detectors, security cameras and elaborate emergency-response plans. It put 6,300 police officers on campuses and trained students to handle bullying and manage anger.
Ten years later, the money is drying up. The primary pot of federal grants has been cut by a third, a loss of $145 million. The Justice Department has scrapped the cops in schools program, once budgeted at $180 million a year. States are slashing spending, too, or allowing districts to buy textbooks with funds once set aside for security measures.
Money is so tight that the Colorado district that includes Columbine High, which reopened four months after the shootings, has canceled its annual violence-prevention convention. Miami can afford to send just half as many students as it used to through anger-management training. Many educators and security consultants find the cutbacks frightening.
Charter schools offer hope for the future of our public education system. Charter schools promise options and opportunities for students and their parents that include diverse curricula -- arts and humanities, career and vocational choices. They have unique delivery systems -- distance learning, Montessori programs, special needs, and a mix of accelerated traditional and university courses. All meet high standards; all are accountable; all are independent and are defined as public schools, although with a new, expanded concept of public schools.
There are 25 charter schools in Nevada, two in Carson City, several in Washoe, Douglas and Lyon counties. (Nationally there are over 3,000 charter schools and the movement is fast growing.) Charter school growth has not been as robust in this state as in others, but it continues to receive support from the Legislature. In this legislative session there is a bill (AB489), that if passed will create an 18th school district for charter schools and will enable this new school district to authorize new charters.
I serve on the Silver State Charter High School Board in Carson City. This charter, a public school sponsored by the State Board of Education, is a distance learning school in which students interact with their teachers online as well as meet with them in person. The state has identified the school as "exemplary." It is well managed and has a dedicated, licensed faculty and support staff. This charter school is a life-saver for over 500 kids and their parents.
This paper is a synthesis of case studies of four districts that implemented multifaceted reforms aimed at offering rigorous instruction in mathematics and science for all students as part of a National Science Foundation-supported partnership. A common theory of action aimed for a rigorous curriculum, professional development delivered close to the point of instruction, monitoring of instructional quality, and system coordination. Immersion units would offer an in-depth experience in scientific inquiry to all students. The theory of action was successful in many ways. Excellent access to top management allowed the partnership to assist with multiple aligned dimensions of instructional guidance. The biggest obstacles were turnover in district leadership, loose coupling across departments, attenuation of vertical alignment through overload of instructional guidance, and insufficient budget for adequate school site support (e.g., coaches). Greater coherence resulted from delivery of instructional guidance closer to schools and teachers, as with science immersion. The study suggests that complete, affordable packages of instructional guidance delivered to the school level district-wide might be the best model for district reform.
Recent developments in social and emotional learning (SEL) have pointed to the reciprocal relations between children's academic functioning and their socio-emotional health. Professional literature in this field points to the need for including students' academic skills and competencies as part of mental health intervention research.
University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologist and professor Thomas R. Kratochwill says educators cannot afford to continue offering mental health services for K-12 students in isolation. These services need to be reframed, mainstreamed, and folded into schools' broader academic mission.
The good news is that schools already have resources, supports, and opportunities that may provide entry points for delivery of expanded mental health services. Virtually all elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. have school psychologists and provide mental health services, Kratochwill says. The bad news is that the proportion of students needing services continues to outpace supply, and mental health services often remain separate from academic programs. Knowledge about mental health programs and educational achievement have developed in isolation from each other.
To identify research directions for future studies of school-based mental health services, Tom Kratochwill and colleagues reviewed scholarly literature to identify evidence- based interventions that target a combination of students' academic-educational functioning and their mental health functioning.
They studied 2000 articles published between 1990 and 2006; only 64 studies met the methodological criteria for inclusion in this review. Of those 64 studies, 24 tested the effects of a program on both academic and mental health outcomes, while 40 examined mental health outcomes only.
Schools are increasingly held accountable for achieving academic outcomes. Given that, Kratochwill says he was surprised that most of the mental health studies did not include academically relevant outcomes. That means that the impact of school-based mental health interventions on educationally relevant behaviors is under researched and may be poorly understood.
Many children receive mental health services in school settings. Although studies of social and emotional learning have linked social and academic competence, the impacts of mental health interventions on academics, and of academic interventions on mental health, are understudied.
Kratochwill argues for a multi-tiered intervention approach in schools. Varying levels of service intensity are available over time and in different grades for students, especially during transitional periods.
Because schools and districts have tight budgets, it's important to know which students might benefit most from different types of intervention. And to streamline or adapt effective interventions for dissemination on a larger scale, it's important to understand how various interventions produce positive outcomes.
In the school's cavernous facility there are 30 classrooms, a performance art center, a gym, a literacy center, and nearly 700 students in uniform. It is an oasis in a city that witnesses thousands of assaults in its public schools each year and has engaged in a running debate over whether to arm school security guards. The charter school was founded nearly seven years ago, and is very lucky to own its facilities.
Typically, banks are reluctant to lend to charters because they have little collateral, no long-term funding, and a five-year license to operate that may not be renewed. That is the reality that will confront President Barack Obama if he tries to make good on his promise to expand charter schools. These schools serve a public good, but they are also risky borrowers.
What's more, while charters receive per-pupil funding from the state, they aren't given start-up money to buy or lease classroom space -- one of the misguided restrictions put on charters that hamper their growth. The president may want more charters -- see, for example, his March 10 speech, where he called for increasing the number of charters in states that imposed limits -- but is he willing to do more to help charters cover capital costs? At the moment, private organizations step in to fill the void in public funding for these public schools.
While talks between D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and the Washington Teachers' Union remain stalemated over salary and job security issues, one critical question is not even on the bargaining table: how the District's educators will be evaluated.
For months, Rhee and her chief "human capital" assistant, Jason Kamras, have been working on an overhaul of the evaluation system that would expand the ways teachers are assessed. In addition to a system of classroom observations and conferences, it is likely to include methods to track how students' standardized test scores grow over time. Several major school systems, including those in Houston, Chicago and Milwaukee, have started limited use of this new "value-added" approach.
Rhee is under no obligation to bargain with the union on evaluations, though the union wants to see it on the table and said so in the contract proposal it delivered a few weeks ago. Congress gave the school system sole authority over the issue in the mid-1990s after the WTU refused to renegotiate the then-existing evaluation system with the District.
Several Milwaukee School Board members bristled at not receiving or being briefed in advance on a consultants' report that claims the city's public schools could be saving more than $100 million per year if its bureaucracy was run more efficiently.
Some said they had already pushed for reform on many of the reported problem spots: streamlining purchasing, selling unused land and curtailing large salaries.
Outside the system, many wanted to know what makes this report - another in a long line of analyses that paint a dismal picture of MPS - different from the others. What, if anything, will be done about the wasteful spending practices the report outlines? And how soon?
Tim Sheehy, president of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Association of Commerce, called the report "eye-popping, but not unexpected."
Hard battles lost long ago leave a mark. (The worst for me was the 1973 Super Bowl.) University of California at Berkeley professor W. Norton Grubb, for instance, still replays the 1971 Serrano v. Priest decision by the California Supreme Court. It threw out the state's education financing system based on property taxes. He thought the decision was going to make heroes of school financing experts like him who would, he hoped, "improve the minutiae of finance formulas, and equitable and powerful schooling would spread to all children."
Except that didn't happen. Federal courts and the property-tax-limiting ballot Proposition 13 got in the way, and Grubb eventually learned his dream was based on a misunderstanding, what he calls the money myth, which he uses as the title of a very detailed and enlightening new book.
The myth, he says, is "the idea that more money leads to improved outcomes, that the solution to any educational problem requires increased spending."
"The Money Myth," published by the Russell Sage Foundation, has a subtitle, "School Resources, Outcomes and Equity," which sounds like a really bad homework assignment. But once you get into it, it is hard to put down. Grubb makes a daring attempt to identify exactly which approaches will improve our children's academic performance, and by how much.
Providence schools are set to phase out so-called "bumping" by filling teaching vacancies based on instructors' qualifications instead of their senior status.
Superintendant Tom Brady said in a letter Wednesday to staff that six schools in the district will end the practice of seniority-based staffing decisions.
The change goes into effect in the next school year. The rest of the district is to use the new plan beginning in the 2010-2011 academic year.
he six teenage boys, incarcerated at the District's Oak Hill juvenile detention facility in Laurel file into their classroom after lunch one late January afternoon. They are surprised to see strangers -- five women and two men -- sitting in the chairs that the boys typically occupy.
The students find some empty seats and shrug out of their matching brown coats and mismatched scarves. They are curious about the visitors in a lean-back, fold-your-arms, prove-it kind of way.
"I'm James Forman," begins a 40-something man. "I'm a professor at Georgetown Law School and -- "
"You related to the James Forman?" interrupts 17-year-old Carleto Bailey.
"I'm James Forman Jr."
"That your father? James Forman your dad?" Carleto demands.
The nation's top educator headed back to class Wednesday warning states against taking money from their youngest students.
"We're not going to balance the budget on the backs of our young children. We just can't afford to do this," said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
All but 12 states pay for pre-k programs.
The federal government also funds head start, for low-income kids.
Last year, states added more than 100,000 new preschoolers and spent a billion more on them than the year before.
But with five billion in federal stimulus money on the way at least nine states may cut their own funding so there's little if any net benefit.
Advocates say that would hurt the middle class.
"Children whose families are just above the poverty line all the way up to the median income have less chance of being in a good preschool program than children in poverty. And for children in poverty, it's less than 50 percent," said Steve Barnett of the National Institute for Early Education Research
What do we know works to improve student achievement in K-12 STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] education?
A.D.: I'd say great teachers, who know the content.
How do we know that? A.D.: I think that's true in any subject area. If you get outstanding teachers, kids learn.
What's the evidence for that? A.D.: Lots of evidence points to the fact that great teachers have an impact.
What is it about effective teachers that makes a difference? A.D.: Lots of factors. It's not one. In this area, it sounds like common sense, but still, having teachers that truly know the content is critically important. You can't teach what you don't know. So that's a starting point. Beyond that, what do great teachers look like? They are passionate, they have high expectations--this is a calling, not a job. They go way beyond the call of duty to make sure that students are getting what they need. And they are really able to differentiate instruction, to work with kids who are struggling and those who are on track to becoming the next generation of chemists and physicists.
You mentioned content. But there are studies that have found what teachers majored in in college doesn't necessarily affect their ability to improve student achievement. A.D.: You're right. I'm not talking about what you major in. I'm saying that you can't teach physics if you don't know physics. You don't have to have majored in physics. Maybe you come out of industry, or out of some other place. I worry a lot about how many folks are teaching classes in which they are not experts in the content. To me, that's a big part of the problem. We don't have enough teachers today who are experts in math and science. This is not just high school, it's also fifth, sixth, seventh grade.
n the 1990s, the Math Wars pitted two philosophies against each other. One side argued for content-based standards - that elementary school students must memorize multiplication tables by third grade. The other side argued for students to discover math, unfettered by "drill and kill" exercises.
When the new 1994 California Learning Assessment Test trained test graders to award a higher score to a child with a wrong answer (but good essay) than to a student who successfully solved a math problem, but without a cute explanation, the battle was on. New-new math was quickly dubbed "fuzzy crap." By the end of the decade, repentant educators passed solid math standards.
Yet the Math Wars continue in California, as well as in New Jersey, Oregon and elsewhere. In Palo Alto, parent and former Bush education official Ze'ev Wurman is one of a group of parents who oppose the Palo Alto Unified School District Board's April 14 vote to use "Everyday Mathematics" in grades K-5. Wurman recognizes that the "fuzzies" aren't as fuzzy as they used to be, but also believes that state educators who approve math texts "fell asleep at the switch" when they approved the "Everyday" series in 2007.
The "Everyday" approach supports "spiraling" what students learn over as long as two or more years. As an Everyday teacher guide explained, "If we can, as a matter of principle and practice, avoid anxiety about children 'getting' something the first time around, then children will be more relaxed and pick up part or all of what they need. They may not initially remember it, but with appropriate reminders, they will very likely recall, recognize, and get a better grip on the skill or concept when it comes around again in a new format or application-as it will!" Those are my italics - to highlight the "fuzzies' " performance anxiety.
American schoolchildren need to be in class more -- six days a week, at least 11 months a year -- if they are to compete with students abroad, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tuesday.
"Go ahead and boo me," Duncan told about 400 middle and high school students at a public school in northeast Denver. "I fundamentally think that our school day is too short, our school week is too short and our school year is too short."
"You're competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week; eleven, twelve months a year," he said.
Instead of boos, Duncan's remark drew an unsurprising response from the teenage assembly: bored stares.
The former Chicago schools superintendent praised Denver schools for allowing schools to apply for almost complete autonomy, which allows them to waive union contracts so teachers can stay for after-school tutoring or Saturday school.
It is indeed, time to move away from the current, 19th century agrarian model.
Learning at home in her pajamas before a computer screen, Emily Brown's youngest daughter is picking up things in 6th grade that her older daughter is attempting as a freshman at a Catholic school.
For the former teacher, that's evidence enough that Chicago Virtual Charter School is working.
"The curriculum is better here," Brown said. "It's a grade level higher."
The school, the city's only online program for kindergarten through high school, has become an alternative to traditional public schools for parents such as Brown who believe regular schools often don't challenge children enough or don't give slow learners the extra time they need.
Milwaukee Public Schools could save as much as $103 million a year if it operated like a well-run business, according to a much-anticipated report that has Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett taking steps that could lead to a takeover of the system.
The report, released Thursday, concludes that MPS does not have a culture aimed at achieving good results, and is in tenuous financial shape that will worsen without systemic changes.
The report mostly sidesteps the academic side of MPS, concentrating instead on business operations, from busing to lunch programs to purchasing practices to health insurance policies. It found waste in every area - inefficient payroll processing, overqualified maintenance teams, even pencil sharpeners that cost more than $100. The report also found more than five dozen central office jobs with six-figure salaries.
Spending outside the classroom is about a third of total MPS spending.
"To free up funds needed to close its worrisome academic achievement gaps, MPS must first get its financial house in order," the report says.
Invoking powers granted the state by federal law, Doyle and Barrett said they will move within several weeks to create a council of community leaders to pursue major changes in the way MPS conducts business - and, ultimately, how well it educates children.
They say there are two things you should never discuss on a first date or at a dinner party: religion and politics. But there has always been another subject that is so taboo that most people would rather arm wrestle over the other two than dare mention it.
That subject is class.
Americans have never liked discussing class status. Unlike our founding cousins over in England where your status is something bestowed upon you by birth, here we believe in a little something called the American Dream; the idea that any person regardless of race, religion or socio-economic background can become anything they want to be, including president.
But unfortunately that Dream is becoming increasingly out of reach for millions of Americans.
Though Madoff and the Wall Street meltdown have forced some of us to finally become more aware of the world beyond our comfortable middle and upper-middle class bubbles, another issue has been lurking for years that threatens to bring about even greater financial Armageddon for our country down the road: America's burgeoning dropout epidemic. Before you decide that this issue has nothing to do with you (and therefore decide to move on from this blog post) consider these facts for a moment:
A free fall in tax revenue is driving more state lawmakers to turn to broad-based tax increases in a bid to close widening budget gaps.
At least 10 states are considering some kind of major increase in sales or income taxes: Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. California and New York lawmakers already have agreed on multibillion-dollar tax increases that went into effect earlier this year.
Fiscal experts say more states are likely to try to raise tax revenue in coming months, especially once they tally the latest shortfalls from April 15 income-tax filings, often the biggest single source of funds for the 43 states that levy them.
The squeeze is especially severe in states hit hardest by the recession, such as Arizona, where sales-tax revenue has fallen by 10.5%, income-tax collections are down 15.7% this fiscal year, and the government faces a $3.4 billion budget gap next year. But such shortfalls are likely to be widespread; federal income-tax receipts from individuals have dropped more than 15% in the past six months, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.
At today's education committee hearing, City Council members took turns questioning Department of Education officials on the rise of charters schools. Their questions were passionate, specific, and universally accusatory. They may have also been scripted.
Just before the hearing began, a representative of the city teachers union, which describes itself as in favor of charter schools, discreetly passed out a set of index cards to Council members, each printed with a pre-written question.
One batch of cards offered questions for the Department of Education, all of them challenging the proliferation of charter schools. "Doesn't the Department have a clear legal and moral responsibility to provide every family in the city guaranteed seats for their children in a neighborhood elementary school?" one card suggested members ask school officials. "Isn't the fundamental problem here the Department's abdication of its most important responsibility to provide quality district public schools in all parts of the city?" another card said. (View more of the cards in the slideshow above.)
Several council members picked up on the line of thought. "Shouldn't we aspire to have every school in the city good enough for parents to feel comfortable sending their children?" Melinda Katz, a Council member from Queens, said in questioning school officials. "I remember when Joel Klein became the chancellor," the committee chair, Robert Jackson, said. "Back then, he used to talk about making every neighborhood school a good school where every parent would want to send their children. I don't hear him talk about that anymore."
Asked about the cards, union president Randi Weingarten provided a statement saying that she regretted the tactic. "We are often asked by the council for information and ideas about various issues. Additionally, when I am available, I often respond to what others testify to. In this instance, I was in Washington and couldn't be at City Hall," she said in the statement. "I am proud of the testimony we gave today, but I regret the manner in which our other concerns were shared."
Staving off a spirited run by a political newcomer, Tony Evers went from understudy to Wisconsin's next schools chief Tuesday with the backing of the state's largest teachers union and other professional educators throughout the state.
In doing so, he beat back a challenge from Rose Fernandez, a parent advocate and former pediatric trauma nurse who tried to capitalize on discontent with the educational status quo.
Evers won with the significant help of the Wisconsin Education Association Council and its affiliates throughout the state, which contributed nearly $700,000 toward his campaign.
Evers credited his victory to people's trust in his ability to help improve state schools.
"People recognize that in order to make the changes necessary, we need a candidate with a broad base of support behind him, and we need a candidate with experience behind him," he said.
Evers, 57, was considered the front-runner in the race ever since he declared his candidacy in October.
UC Berkeley professor takes on school spending In his book, "The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity," W. Norton Grubb argues that how much is spent is less important than how it is spent
SDo we spend enough on public education? What does it mean that California has fallen from near the top of per-pupil spending in the United States to very near the bottom?
Money has long been at the center of debates over education. Now a book from a UC Berkeley professor argues that the entire debate is wrongheaded.
In "The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity" (Russell Sage Foundation, 2009), W. Norton Grubb argues that how much we spend is less important than how we spend it. For decades, Grubb says, school spending has inexorably risen, while student achievement has stayed relatively stagnant. Maybe it's time to look at which expenditures actually improve education, he argues, and which are a waste. The Times' Mitchell Landsberg spoke to Grubb about his book.
Let me try to boil down the message in your book: Money matters, but only if it's spent well. Is that right?
That's certainly one of the conclusions, absolutely. And again, this phrase that I use constantly in the book is, "It's often necessary, but it's not sufficient." So it's finding what the necessary resources are in the school and then directing money and other resources -- like leadership, vision, cooperation, collaboration -- to them that makes a difference. And part of the point is an attempt to move the debates away from money to resources, because a lot of the debates in school finance have just been about money.
By taking the nation's education secretary to visit two Denver schools undertaking significant reforms, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet aims to demonstrate why Colorado's innovation should be rewarded with government cash.
But while Denver schools showed some encouraging improvement when Bennet was superintendent, there remains a question whether there is substance behind the buzz at Denver Public Schools.
The two schools Secretary Arne Duncan will visit today -- Montclair Elementary and Bruce Randolph schools -- have made intentional moves to free themselves from district and union rules. Duncan will be watching that kind of innovation as his department decides how to divide $5 billion in stimulus funds nationwide through a program called "Race to the Top."
"This allows the secretary to point to something tangible that should be rewarded in this new world order," said Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform. "People watched (President Barack) Obama run on a campaign of change. This is kind of an attempt to show people what that looks like on the ground."
But at both schools, the reforms are in their infancy. One has had some modest success, but scores are still low.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan did a public service last week when he visited New York City and spoke up for charter schools and mayoral control of education. That was the reformer talking. The status quo Mr. Duncan was on display last month when he let Congress kill a District of Columbia voucher program even as he was sitting on evidence of its success.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, left, and Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, read to first graders at Doswell Brooks Elementary School in Capitol Heights, Md. on Wednesday, April 1, 2009.
In New York City with its 1.1 million students, mayoral control has resulted in better test scores and graduation rates, while expanding charter schools, which means more and better education choices for low-income families. But mayoral control expires in June unless state lawmakers renew it, and the United Federation of Teachers is working with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to weaken or kill it.
President Obama's stimulus is sending some $100 billion to the nation's school districts. What will he demand in return? The state budget passed by the New York legislature last week freezes funding for charters but increases it by more that $400 million for other public schools. Perhaps a visit to a charter school in Harlem would help Mr. Obama honor his reform pledge. "I'm looking at the data here in front of me," Mr. Duncan told the New York Post. "Graduation rates are up. Test scores are up. Teacher salaries are up. Social promotion was eliminated. Dramatically increasing parental choice. That's real progress."
One of the most striking things about Tuesday's contested Madison School Board race is that challenger Donald Gors does not cite any policy differences he has with incumbent Arlene Silveira, who is the board's president.
"I don't disagree with anything," Gors said in an interview after a candidate forum Saturday morning. "It's just that there are differences in people and what they offer."
That sentiment showed at the forum attended by about 10 people at the Lakeview Branch of the Madison Public Library, where the candidates presented their positions on a range of issues. For the most part, Gors did not disagree with Silveira, although he did emphasize different things.
"School safety is job one," said Gors, 58, reiterating a theme that he has raised in what has been limited coverage of a quiet race. He runs two businesses out of his home. He is a distributor for Eco Friendly Indoor Solutions and owns ClearViewCleanWindows.
Gors, who has a daughter at Memorial High School, said schools could install automatic sensors and door locks for security. More importantly, he added, all staff in school buildings should develop a culture of promoting a safe environment at all times.
Silveira, meanwhile, called for a multi-faceted approach toward safety, encompassing facilities, school programs and students.
A tug of war erupted last week over L.A.'s new downtown arts high school, with some of its biggest supporters declaring that they had given up on the Los Angeles Unified School District and wanted the $242-million campus turned over to a charter school organization. In response to the critics, who included philanthropist Eli Broad, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines shot back: "There is not a for-sale sign on it."
The tension had been building for months, fueled in part by the district's plan to reserve most of the school's seats for students from the surrounding neighborhood rather than open it up to the most talented students districtwide. It bubbled over after two star principals from the East Coast turned down offers to take charge, leaving the school leaderless less than six months before it opens in September.
"This pace is so slow that we have lost total confidence that the district could open this school in September as a really excellent place for students," said Maria Casillas, president of Families in Schools, a nonprofit organization that encourages parental involvement in education. She is on the board of Discovering the Arts, an organization created to support the downtown arts school, and was on a design team for the school until she recently resigned in frustration.
Casillas and others have reached out to Judy Burton, the president and chief executive of the Alliance for College Ready Public Schools, a successful charter organization, in hopes that she could run the arts school with Board of Education approval. Burton, a former top official at L.A. Unified, said she would do so only in partnership with the district, and with the blessing of Cortines and board President Monica Garcia.
At a time when many Minnesota school boards have been cutting programs and laying off teachers, school districts as a whole are sitting on record budget reserves.
Total general fund reserves for the state's 340 school districts and 153 charter schools grew last year to nearly $1 billion.
Some state lawmakers have noticed the money. And they say schools are well positioned to absorb a financial hit to help erase the state's $4.6 billion budget deficit.
St. Paul, Minn. -- Gov. Tim Pawlenty and House Democrats want to delay payments to school districts as part of their budget plans. Lawmakers have used the accounting shift before to help balance the books.
Holding back some of the promised funding until the second year of the two-year budget cycle comes at a cost.
Some school districts would be forced to take out loans to pay their bills. But some lawmakers say many districts could handle the shift by tapping into budget reserves.
A U.S. Education Department study released yesterday found that District students who were given vouchers to attend private schools outperformed public school peers on reading tests, findings likely to reignite debate over the fate of the controversial program.
The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the first federal initiative to spend taxpayer dollars on private school tuition, was created by a Republican-led Congress in 2004 to help students from low-income families. Congress has cut off federal funding after the 2009-10 school year unless lawmakers vote to reauthorize it.
Overall, the study found that students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school. However, as a group, students who had been in the lowest-performing public schools did not show those gains. There was no difference in math performance between the groups.
Mathiak said the district needs to restructure how it approaches school funding.
"We will not cut something for another," Mathiak said. "We need to change the way we use resources and find other ways to manage them without hurting people. We have to make things more efficient."
The candidates agreed that schools need to reach out to parents of minorities and form more community partnerships with businesses and groups.
Silveira said schools need to cultivate trust, understand what works for parents and how to make them comfortable. She cited south-side Franklin Elementary, which has parent engagement groups, as a positive example that other schools should emulate.
"It's very important to remember there isn't one model, we have to develop trust and understanding between schools and parents," Silveira said.
One area where Gors and Silveira differed greatly was on the need for continuity in leadership.
This week brought their latest display of strange bedfellows, as the couple, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and the Rev. Al Sharpton, co-sponsored a conference of the Education Equality Project, at which the audience included the left-leaning mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio R. Villaraigosa, and Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker.
The pair is not lacking for shtick — rarely do they conclude a public performance without referring to themselves as looking something akin to a before-and-after advertisement for hair transplants. (Mr. Klein has a rather sparse scalp next to Mr. Sharpton’s signature bouffant.)
Since forming the alliance nearly a year ago, Mr. Klein and Mr. Sharpton have raised more than $1 million to promote school improvement across the country.
With a coalition that includes several black and Hispanic elected Democratic officials at all levels, the group has embraced many policies once anathema to the Democratic Party — including increasing the number of charter schools, providing performance pay for teachers and expanding the use of data to measure performance at every level of the schools.
Scores on the statewide math tests have risen for the fourth consecutive year, the Michigan Department of Education announced today. Students' scores in social studies and writing rose overall, as well.
Over 75 percent of students in grades 3-8 tested as "proficient or above" on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) math tests given in the Fall of 2008, including 91 percent of third graders. The greatest improvement was among seventh graders, where 83 percent scored proficient or above, compared to 73 percent the year before.
"There is a direct connection between our kids learning more in the classroom and getting the jobs we need in Michigan's economy," said Governor Jennifer M. Granholm. "We are glad to see these signs of success but we know we have a lot of work to do to give Michigan the best educated workforce in the nation and that must be our goal."
Michigan students were tested in October 2008 on skills learned through the end of the previous year. Students' MEAP scores are divided into four performance levels: Not Proficient, Partially Proficient, Proficient, and Advanced. Students who place in either the Proficient or Advanced levels are considered to be "proficient or above" in that subject.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the nation's governors on Wednesday that in exchange for billions of dollars in federal education aid provided under the economic stimulus law, he wants new information about the performance of their public schools, much of which could be embarrassing.
In a "Dear Governor" letter to the 50 states, Mr. Duncan said $44 billion in stimulus money was being made available to states immediately. To qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information.
The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.
It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the nation's governors on Wednesday that in exchange for billions of dollars in federal education aid provided under the economic stimulus law, he wants new information about the performance of their public schools, much of which could be embarrassing.
In a "Dear Governor" letter to the 50 states, Mr. Duncan said $44 billion in stimulus money was being made available to states immediately. To qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information.
The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.
It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.
Wisconsin is not making as much progress raising student achievement and closing the gaps between have and have-not students as the nation as a whole, according to a report released Tuesday by the Education Trust, an influential, Washington-based nonprofit group.
As with other reports in recent years, the analysis showed the achievement of African-American students remains a major issue overall and that the gaps between black students and white students in Wisconsin are among the largest in the United States.
But it also analyzed the progress made in recent years and found Wisconsin lagging when it came to all racial and ethnic groups - and the news was generally not good across a wide range of measures.
Daria Hall, director of kindergarten through 12th-grade policy for the Education Trust, said, "What you see is when you look at any of the critical milestones in education - fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade math, high school graduation, collegiate graduation - Wisconsin and African-American students in particular are far below their peers in other states. This shows that while there has been some improvement, it is not nearly fast enough for the state's young people, communities or the economy as a whole."
For example, consider reading scores for fourth-graders in 1998 and in 2007 in the testing program known as the National Assessment of Education Progress. White students nationwide improved their scores seven points over the nine-year period (on a scale where average scores were in the low 200s), while in Wisconsin, the improvement was one point. For black fourth-graders, the nationwide gain was 11 points, while in Wisconsin it was four. And for low-income students in general, the national gain was 10 points, while in Wisconsin it was two points.
Wisconsin lagged the nation when it came to similar comparisons involving the graduation rate for black students, the percentages of black and Hispanic students graduating college within six years of finishing high school and the degree to which there had been improvements in recent years in the size of black/white achievement gaps.
c Schools, he was seen by some liberal critics as a right wing-toady who had betrayed his old ideology by getting in bed with conservative school choice supporters. That view was always simplistic, as his bold call for reform of school choice, announced last week, proved once again. His new position – which could greatly alter the politics of school choice – raises many questions.
For starters, why the seeming flip-flop by Fuller? The answer is that he’s never been an ideologue. The old Fuller, after all, was a Democrat. He worked to get Democrat Tony Earl elected in 1982 and was rewarded with a position running the state’s Department of Employment Relations. And his commitment to public schools was personified by his work as MPS superintendent from 1991-1995, which included championing an über-liberal referendum to spend some $400 million to construct new schools, which was defeated by the taxpayers.
But Fuller was more often a critic of MPS, among other things proposing (in the late 1980s) to create an all-black school district that would be carved out of MPS. (That idea, too, went down in flames.) Fuller was always a supporter of alternative schools – or any schools, really – that would provide a good education for minority and low-income students. And he was always willing to work with business leaders and politicians of either party to accomplish his ends. For at least the last 10 years, that has meant mostly Republicans, as he embraced school choice as the solution to urban education in Milwaukee.
But the latest results of the five-year study on school choice, reported last week in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, showed there is no statistically significant difference in achievement between MPS and voucher schools. The schools are cheaper, but because of the partisan legislation battles over voucher funding, the program’s complicated funding formula awards most of the savings (some $82 million a year) to every place in the state but Milwaukee. This city’s property taxpayers are paying $45 million more annually for a program that appears to be having little positive impact on education.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says big city mayors should take control of their school systems.
Duncan said Tuesday that there's too much turnover among superintendents in cities where the mayor is not in charge of the schools. He says strong leadership is needed to carry out reform in big cities, where children are struggling the most.
Currently, mayors control the public schools in only a few cities while most others are run by school boards. Duncan told the U.S. Conference of Mayors that if the number doesn't rise, he will have failed as secretary.
Fascinating: Duncan is a former Chicago Public Schools CEO. His governance point is well worth discussin.
The AP Annual Conference is a forum for all members of the AP and Pre-AP communities, worldwide, to exchange experiences, strengthen professional ties, and gain a better sense of how they can help their students to prepare for college success.
Schools with cafeterias can reduce food wastage and save about 2.14 million disposable lunch boxes heading for landfills every year, Greeners Action project officer Yip Chui-man said yesterday.
Roughly 380,000 primary school students take lunch everyday, according to Yip, who said over one-third of 13,000 disposable lunch boxes went straight into the garbage, a February to March survey of 212 primary schools showed.
The survey suggested most primary schools want more funding to introduce canteens in a bid to cut down on waste.
With a mere 5 percent drop in the amount of disposable lunch boxes being junked, compared to seven years ago, Yip is calling on the Education Bureau and the Environmental Protection Department to set up regulations to control lunch-time garbage.
A resounding 95 percent of primary schools want public money to outfit them with a cafeteria.
Bilingual education is supposed to be expanding to more languages - such as Vietnamese and Arabic - but many school districts can't find the teachers to handle the two-language classes.
"The teacher shortage that was there for Spanish now translates to other languages," said Shannon Terry, Garland ISD's director of English as a Second Language (ESL) and bilingual education.
Area districts are recruiting for next school year, searching for tough-to-staff areas such as math and science. But bilingual teachers are also in high demand.
The state requires any school district that has at least 20 students in a grade level who speak a language other than English to provide a bilingual program in that language.
In 2007, the State Board for Educator Certification expanded the bilingual program to include Vietnamese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian. But that doesn't mean more diverse teachers are lining up for jobs.
"It's not common knowledge," said Terry. "The universities aren't designing programs necessarily yet to support teachers in securing those credentials."
Saying it was time "for a fresh look" at the Philadelphia School District, Gov. Rendell and Mayor Nutter yesterday named two lawyers and an educator who was trained as an artist to the School Reform Commission.
With the appointments, Rendell and Nutter have remade the five-member commission - established after the 2001 state takeover of the schools - signaling a new era in leadership of the 167,000-student district.
They announced their selections at a briefing packed with politicians and educational activists at the High School of the Future in West Philadelphia.
Rendell also announced he had nominated Sandra Dungee Glenn, the former commission chairwoman, to the state Board of Education.
"Your work is not done," Rendell told Dungee Glenn, who had been part of the district's governance for nearly a decade and attended the briefing.
Nutter named Robert L. Archie Jr., a partner at Duane Morris L.L.P., and Johnny Irizarry, director of the Center for Hispanic Excellence at the University of Pennsylvania, to four-year terms.
The "education president" remained silent when his congressional Democrats essentially killed the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in the city where he now lives and works.
Of the 1,700 students, starting in kindergarten, in this private-school voucher program, 90 percent are black and 9 percent are Hispanic.
First the House and then the Senate inserted into the $410-billion omnibus spending bill language to eliminate the $7,500 annual scholarships for these poor children after the next school year.
A key executioner in the Senate of the OSP was Sen. Dick Durbin, Illinois Democrat. I have written admiringly of Durbin's concern for human rights abroad. But what about education rights for minority children in the nation's capital?
Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute (where I am a senior fellow) supplied the answer when he wrote: "Because they saw it as a threat to their political power, Democrats in Washington appear willing to extinguish the dreams of a few thousand poor kids to protect their political base."
Advanced Placement English teacher Allison Beers asked her 11th-grade students at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George's County to critique my annual rankings, in The Washington Post and Newsweek, of public high schools. I use the Challenge Index, a measure of participation in AP and other college-level tests. Here are excerpts of comments from several students, with some comments from me:
Calling this a potentially historic moment in Milwaukee education, a key leader of the private school voucher movement called Thursday for major increases in regulation of the participating schools and for a new focus on quality across all the channels of schooling in the city.
Howard Fuller, the former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent who is now a central figure nationally in advocating for school choice, said he wants school leaders to join with Gov. Jim Doyle, legislative leaders and others in working out new ways to assure that students of all kinds have quality teachers in quality schools.
"We can't just keep wringing our hands about these terrible schools," Fuller said. "We have a moral responsibility to our children to not accept that."
He said that he believes Doyle is seeking higher quality and more accountability and transparency for the 120 private schools in Milwaukee that have more than 20,000 students attending, thanks to publicly funded vouchers. Fuller said he was in general agreement on those goals.
Doyle has presented "an opportunity to come together and do something that is truly constructive for our children," Fuller said. "I think it is one of those historic moments that don't come all the time."
Fuller was reacting both to a new set of studies of the voucher program and to a dramatically different situation for voucher supporters in the state Capitol.
When Private Schools Take Public Dollars: What's the Place of Accountability in School Voucher Programs?
Chester E. Finn, Jr., Christina M. Hentges, Michael J. Petrilli and Amber M. Winkler [458K PDF]:
Of all the arguments that critics of school voucher programs advance, the one that may resonate loudest with the public concerns school accountability. Opponents say it's not fair to hold public schools to account for their results (under No Child Left Behind and similar systems) and then let private schools receive taxpayer dollars--however indirectly--with no accountability at all. We at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute don't buy that argument entirely. Private schools participating in voucher programs, tax-credit programs, scholarship programs and such are accountable to parents via the school choice marketplace. But we don't dismiss it, either. For both substantive and strategic reasons, we believe it's time for school choice supporters to embrace accountability, done right.
For too long, school choice supporters have been stuck in a tired internal debate that hobbles the advance of vouchers and other worthy forms of school choice. Staunch free-marketers say "leave the schools alone and let the parents decide." More left-leaning critics say "if they won't play by the same rules as public schools don't give them any assistance at all." Yet this debate has become ever more archaic in a society preoccupied with student achievement, school performance, results based accountability, international competitiveness and institutional transparency.
It's time for the school choice movement to wake up--and catch up to the educational demands and expectations of the 21st century. It's paradoxical to us that even as the demands on K-12 education are escalating and important new forms of choice are emerging (not just vouchers for choice's sake but private schooling as a decent option for kids otherwise stuck in failing public schools, means-tested scholarships for low-income families, corporate and individual tax credit and deduction programs, specialized vouchers for disabled youngsters, and more) the accountability and-transparency discussion seems mired in the 1970s.
Let's restart the discussion. But what does "accountability, done right" looklike in practice? To find out, we sought the assistance of 20 experts in the school choice world--scholars, advocates, program administrators, private school representatives--to help us wrestle with the thorny issues that together embody the accountability question writ large. In this paper, we present their insights, opinions, and advice about how accountability for voucher programs should be structured. We then synthesize their views and offer our own take. Here's an overview.
The school-voucher movement is under assault, as opponents have cut federal funding and states move to impose new restrictions on a form of school choice that has been a cornerstone of the conservative agenda for education overhaul.
Vouchers -- which give students public money to pay private-school tuition -- have grown since a 2002 Supreme Court decision upheld their use in religious schools. About 61,700 students use them in the current school year, up 9% from last year, according to the Alliance for School Choice, a voucher advocate.
But earlier this month, Congress voted to stop funding a voucher program for the District of Columbia. Two other prominent voucher programs -- in Milwaukee and Cleveland -- are facing statehouse efforts to impose rules that could prompt some private schools to stop taking voucher students.
Pressure is mounting from other corners as well. President Barack Obama has said he opposes vouchers, and the stimulus bill he signed in February bars its funds from being used to provide financial aid to students attending private schools. On Wednesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that two state voucher programs, benefiting foster children and disabled students, violated Arizona's state constitution.
That's the gist we got out of the First District's ruling today, in a constitutional challenge to Berkeley's way-complicated system for assigning students to different elementary schools, and to different programs in high school. The upshot: The appeals court unanimously said Berkeley's system is A-OK, despite Prop 209, because it doesn't consider a student's own race at all. Instead, all students in a neighborhood are treated the same -- and the way the neighborhood is treated is based on a bunch of things, like average income level, average education level, and the neighborhood's overall racial composition. The court's opinion calls things like this "affirmative policies" fostering social diversity. That term doesn't sound familiar at all.
Still, Nerad has clearly taken notice. Given the new numbers, he plans to ask state lawmakers to allow Madison to deny future requests based on family income levels, rather than race, to prevent disparities from further growing between Madison and its suburbs.
There is no more A for effort at Prospect Hill Elementary School.
Parents have complained that since the new grading system is based on year-end expectations, 4s are generally not available until the final marking period.
In fact, there are no more A's at all. Instead of letter grades in English or math, schoolchildren in this well-to-do Westchester suburb now get report cards filled with numbers indicating how they are faring on dozens of specific skills like "decoding strategies" and "number sense and operations." The lowest mark, 1, indicates a student is not meeting New York State's academic standards, while the top grade of 4 celebrates "meeting standards with distinction."
They are called standards-based report cards, part of a new system flourishing around the country as the latest frontier in a 20-year push to establish rigorous academic standards and require state tests on the material.
Educators praise them for setting clear expectations, but many parents who chose to live in Pelham because of its well-regarded schools find them confusing or worse. Among their complaints are that since the new grades are based on year-end expectations, 4s are generally not available until the final marking period (school officials are planning to tweak this aspect next year).
"We're running around the school saying '2 is cool,' " said Jennifer Lapey, a parent who grew up in Pelham, "but in my world, 2 out of 4 is not so cool."
When Mateus Bontempo started preschool at a public school in Long Branch, N.J., he rarely talked and was so shy he'd stand in the classroom doorway until a teacher came to escort him inside.
Anna Dasilva, his mother, says educators worked with Mateus on his social skills, sometimes taking him to other classrooms to meet new children. Four years later, the eight-year-old third grader plays trumpet, participates in math competitions and performs in plays. "They really helped him along," says Mrs. Dasilva, who thinks all children should have the same preschool opportunity.
So does President Barack Obama. As one of the main goals of his education plan, he wants to spend $10 billion to encourage states to offer universal preschool and expand federal early-learning programs like Head Start. The recently passed stimulus bill includes half that spending goal, or $5 billion, for Head Start and related early-childhood efforts.
But the current economic crisis may blunt state-level efforts to broaden access to preschool. Even in better times, building a "universal" preschool system would likely be a slow and expensive proposition, given the patchwork nature of what currently exists.
And as state and federal efforts target early learning programs toward disadvantaged students, some middle-class parents feel that their children are being left out. According to a recent study by Pre-K Now, families earning more than about $40,000 a year are already ineligible for free preschool in most of the 20 states that use income to determine eligibility.
A high-profile and lauded dropout-prevention program is falling victim to budget cuts -- although top Los Angeles school officials insist that they'll provide a more effective program in its place.
The precarious Diploma Project is emblematic of the financial crisis slowly working its way across the nation's second-largest school system as ripples of a statewide budget shortfall touch counselors, teachers and other school employees whose work directly affects children enrolled in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Nearly 9,000 employees -- about 10% of the full-time workforce -- received notice of a possible layoff this month as the district seeks to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from its nearly $6-billion general fund. But there's more going on than financial pain.
Reshaping system
After taking the helm in January, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, one of the country's most experienced educators, has attempted to reshape the school system. Cortines is seizing the moment to trim or gut some of the central bureaucracy, while also moving dollars and responsibility to schools. The superintendent wants schools to decide for themselves whether to pay for additional counselors, arts programs and librarians, among other things.
The new setup must save money, but it also should be more effective, he said.
Like any successful negotiator, Randi Weingarten can sense when the time for compromise is nigh. On Nov. 17, after the Election Day dust had cleared, Weingarten, the president of both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and its New York City affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers, gave a major speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In attendance were a host of education-policy luminaries, including Weingarten's sometimes-foe Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern, National Education Association (NEA) President Dennis van Roekel, and Rep. George Miller of California.
"No issue should be off the table, provided it is good for children and fair for teachers," Weingarten vowed, referencing debates within the Democratic coalition over charter schools and performance pay for teachers -- innovations that teachers' unions traditionally held at arm's length.
The first openly gay president of a major American labor union, Weingarten is small -- both short and slight. But she speaks in the commanding, practiced tones of a unionist. In speeches, newspaper op-eds, and public appearances, Weingarten, once known as a guns-blazing New York power broker, has been trying to carve out a conciliatory role for herself in the national debate over education policy. It is a public-relations strategy clearly crafted for the Obama era: an effort to focus on common ground instead of long-simmering differences.
Notably absent from the audience for Weingarten's post-election speech was D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. In the summer of 2007, Rhee, a Teach For America alumna and founder of the anti-union New Teacher Project, took office and quickly implemented an agenda of school closings, teacher and principal firings, and a push toward merit pay. These actions met with their fair share of outrage from both parents and teachers and especially from the local teachers' union. At the time of Weingarten's speech, Rhee and the AFT-affiliated Washington Teachers' Union (WTU) were stalemated over a proposed new contract for teachers.
Chicago public school coaches are in for a crackdown under a proposed city policy that explicitly bans everything from pushing, pinching or paddling athletes to "displays of temper.''
The massive overhaul of the Chicago Public High Schools Athletic Association bylaws follows allegations that began emerging last fall that at least four CPS coaches had paddled or hit athletes.
The new policy creates the possibility that coaches can be banned for life for just one rule violation. Previously, such punishment followed only "knowing and repeated'' rule violations.
It also mandates annual coaching training, requires that all coaches undergo criminal background checks and fingerprint analysis, and establishes a "pool'' of thoroughly screened candidates from which principals must now pick their coaches.
Prohibitions against corporal punishment and even "forcing a student to stand or kneel for an inordinate time" were listed elsewhere in CPS policy, but after the paddling scandal, CPS wanted to take a clear stand against a wide variety of corporal punishment, said CPS counsel Patrick Rocks.
State Sen. Robert Ford is putting a new face on the long-running fight over whether to spend public education dollars to pay for private schools.
To the dismay of his African American colleagues, the Charleston Democrat is hawking a bill that would give students a publicly paid scholarship or tuition grant to go to a private school.
So far, the push for school choice has had mostly white faces out front. But Ford, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, is making the case that the students who would benefit most from a voucher-style program in South Carolina are African Americans who attend poorly performing schools.
He dismisses those who say his program would hurt already struggling public schools, framing the argument as a choice between protecting schools or giving children the lifeline they need to succeed.
"You're damn right I'm hurting public education, because public education is hurting our kids," Ford said.
Races for the Madison School Board, once among the most intense of local electoral competitions, have been a lot quieter in recent years. The more cooperative and functional character of the board, combined with a more responsive approach to community concerns, is confirmed by the fact that many voters are unaware that there is even a contest for one of the two seats that will be filled April 7.
While Seat 2 incumbent Lucy Mathiak, a serious and engaged board member, is unopposed, School Board President Arlene Silveira faces Donald Gors for Seat 1.
We're glad that Gors, a parent and business owner, is making the race. It is good to have the competition. But even as he launched his run, Gors admitted, "I don't really know anything about the people on the board or where they stand."
I'm not trying to be a hypocrite. I have supported D.C. school vouchers. The program has used tax dollars well in transferring impoverished students to private schools with higher standards than D.C. public schools. But it has reached a dead end. Congress should fund the 1,713 current voucher recipients until they graduate from high school but stop new enrollments and find a more promising use of the money.
That exasperation you hear is from my friend and former boss, the brilliant Washington Post editorial writer who has been eviscerating Democrats in Congress for trying to kill D.C. vouchers. We don't identify the authors of our unsigned editorials, but her in-your-face style is unmistakable and her arguments morally unassailable.
My problems with what is formally known as the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program are political and cultural, not moral. The program provides up to $7,500 a year for private-school tuition for poor children at an annual cost of about $12 million. Vouchers help such kids, but not enough of them. The vouchers are too at odds with the general public view of education. They don't have much of a future.
Kayla Crowley, 18, is healthy, but she's lying in a financial institution with a thermometer in her mouth.
Two mornings a week, this basement room in the Oregon Community Bank and Trust has served as a bustling training area -- not for lending money, but for lending a hand.
Crowley and 10 other students from Oregon High School are earning both high school and college credit while they prepare for a booming job category: nursing assistant. While courses such as this take place across the region, the Oregon class "has been a real community effort," said Bill Urban, coordinator for Oregon's School 2 Career program, which matches students with on-the-job training.
The bank donated space. Meriter loaned two hospital beds. Oregon Manor contributed two wheelchairs and a Hoyer patient lift.
Randi Weingarten, the notoriously feisty president of the second-largest national teachers' union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), received a hero's welcome at the National Press Club last November. In her speech, she vowed to give ear to almost any tough-minded school reform, and, in a line that thrilled many reformers, promised that the AFT will not protect incompetent teachers: "Teachers are the first to say, 'Let's get incompetent teachers out of the classroom.'"
Weingarten would seem to be donning the reformist mantle of a previous AFT president, Al Shanker, a highly regarded reformer who shook up pro-union liberals by reminding everyone that tough school discipline and achievement standards were civil rights fundamentals. But an approach that worked during Shanker's tenure is more difficult now, with the reformers and unionists pitched in a bare-knuckled fight that is not about lofty, system-changing goals as much as about the thorny specifics of state and local education policy. Caught up in a contentious situation with the Washington, D.C. school system that has challenged her reformist credentials, Weingarten's attempt to satisfy both sides of the debate is being put to the test--the result of which could dictate the future of education reform across the country.
Every two years, state government adopts a biennial budget that funds nearly every program in state government. Gov. Jim Doyle's budget mostly protects K-12, but many K-12 programs were cut by 1%. Due to the floundering national/state economy millions of dollars in federal stimulus funds for Wisconsin are being used to provide a one-time boost to state funding for schools over the next two years.
Short-term, there are some important items in the budget that will help MMSD; but long-term, little is being done to end the annual ritual of either going to referendum or determining what programs and services for students must be cut to balance the local budget.
In the two-year legislative cycle, April in odd years is probably the most important time to contact your legislator to advocate for school programs. Whether it's SAGE, the K-3 class size reduction program funded by the state, or funding for students in special education -- the biennial budget provides the resources.
If you want to advocate to protect school programs/services, please come to the State Budget Forum on April 1st (see attached flier [54K PDF]) to learn about the issues, receive information to help you with that advocacy and find out what is being done to bring about comprehensive school funding reform.
Please forward this information to others who might be interested. Hope to see you April 1st,
Joe Quick
Legislative Liaison/Communication Specialist
Madison Schools
608 663-1902
Although Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos is talking up the idea of converting almost the entire public school system to a year-round schedule, a new study of MPS schools finds mixed evidence, at best, that it increases academic success.
The study, conducted by Bradley R. Carl, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher, finds little difference in the annual improvement between students on year-round schedules and those on the traditional September to June calendar. The study, completed in February, can be found on the MPS Web site.
Andrekopoulos enters the week still promoting the year-round idea, although it got a tepid reception last week and, in addition to Carl's research, there is no agreement among researchers nationally that the revamped schedule improves results.
The superintendent pointed to evidence in the Carl study that students who remained in the same school for two years made bigger gains under the year-round schedule, in which they get shorter summer vacation and longer breaks during the rest of the year.
He said the results showed the importance of reducing the very high percentage of MPS students who change schools frequently - more than 30% are in a different school each September than they were in the year before, not including those who get promoted. A year-round schedule across the city would reduce mobility, Andrekopoulos suggested.
The most unlikely figure in the struggle to reform America's education system right now is Michelle Rhee.
She's a Korean-American chancellor of schools in a city that is mostly African-American. She's an insurgent from the school-reform movement who spent her career on the outside of the system, her nose pressed against the glass -- and now she's in charge of some of America's most blighted schools. Less than two years into the job, she has transformed Washington into ground zero of America's education reform movement.
Ms. Rhee, 39, who became Washington's sixth school superintendent in 10 years, has ousted one-third of the district's principals, shaken up the system, created untold enemies, improved test scores, and -- more than almost anyone else -- dared to talk openly about the need to replace ineffective teachers.
"It's sort of a taboo topic that nobody wants to talk about," she acknowledged in an interview in her office, not far from the Capitol. "I used to say 'fire people.' And they said you can't say that. Say, 'separate them from the district' or something like that."
Click above to watch, or CTRL-click to download this mpeg4 or mp3 audio file. You'll need Quicktime to view the video file. Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira is up for re-election on April 7, 2009. Arlene graciously agreed to record this video conversation recently. We discussed her sense of where the Madison School District is in terms of:
academics
finance
community support/interaction
Leadership (Board and Administration)
We also discussed what she hopes to accomplish over the next three years.
I emailed Arlene, Donald Gors and Lucy Mathiak (who is running unopposed) regarding this video conversation. I hope to meet Lucy at some point over the next few weeks. I have not heard from Donald Gors.
Rose Fernandez regularly refers to herself as an outsider in the race to become the state's next schools chief.
The implication is that her April 7 opponent, Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, is an insider who is unlikely to change what is happening with education in the state.
The outsider candidate who can change things and shake up the status quo has long been a popular thrust in political campaigns. President Barack Obama, although a U.S. senator at the time, used aspects of the tactic in his campaign last fall.
But some wonder whether it will have the same impact in what is likely to be a low-turnout election April 7.
"The advantage to the insider is being able to draw off of established, organizational support," said Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The outsider's goal is to try to become visible enough that people unhappy with the status quo can voice their outsider outrage."
From her Web site address - www.changedpi.com - to frequently tying her opponent to the state's largest teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, Fernandez appears to be trying to capitalize on one of her many differences with her opponent.
"There are perils with entrenchment," said Fernandez, a former pediatric trauma nurse and past president of the Wisconsin Coalition for Virtual School Families. "With that there comes an inability to see the problems as they really are."
But being an outsider also has some disadvantages, which Evers is trying to play up as well.
At a recent appearance before the Public Policy Forum, Evers puzzled about Fernandez's stance against a provision in Gov. Jim Doyle's bill that he said was supported by voucher school proponents while she expressed support for voucher schools.
Taylor Betz will make a lot more as a high school math teacher this year than her normal salary might suggest.
There's the $2,300 bonus she gets for working at a "hard-to-serve school," the $2,300 for filling a "hard-to-staff position," the $2,300 that all teachers at her school are likely to get for raising student scores on state tests, the $2,300 "beating the odds" bonus she gets for significantly raising the math scores of her own students, and a few smaller bonuses.
Given the extra money, it's easy to see why a teacher like Ms. Betz would be an enthusiastic supporter of the "pay for performance" system that Denver has adopted. But even though such systems are proliferating, they're still both highly controversial and little understood.
Performance pay is one of several areas getting attention right now as education reformers zero in on high-quality teaching as the key to helping students learn. The thinking goes like this: It takes good teachers to improve student achievement, and it will take better pay to lure and keep good teachers.
Not only that, advocates of these plans say, but pay should be more directly linked to how well teachers do. And one way to make that link is by looking at students' scores on standardized tests.
Dale Lamborn, the superintendent of a somewhat threadbare rural school district, feels the pain of Utah's economic crisis every day as he tinkers with his shrinking budget, struggling to avoid laying off teachers or cutting classes like welding or calculus.
Just across the border in Wyoming, a state awash in oil and gas money, James Bailey runs a wealthier district. It has a new elementary school and gives every child an Apple laptop.
But under the Obama administration's education stimulus package, Mr. Lamborn, who needs every penny he can get, will receive hundreds of dollars less per student than will Dr. Bailey, who says he does not need the extra money.
"For us, this is just a windfall," Dr. Bailey said.
In pouring rivers of cash into states and school districts, Washington is using a tangle of well-worn federal formulas, some of which benefit states that spend more per pupil, while others help states with large concentrations of poor students or simply channel money based on population. Combined, the formulas seem to take little account of who needs the money most.
As a result, some districts that are well off will find themselves swimming in cash, while some that are struggling may get too little to avoid cutbacks.
WisPolitics: Evers, Fernandez question each other in We The People debate
3/20/2009
By Greg Bump
WisPolitics
Tony Evers questioned opponent Rose Fernandez's qualifications for the state's top education spot Friday night, while Fernandez countered by trying to portray him as a crony of Wisconsin's largest teacher's union.
The two, vying for the post of superintendent of Public Instruction, laid out competing visions in a We The People debate.
Evers, the deputy superintendent at DPI, touted his 34 years of experience in education while contrasting his resume with the credentials of Fernandez, who is a nurse by trade and has never worked in a public school.
Fernandez, a virtual school advocate, countered by continually trying to lay problems with the state's educational system at the feet of Evers, who has held the No. 2 post at the agency for eight years.
Given the opportunity to question each other, Evers pointed out Fernandez represented virtual schools and has zero experience in the administration of public schools. He asked how parents with children in public schools can trust her to invest in their education rather than funneling money toward special interests.
"My own special interest is the boys and girls growing up in the state of Wisconsin," Fernandez shot back.
Fernandez then stressed Evers' endorsement by the Wisconsin Education Association Council and the "hundreds of thousands of dollars" the union has spent to support his campaign. She asked him to list three reforms he has supported that WEAC opposed.
Evers answered that the union was unhappy with a settlement DPI reached on allowing virtual schools -- in which districts allow students to take courses on-line -- to continue. He also said he has been a strong advocate of charter schools -- which operate without some of the regulations of other public schools -- something the union has opposed.
"I started charter schools. I know what charter schools are about," Evers said. "I don't need a lecture about charter schools."
Evers also stressed his support from school boards, child advocates, parents and others.
"That's why you have to have a broad coalition," Evers said. "This isn't about this overwhelming group of people driving policy at the state level. That just isn't fact."
Fernandez ripped DPI for not doing enough to help the struggling Milwaukee Public School system address issues like dropout rates and the achievement gap for minority students.
Evers countered that he has worked on the issue with educators in Milwaukee, but there are also socioeconomic factors that are hampering achievement.
"Laying this issue on my lap is irrational," Evers said.
Fernandez also brought up a piece of Evers' campaign lit that referred to voucher schools in Milwaukee as "a privatization scheme."
"Some of the schools have been scheming, and those schools we have drummed out of the program," Evers replied.
Evers warned that Fernandez would run DPI through the prism of the "special interest" of choice schools.
Both candidates agreed that a merit pay system for educators could have benefit, but they disagreed on the details. Fernandez indicated that she would base her merit pay system more on classroom outcomes, while Evers stressed that rewards for training were equally important.
They differed more prominently on the qualified economic offer, which Gov. Jim Doyle has proposed eliminating in his 2009-11 budget plan. Fernandez wants to retain it, saying that without the control on teacher compensation, property taxes could rise sharply.
"Children may become the enemy of the taxpayer," she said.
Evers said he has bargained on both sides of the table, and he opposes the QEO because it hurts the state's ability to stay competitive in teacher pay.
Evers embraced the coming federal stimulus cash, which will pump $800 million into state schools as "a historic event" that acknowledges "educators are the lever that can turn our economy around." He said he would appoint a trustee to oversee the allocation of the funds in Milwaukee schools to ensure the money is getting to the classrooms.
In contrast, Fernandez said she looked upon the federal stimulus with caution in that it is one-time funding that won't be there in the future
And while Evers touted the state's ACT and SAT scores as being among the highest in the nation, Fernandez said those tests are only administered to college-bound students and aren't indicative of the academic struggles in districts like Milwaukee.
We the People/Wisconsin is a multi-media that includes the Wisconsin State Journal, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, WISC-TV, WisPolitics.com and Wood Communications Group.
Tony Evers today pledged to continue his long commitment to Wisconsin's charter schools, which provide innovative educational strategies. Dr. Evers has played a major educational leadership role in making Wisconsin 6th in the nation, out of all 50 states, in both the number of charter schools and the number of students enrolled in charter schools.
"We are a national leader in charter schools and I will continue my work for strong charter schools in Wisconsin," Evers said. "As State Superintendent, I will continue to promote our charter schools and the innovative, successful learning strategies they pursue as we work to increase achievement for all students no matter where they live."
Evers, as Deputy State Superintendent, has been directly responsible for overseeing two successful competitive federal charter school grants that brought over $90 million to Wisconsin. From these successful applications, Evers has recommended the approval of over 700 separate planning, implementation, implementation renewal, and dissemination grants to charter schools around the state since 2001.
During the past eight years, the number of charter schools in Wisconsin has risen from 92 to 221 - an increase of almost 150%. The number of students enrolled in charter schools has increased from 12,000 students in 2001 to nearly 36,000 today.
Evers has also represented the Department of Public Instruction on State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster's Charter School Advisory Council. The council was created to provide charter school representatives, parents, and others with the opportunity to discuss issues of mutual interest and provide recommendations to the State Superintendent.
My suggestions last month [Metro Monday column, Feb. 16] for raising achievement in budget-cutting times inspired an outpouring of reader ideas. Some were interesting, such as tougher honor rolls, more reading clubs and more speaking practice. Some were wild, such as my favorite, eliminating school buses.
A lot of people yearned, as I did, for simpler approaches that drew parents into schooling, thus strengthening family ties and improving education while saving money. Most of us admitted that few, if any, of our suggestions will be adopted, but keep in mind that hardly anyone believed the Boston Red Sox would ever win the World Series again.
I had seven ideas: replace elementary school homework with free reading; eliminate barriers to charter school growth; have teachers call parents to praise their kids; have parents e-mail educators to laud their teaching; require high school students to read at least one nonfiction book; call on every child in every class; and declare a national holiday on which everyone reads. As I expected, my charter school notion was unpopular, but President Obama has since made it a top priority anyway. Good luck with that, Mr. President. All the rest won reader support, particularly the first idea on homework. I will get to that after we review the most intriguing of your suggestions.
We've made the case numerous times on this blog that Governor Doyle's proposed budget uses too much one-time money to balance the state budget. Just yesterday, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimated the structural deficit for 2011-13 at $1.5 billion - and keep in mind, that's with $3 billion in new ongoing taxes added to the rolls.
Charter schools generally cannot take credit for boosting test scores, but there is intriguing evidence that students at charter high schools may be more likely to graduate and attend college, a national study concludes.
The Rand Corp. study, which was released Wednesday, examined charters in eight states. Rand, a nonprofit research organization in Santa Monica, Calif., also examined charters in Chicago, San Diego, Denver, Milwaukee, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and Florida.
A year ago, a Rand report on charter schools in Philadelphia found that their students performed about the same as students in district-run schools.
Charter school research has become politically charged, with dueling views. Some reports have concluded that students at the nation's 4,100 charter schools outperform their counterparts in traditional public schools. Other investigators have said charter students do no better than public school students and often do worse.
Researchers involved with the Rand report said they had used performance data of individual students over time to try to evaluate charter schools more accurately. Their work received financial support from several nonprofit foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the William Penn Foundation. Bill Gates supports charter schools, and the Gates Foundation has provided millions of dollars to help successful ones expand.
The first U.S. charter school opened in 1992, and the scale of the charter movement has since grown to 4,000 schools and more than a million students in 40 states plus the District of Columbia. With this growth has also come a contentious debate about the effects of the schools on their own students and on students in nearby traditional public schools (TPSs). In recent years, research has begun to inform this debate, but many of the key outcomes have not been adequately examined, or have been examined in only a few states. Do the conflicting conclusions of different studies reflect real differences in effects driven by variation in charter laws and policies? Or do they reflect differences in research approaches -- some of which may be biased? This book examines four primary research questions: (1) What are the characteristics of students transferring to charter schools? (2) What effect do charter schools have on test-score gains for students who transfer between TPSs and charter schools? (3) What is the effect of attending a charter high school on the probability of graduating and of entering college? (4) What effect does the introduction of charter schools have on test scores of students in nearby TPSs?
In each recent year, the number of people saying they are opening voucher schools was similar to this year's total and the number who made it into operation was in the single digits. The schools have substantial hurdles to clear, including getting a building that meets codes and signing up students and teachers.
In addition to the 57 new applicants, just about all of the current roster of voucher schools - around 120, including a few that do not appear to be operating at the moment - have applied to remain in the program next year.
Rising ranks of students
Put it all together and DPI is forecasting the number of low-income students using the state voucher program next year will be equal to about 20,500 full-time students, up from about 19,500 this year, an increase that is line with the pattern of recent years. (The actual number of students is higher than the "full time equivalent" figure because four-year-old kindergartners are funded at a fraction of other students. The actual number in September was 20,244.)
The pediatric nurse and mother of five will be a strong advocate for change -- someone who will use the mostly symbolic post of state schools superintendent as a bully pulpit to press for reforms, many of which President Barack Obama favors.
With so many high school students failing to graduate in Milwaukee, with so much at stake for Wisconsin in the changing, knowledge-based economy, Fernandez is the best candidate to invigorate DPI.
Fernandez, of Mukwonogo, drew public attention last year for her advocacy of public online charter schools. She helped push for a bipartisan legislative compromise that allowed virtual schools to continue serving thousands of students online with more accountability.
In February 2008, the Madison school board - facing mounting legal pressure - overturned a policy that allowed the district to deny transfer requests based on race. Before that, white students were routinely told they couldn't transfer. Madison was the only district in the state with such a policy, which aimed to limit racial inequalities throughout the district, said district spokesman Ken Syke.
With that policy gone, Madison saw a nearly 50 percent increase in students asking to transfer, from 435 to 643.
Madison superintendent Daniel Nerad notes that Madison's numbers had been steadily increasing for years. But he acknowledged that the policy change likely explains some of this year's jump.
"I think we do see some effect of that, but I'm not suggesting all of it comes from that, because frankly we don't know," he said.
Still, Nerad has clearly taken notice. Given the new numbers, he plans to ask state lawmakers to allow Madison to deny future requests based on family income levels, rather than race, to prevent disparities from further growing between Madison and its suburbs.
Other districts that border Madison - including Monona Grove, Middleton and McFarland - are seeing more transfer requests from Madison this year, too.
"The change Madison made ... that certainly increased the application numbers," said McFarland's business director, Jeff Mahoney.
In addition, Verona school board member Dennis Beres said he suspects many Madison parents are trying to transfer their kids from the chronically overcrowded Aldo Leopold elementary school, which is just two miles northeast of Stoner Prairie Elementary in Fitchburg.
Fascinating. I would hope that the Madison School District would pursue students with high academic standards rather than simply try, via legislative influence and lobbying, to prevent them from leaving.... The effects of that initiative may not be positive for the City of Madison's tax base.
All of the speakers were good, but I will admit I really enjoyed listening to Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Dan Nerad talk on the issue of poverty in our schools.
"Oftentimes, the statement is used as follows: Our children are our future. In reality, we are theirs."
Nerad made one more point I found interesting, which was his explanation for why for every one student that comes into the MMSD, two to three students leave it. While MMSD has been well-recognized for having great schools and students, many of the schools have high concentrations of poverty (17 of 32 elementary schools have more than 50 percent of students on free or reduced lunch programs), which Nerad said can lead to perception issues about how MMSD uses its resources.
"From my perspective, it's a huge issue that we must face as a community -- for every one child coming in, two to three come out right now. I worry that a lot of it is based on this increasing poverty density that we have in our school district ... Oftentimes that's based on a perception of quality, and it's based on a perception based on that oftentimes that we have more kids in need, that we have more kids with more resource needs, and oftentimes people feel that their own children's needs may not be met in that equation."
Not long ago, the idea of placing the Milwaukee Public Schools under control of the city's mayor was getting considerable discussion. Then two things happened. The Public Policy Forum did a study of other cities, which found no clear-cut answers as to whether a governance change improved their school districts.
The Forum also convened a panel of community leaders to discuss this, and the feeling was unanimous that this would make no difference to the success of MPS. From teachers union head Dennis Oulahan to business leader Tim Sheehy, there was not "a great deal of support for a change in governance," moderator Mike Gousha concluded.
That seems to have killed the idea. After all, if the experts agree it wouldn't do anything, and the study is equivocal, it must be a bad idea, right?
Wrong. The idea has great merit, and nothing in the study - or the statements of experts - proves otherwise. A system in which, say, the mayor appoints the school board members, much as he appoints the Fire and Police Commission, could have many benefits, including:
More attention to the problem: School Board members are elected in low-turnout elections in which a minuscule percentage of city residents vote. Mayoral elections are high-interest affairs that would automatically elevate the issue of education, while making the city's most important officeholder accountable for the schools. We vote for the mayor based on how he does on property taxes and crime, but not on education, which is just as important to the city's success. Why put so little value on the schools?
A less parochial school board. The teachers union routinely gets candidates elected who readily vote for increases in salaries and benefits. The typical opponent of the union is the business community. The board has swung back and forth between these interests, as their respective candidates get elected. By contrast, the mayor is answerable to the full spectrum of voters. His choices for the board are likely to be more independent.
itizens of Hudson, N.H., are backing their school board's decision to reject an unfunded state mandate to provide free kindergarten. The case gets a hearing Wednesday.
Not only is one time revenue being used for ongoing expenses (which may be acceptable in these economic circumstance), but all this revenue is being used to offset state funds. When combined with the "current law" revenue cap increases estimated at $277 and $286 per member for the two years, this shifts the burden to local property taxpayers in significant ways.
However things go down, the state will move further from the 2/3 support concept and consequently the local property tax portion of school revenues will be increasing at a faster rate than the state portion (unless districts don't tax to the limit, but that has some bad effects in subsequent years). I am still confused about the Governor's and the LFB thoughts on IDEA and Title I, which appear to be at least partially contrary to the "supplement not supplant" provisions. I do know that there is lobbying going on from many quarters to expand the loopholes and allow more of the stimulus money to be used to fund existing, not expanded programs and services.
There are also some positives. Revenue cap increases are included at past levels, school safety, nurses and transportation are eased; the low revenue ceiling is raised, Special Education isn't actually cut, SAGE and 4 K are given increases, albeit insufficient ones. It could be worse.
We Should Not Be Surprised at These Outcomes, When We Teach our Children PowerPoint
A recently released "slideument" from General Motors. This document [PDF or [PPT] "explains" their March, 2009 buyer and dealer incentives. Via the Truth About Cars.
The headlines are dramatic: a state running billions in debt with declining revenue and a legislature waiting anxiously for federal money to show up.
"All the world's a stage" -- beyond a doubt. The feat is to decide whether this is a comedy or tragedy amid a dismal economy and different players.
Like stock characters, lobbyists continue to collect in the halls of government to sell their wares.
The predictable talk of paying for education plays to the citizenry. Don't raise taxes and do more with less -- it's the same old dichotomy. Lately there's new irony, as suggested by Gov. Jim Doyle, that school boards should go to the table with "more creative ways" to bargain and without the QEO (qualified economic offer).
We've been focusing in the wrong place, according to Doyle. All we need is a "creative teacher compensation package." Problem solved. So school boards just need to get more creative and drop the discussion on school finance and educational excellence? Talk about a plot twist!
The cynical souls suggest that now is the time for caution and control, no time to attempt school finance reform, though the current formula was a short-term solution whence it began. They heed us to plod along with conventional plans and wait for -- who and when? Next year? The year after?
The Oakland school board has sued State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell, saying he violated state law and financial common sense when he gave city charter schools $450,000 out of the district's bank account.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday, is the latest volley in a fight for power and authority over the Oakland schools. O'Connell has controlled the purse strings since the state bailed out the nearly bankrupt district with a $100 million loan in 2003.
O'Connell said giving additional funding to the district's 32 charters schools - about $60 for each of their 7,500 students - was an equity issue. The alternative public schools were left out of a parcel tax passed by voters a year ago.
"Clearly all of the public schools in Oakland are deserving of resources, including the district's charter schools," said O'Connell spokeswoman Hilary McLean.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says schools must make drastic changes to get money from a special $5 billion fund in the economic stimulus bill.
"We're going to reward those states and those districts that are willing to challenge the status quo and get dramatically better," Duncan said Monday at the White House.
Those who keep doing the same old thing, however, won't be eligible for the money, he said.
Schools will be getting tens of billions more dollars through regular channels. On top of that, Duncan will have an unprecedented $5 billion to award for lasting reforms.
To get an award, schools and states must show they have been spending their money wisely. They are supposed to find innovative ways to close the achievement gap between black and Latino children who lag behind their white counterparts in more affluent schools.
Specifically, states are supposed to:
Improve teacher quality and get good teachers into high-poverty schools;
Set up sophisticated data systems to track student learning;
Boost the quality of academic standards and tests;
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner may be the Obama cabinet member facing the biggest crisis -- the economic one -- but Education Secretary Arne Duncan may be the one holding the biggest opportunity in his hands.
It is this: He inherits the best chance in a generation to really shake up an American education system that is uneven and underperforming. And he knows it.
"I see this as an extraordinary opportunity," Mr. Duncan says in an interview. "We have a couple of things going in our direction that create what I call the perfect storm for reform."
If the economy ever heals, and if Afghanistan doesn't blow up, this quest to change the way Americans educate their kids may emerge as one of the biggest dramas of the Obama term. Here are the components of that perfect storm for change that Mr. Duncan describes:
There's virtually a national consensus -- one that certainly includes business leaders panting for a better-prepared work force -- that America's ossified education system needs a big shake-up. Moreover, a bipartisan trail toward real change was blazed by the Bush administration (which gets too little credit for doing so).
Superintendent William Andrekopoulos on Sunday called for using tens of millions of dollars in federal economic stimulus money "to disrupt the status quo" in Milwaukee Public Schools in a bid to increase student achievement.
Making school days for kindergarten through eighth grader longer by something less than an hour a day and pushing the entire MPS system to switch to a "year-round" schedule, in which summer vacation is shortened, were two of the ideas suggested by Andrekopoulos.
He also called for improving teaching quality by giving staff members more time to prepare for class and collaborate with other teachers and by providing teachers more training.
Andrekopoulos said the short time frame being set for spending economic stimulus money and the urgency of improving student achievement mean that MPS should aim to implement the changes by the start of the coming school year. Decisions must be made by about May 1, he said.
A set of public meetings will be held, beginning Wednesday, to get public reaction and allow people to make their own suggestions on what MPS should do.
The National Education Association appears to be humming "Stand By Your Man," even after President Barack Obama promoted both merit pay and an expansion of charter schools in his recent comments about education.
What gives? Whenever a conservative leader talks about pay differences for educators instead of one-size-fits-all raises, teachers' unions say "no," "no" and, "hell, no." And whenever a Republican supports charter schools, NEA members start calling politicians enemies of public schools.
In a statement released after Obama's "cradle-to-career" education speech last week, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel welcomed Obama's "vision" for strengthening public education and said, "He's off to a solid start. ... His 'cradle-to-career' proposal mirrors what NEA and its 3.2million members have been advocating."
The union clearly heard what it wanted to hear (more money) and ignored much of Obama's talk. Merit pay, charter school expansion and more school accountability are not what the union has been advocating. Given the NEA's glowing review, I wondered if the union would even have blinked if the president demanded an end to undemocratic, mandatory unionism. (That was not on Obama's radar, needless to say.)
Tax dollars intended to help parents improve their children's academic achievement have for years routinely been spent by Milwaukee public schools on everything from roller skating to bowling to water-park field trips, an investigation by Wisconsin Interest has found.
Thousands of dollars were also spent on fast food, DJs, prizes, gift certificates and other goodies and giveaways. One school spent $556 in parental-involvement money to buy 250 pumpkins. Another spent $686 for a Milwaukee Bucks "Family Night."
Even when a clear academic purpose is evident, there are often questions about excess. Two schools, according to invoice descriptions, spent more than $17,000 to rent hotel and banquet-hall space for student recognition ceremonies.
Research, as well as common sense, has long shown that having engaged and informed parents is one of the most important ways to increase a child's success in school - and in life. Recognizing that, the federal government has funneled "parental involvement" tax dollars to many school districts across the country.
This year alone, schools run by MPS will receive $38.2 million from the federal government's Title I program. Like other large districts, MPS must set aside at least 1% for parental-involvement initiatives. The district goes further and sets aside 2% - which would amount to about $764,000 in the 2008-2009 school year.
Democrats in the Minnesota Senate are proposing deep cuts in education funding to help balance the state's budget. Their plan includes a cut in early education through 12th grade funding of nearly $1 billion dollars. They would also cut state funding for higher education by $221 million dollars. The Senate DFL plan is the first proposal from state lawmakers to erase the state's $4.6 billion deficit.
The plan would cut spending by 7 percent across all budget areas. The largest programs hit are schools, health and human services and aid to local government. In total, the plan cuts $2.4 billion in spending. The plan also relies on $2 billion in unspecified new revenue.
At a news conference, DFL Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller said the cuts are needed to stabilize the budget in the long term. He said Governor Pawlenty's proposal to use one-time money, accounting shifts and spending cuts does not adequately address the problem.
"It's a day of reckoning for Minnesotans, both for elected officials both in the executive branch and the legislative branch," Pogemiller said. "We need to do our duty to balance the state budget for the long-term financial health of the state."
What is most notable is that Senate Democrats are proposing $1 billion in cuts to early childhood education and K thru 12 schools. K-12 funding is required under the Minnesota Constitution and lawmakers have been reluctant to cut those programs for fear of angering voters. Senate Education Finance Chair Leroy Stumpf, of Plummer, said the depth of the budget problem, along with a sputtering economy, mean all programs have to be on the table.
District teachers will be evaluated on their individual effectiveness and their school's overall success in improving student performance under an assessment system to be unveiled this fall, Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said yesterday.
In her most detailed public comments to date on planned changes to the evaluation system, Rhee said at a D.C. Council hearing that the approach would combine standardized test scores where practical, intensive classroom observation and "value added" measurements of students' growth during the year.
Teachers would also be allowed to set buildingwide goals for achievement that would be used in evaluating their performance.
Rhee said the Professional Performance Evaluation Program, which the District has used in recent years, is inadequate and does not reflect a teacher's worth or how much he or she has helped students grow. She said the federal No Child Left Behind law, as written, is too narrowly focused on test results and not student progress from year to year.
In a speech on education this morning at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Obama repeats questionable statistics in support of his bid to expand the government's monopoly on education back to the womb, asserting that "$1 of early education leads to $10 in saved social services."
Unfortunately he's referring to small-scale programs that involved extensive and often intensive total-family intervention rather than simple "early education."
President Obama outlined his reform agenda yesterday for the nation's public schools in a speech before the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. He promoted extending the school day, adopting performance pay for teachers, and encouraging the proliferation of charter schools, to name a few.
But what did he say about math, you are wondering.
Here it is - the math report. Obama's speech mentioned math education explicitly four times:
1. He reminded the nation that economic development and academic achievement go hand in hand and that the federal government can play a significant role.
"Investments in math and science under President Eisenhower gave new opportunities to young scientists and engineers all across the country. It made possible somebody like a Sergei Brin to attend graduate school and found an upstart company called Google that would forever change our world," he said.
In his education speech earlier this week, President Barack Obama described the U.S. education system in some pretty dire terms. He used some dramatic numbers to back up his claims.
No time is really a good time to ask taxpayers to vote on three expensive school referendums, but in the current economic climate, Ellen Lindgren hopes Middleton and Cross Plains voters choose hope over fear.
"Some people think that it's bad timing," said Lindgren, president of the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School Board. "But unfortunately we didn't have a say on when the economy tanks."
The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School Board voted in November to ask taxpayers for extra spending to ease overcrowding in Middleton elementary and middle schools.
"We are out of space, and we have a need to provide for basic classrooms for students," said Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District Superintendent Don Johnson.
Johnson said the district's elementary schools are about 350 students over capacity, and the middle schools are struggling with about 150 more children than they can fit in the space.
The district will also ask voters on April 7 for funds to beef up security and to purchase instructional materials, including textbooks and computers.
The problem is that as our ability to get data has improved, the education establishment's ability to evade the consequences of data has improved, too. Most districts don't use data to reward good teachers. States have watered down their proficiency standards so parents think their own schools are much better than they are.
As Education Secretary Arne Duncan told me, "We've seen a race to the bottom. States are lying to children. They are lying to parents. They're ignoring failure, and that's unacceptable. We have to be fierce."
JUDY WOODRUFF: Next, the new secretary of education and what's on his plate. President Obama earlier this week called for big changes in education. The NewsHour's special correspondent for education, John Merrow, has a look at how the president's point-man plans to approach that.
JOHN MERROW, NewsHour Correspondent: This time last year, former pro basketball player Arne Duncan was leading the Chicago public schools and occasionally playing basketball with friends, including then-Senator Barack Obama. A lot has changed since then.
BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States: I think we are putting together the best basketball-playing cabinet in American history.
JOHN MERROW: Thanks to President Obama, Arne Duncan has the opportunity to become the most powerful U.S. secretary of education ever.
ARNE DUNCAN, Secretary of Education: This was not something I aspired to do. Frankly, were it anyone but him, I wouldn't probably do it.
Written Bomb Threat at Madison West High School: Letter to Parents
Principal Ed Holmes [9K PDF] via a kind reader's email:
When Madison Schools receive any information that jeopardizes or threatens the safety of our schools, we immediately report the incident to Madison Police and consult with them to determine what the best course of action should be.
The Madison School District has well-defined protocols that are implemented anytime a threat is made against schools. The decisions regarding a response to safety situations are always made in close consultation with the Madison Police Department and other law enforcement agencies.
The safest place for students is in school where we provide structure and supervision. Therefore any decision to remove students from that environment has to be weighed carefully with a potential for placing them in a less structured environment that potentially raises other safety concerns.
These procedures were followed today at West High in response to a written bomb threat.
After consulting with District Administration, the building was searched at 6:00 a.m. using trained Madison Metropolitan School district engineers, architects and custodial supervisors. This procedure has been used in other schools under similar circumstances. Our goal is to maintain a safe educational environment for all students and staff. We have an excellent relationship with our students and encourage them to talk with us about possible issues. We ask you, as families, to help keep our lines of communication open by encouraging your students to talk about their concerns.
West High continues to be a safe place. We pledge that we will continue to focus our time, attention, and resources to keep it so.
They called Superintendent Carlos Garcia a "champion for charter school equity," saying he helped the charters get funding from the city's Rainy Day Fund and Proposition A's parcel tax.
The bestowers of the award also pat the school board on the back.
"The SFUSD Board of Education has also played a strong authorizing role in recent years and recognizes the special contributions charter schools make to public schools in San Francisco," the association said in its announcement.
I would not be surprised if Madison has more charter schools - in 10 years.
It's a classic political face-off: a seasoned professional with a mile-long résumé and a host of influential backers versus a relative neophyte with a fervent grassroots base.
It happened in last year's presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and it's happening in Wisconsin now, in the race to run the state Department of Public Instruction.
Standing in for Clinton is Tony Evers (tonyevers.com), currently deputy superintendent to retiring DPI head Elizabeth Burmaster. Evers, 57, is the choice of the state's education establishment, including unions and professional groups representing teachers and administrators.
This kind of backing has been critical to Burmaster and her predecessors, who've had little trouble dispatching challengers over the last two decades. The easy analysis is that heavy union spending should ensure Evers' victory April 7.
That is, unless Rose Fernandez (changedpi.com) pulls an Obama.
Fernandez, 51, who finished a close second in the five-way Feb. 17 primary, is a pediatric nurse who became a parent activist on behalf of families of children enrolled in "virtual" schools. She led the charge for the online academies after their existence was threatened by a court ruling sought by DPI.
The race is officially nonpartisan, and both candidates eschew identifying with political parties. But as in past races, the candidates and their supporters seem to fall into two camps: center/left (Evers) or right (Fernandez). And the campaigns reflect the ideological fissures dominating discourse regarding education reform.
Dissolving School Boards: For More Mayors, School Takeovers Are a No-Brainer Oversight by City Hall Can Help Push Through Reforms, but Some Parents and Teachers See Too Much Bullying
More U.S. cities are considering scrapping a longstanding tradition in American education, the elected school board, and opting to let mayors rule over the classroom.
Dallas and Milwaukee are currently mulling mayoral control of the city's schools, and Detroit is under pressure to try it -- for the second time. A dozen major school systems, including New York, Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C., already have a form of mayoral control.
Advocates say the structure, in which mayors generally appoint school boards and have the power to pick superintendents, enables tough-minded reforms by promoting stable leadership and accountability. Giving the idea more currency, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, until recently the Chicago schools chief, is a fan and product of mayoral control. And, this week, President Barack Obama promoted some controversial initiatives that have been pushed heavily in districts with mayoral control: charter schools, merit pay for teachers, and accountability, based on rigorous testing standards.
"I would anticipate that over the next few years we will see a new wave" of switches to mayoral authority, says Kenneth Wong, director of Brown University's urban education policy program, who studies mayoral control of schools.
But critics say that results on student achievement are mixed, and mayoral control can shut out dissent, especially from parents and teachers. That concern is fueling a debate over the reauthorization of a seven-year-old state law this June that gives New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg control over the city's schools. His hard-charging chancellor, Joel Klein, who has introduced more school and teacher accountability, has also alienated some politicians and parents, leading to questions about whether the law should be changed or eliminated.
Henry Tyson shows how urban education can succeed in the right setting.
"I never wanted to be involved in helping the poor. My mother was born in Africa and was always very sympathetic toward the poor and people of other races. But the whole inner-city thing came about during my senior year at Northwestern," says the superintendent of Milwaukee's St. Marcus School.
"I was majoring in Russian, so in the summer of my junior year, I went to Russia. I absolutely hated it - just hated it. So when I got back to school, I realized I had a problem figuring out what to do next," he remembers.
About that time, he was having a discussion with a black friend, "and she basically told me I didn't have a clue what it was like in the inner city. She challenged me to do an 'Urban Plunge,' which is a program where you spend a week in an inner-city neighborhood.
"We were in the Austin neighborhood, on the West Side of Chicago. It was a defining moment for me," he says. "I was so struck by the inequity and therefore the injustice of it all. I couldn't believe that people lived - and children were growing up! - in such an environment, such abject poverty."
"I knew after that week that I wanted to work with the urban poor. I felt a deep tug, like this was what I was meant to do. In my view, it was like a spiritual calling."
The President's speech today includes a lot of interesting tidbits, a shout-out for performance pay, a call to lift charter school caps, and even a very pro-Broad Prize signal embedded in the data section. I've been lukewarm on some of the stimulus, more on that later, but this is an important speech. They're scrambling on 16th Street...
[National Education Association President Dennis] Van Roekel insisted that Obama's call for teacher performance pay does not necessarily mean raises or bonuses would be tied to student test scores. It could mean more pay for board-certified teachers or for those who work in high-poverty, hard-to-staff schools, he said.
However, administration officials said later they do mean higher pay based on student achievement, among other things.
Hmmm...doesn't seem like they both can be right...
A few basic goals of high school mathematics will be looked at closely in the top programs chosen for high school by the state of Washington. Our concern will be with the mathematical development and coherence of the programs and not with issues of pedagogy.
Algebra: linear functions, equations, and inequalities
We examine the algebraic concepts and skills associated with linear functions because they are a critical foundation for the further study of algebra. We focus our evaluation of the programs on the following Washington standard: A1.4.B Write and graph an equation for a line given the slope and the y intercept, the slope and a point on the line, or two points on the line, and translate between forms of linear equations.
We also consider how well the programs meet the following important standard: A1.1.B Solve problems that can be represented by linear functions, equations, and inequalities.
Linear functions, equations, and inequalities in Holt
We review Chapter 5 of Holt Algebra 1 on linear functions.
The study of linear equations and their graphs in Chapter 5 begins with a flawed foundation. Because this is so common, it will not be emphasized, but teachers need to compensate for these problems.
Three foundational issues are not dealt with at all. First, it is not shown that the definition of slope works for a line in the plane. The definition, as given, produces a ratio for every pair of points on the line. It is true that for a line these are all the same ratios, but no attempt is made to show that. Second, no attempt is made to show that a line in the plane is the graph of a linear equation; it is just asserted.
Third, it not shown that the graph of a linear equation is a line; again, it is just asserted.
Richard Rivera joined the Algebra Project at exactly the wrong time.
After three years at charter schools, Rivera returned to the Los Angeles Unified School District last year as a math coach -- a kind of roving instructor and supervisor -- at Luther Burbank Middle School in Highland Park. He also agreed to work on the Algebra Project, a new program designed to keep low-achieving students involved in math.
But even though Rivera spent a decade teaching in the district, he lost his seniority with L.A. Unified because of his foray into the charter world. Because the district lays off teachers based on the amount of time they've worked for the school system, Rivera is now in danger of losing his job, and the Algebra Project might stall before it even begins.
If Rivera and other younger teachers involved in the program leave, the school goes "right back to square one," said John Samaniego, the principal at Burbank, where test scores have slowly been rising.
Samaniego's dilemma is common throughout the state as districts prepare to issue preliminary layoff notices to teachers by Friday and principals try to determine their plans for next year. The Los Angeles Board of Education is scheduled to vote today on whether to issue these notices to about 9,000 employees, including 5,500 teachers, because of an expected $700-million budget shortfall.
With the announcement of the new Summit Credit Union Baseball Field, Sun Prairie has likely become the first Dane County school district to sell the naming rights for a specific school facility.
And the high school's varsity baseball field could be just the beginning: District officials want to sell naming rights to everything from the classrooms and the cafeteria to trophy cases and field lights at the new high school slated to open in the fall of 2010.
"Our goal is to have as many of the big items named before the school opens," said Jim McCourt, Sun Prairie School Board treasurer and member of the Naming Rights Subcommittee.
The subcommittee has a tentative goal of selling more than $3 million in naming rights. However, district officials say business or individual monikers would be presented tactfully, such as a plaque bearing a person's name on the back of an auditorium seat or above a classroom doorway.
"It's not like we're going to have banners all over the school," McCourt said.
On Tuesday the district announced Summit Credit Union as the first company to be granted naming rights for a district facility, under the new policy to allow for names of businesses attached to facilities, in exchange for donations.
The School Board approved the naming rights agreement with Summit on Monday night, which will be in effect for 20 years. The credit union donated $99,537, which pays for about a third of the cost of the field that will have artificial turf on the infield.
President Obama's education speech this morning was, in my memory, the largest assemblage of smart ideas about schools ever issued by one president at one time. Everyone will have a different favorite part -- performance pay models for teachers, better student data tracking systems, longer school days and years, eliminating weak state testing standards, more money for schools that improve, more grants for fresh ideas, better teacher training, more charter school growth, faster closing of bad charters and many more.
The speech puts Obama without any further doubt in the long line of Democratic party leaders who have embraced accountability in schools through testing, even at the risk of seeming to be in league with the Republican Party. His explicit endorsement of the tough Massachusetts testing system -- a favorite of GOP conservatives -- will irritate many teachers and education activists in his own party, but that group of Democrats has not had a champion who has ever gotten closer to the presidency than former Vermont governor Howard Dean, and we know how his candidacy turned out.
The problem, which the president did not mention, is that he has limited power to make any of these things happen. His speech was full of encouraging words to state and school district officials, who will be the true deciders. True, he has some money to spread around for new ideas. But the vast bulk of the budget stimulus dough will go, as he said, to saving jobs in school systems.
President Barack Obama is laying out his "cradle to career" agenda for education Tuesday, including a controversial plan to boost pay for teachers who excel.
The White House plan also includes new incentives for states to boost quality in their preschool programs, to raise standards for student achievement and to reduce the high school drop-out rate. And the president is fleshing out his plan to increase financial aid for college students, senior administration officials said.
In a speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the president will also call on Americans to take responsibility for their children's education and their own, the officials said.
The speech will build on comments made during his address to Congress, where Mr. Obama dramatically declared that those who drop out of school are failing not just themselves, but their country.
The speech was described by three administration officials speaking on condition of anonymity in advance of the official announcement, and in a fact sheet provided by the White House.
The merit pay proposal would significantly expand a federal program that increases pay for high-performing teachers to an additional 150 school districts, officials said. "What he'll be calling for...is to reward good teachers that are improving student outcomes," said one official.
Prince William County elementary schools will continue to teach mathematics with a textbook series that has drawn parent criticism and national scrutiny, despite deep divisions in the community over whether students should be given other options.
The curriculum from Pearson Education, "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space," which is used in thousands of classrooms nationwide, has been debated virtually since Prince William began using it three years ago under the administration of Superintendent Steven L. Walts. Critics say it fails to help students learn basic skills and facts.
But educators who have championed "Investigations" say it helps students develop a deeper conception of math fundamentals before they take on complicated topics. The debate shows no signs of going away.
Last week, the Prince William School Board split 4 to 4 on a proposal that would have allowed parents to choose between "Investigations" and a more traditional math curriculum. Opponents of the proposal, which failed Wednesday on the tie vote, said that it would have been cost prohibitive and that education would have suffered.
We wrote last week about Democratic efforts to strip 1,900 low-income Washington children of $7,500 "opportunity scholarships" to attend private schools.
It's an experiment in school vouchers, an experiment with little potential downside. But it's an experiment that was launched in 2004 by a Republican-controlled Congress. Today it's on the verge of extinction because the Democratic-controlled Congress wants to do the bidding of public-school teachers unions. The unions see vouchers that let poor kids go to private schools as aiding the enemy.
Language passed by the House as part of a massive $410 billion spending bill would effectively doom the federally funded program. The 1,900 kids would have to leave their schools and re-enter public schools in Washington, which has some of the worst schools in the nation.
The measure, by the way, is referred to as "the Durbin language" for sponsoring Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois.
From the start, Todd Gray knew it wasn't going to be easy.
On the day he signed the Waukesha Public School District superintendent's contract, he was told that he might have to close one or two schools because of finances - something nobody brought up in his interviews.
Eight months later, Gray hasn't closed those schools. Instead, he's trying to create new ones as part of a sweeping reform effort for Waukesha that may include the implementation of 4-year-old kindergarten, a new middle school structure and expanded business partnerships with the community.
Gray's emphasis on collaboration and innovation, and his fiscal skills gleaned from years as a certified public accountant, might make him the adrenaline shot that Waukesha's schools have needed for years.
His guiding principles are inclusive and simple: We can educate kids better, and we can do it for less money.
"Whatever we throw out has to improve education and fit our current goals," said Gray, who grew up near Lake Geneva and had worked as a deputy superintendent for Oshkosh schools.
When he started in Waukesha this past summer, Gray inherited a report from the former superintendent that suggested closing a school or two to consolidate space and save money. He distanced himself from it, spending weeks studying alternatives.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last week that poor children receiving federally financed vouchers to attend private schools in Washington, D.C., shouldn't be forced out of those schools. Bully for Mr. Duncan. But the voice that matters most is President Obama's, and so far he's been shouting at zero decibels.
His silence is an all-clear for Democrats in Congress who have put language in the omnibus spending bill that would effectively end the program after next year. Should they succeed, 1,700 mostly black and Hispanic students who use the vouchers would return to the notoriously violent and underperforming D.C. public school system, which spends more money per pupil than almost any city in the nation yet graduates only about half of its students.
The D.C. voucher program has more than four applicants for every available slot. Parental satisfaction is sky high. And independent evaluations -- another is scheduled for release later this month -- show that children in the program perform better academically than their peers who do not receive vouchers. This is the kind of school reform that the federal government should encourage and expand.
Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, sent a message to the nation's school officials last week: Heads up! We'll be sending you billions of dollars by month's end. Spend the money quickly but wisely. And keep receipts; we'll be asking.
The message, which went out Friday in documents e-mailed to governors, state education commissioners and thousands of school superintendents, provided the first broad guidelines for how the Education Department intends to channel $100 billion to the nation's 14,000 school districts over the next few months. The expenditure is part of the Obama administration's economic stimulus package.
Some $44 billion will be made available to states before the end of this month, Mr. Duncan said, in the hope that layoffs can be averted. Hundreds of thousands of job losses in schools had been projected for the fall because of growing state budget deficits caused by a steep drop in tax revenues.
More school stimulus money will be distributed in the spring through the fall, the documents said, after states apply for the financing and provide Congressionally mandated "assurances" to Mr. Duncan that they are complying with federal education laws.
On his first day of eighth grade at the former Holy Name Roman Catholic school last fall, Jeffrey Stone bowed his head, clasped his hands and began to recite the Lord's Prayer. Within seconds, his teacher chided him: "We don't do that anymore."
Over the summer Holy Name, along with six other financially troubled Catholic schools here, had converted into a charter school, packing up crucifixes, redesigning uniforms and expunging religion from its curriculum. But virtually the entire staff and much of the student body stayed the same through the transition, and they had come to expect lessons in faith and values alongside algebra and literature.
"I was shocked," recalled Jeffrey, 13, who played on the Catholic youth basketball team and relied on his school's pastor-in-residence for advice. "I was like, how am I going to survive?"
The seven Catholic-turned-charter schools in Washington are at the cusp of what is becoming a popular exit strategy for urban parochial schools nationwide facing plummeting enrollment and untenable operating costs. In New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled a plan last month to transform four Catholic schools in Brooklyn and Queens into charters, which are publicly financed but independently operated. In San Antonio, a major charter school operator is lobbying the archdiocese to consider charters if it is forced to close schools.
The Lodi Unified School District is proposing its 3,100 employees take a pay cut of up to 10 percent, district officials have confirmed.
District negotiators and union leaders met last week to discuss a potential pay cut or furlough plan for all employees, including high-ranking officials, that could trim millions from the district's estimated $25 million budget shortfall and curb a proposed elimination of 500 jobs, Trustee President Richard Jones said.
"I won't get into specifics, but negotiations have begun," Jones said
Salaries account for 90 percent of Lodi Unified's $273 million budget, and officials have determined that the majority of budget cuts must be made through payroll.
Trustees have approved a layoff plan of 217 teachers and are expected to approve the layoff of 109 full-time positions at a future meeting as well.
Trustees say jobs could be spared, however, if employees are willing to accept a furlough or pay cut. Trustees have already approved a 10 percent reduction of their $750 monthly stipend and have entered negotiations regarding Superintendent Cathy Nichols-Washer's contract, Jones said.
Lodi Unified personnel director and lead negotiator Mike McKilligan would not comment on negotiations. Based on the $245 million district payroll, however, a 10-percent across-the-board cut would add up to $24.5 million, district officials confirmed.
The Hong Kong education system has become far too complex and exam-oriented with regard to teaching English. For example, the Education Bureau's websites are so difficult to understand and navigate that many public schools are hiring native-English-speaking consultants to break down new senior secondary curriculum guides and assessment modules.
This is all being done in the name of the HKCEE, an acronym that strikes fear into many a secondary student. This is a dysfunctional system. English needs to be taught as a means to communicate, not as an end product used to pass exams. The bureau is neglecting the core, instinctive method of learning a language.
The driving forces behind learning a language remain the same whether it is the mother tongue or a secondary one. They include: the need to understand others and to communicate effectively, and the desire to express ones ideas and opinions. It is hard-wired into our brains from birth to strive to master communication, in any form or language. There is what we call "intrinsic motivation". Our children are born with an innate desire to hear and be heard. They seek to mimic, emulate and ultimately understand others. This is not theory, it is fact.
There is a language explosion between the ages of two and six. The average child's vocabulary expands from about 50 words at the age of 18 months to an average of more than 10,000 words by the age of six. Children are not concerned at this age with what language it is, as long as it allows them to communicate their thoughts, emotions and ideas.
If fluent English is the goal for local students, then the whole language and education system in Hong Kong needs to be overhauled and simplified to allow for this crucial period in children's linguistic development. Teaching children in one language and then switching to another simply to prepare for exams ignores the underlying principles of why and how children learn a language. It favours only those who have been immersed in that second language from an early age.
Madison needs to get past its outdated phobia of charter schools.
Charter schools are not a threat to public schools here or anywhere else in Wisconsin. They are an exciting addition and asset to public schools -- a potential source of innovation, higher student achievement and millions in federal grants.
And when charter schools do succeed at something new, their formula for success can be replicated at traditional schools to help all students.
That's what's starting to happen in Madison with the success of a dual-language charter elementary school called Nuestro Mundo. Yet too many district officials, board members and the teachers union still view charters with needless suspicion.
Madison's skeptics should listen to President Barack Obama, who touts charter schools as key to engaging disadvantaged students who don't respond well to traditional school settings and curriculums. Obama has promised to double federal money for charter school grants.
But Madison school officials are ignoring this new pot of money and getting defensive, as if supporting charter schools might suggest that traditional schools can't innovate on their own.
Of course traditional schools can innovate. Yet charter schools have an easier time breaking from the mold in more dramatic ways because of their autonomy and high level of parent involvement.
Several School Board members last week spoke dismissively of a parent-driven plan to create a dual-language charter school within a portion of Sennett Middle School. Under the proposal, Nuestro Mundo would feed its bilingual students into a charter at Sennett starting in the fall of 2010.
I continue to believe that our community and schools would be better off with a far more diffused governance structure, particularly in the management of more than $415,699,322 (current 08/09 budget) for a 24,189 student district. Related: the failed Madison Studio Charter School application.
A family's federal court victory over the Madison School District in a disability rights lawsuit could push forward efforts in the district to start a 4-year-old kindergarten program, the attorney representing the family predicts.
On Feb 25, U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb ruled that the district violated the federal law governing children with disabilities when it refused to pay a portion of the private preschool tuition for a 4-year-old with a learning disability.
The child needed to participate in activities with non-disabled peers to improve his social behavior, according to the lawsuit filed by his parents.
The preschool was an appropriate setting for this to happen, and the district did not offer any alternatives, Crabb ruled.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires districts to provide disabled 3- and 4-year-olds with an appropriate preschool education at no charge
This week, education secretary Arne Duncan referred to DC public schools as a district with " more money than God." Perhaps he was thinking of the $24,600 total per-pupil spending figure I reported last year in the Washington Post and on this blog. If so, he's low-balling the number. With the invaluable help of my research assistant Elizabeth Li, I've just calculated the figure for the current school year. It is $28,813 per pupil.
In his address to Congress and his just-released budget, the president repeatedly called for efficiency in government education spending. At the same time, the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have been trying to sunset funding for the DC voucher program that serves 1,700 poor kids in the nation's capital. So it seems relevant to compare the efficiencies of these programs.
According to the official study of the DC voucher program, the average voucher amount is less than $6,000. That is less than ONE QUARTER what DC is spending per pupil on education. And yet, academic achievement in the voucher program is at least as good as in the District schools, and voucher parents are much happier with the program than are public school parents.
In fact, since the average income of participating voucher families is about $23,000, DC is currently spending about as much per pupil on education as the vouchers plus the family income of the voucher recipients COMBINED.
President Obama's massive education initiative detailed in his proposed budget aims at the right challenge - lifting our schools and narrowing achievement gaps. But huge chunks of his eye-popping $131 billion package, now before Congress, would go for stale federal programs that have long failed to elevate students' learning curves.
Mr. Obama promised a sharp break from President Bush, who often bent scientific findings to advance his favored dogma. Instead, "it's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology," Obama promised at his inauguration.
Few question the president's plea to improve the quality of our schools and colleges, racheting-up our economy's competitiveness. This requires not just retooling auto factories or investing in solar power, but enriching the nation's human capital as well.
To boost school quality Obama declared that he would only fund programs that lift pupil performance. "In this budget," he declared before the Congress, "we will end education programs that don't work." Music to the ears of the empirically minded.
But hard-headed scholars are scratching those craniums over Obama's desire to spend billions more on disparate federal programs that have delivered little for children or teachers over the past decade.
Take Washington's biggest schools effort: the $14 billion compensatory education program, known as Title I, supporting classroom aides and reading tutors for children falling behind. A 1999 federal evaluation showed tepid results at best, largely because local programs fail to alter core classroom practices or sprout innovative ways of engaging weaker students.
Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at the UC Berkeley, is author of "Standardized Childhood."
The Wisconsin Virtual Academy, sponsored by the Northern Ozaukee School District, just completed its busiest time of year. As Wisconsin progressed through the open school enrollment period for the 2009-2010 school year, the WIVA bombarded homes around the state with mailings, advertising itself as an online alternative to local schools. School administrators traveled to dozens of locations around the state, offering introductory sessions designed to entice students away from brick and mortar schools, in favor of clicking, scrolling and remotely conferencing through virtual classes.
Wisconsins open enrollment provides more than $6,000 per student in transfer fees to the recipient school district, on behalf of students whose parents choose to send them to public schools outside of their local community. Open enrollment in general carries many benefits for students, providing alternatives in heavily populated areas like Milwaukee, where many different school districts of varying quality and program offerings exist in close proximity. But the WIVA, operated by the McFarland School District, has no geographical association with the majority of its students.
School districts in southern Ozaukee County require between $11,000 and $13,000 in tax revenue per student, collected from federal, state, and property taxes, and other sources. The Wisconsin Virtual Academy receives only the 2008-2009 state transfer payments of $6,322 per student. Unlike traditional schools, the state payment fully funds the virtual program, and coincidentally still provides ample profit for the virtual programs curriculum and software vendors. But any such comparison between a virtual school and a more traditional brick and mortar facility is probably not comparing apples to apples, considering teacher-to-student ratios and well-rounded learning experiences.
The WIVA is operated in partnership with a company called K12, Inc., which even hosts the WIVAs promotional Web site on behalf of the school district. K12 is a publicly-traded, for-profit company based in Virginia, and for the record, the company has no shortage of profit. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008, K12 reported net income of $18 million, on revenues of $226 million, primarily collected from states like Wisconsin, which make tax dollars available to virtual schools.
In what might be the largest number of school closing proposals presented at once, Milwaukee Public Schools officials announced plans Friday to end contracts with six charter schools in the district, including almost all the fledgling small high schools within the North Division complex.
MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said he supported a proposal from School Board Director Michael Bonds, who wants to return North to its original incarnation - a large, comprehensive city high school at 1011 W. Center St.
While Bonds cited the desire from alumni to return North to a large-scale institution, Andrekopoulos said a review of the small schools in the complex revealed failures in test scores and poor student progress.
"We can do better for our kids; the status quo is not acceptable," Andrekopoulos said, though he stopped short of calling the small-schools-within-a-big-school experiment a failure.
"We've created successful small schools," he said. "But we're willing to stand up (and change) something not working."
The high schools in North that could lose their charter contracts include the Truth Institute for Leadership and Service with 171 students, the Genesis School of Business Technology/Trade, Health and Human Services with 233 students, and Metropolitan High School, with 250 students.
The proposal will be discussed at two meetings next week.
The federal economic stimulus law will deliver about $398 million to Wisconsin's schools over the next two years, but officials say it won't solve their budget problems and homeowners should still expect property tax increases.
Moreover, it's still unclear how districts will be able to use the money, when it will arrive and what impact it will have on students.
"It is pretty significant," said Erica Pickett, director of business services for the Stoughton School District, of the stimulus money. "But what we don't have are the strings -- what we can and can't spend it on."
Also unclear is how most of the money will be divided among school districts.
The U.S. Department of Education last week unveiled preliminary district-by-district allocations for the program in the stimulus law that provides money to help disadvantaged students, a total of $139 million for Wisconsin.
Madison schools, for example, would receive $5.7 million over the next two years for the program, known as Title I and designed to assist disadvantaged students in reading and math.
That's in addition to the $5.4 million the district is getting in the current year under the program. In Portage, schools will get $175,987 over two years in new Title I money under the stimulus law. That compares with the $268,497 it is receiving this year.
School Districts should not spend the money in ways that increase ongoing operating costs.... Much more on the splurge/stimulus here.
Parents of students at a Madison middle school worry about safety after a child was beat up in one the school's bathroom.
The incident happened last week Thursday.
According to a letter sent home to parents Monday, a group of students followed a male student into the boy's bathroom where another student assaulted him.
The group blocked entrance to the bathroom.
Surveillance cameras show the beating along with a group of witnesses cheering on the violence.
Toki [Map] Principal Nicole Schaefer says the school sent the letter to alert parents that the proper actions were taken and assure them the school is safe.
Schaefer would not tell 27 News if any students were suspended or if the victim is back in school.
Toki Middle School Restorative Justice Plan [82K PDF]:
Judicious discipline is a three pillared process set on a solid educational foundation. The first pillar is prevention through education and positive behavior supports; the second pillar is equity through fair and consistent consequences, and the third pillar is restoration through empathy, forgiveness and conflict resolution. The educational foundation that these pillars stand on is curriculum, instruction and assessment practices that are engaging, rigorous, culturally responsive, and individualized. In summary, kids who are engaged in learning are less likely to engage in misconduct.
The backbone of our discipline policy is that all staff and students must be treated with dignity and respect, including those who harm others. We want everyone to know that misconduct is never acceptable, but always fixable. We will be warm but strict, and follow through with clear, fair and consistent consequences, but also encourage students to repair the harm they caused, earn forgiveness, and restore their reputations.
When a student engages in misconduct, we must care for two interests:
The student who misbehaves - We teach the student how to repair the harm, earn forgiveness, and restore his or her reputation
All other students - We protect their health, safety, property, and opportunity to learn in an environment free from distractions
Therefore, when a student engages in misconduct, he or she has two options:
Fix the harm (ex: Apology, Mediation, Repair or Replace, Community service, Extended learning)
Accept a consequence (ex: Lunch detention, After school detention, In school suspension, Out of school suspension, Suspension alternatives)
The consequences for misconduct will vary, depending on how the behavior harms the health, safety, property and learning opportunities of other students. Although choosing to "fix the harm" may reduce or replace consequences for less harmful misconduct, behaviors that significantly or severely harm others will result in mandatory suspension days, up to a recommendation for expulsion.
Bill Gates has been quoted as saying (before iPhone) "The computer of the future will be the cellphone". The implications for educators is profound, and should have us re-thinking are attitudes and acceptance of cell phones in the school. I am not blind to the fact that there are sometimes problems associated with the cellphone in the schools, but we should address those by addressing the behavior, not the object. We don't take away a pencil the student is tapping, we address the tapping behavior.
As an administrator for highly at-risk students in a Cincinnati charter high school, I found it much easier to have students use Google SMS to look up words and definitions when they were struggling with reading than using a book. Very few of these students would be caught carrying books home, but they would use their cell phone to help complete assignments.
As we look at HOW cellphones may be implemented today, we also look at Adobe and their role. Captivate lets us easily create microcontent with quizzes, saved in Flash. Flash itself let's students see, create and engage with interactive simulations and games that can have a profound effect on learning. Many Web 2.0 sites are built in Flash, and extend the capabilities of the cellphone beyond what we would have thought possible a few years ago.
Last fall I wrote a post on this blog titled Hacking Education. In it, I outlined my thoughts on why the education system (broadly speaking) is failing our society and why hacking it seems like both an important and profitable endeavor.
Our firm, Union Square Ventures, has been digging deeply into the intersection of the web and the education business in search of disruptive bets we can make on this hacking education theme.
My partner Albert led an effort over the past few months to assemble a group of leading thinkers, educators, and entrepreneurs and today we got them all together and talked about hacking education for six hours.
The event has just ended and my head is buzzing with so many thoughts.
We will post the entire transcript of the event once the stenograpger gets it to us. That usually takes about a week. In the meantime you can see about ten or twenty pages of tweets that were generated both at the event and on the web by people who were following the conversation and joining in.
But here's a quick summary of my big takeaways:
1) The student (and his/her parents) is increasingly going to take control of his/her education including choice of schools, teachers, classes, and even curriculum. That's what the web does. It transfers control from institutions to individuals and its going to do that to education too.
Madison School Board: Legislative Session and Fine Arts Task Force
Legislative Informational Community Session: We are holding a special Board meeting to focus on legislative issues on Wednesday April 1 at 6:00pm at Wright Middle School. At this session we will provide updates on school funding and state budget issues that affect the MMSD. We will discuss and share strategies on how the community can get involved in advocating for our schools.
Fine Arts Task Force (FATF) Informational Community Sessions: The focus of each session will be a presentation of the findings and recommendations of the FATF followed by an opportunity for discussion. The Executive Summary and complete FATF report can be found at http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/boe/finearts/ Tuesday, March 10, 6:00-8:00pm, Memorial High School. Thursday, March 12, 6:00-8:00pm, La Follette High School LMC.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama's stimulus package, could serve as a historic investment in our children's future, an initiative that could very well change the course of our nation.
It is an opportunity that cannot be squandered.
However, there is good reason for concern that the funds made available for education under the act will not result in the change we need.
Over the past eight years, educational progress in the United States has been modest at best. According to a national study by the Gates Foundation ("The Silent Epidemic," 2006), dropout rates in many of our nation's largest cities are 50 percent or higher.
Similarly, large numbers of students lack proficiency in reading and math in many school districts across the country, and many who graduate and go on to college are largely unprepared for the rigors of college-level course work.
Seven years after the adoption of the No Child Left Behind law, it is clear we are still leaving many children behind.
Tinkering with existing policy is unlikely to produce different results. The Obama administration needs a bold new strategy for reforming our public education system if it hopes that our schools are going to play a more significant role in moving the nation forward. However, so far, and certainly it is still is early in the term of this administration, no new vision or strategy for reforming the nation's schools has been articulated.
There is justifiable reason to be concerned that by calling for funds from the stimulus package to be spent quickly on "shovel-ready" projects in order to produce the jobs that are so desperately needed, the administration will not have the time to develop a thoughtful strategy that can guide the reform of the nation's public schools.
"It's like Celsius and Fahrenheit. It's exactly the same thing," he said.
Bob Schaeffer, public education director for the advocacy group FairTest, said a debate over grading scales often reveals the "tyranny of false precision."
"These numbers were not handed down by God on a stone tablet," he said.
To Robert Marzano, a Denver-based education researcher, the typical grading scale is an incomplete measure of student achievement. He recommends bar graphs measuring student achievement on various course topics.
As officials in the Pittsburgh Public Schools prepare to drop a controversial grading scale for a 5-point scale they're calling fairer and more accurate, Dr. Chard, Dr. Marzano and Mr. Schaeffer cautioned that no version is perfect.
All require some degree of teacher subjectivity, and all require careful, thoughtful application, Dr. Chard said.
Mr. Schaeffer said grading scale controversies generate "much more heat than light," yet Dallas and Fairfax, Va., also are in the midst of them now.
Dr. Marzano said as many as 3,000 schools or districts have made some of the improvements he favors, such as expanded report cards with bar graphs breaking down student achievement at the topic level while still giving overall course averages and letter grades. He said the bar graphs can correspond to five-point scales measuring achievement in the topic areas.
The "hot lunch" line snakes out the door of the multipurpose room at Franklin Elementary School. Kids dressed in snow boots and parkas file past a table where a staff member is handing out plastic-wrapped containers of hot dogs and fries, canned peaches and a cookie. Forget trays or plates. The kids clutch the packages in both hands and, after a student helper plunks a carton of milk on top, hug the whole load to their chests, trying not to drop mittens and hats. They scurry into the gym and squeeze into a spot at one of the crowded lunch tables, where the "cold lunch" kids are chowing down with a 10-minute head start. Twelve minutes left before the bell rings. Better eat fast.
Is the Madison Metropolitan School District's school lunch program unhealthy for kids?
It depends who you ask. On one side is a well-trained food service department that manages to feed 19,000 kids under a bevy of guidelines on a slim budget. On the other is a growing number of parents and community advocates armed with research about the shortcomings of mass-produced food and race-to-the-finish mealtimes.
"We're perpetuating a fast-food mentality," said Pat Mulvey, a personal chef and the parent of a second-grader and a kindergartner at Franklin. "We can do better."
Mulvey has joined a small group of parents at south side Franklin and affiliated Randall Elementary calling for changes to the school lunch program. Among their concerns: a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables, high fat and salt content in items perceived as "processed" or "junk food," little nutritional information on the Web site, too much plastic, too much waste and too little time to eat.
This isn't the first time parents in the district have raised concerns about school lunch. For the past decade, parents, educators and healthy food advocates in the Madison area have asked the School Board, principals and the district's food service to serve more fresh foods and make lunch longer than 25 minutes.
Privatizing education is the best way to ensure quality
With Gov. Jim Gibbons' proposed budget cuts to Nevada's education system being debated within the chambers of the state legislature, everyone is cowering in the corner wondering whether or not we will have a recognizable education system in the future.
Managing and cutting the budget for useless and wasteful programs is what might determine our future. Does a UNLV coach deserve to get paid millions of dollars? Does President David B. Ashley really need a $15,000 desk with matching $3600 leather chairs? Most people don't care enough to notice this wasteful spending or assume that these benefits are predetermined in contracts. But, when we catch corporate CEOs and other executives flying in private jets or building huge corporate offices, we criticize them openly.
Outrageously expensive desks aside, raising taxes is not the solution. Some suggest raising the room tax because the burden falls on tourists. This mentality is careless because I can't imagine a tourist who would spend a night in a hotel room with artificially inflated prices due to higher room taxes. As we have seen recently, they are more likely to take their business elsewhere.
More than enough tax money already goes to an already failing public school system. This past election, voters passed yet another room tax to further support the failing public education system in the state.
Schools struggling with some of their worst budget crises in generations are taking stock of President Obama's stimulus package -- hoping the money will restore funding for things like textbooks, teacher salaries and tuition.
The $100 billion in funding dedicated to education touches programs for almost every age group, from early-childhood programs to financial aid for college students. While the money, part of the $787 billion stimulus package, may not result in a full turnaround, districts say, it will help stop some of the bleeding.
Michael Klein
"It's going to mean a softer landing for us," says Jack O'Connell, state superintendent of public instruction in California. That state is facing an $11.6 billion cutback in public-education funding, affecting the remainder of this school year as well as next. In some cases, Mr. O'Connell says, "instead of a superintendent having to decide between textbooks or a math teacher, we'll be able to do both. Or, it will mean a longer bus ride for kids, instead of eliminating transportation."
When addressing education in the stimulus package, the president last week told a joint session of Congress, "We have provided the resources necessary to prevent painful cuts and teacher layoffs that would set back our children's progress."
The true story of little-known rooms in the New York City Board of Education building. Teachers are told to report there instead of their classrooms. No reason is usually given. When they arrive, they find they've been put on some kind of probationary status, and they must report every day until the matter is cleared up. They call it the Rubber Room. Average length of stay? Months, sometimes years. Plus other stories of the uneasy interaction between humans and their institutions.
The Rubber Room story was produced by Joe Richman and the good people at Radio Diaries.
Note: we're doing the Rubber Room story with some filmmakers who are making a feature-length documentary about the Rubber Room. Learn more here.
The mood was sour at the WEAC offices in August of 2001. Republican Governor Scott McCallum had signed a budget that only increased school funding by $472 million over the biennium. These new funds, approved by McCallum while the Governor was wrestling with a budget deficit, represented increases of 3.1% and 4.2% in school aids over the 2001-03 biennium.
In a press release following the bill signing, the teachers' union sneered at McCallum's paltry effort, calling it a "status quo" budget. At no point in the release did they mention the half a billion in new funds they received - instead, they excoriated McCallum for vetoing a .78% increase in the property tax caps and for vetoing relaxation of the Qualified Economic Offer (QEO) law, which caps teacher salaries. They derided the Republican governor for not increasing aid enough for special education, saying the "lack" of special education funds meant "school districts will be forced to pit special education against other programs, resulting in decisions that hurt all students." To the extent they mention the increased aids at all, they dismiss them as merely "part of a continuing effort" to hold down property taxes.
Nearly eight years later, Democratic Governor Jim Doyle stood at the podium in front of the Legislature, which was now controlled fully by members of his own party. Faced with a budget deficit of $5.9 billion (much of it his own doing) Doyle announced his intention to increase school aids by $426 million over the biennium. Even public school children in Wisconsin will recognize this as $46 million less than the increase authorized by McCallum in 2001.
Doyle's budget also included a funding shell game that imperiled school aids in the future. Doyle cut over $500 million in general funds out of school aids and plugged in an equal amount in federal "stimulus" funds to cover the aids - federal funds which may very well not be available in the next budget. On top of that, he funds virtually the entire school aid increase with one-time federal money. When 2011 rolls around, school aids could be over $1 billion in the hole and fighting tooth and nail with other state programs for funding.
Undoubtedly, the small funding increase, coupled with the risky way funds are shifted around to patch up holes, would cause the thoughtful folks at WEAC to have some serious concerns regarding Doyle's budget.
Surprise! The day after his budget address, WEAC wasted no time in praising the proposed Doyle school funding plan, gushing that it "stays true to Wisconsin's priorities and values."
State legislators no sooner congratulated themselves for solving California's $42 billion budget deficit than state Controller John Chiang insensitively reminded them they are continually adding to an even larger debt for retiree health and dental benefits.
The $42 billion deficit supposedly was wiped away by last week's narrowly approved $12.5 billion in new taxes, $14.9 billion in spending cuts and $11 billion in new borrowing in adopted budgets for 2008-09 and 2009-10. We're skeptical considering the state's typically rosy revenue projections, the continual economic decline that is likely to reduce revenue even more and voters' unlikely approval of borrowing schemes on the May 19 ballot to bridge the budget gap.
However that pans out, the state already owes another $48.2 billion in unpaid costs for retiree health and dental benefits. This year, 392,000 state employees and retirees whose health coverage is provided by the California Public Employees' Retirement System cost the state $3.7 billion. The health benefits are separate from CalPERS' retirement fund, and are financed from employer and member payments.
In effect the state has paid the bare minimum to cover its annual costs, as an overspending consumer might squeak by making the minimum monthly credit card payment. But the debt mounts.
You're now welcome to put up advertising inside Milwaukee public schools - provided you can meet more than 15 restrictions on what the ads say and where they're placed.
An end to the ban on advertising inside schools was sought by MPS athletic commissioner Bill Molbeck and others who are hoping that ads in places such as gyms and athletic fields will generate money for financially stressed athletic programs.
After extended discussions at three meetings in recent weeks, the School Board approved the policy last week without discussion.
Athletic directors and coaches at several high schools told School Board members that they are having a hard time obtaining uniforms, practice equipment and other necessities because they are short of money. They said many of the teams they play, including teams from some suburban schools, are able to do things that they can't because they get money from advertising.
Board members, particularly Jennifer Morales, added provisions to the original proposal from school administrators to make sure advertising they thought was inappropriate remained out of bounds.
Under the new policy, businesses or organizations will be allowed to advertise as long as ads meet requirements such as:
Parents, teachers and ministers are all engaged in a deception over our exam system says the former chief inspector of schools
Sitting at the back of the classroom, I cringed. A pupil had given an answer that betrayed his complete misunderstanding of the question. His teacher beamed. "Well done, Johnny," she said, "that is fantastic."
Why, I asked her afterwards, had she not corrected his mistake? She looked at me as if I were mad. "If I'd told him that he'd got it wrong he would have been humiliated in front of the rest of the class. It would have been a dreadful blow to his self-esteem." With a frosty glare she left the room.
Have you looked at your children's exercise books recently? The odds are that the teacher's comments will all be in green ink. Red ink these days is thought to be threatening and confrontational. Green is calm and reassuring and encouraging. If you read the comments, you will probably find that they are pretty reassuring and encouraging, too. The work may not be very good, but the teacher appears to have found it inspirational.
One of my Sunday Times readers wrote in recently to ask why her son's headmaster was so reluctant to tell parents whether children had passed or failed internal school examinations. His line was that school tests were meant to diagnose weaknesses rather than to give a clear view of a pupil's grasp of the subject. He wanted to help his pupils do better and he was worried that honesty might demotivate pupils who were not achieving very much. Did I, she asked, think this was a very sensible idea? I replied that I did not.
Kenya appears to be a fave location among educational researchers of late. A relatively stable country where teacher salaries are low (primary teachers make the equivalent of about $3,500 annually) must be the draw. To study the effects of ability tracking in schools, three U.S. researchers provided the funding to 121 Kenyan schools so that they could double the number of their first grade teachers, enabling class sizes of 45 students instead of 90.
Half of the students were assigned to the new first grade classes based on their ability, a practice pejoratively referred to in the U.S. as 'tracking', and the other half were randomly assigned, regardless of their ability. Researchers found that students in the schools with tracking scored higher--though just a little--on a post-test than their peers in nontracked schools. More important was the fact that the improved performance was consistent across the board at all levels, for low-, medium- and high-scoring students.
Given the inordinate differences between class sizes, the results are likely not generalizable to the U.S., but still of interest.
Seems that in the last 96 hours the zeitgeist about “21st Century Skills” has shifted from lively debate and healthy skepticism to a brawl…was it the debate the other day?
…the burden should be on 21st-century skills proponents to prove that their methods offer a better way to prepare students for college and the workplace. So far, they haven’t done that. And while they say 21st-century skills will only complement the state’s current efforts, it’s not clear that the approach can be implemented without de-emphasizing academic content.
Teachers and parents across the state just don’t know enough about 21st-century skills. The unnerving part is that the proponents don’t seem to know much more.
Achievement Effects of Four Early Elementary School Math Curricula Findings from First Graders in 39 Schools
Roberto Agodini, Barbara Harris, Sally Atkins-Burnett, Sheila Heaviside, Timothy Novak, Robert Murphy and Audrey Pendleton [693K PDF]:
Many U.S. children start school with weak math skills and there are differences between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds--those from poor families lag behind those from affluent ones (Rathburn and West 2004). These differences also grow over time, resulting in substantial differences in math achievement by the time students reach the fourth grade (Lee, Gregg, and Dion 2007).
The federal Title I program provides financial assistance to schools with a high number or percentage of poor children to help all students meet state academic standards. Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), Title I schools must make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in bringing their students to state-specific targets for proficiency in math and reading. The goal of this provision is to ensure that all students are proficient in math and reading by 2014.
The purpose of this large-scale, national study is to determine whether some early elementary school math curricula are more effective than others at improving student math achievement, thereby providing educators with information that may be useful for making AYP. A small number of curricula dominate elementary math instruction (seven math curricula make up 91 percent of the curricula used by K-2 educators), and the curricula are based on different theories for developing student math skills (Education Market Research 2008). NCLB emphasizes the importance of adopting scientifically-based educational practices; however, there is little rigorous research evidence to support one theory or curriculum over another. This study will help to fill that knowledge gap. The study is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the U.S. Department of Education and is being conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. (MPR) and its subcontractor SRI International (SRI).
BASIS FOR THE CURRENT FINDINGS
This report presents results from the first cohort of 39 schools participating in the evaluation, with the goal of answering the following research question: What are the relative effects of different early elementary math curricula on student math achievement in disadvantaged schools? The report also examines whether curriculum effects differ for student subgroups in different instructional settings.
Curricula Included in the Study. A competitive process was used to select four curricula for the evaluation that represent many of the diverse approaches used to teach elementary school math in the United States:
Investigations in Number, Data, and Space (Investigations) published by Pearson Scott Foresman (Russell, Economopoulos, Mokros, Kliman, Wright, Clements, Goodrow, Murray, and Sarama 2006)
Math Expressions published by Houghton Mifflin Company (Fuson 2006a)
Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics (SFAW) published by Pearson Scott Foresman (Charles, Crown, Fennel, Caldwell, Cavanagh, Chancellor, Ramirez, Ramos, Sammons, Schielack, Tate, Thompson, and Van de Walle 2005)
The process for selecting the curricula began with the study team inviting developers and publishers of early elementary school math curricula to submit a proposal to include their curricula in the evaluation. A panel of outside experts in math and math instruction then reviewed the submissions and recommended to IES curricula suitable for the study. The goal of the review process was to identify widely used curricula that draw on different instructional approaches and that hold promise for improving student math achievement.
Heather Lawnicki -- Señora Lawnickci to her students -- sweeps into her fourth-grade classroom at Heritage Elementary and immediately leads students in singing "Buenas tardes," a popular Spanish tune that gets the children primed to think and speak in Spanish.
The clock is ticking and there's no time to waste: Lawnicki has just 30 minutes to cover lessons in both Spanish and social studies -- on this day "los indios" of Wisconsin, the Indians.
While Lawnicki, who is fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese, delivers most of the instruction in Spanish, she often needs to repeat her questions in English. The children, who appear to have a general grasp of the language, sometimes answer in kind until Lawnicki prompts them to respond in Spanish.
If our nation's high school teachers had $20 for every time they had to endure the Depth vs. Breadth debate, they all would have retired to mansions in West Palm Beach.
The debate goes like this: Should they focus on a few topics so students have time to absorb and comprehend the inner workings of the subject? Or should they cover every topic so students get a sense of the whole and can later pursue those parts that interest them most?
The truth, of course, is that students need both. Teachers try to mix the two in ways that make sense to them and their students. But a surprising study -- certain to be a hot topic in teacher lounges and education schools -- is providing new data that suggest educators should spend much more time on a few issues and let some topics slide. Based on a sample of 8,310 undergraduates, the national study says that students who spend at least a month on just one topic in a high school science course get better grades in a freshman college course in that subject than students whose high school courses were more balanced.
Madison School District's Outbound Open Enrollment for 2009/2010
648 (2.68% of the District's enrollment) students open enrolled out for the 2009/2010 school year. 217 high school, 127 middle school and 304 elementary students. [704K PDF: pages 14, 15 and 16]
Some teachers in Oregon want to do as they do, not as they say. The state has banned the sale of junk food in schools in an effort to protect the health of kids. But under prodding from teachers, the Oregon state House approved an exception. If the measure becomes law, unhealthy snacks would be allowed in teachers' lounges. The teachers say they're adults and can decide for themselves whether they should eat chips.
Obama may love charter schools, Georgia may be on the fence, but St. Louis school leaders see charter schools as a vice. While researching our upcoming story about the International Community School and charter school facilities, I learned that last year, as the leaders of St. Louis public schools prepared to sell a bunch of empty school buildings, the district barred certain unwanted buyers: "liquor stores, landfills, distilleries, as well as shops that sell "so-called 'sexual toys,' " writes St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter David Hunn. "They also blackballed charter schools."
This despite the city's 17 public charter schools and 9,500 charter students - and eight new charters expected to open by fall 2010 - writes Bill Schulz of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. "Porn shops and liquor stores and charter schools, oh my!" he quipped.
Huhn reports: " 'We tried to buy three,' said Susan Uchitelle, board member at Confluence Academy, a charter school with three campuses and 2,700 students in St. Louis. 'We finally just gave up.... It was made very clear they weren't going to sell to us. They'd show them to us. They'd let us walk through them. But then they'd take them off the market.' "
Rift in Democratic Party over the nation's education reform agenda is growing. One side backs strong accountability through reforms, the other looks to augment the current system with social support programs.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's Senate confirmation hearing in January was thick with encomiums. He was praised by Democrat Tom Harkin of Iowa for the "fresh thinking" he brought to his post as Chicago schools chief for seven years. Republican Lamar Alexander, education secretary under George H. W. Bush, told Duncan he was the best of President Barack Obama's cabinet appointments. Ailing Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, in written comments entered into the record, praised Duncan for having "championed pragmatic solutions to persistent problems" and for lasting longer in Chicago than most urban superintendents.
The warm greetings given by both Republicans and Democrats on the committee reflect Duncan's reputation as a centrist in the ideologically fraught battles over education reform. He has received national attention for moves favored by reformers, such as opening 75 new schools operated by outside groups and staffed by non-union teachers; introducing a pay-for-performance plan that will eventually be in 40 Chicago schools; and working with organizations, including The New Teacher Project, Teach For America, and New Leaders for New Schools, that recruit talented educators through alternatives to the traditional education-school route.
At the same time, Duncan maintained at least a cordial working relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union, and both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) backed his nomination. He supported the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), but also called for dramatic increases in spending to help schools meet the law's targets, and additional flexibility for districts like his own. In nominating Duncan, Obama said, "We share a deep pragmatism about how to go about this. If pay-for-performance works and we can work with teachers so it doesn't feel like it's being imposed upon them...then that's something that we should explore. If charter schools work, try that. You know, let's not be clouded by ideology when it comes to figuring out what helps our kids."
Former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk said today that Texas should take an "honest assessment" on how public schools are governed, even if it means dismantling elected school boards that he says lack financial and technical skills needed to oversee problematic urban districts.
The Dallas Morning News reported Sunday that Leppert has talked to a state senator and business leader about giving the mayor some control -- or total control -- of the school district.
"Good for the mayor," Kirk said. "I understand his frustration. A mayor spends half his time talking about the state of public schools. ... Whether there's a legal nexus or not, people look toward the mayor for help."
In 1999, when Kirk was mayor, he asked the entire DISD Board of Trustees to resign.
That didn't happen, but the Citizens Council began recruiting young leaders like Rafael Anchia, now a state representative, to serve on the board.
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IKE buses, not just one but two reviews of primary education in Britain are arriving at the same time. Their titles may be similar but they could hardly differ more.
The Cambridge Primary Review was independently conceived and financed, has been years in the planning and execution, and draws on international evidence and scores of experts. Its final conclusions, due later this year, will synthesise 30 research surveys on all aspects of primary education. The Primary Curriculum Review, by contrast, was commissioned and paid for by the government and is the sole work of a serial government-report writer, Sir Jim Rose. He was asked to look at only the curriculum--not standards, testing or funding--and within that limited remit he was constrained by a tight brief and heavy hints as to the desired conclusions.
On February 20th the Cambridge-led team abandoned their publishing schedule and released the part of their final report that looks at the curriculum. It hopes, somewhat forlornly, to influence government policy. That seems unlikely. The official curriculum agency is already far advanced in creating teaching material along the lines Sir Jim recommends--even though only his interim report has appeared, and that is supposed to be open for consultation until February 28th.
Why am I so ill-tempered when I read a sensible report like "Bridging the Gap: How to Strengthen the Pk-16 Pipeline to Improve College Readiness"?
The authors, Ulrich Boser and Stephen Burd, know their stuff. The sponsoring organization, New America Foundation, has a great reputation. (Bias alert: It also employs one of my sons as a senior fellow, but he does California politics and direct democracy, not national education policy.)
My problem is that smart and industrious experts like Boser and Burd often unearth startling facts but don't follow through. "Bridging the Gap," available at Newamerica.net, details the large percentage of first-year college students in remedial courses and the duplication in federal college preparation programs. This is interesting information of which few people are aware.
But their recommendations follow the standard line: Let's have more meetings and spend more money. Example: "We recommend that the federal government provide states with incentives to come together and adopt national college and work-readiness standards in math, science and the language arts."
Or: "The federal government should work directly with states to foster partnerships between high schools and postsecondary institutions to smooth the transition between high school and college."
You might think that sounds reasonable. I think it misses an opportunity. Why not harness the energy and ambition of a new president to shake things up?
The Obama administration doesn't have much money to spend getting more students ready for college. The Education Department's $100 billion in stimulus funds will mostly go to less sophisticated projects that create jobs fast.
Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee says the District is no longer exploring the idea of seeking federal legislation declaring the school system in a "state of emergency," a move that would have freed it from the obligation to bargain with the Washington Teachers' Union.
In a recent radio interview, Rhee said that the initiative, patterned after a state takeover of schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, was never seriously considered.
The proposal appeared in a statement drafted for a Sept. 22 news conference at which Rhee and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty were scheduled to present a series of steps to rid the District of teachers deemed ineffective. The steps, dubbed "Plan B," were based on existing powers the chancellor possessed and fell outside the legal scope of contract negotiations.
Attention, school officials around the country: If your school is having trouble meeting standards for adequate progress, consider moving the whole operation to Wisconsin.
That was the implication of a study released this week comparing the way 28 states treat the same performance results from schools. More of the 36 schools in the study would be rated as making "adequate yearly progress" in Wisconsin than in any other state. Two schools in the study would be regarded as making adequate progress only in Wisconsin, the report says.
"Although schools are being told that they need to improve student achievement in order to make AYP under the law, the truth is that many would fare better if they just moved across state lines," the report says.
And Wisconsin would be the place to go.
The report, titled "The Accountability Illusion," was issued by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank generally regarded as right of center. The foundation supports having national standards for accountability that are consistent from state to state and said the results of the study show the wide variation in how demanding states are when it comes to school quality.
Congress took a potentially transformative step when it devoted $100 billion in the stimulus package to education. Carefully targeted, this money could revive the reform efforts that began promisingly with President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 -- but later languished when his administration buckled under to political pressures from state officials.
Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, will need to resist those pressures. The Bush administration allowed states to phony-up statistics on everything from graduation rates to student achievement to teacher training and state education standards. As a result, the country has yet to reach not only the goals that were clearly laid out in the law but also farsighted education reforms dating to the mid-1990s.
The stimulus package, including a $54 billion "stabilization" fund to protect schools against layoffs and budget cuts, is rightly framed to encourage compliance. States will need to create data collection systems that should ideally show how children perform year to year as well as how teachers affect student performance over time. States will also be required to improve academic standards as well as the notoriously weak tests now used to measure achievement -- replacing, for instance, the pervasive fill-in-the-bubble tests with advanced assessments that better measure writing and thinking.
Jay Mathews is a bit of a journalistic oddball. Most reporters see the education beat as a stepping stone to bigger things, but much to his credit Mathews, who writes for The Washington Post, returned to covering schools after an international reporting career. He is best known for his book on Jaime Escalante, who taught low-income children in East Los Angeles to excel in AP calculus and was featured in the film "Stand and Deliver." Now Mathews is back to profile two young teachers -- Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin -- who founded the wildly successful Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a chain of 66 charter schools now educating 16,000 low-income students in 19 states and the District of Columbia.
While I have some quarrels with the book's implicit and explicit public-policy conclusions, "Work Hard. Be Nice" provides a fast-paced, engrossing and heartening story of two phenomenally dedicated teachers who demonstrate that low-income students, if given the right environment, can thrive academically. In 52 short and easily digestible chapters, Mathews traces the story of two Ivy League graduates who began teaching in Houston in 1992 as part of the Teach for America program. Both struggle at first but come under the tutelage of an experienced educator, Harriett Ball, who employs chants and songs and tough love to reach students whom lesser teachers might give up on. Levin and Feinberg care deeply: They encourage students to call them in the evening for help with homework, visit student homes to get parents on their side and dig into their own pockets to buy alarm clocks to help students get to school on time. In Mathews's telling, it's hard not to love these guys.
I am not a liberal, but I'm starting to think that decades of tinkering with MPS just may be a smokescreen to ignore the real problems with the system: that in the end, our schools do nothing more than reflect the nature of the city itself.
We've spent generations pretending that isn't the case. I graduated from Pulaski High School just in time to have Howard Fuller present me my diploma. You remember Fuller, right? He was the man who was going to reinvigorate the "troubled" school system and bring hope to Milwaukee.
I walked across that stage in 1992. Exactly what has changed since then? Sure, it's not all bad. Some schools have high attendance, great parental participation and students who perform well.
But that just bolsters my point. If MPS as an entity was the problem, wouldn't all schools fail? Wouldn't all students have to exert an incredible amount of self-determination and willpower just to succeed academically?
Some people, such as School Board member Terry Falk, continue to believe that fiddling is best. Falk's latest theoretical fix? Potentially scrapping K-8 schools - themselves a recent idea - in favor of grades 6-12 facilities.
Enough already. The fault lines seem clear. MPS is operating in a city with dire problems, where some geographic areas continue to prosper while others operate in a climate of poverty and crime. School performance appears often to follow those socioeconomic trends.
For the record, I'm not excusing the poor performance of students who should realize that education is a path to greater prosperity. And I don't have any bright solutions either. Except one: If we're going to keep the questionable practice of throwing money at the problem, quit wasting it on the wrong problem.
IF YOU know what deep learning and functional skills are, then you are already on the way to understanding eduspeak. But there are other terms that must be grasped to attain an A* in the subject.
Satisfactory. One of the four possible judgments of the schools inspectorate (the other three are inadequate, good and outstanding). It means "unsatisfactory". ("Inadequate" for its part means "dire".) This explains the chief schools inspector's pronouncement that satisfactory schools are "not good enough".
Excellence and enjoyment are mutually exclusive. The first is used for what matters (literacy and numeracy), the second for what does not (everything else). "Enjoying reading" and "excelling in music" are howlers in eduspeak.
Non-statutory depends on context. It can mean "optional", but in the National Primary Strategy, a set of "guidelines" on teaching literacy and numeracy, it means "obligatory"--unless a school wants to risk being deemed "satisfactory".
Gifted and talented refer to the top 5-10% in academic and non-academic pursuits respectively, who are to be encouraged in their gifts and talents. The terms are necessary as a sop to middle-class parents concerned that their children are not being stretched enough. To deflect the charge of elitism, levelled by many teachers, the categories have proliferated to include the capacity to "make sound judgments", to show "great sensitivity or empathy" or to be "fascinated by a particular subject".
Education Commissioner Peter McWalters has ordered the city schools to begin filling teacher vacancies based on qualifications rather than seniority, an order that could fly in the face of the teachers' contract.
McWalters, in a no-nonsense letter yesterday to Supt. Tom Brady, said the district hasn't been moving fast enough to improve student achievement and that it was time to intervene in a much more aggressive fashion.
The order should come as no surprise to the district. Over the last two years the commissioner has issued a series of "corrective action" orders that spelled out what the district needed to do to improve student performance.
"This is intervention," McWalters said yesterday. "Every state gets to the point when it's time to stop suggesting. The district can't come back and tell me they can't get it done."
McWalters said that seniority can no longer be the way that teachers are assigned and vacancies are filled. Starting this fall, teachers at six Providence schools, including the new career and technical high school and the new East Side middle school, will be assigned based on whether they have the skills needed to serve students at those particular schools.
The chamber brings together business people and citizens each year to assess the school system.
Metro schools has missed the required No Child Left Behind benchmarks five times in the past six years. That moved the school system into "restructuring" from "corrective action" under the federal act, one year away from a possible state takeover.
The Education Report Card Committee said it was encouraged to see Metro offering a modest incentive pay plan to help recruit teachers in hard-to-staff subjects, as well as Mayor Karl Dean's recruitment of two national nonprofits, The New Teacher Project and Teach for America, to bring new talent into the classrooms.
While there were some improvements in 2008, the committee said the city cannot have another year of waiting for a common vision for the standards the schools want to reach.
This study examines the No Child Left Behind Act system and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) rules for 28 states. We selected 36 real schools (half elementary, half middle) that vary by size, achievement, diversity, etc. and determined which of them would or would not make AYP when evaluated under each state's accountability rules. If a school that made AYP in Washington were relocated to Wisconsin or Ohio, would that same school make AYP there? Based on this analysis, we can see how AYP varies across the country and evaluate the effectiveness of NCLB.
More schools make AYP in 2008 under Wisconsin's accountability system than in any other state in our sample. This is likely due to the fact that Wisconsin's proficiency standards (or cut scores) are relatively easy compared to other states (all of them are below the 30th percentile). Second, Wisconsin's minimum subgroup size for students with disabilities is 50, which is a bit larger than most other states (the size for their other subgroups is comparable to other states'). This means that Wisconsin schools must have more students with disabilities in order for that group to be held separately accountable. Third, Wisconsin's 99 percent confidence interval provides schools with greater leniency than the more commonly used 95 percent confidence interval. Last, unlike most states, Wisconsin measures its student performance with a proficiency index, which gives partial credit for students achieving "partial proficiency." All of these factors work together so that 17 out of 18 elementary schools make AYP in Wisconsin, more than any other state in the study.
Some schools deemed to be failing in one state would get passing grades in another under the No Child Left Behind law, a national study found.
The study underscores wide variation in academic standards from state to state. It was to be issued today by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which conducted the study with the Kingsbury Center at the Northwest Evaluation Association.
The study comes as the Obama administration indicates it will encourage states to adopt common standards, an often controversial issue on which previous presidents have trod lightly.
"I know that talking about standards can make people nervous," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said recently.
"But the notion that we have 50 different goal posts doesn't make sense," Duncan said. "A high school diploma needs to mean something, no matter where it's from."
Every state, he said, needs standards that make kids college- and career-ready and are benchmarked against international standards.
The Fordham study measured test scores of 36 elementary and middle schools against accountability rules in 28 states.
Fernandez cleaned up in traditionally Republican (but trending Democratic) Waukesha County, where she won 52 percent of the vote, to just 23 percent for Evers. It was roughly the same split in Washington County. Fernandez even beat Mobley in the other conservative's home county of Ozaukee. Even in more Democratic Racine County, Fernandez won 40 percent to just 26 percent for Evers.
Where did Evers do well? Dane County, where the deputy superintendent won more than 50 percent to a mere 20 percent for Fernandez. Of Evers' 9,905 vote lead statewide, 7,351 votes came from Madison and surrounding communities. Evers won very big in the city of Madison, where Progressive Dane-backed candidate Price actually beat Fernandez (and came close to the frontrunner) in some isthmus wards.
What's the bottom line: Fernandez has proven herself. She is going to be a serious contender, and if she gets some national conservative money -- perhaps shifting from the Supreme Court race -- she could beat Evers.
Of course, in a higher-turnout, bigger-spending race, a lot can change. And Evers will have plenty of union backing. But this is going to be a hot contest right up until April 7. And that could have consequences for the court race; if Fernandez turns out conservatives in big numbers, that could help Koschnick.
Readers may find the 2005 DPI race worth revisiting. Audio & video here.
Wisconsin DPI Superintendent: It looks like an interesting race
Despite being outspent $96,129 to $10,500 (WisPolitics) by Tony Evers, Rose Fernandez obtained 31% of yesterday's vote. Tony Evers received 35%. Here's a roundup of the election and candidates:
On Tuesday, he finished just ahead of Rose Fernandez, a former pediatric trauma nurse and parent advocate, in a five-person field.
Although she finished the night in second place, Fernandez, 51, characterized her performance as "a victory for real people over the special interests."
In addition to being first to declare his candidacy, Evers also captured endorsements - and contributions - from the Wisconsin Education Association Council as well as other labor and education-based groups. WEAC PAC, the political arm of the state's largest teachers union, contributed $8,625 to Evers' campaign, in addition to spending nearly $180,000 on media buys for the candidate, according to campaign filings earlier this month.
By contrast, the Fernandez campaign spent $20,000. She said that her message of calling for merit pay for teachers and choices for parents had resonated with voters.
"Tonight, we have all the momentum," she said. "This is going to be a real choice. It's going to be a choice between special interests and the status quo, the bureaucracy that is entrenched at the Department of Public Instruction, vs. a focus on the results we are looking for in our investment in education, a push for higher standards instead of higher taxes."
Evers, 57, has distanced himself somewhat from the current schools superintendent, Elizabeth Burmaster, saying it's time to be more aggressive about reforming Milwaukee Public Schools and calling for an increase in the state's graduation rate.
On Tuesday, he denied Fernandez's charge of favoring special interests
From teachers union president Dennis Oulahan to school voucher advocate Howard Fuller, from liberal School Board member Jennifer Morales to business leader Tim Sheehy, it was hard to keep the people involved in a panel at the Marquette University Law School on the topic of whether there should be mayoral control of schools, or something in that vein, as they kept turning to other issues.
None expressed hope that a step of that kind, at least in itself, would change the rate of success in MPS.
"No matter who takes it over . . . if you don't change anything that's going on within the body itself that prevents good practice," it will be an illusion to think things will get better, Fuller said.
"Any kind of governance can work if it has the right support."
Oulahan said there was a long history of reforms in MPS, such as the Neighborhood Schools Initiative launched in 2000 and the small high school reform in recent years, that really were about buildings or programs and not about kids. Unless the focus is on teaching children using practices that actually work, nothing will change, he said.
"I believe that my message of experience has played well so far," Evers said. "I won the primary and I anticipate that we'll just work hard to get the message out. I believe that people do believe experience matters."
Fernandez, who has often been at odds with the state education department over virtual schools, reveled in the fact that she didn't get the WEAC endorsement, touting it as another sign of her being outside the state education bureaucracy.
Fernandez was the only one of the five candidates without any professional education experience. A former nurse, she recently stepped down as president of the Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families.
"Some people have dismissed me as just a mom on a mission, but that's a label I'll be wearing as a badge of honor," Fernandez said. She pledged to overcome WEAC's financial backing of Evers with a broad base of support that taps into teachers, parents and students across the state.
"We're hearing that there's a great hunger out there for our message that higher standards without higher taxes is what they want," she said.
Her campaign called for reforming the state education department, enacting changes to allow for teacher merit pay and protecting alternative education options such as virtual schools, home schooling and Milwaukee's school choice voucher program.
Evers, the deputy under retiring Superintendent Libby Burmaster for the past eight years, emphasized his 34 years of education experience during the campaign. Opponents criticized him as a status-quo insider candidate, while Evers countered he was the best-grounded to initiate reforms, particularly in the Milwaukee schools.
Given the recent economic news, it seems everyone wants to talk about the long-term impact of short-term thinking. Why not do the same with education and magnet schools? Think of the issues educators faced 30 or 40 years ago: Smart kids not being challenged? Academically under-prepared kids, most of them ethnic minorities, moving in and test scores going down? It's completely logical that they chose a path to create magnet schools. But it was a short-term solution that has had long-term negative consequences.
I take my students to lots of outside events where they are required to interact with students who come from magnet or high-performing suburban schools. What I see time after time is how my kids rise to the occasion, performing as well (or at least trying to) as those students whose test scores or geographic location landed them in much more demanding academic environments.
On a daily basis, I see the same kids who do amazing things when surrounded by their brightest counterparts from other schools slip into every negative stereotype you can imagine, and worse, when surrounded by their under-performing peers at our "neighborhood" school.
When educational leaders decided to create magnet schools, they didn't just get it wrong, they got it backwards. They pulled out the best and brightest from our communities and sent them away. The students who are part of the "great middle" now find themselves in an environment where the peers who have the greatest influence in their school are the least positive role models.
Schools adapted, and quickly. We tightened security, installed metal detectors, and adopted ideas like zero-tolerance. And neighborhood schools, without restrictive admission policies based on test scores, quickly spiraled downward -- somewhat like an economy. Except in education, we can't lay off students who have a negative impact on the school culture. That is why adopting such a business model for the educational system has been and always will be a recipe for failure.
What should have been done was to pull out the bottom ten percent. Educational leaders could have greatly expanded the alternative school model and sent struggling students to a place that had been designed to meet their educational needs.
As happens in every recession, Washington area school systems are cutting back. It's depressing. Here's an antidote: Harness the creativity of educators, parents and students to improve our schools without more spending. Some teachers I trust helped me come up with these seven ideas.
1. Replace elementary school homework with free reading. Throw away the expensive take-home textbooks, the boring worksheets and the fiendish make-a-log-cabin-out-of-Tootsie-Rolls projects. One of the clearest (and most ignored) findings of educational research is that elementary students who do lots of homework don't learn more than students who do none. Eliminating traditional homework for this age group will save paper, reduce textbook losses and sweeten home life. Students should be asked instead to read something, maybe with their parents -- at least 10 minutes a night for first-graders, 20 minutes for second-graders and so on. Teachers can ask a few kids each day what they learned from their reading to discourage shirkers.
2. Unleash charter schools. I know, I know. Many good people find this suggestion as welcome as a call from a collection agency. They think charter schools, public schools that make their own rules, are draining money from school systems, but the opposite seems to be true. In most states, charters receive fewer tax dollars per child than regular public schools. Yet they often attract creative principals and teachers who do more with less. School finance experts don't all agree, but I am convinced that charters are a bargain. So let's have more. That won't save money in the District, one of the few places that pay as much for charters as regular schools, but Maryland and Virginia would find more charters a boon if they dropped their suburban, aren't-we-great notions and listened to what imaginative educators in a few little charter schools could teach them.
3. Have teachers call or e-mail parents -- once a day would be fine -- with praise for their children. Some great classroom teachers make a habit of contacting parents when kids do something well. Jason Kamras, 2005 national teacher of the year and now a leading D.C. schools executive, used to punch up the parent's number on his cellphone while standing next to a student's desk. It doesn't take long. It doesn't cost much. But it nurtures bonds among teachers, students and parents that can lead to wonderful things.
The $100 billion in emergency aid for public schools and colleges in the economic stimulus bill could transform Arne Duncan into an exceptional figure in the history of federal education policy: a secretary of education loaded with money and the power to spend large chunks of it as he sees fit.
Upon meeting department employees last month, Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, asked them to call him by his first name. "My name is Arne," he said. "It's not Mr. Secretary."
But the money also poses challenges and risks for Mr. Duncan, the 44-year-old former Chicago schools chief who now heads the Department of Education.
Mr. Duncan must develop procedures on the fly for disbursing a budget that has, overnight, more than doubled, and communicate the rules quickly to all 50 states and the nation's 14,000 school districts. And he faces thousands of tricky decisions about how much money to give to whom and for what.
"It'll be wonderful fun for a time for his team -- it'll be like Christmas," said Chester Finn, a former Department of Education official who has watched education secretaries or commissioners come and go here since the mid-1960s. "But the thing about discretionary spending is that it makes more people angry than it makes happy."
What comes through when Mr. Bush is asked about education is how radical his views are. He would toss out the traditional K-to-12 scheme in favor of a credit system, like colleges have.
"It's not based on seat time," he says. "It's whether you accomplished the task. Now we're like GM in its heyday of mass production. We don't have a flourishing education system that's customized. There's a whole world out there that didn't exist 10 years ago, which is online learning. We have the ability today to customize learning so we don't cast young people aside."
This is where Sweden comes in. "The idea that somehow Sweden would be the land of innovation, where private involvement in what was considered a government activity, is quite shocking to us Americans," Mr. Bush says. "But they're way ahead of us. They have a totally voucherized system. The kids come from Baghdad, Somalia -- this is in the tougher part of Stockholm -- and they're learning three languages by the time they finish. . . . there's no reason we can't have that except we're stuck in the old way."
Turning over control of a school system to a mayor is no cure-all for problems, and it is "messy, difficult work" to make such changes, according to an analysis of other cities being released today by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.
The report and a forum set for Monday night to discuss it amount to firing the starting gun on a crucial debate over whether the mayor or some new body should take over Milwaukee Public Schools, or whether the MPS School Board should be revamped.
Mayor Tom Barrett is signaling that he is more serious than at any point since he was elected in 2004 about the possibility of putting the school system under his control.
"It's time we do have a conversation about what's best for the children of this community," he said.
Barrett did not give a direct answer on whether he wants control of MPS but said, "We have to have significant change in the fiscal management of the district if it's going to survive."
He said he did not want to take over MPS in the absence of other steps to deal with problems that threaten the school system. They include an estimated $2.4 billion in commitments to pay benefits to current and future retirees. Progress on such issues almost surely would take broad, innovative agreements between city, state and union leadership.
To what extent has governance reform in large, urban public school districts resulted in better student performance, greater accountability, and more educational innovation? When a school district is governed by a mayor, do the district's fortunes improve?
The answers to these questions, unfortunately, are not clear cut. Large urban districts that have experienced governance reform have often seen several iterations of reform over the course of several years and mixed results. Still, despite the complexity of their reform efforts over the past decade, comparable school districts have much to teach policymakers and educators in Milwaukee. The Public Policy Forum researched several comparable districts and came up with these key findings:
For the last twenty years of so, I and others have argued, without much success, that our high schools should assign students complete nonfiction books and serious academic research papers at least once in their high school careers, so that if they decide to go on to college, they will be partly prepared for the reading lists of nonfiction books and the term paper assignments they would find there.
I now realize that I have been going about this all the wrong way. Instead of publishing 846 exemplary history research papers by high school students from 36 countries since 1987, in an effort to inspire high school students and their teachers to give more attention to real history books and research papers, I should have lobbied for a change in the academic requirements at the college level instead!
If colleges could simply extend many of their current efforts to eliminate books by dead white males, and to have students write more about themselves in expository writing courses, and could gradually guide students away from the requirements for reading nonfiction books and writing term papers, then the pressure to raise academic standards for reading and writing in our high schools could be further relaxed, relieving our students of all that pressure to become well educated.
Many colleges are leading the way in this endeavor, abandoning courses in United States history, and reducing the number of assigned books, many of which are even older than the students themselves. It is felt that movies by Oliver Stone and creative fiction about vampires may be more relevant to today's 21st Century students than musty old plays by Shakespeare, which were not even written in today's English, and long difficult history books written about events that probably happened before our students were even born!
Courses about the oppression of women, which inform students that all American presidents so far have been men, and courses which analyze the various Dracula movies, are much easier for many students to relate to, if they have never read a single nonfiction book or written one history research paper in their high school years.
Liberal arts courses in history, literature, philosophy, and the like have now been shown to be of little benefit in preparing students for jobs as technical support people in the computer industry or as insurance adjusters.
Of course there are those conservatives who will maintain that even computer techs, nurses, and schoolteachers need to be able to read, and even to write a little, but why can't they see that it would be so much easier and, at least initially, so much more popular, simply to reduce the academic content and standards at the college level than to keep complaining about the one million U.S. high school graduates each year who have to enroll in remedial math, reading and writing courses when they get to college?
Nowadays, if the graduates of these new, easier, and more practical colleges find they need to know something more than they studied as undergraduates, they can look it up on Wikipedia. If they don't have the academic background, or perhaps the reading skills, to understand what they find on the Web, then perhaps it wasn't that important anyway.
If colleges would just further reduce their clinging to outdated views about the importance of a liberal arts education, and would continue to expand their definition of a general education to include anything that a professor wants to call a course and anything a student wants to get a grade for, all of this crazy pressure to raise academic standards at the high school level could be reduced significantly.
Again, there will be those diehards who think that high schools should continue to offer Calculus, European History, English Literature, Physics, Chemistry, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, and so on, and schools could continue to offer such courses to those students who think they might be worthwhile. But at least if colleges could cut back on or eliminate the expectation that undergraduates should be able to read nonfiction books and write term papers, then our high schools could continue to graduate the majority of their students who have not been asked to do that sort of thing.
It seems so obvious and so simple that, instead of working so hard to raise academic standards for reading and writing in the secondary schools, we could just lower them even more in our colleges. Why did it take me so long to understand that? But I still don't recommend it.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
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Varsity Academics®
Geoffrey Stanford, 17, discovered during a Kansas writing test last week that an essay question concerning greenhouse gases incorrectly used the word "omission" for the word "emission," prompting the Wichita East High School junior to point out the error.
"I thought, `Surely they're not talking about leaving out carbon dioxide altogether.' It just didn't make sense," Stanford said. "It had to be a mistake."
The state Department of Education has e-mailed a corrected version of the essay question to test coordinators around the state, but the incident already has caused a lot of red faces at the department, which used a committee of more than 30 state teachers to develop the test almost two years ago.
They sound like workout sessions at a gym, but "flex periods" are fast becoming a scheduling strategy among Northern Virginia high schools that want to offer students remediation or enrichment during the school day rather than before or after classes.
High schools in Loudoun, Fairfax and Prince William counties have been inserting these chunks of time -- from 40 to 90 minutes, depending on the school -- for several years, often to reduce after-school tutoring costs but also to raise achievement in the era of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The program varies among schools, but the premise is similar: Between regular courses, students are assigned to a flex classroom to review material or work independently. Flex time can also be used for attending schoolwide events. And if a student needs help from a teacher in another part of the building, he or she can get a pass and visit the teacher during flex time.
Students at Stonewall Jackson High School near Manassas are in the second year of a flex program. Reactions have been mixed: Some students interviewed said the periods help them catch up on homework or review tough lessons with teachers, but others said the time is often exploited by students prone to goofing off or leaving school property. Schools are trying to crack down on the latter.
A move to create a union at one of the city's leading charter schools may turn into a protracted battle, as the deadline passed on Thursday for the school, KIPP AMP in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to voluntarily recognize the union.
The United Federation of Teachers, which is seeking to represent the teachers, must now file for recognition with the state's Public Employment Relations Board, which will most likely give the school's administration several days to respond.
David Levin -- a founder of the national network that operates the schools, the Knowledge Is Power Program, and the superintendent of its four New York City schools (another will open this summer) -- said that the administration would "respect and follow the state process," but did not specify what, if any, challenges it would raise with the labor board.
"For the past 15 years, it has been the ability of everyone to work together, and to do that with flexibility has been the key to our success," Mr. Levin said in an interview on Thursday. "We were created as an alternative to the public schools, and we need to be committed to and maintain our work and focus on results."
Take a look at this chart that someone sent to me a couple days ago. I'm making it big so you can see as much detail as possible. Have a look and then come back, okay?
Pretty scary, eh? It's a chart showing the deterioration of major bank market caps since 2007. Prepared by someone at JP Morgan based on data from Bloomberg, this chart flashed across Wall Street and the financial world a few days ago, filling thousands of e-mail in boxes. Putting a face on the current banking crisis it really brought home to many people on Wall Street the critical position the financial industry finds itself in.
Too bad the chart is wrong.
It's a simple error, really. The bubbles are two-dimensional so they imply that the way to see change is by comparing AREAS of the bubbles. But if you look at the numbers themselves you can see that's not the case.
In the national charter school debate, Boston has special significance. The city has unleashed imaginative teachers to run both independent charter schools and semi-independent "pilot" schools, with much of the rest of the country waiting to see which does best.
Teachers unions and charter opponents have put unusual emphasis on this contest. Boston pilot schools were designed to show that schools with collectively bargained pay scales and seniority protections could do just as well as charters, whose teachers are usually non-union.
Charters, independently operated schools with public funding, were not designed to be anti-union. American Federation of Teachers founding president Al Shanker originated the charter idea. But many conservatives who think unions stand in the way of raising student achievement have embraced the charter school cause, thus politicizing the debate. Their side just won the first round in Boston, and they are not likely to let charter opponents forget it.
A study by scholars from Harvard, MIT, Michigan and Duke, sponsored by the Boston Foundation, shows the Boston charters are doing significantly better than pilots in raising student achievement. This includes results from randomized studies designed to reduce the possibility that charters might benefit from having more motivated students and parents. The study is called "Informing the Debate: Comparing Boston's Charter, Pilot and Traditional Schools."
People who see charters as a ruinous drain on regular public schools, and a threat to job security and salary protections for teachers, are not going to accept this verdict. The data come from just one city, with many qualifications. For instance, the randomized results apply only to charters so popular they have more applicants than they can accept. Less popular charters were not included in that part of the study; they could have reduced the charters' measured gains if their data had counted.
Milwaukee Public Schools spends significantly more per student than comparable systems around the United States, but, by one measure, has some of the weakest academic results, according to a new analysis by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
In line with other research in recent years, the private, nonprofit research organization based in Madison found that the cost of benefits in MPS was especially high - higher than any of the other 15 districts analyzed.
The practices in MPS of paying large amounts for health care for retirees and for supplemental pensions to encourage early retirement, as well as the high price MPS pays for health coverage for everyone in its system, were listed as factors in the high costs of running the system.
• MPS spent $8,702 per student in 2005-'06 in compensation for employees, third highest among the 16 districts examined. Only Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis were higher.
• Total spending in MPS was $11,277 per student in 2005-'06, also the third highest in the study. The amount spent on instructional costs, $6,825, was the highest among the 16 districts, while the amount spent on central administration costs was the third highest.
• Spending on benefits was $3,195 per student, more than $500 above the second highest school system. Only four of the other districts spent more than $2,000 per student for benefits, including retirement costs and health costs. The MPS benefit costs were 90% above the median of the other 15 districts.
"According to figures from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, MPS health insurance premiums were more than 50% above the average private sector rate in Wisconsin and about 15% higher than the average Wisconsin school district," the report said.
Parents in Waunakee say they're concerned about a newer teaching technique that's combining Spanish and Social Studies into one class.
The elementary school children are learning Social Studies entirely in Spanish -- and parents said their children are struggling to learn the lessons.
Parents like Jean Magnes said children are missing out on important Social Studies topics because they simply don't understand it in Spanish.
"I noticed something was wrong," Magnes said. "All I knew was that she kept coming home and saying she didn't like Spanish."
Other parents said their children feel like they're failing. Parents are gathering support and forming a grassroots effort to change the teaching style.
Compared with the students in the 1970s, today's accounting students are uneducated and unfit for a college education.
I have been teaching full time for over thirty years. If you toss in my apprenticeship teaching as a graduate student, I have taught for almost thirty-five years. During that span of time, one sees many, many students, and it amazes me how different they have been over time, and the inequality continues to grow. Compared with the students in the 1970s, today's students are uneducated and unfit for a college education.
Before proceeding, let me enunciate two premises. First, I do not think there is any significant difference between the two groups in terms of native, raw intelligence. Instead, the distinction between yesterday's and today's students when they first set foot on college campuses rests in their educational backgrounds, analytical thinking, quantitative skills, reading abilities, willingness to work, and their attitudes concerning the educational process. In short, they differ in terms of their readiness for college. Second, I am focusing on the average student who majors in accounting. Both groups arise from a distribution of students. The lower tail of yesteryear's population had some weak students, and the upper tail of the present-day population has some very strong students; however, when one focuses on the means of these two distributions, he or she finds a huge gap.
To begin, today's average accounting major cannot perform what used to be Algebra I and II in high school. Students cannot solve simultaneous equations. Students have difficulty with present value computations, not to mention formula derivations. Students even have difficulty employing the high-low method to derive a cost function, something that merely requires one to estimate a straight line from two points.
I would like to discuss in class the partial derivative of a present value formula to ascertain the impact of changes in interest rates, but that has become a fruitless enterprise. Even if students had a course in calculus, the exams probably had multiple choice questions so students guessed their way through the course, they don't remember what they learned, and whatever they learned was mechanical and superficial.
There is a school of thought-one that Mayor Richard Daley subscribes to-that says that if you are a good manager, you can manage anything.
That is the announced basis for Daley choosing Ron Huberman to head up the Chicago Public Schools, replacing Arne Duncan, who is now serving President Barack Obama as the Secretary of Education.
I have no doubt that Huberman, 37, who formerly was in charge of the Chicago Transit Authority, is intelligent. I have no doubt that Daley is a huge booster.
I have serious doubts, however, about Huberman's fitness to lead the Chicago Public Schools.
The mayor pats himself on the back for choosing Arne Duncan, and before him, Paul Vallas. He says that the schools were in horrible shape in 1995 when the law was changed to allow him to take control of the school district. He said that "educators" were in charge of the district then, and it was an abysmal failure.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said yesterday that the deteriorating economy will force the District to cut the wage proposal in its contract offer to the Washington Teachers' Union. At the same time, Rhee spoke in upbeat and conciliatory terms about negotiations with the union, now in their 15th month.
The financial package Rhee offered in July called for a minimum increase of 28 percent over five years, depending on which salary "tier" teachers selected. But with the District expected to collect at least $456 million less in tax revenue during the 2010 fiscal year, she said the situation has changed. Rhee said she would soon submit a revised final offer.
"Obviously, we're in a much different situation financially," Rhee said at a mid-morning news conference, called to highlight improved rates of graduation, attendance and service to special education students.
The chancellor said the financial downturn has not weakened what she has described as commitments from private foundations to fund an unprecedented five-year program of "reform stipends" and performance bonuses for teachers. An information packet given to the union this summer said senior teachers could make as much as $135,000 annually in salary and bonuses. Rhee has declined to name the organizations but has mentioned four to private audiences: Gates, Broad, Dell and Robertson.
I had a couple of interesting run-ins Tuesday when I was trying to get copies of some superintendents' contracts in light of HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra's sweet deal. When I called Dallas ISD's press office and identified myself as a reporter, two different people asked why I wanted a copy of Superintendent Michael Hinojosa's contract. I told them -- because I wanted to see how Saavedra's deal compared -- but, for the record, under the Texas Public Information Act, a superintendent's contract (or any public document) is public, no matter why the requester is asking.
It's also illegal for a governmental entity to ask a person why they want a particular document (see Section 552.222). Props, though, to Dallas for sending me a link to the contract with an hour or two. And speaking of links, why don't all districts post copies of their superintendents' contracts in an easy-to-find spot on their Web sites? Anyone?
First, I don't know exactly what is or is not happening at the school. But, isn't this one possible counter-hypothesis to the assertions in the story: This school is populated with a lot of people -- on all sides of the issue of whether or not to unionize -- who care deeply about kids, care deeply about the school and its mission, and are going through this process for the first time? In other words, there is an assumption that this is Wal-Mart or some other entity with a track record of and skill set for fighting union drives when in fact it may just be a case of people fumbling through a new and complicated situation.
The proposal would fully fund the Loudoun County School Board's $747 million budget, which also freezes salaries, increases staff health-care costs and imposes new fees on students and cuts $12 million from this year's level of local funding costs. Overall education funding is approved by the supervisors, but line-item spending power is in the hands of the School Board.
Bowers's presentation also included proposals for local funding cuts of up to 15 percent, something supervisors asked to see so that they could better understand the consequences of the budget crunch. If they opt for the most extensive cuts, 404 jobs would be slashed and many public programs would be cut back or eliminated.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago working and living with young children of color.
These kids were threatened every day. They lacked role models to protect them and guide them to a safe place where learning was valued and rewarded.
Barack and Michelle Obama can be those role models on a national scale--and that's just one reason I am hopeful.
I am also hopeful because the leadership in Congress is so committed to education. They are very passionate about the issue--and they recognize its importance to our future.
I am hopeful because of the incredible progress in school districts, colleges and universities all across the country--developing new learning models--new educational approaches--and bringing new energy and ideas to the field of education.
From Teach for America to the KIPP charter schools to instructional innovations at colleges and universities, we have proven strategies ready to go to scale.
While high schools across the state are toughening their graduation requirements to prepare students for college, one of the state's largest school districts is planning to make it easier for students to graduate.
In a proposal that would cut out health, college and career planning, world geography and earth science as required courses, the Santa Ana Unified School District is seeking to reduce the number of credits necessary to graduate.
Santa Ana's graduation requirement -- 240 credits -- is among the state's highest benchmarks. And like several other school districts, Santa Ana's move to lower the credit requirement to 220 may be an admission that it had pushed too hard, especially in a district where administrators struggle with keeping students in school.
"It will have a positive effect on dropout rates," Deputy Supt. Cathie Olsky said of the proposal. "It puts graduation in reach."
North Carolina's two largest school systems have taken vastly different approaches to two thorny issues -- student reassignment and educating low-income students with hefty academic deficiencies.
Wake County, the state's largest district, has used buses instead of greenbacks to address the academic needs of low-income students.
To meet the demands of growth and support a diversity policy aimed at reducing the number of high-poverty schools, Wake's system moves thousands of students each year to different schools, sometimes sending kids on bus rides of more than 20 miles.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the second-largest district in North Carolina, has shifted to a system of largely neighborhood schools, resulting in a stratified mix of affluent schools in the suburbs and high-poverty schools near downtown Charlotte.
Instead of busing kids to balance out the level of low-income students at each school, the district pours millions of dollars into these high-poverty schools each year to boost the performance of academically disadvantaged students.
Charles J. Sykes, Wisconsin Interest, reprinted in Network News & Views 2/94, pp. 9-18
Joan Wittig is not an expert, nor is she an activist. She just didn't understand why her children weren't learning to write, spell, or read very well. She didn't understand why they kept coming home with sloppy papers filled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar and why teachers never corrected them or demanded better work. Nor could she fathom why her child's fourth-grade teacher would write, "I love your story, especially the spelling," on a story jammed with misspelled words. (It began: "Once a pona time I visited a tropical rian forist.")
While Wittig did not have a degree in education, she did have some college-level credits in education and a "background of training others to perform accurately and competently in my numerous job positions, beginning in my high school years." That experience was enough for her to sense something was wrong. She was not easily brushed off by assurances that her children were being taught "whole language skills." For two years, she agonized before transferring her children from New Berlin's public schools to private schools.
After only a semester at the private schools, her children were writing and reading at a markedly higher level. Their papers were neatly written, grammatical, and their spelling was systematically corrected.
Earlier this year, she decided to take her story to her local school board.
Armed with copies of her children's work (before and after their transfer to private schools), she questioned the district's allegiance to "whole language"--a teaching philosophy, Wittig said, where children are "encouraged to write and spell any way they want and the teacher does not correct the spelling so that the child's creativity is not stifled."
"Is this to be considered teaching?" she asked. "Is effective learning taking place?"
She also wondered about the schools' emphasis on "cooperative learning," in which children learn in groups. "I sent my child to school to be taught by a teacher," she said, "not by another student."
A local newspaper story recounted the reaction to Wittig's presentation: "Superintendent James Benfield said such criticism could make school employees feel they are doing something wrong. 'We should not have employees criticized until we change the guidelines,' he said, adding that he would be willing to consider a change."
Change is unlikely. If Wittig left the skirmish puzzled, she is not alone.
A growing number of school districts seem eager to embrace the very techniques Joan Wittig was challenging. And what she saw as the dumbing down of her children's schools is being hailed by state commissions, educational experts, and a growing number of school boards as the latest in educational "reforms."
Many of those "reforms" are being instituted under the rubric of outcome based education (OBE), a term fraught with controversy, ambiguity, and misunderstanding.
The source of the confusion is readily understandable. Different people mean different things when they talk about outcome based education. Adding to the confusion, some districts apparently have adopted OBE techniques, but deny having done so when parents and/or reporters make inquiries.
Lost in the fog of jargon that surrounds OBE are radical differences over the role of schools in society. School administrators who are understandably reluctant to venture into such treacherous waters often downplay, deny, or evade the philosophical underpinnings of the reforms they advocate.
One thing, however, is clear. Outcome based education programs are spreading rapidly at both the state and local level, driven in large measure by efforts to establish national and state "goals" for improving education. That process is likely to accelerate with the Clinton administration's decision to require states to adopt federally approved "goals" as a condition of receiving school aid. Those federal guidelines could very well look a good deal like the "outcomes" advocated by architects of OBE.
This will intensify the level of political controversy over OBE.
But the politics of OBE are anything but simple. OBE programs are bitterly opposed by some conservative parent groups, but have been widely embraced by moderate and conservative business leaders, including those who served on Governor Tommy G. Thompson's Commission on Schools for the 21st Century (known as the Fish Commission after its chairman, Ody Fish). On the other hand, OBE is championed by the education establishment (and is de rigueur at schools of education), but it is opposed by one of the nation's largest teachers' unions, the American Federation of Teachers.
Much of the confusion over OBE centers on the notion of "outcomes."
Ironically, "outcomes" were first raised to prominence by leaders of the conservative educational reform movement of the 1980s. Championed by Chester E. Finn, Jr., among others, such reformers argued that the obsession with inputs (dollars spent, books bought, staff hired) focused on the wrong end of the educational pipeline. They insisted that schools could be made more effective and accountable by shifting emphasis to outcomes (what children actually learned). Finn's emphasis on outcomes was designed explicitly to make schools more accountable by creating specific and verifiable educational objectives in subjects like math, science, history, geography, and English. In retrospect, the intellectual debate over accountability was won by conservatives. Indeed, conservatives were so successful in advancing their case that the term "outcomes" has become a virtually irresistible sales tool for educational reform.
The irony is that, in practice, the educational philosophies collectively known as outcome based education have little, if anything, in common with these original goals. To the contrary, OBE, with its hostility to competition, traditional measures of progress, and academic disciplines in general, can more accurately be described as part of a counter-reformation, a reaction to those attempts to make schools more accountable and effective. The OBE being sold to schools across Wisconsin represents, in effect, a semantic hijacking.
"The conservative education reform of the 1980s wanted to focus on outcomes (i.e. knowledge gained) instead of inputs (i.e. dollars spent)," notes former Education Secretary William Bennett. "The aim was to ensure greater accountability. What the education establishment has done is to appropriate the term but change the intent."
In other words, educationists have adopted the language of accountability to help them avoid being accountable.
Central to this semantic hijacking is OBE's shift of outcomes from cognitive knowledge to goals centering on values, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings. As an example of a rigorous cognitive outcome (the sort the original reformers had in mind), Bennett cites the Advanced Placement Examinations, which give students credit for courses based on their knowledge and proficiency in a subject area, rather than on their accumulated "seat-time" in a classroom.
In contrast, OBE programs are less interested in whether students know the origins of the Civil War or the author of the Tempest than whether students have met such outcomes as "establishing priorities to balance multiple life roles" (a goal in Pennsylvania) or "positive self-concept" (a goal in Kentucky). Nothing that Joan Wittig found in her children's classrooms was inconsistent with OBE philosophies or practices.
Consider the differences in approaches to educational reforms:
Where the reformers like Finn cited "outcomes," they insisted on higher academic standards; OBE lowers them.
Where the original reformers aimed at accountability, OBE makes it difficult, if not impossible, to objectively measure and compare educational progress.
Instead of clearly stated, verifiable outcomes, OBE goals are often diffuse, fuzzy, and ill-defined, loaded with educationist jargon like "holistic learning," "whole-child development," and "interpersonal competencies."
Where the original reformers saw their goal as excellence, OBE is characterized by a radical egalitarianism that tends to penalize high-achieving students.
Where original reformers emphasized schools that worked, OBE is experimental. Its advocates are unable to point to a single district where it has been successful.
And finally, where the original reformers saw an emphasis on outcomes as a way to return to educational basics, OBE has become, in Bennett's words, "a Trojan Horse for social engineering, an elementary and secondary version of the kind of 'politically correct' thinking that has infected our colleges and universities."
But while much of Outcome Based Education is genuinely radical, in general, it does not represent anything really very new. Rather, it is a continuation of the decades-old drift in educational circles away from subject content towards technique; from teaching knowledge to emphasizing nebulous "mental skills."
It represents a continuation of the flight from academic rigor and accountability. Ultimately, OBE is less sinister than it is the embodiment of mediocrity as an educational goal.
The architects of OBE envision a world in which no one fails, or at least one in which no one fails in school. "For the most part," declares Albert Mammary, "we believe competition in the classroom is destructive." Mammary has been superintendent of New York's Johnson City Central School District, K-12, where he developed an "Outcomes-Driven Developmental Model" (ODDM), which he describes as the "nation's first comprehensive school improvement model."
The model is built on slogans along the line of "Success for all students" and "Excellence for All."
For Mammary, the first step to success begins with doing away with failure.
Outcome based schools "believe there should be no failure and that failure ought to be removed from our vocabulary and thoughts," he wrote in 1991. "Failure, or fear of failure, will cause students to give up."
Former students may recall that, to the contrary, the fear of failure was an inducement to try harder, a spur that caused papers to be written and formulas memorized. But Mammary sees the threat of failure only as a barrier to enthusiastic learning.
"When students don't have to worry about failure," he insists, "they will be more apt to want to learn."
Mammary apparently feels the same way about differentiation of any sort. He opposes curved grading, ability grouping, and tracking. Tests are also transformed. They are no longer trials of knowledge, but celebrations of success.
"Testing should be creative," he insists, "aligned to learning outcomes, and only given when the students will do well."
This is only the beginning of his redefinition of "success" and "excellence."
Outcome based schools, he declares, "believe excellence is for every child and not just a few." They achieve this not by dragging the top kids down, he writes, but by bringing expectations up for everyone. He does this, however, by insisting that everyone be a winner.
Mammary is explicit on this: "A no-cut philosophy is recommended. Everyone trying out for the football team should make it; every girl or boy that (sic) wants to be a cheerleader should make it; everyone who comes to the program for the gifted and talented should make it."
There is a dreamy, utopian quality about all of this. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone were a prom queen; if everybody who dreamed of being a quarterback could be one; if every aspiring pianist could star in a concert. The world, unfortunately, doesn't work that way.
But that is precisely the point. Dreams have such power to fix our imaginations precisely because everyone cannot achieve them. Boys aspire to be quarterbacks because of the level of accomplishment it represents. Not everyone can do it. If anyone could be quarterback, what is left to aspire to?
There is also a practical concern here. A football team that must play anyone who wishes to be quarterback will quickly become a team on which no one will want to play any position.
By abolishing failure (or at least the recognition and consequences of failure) and redefining excellence to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean, we deprive success of meaning. In the ideal OBE world, everyone would feel like a success, without necessarily having to do much of anything to justify their self-esteem.
If Mammary appears to be a dreamer, there are practical applications of his philosophy. The most obvious is the hostility of OBE to traditional grades as measurements of achievement.
The emphasis on abolishing grades and traditional tests is central to the philosophy of OBE advocates. "Grading lies at the core of how our current system operates," declares OBE guru William Spady, director of the High Success Program on Outcome-Based Education.
Spady, who has been influential in the establishment of OBE programs in Wisconsin, quotes conservative reformers such as Chester Finn in his writings, but he follows Mammary in calling for the leveling of distinctions based on ability, industry or achievement.
Grades are gatekeepers, separating good students from others. "This, in turn, reinforces the system of inter-student comparison and competition created by class ranks. Such a system, of course, gives a natural advantage to those with stronger academic backgrounds, higher aptitudes for given areas of learning, and more resources at home to support their learning."
His objection appears to be based less on educational grounds than on his suspicion of inequality of any sort. Grades favor the smart and the studious. Spady wants to make up for the unfairness of it all.
Grades are oppressive, Spady writes. "Grades label students, control their opportunities, limit their choices, shape their identities, and define their rewards for learning and behaving in given ways."
Grades pit students against one another, he complains, "implying that achievement and success are inherently comparative, competitive and relevant" (which, in fact, they are, both in school and life). Indeed, Spady sees the issue of grades in terms of class struggle. "The usual result: the rich get richer, the poor give up."
Not necessarily. Occasionally, the student who gets Ds will work to become a student who gets Cs, and the C student will strive to become an A student. The A student may work harder so that he does not become a C student.
But Spady sees no link between grades and motivation to succeed or improve oneself. Instead, he focuses on the potential damage that poor grades might inflict on "young people struggling to define their identity and self-worth." He assumes here that identity and self-worth are independent of achievement.
Like Mammary, Spady envisions a grading system with no failure, but also no bad grades at all. OBE, he explains, eliminates labeling and competitive grading and stresses "VALIDATING that a high level of performance is ultimately reached on those things that will directly impact on the student's success in the future. In other words, all we're really interested in is A-level performance, thank you, so we EXPECT it of all students, systematically teach for it, and validate it when it occurs."
The OBE buzzword for its approved evaluation system is "authentic assessment." Assessment is authentic, apparently, only when it becomes impossible to rank one student's performance ahead of another's.
In this new system, Spady suggests that teachers will be able to "throw away their pens at evaluation and reporting time and replace them with pencils that have large erasers." Although he does not expand on the point, the abolition of "permanent records" has obvious advantages for educationists as well as students. The eraser takes both off the hook at the same time.
One form of accountability especially detested by the educational establishment creates measurements by which academic achievement can be readily compared among schools and among districts. Evaluations that are constantly in flux obviously cannot be compared this way. At most, schools could report progress toward their educational "goals," which may be notoriously difficult to quantify. Those goals, however, will be a benchmark of sorts, and educationists can be expected to point to them as authentic measures of their success.
Indeed, success of some sort or another seems inevitable, since the goals often appear to be set to accommodate the lowest common denominator.
In its goal statement, Milwaukee's suburban Whitnall district declared, "By 1996-97, all students will demonstrate 100% proficiency in the District's performance outcomes."
Whitnall school board member Ted Mueller quotes one astute resident remarking, "If we require all students to be able to stuff a basketball to be able to graduate from high school, the only way you're going to be able to accomplish that is to lower the basketball hoop."
Because material must be taught and re-taught until every student has mastered it, teachers in the OBE classroom necessarily have to narrow their ambitions. OBE advocates describe this as teaching less, but better. Fewer areas of math are covered, but they are covered more intensely. Even so, it is hard to avoid the "Robin Hood effect," in which time and attention are shifted from high achieving students (who quickly master the material) to slower achieving students. This is, of course, exacerbated by OBE's insistence on eliminating tracking or ability grouping.
Robert Slavin, director of the elementary school program at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Research on Elementary and Middle Schools, notes that OBE (or "mastery learning") "poses a dilemma, a choice between content coverage and mastery."
"Because rapid coverage is likely to be of greatest benefit to high achievers, whereas high mastery is of greatest benefit to low achievers," he concludes, programs such as OBE may be taught at the expense of the quicker students.
"If some students take much longer than others to learn a particular objective, then one of two things must happen," Slavin writes. "Either corrective instruction must be given outside of regular classroom time, or students who achieve mastery early on will have to spend considerable amounts of time waiting for their classmates to catch up..." It is not even clear that such a system benefits slower learners. Slavin's research found that "it may often be the case that even for low achievers, spending the time to master each objective may be less productive than covering more objectives."
One of the most popular features of OBE is also one of the overt examples of the Robin Hood effect. In cooperative learning, students allegedly teach one another. In reality, it serves as a mechanism to keep students working at a uniform pace.
In her presentation to the New Berlin school board, Joan Wittig remarked on the bizarre consequences of such mandatory "cooperation."
"Lazy, poor students rely on the good students to do all the work," she told the board. "Good students are reinforced that they must do everything if it is to be done right."
Another critic is high school senior Marisa Meisters, who wrote to a local newspaper:
As a senior at Arrowhead [High School], I have seen the results of OBE firsthand. The bottom line is that it does not work. The main goal of OBE is to teach students how to work in groups. The students in each group who understand the concept are supposed to teach the others in the group. Instead of moving on to more challenging concepts, the faster students have to wait for the entire group to understand the concept before they move on. Another OBE goal is to allow students to master subjects by retaking any test until the student can pass. The result is that the students do not study. Why should they when they can keep retaking the test? Eventually the student is bound to guess right.
But the genuinely radical vision of OBE's architects is nothing so banal as "less taught but taught well." Theorists like William Spady envision an educational system "grounded on future-driven outcomes that will directly impact the lives of students in the future, not on lesson and unit and course objectives. This means that content details will have to give way to the larger cognitive, technical, and interpersonal competencies needed in our complex, changing world."
Exactly how "exit outcomes" will be divorced from "content details" is unclear. But it seems to mean that details of history (such as who won World War II) might be sacrificed in favor of material that will "directly impact" the lives of young people. Teaching "things," or specific knowledge, is thus downgraded in the service of what Spady vaguely describes as "larger...competencies." This appears to be educationese for saying that one does not need to know where England is as long as one has mastered "spatial" competencies; one need not know history as long as one has attained an interpersonally competent outcome.
Of course, Spady doesn't expect this to come all at once. He acknowledges that schools will have to muddle through for the time being with the existing curriculum content, or what is left of it. Spady envisions a three-part process of transformation.
In the first stage, existing subject areas (science, math, history, English) "are taken as givens and are used to frame and define outcomes." In its infancy, OBE will be content to define outcomes in terms of math abilities, knowledge of history, etc. These are the terms on which OBE is usually sold to parents and school boards. This is, however, only the beginning as far as Spady is concerned.
In the second stage, which Spady calls "Transitional OBE," educrats create "a vehicle for separating curriculum content from intended outcomes and for placing primacy on the latter."
In this stage, traditional curricular content is replaced by outcomes emphasizing Spady's "higher order competencies and orientations."
As if to emphasize how separate these competencies are from the traditional content of the curriculum, Spady stresses that "these broad competencies are almost always content neutral." Indeed, he goes so far as to declare that the "content simply becomes a vehicle through which [higher order competencies] are developed and demonstrated."
By Spady's third and final stage--called "Transformational OBE"--the divorce between course content and the "exit outcomes" is complete and irreversible. Traditional curricular content has faded away altogether. In Transformational OBE, Spady writes, "curriculum content is no longer the grounding and defining element of outcomes."
With content excluded, Spady turns up the flow of educationese to full-bore.
Now he writes, "outcomes are seen as culminating Exit role performances which include sometimes complex arrays of knowledge, competencies, and orientations and which require learning demonstrations in varying role contexts."
Naturally this "dramatically redefines the role of subject content in determining and constraining what outcomes can be." Actual knowledge--the ability to write a coherent letter, add a column of numbers, know the century in which the [U.S.] Civil War took place--should not be allowed to crimp the style of the higher order competencies.
Predictably (and also conveniently), these competencies cannot be measured by tests or other verifiable, comparative measures. Indeed, Spady describes the student of the future as a sort of performance art--a work in progress.
"The bottom line of Transformational OBE is that student learning is manifested through their ability to carry out performance roles in contexts that at least simulate life situations and challenges."
Unfortunately, graduates will not be called on merely to perform in simulations of life. They will face the real thing, a reality unlikely to conform itself to Spady's model.
Perhaps because of the transitional nature of OBE, fuzzy goals clogged with impenetrable jargon seem endemic to OBE.
Kentucky's state educational goals include such "valued outcomes" as: "Listening," which officials defined by saying "Students construct meaning from messages communicated in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes through listening."
This was distinguished from "Observing," which they defined by saying "Students construct meaning from messages communicated in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes through observing."
Other goals included: "Interpersonal Relationships," in which "Students observe, analyze, and interpret human behaviors to acquire a better understanding of self, others, and human relationships;" "Consumerism...Students demonstrate effective decision-making and evaluate consumer skills;" "Mental and Emotional Wellness...Students demonstrate positive strategies for achieving and maintaining mental and emotional wellness;" "Positive self-concept...Students demonstrate the ability to be adaptable and flexible through appropriate tasks or projects;" "Multicultural and World View...Students demonstrate an understanding of, appreciation of, and sensitivity to a multicultural and world view;" and "Ethical values...Students demonstrate the ability to make decisions based on ethical values."
Obvious questions remain unanswered here: Whose ethical values will be used to establish the acceptable outcomes? Will any size fit? How will they be measured? How will schools determine whether a student has met its goals for "Interpersonal Skills" or "Consistent, Responsive and Caring Behavior," or "Open Mind to Alternative Perspectives?"
And haven't the schools gotten themselves into a lot of areas that are, frankly, none of their business?
Academic areas are not neglected, but they often bear only a passing resemblance to traditional fields of study.
Geography is transformed into "Relationship of Geography to Human Activity," in which "Students recognize the geographic interaction between people and their surroundings in order to make decisions and take actions that reflect responsibility for the environment." (Note that this does not actually include knowing something so mundane as what countries border the United States.)
Similarly, the "aesthetic" goal in which "Students appreciate creativity and the value of the arts and humanities" could conceivably by achieved without students having read a classic work of literature or seen a masterpiece of art.
The emphasis on "skills" tends to conceal the basic flaw of such curriculums that are devoid of "facts." As E.D. Hirsch notes, "Yes, problem-solving skills are necessary, But they depend on a wealth of relevant knowledge." Such knowledge plays little, if any, role in what passes for outcome based education these days.
Criticism of OBE's abstract academic goals is not limited to conservatives. Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has joined the chorus of OBE critics who question its academic priorities.
"OBE standards include academic outcomes," he notes, "but they are very few and so vague that they would be satisfied by almost any level of achievement, from top-notch to minimal; in other words, they are no improvement over what we have now."
Pennsylvania's writing outcome, for example, called for "All students [to] write for a variety of purposes including to narrate, inform, and persuade, in all subject areas." Remarked Shanker, "In an excellent school, this could mean a portfolio of short stories, several 1,000-word essays, and numerous shorter ones. In a poor school, it could mean three short paragraphs loaded with misspellings.
"Vaguely worded outcomes like this will not send a message to students, teachers and parents about what is required of youngsters. Nor will they help bridge the enormous gap between schools where students are expected to achieve...and schools where anything goes."
As Shanker noted, Pennsylvania was something of a trailblazer in the area of establishing "goals" for outcome based educational programs. Officials there were so enthusiastic that they embraced 51 separate "learning outcomes," of which the vast majority concerned values, feelings, or attitudes.
One "outcome" defined as a base goal in Pennsylvania was that "all students understand and appreciate their worth as unique and capable individuals and exhibit self-esteem." It did not describe how self-esteem would be exhibited or measured.
Other learning outcomes included: "All students develop interpersonal communication, decision making, coping, and evaluation skills and apply them to personal, family and community living." "All students relate in writing, speech or other media, the history and nature of various forms of prejudice to current problems facing communities and nations, including the United States."
Once again, it was not clear how the schools would keep tabs on environmental decisions made in students' private lives or how they would remediate environmentally incorrect behaviors.
The very number of "learning outcomes" is significant. As Shanker notes, the large number of outcomes "sounds demanding, but it's the opposite." That is because teachers are already spread thin and will therefore have to pick and choose among the dozens of mandated "outcomes." It is not hard to predict what sort of choices they will make. Remarks Shanker, "it's a lot easier to schmooze with kids about 'life roles' than to make sure they can do geometry theorems or read Macbeth. In an educational version of Gresham's law, the fluffy will drive out the solid and worthwhile."
Wisconsin, known for its good sense and immunity to the trendy and untested, has not escaped infection. OBE buzzwords have become commonplace in local district mission statements and planning documents. The City of Waukesha School District's Strategic Planning report, for instance, declares that "The process of learning is as important as the content being taught" and that "learning to cooperate is as important as learning to compete."
The movement towards outcome based education was given its greatest impetus, however, by a state commission charged with developing goals for the state's schools. The Governor's Commission on Schools for the 21st Century called for state law to be revised "to state the goals and expectations of Wisconsin pubic schools in language that is compatible with an outcome-based integration education model..." It also called on state officials to ensure "conformity with outcome-based educational objectives."
The Fish Commission embraced an "integrated education model curriculum framework" that says that "every student will give evidence of the knowledge, skills, and understanding in each of the following areas."
There followed a list of "outcomes" and "goals," including: "Leisure Time; Cultural interdependence; Interpersonal skills; Adaptability; Equity; Accepting People; Positive self-image; Application of values and ethics; Risk taking and experimentation; Family relationships; Environmental Stewardship; Positive work attitudes and habits; Racial, ethnic, cultural diversity histories of U.S.; Team Work; Human Growth and Development; Respect all occupations; Shared decision making; Health & wellness.
While the list did include history, geography, computer literacy, and communications among other more traditional subjects, it is still remarkable for its lack of focus and its extraordinarily wide net. The commission did not explain how it would ascertain, measure, or correct students' knowledge, skills, and understanding of family relationships, or why this should be considered a state-mandated educational goal.
In May 1993, I had the chance to moderate a debate on outcome based education. During the debate, I asked an official of Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction (and a proponent of OBE), "Have there been specific, controlled studies conducted to measure the performance of low, medium, and high capability students in Outcome Based Education versus traditional teaching curriculums."
His answer: "Most of the outcome based programs that are in effect now have not been in effect for a long enough period of time for studies of the kind you're talking about to take place."
In other words: no.
The suspicions that OBE might be a stalking horse for politically correct social engineering are fueled by its penchant for setting "outcomes" that relate to social, cultural, and political issues. Comments by some of OBE's most prominent architects tend to contribute to the misgivings of critics. William Spady, who has been paid $2,500 to make presentations to at least one suburban Milwaukee district, has made it clear that his vision of the future of education is dominated by social, cultural, and ideological preoccupations.
At times, his agenda is overtly political.
In 1987, Spady outlined his own assumptions regarding the future which needed to be taken into account when fashioning "exit outcomes."
His first assumption stated, "Despite the historical trend toward intellectual enlightenment and cultural pluralism, there has been a major rise in religious and political orthodoxy, intolerance, and conservatism with which young people will have to deal."
The implication is that OBE could somehow serve as an antidote to this 'ominous' resurgence of conservative thought.
His remaining assumptions strike a similarly ideological note. He describes the "re-pluralizing of society," the "decline of the traditional nuclear family," and the "gap between 'have' and 'have not' children." He is alarmist about the future of the environment.
"Global climate and ecology," he wrote, "are already shifting in a dangerous direction."
This is not to suggest that all OBE programs have a hidden political agenda. But its authors do seem to have a far more expansive view of the role of schools than more traditional educators ever envisioned. Albert Mammary, for example, writes:
"We believe that if students don't get love at home, they should get it in schools. If they don't get caring at home, they should get it in schools. If they don't belong and aren't connected at home, they should get it in schools. If they don't get food and clothing at home, they should also get that in schools."
This would seem to suggest that schools not only become centers of social work and welfare, but also substitute families. Educators should not be surprised if this ambition is not greeted with enthusiasm from every corner of society.
Designers of OBE scoff at charges that the new curriculums involve social engineering, and they are right to the extent that many programs bear little resemblance to the grandiose visions set out by Messrs. Mammary and Spady.
But, given the vagueness of the jargon-laden "outcomes," it is difficult for parents to know in advance what their students will learn and equally hard to measure success after the fact.
Such confusion provides ample opportunity for abuse. Political agendas can infiltrate curriculums as certain ideas and attitudes become part of the mandated "outcomes," but this is not inevitable.
In most cases, the outcome is less likely to be indoctrination than a pervasive mediocrity. A recent National Geographic article describing the culture of Sweden quoted one ethnologist: "We're taught very early not to stand out from the crowd..." The Swedish word lagom refers to this sense of "appropriateness," or averageness, that dominates Swedish life. "Lagom is best," Swedes are quoted as saying. "To be average is good in Sweden. To be different is bad."
This could well be the slogan for Outcome Based Education.
In a world with no losers and no winners, the overall tone will be blandness and conformity, an outcome that would probably be met with considerable enthusiasm by the designers of Outcome Based Education. No one feels very good, but then no one's self-esteem suffers much either.
What's really wrong with OBE? Its product is likely to be unmotivated, uninspired children who feel good about themselves, but who are unprepared for failure, rejection, and disappointment--and equally unprepared for competition in the 1990s and beyond.
The Madison School District is inviting members of the community to join them in putting into action five priorities for the future identified in a major planning bash last month.
The process was open and inclusive with more than token representation by people of color, committee member Annette Miller on Monday told members of Communities United, a Madison coalition committed to promoting social justice. "I didn't feel like I was the African-American representing the whole African-American community," Miller said.
The process may have been close to the ground, but the priorities developed by the committee smack of "educationalese" (and writing by committee) in the draft report released Monday to Communities United.
As roughly translated into plain English, they are: eliminate the achievement gap between students of color and white students; evaluate programs and personnel, then prioritize and allocate resources equitably; recruit and retain staff members who reflect the cultural composition of the student body; "revolutionize" Madison education with rigorous, culturally relevant and accelerated learning opportunities; provide a safe, welcoming learning environment for all children by building ties to the community, confronting fears about diversity, and being accountable to all.
Children entering Leopold Elementary School next year will have a chance to participate in a dual language immersion program which is designed to have the students proficient in both English and Spanish by the fifth grade.
Madison Metropolitan School District officials said the program will be offered for the first time in the 2009-2010 school year and parents will have an option of choosing either a standard English-only kindergarten program or enrolling students in the dual language program.
While the program is open to all families living in the Leopold Elementary attendance area, school officials said if there is greater demand than openings, a lottery system will be used to determine which students get into the new program.
The school system said it is anticipated that when the program is fully implemented in six years, the dual language program at Leopold will be used in 16 of the school's 44 classrooms.
And informational meeting about the program will be held at the school, at 2602 Post Road, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 24, in the school's cafeteria.
Brian Betts, a new principal in one of the District's most troubled neighborhoods, excitedly displayed his school's latest reading test results. Tall green bars on the graphs meant that in some classes a majority of students were proficient. This was big news for Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson, an amalgam of two campuses where failure had been the norm.
Betts's reaction to the quarterly results came in a rush of teachers' names, explosive interjections and expansive adjectives: "Anita Walls! Boom, boom, boom! Unbelievable! Brian Diamond! Boom, boom, boom! Fantastic!"
He had not felt so giddy the week before, when his unit tests -- written by his teachers -- showed that students were still struggling in the mid-to-low-C range. Most of Shaw's faculty members are new to the school, and many are new to teaching. That makes the school a crucial experiment for D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. She has put extra resources into it and given Betts, 41, extraordinary power to make his own rules, with the help of two teaching stars he recruited from Montgomery County. But in mid-January he was worried.
Wagner's book is engaging and sometimes points to real defects in American schools. Yet it fails to use research objectively to ascertain what is truly happening in America's 90,000 public schools. Moreover, like all too many education "reformers" Wagner is simply hostile to academic content. Wagner does not seem to care if students can read and write grammatically, do math or know something about science and history - real subjects that schools can teach and policy-makers can measure.
Unfortunately, Wagner dismisses measurable academic content while embracing buzzwords like "adaptability" and "curiosity," which no one could possibly be against, but also which no one could possibly measure. Do we really care if our students are curious and adaptable if they cannot read and write their own names?
In one of his more significant, although slightly flawed, education reform initiatives, Gov. Ted Strickland wants school districts to undergo annual financial and operational performance audits.
''Just as we provide an academic report card for our schools, we will provide parents, public officials and taxpayers an annual fiscal and operational report card for every school district. That means that when we send districts funding to help students who need additional attention and instruction, we will now be able to track our dollars to see that they directly reach those students,'' Strickland said in his third State of the State address.
This is a great idea on a number of levels.
Parents and homeowners would be able to determine whether their district is making the grade on spending. For years, the Ohio Department of Education has issued academic report cards for districts.
Yes, at times, woeful news in the audits would make it more difficult for superintendents and school board members to ask voters to pass levies.
On the other hand, fiscal and operational performance audits would help districts identify and correct spending problems.
It is troubling that Gov. Ed Rendell's budget-related proposal to reduce the number of school districts from 500 to fewer than 100 came as a surprise to educators.
Local administrators described it as a "bolt from the blue," and one local superintendent said he was "shocked and awed" by the scope of the proposal, for which the governor, apparently with little or no comment from educators, is now seeking taxpayer funding for a commission to study and plan the consolidations.
Researchers at Syracuse studied the impacts of consolidation in rural school districts in New York state from 1985 to 1997 and found operating cost savings of around 20 percent in the consolidation of two 300-pupil school districts, savings of 7 to 9 percent in the consolidation of two 900-pupil school districts and "little, if any, impact on the costs of two 1,500-pupil districts."
Tens of thousands of Chinese have joined a debate on whether students should be separated into science and liberal arts classes in high school, a practice that allows them to stay competitive in college entrance exam by choosing preferred subjects.
The debate came after the Ministry of Education began to solicit opinions from the public on Friday on whether it was necessary and feasible to abolish the classification system, which have been adopted for decades.
In a survey launched by www.qq.com, a Chinese portal, more than 260,000 people cast their votes as of Saturday with 54 percent of those polled voted for the abolishment and 40 percent against.
More than 87,000 netizens have made also their voice heard as of 10 a.m. Sunday morning in the website's forum.
A netizen from Chengdu, capital of southwest Sichuan Province, who identified himself as a high school math teacher, said "students should study both arts and science so they could have comprehensive development and become more flexible in using their knowledge."
"Sciences can activate the mind, while arts could strengthen their learning capability," he added.
Madison Math Task Force Report Public Session: February 11, 2009 @ Cherokee Middle School
The Cherokee PTO [Map] is hosting a discussion of the Madison School District's Math Task Force Report this Wednesday evening, February 11, 2009 in the Library.
A state program meant to give only effective Minnesota teachers merit pay raises instead appears to be rewarding nearly all the teachers participating in it with more money.
The program, called "Q Comp," is one of Gov. Tim Pawlenty's top initiatives to improve schools, and many educators say it is strengthening teacher evaluations and training. But others are questioning whether Q Comp has just become a cash handout.
In 22 school districts whose Q Comp practices were examined by the Star Tribune, more than 99 percent of teachers in the program received merit raises during the most recent school year.
Only 27 of the roughly 4,200 teachers eligible did not get a pay raise.
The state gave schools $64 million to spend on Q Comp, which stands for quality compensation, during the 2007-08 school year. Pawlenty is now proposing to increase spending on the program by $41 million next year. But some lawmakers are questioning that step.
"Why should we expand it statewide when there is no evidence that it's improving anything?" asked Rep. Mark Buesgens, R-Jordan.
"Let's quit the charade, let's give every district another $300 per pupil, and quit bluffing."
Pawlenty's spokesman Brian McClung defended the program Friday as "a move towards greater emphasis on student achievement and the measures that lead to [it]." He added, "Ideally Q Comp would demand more, but we had to compromise with a Legislature that was uncomfortable going further."
Test data suggest that, so far, students in school districts in at least their third year of Q Comp have not shown more improvement in reading and math than students in schools not participating in the program.
The Minnesota Department of Education asserts that it is too early in the program's life to make substantive comparisons about how Q Comp is affecting student achievement. In a statement Friday, Education Commissioner Alice Seagren said the department has faith in the program.
"We believe that Q Comp will lead to higher levels of student achievement, students who are college-and-work ready upon graduation, and a larger supply of qualified workers for our state's employers," she said.
School superintendents, meanwhile, say the money involved--up to $260 per pupil this year--has been a major draw in an era of budget cuts.
Joseph Brown, superintendent of the Grand Meadow School District, said Q Comp is improving teacher pay in ways that might otherwise not be possible.
"We really felt the only way teachers would get additional income was to generate additional revenue," he said.
Reward or punishment?
Under Q Comp, participating districts and charter schools set up teacher-driven training, such as having them observe one another and work in small groups to share tips.
Each participating district--there were 39 in 2007-08--sets up its own program with the local teachers union, resulting in a complicated patchwork of programs that reward teachers for a variety of things.
In addition to the merit pay raises, teachers can receive bonuses--usually up to a total of around $2,000--for things such as improving student performance, meeting professional development goals, being evaluated by other teachers, and whether their school meets testing goals. In districts the Star Tribune examined, the vast majority of teachers got most of the bonus money available. Many lost portions of the money when students did not meet testing goals.
The merit pay raises that teachers receive--the scale on which virtually all the state's teachers succeed--are mostly based on things such as whether teachers successfully complete evaluations and training, rather than on student performance.
"Is the focus supposed to be growing better teachers or punishing bad teachers?" said Tim Bunnell, program leader for the South Washington County schools, who said he isn't surprised districts aren't withholding pay scale advancement. "That would be a huge punishment."
It could, in fact, mean up to $15,000 or $20,000 lost over a teacher's career in the district, Bunnell said.
Education Minnesota, the state teachers union, has always taken the position that ongoing, high-quality professional development is needed in schools, according to Tom Dooher, the union's president. Q Comp can provide that if it's correctly negotiated with the union, he said.
On Tuesday, the state's legislative auditor is scheduled to release a report on Q Comp, analyzing the Department of Education's oversight of the program.
According to Sandi Jacobs, vice president for policy at the National Council on Teacher Quality, the fact that virtually all the state's teachers are advancing "should really give the state some important food for thought about whether the program is accomplishing their intent."
Teaching can be a lonely profession, with teachers sequestered in classrooms, having too few opportunities to see their colleagues work.
With Q Comp, teachers get a chance to coach and be coached by other teachers. They talk about their craft in small professional development groups, and work together to help students meet goals. Many educators and policymakers applaud this aspect of the program.
In the Brandon School District in central Minnesota, a district with 22 teachers, teachers are observed three times during the school year.
"It's about taking time to reflect," Superintendent Mark Westby said. "I don't think teachers change because they're told they need to. They change because they see on their own what they could do differently."
A June 2008 teacher survey of South Washington County teachers shows that 84 percent of teachers are highly or somewhat satisfied with the district's pay program, and 77 percent report that peer coaching and observation is either "vital and highly effective" or "has an important role" in promoting professional growth.
But not all teachers on the front lines agree, according to Steve Watson, a recently retired Eden Prairie art teacher and a vocal critic of the program.
He says that the program is advertised as paying effective teachers, but points out that the bonus for having students meet testing goals is minimal--usually about several hundred dollars in most districts--compared with what teachers receive for "jumping through hoops."
In more than 30 years of teaching, Watson said, he's seen many other trends in education come and go. This one is different.
"They found out the teachers would buy into it if they just paid them off."
Require it statewide?
There are currently 44 school districts and 28 charter schools enrolled in the Q Comp program, educating about a third of Minnesota's 820,000 students.
Dooher said that Education Minnesota would rather have money currently spent on Q Comp be added to general school funding.
"The system [Pawlenty] has proposed doesn't get at the real crux of the problem," he said. "Our class sizes are too big, we don't have the resources, and we don't have the up-to-date materials to really, really impact test scores and student achievement."
Many participating districts are stressed about the state's financial position: Facing a $4.8 billion two-year deficit going into this year's legislative session, superintendents are worried about professional development advances they've made, and what would happen if the money disappears.
The Orono School District spent almost $800,000 on the program last year, according to the Department of Education.
Neal Lawson, the district's assistant superintendent for business, said, "We just don't have that kind of money sitting around for us to be able to continue the program if the funding is cut."
Staff writer Glenn Howatt contributed to this report. Emily Johns • 612-673-7460
Three area school districts in need of building renovation or expansion are taking very tentative steps toward consolidation -- a touchy topic for residents worried about losing a community's identity.
The Belleville, Monticello and New Glarus school districts, located in Dane and Green counties, are asking the state Department of Public Instruction for $10,000 to study the idea of combining their programs and student populations.
"I think it's just a case of having a nice discussion and getting solid, objective information," said Randy Freese, superintendent for the Belleville School District.
Facing continued tight budgets, districts around the state will be looking at options to save money, and "investigating consolidation is definitely one of those options," said Patrick Gasper, DPI spokesman. "I think we'll see more people looking into it."
Using money approved as part of the 2007-09 state budget, the DPI has funded grants for at least eight other district groups, including Pecatonica and Argyle in Lafayette and Iowa counties.
Mayor Daley also sees an important role for charter schools. "You can't have a monopoly and think a monopoly works. Slowly it dissolves. And I think that charter schools are good to compete with public schools." Nobody says there's something wrong with public universities facing competition from private ones. "I think the more competition we have, the better off we are in Chicago."
But the mayor won't support vouchers. "School choice is hard. You're going back to arguing," he says, trailing off without making clear whether he means the politics. But he does think it's notable that, while federal money and Pell grants can be used to finance an education at a private college, federal money can't be used to help students get a private education at the K-12 level.
Ron Huberman, Mr. Daley's former chief of staff and head of the Chicago Transit Authority, is anything but an education bureaucrat, and that's just what the mayor wants in the man he named to replace Mr. Duncan as chief of Chicago schools. Too often in the past, before the mayor took over, the city would bring in schools chiefs who seemed to be riding an education lazy-susan from school to school. "We'd give them big bonuses to come here and then when we'd fire them they'd go to other school systems."
Educators across the United States continue to enable a wider and ethnically diverse proportion of students to achieve success in AP®. Significant inequities remain, however, which can result in traditionally underserved students not receiving the sort of AP opportunities that can best prepare them for college success. The 5th Annual AP Report to the Nation uses a combination of state, national and AP Program data to provide each U.S. state with the context it can use to celebrate its successes, understand its unique challenges, and set meaningful, data-driven goals to prepare more students for success in college.
Three public schools in California led the nation in helping Latino students outperform their counterparts in other states on Advanced Placement exams in Spanish language, Spanish literature and world history, according to a report released Wednesday by the College Board.
Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach was cited as the public school with the largest number of Latino students from the class of 2008 earning a 3 or better in AP world history. Exams are scored on a scale of 1 to 5, and many colleges and universities give students course credit for scores of 3 or higher. Advanced Placement courses offer college-level material in a variety of subjects.
Latino students at Fontana High School outpaced their peers on the AP Spanish-language exam, and San Ysidro High School in San Diego had the most Latino students who succeeded on the AP Spanish literature exam.
Wagner promotes seven "21st century" skills that he claims are not taught in our schools. These "survival" skills are also being promoted by advocacy groups like the National Educational Association.
Wagner's list seems plausible. Who can argue against teaching students "agility and adaptability" or how to "ask good questions?" Yet these "skills" are largely unsupported by actual scientific research. Wagner presents nothing to justify his list except glib language and a virtually endless string of anecdotes about his conversations with high-tech CEOs.
Even where Wagner does use research, it's not clear that we can trust what he reports as fact. On page 92, to discredit attempts to increase the number of high school students studying algebra and advanced mathematics courses, he refers to a "study" of MIT graduates that he claims found only a few mentioning anything "more than arithmetic, statistics and probability" as useful to their work. Curious, I checked out the "study" using the URL provided in an end note for Chapter 3. It consisted of 17, yes 17, MIT graduates, and, according to my count, 11 of the 17 explicitly mentioned linear algebra, trig, proofs and/ or calculus, or other advanced mathematics courses as vital to their work - exactly the opposite of what Wagner reports! Perhaps exposure to higher mathematics is not the worst problem facing American students!
K-12 school districts that lay off personnel according to seniority cause disproportionate damage to their programs and students than if layoffs were determined on a seniority-neutral basis.
School districts face severe budget challenges with state funding at risk in this perilous economy. In this four-page analysis of K-12 district layoff issues, Marguerite Roza, a senior scholar at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, calculates that if a district is required to use layoffs to cut its budget by 10 percent and cuts the most junior employees, it will need to axe 14.3 percent of its workforce (including teachers) to meet the 10 percent budget reduction.
On the other hand, if that district followed a seniority-neutral layoff policy--say by a standard of employee effectiveness--only 10 percent of the workforce would lose their jobs.
Nationwide, if all districts followed a seniority-neutral layoff policy to save 10 percent, 612,256 jobs would be lost compared with 874,623 lost under a seniority-based policy.
Gov. Jim Doyle is stumping for a bill that would require insurance companies to cover autism.
Most insurance companies don't cover autism because it is classified as an emotional disorder rather than a neurological condition.
A host of lawmakers and Drew Goldsmith, a 12-year-old autistic boy from Middleton, backed Doyle at a press conference in his office Tuesday.
Doyle is proposing strengthening current legislation to include minimum coverage levels of $60,000 for intensive treatment and $30,000 for post-intensive services. He said it would cut the waiting list to join a state-run program for autism services by a third.
Lawmakers on Tuesday said they hope to win support for the bill in the Legislature.
In the summer of 1998, over two frantic weeks in July, I wrote an essay titled The Future of Online Learning. (Downes, 1998) At the time, I was working as a distance education and new media design specialist at Assiniboine Community College, and I wrote the essay to defend the work I was doing at the time. "We want a plan," said my managers, and so I outlined the future as I thought it would - and should - unfold.
In the ten years that have followed, this vision of the future has proven to be remarkably robust. I have found, on rereading and reworking the essay, that though there may have been some movement in the margins, the overall thrust of the paper was essentially correct. This gives me confidence in my understanding of those forces and trends that are moving education today.
In this essay I offer a renewal of those predictions. I look at each of the points I addressed in 1998, and with the benefit of ten year's experience, recast and rewrite each prediction. This essay is not an attempt to vindicate the previous paper - time has done that - but to carry on in the same spirit, and to push that vision ten years deeper into the future.
Times are tough, particularly in our schools. We don't have the money, beleaguered education officials say, for every student who wants to play games after class. Some school sports have to go. Loudoun County is talking about cutting junior varsity lacrosse and all freshman sports. Fairfax County's proposed budget would end girls' gymnastics. Other teams are in jeopardy. The public high schools can't afford them anymore.
And yet many people who reflect for a moment will remember their own school days and see this kind of financial austerity as shortsighted, like cutting back on English classes because most kids already speak that language. Many of us remember some competitive activity, usually in high school, that became a vital force in our adolescence. It gave us a self-awareness and self-confidence that changed us forever.
None of us read all of the 481,563 articles published last year on the early life and struggles of the soon-to-be president of the United States, but most of us know that if Barack Obama had not discovered basketball he would not have become the leader he is today. On the opposite end of that scale of significance, I compiled the worst record ever at my high school, 0-14, in league play as the tennis team's No. 1 singles player. I didn't care much about winning. I got some exercise, and something even better. I was a total nerd, but I could strut around with my very own varsity letter, just like the football players. I still carry that morale boost.
But while this generation of baby-boom teachers has witnessed remarkable transformations in their lifetime -- in women's rights, in civil rights -- the waves of education reforms aimed at remaking our urban schools that they have been dispatched to implement have repeatedly fallen short.
Ms. Huff has taught both basic math and calculus at East High, a failing school under the federal No Child Left Behind law, considered by many here to be the city's most troubled. As I walked in the front door one frigid day last month, ambulance attendants were rolling out a young man on a gurney and wearing a neck brace.
MS. HUFF'S eighth period has just five calculus students -- normally not enough to justify a class -- but the administration keeps it going so these children have a shot at competing with top students elsewhere. No sooner had they sat down and finished their daily warm-up quiz, than there was a loud clanging. "A pull," Ms. Huff said. "Let's go." Someone had yanked the fire alarm. Ms. Huff led her students through halls that were chaotic. Several times when she tried to quiet students from other classes, they swore at her.
For 15 minutes she and her calculus students -- none of them with coats -- stood in a parking lot battered by a fierce wind off Lake Ontario. Everywhere, kids could be seen leaving school for the day, but all the calculus students returned, took their seats, and just as Ms. Huff started teaching, there was another false alarm and they had to march out again.
Seems like a simple question, but given how much time and money we spend on it, it has a wide range of answers, many unexplored, some contradictory. I have a few thoughts about education, how we use it to market ourselves and compete, and I realized that without a common place to start, it's hard to figure out what to do.
So, a starter list. The purpose of school is to:
Become an informed citizen
Be able to read for pleasure
Be trained in the rudimentary skills necessary for employment
Do well on standardized tests
Homogenize society, at least a bit
Pasteurize out the dangerous ideas
Give kids something to do while parents work
Teach future citizens how to conform
Teach future consumers how to desire....
The consumption aspects of this list are useful to consider, particularly in light of some reform textbooks.
Madison School District Survey for Parents Who Have Left
via a kind reader's email:
Superintendent Dan Nerad is conducting a survey of families who left the MMSD and invites your participation.
If you opted to not enroll your child/children in their MMSD school -- if they attend private school, you home school or you moved out of the District -- or you are strongly considering the same and you are willing to participate in this survey, please let Superintendent Nerad know. Send your contact information to his assistant, Ann Wilson (awilson@madison.k12.wi.us or 608 663-1607).
Marshall Middle School in Janesville is in its second year of offering single-gender classrooms, and students and teachers said the program has made a positive difference in their education.
Currently, more than 200 school districts around the country are testing out the teaching method, and about 10 schools in Wisconsin offer a single-gender classroom program.
Marshall Middle School teacher Charles Smith said getting eighth-grade boys and girls to agree on music isn't easy. But his social studies class is girls only, and Smith said the class prefers to study to the music of Beyonce.
"If the kids are comfortable, they feel better about it. Then this is a good place for them," said Smith.
Smith said the single-gender classroom is about making students feel comfortable.
While his students learn, he said he's also learning how to better tailor his lessons.
*The administration has been developing a differentiated compensation strategy. Saavedra has hinted at this before, but the bottom line is he wants to pay the highest-performing teachers significantly more money. Some proposed details: The district would identify the teachers who rank among the top 10 percent of value-added student test data for at least two consecutive years. Those top performers would get a 10 percent salary increase, and they would have the option -- Saavedra emphasized this would be a choice -- to transfer to a low-performing school and get another 15 percent salary increase. These top teachers also could get even more money if they agree to teach summer school; rather than the usual $25-an-hour rate, they would get 125 percent of their full daily rate of pay. And there's more: These teachers could choose to serve as master teachers and share their best practices across the district for 15 days, at a rate of $500 per day.
*Mission and vision for human capital, from Best's PowerPoint (I'll try to get an electronic copy and post later):
Mission: HISD's most important resource in helping our students become college- and career-ready is our employees. Our success to move our organization to its next level of achievement depends on our ability to attract and cultivate human capital and provide the support for our employees to excel in their work.
Vision: HISD seeks to create a culture that values employees who are talented, innovative thinkers who are reuslts-oriented; individuals who strive to increase student achievement and revolutionize the field of education. We know that a wise investment in human capital in each individual at every level will yield success for our students.
*On the recruiting strategy, it sounds like Best wants the central HR department to have a bigger central office role in the recruiting process. Basically, the department would take the lead in identifying talent, wherever it is. Best is proposing a pilot where principals would agree to hire some of the centrally recruited teachers.
The process, which included meetings Thursday (1/29/2009) from 8 to 6 Friday (1/30/2009) from 8 to 5 and Saturday (1/31/2009) from 8 to 12, thus far, resulted in the following words:
MMSD Mission Statement (1/30/2009):
Our mission is to cultivate the potential in every student to thrive as a global citizen by inspiring a love of learning and civic engagement, by challenging and supporting every student to achieve academic excellence, and by embracing the full richness and diversity of our community.
Draft Strategic Priorities
1. Student:
We will eliminate the achievement gap by ensuring that all students reach their highest potential. To do this, we will prepare every student for kindergarten, create meaningful student-adult relationships, and provide student-centered programs and supports that lead to prepared graduates. (see also student outcomes)
2. Resource/Capacity:
We will rigorously evaluate programs, services and personnel through a collaborative, data-driven process to prioritize and allocate resources effectively and equitably, and vigorously pursue the resources necessary to achieve our mission.
3. Staff
We will implement a formal system to support and inspire continuous development of effective teaching and leadership skills of all staff who serve to engage our diverse student body while furthering development of programs that target the recruitment and retent ion of staff members who reflect the cultural composition of our student body.
4. Curriculum
We will revolutionize the educational model to engage and support all students in a comprehensive participatory educational experience defined by rigorous, culturally relevant and accelerated learning opportunities where authentic assessment is paired with flexible instruction.
5. Organization/Systems:
We will proudly leverage our rich diversity as our greatest strength and provide a learning environment in which all our children experience what we want for each of our children. We will:
Provide a safe, welcoming learn ing environment
Coordinate and cooperate across the district
Build and sustain meaningful partnerships throughout our community
Invite and incorporate (require) inclusive decision-making
Remain accountable to all stakeholders
Engage community in dialogue around diversity confront fears and misunderstandings
Half of Maricopa County's high-school graduates who enter Arizona universities or colleges must take a remedial math class. And just under a quarter must take a remedial English class.
The new findings are helping legislators push for a change in how Arizona decides if its high schools are excelling or failing, a move that would topple AIMS test scores as the main measurement.
Two key House leaders are proposing a pilot program that could lead to making the percentage of students who graduate "college-ready" the prime indicator of how well a high school performs.
Rating schools by AIMS scores sets the bar too low because the state's standardized student tests are based on 10th-grade skills, said Reps. Rich Crandall, a Mesa Republican, and David Lujan, a Phoenix Democrat.
Some educators fear that the new approach would put too much emphasis on college-bound students and not enough on marginal students who need extra help or students who don't want to attend college.
The College Readiness Report calculated how many 2006 high-school graduates could directly enter freshman-level English and algebra classes and how many had to take remedial classes first.
The study tracked graduates at each of 115 Maricopa County districts and charter high schools who entered one of the three state universities or Maricopa Community Colleges. Those students accounted for 55 percent of the county's 2006 graduates, or about 17,400 students.
The results: Seventy-seven percent were prepared to enter a college-level English course without extra help; half were ready for college algebra.
"The glass is half-full or half-empty, depending on how you look at it," said Arizona State University's David Garcia, who conducted the research. All the students in the study had passed Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards, passed their high-school courses and earned diplomas, he said.
"After that, the burning question is: 'What did that mean?'. . . Are we aiming at the right place?" Garcia said. "My primary interest in doing this is to put something else out there for public discussion other than AIMS."
The study is the first to track such data for individual high schools. Garcia said he is preparing to conduct the research statewide and include students who attend colleges and universities out of state. He also is working on tracking students who attend trade schools.
The College Readiness Report caught the attention of Crandall and Lujan, who plan to introduce a bill this week that would establish a pilot program using the report's data as the primary measurement of a high school's performance.
The schools would be measured on improvement in the percentage of graduates who entered college without needing remedial classes.
"When you use AIMS as your total measurement, you get 10th-grade results, and that's not good enough," said Crandall, chairman of the House Education Committee. Crandall, once president of the Mesa Unified District governing board, who has already established a legislative task force to examine the future of AIMS. Its recommendations are due in June, and it could suggest changing the AIMS exam, killing it as a graduation requirement, replacing it or adding a college-entrance or another test.
The bill, drafted by Lujan, would keep AIMS scores and graduation rates as part of a new formula to evaluate school instruction, but College Readiness Report data would play the key role. Lujan said it's easier for parents to understand.
In all measures, schools would have to show progress in the percentage of students meeting the new goals.
The AIMS reading, writing and math exam is taken each year by students in third through eighth grades and in 10th grade. It measures how well students are achieving grade-level learning goals, and high-school students must pass the exam to graduate. Test scores are used to rate schools on a six-level scale that ranges from excelling to failing.
"People really don't know what the AIMS test measures," Lujan said. "Looking at how many students have to take remedial classes when they get to college, I think that's a really good indicator."
Schools participating in the pilot would include all the high schools in one district, most likely Phoenix Union High School District, where Lujan still sits on the board, and five charter high schools.
The schools would develop the new formula and use it to determine their rankings by September 2010.
State officials would track and report on the progress of students in schools using the new formula.
Tom Horne, state superintendent of public instruction, said he, too, wants to push all high schools to improve learning for college-bound students. College-readiness numbers could become a small part of the current formula, but AIMS scores should remain the key indicator, he said.
"I worked very hard to make sure the formula, as a whole, is fair," Horne said. "We must be sure the kids who don't go to college are still well prepared for life."
The transition of students from high school into postsecondary education is an important but under-informed policy issue. To address this research question, the Arizona Community Foundation and Arizona State University tracked high school graduates from the classes of 2005 and 2006 who enrolled in either the Maricopa community college system or one of Arizona's three public universities the year following graduation from high school.
These previously unreleased data provide school-level results on the percentage of high school graduates from Maricopa County district and charter high schools who enter postsecondary education ready for college-level coursework. For the purpose of this study, college-level is defined as any course categorized by the postsecondary institutions as:
English - Freshman English or above (courses designated as Pre-Freshman English and Other Lower Division English were not designated as college-level).
Mathematics - College Algebra or above (courses designated as Pre-Intermediate Algebra, Intermediate Algebra and those designated as Other Lower Division Mathematics were not designated as college-level).
For a new generation of well-wired activists in the Washington region, it's not enough to speak at Parent-Teacher Association or late-night school board meetings. They are going head-to-head with superintendents through e-mail blitzes, social networking Web sites, online petitions, partnerships with business and student groups, and research that mines a mountain of electronic data on school performance.
In recent weeks, parent-led campaigns helped bring down a long-established grading policy in Fairfax County and scale back the unpopular practice of charging fees for courses in Montgomery County. They have also stoked debates over math education in Frederick and Prince William counties.
Wauwatosa School District officials have found a home for the trade charter school that will be opening for the 2009-10 school year.
For the first year, the School of the Trades will be housed in the basement of the Fisher Building, 12121 W. North Ave.
Superintendent Phil Ertl said the district is looking at the location for one year as it evaluates the viability and efficiency of the building.
It was determined that the Fisher Building would be the best place to house the district's second trade charter school because it doesn't need major renovations.
"It's all there right now," Jason Zurawik, West associate principal who has been working with the trade charter school committee, told the School Board on Jan. 26.
Several parents from Jefferson Middle School have been meeting with Dr. Nerad and administrators to discuss the evolution of the standards based report cards in Middle School.
After much research on my part, it is clear standard based report cards are the "new" thing and a result of NCLB. It is easily adaptable at the elementary school, but very FEW school districts have implemented these changes in the middle school and in the high school it is almost nonexistent due to the difficulty adapting them for college entrance. It seems the goal of standard based report cards from the NCLB legistation is to make sure teachers teach the standards. It is kind of backwards that way but many teachers feel it makes sure they cover all the required standards.
Our local concerns and response from district include:
Infinite Campus, which was up and running last year is no longer functioning for middle school students.
Their response: Yes there are problems and we have provided training but the staff have not taking us up on the paid training made available.
My response: If you are going to implement a change, since when is it optional to learn a new system the district is implementing. My daughter has no grades, assignments, or anything on IC accept the final grade. When asked if this will be mandatory in the future I was told we have no idea and we can't promise that it will be. It is clear after two meetings and several discussion with Lisa Wachtel that IC will not accommodate standards based grading. Basically elementary students will never be up. She projected 5 years and the middle school while up it is not easy to use the grade book for a program designed for 100% grading. I am only left to believe 2/3 of MMSD students will not benefit from a potentially good way for parents to stay informed about their students progress, grades, test, assignments, etc.....
While some areas are better (Language Arts, Spanish, PE) evaluation includes written, oral,as well as comprehension for the languages, and for PE it includes evaluation for knowledge, skill, and effort.
In Math my child made a 4 on Content 1, 2 on Content 2, 1 on Content 3, and a 3 on Content 4. She received a cummulitative grade of D. When I add 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 and divide by 4 it equals 2.5 which is not a D. After much research I found out each area is weighted different which is not explained on the report card. I also asked and it required much investigation to find out what each content area (1,2,3,4) was evaluating. She clearly understands one of them and has poor understanding in the one weighed higher but I had no idea what they were as they were only labelled by a number.
Administration response: Math is a problem we are working on.
I accept with many reservations that we are doing standards based reporting for middle school students. I am angry that the district picked Infinite Campus at about the same time they were discussing going to Standards Based Report cards and did not realize 2/3 of the students will not benefit from IC. I am also upset that a pilot of the middle school report card was not conducted with staff, parents and student input. At Jefferson the staff feel under trained, overwhelmed and as though this was pushed down their throats. It says to me the staff were not consulted. When the staff person that was in charge of training the rest of the staff at Jefferson is not even using the I.C. it says a lot about the implementation of the middle school reporting. As far as standards based report cards moving to high school for MMSD, this would be very difficult. Not just due to college entrance but because MMSD high schools do not have standards to base the report cards upon.
The School Board in Loudoun County, where the recession might be having a greater effect on teachers' wallets than in any other Washington area jurisdiction, late last night approved a budget of $747. million that would freeze teacher salaries.
The spending plan, which passed by an 8 to 1 vote, would omit cost-of-living and seniority raises to save $31. million. It would be the second straight year that Loudoun teachers have gone without a cost-of-living increase. The other type of raise, for rising seniority, is also known as a step increase. The no vote came from John Stevens (Potomac).
Last week, Superintendent Edgar B. Hatrick III proposed forgoing the step increase, a move he said would align Loudoun schools with others in the state. Some of the savings would preserve jobs that had been in jeopardy.
"We've been weighing this against the positions that were disappearing in order to keep the step alive," Hatrick said before the board meeting in Ashburn. "We're cognizant that there's a lot of economic strife out there."
2009 Madison Teachers, Inc. Candidate Questionnaire
1.2MB PDF File. This document includes responses from Madison School Board seat 1 candidates Arlene Silveira and Donald Gors, Seat 2 candidate Lucy Mathiak and a number of other local and statewide candidates for office in the upcoming April, 2009 election. Via a kind reader's email.
But there is controversy with 4K, and not just because of the cost. In other districts that have started programs, operators of private centers that stand to lose tuition dollars have emerged as opponents.
That's unlikely to be true for Renee Zaman, director of Orchard Ridge Nursery School on Madison's west side, who said last week that her center would be in a good position to participate with a 4K program because they already teach 84 4-year-olds and because all of their early childhood teachers are state certified.
But Zaman also said she hopes that the district doesn't push a 4K program through too quickly. She is particularly worried that the curriculum might focus too heavily on academics.
One sticking point in past 4K discussions in Madison was concern from the teachers union, Madison Teachers Inc., that preschool teachers at off-site programming centers might not be employees of the school district.
But Nerad and MTI Executive Director John Matthews have had many discussions about 4K over the past several months, and Matthews said as long as no district teachers are displaced, he is in favor of the program.
These successes and failures have underscored the need to aim high and embrace change in America's schools. Our goal as a nation should be to ensure that 80 percent of our students graduate from high school fully ready to attend college by 2025. This goal will probably be more difficult to achieve than anything else the foundation works on, because change comes so slowly and is so hard to measure. Unlike scientists developing a vaccine, it is hard to test with scientific certainty what works in schools. If one school's students do better than another school's, how do you determine the exact cause? But the difficulty of the problem does not make it any less important to solve. And as the successes show, some schools are making real progress.
Based on what the foundation has learned so far, we have refined our strategy. We will continue to invest in replicating the school models that worked the best. Almost all of these schools are charter schools. Many states have limits on charter schools, including giving them less funding than other schools. Educational innovation and overall improvement will go a lot faster if the charter school limits and funding rules are changed.
One of the key things these schools have done is help their teachers be more effective in the classroom. It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one. Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.
Whenever I talk to teachers, it is clear that they want to be great, but they need better tools so they can measure their progress and keep improving. So our new strategy focuses on learning why some teachers are so much more effective than others and how best practices can be spread throughout the education system so that the average quality goes up. We will work with some of the best teachers to put their lectures online as a model for other teachers and as a resource for students.
Some details emerged today from the proposal by Gov. Tim Pawlenty and several lawmakers for what they call a bipartisan effort to require Minnesota school districts and charter schools to combine efforts to reduce costs.
Under their Minnesota K-12 Shared Service proposal, school districts and charter schools will be able to pool their purchasing power for information technology, food services, supplies and equipment, operations, transportation and other goods and services. All Minnesota public school districts and charter schools will be required to participate in shared services.
The proposal calls for the Minnesota Department of Education to create and maintain a list of preferred vendors for various shared services. Once the list was compiled, the ed department would create contracts with the preferred vendors on behalf of the state and work with school administrators, educators and other stakeholders on a two-year shared-services plan to best realize cost savings.
he bill would require (note the "require" part) all public K-12 and charter schools to purchase services in the following areas from a list of approved vendors: all school materials, supplies, tools, and equipment for school facilities operations and maintenance; technology equipment and communication services; food services; and transportation services. MDE would be responsible for approving the vendors and maintaining the list. The bill would be effective July 1, 2009. A consultant would be hired for the first two years to help the department implement the program. The consultant would be paid on a percentage of realized savings not to exceed 5%. The consultant's fee would be paid from the savings realized by individual school districts, so each district would have to calculate how much their participation in the shared services program had saved them. MDE would reduce their state funding by a certain amount to recover the funds to pay the consultant. Each district's savings would be required to be allocated to "classroom education."
The senators quickly moved to the heart of the matter, and Sen. Bonoff introduced a Mr. Dahl from Deloitte, the accounting firm. Apparently Deloitte had done some work on shared services in schools in Pennsylvania. He shared a PowerPoint with the committee describing the benefits and anticipated savings. He estimated a potential savings for MN schools of $1M/week. The questions starting coming right after he was done.
Sen. Hann (R-Eden Prairie) wondered how the new bureaucracy would not consume all of the potential savings. Dahl recognized the work of the OET and existing service coops and said that their work would be made more effective.
Sen. Hann asked if it was possible that some schools in the state would see an increase in their costs because they had already negotiated very favorable contracts. Dahl said possible, but not likely.
Sen. Hann asked what constitutes "classroom use" for the allocation of savings. Sen. Bonoff said that the intent of the legislation is to be "loose" with the classroom use restriction.
Sen. Saltzman (DFL-Woodbury) asked if the bill would have curriculum implications for textbooks, etc. Bonoff said no.
When voters on Feb. 3 decide on the Dubuque Community School District's tax proposal, the decision comes down to one thing: trust.
Do they trust school officials when they say this is a revenue-neutral proposition?
Basically, the school district is cash-strapped in one account and adequately funded in another -- but money from those funds cannot be commingled.
So, the proposal is that voters double the Instructional Support Levy and the school board promises to reduce the Cash Reserve Levy an equivalent amount. That way, taxpayers will pay the same but the district has the authority to spend dollars where they are most needed.
Voters should support the change.
However, taxing issues are never that simple. Taxpayers might vote against the Instructional Support Levy if they don't trust the school district to keep its word. It's a matter of trust. During this past decade, especially, the Dubuque Community School District has worked hard to earn and retain citizens' trust.
The focus of each session will be a presentation of the findings and recommendations of the Fine Arts Task Force followed by an opportunity for discussion. The Executive Summary and complete Fine Arts Task Force Report can be found at http://www.mmsd.org/boe/finearts/.
We are looking forward to sharing this information with you and hearing your thoughts about the research and recommendations provided by the Fine Arts Task Force.
Feedback from sessions and the recommendations from the Fine Arts Task Force will assist in improving the MMSD K-12 Fine Arts program and opportunities for our students,
If you have any questions or comments, please contact Julie Palkowski at jpalkowski@madison.k12.wi.us
Lisa Wachtel
Executive Director of Teaching and Learning
Julie Palkowski
Coordinator of Fine Arts
Please share this information with others that may be interested in attending these sessions and/or sharing their comments.
Senior class president Christopher Jolly says suspensions are so common at Anacostia High School -- where eight students were injured, including three who were stabbed, in a melee two months ago -- that they have become meaningless as a form of discipline.
"The fact that everyone knows someone who has been suspended before often causes kids not to respect the suspension process," Jolly said at a community forum this month on D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's proposal to revise the District's student behavior code.
Rhee's changes would move the system in a direction that makes sense to Jolly: away from out-of-school suspension as the disciplinary method of choice and toward counseling, peer influence and more options for keeping suspended students in school.
Officials said reliable data on suspensions are hard to come by because recordkeeping has been slipshod. But the available numbers suggest a dramatic surge. According to District figures, suspensions grew 72 percent between the 2006-07 and 2007-08 school years, from 1,303 to 2,245. That represents 4.5 percent of total enrollment. Numbers through November, the latest available for the current academic year, show suspensions running slightly behind last year.
In the letter, Mr. Gates goes out of his way to acknowledge setbacks. For example, the Gates Foundation made a major push for smaller high schools in the United States, often helping to pay for the creation of small schools within larger buildings.
"Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students' achievement in any significant way," he acknowledges. Small schools succeeded when the principal was able to change teachers, curriculum and culture, but smaller size by itself proved disappointing. "In most cases," he says, "we fell short."
Mr. Gates comes across as a strong education reformer, focusing on supporting charter schools and improving teacher quality. He suggested that when he has nailed down the evidence more firmly, he will wade into the education debates.
"It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one," Mr. Gates writes in his letter. "Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school."
I could not agree more. Rather than add coaches and layers of support staff, I'd prefer simply hiring the best teachers (and paying them) and getting out of the way. Of course, this means that not all teachers (like the population) are perfect, or above average!
The House version of a federal economic stimulus bill would deliver more than $4.3 billion to Wisconsin over the next two years, under details of the bill released Friday.
That figure includes nearly $18 million for Madison schools and millions more for other local districts.
"I'm very pleased by this. We know this is a difficult time, but at the same time there are needs that our children have that can't go unmet," said Dan Nerad, Madison schools superintendent. "I'm very hopeful. I'm very optimistic and we'll see what comes."
Under bill descriptions released by Rep. Ron Kind, D-La Crosse, and an analysis of Medicaid by a Washington, D.C. think tank, the House version would also provide:
$1.2 billion to help the state fill its $5.4 billion budget hole, with at least 61 percent being spent on schools and colleges.
Total taxes collected from Wisconsin averaged $12,281 per person in 2007-08. The $69.4 billion in annual collections was up 3.4%. Relative to personal income, however, taxes were down slightly, from 34.9% in 2007 to 34.2% in 2008.
One telling example is found in the following quote that has already created international consternation. Geithner twice answered questions about currency and China. In so doing he has placed the Obama administration squarely in the middle of the tension between the United States and the largest international buyer and holder of US debt: China. This happened as the same Obama administration is unveiling a package that will add to the TARP financing needs and the cyclical deficit financing needs and cause the United States to borrow about $2 trillion this year. Two trillion dollars of newly issued Treasury debt - and this is how the question was answered. Not once but twice.
Geithner (on page 81 and again on page 95) answered: "President Obama - backed by the conclusions of a broad range of economists - believes that China is manipulating its currency. President Obama has pledged as President to use aggressively all the diplomatic avenues open to him to seek change in China's currency practices."
"Manipulation?" "Aggressively?" This is strong language. Geithner did not do this on his own authority. These are prepared answers. He is citing the new President, not once but twice.
China's response was fast and direct. China's commerce ministry said in Beijing that China "has never used so-called currency manipulation to gain benefits in its international trade. Directing unsubstantiated criticism at China on the exchange-rate issue will only help US protectionism and will not help towards a real solution to the issue."
Are we seeing the world's largest and third largest economies calling each other names in the middle of a global economic and financial meltdown?
To increase public awareness of the nature and urgency of key economic challenges threatening America's future and accelerate action on them. To meet these challenges successfully, we work to bring Americans together to find sensible, sustainable solutions that transcend age, party lines and ideological divides in order to achieve real results.
Your critics blame your monetary policies for Zimbabwe's economic problems. I've been condemned by traditional economists who said that printing money is responsible for inflation. Out of the necessity to exist, to ensure my people survive, I had to find myself printing money. I found myself doing extraordinary things that aren't in the textbooks. Then the IMF asked the U.S. to please print money. I began to see the whole world now in a mode of practicing what they have been saying I should not. I decided that God had been on my side and had come to vindicate me.
It will be interesting to see how this money, assuming it is authorized and borrowed, is spent. Will it be spent in a way that grows the District's operating costs and therefore increases the local property tax burden once the stimulus/splurge is exhausted?
If we must borrow these funds from our grandchildren, then I would like to see it spent in a way that has long term benefits. Superintendent Nerad spoke of children whose needs are going unmet; well, those kids will be paying for these borrowed funds.
Finally, it appears that someone is spreading the love, as it were. The Congressional Research Service (whose work is not publicly available) wrote a report on stimulus/splurge funding for all US school districts. Have a look at all of the Google News references. Defense programs are known for spreading jobs around key congressional districts as a means of self preservation.
ell that didn't take long; the glow from the inauguration of the first African-American president is rapidly dimming. In President Barack Hussein Obama's (D) Chicago, the school system, recently under the superintendency of new Education Secretary Arne Duncan,
issued the following directives for high school sports competitions.
The Public League is taking drastic measures to curb a rash of violence that has erupted at its basketball games in the last week.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will announce a nearly $3.8 million grant today to help fund a mega-database that provides Dallas school educators instant access to student information - from preschool to graduation.
The Dallas Independent School District began testing the database last year. It allows educators to access "real time" student academic information and helps them watch for learning patterns. The system also holds other district-related data, such as student and teacher absences.
The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation got the data system off the ground last year with a $5 million donation to the Dallas Education Foundation, a nonprofit group created in 2006 to raise money to benefit DISD.
Today's grant of $3.77 million will be distributed over three years to DISD to help build onto the current system. The donation is among more than $22 million in grants that the Gates Foundation is announcing today for research and data systems for schools and a number of education organizations.
The Gates Foundation has invested $4 billion in improving schools and providing scholarships to students since 2000, according to foundation officials.
This year marks the ninth year of public reporting on the Board of Education Priorities for reading and mathematics achievement and school attendance. The data present a clear picture of District progress on each of the priorities. The document also reflects the deep commitment of the Madison Metropolitan School District to assuring that all students have the knowledge and skills needed for academic achievement and a successful life.
1. All students complete 3rd grade able to read at grade level or beyond.
Beginning in the fall of 2005-06, the federal No Child Left Behind Act required all states to test all students in reading from grades 3-8 and once in high school. This test replaced the former Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test. MMSD now reports on three years of data for students in grade 4.
District wide 74% of students scored proficient or advanced in reading on the 2007-08 WKCE, which is a 2% decline.
Hispanic and Other Asian students posted increases in percent of proficient or higher reading levels between 2007 and 2008.
2. All students complete Algebra by the end of 9th grade and Geometry by the end of 10th grade.
The largest relative gain in Algebra between the previous year measure, 2007-08, and this school year was among African American students.
Students living in low income households who successfully completed Algebra by grade 10 at the beginning of 2008-09 increased since the previous year.
The rate for Geometry completions for females continues to be slighter higher than their male counterparts.
3. All students, regardless of racial, ethnic, socioeconomic or linguistic subgroup, attend school at a 94 percent attendance rate at each grade level. The attendance rate of elementary students as a group continues to be above the 94% goal. All ethnic subgroups, except for African American (92.5% rate for 2007-08, 93.0% rate for 2006-07 and 93.1% for the previous two years) continue to meet the 94% attendance goal.
This report includes information about district initiatives that support students' goal attainment. In the context of the MMSD Educational Framework, the initiatives described for the literacy and the mathematics priorities focus primarily within the LEARNING component and those described for the attendance priority focus primarily within the ENGAGEMENT component. It is important to note that underlying the success of any efforts that focus on LEARNING or ENGAGEMENT is the significance of RELATIONSHIPS.
Around the country, school districts are urging officials to crack down on charter school growth--and on existing charter schools--because, they assert, there isn't enough money in strapped state budgets to pay for this sector--and of course the districts must come first.
I'm seeing this in Ohio, in Utah and in Massachusetts and do not doubt that it's happening all over the place.
But of course it's completely cockeyed. If every public-school pupil in America attended a charter school, the total taxpayer cost would be 20-30% LESS than it is today. That's because charters are underfunded (compared with district schools) and thus represent an extraordinary bargain--even if their overall academic performance isn't much different from that of district schools. Think of it as the same amount of learning at three-quarters of the price.
Milwaukee School Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and the School Board agreed Tuesday night to extend his contract to June 30, 2010 - at which point he expects to end his lengthy run in the job.
After a closed session that took less than 90 minutes, the board voted 8-0 to give Andrekopoulos the additional 15 months he asked for. His current contract expires March 23.
Andrekopoulos will be 62 at the end of the 2009-'10 school year and will be finishing eight years as superintendent, one of the longest runs currently among urban school chiefs in the country. He succeeded Spence Korté as superintendent in August 2002.
The board and Andrekopoulos agreed that the contract extension will include provisions that would pave the way for him to help with the transition to a new superintendent. That could include having him stay on in some capacity for a limited time beyond July 1, 2010.
Anyone viewing President Obama's education plans from a UK perspective will be reminded of Labour's ambitions in 1997.
The incoming US president wants to offer more support for early years children, promote innovation in schools and shut down those that are failing.
There will be a drive to widen access to higher education - with more student funding and awareness-raising.
Obama's education secretary is Chicago school chief, Arne Duncan.
Under the banner of "Zero to five", the new administration is promising extra support for early years - arguing that for every dollar invested, there will be a return to society worth $7 to $10.
Mason school officials said they are taking a proactive educational approach in advance of next week's planned Inauguration Day activities.
"Inappropriate comments that may make other students, staff or families feel unwelcome or uncomfortable in school or on the bus will not be tolerated," Superintendent Kevin Bright said in an e-mail sent to parents Monday, Jan. 12.
The district, he said, expects students and staff to show respect for President-elect Obama and the incoming administration, as well as President Bush and the outgoing administration, and recognize that "while the election is a competitive process, our nation's greatness is displayed when all sides come together for a united country."
Jeff Schlaeger, Mason High School's psychologist, said "inappropriate comments" occurred around election week when doctored pictures of Obama appeared at the school, including "derogatory caricatures" of him dressed like a terrorist and signs that read "Obama '08/Biden '09."
The USA's public schools stand to be the biggest winners in Congress' $825 billion economic stimulus plan unveiled last week. Schools are scheduled to receive nearly $142 billion over the next two years -- more than health care, energy or infrastructure projects -- and the stimulus could bring school advocates closer than ever to a long-sought dream: full funding of the No Child Left Behind law and other huge federal programs.
But tucked into the text of the proposal's 328 pages are a few surprises: If they want the money -- and they certainly do -- schools must spend at least a portion of it on a few of education advocates' long-sought dreams. In particular, they must develop:
High-quality educational tests.
Ways to recruit and retain top teachers in hard-to-staff schools.
Longitudinal data systems that let schools track long-term progress.
To keep up with competition among virtual schools in the state, the Waukesha School District's virtual charter high school has received the green light to expand its computer-based learning environment to middle school students next year.
The Waukesha School Board approved a proposal last week to add grades six, seven and eight in the 2009-'10 academic year to ">iQ Academy Wisconsin, perpetuating a trend in virtual-school growth that's happening elsewhere around the country.
The 5-year-old iQ Academy is one of 18 virtual schools in Wisconsin that residents can attend for free through open enrollment.
"We're seeing a lot of growth on both sides: Elementary programs that started as K-5 or K-6 are expanding to middle-school programs, and at the high-school level, we're seeing them reaching back to the middle-school grades," Patrick said.
Virtual high schools that expand to middle schools often do so because they want to make sure students are competent in the academic content for core courses at the high school level, Patrick said.
Typically, virtual schools exist in one of two forms. Thirty-four states, including Wisconsin, have part-time virtual schools that serve as supplemental programs for students behind on credits or to offer students a class they can't get in their public school. Students may spend a portion of their normal, supervised school day logging into an online course.
Poor test scores. High dropout rates. Enormous schools. Large class sizes. These are the words that come to Milena Skollar's mind when you ask the transplant about sending her children to school in Georgia.
"It's not fun to be 50th in the nation in SAT scores -- plus the size of the schools is very disturbing," the mother of three said. "I believe in public education. I just wish the schools were better for my children."
Eric Johnson is a Republican state senator from Savannah. Skollar, a New Jersey native, is also a school social worker employed by a metro Atlanta school system. She is among the 68 percent of Georgia voters in a recent poll who support offering parents the option to transfer their children to a private school with a voucher.
As we commence another session of the General Assembly, it's time to start thinking about parents such as Skollar and stop offering a one-size-fits-all education model to Georgia students. It's time to offer a school voucher program for parents who want it for their children who need it.
Because both of her daughters excel in the classroom, Skollar believes her Fulton County public schools cannot challenge them enough as they get older and that a private school with smaller classes may be more appropriate. She would like more options.
Stan Jones, who announced this week that he'll step down in April after 14 years as Indiana's commissioner of higher education, is right when he says that the state has made major improvements in recent years in its educational system.
But he's also correct in noting that "we still have a long way to go."
One area of vital growth, and a major part of Jones' legacy, has been the creation of a community college system, a key step toward building a work force ready to handle the challenges of the 21st century economy.
Jones on Friday said the state's community college network, launched a decade ago, is starting to show deeper maturity and higher quality. The rapid growth in enrollment at Ivy Tech Community College also indicates that students who in the past would have missed out on an education beyond high school are now pursuing degrees.
One measure of success: Two decades ago, Indiana ranked 34th in the nation in the percentage of high school seniors who went on to college. It's now 10th.
Yet, as Jones points out, college graduation rates are abysmal.
As colleges and students around the country struggle with the effects of the worldwide economic downturn, help appears to be on the way from the nation's capital. And plenty of it, to judge from a draft of a massive, $825 billion stimulus package released by Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives Thursday.
Calculating exactly how much of the proposed money -- $550 billion in new spending and $275 billion in tax breaks over two years -- could (if enacted) flow to postsecondary institutions, and to students and potential students, is difficult because many of the proposals in the package lack detail. It would also be premature for anyone in higher education (or any other potential recipients of stimulus funds) to start spending it, since (1) budget hawks in Congress and elsewhere blanched at the size and scope of the package, (2) this is just the House's version, with the Senate reportedly drafting its own, and (3) multiple steps remain in the process.
Still, none of those factors are likely to dampen interest in what's in the legislation, and a rough estimate by Inside Higher Ed suggests that tens of billions of dollars could flow to colleges and their students, in the following broad categories:
A groundswell of parents have urged the school system, which requires a 94 for an A and a 64 to pass, to adopt the more broadly used practice of giving an A for 90 or better and setting 60 as the passing score. They also have argued that Fairfax should add extra points to the grade-point averages of those who take honors courses or college-level classes. They maintain that the current policy puts students at a disadvantage when they apply to colleges and for scholarships.
On Jan. 2, Dale recommended changing how the school system calculates GPAs but not the grading scale.
In a work session yesterday, board members listed advantages of changing the scale and advantages of keeping it. The list of reasons offered for change was twice as long. For example, members said a change would align Fairfax with other school systems and lessen parents' confusion. But an advantage to keeping the scale, some said, would be that students would work harder for better grades.
The Washington Teachers' Union says the District is improperly withholding the names of instructors who have been given 90 school days to improve their performance or face dismissal.
Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said the disclosure would be counterproductive, but the union said she is obligated by contract to share the information. The issue is likely to be discussed at today's D.C. Council hearing on school personnel practices.
The 90-day plans are part of Rhee's attempt to remove "a significant share" of the 4,000-member teacher corps, which she regards as "not up to the demanding task of educating our youth effectively," according to the long-range action document she presented in October.
Abplanalp, who has been working on the 4-K project for the seven years since joining the district as lead elementary principal, said there isn't a timetable in place as to when the program would start.
But she wouldn't count out the 2009-10 school year if three main issues can be ironed out.
"Could we get things in place by the fall? We think we could if we got the go-ahead," Abplanalp said Thursday afternoon. "If not, it's because we have issues to work out contractually with MTI (the teacher's union). ... We also have to work out community site issues, negotiating (contract) issues and financial issues."
Madison Metropolitan School District officials will unveil plans to offer a dual-language program at Leopold Elementary beginning next fall.
The new curriculum for the south side school would include education in English and Spanish, and discussion of the plan is anticipated at a Madison School Board meeting on Feb. 2.
Three sections of kindergarten classes with approximately 48 children will become part of the program, which will progress one grade level each school year until the program's initial students finish fifth grade. The school will join east side's Nuestro Mundo as the second public school in the Madison Metropolitan School District to offer a dual-language program. Nuestro Mundo, a charter school, has been in operation for five years.
Eight of Leopold's 44 classrooms are bilingual, and the school is a perfect fit for the immersion program, according to Assistant Superintendent Sue Abplanalp.
"We know the benefits of dual-immersion programming," Abplanalp said. "This is a perfect place to begin such a program because we know could get the enrollment that we need to make it a viable program for the future.
"We want native speaking Spanish children as well as non-native Spanish children, and that's the population that is at that building," she said.
The local public colleges that enroll the most Boston high school graduates have had a dismal record seeing them through to a degree, with many posting graduation rates of less than 25 percent, according to a study that reviewed the collegiate careers of the city's class of 2000.
Only 20.7 percent of the 150 students from the class who attended the University of Massachusetts at Boston - the most popular four-year public college for Boston high school students - graduated by the spring of 2007. By contrast, the most popular private school, Northeastern University, has handed degrees to 82.5 percent of the 80 Boston students from that class who enrolled there by the fall of 2001.
The rates at other popular public colleges were even worse. Bunker Hill Community College graduated 14.2 percent of its 155 Boston students, while Roxbury Community College had a graduation rate of 5.9 percent for its 101 Boston enrollees, according to new data released by the Boston Private Industry Council at the Globe's request. The council is a group of city business leaders who work on education policy issues.
Are teachers unions and collective bargaining agreements barriers to high school reform and redesign efforts in Washington, California, and Ohio? The short answer: sometimes, but not as often as many educators seem to think.
On one hand, collective bargaining agreements (CBAs)--long, complex, and unwieldy documents which can be difficult for an overworked principal to navigate--are often perceived as obstacles by many principals and other educators, and to a certain extent this perception becomes reality. And, while these perceptions can limit school-level flexibility and autonomy, there are also restrictive provisions within CBAs that do so as well.
On the other hand, CBAs tend to have waiver provisions. In many cases, districts and teachers unions can also negotiate side agreements on individual issues (e.g., memoranda of understanding, or MOUs) to provide desired flexibility. And, in perhaps our most significant finding, many of the CBA provisions that we analyzed were more flexible than educators and reform advocates often suggest.
Finally, many CBA provisions that we studied were simply ambiguous. This ambiguity could potentially allow for greater latitude for an aggressive principal who is looking for greater flexibility and willing to push the envelope, while serving to limit a more cautious or timid principal who looks to the CBA for explicit authority or permission first before acting.
Mariel Wozniak, via email: The National Governor's Association 4.5MB PDF Report:
Today, the National Governors Association (NGA) has released Arts & the Economy: Using Arts and Culture to Stimulate State Economic Development. This comprehensive report is a product of the long-standing partnership between the NEA and NGA, with extensive research support from the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA). At this moment, the report is enjoying front page status on the NGA website at www.nga.org . It's not often that governors receive information from the NGA that gives such high priority to the arts as a policy solution to the issues they are facing. Arts & the Economy arrives on the desks of governors at what is obviously a critical decision-making period for all states. We're confident you will find it is a valuable resource to share with your governor, legislators, constituents and advocates as you move through the budget process for FY 10.
Here is a quotation I placed in one of the meeting rooms in the Ruth Bachhuber-Doyle Adm. Building during my tenure at MMSD. It ought to be in every school:
"Our greatest scientists are generally skilled in non-verbal thinking yet we usually discourage science students from studying artistic subjects. Unless we reverse this trend, they will continue to be cut off from thought processes that lead to creative breakthroughs."
Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein, Professor of Physiology at Michigan State University, formerly scientist with the Salk Institute.
We constantly think that we need more teachers. That may not be the case. In fact we may need fewer, better teachers in combination with better automation (particularly in college). Some points:
The delta of experience between attending a lecture and watching a video of a lecture? Nada. If anything, the video is better since you can rewind it, view it at the best vantage point (vs. at the back of a big lecture hall), and view it in a quiet relaxed space.
Video lectures (as most colleges are doing now) make it possible to get the best. A dozen of the best lecture series could serve to replace 99% of lectures now being given by less gifted teachers.
Interactive education, like what MIT is providing now, is highly computerized. Almost all of it could be done online.
The interactive process of learning/application via collaboration is something that is perfectly suited for virtual worlds. JIT information in combination with simulated real world application within a collaborative environment is something that is going on with WoW right now (on a massive scale).
The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.
M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.
The traditional 50-minute lecture was geared more toward physics majors, said Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard who is a pioneer of the new approach, and whose work has influenced the change at M.I.T.
"The people who wanted to understand," Professor Mazur said, "had the discipline, the urge, to sit down afterwards and say, 'Let me figure this out.' " But for the majority, he said, a different approach is needed.
Certainly worth exploring as part of Madison's strategic plan. School Board member Ed Hughes has mentioned virtual learning and collaboration a number of times.
WORKLESS children were "idling in the streets" and "tumbling about in the gutters", wrote one observer in 1861 of the supposedly baleful effects of a reduction in the use of child labour. Such concerns eventually led to schooling being made mandatory for under-tens in 1880. The minimum school-leaving age has been raised five times since then and now stands at 16; but panic about feral youths menacing upright citizens and misspending the best years of their lives has not gone away.
Today's equivalent of the Victorian street urchin is the "NEET"--a youth "not in education, employment or training". And the same remedy is being prescribed: by 2013 all teenagers will have to continue in education or training until age 17, and by 2015 until 18. Now there are political rumours that the education-leaving age could be raised sooner, perhaps as early as this autumn. Bringing the measure forward is said to be among the proposals being prepared for the "jobs summit" Gordon Brown has grandly announced.
During downturns young people tend to have more difficulty finding, and staying in, work than older ones. So a policy that would keep them off the jobless register has obvious appeal for the government. Youngsters who have studied for longer may, moreover, be better placed for an eventual upturn, whenever that might be. And, unlike other measures on Mr Brown's wish-list, this one is achievable by ministerial edict.
Your editorial "A Charter Setback in Florida" (Jan. 7) might lead some people to infer that my administration is not a champion of school choice. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, as a state senator I co-sponsored the original 1996 legislation that created charter schools in Florida. Florida now ranks third nationally in the number of charter schools and fourth in the number of charter-school students, and I am committed to championing school choice in Florida.
Charter schools are not only critical to a successful public education system, but they also represent the ingenuity of communities throughout the Sunshine State.
Florida has made great strides when it comes to education, as evidenced by the "2009 Quality Counts: Portrait of a Population" report released this week. Issued annually by "Education Week," the report tracks state policies and performance across key areas of education. Florida's education ranking jumped from 14th to 10th in the nation, and its overall grade improved from a C+ to a B-. Among our many achievements, we are also closing the achievement gap between minority students and white students -- and have even eliminated it when you consider the number of Florida's Hispanic students passing Advanced Placement exams in 2007. Students in the Sunshine State excel in AP course participation and performance, with more than one-fifth of 2007 graduates passing an AP exam.
In the afterglow of your election, Americans today run the risk of forgetting that the nation still faces one last great civil-rights battle: closing the insidious achievement gap between minority and white students. Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America. Yet today the average 12th-grade black or Hispanic student has the reading, writing and math skills of an eighth-grade white student.
That appalling four-year gap is even worse in high-poverty high schools, which often are dropout factories. In Detroit, just 34% of black males manage to graduate. In the nation's capital -- home to one of the worst public-school systems in America -- only 9% of ninth-grade students go on to graduate and finish college within five years. Can this really be the shameful civil-rights legacy that we bequeath to poor black and Hispanic children in today's global economy?
This achievement gap cannot be narrowed by a series of half-steps from the usual suspects. As you observed when naming Chicago superintendent Arne Duncan to be the next secretary of education, "We have talked our education problems to death in Washington." Genuine school reform, you stated during the campaign, "will require leaders in Washington who are willing to learn from students and teachers . . . about what actually works."
We, too, believe that true education reform can only be brought about by a bipartisan coalition that challenges the entrenched education establishment. And we second your belief that school reformers must demonstrate an unflagging commitment to "what works" to dramatically boost academic achievement -- rather than clinging to reforms that we "wish would work."
With two massive parental revolts nearing victory in Fairfax County, and mothers and fathers elsewhere in the area plotting similar insurgencies, it is time to disclose a great truth about even the best educators I know: As much as they deny it, they really don't like outsiders messing with the way they do their jobs.
I don't like that either. Do you? We know what we are doing. Most other folks don't. We are polite to outsiders, but only to mollify them so we can hang up and get back to work.
The problem is that schools, unlike most institutions, are handling parents' most precious possessions, their children. That aggravates the emotional side of the discussion. It makes it more likely that smart educators are going to write off parents as interfering idiots, even if they actually have a good idea and data to prove it.
I was a school parent for 30 years. The last kid graduated from college in 2007, but a grandchild has just appeared. That sound you hear is California teachers muttering at the thought of me at their door, brimming with helpful suggestions. I know how this works. The school people smile and nod, but nothing happens. Sure, some parent ideas are daft. But important queries are also shrugged off.
The average teacher salary last year was $65,808, an increase of 3.4 percent from 2007, according to new state figures. Teacher pay varies widely by district. And some districts have seen average salaries drop as they replace a large number of experienced teachers with new recruits.
Notes: Average salaries are often a reflection of three things: An area's cost of living; how much the district is willing to pay and the number of experienced teachers the district employs. So if your district is low on this list but you see it has a high maximum salary, it probably means that it's got a lot of teachers fresh out of college.
About 5 percent of the state's districts didn't submit data in 2008; for most of these, The Bee used 2007 salary data. Please note the year of the data as listed in your results. Districts with no data for 2007 or 2008 were excluded from this database. Salary changes were calculated using inflation-adjusted 2004 average annual salary figures.
As Chicago schools chief, Arne Duncan has found innovative ways to skirt the restrictive cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in Illinois, thus expanding opportunities for low-income kids. So it's instructive to contrast Mr. Duncan's can-do attitude with that of Florida Governor Charlie Crist, whose inaction last week handed a victory to opponents of school choice.
On December 2 a Florida District Court struck down a law that created the Florida Schools of Excellence Commission, an alternative authorizer of charter schools formed in 2006 under Governor Crist's predecessor, Jeb Bush. The state had 30 days to appeal to the Florida Supreme Court but let the deadline pass last week.
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The upshot is that only local school boards will be able to authorize charter schools, creating a fox-in-the-hen-house situation in which the same institutions that most oppose school choice will be in a position to block its expansion. Charter schools compete with district schools for students and teachers. And the teachers unions that control the traditional public school system fear that more charters mean smaller school districts and fewer dues-paying union jobs.
Madison Math Task Force Public Session Wednesday Evening 1/14/2009
The public is invited to attend the Cherokee Middle School PTO's meeting this Wednesday, January 14, 2009. The Madison School District will present it's recent Math Task Force findings at 7:00p.m. in the Library.
A participant asked why the report focused on Middle Schools. The impetus behind the effort was the ongoing controversy over the Madison School District's use of Connected Math.
Madison's math coordinator, Brian Sniff, mentioned that the District sought a "neutral group, people not very vocal one end or the other". Terry Millar, while not officially part of the task force, has been very involved in the District's use of reform math programs (Connected Math) for a number of years and was present at the meeting. The 2003, $200,000 SCALE (System-Wide Change for All Learners and Educators" (Award # EHR-0227016 (Clusty Search), CFDA # 47.076 (Clusty Search)), from the National Science Foundation) agreement between the UW School of Education (Wisconsin Center for Education Research) names Terry as the principal investigator [340K PDF]. The SCALE project has continued each year, since 2003. Interestingly, the 2008 SCALE agreement ([315K PDF] page 6) references the controversial "standards based report cards" as a deliverable by June, 2008, small learning communities (page 3) and "Science Standards Based Differentiated Assessments for Connected Math" (page 6). The document also references a budget increase to $812,336. (additional SCALE agreements, subsequent to 2003: two, three, four)
Task force member Dr. Mitchell Nathan is Director of AWAKEN [1.1MB PDF]:
Agreement for Releasing Data and Conducting Research for
AWAKEN Project in Madison Metropolitan School District
The Aligning Educational Experiences with Ways of Knowing Engineering (AWAKEN) Project (NSF giant #EEC-0648267 (Clusty search)) aims to contribute to the long-term goal of fostering a larger, more diverse and more able pool of engineers in the United States. We propose to do so by looking at engineering education as a system or continuous developmental experience from secondary education through professional practice....
In collaboration with the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD), AWAKEN researchers from the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research (WCER) will study and report on science, mathematics, and Career and Technical Education (specifically Project Lead The Way) curricula in the district.
I am particularly interested in what the ties between the UW-Madison School of Education and the Madison School District mean for the upcoming "Strategic Planning Process" [49K PDF]. The presence of the term "standards based report cards" and "small learning communities" within one of the SCALE agreements makes me wonder who is actually driving the District. In other words, are the grants driving decision making?
High schools are supposed to produce graduates. But some schools are dubbed drop out factories. At Chicago's Robeson High, on the city's South Side, the graduation rate is just 39 percent. It is a place where more students quit than graduate. Almost all of the 1,300 kids here fail to meet state standards. But everyday, there are administrators, teachers and students who come to school hoping to make a difference. We're spending time at Robeson High because we want to understand the complex issues that go into a student's decision to quit. And we want to know why other students in the same place hang in there and graduate against the odds.
"This school is not for the faint of heart."--Principal Morrow.
Related: Meet the students and teachers from 50/50: The Odds of Graduating.
A week before school starts, Robeson staff gathers in the media center to go over what to expect.
The Verona School District is planning to become the first in Dane County to lock all doors at some schools and require visitors to appear on camera to receive permission to enter, and the first to require that high school students display identification badges at all times. Many students support the moves, even as others question whether they're really needed in the community that calls itself "Hometown, USA."
In Middleton, educators are deep into discussions that could lead to asking taxpayers for $3.5 million for cameras, other equipment and remodeling projects to tighten security at their 10 schools. Madison school officials have begun a major review of security measures that by spring could lead to proposals to control the public's access to that district's 48 schools.
These are signs that despite tight budgets, Wisconsin educators are pushing ahead in their efforts to keep schools safe -- efforts that took on added urgency with the 2006 slaying of Weston High School principal John Klang by a student, and other tragedies across the nation.
On one wall of my cubicle is a large chart extracted from Tom Luce and Lee Thompson's 2005 book "Do What Works: How Proven Practices Can Improve America's Public Schools." It shows that a study of 78,000 Texas students found college graduation rates much higher for those who, while in high school, took Advanced Placement exams -- but failed them -- than those who took no AP exams at all.
At this point, you may be saying, "Huh?" We AP wonks are an odd breed. We often cite statistics that make no sense to normal people. But I will try to explain this one, and why it was greeted with such excitement by AP teachers four years ago.
AP courses are given in nearly 40 subjects. They allow high school students to earn college credit, or at least skip college introductory courses, if they do well on the final exams. Many AP teachers argue that students' grades on the three-hour exams, given in most U.S. high schools every May, are not as important as taking the college-level course and exam and getting a taste of college trauma. Many of their students who flunk the AP exam still report, when they come back to visit after their freshman year of college, that the AP experience made it easier for them to adjust to fat college reading lists and long, analytical college exams. They may have failed the AP exam, but by taking it, and the course, they were better prepared for the load of stuff dumped on them in college. When they took the college introductory course in the subject that had been so difficult for them in high school AP, they did much better.
The Texas study showing that failed AP students were more likely to graduate from college than non-AP students was thus greeted as proof that the AP teachers' view on this issue was correct. But the researchers who had done the work cautioned against putting too much weight on it. There were too many variables to reach hard conclusions.
On pages 35 and 36 of their report, the Texas researchers revealed what was for me the most interesting of their many new disclosures. They show that even students who only get a 2 on their AP exams after taking the AP course have significantly better college outcomes than non-AP students. Students who get 1s on the exam do not do better than non-AP students, but as I have often heard AP teachers say, they have no chance to build those students up to a 2 or a 3 unless they are allowed in their courses.
These are complicated issues. This study is not the last word. Critics of AP may say that these researchers' work is tainted by the fact that the College Board, which owns the AP program, paid them for their study. But there is no question they are reputable, independent scholars, and their data is there for all to see.
Fartun Warsame, a Somali immigrant, thought she was being a good mother when she transferred her five boys to a top elementary school in an affluent Minneapolis suburb. Besides its academic advantages, the school was close to her job as an ultrasound technician, so if the teachers called, she could get there right away.
"Immediately they changed," Ms. Warsame said of her sons. "They wanted to wear shorts. They'd say, 'Buy me this.' I said, 'Where did you guys get this idea you can control me?' "
Her sons informed her that this was the way things were in America. But not in this Somali mother's house. She soon moved them back to the city, to the International Elementary School, a charter school of about 560 pupils in downtown Minneapolis founded by leaders of the city's large East African community. The extra commuting time was worth the return to the old order: five well-behaved sons, and one all-powerful mother.
Charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently run, were conceived as a way to improve academic performance. But for immigrant families, they have also become havens where their children are shielded from the American youth culture that pervades large district schools.
The curriculum at the Twin Cities International Elementary School, and at its partner middle school and high school, is similar to that of other public schools with high academic goals. But at Twin Cities International the girls say they can freely wear head scarves without being teased, the lunchroom serves food that meets the dietary requirements of Muslims, and in every classroom there are East African teaching assistants who understand the needs of students who may have spent years in refugee camps. Twin Cities International students are from Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan, with a small population from the Middle East.
The diversity of Minneapolis charter schools is one reason my niece and her family remain in the city, rather than retreating to the burbs.
In March of 2008, Lieutenant Governor Barbara Lawton and State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster formed the Wisconsin Task Force on Arts and Creativity in Education and they began their work to assert the central role of the arts and creativity in education in this 21st century global economy. (You can watch a short video on the Task Force's launch here.) The Co-Chairs and Task Force members alike understand creativity to be the bedrock of the arts, the renewable resource that will be the sustainable energy of this economy. As international expert Charles Landry says, "Creativity is one of the last remaining legal ways to gain an unfair advantage over the competition.
Through this web site you will learn about the Task Force and its workgroups. You can listen to the testimony from the Public Forums and experience the resources that influenced the Task Force's work.
As President-Elect Barack Obama and his Congressional allies shape -- and debate -- their big economic-stimulus package any day now, governors are pleading with them to include hundreds of billions for state governments that face whopping deficits. Most analysts of the stimulus measure will ask whether such spending will truly goose the economy, whether Obama kept his campaign promises, or how much of the bill is just pork. But those who worry about k-12 education should be asking: will it be good for education reform? And to date there's ample reason to suspect that the answer will be "no".
The most interesting part of this evaluation is the continued poor rating our standards receive. Those lovely standards we are basing our new middle school report cards upon. Otherwise Wisconsin stacks up pretty well.
The Madison School District Administration held a public input session on the recent Math Task Force report [3.9MB PDF] last evening at Memorial High School. Superintendent Dan Nerad opened and closed the meeting, which featured about 56 attendees, at least half of whom appeared to be district teachers and staff. Math Coordinator Brian Sniff ran the meeting.
Task force member and UW-Madison Professor Mitchell Nathan [Clusty Search] was in attendance along with Terry Millar, a UW-Madison Professor who has been very involved in the Madison School District's math programs for many years. (Former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater recently joined the UW-Madison Center for Education Research, among other appointments). UW-Madison Math professor Steffen Lempp attended as did school board President Arlene Silveira and board members Ed Hughes and Beth Moss. Jill Jokela, the parent representative on the Math Task Force, was also present.
A New Indoor Pool/Parking Complex at Madison West High School?
A proposed $17,624,450 eight lane indoor pool, diving well, fitness center, community activity/wellness pool and a two-level parking deck for Madison West High School was on Monday evening's Madison School Board agenda [441K PDF].
Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz's wishlist (it includes $14,000,000 for "public pools at Warner Park and Reindahl", but no funds for this, as far as I can see).
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, in light of the District's strategic plan, academic priorities, other high school facilities and how the operating costs are covered.
Via the Madison City Clerk's Office, Seat 1 will have a competitive race with Donald Gors, Jr. facing incumbent Arlene Silveira. Arlene has served as President for the past two years. The current occupant of seat 2, Lucy Mathiak is running unopposed.
Nineteen years ago, Jennifer Courter set out on a career path that has since provided her with a steady stream of lucrative, low-stress jobs. Now, her occupation -- mathematician -- has landed at the top spot on a new study ranking the best and worst jobs in the U.S.
"It's a lot more than just some boring subject that everybody has to take in school," says Ms. Courter, a research mathematician at mental images Inc., a maker of 3D-visualization software in San Francisco. "It's the science of problem-solving."
The study, to be released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress. (CareerCast.com is published by Adicio Inc., in which Wall Street Journal owner News Corp. holds a minority stake.)
The findings were compiled by Les Krantz, author of "Jobs Rated Almanac," and are based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, as well as studies from trade associations and Mr. Krantz's own expertise.
According to the study, mathematicians fared best in part because they typically work in favorable conditions -- indoors and in places free of toxic fumes or noise -- unlike those toward the bottom of the list like sewage-plant operator, painter and bricklayer. They also aren't expected to do any heavy lifting, crawling or crouching -- attributes associated with occupations such as firefighter, auto mechanic and plumber.
The study also considers pay, which was determined by measuring each job's median income and growth potential. Mathematicians' annual income was pegged at $94,160, but Ms. Courter, 38, says her salary exceeds that amount.
Parents and citizens have another opportunity to provide input on this matter when Brian Sniff, Madison's Math Coordinator and Lisa Wachtel, Director of Madison's Teaching & Learning discuss the Math Report at a Cherokee Middle School PTO meeting on January 14, 2009 at 7:00p.m.
A change in how the state finances schools is having an effect that is the reverse of what Robin Hood would do, an advocacy group contends.
It is aiding the rich at the expense of the poor.
Increases in the state's school levy tax credit in recent years mean that taxpayers statewide saw $822.4 million taken off of their property tax bills in December. But the Association for Equity in Funding argues that credit amount, which is distributed based on property tax burden, results in more help for school districts where residents generally have higher incomes and already spend more on education than for low-income districts.
How much so? In an analysis released in December, the group found that all but one of 46 school districts that received more than $1,500 per pupil from the levy credit spent above the state average. In contrast, 35 of the 57 school districts that received less than $500 per pupil from the credit had below-average spending.
That result is contrary to the general aim of the state's school funding system to distribute aid in a way to help reduce the gap between rich and poor communities, the association said.
"The governor and the Legislature should stop increasing the school levy credit now!" wrote Doug Haselow, executive director of the association, which unsuccessfully sued to overturn the state's school funding system earlier in the decade.
That might be difficult to do.
One main reason that the levy credit has increased in every budget since Gov. Jim Doyle took office is that "it's an accounting trick," said Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
Although the levy credit can be counted toward funding the state government's two-thirds portion of school costs in one year, it actually isn't paid to municipalities until the following fiscal year, Berry said. That has helped the state balance its budgets while claiming to cover its obligations, he said.
Police arrests of students at Hartford-area schools are on the rise, according to a new American Civil Liberties Union report released today, a trend that disproportionately impacts children of color.
The ACLU report, entitled "Hard Lessons: School Resource Officer Programs and School-Based Arrests in Three Connecticut Towns," also shows how the use by school districts in Hartford, East Hartford and West Hartford of school resource officers who are not adequately trained and whose objectives are not clearly defined leads to the criminalization of students at the expense of their education.
The report's findings are just the latest examples of a disturbing national trend known as the "school to prison pipeline" wherein children are over-aggressively funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
"Our goal is to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to receive a quality education," said Jamie Dycus, staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program and the primary author of the report. "Relying too heavily on arrests as a disciplinary measure impedes that goal and only serves to ensure that some of our most vulnerable populations are criminalized at very young ages before alternatives are exhausted that could lead to academic success."
According to the report, students in West Hartford and East Hartford are arrested at school at a rate far out of proportion to their numbers. During the 2006-07 school year, for example, black and Hispanic students together accounted for 69 percent of East Hartford's student population, but experienced 85 percent of its school-based arrests. In West Hartford during the same year, black and Hispanic students accounted for 24 percent of the population, but experienced 63 percent of the arrests.
Five people are vying to become the next superintendent of education in Wisconsin, a position that will help shape education policy in the state for the next four years.
The five come from a variety of backgrounds -- one is a school superintendent, two are college professors, one is a virtual schools leader, and another is the deputy superintendent.
Tuesday is the deadline for those who want to run for the position to file signatures with the state. It's also the deadline for all other spring elections, including judicial openings and the state Supreme Court.
The field for the education secretary race and any other with more than two candidates will be narrowed to two in a Feb. 17 primary. The election is April 7. The new education secretary takes over July 1 for Libby Burmaster, who decided against seeking a third term.
The state superintendent is largely an administrative post, with little actual power over setting policy, but able to use the position to advocate for their priorities across the state.
The superintendent is responsible for governing Wisconsin's public schools, administering state and federal aid, and offering guidance to teachers and administrators. The superintendent also crafts a spending request every two years to run the agency and provide state aid to public schools, which is subject to approval by the Legislature.
Despite the diverse field seeking the post this year, all five candidates agree on many issues such as the need for reform statewide, changes to the No Child Left Behind Law, and improving Milwaukee schools. But they also disagree on major areas, such as the need to repeal a law affecting teacher salaries, that could play a major factor in who wins.
Early on in his campaign, Barack Obama's education agenda included a long wish list of proposals for early childhood education, dropout prevention and after-school and college outreach programs among others. Obama called it his "Children First" agenda.
With the economy on life support and just about every state now slashing education funding, President-elect Obama is likely to focus less on his wish list and more on the political consensus he says he wants to build around education.
"For years, we've talked our education problems to death," he said last month. "Stuck in the same tired debates, Democrat versus Republican, more money versus more reform, all along failing to acknowledge that both sides have good ideas and good intentions. We can't continue like this."
If you're looking for good news about Milwaukee Public Schools, consider this: The graduation rate has risen steadily in recent years and is more than 18 percentage points higher than it was in 1996-'97.
Those who say only half of MPS students graduate are right - if they're using figures from a few years ago. But they're wrong now. The official graduation rate is pushing 70%, and even independent analysts, using different ways of calculating the rate, put the figure at closer to 60%.
It appears clear that MPS is doing a better job of keeping teens in school and getting them to the point where they cross a stage and receive a diploma.
Maybe the cause is the creation of a couple of dozen small high schools or changes in the programs inside some of the remaining big schools. Or maybe it's simply success in spreading the message that a diploma is important. But dropout rates are down and kids who used to drift away from school are staying connected.
Before you get too cheery about the improving picture, however, you might want to consider a few more aspects of the crucial question of whether MPS is graduating a sufficiently large number of students who are ready for life after graduation.
To sum up: There just isn't much evidence that MPS high school students are actually doing much better academically. In short, graduation is up, but actual readiness to take on the world might not have changed much.
If there was any doubt that Jon Bales would be a good fit for the DeForest School District, it was quickly erased when he arrived here nearly a decade ago.
The School Board had set up a program to solicit input from residents about the future direction of the district. Another superintendent might have been more eager to put his own stamp on the district. But Bales embraced the project, which led to a renewed commitment to technology, quality facilities and individualized learning programs.
"When we did that, it just really made a connection between the district and the community," said Bales, 56. "For me that was one of the most gratifying things we've done. All that community input is like gold."
In February, the district plans to hold a similar program, this time looking to the year 2025.
Bales' role in implementing those goals is among the reasons he has been named Wisconsin's 2009 Superintendent of the Year by the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators.
The governor's ambitious overhaul of public education -- from universal preschool to free community college -- appears likely to be placed on hold, as the state grapples with a massive budget deficit that could lead to funding cuts for local school districts.
An education finance committee that was appointed by the governor last summer said today that the economic downturn is preventing it from recommending any immediate measures to raise revenue to pay for the governor's plan. Instead, the committee recommended modest cost-saving measures that could yield $550 million.
"The commission recognized that the state is facing completely different fiscal realities than were contemplated this past summer," according to a report released today by the commission. "The most recent estimates for the fiscal year 2010 budget predict a deficit of between $2 and $3 billion dollars. ... The commission's deliberations, therefore, concentrated on the urgent need to find opportunities for cost savings and to maintain support for our education system in a time of inadequate resources."
The cost-saving measures focus heavily on encouraging local school districts to pool together resources to increase their ability to negotiate better purchase prices for things such as health insurance, energy contracts, and classroom supplies as well as share some administrative jobs.
With the start of Minnesota's legislative session nearing, several education groups have been pushing the Legislature to establish an independent commission to research state education policy and look at efficient, innovative ways to educate Minnesota students.
Groups such as Parents United for Public Schools and the Association of Metropolitan School Districts say it will help the state's education system if legislators are armed with good, independent peer-reviewed research. And they say it will help the state's taxpayers when education policies that are ineffective or inefficient are proven to be so, and are ended.
"We as legislators are constantly asked to make some very hard decisions that impact many, many lives, and we don't always have good research at our disposal," said Sen. Sandy Rummel, DFL-White Bear Lake, who is working on drafting the legislation.
An independent research group would likely be funded by start-up money from the state -- maybe $200,000, according to Scott Croonquist, executive director of the Association of Metropolitan School Districts. Then, it would seek independent foundation and grant money, and try to get some help from higher education research institutions, he said.
As lawmakers head to the Capitol next week to face a massive budget deficit, two new reports are making the case that lawmakers need to put more money into education.
One report, from the Minnesota Budget Project, concludes what many school leaders have said for years: That state funding hasn't kept up with inflation this decade.
Analyst Katherine Blauvelt says the state dropoff has resulted in higher property taxes. And Blauvelt says that might leave homeowners thinking schools are flush with cash.
"But what we actually found was the increased property taxes didn't plug the budget hole that the drop in state dollars left," she said.
The report also analyzes data on college tuition increases over the past decade.
Another report, from the Bush Foundation, found unprepared kindergartners are more likely to drop out of high school, which costs Minnesota schools $42 million a year in lost state aid.
Among the recommendations from a task force that recently completed a one-year study:
• Switch to full-time math teachers for all students in grades five through eight.
• The math task force's executive summary and full report
• Substantially boost the training of math teachers.
• Seriously consider selecting a single textbook for each grade level or course in the district, rather than having a variety of textbooks used in schools across the district.
The task force was created in 2006 by the Madison School Board to independently review the district's math programs and seek ways to improve students' performance.
Pelham said Vermont schools are among the best-funded in the nation and have been getting more money and more staff while the number of students continues to decline.
"Vermont's best-in-the-nation spending on K-12 education provides a very reasonable basis to ask the education lobby to temper their exuberant self-interest and to work with others to find a more balanced response to Vermont's current economic and fiscal concerns," Pelham said in a Dec. 29 letter to legislative leaders.
John Nelson of the Vermont School Boards' Association said he took exception to Pelham's letter.
"What I know from talking with board members around the state is that there are truly agonizing discussions going on about this year's budget," Nelson said. "We're aware of the economic climate, but we're also aware of the continuing demand on schools."
State Sen. Peter Shumlin, a Putney Democrat, the senate president pro tem and one of the lawmakers to whom Pelham's letter was addressed, said it was "disrespectful and destructive" to blame school boards for rising costs.
"Clearly, the tone of the letter suggests there is real animosity between the governor, the tax commissioner and hard working school board members. When that spills over into the public dialogue it is a disservice to all Vermonters," Shumlin said.
The collective bargaining agreement with the UAW is a heavily negotiated document the size of a small telephone book. It is virtually identical for each of the Detroit Three, owing to "pattern" bargaining, but it doesn't exist at all in their U.S. competition, the nonunionized transplants. Not only work rules, but fundamental business decisions to sell, close or spin-off plants are forbidden without permission. That permission may come, but only at a price, since everything that affects the workplace must be negotiated.
Both the UAW and the Detroit Three maintain large staffs of lawyers, contract administrators, and financial and human-resources representatives whose principal job is to negotiate with the other side. These staffs are at all levels, from the factory floor to corporate headquarters and the UAW's "Solidarity House" in downtown Detroit.
The collective bargaining agreements are now renegotiated every four years; in each negotiation the power and penetration of the union grows. If the company asks to change the flow of work for any reason, from cost-savings to vehicle improvements, the local union president will listen politely, and then say something like, "We can help you with this, but what's in it for my guys?"
Typically, he will have a list of things he wants, some understandable (better cafeterias) some questionable (hire my nephew), but there is always a quid pro quo. These mutually sustaining bureaucracies exist to negotiate with each other.
In an environment of downsizing, the problem is exacerbated, as the entrenched bargaining structure causes innumerable inefficiencies. Typically each plant or warehouse is a "bargaining unit" and has a union president, who has a staff. If the company consolidates facilities, there will be no need for two presidents and two staffs. Since neither president wants to play musical chairs, they will both point to the bargaining agreement and resist consolidation. As a result, unnecessary facilities are not sold, but kept open, lit and heated, just to preserve a redundant bargaining-unit president and his team.
Many teacher union agreements are patterned after the United Auto Workers. Here's a look at several agreements:
A school district in Westminster struggling with declining enrollment and falling test scores will try something revolutionary next year that many say never has been accomplished in the Lower 48.
Adams 50 will eliminate grade levels and instead group students based on what they know, allowing them to advance to the next level after they have proved proficiency.
"If they can pull this off, it will be a lighthouse for America's challenged school districts," said Richard DeLorenzo, the consultant who implemented a standards-based model in Alaska and is working with Adams 50. "It will change the face of American education."
A district of 10,000 students and 21 schools, Adams 50 serves a working-class suburb north of Denver. Seventy-two percent of its students are poor enough for federal meal benefits, two-thirds are Latino, and 38 percent still are learning English.
When Janet Webber's three youngest children head to school, they don't meet up with the yellow buses rolling through their Cumming subdivision.
Instead Roni, the seventh-grader, spreads books across the kitchen table and logs onto the computer. Webber leads her other two children --- a first- and third-grader --- upstairs, to a sunny room with two desks, a laptop computer and bookcases filled with textbooks.
The three kids spend the next five hours or so completing lessons designed by the Georgia Virtual Academy. The online charter school started in 2007 and has quietly become one of the largest public schools in the state. It teaches about 4,400 elementary and middle school students from 163 of the state's 180 school districts.
Internet-based schools have popped up across the country in the past few years because of improved technology and changing education laws. As of January, there were 173 virtual charter schools teaching about 92,000 students in 18 states, according to the North American Council for Online Learning.
Nationally, little research has been done on the effectiveness of such online schools. They're just too new.
But Roni, 12, has no doubts about her school.
"I do everything else on the computer, so why not go to school that way?" she said.
For the Webber children, the computer is their classroom.
At Cameron Elementary School west of downtown, most kids don't know the alphabet when they start kindergarten, nearly all are poor, and one was jumped by a gang recently, just off campus. But the school this year posted its highest reading and math scores ever -- a feat that earned cash bonuses for teachers, administrators, even janitors.
City schools chief executive Arne Duncan, President-elect Barack Obama's choice for education secretary, pushed that performance-pay plan and a host of other innovations to transform a school system once regarded as one of the country's worst. As Duncan heads to Washington, the lessons of Chicago could provide a model for fixing America's schools.
"Obama chose Arne Duncan for a reason, and part of that reason is the experimentation that Duncan has done in Chicago and his real attention to data and outcomes," said Elliot Weinbaum, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. "Duncan's willing to try new things and see if they work, hopefully keep the ones that do and drop the ones that don't. I expect that experimentation to continue on a national scale."
About 13% of public school students in New York State are enrolled in special education. Educating each of them costs taxpayers many thousands of dollars more than it does to educate a regular student. With the financial crisis compelling Gov. Paterson, Mayor Bloomberg and other officials around the state to make cuts that have the least impact on services to which we have become accustomed, now is the time for them to give a special-education voucher program a second look. Aside from offering better educational outcomes, such a program would significantly reduce expenditures.
Contrary to popular belief, tuition charged by private schools, where vouchers can be used, is actually lower than public school per-pupil expenditures. Take Florida, which is home to the nation's first voucher program for disabled students. Under the program, all disabled students are eligible for a voucher that is worth the lesser of the amount the public school would have spent on them or the tuition at a chosen private school. The value of the average voucher for disabled students there is $7,295. Not only is this far less than what the state spends to educate a disabled student in a public school, it is even below the state's much lower average per-pupil cost of educating all students, both disabled and regular enrollment.
In other words, the public system actually saves money when it pays for students to attend private school, and even more money when those students are disabled.
When an unusual coalition of Republicans and Philadelphia Democrats led by State Rep. Dwight Evans joined forces to pass a law bringing charter schools to Pennsylvania, they spoke in glowing terms about this "innovative" alternative to troubled public schools.
At that time - 11 years ago - few could have predicted the explosive growth - and controversy - that now surround the charter movement.
About 67,000 students are enrolled at 127 charter schools statewide, including several in Philadelphia that are now under criminal investigation.
The "innovation" most in evidence at the Philadelphia Academy Charter School in Northeast Philadelphia, as The Inquirer has reported, has led to allegations of nepotism, conflicts of interest and financial mismanagement, all now under investigation by federal authorities.
IB coordinators at Bosse High School and Signature School told the Evansville Courier & Press that the program helps create well-rounded students. Students in the challenging IB program study a foreign language, social sciences and the arts as well as math and experimental sciences.
When Bosse and Signature were approved as IB schools three years ago, they were only the eighth and ninth Indiana schools to offer the program. The number since has doubled, and 18 Indiana schools now offer IB programs.
As the Scottsdale Unified School District debated closing a school earlier this year, a parent group petitioned the district to let the school grow from providing pre-K through fifth grade into providing pre-K through eighth grade (K-8).
The group included one parent who said she was terrified to send her child to a middle school, which provides sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
K-8 schools have become the norm in the Valley in recent years, although research remains inconclusive on which school structure is better for students.
"By the time they leave eighth grade and go into high school, it's too late," said Al Summers, director of professional development for the National Middle School Association.
However, the most recent results for the 2008 ACT-tested high school graduating class are alarming: only one in five ACT-tested 2008 high school graduates are prepared for entry-level college courses in English Composition, College Algebra, social science, and Biology, while one in four are not prepared for college-level coursework in any of the four subject areas (ACT, 2008).
Current international comparisons of academic achievement show students in the United States at a deficit compared to students in many other nations. According to the most recent results of the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), U.S. eighth graders rank fifteenth of forty-five countries in average mathematics score and ninth in average science score (Gonzales et al., 2004). The most recent results of the PISA (Programme forInternational Student Assessment) rank U.S. 15-year-olds twenty-eighth of forty countries in average mathematics performance, eighteenth in average reading performance, and twenty-second in average science performance (Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development, 2004).
Recent ACT research has investigated the multifaceted nature of college and career readiness. We first analyzed the low level of college and career readiness among U.S. high school graduates in Crisis at the Core (ACT, 2004). The critical role that high-level reading skills play in college and career readiness in all subject areas was the focus of Reading Between the Lines(ACT, 2006a). And when ACT data showed that many high school students were still not ready for college and career after taking a core curriculum, we examined the need for increased rigor in the high school core curriculum as an essential element of college and career readiness in Rigor at Risk (ACT, 2007b). The Forgotten Middleextends this research. This report examines the specific factors that influence college and career readiness and how these factors can have their greatest impact during a student's educational development. This report suggests that, in the current educational environment, there is a critical defining point for students in the college and career readiness process--one so important that, if students are not on target for college and career readiness by the time they reach this point, the impact may be nearly irreversible.
For years attendance was minimal at Tefft Middle School's annual parent-teacher conferences, but the principal did not chalk up the poor response to apathetic or dysfunctional families. Instead, she blamed what she saw as the outmoded, irrelevant way the conferences were conducted.
Roughly 60 percent of the 850 students at Tefft, in this working-class suburb some 30 miles northwest of Chicago, are from low-income families. Many are immigrants, unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the tradition of parents perched in pint-size chairs, listening intently as a teacher delivers a 15-minute soliloquy on their child's academic progress, or lack thereof.
"Five years ago, the most important person -- the student -- was left out of the parent-teacher conference," Tefft's principal, Lavonne Smiley, said. "The old conferences were such a negative thing, so we turned it around by removing all the barriers and obstacles," including allowing students not only to attend but also to lead the gatherings instead of anxiously awaiting their parents' return home with the teacher's verdict on their classroom performance.
I often spout opinions on matters about which I know nothing, so I understand when my favorite peer group -- the American people -- does the same. The latest example is a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults [931K PDF] by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which specializes in public health projects, and Sports4Kids, a national nonprofit organization that supports safe and healthy playtime in low-income elementary schools.
According to the survey's press release, "seven out of 10 Americans disagree with schools' policies of eliminating or reducing recess time for budgetary, safety or academic reasons." I realize most people don't know how poisonous recess can be for urban schools with severe academic needs, but I was surprised to see the news release fail to acknowledge this. It even suggests, without qualification, that "in low-income communities" recess time "offers one of our best chances to help children develop into healthy, active adults who know how to work together and resolve conflicts."
Few Americans have an opportunity to experience what teaching in urban schools is like. The people I know who have done so have developed a well-reasoned antipathy for the typical half-hour, go-out-and-play-but-don't-kill-anybody recess. In my forthcoming book, "Work Hard. Be Nice," about the Knowledge Is Power Program, I describe the classroom and playground chaos KIPP co-founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin encountered before starting their first KIPP fifth grade in a Houston public elementary school, the beginning of their successful program:
CRG Network, the citizen organization that emerged from the recall campaign against Milwaukee County Executive Tom Ament in 2002, has come up with more than 432,000 answers to the question of how Milwaukee Public Schools spends its money.
Given that MPS is, among other things, a $1.2 billion-a-year business, there's a lot of stuff there, ranging from payments for a few bucks to reimburse a principal for parking at a conference to six-figure amounts for contracts with University of Wisconsin researchers and millions of dollars in payments to bus companies.
Conservative talk show hosts and bloggers in recent weeks have targeted items in the database for attention, such as $16,958 in 49 invoices for Cousins Subs, many of them involving food for events involving teacher training.
Chris Kliesmet, executive administrator of CRG Network, said there have been more than 50,000 hits on the Web site with the database, some of them from foreign countries, including Iraq.
A great idea. Every school district should do this.
Globe Editorial
The Boston Globe
In college, but only marginally
December 23, 2008
MUCH SOUL-SEARCHING is taking place on local college campuses after a recent study showing that college was a bust for almost two-thirds of Boston high school graduates in the class of 2000. Students attending two-year community colleges--the least-expensive option--fared the worst in the survey by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, with an abysmal 12 percent graduation rate.
Specific results for all public and private colleges in the study should be available shortly after Christmas. But some figures are trickling in. Roxbury Community College fell flat. Of the 101 students from the high school class of 2000 who enrolled in RCC shortly after high school, only 6 percent would go on to earn a diploma there--or anywhere else--by June 2007. Quincy College, a low-profile, two-year college on the South Shore, did comparatively well (but not good enough) by its 62 Boston students, posting a 19 percent graduation rate. Bunker Hill Community College, which drew 155 enrollees from Boston's class of 2000, yielded a 14 percent graduation rate.
The study, which was funded by the Boston Foundation, strips away some of the hype about college attendance rates in Boston. Seven out of 10 public school graduates may get into college, but many lack the preparation to succeed. At Bunker Hill, for example, more than 80 percent of the Boston students from the class of 2000 required a remedial math course. Wisely, Bunker Hill and Boston school officials are now introducing students at some city high schools to the placement exams they will face on campus in the coming year.
The study should put an end to common claims by community college officials that their graduation rates don't reveal much because many of their students transfer to four-year colleges before earning associate degrees. In this study, a student merely needed to earn a diploma or certificate from any institution of higher education, not just the original college. And by providing at least a six-year window, the study made allowances for students who often juggle college with work or family obligations. Rationalizations are now off the table.
Bad numbers as motivation
There will be more than a few red-faced college officials when the final statistics are released. Only about one-third of students at four-year state colleges pulled through. Students at four-year, private colleges fared best, with a 56 percent graduation rate. Still, the study is proving to be a good motivator. UMass-Boston, which struggles with graduation rates, is expected to take a lead role in crafting solutions. And the Boston Private Industry Council, a co-author of the study, is keeping up the pressure with plans to publish graduation data for future Boston public school classes.
The stakes are highest at the community colleges, a traditional choice for students who struggled in high school. Mary Fifield, Bunker Hill Community College president, has launched a program that pairs remedial courses with college-level classes for incoming full-time students. Students are grouped by ability or academic interest and placed with handpicked professors who take an interest in their academic achievement and social adjustment. The college is also planning a "survival skills" class for freshmen, focusing on everything from reading class schedules to maximizing financial aid.
At Roxbury Community College, officials say they are also launching initiatives with the help of a Lumina Foundation grant to provide more intensive advising and tutoring, as well as a mandatory course on study skills for first-semester students. Impending cuts in the state budget, however, threaten these offerings.
Progress on the South Shore
Self-supporting Quincy College, a public community college operated under the auspices of the South Shore city, may have a lot to teach in tough times. Although the college offers few formal retention programs and no on-site day care for its roughly 4,000 students, it manages to outperform some of its state-operated counterparts. College president Sue Harris says that student advisers are widely available in the evening.
The college also offers so-called "nested semesters" that allow students to take accelerated courses over 10- or even 5-week periods in addition to the traditional 15-week schedule. The faster pace creates a sense of urgency missing on many campuses. Minority students, who make up 42 percent of the student body, appear to fare especially well at Quincy College. Black and Hispanic graduation rates for a recent class, says Harris, outstripped that of Asian students.
No one believes that ill-prepared urban students will suddenly cruise through college. But any college that can't help at least half to the finish line needs to reexamine what value it is adding to the educational experience.
Teachers unions routinely claim that the interests of students are their top priority. So we would be interested to hear how the Pennsylvania affiliate of the National Education Association explains the proliferation of teacher walkouts in the middle of the school year.
According to a recent study by the Allegheny Institute, Pennsylvania is once again the worst state in the country for teacher strikes. No less than 42% of all teacher walkouts nationwide occur in the Keystone State, leaving kids sidelined and parents scrambling to juggle work and family, potentially on as little as 48 hours notice required by state law.
The strikes take place despite the state's ranking in the top 20% nationwide for teacher salaries in 2006-2007 -- the most recent data available -- with an average of $54,970. Those paychecks go even further when adjusted for the state's cost of living compared to top-spending school districts in places like California.
The campus has long been intended as a local school, mostly serving students from surrounding neighborhoods. Critics say the district's best resources shouldn't be restricted geographically.
With just nine months left before it opens, a new arts high school in downtown Los Angeles still lacks a principal, a staff, a curriculum, a permanent name and a clearly articulated plan for how students will be selected -- critical details for a school that aims to be one of the foremost arts education institutions in the United States.
Central High School No. 9 does have a completed campus, believed to be the second most expensive public high school ever built in the United States. But the very fact that it offers what may be the finest such facilities in the region has fueled a debate over the district's plan to operate it primarily as a neighborhood school, with fewer than one-quarter of its slots allotted to students citywide.
Milwaukee Ald. Bob Donovan apparently doesn't have room for democracy, at least when it comes to the Milwaukee School Board.
Donovan wants an appointed School Board as opposed to letting the public choose their representatives. He calls it a priority on his Christmas wish list.
"To me (improvements and gains made under appointed boards) shows that the problems lie with bloated bureaucracy and poor governance that keep real improvements from happening in the classroom," Donovan says.
"Sadly, this mayor (Tom Barrett) and this administration can't seem to make up its mind on what to do, and so we continue to drift."
Now that Connie Calloway has been ousted as superintendent by the Detroit school board that hired her less than two years ago, a group of prominent local citizens is offering the DPS board some unsolicited advice about finding a good successor.
It won't be easy, given the mess the district is in and especially given the board's reputation as an employer and the state's impending appointment of a powerful financial manager to get the DPS books in order. Here's the text of a letter the group sent Tuesday to DPS Board President Carla Scott. The names of the signers are at the bottom.
Dear Honorable Carla D Scott, M.D.:
We are united in a fervent belief that a dynamic public education system is both imperative and possible here in Detroit. Because of that belief and our commitment to public education, we have conducted extensive research, both individually and collectively, to identify the dynamics that have enabled other urban districts to achieve turnarounds in the education they provide their students.
Clearly, a cornerstone of any successful school district, large or small, is aneffective superintendent who is focused on improving achievement scores, graduation rates and other critical indicators of performance.
Our kids need all of us working together to fix a broken system. Including these criteria in your selection process can help assure that we are working together with the single focus of improving the education that our children receive.
Michigan's top school official today rejected Detroit Public Schools' fight against a state takeover of the district's $1.1-billion budget.
The decision comes after a Thursday hearing where Flanagan allowed school board attorneys to explain why the state should not take control over the deficit-ridden budget. The attorneys argued that the two-day lead time Flanagan gave was not enough time to prepare a case.
Flanagan was not moved by the argument.
"I confirm my previous determination that a financial emergency exists in the Detroit Public Schools," Flanagan wrote in an 11-page letter to the school board on Tuesday.
School board officials offered no comment today.
"The Board has received the letter and is reviewing it at this time," DPS spokesman Steve Wasko wrote in an e-mailed response today.
Hawaii public school teachers signed off on first-in-the-nation statewide random drug testing in exchange for pay raises, but now the state claims the educators are trying to take the money and run.
Since the teachers' union approved the pact nearly two years ago, they've accepted the 11 percent boost in pay while fighting the random tests as an illegal violation of their privacy rights. No teacher has been tested.
The showdown over teacher drug testing arose from the highly publicized arrests of six state Education Department employees in unrelated drug cases over a six-month period. One, special education teacher Lee Anzai at Leilehua High School, pleaded guilty to selling more than $40,000 worth of crystal methamphetamine to an undercover agent.
Though some teachers may not realize it, Maryland's laws infringe on their freedoms, place the interests of unions over individual teachers and restrict the ability of teachers to become entrepreneurs.
Teachers ought to have the right to be represented by a union. But they should also have the right to not be represented. Maryland forces teachers to be represented by unions, which violates teachers' rights and has negative consequences for teachers and students.
There is an important distinction between being "represented" by a union and being a "member" of a union. Maryland law - like that in many other states - does not require that teachers be members of a union, but it does require them to be represented. This means that individual teachers are not permitted to negotiate their own salaries, benefits and working conditions, even if they want to. Forbidding workers from negotiating on their own behalf and requiring that a third party be involved serves no public purpose, but it does benefit unions.
Interestingly, while local property taxes have remained relatively flat, taxpayers have supported a large increase in State of Wisconsin taxes spent on K-12 public school districts. Of course these funds largely come from the same wallets that support property taxes.
The sudden rise of one Chicagoan and fall of another in recent days holds a unique significance for New Orleans' Recovery School District superintendent, Paul Vallas.
Arne Duncan, President-elect Barack Obama's pick for secretary of education, was among Vallas' trusted deputies when Vallas led the Chicago Public Schools.
Rod Blagojevich, the scandal-ridden Illinois governor, edged out Vallas to secure the Democratic Party nomination in the 2002 gubernatorial election.
Vallas' former protege in urban education has made a name for himself in use of innovations such as a financial reward system for successful teachers, a pay-for-performance strategy. His former political rival, on the other hand, has become a household name because of pay-to-play allegations.
Shortly after his loss to Blagojevich, Vallas left his native city to lead the Philadelphia school system. A year-and-a-half ago, he moved to New Orleans to take over the recovery schools position.
A child-centered school finance policy that supports the choices of parents can create higher-quality schools and more equality in the educational opportunities available to children. The only way to ensure that all children have the same educational opportunities and equal resources to obtain them and at the same time create powerful incentives to improve school performance, is to adopt a student-centered school funding system.
Public schools are nominally "free," but pricing, which implicitly occurs through housing markets, fundamentally limits access to better schools and consigns less wealthy families to less desirable schools. The subsequent separation of students along class lines also means that the non-financial inputs critical to good schools, such as peer and family influences, can be even more unevenly distributed than financial resources. The unequal distribution of opportunity remains even when state aid is targeted at the "neediest" schools. state money that simply equalizes financial resources will have limited effects on the root causes of education inequities.
This report outlines an alternative approach that seeks to overcome the limits of past attempts to equalize opportunities. It investigates the combined policies of open enrollment (in public, charter, and private schools) with financial support that follows the child. such a system will make the differences in local resources for education funding largely irrelevant. We limit our report to the mechanics and implementation issues of such a system, but to highlight how key policy choices would affect its implementation and costs. The report and demonstrate its fiscal impacts. our purpose is not to argue for particular policies within such a systeis an introduction to and not the final word on a fundamental shift in school finance policy in Ohio. As such, it will invite many questions and concerns that will deserve further research.
The report:
highlights the need for a reform of ohio's school finance system.
Documents ohio's level of financial support and compares it to other states.
Discusses the role of property taxes in funding schools.
outlines the basic structure of a child-centered school finance system.
Presents a basic weighted system of per-pupil financial support and creates a matrix of students in ohio schools to estimate the expenditures required to fund each child under a child-centered finance system.
Presents a model to calculate the expenditures required to fund a child-centered system at different levels of per-pupil financial support and under various policy choices.
Analyzes the implications for property taxes within communities under different policy choices within a child-centered funding system.
Estimates how much money businesses and individuals would contribute towards the education of deserving, needy students after the introduction of a tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations.
In the 1990s Continental Airlines was struggling, even more than its troubled U.S. airline peers. As the company's then-president Greg Brenneman explained in a 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), "Continental ranked tenth out of the ten largest U.S. airlines in all key customer service areas as measured by the Department of Transportation: on-time arrivals, baggage handling, customer complaints, and involuntary denied boardings." The airline had already been in bankruptcy twice, and was headed for a third round as its cash dried up.
In 1994, Gordon Bethune took the helm, with Brenneman becoming president and chief operating officer. They staved off bankruptcy by renegotiating with their creditors. And they launched an organizational turnaround that proved remarkably successful, catapulting Continental from worst to best among big U.S. carriers.
By 1995, Continental was moving up on the Department of Transportation's (DOT's) performance measures (see Figure 1). Its stock price was soaring. And the turnaround stuck. The latest rankings by Consumer Reports place Continental first among the seven big U.S. airlines. Zagat's 2007 survey of frequent flyers found overall ratings for the big airlines were low and declining, with the "notable exception" of Continental. Continental was the only big airline, and one of only five overall, to be a Zagat Top Spot.
Dick Hubert's one-man campaign to desegregate, however slightly, the Blind Brook school district thudded to its inevitable close at 10:55 p.m. Monday, at the end of a long school board meeting.
The auditorium where the meeting took place was virtually empty. The board members, so animated earlier about the cost of glue sticks and the intricacies of earth science curriculum, seemed to make a point of looking as uninterested as possible as he read his statement.
"At this point, there is nothing more for me to add to this dialogue," Mr. Hubert concluded. "The United States will be a majority nonwhite country in the adult lifetime of the children in your care. The only question is: How well will you have prepared them for being citizen leaders in this society?"
The board members barely looked up. He left the building and walked out into the cold rain.
Mr. Hubert, a 70-year-old retired television journalist who runs a small video production company, may not have made the most adroit case for his argument that Blind Brook, which is wealthy and 93 percent white, should make it a priority to merge some services and build links with its neighboring school district in Port Chester, which is largely poor and working class and 80 percent minorities.
There wasn't much celebration yesterday for Barack Obama's nomination of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education from either the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten (who praised Duncan for helping "students with the greatest needs") or from National Education Association honcho Van Roekel (who said nothing at all). The unions, long used to getting their way with Democratic Party leaders, were more disappointed that their favorite pick -- Obama adviser and No Child Left Behind Act critic Linda Darling-Hammond -- didn't get the nod.
But the real celebration came from another corner of the Democratic National Committee -- the motley crew of centrist city officials and liberal activists who have long-championed (and helped pass) No Child in the first place. Declared former Daily News reporter, Joe Williams, who runs the New York-based Democrats For Education Reform: "[Duncan] will lead the charge of breaking the existing ideological and political gridlock to promote new, innovative and experimental ideas in education."
It remains unclear whether the merit pay program for teachers in Texas is yielding the results its proponents have advocated - higher student achievement.
But a two-year evaluation of the Texas Educator Excellence Grant program released Thursday shows that 90 percent of the eligible schools have participated in the voluntary initiative. That means teachers and schools are interested in the concept, said Matthew Springer, the lead author of the report and director of the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College.
The study also found that turnover is lower among teachers who received bonus pay than those who did not.
The report said the greatest problem two years into the new system is that too many schools have to discontinue the program too quickly. A majority of the schools eligible to participate one year did not return the following year because they failed to meet eligibility requirements.
To be eligible, schools must have a high percentage of low-income students. They must also earn a recognized or exemplary state rating, or passing rates on the state math and reading tests must rank in the top quarter of Texas schools.
The Obama administration's selection of Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan as education secretary signals an intent to maintain a rigorous system of standardized tests in public schools, while experimenting with reforms disliked by unions, such as teacher merit pay.
In announcing the appointment Tuesday at a Chicago news conference, President-elect Barack Obama said he and Mr. Duncan share a "deep pragmatism" and a willingness to tap ideas often associated with conservatives. "Let's not be clouded by ideology when it comes to figuring out what helps our kids," Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Duncan's "strength is really his openness to ideas and a real interest in data and how things are working," said John Easton, executive director of the Consortium of Chicago School Research, a University of Chicago program that has studied the city's schools.
One of Mr. Duncan's first tasks will be deciding what to do about the federal No Child Left Behind law, enacted in 2002, and now due for reauthorization. The statute, which has divided educators, requires all students to be proficient in math and reading by 2014. Schools that don't make adequate progress on tests measuring student achievement face sanctions.
Students in the District's charter schools have opened a solid academic lead over those in its traditional public schools, adding momentum to a movement that is recasting public education in the city.
The gains show up on national standardized tests and the city's own tests in reading and math, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. Charters have been particularly successful with low-income children, who make up two-thirds of D.C. public school students.
A dozen years after it was created by Congress, the city's charter system has taken shape as a fast-growing network of schools, whose ability to tap into private donors, bankers and developers has made it possible to fund impressive facilities, expand programs and reduce class sizes.
With freedom to experiment, the independent, nonprofit charters have emphasized strategies known to help poor children learn -- longer school days, summer and Saturday classes, parent involvement and a cohesive, disciplined culture among staff members and students.
If we want our children to be scientifically literate and get good jobs in the future, why are we spending precious hours in school teaching them to be garbage collectors?
That's the question that occurred to me after reading about the second-graders in West Virginia who fought for the right to keep recycling trash even after it became so uneconomical that public officials tried to stop the program. As my colleague Kate Galbraith reports, their teacher was proud of them for all the time they spent campaigning to keep the recycling program alive.
My colleague Andy Revkin suggests that the West Virginia students might be learning something useful about the interplay of economics and ecology, but I fear they and their teacher have missed the lesson. The reason that public officials cut back the program, as Matt Richtel and Kate reported, is the market for recyclables has collapsed because the supply vastly exceeds the demand. This could be a valuable learning experience for the students about markets and about the long-term tendency of prices of natural resources to fall while the cost of people's time rises.
Most people think textbooks are important. Schools that don't have all of theirs might find themselves accused of dereliction of duty. The Washington Post, for instance, was aghast last year that several thousand D.C. schoolbooks hadn't yet left the warehouse when classes began.
My colleague Michael Alison Chandler underlined this in her story two weeks ago about an effort by some Virginia teachers to break the $8 billion-a-year textbook industry's tight grip on science instruction, which often stops abruptly about the time Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity in 1905.
The fact that such obsolescence is tolerated shows how much faith we put in textbooks. So does our acceptance of the difficulty most students have reading through a standard textbook without falling asleep. Reid Saaris, founder of the D.C.-based Equal Opportunity Schools Organization, remembers teaching 12th-grade history in Beaufort, S.C., with a particularly tedious required text. The few seniors who chose his class usually did so for inappropriate reasons. One year, five boys showed up, gave Saaris disappointed looks and said they had enrolled only "because of the hot lady who was supposed to be teaching the class."
Three years of math, three years of science - start getting ready, all you sixth-graders in Milwaukee Public Schools.
A School Board committee voted 3-0 Monday night to increase the requirements for graduating from MPS from two years each of math and science to three, effective with the class of 2014-'15, members of which are currently sixth-graders.
In addition, students would need to complete a half-year's worth of either an online course, community service or a service-learning project.
The proposal will go to the full board tonight and is expected to be approved.
President-elect Barack Obama named Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan as his education secretary on Tuesday -- choosing a hometown friend who has introduced some education reforms popular with conservatives without alienating teachers unions.
As Chicago's top school official for seven years, Mr. Duncan has overseen the closure of struggling schools, advocated merit pay for better teachers, and adopted a program to use private money to reward children for better grades.
"When it comes to school reform, Arne is the most hands-on of hands-on practitioners," Mr. Obama said, making the announcement at a school that he said has made remarkable progress under Mr. Duncan's leadership.
"He's not beholden to any one ideology, and he's worked tirelessly to improve teacher quality," Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Duncan, a 44-year-old Harvard graduate, has raised achievement in the nation's third-largest school district and often faced the ticklish challenge of shuttering failing schools and replacing ineffective teachers, usually with improved results.
He represents a compromise choice in the debate that has divided Democrats in recent months over the proper course for public-school policy after the Bush years.
In June, rival nationwide groups of educators circulated competing educational manifestos, with one group espousing a get-tough policy based on pushing teachers and administrators harder to raise achievement, and another arguing that schools alone could not close the racial achievement gap and urging new investments in school-based health clinics and other social programs to help poor students learn.
Mr. Duncan was the only big-city superintendent to sign both manifestos.
The Milwaukee School Board on Tuesday night will face a serving of a stew with many of the ingredients that make life complicated in Milwaukee Public Schools. How it decides what parts to eat or not eat will say a lot about the prospects for change in the system.
The board will take up a multi-part proposal from north side member Michael Bonds to realign a cluster of schools in the vicinity of W. Hampton and W. Silver Spring avenues from N. Green Bay Ave. to N. 35th St.
Included in the proposals are closing Carleton School, converting McNair Academy to a middle school with an emphasis on arts and science, and attempting for the first time to provide short-distance bus service to nearby schools as an alternative to busing to distant parts of town. For families living in the affected area, busing options to schools elsewhere would be restricted as a way of encouraging enrollment in the local schools.
Bonds' proposal is one of the boldest attempts in years to reduce busing and invigorate the idea of attending schools near home. It comes after the board agreed in principle to make major cuts in busing - a stand that has not been translated into action yet.
But two School Board committee meetings last week brought out how many factors are at play. Among them:
Busing: Do people put their kids on buses to distant schools because they want to or because they don't have much choice? Milwaukee has one of the most expansive busing policies in the country. The $102 million neighborhood school plan in recent years failed to persuade parents to take their kids off buses. Is anything different now?
K-8 vs. middle schools: Middle schools have been in sharp decline in MPS as schools offering kindergarten through eighth grade programs have increased rapidly. Is that because parents really want K-8s or because they haven't been given quality choices in middle schools? The prevailing thinking in MPS has been that K-8s are popular, but there appears to be a growing counter-movement, with Bonds as a leading voice for middle schools.
An Update on Madison's Small Learning Community / High School "Redesign" Plans
The Madison School Board recently received a presentation (25mb mp3 file) from the Administration on its plans for High School "redesign" and the use of the $5,500,000 Small Learning Community grant funded by our federal tax dollars. Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash along with representatives from the four large high schools participated in the discussion. The Board asked some interesting questions. President Arlene Silveira asked how this initiative relates to the District's "Strategic Planning Process"? Vice President Lucy Mathiak asked about opportunities for advanced students.
The British government's latest crack at reforming schools is yet another step towards contentless learning
"NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life." How horrible for the pupils at Professor Gradgrind's school; Charles Dickens pulled out all the grim stops in describing it. No one today really thinks that school, especially in the early years, should consist of nothing but dreary rote learning.
But children do love learning real things--why trees have leaves, how two minuses make a plus, the number of wives' heads Henry VIII removed. Only if they begin to build up a core of knowledge can they develop the habits of mental discipline that must last them a lifetime. You cannot look up on Google something you do not know exists; and the ability to hold facts in your head is a prerequisite for many careers--the law, say, or engineering. It is not enough in primary school to learn about learning; children need to learn actual stuff.
So it is a particular disappointment that the interim version of the biggest review of British primary schooling in decades nudges the country a little further down its path toward factfree education (see article). The existing curriculum is not without its faults: repeatedly re-engineered since it was set in place 20 years ago, it is now cluttered and prescriptive. And Sir Jim Rose, once Britain's chief inspector of primary schools, was dealt some marked cards for his review: computer skills had to be ranked alongside literacy and numeracy (though employers complain not that young job-seekers are clueless online but that they are illiterate); room had to be made to teach a modern foreign language (thank heavens); and a gaggle of personal-development goals (learning not to set fire to your friends or trash the classroom) were to be emphasised.
Menomonee Falls Superintendent Dr. Keith Marty to Facilitate Madison's "Strategic Planning Process"
A recent Madison School Board meeting discussed the planned "Strategic Review" 10MB mp3 audio. Superintendent Dan Nerad mentioned that he planned to retain Menomonee Falls Superintendent Dr. Keith Marty to facilitate the process. Links:
Dane County High School AP Course Offering Comparison
The College Board recently updated their AP Course Audit data. Dane County offerings are noted below, including changes from 2007-2008:
Abundant Life Christian School: 3 Courses in 2007/2008 and 3 in 2008/2009
Cambridge High School: 1 Course in 2007/2008 and 0 in 2008/2009
De Forest High School: 8 Courses in 2007/2008 and 8 in 2008/2009
Madison East High School: 12 Courses in 2007/2008 and 12 in 2008/2009
Madison Edgewood High School: 11 Courses in 2007/2008 and 10 in 2008/2009 (11 are on offer this year. There's been a paperwork delay for the 11th course, AP Biology due to a new teacher)
Madison LaFollette High School: 12 Courses in 2007/2008 and 6 in 2008/2009
Madison Memorial High School: 18 Courses in 2007/2008 and 17 in 2008/2009
Madison West High School: 6 Courses in 2007/2008 and 0 in 2008/2009 (I'm told that West has 6, but the College Board has a paperwork problem)
Marshall High School: 5 Courses in 2007/2008 and 5 in 2008/2009
McFarland High School: 6 Courses in 2007/2008 and 6 in 2008/2009
Middleton-Cross Plains High School: 8 Courses in 2007/2008 and 8 in 2008/2009
Monona Grove High School: 9 Courses in 2007/2008 and 8 in 2008/2009
Mt. Horeb High School: 5 Courses in 2007/2008 and 5 in 2008/2009
Oregon High School: 9 Courses in 2007/2008 and 9 in 2008/2009
Sauk Prairie High School: 10 Courses in 2007/2008 and 10 in 2008/2009
Stoughton High School: 7 Courses in 2007/2008 and 10 in 2008/2009
Sun Prairie High School: 15 Courses in 2007/2008 and 17 in 2008/2009
Verona High School: 10 Courses in 2007/2008 and 11 in 2008/2009
Waunakee High School: 6 Courses in 2007/2008 and 6 in 2008/2009
Wisconsin Heights High School: 6 Courses in 2007/2008 and 6 in 2008/2009
As state governors warn of significant shortfalls in their budgets, many schools districts are facing the biggest cutbacks they've seen in decades. And in some cases, they're already slashing.
In Virginia, the Fairfax County school district is considering everything from increasing class sizes to eliminating certain high-school sports starting next fall. In Florida, the Broward County School District is looking at thousands of layoffs and eliminating certain courses and activities. The Seattle School District is even considering shuttering certain schools. This year, the Los Angeles Unified School District has already reduced 600 administrative jobs at headquarters and delayed textbook purchases.
These moves have fired up parents. Julie Jackson, the parent of a fourth-grader at Kettering Elementary School in Long Beach, Calif., says parents there have for several years been raising money for salaries, supplies and programs that the state should be paying for in the first place. She and other parents are petitioning the governor and members of the state legislature to stop any further cuts. "The parents are now at a breaking point," the petition states.
Among the forces behind the shortfalls: Job losses are cutting into state income-tax revenue; the erosion of home values is hurting property-tax revenue; and the drop in consumer spending reduces revenue from sales tax. As a result, 37 states are projecting midyear shortfalls this fiscal year, according to a survey by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That is compared with only seven a year ago. Based on how things are going, the center estimates that total state budget gaps for next fiscal year will likely be around $100 billion, almost 10 times what it was last fiscal year, according to Elizabeth McNichol, senior fellow at the Washington D.C.-based center.
Under Stephen Strachan, students wear uniforms, it takes a C to pass and a 'fifth-year senior' program is bringing dropouts back.
You can blame the failure of Los Angeles' latest school superintendent on racial politics, an incompetent school board or a bureaucracy impervious to reform.
But you can't sell that to Stephen Strachan.
Strachan is the principal at Jordan High in Watts. Like Supt. David Brewer, Strachan thinks big and is brimming with self-confidence.
But unlike Brewer, Strachan has managed to move beyond summits and slogans to remake a high school long considered one of the district's worst.
I met Strachan two years ago -- about the time Brewer arrived in Los Angeles. I visited Jordan High because I wanted to know what it was like running a school that bordered one of the city's most dangerous housing projects.
Like all unions, teachers unions have a vested interest in restricting the labor supply to reduce job competition. Traditional state certification rules help to limit the supply of "certified" teachers. But a new study suggests that such requirements also hinder student learning.
Harvard researchers Paul Peterson and Daniel Nadler compared states that have genuine alternative certification with those that have it in name only. And they found that between 2003 and 2007 students in states with a real alternative pathway to teaching gained more on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal standardized test) than did students in other states.
"In states that had genuine alternative certification, test-score gains on the NAEP exceeded those in the other states by 4.8 points and 7.6 points in 4th- and 8th-grade math, respectively," report the authors in the current issue of Education Next. "In reading, the additional gains in the states with genuine alternative certification were 10.6 points and 3.9 points for the two grade levels respectively."
The study undermines the arguments from colleges of education and teachers unions, which say that traditional certification, which they control, is the only process that can produce quality teachers. The findings hold up even after controlling for race, ethnicity, free-lunch eligibility, class size and per-pupil state spending.
Forty-seven states have adopted a pathway to teaching, alternative to the standard state certification otherwise required. Is this new pathway genuine or merely symbolic? Does it open the classroom door to teachers of minority background? Does it help--or hinder--learning in the classroom? Claims about all of these questions have arisen in public discourse. Recently, data have become available that allow us to check their validity.
To receive a standard state certification in most states, prospective teachers not only must be college graduates but also must have taken a specific set of education-related courses that comprise approximately 30 credit hours of coursework. Prospective teachers are well advised to pursue studies at a college or university within the state where they expect to teach, because it is often only within that state that students can get the courses required for state certification in the subject area and for the grade levels that they will be teaching.
Such certification requirements limit the supply of certified teachers, and as a result, serious teaching shortages are regularly observed. For example, in California, one-third of the entire teacher work force, about 100,000 teachers, will retire over the next decade and need to be replaced, compounding what the governor's office calls a "severe" current teacher shortage. Other states are facing a similar situation. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics projects a shortfall of 280,000 qualified math and science teachers by 2015. As former National Education Association president Reg Weaver put it, "At the start of every school year, we read in the newspaper...stories about schools scrambling to hire teachers."
IF YOU are in your 40s and British, it is quite possible that your spelling is an embarrassment. You may never have been taught the distinction between "there", "their" and "they're", or perhaps even your times tables. If you moved house during your primary years you may have entirely missed some vital topic--joined-up writing, say. And you may have struggled to learn to read using the "initial teaching alphabet", a concoction of 40 letters that was supposed to provide a stepping stone to literacy but tripped up many children when they had to switch to the standard 26.
Those days of swivel-eyed theorising and untrammelled experimentation--or, as the schools inspectorate put it at the time, "markedly individual decisions about what is to be taught"--ended in 1988 with the introduction of a national curriculum. But though that brought rigour and uniformity, it also created an unwieldy--and unworldly--blueprint for the Renaissance Child. Schools have struggled to fit it all in ever since. Now, 20 years later, the primary curriculum is to be cut down.
Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast released a budget request yesterday that seeks almost level funding for the coming school year, a gesture of fiscal restraint likely to be repeated across the region's school systems in coming months.
The $2.1 billion spending proposal for the fiscal year that begins in July reflects a net increase of $40 million, or 2 percent, the smallest year-to-year bump Weast has requested in nine years as Montgomery superintendent. The budget assumes just $20 million in new local funds, all cost savings from this year that Weast would carry over as revenue for next year, and $20 million from the state, chiefly to cover enrollment growth.
"It's a flat budget," Weast said. It is the first formal fiscal 2010 spending plan for a major local school system.
Weast said he had to close a $176 million revenue gap to balance the budget. He did that by eliminating contracted cost-of-living increases for all school system employees and by cutting $36 million in projected spending across the 139,000-student system, shedding 300 jobs.
Today we present readers an in-depth interview with Ira David Socol, author of "The Drool Room" and the web site "SpeEdChange." Our interest in talking with Ira centered upon three critical factors.
First, there is little doubt that Ira is passionate about education and the process of learning. More importantly, that passion is relentlessly focused on creating a learning process that is responsive to the needs of learners.
Second, to be frank, Ira shares some of our views on how best to reform education. He notes that there are a multitude of ways to create positive learning opportunities for students but our current school structures prevent the flexibility necessary to provide alternate paths. Like OpenEducation.net, he is also a strong proponent of the use of technology yet does not buy into the "digital natives" nonsense.
Informational and Community Discussion Sessions on the Madison Mathematics Task Force
Date: January 6th, 2009
Time: 6:00 - 8:00 pm
Where: LaFollette High School - LMC
Date: January 7th, 2009
Time: 6:00 - 8:00 pm
Where: Memorial High School - Wisconsin Neighborhood Center
You are cordially invited to attend an information session and discussion about the findings and recommendations of the Math Task Force which recently completed a review of the MMSD K-12 Mathematics program. Please also share this information with others who may be interested in attending.
At each session, there will be a brief informational presentation followed by an opportunity for discussion. The Executive Summary and complete Task Force Report can be found at http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/boe/math/.
We are looking forward to sharing this information with you and learning about your reactions to the research and recommendations included in the report. Your thoughts are important to us as we work to improve the MMSD K-12 Mathematics program.
Questions/comments? Please contact Brian Sniff at bsniff@madison.k12.wi.us
Looking forward to seeing you on January 6th or 7th.
Gangs are everywhere in Dane County, from the largest Madison high schools to the smallest rural hamlets.
In the latest of a series of informational meetings led by a Dane County detective who monitors local gang activity, Sun Prairie parents were told their help is needed.
Detective Joel Wagner estimated that 3 to 4 percent of Dane County youths are involved in a gang. Recruiting begins in the fourth grade, he said; gang members can be of any race and socioeconomic status, but are primarily kids who have fallen away from school and family and are looking for a group to belong to.
"The best thing is prevention," Wagner said. "We need to get back to eyes and ears."
"Know your children's friends. Know them well," he said. "Know your children's friends' parents. Know them better."
Wednesday night's meeting at Sun Prairie High School stretched more than two hours and included disturbing video of gang fights and other violence from Dane County and across the nation as well as online photos of gang members who identify themselves as being from Sun Prairie and other Dane County communities.
Particularly disturbing was video -- not from Dane County -- of a gang initiation in which a teen's head was smashed into a cement curb and into a florescent light tube. In another video, a teen was beaten in a bathroom as part of an initiation.
U.S. students are doing no better on an international science exam than they were in the mid-1990s, a performance plateau that leaves educators and policymakers worried about how schools are preparing students to compete in an increasingly global economy.
Results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), released yesterday, show how fourth- and eighth-graders in the United States measure up to peers around the world. U.S. students showed gains in math in both grades. But average science performance, although still stronger than in many countries, has stagnated since 1995.
Students in Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong outperformed U.S. fourth-graders in science. The U.S. students had an average score of 539 on a 1,000-point scale, higher than their peers in 25 countries.
Five Texas education leaders, including former Education Commissioner Mike Moses, are proposing college or workplace readiness as the standard for all high school graduates in their plan to improve public education.
They also advocate a better accountability system, more money to improve student performance and a shared partnership between the state and local school districts.
The education leaders have often disagreed on education ideas but drafted a framework of shared principles they believe can serve as a starting ground for continued debate.
The five are attorney David Thompson, a school finance expert; Sandy Kress, who helped President Bush develop No Child Left Behind; Don McAdams, president of the Center for Reform of School Systems and a former member of the Houston Independent School District board; Jim Windham, former chairman of the Texas Association of Business; and Moses, education commissioner under Gov. George W. Bush.
The Atlantic Monthly, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have chronicled her battles with the Washington Teachers' Union. The PBS "NewsHour" and "60 Minutes" have trailed her up and down school corridors. She can be seen at A-list gatherings, from Herbert Allen's annual Sun Valley, Idaho, retreat for corporate moguls to education summits hosted by Bill Gates and the Aspen Institute.
Last week, on the cover of Time, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee cemented her status as the national standard-bearer of tough-minded, no-excuses urban school reform. She is photographed at the front of a classroom, stern-faced and clutching a broom, symbolizing her promise of sweeping change.
For journalists and pundits who follow education, Rhee's narrative has elements that are irresistible. A slight, young Korean American woman with no big-city school leadership experience is plucked from the nonprofit world by a reform-minded mayor in June 2007 to fire bad teachers, face down their union and take on hidebound bureaucrats, all in the name of turning around a system with a legacy of failure. The stories are not uniformly glowing, but they generally depict Rhee as a gutsy, gritty agent of change driven to turn around the District's schools.
"Michelle Rhee charged in as chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools wielding BlackBerrys and data -- and a giant axe," said the Atlantic's November issue.
Closer to home, Rhee's media stardom has inspired a mix of praise, puzzlement and resentment. Boosters say her high profile can only help the District overhaul its schools. Others see her pursuing a national platform for a message that is hostile to older, experienced teachers and partial to younger instructors from nontraditional training programs such as Teach for America, where she started her career.
The Advanced Placement English class at Scarsdale High School used to race through four centuries of literature to prepare students for the A.P. exam in May. But in this year's class, renamed Advanced Topics, students spent a week studying Calder, Pissarro and Monet to digest the meaning of form and digressed to read essays by Virginia Woolf and Francis Bacon -- items not covered by the exam.
A similarly slowed-down pace came at a cost for some students in one of Scarsdale's Advanced Topics classes in United States history; it was still in the 1950s at the time of the exam, whose main essay question was on the Vietnam War.
Sarah Benowich, a senior, said that the A.T. approach had improved her writing but that she would have liked more dates and facts worked in. Despite studying Advanced Placement exam review books on her own, she still felt "shaky on some of the more concrete details," she said.
A year after Scarsdale became the most prominent school district in the nation to phase out the College Board's Advanced Placement courses -- and make A.P. exams optional -- most students and teachers here praise the change for replacing mountains of memorization with more sophisticated and creative curriculums.
Under pressure by civic leaders and members of his own school board, Los Angeles Schools Supt. David L. Brewer announced Monday that he would leave his post rather than drag the district through a racially divisive fight.
The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education is expected to hash out the final details of an exit package today for Brewer, the retired Navy vice admiral who was supposed to bring military know-how and a deep passion for education to the job of running the nation's second-largest school district.
"As an African American, I've experienced my share of discrimination," he told reporters, school board members and district employees Monday. "I know what it looks like, smells like, and the consequences."
"Although this debate is disconcerting and troubling, it must not become an ethnic issue. When adults fight, it can manifest itself in our children," said Brewer, the district's second African American superintendent. "This must not become an ethnic or racial battle that infests our schools, our campuses, our playgrounds. This is not about settling an old score; this must be about what is best for every LAUSD student."
Extraordinary times command extraordinary measures and grant extraordinary opportunities. Our state's budget crisis calls already for kids and schools to sacrifice. It does not have to be. This is Olympia's chance to substantially improve our entrenched education system and save some money.
Here are three problems Olympia must tackle to make a real difference:
1. Washington taxpayers support 295 independent school districts. Each district is top-heavy with too many administrators: superintendents, assistant superintendents, executive directors, curriculum directors, special ed directors, human resources directors, finance directors, transportation directors, purchasing directors and other nonteaching executives.
2. The second problem is lack of stability. Administrators introduce too often "new" educational theories. With each new administrator come new ideas. What was the silver bullet in education one year ago is toxic with a new principal or new superintendent.
I experienced over a period of 12 years changes from a six periods day to a four periods "block system" (several years in the planning). After starting the block, my school planned for two years to establish five to six autonomous Small Schools, but only one was eventually organized. In the midst of those disruptive changes, Best Practices was contemplated but never enacted; special ed and ESL students were mainstreamed, and NovaNet, a computerized distant learning, was initiated with former Gov. Gary Locke present and praising our vision. Finally, all honors classes were abandoned and differentiated instruction was introduced.
Eventually, all these new methods were delegated to the trash heap of other failed educational experiments. By 2008, the school was where it had been in 1996, minus some very good teachers and more than a few dollars.
3. The third problem is the disconnect between endorsements and competency. A sociology major gets a social sciences endorsement from the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and may teach history, or math, or Spanish. A PE teacher may instruct students in English literature or history. A German or English teacher may teach U.S. history.
The voucher funding flaw is a bigger problem than ever and is costing Milwaukee property taxpayers millions of dollars a year.
The voucher funding flaw effectively no longer exists, and the publicly funded program that allows children to go to private schools is saving Milwaukeeans property tax dollars.
Can both of those things be true?
Decide for yourself.
When Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and leaders of the Milwaukee Public Schools system look at the issue, one number jumps out: 14.6%. That's how much the property tax levy to pay for schools in the city is going up this year.
They associate a lot of that increase with the impact on local taxes of the school voucher program, which is allowing 20,000 low-income Milwaukee children to attend private schools this year.
The way vouchers are paid for now, through a combination of money from state government and Milwaukee property taxes, is a major reason why the property tax increase is so large, they say. If the formula were fair, in the eyes of Barrett and the MPS leaders, the school tax increase would be in the neighborhood of 4%, and maybe less. They say changing the voucher funding system is an urgent priority for the Legislature to tackle.
When leaders of School Choice Wisconsin, an influential group of supporters of the voucher program, look at the issue, a different number jumps out: $123. That's how much more is being spent in property taxes this year on each student in MPS than on each voucher student.
To most of the working world, the business meeting is a usual - if not exactly appreciated - part of professional life.
To Jeanne Paulus, a resource teacher at Roosevelt Elementary School in Wauwatosa, her weekly meetings with fellow teachers are nothing less than earth-shattering.
While conversations between teachers might have been fleeting in years past, conducted quickly during bathroom breaks or brief moments in the day when they found themselves without their students, this year such discussions have become a regular part of the teachers' week.
"To me, this is a huge, gigantic shift for teachers," said Paulus, who teaches math and gifted education at Roosevelt.
The reaction is no less fervent at Kettle Moraine High School, which - like the Wauwatosa School District - started setting aside time this year for its teachers to meet after school.
At both places, students are dismissed early once a week to give their teachers time to plan, reflect on their teaching and analyze their students' performance.
"What happens during this time is our teachers are learners, they're not just teachers," said Kettle Moraine High School Principal David Hay.
I had lunch with Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. David Brewer earlier this year at a restaurant near downtown Los Angeles and almost choked. Not on the food, but the prices.
I wasn't that hungry, fortunately, so I had the Chinese chicken salad, which cost an eye-popping $28.95. Brewer wasn't famished either, so he just had an appetizer, the crab cakes, and those ran $16.95.
Over lunch, he defended himself against widespread criticism that he was the wrong man for the job and had been a big disappointment. But instead of talking about students, he went on and on about building a "matrix" system and "vertical" as well as "horizontal articulation." By the end of it I had an expensive stomachache.
The L.A. Times picked up the tab, but Brewer had chosen the restaurant and he seemed to know his way around there, so I started wondering if his tastes always ran so high-end. To find out, I called the school district and requested all of his expense reports dating back to his hiring in 2006.
When the documents arrived, much of the information had been blacked out. Why? Because several high-level officials use the same credit card account, I was told, and I hadn't asked for their expenses; only Brewer's.
Joe Nathan, a University of Minnesota school leadership scholar, dropped by recently to tell me about his latest project: the Minnesota Leadership Academy for Charter and Alternative Public Schools. He wants to produce all-star principals for innovative schools, including the charter school movement he has been studying since its beginnings.
Nathan gave me a report he just produced with Carleton College junior Joanna Plotz. Their paper, "Learning to Lead," reveals the secrets of good management of schools and companies, derived from interviews with 24 business leaders. In the Leadership Academy, which opened this fall in cooperation with the Minnesota Department of Education, each participating educator has two mentors, one a successful business executive and the other a successful school leader.
That sounds peachy, but it doesn't get to the heart of what many teachers tell me is the key issue in school leadership today: How did we produce so many lousy administrators?
Bill Gates was all over DC yesterday, talking about charter schools at every stop. He told the President-elect that investing in charters is a great example of how to think long-term while trying to rescue the economy, and repeated that thought in chatting with Wolf Blitzer at CNN. Then he stopped by George Washington U to talk to an invited audience about poverty, recession, and education - and delivered some remarkably forceful endorsements of charter schools and the charter model itself. Full text of this important speech here.
Here's his central economic-strategy point. Note how he prioritizes charters:
"In a crisis, there is always a risk that you take your eyes off the future - and you sacrifice long-term investments for near-term gains...But I want us to have a bigger goal than getting the economy growing again. I want us to expand the number of people who are contributing to the economy and benefiting from it. The young woman who needs help paying for college, the young man whose charter school needs government support, the children whose parents need AIDS drugs, the poor family trying to farm in Ghana--if we don't make these people part of our investments, when the economy comes back, they won't be coming back with it."
Public schools will be the next institutions to want more money to fix crumbling buildings, patch bloated budgets, buy more buses, and perpetuate stagnated objectives but in reality they need to re-invent education to take wholesale advantage of proven technologies from sophisticated software and broadband connectivity to distance learning and interactive video capabilities.
For the most part, public schools are an anachronism. They were designed in the Industrial Age to assimilate an agrarian society into a workforce for the Industrial Age. The Industrial Age surged into the Information Age a good forty years ago and we did not do much to change the framework of education. If anything, we bloated it with multiple assistant superintendents, curriculum advisors, crisis counselors, and a dozen more positions that were unheard of twenty years ago.
We are now well past the Information Age and are in what some would call a Mobile Internet Age. We need to embrace a whole new set of educational concepts and discard those that include teaching obsolete skills, protecting deadwood teachers and adhering to schedules that reflect the harvesting of crops.
Montgomery County teachers and other school employees have agreed to give up a 5 percent pay raise next year, a concession that saves the school system $89 million and allows Superintendent Jerry D. Weast to balance the budget.
The Montgomery County Board of Education, meeting in closed session last night, tentatively accepted the renegotiated labor deals, according to a school official.
Leaders of four employee associations, representing more than 22,000 workers, agreed Tuesday to forgo the raise all workers would have received in the fiscal year that begins in July. Weast said he and other top administrators in Maryland's largest school system would also lose annual raises.
School officials said it was the first time since the early 1990s that Montgomery school employees had given up a contractual pay raise, a sign of the magnitude of the economic challenge. School board President Nancy Navarro (Northeastern County) credited unions with "tremendous sacrifice during these tough times."
Budget constraints have prompted Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) to consider requiring unpaid furloughs for more than 67,000 state employees and contractors. And across the region, school officials are wondering whether they can fund cost-of-living raises in the 2009-10 academic year. Loudoun County teachers were forced to go without such raises this school year.
Suspensions across the Milwaukee Public Schools system are down sharply so far this school year, Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said Monday.
Andrekopoulos released figures that show suspensions in MPS, as of the end of November, down sharply from last year, showing declines of about 15% in the number of students who have been suspended and of more than 20% in the number of days students have spent on suspensions, compared with the same period a year ago.
The new figures come as MPS is under pressure to lower its high suspension rate - Andrekopoulos has called it "appalling" in the past - and improve the overall behavior climate in schools.
The Council of the Great City Schools, an organization of large urban districts, submitted a report to MPS officials last spring that called for an urgent districtwide mobilization over behavior issues, especially related to suspensions. The report says MPS schools used suspensions, often for minor matters, instead of lesser steps that could bring more constructive results. It suggests the MPS suspension rate was among the highest in the country.
Andrekopoulos said data through last week showed that 12.3% of students had been suspended at least once so far this year, compared with 14.4% in the same period last year, and that the number of "suspension days" had declined from 42,994 to 33,846.
When Kina King goes through the classwork her children bring home from school, she has a hard time telling which belongs to 5-year-old Danielle and which belongs to 16-year-old Jamie.
That's because Jamie, a freshman at Wisconsin Career Academy in Milwaukee, reads at the level of a second-grader. Her writing, with its d's and b's reversed and halting attempts at self-expression, is at a third-grade level.
King said she repeatedly had asked Milwaukee Public Schools to evaluate whether Jamie had special needs since the girl was 5. But it wasn't until Jamie failed first grade for the third time that the district determined that she suffers from cognitive delays and needs additional support.
The question of what MPS should do to compensate the students it has failed to place in special education in a timely manner is at the heart of the third phase in an ongoing class-action suit about how MPS serves special education students. Jamie Stokes is the lead plaintiff in that suit and testified during a weeklong trial that wrapped up in November.
"If they gave her the help she would have been better, not doing coloring books her sister in kindergarten is doing," King said.
MMSD Board of Education Progress Report - November, 2008
The major focus of our meetings in November was on aligning the work of the Board to the district's mission and research regarding effective school boards. The emerging literature regarding the role of school board governance in improving student achievement suggests that the manner in which the Board does its work can lead to positive student achievement results. Superintendent Nerad has provided us with great amount of research and experience to guide us in our discussions. An overview of some of our major changes is below. There are a lot of details behind each of the items listed below. If you have any questions, please let us know via email: comments@madison.k12.wi.us
Arlene Silveira (516-8981)
Committees: We voted to replace the existing committees with the committees listed below in order to create a greater focus on student achievement and the need for improved student achievement and related development outcomes for the district. The committees are structured along key governing lines. Each committee is composed of the board as a whole with co-chairs.
Student Achievement and Performance Monitoring: Focuses on the district's mission and will consist of matters related to factors leading to the improvement of student learning. Governance function: district's mission - work and related accountability for student learning. Co-chairs: Johnny Winston Jr., Maya Cole
Planning and Development: Focuses on ensuring effective planning related to the district's strategic plan, demographic planning, facility planning and budget planning. Governance function: planning for improved results. Co-chairs: Ed Hughes, Marj Passman
Operational Support: Focuses on financial management, building maintenance and operations, land purchase and district administrative operations, retention and hiring of staff and staff equity issues. Governance function: internal functions and ensuring quality business, finance and human resource systems. Co-chairs: Lucy Mathiak, Beth Moss
Engaging/Linking Stakeholders: We are expanding engagement practices with the goals of determining stakeholder perceptions about the district and educating members of the public to build public will and support.
6 Regular board meeting/year will be held in different schools. As part of the agenda, principals and staff will present learning data and their School Improvement Plan.
Each Board member will serve as a liaison to 7 schools to assist the Board in understanding the learning-related work in our schools.
The Board will schedule 4-6 meetings/year within the community to collect input from community stakeholders regarding "big" questions related to the district's strategic plan and/or educational programs/services.
Ensuring a Focus on Results and Accountability:
Data retreats: As part of the work of the Student Achievement and Performance Monitoring committee, 4 meetings/year will include a data presentation related to specific student achievement and student performance measures.
Program evaluation: As part of the Student Achievement and Performance Monitoring committee, a schedule of program evaluations will be identified and implemented.
Improvement benchmarks: When the district's strategic plan is completed. District level improvement benchmarks will be identified for each student based strategy within the plan.
Rupert Murdoch has used his fourth Boyer Lecture to slam Australian schooling. No punches pulled here. "Our public education systems are a disgrace" was almost his opening sentence. And the reason is clear : "despite spending more and more money, our children seem to be learning less and less."
A residual affection for the land of his birth is probably the main driving force of his critique. His country is going down the gurgler. It is a realistic assessment of the situation we are in. India and China especially are poised to wipe us out. Finland irks. Singapore and Korea also graduate students who both know more and think better than Aussie grads. Intellectual sophistication in Australia is an increasingly rare and obviously endangered phenomenon. Football commands the Aussie imagination. Those who study think of learning as work, from which escape must be regularly programmed in order to maintain sanity.
Explanations for poor results abound. The teaching staffs of our schools manifest a huge compassion for instance, for the children who have a low SES (Socio-Economic Status) rating, and stress that these children don't/can't learn because they don't have space at home to do their homework. Murdoch is properly scathing about this and about all the other various excuses offered to explain why so many children are learning so little:"a whole industry of pedagogues (is) devoted to explaining why some schools and some students are failing. Some say classrooms are too large. Others complain that not enough public funding is devoted to this or that program. Still others will tell you that the students who come from certain backgrounds just can't learn."
While George Bush may be reasonably classified as a major disaster, someone seems to have provided him with a memorable, useful and highly pertinent assessment. (The US Dept of Ed has been a good deal more useful to humanity than its Dept Of Defence).His words were resonant. He said we should overthrow "the tyranny of low expectations".(I have written more extensively on this dereliction of professional duty in a paper that can be read at http://review100childrenturn10.blogspot.com)
Murdoch is of the same view, that all our students need us to have high expectations of them, and"the real answer is to start pursuing success".
While the economic news has most Americans in a state of near depression, hope abounds today that the country may use the current economic crisis as leverage to address some longstanding problems. Nowhere is that prospect for progress more worthy than the crisis in our public education system.
So, from someone who realized rather glumly last week that he has been working at school reform for 40 years, here is a prescription for leadership from the Obama administration.
We must start with the recognition that, despite decade after decade of reform efforts, our public K-12 schools have not improved. We can point to individual schools and some entire districts that have advanced, but the system as a whole is still failing. High school and college graduation rates, test scores, the number of graduates majoring in science and engineering all are flat or down over the past two decades. Disappointingly, the relative performance of our students has suffered compared to those of other nations. As a former CEO, I am worried about what this will mean for our future workforce.
It is most crucial for our political leaders to ask why we are at this point -- why after millions of pages, in thousands of reports, from hundreds of commissions and task forces, financed by billions of dollars, have we failed to achieve any significant progress?
Answering this question correctly is the key to finally remaking our public schools.
This is a complex problem, but countless experiments and analyses have clearly indicated we need to do four straightforward things to bring fundamental changes to K-12 education:
Set high academic standards for all of our kids, supported by a rigorous curriculum.
Greatly improve the quality of teaching in our classrooms, supported by substantially higher compensation for our best teachers.
Measure student and teacher performance on a systematic basis, supported by tests and assessments.
Increase "time on task" for all students; this means more time in school each day, and a longer school year.
Everything else either does not matter (e.g., smaller class sizes) or is supportive of these four steps (e.g., vastly improve schools of education).
In 2004, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, a San Francisco think tank, launched an effort to address "anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism" in American education, from K-12 to higher education. Its book, The UnCivil University, focused on the USA's colleges and universities.But the effort also gave rise to an extensive survey on the political, religious and social beliefs of university faculty -- some of whom admitted to holding strong prejudices against evangelical Christians.
The researchers say they found a politically active, vocal minority -- especially within Middle East studies departments -- that held strong anti-Israel positions. Many of the same professors holding what the researchers found were strong political biases are often tapped to review K-12 social studies, history and geography textbooks, which explain religious history, among other topics, to very young children, the institute says.
So authors Gary Tobin and Dennis Ybarra looked at 28 textbooks over nearly five years -- finding what they call "glaring distortions and inaccuracies," many centered on the books' treatment of Israel, Judaism and Christianity. Aside from their findings on how religions are treated, their new book, The Trouble With Textbooks (Lexington Books, $21.95), which appeared on shelves this fall, in part explores problems with the textbook approval process.
Interestingly, though Rhee is a Democrat, she almost voted for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
"It was a very hard decision," Rhee says. "I'm somewhat terrified of what the Democrats are going to do on education."
What does President-elect Obama think? Tough to say. He has supported merit pay for teachers, which teachers' unions oppose, and heralded Rhee. He has been a strong advocate of charter schools and in 2002 said he was "not closed minded" on the subject of vouchers, though since then he has come out against vouchers. Over the Summer, I asked him why.
"The problem is, is that, you know, although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you're going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom," he said. "We don't have enough slots for every child to go into a parochial school or a private school. And what you would see is a huge drain of resources out of the public schools. So what I've said is let's foster competition within the public school system. Let's make sure that charter schools are up and running. Let's make sure that kids who are in failing schools, in local school districts, have an option to go to schools that are doing well.
"But what I don't want to do is to see a diminished commitment to the public schools to the point where all we have are the hardest-to-teach kids with the least involved parents with the most disabilities in the public schools," Obama continued. "That's going to make things worse, and we're going to lose the commitment to public schools that I think have been so important to building this country."
In March, Josh Patashnik of The New Republic took a closer look at PEBO and education, writing that Obama "has long advocated a reformist agenda that looks favorably upon things like competition between schools, test-based accountability, and performance pay for teachers. But the Obama campaign has hesitated to trumpet its candidate's maverick credentials. As an increasingly influential chorus of donors and policy wonks pushes an agenda within the Democratic Party that frightens teachers' unions and their traditional liberal allies, Obama seems unsure how far he can go in reassuring the former group that he's one of them without alienating the latter. And this is a shame, because Obama may represent the best hope for real reform in decades."
Private schools across New York City say they are thriving this fall, with record numbers of applicants and no significant decline in donations. Yet almost daily, even brand-name schools are finding that they have to reassure jittery parents about shrinking endowments and dispel rumors that requests for financial aid are pouring in, and that economically squeezed families are pulling their children out and enrolling them in public schools.
Trinity's interim head of school, Suellyn P. Scull, issued a letter taking issue with recent news reports that 45 families had given notice that they were leaving. Trinity, among the most competitive schools in the city, received 698 applications for the 60 kindergarten spots in this year's class.
The school is not yet releasing admission numbers for next year's class, but Ms. Scull wrote, "This year's admissions season has been perhaps busier than usual, and to date we have had no reports of families planning to leave us."
But the shrinking economy is taking a toll on investment returns at Trinity, whose endowment has fallen to $40 million from $50 million in July, and at other private schools, affecting what they can spend on programs and activities. "There's no way of escaping it," said Lawrence Buttenwieser, a former trustee at Dalton. "If it happens at Harvard, it will happen to everybody."
In 11th grade, Allante Rhodes spent 50 minutes a day in a Microsoft Word class at Anacostia Senior High School in Washington. He was determined to go to college, and he figured that knowing Word was a prerequisite. But on a good day, only six of the school's 14 computers worked. He never knew which ones until he sat down and searched for a flicker of life on the screen. "It was like Russian roulette," says Rhodes, a tall young man with an older man's steady gaze. If he picked the wrong computer, the teacher would give him a handout. He would spend the rest of the period learning to use Microsoft Word with a pencil and paper.
One day last fall, tired of this absurdity, Rhodes e-mailed Michelle Rhee, the new, bold-talking chancellor running the District of Columbia Public Schools system. His teacher had given him the address, which was on the chancellor's home page. He was nervous when he hit SEND, but the words were reasonable. "Computers are slowly becoming something that we use every day," he wrote. "And learning how to use them is a major factor in our lives. So I'm just bringing this to your attention." He didn't expect to hear back. Rhee answered the same day. It was the beginning of an unusual relationship.
The U.S. spends more per pupil on elementary and high school education than most developed nations. Yet it is behind most of them in the math and science abilities of its children. Young Americans today are less likely than their parents were to finish high school. This is an issue that is warping the nation's economy and security, and the causes are not as mysterious as they seem. The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research. And Washington, which spends more money per pupil than the vast majority of large districts, is the problem writ extreme, a laboratory that failure made. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)
"It was a very hard decision," Rhee said of her vote. "I'm somewhat terrified of what the Democrats are going to do on education."
No word on whether the intermediary was Jason Kamras, a top Rhee aide who advised the Obama campaign on education issues.
Now that Obama has won office, Rhee has reasons for both hope and alarm.
Before clinching the nomination, Obama bucked the National Education Association to introduce a Senate bill that would reward teachers according to the sort of statistically-based rating system Rhee champions. In his book "The Audacity of Hope," Obama also stressed the need for linking increased teacher pay to greater accountability. And in his last debate with McCain, Obama even praised Rhee, describing her as "a wonderful new superintendent ... who's working very hard with the young mayor ... who initiated, actually supports, charters." (Rhee said she slept through that moment.)
n Washington, we have these arguments every time a rich Democrat sends his kids to private schools, which is very often. The real issue is why the public schools are unacceptable to pretty much anyone, liberal or conservative, who has other options.
Most Washington public schools are hellholes. So parents here -- including the first family -- find hypocrisy a small price to pay for fulfilling their parental obligations.
According to data compiled by the Washington Post in 2007, of the 100 largest school districts in the country, D.C. ranks third in spending for each student, around $13,000 a pupil, but last in spending on instruction. More than half of every dollar of education spending goes to the salaries of administrators. Test scores are abysmal; the campuses are often unsafe.
Michelle Rhee, D.C.'s new school chancellor, in 17 months has already made meaningful improvements. But that's grading on an enormous curve. The Post recently reported that on observing a bad teacher in a classroom, Rhee complained to the principal. "Would you put your grandchild in that class?" she asked. "If that's the standard," replied the principal, "we don't have any effective teachers in my school."
So if Obama and other politicians don't want to send their kids to schools where even the principals have such views, that's no scandal. The scandal is that these politicians tolerate such awful schools at all. For anyone.
It was reported last week that the Obamas have chosen the elite, $30,000 per year Sidwell Friends School for their daughters. On blogs, there are the predictable arguments about whether President-elect Obama should have chosen a public school instead, with reasonable ripostes about the daughters' safety.
These arguments, overall, are mundane and avoid the point since the Obamas enjoy the same freedom of personal decision as everyone else in terms of choosing a school within the limits of their finances. Furthermore, no matter what school they attend, Malia and Sasha Obama have all of the advantages in the world. If they truly couldn't be expected to turn out as decent, 18-year-old products of the District of Columbia School system, then the whole enterprise of public schooling should conceivably be scrapped.
I taught students the same age as Malia and Sasha for a few years in urban Los Angeles. My school was 100% racial minority: 75% Hispanic, 25% African-American. While Sidwell's exhaustive website notes that the school's missions include "prizing diversity" and "environmental stewardship," our motto was simply, "Be respectful, responsible and safe." I made sure my students abided by that credo, and I've lived to write a book and numerous articles about those experiences.
Gwinnett County Public Schools is seeking freedom from the state to overhaul its methods for improving student performance.
The proposal, which includes flexible teacher pay, increasing class sizes and using aides as stand-ins for teachers, is being crafted by Gwinnett school administrators to give the state's largest school district the flexibility to opt out of restrictive state education mandates.
Some school officials view the mandates as hindering the system's ability to significantly raise standardized test scores.
School administrators have submitted a 104-page draft proposal to the state that details how the system could restructure and reassign teachers with the goal of closing the achievement gap between white, black and Hispanic students by 10 percent annually and improving participation in high-level academic courses.
"We are looking at a number of factors that may be outside the box of what the current rules in the state say," Gwinnett school board member Louise Radloff said. "The key is making sure students are more successful. Having flexibility would allow us to try some things differently."
Montgomery County's high school consortiums, set up partly as a tool for desegregation, have done little to reverse racial isolation or white flight, according to a new report from a government oversight group released this week.
But school system leaders say the programs have succeeded in giving students a measure of choice about their education and have allowed administrators to shift school populations without a painful exercise in redrawing school boundaries.
Eight of the county's 25 high schools belong to two consortiums, which allow students to choose from a menu of programs and schools, rather than settle for a neighborhood school or compete for a selective magnet program.
"They do provide a lot of choice, and we get a lot of positive feedback from parents that they like having those options," said Marty Creel, director of enriched and innovative programs for the school system.
But the consortium programs have not done much to erase socioeconomic inequities, according to the 64-page report, released Tuesday by the county's Office of Legislative Oversight. It finds that "neither consortium reversed minority isolation nor improved socio-economic integration." Poverty rates have continued to increase at schools in the programs, sometimes at a faster rate than in the county as a whole. The percen tage of white students has dwindled at all eight schools, as in the county generally.
Bill and Melinda Gates go back to school Their crusade to fix schools earned a "needs improvement," so they have a new plan. The most surprising beneficiaries? Community colleges.
ince 2000 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested $2 billion in public education, plus another $2 billion in scholarships. Most of it went into efforts to improve high schools that serve poor and minority students - mainly breaking up big, urban high schools and creating smaller, friendlier, and in theory more scholastically sound academies. (All told, the Gates Foundation gave money to 2,602 schools in 40 school districts.) Overall, it hasn't worked. [Much more on Small Learning Communities]
"We had a high hope that just by changing the structure, we'd do something dramatic," Gates concedes. "But it's nowhere near enough."
The results were a disappointing setback. So Gates and his $35 billion foundation went back to school on the issue. They spent more than a year analyzing what went wrong (and in some cases what went right). They hired new leaders for their education effort, while Gates turned his attention to philanthropy full-time after stepping away from his operating role at Microsoft last summer.
In mid-November, when Gates and his wife, Melinda, were finally ready to unveil their fresh direction, they delivered the news at a private forum at the Sheraton Seattle for America's education elite, including New York City schools chief Joel Klein, his Washington, D.C., counterpart, Michelle Rhee, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, and top advisors to President-elect Obama.
The upshot is that Education 2.0 is bolder and more aggressive in its goals, and it involves even more intensive investment - $3 billion over the next five years. This time the focus isn't on the structure of public high schools but on what's inside the classrooms: the quality of the teaching and the relevance of the curriculum. It steers smack into some of the biggest controversies in American education - tying teacher tenure and salaries to performance, and setting national standards for what is taught and tested.
And it looks beyond high school. "Our goal, with your help, is to double the number of low-income students who earn post-secondary degrees or credentials that let them earn a living wage," declared Melinda French Gates at the Seattle gathering.
Today's topic is one that impacts gifted kids in schools on a regular basis. In the past, gifted children were often placed into special gifted classes or special, accelerated learning groups. The thinking went that gifted children learned at a faster pace than other kids, and if you could group gifted children together it was easier for those students and their teachers to move at a faster pace through a class' subject matter.
However, the practice of grouping students by ability has become a controversial topic in many schools. As a result, during the last few years we have seen the dismantling of special gifted classes. We've seen teachers move away from the use of ability groups in their classrooms.
How are gifted students affected by this change and does it make sense to move away from ability grouping?
Kindergartners would be expected to be able to count to 100, not just to 30. Perimeter and area would be introduced and explored in third grade, instead of in second grade.
Those are among many proposed revisions to Virginia's math standards that are part of a national movement to strengthen and streamline math education to prepare all students to learn algebra and higher concepts.
The standards prescribe in detail concepts students are expected to learn in each grade, and the state verifies whether those expectations are met each year through the Standards of Learning tests. Now the standards are being revised for the second time since their introduction in 1995.
According to Dr. Mike Kuehne, the principal of Craig High School, the reasons for keeping students has to do with the fact that some students who leave for lunch don't come back.
"What we're really trying to do is look out for the best interest of our students," Kuehne said.
Safety is another concern for Kuehne. School officials said that they can't control who visits students off school property.
"They hang around young adults -- 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds -- many of them not from our community and they're just hanging there to associate with the kids who are going to lunch," Kuehne said. "It's not an environment that we think is safe for some of our students."
So far, if the campus is closed next year it would only affect incoming students.
Can Barack Obama bring change to American education? The answer is: Yes he can. The question, however, is whether he actually will. Our president-elect has the potential to be an extraordinary leader, and that's why I've supported him since the beginning of his campaign. But on public education, he and the Democrats are faced with a dilemma that has boxed in the party for decades.
Democrats are fervent supporters of public education, and the party genuinely wants to help disadvantaged kids stuck in bad schools. But it resists bold action. It is immobilized. Impotent. The explanation lies in its longstanding alliance with the teachers' unions -- which, with more than three million members, tons of money and legions of activists, are among the most powerful groups in American politics. The Democrats benefit enormously from all this firepower, and they know what they need to do to keep it. They need to stay inside the box.
And they have done just that. Democrats favor educational "change" -- as long as it doesn't affect anyone's job, reallocate resources, or otherwise threaten the occupational interests of the adults running the system. Most changes of real consequence are therefore off the table. The party specializes instead in proposals that involve spending more money and hiring more teachers -- such as reductions in class size, across-the-board raises and huge new programs like universal preschool. These efforts probably have some benefits for kids. But they come at an exorbitant price, both in dollars and opportunities foregone, and purposely ignore the fundamentals that need to be addressed.
What should the Democrats be doing? Above all, they should be guided by a single overarching principle: Do what is best for children. As for specifics, here are a few that deserve priority.
America's nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation's teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores--things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. "Let's be honest," darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University's Teachers College last February. "What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?" It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation's teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)--self-actualization, following one's joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity--but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in "constructing one's own knowledge," or "contextualized knowledge." Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to "professionalize" teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats' pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in "Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education" that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
As with most education classes, the title of Professor Nelson's course doesn't give a clear sense of what it is about. Unfortunately, Professor Nelson doesn't either. The semester began, she said in a pre-class interview, by "building a community, rich of talk, in which students look at what they themselves are doing by in-class writing." On this, the third meeting of the semester, Professor Nelson said that she would be "getting the students to develop the subtext of what they're doing." I would soon discover why Professor Nelson was so vague.
"Developing the subtext" turns out to involve a chain reaction of solipsistic moments. After taking attendance and--most admirably--quickly checking the students' weekly handwriting practice, Professor Nelson begins the main work of the day: generating feather-light "texts," both written and oral, for immediate group analysis. She asks the students to write for seven minutes on each of three questions; "What excites me about teaching?" "What concerns me about teaching?" and then, the moment that brands this class as hopelessly steeped in the Anything But Knowledge credo: "What was it like to do this writing?"
This last question triggers a quickening volley of self-reflexive turns. After the students read aloud their predictable reflections on teaching, Professor Nelson asks: "What are you hearing?" A young man states the obvious: "Everyone seems to be reflecting on what their anxieties are." This is too straightforward an answer. Professor Nelson translates into ed-speak: "So writing gave you permission to think on paper about what's there." Ed-speak dresses up the most mundane processes in dramatic terminology--one doesn't just write, one is "given permission to think on paper"; one doesn't converse, one "negotiates meaning." Then, like a champion tennis player finishing off a set, Nelson reaches for the ultimate level of self-reflexivity and drives it home: "What was it like to listen to each other's responses?"
The self-reflection isn't over yet, however. The class next moves into small groups--along with in-class writing, the most pervasive gimmick in progressive classrooms today--to discuss a set of student-teaching guidelines. After ten minutes, Nelson interrupts the by-now lively and largely off-topic conversations, and asks: "Let's talk about how you felt in these small groups." The students are picking up ed-speak. "It shifted the comfort zone," reveals one. "It was just acceptance; I felt the vibe going through the group." Another adds: "I felt really comfortable; I had trust there." Nelson senses a "teachable moment." "Let's talk about that," she interjects. "We are building trust in this class; we are learning how to work with each other."
Now, let us note what this class was not: it was not about how to keep the attention of eight-year-olds or plan a lesson or make the Pilgrims real to first-graders. It did not, in other words, contain any material (with the exception of the student-teacher guidelines) from the outside world. Instead, it continuously spun its own subject matter out of itself. Like a relationship that consists of obsessively analyzing the relationship, the only content of the course was the course itself.
How did such navel-gazing come to be central to teacher education? It is the almost inevitable consequence of the Anything But Knowledge doctrine, born in a burst of quintessentially American anti-intellectual fervor in the wake of World War I. Educators within the federal government and at Columbia's Teachers College issued a clarion call to schools: cast off the traditional academic curriculum and start preparing young people for the demands of modern life. America is a forward-looking country, they boasted; what need have we for such impractical disciplines as Greek, Latin, and higher math? Instead, let the students then flooding the schools take such useful courses as family membership, hygiene, and the worthy use of leisure time. "Life adjustment," not wisdom or learning, was to be the goal of education.
The early decades of this century forged the central educational fallacy of our time: that one can think without having anything to think about. Knowledge is changing too fast to be transmitted usefully to students, argued William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College, the most influential American educator of the century; instead of teaching children dead facts and figures, schools should teach them "critical thinking," he wrote in 1925. What matters is not what you know, but whether you know how to look it up, so that you can be a "lifelong learner."
Two final doctrines rounded out the indelible legacy of progressivism. First, Harold Rugg's The Child-Centered School (1928) shifted the locus of power in the classroom from the teacher to the student. In a child-centered class, the child determines what he wants to learn. Forcing children into an existing curriculum inhibits their self-actualization, Rugg argued, just as forcing them into neat rows of chairs and desks inhibits their creativity. The teacher becomes an enabler, an advisor; not, heaven forbid, the transmitter of a pre-existing body of ideas, texts, or worst of all, facts. In today's jargon, the child should "construct" his own knowledge rather than passively receive it. Bu the late 1920s, students were moving their chairs around to form groups of "active learners" pursuing their own individual interests, and, instead of a curriculum, the student-centered classroom followed just one principle: "activity leading to further activity without badness," in Kilpatrick's words. Today's educators still present these seven-decades-old practices as cutting-edge.
As E.D. Hirsch observes, the child-centered doctrines grew out of the romantic idealization of children. If the child was, in Wordsworth's words, a "Mighty Prophet! Seer Blest!" then who needs teachers? But the Mighty Prophet emerged from student-centered schools ever more ignorant and incurious as the schools became more vacuous. By the 1940s and 1950s, schools were offering classes in how to put on nail polish and how to act on a date. The notion that learning should push students out of their narrow world had been lost.
The final cornerstone of progressive theory was the disdain for report cards and objective tests of knowledge. These inhibit authentic learning, Kilpatrick argued; and he carried the day, to the eternal joy of students everywhere.
The foregoing doctrines are complete bunk, but bunk that has survived virtually unchanged to the present. The notion that one can teach "metacognitive" thinking in the abstract is senseless. Students need to learn something to learn how to learn at all. The claim that prior knowledge is superfluous because one can always look it up, preferably on the Internet, is equally senseless. Effective research depends on preexisting knowledge. Moreover, if you don't know in what century the atomic bomb was dropped without rushing to an encyclopedia, you cannot fully participate in society. Lastly, Kilpatrick's influential assertion that knowledge was changing too fast to be taught presupposes a blinkered definition of knowledge that excludes the great works and enterprises of the past.
The rejection of testing rests on premises as flawed as the push for "critical thinking skills." Progressives argue that if tests exist, then teachers will "teach to the test"--a bad thing, in their view. But why would "teaching to a test" that asked for, say, the causes of the [U.S.] Civil War be bad for students? Additionally, progressives complain that testing provokes rote memorization--again, a bad thing. One of the most tragically influential education professors today, Columbia's Linda Darling-Hammond, director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, an advocacy group for increased teacher "professionalization," gives a telling example of what she considers a criminally bad test in her hackneyed 1997 brief for progressive education, The Right to Learn. She points disdainfully to the following question from the 1995 New York State Regents Exam in biology (required for high school graduation) as "a rote recall of isolated facts and vocabulary terms": "The tissue which conducts organic food through a vascular plant is composed of: (1) Cambium cells; (2) Xylem cells; (3) Phloem cells; (4) Epidermal cells."
Only a know-nothing could be offended by so innocent a question. It never occurs to Darling-Hammond that there may be a joy in mastering the parts of a plant or the organelles of a cell, and that such memorization constitutes learning. Moreover, when, in the progressives' view, will a student ever be held accountable for such knowledge? Does Darling-Hammond believe that a student can pursue a career in, say, molecular biology or in medicine without it? And how else will that learning be demonstrated, if not in a test? But of course such testing will produce unequal results, and that is the real target of Darling-Hammond's animus.
Once you dismiss real knowledge as the goal of education, you have to find something else to do. That's why the Anything But Knowledge doctrine leads directly to Professor Nelson's odd course. In thousands of education schools across the country, teachers are generating little moments of meaning, which they then subject to instant replay. Educators call this "constructing knowledge," a fatuous label for something that is neither construction nor knowledge but mere game-playing. Teacher educators, though, posses a primitive relationship to words. They believe that if they just label something "critical thinking" or "community-building," these activities will magically occur...
The Anything But Knowledge credo leaves education professors and their acolytes free to concentrate on more pressing matters than how to teach the facts of history or the rules of sentence construction. "Community-building" is one of their most urgent concerns. Teacher educators conceive of their classes as sites of profound political engagement, out of which the new egalitarian order will emerge. A case in point is Columbia's required class, "Teaching English in Diverse Social and Cultural Contexts," taught by Professor Barbara Tenney (a pseudonym). "I want to work at a very conscious level with you to build community in this class," Tenney tells her attentive students on the first day of the semester this spring. "You can do it consciously, and you ought to do it in your own classes." Community-building starts by making nameplates for our desks. Then we all find a partner to interview about each other's "identity." Over the course of the semester, each student will conduct two more "identity" interviews with different partners. After the interview, the inevitable self-reflexive moment arrives, when Tenney asks: "How did it work?" This is a sign that we are on our way to "constructing knowledge."...
All this artificial "community-building," however gratifying to the professors, has nothing to do with learning. Learning is ultimately a solitary activity: we have only one brain, and at some point we must exercise it in private. One could learn an immense amount about Schubert's lieder or calculus without ever knowing the name of one's seatmate. Such a view is heresy to the education establishment, determined, as Rita Kramer has noted, to eradicate any opportunity for individual accomplishment, with its sinister risk of superior achievement. For the educrats, the group is the irreducible unit of learning. Fueling this principle is the gap in achievement between whites and Asians, on the one hand, and other minorities on the other. Unwilling to adopt the discipline and teaching practices that would help reduce the gap, the education establishment tries to conceal it under group projects....
The consequences of the Anything But Knowledge credo for intellectual standards have been dire. Education professors are remarkably casual when it comes to determining whether their students actually know anything, rarely asking them, for example, what can you tell us about the American Revolution? The ed schools incorrectly presume that students have learned everything they need to know in their other or previous college courses, and that the teacher certification exam will screen out people who didn't.
Even if college education were reliably rigorous and comprehensive, education majors aren't the students most likely to profit from it. Nationally, undergraduate education majors have lower SAT and ACT scores than students in any other program of study. Only 16 percent of education majors scored in the top quartile of 1992-1993 graduates, compared with 33 percent of humanities majors. Education majors were overrepresented in the bottom quartile, at 30 percent. In New York City, many education majors have an uncertain command of English--I saw one education student at City College repeatedly write "choce" for "choice"-- and appear altogether ill at ease in a classroom. To presume anything about this population without a rigorous content exit exam is unwarranted.
The laissez-faire attitude toward student knowledge rests on "principled" grounds, as well as on see-no-evil inertia. Many education professors embrace the facile post-structuralist view that knowledge is always political. "An education program can't have content [knowledge] specifics," explains Migdalia Romero, chair of Hunter College's Department of Curriculum and Teaching, "because then you have a point of view. Once you define exactly what finite knowledge is, it becomes a perspective." The notion that culture could possess a pre-political common store of texts and idea is anathema to the modern academic.
The most powerful dodge regurgitates William Heard Kilpatrick's classic "critical thinking" scam. Asked whether a future teacher should know the date of the 1812 war, Professor Romero replied: "Teaching and learning is not about dates, facts, and figures, but about developing critical thinking." When pressed if there were not some core facts that a teacher or student should know, she valiantly held her ground. "There are two ways of looking at teaching and learning," she replied. "Either you are imparting knowledge, giving an absolute knowledge base, or teaching and learning is about dialogue, a dialogue that helps to internalize and to raise questions." Though she offered the disclaimer "of course you need both," Romero added that teachers don't have to know everything, because they can always look things up....
Disregard for language runs deep in the teacher education profession, so much so that ed school professors tolerate glaring language deficiencies in schoolchildren. Last January, Manhattan's Park West High School shut down for a day, so that its faculty could bone up on progressive pedagogy. One of the more popular staff development seminars ws "Using Journals and Learning Logs." The presenters--two Park West teachers and a representative from the New York City Writing Project, an anti-grammar initiative run by the Lehman College's Education School--proudly passed around their students' journal writing, including the following representative entry on "Matriarchys v. pratiarchys [sic]": "The different between Matriarchys and patriarchys is that when the mother is in charge of the house. sometime the children do whatever they want. But sometimes the mother can do both roll as mother and as a father too and they can do it very good." A more personal entry described how the author met her boyfriend: "He said you are so kind I said you noticed and then he hit me on my head. I made-believe I was crying and when he came naire me I slaped him right in his head and than I ran...to my grandparients home and he was right behind me. Thats when he asked did I have a boyfriend."
The ubiquitous journal-writing cult holds that such writing should go uncorrected. Fortunately, some Park West teachers bridled at the notion. "At some point, the students go into the job market, and they're not being judged 'holistically,'" protested a black teacher, responding to the invocation of the state's "holistic" model for grading writing. Another teacher bemoaned the Board of Ed's failure to provide guidance on teaching grammar. "My kids are graduating without skills," he lamented.
Such views, however, were decidedly in the minority. "Grammar is related to purpose," soothed the Lehman College representative, educrat code for the proposition that asking students to write grammatically on topics they are not personally "invested in" is unrealistic. A Park West presenter burst out with a more direct explanation for his chilling indifference to student incompetence. "I'm not going to spend my life doing error diagnosis! I'm not going to spend my weekend on that!" Correcting papers used to be part of the necessary drudgery of a teacher's job. No more, with the advent of enlightened views about "self-expression" and "writing with intentionality."
However easygoing the educational establishment is regarding future teachers' knowledge of history, literature, and science, there is one topic that it assiduously monitors: their awareness of racism. To many teacher educators, such an awareness is the most important tool a young teacher can bring to the classroom. It cannot be developed too early. Rosa, a bouncy and enthusiastic junior at Hunter College, has completed only her first semester of education courses, but already she has mastered the most important lesson: American is a racist, imperialist country, most like, say, Nazi Germany. "We are lied to by the very institutions we have come to trust," she recalls from her first-semester reading. "It's all government that's inventing these lies, such as Western heritage."
The source of Rosa's newfound wisdom, Donald Macedo's Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know, is an execrable book by any measure. But given its target audience--impressionable education students--it comes close to being a crime. Widely assigned at Hunter, and in use in approximately 150 education schools nationally, it is an illiterate, barbarically ignorant Marxist-inspired screed against America. Macedo opens his first chapter, "Literacy for Stupidification: The Pedagogy of Big Lies," with a quote from Hitler and quickly segues to Ronald Reagan: "While busily calling out slogans from their patriotic vocabulary memory warehouse, these same Americans dutifully vote...for Ronald Reagan...giving him a landslide victory...These same voters ascended [sic] to Bush's morally high-minded call to apply international laws against Saddam Hussein's tyranny and his invasion of Kuwait." Standing against this wave of ignorance and imperialism is a lone 12-year-old from Boston, whom Macedo celebrates for his courageous refusal to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
What does any of this have to do with teaching? Everything, it turns out. In the 1960s, educational progressivism took on an explicitly political cast: schools were to fight institutional racism and redistribute power. Today, Columbia's Teachers College holds workshops on cultural and political "oppression," in which students role-play ways to "usurp the existing power structure," and the New York State Regents happily call teachers "the ultimate change agents." To be a change agent, one must first learn to "critique" the existing social structure. Hence, the assignment of such propaganda as Macedo's book.
But Macedo is just one of the political tracts that Hunter force-fed the innocent Rosa in her first semester. She also learned about the evils of traditional children's stories from the education radical Herbert Kohl. In Should We Burn Babar? Kohl weighs the case for and against the dearly beloved children's classic, Babar the Elephant, noting in passing that it prevented him from "questioning the patriarchy earlier." He decides--but let Rosa expound the meaning of Kohl's book: "[Babar]'s like a children's book, right? [But] there's an underlying meaning about colonialism, about like colonialism, and is it OK, it's really like it's OK, but it's like really offensive to the people." Better burn Babar now!...
Though the current diversity battle cry is "All students can learn," the educationists continually lower expectations of what they should learn. No longer are students expected to learn all their multiplication tables in the third grade, as has been traditional. But while American educators come up with various theories about fixed cognitive phases to explain why our children should go slow, other nationalities trounce us. Sometimes, we're trounced in our own backyards, causing cognitive dissonance in local teachers.
A young student at Teachers College named Susan describes incredulously a Korean-run preschool in Queens. To her horror, the school, the Holy Mountain School, violates every progressive tenet: rather than being "student-centered" and allowing each child to do whatever he chooses, the school imposes a curriculum on the children, based on the alphabet. "Each week, the children get a different letter," Susan recalls grimly. Such an approach violates "whole language" doctrine, which holds that students can't "grasp the [alphabetic] symbols without the whole word or the meaning or any context in their lives." In Susan's words, Holy Mountain's further infractions include teaching its wildly international students only in English and failing to provide an "anti-bias multicultural curriculum." The result? By the end of preschool the children learn English and are writing words. Here is the true belief in the ability of all children to learn, for it is backed up by action....
Given progressive education's dismal record, all New Yorkers should tremble at what the Regents have in store for the state. The state's teacher education establishment, led by Columbia's Linda Darling-Hammond, has persuaded the Regents to make its monopoly on teacher credentialing total. Starting in 2003, according to the Regents plan steaming inexorably toward adoption, all teacher candidates must pass through an education school to be admitted to a classroom. We know, alas, what will happen to them there.
This power grab will be a disaster for children. By making ed school inescapable, the Regents will drive away every last educated adult who may not be willing to sit still for its foolishness but who could bring to the classroom unusual knowledge or experience. The nation's elite private schools are full of such people, and parents eagerly proffer tens of thousands of dollars to give their children the benefit of such skill and wisdom.
Amazingly, even the Regents, among the nation's most addled education bodies, sporadically acknowledge what works in the classroom. A Task Force on Teaching paper cites some of the factors that allow other countries to wallop us routinely in international tests: a high amount of lesson content (in other words, teacher-centered, not student-centered, learning), individual tracking of students, and a coherent curriculum. The state should cling steadfastly to its momentary insight, at odds with its usual policies, and discard its foolish plan to enshrine Anything But Knowledge as its sole education dogma. Instead of permanently establishing the teacher education status quo, it should search tirelessly for alternatives and for potential teachers with a firm grasp of subject matter and basic skills. Otherwise ed school claptrap will continue to stunt the intellectual growth of the Empire State's children.
[Heather Mac Donald graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and earned an M.A. at Cambridge University. She holds the J.D. degree from Stanford Law School, and is a John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal]
You know that line about "the best-laid plans"? It came to mind earlier this month as I sat in on a west-metro League of Women Voters briefing on big plans to tidy up the mess that's been made of Minnesota's school-funding system.
A "New Minnesota Miracle." That idea was supposed to be the big issue in state House races this summer and fall. It was supposed to be top-tier policy stuff at the 2009 Legislature. The studies have been done; the proposal drafted; the stakeholders' coalition built, and the hearings held around the state.
And the state senator who led the briefing, Minnetonka DFLer Terri Bonoff -- well, according to her plan last winter, she wasn't even going to be in the Legislature in 2009. She aimed to be off to Congress as the newly elected successor to Third District Rep. Jim Ramstad.
Plans go awry. Bonoff is still in the state Senate. The education issue is being eclipsed by economic distress and -- temporarily, let us pray -- by the Coleman-Franken recount.
Community Input on Math Task Force Recommendations - SAVE THE DATES!
Hi - there will be 2 community input forums to gather input from the community on the recommendations of the Math Task Force. The report of the MTF can be found at:
Monday, December 8 from 6:00-8:00pm at Memorial High School
Tuesday, December 9 from 6:00-8:00pm at LaFollette High School
I am not sure of the format yet but know this is a busy time of year so wanted to give you an opportunity to mark your calendars if you plan on attending on of the forums. I'll send more information when available.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, it's wonderful that the Obamas had such a broad range of public and private school choices available to them. What's puzzling is that the president-elect opposes programs that would bring that same easy choice of schools within reach of families who lack his personal wealth. By his actions, Senator Obama is demonstrating that he is not willing to wait for his own policy prescriptions to "fix and improve" public schools, but he expects folks with less ample bank accounts to patiently await his hoped-for change.
And while many reports will no doubt trumpet the $25,000+ tuition at Sidwell Friends, implying that this is extravagantly beyond what is spent in D.C. public schools, they will be mistaken. As I wrote in the Washington Post and on this blog, D.C. public schools also spent about $25,000 per child in the 2007-08 school year.
It's not that president-elect Obama is against spending a lot of money on other people's kids -- he's just against letting their parents choose where that money is spent.
It is the Quaker ethos that is the most striking feature of Sidwell Friends School, the one chosen by President-elect Obama for his daughters Sasha and Malia. A sense of community, equality and friendship runs through every classroom: children are encouraged to strive for their best, but to value above all their relations with each other and their place in the school family.
For any president trying to ensure that his children enjoy as normal an education as possible, such an ethos is invaluable. However rich, influential or politically important the parents - as many at Sidwell are - what matters is the "inner light" in every child. Pupils are not ranked by academic scores, and Sidwell never releases its SAT scores or college admission list. In race, wealth and nationality and in all else, all are treated the same. The two Obama girls will find their White House address is officially all but irrelevant.
Sidwell, founded in 1883 and now enrolling more than 1,000 children from kindergarten to 18, was a committed pioneer of integration and coeducation. More than one third of its intake belongs to ethnic minorities and one fifth receives financial assistance to help with the fees. The only preference is to those with Quaker connections. Since my wife and I went to Quaker schools, our daughter spent three happy primary years there during my time as bureau chief in Washington.
US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.
Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).
"It is disturbing enough that the general public failed ISI's civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of elected officials, you have to be concerned," said Josiah Bunting, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board at ISI.
"How can political leaders make informed decisions if they don't understand the American experience?" he added.
The exam questions covered American history, the workings of the US government and economics.
Among the questions asked of some 2,500 people who were randomly selected to take the test, including "self-identified elected officials," was one which asked respondents to "name two countries that were our enemies during World War II."
Only four Tennessee public high schools are preparing students to pass basic academic courses when they go on to college, if their ACT entrance exams are the indicator.
The ACT is one of the most high-profile, high-stakes tests in the country. In Tennessee, a score of 21 out of a perfect 36 is one of the requirements to earn a lottery scholarship.
Students from Hume-Fogg and Martin Luther King magnet schools in Metro Nashville, Merrol Hyde Magnet in Hendersonville and Gatlinburg-Pittman in East Tennessee averaged ACT scores high enough over a three-year period to be considered ready for basic college coursework. Only 18 percent of Tennessee's class of 2008 students who took the test met that standard, compared with about 22 percent of students nationally.
Education experts in the state and region say that's more evidence of what they've been saying about Tennessee's high school curriculum: It's too easy.
"We see high school valedictorians who are forced to take remedial courses," said Alan Richard, spokesman for the Southern Regional Education Board, a nonprofit network that focuses on learning in the South. "That means there's a gulf between what high schools teach and what colleges expect."
Major changes in how Milwaukee Public Schools teaches reading and writing are coming soon, according to school Superintendent William Andrekopoulos.
He said a team of outside experts has been evaluating MPS literacy efforts and he expects to get its report in December. He said he has been given indications of what the experts will recommend.
"I think you will see this report turning things upside down, changing some past practices, and making some bold changes that we hope will improve the performance of our kids," he said earlier this week.
He said the state Department of Public Instruction had put together the expert team and was paying for the study as part of plans aimed at bringing MPS into compliance with goals set by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
"We're going to take it to heart, what's in that report," he said. "The status quo is unacceptable. . . . We realize if we just continue to do the same thing, we're going to get the same results."
He did not provide details of what is expected to be in the report.
Now that we've made history by electing our first African-American president, what has changed? On first blush, not much, especially when it comes to our schools. Indeed, as the spiraling United States economy takes precedence, education is moving to the back burner, though sadly it was never really on the front burner during the campaign. Meanwhile Washington high society is swooning as chatty lifestyle stories document the courtship of Barack Obama's daughters by a bevy of exclusive private schools. Am I the only one who is outraged here?
Again, I feel compelled to point out, one last time: Sarah Palin was taken tirelessly to the mat for every detail of her personal life -- her mothering skills, hunting proclivities, reading habits (such as they were), the wacky names of her children, her pricey outfits and even the height of her heels. By contrast, the Obama family's move from toney Chicago private school (chosen before presidential security was an issue) to toney Washington private school draws little national commentary. Why? Because for the ruling American political and professional class, not to mention the news media, sending one's child to public school is unthinkable; and has nothing to do with public education policy. (Love that Teach for America, though! And universal preschool -- it's great! Computers! Innovation! Stimulation! Richard Branson! Aspen Technology Conference! Blah, blah blah.)
Meanwhile, as the fall days darken earlier, in my own Los Angeles Unified school district, citizens here have just passed a $7 billion construction bond -- not because we need more new schools (we've already approved $20 billion via four previous bond issues), but because a consulting firm deduced that $7 billion was the size of a blank check most likely to be approved by voters.
The proposal, which could go into effect as early as next school year, would allow four years of sports to count as elective credits toward graduation instead of the current maximum of two years.
The board's 10-5 vote followed often emotional debate, with both Dallas members - Republican Geraldine Miller and Democrat Mavis Knight - voting no.
Supporters said the move would keep kids in school and spur them to do well in academic courses. Critics charged that the plan would de-emphasize academics and return to the days of "football comes first."
Ms. Miller was among the most vocal opponents, insisting the plan would "completely dismantle" many of the education reforms enacted in Texas over the last two decades.
"This takes us back to the way things used to be," she said. "Our school reform movement put everything in perspective, with academics coming first. Now, we are opening the door to water down all the efforts we have made to strengthen standards in our schools."
But Craig Agnew, the Brenham High School coach and teacher who petitioned the board to adopt the rule, said an "unfair burden" exists for student athletes who must meet stringent course requirements to retain their athletic eligibility.
From the corner of N. 27th St. and North Ave., Transition High School looks more like a strip mall than a place where teenagers are turning their lives around.
The Milwaukee public school, which opened in March, is home to students working through challenges beyond the scope of what most traditional high schools can handle. Some have been expelled. Others have served sentences in the House of Correction or a youth facility. Some have been truant for more than a year.
But on a recent day, as they wrapped up online coursework and got ready for an afternoon of off-campus rock climbing, students talked about how safe they felt.
"This is a non-violent place," said Charles Banster, 16, and a sophomore. "Nobody has problems here."
Another student, who said he had spent time in a large school on the city's south side, agreed. The small environment makes him feel like he's among family.
"I don't like too many people around me," said 14-year-old Tim Owens-Rice. "I just feel paranoid." In the past, that need to define and defend his personal space has led to fights, he said.
Revamped security and discipline policies, more specialized schools, a "Parent Academy" to help District parents take charge of their children's education and the possibility of more school closures are part of the long-term vision proposed by Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee in a new document.
The 79-page "action plan," which Rhee will present to the D.C. Council tomorrow, pulls together a broad variety of ideas that have been only hinted at publicly, including a possible end to out-of-school suspensions and an increase in the number of "theme" schools, focusing on high technology, language immersion, or gifted and talented students.
Other goals in the draft document -- the need for new and better-paid teachers, higher test scores, closing the achievement gap between white and minority students -- are ones she has frequently articulated. Taken together, they provide the most detailed picture of Rhee's aspirations for the 120-school system, which is affected by declining enrollment and poor academic performance.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Monday that given the economic crisis, her union would be willing to discuss new approaches to issues like teacher tenure and merit pay.
"Faced with declining tax revenues, state and local governments are cutting" education budgets nationwide, Ms. Weingarten said in a speech to education policy makers in Washington.
"In the spirit of this extraordinary moment, and as a pledge of shared responsibility, I'll take the first step," she said. "With the exception of vouchers, which siphon scarce resources from public schools, no issue should be off the table, provided it is good for children and fair to teachers."
It is unclear how much practical effect Ms. Weingarten's speech will have on the stance her 1.4-million-member union and its locals take in negotiations with school districts or in lobbying state legislatures.
The Minneapolis School District is close to finalizing the sale of three of its shuttered buildings. But unlike previous real estate deals, the district this time entertained offers from charter schools.
St. Paul, Minn. -- Minneapolis School Board member Pam Costain calls the sale of Franklin, Putnam, and Morris Park Schools "uncharted territory." That's because, even though the district has leased space to private schools before, there used to be a policy banning the sale of any of district buildings to charter schools -- with the idea that they're the competition.
But that's exactly who's in line to move into these buildings, in North, Northeast, and South Minneapolis.
Third-graders at Hunters Woods Elementary School are required to learn the fundamentals of the violin. They know how to stand up straight, how to hold their instruments and how to use the tippy tips of their fingers when they press on the strings so they don't make what their teacher calls "an icky sound."
After learning a grand total of eight notes, they also know how to make music. Their repertoire one fall morning included pieces from a range of cultures and styles: "Caribbean Island," "Seminole Chant," "Good King Wenceslas."
In Fairfax County and elsewhere, students often begin studying violin in fourth grade. Hunters Woods, an arts and science magnet school in Reston, gives them a one-year head start. Experts say the earlier children begin, the more likely they are to succeed in music.
Hunters Woods, with 950 students, is one of more than a dozen local schools in which teachers are trained through the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to infuse arts education into other subjects. For instance, students might build instruments from recycled materials, learn science through lessons on sound and vibration or study math through measurement and patterning. Some also compose songs with lyrics inspired by Virginia history.
But music programs and the rest of the education budget are under scrutiny as the county School Board seeks to close a $220 million budget shortfall for the fiscal year that begins in July. One proposal to save about $850,000 would trim band and strings teaching positions, making it tough to keep such programs in third and fourth grades, said Roger Tomhave, fine arts coordinator for Fairfax schools.
The analysis of data from 27 elementary schools and 11 middle schools is based on scores from the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE), a state test required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Madison is the second Wisconsin district, after Milwaukee, to make a major push toward value-added systems, which are gaining support nationally as an improved way of measuring school performance.
Advocates say it's better to track specific students' gains over time than the current system, which holds schools accountable for how many students at a single point in time are rated proficient on state tests.
"This is very important," Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad said. "We think it's a particularly fair way ... because it's looking at the growth in that school and ascertaining the influence that the school is having on that outcome."
The findings will be used to pinpoint effective teaching methods and classroom design strategies, officials said. But they won't be used to evaluate teachers: That's forbidden by state law.
"... The WKCE is a large-scale assessment designed to provide a snapshot of how well a district or school is doing at helping all students reach proficiency on state standards, with a focus on school and district-level accountability. A large-scale, summative assessment such as the WKCE is not designed to provide diagnostic information about individual students. Those assessments are best done at the local level, where immediate results can be obtained. Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum."
The head of the American Federation of Teachers signaled the union's willingness Monday to work broadly on education reform with the incoming Obama administration. It said that, with the exception of school vouchers, "no issue should be off the table."
AFT president Randi Weingarten cautioned lawmakers nationwide against a "disinvestment in education" in the face of the economic meltdown. She warned that cutting aid to schools "places our economy in a race to the bottom for years to come."
Weingarten already has told Congress that schools must be included in economic stimulus plans. She testified last month that lawmakers should add $20 billion to a social-services block grant to help state and local governments balance budgets without cutting education. She also said schools need $286 billion for buildings improvements.
The A-through-F grading system for New York City schools is billed as a public information tool, helping people sort out which schools are teaching children and which schools are just moving them along. Instead of inscrutable education jargon and endless score charts, the letter grades act like billboards broadcasting achievements and failures.
But for parents shopping for the best schools, the letter grades can obscure some of the most salient information, because they are determined largely by how much progress students make year to year rather than how well their skills stand up against objective standards.
While the question of how effective teachers are at moving students forward is a critical one for their bosses, many parents are equally interested in which schools are most likely to, say, have students reading at grade level or ensure that sophomores are mastering algebra. The heavy emphasis on peer comparisons to schools serving similar populations is clearly a fairer yardstick for educators, but it can hide schools burdened by particularly challenging demographics.
Excerpt: "A main strategy of the schools, breaking large high schools into smaller units, on its own guaranteed no overall success, Gates said.
He said the New York City small schools were an example of successes in raising high school graduation rates -- but a disappointment in that their graduates were no likelier than any city student to be prepared to go onto college.
Gates said the small number of successful schools did well not because they were structured as small schools, but because they enacted many different innovations: improved teaching quality, a longer school day, innovative instructional tools, a focus on tracking student achievement data."
Fremont School District Board of Education and FoxPolitics reader, wrote to update me with positive (!!) financial news from a school district. Refreshing!
In early March, 2007, the Post-Crescent, striving to illustrate the Freedom of Information Act for readers, requested invoices for legal charges from Weyauwega Fremont (W-F), a 1000-student school district west of Appleton. Per one of the newspaper's articles at the time:
Using the state's Open Records law, the newspaper fought for 10 months to see detailed invoices for attorney services after the district released heavily redacted copies ....
Loehrke objected to carte blanche (unredacted) release of the information and the P/C suit ended up costing district taxpayers about $25,000.
Quoting again from the March 11, 2007 P/C article:
District officials maintain they have not broken the law nor spent money irresponsibly, that the media is hyping the issue, and a handful of antagonistic residents are digging for dirt where none exists.
"We have willingly and openly responded promptly to more than 30 open records requests in the last year," school board president Steve Loehrke wrote in an e-mail to The P-C this past week.
Much of the legal work paid for by W-F and questioned by the P-C, was in response to actions by district retirees unhappy with health insurance changes the board and administration were considering - changes which ultimately led to substantial savings for the District.
Loehrke is proud of his school district and concerned that good news isn't reported.
To update you, our school district changed to a self-funded insurance plan and got rid of the WEAC owned insurance carrier. This year the school district put $800,000 (8%) of our budget into the Fund Balance. Tax rate is lowest of all surrounding school districts. Test scores are up. Permanently fixed the OPEB [Other Post-Employment Benefits] problem. Balanced the next year's budget. Many things the newspaper could have and should have reported. Instead they wanted a whipping boy to help them sell papers. They never showed up at this year's annual meeting. News silence. Good news isn't news.
I talked with W-F District Administrator Jim Harlan to confirm Loehrke's claims, and if accurate, to get the low-down on how the district achieved all this good stuff.
It seems to me the primary story is one of doggedly doing everything they can to reduce costs - to reduce costs that don't impact learning in the classroom. Lo and behold, one way W-F reduced costs was by controlling - surprise, surprise - health insurance costs.
Like the typical school district, teachers had a contracted right to choose the district's health insurance carrier. So again, like most other districts in the state, WEAC members chose the Insurance Trust (WEA IT) run by their union. With no competitive bidding.
In negotiations, Harlan and his teachers agreed to form a committee that would simply look into a possible change. Ultimately all parties saw it as a win-win for the district to self-fund their insurance program. Premiums are lower and coverage is better than the WEA IT program - so good in fact, the district was able to add dollars to their reserve fund, as Loehrke mentions above. ($200,000 of the $800,000 mentioned by Loehrke came from positive performance of the self-funded health insurance program.)
Those dang OPEBs
"Other Post-Employment Benefits" are a huge budget item for most school districts - districts that years ago agreed to fund health insurance benefits for retirees from as early as age 55, to age 65 when employees are eligible for Medicare coverage. As you can imagine, this gets to be a pretty hefty bill, with family coverage per retiree at $14,000 annually and up. (Here's a great primer on the extent of the OPEB problem in Wisconsin. To get a good overview, read the Executive Summary at the beginning and the Recommendations section at the end.)
For newly hired employees, W-F is phasing in a defined contribution retirement plan meant to fund retiree health care coverage. The District now establishes (and funds half of) a 403(b) (like a 401(k), only used by public sector and nonprofit corp. employees) that ultimately is meant to pay for health insurance benefits on retirement. And it's portable - traveling with a teacher if he moves to another district - or another position.
Other school districts, and several local governments have huge health insurance and OPEB challenges. Kudos to W-F for addressing theirs.
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee are discussing a dramatic expansion of their effort to remove ineffective teachers by restoring the District's power to create nonunionized charter schools and seeking federal legislation declaring the school system in a "state of emergency," a move that would eliminate the need to bargain with the Washington Teachers' Union.
If adopted, the measures would essentially allow the District to begin building a new school system. Such an effort would be similar to one underway in New Orleans, where a state takeover after Hurricane Katrina placed most of the city's 78 public schools in a special Recovery School District. About half of the district's schools are charters, and it has no union contract.
Pursuit of the ideas would intensify the considerable national attention that Washington has drawn as a staging ground for school reforms. The moves could force a major confrontation with the union and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers, which has denounced the changes in New Orleans. The proposals also could place Fenty (D) and Rhee at odds with President-elect Barack Obama, who has praised their reform efforts but who also counts federation President Randi Weingarten as a major supporter in the labor movement.
Fenty and Rhee referred questions about the proposals to mayoral spokeswoman Mafara Hobson.
he Social Security Administration is looking into DISD's practice of issuing fake Social Security numbers to employees hired from foreign countries and will determine whether a formal investigation is needed, Wes Davis, the agency's spokesman in Dallas, said Friday.
Mr. Davis said the review would look at whether there was any criminal intent by the Dallas Independent School District and whether further investigation or prosecution is called for by the U.S. attorney's office. He said he hasn't heard of any other school districts issuing false Social Security numbers.
Richard Roper, U.S. attorney in Dallas, said he could not comment on whether his agency would investigate the matter.
DISD had been issuing the fake numbers - some of which had already been assigned to people elsewhere - for several years before ending the practice this past summer. The false numbers were issued to get the foreign citizens - mostly teachers brought in on visas to teach bilingual classes - on the payroll quickly.
A slight improvement in enrollment this fall - equal to about one student per building - is about all that has changed for 25 schools that were at the heart of a troubled $102 million construction program for Milwaukee Public Schools.
Officials have taken no major steps to change the situation at schools where enrollment is far below the goals set when the Neighborhood Schools Initiative was launched in 2000. A series of stories in the Journal Sentinel in August described how millions of dollars of building projects had brought little visible gain.
The lack of action has at least one School Board member unhappy.
"I see waste in the district, but no one wants to cut," said Michael Bonds, chair of the board's finance committee. "We have to reduce the number of buildings we have. It's almost a mockery."
No serious proposals related to the neighborhood project have been discussed publicly this fall to close schools or take other steps aimed at getting more bang from the $102 million.
This year brought the biggest electoral Democratic wave in more than three decades. Yet Colorado teachers union officials may have lost, rather than gained, political ground.
Sometimes, the interests of the Democratic Party and teachers union officials align closely. The Colorado Education Association and Colorado Federation of Teachers together give Democrats about $50 in contributions for every $1 they give Republicans.
Of course, not all Democratic legislators are in the pockets of the teachers union hierarchy. It is remarkable, though, to see not one but two legislators without union connections assume the highest positions at our state Capitol. Peter Groff's Democratic peers voted to re-elect him as state Senate president, and Rep. Terrance Carroll was selected to become the new speaker of the House.
Supporters of public school parental choice could find no better friends in the Democratic caucus than Groff and Carroll. Both men have a strong record of protecting charter schools against union-backed legislative attacks, even attacks launched by other Democrats.
Don't be surprised if you hear a lot more from teachers and board members about "out of school" social issues and programs this year. Chatter about more daring and wider-ranging approaches to school improvement is all the rage right now, as part of a longer-term pushback against accountability-based reform like NCLB.
Jumping into efforts to reach children in their home lives, however, may stretch schools' abilities to make a real difference--and may take you and your team's eyes off quality classroom instruction and academic improvement.
Over the past few months, there has been a slew of ideas and proposals to move beyond reform efforts that are primarily school-based. Just as the Democratic primary was wrapping up, a coalition of educators put out a call for a "broader, bolder" approach to education reform. Later in the summer, aft president-elect Randi Weingarten called for "community schools" that would provide social services as well as education. Early in the fall, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama began touting a proposal to create "Promise Neighborhoods" around the country, in which low-income children and their parents would receive a comprehensive set of medical and social services in addition to a quality education. About a third of states have recently embarked on new antipoverty programs, according to Stateline.org .
It's a brisk Friday morning and a skinny little boy in a large blazer stands shivering by locked school gates. Close beside him are his mother, his father and his two grandmothers, both in saris. The trembling child is right to be anxious. He is about to sit the entrance tests for Queen Elizabeth's School in Barnet, north London, one of England's leading grammar schools, and the odds against him passing through this narrow gateway to academic success are extremely slim. There are just 180 places available in the school's Year Seven each year and 1,200 boys hoping to fill them.
Grammar schools have always been popular but with the financial meltdown affecting many affluent families, a free education in a traditional environment is looking highly attractive to parents of bright 10-year-olds. Fees for three children at independent secondary schools cost £50,000 or more a year, and four out of five parents pay those fees out of income.
Jenny Jones, secretary of the National Grammar Schools Association, a non-political body of parents, teachers and heads promoting grammar schools, confirms that "there have definitely been more applications from families who would normally go to independent schools".
In 2005, when Boston mayor Thomas Menino announced his plan to make prekindergarten available to all four-year-olds in the city, parents and early childhood advocates applauded this initiative to add a 14th year to the city's public school system.
Three years later, after preK classrooms were established in 50 of the city's 67 elementary schools, educators say implementing the mayor's vision has proved to be a major challenge. There were facility issues: none of the classrooms had running water or bathrooms, so administrators lobbied to build toilet facilities in the rooms--at the cost of $35,000 each. There were oversight issues: many of the elementary school principals weren't sensitive to the needs of four-year-olds, so Boston established a professional development academy for administrators faced with the prospect of educating preschoolers.
Then there was the impact on the elementary schools where those four-year-olds were getting ready for kindergarten. When those students turned five, they were so well prepared that the district had to retool its kindergarten curriculum to keep pace with children much more ready to learn.
Thank You: On behalf of the BOE, I would like to thank the community for their support in the recent referendum vote. Your support of our students and schools is appreciated. Because of your support, you have maintained our foundation and provided us three years to focus on ways to improve our schools without the constant specter of compulsory budget slashing. We are committed to continuing the "Partnership Plan" that was at the heart of the referendum. We look forward to working together, with each other and with the community. More information on our future plans is below.
Governance: As we have stated, the referendum was only a piece of a bigger plan for the district. This week the Board and the Superintendent have continued discussions on governance models which will allow us to focus our energies and attention on student achievement. We plan on starting the implementation of a new governance model in December. Community engagement will be a key part of any model we pursue. More details will be available after our November 24 BOE meeting.
THE Edgewood independent school district covers an unassuming part of west San Antonio, a district of fast-food joints and car-body shops, with houses that run from modest to ramshackle. It is mostly poor and mostly Hispanic, and in 1968 its government-funded public schools were so bad that a parents' group sued the state, prompting a debate over school funding that lasted for decades. By 1998 the situation had improved. The National Education Association, America's largest teachers' union, said that Edgewood could be a model for other urban school districts.
Then its voucher programme started. In 1998 the Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation, a private group, announced that it would put up $50m over the next ten years to provide vouchers for private education to any low-income Edgewood student who wanted one. The "Horizon" plan was meant to show legislators that vouchers could help students and motivate schools through competition.
Critics said the programme would take money from a school district that was poor already. One teacher wrote an angry editorial comparing Horizon to Napoleons invasion of Russia">Napoleon's invasion of Russia, destined for "history's trash heap of bad ideas".
But a report published in September [3.5MB PDF Report] by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a conservative think-tank, argues that the programme was a hit over its ten-year span. More than 4,000 students claimed the vouchers; their test scores jumped, and only two dropped out.
Mickey Buhl, 40, became principal at Glendale in 2005, taking the helm of a Madison school with significant challenges: the highest rate of low-income students at 80 percent, annual student turnover rate around 40 percent and a majority of students in either special education or English as a Second Language classes. He's passionate about the good things happening at Glendale and working with staff members to beat those statistical odds. He's also clearly obsessed with baseball.
MC: Is it true you worked in the Congressional Budget Office?
MB: It was my first job working for anyone other than my father. I started at the CBO after I got my master's degree in public policy. They would send a bill and I'd estimate the cost of it. The Family and Medical Leave Act came through and I got that. The politics of Washington permeated every aspect of life, and there was enough nastiness to it that I just decided I didn't want to make a life of it.
Michelle Rhee, the hard-charging chancellor of the Washington public schools, thinks teacher tenure may be great for adults, those who go into teaching to get summer vacations and great health insurance, for instance. But it hurts children, she says, by making incompetent instructors harder to fire.
So Ms. Rhee has proposed spectacular raises of as much as $40,000, financed by private foundations, for teachers willing to give up tenure.
Policy makers and educators nationwide are watching to see what happens to Ms. Rhee's bold proposal. The 4,000-member Washington Teachers' Union has divided over whether to embrace it, with many union members calling tenure a crucial protection against arbitrary firing.
"If Michelle Rhee were to get what she is demanding," said Allan R. Odden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies teacher compensation, "it would raise eyebrows everywhere, because that would be a gargantuan change."
Last month, Ms. Rhee said she could no longer wait for a union response to her proposal, first outlined last summer, and announced an effort to identify and fire ineffective teachers, including those with tenure. The union is mobilizing to protect members, and the nation's capital is bracing for what could be a wrenching labor struggle.
In the aftermath of the successful Madison Metropolitan School District referendum, many critics and supporters agree on one thing: They were surprised with district voters' overwhelming approval of the operating referendum.
Nearly 68 percent of voters favored the referendum, which will allow the district to exceed its tax limits by $5 million during the 2009-10 school year, then by an additional $4 million in each of the following two years. The total increase of $13 million will be permanent for every year after that.
The referendum won a majority in almost every ward in the district, but Superintendent Dan Nerad admitted afterward that he wasn't sure that the initiative would pass due to the tumultuous economy. District officials say the referendum will increase taxes for the owner of an average Madison home by $27.50 the first year, then $43 more the second year and an additional $21 in the third.
Four Southern California charters and one L.A. Unified campus are among the top 15 serving students living in poverty.
The burgeoning charter school movement in California has largely made its mark as an alternative to low-performing inner-city schools. An analysis being issued today suggests that, at their best, charters are doing that job well, outperforming most traditional public schools that serve children in poverty.
Using the Academic Performance Index as a measuring tool, the California Charter Schools Assn. found that 12 of the top 15 public schools in California that cater primarily to poor children are charters.
"These results show that charter schools are opening doors of opportunity for California's most underserved students, and effectively advancing them on the path to academic success," said Peter Thorp, interim head of the association. He urged traditional public schools to study the charters to replicate their success.
The association, which is an advocate for charter schools, focused on schools where at least 70% of the children qualify for free or reduced price lunch. Of more than 3,000 public schools statewide that fit that description, the highest API score -- 967 -- was earned by American Indian Public Charter, a middle school in Oakland whose students are primarily Asian, black and Latino, and have a poverty rate of 98%. It was followed by its sibling, American Indian Public High School, with a score of 958.
The man who boasts of walking seven miles to school, barefoot, every morning, happily drives his own grandchildren ten blocks in an S.U.V. We have become convinced that the surest path to success for our children involves providing them with a carefully optimized educational experience: the "best" schools, the most highly educated teachers, the smallest classrooms, the shiniest facilities, the greatest variety of colors in the art-room paint box. But one need only look at countries where schoolchildren outperform their American counterparts--despite larger classes, shabbier schools, and smaller budgets--to wonder if our wholesale embrace of the advantages of advantages isn't as simplistic as Carnegie's wholesale embrace of the advantages of disadvantages.
In E. J. Kahn's Profile, he tells the story of a C.E.O. retreat that Weinberg attended, organized by Averell Harriman. It was at Sun Valley, Harriman's ski resort, where, Kahn writes, it emerged that Weinberg had never skied before:
Eight months after the Sun Prairie School Board capped a hugely divisive debate over elementary boundaries by deciding to bus town of Bristol children to Westside school, Bristol parents are demanding further review.
After the March decision some School Board members said they wanted to form a committee to look long-term at elementary boundaries and related issues such as socio-economic and racial balance between buildings.
High school sophomores should be ready for college by age 16. That's the message from New Hampshire education officials, who announced plans Oct. 30 for a new rigorous state board of exams to be given to 10th graders. Students who pass will be prepared to move on to the state's community or technical colleges, skipping the last two years of high school. (See pictures of teens and how they would vote.)
Once implemented, the new battery of tests is expected to guarantee higher competency in core school subjects, lower dropout rates and free up millions of education dollars. Students may take the exams -- which are modeled on existing AP or International Baccalaureate tests -- as many times as they need to pass. Or those who want to go to a prestigious university may stay and finish the final two years, taking a second, more difficult set of exams senior year. "We want students who are ready to be able to move on to their higher education," says Lyonel Tracy, New Hampshire's Commissioner for Education. "And then we can focus even more attention on those kids who need more help to get there."
Do as I say, not as I do. That's the lesson being taught every day in school cafeterias across Long Island. According to a series of Newsday reports, school lunches are high in fat and sodium, and low on fresh ingredients. Lunch programs, which are expected to pay their own way without help from the school budget, rely on chip and cookie sales - not to mention sugary soda machines - to amp up their profits.
We are sending kids all the wrong messages by placing these bad-habit-forming temptations in their paths. For a few cents more per meal, children could be eating healthfully and learning by example about good nutrition.
Sure, the few cents add up. But aren't we already paying a price? New Yorkers spend $242 million a year to treat obesity-related illness in children, and $6.1 billion a year on adults. Studies show that overweight children often carry the weight into adulthood.
The number of Milwaukee children attending private schools using publicly funded vouchers has crossed 20,000 for the first time, according to data released by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
At the same time, the number of students in the main roster of Milwaukee Public Schools elementary, middle and high schools has fallen below 80,000 for the first time in well over a decade and declined for at least the 10th year in a row.
Amid a host of other factors shaping the school landscape in Milwaukee, those two trends point to some of the key stresses and looming issues for both MPS, which remains one of the nation's larger school systems, and the voucher program, the largest, oldest and arguably most significant urban school voucher program in the United States.
For MPS, declining enrollment means greater financial pressure, a need to close school buildings and a continual search for ways to attract students and raise overall levels of achievement.
For the voucher program, the increase means the state-imposed cap on its size is coming into view, and issues related to the property-tax impact of the funding program are becoming more urgent. In addition, with Democrats having gained control of the state Legislature, efforts to impose more regulations on schools with voucher students are likely to become much more serious.
Nationwide, the momentum behind support for voucher programs such as the one in Milwaukee has been limited, and most likely has lost further steam with the election of Sen. Barack Obama to be president. Although Obama favors charter schools - generally, independent publicly funded schools that have more public accountability than private schools - he has not favored vouchers, and the Congress, controlled firmly by Democrats, is not going to support such plans either.
Decentralization must be accompanied by transparency so the public easily understands how tax dollars are being used or misused. One way to make education financing more transparent is to simplify the way Washington doles out money. Federal dollars could be attached to the individual child -- so-called backpacking -- and that money would be portable, meaning it would follow the child to whichever school he or she attends.
Dan Lips, an education analyst at the Heritage Foundation, notes that federal Title I dollars, which are supposed to go to disadvantaged students but because of complicated financing formulas result in wide per-student funding differences from school to school, "could be delivered through a simple formula based on the number of low-income students in a state" and "states could be allowed to use Title I funds in ways that make it follow the child." The result would be a "simple and transparent system of school funding."
Furthermore, Republicans should advocate for widespread state-based parental empowerment, specifically through school-choice options, to ensure that the state and local affiliates of Mr. Obama's friends at the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers do not hijack decision-making power. Only if all children, not just those who are poor or have special needs, have an exit ticket out of the public school system through, say, a voucher or a tuition tax credit will state and local officials have the incentive to use their greater powers for the benefit of students rather than special interests.
My publisher and I had a fight over the subtitle of my upcoming book, "Work Hard. Be Nice," about the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Okay, it wasn't a fight exactly. My editor at Algonquin Books, Amy Gash, is too polite and professional for that. It was a spirited discussion. Gash said the Algonquin view was that my subtitle, "How Two Inspired Teachers Created America's Best Schools" was off-putting and hyperbolic. Who was I to say what was best and what wasn't?
I defended the loaded adjective because I thought it was accurate and would inspire useful arguments about how to make schools better. Nonetheless, Algonquin seemed more interested in selling books than encouraging my pugnacious tendencies, and I saw their point. We considered more than 100 alternatives before settling on "How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America." That seems like a trivial change, but it's not. A new research assessment by Columbia University scholar Jeffrey R. Henig suggests it is the right way to think about these intriguing but still developing schools, and about other new approaches to schooling that may bloom in the future.
The 66 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District feed off the work of KIPP co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, who started teaching impoverished children in Houston when they were just out of college in 1992. The first KIPP class began in 1994. It had a longer school day, required summer school, required homework, frequent contact with parents, consistent methods of discipline, imaginative and energetic teaching and lots of singing and fun. It has become the best known and most researched network of independent public charter schools in the country.
That's the theme of the Green Charter Schools Network, an organization headquartered in Madison that links environmental charter schools around the nation. It was also the theme of a conference Saturday at the Pyle Center that drew 200 people from around Wisconsin and more than 10 other states.
"We hope to make this a national movement," said Jim McGrath, president of the new Green Charter Schools Network. "We have identified 135 green charter schools around the country, and we believe there are another 150."
That includes 18 in Wisconsin, in locations as far flung as Green Lake, Merrimac, Rhinelander, Oshkosh and Stevens Point.
Charter schools are innovative public schools that provide educational choices for families and school-site accountability for results. Forty states allow charter schools, and they are formed in Wisconsin when a contract is signed between a charter school and its school district or school board. The arrangement gives the school more autonomy, more on-site decision-making, but also considerable responsibility for results.
The 2009-'10 budget that Doyle must recommend early next year will be his hardest, for several reasons. It's the last budget before he is expected to seek a third term in 2010. The current budget had $750 million in tax and fee increases, which raised taxes on cigarettes and license plate renewals. Accounting tricks used by both parties over the past eight years are no longer available. Long-term debt has risen dramatically, raising questions about how much more debt the state can handle.
"This is going to be a very difficult time," Doyle said.
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison) said Democrats would quickly pass bills to increase job training, boost spending on green energy, require businesses to more publicly disclose their tax liabilities and bar the state from contracting with companies that ship jobs overseas.
"Our number one thing we want to do is get in there and work on the economy and jobs and the cost of living," Pocan said. "And when working on the (state) budget, we're going to do it with working families and the middle class first and foremost in mind, and not the special interests."
Republican Sen. Ted Kanavas of Brookfield said Thursday that Republicans know they won't be able to pass anything in the next legislative session, but they can be advocates for taxpayers.
"We can't lead, but we can point out" problems in the choices Democrats make, Kanavas said.
It also says something about Madison that, despite a troubled economy, people still felt they could afford to pay more. No other school referendum across the state passed with such a big majority -- and many failed.
By more than a 2-1 margin, voters gave Madison schools permission to spend millions more than the state would otherwise allow.
The public seemed to recognize the difficult predicament the district is in. And good vibes from the historic election of Barack Obama framed every question on Tuesday's ballot with a theme of hope.
Another factor in the school district's favor was the vote of the many residents who don't directly pay property taxes because they're in college or rent apartments.
A group of city officials are exploring a program that would pay for Racine high school graduates to attend college.
The idea is based on the Kalamazoo Promise, a program started three years ago in Kalamazoo, Mich. to attract families to the city. The program is simple: If a child graduates from a Kalamazoo High School, their tuition is paid to any Michigan university or tech school. That could amount to $36,000 for a student attending the University of Michigan. The only requirement is that a student maintains a 2.0 GPA and makes continual progress toward their high school diploma.
Aldermen Aron Wisneski and Greg Helding, and City Administrator Ben Hughes, are seeking two $8,000 grants to study creating a similar program here. The City Council is expected to grant permission to pursue the grant on Wednesday.
Those who think there couldn't possibly be another major urban school district under greater fiscal stress than Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) need look no further than across Lake Michigan. Articles in Saturday's and today's Detroit News report how Detroit Public Schools (DPS) was required either to accept a consent decree issued by a state review team examining its fiscal situation, or have a state-appointed manager take control of its finances. The school board opted to accept the decree, which requires it to submit a deficit elimination plan within four weeks and abide by a host of stringent reporting requirements.
How did the Detroit school district get into this predicament? To start, there is the district's perennial budget deficit (at least $10 million per year since 2000), which at one point earlier this year was estimated at $400 million in a $1.1 billion annual budget. Then there was the district's inability to meet payroll obligations during two separate months last summer, necessitating a $103 million advance in state aid payments, and its continued heavy reliance on borrowing to address cash flow needs.
DPS also faces steep declining enrollment, with a reduction of 67,000 students since 2000 to the current estimate of 98,000 students. In a recent article in Education Week, an official with the Council of the Great City Schools attributed this decline both to the flight of Detroit residents with school-age children out of the city and to competition from charter schools.
The school board now has seven members, all elected at large from the entire district. The new plan board will expand from six to nine members, with six of those members to be elected from districts that correspond with the current Minneapolis park board districts. The remaining three board members would be at large. That measure passed 104,283 to 54,042.
Supporters argued that it would guarantee representation from every part of the city and give parents just one point person to contact. Opponents said it would balkanize the board into factions with local, rather than citywide, concerns, could lead to political deal-making on budgets and school closings, and might diminish minority representation. Voters rejected a similar proposal in 1987.
Madison should move to geographic representation, which would significantly reduce the cost of running, and hopefully attract more candidates.
The tumultuous state of the economy was a nagging concern for supporters of the $13 million Madison Metropolitan School District referendum, but it passed Tuesday night with a surprisingly large 68 percent of the vote.
A handful of wards were still uncounted after midnight, but the totals then were 84,084 in favor and 39,116 opposed to the measure that will allow the school district to raise its taxing limits.
Voters approved an operating referendum to maintain current services, which district officials say shows that the community places a high value on quality education.
"We also knew this was not an easy time for people and that was not lost on us," Superintendent Dan Nerad said late Tuesday night. "We are heartened by this response, and what this will allow us to do is to maintain our existing programs as we move into a new discussion about what should our priorities be going forward, and involving the community in that discussion in regard to the strategic planning."
The referendum allows the district to exceed its tax limits by $5 million during the 2009-10 school year, then by an additional $4 million in each of the following two years. The referendum will add $27.50 onto the taxes of a $250,000 home in the first year, district officials say, and add an extra $43 to that tax bill in 2010-11 and an additional $21 to the bill in 2011-12.
The recurring referendum will increase the current tax limit by $13 million in 2011-12 and in every year after that.
The measure, a "recurring referendum," gives the district permission to build on the previous year's revenue limit increase by additional amounts of $4 million in 2010-11 and another $4 million in 2011-12. The measure permits a total increase of $13 million -- a change that will be permanent, unlike the impact of some other referendums that end after a specified period.
By comparison, the district's total budget for the current school year is $368 million.
Referendum backers hoped voters would set aside concerns about the economy to help the district avert multimillion-dollar budget cuts that would lead to larger class sizes and other changes in school operations.
A big thanks to those who voted in support of the school referendum. Your support is appreciated.
To those who chose not to support the referendum, please let us know why. This feedback is very important to us.
So...what are the next steps? As we have been saying throughout the referendum campaign, the referendum is really only one piece of a bigger picture. A couple of things about the bigger picture. On November 10 we continue our discussions on board-superintendent governance models. How can we best work together to strengthen our focus on student achievement?
My sense of these local questions after observing them for a number of years is that:
33 to 40% of the voters will always vote yes on school related issues, and
30 to 35% will always vote no, or anti-incumbent and,
elections are won or lost based on the remaining 25 to 35% who will vote "independently".
I received a newsletter in the mail yesterday from Toki Middle School, where my son is now a sixth-grader. The principal's letter says:
"With the introduction of standards-based middle school report cards, we decided to send first quarter progress reports only to students currently not meeting grade level standards in curricular areas."
So, assuming my child meets the standards, he just doesn't matter? He's not worth the time to figure out how to fill out the new report cards? The teachers are taking an extra half day today (early release: 11:30) to work more on dealing with these new report cards - and they've already taken at least one or two other days - but it's still too hard to give my child a report card?
What if I want to know how well my child is doing? What if I want to know if he's EXCEEDING the standards? Oh, wait.... I forgot. MMSD doesn't care if he exceeds them. They just want to know if he MEETS them. God forbid I learn how MUCH he's exceeding them by, or if he's just skating and is merely meeting the standards. Or if he excels in one subject but is simply OK in another. We went through this in elementary school, so I suppose it should be no surprise that it's happening in middle school.
I know there's a teacher conference coming up, but if they're not giving us report cards, then I'm thinking 15 minutes isn't enough time to really lay out my child's strengths and weaknesses in several different subjects. It's not enough time for the teacher to give me a thorough assessment of my child's progress. Oh, wait....I forgot. MMSD doesn't care about giving me a thorough assessment. Judging from our experience in elementary school, the teachers just want you in and out of there as quickly as possible. They don't want to answer my questions about how we can help him at home so he can do better in any subjects. ("Your son is a joy to have in class. He's doing well in all subjects. He talks a little too much, but we're working on that. Thanks for coming!")
They DID send home a note asking if I needed to meet with any of his Unified Arts teachers (in addition to just his homeroom teacher) - but I checked no, because I assumed we'd be getting report cards with information from all his teachers! Nice of MMSD to wait until AFTER those papers had been turned in to let us know we wouldn't be GETTING report cards. (Yes, I'll be emailing the principal to let her know I've changed my mind.)
Oh, and I CAN sign in to Infinite Campus to see what's going on with my child's record (which hopefully is updated more often that the Toki Web site, which we were told would be updated every three or four weeks, but hasn't been updated since before the beginning of school). But to do this, I have to **go into the school during school hours** with a photo ID. I can't just use social security numbers or anything else to access this online. Could they be more clear in the message that they'd rather you not use Infinite Campus?
Isn't it bad enough that MMSD doesn't do thorough third-quarter report cards, because they believe not enough time has elapsed between the second and third quarters to make any discernible improvement? If my child isn't making any improvement, if my child's work isn't worthy of a report card, then WHAT'S HE DOING IN SCHOOL?
We moved here four years ago, so looking forward to the "great" Madison schools. We couldn't have been more wrong. My bright children are lagging. My sixth-grade son who tested as gifted before we moved to Madison is no longer (witness his dropping test scores - oh, wait...they're still average or above, so MMSD doesn't care).
I've brought up my concerns repeatedly. I've offered constructive suggestions. I've offered to help, at school and at home. I did two years as a PTO president in the elementary school and struggled unsuccessfully to get improvements. I might as well have thrown myself in front of a semi truck for all the good it's done and for how beaten down I feel by this school system. The minute this housing market turns around, I'm investigating the nearby schooling options with an eye toward getting the heck out of here. I'm SO FED UP with MMSD and it's reverse-discrimination against children who are average and above.
November 2008 Madison School District Referendum Watch List Report Card
Active Citizens for Education presents this "Watch List Report Card" as a means of reporting relevant information, facts and analyses on topics appropriate for consideration by taxpayers in voting on the Madison Metropolitan School District referendum question November 4, 2008. This document is dynamic in nature, thus it is updated on a regular basis with new information and data. Questions, analyses, clarifications and perspectives will be added to the entries as appropriate. Review Ratings will be applied to report the progress (or lack thereof) of the Board of Education and Administration in its plans, data, information, reports and communications related to the referendum.
Parents and students in a growing number of Washington area schools can track fluctuations in a grade-point average from the nearest computer in real time, a ritual that can become as addictive as watching political polls or a stock-market index.
The proliferation of online grading systems has transformed relations among teachers, parents and students and changed the rhythm of the school year. Internet-based programs including SchoolMAX and Edulink are pushing mid-term progress reports into obsolescence. Prospective failure is no longer a bombshell dropped in a parent-teacher conference. A bad grade on a test can't be concealed by discarding the evidence. A student can log on at school, or a parent at work, to see the immediate impact of a missed assignment on the cumulative grade or to calculate what score on the next quiz might raise an 89.5 to a 90. Report cards hold little surprise.
"Half of the time, I know what grade my daughter got on something before she does," said Susan Young, mother of an eighth-grader at Montgomery Village Middle School in Montgomery County.
Parents say the programs reconnect them to the academic lives of their children, a relationship that can decay as students move from elementary to middle and high school.
The Madison School District uses a system called "Infinite Campus". A number of nearby districts use Powerschool, among others.
The Madison Metropolitan School District [724K PDF]:
The following document explores enrollment trends based on four different factors: intemal transfers, private school enrollments, inter-district Open Enrollment, and home based enrollments. The most current data is provided in each case. Not all data are from the current school year. Certain data are based on DPI reports and there are lags in the dates upon which reports are published.
Summary
Most internal transfers within the MMSD are a function of two factors: programs not offered at each home school (e.g., ESL centers) and students moving between attendance areas and wishing to remain in the school they had been attending prior to the move. Notable schools in regard to transfers include Shorewood Elementary which has both a very high transfer in rate and a very low transfer out rate, Marquette which has a high transfer in rate, and Emerson which has a high transfer out rate.
Based on data reported to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI), private school enrollments within the MMSD attendance area have held fairly steady for the past several years, with a slight increase in the most recent two years. The District's percentage of private school enrollment is roughly average among two separate benchmark cohort groups: the largest Wisconsin school districts and the Dane County school districts. Using data supplied annually to the MMSD by ten area private schools it appears that for the past three year period private school elementary enrollment is declining slightly, middle school enrollment is constant, and high school enrollment has been variable. Stephens, Midvale, Leopold, and Crestwood Elementary Schools, and Cherokee and Whitehorse Middle Schools have experienced declines in private school enrollment during this period. Hawthorne and Emerson Elementary Schools, Toki and (to a lesser extent) Sherman Middle Schools, and West and Memorial High Schools have experienced increases in private school enrollments. The East attendance area has very limited private school enrollment.
Home based education has remained very steady over the past six years based on data reported to the DPI. There is no discernible trend either upward or downward. Roughly 420 to 450 students residing within the MMSD area are reported as participating in home based instruction during this period. Like private school enrollment, the MMSD's percentage of home based enrollment is roughly average among two separate benchmark cohort groups: the largest Wisconsin school districts and the Dane County school districts.
Open Enrollment, which allows for parents to apply to enroll their Children in districts other than their home district, is by far the largest contributor to enrollment shifts relative to this list of factors. In 2008-09, there are now over 450 students leaving the MMSD to attend other districts compared with just under 170 students entering the MMSD. Transition grades appear to be critical decision points for parents. Certain schools are particularly affected by Open Enrollment decisions and these tend to be schools near locations within close proximity to surrounding school districts. Virtual school options do not appear to be increasing in popularity relative to physical school altematives.
Jason Crocker, an educational consultant in Prince George's County, is exasperated with me and my rating of high schools, called the Challenge Index, based on how many college-level Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests schools give. In response to one of my columns, Crocker vowed to refute anything nice I say about AP, particularly in his county.
He reflects the views of many in the Washington area. People wonder why kids are taking wearisome three-hour AP exams (or five-hour IB exams) in history, calculus or physics when their grades aren't that good and their SAT scores are low. Crocker, who is African American, is particularly worried about what all this testing is doing to black students.
"Mr. Mathews, AP in Prince George's County is about setting African American students up for failure to satisfy your Challenge Index," he said. "The flip side of this is that most of these new students taking the exam are not adequately prepared for the exam and Prince George's County cannot recruit enough teachers to teach the exam who are highly qualified."
A survey shows more young people today can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told a packed auditorium Friday at the University of Tennessee. Civic education has "really lost ground" in the United States, and "unless we do something to reverse that disturbing trend, the joke may be on us," O'Connor said at the 1,000-seat Cox Auditorium at the UT Alumni Memorial Building.
O'Connor was at UT to celebrate the opening of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy.
"Only an educated citizen can ensure our nation's commitment to liberty is upheld. If we fail to educate young people to be active and informed participants at all levels, our democracy will fail," said O'Connor, the first woman on the nation's high court.
She spoke about the need for civic education, citing three problems with what she calls "civic illiberty": the lack of time schools spend teaching civics; a static approach to civic education; and the lack of modern teaching methods such as computer programs in teaching civics.
"Creating engaged and active citizens is too important a priority to shortchange in curriculum planning in schools," she said.
On a snowy day two years ago, the school board in Whitefish Bay, Wis., gathered to discuss a looming problem: how to plug a gaping hole in the teachers' retirement plan.
It turned to David W. Noack, a trusted local investment banker, who proposed that the district borrow from overseas and use the money for a complex investment that offered big profits.
"Every three months you're going to get a payment," he promised, according to a tape of the meeting. But would it be risky? "There would need to be 15 Enrons" for the district to lose money, he said.
The board and four other nearby districts ultimately invested $200 million in the deal, most of it borrowed from an Irish bank. Without realizing it, the schools were imitating hedge funds.
Half a continent away, New York subway officials were also being wooed by bankers. Officials were told that just as home buyers had embraced adjustable-rate loans, New York could save money by borrowing at lower interest rates that changed every day.
SIS Links. NPR covers the story here. Madison Assistant Superintendent for Business Services Erik Kass held the same position at the Waukesha School District, which was involved in this investment strategy.
George W. Bush rode to the White House pledging high standards for all students. He'll leave Washington with the nation's public education system focused on teaching basic skills to disadvantaged student populations, with the United States lagging in international comparisons of educational attainment, and with his signature education law plagued by so many problems and mired in so much controversy that it has put at serious risk two decades of work to improve public schooling by making educators accountable for their students' success.
The most important thing Barack Obama or John McCain could do quickly to salvage the accountability movement is change the way that the federal No Child Left Behind Act judges schools. Not by abandoning NCLB's focus on students' meeting standards, a move that would be unwise on both policy and political grounds, but by making the law a more legitimate report card of school performance, one that provides a fair and accurate gauge of educators' contribution to their students' achievement. Since its inception, NCLB has instead held schools responsible for factors they can't control and perversely encouraged states to set standards low.
It's critical in any accountability system that the metrics used to judge performance reflect accurately the contributions of those being judged. In education, that means measuring how much progress a school's students make during the school year, a "value added" approach that accounts for the disadvantages (or advantages) students may bring to school because of the quality of prior instruction or their family backgrounds. It's a strategy that pressures schools working with disadvantaged students to work hard in their students' behalf without penalizing educators for taking on tough assignments. And it's a strategy that doesn't reward rich schools merely for having privileged students.
A temporary solution to concerns about Leopold Elementary School will be announced by June 2009, according to Daniel Nerad, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Nerad, members of the school board and other officials held what Nerad called "an engagement session" at Leopold on Oct. 20. About 100 parents attended the session, part of what Nerad called an effort to find "a short-term solution to find a long-term solution."
But a show of hands after the meeting indicated most of those attending the session opposed the proposed short-term solution, which would involve transferring fifth graders to Cherokee and Wright middle schools.
"I'm confident it (the short-term solution) would work for two years," Nerad said.
Nerad conceded that the short-term plan would address crowding but not another concern of parents- the high proportion (68 percent) of low-income students at Leopold. The long-term plan would tackle that issue, he said.
Maryland's state school board made a final decision yesterday to hold firm and require this year's high school seniors to pass four subject tests to graduate in June, although it left open the possibility of exemptions for special education students and those learning English.
The decision leaves 9,059 students across the state - or about 17 percent of the Class of 2009 - at risk of not getting a diploma, according to data released yesterday.
Only 70 percent of African-Americans statewide and 50 percent of special education students have met the requirements. But the group most likely to be barred from graduation are immigrants who are learning English. Many have not yet taken all the tests, and only 15 percent have met the requirements.
Just two months after opening a $25 million new middle school, the Monona Grove School Board is considering closing an elementary school and busing students between Monona and Cottage Grove.
Any of those moves could plunge the district into another tense struggle like the one in 2006 that ultimately led to voters approving the new middle school.
On Nov. 12, the board will consider forming a committee to study whether to close Maywood Elementary in Monona and whether to move Monona sixth-graders to Glacial Drumlin Middle School in Cottage Grove.
Glacial Drumlin opened in September for fifth- through eighth-graders from Cottage Grove, and seventh- and eighth-graders from Monona.
The board may also ask the committee to study changes in Cottage Grove, where Taylor Prairie Elementary is at its enrollment capacity and Cottage Grove Elementary is about 35 students over. Potential moves range from building a $2 million to $3 million addition at Cottage Grove Elementary to using portable classrooms to busing fourth-graders to Monona, where classroom space is abundant. With its price tag, a Cottage Grove Elementary building addition would require a referendum.
Anyone keeping tabs of next week's election in the Minneapolis School District is likely aware of a $60 million levy that would raise property taxes to garner more funding for schools. But there's also a second question on the ballot that's not getting much attention.
Minneapolis, Minn. -- The first question would raise property taxes on a $250,000 house by about $200 a year.
Supporters, like Superintendent Bill Green, say the extra money is needed because the state hasn't kept pace with education funding, and the district will have to make deep budget cuts without the extra money.
When we ran the previous referendum, it was based on an assumption that the state and federal government would continue the allocation formula they had set out," Green said. "That we would be able to anticipate that they would keep pace with the cost of living and other factors.
"They didn't, and so we feel we can't make the same assumptions (now)."
There is no formal campaign opposing the levy, but voters have expressed opposition.
If art really does imitate life, then a peek into the interracial dynamics of high school life in Madison can be found every morning inside Room 272 at West High School. There, the students, hand-picked because of their ethnicity, respond to bullying, gang-related activities, body awareness issues and racial stereotyping by creating skits that mimic common situations students experience in school.
Lounging on pillows and passing around a bag of suckers at 9 a.m., the students, from varying backgrounds including Hmong, Chinese, African-American, Albanian and Laotian, are at ease with one another. This is not a dynamic reflected by every student in every school.
Sometimes an inspiration for a skit can be found right outside the classroom door, as junior Louisa Kornblatt found out on a recent morning when a student yelled, "Watch where your tall white ass is going, bitch," during a break between classes. Although Kornblatt returned to the classroom with a flushed face, asking if anyone else had heard the comment, most of the students reacted to it nonchalantly.
"That's just part of a day," said senior John Reynolds, one of the students in the Multico theater group, which performs in schools all over the district. "You learn to ignore it. West is a culturally diverse place, and you'll hear those kinds of statements in the hallways. You just need to learn to focus on the good, not the bad."
About half of the classrooms participating in the state's school class-size reduction program in 2006-'07 exceeded its 15-student limit at least part of the school day, according to a recent report.
Although the report raises concerns about such practices, including that some school administrators seemed unaware of the program's 15-student maximum, it concludes, "There are multiple ways to implement reduced class size well."
The report is part of the state Department of Public Instruction's regular monitoring of the $111 million SAGE program - Student Achievement Guarantee in Education - that aims to reduce class sizes for kindergarten through third grade in more than 470 Wisconsin schools. The center has another study in the works looking at long-term quantitative results from the program.
If there is a case to be made for dissolving the Milwaukee Public Schools board, several of its members, but particularly its president, Peter Blewett, seemed hell bent on making it during last week's budget meetings.
That the end result of those meetings--a double digit increase in the district's property tax levy--was the only responsible option the board could have chosen, won't do anything to assuage the board's growing number of critics or even improve its standing among its supporters.
Blewett has had a long time (a year, in fact, since the last budget fiasco) to persuade the public and other elected officials that the board and Superintendent William Andrekopoulos have the ability to manage the district's complicated finances. And while the scores of people who showed up to support an increase in the tax levy made an impressive display, their presence seemed more in support of an idea and not an endorsement of those behind it. It's notable that, as far as I know, not one elected official spoke out in support of the board's actions despite the fact that everyone is aware of the poor hand MPS is dealt when it comes to state funding.
The students in the jewelry and metalsmithing class at Pelham Memorial High School painstakingly coiled copper and brass wires into necklaces the other morning, while across the hall, the history of rock 'n' roll class pondered the meaning of Don McLean's "American Pie."
These are two of the 17 electives added this year to the curriculum in this affluent Westchester County suburb, redefining traditional notions of a college-preparatory education and allowing students to pursue specialized interests that once were relegated to after-school clubs and weekend hobbies. Now, budding musicians take guitar lessons, amateur war historians re-enact military battles, and future engineers build solar-powered cars -- all during school hours, and for credit.
"It's letting people learn about what they love rather than dictating what they should be learning," said Morgan McDaniel, a senior who added the rock 'n' roll class to her roster of Advanced Placement classes in calculus, biology, European history and studio art.
They include Howard and Mattie Smith Academy, a K-3, 9-12 school proposed for Minneapolis, named for two legendary preachers at Shiloh Temple Church. Another is The Academy, a 10-12 Minneapolis school, and the third is a 7-12 school, St. Paul Rising Sun.
A new charitable organization, Minnesota Education Trust (MET), has applied to sponsor all three schools, and at one point sought to assume sponsorship of a fourth -- the Academy for Food Sciences and Agriculture, whose name evokes Minnesota's heartland. "Minnesota Education Trust" sounds pretty generic, but the name seems to convey a clear sense of the organization's mission.
Or does it?
MET's "principal goals" are set forth in its articles of incorporation, filed with the secretary of state in May 2007. The first goal listed is "to promote the message of Islam to Muslims and non-Muslims and promote understanding between them." Other goals include building a virtuous society and providing education to children and adults. The final goal is to "support schools, community centers, mosques and other organizations that serve the above goals."
To understand D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and the educational insurgency she is part of, you have to know what happened when she taught at Baltimore's Harlem Park Elementary School in the early 1990s.
The Teach for America program threw well-educated young people such as Rhee -- bachelor's degree from Cornell, master's from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government -- into classrooms full of impoverished children after only a summer of training. "It was a zoo, every day," she recalled. Thirty-six children, all poor, suffered under a novice who had no idea what to do.
But within months, for Rhee and other influential educators in her age group, the situation changed. She vowed not "to let 8-year-olds run me out of town." She discovered learning improved when everyone sat in a big U-pattern with her in the middle and she made quick marks on the blackboard for good and bad behavior without ever stopping the lesson. She spent an entire summer making lesson plans and teaching materials, with the help of indulgent aunts visiting from Korea. She found unconventional but effective ways to teach reading and math. She set written goals for each child and enlisted parents in her plans.
In her first policy speech of the presidential campaign, Gov. Sarah Palin vowed Friday that a McCain administration would allow all special-needs students the choice of attending private schools at public expense, a controversial and potentially costly proposal likely to be welcomed by many parents and bitterly opposed by many school districts.
Ms. Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, also promised that she and Senator John McCain would finally provide public schools the federal money that was promised when the law covering students with special needs was passed in 1975. Her pledge was intended to address the top concern of many school districts, and is one that has been made by many other politicians but never fulfilled.
The policy speech was a departure for Ms. Palin, whose métier is the kind of foot-stomping pep rally she headlined the night before, at a stop north of Pittsburgh, where she recalled an anecdote about "Joe the quarterback" -- as in Namath, a local native -- to "guarantee" that she and Mr. McCain would come from behind to win.
In a hotel meeting room before about 150 parents and children with special needs, Ms. Palin was more subdued, and departed slightly from her prepared remarks to speak of her fears when she learned that the baby she was carrying earlier this year would have Down syndrome.
The Madison School District spent $70,582,539 on Special Education, according to the 2007/2008 Amended Budget (,a href="http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/pdf/2008/10/2007_MMSD_BOE_Amended_Budgetocr.pdf">460K PDF). Total budget was $365,248,476 according to the same document.
The prevailing wisdom is that the referendum will pass. The prevailing wisdom is probably correct. There has been no organized effort to fight it, unlike three years ago. And the surge of Obama voters, the scent of victory in their flaring nostrils, will carry along the schools in that high tide that lifts all boats. The Wisconsin State Journal has yet to do any serious journalism on the issue. It's been lost in the shuffle.
On the other hand, the stock market is in the toilet and with it, people's retirement plans. Home values are falling. Layoffs are accelerating. Energy prices are moderating but still expensive. And in the near future: a recession of unknown duration. So, maybe it doesn't pass.
The referendum was recommended 7-0 August 26 by the overly harmonious school board, including Lucy Mathiak, who once teamed with Ruth Robarts and Laurie Kobza. Those two, however, are no longer serving.
I give Ed Hughes credit for reaching out to this irascible blogger. The schools have not done enough of that in the past. I am thinking now of former TV-3 news anchor Beth Zurbuchen, who infamously dissed of opponents of the referendum three years ago for being "selfish."
Two of the three spending referenda were defeated that year, in no small part to such arrogance. I made that point with Ed Hughes. For arrogance this year, we have Marge Passman of Progressive Dane. You can hear Mitch Henck sputtering with amazement on his WIBA radio program Outside the Box as Passman makes the most ridiculous comments.
One Madison voter with a ballot discrepancy said that she's now questioning whether these mistakes are really mistakes, WISC-TV reported.
When Carole McGuire received her absentee ballot, she said something didn't look right. "The ballot came, and I thought, 'That's odd,'" said McGuire.
She said that noticed that among all the races, the Madison Metropolitan School District referendum was nowhere to be found.
"Here is where the school district referendum would be, and it's not there," said McGuire, who then called the city clerk.
"I said, 'This isn't the correct ballot,'" said McGuire. "She said, 'Oh well, tear it up and we'll give you a new one.' I said, 'No, I don't want to tear it up at the moment, I'll come back.'
States are beginning to report revenue collections for the July-September 2008 quarter, and the new figures raise the likelihood that large, additional budget shortfalls are developing. Of 15 mostly large and mid-sized states that have published complete data for this period, the majority collected less total tax revenue in July-September 2008 than was collected in the same period in 2007. ... After adjustment for inflation, total revenue collections are below 2007 levels in 14 of the 15 states.
In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.--Mark Twain
The "goody bags" may have been the tipping point.
In August, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation highlighted massive waste and failure in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS): after spending more than a $100 million on neighborhood schools, the paper reported, many of the new buildings were unused and the classrooms empty. "With a few exceptions" the paper reported, "student achievement has shown little improvement--and in some cases it has fallen dramatically--at 22 schools that were among the largest beneficiaries of the district's school construction program."
But it was the bags that caught the public's attention.
A week after the series on the failed building project, columnist Dan Bice reported that Milwaukee School Board member Charlene Hardin, accompanied by a high school data-processing secretary, had junketed at taxpayer expense to Philadelphia in mid-July, ostensibly to attend a conference on school safety. But organizers of the conference said that Hardin never showed up for any of the conference itself.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and the Washington Teachers' Union -- aided by its national parent organization -- are digging in for what could be a protracted struggle over Rhee's plan to fire instructors deemed to be ineffective.
School officials have posted job openings for an unspecified number of "helping teachers" to counsel instructors who have received notice to improve or face termination. Principals have been asked to identify teachers who can be placed on the so-called 90-day plan, which gives teachers 90 school days -- or about five months -- to upgrade their performance. The helping teachers will also document all assistance given to instructors and report to central office administrators, according to the job description posted on the D.C. schools Web site.
Newsday examined hundreds of school menus, budgets and vending machine contracts, and spoke to professionals and leaders. What we found might disturb you.
After acting to protect their travel budget and to keep their right to receive a $150-a-year car allowance and $3 for each time they go somewhere in the city on official business, Milwaukee School Board members early Friday approved a budget for this year that will raise the amount to be collected in property taxes for schools by 14.6%.
The approval came on a 6-3 vote at 1:46 a.m., seven minutes after the board voted down an otherwise-identical proposal that would have taken away the car allowance and tightened up travel spending.
The mini-drama over the board members' travel budget came at the same meeting the board approved a much tighter set of rules for out-of-town trips for members, a reaction to Journal Sentinel stories about travel by board member Charlene Hardin, including a trip to a conference she reportedly did not actually attend.
The budget vote means Milwaukee Public Schools is returning to spending the maximum amount allowed by state law, a practice that had been followed in every recent year except for a year ago, when the tax levy increase was held to 9% although state law permitted an increase of more than 16%.
Because of provisions in the state school funding formula, holding down spending cost MPS more than $5 million in state aid this year, which was one of the arguments for returning to spending at the maximum level.
This is an especially timely discussion as control of the Wisconsin Legislature hangs in the balance with the upcoming fall election. While it is widely believed that the state Senate will remain in Democratic hands, the Assembly is altogether another matter. With a mere five vote majority and a nation anxious to blame Republicans for both the war in Iraq as well as the weak economy, Republican retention of an Assembly majority is definitely in play. If the Assembly were to tumble into Democratic hands, Democrats would control all of state government. At long last, the thinking goes, WEAC will rise up and ensure its minions in the Capitol do what they have promised; expunge the QEO from state law books.
But is that the case? Maybe not. That picture might have been clear a few years ago, but it is less clear today.
The QEO Through Time
To understand the roots of the popular caricature of WEAC, a short history lesson is in order. As we close in on a generation under the QEO, it is easy to forget what life was like before Tommy Thompson signed the QEO into law. In the 1980s and into the early 1990s a statewide furrowing of the brow and wringing of hands occurred every Christmas season when local governments slid property tax bills into our mailboxes. In 1989 school taxes rose 9% followed by a 9.4% increase in 1990 and a 10% jump in 1991. The last straw came in 1993 when schools added 12.3% to the property tax bill. Of course every year the school tax was layered on top of the tax bill from cities, villages and town so property taxes were routinely increasing at double-digit rates.
While property taxes might not have stirred the public psyche as much as say the Vietnam War had, it was close. Every state budget discussion started and ended with property taxes. It was the third rail of Wisconsin politics. The property tax discussion drove a wedge between Democrats and Republicans; it caused short fuses between state and local governments and between general governments and schools. And everyone understood who was operating the jack that kept ratcheting up property taxes: it was teachers.
No, it wasn't just teachers, it was WEAC. What generations of teachers had known as a helpful service organization, overnight had assumed the pale of a hard-line labor union. It was as though WEAC had undergone its own version of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The side of the organization that provided teacher services was taken over by the union side. Overnight it became clear that nothing mattered to the staff at WEAC if it didn't entail: raising teacher pay, protecting jobs, or improving working conditions. This was the familiar mantra of every labor union from the autoworkers to air traffic controllers.
In 2000, Memorial became the first Madison school to land one of the U.S. Department of Education grants. It was awarded $438,000 to create its neighborhood social structure. West High School became the second, winning a $500,000 grant in 2002 and reorganizing its ninth and 10th grades around core courses.
In August, district officials were thrilled to learn the district was awarded $5.5 million over five years for its four major high schools -- Memorial, West, La Follette and East -- to build stronger connections among students and faculty by creating so-called "small learning communities" that divide each high school population into smaller populations.
Officials cite research showing that schools with 500 to 900 students tend to be the most effective, and recent findings suggest that students at schools with small learning communities are more likely to complete ninth grade, less likely to become involved in violence and more likely to attend college after graduation. However, the latest federal study failed to find a clear link between small learning communities and higher academic achievement.
Each Madison high school will develop its own plan for how to spend the grant money. Their common goals: Make school feel like a smaller, friendlier place where all students feel included. Shrink the racial achievement gap, raise graduation rates, expand the courses available and improve planning for further education and careers.
The high schools, with enrollments ranging from 1,600 to 2,000 students, are being redesigned as their overall scores on state 10th grade reading and math tests are worrisome, having declined slightly the past two years.
In Support of the November, 2008 Madison Schools' Referendum
In just a few days we have the opportunity and the responsibility to show our continuing support for Madison Public Schools by voting yes for the school district referendum. Please remember to vote for the referendum as you do your balloting and please talk with friends and family and urge their support for the referendum also.
If Madison residents need help understanding the property tax implications of the referendum, the following paragraphs may help some.
Passage of the referendum will permanently increase the revenue cap for operating costs by $5 million in 2009-2010, and by $4 million in both 2010-11 and 2011-12 for a total request of $13 million over the three-year period.
The average Madison homeowner would see their tax bill increase by $27.50 in 2009; $43.10 in 2010; and $20.90 in 2011. However, in 2008, school property taxes on the average home will decrease about $40. Therefore, in 2011, average homeowners will pay $51.50 more in school taxes than they paid in 2007. That means many of us will still pay less school tax in 2011 than we paid in 1994. Unbelievable, but true.
In 1993-94 Madison's mil rate for its schools was 19.15; in 2007 it was 10.08, almost half of what it was. Unless your home assessment has doubled in that period of time (which it may have), your school property tax has gone down. If your home assessment doubled, your school property tax would be about the same now as it was in 1993-94. Again, even with passage of the referendum, many Madison taxpayers will be paying less in school taxes in 2011 than they did in 1994.
Thank you for your continued support of Madison Schools and Madison kids. Together we make the community a stronger, more vibrant place for all of us to live.
Barbara Arnold, member of GRUMPS (Grandparents United For Madison Public Schools) Steering Committee and a former President of the Madison Board of Education
barbaraarnold@charter.net
Since her arrival, in the summer of 2007, Rhee, just 38 years old, has become the most controversial figure in American public education and the standard-bearer for a new type of schools leader nationwide. She and her cohort often seek to bypass the traditional forces of education schools and unions, instead embracing nontraditional reform mechanisms like charter schools, vouchers, and the No Child Left Behind Act. "They tend to be younger, and many didn't come through the traditional route," says Margaret Sullivan, a former education analyst at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. And that often means going head-to-head with the people who did.
Rhee, responsible not to a school board but only to the mayor, went on a spree almost as soon as she arrived. She gained the right to fire central-office employees and then axed 98 of them. She canned 24 principals, 22 assistant principals, and, at the beginning of this summer, 250 teachers and 500 teaching aides. She announced plans to close 23 underused schools and set about restructuring 26 other schools (together, about a third of the system). And she began negotiating a radical performance-based compensation contract with the teachers union that could revolutionize the way teachers get paid.
Her quick action has brought Rhee laudatory profiles everywhere from Newsweek to the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, and appearances on Charlie Rose and at Allen & Company's annual Sun Valley conference. Washington is now ground zero for education reformers. "People are coming from across the country to work for her," says Andrew Rotherham, the co-director of Education Sector, a Washington think tank. "It's the thing to do." Rhee had Stanford and Harvard business-school students on her intern staff this summer, and she has received blank checks from reform-minded philanthropists at the Gates and Broad foundations to fund experimental programs. Businesses have flooded her with offers to help--providing supplies, mentoring, or just giving cash.
One of the more consistent, ongoing suggestions for improving America's educational system centers upon the creation of greater competition amongst public schools. The reason for the steady drumbeat centers upon a belief that a change to the free market system would be one of the best methods for creating better educational opportunities for children.
In direct response to the push for greater competition, forty states across America have now initiated legislation to allow the construction of new public schools called charter schools. Minnesota was the first state to pass laws regarding charter schools, doing so in 1991.
The concept is definitely catching on. Today, according to USCharterSchools.org, there are nearly 4,000 charter schools across our country educating more than 1.1 million children. The state of California, the second to enact such legislation, has more than 600 such schools educating about one-fifth of all charter school students.
While the number of schools continues to grow, large numbers of Americans, many even within the field of education, simply do not know what a charter school really consists of or how this new school concept differs from traditional public schools. Today at OpenEducation.net, we provide our readers the fundamentals of the charter school concept.
Can Interdistrict Choice Boost Student Achievement? The Case of Connecticut's Interdistrict Magnet School Program
Robert Bifulco, Casey Cobb & Courtney Bell [320K PDF]:
In response to a landmark civil rights ruling, the state of Connecticut has adopted models of choice-based interdistrict desegregation that appear to satisfy current legal constraints. In this paper, we focus on Connecticut's interdistrict magnet schools, and estimate the effects these schools have had on student achievement. We use longitudinal data on individual student test performance and information from admissions lotteries to implement quasi-experimental, regression-based, and propensity score estimators. Preliminary analyses show that lottery based methods, propensity score methods, and regression analysis provide similar estimates of achievement effects of for the small set of schools for which all three methods can be implemented. We then proceed to use the latter two methods to estimate effects for all of the interdistrict magnet high schools and middle schools that serve students from Hartford, Waterbury and New Haven. Results indicate that, on average, interdistrict magnet high schools have positive effects on both math and reading achievement, and interdistrict magnet middle schools have positive effects on reading achievement. Extensions of our analysis indicate that interdistrict magnet high schools have positive effects particularly on the achievement of students in Hartford, New Haven and Waterbury and do so regardless of how much attending an interdistrict magnet high school reduces racial isolation. The positive effects of magnet middle schools appear to be limited to suburban students, except in those schools that are able to achieve substantial reductions in racial isolation for their central city students.
After overhauling its K-12 sex education curriculum this summer with the help of community partners and health experts, Milwaukee Public School district officials have released the first draft of lessons to be taught to kids in kindergarten through fifth grade.
The problem: Despite calls to every elementary school principal for help in reaching parents, and a link to the proposed human growth and development curriculum on the MPS home website, only a handful of people have offered feedback.
"I'd like to hear from anyone in the community, but I really need parents," said Brett Fuller, curriculum specialist for health, wellness and safe and drug-free schools.
Expedient feedback is important to the district for several reasons. For one, sex education can be a touchy subject and the more people who see the proposed changes, the better chance there is of everyone feeling comfortable with what's being taught.
Primary school children are to be given compulsory lessons in sex education and the dangers of drugs, the Government confirmed.
The shake-up of lessons is aimed at cutting Britain's high teenage pregnancy rate and steering youngsters away from drug and alcohol misuse.
It will mean primary school children will learn about puberty and the facts of life from the age of seven. From the age of five, pupils will be taught about topics such as the parts of the body, relationships and the effects of drugs on the body.
As pupils progress through school they will be given detailed information about contraception and sexually transmitted infections as well as the risks of drug and alcohol misuse.
Students in six major U.S. cities are performing on par or better in mathematics than their peers in other countries in grades 4 and 8, according to a new study by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). However, students from five other major cities are not faring as well, and overall, U.S. student performance in mathematics falls off from elementary to middle school grades -- and remains behind many industrialized nations, particularly Asian nations.
The AIR study offers the first comparison between students from large U.S. cities and their international peers. The study compares U.S. 4th grade students with their counterparts in 24 countries and 8th grade students with peers in 45 countries.
"Globalization is not something we can hold off or turn off...it is the economic equivalent of a force of nature... like the wind and water" (Bill Clinton)
If you are a student today competing for jobs in a global economy, the good jobs will not go to the best in your graduating class--the jobs will go to the best students in the world. Large urban cities are intimately connected to the nations of the world. Large corporations locate their businesses in U.S. cities; foreign students attend U.S. schools; and U.S. businesses export goods and services to foreign nations. Large urban cities need to know how their students stack up against peers in the nations with which the U.S. does business. This is especially important for students in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The students in these fields will allow our future generation to remain technologically innovative and economically competitive.
This report provides a comparison of the number of mathematically Proficient students in Grades 4 and 8 in 11 large cities in the United States with their international peers.
This comparison is made possible by statistically linking the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2003 and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 2003 when both assessments were conducted in the United States in the same year and in the same grades.
After the statistical linking was completed, it was possible to compare the most recent NAEP results (from 2007) to the most recent TIMSS results (from 2003). How the United States compares to the overall international average.
At Grade 4, five countries (Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Chinese Taipei, Japan, and the Flemish portion of Belgium) performed significantly better than the United States (Figure 1). However, the United States (at 39% proficiency) performed better than the international average (27% proficiency) of all 24 countries (Figure 13).
At Grade 8, eight countries (Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Republic of Korea, Chinese Taipei, Japan, Belgium (Flemish), Netherlands, and Hungary) performed significantly better than the United States (Figure 1). However, the United States (at 31% proficiency) performed better than the international average (21% proficiency) of all 44 countries (Figure 14).
....
Because of the persistent requests of urban school districts, the U .S . Congress authorized NAEP to assess, on a trial basis, six large urban school districts beginning in 2002 . Since then, more districts have been added, resulting in 11 school districts in 2007 (and plans are underway to include even more districts in the future) . The urban school chiefs in these 11 large school districts, which voluntarily participated in the 2007 NAEP, recognized the global nature of educational expectations and the importance of having reliable external data against which to judge the performance of their students and to hold themselves accountable . They should be commended for their visionary goal of trying to benchmark their local performance against tough national standards. National standards provide a broad context and an external compass with which to steer educational policy to benefit local systems . The purpose of this report is to further help those systems navigate by providing international benchmarks.
Even if the findings are less-than-stellar, he says, they should help local officials focus on improving results.
"In that sense, I think it could be a very positive thing to use in-house, in the district, to keep their nose to the grindstone," says Kepner, a former middle- and high-school math teacher in Iowa and Wisconsin."If they can show they're improving, they might be able to attract more companies to a system that's on the move."
Phillips says the findings prove that in other countries "it is possible to do well and learn considerably under a lot of varied circumstances -- in other words, being low-income is not really an excuse when you look around the rest of the world."
Even with approval of the referendum, district administrations would have to run a tight ship. They are not asking taxpayers to bridge all the gaps created by the anticipated deficits. They are prepared to trim budgets and delay the initiation of programs until economic circumstances improve or, ideally, the state accepts more of its deferred responsibilities.
Weighing the big-picture educational challenges that we face as a community, a state and a nation, as well as the hometown reality of strong schools facing genuine threats, this referendum does not pose a difficult choice.
The only vote that makes sense is "yes."
It is essential for everyone who is heading to the polls on Nov. 4 to decide the presidential race between two men who say education is a priority -- as well as every voter who casts an early ballot -- and to make the extra effort to find the referendum question and mark that "yes" box.
cross the USA, a small but growing number of school districts are experimenting with teacher-pay packages that front-load higher salaries and offer bonuses -- sometimes tens of thousands of dollars' worth -- if student test scores improve or if teachers work in hard-to-staff schools.
At least eight states are moving away from a traditional pay model, which increases salaries based on seniority and advanced degrees. Many of the pay packages are funded by private foundations. In dozens of districts, test scores already have earned teachers more money. A few examples:
In Chicago, teachers at a handful of schools can earn up to $8,000 in annual bonuses for improved scores, while mentor teachers and "lead teachers" can earn an extra $7,000 or $15,000, respectively.
In Nashville, middle-school math teachers can earn up to $15,000 based on student performance.
The school district has made a number of efforts to handle Leopold's enrollment over the years, with mixed results. Eight classrooms were added in 2003, but a $14.5 million referendum to make upgrades to the existing school and build a second school on the site failed in 2005. In 2006, the cafeteria and several areas of the campus were remodeled. In addition, attendance boundaries were adjusted on two occasions, and third-graders were transported to other schools for two years.
To handle overcrowding this year, the district approved transfers of 31 students both within and outside the district. An additional classroom was also added by moving the computer lab to the library.
Meanwhile, Nerad urged the community to be patient as the planning process continues to unfold. The district's ultimate goals are to cap enrollment at 650 students and to implement a better balance of students according to family income. Sixty-eight percent of students at Leopold come from low-income families.
"We really want to make sure that we have dotted all of our I's and crossed our T's and looked at a variety of options," Nerad said. "And I can assure you relative to the long-term solution that we have not taken anything off the table. It's just a matter in these tough (economic) times of assuring our community that we have done that due diligence.
Schools that improve test scores do so at the expense of other subjects and ideas, he said.
"When the scores go up, it's not just meaningless. It's worrisome," Kohn told hundreds of educators on the last day of the convention. "What did you sacrifice from my child's education to raise scores on the test?"
Kohn, who's written 11 books on human behavior, parenting and schools, spent nearly two hours Friday morning ripping into both established and relatively new education concepts. He slammed merit pay for teachers, competition in schools, Advanced Placement classes, curriculum standards and testing--including Utah's standards and testing system -- drawing mixed reactions from his audience.
"Considering what we hear a lot, it was pure blasphemy," said Richard Heath, a teacher at Central Davis Junior High School in Layton.
Kohn called merit pay--forms of which many Utah school districts are implementing this year--an "odious" type of control imposed on teachers.
"If you jump through hoops, we'll give you a doggie biscuit in the form of money," Kohn said.
He said competition in schools destroys their sense of community. Advanced Placement classes, he claimed, focus more on material but don't do much to deepen students' understanding. He said standardized tests are designed so that some students must always fail or they're considered too easy, and often the students who do poorly are members of minority groups.
"We are creating in this country before our eyes, little by little, what could be described as educational ethnic cleansing," Kohn said. He called Utah's standards too specific and the number of tests given to Utah students "mind-boggling."
He called on teachers to explain such problems to parents and community members.
"The best teachers spend every day of their lives strategically avoiding or subverting the Utah curriculum," Kohn said.
Many teachers said they agreed with much of Kohn's talk, but disagreed on some points.
Shauna Cooney, a second grade teacher at Majestic Elementary School in Ogden, said it's important to have standards that give all children equal opportunities to learn certain concepts before they move forward.
Sidni Jones, an elementary teacher mentor in the Davis School District, agreed that current standardized tests are not as meaningful as other types of assessment, but she said it is hard to fight the current system.
"You can't just openly rebel against standardized testing because they're mandated," Jones said. "That's part of our jobs."
Rep. Kory Holdaway, R-Taylorsville, who is also a special education teacher at Taylorsville High School, said he walked out of the speech.
"We have got to have some degree of accountability for the public," Holdaway said. "The public demands it. Sometimes we forget who our customers are in terms of children and families."
Others, however, largely agreed with Kohn.
"It was awesome," said Claudia Butter, a teacher at the Open Classroom (good grief, are there still Open Classroom schools around??? Lord help us!) charter school in Salt Lake City. "With little steps we might be able to effect a change."
UEA President Kim Campbell said the UEA doesn't necessarily agree with everything Kohn advocates, but chose him as the keynote speaker because of his thought-provoking ideas.
"We want our members to constantly be challenging themselves and be thinking about new ideas and what they're doing in the classroom," Campbell said.
In Oregon, if the referendum passes, it'll mean $10 more a year for property tax payers.
In Madison though, the bill is higher, over the three years of the referendum the average cost to taxpayers is about $65.
Some parents told WISC-TV if it means more money out of their pocket, then they're saying no to a referendum.
But most Madison parents WISC-TV spoke with facing those tough cuts say they'll support it.
There are other issues on ballots in the area including, the MMDS asking to exceed revenue limits by $13 million.
A clerical mistake in the Madison city clerk's office means about 20 voters within the Madison School District got absentee ballots that do not have the district's $13 million referendum question on it, city and district officials said Tuesday.
Madison City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl said six of those voters have come forward, and she urged other district residents who aren't sure if they voted on the question to call her office so her staff can destroy their old ballots and issue new ones.
Witzel-Behl said the mistake occurred because one of her employees created mailing labels for the absentee ballots' envelopes that did not identify the voter as a resident of the School District.
"My best guess is we're looking at less than 20 ballots total," she said.
There was plenty of food and equally as much information at the Goodman Community center.
The Tenny Lapham Neighborhood Association held a spaghetti dinner to help community members understand the madison school districts recurring referendum on the November ballot.
"The school referendum us a complicated issue especially in the times that we are in-- people are concerned about something that is going to increase their tax bill," says association member Carole Trone.
Here's how the referendum works.
The referendum asks to exceed the revenue limit by $5 five million next school year.
Jennifer Davis is on an educational mission to extend the school day. She's president and CEO of the National Center on Time and Learning, an organization that describes itself as "dedicated to expanding learning time to improve student achievement and enable a well-rounded education for all children." Ms. Davis's says under her organization's scenario, children would be happier because they have more time to learn, teachers would be able to devote more time for enrichment programs that go beyond standardized tests, and parents-especially those from lower-income families-would be reassured their children are safe in a learning environment. Below are excerpts from an interview with Ms. Davis:
I think it's safe to say that most schoolchildren would probably hate the thought of an extended school day. How can a longer day help them?
The initiative we are promoting involves the redesign of the school day to include more enrichment opportunities like music and art and apprenticeship. It includes significant recess and lunch time. And it also includes a lot of project-based learning and one-on-one time with teachers -- and all those things, students like. If you interviewed students in the schools we're working with... the students are enjoying the schedule in part because it gives them lots of opportunities. What's happening all over the country is that classes like physical education, arts and even recess and lunch time have been shortened or eliminated because of the pressures of testing and classes that are tested like math and English.
The District's top special education official testified in federal court yesterday that some school personnel ignore scheduled meetings with parents, contributing to the city's failure to meet the needs of students with learning disabilities or behavioral challenges.
Richard Nyankori, acting deputy chancellor for special education, said the backlog of D.C. children awaiting special education services is lengthy in part because school staff don't show up for meetings, leaving cases unresolved and parents in the lurch.
"Sometimes it is willful on the part of some staff not to make it to meetings," Nyankori said under questioning from U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman.
Friedman called the hearing to quiz officials about the District's lack of progress in complying with a 2006 consent decree that settled a class action brought by parents of children with learning problems. The District's public and public charter schools have nearly 11,000 special education students. About 20 percent attend private schools, at a cost to taxpayers of about $200 million, because D.C. cannot meet their needs.
Mayors Go Door to Door, Personally Encouraging Students to Stay in the Game for Their Own Good -- and for the Sake of the City
As the financial meltdown and economic slump hold the national spotlight, another potential crisis is on the horizon: a persistently high dropout rate that educators and mayors across the country say increases the threat to the country's strength and prosperity.
According to one study, only half of the high school students in the nation's 50 largest cities are graduating in four years, with a figure as low as 25% in Detroit. And while concern over dropouts isn't new, the problem now has officials outside of public education worried enough to get directly involved.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors [PDF Report] is focusing its education efforts on dropouts. Mayors in Houston and other Texas cities go door to door to the homes of dropouts, encouraging them to return to school. Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin meets on weekends with students and helps them with life planning. Other cities, like Milwaukee and Kansas City, Mo., have dropout prevention programs.
Some new studies show far fewer students completing high school with diplomas than long believed. "Whereas the conventional wisdom had long placed the graduation rate around 85%, a growing consensus has emerged that only about seven in 10 students are actually successfully finishing high school" in four years, said a study by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, a nonprofit group based in Bethesda, Md. It was released this year by America's Promise Alliance, a nonpartisan advocacy group for youth. In the nation's 50 largest cities, the graduation rate was 52%.
Milwaukee Public Schools is crippled by a broken state funding system that needs to be changed, or the district will be destitute within a decade, if not sooner.
In one sense, the financial crisis at MPS is similar to that of the banks: MPS essentially is asking the Legislature for a rescue plan.
MPS officials say the state funding formula needs to change so that it can sustain itself and perform its core mission of educating some of the state's poorest students. Like most urban districts, MPS is dealing with low test scores, high dropout rates and violence in addition to money problems.
We back MPS in its push, and we urge the Legislature to do two things: Change the overall formula that places MPS in such a tough situation, and correct a specific problem with the way Milwaukee's voucher schools are funded that places undue burden on Milwaukee property owners.
First, let's consider the state's overall funding formula. Its goal is to try to equalize funding between rich and poor districts so that students in property-poor districts are not penalized because of where they live. The idea is that a taxpayer in a property-poor district should not have to pay much higher taxes to achieve the same per-student funding.
As many as 5,000 middle school teachers in Chicago could be required to go back to school for additional training to continue teaching under a plan expected to be approved by the Board of Education this week.
Under the proposal, 6th-, 7th- and 8th-grade teachers would be asked to gain an "endorsement" noting they are qualified for specific subjects at those grade levels, said Xavier Botana, head of elementary education for the Chicago Public Schools.
While teachers must be state-certified to teach in the district, currently neither the district nor the state requires teachers to gain the additional credential for classes such as math, English and science. Chicago is following many other districts in toughening requirements, officials said.
Botana said that while potentially 5,000 middle school teachers are affected, many already may have the necessary credits.
"Going forward, all of our kids in 6th through 8th grades will be taught by somebody who has a deeper level of content area knowledge than what is currently required," he said. "We need to aim higher."
Mary McClure, a Chicago Teachers Union official, said the union supports the move and has been working with the district to make sure teachers have enough time to take the classes.
Here's a tough decision: The Milwaukee School Board must decide whether to increase property taxes for schools this year by a double-digit percentage or make cuts in the budget, or maybe both.
Here's a group that seems to be having a hard time making tough decisions: the Milwaukee School Board.
The board -- and the Milwaukee Public Schools system as a whole -- face one of the most demanding points in memory.
Specifically, this is the point when the budget has to be finalized for this year, along with the property tax level. Superintendent William Andrekopoulos is expected to propose something in the vicinity of a 14% one-year increase in property tax collections to support schools (school spending accounts for roughly a third of the total tax bill).
It is also the point when decisions loom about what schools to merge or move for next year because decision-making on enrollment starts soon and administrators say they need to reduce the number of school buildings to save money in the long run. That is also expected to come to a head this week.
The fatal shooting of one Henry Ford High student and the wounding of three other teens is expected to be discussed at a special Detroit Board of Education meeting at 6 p.m. Monday at Spain Elementary-Middle School, 3700 Beaubien.
A vision of greater state school independence has been set out by the new academies minister, with a prediction that "self-governing schools" will become the "dominant" model for secondary education.
Jim Knight's comments, in an interview with the Financial Times, suggest Labour is determined to avoid being outflanked by the Conservatives as both parties vie to outbid each other in giving schools greater autonomy - a policy attractive to many families.
Mr Knight was schools minister but has now added academies to his responsibilities after Andrew Adonis's move to transport in the recent cabinet reshuffle.
His first interview about academies since taking on the portfolio will soothe fears of sponsors and education officials over the departure of Lord Adonis, who conceived and ran the academies programme.
Sponsors are concerned that Ed Balls, the schools secretary, wants to give a bigger role to local authorities and is less enthusiastic about faith and independent schools becoming academies. Officials also say that without Lord Adonis's "obsessive" commitment to establishing new academies, the programme will lose drive.
It's a difficult time for Madison schools to be asking property taxpayers for more money.
But it also is a very tough time for Madison schools to be reducing services for students -- a large and growing percentage of whom need extra or tailored help to succeed.
That's why Madison should vote "yes" on its school referendum Nov. 4 -- with one big demand in return. Moving forward, school leaders and, especially, the teachers union need to commit to more innovation and evaluation of existing school programs.
That means more charter and specialty schools to excite parents and to give struggling students concrete evidence of a successful career path after graduation
Moving the Los Angeles Schools to the 21st Century
Charles Kerchner, a professor at Claremont Graduate University and a specialist in educational organizations, educational policy and teacher unions, writes::
While the financial markets have reached the point of panic, a longer-running crisis has enveloped Los Angeles' school system. For at least a decade, people have called the Los Angeles Unified School District a system in crisis. Even when it does things well, it gets little credit.
In a crisis, a special type of politics is supposed to take hold. People of all political stripes are supposed to come together to fashion a solution, the very kind of politics we are witnessing in response to the financial markets' dysfunction. But unlike that situation, there is no sure resolution of the school's systemic failure, and no sense of urgency. So LAUSD bumps along in a state of permanent crisis.
Getting past permanent crisis and creating a 21st century institution of public education requires only that those interested in the district's future learn from its history. After half a decade of studying efforts to transform the district, my colleagues and I have five policy ideas that we think would move the district beyond permanent crisis.
With the nation's school systems roiled by campus shootings over the past decade, and on the lookout for conflict, students are being asked to check a broader array of free-speech rights at the door -- raising questions about what lesson that is teaching them.
Public-school administrators are hewing to a zero-tolerance policy on expression they believe incites violence, and they are doing so with the backing of the courts. Controversial clothing has been a common casualty. Struggling with racial tensions at his high school, a principal in Maryville, Tenn., banned depictions of the Confederate flag in 2005 and was supported by a federal court. Last month, the Aurora Frontier K-8 School in Aurora, Colo., suspended an 11-year-old who refused to remove a homemade T-shirt that read, "Obama is a terrorist's best friend." The shirt caused "a very loud argument on the playground," according to a statement from the school.
Since such actions stem from a concern over the safety of adolescents, even free-speech advocates acknowledge a need for some degree of deference to educators. But an argument of imminent danger is hard to make in many of these cases. Some think educators may be inadvertently teaching children that suppressing speech is the ready solution to ideological conflict.
"Education creates prospects - multilingualism opens new horizons. With our partner schools abroad we not only want to give children access to the German language and education but also to awaken an interest in and understanding for each other. Openness to cultural diversity and tolerance towards other people's distinctiveness are not mutually exclusive. To help children grasp this even better we need, more than ever, places where they can meet, learn and be creative together. The earlier we realize that we are an international learning community, the more capable we will be of solving our shared problems. Our partner schools abroad want to contribute towards that goal."
-- Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier
Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has launched the "Schools: Partners for the Future" Initiative. Its goal is to build up a worldwide network of at least 1000 partner schools through which to awaken young people's interest in and enthusiasm for modern-day Germany and German society. Additional funds to the tune of 45 million euro have been earmarked for the initiative in 2008. It will be coordinated by the Federal Foreign Office and implemented in cooperation with the Central Agency for Schools Abroad, the Goethe-Institut, the Educational Exchange Service of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Academic Exchange Service.PDF Brochure and Teacher's Abroad.
Ambassador Klaus Scharioth visited the Smith Academy of International Languages in Charlotte, North Carolina, to present a check for $22,101 on September 22, 2008. The school is one of the 16 new members in the US of the worldwide partner school network, which currently has around 500 partner schools.
The State University of New York Board of Trustees approved the charter application last week for the New Roots Charter School, an innovative new high school that will be one of the first fully integrated models of education for sustainability at the secondary level in the nation. Students in my spring 2007 "Teaching Sustainability" course contributed to the development of the initial school concept paper, which provided the foundation for the charter application submitted in June.
Why this school, why here and why now? New Roots Charter School answers the call of the U.N. Decade for Education for Sustainable Development for the rethinking of education necessary to address the problems of the 21st century. Gov. David Paterson was quoted as saying, "Global warming presents each of us with a question. Do we continue with the status quo or are we ready to make significant cultural and lifestyle alterations?"
Consider our energy crisis, expanding poverty and the degradation of essential ecosystem services, and Paterson's conclusion becomes even more urgent. "Future actions will require a fundamental change of philosophy in how we live our lives," he said.
HER giggling friends suddenly quiet down when Jamilka Carrasquillo, her large silver hoop earrings swinging, describes the day her class killed chickens.
"We actually had to go up to the woods to do it," she says, perched on the back of a chair in a classroom at Common Ground High School in New Haven.
Each student who wanted one got a bird. Following a modified-kosher method (no rabbi), the students stunned the birds with an electric shock, hung them upside down and cut the jugular vein. They call the chickens "meat birds" to maintain emotional distance, but the experience can be difficult.
Jamilka cried; others, even teachers, did too. A lot emerged as vegetarians. Jamilka did not, but she says she came to understand that the pinkish slabs wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf actually come from living animals. She pledged not to waste food.
A prominent RTI educational organization recognized for achieving positive sustainable results in schools, published the latest volume of its Reading Review this week.
This newspaper is designed for Directors of Curriculum, Teachers, Principals, and Superintendents, sharing the stories of schools' successes, LETRS Coaching, RTI Implementation and other rewarding articles. Read the Reading Review today to discover what success is actually occurring in today's classrooms.
November's referendum seeks to permanently increase the revenue cap for operating costs by $5 million in 2009-10, and an additional $4 million in both 2010-11 and 2011-12, for a total of $13 million. These increases would be permanent.
The projected tax hike on an average $250,000 home is $27.50 in 2009, $70.60 in 2010, and $91.50 in 2011, for a total three-year increase of $189.60.
To demonstrate fiscal discipline, Nerad has committed to making $1 million in cuts this year, including $600,000 in staff positions, even if the referendum passes. And Nerad pledges $2.5 million in additional spending cuts in the two subsequent years. The district will also transfer $2 million from its cash balance to offset the budget deficit.
Other savings will come from a new fund that allows the district to spread out capital costs over a longer period of time, remove some costs from the operating budget, and receive more state aid.
"We are committed to making reductions, finding efficiencies and being good stewards of tax dollars," Nerad says. "We realize this is a difficult time for people. At the same time, we have an obligation to serve our children well."
Don Severson, head of the fiscally conservative watchdog group Active Citizens for Education and a persistent referendum critic, wishes the district would have developed its new strategic plans before launching a ballot initiative.
"This money is to continue the same services that have not provided increases in student achievement" and come with no guarantees of program evaluations or instructional changes, Severson says.
ACE Update on the November 2008 Madison Referendum, Information Session Tonight
REMINDER: The MMSD district is holding its second of four "Information Sessions" regarding the referendum tonight (Thursday, October 16), 6:30 pm, Jefferson Middle School. You are urged to attend.
The Madison Metropolitan School District seeks approval of the district taxpayers to permanently exceed the revenue cap for operations money by $13 million a year. In the meantime, to establish that new tax base over the next three years, a total of $27 million in more revenue will have been raised for programs and services. The district has also projected there will continue to be a 'gap' or shortfall of revenue to meet expenses of approximately $4 million per year after the next three years, thereby expecting to seek approval for additional spending authority.
Whereas, the Board of Education has staked the future of the district on increased spending to maintain current programs and services for a "high quality education;"
Whereas, student performance on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exams has languished at the 7, 8, and 9 deciles (in comparison with the rest of the state's schools where 1 is the highest level and 10 is the lowest) in 4th, 8th and 10th grade reading, math, science, social studies and language arts exams for the past five years. The total percentage of MMSD students performing at either "proficient" or "advanced" levels (the two highest standards) has consistently ranged in mid 60%s to mid 70%s;
Whereas, the district Drop Out Rate of 2.7% (2006-07) was the highest since 1998-99. With the exception of two years with slight declines, the rate has risen steadily since 1999.
Whereas, the Attendance Rate for all students has remained basically steady since 1998-99 in a range from 95.2% (2005-06) to a high of 96.5% (2001-02);
Whereas, the district Truancy Rate of students habitually truant has risen again in the past three years to 6.0% in 2006-07. The truancy rate has ranged from 6.3% (1999-2000) to 4.4% in 2002-03;
Whereas, the district total PreK-12 enrollment has declined from 25,087 (2000-01) to its second lowest total of 24,540 (2008-09) since that time;
Whereas, the district annual budget has increased from approximately $183 million in 1994-1995 (the first year of revenue caps) to approximately $368 million (2008-09);
Whereas, the board explains the 'budget gap' between revenue and expenses as created by the difference between the state mandated Qualified Economic Offer of 3.8% minimum for salary and health benefits for professional teaching staff and the 2.2% average annual increases per student in the property tax levy. The district, however, has agreed with the teachers' union for an average 4.24% in annual increases since 2001;
Whereas, the district annual cost per pupil is the second highest in the state at $13,280 for the school year 2007-08;
The Madison Metropolitan School District seeks approval of the district taxpayers to permanently exceed the revenue cap for operations money by $13 million a year. In the meantime, to establish that new tax base over the next three years, a total of $27 million in more revenue will have been raised for programs and services. The district has also projected there will continue to be a 'gap' or shortfall of revenue to meet expenses of approximately $4 million per year after the next three years, thereby expecting to seek approval for additional spending authority.
Whereas, the Board of Education has staked the future of the district on increased spending to maintain current programs and services for a "high quality education;"
Whereas, student performance on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exams has languished at the 7, 8, and 9 deciles (in comparison with the rest of the state's schools where 1 is the highest level and 10 is the lowest) in 4th, 8th and 10th grade reading, math, science, social studies and language arts exams for the past five years. The total percentage of MMSD students performing at either "proficient" or "advanced" levels (the two highest standards) has consistently ranged in mid 60%s to mid 70%s;
Whereas, the district Drop Out Rate of 2.7% (2006-07) was the highest since 1998-99. With the exception of two years with slight declines, the rate has risen steadily since 1999.
Whereas, the Attendance Rate for all students has remained basically steady since 1998-99 in a range from 95.2% (2005-06) to a high of 96.5% (2001-02);
Whereas, the district Truancy Rate of students habitually truant has risen again in the past three years to 6.0% in 2006-07. The truancy rate has ranged from 6.3% (1999-2000) to 4.4% in 2002-03;
Whereas, the district total PreK-12 enrollment has declined from 25,087 (2000-01) to its second lowest total of 24,540 (2008-09) since that time;
Whereas, the district annual budget has increased from approximately $183 million in 1994-1995 (the first year of revenue caps) to approximately $368 million (2008-09);
Whereas, the board explains the 'budget gap' between revenue and expenses as created by the difference between the state mandated Qualified Economic Offer of 3.8% minimum for salary and health benefits for professional teaching staff and the 2.2% average annual increases per student in the property tax levy. The district, however, has agreed with the teachers' union for an average 4.24% in annual increases since 2001;
Whereas, the district annual cost per pupil is the second highest in the state at $13,280 for the school year 2007-08;
Whereas, there has been a significant growth in the numbers of MMSD graduates who are required to take remedial math, English and writing courses at post secondary institutions of higher learning in order to enter regular, beginning level courses;
Whereas, the 2008 MMSD Math Task Force Report states that MMSD students are required to take less math than other urban schools in Wisconsin; and, there are notable differences in the achievement gap;
Whereas, there is district acknowledgement of a serious achievement gap between low-income and minority student groups compared with others. There are no plans evident for changing how new or existing money will be spent differently in order to have an impact on improving student learning/achievement and instructional effectiveness;
Whereas, there are no specific plans and strategies for changes in the response and reporting systems for safety, use of appropriate technology and for curriculum and services for helping students, staff, parents and the community develop shared responsibilities for safety and conflict resolution;
Whereas, there are no cost-sharing and collaborative initiatives taking place with city and county governments to reduce costs, minimize duplication of services and create better-defined roles and responsibilities;
Whereas, the district is not demonstrating full disclosure, accountability and transparency by providing data and information to show and verify criteria, assumptions, base lines, calculations and analyses for stated efficiencies, savings, past and current projects, cuts and reductions;
Whereas, the board will make budget cuts affecting programs and services, whether or not this referendum passes. The cuts will be made with no specific assessment/evaluation process or strategy for objective analyses of educational or business programs and services to determine the most effective and efficient use of money they already have, as well as for the additional spending authority they are asking with this referendum;
Whereas, there is a lack of a data-driven basis for the re-allocation of existing funds, as well as for the allocation of new funds to programs and services for the greater benefit of all students; therefore, all students are in harms way and are impeded in their academic achievement and personal development;
THEREFORE, THE question is: "Why authorize more spending for the same programs, services and personnel which are NOT attaining desirable results with cost efficient and benefit effective performance?
Active Citizens for Education www.activecitizensforeducation.org
Don Severson, President
608 577-0851 infor@activecitizensforeducation.org
Wisconsin schools budgeted to spend $9.94 billion last year, or $11,522 per pupil. About 58% of that went to instruction. Over the past decade, increases in per pupil spending have averaged 4.0% per year. Meanwhile, statewide enrollments have dropped for five consecutive years.
T he world in which Wisconsin public schools operate today is markedly different from the one in the early 1990s. Enrollments and expenditure trends, and spending and staffing patterns, have all changed--in some cases, dramatically. But, simple pictures often tell the story.
One of the most noticeable developments over the past 20 years has been the ebb and flow of student numbers. The "baby boom echo" led to K-12 enrollments rising from 757,050 in 1990 to 874,042 in 2003. Since then, however, the student count dropped to 863,660 in 2008, the fifth consecutive year of decline.
That is sometimes the function -- although not the intent, really, of the TEP program -- which provides academic and emotional support for students whose chaotic life circumstances can set them grades behind their classmates.
The Zavala kids are among more than 280 students identified as homeless in the school district in the first six weeks of the school year. That number is a rolling count, updated throughout the school year as the district as students become homeless.
The district is on pace to exceed last year's total, which was up sharply from the year before. The nation's growing economic crisis is a likely culprit for at least some of the increase. One longtime TEP teacher says more homeless students are coming from established Madison families, not just those who have recently arrived to the city without housing.
As a result, homeless students are now in the attendance areas of schools all over the city -- and not just those near homeless shelters and motels used to house homeless families. As a result, school officials this year are re-examining how best to use their limited resources, said Nancy Yoder, director of alternative programs. The school district now spends more than $750,000 on homeless services, but more district dollars are highly unlikely, Superintendent Dan Nerad said Thursday. District officials are preparing for a November referendum asking voters to approve increasing their spending limit by a total of $13 million over the next three years just to preserve current programs.
[7:48] On property values and assessment changes. Two years ago, property values grew 9%, last year 6%, 3% this year with most of the recent growth coming from commercial properties.
[8:57] Wisconsin Income Growth: Per Capita personal income "The canary in the mineshaft" and how we lag the national average by 6% or more.
Why?
The population is aging. Senior population will double by 2030. School age population is stagnant.
Employment growth peaked before the nation (04/05)
Wisconsin wages per worker is about 10% less than the national average. 1969; 4% below national average, 1980's; 10 or 11% below national average. Wisconsin wagers per worker are now 14% below national average. We've been on a 40 year slide.
We've hid this because the labor force participation of women has increased dramatically.
Wisconsin is losing corporate headquarters.
[18:18] What does this all mean for K-12 spending?
"If there is going to be growth in any state appropriation,it is going to be schools and Medicaid". The way the Legislature and Governor have set up these two programs, they are more or less on auto-pilot. They will grab whatever money is available and crowd out most everything else. So you get this strange situation where state aid to schools has tripled in the last 25 years while funding for the UW has barely doubled. That sounds like a lot, but when you look at it on a year by year basis, that means state funding for the University of Wisconsin System has grown less than the rate of inflation on an annual average basis while school aids has outpaced it (inflation) as has Medicaid."
Is there anything on the horizon in terms of changes in school finance sources? A discussion of shifting state school finance to the sales tax. "It's clear that in states where state government became even more dominant (in K-12 finance) than in Wisconsin, the net result, in the long run, was a slowing of state support for schools. The legislature behaves like a school board, micromanaging and mandating. California is the poster child.
[20:52] On why the Madison School District, despite flat enrollment and revenue caps, has been able to grow revenues at an average of 5.25% over the past 20 years. Barry discussed: suburban growth around Madison, academic competition amongst Dane County high schools. He discussed Madison's top end students (college bound kids, kids of professionals and faculty) versus the "other half that doesn't take those (college entrance) tests" and that the "other half" is in the bottom 10 to 20% while the others are sitting up at the top on college entrance exams.
[23:17]: This is a long way of saying that Madison has made its problem worse and has put itself on a course toward flat enrollment because of social service policies, school boundary policies and so forth that have pushed people out of the city.
[23:42] "If there is a way within state law to get around revenue caps, Madison has been the poster child". Mentions Fund 80 and frequent and successfully passing referendums along with Madison's high spending per pupil.
People think of the Milwaukee Public Schools as a high spending District. When you really look start to dig into it, it is above average, but Madison is way out there compared to even MPS. People argue that argue that MPS is top heavy in terms of administrative costs per student, Madison actually spends more in some of those categories than Milwaukee. (See SchoolFacts, more)
[26:45] On K-12 School finance outlook: The last time we blew up the school finance system in Wisconsin was in 1994. And, it happened very quickly within a span of 2 to 3 months and it had everything to do with partisan political gotcha and it had nothing to do with education.
[28:26] "Where are the two bastians of Democratic seats in the legislature? Madison and Milwaukee. Madison is property rich and Milwaukee is relatively property poor. Somehow you have to reconcile those two within a Democratic environment and on the Republican side you have property rich suburbs and some very property poor rural districts.
Five Wisconsin school districts suing over investments made two years ago were given "significant disclosure" of what was in those deals and represented themselves as sophisticated investors, an official with a financial institution targeted by the lawsuit said Tuesday.
"We made full disclosure of the merits and the risks associated with these transactions, and we were never guarantors in any fashion of the performance of those investments," said David DeYoung, senior vice president and managing director of the Wisconsin public finance unit for St. Louis-based Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Inc.
Stifel acted as no more than a placement agent in the transactions, DeYoung said. In that capacity, the firm connected the five districts to Royal Bank of Canada, which sold them complex financial products as a way to help fund retiree benefits, and DEPFA Bank in Ireland, which lent the districts most of the money to buy the investments, he said.
"We had a very limited role in this," DeYoung said.
"The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued."
The idea that the U.S. won't even properly develop the skills of young people who could perform at the highest intellectual levels is breathtaking -- breathtakingly stupid, that is.
The authors of the study, published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, concluded that American culture does not value talent in math very highly. I suppose we're busy with other things, like text-messaging while jay-walking. The math thing is seen as something for Asians and nerds.
On Milwaukee's Schools: A clearer picture of the district's financial problems is essential, but a broader discussion of its challenges also must take place.
Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett will hire a consultant within the next week to get a clearer picture of Milwaukee Public Schools' financial underpinnings.
Their joint announcement Saturday feels like progress. But it's only a first step.
Yes, by all means, learn as much as possible about the district's troubled books. But then take action to shore up those finances and focus on other looming issues -- namely the question of governance.
That broader discussion is essential. It's one that Doyle and Barrett must lead. But before that, they agree that they need to know what works financially and what doesn't within the district. Fair enough, because if money is the problem, then an audit will help them deliver that message to the public.
THE CASE FOR CHANGE
Seattle Public Schools has pockets of excellence and many outstanding principals, teachers and programs. WASL scores have improved consistently over the last five years and SAT scores surpass state and national averages. However, we cannot accept a system with a 59% graduation rate and a 22% dropout rate. We cannot accept the lack of proficiency demonstrated in core subjects, particularly in math. We cannot accept a system with uneven school quality. And we cannot accept the glaring, persistent achievement gap among student groups.
We cannot accept a system facing years of multimillion dollar structural deficits. Nor can we accept the burdensome, complex and inadequate state-funding model to which the District is subjected.
We cannot accept these conditions and results. Instead, we must view this as an opportunity for decision makers to demonstrate true leadership and respond to this call to action.
WHAT IT WILL TAKE
It begins with leadership, including:
More forceful direction from the Superintendent and greater unity and cohesion on the part of the School Board
Greater mission clarity and a more focused and concise strategic plan;
An organizational culture-shift that values creativity, fosters adaptability, demands accountability and rewards innovation, teamwork and risk-taking.
It will take resourcefulness to increase investment inacademic outcomes. This will entail a financial strategy truly driven by student achievement goals and aimed at improved outcomes for all.
It will take a resolute approach to establishing long-term fiscal viability. This must include an honest assessment of demographic realities and opportunities for improved operational and program efficiencies across the board. Business as-usual cannot continue.
A state-by-state analysis by The New York Times found that in the 40 states reporting on their compliance so far this year, on average, 4 in 10 schools fell short of the law's testing targets, up from about 3 in 10 last year. Few schools missed targets in states with easy exams, like Wisconsin and Mississippi, but states with tough tests had a harder time. In Hawaii, Massachusetts and New Mexico, which have stringent exams, 60 to 70 percent of schools missed testing goals. And in South Carolina, which has what may be the nation's most rigorous tests, 83 percent of schools missed targets.
1. Mortgage on future property with permanent increase: Asking taxpayers to refinance/mortgage their futures and that of the school district with a permanent increase of $13 million yearly for the operations budget. It has been stated the district needs the money to help keep current programs in place. It is expected that even after 3 years of this referendum totaling $27 million, the Board is projecting a continued revenue gap and will be back asking for even more.
2. No evaluation nor analysis of programs and services: The Board will make budget cuts affecting program and services, whether or not this referendum passes. The cuts will be made with no assessment/evaluation process or strategy for objective analyses of educational or business programs and services to determine the most effective and efficient use of money they already have as well as for the additional money they are asking with this referendum.
3. Inflated criteria for property value growth: The dollar impact on property to be taxed is projected on an inflated criteria of 4% growth in property valuation assessment; therefore, reducing the cost projection for the property tax levy. The growth for property valuation in 2007 was 3.2% and for 2008 it was 1.0%. Given the state of the economy and the housing market, the growth rate is expected to further decline in 2009. [10/13 Update: The above references to property valuation assessment growth are cited from City of Madison Assessor data. See ACE document "Watch List Report Card" [2008 Referendum Watch List 755K PDF] for State Department of Revenue citations for property valuation base and growth rate used for determination of MMSD property tax levy.]
4. No direct impact on student learning and classroom instruction: There is District acknowledgement of a serious achievement gap between low-income and minority student groups compared with others. There are no plans evident for changing how new or existing money will be spent differently in order to have an impact on improving student learning/achievement and instructional effectiveness.
5. Lack of verification of reduction in negative aid impact on taxes: District scenarios illustrating a drastic reduction in the negative impact on state aids from our property-rich district is unsubstantiated and unverified, as well as raising questions about unknown possible future unintended consequences. The illustrated reduction is from approximately 60% to 1% results by switching maintenance funds from the operations budget and 2005 referendum proceeds to a newly created "Capital Expansion Fund--Fund 41" account. [Update: 10/13: The reduction in the negative aid impact will take affect regardless of the outcome of the referendum vote. See the ACE document "Watch List Report Card" [2008 Referendum Watch List 755K PDF] for details.]
6. Full disclosure, accountability and transparency: Data and information has not been presented to show and verify criteria, assumptions, base lines, calculations and analyses for stated efficiencies, effectiveness, savings, past and current projects, cuts and reductions. [Update 10/13: The new administration is gathering and preparing information and data on a pro-active, but limited, basis.]
7. No cost-sharing and collaborative initiatives with other governments: Discussions and negotiations have not taken place with city and county governments for cost-sharing and collaborative initiatives to reduce costs, minimize duplication of services, and create better defined roles and responsibilities.
8. Making schools safe for students and staff: There are no specific plans or strategies for changes in the response system for safety, use of appropriate technology and curriculum helping students and staff develop shared responsibilities and conflict resolution. [Update 10/13: The administration is engaging input from school staff, students, parents and city officials for the development of plans. They are also working on identifying funding sources to provide for safer access from outside walk-ins to the buildings.]
9. Impact of economics and affordability: The impact of tax increases becomes staggering when put in the total context of a school referendum increase and an operations increase; a City of Madison projected 4-6% budget increase; a County of Dane projected 4-6% budget increase; the State of Wisconsin budget expense deficit and decrease in revenues; and the national economic scene of increased food and fuel costs along with the lack of stability in the financial and housing markets.
10. Expected approval of future Maintenance Referendum included in tax impact: The District states that their figures showing the tax impact with approval of the current referendum includes the current Maintenance Referendum (approximately $5 million per year) running through 2009-10 will be approved again past 2009-10. [Update: 10/13: Projections are now available excluding the tax impacts of the current and projected maintenance referendums.]
11. Board discussing another new elementary school: The Board of Education has authorized the administration to seek property in south Madison to build a new elementary school. Planning initiatives are underway to propose a referendum for building an elementary school building in the near future. [Update: 10/13: The administration is not taking any action on this initiative at this time.] See ACE document "Watch List Report Card" [230K PDF Version] for detailed information on 'key issues'
Milwaukee Public Schools retirees and part-time employees earn "considerably more generous benefit levels" than other groups, according to a major consultant's report to the School Board.
The report, which comes as financial and political pressures on MPS are at levels that may be unprecedented, found that fringe benefits cost the school system 61.5 cents for every dollar spent on wages. That compared with 24.5 cents when figures for a dozen comparable employers and MPS were calculated all together.
The New York-based consulting firm, the Segal Co., analyzed data from MPS and 33 comparable employers, including school districts in Wisconsin and elsewhere and other government units. The results of the analysis are to be presented to the School Board's finance committee Thursday night, but no action will be taken then.
With two supplemental pension funds for early retirees, MPS makes payments to four pension funds, with annual payments equal to 14% of its payroll, compared with an average of 9.9% for other public employers in the study.
And practices such as giving full health insurance to people who work 20 hours a week, and in some cases less, and giving people who retire at 55 almost the same health insurance as active workers are uncommon among employers, the report says.
Gov. Jim Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett plan to hire a consultant to analyze Milwaukee Public Schools' finances and operations, and the study is to be finished in time for Doyle to make recommendations to the Legislature in January.
Doyle said he expects the next steps to include changing the state funding formula, changing practices in MPS or some combination of the two.
The consultant, who will be hired in the next 10 days, will be paid by local donors and will have national experience in restructuring and strategic planning, Barrett said in a conference call Saturday.
"We have to have a very solid understanding of the financial underpinnings of this district so we can decide as a community what steps are necessary to move the district forward," he said.
Both officials expressed support for teachers and students in MPS and a desire to know whether the district is using its funds efficiently.
Boston high school students may soon be marching to the beat of their own drums. Or the oompah of their own tubas. Literally.
Tucked into Superintendent Carol R. Johnson's ambitious plan to reorganize the school system is a small but splashy proposal: revive the tradition of a high school marching band in a city bereft of one for about four decades.
"I think it would be pretty exciting," Johnson said. "In a city where we have a lot of great historical celebrations and athletic celebrations, it would make us proud to have BPS students marching down the street. I believe there is enough talent in this city to make it happen."
The city would have to find just a few dozen students - out of more than 18,000 high school students districtwide - suit them up and make sure they can play their instruments while marching in synchronized steps. Sounds simple enough, but prior attempts have flopped.
In the mid-1980s, the district proposed a 200-piece citywide marching band with much fanfare and later unveiled a uniform inscribed with the words "Pride of Boston." But rehearsals were never held, and newly purchased drums, cymbals, and horns ultimately collected dust in a school closet.
Garfield Elementary pupils note broken sidewalks, speeding motorists and other hazards in hopes that Santa Ana will correct them.
n the first day of class, Chris Marx asks his fifth-grade students how they get to school and what they encounter along the way.
Even though most students at Garfield Elementary in Santa Ana walk only a few blocks to class, they often trudge over broken sidewalks and through littered alleyways, rub up against graffiti-covered walls and step over rubble from construction sites. Some dodge roving dogs, homeless people or gang members.
"You ask the kids how many times they've heard gunshots and there are some hands raised," Marx said.
Students at thousands of schools nationwide walked en masse to school Wednesday in events timed for International Walk to School Day, meant to encourage physical fitness and to reduce carbon emissions.
Five Wisconsin school districts suing over millions of borrowed dollars they invested to help pay retiree benefits were given some warnings of the risks involved in the transactions, documents show.
At least one document appears to contradict one contention in the lawsuit filed Sept. 29.
But it remains unclear how much school officials were told about transactions they undertook in 2006 in which they poured $200 million into collateralized debt obligations, financial instruments at the center of the global economic meltdown.
The districts -- Kenosha, Kimberly, Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee and Whitefish Bay -- allege they were misled by two financial institutions that promoted the investments: Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Inc. of St. Louis and Royal Bank of Canada.
A generation ago, the yellow school bus became a symbol of school desegregation, with thousands of the iconic vehicles ferrying minority children away from schools in their own neighborhoods to others in higher-income white areas.
Although the Supreme Court has tightly restricted such overt racial integration efforts in recent years, buses are still crucial to many magnet schools, open-enrollment programs and other school-choice strategies designed to encourage diversity and provide options for students in low-performing schools, as is required under the No Child Left Behind law.
But more and more school districts are curtailing bus service for such programs as a result of higher fuel costs and other financial pressures. That has sparked fears that the only choice for many students will be neighborhood schools attended by classmates of their own race and economic background, which has the unintended effect of re-segregating schools.
"Basically, you can't have racial and class diversity of any sort if you don't provide transportation," says Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project, a research group at the University of California at Los Angeles. "This is kind of closing the last door for urgently needed opportunities for kids who are in schools that are really dysfunctional and inadequate."
Hubbert said he expects Education Trust Fund revenues to fall short at least 5 percent, or at least $318 million, of what the Legislature budgeted for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. As bad as that sounds, it could get worse. Hubbert said if the economy continues to slide, the shortfall could top $400 million.
Trust fund revenues already are more than $200 million below what lawmakers expected. That's mainly because tax collections for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 grew $146 million less than forecast, and Riley last year drained a $440 million reserve to avoid education spending cuts. Lawmakers had expected to have from $64 million to $109 million left in the reserve fund to spend this year. Instead, that money is gone.
The Legislature didn't help matters by passing a $6.36 billion education budget for 2009. That amount exceeds by $102 million the average revenue forecasts of the state finance director and the Legislative Fiscal Office. Essentially, lawmakers decided that cutting almost $370 million from the $6.7 billion education budget from 2008 was hard enough, and they didn't want to carve another $100 million-plus for 2009.
Taxpayers got a chance to ask the questions Tuesday night about the upcoming multimillion dollar Madison school referendum.
More than a dozen people turned out to Sherman Middle School for the first of four public hearings across the city.
Superintendent Dan Nerad gave a brief presentation before opening the forum up for questions.
Voters questioned everything from Fund 80 to the Capital Expansion Fund and student achievement.
Active Citizens for Education said they would like to have seen the referendum scheduled for the spring in order to give the district time to re-evaluate programs that they say are not working - programs that could be cut or changed.
"Where they're talking about maintaining current programs and services it's not getting good results," said ACE's Don Severson. "You look at the achievement gap, look at increased truancy, look an an increased drop-out rate, decreased attendance rates, more money isn't going to get different results."
"I think it is going to be a hard sell," said CAST member and first-grade teacher Troy Dassler. "We really need to get people out there who are interested still in investing in infrastructure. I can think of no greater an investment -- even in the most difficult tough times that we're facing that we wouldn't invest in the future of Madison."
School Board President Arlene Silveira was pleased with the dialogue and questions asked at the forum and said she hasn't been overwhelmed with questions from constituents about the referendum.
"It's been fairly quiet, and I think it's been overshadowed by the presidential election and (downturn with) the economy," Silveira said. "People are very interested, but it does take an explanation.
"People ask a lot of questions just because it's different (with the tax components). Their initial reaction is: Tell me what this is again and what this means? They realize a lot of thought and work has gone into this and certainly this is something they will support or consider supporting after they go back and look at their own personal needs."
Superintendent Dan Nerad has already formulated a plan for program and service cuts in the 2009-2010 budget if voters do not pass the referendum. Those include increasing class sizes at elementary and high schools, trimming services for at-risk students, reducing high school support staff, decreasing special education staffing, and eliminating some maintenance projects.
Nerad said outlining potential budget cuts by general categories as opposed to specific programs was the best route for the district at this juncture.
Texas school districts say a state proposal to standardize the way they calculate high school grade point averages will "dumb down" public education and discourage students from taking rigorous courses.
Later this month, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will consider approval of a new regulation designed to help Texas colleges and universities better assess the academic records of high school students.
Texas Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes said the current system for calculating GPAs is not consistent. A 4.0 in one district, for example, could vary greatly from a 4.0 in another district.
"There's no uniformity in the way GPA is calculated," said Dr. Paredes. "It's very difficult for universities to know what grade points mean."
There had been some speculation Burmaster was interested in running for governor if Gov. Jim Doyle didn't seek re-election in 2010, but she said that type of campaign is not in her plans.
She would not elaborate on her future career endeavors except to say, "I'm an education leader and I want to continue to serve in that capacity." She also said she will get back to working in community schools with students in a "hands-on" role.
Interviews with 2005 Candidates for the Wisconsin DPI Superintendent position can be seen here.
Milwaukee District's financial hole makes everything harder
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
Milwaukee Public Schools' biggest problem may be financial, but the district must not lose sight of a key goal: giving students a quality education and restoring confidence in parents.
The thought of Milwaukee Public Schools going bankrupt is scary, but like some of those big financial institutions in the headlines lately, MPS also must be considered too big to fail.
The public isn't in any mood to hear that a big part of the system's problems are financial. But it is inescapable.
We'd support thoughtful change to the state's funding formula that acknowledges the special needs and challenges facing urban districts such as MPS. And we encourage MPS administrators, the School Board and the teachers union to face up to the legacy costs that are weighing the district down.
But no one should support just throwing more money at MPS -- not until we know for certain how well the district is using the money it has. To say that the public lacks confidence in the district's abilities is a vast understatement.
East County's largest school district has introduced a character education program that aims to reduce cheating and other bad conduct by promoting ethical behavior.
"What you allow, you encourage," said ethics expert Michael Josephson, who is working with the Grossmont Union High School District on the Character Counts program. "It's about helping kids form better values, make better choices."
The Josephson Institute of Ethics plans to release in a few weeks its 2008 national survey of student attitudes and behavior.
Two years ago, the institute's survey of more than 30,000 students showed alarming rates of cheating, lying and theft at schools across the United States.
Six out of 10 high school students said they had cheated at least once during a test during the past year.
1. Without raising taxes, Amendment 59 provides a future source of money for educating Colorado's children. This money may be used to increase per-student funding and for preschool through 12th-grade, or P-12, education improvements, including expanding preschool and full-day kindergarten programs, reducing class size, expanding technology education and providing performance pay for teachers. Providing new sources of money to invest in P-12 education helps schools teach children the skills needed for the jobs of the future. A well-educated work force is necessary to attract new businesses, generate new jobs and keep existing jobs in Colorado.
1. Amendment 59 permanently eliminates all future TABOR rebates to Colorado taxpayers. It is effectively a tax increase that will grow the size of state government. In addition, while the TABOR rebates are supposed to be spent on education, the money could instead replace existing education spending, allowing growth in other state programs. Amendment 59 also allows the only major source of money that is spent on the state's buildings to be transferred for spending on P-12 education at a time when the state is currently unable to keep up with building maintenance and construction needs.
The red pen. In our still largely decentralized public school system, it's no big surprise that this old-fashioned instrument of ill repute gets starkly different treatment from district to district and state to state. Three locales, in fact, have recently reopened the question, "what's in a grade"--and come up with very different answers. Perhaps by evaluating these recent conversations, we can imagine what standard GPAs might look like.
Fairfax County, Virginia, parents are outraged that their children must score a 94 to receive an A. Neighboring counties give As for a mere 90, they argue, and they and their kids are being unfairly penalized when competing for college admission, national merit awards, even a lower car insurance bill. Parents have taken up arms in hopes that extended pressure on the district to follow the example of nearby school systems will lead to a lower bar; Fairfax is contemplating doing so.
Fairfax's one-county crusade against grade inflation is probably sacrificing its students on the altar of its ideals, as parents allege, and remedying that problem is not difficult. Despite cries of the old "slippery slope," shifting the letter-number ratio to match neighboring counties will ultimately benefit Fairfax students (in the short term at least) when it comes to college admissions and the like.
Pittsburgh has tackled the other end of the grading spectrum. All failing grades (those of 50 or below) will henceforth be marked down as 50 percent credit in grade books. Long on the books but only recently enforced, this policy, the district claims, is simply giving students a better chance to "catch up" in the next quarter since quarters are averaged into semester and yearlong grades. "A failing grade is still a failing grade," explains district spokeswoman Ebony Pugh. Seems not to matter if it's a 14 or a 49. Round up to 50.
Locally, the Madison School District is implementing "Standards Based Report Cards" in the middle schools.
I've wondered what the implementation of this initiative tells parents, citizens and taxpayers, not to mention students about the new Superintendent? See his memo on the subject here. More here.
... The WKCE is a large-scale assessment designed to provide a snapshot of how well a district or school is doing at helping all students reach proficiency on state standards, with a focus on school and district-level accountability. A large-scale, summative assessment such as the WKCE is not designed to provide diagnostic information about individual students. Those assessments are best done at the local level, where immediate results can be obtained. Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum.
Invisible Ink in Collective Bargaining Agreements: Why Key Issues Are Not Addressed
Emily Cohen, Kate Walsh & RiShawn Biddle [305K PDF]:
NCTQ takes a close look at the governance of the teaching profession and finds that state legislators and other state-level policymakers crafting state laws and regulation, not those bargaining at the local level, decide some of the most important rules governing the teaching profession.
As a number of big school districts around the country such as San Diego, Broward County, and Philadelphia hammer out new teacher contracts over the next few months, both sides will no doubt bring laundry lists of "must-haves" to the bargaining table. The common assumption is that the important action happens when district administrators and union representatives sit down at the bargaining table. Yet the reality is that well before anyone meets to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement, many issues will have already been decided.
State legislators and other state-level policymakers crafting state laws and regulation, not those bargaining at the local level, decide some of the most important rules governing the teaching profession. Though the teacher contract still figures prominently on such issues as teacher pay and the schedule of the school day, it is by no means the monolithic authority that many presume it to be. In fact, on the most critical issues of the teaching profession, the state is the real powerhouse. State law dictates how often teachers must be evaluated, when teachers can earn tenure, the benefits they'll receive, and even the rules for firing a teacher.
A recent example out of New York State illustrates the growing authority of the state legislature in shaping rules that were traditionally in the purview of the local school district. Last year New York City Public Schools sought to change the process for awarding teachers tenure by factoring in student data. The local teachers' union, the United Federation of Teachers protested the district's new policy, not through a local grievance (because the union, by state law, had no say on tenure issues), but by lobbying state legislatures to pass a bill that would effectively make the district's action illegal.1 Guided by the heavy hand of the state teachers' union and the UFT, the New York State Legislature blocked New York City's tenure changes by embedding a provision in the 2008-2009 budget that made it illegal to consider a teacher's job performance as a factor in the tenure process.2 The placement of the provision in the large, unwieldy budget virtually assured the union of a win, as few legislators or the governor would have been prepared to have the budget go down on the basis of a single provision.
Parents of Chicago public school students living on the West Side overwhelmingly want to have more of a say on school decisions and want better communication from the district when it comes to school-restructuring efforts, according to the findings of a five-month survey released Friday.
The survey conducted by the Parents & Residents Invested in School & Education Reform (PRISE Reform), queried 504 households of students in the 6th through 12th grades in the Humboldt Park, Garfield Park and Austin neighborhoods.
No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America's Education Schools
Julie Greenberg and Kate Walsh, National Council on Teacher Quality1.5MB PDF:
American students' chronically poor performance in mathematics on international tests may begin in the earliest grades, handicapped by the weak knowledge of mathematics of their own elementary teachers. NCTQ looks at the quality of preparation provided by a representative sampling of institutions in nearly every state. We also provide a test developed by leading mathematicians which assesses for the knowledge that elementary teachers should acquire during their preparation. Imagine the implications of an elementary teaching force being able to pass this test.
Aug. 29, 2008, marked the end of the second week of my second year teaching at Craig Elementary school, one of nearly 35 public schools that make up the Recovery School District, a state run system created in 2005 to reform New Orleans' failing schools.
The date had a much greater significance for my students and our city, of course -- it was both the three year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastating landfall, and the day before Mayor C. Ray Nagin would declare a mandatory evacuation in preparation for what could be "the storm of the century," Hurricane Gustav.
As we neared dismissal that day, my students buzzed around the wooden shelves that housed their binders of classwork.
Mayor Adrian Fenty of Washington has moved at warp speed to make reforms since lawmakers gave him direct control of the city's corrupt and dysfunctional school system a little more than a year ago. He named a hard-nosed schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who has replaced dozens of inept principals and reined in a rapacious central bureaucracy that was infamous for wasting money and thwarting reform.
The mayor and his chancellor are now hoping to negotiate an innovative new teachers' contract that, if ratified, could become a model for underperforming school systems throughout the country.
Like many other cities, Washington wants to relax seniority rules that make it difficult to remove underperforming teachers and to reward high performers with fewer years of service.
Ms. Rhee has proposed a new approach in which teachers could choose between two employment options. The first would continue the traditional tenure arrangement, under which teachers would be compensated based on their years of experience and educational attainment. Or teachers could choose to give up tenure protection -- for the first year of the new contract -- and would have to agree to an evaluation of their teaching skills. The teachers who temporarily relinquished tenure, and passed the review, would be rewarded with higher salaries and bonuses that could push their earnings to as high as $130,000 a year. At present, a teacher with a Ph.D. and 21 years of experience makes $87,500 a year. Those who received lower ratings, however, would risk being fired during a probationary year.
"The goal and responsibility and moral imperative of this administration is to make sure that each child gets an excellent education," said Rhee, who had hinted broadly in recent weeks that she was ready to invoke what she has dubbed "Plan B."
The blueprint includes a new teacher evaluation system based primarily on student test scores and other achievement benchmarks. She has also decided to employ rules that are on the books but seldom used, including one that allows her to deemphasize the importance of seniority in deciding which teachers would lose jobs in the event of declining enrollment or school closures. Seniority would become one of multiple factors taken into account.
Exactly how teachers will be evaluated on the basis of test scores is still under review, Rhee said. The provision allowing a 90-day review of teacher performance, however, could have a more immediate impact.
Five days after Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison School Board officials learn if voters approved a referendum to help finance the district budget, they're expected to vote on options to ease overcrowding at Leopold Elementary.
A long-term plan for coping with Leopold Elementary's crowded classrooms would be delayed until June, and the school's fifth graders would be shuttled to two middle schools for two years under a proposal released today by Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad.
In a report to the Madison School Board, Nerad acknowledged that residents living in the Leopold area on Madison's South Side would prefer that a new school be built in the area.
However, he recommended the stopgap measures while delaying the long-term plan, which had been expected to be announced this fall. District officials have been studying the problem since April.
Under Nerad's plan, Leopold's fifth graders would attend Cherokee and Wright middle schools in the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years. About three-fourths of the fifth graders would be sent to Cherokee.
Since 1984 I have been following issues in and around Milwaukee Public Schools. That means that, since 1984 I have been searching for who is responsible for the pitiful state of education in Milwaukee. At long last I found the culprit; it is the Milwaukee School Board. That board has proven itself to be self-serving, insular and overtly political.
Their high crime is that this body, entrusted to care for Milwaukee's children, has been caught stealing money that should have been put into the classrooms of schools throughout the city.
Like the scandals that brought down huge corporations, from Enron to Fannie Mae, the evidence of the crime was assembled by accountants. Last week the WPRI released a report, authored by Christian Schneider, showing that the MPS board has racked up $2.2 billion of unfunded liabilities to pay the health care cost of retired employees. That means that the board committed to pay $2.2 billion it does not have. That also means that for years, while begging for more money to address the all-to-real challenges of urban education, the MPS board had already decided that their top priority was to pay for retiree health care costs.
The Milwaukee School Board should censure member Charlene Hardin and forbid her from taking any more trips after records revealed she racked up bills of more than $8,500 while jetting around the country on the school district's dime. For one trip, she billed Milwaukee Public Schools more than $400 to rent a Chrysler 300 Touring car for two days.
In a column Thursday, the Journal Sentinel's Dan Bice revealed that Hardin was hit in March with a nearly $300 penalty for smoking cigarettes while staying at a smoke-free Marriott in Washington
he Madison Metropolitan School District is facing a federal class-action lawsuit.
An East High School parent claims a request to transfer her daughter out of the district was been denied based on race.
The class-action lawsuit, filed in federal court on Wednesday, claims the Madison school district discriminated against a white, female student who wanted to transfer from East High School using open enrollment.
At the time, in the 2006-2007 school year, the transfer request was denied because it would increase the racial imbalance in the district. It was the district's policy at the time, but that policy was changed earlier this year after a Supreme Court ruling involving school districts in Seattle and Louisville, WISC-TV reported.
"I believe this district had a policy that was absolutely consistent with state law," Madison Schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad said. "When there was a legal decision by the highest court of the land... that was no longer a factor. I believe the district responded very responsibly in making a change in the policy."
In the 2006-07 school year, Madison was the only one of the state's 426 school districts to deny transfer requests because of race, rejecting 126 white students' applications to enroll in other districts, including online schools, records show.
Identify community goals for Madison Metropolitan School District K-12 Fine Arts education including curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular.
Recommend up to five ways to increase minority student participation and participation of low-income students in Fine Arts at elementary, middle and high school levels.
Make recommendations regarding priorities for district funding of Fine Arts.
Members of the Task Force will present the findings and recommendations to the MMSD School Board on Monday, October, 6, 2008, at 6:15 pm, in the McDaniels Auditorium of the Doyle Administration Building, 545 West Dayton Street, Madison.
Students, parents and the general public are encouraged to attend to show support for the role of the arts in ensuring a quality education for every MMSD student. Attendees can register in support of the report at the meeting.
Nineteen community members, including 5 MMSD students, were appointed by the School Board to the Task Force, which met numerous times from February 2007 through June 2008. The Task Force received a great deal of supportive assistance from the Madison community and many individuals throughout the 16 month information gathering and , deliberation process. More than 1,000 on-line surveys were completed by community members, parents, artists, arts organizations, students, administrators and teachers, providing a wealth of information to inform the task force?s discussions and recommendations.
The full Task Force report and appendices, and a list of Task Force members, can be found at http://mmsd.org/boe/finearts/.
Fine Arts Task Force Report [1.62MB PDF] and appendices:
Knowledge@Wharton High School is an interactive site for high school students interested in finding out more about the world of business. It's a subject that touches your lives in many ways -- from the malls you shop and the plastics you recycle to the entrepreneurs, sports managers, fashion designers, stock brokers, artists and other leaders that you might become. At KWHS, you will find features about the companies you know and the people who run them, games to improve your financial skills and test your commitment to a greener marketplace, tools to explain how business works, and podcasts and videos that spotlight the world's most creative and colorful people. As part of a network of global online business publications published by The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, KWHS will show you how your ideas can change the world.
In the agreement announced Tuesday, there were no program changes made to the current virtual/online curriculum, but requirements outlined in the agreement assure that classes are supervised by district teachers.
During the 2007-08 school year, there were 10 district students and 40 students from across the state who took MMSD online courses.
Independent schools get better results than state schools because they have the freedom to tailor teaching to the needs of their pupils, researchers say.
A University of Buckingham report found social background and ability were not the only factors behind higher grades in private schools.
The study said autonomy meant decisions were made close to the classroom.
The findings showed how the quality of education could be improved in the state school sector, the report added.
A recent World Bank report on the Federal Government's funding of the education sector has revealed a disproportionate allocation of funds to the payment of salaries and wages. The report titled "A Review of the Cost and Financing of Public Education" states that while funding levels increased from N30.6 billion in 1999 to N205.2 billion in 2007, public expenditure on education declined in real terms as the increase in funding did not translate into a commensurate improvement in the provision of facilities, equipment, infrastructure and services.
Giving the breakdown of the total sum of N738 billion the FG allocated to the sector between 1999 and 2007, the report revealed that the Federal Ministry of Education and its four key agencies spent about N472 billion on salaries and wages, leaving a paltry sum of N265 billion for infrastructure development. For the 2008 budget, the FG devoted N210 billion or 13 per cent of the total budget to education, apart from another N39.7 billion earmarked as intervention fund for the UBE programme.
It is claimed that the funds the National Universities Commission and the federal universities devoted to salaries and wages alone peaked at 83 per cent of the FG's university funding in 2007. Other streams of education, including colleges of education, similarly recorded high percentages in personnel costs.
Arizona school boards, city councils and other public bodies can meet online to discuss public business but that they still need to accommodate the public, Attorney General Terry Goddard said Tuesday.
Telecommunications technology offers the promise of widening public access to meetings held through webcasts and other means, Goddard said. "This promise, however, is counterbalanced by the potential for abuse or technical obstacles for some citizens to access the meeting."
Goddard discussed the issue in a legal opinion that reviewed a plan by the Camp Verde Unified School District's governing board to meet online to discuss a document.
t. Louis is looking for its eighth school superintendent since 2003. Kansas City is on its 25th superintendent in 39 years.
Despite good salaries and plenty of perks, a recent study found that the average urban superintendent nationwide stays on the job only about three years -- which educators say isn't enough time to enact meaningful, long-lasting reform.
"Would you buy Coca-Cola if they changed CEOs every year?" asked Diana Bourisaw, who left as St. Louis superintendent in July after two years in the top job. "The answer is no. I wouldn't."
On Friday, Kelvin Adams signed a three-year contract with the St. Louis district worth $225,000 annually plus bonus incentives, a day after his hiring was approved by a state-appointed board that oversees the district.
Adams figures he can buck the trend of superintendent turnover.
"I am absolutely focused on one thing -- student achievement," Adams said.
MidAmerican also sees promise in BYD's battery technologies for storing wind energy and solar energy, Mr. Sokol said. Difficulties in storing energy for when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining have limited the deployment of these renewable energy technologies.
More broadly, Berkshire Hathaway wants to tap into China's engineering talent and is doing so through BYD, which has 11,000 engineers and technicians among its 130,000 employees.
Mr. Buffett did not attend the news conference, but said in a statement that he was impressed with Mr. Wang's record as a manager.
Unlike past charter school studies, which focus on student achievement, the authors analyze the relationship between charter high school attendance and educational attainment. They find that charter high schools in Florida and in Chicago have substantial positive effects on both high school completion and college attendance. Controlling for observed student characteristics and test scores, univariate probit estimates indicate that among students who attended a charter middle school, those who went on to attend a charter high school were 7 to 15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who transitioned to a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school were 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college. Using the proximity of charters and other types of high schools as exogenous instruments for charter high school attendance, they find even stronger effects in bivariate probit models of charter attendance and educational attainment. While large, their estimates are in line with previous studies of the impact of Catholic high schools on educational attainment.
Sarah Hayes, principal of the KIPP DC:KEY Academy, realized that two new teachers were not working out. Their résumés and recommendations had been good. They were nice people. But their classes were disorganized, their standards low. Efforts to help them improve had little effect.
If KEY were a traditional school, Hayes's only reasonable option would have been to mentor the teachers, note her dissatisfaction on their evaluations and recommend that they not be kept after a two-year probation. That is the way it goes in most school systems. Staffing rules, tenure agreements and low expectations tend to favor weak teachers unless they do something awful.
But KEY is a public charter school, one of many in the District that do not have such rules. Hayes was able to get the teachers out of her middle school by Christmas and replace them with proven talents, who were freed from other duties at KEY because of flexibility allowed such schools.
But that might not make much difference in kids' overall soda consumption.
Both pieces of news came across my desk as I was writing today's "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy" column about school lunch nutrition. Together they demonstrate how daunting a goal it is to try to change eating and drinking habits -- other people's and our own.
The good news, coming from the American Beverage Association, is that sweetened soft drinks accounted for less than 25 percent of beverages sold in schools last year; that's down from 40 percent in 2004. The ABA has been working with the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation (as in former President Bill) to affect a shift toward healthier drinks -- those with fewer calories and offered in smaller portions than your standard can of pop -- in schools. Bottled water has filled much of the gap, moving from 13 percent of the beverages sold in schools in 2004 to almost 28 percent last year.
Brian Betts, principal of Shaw at Garnet-Patterson Middle School, said he knew that the experimental program to pay cash for good grades and behavior, which began yesterday at 15 D.C. schools, had captured his students' imaginations when they began asking about the economic crisis.
" 'I heard about this banking stuff,' " Betts recalled one saying the other day. " 'Are we still going to have this money?' "
The answer is yes. The Northwest Washington school's 307 students are among the roughly 3,000 middle-schoolers eligible to earn as much as $100 every two weeks -- to a maximum of $1,500 for the academic year -- for showing up on time, not disrupting class and getting high grades.
Students have been buzzing about the pilot program, called Capital Gains, since they learned in late August that their school had been selected. The school now includes students from Shaw, which closed in June.
When charter school directors step into the job, they step onto a high wire with no safety net below them. Though they take on a broader set of responsibilities than traditional public school leaders, charter directors rarely have the "back office" administrative support of a district central office. Instead, it is up to them to secure and manage facilities, recruit students and teachers, raise and manage funds, and coordinate curriculum and instruction.
How are charter school leaders facing this challenge? In Working Without a Safety Net: How Charter School Leaders Can Best Survive on the High Wire, authors Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross explain that today's charter school directors, though deeply motivated by their school's mission and the students they serve, can have their confidence shaken by many of the extras they face.
Drawing from a six-state survey, the authors find that, like traditional public school principals, today's charter school directors often come to their positions from other jobs in education and with training from schools of education. However, charter school leaders tend to be younger and newer to leadership positions; many have only a couple years of experience in school administration.
The contract includes average salary increases of 5 percent the first two years and 5.5 percent the last three, according to the release. It also adds 20 minutes per day to the schedule for kindergarten through 4th-grade teachers.
The answer isn't simply investing more in computer equipment and technology for schools, either. The United States has spent more than $60 billion equipping schools with computers during the last two decades, but as countless studies and any routine observation reveal, the computers have not transformed the classroom, nor has their use boosted learning as measured by test scores. Instead, technology and computers have tended merely to sustain and add cost to the existing system.
That schools have gotten so little back from their investment comes as no surprise. Schools have done what virtually every organization does when implementing an innovation. An organization's natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does. This is perfectly predictable, perfectly logical -- and perfectly wrong.
Student as Consumer
The key to transforming the classroom with technology is in how it is implemented. We need to introduce the innovation disruptively -- not by using it to compete against the existing paradigm and serve existing customers, but to target those who are not being served -- people we call nonconsumers. That way, all the new approach has to do is be better than the alternative -- which is nothing at all.
To convey what we mean, we need to briefly explain the disruptive-innovation theory. In every market, there are two trajectories: the pace at which technology improves and the pace at which customers can utilize the improvements. Customers' needs tend to be relatively stable over time, whereas technology improves at a much faster rate. As a result, products and services are initially not good enough for the typical customer, but, over time, they improve and pack in more features and functions than customers can use.
Managing almost 900 schools and more than 650,000 students is a huge task. But a Daily News review of salaries and staffing shows LAUSD's bureaucracy ballooned by nearly 20 percent from 2001 to 2007. Over the same period, 500 teaching positions were cut and enrollment dropped by 6 percent.
The district has approximately 4,000 administrators, managers and other nonschool-based employees - not including clerks and office workers - whose average annual salary is about $95,000. About 2,400 administrators are among the 3,478 LAUSD employees who earn more than $100,000 annually.
Meanwhile, the average salary for an LAUSD teacher is $63,000. And the average household income in Los Angeles County is less than $73,000.
"(The bureaucracy) grows whether it's fat or lean times," said United Teachers Los Angeles union leader A.J. Duffy, a longtime critic of the district's administrative staffing.
Dan Nerad opened his remarks by stating his commitment to efforts for always continuing change and improvement with the engagement of the community. He outlined four areas of focus on where we are going from here.
Funding: must balance district needs and taxpayer needs. He mentioned the referendum to help keep current programs in place and it will not include "new" things.
Strategic Plan: this initiative will formally begin in January 2009 and will involve a large community group process to develop as an ongoing activity.
Meet people: going throughout the community to meet people on their own terms. He will carefully listen. He also has ideas.
Teaching and learning mission: there are notable achievement gaps we need to face head-on. The "achievement gap" is serious. The broader mission not only includes workforce development but also helping students learn to be better people. We have a "tale of two school districts" - numbers of high achievers (including National Merit Scholars), but not doing well with a lot of other students. Low income and minority students are furtherest away from standards that must be met. Need to be more transparent with the journey to fix this problem and where we are not good. Must have the help of the community. The focus must be to improve learning for ALL kids, it is a "both/and" proposition with a need to reframe the issue to help all kids move forward from where they are. Must use best practices in contemporary assessment, curriculum, pedagogy and instructional methods.
Dr. Nerad discussed five areas about which he sees a need for community-wide conversations for how to meet needs in the district.
Early learning opportunities: for pre-kindergarten children. A total community commitment is needed to prevent the 'achievement gap' from widening.
High schools: How do we want high schools to be? Need to be more responsive. The curriculum needs to be more career oriented. Need to break down the 'silos' between high school, tech schools and colleges. Need to help students move through the opportunities differently. The Small Learning Communities Grant recently awarded to the district for high schools and with the help of the community will aid the processes for changes in the high schools.
School safety: there must be an on-going commitment for changes. Nerad cited three areas for change:
a. A stronger curriculum helping people relate with other people, their differences and conflicts.
b. A response system to safety. Schools must be the safest of sanctuaries for living, learning and development.
c.Must make better use of research-based technology that makes sense.
a. Good news: several recommendations for curriculum, instruction and policies for change.
b. Bad news: our students take less math than other urban schools in the state; there are notable differences in the achievement gap.
Fine Arts: Cited recent Fine Arts Task Force Report. Fine arts curriculum and activities in the schools, once a strength, has been whittled away due to budget constraints. We must deal with the 'hands of the clock' going forward and develop a closer integration of the schools and community in this area.
Dr. Nerad introduced Mr. Erik Kass, Assistant Superintendent for Business Services who made the following remarks:
He is leading the management team in a revisit of the budget model and looking at the financial system; how the district does business; and, how effectively are we spending the money.
He will be looking to the city and county for partnerships and shared services
His mission with the Board of Education and the public is to present information in ways which ensure that information is accurate, honest, understandable and accessible.
Following are questions and comments from DCPAC members and guests with responses from Dr. Nerad.
John Pinto: a) what if the referendum fails? [Nerad: engage the community in priorities. He has an idea list of cuts, but is not sure if those are cuts in the right places.] b) how to get teachers less into 'politics' and more into school? [Nerad: there is a need to separate the work of teachers from politics in the schools. Continuing professional development in teaching and learning and by encouraging new teachers who make teaching their 'first' career choice.]
Nancy Mistele: a) urged engaging former board members and other community people with historical perspectives, expertise, etc. to offer the district; b) Fund 41 a good idea. [Nerad: the benefit of Fund 41 will be to reduce the negative impact on the Madison property tax payers for state aid and Fund 80 will reduce the amount of tax authority outside the revenue caps]; c) what does it cost to educate a child in this state and what does it cost not to educate children properly? [Nerad: The answer to those questions are very complex and involve community priorities and the state legislature engaging in proactive efforts.]
Don Severson: What are your thoughts and plans for cost/benefits/results analyses of programs and services on both sides of the house--educational and business? [Nerad: Outcome assessments should be tied to the strategic plan. He is very much interested in program evaluation - what is the cost and how it is done. He believes application of experimental research methodology for program assessment is questionable.]
Jonathon Barry: Stated his thanks to Dr. Nerad for his clear enunciation of the issues and directions. Barry remarked about his involvement with the :Fresh Start" program. There are 4000 disconnected youth in our area. Stated that MMSD will not contract with Fresh Start and that the Madison Teachers contract is a barrier to the issue. [Nerad: will contact Barry to set up a meeting. He needs to evaluate and determine where the district is with alternative programs. The principals are asking for help. We need more alternatives--it is all about students.]
Judy Reed: She is the principal of the Dane County Transition School, not associated with MMSD, but believes there also should be a working arrangement. Relationships are the key with the disconnected kids. Asked why does there need to be one dropout? [Nerad: will contact Reed to arrange a meeting.]
Gary Schmerler: Requested consideration for MMSD involvement in the county consortium for charter schools. [Nerad: he has asked that MMSD be at the table for the consortium dealing with career-based alternatives. He raised the question for further discussion as to: why do people want charters and how can we be more responsive in our programming in the district?"]
Phil Salkin: Suggested Nerad and others connect with www.wisconsinway@wcgpr.com for a statewide initiative underway to look at funding for education in Wisconsin and how individuals and groups can participate in that effort. He stated it was refreshing to hear about the initiatives for cost analyses, workforce development, etc., but the community and state must provide funding for education.
Chan Stroman: Stated that the district and community can't continue to excuse the problem of school safety fixes until school finance is fixed. She also stated that it does cost more to educate students from low-income families and for special needs students.
Dave Glomp: Expressed thanks to Nerad as a: breath of fresh air" and for his transparency. Requested the district to address the teacher contract as out of sync, collaborative, with the budget process. [Nerad: he will look at all of that. Also stated that teaching needs to be a profession of first choice. There also needs to be more of a balance of male and female teachers, especially at the elementary level.]
Final statement by Dr. Nerad: He is committed to keep communications open and the community engaged in the issues and problem resolutions. He urged individuals and the group to communicate with him their suggestions and needs.
Active Citizens for Education presents this "Watch List Report Card" as a means of reporting relevant information, facts and analyses on topics appropriate for consideration by taxpayers in voting on the Madison Metropolitan School District referendum question November 4, 2008.
This document is dynamic in nature, thus it is updated on a regular basis with new information and data. Questions, analyses, clarifications and perspectives will be added to the entries as appropriate. Review Ratings will be applied to report the progress (or lack thereof) of the Board of Education and Administration in its plans, data, information, reports and communications related to the referendum.
The question which shall appear on the ballot is as follows:
"Shall the following Resolution be approved?
RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING THE SCHOOL DISTRICT BUDGET TO EXCEED REVENUE LIMIT FOR RECURRING PURPOSES
BE IT RESOLVED by the School Board of the Madison Metropolitan School District, Dane County, Wisconsin that the revenues included in the School District budget be authorized to exceed the revenue limit specified in Section 121.91, Wisconsin Statutes, for recurring purposes by: $5,000,000 beginning in the 2009-2010 school year; an additional $4,000,000 beginning in the 2010-2011 school year (for a total of $9,000,000); and an additional $4,000,000 beginning in the 2011-2012 school year (for a total of $13,000,000 in 2011-2012 and each year thereafter)."
At Brookfield East High School, Laura Turner is the kind of student who shouldn't have to worry about getting into the college of her choice.
She's articulate, mature and enthusiastic, a hard worker with high marks -- a 3.88 grade-point average -- who organized hundreds of students last year in Waukesha County to sleep in a parking lot and raise thousands of dollars for displaced Ugandan citizens.
But ranked against her peers in terms of GPA, Turner isn't in the top 25% of her senior class.
The stratification caused by class rank, which arguably makes a student such as Turner appear less accomplished, compelled the Elmbrook School District last week to start looking at whether its two high schools should quit tracking the data. It's a move that's been implemented within the past five years at Whitefish Bay and Shorewood high schools, where administrators say they've seen more seniors being accepted into the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A School Board member says voters can approve a $22.5 million school referendum without seeing an increase in property taxes - and a pro-referendum committee goes even further, saying a successful referendum could actually lower property tax bills.
The president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance has his doubts, and some Germantown School District residents question the idea that borrowing $22.5 million for a new elementary school wouldn't raise their taxes.
"It just makes people all the more suspicious," resident Anne Bastow said about the Nov. 4 referendum. "To say your (property tax) payments are going down when you're getting something new, it just doesn't jibe."
But a top official with the state Department of Public Instruction says school districts can increase their state aid - and simultaneously reduce property tax levies - by increasing enrollment.
WISTAX published a fascinating chart in their most recent issue of FOCUS [Page 1, Page 2]:
However, the state pledge to provide two-thirds of schools revenues in 1996-97 changed the budget landscape. By 2006-07, state-tax support for the UW System had almost doubled during Ihe 25 years prior. However, inflation (CPI, up 115%). school aids/credits (320%). and overall slate GPR expenditures (222%) rose more.
Further proof that there is no free lunch. The ongoing calls for additional state redistributed tax dollars for K-12 public education will likely have an effect on other programs, as this information illustrates. I do think that there should be a conversation on spending priorities.
The East Hartford Public Schools District Improvement Plan represents the evolution of work begun five years ago. Although it has undergone several transformations as a result of extensive professional development, it continues to serve as the blueprint for action and a path to excellence.
The generally upward trajectories in student achievement confirm the application of researched-based strategies can make a difference in student achievement. This result has provided encouragement and motivation to staff.
Although pleased with the district's accomplishments and the progress we have made, sustained focus, reinforcement, and fidelity of implementation must continue to be priority. Accomplishments, along with current work in progress, encompass many important areas of focus:
The board of education has unanimously endorsed a state-mandated district improvement plan that aims to raise standardized test scores, reduce school suspensions and narrow significant achievement gaps between black and white students and poor students and their wealthier peers.
Superintendent of Schools Marion H. Martinez will present the plan, approved Monday night, to the State Board of Education on Oct. 2. It will then be detailed for the public at a local board meeting on Oct. 6. The state requires such plans when districts or schools have been deemed "in need of improvement" under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
The plan calls for raising the percentage of students reaching proficiency in reading, writing and math scores on the Connecticut Mastery Test and Connecticut Academic Performance Test by at least 15 points over the next three years. It also calls for reducing the test score gap between racial and ethnic groups and socioeconomic groups by 30 percent in the same three years. Currently, for example, there is a 30 percent average gap in reading scores between those groups in grades 3 to 9, and the plan calls for the gap to be narrowed by 9 percentage points -- a 30 percent drop -- by 2010-11.
When fixing schools, beware of miracle cures. Every week people send me ideas they say will change the future of education and lead all humanity to enlightenment. So, when management expert William G. Ouchi let me look at his new work on the surprising power of total student loads per teacher, or TSL, I was skeptical.
He says when middle or high school principals are given control of their schools' budgets -- a rare occurrence in big districts -- they tend to make changes in staffing, curriculum and scheduling that sharply reduce TSL, the number of students each of their teachers is responsible for. Some urban districts have TSLs approaching 200 kids per teacher. But after principals get budgeting power, the load drops sharply, sometimes to as low as 80 kids per instructor. When that happens, the portion of students scoring "proficient" on state tests climbs. A group of New York schools had a surge of 11 percentage points after they reduced average TSL by 25 students per teacher.
I hear the mumbles out there. Yes, correlation is not causation. Test scores are not a perfect measure. Many other factors could explain the rise in achievement. For instance, the principals might be using their new powers to hire good teachers and fire bad ones.
Gov. Sonny Perdue has asked the attorney general's office to determine whether school districts can use state and local school money to pay for a lawsuit over how Georgia funds education.
The Consortium for Adequate School Funding in Georgia, a group of about 50 mostly rural systems, filed the suit in 2004. The trial was scheduled to begin next month, but the group withdrew the action last week after the case was assigned to a new judge. Consortium leaders, who argue insufficient state funding has resulted in low student achievement, said they will file a new lawsuit.
In a letter Perdue sent to the attorney general's office Tuesday, he cited a provision in the state constitution that requires school money be spent on schools, academics and support programs.
"Taxpayers in these school districts need to know that their education tax dollars have been used to pay lawyers suing the state instead of in their children's classrooms," Perdue said Thursday in a news release. "My hope is that in the future decisions on school funding will be made through the public policy process, not in a courtroom where the plaintiffs' lawyers are paid with local education tax dollars to battle defense lawyers paid with state tax dollars."
Speaking at the 2007 EG conference, "renegade lunch lady" Ann Cooper shares her passionate belief in remaking the school lunch. She uses scathing language to describe how most American kids are fed at the noon bell, out of cans, boxes and plastic bags -- sowing the seeds of the obesity epidemic that is spreading from the US around the globe. But, she says, there's a coming revolution in the way kids eat at school -- local, sustainable, seasonal and even educational food. (Recorded December 2007 in Los Angeles, California. Duration: 19:42.)
In a report released last week that did not get press other than a post on the education blog of the Journal Sentinel, the Legislative Audit Bureau rehashed the first-year findings of the School Choice Demonstration Project's study of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Interestingly, the Bureau found the study's data cannot provide information about performance in individual schools. In response, a prominent school choice lobbying group has called for test scores to be reported annually on a school-by-school basis.
The overall findings, released last February, were not as positive as education reform supporters had anticipated. The Audit Bureau re-analyzed the data and confirmed these findings. For example, the sample of choice students in the private schools had lower reading scores on state standardized tests than a matched sample of MPS students at three of six grade levels. At all six grade levels tested, the private school students scored lower than a random sample of MPS students. In nearly all cases, however, the differences were not statistically significant.
Roland G. Fryer Jr., a Harvard economist, has often complained that while pharmaceutical companies have poured billions of dollars each year into studying new drugs and Boeing devoted $3 billion to develop the 777 jet, there has been little spent on efforts to scientifically test educational theories.
Now Dr. Fryer has quit his part-time post as chief equality officer of the New York City public schools to lead a $44 million effort, called the Educational Innovation Laboratory, to bring the rigor of research and development to education. The initiative will team economists, marketers and others interested in turning around struggling schools with educators in New York, Washington and Chicago.
Backed by the Broad Foundation, founded by the billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, and other private groups, the research is intended to infuse education with the data-driven approach that is common in science and business, Dr. Fryer said. He compared the current methods of educational research to the prescriptions of an ineffective doctor.
"MORE will mean worse," wrote an angry Kingsley Amis in 1961, contemplating plans to expand university education. His prediction has been tested past anything he could have imagined, as that era's new universities were joined by the ex-polytechnics in the 1990s, and the proportion of youngsters who go on to university rose from less than 10% to almost 40% now. The 430,000 new undergraduates heading off to freshers' weeks later this month will find themselves part of Britain's largest university cohort ever.
Similar rumblings have continued since Amis's jeremiad. With less government money (in real terms) per student than in his day, universities have to pack them in and keep them in to balance the books. Paul Buckland, an archaeology professor at Bournemouth University, resigned when administrators overruled his failing grades for ten students (last month he won a case for "constructive dismissal"). In June a barnstorming lecture by Geoffrey Alderman, of Buckingham University, gained wide attention with its claims of impotent external examiners, widespread unpunished plagiarism and a "grotesque bidding game" in which universities dished out good grades in order to claw their way up league tables.
Early in the week the Madison Board of Education approved the submission of two resolutions for the state school board association's annual meeting. I was happy to be an author of one and to get assistance from the Middleton/Cross Plains board on the second.
One meeting that I'm always happy to attend is with community organizers and childcare providers working to bring quality early childhood education to all students in Madison. We met at a local business, Ground Zero coffee shop, and enjoyed much in the way of conversation and goal-setting. If you would like to learn how to get involved in this effort feel free to contact me and I will put you in touch with some great people working on behalf of young children and through an investment in our future.
In addition, I may start holding listening sessions at local businesses to better communicate with the community.
Kaley Stroup has seen the impact school budget cuts have had on classmates and friends at La Follette High School.
Officials at La Follette were forced to drop the Italian language program from the curriculum for the 2008-09 school year, and students had to scramble to restructure their class schedules.
Stroup said elimination of the courses put many seniors like her in a tough situation when thinking ahead to college.
"Their schedules are messed up now because colleges want you to have four years of the same foreign language, and they've had to switch to French and Spanish, and it's thrown things off for them," Stroup said.
She is part of a group of Madison Metropolitan School District students intent on bolstering community approval for the school referendum so deeper budget cuts won't have to be made going forward. Leaders of the group hope to have some two dozen students getting out the word about voting "yes" on Nov. 4.
David Poythress called. The only announced Democratic candidate for governor wanted to pick a fight with Eric Johnson over school vouchers.
"To re-direct public money from public education into unregulated private entities with the magical expectation that somehow the private sector was going to remedy all the education problems in the state -- that's just wrong. It's not going to happen," Poythress said.
Johnson, currently the Senate president pro tem, has seized on the voucher issue as a likely ticket to the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in 2010.
A chancellor who would coordinate all the schools in town, including private schools and universities?
Clamping down on busing of Milwaukee Public Schools students, high salaries in central office and other high-cost items?
Creating new programs to get disruptive students out of classrooms?
Ideas were flying Monday as the spotlight continued to shine on MPS and its financial problems.
In its specifics, the proposal endorsed by School Board members on a 6-3 vote last week to explore dissolving MPS may or may not go forward. A meeting Thursday night at which the board will consider it formally is the next main event.
The new union-friendly charter school in the Bronx I wrote about last week is not the only big project that Green Dot Public Schools has taken on this fall. The other is the attempted transformation of Locke High School in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The school, which currently has about 2,500 students, has long been notorious as one of the worst in the city, with what the L.A. Times recently described as a "reputation for student fisticuffs and an appallingly high dropout rate."
Green Dot was founded by Steve Barr, a garrulous, outspoken Irish American in his late 40s who helped start Rock the Vote in 1990 and nine years later decided his role in life was to run high schools. His organization now manages 10 of them, mostly in L.A., and his new mission is to transform the way public education works in the city (and then in the rest of the country).
In a week when America's financial markets experienced a meltdown, perhaps it shouldn't have been that surprising to learn Milwaukee Public Schools was also apparently in dire financial straits.
Last week, a shake-up of major Wall Street firms sent shock waves through the stock market. The federal government announced a risky, multibillion-dollar bailout of endangered institutions amid concerns about the worst financial crisis in decades. With all that turmoil afoot, it was almost anticlimactic to learn the School Board had voted to look into ways to dissolve the public school system because of increasing financial problems.
Yes, that's right; dissolve it.
Most folks knew things were bad at MPS; nobody suspected it was that bad. At least one board member, Michael Bonds, still isn't convinced.
"I was outraged," said Bonds, who left the room shortly after a 6-3 vote by MPS board members to consider options for dissolving the state's largest school district. "Yes, that's why I left the room."
The new state policy of requiring algebra in the eighth grade will set up unprepared students for failure while holding back others with solid math skills, a new report has concluded.
These predictions, based on national data, come in the wake of an algebra mandate that the state Board of Education, under pressure from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, adopted in July. That decision won widespread praise from some reform advocates and the Bush administration, putting California out front in a national debate over improving mathematics instruction.
The policy also led to a lawsuit filed this month by groups representing school districts and school administrators. They contend that the state board adopted the new rules illegally. Their underlying concern is that the algebra policy is unworkable and unfunded.
The new study, released today by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., looked at who is taking eighth-grade algebra and how they are doing.
And there was some ostensibly good news. Nationwide, more students are taking algebra than before. Over five years, the percentage of eighth-graders in advanced math -- algebra or higher -- went up by more than one-third. In total, about 37% of all U.S. students took advanced math in 2005, the most recent year in the analysis.
Nobody writing about schools has been a bigger supporter of getting more students into eighth-grade algebra than I have been. I wrote a two-part series for the front page six years ago that pointed out how important it is to be able to handle algebra's abstractions and unknown quantities before starting high school. I have argued that we should rate middle schools by the percentage of students who complete Algebra I by eighth grade.
Now, because of a startling study being released today, I am having second thoughts.
The report (to be available at http://www.brookings.edu/brown.aspx ) reprints this simple NAEP problem:
There were 90 employees in a company last year. This year the number of employees increased by 10 percent. How many employees are in the company this year?
A) 9
B) 81
C) 91
D) 99
E) 100
The correct answer is D. Ten percent of 90 is 9. Add that to 90 and you get 99. How many of the misplaced students got it right? Just 9.8 percent. Not good.
On what basis should we distribute rewards to salespeople?
It seems like a silly question, doesn't it? First, "we," meaning the public at large, don't usually get to decide such matters. Second, there are obvious systems of rewards for salespeople already in place, foremost among them the system of commissions, which pays salespersons for the value they directly contribute to a firm's operation.
Replace the word "salespeople" with "teachers," however, and we move from the realm of silly questions to the arena of intense policy debate. Teachers are in most cases public employees. So we do, in theory at least, get to decide how they are paid. The commission model for teachers, variants of which have been proposed for many years, would involve compensating them for the value they provide to their school's operation, that is, the degree to which they educate their students. Unfortunately, the amount of education a student receives in a given year is much harder to quantify than the total sales recorded by a clerk in a store. Measuring student growth has been made somewhat easier by recent advances in the tracking of student performance on standardized tests over time. But the notion of paying teachers on the basis of their ability to improve test scores, often termed "merit pay," while earnestly debated by education policy researchers, is strongly opposed by teachers unions and is a political nonstarter in many parts of the country.
A consortium of rural school districts suing the state to change its funding formula withdrew its long-running case from Fulton last week and said it would refile it in another venue after it was reassigned to Schwall.
"We have been transferred to a judge who is new to the subject, and we have a judge whose political views are well-known," said Joe Martin, the group's executive director and a Democrat who has run for state school superintendent. "We could barrel ahead, but it is unlikely we would get a fair hearing" because of his political connections.
Gov. Sonny Perdue, who is fighting the school suit, appointed Schwall to the bench after Judge Roland Barnes was allegedly shot to death by Nichols in 2005. Perdue lashed out at the group's "transparent attempt at forum shopping."
Schwall, in an e-mail to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said: "The integrity of our judicial system depends on a judge's ability to make decisions based upon the law and the facts presented, not upon politics or any other outside influence."
A third of the elementary classrooms in the Madison School District are multi-age. That figure, which has held steady for more than five years, makes Madison one of the biggest users of multi-age classrooms -- some educators say the largest user -- in Dane County.
Also, Madison's Sennett Middle School is in its 33rd year of offering a unique multi-age classroom setting that blends sixth, seventh and eighth graders.
"I think it really does foster that sense of family," said Sennett Principal Colleen Lodholz, who said the arrangement is so popular that several former students have returned to teach at the East Side school.
There's nothing new about putting children of more than one grade level into a single classroom.
"Look at the one-room schoolhouse. That was all multi-age. That's where we started in the United States," said Sue Abplanalp, the assistant superintendent overseeing Madison's elementary schools.
"Nothing like a little math to wake you up in the morning," teacher Tricia Colclaser said this month after a taxing round of word problems.
Abstract math is not known for its stirring effect on U.S. teenagers. But algebra is viewed as increasingly essential for students preparing for college or careers in a fast-changing, technology-based economy. Some advocates call it the new literacy.
Strengthening the math abilities of all students is a steep challenge. Educators must reinforce basic concepts early on, attract teachers talented enough to go beyond dictating formulas, and, not least, overcome an anti-math bias many students harbor long into adulthood, that all the hours spent mixing letters and numbers yield more punishment than possibility.
How hard can it be?
The question led this education reporter back to high school to try again, as a student in Colclaser's class. To prepare, I reviewed a recent version of Virginia's Algebra II Standards of Learning exam. The 50 questions conjured a familiar wave of anxiety but little actual math. I then fumbled through a state Algebra I test, getting at most 10 answers right.
Everyone seems to have an opinion about education and they seem more than happy to share it. Nelson Mandela called education the most powerful tool you can use to change the world, while Mark Twain joked that he never let his schooling interfere with his education.
One thing we can agree on: We all want our children to have the best education possible -- one that will help them to achieve their potential in life, no matter which path they choose.
Our kids in Hawaii deserve our best efforts to give them a good start on life, and we have a unique opportunity to do just that. With a culturally rich and ethnically diverse student population, Hawaii represents a microcosm of the world's future. We have teachers, principals and administrators deeply committed to equipping our children with the knowledge and skills they'll need, and parents ready to support them in their efforts. We have a Board of Education responsible for setting policies and standards to ensure all children a quality education, regardless of their economic background or ZIP code. By working together and coordinating our efforts, we have the potential to transform our island state into an educational model for others to emulate.
Gov. Jim Doyle called Friday for "a complete evaluation of exactly where MPS is" as a first step toward any action by state government to do more for Milwaukee schools or change the way the school system is run.
"The School Board has really opened this up now," Doyle said, referring to a surprising 6-3 vote by Milwaukee School Board members Thursday night in favor of exploring the dissolving of Milwaukee Public Schools, which is under financial pressure. Such a step might leave responsibility for Milwaukee schools in the state's lap.
"I take this vote very seriously by the board and, if they are moving in this direction at all, it can only be done through state law," Doyle said in an interview. "I think we need -- everybody needs -- to have a good clear understanding of where exactly the Milwaukee schools are."
He said he wants to know whether MPS is making the best use of the money it has. He expects to announce plans for conducting such an evaluation next week.
"You can't just sort of speculate that maybe we're going to dissolve and have the state just sort of stand there," Doyle said. "We have to be prepared."
One of the benefits of finding public schools that work is the chance to study them and discover exactly what they are doing that other schools are not doing. Sadly, this rarely seems a blessing to the educators at those schools, who have to fill out surveys, sit for long interviews and have strangers recording their every move. Often they feel like Michael Phelps might have felt, told to take a drug test every time he won an Olympic gold medal.
I sense these often intrusive assessments have been particularly galling for many teachers at KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program). It has become the most studied school network in the country, one more indication that it is probably also the best. KIPP serves children from mostly low-income minority families at 66 schools in 19 states and the District, a network way too big for most researchers to handle. But since KIPP began to expand in 2001 from the two successful charter middle schools created by co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, scholars have been examining pieces of the growing enterprise.
The Milwaukee School Board voted Thursday night to begin looking into dissolving the Milwaukee Public Schools system.
The completely unexpected 6-to-3 vote followed a gloomy assessment of the short- and long-term financial situation of MPS from Superintendent William Andrekopoulos and several board members.
The resolution called for the administration to examine state and federal guidelines for dissolving the school district and who would be responsible for educating children in Milwaukee if that happened.
Voting for the resolution were board members Danny Goldberg, Jennifer Morales, Jeff Spence, Bruce Thompson, Terry Falk and Tim Petersons. Voting against were Peter Blewett, Michael Bonds and Charlene Hardin.
While it is extremely far from this step to MPS going out of business -- and the action might turn out to be largely a symbolic protest of the MPS financial situation -- it was by far the board's most dramatic reaction to the pressures it is under. Those pressures include wide demands for better student achievement, a tightening money vise and the strong prospect of a double-digit increase in the property tax levy to be imposed this fall.
"We have ample evidence the current model is going to move us to ruination sooner or later," Goldberg said.
College scholarships for specific abilities and achievements are not news. There are football scholarships and volleyball scholarships and music scholarships and cheerleading scholarships, and so on - there is a long list of sources of money to attract and reward high school students who have talent and accomplishments if those are not academic.
Consider an example: there is a high school student in Georgia, in an IB program, who spent a year and a half working on an independent study of the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s. This paper, a bit more than 15,000 words, with endnotes and bibliography was published in the Fall 2008 issue of The Concord Review, the only journal in the world for the academic research papers of secondary students, and it is a strong candidate for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize. If he were an outstanding baseball player, a number of college baseball coaches would have heard about him, and would be doing what they could to persuade him to accept an athletic (baseball) scholarship to their colleges.
But suppose he were not a HS athlete, but only a HS history students of extraordinary academic promise at the high school level. Would college professors of history know about and take an interest in his work? No. Would there be college history scholarships competing for him? No. Would his teacher, who worked with him on his independent study, attract attention from his peers at the college and university level? No.
I hope I am wrong, but based on what I have found out so far, there are no college scholarships available specifically for outstanding secondary students of history. There is abundant moaning and gnashing of teeth by edupundits and professors about the widespread ignorance of history among our young people, but when someone shows unusually strong knowledge of history at the Lower Education Level, no one pays any attention at the Higher Education Level.
In 21 years of working to publish 824 history research papers by secondary students of history from 44 states and 34 other countries in The Concord Review, I have not learned of a single instance of an author being offered a college scholarship based on their academic work in history.
When we lament that our adolescents seem more interested in sports than in academics, we might consider how differently we celebrate and reward those activities. High school coaches who are well known to and almost treated as peers by their college counterparts, receive no attention at all for their work as teachers, no matter how unusually productive that work may happen to be. Higher Education simply does not care about the academic work being done by teachers and students at the Lower Education level.
Behavioral psychology argues that by ignoring some behavior you will tend to get less of if, and by paying attention to and rewarding other behavior you are likely to find that there is more of it.
I know that students are being recruited for college scholarships in cheerleading, and I would dearly love to hear from anyone who can tell me of students being recruited for their specific academic work in a high school subject, like history, literature, physics, Chinese, chemistry and so on.
I realize there are scholarships for disadvantaged students, for students of high general intellectual ability, and the like, but where are the scholarships for specific HS academic achievement? After all, athletic and dance scholarships are not awarded on the basis of general tests of physical fitness, but because of achievement in the actual performance of particular athletic or artistic activities.
It is said that you get what you pay for, and it seems likely that you get more of what you value and reward in academics as well. If we continue to overlook and ignore the academic achievement of our secondary-level scholars of history and other subjects, that does not mean that some students will no longer work hard in their areas of academic interest. There may be fewer of them, and fewer teachers who see the point of putting in the extra coaching time with exceptionally diligent students, but if we continue down this road, at least folks in Higher Education ought to be aware that they are working just as hard to discourage good academic work at the secondary level as anyone, and they should stop complaining about the attitudes toward scholarship of the students in their classrooms, which, after all, are in part a result of their own contempt for and neglect of academic work at the secondary (aka "pre-college") level.
Will Fitzhugh [founder], Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987], Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998], TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007, www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org, Varsity Academics®
They have been mocked for being dysfunctional, chided for their infighting and, most recently, ridiculed as busybodies and micromanagers.
During the past decade, San Diego school board members have been known as much for their reforms as for their behavior on and off the dais.
Now, in the peak of campaign season - three seats are up in November - when tensions tend to run high, trustees have agreed to a strict new governence code.
Months in the making, the new policies follow several workshops and retreats aimed at improving board relations and increasing efficiency. The 46-page document outlines issues such as acceptable behavior during public forums and professional conduct in the community, with the media and in the Normal Street headquarters of the San Diego Unified School District.
Superintendent Terry Grier negotiated a "no meddling" clause in his contract, as did his predecessor Carl Cohn. But the new policies specifically elaborate on the relationship between superintendent and trustees.
For example, the superintendent "is neither obligated nor expected to follow the directions or instructions of individual board members," according to the document. Instead, directives are to come from the entire board and after a vote on any matter.
David Morales never thought much about going to college. But in 12th grade he watched his aunt graduate from The Richard Stockton College in Galloway Town-ship.
"After seeing her succeed in everything she wanted to do and watching her face light up with her own accomplishment, this inspired me to change my mind," Morales told the state Board of Education on Wednesday.
It was too late to switch to college preparatory classes, but Morales thought that since he had received all A's and B's in his courses, he could still handle college. But when he took the Accuplacer placement test at Cumberland County College, he found he would have to take remedial courses first.
"Now I will be in school a year longer to get my degree (in radiology)," he said.
Morales was one of three current and former Cumberland County College students who spoke to the board about their high school experiences. CCC President Ken Ender brought them to the meeting to demonstrate the consequences for students who meet the current high school graduation requirements but are still not ready for college.
How migrants fare in school, and what schools can learn from them.
MOST teachers admit that occasionally, when a lesson is going badly, they suspect the problem lies not with the subject or pedagogy, but with the pupils. Some children just seem harder to teach than others. But why? Is it because of, say, cultural factors: parents from some backgrounds place a low value on education and do not push their children? Or is it to do with schools themselves, and their capacity to teach children of different abilities?
It might seem impossible to answer such a question. To do so would require exposing similar sorts of children to many different education systems and see which does best. As it happens, however, an experiment along those lines already exists--as a result of mass migration. Children of migrants from a single country of origin come as near to being a test of the question as you are likely to find.
Revisit strategic plan in January with local stakeholders. Preferred to lead with strategic plan but budget came first.
Hopes (MMSD) literacy programs are maintained.
He wants to listen to the community.
The District's mission is teaching and learning.
The District has several strengths and some notable weaknesses, including achievement gaps.
Schools have a broader mission than workforce development, including helping students be good people.
Achievement gap is a significant issue. There is a compelling need to face an issue that affects Madison's viability. These are not quick fix kind of issues. We need to talk more openly about this.
If I speak openly, I hope that people will be supportive of public education.
He wishes to reframe conversation around improvements for all students.
Five areas of discussion:
4k community conversation
SLC grant (More here). Use the grant to begin a conversation about high schools. The structure has been in place for over 100 years. Discussed kids who are lost in high school.
Curriculum can be more workforce based. Green bay has 4 high schools aligned with careers (for example: Health care).
Revisit school safety
Curriculum
- safety plan and response system
- schools should be the safest place in the community
- technology is not the complete answer
- math task force; Madison high school students take fewer credits than other Wisconsin urban districts
- reaffirms notable math achievement gap
Erik Kass, Assistant Superintendent of Business Services:
Discussed budget gaps.
Plans to review financial processes.
He previously worked as a financial analyst.
Goal is to provide accurate, honest and understandable information.
Jonathan Barry posed a useful question (46 minutes) on how the current MTI agreement prohibits participation in alternative programs, such as Operation Fresh Start ("nobody shall educate that is not a member of Madison Teachers"). Barry mentioned that a recent United Way study referenced 4,000 local disconnected youth (under 21). This topic is relevant in a number of areas, including online learning and credit for non-MMSD courses. This has also been an issue in the local lack of a 4K program.
Crisis in the financial markets on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. And Americans awakening to challenges that go to the bedrock of the nation's strength.
Nothing is ultimately more bedrock than the education of our children -- the readiness of our citizens and coming generations to compete and lead in a global economy. To carry the responsibilities of democracy.
Where do McCain and Obama stand? This hour, we'll ask their top advisers where McCain and Obama would lead on a basic issue for America -- education.
Five days after Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison School Board officials learn if voters approved a referendum to help finance the district budget, they're expected to vote on options to ease overcrowding at Leopold Elementary.
And those fixes, especially the long-range ones, won't be cheap.
Overcrowding at the largest elementary school in the district has been a hot-button topic the past several years, and the School Board has put the issue at the top of its priority list. Leopold had 718 students last year (new figures aren't available yet), making it more than double the size of many district elementary schools and larger even than all but one middle school.
A decision can't come quickly enough for the Leopold community, as evidenced by the 130 parents, teachers and faculty who attended a meeting Sept. 9 at the school. District officials were there to outline a variety of options (see them at www.mmsd.org/boe/longrange) they're considering for the south Madison school located on Post Road.
As a host of new charter schools opened this year in the metro area, trying to lure disaffected parents away from public school systems, both Minneapolis and St Paul public schools are rolling out new programs and programming changes to keep these families - and the state funding dollars that come with them - in the school systems. In particular, Minneapolis public schools have fired the opening salvo in a multi-year offensive against their poor reputation, with a thorough-going re-design of district high schools.
St Paul
Fortunately for St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS), the district does not have as serious a credibility problem as Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS). St Paul school board members Tom Goldstein and Keith Hardy told this reporter in July that district leadership believes not all parents want a "one-size-fits-all" public school. Some parents, Hardy said, are looking for specific types of programming, such as gender-segregated education or career-specific training in high school, and the district has to provide these or risk losing these families to charter schools.
"The district and the union also have quarreled over the role of MTI members in online learning for seven years. Under the new agreement, ANY (my emphasis) instruction of district students will be supervised by Madison teachers. The deal doesn't change existing practice but confirms that that practice will continue."
You are quite new to the MMSD. I am EXTREMELY disappointed that you would "cave in" to MTI regarding a long-standing quarrel it has had with the MMSD without first taking the time to get input from ALL affected parties, i.e., students and their parents as well as teachers who might not agree with Matthews on this issue. Does this agreement deal only with online learning or ALL non-MMSD courses (e.g., correspondence ones done by mail; UW and MATC courses not taken via the YOP)? Given we have been waiting 7 years to resolve this issue, there was clearly no urgent need for you to do so this rapidly and so soon after coming on board. The reality is that it is an outright LIE that the deal you just struck with MTI is not a change from the practice that existed 7 years ago when MTI first demanded a change in unofficial policy. I have copies of student transcripts that can unequivocally PROVE that some MMSD students used to be able to receive high school credit for courses they took elsewhere even when the MMSD offered a comparable course. These courses include high school biology and history courses taken via UW-Extension, high school chemistry taken via Northwestern University's Center for Talent Development, and mathematics, computer science, and history courses taken at UW-Madison outside of the YOP. One of these transcripts shows credit for a course taken as recently as fall, 2005; without this particular 1/2 course credit, this student would have been lacking a course in modern US history, a requirement for a high school diploma from the State of Wisconsin.
The MMSD BOE was well aware that they had never written and approved a clear policy regarding this matter, leaving each school in the district deciding for themselves whether or not to approve for credit non-MMSD courses. They were well aware that Madison West HAD been giving many students credit in the past for non-MMSD courses. The fact is that the BOE voted in January, 2007 to "freeze" policy at whatever each school had been doing until such time as they approved an official policy. Rainwater then chose to ignore this official vote of the BOE, telling the guidance departments to stop giving students credit for such courses regardless of whether they had in the past. The fact is that the BOE was in the process of working to create a uniform policy regarding non-MMSD courses last spring. As an employee of the BOE, you should not have signed an agreement with MTI until AFTER the BOE had determined official MMSD policy on this topic. By doing so, you pre-empted the process.
There exist dozens of students per year in the MMSD whose academic needs are not adequately met to the courses currently offered by MTI teachers, including through the District's online offerings. These include students with a wide variety of disabilities, medical problems, and other types of special needs as well as academically gifted ones. By taking appropriate online and correspondence courses and non-MMSD courses they can physically access within Madison, these students can work at their own pace or in their own way or at an accessible location that enables them to succeed. "Success for all" must include these students as well. Your deal with MTI will result in dozens of students per year dropping out of school, failing to graduate, or transferring to other schools or school districts that are more willing to better meet their "special" individual needs.
Your rush to resolve this issue sends a VERY bad message to many families in the MMSD. We were hoping you might be different from Rainwater. Unfortunately, it says to them that you don't really care what they think. It says to them that the demands of Matthews take primarily over the needs of their children. Does the MMSD exist for Matthews or for the children of this District? As you yourself said, the MMSD is at a "tipping point", with there currently being almost 50% "free and reduced lunch" students. Families were waiting and hoping that you might be different. As they learn that you are not based upon your actions, the exodus of middle class families from the MMSD's public schools will only accelerate. It will be on your watch as superintendent that the MMSD irreversibly turns into yet another troubled inner city school district. I urge you to take the time to learn more about the MMSD, including getting input from all interested parties, before you act in the future.
VERY disappointingly yours, Janet Mertz
parent of 2 Madison West graduates
"Tuesday's agreement also will implement a measure that requires a licensed teacher from the bargaining unit supervise virtual/online classes within the district. The district and union have bickered on-and-off for nearly seven years over the virtual/online education issue. Matthews said the district was violating the collective bargaining contract with development of its virtual school learning program that offered online courses taught by teachers who are not members of MTI.
In the agreement announced Tuesday, there were no program changes made to the current virtual/online curriculum, but requirements outlined in the agreement assure that classes are supervised by district teachers.
During the 2007-08 school year, there were 10 district students and 40 students from across the state who took MMSD online courses.
Though Nerad has been on the job for less than three months, Matthews said he is pleased with his initial dealings and working relationship with the new superintendent.
"This is that foundation we need," Matthews said. "There was a lot of trust level that was built up here and a lot of learning of each other's personalities, style and philosophy. All those things are important.
"It's going to be good for the entire school district if we're able to do this kind of thing, and we're already talking about what's next."
The Death of WKCE? Task Force to Develop "Comprehensive Assessment System for Wisconsin"
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [150K PDF], via a kind reader's email:
Wisconsin needs a comprehensive assessment system that provides educators and parents with timely and relevant information that helps them make instructional decisions to improve student achievement," said State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster in announcing members of a statewide Next Generation Assessment Task Force.
Representatives from business, commerce, and education will make recommendations to the state superintendent on the components of an assessment system that are essential to increase student achievement. Task force members will review the history of assessment in Wisconsin and learn about the value, limitations, and costs of a range of assessment approaches. They will hear presentations on a number of other states' assessment systems. Those systems may include ACT as part of a comprehensive assessment system, diagnostic or benchmark assessments given throughout the year, or other assessment instruments and test administration methods. The group's first meeting will be held October 8 in Madison.
For the next president, one of the first domestic challenges will be to reshape the No Child Left Behind law, hailed six years ago as a bipartisan solution to America's education troubles.
But in their race for the White House, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are distancing themselves from what has become a tainted brand.
Education experts say the candidates have offered, at best, a fuzzy vision for the future of the No Child Left Behind law. Obama pledges to "fix the failures" of the law, while McCain seeks to avoid mention of it.
At a joint news conference at MTI headquarters, Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad and MTI Executive Director John Matthews said the settlement resolves issues that have festered for up to eight years.
Among other things, the agreement reinstates Boyce Hodge, the longtime West High School athletic director, to that position and as coach of the boys basketball team for the current school year. The district's other three major high schools also will have full-time athletic directors.
The district and the union also have quarreled over the role of MTI members in online learning for seven years. Under the new agreement, any instruction of district students will be supervised by Madison teachers. The deal doesn't change existing practice but confirms that that practice will continue.
Matthews said he was pleased with the negotiations and agreements, and added that he's enjoyed working with Nerad.
"I think probably the over-reaching issue that this resolution provides is an improved problem-solving relationship between the union and the school district that's possible now with the coming of Dan Nerad as the superintendent in Madison," Matthews said.
Fascinating and an interesting look at new Superintendent Dan Nerad's approach.
Because the first year of high school is considered crucial to a student's success, more campuses are sheltering freshmen in small learning communities or sometimes on separate campuses.
As Jessica McClain, 14, stood in line to get her student ID picture taken on her first official day as a Muir High School student, she was a churning mix of anticipation and anxiety.
"The campus is huge," a wide-eyed McClain said as she looked at hundreds of freshmen lined up in the school's cavernous gymnasium. "I am excited, but I'm nervous. New school. Bigger school. Bigger people."
But for McClain, freshman year will be a more intimate experience than for earlier generations. Ninth grade is crucial to a student's eventual academic success, so secondary schools across the nation, including Pasadena's Muir High, are increasingly sheltering their freshmen in small learning communities or sometimes on separate campuses.
"We really wanted to make sure our freshmen have a strong, solid foundation and are able to bond with the school," said Edwin Diaz, superintendent of the Pasadena Unified School District. "If they don't connect well in ninth grade, they tend to disappear in 10th. A high percentage drop out."
Madison CAST November, 2008 Referendum Neighborhood & PTO Newsletter
We are asking if you would put this in your school newsletters and share it with your members as we need your help to spread the word about the referendum to your friends and neighbors. Please feel free to share the attached with your neighborhood newsletters as well.
On November 4, 2008 voters in the Madison school district will decide on a funding referendum that is crucial to the future of our children and our community.
Good schools are the backbone of a healthy community. Our public schools are essential for expanding prosperity, creating opportunity, overcoming inequality, and assuring an informed, involved citizenry. Madison's public schools have been highly successful and highly regarded for many years. We've learned that quality public education comes from well-trained teachers, the hard work of our students and teachers, and also from a steady commitment from the community at large.
After several public forums, study, and deliberation, the Board of Education has unanimously recommended that our community go to referendum, to allow the board to budget responsibly and exceed the revenue caps for the 2009-2012 school years. The referendum is a compromise proposal in that it seeks to offset only about 60% of the estimated budget shortfall in order to keep tax increases low.
The projection is that school property taxes would increase by less than 2%. Even with increased property values and a successful referendum, most property owners will still pay less school property taxes than they did in 2001.
Most importantly, this November 4th, the voters in Madison can recommit to public education and its ideals by passing a referendum for the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Thank you so much for your work and support for Madison's Public Schools, Communities and Schools Together (CAST) - a grassroots organization devoted to educating and advocating on behalf of quality schools -- needs your help in support of the November referendum. We need volunteers to help distribute literature, put up yard signs, host house parties for neighbors, write letters to the editor--but most of all we need your support by voting YES on the referendum question.
Keep our schools and communities strong by supporting the referendum. To learn more, donate to the campaign or get involved--visit Community and Schools Together (CAST) at www.madisoncast.org.
The school system in coastal Baldwin County -- 60 miles by 25 miles of Alabama farmland framed on two sides by waterfront towns -- was short on teachers, especially in courses such as math and science.
So short, in fact, that district officials went around the world last year, with expenses paid by a teacher recruiting firm, and brought back Michel Olalo of Manila and 11 other Filipinos to teach along the shores of the Gulf Coast and Mobile Bay and in the communities in between.
That raised some eyebrows in Baldwin County, where nine out of 10 people are white, just one in 50 is foreign-born and, as the county's teacher recruiter Tom Sisk noted recently, "Many of our children will never travel outside the United States."
Yet school administrators throughout the U.S. are plucking from an abundance of skilled international teachers, a burgeoning import that critics call shortsighted but educators here and abroad say meets the needs of students and qualified candidates.
As the new Miami-Dade schools superintendent, Alberto Carvalho will face a multitude of challenges -- among them, boosting morale among teachers and navigating a financial crisis.
But none will be as tricky -- or as paramount to his success -- as working with the sharply fractured School Board.
''There's a divided board that isn't in harmony,'' said former schools chief Merrett Stierheim. ``That's the mountain he's got to climb. And it's a very steep mountain.''
While board members were hesitant at first to appoint a permanent replacement for Rudy Crew last week, Carvalho, with a competing offer from Pinellas County in hand, told them he wouldn't accept a temporary position.
He was offered the permanent top job with a 5-3 vote.
Sandra Tsing Loh, making sense, continues her whirlwind media tour, this time at the Washington Post (thanks to a kind reader's email for this link):
Yea, public school parents' priorities are routinely placed below those of building inspectors, plant managers, even, given an errant bell schedule, cafeteria workers. Although, teachers are down in the bunkers with us, too. You'd be amazed how many extraordinary schoolteachers, who've served faithfully, conscientiously, daily for 40 years, just keep their heads down at this point.
Since most politicians have never dealt with U.S. public schools as customers themselves (in the same way that precious few of them put their own children in the Army), it might shock you, Mr. Future President, how poorly parents are treated out here in Public-School-Landia. You know how when you walk into a Wal-Mart or a McDonald's, someone greets you with, "Hello! May I help you?" It's startling how seldom you can expect this basic courtesy in public schools, how often we parents approaching the counter are treated as felons, or more often simply ignored by the frantically typing office-administrator-type-person. It's a peculiar thing, in this 21st century. Forget best-practice research and technology-driven classrooms. I really believe if anyone in the multibillion-dollar industry called U.S. public education were ever listening to us, improved schools would start, simply, with this: "Hello! May I help you?"
Where does this culture of committee-oriented time wastage -- even for parents who work -- spring from? Here's a clue. L.A. Unified recently faced such a budget shortfall that the district was actively recruiting potential save-our-schools spokesparents to submit their resumes and come to the central offices for "media training" if selected. Cut to the bone as it is, though, next year's budget still slates a hefty $78.8 million for consultants (last year a consultant was paid $35,000 to teach our superintendent how to use a computer). And yes, I realize that I'm getting off-message by noting that our school district wastes money.. . . That's like waving red meat in front of America's seniors, who'll probably vote to cut taxes again! Even though it's not the bureaucracy, but the children who get squeezed. That's all budget cuts mean, in the end. My kids have their assemblies on cracked asphalt. Now the cracked asphalt will have weeds.
But here's the good news, Mr. Future President. In a testament to the incredible can-do American spirit (and I mean that in the most drop-dead-serious way), activist public school parents are fighting back against U.S. public education's wasteful and unresponsive corporate "professionalism." (Remember George Bernard Shaw's quip about the professions being "conspiracies against the laity"?) City by city, homegrown "parents for public schools"-style Web sites are springing up daily, little rebel force fires on the horizon. From New York to Chicago, Seattle to San Francisco and beyond, activist parents are starting to blog their outrage over millions of education dollars wasted on non-working computer technology, non-child-centered programs and, of course, those entities whose education dollars are never, ever cut -- the standardized-testing companies.
Some years ago, I sketched a chart illustrating the influence of various factions on our nearly $400M local school system. Topping the list were Administrators of both the school system and local teachers union. Far down were teachers (think of the "downtown math police") and parents. Further still were students themselves. Taxpayers were not represented.
Observing public education rather closely for a number of years, it seems to me that all players, especially teachers, parents and students, would be better off with a far more diffused governance model (charters, smaller districts/schools, choice?).
More than 60 Wisconsin school districts got an earlier start than Madison did in instituting a bookkeeping change that potentially saves local property owners millions of dollars in taxes.
But led by a new superintendent and business manager, Madison last month adopted the accounting measure -- a move that school officials hope will strengthen community support for a Nov. 4 referendum.
The referendum will ask voters for a three-year series of permanent tax increases to generate $13 million to avert multimillion-dollar budget cuts.
A Union Grove resident who has tried for 2 1/2 years to start a private, co-ed military school for sixth- through 12th-graders in southeastern Wisconsin may have finally found a home for the school - the old Prospect Hill Elementary School near the intersection of Racine and National avenues.
New Berlin's School Board agreed this week to sell the property at 5330 S. Racine Ave. for $1.25 million to Jeff Starke, a retired U.S. Navy serviceman and lieutenant in the volunteer Civil Air Patrol who is eager to launch his Wisconsin Air Academy.
Starke's quest to create a day academy and boarding school for middle school and high school students, a venture that even experts in the field say is a tough business, has been fraught with difficulties.
Plans for sites in three municipalities have fallen through because of legalities, municipal demands or neighborhood opposition. Two contracting firms are suing Starke over development issues, and Bill Orris, the Wisconsin Air Academy's intended president and dean of admissions, was fired mid-year from his last job as dean of admissions at the Florida Air Academy, according to that school's president, James Dwight.
The Madison School District and Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, may be nearing a wide-ranging settlement on staffing issues that have divided them for up to eight years.
"I would say it is a big deal and that's about all I can tell you at the moment," MTI Executive Director John Matthews said Friday afternoon. "I just feel compelled to keep my mouth shut. That's the agreement I reached with the superintendent so I'm not going to violate it."
Matthews said he expects to announce details at a news conference early next week with Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad.
The Bellevue School District increased its salary offer to teachers in a late-night bargaining session Thursday.
The total pay raise would be 5 percent over the three-year contract.
Union officials praised the move and said they planned to hold an "optimism" rally at Crossroads Park in Bellevue today while bargaining was expected to continue.
The school district initially offered teachers 3 percent in wage increases over the three-year contract but raised the offer to 4.5 percent last week, saying the increase was contingent on voter approval of a levy in the third year of the contract.
Curriculum is also an issue in this strike [32K PDF]:
Language Arts 4th - 12th grade: Many teachers believe there far too few lessons on punctuation and grammar. You cannot add lessons in these areas, since that might supplant the scripted lesson goal of the day.
Middle School Math: Since the district only allows one level of math at each grade in Middle School, there are many bored and overwhelmed students simultaneously stuck in the same class. The District's current curriculum proposal wouldn't allow a teacher to develop entirely new topics of instruction to engage the bored students. Additionally, while teachers would be allowed to make small adjustments for struggling kids, they couldn't use those changes the following year without the approval of the Curriculum Department.
Certainly, Math and writing skills are fertile ground for curriculum controversy.
I asked Madison's three superintendent candidates earlier this year if they supported a "top down" curricular approach or, simply hiring the best teachers. It's hard to imagine a top down approach actually working in a large organization.
Columbia Public Schools' chief academic officer said the district is ready to compromise with the community when it comes to elementary math. But Sally Beth Lyon, who oversees district curricula, stopped short of saying concepts-based math would be replaced by a more traditional program.
"We're going to figure out how to get something done so we can all move forward," she told the Tribune. "We're still at the table and will discuss the best way to move forward and include and acknowledge the community concerns we're hearing."
Lyon's comments followed last night's Board of Education meeting, where board member Ines Segert accused the district of appointing people to district math committees who are biased toward investigative math programs and not appointing mathematicians who favor more traditional math instruction.
Segert cited three University of Missouri math education professors who serve on district committees and have received grant funds to train Columbia teachers how to use concepts-based math materials. "They instruct teachers in a certain ideology that happens to be used in these textbooks we have in class," said Segert, a vocal advocate of returning traditional math to classrooms.
Lyon's comments followed what was almost a scolding from board member Ines Segert during last night's board meeting. Segert criticized the district for appointing math education professors on math committees who seem to benefit from investigative math curriculum. She also accused the district of giving people incomplete data and summaries that skew results to justify current practices.
Lyon denied that anyone making curricula decisions receive district dollars. Any grant money they get comes from federal and state sources, she said.
Trouble with a complex investment to help pay for retirement benefits has spread to other areas of the Waukesha School District's bottom line, driving up the cost of a routine borrowing transaction by more than $300,000 this year, a district official estimated.
nterim business manager, said the district will pay about 1 percentage point more in interest on a $26 million short-term bond issue because of a recent decision by Moody's Investors Service to downgrade its outlook to negative from stable. That translates to $260,000.
In addition, the district is paying $60,000 more in fees related to disclosures about its investment and a change in both financial adviser and bound counsel for the deal, Demerath said. The transaction is scheduled to be voted on tonight by the Waukesha School Board.
Demerath attributed the extra costs to the district's 2006 investment in controversial financial instruments known as collateralized debt obligations, which have plummeted in value over the last year and could lead to legal action.
As the cost of running the district continues to rise, and as Madison homeowners and families find it increasingly difficult to make ends meet, it is easy to think that our property taxes are also ever rising. But that's not the case, at least as regards the portion that goes toward our schools. Over the past 15 years, the schools' portion of Madison property taxes has declined 6%, on average. The decrease is 9% if you adjust for today's higher enrollment figures (1993 = 23,600; 2007 = 24,200). And it plunges to a 36% decrease if you adjust for inflation; (a dollar today is worth 30% less than it was 15 years ago).
The chart below, based on local funding of MMSD and data from the city assessor's office, shows the recent history of school mill rates, the rate that is applied to your assessed property value to determine how much you contribute towards Madison schools (10 mills = 1.0% of the assessed property value). The reported rate has dropped from 20 mills to 10, but property values have doubled thanks to the general rise in home prices (termed "revaluations" by the assessor's office), so the rate is more appropriately captured below by the "Net of Revaluations" line. That line is then adjusted for school enrollment (the red line), and inflation (the heavier blue line).
There are three important caveats to the above statements: 1.) school taxes are lower on average, but if your home has increased in value by more than about 110% since 1993, then you will be paying more for schools; 2.) it is the schools portion of property taxes that is lower on average; the remaining portion of property taxes that pays for the city, Dane County, Wisconsin, and MATC, has risen; 3.) other sources of Madison school funding (state and federal funds, and grants and fees) have also gone up; (I have not done the much more complicated calculation of real increase in funding there).
That the infamous schools' portion of property taxes has declined over these past 15 years is quite a surprising result, and certainly counterintuitive to what one might expect. How is this possible? First, the school finance structure put in place by the state years ago has worked, at least as far as holding down property taxes. The current structure allows about a 2% increase in expense each year, consistent with the CPI (Consumer Price Index) at the state level. (In fact, local funding of the MMSD has increased from $150 million in 1993 to $209 million in 2007, equivalent to about a 2.4% increase each year.) Of course, the problem is that same structure allows for a 3.8% wage hike for teachers if districts wish to avoid arbitration, an aspect that has essentially set an effective floor on salary increases (with salaries & benefits representing 84% of the district budget). The difference between the revenue increases and the pay increases, about 1-2% annually, is why we face these annual painful budget quandaries that can only be met by cuts in school services, or by a referendum permitting higher school costs, and taxes.
The second reason today's property taxes are lower than they have been historically is growth, in the form of new construction (i.e. new homes & buildings, as well as remodelings). What we each pay in school property taxes is the result of a simple fraction: the numerator is the portion of school expenses that is paid through local property taxes, while the denominator is the tax base for the entire city (actually the portion of Madison and neighboring communities where kids live within the MMSD). The more the tax base grows, the larger the denominator, and the more people and places to share the property taxes with. Since 1993, new construction in Madison has consistently grown at about 3% per year. Indeed, since 1980 no year has ever seen new construction less than 2.3% nor more than 3.9%. So every year, your property taxes are reduced about 3% thanks to all the new construction in town. I leave it to the reader to speculate how much the pace of new construction and revaluations will decline if the schools here should decline in quality.
FYI, the figure below shows how new construction and revaluations have behaved in Madison since 1984, as well as total valuations (which is the sum of the two).
Debates about how to improve public education in America often focus on whether government should spend more on education. Federal and state policy makers proposing new education programs often base their arguments on the need to provide more resources to schools to improve opportunities for students.
Many Americans seem to share this view. Polling data show that many people believe that government allocates insufficient resources to schools. A poll conducted annually from 2004 through 2007 found that American adults list insufficient funding and resources as a top problem facing public schools in their communities.[1]
While this view may be commonly held, policy makers and citizens should question whether histori cal evidence and academic research actually support it. This paper addresses two important questions:
How much does the United States spend on public education?
What does the evidence show about the relationship between public education spending and stu dents' academic achievement?
The answers to these questions should inform federal and state policy debates about how best to improve education.
Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia face budget shortfalls totaling approximately $48 billion for fiscal year 2009.[2] Even more states could face shortfalls in the near future. At the federal level, long-term budgets face a challenging fiscal climate. Pro jected growth of entitlement programs is expected to place an ever-increasing burden on the federal budget, limiting the resources available for other purposes, including education.[3] Related: Charts - Enrollment; Local, State, Federal and Global Education Spending
Two years after the Legislature cut school property taxes by a third, more than 100 school districts - including several from North Texas - will try to persuade voters this fall to bump their tax rates back up.
And a majority of those districts have found a way to avoid a tax rate election on the same day as the Nov. 4 general election, improving their prospects for voter approval of higher property taxes. Most are holding elections in early October.
The 103 school districts - about one in 10 statewide - say they are being squeezed financially and have to increase taxes to meet basic expenses and give their teachers a pay raise. Among them are the Austin and Corpus Christi districts.
"Most districts are hurting," said Clayton Downing, president of the Texas School Coalition and former superintendent of Lewisville schools, noting that many districts in need of more revenue probably decided against a tax rate election this year because of the worsening economy.
Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is preparing to bypass the Washington Teachers' Union in pursuit of the objective she considers essential to overhauling the District's public schools: the power to fire at will teachers she deems ineffective.
What she calls "Plan B" involves a more aggressive use of powers she already has and that are not subject to contract negotiations with the union. These could include strengthening the existing system of annual personnel evaluations that spell out procedures for terminating teachers.
Rhee is also positioned to benefit from a potentially groundbreaking revision that has unfolded largely outside public view during contract talks. It would make the District school system one of the few in the country to link the licensing of teachers to their classroom performance, rather than their academic credentials. New rules, scheduled to go into effect this week, would grant State Superintendent of Education Deborah A. Gist the discretion to create an advanced teaching credential specifying the bench marks instructors would have to meet to keep their jobs.
Two major urban school districts are working on new teacher contracts that could help decide the future of performance pay -- which some consider the "flavor of the month" in education reform.
Public school administrators in the District of Columbia and Denver say their plans to reward effective teachers are the best way to raise teacher pay and improve student performance. But teachers are not always quick to agree.
D.C. Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee says teachers are getting a shot at an incredible pay increase.
Amendment 23, approved by voters in 2000, required funding increases to raise the state's support for public schools to the national average.
But when Colorado's economy soured in the early part of this decade, legslators found themselves slashing other programs -- such as health care and higher education -- to keep the promise to public schools.
Amendment 59 on the Nov. 4 ballot would resolve that problem in the future by creating a savings account for schools to be filled when economic times are good and spent when times are bad.
During those lean years, the legislature balanced the budget with "a lot of baling wire and duct tape," said House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. "This (Amendment 59) is a much more responsible way to balance the budget."
ne striking phenomenon revealed by the Denver negotiations was a generational split among teachers. Younger teachers were generally in favor the deal being offered, and older teachers tended to oppose it. (Some veteran teachers told the Denver Post that they felt "dissed.")
A similar generational divide has appeared in D.C., where, as the Washington Post reported last month,
many of the District's 4,000 public school teachers are locked in a heated debate over Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's proposal to offer salaries exceeding $100,000 for those willing to give up job security and tie their fates to student achievement. ... The split in the teaching corps largely, but not exclusively, is occurring along generational lines, with younger teachers more willing to accept the risks and older ones often questioning the proposal.
The Post story mentioned an anonymous young teacher-blogger, "D.C. Teacher Chic," who is a fan of Chancellor Rhee and is decidedly in favor of her new deal (under which teachers could choose a "green plan" that would trade tenure for a higher salary or a more traditional "red plan"). Her blog--often funny, usually outraged--offers a great insight into the mind of a teacher on the young side of this growing generational divide.
Q. It seems sometimes that the Journal Sentinel does nothing but bash the Milwaukee Public Schools. There are a lot of people working for MPS who work hard to make a difference in kids' lives. They are writing grant proposals to make it possible for kids to attend camps they couldn't otherwise attend, and creating programs to keep kids involved in school and off the streets. As a former camp counselor and volunteer in the classroom, I know how important these things are.
A. I share your concern that our coverage can seem, at times, negative - not just about MPS, but about any number of community institutions we cover. It is an issue we talk about a great deal because we don't just report on this area - we live here ourselves. What I would ask you to think about is that what drives us to report what may seem like a negative story is actually our concern, our passion, for our community.
When we write about a school board member going to a convention but never attending its sessions, it is because that money could have been used to improve the educational experience of students and teachers. When we write about the failure of the $102 million Neighborhood Schools Initiative building plan, it is because that money could have been used for other projects to transform the lives of students, teachers and staff alike. When we write about the district receiving a low level of funding to educate disabled children, it is because other districts seem to be taking better advantage of available money to improve the lives of children who already face so many challenges.
Today's paper brings the news that Michelle Rhee, the superintendent of the D.C. public schools, has come up with a Plan B to use if the D.C. teachers union refuses to accept her proposed new contract.
Plan A, as I wrote last week, was a contract under which teachers could give up tenure in return for large pay increases. Plan B, essentially, is a system in which teachers lose tenure and don't get large pay increases. Rhee says she and the state superintendent could also change the licensing requirements for the district's teachers so as to require them to demonstrate classroom performance--the kind that would have earned them big bonuses under the contract--merely to keep their jobs.
The story in the Washington Post suggests that Rhee is not only aware of the city's generation gap among teachers, she also plans to take advantage of it.
Rhee's ultimate goal is clear: to weed the District's instructional corps of underperformers and remake it, at least in part, with younger, highly energized graduates of such alternative training programs as Teach for America, where she began her career. Unlike many tenured Washington teachers, those emerging from such programs are unlikely to invest their entire working lives in education. But they will, in Rhee's estimation, be more inclined to embrace her core message: that children can learn no matter what economic and social conditions they face beyond the classroom and that teachers should be held directly accountable for their progress through test scores and other measurements.
The U.S. Supreme Court's June 2007 decision to strike down integration plans in two public school districts was based on a simple premise: discrimination is discrimination.
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race," Chief Justice John Roberts declared, "is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
In the wake of that ruling, large, ethnically diverse districts are now finding themselves in uncharted waters.
Though prohibited from using race-conscious measures to integrate their schools, districts also must ensure academic success for all students - regardless of skin color or neighborhoods in which they live.
The class-action racial bias suit pending against Elgin Area School District U-46 is one of the first major school discrimination cases to be decided since last year's Supreme Court ruling.
Its outcome, experts say, could have for far-reaching effects.
"Class-action school cases are relatively rare," said Michael Kaufman, Academic Dean and Director of the Child Law and Education Institute at Loyola University Chicago. "This case will almost by definition have profound implications in regards to remedies after last summer's ruling."
New state test results show that Prince William County's third-graders are struggling to score at the highest level since the implementation of a controversial math program that was intended to boost performance.
The scores, which are the first state Standards of Learning (SOL) results to gauge the new program's effectiveness, reveal that fewer than half of Prince William's third-graders scored in the advanced category this year, the first that the Pearson math program "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space" was taught in that grade. Last year, third-graders who had not begun "Investigations" posted the same results.
The flat scores are a sizable decline since 2006, when 56 percent of third-graders reached the advanced level in math.
" 'Investigations' didn't cure the problem," said Vern Williams, a Fairfax County teacher and former member of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel who was invited by the Prince William School Board to speak at its work session later this month.
It will be interesting to see what, if any effect the soon to be released Madison Math Task Force report has on the local curriculum.
In an election season when Democrats find themselves unusually unified on everything from tax policy to foreign affairs, one issue still divides them: education. It is a surprising fault line, perhaps, given the party's long dominance on the issue. Voters consistently say they trust the Democrats over the Republicans on education, by a wide margin. But the split in the party is real, deep and intense, and it shows no signs of healing any time soon.
On one side are the members of the two huge teachers' unions and the many parents who support them. To them, the big problem in public education is No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law. Teachers have many complaints about the law: it encourages "teaching to the test" at the expense of art, music and other electives, they say; it blames teachers, especially those in inner-city schools, for the poor performance of disadvantaged children; and it demands better results without providing educators with the resources they need.
On the other side are the party's self-defined "education reformers." Members of this group -- a loose coalition of mayors and superintendents, charter-school proponents and civil rights advocates -- actually admire the accountability provisions in No Child Left Behind, although they often criticize the law's implementation. They point instead to a bigger, more systemic crisis. These reformers describe the underperformance of the country's schoolchildren, and especially of poor minorities, as a national crisis that demands a drastic overhaul of the way schools are run. In order to get better teachers into failing classrooms, they support performance bonuses, less protection for low-performing teachers, alternative certification programs to attract young, ambitious teachers and flexible contracts that could allow for longer school days and an extended school year. The unions see these proposals as attacks on their members' job security -- which, in many ways, they are.
Obama's contention is that the traditional Democratic solution -- more money for public schools -- is no longer enough. In February, in an interview with the editorial board of The Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee, he called for "a cultural change in education in inner-city communities and low-income communities across the country -- not just inner-city, but also rural." In many low-income communities, Obama said, "there's this sense that education is somehow a passive activity, and you tip your head over and pour education in somebody's ear. And that's not how it works. So we're going to have to work with parents."
Holding school referendums in liberal Madison during major national elections has shown to have strategic advantages.
For one thing, young people vote in much higher numbers. And young adults will overwhelmingly support school referendums no matter the details or cost. That's because they don't pay property taxes, at least directly. They also have a high appreciation for schools because they are, or not long ago were, students.
Another advantage is that huge majorities of middle-aged and older voters in Madison are fed up with President Bush. Madison and the rest of the nation produced a Democratic landslide on Nov. 7, 2006, with the Iraq war overshadowing a largely-ignored Madison school building referendum that easily passed.
The St. Paul School District this fall is planning on engaging community members, parents and school district staff in an indepth discussion about the district's future with one major premise: Things need to change.
The district, which serves about 38,800 students, faces considerable challenges. It has made more than $93 million in budget cuts over the last nine years. Only half its students are proficient in reading, the achievement gap between white students and students of color is among the widest in the nation, and federal and state expectations for student achievement are accelerating.
The district "is at a crossroads," according to a presentation that district staff made to school board members on Thursday night. "Business as usual is not a sustainable option for achieving our mission."
The St. Paul district's efforts to comply with federal and state desegregation laws over the past 30 years and retain students have resulted in a complex network of magnet and neighborhood schools.
But Robertson, a former middle school principal in Milwaukee, still had at least one thing going for him -- he didn't lose his license to teach children in Wisconsin, at least not then.
Robertson was among a group of 18 people licensed to teach in the state as of June who had felony convictions and were still being monitored by probation or parole agents at the start of this year, a Wisconsin State Journal investigation found. That number included at least 13 felony convictions previously unknown to the agency in charge of licensing the state's teachers.
As a result of the newspaper's reporting, the state Department of Public Instruction has revoked or placed under scrutiny the licenses of Robertson and seven others.
In their cases, the State Journal found no evidence that any students faced immediate risk. Those eight people under scrutiny, including Robertson, are not shown in state records as currently teaching in a public school, and they likely would have faced hurdles returning to teaching because of their convictions.
Let's remember back for a moment to the excitement of 2001. Gail Littlejohn, a retired corporate attorney, and three allies won four seats on the school board, taking control with a majority and promising big changes that would help lead the district back to respectability.
And for the first few years, the Kids First team had a remarkable run of successes. They replaced a well meaning but floundering superintendent with an efficient manager in Percy Mack, a move that was well received in the community. They put a reform in place that emphasized teacher training and focused on math and reading instruction. They got the NAACP and the state to agree to settle the 20-year-old desegregation case, bringing millions in cash and releasing the district from court supervision. They got a huge bond issue passed to rebuild all the schools in the city. Eventually, Dayton even had enough test score gain to jump from "academic emergency to "continuous improvement" in the state ratings. And for at least those first few years, Kids First got support from the rest of the school board, business leaders and much of the community.
Kohl spoke at length about education, especially the failure of the public school system in Milwaukee, "where many neighborhoods are not inhabitable ... a problem spread across the country. When we have a large number of people unproductive, who do you think pays for it? We all do."
In answer to a question about school choice, and what the questioner called the "horrible" academic gap here in Racine, Kohl responded: "Anybody who had the answer would be lauded and sainted."
He mentioned meeting with New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and NY School Chancellor Joel Klein, and hearing from them "how important high standards and accountability are. We all know it's not only the schools that fail; it's the homes and neighborhoods the kids come out of. I would have very high, very high accountability, and reward good teachers, measure teachers. We need to find a way to pay teachers more, and the better ones more than that, and schools that fail should be closed."
Kohl related his approach toward education to his firing of the Bucks GM and coach last year. "We were not getting the job done." Ditto in education. "For too long we've not been willing to do enough to get the job done."
Armando Sosa's elementary school is just a quick scramble up a steep dirt path and over a crosswalk from his home in Ramona Gardens, an Eastside housing project known for its crime and violence. If he's late, he can hear the school bell from his bedroom.
His mother, Liliana Martinez, loves Murchison Elementary but worries that Armando's zeal for learning will wither in middle school. She has seen too many children from the projects nose dive in sixth grade and begin gravitating toward the gang life that has devoured the youth of Ramona Gardens for generations.
So, along with other mothers, most of them Mexican immigrants struggling for a foothold in U.S. society, Martinez helped start a movement to keep children at Murchison at least through sixth grade. That is typically the first year of middle school.
Goal achieved.
When the new school year starts Wednesday, about 100 sixth-graders will be staying at Murchison, instead of being bused across the tracks to El Sereno Middle School, where parents and teachers say they face teasing and bullying because they are poor and come from a housing project.
School leaders in OECD countries are facing challenges with the rising expectations for schools and schooling in a century characterized by technological innovation, migration and globalization. As countries aim to transform their educational systems to prepare all young people with the knowledge and skills needed in this changing world, the roles and expectations for school leaders have changed radically. They are no longer expected to be merely good managers. Effective school leadership is increasingly viewed as key to large-scale education reform and to improved educational outcomes.
With 22 participating countries, this activity aims to support policy development by providing in-depth analyses of different approaches to school leadership. In broad terms, the following key questions are being explored:
The first day of school Tuesday marked a big change for Naomi Wills and her kids: They started out at a bus stop bound for a big, new school.
In past years, the morning routine involved Wills walking son Luke and daughter Larissa the two blocks to Osseo Elementary. Younger daughter Natalie, not yet in school, would tag along. Then, more often than not, Wills would linger and chat with the principal and teachers.
But Osseo Elementary, loved by parents, teachers and kids for its small size, hometown feel, and convenient walking distances, was closed by the cash-strapped Osseo School District last year.
"One of the first things that hit me when we found out the school was closing was that all those years my kindergartner would walk with her older siblings to school, and, now, she won't get to walk there," Wills said.
One of the states that's most on-board with the four day school week is Colorado. Mostly because it's so rural, which means long bus routes.
WENDY DUNAWAY: As of 2007, we had 67 out of 178 districts that are on a four-day week.
That's Wendy Dunaway with the Colorado Department of Education. She says the districts that have switched are almost all rural and are generally happy with the change.
On a rainy afternoon at a hotel in Colorado Springs, about 25 people gather in a medium-sized conference room. They are parents, teachers and administrators from the Calhan School District, which has been on a four-day schedule since the last energy crisis nearly three decades ago.
Pennsylvania will be shedding a school district by the end of this school year -- a significant development even after years of nationwide efforts to nudge and sometimes force school systems to share services or merge.
The merger unfolding between two western Pennsylvania public school systems with sharply declining enrollments is the state's first district consolidation in at least 20 years, and most notably, its first voluntary one.
Officials say the move will save money and improve educational offerings, yet parents in both districts worry that some losses will accompany any gains. In any case, the consolidation is expected to be closely watched.
The willingness of two school districts to dissolve boundary lines is rare in states where local school board control is sacrosanct and school traditions that define a community are deeply ingrained. In recent years, at least a few states have tried to force mergers, with mixed results.
Yet the marriage of the Center Area and Monaca school districts northwest of Pittsburgh is part of a gradual, ongoing national progression toward fewer districts educating public school students.
Close allies of the Bloomberg administration have set up a political organization to campaign for renewal of the landmark state law giving New York City's mayor control of its public schools, hiring a veteran operative and planning to raise up to $20 million for television advertisements, lobbying and grass-roots organizing.
The group, called Mayoral Accountability for School Success, is officially headed by three well-known and respected city figures, among them a nun lauded for her work with struggling students and a popular Harlem minister. But it is backed by top City Hall and Education Department officials, for whom persuading Albany to extend mayoral control is the No. 1 goal for the school year that starts on Tuesday.
The group filed papers in recent weeks to become designated a 501(c)(4), a nonprofit that can lobby and participate in political campaign activity. The move is the first salvo in the pitched battle expected to unfold between now and the end of June 2009, when the 2002 law giving Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg authority over the nation's largest school system is set to expire.
Renewal is crucial to Mr. Bloomberg's legacy, since he has staked his reputation on overhauling the schools and has repeatedly argued that without City Hall at the wheel, the system would be doomed to fail.
At 9 a.m. Wednesday, the state Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that will shape the future of education in Florida. At issue are two constitutional amendment questions slated to go before voters in November.
A lawyer for Florida's teachers union will argue that they should be removed from the ballot; the secretary of state's lawyer will ask the court to leave them in place, allowing voters to decide these questions. The court should let Floridians have their say.
The first question, Amendment 7, deals with religious discrimination. This amendment would make it illegal to exclude any person or organization from participating in a public program because of religion. It also would allow the state to continue operating programs under which religious organizations can receive funding as long as the purposes and primary effects of those programs are secular (as required by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution).
The second question, Amendment 9, would require at least 65 percent of school-district operating expenditures to be spent in the classroom rather than on administration. It also would allow legislators to create alternative education programs in addition to the constitutionally required public-school system (though it wouldn't create any new programs).
by Unnamed MMSD Educators [RSS]. The blog touches on the "Standards Based Report Card" initiative among a number of other topics.
What about . . . THE 6th GRADE STUDENT READING AT A 2nd GRADE LEVEL?
From the district Curricular Standards:
"These Grade Level Performance Standards describe behaviors typical at the specified grade level. They represent behaviors students generally exhibit as they move from novice to expert in their ability to take control of language processes. It is important to remember, however, that literacy learning may not be sequential and each child has a unique developmental pattern."
The 6th grade student reading at a 2nd grade level earns a ONE (remember, no zeroes) for the Power Standard of Reading Comprehension. Why? For not meeting the "behaviors typical at the specified grade level " (6th).
Now, if said student raises her/his reading level to that of a 4th-grade student, guess what. That student still does not meet the 6th grade standard and will still earn a ONE for the Power Standard of Reading Comprehension. Effort and improvement are not taken into consideration in this constricted construct for grading.
A funny thing happened to the Democratic Party on the way to an education platform: The party has visibly split with teachers unions, its longtime allies, on key issues.
The ink is barely dry on the official document, which outlines the party's guiding principles, but it shows that in this fall's general election, Democrats will stake out a few positions that unions have long opposed.
Among them: paying teachers more if they raise test scores, teach in "underserved areas" or take on new responsibilities such as mentoring new teachers.
Randi Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers' new president, says she's willing to entertain merit-pay plans. But most union leaders, as well as rank-and-file members, have long resisted, saying teachers would compete for jobs rather than cooperate and share ideas.
The following was released today by The Heritage Foundation:
One of every four children in America's public schools isn't going to graduate. And in many large cities, the graduation rate is twice as bad: two of every four kids will fail to graduate.
Staying in school doesn't guarantee a good education, either. Fewer than a third of 12th-graders can identify why the Puritans sailed to these shores. Only four in 10 know the more recent significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
These and other eye-popping facts make for compelling reading in A Parent's Guide to Education Reform, a new, 35-page booklet from The Heritage Foundation ( http://www.heritage.org/). Taxpayers, it makes clear, aren't getting much of a return on the roughly $9,300 a year they spend on each child in public schools.
So we frown on radicalism. Yet we have embarked on one of the most radical endeavors families can undertake: home-schooling. Given preconceptions about this practice, I should note that we are not anti-government wingnuts living on a compound. We like literature, and nice wines, and Celeste would stab me in the heart with a spoon if I gave her one of those head bonnets the Amish women wear. We are not, in other words, stereotypical home-schooling parents. But neither are most actual home-schooling parents.
Even though Ma and Pa Ingalls sent their children off to the little schoolhouse in Walnut Grove, we've decided to start our own. In the eyes of Kansas authorities that's exactly what we've done; regulations require us to establish a school and name it. Ours is the Woodlief Homestead School. I wanted to go with something like: "The School of Revolutionary Resistance," but Celeste said that was just inviting trouble.
The reason we've broken with tradition, or perhaps reverted to a deeper tradition, is not because we oppose sex education, or because we think their egos are too tender for public schools. It's because we can do a superior job of educating our children. We want to cultivate in them an intellectual breadth and curiosity that public schools no longer offer.
Somewhere there is now an indignant teacher typing an email to instruct me about his profession's nobility. Perhaps some public schools educate children in multiple languages and musical instruments, have them reading classic literature by age seven, offer intensive studies of math, science, logic, and history, and coach them in public speaking and writing. The thing is, I don't know where those schools are.
A wise friend recently mentioned that "choice is good". It will be interesting to see if the upcoming Madison School District math review addresses ongoing concerns over reduced rigor. Math Forum audio / video.
Fifth and sixth grades are in the newsroom, middle school dominates the Clinton campaign's War Room, and seventh-graders have the run of the sports department.
While some cities try to lure athletic teams, mega-retailers or a few large employers to revitalize their downtowns, Little Rock is getting an economic-development boost from an unlikely source: eStem charter schools, which have taken over the old Arkansas Gazette building and is bringing new life to a formerly abandoned part of the city.
The Gazette won two Pulitzer Prizes in 1958 for its courageous coverage and editorials on the Central High desegregation crisis, but lost a drawn-out newspaper war with the Arkansas Democrat and closed on Oct. 18, 1991.
After that, the Gazette's building was used temporarily by the Clinton presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996, and by an occasional retailer. But for the most part, it sat vacant. Over time, the surrounding neighborhood began to slump as well. A grand, wide-columned building across the street once called home by the Federal Reserve is empty. A building catty-corner from the school -- an urban-renewal atrocity that once headquartered Central Arkansas' NBC-TV affiliate -- sits idle too. Before eStem schools opened, you could work downtown and never find reason to pass by the Gazette building. (Full disclosure, the Gazette building is owned by the newspaper I work for, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which leases it to eStem.)
Now it's busy enough that some folks worry about traffic jams, as parents drop their kids off and head to work, or pick them up for lunch.
On July 21, eStem schools opened the doors. There are actually three schools in one historic 1908 building: an elementary, middle and high school. The schools' name stands for the economics of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And their curricula, which emphasize languages like Latin and even Mandarin Chinese, as well as economics and the sciences, are proving to be popular.
In the summer of 1918, as tuberculosis, bubonic plague and a flu pandemic threatened America's newly crowded cities, the chemist Charles Holmes Herty took a walk through New York City with his colleague J.R. Bailey. Herty posed a question: Suppose Bailey discovered an exceptionally powerful medicine. What institution would allow him to take his breakthrough from lab experiment to widespread cure?
Bailey replied, "I don't know."
That alarming answer moved Herty to propose a visionary solution -- an institution that would encourage research and development throughout the country. It would find its value, Herty said, "in the stimulus which it gives" to research, thought and discovery by practitioners in the field.
Nearly a century later, that vision stands as the National Institutes of Health. Its record, from deciphering and mapping the human genome to finding the source of AIDS, leaves no doubt about the NIH's ability to stimulate innovation.
Today, the shame of our cities isn't bubonic plague; it's ignorance. In our urban areas, only one child in five is proficient in reading. On international tests, we rank behind the Czech Republic and Latvia; our high school graduation rate barely makes the top 20 worldwide. As columnist David Brooks has noted, educational progress has been so slow that "America's lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited." Under-education may not end lives the way infectious diseases do, but it just as surely wastes them. For all the hard work of our good teachers, our system is failing to keep pace with the demands of a new century.
Total police calls to Madison's four main high schools declined 38 percent from the fall semester of 2006 to last spring. But those figures tell only a partial story, and not a very meaningful one.
That's because the numbers include all police calls, including ones for 911 disconnects, parking lot crashes and stranded baby ducks. (It happened at La Follette last May.)
The State Journal then looked at police calls in eight categories closely related to safety -- aggravated batteries, batteries, weapons offenses, fights, bomb threats, disturbances, robberies and sexual assaults. Those calls are down 46 percent from fall 2006 to spring 2008.
The schools varied little last spring in the eight categories. Memorial and West each had 13 such calls, La Follette 14 and East 16.
School officials are relieved by the downward trend but careful not to read too much into the figures.
"We know there's almost a cyclical nature to crime statistics and even to individual behavior," said Luis Yudice, who is beginning his third year as district security coordinator.
Art Camosy, a veteran science teacher at Memorial, said he thinks the climate is improving at his school. Yet he views the police figures skeptically, in part because the numbers are "blips in time" but also because he wonders if the district's central office is behind the drop.
"Are our building administrators being pressured not to call police as often?" he asks.
John Matthews, the longtime executive director of Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI), the district's teachers union, contends that the district's leadership has indeed done this from time to time, directing building administrators to hold off on calling police so often.
Yudice, a former Madison police captain, said there was a time years ago when the district was extremely sensitive about appearing to have a large police presence at its schools. He rejects that notion now.
"It's just the opposite," he said. "We are more openly acknowledging that we have issues that need to be dealt with by the police. Since I've been working here, there has never been a directive to me or the school principals to minimize the involvement of police."
Finally, I hope that the Madison Police Department will begin publishing all police calls online, daily, so that the public can review and evaluate the information.
Mayor Tom Barrett and the Milwaukee School Board agree on this much: The community needs an accurate reading on the district's finances.
Unfortunately, that may be the only thing they agree on.
Both are moving separately on plans to get the numbers. The School Board wants to spend $50,000 of taxpayers' money to perform an audit to see where the Milwaukee Public Schools can be more efficient. Barrett is seeking funding from local foundations for an assessment of the struggling district's financial and operational situation -- a study that also could take the next step and recommend restructuring and how to best direct resources to the classroom where they can most help educate Milwaukee's kids.
On paper, we believe Barrett's plan goes beyond that of the School Board, because it will home in on a half-dozen or so top priorities that, when funded adequately, will improve MPS performance and increase the district's credibility among parents, taxpayers and decision-makers in Madison.
For Barrett's plan to have bite, he needs the support of foundations to retain a firm expert in urban school system finance and operations. Then the mayor needs to pressure the board and administration to get to work.
You want truly radical education reform in Milwaukee?
Form a countywide system so that Milwaukee children can, without restrictions, attend schools in Whitefish Bay and Greendale. Or launch a regional onslaught against the economic, housing and transportation disparities that, in the absence of locally owned breweries, now make Milwaukee famous.
Unfortunately, it's not likely to happen. If you even mention the region's divides, you are labeled as anti-suburban.
Luckily, the U.S. Census Bureau isn't afraid of Milwaukee's culture of silence about such realities. Once again (I've lost count of the many similar reports) Milwaukee made the news last week, for having the seventh-worst poverty rate of any major city. Waukesha County, in contrast, had the fifth-lowest poverty rate of any major county.
As we head into the Labor Day weekend, it is only fitting that we consider what may be the country's most significant contract negotiation, which happens to be going on right here in Washington between the teachers union and the District's dynamic and determined new schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee.
Negotiations are stalled over Rhee's proposal to give teachers the option of earning up to $131,000 during the 10-month school year in exchange for giving up absolute job security and a personnel-and-pay system based almost exclusively on years served.
If Rhee succeeds in ending tenure and seniority as we know them while introducing merit pay into one of the country's most expensive and underperforming school systems, it would be a watershed event in U.S. labor history, on a par with President Ronald Reagan's firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981. It would trigger a national debate on why public employees continue to enjoy what amounts to ironclad job security without accountability while the taxpayers who fund their salaries have long since been forced to accept the realities of a performance-based global economy.
Union leaders from around the country, concerned about the attention the Rhee proposal has received and the precedent it could set, have been pressing the Washington local to resist. But Rhee clearly has the upper hand. The chancellor has the solid support of the mayor and city council, and should it come to a showdown, there is little doubt that the voters would stand behind her in a battle with a union already badly tarnished by an embezzlement scandal and deeply implicated in the school system's chronic failure.
School District Consolidation feasibility study grants
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:
The Department of Public Instruction has awarded consolidation feasibility study grants for six consortiums (a total of 14 school districts). The grants, $10,000 to each consortium, are intended to provide funding for the identification of issues, data analysis, and the development of reports to inform the communities on the possibility of consolidation.
The grants went to consortiums consisting of: Chetek and Weyerhaeuser, Glidden and Park Falls, Bruce and Ladysmith-Hawkins; Benton, Cuba City, Southwestern, and Shullsburg; Montello and Westfield; and Prairie Du Chien and Wauzeka-Steuben.
On June 19, Rainwater told the Wisconsin State Journal that the district wouldn't appeal Flaten's decision, saying, "The standard to overturn an arbitrator's ruling is just really, really high."
"It is," Bob Nadler, the district's executive director of human resources, agreed in an interview Friday.
The district, Nadler said, filed the suit because Friday was the deadline for filing a challenge to Flaten's decision, and the district needed to preserve that option in case ongoing talks break down.
The district and union will continue to negotiate, outside of court and the WERC, to seek a settlement, Nadler said. The next session is Tuesday.
Nadler said the suit shouldn't be viewed as a signal that Daniel Nerad, who succeeded Rainwater as superintendent on July 1, is taking a harder line with the union.
"I think this is just a very specific case that we feel we may have to challenge in the future," Nadler said.
But John Matthews, executive director of the teachers union, called the filing of the suit "a stupid waste of money because there's absolutely no way that they can succeed.
ast week all hell broke loose regarding the fate of Milwaukee Public Schools. Mayor Tom Barrett proposed an outside audit of the system. As a candidate for mayor, Barrett floated the idea of a mayoral takeover of the schools, so this looks like a first step toward establishing control - and a clear message the MPS ship is sinking.
Meanwhile, a new group called Milwaukee Quality Education was formed, led by Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce President Tim Sheehy and former MPS Superintendent Howard Fuller. Reforms tried in other cities were supposed to be discussed, with the obvious aim of dramatically changing MPS. "We have urgency coming out of our ears," Sheehy declared.
Add to this the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's three-part series suggesting MPS wasted most of a $100 million effort to cut back busing, and the takeaway message is that a dysfunctional school system needs rescue.
Meanwhile, the Greater Milwaukee Committee has been engaged in an ongoing effort to improve MPS, creating a plan of "corrective action." One insider tells me Sister Joel Read, former Alverno College president, was very influential in formulating the plan.
Making connections among various types of crimes and ways to remedy them was the theme of the night as Police Chief Noble Wray gave a talk on public safety in Madison to the City Council Wednesday night.
Statistically, crime in Madison was a mixed bag in 2007, Wray said. While overall crime was up 5.5 percent from 2006, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, that increase stemmed primarily from an 8.3 percent increase in property crimes such as burglary, theft and arson. By contrast, violent crime, which includes acts such as homicide, rape and aggravated assault, decreased 14.2 percent in 2007.
Wray explained that the rising rates of property crimes came from the increased theft of precious metals, in particular copper, as well as thefts of big-ticket items such as televisions from businesses, which were directly related to gang activity and the drug trade, he said.
"This is the first time that I've noticed this, and I've worked for the Madison department for 24 years, that there is a serious gang connection with these (burglaries)," he said. "We haven't had that in the past."
In a makeshift waiting room of the warehouse that serves as the headquarters for public schools, three young prospective teachers sit.
As superintendent, Paul Vallas could someday be their boss. As he passes through the room, he stops to shake hands. Then he tries to persuade them to teach someplace else.
He has more than enough teachers for the new school year, which began last week, he explains. Have they considered Baton Rouge?
"I know Baton Rouge doesn't have the French Quarter," he says. "That's OK. It's OK to be far from the French Quarter -- keep you out of trouble."
As Vallas begins his second and probably final year trying to rebuild the ailing public school system, he not only has more teachers than he needs. He has eye-popping funding, nearly unchecked administrative power and "a sea of goodwill" that stretches across the USA.
The biggest question isn't whether he'll be able to turn around the system, at least in the short term. It's whether there's anything standing in his way.
If Vallas succeeds, observers say, he'll show that with a clean slate, extra cash and a few big ideas, a hard-charging reformer can fix an ailing system and create a template for other districts. If he doesn't succeed, they worry, Americans' faith in urban public schools could burn out for good.
The house of cards known as the state budget is predictably collapsing.
A Dane County judge heard arguments this week on the legality of a $200 million raid state leaders made on a special fund that's supposed to cover large medical malpractice awards.
Doctors pay into the fund to hold down their insurance rates. So the Wisconsin Medical Society, which represents about 60 percent of doctors, sued the state last year after the governor and Legislature raiding the fund to patch a state budget hole.
The state raid was just the latest in a series of poor financial moves that voters should remember when voting for legislative candidates this fall.
Voters should favor those candidates willing to scrutinize spending and resist expensive new programs. The accounting tricks and money raids need to stop. And the longer Wisconsin waits to get its financial house in order, the harder and more painful it will be to fix.
"Part of what we're going to be doing is writing the next chapter of the story of this school district," Sherman, the school system's new superintendent, said he told them.
Educators often spend their days running from decision to decision. Sherman said he thinks it is important for them to sometimes stop, find a quiet moment and reflect on what they are trying to achieve for the students.
Sherman, 58, is the Washington region's newest superintendent, on contract for $250,000 a year through June 2012. A former superintendent in Tenafly, N.J., he replaces Rebecca L. Perry in heading the 10,600-student system.
Sherman said his first task involves being a "good anthropologist."
The CEO of the reform group New Leaders for New Schools, also an adviser to Barack Obama's campaign, got a prime seat on the stage of the Democratic National Convention Monday night during the first of three American town halls.
The 15-minute town hall meeting managed to cram in issues including health care, tax reform, and education
Sen. James Meeks' (D-Chicago) proposed student boycott of Chicago public schools next month has sparked furious controversy. Should students miss their first day of class for the worthy goal of promoting equity in public school spending? Leaders such as Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Public Schools Chief Arne Duncan are worried about the disruption involved as Meeks seeks to enroll Chicago students at New Trier High School in Winnetka.
Missing from the discussion is a bigger point: The main reason New Trier's students achieve and graduate at much higher levels isn't per-pupil expenditure; it's differences in the socioeconomic status of the student bodies in Chicago and New Trier.
Decades of research have found that the biggest determinant of academic achievement is the socioeconomic status of the family a child comes from and the second biggest determinant is the socioeconomic status of the school she attends. The main problem with Chicago schools isn't that too little is spent on students but that the school district has overwhelming concentrations of poverty.
In the 2005-06 school year, Chicago public schools spent $10,409 per pupil, much less than New Trier ($16,856), but slightly more than several high-performing suburban school districts, including ones in Naperville ($9,881) and Geneva ($9,807). The key difference is that while 84.9 percent of Chicago students come from low-income homes, New Trier has a low-income population of 1.9 percent, Naperville has 5 percent and Geneva 2.4percent.
his week, in a lawsuit brought against the State of Illinois and the State Board of Education, the Chicago Urban League and Quad County Urban League called on the courts to end the discriminatory and unconstitutional way public school education is funded in Illinois. This is not just an educational issue, but a civil rights issue, too, for thousands of African-American and Latino students whose social and economic future is being shortchanged by a flawed state policy.
After more than a decade of legislative gridlock on education funding reform, set against a bleak backdrop of crumbling schoolhouses, moldy books and shamefully low graduation rates--the time has come to dismantle the current property-based system of school financing.
That system is discriminatory in its impact, sustaining huge funding gaps between black and white schools.
It makes quality education nearly impossible for thousands of students of color. It confounds the best efforts of well-meaning parents, teachers and administrators. And it puts children on a pathway to lifelong poverty and social pathologies that squander their potential and exact enormous social costs.
Damian Creamer, founder of Primavera Online High School, was the guest last week on Live Talk Wednesday, talking about secondary education via the computer.
Creamer formerly was an enrollment counselor at the University of Phoenix.
"Their (online) program was in its infancy and it was a unique opportunity to be involved with such a dynamic organization as they pioneered online education at the post-secondary level," he said.
Afterward, he helped a small charter school in the West Valley found two additional charter schools.
Creamer opened Primavera Technical Learning Center (the predecessor to Primavera Online High School) in 2001.
" In its first year, Primavera had a few hundred students. Last year, I believe that we carried an average daily membership of 2,700 students," Creamer said.
Last year, Primavera graduated 469 students, according to Creamer.
Community and Schools Together (CAST) has been working to educate the public on the need to change the state finance system and support referendums that preserve and expand the good our schools do. We are eager to continue this work and help pass the referendum the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education approved on Monday, August 25, 2008.
"The support and interest from everyone has been great," said Franklin and Wright parent and CAST member Thomas J. Mertz. "We've got a strong organization, lots of enthusiasm, and we're ready to do everything we can to pass this referendum and move our schools beyond the painful annual cuts. Our community values education. It's a good referendum and we are confident the community will support it."
Community and Schools Together (CAST) strongly supports the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education's decision to place a three-year recurring referendum on the November 4, 2008 ballot. This is the best way for the district to address the legislated structural deficit we will face over the next few years.
This responsible approach provides time for the MMSD and the community to engage in the strategic planning that will take our already excellent schools to the next echelon. It will also establish a solid foundation for setting future budgets, justifying future referendums, and working for state finance reform. Such a process could be easily derailed if the community and district become distracted by discussion of major reductions in programs and services. At little cost to taxpayers, the Board's action has given our community an opportunity to enter the Superintendent Nerad era in a way that will allow us to make good use of his talents and contributions.
"If we want to look at the big picture and plan for the future, we need the certainty that a recurring referendum provides," stressed Hamilton Middle School parent and CAST activist Jerry Eykholt.
Since 1993 the district has reduced programs and services by over $60 million, even as other costs have continued to rise. The proposed referendum will provide basic operating funds to maintain the existing programs and services in Madison's schools. Over the last fifteen years more than $60 million of programs and services have been cut. Without a referendum the cuts will continue at ever higher levels.
"Without the referendum, the preliminary areas identified by Superintendent Nerad and his staff for further cuts would create unwarranted stresses on our students, making it much harder to provide the education they deserve," said Deb Gilbert, a CAST member and parent of two children at Leopold.
CAST is confident that the board and administration understand this referendum simply provides the authority to exceed revenue limits and, with the community, will continue to seek additional efficiencies and limit levy amounts to that needed to ensure a sound education for Madison's children.
"I like the partnership aspects," said CAST Treasurer and Falk parent Jackie Woodruff. "They clearly understand that we all need to work together to make the best use of the resources the community provides."
A three-year referendum is a responsible way to allow the community and district to engage in a strong partnership to ensure the future success of Madison schools and students while minimizing the impact on children and tax payers.
CAST is proud of the quality of Madison's schools and what they have achieved, even as resources have been cut and the needs of our population have grown through rapidly changing demographics--evidence of the dedication and creativity of the MMSD staff and the Madison community. Quality public education is essential to maintaining the economic health and quality of life of our community.
"We need to keep our schools strong--they are at the heart of our neighborhoods and what makes Madison such a great place to raise children" said Jill Jacklitz an activist with CAST and parent at Marquette and Lapham.
CAST is a grassroots organization of parents, educators, and community members that is dedicated to educating the citizens of Madison about school funding referenda in the Madison Metropolitan School District.
If you believe quality public schools for all is an integral part of our democracy, join us in working to assure our schools have adequate resources. We look forward to sharing a positive message about the future of the MMSD. Visit www.madisoncast.org for more information or contact:
Community and Schools Together, madisoncast@sbcglobal.net
Jill Jacklitz 608-249-4377, mamajillj@gmail.com
Thomas J. Mertz 608-255-4550, 608-215-1942, tjmertz@sbcglobal.net
Deb Gilbert, 608-212-1237, heintzfamily@charter.net
Members of the Madison School Board will ask city taxpayers to help finance the Madison Metropolitan School District budget, voting Monday night to move forward with a school referendum.
The referendum will be on the ballot on Election Day, Nov. 4.
Superintendent Dan Nerad outlined a recommendation last week for the board to approve a recurring referendum asking to exceed revenue limits by $5 million during the 2009-10 school year, $4 million for 2010-11 and $4 million for 2011-12. With a recurring referendum, the authority afforded by the community continues permanently, as opposed to other referendums that conclude after a period of time.
Accounting initiatives that would soften the impact on taxpayers were also approved Monday.
One part of the initiative would return $2 million to taxpayers from the Community Services Fund, which is used for afterschool programs. The second part of the initiative would spread the costs of facility maintenance projects over a longer period.
Madison School District voters on Nov. 4 will be asked to approve permanent tax increases in the district to head off projected multimillion-dollar budget shortfalls.
In a pair of 7-0 votes, the Madison School Board on Monday night approved a proposal from Superintendent Daniel Nerad to hold a referendum and to adopt a series of accounting measures to reduce their effect on taxpayers.
Nerad said the district would work "day and night" to meet with residents and make information available about the need for the additional money to avert what school officials say would be devastating cuts in programs and services beginning in 2009-10, when the projected budget shortfall is $8.1 million.
"I understand this goes to the community to see if this is something they support. We're going to do our best to provide good information," said Nerad.
Some citizens who spoke at Monday's meeting echoed the sentiments of board members and school officials.
"Our schools are already underfunded," said one man.
However, others spoke against the plan. "This is virtually a blank check from taxpayers.
Superintendent Dan Nerad had to act quickly to put the plan together, facing the $8 million shortfall in his first few days on the job.
"I will never hesitate to look for where we can become more efficient and where we can make reductions," said Nerad. "But I think we can say $8 million in program cuts, if it were only done that way, would have a significant impact on our kids."
The plan was highly praised by most board members, but not by everyone who attended the meeting.
"This virtually gives the board a blank check from all of Madison's taxpayers' checkbooks," said Madison resident David Glomp. "It may very well allow the school board members to never have to do the heavy lifting of developing a real long-term cost saving."
"We need to respect the views of those who disagree with us and that doesn't mean they're anti-school or anti-kids," says board member Ed Hughes.
Board members stressed, the additional money would not be used to create new programs, like 4-year-old kindergarten.
"What's a miracle is that our schools are continuing to function and I think that's the conversation happening around Wisconsin, now, says board vice president Lucy Mathiak. "How much longer can we do this?"
The referendum question will appear on the November 4th general election ballot.
The board will discuss its educational campaign at its September 8th meeting.
The morning began with the buoyant spirit of a pep rally -- all cheers, prizes and inspirational words from Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and other officials to launch the District's teachers into the fall term that starts Monday.
Before it ended, however, the "welcome back" assembly at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center yesterday took a more anxious turn. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and Washington Teachers' Union President George Parker each seized the opportunity to speak to the audience of 4,000 teachers about Rhee's pay package proposal, which has roiled and divided them.
Rhee was there to win hearts and minds. Parker was there to count them.
Rhee is offering teachers a "green tier" plan that would boost many of them over the $100,000 mark in salary and performance bonuses. In exchange, they must surrender tenure protections for a year and risk dismissal by going on probation. Teachers who want to retain tenure can opt for the "red tier," which would offer lower, but still significant, raises and bonuses.
In protest of Chicago's failing school system, Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) is staging a field trip of sorts. He's urging kids from his legislative district to skip the first day of school, board buses, travel to Winnetka, and attempt to enroll in New Trier High School.
One can understand why Meeks would want better educational options for Chicago kids. But on his way to Winnetka, the senator might want to take a look out the window where there are already many Chicago public schools--charter schools--that are performing on par with top-notch suburban and downstate schools. One such school, Chicago International Charter School, graduates its students 86 percent of the time--comparing quite favorably with public schools Downstate and suburban Chicago, which have an average graduation rate of 84 percent. Overall, charter public schools in Chicago graduate 77 percent of their students, compared with a citywide average of 51 percent.
Why aren't there more charter schools in Chicago? Because state law caps the number of charters in the city at 30. Today, approximately 13,000 Chicago public school children are on a waiting list to get into charters--schools that have offered a proven formula for success. To give inner-city kids the opportunities they deserve, the charter-school cap should be lifted.
I've been so tied up with life and the referendum stuff that I haven't been much paying attention to the city budget process. A story in today's Wisconsin State Journal got my attention, this graphic in particular. Two items on the possible cut list will directly impact the school district budget and at least three more will make things harder for our schools to do their job.
These possible cuts have been identified early in the budget process. Mayor Cieslewicz asked all departments to list what they would propose in the way of a 5% budget cut. If things go as the Mayor envisions, about 37% of these cuts will need to be enacted. Nothing is set in stone at this point. The Mayor will propose his budget in October and the Common Council will act in November.
Referendum Climate: Charts - Enrollment; Local, State, Federal and Global Education Spending
Variations of this question are often asked: "Are we spending too much, too little or just the right amount on education?" I thought it might be useful to have a look at some local, state, federal and global information. Click to view the charts in detail:
Madison School District Enrollment: 1994-2007 (the demographics have changed during this time)
Madison School District Budgets: 1995-2009
Percentage of Wisconsin General Purpose State Tax Revenue Spent on K-12 School Districts: 1972-2007
Wisconsin State Tax Dollars Spent on K-12 School Districts: 1972-2007
US Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Price Index. $1000 in 1995 requires $1443.33 according to their inflation calculator, while $1000 in 1972 requires $5,262.30 in 2008.
Milwaukee's children are the city's future, and their education is a profound concern to all of us. Milwaukee Public Schools is responsible for ensuring students have the knowledge and skills to be capable workers and good citizens.
Like other urban school districts in the country, MPS struggles against mighty odds to fulfill this mission. There are major successes and many problems. Trying to overcome these problems is crucial, and there is room for all sectors of the city and region to share in the work.
A new initiative to audit or otherwise examine MPS could be very helpful if the analysis addresses all the fundamental issues at play, including the following:
• The households MPS students come from are in increasing economic distress, and almost one in five students come to the classroom with special needs -- emotional, physical and cognitive -- that require additional personnel and resources.
Karen Royster is executive director of the Institute for Wisconsin's Future; Jack Norman is the institute's research director. The institute is funded by national foundations and does not receive money from state or local teachers unions.
Auer Avenue Elementary School was "the poster child," as one school official put it, for why Milwaukee Public Schools needed a Neighborhood Schools Initiative.
The reason was obvious: In the fall of 1999, kids from the attendance area for the school at N. 24th St. and W. Auer Ave. were enrolled in more than 90 schools all over Milwaukee, many of them no better than Auer Avenue.
So MPS spent $2 million to improve facilities for the school's students, added sixth-, seventh- and eight-grade classes and added before- and after-school services, all to encourage neighborhood enrollment.
The result? Today, students in the area attend more than 90 schools elsewhere in Milwaukee. The percentage of students in Auer Avenue who are from the neighborhood has actually gone down, as has total enrollment in the school.
Those facts tells you an awful lot about how little impact the $102 million neighborhood school plan has had.
In a world of increased occasions for forms of social control, the university is extending its reach. In an AP story today we learn that universities are broadening the scope of their campus behavior codes to apply to student conduct off campus, in an effort to cultivate humanity, to borrow from Martha Nussbaum. One purpose is to make students better citizens within the community. From the article: We have a responsibility to educate our students about being responsible citizens,'' said Elizabeth A. Higgins, Washington's director of community standards and student conduct, whose office has 'educated' 19 students since the extended code of conduct took effect in January.
The scope of these codes can be quite broad, as the article reports that the University of Colorado code "regulates any conduct that ''affects the health, safety or security of any member of the university community or the mission of the university." The article further reports that Seattle University "has put its students on notice that cyber-patrolling will continue this year."
Tangentially, this is one of the issues worth looking into around local high schools: given the open campus, how much undesirable activity occurs near those facilities, and who has jurisdiction? This data: Madison police calls near local high schools: 1996-2006.
Believe it or not, that more or less sums up the big new marketing campaign the teachers' unions are using to try to lure you into giving them more money. It's actually called "Broader, Bolder." If you've ever seen a title that sounded more like a gimmick to sucker people out of their money, you've seen more marketing gimmicks than I have.
The argument runs like this: kids do better in school when they're well fed, healthy, and so forth. Therefore schools should be transformed into social-service centers that will not only teach students, but also provide health care and lots of other services. Schools would be open all day and provide a wide variety of community programs.
This will, of course, cost a ton of money and entail a huge expansion of the government educational bureaucracy. Which has nothing to do with why the unions want it.
One of the biggest differences between Nerad and Rainwater, according to School Board members, is that Nerad provides the board with more information about what's happening in the district. Silveira said Nerad's weekly memos help board members feel engaged, and she's hopeful that after the current financial questions are settled, the board can turn its focus to improving student achievement.
Mathiak said she was thrilled last week after hearing Nerad's plan. "I think there is a honeymoon period and I think we're still in it."
Winston said after watching Nerad at work, "I'm convinced we made the right choice. I think he's here for the long haul, too."
Passage of a recurring referendum on the November 2008 ballot would allow the board and school administration to permanently exceed the state mandated revenue spending caps. Such a move to fix a so-called current "budget gap" would allow the board and administration to exceed annual spending caps permanently, every year into the future. This would virtually give the board a "blank check" from district taxpayers to plug future budget gaps or shortfalls. It could prevent the board and administration from having to carefully and thoughtfully budget, like every taxpayer must do when their household budget faces tough economic times and shortfalls.
The plans and communications presented in recent weeks by the board and administration provide greater hope for more effective decision-making now and in the future. The recommendations for changes in policy and accountability options in community services, transportation, lease contracts, fund balances and capital expansion (maintenance) will have positive impacts on reducing the so-called "budget gap."
The Board must earn the trust of the taxpayers by clearly showing that they can be "good stewards" of taxpayer dollars. Past experience has not earned that trust! If a referendum is ultimately required to fix upcoming budgets, it should be a non-recurring referendum, thereby preventing 'mortgaging' the future with year-after-year, permanent increases in spending authority.
The Board and administration must correct the absence of specific processes and strategies for analysis and evaluation of business and educational services, programs, practices and policies. Urgent and substantial investments of time and work are critical for these processes to evolve into hard evidence. This evidence is absolutely necessary to show the public that serious steps are under way to provide clear, concrete data and options for identifying the most effective and efficient results-oriented management of the financial resources of the district. It must be shown that the resources will be directly applied to improvements in student learning and achievement.
In order for the public to support any change in spending habits or spending authority the district must meet the following conditions: a) full disclosure and accountability in the reporting of methodologies, data measurements, analyses and results in spending and the effective use of existing funding levels; b) assure that the shifting of funds is done on the basis of evaluations and assessments; c) changes are put in place to affect improvements in curriculum and instruction which directly increase student achievement and development at all levels; d) make the schools and the educational climate safe and secure for all students and staff; and e) engage in collaborative and cost-sharing initiatives with other government entities, as well as private and non-profit organizations.
Don Severson, President of ACE, said in a statement "When realistic evidence of progress toward these conditions is shown, then Active Citizens for Education and the general public will actively and willingly support the district with appropriate financial means. Anything short of meeting these conditions will not be in the best interests of our children and the community."
The school board and administration must continue to work to improve their communications and evaluation processes to gain the trust and confidence of the public for both short-and long-term successes. The district board is urged to proceed carefully and firmly in a strategic and progressive manner. A decision, at this time, by the board to request taxpayer support for a recurring referendum on the November 2008 ballot would be significantly premature and disastrous.
Please send your own comments, concerns and/or convictions to all board members and superintenent at comments@madison.k12.wi.us or to selected ones of your choice.
More than 10 years after New York's political and education leaders promised to work toward providing access to pre-kindergarten classes to every 4-year-old across the state, more than a third of the 677 local school districts have no such programs. Last year, fewer than 91,000 children attended state-financed pre-kindergarten classes -- 38 percent of the state's 4-year-olds.
The early promise of universal pre-kindergarten programs was undermined by state budget problems, especially after 9/11, and local districts were never required to offer them. But even as funding dedicated to pre-kindergarten has more than doubled over the last three years, hundreds of mainly suburban and rural districts have rejected the state money, with many saying they would have to cut other things or raise taxes to establish the programs.
Last year, local districts passed up $67.5 million of the $438 million the state set aside for pre-K.
"Universal pre-K is an idea that looks good on paper, but it doesn't work for a district of this size," said Superintendent Edward Ehmann of the Smithtown school district on Long Island, which turned down $459,000 in state aid because, he said, it would cover only a quarter of the cost of providing pre-kindergarten to 750 children.
Five Wisconsin school districts could face combined losses of tens of millions of dollars in a complex investment scheme to help fund employee retirement benefits, according to investigators hired by the districts.
The value of district investments has declined by $120 million - or 60% - since the transactions were undertaken within the last two years, according to a news release from a public relations firm for the attorneys who examined the deals.
School district officials released statements accompanying the news release Wednesday, saying they were misled by a financial adviser, and that the investments were much riskier than they had been told.
On June 30, the board of education and the town council in Enfield, Conn., convened to hear the results of a citizen cost-cutting committee. Among its other recommendations, the 17 residents recommended replacing some public school teachers with low-cost college interns, restricting the use of school vehicles, and increasing employee contributions to benefit plans.
These may seem modest steps toward fiscal responsibility -- but they are emblematic of a significant change in this very blue state: growing disenchantment with the price of government, especially of public education.
Over the past two and a half decades, the student population in Connecticut has increased only 10%. Yet the cost of schooling more than doubled -- to $8.8 billion in 2006, up from $3.4 billion in 1981. Seventeen years ago, the state enacted an income tax with promises to cut other taxes. Instead, real-estate assessments soared, creating a massive income transfer from the private to the public sector, fueled in part by a state cost-sharing formula that uses taxes on residents in the suburbs to subsidize urban schools. Helping to soak up all that money were binding arbitration laws, skewed to give teacher unions an advantage in collective bargaining negotiations.
Redding is a fabulous place. And Connecticut is a great state. Our goal is to help make Redding even better!
Since about three-quarters of our budget supports our schools, we explored ways to get a bigger bang for the education buck while simultaneously improving the quality of education. So we developed The School Choice Plan. Not only does it save money for all taxpayers, it also empowers parents with choice and improves education. The Plan is summarized in our School Choice Plan brochure as is the School Grants Calculator we developed. Take a look at the brochure.
Barack Obama says he believes in universal preschool and if he's elected president he'll pump "billions of dollars into early childhood education." Universal preschool is now second only to universal health care on the liberal policy wish list. Democratic governors across the country -- including in Illinois, Arizona, Massachusetts and Virginia -- have made a major push to fund universal preschool in their states.
But is strapping a backpack on all 4-year-olds and sending them to preschool good for them? Not according to available evidence.
"Advocates and supporters of universal preschool often use existing research for purely political purposes," says James Heckman, a University of Chicago Noble laureate in economics whose work Mr. Obama and preschool activists routinely cite. "But the solid evidence for the effectiveness of early interventions is limited to those conducted on disadvantaged populations."
Mr. Obama asserted in the Las Vegas debate on Jan. 15 that every dollar spent on preschool will produce a 10-fold return by improving academic performance, which will supposedly lower juvenile delinquency and welfare use -- and raise wages and tax contributions. Such claims are wildly exaggerated at best.
A new group calling itself the Milwaukee Quality Education Initiative has joined the accelerating, behind-the-scenes conversations about the future of the city's schools, and is hosting a retreat this weekend at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine.
The group's goal is to brainstorm ways to improve K-12 education in the city, including public, voucher and charter schools, Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce President Tim Sheehy said Friday.
"We didn't come down here to blow up MPS," he said Friday when reached at Wingspread. "We came down here to figure out what action steps we might take to reach a starting point to a broader conversation in the city."
Sheehy, voucher school advocate and former MPS superintendent Howard Fuller and former state Secretary of Commerce Cory Nettles launched the group several months ago but hadn't made their efforts known to the larger public, Fuller said. He added that their work hasn't been particularly influenced by events this week such as Mayor Tom Barrett's call for an independent audit of MPS or a Journal Sentinel investigation of the district's Neighborhood Schools Initiative.
He downplayed his previously stated interest in mayoral control of the district, but said all options for control of the district should be explored.
"I'm not interested in a power grab," Barrett said. "I'm interested in MPS performance. But confidence is not high right now."
Barrett made his comments after a Journal Sentinel investigation this week of the district's neighborhood schools plan. Despite spending $102 million to expand schools, MPS failed to reduce busing as hoped or attract more students to local schools, leaving a trail of empty or severely underused building additions. Many of the schools that got new classrooms and other improvements also have seen a decline in student test scores.
Two School Board leaders, reacting to the mayor Thursday night, said a study would merely duplicate one soon to get under way.
The mayor said that in recent months, he has stepped up his behind-the-scenes efforts regarding the "very stressed" district. He said he has been talking with a firm that specializes in financial and operational reviews of urban school systems
And now, thanks to the in-depth reporting this week by the Journal Sentinel's Alan J. Borsuk and Dave Umhoefer, we know that the district has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on the failed Neighborhood Schools Initiative.
What isn't known precisely is how bad things are.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said Thursday he wants to hire a consultant to do an audit of the district. The audit would be paid for, he hopes, by local foundations. Previously, the School Board had ordered a "long-term stability" audit to be performed by Robert W. Baird & Co., the district told reporters.
Nerad is earnest, diplomatic and clear spoken. It's a good bet that most anybody who hears him talk will find something they like in his message. Whether that adds up to support for a coherent educational program remains to be seen.
He faces huge challenges: not just closing the achievement gap while maintaining programs that attract middle-class families, but doing it while state fiscal controls continually squeeze his budget.
Equally hard will be overcoming the district's own organizational stasis -- it's tendency to stick with the status quo. For all of Madison's reputation as a progressive community, Madison schools are conservatively run and seriously resistant to change.
Authoritarian, top-down management grew under Nerad's predecessor, Art Rainwater. Innovations like charter schools are still viewed skeptically, including by Nerad. Four-year-old kindergarten, which could be key to narrowing the achievement gap, is still seen as a problem. The middle school redesign project of a few years ago has been judged by insiders as pretty much a non-event. The high school redesign effort that Nerad inherited seems intent on embracing a program that is still unproven at West and Memorial.
via the City of Madison Assessor's office: "The 2008 Property Tax Base of the City of Madison (52K PDF)". The City's tax base continues to expand. There are 71,939 parcels in Madison, up from 40,069 in 1990. The Total 2008 assessed value is 21,496,000,000, up from $13,791,000,000 in 2002. Such growth provides great latidude in easing mill rates. Of course, as valuations flatten or decline, the mill rate may dramatically increase, depending on the magnitude of government/school spending increases.
As students prepare to return to school here Monday, teachers and parents criticized the relaxation of the district's grading policies in a state that helped trigger national testing requirements.
The Dallas Independent School District's new policies give students who do poorly more chances to improve their grades. Among the changes: High-school students who fail major tests can retake them within five school days, and only the higher scores count.
School officials say the changes are designed to reduce one of the highest dropout rates in the state. According to the Texas Education Agency, 25.8% of students in the Dallas district who enrolled as ninth-graders in 2003 dropped out before their class's scheduled 2007 graduation.
But the policies have sparked criticism since the Dallas Morning News reported them last week, with angry parents and teachers contending that the district is watering down educational standards for its more than 160,000 students.
The $102 million spent on reviving the concept of the neighborhood school in Milwaukee hasn't improved academic success at most of the schools where the money was used, a Journal Sentinel investigation found.
With a few exceptions, student achievement has shown little improvement - and in some cases it has fallen dramatically - at 22 schools that were among the largest beneficiaries of the district's school construction program.
The district's Neighborhood Schools Initiative was conceived as a way to get children off buses and into their local schools - which MPS officials hoped to improve with new classrooms, before-school and after-school services, and such things as state-of-the-art science labs and libraries.
But bricks and mortar have not raised student performance, testing data shows.
In 16 of the 22 schools, the percentage of fourth-graders rated as proficient or better in reading was lower last year than it was in 2002 - the year the school building initiative hit high gear. Nine schools saw their math scores drop.
Overall, combined fourth-grade reading and math scores have declined sharply at a half dozen of the22 schools where more than $1 million was spent on improvements. Only five schools have had major increases in their combined reading and math performance.
But Silveira also said the 2005 referendum campaign suffered because the School Board itself was divided on it, "and it was a pretty split community speaking out on both sides in favor and being opposed.
"We are on the same page now. We're really changing our focus to one of really spending more time on student achievement."
For board member Lucy Mathiak, a key difference between Nerad's proposal and past ones are the measures he has taken to cut costs already.
I have appreciated having the opportunity to talk about our schools with you and value your insights, so I wanted to let you know where matters stand on the possibility of a school spending referendum on the November ballot.
As you probably know, Superintendent Dan Nerad submitted his recommendations to the Board at a School Board meeting Monday night (1MB PDF, 3 year financial forecast PDF). In summary, the structural deficit the school funding law imposes on districts as well as increased fixed costs result in a projected budget deficit of $8.1 million for the 2009-2010 school year, $4.4 million for the 2010-2011 school year, and $4.3 million for the 2011-2012 school year, calculated on a same-service basis.
To meet these gaps, the superintendent recommends that the Board approve a referendum asking the voters to authorize the district to exceed our spending limits by $5 million next year, and $4 million in each of the following two years. This would be a recurring referendum, meaning that the authorization for the increased spending in the specified amounts would continue indefinitely.
The amount of extra spending authority we would seek is less than the projected budget gaps. The idea is that this a shared-sacrifice sort of proposal - we would be asking the community to permit us to erase some of the gap through additional taxes while we pledge to address the remainder through seeking out savings and efficiencies that will not have a detrimental impact on classroom learning. As is probably apparent, the referendum is not designed to allow us to restore in a significant way any of the painful cuts we have made in previous years.
Budget information for the district has historically been confusing. We're working on greater clarity and transparency in our budget information. I have some questions about our numbers that I'm in the process of trying to get clarified. Part of the confusion derives from the fact that the budget is arranged in a number of separate funds that are defined by DPI. The principal category of spending for our purposes is Fund 10. For the upcoming school year, we are projecting Fund 10 expenditures of about $306 million. For the following year, the one that shows the $8.1 million shortfall, we foresee expenditures of about $318 million, or a 3.78% increase.
With the Qualified Economic Offer, salaries and benefits for teachers are, as a practical matter, required to go up at least 3.8% per year. Our total projected increase for next year for salary and benefits is 3.88%. The rest of the Fund 10 budget, a little under $100 million, increases 3.55% from this year. (By comparison, the consumer price index has increased 5.6% since July of 2007.) This budget does not include any significant new initiatives.
Turning to the revenues side of the ledger, the category of interest here is the tax levy. This is what our community has to cough up to pay for our schools, and it represents the difference between our expenditures and our other sources of revenue, including state and federal aid and grant money. The portion of the tax levy that is attributable to Fund 10 expense is governed by the spending cap that state law imposes.
The total tax levy for the current year is about $226 million. Under the superintendent's plan, if the referendum passes, the total levy for next year would be $237 million, an increase of 5.07%.
If total expenditures are increasing less than 4%, why is the tax levy projected to increase 5.07%? There are a couple of reasons. First, we are unable to project that increases in other sources of funding will keep pace with our increasing level of expenditures. Indeed, we do not project any increase in state or federal aid. Second, the tax levy increase was moderated this year by the one-time injection of about $4.1 million in TIF funds. Had these funds not been received, then the tax levy would have had to increase this year (presumably through a referendum) in order to support this year's level of spending. The 5.07% increase in the tax levy for next year is thus partially the result of starting from an artificially low base.
A final consideration is the mill rate. This is the amount applied against the assessed value of a taxpayer's property to arrive at the amount in taxes that is levied. As the total value of property in our community increases, the mill rate goes down, all things equal. Under the superintendent's plan, the mill rate increases from this year's $9.92 to next year's $10.03 (an increase of about 1%) and then is projected to decrease the next two years, to $9.59 and $9.29. So if one owns a house with an assessed value of $300,000, and the assessment remains the same next year, the amount that taxpayer would pay for schools would rise from $2,976 this year to $3,009 next year, and would decrease in the following two years if one is willing to entertain the unlikely assumption that the assessed value of the house would remain the same over the relevant years.
This analysis assumes that the referendum passes. If the referendum fails, then we will be obligated once more to hack away at the budget and attempt to find cuts that do the least amount of damage to classroom learning.
There are many reasons to want to avoid this. As past experience has shown, it is a divisive and painful exercise for the community. It requires that the Board devote much time and attention to the budget-cutting process - time that could be better used by the Board to work on strategies for improving student learning. Some of the decisions that have resulted from this typically-rushed process have later appeared to be short-sighted or misguided. And, most importantly, the cuts diminish the quality of the education we are able to provide to our students. There are no easy cuts left. If we are compelled to continue to slash away year after year, we will soon be at a point where we will be unable to provide the quality of education that our community wants and expects.
If the referendum passes, we will have breathing room. We should have three years when the specter of budget cuts is not hanging over our heads. This will enable the Board and the new administration to put into place the process we currently contemplate for reviewing our strategic priorities, establishing strategies and benchmarks, and aligning our resources.
Superintendent Nerad has described a proposal that contemplates a broad-based strategic planning process that will kick off during the second semester of the upcoming school year. This process will be designed to identify the community's priorities for our schools, priorities that I expect will reflect a concentrated focus on enhancing student achievement. Once we have identified our priorities and promising strategies for achieving them, we'll likely turn to examining how well our organization is aligned toward pursuing our goals. This will likely be the point at which we take a long, hard look at our administrative structure and see if we can arrange our resources more efficiently.
It will take a while - certainly more than a year - for us to undertake this sweeping kind of review of our programs and spending in a careful, collaborative and deliberative way. If we do go to referendum, and the voters authorize the increased spending authority we seek, then the obligation will pass to the Board and administration to demonstrate that the community's vote of confidence was well placed. There will be much for us to do and it will be fair to judge our performance on how well we take advantage of the opportunity the community will have given us.
These are my initial thoughts. As you can probably tell, I am sympathetic to the approach the superintendent proposes and I am inclined to support his recommendation. However, we did just receive the recommendations Monday night, and I may well be confused about a few of these points. But since we will vote on a referendum next Monday, I wanted to get this summary to you as soon as possible. If you have thoughts or questions, I'd appreciate it if you could share them with me.
Ed
Ed Hughes
2226 Lakeland Avenue
Madison WI 53704
(608) 241-4854
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad's budget and recommendations memorandum to the School board (1MB PDF):
In 1993, three pieces of legislation were enacted by the State of Wisconsin directly affecting school districts throughout the state. These pieces of legislation created revenue limits, created the state's commitment to two·thirds funding, and created the qualified economic offer (QEO) in Wisconsin. Since 1993 revenue limits in Wisconsin have allowed the Madison Metropolitan School District to increase revenues annually by 2.2% on average. Conversely the QEO requires school boards to offer a comprehensive salary and benefit package to certified teaching staff of not less than 3.8% annually to avoid binding arbitration. Recognizing that the Madison Metropolitan School District's budget is comprised of 84% salary and benefits, it must be recognized that while our revenues increase annually by 2.2%, the largest portion of our budget is mandated to minimally increase by 3.8%. Due to these competing pieces of legislation, the Board of Education since 1993 has reduced program and services by over $60 million to comply with state mandated revenue limits, of which $35 million has occurred within the past five years.
Since the 1992·93 School Year the Madison Metropolitan School District has increased the total tax levy by $74,944,431 through the projected 2008·09 property tax levy. This amounts to an average annual increase of 2.56% since the 1992·93 School Year (see Attachment A). During that same time frame from 1992·93 through the projections for the 2008·09 property tax rate, the Madison Metropolitan School District has decreased the total tax rate from $20.69 to a projected rate of $9.92 for the 2008·09 School Year (see Attachment B).
Nerad also posted a 3 year financial forecast (250K PDF)
A look at the growth in Madison's tax base: In 1990, the City of Madison included 40,069 parcels, a number that grew to 64,976 in 2005. Assessment and parcel growth mitigates tax levy increases, or allows it to decline (though this of course, depends on the real estate market along with tax policies).
Nerad told school board members on Monday night that he's recommending a three-year recurring referendum.
It's part of what he called a partnership plan to address the budget shortfall.
The plan would put a referendum on the November ballot for $5 million and would ask voters for $4 million in the two following years.
Nerad said to make up the remaining $3 million gap the district would move $2 million from the district's fund balance, eliminate $600,000 in unallocated staff, which are positions set aside in case of additional enrollment, and make up the remaining $400,000 through other reductions, which he has not yet named.
"We're working both sides of this and in the end our kids need things from us, our taxpayers need us to be sensitive and all I can say is we tried every step of putting these recommendations together to be responsive on both fronts," said Nerad.
The measure, a "recurring referendum," would give the district permission to build on the previous year's spending limit increase by additional amounts of $4 million in 2010-11 and another $4 million in 2011-12. The measure would permit a total increase of $13 million -- a change that would be permanent, unlike the impact of some other referendums that end after a specified period.
Approval of the referendum would cost the owner of a home with an assessed value of $250,000 an estimated $27.50 in additional taxes in the 2009-10 school year. That represents an increase of 1.1 percent of the School District's portion of the tax bill.
But for at least the next two years, the schools' portion of that homeowner's tax bill would decline even if the referendum is approved, under the plan developed by Nerad and Erik Kass, assistant superintendent for business services.
They estimate the tax bill for 2010-11 would be $27.50 lower than it is now, and the bill the following year would be about $100 below its current level if voters back the referendum and the School Board implements proposed changes in accounting measures.
In the first year, the referendum would add an additional $27.50 onto the tax bill of a $250,000 home. Another initiative in Nerad's recommendation, drawn up along with Assistant Superintendent of Business Services Erik Kass, is to enact changes to help mitigate the tax impact of the referendum. Nerad and Kass said these changes would decrease taxes for homeowners in the second and third year of the referendum.
One aspect of the proposal would return $2 million of an equity to the taxpayers in the form of a reduced levy in the Community Services Fund (Fund 80) for the 2009-10 school year. The second part of the tax impact referendum would be implementation of a Capital Expansion Fund, called Fund 41, in an effort to levy a property tax under revenue limits to spread the costs of facility maintenance projects over a longer period.
Nerad said the referendum process has been a deliberative process, and he's been cognizant of weighing board members and community questions.
National education experts are dismayed. If merit pay can't work in Denver, "future initiatives are destined to fail," said Matthew Springer, director of the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
The breakdown stems from a philosophical disagreement between the school district and the union.
The district is offering large increases in incentive pay. But the biggest rewards will go to early- and midcareer teachers -- and to those willing to take risks by working in impoverished schools or taking jobs few others want, such as teaching middle-school math. Yearly bonuses for such work would nearly triple, to about $3,000.
The union is all for boosting bonuses but also wants an across-the-board pay increase. Most crucially, union leadership objects to proposed changes that would hold down the salaries of veteran teachers to free more money for novices.
Mediation is scheduled to begin Wednesday. If it fails, the union could begin job actions just as the Democratic National Convention comes to town.
For awhile I figured that didn't matter. These schools are raising student achievement to new heights without a cool, overarching label. Maybe they don't need one. But I changed my mind about that after reading David Whitman's splendid new book about these schools, "Sweating the Small Stuff."
My problem is this: I hate his subtitle, "Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism." And I like his decision to refer to this group as "the paternalistic schools" even less.
But even those who might oppose a referendum should be in favor of board action at this point.
If the board moves now, the referendum question can be on the Nov. 4 ballot.
Because the presidential race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain is expected to draw a record voter turnout on that day, there could be no better point at which to assess the level of support for the school district in general and the current board's strategies in particular.
Wisconsin has a great tradition of involving all taxpayers in the process of setting and supporting education priorities. We keep the decision-making process at the grass roots level. We elect school boards. We put major spending and building questions to the voters in the form of referendums. The system has worked well -- even as state meddling in the structures of school financing has made things difficult. And it works best when referendums attract maximum participation.
Given the critical values briefly outlined above, it is premature at this time to make recommendations or decisions on a course or courses of action to seek more spending authority as a solution regarding the financial needs of the district. The groundwork for decision-making and the development of improved levels of public confidence in the Board and administration have to continue to be proactively matured for both short- and long-term successes in the district. We urge you to proceed carefully, firmly and in a strategic and progressive manner.
Imagine this scenario: You are the head of a declining business. Without much fanfare, you have developed a new product that is highly effective and wildly popular when test-marketed on a limited basis. What would you do? Most likely, expand the new product as rapidly as possible while you reach out to potential new customers.
This first part of this situation exists in our own city in a key enterprise with great significance for the region: the Boston public school system. The product is the pilot school, which gives autonomy to individual schools, enabling them to control their budgets, staffing, schedule and curriculum. Research has established that Boston school students thrive in pilot schools, outperforming their peers in traditional schools. They test better, accrue fewer suspensions, are less likely to drop out and more likely to further their schooling.
We begin the presentation by focusing on why is there a problem. And we wanna first and foremost point out that the issues affecting this school district are issues that are also occurring in other school districts in the state. While there may be some circumstances, and there are circumstances that are unique to one place or another, we know that this funding dilemma and the gap that exists between what the current state funding formula provides and how expenses are being dealt with in school district is not unique to this school district. Although we have our story here that is certainly unique. And again I want to emphasize that it really lies at the heart of it is the constraint between the current formula that was put into place in 1993 which basically asserted that the state provide more resources to schools through the two thirds funding if, in turn, school districts would control their costs in two ways. One was through the revenue cap and the second was through the qualified economic offer. And so that was the kind of exchange or the quid pro quo that was made at that time in public policy; to be able to provide more state funding for schools at the same time to place limitations on how much a school district could spend.
In the document we point out examples of this dilemma as it is affecting some of the top ten school districts in the state. Ranging in, for example Waukesha school district of 2.6 million dollar program and service reduction for the 08/09 school year. The district that I am most recently familiar with, Greenbay with a 6.5 million program and service reduction. And just to point out the difference we mentioned we seen there, we use a wording increase revenue authority that represents their gap but that's also, its described that way because of having more authority through a successfully passed referendum to exceed the revenue cap within that community. So that is what's meant by an increase revenue of authority.
Now the funding formula is one that school districts across the state are wrestling with. You know the history that this school district has had in terms of the types of decisions that have been made which we are going to underscore in just a minute to accommodate that funding formula but as I turn this over to Eric for the bulk of the rest of the presentation, I'll conclude its all with the idea yes there is a need to have school funded but its around the assertion that our kids have to have a high quality education to be successful in the world that they are growing into. And yes we do have a fiscal responsibility to use community resources in the most cost effective manner and the reality of it is there are constraints in meeting that proposition. So with that, and I will return for the conclusion, I'll turn it to Eric who will provide us with more detail of the nature of the problem.
But it wasn't only sympathy for the survivors of Katrina that drew them to New Orleans. The city's disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the flood -- many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired. What is being built in its place is an educational landscape unlike any other, a radical experiment in reform. More than half of the city's public-school students are now being educated in charter schools, publicly financed but privately run, and most of the rest are enrolled in schools run by an unusually decentralized and rapidly changing school district. From across the country, and in increasing numbers, hundreds of ambitious, idealistic young educators like Hardrick and Sanders have descended on New Orleans, determined to take advantage of the opportunity not just to innovate and reinvent but also to prove to the rest of the country that an entire city of children in the demographic generally considered the hardest to educate -- poor African-American kids -- can achieve high levels of academic success.
Katrina struck at a critical moment in the evolution of the contemporary education-reform movement. President Bush's education initiative, No Child Left Behind, had shined a light on the underperformance of poor minority students across the country by requiring, for the first time, that a school successfully educate not just its best students but its poor and minority students too in order to be counted as successful. Scattered across the country were a growing number of schools, often intensive charter schools, that seemed to be succeeding with disadvantaged students in a consistent and measurable way. But these schools were isolated examples. No one had figured out how to "scale up" those successes to transform an entire urban school district. There were ambitious new superintendents in Philadelphia, New York City, Denver and Chicago, all determined to reform their school systems to better serve poor children, but even those who seemed to be succeeding were doing so in incremental ways, lifting the percentage of students passing statewide or citywide tests to, say, 40 from 30 or to 50 from 40.
Fascinating. Innovation occurs at the edges and is more likely to flourish in the absence of traditional monolithic governance, or a "one size fits all" approach to education.
Madison School District's Financial Situation: Memo to the School Board & Administration
Thank you for engaging the community in such a meaningful way with the forums this week. I believe the forums were successful in that the participating citizens had the opportunity to openly ask questions, seek information and give suggestions for consideration. The information provided by Dan and Erik was clear and helpful. We believe, that with the actions of the board and administration in recent weeks, there is a new openness, a willingness for exercising greater due-diligence, and an openness to examine more fully the opportunities and challenges with fresh insights and strategies.
There is a challenging road ahead with very heavy lifting to be done to continue to more fully communicate with and engage the public in the decision-making process regarding the future of the district in the educational, business and financial elements. These processes are absolutely critical to charting the course toward more effectivenss in student achievement results and business management. At this point in time, the plans and communications provide greater hope for more effective decision-making. However, time is critical for these processes to evolve with hard evidence to show the public that serious steps are actually underway and are producing information and results in order to provide for clearer future options and enlightened decision-making.
Given the critical values briefly outlined above, it is premature at this time to make recommendations or decisions on a course or courses of action to seek more spending authority as a solution regarding the financial needs of the district. The groundwork for decision-making and the development of improved levels of public confidence in the Board and administration have to continue to be proactively matured for both short- and long-term successes in the district. We urge you to proceed carefully, firmly and in a strategic and progressive manner.
I am available and willing at any time to engage in discussion regarding these statements and recommendations.
Many educators and visitors had an opportunity to learn how Colorado is addressing education reform during the back-to-school kick-off workshop Wednesday at Cañon City High School.
"Gov. Ritter and I are doing (this) all over the state" to kick off the beginning of the school year, Lt. Gov. Barbara O'Brien said prior to her speech. "We want to talk about changes that we're implementing through the P-20 Education Coordinating Council. P is for preschool and the 20 is to get us all ready for graduate school."
During her presentation, she explained how several recommendations were passed through the Legislature that took affect July 1.
On Aug. 18 Nerad will present his recommendations to the board on whether a referendum is the way to trim an $8.2 million hole in the budget, and the board likely will vote Aug. 25 to formulate referendum questions for the Nov. 4 election. In addition, the gap is expected to be $6 million in the 2010-11 school year and $5.1 million in 2011-12.
Since a state-imposed revenue formula was implemented in 1993 to control property taxes, the district has cut $60 million in programs, staffing and services. The district did not have to make budget reductions during the 2008-09 school year after it benefited from a one-time, $5.7 million tax incremental financing district windfall from the city. The district will spend approximately $367.6 million during the 2008-09 school year, an increase of about 0.75 percent over the 2007-08 school year budget.
In addition to exploring reductions, Madison officials are researching how much it would cost to begin offering kindergarten to 4-year-olds in the district — a program offered by two-thirds of the school districts in Wisconsin.
Resident William Rowe, a retired educator, urged school officials to generate excitement by offering 4K, which research has shown can help improve academic achievement.
"I believe this is the time to go for it," said Rowe, who proposed that a 4K referendum be offered separately from a referendum that would help avert budget cuts.
Don Severson, president of Active Citizens for Education, a district watchdog group, praised district officials for making the process so open to the public. However, he urged officials to provide more information about the costs and benefits of specific programs to help the public understand what's working and what's not. He predicted a referendum is "going to be very difficult to pass" but said he still hasn't decided whether one is needed.
The Los Angeles Unified School District's Board of Education voted on Aug. 1 to put a $7 billion school bond on the Nov. 4 ballot. That's more than twice the amount the school board was mulling just two weeks earlier. The size of the bond may have jumped because polling showed voters would approve it, and because the Community College District trustees voted the previous week to put a $3.2 billion bond on the same ballot.
But the board may have overreached. About $2 billion of the bond is not yet allocated to any particular project. That lack of specificity may run afoul of the California constitutional amendment that allows school bonds to pass with just a 55% vote, rather than the two-thirds needed for other local bonds. The larger number may also be more of a reflection of bargaining with charter schools over funding and backing for the bond, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's desire to demonstrate progress on improving schools, than actual need.
A $5.5 million federal grant will boost efforts to shrink the racial achievement gap, raise graduation rates and expand the courses available in the Madison School District's four major high schools, officials announced Monday.
The five-year U.S. Department of Education grant will help the district build stronger connections to students by creating so-called "small learning communities" that divide each high school population into smaller populations.
Many of those structural changes already have been implemented at two high schools -- Memorial and West -- and similar redesigns are planned for East and La Follette high schools.
Under that plan, East's student body will be randomly assigned to four learning communities. La Follette will launch "freshman academies" -- smaller class sizes for freshmen in core academic areas, plus advisers and mentors to help them feel connected to the school.
"The grant centers on things that already are important to the school district: the goals of increasing academic success for all students, strengthening student-student and student-adult relationships and improving post-secondary outlooks," Nerad said.
Expected plans at Madison East include randomly placing students in one of four learning neighborhoods, while faculty and administrators at La Follette will create "academies" with smaller classes to improve learning for freshmen in core courses. Additional advisors will also be assigned to aid students in academies at La Follette.
The interesting question in all of this is: does the money drive strategy or is it the other way around? In addition, what is the budget impact after 5 years? A friend mentioned several years ago, during the proposed East High School curriculum change controversy, that these initiatives fail to address the real issue: lack of elementary and middle school preparation.
Finally, will this additional $1.1m in annual funds for 5 years reduce the projected budget "gap" that may drive a fall referendum?
Looking for a way to improve your mind and make some money? Check out the latest "critical thinking" courses. Many come up on a Google search. Many promise better grades and higher test scores. Without much effort, you can create your own course and tap into this hot topic.
The only thing is, it turns out such programs don't work very well, except as a measure of the gullibility of even smart educators. A remarkable article by Daniel T. Willingham, the University of Virginia cognitive scientist outlines the reasons. Critical thinking, he explains in a summer 2007 American Educator article, overlooked until now by me, is not a skill like riding a bike or diagramming a sentence that, once learned, can be applied in many situations.
Instead, as your most-hated high school teacher often told you, you have to buckle down and learn the content of a subject--facts, concepts and trends--before the maxims of critical thinking taught in these feverishly-marketed courses will do you much good.
It wasn't until he hand-delivered bottles of the discolored water to School Board members at a public meeting that the district took action.
That was five years ago, and Seattle Public Schools has addressed those problems and adopted tough water-quality standards since then. But Cooper warns of similar environmental health and safety problems in schools statewide – and that Washington's code is woefully outdated.
With the state Board of Health on the cusp of revising its rule governing environmental health and safety in schools – the first major changes in nearly four decades – it's time for the public to take note, Cooper said.
"If you don't pay attention, and don't get involved, it will be your own backyard, your own child being affected," he said.
The proposal under consideration would modernize the rule, adding standards for indoor air and water quality and playground safety.
The weakest and most vulnerable element in education, particularly in the developed world, is the education of adolescents in our secondary-school systems. Relative economic prosperity and the extension of leisure time have spawned an inconsistent but prevalent postponement of adulthood. On the one hand, as consumers and future citizens, young people between the ages of 13 and 18 are afforded considerable status and independence. Yet they remain infantilized in terms of their education, despite the earlier onset of maturation. Standards and expectations are too low. Modern democracies are increasingly inclined to ensure rates of close to 100 percent completion of a secondary school that can lead to university education. This has intensified an unresolved struggle between the demands of equity and the requirements of excellence. If we do not address these problems, the quality of university education will be at risk.
To make secondary education meaningful, more intellectual demands of an adult nature should be placed on adolescents. They should be required to use primary materials of learning, not standardized textbooks; original work should be emphasized, not imitative, uniform assignments; and above all, students should undergo inspired teaching by experts. Curricula should be based on current problems and issues, not disciplines defined a century ago. Statistics and probability need to be brought to the forefront, given our need to assess risk and handle data, replacing calculus as the entry-level college requirement. Secondary schools and their programs of study are not only intellectually out of date, but socially obsolete. They were designed decades ago for large children, not today's young adults.
Raise, not lower standards. Quite a concept. Clusty Search: Leon Botstein.
STATE governments across the country are reeling from the effects of the current economic downturn. New York, facing a $26.2 billion deficit over the next three years, is particularly hard hit. Like most other states, it is looking to balance its budget mainly by cutting spending.
But if history is a guide, governors and legislators across the country will seek to avoid the difficult choices that are required. Instead, they will likely pass the costs of the services that we enjoy today on to our children and grandchildren, through creatively deceptive budgeting.
This is a time-honored practice. In 1991, the State of New York sold Attica prison to none other than itself. The buyer was a state agency that financed the $200 million purchase price by issuing bonds. The agency then leased the prison back to the state, with the lease payments being equal to the debt service on the bonds.
In substance, of course, the transaction was nothing more than a borrowing arrangement — the equivalent of borrowing $200 million from the buyers of the bonds. Nevertheless, the state booked the entire sale price as revenue for the year. The previous year, the state sold the Cross Westchester Expressway to the New York Thruway Authority — in other words, to itself.
rom the tough streets of Oakland, where so many of Alice Payne’s relatives and friends had been shot to death, the newspaper advertisement for a federally assisted rental property in this Northern California suburb was like a bridge across the River Jordan.
Ms. Payne, a 42-year-old African-American mother of five, moved to Antioch in 2006. With the local real estate market slowing and a housing voucher covering two-thirds of the rent, she found she could afford a large, new home, with a pool, for $2,200 a month.
But old problems persisted. When her estranged husband was arrested, the local housing authority tried to cut off her subsidy, citing disturbances at her house. Then the police threatened to prosecute her landlord for any criminal activity or public nuisances caused by the family. The landlord forced the Paynes to leave when their lease was up.
Under the Section 8 federal housing voucher program, thousands of poor, urban and often African-American residents have left hardscrabble neighborhoods in the nation’s largest cities and resettled in the suburbs.
Law enforcement experts and housing researchers argue that rising crime rates follow Section 8 recipients to their new homes, while other experts discount any direct link. But there is little doubt that cultural shock waves have followed the migration. Social and racial tensions between newcomers and their neighbors have increased, forcing suburban communities like Antioch to re-evaluate their civic identities along with their methods of dealing with the new residents.
Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades by Hanna Rosin @ the Atlantic Monthly:
Lately, though, a new and unexpected pattern has emerged, taking criminologists by surprise. While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a year. In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called “A Gathering Storm” that this might represent “the front end … of an epidemic of violence not seen for years.” The leaders of the group, which is made up of police chiefs and sheriffs, theorized about what might be spurring the latest crime wave: the spread of gangs, the masses of offenders coming out of prison, methamphetamines. But mostly they puzzled over the bleak new landscape. According to FBI data, America’s most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out--Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee.
Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.
Bria Heard, 14, a rising sophomore in Prince William County, had a couple of options after she failed world history last year. She could retake the course over six weeks in summer school or during the next school year and try to improve her grade.
Or, she could choose a fairly novel program available in the school system. She could do the course work using a new computer-based program that would not improve her grade, but would allow her to earn the credits needed to stay on track to graduate in four years. To her, the benefits outweighed the cost of not getting a better grade. The program is free and can be completed in days.
For 18 consecutive years the Tax Foundation has published an estimate of the combined state-local tax burden shouldered by the residents of each of the 50 states. For each state, we calculate the total amount paid by the residents in taxes, and we divide those taxes by the total income in each state to compute a “tax burden” measure.
We make this calculation not only for the most recent year but also for earlier years because tax and income data are revised periodically by government agencies, and in our own methodology to take advantage of new datasets.
The goal is to focus not on the tax collectors but on the taxpayers. That is, we answer the question: What percentage of their income are the residents of this state paying in state and local taxes? We are not trying to answer the question: How much money have state and local governments collected?
A community group that supports D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's proposed salary and bonus package for teachers has hired a small group of instructors at $1,000 a week to lobby colleagues for the plan, drawing accusations from union leaders of interference with the collective bargaining process.
A spokesman for Strong Schools DC, founded in May by half a dozen local philanthropists with a history of involvement in education issues, said five public school teachers were employed "to spread the word" about Rhee's plan. A recruiting e-mail, sent by one of the teachers, said the group was prepared to hire as many as 20 "teacher contract outreach coordinators."
But Todd Lamb, the spokesman, said the group has decided to pull back for the moment, principally because contract talks between Rhee and the Washington Teachers' Union have not concluded.
This year's Sats results suggest, for the third year in a row, that only 67 per cent of pupils are achieving the writing standard required of them. For boys, the figure is worse, with just 60 per cent able to put pencil to paper with any proficiency. I use the word "any" advisedly. I think that many people would be pretty shocked to see the unimpressive level of literacy that is needed for pupils to manage a pass. Yet the numbers achieving even this modest benchmark, teachers themselves say, offer an exaggerated picture of the writing ability of schoolchildren.
Nearly all secondary schools now feel obliged to re-test their intake when they start this new phase of their education. They cannot trust what Sats tell them, and feel obliged to find out for themselves what sort of remedial input a child really needs. Such measures attest that the problem is not marginal. It is not without the bounds of probability to infer that as many as half of all boys are going into secondary education without having mastered the basic skills needed to express their thoughts on paper. How dismal.
This miserable state of affairs gives the lie to the fantasy that has been long promulgated by the Government, which insists that primary education is fine, and all the trouble begins at secondary school. Of course pupils will run into difficulties at secondary school, if the groundwork laid down in their previous six years of education has not been thorough. This has been happening for years.
At this juncture, several board members won't say if they favor a referendum, instead choosing to wait to hear what the public has to say and to discover what Nerad's recommendations are. But it is widely expected that a referendum will be the path they will take in order to close a gaping hole in the budget.
One other topic of discussion that was brought up at Monday's meeting was Nerad's stance on implementing 4-year-old kindergarten. Nerad and Eric Kass, the district's assistant superintendent of business services, are working on a cost analysis of bringing 4K to the district. Fully exploring the options of how the program can be funded until it generates revenue is Nerad's main concern, and though Kass is gathering the data, the district won't be ready to present the data in time for a possible fall referendum.
"My preference would be to see if there are any other options short of a referendum to address the first two years of the funding," Nerad said. "I will also say that I haven't closed my mind at all because if those other options don't work, then we need to have the discussion about addressing this in any other way."
The property tax effect of a potential referendum will be unveiled in two weeks, Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad said Monday.
At the Madison School Board's meeting on Aug. 18, Nerad plans to recommend whether the School Board should ask voters for additional money to avoid deep budget cuts.
The district's budget shortfall is projected to be $8.2 million in the 2009-10 school year and about $5 million each of the following three years.
Governors one after another have tinkered with public education inputs and funding formulas, promising all the while to succeed where their predecessors had failed. Had those approaches worked —- more inputs and revised formulas recommended by blue ribbon commissions —- schools would be fixed by now.
They aren’t.
It’s the model that’s broken, not the funding formulas.
Across the country industries beset by new marketplace dynamics —- industries that include newspapers, health care providers and all others, automobiles among them, that compete globally —- are frantically at work reinventing their business models.
Education’s marketplace changed decades ago. The best hope now is to stop fighting the marketplace and, instead, let competition work. Give parents choice —- and the means to exercise it. Improve public schools, yes. But don’t keep children prisoners until the system is perfected.
Jan Morrison of the Gates Foundation recently posed a rhetorical question that perfectly sums up the state of K-12 education: “Do our schools still look like they did in the 1950s – now ask yourself, do our companies still look like they did in the 1950s?"
The answer is quite clear – the world economy has changed dramatically since the 1950s, and any company that refuses to keep up is soon out of business. The same cannot be said of American schools, where the curricula are largely unchanged since the 1950s and classroom technology isn’t much better. Even our school calendar is still based on an agrarian society. How many bushels of corn has your child harvested this summer?
Although our schools are not going out of business, their results are akin to a company ready to file for Chapter 11. While 90 percent of the fastest-growing jobs in America require some postsecondary education, about a third of our nation's students do not even finish high school in four years. Our highest-performing state, Massachusetts, can only boast that 51 percent of its eighth grade students are proficient in math. There is a growing consensus that education reform is critical to our nation’s competitiveness, and there should be when confronted by statistics like these.
One of Utah's smallest school districts wants to move to a four-day week permanently, saying the schedule has helped increase instructional time for many students.
Tiny Rich School District in northern Utah asked state education leaders Friday to consider allowing it to continue holding school four days a week in the future. The schedule saves the district about $1,500 a week in transportation costs, said Ralph Johnson, Rich school board president.
Beginning Monday, many state government offices will also be open only four days a week in a move meant to lower energy costs for the state and employees.
But saving energy is not the main reason the district wants to continue the four-day schedule, which started two years ago and is due to continue next year under an agreement approved by the Utah State Board of Education. Rich, which last school year had 436 students attending four schools, conceived the arrangement to deal with sports and activities.
A team of national experts has urged a major overhaul in the way Milwaukee Public Schools handles behavior issues in schools, saying MPS does not do enough to deal with problems short of suspending students and may have the highest suspension rate of any urban school system in America.
"District staff members need to mobilize to meet this challenge" of dealing with behavior issues in ways that don't involve suspensions but are more effective in improving both a student's behavior and academic work, the team said in a report to MPS officials.
Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said in an interview that changes in line with the report's recommendations are under way, including a new policy in which every parent will be given a written statement this fall on the disciplinary practices that will be used in a child's classroom.
The report, submitted several months ago, is the second in two years by a team from the Council of Great City Schools that was critical of major aspects of what goes on in MPS classrooms. In both cases, the reports were not made public until a Journal Sentinel reporter asked for them. In 2006, a report from the council criticized academic practices and low achievement by students, called for more direction from the central administration of what was being done in schools, and said people involved in MPS, from the School Board to the classroom, "appear fairly complacent."
The students swapped stories of little sisters, brothers and cousins who were taking above-grade-level math and getting good grades, yet did not seem to have a firm grasp of the material. The curriculum is being "narrowed and shallowed," Walstein said. "The philosophy is that they squeeze you out the top like a tube of toothpaste. That's what Montgomery County math is."
Several students nodded their heads. This thesis has become Walstein's obsession: In its drive to be the best, please affluent parents and close the achievement gap on standardized tests, the county is accelerating too many students in math, at the expense of the curriculum -- and the students. The average accelerated math student "thinks he's fine. His parents think he's fine. The school system says he's fine. But he's not fine!" Walstein declares on one occasion. On another, Walstein is even less diplomatic. " 'We have the best courses and there's no achievement gap and everything is wonderful,' " he says, parroting the message he believes county administrators are trying to project.
In Shaw's educational universe, "It's the teachers who are important." His goal -- doubling the number of kids in the "advanced:" category in five years -- focuses on teachers. "Most of the variable is teachers so you focus on teaching. You try to use techniques that are effective with different kinds of kids." And he also would use a pay-for-performance plan to reward the best teachers.
Although he's been a professor at UW-Madison for five years, he had a key criticism: "At the University of Wisconsin, the best teachers get the best kids. That system is not working. We need to share the best teachers with the kids who are struggling." And he wants to improve teaching at Unified first by speeding up the hiring process, cutting through the delays that let the best new grads commit early to other districts, and by developing our existing teachers through active coaching. "Teachers working with other teachers, not just lectures. Professional development must be embedded in the schedule," he said.
In the first major test for newly hired Superintendent Daniel Nerad, Madison school officials this week will begin public discussions of whether to ask voters for additional money to head off a potentially "catastrophic" $8.2 million budget gap for the 2009-10 school year.
The Madison School Board's meetings in August will be dominated by talk of the possible referendum, which could appear on the Nov. 4 ballot.
The public will be invited to speak out at forums on Aug. 12 and 14.
Related:
Madison School District Budget history. The current 2008-2009 budget is $367,806,712, up from $339,685,844 in 2007-2008 (the 08/09 budget includes $17M for a new far west side school). The "final" budget numbers typically change a number of times throughout the year as new tax revenues appear (schools receive tax dollars via local property taxes, redistributed state income and sales taxes and some federal income taxes. Formulas, legislation and grants often change, including those based on enrollment).
Listen to Monday evening's referendum discussion via this 28MB mp3 audio file
Props to the District for finding a reduced spending increase of $1,000,000 and looking for more (The same service budget growth, given teacher contract and other increases vs budget growth limits results in the "gap" referred to in Hall's article above). Happily, Monday evening's referendum discussion included a brief mention of revisiting the now many years old "same service" budget approach (28mb mp3, about 30 minutes). A question was also raised about attracting students (MMSD enrollment has been flat for years). Student growth means additional tax and spending authority for the school district.
The Madison school board has been far more actively involved in financial issues recently. Matters such as the MMSD's declining equity (and related structural deficit) have been publicly discussed. A very useful "citizen's budget" document was created for the 2006-2007 ($333M) and 2007-2008 ($339M) (though the final 2007-2008 number was apparently $365M) budgets. Keeping track of changes year to year is not a small challenge.
Nearly 50 New York City school principals were fired immediately in what Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein declared a “warning shot across the bow.” Blackwater USA was awarded a no-bid contract to take over school security. And a national education foundation offered a $100 million endowment to any university that established a degree in “high-stakes test-taking.”
Those satirical news items, which appear on an education blog, are always slightly off-kilter, but several have seemed believable enough to prompt inquiries to the Education Department’s headquarters from parents and journalism students asking to follow up on a story they saw elsewhere.
“The best part is when people can’t distinguish their reality from the reality that is made up,” said Gary Babad, the writer of dozens of mock news items dealing with the Education Department. “I think of it as a kind of therapy and my form of quiet dissent. And it’s a stress reliever.”
As education expenses continue to grow, strapped taxpayers have begun pushing back on state and local governments. In the tiny State of Maine, many school districts are finding that passing a school budget for the upcoming school year a sincere challenge.
Even the tiny town of Monmouth, home to one of Maine’s finest public school systems, has seen such a rebellion, leaving school officials without a school budget for 2008-09. With another school year set to begin in less than a month’s time, Monmouth finds itself in an extremely challenging position.
Why did the United States become the leading economic power of the 20th century? The best short answer is that a ferocious belief that people have the power to transform their own lives gave Americans an unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom.
Between 1870 and 1950, the average American’s level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade. In 1890, the average adult had completed about 8 years of schooling. By 1900, the average American had 8.8 years. By 1910, it was 9.6 years, and by 1960, it was nearly 14 years.
As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” America’s educational progress was amazingly steady over those decades, and the U.S. opened up a gigantic global lead. Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school.
In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.
More than a year ago, Kaiser Aluminum Corp. was looking for a spot to build an $80 million office-and-research center that would employ 150 workers.
After considering cities in three different states, the maker of aluminum products settled on Kalamazoo, Mich., a once-prosperous manufacturing city that had lost thousands of jobs in the last decade or so.
One of the draws: The Kalamazoo Promise, a program that provides at least partial college tuition to all graduating seniors who spent their high-school years in the city's public schools.
Just as Kaiser was gearing up its search, a group of wealthy philanthropists who have remained anonymous unveiled the Promise as a gift to the city. The lure of the program as a benefit for Kaiser employees, and its potential to produce a highly educated work force, proved a big attraction, says Martin Carter, vice president and general manager of common alloy products at Foothill Ranch, Calif.-based Kaiser.
Seven years ago, I watched my daughter, Janet, receive her diploma from Johnston High School, in East Austin. No parent will ever do that again: In June, Johnston ceased to exist. A few days before this year’s graduation ceremony, Texas education commissioner Robert Scott informed the Austin Independent School District that he was invoking the nuclear option authorized by the Texas Education Code to close the school after five consecutive years of “academically unacceptable” performances on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test. Scores improved this year, but not enough to save the school. State rules mandate that three fourths of Johnston’s teachers and half of its students be reassigned when the 2008—2009 academic year begins (some students and teachers can opt to remain at the current campus, which will be “repurposed”). The Johnston name will be expunged, and AISD must produce a plan for some sort of educational triage.
I was saddened to read about Johnston’s fate—but not surprised. For almost two years I had served on its campus advisory council (CAC) with other parents, teachers, administrators, and representatives of the community. I knew Johnston’s problems all too well. In one of my first meetings, we learned that 50 percent of the freshman class had failed all four core courses (English, math, science, social studies) the previous year. In an educational environment dominated by high-stakes testing, Johnston got the black mark, but the roots of the problem reached back into the elementary and middle schools that had failed to prepare their students for high school.
Schools run by private enterprise? Free iPods and laptop computers to attract students?
It may sound out of place in Sweden, that paragon of taxpayer-funded cradle-to-grave welfare. But a sweeping reform of the school system has survived the critics and 16 years later is spreading and attracting interest abroad.
"I think most people, parents and children, appreciate the choice," said Bertil Ostberg, from the Ministry of Education. "You can decide what school you want to attend and that appeals to people."
Since the change was introduced in 1992 by a center-right government that briefly replaced the long-governing Social Democrats, the numbers have shot up. In 1992, 1.7 percent of high schoolers and 1 percent of elementary schoolchildren were privately educated. Now the figures are 17 percent and 9 percent.
In some ways the trend mirrors the rise of the voucher system in the U.S., with all its pros and cons. But while the percentage of children in U.S. private schools has dropped slightly in recent years, signs are that the trend in Sweden is growing.
I thoroughly enjoy working for my principal. He's a great guy, has a no-nonsense approach to dealing with discipline and doesn't try to micromanage the staff. He's not perfect (e.g. he still requires me to wear a tie), but after reading all of the comments about other principals, he does an outstanding job. That said, I would very much enjoy to see him more at school, not off at DISD-mandated principals' meetings.
Now, I don't know the exact number he has gone to meetings across Dallas, but it's often more than once a week, and usually half a day or longer. He tries to make it every morning, give the announcements, meet with parents, etc., but then he's off in a flash to learn about some new initiative, see how our OHI scores are faring, or TAKS test security guidelines. And when we hit the AYP list the first time, he was gone almost twice as much. I've yet to see the man take a day off and I wonder how he maintains his sanity sitting in meetings all the time.
Jeff Spitzer-Resnick says the case could spur the Madison school district to offer 4-year-old kindergarten and amp up its assistance to dozens of families.
"My clients can afford preschool," says Spitzer-Resnick, an attorney with Disability Rights Wisconsin, a nonprofit public-interest law firm. "The people who most need help and most stand to benefit are the ones who can’t."
Spitzer-Resnick is representing the parents of a 4-year-old special needs child. A district evaluation in mid-2007 determined that the child qualified for special education services, as is mandated for 3- and 4-year-olds by state and federal law.
But the Madison district does not offer 4-year-old kindergarten and has only nominal programming for kids in this category. And so the parents (whom Isthmus is not naming to protect their child’s privacy) asked Disability Rights Wisconsin to argue that the district must pay the costs of a private preschool they used as an alternative.
The poor rating should serve as yet another warning to state and local leaders not to jack up this worst-of-all tax even higher. It also should energize groups such as The Wisconsin Way, which is brainstorming for creative and fair ways to reduce our state 's property tax burden while growing our high-tech economy.
If anything, the Taxpayers Alliance ranking Tuesday minimized the pinch many Wisconsin homeowners feel. That 's because the group looked at the burden on all properties together -- homes, businesses, farms and other land.
If you single out just homes, a different study last year suggested Wisconsin property taxes rank No. 1 in the nation. The National Association of Home Builders compiled property tax rates on a median-valued home in each state. Only Wisconsin and Texas (which doesn 't have a state income tax) exceeded $18 per $1,000 of property value.
In its report Tuesday, the Taxpayers Alliance measured the property tax bite more broadly. It ranked states based on ability to pay. It found that Wisconsin 's property tax burden eats up about 4.4 percent of personal income here.
These middle class retirement programs, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, cost more than $1 trillion annually (about the same as the entire economic output of Canada, the 13th largest ecoomy in the world, see chart above), and will cause federal spending to jump by half, from 20% of the economy to 35% by 2035. This tsunami of spending is a major threat to limited government because it runs on auto-pilot with automatic increases locked in by each program’s governing laws. While other programs are constrained through annual budgets, entitlements get first call on resources. Other goals such as defense or national security must compete for an increasingly smaller share of what’s left.
A case in point: When a class of local elementary school students wrote emails to district officials last year expressing their disappointment over a canceled field trip, the district responded by reprimanding their teacher. (See "The Danger of Teaching Democracy," 2/7/08.) Apparently, Rainwater didn’t appreciate the teacher’s efforts to give her students a little civics lesson.
That’s not to say the district doesn’t listen to students at all. Each year, students complete a school climate survey, which gathers their opinions on the fairness of school policies and the effectiveness of support services.
But if students want to share what’s on their minds on their own terms? Forget it.
JOHN MERROW: ... when she announced she would close the 23 chronically under-enrolled schools. Ongoing protests did not slow Rhee down. By the end of the school year, she had removed 36 principals, 22 assistant principals, and 121 employees in her central office.
She also revealed plans to overhaul 27 additional schools that had failed to meet federal standards for academic improvement.
MICHELLE RHEE: I'm proud of the fact that we have made some very difficult decisions that there was very vocal opposition to, that we stuck to our guns.
ADRIAN FENTY: We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make this school system excellent. And to the extent we can allow her to do that, as free from outside obstacles as humanly possible, the faster she will move.
JOHN MERROW: Last year, D.C. voted to dissolve the elected school board. Unlike her predecessors, Rhee reports to one person alone: the mayor.
Texas schools with student dropout problems are getting a break in the state’s performance ratings this year – a move likely to spare dozens of school districts and campuses from being slapped with “academically unacceptable” ratings.
State Education Commissioner Robert Scott has decided to excuse schools that fail to meet minimum criteria under the new federal definition for dropouts as long as their passing rates for all student groups on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills are satisfactory.
The decision means that no school district or campus can receive an unacceptable rating solely for dropout or student completion rates that fall short of the federal standards.
Those standards basically require a high school completion rate of at least 75 percent and an annual dropout rate of no more than 1 percent of the students in grades 7 and 8. The current completion rate refers to the percentage of ninth graders from five years ago who graduated in the Class of 2007.
Earlier today I had the high privilege of visiting and being given a tour of the Oakland Military Institute, a charter school in the Oakland (California) School District. Summer school was in session so I did get to see some cadets, but I look forward to visiting again some time when the full student population is present--that's the only way to get a true feel for a school.
The school board and local teachers union were hostile to the creation of OMI from the very beginning; it was only the persistence of then-Mayor Jerry Brown (former CA governor, current attorney general), that allowed the school to get off the ground. For its first few years, OMI was located at the former Oakland Army Base. But that facility became needed, and OMI had to find a new home. There was a closed elementary school in a residential neighborhood...
Six school districts in Dane County are showing that when the going gets tough, the tough come up with smart ideas.
Administrators in the six districts hope to pool resources and work with Madison Area Technical College to offer courses in specialized skills that might not otherwise be possible.
The administrators hope to launch by 2010 what 's being called The Global Academy, a hybrid of career-related high school and college courses for high school juniors and seniors from the Verona, Middleton-Cross Plains, Belleville, McFarland, Mount Horeb and Oregon school districts.
Changing enrollments, higher expenses, taxpayer angst and the state 's faulty school financing system are making it harder for individual districts to provide as many courses or offer new ones.
Mayor Villaraigosa announces a program to train students in culinary arts and tourism while they complete high school. The goal is to prepare them for both a career and further college education.
A $1.2-million program designed to curb galloping high school dropout rates will send Santee Education Complex students to Los Angeles Trade Technical College to train in culinary arts and tourism Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced Tuesday.
Funded by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation,, the three-year program will combine college classes with hands-on work experience to produce graduating seniors who are both college-ready and qualified to join the workforce, officials said. Currently, nearly half of Santee's mostly low-income students drop out.
Net property taxes in Wisconsin rose 5.7% in 2008, the largest increase since 2005, the year before the recent levy limits on municipalities and counties were imposed. A new report from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX) found that while gross property taxes climbed 6.2%, state lawmakers increased the school levy credit $79.3 million to $672.4 million to lessen the impact on property taxpayers. The new study, "The Property Tax in National Context," notes that 2006 property taxes here were ninth highest nationally and higher than those in all surrounding states.
According to the new study, school levies rose the most, 7.4%. With the recent state budget delayed until October 2007, school aids were unchanged from 2006-07. Since school property taxes are tied to state aids through state-imposed revenue limits, the budget delay resulted in higher school property taxes, WISTAX said. Now in its 76th year, WISTAX is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public-policy research organization dedicated to citizen education.
County and municipal levy increases were limited by state lawmakers to the greater of 3.86% or the increase in property values due to new construction. There were exceptions to the limits, particularly for new debt service. The WISTAX report noted that, with a slowing real estate market, statewide net new construction growth was 2.5%. However, municipal property taxes climbed 5.0%, and county levies were up 4.5%.
Among the three types of municipalities, municipal-purpose property tax levies in cities (5.3%) grew fastest, followed by villages (4.6%) and towns (4.2%). The report noted that the state’s two largest municipalities had above-average increases: Milwaukee was up 9.0%, while Madison’s municipal levy climbed 6.9%. The largest county increases were in Eau Claire (19.2%), Polk (13.5%), Door (12.4%), and Pierce (12.3%) counties.
Ruby Payne and Jawanza Kunjufu had never shared the stage before Friday, but their careers have intertwined for years in a debate over how American teachers differ from their students.
Both believe teachers fail to make connections with students because of differences in cultural backgrounds. Payne, a white former principal, believes poverty is the root of that disconnect. Kunjufu, a black educator, says that theory ignores race.
The two have sparred in writing and in separate appearances but spoke together for the first time Friday at Indiana Black Expo to a room of hundreds of educators from around the state.
"They do not agree on many issues, but they have agreed on one important thing: They have agreed to come together and talk to us and help us better understand their views," Brownsburg Schools Superintendent Kathleen Corbin said in an introduction.
Ellen Estrada is principal of Walter Payton College Prep High School on the near north side of Chicago, near downtown. The public magnet school, which opened in 2000, is named in honor of the legendary Chicago Bears football player, who died shortly before it opened. In 2006, Walter Payton won a prestigious Goldman Sachs Prize for Excellence in International Education. Almost all students take four years of a foreign language and have the opportunity to travel abroad. Videoconferences have been held with students in Iraq, South Africa, Morocco, China and Chile, among other places. The school's reputation for nurturing global citizens brought U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to the school for a visit in February. Estrada was interviewed by Linda Lantor Fandel, deputy editorial-page editor.
Jordan Nolan didn't have to show up after school on a Friday in late May for a discussion about the invisible children of Uganda. Neither did about 30 other teenagers sprawled on couches and chairs in a classroom at Walter Payton College Prep High School in Chicago.
But after a brief presentation by four students, they engaged in a spirited, hour-long debate about just whose responsibility it is to try to end a civil war fought with kidnapped child soldiers.
The turnout wasn't surprising, not even at the end of a week near the end of the school year.
Not at a public high school that's an American showcase for how to prepare young people for a globally competitive economy in the 21century.
While the national and international conversation grows louder about how to define a world-class education, Payton is a real-life laboratory.
or the seventh year in a row, state audits of Seattle Public Schools highlighted some questionable expenses and persistent payroll problems.
The audits, released Monday, noted about $23,890 worth of questionable expenses from the 2006-07 school year. In one case, a former school district secretary forged her supervisor's signature to get paid for nearly 300 hours of overtime that she had not worked, costing the district more than $8,700. The district fired her.
In another case, auditors found that more than $15,100 in Associated Student Body money was used improperly to pay for plane tickets to bring South African exchange students and teachers to Seattle as part of a high school foreign-exchange program.
The district also was faulted for paying some Seattle high school students participating in the exchange program approximately $25,000 up front for travel expenses to South Africa and Ireland. The district should have reimbursed them later, auditors said, and shouldn't have covered some improper purchases made during the trips -- including alcoholic drinks and host gifts.
Parents have said they want to be more involved with the selection process. About 25 JPS parents and Jackson residents rallied on South State Street in front of the district's administration buildings Friday, urging the board to slow down the selection process and allow for more community involvement.
In an attempt to get the public more involved, the board asked community members to submit suggested questions for the board to ask applicants. Stamps said at least 20 community members responded.
Jackson supports about 31,000 students and the article notes that "20 community members responded". I recall that the Madison Superintendent Search consultants mentioned that the approximately 400 community responses (in a district with 24,268 students) was quite good. Certainly, apathy reigns.
This report includes general purpose revenue (GPR) taxes collected by the Wisconsin Department of Revenue, and does not include taxes collected by the Office of the Commissioner of Insurance (OCI), administrative fees, and other miscellaneous revenues. Total General Fund tax collections are reported in the Department of Administration’s Report of Monthly General Fund Financial Information, which includes GPR and program revenue taxes collected by all state agencies.
Overall tax collections are up 2.9%, however, state spending is growing at a faster rate, which has caused state and local spending changes. I wonder how the 2.9% tax collection increase compares to the average annual wage changes?
Some of it went to cover increases in the cost of living, and state spending naturally grows with the size of the population. But even adjusting for inflation and population growth, state spending is up almost 20% compared with four years ago, a big enough bump that ordinary Californians should be able to notice it. The state's financial statements describe where the money went -- the big gainers were education ($13 billion), transportation ($10 billion) and health ($10 billion) -- but not why these billions don't create even a blip on our day-to-day radar.
One possibility is that we simply do not notice all of the valuable services we receive. A national 2007 survey by William G. Howell at the University of Chicago and Martin R. West at Brown University found that respondents underestimated spending in their school district by 60%; on average, they believed spending was $4,231 per student when in fact it was $10,377. They also found that Americans underestimated teacher salaries by 30%. How many Californians know that public school teachers in the state earn an average of $59,000 a year, essentially tied with Connecticut for the highest average pay in the country? Likewise, perhaps we don't notice the repaired roads or new buses and trains that take us to work.
On the other hand, maybe these billions of dollars just do not translate into services that are valuable to us.
Local school officials took another early step Monday toward creating a Verona-based magnet school that could offer area high school students specialized classes they might not get otherwise.
With Madison Area Technical College searching for a new place to build a campus in southwestern Dane County, six area school districts are lining up behind the idea of a "Global Academy," where high schoolers could learn job skills and earn post-secondary credits.
The Verona Area school board Monday approved the spending of $6,750 to hire a consultant to put together a detailed plan for how the six districts could work with MATC - and possibly the University of Wisconsin - to create such a campus.
That money will pool with similar amounts from five districts - Oregon, Belleville, Mount Horeb, McFarland and Middleton-Cross Plains - eager to see MATC land nearby, too.
The consultant, expected to start Aug. 15, will be asked to hone the concept of the school, including how it could be organized and how the consortium would work together.
Though the academy is currently little more than a concept, board member Dennis Beres said that if it comes to fruition, it could be a huge addition for the district.
Administrators from six Dane County school districts are planning to create a program called The Global Academy, a hybrid of high school and college courses offering specialized skills for high school juniors and seniors.
The consortium of districts includes Verona, MiddletonCross Plains, Belleville, McFarland, Mount Horeb and Oregon.
The Global Academy would offer courses in four career clusters: architecture and construction; health science; information technology; and science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
"We really see a need for vocational and technical programs and career planning," said Dean Gorrell, superintendent of Verona Schools. "It's tough to keep those going."
What would it take for Iowa - and the nation - to fully prepare students for the globally competitive world of today and tomorrow?
What does that mean for the curriculum, training of teachers and expectations for students? What is the best way to transform classrooms to deliver this world-class education, not just to elite students but to everyone? Are national standards the answer, or should that be left to states?
Those are some of the questions The Des Moines Register's editorial board has asked in recent months. We've talked with educators and policymakers, we've visited schools and we'll visit others here and abroad.
everal things are clear from conversations to date:
One is a growing, though hardly universal, concern that the United States must better educate students to keep its competitive edge in a fast-changing global economy. The rise of Asia and the flattening of the world with technology - allowing jobs to move virtually anywhere in the world - create great opportunities but also pose significant threats. That's especially worrisome when American youngsters perform so poorly in math and science on international tests compared to their peers in many other places.
On June 30 and July 1st an historic educational event took place in Enfield, CT (school population of 6500) where a joint meeting of the Board of Education and Town Council convened to hear four reports from a citizen's audit committee composed of 17 members that was authorized by the Board of Education in January 2008.
It was the determined effort of one board member, Sue Lavelli-Hozempa, who was responsible for getting the audit committee authorized.She learned about the audit committee approach from one of my presentations that she attended on school finance and budgeting that I conduct throughout Connecticut.
It's historic for four reasons.First, it is probably the first time an audit committee proved that ordinary citizens who were selected without any required qualifications could, with training, education and direction, be a tremendous community and board asset in providing effective and meaningful fiscal oversight of school spending.
But it went beyond what is typically done with typical financial audits; instead, it was also designed to begin a Performance Review Audit (PRA) process.The PRA is "an examination of a program, function, operation or management systems and procedures to assess whether the district is achieving economy, efficiency and effectiveness in the employment of available resources."This is really what taxpayers want to know and certainly it should be what every school board member would want to know and what every administrator should be doing:determining how money is actually spent and whether waste and mismanagement exists in school operations, practices, procedures and policie--something a fiscal audit does not do.
Elementary students in Sioux City and Wales have been getting together occasionally for years to talk about holiday traditions, sports and school lunches, said Jim Christensen, distance-learning coordinator at the Northwest Area Education Agency in Sioux City. They've made presentations and held interactive question-and-answer sessions.
"It's easy to say, 'What does that have to do with the curriculum?' But it has everything to do with learning to communicate and a perspective on the world that's unbelievable," he said.
Colin Evans, head teacher of the school in Wales, echoed those thoughts in an e-mail: "Exchanging e-mails or written letters and photographs would be a poor substitute for these experiences. This has brought a whole new dimension to the curriculum... Use of technology is uniting two schools 6,000 miles apart into one global classroom."
by Leonard Pitts Miami Herald lpitts@miamiherald.com
This will be the last What Works column.
I reserve the right to report occasionally on any program I run across that shows results in saving the lives and futures of African American kids. But this is the last in the series I started 19 months ago to spotlight such programs.
Let me begin by thanking you for your overwhelming response to my request for nominations, and to thank everyone from every program who allowed me to peek behind the scenes. From the Harlem Children's Zone in New York City to SEI (Self-Enhancement Inc.) in Portland, Ore., I have been privileged and uplifted to see dedicated people doing amazing work.
I am often asked whether I've found common denominators in all these successful programs, anything we can use in helping kids at risk. The short answer is, yes. You want to know what works? Longer school days and longer school years work. Giving principals the power to hire good teachers and fire bad ones works. High expectations work. Giving a teacher freedom to hug a child who needs hugging works. Parental involvement works. Counseling for troubled students and families works. Consistency of effort works. Incentives work. Field trips that expose kids to possibilities you can't see from their broken neighborhoods, work.
Indeed, the most important thing I've learned is that none of this is rocket science. We already know what works. What we lack is the will to do it. Instead, we have a hit-and-miss patchwork of programs achieving stellar results out on the fringes of the larger, failing, system. Why are they the exception and not the rule? If we know what works, why don't we simply do it? Nineteen months ago when I started, I asked Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone why anyone should pay to help him help poor kids in crumbling neighborhoods. He told me, "Someone's yelling at me because I'm spending $3,500 a year on 'Alfred.' Alfred is 8. OK, Alfred turns 18. No one thinks anything about locking him up for 10 years at $60,000 a year." Amen. Forget the notion of a moral obligation to uplift failing children. Consider the math instead. If that investment of $3,500 per annum creates a functioning adult who pays taxes and otherwise contributes to the system, why would we pass that up in favor of creating, 10 years later, an adult who drains the system to the tune of $60,000 a year for his incarceration alone, to say nothing of the other costs he foists upon society? How does that make sense? Nineteen months later, I have yet to find a good answer.
Instead, I find passivity. "Save the Children," Marvin Gaye exhorted 27 years ago. But we are losing the children in obscene numbers. Losing them to jails, losing them to graves, losing them to illiteracy, teen parenthood, and other dead-ends and cul-de-sacs of life. But I have yet to hear America – or even African America – scream about it. Does no one else see a crisis here? "I don't think that in America, especially in black America, we can arrest this problem unless we understand the urgency of it," says Tony Hopson Sr., founder of SEI. "When I say urgency, I'm talking 9/11 urgency, I'm talking Hurricane Katrina urgency, things that stop a nation. I don't think in black America this is urgent enough. Kids are dying every single day. I don't see where the NAACP, the Urban League, the Black Caucus, have decided that the fact that black boys are being locked up at alarming rates means we need to stop the nation and have a discussion about how we're going to eradicate that as a problem. It has not become urgent enough. If black America don't see it as urgent enough, how dare us think white America is going to think it's urgent enough?"
In other words, stand up. Get angry. Stop accepting what is clearly unacceptable. I'll bet you that works, too.
By usual measures of student progress, America's high school career academies have been a failure. One of the longest and most scientific education studies ever conducted concluded they did not improve test scores or graduation rates or college success for urban youth. People like me, obsessed with raising student achievement, saw those numbers and said: Well, too bad. Let's try something else.
And yet, because the career academy research by the New York-based MDRC (formerly known as the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp.) was so detailed and professional, we have just learned that the academies accomplished something perhaps even better than higher passing rates on reading exams. They produced young men who got better-paying jobs, were more likely to live independently with children and a spouse or partner and were more likely to be married and have custody of their children.
This is a remarkable finding. It has the power not only to revitalize vocational education but to shift the emphasis of school assessment toward long-range effects on students' lives, not just on how well they did in school and college.
Established more than 30 years ago, Career Academies have become a widely used high school reform initiative that aims to keep students engaged in school and prepare them for successful transitions to postsecondary education and employment. Typically serving between 150 and 200 students from grades 9 or 10 through grade 12, Career Academies are organized as small learning communities, combine academic and technical curricula around a career theme, and establish partnerships with local employers to provide work-based learning opportunities. There are estimated to be more than 2,500 Career Academies operating around the country.
Since 1993, MDRC has been conducting a uniquely rigorous evaluation of the Career Academy approach that uses a random assignment research design in a diverse group of nine high schools across the United States. Located in medium- and large-sized school districts, the schools confront many of the educational challenges found in low-income urban settings. The participating Career Academies were able to implement and sustain the core features of the approach, and they served a cross-section of the student populations in their host schools. This report describes how Career Academies influenced students’ labor market prospects and postsecondary educational attainment in the eight years following their expected graduation. The results are based on the experiences of more than 1,400 young people, approximately 85 percent of whom are Hispanic or African-American.
In June of last year, a conservative majority of the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, declared the racial-integration efforts of two school districts unconstitutional. Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could no longer assign students to schools based on their race, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his lead opinion in Meredith v. Jefferson County School Board (and its companion case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1). Justice Stephen Breyer sounded a sad and grim note of dissent. Pointing out that the court was rejecting student-assignment plans that the districts had designed to stave off de facto resegregation, Breyer wrote that “to invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown.” By invoking Brown v. Board of Education, the court’s landmark 1954 civil rights ruling, Breyer accused the majority of abandoning a touchstone in the country’s efforts to overcome racial division. “This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret,” he concluded.
Breyer’s warning, along with even more dire predictions from civil rights groups, helped place the court’s ruling at the center of the liberal indictment of the Roberts court. In Louisville, too, the court’s verdict met with resentment. Last fall, I asked Pat Todd, the assignment director for the school district of Jefferson County, which encompasses Louisville and its suburbs, whether any good could come of the ruling. She shook her head so hard that strands of blond hair loosened from her bun. “No,” she said with uncharacteristic exasperation, “we’re already doing what we should be.”
Todd was referring to Louisville’s success in distributing black and white students, which it does more evenly than any district in the country with a comparable black student population; almost every school is between 15 and 50 percent African-American. The district’s combination of school choice, busing and magnet programs has brought general, if not uniform, acceptance — rather than white flight and disaffection, the legacy of desegregation in cities like Boston and Kansas City, Mo. The student population, which now numbers nearly 100,000, has held steady at about 35 percent black and 55 percent white, along with a small and growing number of Hispanics and Asians.
In an e-mail sent to union members Thursday night, Parker said contract talks will be shut down next week "to share detailed information with our members and provide clarity about key issues as they relate to seniority, tenure and compensation."
Parker said the meetings, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday at McKinley Technological High School in Northeast Washington, will also be attended by Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. He said Rhee "will be available for Q and A at a designated time during each session."
The negotiations, which began in December, have come to focus on Rhee's efforts to win acceptance of an optional "pay-for-performance plan," a system of compensation historically opposed by teachers unions.
Citing union sources, none of whom was Parker, The Washington Post reported July 3 that Rhee was proposing a two-tiered salary system in which teachers could earn substantially more if they relinquished some seniority rights and assumed some accountability for test scores. Teachers could choose to retain seniority and receive smaller raises.
PS 49 in Queens used to be an average school in New York City's decidedly below-average school system. That was before Anthony Lombardi moved into the principal's office. When Lombardi took charge in 1997, 37 percent of fourth graders read at grade level, compared with nearly 90 percent today; there have also been double-digit improvements in math scores. By 2002, PS 49 made the state's list of most improved schools. If you ask Lombardi how it happened, he'll launch into a well-practiced monologue on the many changes that he brought to PS 49 (an arts program, a new curriculum from Columbia's Teachers College). But he keeps coming back to one highly controversial element of the school's turnaround: getting rid of incompetent teachers.
Firing bad teachers may seem like a rather obvious solution, but it requires some gumption to take on a teachers union. And cleaning house isn't necessarily the only answer. There are three basic ways to improve a school's faculty: take greater care in selecting good teachers upfront, throw out the bad ones who are already teaching, and provide training to make current teachers better. In theory, the first two should have more or less the same effect, and it might seem preferable to focus on never hiring unpromising instructors—once entrenched, it's nearly impossible in most places to remove teachers from their union-protected jobs. But that's assuming we're good at predicting who will teach well in the first place.
At the urging of major employers and state officials, the Washington state Board of Education is about to adopt tough new high school graduation requirements.
But students might not notice a difference.
That’s because the so-called Core 24 requirements would not take effect until the Legislature comes up with money to pay for them. Educators say the state already falls about $1 billion short of meeting its mandate to finance basic education.
One exception: The board next week is expected to adopt a required third math credit starting with the class of 2013. And that class will have to be at the level of Algebra II or above.
Bob Marcusse calls the link between education and economic development a virtuous circle -- good educational programs attract new business, which leads to more financing for schools, which attract more people to an area to work at those companies.
"We and (educators) clearly understand the symbiotic relationship between education and economic development," said Marcusse, CEO of the Kansas City Area Development Council.
Educational resources act as an economic driver in numerous ways. Schools are obviously responsible for producing the work force in any given area, but they also help recruit businesses and residents, foster research that can generate money and spawn new business, and directly funnel money back into the economy through building projects and tourism dollars.
Tax base expansion (as opposed to tax rate increases) is a good idea.
Back in 1996, Money credited Madison schools for high test scores and parent satisfaction. But this week, Money cited Madison for below average test scores in math. Reading scores also fell behind cities on the list.
Madison 's property taxes weren 't mentioned as a problem back in 1996. But this week, Money listed them as $600 higher than the average city on its list.
States are cracking down on a controversial practice that lets government workers collect pension benefits while continuing to work for a salary.
The practice — called "double dipping" — lets tens of thousands of state and local workers retire, collect pension benefits and then keep working, often at the same job.
"What was going on was absolutely ludicrous," says Kentucky state Rep. Mike Cherry, a Democrat. Kentucky's Legislature last month ended a policy that let workers retire, get rehired and start a second pension in addition to the first.
Double-dipping is legal in nearly every state under existing pension and hiring rules. It is especially common among educators, police officers and others who retire young after 20 to 30 years on the job.
Have you enjoyed seeing your child on MMSD-TV? Do you appreciate having access to live coverage of school board meetings?
Channels 10 and 19, the cable TV service of the Madison Metropolitan School District, are moving. As a result of a recent law deregulating cable television, Charter Cable has decided to move our channels to digital channels 992 and 993 effective August 12, 2008.
What will this mean for you?
To continue seeing Madison Board of Education meetings, high school sporting events, fine arts, school news, newscasts from around the world or any of the other learning services offered by MMSD-TV, you will need a digital TV or digital video recorder (DVR) with a QAM tuner. If you do not have a digital TV, you will need to obtain a set-top digital converter box from Charter. Charter has agreed to provide the box at no charge for the first six months of service to customers UPON SPECIFIC REQUEST, after which Charter will add a monthly fee to your bill for rental of the box.
Be advised, however, that the Charter box is NOT the same box being advertised by broadcasters as a way of receiving digital over-the-air signals after the national conversion to digital which will take place in February, 2009.
Confused and frustrated? - Understandably so. Therefore, we want to help you in making this transition.
Charter Cable is required by law to provide space on its basic tier for community access television from the Madison Schools as well as from the City of Madison and WYOU Community Television. Charter will continue to include MMSD-TV and the other Madison community access channels in their basic cable service at the existing subscription rate. However, the channels will be viewable only -- as noted above --with a digital TV or by renting a digital converter.
The new location for MMSD-TV on channels 992 and 993 will be part of a "public affairs neighborhood", a block of channels 980-999 that will include CSPAN II, CSPAN III, Wisconsin Eye (state government programming), along with other community channels from the Madison and Dane County areas.
What to do?
Call Charter customer service at (888) 438-2427 to request a digital converter box at no charge in order to receive your basic service which includes the digital "public affairs neighborhood" channels.
Need answers? Send your questions and/or concerns in an email to Tim Vowell, Charter Communications Vice President of Government Relations, at tvowell@chartercom.com. Please send a copy to me at mstandiford@madison.k12.wi.us.
Let me know if your contact with Charter is successful. Email me at mstandiford@madison.k12.wi.us or call 663-1969.
Call the State of Wisconsin legislative hotline at 1-800-362-9472. Describe your concerns related to cable TV and the new law -- Act 42.
Most importantly,
Keep watching MMSD-TV on channels 10 & 19 until August 12, 2008. After that date, find us at 992 and 993.
Of course we will continue to expand our offerings on the web at www.mmsd.tv. But we want to make sure we reach as many families as possible. This is why MMSD's access to cable TV remains a critical resource. Please help us preserve that resource.
Thank you for your interest. Keep in touch!
Marcia Standiford
Manager of Cable and Video Services
Madison Metropolitan School District
545 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53703 www.mmsd.org/mmsdtv
(608) 663-1969
The local schools should operate a public fiber network within the city. The buildings represent a great 'footprint". It would be great for the schools, and perhaps with some astute legal and economic legwork, a huge win for the city. Another idea for the November referendum.
There've been lots of complaints that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has neither much interest in education policy, nor the capacity to deal with it. But his precipitous plunge into the algebra wars last week and the state Board of Education's sudden decision to bow to his demand makes you wish that that he had less interest or a lot more capacity.
The leap, in the form of a letter urging the board to require that every eighth-grader take beginning algebra and the board's overnight agreement to mandate it within three years is like trying to make a scrawny horse pull a heavier load with a bigger whip. At best, it won't work; at worst, it will kill the horse.
The state has for some years had an admirable "goal" that every eighth-grader take algebra, combined with a set of incentives for districts to get all students there. The incentives – essentially penalizing schools by reducing a school's Academic Proficiency Index for each student who takes only general math – have worked. More than half of California's eighth-graders now take either algebra or geometry.
Middle school students at the Crossroads School near Fells Point were evaluated by teachers every single day last school year, with the results driving the next day's instruction.
At East Baltimore's Fort Worthington Elementary, about a quarter of the school's parents turned out for MSA Family Fun Night and sampled questions from the Maryland School Assessments.
Alexander Hamilton Elementary, situated in a West Baltimore neighborhood that the principal calls "gang-infested," started a gifted education program last year to challenge students to learn beyond their grade levels.
The principals of the three schools credit those and myriad other initiatives with making their schools among of the most improved in Baltimore, during a year in which the school system overall posted historic gains on the standardized tests administered under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
For the past two weeks, Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendant Dan Nerad has been learning the ropes in Madison. He said he has been doing a lot of listening and learning.
On Monday, he officially brought his ideas to the Madison School Board, for the first time laying out a vision for his first year as superintendant.
"I guess my hope, over time, is that while I'm learning about the Madison Metropolitan School District that I can also help inform the school district of important new directions I hope we can take over time," said Nerad.
One idea Nerad said he believes should be revisited in Madison is 4-year-old kindergarten.
It isn't absurd enough that we test high school students with a High School Exit Exam that is pretty much on a par with the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) required of teachers, but now we are all congratulating ourselves with a decision to test eighth graders for algebra. At least state schools chief Jack O'Connell has learned from his own past mistakes and opposed this decision. If only he had the guts to say he blew it on advocating for the exit exam, which is not only a complete waste of tens of millions of dollars, but sends more and more kids into the streets and trouble with the law when they fail to graduate because they do not test as well as others. (About 10 percent of high school students must "fail," otherwise it isn't a "test.")
I tutored algebra to younger students when I myself was in high school. Later I taught it in public high schools for nearly 20 years, concurrently with other math courses, including geometry, pre-algebra and seventh and eighth grade math. I taught in some of the highest achieving, and some of the lowest achieving middle and high schools in the state. So, maybe my perspective is broader than the average citizen's. Still, anyone who thinks it is a good idea to begin testing all eighth graders in algebra is simply delusional. It would be more PC to say uninformed, but I am at wit's end.
Referendum Climate: Madison Mayor Orders 5% Cut in 2009 City Budget
A possible Fall 2008 Madison School District Referendum may occur amid changes in City spending (and property taxes). Mayor Dave Cieslewicz's Memo to City Managers includes this [PDF]:
This is the most challenging budget year I have seen in six years and it appears to be among the most challenging in two decades or more. High fuel prices combined with lagging revenues associated with the economic downturn and increases in debt service and other costs will force us to work hard just to maintain current services. Other typical cost increases in areas such as health insurance and wages will create additional pressure on our budget situation.
Based on current estimates, our “cost to continue” budget would result in an unacceptably high increase of about 10% for taxes on the average home and a levy increase of around 15%.
Madison's budget has grown from $245,131,022 in 1998 to $367,806,712 in 2008, while enrollment has declined slightly from 25,132 to 24,268 ($13,997/student). 2008 budget discussion notes.
One would hope that a referendum initiative would address a number of simmering issues, including math, curriculum reduction, expanded charter options, a look at the cost and effectiveness of reading recovery, perhaps a reduction in the local curriculum creation department and the elimination of the controversial report card initiative. Or, will we see the now decades old "same service approach" to MMSD spending growth?
Patrick L. Hess, a lifelong Fallston resident, has assumed leadership of the Harford County Board of Education after the resignation of Vice President Salina M. Williams.
Hess graduated from North Harford High School and is the sixth generation of his family to live in Harford County. His wife, Lynn, is a kindergarten teacher at Jarrettsville Elementary School, and his three children have graduated from Harford County public schools.
Hess was named to the board in 2004, after board member Karen L. Wolf resigned. He was tapped to finish the remaining two years of Wolf's term. Hess was reappointed in 2006 by then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. to serve a full five-year term on the board.
Hess is chief executive officer of Operations Management Inc., a restaurant management company that oversees Denny's franchises. He recently sat for an interview with The Su
"The narrowing of test score gaps, although an important accomplishment," Loveless writes, should not "overshadow the languid performance trends of high-achieving students." He adds: "Their test scores are not being harmed during the NCLB era, but they are not flourishing either. Gaps are narrowing because the gains of low-achieving students are outstripping those of high achievers by a factor of two or three to one. The nation has a strong interest in developing the talents of its best students to their fullest to foster the kind of growth at the top end of the achievement distribution that has been occurring at the bottom end."
This publication reports the results of the first two (of five) studies of a multifaceted research investigation of the state of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era.
Part I: An Analysis of NAEP Data, authored by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, examines achievement trends for high-achieving students (defined, like low-achieving students, by their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) since the early 1990s and, in more detail, since 2000.
Part II: Results from a National Teacher Survey, authored by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett of Farkas Duffett Research Group, reports on teachers' own views of how schools are serving high-achieving pupils in the NCLB era.
I hope you are enjoying you summer. Below is the school board update. Please let me know if you have any questions.
1. Our new superintendent, Dan Nerad, took over on July 1. Dan has spent a great deal of time meeting with board members, staff and community members. The transition has gone really well. One of the reasons for the seamless transition is that Dan committed 10 days prior to starting in Madison, to visit the district and meet people and learn about many of the programs/plans. He also spent a few weekends in Madison attending school and neighborhood events.
2. You will start to hear talk of a referendum in November as there is a community group starting to form in support of this action. At this point in time, the Board has not had any discussions on a future referendum. We will have a meeting on July 28 to start the discussion on this topic. The budget gap for the 09/10 school year is projected to be approximately $9.2M. Dan Nerad has our business office reviewing numbers in preparation for our discussion. IF, after our discussions and public hearing, we vote to go to referendum in November, the question(s) are due to the clerk's office in early September. There will be an opportunity for public input. There is quite a bit of discussion that will take place in a short period of time. If you have any questions/comments, please let me know.
Hi all,
I hope you are enjoying you summer. Below is the school board update. Please let me know if you have any questions.
1. Our new superintendent, Dan Nerad, took over on July 1. Dan has spent a great deal of time meeting with board members, staff and community members. The transition has gone really well. One of the reasons for the seamless transition is that Dan committed 10 days prior to starting in Madison, to visit the district and meet people and learn about many of the programs/plans. He also spent a few weekends in Madison attending school and neighborhood events.
2. You will start to hear talk of a referendum in November as there is a community group starting to form in support of this action. At this point in time, the Board has not had any discussions on a future referendum. We will have a meeting on July 28 to start the discussion on this topic. The budget gap for the 09/10 school year is projected to be approximately $9.2M. Dan Nerad has our business office reviewing numbers in preparation for our discussion. IF, after our discussions and public hearing, we vote to go to referendum in November, the question(s) are due to the clerk's office in early September. There will be an opportunity for public input. There is quite a bit of discussion that will take place in a short period of time. If you have any questions/comments, please let me know.
As early as fourth grade, students who will be at risk of failing the high school exit exam – a state requirement to earn a diploma – can be identified based on grades, classroom behavior and test scores, according to a new study released Tuesday.
The findings, based on an extensive study of student achievement in San Diego schools, call into question the effectiveness of aiming significant efforts and tens of millions of dollars at struggling high school seniors and older students to help them pass the exam.
“From a political standpoint, such spending seems necessary. However, our results strongly suggest that these 11th-hour interventions by themselves are unlikely to yield the intended results,” according to the report by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Instead, the authors suggested, “moving a portion of these tutoring dollars to struggling students in earlier grades – when the students are still in school – could be a wise choice. An ounce of prevention could indeed be worth a pound of cure.”
President Bush has often spoken about education reform as a civil rights issue. So we're not entirely surprised to see civil rights groups now defending the No Child Left Behind law against attempts to gut its most effective provisions.
Last month, Representative Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, introduced the NCLB Recess Until Reauthorization Act, which would essentially suspend the law's accountability provisions but not the funding. Under Mr. Graves's bill, schools would no longer have to file progress reports that expose achievement gaps between kids of different races, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds.
BAD schools, the left insists, are bad because they do not have enough money. The nation’s capital somewhat undermines this theory. Spending per pupil in Washington, DC, is a whopping 50% higher than the national average, yet the city’s public schools are atrocious. If it were a state, its pupils’ test scores would rank dead last.
Some schools struggle with the basics, such as discipline. Until last year, for example, the Johnson Middle School “had a nightclub on every floor”, says Clarence Burrell, a youth adviser at the school. There would be dozens of kids hanging out on each corridor during classes, schoolboys “with their shirts off getting massages” from female classmates and fights “all the time”, he says.
Mr Burrell, a tough-looking reformed convict, was hired by LifeSTARTS, a local charity, to help restore order. With his four colleagues, he pays attention to the most disruptive kids. He listens to them. He nudges them to pipe down and study. He offers his own “hectic” life as a cautionary tale. “Jail is ten times worse than school,” he warns young troublemakers. “It’s a long time, just you in that cell with a bunch of dudes.”
A new initiative for Minneapolis and Hennepin County will increase penalties for juveniles caught with firearms, both replica and real.
Minneapolis and Hennepin County officials hope to reduce juvenile gun crime this summer by stiffening penalties for youths caught with BB guns, real guns or replicas.
The new Juvenile Gun Offender Initiative was announced Tuesday by Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman and others. It will also increase enforcement of youth curfew laws, replica firearms ordinances and supervision of juveniles on probation for gun offenses.
The new rules apply to offenders between 10 and 17 years old. First-time offenders with a real gun will be given probation, four to six weeks of out-of-home placement and 40 hours of education on the dangers and effects of guns. If the requirements aren't met, youths will be given four to six months of out-of-home placement.
Half of courses in Grades 9 to 12 will be delivered online by 2019, predicts a new report.
Rather than send her kids off on the yellow bus, Briana LeClaire has school come to her home. Her kids attend a virtual public school, connecting online to teachers and coursework. Everything from books to microscopes to radish seeds arrives via brown trucks.
Mrs. LeClaire describes it as the 21st-century, middle-class version of the private tutor. Her 6th-grader can move quickly through her strong subjects, such as literature, and spend more time on her weaker areas, like math.
Enrollment in online classes last year reached the 1 million mark, growing 22 times the level seen in 2000, according to the North American Council for Online Learning. That's just the start, says a new paper by the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. Its authors predict that by 2019 half of courses in Grades 9 to 12 will be delivered online.
1) Terry, you have just taken over as Superintendent of San Diego Public School. How did this come about?
Late last year, I was conducted by the search firm conducing the San Diego Unified School District's Superintendent search to determine my interest.I had served as Superintendent of the 71,000 student Guilford County School District, Greensboro, NC, for the past eight years.I was in 'good standing' with the GCS school board, enjoyed my job, and had many friends in the Guilford County community.After reviewing the San Diego job description and researching the district's history, challenges, and opportunities, I thought my experiences and background would be a good match.I flew to San Diego and met with the board of education and was impressed with their passion for educating all children to much higher levels.Following an initial interview, the process gained speed. My wife Nancy and I were invited back to a second interview the following week.Two days later, we were notified that SDUSD board members wanted to visit Guilford County the following weekend.Following their visit, we began contract negotiations.
Georgia is one 23 states that likely will be hard-pressed to make needed improvements under the No Child Left Behind Act before the law's 2014 achievement deadline, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.
The center issued its report at the midway point of the 2002 NCLB law, which requires states to bring all students to grade-level proficiency in reading and math by 2014 and allows each state to set up its own track to get there.
Georgia opted for the backloaded approach, which requires less progress in the early years followed by substantially higher gains closer to the deadline.
Now, some states will need to increase the percentage of students reaching proficiency on state assessments by 10 points or more each year in the six years left to meet the NCLB goals, the report said.
"Many states may have originally set lower achievement goals for the first few years under NCLB in hopes of getting systems into place or gaining some flexibility from Washington later on," Jack Jennings, president and CEO of the Center on Education Policy, said in a statement released Tuesday. "But right now, they are still on the hook for the academic equivalent of a mortgage payment that is about to balloon far beyond their current ability to pay."
But even those states that took an incremental approach to hitting achievement targets also will face difficulties in reaching 100 percent proficiency, the report said.
After a school year marked by academic and administrative controversy, Prince William County Superintendent Steven L. Walts retains rock-solid School Board support as he seeks to raise the reputation of Virginia's second-largest school system. But his relationships with many parents have fractured, and some local officials wonder when, if ever, test scores will rise to levels found among the county's neighbors.
Hundreds of parents protested an elementary math program Walts championed, prompting board members to reevaluate it. Two of the county's top-performing high schools and a third of its elementary schools remain overcrowded. Teachers in Prince William continue to earn less than those in neighboring counties.
Test scores from Walts's third year are not yet public. But results from the first two after his 2005 arrival were uneven: SAT and state test scores remained among Northern Virginia's lowest. The decline in the county's average SAT score -- from 1504 to 1486, by far the steepest drop among the area's major districts -- meant that Prince William continued to lose ground to Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington counties.
In a second floor classroom at St. Lima School in Newark today, 22 pupils were mulling over questions about anger.
What, they were asked, do they do if they are angry?
What makes them angry?
And what can they do to control their anger?
"Go to anger management class," suggested Sean Smart, a fourth-grader.
The real lesson, though, was about a topic that was never mentioned in class yesterday: gangs.
With street gangs recruiting at a younger age, law enforcement officials are trying to get to them sooner through the federally-funded Gang Resistance Education and Training program. The state parole board's gang unit began working with sixth graders two years ago, but then expanded it to third and fourth-graders this year.
ersonally, I know that China and India are not “Third World” countries, but that is because I’ve traveled to those countries and I deeply admire their cultures and their people.
The inspiration for the name “Third World Challenge” came a statement made to me by a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education when I showed my film Two Million Minutes for the HGSE faulty. “We have nothing to learn from education systems in Third World countries,” he intoned with much gravitas, “Much less a Third World country that lacks freedom of speech.” To my surprise, no other faculty member rose to challenge that statement.
While I certainly expected a more open-minded and globally aware audience at Harvard, I have now screened my film around the country and a surprisingly large segment of the American population believes India and China’s K-12 education systems are inferior to that of the United States. While no American makes the statement with the boundless hubris of a Harvard professor, the conclusion often is the same – America is number one in education and always will be.
This of course is not true. American students’ academic achievement has been declining vis-à-vis other developed countries for more than 20 years. What is now surprising and worrisome is US students are even lagging the developing world.
She wakes up in her suburban home, has breakfast and jumps into her mom's car for a ride to school each morning.
He struggles to rouse himself off a bed of blankets on the floor, grabs the same clothes he wore yesterday and, with an empty stomach, starts his walk to school.
When she sits in her seat in her third-grade classroom, she brings a wealth of life experiences: soccer games and ballet; spring breaks in Florida; summers at a cottage on the lake; weekends spent at the zoo or museum.
He brings experiences, too: baby-sitting for his siblings; worrying about whether this will be the night the landlord kicks his family out; dreading the summer when he can't rely on regular meals like the ones his school provides.
Two children. Two different worlds.
And two entirely different schools. Hers gets more than $12,000 per student in funding. His gets $5,000 per student less.
This is a powerful issue. Incoming Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad's former district, Green Bay spends $11,269 per student while Madison spends $13,201 according to a recent Isthmus article. More here.
Black students are far more likely to be suspended from school than are their white classmates -- and Minnesota's disparity in suspensions is twice the national average. Why? What are the consequences?
Keenan Hooper likes to joke around and admits he has a motormouth. He also admits to getting into trouble again and again with teachers weary of his antics. School officials have sent him home more times than Keenan or his mom can count. ¶ So often, in fact, during his past couple years at Jackson Middle School in Champlin that he was referred to special education for a "behavioral disability" and saw his grades plummet.
This is not what Keisha Hooper wants for her son, who is black. She said she has asked how sending him away is helping.
"Teachers need order in the classroom, I agree," Keisha Hooper said. "I think where we part ways is that they seem to lose patience with the black kids more than they do the white."
ON the morning of her Regents Exam in English language arts earlier this month, Sheile Echie-Davis, an 11th grader at Roosevelt High School, pointed to a blemish just below the swirls of pink and purple polish that covered her long fingernails and explained its meaning. “I’ve been writing so much, I’m getting bruises from holding my pencils,” she said, her tone conveying pride rather than concern that the results of weeks of intense studying were so visible.
Sheile, 16, expected to do well on the exam, judging by her past results: She scored 88 percent on her Regents Exam in United States history last year, even though the subject is her least favorite.
Three years ago, Sheile was an unlikely candidate for academic success given her chronic truancy from school. Skipping class regularly led to her having to repeat eighth grade in her Brooklyn middle school. Parental pressure and visits from truancy officers did little to budge her belief that the classroom was not where she belonged. Dropping out, she said, was a foregone conclusion.
The expulsion of four elementary school students for bringing knives onto campus and a rise in violence involving female African-American students have left city and school officials scrambling for solutions.
Records obtained by the Pasadena Weekly show that more than half of the 31 students expelled from the start of the school year through March were African American, and 11 of those 17 kids were girls, including five former students of Blair International Baccalaureate Magnet School who were involved in what has come to be known by teachers, students and administrators as “The Day of Six Fights” on Feb 18.
Although all those incidents involved weapons or violence or both, and a multijurisdictional board had been working since October on combating instances of youth- and gang-related violence, that information was not shared with the former 14-member Committee on Youth Development and Violence Prevention — even though that board included two sitting members of the Board
of Education, which ultimately approved all of the expulsions.
Further, the Pasadena Unified School District has few programs in place to address the rise in violence and no facilities available to help with the increase in expulsions from the district’s elementary schools.
WHY is it that significant reform is opposed with the claim that research is needed, yet proposals to conduct such research are also opposed?
WHY does the present system not only lack a research base but much of it functions in direct contradiction to research findings?
WHY, for example, do we educate students by building a box called a school, inside of which are little boxes called classrooms, occupied by students in rows facing the front of the room, where an adult talks 75-80% of the time;
that is, the adult talks three to four times as much as all of the students combined?
WHY does secondary schooling use arbitrary time blocks after each of which students move to another room for a separate subject of instruction?
Thousands of Tucson-area middle and high school students who fail key subjects continue to progress through Pima County's largest school districts every year toward graduation, a 10-month investigation by the Arizona Daily Star has found.
In the 2006-07 school year alone, nine in 10 students were moved to the next grade level, but data show that nearly a third of them failed basic courses in English, math, science or social studies. At least 94,000 students failed essential classes during the past six years.
The analysis confirms what has essentially been an open secret in education for years, what critics call social promotion, and shows it is pervasive throughout Tucson's schools.
The practice is not only causing major academic problems now, but is setting up what could be a major blow to the region's economy.
The underlying problem, experts say, is low student achievement compounded by the lack of concrete promotion policies and systemic pressure not to flunk children.
The Star's analysis found, that because grade inflation is likely occurring in Tucson-area schools, not only are thousands of children being socially promoted every year, but many other students are receiving passing grades they may not deserve.
A poll conducted by the Associated Press has found that more than half of people polled claim that U.S. high schools are falling short when it comes to readying students for adulthood. In addition, the same number of American’s polled believe that schools are focusing too much on some subjects and neglecting others, leading to an unbalanced education and a lack of “survival skills” needed for life after high school.
“When you get out of high school, what are you educated to do?” Mused California firefighter Jamie Norton. “A lot of kids, when they get out of school, are kind of lost.”
The AP poll revealed that parents from a minority group tend to believe that their children are receiving an education than they actually are. Three-fourths of adults polled also claimed that their children’s schools were emphasizing the wrong subjects – music, art, English – and not spending enough time on “important” subjects, such as math or biology. Parents are also frustrated by the seeming lack of assistance available during school hours for children who may be struggling with math, and are often unwilling to dedicate time at home to work on their children’s math homework.
Most individuals polled claimed that the U.S. is far behind other world countries when it comes to education. In reality, U.S. students fall somewhere in the middle when compared to students from other countries.
Madison school Superintendent Art Rainwater is officially off the clock. After 14 years of work in Madison, Rainwater stepped down from his post at noon on Monday.
"This will be the first year that I haven't been involved with school since 1948, so it's been my whole life," Rainwater told WISC-TV.
Rainwater came to Madison in 1994 as deputy Superintendent.
He said all it took was a visit to the farmers' market on the Saturday before his interview for him to realize he was home.
He took the helm as superintendent in 1999.
"I always felt it was a position that I could do the most, with the most children," said Rainwater. "I think that's certainly what drove me to be a superintendent."
Some prominent Denver foundations are working on a plan that could create new schools for thousands of poor children in Colorado in the next few years.
The idea is to pool money and knowledge to help jump-start the creation or replication of schools that have proved successful with students from low-income families.
That includes expanding homegrown models such as West Denver Preparatory Charter School on South Federal Boulevard, which Head of School Chris Gibbons wants to grow from a single school to three by 2015.
Tax rates could double. Spending on education, research, health and even Social Security could be squeezed tighter than ever. And foreign governments could use powerful financial leverage, rather than military force, to impose their economic and political agendas on the United States.
All because the U.S. national debt - which is being financed on a daily basis by the governments of China and a host of oil-exporting states, among others - has made this country far more vulnerable than its elected leaders let on, says David Walker, who recently finished a 10-year stint as U.S. comptroller general and head of the Government Accountability Office.
The nation's former auditor-in-chief will outline this crisis scenario today in Milwaukee, when he and an entourage of like-minded Washington policy analysts make their latest stop on Walker's Fiscal Wake-Up Tour.
Foreign governments and investors now hold fully half of the United States' total outstanding debt, making Washington susceptible to a new form of geopolitical conflict that Walker calls "financial warfare."
L. A. schools Supt. David L. Brewer said this week he would "kick some ass" to improve schools if the school board would give him political cover, which would include standing up to employee unions who might resist reforms.
The comment came at a public but hard-to-reach meeting Thursday on the 24th floor of school district headquarters. The meeting's topic was the governance of the school district, and the discussion gravitated toward giving school principals real power over their budget -- along with demanding real accountability for results.
The room happened to be weighted with administrators -- even a representative from the League of Women Voters was a retired principal. There was broad agreement on a need to decentralize the district.
UCLA Professor William Ouchi offered the New York City schools as an example of progress through focusing on principals. These unchained administrators have used their new authority to reduce the number of students each teacher must handle per day, he said, because that tactic raises student achievement.
The San Francisco Unified School District should dump its "confusing, time-consuming, alienating" system of assigning students to schools and instead allow them to go to ones in their neighborhoods, the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury said in a report released Thursday.
The grand jury focused on the way kindergarten students were assigned to schools in the 2007-08 school year. The district's system, dubbed "the diversity index," is used for students of all ages entering new schools.
Under the current system, families submit their top seven school choices and a number of socioeconomic indicators, but not race. The vast majority of families get one of their seven choices, but families who can't get their child into a school in their neighborhood have complained it's unfair. Studies have shown schools are becoming increasingly resegregated.
The grand jury blasted the system for being expensive to run, driving families away from the district and not doing much to diversify schools.
The dilemma confronting trustees of the Toronto school board and likely Jim Spyropoulos himself underscores a destructive flaw basic to the compensation structure of public education. Every time individuals excel as teachers or principals, they are promoted up and away from the site of their excellence.
Surely the education system can figure out a way to compensate talent generously and keep it where it is most needed. Many fields of professional endeavour – sports, theatre, science – manage to pay their stars considerably more than they pay their managers.
Clearly Spyropoulos can't be blamed for pursuing a path that is the most advantageous to career growth and compensation. But that's too bad. He is needed in school, as were many other talented people over the years who have been pulled from meaningful daily contact at schools and stuck somewhere away from the action.
Gov. Jim Doyle is telling most state agencies not to expect any increase in funding over the next two years.
Doyle is also telling state officials to prepare plans for a 10 percent cut. He gave the same order to agencies two years ago.
The governor's instructions come in a letter that outlines what to expect in the next two-year budget plan he will submit to the Legislature in February.
Something to ponder as the Madison School Administration and Board consider a fall referendum.
Twenty five years ago this week, there was a landmark decision where the people of Madison stood up for themselves and fought against the creation and maintenance of segregation resulting directly from school boundary changes.
t was an attempt to abandon the central city and the south side in favor of newer, developing peripheral areas. The process would have done serious damage to Madison’s Black population.
But two people wouldn't let it happen.
Sandy Solberg, on behalf of two neighborhood centers in Central and South Madison, and Richard Harris, who then was an administrator at Madison Area Technical College and a member of the district's Lincoln-Franklin Task Force, were instrumental in fighting a fight that eventually found that the Madison School Board's 1979 decision to close schools and redraw attendance boundaries discriminated against minority students and violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
What do you think about the CPS effort to bring more algebra into middle schools?
From Catalyst: "The June board meeting included a brief presentation on student achievement from the Office of Instructional Design and Assessment. A recap of statistics showed that while 40 percent of 8th-graders across the country take algebra, only 8 percent of CPS 8th-graders do.
"With this in mind, Chief Officer Xavier Botana noted how the district is revamping algebra instruction: 8th-grade algebra will now be called “High School Algebra in the Middle Grades,” a name change that Botana said will help parents and others understand that students are tackling high-school-level material.
A commenter nails the issue:
The exit exams have to be real. They can't be given credit for high school algebra, then show up in high school unprepared to take second year algebra.
Of course, they would only be prepared to take algebra in 8th grade if they have had rigorous math instruction before that. I believe these suburban schools with 40% of 8th graders taking algebra also have pre-algebra programs for kids in the 7th grade.
I'm all for offering rigorous classes; but there has to be some support to help kids get there.
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator's office to phase out our "accelerated" course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
American students' chronically poor performance in mathematics on international tests may begin in the earliest grades, handicapped by the weak knowledge of mathematics of their own elementary teachers. NCTQ looks at the quality of preparation provided by a representative sampling of institutions in nearly every state. We also provide a test developed by leading mathematicians which assesses for the knowledge that elementary teachers should acquire during their preparation. Imagine the implications of an elementary teaching force being able to pass this test.
Most of the nation's undergraduate education programs do not adequately prepare elementary teachers to teach mathematics, according to a study released Thursday by an education-reform advocacy group. Utah State University is among the 83 percent of surveyed programs that didn't meet what the National Council on Teacher Quality calls an emerging "consensus" on what elementary teachers must learn before joining professional ranks.
"There's a long-standing belief in our country that elementary teachers don't really need to get much math. The only thing you need to teach second-grade math is to learn third-grade math," said Kate Walsh, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based group. "We haven't put much attention to fact the elementary teachers are the first math teachers kids get. Their foundational skills have long-term ramifications whether that child will be able to do middle and high school math."
The NCTQ's findings are similar to a reading report the group released two years ago, claiming that 85 percent of undergraduate elementary education programs fail to adequately prepare students to teach reading.
Joanne has more. It will be interesting to see of the Madison Math Task Force addresses the question of teacher content knowledge. Related:
A multimillion-dollar investment earned the Waukesha School District about $83,000 less for the last three months than it has been accruing in debt payments for loans used to finance the deal, according to information released by the district this week.
The district's $65 million investment in complex financial instruments earned it about $135,136 for the fiscal quarter that ends this month.
But that amount is offset by payments the district makes on a semiannual basis for $15.67 million borrowed in 2006. Those district payments - on debt fixed at a 5.58% interest rate - average about $218,000 per quarter.
For the last quarter, none of the district's investments returned income at a higher rate than 3.55%, according to data provided by district Controller Jason Demerath.
It was the first quarterly loss for the investment, and the district ended up $192,500 in the black for the financial year that ends this month, figures for the district show.
More than 100,000 California students quit high school each year, but the path toward dropping out begins long before high school. Three new studies from the California Dropout Research Project reveal how and why academic success in middle school is critical to graduating from high school.
The studies, based on data from four of California's largest school districts, found that both middle school grades and test scores predicted whether students graduated from high school. The strongest predictor was whether students passed all their core academic subjects in math, English, history and science.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, only 40 percent of students who failed two or more academic classes in middle school graduated within four years of entering ninth grade. In Fresno, Long Beach and San Francisco only a third of the students who failed two or more courses in seventh grade graduated on time.
The Austin school district did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
Austin was the first district to implement a new law requiring all certified teachers and substitutes to be fingerprinted by Sept. 1, 2011. Other school employees, such as janitors and cafeteria workers, will be required to complete the process at the time of their hire.
The prints are scanned by the Department of Public Safety and sent to the FBI for a national criminal history database check. School employees who don't comply risk losing their teaching certification.
The newspaper requested documents showing a school-by-school breakdown of crimes revealed in the background checks and the outcomes of those cases. The newspaper has reported that it did not ask for names or other identifying information.
The district argued that releasing the requested information would violate employees' privacy rights and is not in the public interest.
Education has long been a passion of U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, stretching back to the 1980s, when she worked in the Texas Legislature. While serving as chief domestic policy adviser to President George W. Bush, she was an architect of the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind Act. Its goal is for all children to become proficient in math and reading by 2014.
In 2005, the same year she became education secretary, Spellings convened the Commission on the Future of Higher Education to look at how to improve post-secondary institutions. Spellings is the first mother of school-age children to serve as education secretary, and only the second woman to be appointed to the post. In her final few months on the job, much of her time has been devoted to shoring up support for the No Child Left Behind law.
Q. Does the United States need to create world-class schools in every community, and, if so, why?
A. Absolutely, emphatically, yes. And why? Because we pride ourselves on being the center of innovation and creativity, and that has brought us the Internet and other technologies, but we are at risk of losing that. Our country has gotten more diverse [in terms of poverty and children learning to speak English as a second language], so some of the work is more challenging. More education is necessary for everybody. We have to pick up the pace. No Child Left Behind is about that.
Community service nonprofits can soon apply for funding to carry out projects that serve school-age children or their parents in the Madison School District.
The school district is requesting the proposals because a portion of the MMSD budget is designated by Wisconsin statute to be used for community activities which support the well-being of district students and/or their parents. The amount of available funding is $290,000.
This is the first time that this funding has been opened up to all eligible organizations.
A new audit says Michigan's annual school progress reports from 2004-05 and 2005-06 contained some errors that might have artificially improved some schools' results.
The Office of the Auditor General report [1.6MB PDF] released Wednesday dealt with the Michigan Department of Education's school report cards and adequate yearly progress reports based on federal No Child Left Behind rules.
The problem stemmed in part from inaccuracies and inconsistencies in computer programming logic used to calculate the scores. But there were other problems cited in the audit, including insufficient monitoring of data supplied by school districts -- some of which may contain inflated favorable self-reporting and missing information.
The plan makes Oregon one of several states moving past the "one-size-fits-all" high-stakes testing that became commonplace in many U.S. high schools in the 1990s. In Pennsylvania, the Board of Education is considering a three-pronged approach similar to Oregon's plan, while in Maryland, students who can't pass the state tests could be allowed to do a senior project instead.
But some say such choices allow some students _ and states _ to take the easy way out.
Daria Hall, assistant director for K-12 policy at Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for poor and minority children, points to New Jersey, where up to 80 percent of students at high schools in poor cities like Newark and Camden receive alternative diplomas after not passing the state tests. The number falls to about 3 percent in wealthy areas like Princeton, N.J., she said.
"Most incoming (community college) students are not ready for college-level work," the report says. "In addition, relatively few of these students reach proficiency during their time (in community college)."
That's interesting, but it also raises this question: Since virtually all of those community college students graduated from high school, what is that telling us about the level of K-12 instruction?
One presumes, perhaps naively, that if someone possesses a California high school diploma, thus signifying 12 years of education costing taxpayers around $130,000, that someone must possess basic reading, writing and computational skills.
Remember, we're not talking about the roughly one-third of California's teenagers who don't graduate from high school; with few exceptions we're talking about graduates who have enough gumption to attend community college, and yet, this report says most don't have the appropriate basic skills for college-level studies. By the way, that also doesn't count the large numbers of high school graduates – well over a third – who require remedial instruction after being accepted into the California State University system.
Ross Perot is the father of fiscal charts. PerotCharts.com will help Americans understand the serious fiscal challenges facing our nation. These new electronic charts will also serve to hold elected officials accountable while accelerating needed actions to help ensure that our collective future will be better than our past.
And this doesn't even mention the cancerous growth in the size of government, which grew by borrowing a big chunk of all the money that the Fed created, and taxing the profits everybody else made with what was left, and the government used it to create incomes for more and more people, until the federal government now supports half of the population, all of whom unfortunately need more money because of the higher prices.
Now, total government taxation consumes half of all incomes, all of which goes around and around until my head is spinning and I wonder how it is possible that any country with as many schools, colleges and universities as we have can be so freakishly, perversely, brain-dead as to believe that such idiocy was even freaking possible?
The number of Wisconsin schools that didn't meet standards set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act and could face sanctions increased from 95 to 156 this year, including the entire Madison Metropolitan School District.
Of the 156 schools on the list released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction, 82 were in the Milwaukee Public School district. Seven of the schools on the list were charter schools.
Besides individual schools on the list, four entire districts made the list for not meeting the standards. That lists includes the school districts of Beloit, Madison, Milwaukee and Racine.
Bill Novak (Interestingly, this Capital Times article originally had many comments, which are now gone):
Superintendent Art Rainwater told The Capital Times the list is "ludicrous," the district doesn't pay attention to it, and the district will do what's best for the students and not gear curriculum to meet the criteria set by the federal government.
"As we've said from the day this law was passed, it is only a matter of time before every school in America is on the list," Rainwater said. "It's a law that impossible to meet, because eventually if every single student in a school isn't successful, you are on the list."
NCLB's biggest problem is that it's designed to help Washington politicians appear all things to all people. To look tough on bad schools, it requires states to establish standards and tests in reading, math and science, and it requires all schools to make annual progress toward 100% reading and math proficiency by 2014. To preserve local control, however, it allows states to set their own standards, "adequate yearly progress" goals, and definitions of proficiency. As a result, states have set low standards, enabling politicians to declare victory amid rising test scores without taking any truly substantive action.
NCLB's perverse effects are illustrated by Michigan, which dropped its relatively demanding standards when it had over 1,500 schools on NCLB's first "needs improvement" list. The July 2002 transformation of then-state superintendent Tom Watkins captures NCLB's power. Early that month, when discussing the effects of state budget cuts on Michigan schools, Mr. Watkins declared that cuts or no cuts, "We don't lower standards in this state!" A few weeks later, thanks to NCLB, Michigan cut drastically the percentage of students who needed to hit proficiency on state tests for a school to make adequate yearly progress. "Michigan stretches to do what's right with our children," Mr. Watkins said, "but we're not going to shoot ourselves in the foot."
Madison's Leopold and Lincoln elementary schools were among the list of schools failing to attain the standards, marking the first time that a Madison elementary school made the list.
Three Madison middle schools — Sherman, Cherokee and Toki — also joined the list, which continued to include the district's four major high schools: East, West, La Follette and Memorial. Madison's Black Hawk Middle School, which was on the list last year, made enough academic progress to be removed from it.
Schools receive local property tax money through levies and federal money, but the majority of funding comes from the state.
The current public education funding system emerged from a 1977 state Supreme Court decision in which Seattle schools sued the state over inadequate funding. The ruling held that the state must fund equally across districts a "basic education" program that went beyond reading, writing and math. Subsequent court rulings over the years have expanded the formula, resulting in an extremely complex system.
It's been called antiquated, outdated, ossified. Even Byzantine.
"Our system is pretty equitable now in that everyone gets ripped off," Hyde said. "Just think, do you live now like you lived 30 years ago?"
The formula begins with all schools receiving a basic education allocation per student. The allocation varies from district to district based on teacher experience and education levels, teacher-student ratios, allocations for administrators and classified staff and several other factors.
The article includes a number of interesting comments.
Mark Baida was pleased with his latest taste test: lots of empty little black trays, sometimes stacked three deep in front of his guinea pigs, a group of Garfield High School students.
But the pressure is on the new executive chef of the Los Angeles Unified School District: Demands are growing from parent groups, the school board and students for food that is delicious, healthful, served quickly -- and really, really inexpensive. In the last few years, the school board has banned soda and set standards for salt and fat, among other things. Now the aim is to make it more appealing too.
1997 saw the height of the Math Wars in California.
On the one side stood educrats, who advocated mushy math - or new-new math. They sought to de-emphasize math skills, such as multiplication and solving numeric equations, in favor of pushing students to write about math and how they might solve a problem. Their unofficial motto was: There is no right answer. (Even to 2 +2.)
They were clever. They knew how to make it seem as if they were pushing for more rigor, as they dumbed down curricula. For example, they said they wanted to teach children algebra starting in kindergarten, which seemed rigorous, but they had expanded the definition of algebra to the point that it was meaningless.
On the other side were reformers, who wanted the board to push through rigorous and specific standards that raised the bar for all California kids. Miraculously, they succeeded, and they took pride in the state Board of Education's vote for academic standards that called for all eighth-graders to learn Algebra I.
John W. Thompson wasn't in attendance at Sunday evening's candidate forum sponsored by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and WSB-TV.
But the new Clayton County schools corrective superintendent was very much the topic of conversation before the approximately 150 people gathered at Clayton State University.
More specifically, it was his $285,000 salary and flexible contract that excludes him from having to answer to the school board as the county fights to save its accreditation.
"That would have to be reconsidered," said District 5 candidate Phyllis Moore, "because that's not the way we're supposed to be operating."
Moore was hardly alone. Other candidates also expressed problems with Thompson, who was hired in April to prevent Clayton from becoming the nation's first school system in nearly 40 years to have its accreditation withdrawn.
Andre Cowling, who just finished his first year as principal of Harvard Elementary, one of the poorest-performing schools in Chicago, said the South Side’s eighth-grade celebrations are like “Easter Sunday on steroids.”
In a speech last Sunday at a Chicago church, Barack Obama took on the pomp and purpose of these ceremonies. “Now hold on a second — this is just eighth grade,” he said. “So, let’s not go over the top. Let’s not have a huge party. Let’s just give them a handshake.” He continued: “You’re supposed to graduate from eighth grade.”
Mr. Obama was wading into a simmering debate about eighth-grade ceremonies and their attendant hoopla. Do they inspire at-risk students to remain in high school and beyond? Or do they imply finality?
While some educators are grateful that notice is still being paid to academic achievement, others deride the festivities as overpraising what should be routine accomplishment. Some principals, school superintendents and legislators are trying to scale back the grandeur. But stepping between parents and ever-escalating celebrations of their children’s achievements can be dicey, at best.
At a time when overall Minnesota school enrollment is declining, enrollment in charter schools in the state soared by a record number last year, according to a study released Thursday.
The study, conducted by the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, found that the number of students attending charter schools rose by 4,337 during the 2007-08 school year. That marks the biggest enrollment increase since 1991-92, when the charter school option was first made available to Minnesota students and parents.
Total enrollment for charter schools stands at 28,206. That's almost three times the enrollment in the 2001-02 school year. The total public school enrollment last year in Minnesota was 796,757, a number that has been declining for several years.
"I've never seen anything escalate this quick," says Hank Hurd, the Durham district's chief operating officer. "There's no way for a school district to absorb those kinds of increases."
The 2007-08 school year has come to a close, but as superintendents across the country finalize their budgets for the fall, many are projecting major spikes in a number of areas -- cafeteria food and heating oil, for example. Perhaps the greatest bump is for diesel, which fuels the yellow buses that bring kids to school in the first place.
Some 475,000 school buses transport 25 million children -- more than half of the country's schoolchildren -- each day, and cover 4.3 billion miles a year, says the American School Bus Council, a Washington, D.C.-based group that lobbies on behalf of the school-bus industry. And the cost of fueling all these vehicles has a direct impact beyond the bus.
Bowling Green has cut back a teaching position and ordered fewer new textbooks. Pennsylvania's Palisades School District will start charging kids extra when they go on field trips. The Bellevue district in Nebraska will skip a planned roofing job and defer replacing some old-but-still-functional boilers.
Two area school districts are paying more in interest than they are receiving this quarter in a complex investment program they undertook two years ago to help pay retirement benefits, a Journal Sentinel analysis found.
The investment plans implemented in the Waukesha and West Allis-Milwaukee districts are the same as a program that an outside analyst said was causing a loss for the Kenosha Unified district in the current quarter.
For part of their investments in the complicated programs, all three districts borrowed money at fixed rates that now exceed what they receive in income. In addition, because the value of the investments has fallen substantially over the last year, the interest rate on debt issued by district-run trusts has increased enough to cut into profits they had expected to make.
As a result, Waukesha and West Allis-West Milwaukee could be obligated to pay out thousands of dollars more in interest than they are receiving from the investments for the quarter ending this month.
The article notes that Erik Kass, Waukesha's executive Director of Business Services will soon become assistant superintendent of business services in Madison. A significant decline (from $48M in 2000 to $24M in 2006; annual budgets were $252M and $333M) in the Madison School District's "Equity Fund" balance (the difference between assets and liabilities) has been an issue in recent board races and meetings.
It will be interesting to see how both the past experiences of Erik Kass and incoming Superintendent Dan Nerad frame their approach to local governance and community interaction.
Outgoing Green Bay School District Superintendent Daniel Nerad always will have new-job jitters.
The butterflies were there on his first day as a Green Bay School District employee 33 years ago, and he predicts they'll be there when he starts his new role as head of the Madison School District July 1.
Nerad can only hope there's less property damage this time around.
"My parents gave me a new briefcase when I was employed here," he recalled Tuesday. "I had this old beat-up car that the driver's side door sometimes would unlock and sometimes didn't unlock. … So I put the briefcase down on the side of the car and I went on the passenger's side and went in. Started the car, backed up — smashed my new briefcase.
"So just as there were first-day jitters then, there will be first-day jitters (in Madison)."
There's also been sadness around Nerad leaving, as he admits and as was evident at the conclusion of his last Green Bay School Board meeting Monday night.
Much more on incoming Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad here.
The report, "High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB," uses scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to compare changes in the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent of students since the introduction of No Child Left Behind.
The good news is that NCLB seems to be making progress toward its goal of closing the "achievement gap," states the report: In fourth-grade reading, for example, NAEP scores for the bottom tenth increased 16 points from 2000 to 2007, compared to 3 points for the top tenth.
But what does the narrowing of that gap mean for students scoring at the top of the spectrum?
"The progress of our top students has been modest at best," said the report, noting that the focus of NCLB on bringing students to the "proficient" level might result in the neglect of gifted students who are already proficient.
"People can look at this data and say, 'This is great news,' and maybe that's what our national education policy should be," said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Fordham Institute. "But you see that the performance of the high-achieving students is languid, and the question is whether languid is going to cut it in a global economy."
This publication reports the results of the first two (of five) studies of a multifaceted research investigation of the state of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era.
Part I: An Analysis of NAEP Data, authored by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, examines achievement trends for high-achieving students (defined, like low-achieving students, by their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) since the early 1990s and, in more detail, since 2000.
Part II: Results from a National Teacher Survey, authored by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett of Farkas Duffett Research Group, reports on teachers' own views of how schools are serving high-achieving pupils in the NCLB era.
And about three-quarters of the teachers surveyed said they agreed with this statement: "Too often, the brightest students are bored and under-challenged in school -- we're not giving them a sufficient chance to thrive".
Hailed as a hard worker by district peers and teachers, in person, Nerad is a quiet and astute listener who weighs opinions, questions and ideas in a thoughtful manner.
It's the quiet that marks the greatest contrast with outgoing Superintendent Art Rainwater, a former football coach with a commanding physical presence. Rainwater's assertive, booming voice resonates in the Doyle Administration Building's auditorium with or without a microphone.
Asked what the biggest difference is between Rainwater and Nerad, School Board President Arlene Silveira said it "will be Dan being out in the community and being more communicative. I think he will be more available and more accessible to the community as a whole. ... I think people should feel very comfortable and confident that stepping in, he will be able to start making decisions and leading us from day one. I think that's a big deal and very positive for us."
Her learning marked her as different in her neighborhood and her home. And that was the conundrum she presented to the benefactor driving her home for summer break from the last day of school on Thursday.
Her family lives in one of the roughest housing projects in Washington, D.C. But for the past three years, the 15-year-old ninth-grader has been attending the SEED School in that city, which meant she lived at the school five days a week, except in the summer. It is a boarding school of the type that a core group of influential Milwaukeeans wants to establish here — providing remedial and college-prep, wraparound services that cocoon students from tough family and neighborhood circumstances so that they may better acquire the academic and life skills to succeed.
This girl represents one of the reasons Milwaukee and state leaders should get behind this proposal, contributing to a capital campaign that must raise $30 million to $60 million in private money and injecting a commitment in the governor’s upcoming budget for direct state funding in 2011.
“Ms. Poole, I’m concerned,” the girl said, as Lesley Poole, the schools director of student life, tells it on the day it happened. “I think I’m getting smarter and know more than anyone in my house, and that’s unfair to my mom. I know more words than she does. . . . I can out talk her.”
Houston Independent School District officials probably reckoned they made a thrifty choice when they planned to close William Wharton Elementary (latest news). Because many Wharton students come from neighborhoods outside its zone, administrators must have assumed that shuttering the school, consolidating its student body with that of a bigger facility, and perhaps selling the pricey Montrose real estate was a winning formula.
They failed to do their homework. A small army of Montrose residents organized to save the school. The residents have spoken out at public hearings, met with Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra and launched a tidy new Web site called www.friendsofwharton.org. In the process, the coalition revealed the central role a healthy school plays for its community. Wharton, the Montrose activists argue, is not only an academic success story. It is a catalyst for political participation, as neighbors return there year after year to vote. With cozy, mini-Alamo style architecture, it's one of a handful of HISD elementary schools considered architecturally significant. And it hosts an Urban Harvest community garden, a neighborhood playground and a baseball field, which cost the Neartown Little League more than $400,000.
HISD, of course, is not the park service. Much as neighbors like Wharton, administrators could argue, the district must pass only one exam in deciding its fate: whether it benefits Houston students. Yet Wharton, it turns out, educates well. Uniquely well.
Nearly 200 employees of the Madison School District who currently have health insurance provided by Wisconsin Physicians Service will lose that option, saving the district at least $1.6 million next year.
But the real savings in eliminating what has long been the most expensive health insurance option for district employees will come in "cost avoidance" in the future, said Bob Nadler, director of human resources for the district.
"It's a big deal for us - it really is," Nadler said.
"It certainly will be a benefit to both our employees and the taxpayers," said Superintendent Art Rainwater, adding that the savings were applied to salary increases for the employees affected.
The change, which will take effect Aug. 1, is the result of an arbitrator's ruling that allows the district to eliminate WPS coverage as an option for members of the clerical unit of Madison Teachers Inc., and instead offer a choice of coverage by Group Health Cooperative, Dean Care or Physicians Plus at no cost to employees. Those employees previously had a choice between only WPS or GHC.
Currently, the district pays $1,878.44 a month for each employee who chooses WPS family coverage and $716.25 for single coverage.
For Dean Care, the next highest in cost, the district will pay $1,257.68 per employee a month for family coverage and $478.21 for single coverage.
This year, WPS raised its costs more than 11 percent while other providers raised their costs by 5 percent to 9 percent, Nadler said.
The tradeoff between WPS's large annual cost increases, salaries and staff layoffs will certainly be a much discussed topic in the next round of local teacher union negotiations.
Budget cuts. Teacher layoffs. In this time of budget crisis, can our public schools really afford to continue funding arts and music education?
The appropriate question is: Can California schools afford not to?
The Dana Arts and Cognition Consortium recently identified a direct correlation between arts experiences and both academic achievement and personal development. The research shows that students who are exposed to the arts demonstrate increased overall academic success beyond just test scores, are connected to the world outside of school, and have more self-confidence.
What's more, the report found that training in the arts leads to higher levels of reading acquisition, motivation, extended attention spans, information recall in long-term memory, and understanding of geometric representation. For example, specific pathways in the brain can be identified and improved during performing and visual arts instruction.
Not convinced by the academic research? Then look at the economics.
District officials announced the decision Sunday afternoon after a marathon 7-hour closed session board meeting Saturday.
Maass, the superintendent of the Fond du Lac School District, will assume the district's top post later this summer pending a School Board site visit, background check and successful contract negotiations.
He's set to replace Superintendent Daniel Nerad, who will begin his tenure as the head of the Madison School District July 1.
March 7, 2008 Meeting [rtf / pdf]. Well worth reading for those interested in the use of Connected Math and Core Plus, among others, in our schools.
A few interesting items:
Mitchell Nathan proposed a change to the name of the Work Group to more authentically describe its intent. There was consensus to accept the change in designation for the Work Group from "Curriculum Review and Research Findings" to “Learning from Curricula."
"Addresses the misconception that there is one curriculum. There are a number of curricula at play, with the exception of the narrowing down at the middle school level, but teachers are also drawing from supplementary materials. There are a range of pathways for math experiences. The work plan would give an overview by level of program of what exists. "
"Could say that variety is good for children to have places to plug into. Could expand on the normative idea of purchasing commercial curricula vs. richer, in-house materials. Standards tell the teachers what needs to be taught. Published materials often are missing some aspect of the standards. District tries to define core resources; guides that help people with classroom organization." Fascinating, given the move toward one size fits all in high school, such as English 9 and 10.
"Want to include a summary of the NRC report that came out in favor of Connected Math but was not conclusive—cannot control for teacher effects, positive effects of all curricula, etc. "
"Would like to give some portrayal of the opportunities for accelerated performance -- want to document informal ways things are made available for differentiation. "
"Include elementary math targeted at middle school, e.g., Math Masters. There is information out there to address the Math Masters program and its effect on student achievement."
"Data are available to conclude that there is equity in terms of resources"
"District will have trend data, including the period when Connected Math was implemented, and control for changes in demographics and see if there was a change. No way to link students who took the WKCE with a particular curriculum experience (ed: some years ago, I recall a teacher asked Administration at a PTO meeting whether they would track students who took Singapore Math at the Elementary level: "No"). That kind of data table has to be built, including controls and something to match teacher quality. May recommend that not worth looking at WKCE scores of CM (Connected Math) student or a case study is worth doing. "
The Parent Survey will be mailed to the homes of 1500 parents of students across all grades currently enrolled in MMSD math classes. The Teacher Survey will be conducted via the district’s web site using the Infinite Campus System.
It's apparent from The Times editorial, "Hope for Locke High,” and two previous articles why this newspaper deserves its poor reputation among local educators and informed community members when it comes to public education. A runaway bureaucracy, top-down authoritarian school administrations and a decided lack of collaboration are the real issues. It's too bad that they remain hidden behind The Times' blame-the-bad-teacher cries and charter-school cheerleading.
Can we at least talk about the real problem, the state budget, for a moment? Because California is one of the largest economies in the world, it's a crime that the state ranks among the lowest in per-pupil spending and has such large teacher-student ratios. It would make sense to give a much greater financial priority to public education. What we don't spend on now, we will have to spend much more on later. Incarceration, healthcare and welfare already cost our society too much.
Senior Deputy Supt. Ramon C. Cortines (who really should be called the superintendent in light of the vacant leadership of David L. Brewer) was clear and correct in taking responsibility for the latest outburst of violence at Locke High School. The Los Angeles Unified School District has "abdicated [its] responsibility” for too many years at a host of schools in inner-city Los Angeles. Years of inexperienced or despotic administrators have helped drive excellent, experienced teachers away. A lack of true collaboration with teachers and parents, turning a blind eye to the collective bargaining agreement and ignoring student-centered reforms lowered morale. When teachers aren't valued, they try to find places where they are.
Thinking about running for the Birmingham Board of Education next year? (And we're hoping a lot of people are.)
School board members offered up a nicely gift-wrapped campaign issue for opponents to run with.
Amazingly, the school board rejected a document last week requesting bids on legal services. Instead, the board will stay with the two, expensive, outside law firms it has used for a dozen years: Waldrep, Stewart and Kendrick; and Thomas, Means, Gillis and Seay.
Even with all the financial troubles the city school system is having, this wasn't even a close vote. By 6-2, the board turned back a document that would request - only request, mind you - proposals from other law firms.
Just asking for other proposals shouldn't be difficult for the school board - if it truly has the best interests of city taxpayers and the school system's future in mind.
The legal fees the system pays are out of line with anything reasonable, especially when you look at what other school systems pay for legal services. Last year, Birmingham paid $108 per student in legal fees, by far the highest in the state. Second-place Anniston spent just under $57 per student.
Wonder if steep legal fees are an unfortunate characteristic of the metropolitan area? Not if one considers Jefferson County's legal spending. During the same period the Birmingham school board was forking over $3 million-plus in fees and lawsuit settlements, the Jefferson County system, with thousands more students, was paying about one-sixth that amount.
From Wisconsin Heights on the west to Marshall on the east, 10 Dane County school districts and the private Eagle School in Fitchburg are among more than 170 Wisconsin public and private school systems purchasing tests from Northwest Evaluation Association, a nonprofit group based in the state of Oregon.
The aim of those tests, known as Measures of Academic Progress, and others purchased from other vendors, is to give educators, students and parents more information about students ' strengths and weaknesses. Officials at these districts say the cost, about $12 per student per year for MAP tests, is a good investment.
The tests ' popularity also reflects widespread frustration over the state 's $10 million testing program, the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination.
Critics say that WKCE, which is used to hold schools accountable under the federal No Child Left Behind law, fails to provide adequate data to help improve the teaching methods and curriculum used in the classrooms.
They complain that because the tests are administered just once a year, and it takes nearly six months to receive the results, the information arrives in May -- too late to be of use to teachers during the school year.
The testing controversy is "a healthy debate, " said Tony Evers, deputy state superintendent of public instruction, whose agency contends that there 's room for both WKCE and MAP.
....
"It 's a test that we feel is much more relevant to assisting students and helping them with their skills development, " said Mike Hensgen, director of curriculum and instruction for the Waunakee School District, who acknowledges he 's a radical in his dislike of WKCE.
"To me, the WKCE is not rigorous enough. When a kid sees he 's proficient, ' he thinks he 's fine. "
Hensgen contends that the WKCE, which is based on the state 's academic content for each grade level, does a poor job of depicting what elite students, and students performing at the bottom level, really know.
The Waunakee School Board, in a letter being distributed this month, is urging state legislators and education officials to find ways to dump WKCE in favor of MAP and tests from ACT and other vendors.
D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and education officials marked the first anniversary of his takeover of the city's beleaguered public schools yesterday by listing a series of improvements, mainly in business functions and school facilities, and outlined their goal of improving student achievement in the second year.
School system officials acknowledge that the efforts, while serving as a foundation for better instruction, probably will show little immediate effect on performance, as rated on test scores due later this summer.
A five-page, mostly single-spaced handout detailed 46 initiatives. They include a new textbook distribution system, refurbished high school athletic fields, spruced-up buildings, more art and music teachers and digitized personnel files that eliminated 4.6 million documents in disarray.
The Milwaukee police chief’s concerns about the summer aren’t overinflated when three officers are injured in a melee near a high school that began with a water balloon fight.
A group of education and business leaders are trying to improve school boards across Georgia.
This new Commission for School Board Excellence was formed at the request of the State Board of Education. The group includes representatives from the Georgia and Metro Atlanta Chambers of Commerce and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).
The new group listed a few places where weak board struggle: micromanagement of staff, poor decision-making and mismanaging money.
These are severe problems. This new group may have good ideas on how to help school boards, but do you think board members will listen to the advice?
High schools receiving $80 million in annual federal funding to support “smaller learning communities” can document that they are taking steps to establish learning environments more intimate than found in the typical comprehensive high school.
But, according to a federal study, such smaller schools can’t answer the most significant question: Is student achievement improving in the smaller settings?
The evaluation of the 8-year-old program found that schools participating in it show signs of success. In the schools, the proportion of students being promoted from 9th to 10th grade increases, participation in extracurricular activities rises, and the rate of violent incidents declines.
But the evaluation found “no significant trends” in achievement on state tests or college-entrance exams, says the report, which was prepared by a private contractor and released by the U.S. Department of Education last week.
Less than three months into his tenure, Superintendent Terry Grier is shaking up the top ranks of San Diego Unified.
Top-earning administrators and vice principals are interviewing to keep their own jobs. School district outsiders and insiders alike are being tapped to fill new slots. And Grier has introduced a novel method to screen the best principals and administrators for the jobs -- an interview meant to measure values and problem-solving, aimed at picking the optimal principals and teachers for disadvantaged kids.
"It's easy for us to get comfortable in our positions, comfortable in our expectations, and comfortable in our authority," said Katherine Nakamura, the president of the school board. "It's not a bad thing to reassess ourselves from time to time."
Yet even as Grier announces his first selections, few staffers fully understand the big picture for San Diego Unified. Most employees still haven't seen a simple chart outlining the new makeup of the school district: which jobs stay, which jobs go, and who reports to whom. The chart, which exists in draft form, has not yet been made public.
That uncertainty unnerves some employees. The rapid overhaul undertaken by Grier stands in contrast to his predecessor, Carl Cohn, who waited more than six months before introducing a new layout for San Diego Unified. The hallmark of Cohn's reorganization, five area superintendents who divvied up the massive school district, weren't appointed until eight months into his tenure.
"In 40 years, I have never heard anybody come in and immediately implement a procedure that says if you don't pass this interview, you lose the job you're in," said Jeannie Steeg, executive director of the Administrators Association of San Diego. "And never has a process been implemented so quickly.
All vice principals underwent a new interview to compete for a shifting pool of jobs. The interview is modeled on the teachings of University of Wisconsin Milwaukee professor Martin Haberman, who studies disadvantaged students and the educators who help them best. Principals applying for new jobs were interviewed as well. San Diego Unified signed a $23,000 contract with the Haberman Educational Foundation to train staffers in the interview process, which includes problem-solving scenarios and is meant to reveal the applicants' core values. Two people ask open-ended questions during a tape-recorded interview and score the answers.
CPS Secondary Math Curriculum Coordinator Chip Sharp provided average ACT scores reported by course enrollment which are used in the figures below. Plotting the data in several ways gives food for thought regarding the differences between algebra and integrated math pathways offered at CPS.
The data don't distinguish between which students are sophomores, juniors or seniors when they take the ACT, which students may have repeated courses or what year they started the pathway (7th, 8th or 9th grade). But it does give some idea of how much math "preparation" each course pathway provides at least for the years for which data is available.
I've heard that Madison's Math Task Force will render a report prior to Superintendent Art Rainwater's June 30, 2008 retirement. Related: Math Forum.
pare a thought this morning for teachers whose schools have the lowest results in the country, waking up to a warning from the Government that they have 50 days - 50 days! - to produce an “action plan” or face closure or merger.
Some of these schools may deserve the opprobrium that ministers are inviting us to heap upon them. Many more will not. Most “failing” schools take the toughest kids from the most socially disadvantaged areas. They are not dealing with the problems you and I might be worrying about: whether the curriculum is broad enough for Sophie's myriad interests, or when Jamie will fit in the third language you want him to learn.
These schools are dealing with children with deprived and disruptive family backgrounds many of whom cannot read or write English, lack any positive parental support and have already given up on their chances in life before they walk through the school gates at 11.
One day in August 2005, Dan Swinney went to the Chicago public schools for help in his crusade to revive manufacturing here. Instead, Mr. Swinney left his meeting with some homework: design a new high school to train the workers needed to make that revival happen.
This past fall, the school, Austin Polytechnical Academy, opened inside a building that had once housed a mammoth, violence-prone high school on the city's struggling West Side. Now, Mr. Swinney, chairman of the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council, has plans to open two more high schools and an elementary school in other areas of the city.
Mr. Swinney says American manufacturing is adapting to globalization by shifting to higher-value products. But with the baby boomers' looming retirement, the education system isn't producing the workers and managers needed to take over the highly skilled jobs that are most in demand.
"There's a window that's open that will allow us to sustain and expand our competitive advantage, but it's only open for a few years," Mr. Swinney says. Training poor students to fill these positions can "address deep social problems," while giving industry the work force it needs.
Leadership Public Schools' longstanding battle with the Campbell Union High School District is over.
The district has won. Families of low-income Hispanics, whom the school was designed to serve, have lost.
The board of the non-profit San Francisco-based charter organization voted last week to shut down its Campbell high school after only two years of operation. Leadership is calling the closing a consolidation.
Students will be bused to Overfelt High in East San Jose, where Leadership has a 10-year lease from charter-welcoming East Side Union High School District.
But let's be straight: This was sabotage by Campbell Union. And it points to weaknesses in the state law that says school districts must provide space to charter schools.
Proposition 39 requires that districts provide equivalent facilities, but only on a yearly basis. So many anti-charter districts, like Campbell, use the provision to give charters a literal run-around and force them to move every year.
Leadership opened two years ago with 120 ninth-graders in rented space at a church not far from Del Mar High, the target area where there was a concentration of long-under-served Hispanic children. (Perhaps showing the value of competition, Del Mar itself has made considerable strides in the past few years under Principal Jim Russell.)
Teachers' unions are often blamed for protecting educators who are burned out or should never have been allowed to teach in the first place. But in Toledo, Ohio, the union has spearheaded a controversial policy to purge the school district of incompetent teachers. It's called "peer review" and no school system in the country has been doing it longer than Toledo.
It started with four older girls calling her vulgar names, one pouring a bottle of water on her head, then yanking a fistful of hair from her scalp - right in the Los Gatos High School cafeteria.
It led to school authorities summoning police, suspending the lead bully, convening mediation sessions and checking in daily with the freshman who was bullied. The school even mapped routes around campus to ensure the antagonists remain apart after the victim's parents took out a restraining order against their daughter's harasser.
But at a time when awareness of harassment at schools seems to be growing, the Los Gatos incident underscores the difficulty of dealing with the problem: Short of kicking a bully out of school, even when educators do a lot they are often accused of doing too little to appease parents and ease victims' fears.
"We're trying to help on a daily basis," Los Gatos-Saratoga Union School District Superintendent Cary Matsuoka said. "But there's only so much we can control in the world of 14-, 15-year-old adolescents."
Across the valley, parents of harassment victims insist school authorities don't react quickly or forcefully enough to protect their children - even as school officials say they're working harder than ever to prevent and respond to bullying and aggression.
Harassment peaks in middle school, the time when kids are sorting out themselves and their place in life. In California, 42 percent of seventh-graders, 38 percent of ninth-graders and 33 percent of 11th-graders reported being victims of harassment, according to the 2005-07 Healthy Kids survey.
At tomorrow’s meeting of the West Bend School Board, they will he hearing the third reading and possibly passing a new harassment policy. This proposed policy goes way overboard. Here is the proposed policy:
Sorry for the images, but that’s all I have. A policy like this is a good idea. What constitutes harassment and what should be done about it should be defined to protect both the students and the faculty. But this policy is way too broad and fraught with problems. Let’s look at a couple of them. Here is the definition of “harassment:”
Harassment means verbal or physical conduct related to an individual’s membership in a protected class (including, but not limited to: sex, race, religion, national origin, ancestry, creed, pregnancy, marital or parental status, sexual orientation or physical, mental, emotional or learning disability) that has the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working or learning environment or interferes with the individual’s work or learning performance.
The presumed November matchup produced by the long presidential-primary season that ended last week offers contrasting approaches to K-12 policy, along with some common ground on the basics of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who last week secured enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination, both express support for the nclb law’s goals and its use of testing to measure schools’ success.
But Sen. McCain would promote market forces as a way to spur school improvement, and would likely seek to freeze education spending as part of a review of the effectiveness of federal programs.
Sen. Obama, meanwhile, promises to search for new ways of assessing students and to invest significantly in efforts to improve teacher quality.
Although education wasn’t a prominent issue in the Democratic or Republican primaries, it could emerge more clearly in the general-election campaign, one political scientist said last week. He pointed particularly to the potential for a sharper focus on where the candidates stand on the requirements for testing and accountability under the NCLB law.
The storm that swamped this city three years ago also effectively swept away a public school system with a dismal record and faint prospects of getting better. Before Hurricane Katrina, educator John Alford said, he toured schools and found "kids just watching movies" in classes where "low expectations were the norm."
Now Alford is one of many new principals leading an unparalleled education experiment, with possible lessons for troubled urban schools in the District and elsewhere. New Orleans, in a post-Katrina flash, has become the first major city in which more than half of all public school students attend charter schools.
For these new schools with taxpayer funding and independent management, old rules and habits are out. No more standard hours, seniority, union contracts, shared curriculum or common textbooks. In are a crowd of newcomers -- critics call them opportunists -- seeking to lift standards and achievement. They compete for space, steal each other's top teachers and wonder how it is all going to work.
Next time it rewrites its statewide standardized math test, the state Department of Education might consider this challenging question:
With a statewide high school graduation rate of 58.1 percent in 2005 and an improvement rate of 2.6 percentage points over the previous five years, when can Georgia expect to achieve a 100 percent graduation rate?
Answer: 2110.
One hundred and two years is a long, long time —- too long, in fact. But with the sluggish response of state leaders to holistic and meaningful education reform, accelerating that time frame will be very difficult.
While Gov. Sonny Perdue has introduced graduation coaches to identify and deflect potential dropouts in high school, there's far more to be done to reclaim children in the early grades, where most kids wander off track. And rather than whittling away at instructional funding, as Georgia has done in recent years, the state ought to be investing in programs to prepare low-income 3-year-olds for school and to help struggling third-graders learn to read.
To truly transform its low-performing schools, Georgia has to take an honest look at its financial commitment to education. That starts with the governor, who continues to maintain that his administration has not shortchanged education and is, in fact, spending more than ever on a per-pupil basis.
Moneyball tells about a system that did not want to change; of practices held steadfast in tradition; and of how a leader, with the right motivation and insight, innovated for success. So, as this season winds down and you sit watching nine innings, consider these nine lessons for educators drawn from an unlikely place: America’s simple favorite pastime—baseball.
1. Don’t go for the home runs … just get on base and the rest will come. Beane didn’t win baseball games by hoping for home runs. Home runs are rare, and hope doesn’t win games. He understood that individual players don’t win games; teams do—when they work together in a process of creating runs. In education, we identify isolated strategies that we hope will be our home runs. But experience tells us that a better approach is to get solidly and clearly “on base.” Then, the system can work, each piece supporting the other, stepping up when necessary and stepping back to “sacrifice” if that is what will win the game. The only way the system can work is if everyone buys in and does his or her part.
2. Money is important, but it is not the answer. Beane had to spend his team’s meager $40 million wisely; other clubs had several times that amount. So he set out to identify ways he could use his money more efficiently. As Lewis writes, “[I]n professional baseball it still matters less how much money you have than how well you spend it.” Instead of investing in one big star, Beane sought out those players who were regularly and consistently getting on base (see lesson one). We in education need to find ways to get on base. Small steps are enough if they are consistent and well informed. The smartest strategies don’t necessarily cost the most money. Indeed, some of them don’t cost anything at all.
One constant cry in the debate over educational reform is that we must save our public schools. But proponents of that argument assume that a public school system must be exactly what we have today: schools clustered in districts governed by centralized bureaucracies that oversee every detail of what goes on in individual schools, from budgets to personnel to curricula. That's like saying that our steel industry should center on open-hearth furnaces and giant corporations rather than the nimble mini-mills that have largely superseded them. Let's agree, for argument, that a public school system is a good thing: but why should it look just like it does today—which is what it looked like 50 years ago?
There's nothing sacrosanct, after all, about the current structure of our public education system. Its roots go back to the nineteenth century, when a geographical community would club together to hire and pay a teacher and later, when things got more complicated, would tax property to provide a local school and then appoint or elect a few people to a small board that would oversee it and hire its teacher. As the communities grew into towns and cities, it seemed logical to expand the governing mechanisms already in place. Tiny school boards slowly swelled into today's bloated and dysfunctional school districts, responsible for running not one but 5 or 25 or 50 schools.
If we want to save the public schools, we mustn't confuse the ideal of public education—that every child has the right to a good K-12 education at public expense—with any particular system, including the one we've got. Surely we can come up with a modernized definition of public education fit for a new millennium. In Arizona, where I'm Superintendent of Public Instruction, that's just what we're trying to achieve. Our new approach, aimed at shifting power from bureaucrats to students and families, has three key, equally essential parts: student-centered funding, parental choice, and tough, objectively measurable, standards.
Start with student-centered funding. In Arizona, we've all but replaced an older and more typical system, in which school districts assess and use local property taxes to fund schools, with one in which the state raises the money (including for capital construction) through a statewide tax, straps an equal amount of it to each student's back, and releases it only when he walks into the school of his choice.
Today's district is a rigid command-and-control system that offers dissatisfied parents no choices except, if they don't like the district school, to send their kids to private school or to home-school them. Moreover, like the Soviet Union with its five-year plans, the districts do a poor job of management, for the reason F. A. Hayek pointed out: command-and-control systems suffer from an information deficit. How can a distant district office bureaucrat know how to run a school better than the principals and teachers who work there? Too often, the district just lays down a single set of policies to govern all its schools, imposing one-size-fits-all curricula and disciplinary policies on schools that may have very different needs. The system also seems impervious to reform from within. In my experience, those who join district boards, even those who start out reform-minded, eerily become co-opted and wind up defending the system tooth and nail. It's just like watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
If you need an additional reason to abolish the traditional property-tax funding system, consider this: it's unfair. Funding education through local property taxes is deeply regressive. It lets rich districts spend more per pupil, at much lower tax rates, than poor districts. After all, a rich district's citizens who pay $3,000 per year on their $300,000 houses are paying 10 percent in taxes; the poor district's citizens who pay $1,200 on their $100,000 houses are paying 12 percent.
The Green Bay School District, currently run by incoming Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad spent $11,441 per student ($232,232,000 total budget) in 2006/2007 while Madison spent $12,422 per student ($329,596,000 total budget) during the same period according to School Facts 2007 by WISTAX.
A few other interesting comparisons between the Districts (2006/2007):
To anyone casually observing the two in an effort to divine differences between the candidates, the disagreements seemed small.
Both Obama and McCain believe in rigorous standards and rich curricula to help students compete in a global economy. Century even suggested that American kids should be "trilingual," not just bilingual, to compete with the rest of the world.
Both candidates support publicly funded, but privately run, charter schools.
For now at least, both oppose using taxpayer dollars for large-scale voucher programs. (In a later session with reporters, though, Keegan pointed out that McCain actually supported the push in 2003 for a small-scale voucher that now operates in Washington, D.C., public schools. She added that if a state asked McCain to support a voucher program, "he might be supportive." But she said he doesn't currently support changing the provisions of No Child Left Behind to allow for private school vouchers. Currently, students in under-performing schools can get taxpayer dollars for free tutoring or transfer to a better-performing public school.)
Speaking of No Child Left Behind, both candidates would tweak it in ways that, for the most part, only education wonks can appreciate. They'd both fund it differently. Keegan says McCain would figure out more efficient, focused ways to spend what she says is NCLB's "unprecedented" increase in funding to schools. Century says Obama believes NCLB "was insufficiently funded and poorly implemented."
They both bemoan the law's inability to ensure that low-income children get high-quality teachers and they'd both push for so-called "value added" provisions that would give schools credit for test score gains that children make each year, even if all children don't meet a pre-set proficiency goal in reading or math.
A $1.2 billion budget that would keep trends generally on the same track in Milwaukee Public Schools for the coming school year was advanced early Wednesday by the Milwaukee School Board budget committee.
Those trends include substantial declines in enrollment, tightening services in many schools and an ever-growing portion of students with special needs.
hey also include increased emphasis on math instruction, health services for students and nutrition programs, including widely available free breakfast.
Board members and administrators avoided making any projections on the property tax implications of the budget, leaving that highly charged matter to the fall, when the proposal will be revised to reflect the state of finances just before property tax bills are calculated.
The proposal made in April by Superintendent William Andrekopoulos was in line with a directive from the School Board that the increase in total spending on operations be held to 0.25% for next year.
Fairfax County School Board members said they are likely to abandon a staff report that showed racial and ethnic gaps in some measures of student behavior, including in the demonstration of "sound moral character and ethical judgment."
The board had delayed an April vote to approve the report after concerns were raised that findings were based on subjective measures, such as elementary report card data, and that they would fuel negative stereotypes.
Board member Phillip A. Niedzielski-Eichner (Providence) said yesterday that he plans to propose at a June 19 meeting that a vote on the report be postponed indefinitely. Several board members have indicated their support, he said.
Board member Martina A. Hone (At Large) said that the original report is "fatally flawed" and that it doesn't make sense "to work on fixing it." She said she is pleased with the way the board is rethinking it. "I think we have come out a stronger school board," she said.
via a kind reader's email - David A. Mittell, Jr., a fascinating look at the political sausage making and special interests behind, or blocking school "reform":
THE (Deval) PATRICK administration is big on reform when it comes to organizational charts, which in the to and fro of politics are accidents of history; are aesthetically displeasing to social scientists; and more often than not downright inefficient. It is the last point that deserves attention. The Patrick administration seems partly inhabited by people concerned with the second point and partly by people impatient for more power to do what they want by direct administrative order, rather than having to cajole semi-autonomous boards and authorities.
Mitt Romney had plans along the same lines and was pleased with himself when, early in his term, he was able to persuade the legislature to eliminate the notoriously inefficient Metropolitan District Commission and transfer its functions to the Department of Conservation and Recreation. How much actual efficiency was achieved is debatable.
Mr. Romney also tried to eliminate the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. As a Republican governor he had no chance of eradicating this termites' nest, despite its many public failings. Thereafter, wisely, he resolved to do what he could with the rusty tools that hehad. The danger of persisting in trying to clean up the flow chart in the face of political opposition was that, even had he succeeded to some extent, he would have spent his whole term doing it. Redirectin the mission of state government would have been lost.
With more than a third of his own term gone by, Mr. Patrick faces the same conundrum. He too wants to put the Turnpike Authority and all other transportation-related agencies under his direct control. That will need a column of its own. Here I want to deal with his partly completed effort to put all education-related agencies under his control.
That's not my list and I do not endorse it. But the evidence to date is that the critics have the politics right. Not only does Governor Patrick seem to be moving to quash some of the most hopeful aspects of education reform, appointed minions are acting on his behalf in petty and vindictive ways:
On Feb.12, the legislature approved exhuming the corpse of a cabinet-level secretariat of education, which, with good reason, Gov. William Weld had persuaded the legislature to bury in 1996. The old education secretariat -- created with the idea of giving the governor clear line-authority to get things done -- had become a static extra layer of bureaucracy that got in the way of getting things done. The "corpse," which had only been alternately hibernating and estivating for 12 years, has been resuscitated with the same noble words about "action" that were spoken at its first founding.
On Jan. 17, after a long search, the Board of Education approved Mitchell Chester to be commissioner, succeeding the retired David Driscoll. He was chosen over two other finalists, including Karla Baehr, who was the clear favorite of education insiders. Later, on March 10, by an executive order, Governor Patrick stripped the Board of Education of its 170-year-old independence -- dating to its founder, Horace Mann -- and put it under the authority of the resuscitated education secretariat. He also enlarged its membership, packing it with his own people.
Unlike the Turnpike Authority, the Board of Education was not made up of "termites." Its members were distinguished gubernatorial appointees of both parties and different points of view. If ever there was a board that didn't need the bureaucratic shuffle dance, this was it.
From the beginning, activists from the Patrick gubernatorial campaign seemed to have it in for the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability. Created in 2001, operating on a $2.97 million budget, EQA served as an independent monitor of the progress of public schools spending almost $9 billion a year in state and local funds. Last year it was phased out in the budget and is currently in limbo. On April 11, its director, Joseph Rappa, was asked to leave a meeting of the governor's Educational Management Audit Council so it could go into executive session. A majority of three Patrick-appointed members then voted to fire him.
Mr. Rappa's contract was expiring anyway, and he was perfectly prepared to move on without in any way embarrassing the governor. But on April 16, as he was cleaning out his Ashburton Place office, in Boston, the governor's Education Advisers Office got into the act. Sydney Asbury and Michele Norman of that office had two State Police troopers eyeball Mr. Rappa as he cleaned out his desk, and then escort him out of the building. Thanks to these two goons (the bureaucrats, not the troopers), the public is assured that Mr. Rappa did not take any of the people's pencils.
On May 6, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings came to Boston to mark National Charter Schools Week and visit the successful Edward Brooke Charter School, in Roslindale, founded in 2002 and named after the former Republican senator from Massachusetts. Governor Patrick could not fit her into his schedule and did not attend a meeting with top state education officials chaired by Paul Reville, the incoming secretary of the no-longer hibernating cabinet-level Department of Education.
In an hour-long roundtable discussion the term "charter schools" did not come up, despite their being the reason for Secretary Spellings's visit to Boston. Nor did Secretary-designate Reville see fit to call on Commissioner-designate Mitchell Chester, who was on a telephone hook-up. It appears likely that this capable outsider is going to be shunned by the embittered friends of Karla Baehr.
So it goes. These are political games, and I here use the words child and student for the first time in this column. For their better being we must fear.
David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal's editorial board.
The Seattle School Board approved a five-year plan Wednesday that sets specific targets for raising test scores, graduation rates and even the number of credits earned by ninth-graders.
By 2012, for example, the district wants 88 percent of third-graders to pass reading on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, and 95 percent of the 10th-graders to do the same. Some of the most ambitious goals are in math and science, especially a passage rate of 80 percent on the science section of the 10th-grade WASL. In spring 2007, 33 percent passed.
To reach those and other goals, the plan calls for everything from better math and science instruction, to more consistency in what's taught from school to school, more tests to track student progress, and hiring teachers earlier so classes don't start the year with substitutes.
District officials have described the goals as ambitious, but achievable. And some of the most ambitious ones simply match what's required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, or reflect increasingly tough graduation requirements for high-school students.
Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson at Wednesday's School Board meeting said her plan doesn't cover everything, but that a strategic plan is meant to focus on "deficits."
Faced with growing numbers of students, what should school officials in Hartford and Germantown do to provide adequate school facilities?
One is tempted to ask just what part of "no" school officials in Germantown and Hartford don't understand.
Faced with the rejection by voters of a school building referendum in April, the Germantown School Board probably will try again in November with the same referendum. Meanwhile, in Hartford, officials haven't given up their quest for a new school despite being shot down twice - in November and April referendum balloting - by a 2-1 or better ratio.
Some consider their efforts arrogance and a slap in the face to voters. Maybe. But maybe it's a sincere attempt to find the best answer to a simple challenge faced by both communities.
Germantown and Hartford schools are a part of growing communities that every year are adding more subdivisions with families that include children. Those kids have to be educated somewhere. And as families grow, classrooms grow and become crowded. School officials in both districts contend that they need new elementary schools to cope with that growth.
The results for the WKCE test administered in November 2007 were finally released on May 30th. That is more than six months after the test was given. Worse, the data files containing the detailed results that can be used for proper statistical analysis of the results are STILL not available for download. Assessments are information that degrades over time. The fact that it takes six months to get the data out (whatever its other shortcomings) cheats the taxpayers of the full value of their investment.
At the very least the WI DPI should be embarrassed by the fact it takes this long to release the test results. Personally I find it outrageous. I had an email exchange with DPI officials concerning this long delay and the loss of value, this is an excerpt from part of that response (italics mine):
... The WKCE is a large-scale assessment designed to provide a snapshot of how well a district or school is doing at helping all students reach proficiency on state standards, with a focus on school and district-level accountability. A large-scale, summative assessment such as the WKCE is not designed to provide diagnostic information about individual students. Those assessments are best done at the local level, where immediate results can be obtained. Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum.
Does anyone else find the fact that the state issues WKCE results to individual students surprising given the above statement?
The Madison School District, together with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research is using local WKCE results for "Value Added Assessment".
Superintendent Art Rainwater attended his last Madison School Board meeting Monday night, and everything seemed so collegial and functional that it was easy to imagine it had always been this way.
But, of course, it was not.
Art Rainwater took over a school district that was in crisis.
When he succeeded former Superintendent Cheryl Wilhoyte a decade ago, the administration was at odds with much of the School Board, the community and, most seriously, with unions representing teachers and other school employees.
Much of the trouble had to do with Wilhoyte's unwillingness -- perhaps inability -- to communicate in a straight-forward manner.
Rainwater changed things immediately.
He was frank and accessible, never spoke in the arcane jargon of education bureaucrats and set up a regular schedule of meetings with board members, community leaders and Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews.
The Madison School District must reinstate four high school athletic directors and "make them whole for any financial loss, " according to an arbitrator 's ruling made public Monday.
Arbitrator Milo Flaten ruled the district violated its contract with Madison Teachers Inc. a year ago when it replaced the four athletic directors -- who were union members -- with two managers hired from other school districts.
In the decision, dated Friday and released by MTI on Monday, Flaten wrote that under its existing contract with MTI, the district promised that "athletic directors in the four schools would be represented by the union and that they would be members of the bargaining unit. No amount of reassignment of duties or creation of superficial boundaries can change that."
MTI Executive Director John Matthews on Monday estimated the decision could cost the district more than $230,000.
Of that amount, each of the four former athletic directors would receive about $8,000 apiece -- the extra compensation the four, who still work for the district, would have received this school year as athletic directors.
THE best schools in the world, it is generally agreed, are in Finland. In the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) studies, which compare 15-year-olds' reading, mathematics and science abilities in more than 50 countries, it routinely comes top. So politicians, academics, think-tankers and teachers from all over the world visit Finnish schools in the hope of discovering the magic ingredient. Journalists come too, and now it’s my turn.
And since I'm coming this far north, I want to take in Sweden too. That social-democratic paradise has carried out school reforms that make free-market ideologues the world over weak at the knees. In the 1990s it opened its state-education system to private competition, allowing new schools to receive the same amount for each pupil as the state would have spent on that child.
Sweden is my first stop. My week starts with post-breakfast coffee with Widar Andersson, an ex-chairman of Sweden’s Independent Schools Association. When the independent schools reforms were first mooted in 1991, he was a member of parliament for the Social Democrats, in one of their rare spells in opposition. “I think I was the only Social Democrat in favour of the reforms,” he tells me.
In 1994, when they came into force, he and two state-school teachers opened one of the very first independent schools. It was not the first time he took on the state: years earlier he and a few other social workers had set up a private company trying innovative ways to treat drug addicts. “I learned there must be other ways to do things than those the state has decided are right, especially in a country like Sweden where the state is so large,” he says.
Test scores released last week clearly show one of the primary tasks confronting Madison School District 's incoming superintendent, Daniel Nerad:
The district should find more effective ways to educate its rapidly growing populations of foreign-speaking students and lower-income students.
Students from immigrant families and students from lower-income families continue to score low on the annual tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
That 's the chief reason the Madison district fell below the state average in 22 of 23 scores.
Hours of physical training and military drills every day. Orders, sometimes given in nose-to-nose style, for what he was supposed to do every moment. Strict codes of conduct and dress - no cussing, no talking back, most everything done at double time, books carried with your left arm so you can salute with your right at any moment.
Last fall, when his mother brought him for the first time to Right Step, a military-style boot camp school for high school kids who generally have been failures in every other setting they've been in, Shields, now 16, said to himself, "Can't nobody change me."
The first day, he says, he mouthed off to a drill sergeant and found himself on his knees, with his arms pinned behind his back.
It was the start of a happy relationship - a process that, in Shields' description, turned him from being a street tough who had been into every form of wrongdoing into something he is proud to call himself: a cadet
When students return to classes in the fall, it'll mark the first time in six decades the Madison School District hasn't offered a program in agricultural education.
And that leaves Mary Klecker, who is retiring after three decades of leading the program, feeling angry.
"As I retire, I feel a strong sense of betrayal by this School District," Klecker wrote in a letter last week to members of the School Board and top state officials.
"It will be a sad end to a wonderful program that provides our students learning and career opportunities for a lifetime."
Fifty-three students are enrolled in agricultural education courses this year at East High School.
The program, which has included courses in introduction to agriculture, animal science, conservation and environmental science, leadership skills with the FFA, and horticulture, attracted more than 200 students at three high schools during its heyday in the mid-1990s.
In her letter and an interview, Klecker railed against district leaders, whom she said "lack a grasp of our state's agricultural heritage" and the importance of agribusiness and "are totally clueless" about related, outstanding programs at Madison Area Technical College and UW-Madison.
Across the nation, charter laws have spawned certain schools that are so successful they’re being replicated in other towns and states.
Nonprofit providers of these nationally acclaimed schools have been wooed and welcomed into communities hungry for better, more-effective options. The best of these models can prove their strategies’ merits with lots of encouraging data, testimonies from happy parents and impressive stories about their successful students.
These networks include the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Achievement First and the Green Dot Schools, among others. Pop down to New Haven, Conn., to see the thing of beauty that is the Amistad Academy run by Achievement First. Or drive up to Lynn, Mass., to take in a KIPP.
Can Rhode Island benefit from these proven successes? In a word, no.
Our laws fiercely protect Rhode Island’s educational status quo, as though it were a real treasure like Narragansett Bay or our historical architecture. The protectionist laws make it impossible for outside providers to do business in the state. (One could argue that the state laws make it impossible even for local schools to do business effectively. Certain Rhode Island charter schools are now being crushed by our protectionist culture.)
Take as only one example Rhode Island’s General Law 16-13-6 which cements teacher tenure, seniority and “bumping” into place, leaving Rhode Island administrators little if any control over the quality of their staff. No school providers from saner states can possibly assure us that they can be successful here if they can’t retain the stability of their staff and let ineffective teachers go, when necessary. Longtime Rhode Island residents have been drinking the protectionist Kool-Aid for so long they forget what effective school governance might look like.
SCHOOL LEADERS IN Holyoke are no strangers to finger-wagging state reports on student achievement at the Lynch Middle School. It was eight years ago this month that the state education department first declared the Holyoke school, which has a student-poverty rate of 84 percent, "underperforming." In the years since then, state officials have paid visit after visit to Holyoke, documenting shortcomings in written reports and recording the steps the school was taking to try to address them.
The Lynch was one of the first schools in Massachusetts to earn that unenviable distinction, which is part of the accountability system established by the landmark education reform bill passed in 1993. And today it is still among the 114 schools in the state - nearly all of them serving high-poverty populations - that are officially "underperforming." Of all the schools that have made this list, only nine have been able to climb off of it. Lynch, and many other schools, land on the list and tend to stay there.
Fifteen years into education reform, a growing number of critics charge that the effort has hit a wall. With MCAS, the sometimes controversial achievement test, the state has become quite good at identifying schools where performance is lagging. But it has failed at the crucial next step: fixing the schools.
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Chancellor Bruce Shepard will present Chancellor's Awards to longtime UW-Green Bay friends Daniel Nerad and Leonard A. Seidl during commencement ceremonies Saturday, May 17, on campus.
The Chancellor's Award is UW-Green Bay's highest community honor. It recognizes distinguished service to the University and community.
Daniel Nerad, Ph.D., is recognized for his service to the community and success in promoting partnerships with its public university.
Nerad has been superintendent of schools and learning in the Green Bay Area Public School District since 2001. Prior to his appointment as superintendent, he served the Green Bay district in a variety of roles including assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction and executive director of curriculum. He earned Wisconsin Superintendent of the Year honors in 2006.
UW-Green Bay Chancellor Bruce Shepard notes that Dr. Nerad's "commitment and dedication to education have had a major impact on students and people of all ages in our community." In particular, the superintendent's support of Phuture Phoenix at UW-Green Bay has helped the precollege program expand its reach to thousands of local students as early as fifth grade. The program matches volunteer mentors with students from low-income neighborhoods and counsels children to value education and plan for college. Nerad has also been a partner with the Institute for Learning Partnership at UW-Green Bay. Much more on Dan Nerad here.
A school board expert from Iowa who spoke at a conference in Dartmouth earlier this month noted that elected school boards in both Canada and the United States are increasingly being replaced by appointed bureaucrats.
Mary L. Delagardelle, who is in favour of elected boards, warned that "giving up elected school boards . . . is also giving up a little piece of democracy."
True enough. But we have surely reached the point in Nova Scotia, after a decade of troubles with school boards, where a little less democracy would be welcome change.
On June 30th, Art Rainwater is stepping down as superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
It's a position the 65-year-old never expected to fill, in Madison or anywhere else.
"My only career goal was to be a high school football coach," says Rainwater.
He was in 1965. Rainwater's career kicked off in Arkansas. The teacher-coach then moved to Texas. Next, Rainwater took a principal job in Alabama. His path eventually led to administrative work in Missouri. Then, in 1994, Rainwater became deputy superintendent in Wisconsin's Capitol City.
"I've served at almost every level of the K-12 education system that you can serve," he says.
In 1998, he added interim superintendent to his resume, replacing Cheryl Wilhoyte. During her tenure the district hit plenty of road bumps. Tensions were high.
"I think there was a lot of dissatisfaction, across the community, with the school district, at that time," says Rainwater. "So, the damage control was pretty obvious, (it) was going to happen."
Rainwater came in with three immediate goals. Smooth things over with the teachers union. Repair the district's relationship with the UW. And, gain the support of the business community.
"I thought by doing those three things, it would put the new superintendent, in place, to come in and hit the ground running," he adds.
The board is in the midst of interviews with six semifinalists for the superintendent's job, chosen from a pool "just shy of 20" applicants screened by search consulting firm Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates. The interviews are scheduled to wrap up tonight, with the board naming one or several finalists afterward, Warren said.
That puts the district on track to bring in its finalists next week for meetings with administrators, community leaders, labor groups and board members, with the possibility that the board could know whether it has a final candidate by week's end, he said.
The names of the semifinalists have not been released.
The original bill required only "a statement of the level of support" for the plan by school employees, students and parents, and the community. The amended bill requires a four-part test of support among various constituencies: "a majority of administrators," "a majority of teachers" and a "majority of the school advisory council," plus "a statement of the level of support" among other school employees, students and parents, and the surrounding community.
The amendments add a requirement to the application process - a description of the elements of any collective bargaining agreement that would need to be waived for an innovation plan to work.
Second (really) big change
The original bill gave innovation schools blanket exemption from laws and rules on: performance evaluations, authority of principals, employment of teachers, transfer of teachers, dismissal of teachers, salary schedules, teacher licensing and teacher salary payment.
All of that was struck by the amendments and replaced with language allowing a school board to waive any requirements deemed necessary to an innovation plan, except provisions of the school finance law, the exceptional children's educational act, data requirements necessary for School Accountability Reports, laws requiring criminal background checks of employees and the children's Internet protection act. (The original language barred any waivers of CSAP and No Child Left Behind requirements, and those remain in the bill.)
Third (really) big change
The original bill allowed innovation schools to be removed from a district's entire collective bargaining agreement by a vote of a majority of the personnel at the affected school or schools.
The amendments require "waiver of one or more of the provisions of the collective bargaining agreement" (italics added) to be approved by vote of "at least sixty percent of the members of the collective bargain unit who are employed at the innovation school."
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has scrapped a funding formula introduced in the late 1990s to bring more transparency and public participation to budget deliberations, replacing it with a system that critics say diminishes the autonomy of individual schools.
Rhee says that the funding method, known as the "weighted student formula," has not served many schools well, placing too much power in the hands of principals. Her alternative, she said, will increase transparency and help her make good on a core promise: to provide every D.C. school with art, music and physical education teachers.
Dismay over changes in the formula is part of a broader unhappiness with the development of the 2008-09 budget, the first on Rhee's watch. Information about the proposed allocation of money, usually available to the public in February, was posted only a week ago on the D.C. Public Schools Web site.
Some parents in the Elmbrook School District have complained about their district's move away from weekly, one-hour early releases to a schedule that dismisses students two hours and 15 minutes earlier than usual less frequently.
Kettle Moraine's plan has yet to be shared with all of the school's parents, said Kotlowski, although she said it has the near unanimous support of teachers.
The school should look into whether it could offer activities to occupy the student body while teachers are meeting as an alternative to sending them home early, Kettle Moraine board member Colin Butler suggested. He said students in Vermont, where he previously served on the school board, were allowed to ski free on the days when they went home early from school.
"Time given away will be very difficult to retrieve later on," Butler said.
Margaret V. Soucek and a small group of friends set out in the mid-1960s to help reform the Morton High School District 201 Board.
Their group, The Organization for Better Education, met with so much stonewalling and hostility from local political forces in Berwyn and Cicero that one of their candidates, Mary Karasek, considered dropping out of the race, Karasek recalled Monday. But when Mrs. Soucek heard about her friend's wish, she wouldn't have it.
"I thought, 'It isn't worth it,'" Karasek said. "But Margaret got so worked up about the fact that I withdrew, that I decided I had to [run]."
Mrs. Soucek, 86, a longtime Berwyn resident, would go on to serve as president of the District 201 Board, frequently squaring off against forces loyal to west suburban figures such as former Cicero Town President Betty Loren-Maltese. Mrs. Soucek died Wednesday, May 21, in Adventist La Grange Memorial Hospital after a heart attack.
Local Politics: Madison Mayor Dave Meets with MTI's John Matthews & Former WEAC Director Mo Andrews
Jason Joyce's useful look at Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz's weekly schedule often reveals a few nuggets of local political trivia. Today, the Mayor met with Madison Teachers, Inc. Executive Director John Matthews and former WEAC Executive Director Morris (Mo) Andrews.
Madison School District's 2008/2009 $367,806,712 budget (up from $217M in 1995, while enrollment has been flat the demographics have changed significantly)
A second round of results comparing high school graduation figures for Milwaukee Public Schools and a group of private schools in the city's publicly funded voucher program has reached the same conclusion as a report issued in January: Students who attend voucher schools are more likely to graduate than those who attend MPS.
The second report, issued today, adds data for the class of 2007 to its figures. The earlier report had figures for the classes of 2003 through 2006.
The report was funded by and released by School Choice Wisconsin, the main organization for advocacy for Milwaukee's voucher program, which is the oldest and largest of its kind in the United States. About 19,000 students attended about 120 private schools in the city this year, with public funds of up to $6,501 per student going to the schools.
The move comes after a mediation session was held Thursday. School officials say that session was unproductive. The board also took a no-confidence vote in Grand Rapids Education Association president Paul Helder.
The dues are now taken out of teachers' paychecks by the district and forwarded to the union. It amounts to $57,000 every pay period, once every two weeks.
The district continued the practice voluntarily after the old contract expired, but that will end May 30.
Board leadership said they are trying to send a message that union leadership is dysfunctional, in part because the board president said Thursday's mediation session wasted time repeating the same arguments about the district's financial condition.
Thousands of high school freshmen across Michigan are failing Algebra I, the first of four math courses this class of students must take and pass to fulfill what are among the toughest graduation requirements in the nation.
The failure rate -- estimated at 20% to 30% of about 113,000 freshmen -- has some predicting a crisis by the time these students are juniors and must take Algebra II.
In Macomb County after the first semester of this school year, the failure rate was around 28%.
"We have enough data to think this is going to continue to be a problem," said Gayle Green, assistant superintendent with the Macomb Intermediate School District. Failure rates for Oakland and Wayne counties haven't been compiled but officials there are concerned, too.
The House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing to examine a recent report released by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel on the state of math education and instruction in the United States. Among other things, the report found that the nation's system for teaching math is "broken and must be fixed" if the U.S. wants to maintain its competitive edge.
Skip Fennel's wide ranging testimony can be read here [66K PDF]:
However, I would add that at a time of teacher surplus at the elementary school level, it is perhaps time to scrap the model of elementary teacher as generalist. Why not have specifically trained elementary mathematics specialists starting from day one of their career? Our country can’t wait until such specialists are graduate students.
The board wants to nullify the ballots of all the Germantown citizens who, just last month, voted 55% to 45% against a $16.5 million school referendum.
Unhappy with the results, the board is now considering a "do-over."
It wants to schedule the exact same referendum in November it just staged in April - sort of a déjà screw.
Not everyone sees it that way, of course, as I found out when I opened my e-mail.
Currently, there are two significant revenue categories of note:
1) Building Permit Revenues: These are way down, with revenues of just over $800K posted through the first quarter. Total posted receipts comprise only 17% of the total anticipated for the year. At a minimum, we'd like to see this at 20%, or 25%. The number of residential construction permits issued in the first quarter of '08 is 51, versus 89 issued during the same period of 2007.
So, the softening continues, and our projections suggest revenues ranging from $2.8M to $3.5M for the year, as compared with $4.69M budgeted. If we use a mid-point of $3.2M, this suggests a revenue shortfall for the year of $1.5M for this category.
65% of the Madison School District's Budget ($367M in 2008/2009) is generated from local property taxes.
The AB/IB Committee, co-chaired by Drs. Prendergast and Bacotti, and comprised of administrators, teachers and three parents, conducted a comprehensive study of the current AP program and researched the possibility of implementing the IB program. They then compared the two and presented their recommendations to the Board.
"It is clear that some of the issues that we realize are out there with AP programs may in fact be addressed by a rigorous IB program," said School Board President Kenneth Monaghan. He gave the example of the study of world language. Many students do not pursue foreign language study at the AP level because the course and exam are recognized to be extremely difficult and students are concerned with how it might affect their overall grade point average.
"It's not that the AP program is irrelevant. It's not," he continued. "Nor is it a matter of whether or not the IB program is more relevant. The question is whether or not the two together, or in combination, may balance out each other's shortcomings and help us devise a program which has greater relevance for our students going forward, in particular for the vast majority of our students who are going on to collegiate work. We want to make sure that they are as prepared as possible."
The committee will take their research to the next level by establishing contacts with other high-performing districts that are offering the IB program and expanding the number of parents on the committee. Committee members plan to attend a Guild of IB Schools of the Northeast orientation seminar in Commack on June 7th and file an official "Intent to Apply" interest form with the International Baccalaureate Organization. After they file the interest form, teachers and administrators will be allowed to attend professional development Level 1 workshops. The committee will report back to the Board in the fall.
The question to a focus group of Dunbar High students was: What did they like best about going to school there?
"Freedom," said one who takes Advanced Placement classes at the school in Northwest Washington. "We can do whatever we want at this school. That's the only good thing about this place."
At Green Elementary School in Southeast, one child urged: "Give us harder work, not the busywork that we already know."
"They let us struggle," a student at Lincoln Middle School in Northwest said of the teachers. "They let you know you are failing, but then let you go on struggling and then send you to summer school."
A couple of weeks ago in these pages, Marc Eisen had some harsh words for the work of the Madison school district's Equity Task Force ("When Policy Trumps Results," 5/2/09). As a new school board member, I too have some doubts about the utility of the task force's report. Perhaps it's to be expected that while Eisen's concerns touch on theory and rhetoric, mine are focused more on the nitty-gritty of decision making.
The smart and dedicated members of the Equity Task Force were assigned an impossible task: detailing an equity policy for me and other board members to follow. Equity is such a critical and nuanced consideration in school board decisions that, to be blunt, I'm not going to let any individual or group tell me what to do.
I am unwilling to delegate my responsibility to exercise my judgment on equity issues to a task force, no matter how impressive the group. Just as one school board cannot bind a future school board's policymaking, I don't think that the deliberations of a task force can restrict my exercise of independent judgment.
Admittedly, the task force faced a difficult challenge. It was obligated by the nature of its assignment to discuss equity issues in the abstract and offer up broad statements of principle.
Not surprisingly, most of the recommendations fall into the "of course" category. These include "Distribute resources based on student needs" and "Foster high academic expectations for all students." I agree.
Classroom 2010 is our technology standard model for classrooms at the new Sun Prairie High School, and for our remodeled upper middle school, which will both open in the year 2010.
To inspire 21st Century learning in these schools, we are providing the following equipment:
The Washington Teachers' Union is discussing a proposed three-year contract from the school system that would eliminate seniority, giving Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee more control in filling vacancies, a union member familiar with the talks said yesterday.
Without seniority, Rhee could place teachers based on qualifications or performance rather than years of service, said the union member, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential. The union member said Rhee sought the provision as a recruiting tool so she could offer talented candidates the position of their choice. She would be able to fill positions with less experienced teachers.
Under the proposed contract, teachers would give up seniority in exchange for annual raises of about 6 percent, more personal-leave days and more money for supplies, the union member said. In the last contract, which expired in the fall, teachers received a 10 percent raise over two years.
Rhee "does want to infuse some new blood [into the schools]. She wants to make it attractive for young people coming in to advance," said the union member, adding that the union's negotiating team will meet with her tomorrow or Friday. "We've come to realize we're going to have to give in to her."
The West Bend School Board, chastened by a two-to-one defeat of its $119 million referendum for improved facilities, is seeking input from the community on how to go forward.
To their credit, district leaders have done that all along. But they still missed the mark on gauging what the community wanted.
One thing is clear: just coming back at a slightly reduced total will probably not work. The margin of defeat was too large. So, some creative thinking is needed.
My own guess is that the referendum failed on two counts: its sheer size in dollars was too much for taxpayers to swallow and it lacked vision.
It’s hard to get excited about bricks, mortar and maintenance, necessary as they are.
It would be exciting, though, to come up with a program of study that would allow our young people to compete better in the globalizing world.
A stunning new book, "The Post-American World," by Fareed Zakaria, a Newsweek columnist and perhaps the most insightful journalist in the country, outlines the challenges facing the United States and its next generations.
He calls it "The Rise of the Rest" and generally says the rise into prosperity of other countries can be a positive for America if we react in the right way.
Over the last six weeks, Assistant Superintendent Sue Abplanalp and Chief Information Officer Kurt Kiefer have created an array of options based on research and surveys of faculty and parents. The options include remodeling classrooms, increasing the size of fourth-grade classes, relocating the computer lab to the library, or incorporating music and art in one classroom, since each room currently is scheduled for use only 50 percent of the school day. The project to remodel and reconfigure the classrooms would cost $20,000.
The administration will decide on one of several available options, and Abplanalp anticipates that decision will be made in the next few weeks.
But teachers and parents have hopes for a much broader solution for the school, which serves a large number of students in nearby apartments.
In an approach based in Green Bay that has spread down the Lake Michigan shoreline, about 40 Wisconsin districts (though not Madison) belong to a consortium called the Einstein Project, a nonprofit group that buys the kits from publishers, leases them for a nominal fee to schools and arranges teacher training on their use.
Hailed as a national model by the National Science Teachers Association, the Einstein Project began on a shoestring and now has 10 employees, two kit warehouses and a $1 million annual budget supported by the rental fees, year-round fundraising and private and corporate backing.
But critics of the hands-on movement charge that without textbooks and the structured reading, teacher-driven learning and broad memorization of facts that traditionally define classroom science, kids are being short-changed on core knowledge.
A major fight over science curriculum in California got national attention in 2004, as the state weighed a proposal to allow no more than 25 percent of science classroom time for hands-on activities. But in an abrupt reversal after intense debate, the adopted standard reads that at least 25 percent of science classroom time has to be hands-on.
Stanley Metzenberg, an assistant biology professor from California State University-Northridge, said in congressional testimony that reading is critical for scientists and that children are best served through traditional textbooks and teacher-directed instruction.
Superintendent Terry Grier's contract with the San Diego Unified School District calls for him to receive up to $10,500 in annual performance bonuses if he meets three goals set by the school board.
But months after Grier was hired, trustees have yet to agree on what goals the superintendent and the district should meet.
The board went through goal-setting exercises in November before Grier was hired; it undertook similar exercises before and after hiring Grier's predecessor, Carl Cohn.
On Monday, the school board talked about setting goals for two hours without reaching a consensus. Grier is pushing the board to lay down specific goals that can be used to evaluate the district's progress and by extension, his performance.
Throughout the meeting, Grier relentlessly nudged trustees to develop a list of overarching goals for elementary, middle and high schools.
The Newsweek and Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school's effort to challenge its students. The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 29, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.
The rating is not a measurement of the overall quality of the school but illuminates one factor that many educators consider important.
The list below includes all public schools with a rating of 1.000. There are nearly 1,400 -- the top 5 percent of all 27,000 U.S. high schools in encouraging students to take AP, IB or Cambridge tests. Also listed are the name of the city or school district and the percentage of a school's students whose family incomes are low enough to qualify for federally subsidized lunches and who also apply for that program. The portion of subsidized-lunch applicants is a rough indicator of a school’s poverty level. High-poverty schools are at a disadvantage in persuading students to take college-level courses, but some on this list have succeeded in doing so anyway.
The Equity and Excellence rate is the percentage of all seniors who have had at least one score on an AP, IB or Cambridge test that would qualify them for college credit. The average AP Equity and Excellence rate for all U.S. schools is about 15 percent.
Milwaukee Rufus King ranked highest among the 21 Wisconsin High Schools at #209. The only Madison area high school to make the list is Verona at #808.
This week, Newsweek magazine and its Web site Newsweek.com unveil this year's Top High Schools list, based on a rating system I invented a decade ago called the Challenge Index. The index ranks schools based on college-level course participation, adding up the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and other college-level tests in a given year for a given school, and dividing that total by its number of graduating seniors.
Several weeks ago I asked students, teachers and parents to tell me how this annual ranking affected their schools. Here is a sampling of several points of view, both critical and complimentary.
* * *
So, with regard to your Challenge Index -- it really is a quick and dirty way of assessing schools. Very ambitious and probably very imperfect. However, there isn't anything else out there like it. I think the reason our school systems are not very good compared to other countries is that we underestimate the abilities of our children. I think too the education field is fuzzy -- not very good data or evidence to support the programs that are out there. . . . More and better research is needed. And of course there are the socioeconomic/family issues of some schools/districts that cannot/will not be fixed with just higher expectations.
When principal Debbie Brockett announced a policy last fall of not allowing teachers to issue any score less than 50 to failing students, she thought she was adopting a means of leveling out an unfair grading curve.
To many outraged teachers at Las Vegas High, however, Brockett's plan amounted to fuzzy new math designed to offer unfair assistance to low-achieving students.
They protested, and she backed down. But in the process, both sides stepped into one of the hottest grading debates within academic circles today. Across the USA, education experts and school administrators are trying to determine how and whether to reform grading systems to give failing students a better chance to catch up.
"I made a bad call at the time, going with past experience, and I didn't expect it to become controversial," says Brockett, who had just been promoted from a middle school where her minimum-F policy was in place. "Now it's an ongoing conversation we're having."
Charles M. Payne has been a scholar of urban education long enough to see many fashions of public-school reform come and go. The School of Social Service Administration’s Frank P. Hixon professor, Payne first developed an interest in education in 1969, while a Syracuse University undergraduate. Administrators there, Payne recalls, had brought an inner-city school to campus with a bold, if naive and unfocused, purpose: “to change this.” The program failed to establish a model for effective school reform, Payne says, because “none of us understood how hard this was going to be.”
With a sociology PhD from Northwestern University and 40 years of research and advocacy under his belt, Payne believes that the same core problem—a misunderstanding of the difficulties involved—continues to hinder school-reform efforts. His years as founding director of an education nonprofit in Orange, New Jersey, and studying schools in Chicago and around the world have taught him that the solution to school failure is deep and fundamental. Initiatives that focus on particular grade levels or types of students don’t work, Payne says. In a book out this May, So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2008), he argues that rather than searching for the silver-bullet program that will turn a school around, would-be reformers must strike at the “culture of failure” that perpetuates dismal school performance.
Question: What is Wisconsin's high school graduation rate?
Answer: About 91 percent, ranking among the top five states in the nation.
Or 86 percent, in the top 10.
Or 77 percent, ranking 11th.
It all depends on who is counting — the state government, the federal government or independent analysts.
Shouldn't there be one straight answer?
Yes.
That's why Congress ought to approve the Bush administration's plan to require all states to calculate graduation rates by the same formula — one endorsed by the National Governors Association in 2005.
A standard graduation rate formula is central to evaluating and solving one of the nation's biggest social problems — the high school dropout rate.
Leopold Elementary School is getting a new principal this summer but for many teachers and parents, it seems like déjà vu all over again.
For years, Leopold has dealt with a series of temporary remedies to deal with overcrowding, including sending students to different schools, a new addition and remodeling space to accommodate more classrooms.
The Leopold Parent Faculty Organization is asking the Madison Metropolitan School Board to find a long-term solution to the problem, although it might accept some temporary measures en route to a "real" solution.
Some worry that some of temporary solutions, such as carving out more classroom space, may turn out to be the status quo, as has happened when "temporary" classrooms came to be considered in determining the school's capacity.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has fired 24 principals, including 13 who headed schools deemed to be failing under the federal "No Child Left Behind Act," officials confirmed yesterday.
Principals work on year-to-year agreements. About 15 to 20 principals are let go annually, according to the Council of School Officers, the principal's union.
This year's reshuffling has drawn heightened interest because it provides another window into Rhee's still-new leadership of the school system. The personnel changes also have added urgency because of the federal mandate to make major changes in 26 schools that have failed to show adequate progress under "No Child Left Behind."
Public education costs a lot of money -- over $500 billion per year. Over the last century, there have been huge changes in where that money comes from and how it's spent. In 1930, only 17 percent of school funding came from state sources, and virtually none came from the federal government. Today, the state / local / federal split is roughly 50/40/10 (individual states vary). People still say all the time that "most" school funding comes from local property taxes, but that hasn't actually been true since the mid-1970s.
On the whole, this change has been of tremendous benefit to disadvantaged students. As states have assumed the primary role in funding education, they've tended to distribute money in ways that are, on the whole, more equitable. The same is true for federal funding, most of which is spent on behalf of poor students and students with disabilities. (This works because taxpayers have a weird psychological relationship with their tax dollars. Rationally, people should view every dollar they pay in taxes and receive in services as equal, regardless of the basis of taxation or the source of the services. But they don't. People feel very strongly that locally-generated property taxes should be spent locally, while they feel less ownership over state taxes and even less over federal dollars. As a result, they'll tear their hair out if you propose transferring 10 percent of their local property tax dollars to a low-income district across the state, but they're far more sanguine if you propose a state school funding formula with precisely the same net result in terms of the taxes they pay and the dollars their local school district receives. It doesn't make sense, but that's okay, because this irrational jurisdiction-dependent selflessness is what allows for the redistributionist school funding policies that poor students depend on to get a decent education.)
Madison's revenue sources are a bit different than Carey's example: 65.1% from local property taxes, 17.2% redistributed state taxes and the rest from grants, contributions and other sources.
Wisconsin's entwined state and local governments taxed a sum equal to 12.3% of Wisconsinites' income last year. That was up from 12.2% the year before and 12.1% the year before that. This biennium, the state is spending 10.5% more than last. Ever, the numbers rise.
They rise because the state's costs do. But taxpayers, too, pay more for gasoline, food, power and practically everything else. Times are tough. You'd think the least government could do would be to avoid piling on.
More than a decade after charter schools became legal in Pennsylvania, it is safe to say the schools, once considered experimental and still sometimes controversial, are here to stay.
About 64,000 students are enrolled in 126 charter schools statewide, and about 20,000 are on charter school waiting lists, according to the Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools.
Nearly half of the schools are in Philadelphia. But parents of Western Pennsylvania students -- including 2,355 children living in Pittsburgh -- also have chosen charter schools, which can be bricks-and-mortar buildings or cyber schools.
Their staying power will be in evident this week as the Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools, a statewide advocacy and support organization, conducts its state convention at the Pittsburgh Marriott City Center, Uptown. The meeting, which began yesterday, runs through tomorrow and is expected to attract more than 1,000 people.
District officials blame the financial troubles on the discrepancy between what they can raise under revenue caps, which increase roughly 2% a year, and expenditures that grow about 4% a year.
A $4.9 million annual addition to the district's operating revenue that was approved by voters in an April 2001 referendum gave the district only a few years free from cutting programs and services. Another referendum attempt in April 2005 that would have raised taxes to help avoid further staff reductions failed by a substantial margin.
Board member Patrick McCaffery warned that the board risked another referendum setback if it proceeds without searching for additional efficiencies, including closing a school and realigning attendance boundaries
In Peanuts, when we see Lucy offering Psychiatric Help for a nickel, we know it is a joke: ("The Psychiatrist is IN"), but when English teachers in the schools insist that students write about the most intimate details of their private lives for school assignments, that is not a joke, it is an unwarranted intrusion.
There are a couple of major problems with the "personal writing" that has taken over so many of the writing assignments for the English classes in our schools.
First, the teachers are asking students to share information about their personal lives that is none of the teachers' business. The vast majority of English teachers are not qualified as psychologists, much less as psychiatrists, and they should not pretend that they are.
Second, the time spent by students writing assignments for their teachers in their personal diaries is subtracted from time they need to spend learning how to do the academic expository writing they will need to be able to do when they leave school, for college and for work.
I will leave it to others to explain why English teachers have gone down this road in so many of our schools. I have written a number of articles about Creative Nonfiction and Contentless Writing, and the like, to try to encourage some attention to the retreat (or flight) from academic writing in our schools.
But I urge parents and others concerned about the preparation their children are receiving in reading and writing to find out why so many students are being assigned this personal writing which does not belong in the school, and the information in which is, or should be, of no concern of their English teachers, who need instead to focus on reading, grammar, literature and academic writing, instead of setting themselves up as nickel psychiatrists without either the training or the permission to practice on our children.
Our students are doing poorly in NAEP examinations of reading and writing, and having their teachers spend time as untrained therapists is no help with that at all.
"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
More than 100 friends, colleagues, family members and parents showed up at a farewell party Wednesday at Olbrich Gardens to say goodbye and thank you to Carol Carstensen, who served six terms on the Madison School Board and stepped down after the spring elections.
"There will never be another Carol Carstensen. I will predict that," said School Board member Johnny Winston Jr. "There will never be another School Board member in this community that will serve 18 years. I miss her already."
Winston called it a wonderful experience to work with Carstensen.
"She really not only knew the material and had a grasp of the issues going on, but she also had her pulse on the community as well," he said.
Former board member Nan Brien, who served with Carstensen in the early 1990s, said that for 18 years Carstensen was the spokesperson on the board for all the kids in the district.
"She was particularly adamant that all kids, no matter their background, have an opportunity for the best education. That is the heart and soul of who Carol Carstensen is," Brien said.
Carol reflects on her tenure, including three accomplishments she takes personal pride in: Wright Middle School, renaming 5 middle schools to reflect the diversity of our community and establishment of the Joe Thomas award.
"I’ve tackled some of the sacred cows in my recommendations, such as the issues of contracts, how much money we could receive from that. Such as the issue of health benefits, and how much money we could receive by capping that. And increasing the co-pay."
Cortines was at times unsparing of LAUSD's failures, saying that the district is organized for the benefit of the adults who work there, not the children they are hired to serve. He said the school board passes too many resolutions that "aren't worth the paper [they're] printed on." And he said the district had "abdicated our responsibility" for Locke High School, which is about to be turned over to Green Dot Public Schools, the big charter operator. Students didn't get a pass, though: He said the district needs to enforce "a code of behavior" based on the idea that they don't just have rights -- they also have responsibilities.
Dozens of parents and staff members attended Monday night's Madison Metropolitan School District's Board of Education meeting to shed new light on an old problem: overcrowding at a local elementary school.
The issue of overcrowding at Aldo Leopold Elementary School is prompting some parents and teachers to tell the board solutions they'd like to see to relieve the problem.
Some said that the obvious solution would be to build a new Leopold Elementary or perhaps to adjust the school's boundaries. The group presenting the board with the findings of a parent-teacher survey about the challenges at the school, WISC-TV reported.
The school is at 99 percent attendance with 718 students and can only handle eight more students, officials said.
Monday evening's Board meeting included a brief discussion of a much larger Leapold School - perhaps similar to the failed 2005 referendum that would have created a building suitable for 1100+students.
Public boarding schools where homeless children and those from troubled homes could find the safety and stability to learn are being pursued by Chicago Public Schools officials.
Under the plan, still in the nascent stages, the first pilot residential program could open as soon as fall 2009. District officials hope to launch as many as six such schools in the following years, including at least one that would operate as a year-round school.
The proposal puts Chicago at the forefront of urban school reform, as cities struggle to raise the academic achievement of students hampered by dysfunctional homes and other obstacles outside school.
Some districts, including Chicago, have looked for solutions from small schools to single-sex campuses. But residential schools are a bolder -- and far more expensive -- proposition. Long an option for the affluent, boarding schools are virtually unheard of for the disadvantaged.
Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan said he does not want to be in the "parenting" business, but he worries that some homes and some neighborhoods are unsafe, making education an afterthought.
"Some children should not go home at night; some of them we need 24-7," he told the Tribune. "We want to serve children who are really not getting enough structure at home. There's a certain point where dad is in jail or has disappeared and mom is on crack ... where there isn't a stable grandmother, that child is being raised by the streets."
Chicago school officials are still working through details of the plan, and it's not clear whether the schools would be run by the district, outside agencies or some combination of the two.
It's also not certain how the schools would be funded, who would shoulder the liability of keeping students overnight or how students would be selected.
In April, as part of its Renaissance 2010 new schools program, the district will put out a formal request for boarding school proposals. Officials have already met with interested groups in Chicago.
Officials have also visited several public and private boarding schools across the country and asked some to submit proposals.
Duncan said he has dreamed for years about opening boarding schools, but only last year, when he hired Josh Edelman, son of Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, did the idea take off.
The younger Edelman served for four years as the principal of The SEED School, the nation's oldest and most successful urban boarding school. Located in Washington, D.C., the public, college preparatory campus serves 300 students from 7th through 12th grades.
Nearly 72 percent of SEED students, who hail from low-income and sometimes troubled backgrounds, go on to four-year colleges.
Edelman said Chicago Public Schools officials are interested in several models, including SEED, in which students live and attend school in the same building. Other options would include an arrangement in which students live in one building and ride the bus to a nearby school or a large central dormitory in which students live in one building but attend several schools.
All of these settings could allow students to go home on weekends, or stay at the facility 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Officials said they would look at both options or a combination.
Edelman said his experience at The SEED School proved to him that family and community involvement are paramount to making a boarding school successful.
In Chicago, children would attend the school only after the parents or guardian choose the option. Schools would then work with parents to ensure that the students' academic and social needs are being met.
"This is not about doing something to parents because parents are bad," Edelman said. "This is about doing something in conjunction with parents and the community."
Chicago flirted briefly with the idea of public school residential facilities in the mid-1990s, when a private group proposed transforming a 16-story unit at the Robert Taylor Homes into a dormitory for 800 students. The proposal died when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took over the CHA.
A few years later, then-schools chief Paul Vallas floated the idea of opening a boarding school for neglected and homeless children. Students would live at the school until the Department of Children and Family Services was able to place them in foster care or with relatives. The plan collapsed because of the high price tag.
Now the district is hoping to launch a pilot program in September 2009, operated by North Lawndale College Prep. The charter group, which runs two Chicago high schools, is working on a proposal to create an off-site dormitory, initially for about 15 to 20 of its homeless students.
The teenagers would live in the building 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Teen Living Program, which works with federal, state and city government to provide shelter and support for homeless teens, would run the residential units.
John Horan, director of expansion for the charter group, said officials are looking for a building that could house the students and are working through funding and liability issues that go along with operating a residential facility.
The charter group and Teen Living plan to present the proposal to their respective boards of directors in the summer. The proposal then would have to go before the Chicago Board of Education for final approval.
Horan said between 6 and 8 percent of North Lawndale's 400 students are homeless, either because their parents are in prison or have disappeared. Some teachers have stepped in as parents, allowing students to bunk at their homes or, in some cases, taking temporary guardianship of the students.
"It's not sustainable; you can't really depend on your staff to do that," Horan said. "Our notion now is if you are going to be serious about providing college prep for kids who are from [poor] communities you have to deal with the housing."
But housing is an expensive proposition.
Illinois already has one residential school, the Illinois Math and Science Academy, a state-funded 10th through 12th-grade college prep high school that enrolls about 650 gifted students. The price tag: about $23,000 per student each year.
Providing the same services for low-income urban students who face more significant life problems is certain to be most costly. The SEED School is opening a second school in Baltimore. The cost per student: $34,000.
Chicago spends about $7,000 per pupil in operating costs.
"This is a big idea that has residual effect beyond the kids," said Cheye Calvo, director of expansion for The SEED School. "In the long term, this is better for society because the economic impact of failure affects us all. But opening a boarding school requires political leadership to step forward and provide the resources."
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SEED success
72%
of students at The SEED School go on to four-year colleges. The school, the nation's oldest urban boarding school, serves students from 7th through 12th grades in Washington, D.C.
Philadelphia public schools are unsafe places where students who commit violent crimes are rarely punished and rehabilitated and with a disciplinary system that is "dysfunctional and unjust," according to a report by the district's safe-schools advocate.
In a blistering 72-page document obtained by The Inquirer, Jack Stollsteimer describes a district where students who assault teachers or come to school with guns are not removed from classrooms, a violation of federal and state law.
School crime, he says, has been historically underreported, victims do not receive proper rights, and the increasing violence against teachers and employees is not taken seriously.
Prompted by questions from The Inquirer and two months after receiving Stollsteimer's report - which he is required by law to complete - the state blasted the safe-schools advocate's document and said it would release its own version next week.
"The draft report has serious problems - some of the data analysis is inaccurate, the legal analysis is flawed. We are releasing the official report on Monday," said Sheila Ballen, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
The case against Vang Pao grew out of a sting operation, a crime created in part by the government itself. What evidence there is rests largely on secretly recorded conversations led by an undercover federal agent, and while the transcripts implicating some of the co-defendants in the case seem damning, the agent barely met Vang Pao. The talk between them was brief; though Vang Pao may have dreamed aloud of a glorious revolution in Laos in years gone by, his role in the conspiracy charged by the government may be hard to prove. The government presents the case as a clear-cut gunrunning conspiracy in violation of the Neutrality Act, which outlaws military expeditions against nations with which the United States is at peace. But the old general’s defenders contend that the case against him is the consequence of a misguided post-9/11 zeal. If convicted in a trial, the former American ally could face the rest of his life in prison. And already his indictment has apparently emboldened Laotian and Thai authorities to crack down on the beleaguered Hmong who remain in refugee camps or in hiding in the jungles of Laos.
The government has a checkered record of late in its sting operations against people subsequently charged with planning acts of political terror. In 2006, to take one example, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that a joint terrorism task force had broken up a plot to “levy war” and to blow up the 110-story Sears Tower in Chicago. In that case, as two trials have shown, an F.B.I. informant known to the defendants as Brother Mohammed created some of the key evidence — leading the group in an oath of loyalty to Al Qaeda, for instance. He provided them with plans and plots and gave them military gear like combat boots. The defendants never had contact with actual terrorists, never obtained weapons or explosives. Two juries have failed to see the logic of the case; a federal judge has had to declare two mistrials. (The government plans to try the case a third time.)
The sting operation against Vang Pao exhibits some similar traits. It has also dismayed a number of American intelligence officers who worked with the Hmong against the army of North Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s. “We taught him how to do these things — to fight political warfare, to try to defeat the enemy,” I was told by Larry Devlin, a former C.I.A. station chief who worked with the general in Laos. “We helped Vang Pao learn to do some of the things that he and his troops are now charged with.”
Across the nation, educators are struggling to turn around troubled schools. In the District of Columbia, Chancellor Michelle Rhee has teams seeking to overhaul 27 schools targeted for “restructuring” by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
This is hardly uncharted territory. Reformers have spent decades proposing new remedies for low-performing schools. Magnet programs, schools without walls, block scheduling, site-based management, and a litany of other popular ideas have emerged, only to disappoint.
Today, NCLB’s mandated restructuring of schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” for five consecutive years has fueled extensive new efforts. NCLB spells out five options for such schools: reopening as a public charter school; replacing most staff; contracting out operations to a new organization; turning the keys over to the state; or adopting “any other major restructuring of the school’s governance.” Modest variations of the amorphous fifth option have proven the most popular, by far.
More than 2,000 schools across the United States are currently in the process of restructuring, which has given rise to a nascent “turnaround” industry. The Louisiana School Turnaround Specialist Program is recruiting and grooming a cadre of school leaders. In New York, the Rensselaerville Institute runs a school turnaround program. At the University of Virginia, the graduate schools of education and business have partnered to train “turnaround specialists.” In Chicago, the Chicago International Charter School has launched ChicagoRise to provide management expertise and support for turnaround projects.
Charter schools allowed Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin to create the burgeoning and phenomenally successful KIPP network of middle schools serving almost exclusively poor, minority, and previously low-achieving children. Charter schools allowed veteran labor organizer Steve Barr to create Green Dot Public Schools as an alternative to the terrible high schools in Los Angeles. Charter schools gave a couple of young management consultants the ability to create the nation's first, and very successful, urban public boarding school in impoverished Southeast DC. And so on.
Given the opportunity, the best charter schools (and to be clear, there are certainly bad ones) haven't tried to reinvent the wheel. They've just balanced the wheel, fine-tuned it, reinforced the parts that were weak, and made sure it was in maximum working order. Charter school laws opened a conduit for talent, energy, and philanthropic money directed toward public education, resources that previously had no way to break into a bureaucratized monopoly state school system. Even if that's all they did, that's way more than enough.
Carey is spot on. Cracking the legacy public school governance monolith is essential to progress. "Progress requires conflict".
New research into the progress of 500 children published today shows that young children who were the poorest readers - and the very lowest-achieving in their class - can go on to outperform the national average within two years. They must be given four to five months of one-to-one tuition by specially trained Reading Recovery teachers for about 30 minutes a day while the children are aged six.
The research by the Institute of Education into the Every Child a Reader project shows that boys benefit to the same extent as girls and that one-to-one tuition helps to reduce the gender gap. The presence of Reading Recovery teachers also helps the other children in the school who do not attend the Reading Recovery lessons.
The two-year research project looked at the reading and writing progress of the lowest achieving children in 42 schools in ten inner London boroughs with the biggest social problems. The eight poorest readers in each class, then aged six, were selected. Eighty-seven of these children had the benefit of the Reading Recovery special tuition programme and their progress was compared to a group of children of similar ability and backgrounds, who did not receive the same tuition.
After one year children who had received the tuition had reading ages that matched their chronological age, and were 14 months ahead of the children in the comparison group.
Facing a possible referendum and $9.2 million hole for the 2009-10 school year, no major alterations are anticipated to the school 2008-09 budget that will be finalized Monday by Madison School Board members.
When new superintendent Dan Nerad starts in July, referendum discussion will come to the forefront for the Madison Metropolitan School District. If Board members decide to propose a referendum, which could occur as early as November, they will request taxpayers consider overriding state-imposed revenue gaps so that services and programs won't have to be severely slashed from the district's budget.
In the meantime, only one administrative amendment and two Board amendments are on the agenda and approval is expected at the School Board meeting as superintendent Art Rainwater presents plans for the final budget of his tenure. Rainwater, who has worked with the district for 14 years -- including the last 10 as superintendent -- will retire this summer. Nerad will take over on July 1.
School Board members are well aware of the multi-million budget cuts looming for the 2009-10 school year, and Rainwater said he wasn't surprised with short list of amendments.
"I think the overall intention for the Board from day one was really and truly to work to preserve exactly what we have," Rainwater said during a telephone interview Friday.
In Madison, where schools Superintendent Art Rainwater in a 2004 memo described 4K as potentially "the next best tool" for raising students' performance and narrowing the racial achievement gap, years of study and talks with leaders of early childhood education centers have failed to produce results.
"It's one of the things that I regret the most, that I think would have made a big impact, that I was not able to do," said Rainwater, who is retiring next month after leading the district for a decade.
"We've never been able to get around the money," said Rainwater, whose tenure was marked by annual multimillion-dollar budget cuts to conform to the state's limits on how much money districts can raise from local property taxpayers.
A complicating factor was the opposition of Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, to the idea that the 4K program would include preschool teachers not employed by the School District. However, Rainwater said he's "always believed that those things could have been resolved" if money had been available.
Starting a 4K program for an estimated 1,700 students would cost Madison $5 million the first year and $2.5 million the second year before it would get full state funding in the third year under the state's school-funding system.
In comparison, the entire state grant available to defray Wisconsin districts' startup costs next year is $3 million — and that amount is being shared by 32 eligible districts.
One of those districts, Green Bay, is headed by Daniel Nerad, who has been hired to succeed Rainwater in Madison.
"I am excited about it," said Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira, who is envious of the 4K sign-up information that appears on the Green Bay district's Web site. "He's gone out and he's made it work in Green Bay. That will certainly help us here as we start taking the message forward again.
Madison's inability to start 4K has gained the attention of national advocates of 4K programs, who hail Wisconsin's approach as a model during the current national economic downturn. Milwaukee, the state's largest district, long has offered 4K.
"It's been disappointing that Madison has been very slow to step up to provide for its children," said Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, a national nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., that campaigns for kindergarten programs for children ages 3 and 4.
"The way 4K is being done in your state is the right way."
Related:
Marc Eisen: Missed Opportunity for 4K and High School Redesign
MMSD Budget History: Madison's spending has grown about 50% from 1998 ($245,131,022) to 2008 ($367,806,712) while enrollment has declined slightly from 25,132 to 24,268 ($13,997/student).
Suppose a swimming instructor told his 10-year-old students to swim the length of the pool to demonstrate what he'd taught them, and half of them nearly drowned? Would it be reasonable to make a judgment about his teaching ability?
Or suppose nearly all the 10-year-old students in a particular clarinet class learned to play five or six pieces well in a semester? Would it be reasonable to consider their achievement when deciding whether to rehire the music teacher?
These questions answer themselves. Only an idiot would overlook student performance, be it dismal or outstanding.
However, suppose test results indicated that most students in a particular class don't have a clue about how to multiply with fractions, or master other material in the curriculum? Should that be considered when the math teacher comes up for tenure?
Whoops, the obvious answer is wrong. That's because public education lives in an upside-down universe where student outcomes are not allowed to be connected to teaching.
Retiring Superintendent Art Rainwater's view on the District's structural deficit and the decline in it's equity (Assets - Liabilities = Equity; Britannica on the The Balance Sheet) from $48,000,000 in the year 2000 to $24,000,000 in 2006 (it is now about 8% of the budget or $20M). (See Lawrie Kobza's discussion of this issue in November, 2006. Lawrie spent a great deal of time digging into and disclosing the structural deficits.) Art also mentioned the resulting downgrade in the District's bond rating (results in somewhat higher interest rates).
Marj asked an interesting question about the K-1 combination and staff scheduling vis a vis the present Teacher Union Contract.
Lucy asked about specials scheduling (about 17 minutes).
Maya asked about the combined K-1 Art classes ("Class and a half" art and music) and whether we are losing instructional minutes. She advocated for being "open and honest with the public" about this change. Art responded (23 minutes) vociferously about the reduction in services, the necessity for the community to vote yes on operating referendums, ACT scores and National Merit Scholars.
Beth mentioned (about 30 minutes) that "the district has done amazing things with less resources". She also discussed teacher tools, curriculum and information sharing.
Ed Hughes (about 37 minutes) asked about the Madison Family Literacy initiative at Leopold and Northport. Lucy inquired about Fund 80 support for this project.
Maya later inquired (45 minutes) about a possible increase in Wisconsin DPI's common school fund for libraries and left over Title 1 funds supporting future staff costs rather than professional development.
Beth (about 48 minutes) advocated accelerated computer deployments to the schools. Lucy followed up and asked about the District's installation schedule. Johnny followed up on this matter with a question regarding the most recent maintenance referendum which included $500,000 annually for technology.
Lucy discussed (52 minutes) contingency funds for energy costs as well as providing some discretion for incoming superintendent Dan Nerad.
Rick Berg notes that some homes are selling below assessed value, which will affect the local tax base (property taxes for schools) and potential referendums:
But the marketplace will ultimately expose any gaps between assessment and true market value. And that could force local governments to choose between reducing spending (not likely) and hiking the mill rate (more likely) to make up for the decreasing value of real estate.
Pity the poor homeowners who see the value of their home fall 10%, 20% or even 30% with no corresponding savings in their property tax bill, or, worse yet, their tax bill goes up! Therein lie the seeds of a genuine taxpayer revolt. Brace yourselves. It's gonna be a rough ride.
The budget for Montgomery County's public schools has doubled in 10 years, a massive investment in smaller classes, better-paid teachers and specialized programs to serve growing ranks of low-income and immigrant children.
That era might be coming to an end. The County Council will adopt an education budget this month that provides the smallest year-to-year increase in a decade for public schools. County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) has recommended trimming $51 million from the $2.11 billion spending plan submitted by the Board of Education.
County leaders say the budget can no longer keep up with the spending pace of Superintendent Jerry D. Weast, who has overseen a billion-dollar expansion since his arrival in 1999. Weast has reduced elementary class sizes, expanded preschool and kindergarten programs and invested heavily in the high-poverty area of the county known around his office as the Red Zone.
"Laudable goals, objectives, nobody's going to argue with that," Leggett said in a recent interview at his Rockville office. "But is it affordable?"
It's a question being asked of every department in a county whose overall budget has swelled from $2.1 billion in fiscal 1998 to $4.3 billion this year, a growth rate Leggett terms "unacceptable."
Montgomery County enrolls 137,745 students and spent $2,100,000,000 this year ($15,245/student). Madison's spending has grown about 50% from 1998 ($245,131,022) to 2008 ($367,806,712) while enrollment has declined slightly from 25,132 to 24,268 ($13,997/student).
I've not seen any local media coverage of the District's budget this week.
Aspiring early childhood and elementary school teachers will have to prove they know how to teach reading on a test the State Board of Education has added to Connecticut's teacher certification requirements. The change, which was made Wednesday, comes amid worries about stagnating or declining student reading scores statewide and concerns that not all state teachers know the mechanics of teaching reading.
"This sends a message to teacher preparation institutions that they need to make sure they have a focus on the art and science of teaching reading," state Department of Education spokesman Tom Murphy said.
Introducing a test on teaching reading was among the recommendations offered by educators at a reading summit the state education department held last fall. Legislators also have pushed for adding a test on reading instruction to certification requirements.
Related by Jason Kottke regarding Malcolm Gladwell's forthcoming book:
A more material example is teachers. Gladwell says that while we evaluate teachers on the basis of high standardized test scores and whether they have degrees and credentialed training, that makes little difference in how well people actually teach.
EVERY weekday, 300 boys gather in a gym on Chicago's South Side. They are all black. More than 80% are poor. Over the past few weeks Chicago has seen a surge in gang violence. But here boys stand in straight lines. Each wears a blazer and a red tie. And in unison they begin to shout their creed: “We believe. We are the young men of Urban Prep. We are college-bound.”
Urban Prep Charter Academy opened in 2006, part of an effort to bring 100 new schools to Chicago's bleakest areas by 2010. Richard Daley, the city's mayor, announced Renaissance 2010 (“Ren 10”) in 2004; Chicago's business leaders created the Renaissance Schools Fund (RSF) to help support it. Backers of this ambitious scheme hope it will spur competition across the school district. On May 6th RSF held a conference to discuss the “new market of public education”.
At the core of Ren 10 is the desire to welcome “education entrepreneurs”, as RSF calls them. Ren 10 lets them start schools and run them mostly as they choose (for example, with longer days and, in some cases, their own salary structure); it also sets the standards they must meet. Schools receive money on a per pupil basis, and may raise private funds as well.
Student Representatives on the Madison School Board
MMSD: The Student Liaison to the Madison Board of Education next year will be Sarah Maslin, while the Alternate Student Liaison and the Student Senate President will be Chelli Riddiough.
Both were elected last week by high school students in the Madison School District and will take their one year positions in July.
THOSE who had won whooped with joy and punched their fists. The disappointed shed tears. Some 5,000 people attended April 17th's Harlem Success Academy Charter School lottery, the largest ever held for charter schools in the history of New York state. About 3,600 applied for 600 available places, and 900 applied for the 11 open slots in the second grade.
The desperation of these parents is hardly surprising. In one Harlem school district, not one public elementary school has more than 55% of its pupils reading at the level expected for their grade. And 75% of 14-year-olds are unable to read at their grade level. So Harlem parents are beginning to leave the public school system in crowds.
John Broome lasted just four months as principal of La Follette High School.
Under pressure due to escalating fighting at the 1,710-student east side school and hearing far-reaching complaints from parents and staff over his management style, Broome resigned in December 2006. Veteran district administrator Loren Rathert came out of retirement to finish the school year as interim principal.
So when Joe Gothard took over as principal last September, it was no secret that he was entering a difficult situation.
"Actually it was really bad," says Jamison Vacek, a member of a Lancer senior class that has had four principals in four years. "There were fights almost every day at the school when we had those other principals."
But ask students, staff and observers about La Follette now, and there seems a consensus that Gothard has helped put the school on the right path.
The students used to overflow the wooden booths and green tables at Don Jono’s Pizzeria, racing through pepperoni slices and large sodas before driving the quarter-mile back to Smithtown High School West in time for their next class.
But now the pizzas pile up behind the counter. Pete Crescimanno, a compact man with a neat black mustache who co-owns the place, estimates that he has lost more than $500 a week in sales since the school district ended its longstanding policy of allowing seniors to go off-campus for lunch. One recent morning, Mr. Crescimanno and an assistant pounded and tossed dough in a nearly empty storefront, with only the radio to break the silence.
"It’s not the same, and you miss that because you used to prepare for the kids and now you don’t see them," he said. “Of course, you miss the business, but you also miss the fact that they’re not here anymore.”
In their recent report analyzing the politics of charter school laws, Christiana Stoddard and Sean P. Corcoran of Education Nextrelied upon The Center for Education Reform’s (CER) Charter School Law Rankings and Profiles to study the success of the charter school movement.
As they recognized, the strength of a law could impact the way in which healthy charter schools grow and how they serve students. Having laws with certain components is critical.
CER welcomes this scrutiny and the dozens of other research reports, which utilize its rankings as a guide for assessing policy. We also recognize that not all researchers find the work we have done for ten years on law strength compelling. Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder find our data and conclusions a bit hard to swallow. They argue that what CER considers strong components of a law – flexibility, autonomy, equitable funding – are actually weaknesses. Despite their claims that the weakest are actually the strongest, the data do not lie. States with strong laws by our standards (and those shared almost universally by the research community whether friend or foe) create strong schools.
For those who still think helping children learn is everybody's top priority in our schools, let me cite a disturbing dispute over where to send several hundred teachers at 23 D.C. schools that are about to be closed for inadequate enrollment.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee wants the principals of her remaining schools to decide which of those excess teachers they will hire, within the limits of a contract that guarantees them jobs somewhere in the system. Urban schools don't work if all adults in each building don't agree on what must be done to make them work. There is no chance of that shared vision if each principal is not allowed to pick the players on his or her team.
Unfortunately, many kind and well-intentioned teachers and parents in the District and other cities have a different view. Their first priority is not so much that children learn, but that they feel secure and comfortable. They want those excess teachers to accompany the students they know at their current school to whichever school the children are transferred to. That way, they say, the kids will have an easier and more comfortable transition.
Some members of the Washington Teachers' Union, which is in the midst of a leadership fight, also say they fear Rhee is resisting this more genial approach because she wants to get rid of any teachers who can't find principals who want them.
Technology-based forces of "disruptive innovation" are gathering around public education and will overhaul the way K-12 students learn—with potentially dramatic consequences for established public schools, according to an upcoming book that draws parallels to disruptions in other industries.
Clayton M. Christensen, the book's lead author and a business professor at Harvard University, is well respected in the business world for his best-sellers The Innovator’s Dilemma, published in 1997, and The Innovator’s Solution, published in 2003.
Those books analyze why leading companies in various industries—computers, electronics, retail, and others—were knocked off by upstarts that were better able to take advantage of innovations based on new technology and changing conditions.
School organizations are similarly vulnerable, Mr. Christensen contends.
"The schools as they are now structured cannot do it," he said in an interview, referring to adapting successfully to coming computer-based innovations. "Even the best managers in the world, if they were heads of departments in schools and the administrators of schools, could not do it."
Under Mr. Christensen’s analytical model, the tables typically turn in an industry even when the dominant companies are well aware of a disruptive innovation and try to use it to transform themselves
There's no doubt that a revolution is underway in education. LIke other industries, it is doubtful that many of the current players will make the turn, which is likely why issues such as credit for non MMSD courses is evidently such a problem. Two related articles by Cringely provide useful background.
More:
Like the leaders in other industries, the education establishment has crammed down technology onto its existing architecture, which is dominated by the "monolithic" processes of textbook creation and adoption, teaching practices and training, and standardized assessment—which, despite some efforts at individualization, by and large treat students the same, the book says.
But new providers are stepping forward to serve students that mainline education does not serve, or serve well, the authors write. Those students, which the book describes as K-12 education’s version of "nonconsumers," include those lacking access to Advanced Placement courses, needing alternatives to standard classroom instruction, homebound or home-schooled students, those needing to make up course credits to graduate—and even prekindergarten children.
By addressing those groups, providers such as charter schools, companies catering to home schoolers, private tutoring companies, and online-curriculum companies have developed their methods and tapped networks of students, parents, and teachers for ideas.
Those providers will gradually improve their tools to offer instruction that is more student-centered, in part by breaking courses into modules that can be recombined specifically for each student, the authors predict.
Such providers’ approaches, the authors argue, will also become more affordable, and they will start attracting more and more students from regular schools.
Marc Eisen of the Isthmus has checked in again on the Madison Schools with a column titled "When Policy Trumps Results." This time the target of his ill informed scribblings is the equity work of the district, particularly the Equity Task Force, of which I was a member. It is a hatchet job.
Mr. Eisen gets his facts wrong, misreads or misrepresents task force documents and at no point engages with the content of the task force’s work. We offered the Board ideas for policies and practices that we thought would help produce and assess results. You would never know that reading Mr. Eisen's column. Despite the title, all he seems to care about is style.
In return, I’m going to wield the axe. I'm going to go paragraph by paragraph to highlight the low level of knowledge and effort Eisen displays and the ultimate emptiness of his critique, hitting some other things along the way (quotes from Mr. Eisen in italics). Mr. Eisen's column probably does not deserve this much attention. However the power of the press is such that often when uncorrected, "the legend becomes fact." I believe equity work in our school district is too important to allow that to happen. Let’s get started.
The future educational path for the United States should come from looking within the country rather than lionizing faraway test-score champions. Our analysis3 of the data suggests two fundamental problems that require different approaches. First, pedagogies must address science literacy for the large numbers of low-performing students. Second, education policy for our highest-performing students needs to meet actual labour-market demand.
In the United States, a decade's worth of international test rankings based on slender measures of academic achievement in science and maths have been stretched far beyond their usefulness. Perhaps policy-makers feel it is better to motivate policy by pointing to high-scoring Czechs with fear, instead of noting our high-scoring Minnesotans as examples to emulate. But looking within the United States may be the best way to learn about effective education. As the PISA authors emphasize in their report, 90% of the variance in the scores is within countries rather than between countries. Therefore, most of what one can learn about high performance is due to the variation in factors within the nation's borders. It would seem far more effective to transfer best practices across city and state lines than over oceans.
At Marshall Middle School in Janesville, Mike Tollefsrud 's sixth-grade science class sits in straight rows reviewing for an upcoming test. "Do electrons have a positive charge? " he asks. Hands quickly shoot up. Tollefsrud then tells them to do the first 10 questions on the review paper in front of them. Another student asks, "Can we do all of them tonight if we want to? "
"Of course," he replies as students quietly begin scribbling.
In a classroom next door, Mike Morgan 's students are reviewing for the same test on atoms. They are divided into two teams, desks facing their opponents. Some kids spin the white erase boards they use to write answers to Morgan 's barrage of questions. A student from each team comes up front, squaring off to see who gets the answer right first, so they can roll dice to earn points for their team. Correct answers are greeted with whopping cheers and high-fives. "In your face! " hollers a kid at the other side of the room after a teammate scores big points.
Monday evening's (5/5/2008) meeting agenda (PDF) includes a discussion of the proposed $367,806,712 budget. It will be interesting to see what type of changes to retiring Superintendent Art Rainwater's last budget are discussed. Perhaps, a place to start would be the report card initiative from the District's curriculum creation department (Teaching & Learning). Watch a presentation on the proposed "Standards Based" report cards. Contact the Madison School Board here comments@madison.k12.wi.us
With loads of financial support from both CPS (Arnie Duncan) and the Gates Foundation (among others) CCSR and the school system built a tracking system that allows them to follow kids out of high school and into college & work, to see how they do-- and even more importantly, to figure out how to help them do better.
It's so unusual for a school district, especially one as large as Chicago's (130+ high schools!) to have the data capacity to do this. The vast majority of high schools in the U.S. rely on a student exit questionnaire administered in the spring of senior year, which asks kids "What are your plans for the fall" (choices include 4 yr college, 2yr college, work, etc) and their responses are used as a proxy for the real destination. In other words, the college-going rate for a high school or district is based on a student's self-report in May of senior year. This is a highly inaccurate measure, as several different data sources have proven-- plenty of kids who say they are going to college do not (or do not go to the kind of school they said they were going to, even if they were admitted and accepted) because they realize they cannot afford it, or get side-tracked during the summer, and many who say they aren't going, do decide to show up at a community college. Clearly districts need a much more reliable source of information if they are to learn about their high school graduates, and use that information to inform and change their educational practices.
Much to its credit, the Madison school board has mostly ignored the March 2007 recommendations of the district's Equity Task Force. This earnest but unhelpful committee delved into the abstractions of what distinguishes "equity" from "equality," how the board might commit to equity and what esoteric guidelines could measure that commitment.
.............
This point needs to be emphasized. Madisonians aren't afraid to tax themselves. They just want good services in return and know that their money isn't being wasted.
But I can't for the life of me see them rallying around a pompous and abstruse equity policy, especially one that reads like it was formulated by the UW Department of Leftwing Social Engineering. (Example: "Equity will come about when we raise a generation of children tolerant of differences and engaged in their democracy to stop the processes leading to inequity.")
The school board, after a suitable 14-month delay, should politely shelve the task force's recommendations when it finally gets around to voting on them in May.
Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron provides a timely read after Marc's article.
The Wisconsin Model Academic Standards (WMAS) articulate what students should know and be able to do in each curricular area. Community leaders and staff in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) elaborated upon these state standards to frame district curriculum and instruction.
Curriculum can be thought of as the planned educational experiences taught in each subject area at each grade level. Standards-based instruction focuses on teaching the knowledge and skills which support students' continual progress toward meeting the standards.
This article focuses on assessment, the process of using multiple strategies to measure student learning.
The remainder of this article will use mathematics as an example of a content area to demonstrate the use of standards-based assessment. MMSD teachers assess the content standards (i.e., number and algebra) as well as the process standards (i.e., communication, problem solving, and reasoning).
Research indicates that in addition to quizzes and tests, a variety of daily assessment tools (i.e., questioning, observations, discussions, and presentations) are needed to create a more thorough picture of what a student understands.
Deborah Ptak, an assistant principal for the past five years at Sennett Middle School, has been selected to take over as principal at Whitehorse Middle School. She replaces Anne Nolan, who is retiring after a nine-year tenure.
Ptak is one of three people expected to receive a new position as principal within the Madison Metropolitan School District when the School Board holds its meeting Monday.
In addition, Javier Bolivar was named principal at Nuestro Mundo Community School, and Sarah Galanter will shed her interim principal title at Stephens Elementary School and assume the principal position
This announcement, along with a number of other recent items have not appeared on the MMSD's press release page.
Black children and yellow school buses long have been inextricably linked in the history of education in America. It started with the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that allowed for school desegregation in cities like Milwaukee. That led to widespread busing movements that allowed black students to attend classes outside their neighborhoods at predominantly white schools.
A decision by the Milwaukee School Board last week to drastically reduce the amount of busing in the district will alter a fundamental relationship that has existed in this city for generations of students.
But what the Milwaukee School Board did was not a statement about the racial makeup of the city's public schools, many of which are predominantly African-American. School Board member Michael Bonds, the architect of the plan, says busing isn't about desegregation anymore.
"When the district is 88% minority, it's not about race," Bonds told me. "It's about the fact we've spent $57 million on a failed policy."
A proposal to standardize the way states calculate high school graduation rates makes sense.
A report earlier this month examining America's 50 largest school districts found that Milwaukee Public Schools had a graduation rate of only 46.1%. The report by America's Promise Alliance, an advocacy group, reported that Detroit was at the bottom of that list with a graduation rate of 24.9%.
Wait a minute, MPS officials countered. Our graduation rate is 66%.
Who's right?
Both probably are. That's the problem U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings hopes to solve by changing some of the rules under the No Child Left Behind Act, which Congress is considering reauthorizing.
Under the proposal, states would be required to use a uniform method of calculating high school graduation rates by the 2012-'13 school year. As it stands now, comparing graduation rates is difficult. Under the proposal, only students who complete school on time with a regular degree can be counted as graduates. Students who take longer than four years or who earn an alternative diploma, such as a GED certificate, would not be counted.
Superintendent Art Rainwater will add a longtime Madison-area educator and a staff member new to the district to his Madison Metropolitan School District staff, pending approval at next week's School Board meeting.
Ann Yehle will assume the post of executive director of educational services and Erik Kass will take over as assistant superintendent for business services. If these major positions are approved by the Board, Yehle and Kass are expected to be named to the jobs May 5 and will begin their jobs July 1.
Yehle, who currently works as an administrator in the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction's Division of Reading and Student Achievement, was the principal at Sherman Middle School for six years.
Join us for a live Web chat about the impact of A Nation at Risk and the potential for using international comparison data to improve academic standards and student achievement in U.S. schools.
Twenty-five years ago, a federal commission issued the landmark report that declared a "rising tide of mediocrity" in U.S. education posed a threat to America's prosperity and status in the world. Today, many policymakers and members of the business and education communities are sounding the same alarm bells.
Some experts are recommending that the United States put more stock in measuring itself against other countries, including having individual states benchmark their progress against those countries to get a clear and true picture of the status of American education. Would that help improve education in America? What can the United States do to improve education and continue to compete globally? Are the problems with the U.S. education system, compared with those of other industrialized countries', overblown? Join us for this discussion.
About the guests:
• Dane Linn, is the director of the education division of the National Governors Association, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization that has taken an active role in examining how states might align their academic standards and practices to those of top-performing nations
• Iris C. Rotberg, is the co-director of the Center for Curriculum, Standards, and Technology at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.
The Madison School Board met on Monday night to discuss a new positive behavior support plan as well as a new code of conduct for students who attend Madison public schools.
The code of conduct has been under review for months by a committee who made recommendations to the board in a special meeting on Monday.
Committee members will recommend making a few major revisions or additions to the code, including specifically banning voice or image recording.
Board members discussed safety, discipline and cell phones, which were all topics of importance that applied to the Toki situation, reported WISC-TV.
Madison's new student code of conduct targets cell phones. Secret or hidden recordings are a serious offense that could get a student suspended or expelled.
"Cell phones and video cameras are being used in very wrong ways, to take pictures of tests, to film fighting, to record kids in the locker room, that's just not acceptable," said school board president Arlene Silviera. "I think we have to be very specific in the use of these types of devices -- what can and what cannot be done."
In an effort to give principals and administrators a chance to exercise discretion to expel a student who brings a weapon besides a gun to school, Madison school district officials are considering alterations to the language in the student codes of conduct.
Recommended revisions were discussed at Monday night's School Board meeting.
The current rule for a first offense states that a student who has a weapon on school grounds besides a firearm, pellet gun or BB gun and isn't carrying the weapon with an "intent to cause harm to another" will receive a five-day suspension. After a second offense, a student could face an expulsion recommendation.
The rule revision would give principals and administrators the option to expel the student for a first-time offense.
Dan Mallin, who works in legal services with the Madison Metropolitan School District and is a member of the committee drafting changes to the codes of conduct, said the rule change is meant to take into account a variety of circumstances.
Marj Passman is so excited she 's having trouble sleeping.
Ed Hughes is sleeping just fine -- so far, he adds with a chuckle.
Monday evening, Passman and Hughes will be sworn in as members of the Madison School Board. It will mark the first time either has held public office.
Their path to the board was easier than expected -- both ran unopposed -- and their arrival comes at an unusually quiet moment in Madison 's public school system. Thanks to a one-time windfall from special city of Madison taxing districts, the schools are averting budget cuts for the first time in 14 years.
But Passman, 66, a retired teacher, and Hughes, 55, a lawyer, know that by summer 's end the board will be deep into discussions about asking voters to approve millions of dollars in extra taxes to avoid budget cuts for coming years.
They 've been doing their homework to join the board -- an act that will become official with a ceremony at the board 's 5 p.m. meeting at the district 's headquarters, 545 W. Dayton St.
Passman and Hughes fill the seats held by retiring board members Carol Carstensen, the board 's senior member who gained detailed knowledge of issues while serving since 1990, and Lawrie Kobza, who developed a reputation for carefully scrutinizing the district 's operations during her single three-year term.
Few jobs are as difficult and thankless as serving on a local school board.
Just ask Lawrie Kobza and Carol Carstensen.
The two Madison School Board members chose not to seek re-election this spring after years of honorable and energetic service.
Their replacements -- Ed Hughes and Marj Passman -- were sworn in Monday evening.
The fact that no one in Madison, a city steeped in political activism, chose to challenge Hughes or Passman for the two open board seats suggests increasing wariness toward the rigors of the task.
The job comes with token pay, a slew of long meetings, frequent controversy and angry calls at home. On top of that, the state has put public schools into a vise of mandates and caps that virtually require unpopular board decisions.
A venerable and valued West High School academic institution has been cut from next year's schedule, and this time the immediate blame lies with dwindling enrollment projections for Madison high schools and middle schools, not the perennial budget cuts caused by state-imposed revenue caps.
The Writing Lab, a 30-year tradition at West which provides students with one-on-one help for writing papers and college essays, will be cut next year, Principal Ed Holmes confirmed.
John Howe, chair of West's English department, said the Writing Lab gets about 900 visits a year from students seeking help for everything from developing early ideas or themes to preparing final drafts.
Students get help, he said, with English papers, but also with writing assignments from virtually every other class that has a written component.
"Every year, we have students who have graduated that come back to West, telling us how well they were prepared for college writing assignments because of the Writing Lab," Howe said.
One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour toward Station B. A second train leaves Station B at 7 p.m. traveling on parallel tracks at 50 m.p.h. toward Station A. The stations are 400 miles apart. When do the trains pass each other?
Entranced, perhaps, by those infamous hypothetical trains, many educators in recent years have incorporated more and more examples from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.
That idea may be wrong, if researchers at Ohio State University are correct. An experiment by the researchers suggests that it might be better to let the apples, oranges and locomotives stay in the real world and, in the classroom, to focus on abstract equations, in this case 40 (t + 1) = 400 - 50t, where t is the travel time in hours of the second train. (The answer is below.)
“The motivation behind this research was to examine a very widespread belief about the teaching of mathematics, namely that teaching students multiple concrete examples will benefit learning,” said Jennifer A. Kaminski, a research scientist at the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State. “It was really just that, a belief.”
Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
A unanimous Milwaukee School Board agreed Thursday night "to reduce massive busing" in Milwaukee Public Schools, but to soften a proposed timetable for achieving ambitious cuts.
But while all nine members generally agreed on the goal of getting more kids off buses and into improved neighborhood schools, what will actually result will not be clear for perhaps several years.
The board action, in effect, fired the starting gun on a process that will require balancing the desire of thousands of parents to send their children to schools somewhere other than their neighborhood with the desire to see more money spent in classrooms and less on buses.
Board member Michael Bonds, who proposed the resolution, said, "This is an opportunity for us to put millions of dollars back into the classroom, to provide our students with a quality, comprehensive education."
Last night MPS board members moved to reduce voluntary busing, for a potential savings of millions of dollars. In our recent meeting with Directors Spence and Thompson, busing has been identified as a source of tremendous savings. Despite the Neighborhood Schools Initiative, students are still being bused all over city to schools that are not citywide.
All members seem to support the idea of reducing busing, but several are concerned about options for parents who use the bus as child care. It's important for the district to keep in mind that its main mission is to educate children, first and foremost. It can't be in the position of sacrificing the academic goals of the district in order to provide services for parents that it can no longer afford.
As you are aware, the Waukesha Board of Education has initiated its search for a new superintendent. To provide counsel to us in this important process, we have retained the services of Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, Ltd. (HYA), a search firm that specializes in assisting boards with the identification and selection of superintendents. Click here to connect to HYA's website.
A very important early step in this process is to identify the characteristics we will be seeking in our new superintendent. We would appreciate your assistance with this task and invite you to attend a community forum meeting with a representative from Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, Ltd. on Monday, May 5, 2008 at 6:30 p.m. This meeting will be held in the Media Center at Central Middle School, 400 N. Grand Avenue, Waukesha 53186.
But her enthusiasm for the cameras pales in comparison to a new district-wide middle school program started this year called Positive Behavior Intervention Support, or PBIS.
"This is very good for kids -- very, very good," Lodholz said.
The PBIS program uses positive behavior support coaches like Sennett's Jennifer Tomlinson. She works with students, teachers and staff to teach positive behavior skills to students.
Often the behavior is rewarded and promoted by the students themselves, through handmade posters or activities aimed at showcasing such behaviors, WISC-TV reported.
Officials said the key is to actually instruct kids how to behave correctly, be it through mediation sessions, classroom instruction or other innovative approaches.
"We need to teach kids how to be accountable for their actions and that's what we're doing through this system," Tomlinson said.
Lodholz said the program helps offer instruction to students on how they should be behave. She said the PBIS program builds upon other Sennett school strategies and that it all seems to be working.
Last year incidents of misconduct at Sennett totaled 1,706, and 1,169 suspensions were handed out.
But in the 2007-08 school year to date, with the cameras and new program, Sennett's seen more than 730 fewer misconduct incidents -- at 973 -- and only 94 suspensions.
A Look at Sacramento's High School "Redesign" Initiative
Linking Education and Economic Development and the Sacramento City Unified School District [488K PDF]:
Over the past five years, the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) in partnership with LEED—Linking Education and Economic Development, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has implemented a system-wide redesign of the District’s high schools. With the assistance of community members, teachers principals, and especially parents and students, we have worked to create new models for high school learning in the 21st Century. To share the results of this effort, including accomplishments, lessons learned, and ongoing challenges, partners came together to create the "Report to the Community on the Education for the 21st Century (e21) High School Redesign Initiative: 2002-2007 and Beyond". This Executive Summary captures some of the key elements of this Report
A Milwaukee School Board committee voted unanimously Tuesday night "to reduce massive busing" within Milwaukee Public Schools, a step that could lead to major changes in the way the system functions and the options parents and students are given in selecting schools.
The board's finance committee said it wanted $20 million cut from the amount spent on busing by the 2009-'10 school year, more than two-thirds of the amount spent to bus students who do not fit into special categories or have special needs.
If implemented as envisioned by the main sponsor, board member Michael Bonds, the $20 million savings would be spent on a list of efforts to improve and build up faltering schools, primarily on the north side.
More broadly, it would be the strongest step toward cutting busing in Milwaukee since court ordered school desegregation began in 1976. At one time, more than 70% of all students in the city were bused to school; currently, more than 50% of students are bused, and MPS spends more than $55 million on busing.
The African American Education Council, an organization founded by state Rep. Polly Williams (D-Milwaukee), has been pushing for a year for a large cut in busing in the city and was behind its inclusion as a goal in a strategic plan MPS adopted last year. Members of the organization were key advocates for Bonds'
School districts in Stoughton, Columbus, Deerfield, Sauk Prairie and Janesville were among 32 statewide named Monday to receive Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction grants to start kindergarten programs for 4-year-olds.
But it may not be enough for at least one area district.
Getting 4-year-olds enrolled in kindergarten is a key step to raising student achievement levels and graduation rates, particularly among children from low-income families, national research has shown, DPI spokesman Patrick Gasper said.
School districts' efforts to launch 4K programs have been hampered because it takes three years to get full funding for the program under the state's school-finance system, according to DPI.
That's what these grants are supposed to address with $3 million announced for 4K programs to start this fall.
Columbus, one of the school districts that qualified for the grant, would get an estimated $62,814 to enroll 87 children this fall.
The good news is that the feds refused to fund the school district's proposal to revamp the high schools. The plan was wrongheaded in many respects, including its seeming intent to eliminate advanced classes that are overwhelmingly white and mix kids of distressingly varied achievement levels in the same classrooms.
This is a recipe for encouraging more middle-class flight to the suburbs. And, more to the point, addressing the achievement gap in high school is way too late. Turning around a hormone-surging teenager after eight years of educational frustration and failure is painfully hard.
We need to save these kids when they're still kids. We need to pull them up to grade level well before they hit the wasteland of middle school. That's why kindergarten for 4-year-olds is a community imperative.
As it happens, state school Supt. Elizabeth Burmaster issued a report last week announcing that 283 of Wisconsin's 426 school districts now offer 4K. Enrollment has doubled since 2001, to almost 28,000 4-year-olds statewide.
Burmaster nailed it when she cited research showing that quality early-childhood programs prepare children "to successfully transition into school by bridging the effects of poverty, allowing children from economically disadvantaged families to gain an equal footing with their peers."
For many years, recognizing the value to both children and the community, Madison Teachers Inc. has endorsed 4-year-old kindergarten being universally accessible to all.
This forward-thinking educational opportunity will provide all children with an opportunity to develop the skills they need to be better prepared to proceed with their education, with the benefit of 4- year-old kindergarten. They will be more successful, not only in school, but in life.
Four-year-old kindergarten is just one more way in which Madison schools will be on the cutting edge, offering the best educational opportunities to children. In a city that values education as we do, there is no question that people understand the value it provides.
Because of the increasing financial pressures placed upon the Madison School District, resulting from state- imposed revenue limits, many educational services and programs have been cut to the bone.
During the 2001-02 budget cycle, the axe unfortunately fell on the district's 4-year-old kindergarten program. The School Board was forced to eliminate the remaining $380,000 funding then available to those families opting to enroll their children in the program.
This includes its opposition to collaborative 4-year-old kindergarten, virtual classes and charter schools, all of which might improve the chances of low achievers and help retain a crucial cadre of students from higher-income families. Virtual classes would allow the district to expand its offerings beyond its traditional curriculum, helping everyone from teen parents to those seeking high-level math and science courses. But the union has fought the district's attempts to offer classes that are not led by MTI teachers.
As for charter schools, MTI has long opposed them and lobbied behind the scenes last year to kill the Studio School, an arts and technology charter that the school board rejected by a 4-3 vote. (Many have also speculated that Winston's last minute flip-flop was partly to appease the union.)
"There have become these huge blind spots in a system where the superintendent doesn't raise certain issues because it will upset the union," Robarts says. "Everyone ends up being subject to the one big political player in the system, and that's the teachers union."
MTI's opposition was a major factor in Rainwater's decision to kill a 4-year-old kindergarten proposal in 2003, a city official told Isthmus last year (See "How can we help poor students achieve more?" 3/22/07).
Matthews' major problem with a collaborative proposal is that district money would support daycare workers who are not MTI members. "The basic union concept gets shot," he says. "And if you shoot it there, where else are you going to shoot it?"
At times, Matthews can appear downright callous. He says he has no problem with the district opening up its own 4K program, which would cost more and require significant physical space that the district doesn't have. It would also devastate the city's accredited non-profit daycare providers by siphoning off older kids whose enrollment offsets costs associated with infants and toddlers.
By the year 2017, the institute projects, 17 percent of Brown County's population will be Hispanic. In Green Bay public schools, that projection is already a reality.
"We are just about there right now," Superintendent Dan Nerad said.
The data show immigrants consume more in state and local services than they pay into the system through state and local taxes, but the report adds that immigrants contribute to economic growth by opening businesses and spending money here, and says it's unlikely the influx of immigrants had any negative impact on job opportunities for long-time residents.
The most expensive public service is K through 12 education, but school officials see that service as an investment.
"It's all part of the changing demographic in our country," Nerad said.
Nerad said it's his responsibility to educate all children in Green Bay, although he acknowledges a changing demographic isn't always easy to handle.
It can't be easy for U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. She's passionate about all things to do with school. "This is my life's work, my calling," she says. Yet, here she is, in the final year of the Bush administration, and instead of continuing the grand work of remaking America's schools, she's stamping out brush fires in college-lending caused by the credit crunch and rattling the cages of fat cats in higher education. She doesn't like to say it out loud, but despite her very best efforts, things haven't worked out like she (or her boss) had planned.
At lunch this week with NEWSWEEK, she was determined to look forward, not back. She's had a great ride. She came to Washington, first as senior domestic policy adviser in 2001, with a popular Republican president who promptly wrested education away from the Democrats, the ones who had traditionally dominated the issue. Back then, President Bush spoke loud and often about the raw deal poor and minority kids were getting in public school. Instead of a bleeding heart, he showed a kind of flinty compassion for the poor by condemning what he famously called the "soft bigotry of low expectations" that plagued our inner cities. He coupled that with an inspired can-do attitude about making real, lasting change that disarmed even his fiercest opponents.
"If we don't teach this to them," Joan Fecteau, an MPS instructional technology leader, told me, "then we are doing as much of a disservice as not teaching them to read or write."
But you can't teach driving by sitting at a desk. You have to get behind the wheel. Let's give kids hands-on experience under teacher supervision.
Fecteau not only teaches students but teachers as well. "Some teachers don't know enough about the Internet to understand how to avoid viruses and tracking devices. For example, clicking on a pop-up window can lead to malicious spyware or unintended Web pages being displayed."
It is apparent to parents that most kids are far beyond their teachers' and parents' understanding. The one institution that has the mission to teach is not keeping up. We need to give schools the nod and the resources to do it - which is code for funding. Oh, no, did I say that?
In my view, technology, per se, is not the core issue. Critical thinking and knowledge come first, then tools. Tools we purchase today will be long obsolete by the time our children graduate (maybe this argues for some technology presence in high school). Ideally, our schools should have fast fiber and wireless (open) networks, and as Momanonymous noted, perhaps teacher compensation might include a laptop/mobile device allowance.
I am generally against teaching kids powerpoint, particularly before they've mastered the art of writing a paper.
On April 16th 2008, Toronto Canada became one of the first jurisdictions in North America to pass a substantive homework reform policy.
The policy reduces the homework burden on middle school and high school students and all but eliminates homework in the elementary grades. In addition, homework will no longer be allowed during vacations.
The new policy mandates that teacher’s co-ordinate their efforts and that the homework that is sent home is “clearly articulated and carefully planned” and “require no additional teaching outside the classroom”.
This policy is a major breakthrough for those of us who have been advocating for homework reform.
When I started to write this it was intended to be a “how to” guide for anyone who wanted to replicate what we have achieved in Toronto. But when I read it it seemed preachy.
I guess what I really want to communicate is, just start. Every situation is different, every school board is different, and every community is different, but just start somewhere.
Are you better off than you were eight years ago? For a growing number of middle-class Americans, the answer is "No."
Here and elsewhere, middle-class earnings aren't keeping up with the cost of living. Rising gasoline and food prices, health bills, child-care and education costs are leaving less to set aside for retirement. With the housing market in turmoil, even the asset many had come to count on -- the value of their homes -- is threatened.It isn't just a reflection of the current economic slowdown and rise in commodity prices: Middle-class incomes have been stagnant for several years. The well-heeled keep doing better, with the wealthiest 1% of U.S. families garnering the largest share of income since 1929.
"This is a squeezing-down cycle, and people are trying to hang on," says Randy Riggs, pastor at First Presbyterian Church in this city in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch Country. "Five years ago, I had these visions of what the church could do and hoped to raise funds to do so. I can't be a dreamer at the moment." Mr. Riggs says he recently tabled a project to renovate the church's chapel because he sensed he couldn't raise enough money.
The next superintendent of the Green Bay School District should be an experienced, community-minded leader focused on student achievement and knowledgeable of changing district demographics, according to the search firm charged with finding him or her.
Those were just a few of the key themes that emerged as the result of two full days of interviews and written feedback submitted by about 275 district stakeholders earlier this month.
The School Board on Saturday assessed the results of that feedback in the form of a leadership profile submitted by search firm Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, the group charged with finding current superintendent Daniel Nerad's replacement.
Nerad, who started as superintendent in 2001, will become the next leader of the Madison School District July 1. The search firm will use the profile to narrow a pool of perhaps 25 applicants to a field of five semifinalists.
In spring 1991, after a teenage girl stabbed a classmate in the cafeteria of an Anacostia school, the D.C. Board of Education voted to install metal detectors at the front entrances of 10 middle and high schools.
No other school system in the region has embraced the technology, even as metal detectors have multiplied in courthouses, museums and other public buildings across the region over the past two decades.
Many school officials view metal detectors as costly, impractical and fallible. To suburban parents, they conjure up images of armed camps. Even at Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, where three loaded guns were found in a locker last week, consensus is building against them.
"I don't want my son to come to school through metal detectors. That's prison," said Alex Colina, speaking to several hundred other parents at a community meeting Monday night.
New research into what is commonly called the black-white “achievement gap” suggests that the students who lose the most ground academically in U.S. public schools may be the brightest African-American children.
As black students move through elementary and middle school, these studies show, the test-score gaps that separate them from their better-performing white counterparts grow fastest among the most able students and the most slowly for those who start out with below-average academic skills.
“We care about achievement gaps because of their implications for labor-market and socioeconomic-status issues down the line,” said Lindsay C. Page, a Harvard University researcher, commenting on the studies. “It’s disconcerting if the gap is growing particularly high among high-achieving black and white students.”
Disconcerting, but not surprising, said researchers who have studied achievement gaps. Studies have long shown, for instance, that African-American students are underrepresented among the top scorers on standardized tests, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Fewer studies, though, have traced the growth of those gaps among high and low achievers.
The reasons why achievement gaps are wider at the upper end of the achievement scale are still unclear. But some experts believe the patterns have something to do with the fact that African-American children tend to be taught in predominantly black schools, where test scores are lower on average, teachers are less experienced, and high-achieving peers are harder to find.
Thousands of Massachusetts public high school graduates arrive at college unprepared for even the most basic math and English classes, forcing them to take remedial courses that discourage many from staying in school, according to a statewide study released yesterday.
The problem is particularly acute in urban districts and vocational schools, according to the first-of-its kind study. At three high schools in Boston and two in Worcester, at least 70 percent of students were forced to take at least one remedial class because they scored poorly on a college placement test.
The study raises concern that the state’s public schools are not doing enough to prepare all of their students for college, despite years of overhauls and large infusions of money.
The findings are also worrisome because students who take remedial courses, which do not count toward a degree, are far more likely to drop out of college, often without the skills needed to land a good job. That has broad implications for the state’s workforce, economy, and social mobility.
The report, conducted jointly by the state Departments of Elementary and Secondary Education and Higher Education, found that the problem crossed socioeconomic lines. One third of high school graduates in suburban Hanover took remedial classes, as did 27 percent of graduates in Lynnfield and Needham.
“This is a statewide problem,” said Linda M. Noonan, managing director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, a nonprofit group that supports tougher educational standards to create a better workforce. "There's something systemic that we're not doing to get these kids ready to do college-level work."
High school administrators said they welcomed the new information, and pledged to use it to make the high school diploma a true sign of readiness for college.
"If you're a good district, this is information you want," said Paul Schlichtman, who coordinates research, testing, and assessment for the Lowell schools, where about half of graduates who went on to a state college or university in Massachusetts took remedial classes. "Your high school diploma needs to be a credential for a two- and four-year school, and it's something that we take very seriously."
The study tracked more than 19,000 students who graduated from public high schools in 2005 and attended an institution within the state's higher education system. Overall, it found that 37 percent of the graduates enrolled in at least one remedial course in their first semester in college. In many urban districts, a majority of the graduates studied took at least one remedial class their first year.
Among the roughly 8,500 students in the study who attended community colleges, nearly two-thirds took a remedial course. Many college administrators blame remedial courses for the high dropout rate at the state's two-year schools.
The results also cast doubt on the MCAS exams as a predictor of college readiness at a time when state education leaders are urging high schools to require a more rigorous course load to boost MCAS scores, as required under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
High school students who received special education instruction in high school, low-income and limited-English speaking students, and Hispanic and African-American students, were more likely to enroll in remedial classes, the study found.
The report marks the first time education researchers have detailed how public high school graduates from individual school districts perform in Massachusetts public colleges. State education officials distributed the reports last week to nearly 300 high schools across the state, and hope the information will spur improvements.
"We're hopeful high schools will regard this very seriously," said Paul Reville, chairman of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, who will take over as the state's education secretary in July. "This tells us that higher standards are necessary. We're not fully preparing students for non-remediated college work."
The report showed that students who barely pass the MCAS tests are far more likely to take college remedial classes. For example, half of students who scored a "needs improvement" on the 10th-grade MCAS math test were forced to take developmental math classes, as opposed to 20 percent who received the score "proficient."
In November, state education officials unanimously approved a recommended core high school curriculum in response to growing concerns about the number of students taking remedial classes. The recommended program includes four years of English, four years of math, three years of science, and three years of history.
Beginning this fall, students who do not reach the proficiency level on the English and math MCAS exams will be required to take more core classes and periodic tests to gauge their progress. Reville also said administrators have discussed giving high school seniors college placement tests.
Patricia F. Plummer, commissioner of the Department of Higher Education, said research has shown that students who take math and English in all four years of high school are far more likely to succeed in college.
"It's tremendously discouraging for them to be in college and not taking college-level work," she said. "And in terms of economic development, we can't afford to lose them."
More than ever, students need college education and training to compete for entry-level positions and launch a good career, Plummer said.
Education officials said they were encouraged by one finding: 80 percent of first-time, full-time students enrolled for a second year of college in 2006.
At Bunker Hill Community College, educators said the MCAS had not improved performance on college placement tests, and that some high school graduates show up woefully unprepared for basic college work.
"I haven't seen any significant change," said Deborah Barrett, the college's coordinator of student assessment. "It's very frustrating for students. They think that they've graduated from high school, they passed the MCAS, so they're ready for college."
Almost 90 percent of Bunker Hill students end up taking remedial math, and 63 percent take remedial English. Some graduates are writing at such a poor level that they must take the most introductory remedial class, she said. Only 20 percent of students complete their remedial work within two years, she said.
Educators and researchers said the study suggested that students who merely pass are not necessarily ready for college.
"The dirty little secret is that MCAS doesn't test 10th grade skills, much less college skills," said Robert Gaudet, an education researcher at the University of Massachusetts' Donahue Institute. "Passing is not that hard, it's getting to proficient that's tougher."
I read with interest the Thursday editorial on "The mayor and the schools." As a member of the School Board, I agree that a closer working relationship and collaboration between the city and the Madison Metropolitan School District would be a positive thing. Certainly there are critical issues in planning, housing development patterns, transportation, zoning, and other matters that have a critical impact on our district in both the short and the long term.
For example, the "best planning practices" of infill have had a great deal to do with enrollment declines in isthmus schools by replacing family housing with condos. Decisions by the traffic engineering officials -- such as roundabouts at $1.2 million each -- have an impact on our budget. When the city annexes land on the periphery, it affects how and where we must provide schools; we do not have a right to refuse to also annex the students that go with the land.
Without a voice in decisions and processes, we are effectively at the mercy of the city on key issues that affect how we use the scarce resources that we have under state finance.
There is a new genre of teenage writing in town: Creative Nonfiction. It allows high school students (mostly girls) to complete writing assignments and participate in "essay contests" by writing about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, as well as more existential questions such as “How do I look?" and "What should I wear to school?"
This kind of writing is celebrated by Teen Voices, where teen girls can publish their thoughts about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, etc. and by contests such as the one sponsored by Imagine, the magazine of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.
College admissions officers also ask applicants to write about themselves, rather than, for example, asking to see their best extended research paper from high school. The outcome is that many of our public high school graduates encounter college term paper assignments which ask them to learn and write about something other than themselves, and thanks to the kudzu of Creative Nonfiction, this they are unprepared to do.
How teen autobiography came to be a substitute for nonfiction reading and academic writing is a long story, but clearly many now feel that a pumped-up diary entry is worthy of prizes in high school “essay contests,” and may be required in college application materials.
Of course teen girls should write about anything they want in their diaries, that is what diaries are for, after all, but it is a crime and a shame to try to confine their academic writing experiences in such a small, and poorly-gilded, cage of expectations.
Since 1987, The Concord Review has published long serious history research papers by high school girls on such subjects as the trial of Anne Hutchinson, the Great Awakening, the reform efforts of Peter the Great, the Seneca Falls Convention, the administrative and doctrinal confusions after the merger between the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church in the fourth century, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah in 1857, among many hundreds of other academic topics.
Now that the President of Harvard, the Secretary of State, the CEO of Pepsi Cola and one of the principal presidential candidates are female, perhaps it is not too soon to revisit the notion that all high school girls must be asked to write about is themselves.
Of course high school girls like to think and write about themselves and their friends, just as many boys still like to play Grand Theft Auto–San Andreas, but why should that lead to the practice of limiting their academic writing to personal matters, whether that writing has been re-branded as “Creative Nonfiction” or not.
Shakespeare is still generally credited with good creative writing, even if it was not nonfiction, but at his elementary school in Stratford, according to a recent article in Academic Questions, he “would have studied Latin and Greek over the course of eight years, in a curriculum that exposed students to essential masters, including: Lucian, Demosthenes, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Homer, Euripides, Terence, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Caesar, Salust, Origen, Basil, Jerome et al.” One can only speculate about how much more creative he would have been if he had been allowed to do some real Creative Nonfiction in school about his own daily personal life in Stratford!?
International competitions have shown us how poorly our high school students perform in math and science, but there is no international comparison of academic writing standards and performance that I know of. Perhaps that is lucky, as it seems likely that having our secondary students write about themselves most of the time has guaranteed that their writing would seem silly, superficial and solipsistic when compared with, for example, the International Baccalaureate Extended Essays, which are generally not about high school student hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), parents, and those perennial dilemmas: “How do I look?” and “What should I wear to school?”
Of course we can do better. We have high school students tackling calculus, Chinese, chemistry, European history and many more challenging academic subjects. Why can’t we free them as well from the anti-knowledge, anti-intellectual and anti-academic Creative Nonfiction writing assignments which so many students are now being given on which to waste their precious time?
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
A new term could bring a new emphasis on education to City Hall, as elected officials push for a stronger voice on an issue they say is vital to Milwaukee's future.
Otherwise, many of the issues will be familiar when a new term starts Tuesday for Mayor Tom Barrett and the Common Council.
Such perennial themes as economic development, public safety, transportation, taxes and state aid will continue to dominate the agenda over the next four years, Barrett and leading aldermen said in separate interviews.
On April 1, voters re-elected Barrett and 13 of 15 aldermen by comfortable margins. New to the council will be Aldermen-elect Milele Coggs, who defeated the jailed Ald. Michael McGee, and Nik Kovac, replacing Ald. Mike D'Amato, who did not seek re-election. Both the new and returning officials will be sworn in Tuesday.
When the superintendent brought in auditors to look at the Indianapolis Public Schools bus operation in December, the department couldn't say how many routes it runs each day. Auditors had to guess.
When the school district tried to dismiss 14 administrators this year, it missed a deadline to notify the employees and now must pay their full salaries for another year.
Although the district struggles to hire teachers and is chronically short-staffed, it has 10,000 job applications that have never been reviewed.
That confusion and lack of oversight represent what may be the biggest challenge to the state's largest school district as it continues efforts to reform.
Over the past three years, Superintendent Eugene White has tackled classroom shortcomings such as weak teaching and poor discipline. Now he has started to remake the crippling bureaucracy behind practices that are often inefficient, sometimes illegal and occasionally dangerous to children.
Others before him have tried, only to be defeated by a culture steeped in an attitude of "this, too, shall pass."
"I've heard it ever since 1971 that I've been in IPS: 'Just wait it out,' " said Jane Ajabu, the district's personnel director. "Unfortunately, the people in the district have adopted the attitude of: 'It's mediocre, it's ineffective, that's just how it is.' "
Large urban school districts are notoriously inefficient, and at least one measure suggests IPS may be worse than other Indiana districts. Its bureaucracy has an unusually high proportion of licensed educators working outside classrooms.
For every 53 students, IPS has one licensed educator working in a nonteaching job. Across the state, only Gary Public Schools has as high a ratio of administrators to students. Other Marion County districts have 86 to 156 students per licensed educator in a job outside the classroom.
A council has used powers intended for anti-terrorism surveillance to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form.
For two weeks the middle-class family was followed by council officials who wanted to establish whether they had given a false address within the catchment area of an oversubscribed school to secure a place for their three-year-old.
The "spies" made copious notes on the movements of the mother and her three children, who they referred to as "targets" as they were trailed on school runs. The snoopers even watched the family home at night to establish where they were sleeping.
In fact, the 39-year-old mother - who described the snooping as "a grotesque invasion of privacy" - had held lengthy discussions with the council, which assured her that her school application was totally in order.
Poole borough council disclosed that it had legitimately used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to spy on the family.
This has led to fears that parents all over the country could be monitored by councils cracking down on those who bend the rules to get their children into a good school.
The Act was pushed through by the Government in 2000 to allow police and other security agencies to carry out surveillance on serious organised crime and terrorists. It has since been taken up by councils to catch those carrying out any "criminal activity".
The mother, who wishes to remain anonymous, said: "I'm incensed that legislation designed to combat terrorism can be turned on a three-year-old. It was very creepy when we found out that people had been watching us and making notes.
Now that Madison School Supt. Art Rainwater is on his way to retirement, it's time to reexamine programs, staffing and curricula throughout the district.
Let's face it, again. African American and Latino academic achievement pales in comparison to that of white and Asian American students, though some segments of the Southeast Asian community struggle as well.
Daniel Nerad, the new superintendent, should dust off all the research that the district has gathered over the past 40 years, look at the recent studies pointing to excellence in education and put together a new approach to ending the achievement gap.
Things are already cooking at the Ruth Doyle Administration Building. Restructuring the high schools is in the works. Pam Nash, former Memorial High School principal and now assistant superintendent for secondary schools, is taking on this enormous task. Based on her work at Memorial, she's the right person for the task.
Nash acknowledges the concerns and complaints of African American parents, educators and community leaders. It's time to raise those achievement scores and graduation rates. She's fully aware of a solid approach that didn't fare well with Rainwater, so she's left to figure out what else can be done.
I am the parent of 2 children, one in first grade and the other soon to enter Kindergarten. I recently registered my child for Kindergarten where I was handed a very helpful folder with lots of great information in it. It had pictures of children learning in various contexts and text touting the wonderful education Madison children receive. The curious thing is that in the center of the folder is a picture of children using computers that are most likely more than 10 years old. Across the picture in large print it says "Welcome to Madison's Award Winning Schools!" Opposite the picture is a paragraph stating that there is a 4 to 1 computer ratio and that computers are integral to the K-12 instructional program. While I don't doubt all this to be true, just how old is that computer that is "integral" to my child's instructional program? Is my child getting the experiences that meet today's standards for knowledge in this area? While this is just a picture, it caused me to look around my daughter's school and to talk to a few teachers. What I learned was appalling.
Many teachers do their grades at home, not because of time, but because their classroom computer is so old and slow that it freezes on them or times out during an upload and they lose all of their data. I was stunned and confused. We as parents have been hearing about this new system that will allow us better access to seeing how our kids are doing in school and yet the teachers can't even enter data from their classrooms. Should we not be embarrassed as a district? Can we really claim truth in the text filled folds of the aforementioned folder?
I know there are many academic standards which drive curriculum. These standards also include technology standards. In fact the federal government through Title II Part D Enhancing Education Through Technology Program allocates funds to the DPI for which school districts can then apply for grants with the specific goal to:
"improve student academic achievement through the use of technology in elementary and secondary schools. It is also designed to assist every student – regardless of race, ethnicity, income, geographical location, or disability – in becoming technologically literate by the end of eighth grade, and to encourage the effective integration of technology resources and systems with professional development and curriculum development to promote research-based instructional methods that can be widely replicated."
Perhaps MMSD does apply for funds, but if so, where are they? Do they not make it to our elementary schools? Are they being used for something else? How are our students to become technologically literate by the end of 8th grade when the equipment they have to work on is so slow and out dated that rather than being productive it becomes an exercise in frustration? If it isn't an exercise in frustration my suspicion is the programs that are being used and taught to our kids are yesterday's technology rather than today's, as that is the only technology that could perhaps run on their current machines. I'm sure students are learning some keyboarding skills and drawing tools which are important. But, are they getting access to working with digital photos, video, creating their own publications, Internet search skills for researching topics they are studying, learning about authors whose books they are reading, participating in Project Lemonade (http://projectlemonade.blogspot.com/) and many other educational ventures appropriate for elementary students? I'd be surprised if any of this could be done successfully on the equipment currently in the classroom and in many of the elementary computer lab classrooms throughout the district.
Madison won awards for educational excellence but that was long ago. It is now 2008, what are we doing to keep up? We can't keep riding on our old fame. I'm glad to see so many new faces in the school board and perhaps with a new superintendent at the helm we will be in a better position to start "catching up" to where we should be if we are living up to the spirit of the language on our "welcome to MMSD" folders.
Seattle Public Schools will pay $3 million for failing to act on dozens of warnings that a popular teacher was molesting some of his fifth-grade students, a pattern that lasted two decades.
The most abused girl will receive $2.5 million, which her attorney said will be the largest reported settlement paid by a school district in Washington to a single victim in a sex-abuse case.
Under the settlement, approved Monday in King County Superior Court, the district acknowledged negligence in failing to protect two girls from Laurence "Shayne" Hill, 58, who has admitted to molesting at least seven girls while teaching at Broadview-Thomson Elementary in North Seattle.
The girls' lawyers said the district protected Hill even though at least 15 teachers and staff members made at least 30 reports to administrators that he was grabbing girls' buttocks and having them sit on his lap, sometimes in darkened classrooms, since the mid-1980s.
he MMSD finance and operations committee of the school board on Tuesday voted to approve a plan to continue bus services for Madison's Catholic schools. MMSD provides bus transportation under state law.
Under the plan, two schools, Queen of Peace and St. Maria Goretti, will adjust their schedules so they can share a bus. The kindergarten noon bus at St. Dennis will be discontinued, as will bus service to Edgewood. The eliminations would affect a handful of families and they will receive vouchers from MMSD to cover the cost of private transportation.
The school schedule adjustments and two route cancellations will save the public schools about $140,000 a year, according to MMSD officials.
Like a bouncer at a nightclub, Melissa Gladwell was parked at the main entrance of Cheektowaga Central Middle School on Friday night, with a list of 150 names highlighted in yellow marker, the names of students barred from the after-hours games, crafts and ice cream because of poor grades or bad attitudes.
“You’re ineligible,” Ms. Gladwell, a sixth-grade teacher, told one boy, who turned around without protest. “That happens. I think they think we’re going to forget.”
In a far-reaching experiment with disciplinary measures reminiscent of old-style Catholic schools or military academies, the Cheektowaga district this year began essentially grounding middle school students whose grade in any class falls below 65, or who show what educators describe as a lack of effort.
Such students — more than a quarter of the 580 at the school as of last week — are excluded from all aspects of extracurricular life, including athletic contests, academic clubs, dances and plays, unless they demonstrate improvement on weekly progress reports filled out by their teachers.
For families with children, the quality of local schools is often a key factor in deciding which house to buy.
Buyers trying to determine if the schools in a neighborhood will meet their needs can find plenty of data on the Internet about standardized tests, but they shouldn't neglect the value of visits to the schools and old-fashioned word of mouth, real estate agents and education experts say.
If you're working with an agent, don't expect him to judge the schools for you.
"When my clients begin to ask questions about the quality of the school system, I try to be careful with labeling schools as 'good' or 'bad' that could be construed as code words to discourage certain groups of people from buying a home in a particular neighborhood, which is a violation of the Fair Housing Act," said Thomas Minetree, a real estate agent in Weichert's Gainesville office.
At one of Florida's largest public schools, students take classes in English literature, Spanish and calculus. They join clubs, enter science fairs and talk one on one with their teachers.
But no one complains about mystery meat from the school cafeteria, no one ever gets asked to — or snubbed at — a school dance, and there is no football team to cheer for.
A decade after its founding, the Florida Virtual School has become a quiet force in the state's education system. It's an Internet-based school that offers free, accredited classes for middle school and high school students in Florida. More than 54,000 students took courses last year, and it's growing.
"They are the largest state-led virtual school program based in the United States,'' said Susan Patrick, president of the North American Council for Online Learning. "I think that they have one of the most innovative education solutions for how we can better serve students."
Janice Barnard, whose 17-year-old daughter is taking Virtual School classes in a program affiliated with Tampa's Blake High School, says, "It's not for everyone. You must have a self-motivated child, somebody who wants to learn, who wants to achieve."
By this September, the number of teachers who work for the Mequon-Thiensville School District is expected to have shrunk 17% since January 2001, Superintendent Robert Slotterback said last week.
The district, like many others in Wisconsin, is functioning with fewer teachers and dealing with smaller student enrollments, rising costs and an electorate that in referendums in 2006 and 2002 told the district that it could not spend significantly more money.
Slotterback maintains, though, the district has not reduced its course offerings or lowered its standards.
"We have not really had to eliminate student options," he said. "Your class size may have gotten bigger, but I am not aware of any class option that we have eliminated. We have not purposely shrunk the options for kids up to this point."
Madison School Board Says No to City Infrastructure Costs for a Potential New East Side School Development
There was an interesting discussion that unfortunately received no publicity during the March 24, 2008 school board meeting regarding proposed Sprecher Road [map] seven figure infrastructure costs (this spending would, perhaps have begun the process of constructing a new east side school). The Board voted 3-3 (Yes: Carstensen, Moss and Silveira; No: Cole, Kobza and Mathiak with Winston absent), which resulted in a no on these costs. Watch the video here. It would seem ill advised to begin borrowing money for a new school given the ongoing budget challenges. Last spring's downtown school closing unpleasantness is another factor to consider with respect to potential new edge schools.
Madison School District Administration's Proposed 2008-2009 Budget Published
The observation of school district budgeting is fascinating. Numbers are big (9 or more digits) and the politics significant. Many factors affect such expenditures including local property taxes, state and federal redistributed tax dollars, enrollment, grants, referendums, new programs, politics and periodically local priorities. The Madison School District Administration released it's proposed 2008-2009 $367,806,712 budget Friday, April 4, 2008 (Allocations were sent to the schools on March 5, 2008 prior to the budget's public release Friday).
There will be a number of versions between this proposal and a final budget later this year (MMSD 2008-2009 Budget timeline).
I've summarized budget and enrollment information from 1995 through 2008-2009 below:
The referendum, which would ask taxpayers to override state-imposed revenue caps so services and programs would not have to be cut from the Madison Metropolitan School District, could take place as early as November, School Board President Arlene Silveira said Friday afternoon following a press briefing on the district's 2008-09 budget.
"The discussion between the Board of Education and the new superintendent about whether to go to referendum will surely be one of the first things on our agenda in July," Silveira said.
While the forecast for the district's budget in 2009-2010 looks gloomy, the news on the 2008-2009 budget is far more upbeat, thanks to a one-time $5.7 million windfall from the city.
This is an interesting dilemma for the Board and new Superintendent. On the one hand, the timing may be favorable given Dan Nerad's honeymoon period and a presidential vote generates far higher turnout than spring elections. The potential date presents an interesting contrast to just a few years ago, when the MMSD preferred to call (expensive) special elections, thinking that low turnout would benefit a yes vote. The most recent referendum, held on November 7, 2006 was a "high turnout" event - and the referendum passed handily.
Perhaps the new Superintendent might use his honeymoon capital for something more than the "same service" or cost to continue approach we've seen over the past decade.
Identifying what needs to be fixed in the field of education is easy: the No Child Left Behind Act, currently up for reauthorization but stalled in Congress pending the next election. The elaborate law requires schools to test the bejeezus out of elementary- and middle-school students in reading and math, to test them again in high school, and to sprinkle in a few science tests along the way. Schools posting consistently poor test scores are supposed to be punished so that they'll clean up their acts and allow NCLB's ultimate goal to be achieved in 2014. The act imagines that essentially all students across the country will be "proficient" in that year, meaning that they'll all pass the battery of standardized tests required by the NCLB. Hence the act's catchy title.
NCLB was enacted in 2001 with huge bipartisan support, though many Democrats in Congress have since disclaimed if not denounced it, presumably having had some time to read it. The act is at once the Bush administration's signature piece of education legislation, its most significant domestic policy initiative, and the most intrusive federal education law in our nation's history. The federal government provides less than 10 percent of all education funding, yet NCLB drives education policy in every school district in the country. In short, it's a big deal. It's also in need of repair. No one—conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican—doubts that.
The Madison School District is making the full transition to a standards-based educational system. Here is the third in a series of articles about a standards-based system, with this one focusing on instruction.
Introduction to a standards-based system... instruction
The Wisconsin Model Academic Standards (WMAS) articulate what students should know and be able to do in each curricular area. Madison Metropolitan School District staff elaborated upon these state standards to frame district curriculum and instruction.
Curriculum is the planned educational experiences taught in each subject area at each grade level. This issue focuses on instruction, which is the action or practice of teaching the curriculum.
Instruction is standards-based when the knowledge and skills that are the primary focus of the lesson support students' continual progress toward meeting the standards.
This article shares an example from language arts to show how instruction in the MMSD is standards-based.
Dan Nerad is already beginning to reach out to the community, three months before he formally steps into his new role as Madison's next superintendent of schools.
In The Capital Times' offices on Wednesday, School Board President Arlene Silveira introduced Nerad to staff members, noting that last week was spring break in Green Bay, where he is currently the superintendent of schools.
"Dan spent his vacation in the Doyle Building," Silveira said, referring to the site of the Madison school district's central administration.
Nerad was in Madison Wednesday, speaking to media editorial boards and joining current Superintendent Art Rainwater to address a lunch meeting of the Madison Downtown Rotary club.
"My role will be to add value to what is already an excellent school district," Nerad told the Rotarians. He added that he is committed to the goal of continuous improvement.
"You have to focus on the next steps," he said.
During his visit to The Capital Times, Nerad described innovations in Green Bay during his tenure. They include specialty focus areas in each of the district's four high schools and a plan for 4-year-old kindergarten slated to begin during the 2008-2009 school year.
t said that he believes Tuesday's school referendum failed because it had "no light at the end of the tunnel".
Terry Zander was one of three school board members opposed to holding the referendum and said that he voted against it. He doesn't, however, rule out the possibility of another referendum being held later, perhaps next spring, WISC-TV reported.
District voters saw their total property tax bills rise 16 percent last year when adding together school and all other property taxes. They narrowly defeated Tuesday's plan, which sought to exceed state revenue caps and increase spending by a total $800,000 to cover budget deficits during the next two years.
The measure was defeated by a mere 53 votes, but Zander said that the "people have spoken" and the amount of votes shouldn't matter.
He said that he doesn't believe people change a budget deficit situation overnight. He said that past cuts are still being implemented and that voters want the board to work together to find a long-term solution to the situation. When that is done, Zander said that if a deficit remains, he could see holding another referendum.
This is the second referendum in two years that has failed to get approved, WISC-TV reported.
Despite its teacher union origins as a vehicle for teacher-led, bottom-up innovation and early bi-partisan support, the charter movement was adopted by political conservatives as a vehicle for market-oriented education reforms. In the process, teacher unions largely repudiated an idea they helped launch. Yet recently, a flurry of discussion has emerged regarding an evolving and potentially productive relationship between charter schools and teacher unions. These discussions were precipitated by the recent actions of a few notable policy entrepreneurs whose work may suggest political and policy alternatives that could advance and sustain the policies embedded in the charter model.
This paper chronicles the political history of the charter school movement in the United States, starting with ideas promulgated by the late American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker and continuing through the embrace of charter schools by political conservatives. Through a review of available research, the paper assesses the current state of the charter school movement, including an assessment of charter school achievement data and a critique of the charter school policy framework, with particular emphasis on charter school financing, philanthropic support, and access to human capital. The paper also describes the recent and politically counter-intuitive work by the United Federation of Teachers, New York City’s teachers union, in founding two charter schools.
With the broad history and state of the charter school movement established, this paper analyzes recent events through the agenda setting frameworks developed by Baumgartner and Jones (1993) and Kingdon (1984). Specifically, the paper argues that the charter school movement may be approaching an instance of “punctuated equilibrium” due to the charter school movement’s changing “policy image” and the loss of “monopolistic control” over the charter school agenda by a small interest group. The paper concludes that school-based collective bargaining may be a “new institutional structure” that could have transformative and productive consequences for the charter school movement.
Without opponents in their races for Madison School Board seats, candidates Ed Hughes and Marjorie Passman have spent more time identifying issues that unite rather than divide them.
Although both candidates said they were concerned by the lack of interest in this spring's school board race, they admitted that it had offered some unique opportunities.
"In a contested election, there's a tendency to pigeonhole the candidates," Hughes, a Madison attorney who is running for his first elected office, said in a recent interview.
Hughes said that in a more normal election, Passman's extensive classroom experience and passionate enthusiasm for teaching and teachers would have labeled her as the teachers' union candidate.
"She would have been pushed towards MTI. It's likely I would have been pushed in the other direction. It's far more subtle than that and it's not fair to either one of us," he observed.
No Child Left Behind has created a demand for school administrators who can take the pressure, and some 20 percent of school districts are now seeking superintendents because of a shortage.
The list reads more like demands from a Hollywood agent than from a candidate to lead the schools for an antebellum-tinged suburb of Atlanta.
To come to work here in Clayton County, a failing school district in Georgia, former Pittsburgh superintendent John Thompson wants $275,000 in salary, a $2 million consulting budget, a Lincoln Town Car with a driver, and money to pay a personal bodyguard.
Sound a bit hefty for someone likely to pull a power lunch in a junior high cafeteria? Maybe not.
Fewer qualified candidates, rising expectations, and a near-impossible job description are creating a new breed of superintendents: Call them central office rock stars. These candidates say that, for the right price, they're willing to do an unpopular job that can take a heavy personal and professional toll to whip underperforming districts into shape.
The trend is exacerbated in struggling minority districts – many in the South – the very ones feeling the greatest pinch from new federal and state accountability laws.
Why do some countries, like Singapore, Korea, and the Czech Republic, do so much better than the United States in math? I've heard all sorts of reasons; diversity and poverty top the list. But after some 15 years conducting international research, I am convinced that it's the diversity and poverty of U.S. math standards—not the diversity and poverty of U.S. students—that are to blame.
The single most important result of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is that we now know that student performance is directly related to the nature of the curricular expectations. I do not mean the instructional practices. I mean the nature of what it is that children are to learn within schools. (In the U.S., the curricular expectations are usually referred to as standards; in other countries they are known by various names.) After all, what is more central to schooling than those things we, as a society, have chosen to pass on to our children?
The TIMSS research has revealed that there are three aspects of math expectations, or standards, that are really important: focus, rigor, and coherence. Let's take a brief look at each.
Who is going to be our next education president? I know, but I'm not telling. Most of The Washington Post's political reporters these days are young, strong and potentially dangerous. They have warned me about previous attempts to tread on their turf. So I am going to confine myself to helpful advice for our future chief executive, without revealing that person's name.
I have gotten some astute assistance in this effort from Sharon L. Nichols, an educational psychologist who is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and David C. Berliner, Regents' Professor of education at Arizona State University. Their 2007 book "Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools" is the latest selection to our Better Late Than Never Book Club, this column's way of spotlighting good work that I really should have read when it appeared months, sometimes years, before.
Nichols and Berliner attack from all sides the state testing that we use to assess schools under the No Child Left Behind law. Their analysis is clear, their arguments strong. What particularly impressed me was their willingness to suggest viable alternatives to testing as a way for us voters, parents and taxpayers to know which of our schools are doing well and which are not, a service to which some critics of testing seem to think we are not entitled.
Excerpt from the Framework for Grade Ten—World History, Culture, and Geography: The Modern World
World War I and Its Consequences
The growth of nationalism, imperialism, and militarism provides the backdrop for consideration of World War I, which permanently changed the map of Europe and deeply affected the rest of the world. Students should understand the political conditions that led to the outbreak of the war in Europe. Caused in large measure by nationalism, the war stimulated even greater nationalist impulses by dissolving old empires, unleashing irredentist movements, and promoting the spirit of selfdetermination. Within the context of human rights and genocide, students should learn of the Ottoman government's planned mass deportation and systematic annihilation of the Armenian population in 1915. Students should also examine the reactions of other governments, including that of the United States, and world opinion during and after the Armenian genocide. They should examine the effects of the genocide on the remaining Armenian people, who were deprived of their historic homeland, and the ways in which it became a prototype of subsequent genocides.
John DeMain's Remarks at the 2008 Memorial / West Strings Festival
Madison Symphony Orchestra Conductor John DeMain made a few remarks at Saturday's Memorial / West area Strings Festival. Watch the video. Much more about John DeMain.
Dan Nerad's Remarks at the 2008 Madison Memorial/West Area Strings Festival
Incoming Madison Schools' Superintendent Dan Nerad made a few remarks at Saturday's Memorial / West area Strings Festival. Watch the video. Much more on Dan Nerad here.
Gov. Haley Barbour has signed several bills into law, including one that would require additional training for school board members in low-performing districts.
The bill becomes law July 1. It would affect local school boards that serve in districts with one or more underperforming schools or in districts with serious financial problems.
The members would undergo training geared toward improving learning and promoting effective financial management. The training would be provided annually by the Mississippi School Boards Association.
Sen. Alice Harden, D-Jackson, a former teacher and a member of the Senate Education Committee, said the bill doesn't go far enough. She said the additional training should be required for school board members in all districts.
She said many of the state's school board members are elected, and while they're committed to supporting the district, "they don't exactly understand their responsibilities."
"What they do is set the philosophy of what a district should be doing," Harden said Wednesday. "The teachers are teaching, the environment is conducive to learning and the school is up to par."
Let's consider for a moment what many readers will find to be a politically incorrect position: because of cheap computers and the Internet, the ability to solve problems ad hoc has become more efficient than teaching kids about problems and issues that will never face them. As a result, the United States has let itself become less competitive by putting so much money into a product (a kid) making both its cost and its ability globally uncompetitive. So, instead of putting more effort into making globally competitive products, we put more effort into blaming those who are smarter at using technology that was mostly invented here.
If the idea is to give everyone a nice comfortable pension, if the same money invested each year in a typical kid's education was instead invested in an IRA, it would give that kid a very comfortable living upon reaching age 65.
Well this is a terrible position to take, don't you think? It treats our children like capital goods and denies them any ability to excel, dooming them to mediocrity.
Really?
My Mom (Mrs. Cringely to you) once said, "I may not have been the best mother, but at least I got all my kids through school."
"No you didn't," I replied (this is a true story, by the way). "We would have made it through school with or without you." And we would have.
Not wanting to put too much of a Libertarian spin on it, because I am certainly not a Libertarian, this is a fact that is missed by so many people. There will always be achievers, whether they go to public schools, private schools, home schools, magnet schools, charter schools, or no schools at all. While it is fine for society to create opportunities for advancement, what's more important is removing BARRIERS to advancement. And for the most part that's not what we are about.
What we tend to be about as a society is building power structures and most of those power structures, including schools and governments, are decidedly reactive. This is not all bad. After all, the poster child for educational and government proactivity in the 20th century may have been the Taliban in Afghanistan.
But while Matthews laments the failures of government to improve teaching and learning, he glosses over his own pivotal role in local educational leadership. That role includes standing in the way of programs like 4-year-old kindergarten that could help the district meet its educational objectives.
Beginning in the next few weeks, a school board made up mostly of rookies will begin to address the challenges ahead. A new superintendent starting July 1 — Daniel Nerad, formerly top dog in Green Bay — inspires hope of new solutions to nagging problems. But the third pillar of power is John Matthews. He's been around the longest and arguably knows the most.
Already, Matthews has cemented his legacy from building a strong, tough union. But now, some are wondering if Matthews will also leave behind a legacy of obstructing key educational change.
Just because they’re uncontested, you shouldn’t overlook the two races for the Madison school board on the April 1 ballot.
There isn’t a tougher job or a more important one in local politics than maintaining the high quality of the Madison schools and dealing with the serious problems that confront them.
Over the past five weeks, we’ve queried retired teacher Marj Passman, the lone candidate for Seat 6, and attorney Ed Hughes, the lone candidate for Seat 7, on the important issues.
Here’s the week-by-week breakdown of our questions:
Glendale Elementary may be failing by test-based standards, but it's succeeding by human ones.
The question of how we recognize good schools and bad ones has become a pressing issue.
In Washington, Congress is debating the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind legislation. Locally, Madison and Sun Prairie parents have recently been upset over boundary changes that some see as sending their children to less desirable schools.
At the same time, the movement toward inclusivity in special education, a growing minority population and increasing poverty rates throughout Dane County, particularly in Madison, have put a sharp point on some important questions:
Do advanced students suffer when they share a classroom with struggling students?
How should schools address the stresses of poverty?
Are test scores a reliable measure of a school's effectiveness?
This story doesn't attempt to answer those questions; educational researchers have been struggling with them for decades. Instead, it puts one Madison elementary school under the microscope where all those currents come together -- a school that by No Child Left Behind's test-based standards is clearing failing. Yet, by the assessment of a number of parents, volunteers and other fans, the school is succeeding beyond all expectations.
A closer look at Glendale Elementary, a 50-year-old Madison school within the noisy shadow of U.S. 51, shows a school where success is occurring in ways that test scores can't measure and poverty rates don't reveal.
For the first time in years, Madison has no contested School Board races this year.
On April 1, voters will elect two new members of the board. Traditionally, open seat contests have been intense, highlighting ideological, practical, geographic and stylistic divides not just between the candidates but within the community.
This year, there is no such competition.
Retired teacher Marj Passman is running without opposition for Seat 6.
Attorney and veteran community leader Ed Hughes is the sole contender for Seat 7.
They will be elected Tuesday and quickly join a board that faces serious budgeting, curriculum and structural challenges at a time when funding has been squeezed and the district superintendent, Art Rainwater, is retiring.
That does not mean that voters should take a pass on these races, however.
“Summary of Education Reform Process” sketches out four phases designed to result in a plan to be implemented in March 2009 although it appears many of the ideas would require approval from the Republican-controlled legislature.
Strickland’s spokesman, Keith Dailey, cautioned that the document did not constitute a plan or proposal.
“The collection of ideas merged over the past year,” he said. “This isn’t the governor’s plan. This is a process that is geared toward ongoing discussion and through the conversation the governor believes consensus for reform will emerge.”
Among the ideas on the discussion list are:
—Junking the Ohio Graduation Test in favor of “portfolio” approach that would require students to complete a senior project, a community service project and both the ACT college entrance exam and end-of-course exams when the complete core high school subjects.
Talk with Terry Millar long enough and it’s bound to happen: The mathematics professor will begin drilling you in math. He’ll slip in a question such as “What is pi?” and before you know it you’re being coached to a whole new level of mathematical understanding.
Linda McQuillen refers to it as having Millar “attend to her mathematics” and as his long-time collaborator she’s well acquainted with the experience.
“Traveling with him [to meetings] and when we’d do presentations for various audiences, on the cab rides to and from the airport, we were always doing mathematics,” laughs McQuillen, a retired math teacher and a former leader of the Madison school district’s math goals. “The problem is, Terry can do it verbally and I can’t. He’s just amazing.”
If Millar’s enthusiasm for teaching math can be overwhelming, it’s also true he has put the energy to good use. For well over a decade, Millar has worked to improve math and science instruction for students at all levels by bringing together the knowledge of university mathematicians and scientists with the teaching and curricular expertise of educators.
No barbs were tossed, no snide remarks made, no mud slung.
Instead, the two men locked in what may be Delaware's fiercest Democratic gubernatorial primary ever spent a full hour talking about public education to about 500 people at The Grand in Wilmington.
It was the first major debate of the 2008 election season for Lt. Gov. John Carney Jr. and State Treasurer Jack Markell and it drew teachers, businessmen, parents, policymakers, young and old, undecided voters and plenty of campaign workers.
The men talked about how to pay for schools, find good teachers, scrap the state's testing program and make sure kids get the best shot they can at a good future, no matter what their present circumstances.
On many issues, their views were similar. Both support most recommendations of the Vision 2015 panel of experts, who have developed plans and pilot programs to give Delaware "world-class" schools by 2015. Both want more money to address Delaware's high dropout rates, especially among Hispanic and black students.
Both were cautious about endorsing widespread expansion of Delaware's charter school programs, urging an evaluation of that 10-year-old effort to bring innovation to the school system. Neither would commit to adding state money for charter school capital projects.
Imagine for a moment that you are a new fourth-grade teacher with 25 children squirming in front of you. There’s a test at the end of the year, though you really aren’t sure what’s on it, and there are stacks of enormous textbooks— too enormous to tackle cover-to-cover—on the shelf. The one thing that is abundantly clear is that you are supposed to teach to the standards.
So, when you open up that standards document, do you hope to see something like this?
Analyze the style or structure of a text.
or something like this?
Describe the differences of various imaginative forms of literature, including fantasies, fables, myths, legends, and other tales.
Example: After reading some of the Greek or Norse myths found in such books as Book of Greek Myths or Book of Norse Myths, both by Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire, discuss how myths were sometimes used to explain physical phenomena like movement of the sun across the sky or the sound of thunder.
Both are from current state standards, but one, obviously, offers much more guidance as to what your fourth-graders need to learn. If your instruction is guided by the first standard, you may or may not adequately prepare students for the test—or for fifth grade. But if your instruction is guided by the second standard, your students have a much better chance of being on grade level. And we can imagine an even clearer, more specific standard that would give you greater confidence that your instruction was on target.
For example, instead of merely suggesting books to draw from, the latter standard could specify exactly which myths, fables, legends, etc. students should read and ensure that none of those selections is repeated in other grades.
A lawyer and former teacher will replace a lawyer and former teacher in the uncontested Madison school board elections on April 1. The result will be the most inexperienced board in years at a particularly important time for the city's public schools.
The school board is perhaps the hardest-working body of local elected officials and, judging by the throngs that flock to public meetings on issues big and small, also the most democratic. While the board's past effectiveness has been marred by infighting and grandstanding, the last two years have been much more congenial, under the presidencies of Johnny Winston Jr. and Arlene Silveira.
After the elections, the seven-member board will lose the inquisitive eye of Lawrie Kobza and the institutional memory of Carol Carstensen. Replacing them are Ed Hughes, a reserved but intriguing lawyer, and Marj Passman, a provocative and passionate retired teacher.
They will join rookies Beth Moss and Maya Cole, who are still struggling to master the issues. Silveira is likely to remain president, and Winston will be the most senior member. Rounding out the board is Lucy Mathiak, whose temper, colleagues say, has muted her effectiveness.
All states should have clear, specific, grade-by-grade, content-rich standards. When they don't, it's the students who miss out on a top-notch education and the teachers—especially the new teachers—who find more frustration than fulfillment. Below, we hear from a new teacher who laments the lack of direction she received in her first year on the job. We have withheld her name and school district to allow her to speak frankly and to emphasize that new teachers across the country are facing similar challenges.
–Editors
First days are always nerve-racking—first days attending a new school, first days in a new neighborhood, and especially first days at a new job. My first day as a high school English teacher in a large, urban public school was no exception. It was my first "real" job after graduating college just three months earlier, and to add to my anxiety, I was hired just one day, precisely 24 hours, before my students would arrive. But my family and friends, mentors, and former professors all assured me that, like all other first days I had conquered, this day would be a successful start to a successful career. Unfortunately, this time they were wrong.
My first day on the job, I entered the building expecting to be greeted by the principal or chairperson, guided to my classrooms, and provided with what I considered to be the essentials: a schedule, a curriculum, rosters, and keys. Instead, the only things I received were a piece of paper on which two numerical codes were written, and a warning not to use the women's bathroom on the second floor. After some frantic inquiring, I learned that the codes signified that I would be teaching ninthand tenth-grade regular English. As various colleagues pulled at my paper to get a glance, some nodded approvingly, while others sighed sympathetically. Eager to make a judgment of my own, I asked a question that, two years later, has yet to be answered: "What is taught in ninth- and tenth-grade regular English?" In response, I was given book lists containing over 20 books per grade, ranging from Robert Lipsyte's The Contender to William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew on the freshman list alone, and even greater disparities on the other three lists. I was told to select six books from the appropriate list for each grade I taught, and "teach a book for every six weeks of the school year." Unsatisfied with this answer, yet slowly beginning to feel foolish for asking (Should I know the answers to these questions? Am I unqualified to be a teacher if I don't know what ninth- and tenth-grade English means?), I gathered the courage to inquire further. "What concepts are we supposed to teach the students through these books?" Now growing visibly agitated, several colleagues responded, "Teach literary elements and techniques. They need to re-learn those every year, and prepare them for the state test, and teach them some grammar and vocabulary as well as whatever concepts each book calls for."
Like other forward-looking organizations, the American Federation of Teachers believes that we need to have better state standards if we are truly going to improve K-12 education. I’ve earnestly stated that same view. That’s no doubt why I’ve been invited to write on this subject.
I’m genuinely flattered. But after living with this question for more than two decades, my views have become so definite (some might say extreme) that I decided to conceive of this piece as a guest editorial where no one should think I am speaking for anyone but myself. That will allow me to speak my mind, which will I hope be more useful to readers than an attempt to find and express a consensus view on behalf of American Educator and the AFT on this controversial subject.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and author of many articles and books, including the bestselling Cultural Literacy and The Schools We Need. He is a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation. His most recent book is The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children.
The subject is controversial in part because some teachers do not like explicit subject-matter standards. In my own state of Virginia, some teachers are quite annoyed with me personally because many years back my writings influenced the Virginia Board of Education when they introduced the “Virginia Standards of Learning”—the much debated, often dreaded SoLs. But let me say to those teachers, and to other teachers, that the state did not pay attention to what my colleagues and I said back in 1988. We said that subject-matter standards and tests of them should be just two prongs of a four-pronged policy. Standards and tests needed to be accompanied by good teacher training in the subject matter specified in the standards and by good classroom materials that clearly indicate what to teach, but not how to teach it. The last two prongs have never come properly into existence in Virginia, nor to my knowledge in any other state. Moreover, the Virginia standards (not to mention the tests) are not nearly as good as they should be. other state standards are even worse. No wonder there is such dissatisfaction!
But many teachers I have talked to have agreed that they would very much prefer to work in a more coherent system, one that ensured that students who entered their classrooms were adequately prepared.
Three Madison elementary school principals have been reassigned to new schools for the 2008/2009 school year.
They will begin their new duties on July 1.
John Burkholder, who is currently the principal at Midvale Elementary, will become principal at Leopold. He will be replaced at Midvale by Pam Wilson, who is currently the principal of Lindbergh.
Lindbergh's new principal will be Mary Hyde, who is currently the principal at Leopold. Mary Manthey, the current assistant principal at Leopold, will be reassigned as assistant principal at Kennedy. This is a new position at Kennedy, the result of an increased student population at that school.
When senior Zack Jackson wanted to take a class in mythology, he wasn't out of luck just because his small high school in rural Virginia didn't offer it. Instead, he headed online.
The course comes courtesy of Virtual Virginia, a state program that offers dozens of online classes to middle and high school students. The program allows children to take classes that aren't offered at their schools. Nationwide, programs like Virtual Virginia help hundreds of thousands of students take the kinds of unusual courses that make colleges sit up and take notice.
Most of the 3,000 students in the Virtual Virginia program enroll in online advanced placement courses. And thanks to the program, Zack's school, Rappahannock County High, can offer more AP classes, allowing it to compete with local private schools, which often use AP courses as a selling point.
Principal Robyn Puryear says students have to be self-directed to succeed in an online class. Since online courses are self-paced, there's a temptation to procrastinate — and that leads to trouble.
Abramson's article includes a chat with online Mandarin teacher Susan Cox. Virtual courses would seem to be ideal for a number of subjects that are often sparsely offered. Mandarin for example, is only available at Madison's Memorial High School.
The lunch lines in West Virginia’s Wood County schools move much faster than they used to. After students fill their trays with food, they approach a small machine, push their thumbs against a touch pad — and with that small movement, they’ve paid for their meal.
For half the state’s school districts, as well as hundreds more across the country, the days of dealing with lost lunch cards or forgotten identification numbers are over.
“A student cannot forget their finger,” said Beverly Blough, the director of food service in Wood County School District, which in 2003 became the first district in West Virginia to use finger scanners.
But the emergence of finger scanning has also sparked a backlash from parents and civil libertarians worried about identity theft and violation of children’s privacy rights. In several cases when parents have objected, school districts have backed down, and some states have outlawed or limited the technology.
In one key way, the Madison school district is no different than any other urban school system in the country -- poor kids and kids of color just aren’t learning as much as other students.
We asked the two Madison school board candidates on the April 1 ballot -- Marj Passman is the lone candidate for Seat 6, while Ed Hughes is running unopposed for Seat 7 -- how they would address the achievement gap.
Interestingly, both see early education as part of the solution, but both also stopped short of endorsing the introduction of 4-year-old kindergarten in Madison.
We ended our five-week series of questions for the candidates with an open-ended query on what they felt were an overlooked issue in the schools.
Both gave thoughtful responses.
Passman suggested the schools needed to do more about the pervasiveness of substance abuse among teenagers, while Hughes said the district needs to pay more attention to why parents pull their children out of the Madison schools.
Madison's new elementary school on the far west side will bear the name of Paul J. Olson, a beloved Madison teacher, principal and ardent conservationist, following a vote at Monday night's School Board meeting.
Olson, who was born in Mount Horeb and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spent most of his life on crutches following a childhood bout with polio. He died in 1993 at age 84.
Three of Olson's four children were at Monday's meeting.
"The thing that always struck me most about my dad was his optimism. He believed in the art of the possible," Tom Olson said following the meeting. He said his father's focus on overcoming any obstacle was what he taught his students.
The younger Olson and his brother Jim attended the meeting with their sister, Karen Sullivan of Janesville. They noted their father loved the natural world and was a committed environmentalist, fisherman and outdoorsman. He enjoyed canoeing and navigated the Boundary Waters on crutches.
One Colorado school district is going to shake things up by getting rid of grades.
The move includes traditional letter grades and grade levels.
The Adams County School District 50 school board approved a new system that lets students progress at their own pace.
Students will need to master 10 skill levels to graduate. They could end up graduating earlier, or later than fellow classmates. It just depends upon how long they need in order to master the skills.
District administrators says the new system will focus on students' competence, rather than achievement for grades.
There are other school districts across the country that have adopted this type of system.
The district says it will put an explainer on transcripts for students applying to college, since the students will not have grade point averages or class rankings.
As it stands, Madison school district policy strictly forbids students from having cell phones in school. The Student Senate will recommend to the School Board next month that phones be allowed to be used before and after school and during lunch.
"I don't know many teenagers who would like to be separated from their cell phone," said Laura Checovich, 17, president of the Student Senate and a student at West High School.
"Right now, the current policy is that you could be expelled just for having one in your backpack or in your pocket. We thought that was pretty drastic and thought it needed to be looked at again," she said.
Some students leave their cell phones in their lockers, but Checovich estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of students keep their phones in their pockets or backpacks, which is prohibited under current school policy.
The School Board directed the Student Senate in December to research and recommend potential changes to district policy on cell phone use in schools. The Senate's recommendations will be confined to policy in the high schools. The Senate will present its findings to the board at a 5 p.m. meeting April 14 at La Follette High School.
The names are Jeffrey Erlanger, an advocate for people with disabilities; Paul J. Olson, a conservationist and well-known Madison educator; Howard Temin, a Nobel Prize-winning UW cancer researcher; and Ilda Thomas, a community activist who helped found Centro Hispano.
The Erlanger and Olson names have received the most community support to date.
"We have the school, the principal, the boundaries. We are looking forward to having a name," School Board President Arlene Silveira said this morning.
The four final names were recommended to the board by a citizen committee which met extensively in January and early February, winnowing a pool of 87 names submitted by the public down to four.
Die-hard charter school advocates are rethinking their approach to school reform and the ability of competition and charter schools alone to transform American urban schools and their awful student achievement rates.
It's a surprising change and it's hardly common, particularly at the grassroots level.
Still, in recent weeks a number of the country's leading pro-charter think-tanks and leaders have published pieces, announced policies or made statements indicating their reconsideration -- and it likely will have an enormous impact on policymaking and Republican politics.
From New York City to Detroit to Atlanta, charter advocates have echoed writer Sol Stern, an important conservative voice on education reform, when he wrote in a recent edition of the City Journal: "education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don't produce verifiable results in the classroom."
Madison School Board member Carol Carstensen has handed out enough high school diplomas to know that, eventually, everyone must move on.
It is her turn now. After six terms and 18 years on the board, she will step down following the April 1 elections.
Some say it's too soon; others say it's about time.
A steadfast liberal, Carstensen, 65, can exasperate conservatives. Perhaps no one is more responsible for higher school property taxes in Madison in recent years — she supported all 14 referendum questions during her tenure and instigated several of them.
Yet she never lost a board election, even after enraging some constituents by supposedly disrespecting the Pledge of Allegiance. As she leaves, there is apt symbolism in the years she has served.
The Madison Metropolitan School District’s policy on military recruitment in schools, along with advertisements for the armed forces, is one issue that has generated significant comment to the school board recently.
Marj Passman and Ed Hughes, who are running unopposed for Seats 6 and 7 on the board, respectively, differ on this policy. Both also discuss the perennially contentious topic of school financing.
Here’s what we asked the two candidates this week.
Here, buried in my sixth paragraph, is the most important nugget: we've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.
I came to this conclusion recently while attending Brainstorm 2008, a delightful conference for computer people in K-12 schools throughout Wisconsin. They didn't hold breakout sessions on technology battles or tactics, but the idea was in the air. These people were under siege.
I started writing educational software in 1978. The role of instructional technology has changed since then from a gimmick to a novelty to an effort to an essential component of any curriculum. Kids can't go to school today without working on computers. But having said that, in the last five years more and more technical resources have been turned to how to keep technology OUT of our schools. Keeping kids from instant messaging, then text messaging or using their phones in class is a big issue as is how to minimize plagiarism from the Internet. These defensive measures are based on the idea that unbound use of these communication and information technologies is bad, that it keeps students from learning what they must, and hurts their ability to later succeed as adults.
But does it?
These are kids who have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. But far more important, there is emerging a class of students whose PARENTS have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. The Big Kahuna in educational discipline isn't the school, it is the parent. Ward Cleaver rules. But what if Ward puts down his pipe and starts texting? Well he has.
Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I'm sure today Dave wouldn't bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what's wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?
This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained - a view that doesn't work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we're getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.
There's no question that revolution is in the air. The education process is ripe for change for a number of reasons, including those mentioned by Cringely. We've seen substantial education spending increases over the past decade, which are unlikely to continue growing at the same pace, given other spending priorities such as health care and infrastructure. The ongoing flap over the proposed Madison report card changes is another example of change in the air. Links:
The D.C. schools' proposed $773 million fiscal 2009 budget is garnering attention not only for the millions added for art and music classes, but for what it doesn't have -- money for special education tuition, transportation and attorney's fees, which annually created huge shortfalls.
Under Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's takeover of the 49,600-student school system, city officials have shifted to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education a total of $231.5 million in costs associated with educating about 2,000 disabled students in private schools. For years, severe overspending on tuition, transportation and attorney's fees has contributed to budget gaps, forcing the system to lay off teachers and shift as much as $54 million from classroom instruction.
Previously, the system assumed the duties of a state and a local district, essentially overseeing itself. That structure led to the mismanagement of millions of dollars in federal funds, according to the Department of Education, which designated the system a "high risk" grantee.
In the new structure, all oversight responsibilities and other duties associated with a state were transferred to the state superintendent. Another problem area -- school construction and maintenance -- was shifted to the new Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization.
The modern academy is notoriously immune from accountability, as Larry Summers so painfully learned at Harvard. So it is worth noting, and applauding, the achievements of Hank Brown, the best college president you've never heard of, who retired this month from the University of Colorado.
Mr. Brown took over as interim president in April 2005 when the school of 50,000 was in turmoil. This was a couple of months after CU professor Ward Churchill had become infamous, and a year after the school's athletic department was accused of offering alcohol and sex to recruit football players. A former U.S. Senator, Mr. Brown was reappointed in 2006 in a permanent capacity.
Mr. Brown proceeded to oversee a complete examination of Mr. Churchill's work, and the ethnic studies professor was eventually fired because of fraudulent scholarship, not his politics. Mr. Brown then initiated a complete review of CU's tenure policies, making it easier for his successors to get rid of deadwood. He also took on the equally sensitive subject of grade inflation, insisting that the university disclose student class rank on transcripts. If a B average puts a student at the bottom of his class, future employers will know it.
Frederick Hess, who researches higher education at the American Enterprise Institute, says there may be plenty of other people who know how to fix a university. But the reason there are so few Hank Browns goes back to Machiavelli. "When a leader tries to wrestle with these things," Mr. Hess notes, "there are influential constituencies that he upsets. It's much easier to manage the status quo than to enforce change."
Some Milwaukee-area school boards have given cash and insurance benefits worth tens of thousands of dollars to departing superintendents that are above and beyond what
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In Germantown, where a $16.5 million school referendum is on the April 1 ballot, Superintendent Victor Rossetti's contract was set to expire at the end of this school year. But the School Board decided to give him early retirement benefits for which he had not qualified.
Rossetti, who has worked for the district for seven years, will retire June 30 with an additional $54,000 in cash and insurance benefits, including $15,000 for severance pay and two weeks of unused vacation.
Germantown School Board President Michael Erdmann could not be reached for comment on why the board in January approved the retirement package. Vice President Michael Schultz referred questions to Erdmann. were called for in the superintendents' contracts.
Wisconsin is not one of the nation’s best-managed states. Such is the conclusion of Governing Magazine in its March cover story. The magazine’s annual report card, done in conjunction with the Pew Center on the States, gives Wisconsin a B-minus, ranking it above just 19 states, including big loser New Hampshire (D-plus).
But 30 states ranked above Wisconsin, including such paragons as Utah and Virginia, which both got an A-minus.
The report ranked states on money (including budget and finances), people (hiring, training, retaining employees), infrastructure (maintenance, capital planning) and information (auditing and evaluation, etc.).
Wisconsin got a black eye for how it is handling state employees. “Hiring freezes, ongoing budget disputes and lagging pay scale help explain why Wisconsin has the second-highest turnover rate in the country for veteran employees,” the story noted.
Readers of this column will recall my questioning whether Gov. Jim Doyle has been cutting state employees at all costs to live up to his campaign promise to slash the total payroll by 10,000 employees. The approach seems to be creating problems. “The state is contracting out for all sorts of things without monitoring them sufficiently,” one high-level state employee told the magazine. Had this sort of thing happened under a Republican governor, Democrats would be crying foul.
The magazine also notes the saga of civil-service employee Georgia Thompson, whose life was made a hell because of an unnecessary prosecution by U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic. True enough, but I question whether this anomaly of a case, which was thrown out on appeal, has led to any turnover.
The story also notes the state’s continuing structural deficit, which has been around forever, probably since Jim Doyle had hair, and was estimated at $2.4 billion at the end of fiscal 2007.
It is difficult to see state school spending materially changing in the near term.
How can Milwaukee Public Schools support its high-achieving programs while meeting its mandate to improve struggling schools?
That's the central question at a web site parents at Milwaukee German Immersion School have launched to weigh in on the district's budget process for the 2008- '09 school year.
District officials have asked the specialty elementary school, which has just over 580 students and consitently gets more than three-fourths of them scoring in the proficient or advanced range on state test scores, to cut around $180,000 from next year's budget.
Last month, principal Albert Brugger and the school's Governance Council responded by submitting a proposal that cuts music and physical eduation from the school's offerings. The school has lost its assistant principal and art teacher in recent years due to budget constraints.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee likes to tell a story about one of her principals who pledged to improve student achievement scores by 43 percentage points by the end of the school year.
How? Rhee asked.
" 'I'm going to pray,' " the principal said, according to Rhee.
"It showed me," Rhee recently told the Washington-based Institute for Education, "that there's a very significant disconnect with some of our school leaders in really understanding what challenges they're up against."
Congratulations, dear seventh grader, for nailing science class.
Your science grade this quarter is A, 4, 3, 3, M, S, R.
Now, let's take a look at your English grade...
That's a preview of how, beginning in the fall, parents of middle school students might read a new type of report card coming to the Madison School District.
The change will make Madison one of the first districts in Dane County to adopt middle school report cards based directly upon how well students are mastering the state's standards that list what they're supposed to learn in every subject.
In some ways, Madison's change isn't radical. The district is retaining traditional report card letter grades. And the district's elementary students, like many around the state, already receive report cards based upon the state's academic standards.
The shift is being met, however with a mixture of criticism and hope.
Sitting in the back row of her South Fayette High School economics class, Emily Cord waved off her teacher as he passed out voter-registration cards.
"I'm not 18 till June," she said.
An hour later, however, she was sitting in ECO102, Principles of Macroeconomics, at Community College of Allegheny County, with classmates beyond not just the voting age but the drinking age.
Emily is one of thousands of Pennsylvania students enrolled in both high school and college classes through the state's dual enrollment program, which pays part of the college tuition.
A state report released last month notes "extraordinary demand and interest on the part of students" in the program. Since the dual enrollment program started in the 2005-06 school year, state funding has doubled, to $10 million for the current school year.
In the 2006-07 school year, the number of participants increased 69 percent from the previous year, from 7,270 students to 12,267 students statewide.
Hmm. This is interesting. To varying degrees, both Madison school board candidates express unease with the school district's failure to report a suspected sex offender to state authorities.
Ed Hughes, who is running unopposed for Seat 7, raises the most questions, but Marj Passman, the lone candidate for Seat 6, also is critical.
On the other hand, both support the Madison school board's recent decision on school boundaries, and both Passman and Hughes praise a committee's recent report on school names.
Here's what we asked the two candidates this week.
HE DAILY PAGE: DO YOU AGREE WITH HOW THE MADISON SCHOOL DISTRICT ADMINISTRATION AND THE TEACHERS UNION HANDLED THE ANTHONY HIRSCH CASE?
HIRSH RESIGNED AS A SPECIAL EDUCATION AIDE AT LA FOLLETTE HIGH SCHOOL IN 2006 (HE WAS HIRED IN 1998) AFTER A FEMALE STUDENT COMPLAINED THAT HE TOUCHED HER LEG IN A SEXUALLY SUGGESTIVE WAY. HIRSCH DENIED IT HAPPENED.
THE SEPARATION AGREEMENT SIGNED BY THE DISTRICT AND THE UNION SAID THAT IN RETURN FOR HIRSCH RESIGNING THE DISTRICT WOULD OFFER A "NEUTRAL REFERENCE" TO POTENTIAL EMPLOYERS, AND THAT THE DISTRICT WOULD NOT NOTIFY THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF INSTRUCTION THAT IT SUSPECTED HIRSCH HAD ENGAGED IN IMMORAL CONDUCT.
HIRSCH WAS SUBSEQUENTLY HIRED BY THE WAUNAKEE SCHOOL DISTRICT AND IS NOW FACING FELONY CHARGES OF POSSESSING CHILD PORNOGRAPHY AND OF HAVING A SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH A 14-YEAR-OLD LA FOLLETTE STUDENT. HE HAS YET TO ENTER A PLEA.
Madison school officials on Tuesday said they 're strengthening security at Toki Middle School to calm concerns from staff members and parents that the building is becoming too chaotic.
Beginning today, Toki will get a second security guard and also will get a dean of students to assist with discipline problems. The guard is being transferred from Memorial High School, while the dean of students is an administrative intern who has served at La Follette High School.
"I think very shortly Toki will get back on its feet, " said Pam Nash, the Madison School District 's assistant superintendent overseeing middle and high schools.
The moves come a week after about 100 parents, school staff members and top district officials attended an emotional, three-hour Parent Teacher Organization meeting at which speakers expressed fears about safety and discipline at the West Side school.
Police were called to Toki 107 times last school year for incidents that included 17 disturbances, 11 batteries, five weapons offenses and one arson, WISC-TV reported.
So far this year, police have been called to 26 incidents. The district security chief said the school is safe, though, and he warned the numbers can be misleading.
There was no way to compare those numbers to police calls at other Madison middle schools because the district doesn't keep that data itself. But the district security chief said they are working on that.
Toki PTO President Betsy Reck said "it's a start," but she said she believe there needs to be a clearly defined "behavior plan" posted immediately that shows appropriate behaviors and the consequences if they are not followed.
Reck said she wants consistent consequences applied to negative behavior.
Gov. Jim Doyle today offered a $527 million package to repair the state budget with cuts and delays to new programs, as well as a new tax on hospitals and a transfer of $243 million from the state's transportation fund.
The budget that runs through mid-2009 is $650 million short, though Doyle already whittled that down through austerity measures, including delaying paying off some debt.
The budget is short because the slumping economy has led the state to collect fewer taxes than projected.
"Just like any real solution to a budget gap, this plan cuts spending and looks for good sources of revenue," Doyle said, adding that it protects such priorities as health care, education and job creation.
Although Doyle said he wanted to avoid some of last year's budget fights, he reopened one by introducing the tax on hospital revenue.
Madison United for Academic Excellence (MUAE) will be hosting a "Conversation With the Madison School Board Candidates" on Tuesday, March 11, at 7:00 p.m. in the Wright Middle School LMC, 1313 Fish Hatchery Road. Marjorie Passman and Ed Hughes are running for Seats 6 and 7, respectively. Both are running unopposed. Please join us for a relaxed and productive dialogue, sans political sparring. Bring your questions, comments, concerns and ideas. The candidates are as eager to listen as they are to speak.
IF the Democratic race is settled at the party’s convention this summer — not unlikely, given Hillary Clinton’s victories over Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas — certain delegate constituencies are going to be the object of much affection from the candidates. Most prominent among these is the delegate and superdelegate bloc affiliated with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions. In 2004, more than 400 regular delegates to the convention were members of the two unions, making up a group bigger than every state delegation except California’s.
Good news for the unions, however, might not be good news for education. The union agenda has often run counter to the interests of students and teachers alike.
Take those collective bargaining agreements that the unions have negotiated in school districts across the nation. As Terry Moe, a professor of political science at Stanford, demonstrated, these agreements have hampered student performance in California. Why? Because they protect ineffective teachers — at the expense of everyone else.
Or consider performance-based pay. Forty percent of teachers leave the classroom within their first five years on the job — in some measure because they don’t stand to gain the same performance-based pay raises available to their private-sector counterparts. Merit pay would help public schools retain good teachers by paying them more. But the unions have fought against such measures.
welcome you to see through my eyes as a first year principal at Marquette Elementary.
Right now I see snow: a record amount of snow!
It covers our staff's cars in the parking lot, our playground and our students. It is the time of year when the shine on the floors turns to a dull, salty dust and a scattering of wet boots lay "close to" lockers in the halls. No wonder the Lost and Found bin overflows so quickly.
We've rounded the corner into the second semester and I've learned a lot about snow and how our attention clings to what the weather brings. It begins with a continuing debate in determining where snow boots and pants need to be worn on the playground.
With every new layer of snow, I am thankful for the staff that fashion the blaze orange vests and assist in addressing these questions to keep our students safe and as dry as possible outside.
In the past weeks, judges, legislators, parents and school district staff throughout Wisconsin have created a lot of buzz around virtual charter schools. Meanwhile, the Madison Metropolitan School District quietly, but proudly, launched a long-awaited and much-needed program named Madison Virtual Campus (MVC) that has avoided the virtual school controversy through careful and thoughtful planning.
MVC is not an online school, but rather is a group of online educational options that serve students and staff across the district. The district recognizes that high school students sometimes have learning needs that may not fit the typical school attendance model.
For example, high school students are now able to register for up to two online high school courses at any time during a school year. To assure success, online students are guided and supported by online teachers at each of the district's high schools.
In a recent class at Abraham Clark High School in Roselle, N.J., business teacher Barbara Govahn distributed glossy classroom materials that invited students to think about what they want to be when they grow up. Eighteen career paths were profiled, including a writer, a magician, a town mayor -- and five employees from accounting giant Deloitte LLP.
"Consider a career you may never have imagined," the book suggests. "Working as a professional auditor."
The curriculum, provided free to the public school by a nonprofit arm of Deloitte, aims to persuade students to join the company's ranks. One 18-year-old senior in Ms. Govahn's class, Hipolito Rivera, says the company-sponsored lesson drove home how professionals in all fields need accountants. "They make it sound pretty good," he says.
Deloitte and other corporations are reaching out to classrooms -- drafting curricula while also conveying the benefits of working for the sponsor companies. Hoping to create a pipeline of workers far into the future, these corporations furnish free lesson plans and may also underwrite classroom materials, computers or training seminars for teachers.
The programs represent a new dimension of the business world's influence in public schools. Companies such as McDonald's Corp. and Yum Brands Inc.'s Pizza Hut have long attempted to use school promotions to turn students into customers. The latest initiatives would turn them into employees.
All the adults (teachers, bus drivers, administrators, after-school staff) work hard to develop relationships.
Behavioral expectations are consistent and taught in a way that makes sense.
Misbehaviors are viewed as teachable moments and responses help build responsibility.
Such an experience was the goal of the summer professional development series provided last August 20-24. Through the combined funding of an Evjue mini-grant ($4730), an Aristos grant ($2500), and a grant through The Foundation for Madison Public Schools ($10,000), a six-session series with noted presenter Corwin Kronenberg (pictured) was planned for an array of different target audiences. Kronenberg, the author of the Above the Line model for supporting student behavior, had provided smaller-scale trainings during the two previous summers.
More and more Wisconsin school districts are experimenting with charter schools. Some 231 are in operation. Most have a specialty focus and are exempted from certain state regulations to facilitate new approaches to learning.
Appleton, for example, has 14 charter schools for its 15,000 students. These schools focus on Montessori learning, environmentalism, gifted education, the construction industry, arts immersion and alternative programs, among others.
Madison with its almost 25,000 students has held back, authorizing just two charters, the bilingual Nuestro Mundo on the east side, and the south side’s Wright Middle School, which despite its charter designation offers a program similar to Madison's other middle schools.
The two Madison school board candidates -- Marj Passman is the lone candidate for Seat 6, while Ed Hughes is running unopposed for Seat 7 -- were relatively vague when we asked them about charter schools this week. Perhaps an inquiring voter will pin them down at an upcoming forum.
The words of Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater should stand as a warning to school administrators statewide:
"In the context of what we know now, we would take a whole different approach. "
Rainwater was referring to the district 's experience with a former male employee, allowed to quietly resign after a complaint of inappropriate behavior toward a female student.
The man later got a job with a different school district, which was unaware of the accusation at La Follette High School.
The man is now charged with repeated sexual assault of a child and with possession of child pornography.
The Madison district 's handling of the 2006 resignation of the employee, Anthony Hirsch, now of DeForest, should prompt all school districts to take a skeptical view of signing resignation agreements that require the district to keep quiet about any suspicions of inappropriate behavior on the job.
ome disappointed Madison parents said they will try to find the words to tell their children that they'll be moving to another school next year.
In a unanimous decision, the Madison Metropolitan School District's Board of Education voted to approve Plan F, which will move dozens of students from Chavez Elementary School to Falk Elementary next year. The affected area is referred to by the district officials as the "Channel 3 area," which is the neighborhood that basically surrounds WISC-TV studios on the West Side of the city.
The district's Long Range Planning Committee recommended Plan F, which will move 65 children in those neighborhoods to another elementary school for the fourth time in the last 15 years.
After hearing from about 30 speakers, a few of whom were moved to tears, the Madison School Board on Monday night approved controversial plans to redraw elementary and middle school attendance boundaries on the West Side.
Two hours of public testimony and 90 minutes of discussion by board members resulted in six unanimous decisions to approve changes in the Memorial High School attendance area to accommodate population changes and an elementary school that will open in the fall on the Far West Side.
Several speakers said the changes, which also affected Jefferson and Toki middle schools, will cause them to consider enrolling their children in private school.
Mrs. Potter grabbed a chunky stack of flashcards, stood in front of the classroom and flipped through them every day when I was in second grade: 6 + 6 = blank, 7 + 3 = blank, 5 + 6 = blank. In unison, we responded 12, 10, 11. Our robotic pace slowed a bit when she held up subtraction cards.
That’s so old school.
The triangles my second-grade son brought home from school this year have plus and minus signs in the middle, with one number on each point. Students learn number families. For example, on a triangle of 6, 8 and 14 students see that 6 + 8, 8 + 6, 14 – 6 and 14 – 8 are all related.
Math triangles are part of the reform math curricula taught in more than one quarter of the nation’s schools. (See article “Math Wars” for a history of U.S. math education.) Seattle’s public elementary and middle schools teach reform math. This month the Seattle School Board will hear a recommendation for a new high school math curriculum that will be reform based. A key feature of this type of instruction is an emphasis on concepts, as opposed to computations.
In a traditional classroom, solving 89 + 21 involves lining the numbers up, carrying the one and arriving at 110 as the answer. Students learning reform math would think about the problem and reorganize it in several ways: 80 + 20 + 10, or 80 + 30, or 90 + 20. Same answer, different method.
Madison School Board Detailed Agenda Posted Online - Including a Proposed Wisconsin Center for Education Research Contract
A reader's email mentioned that the Madison School Board has begun posting more detailed agenda items on their meeting web page. Monday, March 3's full agenda includes Superintedent Art Rainwater's discussion of the proposed Middle School report card changes along with a recommendation to approve an agreement with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (1.5MB PDF):
The focus of this project is to develop a value-added system for the Madison Metropolitan School District and produce value-added reports using assessment data from November 2005 to November 2007. Since the data from the November 2007 assessment will not be available until March 2008, WCER will first develop a value-added system based on two years of state assessment data (November 2005 and November 2006). After the 2007 data becomes available (about Ma r c h 1 2008), WCER will extend the value-added system so that it incorporates all three years of data. Below, we list the tasks for this project and a project timeline.
Task 1. Specify features o f MMSD value-added model
Task 2. Develop value-added model using 2005 and 2006 assessment dat a
Task 3. Produce value-added reports using 2005 and 2006 assessment data
Task 4. Develop value-added model using 2005, 2006, and 2007 assessment
Task 5. Produce value-added reports using 2005-2007 assessment data
The WTL was asked by the Waukesha School District what three criteria we would be looking for in a new superintendent. Here is our response.
1. Strong fiscally conservative background with a desire to be creative in finding solutions to budget woes other than referendums and new fees. Stability is a must to protect the children and deliver a high quality of education.
2. Knowledge and belief in charter and virtual schools including but not limited to "IQ academies". These are great tools to address different learning styles, abilities and interests of children so they can succeed.
3. Belief in high academic standards in the core subjects to be competitive not only locally but worldwide. We have a worldwide economy and thus must deliver an education that will allow our children to compete worldwide.
Take the idea of “constructivism.” Yes, I agree with you that we all “construct” knowledge as we encounter new ideas. We try to make sense of new ideas by fitting them to what we already know, using the vocabulary and experiences that we have already accumulated. If we have a meager vocabulary—or none at all, as when we visit a foreign country and are unfamiliar with the language—and if we have no experiences that are connected to the new ideas, then we will not be able to do much constructing of knowledge.
So the job of the school becomes one of conscientiously, purposefully building the vocabulary and background knowledge of students so that they can use them dynamically to understand new ideas and enlarge their knowledge.
There is another sort of constructivism in which students are busily discovering whatever they want to discover or trying to figure out through inquiry what the teacher knows but refuses to teach them or sitting around idly because they don’t know what they feel like discovering today. This is not the sort of classroom I admire. I have never much cottoned to the idea of the teacher as a “guide on the side, rather than a sage on the stage.” I tend to like the happy medium: the teacher who has clear aims, who knows what knowledge he or she is trying to convey, and who figures out imaginative, creative, innovative ways to teach it.
A former Waunakee educator now facing sexual assault and child pornography charges was allowed to quietly resign from the Madison School District in 2006 after a female student accused him of inappropriately touching her leg, according to interviews and public records.
And a May 2006 agreement forbade Madison officials from notifying the state Department of Public Instruction of the girl 's accusations against Anthony Hirsch, who was a special education assistant at La Follette High School.
Hirsch, 32, of DeForest, was charged last month with possessing child pornography he allegedly bought and downloaded from Web sites and with having a sexual relationship with a student about five years ago while working at La Follette.
The charges -- one count each of repeated sexual assault of a child and possession of child pornography -- carry a maximum sentence of 85 years in prison and extended supervision.
Hirsch was an educational assistant for special education students at Waunakee Middle School until he submitted his resignation on Jan. 9 after he was arrested, Waunakee Superintendent Chuck Pursell has said. Hirsch worked at La Follette from 1998 until April 2006.
Nevada parents want the option of sending their children to charter schools.
State and local education officials say they won’t approve charter schools unless they can ensure the schools meet standards.
That’s all good, right? Well, it has educators and lawmakers in the bureaucratic equivalent of a schoolyard shoving match.
Following the Clark County School District’s lead, the State Board of Education in November said it was suspending approval of new charter school applications. The education officials said they did not have the staff to handle the workload. So, they said, until they can handle new charter schools properly, they aren’t going to handle them at all.
There were some tense exchanges among state board members and lawmakers in the days leading up to and following the moratorium vote.
Some lawmakers were infuriated, alleging the motives had more to do with turf protection than logistical challenges. A few legislators suggested the vote had violated the state’s open meeting law.
Why is The Daily Page wasting precious pixels by questioning two Madison school board candidates who are running unopposed on the April 1 ballot?
Because the success of the public schools is absolutely essential to Madison’s future. And by questioning Marjorie Passman, the lone candidate for Seat 6, and Ed Hughes, the lone candidate for Seat 7, we hope to further the discussion of education in Madison.
So for the next five weeks we will revive Take Home Test, asking the candidates large and small questions each week. Their responses to our questions follow.
THE DAILY PAGE: WHAT IN YOUR BACKGROUND PREPARES YOU TO SET POLICY FOR A SCHOOL DISTRICT OF ALMOST 25,000 STUDENTS WITH A $340 MILLION BUDGET AND 3,700 EMPLOYEES? PLEASE DISCUSS YOUR PERTINENT TRAITS AND EXPERIENCES.
Via a couple of emails, including Ed Hughes, who urges us to look forward!
Before he leaves his post as head of the Madison Metropolitan School District, Art Rainwater reflects on the past, present and future of public education for all in a city and a school system that look and feel very different than the ones he was introduced to a decade-and-a-half ago
For an Arkansas native who grew up professionally in Kansas City--and who still looks like he'd be right at home on a Southern high-school football field--it's hard to imagine Madison schools without Art Rainwater at the helm. The guy's right up there with Soglin and Alvarez: They hail from somewhere else but if you didn't know it you'd think they've been Madisonians all along.
But just as our collective recollection of his predecessor Cheryl Wilhoyte's tumultuous term as schools superintendent has faded, so too will our familiarity with the large and at times imposing personality of Rainwater, sixty-five, after he retires in June. What will fade more slowly is the impact he has had on the Madison school district.
While it remains one of the best school districts in America, MMSD faces profound challenges that the next superintendent will inherit from Rainwater, who arrived in Madison almost fourteen years ago to design and implement the district's first magnet school. He came from the Kansas City, Missouri School District, where he started as a principal in 1987 and finished as special assistant to the superintendent, the number-two position in the district. If Rainwater has seemed comfortable in the eye of the storm, it's because his career matured amid the extremely difficult and sometimes ugly stress of one of America's most bitter desegregation battles--a battle that in 1994 looked like it might flare anew.
Many people look to the future with fear. We see this fear throughout the web. Right-wing sites describe the imminent end of America: overrun by foreigners, victim of cultural and financial collapse. Left-wing sites describe “die-off” scenarios due to Peak Oil, climate change, and ecological collapse - as the American dream dies from takeover by theocrats and fascists.
Most of this is nonsense, but not the prospect of massive changes in our world. But need we fear the future?
The past should give us confidence when we look ahead. Consider Dodge City in 1877. Bat Masterson is sheriff, maintaining some semblance of law in the Wild West. Life in Dodge is materially only slightly better from that in an English village of a century before. But social and technological evolution has accelerated to a dizzying pace, and Bat cannot imagine what lies ahead.
Well worth reading as Madison prepares for a new Superintendent and two new school board members.
Madison School Board PA Committee Credit for Courses Taken Outside the District Discussion
Watch the public appearances (including a discussion about the proposed report card changes) along with the Committee's discussion on this matter. Janet Mertz's latest post can be read here, along with a number of related links.
Anita Formichella is tired of hiding like a criminal.
"The sound of the doorbell literally strikes terror in my heart," said Formichella, a bespectacled, middle-aged former school volunteer from Redding in her testimony to members of the legislature's select committee on children on Tuesday.
For the past two years, Formichella said she has hidden in her house, shouting through the door when people knock because she fears the person on the other side might be a state social worker coming to take her children away.
Formichella isn't a child abuser. She has never been cited for child neglect. She is a teacher. A home-school teacher. And therein lies the rub.
Within weeks of pulling her children from the public school system in 2006, Formichella received a letter from the local school superintendent requiring her to sign a form and submit more evidence that her children were being properly schooled. If she didn't, Formichella said, she would risk a neglect investigation by the state Department of Children and Families. Formichella was frightened at first, then incensed.
"That's a heinous, heinous thing to threaten a parent," Formichella said outside the hearing room Tuesday. "And [the school superintendent] knew me!"
Update on Madison BOE policy regarding students taking non-MMSD courses:
The February 25, 2008 Meeting of the Performance & Achievement Committee was devoted to developing a policy regarding students taking non-MMSD courses. The proposal Pam Nash suggested to the committee was essentially identical to the highly restrictive one she had originally proposed during the December, 2006 meeting of this committee: students would be permitted to earn a maximum of TWO ELECTIVE credits for course work and only when no comparable course is offered ANYWHERE in the District. Even Rainwater felt these rules were overly restrictive. He seemed willing (i) to increase the number of credits a student could earn, and (ii) to permit students to take a course offered elsewhere in the District if the student could not reasonably access the District's course. Discussion of the Nash proposed policy ensued, but no specific revisions to it were made during this committee meeting. Both Maya and Johnnie (2 or the 3 members of the committee) suggested that the District needed to research the topic better, e.g., investigate what other comparable school districts in WI (e.g., Appleton which has in place a much less restrictive policy) were doing and to obtain feedback from the guidance departments of each of the 5 high schools, before the BOE should vote on approving a policy. Lawrie, chair of this committee, bypassed having a vote on whether to recommend the Nash version of the policy to the full BOE since she clearly would have lost such a vote. Instead, she simply stated that she had ALREADY placed this topic on the agenda for a special meeting of the BOE to be held March 10th, a meeting at which public appearances will NOT be permitted. Why the urgency now after we have been waiting for 6 years for the District to develop a policy in this matter? Possibly, the new Board that starts in April would approve a different policy, one that better meets the needs of students. Thus, folks, your only remaining opportunities to influence this policy to be approved by the BOE on March 10th are (i) to email and phone members of the BOE between now and March 10, telling them your opinions and why, ideally with examples of specific students, and (ii) to attend the March 10th meeting so the Board members will know you are watching how they vote.
Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac. Once-tidy yards have become overgrown, as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading.
At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”
In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents’ association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, “There’s been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years.”
In the first half of last year, residential burglaries rose by 35 percent and robberies by 58 percent in suburban Lee County, Florida, where one in four houses stands empty. Charlotte’s crime rates have stayed flat overall in recent years—but from 2003 to 2006, in the 10 suburbs of the city that have experienced the highest foreclosure rates, crime rose 33 percent. Civic organizations in some suburbs have begun to mow the lawns around empty houses to keep up the appearance of stability. Police departments are mapping foreclosures in an effort to identify emerging criminal hot spots.
This is an interesting issue to consider, as school districts continue to ponder new edge schools.
A Madison School Board committee recommended Monday night that students at Madison's newest elementary school now under construction should attend Toki Middle School, not Jefferson Middle School as originally planned.
Members of the board's long range planning committee also recommended final boundary Plan F for elementary school students in the Memorial High School attendance area that would send children in the neighborhood around Channel 3 to Falk Elementary School instead of Chavez Elementary or the new school, located west of Highway M.
The full School Board plans to vote on the recommendations March 3 at its regular meeting at the Doyle Administration Building at 7 p.m. There will be an opportunity for public commentary before the vote.
Among some west side parents, the most controversial part of planning the changes to accommodate the new school has been deciding which children and neighborhoods will attend Falk Elementary School, which has the west side's highest percentage of low income students.
Numbers of low income students in the Memorial area range from 22 percent at Crestwood to 66 percent at Falk. Under the proposed plan, Falk's low income percentage would drop to 57 percent.
This concept of relentless deconstruction is a disaster for modern institutions built on “facts” of history and maintained by hierarchical systems of rule, order and especially tradition, for each — deconstructionists teach — is subject to examinations that reveal the subjective nature of humankind and its decisions, big and small.
It is in this light that I wish to state the argument that Bill Keller — and many, if not most people in such positions within the institution of modernist journalism — continue to function as if their access to knowledge is unique and justifies conclusions that can be used to manipulate culture, whether deliberately or otherwise. So deep is this belief, that Keller expresses shock when the Times’ conclusions are challenged.
The problem is that the public now has access to enough information — in most cases — to make up its own mind about issues and events, their causes and results. Moreover, the public now has enough knowledge to rightly question the assumptions and history that shape even the day-to-day decisions of the press, and with that knowledge, they also increasingly have the ability to make up their own minds. This will never return to the way it was, and in fact, will increasingly impact the culture as a whole.
So to me, Keller’s “surprise” is legitimate, but it’s based in the confusion of the era, especially for modernist, institutional thinkers. The public is a lot smarter and better informed than anybody in media gives them credit for being, and they are armed with simple tools to do their own investigating. And every time the curtain is pulled back on the editorial decision-making process within the institutional press, it gets easier and easier to find the natural biases and influences that drive the information gatekeepers of the culture.
It is the policy of the Board to expand the opportunities for students to take courses outside of the District without increasing the costs to the District and without undermining the integrity of the diploma a student receives from the District. A student may receive credit for taking such outside courses. No District funds shall be utilized to pay for the costs to a student taking courses under this policy.
Taking outside courses if a student wishes to receive credit toward graduation.
By May 1 of the previous school year for first semester courses and by December 1 for second semester courses, the student shall submit to his/her principal or the principal’s designee the student’s request to take a course under this policy. Within 15 school days after receiving the student’s request, the principal, in consultation with the appropriate staff member(s), shall make a recommendation to the Superintendent or his/her designee as to whether the course shall be approved. Within 15 school days after receiving the principal’s recommendation, the Superintendent or his/her designee shall notify the student whether his/her request has been granted or denied.
A student may receive credit toward graduation. The grade will be recorded but not counted in the GPA.
Credits toward graduation shall be granted in the following manner:
No more than 4 credits per year.
No more than 11 credits may be applied to the total graduation requirement.
The student’s transcript shall include a description of the course, the institution, if any, the date the course was completed, the credit, and the grade.
No grades shall be included as part of a student’s grade point average (GPA).
All costs related to taking the course shall be the responsibility of the student and/or his/her parent/guardian.
Taking outside courses if a student does not wish to receive credit.
By May 1 of the previous school year for first semester courses and by December 1 for second semester courses, the student shall submit to his/her principal or the principal’s designee the students’ request to take a course under this policy. Within 15 days after receiving the student’s request, the principal, in consultation with the appropriate staff member(s), shall make a recommendation to the Superintendent or his/her designee as to whether the course shall be approved. Within 15 days after receiving the principal’s recommendation, the Superintendent or his/her designee shall notify whether his/her request has been granted or denied.
The student’s transcript shall include a description of the course, the institution, if any, the date the course was completed, and the pass/fail grade unless the student or his/her parent/guardian request that the student’s letter grade appear on the transcript in which case the student’s letter grade will appear on the transcript.
No grade shall be included as part of the student’s GPA.
All costs related to taking the course shall be the responsibility of the student and/or the student’s parent/guardian.
On January 8, 2007, the Board took the following action:
lt is recommended that the Board direct the Administration to: 1) freeze new procedures or guidelines for credit towards graduation for courses taken outside the MMSD until the Administration reports to the Board about whether current MMSD policies need to be updated or changed in view of any technological changes in the law and other opportunities; 2) develop a proposal on either the implementation and communication of the policies and procedures to parents and students for consistency across the District at the levels affected; and 3) have the Administration give the Board the pros and cons of adopting a policy like the one proposed by Dr. Mertz as a draft proposal. It is further recommended that the Administration review all nine of the policies, including the proposed "Guidelines for Coursework Outside the MMSD'" for possible revision, consolidation, or propose a newly created policy.
Attached is Exhibit 1, an amended draft of the policy previously submitted to the Board in a memo from Pamela Nash dated May 4, 2007. The amendments modify the timing of a student's appiication to take courses outside the MMSD and the response time of the District. This time frame is modeled after the Youth Options time frame.
Also attached to this Memorandum is a copy of a policy proposal previously submitted by Dr. Janet Mertz, Exhibit 2A, and the District's analysis of that proposal,
Exhibits 2 and 2B. These documents were also submitted to the Board of Education under cover of Dr. Nash's memo of May 4, 2007. This matter is scheduled to be heard before the Performance and Achievement Committee on February 25, 2008.
Business leaders are increasingly aware that the health of their enterprise is intimately connected with the health of the communities where they operate. As employers, they sometimes find themselves drawn in to help solve local problems. But they are also often frustrated by those efforts, and no wonder. When a community sets out to address complex problems, such as economic stagnation, sprawl, and failing schools, the effort usually ends up going nowhere. Competing agendas surface, members delegate responsibilities to staff, difficult decisions get postponed. Hopes fade and interest flags as the hidden challenges and underlying conflicts become apparent.
The quiet failure of such initiatives is often attributed to human nature, or to some flaw in the process that shaped the effort. But in fact, the problem usually starts when the project organizers compose their first list of proposed participants. The organizers ask themselves: Who are the power brokers around town? Who are the key players? Who from business, government, education, and nonprofits should be involved?
Once the list is compiled, the usual suspects are convened. They assemble with enthusiasm, write a vision statement, sign up for committees, and pledge support. A press release goes out: “Local Leadership Team Sets to Work!”
At the November 26, 2007 meeting of the MMSD BOE's Performance and Achievement Committee [18MB mp3 audio], the District's Attorney handed out a draft of a policy for the District's Youth Options Program dated November 20, 2007. It is a fine working draft. However, it has been written with rules making it as difficult as possible for students to actually take advantage of this State-mandated program. Thus, I urge all families with children who may be affected by this policy now or in the future to request a copy of this document, read it over carefully, and then write within the next couple of weeks to all BOE members, the District's Attorney, Pam Nash, and Art Rainwater with suggestions for modifications to the draft text. For example, the current draft states that students are not eligible to take a course under the YOP if a comparable course is offered ANYWHERE in the MMSD (i.e., regardless of whether the student has a reasonable method to physically access the District's comparable course). It also restricts students to taking courses at institutions "located in this State" (i.e., precluding online courses such as ones offered for academically advanced students via Stanford's EPGY and Northwestern's CTD).
The Attorney's memorandum dated November 21, 2007 to this Committee, the BOE, and the Superintendent outlined a BOE policy chapter entitled "Educational Options" that would include, as well, a policy regarding "Credit for Courses Taken Outside the MMSD". Unfortunately, this memo stated that this latter policy as one "to be developed". It has now been almost 6 years (!) since Art Rainwater promised us that the District would develop an official policy regarding credit for courses taken outside the MMSD. A working draft available for public comment and BOE approval has yet to appear. In the interim, the "freeze" the BOE unanimously approved, yet again, last winter has been ignored by administrators, some students are leaving the MMSD because of its absence, and chaos continues to rein because there exists no clearly written policy defining the rules by which non-MMSD courses can be taken for high school credit. Can anyone give us a timetable by which an official BOE-approved policy on this topic will finally be in place?
Links:
11/26/2007 Performance & Achievement Committee Meeting Video and Audio
If you think high school sports are too slick, too big-time, or too professional, just wait. When this Ohio transplant has his way—and he will—they’re going to get slicker, bigger, and much more pro. Stephenson, the former president of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, founded Titus Sports Marketing in 2003. The company’s first major deal came a year later, when it sold naming rights for the Tyler Independent School District’s stadium to Trinity Mother Frances Health System for $1.92 million, the largest such contract for a high school ever. In September 2007 Titus also put together the Clash of Champions, a game televised on ESPNU between the best high school football team in Florida, Miami Northwestern, and the best in Texas, Southlake Carroll. Northwestern won the game (hyped as “the biggest game in the history of high school football”) 29—21, but the real winner may have been Stephenson.
Where did you get the idea for Titus?
I knew high schools were looking at ways of maximizing revenue. A lot of districts are looking to give their stadiums a face-lift—to add parking, double the concessions and restrooms, redo the field house. High schools are where colleges were fifteen years ago, and there’s a lot of lost advertising revenue because there’s nobody there to capture it. We’re pioneers. We work with the school district; we sell the assets that they direct us to sell.
First, I would like to let you know that I have new podcasts and blog posts up on my website! You can get information on how our superintendent search evolved and learn how school districts lobby the legislature at a state level through the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
I am also happy to report that several of us on the Board have begun to meet (after a long hiatus) as members of the Dane County School Board Consortium. The Madison School Board will be hosting other districts next month at LaFollette High School. We will be discussing how we can engage and listen to the public on boundary changes. We hope to come together in the future and combine our lobbying efforts as representatives of Dane County schools. If you know of any state or local officials who would be interested in joining us to learn more about issues facing school districts, please feel free to send them my e-mail address.
I also have two new podcasts, five minutes in length, that explain all you need to know about No Child Left Behind and its re-authorization this year. I met with Sennett school teacher David Wasserman and promised him I would work on engaging the public on this important issue. Please take a listen and pass it on to your friends.
These past few months I have been working hard on many issues on behalf of the school district. I met many fascinating educators and members of the community that are interested in our schools. Some of the Board highlights include, but are not limited to:
Selecting a new superintendent from public input sessions leading to a nationwide search and a great list of finalists.
Working with staff and the rest of the Board during our series of meetings on the topic of expulsions.
The administration is working concurrently on the Codes of Conduct.
We selected a Citizens Naming Committee which met and gave us a final list of names for the new school. This committee did a great job and provided us with an excellent report which I hope we can use as a "best practice" for BOE committees in the future.
The Board approved the use of Title I money for the expansion of the Play and Learn program to include "mobile" Play and Learn Groups for caregivers and their preschool-aged children. We also approved the purchase of additional books for the Reading Rooms in our Title I schools with the additional Title I money that was above that budgeted for this school year.
The Performance and Achievement Committee has reviewed a variety of topics, including: a review of School Climate Surveys; discussions on Youth Options and Charter School Policy (under the development of a new Board policy chapter titled, "Educational Options"); and, a review of District Performance Goals.
The Community Partnerships Committee, of which I am the chair, has worked on fine-tuning the definition of "partnerships" in the district; has made connections with the Foundation for Madison Public Schools; is working on creating new avenues of support for our schools (volunteers) and programs (athletics.) The committee is now working on a review of the Parent Involvement policy.
Our Board President, Arlene Silveira, sends out monthly reports on Board actions - if you would like to see the latest, you can go here.
Finally, I know that I don't get to talk to many of you individually; but, I want you to know that you are on my mind. Behind the scenes, I have been working on learning about and advocating on behalf of: Early Childhood Education in Madison (4K); TAG issues facing the district; charter schools; Equity; reviewing our advertising policy; changes in our fine arts and other specials allocations and its impacts on learning.
The district and its children mean a great deal to me and the job of a school board member is a day and night, weekday and weekend operation.
If there is anything you want to talk to me about, please feel free to get in touch with me at my school district e-mail or by phone at 259-0549. I value your interest and your perspective on what is going on in our schools. Stay in touch and stay engaged!
Best,
Maya P. Cole
Madison Metro School District
Board Member
In the era of No Child Left Behind, principals are increasingly held accountable for student performance. But are teacher labor agreements giving them enough flexibility to manage effectively? The Leadership Limbo: Teacher Labor Agreements in America's Fifty Largest School Districts, answers this question and others.
The main findings:
Thirty, or more than half, of the 50 districts have labor agreements that are ambiguous. The collective bargaining agreements and the formal board policies in these districts appear to grant leaders substantial leeway to manage assertively, should they so choose.
Fifteen of the 50 districts are home to Restrictive or Highly Restrictive labor agreements. Nearly 10 percent of the nation's African-American K-12 students population attend school in the 15 lowest-scoring districts-making these contracts major barriers to more equal educational opportunity.
The study also found that districts with high concentrations of poor and minority students tend to have more restrictive contracts than other districts-another alarming indication of inequity along racial and class lines.
While more American public school students are taking Advanced Placement tests, the proportion of tests receiving what is deemed a passing score has dipped, and the mean score is down for the fourth year in a row, an Education Week analysis of newly released data from the College Board shows.
Data released here this week by the New York City-based nonprofit organization that owns the AP brand shows that a greater-than-ever proportion of students overall—more than 15 percent of the public high school class of 2007—scored at least one 3 on an AP test. The tests are graded on a scale of 1 to 5, the highest score.
Yet, as the number of AP exams taken in U.S. public schools has ballooned by almost 25 percent over the four years that the College Board has released its “AP Report to the Nation,” the percentage of exams that received at least a 3—the minimum score that the College Board considers predictive of success in college—has slipped from about 60 percent to 57 percent.
The mean score on the nearly 2 million AP exams taken by students in last year’s U.S. public graduating class was 2.83, down from 2.9 in 2004.
“That happens,” said Jennifer Topiel, a spokeswoman for the College Board. “Any psychometrician can tell you that as participation grows, scores go down.”
Still, Ms. Topiel said the score declines are a major concern for the organization, as are widening score gaps between some racial and ethnic groups, “particularly those among underrepresented students who are not being prepared and not having the same resources.”
A new policy to clarify rules on recruiting Madison high school students for the military, for post-secondary education opportunities or for potential employment is under review by the Madison School Board, but is not quite ready to pass muster.
At a meeting Monday night, the board sent the recruitment policy back to the administration for additional work and chose to table a discussion about the sales of military ads on school grounds until the recruitment policy changes are complete.
Anti-war activists have argued that the ads constitute recruiting materials and are by current policy banned anywhere except in school guidance offices. In addition, some students have complained that recruiters can be overly aggressive in pursuing students.
"I think we're pretty close to making a decision on the revised recruitment policy," Board President Arlene Silveira said in an interview this morning, "but we wanted some additional clarification from the administration, and we wanted to make sure the changes in the rules make sense to the people in the schools who will be working with them."
She also said the board wanted to ensure the policy was fair and consistent toward all individuals and organizations coming into the schools to recruit students, whether they are promoting military service, employment or educational opportunities.
Issues include how many visits recruiters may make to a school, and whether activities like hanging around the cafeteria during lunch to talk with students would be permitted.
Superintendent Art Rainwater said that while only about one percent of Madison students go into the military, 80 percent go on to post-secondary education. He emphasized that treatment of recruiters, no matter who they represent, must be consistent.
I am breaking the rules of book-reviewing by admitting right away that I like Chester E. "Checker" Finn Jr., whose memoir, "Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik," just came out. For an education reporter, Finn is a godsend -- the most quotable man in his field. But that also means he is funny, irreverent and often as irritating as he can be.
I think that's good. I don't know him well personally, other than seeing him in the supermarket occasionally. (A very picky shopper, he is murder on the produce.) We don't always agree, particularly over a recent column of mine that criticized a report by his Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
But I love the fact that no one is spared his acidic sense of humor. That makes him a first-class writer, and "Troublemaker" may be the best of his many books. It's $26.95, from Princeton University Press, though you can buy it for less online. The book offers one of the most enjoyable, astute and fair-minded reviews of the topsy-turvy course of our national effort to improve schools. It flavors that complex tale with the story of Checker Finn, a smart kid from Dayton, Ohio, who wisely attached himself to some of the most thoughtful political figures of his era and brought their practical approach to fixing schools to a new generation. Among them were Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as a Democratic senator from New York from 1977 to 2001; William J. Bennett, a Reagan administration education secretary; and Lamar Alexander, an education secretary in administration of President George H. W. Bush and now a Republican senator from Tennessee.
Time was that a fifth grader’s greatest concern about gym was whether he or she would be picked last for the kickball team. Now, in schools in Hartford, that 10-year-old would-be athlete is being graded on how he or she “establishes and maintains a healthy lifestyle by avoiding risk-taking behavior.” In music class, students are being graded on how they make “connections between music and other disciplines through evaluation and analysis of compositions and performances.” That is pretty far from just trying to sing “Yankee Doodle” on key.
These examples come from a new report card, introduced last November in all of Hartford’s elementary schools. It measures 58 academic, social and behavioral skills and, including other information, can run as long as seven pages.
Not surprisingly, the language was produced by a committee. Some of the wording is clear; anyone can understand “shows courtesy and respect toward others.” But the academic measurements, which are designed to grade areas of student performance that are also measured on state standardized tests, seem more likely to confuse than illuminate.
Christopher Leone, the spokesman for the Hartford school district, said that the goal was to give parents more detailed information about the progress of their children. He says that so far the response from parents has been overwhelmingly positive. The district hasn’t surveyed the teachers, but the report card made me appreciate, as nothing else has ever done, why teachers say they are buried in paperwork.
Consider the eighth-grade NAEP results from Massachusetts, which are a stunning exception to the nationwide pattern of stagnation and decline. Since 1998, the state has improved significantly in the number of eighth-graders reading at the "proficient" or "advanced" levels: Massachusetts now has the largest percentage of students reading at that higher level, and it is No. 1 in average scores for the eighth grade. That is because Massachusetts decided in 1997 that students (and teachers) should learn certain explicit, substantive things about history, science and literature, and that students should be tested on such knowledge.
E.D. Hirsch Jr. is an author, most recently of "The Knowledge Deficit," and chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation.
Madison Middle School Report Card/Homework Assessment Proposed Changes
Michael Maguire, via email:
I'm interested in gathering more information on this topic, as outlined in a message I received from a neighbor and PTO member. I appreciate more background info, if you have it (or a suggestion of where else I can go/with whom I can speak) to find out more: ["On Wednesday, February 20, at 7 pm Dr. Pam Nash and Lisa Wactel from MMSD will present the new format for middle school report cards. The meeting is in the LMC at Hamilton Middle School [Map].
The district is changing the middle school report cards to the same as the elementary: proficient, at grade level, needs improvement (or whatever those categories are). They will eliminate the letter grades: A, B, C, etc.
Another factor in the report cards is that homework will not count toward the grade. Teachers can still assign homework, but that will not count toward your child's assessment."]
Michael Maguire
RugbyMaguires@aol.com
(608) 233-1235
Wisconsin Bill Proposes to Grant Awards to add World Language Instruction in Grades One to Six
Lauren Rosen, via email:
Dear Colleagues,
I am writing to share that Senators Lassa, Schultz and Risser have introduced Senate Bill 466 cosponsored by Representatives Hebl, Musser, Hixson, Sheridan, Berceau, Cullen and Schneider. This bill, currently referred to the Committee on Education, proposes grant awards to school districts to add instruction in world languages other than English in grades one to six. This bill can be viewed at http://www.legis.state.wi.us/2007/data/SB-466.pdf. Please consider reviewing the bill, sharing this proposed legislation with others, and contacting your legislators to share your perspective and assess their position.
=====
I believe this is the golden opportunity for Madison to start keeping up with creating global citzens by supporting a bill that would allow us to request funds to start elementary school language programs. If MMSD doesn't that too is a message from the school board that they really aren't so interested in global citizens.
I can only hope that MMSD is willing to act on behalf of the interest of its community members with children in the schools.
Grier called on employees to stop dwelling on the shortcomings of previous superintendents.
“I want us to move away from discussions about yesterday,” Grier said, in reference to the stream of complaints he has heard about Alan Bersin's heavy-handed management and Carl Cohn's multiple hires from the Long Beach school district.
“I'm not coming here to try to recreate Guilford County, N.C., West,” he said. “There's a lot of bright, talented people here.”
Sam Wong, the district's chief of human resources, was hopeful that Grier could get people to stop reliving the mishaps of Bersin and Cohn.
“You do have to say goodbye to the past to move forward, otherwise you never make progress,” Wong said. “I like what I'm hearing.”
Grier took issue with the district's so-called 98 percent graduation rate. He suggested that the statistic was misleading, given that there are always thousands more freshmen than seniors.
“That is not acceptable,” he said. “I'm sorry, you don't have a 98 percent graduation rate.”
enver Public Schools and its teachers union on Tuesday announced a compromise that will grant historic freedoms in hiring, staffing and scheduling for two city schools that sought to break free of union and district rules.
Bruce Randolph and Manual schools in northeast Denver will be able to post job vacancies and hire at will, among other freedoms outlined in the agreement.
"It was a very positive resolution and came rather quickly after we all sat down together to talk about it," said Kim Ursetta, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association.
Bruce Randolph Principal Kristin Waters said she was "ecstatic. It's great for kids, for the teachers, and I think it's good for the union."
The news came as the principals of 18 schools in far northeast Denver put the final touches on their own autonomy proposal, which they'll present to DPS board members Tuesday. Any agreements also must be OK'd by the union governing board.
The state's projected two-year budget shortfall has doubled to a hefty $652.3 million, the Legislature's budget office reported today.
The potential deficit, up from last month's estimates of $300 million to $400 million, represents a much greater challenge for lawmakers and Gov. Jim Doyle as they attempt to balance the state's books in the face of a looming national recession and falling state tax revenues.
The red splashed across the state's books also increases the chance that officials might have to cut programs, raise taxes or raid other state funds to cover the shortfall.
The state's January 2008 report on tax collections — which includes key sales from the holiday retail season — and the forecasts for this month point to "further weakness" in tax revenues, the report from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau found.
That means a $586.5 million projected decrease in state collections and a $34.9 million decrease in interest income and other revenue to state agencies, the report found.
2008_02_13_Revenue estimates.pdf 84KThese deficits, along with a number of other issues, make it unlikely that we'll see meaningful new state redistributed tax dollars for the Madison School District. Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau's website.
After breakfast at Mother's, Marty, Felice and myself took a cab deep into the French Quarter to the McDonogh School, where the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation was presenting the music program with a slew of instruments. That's what the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation does, grant instruments to school music programs. It was started by Michael Kamen, who composed the music for the movie. He wanted students to have the same opportunity he had, to learn an instrument in school, to be fulfilled, to be enriched. Felice runs the Foundation.
I'd been hearing about all the great work the Foundation had been doing in New Orleans for two years. And on a site visit a couple of months back, Tricia had encountered Kelvin Harrison and his program. She believed they were worthy, they deserved the instruments. The program had started after Katrina with no instruments. Mr. Harrison had taught his students on recorders when the ordered instruments hadn't arrived. But now he was up and running, he needed more. And that's why we were there.
The environment in the building was completely different from my educational experience. Instead of sterility, I found vibrancy. Silhouettes graced the cafeteria, with explanations of each. One student said his creation was as big as the 24" rims on his older brother's car. That cracked me up. But I loved the banner on the far side of the room: "Climb the mountain to college." There were aphorisms all over the place. Informing the students to pay attention now, to apply themselves now, to prepare, for otherwise, in the future, they'd be left out.
And after reading the display about Black History Month, learning exactly who Booker T. Washington was, we ascended the stairs to the third floor, where Mr. Harrison was warming up the band. Brass members were playing notes. I prepared myself. This was going to be awful. An endurance test. You know what it's like being in the vicinity of someone learning an instrument. You want to support them, but the sound is grating, you can't read, you can't watch television, you just want the noise to stop.
After quieting everybody down, Mr. Harrison looked at the assembled multitude and said the band was going to play a couple of numbers. They were going to start with "Oye Como Va".
Oh, I know it wasn't a Santana original. But that's where I heard it. Coming out of John "Muddy" Waters' room in the dorm all of freshman year. I've come to love "Abraxas". I bought it on vinyl. And have a gold CD. I've got all the MP3s. I love "Oye Como Va". I was trepidatiously excited. Then the two players on keys rolled out the intro, the drummers started hitting the accents, the horn players lifted their instruments to their lips and the band started to swing!
I couldn't believe it! Fifth graders? My high school's band wasn't this good. This was good enough for college! The flutes are wailing. I notice the drummer is a girl. And yes, that tiny figure behind the keyboard, she's hitting every note. Trombone players got up and soloed. Tears started coming to my eyes. This was education! If I could play in a band like this, I'd want to come to school!
And when they finished, there was raucous applause. And then they lit into Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man". These little kids, they had soul!
Then we went back to the cafeteria. Where the curtain was parted and the students saw the sousaphone, the tympani, the other instruments the Foundation was granting. The excitement, the whooping, it was not something learned on MTV, it was not the fakery of the peanut gallery standing in front of the stage at a televised awards show, it was genuine. They were excited for the school, for themselves.
Then Felice said they weren't done. That our mission wasn't complete. We had another item on our agenda. To honor Mr. Harrison's greatness, he was being awarded a Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation Teacher Award. Which granted him $10,000 to spend as he pleased. And that the check would be delivered in a ceremony, in April, on the stage of Carnegie Hall.
Kelvin Harrison was in shock. You should have heard the shriek when the dollar figure was announced. To little kids ten grand is a million! Kelvin kept rubbing his nose, trying to keep his composure. But he couldn't. Tears were welling in his eyes.
As they were in mine. A veritable waterworks. Who knew such great work was being done, especially in an area almost totaled by a hurricane. And sure, Mr. Harrison wanted to get paid, but it wasn't about the money. The sense of accomplishment, the glow on his students' faces was enough.
Eventually, the kids went back to class. School business resumed. I wandered the halls. I had an urge to stay. The work being done here was so important. Not only were children being educated, they were being given hope. Because people cared.
he names of four prominent deceased local citizens have gone to the head of the class as names for Madison's newest elementary school, slated to open next fall on the far west side. They include Jeffrey Erlanger, Paul J. Olson, Howard Temin and Ilda Thomas.
A 13-member citizen naming committee, chaired by Madison historian David Mollenhoff, will recommend the names to the Madison School Board in a report to be distributed to board members on Thursday. The group has been meeting since early January to consider more than 80 names submitted by the public for the new school.
More than 15 percent of the public high school class of 2007 achieved at least one AP® Exam grade of 3 or higher1—the score that is predictive of college success. This achievement represents a significant and consistent improvement since the class of 2002 when less than 12 percent of public school graduates attained this goal.
Out of all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, Vermont captured the largest increase in the percentage of high school graduates who scored a 3 or higher on an AP Exam.
In its fourth annual "AP Report to the Nation," the College Board (the not-for-profit membership association that owns and administers the AP Program), focuses on educators' quantifiable successes in helping a wider segment of the nation's students gain access to and achieve success in college-level work. Of the estimated 2.8 million students who graduated from U.S. public schools in 2007, almost 426,000 (15.2 percent) earned an AP Exam grade of at least a 3 on one or more AP Exams during their high school tenure, the report documents. This is up from 14.7 percent in 2006 and 11.7 percent in 2002.
Earning a 3 or higher on an AP Exam is one of "the very best predictors of college performance,"2 with AP students earning higher college grades and graduating from college at higher rates than otherwise similar peers in control groups, according to recent reports from researchers at the University of California at Berkeley,3 the National Center for Educational Accountability,4 and the University of Texas at Austin.5,6
New York, Maryland, Virginia, Florida, Massachusetts and Connecticut all saw more than 20 percent of their students graduate from high school having earned an AP Exam grade of 3 or higher. AP achievements for each state's class of 2002, class of 2006 and class of 2007 are detailed in the report. (See "The 4th Annual AP Report to the Nation," Table 1, page 5.)
"Educators and policymakers across the nation should be commended for their sustained commitment to helping students achieve access to and success in AP courses and exams" said College Board President Gaston Caperton. "More students from varied backgrounds are accomplishing their AP goals, but we can't afford to believe equity has been achieved until the demographics of successful AP participation and performance are identical to the demographics of the overall student population."
Though 75 percent of U.S. high school graduates enter college,7 dropout rates and the fact that about half of all college freshmen are taking at least one remedial course indicate that secondary schools must dedicate themselves to more than college admission,8 the report asserts.
"Remedial course work in college costs taxpayers an estimated $1 billion a year,"9 Caperton said. "To shrink the gap between those who enter college and those who complete a degree, we must target the divide between high school graduation standards and the skills that all students need to be prepared for the rigors of college. The critical reasoning, subject-matter expertise and study skills students must develop to succeed on the three-hour college-level AP Exams fortify high school graduates for a successful transition into their freshman year at college. This makes providing better readiness for—and access to—AP courses absolutely essential."
Later this month, a new contract between Dr. Daniel Nerad and the Madison Metropolitan School District will signal the end of an era. For over a decade, Art Rainwater has been at the helm of Madison's public schools, guiding the district during a period of rapid demographic change and increasingly painful budget cutting. Both admirers and critics believe Rainwater has had a profound impact on the district.
Retiring Madison schools superintendent Art Rainwater may have the name of a poet, but his first ambition was to be a high school football coach.
"I grew up loving football -- still do -- especially the intellectual challenge of the game. I was obsessed with it," Rainwater explained in a recent interview.
In fact, during his early years as an educator, Rainwater was so consumed by his football duties for a Catholic high school in Texas he eventually switched from coaching to school administration for the sake of his family.
In some ways, Rainwater has been an unusual person to lead Madison's school district -- an assertive personality in a town notorious for talking issues to death. His management style grows out of his coaching background -- he's been willing to make unpopular decisions, takes personal responsibility for success or failure, puts a premium on loyalty and hard work and is not swayed by armchair quarterbacks.
Much more on Art here. Like or loath him, Art certainly poured a huge amount of his life into what is a very difficult job. I was always amazed at the early morning emails, then, later, seeing him at an evening event. Best wishes to Art as he moves on.
After a round of "meet and greets" with the three finalists for the job of Madison schools superintendent, insiders were divided on two favorites. Leaders who've pushed for greater educational reforms spoke highly of Miami's Steve Gallon, while key institutional players favored Green Bay's Dan Nerad.
Nerad, 56, the most battle-tested of the finalists, delivered a solid introductory speech that struck the right notes. He stressed his consensus-building record, cautioned against embracing reform for its own sake, and drew applause by blasting state revenue controls.
In contrast, Gallon seemed bolder but less experienced. He ventured into dangerous territory by saying inadequate funding shouldn't be used as an excuse for educational failures. A 38-year-old black single father, Gallon attended the same Miami public school system where he now runs alternative programs, and many saw his potential as a visionary leader.
In the end, picking a replacement for Art Rainwater, who is retiring in June after eight years in the top job, was not hard to do. The night before school board deliberations, Gallon dropped out after finding a job on the East Coast. The Madison board unanimously made an offer to Nerad, Green Bay's school superintendent since 2001.
Those who lobbied for Gallon behind the scenes say privately they're over any disappointment they initially felt. And school board members say they're excited — if not relieved — to find someone like Nerad. "It feels right. It feels good," says board president Arlene Silveira.
Education reform is often stifled by the vested interests that resist accountability and new models like charter and pilot schools. In Massachusetts, the independence of the state Board of Education provided the continuity that allowed reform to be successfully implemented year after year.
The board was responsible for the initiatives that were the heart and soul of reform, like the MCAS exam, teacher testing, and academically rigorous curriculum frameworks. It was the board that followed a prudent course by creating rigorous charter school approval and closure processes.
Each of these reforms was the target of substantial resistance from a powerful and change-averse education establishment. Only an independent Board of Education, insulated from politics, could have made them a reality.
Despite these unparalleled successes, all we have achieved is now at risk. A proposal to eliminate the Board of Education's independence seems to be breezing through the Legislature. The proposal would make the board just another part of Governor Patrick's administration and thus politicize an institution that has been insulated from politics since 1837, when Horace Mann was its first leader.
Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Rudy Crew rolled out a proposal Thursday to provide students throughout the county with greater access to specialty programs such as magnet schools, International Baccalaureate programs and K-8 Centers.
The proposed plan, dubbed the Equity & Access Plan, will create rigorous, specialized academic programs in areas that don't yet have them, Crew said. It would run for three years, beginning in 2008, and cost about $6 million.
''When you look at the map, what you'll essentially see is that the distribution [of programs] here has been at best, or possibly at worst, random,'' Crew said. ``This conversation was based largely on the need to change that map so you have more children having access to high-demand programs.''
Currently, most K-8 centers are clustered in the southern half of the county or near Aventura. Many urban neighborhoods, other than downtown Miami, do not have magnet programs nearby.
And the lone specialty school for math and science, the Maritime and Science Technology Academy, is tucked away on Key Biscayne.
Among Crew's recommendations:
Develop 10 new International Baccalaureate programs, to join the 14 existing programs. Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior, Miami Carol City Senior, and Miami Beach Senior would be among the host schools.
Open two new mathematics and science senior high school programs. One would be a senior high school for medical technologies at the former Homestead Hospital. The other would be in northwest Miami-Dade County.
Develop six new magnet programs, four of which would be housed in schools in the southern part of the county.
While Crew said he is prepared to raise money to fund future projects, likely through federal and state grants, he said his initial goal was to take a strategic look at the placement of academic programs.
One of the three finalists for the Madison Superintendent position, Steve Gallon, hailed from Miami-Dade.
Madison parents in the Valley Ridge subdivision who objected to seeing their neighborhood split and some of their children moving to Falk Elementary may be pleased with the latest developments in planning for new west side school boundaries.
Likewise, parents who expressed concern about proposed school pairing plans that would join Falk and Stephens, or Falk and Crestwood schools, may also be breathing easier.
Those potential boundary plans might be off the table following the School Board's long-range planning committee on Monday.
Carol Carstensen, chairwoman of the board's planning committee, said the administration was asked this week to refine what's become known as Plan B, which keeps more children in their current schools than previous plans. As part of Plan B, children in areas surrounding Channel 3 on the city's western fringe may be moved to Falk Elementary, which is in a contiguous neighborhood, Carstensen said.
The boundary changes are necessary because of the need to balance student enrollments at west side elementary schools in anticipation of opening a new far west side elementary school next fall. The new school, located west of Highway M, is now under construction.
School boundary changes try to balance the use and capacity of school buildings with the distance and cost of transporting students. In addition, there is an effort to provide an economic mix of students, Carstensen said.
College-bound or not, all juniors at Monona Grove High School will spend more than four hours this spring filling in tiny bubbles as part of a mandatory ACT test.
District administrators say the school will be the first in the state to administer the college preparatory test to all juniors, and will foot the $11,000 bill.
Although not a novel idea -- five states require the test of all juniors -- the idea of using the ACT to better judge proficiency in areas such as reading, math and science appeals to other area districts.
"All students need to have college-readiness skills in areas like reading and math no matter what they plan to do after high school, " said Bill Breisch, curriculum director for Monona Grove School District. "Graduating with college-readiness skills is no longer just for some of our high school students. "
By requiring the test of juniors, the district is also offering college-bound students a year to get on track if their scores show them weak in a certain area, Breisch said. That way, seniors aren 't blindsided when they take the ACT and find out they have to take remedial math in college, he said.
Case studies are produced as part of a larger study of middle schools conducted during the 2006-07 school year. Research teams investigated ten consistently higher-performing and six consistently average-performing middle schools based on student performance on New York State Assessments of 8th-grade English Language Arts and Mathematics.
Research teams used site-based interviews of teachers and administrators, as well as analysis of supportive documentation, to determine differences in practices between higher- and average-performing schools in the sample.
At the Board of Education meeting Monday (2/4/2008) a proposal was put forth to enact new limits on public testimony. This proposal and the way it was introduced and discussed showed some on the Board at their worst, both tin-eared and wrong-headed. These are overlapping criticisms, because with the interactions between elected officials and the public, perceptions (tin-eared) and realities (wrong-headed) are inseparable.
Before I go further a caveat is in order. I did not attend the meeting on Monday and only watched the last 45 minutes or so at home. Still, I’m pretty confident in what I have to say.
Madison School Board members voted Monday night to halt the practice of using race as a reason to deny transfers by white students to other school districts for the current open enrollment period, which began Monday and continues through Feb. 22. [About open enrollment: Part and Full Time]
The decision was made by unanimous vote during the board's regular meeting, following a closed-door session with district superintendent Art Rainwater and the district's legal staff.
Last year, the portion of the district's open enrollment policy focusing on achieving racial balance in district schools affected about 120 students whose requests for transfer were denied, Rainwater said in a short interview following the meeting.
He said he had no idea how many students might be affected during the current enrollment period.
He also said that the Madison district has been closely following state statute regarding open enrollment, although it is the only district in the state to have denied transfers based on race.
"We take the laws of the state of Wisconsin very seriously," Rainwater said. "I guess I'd question why in the past the other districts weren't following the law as it's written."
An impressive group of what Sister Joel Read called "good, critical friends" came together Monday to announce that it was launching an effort aimed at providing both support and pressure for Milwaukee Public Schools to meet the ambitious goals of its new strategic plan.
Representatives of the business community, labor, education institutions, community groups and the state and local political worlds took part in the session at the new downtown headquarters of Manpower International, led by Read, the retired president of Alverno College.
"You've got a buy-in here," said Mayor Tom Barrett, who will be a member of the committee, known as the Accountability and Support Group. "We all know what's at stake here - the future of the city."
Jeff Joerres, chief executive officer of Manpower, told the group that life needs to be put into the strategic plan because the future of the economy of the city depends on education and commitment to success. There is no option about whether to make sure there is momentum in improving education, he said.
The group will meet quarterly to look at how things are going in MPS, beginning in May, Read said. She said she expected the meetings to be demanding and detailed.
"We'll do the things that good, critical friends do," she said.
Circuit Judge Carl Ashley, a member of the group, said this is a time of necessity and opportunity for MPS - necessity because of the importance of improving educational results, and opportunity because "there is a coordinated community response" to what is going on.
Half a dozen Indiana school boards are considering whether to take on the new responsibility of authorizing police officers.
The move could create a minefield of issues from issuing badges to setting policies. So far, Pike Township Schools may be the only district to use a new law that allows school boards to appoint officers.
Previously, school districts could not grant police powers, although several have long said they have "police departments" that derive authority from a local sheriff or police chief.
In districts that convert, students will see little difference. A badge or uniform may change, but few officers will change duties.
The change affects school boards, which will have greater responsibility for making police policy regarding training, firearms use, police chases and various protocols.
Any school police policy entrusted to mayors and sheriffs would rest with school boards, too.
Pike Township Schools became the first school district to launch its own police department in July. Brownsburg, Center Grove and Indianapolis Public Schools are among those considering the change.
Congress erred big-time when NCLB assigned each state to set its own standards and devise and score its own tests … this study underscores the folly of a big modern nation, worried about its global competitiveness, nodding with approval as Wisconsin sets its eighth-grade reading passing level at the 14th percentile while South Carolina sets its at the 71st percentile.
It wasn’t just the slate and pencil on every desk, or the absence of daily beatings. As Horace Mann sat in a Leipzig classroom in the summer of 1843, it was the entire Prussian system of schools that impressed him. Mann was six years into the work as Massachusetts secretary of education that would earn him lasting fame as the “father of public education.” He had sailed from Boston to England several weeks earlier with his new wife, combining a European honeymoon with educational fact-finding. In England, the couple had been startled by the luxury and refinement of the upper classes, which exceeded anything they had seen in America and stood in stark contrast to the poverty and ignorance of the masses. If the United States was to avoid this awful chasm and the social upheaval it seemed sure to create, he thought, education was the answer. Now he was seeing firsthand the Prussian schools that were the talk of reformers on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Massachusetts, Mann’s vision of “common schools,” publicly funded and attended by all, represented an inspiring democratic advance over the state’s hodgepodge of privately funded and charity schools. But beyond using the bully pulpit, Mann had little power to make his vision a reality. Prussia, by contrast, had a system designed from the center. School attendance was compulsory. Teachers were trained at national institutes with the same care that went into training military officers. Their enthusiasm for their subjects was contagious, and their devotion to students evoked reciprocal affection and respect, making Boston’s routine resort to classroom whippings seem barbaric.
Mann also admired Prussia’s rigorous national curriculum and tests. The results spoke for themselves: illiteracy had been vanquished. To be sure, Prussian schools sought to create obedient subjects of the kaiser—hardly Mann’s aim. Yet the lessons were undeniable, and Mann returned home determined to share what he had seen. In the seventh of his legendary “Annual Reports” on education to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he touted the benefits of a national system and cautioned against the “calamities which result … from leaving this most important of all the functions of a government to chance.”
Mann’s epiphany that summer put him on the wrong side of America’s tradition of radical localism when it came to schools. And although his efforts in the years that followed made Massachusetts a model for taxpayer-funded schools and state-sponsored teacher training, the obsession with local control—not incidentally, an almost uniquely American obsession—still dominates U.S. education to this day. For much of the 150 or so years between Mann’s era and now, the system served us adequately: during that time, we extended more schooling to more people than any nation had before and rose to superpower status. But let’s look at what local control gives us today, in the “flat” world in which our students will have to compete.
The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.
Dismal fact after dismal fact; by now, they are hardly news. But in the 25 years since the landmark report A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm about our educational mediocrity, America’s response has been scattershot and ineffective, orchestrated mainly by some 15,000 school districts acting alone, with help more recently from the states. It’s as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories; they’d know what kinds of planes and tanks were needed, right?
When you look at what local control of education has wrought, the conclusion is inescapable: we must carry Mann’s insights to their logical end and nationalize our schools, to some degree. But before delving into the details of why and how, let’s back up for a moment and consider what brought us to this pass.
As families' application deadline looms, many are wondering whether the Madison School District will halt its practice of using race as the reason for denying some white students' requests to transfer to other districts.
The answer could begin to emerge as early as Monday, the first day for Wisconsin families
to request open-enrollment transfers for the coming school year.
Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater and the district's legal counsel will confer Monday night with the School Board. It's possible that after the closed-door discussion, the board will take a vote in open session to stop blocking open-enrollment requests on the basis of race, School Board President Arlene Silveira said.
"This is a serious decision for our school district, " Rainwater said.
"It is our responsibility to take a very careful look at legal issues facing our school district. "
Last year, Madison was the only of the state's 426 school districts to deny transfer requests because of race, rejecting 126 white students' applications to enroll in other districts, including online schools. Many of the affected students live within the district but weren't enrolled in public schools because they were being home-schooled or attended private schools.
He's a senior at Milwaukee's Rufus King High School, he's a good student, and he's a big sports fan.
You can serve all that on a silver platter.
At least that's what Mohammad did this week at a program honoring him and 92 fellow students for completing lengthy research papers as part of their work at the school.
The 3,000- to 4,000-word papers - "extended essays" - are required for students who want to receive the International Baccalaureate diploma. For those who complete such a paper - a process that begins in the spring of their junior years - it is a tradition to present the final product on a silver platter to the teacher who advised the student along the way, followed by the student and the teacher each commenting on what was learned.
The silver platter ceremony was held this week, and the 93 who presented their work are the largest group to complete the formidable research project in King's nearly 30-year history as an IB school.
The topics they researched included matters from the worlds of science, history, art, religion and beyond. Daniel Gatewood, one of the advisers, said as he commented on one of his student's papers, "I didn't learn to write like this until graduate school."
Mohammad said, "Every time I get one of these papers, I try to incorporate sports into it." He chose as his topic the effects on American and Soviet psyches of the "Miracle on Ice" victory of the U.S. hockey team over the Russians at the 1980 Winter Olympics.
Five months after taking over as Boston public schools superintendent, Carol R. Johnson last night proposed a shakeup in her administration to close the achievement gap among students and ensure “graduation for all.”
Under her plan, a new office will focus on closing the achievement gap between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian peers, as well as the performance gaps between rich and poor, between male and female, and between English and non-English speaking students.
The superintendent also announced a reorganization of the district’s administration, including the appointment of a new chief academic officer and five academic superintendents to supervise and support school principals.
Weekday mornings, three of Tracie Weldie’s children eat breakfast, make beds and trudge off to public school — in their case, downstairs to their basement in a suburb here, where their mother leads them through math and other lessons outlined by an Internet-based charter school.
Half a million American children take classes online, with a significant group, like the Weldies, getting all their schooling from virtual public schools. The rapid growth of these schools has provoked debates in courtrooms and legislatures over money, as the schools compete with local districts for millions in public dollars, and over issues like whether online learning is appropriate for young children.
One of the sharpest debates has concerned the Weldies’ school in Wisconsin, where last week the backers of online education persuaded state lawmakers to keep it and 11 other virtual schools open despite a court ruling against them and the opposition of the teachers union. John Watson, a consultant in Colorado who does an annual survey of education that is based on the Internet, said events in Wisconsin followed the pattern in other states where online schools have proliferated fast.
“Somebody says, ‘What’s going on, does this make sense?’ ” Mr. Watson said. “And after some inquiry most states have said, ‘Yes, we like online learning, but these are such new ways of teaching children that we’ll need to change some regulations and get some more oversight.’ ”
Two models of online schooling predominate. In Florida, Illinois and half a dozen other states, growth has been driven by a state-led, state-financed virtual school that does not give a diploma but offers courses that supplement regular work at a traditional school. Generally, these schools enroll only middle and high school students.
No school district in the nation has yet managed what Chicago officials proposed last week: a sweeping, simultaneous overhaul of a cluster of failing schools.
Experts say the plan to fire the staffs of eight schools and replace them with better qualified educators is somewhat of a gamble, one that will require an almost perfect alignment of stellar principals, committed teachers and re-invigorated curriculum and programs to succeed.
But that's no guarantee.
"No one knows if turnarounds work," said Andrew Calkins of the Mass Insight Education and Research Institute. "We spent two years looking at turnarounds and could not find a single example of turnaround work that was successful and sustained and done on scale, not just one school."
As Chicago parents began to digest the proposal first reported in the Tribune on Thursday, many seemed willing to roll the dice -- in part, an acknowledgment that even partial success is better than what their children face now.
Fara Bell, a Morton Career Academy parent, said turning around both Orr High School and Morton, an elementary school that feeds into it, is the only way to guarantee wholesale change.
Reading is the key to everything. Teaching children to read is a fundamental moral obligation of the society. That 27 percent are at serious risk of crippling illiteracy is an outrageous scandal.
This is a bleak picture for an old Democrat. Face it, the schools are not run by Republican oligarchs in top hats and spats but by perfectly nice, caring, sharing people, with a smattering of yoga/raga/tofu/mojo/mantra folks like my old confreres. Nice people are failing these kids, but when they are called on it, they get very huffy. When the grand poobah Ph.D.s of education stand up and blow, they speak with great confidence about theories of teaching, and considering the test results, the bums ought to be thrown out.
There is much evidence that teaching phonics really works, especially with kids with learning disabilities, a growing constituency. But because phonics is associated with behaviorism and with conservatives, and because the Current Occupant has spoken on the subject, my fellow liberals are opposed.
Teachers at a school in northeast Denver seeking freedom from union and district rules will move forward with their autonomy plan, despite failing to get wholesale approval from their union.
Teachers and administrators at Bruce Randolph School want control over the school's budget, teacher time, incentives and hiring decisions and to be free from union and district red tape that they say is impeding student progress.
Denver's school board last month agreed to the Bruce Randolph autonomy proposal, but the teachers union balked Tuesday at permitting much of the school's request — which sought waivers from 18 articles of the union contract and parts of six other articles.
"Certainly I feel excitement about this possibility, but I also want you to know that this has not been an easy process for me, " Nerad told reporters Monday night at a Green Bay School Board meeting as he confirmed he was ending a 32-year career in the district where his two children grew up.
"My hope is that I have been able to contribute to the well-being of children in this community -- first and foremost, regardless of what the role is. "
Nerad conditionally accepted the position Monday, pending a final background check, successful contract negotiations and a visit by a delegation from the Madison School Board, President Arlene Silveira said at a news conference in Madison.
Green Bay schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad has been chosen to succeed Art Rainwater as head of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
School Board President Arlene Silveira said Monday night that Nerad, 56, was the board's unanimous top choice. She said they offered him the job on Saturday, following board interviews with finalists last week and deliberations on Saturday morning.
Silveira said Nerad asked the board to delay announcing its choice until he was able to meet with members of the Green Bay School Board Monday at 6 p.m. Silveira made the announcement at 7 p.m. in Madison.
"This is a very, very exciting choice for the district, and for the Board," Silveira said.
"Dr. Nerad overwhelmingly met every one of the desired superintendent characteristics that helped guide the hiring process," she added.
Many of Nerad's challenges as Madison schools chief will mirror those he has faced in Green Bay, Silveira said, including changing student demographics and working within the confines of the current state funding formula.
Both the Green Bay and Madison school districts are members of the Minority Student Achievement Network, a nationwide coalition of schools dedicated to ensuring high academic achievement for students of color.
Network membership is one way Nerad and Rainwater became acquainted, Rainwater said in an interview earlier this month.
Nerad said Monday he regrets that more progress hasn't been made in advancing the achievement of minority students during his tenure. But he believes it will happen, he said.
The next head of the Green Bay schools also will inherit the aftermath of a failed 2007 referendum for a fifth district high school and other projects.
A community-based task force charged with next steps has been working since summer, and its work will continue regardless of who's at the helm, School Board vice president and task force member Katie Maloney said Monday.
Still, Maloney said it won't be easy to see him go.
I wish Dan well in what will certainly be an interesting, challenging and stimulating next few years. Thanks also to the Madison School Board for making it happen.
Parents on the west side are speaking out about proposed plans that would change school boundaries for more than 100 children.
The Madison School Board drew up four possible plans that would affect students attending Falk, Stephens and Crestwood elementary schools, and all possibilities drew a lot of criticism.
The school board said their "plan A" would divide 151 students living in the Valley Ridge neighborhood between Crestwood and Falk elementary schools. That plan, released in December, garnered strong opposition, leading the board to propose three new plans.
Their "plan B" would call for Valley Ridge students to stay at Stephens Elementary and move students from other neighborhoods, including Spring Harbor and Junction Road.
Their "plan C" calls for the pairing of Stephens and Crestwood schools and "plan D" would call for Crestwood and Falk pairing up.
School board officials said if any of the schools were paired, students would attend one school from kindergarten through second grade, and then move to the other school for grades three through five.
Green Bay school superintendent Daniel Nerad has been chosen to become the Madison school district's next superintendent.
The Madison Metropolitan School District's Board of Education announced on Monday night that it unanimously selected Nerad as the new superintendent. Nerad has conditionally accepted, pending a final background check, contract negotiations and a site visit by a board delegation, according to a district news release.
Nerad is currently the superintendent of the Green Bay Area Public School District.
Nerad will replace current Superintendent Art Rainwater, who turned 65 on New Year's Day, and is scheduled to retire on June 30. Nerad is scheduled to take over on July 1.
A Madison School District spokesman said school board members voted unanimously to select Green Bay Schools Superintendent Dan Nerad as the next superintendent of Madison's public schools.
District spokesman Ken Syke said Nerad has conditionally accepted the position, pending a background check, contract negotiations and a site visit to Green Bay by a delegation from the school board.
The offer to Nerad was reported exclusively by wkowtv.com, hours before the school district spokesman's announcement.
School Board members had identified Nerad, Miami-Dade Public Schools administrator Steve Gallon, and Boston Public Schools Budget Director James McIntyre as the three finalists for the position.
Nerad, 56, is a Wisconsin native who was named state superintendent of the year in 2006.
The Madison Metropolitan School District has chosen Green Bay school superintendent Daniel Nerad to be its next superintendent.
Madison School Board president Arlene Silveira made the announcement tonight during a 7 p.m. news conference in Madison, saying Nerad was a unanimous choice for the job.
Nerad, 56, who has almost 33 years experience with the Green Bay district, would replace retiring Madison superintendent Art Rainwater. He is expected to begin work in Madison on July 1. Rainwater retires June 30.
Nerad has been superintendent in Green Bay since 2001.
high-ranking Miami-Dade Public Schools official says he withdrew his candidacy to become superintendent of the Madison School District, leaving just two educators from Green Bay and Boston in the running to head Wisconsin's second-largest school district.
"My withdrawal is in no fashion any reflection on the people of Madison or the school district," Steve Gallon III, who oversees Miami-Dade's alternative education schools and programs, said Monday afternoon.
Gallon said he believes the School Board was notified of his decision before it began its deliberations Saturday to name its top pick to succeed Superintendent Art Rainwater, who is retiring on June 30.
Gallon, a Miami native, said "people in Wisconsin were great" last week during his visit. He said it would be "presumptuous" of him to discuss his reasons for stepping aside, and Board President Arlene Silveira "would be a better position to share" the details.
Silveira said according to the school board's consultant Gallon took another superintendent's job.
Two sources close to the process of selecting a new Madison Schools Superintendent tell 27 News the position has been offered to Green Bay School District Superintendent Daniel Nerad.
Green Bay School District spokesperson Amanda Brooker told 27 News Nerad, 56, would not comment Monday on the selection process.
Madison School Board President Arlene Silviera also declined comment.
School Board members had identified Nerad, Miami-Dade Public Schools administrator Steve Gallon, and Boston Public Schools Budget Director James McIntyre as the three finalists for the position.
I just received an e-mail from a parent stating the Middle School report cards are converting to the elementary format of 1 - 4 and they are dropping the A - F grading system. She spoke to Lisa Wachtel, Head of Teaching and Learning to confirm that this is the direction the district is headed.
DO any of you have any info on this? They claim it is on the website but other than the Standards Base System info, which is pretty general I can not locate this info. This greatly concerns me if it is true.
Protests from this small school district nestled in the Texas Hill Country are reverberating across the state's school finance landscape.
School board members – backed by parents and local business owners – have decided to say "no" when their payment comes due next month under the state's "Robin Hood" school funding law.
Wimberley is one of more than 160 high-wealth school districts – including several in the Dallas area – that are required to share their property tax revenue with other districts. But residents here insist that their students will suffer if they turn the money over to the state.
"We're not going to pay it," said Gary Pigg, vice president of the Wimberley school board and a small-business owner. "Our teachers are some of the lowest-paid in the area. Our buildings need massive repairs. We keep running a deficit – and they still want us to give money away.
"It's unconstitutional – and I'm ready to go to jail if I have to."
Mr. Pigg and the rest of the Wimberley school board voted last fall to withhold the payment of an estimated $3.1 million in local property taxes – one-sixth of the district's total revenue – that was supposed to be sent to the state under the share-the-wealth school finance law passed in 1993. The law was passed in response to a series of court orders calling for equalized funding among school districts.
Wisconsin's school finance system takes a similar approach: High property assessement values reduce state aids. Unlike Texas, Wisconsin simply redistributes fewer state tax dollars to Districts with "high" property values, such as Madison. Texas requires Districts to send some of their property tax receipts to the state to be redistributed to other districts. School finance has many complicated aspects, one of which is a "Robin Hood" like provision. Another is "Negative Aid": If Madison increases spending via referendums, it loses state aid. This situation is referenced in the article:
Regarding the possibility of a tax hike, Mr. York noted that an increase would require voter approval – something that is not likely to happen with residents knowing that a big chunk of their money will be taken by the state.
One of the many ironies in our school finance system is that there is an incentive to grow the tax base, or the annual assessment increases. The politicians can then point to the flat or small growth in the mill rate, rather than the growth in the total tax burden.
So...........I dug up my West Side Long Term Planning Binder and reviewed all the data presented to us, as a member of that committee, and remembered the HOURS we spent debating and reviewing the pros and cons of each plan. I believe this is a very hard process and I am sad it is being altered at this late date.
I think one thing many of us felt on the Long Range Planning Committee was even with the new school and addition to Leopold we did not devise a Long Term Plan. My #1 suggestion to the board would be to revisit the plan of "making the map look better" and balancing the income levels but TO MAKE IT A LONG TERM plan and say in 6 years this is what we are going to do. (and stick to it) I think when you spring it on families that in a few months Johnny has to switch schools, we parents are too invested and comfortable with the school and protest the change. But if a 6 Year Plan was in place with some options to start at the new school, grandfather for a couple of years the protest would be great but families would have lots of time to accept the change and deal with it. It would also be a LONG TERM PLAN.
As far as the new plans I have to LAUGH at the school pairing idea. This was the number one presentation from Mary and the administration. They clearly loved the idea of pairing and attempted to pair Chavez/Leopold, Crestwood and Stephens, Crestwood/Falk, Chavez/Lincoln, Thoreau/Lincoln...................
Each time the committee shot it down. We did not, from a community few point find it appealing. Notice of the 12 or so plans we came up with not one pairing survived. I know it is more convenient for downtown and their numbers but let me tell you our thoughts at the time.
Pairing two schools has worked for Marquette/Lapham and Franklin/Randall primarily because they are similar in their make-up of families and because they are neighborhood schools (0 bus). While Stephens and Crestwood are similar in make-up they happen to be two of the most "bused" schools in the district. Crestwood is at 7 buses and Stephens I believe has 8 or so. That means if Johnny is in 1st grade and Sally is in fifth, they could both take two buses to and from school, or there will have to be two different buses come pick up these two siblings. Either way it is different than the Johnny walk to school and then takes a bus to the "other" school, and it seems like it would increase the transportation cost. But at least these schools are close in proximity.
Pairing will reduce parental participation. At the middle school (as PTO president) I find people feel it takes a year to learn the ropes, and many do not want to get involved because the investment of time is so reduced. 6 years at Crestwood getting to know a principal, staff, etc is different than 3 at Crestwood and 3 at Stephens. We also use the older students for reading buddies, snow suit helpers, etc.... I love having my kids at one school not 2 and since I have more than two kids 3. Three principals, 3 rules, 3 different PTO's, 3 different places to drive. I currently have this situation (high school, jr. high, elementary) and it's not fun.
Pairing schools to solve the high low income numbers did not work at Midvale/Lincoln. It was an interesting experiment but in 1991 Lincoln had a low income of 51% and in 2005 they were at 69% combined currently it is 64%, and Midvale in 1991 was 42% and 2005 it was at 64%. I know many claim this was for odd reasons but the pairing of Falk/Crestwood to solve the low income I predict would have the same impact and we would loss families as we did in Midvale. These schools are too different. Falk has 0 or one bus. Most families walk to school. You would then bus them to school. Crestwood families would again have to take two buses I suppose to get to Falk. Also as with the problem of moving low income families to a school far away, you cause this same transportation problems. These kids may not be able to get to school if they miss the bus, etc due to parental lack of transportation. Pairing two school so far from each other makes little sense too me for this reason.
Pairing two school such as Falk/Crestwood from two different Middle School boundaries also creates problems with where they go after elementary. Do you separate kids that go to elementary together?
I hope the district is prepared to lend Jefferson an enormous amount of resources if the pair go to Jefferson. Since Crestwood and Stephens will increase their high needs students from Allied, the Wexford community already attends Jefferson and then add many high needs from Falk, I expect Jefferson would require greater resources. If you send them to Toki, my children who currently walk to school would take a bus to school.
These were just a view of the complaints, concerns I can remember, or I took from my notes. I know NONE of these issues are simple. To be frank moving high income families to a low income schools creates problems and can cause the district to lose families. Moving low income to high income schools causes problems with transportation for those kids and families. Once families are invested in a school far away or close they tend to like that school best, which speaks volumes to the individual schools and their staff and principals. I felt the original plan had the best balance of moving families to fill schools and balance some of the stress at Falk. For whatever reason that was changed. But to me the plan to move Spring Harbor to Crestwood makes the most sense and then do a 6 YEAR plan to address the low income needs and take that $90,000 to bus kids to and from Falk and put it into extra staff support where it is needed at Falk. We can't solve the changing demographics overnight. I truly understand the difficultly involved in changing boundaries and do not take your job lightly, but as an enormous amount of hours were spent on this issue by many members of the community I felt you should also not take our input too lightly.
Thanks for your attention,
Mary Kay Battaglia
mom at Crestwood, Jefferson, and Memorial (3 schools is too much!!!)
School Board Chairman Claire M. Eberwein said that 18 people have formally applied for the job Perry left Jan. 18 and that search consultants indicate eight are highly qualified. More possible candidates have been identified from a pool of 141 people who expressed interest. The application deadline is Feb. 19.
Experts aren't surprised that the job is drawing interest despite Perry's abrupt exit after more than six years. They credit the attractiveness of Alexandria and the surrounding region as a place to work and live.
In May, the board voted 5 to 4 to seek a new schools chief. The way Perry was suddenly removed caused consternation among some residents. Minutes after she left, a locksmith changed the locks.
"There was widespread dismay at how the process went," said Kitty Porterfield, a 29-year employee of Northern Virginia school systems and author of a new book, "Getting It Right: Why Good School Communication Matters." She said, "The community is very wary now."
Looking ahead, William Campbell, a PTA president and a member of the superintendent advisory search committee, said he wants a superintendent who did not rise through the traditional school ranks, perhaps a chief executive of a business.
Houston said some school systems have recruited such candidates recently with mixed results. "Some of them have been a disaster," Houston said. "The jury's still out on that model."
Finding a superintendent these days isn't easy, despite the hefty salary the position commands, experts say. For the Alexandria job, the board is advertising an annual salary of about $230,000 and a "comprehensive and competitive" benefits package.
"The superintendency has lost a lot of its luster," said Jay P. Goldman, editor of the school administrator association's magazine. "There was a time, not that long ago, when the pinnacle of one's career would be to rise to superintendent. That day is gone."
Goldman said many educators now view the top job in a school district as "an impossible, can't-win position. They're often brought in as the knight in shining armor. Expectations are unreal. Communities expect overnight success and every ill solved in a year or two."
The Madison School Board will meet behind closed doors this morning to begin determining which of the three finalists it'd like to hire to replace Superintendent Art Rainwater, who retires June 30.
Three men from Miami, Boston and Green Bay who share an obsession for education but offer sharply differing backgrounds visited Madison this week to compete for the job of heading Wisconsin's second-largest school district.
Candidate details, including links, photos, audio and video:
Congratulations to virtual school students, virtual school families, forward-thinking school districts around the state**, and to all Wisconsinites dedicated to high quality education for all. As reported in several news outlets yesterday, legislators have agreed to a compromise that guarantees the survival of virtual schools in Wisconsin.
**Thank you Lee Allinger, AASD Superintendent, and your staff, for preparing testimony in support of continuation of Wisconsin Connections Academy.
Thank you and congratulations to the Coalition of Virtual School Families, who issued this press release of thanks (and relief) yesterday.
But mostly, hallelujah! for democratic process and to kids and families who made a difference. Kids and families – 1100 of whom showed up in Madison last week to plea for their cause. Wow.
And congratulations to State Rep. Brett Davis and Senator John Lehman, who were able to reach across the aisle (political pressure didn’t hurt – see above) and find a solution.
The new elementary school being built on Madison's Far West Side, already mired in controversy over its name, now is part of a second emotional debate: Which students should be uprooted from their current schools when school attendance boundaries are redrawn this year to accommodate the new school and recent population changes?
A well-organized group of dozens of Stephens Elementary parents is fighting the Madison School District's proposal to move 83 students from Stephens to Falk Elementary. The students would be among 524 at seven elementary and middle schools affected by the proposal, which is known as Plan A.
Parents in the Valley Ridge neighborhood contend their children, most of whom are from middle-class backgrounds, would receive an inferior education at Falk because the school already has an extraordinarily high number of low-income and other students who need extra attention.
Fifty-three percent of Falk's students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, compared to an average of 36 percent at elementary schools in the Memorial High School attendance area.
Dan Nerad believes it takes a village to educate a child, and after three decades of being a leader in Green Bay's schools, he'd like to bring his skills here as the Madison district's next superintendent.
Nerad, 56, is superintendent of the Green Bay public school system, which has just more than 20,000 students.
At a third and final public meet-and-greet session for the candidates for Madison school superintendent on Thursday at the Monona Terrace Convention Center, Nerad spoke of his passion for helping students and his philosophies of educational leadership.
Speaking to a crowd of about 70 community members, Nerad began his brief remarks by quoting Chief Sitting Bull, "Let us put our minds together and see what kind of life we can make for our children."
"I believe the 'us' must really be us -- all of us -- working to meet the needs of all children," he said. Several times during his remarks, he emphasized that education is an investment in work force development, in the community and in the future.
He also said that he believes it's a moral commitment.
Nerad talked about his efforts to create an entire district of leaders, and the importance of a healthy, collaborative culture in the schools. He said he saw diversity as "a strong, strong asset" because it allows kids to learn in an atmosphere that reflects the world they are likely to live in.
Emma Carlisle and Cora Wiese Moore provided music during the event. Both attend Blackhawk Middle School.
It was definitely not one of his spotlighted points, but Gov. Jim Doyle, in his State of the State address this week, said he wants to see the overall pay structure of teachers in Wisconsin improved and he will make proposals in that direction when the next round of the state budget process starts a year from now. From the text released by the governor's office, here is what Doyle said:
"We need high standards for our students and our teachers, but we have a compensation system that rewards neither. The system is broken. It's a relic from a political fight a half a generation ago. From Waukesha to Wausau, school districts, parents, and taxpayers have all had enough.
A group of Prince William County parents is mounting a campaign to repeal a new elementary school math curriculum, using an Internet discussion group and an online petition to gather support and fuel criticism.
The group, whose members include parents from such elementary schools as Westridge, Ashland and Springwoods as well as teachers from various schools, plans to present the Prince William County School Board in February with its petition, which has about 500 names. Parents in the group, whose Web site ( http://www.pwcteachmathright.com) lists several of their complaints, say that the Investigations curriculum is putting their children behind grade level and is too convoluted.
The group's formation comes right after the school system presented a year-long study of the curriculum that showed 80 percent of second-graders and 70 percent of first-graders are proficient on all 10 subtests of the Stanford Diagnostic Mathematics Test. The school system wants to continue studying the program and incorporate data from student performance on the state Standards of Learning exams.
School Board member Julie C. Lucas (Neabsco) said in an interview that she wants to examine the program inside a classroom to assess its effectiveness. She added that she has been hearing positive reviews from at least one principal in her district but that she wants to withhold making public comments until she visits schools.
The Investigations program has been undergoing a phased-in implementation since the School Board adopted its materials in 2006. In the 2006-07 academic year, kindergarten through second grade started the program; this year, third-graders began it; and next year, fourth-graders will use the material.
Investigations teaches children new ways of learning mathematics and solving problems. For instance, a student may not need to learn how to add 37 and 23 by stacking the figures on top of each other, and carrying the numbers. They may learn to add up the tens and then combine the seven and three to arrive at 60.
Why this website?
...Because our children - ALL children - deserve a quality mathematics education in PWCS!!
In 2006 PWCS directed mandatory implementation of the elementary school mathematics curriculum TERC - "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space" in all PWCS elementary schools. The traditional, proven, successful mathematics program was abandoned for a "discovery learning" program that has a record of failure across the country.
Of all the VA Department of Education approved elementary math text/materials, "Investigations" least adequately supports the VA Standards of Learning. Yet it was somehow "the right choice" for PWCS children. Parents of 2nd and 3d graders are already realizing the negative impact of this program in only a year and a half's worth of "Investigations." Children subjected to this program end up two years behind where they should be in mathematics fluency and competency by the end of 5th grade. PWCS is committed to experimenting with our children's future. We think our children and our tax dollars deserve better.
The students in an alternative high school in East St. Louis inspired Jim McIntyre when he was their teacher and continue to inspire him today as an administrator in the Boston public school system.
McIntyre, 40, spoke late Wednesday afternoon at Monona Terrace to a crowd of around 50 people at the second of three public meet-and-greet sessions for the final candidates vying for the job of Madison school superintendent.
"Teaching in East St. Louis was a life-changing experience," McIntyre explained.
"Many of my students were children who lived under very, very difficult circumstances. When you were able to eliminate some of the distractions they faced and get them engaged in school, they were smart, talented students," he said.
But for some, the odds were so difficult, and their lives so daunting that hope was hard to maintain.
"My brightest student, my best student, took his own life because he just didn't see any future. It's with me every day," McIntyre said.
McIntyre, 40, is currently the chief operating officer of the Boston public school system, which has an operating budget of about $800 million. Before becoming chief operating officer about two years ago, McIntyre was budget director of the district, which serves about 57,000 students, for 8 years.
He says he tries to bring a student-centered focus to his job managing facilities, food service, safety, transportation and all other aspects of his job.
As a life-long resident of southern Florida, school superintendent candidate Steve Gallon III grimaced, then grinned, when asked about how he liked Wisconsin weather.
Known as a motivational speaker as well as a top teacher, principal and administrator in the Miami/Dade County public school system, Gallon quickly got back on message: He sees his experiences as an educator and a leader as a good match for the school district here, especially given its rapidly changing demographics and challenges in funding.
He said the issue of underperforming students is not so much one of ethnicity but of economics.
"What we have to do is embrace the reality that gaps in achievement exist," Gallon said. Much of it, he said, has to do with economic disadvantage.
"It's the 800-pound gorilla in the room. You must acknowledge that work needs to be done before you're going to be successful in dealing with it," he said.
Gallon, 39, is one of three finalists for the position of school superintendent here. He talked with community members and the media in a meet and greet session late Monday afternoon at Monona Terrace. There will be similar sessions today and Wednesday for candidates James McIntyre, chief operating officer for the Boston public schools and Daniel Nerad, superintendent of the Green Bay district.
In responses to questions from the audience, Gallon applauded the notion of working closely with the resources of the University of Wisconsin, said he believed in the least restrictive environment for special education students and cautioned that problems facing schools in terms of funding weren't likely to be solved easily.
Collections of the three most important Wisconsin taxes increased less than 1% in the second half of 2007 - falling far short of the 3% assumed growth needed to cover state expenditures this year and raising fears that deep spending cuts will be necessary.
Preliminary state Department of Revenue totals show the personal and corporate income tax and the sales tax brought in $5.13 billion from July through December, an increase of only 0.8% over the same period in 2006.
Those three taxes account for $9 out of every $10 in general-fund taxes.
Every unexpected 1% drop in collections from those taxes means state government will have $120 million less a year to spend. If tax collections don't pick up, the shortfall would quickly wipe out the projected $67 million surplus Capitol leaders had hoped for this fiscal year and force reductions across state government.
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle said he will warn of the economic downturn in his sixth "state of the state" message Wednesday. Many states are facing economic slowdowns, and California must fix a $14.5 billion shortfall, Doyle noted.
In his speech, Doyle said, "I'm going to talk pretty directly that this is a challenge that we have ahead of us, and we have to face up to it. Unless the national economy just totally goes into the tank, this is something we can manage and get through. But it's going to be pretty tough."
A reduction in the rate of State tax receipt increases makes it unlikely that there will be meaningful reform in redistributed state tax dollars flowing back to local school districts.
With millions of dollars in aid to schools at stake, the Milwaukee School Board has put the brakes on a main element of a plan to get MPS off the list of districts not measuring up under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
"I dare them to take money out of kids' classrooms," board member Jennifer Morales said. She has led the charge to oppose two steps required under a plan the board agreed to in September for dealing with MPS' label of District Identified for Improvement under the federal law.
Morales said she had reached the point of refusing to cooperate any further with the requirements of what she called a failed law distracting MPS from doing things that actually improve student achievement.
"Now is the moment when we just say 'enough,' " she said. "If we don't hold the line and say, 'No way, we're not going to play this stupid game and waste the taxpayers' money,' who is?"
At a meeting Thursday night, board members reluctantly approved one of the steps in the DIFI plan, but halted the other. The board voted to delay hiring required under the plan, yet a disputed reading program will begin.
Cities across America have long hunted for tougher, better-trained principals to turn around struggling schools full of impoverished children. A major university and an influential group of educators in Texas are proposing a provocative way to meet the demand: They say urban principals of the future can skip the traditional education school credentials and learn instead about business.
The nascent movement toward an alternative path to school leadership is driven by the troubles facing schools in the District and elsewhere as would-be reformers argue that a key to raising student achievement is to overhaul personnel, from the central office down to the classroom. The change also comes amid growing debate over which of a principal's many duties are most important. School leaders often feel like the combined mayor, police chief and schoolmaster of a town with a population of 1,000 or more.
Education schools, where most principals are trained, emphasize teaching and managing children. But organizers of a new Rice University program for "education entrepreneurs," and some top education officials in the Washington area, say an inner-city principal cannot succeed without enough business smarts to manage adults. For example, they say, principals need to know how to recruit great employees and fire bad ones.
Rice, which has no education school, is launching a master's of business administration program this year to prepare principals for several Houston schools.
And Then There Were 3: Finalists for the Madison Superintendent Job
Madison Board of Education:
Following a first round of interviews with the five semifinalists, the Board of Education has selected three candidates as finalists for the position of Superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
The Board interviewed the candidates last evening and today.
Each of the three finalists will spend a day in Madison on January 22, 23 or 24. In addition to a second interview with the Board, the candidates will visit some schools and see parts of Madison, talk to attendees at the Community Meet and Greet, and speak with district administrators.
The community is invited to the Meet and Greets scheduled from 4:00 to 5:15 p.m. at the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center on January 22, 23 and 24. In the first hour, attendees will be able to briefly meet and greet the candidate as part of a receiving line. From 5:00 to 5:15 p.m. each day, the candidate will make a brief statement and might take questions. The session will end promptly at 5:15 p.m.
The schedule for visits by the finalists:
Tuesday, January 22 Steve Gallon
Wednesday, January 23 James McIntyre
Thursday, January 24 Daniel Nerad
On January 26 or 27, the Board will identify a preferred finalist. To ensure the Board's research will be as comprehensive as possible, a Board delegation is expected to visit the finalist's community during the week of January 28. The announcement of the appointment of the new Superintendent is scheduled for early February.
The consulting firm Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates was hired by the Board last summer to manage the search and advise the Board during the process. In October, the Board approved the leadership profile developed as a result of community input. This profile can be viewed by going to "Superintendent Search" at www.mmsd.org
For the last three months, the consultants recruited candidates for the position, conducted preliminary reference checks for the most promising applicants, and conducted initial interviews.
From this process, the consultants brought to the Board a select slate of candidates from which the five semifinalists were named by the Board on January 7.
The semifinalists were chosen from among 25 persons who sought the position currently held by Art Rainwater. Rainwater will retire on June 30, 2008, with the new Superintendent scheduled to begin on July 1.
Members of the Madison School Board will narrow the field of candidates for the next superintendent of the school district from five to three late today. School Board President Arlene Silveira said she expected that the three final candidates would be named sometime late this afternoon or early evening, following three candidate interviews today and two on Friday.
The five candidates are: Bart Anderson, county superintendent of the Franklin County Educational Service Center in Columbus, Ohio; Steve Gallon, district administrative director of the Miami/Dade Public Schools; James McIntyre, chief operating officer of the Boston Public Schools; Daniel Nerad, superintendent of schools, Green Bay Public Schools and Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard, chief academic officer, Racine Public School District.
The Capital Times asked candidates why they would like to come to Madison and what accomplishments have given them pride in their careers. Anderson, McIntyre and Vanden Wyngaard were interviewed by phone, and Nerad responded by e-mail. Steve Gallon did not respond to several calls asking for his answers to the two questions.
Anderson said he had two reasons for wanting to come to Madison.
"First and foremost, Madison has a very special story to tell regarding its history of achievement both in its school district and in its community. In addition, the assets Madison has with the combination of the state capital and the university community very much align with the creative class environment I find very appealing. I think my skills and experiences match the needs of the district, and we could both benefit," Anderson said.
He said that the development of partnerships with the University of Ohio and the school districts he helps supervise in the Columbus area are a particular source of pride for him, especially programs that allow students to enroll in university classes while still in high school. He also points to a support team he helped develop that travels to area schools to help them make the adequate yearly progress necessary under federal No Child Left Behind law. The support teams have been so successful, he said, that the state is replicating them in other parts of Ohio.
Steve Gallon
Gallon is an administrative director of school operations with the Miami/Dade Public Schools, which serves about 350,000 students. He grew up in Liberty City, one of the Miami area's toughest neighborhoods, and has worked as a teacher, principal, author, lecturer and administrator. He is one of southern Florida's most sought after motivational speakers. In 2001 he was recognized as one of eight outstanding Americans in an issue of the College Board Review entitled "Heroes of a Different Kind."
Gallon has an undergraduate degree in English from Florida A&M University, a master's in educational leadership from Florida International University and a doctor of education degree in administration from Florida International University. (Gallon did not return several phone calls asking for responses to Capital Times questions).
James McIntyre
McIntyre says that it's easy to want to come to Madison.
"I'm quite delighted, actually. It has a wonderful reputation as a community and as an excellent school district," he said. He added that the district provides the opportunity to build on historic success, rather than trying to turn around struggling schools. McIntyre said he's been fortunate to work with some of the top urban school administrators in the country in Boston and would look forward to bringing the skills he learned there to Madison.
As chief operating officer and former budget director for Boston's public schools, McIntyre says he has focused on the district's educational goals as he's managed its resources. "Of course it's about how we can do our work efficiently and effectively, but it's more important to put that in a context that enables and supports student achievement. It's about creating a culture in every department that's student-centered. It's not just about buses or buildings."
During McIntyre's tenure in Boston, the district won the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education.
Daniel Nerad
In response to the question about why he wanted to come to Madison, Nerad wrote:
Serving as superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District would allow me to return to a community that has special meaning in my life. My undergraduate and first graduate degree were both from the UW-Madison, and our two children are also graduates. Our son continues to live and work in Madison.
Like Green Bay, Madison is a community that cares about its children, focused on improving learning for all students while addressing the elimination of specific achievement gaps. This is where I place my heart as a leader.
For his answer to the question regarding what made him proud in his current work, Nerad continued in his e-mail:
Leaders don't work alone. Everything I have accomplished has been done with a great, dedicated staff. I am most proud about our staff's child-centered values and focus on ensuring that all students are successful, both academically and socially. Educating children is a team effort across the board.
Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard
Vanden Wyngaard believes Madison is a community with a reputation for facing many of the hard questions in American education, including issues like student achievement, social class, disability and race. "If a community is willing to deal with these things, so am I," she said.
In fact, she added, "My mission on this planet is to eliminate the notion that we can predict the success of our students based on factors like race, language, class, sexual orientation, disability or where they come from. I think Madison is already successfully working on some of these issues."
Vanden Wyngaard, who's known as Dr. V, says she is proud of helping create meaningful change at the middle and high school levels in three different districts, including public schools in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Cleveland and Willow Run, Ohio.
In order to move the process forward, she said, it's necessary to be able to bring together different stakeholders, from business leaders to staff, students and parents. She said she is also proud of work in Racine that will enhance professional development and increase student engagement.
We talk so much about the value of education and the need to do something to reduce dropouts that it may surprise some people that nearly half of all the freshmen in the Milwaukee Public Schools have been ordered not to come to school.
In fact, beginning in the sixth grade, more than a third of every grade level until senior year is suspended and told to stay away from school for up to three days at a time. Many are repeatedly told not to attend school.
The good news is that Milwaukee Superintendent William Andrekopoulos, after more than five years on the job, has finally noticed the destructive practice he has been presiding over and decided to do something about it.
Andrekopoulos says Milwaukee may have the highest suspension rates in the country. He has asked outside educational experts, the Council on Great City Schools, to examine Milwaukee's suspension policies and recommend ways to keep more kids in school.
The highest in the country. Hmmm. That sounds familiar. What else have we read recently about Milwaukee Public Schools leading the country? Oh, we remember now. MPS also had the lowest reading scores in the country.
At Excel High School, in South Boston, teachers do not just prepare students academically for the SAT; they take them on practice walks to the building where the SAT will be given so they won’t get lost on the day of the test.
In Chattanooga, Tenn., the schools have abolished their multitrack curriculum, which pointed only a fraction of students toward college. Every student is now on a college track.
And in the Washington suburb of Prince George’s County, Md., the school district is arranging college tours for students as early as seventh grade, and adding eight core Advanced Placement classes to every high school, including some schools that had none.
Those efforts, and others across the country, reflect a growing sense of urgency among educators that the primary goal of many large high schools serving low-income and urban populations — to move students toward graduation — is no longer enough. Now, educators say, even as they struggle to lift dismal high school graduation rates, they must also prepare the students for college, or some form of post-secondary school training, with the skills to succeed.
The Hartford school district is poised to make a dramatic shift in the way school budgets are prepared to give principals control over just about everything, including the composition of their staff, the length of their school days and years, and more.
"This is a fundamental change," Superintendent Steven Adamowski told the school board Tuesday night.
Historically, the central office has set school budgets, determined how many teachers, social workers and other employees would work in a school, hired those employees and paid for books and programs for the classrooms.
The system made it difficult to hold schools and their principals accountable for student achievement because they had so little control of their own, Adamowski said. "In the past, we said, 'come up with school improvement plans.' But we gave schools exactly the same amount of money and the same way of doing things."
To make the switch this spring to the new "student-based budgeting," Adamowski formed a committee of teachers, principals, parents and budget office employees. What they found in their study, said Ebbie Parsons III, one of the project leaders, was that under the old system of budgeting, funding was uneven and unfair throughout the district.
The Racine Unified School Board wants to have a new superintendent in place by early May, and will host a series of community forums this month to gauge what district residents want in the new hire.
Five forums are scheduled for the mornings and evenings of Jan. 29 and Jan. 30, and the board is hoping that parents, students, staff and other district residents show up.
Meet and Greet the 3 Madison Superintendent Candidates
Via a Ken Syke email:
You are invited to meet and greet each of the three finalists for the Superintendent position of the Madison School District.
The Board of Education has scheduled a Community Meet and Greet for each of the finalists on January 22, 23 and 24. The sessions will be from 4:00 to 5:15 p.m. at the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center [Map] in rooms on Level 4.
One finalist will be present each day.
In the first hour, you will be able to briefly meet and greet the candidate as part of a receiving line. From 5:00 to 5:15 p.m. each day, the candidate will make a brief statement and might take questions. The session will end promptly at 5:15 p.m.
No RSVP is necessary.
This weekend, the Board will select the three finalists from among five semifinalists named on January 7.
The community is invited to this Meet and Greet so please forward this to anyone who might be interested in attending.
The announcement of the new Superintendent is scheduled for early February. For more information about the Superintendent selection process, see the MMSD Today article at http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/today/756.htm.
Thanks for your interest in and support of the Madison School District.
Racine Unified's academic director heads into her next round of interviews for the Madison Schools superintendent job on Friday.
Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard, who joined Racine Unifed in November 2006 after a stint as an assistant superintendent in Ann Arbor, Mich., is one of five semi-finalists for the Madison job, she said Monday.
Vanden Wyngaard and Green Bay Schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad are the two Wisconsin-based educators in the running, the Green Bay Press-Gazette reported last week. Schools officials from Miami, Fla. and Boston have also made it to the semi-final round. The Madison school board will next narrow the field to three candidates, Vanden Wyngaard said.
Sue Kutz, vice president of Racine Unified's school board, said she was shocked to hear that Vanden Wyngaard was interested in the Madison job. Racine Unified is on the hunt for a replacement for interim superintendent Jackson Parker, who stepped in after Tom Hicks resigned in August.
“She has expressed to me several times that she wanted to be superintendent of Racine Unified, so I was kind of surprised," said Kutz, who is chairing the search committee for the district's new leader.
Vanden Wyngaard said she still plans to throw her hat in the ring for the Racine job and will meet the February 20 application deadline. She acknowledged that her interviews in Madison could be viewed as a lack of commitment to her current employer, but said she's trying not to worry much about whatever speculations might be afloat.
“I have a mission for urban education, so I’m looking to be in a place that will help me fulfill that goal," Vanden Wyngaard said Monday. "If the community and the board believe that my candidacy here is important and that I can lead the district toward strategic change, then it won’t matter. If I’m the person for the job in Racine, it’ll happen."
At $6,000 per child that's about $16 million per year. At $9,000 per child, that's about $23 million per year. If we kept 332, that would be $2-3 million more per year.
Also, MMSD not only lost students, which has a negative effect on what the district gets under revenue caps, we've increased our low-income population, which means that for every dollar the district gets, more of those dollars need to be spent on non-instructional services.
Here's the point: administrators either respect their teachers and staff as professionals, or they don't. Professionals are given the tools they need to succeed by their management. Time, support and responsibility are three of the most important tools managers give to those they supervise. Administrators, you are managers for your teachers and staff. You would think I wouldn't have to say that, either, but I DO.
To the Superintendent Selection Committee of Madison Metropolitan Schools
via email (with an opportunity to sign on below):
As you make your selection for the next Superintendent of MMSD, we ask you to choose a candidate that will be able to address the needs of all students, including those of gifted and talented (GT) students. We strongly urge you to hire a candidate that is knowledgeable of and open to the special needs of gifted learners.
The following are reasons this is necessary. References for these points are attached.
Approximately 1 out of every 5 drop-outs is gifted.
Giftedness occurs in all racial and socioeconomic groups. It is short-sighted to ignore the needs of the gifted as we increase in low-income enrollment, and creates even more disparity as those who have resources have other choices.
The statistics for Madison's gifted low-income and minority student drop-outs may be significantly higher than 1 out of 5.
GT students may learn poorly when taught at standard grade level and rate.
It may be thought that the experience of gifted in heterogeneous classrooms is that of the pleasure of excelling above everyone. However, as one GT teacher at Appleton's gifted school observed, it is the experience of a 5th grader whose teacher inexplicably teaches 1st grade curriculum.
Children who are highly gifted have special needs, academically and emotionally, and that should be recognized. Some states, such as New Mexico, give children at both ends of the academic bell curve IEPs.
Gifted children do not automatically “make it anyway”.
In the past 5 years, MMSD TAG staff has been cut by more than half, while other Teaching and Learning Department allocations have increased.
The student to TAG staff ratio in all neighboring districts is at least 4 times better than MMSD’s.
MMSD student enrollment has decreased and enrollment in all neighboring districts has increased. Many of us know families that have left for more challenging academics and school choice (“Bright Flight”).
MMSD spends nearly $14,000 per student. Edgewood Schools’ tuition is approximately $6000/student. Even if that figure is doubled to allow for resources for other children with special needs, there should still be enough for gifted education as well if it is valued.
Many other cities have gifted charters, or at least gifted programming. Janesville, Appleton, and Milwaukee are Wisconsin examples. Why do we not have gifted programming in Madison?
We need a superintendent who is specifically knowledgeable in the needs of the gifted to be able to support “best practices” from GT research.
All children deserve and should be entitled to learn at their level and speed. Our children should not be used for philosophical or political purposes.
The field of education seems particularly susceptible to cycles of philosophy and those in charge often adhere religiously to particular dogma. We need a moderate superintendent, open to parental choices and alternatives and the needs of all students. He or she should be able to recognize that for some, the neighborhood school is best, heterogeneous classes are the best, and for others, a charter school specializing in a high degree of challenge is needed.
We need to think about the future and think globally.
Thank you for your consideration,
Sincerely,
Bonnie
"To sign on to this letter, please email pbe@terracom.net and write "Letter Sign On" in the subject."
Some in a big Madison neighborhood are outraged over the latest plan to change West Side school boundaries to make way for a new school opening near Hawk's Landing next fall.
Residents in the Valley Ridge neighborhood are pledging to start a petition drive and to do whatever it takes to stop the proposal.
The new, yet-to-be-named school on the far West Side has prompted officials to try to rearrange boundary lines on the West Side. But, the boundary lines are different than initially proposed and some in Valley Ridge said they are in shock.
"I feel very deceived," said parent and homeowner Beth Todd, vice president of the Glenn Stephens PTO.
Todd, her husband and other parents said they were always told their children would not be affected by the new boundary changes in meetings with school officials before the referendum for the new school passed.
Currently, Valley Ridge children go to Stephens school as well as Jefferson Middle School. But under a new proposal, that would all drastically change, and, some contend, for no good reason.
The School Board sacrificed administrative staff for teaching positions as part of nearly $1.3 million in program reductions approved Wednesday night for the 2008-'09 year.
The savings generated by eliminating the School District's last staff member dedicated to implementing its gifted-and-talented program, as well as the equivalent of one-third of its department chairmen, helped keep the staff needed to preserve an eight-period day at the middle schools.
The board also voted to reduce the amount of money it distributes to building sites for discretionary spending by $200,000, or 3%, to cover some of the costs of a middle-school program that gives students one period every day for enrichment or extra help.
"None of us wants to make these cuts," board member Kurt O'Bryan said. But he said the district paid its department chairmen more and gave them more time than did other school districts, and that administrative reductions would hurt students less than teacher layoffs.
State-mandated bonuses to help recruit tough-to-find teachers and reward great ones will look different from district to district in Tennessee.
Much-awaited guidelines out last month from the state Board of Education are broad — basically, they direct districts to put in place some sort of plan and launch it by the start of the 2008-09 school year.
That differs from other states experimenting with pay-for-performance. In Texas, for instance, some rewards are tied to specific student achievement on standardized tests. Those behind the Tennessee law say there's good reason to keep it flexible enough for districts to explore options.
"The best chance for it to have a positive impact is to have those plans bubble up from the system level," said Gary Nixon, executive director of the state Board of Education. "They'll have to work with their teachers' associations to come up with a plan that works for them. It's better than it coming from the state."
Teachers unions, which will have to approve the plans in districts where they have bargaining power, opposed the measure in the legislature last year. They said it didn't address the underlying issue of low teacher pay and may not be fair.
Sen. Joe Haynes, D-Goodlettsville, who serves on the state legislature's education committee, said pay incentives have merit if they're distributed correctly.
America's schools have fallen into a giant trap. This trap is epic in its dimensions, because the people capable of leading us out of it have been silenced, and the initiative that could help us is being systematically squashed.
Policymakers and the public have been seduced by a simple formulation. No Child Left Behind posits that we have troubled schools because they have not been accountable. If we make teachers and schools pay a price for the failure of their students, they will bring those students up to speed.
But schools are NOT the only factor determining student success. Urban neighborhoods are plagued by poverty and violence and recent reports in The Chronicle show that as many as 30 percent of the children in these neighborhoods suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Fully 40 percent of our students are English learners, but these students must take the same tests as native English speakers. Moreover, a recent study provides strong evidence that family-based factors such as the quality of day care, the home vocabulary and the amount of time spent reading and watching television at home account for two-thirds of the difference in academic success for students. Nonetheless, NCLB holds only the schools accountable.
Teachers are realizing that this is a raw deal. We can't single-handedly solve these problems, and we can't bring 100 percent of our students to proficiency in the next six years, no matter how "accountable" the law makes us, and no matter the punishments it metes out. But if we speak up to point out the injustice and unreasonableness of the demands on our schools, we are shouted down, accused of making excuses for ourselves and not having high expectations for our students. Thus, teachers have been silenced, our expertise squandered.
In August 2002, when he was named superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools on a 5-4 vote, William Andrekopoulos said he wanted to serve five years in the job.
It seemed an iffy proposition, given his narrow support and the fact that five superintendents before him hadn't lasted that long.
A couple of years later, with a majority of the School Board behind him and a firm grip on the job, Andrekopoulos said he was aiming for six years, which would take him close to his 60th birthday.
Now, as the six-year mark looms, as rumors swirl that he will leave soon, and as the School Board begins the process that usually leads to a decision on a superintendent's contract, Andrekopoulos says he wants to stay in the job for an undetermined length beyond six years.
"I'm in it for the long haul," he said. "I feel energized."
Reinventing high school
The extent of the change can be seen in figures included in the annual "report card" for MPS being presented to a board committee tonight. In 1998-'99, 91% of all MPS high school students were enrolled in 15 large schools and 2% in small high schools. In 2007-'08, 42% were enrolled in nine large high schools and 44% in 30 small high schools or in buildings with several schools within one building. (Other students were enrolled in alternative and "partnership" schools that are part of the MPS system.)
Andrekopoulos also has pushed in recent years to return to more centralized power in MPS, especially when it comes to low-performing schools. Those schools are now being given much more specific directions from the central office about what and how to teach.
Andrekopoulos' salary is $171,376.80 a year, plus a variety of benefits, including payments to a retirement fund of $19,000 a year above the base benefit of MPS employees. His financial package, however, is considerably less than that of many other superintendents of large districts around the country and not much higher than those offered by many Milwaukee-area suburban districts.
Yin & Yang: Madison Superintendent Search 1999 vs 2008
Props to the Madison School Board for a process that has resulted in five interesting candidates. We'll see how it plays out. Susan Troller on the current process:
The pool of five candidates for Madison's top school district job includes two superintendents and high-level administrators from some of the largest and oldest school districts in America.
The candidates -- four men and one woman -- all have experience working in urban school districts. All have doctoral degrees, two are minorities, and three come from out of state. The out-of-staters have administrative experience in the Boston Public Schools in Massachusetts, the Miami/Dade school system in Florida and a combined district that includes schools in Columbus, Ohio.
The two candidates from Wisconsin include Green Bay's current superintendent and the chief academic officer of the Racine Unified School District.
The semifinalists, chosen by the Hazard, Young and Attea national executive search firm, come from an original pool of 25 candidates from 11 states.
The districts where the candidates are currently working range in size from Green Bay and Racine, which have about 20,000 students, to districts like Miami/Dade, which has about 350,000 students.
The way is almost clear for Art Rainwater to be the nextsuperintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Rainwater was the only applicant for the permanent post at the head of theMadison schools as of 11 a.m. today. The application deadline is 4:15 p.m.today.The School Board will meet tonight to discuss the applicants, but membershave said they will make no hiring decisions because one of their number,JoAnn Elder, is out of town. The board planned to interview the superintendentcandidates on Feb. 1 and possibly make a decision that night.
``Of course, one could make the case that we've been interviewing Art forthe past five years, but another few questions probably won't bother him atall,'' said School Board member Deborah Lawson. She is one of three boardmembers who have been pushing to hire Rainwater since this summer withoutconducting a nationwide search.
The board reached a compromise last month in which only employees would beeligible to apply for the job. About a dozen district employees have thecertification to be a superintendent.
Rafael Gomez is hosting a discussion of school models (traditional, charter, magnet) with Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater.
When: 6:30p.m. Tuesday January 8, 2008.
Where:
Covenant Presbyterian Church
318 South Segoe Rd
Madison, WI 53705 [Map]
Background:
Many communities offer a growing number of K-12 educational options. Learn about Madison's current offerings and the climate for future charter/magnet initiatives.
Format:
Question and Answer
Rafael has hosted a number of previous forums, including those that address:
Following their meeting this evening with Superintendent search consultants from Hazard, Young and Attea & Associates, Ltd., the Board of Education has selected five applicants as semifinalists for the position of Superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
The semifinalists were chosen from among 25 persons who sought the position currently held by Art Rainwater. Rainwater will retire on June 30, 2008, with the new Superintendent scheduled to begin on July 1.
If there 's one institution in Madison that needs strong leaders to tackle huge challenges, it 's the city 's school district.
Unfortunately, only two people are seeking two open School Board seats in the coming spring election. The deadline for declaring a candidacy was Wednesday.
That means voters won 't have any choice in who will serve, barring any late write-in campaigns.
That 's a shame -- one that Madison can 't afford to repeat.
he rigors of a campaign test potential board members and help the community choose which direction to take the district.
Competitive School Board campaigns also draw considerable and much-needed attention to huge local issues, such as the increasing number of children who show up for kindergarten unprepared, rising health insurance costs for school employees, shifting demographics, school security and tight limits on spending.
Next week, Waukesha School District leaders plan to take an unusual step, one they contend is necessary after cutting $9.4 million worth of services over the past seven years: They will sit down with their teachers union to hash out a contract with help from a mediator.
What's more unusual is the culprit that Waukesha Superintendent David Schmidt blames in part for the district's financial woes: the state law intended to help school districts keep down teacher compensation costs.
"To some degree, we'd like to say we can control our labor costs," Schmidt said. "The QEO makes that harder."
Schmidt has company in other state school officials who contend the QEO, known more formally as the qualified economic offer law, has created fiscal problems for them. After 15 years with the law, considered one leg of the state's so-called three-legged stool for school funding, calls for change are coming from many quarters.
At issue is what some have called the cap gap that exists between the roughly 2% increase in school revenue allowed annually under current law and the 3.8% boost in salaries and benefits practically guaranteed by the QEO, which says school boards can avoid arbitration if they offer teachers compensation increases in that amount.
"That's probably the core issue right now within our system that's causing some frustration from school district administrators," said state Rep. Brett Davis (R-Oregon).
Although Waukesha school officials have not revealed the details of talks with the teachers union, indications are that their unusual move this year toward mediation and possible arbitration is to seek less than a 3.8% package increase for their teachers.
In addition to school leaders who complain the law's conflict with revenue caps has forced staff cuts, teachers say the QEO increase has suppressed salaries. Critics contend it has helped educators keep inflated benefits.
Lost in the hubbub over a home-school educator’s election to chair of the S.C. Board of Education in 2009 is the man who will precede her in the post — Al Simpson of Lancaster.
Simpson takes over the gavel as state school board chairman from John Tindal of Manning when the panel convenes for its next meeting in mid-January. State board members follow a policy of picking their future leader a year in advance.
Simpson cast a critical preliminary vote Dec. 12 that enabled Kristin Maguire of Clemson to defeat Fred “Trip” DuBard, a Florence businessman.
“We had two good candidates,” he said. “I don’t think this vote is going to cause any problems with the board.”
Maguire, he said, “has a whole year to prepare to move up. She’ll do a fine job. She’s shown me she’s dedicated to public schools.”
So is Simpson.
A product of South Carolina public schools, Simpson’s three children attend Lancaster County public schools, where he said he has seen choice work for families.
Local school districts continued to turn to the unrestricted community service levy this school year, boosting taxes paid to the fund by 10%, almost twice the increase in their total property tax income.
For the 2007-'08 school year, the 60 public school districts in the five-county metro Milwaukee area plan to raise nearly $22.6 million through the community service levy, which has grown rapidly since the state Legislature removed it from under revenue caps seven years ago.
Statewide, school systems will receive about $66.6 million in community service funds through property tax increases this school year, according to information from the state Department of Public Instruction. That compares with just over $17 million raised by Wisconsin school districts for community service activities in 2000-'01, the first year the fund came out from under the state revenue controls.
When legislators first removed community service activities from under the strictures of revenue caps, they said they did so because school districts that run recreational departments for their communities should not be forced to cut educational services to fund outside activities.
It wasn’t enough for Beverly Petrie and her fellow school activists to help the Stillwater district reap some funding in the Nov. 6 election. After they fought for the levy, they figured there was more to be done. So, they decided to set their sights on lobbying the Legislature on behalf of the district this winter.
“One of the things we heard a lot during the [levy] campaign is people believe it’s the state’s responsibility to pay for public schools,” Petrie said. “So, hearing that so often during the campaign, it’s hard for us to let it all collapse at this point.”
Thus began Stillwater schools’ legislative action committee, still without an official name or agenda.
Around the Twin Cities, parents are banding together to take the cause of their school districts to the Capitol. Often, they’re trying to help secure more funding. With the beginning of the legislative session about two months away, such groups are now holding their first meetings and formulating legislative platforms.
The latest plan will be presented to the public with an opportunity for comment early next year, said Sue Abplanalp, assistant superintendent for elementary schools.
Known as Plan A, it moves fewer children and brings building capacities and numbers of low-income students at all schools into closer alignment, said Kurt Kiefer, Madison schools' director of research.
The good news is that the feds refused to fund the school district's proposal to revamp the high schools. The plan was wrongheaded in many respects, including its seeming intent to eliminate advanced classes that are overwhelmingly white and mix kids of distressingly varied achievement levels in the same classrooms.
This is a recipe for encouraging more middle-class flight to the suburbs. And, more to the point, addressing the achievement gap in high school is way too late. Turning around a hormone-surging teenager after eight years of educational frustration and failure is painfully hard.
We need to save these kids when they're still kids. We need to pull them up to grade level well before they hit the wasteland of middle school. That's why kindergarten for 4-year-olds is a community imperative.
As it happens, state school Supt. Elizabeth Burmaster issued a report last week announcing that 283 of Wisconsin's 426 school districts now offer 4K. Enrollment has doubled since 2001, to almost 28,000 4-year-olds statewide.
Burmaster nailed it when she cited research showing that quality early-childhood programs prepare children "to successfully transition into school by bridging the effects of poverty, allowing children from economically disadvantaged families to gain an equal footing with their peers."
Metro Schools Director Pedro Garcia's legacy as an idea man has hit a snag.
The school chief once enjoyed strong support for his ideas on reforming Nashville's public education. But after Metro failed to meet No Child Left Behind requirements for four years in a row — one of the first two Tennessee districts to do so — state officials have a louder voice in how the district is run.
And its leaders are listening.
Board members want to take the state's advice and hold off on Garcia's new ideas until the district gets a handle on the basics. The attitude marks a significant shift in the dynamic between the board, the director and the state Department of Education.
"Some things have come back to haunt us," said District 7 board member Edward Kindall, who represents north Nashville. "I can't totally blame Dr. Garcia or the administration. I think in some instances, we haven't focused on the right thing."
Amid the innovations, many of Metro's students have been struggling to learn math and reading. Poor reading scores among Hispanic and black students and dismal math scores across the county prompted the failing marks under No Child Left Behind.
"Clearly the administration has tried to make a lot of big splashes with their innovation, but they haven't always given a lot of thought to what they're doing," said Erick Huth, president of the Metro Nashville Education Association, the teachers union.
In this education nirvana, teachers would decide what to teach and when. Teachers and parents would hire and fire principals. No supervisors from downtown would tell anyone -- neither teachers nor students -- what to wear.
These are among the ideas a delegation of teachers and their union officers are urging L.A. schools Supt. David L. Brewer to include in the school reform plan he will present to the school board Tuesday.
If Brewer passes on the delegation's proposals, the union can go directly to the seven-member Board of Education. Employee unions recently have had success in getting the board to overrule the superintendent on health benefits for some part-time workers and on school staffing.
At stake now is the Los Angeles Unified School District's effort to turn around its 34 most troubled middle and high schools. The data suggests the urgency: As many as three-quarters of the students in these "high priority schools" scored well below grade level across multiple subjects on last year's California Standards Tests.
Whatever remedy emerges is likely to become a blueprint for widespread reform efforts. Brewer and his team are working on their 11th draft; the drafts have evolved significantly since September because of resistance inside and outside the school system.
Assistant school superintendents here are routinely summoned to a 10 a.m. Thursday meeting where they must answer for missing test scores, overdue building repairs and other lapses, which are presented in painful detail on PowerPoint slides. Excuses are not an option.
It is the latest evolution of Compstat, a widely copied management program pioneered by the New York Police Department in 1994. Paterson is one of a half-dozen school districts around the country that have embraced this confrontational approach, known here as SchoolStat, in an effort to improve school performance and overhaul bureaucracies long seen as bloated, wasteful and unresponsive to the public.
SchoolStat borrows the tactics of the Compstat program — regular, intense meetings in which police officials famously pick apart crime data and, just as often, their subordinates — to analyze police performance and crime trends, and to deploy resources to trouble spots. The school version taps into an ever-expanding universe of data about standardized testing and school operations to establish a system of accountability.
In Maryland, the process has been credited with reducing teacher vacancies and increasing student immunization rates in Baltimore schools. In Montgomery County, Md., it has pushed principals to come up with strategies like encouraging students to take the Preliminary SAT by offering a free pancake breakfast if they attend.
For many urban youth in poverty moving from school to work is about as likely as having a career in the NBA.While urban schools struggle and fail at teaching basic skills they are extremely effective at teaching skills which predispose youth to fail in the world of work.The urban school environment spreads a dangerous contagion in the form of behaviors and beliefs which form an ideology.This ideology "works" for youngsters by getting them through urban middle and secondary schools.But the very ideology that helps youth slip and slide through school becomes the source of their subsequent failure.It is an ideology that is easily learned, readily implemented, rewarded by teachers and principals, and supporting by school policies.It is an ideology which schools promulgate because it is easier to accede to the students' street values than it is to shape them into more gentle human beings.The latter requires a great deal of persistent effort not unlike a dike working against an unyielding sea.It is much easier for urban schools to lower their expectations and simply survive with youth than it is to try to change them.
The ideology of unemployment insures that those infected with it will be unable to enter or remain in the world of work without serious in-depth unlearning and retraining.Urban youth are not simply ill prepared for work but systematically and carefully trained to be quitters, failures, and the discouraged workers who no longer even seek employment.What this means is that it is counterproductive to help urban schools do better at what they now do since they are a basic cause of their graduates living out lives of hopelessness and desperation.
The dropout problem among urban youth--as catastrophic as it is--is less detrimental than this active training for unemployment.We need be more concerned for "successful" youth who graduate since it is they who have been most seriously infected.They have been exposed longest, practiced the anti-work behaviors for the longest period, and been rewarded most.In effect, the urban schools create a pool of youth much larger than the number of dropouts who we have labeled as "successful" but who have been more carefully schooled for failure.
Update on Credit for non-MMSD Courses, including Youth Options Program:
At the November 26, 2007 meeting of the MMSD BOE's Performance and Achievement Committee [18MB mp3 audio], the District's Attorney handed out a draft of a policy for the District's Youth Options Program dated November 20, 2007. It is a fine working draft. However, it has been written with rules making it as difficult as possible for students to actually take advantage of this State-mandated program. Thus, I urge all families with children who may be affected by this policy now or in the future to request a copy of this document, read it over carefully, and then write within the next couple of weeks to all BOE members, the District's Attorney, Pam Nash, and Art Rainwater with suggestions for modifications to the draft text. For example, the current draft states that students are not eligible to take a course under the YOP if a comparable course is offered ANYWHERE in the MMSD (i.e., regardless of whether the student has a reasonable method to physically access the District's comparable course). It also restricts students to taking courses at institutions "located in this State" (i.e., precluding online courses such as ones offered for academically advanced students via Stanford's EPGY and Northwestern's CTD).
The Attorney's memorandum dated November 21, 2007 to this Committee, the BOE, and the Superintendent outlined a BOE policy chapter entitled "Educational Options" that would include, as well, a policy regarding "Credit for Courses Taken Outside the MMSD". Unfortunately, this memo stated that this latter policy as one "to be developed". It has now been almost 6 years (!) since Art Rainwater promised us that the District would develop an official policy regarding credit for courses taken outside the MMSD. A working draft available for public comment and BOE approval has yet to appear. In the interim, the "freeze" the BOE unanimously approved, yet again, last winter has been ignored by administrators, some students are leaving the MMSD because of its absence, and chaos continues to rein because there exists no clearly written policy defining the rules by which non-MMSD courses can be taken for high school credit. Can anyone give us a timetable by which an official BOE-approved policy on this topic will finally be in place?
Links:
11/26/2007 Performance & Achievement Committee Meeting Video and Audio
conducted a survey in September 2007, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, about state data systems to determine the number of states that have built the infrastructure to tap into the power of longitudinal data. Similar surveys were conducted by NCEA in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. This website provides an overview of the findings of the survey in addition to a state-by-state analysis of the policy implications of each state's data system.
The Power of Longitudinal Data
Longitudinal data matches individual student records over time, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade and into post secondary education. States are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to improve student achievement. But without quality data, they are essentially flying blind. Policymakers need to act now to put in place the policies and resources to ensure that each state has a longitudinal data system and the culture and capacity to translate the information into specific action steps to improve student achievement. When states collect the most relevant data and are able to match individual student records over time, they can answer the questions that are at the core of educational effectiveness. Longitudinal data (data gathered on the same student from year to year) makes it possible to:
If your definition of "public school" is the regular public school system, you are talking about a slice of Milwaukee's educational infrastructure in which the student population is getting smaller each year.
But if your definition means any school where public dollars pay for children's educations, you're talking about a bigger pie, with more ingredients - a pie unlike anything served elsewhere in the United States.
Voucher schools, charter schools, alternative schools, ways of sending kids to schools in other communities - parents, especially those with low income, continue to have a wide array of choices in Milwaukee, all of them funded by public dollars.
Thousands of parents are taking advantage of that. Enrollment statistics for this year show more than 30% of all Milwaukee kids whose educations are paid for with tax dollars attend schools outside the main roster of Milwaukee Public Schools. That appears to be the highest percentage on record.
While enrollment in MPS elementary, middle and high schools fell almost 4% to 81,681, the number of students using publicly funded vouchers to attend 122 private schools in the city rose 8% to 19,233.
At a struggling school in Benton Harbor, Mich., all eyes are on a young, new principal who has brought discipline and excitement about learning. Michigan is one of several states with schools that have failed to meet its No Child Left Behind goals for at least five consecutive years.
Madison School District Administration Presentation on High School Redesign
The Madison School viewed a presentation from the Administration Monday evening on their proposed High School redesign. Listen via this mp3 audio file (or watch the MMSDTV Video Archive).
"Sometimes institutional history can be a weight around your neck," Rainwater noted. "This can be an opportunity to bring in new ideas, and new blood," he added.
Rainwater has said change is necessary because high schools today look and feel much like they have for generations but that students will live and work in a world that has changed dramatically, and which demands new skills and abilities.
He acknowledged that the path was likely to be bumpy, and noted that the plan -- which has been developed thus far without public input -- recognizes that there are major concerns in the community regarding changes to Madison's school system.
Some of those concerns include worries about trying to balance resources among students of widely varying abilities, about "dumbing down" the curriculum with inclusive classrooms, the potential for the high schools to lose their unique personalities and concerns that addressing the broad ranges of culture in the district will not serve students well.
High School Redesign Committee (currently there are no parent or community members - Susan Troller "which has been developed thus far without public input")
Curriculum Acceleration/Middle School Charter Meeting: November 26 at 11:30 a.m.
A group of parents will be gathering to discuss developing a public school charter (or other educational alternatives) for middle schoolers who need an advanced level and faster pace of instruction (curriculum acceleration). Our first meeting will be Monday, November 26 at 11:30 am for lunch at the Sun Print Cafe, 1 South Pinckney Street [Map], in the US Bank building. If interested, please email Bonnie at pbe@terracom.net.
A little-publicized provision of the No Child Left Behind Act requiring states to identify "persistently dangerous schools" is hampered by widespread underreporting of violent incidents and by major differences among the states in defining unsafe campuses, several audits say. Out of about 94,000 schools in the United States, only 46 were designated as persistently dangerous in the past school year.
Maryland had six, all in Baltimore; the District and Virginia had none.
At Anacostia Senior High School last school year, private security guards working under D.C. police recorded 61 violent offenses, including three sexual assaults and one assault with a deadly weapon. There were 21 other nonviolent cases in which students were caught bringing knives and guns to school. Anacostia is not considered a persistently dangerous school.
One high school in Los Angeles had 289 cases of battery, two assaults with a deadly weapon, a robbery and two sex offenses in one school year, according to an audit by the U.S. Department of Education's inspector general. It did not meet the state's definition of a persistently dangerous school, or PDS. None of California's roughly 9,000 schools has.
The reason, according to an audit issued by the Department of Education in August: "States fear the political, social, and economic consequences of having schools designated as PDS, and school administrators view the label as detrimental to their careers. Consequently, states set unreasonable definitions for PDS and schools have underreported violent incidents."
Critics of the law, including lawmakers who hope the policy can be changed as part of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, say the low number is a sign the legislation is not working.
Madison School District School Security Discussion
Madison School Board: Monday evening, November 12, 2007: 40MB mp3 audio file. Participants include: Superintendent Art Rainwater, East High Principal Al Harris, Cherokee Middle School Principal Karen Seno, Sennett Middle School Principal Colleen Lodholz and Pam Nash, assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools.
A few notes:
First 30 minutes: The City of Madison has agreed to fund police overtime in the schools. Johnny Winston, Jr. asked about supporting temporary "shows of force" to respond to issues that arise. Maya Cole asked what they (Administrators) do when staff choose not to get involved. East High Principal Al Harris mentioned that his staff conducts hall sweeps hourly. Sennett Principal Colleen Lodholz mentioned that they keep only one entrance open during recess.
52 minutes: Al Harris discussed the importance of consistency for staff, students and parents. He has named an assistant principal to be responsible for security. East now has data for the past year for comparison purposes. Additional assistant principals are responsible for classrooms, transitions and athletics.
55 minutes: Art Rainwater discussed District-wide procedures, a checklist for major incidents and that today parents are often informed before anyone else due to cell phones and text messaging.
Recommendations (at 60 minutes):
Pam Nash mentioned a strong need for increased communication. She discussed the recent West High School community forums and their new personal safety handbook. This handbook includes an outline of how West is supervised.
68 to 74 minutes: A discussion of the District's equity policy vis a vis resource allocations for special needs students.
77 minutes - Steve Hartley discusses his experiences with community resources.
81+ minutes: Steve Hartley mentioned the need for improved tracking and Art Rainwater discussed perceptions vs what is actually happening. He also mentioned that the District is looking at alternative programs for some of these children. Student Board Representative Joe Carlsmith mentioned that these issues are not a big part of student life. He had not yet seen the new West High safety handbook. Carol Carstensen discussed (95 minutes) that these issues are not the common day to day experiences of our students and that contacts from the public are sometimes based more on rumor and gossip than actual reality.
I'm glad the Board and Administration had this discussion.
A schedule of forums appears on their website (Madison is 12/6/2007). More:
Welcome to the Wisconsin Way! You’ve made the first step to helping lower Wisconsin’s property taxes, while protecting our services and maintaining Wisconsin’s quality of life.
A groundswell of public concern about the affordability of property taxes on the one hand and the need to maintain Wisconsin’s critical infrastructure on the other has prompted several statewide leadership groups to join forces in a historic search for solutions called The Wisconsin Way.
In the coming months, the original conveners of the Wisconsin Way—the Wisconsin Counties Association, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, Wisconsin Realtors Association, Wisconsin Transportation Builders Association and Wood Communications Group—will host a series of public gatherings around the state in an effort to engage Wisconsin citizens in a constructive, solution-oriented conversation about what we can do to make Wisconsin taxes fairer and reduce the property tax burden without sacrificing the quality of public services that have made Wisconsin a special place to live and work.
There are casual days at Milwaukee College Preparatory School when it comes to what students can wear. Polo shirts (red for almost all the students and yellow for standouts who have earned privileges) are the uniform for those days. Other days, students have to wear blazers and ties.
But there are no casual days at the school when it comes to academics, even down to the kindergartners.
"Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go," eighth-grade math teacher Edward Richerson exhorts his students as a half dozen head toward the blackboard to solve some equations. They're not moving fast enough for him.
A couple of them falter in their explanations. "What I've told you not to do is get lazy on these equations, which is what you've done," Richerson says. If you're not getting them, it's not because you're not smart enough, he says. "Since we are overachievers," he begins as he tells them why they have to be as picky about the details of the answers as he is.
In a 5-year-old kindergarten class, children do an exercise in counting and understanding sequences of shapes. Four-year-olds are expected to be on the verge of reading by Christmas.
In national education circles, phrases such as "no excuses" and names such as "KIPP" have come to stand for a hard-driving approach to educating low-income urban children, and that includes longer days, strict codes of conduct, an emphasis on mastering basics and a dedication among staff members approaching zeal. The Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, operates 57 schools in cities around the country and has a record that is not perfect but is noteworthy for its success.
Milwaukee College Prep, 2449 N. 36th St., is the prime example in Milwaukee of a no-excuses school. The charter school, which is publicly funded and was chartered through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is not formally a KIPP school, although it is affiliated with the KIPP movement.
The word "mediation" usually isnt all that menacing. But these days, and in this district, "mediation" packs plenty of punch.
A few weeks ago the Waukesha School Board announced it had taken its teachers to mediation. That means a neutral party will try to negotiate a settlement between the teachers union (the Education Association of Waukesha) and the board.
Whats most significant about the boards action is the mediator can declare an impasse and send the proposals to an arbitrator. And that, my friend, is a big deal.
Why? First, because arbitration is the labor-relations version of high-stakes poker. Its a winner-take-all proposition. Both sides present their proposal to a (supposedly) neutral third party, who picks the plan he or she believes fairest. There is no in-between - you win or you lose.
Arbitration also is a big deal because its hardly ever done, at least when state public schools are involved.
"Yes, its significant," said David Schmidt, superintendent of the School District of Waukesha for the past 10 years. "Its the first time weve done it since Ive been here."
Schmidt says he is fine with the teachers union, that the real trouble is in Madison. (The EAW is very much in agreement.) But right now, the problem has to be fixed closer to home. "What we can control locally are our expenditures," Schmidt says.
In a notebook on her desk at Rock View Elementary School, Principal Patsy Roberson keeps tabs on every student: red for those who have failed to attain proficiency on Maryland's statewide exam, an asterisk for students learning English and squares for black or Hispanic children whose scores place them "in the gap."
Roberson and the Rock View faculty are having remarkable success lifting children out of that gap, the achievement gap that separates poor and minority children from other students and represents one of public education's most intractable problems.
They have done it with an unusual approach. The Kensington school's 497 students are grouped into classrooms according to reading and math ability for more than half of the instructional day.
The technique, called performance-based grouping, is uncommon in the region. Some educators believe it too closely resembles tracking, the outmoded practice of assigning students to inflexible academic tracks by ability.
Educators say Rock View, however, is using the same basic concept to opposite effect, and the results have been positive. While some other Montgomery County schools serving low-income populations have posted higher test scores, few have shown such improvement or consistency across socioeconomic and racial lines.
Mayor Francis Slay has laid the groundwork for a new system of hand-picked public charter schools, meant to rival the city's sinking school district and draw families back to the city.
Today, Slay's office will send roughly 70 letters to local educators, Midwest nonprofit education groups, and big charter school companies across the country.
Those letters will invite each of them to start a school here.
His goal is to open quality schools. How many? Realistically, he thinks two or three a year, adding as many as 30 in the next 10 years.
The schools would steer thousands of kids away from the St. Louis Public Schools.
"Our city is cleaner, safer and more beautiful than it has been in a long time," Slay wrote in the letter. "In short, St. Louis has it all — except enough quality public schools."
But some say the plan would create a cycle disastrous to the city school district.
"It sounds like a plan, then, to abandon half the children in St. Louis," said Peter Downs, president of the elected St. Louis School Board. "It's like setting up two fire departments, two police departments. If you try to do it at the same cost, you have a lot more impoverished schools."
If Congress doesn't get the job done, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says she'll consider using her authority to require states to report high school graduation rates in a more uniform and accurate way.
"I think we need some truth in advertising," Spellings said in an interview, referring to the hodgepodge of ways states now report graduation data.
States calculate their graduation rates using all sorts of methods, many of which critics say are based on unreliable information about school dropouts.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress have drafted proposals to better gauge how well high schools are doing at getting students diplomas, and doing it on time. The changes are part of a rewrite of the No Child Left Behind education law, but that bill's progress has stalled amid disputes over unrelated testing and teacher pay issues.
If a school boundary initiative in western Independence and Sugar Creek succeeds, test scores in the seven contested buildings may indeed increase right off the bat.
But that won’t necessarily demonstrate that the Independence School District is superior to the Kansas City School District.
A Kansas City Star analysis of test-score data suggests that Independence would generally inherit more of the higher-performing students from the seven buildings, leaving more of the tougher educational challenges to the Kansas
I receive many reports on how to improve our schools. This is an occupational hazard. Reading them is often confusing, depressing, disorienting and maddening. But there is no help for it. The academic papers, commission recommendations and task force action plans are usually written by some of the smartest experts in the country. They have stuff I need to know, so I plow through them.
It is best that I be vague, however, about what the margins of these reports look like after I have finished with them. I have just gone through, for instance, a paper by two leading experts, W. Norton Grubb of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jeannie Oakes of the University of California, Los Angeles. I looked forward to reading their report, "'Restoring Value' to the High School Diploma: The Rhetoric and Practice of Higher Standards. 432K PDF" It was published by the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University. They focus on the push for rigor in high schools and argue that the discussion spends too much time on narrow definitions of rigor, based on test scores and demanding courses, and ignores other conceptions, such as more sophisticated levels of understanding and the ability to apply learning in unfamiliar settings.
The authors write well and know their stuff. Nonetheless, here are some of the words I wrote on the margins: "stupid," "so what?" "no! no!" "recipe for disaster," "booo!" "who cares?" and a few others I may not quote on a family Web site.
Ordinarily, I would use this column to flay Grubb and Oakes for disagreeing with me on how to fix high schools, my favorite topic. But I am writing this on a lovely Saturday, with the leaves turning and the birds happily washing themselves in the little puddles left by my garden-watering wife. Why don't I, just this once, write about this report's good points? They include at least seven astute warnings about sloppy thinking in the high school reform debate. Here they are, plus one mistake in their thinking that I could not resist trashing.
Inside Wingra School, the day is just beginning, and already Lisa Kass is commandeering a discussion about violence sparked by storyboards written by her fourth- and fifth-grade students.
"Why do you play violent videogames?" she asks. "Do you think the violence affects you?" This leads to a 45-minute discussion that temporarily pushes back a math lesson.
"It's cartoon violence, it's not real violence," says one boy. "Well, really the goal is to kill people," admits another. That, says a third student, is why he plays mostly strategy videogames.
The students at Wingra are articulate, reflective and eager to share their opinions. They refine their thoughts as Kass prods them to be more specific or clearer.
Kass, a 19-year veteran Wingra teacher, says later: "I don't want to censor them, but I want them to think about what's appropriate and what effects violence might have on them and others."
Board of Education Progress Report -- October, 2007
I hope your school year is going well. Below is the October BOE update.
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact myself at
asilveira@madison.k12.wi.us or the entire board at
comments@madison.k12.wi.us
Arlene Silveira
Superintendent Search: Our consultants presented a summary of the
community input sessions on the desired characteristics for a new
superintendent. Read the entire report at www.mmsd.org/topics/supt/.
The desired superintendent characteristics approved by the BOE are
also available at this site. The consultant firm is recruiting and
screening candidates and will bring a slate of candidates back to the
BOE in January.
Fine Arts Task Force (FATF): The FATF is seeking community input on
their goals for Fine Arts education. The survey is available at www.mmsd.org/boe/finearts/.
Referendum: The District will receive an approximate $5.5M windfall
from the city as a result of closing 2 tax incremental districts (TID).
The BOE voted to use this money to close our projected budget gap for
the '08/09 school year. Because we will use the money to close the
projected gap, we also made the decision that we will not go to
referendum in the Spring '08. In the summer of '08, the BOE will begin
discussions of a possible operating referendum to cover the gap for the
'09/10 school year and beyond.
Performance and Achievement Committee: (Lawrie Kobza, Johnny Winston
Jr., Maya Cole). The committee started discussions on different school
models (charter, magnet, neighborhood, etc.). Discussions will continue
in committee. The committee reviewed a plan/proposal to expand our Play
and Learn program by making the program "mobile". Further discussion
will continue at full BOE. The committee began the discussion of
updating district performance goals to make them more measurable and
relevant. The first goal being evaluated is focused on improving
student achievement.
Human Resources Committee: (Johnny Winston Jr., Lawrie Kobza, Beth
Moss). The committee reviewed the results of a study that had been
requested by the BOE to determine how the MMSD Administrator pay and
benefits structure and related policies compare to other selected school
districts in Wisconsin. Discussion will continue in committee.
Communications Committee: (Beth Moss, Lawrie Kobza, Carol Carstensen).
WAES (Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools) made a presentation on
state funding. A legislative update on the state budget was also
provided.
Finance and Operations Committee: (Lucy Mathiak, Carol Carstensen, Maya
Cole). The committee took the lead at analyzing the TID and referendum
options and making recommendations to the full BOE for vote (above).
Long Range Planning: (Carol Carstensen, Lucy Mathiak, Beth Moss).
There was a presentation on all of the initiatives in the District's
Energy Management Program. There are many exciting programs in place
across the District. Since our program was put into effect, we have
decreased consumption rates and expenditures. Had we continued to
consume at 1997 consumption rates, our utility expenditures would have
been $4,400,000 more.
Community Partnerships: (Maya Cole, Johnny Winston Jr., Lucy Mathiak).
The committee is in the process of defining "Partnerships". They are
also reviewing the policy on parent involvement in the schools.
Madison School Board Discussion of School Models, Including Basic and Alternative Approaches
The Madison School Board's Performance and Achievement Committee recently discussed alternative education models. Watch the video here (or download the mp4 file via a CTRL Click. mp4 files can be played back on many portable media players such as iPods). Listen via this mp3 audio file.
In a move applauded by some charter school advocates, the state Department of Public Instruction has approved only 10 of 50 applications so far this year for federal funding aimed at expanding independent public schools.
Triggering the new scrutiny was a reminder this year from the U.S. Department of Education about requirements for the grants. That included ensuring Wisconsin applicants met the federal definitions for such terms as "eligible applicant" and "charter school," according to Education Department spokeswoman Elaine Quesinberry.
The 20% approval rate contrasts to previous years, when state administration of charter school grants helped fuel a boom of such schools. In 2006 alone, the DPI approved 100 of 121 applications, an 83% acceptance rate.
The federal intervention addresses concerns about the degree to which entities using the charter school title are autonomous and accountable, said Todd Ziebarth, a policy analyst with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Audio: Madison School Board 2007-2008 Final $349M Budget Discussion
Listen to the Madison School Board discuss the District Administration's proposed final 2007-2008 budget: $349M, up $10M from the previously approved $339M last spring. The Board had an interesting discussion regarding the use of these new funds. Final approval is scheduled for Monday evening, 10/29/2007 @ 5:45p.m.:
Approval of Finalized 2007-08 Budget Adjustments and Adoption of the Tax Levy.
It will be interesting to see where these additional funds are spent, particularly in light of the annual spring ritual of reducing the budget increases. Send your thoughts to the Madison School Board: comments@madison.k12.wi.us
Madison School District Proposed Final 2007-2008 Budget: $349M
The Madison School District's Administration proposed a $349,562,776 final 2007-2008 budget last night [$14,404.26/student (24,268)]. This represents an increase of $10,136,058 from the adopted current year budget ($339,427,718). It also represents a $16,460,911 increase (4.94%) over the 2006-2007 revised budget. [Citizen's Budget]
It will be interesting to see where these additional funds are spent. Send your thoughts to the Madison School Board: comments@madison.k12.wi.us
Superintendent Rainwater mentioned last night that 55 additional students "open enrolled" out of the MMSD this year, taking their spending authority with them. The numbers are evidently "trending up".
The Members of the Madison School Board have agreed to attend and participate in the Northside Planning Council and the East Attendance Area Parent/Teacher Organization Coalition (NPC/EAAPTO) Forum to be held on Sunday, October 21, 2007 (3:00p.m. at the UW Memorial Union's Tripp Commons). This joint meeting of the NPC/EAAPTO Coalition and the members of the School Board constitutes an open meeting of the members of the Madison School Board for which public notice must be given pursuant to Wisconsin Statute § 19.82 through § 19.84.
But do small, neighborhood schools really lead to higher achievement levels for students?
"I don 't think there 's any hard-core answer to that, " said Allan Odden, a UW-Madison education professor and nationally recognized expert in education policy and reform.
Research so far, Odden said, fails to show a clear link between achievement and school size, particularly within the range of sizes in Madison.
The district 's smallest elementary school is Nuestro Mundo, with 181 students, and largest is Leopold, with 718.
Odden does offer an opinion, though, of Madison 's turmoil over neighborhood schools.
"What I would say is the city has too many schools in some neighborhoods and it costs too much to keep some of them open, " Odden said. "The issue to me here is not effectiveness (of small schools compared to larger schools). The issue to me is budget and politics. "
The other trade-off, in some neighborhood schools, is that students may be packed into classrooms or have inferior bathrooms or gyms, compared to their peers in larger, newer buildings.
This is an issue. The classroom fixtures in new school structures (far west elementary building) are quite different than those found in most facilities.
Beebe made his pitch at a meeting of the school board's communications committee chaired by Beth Moss, who says one of her top priorities this year is developing strategies to more aggressively seek changes in state funding.
"We're going to have to continue to cut the budget annually, and it's going to be worse and worse," laments Moss, a school board newcomer elected in April. She fears the district will have no choice but to begin "dismantling programs.
As for the perennial issue of school funding, Moss and others are gearing up for a Nov. 15 state Senate education committee hearing. Tom Beebe's group supports a proposal to hike state funding for K-12 education by $2.6 billion a year, based on a model developed by UW-Madison professor Allan Odden.
But as Beebe was asking the Madison district to join his group as a paying member, Rainwater expressed "serious doubts" about the plan and questioned whether Madison schools would benefit. The funding scheme, Beebe admitted, could potentially lead to an initial decrease in state funding to Madison.
"In the first year, Madison gets screwed for political reasons," Beebe told the committee — hardly the best message to send when seeking money from a cash-strapped district.
Beebe might benefit from a lesson in better communication. Or maybe he believes that sometimes, the best PR strategy is telling it like it really is.
I continue to believe that the odds of successfully influencing the State Legislature - in Madison's favor - are long. Better to spend the effort locally on community partnerships and substantively addressing the many issues facing our public schools (such as academic preparation in elementary and middle schools so that students are prepared for high school, rather than watering down high school curriculum). Madison spends more per student (about $13,997) than the average Wisconsin School District (11,085).
Ed Hughes and Marj Passman on Madison's Small Learning Community Climate and Grant Application
I sent an email to Ed and Marj, both of whom have announced their plans to run for Madison School Board next spring, asking the following:
I'm writing to see what your thoughts are on the mmsd's high school "reform" initiative, particularly in light of two things:
The decision to re-apply for the US Dept of Education Grant next month
The lack of any public (any?) evaluation of the results at West and Memorial in light of their stated SLC goals?
In other words, how do you feel about accountability? :)
They replied:
Marj Passman:
I am generally supportive of small learning communities and the decision to reapply for a Federal grant. Our high schools continue to provide a rich education for most students -- especially the college bound - but there is a significant and maybe growing number of students who are not being engaged. They need our attention. The best evidence is that well implemented small learning communities show promise as part of the solution to increasing the engagement and achievement of those who are not being well served, do no harm and may help others also. My experience as a teacher backs up the research because I found that the caring relationships between staff and students so crucial to reaching those students falling between the cracks on any level of achievement are more likely to develop in smaller settings. Some form of small learning communities are almost a given as part of any reform of our high schools and if we can get financial help from the Federal government with this part of the work, I'm all for it.
I think it is important not to overestimate either the problems or the promise of the proposed solutions. The first step in things like this is to ask what is good that we want to preserve. Our best graduates are competitive with any students anywhere. The majority of our graduates are well prepared for their next academic or vocational endeavors. We need to keep doing the good things we do well. If done successfully, SLCs offer as much for the top achieving students as for any group – individual attention, focus on working with others of their ability, close connection to staff, and consistent evaluation.
You also asked about "accountability" and the evaluations of the existing SLCs. Both evaluations are generally positive, show some progress in important areas and point to places where improvements still need to be made. Neither contains any alarming information that would suggest the SLCs should be abandoned. The data from these limited studies should be looked at with similar research elsewhere that supports SLC as part of the solution to persistent (and in Madison) growing issues.
Like many I applauded when all the Board members asked for a public process for the High Schools of the Future project and like many I have been woefully disappointed with what I've seen so far. Because of this and the coming changes in district leadership I'd like to see the redesign time line extended (the final report is due in April) to allow for more input from both the public and the new superintendent.
From what I know, I am not opposed to MMSD re-applying for the U.S. Dept. of Education grant next month. From my review of the grant application, it did not seem to lock the high schools into new and significant changes. Perhaps that is a weakness of the application. But if the federal government is willing to provide funds to our high schools to do what they are likely to do anyway, I'm all for it.
Like you, I am troubled with the apparent lack of evaluation of results at West and Memorial attributable to their small learning communities initiatives. This may seem inconsistent with my view on applying for the grant, but I do not think we should proceed further down an SLC path without having a better sense of whether in fact it is working at the two schools that have tried it. It seems to me that this should be a major focus of the high school redesign study, but who knows what is going on with that. I asked recently and was told that the study kind of went dormant for awhile after the grant application was submitted.
My own thoughts about high school are pointing in what may be the opposite direction - bigger learning communities rather than smaller. I am concerned about our high schools being able to provide a sufficiently rich range of courses to prepare our students for post-high school life and to retain our students whose families have educational options. The challenges the schools face in this regard were underscored last spring when East eliminated German classes, and now offers only Spanish and French as world language options.
It seems to me that one way to approach this issue is to move toward thinking of the four comprehensive high schools as separate campuses of a single, unified, city-wide high school in some respects. We need to do a lot more to install sufficient teleconferencing equipment to allow the four schools to be linked - so that a teacher in a classroom at Memorial, say, can be seen on a screen in classrooms in the other three schools. In fact, views of all four linked classrooms should simultaneously be seen on the screen. With this kind of linkage, we could take advantage of economies of scale and have enough student interest to justify offering classes in a rich selection of languages to students in all four high schools. I'm sure there are other types of classes where linked classrooms would also make sense.
This kind of approach raises issues. For example, LaFollette's four block system would be incompatible with this approach. There would also be a question of whether there would need to be a teacher or educational assistant in every classroom, even if the students in the classroom are receiving instruction over the teleconferencing system from another teacher in another school. I would hope that these are the kinds of issues the high school re-design group would be wrestling with. Perhaps they are, or will, but at this point there seems to be no way to know.
There are some off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts prompted by your question and by Maya Cole's post about the high school re-design study. Feel free to do what you want with this response.
Madison School Board Discussion of Fund 80 Based Community Partnerships
Monday evening's Madison School Board meeting included a fascinating and quite useful discussion of the way in which the district "grants" money to (or creates partnerships with) local groups via Fund 80 (Fund 80, or "Community Services" is money sourced from local property taxes that lives outside the state revenue caps. This means that Fund 80 spending can grow as fast as the School Board approves). The growth of Fund 80 spending has been the subject of some controversy during the recent past.
Props to the school board for discussing and addressing this matter.
Another factor that will drive property taxes is the changing real estate market. I noted nearly two years ago, that Madison had about 14,000 more parcels in 2005, than 1990. This creates a larger pie to spread government and school spending across. Slower or no growth in the property tax base may mean larger tax increases per parcel than we've seen in the past (along with flat state funding). Madison is considered a "property rich" school district, therefore we receive a much smaller percentage of our budget from redistributed state taxes and fees (this approach was referred to as the "Robin Hood Act" in Texas). The MMSD's handy citizen's budget notes that 65% of its revenues arrive via local property taxes. Finally, Madison's property rich status means that any increase in spending beyond the revenue limits via referendums reduce state aids. For example, $1.00 of new referendum spending may cost local property taxpayers $1.60 or thereabouts. This concept is known as "Negative Aid".
As D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty proposed legislation yesterday that would grant schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee the power to drastically revamp the system's central office, Rhee said she also wants more authority to fire underperforming teachers.
It was her first public statement that teachers could be ousted as part of what Fenty (D) called "wholesale changes" to the 49,000-student system.
Within a year of enacting the legislation, Fenty said, "I would be surprised if we kept more than a small percentage" of the 934 central office employees.
"We're not going to tinker around the edges," he said in an interview.
The statements by Rhee and the mayor marked an escalation in their efforts to overhaul the bureaucracy. Their attempt to acquire broader personnel authority through legislation and labor negotiations is a key test of Fenty's power as the ultimate arbiter of city education.
I will periodically provide updates for the community so that you can read what the Board of Education (BOE) is working on during the year. I also do so when I have particular interest in, or concerns regarding, decisions made on behalf of the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD).
One area that I believe is of utmost importance and may be on the mind of the public is high school reform.
I am particularly interested in answering two questions as they relate to this issue.
First, what are the problem(s) we are trying to address as a district in our high schools?
Second, how does the current high school framework align with the skills and knowledge required by colleges and employers and in the overall reform movement of standards and accountability?
To address this issue as a board member, I look for specific timelines, benchmarks and periodic updates.
I think it would well serve the community and the entire board to know exactly where we are in the process. Originally, high school reform in MMSD was presented to the community in a BOE Special Meeting and referred to as a "blank slate."
Recently, the district submitted an application for a Small Learning Communities (SLC) federal grant. It was not awarded. It was at this time that I had requested that the BOE review the process of high school reform in MMSD at a BOE Special Meeting. I have also raised concerns that the administration has decided to apply for the grant again. The board has been told that we have a good chance that we will get the grant on the second round. I have again requested that the board meet as soon as possible.
However, as a board member of seven – there must be four BOE members willing to submit such a request to put this topic on the agenda. So far, I am the only member requesting this motion.
I raise this issue because of my firmly held belief that my role as a BOE member is to represent the community and provide, to the best of my ability, an accessible, open process when major decisions are made on behalf of the community.
It appears that as of today, the grant will be resubmitted before the only scheduled BOE meeting on high school reform on the 19th of November.
A little history. The high school reform process should be transparent and accessible to the entire community. I am trying to get a handle on this process myself. Here is a look at what has transpired so far:
“I believe that discussion concerning the way in which our schools prepare all students for post secondary education and employment in an increasingly global economy is too important to rush.
Interest in this topic is high and we can best serve our future students, our broader community and our beliefs as educators by taking the quality time necessary to hear from parents, students, staff, business people, post secondary institutions, and others who value what a high school education can provide.
I am asking you to cease any significant programmatic changes at each of your schools as this community dialogue progresses. We need a tableau rosa mentality that will allow for a free flow of ideas, an opportunity to solidify trust in our expertise, and a chance at a solid, exciting product at the end.”
And by November 27, 2006 I heard this from the superintendent regarding his presentation to the Board: “Change occurs more effectively, when the broad public has something to react to.”
It appears however, that when it comes to high school reform, the public may have little to react to as we move our high schools into the SLC model.
Now I recognize that the driving force may be the reality that there are limited resources for funding improvements to our high schools. This, of course, is in direct relation to a broken public education finance system in Wisconsin. But once the SLC check is presented, who in their right mind will question taking the money or back away from the SLC model?
We will be committed to this model without adequate input from the public for the next few years and we will place this in the lap of a new superintendent.
We will be committed to this model without an accessible, district-wide set of diagnostic and longitudinal benchmark assessments that have been determined to lead to continued academic and/or professional success once our students leave high school.
We will be committed to this model without adequate discussion in a public and open format among all members of the community.
We will be committed to this model without ever bringing to light our evaluation of current programs implemented at our high schools now so as to ensure that they are instructionally effective.
I have been told that the high school redesign is an initiative of the administration and was defined by the high school principals, the Assistant Superintendent and the Superintendent. The Board is essentially being told to wait to see what gets reported from this administrative exercise.
Much of what I have learned from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards over the past few years tells me that this should be a decision with broad community input. It is the duty of the Board to set the long-term vision of our high schools of the future first; and then, instruct the administration to make it happen.
My question as a board member is this: Is high school reform in Madison really a blank slate or has it become a black box? Community members, you tell me; I welcome public discussion.
The Board of Education of the Madison Metropolitan School District, after consulting staff, students, parents and community members, seeks an educational leader who is student-centered and demonstrates the following characteristics:
Possessing:
Leadership experience and demonstrated success in a diverse community and school district
Leadership experience and demonstrated success in challenging and engaging students at all points along the educational performance continuum
Effective communication skills
Strong collaborative and visionary leadership skills
Unquestioned integrity
Excellent organizational and fiscal management skills
Ability to:
Deal directly and fairly with faculty, staff, students, parents and community members
Be accessible, open-minded and consider all points of view before making decisions
Build consensus and support for a shared vision for the future
Develop positive working relationships with a wide variety of constituent groups
The individual selected is expected to be highly visible in and engaged with the schools and community. Successful experience as a superintendent or district level administrator in a similar urban environment and school district size is preferred.
This report summarizes the findings of the Leadership Profile Assessment conducted by Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, Ltd. (HYA) for the Board of Education of Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD). The data contained herein were obtained from reviewing approximately 185 completed Leadership Profile Assessment forms, 220 emailed responses and interviews with approximately 240 persons identified b y the Board, in either individual, focus group or community input settings, on September 19 and 20, 2007. The questionnaire, interviews and focus groups were structured to gather data to assist the Board in detennining the primary characteristics it might seek in its next superintendent of schools. Through this process, the consultants attempted to identify the personal and professional characteristics desired in the superintendent, as well as the skill sets necessary to maintain what constituent groups value and to address current and emerging issues which the District might be facing.
Information obtained through interviews, emails and completed questionnaires reflects similar views from all groups with respect to the multiple strengths of MMSD. Respondents were extremely proud of their District's national recognition for educational excellence. They voiced pride in their students' excellent test scores, the District's exceedingly high number of National Merit Semifinalists and its ability to provide top quality academic programs in an environment of rapidly changing demographics. Given the changes in the socio-economic, racial and ethnic make-up of the student body, residents identified as major strengths the District's commitment to reduce the achievement gap between Caucasian and minority students, its willingness to address issues of diversity and its provision of training in best practices to assist staff in meeting the special needs of a diverse student population.
Respondents also pointed to MMSD' s commitment to neighborhood schools, retention of small class sizes in most elementary schools, rigorous curriculum, support of music programs and the arts, broad range of sports and other extra-curricular activities, high expectations of a well educated parent constituency and its excellent special education program with the focus on the inclusion of students in regular classrooms. Residents cited the strong support for the District by caring, involved parents and by a community that values high academic standards and achievement. Other strengths cited included the District's bright, motivated students and its highly competent, dedicated, hard-working teachers and support staff committed to the success of all students. Building administrators were commended for their dedication, accessibility and innovative leadership in providing programs that reflect the needs of their individual school populations. All respondents cited MMSD's proximity to and partnership with UW-Madison and Edgewood College as invaluable assets.
The over-arching challenge cited by all respondents centered on the MMSD' s future ability to maintain its excellent academic programs and student performance, given the District's insufficient financial resources, significant budget cuts and ever-growing low-income and ELL student populations. These concerns are interrelated and if not addressed successfully could eventually become the self-fulfilling cause of what respondents feared the most: the exodus of a considerable number of high-performing upper/middle class students to private or suburban schools as a "bright flight" mentality overrides parental desire to provide children with a "real world" enviromnent of socio-economic, ethnic and racial diversity.
Concern over the funding issue was expressed in several ways: failure to cut the personnel costs of a "top heavy" central office, more equitable funding of the various schools, state level politics that restrict local access to property taxes and fail to increase state funding, the cost of responding to the arbitrary mandates of t he NCLB law, the future need for a referendum to increase property taxes and a strong teachers' union perceived as placing its salary/benefit issues, restrictions on management prerogatives and undue influence over the Board ahead of the District's interests. The impact of continued budget cuts strikes at the quality and reputation of the educational program, with fear of an erosion of the comprehensive curriculum and after-school activities, reduction in aides who help classroom teachers with ELL and special education students; curtailment of music, fine arts and gifted programs; increases in class size; lack of classroom supplies; postponed maintenance and renovation of aging facilities; need to update technology and the lack of long-range financial planning as the District confronts one financial crisis after another.
Concern over the impact of the changing demographics was also expressed in various ways: fear that the rising cost of responding to the special needs of an increasingly diverse student population and efforts to close the achievement gap will reduce the dollars available to maintain electives and enrichment programs for regular and gifted students; the changing school culture in which gang activity, fights between students, a pervasive lack of respect by students toward authority are perceived as the norm, which in turn generates fear that the schools are no longer as safe as they used to be; the need to provide more relevant programs for the non-college bound students and the need to address the high minority student dropout rate. Concern that students from minority group populations are disproportionately disciplined, suspended and/or expelled was also expressed.
Almost all constituent groups felt that the Board and Administration need to gain the trust of parents and the community through communication that clearly identifies the fiscal issues and the criteria on which funding and budget decisions are based. Many expressed the view that the Board and Administration's lack of transparency in district decision-making and show of disrespect toward those who question administrative proposals have eroded constituent support. A concerted effort by the Board and Administration to become more creative in publicizing the successes of MMSD's outstanding educational opportunities might encourage mor e young upper/middle class families to move into the District and convince others to remain.
Respondents agreed on many of the attributes that would assist a new superintendent in addressing the issues confronting MMSD. They want a student-centered, collaborative educational leader of unquestioned integrity with superior communication, interpersonal and management skills. He/she should have strategic plmming skills and feel comfortable with the involvement of parents, teachers and community members in shaping a vision for the District's future direction. The successful candidate should be a consensus builder who has had experience in meeting the needs of an ethnically and socio-economically diverse student population. He/she should b e sensitive and proactive in addressing diversity issues and a strong advocate of effective programs for ELL and gifted students and of inclusion programs for special education students. The new superintendent should be open to new ideas and encourage staff to take risks with research-based initiatives that engage students in learning and maintain high academic expectations as they work together toward common goals. When confronted with controversial issues, he/she should be willing to seek the views of those affected, examine all options and then make the tough decisions. The new superintendent should have the courage of his/her convictions and support decisions based on what is best for all students
The successful individual should have a firm understanding of fiscal management and budgets, K-12 curriculum and best practice and the importance of technology in the classroom. He/she should be a strong supporter of music, fine arts and after-school activities. The new superintendent should have successful experience dealing collaboratively with a Board and establishing agreement on their respective govemance roles. He/she should have a proven record of recruiting minority staff and hiring competent people who are empowered to strive for excellence and are held accountable.
He/she should b e visible in the school buildings and at school events, enjoy interacting with students and staff, be actively involved in the community and seek opportunities to develop positive working relationships with state and local officials, business and community groups. The individual should be a personable, accessible, open-minded leader who engages staff, students, parents and the community in dialogue, keeps them well informed and responds respectfully to inquiries in a timely, forthright manner.
While it is unlikely tofind a candidate who possesses all of the characteristics desired by respondents, HYA and the Board intend to meet the challenge of finding an individual who possesses many of the skills and character traits required to address the issues described b y the constituent groups. We expect the new superintendent to provide the leadership that inspires trust and unites the community in its support for MMSD's efforts to achieve an even higher level of performance for its students and staff.
A tentative teacher contract agreement announced Wednesday for Milwaukee Public Schools would mean the process of hiring teachers would start sooner each spring and operate with more of a welcome mat for people willing to work in high-needs schools or teach subjects in which there are shortages of teachers.
The agreement would change the date by which teachers give notice that they will be retiring or resigning for the next school year from April 1 to March 1 and would allow schools to begin interviewing for openings March 1 instead of May 1.
It also would allow about 40 schools with weak records to interview new applicants for MPS jobs from the start of the interviewing period. Now, only current MPS teachers can be considered in the first round of interviews. Low-performing schools and schools in less-popular neighborhoods say they have trouble attracting job candidates under the current system and are cut off from going outside the system until the summer.
The new contract also would allow any school to interview new applicants for jobs in subjects that are hard to fill - math, science, special education and bilingual instruction - from the start of the hiring process.
Tim Daly, president of The New Teacher Project, praised the changes in the contract, saying that more Milwaukee teachers could now have a say in who their colleagues are.
FURTHER ISSUES: Matthews said another issue that is likely to cause consternation among MTI members during contract negotiations has to do with administration proposals to change the criteria used when teachers are surplused, transferred or laid off.
Matthews said the district is trying to shift the current seniority system to one that relies on the judgment of principals and administrators about where and how teachers should be assigned, and positions allocated.
"We've worked smoothly with the current system for years, and I simply don't understand why this kind of evil proposal is being brought forward," Matthews said. "It's just absurd."
Bill Clingan will become part of a bridge between the mayor's office and the Madison School District if the City Council confirms Clingan's appointment as the director of its new Economic and Community Development Department.
As Mayor Dave Cieslewicz told the Capital Times editorial Board this week, the city has no real authority over the schools but they are crucial to the city's success in fighting crime and in promoting economic development.
"We need to find the right way to engage with the schools," he said. "Bill Clingan is part of the answer."
Clingan, 53, was a Metropolitan Madison School District board member from 2003 through 2005.
Business relocation decision are based in large part on access to a skilled work force and quality of life issues, Cieslewicz said. Both are related to good schools, he added.
"We shouldn't miss the opportunity presented by a new school district superintendent," Cieslewicz said.
He added he had already met with the consultants who are helping the school district pick a new district superintendent to replace Art Rainwater, who is retiring at the end of this school year. Rainwater has been at the head of Madison's schools since February 1999.
Gary Schumacher's future is as wide open as the no-walls classrooms he taught in 30 years ago.
His "new adventure" might involve teaching at the college level, which he has dabbled in, or a job in the private sector.
It will likely be somewhere warm.
"I've gotten less tolerant of Wisconsin winters," said Schumacher, who announced last week he would leave his post as Monona Grove superintendent on June 30, with some ideas but no specific plan for what comes next.
Schumacher has been superintendent of Monona Grove since 2000.
"There have been challenging times here, no doubt, but this has been a great experience. It's just time to move on," he said.
School Board President John Kitslaar said the search for a replacement will begin in October. The first step, he said, will be deciding whether to hire a consultant to oversee the process or to handle it in-house.
Ho-hum: Another study suggesting good results from school choice in Milwaukee, not that it will make much of a dent with the opposition.
This tells you something about the opposition.
The latest study links the ability of poor parents to take state aid to religious schools to improvements at Milwaukee Public Schools.
Researcher Rajashri Chakrabarti found that while school choice showed little effect on MPS early on, it showed a much bigger effect after key changes in late 1990s: The Wisconsin Supreme Court cleared the way for religious schools to take part, greatly increasing the options, and changes in funding made MPS feel the loss of students more keenly.
Math, language arts and reading scores at Milwaukee's public schools showed more improvement after new competition came into the picture, says Chakrabarti. Scores improved more at schools that were more subject to competition - schools where a greater proportion of students were poor and could use a voucher if their parents chose. This shows the improvements weren't driven by other changes in MPS, such as new leadership. It was the increased competition, she says.
It's plain to Fuller, a former MPS superintendent, that choice helps public schools, too. "It gives a superintendent leverage," he says. While there are many in MPS who try improving schools out of professionalism, there are some teachers and administrators who resist reform. Competition strengthens the reformers' hand.
Last week, the consultants hired to organize the superintendent search conducted 31 hour-long individual and focus group sessions to gather information from concerned citizens and stakeholders about the strengths and challenges of the Madison School District, as well as characteristics we would like to see in the next superintendent.
I attended three of these sessions -- two general community sessions and the Parent-Teacher Organization representatives ' focus group.
Many different opinions were expressed on a broad array of topics, but in each there was widespread agreement about two issues: the need for a more transparent budget process and the vastly underused resource of potential partnerships with parents, businesses and community members who are willing to participate in the creation of a thriving public education system that benefits all of our students.
Many people also expressed the perception that the School Board is powerless in relation to the administration. This perception is fueled by the fact that the board as a whole is actually not connected to its source of power (the residents of the district) in any broad-based, comprehensive way.
It is time for concerned citizens to find common ground on district-wide issues so that we can give the board the support it needs to make principled, proactive decisions about the future of our schools, instead of making decisions that falsely pit schools against each other or that divide taxpayers who have children in public schools from those who do not.
The district is at a point of great opportunity with the promise of a new superintendent, the pressures of a possible referendum, and a School Board that seems willing to engage the public in productive dialogue based on shared concerns rather than divisive ones. (At its planning meeting with the search consultants, the board requested that the written surveys be returned to them so that they could use the input for planning purposes not connected with the superintendent search.)
Over the summer, the Northside Planning Council and the East Attendance Area PTO Coalition have conducted a house meeting campaign to discuss residents ' concerns about and hopes for the district.
We have had more than 20 house meetings on the North and East sides of town. In an attempt to reach out to the rest of the community, we will be host to a community roundtable at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday at the Madison Senior Center, 330 W. Mifflin.
We invite anybody who wishes to contribute to this process to join us. We will break into small groups, share personal stories and concerns about how the Madison School District operates, and tease out common themes.
In a public meeting on Oct. 21, we will share the results of the house meetings and roundtable with board member and ask them to act upon the specific issues that we will have identified.
We hope this campaign will be the first step in shifting the relationship between the community and the School Board away from reactive, crisis-driven involvement, toward mutually satisfying, cooperative efforts that benefit the most underused resource in our district -- the creative genius of each and every one of our children.
Kemble is co-chairperson of the East Attendance Area PTO Coalition.
In an effort to keep people informed of my activities on the Madison School Board, and to encourage people to participate in school-related activities, I have started a podcast, which I am calling the Maya Cole Schoolcast. You can find it at www.coleschoolcast.org. You can also subscribe to the podcast with iTunes or any other podcast software. You can find it by searching the podcast directory for Maya Cole.
Please feel free to give me your comments and suggestions. This edition includes a discussion with several Madison Alders regarding safe walk to school among other topics.
And somehow, in a time window one third the size that many adults take for lunch, 215 young children crowd around picnic-style tables, consume chicken nuggets — or whatever they brought from home — and hustle outside to play.
Squeezed by tight school budgets, the federal No Child Left Behind law and Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction rules on instructional time, the school lunch period isn't what it used to be in many school districts.
ver the years," said Frank Kelly, food services director of the Madison School District, who estimates that overall, school lunch periods in the district have been trimmed about 10 minutes over the past 10 years.
"I don't think people are going to accept anything less than this."
In fact, in response to complaints from parents four years ago, Madison officials eased the lunch crunch a bit for elementary students by using the last five minutes of the class period before lunch to move students to the cafeteria.
There was talk four years ago of expanding the elementary lunch period to 35 minutes. But the idea was dropped after officials estimated it might cost more than $2 million to pay teachers and lunch supervisors.
"We don't have much flexibility in extending that," said Sue Abplanalp, an assistant superintendent who oversees Madison's elementary schools.
While DPI leaves it up to local officials to determine the length of lunch periods, Madison educators say they believe they attain a decent compromise by giving:
•Elementary students 20 minutes.
•Middle school students 30 to 34 minutes.
•High school students about 35 minutes (except at West High School, where most students get 55 minutes under a plan initiated last year).
Those schedules are typical of what's found around Wisconsin, said Kelly, who has worked in food service for 31 years.
"For most of our people, it works very well," Madison schools Superintendent Art Rainwater said.
But the times seem to have changed a bit. At Monday's night's DFER DC launch at the Hotel Washington, Jackson seemed to be embracing what I like to call the Anti-Crappy Schools Doctrine. Forget whether a school is a traditional public school, or a charter school, or private school - how do we make sure every kid in America is able to attend a GOOD school?
Nearly a decade after the Milwaukee rally, Jackson Jr. was talking about "alarming dropout rates" the dangers of a "monopoly" filled with failing schools, etc. He was suggesting that every American child be entitled to a good public education "or charter education or whatever kind of education we can to produce the kind of Americans that we'll all be proud of in the future."
With the Washington Monument to his left, Jackson Jr. was highlighting the fact that his own parents sought the best for him by sending him to the elite St. Albans Episcopal School in DC as a kid. He talked about "pushing the envelope to make the majority party in this country" approach education with a more open mind.
"We must explore options," Jackson Jr. said. "Every option for every American child so that every child might have the high-quality education they deserve in their lifetime."
9/19/2007; 7:00p.m. at Memorial High School (Auditorium) [Map]
9/20/2007; 7:00p.m. La Follette High School (Auditorium) [Map]
I passed along a few general thoughts earlier today:
Candor An organization's forthrightness and philosophy is set from the top.
I cited examples including: the past method of discussing referendum costs without the effect of negative aid (reduction in state aids that requires increased local property taxes), parsing math and reading test results, structural deficits and collecting data on new initiatives to determine their validity and utility [RSS]. Public/Taxpayer confidence in our $340M+ school district is critical to successful future referendums.
Interact with our rich community Madison offers an unprecedented financial and intellectual environment for someone willing to seize the opportunity.
Raise academic expectations via a substantive, world class curriculum We do our students no favors by watering down curricular quality.
The decision of Madison School Board member Lawrie Kobza not to seek a second term, while anticipated, is both significant and troubling.
Along with veteran Carol Carstensen, who will also step down after next April's election, Kobza is a School Board member who has seriously embraced the difficult work of budgeting.
Since her election three years ago, Kobza has meticulously studied the intricate process by which the school district shapes it complex spending plans. A successful lawyer with a young family and multiple civic responsibilities, she nonetheless has carved time out of her weekly schedule to meet with experts on budgeting at the district's Dayton Street headquarters and with independent analysts.
When Carstensen announced that she was stepping down after serving the better part of two decades on the board, the hope was that Kobza would fill the gap created by the loss of the body's most serious player in the budget process.
That won't happen. Kobza's legitimate frustration with the way the board has operated combined with personal and professional demands to make her decide against seeking re-election.
Wanted: Superintendent for Madison School District, Wisconsin's second-largest school system, responsible for about 24,000 students, 3,700 employees and a $340 million budget.
Pay negotiable. Current superintendent, Art Rainwater, receives a salary of $190,210.
Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. While historical records are incomplete, district observers believe that except for Cheryl Wilhoyte, who served from 1992 to 1998, the superintendents who have served since the position was created in 1855 have been white males.
At the John D. Shoop Academy on Chicago's South Side, Principal Lisa Moreno ushers students inside for an early breakfast.
She greets her uniformed flock, then heads to the playground, where she keeps a close eye on some of the eighth graders who are already testing her staff.
"You just try to make sure that they don't think that they run the school," she says.
Moreno is one of 170 new principals in the Chicago public school system this year. Since 2004, more than 350 of the school system's principals have retired, taking advantage of early retirement incentives. Like Chicago, many other school systems across the country are facing the same turnover, as baby boomer principals near retirement age. And for the rookie principals, challenges come early and often.
The HOPE (Having Options in Public Education) Coalition
The HOPE (Having Options in Public Education) Coalition is a grassroots group of concerned parents, educators, and community members who believe creating and sustaining new educational options would strengthen MMSD. New options in public schools would benefit students, families, teachers, and our community. Options are needed because "one size does not fit all"! The diversity of students' backgrounds and learning styles requires a diversity of learning models.
The HOPE Coalition met last week to discuss the superintendent search. We found 3 characteristics to be important for our incoming superintendent. Using the points below, and/or your own words, please make your voice heard! You may copy and paste the below paragraphs if you are pressed for time. The superintendent should:
be an innovative problem solver. The candidate should have a demonstrated record of running a district that has successfully implemented new ideas and creative approaches (charter schools, magnet schools, 4K, etc.) to serve a diverse population of learners. The new superintendent should be committed to offering a variety of educational models within public schools so that families have options that can address the needs of students with a wide range of strengths, interests and learning styles.
demonstrate a collaborative leadership style. The candidate should have a history of fostering open, frequent communication with parents and other taxpayers; non-profit organizations; university faculty; and city, county and state government officials. The new superintendent should build collaborative partnerships that bring parents, teachers and community members together for the benefit of students.
cultivate a climate of less centralized authority throughout MMSD. The candidate should empower staff both at the district and individual school sites, giving them the authority to use their specific expertise to its fullest potential. The superintendent should allow local school administrators the flexibility to run their school, in collaboration with teachers, so that it most effectively addresses the needs of the students and families that it serves. School-based decisions may involve curriculum, budgeting, staffing, extracurricular programming, etc.
Make your voice heard...
... to the Board! Email them all (comments@madison.k12.wi.us) or contact them individually (go to www.mmsd.org/boe and scroll down to find contact information). This may be the most influential means of sharing your opinion!
... to the consultants hired for the search! Complete their survey by going to www.mmsd.org/topics/supt and scrolling down to find the link to it. You will also find information about the community input sessions. Please attend one! and tell us your impression of how successful it was.
Encourage friends, neighbors, and coworkers to make their voices heard too! Please contact Sarah Granofsky (s.granofsky@gmail.com) or Lauren Cunningham (cunningham.lauren@sbcglobal.net) with any questions or suggestions, or if you would like to learn more about HOPE for Madison.
Madison LaFollette High School and the District's Athletic Director Changes
from a "Madison Parent", via email:
I was checking out the MMSD situation with reguards to the Athletic Directors positions and its impact on the schools. I was real suprised to hear that Lafollette has kept on Jim Pliner as a stff member in a position as Dean of Students. It seems that as he cannot be the AD they did find a way to keep Mr. Pliner. I will first say that Jim was and is a great asset to Lafollette. He was a great influence on students in a most positive fashion, not just for athletes but all the student body. BUT.....Lafollette already has one Dean of students. This replaces a Assit. Principal that was eliminated due to enrollment decline and the budget.Now we take and add a dean of students and they assume some of those duties to help the administration cope. What they do not tell parents is the position takes away from a teaching position.So now we have two deans and that means two Faculty positions are gone. Lafollette has created "skinny" classes in some electives so they can still be offered to students but even these are not enough to keep classes avail to most. What was cut from the schedule this year and prior years to keep the "Deans".And with cuts coming up again, what gets cut again. A look will reveal its not the "prep" courses but a lot of Tech and other electives that the "blue collar" community of Lafollette could use. enough from me..Could someone show mw Im wrong?
If he lived anywhere else in Wisconsin, Zachary Walton, 12, wouldn't have this problem.
If he were black, Asian, Hispanic, or American Indian, Zachary wouldn't have this problem, either.
But he's in Madison, where growing numbers of white students are discovering that because of their race, the state's open enrollment program actually is closed.
"I feel like I'm left out," said Zachary, who wants to attend a public online school — one like his big brother Daniel, 15, enjoys.
Last week, when most students across Wisconsin began a new school year, Zachary began his second year of home schooling in his family's East Side apartment.
Madison officials, supported by the state Department of Public Instruction, have ruled that Zachary and 125 other students living in the district must stay put this year in the name of racial integration.
The policy is enforced even for dozens of students, such as Zachary, who don't attend public school but instead go to private schools or receive home schooling.
Laura and Mike Starks, Zachary's mother and stepfather, believe that Madison and DPI are going overboard. And that it's depriving Zachary of one-on-one attention needed for him to catch up academically.
"If we had the money, we would have aggressively fought this," Mike Starks said.
The headline in Sunday's paper - "You can't transfer, white kids told" - could just as easily have been "School district refuses to re-segregate" or "School district complies with spirit of Brown decision." Of course, that would not be nearly as provocative as the one designed to sell more papers and allow members of the white community to believe they have fewer privileges than families of color.
School district officials are not ignorant. They know that if every transfer request is granted, some of our schools will become even more racially segregated and inequitable.
Also, it is interesting that your story focuses on the 140 denials rather than the 286 acceptances and, more specifically, on the 77 out of 140 denials that used racial balance as a reason for the denial.
Incidentally, my own daughter was denied a transfer in 1999. I guess if she were white we could have had a feature story about it.
Madison's enrollment policy racist
I was appalled by the front page of Sunday's State Journal. Madison, the supposed bastion of progressive thought, has the only school district in the state that is working under a racist policy when it comes to open enrollment.
Even worse, District Administrator Art Rainwater believes his hands are tied. His "we are powerless" statements when facing a blatantly in-your-face racist policy indicate poor leadership.
Please recall Dr. King's message that it's not the color of one's skin, and I believe he meant any color. Come on, get out of the kids' way!
This week, nearly 25,000 Madison schoolchildren will settle into the routines of a new school year defined by anticipation and anxiety about big changes to come.
After eight years as superintendent, Art Rainwater, 64, will retire in June. Last week, the Madison school board moved decisively on its new top priority by agreeing on key details for the replacement search and setting a half-dozen deadlines leading to the hiring of a new superintendent early next year.
Rainwater's announcement in early January of his plan to step down has given his loyal deputies ample time to consider retirement or new jobs. In recent months, Rainwater has lost three top aides: chief of staff Mary Gulbrandsen, legal counsel Clarence Sherrod and budget director Roger Price.
Rainwater calls Gulbrandsen and Sherrod his "two closest advisers," and tried to convince both to stay for his final year. "I honestly talked to Mary probably 15 times a day," Rainwater says. "There probably hasn't been a thought that went through my head in the last nine years that she didn't react to."
More high-level retirements are expected at the end of this school year, leaving in place as few as three of nine department heads with significant time on the job. The brain drain is coupled with a relatively inexperienced principal base, especially at the city's four major high schools, and departures in other administrative positions.
Superintendent Search: The search for our new Superintendent officially started on August 27. The Board met with our search consultant, Hazard, Young and Attea, to plan the timeline and action items for the search. Ideally, we would like to have a new Superintendent in place in the February time-frame. This will give the new person time to transition properly with Superintendent Rainwater. The first big step in the process is the development of the Superintendent Leadership Profile. The development of the profile will involve the Board, staff and community. Our consultants will conduct focus groups and forums on September 19 and 20 to determine what people value in a new Superintendent. We are in the process of scheduling times for our staff and community to be involved in this process. More detailed information will be available the week of September 3. Everyone will have an opportunity to participate in this process.
School Naming: The Board has made final revisions to Board Policy 6700, the policy for naming an MMSD building or facility. A Citizens Naming Committee will now be part of the process. The committee will review all of the proposed names, copies of public comments, and ay additional research conducted on the proposed names. The committee will recommend to the Board a minimum of four names which meet the naming criteria established by the Policy and provide the reasons for the Committee’s recommendation. At least 2 of the recommended names shall be for a prominent national or local figure who is deceased. The committee will have 12 members and 1 chairperson. Board members will submit citizen recommendations to the Board President who will assign the committee members. We will start accepting new names the week of September 17. The process and information on how to submit names will be found on the MMSD home page at www.mmsd.org .
Referendum Discussion: The Board had its first discussion on a potential referendum to be held during the 2007-2008 school year. Below are the questions the Board will have to answer as we move through the evaluation process:
Should the Board submit a referendum question(s) to the public during the 2007-2008 school year to alleviate the continuing reduction of services caused by the revenue caps?
If the Board decided to submit a referendum question(s) to the public, should it be recurring or non-recurring?
How many years should the referendum question(s) cover?
What should be the content of the referendum question(s)?
Should the referendum be one question or separate questions?
When should the referendum be held? February 19, 2008 or April 1, 2008
Among the problems highlighted in a recent investigation of the Racine Unified School District's relationship with a private firm was the "broad discretion" given to the district's superintendent.
Although the words are never mentioned in the seven-page preliminary report by Milwaukee-based law firm Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren, to those familiar with the Racine School Board, that complaint refers to policy governance.
Begun in Racine in early 2006, policy governance was intended to reduce board micromanagement in operational issues that could be left to hired professionals, such as superintendents, so members could focus more on student achievement. It's a concept that is gaining support in school systems throughout the state with encouragement and training by the Wisconsin Association of School Boards.
The idea is that while school boards have traditionally been intimately involved in the operational issues of running school districts - some believe too involved - they have not been active enough in monitoring student achievement. Under policy governance, they draft policies and achievement goals and give wide leeway to their superintendents to meet those high expectations.
Area school boards are trying to change the traditional model, and three - Brown Deer, Kettle Moraine and Wauwatosa - have agreed to participate in a multistate study into whether their efforts can affect student performance.
"The demands have changed, where years ago boards were really to focus on the budget and maybe boundary lines," said LuAnn Bird, a governance consultant for the school board association. "What's changed for school boards is . . . there's more demand from the public that it's no longer acceptable to have children who, for example, can't read or graduate without the basics.
As many of you know, I have been in touch with the District and West HS administration -- as well as with our BOE -- with a request for "before-and-after" data on the English elective choices of West's juniors and seniors. The reason for my request is that one of the primary reasons why English 10 was implemented was the concern that some groups of West students were not choosing to take challenging electives in their upper class years. Here are links to my earlier posts:
On August 29, I received the following email from Pam Nash:
Laurie-
Our Research and Evaluation staff reported today that the district does not keep course requests and course assignments beyond one year. Therefore, we cannot retrieve information that shows, historically, what English courses were chosen by whom over time.
We will be able to give you this year's information by the end of next week.
Pam
That same day, I wrote to Pam:
Are you saying you do not know what this year's seniors took last year, as
juniors? Or is their data still available (along with this year's juniors)?
Pam wrote back:
Laurie-
R&E says that they do not save an archive base of course requests. They do still have the Spring 2007 requests.
To which I replied today:
Hi, Pam. Thanks for the update on the data situation. It's somewhat good news. I think. Assuming that I understand what you're saying.
I think you're saying that we still have the senior English elective choices made by the current senior class, the last class to not have English 10, the last class to take English electives as sophomores.
I assume it also means that we still have the junior English elective choices made by the current 11th grade class.
By all means, don't let anyone destroy that data! It may be the only thing we have for a "before and after" comparison.
Or is it? My son pointed out to me that surely West must have complete transcripts for all current seniors. Right? (Maybe even the complete transcripts for several recently graduated classes, it occurs to me.) Doesn't that mean we have a listing of any and all courses that the current seniors have taken while at West? If so, that must mean we still have information about which junior year English electives the current seniors took. And that would obviously be the better comparison to the choices of the current junior class.
Something I really don't understand, Pam, is that if there was such concern about the English electives being taken by different groups of West students, where are the data that justify that concern?
I also do not understand why -- if English 10 was instituted largely to rectify that specific problem -- no effort was made to collect, save, organize and analyze the data that would tell us if the new core curriculum is having the desired effect?
In any event, I look forward to receiving any and all relevant data. At the very least, I hope there is a way to retrieve the current seniors' junior year elective choices, so that a comparison can be made with this year's juniors' elective choices.
Laurie
It would be nice if one of our school board members would request these data analyses.
The Madison School Board intends to hire its new superintendent of schools by early February 2008, so he or she can learn the ropes before veteran Superintendent Art Rainwater retires at the end of June.
Board President Arlene Silveira announced a working schedule for the superintendent search this week. The board has been meeting throughout the summer with a consulting firm and now has mapped out dates and action items for naming the new administrator.
"We're very comfortable with our consultants and with the process. Even so, I'm a little nervous about it," she said this morning. "This is likely to be the most important thing we do as a board, and we're taking it very seriously. Change is good, though, and it's an exciting process."
She said the process in Madison will include more public input than is typical in most communities looking for a new school superintendent.
"We'll have two general community forums on September 19 and 20, and there will probably be 20 focus groups with everyone from advocacy groups, to our philanthropic partners, to the business community and staff members. If we made it any broader, we'd just be inviting names out of the phone book," she laughed.
The L.A. schools chief tells administrators 'we're going to teach you how to change.' They'll get leadership training and will be held accountable for student achievement, he says.
In his first formal speech to administrators, Los Angeles Schools Supt. David L. Brewer told principals and managers Friday that they must change both themselves and a pervasive culture of "low expectations for brown and black children," adding that they would receive mandatory leadership training and support but also would be held accountable for student achievement.
Brewer, a devotee of management books, set out eight principles -- including creating "a sense of urgency," "building a team" and "communicating a vision" -- that he expects principals and others to follow.
In a later interview, Brewer said the Los Angeles Unified School District would launch a pilot management-training program, with courses shaped by input from universities, outside consultant firms and corporations.
"We're going to teach you how to change," Brewer told his audience, promising "world-class leadership and management training" as well as real support from higher-ups. "You're going to need it," he said.
Many of the roughly 1,500 administrators in attendance took notes on stationery provided free by a credit union that was trying to drum up business. After Brewer's morning speech at a hall in the Los Angeles Convention Center, "inspirational" was the adjective of choice for many.
School employees commonly serve on the governing boards of school districts that don't employ them. What makes a case in South County different is three administrators' dual roles at Southwestern College and the Sweetwater Union High School District, because they're in positions to vote on each other's budgets and salaries.
Greg Sandoval is interim president of Southwestern and a member of the Sweetwater board. Arlie Ricasa is director of student activities at Southwestern and is on the Sweetwater board. Jorge Dominguez is director of the Educational Technology Department at Sweetwater and a member of the Southwestern board.
The arrangement is legal. Governance ethicists raise questions about appearances, though, especially when the crossover votes occur as close together as they have recently.
How close?
In May, Sandoval joined the majority in a 3-2 vote rejecting $500,000 for Dominguez's department.
The Madison School District said Tuesday it will provide bus rides for children attending private schools this year because it missed a legal deadline to notify families that the service was ending.
Hoping to save about $229,000, the School Board voted last spring to abolish bus routes that carried 208 children to six Catholic schools.
Instead, the district would pay their parents a transportation subsidy of about $450 per student.
The district has been working this summer with the Catholic Diocese of Madison to help it set up an alternative transportation system, but it did not realize there was an Aug. 4 deadline for notifying parents affected by the change, Superintendent Art Rainwater said Tuesday.
"We were so engrossed, it just went by us, " he said. "The statute is very clear and we did not meet it. "
Michael Lancaster, superintendent of schools for the diocese, said he 's happy that children will be receiving safe rides to school.
"Safety was a huge parental concern and ours as well, ' ' he said.
The financial effect on the district will be evaluated in October when it deals with "hundreds of pluses and minuses ' ' in making final budget adjustments after receiving data on enrollment, state aid and other factors, Rainwater said.
"We really don 't know until October how this fits in," he said.
Approval of Minutes dated April 30, May 7, May 14, May 22, May 29, June 27, July 16 (two sets), 2007
Announcements
There are no announcements.
Initial Discussion of Potential 2007-08 Referendum.
An oversight by the Madison school district's administration means that the prayers of some Catholic school parents have been answered.
The school district announced Tuesday that it must continue to provide yellow school bus service for students at six local Catholic schools through the 2007-08 school year because it missed a deadline for notifying parents that there would be a change in transportation policy.
The Madison School Board voted last spring to eliminate busing for parochial school students and instead provide a stipend of $450 per child so parents can pay the cost of transportation themselves. State statutes mandate that public schools must provide transportation to all students in their districts, even those attending private schools.
According to Superintendent Art Rainwater, the district has been working over the summer with the Catholic Diocese of Madison to establish alternative means of getting parochial students to school, and it inadvertently missed the 30-day legal deadline for notifying individual parents that there would be a change in transportation policy.
Mayoral control, the hot new trend in urban school reform, began in Boston and Chicago in the 1990s. Now it’s the New York City school system, under the authority of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, that’s become the beacon for education-mayor wannabes like Adrian Fenty of Washington, D.C., and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles. Influential philanthropic foundations, such as the Los Angeles–based Broad Foundation (headed by Bloomberg friend and fellow billionaire Eli Broad) and the Gates Foundation, are investing in Bloomberg as the model big-city mayor who uses his new executive powers over the schools to advance a daring reform agenda. Meanwhile, the national media’s positive coverage of mayoral control in Gotham is adding to the luster of a possible Bloomberg presidential run.
For New Yorkers, though, the original appeal of mayoral control was entirely parochial. The old Board of Education—with seven members, appointed by six elected city officials—offered a case study of the paralysis that sets in when fragmented political authority tries to direct a dysfunctional bureaucracy. New Yorkers arrived at a consensus that there was not much hope of lifting student achievement substantially under such a regime. The newly elected Bloomberg made an offer that they couldn’t refuse: Give me the authority to improve the schools, and then hold me accountable for the results.
District SLC Grant - Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 2
An earlier posting examined the results of the small school initiative at Memorial high school. This post aims to examine West's SLC grant. Similar to the Memorial grant, the goal of West's SLC grant was to reduce the achievement gap and to increase students' sense of community.
The final report is a major source of frustration for anyone who values data analysis and statistics. Essentially, there are no statistics reported. The data is presented in figures that are cluttered and too small, which makes them difficult to interpret. Changes over time are discussed as trends without any sort of statistical tests being reported. Most of the data presented are no more detailed than what anyone can pull off the DPI web site.
Before examining the impact of West's restructuring on student achievement and on students' connection to the school, it is necessary to identify just a few of the components of the West proposal that were never enacted:
"C.2.c Advocate Mentor. Each student will have an adult advocate from their learning community (LC) who stays with them through their years at West. Students will meet weekly with their advocate to review academic progress and attendance, preview the upcoming week, discuss school or personal issues, etc." A rather ambitious aspect of the proposal, and considering District finances a totally unrealistic proposal. It was not implemented.
"C.2.d. Academic/Career Pathways. Beginning early in freshman year, each student will work with their LC guidance counselor and parent(s) to develop an Individualized Graduation Plan (IGP) that includes (1) personal, academic, and career/avocation exploration goals, and (2) academic coursework and learning experiences beyond the classroom that help students achieve these goals. Updated periodically, the IGP will be based on the student's academic record and a current assessment of their skills and competencies, intellectual interests, and personality." As far as I know, this never happened, at the very least parents were never involved.
"C.5.e. Strategies for securing/maintaining staff, community, and parent buy-in. ... We will provide frequent formal (e.g., surveys, focus groups) and informal chances for staff and other stakeholders to raise concerns with the project leadership (Principal and hired project staff)." Parents were never surveyed and the only focus groups that I am aware of were two meetings conducted following parents' uproar over English 10 ...
"The SLC Coordinator will also provide frequent progress reports through a variety of school and community-based media (e.g., special staff newsletter and memos from the principal; school newsletter sent home; media coverage of positive developments, etc.). Also our community partners will serve as ambassadors for the project via communications to their respective constituencies." There were two presentations to the PTSO summarizing the results of the grant. I am not aware of anything in the school newsletter or in the "media" that reported on the results of the restructuring.
"E.1 Overall Evaluation Strategy
Third-Party Evaluator. ... He will develop survey instruments and analyze the formative and summative data described below, and prepare annual reports of his findings for all stakeholder groups. Parents (one of the stakeholders) never received annual reports from the evaluator, and I have no idea about what surveys were or were not developed ...
Also the outcome data for West will be compared to the same data elements for a school with similar demographic characteristics that is not restructuring into learning communities." Rather than comparing West's outcome data to a comparable school, the final report compares West's data to the District's data.
Finally, one of the goals of the grant (2.f. Parent Participation) was to increase the % of parents of color who attend school functions. This data was to come from attendance logs collected by the LC Assistant Principals. This objective is not even listed as one of the goals on the Final Report, and if attendance at PTSO meetings is any indicator, the SLC grant had no impact on the participation of parents of color. It is interesting to note that the recently submitted high school redesign grant does not include any efforts at increasing parental participation. Given the extensive literature on the importance of parental involvement, especially for low income students (see the recent meta analysis by Jeynes (2007) in Urban Education, Vol. 42, pp. 82-110), it is disappointing to see that the District has given up on this goal.
On to the data...
Academic Achievement
Goal 1.a. Attendance - "Attendance rates for many sub-groups of students have declined since the 2000-01 school year, and a number of them remain below the district target of 94%." (p. 19) In fact, the only groups that have shown an increase in attendance over this period of time are white and non-low income students.
Goal 1.b. Access to challenging coursework - The data on page 21 of the final report show that enrollment in Advanced Placement courses has declined for ELL and Other Asian students, remained unchanged for African American students and had a slight increase for Hispanic students, "... and the gap among groups persists."
Goal 1.c. College Entrance Exams - "Participation in the ACT is up slightly, but down for the SAT over the last few years. Disaggregated data for the ACT show the persisting gap across racial/ethnic groups." (p.21) While more than 60% of white students take the ACT, the percentage of minority students taking this test has essentially not changed, and is still below 10%.
Goal 1.d. Grade Point Average - "Trends in overall GPA’s are flat or increasing for some groups, but decreases for ELL students, Hispanic students, and students who are not low income (after steadily rising) are troublesome. GPA’s for students of color, low income students, and students with disabilities remain well below those for White, Asian, and economically advantaged." (p.19) Only White and Other Asian students show increases in gpa over the last five years. For an indication of the extent of the achievement gap, the average gpa of African American and low income students was less than 2.0 for the last year data was available, while White students had gpa's of over 3.0. The difference between groups has only gotten larger in the last five years.
Goal 1.e. Content Area Proficiency - There is some indication from WKCE scores that the restructuring has benefitted some students: "In comparison to the MMSD as a whole (shown below), the increase in percent of students at the advanced and proficient levels was greater for West for 6 of 9 student sub-groups in reading and 7 of 9 in math." The increases for West's White and limited English proficiency (LEP) students, however, were smaller than their counterparts across the District.
A major goal of West's SLC grant was to reduce the achievement gap. Unfortunately, it does not appear that the school is making progress in this area. Recall that the first year of the grant was 2003/04, and in that year the only impact of the restructuring was that students were assigned to SLC's. It was not until the next year that students began to be assigned to their core courses within their SLC, i.e., changes in curriculum began in 2004/05. Looking at the table below, we can see that the achievement gap, as reflected in WKCE scores, is unchanged since 2003/04.
WKCE
2002/03
2003/04
2004/05
2005/06
2006/07
Reading
African American
34.0
53.7
51.5
50.7
53.5*
Hispanic
35.0*
52.3
40.7*
60.5
40.0
White
91.0
92.1
93.9
94.2
90.4
Low Income
34.0
48.6
44.0
48.2
34.7
Not Low Income
88.0
88.5
88.1
92
92.7
Math
African American
31.0
48.1
39.7
38.7
51.2*
Hispanic
45.0*
50.0
40.7*
55.8
42.2
White
91.0
91.5
90.3
93.5
92.1
Low Income
35.0
48.6
38.5
43.0
46.5
Not Low Income
88.0
88.0
83.1
91.2
92.7
* note. includes 4 Native American students 02/03 and 06/07, 1 Native American student 03/04
Goal 1.f. Graduation - "With some fluctuation, trends are in the right direction for all groups except student with disabilities. The gaps in graduation rates among the different groups merit ongoing attention." (p.20) However, when we look at this figure, we see that it only presents data through 2004/05, and there is no change in the graduation rates for the two years of the grant for Hispanic or African American students.
Given the data that West presents in their final report, one would be hard pressed to say that the restructuring has had a positive impact on student performance, and it appears that it failing in several major areas such as decreasing the achievement gap, increasing parental participation, and increasing attendance. I'll examine the issue of School Community and Connectedness in another post, but I'll leave you with this tidbit: the Final Report does not include any data from the student climate surveys.
The first thing I noticed about the KIPP School Summit, the annual meeting of the country's most intriguing public school network, was the food. It was cheap, simple and abundant -- potato chips, popcorn, corn chips, juice bars, hamburgers and fajitas available outside the many meeting rooms last week. This was fuel for teachers half my age, about 1,200 of them, nearly all in their 20s and early 30s.
The second thing I noticed were the principals. Each time I met a school leader, as they are called at KIPP, my generational surprise alarm sounded. Forgive me, but my 62-year-old brain still thinks of principals as men in the middle to later years of their lives. About half of the KIPP school leaders were women. Nearly all of them were, like the teachers, also in their 20s or early 30s, and much more representative of inner-city ethnicities than any other school organization I have seen.
KIPP is short for Knowledge Is Power Program. Each school is an independent public school, typically a charter or contract school that does not have to follow the usual rules in its district. Most are fifth-through-eighth grade middle schools, but some KIPP high schools and elementary schools have been established. The schools are small, usually about 300 students. The school leaders are carefully selected from the best available teachers and given a year of special training. They have power to hire and fire their staffs and use any curriculum they like as long as it produces significant gains in the achievement of their students, more than 80 percent of whom are from low-income families.
I can use the words privileged and honored when I think of all of the people with whom I have been lucky enough to work, but it is much more than that. I have learned so much from the occupational and physical therapy staff, the psychology and social work staff, the R&E staff, the SAPAR staff, the principals, the teachers, all of the central office staff, the management team with whom I have closely worked the last nine years and last, but not least, the group with whom I started, the health services staff.
For me, the most difficult part of leaving the district is realizing that I won't see the same people that I'm accustomed to seeing, worrying with, planning with, caring about, arguing with, and celebrating with on a daily basis. I will miss you all.
I hope everyone is enjoying their summer. Below is the July progress report for the Board of Education. As you will see, it has been a busy summer. We have started committee meetings and have also been working
in preparation for the search for a new Superintendent.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact me(asilveira@madison.k12.wi.us) or the full Board
(comments@madison.k12.wi.us).
Arlene Silveira
Board Priorities
Listed below are the MMSD Board of Education priorities for the 2007-08 school year. In addition to these priorities the Board and committees will also be working on many other issues throughout the year.
1. Hire a new Superintendent to lead the school district by April 2008.
2. Develop specific, measurable goals to evaluate student progress and success.
3. Evaluate the need and weigh options for going to the community for an Operating referendum. If a decision is made to go to referendum, plan strategy and define referendum question(s).
4. Consider revisions to the BOE's equity policy and the development of guidelines to implement the policy to support the BOE goals of reading, math and attendance.
5. Study and address issues that affect the educational environment and student achievement such as attendance, dropouts, truancy, expulsions and bullying.
District SLC Grant - Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 1
The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) recently submitted a five year, $5 million grant proposal to the US Department of Education (DOE) to support the creation of Small Learning Communities (SLCs) in all four high schools (See here for post re. grant application). While the grant proposal makes mention of the two smaller SLC grants the district received earlier, there is no examination of the data from those two projects. One would think that DOE would be curious to know if MMSD's earlier efforts at creating SLCs had produced the desired results before agreeing to provide further funding. Furthermore, one would think it important to examine if the schools implemented the changes that they proposed in their applications. It is my intention to provide some of that analysis over the course of several posts, and I want to encourage other community members to examine the Memorial grant proposal and final report and the West grant and final report themselves.
We begin by examining Memorial High School's SLC grant which was funded from 2000-2003. Memorial's SLC grant is a good place to start, not only because it was the first MMSD SLC grant, but because they lay out clearly the outcome measures that they intend to evaluate and their final report provides hard numbers (as opposed to graphics) over a number of years before and after the implementation of the SLC grant. Memorial had two goals for their SLC grant: 1) to reduce the achievement gap and 2) to increase students' connectedness to the school.
Examining student achievement suggests mixed results for Memorial's restructuring. Student GPA's indicate a slight narrowing of the achievement gap for African American students and essentially no change for Hispanic students when compared to their fellow white students over the period of the grant.
Difference Between
2000
2001
2002
2003
White & African American
1.35
1.35
1.16
1.24
White & Hispanic
0.75
0.87
0.74
0.79
Student WKCE performance can be considered an external indicator of student success, and these data indicate no change in the proportion of students scoring at the Proficient and/or Advanced levels, an especially noteworthy result given that the criteria for the WKCEs were lowered in 2002/03 which was the last year of the grant. I've included data up through this past school year since that is available on the DPI website, and I've only presented data from math and reading in the interests of not overloading SIS readers.
WKCE
99/2000
2000/01
2001/02
2002/03
2003/04
2004/05
2005/06
2006/07
Reading
African American
45.09
54.90
36.00
33.00
40.5
45.8
42.9
29.8
Hispanic
63.16
80.00
47.00
54.00
53.6
51.7*
53.1*
29.3*
White
93.33
85.55
86.00
89.00
90.2
86.2
89.0
84.2
Low Income
53.33
56.36
36.00
36.00
32.9
40.7
43.7
25.7
Not Low Income
88.00
86.9
84.7
89.8
80.2
Math
African American
18.00
27.45
20.00
29.00**
39.2
32.2
27.3
39.4
Hispanic
42.11
40.00
33.00
49.00
42.9
62.1*
59.4*
36.2*
White
77.44
76.48
68.00
90.00
89.7
89.3
89.0
86.4
Low Income
18.64
16.37
16.00
29.00**
29.4
38.4
38.7
35.7
Not Low Income
90
85.8
86.9
89.2
84.2
* note. data for Hispanic students includes 4 Native American students in 03/04 and 2 in the following two years
** note. DPI actually reports higher percentages of students scoring proficient/advanced: 34% and 37% respectively for these two cells
The data from DPI looking at ACT test performance and percentage of students tested does not suggest any change has occurred in the last 10 years, so the data presented here would suggest that Memorial's SLC restructuring hasn't had any effect on the achievement gap, but what about the other goal, student connectedness?
Memorial's final report presents data on student suspensions and expulsions as their quantitative indicators of student connectedness. It should be noted that in their grant proposal, Memorial was going to examine student responses to the annual climate survey as a way to track students' sense of belonging and relationship with the school, but, regretfully, that information isn't presented. When we look at the information we are provided with, there appears to be no change, but DPI data suggest that things have declined in recent years: suspension rate the year prior to the grant (99/00) - 4.3%, suspension rate last year of grant (02/03) - 6.1%, suspension rate for most current year's data (05/06) - 10.2%. The picture is the same for student expulsions: 99/00 - 0.20%, 02/03 - 0.23%, 05/06 - 0.6%. Data from DPI also suggest that there has been no change in attendance rates or in the percentage of students habitually truant.
The goals of the District's SLC proposal are admirable. However, this data does not suggest that the Memorial model will produce the desired results. Next time we look at West.
Superintendent Art Rainwater gave a presentation on "Value Added Assessment" to the Madison School Board's Performance & Achievement committee Monday evening. Art described VAA "as a method to track student growth longitudinally over time and to utilize that data to look at how successful we are at all levels of our organization". MMSD CIO Kurt Kiefer, Ernie Morgan, Mike Christian and Rob Meyer, a senior scientist at WCER presented this information to the committee (there were two others whose names I could not decipher from the audio).
"That is, there is no way of knowing whether previous WKCE tests were easier or harder than today's, and also, DPI has changed the curve. For both reasons, we can't use WKCE to gauge student progress (or lack of it) over time.
Pause and think about this. DPI says WKCE cannot tell us whether the academic skills of Wisconsin students are improving, staying the same, or getting worse over time."
The fact that the School Board is actually discussing this topic is a positive change from the recent past. One paradox of this initiative is that while the MMSD is apparently collecting more student performance data, some parents (there are some teachers who provide full report cards) are actually receiving less via the report card reduction activities (more here and here). Perhaps the school district's new parent portal will provide more up to date student data.
A few interesting quotes from the discussion:
45 minutes: Kurt has built a very rich student database over the years (goes back to 1990).
46 Superintendent Art Rainwater: We used to always have the opinion here that if we didn't invent it, it couldn't possibly be any good because we're so smart that we've have thought of it before anybody else if it was any good. Hopefully, we've begun to understand that there are 15,000 school districts in America and that all of them are doing some things that we can learn from.
47 Art, continued: It's a shame Ruth (Robarts) isn't sitting here because a lot of things that Ruth used to ask us to do that we said we just don't have the tools to do that with I think, over time, this will give us the tools that we need. More from Ruth here and here.
55 Arlene Silveira asked about staff reaction in Milwaukee and Chicago to this type of analysis.
69 Maya asked about how the School Board will use this to determine if this program or that program is working. Maya also asked earlier about the data source for this analysis, whether it is WKCE or NAEP. Kurt responded that they would use WKCE (which, unfortunately seems to change every few years).
71 Lawrie Kobza: This has been one of the most interesting discussions I've been at since I've been on the school board.
Lawrie, Arlene and Maya look like they will be rather active over the next 8 months.
Several weeks into his first year of teaching math at the High School of Arts and Technology in Manhattan, Austin Lampros received a copy of the school’s grading policy. He took particular note of the stipulation that a student who attended class even once during a semester, who did absolutely nothing else, was to be given 45 points on the 100-point scale, just 20 short of a passing mark.
Mr. Lampros’s introduction to the high school’s academic standards proved a fitting preamble to a disastrous year. It reached its low point in late June, when Arts and Technology’s principal, Anne Geiger, overruled Mr. Lampros and passed a senior whom he had failed in a required math course.
That student, Indira Fernandez, had missed dozens of class sessions and failed to turn in numerous homework assignments, according to Mr. Lampros’s meticulous records, which he provided to The New York Times. She had not even shown up to take the final exam. She did, however, attend the senior prom.
Through the intercession of Ms. Geiger, Miss Fernandez was permitted to retake the final after receiving two days of personal tutoring from another math teacher. Even though her score of 66 still left her with a failing grade for the course as a whole by Mr. Lampros’s calculations, Ms. Geiger gave the student a passing mark, which allowed her to graduate.
A surge of action and proposed action, a president who wants his hands on a lot of things and bad blood between board members - the heat is growing at Milwaukee School Board meetings, and it is creating an environment in which Superintendent William Andrekopoulos is facing the stiffest political challenges of his five years in office.
The election in April of Michael Bonds to replace Ken Johnson on the board, followed by the election of Peter Blewett as the board's president, have put into power two people with strong feelings about doing things differently from the way Andrekopoulos wants.
And they are acting on those feelings.
A central role for the board president is to name members of the committees that do most of the board's work. The president usually gives his allies the dominant positions but doesn't put himself in many roles.
Blewett has done much more than that - he named himself chairman of two committees, one that handles the budget and strategic direction of Milwaukee Public Schools and one that handles questions of policy and rules, and he named himself as a member of two other major committees, handling finance and safety. He also named Bonds to head the Finance Committee, an unusual step, given that Bonds was brand new.
Blewett and Bonds, who have formed a generally close relationship, have also been submitting a relative flood of proposals for the board to take up. Since May 1, the two have submitted 34 resolutions between them, with nine others coming from the other seven members of the board.
Some seek major changes in MPS practices or to reopen issues previously decided by the board. Included would be reopening Juneau High School, reuniting Washington High School into one operation (it has been broken into three), restoring ninth-grade athletics and building up arts programs in schools.
The total of 43 resolutions is more than board members submitted in the entire year in six of the eight previous years. Seventeen resolutions were introduced at a board meeting last week, 14 of them written or co-written by Blewett or Bonds.
Although this might seem like a bureaucratic matter, it is a key element of efforts by Blewett and Bonds to shake up the central administration of MPS. They are challenging Andrekopoulos openly in ways not seen in prior years, when a firm majority of board members supported Andrekopoulos.
He and Bonds have been critical of Andrekopoulos and the previous board for not doing enough to listen to people in the city as a whole and for not providing enough information to the board.
Blewett said his main agenda item as president is "to engage the community." Just holding public hearings or meetings around the community is not enough, he said, referring to a round of community meetings last fall on a new strategic plan for MPS as "spectacular wastes of time and money." He said people who work in schools, parents and the community in general need meaningful involvement.
"I really want to make sure that we're investigating every opportunity to engage the public and provide our students with quality learning experiences that get beyond reading and math," he said.
Bonds said, "I have a very aggressive agenda to change the direction of the School District."
He was strongly critical of policies such as the redesigning of high schools led by Andrekopoulos in recent years, including the creation of numerous small high schools.
"Given the resources we (MPS) have, we should be providing a better product," he said. "I feel the administration has led us down a failed path."
There are similar issues at play in Madison. The local school board's composition has significantly changed over the past few years - much for the better. Time will tell, whether that governance change translates into a necessary new direction for our $339M+, 24, 342 student Madison School District. Alan Borsuk is a Madison West High Grad.
CUNY Plans to Raise Its Admissions Standards: "the math cutoff would be raised first because that was where the students were “so woefully unprepared""
The City University of New York is beginning a drive to raise admissions requirements at its senior colleges, its first broad revision since its trustees voted to bar students needing remedial instruction from its bachelor’s degree programs nine years ago.
In 2008, freshmen will have to show math SAT scores 20 to 30 points higher than they do now to enter the university’s top-tier colleges — Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter and Queens — and its six other senior colleges.
Students now can also qualify for the bachelor’s degree programs with satisfactory scores on the math Regents examination or on placement tests; required cutoffs for those tests will also be raised.
Open admissions policies at the community colleges will be unaffected.
“We are very serious in taking a group of our institutions and placing them in the top segment of universities and colleges,” said Matthew Goldstein, the university chancellor, who described the plan in an interview. “That is the kind of profile we want for our students.”
Dr. Goldstein said that the English requirements for the senior colleges would be raised as well, but that the math cutoff would be raised first because that was where the students were “so woefully unprepared.”
1. Initiate and complete a comprehensive, independent and neutral review and assessment of the District's K-12 math curriculum. The review and assessment shall be undertaken by a task force whose members are appointed by the Superintendent and approved by the BOE. Members of the task force shall have math and math education expertise and represent a variety of perspectives regarding math education.
Madison Metropolitan School District: A Tale of Two Cities-Interrupted
Smaller Learning Communities Program CFDA #84.215L [Clusty Search]
NEED FOR THE PROJECT
Wisconsin. Home of contented cows, cheese curds, and the highest incarceration rate for African American males in the country. The juxtaposition of one against the other, the bucolic against the inexplicable, causes those of us who live here and work with Wisconsin youth to want desperately to change this embarrassment. Madison, Wisconsin. Capital city. Ranked number one place in America to live by Money (1997) magazine. Home to Presidential scholars, twenty times the average number of National Merit finalists, perfect ACT and SAT scores. Home also to glaring rates of racial and socio-economic disproportionality in special education identification, suspension and expulsion rates, graduation rates, and enrollment in rigorous courses. This disparity holds true across all four of Madison’s large, comprehensive high schools and is increasing over time.
Madison’s Chief of Police has grimly characterized the educational experience for many low income students of color as a "pipeline to prison" in Wisconsin. He alludes to Madison’s dramatically changing demographics as a "tale of two cities." The purpose of the proposed project is to re-title that unfolding story and change it to a "tale of two cities-interrupted" (TC-I). We are optimistic in altering the plot based upon our success educating a large portion of our students and our ability to solve problems through thoughtful innovation and purposeful action. Our intent is to provide the best possible educational experience for all of our students.
This document is a fascinating look into the "soul" of the current MMSD Administration ($339M+ annual budget) along with their perceptions of our community. It's important to note that the current "high school redesign" committee (Note Celeste Roberts' comments in this link) is rather insular from a community participation perspective, not to mention those who actually "pay the bills" via property taxes and redistributed sales, income and user fees at the state and federal level.
More spending doesn’t necessarily buy you better schools. With property taxes rising across the country, we took a look at per-pupil spending in public schools and weighed it against student performance--college entrance exam scores (SAT or ACT, depending on which is more common in the state), exam participation rates and graduation rates.
Winners in this rating system are counties whose schools deliver high performance at low cost. The losers spend a lot of money and have little to show for it.
Marin County, Calif., provides the best bang for the buck. In 2004 Marin spent an average of $9,356 ($6,579 adjusted for the cost of living relative to other metro areas in the U.S.) per pupil, among the lowest education expenditures in the country. But in return Marin delivered results above the national average: 96.8% of its seniors graduated, and 60.4% of them took the SAT college entrance exam and scored a mean 1133 (out of 1600). The others in the top five are Collin, Texas; Hamilton, Ind.; Norfolk, Mass.; and Montgomery, Md.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Alexandria City, Va., which sits just six miles outside of our nation’s capital, spent $13,730 ($11,404 adjusted) per pupil, but its high schools registered only a 73% graduation rate, with 65.0% of the seniors participating in the SAT for a mean score of 963. According to John Porter, assistant superintendent, Administrative Services and Public Relations for the Alexandria City Public Schools, their graduation rate is reflective of a large number of foreign-born students who may take longer than the traditional four years to graduate. He also noted that their performance measures are rising, along with their expenditures. Per-pupil spending in Alexandria City is now over $18,000. Others on the bottom of the list include Glynn, Ga.; Washington, D.C.; Ulster, N.Y.; and Beaufort, S.C.
Using research provided by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington, D.C., Forbes began with a list of the 775 counties in the country with populations greater than 65,000 that had the highest average property taxes. From this list we isolated the 97 counties where more than 50% of per-pupil spending contributions comes from property taxes. ( Click Here For Full Rankings)
Since it costs more to educate a student in New York than Alabama, we adjusted expenditures for each metropolitan area based on Economy.com’s national cost of living average. We then chose to compare spending to the only performance measures that can be used to compare students equally across the country. With a nod toward recognizing the importance of education, performance was weighted twice against cost. Performance and cost numbers are county averages; individual school districts within a county can vary greatly.
Education scholars and school system officials greeted the study as a flawed answer to a fascinating question: Which school districts deliver the best results for the tax dollars citizens invest?
"The value of this kind of analysis is to remind us that simply pouring more [money] into existing school systems is no formula for producing higher achievement out the other end," Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, said in an e-mail.
But Finn derided this analysis as "just plain dumb" for failing to consider other factors, such as wealth and parent education, that affect test scores and graduation prospects.
The Forbes study takes the unusual approach of rating school systems from a stockbroker's perspective -- or, more specifically, the perspective of a stockbroker raising a family in the D.C. suburbs. Rather than simply rank them by SAT participation or outcome or graduation rate, it considers all three measures and a fourth, dollars spent.
The endeavor is skewed toward affluent and suburban schools, educators said, because of the focus on local property taxes; wealthier jurisdictions tend to pay a greater share of education costs from their own tax coffers. The top three systems in the resulting ranking are all suburban: Marin County, just north of San Francisco; Collin County, near Dallas; and Hamilton County, outside Indianapolis.
Appleton's Board of Education hopes to maintain momentum — or what one member calls the "wow factor" — the school district has built in attracting outsiders, especially in an increasingly competitive landscape.
In tight budget times, the district's financial health and survival depends on it.
John Mielke said the school cannot rest on its laurels.
"I think the charter schools have developed a 'wow factor,'" Mielke said at the annual school board retreat recently. "We are a leader in the charter school movement and I think people look at what we've done with charters and think: 'Other things must be interesting in that district.' Our challenge is what's the next 'wow factor.' You can't exist on just the wow factor of charter schools. What's the next step up?"
During the June 25-26 retreat, he and other board members learned that while many larger Wisconsin districts are losing students, Appleton, the sixth largest in the state, is an "aberration," owed in large part to the draw of its charter schools to outsiders.
Last school year 879 students, or 6 percent of the district's total enrollment of 15,228, open enrolled to Appleton from outside the district. A total of 617, or 70 percent who came into the district attended charter schools.
Charter schools are public schools that are allowed to waive state regulations to deliver their programs. Appleton offered 13 charter schools last school year, offering families choices for students interested in everything from the environment and fine arts to engineering and such approaches as Montessori, Core Knowledge and online virtual education.
By contrast, 160 students open enrolled out of the district.
The Toolkit is the product of a two-year effort by ECS, underwritten by the MetLife Foundation, to enlarge awareness and understanding of the policies, practices and processes that serve to strengthen leadership for reform and improvement in schools and districts.
Policymakers and educators across the nation can tap the lessons learned in eight critical areas – ranging from decisionmaking processes to resource allocation to instruction, professional development and accountability – in three outstanding school systems: Boston Public Schools, Memphis City School District and National City (California) School District.
The Toolkit is organized around what the ECS study team found to be the defining features of the improvement efforts under way in Boston, National City and Memphis. Foremost among them is a clearly expressed, widely shared acceptance of responsibility for the educational success of all children.
This commitment is reflected in – and reinforced by – purposeful efforts to enhance collaboration, communication and leadership capacity within and across schools, and to forge stronger connections with families, community organizations, higher education institutions and other partners; a versatile infrastructure of support for teachers and principals; consistent, continuous evaluation of student performance, instructional practices and program implementation; and creative, strategic use of resources – not just money but also time, space and talent.
This is the first in a series of articles focusing on the Madison School Board. The purpose is to familiarize you with who we are, how we do our work, and how we can work together to keep the Madison Metropolitan School District strong.
--
July 1 marks the start of the 2007-08 fiscal school year. For the Madison School Board, this will be a year filled with many challenges and tremendous opportunities. We are coming off several rocky months.
State-imposed revenue caps forced us to make budget cuts that will affect every school and student in the District. Special interest groups lobbied for specific schools and programs for their children and sometimes found themselves pitted against other groups. Decisions had to be made where there were no good choices. In addition, the public was divided on the naming of a new school. As a community we were fragmented in actions yet united in our belief that quality schools are vital for the future of our children and society.
A new year provides us with an opportunity to look ahead and make plans to move the District forward. As a Board, we are committed to working hard to make this happen. We have set our Board priorities for the year, all integral to the success of our District and our community.
Our single most important priority is to hire a new Superintendent to lead our District. This will be an exciting process, directed by the Board, that will involve staff and the community in developing a leadership profile for the new Superintendent and the future of our District. Ways in which you can participate in this effort will soon be announced.
In other priorities, we will evaluate the need and weigh the options for going to another referendum in order to eliminate painful budget cuts again next year. We will consider revisions to the Board’s equity policy and the development of guidelines to implement this policy. We will develop specific, measurable goals to evaluate student progress and success. We will study and address the issues that affect educational environment and student achievement such as attendance, dropouts, truancy, expulsions and bullying.
The priorities I have listed above are educational issues. I also believe we need to demonstrate consistency in the decision-making process. The community must understand how the Board makes decisions, and at the same time, the Board must listen to what the community values in public education. This year you will see a proactive effort by our Board to collect information from the community and strengthen the school-community partnerships.
As Board President, what are my thoughts? I know there are challenges ahead of us, many of which are caused by inadequate state funding for schools. I know we have a strong foundation, with talented staff committed to the children of our District. I know we have a community who believes our children are our future. I know that a strong public school system is central to a thriving community.
You have my commitment that as a Board we will work hard to focus our discussions and actions on finding creative, collaborative and positive approaches and solutions to the challenges facing us. A School Board working together in partnership with the community can prevail and succeed not only for our nearly 25,000 children but for the entire Madison Metropolitan School District. Happy New School Year. I look forward to working with you.
The union is obligated to represent its members interests. The union surveyed its members prior to entering bargaining and the members spoke loudly and clearly: Retain our health insurance options.
MTI members value Wisconsin Physicians Service because it enables freedom of choice in medical providers. And MTI members value the services of Group Health Cooperative. However, both GHC and WPS coverage would be in jeopardy under the district's proposal.
GHC has the option of increasing its premium by 2 percent for each additional HMO offered by the district. Adding other HMOs would undercut the financial base of employees necessary to maintain the foundation of the WPS option.
Insurance is supposed to assure economic stability. Revenue controls undercut this basic principal of employment benefits, as it causes even the best intentioned individuals to think about reducing the quality of insurance to provide wages. MTI members have not been willing to take that risk.
The district proposed to add two more HMO options for teachers. If a teacher chose any of the three HMO options, the district would pay the full premium. But if a teacher chose the high-cost WPS option, the district would pay only up to the cost of the highest-priced HMO plan. The teacher would be responsible for the remainder.
The change would have saved the district enough money to permit salaries to increase 2.8 percent, rather than 1 percent.
Madison Teachers Inc., however, resisted. Although bargaining units for food service workers, custodians and other district employees had accepted similar changes to their health insurance plans, the teachers union preferred to sacrifice higher pay to maintain the WPS health insurance option.
The School Board's mistake was to cave in to the union's position. While the cost to taxpayers was the same whether money was devoted to health insurance or salaries, it was in the district's long-term interest to control health insurance costs and shift more money to salaries.
he union is obligated to represent its members interests. The union surveyed its members prior to entering bargaining and the members spoke loudly and clearly: Retain our health insurance options.
MTI members value Wisconsin Physicians Service because it enables freedom of choice in medical providers. And MTI members value the services of Group Health Cooperative. However, both GHC and WPS coverage would be in jeopardy under the district's proposal.
GHC has the option of increasing its premium by 2 percent for each additional HMO offered by the district. Adding other HMOs would undercut the financial base of employees necessary to maintain the foundation of the WPS option.
Insurance is supposed to assure economic stability. Revenue controls undercut this basic principal of employment benefits, as it causes even the best intentioned individuals to think about reducing the quality of insurance to provide wages. MTI members have not been willing to take that risk.
Chan Stroman posted a valuable and in-depth examination of the District's WKCE scores, and is it in the spirit of that posting that I would like to share my own little examination of our most recent test results. Rather than focusing on the scores of our students, this is an investigation of the numbers of MMSD students who took the WKCE exams. My intention is to simply present the data and let the reader draw their own conclusions.
This journey began with a question: How did students at West High School do on the WKCE exams now that the school has completed their three year Small Learning Communities grant. A relatively straightforward question that can be addressed by a visit to the DPI web site. However, in the process of looking at West High School's test data from the Fall of 2006, it was surprising to see that only 39 African American students had been tested. Certainly there had to be more than 39 African American 10th graders at West this year, and if we want WKCE scores to provide an accurate assessment of the
"success" of a school, it is important that there isn't any bias in which groups of students provide the assessment data.
The District makes available a number of breakdowns of student enrollment data by grade, by school, by ethnicity, by income status, and combinations thereof. However, there is not a breakdown that provides enrollment numbers by school by grade by ethnicity. Thus, if we want to know the number of African American 10th graders at a particular school we have to make an educated guess. We can do that by taking the percentage of African American students enrolled in the school and multiplying that by the number of students in the 10th grade. This gives us a rough estimate of the number of students enrolled. We can then compare that to the number of students who took the WKCE test to estimate the percentage of missing students.
West High School had 517 10th graders enrolled this past year, and 14% of the student body was African American. This suggests that there should be approximately 73 African American 10th graders at West which means that 34 students or 46.6% were not tested. This is very different from the overall proportion of West 10th graders not tested: 14.5% (DPI data show that 442 of the 517 students in the 10th grade were tested this past year). However, this is only one year's data at one of our high schools. We need to put this data in context if we are to draw any conclusions. So here is the data for the four high schools for the past five years.
High School
Year
MMSD Enrollment
Proportion African American Enrolled
Predicted AA 10th Graders
African American Tested
Total 10th Grade Tested
% AA Missing
% Total Missing
Discrepancy (AA% - Total %)
West
2002/03
624
14%
85.86
73
529
14.99%
15.22%
-0.24%
2003/04
591
14%
79.45
54
484
32.04%
18.10%
13.93%
2004/05
523
15%
77.09
68
457
11.78%
12.62%
-0.83%
2005/06
563
14%
77.91
75
489
3.74%
13.14%
-9.41%
2006/07
517
14%
72.98
39
442
46.56%
14.51%
32.05%
East
2002/03
598
21%
125.91
85
481
32.49%
19.57%
12.93%
2003/04
538
22%
116.39
91
437
21.81%
18.77%
3.04%
2004/05
538
21%
113.54
94
444
17.21%
17.47%
-0.26%
2005/06
501
23%
114.15
93
443
18.53%
11.58%
6.95%
2006/07
472
22%
105.64
81
385
23.32%
18.43%
4.90%
La Follette
2002/03
416
12%
50.23
42
373
16.38%
10.34%
6.05%
2003/04
464
14%
63.72
41
385
35.66%
17.03%
18.63%
2004/05
427
16%
67.40
50
355
25.81%
16.86%
8.95%
2005/06
456
17%
79.57
53
389
33.39%
14.69%
18.69%
2006/07
466
21%
96.88
76
413
21.55%
11.37%
10.18%
Memorial
2002/03
577
14%
80.75
74
502
8.36%
13.00%
-4.64%
2003/04
612
13%
87.55
74
528
15.47%
13.73%
1.75%
2004/05
592
15%
92.74
59
491
36.38%
17.06%
19.32%
2005/06
552
14%
96.48
77
471
20.19%
14.67%
5.52%
2006/07
542
14%
94.01
94
488
0.01%
9.96%
-9.95%
What about other ways to look at the number of high school students who took the WKCE's?
More than race or ethnicity, research clearly shows that school performance is strongly linked to socio-economic status. Thus we can ask are low income students represented to the same degree on the WKCE as non-economically disadvantaged students. Again because the posted enrollment statistics for the district don't provide a breakdown of economic status by grade within a school we have to estimate the numbers of students from the overall school percentages. Given that we know that the percentage of free and reduced lunch students are increasing in our high schools, the use of a whole school perecentage to estimate the 10th grade population will likely underestimate the numbers of low income students, but these numbers are still a starting point.
Here are those data for our four high schools:
High School
Year
MMSD Enrollment
Proportion Low Income Enrolled
Predicted Low Income 10th Graders
Low Income Tested
Non-Disadvantaged Tested
% Low Income Tested
% Non-Disadvantaged Tested
Testing Gap (Low Income - Non-Disadv.%)
West
2002/03
624
18.7%
116.62
73
407
104.61%
80.22%
-24.4%
2003/04
591
24.1%
142.63
54
410
51.88%
91.44%
39.56%
2004/05
523
24.0%
125.42
68
379
62.19%
95.33%
33.14%
2005/06
563
25.2%
142.06
75
375
80.25%
89.09%
8.84%
2006/07
517
27.0%
139.81
39
341
72.24%
90.41%
18.17%
East
2002/03
598
31.8%
190.17
154
327
80.98%
80.18%
-0.80%
2003/04
538
39.0%
209.65
65
372
31%
113.29%
82.29%
2004/05
538
35.3%
189.69
118
326
62.21%
93.59%
31.39%
2005/06
501
42.0%
210.32
178
265
84.63%
91.16%
6.53%
2006/07
472
43.5%
205.27
161
224
78.43%
83.98%
5.55%
La Follette
2002/03
416
17.5%
72.90
66
307
90.54%
89.48%
-1.06%
2003/04
464
23.7%
110.04
61
324
55.44%
91.53%
36.10%
2004/05
427
26.4%
112.65
74
281
65.69%
89.39%
23.70%
2005/06
456
32.2%
146.87
113
276
76.94%
89.28%
12.34%
2006/07
466
36.7%
171.25
143
270
83.50%
91.60%
8.10%
Memorial
2002/03
577
19.2%
110.69
114
388
102.99%
83.21%
-19.78%
2003/04
612
22.3%
136.74
85
443
62.16%
93.21%
31.05%
2004/05
592
23.5%
139.25
86
405
61.76%
89.45%
27.69%
2005/06
552
27.8%
153.26
119
352
77.64%
88.28%
10.63%
2006/07
542
28.8%
156.34
140
348
89.55%
90.24%
0.69%
It is hard to tell if there is any pattern in the data, though it does look like we, as a District, are gradually getting better at getting our low income students tested at similiar rates as our non-economically disadvantaged students. However, when you look at overall percentages of students tested, it does not seem that Madison is doing a very good job of testing students. This is what DPI says about student participation:
All students are expected to take WSAS assessments except students who are excused by their parents. Only a fraction of a percentage of students statewide are excused from WKCE testing by their parents. An extended testing window is provided so that students who are absent on any given day can take make-up tests. Some students are not assessed possibly due to long-term absences or other reasons.
Ninety eight to Ninety-nine percent of students statewide are generally expected to take WKCE during the three-week testing window, but actual participation rates are lower especially among student groups with the lowest achievement levels (e.g. students of color and economically disadvantaged students). One to two percent of students statewide take WAA in lieu of WKCE.
While this suggests that MMSD is not meeting the expectations of DPI regarding student assessment, it is reasonable to ask how other similar districts around the state are doing in their testing of 10th grade students. For this comparison, I examined enrollment data and number of students tested for Green Bay, Appleton, Kenosha, and Milwaukee school districts. All of these numbers come from DPI and reflect students in all high schools and alternative programs. As an aside, I will note that the third Friday enrollment numbers listed by MMSD do not match those posted on the DPI website, and it is for the sake of an honest comparison that I have used DPI numbers for all five districts.
Year
MMSD Third Friday 10th Grade Enrollment
DPI Reported 10th Grade Enrollment
2002/03
2274
2274
2003/04
2252
2263
2004/05
2129
2158
2005/06
2111
2106
2006/07
2058
2104
When we look at these data, we see that MMSD tests fewer of its 10th graders than all four of the chosen districts, even Milwaukee tests a larger percentage!
So there it all is for you, the reader, to chew on. What do you think it means and what do you think it says about our district?
Fresh out of college, Michelle A. Rhee joined Teach for America, the fast-track teacher training program, landing at Harlem Park Community School in Baltimore. The public school ranked near the bottom in city reading and math scores, and as a new teacher, Ms. Rhee got a classroom of 35 children achieving the worst and behaving the worst.
“They ran right over me,” Ms. Rhee recalled. She ended that first year “convinced that I was not going to let 8-year-olds ruin my life.”
The next fall she combined classes with another teacher, and together they taught the same children for two years. By the end of the second year, she said, the class that had been testing in the 13th percentile was on grade level, with some children soaring to the 90th percentile.
Now, Ms. Rhee is betting she can replicate that success on a citywide scale as the newly named chancellor of schools in Washington, arguably the nation’s most dysfunctional school system. Though it is one of the country’s highest-spending districts, most of the money goes to central administration, not to classrooms, according to a recent series of articles in The Washington Post. Its 55,000 mostly poor students score far worse than comparable children anywhere else in reading and math, with nearly 74 percent of the district’s low-income eighth graders lacking basic math skills, compared with the national average of 49 percent.
In our new survey, “Business Coalition Leaders Speak Out on Education,” we asked survey respondents to comment on the lessons they’ve learned from working with schools and districts and to offer advice on becoming attractive partners and on building effective partnerships. Due to space considerations, we weren’t able to include all of the responses in the survey report, so I wanted to share them all here on the blog.
This is the third of three posts, and provides responses to the open-ended question:
“What other advice would you give to schools in general on developing stakeholder relationships?”
Statement on MMSD/MTI Tentative Collective Bargaining Agreement Vote
After much consideration, I have decided to vote against the tentative agreement negotiated by the District and the MTI teachers union. I will do so because the agreement fails to include significant health insurance changes, and as a result, unreasonably depresses the salary increases that can be provided to our teachers.
While the total salary and benefit increase to our teachers under the proposed agreement is 4.02%, our teachers will only receive a 1% increase in their salaries in each of the next two years. This is so even though we ask our teachers to do more and more each year given budget cuts and changes in our student demographics. The rest of the increase is eaten up by benefits, the vast majority of which is for health insurance.
I would like to see our teachers’ salaries increase by more than 1% per year. I believe a greater increase is well-deserved, and is needed to continue to keep and retain excellent teachers. I also believe a greater increase is needed so that the District’s starting salary for new teachers is competitive.
While money is obviously very tight, we could provide teachers with higher salaries if the District and the MTI teachers union - working together - would negotiate health insurance changes. The District’s initial proposal regarding health care insurance was to offer teachers the choice of three different HMO options or WPS. If a teacher chose one of the HMO options - Group Health Cooperative, Physicians Plus, or Dean Care- the District would pay the full cost of that HMO. If however a teacher chose coverage under WPS, which would still be available, the District would only pay the cost of the most expensive HMO, and the teacher would pay the rest of the cost of WPS. This proposal would have provided for a 2.81% salary increase for teachers for 2007-2008 - as opposed to a 1% increase.
When I have raised this concern about how teacher salaries have been unreasonably depressed by the increasing cost of WPS, I have been told by some that it is none of the District’s business how MTI decides to split the negotiated salary and benefit package. I just cannot agree with this view.
While it is true that the total dollar impact to the District is the same regardless of how MTI splits the money between salary and benefits, I believe it is very important to the District how the money is spent. It is essential to the District that we have good, competitive teacher salaries and that our health insurance costs not drain money away from those salaries. It is essential that our teachers are paid fairly and equitably. It is not fair that a teacher who takes WPS insurance should receive $7,500 more in salary and benefits than a teacher who takes Group Health Cooperative. It is not fair that a majority of our teachers take Group Health Cooperative, yet they continue to have their compensation reduced to fund the benefits of others.
I am extremely disappointed that the District and MTI, working together, could not reach an agreement that puts more money into teachers salaries and less into health insurance costs. I truly believe that if the interests of the whole had been put first, this could have been done. Because we failed to take advantage of this opportunity, I feel I have no choice but to vote against the tentative agreement.
Originally named for Hmong Gen. Vang Pao, the board reconsidered the name because of Pao's arrest on charges that he was part of an effort to overthrow the Laotian government.
School Board President Arlene Silviera said before the meeting that she doesn't think the board will make any final decision on a name on Monday night, but would vote on whether to change the current name and how they might select a new one, WISC-TV reported.
Even smart, hardworking students sometimes blow an exam or forget to do their homework, and the results usually show up on their report cards. The same perhaps could be said for the Madison School Board, which essentially finishes its term tonight.
The board has one more big test as it closes out the school year with a bang. Members will be discussing whether to remove the controversial name of Gen. Vang Pao from the district's newest elementary school now being built on the far west side. In addition, they will be voting on a new two-year contract between the teachers union and the distict. The tentative contract was ratified by the union late last week.
Those two issues represent opposite ends of the broad spectrum of board business. The school naming is primarily symbolic, but it packs a huge emotional wallop; the contract vote gets less general attention, but holds the details critically important to the district's financial health.
Andy Hall wrote a useful summary, along with some budget numbers (this agreementi s56% of the MMSD's $339.6M budget):
District negotiators headed by Superintendent Art Rainwater had sought to free up money for starting teachers' salaries by persuading the union to drop Wisconsin Physicians Service, a health-care provider that offers open access to medical treatment with no need for referrals.
The district wanted MTI members to choose from among three health-maintenance organizations that limit coverage to specific providers in return for lower costs.
But the union kept the current mix -- WPS plus one HMO, Group Health Cooperative -- after members in a survey indicated support for maintaining those options.
Matthews is a paid member of the Wisconsin Physicians Service board of directors -- an arrangement he defends as a means of advocating for members and the district. Critics contend it represents a conflict of interest.
"Our plan is cheaper than almost any in town," said Matthews, referring to a union comparison of Wisconsin Physicians Service coverage, used by half of the members, to coverage offered to employees of state and local governments.
"The teachers were willing to pay more, they were willing to move money from wages to health insurance, in order to preserve those kinds of rights."
Among the new costs facing teachers: A $75 co-pay for emergency room visits and a $10 co-pay for office visits.
Premiums for WPS, which is favored by many members with a serious illness in the family, will cost 10.4 percent more beginning July 1. But the premiums will decrease slightly beginning Jan. 1 as the co-pays take effect. For example, the WPS family premium will cost the district $1,711 per month while the employee's share will be $190, falling to $187 on Jan. 1.
The GHC premium will increase by 5.7 percent -- to $974 monthly for family coverage, paid entirely by the district -- beginning July 1. That amount will decrease to $955 on Jan. 1.
Don Severson & Brian Schimming discuss the agreement and the school board: 5MB mp3 audio file.
The Board of Education will discuss reconsidering its decision to name the new elementary school after General Vang Pao because Vang Pao has been charged with a plot to overthrow a foreign country. Since the fall of the Laos monarchy and democracy in 1975, the government of Laos, one of the most oppressive communist regimes in the world, killed the King of Laos and has murdered and continues to murder thousands of Hmong people and use chemical weapons on them.
Yet the United States government and the United Nations have ignored these murders of former American allies 32 years. While not condoning the charges as stated in the indictment, I want this community to know and to understand the horrors those thousands of Hmong people trapped in Laos face even while we debate this name issue. Hmong Americans cannot leave those who were left behind in Laos to be hunted, murdered, and killed by chemical warfare.
Although Vang Pao has not been convicted, those who opposed the Vang Pao name because of dubious allegations claim they have been vindicated. But the indictment has nothing to do with their original objections. However, now that the Board has been convinced that it needs to reconsider the name, I believe this is a good time to invite the broader community to also consider other MMSD schools named after people who have tainted history.
Cy Thao, 35, a Minnesota state representative, one of the few Hmong-Americans serving in a state legislature, said many of the older generation felt confused, even betrayed.
“For them, too, his arrest signals the end of an opportunity for them to ever go home to a free Laos,” Mr. Thao said. “He was their best hope of ever going back so this is sort of the closing of a book.”
Yuepheng Xiong, who owns Hmong ABC, a bookstore on University Avenue in the heart of this city’s Hmong community, which is one of the largest in the country, fought tears as he described the turmoil Gen. Vang Pao’s arrest had stirred.
“He was arrested by the very people that he trusted and who he had been so loyal to — the Americans,” Mr. Xiong said.
The much-reviled Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) could be a surprising role model for the Madison school district as it begins formulating a plan to refashion its high schools for the demands of the 21st century.
MPS, which educates a student body that is overwhelming minority and deeply ensnared in the tentacles of poverty, has a horrid record of academic performance.
But MPS’s very desperation has prompted the state’s largest school district to begin experimenting with small specialty high schools that range from 100 to 400 students. This is an intriguing venture.
The schools’ individualized programs, which promise a shared focus and personalized relationships with staff and families, are startlingly diverse.
How about a high school that uses Montessori instructional methods for an international baccalaureate program? Or one that mixes social justice projects with bilingual instruction? Or how about a four-year heaping of Great Books and Advanced Placement courses? Or a school that stresses visual and performing arts? Or one that couples Maasai-inspired African education with community-service projects? Or another that stresses teaching Chinese and Spanish in the context of international business?
Marc raises many excellent points. Absent changes in the generally monolithic (some might say Frederick Taylor, assembly line) approach taken locally, Milwaukee will certainly have a far richer K-12 environment over the next 20 years than Madison.
The contract, for the period from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2009, needs ratification from both the Board of Education and MTI. MTI will hold a ratification meeting on Thursday, June 14 at 7:00 p.m. at the Alliant Energy Center, Dane County Forum. The Board of Education will take up the proposal in a special meeting on Monday, June 18 at 5:00 p.m. The MTI meeting is closed to the public, while the Board's meeting is open.
Terms of the contract include:
2007-08
Base Salary Raise: 1.00%
Total Raise incl. Benefits: 4.00%
2008-09
Base Salary Raise: 1.00%
Total Raise incl. Benefits: 4.00%
Taxpayers will continue to pay 100% of the health care premiums for half of the teachers who choose Group Health, and 90% of the premiums for the other half of teachers who join WPS. WPS teachers pay $190 a month for a family and $72 a month for an individual.
The union says those costs are too high.
The district said it tried to introduce two new HMO plans to lower costs, but the union rejected them.
Key contract provisions include:
- Creation of a Joint Committee on Wellness and Preventive Health Care
which will study and make recommendations to the district and MTI in hopes
of providing the means to halt the rapid escalation of healthcare costs.
- Creation of a Joint Committee to study and make recommendations to MTI
and the district about the workload of elementary teachers.
- Initiate an emergency room co-pay of $75 and an office visit co-pay of
$10
- Two additional school year calendars. For 2008-09, classes begin
September 2 and end June 12, and for 2009-10 the start and end dates are
September 1 and June 11. Both will have a two-week winter break and a
six-day spring break. (In 2007-08, classes begin September 4 and end June
13.)
"I am very pleased that we are able to reach a negotiated settlement that I
believe is fair to our employees and to the Madison community, given the
financial limitations created by the state-imposed revenue cap," said
Superintendent Art Rainwater.
MTI Executive Director John Matthews said that he was glad that the
contract was reached in time for the union to hold its ratification meeting
prior to school being released for the summer, and that the parties were
able to successfully resolve several matters which were raised in
negotiations.
"But the economic provisions do not adequately reward those who have made
the Madison schools the best in the country. With the State usurping local
control as regards to school funding, this is a matter that the State must
fix; there is nothing local school boards can do. The State must realize
that their funding formula for education is inadequate, and that it is
causing the dissolution of the great education once made available to
Wisconsin children. That must be fixed and it is up to the Governor and
the Legislators to do it," Matthews said.
Contracts are still outstanding for MTI's clerical/technical, educational
assistant and school security bargaining units.
For more information, contact:
MMSD: Ken Syke, 663-1903, or Joe Quick, 663-1902, or
MTI: John Matthews, 257-0491
COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS? PLEASE CONTACT:
Madison Metropolitan School District
Public Information Office
545 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53703
608-663-1879
Hi, everyone. We are writing to share a few thoughts about Monday night's Special Meeting on the High School Redesign and SLC grant. We are writing to you and copying the Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent -- rather than writing to them and copying you -- in order to underscore our belief that you, the School Board, are in charge of this process.
It seems clear to us that the SLC grant requirements and application process will be driving the District's high school re-evaluation and redesign. (So much for the "blank slate" we were promised by the Superintendent last fall. With the SLC grant determining many of the important features of the redesign, obviously some redesign possibilities are already off the table -- whether or not we are awarded the grant, we might add.)
Given that cold, hard fact, it seems to us essential -- ESSENTIAL -- that we understand how our local SLC initiatives have fared before we move forward. That is why Laurie asked on Monday night how the community can access the before-and-after SLC data for Memorial and West.
Memorial and West are, in effect, our "pilot projects." It seems to us that we need to be thoroughly familiar with the results of our pilot projects in order to write the strongest follow-up grant proposal possible. It further seems to us that we need to know if the SLC restructuring programs we have implemented in two of our high schools are achieving their objectives (or not) before we expand the approach to our other high schools (and before we commit to continuing the approach, unchanged, at the first two schools). Let's not forget that our highest priority is to educate and support our students (not to get grant money). In order to do that as well as we possibly can, we need to know what's working for us and what's not working for us. (We imagine the Department of Education will also want to know how our pilot programs have fared before deciding whether or not to give us additional funding.)
The Superintendent said on Monday night that the High School Redesign Committee had "gathered all of the relevant data from each of the four high schools" as part of their early work. And yet, it did not sound like before-and-after SLC restructuring data was part of that effort. We found that very confusing because what data from Memorial and West could possibly be more relevant to the present moment than whether and how their SLC restructuring programs have worked?
With all that as background, we'd like to ask you, the BOE, to:
compile the before-and-after SLC data for both Memorial and West, as well as all progress and final reports that Memorial and West have been required to submit to their granting agency (presumably the DOE);
make those data and reports widely available to the community;
convene two study sessions -- a private one for yourselves and a public one for the community -- where the background and empirical results for the Memorial and West SLC initiatives are thoroughly reviewed and discussed.
Based on our reading of the SLC literature, as well as our direct knowledge of the West grant proposal and daily life at West, we think there are a couple of other things we need to know.
We need to know and understand the extent to which the Memorial and West initiatives are consistent with the recommended "best practices" in the SLC literature. Example: the literature recommends a maximum SLC size of 400 students and that students select into their (ideally, content or theme-based) SLC. In contrast to those recommendations, West students are assigned to their (generic, unthemed) SLC based on the first letter of their last name ... and there are 500 or more students in each SLC.
We need to know and understand the extent to which Memorial and West are actually doing what they told the DOE they would do in their grants. In general, there is a lot that is promised in the West grant that has never happened. (We are in the process of compiling a detailed list.) Example: a huge and important piece of any successful SLC initiative is communication with and outreach to parents, with the clear goal of increasing parental involvement with the school. At West, responsive communication from the school is so far from the norm, the PTSO leadership had to talk with the principal about the complaints they were receiving. In addition, there has been very little targeted outreach to parents aimed at enhancing involvement. What little there has been (PTSO meetings and other events held off-site, in West attendance area neighborhoods) have had dismal attendance, with no follow-up from the school. Interestingly, we don't even have PTSO officers for next year!
A final word about Monday night's meeting --
We found the meeting to be way too structured, to the extent that it prevented open and free-flowing dialogue. Most of what community members were allowed to say had to be in response to things the administration asked, which means the administration controlled the evening's conversation. There was neither time nor support for audience members to ask what they wanted to ask, or to share their full reactions, concerns and recommendations. Ultimately, it felt like a somewhat shallow gesture of interest in community input, not a genuine desire for real, substantive, collaborative dialogue.
We hope you will make sure that we all have the opportunity to educate ourselves about the details of the Memorial and West SLC initiatives, as well as a chance to have real conversation about the future of our high schools.
As always, thank you.
In partnership,
Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques
West High School Parents
A couple of years ago, the students likely would have been suspended. But under a new approach to discipline being tried in the district, the students instead were given the option of coming up with a fix-it plan -- something more than just saying, "I'm sorry."
The students chose to spend all of their recesses over the next two days playing catch with a football, just the two of them.
"They came back and reported that they did much better playing together, and that was the end of it," said school social worker Mike Behlke.
District employees hope the approach will reduce out-of-school suspensions, which have been slowly rising at some schools and often have little effect other than causing the students to miss class.
The MMSD has high expectations for Kronenberg (”As a result of this training student behavior will improve leading to greater success in school. Both student behavioral referrals to staff and suspensions will decrease.” [from the 07-08 Aristos Grant description]). The WSJ piece does its part to create the impression that those expectations are well on the way to being achieved. But, as the scientific adage goes, anecdotes do not equal data. Since we’re in the final few days of a school year in which at least a dozen of the district’s elementary schools and at least two of the middle schools have had a year of working and living with this system, data should be available at this point on the actual incidence of classroom disruption, threats and violence as experienced by students and teachers in schools that have implemented Kronenberg, in those that have not, how they compare to each other, and how they compare over time; and that data ought to be made available to the public.
Madison Math Task Force Meetings Today and Wednesday
Week of June 11, 2007
Tuesday, June 12
9:00 a.m. Math Task Force
1. Introduction of Task Force Members
2. Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Math Instructional System
3. Next steps on How to Proceed and Timeline
4. Adjournment
Wisconsin Center for Education Research
1025 West Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706 [map]
13th Floor Conference Room
Wednesday, June 13+
9:00 a.m. Math Task Force
1. Approval of Minutes dated June 12, 2007
2. Next Steps for How to Proceed and Timeline
3. Background Information from the Madison School Board to Address the Charge to the Task Force
4. Assignment of Tasks
5. Schedule of Future Meetings
6. Adjournment
Wisconsin Center for Education Research
1025 West Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706 [map]
13th Floor Conference Room
This is a report from the Madison police department on calls to the alternative programs that will be relocated to Lapham and Marquette. [The report had individuals' names in a few instances, but I deleted them.]
06/07/07 14:48:28 M A D I S O N P O L I C E D E P A R T M E N T
M.M.S.D. CALLS FOR SERVICE / SEPTEMBER 1, 2006 THRU JUNE 7 2007
* * * * * * ALTERNATIVE LEARNING ACADEMY 15 S BREARLY ST * * * * * * * *
CALL DATE TIME CALL TYPE CASE # REPORT OFFIC
DISPATCH NOTES: Y/N?
09/12/2006 11:54 VIOLCRTORD 06-110419 2 STUDENTS PHYSICAL AND VERBAL WERE OUTSIDE 1154,002 Y FAVOU
09/27/2006 12:32 SXASLTCHIL 06-117349 3 STUDENTS REPORTING THEY HAVE BEEN SEXUALLY ASSAULTED, DIDNT Y FAVOU
10/03/2006 14:22 THREATS 06-119989 THREATS REPORT, VICT IN #207, SUSPECT IS IN THE PRINC OFFICE, N WALKE
10/05/2006 09:49 JUV COMPLT 06-120707 CK STUDENT - [Name deleted] 9/27/89 LISTED AS A Y FAVOU
10/20/2006 11:03 WPNS OFFNS 06-127224 SEE 17 IN THE CLUSTER PROGRAMS ROOM TOOK A KNIFE OFF A Y HENNE
10/23/2006 12:45 BATTERY 06-128387 15YOA FEMALE, OUT OF CONTROL. THE FEMALE IS ALSO PREGNANT AND Y COVER
11/06/2006 12:28 AGGR BATT 06-134539 FIGHT OCCURRED BETWEEN 2 STUDENTS ONE HAD A KNIFE 1228,002 Y ZIEGL
11/10/2006 12:47 JUV COMPLT 06-136265 KIDS RETURNING TO SCHOOL FROM A TRIP DOWNTOWN ARE REPORTING AN Y RAMIR
11/20/2006 08:44 JUV COMPLT 06-140009 NO DATA Y FAVOU
11/21/2006 10:36 DRUG INCID 06-140448 NO DATA Y FAVOU
12/12/2006 14:54 DAM PROPTY 06-148289 REPORT DAMAGE TO AUTO. HAVE SUSPECT INFO. IN THE PARKING LOT. N GOEHR
01/19/2007 08:56 THREATS 07-006335 SEE [Name deleted] HERE, NEEDS TO REPORT A THREAT, ANOTHER 0856,002 Y VALEN
01/30/2007 12:42 THREATS 07-010608 THREATS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST A STUDENT-VICTIM OF THE THREAT IS Y MCCON
02/07/2007 09:45 911 DISCNT 07-013478 MISDIAL 0946,004 N HENNE
03/12/2007 12:35 JUV COMPLT 07-026047 2 STUDENTS HAD AN ALTERCATION NO EMS NEEDED GO TO Y COUTT
03/22/2007 13:34 JUV COMPLT 07-030197 JUVENILE DISTURBING. THEY ARE IN THE STAIRWELL RIGHT NOW. N HENNE
03/29/2007 11:36 SUSPCS PRS 07-033232 2 PEOPLE CAME IN,AND TRIED TO GET TO A STUDENT;THEY RAN OUT Y MCCON
04/12/2007 14:41 CHK PERSON 07-038233 17 SAYS A MALE WHO HAS BEEN ABUSING A FEMALE HERE WAS JUST AT N GOEHR
04/16/2007 09:07 JUV COMPLT 07-039735 [Name deleted] IS HERE. THINK THAT SHE MAY BE A RUNAWAY. Y MCCON
04/17/2007 08:39 ASST CITZN 07-040174 THEY HAVE A STUDENT AT SCHOOL TODAY WHO WAS REPORTED BY HIS N MCCON
04/17/2007 09:53 THREATS 07-040202 SEE 17 IN THE OFFICE ABOUT A FEMALE STUDENT WAS THREATENED ON Y MCCON
04/25/2007 12:07 JUV COMPLT 07-043723 SCHOOL REQUEST STUDENT ISSUED FOR HIBITUAL TRUENCY. SHE IS Y MCCON
04/27/2007 08:42 DISTURBANC 07-044457 PLS SEE 17 IN THE OFFICE, REF TO A DISTURBANCE THAT OCCURRED Y FAVOU
05/02/2007 08:49 DISTURBANC 07-046747 COME TO SAPAR FEMALE STUDENT HERE THEY WANT OUT OF THE Y HARLE
05/10/2007 15:12 DISTURBANC 07-050650 HAPPENED ON E WASH/INGERSOLL BY BUS STOP - ONE OF GIRLS IN Y GOEHR
05/16/2007 11:36 DISTURBANC 07-053258 STUDENT OUT OF CONTROL IN THE OFFICE VERY AGITATED 1136,007 Y HENNE
05/18/2007 09:09 ASST FR/PO 07-054161 SMOKE IN THE BUILDING 0909,001 N SLAWE
05/31/2007 11:00 DISTURBANC 07-060205 14YO CAUSING PROBLEMS, VERBAL ONLY AT THIS TIME COME IN MAIN N PAYNE
06/06/2007 08:33 WPNS OFFNS 07-062961 ONE OF THE KIDS SUPPOSEDLY HAS A KNIFE IN SCHOOL HAS NOT N MCCON
06/06/2007 12:26 DRUG INCID 07-063049 HAVE 3 STUDENTS SELLING MARAJUANA WOULD LIKE TO INTERVIEW N HENNE
TOTAL CALLS FOR THIS SCHOOL
COUNT 30
* * * E N D O F R E P O R T * * *
The MMSD ballyhooed its effort to be reinstated for eligibilty to apply for Reading First funds, even after the superintendent returned more than $2 million in Reading First funds in 2004.
In reponse to my question about the status of being reinstated, MMSD employee Joe Quick last week said that the MMSD has recieved no substantive response from the Department of Education.
I have a friend who is fond of saying "never ascribe to maliciousness that which can be accounted for by incompetence." These words have become a touchstone for me in my dealings with the Madison schools. I work harder than some people might ever believe to remember that every teacher, administrator and staff person I interact with is a human being, with real feelings, probably very stressed out and over-worked. I also do my best to remember to express gratitude and give kudos where they are due and encourage my sons to do the same. But recent events regarding Accelerated Biology at West HS -- and how that compares to things I have heard are happening at one of the other high schools in town -- have stretched my patience and good will to the limit.
I first became aware of Accelerated Biology just over three years ago, when my oldest son was a second-semester 8th grader at Hamilton MS. Somehow, I learned that then-West HS Principal Loren Rathert was going to be eliminating the single section of the course that had existed for some number of years. I contacted Mr. Rathert and put the word out to 8th grade parents (and others) whom I thought would care. We wrote to Mr. Rathert and the School Board and the single section of Accelerated Biology was saved, at least for the time being. My son got into the class and had -- in a word -- a phenomenal learning experience.
For two years, the status of Accelerated Biology did not affect my family directly. And yet, by maintaining contact with the teacher and with families I know in the grade levels between my two sons, I stayed abreast of any threats to the course and I continued to lead advocacy efforts to keep Accelerated Biology intact (if not expanded). Along the way, I learned that East HS and LaFollette HS offer two or three sections of TAG/Advanced Biology (the roughly analogous course goes by different names at the different high schools), depending on yearly demand and need. (Memorial has structured its science curriculum differently, such that all 9th graders take an integrated science course; however, beginning in 10th grade, Memorial students have access to TAG and even AP science classes.) In stark contrast, the selection method at West has always been that interested 8th graders take a screening test for admission into Accelerated Biology and the top 20 scorers get in. (Four spaces have historically been reserved for a variety of "late entries" into the class.) My understanding is that the science faculty at West are as intensely divided over the very existence of Accelerated Biology as the West English faculty were over the creation of English 10. Arguments from the community that student interest and demand (and, most likely, ability) are very high (well over 100 8th graders typically take the screening test each year) and that the selection process makes the course unnecessarily selective have fallen on deaf ears. Ditto the cross-school comparison and educational equity argument.
Nevertheless, this year seemed like the right time to advocate again for a second section of Accelerated Biology at West. On a personal level, my second son was an 8th grader at Hamilton. On a broader level, there has been much talk about our high schools this year, including the needs of the District's highest ability students and important gaps in cross-school equity. Thus in December, my husband and I met with Superintendent Rainwater to talk very specifically about our younger son, his educational needs, and how West was going to meet them. Then in January, several current and future West parents met again with Art to discuss the situation at West for "high end" learners and how the SLC restructuring and concomitant curriculum changes (specifically, the 9th and 10th grade core courses) were not serving these students well. As a result of this meeting (and other behind-the-scenes advocacy efforts), West expanded and improved its system for allowing students who are advanced and talented in language arts to skip over either English 9 [rss] or English 10 [rss] (their choice). As well, in an email dated February 12, 2007, Superintendent Rainwater told me that he had followed up with West Principal Ed Holmes and that there would be an additional section of Accelerated Biology at West next year. Needless to say, this was all very good news. (Unfortunately, the dissemination of information about both of these learning opportunities was handled very, very, very poorly. I hope things go better on that front next year.)
Seventy-seven incoming West 9th graders took the Accelerated Biology screening test at the very beginning of May. This is significantly fewer test-takers than in any previous year since I have been keeping track. It is unclear if the very poor publicity and communication with parents contributed to the lower turnout.
Fast forward to this past week. After the June 4 PTSO meeting, my husband (the West PTSO Treasurer) had reason to email the Accelerated Biology teacher about PTSO funding for an incredible Earth Watch trip she is taking eight students on to Brazil this summer. As a postscript, he asked her about Accelerated Biology. She told him to contact Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash about it.
Jeff and I both wrote to Ms. Nash for an update (especially since we had heard through the grapevine that there was only going to be one section of the class after all and that the West administration didn't want the notification letters to go out until after the school year was over.) Here is my email of June 5:
Hi, Pam. We have been told by the folks at West to direct our questions about Accelerated Biology to you.
As you well know, Art and Ed have promised us two sections of Accelerated Biology at West next fall. Interested 8th graders took the screening test at the very beginning of May, over a month ago. Presumably, the tests have been scored. And yet, we have been told that the West Guidance Department does not want the letters to go out until after the school year is over. As the saying goes, "what's up with that?"
An update from you would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Laurie
And here is Pam's reply:
Laurie-
Acceptance letters went out today, June 6.
Pamela J. Nash
Assistant Superintendent
for Secondary Schools
Madison Metropolitan School District
I wrote back and thanked her for getting back to me. But the next day, June 7, I wrote to her again:
BTW, I assume there will be two sections of the class?
On June 8, I received this reply:
Laurie-
As you know, West High School has always had only one section of accelerated biology and used a floating score on the screener to keep it to one section. We were prepared to have two sections if scores warranted such a move. We took the median score used over time and made that the cut off. In order to have two classes we would have had to dip 20 points below that median.
That was not reasonable given the rigor of the course.
Pam
In addition to posting this email correspondence and thoughts about it on the Madison United for Academic Excellence list serve (where -- needless to say -- others shared their reactions), I wrote again to Pam Nash:
Pam,
What is the range of scores on the screening test? I ask this question because the range provides context for understanding what 20 points really means on the screener.
What are the numbers/scores that have identified the top 20 scorers in the past several years? (Can you simply list them out for me?)
What was the score used this year?
Pam, I think the selection method may have guaranteed that only one class worth of students would make the cut.
Think about it. If you use a measure of central tendency (in this case, the median -- though I wonder if you actually meant the mean) on the distribution of numbers that has cut off the top 20 scorers over the years, assuming that the same test instrument was used and that the distribution of test scores over the years has been fairly similar, then wouldn't that number -- the median cut-score -- tend to identify the same number of students for admission this year as have been identified in previous years?
Or think of it this way --
Say each year the 85th percentile score (approximately) is used to identify those top 20 students who will be allowed into the Accelerated Biology class. If you create a distribution of the 85th percentile scores over the course of several years, compute a measure of central tendency for that distribution, and then use the resulting number as the cut score for a new distribution of scores (that is, this year's scores), you will cut off approximately the top 15% of the new distribution.
I think the only way that this would not happen -- that is, the only way that more students would have been identified this year (enough for two sections) -- is if the distribution of this year's scores was very negatively skewed (i.e., included a lot more high-scoring students than previous years' distributions).
If my reasoning is correct, then the second section Art assured us would happen back in February never had a chance. As well, "rigor" is being defined as "that which is done by the top 20 students over the years," and not by the course or the screener.
It seems to me that the priority was not to create a second section of Accelerated Biology; the priority was to maintain the status quo and to not allow more students access to greater intellectual challenge.
I hope you will reconsider this decision.
Laurie
And that, folks, is where it currently stands, though I have remembered that -- at the time of the screening test -- a parent I know was told by someone on the West staff, when she asked about who would teach the second section of Accelerated Biology, "if there is a need for a second section," the teacher of the first section had been asked to do it. "If there is a need for a second section ... ?" Hmmmmm.
I promised a cross-school comparison, aimed at putting my frustration with these recent events at West into sharper relief. Here it is. About a month ago, an East HS friend wrote this to me:
Laurie -- It has been a wearing year in a number of respects, so I want to pass along a couple of positive things I learned at last night's East High United meeting. First, despite the allocation cuts, Alan Harris cobbled together the funds for a position that is half-time literacy coordinator and half-time TAG coordinator. Since I gather it's been awhile since schools have been putting new resources into TAG, this seems notable. Also, Alan also said that East would be instituting an AVID program next year. I hadn't heard of this but it sounds great -- it identifies about 25 kids from each freshmen class with some academic promise but who have been underachieving, and who typically would be the first from their families to go to college. It works with the kids to improve their study skills and other habits with the goal the by their junior and senior year they'll be taking TAG and AP classes and will then go on to college. It's the best way to attack the achievement gap -- help kids in the middle or lower pull themselves up to the top. Here's a link I found to a website the described the program. So a few rays of sunshine cutting through the clouds.
Doesn't the AVID program (not to mention a school-based half time TAG coordinator) sound incredible? Wouldn't it be a welcome addition at any of our high schools?
In that vein, I'd like to say that practically every substantive letter I have written to the Superintendent, School Board and West HS administration about "TAG" issues over the past several years has included a plea to expand access and diversity of participation. I know that many other West area parents have made similar arguments, pointing out time and time again that when these learning opportunities are taken away, it is the high ability and high potential students of color and poverty who suffer the most (a point that research confirms). I would also like to remind readers that Jeff and I are the ones who first brought Donna Ford to Madison in early 2005 and that we are the ones who brought and have kept the District dropout data from the late 1990's into public view. I also recently thanked Jim Z for reminding us of the words of the West math teachers in their April, 2004, letter to the editor of Isthmus:
Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority ... talent earlier and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum. It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined "success" as merely "producing fewer failures." Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?
I guess my bottom line here is that I do not understand first, how West can get away with what it is getting away with and second, why there are these fundamental and frustrating differences between the attitude and programming at our high schools? Parents and teachers at East have made it clear that they do not want to become like West. West parents and teachers have been sounding an alarm over the 9th and 10th grade core curriculum and arguing for an expansion of West's most rigorous learning opportunities, combined with substantive efforts (starting well before high school) to identify and support high potential learners from all backgrounds. And yet the differences between the schools persist. It's probably paranoid to wonder if maybe the Administration is working to maintain the East-West differences (and the East-West stereotypes) for its own "divide-and-conquer" purposes. Right?
In October, 2005, MUAE guest speaker Jan Davidson encouraged us to be "pleasantly persistent" in our advocacy work. I have tried hard to do just that. But I must say, it's feeling pretty difficult to maintain that attitude right now.
Madison School Board selects a firm for superintendent search
For immediate release: Friday, June 8, 2007 (sent late Friday afternoon)
The Madison Board of Education has selected the firm of Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates of Glenview, ILto conduct the search for the hiring of a new superintendent. HYA was selected from among four businesses which applied for the search contract.
Board President Arlene Silveira said, "We are delighted to reach an agreement with Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates because they are nationally known and very highly respected in the field of superintendent searches. They specialize in working with districts of more than 20,000 students." The MadisonSchool District's enrollment is 24,755 students.
Superintendent Art Rainwater has announced that he will retire in June 2008.
Among the early steps in the search process, interviews will be conducted with school district and community representatives in order to develop for the Board a leadership profile of a new superintendent.
The flat fee for the search services to be provided by HYA will be $24,000.
COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS? PLEASE CONTACT:
Madison Metropolitan School District
Public Information Office
545 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53703
608-663-1879
Finally, the Madison school board is showing signs it may back away from its wrongheaded decision to name a new elementary school for Hmong warlord Vang Pao.
To a remarkable degree, the board has stubbornly ignored all evidence of Vang Pao's bloody past. That's because Madison's emergent Hmong community has rallied behind the proposal, and the board, wishing to celebrate Madison’s multicultural makeup, has decided that the Hmong's time is now, no matter what the objections.
Carol Carstensen has been the lone exception in her willingness to reconsider the naming decision.
Not surprisingly, Bill Keys, the former school board member and perhaps the city's most arrogant and self-righteous liberal, has been in the frontlines of Vang Pao’s supporters. Disappointingly, several past and present board members who should know better also threw their credibility behind the school naming, despite serious accusations of Vang Pao's war crimes, drug dealing and suspect fundraising activities.
The bargained contract between the Madison Metropolitan School District and Madison Teachers, Inc. (representing teachers) stipulates health coverage from a ‘preferred provider’ (WPS) and a ‘health maintenance organization’ (GHC).
Bids have not been solicited from health care providers in many years. Comparative monthly premium costs for the employer and the employee in the Madison market:
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator's office to phase out our "accelerated" course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
The Task force includes David Griffeath, who, according to this document, provided by a reader, has been a paid math consultant for the Madison School District.
The group will advance three proposals that the School Board should adopt and initiate in the process of deciding whether or not to place any additional requests before the voters for taxpayer funds or exemptions from the state-imposed revenue caps. The proposal topics are:
GOOD HEALTH CARE AT AN AFFORDABLE PRICE
PUT THE LID ON THE COOKIE JAR
ELIMINATE THE CHAOS OF BOARD DECISIONS
Speakers will include Don Severson, president of ACE, and former Madison Alder Dorothy Borchardt, an activist in school and community issues.
In addition to comments by Severson and Borchardt, there will be five display boards briefly outlining the proposals as well as duplicated handouts. The presentation part of the news conference will last 15 minutes, followed by questions.
A path for getting around a state-imposed cap on how much a school district can spend is allowing Milwaukee Public Schools to add driver's education programs, fund more arts programs, maintain after-school centers that are losing federal aid and even add a position to the staff of the School Board.
The path means there will be fewer invasive plant species to be seen at two nature preserves owned by MPS.
But it also means property taxes will be going up more than they otherwise would.
In two years, the School Board has raised the amount being collected through what is called its extension fund by almost 60%, which comes to an increase of about $8 for each resident of the city.
The growing interest in using the extension fund to support initiatives in MPS was evident Thursday night and Friday morning as the board approved amendments to the proposed budget for 2007-'08 that added more than $500,000 in spending to the fund.
The Madison School District's growing use of Fund 80 (expenditures outside the state revenue caps) has been the subject of some controversy.
The search for a new San Francisco schools superintendent is down to one finalist -- former Las Vegas schools chief Carlos Garcia, The Chronicle has learned.
In interviews Friday, four San Francisco school board members said the selection process is down to final steps such as checking references before making an offer.
The four -- Mark Sanchez, Hydra Mendoza, Norman Yee and Jane Kim -- gave Garcia nothing but rave reviews.
They noted that he was a principal of San Francisco's Horace Mann Middle School from 1988 to 1991, when it had a waiting list of 2,000 children. He was also superintendent of the Fresno Unified School District from 1997 to 2000.
The Madison School Board interviewed four superintendent search consultants this week.
Test scores from the November 2006 Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE) and companion Wisconsin Alternate Assessment (WAA) were released by the state Department of Public Instruction this week. The MMSD press release on Madison students' scores ("Despite changes and cuts, Madison students test well") reports the following "notable achievements":
that reading scores have remained steady and math scores have gone up;
that non-low income MMSD students score better than their non-low income peers statewide;
that a higher percentage of MMSD African-American students perform at the highest proficiency level than do other African-American students across the state as a whole; and
that a consistently higher percentage of MMSD students perform at the highest proficiency level than do students across the state as a whole.
Let's take a closer look at the PR and the data:
1: "Reading scores have remained steady and math scores have gone up."
[boxed text and charts excerpted from MMSD press release]
This chart is misleading. In 2002, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction revamped the scoring scale for the WKCE to lower the cut score (or threshold) for the "proficient" category (which is apparent in the jump between pre-2002 and post-2002 scores, as shown above). The DPI web site clearly states that "Proficiency data for November 2002 and later are not comparable to earlier years."
To provide an accurate basis for comparison, the chart should have looked like this:
The corrected chart shows that the percentage of MMSD students scoring at the advanced+proficient levels in reading declined from 2003 to 2006, and that the increase in the percentage of MMSD students scoring at the advanced+proficient level in math increased only slightly from 2003 to 2006. Although numeric percentages aren't specified, it's apparent that the percentage decline in reading exceeded the percentage increase in math. (So, if reading proficiency levels are being described as having remained "steady" because the decline wasn't statistically significant, the minimal change in math proficiency levels can't be touted as a noteworthy increase.)
2: "Non-low income MMSD students score better than their non-low income peers statewide."
There's no question about the data here. But what about the rest of the picture?
In reading and math, a greater percentage of MMSD low-income students scored at the basic+minimal levels (i.e. below grade level) than their peers statewide this year (scores below are for combined grades).
(This and all data are from the DPI web site, using WKCE+WAA scores.)
Looking at 4th grade scores, the percentages of low-income MMSD students performing below grade level in reading and math grew from 2003 to 2006, and grew at a faster rate than statewide peers.
MMSD
State
2003
33.1%
29.6%
2006
43.2%
31.8%
Table 2: 2003 and 2006 reading, low-income, basic+minimal, 4th grade
MMSD
State
2003
47.5%
41.4%
2006
48.7%
38.2%
Table 3: 2003 and 2006 math, low-income, basic+minimal, 4th grade
Looking at more 4th grade scores, a greater percentage of non-low income MMSD students score at the advanced level in reading and math than low income MMSD students, and this gap between high-performing non-low income and low income MMSD students grew from 2003 to 2006.
Low income
Non-low income
Gap
2003
19.1%
56.7%
37.6%
2006
16.8%
64.5%
47.7%
Table 4: 2003 and 2006 reading, advanced, MMSD 4th grade
Low income
Non-low income
Gap
2003
9.7%
43.4%
33.7%
2006
15.0%
57.8%
42.8%
Table 5: 2003 and 2006 math, advanced, MMSD 4th grade
This gap between low and non-low income performance at the advanced level exists across the state, but MMSD's gap grew at a faster rate.
MMSD
State
2003
37.6%
27.8%
2006
47.7%
29.2%
Table 6: 2003 and 2006 reading, advanced, 4th grade, gap between low-income and non-low income
MMSD
State
2003
33.7%
21.5%
2006
42.8%
25.3%
Table 7: 2003 and 2006 math, advanced, 4th grade, gap between low-income and non-low income
3: "A higher percentage of MMSD African American students perform at the highest proficiency level than do other African American students across the state as a whole."
The scale of the percentage range (y-axis) in this chart is magnified in a way that exaggerates this "achievement". (Even so, it's clear that grade by grade, black students don't outperform their state peers in grades 3, 4, or 10.)
MMSD
State
Difference
Combined grades
17.1%
15.0%
2.1%
4th grade
16.3%
16.3%
0.0%
Table 8: 2006 reading, advanced, African-American
The scale for math is even more exaggerated, and the achievement somewhat less than "especially significant."
MMSD
State
Difference
Combined grades
9.7%
7.9%
1.8%
4th grade
9.0%
10.5%
-1.5%
Table 9: 2006 math, advanced, African-American
What is especially significant, however, is the achievement gap between black and white students at the advanced level. MMSD's achievement gap exceeds that for the state, and has grown at a significantly faster rate.
MMSD
State
2003
38.1%
31.7%
2006
48.9%
31.9%
Table 10: 2003 and 2006 reading, advanced, 4th grade, gap between white and black students
MMSD
State
2003
36.5%
24.4%
2006
48.6%
30.3%
Table 11: 2003 and 2006 math, advanced, 4th grade, gap between white and black students
4: "A consistently higher percentage of MMSD students perform at the highest proficiency level than do students across the state as a whole."
However, MMSD's racial and economic achievement gaps at the advanced level exceed those for the state.
MMSD
State
Reading
46.1%
34.8%
Math
41.4%
29.2%
Table 12: 2006, advanced, combined grades, gap between white and black students
MMSD
State
Reading
45.0%
29.8%
Math
39.7%
24.5%
Table 13: 2006, advanced, combined grades, gap between non-low income and low income students
5: "A significant change in testing procedures resulted in a significantly increased percentage of students scoring in the lowest proficiency category."
Without more data (Exactly how much of the percentage increase in this category was attributable to this testing procedure change? How did this increase compare to other districts and the state as a whole, since they were also affected by this same testing procedure change?), this is not sufficient to explain away the increase in the below-grade level category.
Further thoughts:
Curriculum Effectiveness: It's reasonable to assume that students in outperforming categories (white and non-low income) are more likely to have extracurricular educational support and supplementation than other students, and are more likely to be able to overcome curriculum deficiencies they encounter in the MMSD. Any inference that the MMSD deserves all the credit for such students' achievements is misplaced. On the other hand, the success or failure of students at the bottom of the widening racial and economic achievement gaps (and who are likely to lack those extracurricular advantages) is highly dependent on the effectiveness of MMSD's curriculum and instructional choices. For example, we might look at the schools that would have qualified for the Reading First funding that was rejected by the MMSD in 2004, and the percentages of students in 4th grade that are reading below grade level:
2003
2006
Increase
Orchard Ridge
18.4%
28.6%
10.2%
Hawthorne
30.6%
30.6%
0.0%%
Glendale
20.6%
47.4%
27.4%
Lincoln
25.0%
50.0%
25.0%
MMSD
18.4%
22.7%
4.3%
State
17.4%
18.1%
0.7%
Table 14: Reading, basic+minimal, 4th grade
Rigor of WKCE: NAEP scores for 2007 (when they're released) should be compared against WKCE scores as a reality check on whether WKCE testing and standards are consistent or are softening.
Hidden achievement gap: The WKCE scores in the "proficient" category should be examined on a disaggregated basis. If historically underperforming groups are clustered at the lower end of the category (yet are still being identified as "proficient" due to the lowering of the cut scores when the category standards were redefined in 2002), this is an achievement gap too, and shouldn't be ignored.
Special BOE Meeting to Discuss HS Redesign and SLC Grant
The MMSD BOE will hold a special meeting and public information session to discuss the High School Redesign initiative and the Small Learning Communities (SLC) grant at the following time and place:
Thursday, June 7
6:30 p.m.
Wright MS gym
1717 Fish Hatchery Road
While the number of gym teachers and music teachers is set to drop 15% in Milwaukee Public Schools from this year to next, and the number of teachers, education assistants and secretaries is also going down, one group of MPS employees will grow 25%.
It's the staff serving School Board members themselves.
In an action taken about 1:20 a.m. Friday, the board voted 7-2 to add a policy analyst to its staff at a cost of $101,745 for salary and fringe benefits, to be paid by a direct increase in property taxes exempt from the state-imposed lid on MPS spending next year.
Without discussion, it also approved filling a job of staff assistant serving board members that had been vacant for this entire school year. That job is budgeted for $83,000, which, with fringe benefits, will mean a cost of about $133,600. The same position was budgeted for a salary of $63,604 a year ago.
The $101,745 for a policy analyst would be equivalent to a $63,000 salary, plus fringe benefits. MPS generally spends 61.5 cents in fringe benefits for every dollar it spends in salary, an amount well above most other government bodies and far above private-sector employers generally.
Arlene Silveira, School Board President, provided the following update on the Isthmus Forum:
All - here is the update on the search for the new Superintendent.
On Tuesday and Wednesday evenings the Board will interview 4 search firms/consultants. We had decided that we want to use a consultant to assist wit the search for the new Superintendent. These meetings will be open meetings. Each company will make a presentation which will be followed by questions from the Board.
On May 29 the Board will meet to review the financial proposals from each company and rate them based on our RFP. Our hope is to have a company identified by our June 4 meeting so we can approve the company and move into the selection process.
Next steps after the selection include meeting with the board, staff and community to determine a "profile" for our next Superintendent. I don't yet know how this will be accomplished. The specifics of the process forward will be dependent on the consultant chosen to help with the effort.
The Studio School Charter School:
In a couple of years I hope to take another try at leading a charter school initiative. I continue to read so much educational research and literature that strongly supports The Studio School concepts. As you know, we spent some time looking into ways to create TSS as a private school but just couldn't see how it could be affordable to everyone and be sustainable. Even as a sliding-scale-tuition cooperative, there would have to be some tuition paid and that leaves out so many children. It still looks as though a charter school is the best alternative. So maybe there will be some changes in our school district and administrators/ board members will become more actively supportive of charter schools, innovation, and the Studio School concept. Am I overly optimistic?
Programs in my home:
Currently, I'm working with some people to piece together a rather eclectic "menu" of educational programs (art, Spanish, yoga, tutoring, early childhood, etc.) in my home that is licensed for child care for ages 4 - 17. The programs being offered are philosophically aligned with the Reggio Approach - experiential, child-centered, multi-modal learning. I don't have a final name for this yet but the concept is that of a "learning studio" that offers a variety of enriching programs that will provide children with a variety of "languages" for learning and expressing their ideas. (This summer I am offering an Art & Architecture program for 5-8 year old children on Wednesday mornings and we will be working with recycled materials.) If the "eclectic" studio concept is successful, the plan is to move the program out of my house into a public space in the next year or so. I recently met with someone involved in the Hilldale Mall redevelopment project and a location there might be a possibility down the road. And/or it could be offered through community centers or other neighborhood organizations. It's also my hope that if I could somehow provide real life examples of the Reggio Approach to teaching and learning, people might be better able to envision the amazing positive impact it could have in an elementary school.
Community Partnerships:
I intend to continue meeting with people who are interested in new educational initiatives and who might want to work together to create programs and schools that include the arts & technology for all Madison children. So I want to keep reaching out to neighborhood groups and community members. Please let me know if you run into any folks who might be interested in talking with me about this and I will be happy to contact them. Thanks
For at least half a century, Osceola School Board meetings have been followed by a smorgasbord of snacks, desserts and soft drinks where board members can chat about the issues of the day - and, apparently, school business.
It's a tradition that has ended after a local newspaper publisher and editor crashed the after-hours hobnob on April 11, wrote an editorial chastising the School Board and filed a complaint with the Polk County district attorney's office.
" 'Is there something we can help you guys with?' " Kyle Weaver, editor of the weekly Sun, recalls being asked when he and Sun Publisher Carter Johnson walked into the room where five School Board members, the district administrator and four principals were discussing curriculum issues about 20 minutes after the close of the regular meeting.
"I said, 'It appears the meeting is still going on,' and we sat down in our usual chairs," Weaver said. "It went on just a few minutes more. It appeared they were trying to wrap it up pretty quick."
Two weeks after voting to close Marquette Elementary, the Madison School Board bowed to public pressure Monday evening and decided to keep the school open.
The board's 5-2 vote was greeted by cheers and a standing ovation from about 50 parents, children and activists who campaigned to save the school at 1501 Jenifer St. on Madison's Near East Side.
The Rocky Mountain News series, "Leaving to Learn [Denver Public Schools Enrollment Gap]," tells a painful and accurate story about the state of our school district. It is hard to admit, but it is abundantly clear that we will fail the vast majority of children in Denver if we try to run our schools the same old way. The evidence in Denver and from big-city school districts across the country is undeniable. Operating an urban school district in the 21st century based on a century-old configuration will result in failure for too many children. It is long past time to admit this. As a district and a community, we must gather strength and have the courage to make change, knowing that the changes we face are much, much less perilous than the status quo.
Many believe that our system is intractable and impossible to fix. They look at our high dropout rate, our low achievement rate, and decades of failed reform efforts in Denver and around this country, and conclude it cannot be done.
This answer is obviously intolerable for the 72,000 children in our school district, and for the tens of thousands of children who will receive a public education in Denver over the next decade. We must refuse to accept that this is the best we can do for the next generation, or, worse, that this is all we can expect of them.
In view of the current discussions in Denver about whether to close schools after years of declining enrollment and shifting demographics, now is the time to re-examine how our system works. No matter how compelling the arguments for school consolidation, school closures create pain and upset expectations about daily life. In the shadow of this potential dislocation, we are obligated to reconsider the way we do business to ensure that our schools and our students will succeed. In the coming months and years, we must renew and rejuvenate the educational opportunities available to all of Denver's children.
Cities all across the country face dramatic change sooner or later. For a variety of reasons, we think Denver is in a position to create the first 21st century urban school district in the United States. Not the least of these reasons is our tremendous faith in the committed people who work for DPS and in the citizens of Denver. We must not make the easy, but terrible mistake of confusing a lack of confidence in the system with a lack of confidence in ourselves or our children.
The Madison School Board may reverse its decision to consolidate Lapham and Marquette elementary schools after a neighborhood group mobilized in opposition to the budget cut.
The board is nearing the five votes needed to overturn its decision.
Four of the seven board members -- Carol Carstensen, Beth Moss, Johnny Winston Jr. and Maya Cole -- asked board President Arlene Silveira to reopen a discussion on the consolidation for a meeting on Monday. Four votes are needed to reopen discussion.
Vang Pao Elementary School: Remarks to the Madison School Board on May 7, 2007
The decision to name the new school after General Vang Pao was necessary and proper, although difficult.
The board did its job well. Remember that when you evaluate the reactions of some parts of the community.
The reactions are not about the process. Three months of notice and opportunities to comment was sufficient process.
They are not about “localness”. Many of our schools are named after non-local figures.
They are not about new information. Professor McCoy’s allegations about Vang Pao are old news, 2002 news.
They are not about the persuasiveness of Professor McCoy’s allegations. He spent a short time in Laos. His evidence is thin.
In contrast, Dr. Jane Hamilton Merritt spent many years in Laos and interviewed more than a thousand people. She has concluded that McCoy’s allegations are baseless. She has also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Pulitizer Prize for her human rights reporting from Laos. The weight of the evidence is on Dr. Jane’s side.
And you have the testimony of Hmong people from our community and state who contradict Professor McCoy.
Instead, I believe that the reaction is an expression of the deep discomfort that many of us feel when forced to remember the Vietnam War and it is about our denial.
We want to remember the anti-war movement.
We do not want to remember the government lies, assassinations, covert wars, use of napalm and Agent Orange or the loss of so many, many lives. It was a shameful war, one that we’d like to forget.
However, we owe it to our children to learn the lessons of that war and we must tell them how and why Hmong people became part of our community.
Forgetting is not an option for the Hmong. They are here now, living productive lives. They owe much to General Vang Pao for their survival and better fortunes. He gave them the unit and the strength that they needed during the covert war and after our government abandoned them to the repressive Laotian regime after the fall of Saigon.
And we owe the Hmong---just as surely as we owe our own Vietnam War veterans---recognition and inclusion at long last.
When the Madison School Board approved budget cuts last week, it underscored a message important to every school district in Wisconsin:
Schools can no longer afford to conduct business as usual.
If Wisconsin is to preserve high quality education, its school boards, administrators, teachers, students, parents and taxpayers must recognize the need for bolder action.
Schools must create ways to deliver education more cost-effectively.
That means change — change that disturbs the comfort of the status quo.
Letter to School Board Members & a Meeting with Enis Ragland
Sue Arneson, Jason Delborne, Katie Griffiths, Anita Krasno, Dea Larsen Converse, Diane Milligan, Sich Slone, Grant Sovern, Lara Sutherlin:
Dear School Board Members:
A group of neighbors from the Marquette and Tenney-Lapham communities met this morning with Enis Ragland, Assistant to the Mayor. While we didn't claim to represent any organizations, many of us have been tapped into various discussions and email threads over the last few days. We put forth the following points:
The city's vision for downtown development is sorely compromised by the consolidation plan. It goes against all the investments in business development, affordable housing, central park, improved transportation, and the building of a strong community that spans the isthmus.
The school board's own projections predict that Lapham (as the sole elementary campus) will become overcrowded in 5 years - perhaps sooner if we reinstate reduced class sizes. Where will the city find a 'new' school to open in the downtown area?
The Alternatives programs DO need a permanent home, but their own director stated last year that the worst possible site is next to a junior high. Other options are available, including the possibility of the Atwood Community Center once it is completed.
The Lapham/Marquette consolidation passed purely for financial reasons - there is no convincing or consensed-upon programmatic advantages.
As we stated in our campaign against consolidation, budget cuts should be reversible, given that we are on the verge of a referendum. We need to be able to restore services next year if the referendum is to have political traction and real impact.
There are alternatives to saving the money the consolidation would save. One we put forth was:
Maintain the paired schools, with the alternative elementary program at Marquette and the early childhood program/TEP at Lapham
With the increase in some 2nd grade classes (and hence 'open' classrooms), move two alternative programs to the third floor of Lapham. The remaining programs could be housed in other district space, such as the Doyle building
Maintain only one principal for Lapham/Marquette. This would still keep three principals at two campuses (O'Keefe, Alternatives, and L/M principals). This feels like a sacrifice, but one we are already making if Lapham goes K-5. It saves almost HALF of the projected consolidation savings (minus the savings of rent for the Alternatives Programs).
This leaves a deficit of just over $100K. A tangible suggestion was to encourage the city to increase its funding of low-income student transportation because of the likelihood that CAPS funding formulas will change.
If the board can re-open the budget to reconsider the consolidation of the high school golf teams (a savings of less than $20K), they can surely reconsider the hasty and irresponsible decision to close a neighborhood school.
Mr. Ragland agreed to speak with the mayor and we are all committed to putting pressure on board members to reopen this issue in order to prevent the consolidation. We noted that none of us in our group saw flip-flopping the consolidation back to Marquette as a solution. We were a united and energized team.
We urge you to reconsider the Board’s vote to close Marquette school. There are fiscally responsible ways to save the same amount of money without destroying one of our treasured community institutions - the Lapham/Marquette pair.
Capital Times analyzes school closing votes of Madison Board
In The Capital Times for May 4, 2007, the editorial board analyzes the recent vote of the Madison School Board to close Marquette Elementary School. Doing what nobody wants to do
This is from MMSD board attorney Clarence Sherrod:
The board uses a form of parliamentary procedures that allow board members to reconsider actions that have been taken by the board. There are a number of rules that relate to such reconsideration such as the person who is on the prevailing side can only make the motion to reconsider. The board's agenda has to include the item that is to be reconsidered. A majority of the board or the president of the board determines whether or not an item is placed on a board agenda and when. Clarence
Only a member who voted in the majority, i.e., for closing, can make a motion to reconsider, so the pressure needs bear down on Cole, Moss, Silviera, and Kobza. If you can’t get one of them to make the motion, the school closing is done and over with.
Progessive Dane should lean on Beth Moss, the candidate it endorsed.
Maureen Rickman raised some pertinent points in her recent post regarding MMSD budgeting. Observing some of the discussions over the past few months, I found it interesting that when a school board member asked about business services items, teaching and learning (should we really be spending money developing curriculum and "frameworks" in this day and age, never mind the fact that we live in the internet era, the UW and MATC are next door, and that many teachers choose the best tools for their students, regardless of local dogma?) or other items not on the proposed reduction in increased spending list, they never got very far. In one case, the response was (paraphrasing) "if you do that, it will come out of salary savings" which translates to a reduction in the district's equity.
If that is the answer, what can a board member do, in the absence of 3 more votes? Or, if the votes are there, and the Administration does not execute, what happens? What is the recourse? Navigating these challenges is not a simple task.
We'll soon have new leadership in some MMSD departments along with an eventual new Superintendent (props to the board member(s) who recognize this reality and route around the outages). The department changes may be the biggest news of all, particularly, given the timing - before a new super is hired - which is very important, in my view. Laurie Frost looks beyond the "fog". It's interesting that in so many facets of life, one has to step back and try to look beyond the immediate rhetoric.
There are no shortage of challenging K-12 issues at hand. Many on this site have argued (for years) that all budget items should be on the table. I think we're getting closer to that day. I also hope that we'll soon see the last of the "same service" or "cost to continue" or "cost plus" budget approach. After all, spending goes up every year ($333M in 2006 / 2007 to $339.6M+ in 2007 / 2008 - maybe more, we'll see this fall when the "final" budget is adopted).
There has been bitterness, surprise and resentment over my vote with respect to the Lapham/Marquette consolidation. I would like to let people know why I voted to move the alternative programs to Marquette. I have a mix of emotions several days after the storm and hope you find it helpful to understand the process from my perspective.
I made this decision in the most thoughtful and respectful manner possible. Unfortunately, the process of getting to this vote is more complicated than the moment in time when the board makes a single vote. I hope those of you most affected by this can see how this transpired.
In the past three weeks, Beth Moss and I, as newly elected members of the Board of Education, have met with the staff of MMSD to get up to speed with our current programs. This process takes many, many hours. We have also spoken with teachers, visited schools, gone to public forums, taken calls, studied data, looked at programs with a critical eye and visited with many constituents.
Many of you went to forums over the past few weeks and spoke passionately about your schools and programs. I took copious notes and asked questions. Our participation and commitment was to be as effective as possible under the circumstances. Not to just listen silently and abdicate our role by letting the rest of the board make difficult choices.
Our board president urged us to listen to the public and to keep in mind that we had to make a decision soon. He wanted us to stay on task, to move the process forward and to ask the administration as many questions as needed.
In light of the enormous task at hand, we wondered, was there enough time? How could we possibly get all the information we needed? Could we get answers to questions once more information came back from the community?
At first, we were told that we would be voting on the budget the day after we were sworn in. This date was delayed by a week, but it still left us with very little time to ask meaningful questions and make meaningful contributions to the process.
As a board member, I made the motion to slow down the process and give the board two weeks to work together before the final vote. We were given one day to hand in our formal amendments. It is a frustrating process to say the least.
Much of the work on the budget and long range planning had been done in committee this past year. These were the options that the committee brought to the administration and the board. I chose to respect the time and effort of these committees, my fellow board members and staff over the course of the past few years. I respect the work and dedication of all those on the board.
Some people have asked what would have happened if I abstained. I’ve been thinking of this from the standpoint of risking further dissention on the board. Do we really want to risk board members actively and publicly working against each other? I feel we have to stand as one governing body with differing opinions. Outright dissent is crossing the line into the divisiveness for the board that our community has wanted to eliminate.
We can work to change the process. Set a better timeline that gives board members two weeks of orientation; a training session with the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB) on school budgeting; a day at the capital learning about state budgeting (perhaps with another seated board member) and two more weeks to study the budget with no other items on our agenda.
In addition, I would ask for the board to revisit criteria that we could use to provide further review and analysis of specific programs so we can evaluate them. One example is the programs housed in the Teaching and Learning Department. I would like to know exactly how much we want to spend to support quality professional development whether is it effective. Can we measure it?
I am hoping we can improve on the process, but abstaining from the process would be like giving up. I contend we made the best decisions possible for the kids. We inherited a job that many board members face each year. Is it disjointed? Yes. Can it be improved? Yes, and our board can address what worked and what did not this year at our retreat. I have also contacted the WASB for advice on how we can put a process in place if we ever have to consider consolidating or merging paired schools in the future.
I would also like us to consider coming up with community-supported criteria for this process beyond square footage, programming and enrollment. That is the job of the administration. I want us to come up with clear criteria on which to base our board decisions. We are quite capable of doing this.
Lindbergh is a small, charming school in our northside community. It is similar to Leopold, another school that has dealt with overcrowded conditions and is on the edge of our district map. Both are retrofitted from the open classroom concept to divided space.
It serves as a reminder of what we did right. We visited the school and talked to as many people as we could. We held a public forum at Kennedy Heights Neighborhood Center there. Beth and I went on a tour with neighbour-advocates, parents and teachers.
And in the end, with much debate, we found that this is a school that works. It has parent participation, teacher buy-in, neighborhood support and happy kids. All the while, our children are learning and improving.
We made difficult cuts, raised fees and asked more from our community. We committed to being fiscally responsible. We took middle schools off the table until we can have more conversations with community as to what our middle schools should look like.
We made a commitment to save small class size for all of our elementary schools, a worthwhile investment in our future and our young teachers. I personally want to focus on how we can better serve our younger staff and keep the cuts from affecting them the most. These cuts serve as a reminder of how we desperately need to talk about the cost of health insurance in our district.
And when you take a look at what we did not cut; a picture appears: we took Shabazz High School off the table; we took Blackhawk Middle School off the table; and we took Lindbergh off the table. All are good schools that have strong community support, school pride and work outside the general paradigm of what makes a successful school (too alternative, too small, etc.).
In some ways, philosophically, we made a commitment to alternative approaches in education in our district. We chose to not judge a book by its cover.
And the controversy? The near east side schools of Lapham, Marquette and O’Keefe. My experience with paired schools gave me a unique perspective of the inherent difficulties with pairings: one more transition for kids; different leadership styles which can lead to kids sliding backward in their schooling; no room for kids to expand to more challenging classes if they need to “jump ahead” in a particular subject. There are many benefits to bringing this pair together at Lapham.
Mr. Winston’s motion to move the alternative programs from rental space to effectively no known space was not acceptable. I made a motion to put alternative programs in Marquette because of my commitment to these kids.
Conversely, I couldn’t support the rationale provided by those who voted against consolidation – that we would continue to remain silent on where to put alternative programs. It is too late in the process to bring up suggestions for alternative program placement the night of the budget. Our alternative programs needed us to make a decision Monday night; our kids deserve that from us.
At that moment, I recognized that although I was sworn in less than two weeks ago as an individual board member, my success is “inextricably tied to the success of [our] board.” In addition, I became painfully aware that I do not have the authority as an individual to fix the problems I campaigned to fix once we step up before the public and convene as a board.
My alternative cuts may have prevented this consolidation but were not supported by enough members of the board. I was ready to raise fees or cut back on sports programs, a move that a majority of the board is against. I had hoped to have a further discussion on the reduction or elimination of REACH. I wanted to open the possibility of creating a new revenue stream in charging parking fees for those at Doyle and perhaps throughout the district.
I will be looking more closely at these issues in the future.
I feel very sorry to have alienated many of those in the Marquette attendance area with this controversial decision. I hope after reading this you will at least understand my rationale. I chose to advocate for all kids in the community, not just for the politically affluent. I stand by my vote.
I will remain committed to forging working relationships with everyone in the community. Our work is far from over. I hope our community, city alders, the mayor and the business community can find a way to keep all of our schools open. We need leaders to support our school communities. The board’s role is to oversee the education of the children in those schools. I trust that the Marquette community can come together and support our most fragile kids. I know I will.
An open letter to the School Board of Madison Metropolitan Schools
It's about time that this community approached the budget process with the honesty and integrity that we homeowners are required to do. For the past several years, the Superintendent and his associates have made a projected budget by increasing all categories of the budget by a certain percentage (about 5%) whether costs in that area are going up or not. (This is a "cost-plus" approach for those econ majors among you.) Each year, the projected budget comes up short of what is available and the games begin. Cuts are made to beloved programs or high profile student services; the community is upset and the board calls for a referendum or reform of the state funding scheme.
How about budgeting the way I have to? My house, my car, my medical costs and my insurance eat up the majority of the household income. So it is with the district. Teacher's salaries and benefits use up 85% of the budget and go up 4.7% each year. This is essentially a fixed cost that isn?t going to change much. We can complain about rising medical insurance costs or cut a few teachers from beloved "extras" like Strings, but those actions simply raise the ire of the community. I don?'t like that car costs jump up significantly over the several years that pass between purchases. My partner can complain about the mortgage, but we're not moving out of the house.
The reality is that the remaining 15% of the budget IS where the cuts need to be made. When the pocket money in our household drops down during lean times, the morning latte and pastry are replaced by home-perked coffee and a 30-cent bagel. When the muffler blew at the same time as the back tire, we replaced them both and began setting aside money for a new car. How can it be that during the "lean years" of state-imposed constraints, we have had a computer program for budgeting written by consultants who over-ran their budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars? How did the Doyle building get re-furbished from floor tile to light fixture with nary a cough at the timing of it? Where did the money come from to install a district-wide phone system that will likely be outpaced by cellular technology within two or three years? How do we manage to come up with the funds to pay non-union electricians for work when our own full-time employees sit idle (and therefore on target for the chopping block)?
How is it that our district has a 20% "better" child to administrator ratio, (195 children/administrator in Madison vs. 242 children/administrator statewide) and yet we've only let a handful of positions go unfilled? How did Roger Price manage to OVERSPEND his consultant budget by a million dollars, but in his next breath recommend cutting $300,000 for Strings for little kids?
These kinds of budgetary abuses continue despite their being easily defined differences between "student contact" budgetary items (teachers, books, Strings, etc.) and non-student contact items (computer consultants, budgeting programs, etc.). In those years when things like building maintenance costs didn't go up, or the need for consultants is not proven, why can't those non-student contact items be subjected to a freeze?. As a board, I'm sure that your task of managing the "little things" is as difficult for you as it is for me to convince my partner of the virtues of DVD rentals over a night out on the town. But, when the pocket money for the week is frozen at $20, and the credit card is hidden, home-popped corn smells extra good. Perhaps it is time that you send the current budget recommendations back to Mr. Rainwater and Mr. Price with notification that all non-student contact budgetary items will be frozen for the coming year. I'm sure they can work out the details from there.
The Madison School District may have "opened a big door" by authorizing the consolidation of golf teams at its four high schools into two programs as a tiny part of its $7.9 million in budget cuts, a Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association official said Tuesday.
The Madison School Board included that measure as it balanced the district's $339.6 million budget late Monday night because, as in most school districts, costs have grown faster than the state allows the district to raise property taxes.
If the merger of the golf teams gains Big Eight Conference and WIAA approval before a June 1 deadline, Madison Memorial will combine with Madison West, and Madison La Follette will combine with Madison East, beginning with the boys seasons in 2008.
The projected $14,895 savings to the district - all in the form of coaching salaries - was the smallest of the last-minute additions to the district's budget cuts.
Last night's budget session can only be described as ugly.
Ugly on so many different levels:
- Art Rainwater bullying Lucy Mathiak for asking questions;
- Moss, Cole, and Winston voting contrary to what they stated on "consolidation" in the campaign;
- Nickle and diming programs while huge chunks of the budget never get even a casual review;
- Board members ignoring parents, staff, and taxpayers on issues like coaches in schools and damned near any other issue on the agenda.
Board members and administrators alike should feel nothing but shame.
Personally, I'm done. I'm going to do my best never to give the MMSD another serious thought.
I'm going to tackle easier issues -- global warming, peace between Jews and Arabs, ending the war in Iraq, the end of cheap oil, and other issues where I might actually be able to make a difference.
As the MMSD heads to decay and dysfunction, I just don't give a damn.
Board members tussled over dozens of suggestions to try to find money to return various programs and services to the district that had been cut by the administration in an effort to balance the $339.6 million budget.
The administration had originally proposed about $8 million in cuts, including $2 million from special education aimed at helping students with speech or language problems, increased class size at the elementary level and closing Lindbergh Elementary and Black Hawk Middle School, and consolidating Marquette and Lapham.
The board also approved a district proposal to eliminate busing for five Catholic schools in the district, and offer parents a $450 subsidy to transport their children themselves, to save about $230,000. State statutes require that public schools provide transportation for all students in their district. Parents of students at other area private schools take the subsidy in lieu of busing.
Board member Lucy Mathiak and Superintendent Art Rainwater had several testy exchanges as Mathiak grilled administrators on their programs and expenses.
"I'm trying to understand why our district requires so many more people in teaching and learning than other districts," Mathiak said.
"Our priorities since I've been superintendent are highly trained, highly skilled teachers in a small class. After that, we believe in highly trained, highly skilled teachers in front of a large class. We don't believe in poorly trained teachers in small classes," Rainwater said sharply as he defended the Madison district's focus on professional development.
Board members also disagreed on how aggressively to use projected salary savings, an accounting method that predicts how many teachers will leave the district. Any shortfall would have to come out of the district's equity fund, which some board members feel is dangerously low.
In a six-plus-hour meeting punctuated by flaring tempers, the board also found ways to stave off most proposed increases in elementary class sizes by raising fees and increasing projected savings in salaries for the 2007-08 school year.
The board also spared the district's fifth-grade strings program from elimination.
The moves came as the board balanced the district's $339.6 million budget by cutting $7.9 million from existing services and programs.
The budget finally was approved just after midnight on a 6-1 vote. Lucy Mathiak was the lone dissenter.
Board members voted 4-3 to consolidate Marquette and Lapham at Lapham, 1045 E. Dayton St., into a kindergarten through fifth-grade school, while rejecting a proposal from Superintendent Art Rainwater to close Lindbergh, 4500 Kennedy Road. Currently, Lapham hosts K-2 students while Marquette hosts grades three through five.
Rainwater also had proposed consolidating Black Hawk Middle School into Sherman and O'Keeffe middle schools, but that proposal wasn't adopted.
Voting for the consolidation of Marquette and Lapham, to save $522,000, were Lawrie Kobza, Arlene Silveira, Beth Moss and Maya Cole. Opposing the measure were Johnny Winston Jr., Carol Carstensen and Mathiak.
The Madison school board approved the consolidation of Marquette and Lapham elementary schools under next year's budget. The two schools will combine under Lapham's roof, reported WISC-TV.
Under the budget, Marquette will be used for alternative education programs.
The school board also approved combining all high school boys golf teams into two and elminated bussing to Wright and Spring Harbor charter schools.
The moves are all a part of cutting the budget by more than $7 million.
Many of those linked to affected schools have loudly spoken out in opposition to the closings, and Monday was no exception. Parents and students put their concerns in writing outside the Doyle Administration Building -- children writing in chalk on the ground -- hoping to catch the eye of board members before the meeting inside.
"From the debate, the motions and the votes, it seems that all of the rancor over ideological splits in the Madison Metropolitan School Board is irrelevant" given the vote to consolidate Marquette and Lapham schools
I think the current diversity of viewpoints on the Madison School Board is healthy. Rewind the clock three years and imagine how some of these issues might have played out. Would there have been a public discussion? Would the vote have been 6 - 1, or ? One of the reasons the "spending gap" in the MMSD's $339.6M+ budget was larger this year is due to the Board and Administration's public recognition of the structural deficit. The MMSD's "equity" has declined by half over the past 7 years. More from Channel3000.com.
: Edline -- and other programs like it, such as SchoolFusion and School Center -- provide students, teachers and parents with an online meeting place to discuss day-to-day assignments, tests and grades. But it also enables parents to keep track of a kid's academic progress -- or lack of progress -- in a heretofore unthinkably micromanagerial way. Parents can know everything; children have no wiggle room. Gone is the fudge factor, the white lie. A student makes a D on a quiz, a D shows up on Edline. No matter that a student leads a discussion in class or puts forth a cogent point. Or has the possibility to retake the quiz, make up the poor grade or do extra credit work over the weekend.
This swift knowledge of success or failure can drive a wedge into families.
The Madison School District has invested in a new student information system. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, given the recent report card reductions in some schools. More here.
The recent announcement that Montgomery County school officials were starting work on an annual report of crimes committed by students and other disciplinary incidents underscored a surprising fact: In this era of heightened concern about school safety, few Washington area school systems regularly report such offenses to the public.
The annual School Safety Report, slated for publication in Montgomery starting in the 2008-09 academic year, will place the county almost alone among Maryland and Northern Virginia school systems in reporting detailed school crime statistics to the public, according to education leaders and lawmakers. In much of this region, as in much of the nation, comprehensive reports on weapons, drugs and sex in individual public schools simply don't exist.
Among the area's largest school systems, only Fairfax County reports school crime data online, as part of its searchable database of school report cards. One other county, Anne Arundel, publishes a hard-copy student discipline report with annual crime data for individual schools. School systems in Montgomery, Prince George's, Howard, Loudoun and Prince William counties publish no such document.
"It's all theoretically available to the public but rather difficult to obtain," said Montgomery County Council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville), who has pushed for annual school crime reporting.
Here are 10 good reasons to put the paired elementary schools, Lapham and Marquette, into one building.
The school would be a K-5 school, like most elementary schools in the District.
Siblings in elementary school would go to school in the same building. They would not be split after 2nd grade.
Students would have the benefit of having teachers from kindergarten through 5th grade in the same building, which should strengthen relationships between students and teachers.
The teaching teams at Lapham and Marquette would be combined for the K-5 school, so strong teaching teams would not be split up.
The combined K-5 school would have approximately 450 students, which is the size of six other MMSD elementary schools, and significantly smaller than two other MMSD elementary schools.
The K-5 school would have full-time, or close to full-time, art, music and physical education teachers.
All students would attend school close to their homes. Lapham and Marquette are only 1.06 miles away from each other.
District schools would continue to exist and be operated in both the Lapham and Marquette neighborhoods.
If the District’s growth projections for the area are too low, there is still plenty of space at neighboring Lowell and Emerson schools for students.
Last but not least, combining the paired schools would save money, and would free up space to house programs currently located in rented space.
In my view, of almost all the budget items the School Board is looking at, this item has the fewest negative impacts on students. It will be a shame if the Board’s concerns about political pressure trump its concerns about what is best for students.
The district and Madison Teachers Inc. exchanged initial proposals Wednesday to begin negotiations on a new two-year contract that will run through June 30, 2009. The current one expires June 30.
"Frankly, I was shocked and appalled by the school district's initial proposal because it was replete with take-backs in teachers' rights as well as the economic offer," John Matthews, executive director of MTI, said in an interview Thursday.
But Bob Butler, a staff attorney with the Wisconsin Association of School Boards who is part of the district's bargaining team, said he believed the district's proposal was fair and flexible.
He said the administration's proposal on health care provides two new HMO plans that could bring savings to the district and new options to employees, while still providing an option for the more expensive Wisconsin Physicians Service plan for employees who want it.
The district is proposing that teachers accept language that would allow two new HMO insurance plans, provided by Dean Care and Physicians Plus, to be added to the two plans currently offered.
Slightly more than 53 percent of the employees represented by the teachers' bargaining unit use the less expensive Group Health Cooperative plan, which is a health maintenance organization, or HMO. The district's costs for the GHC plan for next year are $364.82 per month for singles and $974.08 for families. Employees who opt for the GHC do not pay a percentage of the premium themselves but are responsible for co-pays for drugs that range from $6 to $30.
If about the same number of district employees -- 1,224 -- use the GHC plan next year, it would cost the district about $11.6 million.
The other option currently available to teachers is provided by Wisconsin Physicians Service. A preferred provider organization plan, it provides health insurance to just under 47 percent of the district's teacher unit.
A more flexible plan that allows participants to go to different doctors for different medical specialties, the WPS plan next year will cost the district $747.78 per month for singles and $1,961.13 for families. Under the current contract, employees pay 10 percent of the cost of the WPS plan, which this year is $65.65 per month for singles, and $172.18 per month for families.
The cost estimate for the school district's share of the WPS plan under the current contract would be about $19 million. Employees, who pick up 10 percent of the cost as their share of the premium, would pay another $2 million under the current structure.
But with the Madison School Board facing a $10.5 million budget shortfall, is the board giving away too much with its promises to retain teachers' increasingly pricey health insurance and to discard its legal mechanism for limiting teachers' total compensation increase to 3.8 percent?
Yes, School Board Vice President Lawrie Kobza said Saturday, "I feel very strongly that this was a mistake," said Kobza, who acknowledged that most board members endorse the agreement with Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union.
State law allows districts to avoid arbitration by making a so-called qualified economic offer, or QEO, by boosting salaries and benefits a combined 3.8 percenter a year.
"To agree before a negotiation starts that we're not going to impose the QEO and negotiate health care weakens the district's position," Kobza said. She contended the district's rising health-care costs are harming its ability to raise starting teachers' salaries enough to remain competitive.
The "voluntary impasse resolution" agreements, which are public records, are used in only a handful of Wisconsin's 425 school districts, according to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.
"Why did our equity go down this past year since we, the board, passed a balanced budget in 2005/2006? Why did it go down by $2.8M (about a 1% variance in last year's $319M+ budget)?
Answer: "Negative expenditure of $6M in salaries (tuition income was down, special ed high incidence aid was down) $5.9M "structural deficit in place"."
The Administration used a "salary savings" account to "balance" the budget. When such savings did not materialize, the MMSD's equity (the difference between an organization's assets and liabilities) declined.
Interestingly, Madison School Board members Beth Moss, Carol Carstensen and Maya Cole have advocated the continued reduction in the District's equity as a means to help balance the 2007 / 2008 $339M+ budget. Beth proposed budgeting an additional $2.133M in "salary savings" above the planned $1M while Carol sought $2M and Maya asked for an additional $500K. [Board member proposed 2007/2008 budget amendments 540K PDF]
Finally, several years ago, I received an email from a person very concerned about the "dramatic" decline in the MMSD's "reserves", which according to this person were, at one time over $50M. I asked for additional data on this matter, but never heard from that person again.
The equity fund's decline gives the MMSD less wiggle room over time, and means that we, as a community face decisions related to facilities, staffing and services. Hopefully, the MMSD board and administration can start to consider and implement new approaches, including virtual learning tools and expanded collaboration with community assets like the UW, MATC and others. I hope that we can move beyond the annual "same service approach" and begin to think differently. Peter Gascoyne's 5 year approach to budgeting is a good place to start
"[Ask] what is the best quality of education that can be purchased for our district for $280 million a year. Start with a completely clean slate. Identify your primary goals and values and priorities. Determine how best to achieve those goals to the highest possible level, given a budget that happens to be $40 million smaller than today’s. Consider everything – school-based budgeting, class sizes, after-school sports, everything."
Catholic school parents and administrators are upset by proposed Madison school district budget cuts that would eliminate the bus service they receive to get their kids to school.
But the school district is hoping to trim nearly $230,000 from its budget by offering more than $162,000 directly to parents to transport their children instead of providing yellow school bus service to five Catholic schools in the Madison district. Busing those students is projected to cost about $392,000 in 2007-08.
State statutes require public school districts to provide transportation for students in private schools as well as public schools, but Madison district officials say it costs them more than 50 percent more per pupil to bus the Catholic school students. Underlying the proposal is the need for the Madison School Board and administrators to find nearly $8 million to cut from next year's budget to comply with state-imposed revenue caps.
There are 358 students who attend St. Dennis, St. James, Edgewood Campus School, St. Maria Goretti and Queen of Peace schools who would be affected by the policy change.
1. Kennedy Heights Community Center with the support of many other individuals and groups is organizing a walk from Kennedy Heights Community Center to Gompers Elementary School to raise awareness about the potential closings of Lindbergh Elementary School and Black Hawk middle school. Neighborhood Schools are a community resource for the children and families in Kennedy Heights and the northside; closing the schools would negatively impact our neighborhood, our community center, and the families that live here. Please come and walk with us to keep northside schools open.
The walk will start at the Kennedy Heights Community Center at 4:00 PM on Monday April 23rd - we will walk together from Kennedy Heights to Gompers Elementary school about 1.3 miles. At Gompers their will be a brief discussion and Popsicles for kids. All are welcome please distribute widely.
PS I know that school board members have a meeting at 5:00 PM, but I hope you can join us
for the beginning of our walk.
2. Join a grassoots rally: “An Hour For Marquette” - On Friday, April 27, from 1:30 - 2:30 come to Marquette and pull your Marquette student from class to protest the proposed consolidation (All concerned parents, students, and other community members are welcome to join in). We will rally at the school. Bring a sign that expresses your feeling about Marquette. We will be working to get press coverage and a visit from the Mayor. If you are interested in attending the rally e-mail Dea Larsen Converse at dealarsen@yahoo.com or Maria Moreno at mcmoreno@tds.net so we can give a head count to the papers.
(Note that this is not a PTG sponsored event)
It’s not over yet! Let’s keep the pressure on!
The MMSD could save one or more teaching positions by combining two positions – public relations and government relations.
The government relations position seems unnecessary given the excellent work of Arlene Silviera and the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools. They have done more in a few short months than the MMSD has ever done to raise awareness about inadequate state funding.
Additionally, most district do not employ a lobbyist, but rely on the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators, Wisconsin Council for Administrators of Special Services, and other organizations lobbying in the state Capitol
The PR position doesn’t seem necessary because the press seems to want to talk to the superintendent, not the PR guy.
Put the two positions together and the MMSD loses nothing and saves services delivered directly to students.
A controversial plan to close and consolidate schools on Madison's North and East sides appears dead a week before the Madison School Board's self- imposed deadline for determining $7.9 million in spending reductions.
Four of the board's seven members plan to vote against Superintendent Art Rainwater's proposal to save $1 million by closing tiny Lindbergh Elementary and reshuffling hundreds of other students in elementary and middle schools, according to interviews with all board members.
The plan could be revived, however, if board members fail to find a comparable amount of cost savings elsewhere in the district's 2007-08 budget.
Related 2007-2008 MMSD Budget (07/08 budget is either $339M or $345M (- I've seen both numbers used); up from $333M in 06/07) Posts:
Can anyone explain why the discussion of ways to meet the gap in next year?s school budget has not included any mention of the cost of teachers? salaries and benefits and how much they are expected to go up next year?
The district has projected a budget deficit for next year of $7.9 million. To arrive at this figure, the district has to make some assumption about the costs of salaries and benefits for next year, which necessarily implies an assumption about how much those costs will increase. There seems to be no information available from the district that explains that assumption.
In last week's Isthmus, Jason Shepard wrote that salaries and benefits are slated to rise 4.7% next year. That figure comes from a five-year budget projection that is available on the district's web site. However, I have been told that that figure is not accurate. The district's contract with MTI for next year has not yet been negotiated (bargaining commences on April 25). I have been told that the district wants to keep its budget assumptions about salaries and benefits confidential for now, in order to avoid adversely affecting its bargaining position. The idea is to preserve the possibility that the district could do better in its bargaining than it is now assuming.
This explanation does not seem compelling to me, for a couple of reasons. First, call me a cynic, but I can't imagine that the very competent folks at MTI cannot figure out what assumptions the district is utilizing, and so those the district is leaving in the dark include everyone except MTI. Second, once the district has gone through the agony of the current round of budget cuts, it will have very little incentive to try to do better in bargaining than the result that it has already planned for.
It seems to me that the cost of salaries and benefits is the dog that didn't bark in the current discussion of budget cuts. The amount by which those costs will go up next year has a significant impact on the amount of cuts that will be required.
Let me be more specific. The superintendent's preferred school consolidation plan calls for closing three schools (Lindbergh, Marquette, and Black Hawk), requiring more than 800 students to change schools, and, to my mind, adversely affecting the education available to many of the elementary school students and certainly all of the middle school students in the East attendance area. (Thanks, Art!) This plan is said to save about $1 million next year, though for various reasons I think that figure is inflated.
Let's assume for the moment that the figures in the District's five-year projection are accurate. I've been told they're not, but we've got nothing better to work with, so let's use these numbers for illustrative purposes. According to this document, the district's salary and benefits costs are assumed to grow from $189,845,020 to $198,761,362 next year, an increase of 4.7%. The Qualified Economic Offer provision of state law requires these costs to increase by at least 3.8% in order to permit the district to avoid arbitration on economic issues. If these expenses went up by 3.8% rather than 4.7%, the budget gap would shrink by $1,702,231. (This means - again assuming the accuracy of these figures - that about $1.7 million of next year's budget gap is, from a legal perspective, voluntarily incurred rather than statutorily imposed.)
According to the web site of the Wisconsin School Board Association, the total average package increase per teacher in school settlements across the state in 2006-2007 was 4.29%. If the district's salary and benefits expenses went up by 4.29% rather than 4.7%, the budget gap would shrink by about $772,000.
If these figures are anywhere close to being accurate, the district could save the same amount of money it hopes to save by closing schools by instead scaling back on the amount by which it plans to increase teacher salary and benefits next year to some percentage closer to 3.8%.
To be clear, I'm not necessarily advocating a reduction in whatever the district and Board are assuming in terms of teacher salaries and benefits. The take home pay of the teacher who lives next door to me hasn't gone up at all in the last three years. That stinks. But the school board is confronted with a menu of awful choices. Shouldn't the awful choice of cutting back the projected increase in teacher salary and benefits to something closer to 3.8% be added to the mix?
Vang Pao Elementary School is as local as most MMSD school names
Making school names local, as suggested by Capital Times editor John Nichols, is a sensible goal. Make school names local The Madison School Board had an open nomination process and it held televised public hearings on the naming of the new west side elementary school. We did so to hear the preferences of local people and their reasons for their choices.
Over several months, we sought and received nominations. While we heard from some people living outside the district, we heard primarily from people from the district.
During these months I came to the conclusion that naming a school after Hmong General Vang Pao would meet important local needs, the need to recognize the sacrifices of the Hmong generation who were US allies during the Vietnam War and to explain the Hmong presence in our community which is a direct result of that alliance.
Having heard from many Hmong speakers during the hearings and from my colleague, Shwaw Vang, about the role that Vang Pao played in their lives, I did not feel that substituting a different Hmong name was an option. I could not imagine telling Shwaw Vang that I had decided that he is a more appropriate hero for the Hmong people in the Madison district. I believe that such an action would have shown great disrespect for the very people that we hope to acknowledge are part of our community and play very positive roles in our community.
The tradition in MMSD—rightly or wrongly—has been to name some schools after national heroes, some after locations, some after people who made significant contributions to the state or the district and some after people who have earned respect locally, even though the honorees were not without controversy. To me, naming the school after General Vang Pao fits in that range.
2007 / 2008 Madison School Board & Budget Discussion
The new Madison School Board heard a brief strings performance from some students this evening at a Memorial High School budget hearing. Left to right: Jacinth Sohi, Beth Moss, Carol Carstensen, Maya Cole, Johnny Winston, Jr., Lawrie Kobza, Arlene Silveira and Lucy Mathiak.
According to a report from a recent East High United meeting, where MMSD Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools Pam Nash did a presentation on the District's high school redesign plans, the following eleven people have been named to the redesign committee:
Pam Nash -- Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools, former principal of Memorial HS. While at Memorial, Ms. Nash oversaw the development and implementation of the "neighborhoods" school restructuring and implementation of the 9th grade core curriculum.
Alan Harris -- Principal of East HS, former principal at Black Hawk MS.
Loren Rathert -- Interim principal at LaFollette HS, former interim principal at East HS, former MMSD Social Studies Coordinator, and former principal at West HS. While at West, Mr. Rathert oversaw the development and initial implementation of the SLC grant, including the initial implementation of the school restructuring and the 9th and 10th grade core curriculum.
Ed Holmes -- Principal at West HS (since fall, 2004), former principal at Wright MS and former assistant principal at West HS. Mr. Holmes has been principal at West during the continued implementation of the SLC grant, school restructuring, and 9th and 10th grade core curriculum.
Bruce Dahmen -- Principal at Memorial HS.
Sally Schultz -- Principal at Shabazz HS.
Steve Hartley -- MMSD Director of Alternative Programs. These include the Transitional Education Program (TEP), the School-Age Parent Program (SAPAR), Operation Fresh Start, the Omega program and many others. Mr. Hartley also oversees the District's implementation of the state-mandated Youth Options Program (YOP), which requires the District to pay for appropriate educational opportunities for eligible high school juniors and seniors whose needs cannot be met at their own schools. A wide range of students may take advantage of YOP. The District's YOP implementation and -- importantly -- policy regarding the giving of high school credit for non-MMSD courses is currently under review and has been discussed on this blog --
Lisa Wachtel -- Director of MMSD Teaching and Learning Department, former MMSD Science Coordinator. Dr. Wachtel oversees a staff of 30-40 educational professionals across a variety of content areas. Possibly important, when asked by the Superintendent to cut two people from her staff for next year, she chose to eliminate two TAG staff (leaving a TAG staff of only five people for the entire district, if the BOE approves the cut).
L. Alan Phelps -- Professor in the U.W. Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (School of Education) and Director of the U.W. Center on Education and Work. He seems to have special interests in special education and intercultural learning. Here are links to two of his recent papers, one entitled "Using Post-School Outcomes Data to Improve Practices and Policies in Restructured Inclusive High Schools" and another entitled "High Schools with Authentic and Inclusive Learning Practices: Selected Features and Findings" --
M. Bruce King -- Faculty Associate in the U.W. Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (School of Education). Dr. King is a longtime West area parent and was hired by the District to serve as the West HS SLC Evaluator. He is the author of the November, 2005, report on West's English 10 initiative that has been heavily discussed on this blog -- http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2005/11/evaluation_of_t.php
Diana Hess -- Associate Professor in the U.W. Department of Curriculum and Instruction (School of Education). Dr. Hess's special area is social studies education, with a particular interest in training teachers to do discussion-based instruction, especially around controversial issues. Here is a link to an article by Dr. Hess entitled "Teaching Students to Discuss Controversial Public Issues" -- http://www.indiana.edu/~ssdc/cpidig.htm
Six elementary schools to have different principals
Six elementary schools will have different principals next year in a series of transfers and changes within the Madison School District. The principals who are transferring have been at their current schools from four to ten years.
The list of new assignments, by principal, with current school and length of service:
Deborah Hoffman to Lincoln from Franklin (10 yrs.)
Beth Lehman to Hawthorne from Lincoln (6 yrs.)
Catherine McMillan to Franklin from Hawthorne (10 yrs.)
Michael Hertting to Lapham from a leave of absence
Kristi Kloos to Lake View from Lapham (4 yrs.)
Joy Larson to Allis from Marquette (4 yrs.)
Allis Principal Chris Hodge and Gompers Principal Sherrill Wagner will retire this summer, and Lake View Principal Linda Sweeney will take a leave of absence for career exploration. Hertting will come off a similar leave; previously he led Orchard Ridge for five years. Vacancies will be filled within the next few months.
"We believe these assignment changes are good for the students, the staff, the principals and the district," said Superintendent Art Rainwater. "Last year, we shifted six other elementary principals after stays of similar length."
Parents at each of the schools were notified yesterday. The changes will take place over the summer in time for the Tuesday, September 4 start of the new school year. Each of the principals will assist her successor in the transition to make it more effective and efficient.
Constant shuffling of principals damages the effectivenss of the MMSD. All the rhetoric about building relationships amounts to nothing but words, when these actions speak louder.
The superintendent named no principal at Marquette. Apparently, he plans to "consolidate" Lapham and Marquette regardless of whether the board votes for it or not.
With the uncertainty and stress about staff cuts and school closings, the changes could not come at a worse time.
Is the superintendent hell-bent on destroying the MMSD?
The reorganization is a sort of inversion of the city school administration. Instead of the traditional model in which principals work directly for a superintendent, each of the city’s more than 1,400 principals will choose a “school support organization” to work with their schools, and will pay these groups out of the school’s budget.
“Until now many educational decisions were made outside of the schools and classrooms,” Mr. Klein said during a news conference at Education Department headquarters.
Principals will have a menu of choices, at various prices, Mr. Klein said. At the low end, principals will pay $29,500 to join the so-called “empowerment network,” in which they are largely freed from oversight in exchange for agreeing to meet performance targets that include higher test scores.
At the high end, schools can choose to contract with the Success for All Foundation, a private nonprofit company based in Baltimore that offers a “whole school reform” model at a cost of up to $145,215, depending on enrollment. Smaller schools will be able to contract with the Success for All for as little as $44,694.
6th Grade Textbooks: Connected (left) and Singapore Math.
UPDATE: A reader emailed this:
I noticed that there were 10 student books in the 6th grade pile for CMP. That was surprising since there are only 8 in publication. Then I looked at the teacher editions and noticed there were 10 as well. There are two copies of both How Likely is It? and Covering and Surrounding.
The statement, "A quick look at the size of the Connected Math textbooks compared to the equivalent Singapore Math course materials illustrates the publisher and author interests in selling these large volumes irrespective of curriculum quality and rigor (not to mention the much larger potential for errors or the lost trees....)" is following the picture in one of the discussions. Taking a look at the Singapore Math website It appears that in addition to the 2 textbooks pictured and student workbooks pictured, there are Intensive Practice books, Extra Practice Books, and Challenging Word Problems books, as well as other resources. Also, the white book on the bottom of the pile appears to be an answer key. There are also teacher guides for 6A and 6B that are not in the picture.
I'm not suggesting the statement above is false, I would just like to point out that the picture being used is not an accurate comparison. I hope you find this information valuable.
Bill Keys Bids Adieu to Ruth Robarts and Shwaw Vang
Long time teacher, former school board member/president and activist Bill Keys spoke last night during Ruth and Shwaw's retirement discussions. Video | mp3 audio
At the heart of the issue is the fact that the East High School attendance area has more elementary schools and schools with smaller populations than the other attendance areas in the district. Of the 10 elementary schools in the East High attendance area, only Hawthorne has more than 300 students.
By contrast, La Follette and Memorial high schools' attendance areas have seven elementary schools, and the West High School attendance area has eight elementary schools. The populations of these schools average over 400 students.
But hundreds of staunch fans of the East area elementary schools are rallying to the defense of their schools, saying that they are successful hubs of their communities, and that their small size and close-knit students and staff help engage families across all demographics while improving student achievement.
"People living on the east and northeast sides of the city shouldn't be punished because the schools in this area were built to be small," parent and longtime school volunteer Jill Jokela said at a gathering last week.
Brittany Burns, 12 years old, has always been on the heavy side. Last year in fifth grade, neighborhood kids started picking on her at the bus stop, calling her "fatty" and "chubby wubby." Then someone else piled on: Brittany's school.
In a letter dated Oct. 2, 2006, the Campbell County School District No. 1 invited "select students" to take part in a fitness and nutrition program set up for some of the district's most overweight kids. At 5 feet 2 inches tall and 179 pounds, Brittany qualified.
Receiving the letter was "embarrassing," Brittany says. Her mother, Mindi Story, a clerk at an Albertsons supermarket, says she seethed "pure anger" because, she argues, her daughter's weight shouldn't be the school's concern: "I send her to school to learn math and reading."
Spurred by a local doctor and an enthusiastic school board, Gillette has banned soda and second helpings on hot meals. This year, it included students' body-mass index -- a number that measures weight adjusted for height -- on report cards, and started recommending students like Brittany for after-school fitness programs. It even offers teachers the chance to earn bonuses based on their fitness.
April Board of Education Progress Report - Johnny Winston, Jr.
The month of April brings showers; however, for the Madison BOE it brings new beginnings, budget challenges and community dialogue.
First, regarding new beginnings, let me congratulate Beth Moss and Maya Cole on their election onto the Madison School Board. They will be replacing the retiring Shwaw Vang and Ruth Robarts. Our community should be proud of Mr. Vang and Ms. Robarts’ years of service. I was also re-elected to a second term and look forward to continued public service in this position.
In addition to new Board members, the Board decided unanimously to name the new school General Vang Pao Elementary.
Second, the Madison School District faces a $7.9 million dollar shortfall, which has the Board discussing school closings and consolidations, increasing elementary class sizes in several schools, increasing class sizes across the district in elementary art, music, gym and REACH, and eliminating the 5th grade strings program. After 14 years of being under the state imposed revenue limits, the budget cuts are now reaching the point of cutting into the foundation of our educational values.
Third, several public hearings on the budget reductions will be held throughout the community including on Tuesday April 17th at La Follette and Thursday April 19th at Memorial. Both hearings are at 6:30 pm. The 2007-08 budget will be finalized in late April or early May.
Fourth, the Board voted down an operating referendum proposal that could have taken place in the summer. However, given our budgetary situation I won’t be surprised to see an operating referendum on the ballot in February 2008.
Fifth, the Board approved a Request For Proposals for consultants to conduct a superintendent search, and decided on health insurance contributions for administrators.
Board Committees
A full month of public hearings and Board workshop agendas kept many committees from meeting since my last report. However, the committees have played an important part in analysis and discussion this year.
Finance and Operations (Lawrie Kobza, Chair) continues its work on the citizen’s budget. Long Range Planning (Carol Carstensen, Chair) held public hearings in the community regarding the proposed closings and consolidations.
Communications (Arlene Silveira, Chair) held a special workshop regarding community advocacy efforts regarding lobbying our state government for additional K-12 funding. Community Partnerships (Lucy Mathiak, Chair) received a presentation regarding the process and procedure the UW Foundation uses to engage people to make contributions.
MMSD News
On Monday March 26th, the MMSD held its annual recognition awards honoring district staff, students and citizens who have made significant contributions to Madison's outstanding schools. Nine students received the Joe Thomas Community Service Award, five teachers were recognized for their work toward the Kohl Teacher Fellowship, and eleven individuals received the Distinguished Service Award. For more MMSD news click here: http://mmsd.org/today/
Thank you for your interest and support of the MMSD.
Johnny Winston, Jr., President, Madison Board of Education
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
Want district information? Go to www.mmsd.org
Write to the entire school board at comments@madison.k12.wi.us.
Sign up for MMSD communications at http://mmsd.org/lists/newuser.cgi
Watch school board meetings and other district programs on MMSD Channel 10 & 19.
Ken Syke
Public Information
Madison School District
voice 663 1903; cell 608 575 6682; fax 608 204 0342
The answer would appear to have a lot to do with threats by school administrators to consolidate and perhaps close schools on the isthmus. A few months before the election, the administration floated the notion that budgets could be balanced by radically altering how Lapham and Marquette elementary schools and O'Keeffe Middle School are organized.
The month of April brings showers, however, for the Madison BOE it brings new beginnings, budget challenges and community dialogue.
First, regarding new beginnings let me congratulate Beth Moss and Maya Cole on their election onto the Madison school board. They will be replacing the retiring Shwaw Vang and Ruth Robarts. Our community should be proud of Mr. Vang and Ms. Robarts’ years of service. I was also re-elected to a second term and look forward to continued public service in this position. In addition to new board members, the board decided unanimously to name the new school General Vang Pao Elementary. Second, the Madison School District faces a $7.1 million dollar shortfall, which has the board discussing school closings and consolidations, increasing elementary class sizes in several schools, increasing class sizes across the district in elementary art, music, gym and REACH, and eliminating the 5th grade strings program. After fourteen years of being under the state imposed revenue limits, the budget cuts are now reaching the point of cutting into the foundation of our educational values. Third, several public hearings on the budget reductions will be held throughout the community including on Tuesday April 17th at LaFollette and Thursday April 19th at Memorial. Both hearings are at 6:30 pm. The 2007-08 budget will be finalized in late April or early May. Fourth, the board voted down an operating referendum proposal that could have taken place in the summer. However, given our budgetary situation I won’t be surprised to see an operating referendum on the ballot in February 2008. Fifth, the board approved a Request For Proposals for consultants to conduct a superintendent search and decided on health insurance contributions for Administrators.
Board Committees:
A full month of public hearings and board workshop agendas kept many committees from meeting since my last report. However, the committees have played an important part in analysis and discussion this year. Finance and Operations (Lawrie Kobza, Chair) continues its work on the citizen’s budget. Long Range Planning (Carol Carstensen, Chair) held public hearings in the community regarding the proposed closings and consolidations. Communications (Arlene Silveira, Chair) held a special workshop regarding community advocacy efforts regarding lobbying our state government for additional K-12 funding. Community Partnerships (Lucy Mathiak, Chair) received a presentation regarding the process and procedure the UW Foundation uses to engage people to make contributions.
MMSD News:
On Monday March 26th, the MMSD held its annual recognition awards honoring district staff, students and citizens who have made significant contributions to Madison's outstanding schools. Nine students received the Joe Thomas Community Service Award, five teachers were recognized for their work toward the Kohl Teacher Fellowship, and eleven individuals received the Distinguished Service Award. For more MMSD news click here: http://mmsd.org/today/
Thank you for your interest and support of the MMSD.
Johnny Winston, Jr., President, Madison Board of Education
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
Want district information? Go to www.mmsd.org
Write to the entire school board at comments@madison.k12.wi.us.
Sign up for MMSD communications at http://mmsd.org/lists/newuser.cgi
Watch school board meetings and other district programs on MMSD Channel 10 & 19.
Are Wisconsin taxes too high, or just property and personal income taxes?
As residents scramble to complete their taxes by this year’s deadline, April 17, there are two contrasting messages coming from Wisconsin’s corporate community on the subject of taxes and economic prosperity.
One of those messages dominates political discussion. It’s easy to state, easy to understand, and easy to put on bumper stickers: Cut My Taxes.
Its chief proponent is Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC), the Madison-based big-business lobby that for years has focused its legislative agenda on plaintive appeals for a reduced tax burden.
Business boosters disagree, but it's possible to get to the truth
Jack Norman, in Isthmus, April 4, 2007 Are Wisconsin taxes too high?
The new board must not chase away Andrekopoulos. He has worked indefatigably and creatively to transform MPS into an effective system of schools.
We have referred to one board faction as the reform wing and the other as the union wing. Those labels best describe what unites them but not necessarily what divides them. The reform side is not necessarily anti-union, and the union side is not necessarily anti-reform.
Bonds, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, may find board support for his call for a more rigorous curriculum. We backed Bonds but hope he doesn't take the board down the policy cul-de-sac of renewed busing. It won't lead to more integration, his stated goal, for lack of white students to go around.
The Isthmus article Blame for the media illustrates a long-obvious truth: John Matthews is Madison's Mayor Daley, a ward boss of our very own, and he gets very angry when his political control slips.
Matthews wanted to control the selection of Board members for three seats in 2007. Odd-year elections are especially important to Madison Teachers Inc. because odd years are the years in which the 2-year MTI-MMSD contracts are negotiated.
This time Mr. Matthews failed. He couldn't find a suitable candidate to run against Johnny Winston, Jr., so he labeled and publicly berated him for not being Bill Keys. In Mr. Matthews' mind that failure left only two seats in play. He won with Beth Moss and lost with Marj Passman.
Net score? For the first time since the early 1980's a majority of the Board of Education are not his endorsees. Endorsed by MTI are Carol Carstensen, Arlene Silveira and Beth Moss. Not endorsed are Maya Cole, Lucy Mathiak, Lawrie Kobza and Johnny Winston Jr.
"Don't make no waves, don't back no losers" was the slogan of the Daley machine. Mr. Matthews says it this way: "don't make no waves, unless you want to be called anti-education and anti-union". This time he failed. I can only hope that all of the local elected officials who towed the MTI endorsement line watched the results carefully.
I welcome Isthmus' taking initiative to analyze Madison School issues and politics. Voters need to know the extent to which the MTI dollars and get-out-the-vote political machine suppress participation by good people in Board elections as well as in helping address the very real problems facing MMSD.
Extra effort could garner two diplomas upon graduation
From a story by Shawanna Robinson in the Daily Journal, Park Hills, Missouri:
Farmington High School Senior Jake Goff will graduate from Farmington High School this May with not only his high school diploma, but an Associate of Arts Degree from Mineral Area College as well.
He is the first of what the district hopes will be many students accomplishing such a feat. The Early College Pathway Program recently received a stamp of approval by both the Farmington R-7 Board of Education and the Mineral Area College Trustees.
The Early College Pathway Program is one where the Juniors and Seniors enrolled would finish their senior year with their high school diploma and either a transcripted 42 (credit hours) general education block from Mineral Area College transferable to most Missouri four-year universities or, such as Goff, with a 62 (credit hours) Associate of Arts degree from Mineral Area College. Goff will actually graduate with 64 credit hours this May.
Ruth Robarts: Let's take school closings off the table, start the planning needed for another referendum
Ruth Robarts, who supports Maya Cole and Rick Thomas for School Board, wrote the following letter to the editor:
I voted no on Carol Carstensen's proposed three-year referendum for several reasons.
First, a referendum requires careful planning. Two weeks' notice did not allow the School Board to do the necessary analysis or planning.
Second, the referendum is not part of a strategic long-range plan. The district needs a 10-year strategic plan, and such a plan must address the structural deficit created by state revenue limits. It must also bring businesses, community organizations and the city of Madison into the solution. While referendums for operating dollars will be necessary, without planning they are of limited use.
Third, relief from the state revenue limits is not on the horizon. Gov. Jim Doyle has no proposal for eliminating the revenue limits. Madison's state representatives recommend that we focus our lobbying efforts on small -cale, stopgap funding issues.
There are some steps that the School Board can take to increase public confidence and pass operating budget referendums in the future.
1. Direct the administration to find the best ways to use the Doyle Building to generate revenue for the district. In 2006, the board defeated this proposal (Kobza and Robarts were the only yes votes.) Using the building as a revenue-generating asset could also move administrators to school buildings and help keep the schools open.
2. Negotiate changes in health insurance coverage for teachers to minimize future costs. Administrators and other unions have recently made such changes without losing quality of health care.
3. Take the closing/consolidation options presented by the Long Range Planning Committee off the table. Look for more focused approaches to saving money, such as moving the Park Street Work and Learn Center into an under-enrolled elementary school as we did in the past when we housed WLC at Allis School.
4. Invite the community to join in a strategic planning process as soon as possible. As long as the state and federal governments shirk their responsibilities and the state over-relies on residential property taxes to pay for essential local services, there will be a gap between the tax funds available and the cost of the high-quality, comprehensive K-12 school system that we want. We need a plan as badly as we need the elimination of the revenue limits and a progressive tax to adequately fund our schools.
Ruth Robarts' roller coaster
DOUG ERICKSON 608-252-6149
derickson@madison.com
Ruth Robarts steps down April 23 after 10 years on the Madison School Board, and, no, she's not expecting a cake from her colleagues.
Although Robarts first ran as a facilitator - "That didn't work out so well," she says now with a guffaw - she became known more as a budget hawk and contrarian.
Along the way, she's been praised as a straight-shooting maverick and criticized as an obstructionist who just likes to carp.
She chose not to seek re- election. Her replacement - Maya Cole or Marjorie Passman - will be elected Tuesday.
Robarts' legacy differs markedly, depending on who's talking, but most agree she traveled an interesting route from a team player to an outsider to a can't-be-ignored-because-the- voters-like-her force.
She finishes her board service less lonely due to the elections in recent years of like- minded colleagues Lawrie Kobza and Lucy Mathiak. But Robarts cautions that in the last decade, it has become more difficult for candidates not endorsed by the teachers union or tied to the board majority to get elected.
"People with good qualifications and interest in the success of the schools laugh when you ask them to consider running for the board," said Robarts, 60, an assistant dean at the UW Law School. "They know that being 'independent' means being publicly and privately disparaged."
Robarts was famously labeled "public enemy No. 1" in 2003 by John Matthews, the executive director of the teachers union, after she voted against a two-year teacher contract and criticized a referendum for more district operating money.
"There were times when the way things played out were really ugly for her," said Mathiak, who praises Robarts for "sticking to ethical and responsible practices in the face of some pretty abusive moments."
Others say Robarts embraced her outsider reputation a little too enthusiastically, leading to a period when she seemed to reflexively criticize almost every administration move.
"She became the darling of the taxpayer, anti-public education crowd," said former board member Juan Jose Lopez. "She decided to pick a niche, and I think she lost focus on what was best for kids."
Seeking harmony
Robarts, a former district teacher and principal, was elected to the board in 1997 to complete conservative Nancy Mistele's term. During that campaign, Robarts, a Democrat, spoke of wanting to help foster harmony among board members.
She was re-elected to a full three-year term the following year with the teachers union's backing - the only time she would get its endorsement. Within weeks, Robarts filed a complaint with the Dane County district attorney alleging that four of her board colleagues had engaged in illegal discussions of a buyout with then-Superintendent Cheryl Wilhoyte.
"I did a few things early on that didn't exactly make me Facilitator of the Year," Robarts says today. (She withdrew the complaint after Wilhoyte resigned.)
Her independent streak ballooned in the years to come. In 2001, she sought a state Ethics Board opinion on situations involving Superintendent Art Rainwater and two board members. That led Lopez to chastise her at a board meeting for going to the media before discussing her concerns with her colleagues.
Robarts says she took her concerns public only after being rebuffed in closed-door sessions. Often, she found herself on the losing side of 6-1 votes.
But there were many good memories, Robarts said. She was an early backer of both the Nuestro Mundo Community School and the Wexford Ridge Neighborhood Center, two proposals Rainwater initially opposed. The projects played to her strengths, allowing her to champion grassroots movements in the face of a supposedly shortsighted bureaucracy.
In 2002, she received a distinguished service award from the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for her advocacy on behalf of minority students. She also became known for trying to make the district's budget process more transparent, a goal that proved elusive, she said. "It's still impenetrable."
Popularity grows
If Robarts felt marginalized, vindication came in 2004 when she was reelected to a third full term with 64 percent of the vote against a strong candidate. She got an unexpected boost from conservatives but was badly outspent and deserted by some former liberal supporters.
Longtime board member Carol Carstensen is among former allies who parted ways. She praises Robarts for many things - helping the board focus on math and reading goals, supporting alternative education programs - but says that for several years, Robarts seemed more intent on ripping her colleagues publicly than accomplishing anything.
"She has some good ideas, so it would have been very helpful if she had been part of the discussions when we were working on things," Carstensen said. "Instead, she tended to write op-ed pieces."
A less-diplomatic Lopez puts it this way: "Did she ever create or initiate anything new? No. She was always knocking down the school system. If you're going to be destructive instead of constructive, then I don't think you should serve on a school board."
Others praise Robarts for asking the difficult questions if not always the popular ones.
Said Kobza: "I think her legacy will be the person who represented an alternative voice at a time when there weren't that many people out there doing that."
http://www.madison.com/wsj/mad/local/index.php?ntid=127332
"If we're going to do it, we're going to do it right," board member Lucy Mathiak argued for the majority of the board in rejecting longtime board member Carol Carstensen's push for the referendum.
School Board Member Mathiak has also detailed a number of options other than closing near eastside schools, which she does not support.
An open letter to the Superintendent of Madison Metropolitan Schools
Dear Mr. Rainwater:
I just found out from the principal at my school that you cut the allocations for SAGE teachers and Strings teachers, but the budget hasn't even been approved. Will you please stop playing politics with our children education? It?s time to think about your legacy.
As you step up to the chopping block for your last whack at the budget, please think carefully about how your tenure as our superintendent will be viewed a little more than a year from now when your position is filled by a forward-thinking problem-solver. (Our district will settle for no less.)
Do you want to be remembered as the Superintendent who increased class size as a first step when the budget got tight? Small class size repeatedly rises to the top as the best way to enhance student achievement at the elementary level. Why would you take away one of best protections against federal funding cuts mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act? Rather than increase pupil to teacher ratios, have you checked to see if the pupil to administrative staff ratio has been brought closer to the state-wide average? (In 2002, Madison Metropolitan schools were at 195 children per administrator; the rest of the state averaged 242 children per administrator.) Have the few administrative openings you?ve left unfilled over the past few years actually brought us into line with the rest of the state?
While Oprah Winfrey is handing out free violins, do you really want to be remembered as the guy who saved less than 1/10 of 1% from the budget ($300,000) by cutting Elementary Strings and effectively locking out low and middle-income students from any real chance to master a musical instrument before being relegated to a lifetime of working to pay the bills? (This program served over 1600 children last year, more than 40% of whom were minority or low-income.) Couldn't your administration come up with even one creative funding idea for this much loved program? How about REACH funds? That union-negotiated teacher allocation can be used for anything. What about procuring foundation grants for Fine Arts and Sports? You nodded in agreement to this idea 4 years ago, but have since blocked every attempt by saying the district can't "earmark" funds.
Do you really want to be remembered as the Superintendent who closed the minority achievement gap by bringing down the achievement level of our highest performing students? We have a history of providing great opportunities for students at all levels of academic involvement and achievement. Heterogeneous grouping at the freshman and sophomore level doesn't save any money, but does reduce achievement scores. (In 2003, 70% of West High's students scored "advanced" on the 10th-grade state reading test; that dropped to 61% in 2005 after homogenizing freshman English.) Do you really want a legacy of lean and mean urban schools with nothing more to offer than a strict expulsion policy?
Do you really want to be remembered as the Superintendent who shook hands with John Matthews enough to cancel out the checks and balances between the Administration and MTI?
Why do our teachers get WPS insurance at less than market rates when every other University employee, firefighter, police officer and City employee in this town has to pay what it really costs to have premium health insurance? It doesn't have anything to do with John Matthews sitting on the board of WPS, does it? Wouldn't our city be better served by having real cost-saving options to negotiate with MTI?
And lastly, why don't you act up a little bit? Since you can't lose your job for it, why don't you shake up the system? Public schools will never be able to compete with the private sector because we are legally mandated to provide education to all children, regardless of their special needs. Morally and ethically, our society can do no less. Why don't you spend the last few months of your tenure lobbying the State and Federal Government to provide funding for these kids? Send them a bill for just one special needs child who needs a full-time aide. Ask them to use school vouchers to cover that cost. Now that would be a legacy.
There are those who like to work with numbers, and then there are those who figure school budgets. They're not necessarily the same person.
School finance consists of a labyrinth of property values, student enrollment totals, federal aid, and state aid. Only two people in Chetek claim to understand the funding formula from top to bottom: Superintendent Al Brown and business manager Tammy Lenbom.
A couple times of year their budgetary work catches the public's eye - once in September when it comes time to pass the budget at the annual meeting, and once about this time of year when Brown and Lenbom propose that budget for next fall.
The budget proposal period is more visible, because that is when we find out how those financial decisions will affect people's lives - teachers who may be forced to look for new jobs, or students who might have their favorite class offering taken away from them.
While it takes a professional to explain a school budget line item by line item, this article is an attempt to at least summarize how school administrators and the school board reach their budgetary decisions, as well as detailing some of the struggles they face.
The timetable
The budget process begins in earnest in November. After the current year's budget is passed by the school board at the annual meeting near the end of September, Brown and Lenbom have a few weeks in October when they don't have to focus on planning a budget, though it's always in the back of their minds.
"Tammy and I are never out of a budget cycle," Brown says.
Under board policy, Brown must present a balanced budget to the school board each spring. Brown and Lenbom begin that process by projecting enrollments and revenue in November of each year. The duo uses a forecast model driven solely on assumptions which are reflective of current school conditions and state and federal legislation.
In December Brown and Lenbom review budget estimates with the board's finance committee, factoring in inflation costs and establishing educational goals at the same time. They also receive facility maintenance needs from each building principal, who turn in any program or class changes they may want to suggest.
By January, the process is in full swing.
"January is the busiest month," Brown said. "That's when we throw everything out on the table."
Building budget allocations are set, and principals need to determine where they can make reductions, or additions for that matter.
"We actually talk more about improving what we have than what we have to cut," Brown claims.
Teacher contracts are reviewed. Brown and Lenbom estimate the number of retirements they'll have and how the staff will be affected. The student registration process also begins in January. The major maintenance budget is allocated.
The open enrollment deadline passes in February, so the administration has more concrete numbers on what enrollment will be for the following year. Registration is completed, and principals can further determine their staffing needs.
By March, Brown and Lenbom can project a budget, and teacher contracts are distributed. That gives staff who may not be returning a head start on finding new employment.
Retirement notifications must be turned in to the administrative office in April, and final decisions on staff are made at the end of the month.
In May, the finance committee reviews the preliminary budget, and final staffing levels are officially announced for the following year.
Over the summer, Lenbom applies the finishing touches and prepares a budget booklet for the annual meeting in September. The district must wait for the third Friday in September to determine its student enrollment for that school year, which is then cemented into the budget.
The board then approves the property tax levy at the annual meeting in September, which determines how much financial support taxpayers will be providing the district.
Throughout the school year, Lenbom provides the school board with quarterly monitoring reports, insuring the board is well-informed about the district's financial status.
Revenue sources
Perhaps creating the most consternation for Brown and Lenbom is trying to determine how much state funding the district will receive, particularly in a year such as 2007 when the governor and legislature are settling on the next biennial budget.
Their negotiations can carry on late into the summer and even early fall, meaning school administrators all over the state are guessing how much money they'll be receiving from the state.
In 1993, the state legislature imposed limits on how much revenue school districts can take in as a way to ease the burden on property taxpayers. Amid frequent criticism from school administrators, Gov. Jim Doyle has kept revenue caps in place during his tenure.
One of the great misconceptions involving school finance concerns the state's pledge to two-thirds funding for public schools. Not every district receives two-thirds state funding. The state as a whole receives that amount - some districts receive much less, some districts receive much more.
That amount is determined by a complicated state formula figuring the district's prior year's expenditures and the district's property value per student. The lower the property value per student, the more state aid that district will receive.
That formula works against a district like Chetek, which has high property values. In 2006-07, Chetek received only 49 percent funding from the state, not even half of its overall revenues.
"Is property value a true indicator of the wealth of your community?" asks Brown. "In our case, no. Around here we have people who are property-rich but income-poor. "
Brown has seen that trend gradually reverse in his 13 years with the district.
"When I first started here in 1994, we were 76-percent funded by the state," Brown points out.
Property values in the Chetek district have ballooned in the last decade. In the 1996-97 school year, the equalized property valuation was $221,251,132 in the district. In 2006-07 that figure climbed to $670,762,641.
Comparing school revenues using the latest information (2005-06) from the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX), Barron received 59 percent of its revenues from the state, Cameron 62 percent, Colfax 72 percent, Rice Lake 54 percent, Weyerhaeuser 24 percent, and New Auburn 23 percent.
The majority of the remaining revenue comes from property taxes paid by residents in the school district. In 2006-07, taxpayers contributed 45 percent of the revenue to the district. Federal aid consisted of 5 percent of Chetek's revenue.
Brown says that revenue caps may not be the ideal funding structure for public education, but they may be as good as schools can hope for.
"Any time your dollars are connected to a political process, this is about as good as it's going to get," Brown acknowledges.
Expenditures
Most of any school district's expenses are made up of salary and benefits packages for staff members. Seventy-eight percent of Chetek's expenses in 2006-07 went to salaries and benefits. Brown says the state average expended in salaries and benefits is approximately 83 percent.
The remaining expenditures consist of instructional materials, operating costs, and maintenance costs.
The base salary for Chetek teachers in 2006-07 was $30,356. That tells only part of the story, as far as expenditures are concerned. Health insurance costs are killing school districts, just as they are killing businesses in the private sector.
Last year alone Chetek saw an increase of 20 percent in the cost of insurance premiums. In 2002-03, the district saw a leap of 34 percent in premium costs.
In 2000-01, the School District of Chetek was paying $7,802.64 in premiums for each teacher. In 2006-07 that figure reached $17,258.88.
Just as the administration estimates what the state's budget may be, school officials sometimes have to guess what their teachers' contract figures will be. Budgets are often approved before teachers' unions have settled with districts regarding their salaries and benefits. Unions and districts may not settle on a contract until that contract has nearly expired, putting them behind schedule on negotiations for the upcoming budget cycle. For example, the Chetek district has been in arbitration with its custodial staff and their union for almost two years.
Gov. Doyle has proposed eliminating the qualified economic offer from his state budget. The QEO insures that teachers will not receive below a 3.8 percent increase in their salaries and benefits packages. Without the QEO, districts could offer more of a raise, or none at all.
Chetek has a history of offering slightly more than the established QEO. In 2006-07, the Chetek district and teachers negotiated a raise of 4.66 percent. In 2005-06, that increase was 4.09.
Where Chetek sits in 06-07
The Chetek administration has proposed a budget reduction of $363,750 in 2006-07. Reductions in staffing will occur in elementary instrumental music; high school math, technical education, business education, and English; and aide positions at both Roselawn Elementary and the high school/middle school IMC.
Breaking it down by building, Roselawn will reduce $16,096, the middle school $30,411, and the high school $128,331.
District operating costs will be reduced by $131,533, and special education costs will be reduced by $46,986.
The high school often sees many of the reductions in costs because of the amount of instructional materials needed. The high school offers elective courses, which are usually the first to be reduced in a budget crunch.
"We have more equipment intensive areas - such as tech ed, business ed, band, music - and more perishables in classes like art and science," high school principal Ed Harris explains. "Our operating budgets are fairly predictable from year to year."
Chetek continues to grapple with an open enrollment problem in the district. In 2006-07, 64 students open-enrolled out of the district, with seven coming in. Those numbers appear to be leveling out, as 65 open enrolled out in 2005-06, while eight came into the district.
Brown maintains this is the result of families moving into the district, but choosing to let their children attend their former, more familiar district, and not the result of Chetek's district chasing students away.
Brown says Chetek combats this issue with unique offerings such as its virtual school and the fledgling Learning Options Program, which Brown adds is designed to prevent high school dropouts.
Chetek couldn't absorb such reductions without the dedication of its staff, Brown says. That's no consolation to a laid-off teacher who's looking for a new job to help support a baby at home, or a student who just saw his favorite teacher reduced to part-time. But such is the price paid in the ever-changing realm of public education.
"The reason we can continue is because of the people we have working here," Brown says. "They allowed us to have some of the things we have that other districts don't have. Everyone in our district is working harder now than ever before."
Isthmus gave the candidates a chance to make one last pitch for votes before next Tuesday's election.
The statements of Maya and Marj say a lot about them as people and potential board members.
Marj repeated her line on all of her experience and said:
I have developed a finely honed instinct for what works and what doesn't.
By contrast Maya said:
The community will be a welcomed partner with our public schools.
In other words, Marj said, "I KNOW what's right and wrong." That's the board majority's persistent response to outside input. "We know what's right and wrong. Thank you very much. You can go away now."
While Maya says, "I welcome a partnership," which reflects an openness to the community.
Yes to strategic planning, no to last minute referendums and school closings
On March 26, I voted no on Carol Carstensen’s proposed three-year referendum for several reasons.
First, a referendum requires careful planning. Two weeks notice did not allow the Madison School Board to do the necessary analysis or planning. Ms. Carstensen—not the administration—provided the only budget analysis for her proposal. The board has not set priorities because the board it is just beginning the budget process.
Second, the referendum is not part of a strategic long-range plan. The district needs a ten-year strategic plan, and such a plan must address the structural deficit created by state revenue limits. It must also bring businesses, community organizations and the City of Madison into the solution. While referendums for operating dollars will be necessary, without planning they are of limited use.
Third, relief from the state revenue limits is not on the horizon. Governor Doyle has no proposal for eliminating the revenue limits. Madison’s state representatives recommend that we focus our lobbying efforts on small scale, stop-gap funding issues. Only Ms. Carstensen and the teachers union seem to think that change is coming soon.
There are some steps that the school board can take to increase public confidence and pass operating budget referendums in the future.
1. Direct the administration to find the best ways to use the Doyle Building to generate revenue for the district. In 2006, the board defeated this proposal (Kobza and Robarts voting yes, Carstensen, Keys, Lopez, Vang and Winston voting no). Using the building as a revenue-generating asset could also move administrators to school buildings and help keep the schools open.
2. Negotiate changes in health insurance coverage for teachers to minimize future costs. Administrators and other unions have recently made such changes without losing quality of health care. Dane County has a competitive health insurance market that can help use save dollars and protect quality of care.
3. Take the closing/consolidation options presented by the Long Range Planning Committee off the table. Look for more focused approaches to saving money, such as moving the Park Street Work and Learn Center into an under-enrolled elementary school as we did in the past when we housed WLC at Allis School.
4. Invite the community to join in a strategic planning process as soon as possible. As long as the state and federal governments shirk their responsibilities and the state over-relies on residential property taxes to pay for essential local services, there will be a gap between the tax funds available and the cost of the high quality, comprehensive k-12 school system that we want. We need a plan as badly as we need the elimination of the revenue limits and a progressive tax to adequately fund our schools.
I am ready to support operating budget referendums based on a strategic plan and best use of the revenues that we have.
Madison School District Changes School Closing Plan
Channel 3000 reports on changes to School closing plans. "The Madison Metropolitan School District has changed its plans for school closings and consolidation, and some north side parents said they were caught off guard by the new plan."
I've never seen a budget process like that being followed by the MMSD and board.
Without having a budget, the board appears poised to close schools and lay off teachers. Who or why would anyone make these types of decisions out of context, that is, without a budget, with out even looking at options other than those recommended by an administration hell bent on preserving as much power and as many positions as possible in the Doyle Building?
It's just insane, and supposedly rational people on the board think that it makes sense! Do they check their brains at the door when they walk into a board meeting?
The 7th annual Wisconsin Charter Schools Conference, co-sponsored by the WCSA and DPI, will be attended by educators, parents, students, school officials, university people, community leaders, state officials, and many other charter friends. Conference Flyer (PDF).
Dates: April 15-17, 2007 (Sunday afternoon through Tuesday)
The Sunday afternoon (4/15) Wisconsin Charter Schools FAIR is open and FREE to the public. Conference sessions on Monday and Tuesday (4/16-17) will focus on planning, authorizing, implementing and operating high-performance charter schools.
I have a few comments on separate courses for students of different abilities
I think that it is important to have opportunities for advanced students to obtain seperate instruction is subjects they excel in. It is my belief that by doing this we don't sacrifice diversity, we actually increase it.
My logic is as follows. If gifted students are not given the challenge they need in school, they will not achieve as much as they can. If the public schools are not able to provide for these childern, then parents of gifted kids will pull them out of school. Unfortunately, only involved parents with money will have the ability to give their kids the alternative education like private school. Thus, the public schools will be left with few children at the top end of the education spectrum since it can't provide for them.
My belief that this is true comes from my home town in California. We have one elementary school in a wealthy area that is known to have much better educational opportunities for students. Parents in other districts constantly try to move their children to this school. Due to declining enrollment, other school districts have stopped letting students switch schools. To still provide for the children, the school in the wealthy area became a charter school. Now, parents can move their children there without incident. But, the other public schools are left without their brightest students. If the other public schools could provide for their brightest, the public schools would include all of the students.
The importance of public education providing for gifted students becomes especially apparent when you look at personal examples. I did not attend the wealthy school, but through an individually tailored math eduacation, I was able to enter high school in trig. The other freshmen in this course were ALL from the wealthy school, though this school only has around 1/5 of students in the area. Some of my classmates at the wealthy school were from advantaged backgrounds. But, one student in particular was not. This student, "John", was given the ability to excell at the wealthy school and performed excellently. By the end of high school, he had completed a large portion of a standard undergraduate mathematics major by taking courses at the local college. He recieved a large scholarship to attend a prestigious liberal arts school. He graduated with a math and physics degree after three years.
If the opportunities that were given the students at the wealthy school and the abilitiy to take college classes while in high school were not there, the wealthier students would not be affected much academically. My area has several private and charter schools that many wealthy kids attend when the public schools aren't good enough. My friends that switched to these schools were predominately the children of doctors, lawyers, and local businessmen. Unfortunately for advanced but disadvantaged students, theirs only chance to succeed is the public schools. If the public schools are not providing for the brightest, the ones with resources shall go elsewhere and the ones without resources will lose out.
My parents told me that had my schools not been willing to give me individual instruction, I would have been homeschooled. My parents felt it was important to see the many culures and personalities in the public school system. But, they would not sacrifice my education for it.
From a story by Deborah Ziff in the Wisconsin State Journal:
The Madison School Board voted against asking taxpayers to help stave off budget cuts as Madison public schools face a projected $10.5 million budget shortfall.
The board voted 5-2 against holding a June referendum, a measure proposed by School Board Treasurer Carol Carstensen. Outgoing board member Shwaw Vang joined Carstensen in voting for the proposal that would have asked taxpayers for an additional $34 million over the next three years.
Board members who voted against the referendum said it was too hastily drawn up, without enough time to refine a referendum question or engage in a campaign to drum up support. Board member Lucy Mathiak said the board has known since October that it would need to make tough budget decisions.
Susan Troller's story in The Capital Times is here.
Superintendent Art Rainwater loves to discuss the Madison Metropolitan School District’s success in eliminating the racial achievement gap.
But he won’t consult with educators from other communities until they are ready to confront the issue head on.
“I’m willing to talk,” Rainwater tells people seeking his advice, “when you are willing to stand up and admit the problem, to say our minority children do not perform as well as our white students.”
Only then will Rainwater reveal the methods Madison used to level the academic playing field for minority students.
This is an odd statement. The racial achievement gap is accepted as an uncomfortable fact everywhere; it is much discussed. No superintendent in the U.S. — except for Rainwater — claims to have eliminated the gap.
Today, Rainwater said, no statistical achievement gap exists between the 25,000 white and minority students in Madison’s schools.
Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Raj Manhas [777K PDF]:
A detailed document on the progress of the priority projects from the 2006‐07 Workplan is attached. Through the project tracking system that is under development as well as additional discussions with project managers, we have captured information on:
What have we accomplished through February 2007?
Are we on‐track to complete the project by August 2007?
The table below reports on the status of our priority projects with respect to completion by August 2007. 16 projects (or almost 60% of the total) are expected to be completed on‐time and another 10 projects are expected to be at least partially completed by August 2007.
A letter to the editor that appeared in the Cap Times:
Dear Editor: As leaders in the Marquette neighborhood, we are extremely disappointed with the discussion of possibly closing Marquette Elementary School.
The Marquette neighborhood is an incredible success story. The economic upswing of this neighborhood has been tied directly to the positive programs being presented at Marquette and Lapham schools.
The $3.5 million addition and improvements made to the O'Keeffe/Marquette complex a few years ago brought incredible stability to this neighborhood. The voters and taxpayers citywide realized the importance of the improvements in keeping families in the downtown area and overwhelmingly approved this expenditure. It would be an egregious slight to abandon this elementary school as throngs of young families have moved into the Marquette neighborhood and greatly improved the housing stock and precipitated a building boom.
It is unprecedented that a diverse neighborhood that could walk in close to 300 students to fill their re-modeled school in a kindergarten through fifth grade configuration would be threatened with closing. It would be beyond belief that a School Board would ask a neighborhood to send five busloads of students to a crowded Lapham building at a cost of $36,000 per bus or $180,000 for the upcoming school year. We support the continuing elementary programs at Marquette and Lapham and keeping O'Keeffe Middle School at its current size.
We realize the school funding dilemma that the whole state faces has led to this situation. We are hoping that these inequities will change and that the option to de-stabilize our community is taken off the table.
Judy Olson
6th District alderperson
Anya Firszt
president,Greater Williamson Area Business Association
Gary Kallas
director, Wil-Mar Neighborhood Center
At last night's candidate forum at the Warner Park neighborhood center, Winston was the only candidate who said he'd vote yes to closing schools.
He proudly listed his connections to the Northside, while missing the irony of being the only one who would close the Northside's Sherman Middle School.
Wisconsin taxpayers are paying millions to lobby state lawmakers, in many cases, for more money.
Dane County does it too -- it spent nearly $175,000 last session, WISC-TV reported. Part of it was for more money from the state to pay for county nursing home patients, and Dane County argued against the taxpayer bill of rights.
Rock County spent about $6,400 on similar issues, WISC-TV reported.
Schools do this as well. The Madison Metropolitan School District spent $133,000 on lobbying, with some of the tax money spent trying to get more tax money into the classrooms.
The district is on record fighting against revenue limits and against limits to local control, WISC-TV reported.
Thank you for your service and thank you for your request to hear from the community.
My name is Shari Entenmann and I’m here as a parent of 3 young children entrusting you with their school experience.
As you move forward with the budget process there are three things I’d like you to commit to:
1. Our downtown schools need to be vital, they are the heart of our city and why many of us moved here – myself included. Let’s not unravel what’s been built and what we can accomplish in the future. We want our schools to be vibrant and attractive so others choose to live here like I did.
2. Consider the details carefully – often it’s the details that matter:
a. What about the TEP program. My understanding from parents directly involved in bringing TEP to Lapham that part of what’s needed to make the program a success is the SAGE class sizes.
• Will Lapham still have TEP
• If TEP then SAGE, if SAGE is there room to consolidate?
• If not TEP, where will it go, back to Emerson – but wasn’t there concern about it being too much for one school?
• When making these decisions you have to consider this vulnerable population in this TEP program.
b. What about the alternatives program. Steve Hartley gave a very inspiring presentation last year at Marquette (when we were going through this exercise) and it was clear to me and others that the keystone to the success of the program is separating the kids from their age-group peers. Are you sure the proposal to move the program to Sherman has considered this, I didn’t see that consideration in the presentation to the board a few weeks ago.
c. Is the proposed larger middle school too big? I hear the comparison to Hamilton as a reference that it’s not. However, I don’t believe that’s an appropriate comparison. This is a very different population and I’ve heard concern from many teachers, and educators that’s it’s too big for this population, particularly with our resource restrictions.
3. An open process that allows all things to be discussed and considered with community involvement. We’ve heard several times that there’s nothing else to cut but things that effect the classroom and so everything must be on the table, even this drastic change that saves less than 700,000. However in all the discussion that’s lead to this point I haven’t heard any discussion on the following:
a. I’ve heard there may be more funds coming in the next few months – is this the time to propose such drastic changes – especially when these changes aren’t part of an overall plan but are part of the annual ad hoc widdling away process.
b. Extra-curriculars
c. Sports
Please consider what I’ve said. I believe it’s necessary to be successful because we live in a passionate community that strongly supports public education. Everyone needs to be involved.
Very sincerely, again, thank you for your service.
It's a contentious fact that has run through so many Madison School Board races and referendums in recent years:
Madison schools spend a lot -- $12,111 per student during the 2005-06 school year.
If the district is spending that much, how can it be in crisis?
The answer is complex and a bit murky. Yet a few things are clear.
Liberal Madison has long spent more than most K-12 districts in Wisconsin. This was true before the state adopted school revenue limits in the 1990s, and the caps only reinforced this today.
"When revenue caps went in, everyone was basically frozen in place," Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater said Friday. "We do spend more than the state average. But that has been the expectation of our community."
So why does Madison spend more? Berry points to Madison's higher number of staff who aren't teachers. Madison hires a lot of social workers, psychologists, nurses and administrators.
Madison spends more per pupil than Racine, Green Bay and Kenosha -- as well as the state average -- on student and staff services, administration and building and grounds. And Madison's non- instructional costs are rising as a percentage of its spending.
"Madison is actually de- emphasizing instruction," Berry contends.
In addition, Berry suspects Madison is over-identifying students for learning disabilities.
MTI spending will likely top $10,000 for Moss & Passman
The Madison Teachers Union political action committee spent a little more than $7,500 in “independent expenditures” in support of for Juan Lopez and Arlene Silveira in last year’s school board races. The money paid for production and air time for radio and newspaper ads, but the figure does not include the newspapers' charges for running the ad.
This year, MTI Voters (the official name for the union’s PAC) contributed the legal maximum - $1,560 – to each campaign committee of Marj Passman and Beth Moss.
We can surely expect MTI Voters to make independent expenditures for Passman and Moss equal to what the PAC spent last year.
Parents on Madison's east side attended a meeting Tuesday to sound off on a plan that would close Sherman Middle School next year.
Parents and school staff packed a cafeteria Tuesday night to hear from the district and school board members about a plan that would consolidate Sherman with Blackhawk and O'Keefe middle schools.
The plan is estimated to save the district more than $750,000 in a budget that has a $10.5 million shortfall.
But parents said that the plan would not only uproot their children's lives but close a school that has come a long way.
I thought it might be helpful to provide some facts and explanations about the topic of health insurance – hopefully this will clear up some of the misinformation and misconceptions present in the public discussions. It is important to remember that the focus must be on the total package settlement – because that is what has an impact on the budget. For example, Sun Prairie’s agreement to make changes in its health insurance (by using a joint committee to find a way to reduce health insurance costs) has been praised, as it should be. It should be noted, however, that Sun Prairie’s total package settlement was 4.75% - while Madison’s package, without switching health insurance carriers, was 3.98%. (A rough estimate is that a 4.75% settlement would have cost Madison about $1.5 Million more.)
A change in health insurance carriers was achieved by several Dane County school districts because of unique circumstances, said Annette Mikula, human resources director for the Sun Prairie School District.
Dean Health System already had been Sun Prairie's point-of-service provider in a plan brokered by WEA Trust, she said. So, after WEA's rates increased nearly 20% last year and were projected for a similar increase this year, the district negotiated a deal directly with Dean.
When the Dean plan goes into effect Sept. 1, the district's premiums will drop enough that it can offer a starting salary $2,000 above what it paid last school year and yet the health plan will stay the same, Mikula said. Several other Dane County districts also have switched to Dean.
our school banned all vending machines 1 1/2 yrs. ago. Did it help? ABSOLUTELY NOT! The kids are now bringing sodas and candy in their back packs and eat it at lunch time. They do not eat in the lunchroom. Elementary students have snack time around 9:30 to 10:30 each day depending on what grade you are in. They have 30 min. What do they eat? They bring candy, chips, sweetened tea, sodas and kool aid bursts. The school lost money and yet the kids are still eating poorly.
What could be done?
Ban the sodas and snacks from home and take away the snack time and replace it with 30 min. of instruction time. or better yet, replace it with 30 more min. of PE time.
There's an excellent book from 1997 called The Limits of Law-Based School Reform that I think everyone - especially lawmakers and public policy experts - should read. But the title alone should be enough for all of us who think passing a law to address a perceived education problem is sufficient to solve it.
It's only human nature after winning a tough legislative battle to want to declare victory and go home. I'm sure the 186 Republicans and 197 Democrats in the U.S. House who voted for the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 didn't think they would still be debating it five years later. The pattern is repeating itself in Utah.
As feared by some parents, the recommendations also included a plan to consolidate schools on the city's East Side. Marquette Elementary students would move to Lapham Elementary and Sherman Middle School students would be split between O'Keeffe and Black Hawk middle schools.
No school buildings would actually close - O'Keeffe would expand into the space it currently shares with Marquette, and the district's alternative programs would move to Sherman Middle School from leased space.
District officials sought to convince people Friday that the consolidation plan would have some educational benefits, but those officials saw no silver lining in having to increase class sizes at several elementary schools.
Friday's announcement has become part of an annual ritual in which Madison - and most other state districts - must reduce programs and services because overhead is rising faster than state-allowed revenue increases. A state law caps property-tax income for districts based on enrollment and other factors.
The Madison School District will have more money to spend next year - about $345 million, up from $332 million - but not enough to keep doing everything it does this year.
School Board members ultimately will decide which cuts to make by late May or June, but typically they stick closely to the administration's recommendations. Last year, out of $6.8 million in reductions, board members altered less than $500,000 of Rainwater's proposal.
Board President Johnny Winston Jr. called the cuts "draconian" but said the district has little choice. Asked if the School Board will consider a referendum to head off the cuts, he said members "will discuss everything."
But board Vice President Lawrie Kobza said she thinks it's too early to ask the community for more money. Voters approved a $23 million referendum last November that included money for a new elementary school on the city's Far West Side.
"I don't see a referendum passing," she said.
Links: Wisconsin K-12 spending. The 10.5M reductions in the increase plus the planned budget growth of $12M yields a "desired" increase of 7.5%. In other words, current Administration spending growth requires a 7.5% increase in tax receipts from property, sales, income, fees and other taxes (maybe less - see Susan Troller's article below). The proposed 07/08 budget grows 3.6% from 333M+ (06/07) to $345M (07/08). Madison's per student spending has grown an average of 5.25% since 1987 - details here.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
The spectre of central city school closings was what prompted some of us to resist the far-west side school referendum. Given the looming energy crisis, we should be encouraging folks to live in town, not at the fringes, strengthen our city neighborhoods. Plus, along with the need to overhaul the way we fund schools, we need a law requiring developers to provide a school or at least the land as a condition to development.
Proposed reductions totaled almost $7.2 million and include increases in elementary school class sizes, changes in special education allocations and school consolidations on the near east side.
Other recommendations include increased hockey fees, the elimination of the elementary strings program and increased student-to-staff ratios at the high school and middle school levels.
UPDATE 3: Roger Price kindly emailed the total planned 07/08 budget: $339,139,282
$1.74B Tax and Fee Increases in Governor Doyle's Proposed Wisconsin 07-09 Budget
Bob Lang, Director: Legislative Fiscal Bureau, 92K PDF:
A number of legislators have requested information concerning state tax and fee changes included in the 2007-09 budget recommendations of the Governor. This memorandum responds to those inquiries.
The attached table provides a brief description of each state tax and fee modification proposed in the Governor's bill. The table consists of three parts: (1) tax increases and decreases; (2) fee increases and decreases; and (3) measures which would enhance the collection of current taxes or fees. Each entry in the table includes the agency name, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau's budget summary document item that describes the change in more detail, a summary of the proposed modification, and an estimate of the revenue change due to the tax or fee modification.
In the table, GPR represents general fund revenue. Revenue to a program revenue account is signified by PR and SEG signifies revenue to a segregated fund. "Unknown" means that no estimate of the revenue impact is available at this time. The fiscal effects shown in the table reflect estimates made by the administration; estimates prepared by this office during budget deliberations may be different.
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's proposed two-year budget includes $1.74 billion in higher taxes and fees, according to a report by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau released Friday.
To put that number in perspective, it amounts to about $630 for each of the 2.76 million Wisconsin income tax filers for 2005.
The budget Doyle presented two years ago, before he won a second term in November, included $304 million in tax and fee increases, according to the non-partisan Fiscal Bureau.
The report says taxes would go up by a total of $1.37 billion by mid-2009, and listed the largest increases as:
Madison Superintendent's 2007-2008 Proposed Budget Changes
Art Rainwater on the reductions in increases to the proposed 2007-2008 MMSD Budget [1.4MB PDF]:
Dear Board of Education,
The attached is my recommendation for the service reductions required to balance the budget for 2007-2008. They are provided to you for review in advance of my Recommended Balanced Budget for 2007-2008 which will be available on April 12, 2007. You requested that the service reductions be presented to you in advance to provide sufficient time for your study and analysis.
After 14 years of continuous reductions in our services for children there are no good choices. While these service reductions are not good for children or the health of the school district they represent our best professional judgment of the least harmful alternatives.
The process that we used to study, analyze, consider and finally recommend the items presented was done over a period of weeks. We first reviewed each department and division of the district and listed anything that could be reduced or eliminated legally or contractually. We narrowed that list to those items which we believed would do the least harm to:
Our academic programs,
The health and safety of our schools,
The opportunities for student involvement,
Our ability to complete our legal and fiscal requirements
The document presented to you today is the result of those discussions. The items are broken into four categories:
Reductions to balance the budget ( Impact Statements provided)
Reductions analyzed, discussed and not included (Impact statements provided)
Reductions reviewed and not advanced
Possible revenues dependent on legislative action
The administration is prepared to provide you further analysis and respond to questions as we continue to work to approve a final working budget in May.
The program, which gives $1 billion a year in grants to states, was supposed to end the so-called reading wars — the battle over the best method of teaching reading — but has instead opened a new and bitter front in the fight.
According to interviews with school officials and a string of federal audits and e-mail messages made public in recent months, federal officials and contractors used the program to pressure schools to adopt approaches that emphasize phonics, focusing on the mechanics of sounding out syllables, and to discard methods drawn from whole language that play down these mechanics and use cues like pictures or context to teach.
Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research” required by the program.
Madison officials say that a year after Wisconsin joined Reading First, in 2004, contractors pressured them to drop their approach, which blends some phonics with whole language in a program called Balanced Literacy. Instead, they gave up the money — about $2 million, according to officials here, who say their program raised reading scores.
“We had data demonstrating that our children were learning at the rate that Reading First was aiming for, and they could not produce a single ounce of data to show the success rates of the program they were proposing,” said Art Rainwater, Madison’s superintendent of schools.
In part one of his response, Ken DeRosa of D-Ed Reckoning provides a reading passage altered to force readers to guess the meaning from context. Struggling this way does not inspire love of reading.
In part two, DeRosa analyzes the statistics to argue Madison students aren’t doing better in reading compared to other Wisconsin students; if anything, they’ve slipped a bit. Because the state reading test was made easier and the cut score for proficiency was lowered, all Wisconsin students look better. However, there was no progress in fourth-grade reading on the federal NAEP test.
With help from Rory of Parentalcation, who’s great at finding data, Ken shows that claims of fantastic progress by black students are illusory. Their scores improved on the easier test at a slightly slower rate than white students. It looks like to me as though blacks nearly caught up in basic skills but remain far behind at the proficient and advanced level. Perhaps someone who knows more statistics than I do — lots of you do — can find flaws in Ken’s analysis.
Diana Schemo's NYT story on Reading First is not surprisingly sparking a lot of pushback and outraged emails, especially from the phonicshajeen. But, they have a point. There are problems with Reading First, but this may not be the best example of them at all...but, while you're there, don't miss the buried lede in graf eight...it's almost like Schemo got snowed by all sides at once on this one...
From a story by Susan Troller in The Capital Times:
Recommended Madison school district changes that involve closing a middle school and joining a pair of elementary schools on the near east side are causing heated reaction in the Lapham-Marquette neighborhood.
"Do we know what we're doing here and does this actually reflect best practices?" Marquette parent and district teacher Kit Rittman asked, reacting to a boundary change scenario that would include closing Sherman Middle School and consolidating students at Black Hawk and O'Keeffe middle schools.
Both schools feed into East High.
Changes would also involve combining students from Lapham, a K-2 school, and Marquette, which houses grades 3, 4 and 5, at the Lapham building on East Dayton Street. Space at Sherman would be filled by moving an existing high school alternative program there.
Since Advocates for Madison Public Schools doesn't allow access to the archived posts of its listserve, I post the following to illustrate the contempt these people feel toward anyone who isn't in lock-step with their point of view:
To: advocatesformadisonpublicschools@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [advocatesformadisonpublicschools] Summer Exercise for "Advocates"
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 23:51:45 -0000
Here's an interesting post from a local blog:
I wil be moving to the madison area soon and need to find schools that
realize "gifted" children do have special needs. I can not waist anymore time trying to get this point accross to educators because meanwhile my cildren suffer. Where is the the best public school for gifted children in the Madison area? I will purchase a home right next door and hopfully I can stop fighting to get my children a proper education
And so "advocates"...how would you answer if she ran into you at the
grocery store?
Bill Keys then responded:
Can't resist the snark of thinking maybe she wants the education she was apparently denied as she wasted time in school. If the King of Typos can catch this one...
AND "cildren."
Tell her to send her kid to the school of hard knocks.
It's right next door to the house for sail.
bk
You could say that this is only Bill Keys ranting, but not one -- NOT ONE -- of the AMPS leaders or listserve subscribers challenges or chides him.
The hostility of AMPS people comes out in the body language and sneers on their faces toward other candidates when AMPS people attend candidate forums and in the disrespect they show toward people who testify before the board and its committees.
It's so sad that they apparently don't want an open organization marked by respect for children, teachers, and parents.
Illinois elementary school pupils passed the newly revamped state achievement exams at record rates last year, but critics suggest it was more the result of changes to the tests than real progress by pupils.
State and local educators attribute the improvement to smarter pupils and teachers' laser-like focus on the state learning standards—the detailed list of what pupils should know at each grade level. They also say that the more child-friendly exams, which included color and better graphics, helped pupils.
But testing experts and critics suggest that the unprecedented growth is more likely the result of changes to the exams.
Most notably, the state dramatically lowered the passing bar on the 8th-grade math test. As a result—after hovering at about 50 percent for five years—the pass rate shot up to 78 percent last year.
While the number of test questions remained generally the same, the number that counted on pupil scores dropped significantly.
Extensive conversations on the part of Marj and Johnny to lobby the state and federal governments for more money. Maya wondered how successful that strategy might be given that our own State Senator Fred Risser failed to sign on to the Pope-Roberts/Breske resolution and that there are many school districts much poorer than Madison who will likely obtain benefits first, if new state tax funds are available. Maya also mentioned her experience at the state level via the concealed carry battles.
The challenge of supporting all students, including those with special needs. Several candidates noted that there is white flight from the MMSD (enrollment has been flat for years, while local population continues to grow)
Mandatory classroom grouping (heterogeneous) was also discussed
I applaud the West PTSO for holding this event. I also liked the way that they handled questions: all were moderated, which prevents a candidate supporter from sandbagging the opposition. I attended a forum last year where supporters posed questions before local parents had the opportunity.
Video and mp3 audio clips are available below. Make sure you have the latest version of Quicktime as the video clips use a new, more efficient compression technique.
Question 1: For Seat 3 Candidate Beth Moss (vs. Rick Thomas) regarding Madison's High Schools: Videomp3 audio
Question 2: What did you do to pass the last referendum and what will you do for the next? Videomp3 audio
Question 3: What values do you bring to the ($333M+ budget) decision making process? Videomp3 audio
Question 4: The MMSD's demographics are changing with more students with special needs while many families feel that they have less resources available for their "normal" students. How would you balance the needs of these various constituencies so that the families without special needs students don't leave the Madison Metropolitan School District? Videomp3 audio
Question 5: for Marj Passman (opposed by Maya Cole); Answering a recent Isthmus question about "How do you play with others", you said that you saw your role as convincing fellow board members as to the correctness of your views. You didn't say anything about listening to others. What role does listening play in your new board member job description? Videomp3 audio
Question 6: Given the statistics in Sunday's paper that only about 30% of Madison households have kids, how does that affect your approach to "selling" another referendum? Videomp3 audio
Question 7 – All Candidates
Please explain your views on additional charter schools given the success of Nuestro Mundo here in Madison and several offerings in Appleton just to name a few?
Question 8 – All Candidates
How can the school district provide for second languages to be taught to all students starting in Kindergarten and continuing through all grades?
Question 9 – All Candidates
The Board will be hiring a new superintendent. Please discuss what you believe is the top 3 criteria for a superintendent. You are free to ignore my request to address communication between Board and Administration/Superintendent, Boards communication with public, Superintendent and Public.
Question 10 – All Candidates
What role should School Board, Parents and Educator play in changing state law which adversely affect our schools?
Question 11 - Rick and Maya
What accountability mechanisms do you envision?
Question 12 – All Candidates
What is your position on the health insurance issue for teachers, that is the WPS option versus HMO’s?
Less than a month before an election that is likely to leave School Superintendent William Andrekopoulos with a board that is not as favorably disposed toward him, the current School Board will hold a session Thursday to consider changing provisions in his contract.
School Board President Joe Dannecker said Monday that he wants the session to focus on how the board will conduct its annual review of Andrekopoulos' job performance. The current contract says the way of conducting those reviews needs to be settled by the end of April. Dannecker also said he hopes the Thursday session will be conducted mostly in public.
After listening to Phony Tony Casteneda's ludicruous charaterizations of those who post on this blog, I remembered a post by Bill Keys on a listserve sponsored by Advocates for Madison Public Schools. Bill and Phony Tony used nearly the same language and divisiveness. Here's Bill's rant:
FACTS? FACTS? FACTS?
Do you really believe that those who criticize public education are the least bit interested in INFORMATION?????
You shoulda been with us while campaigning for the referenda in 2005.
You'd know by now.
They are the Neo-cons and fascists who got us into Iraq, who support
amendments banning same sex marriage, who are opposed to sick leave for workers and living wages and health benefits as well, and who want to stop Mexican immigration even while eating the food that Mexican-Americans grow and harvest?
FACT?
They are not at all interested. A FACT never changed any of these folks' minds.
'Course that's assuming they have any.
Bill
Not a single one of the Advocates for Madison Public Schools called Bill on this abrasiveness or questioned his assertions.
Remember, these are the people who advise and support Marj Passman. Do the comments of Bill and Phony Tony reflect Marj's feelings? Apparently, we'll never know. She's mum to e-mails and requests for her to explain her positions.
When the Menomonee Falls School District opens its doors to a new 4-year-old kindergarten program this fall, private day cares in the village will open theirs to it, too.
Using an idea that's catching on throughout the state, the district plans to partner with local preschool and child care centers to give 4-year-olds a half-day program that proponents say will give them an educational boost for years to come.
"The goal to all of this is to provide quality 4-year-old services for each and every child who resides in the school district, so when they come to 5-K they've got the same kindergarten basis," said Marlene Gross-Ackeret, Menomonee Falls' director of pupil services, and one of the key players in its 4-K initiative.
Almost every Wisconsin school district looking to add a new 4-year-old kindergarten program is considering such a collaborative approach, said Jill Haglund, an early-childhood education consultant for the state Department of Public Instruction who estimated that the partnerships exist in about 50 school systems. Even Milwaukee Public Schools collaborates with some community partners, placing its teachers at off-campus sites, despite having its own extensive 4-K programs.
March Madness is approaching! On the board level, madness can be characterized by the large assortments of topics and decisions that have been or will need to be made such as the superintendent search, budget, and other serious issues that require time, analysis and public discussion. I would like to give you a brief report on some of those topics.
First, the board has developed a Request For Proposals for firms interested in assisting the BOE in its national search for the next superintendent. Second, on Friday March 9th the district will announce prospective budget reductions for the next school year. These reductions will be based on current projections and data that the district has to make decisions. While the Governor’s biennial budget provides some assistance for Madison schools it is not enough to make up the difference in the shortfall. Third, the proposed Studio School charter application was voted down. Fourth, a Fine Arts task force has been developed by the board to: 1) Define community vision and goals for K-12 Fine Arts education; 2) Make recommendations for increasing enrollment of under-represented populations and 3) Make recommendations regarding funding. The task force will report to the BOE in March of 2008. Lastly, our school district will benefit greatly from the recent generosity of the CUNA Mutual Foundation’s $218,000 donation to the Children’s Service Society of Wisconsin for the KinderReady program. Research shows that kindergarten readiness is a key indicator of children’s success in school and beyond. The effort is being guided by the MMSD with the support of the United Way, Dane County and the city of Madison.
Board Committees:
The committees of the BOE continue their hard work and analysis. Finance and Operations (Lawrie Kobza, Chair) received a report from the administration regarding interscholastic athletics, extracurricular programs and debt issuance and refinancing for the November referendum. Long Range Planning (Carol Carstensen, Chair) received a report on Northeast area meetings and will bring forward a plan to move the Brentwood neighborhood to Emerson to address overcrowding at Lakeview. Human Resources (Ruth Robarts, Chair) will review the annual report on minority recruitment/retention on March 5th at 6 pm. Communications (Arlene Silveira, Chair) discussed the MMSD legislative agenda and analyzed the Governor's proposed state budget. Community Partnerships (Lucy Mathiak, Chair) received reports and presentations from WCATY, Charles Hamilton Houston Institute, Kajsiab House, Gay-Straight Alliance for Safe Schools. In addition, staff members from MSCR discussed student functions and supervision at events. Performance and Achievement (Shwaw Vang, Chair) received budget recommendations for the 2007 Summer School. Representatives from Nuestro Mundo addressed the committee regarding future plans.
MMSD News:
Read the new edition of MMSD Today at http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/today/.
March 5th is district wide kindergarten registration. MSCR Summer Preview will be held at LaFollette on March 6th and Memorial on March 7th. MSCR and over 50 local activity providers will let you know what they are offering this summer for children and adults. Call 204-3000 for info… Employees of MMSD and citizen volunteers will receive the Distinguished Service Award, the school district’s highest honor for meritorious contributions to students and schools on Monday, March 26th at 7 p.m. in the Memorial High School auditorium… Forty-one names for the new elementary school have been submitted for consideration to the Board. Citizens can make comments about the proposed names by going to www.mmsd.org until March 21st. A public hearing regarding the names will be held on Monday March 19th at the Doyle Building at 6:30 p.m.
Are You Frustrated With Wisconsin School Financing?:
On Wednesday March 21st at 6:30 p.m. at the Doyle Building the MMSD will hold an information and advocacy session related to the state budget. The meeting will provide advocacy talking points to contact legislators and gain support for some of the budget’s provisions. Together, we can work to educate legislators and bring about school finance reform.
Thank you for your interest and support of the MMSD.
Johnny Winston, Jr., President, Madison Board of Education
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
Want district information? Go to www.mmsd.org
Write to the entire school board at comments@madison.k12.wi.us.
Sign up for MMSD communications at http://mmsd.org/lists/newuser.cgi
Watch school board meetings and other district programs on MMSD Channel 10 & 19.
FOR as long as there have been maths tests, there have been cheats. But whereas a schoolboy caught furtively copying his neighbour's answers can expect a zero and an angry letter home, states that rig exam results are showered with federal cash. This is one reason why the No Child Left Behind Act, a noble attempt to impose discipline on American schools, needs revision before it merits an A grade.
The premise behind the law was sensible enough. Before it was passed in 2002, state education bureaucrats were reluctant to collect and publish the kind of data that would have allowed parents to make comparisons between schools, or to tell if a school was improving over time. Good schools received few rewards; bad ones had little incentive to improve. President George Bush sought to change that.
Under No Child Left Behind, students must be tested on maths and reading every year between the ages of eight and 13, and once in high school. Test results must be published and broken down by race. Schools that fail to show “adequate yearly progress” face penalties. Parents of children at consistently failing schools must be allowed to move them to better ones.
All good stuff. But there are catches. Federal subsidies to the states depend on students meeting standards that the states themselves set. States thus have a multi-billion-dollar incentive to game the system. In Arizona, for example, only one-fifth of eighth-graders were rated “proficient” at maths after taking the state test in 2003. Two years later, that proportion had magically tripled. Does this mean that the test got easier to pass? “Yes,” says Janet Napolitano, Arizona's plain-talking governor.
In June, a different group ranked Wisconsin No. 1 in the country in frustrating the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Also in June, a third organization focused on Milwaukee and Wisconsin as examples of places where more inexperienced - and therefore, less proficient - teachers are disproportionately assigned to high-needs schools. And two weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education rejected as inadequate Wisconsin's plans for dealing with federal requirements that every student have a "highly qualified" teacher.
along with Kevin Carey: "Hot Air: How States Inflate Their Educational Progress Under NCLB "
Critics on both the Left and the Right have charged that the No Child Left Behind Act tramples states' rights by imposing a federally mandated, one-size-fits-all accountability system on the nation's diverse states and schools.
In truth, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) gives states wide discretion to define what students must learn, how that knowledge should be tested, and what test scores constitute “proficiency”—the key elements of any educational accountability system. States also set standards for high school graduation rates, teacher qualifications, school safety and many other aspects of school performance. As a result, states are largely free to define the terms of their own educational success.
The Pangloss Index ranks Wisconsin as the most optimistic state in the nation. Wisconsin scores well on some educational measures, like the SAT, but lags behind in others, such as achievement gaps for minority students. But according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the state is a modern-day educational utopia where a large majority of students meet academic standards, high school graduation rates are high, every school is safe and nearly all teachers are highly qualified. School districts around the nation are struggling to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the primary standard of school and district success under NCLB. Yet 99.8 percent of Wisconsin districts—425 out of 426—made AYP in 2004–05.
How is that possible? As Table 2 shows, some states have identified the large majority of districts as not making AYP. The answer lies with the way Wisconsin has chosen to define the AYP standard.
Sparks Fly as the Madison Studio Charter School is Voted Down
The Madison School Board voted down the proposed Studio Charter School Monday night in a 4-2 vote (Against: Carstensen, Kobza, Silveira and Winston; For Mathiak and Robarts with Vang away).
Sparks flew when Lucy Mathiak asked Nancy Donahue about their interaction with the attempts to talk with principals and teachers about the proposed charter school [12 minute video.] Watch the complete discussion here.
There is disagreement among Madison School Board members over what put the nails in the coffin of a proposal to create a new fine arts and technology-focused charter school.
The Studio School suffered from being the wrong proposal at the wrong time, said board President Johnny Winston Jr., who joined board members Carol Carstensen, Arlene Silveira and Lawrie Kobza in voting against the plan at Monday night's School Board meeting.
But board member Lucy Mathiak says that the vote was wrapped up in School Board and labor politics, and that the Studio School suffered from disapproval from Madison Teachers Inc., the district's union.
But Mathiak, who along with board member Ruth Robarts voted in favor of what would have been Madison's third charter school, said she felt the proposal was primarily doomed by disapproval from MTI.
She noted that the MTI's School Board candidate questionnaire asks whether candidates support charter schools, and added that there was a MTI representative at Monday night's meeting.
"There is definitely the feeling that the union does not look favorably on charter schools, although they are public schools, staffed by district teachers," Mathiak said.
"I find it ironic that the same people who voted for a voluntary impasse resolution agreement regarding teachers' contract negotiations are now saying that developing a charter school is something we can't afford. We should keep all of our options open in the bargaining process ... the potential for cost savings are very significant," she said.
In the context of the Madison School District's financial challenges, it's easy to understand why creating a new program may seem unthinkable. Yet creativity can prove a strong ally in times of adversity. Take the prospect of the latest charter school idea to come before the Madison School Board, and consider these points:
As a charter school, the Studio School can bring in $550,000 in federal grants over its first four years. These grants, earmarked for charter schools, are designed to help districts cover start-up costs. The Studio School can be implemented in a way that keeps operating costs in line with other elementary schools district-wide; yet as a charter with an arts and technology emphasis, it would have the ability to seek additional grants and sources of financial support.
The Studio School would be in an existing public school, just as the district's bilingual charter school operates. This school-within-a- school model is a cost- efficient way to foster innovation. As a taxpayer and a parent, I see the Studio School as an excellent use of underused space. While its location has yet to be determined by the district and School Board, the idea poses interesting possibilities. Could a charter school draw some students from a nearby overcrowded school? Over the long term, might an innovative option help attract new families to a neighborhood where parents had once worried about the future of an under-enrolled school? And how might such an effort dovetail with our city's development plans?
Other districts in Wisconsin have encouraged the development of charters and realized significant financial benefits. For example, the Appleton School District has strategically embraced charter schools. Its 13 charters have garnered more than $3 million in outside funding. The Appleton district encourages parents and educators to propose charters that bring new approaches into the public school system and address families' desires for options. Charter schools have attracted many students from outside the Appleton district, and through open enrollment, this has meant millions of dollars in additional revenue.
Not all students have the same learning style. Maintaining that a uniform approach can equitably serve all students overlooks important differences among children. Charter schools can offer distinct learning environments that suit students who have difficulty thriving in other classroom settings.
Charter schools can offer wonderful opportunities for parents of limited financial means. At the same time, they can keep parents who have the resources to look elsewhere engaged in our public education system. If parents in Madison had more choices within the school district, might some who would move to surrounding districts or opt for private education choose otherwise? Opponents may argue that the district can't afford to be concerned with such families. I contend that having a mix of students from across the socioeconomic spectrum benefits public schools. When site selection, recruitment efforts and enrollment policies are done in ways that attract a diverse student population, charters can serve students from all walks of life.
For these reasons and others, the Studio School deserves careful consideration even in challenging financial times. The Madison School District cannot afford not to consider charter schools. Also published in the Wisconsin State Journal.
Suzanne Fatupaito, a nurse’s assistant in Madison schools, is fed up with Wisconsin Physicians Service, the preferred health insurance provider of Madison Teachers Inc.
“MTI uses scare tactics” to maintain teacher support for WPS, Fatupaito recently wrote to the school board. “If members knew that another insurance [plan] would offer similar services to WPS and was less expensive — it would be a no-brainer.”
WPS, with a monthly price tag of $1,720 for family coverage, is one of two health coverage options available to the district’s teachers. The other is Group Health Cooperative, costing $920 monthly for a family plan.
During the past year, the Madison school board has reached agreements with other employee groups to switch from WPS to HMO plans, with most of the savings going to boost pay.
In December, the board held a secret vote in closed session to give up its right to seek health insurance changes should negotiations on the 2007-09 teachers contract go into binding arbitration. (The board can seek voluntary insurance changes during negotations.)
“What we’ve done is taken away a huge bargaining chip,” says board member Lucy Mathiak. “Every other major industry and public sector has had to deal with health-insurance changes, and we’ve got a very real $10 million deficit.”
MTI Executive Director John Matthews says other employee unions “made a big mistake” in switching to HMO plans. Matthews has long maintained that WPS provides superior coverage, despite its higher costs and disproportionate number of complaints. And he defends the paycheck he collects from WPS as a member of its board, saying he’s better able to lobby for his teachers.
Concessions Made in Advance of MTI Negotiations by a Majority of the Madison School Board
It will be interesting to see how voters on February 20 and April 3 view this decision by a majority of the Madison School Board: Should the Board and Administration continue to give away their ability to negotiate health care benefits ($43.5M of the 2006/2007 budge) before MTI union bargaining begins? Read the 2005 MMSD/MTI Voluntary Impasse Agreement [1.1MB PDF; see paragraph's 2, 10 and 11]. The 2007 version, alluded to in Andy Hall's article below, will be posted when it sees the light of day.
This is an important issue for all of us, given the MMSD's challenge of balancing their growing $331M+ budget, while expenses - mostly salaries and benefits - continue to increase at a faster rate. Mix in the recent public disclosure of the district's $5.9M 7 year structural deficit and I doubt that this is the best approach for our children.
But with the Madison School Board facing a $10.5 million budget shortfall, is the board giving away too much with its promises to retain teachers' increasingly pricey health insurance and to discard its legal mechanism for limiting teachers' total compensation increase to 3.8 percent?
Yes, School Board Vice President Lawrie Kobza said Saturday, "I feel very strongly that this was a mistake," said Kobza, who acknowledged that most board members endorse the agreement with Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union.
State law allows districts to avoid arbitration by making a so-called qualified economic offer, or QEO, by boosting salaries and benefits a combined 3.8 percenter a year.
"To agree before a negotiation starts that we're not going to impose the QEO and negotiate health care weakens the district's position," Kobza said. She contended the district's rising health-care costs are harming its ability to raise starting teachers' salaries enough to remain competitive.
The "voluntary impasse resolution" agreements, which are public records, are used in only a handful of Wisconsin's 425 school districts, according to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.
Four of the 7 current Madison School Board Members were backed by MTI during their campaigns (Arlene Silveira, Carol Carstensen, Shwaw Vang and Johnny Winston, Jr.). Those four votes can continue this practice. Independent School Board members Lawrie Kobza and Ruth Robarts have spoken publicly against the concessions made in advance of negotiations. If you support or oppose this approach, let the board know via email (comments@madison.k12.wi.us), or phone.
In 2006-07 the Madison School district will spend $43.5M on health insurance for its employees, the majority of the money paying for insurance for teachers represented by Madison Teachers, Inc. (MTI) That is 17% of the operating budget under the revenue limits.
In June of 2007, the two-year contract between the district and MTI ends. The parties are now beginning negotiations for the 2007-09 contract.
Ruth Robarts discussed concessions in advance of negotiations, health care costs and the upcoming elections with Vicki McKenna recently. [6.5MB MP3 Audio | Transcript]
Last week, Madison Teachers Inc. announced it would not reopen contract negotiations following a hollow attempt to study health insurance alternatives.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but anyone who suggests the Joint Committee on Health Insurance Issues conducted a fair or comprehensive review needs to get checked out by a doctor.
The task force’s inaction is a victory for John Matthews, MTI’s executive director and board member Wisconsin Physicians Service.
Losers include open government, school officials, taxpayers and young teachers in need of a raise.
From its start, the task force, comprised of three members each from MTI and the district, seemed to dodge not only its mission but scrutiny.
Tuesday's school board seat 3 primary election candidates commented on concessions in advance of negotiations (one of whom, Beth Moss is supported by Madison Teachers, Inc):
"I really think that ...taking the health care off the table and not even exploring ways of bringing some of those costs down is irresponsible," said candidate Pam Cross-Leone, an employee in Madison Gas & Electric's customer-service unit who said she handled similar issues in her former role as a union steward.
The third candidate, Beth Moss, who has been endorsed by Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union, said she wasn't ready to form an opinion until she has had a chance to read the agreement.
Candidate Rick Thomas, a business consultant and former small-business owner, said he only learned of the agreement on Friday so he would need more details before forming a final opinion. But at first glance, he said, the pact appears to be a mistake because "obviously health care is a huge expense so it's going to be something you have to negotiate."
These decisions directly affect the viability of upcoming, necessary referendums.
THE EDUCATION report card for my home state of Nebraska in the spring of 1999 was mixed, according to Education Week. While children in the state ranked among the top 10 nationally in most academic categories, Nebraska nonetheless garnered only a C. Why? Largely because it does not administer statewide, standardized assessments and so is "lagging behind" in accountability. Both those reporting this verdict and most of the state and local officials receiving it seem to be resigned to it as a sure but unsurprising sign that we have more work to do to "catch up" with the rest of the country. It does not seem to strike most observers as odd that, although students' performance is high, the state's marks are only average. Until Nebraska develops statewide tests, it will continue to receive low grades, irrespective of what our students are doing. This kind of press may well propel the state to abandon its long-held commitment to local assessment and fall in line with the national movement toward state standardized tests.
This report and its handling demonstrate the extent to which educational tests have become "common sense." To use a term proposed by Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, educational testing is "hegemonic" -- that is, it manufactures consent by presenting itself (or being represented as) "obvious." Although standardized tests came under intense fire for a short time in the 1970s, we have returned to this practice with a fervor perhaps greater than at any other time since schools in the United States began making extensive use of standardized tests in the 1930s. Even many educators who have long understood the limitations and outright injustices of standardized testing and the testing industry claim that the time has passed when resistance to testing is useful.
I think it is dangerous to be too sanguine about the prospects for reforming the assessment community and disrupting the commonsense script for education reform, in which schools are cast as damsels in distress, remote experts are cast as heroic saviors, and teachers are written out of the production altogether. We need to confront the fact that, finally, the persistence of the "crisis in education" is attributable in large part to two factors: the profit margins of the testing industry that maintains the crisis and the cultural distrust of teachers that the testing industry, along with the political and education establishments, endorses.
But the testing industry has been able to secure a spot in our cultural imagination and our stock exchanges not only because of the business acumen of its leaders (though that is part of it), but also because it plays to and plays up our cultural distrust of teachers. The corporate establishment, led by the political Right, works hard to create a "public" of concerned taxpayers: those who want to be sure that their "investments" in children pay off. Neoconservative columnists play to this audience constantly, stoking the fires of educational crisis and inspiring suspicions about the competence of our public school teachers.... This distrust is carefully nurtured to keep the present educational power structure intact: remote "experts" (the capitalists) develop educational tests and prepackaged curricula and send them off to school administrators (the managers), who then ensure that teachers (the workers) faithfully execute those plans. Students (the products) are thus shaped to the specifications of experts whom they will never meet and who may never have set foot in a classroom.
In other words, whatever the gains of movements like the one for authentic assessment, the prevailing wisdom about education reform has it that reform must be top down, not inside out. Underlying our embrace of the assessment industry and our cultural distrust of teachers is a fundamental belief that what's missing in education today is "efficiency" and that the best way to ensure efficiency is to set up a corporate structure in which teachers are held accountable to corporate CEOs. What's good for General Motors . . .
I’m no different. I want my kids pushed, prodded, inspired, and challenged in school. Too often—in the name of equity, or progressive education, or union protectionism, or just plain cheapness—that isn’t happening in the Madison schools.
Advanced classes are being choked off, while one-size-fits-all classes (“heterogeneous groupings”) are created for more and more students. The TAG staff has been slashed nearly in half (one staffer is now assigned to six elementary schools), and even outside groups promoting educational excellence are treated coolly if not with hostility (this is the fate of the most excellent Wisconsin Center For Academically Talented Youth [WCATY]). And arts programs are demeaned and orphaned.
This is not Tom Friedman’s recipe for student success in the 21st century. Sure, many factors can be blamed for this declining state of affairs, notably the howlingly bad way in which K-12 education is financed and structured in Wisconsin. But much of the problem also derives from the district’s own efforts to deal with “the achievement gap.”
That gap is the euphemism used for the uncomfortable fact that, as a group, white students perform better academically than do black and Hispanic students. For example, 46% of Madison’s black students score below grade level on the state’s 3rd grade reading test compared to 9% of white students.
At East, the state’s 10th grade knowledge-and-concepts test show widely disparate results by race. With reading, 81% of white kids are proficient or advanced versus 43% for black students. The achievement gap is even larger in math, science, social studies, and language arts. No wonder TAG classes are disproportionately white.
Reality is that the push for heterogeneous class grouping becomes, among other things, a convenient cover for reducing the number of advanced classes that are too white and unrepresentative of the district’s minority demographics.
The trick for voters is to elect a School Board that is most likely not only to keep up the momentum but to accelerate it. To that end, in Tuesday's primary, we recommend Bruce Thompson for the citywide seat, Michael Bonds in the 3rd District and incumbent Joe Dannecker in the 8th District.
Reformers now run the School Board, but barely. Almost with each election, control of the board has long switched back and forth between the reform side and union side, which is beholden to the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association. We prefer the reform agenda, which is laying the foundation for success.
I happened to sit next to the Curriculum Coordinator (20+ years in that District) for a large, growing US School District recently ( north of 100,000 students). I found some of the comments interesting:
They cycle through superintendents every 2 to 3 years. The Supers are paid $300K+ with "lots of benefits".
The new super is decentralizing all over the place, pushing control down.
They use trailers as enrollment moves around the community.
The new super wants to require any children in grades K-3 not reading at grade level to have only one task per day (beyond lunch, recess and PE) - read. This involves tracking.
I asked what sort of curriculum they used for reading: Whole language with "lots of phonics". I asked if they used Reading Recovery. The person said that they evaluated RR but felt it was "far too expensive".
Offer a great deal of IB and AP courses. They also have magnet schools, though the person said that they are less popular now that the district has gone back to neighborhood schools (evidently there was a successful reverse discrimination lawsuit). They have evidently received "a great deal of federal funds" to support IB and AP.
8th graders who cannot read at grade level will go to a different set of curriculum or school than those who are at or above.
This district spends about $7,900 per student annually (Madison is in the $12,500 range).
Interestingly, this is the 2nd time during the past 12 months that I've sat next to an educator on their way to a conference sponsored by curriculum publishers.
John Nichols noted that Madison's Mayoral challengers have not raised substantive questions of the incumbent Mayor's (Dave Cieslewicz) record, including schools:
No. 2, he has failed to offer much in the way of a vision for how this rapidly changing city should approach the future. How green should it be? Where does mass transit fit in? How do we diversify the economy? How do we make sure that the schools remain strong and popular with all the city's residents? The mayor thinks about all these issues. He works on them in incremental ways and, frankly, he's done so ably. Unfortunately, he has not communicated in a particularly bold or effective manner with regard to them. Once again, the vulnerability remains.
In politics, an incumbent's vulnerabilities are meaningless if they are not exploited by his or her challengers. Ray Allen and Peter Munoz have failed, so far, to put a dent in Cieslewicz. One of them will survive the primary, and that candidate will have a chance to mount a more serious challenge. With the first critical test just days away, however, Allen and Munoz give every sign of having boarded the wrong trolley.
Why have the Mayor (and challengers) been quiet on substantive school issues?
Perhaps in Madison, where a local elected official recently remarked to me that "we don't have a democracy" (think about that), the endorsement merry go round (maybe the deal with schools is that a candidate gets ground and monetary support, or help with a holiday party, if they stay out of K-12), the "remain silent" requirements of some and the fact that political upside in K-12 is difficult leads to the present situation. Or just indifference?
What do we, as a community, give up when candidates who have cut deals and agree to remain silent on certain issues are elected? What sort of example does this leave for future generations?
"We have to do much better," School Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said, summarizing it all.
But he pointed to improved graduation and dropout rates as encouraging and said he remains convinced reforms will bear fruit, even though it may take years to see that. "We need to stay the course," he said.
The course itself has had plenty of bumps, as the high school redesign report showed. There are now 33 small high schools in MPS, with a wide range of success. An administrative report concluded, "New, small high schools continue to be difficult to develop and implement but show promise with some significant gains."
Budget season is not as much fun as the other seasons. We approach budget season with anxiety because each new budget season means that we will again reduce the services that our students need. Under the current revenue cap law, yearly service reductions are a fact of life for most school districts in Wisconsin. The demands for students to gain more knowledge and skills increase every year while resources to meet their needs decrease every year.
Budget season creates intense concern among staff and parents and makes adversaries among friends. Priorities must be set, and when all of the input has been gathered and discussion completed, it is the responsibility of the elected Board of Education to make those final priority decisions.
According to the MMSD staff directory, 29 resource teachers in Educational Services, seven instructional resource teachers in Language Art/Reading and eight in Math work out of the Doyle building.
Why are those teachers located at Doyle? They work in schools, so they could be relocated in any number of buildings, freeing space at Doyle to house the Brearly Street programs.
I've updated the election page with the following information:
January, 2007 campaign finance filings which show that retired Madison Teacher and seat 5 candidate Marj Passman (who faces Maya Cole - $135.00) has raised $5,530, far ahead of the rest. Beth Moss is next at $822.00 (Moss faces Pam Cross-Leone - $75.00 and Rick Thomas - $100.00 in the February 20, 2007 primary.)
School closings need to be considered in light of the long-term (5-10 years or more) outlook - a 3-5 year outlook, yet alone 1-2 years, is not nearly long enough when considering a measure whose impact lasts for many years, at a student/family level, as well as financial.
What muddies this school closing picture is the outlook for continued enrollment increases on the east side of town, not just the far west and southwest sides. I've heard the district is considering purchase of land not far from the interstate with an eye to building an elementary school there one day. It's hard to imagine building a new school for $10+ million, when other schools less than five miles away have recently been closed. I believe the combination of continued growth on the east side, combined with the continuing increasing birth rate (births have been up every year here for the past ten years, which is a significant explanatory factor for why there is increasing enrollment pressures on almost all our city schools) will render school closures quite unnecessary.
However, the picture gets further complicated when we recognize that the MMSD budget will be $40 million smaller (in real terms) over the next five years (give or take). The only way to find that kind of money is to increase class sizes. The only questions are how, where, when, and by how much. (Which again is why I think a 5-year plan is needed, to ensure these painful adjustments are done in a way that least harms the quality of education.)
Ultimately, the appropriateness and wisdom of closing any school, from a strictly financial perspective, rests on what the long-term picture looks like. This picture needs to combine long-term enrollment projections (at a neighborhood/school level) with a variety of realistic scenarios as to how class sizes may change as the long-term budget situation continues to deteriorate. Without such projections, the district runs a serious risk of doing the wrong thing: by either closing schools when it later proves unnecessary, or by leaving them open when it later proves we would have done better to close them.
School board candidates: What do you think of closing schools?
David Cohen suggested that I ask candidates their positions on closing a school on the isthmus or east side.
So, candidates, if you're elected to the board, will you vote to support closing a school? A simple yes or no will suffice; however, if you'd like to elaborate, feel free.
From all appearances, the MMSD administration desperately wants to close Lapham Elementary without giving serious consideration to other cost-saving options.
The 2006 East Area Task Force concluded that closing a school would be harmful.
Weigh in on whether to close a school by contacting board members and administators with this e-mail address: comments@madison.k12.wi.us
At a time when Madison should be discussing the very real challenge of retooling our schools so that they can educate our young to be the leaders of the 21st century, when we should be getting serious about how to ensure that all citizens have access to affordable housing, and when we should be strategizing about how to diversify our economy in order to provide the jobs that will be required by our burgeoning population - and to protect the dwindling number of unionized industrial jobs that remain - the City Council will tonight discuss whether to put an advisory referendum about trolleys on the spring ballot.
I believe that the school board voted to move forward on the superintendent's recommendation to form a math task force. The board asked the administration to:
Initiate and complete a comprehensive, independent and neutral review and assessment of the District's K-12 math curriculum.
· The review and assessment shall be undertaken by a task force whose members are appointed by the Superintendent and approved by the BOE. Members of the task force shall have math and math education expertise and represent a variety of perspectives regarding math education.
· The task force shall prepare and present to the BOE a preliminary outline of the review and assessment to be undertaken by the task force. The outline shall, at a minimum, include: (1) analysis of math achievement data for MMSD K-12 students, including analysis of all math sub-tests scores disaggregated by student characteristics and schools; (2) analysis of performance expectations for MMSD K-12 students; (3) an overview of math curricula, including MMSD's math curriculum; (4) a discussion of how to improve MMSD student achievement; and (5) recommendations on measures to evaluate the effectiveness of MMSD's math curriculum. The task force is to present the preliminary outline and a timeline to the BOE for comment and approval.
· The task force is to prepare a written draft of the review and assessment, consistent with the approved preliminary outline. The draft is to be presented to the BOE for review and comment.
· The task force is to prepare the final report on the review and assessment.
More details of the superintendent's plans are here.
The superintendent, school board president and other school board candidates are already talking as if this were a done deal. But what is “restorative justice,” and what will it mean to have student misconduct addressed with a “restorative justice” approach? A layperson’s online search leads to academic papers in the criminal and juvenile justice area from fields ranging from sociology, social work, philosophy and theology, but not much specific research or data on whether or how “restorative justice” has been found to work as an approach to addressing misconduct in schools. The decision to move away from a discipline-based approach to a “restorative justice” approach will have an immediate, on-the-ground, daily impact on the school climate and educational experience encountered by the students and teachers in our schools, and parents of children in the public schools here may very well have the following questions:
How to Tell When “Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction” Isn’t.
In this practitioners’ guide, renowned reading expert Louisa Moats (author of the American Federation of Teachers’ Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science and an earlier Thomas B. Fordham Foundation report, Whole Language Lives On: The Illusion of “Balanced” Reading Instruction) explains how educators, parents, and concerned citizens can spot ineffective reading programs that surreptitiously hide under the “scientifically-based” banner.
While the field of reading has made enormous strides in recent years—especially with the publication of the National Reading Panel’s landmark report and enactment of the federal Reading First program discredited and ineffectual practices continue in many schools. Although the term “whole language” is rarely used today, programs based on its premises, such as Reading Recovery, Four Blocks, Guided Reading, and especially “balanced literacy,” are as popular as ever. These approaches may pay lip service to reading science, but they fail to incorporate the content and instructional methods proven to work best with students learning to read. Some districts, such as Denver, openly shun research-based practices, while others, such as Chicago, fail to provide clear, consistent leadership for principals and teachers, who are left to reinvent reading instruction, school by school.
Hathaway, who hopes to be a novelist, is among 1 million kindergarten through high school student enrollments in virtual schooling across the nation, according to the North American Council for Online Learning, a nonprofit organization for administrators, teachers and others involved in online schooling.
Enrollment, counted as the total number of seats in all online classes, not the number of students, has grown more than 20 times in seven years, and the group expects the numbers to continue to jump 30% annually.
To deal with the growth, the University of California is launching an extensive effort to make sure applicants' online high school courses are on par with traditional classroom instruction.
Nearly half the states offer public school classes online, and last year Michigan became the first in the nation to require students to take an online course to graduate from high school. In California, a state senator introduced a bill last week to allow public high school students to take online classes without depriving schools of the state funding they receive for attendance.
The next leader of Seattle Public Schools should be inspirational, able to work well with others, committed to reducing the academic achievement gap and ideally will have experience as an educator, the Seattle School Board agreed.
During a marathon work session Wednesday, the board fine-tuned a list of 10 qualifications to create a "profile" of the person who will take over for departing Superintendent Raj Manhas later this year.
Guest Post from Charles Zogby, he’s currently Senior Vice President for Education Policy with K-12* and the former Secretary of Education Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He was active in the reform efforts in Philly while he was secretary. Responding to this post he writes: I wanted to respond to your recent post regarding RAND's analysis of the various school management options deployed in Philadelphia. You note in your post that for profit and non-profit managers received more resources but did no better in producing academic performance. This is not an entirely accurate picture of either the conditions of the schools or the challenge that the private mangers were handed.
We are sure that this statement will shock this community: The Waukesha Taxpayers League agrees that we have an educational funding problem in Wisconsin.
While there may be widespread agreement with that statement, how we got into this predicament and, more importantly, how we resolve the funding issue is where disagreement exists. As the saying goes, “one must know history well or history is bound to repeat itself.” A brief review of school funding history is in order.
During the late ’80s and early ’90s, education spending was out of control. Double-digit property tax increases were common. The only way to control school taxes and spending was to oust local school board members – always a difficult feat. Fiscally responsible school boards were rendered helpless by state mediation/arbitration law which sent contract disputes to an arbitrator for resolution. The problem was, the arbitrator’s decision was heavily influenced by settlements in surrounding districts. If one district settled at a high level of salary and benefit increases, soon all districts were mandated to provide such settlements. Large settlements combined with increased hiring led to escalating school spending and taxes. Property taxes in particular rose at unbearable rates, angering taxpayers across Wisconsin.
In the early ’90s, responding to an angry electorate, the Legislature passed a “revenue cap” law limiting the amount of revenue a district could collect from property and state taxes, effectively limiting spending. This cap was formulated to allow for inflation and student enrollment changes. Some contend that districts are only allowed to increase spending by 2 percent annually, but Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance figures show that school spending increases have averaged 4 percent yearly since 2001.
To make revenue caps workable, salary and benefits (80 percent of school budgets) also needed to be reined in. The Legislature passed what is commonly called the QEO: qualified economic offer. This law prohibits mediation/arbitration if a district offers the teachers union at least a 3.8 percent salary and benefit increase. However, huge loopholes developed in QEO law, resulting in average salary increases of more than 5 percent annually, not including the increasing cost of health and retirement benefits.
This legislation intentionally created a shortfall between the money generated by revenue caps and the QEO to force districts to prioritize spending within their budgets that had become padded with new programs and staff for years. To provide for some local control of spending, the Legislature included the referendum process for any spending over the revenue caps.
Also passed was “two-thirds funding.” This means that the state provides two-thirds of the cost of education in Wisconsin. This was a huge shift in taxes from the local to the state level. This two-thirds funding is actually a very complex formula that distributes this money unevenly. Property rich districts and big spending districts get less state money than property poor districts and lesser spending districts. Waukesha is considered a property rich district, so we receive less than twothirds funding.
The state of Wisconsin currently spends $5.89 billion on kindergarten through 12thgrade education. This represents 39.3 percent of the state’s general fund. Local property taxes (after all credits) increased 5.4 percent to $3.79 billion. These figures demonstrate how generous Wisconsin taxpayers are to our schools.
Many people still see mathematics as a difficult subject that only a select group of students with special abilities can master. Learning math, they believe, consists of memorizing facts and mastering the application of complicated concepts and procedures.
“That’s simply not true,” says Thomas Carpenter, who has plenty of research to justify his succinct rebuttal.
A pioneering cohort of education researchers at UW-Madison – led by Carpenter, Thomas Romberg, and Elizabeth Fennema, all emeriti professors in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction – have shown, for instance, that children of all abilities enter school with an informal base of mathematical knowledge that enables them to learn more substantive material than traditionally taught.
For more than 30 years, these researchers have put the learning of mathematics under the microscope in search of ways to improve teaching and student understanding. They’ve found, for instance, that math instruction can be strengthened by tapping into children’s informal knowledge, by teaching them to use the same practices as mathematicians, and by engaging them in real-world problem-solving instead of rote drills on abstract skills.
By making math more accessible to students of all ages and abilities, they hope that more people will recognize mathematics as they do – as a language for thought.
Having established a solid foundation, the trail-blazing cohort led by Carpenter, Romberg, and Fennema in recent years has been passing the torch at UW-Madison to a new generation of scholars.
“The Mathematics Education area is in good hands,” says Eric Knuth, associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, who leads a group that includes three assistant professors – Amy Ellis, Victoria Hand, and Edd Taylor. Adapting a phrase used by Sir Isaac Newton, Knuth adds, “We are continuing on the shoulders of giants.”
Like those giants, all four are engaged in research aimed at adding to the body of knowledge of how diverse populations of students learn and understand mathematics. Likewise, they are dedicated to equipping current and future teachers with the best practices, based on the latest knowledge, for supporting all students in their development of mathematical understanding and reasoning.
The path of giants
Tom Romberg describes mathematics as “a human activity involving the ability to represent quantitative and spatial relationships in a broad range of situations, express those relations using the language of mathematics, and use various techniques to carry out numerical procedures.” While humans have used mathematics for centuries to help make sense of the world, he explains, research on the teaching and learning of math is a relatively young discipline.
Romberg is widely recognized for playing an instrumental role in creating the mathematics education research community. Since the late 1960s, he has held numerous leadership posts, including the chairmanships of the Research Committee for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the Special Interest Group in Mathematics Education for the American Educational Research Association, and the North American branch of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education.
In the 1990s, he chaired the NCTM committee that produced the mathematics curriculum and assessment standards, marking the start of the standards movement in education. He notes, “These documents have had considerable impact throughout the world.”
While the accomplishments to date have been substantial, Romberg and his colleagues acknowledge that plenty of work remains. “While all instructional programs have a goal of teaching mathematics so that students ‘understand,’ there has been little evidence that the goal has been reached,” he says.
With evident pride, Romberg and Tom Carpenter describe the contributions of mathematics education research at UW-Madison.
“As a consequence of our program of research for over 30 years, we have developed a workable conception of how to characterize ‘student understanding’ and some ‘powerful practices’ that lead to such understanding,” Romberg explains. “The impact of these conceptions is reflected in our most recent work on teaching early algebra, the development of a middle-school curriculum (Mathematics in Context), and the creation of a classroom assessment system.”
“We have been instrumental in bringing together research on the development of students’ mathematical thinking and the research on classroom interactions and classroom processes,” adds Carpenter, whose credits include serving as editor of NCTM’s Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, the leading journal in the field. He also has been honored for his research publications by the NCTM and the American Educational Research Association.
“This has been a major development in research during the last 15 years,” he says, “and our faculty members have played major roles both in articulating the need and conceptual framework for the integration and in the specific research that was at the forefront of the changes.”
Carpenter also points to his collaboration with Fennema – who is especially known for her research on gender differences in learning mathematics – and others in the development of Cognitively Guided Instruction, a highly regarded professional development program. CGI prepares elementary school teachers to recognize and build on their students’ informal mathematical knowledge by providing a framework that teachers can use in making their own instructional decisions.
“I would consider the remarkable accomplishments of teachers I have worked with in CGI as one of the most significant and satisfying aspects of my career,” says Carpenter. “Elizabeth and I clearly cannot take credit for all they have accomplished, but my relations with them and whatever I contributed to them has been exceptionally rewarding.”
In her CGI research of children in grades 1-3, Fennema noted gender differences in the strategies boys and girls used to solve problems, although not in the results. Girls tended to use more concrete strategies like modeling and counting, while boys used more abstract strategies. Fennema says this study revealed that gender differences emerged earlier and were more complex than previously recognized.
Both Romberg and Carpenter have directed the National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science (NCISLA), a decade-long (1995-2004), federally funded initiative based at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER). NCISLA involved researchers at six institutions collaborating with K-12 teachers to advance effective reform of mathematics and science.
The researchers found, for example, that children are capable of learning more complex ideas at earlier ages than traditionally thought, that teachers need more substantive professional development about student thinking and subject matter, and that standardized tests do not adequately assess students’ long-term growth of knowledge nor depth of understanding.
Carpenter, Romberg, and other NCISLA staff summarized the center’s work in Understanding Mathematics and Science Matters (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), and created a multimedia product, Powerful Practices in Mathematics and Science (Madison, Wis.: NCISLA, 2004) for use by practitioners.
Beyond the research findings and publications, the Mathematics Education program can measure its enduring influence in terms of people. “One of our most significant contributions has been the outstanding graduates of our program who have made important contributions to mathematics education,” Carpenter notes.
Since 1980, UW-Madison has conferred 84 Ph.D.’s in mathematics education and has graduates on the faculties of many universities, including major state universities in California, Georgia, Texas, Illinois, Colorado, Arizona, Missouri, Delaware, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.
New faces, same focus
Effective mathematics instruction, explains Eric Knuth, involves three key components: understanding how children learn, preparing teachers who can tap into and build upon that knowledge, and having a curriculum that supports these efforts. Like the pioneers who preceded them, Knuth and his mathematics education colleagues are engaged in all three parts.
Like Carpenter and others, Knuth and Amy Ellis – who joined the faculty in 1999 and 2004, respectively – are interested in promoting the development of algebraic reasoning. Math researchers describe algebra – which introduces students to the use of symbolic representations – as the gatekeeper between the concrete calculations of arithmetic and higher levels of mathematics.
“A lack of success in algebra means losing opportunities for advanced studies,” Knuth explains. Ellis notes that algebra – which involves “the study of structures and systems generalized beyond specific computations and relations” – plays a vital role in access to college and careers in the sciences and engineering, which are associated with higher earning power.
They regard the development of algebraic reasoning as far too important to wait until eighth or ninth grade, when many students first encounter algebra. The seeds of algebraic reasoning need to be planted and nurtured in the elementary and middle school grades, they say.
“We want students to move beyond solving one problem,” Ellis says.
In studies funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Knuth and Ellis are looking at the development of key practices used by mathematicians and scientists –generalization, modeling, and proof/justification – that are often not emphasized by traditional instruction.
Algebra marks the first time that students are encouraged to generalize patterns, relations, and functions, says Ellis, adding “it’s fairly common for them to struggle with this.”
Ellis, whose work on generalization is funded by a three-year NSF Research on Learning and Education (RoLE) grant, describes generalization as “a sophisticated mathematical activity that involves extending the range of reasoning beyond one specific problem.”
She has found that the development of the abilities to make generalizations and to construct arguments to justify mathematical claims seem to go hand in hand. She also has seen that grounding abstract lessons in measurable situations enhances students’ abilities to generalize.
In a five-year, longitudinal study funded by an NSF Career grant, Knuth has been examining how middle school students acquire and develop their understanding of what constitutes evidence and justification and how such understandings can be refined and extended. Traditionally, students first encounter – and struggle with – justification and proofs in high school geometry.
Knuth and Ellis also have been working with Charles Kalish, professor of educational psychology, to study relationships between student reasoning inside and outside of math. Understanding how children develop their reasoning abilities, especially those related to mathematics, can lead to instructional practices that support and foster their development.
Knuth and other UW-Madison researchers have looked at such essential concepts as how elementary and middle school students understand the equal sign (=). They’ve found that, instead of recognizing that this symbol indicates a relationship – that one side is equivalent to the other – many children interpret it as something like “find the total,” “the answer comes next,” or “do something.”
NCISLA’s Powerful Practices video provides an example: Asked to fill in the blank on 8 + 4 = __ + 5, a fourth-grade class reaches a quick consensus that the correct answer is 12 (the sum of 8 and 4, ignoring the 5). Instead of correcting them, the teacher poses a series of number sentences that prompt the students to re-evaluate their understanding of the equal sign and, ultimately, recognize that the correct answer to the original question is 7.
“We need to provide these kinds of experiences for kids much earlier,” Knuth says.
Edd Taylor and Vicki Hand – who joined the faculty in 2004 and 2005, respectively – address how issues of diversity and equity affect the teaching and learning of mathematics – an area where Elizabeth Fennema and other UW-Madison faculty have made significant contributions. Both Taylor and Hand are involved with Diversity in Mathematics Education (DiME), the National Science Foundation Center for Learning and Teaching based at UW-Madison and led by Tom Carpenter.
DiME – a consortium consisting of UW-Madison, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of California at Berkeley, and school districts in Madison, Los Angeles, and Berkeley – is engaged in preparing a new generation of mathematics education scholars, creating professional development programs for teachers, and facilitating research on equity issues in mathematics education. More information about this project is available online at www.wcer.wisc.edu/dime/.
To the casual observer, the teaching and learning of mathematics might not seem like something that’s affected by ethnic and cultural diversity. Yet, Hand notes, “The notion that mathematics education is culture-free is problematic.”
The broader cultural and social context in which mathematics education takes place influences teachers’ perceptions of what productive and unproductive learning look like – for instance, what “counts” as a justification for students’ mathematical ideas. Hand says misalignments can occur when these cultural differences aren’t taken into account.
Hand has examined structural issues, such as the impact of tracking on opportunities for learning and students’ trajectories for higher education. She has noted that, for a variety of reasons, students of color more often end up in low-tracked classes. Often, these classrooms are less rigorous and put students on a trajectory that doesn’t prepare them for college, she explains. This perpetuates the achievement gap, and feeds the stereotypical view that students of color cannot do math. DiME researchers have found that tracking, even when eliminated as policy, might continue in practice.
Hand also considers broader issues – for example, how the inequitable distribution of high-quality teachers across urban and suburban schools affects students’ opportunities to learn – as she investigates the interplay of structure and student backgrounds.
In his research, Taylor looks beyond the conventional methods used by the mathematics education community at the informal ways children think about math and solve problems outside of school. For instance, he has studied the mathematical development of children who spend money at corner stores in low-income neighborhoods.
Taylor explains that students might solve problems more easily if linked to their everyday practices. For example, a traditional problem – e.g., 160 – 100 = __ – can be presented in a way that draws upon their understanding of money: “If you have $160 and I take away $100, how much do you have left?”
Making teachers more aware of cultural understanding and experiences outside of the classroom can help them create classroom environments that tap into how their students reason through mathematics, he explains. He plans to extend his investigation of math reasoning outside of school to religious organizations and such practices as tithing.
“We want teachers to honor more ways of doing math,” he says. “That’s just good mathematics.”
Influencing practice
“The research has to impact more than just the academic community,” says Knuth.
He and his colleagues underscored the importance of working directly with classroom teachers and connecting their research to the preparation of new teachers. The bridge between research and classroom instruction includes curriculum development and effective teacher education and professional development.
“The kind of research we do has us engaged in the local schools,” explains Ellis. In addition to advancing the research, this benefits the school community and helps teachers address current needs.
Knuth and Ellis design and run the preparation program for secondary mathematics teachers. As the program director, Knuth arranges field placements for pre-service teachers, oversees the teaching assistants who teach methods courses and/or provide field placement supervision, and communicates with cooperating teachers. Taylor directs the preparation program for elementary mathematics teachers.
All four teach also undergraduate courses. Knuth has a class on teaching mathematics with technology. Hand, Taylor, and Ellis have taught various methods courses. Ellis helps run a seminar for pre-service teachers in their final year, and Hand has co-taught a geometry content course within the Mathematics Department for pre-service teachers.
“We all work with graduate students, as well,” Ellis adds. “There is a core sequence of four graduate courses that our math-ed students take, and we all four teach these courses.”
And, all four work with in-service teachers.
Knuth has directed several professional development programs for secondary school mathematics teachers, ranging from a three-year program designed to help high school teachers learn to teach with technology to multi-year programs designed to help middle-school teachers foster students’ mathematical reasoning.
He and Ellis ran a professional development program for pre-service teachers and their cooperating teachers that was geared toward promoting the mentoring relationship. The program was funded by a small grant from the Calculus Consortium for Higher Education.
Through DiME, Hand and Taylor have been involved in creating professional development programs for local school districts to make teachers aware of the learning opportunities that they create. Hand conducts professional development for Madison teachers on equity in mathematics instruction.
Hand and UW-Madison graduate students work with math teachers in the Madison Metropolitan School District in a group designed as a venue for sharing knowledge. She says that efforts by teachers to improve mathematics education for all students in the district have made significant progress over the last three years in narrowing the achievement gap.
The Mathematics Education group also has collaborated with the Mathematics Department to improve the preparation of middle school teachers in both content and teaching diverse populations.
“Teachers need to be given more respect for work they do in their field,” Hand says. “It’s not just about knowing mathematics, but about knowing how to teach mathematics to diverse learners.”
“The research influences how we teach the teachers,” Ellis says. “The teacher’s role is critical in shaping student reasoning.”
“In the end,” Knuth says, “we want all students to learn to meaningfully engage in mathematical practices and to develop increasingly more sophisticated ways of engaging in those practices.”
Let's skip the issues this week and probe the Madison school board candidates on their community involvement and their advice for students moving up to high school. We've asked them to describe their most fulfilling volunteer experiences, as well as what they would say to a graduating class of eighth graders.
You’ll find the answer in the ATTACHED article from the “Wisconsin School News,” monthly journal of the Wisconsin School Boards Association. Appleton Embraces Charter Schools by Annette Talis. [650K PDF]
Is there another school referendum in Madison's immediate future?
If it means saving small schools in the center of the city that face closings or consolidations in the path of this year's $10.5 million budget-cutting juggernaut, some neighborhood advocates argue it would be well worthwhile.
Matt Calvert, a Lapham-Marquette elementary school parent, said he favored a referendum that would provide money to the district for the next several years so that it would not close schools, increase class sizes or cut programs in an effort to close its budget gap.
Mathematics education seems to be very subject to passing trends - surprisingly more so than many other subjects. The most notorious are, of course, the rise of New Math in the 60s and 70s, and the corresponding backlash against it in the late 70s and 80s. It turns out that mathematics education, at least in the US, is now subject to a new trend, and it doesn't appear to be a good one.
To be fair the current driving trend in mathematics education is largely an extension of an existing trend in education generally. The idea is that we need to cater more to the students to better engage them in the material. There is a focus on making things fun, on discovery, on group work, and on making things "relevant to the student". These are often noble goals, and it is something that, in the past, education schemes have often lacked. There is definitely such a thing as "too much of a good thing" with regard to these aims, and as far as I can tell that point was passed some time ago in the case of mathematics.
But citizen praise was matched by district badmouthing. At every stage, district officials exaggerated the potential problems posed by the school, and at no point did they provide evidence that they had worked to resolve them.
For example, Rainwater wants the 44-student school to have its own full-time principal and secretary, while Studio School backers want to save money by sharing Emerson’s resources.
Rainwater’s insistence on spending more money, which could torpedo the proposal, left some shaking their heads. Kobza asked whether it would make sense to even consider other charters, as Rainwater’s rules would make them financially unviable.
Rainwater, amazingly, conceded the point: “I agree that you would never have a charter school” given these requirements, he said.
John Keckhaver: Don't rush approval of Studio School
A letter to the editor
Dear Editor: Much has been made about how the proposed charter Studio School is really a referendum on the openness of the School Board to new ideas. Members of the board have already shown that they are willing to innovate, and this proposal - bound to have impacts not only on those kids who attend the boutique school but also on the entire student body - needs to succeed or fail on its merits.
A number of serious concerns exist, but have yet to gain much media attention.
At a time when the district will be cutting $12 million or so from our schools' budgets, dismissing critical staff and enlarging class sizes at many schools, funding and operating a separate and different program within a larger school, particularly one with a significant low-income population, is simply unfair.
Combined with this concern is the fact that proponents of the school have so far completely failed to reach out to a representative group of Emerson parents.
The fact that the methodology to be employed has largely been one utilized in private preschools and that there are no evaluations to examine regarding its impact on student experiences and outcomes at the public elementary school level suggests a further and more detailed look is needed, and suggests the board should not approve the proposal next week.
In 2006-07 the Madison School district will spend $43.5M on health insurance for its employees, the majority of the money paying for insurance for teachers represented by Madison Teachers, Inc. (MTI) That is 17% of the operating budget under the revenue limits.
In June of 2007, the two-year contract between the district and MTI ends. The parties are now beginning negotiations for the 2007-09 contract.
The Sun Prairie School district and its teachers union recently saved substantial dollars on health insurance. They used the savings to improve teacher wages. The parties joined together openly and publicly to produce a statement of the employees health needs. Then they negotiated a health insurance package with a local HMO that met their needs.
The Madison School district has no choice but to look for ways to reduce future health insurance costs, while keeping a high quality of care. What we pay our teachers in the future depends on it--both in wages and in post-retirement benefits. What we can offer to our children in programs depends on it.
We have made some progress in reducing future health insurance costs for some of the union-represented employees and for our administrators. I hope that board members elected in April will continue down this path. It's not an easy path.
MTI plays hard ball in its election endorsements. It is looking for candidates that will continue coverage by Wisconsin Physicians Services (WPS)---no matter what else is available. It is also telling the incumbents what kind of treatment to expect from executive director John Matthews if the incumbent takes his or her board role seriously enough to represent the kids' interest at the negotiating table. For an example, see MTI's newsletter for late January:
The Madison Board of Education is faced with several great challenges over the next few months. One of the biggest is the announcement that Superintendent Art Rainwater will retire at the end of the June 2008. The board will be working with a consultant to assist in hiring the next superintendent. Another board challenge is the budget shortfall of $10.5 million dollars. Lack of state and federal funding, unfunded and under funded mandates, revenue limits and the qualified economic offer, all contribute to the annual budget woes. While addressing these issues the Board continues its discussion and analysis on positive student behavior in our schools. These changes will lead from a punitive approach to a preventive and restorative justice methodology. This model will increase school safety and lead to changes in the student Code of Conduct and Board policy that can be applied fairly to all students.
Board Committees:
Our board committees continue to meet on a regular basis and are working hard to analyze complex issues to be voted on by the entire board. Finance and Operations (Lawrie Kobza, Chair) has received feedback on the People’s Budget. This will be a document that is easier to read and understand. Long Range Planning (Carol Carstensen, Chair) has held public forums to gather public input regarding overcrowding at Chavez and Lakeview. Joint meetings between the two committees have been held to discuss elementary class size throughout the district. Human Resources (Ruth Robarts, Chair) are discussing the use of a consultant to compare administrative salaries. Communications (Arlene Silveira, Chair) held a meeting featuring several state legislators regarding many issues of the board including school finance and clarification of state statues. Community Partnerships (Lucy Mathiak, Chair) discussed programs receiving community services funding and will have the programs report to the committee soon. Performance and Achievement (Shwaw Vang, Chair) received a presentation of the math masters grant program. Also, a fine arts task force is being developed to study issues and data regarding the percentages of low-income and racial and ethnic student involvement in fine arts programming and make recommendations to increase diverse student participation.
Upcoming meetings in February include: Performance and Achievement will receive a summer school report and budget and a report from Nuestro Mundo on 2/12. The full board will make a decision on The Studio School, charter school proposal and Finance and Operations will receive a report on athletics and extra-curricular activities on 2/19. Please check the board calendar at mmsd.org for updates.
District News:
The MMSD is seeking suggestions for the name of the new school in the Linden Park area. Anyone can submit a name for consideration by completing a form available on the district’s website and submitting by February 23rd. The school is scheduled to open in September 2008…The Elvehjem Playground Improvement Committee was recently named as a finalist in the Playskool “Win A Boundless Playground” Contest. Over 900 entries were received for this competition… Congratulations to LaFollette High School Junior, Denise Jackson for advancing to Hollywood to compete on the hit television show, American Idol. Please follow Denise’s journey and watch American Idol on Fox 47… Over 100 students throughout our district were recognized in the Annual Urban League Youth Recognition Breakfast and Youth Service Day. Former East High School principal, Milt McPike and Tosha Songolo, a senior at Memorial were presented with the City of Madison MLK Humanitarian award. Congratulations to all of the award winners, participants, organizations, students and our community for keeping Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream alive.
Thank you for your interest and support of the MMSD.
Johnny Winston, Jr., President, Madison Board of Education
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
Want district information? Go to www.mmsd.org
Write to the entire school board at comments@madison.k12.wi.us.
Sign up for MMSD communications at http://mmsd.org/lists/newuser.cgi
Watch school board meetings and other district programs on MMSD Channel 10 & 19.
Last week, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein unveiled yet another in a permanent revolution of structural reorganizations, highlighting a program which would allow private entities to assume a prominent role in the management of New York City public schools. For months, there had been rumors swirling around the exact nature of this “Partnership” program, so much so that the New York Times had published an October article on the DOE’s plans, describing them as private management of scores of schools. When a large group of labor, community based organizations, education advocates and elected officials met earlier this month to plan opposition to these efforts, Klein announced publicly that “as long as I am the chancellor of the public school system… the city of New York public schools will remain public schools.” With that announcement, speculation shifted to what the exact nature of the RFP for the “Partneship” would be.
The RFP is now out, sort of. It is hidden deep on the DOE web site, and only registered DOE vendors, such as Edison and Urban Assembly [two entities which have publicly indicated their interest], can actually see it.
Madison School Board Discusses an Independent Math Curriculum Review
The Madison School Board's 2006/2007 Goals for Superintendent Art Rainwater included the "Initiatiation and completion of a comprehensive, independent and neutral review and assessment of the District's K-12 math curriculum". Watch the discussion [Video] and read a memo [240K PDF] from the Superintendent regarding his plans for this goal. Much more here and here.
Barbara Lehman kindly emailed the Board's conclusion Monday evening:
It was moved by Lawrie Kobza and seconded by Ruth Robarts to approve the revised plan for implementation of the Superintendent’s 2006-07 goal to initiate and complete a comprehensive, independent, and neutral review and assessment of the District’s K-12 math curriculum as presented at this meeting, including extension for completion of the evaluation to the 2007-08 school year. The Board of Education shall receive a report in 2006-07 with analysis of math achievement data for MMSD K-12 students, including analysis of all math sub-test scores disaggregated by student characteristics and schools in addition to reports in subsequent years. Student representative advisory vote * aye. Motion carried 6-1 with Lucy Mathiak voting no.
Madison school officials were heartened Monday by a bipartisan state study panel's backing of a measure that would allow the School Board to raise more than an additional $2 million a year.
That would cost the owner of an average city home about $25 a year.
If approved by the Legislature, the proposal would essentially allow school boards to boost their revenue limits by up to 1 percent, which in Madison would be $2.2 million next year. Boards would need to OK such moves by a two-thirds vote, and the spending would be in effect for just one year at a time.
Madison and some other districts with relatively high levels of spending and property values have strong financial disincentives against exceeding the revenue caps. Madison taxpayers, for example, pay $1.61 for every $1 the district exceeds the revenue cap due to the school funding formula, which works to equalize the tax burden between richer and poorer districts.
But the measure that advanced Monday wouldn't subject Madison and similar districts to that financial penalty.
An additional tax of $2.2 million would mean the owner of an average Madison home valued at $239,400 would pay about $25 more per year, said Doug Johnson, a Madison School District budget analyst. The district's property tax levy is $209.2 million.
Pressing the case for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s latest round of changes to the city school system, Chancellor Joel I. Klein yesterday detailed how the new powers being granted to principals would be accompanied by new evaluations of them: teachers for the first time would be able to rate their supervisors.
The mayor’s plans include giving more power and autonomy to principals, requiring teachers to undergo rigorous reviews before earning tenure, and changing the financing formula for schools. The administration is eliminating the current 10 regional superintendents and creating a wider role for private groups in supporting schools.
Allowing teachers to help evaluate principals has been a longstanding request of the teachers’ union, and Mr. Klein seemed to be going out of his way to praise teachers a day after the mayor announced that tenure after a three-year probationary period would no longer be nearly automatic. Instead teachers will be rigorously evaluated.
Taxpayers, parents and students, particularly those who will enter our schools over the next few decades will benefit from more local choices ifthe Madison Studio School can lift off, soon.
The Madison School District Administration's recent history has been marked by a reduction in choice for parents and students and generally a monolithic approach to curriculum. Examples include the rush toward one size fits all curriculum in high schools [East High School and West High School's English 9/10], the annual attempt to kill elementary strings and the ongoing implementation of scripted curriculum such as Connected Math, among others. This has occurred despite flat overall enrollment and growing district budgets.
I hope that The School Board, Administration and Studio School proponents can mutually find a way to say yes, rather than, as Scott Milfred points out, starting with the usual same service reasons to say no.
Over time, I believe the Studio School will grow and spawn additional charter initiatives, perhaps offering middle and high school students more options.
For me, this is simply a governance issue. I think movement away from the typical monolithic approach will benefit our students and community over the long haul.
A closing data point: Appleton's public schools offer 13 charter options, compared to Madison's two.
David Cohen makes some useful counter-points in his comments below.
The Madison School District just went through a successful school building referendum. Yet a key argument by opponents resonated with the public. The critics asked: Why not close an East Side school with falling enrollment to help pay for construction of a school on the far West Side where the number of students is increasing?
Enter a core of enthusiastic East Side parents pitching an idea they believe could fill Emerson at little cost and ease the pressure to construct yet another school elsewhere. If the parents are right, their proposal for turning Emerson into a charter school just might be the only way to save it from closing.
Charter schools are free from certain state rules and strive to innovate. The Emerson parents are proposing a "Studio School" that would emphasize the arts and technology. The charter school would start with two combined kindergarten-first grades next fall. It would feature more hands-on group projects driven by student interests. Yet core subjects such as reading, writing and arithmetic would still be incorporated throughout school activities.
Madison's stubborn teachers union has long been suspicious of charter schools. The union has taken a defensive position that presumes the very suggestion of a charter school implies that traditional schools are somehow inadequate.
The union shouldn't feel insecure. Our traditional Wisconsin public schools do many great things in the face of daunting challenges. Yet public education can and must get better and try new things -- even if some attempts fail.
I could rattle off a half-dozen reasons why it’s a good thing that Art Rainwater is resigning as Madison’s school superintendent in 18 months. But I won’t. I wish instead that he was staying on the job.
Rainwater’s lame duck status and the uncertainty over his replacement come at a particularly bad moment for the schools.
In education-loving Madison, the schools are the city’s pride and joy. But they face huge issues: the influx of educationally disadvantaged poor kids; the loss of middle-class families, who provide the ballast to keep schools on even keel; the deeply troubling “achievement gap” between white and minority students; and the onerous financial squeeze delivered by the state’s perverse system of financing K-12 education.
Rainwater knows these issues. He understands how crucial their solution is to Madison’s future. I’m sharply critical of some of his personnel and strategic decisions, but I don’t doubt his sincerity and commitment to Madison’s 24,000-student district.
Rainwater has brought stability and vision to the district. Where his predecessor had seemed weak and unfocused, Rainwater was a solid administrator who spoke directly and effectively about the system's strengths and its promise. He established a good working relationship with the teachers union, he won the confidence of the community and he has presided over a period of needed growth and, for the most part, smart change.
This is not to say that Rainwater has been a perfect administrator. He has, at times, had testy relations with some members of the School Board, and the voters have sided with the board members who have pressed the administrator -- sending clear signals in the last several elections that they want the board to assert itself and play a more definitional role with regard to the direction of the district. Even Rainwater's critics have recognized, however, that the problem has less to do with him than with the relative weakness of the board in recent years.
Replacing Superintendent Art Rainwater will dominate the Madison school board’s agenda in the next 18 months, a task board members rightly view with trepidation.
“For me, there is an appeal to finding a new person,” says board member Carol Carstensen. “But a lot of me just says this is going to be really, really difficult.”
Rainwater’s retirement announcement this week gives the board until June 30, 2008, to find a replacement. But he’s leaving mighty big shoes to fill.
Rainwater took over Madison schools nearly nine years ago after predecessor Cheryl Wilhoyte was run out of town. Avoiding her missteps, he won at least grudging respect from most quarters, managing tight budgets while maintaining student achievement gains. His candor, plain talk and work ethic have helped build good will with unions, politicians and the media.
As Mr Bloomberg campaigned for mayor in 2001, it was clear that New York's school board was failing its 1.1m students. The board, removed from the city's budget process, had little control over school finances. The consequences were dire. Many high schools were losing more than half their students before graduation. Mr Bloomberg promised change.
With the central school-board disbanded, the mayor got to work. He appointed as his education “chancellor” Joel Klein, a former top trust-buster at the federal Department of Justice. Together, they dissolved the city's 32 school districts and replaced them with ten regions. They chose a uniform curriculum for reading, writing and maths. And they began to close large high schools and open small ones in their place. Mr Bloomberg set up 15 small high schools in 2002, and got money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2003 to help open 169 more.
Two years after seizing control, Messrs Bloomberg and Klein began a push to give more power to certain schools. Management scholars such as William Ouchi, of the University of California, Los Angeles, argued that decentralisation had saved American businesses; it could save schools too. In 2004, New York began opening schools where principals have more control over everything from budgets to staffing. If a principal does not meet the mayor's targets, he can be fired. Last spring, 322 principals, a fifth of the total, joined this “empowerment” programme.
Principals throughout Milwaukee Public Schools were ordered Tuesday to crack down on students carrying cell phones and similar electronic devices inside schools.
Seeking to improve safety after a first semester marred by numerous violent incidents, Superintendent William Andrekopoulos told principals to come up with effective policies banning cell phones, with some exceptions, by Jan. 29, when the second semester starts.
He also announced that students who use cell phones to summon outsiders to a school for reasons that threaten safety will be expelled from school.
In addition, he said that Milwaukee County's new district attorney, John Chisholm, has agreed to consider charging people involved in violence at schools with felonies. Generally, people involved in fighting have been given municipal disorderly conduct tickets, which Andrekopoulos said was too weak a punishment to be effective.
The conference will examine the impact on schools of the increased accountability, rationalization, and standardization of education symbolized and accelerated by the No Child Left Behind Act. It will also look at recent shifts in educational research that are associated with these trends, out of which a new emphasis on, and a new definition of, "scientific research" have emerged.
The conference will start Wednesday evening, February 7th, with a keynote address by Professor Richard F. Elmore, who is the Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Co-Director of the Consortium of Policy Research in Education. Professor Elmore will be introduced by Dean Julie Underwood of the UW School of Education. He is particularly interested in complex efforts at the school level to improve the quality of instruction. He seeks to understand how current state and federal accountability systems can work to support those efforts, as well as how these systems may unintentionally work at cross purposes with school and district level efforts. His recent works include School Reform from the Inside Out and the co-edited Redesigning Accountability Systems for Education.
Thursday's conferences sessions, on February 8th, will include a philosopher's reflections on criteria for judging school improvement; a session by scholars whose research exemplifies the value of quantitative studies of school programs and their effects; and a session by scholars who look at dimensions of current programs that some believe can more readily be understood by participating in the lives of school or talking with educational providers and participants. All of the sessions will consider questions about what is gained and lost by the current emphasis on "accountability" and "scientific research."
All sessions will allow time for audience participation. We hope to draw a rich mix of scholars, students, and practitioners that will encourage stimulating conversation on these subjects. We very much hope that you will join us at this event, and that you will share this invitation and information about the conference with your colleagues.
Sincerely,
Michael R. Olneck
Professor and Conference Convener
=====================
Education and Educational Research in an Era of Accountability: Insights and Blind Spots
A conference sponsored by the
Department of Educational Policy Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
February 7 - 8, 2007
Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St., Madison
Wednesday, February 7, 2007, Pyle Center (check Events Board for room location)
7:00 PM Keynote Address
Richard F. Elmore, Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership, Harvard University; Co-Director, Consortium for Policy Research in Education
"Education and Educational Research in an Era of Accountability"
Thursday, February 8, 2007, Pyle Center (check Events Board for room location)
8:30 - 9:00 AM Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:00 - 10:00 AM Philosophical Perspectives on Evaluating Education Reforms
Harry Brighouse, Professor of Philosophy and Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Values in Evaluation: Why Empirical Evidence is Never Enough"
10:15 AM -
12:00 PM Studying Education Reforms with Quantitative Methods: Emerging Directions and Findings
Adam Gamoran, Professor of Sociology, Educational Policy Studies, and Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis; Director, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"From Discipline-Based Theories to Practical Knowledge: Measuring "What Works" in Education"
Geoffrey Borman, Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, Educational Policy Studies, and Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Final Reading Outcomes of the National Randomized Field Trial of "Success for All""
Douglas Harris, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Reconciling the Short-Term Demands of Accountability with the Long-Term Goals of Education and Research"
1:15 - 3:00 PM. Studying Education Reforms with Qualitative Methods: Emerging Directions and Findings
Mary Haywood Metz, Professor of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Accountability "Shines a Light" on the Products of Schools: Studying School Life Outside the Circle of That Light
Patricia Burch, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Markets and the Implementation of Federal Education Policy: The Case of Supplemental Education Services"
Elizabeth Graue, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction; Director of Graduate Training, Wisconsin Center for Education Research; Wisconsin-Spencer Doctoral Research Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Square Pegs, Round Holes, and Contested Agendas: Doing Policy Relevant Research in a Culture of Accountability"
3:15 - 4:00 PM Conference Summary, Synthesis, and Further Discussion
Michael Olneck, Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
GENERAL INFORMATION
Registration and Fees:
The conference is free and there is no pre-registration.
Directions:
Go to http://www.uwex.edu/about/directions/.
Parking:
Public parking is available at the Lake and Frances Streets ramps, and the Helen C. White public parking area. Limited parking closer to the Pyle Center is sometimes available for $9 / day. To obtain a permit before the conference call the Pyle Center Front Desk at 608 / 262-5956.
For More Information:
Call the Department of Educational Policy Studies at 608 / 262-1760.
This conference is made possible, in part, by a generous contribution from the University Lecturers Committee.
Some Madison community members are circulating a petition to put forward a candidate to be La Follette High School's next principal.
That name is Joe Gothard, who is the former dean of students at La Follette and currently serves as principal at Akira Toki Middle School, WISC-TV reported.
Questions about who would lead the school began to swirl after former principal John Broome stepped down last month after only six months on the job. Loren Rathert, a Madison Metropolitan School District veteran has stepped in to serve as interim principal for the remainder of the school year.
Some of those behind the petition said that Gothard is "exactly what La Follette needs" and is "tough, intelligent, and personable," WISC-TV reported.
"Do you want innovative public school options in Madison?
If you do, then your support of The Studio School charter school proposal is critical. Please let the school board know. Write letters. Email them [comments@madison.k12.wi.us]. Call them. Attend the meeting on January 22nd! I have heard from a board member that if the "pressure" to vote for opening this school in the fall isn't strong enough, board members will not vote in favor of this proposal January 29th.
The opportunity to offer this innovative educational option with the possibility of up to $450,000.00 of federal funding over the next two years will not be available to MMSD again.
For more information to find out how to help, community members are invited to join us for our planning group's general meeting on January 17th (this Wednesday) at 6:30 PM at the Sequoya Branch of the Public Library [Map]. You can also go to our website for more information.
"Schools rise to the level of expectation we place upon them," said James S. Lanich, coauthor of the just-released "Failing Our Future: The Holes in California's School Accountability System and How to Fix Them." "If we don't have a high level of expectation, schools won't improve."
Hundreds of California schools are "failing" under the federal standards, but one that's shining bright — and adding its own wrinkle to the debate over school reform — is Ralph Bunche Elementary, named for the black American diplomat who won the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize.
At this school, the primary mover has been first-time Principal Mikara Solomon Davis, who arrived in mid-2000. Some would say she's done the near impossible.
Bunche has blown past the target score of 800 on the state's Academic Performance Index. Its 868 compares favorably to the scores at schools in Beverly Hills and San Marino. A school would score 875 if every student scored "proficient" on standardized tests.
And that means pushing parents, who adjusted to a principal who in her first year issued more than 100 suspensions in a school of 467 students.
"There was such an issue with discipline that you couldn't teach. Disrespect for teachers and adults was the norm," said Solomon Davis. When parents confront her over a suspension, "I begin by saying, 'Our goal is college for your child. We're not here to punish,' " Solomon Davis said.
It's the right time for Madison School Board to review student discipline code
In The Capital Times, reporter Susan Troller tells the stories of students and teachers who recently experienced violence at Madison schools or school-related activities. The story underscores how important it is for the Madison School Board to take a hard look at violent misconduct at all levels. The board must consider whether the current discipline system needs change--both to improve safety for students and staff and to ensure that interventions are prompt, consistent, unbiased and effective.
The MMSD administration has made some presentations on its ideas during the fall of 2006. Before the board considers changes, I hope that the board will hear more about the facts, particularly the facts about violent incidents. No changes will help unless they are carefully calibrated to the facts.
Madison Superintendent Rainwater Tells MTI about Resignation Plans Before He Tells the School Board?
In a guest editorial in The Capital Times on January 10, 2007, MTI leader John Matthews explains that Madison school superintendent Art Rainwater unveiled his plan to resign at the end of 2007-08 to the teachers union leader long before he told the Madison Board of Education in an executive session on Monday, January 8, 2007.
"When Madison Superintendent of Schools Art Rainwater announced on Monday that he will retire in June of 2008, the news did not catch me by surprise for two reasons.
First, he proclaimed when he was appointed superintendent in 1999 that he would serve for 10 years, the duration of his contract. He said then that he and his wife, a teacher in Verona, planned to retire in 2008.
Secondly, he told me at our regular weekly meeting during the week of Dec. 18 that he would advise the School Board of his resignation when school resumed in January.
Art elected to serve the notice at this time as a courtesy to the school district. It is his belief that the process of selecting a new superintendent will take about 14 months and it will take the next few months to put a plan in place to conduct the search, hire a search firm and the like. Thus, notice at this time is necessary to enable a selection to be made in time to replace him by July 1, 2008.
Art took over as the leader of Madison's schools at a very difficult time. The previous superintendent, Cheryl Wilhoyte, had been terminated during a stormy year of controversial bargaining with Madison Teachers Inc.
Wilhoyte sought to break MTI as she saw the union as being too powerful and she attempted to force a change in MTI's selection of health insurance carriers. She failed on both accounts and caused substantial unrest in the community with her failed attempts.
Art was named interim superintendent and on his first day in office called me early in the morning to say, "We have a lot of bridges to build. When can we get started?"
I responded that we could discuss it at lunch that day.
We developed plans to enable the union and the school district to work together whenever possible and the means to solve problems when the parties experienced bumps in the road.
We talked about how we could improve communications with each other and understand the position of the other party.
Among the systems we developed on that first day were that he and I would meet weekly for a meal. If lunch was not possible, it would be an early breakfast. We agreed that we would not discuss business until we had finished the meal. This really forces the parties to get to know each other and, in our case, develop a respect for each other.
We decided that the MTI professional staff and the district's Labor Relations and Human Resources staff would meet each week and discuss an agenda of cases. When this did not produce resolution of a case, we agreed that the case would go on Art's and my agenda and if we could not resolve it that we would find a peaceful means of resolution.
At times, that has meant litigation via arbitration or the courts, but most often the cases are resolved by the aforementioned means.
We opened our phone lines to each other and take and make calls knowing that the other will be available if we state that there is a need.
In this way, we have gone from a totally dysfunctional relationship with the district being headed by the prior superintendent, to a functional working relationship with Art at the helm.
I see Art as a very knowledgeable and capable educational leader who is hampered by the state's failure to adequately fund education. In fact, he has had to guide the dismantling of the country's best school district because of the Republican leadership usurping the local School Board's authority by imposing revenue controls.
Art is a tough but competent administrator who finds the dismantling of Madison's schools the most repugnant thing he has ever had to do.
On the other side of this issue, he has worked with me to attempt to correct this negative legislation, even to the point of inviting me to meet with the state superintendents' association.
I think the harsh state-imposed revenue controls on school boards will make it very difficult for the Madison Metropolitan School District to attract highly competent candidates for superintendent. They will see their job not as being able to promote programs to improve the quality of education, but rather as overseeing the further demise of the district because of the impact of the revenue controls.
Wisconsin superintendents, in an annual survey, have repeatedly said that they are cutting elective courses, increasing class sizes, laying off staff, not making repairs to buildings, not cleaning classrooms as often as they should be cleaned, using outdated textbooks, etc.
Why would a high-caliber superintendent want to take employment in a district facing such a future?"
Notes and Links on the Madison K-12 Climate and Superintendent Hires Since 1992
Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater's recent public announcement that he plans to retire in 2008 presents an opportunity to look back at previous searches as well as the K-12 climate during those events. Fortunately, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, we can quickly lookup information from the recent past.
In 1985 a federal district judge took partial control over the troubled Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally segregated district with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly. In an effort to bring the district into compliance with his liberal interpretation of federal law, the judge ordered the state and district to spend nearly $2 billion over the next 12 years to build new schools, integrate classrooms, and bring student test scores up to national norms.
It didn't work. When the judge, in March 1997, finally agreed to let the state stop making desegregation payments to the district after 1999, there was little to show for all the money spent. Although the students enjoyed perhaps the best school facilities in the country, the percentage of black students in the largely black district had continued to increase, black students' achievement hadn't improved at all, and the black-white achievement gap was unchanged.(1)
The situation in Kansas City was both a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for supporters of increased funding for public schools. From the beginning, the designers of the district's desegregation and education plan openly touted it as a controlled experiment that, once and for all, would test two radically different philosophies of education. For decades critics of public schools had been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." Educators and advocates of public schools, on the other hand, had always responded by saying, "No one's ever tried."
Art, the only applicant, was promoted from Acting Superintendent to Superintendent in January, 1999. Chris Murphy's January, 1999 article includes this:
Since Wilhoyte's departure, Rainwater has emerged as a popular interim successor. Late last year, School Board members received a set of surveys revealing broad support for a local superintendent as opposed to one hired from outside the district. More than 100 of the 661 respondents recommended hiring Rainwater.
Hanson said the shortfall is partly due to about $1 million in underestimated expenditures. The largest of these are health, dental and othertypes of insurance costs that came in $300,000 over estimates; extended employment and extra duty costs, $300,000; and teacher salaries, $250,000.
In addition, the district did not receive as much as expected in areas suchas disabled tuition, Chapter I aid, food service income and interest income.
School board President Nan Brien also said the board and district are in a tough spot because so many programs have been cut to bring the budget proposal ($149M) under the cap.
``The cuts he made are going to give the board some real difficult times,''Brien said.
Brien said she was satisfied that Travis appeared to make his cuts across the board rather than in one area of the budget.
Travis cut $2.3 million in staff requests. Cuts include a phasing out of the birth to age 2 program for children with special needs and $86,000 in funding to the Bootstrap program for students at risk of not graduating.
Other cuts include 11 regular teachers and seven special education teachers, four positions in health services and about 10 custodial positions. Reductions also include $157,000 for a new child care program that would have helped students in the district's School-Age Parenting Program, more than $35,000 for staff training and professional improvement, and $33,000 for an after-school program (AIMS) for minority students.
Wisconsin's state government ended the past fiscal year with a giant deficit of $2.15 billion, according to the accounting methods used by most businesses.
But the state's books show a cozy balance of $49.2 million.
The discrepancy results from years of Wisconsin governors and legislators manipulating the accounting process to hide irresponsible budget decisions.
Those accounting tricks must stop. Wisconsin should begin to hold itself to the more business-like accounting methods used by Wall Street and by 16 other states the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, known as GAAP.
Wisconsin's fiscal situation makes it unlikely that there will be substantial changes in state funding for K-12 schools, particularly for rich districts like Madison that spend 23% ($333,000,000 for 24,576 students) more per student than the state average. Current state law penalizes districts that increase local school spending (property taxes) via referendum via reduced state aids. This means that for every $1.00 of new local spending above state revenue growth caps, Madison taxpayers must pay $1.61.
More than 100 Racine residents gathered Tuesday to hear panelists debate the merits of desegregation vs. neighborhood schools.
The forum, sponsored by the Racine Taxpayers Association, comes as the U.S. Supreme Court deliberates on school desegregation battles in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, and as the Racine Unified School District decides how to redraw its own district boundaries for next year.
"Desegregation in Racine and throughout the nation has failed based upon the mechanism used, which is busing," said County Supervisor Ken Lumpkin, who publishes a black community newspaper called Insider News.
Mattie Booker, who taught in the Racine Unified School District in the days before desegregation, argued that transporting students is necessary to achieve equityThe forum, sponsored by the Racine Taxpayers Association, comes as the U.S. Supreme Court deliberates on school desegregation battles in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, and as the Racine Unified School District decides how to redraw its own district boundaries for next year.
"Desegregation in Racine and throughout the nation has failed based upon the mechanism used, which is busing," said County Supervisor Ken Lumpkin, who publishes a black community newspaper called Insider News.
Mattie Booker, who taught in the Racine Unified School District in the days before desegregation, argued that transporting students is necessary to achieve equity
MADISON, Wis. -- Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Art Rainwater announced on Monday night that he will retire next year.
Rainwater informed the district's Board of Education at their Monday meeting. His retirement will be effective the end of next school year, which will be June 30, 2008, according to a district press release.
"I am thankful for the opportunity to serve the board and the Madison community," said Rainwater in the news release. "This is a great school district and a great community that has always put the welfare of our children first. I am honored to contribute to this effort."
Rainwater said that he gave the board 18 months notice so they would have sufficient time to conduct a search for the next superintendent.
Rainwater has been the district's superintendent since February 1999.
Locally, Mayor Dave has been, as far as I can tell, very quiet vis a vis substantive public school issues, other than periodically meeting with MTI's John Matthews. I'm unaware of any similar parental meetings on what is a critical issue for any community: raising our next generation with the tools necessary to contribute productively to our society (and I might add, support a growing economic/tax base). Madison has long strongly supported it's public schools with above average taxes and spending.
For over thirty years I said, "There is nothing a mayor can do that has the impact on a city that is as great as the public school system."
The mayor needs to be a partner, a protector, an advocate for the public school system. Any mayor who lets a week go by without having some contact, involvement or support with public education is not doing the job.
Perhaps the April, 2007 Mayor's race will include some conversations about our $333,000,000; 24,576 student K-12 system.
West High School Small Learning Community Presentation 1/8/2007 @ 7:00p.m.
Madison West Small Learning Community Coordinator Heather Lott is giving a presentation at Monday evening's PTSO meeting: "SLC Post-Grant Update and Discussion". Location: Madison West High School LMC [Map] West's implementation of Small Learning Communities has been controversial due to the move toward a one size fits all curriculum (English 9 and English 10).
EVERY YEAR, as many California high school seniors struggle with basic algebra, which is required for graduation, Times readers complain, "Who needs it? How many students will ever use it?" Well, I use it every day; I'm using it now, even though I haven't worked an algebraic equation since my son was in the seventh grade several years ago.
Mathematics and science are unnatural practices. As physics professor Alan Cromer has brutally and elegantly written, "the human mind wasn't designed to study physics," and of course mathematics is the language of physics. "Design" here does not indicate an intelligent designer, which would suggest a creator with a math phobia. Rather it indicates evolutionary processes by which the human brain and mind have come to be what they are.
During the approximately 2 million years that it took for our Homo forebears to progress from habilis to sapiens, they had little use for mathematical reasoning abilities. Their sapientia seems to have been more suited in a good Darwinian sense to the immediate demands of their survival, such as eating, mating and avoiding premature death. Whether for good or ill, as time may tell, our situations have changed much in the last few thousand years, and so have demands on our poor, lagging minds. I don't mean only the obvious and oft-repeated claim that technical jobs require greater skills. That is clear enough in auto mechanics and computer programming. I mean the need to think abstractly, systematically and rationally in various ways.
The Madison School Board Communication Committee's upcoming meeting includes an interesting 2007-2009 legislative agenda for state education finance changes that would increase District annual spending (current budget is $333,000,000) at a higher than normal rate (typically in the 3.8% range):
4. 2007-09 Legislative Agenda
a. Work to create a school finance system that defines that resources are necessary to provide students with a "sound basic education." Using Wisconsin's Academic Standards (which is the standard of achievement set by the Legislature), coupled with proven research that lays out what is necessary to achieve those standards, will more clearly define what programs and services are required for students to attain success.
b. Support thorough legislative review of Wisconsin's tax system; examining all taxing.
c. Provide revenue limit relief to school districts for uncontrollable costs (utilities, transportation). [ed: This shifts the risk to local property taxpayers, which has its pros and cons. The definition of "uncontrollable" would be interesting to read.]
d. Allow a local board of education to exceed the revenue limits by up to 2% of the district's total budget without having to go to referendum. [ed: $6,660,000 above the typical 3.8% annual spending growth: $333,000,000 2006/2007 budget + 3.8% (12,654,000) + 2% (6,660,000) = $19,314,000 increase, or 5.8%]
e. Allow school districts to exceed the revenue limits for security-related expenses by up to $100 per pupil enrolled in the district. [ed: about $2,400,000]
f. Modify the school aid formula so negative tertiary school district (Madison) taxpayers aren't penalized when the district borrows. (Madison Schools' taxpayers have to pay $1.61 for every dollar borrowed.) [ed: This will cost other districts money]
g. Improve Medicaid reimbursement from state to school districts (current law allows the state to "skim" 40% of the federal Medicaid reimbursement dollars for school-based services).
h. Support state aid reimbursement for 4-year old kindergarten programs, similar to the reimbursement for 4-year old kindergarten in Milwaukee choice and charter schools.
i. Support increasing state aid for public school transportation costs.
j. Support allowing a declining enrollment school district to use the highest enrollment in a 5-year period for purposes of calculating its revenue limit. [ed: I wonder if the MMSD perceives itself as a growing or declining district, given the attendance projections used to support new schools over the past several years? Perhaps this item is the answer? The current state funding scheme rewards growing districts. Barb Schrank noted the enrollment changes in surrounding districts last fall.]
k. Support additional resources for mandated special education and English as a Second Language programs, currently reimbursed at 28% and 12%, respectively (when revenue limits began, the reimbursement was 45% and 33% respectively).
l. Maintain current law for disbursement of resources from the Common School Fund for public school libraries.
m. Support increase in per meal reimbursement for school breakfast programs.
There are some good ideas here, including a thorough review of Wisconsin's tax system. Many of these items, if enabled by the state, would result in higher property taxes (Wisconsin is #1 in property taxes as a percentage of the home's value) for those living in the Madison School District. Any of these changes would likely help address the District's $5.9M structural deficit.
I trust that there are some additional budget scenarios in play rather than simply hoping the state will change school finance to help the Madison School District (unlikely, given several recent conversations with state political players). Madison already spends 23% more per student than the state average.
I now come to the last and conclusive theme of my argument. Controlling expenditure always has to balance technical arguments and constraints, with the legitimate and competing claims (often drawing on very different ideological Weltanschauungen) on the resources managed, directly and indirectly, through the political processes. Balancing the two elements is a difficult exercise, as I experience on a daily basis.
Political economists have blamed the difficulty on the fact that the time-horizon of a typical political cycle is shorter than the one relevant on average for the society as a whole, in turn leading the legislature to attribute a smaller weight to the long-run implications of public expenditure policies than it would be socially desirable. Empirical evidence shows that discretionary public expenditure tends to rise before the elections irrespective of the political orientation of the incumbent government, and also in spite of the weak evidence of a relation between the size of pre-election spending and the election outcomes. The politicians’ short horizons and the long lag between reforms and their beneficial effects gives rise to a pervasive tension in expenditure control.
For Faust, the lure of Mephistopheles’ services is greatly enhanced by the fact that the price – albeit a terrible one – is to be paid later. For politicians, the lure of the support obtained through public expenditure is similarly enhanced by the fact that public debt will be paid (o reneged) by next generations, often well after the end of one’s political career. As to myself, having inherited a public debt larger than GDP, and having committed myself and my government to comply with sound fiscal principles, I scarcely can afford even to contemplate the possibility of accepting Mephistopheles’ services.
Looking for the path to effective education, leaders of the Milwaukee Public Schools have long slogged through the wilderness of school reform only to end up where they started. All used to be centralized at MPS. Then decentralization became the watchword. Now centralization is again in.
This lunging between two opposite approaches is in a way understandable. Getting big-city school systems to work is no easy task, to judge from the rarity of the accomplishment. Superintendent William Andrekopoulos is right in being dissatisfied with the slow pace of improvement and in searching for ways to step it up. And recentralization does carry the force of logic for decentralized schools that have failed to improve.
Still, as onetime MPS chief Howard Fuller reminded us when we reached him in New Orleans, where he is consulting, neither centralization nor decentralization is a magic bullet. The key ingredient for great schools are "people committed to do whatever it takes to educate our children."
n doing so, MPS must minimize the red tape, which has clogged school operations. Another trick the system must manage is to refrain from hurting the schools that have thrived under decentralization, an example of which is Hamlin Garland Elementary School on Milwaukee's south side. Borsuk highlighted the school in another article this week.
Madison appears to be rather centralized, with a push for standardized curriculum, generally lead by downtown Teaching and Learning staff. I often wonder how practical this actually is, given 24,000+ students and thousands of teachers and staff. Perhaps, in 2007 and going forward, the best solution is to support easy to access internet based knowledge tools for teachers where they can quickly review a variety of curriculum (including those not blessed by the central administration) with notes and links from others. This could likely be done inexpensively, given the wide variety of knowledge management tools available today.
"We've made more progress in the last five years than the previous 28 years," Spellings said. "Can the law be improved? Should we build on what we've done and all of that sort of thing? You bet. But I don't hear people saying: 'You know what? We really don't need to have education for all students.' "
Her remarks come as various groups begin to weigh in on the law and what they believe works and what does not. The No Child Left Behind law is scheduled to be reauthorized by Congress, but it is uncertain when lawmakers will act.
The Forum on Educational Accountability -- a coalition that includes education, religious, civil rights and disability rights groups -- said yesterday that the law overemphasizes standardized tests and arbitrary academic targets. The coalition also criticized penalties the law imposes on schools that fail to meet standards.
"We don't have to throw out the whole law and make a big political battle," said Reginald M Felton, a senior lobbyist for the National School Boards Association, a member of the coalition. "But we need to change from the punitive, 'gotcha!' kind of approach to actual support for progress."
the portal is the first of its kind-empowering anyone to analyze and compare the day-to-day operations of teachers and schools in a single district or all fifty. You can choose to download the full text of a teacher contract, just the salary schedule, and even the school calendar. Or perhaps you just have a single question and don't want to wade through lengthy documents. Most likely the answer in our database, easily retrieved in three quick steps using our report generator. The database provides answers to over 300 questions, ranging from salary and benefits to how a teacher gets evaluated--with more getting added all the time.
The more this site gets used, the more powerful it will become. We invite users to contribute knowledge and ideas to our data collection, helping us keep the site current, accurate and fair. Consider this site the central depository for teacher policies. To ensure the accuracy of this database, we will be vetting all user feedback before posting any changes.
The 158 page collective bargaining agreement (7/1/2005 to 6/30/2007) between Madison Teachers, Inc. and the Madison Metropolitan School District is available here [540K pdf]. Additional links and documents can be found here.
Driven by newly documented slumps in learning, by crime rates and by high dropout rates in high school, educators across New York and the nation are struggling to rethink middle school and how best to teach adolescents at a transitional juncture of self-discovery and hormonal change.
The difficulty of educating this age group is felt even in many wealthy suburban school districts. But it is particularly intense in cities, where the problems that are compounded in middle school are more acute to begin with and where the search for solutions is most urgent.
In Los Angeles, the new superintendent, David L. Brewer III, has vowed to transform middle schools as a top priority, and low-performing schools are experimenting with intensive counseling.
In Philadelphia and Baltimore, school systems are trying to make the middle school problem literally disappear, by folding grades six through eight into K-8 schools. In one Columbia, S.C., school district, all five middle schools have begun offering some form of single-sex classes, on the theory that they promote self-esteem and reduce distractions.
Not every student at Bannockburn is above average. But 70 percent of the third-grade class has been identified as gifted, based on tests and other academic indicators. The school serves one of the largest concentrations in the region of students capable of working beyond their assigned grade, sometimes well beyond.
"We're constantly trying to find things to pique their interest," said Peterson, whose students have lately practiced dividing numbers into 32nds in their heads.
The bumper crop of gifted children at Bannockburn is a result not of some exclusive magnet program but of Montgomery County's aggressive policy on identifying academic talent. The county screens every second-grader for extraordinary ability. In most other school systems, it's left to parents or teachers to initiate the process. Also, Montgomery's criteria for "giftedness" are unusually broad, covering not just intelligence data but also classroom performance and the impressions of teachers and parents.
That approach drives up the numbers -- 40 percent of Montgomery's 139,000 students carry the label -- and creates a gifted majority at schools such as Bannockburn, which serves an affluent, highly educated neighborhood.
When Tom Brew takes on incumbent School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. in the spring election for Seat 4, he, like Winston, will bring a lifetime of experience with Madison schools to the race.
Brew's own children attended Huegel and Orchard Ridge schools and graduated in the late '80s to mid-90s. A lifelong Madisonian, he attended the former Longfellow Elementary and Central High schools.
"I felt I had some different viewpoints to offer from Johnny's," Brew said this morning. "Basically, I think Johnny has had a go-along-to-get-along attitude."
Brew declared his candidacy on Dec. 22, and said he will complete his paperwork by the filing deadline today at 5 p.m.
He served on the Dane County Board in the early 1990s. In the past, he has been an opponent of school spending referendums.
Brew said he is an advocate for more money going to teachers and less to administrators "downtown in the Doyle building."
Winston said he welcomes the opportunity to debate the issues facing the district and the board.
The general spring election will be held April 3.
Two open seats, being vacated this spring by current board members Ruth Robarts and Shwaw Vang, have attracted five candidates. Beth Moss, Rick Thomas and Pam Cross-Leone will vie for Seat 3 in a primary election on Feb. 20. Maya Cole, who narrowly lost a bid for School Board against Arlene Silveira, is running this time against Marj Passman for School Board Seat 5.
The picture that the team painted was not pretty. Clearly favoring a strong central administration, the team said decentralization in MPS had "gone too far."
"Decentralization has rendered the central office instructional unit (in MPS) irrelevant to the process of raising student achievement," the report says. The team said some schools were using a hodgepodge of materials to teach students, and no one was leading these schools to be more effective. From the School Board to the classroom, there was not a clear vision of what it takes to succeed.
ut the report particularly is critical of the attitude among the 70-plus people the team interviewed, from top MPS leaders to teachers and parents.
"MPS has seen only small, incremental gains in student achievement over the last several years," it says. "More problematic, however, is that many people in the district see these marginal improvements as acceptable. . . . A sense of urgency to raise student achievement is not apparent throughout the organization. The board, administration and staff appear fairly complacent."
The report adds, "Interviews with MPS staff indicated that most were proud of the gains that the district had made, even though scores reflected minimal progress."
From the beginning, Mary Watson Peterson had doubts about the motivations of those in charge of implementing federal education grants known as Reading First. As the Madison district’s coordinator of language arts and reading, she spent hundreds of hours working on Madison’s Reading First grant proposal.
“Right away,” she says, “I recognized a big philosophical difference” between Madison’s reading instruction and the prescriptive, commercially produced lessons advocated by Reading First officials. “The exchange of ideas with the technical adviser ran very counter to what we believe are best practices in teaching.”
The final straw was when the district was required to draft daily lesson plans to be followed by all teachers at the same time.
“We’ve got 25,000 kids who are in 25,000 different places,” says Superintendent Art Rainwater. The program’s insistence on uniformity “fundamentally violated everything we believe about teaching children.”
In October 2004, Rainwater withdrew Madison from the federal grant program, losing potentially $3.2 million even as the district was cutting personnel and programs to balance its budget. Rainwater’s decision, made without input from the school board, drew intense criticism and became an issue in last year’s board elections.
From a public policy perspective, the School Board should have discussed the $3.2M, particularly given the annual agony over very small changes in the District's $333M+ budget.
The further concern over a one size fits all Reading First requirement (“We’ve got 25,000 kids who are in 25,000 different places,” says Superintendent Art Rainwater.) is ironic, given the push toward just that across the District (West's English 10 [Bruce King's English 9 report] and the recently proposed changes at East High School).
Under the model, used by a number of school boards in the state, the board develops a set of expectations and then holds its administrators accountable to achieve those goals and report on progress.
The result is a more focused board that has more objective criteria for evaluating the performance of the school superintendent, said Sue Kutz, president of the Racine Unified School Board, which began using policy governance this year.
Monthly monitoring reports and a review of the board's goals are used to evaluate the superintendent's performance, she said, rather than a subjective evaluation that focuses on "the last great fiasco that happened."
Boards are also spared the details and decision-making on issues for which they have little expertise.
"As a way of doing business, it seems to make so much more sense than the old way," Kutz said.
"We're trying to see if a local school can do things that the present school system is too dysfunctional to handle," said Chuck Samuels, chairman of Wilson's local school restructuring team, the group of parents and teachers that advises the principal. "From this seed of a pilot project could grow more autonomy for Wilson and for other schools to do the same."
Last year, Wilson parents and teachers explored the idea of becoming a charter school after becoming frustrated by the central office's slow response to their maintenance problems and by its move to cut $400,000 from the school's budget to cover a systemwide shortfall.
To avert the exodus of the highest-performing comprehensive high school from the system, Janey signed an agreement with the Wilson parents and teachers allowing them to devise a proposal for becoming independent of the central office by taking charge of areas such as the budget and teacher hiring.
Property taxes in Wisconsin are the nation's highest in proportion to the value of owner-occupied homes, according to a recent national study.
hat is "nothing terribly new or earth-shaking," said Todd A. Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance in Madison, who predicted the taxes still are too low to cause a fundamental change in state policy.
The study results are "a combination of two things," Berry said. "We are a higher property tax state . . . (and) our median home value is lower. Put those together, and it is going to push us up."
No tax riles the American people more than property taxes, especially real estate taxes that are based on the value of their homes and land. According to a recent Tax Foundation poll, property taxes are thought to be the least “fair” of all state and local taxes.
Most likely, part of the reason for this loathing is that taxpayers are more acutely aware of what property taxes cost them than they are of income, payroll, corporate, or sales taxes. Sometimes, property taxes are paid into an escrow account without much personal attention from the taxpayer, but often property taxes involve the actual writing of a huge check to the local government.
Key Findings:
Property taxes highest in the Northeast, Texas, Illinois, and Wisconsin
New York and New Jersey dominate list of high-tax counties
About half of all property taxes go to public schools
Property taxes rose faster than incomes from 2002 to 2004
Housing market decline may force local governments to cut spending or raise property tax rates
Prante's last point regarding the relationship between changes in the housing market, tax assessments and rates is an important factor to watch. Madison has experienced substantial housing growth (and therefore parcel quantity and values) over the past decade. If/when that changes, there will be some blowback with respect to assessments, millrates and the net taxes we pay.
When Nancy Donahue began her effort for a charter school in Madison, she had no idea she would be wading into a world of politics.
"It's a campaign," said Donahue, who hopes to have her arts- and technology-oriented Studio School up and running next fall. "And before this I was very apolitical. But I've learned if you believe in something you do what you have to do."
A couple of close observers of Madison's political tea leaves emailed some additional context:
Former teacher and Progressive Dane education task force member Kristin Forde is a member of the Madison Studio School's "core planning group". In the past, Forde has participated in School Board candidate interviews and a Progressive Dane (PD) candidate Forum.
PD reportedly requires any candidate they endorse to back all of their future candidates and initiatives. [ed: Shades of "with us or against us". Evidently both Russ Feingold and Barack Obama have not read the memo.]
I find PD's positions interesting. They recently strongly supported the Linden Park edge school [map] (opposed by a few locals who dislike the sprawl implications, though it handily passed in November, with 69% voting in favor). I do think Madison is behind the innovation curve with respect to online learning and possibly charters. Appleton has 12 charter schools, including an online school.
It will be interesting to see if the Studio School supporters endorse PD's spring, 2007 candidates, which include Johnny Winston, Jr who is standing for re-election.
Madison Studio School Public Hearing Today @ 5:00p.m.
Will you have an opportunity to register SUPPORT for The STUDIO SCHOOL at today’s (5:00pm) public hearing by the Madison School Board?
With the approval of the school board, the public charter school of arts and technology would open next fall in Madison. See more about The STUDIO SCHOOL (SIS Links) here:
Please contact school board members to voice your support for creating this new educational opportunity, within the public school system, for children in Madison. Thank you.
It is a well-written 28-page summary of good research design and the problems that can and do occur and the inappropriate conclusions drawn from poorly-designed and implemented research.
It should certainly stop all of us from merely repeating opinions and articles as though they were true, even when they support our own prejudices.
I'm reminded of a quote (paraphrased), I believe from John Tukey: "You can lie with statistics, but you can't tell the truth without statistics."
Quoting from the Executive Summary of this report:
Purpose and Executive Summary
This Guide seeks to provide educational practitioners with user-friendly tools to distinguish practices supported by rigorous evidence from those that are not.
The field of K-12 education contains a vast array of educational interventions - such as reading and math curricula, schoolwide reform programs, after-school programs, and new educational technologies - that claim to be able to improve educational outcomes and, in many cases, to be supported by evidence. This evidence often consists of poorly-designed and/or advocacy-driven studies. State and local education officials and educators must sort through a myriad of such claims to decide which interventions merit consideration for their schools and classrooms. Many of these practitioners have seen interventions, introduced with great fanfare as being able to produce dramatic gains, come and go over the years, yielding little in the way of positive and lasting change - a perception confirmed by the flat achievement results over the past 30 years in the National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trend.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and many federal K-12 grant programs, call on educational practitioners to use "scientifically-based research" to guide their decisions about which interventions to implement. As discussed below, we believe this approach can produce major advances in the effectiveness of American education. Yet many practitioners have not been given the tools to distinguish interventions supported by scientifically-rigorous evidence from those which are not. This Guide is intended to serve as a user-friendly resource that the education practitioner can use to identify and implement evidence-based interventions, so as to improve educational and life outcomes for the children they serve.
Table of Contents:
Title Page
Coalition Board of Advisors
Purpose and Executive Summary
Identifying and Implementing Educational Practices Supported By Rigorous Evidence: A User Friendly Guide
I. The randomized controlled trial: What it is, and why it is a critical factor in establishing "strong" evidence of an intervention's effectiveness.
II. How to evaluate whether an intervention is backed by "strong" evidence of effectiveness.
III. How to evaluate whether an intervention is backed by "possible" evidence of effectiveness.
IV. Important factors to consider when implementing an evidence-based intervention in your schools or classrooms.
Appendix A: Where to find evidence-based interventions
Appendix B: Checklist to use in evaluating whether an intervention is backed by rigorous evidence
2007 - 2008 Madison School District Budget Discussions Underway
Watch Monday evening's school board discussion [Video | Download] of the upcoming larger than usual reductions in revenue cap limited increases in the District's 2007 - 2008 budget (they are larger than normal due to the recently disclosed 7 year structural budget deficit). The 2006 / 2007 budget is $333M+ (it was $245M in 98/99 while enrollment has remained flat, though the student composition continues to change).
The report outlined 10 areas, now called "discussion topics," where the administration and board will look to trim or slash programs, personnel or services in an effort over the coming months to balance the district's 2007-2008 budget.
"We cannot call these recommendations, but they are areas we will need to look for cuts. This will be a very difficult budget," he added.
The suggested topics for discussion include cutting athletics and extracurricular activities, consolidating schools, increasing ratios of students to teachers, reducing custodial staff and maintenance, reducing administrative staffing, reducing various services from technology to transportation, and reducing supplemental staff like school social workers, nurses and psychologists.
WIBA's Vicki McKenna and Active Citizens for Education's Don Severson discuss WISTAX's 2006 School Facts [1.4 PDF] in light of the upcoming budget discussions. [10.5MB mp3 audio]. The School Facts report compares student population (a significant factor in a school district's ability to raise taxes/grow revenues) spending, achievement, staffing and the tax base of Madison, Appleton, Green Bay, Janesville, Kenosha, Middleton - Cross Plains, Milwaukee, Racine, Sun Prairie and Verona. The Madison School District spends about 23% more per student than the state average.
La Follette principal resigns; Rathert named interim principal
The MMSD released the following this afternoon:
La Follette High School Principal John Broome on Friday tendered his resignation from his position. Former Madison high school principal Loren Rathert now becomes the interim principal at the school for the remainder of the 2006-07 school year.
The Madison School District will conduct a national search for a new La Follette principal to begin the 2007-08 school year.
"John Broome came to us Friday and said that the needs of the school and his skills were not a match, and in the best interests of the school he felt he should resign," said Superintendent Art Rainwater.
"I'm appreciative to John for recognizing the situation and putting the needs of the La Follette students first."
Rathert is a veteran school administrator who retired in June of this year. He was the principal of Madison West for three years (2001-04) and was the interim principal at Madison East from September 2004 through June 2005.
"We're fortunate that Loren Rathert is willing to take this position," said Rainwater. "He's an outstanding principal and is experienced in managing a large, urban high school."
Broome became La Follette's principal on July 1, coming here from a high school principalship in Charleston, IL.
Superintendent Art Rainwater sent a memo to the School Board [550K PDF] outlining 10 categories that will be considered as the District prepares a balanced 2007/2008 budget in April, 2007. This budget will be more challenging due to the recently disclosed $6M structural deficit, which means that the reduction in the Distict's revenue cap limited spending increases in its' $333M+ budget will be larger than usual. The discussion categories include:
Athletics/Extra Curricular
Consolidate Schools
Teacher/Staff Ratios
Building/Facilities
Reduce Administrative Staffing
Services
Student Services
Curriculum Development and Support
Decrease allocations for instructional supplies/materials/equipment by up to 20%
Eliminate/Reduce District Student Programs/Services
Cardozo High School in Washington, DC, is a national pioneer in introducing Advanced Placement courses to disadvantaged students. It has found ways to build student skills so that they can begin to get passing grades on the AP exams. One of its star AP teachers, Frazier O'Leary, taught the school's first AP class 10 years ago and, since then, has become a frequent speaker and adviser to school districts around the nation.
Structural budget deficit will increase MMSD revenue shortfall for 2007-08
A few weeks ago when the Madison School Board was finalizing the budget for the current academic year, Vice-President Lawrie Kobza pointed out two very serious problems. First, the district has been overstating expected revenues in recent years during the months when the board was reviewing and approving the budgets. Second, the district has been balancing the budget at the end of the year by dipping significantly into its reserves (equity fund).
In Susan Troller's article in The Capital Times, Roger Price, the assistant superintendent for Business Services, promises a "more conservative approach" to budgeting. In part, the "more conservative approach" seems to mean that revenue estimates will not be overstated, making deeper cuts more necessary, but perhaps giving the board a way to reduce the drain on its reserves.
2007/2008 Madison School District Budget Outlook: Half Empty or Half Full?
Susan Troller's piece today on the larger than usual reduction in "revenue cap limited" increases (say that quickly) in the Madison School District's $332M+ 2007/2008 budget is interesting, from my perspective, due to what is left unsaid:
"Why did our equity go down this past year since we, the board, passed a balanced budget in 2005/2006? Why did it go down by $2.8M (about a 1% variance in last year's $319M+ budget)?
Superintendent Art Rainwater responded:
"The way we have attempted to deal with maintaining the quality of education as long as we could was to budget very, very aggressively, realizing that we had an out of fund balance ($5.9M in 2006/2007). We made the decision 7 years ago or so to budget aggressively and try to manage to that budget believing that we would use less fund equity over time than if we set aside a set amount. So that's been our approach. That fund equity has now come down to the point that we believe we can't do that any more and we will not bring you a balanced budget that is aggressive particularly where it gets into aggressive on the revenue side in how much efficiency we believe we can budget. So, what the effect of that is to increase the amount you have to pay.
I've not seen a published figure on how much the District's equity has declined during this "7 year aggressive" budget posture. The District's operating budget in 1998/1999 was approximately $245M. The current year's budget is $332M. Enrollment has remained flat during this time.
Madison is a "rich" district, spending 23% more per student than the state average. Madison is also a property tax rich district, with an average property value per student of $775,000 (Appleton is $411K, Milwaukee $267K, Verona 526K and Middleton-Cross Plains $779K) - via SchoolFacts 2006. George Lighbourn's recent WPRI school finance article is, in my view correct:
Even the most vocal proponents of change understand the reality that big changes are not in the offing. They know that they are up against the most formidable impediment to change, the printout, that age-old tabulation showing how much money each school district will get out of Madison. Any change that shows dozens of school districts will see a decline in state aid has almost no chance of succeeding.
All of this points to the importance of managing the $332M+ budget well, choosing the most effective curriculum and building public confidence for future referendums. I wonder when the public might have learned of the structural deficits (and the District's dwindling cash equity) had elections gone a different way the past few years (reformers vs old guard)? Learn more about the April, 2007 School Board election.
School finance is a mess. However, the Madison School District's $332M+ budget provides resources far beyond most public school systems. Throwing up our arms and blaming the state or feds, or ? will not solve anything and certainly does not put our children's interests first. Transparency, responsibility, creativity, local control (be careful what we wish for with respect to state and federal school finance updates) and wise investments are key to maintaining the community's remarkable financial and voluntary public education support.
See info ATTACHED [Charter High Schools | Edvisions] about New Country Charter School, an EdVisions School, with its teacher-owned cooperative and student-driven project-based learning program. Nick Hanson:
Minnesota New Country School doesn’t look much like a regular high school, and it sure doesn’t feel like one, either.
But when it comes to charter schools, New Country is among the best in the nation, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
In a report released by the Department today, the small Henderson school is touted as one of eight outstanding charter schools across the United States.
Milwaukee Public Schools may go digital with some learning resources as the district selects about $7.7 million worth of new language arts, foreign language, technology education and social studies textbooks.
With a new wireless network expected to bring free broadband Internet access into the homes of MPS students by next semester, Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said the district could start to "expand its textbook options" and look at more paperless models. But questions remain about if and how the district would make the most necessary resource - computers - available to a largely low-income population of students.
"This is the first time we've started looking at online options, especially with language arts material," Andrekopoulos said last month, after a School Board committee voted to move forward with the textbook adoption process. The committee's recommendation was approved by the full board on Nov. 30.
Aquine Jackson, chief academic officer for MPS, said electronic options could improve some of the literacy curricula that need supplemental resources. At a district-estimated $6.7 million worth of materials, language arts texts for grades K-8 and spelling for grades K-5 constitute the bulk of material that's up for adoption.
The latest, December 2006 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly, an official publication of the Mathematical Association of America, contains an 18-page article entitled "A study of Core-Plus students attending Michigan State University" by Richard Hill and Thomas Parker, professors at MSU who teach pre-service high school math teachers.
They state that, "as the implementation progressed, from 1996 to 1999, Core-Plus students placed into, and enrolled in, increasingly lower level courses; this downward trend is statistically robust (p<.0005). The percentages of students who (eventually) passed a technical calculus course show a statistically significant (p<.005) decline averaging 27 percent a year; this trend is accompanied by an obvious and statistically significant increase in percentages of students who placed into low-level and remedial algebra courses.
The grades the Core-Plus students earned in their university mathematics courses are also below average, except for a small group of top students. ACT scores suggest the existence but not the severity of these trends."
Core-Plus is used in some Madison High Schools. Much more on math here.
For many college students, high school math is but a distant memory of derivative functions and playing games on graphing calculators.
When a professor mentions that certain math skills are necessary for his class, it sends the lecture hall into a frenzy of questions and worry. It seems that math, more than any other subject, is lost in the student’s transition from high school to college.
With a $69,000 grant, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh geology professor Jennifer Wenner intends to figure out why.
“There are a couple of hypotheses,” Wenner said. “From my own experience, some people get it in their head that they can’t do math, and they get this block about it.”
The Challenge Index, my system for rating high schools based on college-level test participation, grew from watching a low-income school in East Los Angeles -- Garfield High -- find ways to challenge average students that most high-income schools never thought of. As The Washington Post unveils its 10th annual Challenge Index rankings of Washington area public schools this week, I want to see how low-income schools in this region are doing.
The Challenge Index rates each school by taking the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests the school gave in 2006 and dividing by the number of seniors who graduated from the school this year. High school educators who have learned, as the teachers at Garfield did, that even average students benefit from AP and IB are more likely to have more students taking those exams and do better on The Post's list. High school educators who stick with what is still the majority view about AP and IB in America -- that the programs are suitable only for top students -- do not do so well.
In many cases, the list defies the conventional wisdom that schools with lots of low-income students are bad and schools with few such students are good. That is not to say that most low-income schools do well on the list. Most do not. Many of their teachers and administrators accept the widespread assumption that their students can't do AP or IB. But the few schools in poor neighborhoods that break out of this mindset are worth studying.
Public Comments Regarding Credit For Non-MMSD Courses
Parents Jeff Henriques, Larry Winkler and Janet Mertz appeared in front of the Madison School Board's Performance & Achievement Committee regarding credit for non-MMSD courses. Watch the video.
Madison School Board President Johnny Winston, Jr. (thanks!) posted a rather remarkable summary of recent activity today. I thought it would be useful to recall recent Board Majority inaction when reviewing Johnny's words:
The Community has expressed extensive concern over a variety of curriculum issues. Previous Board majorities said that they "don't do curriculum" despite their responsibility under Wisconsin law (February, 2006). There's a difference between policy and implementation.
All of these issues, and more, affect our next generation.
The Board's recent actions to stop the controversial curriculum changes at East High School (already in place at West) reflects thinking about our children first (see Gamoran discussion here and here [Jason Shephard] (discussion tabled in the Spring of 2005), rather than experimenting with their opportunities:
Happy Holidays to everyone! Despite the cold weather, the Madison Board of Education continues its work.
On December 18th the board will begin the process of 2007-08 budget preparation and receive a report on the 2005-06 audit. On December 11th the Board will continue its discussion and analysis on positive student behavior in safe and secure schools that will hopefully lead to changes in the student Code of Conduct and Board policy #4502…In November, the Board completed the evaluation of the Superintendent. He was evaluated in five areas: District Management, Board Relations, Community Communication & Relationships, Staff Supervision & Evaluation and Professional Growth & Relationships. His scores qualitatively fell between the rating of Proficient and Strong in all categories except in Professional Growth & Relationships where he received the rating of Strong. In addition, the Board and Superintendent mutually agreed to four goals that include: (1) development of a Math Task Force; (2) a plan to promote the MMSD; (3) evaluation of information to the Board; and (4) implementation of the Administrative Intern Professional Development Program… On December 4th the Board received a report by Madison Partners for Inclusive Education. The board also received the annual report from the district regarding the annual goals of 3rd grade reading, algebra/geometry by 9th & 10th grade and student attendance of 97%… On December 20th there will be a public hearing regarding a charter school proposal from The Studio School (www.madisonstudioschool.org)… The Equity Task Force continues its hard work… Lastly, the board is discussing increasing building permit fees and has moved administrators and non-represented employees to three HMO plans effective 7/1/07. More district information can be found in the latest edition of MMSD Today at http://mmsd.org/today/.
Board Committees:
Finance and Operations (Lawrie Kobza, Chair) discussed the process for getting feedback on the citizen's budget; analyzed the transportation budget and received monthly financial reports. Long Range Planning (Carol Carstensen, Chair) discussed enrollment history and projections; school capacity; enrollments; boundaries in West/Memorial attendance areas and overcrowding at Chavez and Lakeview. Human Resources (Ruth Robarts, Chair) reviewed administrative contract renewal, merit pay, positions covered by state statutes. Communications (Arlene Silveira, Chair) discussed planning and structure of community conversations and communications during a school crisis. Community Partnerships (Lucy Mathiak, Chair) discussed the amount of funds expended for MMSD partnerships and reviewed the annual report of programs receiving community services funding. Performance and Achievement (Shwaw Vang, Chair) will receive a report on the disproportionate number of minority students in special education and review credits for courses outside the MMSD. On 12/18, the committee will follow up on the discussion of a Fine Arts task force.
High Schools of the Future:
As you may have heard, the district is embarking on an in-depth analysis of our local high schools. The Superintendent made a presentation at the November 27th board meeting giving some background information and outlining the process to gather community input and evaluate possible changes for our schools. The scope involves challenging curriculum, relationship building and the development of the skills needed for all of our students to succeed in a global economy. The process will take two years. I encourage our community to provide input at local school and community meetings when they are scheduled in the near future.
Thank you for your interest and support of the MMSD. Have a happy and safe holiday season!
Johnny Winston, Jr., President, Madison Board of Education
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
Want district information? Go to www.mmsd.org
Write to the entire school board at comments@madison.k12.wi.us.
Sign up for MMSD communications at http://mmsd.org/lists/newuser.cgi
Watch school board meetings and other district programs on MMSD Channel 10 & 19.
On game days, football fan Tracy French pulls his SUV into a reserved parking spot and rides an elevator to a stadium suite outfitted with plush seats and a big-screen TV.
His team is the Panthers -- the Cabot High School Panthers of Cabot, Ark. Mr. French is the president of a local bank that has given about $65,000 to the school's athletic department over the past five years, and the luxury seats are one of the perks he gets in return. "I would never have thought they'd have these types of facilities," he says.
Public education may face budget shortfalls across the country, but you wouldn't know it from the new digs where the high-rollers of high school football are camped on Friday nights. In a development that is changing the way athletics are funded, some public schools are taking a page from the pros' playbook on VIP seating. Vidalia High School in Georgia spent more than $2 million of public money last year to build a fieldhouse with eight air-conditioned skyboxes. Brookwood High School in Georgia built the Lodge, a facility overlooking the stadium where members of the booster club can lounge on leather couches and have a pregame meal of T-bone steak. Denton, John Guyer and Billy Ryan high schools, which share a new $18.3 million, 12,000-seat stadium in Denton, Texas, added two VIP suites, with tiered seating and cable TV. They rent out one of the suites for $150 a game. At Lucy C. Laney High School, also in Georgia, the principal and county athletic director use the stadium's two skyboxes in part to entertain boosters, alumni and others over cheese plates and chicken wings.
Important new information about credit for non-MMSD courses issue.
"In preparation for the December 11, 2006 meeting of the BOE's Performance and Achievement Committee, Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash prepared a memo dated December 5, 2006 along with 10 "exhibit" appendices for distribution to the BOE. "Exhibit 10" is a copy of the "Guidelines for Taking Coursework Outside the District" that she wrote in October, 2006, and I previously posted on SIS. In her memo she states "All the other nine procedures described herein, except this one, are governed by law or Board Policy. This process (her new Guidelines) was created by the MMSD to expand the opportunities for students to take courses outside the MMSD without increasing the costs to the MMSD and without undermining the integrity of the diploma a student receives from the MMSD. The "Guidelines for Taking Coursework Outside the MMSD" is the process and procedure currently used when, for example, a student who wants to take outside courses, but does not have any other option available to him/her. The cost for taking courses under this procedure is the responsibility of the student/parents. The procedure requires pre-approval by the principal and if the student wants credit for taking the course, he/she will receive elective credit if the District does not offer a comparable course. If the District offers a comparable course, the student will not receive credit. The student's transcript will only include a description of the course, the institution, if any, the date the course was completed, the credit, if any, and the pass/fail grade."
As I had stated previously on SIS I believe this is a new policy. It is definitely different from the one used in the recent past at Madison West HS in several crucial respects. It has never previously been brought before the BOE for formal approval. At the November 13, 2006 meeting of the Performance and Achievement Committee, I presented Superintendent Rainwater and members of the BOE with a copy of these "Guidelines". Superintendent Rainwater responded by stating that these Guidelines only apply to "Independent Study" and do not represent a change in policy. I interpreted his comments to mean they are simply a restatement of Board Policy 3545 - Independent Study. However, Nash's December 5th memo to the BOE quoted above seems to indicate that her "Guidelines" are to be interpreted as a catchall, meant to apply not just to independent study, but to ALL course work not specifically governed by State law or existing MMSD Board Policies, i.e., her exhibits 1-9. In other words, it is to apply as well to UW courses taken outside of the YOP, WCATY courses, online courses such as Stanford's EPGY taken outside of the InSTEP Program, UW-Extension courses where the District claims to offer a comparable course (even though in a very different format), etc., i.e., a variety of different types of formal course work offered through certified, non-MMSD programs. If so, shouldn't these "Guidelines" need formal BOE approval as a new Board Policy since, as Nash states in her memo, they are not currently covered under any existing Board Policies?
Nash's "Guidelines" state that no credit will be permitted for non-MMSD courses whenever THEY deem they offer a comparable course (i.e., regardless of format) ANYWHERE in the MMSD. Even when the MMSD doesn't offer a comparable course, they will permit a maximum of TWO ELECTIVE credits, i.e., they can not be used to fulfill specific requirements for graduation. Thus, if these Guidelines are allowed to stand, no credit whatsoever will be permitted for any high school or college course the district offers that a student takes, instead, via WCATY, EPGY, UW-Extension, online, correspondence, etc., regardless of the student's ability to access the District's comparable course.
I believe these new "Guidelines" will be harmful to a wide variety of alternative learners. They shut off the one safety value students currently have whose needs are not being adequately met by their own middle and high schools. Without it, more families will leave the MMSD for alternative schooling options if they can afford to do so and more students who stay will fail to graduate. If you agree with me, please express your concern by either (i) attending Monday's BOE meeting at 5:45 pm in the Doyle Administration Building, or (ii) writing a letter or email to all BOE members, Pam Nash, and Art Rainwater."
This is a very important issue for academically gifted students who would like to be able to substitute higher-level, faster-paced, or more-readily-accessible-to-them (e.g., because of transportation problems) courses taken via WCATY, EPGY, APEX, UW, etc. for ones offered by their local middle or high school. It is an important issue for other types of alternative learners (e.g., special ed students, temporarily ill or disabled students) as well. It has taken years to get this topic placed on the BOE's agenda. This coming Monday may well be our best opportunity to influence MMSD policy relating to this matter.
Thus, I urge ALL of you who are concerned about this issue either (i) to attend this BOE meeting prepared to give a 3-minute speech during the Public Comments period, or (ii) to send an email this week to Art Rainwater, Pam Nash, and all BOE members (via their comments email address) describing why it is important for their students to be permitted to receive credit toward fulfilling graduation requirements for qualified high school- and college-level courses taken at UW, MATC, TAG summer programs, online, or via correspondence."
As I look over the course catalogs for the four high schools, I see that each school has both a Special Education Department and an English as a Second Language Department (although they may not be called exactly that at each school). Each of these departments in each of the four high schools offers an extensive range of courses for students who qualify and need the specialized educational experiences offered within these departments. Many of the courses offered by these departments fulfill graduation requirements and so can be used as curriculum replacement for the "regular" courses.
Here are my questions:
Does MPIE advocate having the District dismantle the Special Education and English as a Second Language Departments in our high schools? (I assume the answer is "no.")
Does MPIE advocate having the District deny high school graduation credit for any and all courses offered within these departments, so that truly ALL students will be required to take 9th (and -- at West -- 10th) grade core courses at our high schools? (Again, I assume the answer is "no.")
If MPIE advocates full inclusion, why aren't the answers to the above two questions "yes -- absolutely, yes"?
Does MPIE advocate getting rid of all advanced, honors, accelerated, TAG and Advanced Placement classes at our four high schools? In 9th grade? In 10th grade? In all four grades? What is your vision with regard to advanced and accelerated classes?
Please help me understand the logic that says it's O.K. to have entire departments within each high school devoted to the specialized educational needs of some groups of students (not to mention adjustments to high school graduation requirements designed to meet those students' needs), but it is not O.K. to have even a few sections of classes aimed at meeting the specialized educational needs of other students? (IMHO, this way of thinking is really best described as a belief in "selective inclusion.")
Can you see the inherent illogic, inequity and unfairness of that position?
How do you decide which groups of students with specialized educational needs get to have their educational needs met and which groups of students do not?
It seems to me that a big part of the answer to that question should come from the research done from the perspective of the group of students under consideration. Do you agree or disagree with that premise?
Are you aware of the consistency (of findings, of conclusions, of recommendations) within the literature on how best to meet the needs of high performing students (a.k.a. "best practices")?
Why does MPIE prefer the policy of getting rid of advanced high school classes over the policy of working with all K-8 students (and their families) in such a way as to increase the diversity of the students in those classes?
What do some middle and upper middle class parents of children with special education needs find so threatening about the thought of having their schools meet the educational needs of high ability, high performing, even academically talented students with the same thoughtfulness and commitment that they meet the needs of students with other special educational needs?
Are you aware that MMSD and national data indicate that approximately 20-25% of high school dropouts are academically gifted and have a demonstrated history of high academic performance? (In our District, that number is significantly higher at West HS than at the other three high schools and a disproportionate number of the "high performing" dropouts throughout the District are poor and minority students.) How do you understand those data and what do you think should be done about the situation?
Have you read this American Psychologist article on "the two tails of the normal curve," co-authored by nationally recognized experts on the educational needs of students in each of the two "tails"? http://psych.wisc.edu/henriques/papers/two_tails.pdf If so, what do you think of it?
Would any of you would be willing to meet over coffee to talk about how we can work together on these issues and to see if we can find common ground?
It's too late. The students that are behind in 5th grade rarely catch up. The 2/3 combinations are by far the worst academic combination for elementary students, yet we continue this practice to save money, and to save SAGE. I understand the pull out combination system is a great way to deal with cost and transient students....but does it really help? Can't we negotiate with the Union to allow 4 year kindergarten? This is really annoying that we have to bow to the Union for the sacrifice of the lower income students.
The middle school years has a great resource of teachers. My children have had teachers that felt students are undergoing hormonal warfare and felt they should teach less so as not to upset the students. As I quote a teacher my child had in a "Charlie Brown teachers voice", "Less is more and as long as they learn a couple of concepts during the year I feel I have done my job". This fortunately is not the normal approach my children have received. Most of the Jr. High teachers have been focused on preparing the students for Memorial. I wonder if this is the model for most of the Jr. High Schools throughout the district?
The district currently has the highest number of National Merit Scholar graduates in the state, I would assume we send hundred of students to college each year and those that are from higher income families do well. I wonder if the problem is less racial gap and not more economic gap. Please follow the link to the following Newsweek article released by the North Carolina Democratic Party....http://ncdp.org/node/1081. This is an article about how North Carolina kept their struggling students, drop out prone students and low income students engaged in high school by offering them an option to attend a local community college (MATC) and receive not only their HS diploma upon graduation but also an associate degree in an area of interest so that staying in school had meaning....and graduating means getting a real job. Currently all we can offer students that graduate from high school is they will have a diploma and they can essentially get the same jobs in this area with or without that diploma....with an associates degree they can make more than their teachers in computer repair, Xerox repair, IT, health associate degrees and others. Please think about raising the standards and the options for the struggling students, not lowering the standards for the top tier students. This IDEA and a proven method could benefit the entire community and raise the standard of living for lower income families. Please read this article.
Susan Troller reports in The Capital Times on school board candidates:
A retired teacher has thrown her hat in the ring as a candidate for the Madison School Board.
Marj Passman, who was active in the recent successful referendum to approve funding for a new elementary school, has announced that she will be a candidate for Ruth Robarts' open seat on the board. Robarts, who has served as a School Board member since 1997, will not be running again.
Shwaw Vang, another veteran School Board member, has also indicated he will not seek re-election.
Johnny Winston Jr., current School Board president, is planning to defend his seat.
Passman's filing for candidacy with the City Clerk's Office brings three official candidates to next spring's School Board election for three seats.
In addition to Passman and Winston, Beth Moss, a west side parent and school volunteer who also was involved with the pro-referendum group, is planning to run for the board. She has filed with the city to run for the seat currently occupied by Vang.
Maya Cole, who narrowly lost her School Board race last spring to current board member Arlene Silveira, has said she is planning a run for the board again this year, but she says she is still not certain which seat she will seek.
Passman taught for over 25 years in the Madison school district and says her classroom experience at Leopold and Marquette elementary schools, Cherokee Middle School and the Midvale-Lincoln elementary pair provides expertise she will bring to the board. Her husband is a mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their children also attended Leopold, Cherokee and West High School.
Candidates have until 5 p.m. Jan. 2 to file with the city clerk for candidacy for the Madison School Board.
Connected Math textbooks for one year and the equivalent Singapore Math version. Brandon Lorenz:
A recent meeting at Central Middle School attracted about 50 people to discuss concerns with the district's Connected Mathematics Project, a new constructivist approach that was introduced in sixth, seventh and eighth grades this year.
Another meeting for parents is scheduled for Dec. 13 at Horning Middle School.
Such new math programs rely on more hands-on activities and problem-solving skills than traditional programs.
Speaking with Zaborowski, Lynn Kucek said she was worried the math program would make it more difficult for her daughter, who does well in other subjects, to get into college.
Marj Passman for Seat 5 (Ruth Robarts is retiring)
Beth Moss for Seat 3 (Shwaw Vang's seat)
Johnny Winston, Jr., in seat 4 has announced he is running again, but as of this afternoon, had not declared his candidacy according to the City Clerk's office.
It says the typical state math curriculum runs a mile wide and an inch deep, resulting in students being introduced to too many concepts but mastering too few, and urges educators to slim down those lessons.
Some scholars say the American approach to math instruction has allowed students to fall behind those in Singapore, Japan and a dozen other nations. In most states, they say, the math curriculum has swelled into a thick catalogue of skills that students are supposed to master to attain "proficiency" under the federal No Child Left Behind mandate.
“We are relentless,” Dr. Cashin said in a recent interview. “The secret is clear expectations. Everything is spelled out. Nothing is assumed.” She provides her principals, for instance, with a detailed road map of what should be taught in every subject, in every grade, including specific skills of the week in reading and focus on a genre of literature every month.
Dr. Cashin is obsessed with writing, and in most of her schools, student work lines the walls — not just the final product but layers of drafts. Even first graders have writing posted on the walls.
A feature used in every school is the four-square graphic organizer, a worksheet with four boxes like a window pane and a rectangle at its center that helps children develop a five-paragraph essay. Some progressive educators scorn it as a crutch; Dr. Cashin insists that it works.
While the city’s reading program focuses on story books, Dr. Cashin layers on lots of nonfiction. And, responding to research showing that impoverished children often lack vocabulary and basic facts, she has adopted a curriculum called Core Knowledge, which teaches basics like the principles of constitutional government, events in world history and well-known literature.
Superintendent Rainwater and I engaged in a lengthy series of e-mails when I questioned the truth of a statment in a letter he wrote to Wisconsin congressmen to seek their help in reinstating the MMSD's eligibility for funds from Reading First.
In his letter the superintendent said that the MMSD was told "we had to use one of the preferred reading packages authorized by USDOE."
At first the superintendent denied that he said such a thing and asked me to retract the quote from the letter.
After I sent him a link to his letter, he kindly wrote:
I apologize. I did not recall the wording of the letter to our congressional delegation and the fact that we simplified the process in writing them. You are correct that this letter does not accurately reflect everything that happened during the process. Although it was made clear throughout the process that we could opt for one of the pre-approved programs and move ahead the choice was never presented that we had to do that. The final choice that we were faced with was to make the final changes that they required to our program, accept one of the pre-approved programs or reject the grant. Art
As I always say, take nothing from the MMSD at face value.
In 2004, after the district scrapped race as a factor in assignments because of the legal threat, another group of white parents from the same neighborhood got upset when their children were passed over at the same majority-white school, Ballard High. They were left out not because of race, but because they didn't live near enough.
This time, the school district quietly backed down when the parents started sending their children to private or suburban schools instead of the struggling, majority-black school to which they'd been assigned. Ballard and other supposedly full schools together took about 100 extra students, most of them white.
Even as parents challenge a government action making room for minorities in highly-regarded schools, the later events in Seattle show another side of the picture: the ways that school-assignment practices can work to the benefit of whites. In Seattle as in other parts of the country, schools sometimes accommodate middle-class parents who push to get their children into coveted schools. When these middle-class parents are predominantly white, as in Seattle, the lobbying can tend to sort more white children into the most desirable schools.
The teaching of civics presently in the United States is dismal and startling. It used to be, when I was a kid, that there were classes in civics and you learned not only the checks and balances, but hows and whys and wherefores. And you learned what was the reasoning behind the creation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. …
If you think that running a government like ours is, arguably, more complicated than running a pharmaceutical company or an auto company — and it is — then we should train people to the running of the country. …
We want to … define the necessity of civics: What is it and is it necessary? If it's necessary, is it urgent? And, if it's urgent, what do we do? And then [we should start] to proceed to literally design classes.
It is time that we simply revive the notion that we can learn how to run the country — and learn not for Republicans and not for Democrats, but learn how to learn the Constitution. The idea of people having power to pursue a notion of happiness or control of their own lives is a new thing and a miracle. America is a miracle.
As you may have heard, the School Board and district are embarking on a major high school redesign initiative [Discussion & Presentation Audio / Video]. The Superintendent made a presentation at the board meeting last week, giving some background information and outlining the process by which we will gather feedback and evaluate future changes for our high schools. The scope is huge - it involves challenging curriculum, relationship development and development of the skills needed to succeed in a challenging world. What will the new design look like? We don't know. We are starting with a blank slate. The process will be community-oriented. There will be time for more formal input as the process starts after the holidays. In the meantime, I would like to know your thoughts on the following questions:
What do you think MMSD's high schools are already doing well?
What are the barriers that keep our high schools from meeting your expectations?
What is your vision for the future of our high schools.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Arlene Silveira
One of the interesting questions discussed during Monday evening's school board discussion [audio / video] on this issue was the need to address curriculum issues in elementary and middle school so that students arrive in high school prepared. In my view, this should be our first priority.
Students are required to be in school longer-much longer-than their peers in traditional public schools.
Pupils are tested, and re-tested, to measure achievement. Lesson plans, teaching strategies, even whole curricula are adjusted based on how well, or poorly, students are learning what they should. Moreover, teachers are closely monitored and constantly working to improve their skills.
Students’ behavior and values are aggressively shaped by school leaders and instructors.
What is complicated, however, is implementing these changes within today’s rule-bound, bureaucratic system, with its collective bargaining constraints, bureaucratic regulations, and the inertia of 100-plus years of public education. It’s no coincidence that all of Tough’s profiled schools are charters, and as such have the freedom to do things differently and take control of their own destinies. In turn, this greater autonomy allows them to attract many top-notch, talented, and energetic teachers who are willing to work long hours for mediocre pay because they yearn for a results-oriented, break-the-rules environment. Replicating this atmosphere in the traditional system would be hard-maybe even impossible. But expanding charter schools–and getting more good ones-is no easy feat, either.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who says parents should be able to scrutinize schools on the Internet like they are "shopping for a car," received a political boost Thursday with a new poll showing widespread support for opening the financial books at public schools.
With the Legislature beginning its new session Monday, the survey, sponsored by the nonprofit group Children Now, was designed to give Schwarzenegger and lawmakers ammunition next year as they attempt to put more information about the state's 9,500 public schools on the Web.
Schwarzenegger wants large amounts of data — from enrollment numbers and school test scores to reports on the quality of textbooks and individual school budgets — to be posted online in a user-friendly way.
"Let the sun shine in on everything," the governor said recently at a news briefing, describing how the state should "make it easier for parents to shop for the best schools," as he put it, and shame poor-performing schools so "they'll be getting their act together."
We yearn so much for data on the Advanced Placement program -- a powerful influence on high schools today -- that one of the most cited pieces of recent AP research actually does not yet exist, at least in any published form.
This is the report on AP and college science courses by Philip M. Sadler and Robert H. Tai. The only publicly available account of what they found is a Harvard News Office press release with the headline: "High school AP courses do not predict college success in science." They argue that students who took AP science in high school do not do as well in college science courses as AP advocates say they should, and that taking AP science in high school may hurt science education by letting more students avoid college biology, chemistry and physics.
I might have left this issue alone until Sadler and Tai had their work published, but their conclusions are so provocative that the Harvard press release, and the powerpoint slides they used at a February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, have already been cited in several news articles and at least one book, Alfie Kohn's "The Homework Myth." Kohn is one of the most fastidious writers I know, always checking and footnoting his sources. If he thinks it is okay to cite this study before it is published, then it is time to discuss it in this column, which claims to be on top of all things AP. The Sadler-Tai work deserves close attention for many reasons, one of them being I think it is being given more credence than it deserves, at least in its fetal state.
The incumbent policy is more of the same. Both parties in Washington champion more government involvement in primary education and more subsidies for existing colleges and universities.
The innovative policy is to support any alternative to our current education system. Ultimately, we would trust consumers to keep the best alternatives and discard the rest.
.......
While politicians champion more homogeneity in education (national standards; send everyone to college), my guess is that what we need is more differentiation. Students are heterogeneous in terms of their abilities, learning styles, and rates of maturation. Putting every student on the same track is sub-optimal for large numbers of young people.
Some students -- probably more than we realize -- are autodidacts, meaning that they teach themselves at their own pace. One of the brightest students in my high school statistics class simply cannot handle the structure of a school day. He is motivated to learn on his own (he was curious to read my book on health care and asked me for a copy), but he is demotivated by most of his classes.
Some students are not suited for academic study. We speak of the proverbial auto mechanic, but in fact the best career path for many of these students in today's economy would be in the allied health fields. Unfortunately, this career path is blocked by occupational licensing requirements, which prevent many otherwise capable students from pursuing careers in dental hygiene, physical therapy, or similar professions. If we had the equivalent credentialism at work in auto repair, you would need four years of college plus two or three years of post-graduate education just to work on a car.
Interesting timing. I spoke recently with a Madison parent (pre-K child) who agrees with this sentiment (balancing education power with parents via greater local choice).
Curriculum changes halted as district eyes study group
JStanding in front of a giant projection screen with his wireless remote control and clip-on microphone, Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater on Monday unveiled his grand vision for Madison’s four major high schools. But the real backdrop for his presentation before the Madison school board was the criticism of changes implemented last year at West High and proposed this year at East. Both involved reducing course offerings in favor of a core curriculum for all students, from gifted to struggling.
Rainwater stressed his intention to start from scratch in overhauling all aspects of the education provided at West, East, Memorial and La Follette, whose combined enrollment tops 7,600 students. The move follows consolidation of practices in the city’s elementary and middle schools. But it may prove more challenging, since the high schools have a longstanding tradition of independence.
Over the next two years, Rainwater would like a steering committee of experts to study best practices in high school education. Everything, Rainwater stresses, is on the table: “It’s important we don’t have preconceived notions of what it should be.”
Heterogeneous classes, which until last week were the district’s preferred direction for high school changes, are, said Rainwater, “only one piece” of the redesign. But curriculum changes are clearly going to happen.
“It’s not acceptable anymore to lecture four days a week and give a test on Friday,” Rainwater declared. Teachers must learn how to teach students, rather than teach content.
The 50 parents and teachers in the audience reacted coolly, judging from the comments muttered among themselves during the presentation and the nearly two-hour discussion that followed.
Tellingly, the biggest applause came when board member Ruth Robarts said it was “high time we as a board start talking about high school curriculum.” Robarts chastised Rainwater for not including teachers and parents on the steering committee, which will “reinforce a perception that is not in our favor.” She said the district was giving critics only two options: accept the changes or “come down and protest.”
On Nov. 16, East Principal Alan Harris unveiled plans to eliminate several courses in favor of core classes in ninth and 10th grades. Attendees said the plan was presented as a “done deal.” In e-mails to the board, parents called the plan “short-sighted and misguided,” and one teacher warned: “Don’t do it.”
Rainwater, apparently recognizing the damage to parent and teacher relations, sent a memo to principals last week.
“I am asking you to cease any significant programmatic changes at each of your schools as this community dialogue progresses,” he wrote. “We need a tabula rasa mentality that will allow for a free flow of ideas, an opportunity to solidify trust in our expertise, and a chance at a solid, exciting product at the end.”
The four high schools will remain under their current programs until the steering committee gets to work. Chaired by Pam Nash, deputy superintendent of secondary schools, it will include several district administrators as well as experts from the UW-Madison, Edgewood College and MATC.
Rainwater sought to assure board and audience members that teachers and parents will have ample opportunity for input. His plan calls for three separate periods of public comment, after which subcommittees will make revisions. The school board will then vote on the recommendations after additional hearings and debate.
“You get better input if people have something to react to,” Rainwater said, adding that involving teachers in all stages would be impractical, because it would be difficult to cover their teaching assignments. That comment drew a collective groan from teachers in the audience.
Rainwater’s call for a revamping of the city’s high schools suggests the current approach isn’t working. And that poses a dilemma for school officials. The district likes to tout its record number of National Merit semifinalists and state-leading ACT scores as proof that its high schools are successful. Many parents worry that those high-end benchmarks are under attack.
But Madison’s schools continue to fail countless kids — mostly low-income and minority students. This is a profound challenge hardly unique to Madison, but one that deserves more attention from policymakers.
Research in education, the starting point for Rainwater’s steering committee, offers promising solutions. But the district risks much in excluding teachers from the start, since inevitably they will be on the front lines of any change. And excluding parents could heighten the alienation that has already prompted some middle- and upper-class families to abandon the public schools.
While struggling over details, most board members conceptually support the study. During their discussion Monday, Lawrie Kobza cut to the chase.
“What is the problem we’re trying to solve?” she asked. “And is this how we solve this problem?” Kobza professed not to know the answer. But these are the right questions to ask.
By 2014, just eight years from now, the No Child Left Behind Act mandates that there be no racial achievement gap in American education -- none. All children -- black, white, Hispanic, Asian -- will be performing on the same bell curve of test scores.
It's a tough deadline and a beautiful idea. Trouble is, despite Bush administration claims, most studies show it is not happening.
Test score gaps show up in kindergarten, and just get worse, except where they don't. There are trend-bucking success stories in this country - remarkable schools where that gap is being closed, child by child.
This hour On Point: we talk with three principals in the trenches who have made it happen in the war on America's education achievement gap.
Jason Brown doesn't know what to do if his 14-year-old son doesn't get into a good high school next year, namely Rufus King or Riverside.
ellow Milwaukee Public Schools parent James West feels equally uneasy about finding that a teacher had given a near-perfect score to what he called a near-incoherent essay by his daughter.
Anthony Drane, who works in a supplemental instruction program at Milwaukee Area Technical College, fears for his children's futures when he encounters former MPS students who lack basic study skills such as note taking.
The problem, the three fathers have concluded, is not just that Milwaukee's public schools are in crisis but that there aren't enough parents like them who are alarmed and trying to do something about it. They hope to change that with the North Milwaukee Parent Association, a citywide group that intends to motivate parents by giving them the knowledge and support to participate in the school system.
The idea, they said, is that empowering Milwaukee's youths must start with educating their guardians.
Three times in the past week, I've witnessed parents of young children ponder whether to trust education of their offspring to Seattle Public Schools.
In raising children, however, families cannot afford mistakes. When a young life gets off on the wrong track, its retrofit can get more complicated than putting new rails in a tunnel.
And a city increasingly populated by singles and childless couples badly needs families with children. A disastrous mandatory busing program drove working families from Seattle during the 1970s and '80s.
Loss of confidence now threatens public schools with an institutional death spiral.
What happens? People use their doubts and subpar average test scores -- which shouldn't mean much to the middle class, given scores' correlation with poverty -- to justify leaving, without really exploring, what is offered by their local school.
Two pillars of the classical musical establishment, Carnegie Hall and the Juilliard School, have joined forces to give birth to a music academy whose fellows will go forth and propagate musicianship in New York public schools.
The city’s Education Department is opening its arms to the new program, seeing an inexpensive but valuable source of teaching for a system deprived of comprehensive music training. And the leaders of Carnegie and Juilliard see an opportunity to promote their conviction that a musician in 21st-century America should be more than just a person who plays the notes.
Under the new program elite musicians will receive high-level musical training, performance opportunities at Carnegie Hall and guidance from city school teachers in how to teach music. The fellows will each be assigned to a different school and work there one and a half days a week. They will teach their instruments, or music in general, and give their own pointers to school music teachers.
Kudos to the district for stopping the rush to the middle Rainwater and his assistants have been promoting for East. However, the changes that were pushed onto West should also be backed off while the district has a long overdue, community-wide conversation about what it desires its high schools to provide all students. And this time, let's have that discussion backed with empirical studies. Even if the community agrees with Rainwater (and some if not all of the BOE) that closing the minority achievement gap takes priority over other educational goals, let's have a frank discussion as to how that is best achieved.
MMSD to study high schools before "redesigning" them
Madison school Superintendent Art Rainwater has put the brakes on recently proposed changes to the city's high schools as part of an effort to make long-term progress.
That means putting a hold on the proposed elimination of accelerated classes at East. In addition, there will be no changes in the four-block schedule at La Follette at least until a comprehensive look at the entire high school experience in Madison is completed, Rainwater confirmed in an interview this morning. Rainwater says 'whoa' to school changes
By Susan Troller, The Capital Times, November 28, 2006
But Secondary Education Director James VanSciver and other Seaford educators became convinced that with extra help, many more students could be taking algebra in middle school and college-level courses in high school. Four years ago, they began offering special tutoring, summer classes and Saturday classes. The number of Advanced Placement classes at Seaford High swelled from four to 14.
The focus on helping average students also boosted minority enrollment in the most rigorous classes. The district has about 3,400 students, 40 percent black and slightly more than half white. Through the initiative, administrators found more black students doing well and going on to college.
Julius Mullen, who directs a Saturday program for young African American males in Seaford, said the students discovered they could advance if given more time and the assurance that they had their friends with them. "When expectations are raised, I think students will grab for them if they have the support programs in place," Mullen said. "They have to see their friends achieving success."
A discussion regarding the future of Madison's high schools is back on the agenda for tonight's School Board meeting.
The controversial item, which involves curriculum changes and other proposals, is scheduled as part of a special board meeting at 8 p.m. in the Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton St.
In an officers meeting last week, School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. removed the topic of high school redesign from tonight's agenda, saying that he felt the process was not far enough along to produce a productive discussion.
But when other School Board members said that they would prefer keeping the subject on the agenda for tonight's meeting, Winston agreed to return it to the lineup of topics.
The special session will follow meetings of the communications committee at 5 p.m., the human resources committee at 6 p.m. and the finance and operations committee at 7 p.m.
Later tonight, the board also is expected to go into a closed-door discussion of the negotiation strategy regarding Madison Teachers Inc., the teachers union.
In November of 2005, the MMSD Board of Education held two meetings (and the attendance task forces met six times).
This November, the Board has six meetings of the full board, including executive and open sessions, and ten committee meetings. The Equity Task Force will meet once.
Congratulations to a harder working, more effective board.
Let's elect people in the spring who will conintue this new board's committment to overseeing management of the MMSD.
Letter to East Community From Principal Harris Nov. 22, 2006
From the East High Web Site
November 22, 2006
Dear East High School Community:
When I decided to become a principal I promised myself that I would do several things. One was to work as hard as I could to make quality education a reality for all of the students in my building and the second was to pay attention when confronted by people’s concerns and hopes.
As I have worked at East over the last year and a half I have pushed to get the building under control, to begin a conversation with the teaching staff about high quality instruction, to empower students, and to take an honest look at our data.
What we know is that East students can stack up to any group, any where if we give them the tools and the chance. Vision 2012, which involved a group of community members, parents, staff and students, provided us with clear goals for our future. I have proposed programmatic changes I believe can achieve those goals.
Superintendent Art Rainwater has asked that all four high schools cease programmatic changes until the entire district can take the quality time necessary to have broad community discussion regarding how we prepare students for post secondary education and eventual employment in an increasingly global economy.
Changes that are eventually implemented will not be successful without the support of the larger East community. The passion and interest that has been shown by you this week is a strength that we can build on for future discussions.
Let’s take the time to figure out how to best serve all of our students today and in the future, retain parent and community support for our programming, and continue to draw upon the expertise of our East teachers and staff.
by Joe Quick, Legislative Liaison/Communication Specialist
Sens. Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold, along with Rep. Tammy Baldwin have requested that the U.S. Department of Education investigate Madison Schools' loss of an estimated $3.2 million after the district refused to dismantle its successful reading program two years ago, and seek to have the grant re-instated.
A scathing internal audit this fall claimed that USDOE officials managing the $1 billion program knowingly broke the law with unethical practices surrounding the program. In a letter to the above named members of Congress, Supt. Art Rainwater said, "In light of the government audit of the federal Reading First program contending that USDOE ignored the law and violated ethical standards to steer money the way it wanted, I am asking that you request reinstatement of the lost resources to the Madison Metropolitan School District due to USDOE's faulty conclusions that the audit makes obvious."
In a letter to Terrell Halaska , USDOE assistant secretary for legislative and Congressional affairs, the Wisconsin Congressional members said, "The report from the Office of Inspector General questions the program's credibility and implies the Department broke the law by interfering in the curriculum decisions made by schools, thereby failing to follow proper grant review procedures.
"We would appreciate your review and investigation of the concerns expressed by the Madison Metropolitan School District. Specifically, they are seeking reinstatement of lost federal resources to the Madison Schools from the Reading First program."
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (now referred to as No Child Left Behind) is before Congress for reauthorization in 2007. Discussion of Reading First is sure to be part of Congress' examination of needed modifications to the law.
Redesign acknowledges failure to close achievement gap
The high school dumbing down (aka high school redesign) shows the MMSD administration’s loss of will, as well as its refusal to adopt curriculum changes needed to close the achievement gap.
The gap begins in elementary school: 46% of black students score below grade level on the third grade reading test, but only 9% of the white students.
The gap remains into high school: 49% of black 10th graders score below grade level in reading, while only 12% of the white students are at the minimal or basic levels.
The gap remains because the superintendent and administrators refuse to use curricula that will raise performance. For example, the MMSD clings to expensive and ineffective Reading Recovery and fuzzy math in the lower grades, while refusing to expand Read 180 which the district’s reading staff trumpeted for its success in upper grades.Previous boards and some current members share the responsibility too, because of their insistence that they have no role in curriculum issues.
Wisconsin students continue to fare far better on the state's standardized tests than they do on those given by the federal government, according to a new analysis that raises questions about what it means to be "proficient."
About 70% to 85% of Wisconsin students were considered proficient or better on the state's reading and math tests for the 2005-'06 school year. Yet only 33% to 40% of the state's fourth- and eighth-graders scored at least proficient on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress in those subjects, according to the study by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
The state was one of 16 in the country that had a proficiency gap of 45 to 55 percentage points, the Taxpayers Alliance found. Several states, such as Oklahoma and Mississippi, had even larger differences between the percentage of students considered proficient by their states as opposed to the federal government.
"It just creates confusion," said Dale Knapp, research director for the Taxpayers Alliance. "We want a sense of what our students know, where they sort of stand. And we're really getting two different answers that are very different answers."
The blame doesn't necessarily fall on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations, said Tony Evers, deputy superintendent of the state Department of Public Instruction, which administers the tests annually.
"Math is the same in Madison as it is in Missouri as it is in Mumbai." - Michael Petrilli,
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a group that has raised the idea of national standards
"What that ought to be is a big signal to the folks in Wisconsin that they really need to evaluate the rigor of their standards and their assessment." - Daria Hall, Education Trust
November 7 was a great day for our children and for the community. Certainly, the fact that we will have a new school in an area that is experiencing substantial growth is important for our future.
The relief that the community approved from the revenue cap will mean that we will have to reduce our services by less than expected, although we will still have to make cuts of several million dollars. Every staff member whose position is saved to serve children is important and $807,000 of relief will save a number of services.
The most obvious gains aside, it was just as important that the passage of the referendum involved support from the whole community.
The grassroots organization CAST (Community and Schools Together) worked long and hard to be sure that our citizens understood what was at stake and how important their vote was. District staff from the central office, building services and the schools supported this through their hard work and discussion with neighbors and friends.
I am still amazed four years later after a transportation department change that was made during a budget crunch timeframe, that not only is the department still lacking the secretarial position, but it increased the salary and benefits level of every player involved in the situation.
Are the students, parents and school staff being better served by the Transportation Department's surplus of a knowledgeable union employee (4 years ago today)?
Has the fact that the Transportation Coordinator was promoted to Manager, and the newly hired Transportation Coordinator (a former staff of First Student Bus Co) helped with the enormous amount of phone calls that department receives on a daily basis?
Have the homeless students been served with a staff person who stays at the office when a child is lost or not accounted for? (I risked insubordination for "refusing to lose a child in order to force the Board to realize we needed a 3rd person in the department")
I find it hard to believe knowing that the district is maintaining an employee on staff (not even a union employee) waiting for the position of the transportation secretary, to once again be posted and for her to be hired. Until then, I hear the secretaries in the schools and other district operations saying they can't get anyone to talk to in the Transportation Dept or that the carriers have been given the go-ahead to make the decisions.
When personal information is confidential regarding the students, this makes it extremely difficult for carriers to have all the facts they need when a student is missing or unaccounted for. By increasing the Transportation Manager's salary, and her supervisor's salary, and the newly created Coordinator's salary THREE pay levels higher than the surplused secretary's salary, (remember this strongly impacts their benefits - retirement, life insurance, etc) has this substantial cost increase resulted in matched increased service in the transportation department?
I think it would be fair to say in this case that the district is getting less service for more cost and that's exactly opposite where we should be going at a time when budget cuts are affecting the classroom and the students. Does this department really need so many levels of administrators - who is doing the REAL work like talking on the phones and working with the schools and parents and carriers?
Want to know more about this whole scenario? Then push for more information to be released by the administration or the staff who were affected by this surplus, on what really took place on Nov 22, 2002. Then maybe with the public forcing answers to all of the questions, just maybe the Board will take a hard look at what really is happening not only in this department, but across the district, and not say “it's a personnel issue”.
Board's goals for Superintendent Rainwater in 2006-07
On Monday, November 20, 2006, the Madison Board of Education voted unanimously to approve four goals for Superintendent Art Rainwater for 2006-07. (Carstensen, Kobza, Mathiak, Robarts, Silviera, Vang voting yes; Winston absent)
The goals require the superintendent to do the following:
1. Initiate and complete a comprehensive, independent and neutral review and assessment of the District's K-12 math curriculum.
• The review and assessment shall be undertaken by a task force whose members are appointed by the Superintendent and approved by the BOE. Members of the task force shall have math and math education expertise and represent a variety of perspectives regarding math education.
• The task force shall prepare and present to the BOE a preliminary outline of the review and assessment to be undertaken by the task force. The outline shall, at a minimum, include: (1) analysis of math achievement data for MMSD K-12 students, including analysis of all math sub-tests scores disaggregated by student characteristics and schools; (2) analysis of performance expectations for MMSD K-12 students; (3) an overview of math curricula, including MMSD's math curriculum; (4) a discussion of how to improve MMSD student achievement; and (5) recommendations on measures to evaluate the effectiveness of MMSD's math curriculum. The task force is to present the preliminary outline and a timeline to the BOE for comment and approval.
• The task force is to prepare a written draft of the review and assessment, consistent with the approved preliminary outline. The draft is to be presented to the BOE for review and comment.
• The task force is to prepare the final report on the review and assessment.
2. Develop in collaboration with the Board and external advisors, a plan for the District to communicate to the community why parents or guardians should send their children to MMSD schools. Specific tasks include (1) determining what parents and guardians consider important in selecting schools; (2) determining whether and how MMSD schools provide what parents and guardians consider important in selecting schools; (3) using the information gained from parents and guardians, developing a vision of what MMSD should be in the future; and (4) developing a communications plan to promote MMSD schools and why parents or guardians should send their children to them. Timeframe to develop: 6 months.
3. Provide information to the Board in a clear, accurate, complete yet concise, and timely manner. The Board will evaluate progress on this goal through the use of a rating sheet for Board members to give periodic feed-back on the information they receive from the administration. Information provided to the Board shall be rated for timeliness, accuracy, organization and presentation.
4. Implement the Administrative Intern Professional Development Program. Program participants should be selected by the 4th quarter of this year. Special attention will be given to the recruitment of people of color and other historically under-represented groups in administrative positions in all employment categories of the District. (principals, building services, etc.) A report on the program shall be provided to the BOE at least annually.
A quick note to thank the Madison School Board (Johnny Winston, Jr., President; Lawrie Kobza, Vice President; Carol Carstensen, Treasurer; Shwaw Vang, Clerk; Lucy Mathiak, Ruth Robarts and Arlene Silveira) for publicly discussing and addressing a number of issues this year:
The Superintendent's Review (something that was not done for a number of years until a few incumbents lost their seats).
A presentation on the redesign of Madison's high school curriculum scheduled for next week's School Board meeting has been scrapped for the immediate future, School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. confirmed late this morning.
"We'll hold off on changes until we get a better feel for how the process will work," Winston said.
Winston, other School Board members and members of the administration met this morning to discuss high school curriculum proposals, including changes in accelerated classes for freshmen and sophomores at East High.
Madison School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. said community outcry and confusion over East's plans to restructure its classes likely will dominate the board's discussion of reforming operations in the district's high schools. The meeting is set for 8 p.m. Monday in the auditorium at the Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton St.
"I'm sure we're going to hear a lot from the community," Winston said. "Board members want to hear it. They want it now."
Winston said he expects people riled about potential or recent changes at La Follette and West high schools also will attend.
The board, Winston said, needs to set direction for the district's schools and needs to be kept informed. He's opposed to eliminating classes for talented and gifted students. "We need to be enhancing them," he said.
It's essential, Winston said, for parents, students, teachers and the community to have a voice in any talks about changing the way schools are run.
"I really hope we can get this thing, whatever it is, in order," Winston said.
The uproar over proposed changes in East High School's curriculum has apparently prompted Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater to announce a halt to any plans to change programming at Madison's four major high schools.
Here's Rainwater's message to his principals:
To: John Broome, Bruce Dahmen, Alan Harris, Ed Holmes
From: Art Rainwater
Re: High School Redesign Proposal
On Monday, November 27, at the Board meeting I will be putting forth a proposal concerning our high schools. I believe that discussion concerning the way in which our schools prepare all students for post secondary education and employment in an increasingly global economy is too important to rush.
Interest in this topic is high and we can best serve our future students, our broader community and our beliefs as educators by taking the quality time necessary to hear from parents, students, staff, business people, post secondary institutions, and others who value what a high school education can provide.
I am asking you to cease any significant programmatic changes at each of your schools as this community dialogue progresses. We need a tableau rosa mentality that will allow for a free flow of ideas, an opportunity to solidify trust in our expertise, and a chance at a solid, exciting product at the end.
More Than English 10: Let's REALLY Talk About Our High Schools
First, I want to say BRAVO, RUTH, for putting it all together and bringing it on home to us. Thanks, too, to the BOE members who overrode BOE President Johnny Winston Jr's decision to table this important discussion. Finally, deepest thanks to all of the East parents, students and teachers who are speaking out ... and to the many West parents, students and teachers who have also spoken out over the past few years.
As we begin what will hopefully be a thoughtful and thoroughgoing community-wide conversation about what's going on in our high schools, I'd like to clear up some muddiness about what's happened at West in the past few years. I think it's important to have our facts straight and complete. In doing so -- and in comparing what's happened at West to what's now going on at East -- I'd like to draw on the image of an animal experiment (that apparently never happened). In one condition, a frog is put into a bath of cool water, the temperature is gradually raised to boiling, and the frog dies without a struggle. In another condition, a frog is put into a bath of boiling water, immediately jumps out, and lives to tell the tale. As I see it, West was put in the first condition. The administration implemented small changes over the course of several years, with the ultimate goal of turning 9th and 10th grades into two more years of middle school. Students and parents were lulled into thinking that everything was O.K. because, hey, what's one small change? East, in contrast, has been put in the second condition. There, the administration seems to have the same goal of turning 9th and 10th grade into two more years of middle school, but has introduced all of the changes at once. Like the frog placed in the boiling water, East has been shocked into strong reaction.
So what's been going on at West? Advanced learning opportunities have been gradually whittled away, that's what.
This year, as everyone knows, West HS implemented it's new core sophomore English curriculum, English 10. (Did you know that West has also implemented a single Social Studies 10 curriculum this year? More on that in a moment.) It is also true that some of the old English electives (perhaps 5 or 6 -- not the dozen that was recently reported somewhere else on this blog) are no longer offered at West. That's because they have been "rolled into" the single English 10 curriculum. Not necessarily a bad thing.
All West sophomores are now required to take English 10. West sophomores used to be able to choose their English courses from (almost) the full range of English electives. (Certain honors electives required the permission of the student's 9th grade English teacher.) Within English 10, students may elect to take an "embedded" honors option. From what we have heard from current sophomores and their parents, the implementation of this embedded honors option (which also now exists in biology and 10th grade social studies) has been highly variable across teachers. We have heard about one teacher who discouraged her students from taking the honors option because it was just more work. Another teacher, we have been told, lets her students sign up for the honors option but makes no distinction between the honors and non-honors students in the class, in terms of course work requirements. Yet another class we've heard about has 10 honors option students and is essentially functioning as an honors section because of the high level of student-led discussion. It does not appear that anyone is overseeing the implementation of the embedded honors "program" in English 10. Of course, West does not have a full-time TAG coordinator, as is being proposed for East.
Some other details --
While taking the required English 10 course, West sophomores can also take certain additional English electives (mostly the lower level, less challenging ones). Yes, that would mean taking two English courses in one or both semesters of 10th grade.
Finally, this year, a very small number (7 out of 500-plus) of West sophomores were "instepped" over English 10 and allowed into the full range of English electives as 10th graders. These accelerated placement decisions were, for the most part, based on these students' 8th grade WKCE scores in reading and language arts (taken during the first semester of 8th grade). Interestingly, 9th grade students were not allowed to use their 8th grade reading and language arts WKCE scores in order to be "instepped" over English 9. In fact, no West student is allowed to test out of English 9 anymore, although it used to be that some advanced 9th graders were allowed to skip over the second semester. In contrast, at Memorial -- the only other MMSD high school with a single 9th grade English curriculum right now -- 4 or 5 freshmen are allowed to skip English 9 and go right into English 10 Honors each year.
It is important to note that the chief reason the West community was given for the implementation of English 10 was, in a nutshell, the achievement gap. (Indeed, the achievement gap was the rationale for the entire Small Learning Communities initiative.) We were told that certain groups of students have high failure rates in English, as well as low participation rates in the more challenging English electives at West. The hope was that English 10 would boost these students' achievement and self-confidence, such that they would voluntarily elect to take the more challenging English electives as juniors and seniors. The thing is, West's English 9 was similarly intended to close that achievement/participation gap and -- according to a November, 2005, report written by SLC Evaluator Bruce King -- there is no evidence that English 9 has had an impact on what is clearly a very serious problem. That absence of evidence is why West parents pleaded with school and District officials last year to stop plans for implementing English 10 and instead take the time to evaluate and fix English 9. No one listened -- at West or "downtown" -- and West went ahead with its plans.
I mentioned that West has also implemented a single 10th grade social studies curriculum this year. The single curriculum replaces the three "flavors" of 10th grade social studies that used to exist. (West sophomores used to be able to choose between courses with a greater emphasis on a particular time in history -- e.g., the Middle Ages or the Ancient World.) A few years ago, there was also an integrated English-Social Studies option. It, too, has gone away. The overriding reason why these courses have disappeared is that they produced ability grouping; that is, higher performing and more highly motivated students were self-selecting into certain courses and not others, creating ad hoc honors classes. This was seen as a problem. The solution was to get rid of the classes.
I also mentioned that embedded honors options are now available in biology and Social Studies 10. I have not heard anything about how they are going. I do know, though, that many people see the embedded honors option in regular biology as a threat to the single section of Accelerated Biology that parents have had to work so hard to save in recent years. In contrast to the situation at West, the number of sections of Advanced/TAG Biology offered each year at LaFollette and East are adjusted to meet demand.
The SLC initiative has been "blamed" for many of the curricular changes that have been implemented at West -- though no one has ever explained to us why we couldn't have honors sections of many of these courses in each of the four SLC's, a plan that would increase the accessibility of honors courses and could easily be combined with efforts to increase the diversity of the students who take honors classes. (Actually, I've heard that some high-level administrators favor that plan. I am hoping they make their preference known soon.)
In any event, there are several important issues in all of this:
There is an absence of adequate school-based and/or District-based data supporting the specific changes being implemented (West) and proposed (East).
There is an absence of adequate evidence from the empirical literature supporting the specific changes being implemented (West) and proposed (East). (Why, even UW Professor Adam Gamoran told the Superintendent and BOE last January that they are operating on "belief." And did you know that research consistently shows that the students who are hurt the most by "de-tracking" are poor and minority students of high ability?)
It is not clear how the bulk of these changes are going to help the huge percentage of high school students in our District who are reading below grade level and who, therefore, are at risk for poor performance and less learning in most any other course they may take.
There has been an all-but-complete absence of adequate community dialogue about these issues and changes. The community has not been allowed to have a meaningful impact on the planning. There has been only the appearance of partnership. This is because plans have been presented to community members (sometimes even BOE members) after most of the decisions have been made. We are asked to "tweak" and "ask clarifying questions" only. At West, the stonewalling by District officials was more than severe.
The appropriate District professionals (for example, TAG staff) and their expertise have not been included in a respectful, substantive, meaningful way.
There is a cross-high school equity issue regarding how students of similar high ability and motivation are treated and what educational opportunities are made available to them. (State and federal mandates -- as well as the District's fear of litigation -- insures far greater equitability of educational services for other groups of students -- which is not to say they are necessarily well-served.)
As the East community experiences and reacts to a concentrated version of what the West community has experienced, dribbled over the past several years -- and especially as the BOE, the press, and even the District Administration take greater notice than ever before of what we are all saying to them, East and West -- I am hopeful that the tide may be turning, and that meaningful dialogue is about to begin.
Comments from East High Parents on Proposed Curriculum Changes
Viewpoints coming to Madison School board members illustrate the need for a thoughtful look at new goals or curriculums for our high schools.
Here are two samples from e-mail to the board on November 22.
Dear Board Members,
I read with dismay this morning about the East High School proposal to do away with TAG programming. I urge you think long and hard about the long term consequences of doing such a thing. I believe you will lose the support of many, many families. The jury is still very much out on hetergeneous groupings for everything, for every subject, all the time.
I believe as a teacher of 29 years and someone who has been a leader in teaching methods and dedicated to improving learning that this is not the way to go. I was the developer and lead teacher of MATC's Critical Literacy Project for teaching and learning improvement for many years. I taught cooperative learning strategies. To do it well takes expertise and lots of structure and planning--more so than a lecture. Individual accountability needs to be built in. And, I wouldn't recommend using it all the time. It is my impression that lots of sloppy "collaborative learning" is taking place. It often is a simplistic "put them in groups," give them something, and then assume they all work equally together like happy little bees. In the real world, it doesn't work that way.
I will be quite frank here. By the time kids get to 8th grade or earlier most of them HATE group work. You might really want to listen to the kids on this one. It's not organized well, the bright kids get the answers first, the lower achievers copy. The lower kids feel stupid. The research is done by one or two and the others ride along. In fact, there is almost an institutionalization of cheating and short cuts that is happening. As one young teen said, "If it shows scores going up it's because some kids are getting the answers from others."
I could go into some detail about O'Keefe Middle School and what happened there when they went to heterogeneous math classes in 6th and 7th grade. (Hopefully, the Algebra class taught by Hetzel will not also get the axe.) The little secret story many of you don't know is that after countless meetings with individual teachers and the principle and staff downtown that got us nowhere when parents of over 20 students tried to point out that the groups were not working for the bottom or the top, a group of parents was forced to hire a math teacher and teach a cohort of students outside of school, two days a week. To think that teachers will design great extensions to keep those who need greater challenge is somewhat naive. They are often thrown an extra assignment or two and that is it. And, I don't blame teachers--you've got so many students to deal with, it just becomes hard to reach out to all different levels.
I have two daughters at East High. Some of their classes are TAG and others are not. The first time they ever came to appreciate group work was when they were in their TAG classes. They were challenged. They didn't have to lie and cover up for other students who weren't doing their share. They could get down to work with others who were engaged. The TAG Biology class taught by Mr. Duvair is the jewel of the entire Madison School District and envy of every other high school.
Yes, we need to find ways to bring up the bottom and it may have to do with more engaging and inspiring kinds of teaching, and it may have to do with better preparation of basics. It may have to do with reaching down to a focus on 0-5 years of age when the foundation for learning is laid. An approach of just mix everyone for everything seems to me a cheap short cut to a larger challenge. On this note, I would encourage you to talk to Mr. Kelly of East High School . He retired last year, but still teaches the night high school completion program. Mr. Kelly is a brilliant teacher. He taught TAG English and inspired and challenged thousands of students. He teaches English at night school to low-achieving kids. He is brilliant in both contexts, and students thrive and achieve at both ends. If you were to ask him about mixing those two groups, I imagine he would say both would lose out.
I care deeply about low-achieving or simply disadvantaged students who were not tracked for university. I have spent almost three decades teaching them and honing my craft. It takes different things to reach different students sometimes. What they need may differ at times. I myself am for a mixed approach -- to have some heterogeneous and some homogeneous groupings. East seems to have done this. My daughters get a mix of experiences.
In conclusion, I would ask that you not follow the seemingly seductively simple solution of hetergeneous groupings. You might want to consider ways to recruit your best and most inspiring teachers to teach at both ends of the spectrum. For example, if you are not in Mr. Duvairs TAG Biology, but his regular biology, you get a great class. Same for Mr. Kelly.
The Board needs to think about the long term and not losing more middle class families from the public schools. You need to meet the needs of all students and you can't have a viable policy that takes down some to bring others up. We must find ways to bring up without bringing down. I am writing because I am worried about the future of the public schools in Madison . So far we have held our own with a socio-economic mix. That may start to change in a big way and it would be tragic for our district.
To all concerned: As the controversy over the TAG program heats up, I thought I'd share the observations of my son who is a freshman at East. He is not in TAG, nor is he a student in trouble. In other words, he's one of the large middle whose voices unfortunately are not often heard. (He would also be annoyed with his mother if he knew I was sending this...)
Let me first explain that my son has a vantage point that is at the very least, unusual, if not unique. He has friends in TAG and he has friends who are barely getting by. He is friends with white kids, African-American kids, and Latino kids. He has friends who come from Maple Bluff and friends who have been homeless from time to time. As he put it, "I have a pass to just about all of the groups, except! maybe the jocks." My son also has an uncanny knack for sizing up a situation, and unsual insight into people, especially when we consider that he is a 14 year old boy.
When I asked him about this controversy, he said that the TAG program as it is currently designed creates what he called an "elite ghetto." He said the perception among so many is that the "TAG kids" as they are known, "get everything." He said that right now the school can be divided into three groups "the entitled, the kids who are hurting, and everybody else." When I asked about "the kids who are hurting" he said he knew of too many kids who are simply passing time until they drop out. He described these kids as overwhelmingly African-American and Latino. He said it was truly sad because "there are kids in that group who are so smart. No, they don't do well in school, but they have something to say. They know a lot about the world." When I asked whether there was any interaction between the TAG group and this other group he said, "You've got to be kidding. I'm not sure they know that each other exists. They have nothing in common." Then he said, "something has to change." I also asked whether there were any kids of color in the TAG group and he said "maybe one or two. Maybe."
I asked if making honors/advanced/TAG/AP (whatever you want to call them) options accessible to more kids would help at all, he said that many people in the "everybody else" group would certainly benefit, and he knew of many kids of color who would probably be successfully involved. As for the kids in tough shape, he said, "I hope Mr. Harris can come up with something."
Like I said, my son wouldn't be thrilled if he knew I were passing this on. Nevertheless, I thought that his perspective was something that needed to be shared.
Superintendent Rainwater: "We need to dramatically change our high schools."
On Monday, November 27, the Madison School Board will begin to address rumors about major changes coming to our high schools. There are some realities behind the rumors.
For example, West High School substantially reduced the English courses for tenth graders this year. The principal at East High School met with parents last week. He delivered a message that many parents understood as an explanation that decisions on curriculum changes at EHS have already been made and would be carried out. Period. He has since said that he welcomes student and parent viewpoints. End of Gifted Class Drawing Protest And last month there was--to say the least--confusion and misinformation about when students can opt to take college courses for high school credit.
However, the main source of community comment and concerns may be Superintendent Rainwater's October editorial announcing his commitment to redesign of the high schools. Changing our high schools The editorial that went sent to homes across the district via student backpacks is long on generalities and short on specifics, giving rise to the kinds of questions that I have been hearing at work.
In my opinion, now is the right time for the school board to set parameters and goals for changes in the high schools. That's our role. We should hear the ideas coming from the schools and their communities as well as those coming from central administration before any process to redesign the schools goes forward.
I welcome both an on-going board discussion and community public discussion of possible changes to our high schools, particularly changes that could raise academic goals for all students and ensure a wide range of academic challenging courses and activities.
The Madison School Board has given Superintendent Art Rainwater a set of specific orders to accomplish in the coming year, including several directives to take an in-depth look at the district's entire math curriculum.
In the past several years, area math educators have expressed concern about the effectiveness of the Madison district's reliance on a reform math curriculum, which emphasizes word-based problem-solving.
Another goal board members mandated for the superintendent for next year is that he collaborate with them and other advisers on a plan to tell community members why parents and guardians should send their children to Madison public schools.
In addition, the board will evaluate the administration on providing information in a clear, accurate, concise and timely manner.
By Susan Troller, The Capital Times, November 21, 2006
A fourth goal requires the district management to implement an intern program to encourage people of color and other historically underrepresented groups to consider a broad range of administrative jobs in the district.
"I certainly accept and support these four good goals," Rainwater said in an interview this morning. "Like every school year, when you have limited resources, 25,000 students to educate and you want them all to learn, you have many, many things on your plate."
He added that there have been questions in the past about the math curriculum and that he welcomes the opportunity to bring together experts in math and math education to really look at how local students are doing in this critical subject.
In the past, School Board member Ruth Robarts, chair of the Human Relations Committee, has been critical of the administration. She welcomed the new goals for the administration.
"As a board, I think we will be in a much more favorable position to make decisions," she said. "I think this is what the public and the community expect from us."
In addition to new performance goals, the School Board gave Rainwater a review of his 2005-06 performance. Board members rated him either "strong" or "proficient" in the categories of district management, board relations, community communications, and staff supervision and evaluation.
In the category of professional growth and development, board members unanimously gave Rainwater a strong rating. Other rating categories include: exemplary, improvement needed and unsatisfactory.
Delay on high school courses: A presentation on the redesign of Madison's high school curriculum scheduled for next week's School Board meeting has been scrapped for the immediate future, School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. confirmed late this morning.
"We'll hold off on changes until we get a better feel for how the process will work," Winston said.
Winston, other School Board members and members of the administration met this morning to discuss high school curriculum proposals, including changes in accelerated classes for freshmen and sophomores at East High.
Those changes were presented last week by Principal Alan Harris, and have drawn fire from students and parents, who have complained there was not enough opportunity for community input.
"I think we need a more inclusive process," Winston said.
Winston added that he thought all areas of the district's high school redesign might be reconsidered, including La Follette High School's four-block scheduling system and the controversial, undifferentiated core English program for grades 9 and 10 at West High.
E-mail: stroller@madison.com
"This is a discussion killer and it's an education killer because it's going to make kids feel uncomfortable," Collin said Monday of the emerging plan, which would take effect in the fall.
This morning, Collin and other students - he says it may involve 100 of the school's 1,834 students - plan to protest the planned changes by walking out of the school at 2222 E. Washington Ave. Some may try to meet with Superintendent Art Rainwater at his Downtown office.
East Principal Alan Harris said he's heard talk of a student protest. Students refusing to attend class would be dealt with for insubordination, he said, and could face suspension, particularly if he determines their conduct is unsafe.
Harris said he's met with parents, staff members and students, and more private and group meetings are planned, to hear their concerns.
However, Harris said he believes he remains on the right track. East, he said, must change.
Read the extensive discussion on the Madison School District Administration's High School redesign plans here. The Madison School Board will meet to discuss the proposed high school changes on November 27, 2006.
BOE has completed the evaluation of the Superintendent
The Madison Board of Education has completed the evaluation of Superintendent Art Rainwater for the 2005-06 school year. The Board met several times since September in executive session to complete the Superintendent Appraisal Report and discuss goals for this year. We also discussed the goals from last year in open session, which the Superintendent has successfully completed.
The Superintendent was evaluated in five areas: District Management, Board Relations, Community Communication & Relationships, Staff Supervision & Evaluation and Professional Growth & Relationships. He was ranked using the following scale: Exemplary, Strong, Proficient, Improvement Needed and Unsatisfactory. His scores were as follows:
District Management: Scores qualitatively fell between the rating of Proficient and Strong.
Board Relations: Scores qualitatively fell between the rating of Proficient and Strong.
Community Communication & Relationships: Scores qualitatively fell between the rating of Proficient and Strong.
Staff Supervision & Evaluation: Scores qualitatively fell between the rating of Proficient and Strong.
Professional Growth & Development: Score was in the rating of Strong.
In addition to completing the appraisal report, the Board and Superintendent have mutually agreed to four goals for this year that include: (1) development of a Math Task Force; (2) development of a plan to promote the MMSD; (3) evaluation of information given to the members of the Board; and (4) implementation of the Administrative Intern Professional Development Program.
In conclusion, evaluating the Superintendent and setting goals are important responsibilities for the Board of Education. It is imperative that the Board and Superintendent work together for the betterment of the school district. As Board President, I would like to thank the members of the Madison Board of Education (Lawrie Kobza, Carol Carstensen, Ruth Robarts, Shwaw Vang, Lucy Mathiak and Arlene Silveira) for their open, honest and respectful conversations that allowed all board members to fully participate in this evaluation process. I would also like to thank Superintendent Art Rainwater for his hard work, dedication and willingness to work with the elected members of the Board of Education to collaborate on our challenges and celebrate our accomplishments in the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Celeste Roberts posted the following comment in an earlier thread, and it's too good to get lost in the comments section. It deserves recognition on its own.
Captain Rainwater of the MMSD Intrepid, renowned 'round the world for his feckless bravery and singlemindedness, stands at the helm of his beloved vessel and surveys the icy waters ahead.
A crew member approaches. "Captain, sir, we've just received an urgent radio message. Satellite photos show us bearing down on a large iceberg, and nearby ships respectfully asking us if we are monitoring this?" Captain growls, "Well, what do the instruments show?" "Nothing, sir." Captain, glaring, "Well, what are you standing there for? Back to your post." "But sir, what shall I tell the other ships?" "Tell??? Tell them NOTHING," roars the captain. Some moments later, a loud cry is heard. "Ahoy! Iceberg spotted ahead." Soon the deck is filled with sailors scanning the foggy seas ahead. The Captain impassively stands at the helm, maintaining his course. "Captain, what shall we do? Why don't you turn the ship, call for help?" cries one sailor, despairing at the Captain's apparent lack of reaction to the impending disaster.
Aroused from his reverie, the Captain surveys the crowd of panicked sailors surrounding him. "D'ya all see that iceberg there?" "Yes, oh yes," the moan rises. "I'll show you what I'm gonna do. Look, here, I'll make the iceberg vanish. This is a brand-spankin' new magnetic/chemical invisibility screen. The latest technology right here on our ship." Captain holds up a large black box with a big button on it that says 'PRESS ME.'
"Now in order for this here gadget to work properly, I gotta have your full cooperation. Everyone close your eyes and repeat after me while I fire this baby up: There is no iceberg. There is no iceberg. There is no iceberg....Good" As the crew obediently repeats the mantra, Captain Rainwater aims the box at the looming iceberg, presses the button, and incredibly, it disappears. "O.K., you can all open your eyes, now. Look, is the iceberg gone?"
Astonished murmurs fill the deck. They all crane their necks, but the iceberg is nowhere to be seen. Just then, the same timid crewman whom we first encountered bringing the Captain bad news at the beginning of our tragic tale, approaches the Captain again. "Sir, I've just gotten another message from the other ship. They are tracking our approach to the iceberg and respectfully are asking if, ah, if you are out of your mind. Sir, if I might make a suggestion, it is conceivable that our instruments are not operating properly." Another sailor approaches from the other side. "Well, what is it?" barks Captain. "Sir, beggin' your humble pardon, but I'm alooking and looking where that iceberg was, and I think I can still see it a bit. It's kinda hidden, but when I really look hard I can see it behind sort of a silvery screen. I think maybe it IS still there."
The Captain turns toward him, black rage filling his eyes. "So, you see the iceberg. Look carefully now. Do you see it now?" "Um, yyyyes, sir. It's over there." With a quick movement, the Captain shoves the hapless sailor overboard. In a matter of seconds, he sinks below the waves and is drowned. "Hm! Problem solved. Now you don't see it anymore. Anyone else still seeing that iceberg?" In unison, a chorus from the terrified crew, "No, SIR!" .....
How can we turn this story around? Maybe a mutiny by the ship's officers? Put the Captain off in a lifeboat and quickly change course?
Montgomery County public schools this year passed a milestone in college preparation: Half of the 9,737 black high school students are enrolled in honors or Advanced Placement courses.
Five years ago, barely one-third of African Americans participated in such classes, despite the county's reputation as a national leader in college prep. Now, a black student in Montgomery is more likely to take an AP test than a white student elsewhere in the nation.
Kalema took all the honors courses available to her in the ninth grade, then progressed into AP. As a senior, she is taking AP geography, calculus and English literature. She partly credits her counselor, Scott Woo, with her advancement.
"It's always been Mr. Woo saying, 'I think you can take this class,' " she said.
The county's achievement is striking because the national surge in Advanced Placement testing has largely left black students behind.
The success of urban schoolteacher Jaime Escalante with a group of minority AP students in East Los Angeles in the 1980s convinced public educators that motivation and hard work might be just as important as standardized test scores in predicting AP success. Over the past few years, that philosophy has become pervasive in the Washington region.
Principals and teachers in Montgomery high schools began looking for reasons to include students in AP courses, rather than reasons to keep them out. The process evolved into a science: All students now take the PSAT, or Preliminary SAT, a strong predictor of AP potential, in the ninth grade. Principals get spreadsheets that allow them to sort students by PSAT score and grade-point average to identify those capable of AP study not enrolled in an AP course.
Kalema was being groomed for AP while still in middle school. She took Algebra I, a high school course, in the eighth grade; the school system has dramatically expanded advanced math study in elementary and middle schools as a pipeline to future AP and IB study.
A week ago, I said people who want change in the MMSD are a bunch of damn fools. We keep raising issues and making suggestions, but nothing changes. The champions of management without input must laugh themselves to sleep every night, I thought.
However, the forces of board and citizen control may have gained an upper hand in the last week:
The board proposed an independent review of the MMSD math curriculum when the superintendent defended it as good as any other math curriculum available and proposed adding math coaches.
The board proposed a goal for the superintendent to “Provide information to the Board in a clear, accurate, complete yet concise, and timely manner.”
Parents didn’t back down and said the central administration (not individual guidance counselors) had to clarify its own policies on credit for courses taken outside of the MMSD. AND, the board agreed to discuss the issue in committee. (In the last few years, board committees never met, and when they did, they just listened to presentations by the administration.)
The board seems to want to examine the dumbing down of high school curriculum. (The administration calls it high school redesign, but all the rest of us know its dumbing down.)
Lawrie Kobza uncovered the administration’s practice of proposing an out-of-balance budget. (Previous board approved budgets with barely a single probing question.)
The expenditure of $1.34 million for a Madison Virtual Campus came to light and may be an item for discussion on a future board agenda.
Could it be true? Could the board, parents, and citizens be taking control of the Madison schools away from the administration?
There's been a fascinating school board discussion over the past few weeks as the 2006/2007 $332M+ Madison schools budget is finalized.
(about 41 minutes into this 61 minute video clip) Lawrie Kobza:
"Why did our equity go down this past year since we, the board, passed a balanced budget in 2005/2006? Why did it go down by $2.8M (about a 1% variance in last year's $319M+ budget)?
Answer: "Negative expenditure of $6M in salaries (tuition income was down, special ed high incidence aid was down) $5.9M "structural deficit in place"."
Art Rainwater:
"The way we have attempted to deal with maintaining the quality of education as long as we could was to budget very, very aggressively, realizing that we had an out of fund balance ($5.9M in 2006/2007). We made the decision 7 years ago or so to budget aggressively and try to manage to that budget believing that we would use less fund equity over time than if we set aside a set amount. So that's been our approach. That fund equity has now come down to the point that we believe we can't do that any more and we will not bring you a balanced budget that is aggressive particularly where it gets into aggressive on the revenue side in how much efficiency we believe we can budget. So, what the effect of that is to increase the amount you have to pay.
Lawrie Kobza:
We budgeted under this CFO/COO account, we budgeted that we were going to find $6.1M somewhere without saying where, and we didn't. We found all but 2.7M of that. In this year's budget, we have the same type of thing. We have budgeted that we're going to find $5.9M somewhere. So, while we can look at all of our budget items, oh, we're doing great we're right on budget for salaries, transportation, for whatever. We can't just meet our budget, we have to do $5.9M better than our budget. We're going to take this up in the Finance committee to see if there is a different way we can present some of this, to be able to track it.
Roger Price mentioned that this was not a new item, but was in place when he arrived in the mid 1990's.
Ruth Robarts asked about a February 2006 consultant's forecast of the District's equity versus Roger Price's Numbers (52 minutes). Ruth also asked about the financial implications of the District's retirement buyout commitments through 2009. "I've been on the Board a long time and did not see in the documents I've seen that kind of structural deficit".
Bottom Line: Thanks to Lawrie Kobza's digging, the public knows about the Madison School District's $6M "structural deficit". This also means that next year's balanced budget will require significantly greater reductions in spending increases, or "cost to continue approach" than we've seen in the past. It would also be interesting to see how our District's "equity" or cash reserves have declined over the years.
The good news regarding the budget's "Fuzzy Math, or the balanced budget that isn't" (there must be some)? The discussion happened publicly, on MMSDTV, and the community is now aware of looming larger budget changes than we've seen in the past. Unfortunately, I've seen no mention of this in the traditional media.
Last year, amid the uproar that followed West High School’s replacement of more than a dozen elective offerings with a core curriculum for 10th-grade English, Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater told the school board that such changes would be a “major direction” in the district’s future.
Some people see signs that this shift is now occurring.
Concerns about eliminating course offerings are being aired at East High School, which has traditionally offered an array of elective courses in core subject areas. Principal Alan Harris is expected to unveil the plan at a parent meeting on Thursday; officials declined to release details before then.
“There are a lot of reasons to be concerned,” says Lucy Mathiak, a school board member whose son attends East. “It does sound a lot like the West model, and that’s not what East parents asked for,” especially those who participated in this spring’s planning group called East 2012.
According to the agenda for the Board of Education meeting on November 20, 2006:
It is recommended that the Board approve the 2006-07 goals for the Superintendent that require the Superintendent to:
a. Initiate and complete a comprehensive, independent and neutral review and assessment of the District's K-12 math curriculum.
The review and assessment shall be undertaken by a task force whose members are appointed by the Superintendent and approved by the BOE. Members of the task force shall have math and math education expertise and represent a variety of perspectives regarding math education.
The task force shall prepare and present to the BOE a preliminary outline of the review and assessment to be undertaken by the task force. The outline shall, at a minimum, include:
analysis of math achievement data for MMSD K-12 students, including analysis of all math sub-tests scores disaggregated by student characteristics and schools;
analysis of performance expectations for MMSD K-12 students;
an overview of math curricula, including MMSD's math curriculum;
a discussion of how to improve MMSD student achievement; and
recommendations on measures to evaluate the effectiveness of MMSD's math curriculum. The task force is to present the preliminary outline and a timeline to the BOE for comment and approval.
The task force is to prepare a written draft of the review and
assessment, consistent with the approved preliminary outline. The draft is to be presented to the BOE for review and comment.
The task force is to prepare the final report on the review and assessment.
b. Develop in collaboration with the Board and external advisors, a plan for the District to communicate to the community why parents or guardians should send their children to MMSD schools. Specific tasks include
determining what parents and guardians consider important in selecting schools;
determining whether and how MMSD schools provide what parents and guardians consider important in selecting schools;
using the information gained from parents and guardians, developing a vision of what MMSD should be in the future; and
developing a communications plan to promote MMSD schools and why parents or guardians should send their children to them. Timeframe to develop: 6 months.
c. Provide information to the Board in a clear, accurate, complete yet concise, and timely manner. The Board will evaluate progress on this goal through the use of a rating sheet for Board members to give periodic feed-back on the information they receive from the administration. Information provided to the Board shall be rated for timeliness, accuracy, organization and presentation.
d. Implement the Administrative Intern Professional Development Program. Program participants should be selected by the 4th quarter of this year. Special attention will be given to the recruitment of people of color and other historically under-represented groups in administrative positions in all employment categories of the District. (principals, building services, etc.) A report on the program shall be provided to the BOE at least annually.
Tim Schell marvels at the difficulty of serving on a local school board, and I certainly share his amazement at the volume of information presented to board members. With all of that information and time necessary to understand it, how can board effectively oversee the management of a school district? To me, effective means being certain the boards decision's and the actions of the administration reflect the educational goals and values of a community.
I'd think that a board could function most effectively if a district had a clear plan for its future -- clear enough that the community can understand and support it; clear enough that the volumes of information can be understood in the context of the plan; clear enough that a board can keep the administration and itself focused on the plan; clear enough that new programs, new laws, new grants can be assessed against the plan.
Little of the above seems to apply to the MMSD, so the board's oversight of the administration happens piecemeal, largely in response to community screams about changes made unilaterally by the administration.
The disussion of the Madison Virtual Campus stands as an illustration of my point; the board and the community seem to know little about it; no one seems to have discussed whether the Madison Virtual Campus might fit into a grand plan or impact other activities of the district. Just to list a few questions, could the virtual campus satisfy the requests for AP and other advanced classes? Could it reduce the need for more classrooms on the edges of the community? Could it actually reduce MMSD expenditures? Could it be used to raise academic achievement for students who are not up to grade level standards? And the big question, what's the goal or goals of the Madison Virtual Campus?
Back to my original point, the MMSD board could more effectively oversee the Madison Virtual Campus if the MMSD had a clear plan and a clear statement of how the Madison Virtual Campus fits into that plan.
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Actually, I think the administration has a plan (maybe not a grand plan) which guides board and administration decisions. The plan seems to be one to close the achievement gap (and cut costs perhaps) by dumbing down the curriculum. The plan helps me make sense of apparently unrelated decisions, such as English 10 at West, changes at East, and restricting students from accessing courses from institutions outside of the district.
In response to requests from a number of legislators, this office has prepared information on the amount of general school aids to be received by each of the 425 school districts in 2006-07. This memorandum describes the three types of aid funded from the general school aids appropriation and the reductions made to general school aid eligibility related to the Milwaukee and Racine charter school program and the Milwaukee parental choice program. The attachment provides data on each school district's membership, equalized value, shared costs and general school aids payment, based on the October 15, 2006, equalization aid estimate prepared by the
Department of Public Instruction (DPI).
General School Aids
General school aids include equalization, integration (Chapter 220), and special adjustment aids. In 2006-07, $4,722.7 million from the general fund is appropriated for general school aids. Of the total amount of funding provided, including adjustments, 414 school districts are eligible for $4,620.4 million in equalization aid, 28 districts are eligible for $89.0 million in integration aid and 50 districts are eligible for $13.3 million in special adjustment aid.
Equalization Aid.
A major objective of the equalization aid formula is tax base equalization. The formula operates under the principle of equal tax rate for equal per pupil expenditures. In pure form, this means that a school district's property tax rate does not depend on the property tax base of the district, but rather on the level of expenditures. The provision of state aid through the formula allows a district to support a given level of per pupil expenditures with a similar local property tax rate as other districts with the same level of per pupil
expenditures, regardless of property tax wealth. There is an inverse relationship between equalization aid and property valuations. Districts with low per pupil property valuations receive a larger share of their costs through the formula than districts with high per pupil property valuations.
Madison, with 24,792 students will receive $56,984,764 (17.16% of the $332M+ budget) from the State (via income, sales taxes and fees).
"No district operating budget has been used to build the Virtual Campus," according to the memo (original emphasis).
Based on Johnny Winston's comment, "Why don't people know about this," I can only assume that the administration spent $1.34 million without ever informing the Board of Education. That's just plain wrong (my emphasis).
The proposed tax rate, however, is $1.83 per $1,000 of equalized value, down from $1.97 this year. That means the owner of a $250,000 house would save about $35 on the tax bill from the previous year.
"(Vrakas) is calling it a tax decrease because the impact on some homeowners is that their tax bill may go down a couple bucks," said Christine Lufter, president of the Waukesha Taxpayers League.
Focusing on tax rates is "the most deceptive way of selling a budget. It's not an indicator of government efficiency," she said.
Instead, she and Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Association, say taxpayers should focus on the entire budget picture.
"Taxpayers should not pay attention to the tax rate. It's a function of both taxes and (property) values. And in the last 10 to 15 years, when values have been going up at a pretty rapid clip, it becomes almost a no-brainer to drop the tax rate," Berry said. "Playing games with the tax rate is my No. 1 pet peeve."
A story by Susan Troller in the Cap Times reports:
Two elementary schools at opposite ends of the Madison Metropolitan School District are bursting at the seams and may face boundary changes next year to deal with crowding.
Lake View Elementary on the northeast side of the city and Chavez Elementary on the southwest side are both well over their intended capacities, with Lake View at 116 percent and Chavez at 108 percent.
Lake View has an enrollment of 309 students, but is designed for 266. Chavez, with an intended capacity of 602 students, has an enrollment this year of 652 students.
Lake View has an enrollment of 309 students, but is designed for 266. Chavez, with an intended capacity of 602 students, has an enrollment this year of 652 students.
At a Long Range Planning Committee meeting Monday night, School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. noted that in the past, Lake View Elementary parents and staff members said they would prefer dealing with crowding issues internally rather than face boundary changes.
"A couple of years ago we knew Lake View was crowded. They doubled up a room and put some special programs on a cart to free up classroom space. We'll talk again with the school community. Boundary changes may be part of the dialogue now," Winston said.
Although crowding at Chavez will ease when the district's new far west side school at the Linden Park site opens in two years, concerns about the continuing population crunch next year may require action by fall 2007, School Board member Arlene Silveira said.
"We are committed to looking at some solutions to crowding at these two schools. Their numbers are just too high," Silveira said.
At Monday's meeting, Mary Gulbrandsen, district chief of staff, suggested that an option for next year could be moving about 60 students who live in the High Ridge Trail neighborhood in Fitchburg from Chavez to Thoreau Elementary. To accommodate this influx of students at Thoreau, 20-some students living in the Allied neighborhood would move from Thoreau, and be given the choice of attending Crestwood or Stephens Elementary. The Allied students would then attend Memorial High School, and the High Ridge Trail students would attend West.
This particular student switch had already been suggested as an option when the new school opens in 2008, but would be moved up a year if approved as the correct strategy for dealing with current crowding at Chavez.
Gulbrandsen said the administration also looked at the idea of outposting students from Chavez for a year or two while the new school is being built.
Outposting typically involves moving an entire grade from one school to another where there is excess capacity. But Gulbrandsen said there did not appear to be any single school on the west side where four classrooms would be available.
"We'd like the administration to take a look at the options, and crunch the numbers in terms of impact, including how it would affect the various grades at each school," Silveira said.
She also noted that it would be important to look at how the proposed changes would affect the numbers of low-income students at each school.
And parents shouldn't only be concerned about math instruction. They should be looking hard at the reading and writing parts of their kids' educations, too. Are they learning grammar? Can they spell? Punctuate? Understand what they are reading? Most of the Ivy League English majors whose writing I grade have trouble in these areas, which suggests to me that most everyone their age does. I tend to assume that the students I see are among the most linguistically competent students of their generation--but there are still a lot of issues with things such as run-on sentences, comma splices, murky phrasing, limited vocabulary, dangling modifiers, spelling, and so on. That's the legacy of a pedagogical attitude toward literacy that mirrors the one the mother above encountered when she inquired why her son wasn't being taught basic math skills. When I taught high school English in a boarding school a couple of years ago, I found that a great many students there had abysmal language skills. Some bordered on functional illiteracy. When I asked whether the school taught grammar at any point, the head of school told me that teaching grammar thwarted students' creativity and stifled their interest in reading. The utter inadequacy of that outlook really hits home when you realize that it amounts to lying to parents and kids about their kids' abilities, and that it involves sending kids off to college without the skills they will need to succeed there.
For the second time in a generation, education officials are rethinking the teaching of math in American schools.
The changes are being driven by students’ lagging performance on international tests and mathematicians’ warnings that more than a decade of so-called reform math — critics call it fuzzy math — has crippled students with its de-emphasizing of basic drills and memorization in favor of allowing children to find their own ways to solve problems.
At the same time, parental unease has prompted ever more families to pay for tutoring, even for young children. Shalimar Backman, who put pressure on officials here by starting a parents group called Where’s the Math?, remembers the moment she became concerned.
“When my oldest child, an A-plus stellar student, was in sixth grade, I realized he had no idea, no idea at all, how to do long division,” Ms. Backman said, “so I went to school and talked to the teacher, who said, ‘We don’t teach long division; it stifles their creativity.
Grass-roots groups in many cities are agitating for a return to basics. Many point to California’s standards as a good model: the state adopted reform math in the early 1990s but largely rejected it near the end of the decade, a turnaround that led to rising math achievement.
“The Seattle level of concern about math may be unusual, but there’s now an enormous amount of discomfort about fuzzy math on the East Coast, in Maine, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and now New Jersey is starting to make noise,” said R. James Milgram, a math professor at Stanford University. “There’s increasing understanding that the math situation in the United States is a complete disaster.”
The first session will be hosted by the Falk PTO as part of their regular meeting, between 6:30 and 8:00 pm on Tuesday November 14th in the LMC. The second will be Wednesday November 15 at 11:30 am at Centro Hispano, 810 W. Badger Rd.
That’s the official information. Unofficially (as a Task Force member, but not speaking for the Task Force), I’d like to explain a little about this phase of our work. What we are seeking is kind of a reality check, a general sense of what others think about equity, what is important to them and what they would like an equity policy to do. We want to consider this information as we prepare our report to the Board of Education. When we finish with our recommendations and present them to the Board of Education there will be plenty of opportunities to weigh in on the specifics.
The key players involved - a group that you would not have found at the same table often in the past - are the GMC, which is generally composed of business and civic leaders; the Milwaukee School Board; schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos; and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, the union representing more than 8,000 MPS employees.
Sister Joel Read, the retired president of Alverno College who chairs the Greater Milwaukee Committee's education committee, said Milwaukee is a risk-averse city and change in MPS would involve risks for everyone, but she was optimistic about what will result from the effort.
"I think there's a new day here in Milwaukee," she said.
The effort will begin with more than two dozen meetings beginning this week and running into January with a wide range of people who have stakes in the success of MPS. The meetings will include sessions with teachers, principals, business leaders, parents and philanthropists. There will be a public session in each of the eight school board districts
Problem: Find the slope and y-intercept of the equation 10 = x – 2.5.
Solution: The equation 10 = x – 2.5 is a specific case of the equation y = x – 2.5, which has a slope of 1 and a y-intercept of –2.5.
This problem comes from a 7th grade math quiz that accompanies a widely used textbook series for grades 6 to 8 called Connected Mathematics Program or CMP.[1] The solution appears in the CMP Teacher’s Guide and is supported by a discussion of sample student work.
Richard Askey, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reported, “I was told about this problem by a parent whose child took this quiz. The marking was exactly as in the text.”[2] Students instructed and graded in this way learn incorrect mathematics, and teachers who know better may be undermined by their less informed peers, armed with the “solution.” This example is far from the only failing of CMP. Among other shortcomings, there is no instruction on division of fractions in the entire three year CMP series, and the other parts of fraction arithmetic are treated poorly.[3]
Is CMP just an anomaly? Unfortunately not. CMP is only one of more than a dozen defective K-12 math programs funded by the National Science Foundation. More specifically, the NSF programs were created and distributed through grants from the Education and Human Resources (EHR) Division within the NSF. In contrast to the NSF’s admirable and important role in supporting fundamental scientific research, the EHR has caused, and continues to cause, damage to K-12 mathematics education.
The agenda of the meeting was to cover which topics would be the focus of this academic year's meetings, and received a report on ESL from the ESL Coordinator Amy Christianson.
Many parents are actively researching educational options for their young children. Increasingly, they are expecting more from public schools than the one-size-fits-all model schools have traditionally offered. Across the state, school districts are opening more charter schools and boosting their offerings of online and virtual classes to diversify educational approaches.
Some see these alternatives as necessary for the future of public school districts — especially urban ones struggling to eliminate the racial and income achievement gaps while expanding opportunities for both struggling and high-performing students.
“While the system serves many children well, it doesn’t serve all of them well,” says Senn Brown of the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association. “By recognizing that kids learn differently, and by creating options to serve them, school districts do better for all kids.”
Take away the glasses, and Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater bears a passing resemblance to Rodney Dangerfield, the late comedian whose tag line was, “I don’t get no respect.”
The Madison Metropolitan School District has compiled an impressive record of student achievement through the years and has shown heartening progress in reducing the racial performance gap — a gap that has been documented in many districts across the land. But despite this, Rainwater has faced an increasingly restive constituency and a growing public perception, justified or not, that Madison schools are in decline
I would like to thank our community for their passage of the referendum on November 7th. This referendum will build a new school in Linden Park, finance the cafeteria and remodeling of Leopold Elementary and refinance existing debt…
Board committees have been working hard this year and have been at the forefront of the meeting calendar. Here’s an update.
Finance and Operations (Lawrie Kobza, Chair) continues its work on the People’s Budget document and analyzing transportation costs.
Long Range Planning (Carol Carstensen, Chair) received reports from the City of Madison and Fitchburg planning depts. about housing developments and its affect on the district. They also received reports on enrollment which is 24,576, up 86 students from last year.
Human Resources (Ruth Robarts, Chair) received a report on the status and impact of health care costs from Bob Butler from the Wisc. Assoc. of School Boards. The committee also discussed handing complaints of staff.
Communications (Arlene Silveira, Chair) discussed legislative issues and supported them such as Rep. Spencer Black’s proposal to move security expenditures outside the revenue cap and supporting educational leadership for all students. The committee also discussed their next steps for community conversations.
Community Partnerships (Lucy Mathiak, Chair) had a panel of school principals discuss best practices for parent participation. They also discussed a timetable and plan for parent input sessions.
Performance and Achievement (Shwaw Vang, Chair) will receive a report on District's Fine Arts programs and discuss credits for courses outside the MMSD.
For a listing of the board calendar, please log onto www.mmsd.org/boe/…
On Oct. 31st the board approved the tax levy of $10.02 per $1,000 of assessed property value, down from $10.43 last year. Taxes on the typical city home will increase by $74, or 3.2 percent. The board will complete it’s work on the overall budget soon… We are close to completing our evaluation of the Superintendent and goal setting… The board has ratified two collective bargaining agreements with Local 60 custodial and food service employees. The custodians agreed to a 2.0 % wage increase for the first year and a 2.9 % increase in the second year. The food service workers agreed to a 3.25% the first year and 4.25% the second. These wage increases were the result of savings passed on to the employees by their agreeing to a new three-HMO employee health insurance option for the employees that includes Group Health Cooperative, Physicians Plus and Dean Health Plan effective 1/1/07.
District News:
Centro Hispano recognized Cherokee Principal Karen Seno, with its 2006 Partnership Award for outstanding leadership in promoting academic achievement for Latino students…
Building Services Director Douglas Pearson accepted the Governor's Energy Efficiency Award and a check for more than $45,000 on behalf of the MMSD. The award recognizes the districts on-going commitment to energy conservation that results in significant cost savings for the District…
East High teacher, Mary Klecker received an Honorary Recognition award in October from the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. It is the highest honor bestowed, recognizing outstanding contributions toward the development of agriculture, protection of natural resources and improvement of rural living…
The Madison West Rocket Club has won yet another NASA Student Launch Initiative grant. This is West’s fourth SLI grant in three years…
The LaFollette Boys’ cross–country team, led by Coach Brady Nicols, won it’s first-ever WIAA state title…
Congratulations to East and Memorial for their participation in the state soccer tournament. This was East’s first ever appearance at the state tournament. Memorial was the eventual champion in division 1…
Congratulations to all the schools in the MMSD for exceeding the $10,000 milestone needed to establish their endowment fund for the Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools! Endowments are held at the Madison Community Foundation.
Your Input Is Needed:
The Equity Task Force, appointed by the MMSD Board of Education, is seeking community and district employee input regarding aspects of a proposed equity policy. To facilitate gathering community input, a brief online survey is available. To take the survey, please go to http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/boe/equity/survey.htm or go to the district's home page www.mmsd.org and click on the top link under "News from MMSD Today".
Thank you for your interest and support of the MMSD.
Johnny Winston, Jr., President, Madison School Board
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
Want district information? Go to www.mmsd.org
Write to the entire school board at comments@madison.k12.wi.us.
Sign up for MMSD communications at http://mmsd.org/lists/newuser.cgi
Watch school board meetings and other district programs on MMSD Channel 10 & 19.
In 1991, a New York State teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto, wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in which he announced his departure from public school teaching after 30 years. He was no longer willing to "hurt kids" in a broken system where political pressure snuffed out worthy efforts for change. By now, he wrote, "even reformers can't imagine school much different."
Indeed, the first priority of education reformers is often not success but the preservation of methods with which they are already comfortable. As Harold Henderson writes in "Let's Kill Dick and Jane," the American educational establishment possesses "an uncanny ability to transform golden ideas for change -- from left, right, or center -- into a leaden sludge." Mr. Henderson, a longtime staff writer for the Chicago Reader, describes the fate of one textbook company -- Illinois-based Open Court -- as it tried to bring its share of golden ideas to a resistant school system.
The book's title refers to the basal readers that were once a mainstay in American schools: Dick and Jane, created by advocates of the "Look-Say" theory of reading instruction in which children were taught to memorize the appearance of words at the expense of phonetic understanding. The theory has since been discredited, at least in part by the publication in 1955 of Rudolf Flesch's best-selling "Why Johnny Can't Read," which urged a return to phonics instruction.
Blouke Carus and his wife, Marianne, Americans with strong German roots and a familiarity with the exacting standards of the German gymnasium, read Flesch's book and formed Open Court in 1962. Together with a small band of dedicated educational theorists and consultants, they created innovative materials with the goal of educating the American masses as rigorously as the elites of Europe. Providing both a history of this remarkable company and a withering portrait of the education culture, Mr. Henderson's book is more compelling than any lay reader could reasonably expect.
The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD), the nation’s largest community college district, plans to produce enough of its own electricity to take its nine campuses “off the grid.” The LACCD believes that it is the first community college district in the nation to plan to generate all its own electricity. The initial plan is to install enough PV to produce one megawatt of electricity at each of its nine colleges.
The one megawatt per campus program is part of the LACCD's Energy Strategy Plan which includes: plans for a renewable energy Central Plant; performance conservation efficiency contracts; and a sustainability curriculum for its nine Los Angeles-area colleges.
I am collecting the Challenge Index data now. The early returns indicate our local schools will set a record for the number of AP and IB tests being given. In fact, there appears to be no other region in the country that has as high a level of participation in college-level courses and tests.
That, I think, is a good thing. The Washington area is going to look good on most educational measures because it has some of the highest levels of parental income and education. All the research shows that students who come from affluent families with parents who went to college do better in school than students without those factors. But most of our school districts have done something most other U.S. districts have not done. Our districts have opened these challenging courses to all students, not just to those with affluent, well-educated parents. And they have prepared many students from disadvantaged homes so well that they are passing these college-level tests and not only earning college credit but also getting a useful sense of how to handle the heavy reading lists and long final exams that make college, for many students, such a difficult adjustment.
Two large studies in California and Texas have shown that good grades on the three-hour AP tests correlate with higher graduation rates in college. I have interviewed hundreds of AP and IB teachers and students over the past 20 years. They almost all say that the courses and tests are the best academic experiences their high schools have to offer, and they recommend that more high schools use them.
It was a very good night for the Madison schools Tuesday.
By the time all the votes were counted, 69 percent of district voters said yes to three referendums that totaled $23 million in projects: building a new elementary school at Linden Park, shifting the cost of an addition at Leopold from the operating budget to borrowed cash and refinancing existing debt at a more favorable rate.
As with his last book, Mathews offers a great deal of evidence as to the roots and the current state of the issues preventing community engagement. It’s a challenge that’s been more than a century in the making: when the idea of professional specialization took hold at the end of the 19th century, the public passed the reins of our schools to a new class of education administrators, and that trend grew over time into the chasm we see today between the two groups. As a result, we have owners who aren’t getting the results they want from schools, but don’t feel qualified to direct change, and we have experts who resent being second-guessed by people who aren’t qualified to make decisions. (For more, see my notes on his last book here.)
He also paints an exciting picture of what education could look like if communities were welcomed and fully involved. He sees the potential for the community itself as an educational institution, allowing for reinforcement and application of academic content in a real-world environment made up of encouraging and active citizens. And just as importantly, he sees the public as the proper authorities to set educational mandates –the outcomes we wish to reach by educating our kids.
.....
First, most community action happens at a local level and, for the most part, the important education decisions are no longer made locally. Decisions on what to teach, what to test, and often even what materials can be used are made at the state level, and school districts don’t have the authority to overrule them. Further, there’s actually very little discretionary funding available locally to drive change: I’ve heard from school board members who say that they can influence no more than 10% of the district’s budget, and I’ve heard from numerous sources that principles typically have control over less than $50,000 each year (and that’s in school budgets that run into the millions each year).
Audit Faults Wisconsin's Reading First Grant Process
Wisconsin education officials failed to ensure that schools and districts that received federal Reading First grants adhered to the program’s strict guidelines, a failing that, if not rectified, could cost the state nearly $6 million of its $45 million allocation, a federal report concludes.
The audit by the U.S. Department of Education’s inspector general, dated Oct. 20, found that nine of the state’s 26 grant recipients had not received the required approval of a review panel and may not have met all the requirements for receiving the money.
By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, Education Week, November 1, 2006
State officials acknowledged that some of the local grant proposals were stronger than others, and they agreed with the inspector general that the state needs to monitor more closely the program’s implementation and give additional guidance to Reading First schools and districts.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction “supports the Reading First program and will do whatever it takes to guarantee successful implementation of all its programs,” Julie Enloe, Wisconsin’s Reading First coordinator, wrote in her response to the inspector general.
The report is the second of six reviews of the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program being conducted by the inspector general. The first, released in September, was a scathing critique of the federal Education Department’s management of the program following an examination of program documents, e-mail correspondence between federal employees and consultants, and interviews. ("Scathing Report Casts Cloud Over ‘Reading First’," Oct. 4, 2006.)
‘Is This All There Is?’
The new report is limited to Wisconsin’s performance in administering the grants. Little detail about the state’s difficulties in getting approval for its grant during the program’s rollout in 2002 and 2003 is given.
Some Wisconsin educators had complained, for example, that consultants and reviewers rejected the specific reading programs the state had proposed, and pressured them to adopt other programs or assessments.
There is also no explanation of the decision by officials in the Madison school district to give back its $2 million grant shortly after it was approved. Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater decided to drop out of the program after federal consultants told district officials they would have to abandon their existing literacy initiative and adopt a commercially published core reading program, he wrote in a detailed memo to the school board. ("States Report Reading First Yielding Gains," June 8, 2005.)
“Is this all there is?” Kathy Champeau, who heads a task force on the federal No Child Left Behind Act for the Wisconsin State Reading Association and is a member of the state’s Reading First leadership team, said of the inspector general’s audit.
“I was shocked at the limited scope of the report,” she said, “and that it didn’t address … the coercion the state faced to use certain published programs.”
Those issues, however, were not within the scope of the audit, which was to determine whether the state education department followed the requirements of the Reading First program in issuing the grants to local education agencies, the report says. Other audits may include more detail on the Wisconsin program.
Ms. Champeau contended that the Wisconsin department went to great lengths to monitor the grants and ensure that the participating reading programs were of high quality.
Taxpayers in the Madison School District should demand that the School Board be smarter about managing the district's money and resources.
On Tuesday's ballot is a school referendum containing three smart proposals.
That's why the referendum deserves voters' support.
More important than the referendum, however, is what happens next. The School Board is confronting difficult choices, including how to respond to rapid growth in areas where there are no schools while in other parts of the city, schools have excess space.
A pivotal question in upcoming months will be: Does the board have the courage to close a school? While the rapidly growing Far West Side merits a new school, other parts of Madison are experiencing declining student populations.
Taxpayers can't afford to build schools where the children are while maintaining schools where the children aren't.
At least one school should eventually be closed and sold, with boundary changes to distribute children to other schools.
This referendum is different from the last - it has one question, with three parts. In 2005, just one issue of a three-part question passed. Voters passed a plan for building renovations, but they said voted down a second school on the Leopold Elementary site, and to exceeding the revenue cap
Monday night, spokesperson Ken Syke pointed out that since at 1993 no MMSD referendum has fully failed-at least one issue has always passed.
Don Severson & Vicki McKenna discuss the referendum question and a District email to MSCR users [mp3 audio]
A plan to fingerprint elementary school students when they buy lunch has some parents worrying that Big Brother has come to the cafeteria.
The Hope Elementary School District has notified parents that, beginning this month, students at Monte Vista, Vieja Valley and Hope elementary schools will press an index finger to a scanner before buying cafeteria food.
The scan will call up the student's name and student ID, teacher's name and how much the student owes, since some receive government assistance for food. 3 California schools to fingerprint students
After being decisively defeated in two spending referendums last year, the administration and a majority of the Madison School Board haven't learned that the voters are sick and tired of runaway spending and poor management.
In a demonstration of true arrogance, after being told in May 2005 that flat enrollment did not justify a new school in the Leopold School area of Arbor Hills, in June this year, the administration began construction of a major addition to Leopold School.
In so doing they put forth no plan to pay for the addition while gambiling on voters reversing themselves in a new referendum.
Madison spends significantly more per student than other Wisconsin districts. Over the past 10 years, while student enrollment has declined, full-time equivalent staff has increased by more than 600. At the same time, operating budgets have increased 58 percent, the cost per pupil is up 59, and there are 325 more non-teaching staff and administrators.
Clearly, the administration does not seem to be able to prudently manage district finances.
The voters said no to the $17 million request for a new school in 2005, and now the administration and majority of the board want authority to spend $23.56 million for a new school.
It has been repeatedly suggested that any proposal to add a new school should dicate closing an old school. The good economics of coupling such a move would only be fundamental good management, but this suggestion has been totally ignored by the board's majority and the administration. This is not good management.
In May 2005, the voters also overwhelmingly said no to raising the revenue cap for operations. By including all three new borrowing requests in one referendum question, the board and administration gambles on sweeping in refinancing authority by further permanently raising the revenue cap.
This refinancing ploy is a backdoor move that would raise our taxes to free up more than $800,000 a year for the district to spend. But we are not being told how the money will be spent.
Likely we will get more of the same -- more non-classroom and administration personnel, but no improvement in budgeting or expense control.
In the past six years, voters have twice approved referendums to provide funds for deferred maintenance, which the administration repeatedly failed to budget. However, there continues to be substantial deferred maintenance, and voters have not been told how the additional maintenance funds authorized in the past have been spent.
We need to reject the poor budgeting and management and the school board majority's unwillingness or inability to be honest with the voters. It is time to send a message by voting no on Tuesday, and, next spring, by electing board members who are capable and honest managers, good at budgeting, and who will listen to the taxpayers.
We want good schools, but we must insist on good management, and expenditures that benefit our students.
THOROUGH ANALYSIS SUPPORTS "YES" VOTE ON SCHOOL REFERENDUM
On November 7th, voters will be asked to approve a referendum allowing the Madison Metropolitan School District to build a new school and exceed its revenue cap. After very careful consideration, the Board of Education unanimously decided to ask the question. I fully support this referendum and urge you to vote yes.
Our community is committed to our children and our public schools. We want our children to be well-educated and prepared for the future. We engage in passionate discussions over how best to educate our students, and how to ensure that the community’s investment in education is sound. We are not satisfied with the status quo, and we are continually looking for our schools to do better. The Board of Education shares this commitment. We take very seriously our responsibility to gather information, ask questions, and initiate actions to accomplish these goals.
We need to build a new elementary school on the far west side of Madison because there is simply not be enough room in our schools to accommodate the dramatic growth there. Projections, confirmed by student count information, are that elementary schools in the Memorial attendance in total will exceed capacity by 2007 and will be at 111% of capacity by 2010. Linden Park, a fast growing residential area about three miles from the nearest elementary school, is an excellent location for that school. It will service a large attendance area where many students will be able to walk to school, helping to control bussing costs.
No alternatives eliminate the pressing need for a new school. West attendance area schools are currently at 94% capacity (with enrollment projected to increase), so moving students there is not a viable option. Although there is some excess capacity in the East attendance area, the inefficiency and cost of moving students from the far west side of Madison through the Isthmus makes that alternative unworkable. Programming changes – such as expanding class sizes, or eliminating art and music rooms – could slightly expand school capacity, but could not provide nearly enough additional capacity to significantly delay the need for the new school.
Also included in the referendum is the refinancing of debt previously incurred for improvements to Leopold and Hawthorne schools, and the purchase of land on the far eastside of Madison. Refinancing debt with money outside the revenue cap will allowing the District to spend an average of approximately $516,000 over the revenue cap for the next six years, giving the District a small amount of flexibility as it deals with inevitable future budget cuts. In total, passage of the referendum would increase 2007 property taxes for an owner of average-priced home ($239,400) by $29.21
After studying the facts, I truly believe that a “yes” vote on the school referendum is the right decision for our community. I am confident that after studying the issues and alternatives, as the School Board has, voters will also agree that passing the referendum is in the best interest of our children, our schools and our community as a whole.
One of the biggest management challenges anywhere is how to improve student performance in America’s urban public schools. There has been no shortage of proposed solutions: Find great principals and give them power; create competitive markets with charters, vouchers, and choice; establish small schools to ensure that students receive sufficient attention—the list goes on. While these approaches have had a dramatic impact on individual schools, they have failed to produce a single high-performing urban school system.
Despite these initiatives and a doubling in annual public spending on education over the past 30 years, to approximately $450 billion in 2005, no one has figured out how to achieve excellence on a broad scale—at every school in a district. One reason is that educators, researchers, and policy makers often see the district office—the organization headed by the superintendent that oversees and supports all the schools in the district—as part of the problem and not as a crucial part of the solution. This is a mistake.
School-based solutions, while important, aren’t enough. If they were, and low-performing schools could heal themselves, urban systems today would be chock-full of highly functioning schools. Achieving excellence on a broad scale requires a districtwide strategy for improving instruction in the classroom and an organization that can implement it. Only the district office can create such a plan, identify and spread best practices, develop leadership capabilities at all levels, build information systems to monitor student improvement, and hold people accountable for results. One of the main reasons reform efforts haven’t scored any districtwide successes is they have neither helped the district office play this role nor created a viable substitute.
To serve in this capacity, district offices will have to transform themselves. Business leaders, who care about their communities and know that their companies need well-educated workers in order to be competitive, have a big stake in assisting with this transformation. They have been extremely generous with money and counsel for urban districts, only to be frustrated by the results. As some corporate executives are beginning to realize, urban school systems are vastly more complex than businesses, yet the knowledge about how to manage them is amazingly sparse.
The Nov. 7 school referendum is about more than the question of whether Madison needs a new elementary school. It's about the placement of the proposed site and its associated inefficient land use.
I see a "yes" vote as a vote for the same poor growth model of civic design that has been going on for the past 10 years in Dane County, where sprawling developments are constructed for quick revenue and services like the new elementary school come as an afterthought.
Why did the city and county not plan for an eventual site that doesn't slowly encroach on environmentally sensitive areas like Shoveler's Sink and its nearby prairies? One not so dependent on the automobile? One that doesn't consume even more farmland?
While homes in downtown Madison are overvalued and our streets are crumbling back into gravel, the growth-oriented parts of the city have new roads, large lots and no retail. Yet neighborhoods are the fabric of Madison, not subdivisions.
No one has explained what is different from the referendum that was voted on two years ago and that put before us on Nov. 7 other than the referendum's packaging. A "no" vote may force the school and city to rethink the placement of a new school and perhaps bring some regional planning back to Dane County.
Dan Sebald Madison
One of the more interesting comments I've heard on local sprawl was from a nearby town chairman when the City of Madison annexed land for what became the American Center. "When Madison annexes and develops, it's called "planned growth". When a town develops, it's "sprawl". Interesting semantics.
More on "More Madison Building Referendums on the Way?"
Susan Troller's article on Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater's comments regarding the "eventual need for five new elementary schools" sparked a few comments here, as well as several reader emails, one of which included the MarchJune, 2006 School Board minutes:
It appears that the 'plan' was referred to Long Range Planning for additional articulation. The minutes at least put the discussion in context. Note also that Ruth voted against bundling the 3 questions into 1.
States should expand precollegiate online learning by allowing teachers to teach across state lines and removing student seat-time requirements, according to a report that tracks the fast growth of state virtual-learning programs. More states could add online programs if policies meant for traditional schools could be amended to take into account the "anytime, anywhere" aspects of online learning, say the authors of "Keeping Pace," slated for release this week at the Virtual School Symposium in Plano, Texas. The symposium is an annual conference sponsored by the Vienna, Va.-based North American Council for Online Learning, or NACOL, a nonprofit advocacy and research organization.
Severson / McKenna on Negative Aid, Local Media Coverage of Schools and the Referendum
There were some interesting items in today's conversation between Don Severson and Vicki Mckenna [13.7MB mp3 audio file]:
A caller (29 minutes): "Why does the rest of the media have such complacency with the Schools?" Don noted the lack of negative aids discussion in Monday's "very long" Wisconsin State Journal article. The caller raised a good question.
$10.95 of the 29.21 annual average property tax payment for the referendum is "negative aid", ie money local property taxpayers must pay over and above the referendum cost due to the MMSD's spending above state revenue caps. In other words, the more the MMSD spends above the revenue caps, the more state aid it loses and therefore local property taxes have to make up the difference. Some states refer to this as a "Robin Hood" Act.
On Tuesday, voters will make a decision on a $23.5 million school referendum that would include giving the green light to an elementary school on Madison's far west side, but school district officials see it as just the first of several in the near future.
Based on current residential growth patterns, as many as five new elementary schools may eventually be needed to accommodate new generations of children in and around Madison, according to Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Art Rainwater.
But at Scarsdale High, my son was told he could not get into the course unless he did well on an entrance test given to every prospective AP U.S. history student. He passed the test, got into the course and did well, as I expected. That was not my problem. What bothered me was the assumption, deeply imbedded in that school and that community, that AP courses should not be used as great learning experiences for all students headed for college, as they were at Garfield, but instead should be used as rewards for good grades and test scores. At Scarsdale High, only the students with the highest entrance test scores, or highest grade-point averages and strongest teacher recommendations, were considered worthy of admission to an AP course. Not surprisingly, this approach reflected the Ivy League college admission system that is such an obsession in Scarsdale and places like it.
I have always been grateful to Scarsdale High's educators for exposing me to this dysfunctional view of AP because I soon learned that they were not the exception, but the rule. Most U.S. schools, then and now, felt as Scarsdale did that AP should be used as a sorting exercise, not a teaching tool. Eventually, in reaction to what I learned at Scardale, I created the Challenge Index, a way of rating high schools by AP and IB test participation. The index is used by Newsweek for its "America's Best High Schools" list. Many Scarsdale people don't like it because it penalizes them for restricting AP admittance. They think the school deserves to be much higher than number 176 on that list.
The Role of District Leadership in Radical Reform: Philadelphia 2001-2006
Elizabeth Useem, Jolly Bruce Christman and William Lowe Boyd [PDF]:
Recognizing the repeated failure of many conventional approaches to improving urban districts, reformers have turned to increasingly radical ideas. Since 2001, the School District of Philadelphia has served as a prime example and living laboratory for radical reform of a large urban school system. Because of a unique state takeover that sought both comprehensive district-wide reform and, simultaneously, privatization in the management of a large number of schools, educators and policy analysts nationwide are closely watching each stage of this reform. When the controversial state takeover began—in the midst of acrimonious relations between the school district and the state government and strong mayoral and grass roots opposition—the complexity and contradictions of this combination of features led many observers to fear a “train wreck.” Indeed, the title of a previous paper we wrote conveys the difficult circumstances and challenges: “A tall order for Philadelphia’s new approach to school governance: Heal the political rifts, close the budget gap, and improve the schools” (Boyd & Christman, 2003).
Mr. Hartranft, a nuclear engineer who had been forced to retire early because of Parkinson’s disease, came up with what he thinks is a rigorous mathematical model to compare the school’s demanding grading system with more lenient grading in other schools. The model, he and some local school administrators say, is a bold new way to think about grades.
“I’m giving you a G.P.S. navigation system, as opposed to scraps of maps,” Mr. Hartranft said. “If all you have are scraps of maps, which is all that admissions offices get in the existing protocol, then this gives you an overall orientation.”
Mr. Hartranft created an analytical method he calls the g.p.a. plot; it uses national data on grade-point averages and SAT scores to compare national grading norms with those at the local high school. The purpose, he said, is to reduce the variability and subjectivity of grades — and to make it absolutely clear to college admissions offices that a B or B-plus at Simsbury may be the equivalent of an A at most high schools.
Simsbury has included his statistical comparison in its admissions submissions for the last four years. In the suburb just to the north, Granby Memorial High School is using the g.p.a. plot for the first time this fall.
Here in Simsbury, administrators and parents appear satisfied with the results of the model, even though it is unclear whether it has helped increase the number of Simsbury students admitted to elite colleges. Neil Sullivan, the high school’s principal, said the proportion of students admitted by the most selective universities had increased somewhat over the last four years, after dipping slightly when the number of A’s dropped sharply between 1998 and 2001. But the number of A’s given out by Simsbury teachers has also increased in recent years.
He took the scores of 1.5 million students and graphed them against the students’ grade-point averages, as reported by the students on their SAT exams. In a given year, for instance, the analysis might show that on average nationally, students with an A average had a combined SAT score of 1,150, under the old two-part aptitude test. Then he would perform the same comparison for students at Simsbury, where, on average, a student with an A average might have a combined score of 1,220.
I recently asked principal Alan Harris about English 9 and whether it would continue to be divided into three ability groupings: TAG, Academically Motivated, and regular. I was pleased to find out that they no longer call one section Academically Motivated. Instead, it's called Advanced.
At any rate, Alan told me that assistant principal David Watkins is the best contact for all information regarding core academics (English, Math, Science, Social Studies). He also told me that they are in the current planning stages for next year and can't say whether ability groupings will be offered.
Alan stated: "At our East High United meeting on November ninth, at 7:00 we will be discussing our Vision 2012 goals related to high expectations. Advanced classes, TAG programming and curriculum expectations will be a part of this discussion."
If TAG programming, high expectations, and academic rigor are important to you, please attend this meeting and voice your concerns.
Thank you,
Alan Sanderfoot
H 608.242.7344
E sanderfoot at charter.net
Dane County health insurance costs are lowest in Wisconsin
A new study by the Institute for One Wisconsin found that Dane County had the lowest regional health insurance cost in the state, as did the Madison metropolitan area compared to other metro areas.
The analysis by the nonprofit research and education organization, which supports a progressive agenda, found that there was a nearly 30 percent cost variation between the highest and lowest cost areas.
Northwestern Wisconsin had the highest costs by region, followed by west-central and then southeastern Wisconsin. The Racine metro area had the highest cost, followed by the Chippewa Valley and then La Crosse.
By Anita Weier, The Capitol Times, October 31, 2006.
October 31, 2006
Milwaukee, which has been the focus of previous reports for high health care costs, ranked fourth.
"There is increasing evidence that the employer-based health care system is under severe stress in Wisconsin," the report also found. The percentage of Wisconsin workers who had health insurance through their employers plunged from 73 percent in 1979 to 56 percent in 2004.
John Kraus, executive director of the institute, said the report also shows that the consolidation of health systems is a major factor driving up health insurance costs, and - conversely - that large buying pools can bring costs down.
The data did not support the contention that cost shifting of non-reimbursed costs from Medicaid and Medicare patients to private insurance rates is a major factor in high health care costs.
If cost shifting were a big factor, the highest health insurance costs would be in metro areas and regions of the state with much higher Medicaid use, poverty rates and numbers of uninsured people. But some of the highest cost areas, such as La Crosse and Eau Claire, did not fit that pattern.
The study compared the relative health insurance costs across regions and metropolitan areas of Wisconsin by analyzing the 2007 rates paid by the state of Wisconsin's Group Health Insurance Program, which covered 194,000 people - including state employees and retirees and their families - in 2006. Twenty-one participating private health insurance plans in the program cover almost every county in the state.
Dane County qualified as a region because it has such a large number of state employees covered through the insurance program. That fact lends credence to the idea that bargaining power gets better rates, as does having a competitive health care provider market, such as is found in Madison.
The study found that annual Group Health Insurance Program costs for individuals totaled $5,607 in Madison, the lowest, compared with $7,213 in Racine. The state average was $6,501.
Regionally, Dane County had that same low figure of $5,607, while northwestern Wisconsin had the highest single plan cost at $7,189.
I know that decision-makers often try to bury items in budgets, planning documents, and legislation, but I had to chuckle at one that I found in an MMSD budgte document that details spending on consultants. Here's how the explanation of a consulting expenditure of $159,144 reads:
debate and forensics, accompanists for choral/band/orchestra concerts and rehearsals and jazz directors, piano/organ player for graduation, consultant for developing middle school guidance program, drama (costume designers, pit orchestra, lighting, set designers). Other expenses are speakers for all school assemblies, artists in residence, speakers for various classes.
Now isn't it odd that an expenditure for a "consultant for developing middle school guidance program" get buried in a long list of items for the performing arts? Could a reasonable person believe that someone was trying to hid the expenditure for a consultant for developing middle school guidance program?
I asked the MMSD to provide a breakout of the expenditure for the guidance program consultant.
Feel free to search for other oddities in the million dollar budget for consultants. Click here for a PDF of the expenditures.
As a senior adviser and former president of Public Agenda, I’m often asked to interpret public-opinion research in relation to the priorities of major education groups. These groups are seeking information that can help them refine their “messaging” strategies to promote a particular agenda.
“Messaging,” when it assumes that the solution is a given, merely in need of better packaging, is the last thing education reform needs more of. What is undeniably needed in its stead is authentic public engagement, and lots more of it.
The American public education system is facing multiple challenges that are unique in its history, and its ability to respond will depend on greater public involvement and understanding than has been evident to date.
By Deborah Wadsworth, Education Week, October 25, 2006
One significant challenge arises from increased competition from abroad. Public leaders—ranging from President Bush to Bill Gates, and including corporate CEOs and college presidents—have pointed to the need for American schools to ramp up achievement and learning, especially in math, science, foreign languages, and international studies. Unless we do, we risk undermining our own nation and falling behind countries like China and India, which are racing forward in the global competition for high-tech and creative industry.
The second challenge grows out of our promise to deliver education fairly, or to live with the grave consequences of persistent gaps in student achievement. Our nation has made a half-hearted commitment to equal educational opportunity for all, and very troubling achievement gaps between whites and minorities continue as a result. Our education pipeline is leaking badly, with dropout rates for Hispanics and African-Americans at both the high school and college levels unacceptably high. Research from Public Agenda shows that minority students are more likely than white students to report very serious problems in their schools on a whole range of academic and social issues.
A third challenge to public education is maintaining the momentum behind the improvements that have been made so far. Whatever one’s take on the standards movement—whether the changes are generated by local and state policy or the federal No Child Left Behind legislation—it is important to keep in mind that virtually no one we have surveyed believes that we should return to the pre-standards-and-testing past, the status quo ante. This includes teachers, parents, administrators, and students. Maintaining momentum, examining what’s working and what’s not, fine-tuning, and making the right midcourse corrections—those are the primary challenges now. The question is, how do we solidify progress?
I believe it is the human factor that will make a real difference going forward. Very few education leaders—very few Americans, in fact—reject these challenges out of hand. Yet there are strong differences of opinion about how to address them. Focusing on the human ingredient in reform, which has received far too little attention, is going to be indispensable to making further progress on education. At the moment, however, some significant obstacles with very human dimensions are getting in the way of success. We’ve identified them in our research, and, in each instance, at the heart of the matter is the need for greatly improved, many-layered communication.
A major obstacle grows out of the crosstalk that public leaders, educators, communities, and families engage in so frequently. These groups—often on completely different wavelengths—are unable to communicate, making very different assumptions about how well schools work now, and how much change schools need.
Employers and professors, for example, give young people very low marks on a long list of skills and attitudes essential to succeeding in either higher education or the workplace. Yet few principals and superintendents say low standards are a problem for their districts, and parents say schools are better and harder than they were when they went to school. Top business and leadership groups are calling for the country to drastically upgrade its math and science education. But while majorities of parents support stronger math and science education in general, seven in 10 parents of high school students say their children’s math education is just fine as it is. In fact, parents’ concerns about improving math and science education in local schools have actually declined since 1998.
Does it matter if parents and students don’t grasp the challenge as long as education leaders recognize the problem and set policies that require more math and science? The answer is yes, it matters a lot. Even with the No Child Left Behind law, education remains quintessentially a local issue—curriculum requirements; hiring good math, science, and foreign-language teachers; and providing new resources that may be required to make these things happen all boil down to decisions made in communities. Furthermore, simply requiring more of these classes won’t necessarily produce more-motivated students. We need to bridge these gaps in perception and build the “demand” side, the desire among parents for students to excel in these areas, and among students to pursue the challenges and excitement of advanced studies in mathematics, science, and technology.
Another obstacle that calls for better engagement is low teacher morale and the growing evidence that too many schools, especially those serving minority and at-risk students, simply don’t provide the orderly, safe, and respectful environment needed for teachers to teach and kids to learn. Public Agenda surveys repeatedly have shown that teachers are the group most troubled by the environment in which education reform is proceeding, and that they sense their concerns and perspectives are not taken seriously by reformers, or even their own administrators.
Teaching conditions and morale are a major problem. Does it matter? Let’s put it this way: Would a coach want to take the field with demoralized and frustrated players? There is little doubt that teachers’ sense of confidence and purposefulness can affect progress. There is an urgent need to bring classroom teachers into the discussions about how to improve education, to treat their concerns about school climate and student motivation with respect and seriousness. And there is a need to open new channels of communication between teachers and parents on how they can work together on shared goals.
A third obstacle facing education reform is complacency. Problems like truancy, lack of parental involvement, disruptive classroom behavior, and dropping out can’t be solved by schools alone. They require action from the community as a whole. Parents, grandparents, mentors, community and religious groups, businesses, and local agencies need to address these problems and make the case for adequate resources of all kinds to effectively educate the most diverse generation in the nation’s history.
These challenges and obstacles cry out for fundamental shifts in the way teachers, principals, superintendents, students, and parents communicate among themselves and with each other in their day-to-day activities. Improving learning for all kids at high levels requires confidence and purposefulness in the classroom and authentic support in the community. Building real support is not easy, and it is certainly not business as usual. And, quite frankly, “messaging” isn’t going to cut it.
Top-down campaigns, in which the mission is to persuade people to adopt a preconceived agenda without genuine input, cannot build the relationships required to address the kinds of problems we’re facing. Addressing these deeply human issues requires genuine give-and-take among people inside and outside schools. Education leaders and policymakers need to engage with a broad cross section of the community, including regular folks who are not already strongly involved in school activities, to set overall goals and establish priorities for change. Giving people alternatives to consider helps them learn about trade-offs that must be faced and helps reduce simplistic thinking and the tendency to reach for easy answers. Most importantly, a carefully thought-out engagement process allows people with very different starting points to talk effectively and productively about issues.
Public Agenda’s experience in different kinds of districts and diverse communities persuades us that genuine engagement with the public and other stakeholders can help build a broader base for change and help avoid the miscommunication that sometimes stalls progress. Conversation that includes real give-and-take can strengthen relationships and create the channels of communication upon which lasting change can be built. Will people back your agenda? Maybe not on every point and detail, but they will be responsive and thoughtful if invited into broader discussions and given a stake in deciding how to improve student learning.
My advice is to say no to messagingwhen it means spending inordinate amounts of time and money to come up with silver bullets, the language and images needed to persuade folks to buy your point of view. Instead, reconsider what it means to win the game. Engage the public—parents, teachers, education leaders, students, and whole communities alike. Develop relationships that can solve problems, help make solutions stick, and will take root for the long haul. This is not a game to be won through public relations, but with public engagement it is a season that can end successfully.
Deborah Wadsworth, a senior adviser to the nonprofit group Public Agenda, was formerly its president. This essay is adapted from her remarks in September to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development’s Leadership for Effective Advocacy and Practice Institute, in Washington.
The Madison School District Board of Education approved a collective bargaining contract with the custodial units last night in which the custodians agreed to move from their current health care plans (GHC and the Alliance PPO) to a 3 HMO plan which is GHC, Dean Care and Physicans Plus. MMSD continues to pay 100% of the premium, but there are cost savings associated with this change. 85% of those costs savings was passed on to employees in salary and 15% went to MMSD.
This change is effective 1/1/2007. A big benefit of this change is that Administrators will also move to the 3 HMO option.
I've not seen an MMSD press on this important issue, but this is what I understand is happening.
Garfield is a so-called Abbott school district, one of 31 poor districts that have received a total of $35 billion in state aid since 1997 as part of an ambitious court-ordered social experiment to narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor students, whites and minorities. In a decision that set a precedent for school equality cases nationwide, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the poorest urban school districts should be given the resources to spend as much on their students as the wealthiest suburban districts do.
In the meantime, state education officials plan to audit all 31 Abbotts in the next year after finding that the highest-spending districts were making the fewest gains. Asbury Park spent the most, $18,661 per student, in the 2004-5 school year. Still, slightly fewer than half the district’s fourth-grade students were proficient in state language arts and math tests in 2005. “What we know is lots of money has been spent, and in some places, there is very little to show,” said Lucille E. Davy, the education commissioner.
For their part, the Abbott districts have criticized what they see as a bureaucratic system that undermines local authority and forces them to adopt programs that they do not need. For instance, Patrick Gagliardi, the Hoboken superintendent, said that he is required to provide full-day preschool to every 3- and 4-year-old child in his district, regardless of income, a mandate that now benefits many affluent families. “The court intended to help poor people, not the wealthy,” he said. “Now it’s costing the state more money, and it’s inefficient and flawed.”
By the end of the day one thing was clear: Parents, teachers and community organizations want an equal say in determining how the district will be remade.
illaraigosa acknowledged as much in his opening remarks to the group of 100 or so people, who represented church groups, businesses, human services agencies, city and county departments, law enforcement, city councils and numerous schools.
"This issue of 'mayor control' is a misnomer," he told the meeting — billed as an education retreat — at the Doheny campus of Mount St. Mary's College near downtown. "This is the perfect example of a partnership. I don't need to bring 200 people together if I was just going to do it alone."
A close observer of the Madison public education scene for a number of years, I've seen this tension grow, something reflected in recent referenda resultsandboardelections.
On the one hand, we have statements from top Administrators like "we have the children" to teachers, on the other; staff and parents very unhappy with a top down, one size fits all approach to many issues (see the most recent example of substantive changes without public discussion). Parental interest and influence (the use of the term influence does not reflect today's current reality) ranges from those who are extremely active with respect to systemic issues and those active for individual children to various stages of participation and indifference.
In 2006, I believe that parents and citizens continue to have a much smaller role in our K-12 public system governance than they should, given our children's interests and the District's source of funds such as property taxes, fees, sales and income taxes recycled through state and federal spending. Madison's school climate is certainly not unique (Nielsen's Participation Inequality is a good read in this context).
Peter Gascoyne asked some useful questions in response to Gene Hickok's recent Washington Post piece. I "think" that Hickok was driving in the direction of a much more substantive parental role in education.
Getting out information about MMSD health insurance costs: some progress
At the October 23, 2006 meeting of the Human Resources Committee for the Madison School Board, I reported on why the Board of Education and employee representatives should work together to reduce future health insurance costs.
With one exception, my data came directly from the September 25 presentation by Bob Butler, attorney-consultant for the Wisconsin Association for School Boards. Madison School Board HR Committee: Health Care Costs Discussion What's new in my presentation [880K pdf version]is the cost for employee health insurance in 2006-07 ($43.3M) and the portion of this year's budget that goes to pay for health insurance (13%).
Here's the short version of my presentation.
Reason 1: Health insurance costs for school districts are increasing at higher rates than for the private sector or other government employers in Wisconsin.
Reason 2: The percentage of the district's operating budget that goes to health insurance is large and growing rapidly.
$43,303,350 will go to employee health insurance for 2006-07
13% of the total budget for 2006-07 will go to employee health insurance
17% of the budget under revenue limits will go to employee health insurance
Reason 3: Spending more and more on health insurance means that the district must go to strategies such as cutting positions, not replacing employees that retire, increasing class sizes, or creating positions that do not qualify for health insurance in order to balance the budget.
Reason 4: Health insurance costs are drastically reducing dollars that can go to pay competitive wages.
Reason 5: Health insurance costs are also drastically reducing post-retirement benefits to our employees.
Reason 6: Changes in providers and plans can significantly affect future costs.
Reason 7: Districts can have a significant impact on future health insurance costs by working with employee representatives to propose changes in plan designs, providers and wellness plans.
Following discussion, the HR Committee passed the following motion: "the Human Resources Committee recommends that the Board of Education direct the administration to provide recommendations about how the administration could communicate information regarding employee health insurance costs to all district employees and the public. The information should address the following:
Health insurance costs for school districts are increasing at higher rates than for the private sector or other government employers in Wisconsin;
The percentage of the district’s operating budget that goes to health insurance is large and growing rapidly;
Health insurance costs are reducing dollars that can go for paying competitive wages;
Health insurance costs are also reducing post-retirement benefits for our employees;
Changes in providers and plans can significantly affect future costs; and
Some Wisconsin districts have reduced future health insurance costs by working with employee representatives to make changes in plan design, providers, wellness programs and other aspects that reduce future costs.
(Kobza and Robarts voting yes, Vang voting no). This is an unofficial statement of the motion passed. The committee will not vote on the minutes until our November meeting.
Deasy has vowed to raise the county's test scores, which have increased in recent years, by reallocating staff to the system's worst-performing schools, bolstering teacher recruitment and retention, improving parental participation, and giving children more opportunities and better training to participate in Advanced Placement courses.
"You need not be concerned about the level of gravity in which we take it," Deasy told the board. "You need to be concerned about the celebration when we meet our goals."
Latest on the Madison School District's Policy Change Regarding Credit for Non-MMSD Courses
Here is the official wording of the new MMSD policy regarding students taking non-MMSD courses. 78K PDF. See my earlier post on this unpublished change:
A. Taking outside courses (other than Youth Options) if a student wishes to receive credit toward graduation.
The course must be pre-approved by the principal.
The course may only be an elective.
A student may only receive elective credit toward graduation provided the District does not offer a comparable course, if a student receives credit it will be reflected as pass/fail.
Elective credits toward graduation shall be granted in the following manner:
No more than 1 elective credit per year. No more than 1 elective credit in the same subject. more than 2 elective credits may be applied to the total graduation requirement.
The student’s transcript shall only include a description of the course, the institution, if any, the date the course was completed, the credit, if any, and the pass/fail grade.
No grades will be included as part of a student’s GPA.
All costs related to taking the course shall be the responsibility of the guardian of the student or student.
B. Taking outside courses if a student does not wish to receive credit.
The course must be pre-approved by the principal.
The course may only be an elective.
The student’s transcript may only include a description of the course, the institution, if any, the date the course was completed, and the pass/fail grade unless the student or his/her parent/guardian request that the student’s grade appear on the transcript in which case the student ’s grade will appear on the transcript.
No grades shall be included as part of a student’s GPA.
All costs related to taking the course shall be the responsibility of the parent of the student or student.
I am extremely impressed with the collaborative coaching and learning (CCL) model. What is the philosophy that led to its development?
For decades, America's schools have been structured and scheduled in ways that make collaboration and shared learning among teachers difficult. Teachers are alone in classrooms with their students most of the day and have little time for interaction with colleagues. In most professions, there is regular interaction and shared responsibility for tasks and outcomes. CCL breaks down the isolation by scheduling common planning time for teachers to review student data, discuss the curriculum, observe each other teach, and collaborate as a group to determine what works and what doesn't. Teachers and principals become part of a professional learning community.
Having long believed that there are solid grounds for criticizing the Madison School Board, I am happy to see how well we compare in our conduct and meetings to some school boards.
School board has a truancy problem
Steve Brandt, Star Tribune
State conservation officer Brian Buria was checking a wetland complaint on Deer Lake last summer when he encountered a nude Minneapolis school board member.
"It was 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I said, 'Jeepers. You got to be careful about that. You can get yourself in trouble. You could get registered as a sex offender exposing yourself.' "
Neighbors say it was just another swim for Audrey Johnson. Bert Robertson, who lives next door, is among the neighbors who say that Johnson has been living at her family's Itasca County cabin, almost 200 miles from her Minneapolis constituency.
Johnson is one of three members of the seven-person board whose attendance has plummeted this year.
Johnson and Colleen Moriarty, both lame ducks whose terms conclude Dec. 31, have missed six and nine, respectively, out of about 30 public meetings since January, records indicate. Mid-termer Sharon Henry-Blythe has missed seven.
Responding via e-mail from her cabin, Johnson said she has spent substantial time at her cabin for family reasons and acknowledged the skinny-dipping, but she disputed the neighbors' time estimates for both. She said she keeps in touch with constituents mostly by e-mail but also by phone.
Other board members say the absences are frustrating, one factor in the perception that the board has lost steam this year.
There's plenty to deal with: falling enrollment, tight money, an achievement gap, reforming middle and high schools. The board sets policy in these areas, hires a superintendent and oversees finances.
"It's never an easy job, but when I look at what's on their plate, it's an awful lot," said Ann Kaari, a former board chairwoman.
The board adopted a budget in June with only four of seven members present; the numbers were the same on Aug. 22 and Sept. 26, when the board got state testing results. Minutes indicate that the board hasn't met at full strength since July 11.
"It's been really frustrating not to have a full board for meetings," said first-termer Peggy Flanagan. "Frankly, when you run for the board you say you're going to serve the people of Minneapolis, and people need to honor that commitment to the end of the term."
Johnson's neighbor Bert Robinson estimates she spends 90 to 95 percent of her time at Deer Lake. "She's living up here," he said.
As for the skinny-dipping, "It's pretty common. I've probably seen it by accident a dozen times," said Jim Kudluboy, who lives across the lake.
Johnson disputes those estimates.
State law says a vacancy occurs when a school board member ceases to be a resident of the district. Maintaining a home in the district, as Johnson has done, is usually enough to keep residency, according to attorney Cathy McIntyre of the Minnesota School Boards Association.
Chairman Joseph Erickson and Lydia Lee have the board's best attendance records, missing only one meeting each, followed by Farmer, with two.
Erickson, who is also a lame duck, said he's frustrated by attendance problems but leaves showing up to the conscience of members. Their gross pay is $13,800 a year. Erickson said he hasn't delayed any issues due to attendance.
But Flanagan said the board has taken longer to plow through issues such as high-school reform when missing members return and rehash territory that others already have discussed.
Erickson last spring listed three priorities for the board before the terms of four members expire Dec. 31. The board has completed one, taking first steps toward strategic planning that will be mainly carried out by the new board that begins work in January.
Erickson said another priority, student safety, has been discussed mostly by administrators. The board will start to address the third, making middle grades work better, this week.
The lame-duck status of Johnson, Moriarty, Erickson and Judy Farmer prompted the board to delay a search for a superintendent until the new board is seated. The board also didn't follow through on plans for office hours in the community and formal school visits. It did begin cable-casting its discussion meetings.
Absent members list reasons
The truant board members give a mix of reasons for their absences. Moriarty cited a busy season at the nonprofit agency she heads, an ear infection and surgery. Henry-Blythe listed recent trouble keeping track of board meeting times, a family trip, and out-of-town travel or work conflicts.
Johnson responded from her cabin. She said she was sick for two meetings, and out of town or on vacation for others.
Asked about the board's pace this year, she wrote in an e-mail: "I feel that we should allow the meatier decisions to be made by the new board." She said that after seven years on the board, "I have found that the system is very entrenched; politics and the interests of adult players dictate many decisions. The Board of Education has very little authority."
Johnson expressed interest in chairing the board for 2005, but members chose Erickson. Johnson is an outspoken critic of federal and state education policies.
Johnson has yet to pay more than $29,000 in health-insurance premiums she owes the district. Johnson has said that she can't afford to pay until she finds a job after her term ends. Meanwhile, her family is without health insurance, she said.
The district said it still plans to collect the money, which accumulated when premiums weren't fully withheld because of computer issues.
Steve Brandt • 612-673-4438 • sbrandt@startribune.com
Resolved: For-profit companies shouldn't run public schools.
Wilson: The irony! Here we are, in the temple of entrepreneurialism, debating a proposal to continue to deny our public schools--our most troubled institution--that greatest of American strengths, private sector innovation. The results are entirely predictable: An inefficient, outdated education system that consumes ever-increasing resources and posts flat or declining academic results. Worse still, in many inner cities, the public schools not only betray our shared ideals. They are our national shame. Systematically, callously, year after year, they fail millions of children, especially the urban poor. How can there be equal opportunity without universal access to a high quality education? Private action in public education should be welcomed, not decried. Let's engage the talents of private sector in reinventing the schools.
Wood: Not so fast, my friend. Let's look at a couple of your suppositions before we go on, beginning with the claim that our public schools are our most troubled institution. Really? Checked out the health care system lately? How about Congress? And before you credit the American private sector with too much innovative power let us not forget Enron and General Motors to name just a couple of instructive examples.
Of course schools could be better; I've spent the past 25 years working inside of them to do just that. With fewer resources than any CEO would accept, my school and thousands like it are doing a terrific job for every kid that walks through the door. We do something the private sector would never dream of doing: with no control over the funds we have, the materials we are given, or the outcomes that are dictated to us, we do our job and enjoy the highest level of trust of any institution in this country (see the 5/22/06 Zogby poll).
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The first comprehensive look at New York City’s failing students has found that nearly 140,000 people from ages 16 to 21 have either dropped out of high school or are already so far behind that they are unlikely to graduate.
The study, which the New York City Department of Education is to present to the State Board of Regents today, for the first time sheds light on a population of students who for decades have been relegated to the shadows of the city’s sprawling school system. The study was conducted by the Parthenon Group, a Boston consulting group, and was paid for with $2.6 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I think we need to be careful about what we assume when we are talking about students of color in the schools. The children of color in our schools include a growing number of children whose parents, regardless of racial or ethnic identity, are highly educated with degrees ranging from the BA/BS levels to PhD, law, and medical degrees. Many have attended schools or come from communities with high numbers of professionals of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, or American Indian heritage. As our businesses and higher educational institutions hire more diverse professionals, we will see more children of color from middle and upper income families.
Children of color with highly educated parents historically have had trouble getting access to advanced educational opportunities regardless of their academic preparation or ability. And we are seeing a concurrent relocation to private schools, suburbs, and other cities because the parents have every bit as high expectation for their children as any other parents.
Lucy Mathiak deserves high praise for her performance in the discussion on the MMSD's math curriculum. She pressed and pressed the superintendent to justify his recommendations.
A board member of any organization or corporation does not need to be an expert on a topic, but simply has to be certain that the head of the organization holds a firm grasp of the facts to support the direction of the organization.
A major study of restructuring the state's school funding system has produced a plan its author predicts could double academic achievement among Wisconsin students for 6.8% more money annually than the state spends currently.
The study by Allan Odden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison education professor, is more than a year in the making and has included input by some of the state's most influential education policy makers. However, members of the task force who have been advising Odden say it is still a work in progress, and major disagreements arose Friday at a meeting at which he released detailed cost estimates for his plan.
"Nobody agrees with everything," Odden conceded, "but there's been no great revolts."
Odden is slated to present the plan at a hearing next week of a special legislative council on the school-aid formula, which is headed by state Sen. Luther Olsen ( R-Ripon), a member of Odden's task force.
The council will also hear about two other plans, one from Democratic state Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-Middleton) and the other from the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools, Olsen said.
Jack Norman, research director for the Institute for Wisconsin's Future, who helped draft the funding plan for the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools, called Odden's plan "really terrific." But he disagreed with some of the details, including how it would fund special education and its reduced funding for high school electives.
Dane County Saves $1.2M on Employee Health Insurance: Will the Madison School District Follow This Lead?
Recently, the Sun Prairie School district and its teachers' union successfully bargained with DeanCare to bring down future costs for employee health insurance. This week Dane County and five of its employee unions agreed to save $1.2M in employee health insurance costs for 2007 by moving all covered employees to one provider, Physicians Plus HMO. County reaches pacts with 5 of 9 employe unions They chose Physicans Plus HMO following a competitive bidding process.
Can the Madison School Board learn from these examples? I hope so.
On September 25, the Human Resources Committee (Kobza, Vang and Robarts) heard a presentation from a Bob Butler, an attorney-consultant from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards on this topic. Containing MMSD's employee health insurance costs: what's next? The presentation demonstrated why school districts have no choice but to work with employee representatives to try to get the best health insurance for the lowest cost.
On Monday, October 23, the Human Resources Committee will consider making recommendations to the full board regarding future health insurance costs. The meeting will be at 7:45 p.m. in McDaniels Auditorium and will be televised.
School Board members that ask questions are essential to public confidence in and strong oversight of our $332m+ district. Monday evening's Superintendent review discussion with respect to the district's controversial math curriculum was interesting in this respect. Watch the video or listen to the mp3 audio file. The math related discussion starts about 24 minute into the video and ends at about the one hour mark.
3 School Board seats are up for election in April, 2007. These meetings demonstrate the need for candidates with strong leadership and governance abilities with respect to the most important issues for our next generation: a world class curriculum.
The 2006 survey looks at the expectations of teachers upon entering the profession, factors that drive career satisfaction, and the perspectives of principals and education leaders on successful teacher preparation and long-term support. In addition, it examines data collected from past MetLife American Teacher surveys to understand the challenges teachers face and their likelihood of remaining in the profession in order to recommend recruitment and retention strategies. Through focus groups of prospective and former teachers, also conducted by Harris Interactive, the report offers added insight about why individuals choose to enter the profession, and why some "opt out" early.
Key findings include:
1. Today’s teachers face challenges:
Most teachers do not have enough time for planning and grading (65%), helping individual students (60%) or classroom instruction (34%).
Although teachers’ professional prestige is on the rise, nearly four in 10 (37%) say their professional prestige is worse than they expected.
Two-thirds of teachers (64%) report their salaries are not fair for the work they do.
2. The struggle to retain teachers gives cause for concern:
One quarter (27%) of teachers say they are likely to leave the profession within the next five years to enter a different occupation.
The veteran teacher with 21 years or more experience is more likely than his or her less-experienced colleague to "opt out"—that is, more than twice as likely to leave the profession (56% vs. 26%).
3. Principals and education leaders have dramatically different perspectives on what new teachers should expect on-the-job.
More than half of principals (54%) think teachers are unrealistic about the number of hours they will work each week, in contrast to 32% of deans and chairpersons.
More than half of principals (52%) believe teachers are unrealistic about the number of students with special needs with whom they will work, in contrast to 25% of deans and chairpersons.
4. Teachers’ experiences align more closely with what principals say they should expect than with the views of deans and chairpersons who prepare them for classroom life.
Four in 10 teachers (42%) work more with special needs students than they expected.
Fifty-eight percent of teachers find the hours they work each week are worse than expected.
Three of the four top strategies teachers recommend for recruitment and retention—a decent salary, more financial support of school systems and more respect in society--are similar to those of principals.
5. Still, there is good news about the state of K-12 education:
Despite the challenges they face, teachers’ career satisfaction is at 20-year high: 56% are very satisfied with teaching as a career, a 70% increase over findings reported in the 1986 MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Restructuring the Teaching Profession.
Today's new teachers feel better prepared to engage families, work with students of varying abilities and maintain order in the classroom than did their than experienced peers when they first entered the career.
Eighty-two percent of new teachers were matched with a more experienced mentor during their first year of teaching, compared to only 16% of veteran teachers.
Facts & Questions about the 2006 Madison School District Referendum
Questions:
What is the anticipated cost of equipping the Leopold addition and the elementary school at Linden Park? Are those projected costs included in the referendum authorization or not?
What is the anticipated cost of operating the Leopold addition and the elementary school at Linden Park? How will those costs be appropriated/budgeted (and in what years?) given that the Board expects to have to cut $6-8 million per year?
What are the “shared revenue” total costs for each of three parts of the referendum question? Are these costs included in the $29.20 estimated cost for a median assessed home-owner? Please provide the ‘working papers’ or calculations arriving at these costs. How can a home-owner figure the annual cost of this referendum for the assessed value of their home?
What information about the Ridgewood complex and projected enrollment was used to calculate the need for the Leopold addition?
Construction has already begun for the Leopold addition without voter/taxpayer approval. What is the current impact on the operations budget? What would be the future impact on the operations budget if the referendum fails?
What is the current rate of interest paid by the District for the previous additions to the three elementary schools and now for the new addition to Leopold? What is the anticipated rate of interest and fees for refinancing these debts if the referendum is approved?
What changes occur in the calculations of residential build-out and estimated numbers of children in the next few years given the accelerating decline in permits and new home starts and the increasing costs of interest, building materials and land?
How is the planning for the Leopold addition and the new elementary school integrated with a long-range plan for entire District? What are the consequences of flat/stable enrollment figures over the last several years and that from 2005 to 2006 school years five elementary schools on the west side are down in enrollment and seven have had only slight increases?
What priorities will be addressed and what are the plans for use of the nearly $800,000 under the revenue cap in the operations budget that would become available if the referendum is approved?
The Madison Metropolitan School Board of Education has proposed a referendum for district voters to consider on November 7, 2006.
The referendum is a single question with three parts:
Build a new 650-student elementary school in Linden Park on the far west side of Madison at a cost of $17.7 million.
Move previously committed financing of $2.76 million for Leopold elementary school from underneath the revenue cap.
Move financing for previous school additions and land development in the amount of $3.1 million from beneath the revenue cap.
Thus, if approved, the referendum will create $17.7 million of new debt outside the revenue cap, and refinance and move $5.86 million of present debt outside the revenue cap (total of $23.5 million). The School Board and District are telling the public that these actions will cost the owner of an average assessed home of $239,400, about $29.20 per year.
But the Board has refused to tell the public of the true total cost to the taxpayers, and fact that the Board is creating a ‘blank check’ spending entitlement for the Board.
State law will require Madison taxpayers to pay a nearly 60% premium in shared revenues to the State for increasing for increasing local spending authority above the revenue cap by referendum. Thus, if the referendum is approved, Madison taxpayers will have to pay the State over $14 million, making a total of $37.6 million above the revenue cap, all to be borne by Madison taxpayers over the years. In this way, Madison taxpayers will actually be paying costs of other school districts in the state.
Under present District budgeting, the debt service for the $5.86 million existing debt (numbers 2 and 3 of the referendum) is under the revenue cap. By moving this debt from beneath the revenue cap the Board will free up about $800,000 of spending authority. When asked for an accounting of how this new-found money will be spent, they have stated they don’t know.
Consider these issues before voting:
General:
The current revenue caps and levels of state aids to local schools and the property tax bases for local funding will not change in the foreseeable future
The local Board of Education will be required to more effectively and efficiently manage its financial affairs with less money
The local Board of Education will be required to make changes in its delivery systems of curriculum and instruction and student services to attain better achievement results
The local Board of Education will be required to establish a realignment of educational and operational priorities and how those priorities can be met with the existing funding base
The Board of Education cannot financially and educationally manage to take on more debt and operational expenses, as a result of this referendum, with declining ability to pay for these burdens.
Part 1--Regarding the new elementary school proposal:
What will be the operational costs of this school? (has not been disclosed)
How will the operational costs of the school be paid for and what will be the impact on the operational budget when the Board has stated it will have to cut up to about $8 million each year for the next several years? (no planning has been done)
Student enrollment has remained stable for the last several years. Enrollment from 2005 to 2006 declined (-97) in five west side elementary schools and increased in seven (+185)
The impact on reducing existing elementary school building capacities the past several years has been largely due to Board policies regarding class size, racial and low-income student ratios, SAGE reading programs and time of transporting students to and from school
The Board contracted this past spring for architectural and engineering design services for this school at a cost of approximately $90,000
The Board has relied on City of Madison projections for the build-out of 13,000 homes on the far west side in the next 20 years. No consideration has been given to how those numbers are projected to sequentially play out over the years
The decline in home building in Dane County this year has accelerated in September, remaining the weakest this century, less than half of September 2005 (195 down to 73) and at least 68 below every September back to 1999. Year-to-date through September there were 1116 permits in Dane County, 711 below a year ago and at least 332 below every year back to 1999.
Building and land costs as well as interest rates continue to increase creating the significant decline in new residential starts
Approval of the referendum will tax Madison property owners for over $10 million to be given to the state in shared revenues for poorer school districts as no financial benefit to the Madison school district
Part 2--Regarding the addition to the Leopold Elementary School proposal:
Construction for this addition already began in June of this year
Voters defeated a referendum in May 2005 to build an additional complete elementary school on the same property as the existing Leopold Elementary school. The Board is forcing through this addition without prior voter approval and asking taxpayers to approve the expenditure by referendum after the fact
The Board of Education is currently making debt service and principle payments from the general operations budget under the revenue cap
Approval of the referendum would remove approximately $200,000 per year for 16 years from under the revenue cap and provide that amount for the Board to spend without any plan and accountability to educational priorities and needs
Budget cuts for programs, services and various staff were made to the 2006-2007 operations budget partially due to the impact constructing this addition now
The Board made the decision to move ahead not knowing what the impact of redevelopment to the Ridgewood Apartment complex will have on enrollment at Leopold
The addition is underway without a comprehensive long-range plan for dealing with potential enrollment growth in the Fitchburg area of the District coupled with potential growth on the west side of Madison an impacts on existing elementary buildings and boundaries
Approval of the referendum will tax Madison property owners for over $1.65 million to be given to the state in shared revenues for poorer school districts as no financial benefit to the Madison school district
Part 3—Regarding the proposal for refinancing of existing building and land debt:
At the time the Board approved this part for the referendum, no comparative analysis had been conducted of the current debt service cost, length and amount of payments with the same data if approved with the referendum, so they had no idea whether this decision was financially sound or not
Approval of the referendum would remove approximately $516,000 per year for 6 years from under the revenue cap and provide that amount for the Board to spend without any plan and accountability to educational priorities and needs
The Board is forcing through this refinance provision asking taxpayers to approve the expenditures for prior construction and land acquisition by referendum after the fact
Approval of the referendum will tax Madison property owners for over $1.86 million to be given to the state in shared revenues for poorer school districts as no financial benefit to the Madison school district
Taxpayers can view additional questions, information and supporting data by connecting with the following Internet sites:
If Chartering is the Answer, What was the Question?
Ted Kolderie and Joe Graba, charter school leaders at Education/Evolving urge legislators to expand Wisconsin’s charter school law:
"The Importance of Innovation in Chartering"
Remarks to the Legislative Study Committee on Charter Schools
By Ted Kolderie and Joe Graba, Education/Evolving
October 17, 2006
TED KOLDERIE
Let me try to set the context for the Legislature's use of the chartering strategy. The 'Why?' of anything is important to legislators. It is fair to ask: "If 'chartering' is the answer, what was the question?"
The question is: How do we make schooling different enough to motivate the kids who have never learned well in conventional school?
Paul Houston, the head of AASA, has been pointing out how dramatically the signals have been switched for public education. Forever, their charge was access and equity: take everybody; give everybody the opportunity to participate and to learn. Now suddenly the charge is proficiency: The districts are required to see that all children learn.
This is a huge change. The current model of schooling was not built for this. The districts were not built for this. Success with this very different assignment requires major readjustment in the institution.
The states -- which design and construct this institution -- had to ask whether they could rely solely on the existing organizations to meet this new goal. Many asserted they could, or hoped they could. But it was not obvious that kids who had never learned well in traditional schooling suddenly will learn well simply because adults make traditional school 'more rigorous', or tell the kids they "have to".
Most major states decided it is not prudent to commit exclusively to the strategy of transforming existing schools. They have opened a second option, which is to create a new sector in which schools can be created new. It was entirely predictable and perfectly reasonable for the states to conclude that a somewhat different institution is required to carry out successfully the new charge to produce student learning.
A principal charge to this new sector is innovation. In adapting K-12 the states did not -- as they might have -- order the creation of some number of some particular new kind of school recommended by some expert consultant. Rather, the states left the chartering laws open. They invite a wide variety of people to set up and to try out a variety of new models of schooling that might work better. And many states make it possible for these people to get their authorization from a variety of different 'sponsors'.
The goal is better learning. But the Legislature cannot enact better learning. All it can do is to create the conditions that will elicit from the workers on the job of learning -- the students and the teachers -- the motivation and the effort that excellence requires. Chartering is a way of creating those conditions; a way to innovate with models of organization, types of school-culture and approaches to learning that change what kids and teachers do.
We do not know as much as we should about the innovation occurring in the new sector. Probably innovation is the exception, among the schools. Still, there is likely to be more than we think. Research to date has not been very interested in innovation. As John Witte points out: Research looks to generalize; does not focus on the individual cases that might represent the breakthrough model. There is quite an important innovation in school governance in Milwaukee, for example -- which Joe will discuss more specifically -- on which research has not picked up at all.
Choice is a logical and necessary corollary for change and innovation. Nowhere will everyone agree on the direction or rate of change. It is best not to vote on change because we do not believe in coercing people into new-things. So, wisely, the Legislature provided options. Those who want something different can have that. Those who prefer to stay with the traditional model can do that.
So we are now in a major transition. In place of the historic public-utility model, the states now have a diverse form of public education. The districts remain, while a new open sector is emerging. Parents and students may choose where they want to enroll. All this is still evolving: This, like most major changes, a work in progress, continually being adjusted by the state as architect for the system. This too is predictable and reasonable: As Albert Shanker used to say, "Nobody ever gets everything right on the first try".
Like most such change this one is also controversial. The adjustment is difficult for educators. With their long experience in the culture shaped by the old rules it is understandable they are struggling with the new environment of choice, competition and the requirement now for proficiency. There is an understandable impulse to wish all this change could somehow disappear; that everyone could go back to an earlier and more comfortable time.
But the state cannot go back. The challenge is to adapt, as a group of superintendents in Minnesota saw clearly in 1998. Don Helmstetter, the president of MASA that year, and those who joined him in that report, said: We accept what the state has done, with standards and testing and choice and competition. But in fairness to us in the districts, and in the state's own interest, you need now to give us the ability to succeed in this new environment. They asked for flexibility with staffing and with time, for the opportunity to contract for services and for the opportunity to bring in new technology.
That has to be the agenda: to increase the organizational capacity and the system-capacity for change. The requirement for proficiency makes new models of schooling necessary. Information technology -- computers, the internet, the web, the data bases, the search engines -- now make radically new models possible. Gradually, districts in both our states are starting to explore these new possibilities, with innovations both in school-organization and in the approach to learning.
The immediate question now is how -- as it continues to adjust this new and more diverse system of public education -- the Legislature can ensure that the district sector and the open sector, both, have the autonomy needed for the innovation that is required.
Let me turn this over now to Joe, who will talk more specifically about what this rationale implies for the structure of the chartering laws.
JOE GRABA
Let me say again: The need is to produce radically different schools. This is necessary, and this is possible. It will take time . . . and in the meantime we will of course need to keep doing all we can to improve the schools we have, in both sectors. I simply want to stress that for the educational job that has never been done we will need schools of a type we have never had.
There will be some reluctance to do this. Most everybody wants our schools to be better, but almost nobody wants them to be different. So the states will need to move with considerable skill in rearranging the K-12 system to produce the new and different schools.
Minnesota has a more diverse chartered sector than Wisconsin. Early on, our Legislature added other sponsors. We now have the broadest list of eligible sponsors of any state -- including not only colleges and universities but also large nonprofits and foundations as well as various entities in the K-12 structure. Also, in Minnesota the school becomes a discrete legal entity, a nonprofit organization; in your terms a non-instrumentality. Minnesota's schools are relatively independent even when sponsored by districts. We think perhaps Minnesota should create a new category of chartering in which the schools would be closer to the districts, to encourage districts to be more active in this new sector of public education.
Wisconsin is the reverse. Its law, its program, is quite different from most in the country, as you doubtless know. Here chartering has remained almost exclusively a district program. This state has moved only modestly to alternate sponsors; in Milwaukee and in Racine. And the district-sponsored schools are not separate entities. They are, as the law famously says, instrumentalities of the district.
A state is unlikely to get significantly different schools, to get major innovation, within the existing structures. This is not a criticism of the districts: The culture in all organizations works against radical change; works to maintain existing policies and processes. Research by Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School makes it clear that significant innovation comes only when people have the opportunity to work in what he calls "new organizational space". Airlines did not grow out of railroads and motels did not originate with hotels and the PC did not come from the people making mainframes. The innovations appeared outside.
Progressive educators and union leaders are beginning to understand that 'successful' requires 'different' and that 'different' requires 'new'. For the last four or five years I have been a fairly regular attendee at meetings of TURN, the Teacher Union Reform Network. Much of the union leadership understands how deeply its interests are now linked to the creation of new and different schools that can succeed with all kids. In New York City the United Federation of Teachers has gone to one of the alternate authorizers, the State University of New York, to start new schools under New York's chartering law. Discussions are under way similarly in Minneapolis and in California -- actually modeling off Milwaukee.
(I might say: The UFT recently advertised for teachers for its second chartered school. This school will have 20 teaching positions. Eleven hundred teachers applied. And when Public Agenda asked a national sample of teachers a couple of years ago: "How interested would you be in working in a charter school run by teachers?" it found that 55% of all teachers, two-thirds of the under-five-year teachers, and 50% of the over-20-year teachers would be somewhat or very interested in that arrangement.)
This perhaps underscores the significance of the organizational innovation in Milwaukee, in which the authority to design the learning program and to arrange the administration of the school is placed in the hands of a formally-organized group of professional teachers. This is a professional model of school; essentially a partnership. Its effects are quite remarkable. It elicits from teachers the kind of effort it is not often possible for administrators to get within the traditional 'management' model. It does, however, tend to disrupt the traditional operating model, and it is a continuing challenge for top management in Milwaukee to give these schools sufficient authority on a continuing basis.
The new requirement to get all kids to learn is the overriding reason why we need to find new forms of schooling. But there is another important reason to give Wisconsin schools greater opportunity to innovate with governance and with learning. This is the prospect that the traditional model is not economically sustainable even in the fairly near term.
The technology of teacher-instruction is very expensive, and the steady rise in the costs of this service (including the cost of hospital and medical insurance) makes it difficult for states to finance, K-12 being usually the largest single item of state expenditure. With revenue unable to keep up, what results is a continuing process of increases in taxes combined with reductions in the service program; endlessly, less for more.
The response currently, across the country, is to try to secure 'adequate' revenues; to guarantee K-12 revenue sufficient to cover the rising cost of the traditional model regardless of the overall condition of the state budget or of the state's economy. But as these proposals appear the states will likely to want to consider whether there is an alternate approach; some different model with a cost structure that will be sustainable going forward.
Probably there is. Legislators are aware that recent developments with electronic information technology might make this possible; customizing learning in ways that draw greater effort from the students, and that permit the teachers to reduce the time spent simply transmitting-information and increase the time they spend working individually with students.
The need to encourage innovation suggests that Wisconsin now expand its chartering law in several directions. The idea is to give districts and schools, as Wisconsin has been urged to give students, "all the options available".
The teacher-partnership arrangement in Milwaukee is an important variation on the 'instrumentality' school: It should be extended and enlarged.
Second, it would be useful to allow for the non-instrumentality arrangement to be available more widely in the state, and to be used more commonly by the districts.
Third, it would help if the Legislature were to expand the types of sponsors available. Todd Ziebarth set out the possibilities for legislative action along these lines when he appeared before your group earlier.
In Minnesota we have been especially interested recently in the Legislature adding, creating, a few sponsors that would be, as we say, 'special purpose' sponsors. Most sponsors today, everywhere, have some other major thing to do for a living. The 'special purpose sponsor' would have no function except to generate quality public schools new. It would be proactive. And each would specialize, in some way. We think this would help both with innovation and with replication.
We would be happy to discuss these ideas with you.
______________________________
TED KOLDERIE
Senior Associate
Center for Policy Studies, Saint Paul, MN
Ted has worked on system questions and with legislative policy in different areas of public life: urban and metropolitan affairs and public finance through the 1960s and '70s; K-12 public education almost continuously since 1983. He is recognized nationwide for his work on education policy and innovation. Ted was instrumental in helping to design and pass the nation’s first charter law in 1991, and has since worked on the design of chartered school legislation in over seventeen states. He has written about the charter idea and its progress in a variety of publications, and is the author of “Creating the Capacity for Change – How and Why Governors and Legislatures are Opening a New-Schools Sector in Public Education,” a book about charter schools as a state strategy for the reform of public education.
A graduate of Carleton College and of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton University, he was previously executive director of the Citizens League in the Twin Cities area, a reporter and editorial writer for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, and a senior fellow at the Humphrey Institute.
JOE GRABA
Senior Policy Fellow
Hamline University, Saint Paul, MN
Joe’s career in public education spans forty years and an impressive array of leadership positions. Education/Evolving’s thinking on system questions and legislative policy are influenced greatly by Joe’s ability to integrate knowledge gained as a high school teacher, union leader, state legislator and administrator influencing a variety of education committees, national education committee member, and a higher education administrator.
He began as a science teacher at Wadena Public Schools, and served three years as Vice President of the Minnesota Federation of Teachers. Most recently, he was Dean of Hamline University’s Graduate School of Education. In between, he served three terms in the Minnesota House of Representatives; four years as Chair of School Aid Committee. He was appointed as Deputy Commissioner of Education for the State of Minnesota, State Director of Minnesota’s Technical College System, Deputy Executive Director of the Minnesota Higher Education Coordinating Board, and Interim Executive Director of the Minnesota Higher Education Services Office. Beyond Minnesota, Joe was Chair of the Education Committee of the Midwest Conference of the Council of State Governments and a member of the Education Task Force, National Conference of State Legislatures.
Joe received his undergraduate degree from Bemidji State University and did graduate work at Northern Colorado University and Bemidji State University.
Here's a math problem for you: Count the excuses people are trotting out for why schoolkids in New York City and State did poorly in the latest round of math scores. The results showed just 57% of the city's and 66% of the state's students performing at grade level - and a steady decline in achievement as kids got older.
It's about family income, said an article in The New York Times. "The share of students at grade level in affluent districts was more than twice as big as in impoverished urban districts."
It's about unfair funding levels, said state education Secretary Richard Mills.
It's about class size, said activist Leonie Haimson.
Wrong again, claimed other observers. The real culprit was a new test.
If, like me, you're running out of fingers - and patience - there's a reason. Nobody spinning the test scores is zeroing in on the single biggest reason math achievement in New York City and state lags and will continue to lag: Our schools use a far-too-fuzzy curriculum that fails to give kids rigorous instruction in the basics.
In New York City, the program required in the vast majority of schools is called Everyday Mathematics. Chancellor Joel Klein swears by it. If you ask administrators to explain it, they'll use just enough jargon to make it sound decent.
But the truth is, Everyday Math systematically downplays addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, which everyone knows are the foundations for all higher math. Instead of learning those basic four operations like the backs of their hands, students are asked to choose from an array of alternative methods, such as an ancient Egyptian method for multiplication. Long division is especially frowned upon.
The performance of American students in mathematics is mediocre at best. In many cases, mathematics instruction is not serving our children's best interests. In order to help all students achieve success in school mathematics courses, have access to adequate preparation for the broadest options in high school math and science courses, and the opportunity to advance into mathematics based college courses and careers, it is important to examine the direction of recent attempts at mathematics education reform.
This letter and the enclosure are an appeal to you for help in alerting your readers to significant errors and misconceptions in an article printed in the Post on October 1, 2006 titled "Billions for an Inside Game on Reading" by Michael Grunwald.
He asserted that Reading First grants were awarded to preferred reading programs, and that billions of dollars were misspent because the requirement in Reading First that reading programs be based on "scientifically based reading research" were ignored.
Below is a summary of the essential facts that document the errors and misconceptions that have damaged one of the most effective programs to teach vulnerable children to read. Attached to this letter is a detailed presentation that seeks to correct the record.
It is my hope that you will consider printing a clarification so that the public you serve will know the truth about Reading First.
The MMSD's omission with respect to Reading First was to support the Superintendent's rejection of the $2M+ grant without a School Board discussion, particularly in light of the District's devotion to the expensive Reading Recovery program. 2M is material, even to an organization with an annual budget of $332M+. Much more on Reading First here and Bob Sweet [Interview].
n this report, which draws on data from Chicago public elementary schools in the 1990s, the authors present a framework of essential supports and community resources that facilitate school improvement. The authors provide evidence on how the essential supports contribute to improvements in student learning, and they investigate how community circumstances impact schools’ ability to embrace the essential supports.
The authors offer empirical evidence on the five essential supports—leadership, parent-community ties, professional capacity, student-centered learning climate, and ambitious instruction—and investigate the extent to which strength in the essential supports was linked to improvements in student learning, and the extent to which weakness was linked to stagnation in learning gains.
Today the Madison school board received another letter from a teacher explaining how the current state of computers and software makes teaching harder and more stressful. While this is a typical complaint from the schools, I don't see the same problems with central administration computers.
Dear Board Members and Mr. Rainwater,
I have been a teacher for MMSD for fifteen years. I am committed to and love this district and its students. I work at .... This is a wonderful building in which to work. The staff is solid, caring, and professional.
....
A second concern in our building is technology. I love the new attendance system and am currently using the grading program on infinite campus which I also enjoy. Unfortunately, our computers are slow and often freeze up. Quite often, I have to call my attendance into the office because it takes 10-15 minutes for the computer to load. We have little access to adequate computers as a staff. It makes it difficult to be able to keep grades in a timely manner. Six of us in 8th grade have to share one antiquated computer for our planning area. My guess is that most other professionals in this city would not even think of working with such inadequate technology.
I know budget cuts are the number one problem here and I'm sure you'll tell me that there's nothing that can be done unless we get more money. I just wanted an opportunity to tell you that this is quite a stress on those of us who teach and are in the trenches every day. We love our kids and our jobs but it is becoming very difficult to be the best we can be.
The first step toward improving the state's tax climate must be for lawmakers to control spending. The state cannot afford to cut taxes and thus forgo revenue unless the next governor and Legislature do a better job of paring, consolidating and conserving.
Even the promise that lower taxes will generate more business development in the future will not address the immediate strains created by rising costs for Medicaid and other programs.
Despite a "freeze" designed to slow property tax growth, Wisconsin’s 230 largest cities and villages increased levies at the same rate as in prior years. According to the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX), municipal-purpose property tax levies rose 4.1% in these municipalities in 2005-06 (2006), the same as the average increase from 2002 to 2005.
In recent years, most state spending growth has been in two areas: school aids and Medical Assistance (MA). The inescapable link between state aid and school revenue limits on the one hand and property taxes on the other virtually assures that, when combined with accelerating MA costs, most new state revenue is already "spoken for." Funds for state agencies, higher education, and other state programs are likely to grow little, if at all, thus continuing a long trend..
State law gives the governor and legislators the power to enact budgets. Yet, through various actions and commitments from both over the past decade, they have increasingly put the state budget on autopilot.
Globally, American companies already are at a disadvantage because the benchmark federal corporate tax rate is 35%, which the Tax Foundation notes is "one of the highest corporate tax rates of any of the industrialized economies" - even after the successive rounds of tax reductions under President Bush.
The foundation's report, however, only added to a bewildering array of national tax rankings, each using different methodologies that have sparked a lively debate among policy-makers.
The foundation's annual State Business Tax Climate Index is based on a weighted index that ranks each state's corporate taxes, individual income taxes, sales taxes, unemployment taxes and property taxes. While it relies on U.S. census data for each state's property tax, it compares state tax rates and tax laws to measure the other four. It employs a matrix of 10 subindexes and 113 variables.
The Madison-based Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, using the latest available census numbers, put Wisconsin at No. 6 when measured as a percentage of personal income. That figure represents years of incremental improvements after Wisconsin registered No. 3 in the nation under the same measures in 1994.
Taxes, particularly the much discussed property tax "Freeze" will certainly be on voter's minds November 7, 2006. The Madison School District's 06/07 budget will grow local property taxes by 11,626,677 to $211,989,932 (5.8%) [See 2006/2007 Budget Executive Summary - PDF]. Gotta love politics, 5.8% is certainly not a freeze :). The Madison School District's property tax levy changes over the past 6 years. The mill rate has not changed at the same rate as the levy increases because local assessed values have been increasing. That will probably change now as the housing market takes a breather.
A New School on Madison's Far West Side: A Long Term Perspective
On November 7, Madison area residents will be asked to vote on a referendum concerning our local schools. While the referendum has three parts, this paper will focus on the first part - the construction of a new school on the far west side, representing over 75% of the total cost of the referendum.
This report will argue that the most important determinant of whether or not a new school should be built on the far west side (or anywhere else in the district), is whether the long-term outlook clearly indicates it is appropriate. Otherwise, the problem should be considered temporary, with temporary measures pursued to address it. However, the situation here suggests strongly that the problem is a more permanent one, requiring a "permanent solution", the building of a new school.
This report will not attempt to forecast specific enrollment figures for the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) - such an effort would take several months to do properly. Instead, it will focus on the TRENDS that support the conclusion a new school is warranted.
Capacity Constraints - Current Forecast The charts below compare the MMSD's enrollment projections with current capacity, by school. They are sorted by middle school area. When, for example, it shows Leopold at +76 in 2009, it implies that current projections show that school being over-capacity by 76 students in the 2009-10 school year.
Without a new school, Stephens and Chavez will likely face overcrowding substantially worse than that experienced at Leopold today. Meanwhile, Crestwood, Falk and Huegel also face capacity pressures.
Long Term the Key
The situation over the next several years is disturbing. The West & Memorial Area Attendance Task Force examined it thoroughly over a several month period, with significant public input. A new school on the far West side, as well as a modest improvement and expansion of the Leopold campus, was their best proposed solution.
Nevertheless, some question whether a new school is appropriate, particularly given underenrollment on the near East side, a slowing housing market, and the substantial cost involved.
It is difficult to predict with precision what will happen from one year to the next. MMSD's 3-5 year enrollment projections portend serious overcrowding. Nevertheless, one must be cautious about building a new school unless it can be clearly demonstrated that it will be needed in the long-term, more than five years out (preferably 10-20 years out, or longer).
The long-term is the key. New schools will be in place for decades to come. Boundary changes are in effect for years, and hard to reverse. The rest of this report will look at MMSD's long-term picture, and will focus on three areas that shed ligwest side:
Population growth in the Madison area
Potential growth & development on the far west side
Demographic trends pertaining to the numbers of elementary school age kids
1. Madison Population Growth Madison's population is projected to increase by over 33,000, or about 15%, over the next twenty years. Meanwhile, the populations of Fitchburg and Verona are each anticipated to grow at 2-4 times the rate of Madison itself.
It's not surprising Madison's population has been growing so steadily, given the area's offerings: an attractive environment, a diverse economy, good schools and a family-friendly place to live. This continued area growth is vital to the question at hand, for it underlays the argument enrollment will continue to increase for years to come.
2. Potential Growth & Development on Far West Side
The Beltline runs essentially east-west on the south side of Madison. South of the Beltline, and to the west of Verona Rd (Route 18), the MMSD comprises an area of approximately 26 square miles. Imagine High Point Road (just before the Beltline hooks north) extending due south all the way to the furthest reaches of the district, virtually on the outskirts of the city of Verona.
For the table below, MMSD student count data was set against a map of the MMSD boundaries. While the map shows a cluster of schools on the eastern half of this southwestern corner of the MMSD, it is apparent there is potential for many more students to move into the area west of the imaginary High Point Rd line.
The Madison Planning Commission projects 13,000 homes over the next several decades on the far west side of town, with their forecast obviously applying to a far west area larger than the simple area described here. It is extremely easy to imagine many more hundreds of elementary school kids moving into, and growing up in, that far west corner of the district. Meanwhile, it is extremely difficult to imagine that not happening.
3. Demographic Trends - by age
To understand demographic trends concerning age, and their impact on school enrollment, it will be helpful to look at the number of infants (less than 1 year old) in the United States since World War II.
While one can question whether infant count will continue to rise steadily through 2030 (it is difficult for the Census Bureau to try to time another drop), it is significant births have been increasing for the past 9 years, with no sign of soon reversing.
3. Demographic Trends - by age Elementary School
Elementary school children are typically 5-10 years of age. This chart shows that age cohort for the US, expressed as a percentage of the 2005 count; (all charts hereafter will be expressed as a percentage of 2005, to permit comparison across different measures).
The MMSD elementary school enrollment has conformed to the general US pattern, although with more gyrations, and a tendency to lead the nation by about 2-5 years (perhaps because it is a university town).
Madison birth counts serve as a pretty good predictor of MMSD school enrollment. Here, elementary school enrollment is compared with the count of Madison births for the prior 5-10 year period (e.g. Madison births for 2005 equals total births for 1995 to 2000 period).
3. Demographic Trends - by age Middle & High School
The decline in births in the early 1990's in Madison, as well as throughout the country, explains much of why MMSD middle and high school enrollments have been declining. We can expect their enrollments to continue declining a few years longer - and then to follow the upward path already established at the elementary school level.
Summary
The trends described above lead to a very clear conclusion: a new school on the far west side will be required in the long term.
An attractive setting, a healthy and diverse economy, and a family-friendly setting combine to suggest population growth will continue to occur in Madison and in the area covered by the MMSD.
Madison Planning Commission forecasts, and many square miles of developable land, point to much future population growth in the far west side.
The demographic age cycle, which can be traced back to the beginnings of the baby boom, help explain enrollment cycles over the past 60 years. Those cycles, in turn, support expectations of continued increases in elementary enrollment for some time to come.
While this report has not looked at the East side, the trends described here suggest that elementary school enrollment will increase there as well: development continues apace, notwithstanding the housing slump; enrollment has been up the last two years, (and had been declining at a much slower pace the three years prior).
Delaying construction of the far west school would seem advisable if there was a potential for flat elementary school enrollment in the next 5-10 years, or if the pressures on existing structures were not already significant and showing signs of soon becoming substantially worse, or if the cost of construction might suddenly decline. But as none of these elements are evident, and other serious and contentious matters remain, delay seems distinctly unwise.
New Castle School District of New Castle, Indiana, is deploying the Meru Networks Wireless LAN System across its district to enable its more than 4,000 students and 500 staff and faculty to access a broad range of wireless voice and data applications. When completed, the wireless deployment will span New Castle's seven elementary schools, a middle school, high school and vocational school, the district's administration building and its technology center.
With a wireless LAN and several mobile computer labs, New Castle could allow entire classrooms to use computing resources efficiently and cost-effectively. In addition, the district wanted a solution that could be used for both data and voice over IP, allowing staff to keep in touch as they move about the school's campus during the workday.
"Education is not one size fits all" - Johnny during a discussion of the initiatives underway within the school district (the last 12 minutes) such as online learning, the Studio School and differentiation.
Levitan asked Art Rainwater if, during his 8 years as Superintendent, the education our children receive is better than it was in 1998? Art said it was and cited a number of examples.
Look around the business world and two things stand out: the modern economy places an enormous premium on brainpower; and there is not enough to go round.
But education inevitably matters most. How can India talk about its IT economy lifting the country out of poverty when 40% of its population cannot read? [MMSD's 10th Grade Reading Data] As for the richer world, it is hard to say which throw more talent away—America's dire public schools or Europe's dire universities. Both suffer from too little competition and what George Bush has called "the soft bigotry of low expectations".
Thursday's meeting between Madison School Superintendent Art Rainwater, the MMSD's Brian Sniff and the UW Math department included two interesting guests: UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley [useful math links via the Chancellor's website] and the Dean of the UW-Madison Education School. Wiley and the Ed School Dean's attendance reflects the political nature of K-12 curriculum, particularly math. I'm glad Chancellor Wiley took time from his busy schedule to attend and look forward to his support for substantial improvements in our local math program.
Citizen agitation regarding local use of "fuzzy math" has been underway for some time. Melania Alvarez's April, 2004 School Board campaign was based on her UW-Madison work, where she evaluated math capabilities of incoming freshman. A parent, Melania also tutored Math at Thoreau Elementary School, so she "could see both ends". Melania discussed these campaign issues early in 2004:
The Madison School District's full speed ahead implementation of Discovery Math in Elementary School, Connected Math in Middle School and Core Plus in High School despite the dismantling of these programs in Minnesota and California along with extensive local teacher and parent concerns.
Her discussions with MMSD Administration over their plans for these "fuzzy math" programs:
"What happened also is I went and I talked, three years ago [2001], I went and I talked to people at the Madison Metropolitan School District and I asked them if they were trying to implement Discovery, if they were going to do, you know, Connected Math for everybody, and they told me that that was not what they were going to do. And I don’t know if that parents go . . . parents go there, they discuss, they talk with people, they will assure you you’re out there thinking that, you know, that they told you truth, and then come find later on that that’s not the case."
The role of the School Board in setting and overseeing K-12 curriculum:
And what happens is that one of the main jobs of the School Board is to choose curriculums, set curriculums, and the implementation of those curriculums. And, unfortunately, they have not been doing that in the last year(s).
And, of course, then the interest of the few group of educators who want to leave their mark in the world with their own system, this is the way you become famous for life. If your system, if your methodology work, then that’s it, you know, you’re remembered for generations, yeah, and so that is, so this, you know, it’s like a religion, something like that.
And so what happens is that we have to really look at all the possibilities out there, which are being looked at. Like I said, in 19, in late ‘90s, when these curriculums were starting to be implemented, we already knew that these curriculums were controversial and they were failing. And so I am up to date to all those things.
At West, to address the problems of inadequate preparation, we offer an extra hour of math per day in a class called Algebra Extended. There are 11 sections of this class. This is how more kids "complete ninth grade math in the ninth grade," not because of some touted "success" of the feeder programs in middle school.
As a matter of fact, the algebra skills and problem-solving skills of my geometry students have been generally worse every year, and my experience is echoed by many of my colleagues who teach classes beyond geometry. The kids are frustrated and angry as well, feeling, rightfully so, that it's not their fault.
Core-Plus was one of the best of the programs reviewed, panel members say. But studies of its effectiveness were co-authored by Harold Schoen, a University of Iowa professor.
Dr. Schoen, who is listed as a co-director of the program, admits he is in line to receive royalties from the sales of Core-Plus textbooks. His studies, he says, are not motivated by the prospect of royalties, of which he has received little.
But some critics have concerns. "You simply cannot have one of your principal investigators [in a research project] also be the outside evaluator," says R. James Milgram, a Stanford University mathematician and critic.
A quick look at the size of the Connected Math textbooks compared to the equivalent Singapore Math course materials illustrates the publisher and author interests in selling these large volumes irrespective of curriculum quality and rigor (not to mention the much larger potential for errors or the lost trees....).
Who is Responsible for Curriculum Decisions?
Locally, the Madison School Board, certainly the majority of the Board has generally been unwilling to wade into the curriculum oversight waters. One of the arguments put forth is that the Administration takes care of that, and they are the "experts". Wisconsin law says otherwise; School Boards are legally responsible for curriculum:
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) 8.01 & Parent Barb Schrank:
Each school district board shall develop, adopt and implement a written school district curriculum plan which includes the following: a. A kindergarten through grade 12 sequential curriculum plan in each of the following subject areas: reading, language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, health, computer literacy, environmental education, physical education, art and music.
What can Parents/Citizens do?
Run for School Board. Three seats will be contested in April, 2007. Those positions are currently held by Johnny Winston, Jr., Shwaw Vang and Ruth Robarts (Ruth announced last spring that she would not seek re-election).
Send an email (comments@madison.k12.wi.us) or write a letter to the Madison School Board. Mention the board's legal curriculum responsibilities and urge them to publish a review of the current K-12 curriculum with input from Administration, Parents, Teachers and the UW Math Department. In other words, make sure that those critical of the current approach have a substantive say.
Ask that the District's K-12 math curriculum materials (teacher and student) and references be published online (html format) in an easy to review manner. This information should be updated annually.
Advocate for school-based budgeting (a number of districts do this) and local decision making. Teachers should receive the information and tools necessary to meet the needs of all students. MMSD Teacher Barb Williams reflected on this issue in a letter to Isthmus.
Become active in your local PTO, or form a Math Support Group. Thoreau Elementary school has such a group for years. Math was the subject of two Thoreau PTO meetings this year. Following are my notes from the April, 2006 meeting:
The MMSD's Carrie Valentine gave a presentation on how the current K-5 math curriculum was developed and also displayed the new teacher guides "Learning Mathematics in the Primary Grades". Evidently this will be distributed to principals next week.
There were a number of useful questions, including those from a Thoreau teacher who has used Singapore Math the past few years (Barb Williams).
The district has received a "diversity in mathematics grant".
The District requires (or is it the state?) that students have 1 hour of math learning per day.
Barb Williams mentioned that they (her class at Thoreau) were selected to pilot Singapore math (actually a "toe dip" according to the mmsd), yet when she and her students arrived last fall (09/2005), there were no materials.
Singapore Math evidently has been suggested as a supplement in the new teacher materials.
One parent asked if Singapore math can be used as a core? Carrie's response was that they did not select it because there was (has now been rectified, evidently) very little teacher training available for it. Another parent followed up and asked if the PTO could help fund teacher training in Singapore Math.
Another parent mentioned that Singapore has differentiation materials built in, unlike everyday math which is "so shallow" that teachers end up spending lots of free time seeking and copying materials for various students.
A parent asked if the mmsd is tracking students who have taken Singapore math as they move forward? "No."
A parent asked if teachers could share their method and curriculum with parents. She said it would be very helpful to know how they can help. She followed up and said the methods and curriculum change from year to year so it is hard to keep track of what's happening.
Write a comment relating your K-12 math experiences on this post below.
IN A speech at Harvard University in 1943 Winston Churchill observed that “the empires of the future will be empires of the mind.” He might have added that the battles of the future will be battles for talent. To be sure, the old battles for natural resources are still with us. But they are being supplemented by new ones for talent—not just among companies (which are competing for "human resources") but also among countries (which fret about the "balance of brains" as well as the "balance of power")
The problems with CMP go far beyond failing to reach parents. One big problem is that the edifice of mathematics is so huge. Think of how long it took mathematicians to discover all of it. When one tries to use the discovery paradigm as the sole model for math lessons, all of the time available is spent in discovery process of basic concepts. There isn't time for more than a cursory look at any topic. There isn't any work on hard problems related to basic concepts. There isn't time to master computational aspects of basic concepts. Everyone learns 1/2 + 1/4, but no one learns how to find the least common denominator of 1/14 and 1/35. The people who promote a constructivist approach to math set up a false dichotomy between traditional math which teaches one to memorize formulas and tables of computations, and discovery math which teaches one to really understand how math works. I actually had a TAG resource teacher say this to me very patronizingly. "We don't teach math anymore the way that YOU learned it. Now children really understand math when they learn it." Excuse me, but traditional math was never like that. Tradtional math presents concepts AND teaches understanding of concepts. One learns formulas AND why they work. One also does large numbers of progressively more difficult computations to become skilled at them. The problem with traditional math is that large numbers of students don't understand the concepts as presented and try to get by with memorizing and manipulating formulas which they don't understand. They also don't master the computational aspects and try to make up for this deficit by using calculators inappropriately.
Business and technology change rapidly. Education often changes slowly. Nearly 200 people from the southern Wisconsin business and education sectors gathered Thursday to hear an education expert talk about ways of helping education catch up.
Willard Daggett, president and founder of the International Center for Leadership in Education in Rexford, N.Y., was the keynote presenter at a business education conference at the Comfort Inn. He introduced examples of emerging technology and noted that the job market is changing, resulting in fewer low-skill jobs and more high-technology positions.
Daggett offered an especially critical look at education in Wisconsin. "You look more like 1970," he said, comparing state educators to "curators preserving a museum."
35 Members of the UW Math Department (out of 47) wrote a letter expressing concern regarding the MMSD's criteria for a Math Coordinator. Superintendent Art Rainwater's reply.
NCTM's "Focal Points" tries to bring coherence to a national school math problem of many different State Standards. To a reasonable extent, this was influenced by successful Asian curricula, which place a greater focus on what is to be learned each year, expect students to have learned this material, and go on to other topics the next year. There is a greater emphasis on getting arithmetic solid than we have had, and this is included in "Focal Points".
"I suspect Madison can be seen as a microcosm of what is going on throughout the rest of the country," Reese said in a recent interview in his book-lined Bascom Hill office. "There are many extraordinarily well educated people here, and they have very high expectations of what kind of education their children are receiving."
It was a textbook case on how to adopt substandard math textbooks. On June 15, 2005, the Washington, DC School Board voted to adopt Everyday Mathematics (EM) for elementary schools and Connected Math Program (CMP) for middle schools. The action was a photocopy of actions taken by other school boards across the country adoptions that have been occurring on a disturbingly regular basis for the past decade and a half.
What the DCPS Board did and said on June 15 was so similar to what other school boards have done, one would think that they all operate from the same scripts:
A script on how to adopt math textbooks that require extensive teacher training and whose success is most likely attributable to the flurry of tutoring, enrollments in learning centers, or supplemental materials teachers must use if their students are to learn any math that will be of use.
A script on how to disparage testimony from mathematicians and knowledgeable parents, and give credibility only to their own witnesses.
A script on how to have an independent consultant summarize the results of the recommendations for textbook evaluations made by a committee hand picked by the school board.
Like any sleight of hand, once you know the tricks, these techniques are not subtle.
Unfortunately, many people fall prey to the illusions used to convey objectivity and professionalism in the same way Las Vegas audiences believe David Copperfield can make an automobile onstage disappear.
Obviously, getting math right for our future generations is critical to our social (tax base) and economic well being. An MMSD Administrator mentioned to me that they recognize the problem but believe it will take a long time to fix. It appears we have a way to go.
Fancy programs on aging computers: an MMSD teacher tries to make things work
From time to time, I wonder whether MMSD's central administration decisions take into account the needs of staff in our schools. Here's a recent letter to the school board from a middle school teacher discussing the poor fit between software and hardware at the school.
"I came in very early this morning to run new student summaries for several of my kids who had decided to make up missing work in order to raise their grades. I think we would all agree that this is a good thing.
I spent 15 minutes trying to get my computer to print one student's summary. The computer kept locking up on me and I would have to cold boot it. Actually, this is not my computer; it is the only computer in the planning area shared by 6 eighth grade teachers. It runs Windows 98.
As I was complaining about this computer, one of my colleagues mentioned that she has to phone in her attendance each hour about 1/3 of the time because the computer in her classroom either locks up or takes too long to process her attendance. Our tech person has been out several times and is able ! to fix it for awhile, but then it stops functioning properly again.
I have had a similar situation in my classroom. The teacher who is in there first each day timed it and it takes about 7 minutes to boot it up in the morning.
My special education partner just read this note and asked me to add that she was trying to work after school yesterday in the library with some students and the computers in there kept freezing up.
You are asking us to use sophisticated programs on antiquated machinery and it's causing a great deal of stress for staff and students.
And yes, I am filling out a work order for this computer."
Do current housing declines wipe out the need for a new West side school? Here's an article from The Capital Times (Oct. 9, 2006):
Home building keeps plunging here
The decline in home building in Dane County this year accelerated in September, remaining the weakest this century, according to the latest figures from MTD Marketing.
There were just 73 permits issued for single-family homes and duplexes here in September, less than half the 195 last September, and at least 68 below every September back to 1999, the earliest year MTD reported figures.
The September permits did set a record average value for the month at $242,836. The average square footage was 2,410, third highest since 1999.
Year-to-date through September, there were 1,116 permits in Dane County, 711 below a year ago and at least 332 below every year back to 1999. The average value for the first nine months of the year did set a record at $246,660. The average square footage of 2,449 was behind only the 2,469 in 2004.
To provide essential guidance to urban school board members committed to high achievement for all children, Don McAdams presents a comprehensive approach to board leadership he calls reform governance. This accessible framework brings together all the work of an urban school board, including everything from big ideas about core beliefs and theories of action for change, to the fundamental relationships and processes through which boards and superintendents work together, and the leadership role boards have in building community support for sustained change. Taking into account the hot political arena of urban education, reform governance:
Helps school board members understand why it is necessary to redesign urban districts and what their role in the process should be.
Sets forth principles that boards can use as guides to action, and gives real-life examples of how they work.
Shows how a strong board and superintendent team can work together to be agents for change.
The nation is watching to see what happens with New York City school finance. After a dozen years in the courts, the case of Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) v. New York is now back at the Court of Appeals for a final judgment about the added appropriations that the legislature must send to the city. This judgment is, however, unlikely to be the final statement. If the legislature must come up with an incredible sum of money close to the more than $5 billion currently on the table, it may well balk, precipitating a true constitutional crisis.
New York's school-finance case may be the most visible in the nation, but it is certainly not unique. Almost half of the states today have an "adequacy" case in their courts. Only five states have never faced a school-finance case during the past three decades. New York, however, is on center stage this week. Because of the size of the judgment, the New York decision could send shock waves through state legislatures across the country.
Earlier this year New York's intermediate court called for an added appropriation of $4.7 to $5.6 billion per year to go to New York City schools. The state, with Attorney General Eliot Spitzer helming the defense, appealed this decision. Final oral arguments will be given tomorrow, marking at least a culmination in the legal battle, though likely not the last word in the fight.
New Yorkers tend to view this case with righteous indignation: The legislature simply failed to provide the city schools with adequate resources. After all, they argue, the trial court, after listening to seven months of testimony, found this to be a clear violation of the state constitution and slapped a precise dollar value on what it saw to be the magnitude of that violation.
Unfortunately, in determining the cost of an "adequate" education, the court relied heavily on the questionable analysis of consultants hired by the plaintiffs. Their analysis, labeled a "professional judgment model," was advertised as a scientific determination of the amount of spending necessary to secure an "adequate" education for every New York City student. Yet, this analysis violates virtually every principle of science and, as a result, has produced a politically saleable but scientifically unsupportable answer to the problem.
There's no more popular education program among politicians and teachers than reducing class sizes in kindergarten through third grade. No other program, however, has spent more tax dollars for less result. Now lawmakers are pushing a bill that would fund class-size reduction (CSR) for additional grades.
SB 1133 would spend nearly $3 billion over seven years to decrease class size in fourth through eighth grade down to 25 students. California's current CSR law has spent around $16 billion over the last 10 years reducing class size to 20 students per K-3 classroom. The ultimate goal of the program, says the state Department of Education, is to "increase student achievement, particularly in reading and mathematics." Under this criterion, CSR comes up short.
A state-sponsored consortium of top research organizations analyzed the program and found no association between the total number of years a student had been in reduced size classes and differences in academic achievement. Further, there's no evidence that CSR helps at upper grade levels. Stanford education professor Michael Kirst says that research has focused on elementary grades, not middle-school levels, as SB 1133 would do. Also, that research has examined reducing class sizes to 20 students or fewer, not to 25 students as the bill would require. Says Kirst, "This is really a dark continent in terms of any research."
In spite of this lack of evidence, some top state education officials believe that SB 1133's minor provisions aimed at improving teacher quality in low-performing schools make the bill worthwhile. Unfortunately, teacher-quality problems in California plunge to a much deeper level. Consider the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) given to prospective teachers in California.
The CBEST was designed, "to test basic reading, mathematics, and writing skills found to be important for the job of an educator," according to the official CBEST website. While teachers should be proficient in these areas, the CBEST sets such low standards that it proves nothing.
One Bay Area teacher who took the test in 2003 described the experience as "a joke" and said: "Compared with other standardized tests like the SAT and GRE, the CBEST is laughable. The math section tests maybe for a fourth-grade skill level, and the verbal sections are hardly better."
School Improvements, desired by all of us, need financial resources, but primarily, the need is for a quality strategic and measureable plans and goals. Ed Blume has posted a few such rubrics from Victoria Bernhardt. He has not received much input on these worthy rubrics. See.
That was certainly my experience also, as I posted a full Excel spreadsheet of Bernhardt's rubrics on this site back in August 21, 2005.
Bernhardt's rubrics allows one to subjectively rate each of these measures on Approach, Implementation and Outcome on a scale of 1 to 5.
The above three rubrics add to this important list. These rubrics are based on measuring individual schools, and so those with more intimate knowledge of a particular school will be better able to evaluate these rubrics, but using these rubrics to evaluate the District would also be useful. I think finding such raters, at the school level, will be nigh impossible because what I perceive to be the very closed nature of the school administration at MMSD as a whole.
To start the exercise, look at Continuous Improvement.
Level ONE
Approach: Neither goals nor strategies exist for the evaluation and continuous improvement of the school organization or for elements of the school organization.
Implementation: With no overall plan for evaluation and continuous improvement, strategies are changed by individual teachers and administrators only when something sparks the need to improve. Reactive decisions and activities are a daily mode of operation.
Outcome: Individuals struggle with system failure. Finger pointing and blaming others for failure occurs. The effectiveness of strategies is not known. Mistakes are repeated.
Level TWO:
Approach: The approach to continuous improvement and evaluation is problems solving. If there are no problems, or if solutions can be made quickly, there is no need for improvement or analyses. Changes in part of the system are not coordinated with all other parts.
Implementation: Isolated changes are made in some areas of the school organization in response to problem incidents. Changes are not preceded by comprehensive analyses, such as an understanding of the root causes of problems. The effectiveness of the elements of the school organization, or changes made to the elements, is not known.
Outcome: Problems are solved only temporarily and few positive changes results. Additionally, unintended and undesirable consequences often appear in other parts of the system. Many aspects of the school are incongruent, keeping the school from reaching its vision.
Level THREE:
Approach: Some elements of the school organization are evaluated for effectiveness. Some elements are improved on the basis of the evaluation findings.
Implementation: Elements of the school organization are improved on the basis of comprehensive analyses of root causes of problems, client perceptions, and operational effectiveness of processes.
Outcome: Evidence of effective improvement strategies is observable. Positive changes are made and maintained due to comprehensive analyses and evaluation.
Level Four:
Approach: All elements of the school's operations are evaluated for improvement and to ensure congruence of the elements with respect to the confirmation of students' learning experience.
Implementation: Continuous improvement analyses of student achievement and instructional strategies are rigorously reinforced within each classroom and across learning levels to develop a comprehensive learning continuum for students and to prevent student failure.
Outcome: Teachers become astute at assessing and in predicting the impact of their instructional strategies on individual student achievement. Sustainable improvements in student achievement are evident at all grade levels, due to continuous improvement.
Level FIVE:
Approach: All aspects of the school organization are rigorously evaluated and improved on a continuous basis. Students, and the maintenance of a comprehensive learning continuum for students, become the focus of all aspects of the school improvement process.
Implementation: Comprehensive continuous improvement becomes the way of doing business at the school. Teachers continuously improve the appropriateness and effectiveness of instructional strategies based on student feedback and performance. All aspects of the school organization are improved to support teachers' efforts.
Outcome: The school becomes a congruent and effective learning organization. Only instruction and assessment strategies that produce quality student achievement are used. A true continuum of learning results for all students.
*****
Now, on this one measure called Continuous Improvement, how would you rate the Board of Education, MMSD, and one or more individual schools that you are familiar with?
With Election Day just a month off, the discussion over Madison's $23.5 million dollar school referendum has been remarkably quiet.
But that changes today and referendum supporters say they are optimistic that this time voters will give a thumbs-up to district building projects.
A grassroots citizen group will start today to assemble and distribute yard signs supporting the referendum. In the next two weeks, the school district will hold four informational sessions at Sennett, Cherokee, Sherman and Jefferson middle schools.
At issue is the three-part question that school district voters will be asked to approve or reject Nov. 7.
Preschoolers walk in wiggly, giggly lines through the wide halls of the old Crown Hill Elementary School. They clamber on playground equipment, building up appetites for lunch being prepared in the kitchen.
The Seattle School District closed the doors more than 25 years ago, but these days it has found new life.
As the Small Faces Childhood Development Center, about 180 youngsters duck through the doors during the week for preschool, before- and after-school care and summer programs. There's ballet and a children's flamenco class. Community meetings are held in the newly painted classrooms. Basketballs bounce in the gymnasium.
But as the district proposes closing as many as 10 more buildings next year, it also is considering what to do with about two dozen surplus properties it owns, including seven former schools now leased to day care and community-center operators at a discounted rate of $37,000 to more than $60,000 a year.
If I were the superintendent of the MMSD, I’d set the following as my highest management priorities:
1. Move the MMSD administration out of Stage 1 and toward Stage 5 on leadership and partnerships;
2. Focus on the MMSD’s core mission: education. That might mean finding other agencies to provide MSCR functions and summer food programs, for example;
3. Design and implement a budget system that allows for assessment and control of operational and curriculum expenditures by the board;
4. Innovate for achievement, beginning by initiating pilot projects staring with curriculum and charter schools and partnerships with other educational institutions to give MMSD students a wider range of academic choices.
Hopefully, others will post thoughts on what their priorities might be as superintendent.
On Nov. 7, residents in the Madison Metropolitan School District will vote on a referendum that includes building a new school on the far west side. The total package would hike taxes on an average home by about $29.
Although a similar referendum was defeated in May 2005, this year’s ballot initiative may be the best solution to the growth and school-boundary issues that have dogged the district for more than five years.
Already, several Madison schools, notably Leopold elementary, are severely overcrowded. And city planners expect west-side growth to add 13,000 new dwelling units, twice as many as in the city of Middleton, over the next two decades.
.....
“The referendum is not only about the space issue. It’s sort of about how this community supports the school district,” he says. “The district needs to know from a planning perspective whether the community will help the district meet its bottom line.”
There’s no question that boundary and growth issues have consumed Madison school officials, at the expense of issues regarding achievement, accountability and curriculum. November’s referendum gives citizens the chance to move forward the agenda.
Interesting comments from Carol regarding substantive changes in the Madison School Board's discussions. Much more on the 11/7/2006 referendum here.
Shephard's last paragraph succinctly sums up my views on the November question.
Containing MMSD's employee health insurance costs: what's next?
In June of 2006, the Madison School Board identified containment of employee health insurance costs as a major goal for its Human Resources Committee for 2006-07. On September 25, the HR committee began to study current health insurance costs, projections of future increases in these costs and the implications of failing to slow the expected increases. At the September meeting, Bob Butler, an experienced negotiator and consultant from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, presented the facts. 9/25/2006 Health Insurance Presentation
When the HR committee meets again on October 30, I will ask the committee to follow up on key recommendations in the Butler presentation. I will propose two things: a public education campaign and a public process for exploring alternatives. The public education campaign would explain in detail why it is in the best interests of the employees and the district to contain health insurance costs. The public process for exploring alternatives would involve inviting representatives of our employees to engage in a joint and public exploration of changes in plan designs, insurance providers, wellness programs and other options.
Six weeks ago, Deshawn Hill and I walked into Pacific Dining Car and caught a glimpse of democracy in action: A.J. Duffy and Robin Kramer having a late evening chat.
Duffy's the charmingly cocky boss of Southern California's biggest teachers union. Kramer is the mayor's charmingly clever chief of staff. I'll remind you who Hill is later. For now, let's stick to the boss and the chief.
Kramer tells me the meeting was a coincidental bump-into-each-other thing. But seeing those two together at the city's power-broker steak palace resonated with a hunch I'd been harboring: All those months of teachers union squawking about Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's plans to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District were mainly for show.
Because he's a teacher, though, his motives conflict.
Like you, I think good teachers are heroes who deserve more money and respect and smaller classes and more control over what they teach. I understand why many people have a hard time accepting that their kids' teachers' interests don't always overlap with students' interests. In protecting a teacher's interests, a union often adds to the bureaucratic bloat.
Since I began reporting this column in January (and in the 17 years I've followed my children through L.A. Unified schools) the most righteously frustrated people I've met have tended to lash out at two villains: the district bureaucracy and the union to whom so many board members and bureaucrats are beholden.
Even many teachers say privately that they're disgusted that unions erect barricades against merit pay, charter schools and administrators' ability to move experienced teachers to the schools at which they're most needed. Hear enough stories about just how hard it is to fire an utterly incompetent teacher, and you begin to wonder why the public tolerates unelected union power brokers in their children's lives at all.
In what would be the biggest change yet to the way New York City’s school system is administered, officials are considering plans to hire private groups at taxpayer expense to manage scores of public schools.
The money paid to the private groups would replace millions of dollars in grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which supported dozens of these groups in opening more than 180 small schools in the city since 2003.
The four-year grants, typically worth $100,000 a year per school, will run out for more than 50 schools in June.
The move would further Chancellor Joel I. Klein’s earlier efforts to tear apart the traditional bureaucracy of the nation’s largest school system, giving principals greater autonomy and increasing the role of the private sector. It could put private entities like the College Board, the Urban Assembly and Expeditionary Learning-Outward Bound on contract to manage networks of schools as soon as the 2007-8 school year.
ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Children with severe reading problems usually struggle for years before getting the help they need. But a growing number of neurologists and educators say that with the latest diagnostic tests, children at high risk for these problems can be identified in preschool and treated before they ever begin to read.
The newer tests, available in computerized versions, measure a child’s fluency with the skills that are the foundation of reading: the ability to recognize differences between sounds, the knowledge of letters and the accumulation of basic vocabulary and language skills. The National Early Literacy Panel, a committee of experts convened by a consortium of federal agencies, has found that these tests, when given to 3- and 4-year-olds, predict later reading problems as effectively as they do when they are given to kindergartners and first graders, said the panel’s chairman, Dr. Timothy Shanahan of the University of Illinois in Chicago. The committee plans to recommend increased preschool screening when it publishes its findings later this year.
The panel also will recommend some shifts in teaching techniques, said a panel member, Dr. Susan Landry of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. These include having at-risk children spend more time in small groups that address their specific weaknesses; emphasizing skills like blending sounds (C + AT = CAT), which have been found to be good performance predictors; and training parents to reinforce school lessons.
The point is to identify and attack the problems early, when they are easiest to correct.
“Once a child falls behind, it’s very difficult to catch up,” said Dr. Angela Fawcett of the University of Sheffield in England.
Article from New York Times by By JOHN O’NEIL, published: October 4, 2006
In the Head Start program here, screening and teaching are increasingly tied together, and a detailed skills assessment is part of the new school year routine. Last month, Karen Gischlar, a reading consultant, sat down with a 4-year-old, Destiny Freer, with a set of blocks, a book of pictures and a handheld computer loaded with M-Class: Circle, one of several formal screening tests on the market.
M-Class: Circle, which was developed by Dr. Landry, measures the skills linked to reading success. Its manufacturer, Wireless Generation, said the test was used to screen 45,000 preschoolers last year; paper versions were used to screen a similar number.
Destiny breezed through the first rounds of a series of one-minute tests, on naming letters and simple objects. She also aced the first rhyming exercise, on whether pairs of words sounded the “same or different.”
But her answers became hesitant on the next round, when she was asked to find a rhyme to a word given by Ms. Gischlar. And she had more trouble with higher-level skills, like using the blocks to show the number of words in a short sentence and clapping out the syllables in words like cowboy, big or wagon.
When the test was done, there on the computer screen were Destiny’s scores, color coded in red, green and yellow, and a comparison to her scores from earlier this year, both of which showed Destiny to be developmentally on track, despite some of her faltering.
Another tap of Ms. Gischlar’s stylus brought up a list of suggestions for her specific weaknesses — building awareness of word sounds, for instance, by telling a story in rhyme and letting her guess how some sentences end.
Destiny’s teacher, Eliza Commareri, said the test helped plan how to individualize instruction and in arranging small groups because the program provides a database showing children with similar needs. The other benefit, she said, was the close link between the screening and a step-by-step curriculum of suggested activities. For teaching syllables, for instance, Ms. Commareri said she might ask the whole class to clap out “play-ground” when they’re headed out to recess, or get a few children together to bang out words on a drum.
“It’s very helpful because it gives results in all different areas, and activities in all different areas,” she said.
Head Start programs have been taking the lead in preschool screening, in large part because low-income children have high rates of language delay; most of the children in the center here arrive more than a year behind.
Reading failure is linked to two different causes. Children with dyslexia tend to have inherited abnormalities in the brain’s sound-processing mechanism. But insufficient early exposure to what neurologists call “rich language,” a situation more common in poor families, can also undermine the processing abilities that are reading’s foundation.
Screening can uncover both kinds of problems, but poor children are the ones who can benefit the most from preschool intervention, said Dr. Peggy McCardle, the chief of the child development branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
School policy has traditionally been that children qualify for significant extra help only after they’ve fallen behind. In 2004, according to federal data, fewer than 10 percent of students getting special education services under the category of specific learning disability — most of whom have reading as their primary problem — were younger than 9.
In August, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced new regulations meant to make it easier for elementary schools to offer extra help as soon as students start to struggle.
Dr. Fawcett, who is also the editor of the journal Dyslexia, said making students wait for help was costly, both for schools and students.
A study she led found that a small amount of extra tutoring given to preschoolers with language delays — an hour a week of small-group work for 10 weeks — boosted their skills in comparison with similar children in a control group. The gain exceeded what a year’s worth of remediation at age 7 or 8 would produce, she said.
Marj Jones, who runs Head Start programs in Phoenix as the executive director of the Arizona Literacy and Learning Center, is an enthusiastic user of another screening test, Get Ready to Read, developed by the National Center for Learning Disabilities. The center’s executive director, James H. Wendorf, estimated that the test was used to screen about 70,000 preschoolers each year by teachers or by parents using the interactive version available at getreadytoread.org. But Ms. Jones said that even the best testing produces only a limited gain unless it is part of a larger effort.
“You can go in and screen a child, but if you don’t have continuous support from teachers and parents, you’ve only accomplished a short-term goal,” she said.
It's not a debate on the referendum, it's a report on the state of the school system. The referendum will be one of the topics. So, no, not planning on inviting any referendum opponents. But they are welcome, nay, encouraged, to call.
By now, I'm sure you know that last Friday a 15 year old boy entered Weston School in Cazenovia (Sauk County) and allegedly shot and killed the principal. This incident has stirred in all of us the uneasy realization that this can happen anywhere, at anytime. We mourn the loss of the principal and empathize with the staff, students, families and community members of that school district. We also feel tremendous responsibility for our own students and staff. Last week, our entire staff spent a day talking about the crucial nature that relationships play in our schools. While the primary focus was on issues of race and equity, we also know that we were talking about any student who doesn't feel connected to the school and valued by an adult. Last Friday after we heard about what happened at Weston High School, we sent to our staff the following reminders:
Message from Johnny Winston, Jr., President of the Madison Board of Education
On behalf of the Madison Board of Education, we send our heartfelt condolences to the Klang family, Weston School district and Cazenovia community.
In response to this tragedy as well as recent incidents in Green Bay and Colorado, Superintendent Art Rainwater has sent a message to all employees of the Madison Metropolitan School District outlining strategies and effective communication tools between students and adults. He wrote, “The most effective tool we have for preventing violent behaviors at school is building and maintaining a climate of trusting relationships and communication between and among students and adults.” He has also indicated that the Madison Police will increase their presence at our schools for the next week.
We know that the Madison community joins our school board in support of the Klang family, Weston School district and Cazenovia community. Our thoughts and prayers are with them during this difficult period.
Culture of high school marginalizes those who don't conform
Seven years after Columbine, school shootings are still occurring with frightening regularity. Much has been made of the influences that culturally sanctioned violence, neglectful parents and video games may have had on the actions of disaffected young men, and I have no doubt that these are powerful influences indeed.
However, I have yet to see any analysis of the way the culture of public high schools may be linked to the tragedies.
American public high schools have a culture that deifies the physically attractive, the athletically gifted and those who find conformity easy.
This adulation not only gives the "chosen ones" an enormous amount of social power, it also marginalizes students who are not members of the elite.
Not everyone gets to be a beauty, an athlete or a member of a well-adjusted family. There are many students who cannot or will not conform to the accepted norms, and their voices are silenced through abuse, ostracism and simply being allowed to slip through the cracks.
The fact that school administrators the target of the most recent incident in Cazenovia apparently ignore the abuses of the popular and powerful represents appalling indifference to the difficulties the outsiders face.
Bullying is dismissed as something kids just do, and victims are too often told to buck up and ignore it, or that they bring it on themselves by being weird in other words, that simply being who they are gives bullies license to hurt.
I remember all too clearly, all too painfully, my own experiences as a bullying victim in Madison's public schools, and although I cannot condone violence, a part of me understands the motivations of school shooters.
When you are silenced, marginalized, treated as if you don't matter, and abused every day by the people around you, you become desperate. Desperate enough to kill just to make yourself heard.
The culture at large may be the driving force behind the culture of high school. Professional athletes and stereotypically beautiful entertainers are paid sums of money vastly disproportionate to the significance of their occupations. They are held to different standards of behavior, as though they were royalty.
It does not matter whether these individuals have any personal integrity, intelligence or imagination so long as they can throw a touchdown pass or look a certain way. They are held up as role models nonetheless, warping young minds into believing that this is what one should must aspire to.
What does this leave for the uncoordinated young man with acne who writes poetry, or the overweight bespectacled young woman with intellectual curiosity?
Why is it so threatening to the mainstream when a young person chooses to dress outrageously, or falls in love with someone of the same sex?
As members of the same species, we are more alike than we are different, whatever our ethnicity, home environment, appearance or sexual orientation. It is shameful that a culture as rich as ours offers such a narrow spectrum of expression.
I don't know how to change any of this, but the culture of high school needs a serious overhaul. Without it, we can look forward to new generations of desperate young people who feel they have no choice but to lash out with violence.
TO JOURNALISTS, three of anything makes a trend. So after three school shootings in six days, speculation about an epidemic of violence in American classrooms was inevitable, and wrong. Violence in schools has fallen by half since the mid-1990s; children are more than 100 times more likely to be murdered outside the school walls than within them.
Of course, that average is not wholly comforting. Most children who are murdered are murdered by someone they know. But most parents know with certainty that neither they nor their friends or relations are killers, so their worries focus on strangers. Their fears are inevitably stoked by the breathless coverage of school shootings.
Today, there are only about one-third as many students attending the New Orleans public school system as there were before Hurricane Katrina. The system is recovering from the storm, and from a state takeover to address years of failing test scores. As a result, it has been completely remade, and is now being run by a patchwork of charter school organizers, and state and local administrators.
Why is it that the U.S. federal government allows local communities to give tax dollars to wealthy sports team owners rather than to create better benefits for citizens? Why are organ-donor programs constrained to the point where thousands of Americans die needlessly each year? Why did the South African government take a stand against an effective AIDS treatment drug?
The inability of government to make wise tradeoffs—give up small losses for much larger gain—has been investigated by HBS professor Max Bazerman and his research colleagues for years. Much of this work used economic science and political science to explain drivers behind the crafting of public policy. Now Bazerman and coauthors Jonathan Baron and Katherine Shonk are looking into the psychology of decision making to provide a fuller explanation. Their paper, "Enlarging the Societal Pie through Wise Legislation: A Psychological Perspective," has been accepted for publication in Perspectives on Psychological Science later this year.
What they found was that psychological science does indeed help explain how governmental decision making is influenced by such forces as parochialism, nationalism, and dysfunctional competition, while also providing tools that foster rational decision making.
It's probably natural for leaders of organizations to be upbeat about their institutions, and the nation's school children might not be well-served by superintendents and principals who see public schools as places of disappointment, failure and ineptitude. Even so, the positive, almost buoyant outlook of school leaders nationwide captured in this fourth installment of Reality Check 2006 may come as something of a surprise to reformers and critics, including regulators enforcing No Child Left Behind. In many respects, local school leaders seem to operate on a very different wavelength from many of those aiming to reform public schools. The two groups have different assumptions about how much change today's public schools really need. Even when they see the same problems, they often seem to strive for different solutions.
To most public school superintendents - and principals to a lesser extent - local schools are already in pretty good shape. In fact, more than half of the nation's superintendents consider local schools to be "excellent." Most superintendents (77 percent) and principals (79 percent) say low academic standards are not a serious problem where they work. Superintendents are substantially less likely than classroom teachers to believe that too many students get passed through the system without learning. While 62 percent of teachers say this is a "very" or "somewhat serious" problem in local schools, just 27 percent of superintendents say the same.
Some highlights:
93% of superintendents, and 80% of principals, think public schools offer a better education than in the past, and most (86% and 82%) think the material is harder.
Despite the call from the business community for a great focus on science/math, 59% of superintendents and 66% say that the statement “kids are not taught enough science and math” is not a serious problem in their schools.
77% of superintendents and 79% of principals say that the statement “academic standards are too low, and kids are not expected to learn enough” is not a serious problem in their schools.
51% of superintendents say that local schools are excellent; 43% say they are good.
Only 27% of superintendents, compared with 62% of teachers, say it’s a serious problem that too many students get passed through the system without learning.
76% of superintendents and 59% of principals, compared with 33% of high school teachers, say that students graduating from middle school have the reading, writing, and math skills needed to succeed in high school.
Supporters of Boulder Valley's measure say the hefty price tag is the result of cuts to the district's maintenance budget, along with an average building age of 43 years. The combination, they say, has led to schools that are in bad shape.
"We have a lot of old buildings," school board member Ken Roberge said. "We've put our money into the classrooms. We've made the trade-off. At some point, you have to do renovation."
But opponents are skeptical.
Fred Gluck, a school volunteer whose children went through Boulder Valley schools, said he's campaigning against the measure because he no longer trusts the district to keep its promises.
"I support the schools, the teachers and the kids, but I do not support the district administration," he said. "It's a lack of accountability, lack of clear oversight and a lot of money."
The last Boulder Valley bond issue totaled $63.7 million and was approved in 1998. Voters also approved an $89 million bond issue in 1994 and a $45 million bond issue in 1989.
In the past few years, voters also have said "yes" to a $15 million-a-year tax increase to boost the district's operating revenue and a transportation tax increase that frees up money for new computers.
Press release: MMSD Information sessions about Nov. 7 referendum
The Madison School District will hold four referendum information sessions in advance of the November 7 referendum. The public is invited to attend any of these sessions.
Thurs. October 12 6:30 PM Sennett School 502 Pflaum Rd. 53716 Lecture lab
Tues. October 17 6:30 PM Cherokee School 4301 Cherokee Dr. 53711 LMC
Wed. October 18 6:30 PM Sherman School 1610 Ruskin St. 53704 Cafeteria
Wed. October 25 6:30 PM Jefferson School 101 S. Gammon Rd. 53717 Lecture hall
During these sessions, Supt. Art Rainwater will show a short video and make a brief presentation. Most of each session will be spent answering questions from those in attendance.
Spanish interpreters will be available at Cherokee School on October 17 and Sherman School on October 18.
A $23.5 million referendum is on the November 7 ballot. The three parts of the single referendum question are: build a new school on the far west side, provide financing for more classroom space at Leopold School, and provide revenue cap relief via debt refinancing.
For more information about the referendum, go to www.mmsd.org and click on “2006 Referendum.”
For more information contact:
Ken Syke, 663-1903, or Joe Quick, 663-1902
As a former East High School student who lived through four years of closed campus for lunch, and a parent of current East High students -- one a freshman, the other a junior -- I applaud East High Principal Alan Harris.
I think next year he should be brazen and close campus for lunch for all students, unless they are involved in an off-site program. Ease the hectic lunch schedule of the upperclassmen and set an example for the rest of the city.
Talk about taking back the school! This principal is the best one we have seen since Milt McPike. We are cheering for him in our home.
But that will require another strong group of candidates to step forward.
At least one seat on the board will be open because board member Ruth Robarts is retiring after a decade of service. Board president Johnny Winston Jr. has announced he'll seek re-election. Member Shwaw Vang has not yet said if he'll seek another term.
On September 25, the Human Resources Committee of the Madison School Board heard a presentation from Robert Butler, a negotiations consultant from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, about the ever-increasing costs for employee health insurance for school districts. Mr. Butler also recommended steps for the district to take in the future. The committee meets again on Monday, October 30. Board members on the committee are Lawrie Kobza and Shwaw Vang. I am the chair.
The attached document is copied from Vicki McKenna's web site. Her comments are accurate from the conversations she and I have had and information she has reviewed. There still is a lot more critical information, questions and concerns about the referendum that needs exploration, analysis and 'airing.'
Here is what I think is some significant additional data:
The District continues to refuse to tell the public (taxpayers) about the TRUE costs of the referendum. The District is only telling us to consider a $23.1 million referendum without telling us the FULL tax burden that includes the approximate 60% (Sixty) additional cost to taxpayers to satisfy the State Equalization (negative aids) obligation. That $23.1 million actually becomes an estimated $37.67 million. The three parts to the referendum question break out as follows:
Linden Park Elementary: Basic of $17.7 million, plus 60% or $10.6 million equals $28.3 million total actual tax burden
Leopold Elementary School Addition: Basic of $2.76 million, plus 60% or $1.65 million equals $4.41 million total actual tax burden
Debt Refinance: Basic of $3.1 million, plus 60% or $1.86 million equals $4.96 million total actual tax burden
Items 2 and 3 are, in effect (back door approach), a referendum to raise the revenue cap by releasing over $800,000 per year from debt obligations in the operations budget to spend in whatever ways the Board of Education chooses. The Board has done no planning as to if, let alone how, this money will be spent on priorities for classroom, instruction and programs and services toward directly affecting student achievement.
I encourage you to share your insights, questions and suggestions.
As with leadership, Stage 1 on the five-stage chart best describes the MMSD's partnership development:
Approach in Stage 1
There is no system for input from parents, business, or community.
Status quo is desired for managing the school.
Implementation in Stage 1
Barriers are erected to close out involvement of outsiders. Outsiders are managed for least impact on status quo.
Outcome in Stage 1
There is little or no involvement of parents, business, or community at large. School is a closed, isolated system.
I can see some members of the board nudging the district toward more involvement of parents, but the creep is slow, slow, slow.
The description of implementation clearly describes the administration and the thinking of some board members in my mind. The description explains to me why the superintendent unilaterally returned the two-million-dollar Reading First grant. The recent revelations of bureaucratic impropriety are just after-the-fact rationalizations.
I encourage others to comment on this chart and the previous one. If various school advocates can come to some agreement (or at least understanding of each others' points of view) on these charts, we might be able to begin some productive dialog that would move the MMSD closer toward Stage 5.
Good principals must satisfy interest groups and carry out the goals of policymakers. They must master the bureaucracy, feed their teachers’ energy, inspire students and families. They must blend nimbleness with strategic planning, instant pragmatism with sustained idealism.
“The quality of a principal is the single most important factor in a school’s success,” says Superintendent Art Rainwater.
Talk about pressure.
Patrick Delmore, the former principal at O’Keeffe Middle School, knows how hard it can be.
“You might intellectually know the many facets of the job,” he says. “But even if you work pretty efficiently, you find out quickly how important it is to work those extra hours.”
Demands for more tests and more academic rigor are spurring schools to consider something that makes most students shudder: more time in class.
Massachusetts is paying for longer days at 10 schools this year. Minnesota is considering whether to add five weeks to the school calendar. A smattering of schools nationwide, including schools in Iowa, North Carolina and California, already have increased the time some students spend in class.
The argument that students should spend more time in school isn’t new.
“A Nation at Risk,” the landmark 1983 report dissecting America’s education challenges, recommended that schools run seven hours (up from about six today) and 200 to 220 days (up from a current average of 180) to accommodate more rigorous instruction. KIPP charter schools, started in 1994, rely on longer days and Saturday school to teach students.
But the argument is gaining support as increased math and English testing required by the federal No Child Left Behind law has forced schools to focus on the basics at the expense of the arts, physical education and recess.
The taxpayers of Madison owe Ruth Robarts a big thank you.
Robarts has served on the Madison School Board for a decade, asking pesky questions about how tax dollars are spent and how Madison children are educated.
What she lacked in tact she made up for in candor and an unflinching commitment to changing a school system that, while strong, is too often thin-skinned and resistant to scrutiny.
Perhaps a bit early for the eulogy, but well said. Much more on Ruth here and here
I can make sense out of the tensions between different factions of MMSD advocates by placing their various positions at the different ends of the attached chart on school leadership. (Replace "principal" with "superintendent" and "school" with "district" when reading the chart.)
At stage 1 on the chart,
the Approach is:
[Superintendent] as decision maker. Decisions are reactive to state,
district, and federal mandates;
the Implementation is:
[Superintendent] makes all decisions, with little or no input from teachers, the community, or students. Leadership inspects for mistakes;
the Outcome is:
Decisions lack focus and consistency. There is little staff buy-in. Students and parents do no feel they are being heard. Decision-making process is clear and known.
I feel (and perhaps many other posters do to) that Stage 1 closely describes the MMSD.
My impression is that many pro-district advocates believe the MMSD is at Stage 5 at the other end of the chart where
the Approach is:
A strong continuous improvement structure is set into place that allows for input from all sectors of the school, district, and community, ensuring strong communication, flexibility, and refinement of approach and beliefs. The school vision is student focused, based on data and appropriate for school and community values, and meeting
student needs.
the Implementation is:
The vision is implemented and articulated across all grade levels and into feeder schools. Quality standards are reinforced throughout the school. All members of the school community understand and apply the quality standards. Leadership team has systematic interactions and involvement with district administrators, teachers, parents, community, and students about the school's direction.
the Outcome is:
Site-based management and shared decision making truly exists. Teachers understand and display an intimate knowledge of how the school operates. Teachers support and communicate with each other in the implementation of the quality strategies. Teachers implement the vision in their classrooms and can determine how their new approach meets student needs and leads to the attainment of student learning standards.
Consequently, advocates at the ends of the chart can agree on broad issues, such as the MMSD should serve all students, they cannot agree on how well the MMSD serves students nor on how to serve them better.
The pro-referendum group Communities and School Together (CAST) deleted my membership in its list serve, and changed the membership process to require membership approval by a moderator.
I guess that some members of the community are welcome and others aren't. We'll see whether CAST lets me rejoin. Probably not.
Should CAST members be banned from schoolinfosystem.org?
One of the biggest concerns of parents for the new school year is this: What kind of kids are in my child's classroom? The answer to this question is particularly difficult for parents of average students, the most forgotten group today.
All parents want their children to be with the nice kids, the bright and well-behaved types who will pull classes up, rather than with kids who will drag them down. In big, economically and ethnically diverse high schools such as mine, T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Va., where there is enormous variation in academic abilities, average kids run the risk of ending up in one of two tracks: in classes full of students with weak skills and lousy attitudes or in so-called advanced courses where they find themselves in over their heads.
A major part of the problem is the anti-tracking movement, which began in the mid-1980s. Since then, tracking has become to education what abortion and gay marriage are to politics — an incendiary topic with fanatics on both sides. So-called progressive teachers and administrators, whose mantra is "every child can learn," want to do away with tracking.
Good teachers, and fancy sounding course labels such as Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate, are supposed to raise the level of all students no matter how varied their skills or abilities. In truth, social engineering — mixing of races and ethnic groups in classes — is what many administrators really prize, while giving lip service to academic rigor.
On the other end of the tracking wars are fanatical parents — usually white, in my experience — who think their kids are geniuses, who must be protected from less talented kids and who are entitled to every advantage and resource the school system has to offer.
PUTTING FUNDS FROM LEOPOLD REFINANCING INTO THE DISTRICT'S CONTINGENCY FUND IS A WISE MOVE
I would like to address the issue of how the $276,000 from the Leopold refinancing would be handled in the 06-07 school year if the referendum is passed.
The money for the debt service related to the Leopold construction is currently in the Business Services Budget for the District. If the referendum passes, the Board has committed to moving that $276,000 to the District's contingency fund. Questions have been raised about the wisdom of moving the money to the contingency fund. I believe that is a wise move.
The Board has three options for the funds if the referendum is passed. It can either leave that money in the Business Services budget, it can decide to spend that money in another way, or it can decide to move the money to the contingency fund and potentially use it to soften the budget cuts that will be required for the 2007-08 budget period.
I believe the best course is to put the money in the contingency fund and use it to soften the budget cuts needed for 2007-08 if possible. I don't believe it is wise to put something back into the 2006-07 budget now - after it was already cut - especially if it is likely that it would need to be cut again in 2007-08.
Putting money in the contingency fund does give the Board discretion on how to spend or not spend the money. Therefore, if 5 out of the 7 Board members believe that the contingency fund is needed in 2006-07 for some unexpected or unbudgeted item, the money could be used for that item. However, and I believe most importantly, the Board could decide not to spend that money at all and use it to address the cuts needed in the 2007-08 budget. If the Board instead determines now to spend that money in 2006-07, that money would not be available to cushion the blow in 2007-08.
Existing home sales fall for fifth straight month, reports MSNBC.
Though the article reports that Midwest sales have not been hit as hard as other regions, what are the trends for homes in the MMSD?
If home sales slow, does the MMSD need a new West side school at this point in time?
It's easy to predict a contraction of outlying areas in coming years as high fuel prices (gasoline, heating oil, natural gas) pull people closer to central cities. This possibility also could reduce growth on the fringes of the MMSD -- both east and west.
Madison School Board member Ruth Robarts confirmed Friday that she won't seek re-election, ending her sometimes-stormy tenure that over the past decade earned her praise for being a watchdog but also the label of "public enemy No. 1."
"It is primarily for personal reasons. A decade is a long time to meet every single Monday night," Robarts said.
Also, she said, governments benefit from the energy of newcomers.
Ruth announced her intention to not seek re-election in Jason Shephard's spring 2006 article: "The Fate of the Schools". Ruth has done a tremendous service for the community via her strong, independent voice on the Board. She will be missed. Ruth was instrumental in getting this site rolling.
Johnny Winston, Jr. confirmed that "he'll be in their swinging" next April. Check out these video interviews of Ruth, Johnny and others in the April, 2004 election.
Anna Toman and Moises Diaz think it's got problems.
They and the 420 or so members of their Madison East High School freshman class find themselves part of a grand experiment -- the first Madison high school in at least a dozen years to close its campus.
The school's 1,400 older students still are allowed to lounge outside during their 30-minute lunch break.
Better yet, they're able to jump into cars for a dash from 2222 E. Washington Ave. to Burger King, McDonald's or Taco Bell.
But for East's freshmen, there's one choice for lunch -- the cafeteria -- as school officials attempt to reduce the school's truancy rate.
A scorching internal review of the Bush administration's billion-dollar-a-year reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted.
The government audit is unsparing in its view that the Reading First program has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.
Reading First aims to help young children read through scientifically proven programs, and the department considers it a jewel of No Child Left Behind, Bush's education law. Just this week, a separate review found the effort is helping schools raise achievement.
This audit confirms that Reading First is yet another example of rampant cronyism within President Bush's administration. MMSD was wise to stand up to federal blackmail by refusing to abandon its successful elementary reading program.
State schools Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster proposed Thursday that Wisconsin provide $5,000 annual bonuses to highly qualified teachers to teach in high-needs schools such as most of those in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Burmaster also said the next state budget should include $1.6 million for pilot projects in Milwaukee schools that want to extend the school year beyond the conventional 180 days a year; $1 million in grants for arts programs in MPS schools; and significant property tax relief for city of Milwaukee residents through changes in how the voucher school program is funded.
In unveiling her proposals for the two-year state budget that will take effect July 1, Burmaster said Wisconsin should stick to funding two-thirds of the cost of general operation of schools throughout the state, a step that would require an additional $588 million over the two-year period. The state is providing about $5.9 billion in local school aid this year; continuing at the two-thirds level would present a major challenge to an already-stressed budget
Prior to this fall, students could receive high school credit for non-MMSD courses as long as they obtained prior written approval that the courses they planned to take were deemed worthy of high school credit. I have recently learned that this is no longer true. Rather, the only non-MMSD courses that can currently be approved for high school credit are ones in which a comparable course is not offered ANYWHERE in the District.
Why the change in policy?
Why was it permissible to implement this change in policy without first having open public discussions regarding its pros and cons followed by a BOE vote whether to approve it? This policy change will adversely affect a wide variety of students with learning needs that differ from the norm. These alternative learners include students who attend Shabazz High School or other alternative programs within the MMSD, students with disabilities or long-term illnesses, academically gifted students who learn at a faster pace, and students who lack the means to transport themselves in a timely manner to a District school that offers courses their neighborhood school does not.
The cost to the MMSD of the previous policy was essentially zero, if not negative. On the other hand, the new policy will be highly detrimental to some students who now may fail to graduate from high school due to lack of sufficient high school credits or specific courses required by the District or State of Wisconsin.
Some students affected by this policy change may leave the MMSD for other school districts or alternative schooling options such as home schooling. The latter will lead to loss of $s to the MMSD. Students lose. The MMSD loses. Thus, I urge you to place this item on the agendas for upcoming BOE and Curriculum and Achievement Meetings.
Since I finally have a moment to pause and reflect, I thought I would use one of my infrequent posts to put down some of the things I've discovered thus far. In no particular order...
1. The achievement gap is very, very real. Most of my fourth graders don't know the meaning of simple words like "show" and "pair." Most can't do their 2s times-tables. Most read at least a grade level behind. Most have writing skills that could charitably be called atrocious. It's a miracle that so many of them can find Arizona on a map, because they certainly can't find anything else (but, to be fair, 7th graders were placing "Europe" in Oregon and "Greenland" in Montana).
Then there's the one non-special ed. nine-year-old who I last week taught to read the word "the."
It's not that they can't do it. My kids are a bright, energetic, inquistive bunch. Nor is it that they have no prior knowledge -- it's just floating around in shards, unconnected to anything meaningful. I have to ask this question, though: If thirty students have gone through 4 years of many different schools and understand so little, isn't that a sign that something has gone horribly wrong?
More than 15 years after its publication of influential national standards in mathematics, a leading professional organization has unveiled new, more focused guidelines that describe the crucial skills and content students should master in that subject in elementary and middle school.
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics last week released “Curriculum Focal Points for Prekindergarten Through Grade 8 Mathematics,” a document that supporters hope will encourage the polyglot factions of state and local school officials, textbook publishers, and teachers to set clearer, more common goals for math learning.
While the report is being published by the NCTM, it was reviewed by numerous math experts from across the country, some of whom have strongly disagreed with the organization’s past positions on essential skills. The new document reflects an attempt to overcome those conflicts and focus on a number of crucial, agreed-upon concepts.
“I would hope that this has a large impact, because I believe it gets it right,” said R. James Milgram, a Stanford University mathematics professor and a critic of the math organization’s previously issued national standards. He was one of 14 individuals who provided an outside, formal review of the document. “I would like to hope that this represents a new era of cooperation,” he added. “I hope that what this represents is an end to the math wars.”
Deciding which schools should get how many staff members and other resources is a hot topic, and Madison School Board members are tussling over it now.
A majority of board members asked on Monday night to continue the discussion at next week's meeting, despite board President Johnny Winston Jr.'s reluctance to put the issue on the Sept. 25 agenda.
Winston said the equity issue, which has to do with the fair allocation of resources to students and schools, was too broad to be hurried into discussion. He also said it has the potential to be very divisive. When equity formulas are put in place, some schools gain and some schools lose resources, based on the unique needs of their students.
"It's a very complex issue," Winston said.
He is concerned that the board could make hasty changes in how the district's existing policy is applied, creating "ramifications we don't fully understand," he said in an interview today. The district and its financial situation were very different more than a decade ago when the current equity policy was put in place, he said.
Typical of many math textbooks in the U.S., this one is thick, multicolored,and full of games,puzzles,and activities,to help teachers pass the time, but rarely challenge students. Singapore Math’s textbook is thin, and contains only mathematics — no games. Students are given briefexplanations, then confronted with problems which become more complex as the unit progresses.
It was another body blow to education. In December of 2004, media outlets across the country were abuzz with news ofthe just-released results of the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) tests. Once again despite highly publicized efforts to reform American math education (some might say because of the reform efforts) over the past two decades, the United States did little better than average (see Figure 1). Headquartered at the International Study Center at Boston College and taken by tens of thousands of students in more than three dozen countries, TIMSS has become a respected standard of international academic achievement. And in three consecutive TIMSS test rounds (in 1995, 1999,and 2003), 4th- and 8th-grade students in the former British trading colony of Singapore beat all contenders, including math powerhouses Japan and Taiwan. United States 8th graders did not even make the top ten in the 2003 round; they ranked 16th. Worse, scores for American students were, as one Department of Education study put it,"among the lowest of all industrialized countries."
The countries that outperform the United States in math and science education have some things in common. They set national priorities for what public school children should learn and when. They also spend a lot of energy ensuring that every school has a high-quality curriculum that is harnessed to clearly articulated national goals. This country, by contrast, has a wildly uneven system of standards and tests that varies from place to place. We are also notoriously susceptible to educational fads.
One of the most infamous fads took root in the late 1980’s, when many schools moved away from traditional mathematics instruction, which required drills and problem solving. The new system, sometimes derided as “fuzzy math,’’ allowed children to wander through problems in a random way without ever learning basic multiplication or division. As a result, mastery of high-level math and science was unlikely. The new math curriculum was a mile wide and an inch deep, as the saying goes, touching on dozens of topics each year.
New York Times
September 16, 2006
At Odds Over Schools
By BRUCE LAMBERT
LAWRENCE, N.Y.
[This] school district has been changing, house by house, as Orthodox Jewish families have flocked here over the last two decades, gradually at first and then in growing numbers.
While not yet a majority, the Orthodox have nonetheless emerged as the dominant force in a clash of cultures. And the front line in this battle is Lawrence’s once highly regarded public school system.
In each of the last four years, Orthodox voters mobilized to defeat the school budget — one of the longest losing streaks on Long Island. Then in July, they took charge of the school board, though few of the Orthodox send their children to public schools. Out of seven seats, the new majority consists of four Orthodox members and one ally.
[M]any of this district’s Orthodox residents object to paying school taxes that average about $6,000 per home for a system they do not use. Their leaders also complain that more public money should be channeled to the Orthodox day schools, which by law are limited to tax-financed busing, books and special education services.
“We feel invaded,” said an Atlantic Beach delicatessen customer, a self-described non-Orthodox Jew and activist parent who declined to give her name. “We don’t mind them being here, but taking over and shutting down the school system is not the right thing.” (Atlantic Beach is part of the Lawrence school district.)
Experts who track expanding Orthodox neighborhoods around the nation say the conflict in Lawrence has far-reaching implications.
“Other communities are watching Lawrence very closely, for fear they may be next,” said Prof. William B. Helmreich, the director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Queens College. Orthodox adherents “are cohesive, they marshal forces and vote as a bloc,” he said. “It could happen anywhere.”
It has already happened in Rockland County, where Orthodox residents control the East Ramapo school board. Similar strains have arisen over the schools and other services in Lakewood, N.J., home to a large Orthodox population.
“It’s ominous,” said Steven Sanders, a former New York City assemblyman who was chairman of the State Assembly’s Education Committee. “This is not going to be an isolated situation. This is a worrisome trend. The common thread is not religion. The common thread is people who don’t feel invested in educating other people’s children. What do you do when a community is significantly comprised of individuals who don’t have a stake in public schools when they’re already spending for private schools? It’s a fracturing of the social compact.”
I've been something of a cheerleader on the use of new media in the classroom, principally in the form of digital textbooks. But similar to what we've already seen with the calculator, such technology has the potential to inflict damage in the classroom.
Exhibit A: Right Wing Prof flipped his lid a couple of days ago over a math lesson titled "Making Money from Lemons" (produced by Microsoft no less--oh, the irony). Just one problem: the lesson didn't actually involve any, you know, math. Just a bunch of mouse clicks that an orangutan could be trained to perform.
Exhibit B: Educomputer vendor Steve Hargadon did an interview with author Larry Cuban on his 2001 book "Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom". I highly recommend all of Hargadon's post, but I find this paragraph particularly important:
In a major shift from its influential recommendations 17 years ago, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics yesterday issued a report urging that math teaching in kindergarten through eighth grade focus on a few basic skills.
If the report, “Curriculum Focal Points,” has anywhere near the impact of the council’s 1989 report, it could signal a profound change in the teaching of math in American schools. It could also help end the math curriculum struggles that for the last two decades have set progressive educators and their liberal supporters against conservatives and many mathematicians.
At a time when most states call for dozens of math topics to be addressed in each grade, the new report sets forth just three basic skills for each level. In fourth grade, for example, the report recommends that the curriculum should center on the “quick recall” of multiplication and division, the area of two-dimensional shapes and an understanding of decimals. It stopped short of a call for memorization of basic math facts.
The 1989 report is widely seen as an important factor nudging the nation away from rote learning and toward a constructivist approach playing down memorization in favor of having children find their own approaches to problems, and write about their reasoning.
“It was incredibly influential,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., a Department of Education official in the Reagan administration. “More than half the states explicitly acknowledged it in devising their own standards. This report is a major turnaround.”
WHEN Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel I. Klein gained unprecedented power over the vast archipelago of public education in New York more than four years ago, they were the beneficiaries of three beliefs widely held in the city.
The first was that the system of decentralized control, ended after 35 years by the State Legislature in June 2002, had been a misadventure of bureaucratic inefficiency, academic inconsistency and persistent corruption.
The second was that the education program advocated by Mr. Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, with its emphasis on steering public money into vouchers for private schools, was too radical for New York.
The final factor was that Mr. Bloomberg, astride a personal fortune, and Mr. Klein, an anti-trust lawyer in the Clinton administration, were so independent and incorruptible they could be trusted to run a system with more than a million students and a budget well into the billions with few, if any, of the traditional forms of government or community oversight.
Some critics of merit pay argue it puts too much emphasis on standardized tests, but Perry and Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley defended the state's plan for compensating teachers who prove themselves.
"When you reward excellence, excellence becomes the standard," Perry said Tuesday at Oleson Elementary in the Aldine Independent School District.
Eleven schools in Houston ISD and two schools in North Forest ISD also are expecting the staff bonuses. Schools had to give at least 75 percent of the bonus money to teachers, but they could include others.
Perry said the bonuses could be as large as $10,000. At Oleson Elementary, the figure was much lower. Some at the campus received $2,800 while others earned $1,100 based on the school's formula, said Principal Cassandra Cosby.
The nation's math teachers, on the front lines of a 17-year curriculum war, are getting some new marching orders: Make sure students learn the basics.
In a report to be released today, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which represents 100,000 educators from prekindergarten through college, will give ammunition to traditionalists who believe schools should focus heavily and early on teaching such fundamentals as multiplication tables and long division.
The council's advice is striking because in 1989 it touched off the so-called math wars by promoting open-ended problem solving over drilling. Back then, it recommended that students as young as those in kindergarten use calculators in class.
Those recommendations horrified many educators, especially college math professors alarmed by a rising tide of freshmen needing remediation. The council's 1989 report influenced textbooks and led to what are commonly called "reform math" programs, which are used in school systems across the country.
Francis Fennell, the council's president, says the latest guidelines move closer to the curriculum of Asian countries such as Singapore, whose students tend to perform better on international tests. There, children focus intensely on a relative handful of topics, such as multiplication, division and algebra, then practice by solving increasingly difficult word and other problems. That contrasts sharply with the U.S. approach, which the report noted has long been described as "a mile wide and an inch deep."
If school systems adopt the math council's new approach, their classes might resemble those at Garfield Elementary School in Revere, Mass., just north of Boston. Three-quarters of Garfield's students receive free and reduced lunches, and many are the children of recent immigrants from such countries as Brazil, Cambodia and El Salvador.
Three years ago, Garfield started using Singapore Math, a curriculum modeled on that country's official program and now used in about 300 school systems in the U.S. Many school systems and parents regard Singapore Math as an antidote for "reform math" programs that arose from the math council's earlier recommendations.
The Singapore Math curriculum differs sharply from reform math programs, which often ask students to "discover" on their own the way to perform multiplication and division and other operations, and have come to be known as "constructivist" math.
Strong parent and teacher views on the MMSD's math strategy may well spill over to non-support for referendums and incumbent board members, particularly in light of increasing UW Math Department activism on this vital matter.
A while back, a friend asked me what advice I would give administrators, since we were discusing advice to new teachers. After having gotten through the first few weeks of school, I am riled up enough now that I'm going to pick up that challenge. So here we go: advice for vice principals, principals, assistant superintendents, superintendents, and any other person who gets to dip their toes into actual policy-making for the educational world.
In the past, a lack of data enabled stagnation. Armchair observations of real-estate agents were often the most sophisticated opinions regarding the quality of local schools. Today, online services like www.greatschools.net provide a mountain of comparative testing and parental review data in a few short clicks.
New technologies and practices, such as self-paced computer-based instruction and data-based merit pay for instructors, hold enormous promise which has only begun to be explored. That said, disadvantaged children in KIPP Academy schools, among others, have achieved phenomenal academic results not with new technologies, but rather with old-fashioned “time on task” hard work and extended school days.
In short, we now have the primordial soup of a market for schools.
No doubt. I've mentioned before that Milwaukee, over the next few decades (despite stops and starts) will have a far richer K-12 climate than Madison. Madison has the resources and community to step things up - I hope we do so (does it have the leadership?).
Expect details of the Madison School District plan in the coming week. Here's what my sticky fingers were able to pry out of Mary Gulbrandsen, student services director:
Soda pop has already vanished from Madison school vending machines. Candy is no longer sold in school, and in two years, no school group will be allowed to sell candy for fundraising.
(Horde your hockey team candy bars - soon you can sell them on eBay as collectors' items!)
Health insurance has become the most prevalent issue discussed at the bargaining table today. Recent premium increases for school districts with July renewal
dates have focused even more attention on this issue.
Many administrators and board members ask: How can this continue? How do we communicate to our employees, our taxpayers and other interested constituents the effect that our health insurance costs have on our budgets? How do we maintain and, hopefully, expand our educational offerings when our costs for health insurance continue to eat up an ever larger portion of our budget?
There are many factors that have contributed to the high cost of health insurance: utilization of services, demographic trends (such as life expectancy and obesity), healthcare provider consolidation, duplication of services, new products and services, the growing number of uninsured, marketing of prescription drugs, medical malpractice expenses, level of benefits and plan design, among others.
This article will provide insight on how to address items that we can control at the bargaining table: the level of benefits, plan design and consumer behavior. Remember, health insurance is an economic and emotional issue; people don't always make rational decisions when negotiating over this topic.
in March, The New York Times published a major education story under the headline “Schools Cut Back Subjects To Push reading and Math.” The article claimed that “thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math requirements laid out in No Child left Behind [...] by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.”1 The headline appeared “above the fold” in the Sunday edition of the Times, the most valuable and influential real estate in american print journalism.
Predictably, the rest of the media quickly picked up the story in a series of ripples extending outward to other newspapers and magazines to radio and finally to television, cycling back to newspapers in the form of outraged editorials. By the time the story hit the late-night talk shows and drive-time airwaves, commentators had begun to express near hysterical dismay that social studies, science, and the arts were all but disappearing from american schools.
Not so fast. as often happens when complex educational issues encounter the popular media, the extent of the problem was blown out of proportion. The original study on which the Times based its story had actually found that about one third of districts reported that their elementary schools had reduced social studies and science “somewhat” or “to a great extent,” and about one fifth said the same of art and music.
Welcome back to school! I hope you had a wonderful summer. On August 28th the Madison school board approved plans Plan CP2a and Plan CP3a relative to boundary changes that will be necessary if the November 7th referendum to construct an elementary school on the Linden Park site passes or fails. The plan will need to be adjusted depending on enrollment. The board also passed a resolution to place $291,983.75 of the Leopold addition/remodeling monies in the contingency fund of the 2006-07 budget if the referendum passes less the expenses incurred relative to the initial financing of the project
On August 21st, Partnerships, Performance and Achievement and Human Resources convened. The Partnerships Committee (Lucy Mathiak, Chair) discussed strengthening partnerships with parents and caregivers and is working to develop a standard process for administering grants to community partners. Performance and Achievement (Shwaw Vang, Chair) had a presentation on the English-as-a-Second Language Program. Human Resources (Ruth Robarts, Chair) discussed committee goals and activities for 2006-07
On August 14th the board approved a policy that allows animals to be used in the classroom by teachers in their educational curriculum but also protects students that have allergies or other safety concerns. Questions about the November referendum were discussed and an additional JV soccer program at West High school was approved. This team is funded entirely by parents and student fees. The Finance and Operations Committee (Lawrie Kobza, Chair) met to discuss concepts and categories of a document called the Peoples Budget that would be easier to read and understand. Lastly, three citizens were appointed to the newly created Communications Committee (Arlene Silveira, Chair): Deb Gurke, Tim Saterfield and Wayne Strong
Upcoming board meetings include on September 11th our regular board meeting, Partnerships and Communications committees, as well as beginning the process of evaluating the Superintendent. On September 18th the Long Range Planning Committee (Carol Carstensen, Chair) will have a presentation from the City of Madison planning department about development that will impact the MMSD for the next 5 to 20 years. The Board will also receive an interim report from the Equity Task Force, and discuss expulsion and expungement processes.
School District News: Former Madison Police officer Luis Yudice will be recommended to be the district's Coordinator of Safety and Security after the retirement in early October of the current coordinator, Ted Balistreri
Madison students who took the 2006 ACT college entrance exam continued to outperform their state and national peers. Madison students outperformed state peers by 9% & national peers by 15%
. The district has hired 142 new teachers. Twenty-two of them are minorities.
Did you know? 3,800 students participated in the summer school programming? Summer school is composed of several programs. They include: Extended Learning Summer School; ESL/Bilingual; Madison School and Community Recreation-Afternoon Program; Enrichment and High School Summer School.
Thank you for your interest and support of the MMSD.
Johnny Winston, Jr., President, Madison School Board
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
Want district information? Go to www.mmsd.org
Write to the entire school board at comments@madison.k12.wi.us.
Sign up for MMSD communications at http://mmsd.org/lists/newuser.cgi
Watch school board meetings and other district programs on MMSD Channel 10 & 19.
First item on Human Resources Agenda for MMSD: Negotiating health care costs with employees
In August the Human Resources Committee of the Madison School Board---Lawrie Kobza, Shwaw Vang and I--voted unanimously to adopt committee goals for 2006-07 previously presented in this blog.
Human Resources Committee of Madison Board To Set Agenda
Accordingly, Bob Butler, a collective bargaining consultant from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, will discuss why and how school boards should approach negotiating changes in the cost of employee health insurance plans [How Can This Continue? Negotiating Health Insurance Changes]. The meeting of the Human Resources Committee is currently scheduled for 6:00 p.m. in McDaniels Auditorium on Monday, September 25.
At the time, in 2004, the small-schools movement was growing across the country, and it had a powerful backer in Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
But just two years later, criticism from parents and educators has put the future of small schools in jeopardy across the country.
``We made a mistake trying to push autonomy really hard, and the community blew back at us," said Mark Whitson, a journalism teacher at Lebanon High School. ``Parents want us to slow our pace of change until they know what we are doing."
The small-schools concept calls for dividing large high schools into groups of about 300 students with similar academic interests. (Lebanon was divided into ``academies" devoted to communications; farming, natural resources, and health; arts, business, community and family affairs; and engineering and other technical fields.)
The groups then take classes together for four years, with the same teachers. Proponents say students learn more because they and their teachers get to know one another better.
Many of you probably read John Stossel’s polemic in the Sunday Wisconsin State Journal (9/3/06). I’d reprint here, but I don’t want to give it a wider readership than it already has. Instead I want to say few words about a central fallacy in the thinking of Stossel (and many others who wish to destroy public education). Contrary to their rhetoric, PUBLIC EDUCATION IS NOT A MONOPOLY.
I’m not talking about the fact that many fine non-public schools thrive (although that’s true), what I want to do is remind people of the important distinctions between the public and private spheres, between government and enterprise (these distinctions aren’t quite the same, but they are close enough for the purposes here). Education is a public matter, a government function because we have for 150 years (more-or-less, depending on the state and locality) we have wanted it that way.
There were and are many good reasons why this is the case. At base, education is – like garbage disposal, safe food and drugs, efficient roads, airline safety, clean water and much else – too important to be left to the vagaries of the market. At one point Stossel quotes an economist praising the “unpredictability” of the market as a source of innovation. That’s fine for producing a better mousetrap, but in schools (as in all the other examples listed) the stakes are too high to let greed be the motive force. I hear “unpredictability” and think of the children in scam voucher schools who lost out so someone could profit. The successes and innovations of capitalism are the successes of greed. The failures of capitalism are the failures of greed. Tainted milk, like bad charter schools in Milwaukee, was profitable; the market did its work by inducing more people to sell tainted milk. It isn’t the all powerful and all wise market that makes sure our children have safe milk -- profit is profit, the market doesn’t care -- it is the government. Schools were once all private or semi-private, but this – like tainted milk – was not satisfactory and in a democracy things that aren’t satisfactory can be changed.
Democracy is one key to why education is a public matter. If you read the words of those 19th and early 20th century men and women who created and expanded public education, you can sense both their fears and faith. Democratic self-government was a new thing and many scoffed at the idea that “the masses” were capable of the tasks. There was a very real fear of rule by the ignorant mob. But there was also a faith that given the tools their fellow-countrymen (and later women) would be up to the job. The most basic tool was literacy and more broadly education. The state of our political culture may induce many to think that these optimists were wrong about the potential for self-government or perhaps that public education has failed in this mission. I feel that way sometimes, but the republic has survived and the experiment isn’t over. I don’t think we should abandon the basic idea, I think we should work to improve our execution. And since public education is democratically governed (another reason that terming it monopoly is a misnomer), we have the means to make our calls for improvement heard.
Democracy also requires a sense of belonging to the community and the nation. There has long been a tension between the Pluribus and the Unum. America has always been diverse and group identities have threatened to overwhelm a sense of common purpose. When German children went to German schools and Presbyterian children went to Presbyterian schools and rich children went to elite schools and many children went to no school at all (or to charity schools), there was very little to bind them together and much to pull them apart. By making schools public and “common,” the school promoters sought to bolster the Unum. We also struggle with these issues and have arrived in a slightly different place where most of us desire schools to respect group identities, teach respect for group identities (multiculturalism) as well cultivate our commonalities. Finding the balance is not easy and never finished. That cultivating the common is necessary and that the best place to do this is in democratically controlled public schools seems beyond question to me.
Interestingly, capitalism is another reason why public education was considered essential to the health of the nation. There has always been a desire for trained workers and for people to be trained for work, but that isn’t the most interesting or important way that public schools support capitalism. Capitalism is a system of winners and losers. Democracy depends on a rough sense of egalitarianism – “All men are created equal.” So there is another tension here and public education helps resolve it. With free public education, equality becomes “equality of opportunity” and eventually “equality of educational opportunity” (as in the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974). The promise (unfulfilled to a great degree) of equality of opportunity through education further binds the nation together, diffuses the resentments of existing inequalities and provides hope for mobility. Without this, capitalism would be constantly threatened by the “losers.”
Disciples of the market like Stossel rarely address a basic premise of their philosophy and that is that greed and only greed can produce progress and improvement. They see schools that aren’t as good as they should or must be and see “introducing market forces” as the only solution. I don’t hold this dark view of human nature or society. I think that we can be genuinely altruistic; I think that we can work together (cooperation) instead against each other (competition) to produce better schools and a better world. The people who founded public education were far from perfect and filled with self-interested motives, but at the core most shared this belief and I would point to their creation (as imperfect as it is) as evidence that they were right.
"Merit pay is obviously something that has been very controversial around the country," Ehrlich acknowledged to the board, calling his plan "a step in that direction."
Ehrlich and his aides provided few details yesterday about the scope of the proposed program, saying much remains to be worked out. Ehrlich said he would leave it to local jurisdictions to decide whether to participate.
Fall Referendum Climate: Local Property Taxes & Income Growth
Voters evaluating the Madison School District's November referendum (construct a new far west side elementary school, expand Leopold Elementary and refinance District debt) have much to consider. Phil Brinkman added to the mix Sunday noting that "total property taxes paid have grown at a faster pace than income".
A few days later, the US Census Bureau notes that Wisconsin's median household income declined by $2,226 to $45,956 in 2004/2005. [Dane County data can be viewed here: 2005 | 2004 ] Bill Glauber, Katherine Skiba and Mike Johnson:
Some said it was a statistical blip in the way the census came up with the new figures of income averaged over two years.
"These numbers are always noisy, and you can get big changes from year to year," said Laura Dresser of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy.
David Newby, head of the state's AFL-CIO, didn't make much of the new numbers, either.
"My hunch is (wages) have been pretty stagnant," he said. "We have not seen major swings."
Others, though, seized on the data as significant. This is, after all, a big election year, with big stakes, including control of Congress and control of the governor's mansion in Madison.
U.S. Rep. Mark Green of Green Bay, the Republican candidate for governor, said in a statement that the data showed that "Wisconsin's families saw just about the biggest drop in their income in the entire country."
However, Matt Canter, a spokesman for Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, said the census information "is totally inconsistent with other current indicators," adding that the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows an increase in average wages.
The complete census report can be found here 3.1MB PDF:
This report presents data on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States based on information collected in the 2006 and earlier Annual Social and Economic Supplements (ASEC) to the Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Real median household income increased between 2004 and 2005.2 Both the number of people in poverty and the poverty rate were not statistically different between 2004 and 2005. The number of people with health insurance coverage increased, while the percentage of people with health insurance coverage decreased between 2004 and 2005. Both the number and the percentage of people without health insurance coverage increased between 2004 and 2005. These results were not uniform across demographic groups. For example, the poverty rate for non-Hispanic Whites decreased, while the overall rate was statistically unchanged.
This report has three main sections - income, poverty, and health insurance coverage. Each one presents estimates by characteristics such as race, Hispanic origin, nativity, and region. Other topics include earnings of year round, full-time workers; poverty among families; and health insurance coverage of children. This report also contains data by metropolitan area status, which were not included last year due to the transition from a 1990-based sample design to a 2000-based sample design.
I'm certain there will be plenty of discussion on the state household income decline.
Most of the above data come from questionnaires sent to roughly three million American households per year. Here's how to look up the latest on your community: Go to http://factfinder.census.gov. Click on "get data" under American Community Survey. Be sure "2005" is selected, and click "data profiles." Use pull-down menus to select a geographic area. Click "show result." When demographic data appear, click on "economic" or "social" for more.
Quiz: Of the 10 largest school systems, which have made the best gains in student scores? Answer: Philadelphia and New York. Between 2002 and 2005 for grades K-8, Philly gained 19.5 points in proficiency on the state assessment system, while NYC schools posted a 13-point increase on state exams. Even if you normalize for the different gains made in various states, you get the same rankings: Philly No. 1, NYC No. 2.
In 2002, only 21% of Philadelphia students were proficient. By 2005, that nearly doubled to 40%. At its current pace, Philadelphia will increase the proficiency of its students by more than 25 points across five years. That has life-changing consequences for a quarter of its students: One who would have dropped out might now graduate. Another who would have gotten into college might now get into a better one.
In sharp contrast to years past, most big public school systems are now producing achievement gains. That's to be applauded, but educational leadership can learn much from two cities with multiyear trajectories two to three times those of their similar-sized peers. Each has managed to put (and keep) together a group of factors that drive academic success, and that others may want to replicate:
..
The fourth success factor may seem at odds with the third. While Messrs. Vallas and Klein believe in a robust, central system to support their schools, they promote educational competition within their cities. Have they concluded that it may not be possible to move to a complete free market of education in the near term; and, in the meantime, the old but improved system should coexist with a bevy of new educational providers? Or do they believe that one major educational provider with multiple smaller competitors is a preferable course that pushes all schools to higher performance levels? Whatever their philosophy, their actions are clear. Mr. Vallas now presides over a district where roughly 25% of schools are charters or managed by private institutions. Mr. Klein has increased the presence of charters and alternative providers -- and argued that New York's legislature should lift the cap on charters. He's also given unprecedented freedom to a quarter of the sites within his system, those he deems to be most capable of managing their freedom -- as long as they agree to be held accountable if their children fail to improve.
Regardless how people in Madison vote this November the school board will make boundary changes, forcing some students into new schools. Two options were chosen Monday night to deal with overcrowding. The first option reflects what the district would look like if the referendum passes. The second option on the table is in case it doesn't pass
bout 510 students will move if the new school, located west of County M in a rapidly developing area of new homes, is approved and built. If the referendum fails, over 225 students will move and program changes, including converting art and music rooms to classrooms and increasing class size, will be necessary to gain capacity, said Mary Gulbrandsen, the district's chief of staff.
School Board members also voted unanimously on Monday to return over $291,000 to the School District's contingency fund if the referendum passes. That amount represents money already approved to construct the addition at Leopold, which came out of the district's operating budget.
Board member Lawrie Kobza said she felt the public was asking good questions about the referendum, and that it was the board's responsibility to work hard to develop good answers.
An area of concern for Kobza is that the proposed new school does little to change the substantial discrepancy between schools with high and low concentrations of low-income students.
You might recall the legislation I introduced to increase Wisconsin's high school graduation requirement from two- to three-years of math and science. Based on a recent television ad by Jim Doyle, you might be led to believe that this bill was signed into law.
It wasn't.
However, the issues of increasing our math and science requirements and the lack of academically prepared high school graduates keeps surfacing. Constituents talk to me about it at their doors and at public forums, and it's the subject of national publications and state studies:
Revamping high school graduation standards to more closely mirror college-entrance requirements and employer needs was a nearly unanimous recommendation of the U.S. Department of Education's 19-member Commission on the Future of Higher Education this month.
The Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance recently studied the lack of academically prepared students entering the University of Wisconsin System. Almost 17 percent of all UW freshmen took remedial math courses in 2004. At two campuses, more than half the freshmen class needed remedial math instruction. It seems wasteful that our colleges need to spend additional resources preparing students to be there. Among the recommendations of the study was more rigorous exposure in high school curricula.
The recently released national ACT college entrance exam scores showed that the majority of ACT-tested graduates are likely to struggle during their first year of college. Only 42 percent of test-takers are expected to earn a C or higher in college algebra, and only 27 percent are prepared enough to succeed in college biology.
I HAVE NEVER claimed that a third year of math and science for all high school graduates was a cure-all. Yet, a refocus on our core academic areas is obviously part of the solution. We need more rigorous high school curricula and the courage to increase our expectations of student performance. We also need to re-focus on the purpose for publicly funded high schools.
In using MMSD resources and schoolinfosystem.org to promote his basketball event, Johnny Winston, Jr.'s announcements said:
This year’s proceeds will go toward “The Campaign to Promote Student Achievement and Parent Involvement in Schools.”
I have e-mailed him twice to ask for details about the campaign, and he has not answered. Laurie Frost also raised this question in response to Johnny's post and received no response.
I searched the online records of the Department of Regulation and Licensing for a charitable organization by that name. Nothing. I searched the records of the Department of Financial Institutions for a corporation by that name. Nothing. I searched the Internet, and the name only appears in the announcements Johnny distributed.
Johnny's silence makes me wonder whether any such campaign exists, and whether he misused MMSD resources, his political position, and the public's trust. I hope that I'm wrong.
Teaching mathematics has been my profession in New York City public schools since 1969, first at I.S. 201 in District 5, then at J.H.S. 17 in District 2, and since 1983, at Stuyvesant High School. I'm also the father of a 10-year-old daughter who attends District 2 schools and a member of an organization, Nychold (nychold.com), dedicated to bringing sanity to math education.
I'm a firm believer in public education, the great equalizer. Sadly, over the past 10 years, I've witnessed how badly things can go wrong. I am referring specifically to the constructivist math curricula that abound in our city public schools in general and more specifically in District 2, where I live, teach, and raise my daughter.
Constructivist curricula, such as TERC and CMP, forsake algorithms, postulates, and theorems (the foundation of math) as well as teacher-centered learning. Instead, they have students working among themselves in groups, loosely guided by the teacher in a drawn out attempt to "discover" math truths.
In my Upper East Side neighborhood, an incredible number of intelligent young students from the fourth grade and up are seeing private math tutors. Many of these are not the type of children who would normally struggle in arithmetic or elementary algebra. As a result of the way they're taught elementary math, they find themselves unable to do real math. When they're taught math in a more traditional way by their tutors, they invariably find themselves relieved and highly critical of the way they've been taught mathematics.
At Stuyvesant, we have a disproportionate number of freshmen from District 2 taking our introductory algebra course. Most Stuyvesant students have already completed that course before they enter our school. The ratio of District 2 students to non-District 2 students in those classes is close to twice that same ratio in the freshman class as a whole.
"When I first started in education, marketing wasn't something you even had to do," said Suzanne Kirby, principal of MPS' Bell Middle School. Now the south side school has a more strategic effort in place. Kirby cleared her schedule for the summer and invited any prospective family in for a personal tour of the school. She's also designated the school's orchestra director "marketing guy" and has given him some time off in his schedule to visit feeder elementary schools.
Bell teacher ElHadji Ndaw says such efforts are important because "if you have fewer students, you have fewer teachers," and the quality of your programs can deteriorate since so much of school's funding is tied to the number of students.
Then, "if you get down below 300 students," he adds, "they think about closing you."
Many of us believe that all students and families are valuable to the district and that we should actively work to meet all needs and consider all input. When a family who supports and contributes to a school chooses to leave, that seems so sad. I was hoping that representatives of the district may feel the same way. As for me, I was told “West is not in competition for your children”. Ouch!! I suspect that many in the district do not agree with the spirit of that statement.
To that end, Deasy proposed that by the 2007-08 school year each of the county's 22 major high schools should offer at least eight AP courses, which are meant to introduce students to college-level study. Currently, AP offerings in the county vary widely. Many high schools have only a few.
The College Board, which oversees the AP program, will help the school system train a new corps of 200 AP teachers over the next year. In addition, the school system plans to expand subsidies for AP test fees to help ensure that needy students take the tests.
"It's a monumental culture shift," Deasy said. "AP will be on the tongue of every kid around here before too long."
Michael Marchionda, a College Board official working on the project, called it "a multiyear effort" to widen student access to AP. "It's very comprehensive," he said.
The county school board will consider the plan Thursday and is expected to support it.
"People asked for rigor," said Chairman Beatrice P. Tignor (Upper Marlboro). "We've got rigor."
Here's what the superintendent's life-time contract language says about the superintendent's evaluation:
PERFORMANCE EXPECTATIONS: Each year before the first day of school, the Board and superintendent must establish performance expectations for the next year in writing based on his duties and responsibilities under the contract and any other criteria mutally agree upon.
MEASURABLE OUTCOMES: "To the extent possible, all performance expectations shall have measurable outcomes".
JULY 30 DEADLINE: After setting performance expectations, the Board must meet with the superintendent to discuss his evaluation no later than July 30.
Two types of appraisals are required.
SPECIFIC RESULTS & ACCOMPLISHMENTS BASED ON PERFORMANCE EXPECTATIONS: The written performance expectations must include goals that reflect the superintendent's priorities for the improvement programs, projects and activities to be undertaken. Prior to meeting with the Board for his evaluation, the superintendent must complete a self-evaluation that summarizes his progress on each goal.
PERFORMANCE CATEGORIES---PLANNING, ORGANIZING, LEADING, SUPERVISING AND JOB KNOWLEDGE: In each category the Board must indicate the type of evidence of performance and data sources that will be used to evaluate the superintendent's performance.
SURVEYS OF OTHER ADMINISTRATORS: The Board must distribute surveys about the superintendent's performance in the five categories to individuals who report directly to him and a random selection of other administrators.
Has the board met the contract requirements? No one knows.
Last year Ruth Robarts posted news of the evaluation.
Human Resources Committee of Madison Board To Set Agenda
On Monday, August 21 the Human Resources Committee of the Madison School Board will have its first meeting at 7:00 p.m. in Room 103 of the Doyle Administration Building (545 West Dayton Street).
Following a goal-setting meeting of the Board on June 19, the committee will address a number of important issues, beginning with alternative ways that the district could negotiate health insurance coverage for its employees with the goal of providing the same quality service, higher wages and savings for the district. Committee members this year are Shwaw Vang and Lawrie Kobza. I am the chair.
To: Human Resources Committee & Staff
From: Ruth Robarts
Date: August 17, 2006
RE: Goals and agenda for HR Committee for 2006-07 and schedule for meetings
Below are the issues identified at the Board’s June 19, 2006 meeting for the Human Resources Committee for 2006-07 and a proposed calendar for addressing the issues. At our planning meeting on August 21, I hope that we can agree to set calendar for regular meetings (a set Monday of each month and a set meeting time). I have contacted Bob Butler, a Wisconsin Association of School Boards consultant, to make a presentation on approaches to negotiating employee health insurance. Bob has agreed to make a presentation but I cannot reach him before Monday in order to find out when he’s available on a Monday in September.
I look forward to talking with you about our goals.
BOARD OF EDUCATION – GOALS FOR HR COMMITTEE
Health Insurance
• Review impact of current employee health insurance options on district costs, salary increases, post-retirement payments for all bargaining units and administrators
• Consider recommendations for change
Administrator Employment
• Review total compensation packages (including free parking, memberships, subscriptions, post-retirement hiring, etc.)
• Compare starting salaries and ranges with other districts
• Review policies/ procedures and revise if necessary
Timing of approvals for extension of administrators’ contracts
Merit pay
Performance evaluation
Board and public role in selection and reassignment of principals
Handling of parent or staff complaints
Teacher Employment
• Compare Admin/Teacher salaries
Compare starting salaries and salary range with other districts
Review retirement payments and post-retirement obligations
Review layoff process re: keeping the best teachers
Review buyouts of contracts without Board review and approval
Review handling of parent complaints
Monthly on a set Monday at a set time to help the public participate in our activities and with a month between presentations of information and recommendations for action
PROPOSED CALENDAR
August : set goals, priorities and calendar
September: WASB presentation on impacts of current health insurance plans
October: Recommendations re: district approach to health insurance costs
and review of handling of parent complaints about teachers, principals or other administrators
November: Review merit pay , contract renewal, performance evaluations, hiring and reassignment of administrators and related topics
December: Recommendations for re: merit pay, contract renewal, performance evaluations, hiring and reassignment of administrators or related topics
January: Presentation comparing administrator/teacher salaries and benefits with comparable districts (start salaries, benefits, salary ranges, post-retirement employment, early retirement plans, etc.)
February: Recommendations re: approach to administrator/teacher salaries
March: Review annual report on minority recruitment/retention
April: Open
ACT scores are best in 20 years, with a catch, MMSD Curriculum & Upcoming Elections
The issue of curriculum quality and rigor continues to generate attention. P-I:
The good news is that the high school class of 2006 posted the biggest nationwide average score increase on the ACT college entrance exam in 20 years and recorded the highest scores of any class since 1991.
The bad news is that only 21 percent of the students got a passing grade in all four subject areas, including algebra and social science.
"The ACT findings clearly point to the need for high schools to require a rigorous, four-year core curriculum and to offer Advanced Placement classes so that our graduates are prepared to compete and succeed in both college and the work force," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in Washington, D.C.
Wisconsin high school graduates are better prepared to succeed in college than students nationwide - but that means only that more than 70% of state students are at risk of having trouble in one or more freshman-level subjects while the national figure is almost 80%, according to ACT, the college testing company.
The message still isn't getting across," Ferguson said in a telephone news conference. If students want to go to college and do well, they have to take high school seriously and take challenging courses, he said.
ACT results showed that students who took at least four years of English and three years each of math, science and social studies in high school did substantially better on the tests (22.9 in Wisconsin, 22.0 nationwide) than those who took lighter loads in those core areas (21.0 and 19.7, respectively).
Elizabeth Burmaster, Wisconsin's superintendent of public instruction, said she believes that if schools in Wisconsin stay focused on efforts such as early childhood education and small class sizes in the early grades, combined with strong academic programs in middle school and high school, achievement will go up and racial and ethnic gaps will close.
The Madison School District issued a press release on the recent ACT scores (68% of Wisconsin high school graduates took the ACT - I don't know what the MMSD's percentage is):
Madison students who took the 2006 ACT college entrance exam continued to outperform their state and national peers by a wide margin, and the scores of Madison's African-American test takers increased significantly. Madison students' composite score of 24.2 (scale of 1 to 36) was higher for the 12th straight year than the composite scores of Wisconsin students and those across the nation (see table below). District students outscored their state peers by 9% (24.2 vs. 22.2,) and their national peers by 15% (24.2 vs. 21.1).
Compared to the previous year, the average ACT composite score among the district's African-American students increased 6% — 18.8 vs. 17.7 last year. The gap between district African-American and white student ACT scores decreased this year. The relative difference this year was 24% (18.8 vs. 24.8) compared to 30% last year.
Scores also increased this year for the district's Asian students (22.1 to 23.0) and Hispanic students (21.5 to 21.8).
In the Waunakee information I sent to Jim Z, our mean for the Class of 2006 comes first, followed by the core/non-core in parentheses. So, our mean composite score for our 157 seniors who sat for the ACT was 23.3, the mean composite for those completing the ACT suggested core was 24.3, the mean composite for those who did not complete the core was 21.5.
With ACT profile reports, the student information is self-reported. It's reasonably accurate, but some students don't fill in information about course patterns and demographics if it is not required.
Please let me know if there are any other questions.
McFarland data:
It appears that Jim Z's chart comparing scores uses Waunakee's "Core score" as opposed to the average composite that the other schools (at
least McFaland) gave to Jim Z.. If Jim Z. wishes to report average "Core" for McFarland it is 24.5. Our non-core is 22.2 with our average composite 23.7.
More on the meaning of "Core":
Probably everyone is familiar with the ACT definition of core, but it's 4 years of English, and three years each of math, science, and social studies. ACT is refining their position on what course patterns best position a student for undergraduate success, however.
I previously posted links to articles discussing the inappropriate use of Powerpoint - particularly in lower grades. I've been reading Thomas Rick's "Fiasco" . Ricks' mentions that Powerpoint was used to draft and communicate battle and reconstruction plans in Iraq:
[Army Lt. General David] McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging issue: He couldn't get Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks passed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld: "It's quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense…In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary order], or plan, you get a bunch of PowerPoint slides…[T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides."
Yet, Powerpoint is widely used in schools. Garr Reynolds has more.
Some alternatives - outliners that help conceptualize a work prior to expressing it in words. Internet outliners are extraordinarly powerful:
School systems across the Washington area are adding foreign language classes in elementary grades in response to a call from government and business leaders who say the country needs more bilingual speakers to stay competitive and even to fight terrorism.
Educators say that the youngest brains have the greatest aptitude for absorbing language and that someone who is bilingual at a young age will have an easier time learning a third or fourth language later on. Compared with adults or even high school students, young children are better able to learn German with near-native pronunciation or mimic the subtle tones of Mandarin.
The Madison School District's Fall $23.5M Referendum Question will be in front of voters 3 months from today. The question asks voters to fund 3 iniatives with a single yes or no vote:
The question is on the ballot of a "high turnout" election (including the Governor's race), rather than the recent practice of holding special $100K+ elections.
The board, lead by a Johnny Winston, Jr. initiative, recently passed a new advertising policy. This initiative will, over time, generate new revenue sources for the district (I wonder if this policy would have ever seen the light of day under previous board majorities?).
The community has long supported Madison's public schools via above average taxes and spending (while enrollment has largely remained flat) and initiatives such as the Schools of Hope and the Foundation for Madison Public schools, among many others. The November 7, 2006 question will simply be one of public confidence in the governance and education strategy of the MMSD and the willingness to spend more on the part of local property taxpayers.
And like Goldilocks finding a perfect fit after several tries, Broome has had experiences - rather positive experiences he is quick to note - in other places that make him especially appreciative of La Follette's, and the Madison public school district's unique charms.
As Broome steps into the buzz saw surrounding La Follette's controversial four-block scheduling system, and a student population that has grown rapidly diverse, he appears not only fearless, but positively ebullient.
When results are broken down by race, just 10 percent of black and Latino sophomores in Colorado schools are proficient in math; 90 percent are not.
Those scores are "scary," said Jenna Fleur Lin, a math teacher who tutors high school students in the Cherry Creek School District and runs a free week-long math and science camp at an inner-city Denver church.
"What it means is you have a huge population that's not going to function properly," Lin said.
Moloney said one problem is that, unlike elementary and middle school students, high schoolers have the freedom to choose many of their own courses.
"Are minority youngsters being channelled into challenging programs or are you being (steered) to diminished programs?" he said.
Lin said she believes many students don't have a solid foundation in math in elementary school.
They are just learning to do calculations but they don't understand how to
Madison School Board Progress Report for the week of July 31st
Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. Email:
Is it me or is the summer going by way too fast? Very soon the school year will arrive for our students and the board action will mark some changes. On July 17th the Board approved a wellness policy that will prohibit the sale of soft drinks at local high schools in favor of milk, diet sodas, bottled water and 100% juices. In addition, it will stop the sale of junk food during the school day that put school cafeterias in competition with school stores or vending machines. Some of our students and staff believe that this will hurt school fundraising efforts, however, our board believes that our students are resourceful and will find alternative means for funding. This policy was developed in part because of a federal mandate that all schools nationwide must have a wellness policy...The board also approved advertising and sponsorship policies. These policies have very clear parameters. Examples of where ads and sponsorship could occur include the district website, newsletters and announcements at sporting events. Given our fiscal challenges, I believe that this is an appropriate policy that I hope will help preserve some of our extra-curricular, arts and sports programs which are often vulnerable to budget cuts... On August 7th the Board will vote on the proposed Animals in the Classroom policy and begin the process of evaluating the Superintendent
On August 14th the board will discuss the November 7th referendum and have our regular monthly meeting.
District Notes:
The summer edition of MMSD Today is now available at http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/today/. Congratulations to Reggie Williams for being named Boys Varsity basketball coach at LaFollette.... Enrollment of all MMSD elementary school students will be Thursday, August 24 from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at the students school... Supply lists for elementary schools are online... MMSDs Summer Food Service provides free meals to children. The program was established to ensure that children in needy areas continue to receive nutritious meals during summer vacation.
Save the Date (Community Events):
On Saturday August 12th the 6th Annual Streetball & Block Party at 12 noon to 7 p.m. at Penn Park, South Madison. Activities include a mens basketball tournament, youth activities, food and fun. Proceeds to the campaign to promote student achievement and parent involvement... The Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (www.foodallergy.org) is putting on a walk to raise awareness of food allergies on Saturday August 19th at Elver Park at 9 a.m.
Did you know? Madison School and Community Recreation (MSCR) is a department of the Madison Metropolitan School District and has been providing recreation programs for 80 years?
Thank you for your interest and support of the MMSD.
Johnny Winston, Jr., President, Madison School Board
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
Want district information? Go to www.mmsd.org
Write to the entire school board at comments@madison.k12.wi.us.
Sign up for MMSD communications at http://mmsd.org/lists/newuser.cgi
Watch school board meetings and other district programs on MMSD Channel 10 & 19.
Every May a large number of high school students across America take AP exams. In May 2005 over 1.2 million high school students took over 2.1 million AP exams. AP allows students to pursue college-level studies while still in high school. Over 3000 colleges accept AP exam scores for either college credit or placement in higher level courses. AP was developed by The College Board and is one of the most successful and respected academic programs in the nation.
There have been numerous studies and articles proclaiming the advantages of AP. AP test scores have been found to be very good predictors of college grades and college graduation. A National Center for Educational Accountability study (2005) indicated that passing AP exams shows a strong and consistent relationship to college graduation rates. Recently, there has been considerable reporting on the benefits of AP courses and exams for minority students and students from poverty backgrounds. Such students exceed their educators’ expectations on AP (when given the opportunity). AP tests and minority students were made famous with the movie “Stand and Deliver” portraying the high success of inner-city Latino students on the AP Calculus exam.
While there is some controversy over AP (e.g., too much material covered in a short time; more breadth than depth) there is strong agreement (backed by research) by educators that AP courses and exams are a rigorous and meaningful indicator of academic preparation for college. Also, AP exams provide a uniform standard of academic accomplishment across geography, economic status, ethnicity and school size. AP exams cover 34 subject areas and exams are scored on a scale of 1-5, with 5 considered top level work (a grade equivalent of an "A") in a corresponding college course. A score of 3 or better is often accepted for either college credit or placement.
Colangelo said he thought paying close attention to each school's AP DATA would be a good way to encourage Iowa schools to be more challenging. Only four Iowa public schools qualified for the latest Newsweek list of the country's most challenging public high schools. Colangelo discovered that of the 389 public and private high schools in Iowa, only 213 had at least one student take an AP exam in 2005. Of that group, 187 schools--171 public and 16 private--consented to participate in the Iowa AP Index. "The top 25 schools range in class size from 11 to 378," said the report, co-authored by Colangelo, Susan Assouline, Damien Ihrig and Clar Baldus. "There are 20 public and 5 private schools in the top 25. The #1 school is Rivermont Collegiate High School, a small private school in Bettendorf. The biggest school (based on graduating seniors) in the top 25 is Iowa City High School in Iowa City, Iowa [378 seniors]. The smallest school is Russell High School in Russell, Iowa [11 seniors]." The University of Iowa researchers even found an Iowa school, Roosevelt High in Des Moines, that qualified for the Newsweek list but that I had missed, a mistake I plan to rectify soon.
She said she has asked 85 college admissions officers in the past two years what was the first thing they look for in applicants' transcripts. She said each told her it was "the level of difficulty of the courses taken by a student. It is an automatic assumption that if an able student does not take AP courses when his or her high school offers them, then he or she has chosen not to challenge him or herself."
The mission is clearly defined. I proposed ideas, but did not cross the line of micromanaging. The measurement of success is clear: improved MEAP scores and a smaller achievement gap.
One can argue more patience and planning is prudent. Well, this has persisted for years, and while perhaps the administration is already trying things, I believe we need something more bold and aggressive.
I proposed to try this for a year or two and see if it can make a difference. We need to address this issue district-wide, but we need to start where the need is the greatest.
The response I received from some board members seemed to focus on everything but the proposal.
Their concerns over "surprise motions" ring hollow. Mrs. Reseigh's recent motion to cut board member comments from the minutes came without notice, as did Mr. Greimel's motion when he reversed himself on May elections.
And if they liked the idea, but wanted time, why didn't they move to table it until the next meeting?
Cries of "politics" ignore the fact that I have nothing to gain politically by trying to help these schools. It's what I was elected to do. If proposed a month ago, there would've been louder cries of "politics" due to the board election.
It's also puzzling some couldn't understand the plan; it's not complicated, and this board rarely seeks details anyway. For example, there's a budget item of $300,000 for high school reform with absolutely no details whatsoever.
I even suggested the funds could be contingent on a more detailed plan if that's what they wanted.
A college math student might grapple with this topic in an advanced elective. Ryan was stretching his elementary-school mind at MathPath, perhaps the nation's toughest summer camp for numerical prodigies.
Math camps are multiplying in part because families are seeking an edge in competitive college admissions and worry about the quality of U.S. math instruction. Last summer, parents paid $280 million to send 120,000 children to academic summer camps, with math among the most popular subjects, according to Eduventures, a Boston research firm, which estimates enrollment is climbing 10% a year. Sylvan Learning Centers, the big tutoring company, says participation in summer math programs, including day camp, jumped 23% last year -- twice the rate of other subjects.
The American Mathematical Society counts two dozen "challenging summer math programs" -- twice as many as seven years ago. Most focus on high-school students. MathPath caters only to middle-school kids, age 10 to 14. It is also smaller -- and more selective -- than some better known programs.
About 80,000 kids in second through eighth grade, for example, take part in the annual "talent search" run by Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth. Through the search, about 70% qualify for summer camps across the country and some 10,000 enroll in a given year.
Another example of the "Brave New World" referenced in Marc Eisen's recent words. Neal Gleason comments.
I have long admired Marc Eisen's thoughtful prose. But his recent struggle to come to grips with a mutli-ethnic world vvers from xenophobia to hysteria ("Brave New World", 6/23/06). His "unsettling" contact with "stylish" Chinese and "turbaned Sikhs" at a summer program for gifted children precipitated first worry (are my kids prepared to compete?), And then a villain (incompetent public schools).
Although he proclaims himself "a fan" of Madison public schools, he launches a fusillade of complaints: doubting that academic excellence is high on the list of school district pirorities and lamentin tis "dubious maht and reading pedagogy." The accuracy of these concerns is hard to assess, because he offers no evidence.
His main target is heterogeneous (mixed-ability) classes. He speculates that Madison schools, having failed to improve the skills of black and Hispanic kids, are now jeopardizing the education of academically promising kids (read: his kids) for the sake of politically correct equality. The edict from school district headquarters: "Embrace heterogeneous classrooms. Reject tracking of brighter kids. Suppress dissent in the ranks." Whew, that is one serious rant for a fan of public schools.
Eisen correctly observes that "being multilingual" will be a powerful advantage in the business world; familiarity and ease with other cultures will be a plus." Mare than 20 years ago, my kids began to taste this new world in the diverse classrooms of Midvale-Lincoln Elementary, and continued on through West High with its 50-plus nationalitities and a mix of heterogeneous and advanced classes.
They did just fine in college and grad school, emerged bi-and tri-lingual with well worn passorts, and started interesting careers at high tech internationl companies. How will Eisen's kids acquire modern cultural skills if they are cloistered in honors classes, sheltered from daily contact with kids of varied ability?
"Teachers’ dissatisfaction with Leopold principal reaches boiling point"
Kurt Gutnecht writing in the Fitchburg Star: [96K PDF]
The management of Principal Mary Hyde has prompted a near revolt among teachers and staff members at Leopold Elementary School.
Discontent among teachers has been simmering for years and came to the forefront recently when Hyde, who’s been principal at the school for six years, decided to terminate a shared teaching arrangement that had previously been praised by Hyde and others.
Sue Talarczyk, who has had such an arrangement with Sue Wagner for seven years, unsuccessfully sought a fuller explanation for Hyde’s decision. Ninety-one teachers and staff members at the school signed a petition asking Hyde to reconsider the termination.
Appeals to district administrators to review Hyde’s decision were also unsuccessful.
Several teachers characterized Hyde as insensitive, intimidating and inconsiderate. All except Talarczyk asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.
Teachers interviewed for this article said Hyde made decisions unilaterally, without weighing the opinions of teachers and staff members. had actively solicited parents’support.
Five years after state legislators released them from state-imposed revenue caps, school districts' community service tax levies have nearly tripled, reaching $49 million this year.
The rampant growth in these property taxes - earmarked for community-based activities - took place as the total levies for schools statewide rose by 22.7%.
That has raised concerns about school districts skating around revenue limits and has prompted one lawmaker to request an audit of the program.
State Rep. Debi Towns (R-Janesville) said she is curious why property taxes that pay for recreational and community activities offered by school districts have grown so much since the 2000-'01 school year. In that time, the number of school districts raising taxes for such services has doubled to 240.
"I'm not saying anyone's misspending. I'm just saying the fund has grown tremendously, and the purpose never changed," said Towns, chairman of the Assembly Education Committee. In November, Towns called for the Legislative Audit Bureau to study how select school districts use their community service levies.
"So that, of course, leads to a natural questioning of what are they doing differently now than they were doing before," she said.
The growth in the community service levies is expected to continue next year.
Arts, police, pools
Already, Milwaukee Public Schools has launched a arts education program through its recreation centers that it expects to fund with $1 million in community service funds. The Mukwonago School District plans to keep a police officer in its high school, despite the recent loss of a grant, with a $60,000 boost in property taxes from its community service levy.
The Menomonee Falls School District, which has not raised its levy for recreation and community activities in more than a decade, is counting on a $180,000, or 63%, increase next school year to continue operating one of its two pools.
School administrators say they have a simple explanation for why they are turning to their community service levies more now than they did when they were capped - it didn't matter before. Because both the general and community service funds were restricted by revenue caps and eligible for state aid, it was simply an accounting preference whether a district paid for it from one fund or the other.
Athletics or academics?
But once the Legislature removed the caps on the community service levies for the 2000-'01 school year and gave school districts an opportunity to keep their recreational activities from conflicting with educational programs, more took advantage of it.
"I think - when you look at districts across the state - that's really what caused the jump," said Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District, which in 2005-'06 had the largest community service levy in the state.
Like some of the bigger community service funds, Madison's supports a full recreation department with adult and youth programming. But it also helps pay for television production activities, after-school activities, a gay and lesbian community program coordinator and part of a social worker's time to work with low-income families, Rainwater said.
The School District's community service levy is expected to grow to $10.5 million in the coming school year. In contrast, the same levy for Milwaukee Public Schools - which serves nearly four times as many children in its educational programs - is expected to reach $9.3 million, said Michelle Nate, the district's director of finance.
Although the state Department of Public Instruction has issued guidelines to school districts on how they should use their community service levies, it leaves it up to local residents to decide whether their school boards do so wisely and legally.
In the Greendale School District, which at $990,000 had the sixth-largest community service levy in the state last school year, business manager Erin Gauthier-Green acknowledges that her school system has gotten good use out of the fund.
But she also said the School District plans to reduce the property taxes it levies for community services by $300,000 next year now that it has completed some repair projects and before taxpayers complain.
"We know it can be a hot-button issue," Gauthier-Green said.
By AMY HETZNER
ahetzner@journalsentinel.com
July 22, 2006
Children in Reading First classrooms receive significantly more reading instruction and schools participating in the program are much more likely to have a reading coach, according to the Reading First Implementation Evaluation: Interim Report, released today by the U.S. Department of Education. The report shows significant differences between what Reading First teachers report about their instructional practices and the responses of teachers in non-Reading First Title I schools, which are demographically similar to the Reading First schools.
"The goal of Reading First is to help teachers translate scientific insights into practical tools they can use in their classrooms," Secretary Spellings said. "The program is helping millions of children and providing teachers with high-quality, research-based support. As we push towards our ultimate goal of every child reading and doing math on grade level by 2014, Reading First is a valuable help to our efforts."
The report shows Reading First schools appear to be implementing the major elements of the program as intended by the No Child Left Behind legislation. Reading First respondents reported that they made substantial changes to their reading materials and that the instruction is more likely to be aligned with scientifically based reading research; they are more likely to have scheduled reading blocks and spend more time teaching reading; they are more likely to apply assessment results for instructional purposes, and they receive professional development focused on helping struggling readers more often than non-Reading First Title I schools in the evaluation.
"There are high expectations" for the top students, "and expectations that we'll perform miracles on the low end." -- Third-grade teacher Natalie Brady
In the first six weeks of school, Leigha Groves, whose daughter is one of Brady's top students, asks for a syllabus repeatedly and meets with Brady several times. Early on, she only saw math homework coming home and dismissed it as simple.
"When you hear the University of Chicago, you know they want the best, but it's not a gifted program," says Groves, a 39-year-old police officer and college grad. "I wondered where the challenge would come from."
Her daughter, Aleigha, transferred from a gifted program at South Loop elementary. Groves also wanted her daughter with more black students.
Nicole Miller says she thinks her son is changing, for the worse
Lawmaker requests audit as school districts across state raise taxes to support programs.
Five years after state legislators released them from state-imposed revenue caps, school districts' community service tax levies have nearly tripled, reaching $49 million this year.
The rampant growth in these property taxes - earmarked for community-based activities - took place as the total levies for schools statewide rose by 22.7%.
That has raised concerns about school districts skating around revenue limits and has prompted one lawmaker to request an audit of the program.
State Rep. Debi Towns (R-Janesville) said she is curious why property taxes that pay for recreational and community activities offered by school districts have grown so much since the 2000-'01 school year. In that time, the number of school districts raising taxes for such services has doubled to 240.
"I'm not saying anyone's misspending. I'm just saying the fund has grown tremendously, and the purpose never changed," said Towns, chairman of the Assembly Education Committee. In November, Towns called for the Legislative Audit Bureau to study how select school districts use their community service levies.
Pittsburgh has hired a private company to write a coherent curriculum for city schools, reports the Post-Gazette.
Because course content is uneven and out of sync with state standards, the Pittsburgh Public School district is paying New York-based Kaplan K12 Learning Services $8.4 million to write standardized curricula for grades six through 12.
. . . Teachers in other districts have complained that Kaplan's detailed curriculum turned them into automatons and deprived them of time to cover material in adequate detail or help students with individual needs.
. . . Pittsburgh school officials cite an urgent need to bring coherence and rigor to what's taught and tested in the district's classrooms.
Interesting. Perhaps an RFP looking for different ideas might be useful. Public and private organizations could respond. One only has to look at the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" to see the power of a community vs a top down approach. Leadership, particularly that which embraces the community is critical - as Lucy Mathiak recently pointed out:
Later, she added: "I think one of the fundamental questions facing our district is whether we treat parents as resources or problems. Any parent who is concerned about safety, discipline or academic issues needs to feel confident that their concerns are going to be heard. We have to court the parents. The future of our schools depends on their confidence that we are working as partners with them."
If education is funded without measuring results decisions are based on impulse and sentiment, a risky business that. Yet if education is to be funded on results we need a high degree of social consensus on what results are desirable (and measurable).
As it happens, this sentiment does not respect party lines. Former Minnesota DFL Senator John Brandle famously said – more than 20 years ago – “there will be more dollars for education when there is more education for the dollar.”
Conceptually, the task is straightforward: identify what value schooling adds and measure it. While most people associate the value add of schooling with academic progress, there is also a social dimension, ranging from socialization to custodial care. These too can be measured.
Take year ‘round schooling as an example. Students who attend 240 days (rather than the typical US 180-day year) are likely to escape “summer learning loss.” While preliminary evidence suggests that with poor children in particular, summer learning loss is diminished significantly with year ‘round schooling, it is an empirical question. Risk-taking school districts could offer year ‘round schooling on a pilot basis and measure what happens – who enrolls, how popular is the program, and what are the results? (One prediction: working parents will love it.)
Alternately, 13 180-day years equals 2,340 days from K to graduation. Taken in 240 day installments, a typical student could graduate in 10 rather than 13 years. This too is an empirical question. Are there answers? Certainly Japanese experience suggests that there is. The Japanese school year is 240 days long and the typical graduate (after 13 years) is reputed to have completed the equivalent of two years of a good American college.
What business or industry would close for one-third of the year? What other human capital intensive activity -- health care facility, for example --- would shut its doors one-third of the year?
In South Carolina, several large school districts such as Richland 2 and Lexington 1 offered online courses. For example, Richland 2's virtual school employed 27 teachers and had students register for a total of 559 online courses last year, said Margaret Walden, the district's instructional technology coordinator.
Despite the efforts of individual districts, no statewide program existed to help students in rural areas keep pace.
"This levels the playing field," Appleby said. "These online courses are available to any student in any district in the state."
The virtual school has been able to cut down on costs by relying on the same technical software used by teachers for online professional development.
Students at Charleston high schools such Academic Magnet and North Charleston have experience with online courses, but the state's program will expand access, district spokeswoman Mary Girault said.
The question was recently asked on this site as to how teacher experience compared with poverty levels by school. Using the 2004-05 school data provided in the 2005-06 detailed budget, I compared low-income percentages with: number of years’ experience; % of teachers with advanced degrees; student / teacher ratio. Below are summary charts for all schools in the MMSD.
The first chart compares each school’s low-income percentage with the average number of years of experience their teachers have. Each pink data point represents a different school within the district. For example, the highest point on the chart represents Schenk Elementary School, which had 51% low-income (reading from the x-axis), and an average teachers’ experience of 22.8 years (reading from the y-axis). The black line is the Excel-generated trend line depicting the relationship between teacher experience and school poverty levels. Notice that the points in the chart are widely scattered - they are not closely surrounding the trend line. This dispersion implies a very weak relationship between teacher experience and poverty levels. The very weak relationship that does exist suggests teacher experience declines slightly as low-income levels increase. The oft-stated lament in this country is that as teachers become more experienced, they gravitate toward the “easier” schools with fewer low-income kids. In the MMSD at least, that gravitation appears to be occurring at a remarkably slow rate.
The second chart compares low-income percentages by school with the percentage of teachers that possess advanced degrees. For the MMSD, as school poverty levels increase, there is a slight increase in the percentage of teachers with advanced degrees. However, the relationship is virtually non-existent. Nonetheless, the general literature in this country would suggest teachers with advanced degrees tend to gravitate to schools with lower poverty levels.
Finally, the third chart compares school poverty levels with the student / teacher ratio. Here there is a very clear relationship: the student/teacher ratio declines as low-income levels increase; (i.e. there are more teachers per student as poverty increases). Unfortunately, there is one important caveat here: schools with higher levels of poverty typically have more students requiring special education or English as a Second Language. To a certain extent, the lower student/teacher ratios reflect the higher number of teachers required to meet those additional needs. Therefore, one has to be careful precisely how to interpret this chart
The national education reform effort has long suffered from magical thinking about what it takes to improve children’s chances of learning. Instead of homing in on teacher training and high standards, things that distinguish effective schools from poor ones, many reformers have embraced the view that the public schools are irreparably broken and that students of all kinds need to be given vouchers to attend private or religious schools at public expense.
This belief, though widespread, has not held up to careful scrutiny. A growing body of work has shown that the quality of education offered to students varies widely within all school categories. The public, private, charter and religious realms all contain schools that range from good to not so good to downright horrendous.
What the emerging data show most of all is that public, private, charter and religious schools all suffer from the wide fluctuations in quality and effectiveness. Instead of arguing about the alleged superiority of one category over another, the country should stay focused on the overarching problem: on average, American schoolchildren are performing at mediocre levels in reading, math and science — wherever they attend school.
Nancy Greenwald, an attorney and one of the parents involved in the complaint, urged the board to accept Superintendent Art Rainwater's recommendation that Vazquez be fired and to turn over all relevant files to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, which has begun an investigation that could lead to the revocation of Vazquez's teaching license.
In addition, Greenwald said, "We need you to do more. We urge you to step in and turn this administration around. From the beginning, the administration tried to push this complaint under the rug."
Kelly Fitzgerald, PTO president at Jefferson, said in an interview after the meeting: "It has been arduous and painstaking. That it took this long for the administration to recommend removing this teacher is obscene."
Board member Lucy Mathiak, chair of the district's Partnerships Committee, said that supporting and enhancing relationships with parents would be a priority for her committee.
Later, she added: "I think one of the fundamental questions facing our district is whether we treat parents as resources or problems. Any parent who is concerned about safety, discipline or academic issues needs to feel confident that their concerns are going to be heard. We have to court the parents. The future of our schools depends on their confidence that we are working as partners with them."
"The recommendation finally reached after 13 months included an independent investigation and an evaluation by a psychotherapist who was asked to determine whether or not Mr. Vazquez poses a danger to our children," Greenwald said, adding that if the psychotherapist's evaluation "is one reason for the superintendent's recommendation, as we believe it is, then the initial dismissal of our concerns by the administration was not only wrong, it was dangerously wrong."
"It should not take the yearlong efforts of a large group of parents that happens to include two attorneys to get the administration to do the right thing," Greenwald said. "Students who are the victims of sexual harassment are often vulnerable, needy children with little support at home. Who's going to protect them?"
Madison School Board Superintendent Review Discussion
The Madison School Board discussed the Superintendent review process Monday evening. 46MB Video | 7MB MP3 Audio. The discussion included references to curriculum.
he Madison Metro School District's "no advertising" policy is now a thing of the past. Tonight they voted unanimously to allow some advertising at certain venues. They say in the face of limited resources and cutting programs, the district needs to find ways of generating revenue outside the taxpayer.
"The district right now has a menu of things to look at...the website...not really targeting toward kids, but targeting toward the community that would be sporting events, that would be community events that we have," says board president Johnny Winston Jr.
Johnny Winston, Jr. provided a summary of the board's June 19th discussion of board and committee goals.
I found two of the board's priorities particularly noteworthy.
One priority under Performance and Achievement reads:
Math and Literacy and Curriculum
• Review the appropriateness of the goal of completion of algebra and geometry in high school in view of test scores in math (and sub categories) at 4th and 10th grades
• Develop specific, measurable goals regarding the district’s strategic priorities: “offering challenging, diverse and contemporary curriculum and instruction”
- Include input from community
• Initiate public discussion and dissemination of MMSD information that explains:
- What curriculum is used and why
- Evidence base for choosing curriculum and teaching methodologies
- Evaluation of student outcomes associated with changes/use of specific curriculum/methodologies
• Curricular review with input from parents and K-12 post secondary educators and employers
• Cost effectiveness of reading recovery
• Math curriculum
• Review math and reading curriculum to assess impact on high school
The summary also includes the following priorities for the budget process:
• Board—Year long budget process to establish benchmarks for data, standards terms resulting in strategic plan for fiscal resource management
• Budget process that protects school and in school services first
• Review budget timeline and process
• Monthly budget reports
• Development of a budget process that is
1. continual
2. customer friendly
3. incorporates a 2 way communication mechanism so community input is solicited in the process and results are communicated back out to the community
• Budget timeline
• Budget document
• Review and revise if necessary the board’s oversight of fund balances per recommendations from the Department of Public Instruction as follows:
1. As part of the budget process, the board must determine fund balance amounts to be retained for working cash needs and amounts to be used to fund expenditures of the next fiscal period.
2. The board must make a policy decision as to the extent that they will borrow for cash flow rather than maintain a working cash balance
3. More information available at dpi.wi.gov/sfs/fundbal.html
• Cut cell phone use to save $$
Perhaps the most encouraging trend in public education today is the growing willingness of educators and policymakers to embrace choices and customization, while turning away from the notion of one-size-fits-all corporatism that dominated 20th century school reform. In education, though, no good deed long goes unpunished. In a barely coherent 5-2 decision, Florida's Supreme Court used recklessly broad language to overturn the state's private school voucher program. In doing so, it set an unfortunate precedent that stretches far beyond the question of school choice.
Florida's Opportunity Scholarship program is the oldest, and smallest, of three private-school choice plans in Florida and has been the focal point of the legal and political battle between school choice proponents and opponents in Florida. In deciding to declare the program unconstitutional, the court read the constitutional requirement that the state provide a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education” as decreeing a constitutional “uniformity” in operations. The decision was greeted with great fanfare by the National School Boards Association, the NAACP, and the teachers unions.
This report explores the possibility of reaching higher standards for all students in all schools and suggests the principles and practices for doing so. Of course, moving any school system from knowing what high-performing systems do, to doing what high-performing systems do is a complex process. Strong agreement about what high-performing systems do will begin to bring some order to that process.
One practice, which relates to the Framework theme of Curriculum and Academic Goals, is the pursuit of rigorous course content across a broad range of academic levels in high-performing schools. This includes higher expectations for the work of students characterized as "average" or "below average," more aggressive efforts to enroll borderline students in advanced classes, and more frequent access to the school's top teachers for average students. At Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School in Florida, educators said that the "culture of high expectations is applied to students at all performance levels, not just to the academically advanced." Students in all academic courses expect homework assignments that require approximately two hours of time each day to complete for each class.
The Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based education policy research and advocacy group, estimates that as many as 6 million middle and high school students can't read at acceptable levels. It's an issue for students well above the bottom of the class. A report released in March that looked at the reading skills of college-bound students who took the ACT college entrance exam found that only 51 percent were prepared for college-level reading.
"That is what is the most startling and troubling," said Cyndie Schmeiser, ACT's senior vice president of research and development. "The literacy problem affects all groups -- not exactly in the same ways, but it's affecting all groups regardless of gender, income or race."
he future for Allied Drive and the City of Madison appears bleak. WMTV-15 reported two nights ago:
Allied Drive Crowds a Growing Concern for Police
Madison police say they have needed to call for backup three times within the last week due to troublesome crowds of people in the Allied Drive neighborhood. And that's draining resources from other parts of the city.
Police report groups of 20 to 80 people shouting, sometimes pounding on squad cars while officers try to make an arrest...
This report is not from Milwaukee, or even the Town of Madison but the city of Madison, the self-avowed hotbed of progressive leadership. For those interested in verbose, lengthy analysis, go to Waxingamerica.com to any of my posts under the category of gangs.
Last Fall's Gangs and School Violence Forum is a must watch (listen - mp3 audio). Participants included representatives from law enforcement, principals and county/state service employees.
Home building in Dane County remains the weakest it has been this century, according to the latest figures from MTD Marketing.
There were just 129 permits issued for single-family homes and duplexes here in June, well below the 222 last year and at least 39 below every June since 1999, the earliest year for which MTD reported figures. The June permits did have a record average value of $243,038. The average square footage was 2,357, behind only the 2,379 a year ago.
Year-to-date through June, there were 822 permits in Dane County, 414 below a year ago and at least 167 below every year since 1999. This year's permits had a record average value of $250,444, up from the prior record of $239,166 a year ago. The average square footage was a record 2,480, edging out the 2,477 in 2004.
Last month HBS Working Knowledge offered an excerpt from Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results, by Harvard Business School professor Michael E. Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg. The U.S. healthcare system is dysfunctional, a Rube Goldberg contraption that rewards the wrong things and doesn't create value for the consumer. In this Q&A, Porter discusses his research.
Roger Thompson: What went wrong with the American model? On paper it looks ideal. It's private, it's competitive, yet it doesn't seem to work.
Michael E. Porter: The United States has a system with the wrong kind of competition, on the wrong things. Instead, we have a zero-sum competition to restrict services, assemble bargaining power, shift the cost to others, or grab more of the revenue versus other actors in the system.
Zero-sum competition does not create value; it can actually destroy value by adding administrative costs and leads to structures involving health plans and providers and other actors, which are misaligned with patient value. In a world of zero-sum competition, for example, providers will consolidate into provider groups to gain clout against insurers. But, as we point out in our book, the provider group doesn't create any value, but value is not created by breadth of services but excellence in particular medical conditions.
NPR's OnPoint recently interviewed Harvard's Michael Porter: [20MB MP3 Audio]
Health care expenses have been much discussed with respect to the Madison School District's $332M+ budget.
Participation in a rigorous secondary school program of study may qualify a postsecondary student to receive an ACG, if otherwise eligible. The Secretary recognizes at least one rigorous secondary school program of study for each state annually. States may submit proposals for recognition or may elect to accept rigorous secondary school programs of study pre-recognized by the Secretary. The following are recognized rigorous secondary school programs of study for each state for the 2006-07 award year.
Q. The gap is a huge issue in Milwaukee. What would you do if you had full power to do something about things here?
A. When we look at the districts that are making the biggest gains, in terms of both overall achievement and narrowing gaps between groups, what seems to set them apart is their focus. They have very, very clear and high goals for kids. They focus a lot on instruction.
“The schooling system was in much better shape 50 years ago than it is now,” says Friedman, his voice as confident as reinforced concrete.
A big fan of freedom, Friedman objects to public schools on principle, arguing — as he says most classic liberals once did — that government involvement by nature decreases individual liberty. But it’s the decline of schooling at the practical level, especially for the poor, that seems to exasperate him.
Friedman puts much of the blame on centralization.
“When I went to elementary school, a long, long time ago in the 1920s, there were about 150,000 school districts in the United States,” he says. “Today there are fewer than 15,000, and the population is more than twice as large.”
“It’s very clear that the people who suffer most in our present system are people in the slums — blacks, Hispanics, the poor, the underclass.”
When I ask him about the “achievement gap” separating low-scoring black and Latino students from better-scoring whites and Asians, he blames my “friends in the union.”
“They are running a system that maximizes the gap in performance. . . Tell me, where is the gap between the poor and rich wider than it is in schooling? A more sensible education system, one that is based on the market, would stave off the division of this country into haves and have-nots; it would make for a more egalitarian society because you’d have more equal opportunities for education.
Jonathan Kozol, author of “Savage Inequalities” and other books of education journalism, has noted that the parents who whine that “throwing money at education” doesn’t solve the problem are usually those spending $15,000 or $30,000 a year to send their kids to private schools. I ask Friedman about the obvious implications of that.
“In the last 10 years, the amount spent per child on schooling has more than doubled after allowing for inflation. There’s been absolutely no improvement as far as I can see in the quality of education. . . . The system you have is like a sponge. It will absorb the extra money. Because the incentives are wrong.
Madison School Board "Progress Report" Week of July 3rd
Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. email:
Welcome to the week of July 3rd edition of the Madison school boards Progress Report. I hope everyone is enjoying the summer
First, upcoming business...On Monday July 10th several committees of the board are meeting: Partnerships at 5 p.m.; Finance & Operations at 6 p.m.; Communications at 7 p.m. and Long Range Planning at 8 p.m
The general meeting on July 17th will include a drama performance from youth involved in MSCR arts program
Next, a few notes on what was accomplished last month
On June 19th the board held a brainstorming session to discuss future district directions. This included developing agenda items for the board and committees. For the 06-07 school year, the entire board will focus on: 1) Attendance, Dropouts, Truancy and Expulsions; 2) Budget Process; 3) Math & Literacy; and 4) Equity. Many items were discussed for committee agendas and the committees themselves will prioritize them
On June 22nd the board approved a one year total package increase of 3.98% for MMSD administrators with 2.18% of that increase going to base salary. The district will investigate whether the current level of health insurance benefits can be provided at a lower cost, which would result in cost savings
Upcoming agenda items include: Food/Wellness; Animals in the Classroom; and Advertising & Sponsorship policies; and the Superintendents Evaluation.
Citizen Members Needed for Communications Committee:
This is a new committee that replaced the Legislative committee. The focus will be on increasing public engagement in legislative policy and on public understanding of legislative policy impacts. Arlene Silveira is the committee chair. If interested in serving, please send name, address, telephone number and a statement of 500 words or less explaining qualifications and interest to me at 545 W. Dayton St. Madison, WI (03) or Email me.
District Notes:
Congratulations to Vaunce Ashby for being selected as the new principal for Kennedy Elementary School
Ten school libraries will keep their doors open to readers this summer to provide easy access for city elementary age students to check out books from school libraries. Libraries are open to elementary students throughout the city attending public and private schools. For more information go to: http://mmsd.org/cso/news/summer_library.htm.
Did You Know:
The Madison school board has been receiving very positive accolades in the local press lately. This is truly a team effort. I want to thank my board colleagues, district staff, parents, and community members for their support and dedication to the MMSD. Together, we educate and build a better community!
Johnny Winston, Jr.
President, Madison School Board
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
Want district information? Go to www.mmsd.org
Write to the entire school board at comments@madison.k12.wi.us.
Sign up for MMSD communications at http://mmsd.org/lists/newuser.cgi
Watch school board meetings and other district programs on MMSD Cable Channel 10 & 19. It is really reality TV!
Many of the nations that have left the United States behind in math and science have ministries of education with clear mandates when it comes to educational quality control. The American system, by contrast, celebrates local autonomy for its schools. When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, it tried to address the quality control problem through annual tests, which the states were supposed to administer in exchange for federal dollars. But things have not quite worked out as planned.
A startling new study shows that many states have a longstanding tradition of setting basement-level educational standards and misleading the public about student performance. The patterns were set long before No Child Left Behind, and it will require more than just passing a law to change them.
Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a research institute run jointly by Stanford and the University of California, showed that in many states students who performed brilliantly on state tests scored dismally on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is currently the strongest, most well-respected test in the country.
The study analyzed state-level testing practices from 1992 to 2005. It found that many states were dumbing down their tests or shifting the proficiency targets in math and reading, creating a fraudulent appearance of progress and making it impossible to tell how well students were actually performing.
A change in health insurance carriers was achieved by several Dane County school districts because of unique circumstances, said Annette Mikula, human resources director for the Sun Prairie School District.
Dean Health System already had been Sun Prairie's point-of-service provider in a plan brokered by WEA Trust, she said. So, after WEA's rates increased nearly 20% last year and were projected for a similar increase this year, the district negotiated a deal directly with Dean.
When the Dean plan goes into effect Sept. 1, the district's premiums will drop enough that it can offer a starting salary $2,000 above what it paid last school year and yet the health plan will stay the same, Mikula said. Several other Dane County districts also have switched to Dean.
"I don't see that our teachers made a concession because really the only thing that's changing in theory is the name on the card," she said. "But for the name on the card not to say WEA is huge."
According to the school boards association, fringe benefits made up 34% of the average teacher's compensation package in the 2004-'05 school year vs. 24% less than two decades before.
Jason Shephard noted earlier this year that the most recent attempt by the Madison School District to evaluate health care costs was a "Sham(e)":
Last week, Madison Teachers Inc. announced it would not reopen contract negotiations following a hollow attempt to study health insurance alternatives.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but anyone who suggests the Joint Committee on Health Insurance Issues conducted a fair or comprehensive review needs to get checked out by a doctor.
The task force’s inaction is a victory for John Matthews, MTI’s executive director and board member Wisconsin Physicians Service.
Losers include open government, school officials, taxpayers and young teachers in need of a raise.
From its start, the task force, comprised of three members each from MTI and the district, seemed to dodge not only its mission but scrutiny.
Hoping to meet secretly until Isthmus raised legal questions, the committee convened twice for a total of four hours – one hour each for insurance companies to pitch proposals.
No discussion to compare proposals. No discussion about potential cost savings. No discussion about problems with WPS, such as the high number of complaints filed by its subscribers.
The Madison School Board recently discussed their 2006/2007 goals (my suggestsions). The Wisconsin State Journal noted that there are some early positive signs that things might change.
From time to time I've mentioned the disastrous Kansas City experiment, which tends to be a rallying point for those who dare to contradict the Kozol doctrine that increased spending will cure all that ails American education. Looks like somebody didn't get the memo, because we have a Kansas City for the new millennium:
Boots references George Stratigos, President of the Marin city School District - blog.
In the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the Black Power movement in the United States, there is no clearer indication of black power’s failure than in urban school systems like Baltimore’s that are run by Democrats. Washington, D. C. schools are some of the worst in the country. Democrats run D.C.
In the Manhattan Institute study, Baltimore’s graduation rate was 91st of the country’s 100 largest school systems. But Detroit’s -- another city run by Democrats -- was 98th. In both Baltimore and Detroit, most of those Democrats are black who are supposed to be exercising black power to improve conditions for black folks.
A.J. DUFFY'S SUPPORT OF the mayor's plan to reorganize the management of Los Angeles' schools hardly qualifies as news. Duffy is president of the school district's teachers union, which would gain even more power under the plan. But Duffy did propose a novel argument Wednesday in Sacramento, testifying in support of the bill that would authorize the restructuring.
A weakened school board, as beholden to UTLA as ever, makes an ideal negotiating partner for a powerful union. A superintendent who isn't answerable to the board gives the union enough wiggle room to continually challenge district policy. A situation in which no one is dominant provides a perfect opportunity for the strongest player to emerge as the leader of the district. And UTLA is a strong, well-financed player. No wonder Duffy likes this deal so much.
But the investments in China's modernization that are most impressive of all are in human capital. The blunt fact is that many young Chinese in cities like Shanghai or Beijing get a better elementary and high school education than Americans do. That's a reality that should embarrass us and stir us to seek lessons from China.
On this trip I brought with me a specialist on American third-grade education — my third-grade daughter. Together we sat in on third-grade classes in urban Shanghai and in a rural village near the Great Wall. In math, science and foreign languages, the Chinese students were far ahead.
My daughter was mortified when I showed a group of Shanghai teachers some of the homework she had brought along. Their verdict: first-grade level at a Shanghai school.
Granted, China's education system has lots of problems. Universities are mostly awful, and in rural areas it's normally impossible to hold even a primitive conversation in English with an English teacher. But kids in the good schools in Chinese cities are leaving our children in the dust.
Last month, the Asia Society published an excellent report, "Math and Science Education in a Global Age: What the U.S. Can Learn from China." It notes that China educates 20 percent of the world's students with 2 percent of the world's education resources. And the report finds many potential lessons in China's rigorous math and science programs.
Yet, there isn't any magic to it. One reason Chinese students learn more math and science than Americans is that they work harder at it. They spend twice as many hours studying, in school and out, as Americans.
Chinese students, for example, must do several hours of homework each day during their summer vacation, which lasts just two months. In contrast, American students have to spend each September relearning what they forgot over the summer.
China's government has developed a solid national curriculum, so that nearly all high school students study advanced biology and calculus. In contrast, only 13 percent of American high school pupils study calculus, and fewer than 18 percent take advanced biology.
Yet if the Chinese government takes math and science seriously, children and parents do so even more. At Cao Guangbiao elementary school in Shanghai, I asked a third-grade girl, Li Shuyan, her daily schedule. She gets up at 6:30 a.m. and spends the rest of the day studying or practicing her two musical instruments.
So if she gets her work done and has time in the evening, does she watch TV or hang out with friends? "No," she said, "then I review my work and do extra exercises."
A classmate, Jiang Xiuyuan, said that during summer vacation, his father allows him to watch television each evening — for 10 minutes.
The Chinese students get even more driven in high school, as they prepare for the national college entrance exams. Yang Luyi, a tenth grader at the first-rate Shanghai High School, said that even on weekends he avoided going to movies. "Going to the cinema is time-consuming," he noted, "so when all the other students are working so diligently, how can you do something so irrelevant?"
And romance?
Li Yafeng, a tenth-grade girl at the same school, giggled at my question. "I never planned to have a boyfriend in high school," she said, "because it's a waste of time."
Now, I don't want such a pressured childhood for my children. But if Chinese go overboard in one direction, we Americans go overboard in the other. U.S. children average 900 hours a year in class and 1,023 hours in front of a television.
I don't think we could replicate the Chinese students' drive even if we wanted to. But there are lessons we can learn — like the need to shorten summer vacations and to put far more emphasis on math and science. A central challenge for this century will be how to regulate genetic tinkering with the human species; educated Chinese are probably better equipped to make those kinds of decisions than educated Americans.
During the Qing Dynasty that ended in 1912, China was slow to learn lessons from abroad and adjust its curriculum, and it paid the price in its inability to compete with Western powers. These days, the tables are turned, and now we need to learn from China.
Facing a budget shortfall of $7.2 million this year, the Kenosha school district asked each of their labor groups to switch their health insurance provider from the WEA Trust to Minneapolis-based United Healthcare. The coverage offered by United Healthcare has the same benefits and cost sharing provisions as the WEA Trust plan currently used by the district’s employees. All of the labor groups within the district, except for the teacher’s union, chose to make this change and save the district over $3 million in benefit costs. Another $3 million would have been saved if the teacher’s had switched to this identical insurance plan as opposed to remaining with the union owned insurance provider.
The most remarkable part of this story is that because the teachers chose not to make this switch, the district has been forced to layoff 40 teachers to alleviate their budget shortfall.
Early signs of positive change on Madison School board
The editorial board of the Wisconsin State Journal credits the election of Lawrie Kobza, Lucy Mathiak and Arlene Silveira for helping the Madison School board to begin to move in new directions.
Brave New World: Are our kids ready to compete in the new global economy? Maybe not
Marc Eisen:
Most of us have had those eerie moments when the distant winds of globalization suddenly blow across our desks here in comfortable Madison. For parents, it can lead to an unsettling question: Will my kids have the skills, temperament and knowledge to prosper in an exceedingly competitive world?
I’m not so sure.
I’m a fan of Madison’s public schools, but I have my doubts if such preparation is high on the list of school district priorities. (I have no reason to think things are any better in the suburban schools.) Like a lot of parents, I want my kids pushed, prodded, inspired and challenged in school. Too often -- in the name of equity, or progressive education, or union protectionism, or just plain cheapness -- that isn’t happening.
Brave New World: Are our kids ready to compete in the new global economy? Maybe not
Last summer I saw the future, and it was unsettling.
My daughter, then 14, found herself a racial minority in a class of gifted kids in a three-week program at Northwestern University. Of the 16 or so kids, a dozen were Asian or Asian American.
The class wasn't computer science or engineering or chemistry -- classes increasingly populated by international students at the college level -- but a “soft” class, nonfiction writing.
When several hundred parents and students met that afternoon for the introductory remarks, I spotted more turbaned Sikhs in the auditorium than black people. I can't say if there were any Hispanics at all.
Earlier, I had met my daughter's roommate and her mom -- both thin, stylish and surgically connected to their cell phones and iPods. I casually assumed that the kid was a suburban princess, Chinese American division. Later, my daughter told me that her roommate was from Hong Kong, the daughter of a banker, and had at the age of 14 already taken enrichment classes in Europe and Canada. Oh, and she had been born in Australia.
Welcome to the 21st century.
In the coming decades, you can be sure the faces of power and influence won't be monochromatic white and solely American. Being multilingual will be a powerful advantage in the business world, familiarity and ease with other cultures will be a plus, and, above all, talent and drive will be the passwords of success in the global economy.
Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, his chronicle of the rapid economic and social changes wrought by the mercury-like spread of new technology, serves as an essential primer for understanding this new world.
In a nutshell, we shouldn't bet on American hegemony in technology and economic growth in the 21st century. In a ramped-up, knowledge-based, digitalized economy, there are no borders. The built-in advantage the U.S. enjoyed after World War II -- our industrial based was untouched, while the rest of the developed world's was in ruins -- has finally run its course. Today, many tech jobs can just as easily be performed in Bangalore and Beijing as in Fitchburg.
Whether America's youth, raised in the lap of luxury with an overpowering sense of entitlement, will prosper in this meritocratic environment is an interesting question. And what of America's underprivileged youth, struggling in school and conspicuously short of family assets: How well will they fare in the new global marketplace?
My own a-ha! moment came a year ago at about the same time I dropped my youngest daughter off at Northwestern. Out of the blue I received an e-mail from a young man in India, offering his services to proofread the paper. Technically, it was no problem to ship him copy, and because of the 12-hour time difference he could work while the rest of us slept and played -- if we wanted to go down the outsourcing road.
Most of us have had those eerie moments when the distant winds of globalization suddenly blow across our desks here in comfortable Madison. For parents, it can lead to an unsettling question: Will my kids have the skills, temperament and knowledge to prosper in an exceedingly competitive world?
I'm not so sure.
I'm a fan of Madison's public schools, but I have my doubts if such preparation is high on the list of school district priorities. (I have no reason to think things are any better in the suburban schools.) Like a lot of parents, I want my kids pushed, prodded, inspired and challenged in school. Too often -- in the name of equity, or progressive education, or union protectionism, or just plain cheapness -- that isn't happening.
Instead, what we see in Madison is just the opposite: Advanced classes are choked off; one-size-fits-all classes (“heterogeneous class groupings”) are mandated for more and more students; the talented-and-gifted staff is slashed; outside groups promoting educational excellence are treated coolly if not with hostility; and arts programs are demeaned and orphaned. This is not Tom Friedman's recipe for student success in the 21st century.
Sure, many factors can be blamed for this declining state of affairs, notably the howlingly bad way in which K-12 education is financed in Wisconsin. But much of the problem also derives from the district's own efforts to deal with “the achievement gap.”
That gap is the euphemism used for the uncomfortable fact that, as a group, white students perform better academically than do black and Hispanic students. More to the point, mandating heterogeneous class grouping becomes a convenient cover for reducing the number of advanced classes that fail the PC test: too white and unrepresentative of the district's minority demographics.
The problem is that heterogeneous classes are based on the questionable assumption that kids with a wide range of skills -- from high-schoolers reading at a fourth-grade level to future National Merit students -- can be successfully taught in the same sophomore classroom.
“It can be done effectively, but the research so far suggests that it usually doesn't work,” says Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, head of Northwestern's Center for Talent Development, which runs an enrichment program for Evanston's schools.
I have to ask: After failing to improve the skills of so many black and Hispanic kids, is the Madison district now prepared to jeopardize the education of its most academically promising kids as well?
Please don't let me be misunderstood. Madison schools are making progress in reducing the achievement gap. The district does offer alternatives for its brightest students, including college-level Advanced Placement classes. There are scores of educators dedicated to improving both groups of students. But it's also clear which way the wind blows from the district headquarters: Embrace heterogeneous classrooms. Reject tracking of brighter kids. Suppress dissent in the ranks.
The district's wrongheaded approach does the most damage in the elementary-school years. That's where the schools embrace dubious math and reading pedagogy and shun innovative programs, like those operated by the Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth, a nonprofit group that works tirelessly to promote gifted education. (Credit school board president Johnny Winston Jr. for cracking the door open to WCATY.)
In a perfect world, Madison would learn from Evanston's schools and their relationship with WCATY's peer, the Center for Talent Development. Faced with predominantly white faces in its advanced high school classes, this racially mixed district didn't dump those classes but hired Olszewski-Kubilius' group to run an after-school and weekend math and science enrichment program for promising minority students in grades 3-6.
In other words, raise their performance so they qualify for those advanced classes once they get to high school. Now there's an idea that Tom Friedman would like!
MARC EISEN IS EDITOR OF ISTHMUS.Email: EISEN at ISTHMUS.COM
Imagine what would have happened if a city the size of Beloit had sprung up in Dane County over the past five years.
That's almost what happened. Dane County's population grew by 31,580 from 2000 to 2005, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released last week.
No other Wisconsin county gained as many people.
The population increase extended a trend. Over the past 15 years Dane County has gained 91,000 people, almost equal to the population of Kenosha, Wisconsin's fourth largest city. Projections call for the growth to continue.
MMSD Lost 174 Students While the Surrounding School Districts Increased by 1,462 Students Over Four School Years. Revenue Value of 1,462 Students - $13.16 Million Per Year*
MMSD reports that student population is declining. From the 2000-2001 school year through the 2003-2004 school year, MMSD lost 174 students. Did this happen in the areas surrounding MMSD? No. From the 2000-2001 through the 2003-2004 school year, the increase in non-MMSD public school student enrollment was 1,462 outside MMSD.
The property tax and state general fund revenue value of 174 students is $1.57 million per year in the 2003-2004 MMSD school year dollars (about $9,000 per student). For 1,462 students, the revenue value is $13.16 million per year. Put another way, the value of losing 174 students equals a loss of 26-30 teachers. A net increase of 1,462 students equals nearly 219 teachers. There are more subtleties to these calculations due to the convoluted nature of the revenue cap calculation, federal and state funds for ELL and special education, but the impact of losing students and not gaining any of the increase of students in the area is enormous.
Business Week has a cover story this week about Bill and Melinda Gates’ small schools efforts. The story starts in Denver, where the Gates folks made a mess of breaking up that city’s lowest-performing school, “a complete failure,” in the Denver superintendent’s words. Summarizing reporters’ visits to 22 Gates-funded schools around the country, the article finds that “while the Microsoft couple indisputably merit praise for calling national attention to the dropout crisis and funding the creation of some promising schools, they deserve no better than a C when it comes to improving academic performance…Creating small schools may work sometimes, but it’s no panacea.”
The article points to some real successes. Some are in New York City, and the article says part of the reason for the success is Gates’ partnership with New Visions for Public Schools, which has been in the small-schools business a lot longer than Bill and Melinda. Mott Haven Village Prep HS [pdf] is one example. But of all the Gates schools in NYC, the report says one-third had ineffective partnerships, many have rising “social tensions,” and suspensions have triped in the new schools over the last three years to reach the system average. We are never snippy but we told you so. The UFT’s 2005 Small Schools Task Force found too many of the Gates-funded small schools have been started with little planning, inexperienced leadership, minimal input from staff or stakeholders and no coherent vision. Some are little more than shells behind a lofty–sometimes ridiculously lofty–name.
Some interesting changes in the Madison School Board's Governance this week:
Renewed administrator contracts for one year rather than the customary two years. Via Sandy Cullen:
The administration had proposed a two year wage and benefit package for administrators, but School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. said board members did not want to be locked into increases for a second year.
The 3.98 percent increase for the 2006-07 school year - which includes a base salary increase of 2.18 percent - is equal to what teachers received last year and is the maximum allowed under the state's Qualified Economic Offer, or QEO, Rainwater said.
Voted (7 - 0) to use the low bid architect for the planned Linden school (some $200K less than the Administration's suggested award winner based on points). Construction of Linden is part of a planned November 2006 referendum.
Began to address health care costs - via Sandy Cullen:
The Madison School Board on Thursday took what members hope will be a first step toward lowering health-care costs for district employees.
In unanimously approving a 3.98 percent increase in wages and benefits for administrators for the 2006-07 school year, board members also reserved the right to make changes in health insurance providers that would offer the same level of coverage at a lower cost to the district. Cost savings would be used for salary increases for administrators and other district needs.
Voters sought change in recent Madison School Board races, and they are getting the first positive stirrings of it.
There are fewer long, tedious speeches and less of the factionalism that has marred board work in past years. There is more substantial questioning and less contentiousness. Split votes don't have to lead to finger pointing and personal attacks.
And last week the board took a first step toward lowering health care costs.
Lawrie Kobza has spearheaded the shift since her election a year back. And rookie board members Lucy Mathiak and Arlene Silveira, who took office last month, seem to be helping.
Peter Gascoyne made an excellent point in recent comment regarding "No free lunch". In other words, a change that's positive in one area may not be all that great for others. Beverly Creamer notes that Hawaii is implementing a new Weighted Student Formula that is not without controversy:
A new controversy is shaping up over how money is divided among the state's public schools under a formula based on student need.
Small and rural schools were expected to suffer staggering monetary losses under a new Weighted Student Formula that will take effect with the new school year July 27. And even though the losses were averted with an extra $20 million from the Legislature, the outcry over the expected impact on small and rural schools generated widespread concern.
Now, a special Department of Education committee charged with re-examining the formula has proposed a key change intended primarily to address wide discrepancies in funding between the largest and smallest schools.
Under the plan, each school would receive a base amount — or "foundation grant" — to assure that each could afford essential positions. The foundation grants would amount to about 25 percent of total school funding, leaving much less to be divided according to student need.
You learn all you need to know about education policy in California when you understand that both a Republican governor and a Democratic big-city mayor are compelled to negotiate behind closed doors with the bosses of a private enterprise - the teachers' union - but are in no way obligated to solicit the views of the public, who will pay the price for such grand schemes.
The Los Angeles Times editorial page got it exactly right this morning: "Consider a school whose students are failing at math. Who could responsible parents see to address the problem? The teachers picked the curriculum, but they can't be voted out of office. The school didn't decide its budget; the superintendent did that. But both the board and the mayor have a say in it. The board can't hire and fire the superintendent on its own; the mayor can say the board selects the superintendent. And because the board loses power in this deal, it has little interest in seeing it succeed."
I’ve been thinking through my experiences with such partnerships, wondering what the common thread is – what do businesses want to hear from nonprofits who come calling for support? What’s the one thing (if there is one thing) that, more than anything else, will give you the best shot at establishing the partnerships you want?
And in the spirit of the quote above, I think I’ve found the answer – the thing that opens the door to limitless opportunity for any school or nonprofit organization that takes it to heart. Just one word.
At a brainstorming workshop meeting Monday night organized by Winston, School Board members outlined ideas and priorities for the next year. While there was some initial grumbling about process, within a couple of hours, dozens of ideas had been presented, organized and prioritized.
By the end of the evening, four subject areas were chosen as priorities: fair allocation of resources to schools, the budget process, attendance issues and academic performance.
Imagine yourself the parent of an otherwise bright and engaging child who has reached the fourth grade without learning to read. After battling the public school bureaucracy for what seems like a lifetime, you enroll your child in a specialized private school for struggling readers. Over the next few years, you watch in grateful amazement as a child once viewed as uneducable begins to read and experiences his first successes at school.
Most parents are so relieved to find help for their children that they never look back at the public schools that failed them. But a growing number of families are no longer willing to let bygones be bygones. They have hired special education lawyers and asserted their rights under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which allows disabled children whom the public schools have failed to receive private educations at public expense.
Federal disability law offers public school systems a stark choice: The schools can properly educate learning-disabled children — or they can fork over the money to let private schools do the job.
"It is a new direction," said Mathiak, who echoed Kobza's call for changes in the board's decision-making and budget processes in unseating 12-year board veteran Juan Jose Lopez.
Mathiak had recommended many of the areas in which administrative cuts were made. "It's a start toward taking ownership and leadership for the types of things that have to happen," she said.
Mathiak joins Kobza, who unseated incumbent Bill Clingan, and Ruth Robarts, now in her ninth year on the board, as advocates for changing what some critics negatively describe as the status quo. On several successful budget amendments, they were joined by Shwaw Vang, who is in his sixth year on the board, for a 4-3 majority.
Ruth Robarts raised a powerful point in her comments "she is concerned committees might be restricted from taking up issues not supported by a majority of board members.". I hope this is not the case. The Board majority has been criticized for not addressing some of the more challenging issues over the past few years, like health care, the Superintendent's review (something not done from 2002 to 2005!), the effectiveness of the District's curriculum strategy and a variety of budget topics, among others. Improved communication includes actually discussing substantive topics.
It will be interesting to see what topics are addressed by the Madison School board over the next 9 months (I posted some ideas on goals here). Voters will be watching as they consider the fall referendum and April, 2007 election for 3 seats (Robarts, Vang and Winston's seats).
June 12th School Board Update - End of School Year
Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. email:
The Madison School Board has been (and will be) very busy. At the June 12th meeting the board voted to go to referendum on November 7th for a new elementary school on the far Westside of Madison, Leopold Addition and refinancing of existing debt. The total amount of the referendum is $23.5 million. If approved, it would represent about a $21 increase in property taxes for the next 20 years on the average $239,449 home.
The June 5th meeting was devoted to discussing the possible referendum items.
On May 31st the board passed the $333 million dollar budget for the 2006-07 school year. Amongst notable budget amendments include: 5th grade strings program two times per week (with a pilot program at one school with students having the choice of either general music or strings), community services funding for Kasjiab House and GSA for Safe Schools, elementary library pages, Connect program and a garbage truck (to end privatization of service).
pcoming Meetings:
On June 19th the Board will have a brainstorming session to discuss issues and topics for the upcoming school year. This meeting will allow the elected board to develop priorities and a vision for the school district and allow the Administration to address those issues. It will be the goal of the board to work cooperatively, effectively and respectfully. Other general meetings will occur on July 17th and August 14th. Several committees will meet during the summer.
District Notes:
Congratulations to Madison spelling bee champion Isabel Jacobson from OKeeffe Middle School for her impressing 14th place finish in the national spelling bee.
Lynn Winn and Karen Sieber are the new principals at Falk and Stephens Elementary Schools respectively, and Lisa Black is the new Special Assistant to the Superintendent for Parent and Community Response
A record number of 364 scholarships and awards were given by local organizations to this years MMSD graduates total a remarkably high $436,240.
Did You Know?
Since the inception of revenue limits in 1993, the MMSD has cut over $52 million dollars from its budgets.
Lastly, congratulations to all district staff retirees and MMSD graduates! I hope everyone has a wonderful and enjoyable summer. Ill send periodic updates as meetings occur this summer. Thanks for reading and your support of the MMSD.
Johnny Winston, Jr.
President, Madison School Board
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
Want district information? Go to www.mmsd.org
Write to the entire school board at comments@madison.k12.wi.us.
Sign up for MMSD communications at http://mmsd.org/lists/newuser.cgi
Watch school board meetings and other district programs on MMSD Cable Channel 10. It is must see TV!
It's important to note that while revenue limits have been in place since 1993, the MMSD's budget has gone from slightly less than $200M to $333M during that time. Enrollment has been essentially flat, around 24-25,000 students. There's a great deal of budget discussion available here in addition to a summary of district stats over the years here. MMSD statistics page.
Audio / Video: Madison School Board Schools of Hope / Reading Presentation
The Madison School Board heard a presentation on the Schools of Hope initiative Monday evening. There was a lively discussion on the results of this initiative. MP3 Audio or Video
Few educators these days want to go back to the early 19th century, when often the only opportunities for learning were one-room schoolhouses or, if you were rich, private tutors. But a report from the University of Iowa says at least those students had no age and grade rules to hold them back.
What was lost in the 20th century was "an appreciation for individual differences," scholars Nicholas Colangelo, Susan G. Assouline and Miraca U.M. Gross conclude in the report, "A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students." Now, the report says, "America's school system keeps bright students in line by forcing them to learn in a lock-step manner with their classmates."
he Madison School Board will put one $23.5 million referendum question to voters in the Nov. 7 general election.
If approved, the referendum would provide $17.7 million for a new elementary school on the Far West Side, $2.7 million for an addition at Leopold Elementary, and $3.1 million to refinance debt.
It also would free up $876,739 in the portion of next year's operating budget that is subject to state revenue limits. Board members could use that money to restore some of the spending cuts in the $332 million budget they recently approved, which eliminated the equivalent of about 86 full-time positions to help close a $6.9 million gap between what it would cost to continue the same programs and services next year and what the district can raise in taxes under revenue limits.
The board voted unanimously to hold the referendum in November, rather than placing in on the ballot during the fall primary in September. The later date, board members said, provides more time to organize an educational effort on why the projects are necessary.
"We'll see what happens," said board member Ruth Robarts, the lone dissenting voice on the decision to bundle all three projects together in a single question to voters in the general election. Robarts, who preferred asking the three questions separately, said she was concerned that voters who did not like one project might be likely to vote against all three.
What's the outlook for a successful referenda? I think, as I wrote on May 4, 2006 that it is still hard to say:
I agree with Ed that Monday's civilized board meeting absent any bullying is a good sign.
There's been some board turnover since that vote that may be helpful.
On the other hand, there's the ongoing effort to kill 4th and 5th grade strings (5th year of the Administration's "onslaught" - not even a rounding error in the District's 332.9M budget),
2006 / 2007 Madison School Board & Committee Goals
The Madison School Board meets June 19, 2006 @ 5:00p.m. to discuss their 2006 / 2007 goals for our $332M+ schools. A friend wondered what goals readers have in mind.
I thought it might be useful to consider the Board's goals in light of the District's strategic plan [450K pdf]:
Instructional Excellence Improving student achievement Offering challenging, diverse and contemporary curriculum and instruction.
Student Support Assuring a safe, respectful and welcoming learning environment.
Staff Effectiveness Recruiting, developing and retaining a highly competent workforce that reflects the diversity of our students.
Home and Community Partnerships Strengthening community and family partnerships, and communication.
Fiscal Responsibility Using resources efficiently and strategically.
My thoughts are below:
World Class Curriculum: Does the MMSD use it's $332M+ budget for 24,490 students to provide the best possible curriculum to our next generation? There certainly have been some questions, particularly with respect to Math and the growing movement toward a one size fits all curriculum ala West's English 10. Instructional excellence is the District's #1 strategic priority. It would also be useful to discuss the use of online learning tools, particularly for curriculum that is in danger of being eliminated due to staffing challenges, or those that are not currently offered at all schools, such as Mandarin.
Budget Transparency: Create a community working group that includes a variety of skills such as investment professionals (those who know how to read and explain financial statements) and forensic auditors. The goal is to create an understandable, easy to use budget model. This model should include year over year comparisons, individual school budgets and a method to evaluate spending effectiveness.
Health Care Costs: Create and publish online a matrix comparing benefit packages, providers and costs. Chat with a number of local organizations, including Dane County, UW, MATC, AmFam, Oscar Meyer, TDS, General Casualty, City of Madison and the State regarding their approach to these questions and publish the results.
Invite local health care firms/insurance brokerages to give an overview of their services and what the financial options are for an organization the size of MMSD. Perhaps they can provide 3 scenarios with dollars and benefits
I would also invite someone to come in and talk about the emerging Health Savings Accounts. Self Insurance up to a point might also be discussed.
Perhaps begin each meeting with a 10 year chart of the MMSD's health care expenditures and a discussion of what it means to teachers (total compensation, including benefit/salary tradeoffs) and taxpayers. Discuss what happens if nothing changes.
Review Denver's recent pay for performance teacher agreement along with the accompanying tax increase used to fund it. Determine if there are aspects of this program that make sense here.
New Leopold addition. No new school far west side. Gain capacity by programmatic changes, e.g.SAGE reduction, Art and Music rooms converted to classrooms, or reduction of flexible room, at Crestwood and Chavez (increasing capacity). Early Childhood moved from Stephens and Muir to Midvale-Lincoln. Multiple boundary changes.
The District sent literature to various teachers offering credit to those who enroll in the above-referenced courses. As an enticement for the Reading Recovery Teacher Leader course, the District offers "salary, tuition, and book costs." The program will run after work hours during the school year. Regarding the Middle School Math Master’s Program, every District teacher, who teaches math in a middle school, is "expected" to take three (3) District inservice courses in math, unless they hold a math major or minor. The District is advising teachers that they must complete the three (3) courses within two (2) years. The courses are 21 hours each. The program is scheduled to run during the school day, with substitute teachers provided on the days the courses will be taught.
The Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission has previously ruled that an employer offering financial incentives, including meals and lodging, or release time, to employees in conjunction with course work or seminars is a mandatory subject of bargaining between the school district and the union.
On paper, the schools appear troubled: low-income students, low state test scores. But a closer look reveals 13 are doing better than expected.
The challenges are not uncommon at schools such as Dayton's Bluff that serve mostly low-income students. But Siedschlag had faith in the teachers she said nurtured students, and she thought things would get better.
They did. A new principal arrived in 2001 and renewed the school's energy. Expectations became clear. Students respected teachers. And staffers now go out of their way to support parents.
School visits and interviews showed that the factors seen as critical to success at Dayton's Bluff also are found at many of the other schools: They have strong principals and a cohesive staff who offer students consistency and structure. They emphasize reading and writing above all else. And they focus instruction on the needs of individual students rather than trying to reach some average child.
These successful schools have focused on basics — reading, writing and math — as they educate their at-risk students. They also have shifted to small-group learning and one-on-one instruction.
"We used to teach to this mythical middle student," said literacy coach Paul Wahmanholm, who has taught at Dayton's Bluff for eight years. Now, "we got away from this one-size-fits-all approach and focused on individualized instruction."
So shouldn't the level of poverty be taken into account when determining how well schools teach kids?
No, say educators and researchers who contend that doing so would create two classes of U.S. schools and eviscerate the No Child Left Behind federal education law, which aims to have all students proficient in reading and math by 2014.
"Changing that would create a two-tier system of education — one with high expectations for the wealthy and a set of lower expectations for low-income students," said Diane Piché, executive director of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights.
"It's simply not fair for students born into poverty to expect less of them when we know what's possible," she said. "That's what we should focus on, rather than what's likely.
To get such results, do teachers and parents and administrators have to be insufferable? Maybe not. Both Patterson and Winston say their favorite clients -- Feinberg and Levin -- are more mature and less irritating now. Feinberg in particular, by most accounts the more troublesome of the two, is now "quite the diplomat," Patterson said.
We have examples of some big city school systems that have made significant progress under persistent but polite pressure from above. The impressive record of Boston school superintendent Tom Payzant, retiring after 10 years, is one example. Patterson said she thinks she and Feinberg only managed to make headway in Houston for KIPP because that city had a far-sighted and intelligent school board, and an accomplished superintendent, future U.S. education secretary Rod Paige. Paige saw the value of Feinberg's efforts even when the KIPP principal waited beside Paige's car in the school district parking lot all day so that he could ambush him with a request for help in another space crisis.
When the Chalkboard Project conducted the most extensive statewide polling ever of Oregonians on education issues and priorities, 65% said they would have greater confidence in K-12 schools if they could easily find standardized budget information they could compare and contrast.
People want to know where their money is going, and they want that information in a straightforward manner that is easy to understand.
The Open Book$ Project aims to provide ordinary Oregonians with an open, simple look at where K-12 dollars really go. Audited data is supplied by the Oregon Department of Education in cooperation with Oregon's 198 school districts.
Open Book$ is funded by the Chalkboard Project, a non-partisan, non-profit initiative of Foundations For A Better Oregon. Launched in early 2004, Chalkboard exists to inspire Oregonians to do what it takes to make the state's K-12 public schools among the nation's best, while restoring a sense of involvement and ownership back to taxpayers. Chalkboard aims to help create a more informed and engaged public who understand and address the tough choices and trade-offs required to build strong schools
The Portland School District spent $443,634,000 in 2004/2005 to educate 47,674 students ($9,306/student) while the Madison school district spent $317,000,000 to educate 24,710 students (12,829/student) during that same year.
A number of our local politicians have visited Portland over the years in an effort to learn more about their urban and economic development plans.
APPLETON (AP) - Lunch hour at two local schools became the subject for a film crew as part of a federal agency's plan to show how the Appleton district is trying to promote healthy lifestyles and fight the epidemic of childhood obesity.
The media crew also filmed fitness programs at Edison Elementary School and West High School and interviewed staff members, including Superintendent Tom Scullen, for the footage due to be aired June 20 as part of a national talk show on child health and nutrition.
Chuck Heurkens' gym class was filmed on Edison's climbing wall and using new heart monitors and pedometers.
Heurkens, who will appear on the show with experts on fitness and nutrition, said the district has instituted many initiatives to improve the health of children.
In 2003, the district banned the sale of soda and junk food in schools during the school day. Other initiatives have included starting new educational programs on nutrition, offering physical education choices and adding climbing walls, ropes courses and fitness centers to school health fairs. A summer "Healthy Kids" institute was created for district staff.
"We're working to create that climate districtwide and we have a lot of people moving in the same direction," Heurkens said.
Todd May, producer with the U.S. Department of Education's office of communications and outreach, said the agency wanted to share what Appleton has done with other districts that are just getting started.
"Appleton is considered one of the pre-eminent national models of a school district trying to grapple with the problem which is an epidemic nationally and even more so in Appleton," May said.
He cited state statistics indicating more than 60 percent of Appleton adults and 40 percent of children are classified as overweight or obese.
The district's efforts make it a strong example of how to "invest in teacher training, technology and hardware, revamp physical education courses and make changes in what's available to eat so kids can make good nutritional choices," May said.
The federal government is requiring that every school district submit a wellness plan by July 1, giving policies for nutrition and health and how they plan to involve parents and the rest of the school community.
Mikki Duran, leader of Appleton's physical education and health program leader, said the efforts involve simply "recognizing that healthy vibrant kids make better learners and citizens."
West sophomores filmed during lunch said they can tell efforts are being made to try to improve nutrition and fitness options, although the district has a ways to go.
Carly Schaefer, 16, said she has learned more about staying active and eating right. "Now that we're older we care more about what we eat."
Here is the link to the school district's monthly newsletter: http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/today/
I thought the story about awards to staff was especially important: it is half-way down the page,
The superintendent recently received 2 awards from the UW School of Education - to quote from the newsletter:
Professor Paul V. Bredeson, UW School of Education department chair, gave MMSD Superintendent Art Rainwater a Senior Faculty Fellow award in recognition of his significant contributions to the work of the department and his fostering of collaboration between the University and administrators throughout the Madison School District.
This took place at the UW Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis awards reception May 5.
Art also received the national University Council on Educational Administration's (UCEA) Excellence in Educational Leadership Award from UW School of Education Dean Julie K. Underwood.
The faculty of the UW Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis nominated Rainwater for the national recognition given to practicing school administrators who have made significant contributions to the improvement of administrator preparation.
The District has always employed outstanding curriuclum leaders in our Teaching and Learning Department. Mary Ramberg has been a leader in Teaching and Learning as have Lisa Wachtel in Science and Mary Watson Peterrson in Literacy and Language Arts.
Please rest assured that I. even more than you, am committed to employing the best possible math corrdinator. The minimum requirements posted are exactly what they say. They are minimum requirements and failure to meet the requirements eliminates the person from consideration immedately without even a further paper screen. Our district has a hiring process that has served us vrey well over the years and this is only the first part of that process.
The breadth and depth of knowledge of mathematics is obviously one of two key components in determining who will be the final pick for this position. However, equally important in the decision is the breadth and depth of pedogogical knowledge. Both of these will be given equal weight and I will not employ anyone who does not have both.
Art Rainwater
My reply:
Dear Art,
Thanks for your prompt reply.
What caused all of us to write/sign this letter is that the posted job ad does precisely NOT require what we consider two MINIMUM requirements for this position, namely (and I repeat):
subject knowledge equivalent to a strong bachelor's degree in mathematics, and
teaching experience at the highest level in the high school curriculum.
I do hope that the school board and the district administration will RESTRICT its search to ONLY candidates meeting these two MINIMUM requirements.
Madison School Board Unanimously Passes Budget for 2006-07
At the end of six and a half hours of discussion on May 31, the Madison School Board voted 7-0 to adopt the superintendent's proposed budget for 2006-07. The vote came after board members made amendments to the expenditures for the next school year.
Open letter about Math Coordinator position at MMSD
OPEN LETTER:
Dear Members of the School Board, dear Superintendent Rainwater,
We are writing to strongly urge that the new Coordinator of Mathematics have the depth of knowledge of mathematics that we believe is essential for the position. While we are obviously concerned about the preparation of students entering the University, our concerns are much broader than that. The new Coordinator must have a high level of understanding of both mathematical content and pedagogy to independently navigate through the controversies that surround the established standards and published curricula. These "navigational skills" are essential if we are to achieve a program for the Madison school system that meets the needs and aspirations of all the students in the system.
The posted criteria do not give us confidence that the new coordinator will have the required depth of knowledge. Specifically, we recommend adding the following to the list of knowledge and experience that the new Coordinator should have:
Subject knowledge equivalent to a strong Bachelor's degree in mathematics.
The posted criteria call for a Master's degree, but there is no requirement specific to the subject area. Knowledge at the level of a Bachelor's degree seems to us to be a minimum requirement.
Teaching experience at the highest level in the high school curriculum.
The posted criteria call for teaching experience in mathematics, but do not specify the level. Experience at the highest level seems essential if the individual is to have the necessary overview of the entire curriculum.
We recognize that the school system faces many challenges, but we do not believe that we are being self-serving or even controversial in asserting that a high quality mathematics curriculum must be one of the top priorities for the system. The new Coordinator must be fully equipped with the essential skills and knowledge if that priority is to be met.
Respectfully,
Alejandro Adem
Sigurd Angenent
Richard Askey
Eric Bach
Lev Borisov
Richard Brualdi
Andrei Caldararu
David Camacho
Serguei Denissov
Mikhail Feldman
Simon Hellerstein
Shi Jin
Alexander Kiselev
James Kuelbs
Steffen Lempp
Shirin Malekpour
Eugenia Malitsky
Gloria Mari-Beffa
Gabi Meyer
Paul Milewski
Julie Mitchell
Yong-Geun Oh
Marshall Osborn
Seymour Parter
Paul Rabinowitz
Diane Rivard
Joel Robbin
Jean-Pierre Rosay
James Rossmanith
Hans Schneider
Andreas Seeger
Timo Seppalainen
Dietrich Uhlenbrock
Stephen Wainger
Tonghai Yang
By the end of this column I will have selected the next superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Because I believe that the children, parents, teachers and citizens of Los Angeles are entitled to transparency in such deliberations, I invite you to join me as I work my way toward a decision.
Let's start in a classroom at North Hollywood High School, where, in a scene reminiscent of "Blackboard Jungle," 28 young toughs have school board President Marlene Canter backed up against a projector screen.
These aren't physical toughs. They're intellectual toughs. But if I were Canter, I'd take the sneering, tattooed kind any day.
A Parent's Note to the Madison School Board on Strings
Ann O' Brien:
Every year when I attend my children’s strings concerts, I am so amazed by the broad and diverse participation of students in strings. How moving to see so many students playing instruments often stereotyped as only for the rich who can afford lessons. The cacophony of sounds coming from the 100’s of students at the city-wide concerts inspires the kids, the parents and the community that all is well in the world; that integration, opportunity, and artistic expression are not just paid lip service, but are working in our schools. I appreciate your work to keep strings available to all students.
Week of May 30th - School Board Update by President Johnny Winston, Jr.
Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. email:
Currently, the Madison School Board is deliberating over the 2006-07 budget. Board members submitted budget amendments to the Administration last week. The strings program, library pages, funding for community groups, student fees, school programs and class sizes are among the items identified by board members to change in the budget. For a list of budget amendments and Administrative responses please go to: http://mmsd.org/budget/mmsd/0607/budget.htm.
We invite the public to comment on the budget amendments at our public hearing on Tuesday May 30th at 5 p.m. at the Doyle Building or in writing to the board at comments@madison.k12.wi.us. The board will finalize the budget on Wednesday May 31st. Both of these meetings will be televised on MMSD television on cable channel 10 at 5 p.m.
Upcoming Dates & Agenda Items:
· The board will deliberate on a possible fall referendum regarding building of a new school on the far Westside of Madison and the refinancing of building additions debt on June 5th.
· On June 12th the Performance and Achievement Committee will receive a report regarding the new Middle School Design. Board will receive a report on the United Way Schools of Hope Initiative by U.W. School of Educations, Dr. Julie Underwood and discuss policy regarding placement of cell antennas on MMSD property for revenue.
· On June 19th the Board will have a brainstorming session to discuss issues and topics for the upcoming school year. The boards committees will become a focus this year. This meeting will allow the elected board to develop priorities and a vision for the school district and allow the Administration to address those issues. It will be the goal of the board to work cooperatively, effectively and respectfully.
Sign up for MMSD communications at http://mmsd.org/lists/newuser.cgi
Did you know that
there are six School Board committees Finance and Operations; Human Resources; Partnerships; Long Range Planning; Performance and Achievement; and Communications (formerly Legislative).
Thank you for your interest and support of the MMSD.
Johnny Winston, Jr.
President, Madison School Board
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
The education reforms that are under way across the United States fall mainly on the shoulders of school principals, whose jobs are growing more difficult — and more crucial — every day. They must train and inspire new teachers, manage budgets, schedule classes, interact with often troubled families, and keep clean, orderly buildings — all while raising standards and improving student performance, as is now required by federal law. This walk-on-water job requires sound training and a good support system. But it also requires experience, especially in challenging school systems like New York City's, which is on the verge of giving principals even more responsibility.
I sent the following message to the School Board yesterday, in reaction to MMSD’s announcement that 6 elementary principals will be moved to different schools this summer in a series of transfers.
I realize that it’s easy to talk tough from the sidelines, but I think that this is a significant personnel decision that will affect a lot of teachers, kids, and communities. If the School Board hasn’t received a thorough explanation of its rationale, I think they should request one.
A few people have suggested that I post my message to the Board here, so here it is.
-----------------------------------------
To the MMSD Board of Education:
I don't think I understand why Elizabeth Fritz was transferred from Crestwood. It appears that Art Rainwater has decided to remove an effective leader from a healthy school--one whose health she has helped to develop. His letter did not make the reason clear, except to suggest that he thinks it is good to move principals from one school to another every so often. Is this really his view, or the view of the School Board? It doesn't make sense to me.
Perhaps there are good reasons for these principal moves that I'm not aware of. But from the outside they give a worrisome impression--that the Superintendent might be "protecting his own" at the expense of the students he is serving. From the outside, and with incomplete information, it looks as though Mr. Rainwater might be doing the easier thing instead of the better thing--shuttling some unsuccessful principals to different schools instead of firing them. This would at least be a plausible motivation. Rotation for the sake of rotation does not seem to be.
I think the role of principal is the most important role in a school district, and that a principal has more impact on a school's climate than any other person. Good ones are not so easy to come by, and I don't think they should be transferred out unless there's a good reason. I hope the School Board will question Mr. Rainwater closely on his reasons. If it appears he's trying to protect weak principals, or if he can't do better than to say that it's good to rotate principals every so often, I hope the School Board will consider overturning his decision.
Six elementary principals to lead different schools for 2006-07
Six elementary school principals will lead different schools next year in a series of transfers within the Madison School District. All six principals have been at their current schools for at least five years.
The list of new assignments, by principal, with current school and length of service:
Craig Campbell to Elvehjem from Kennedy (10 yrs.)
Lisa Kvistad to Lowell from Elvehjem (5 yrs.)
Bev Cann to Kennedy from Lowell (5 yrs.)
Linda Allen to Chavez from Thoreau (5 yrs.)
Howard Fried to Crestwood from Chavez (6 yrs.)
Liz Fritz to Thoreau from Crestwood (6 yrs.)
In making these assignment changes, Superintendent Art Rainwater said, "All of these principals have been at their schools for several years, and I believe these changes are good for the district, the principals, the staff and the students."
Parents at each of the schools were notified yesterday. The changes will take place over the summer in time for the Tuesday, September 5 start of the new school year. Each of the principals will assist his or her successor in the transition to make it more effective and efficient.
COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS? PLEASE CONTACT:
Madison Metropolitan School District
Public Information Office
545 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53703
608-663-1879
Madison School Board members have come up with their lists of programs to put back into next year's budget.
But in order to get those items back, four of the board's seven members have to agree not only on what to add, but how to fund it.
Madison School Board President Johnny Winston Jr. wants to restore the district's elementary strings program for fifth- graders to twice a week, keep fourth- and fifth-grade classes at Lincoln Elementary School limited to 20 students and fund programs to improve the attendance of Hmong students and to make schools safer by reducing bullying.
School Board member Ruth Robarts wants to keep the strings program for fourth graders as well as fifth-graders, nix increases in student textbook fees and restore the positions of library pages who assist school librarians, which were cut from the $332 million budget district administrators have proposed for next year.
A new statewide assessment used to test the knowledge of Wisconsin students forced a lowering of the curve, a Madison school official said.
The results showed little change in the percentages of students scoring at proficient and advanced levels.
But that's because this year's Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations- Criterion Referenced Tests proved harder for students than last year's assessment, said Kurt Kiefer, director of research and evaluation for the Madison School District, prompting adjustments to the statewide cut-off scores for determining minimal, basic, proficient and advanced levels that were in line with last year's percentages, Kiefer said.
"The intent was not to make a harder test," Kiefer said, adding that the test was particularly more difficult at the eighth- and 10th-grade levels. "It had nothing to do with how smart the kids were."
While scores can differ from district to district, Kiefer said, increases in students testing proficient and advanced are not as profound as districts might have hoped.
But Wisconsin's remarkable district success rate is mostly a function of the way it has used its flexibility under NCLB to manipulate the statistical underpinnings of the AYP formula.
We went from a district which was above the State average to one with scores at best at the State average. The State Test was changed from a nationally normed test to one written just for Wisconsin, and the different levels were set without a national norm. That is what caused the dramatic rise from February 2002 to November 2002. It was not that all of the Middle Schools were now using Connected Mathematics Project, which was the reason given at the meeting for these increases.
This year's results also underscore a vexing question: Why does the percentage of students who are proficient or advanced drop from eighth to 10th grades? The decline was true almost across the board, including across ethnic groups, except in language arts. In reading statewide, the percentage of students who were advanced and proficient held close to steady from third through eighth grade and then dropped 10 points, from 84% to 74% for 10th grade. The decline was even steeper for black and Hispanic students - in each case, 17-point drops from eighth to 10th grade.
Overall, lower test scores at 10th grade are part of a broader picture of concern about how students are doing in high school that has put that level of education on the front burner nationwide, whether it is special programming from Oprah Winfrey or efforts by the National Governors Association, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or others.
But assistant state schools superintendent Margaret Planner said one factor in the 10th-grade drop simply might be that many students at that level do not take the tests very seriously. Their own standing is not affected by how they do, although the status of their school could be affected seriously. She referred to the tests as "low stakes" for students and "high stakes" for schools under the federal education law.
28 minute video excerpt of this evening's discussion of the MMSD's food service budget (the food service budget is evidently supposed to break even, but the operating budget has apparently been subsidizing it by several hundred thousand dollars annually).
This sort of excellent citizen oversite is essential to any publicly financed organization, particularly one that plans to spend $332M in taxpayer funds next year and hopes to pass referenda in the near future.
Former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin made a similar case today when he discussed our fair city's water problems:
It's funny how progressives forget their history and the reason for doing things. The idea is to have a citizen board, not a board with public employees. That is part of the checks and balances. In fact the progressive left in Madison went though considerable time over the years gradually removing city staff from committees so they would not dominate and squelch the citizens who are more likely to be 'whistleblowers.'
In the water example, a citizen spent years chasing this issue, finally getting the attention of the traditional media and the politicians.
A number of board members have been asking many questions (the video clip will give you a nice overview of who is asking the questions and what the responses are). You can check the action out here (Each "Tab" is a question to the Administration, with their response"). For example, we learn in tab 11 2 Page PDF that the district spent a net (after 200K in gate receipts and 450K in student fees) $1,433,603 on athletics in 2005/2006 and plans to spend a net $1,803,286 in 2006/2007, a 25% increase. The overall budget will grow by more than 3%.
This is quite a change from past years, and provides some hope for the future.
Critics on both the Left and the Right have charged that the No Child Left Behind Act tramples states' rights by imposing a federally mandated, one-size-fits-all accountability system on the nation's diverse states and schools.
In truth, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) gives states wide discretion to define what students must learn, how that knowledge should be tested, and what test scores constitute “proficiency”—the key elements of any educational accountability system. States also set standards for high school graduation rates, teacher qualifications, school safety and many other aspects of school performance. As a result, states are largely free to define the terms of their own educational success.
The Pangloss Index ranks Wisconsin as the most optimistic state in the nation. Wisconsin scores well on some educational measures, like the SAT, but lags behind in others, such as achievement gaps for minority students. But according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the state is a modern-day educational utopia where a large majority of students meet academic standards, high school graduation rates are high, every school is safe and nearly all teachers are highly qualified. School districts around the nation are struggling to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the primary standard of school and district success under NCLB. Yet 99.8 percent of Wisconsin districts—425 out of 426—made AYP in 2004–05.
How is that possible? As Table 2 shows, some states have identified the large majority of districts as not making AYP. The answer lies with the way Wisconsin has chosen to define the AYP standard.
NCLB requires states to base AYP designations on the percentage of students who score at the “proficient” level on state tests in reading and math. That percentage is compared to a target percentage, which must be met by both the student body as a whole and by “subgroups” of students, such as students from specific racial and ethnic populations. Districts that fail to make AYP for multiple consecutive years become subject to increasingly serious consequences and interventions.
Wisconsin has a relatively homogenous racial makeup and many small school districts, resulting in fewer subgroups in each district that could potentially miss the proficiency targets. But Wisconsin's remarkable district success rate is mostly a function of the way it has used its flexibility under NCLB to manipulate the statistical underpinnings of the AYP formula.
Then comes the final pox-on-both-their-houses flourish, "what does any of it, really...." Maybe there are people out there who really don't think that reporting accurate public information about the success of the school system has anything to do with the success of the school system. I just didn't expect to find newspapers among their number.
Should metro-area school superintendents earn more than the governor?
More to the point, if they do earn more, shouldn't taxpayers at least be aware of it?
When it comes to the paychecks of school chiefs, what local taxpayers see isn't always what superintendents get. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis found clauses deep in the contracts of 14 metro superintendents that gave the school officals an average of $33,900 in nonsalary pay last year. A notable and laudable exception is the city of Gainesville, which posts Superintendent Steven Ballowe's evaluation scores each year on its Web site.
Allocations were sent to schools in early April 2006 for staffing for the 2006-2007 school year. This represents about 80%+ of the district's budget. These are NOT final allocations. (For example, the School Board HAS NOT made a decision to cut Grade 4 strings for next year - that is the Superintendent's proposal.)
The school board HAS NOT approved the budget for next year. What has been implemented is based upon the Superintendent's recommendations to the School Board, but will not be final until the School Board approves budget, currently scheduled to take place on May 31st.
There will be another public budget hearing, Tuesday, May 30th at the Doyle building, 545 W. Dayton St. I'm not yet sure of the starting time.
Recently Utah schools have been given an F for technology use in the classroom (or lack thereof). This is one area I hope Utah continues to fail in. Technology has been touted as a fabulous tool for teaching math and other subjects, but it’s not. Technology teaches technology; you still have to learn math separately if you want to know math too.
I agree. The basics come first - technology, which changes frequently and may not always be appropriate (see Powerpoint, and here.)
Active Citizens for Education offers the following recommendations for the consideration of the MMSD Board of Education in the allocation of funds for the 2006-2007 budget: (I appeared on WIBA, 1310, this evening with Brian Schimming and discussed the MMSD proposed budget and ACE recommendations) [18MB mp3]
Reduce costs in Central Administration with the elimination of at least 30.0 FTE Instructional Resource Teachers, 3.0 FTE administrative personnel and 2.0 FTE in clerical personnel in Curriculum Research and Staff Development. NOTES: This function was the most frequently identified and top ranked for reduction by participants in the $100.00 Budget Sessions held throughout the District in January, 2006. These reductions are less than 50% of the personnel listed in this area. The Board should also scrutinize the budget impact of another 35.0 FTE or more of these resource teachers who, at some time and in some way during the past year, were shifted to Title One.
Establish a separate decision-making process for consideration and approval of the Community Service Fund (Fund 80); and, initiate a functional audit and cost analysis of all programs, services and administrative operations associated with Fund 80. NOTES: Attached is a copy of the original document with the rationale and supporting information for these recommendations that were presented to the Board in August of 2004 and re-iterated in March of 2005. This audit recommendation is totally unlike an accounting audit that the Board rationalized to dismiss this type of audit request. The goals of this audit and analysis are to
obtain facts that are reliable;
build trust among the Board administration, parents and the community;
engage the Board and community interactively in communications and decision-making processes; and,
identify accountabilities for personnel, policies, processes, procedures and decisions.
Remove the funding of the Leopold Elementary School addition from the operating budget. NOTES: The fiduciary responsibility of the Board includes providing for the direct involvement of the District’s taxpayers in determining capital expenditures. This means approval/disapproval of this expenditure must be put to the public in a referendum before proceeding and not afterwards. Prior to submittal of the question to referendum it is incumbent upon the Board to make all information, including all costs and alternatives, abundantly transparent so that citizens can make fully informed decisions. At no time during the discussions of this project has there been any public mention, let alone data, to inform the Board and citizens of the true cost of the project whether funded through self-bonding or referendum approved bonding. The true cost includes the approximate 60% additional cost due to the state equalization formula assessed our high property value district, as well as the operational and staffing costs associated with expansion of facilities.
Provide for the continuation of a full curricular and instructional strings/fine arts program throughout the elementary school grades. NOTES: It is pure folly to continue to put up this “lightening rod” year after year for cuts. These programs positively affect almost all elementary school children. Research shows the effective impact of these experiences on academic performance. The first priority and core educational responsibility of this Board is to financially enable classroom curriculum and instruction. This curriculum is a state mandated standard for very good reasons, so Board members find a way to fully fund these programs.
Drastically reduce the costs associated with the Reading Recovery program. Re-allocate some of these funds to less costly and more effective reading programs and associated instruction. NOTES: The District’s internal study identified costs associated with this program at over $8,000.00 per student with more than 300 students involved. Study data also showed less than 50% success rate for achieving third grade level reading performance after three years in the program. This is way too much cost for so little success, especially when there are methodologies and programs at much less cost and far more success.
Active Citizens for Education is ready, willing and able to assist the Board and administration with additional information, ideas, analyses and suggestions about the above recommendations, as well as others. Thank you for your consideration.
Active Citizens for Education will also provide you, immediately following your 2006-7 budget decisions in June, with recommendations for the 2007-8 budget cycle regarding processes, analyses and initiatives for the improving the effectiveness, efficiencies and performance in such other program and service areas as health insurance costs, Fund 80, Teacher Emeritus Retirement Program (TERP), Special Education collaborations, maintenance, business operations and services, energy savings and transportation.
"One observation that we made early in PELP is that school systems have essentially not changed their personnel practices around hiring and retention since the end of World War II," says Thomas. It was assumed then that applicants for a teaching position didn't want to do anything else, or that they didn't have many other options, conditions that clearly don't hold in today's world, where vacancy rates in urban districts can reach as high as 50 percent at the start of the school year.
Thomas was struck by the Philadelphia district's approach to recruitment and retention. First, Tomás Hanna, special assistant to the district CEO, assembled a task force in 2002 of district employees and private-sector talent to create a blueprint for what came to be called the Campaign for Human Capital. He then oversaw the implementation of a variety of efforts, including a marketing blitz touting the benefits of teaching in Philadelphia; a recruitment event, "Rolling Out the Red Carpet"; leadership training programs for principals; and a mentoring program for new teachers.
Why Are Public Discussions of the Budget Last on the Agenda?
Why is presentation and discussion of next year's school budget last on the agenda, following a substantial meeting agenda and, tonight, a public hearing. I don't understand why there aren't more public discussions planned for the budget. Perhaps the budget discussion timeline will be discussed further tonight. I hope so, because I think public discussion of the budget and the Board's decisions are important. What process is followed and decisions made are likely to affect the outcome of future referendums.
I'm amazed at the 13 items on tonight's agenda (seems like too much given the important topics, but I guess I don't understand the urgency for all the items), including a public hearing on the Leopold addition, in the middle of the meeting and placing the budget discussion last. I give the School Board credit for stamina, because they will need it for tonight's meeting.
Superintendent Rainwater implemented his proposed 2006-2007 budget in early April via allocations (which are 86% of the total budget), but this is NOT a final budget, because the School Board has the responsibility to approve the budget. April 24th, the budget was presented at the end of the evening. Tonight, the budget discussion is the last item on a 13-item agenda that includes a public hearing, and then the School board will not again discuss the budget for more than 2.5 weeks when the School Board is to have public discussions about "finalizing" the budget. It's not clear when the public will have input into the discussions after tomorrow, May 9th. Public meetings will finish before much public discussion of the budget by the School Board, board amendments, final draft budget before approval. I hope tonight's budget discussion takes up the timeline for the budget for the rest of the fiscal year.
Doesn't it take time to publicly discuss and to understand a $350+ million budget before the Board proposes amendments to the budget? Isn't there one night where the School Board could make public discussions of the budget a priority and explain to the public what will be discussed when? Why can't discussions continue into June - the fiscal year is finished in late June? Is it because of the layoff deadline for union teaching staff? Vacations? Other?
Speak Up For Strings - Monday At Midnight? Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.
In my previous post on Speak Up for Strings, I wrote about two ways to contact the School Board - one way is by speaking to the School Board at public appearances; which,is normally after the minutes of a meeting - at the beginning, before the board begins it's business. A special Board meeting is scheduled for today, but public appearances will not be until agenda item 10, which follows many substantive agenda items, so chances to speak will not be until later in the evening - perhaps quite late.
For those whose schedules did not permit speaking at the budget hearing tomorrow (begins 6:30 at Memorial High School), you may not get a chance to speak at tonight's meeting, which has been changed to one meeting that starts at 5 p.m., until very late. (I've emailed and asked the School Board if children come to the meeting, could they speak first on the agenda.)
If people do go tonight, but cannot stay, I would suggest people consider filling out a registration slip and marking do not wish to speak and write briefly what you want to say or support, which is supposed to be read by School Board members. I'll be at the start of both tonight's meeting, tomorrow's public hearing and at the start of future meetings to help parents with registering to speak on strings during public appearances.
Lastly, I'm amazed at the 13 items on the agenda (seems like too much given the important topics, but I guess I don't understand the urgency for all the items), including a public hearing on the Leopold addition, in the middle of the meeting.
Members of the Board of Education were placed based on their knowledge, skills and interests. Attached is a copy of a PowerPoint presentation [128K PDF], that I will make at Monday night's school board meeting entitled "School Board President's Presentation." Please contact me if you have any questions or comments regarding the Madison Board of Education standing committee assignments. Thank you.
Johnny Winston, Jr.
President, Madison School Board
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
347-9715 cell
Mention public education in the United States and the word "reform" is soon to follow. The need to reform the nation's schools is almost as old as public education itself. Invariably the debate about how to improve public schools focuses on what's wrong with them.
But across the country there are examples of schools that work; classrooms abuzz with creativity and the excitement of learning. They're run by committed teachers, overseen by innovative principals and supported involved parents.
Participants include:
Jay Mathews, Contributing Editor for Newsweek Magazine and Education Reporter for the Washington Post
Robert Schwartz, Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education
Michael Satarino, Principal of Talented and Gifted Magnet School in Dallas, TX - Newsweek's #1 public high school in the United States
Spencer Kern, senior at Martin Luther King school in Nashville, TN, Newsweek's #39 public high school in the United States
Announcement from Madison School Board President Johnny Winston, Jr. (and the 04 / 07 elections)
Via a Johnny Winston, Jr. MMSD email:
It is with great humility that I announce that I have been elected to serve as President of the Madison School Board. I am honored to have the opportunity to provide leadership to our school district and community. Serving as President is the culmination of part of a life long dream to be a public servant.
I was elected to the board in 2004. During my tenure, I have served as Chair of the Finance and Operations and Partnership Committees and most recently as role of Vice President. I welcome working with the entire elected school board. Some of the critical matters for us to address include but are not limited to: the building of new schools to accommodate our growing district, student achievement, parent involvement and strengthening communication and partnership efforts in our community. Together, we can identify and implement creative solutions to these issues.
Another interesting element in all this is the proposed fall referendum for a new far west side elementary school [west task force] and the Leopold expansion (I still wonder about the wisdom of linking the two questions together...., somewhat of a do-over for Leopold linked to another question). Have the local prospects for passing a referendum improved since the May, 2005 vote where two out of three failed (including a much larger Leopold expansion)?
I think it's hard to say:
I agree with Ed that Monday's civilized board meeting absent any bullying is a good sign.
There's been some board turnover since that vote that may be helpful.
On the other hand, there's the ongoing effort to kill 4th and 5th grade strings (5th year of the Administration's "onslaught" - not even a rounding error in the District's 332.9M budget),
It will be an interesting year. I wish the entire Board well as they address these matters. It's never too early to run for school board :) Check out the election pages for links and interviews.
I am a product of Madison schools thus believe in the vital role they have in our community. I welcome this opportunity to collaboratively lead the school board for the betterment of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Johnny Winston, Jr.
President, Madison School Board
jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
(608) 441-0224
The Madison Metropolitan School District is located in Madison, Wisconsin and is the second largest in the state. It has 53 schools/programs including two charter schools and several alternative programs. Enrollment is 24,491 students pre-kindergarten thru twelfth grade. 44% are students of color. 42% receive free and reduced lunch. The district is one of the largest employers in Madison and Dane County with 5,921 employees. The budget for the 2006-07 school year is $332 million.
To survive in poor communities, Ms. Payne contends, people need to be nonverbal and reactive. They place priority on the personal relationships that are often their only significant resources and rely on entertainment to escape harsh realities. Members of the middle class, in contrast, succeed or fail through the use of paper representations and plans for the future. They value work and achievement.
. . . teachers must recognize that children from poor families often benefit from explicit instruction and support in areas that could be taken for granted among middle-class students. Those include the so-called unspoken rules, mental models that help learners store symbolic information, and the procedures that it takes to complete an abstract task.
A teacher attentive to the needs of her low-income students fills the day with pointers and checklists. She puts tools for organizing information into her students’ hands, and helps them translate it from its “street” version to its school one. She spells out reasons for learning.
Another court-monitored effort to integrate a big city school system is coming to an end. The Chicago Public Schools spent billions of dollars trying to integrate. But many of the city's minority students still attend racially isolated schools. District officials say they'll continue efforts to integrate, but maintain it's impossible to truly desegregate when just 9 percent of the student body, citywide, is now white. Jay Field of Chicago Public Radio reports.
I've watched a few minutes of the last two board meetings with new board members Arlene Silveira and Lucy Mathiak. What a refreshing improvement! The meetings seem more focused on the issues at hand with members better prepared to ask questions and give direction to the administration. Bravo!
The National School Board Association argues that local school boards exist to translate the community's educational goals for its children into programs and to hold staff accountable for the quality and effectiveness of the programs:
Your school board sets the standard for achievement in your district, incorporating the community’s view of what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. Your school board also is responsible for working with the superintendent to establish a valid process for measuring student success and, when necessary, shifting resources to ensure that the district’s goals are achieved.
Don't expect to see that kind of process as the Madison School Board adopts a $383.7M budget for 2006-07.
On April 24, 2006, Superintendent Art Rainwater presented his proposed budget for 2006-07 to the school board. MMSD Proposed Balanced Budget for 2006-07 To the credit of the administration, the documents are better organized and provide more detail than in recent years.
Nonetheless, the board's adoption of next year's budget will likely be an unsatisfying process for parents and the community. I say this because the Madison board has again skipped the decision-making steps that are necessary for budget decisions to occur within a framework that we can all understand and support.
Long before the school board tries to evaluate a budget, the board should have translated the community's vision for the education of its children into specific, measurable goals for student achievement. Key Work of School Boards
We don't have such goals except for third grade reading, completion of algebra and geometry and attendance. What kind of budget commitment should we make to offering a comprehensive high school program? We don't know, because we have set no standards for the "challenging, contemporary curriculum" that we claim is a strategic priority for the district. What funds should we commit to fine arts education? We don't know, because we have no achievement goals in the arts or any other curriculum area. Should we cease funding a "Race and Equity" position at the $100,000 a year level? We don't know because we don't have objectives for the position to accomplish.
The board should also have developed a shared understanding of how data will be used to evaluate the district's progress toward meeting its goals.
We don't determine which data will be used in decisions about educational programs or any other aspect of the budget. Should we cease the "same service" approach to the teaching of reading? Should we continue to invest in "instructional coaches" who teach teachers how to present the Connected Math program? Again, we don't know. The administration claims that its curriculum decisions are data-driven. However, the administration does not share the student achievement data behind our "same service" approach or proposed new programs nor has the board agreed to rely on whatever data that the administration may use in its internal analysis.
As the result of the April elections, the board has two new members: Lucy Mathiak and Arlene Silveira. Both promised to focus on standards and accountability during their campaigns. Maybe next year will be better. That's important because the fuss that occurs each spring as the board struggles to "restore" programs or staff that the superintendent has cut should not occur. We should not be on the defensive--always having to create our own individual rationales for replacing cut items or changing programs. We should be on the offensive---judging the superintendent's budget against the goals that we have set for our programs and the measurements of effectiveness that we have agreed on.
By mid-June the Madison School Board plans to adopt a new food policy that addresses food safety and nutrition. Proposed Comprehensive Food Policy Developed by Student Work Group The proposed policy does not address physical activity opportunities for our students, although activity is an important factor in evaluating food policy implications.
This would be a good time for the Madison community and the school board to engage in an in-depth discussion of the connection between physical activity, school nutrition and health. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention offers outstanding do-it-yourself materials to review school health at elementary, middle and high schools. CDC School Health Index.
Only 30 percent of high-school students take any Advanced Placement courses at all; by the time Frausto graduates later this month, she will have taken 16 of them -- in many cases earning the highest grade, a 5, on the three-hour final exam.
That is because Frausto's school, the Talented and Gifted Magnet School near downtown Dallas, is one of a growing number of high schools trying to make AP as much a part of students' lives as french fries and iPods. Located in a run-down neighborhood not usually associated with high-level learning, Talented and Gifted -- "TAG" to its students -- tops NEWSWEEK's list of America's Best High Schools. Members of its racially mixed student body say they feel united by the challenge. "What I really love about TAG is the atmosphere," said Frausto, who will be attending MIT on a scholarship in the fall. "There is so much closeness."
Large studies in Texas and California done over the past two years indicate that good grades on AP tests significantly increase chances of earning college degrees. That has led many public schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods to look for ways to get their students into AP and a similar but smaller college-level course program called International Baccalaureate (IB), in hopes that their students will have the same college-graduation rates enjoyed by AP and IB students from the country's wealthiest private schools and most selective public schools.
Sandburg parents also question quality of 3rd quarter report cards: "What a waste"
I continue to receive messages from elementary school parents about the lack of information on the 3rd quarter report cards regarding the academic achievement of their children. Concern about quality of 3rd quarter report cards (cont)
Good afternoon,
A friend just passed on the article on the web about Crestwood and Elvejhem parents being upset about 3rd quarter report cards. Well, there are some at Sandburg as well.
What a waste of paper... 43 boxes on the report card and only 17 filled out with something other than an "N/A". Didn't anyone think about saving some money and just using one sheet of paper per child (instead of 4) if that was all that was going to be reported?
At least I received comments from the Sage teacher even though I know my daughter is doing well. I know someone at Kennedy who had no comments at all on his daughters' report cards.
If the art, music, gym and Reach teachers are only going to write up an article about what each grade has been doing, why not just publish them in the school newsletters?
This is the stuff that really irks us parents, and especially when it causes an early release day. This is the stuff we remember when it's time to vote.
Board of Education: Common Council Liaison Committee Date: April 18, 2006
Here is a suggestion to improve election day: schedule a staff development day (no school for students) for the November gubernatorial and presidential election days, when there is a very high voter turnout. This would make it easier to find an appropriate room for the polls. Previously, schools have placed equipment and voters in hallways where there is heavy student traffic; or used classrooms, which disrupt classes.
An additional advantage to this schedule proposal is that it will eliminate the extra election-day security concerns for students generated by the many people entering the school to vote. An additional safety concern is the increased vehicular traffic around the school on election day.
Parent Group Presidents:
MEMORIAL AND WEST AREA SCHOOLS: NOTE FORUM DESCRIBED UNDER MAY 8.
BUDGET FACTOID:
The 2006-07 proposed budget is on the district’s web site (www.mmsd.org/budget). The Executive Summary provides an overview of the budget. The list of specific staff cuts is found on pages 3 & 4 of Chapter 3, Department & Division Reports.
None of the cuts are good for the district or for the education of our children but they are required to keep the budget in compliance with the state revenue caps. Since there is likely to be considerable discussion about the cut affecting the elementary strings program, I wanted to provide a little additional information. The administration is proposing to continue the current structure (strings once a week for 45 minutes) for 5th graders only. Additionally, there is a recommendation to have a committee of district staff and UW music education specialists develop a new approach for K-5 music that will include, for all students, experience playing an instrument.
There are forums on the budget scheduled for Tuesday, May 2 at 6:30 p.m. at LaFollette and Tuesday, May 9 at 6:30 at Memorial.
APRIL 24 MEETINGS:
5 p.m. Special Board Meeting: Newly elected Board Members were sworn in (this will be repeated at the Regular Meeting on May 1 at 7:15 when it can be televised).
Executive Session (Room 103): expulsions.
Open Session (McDaniels Auditorium) The Board gave permission to a group proposing a Studio Charter School to submit its application for a DPI planning grant. The Board authorized the sale of the most recent house built by the LaFollette Trades students. (We made a profit on this!!) We also agreed to sell a parcel of land to the city for use as the site of a new fire station. This parcel is a small part of the land we own at Sprecher Road and Wyalusing Drive; this land was purchased several years ago in anticipation of the need for additional schools as the area on the far east side builds out.
There was an extensive discussion on the bid for electrical upgrade work at Sennett. The discussion was to understand why the bid was so much higher than the original estimated cost. The administration explained that the increase was because: 1) the scope of the project was enlarged to include a second project that had been scheduled for a couple years later (it makes sense (and was cheaper overall) when we were closing down the school and tearing into ceiling and walls to do both projects together); 2) construction costs have gone up significantly over the last year; and 3) the RFP for the bid was not put out as early as it should have been due to loss of staff. The Board, after considerable discussion voted to accept the bid.
The administration presented the 2006-07 proposed budget and Board members asked for additional information and explanations. The Board will hold hearings over the next 2 weeks and also go over each area of the budget with the administration to get all questions answered.
Future Meetings: (The Board’s schedule can change so always check the website for the most recent schedule.)
May 1:
** N.B. NEW TIME:
5:30 p.m. Special Board Meeting: Presentation of the 5 Year Long Range Plan; followed by the presentation of the proposed new Food Policy. The Board will create a subcommittee to consider the Food Policy and the views of the public, and come back to the Board with recommendations.
7:15 Regular Board Meeting: Formal swearing in of newly elected Board members; election of new Board officers. The agenda includes a proposal to restructure the Board’s Legislative Committee into an Outreach Committee which will focus on public communication and engagement and government relations.
May 8: (McDaniels Auditorium)
5:15 p.m. Special Board Meeting: Discussion of Board priorities, goals and challenges.
6 p.m. The Board will hold a forum to get public feed back on the plan CP 1a from Jan 23, on the website: www.mmsd.org/boe/longrange/ This plan describes the changes that will have to be made, if the referendum for doesn’t pass, to accommodate increasing numbers of students in the Memorial and West elementary schools.
Carol
Carol Carstensen, President
Madison School Board
"Until lions have their own historians, the hunters will always be glorified." - African Proverb
The property tax discussion is interesting as there are many factors that affect what a homeowner pays for schools including:
redistributed state taxes ("aid" - via income, sales and other taxes/fees), # of students (the district's taxing/spending authority follows students numbers. Losing students is expensive.),
assessed value changes (some communities like Madison reassess annually, while others, such as Fitchburg are on a much less frequent schedule) and
Fund 80 - district spending that is not constrained by state revenue caps.
I'm glad Carol, Nan and others are discussing these issues. I hope we see more of this.
Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz spoke at yesterday's Rotary club meeting. His 3416 word state of the city speech included 159 directly related to our local public schools:
8. We need to work more seamlessly to maintain our excellent public school system.
Our public schools have recently been ranked the third best in the nation. Yet, they face unprecedented challenges as they work to educate more children that come from impoverished families and more children with special needs. I am very aware that we elect a school board to make these decisions and it is not my intent to overstep my authority, but I do recognize that good schools are vital ingredients in healthy neighborhoods. We will renew our efforts to work with the school district, with parents and teachers to make sure that city government and the schools are pulling together, not working at cross purposes. For instance, the decisions the City regarding new housing development has a significant impact on school attendance and boundary issues. Our recently-adopted Comprehensive Plan notes the importance of city and school planning staff working together.
2006 / 2007 Madison School Board Budget Discussion
Superintendent Art Rainwater presented the proposed 2006 / 2007 budget Monday night (Barb earlier pointed out that 06/07 allocations were sent to the schools on 4/3/2006). Board questions followed. Video and audio [22MB mp3]:
In light of the planning grant application approval for the proposed Studio School Charter yesterday, I'm curious about how others view public charters and what their roles should be.
Here are some different conceptions that I've heard or read (I'm sure there are many more and I'd be glad to hear about those):
Charters as laboratories for innovations that can be replicated in other district schools.
Charters as a means of of addressing the needs or desires of self-defined populations.
Charters as a first step toward replacing the current system with a system of semi-autonomous schools.
Related questions include: How should charters and charter proposals be evaluated?
Concern about quality of 3rd quarter report cards (cont.)
Expressions of parent concern over the quality of third-quarter report cards for students in Madison's elementary schools continue. Parents at Thoreau School joined parents from other schools who have wondered why their children make so little progress in the third quarter of the year in many subject areas that no information on progress can be provided to their families. Another Parent Concerned About Third-Quarter Report Cards and Can We Talk 3: 3rd Quarter Report Cards
Here is a letter from Thoreau parents to the Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Schools.
Dear Ms. Abplanalp,
Thank you for you explanatory note regarding third quarter report cards.The report cards would have been most confusing without this explanation.
Regrettably, the reports are of little or no use to us in this format. We understand that our children learn best if parents and teachers can work in partnership to educate. While we make an effort to stay in touch with our children’s teachers, we are unfortunately not always able to communicate effectively on a regular basis. Indirect communication can also be lacking. Although we appreciate that teachers are busy, much of the completed and “graded” homework that comes home does not provide much insight to our children’s progress. With a formal report, we would be able to identify problem areas and work supportively to reinforce those lessons while simultaneously identifying and rewarding successes.
If the changes students experience during the third quarter are too small to measure, it begs the question: why is there not more progress during the heart of the school year? It also leads one to question why an early release day is required to generate such incomplete reports.
The fourth quarter report cards will give us a measure of how our children performed over the course of the year, but will not be of much value as a tool for co-teaching from home. We hope that you will reconsider this reporting practice and replace it with something worthy.
t is simply nothing short of catastrophic that so many Milwaukee youngsters are being left behind in a world in which a bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma. It's a trend that bodes ill for the region's capacity to grow and compete.
Yes, Milwaukee again makes a list it should wish it weren't on with a ranking that should properly make every Milwaukee Public Schools official, School Board member, teacher, parent and taxpayer intensely introspective, not to mention angry.
That's because, whether the graduation rate is 45% - ranking it 94th among the 100 largest school districts in the country, according to the generally conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute - or 61% or 67%, what, respectively, the state and district say it is, that's too few high schoolers graduating.
And the gap between African-American and white achievement in Wisconsin (and between boys and girls) should be topics getting more focus than they have to date. The Manhattan Institute study, released Tuesday, says Wisconsin overall enjoys an 85% graduation rate, but for African-Americans statewide, it's 55%, the second lowest in the country.
Yes, we know all the societal factors involved in low graduation rates, mostly revolving around poverty. However, these graduation figures also point to a degree of failure in the district in dealing with these realities
If Madison is to maintain the high quality of its public schools, the community must solve a growing problem. But first, Madison must distinguish what the problem is from what it is not.
It is not a dramatic increase in the number of minority, immigrant and low-income students requiring extra services. That is not a problem. That is a fact.
The problem is the community's response to the stunning change in the student population. We must find ways to cost-effectively educate the new and vastly more diverse generation of Madisonians.
"Total spending under the proposed budget is $332,947,870, which is an increase of $11,012,181 or 3.42% over 2005-06. The increase of 2.6% under the revenue limit plus other fund increases or expenditures makes up the whole proposed budget. The property tax levy would increase $11,626,677 or 5.8% to $211,989,932."
"The property tax levy has to increase more than spending because state and federal aids and grants are decreasing. The district is being conservative in its early estimates of these aids and grants in order to avoid overspending."
4/5 strings is once again on the chopping block. Page 6 of the executive summary. The document refers to the "current strings program".
Links & Notes:
Barbara Schrank: "2006-2007 School Budget Already Implemented: What's the Current Fanfare About?"
Parent Group Presidents:
BUDGET FACTOID:
The administration’s proposed budget for the 2006-07 school year will be made public on Friday, April 21. Board members and the media will have hard copies of the budget and an electronic version should be up on the web site shortly. The Board begins discussion and consideration of the budget on Monday April 24th at about 6:30 p.m. There are forums scheduled for Tuesday, May 2 at 6:30 p.m. at LaFollette and Tuesday, May 9 at 6:30 at Memorial.
APRIL 10 MEETING:
April 10 (at LaFollette High School):
5 p.m. Special Board Meeting: The Board discussed the financing for the Leopold addition and voted to have the administration include the first year’s cost (about $343,000) in the proposed 2006-07 budget. The Board will then consider this allocation of funds in the context of the other changes proposed by the budget. At this point it is not certain how the Board, with the new Board members, will decide this issue. There was a brief discussion about scheduling a referendum for the new school and to refinance earlier borrowings at the time of the September primary. There was general agreement on this but no vote was taken.
7 p.m. Special Board Meeting: 46 staff, students and community volunteers were recognized with Distinguished Service Awards. Friends, family and colleagues came to cheer on award winners. I think this is one of the highlights of each year; it is so encouraging to see all the excellent people in the district.
Future Meetings: (The Board’s schedule can change so always check the website for the most recent schedule.)
April 24:
5 p.m. Special Board Meeting: Swearing in of newly elected Board Members (this will be repeated at the Regular Meeting on May 1 at 7:15 when it can be televised).
Executive Session (Room 103): expulsions.
About 6:30 p.m. Resume open session (McDaniels Auditorium) The administration will present the 2006-07 proposed budget.
May 1:
5 p.m. Special Board Meeting: Presentation of proposals for a Food Policy. The Board will begin discussion of the Food Policy proposals. Please fill out the survey available on the district’s web site: www.mmsd.org/
7:15 Regular Board Meeting: Formal swearing in of newly elected Board members; election of new Board officers. The Board will also consider a new policy that sets up a procedure for approving the placement of “telecommunication facilities” (usually antenna) on school property for a fee. This policy will be on the website shortly and the Public Information Office of the district will email you a copy so that you have information if you want to comment.
May 8: (time and place to be decided)
The Board will hold a forum to get public feed back on the plan CP 1a from Jan 23, on the website:
www.mmsd.org/boe/longrange/ This plan describes the changes that will have to be made, if the referendum doesn’t pass, to accommodate increasing numbers of students in the Memorial and West elementary schools.
Carol
Carol Carstensen, President
Madison School Board
"Until lions have their own historians, the hunters will always be glorified." - African Proverb
2006-2007 School Budget Already Implemented: What's the Current Fanfare About?
The Superintendent, along with the President and Vice President of the School Board, is holding a press conference to announce the 2006-2007 school budget. They're performing as if this is the start of the public discussion of the budget for next year, which it is. While late April may be the first time the School Board and the community have seen next year's school budget, this budget has already been implemented, beginning in early April and possibly earlier -
Was the School Board involved with any aspect of the implementation of next year's budget? NO. On April 3rd, under the Superintendent's direction, all schools received their staffing allocations for the next year - 85% of the district's budget is staffing. The administration says deadlines for layoff notices and surplus notices to teachers per the union contract drive this timeline, because it takes the district two months to figure out who will need to be laid off - last year it was about 10 people who received layoff notices.
What does this reason have to do with School Board's responsibility to see that proposed resources are being allocated according the the School Board's goals and objectives for next year? Nothing. If the Superintendent feels he needs to give allocations to schools in early April, he then needs to present the budget earlier if he is implementing allocations with budget cuts. (I do not feel the School Board understood that the budget is implemented when allocations are given when they set the budget timeline.)
Prior to the implementation of next year's school budget, I believe the School Board needs to know what is in the budget, what cuts (if any) are being proposed, what curriculum changes are being implemented. Also, they need to know what planning is underway in other areas of the budget for next year that is using current staff time and dollars. In order to perform their responsibilities, the School Board needs some form of an Executive Budget that lays out the framework and gives the School Board the opportunity to publicly discuss the Superintendent's proposed changes. I would recommend strongly that the School Board consider this for next year.
When could the School Board do this? I would suggest the School Board consider doing this during the month of March prior to April 3rd if that deadline is firm. Did any budget discussions take place this year, prior to April 3rd and the April 4th school board elections. NO. Johnny Winston, Jr., who chairs the Finance and Operations Committee, held no meetings in March to discuss next year's school budget, so this might be the time to hold those meetings, asking for the presentation of an Executive level budget with proposed changes.
There is another reason to do this - staffing confusion and uncertainty. Building principals give surplus notices, but staff has no idea what the budget is, if the School Board approved these decisions (School Board has not approved the staffing allocations).
I believe budget objectives, an executive budget (by department) and any cuts to the budget need to be packaged together and the School Board needs to publicly discuss this prior to implementation. As one principal said to me years ago, "Once the Superintendent gives us our allocations, there won't be any changes." That's what I have observed over the past five years. By the time the School Board receives the budget document, next year's budget is already in place and being implemented, and the School Board ends up talking in great detail about less than $1 million of the budget, is unable to make/direct changes.
Sure, the School Board has the authority and can make any changes the majority approves, but a) why isn't the School Board "approving" the budget vs. the Superintendent and b) why would a School Board want to waste precious resources implementing and then reimplementing the budget?
Madison School Board to Vote on a Proposed Charter Elementary School of Arts & Technology
The Madison Board of Education is scheduled to act on Monday evening (4/24) on a request relating to a proposed charter elementary school of arts and technology.
The Board will vote on whether or not to support a grant application to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction for funds to support planning of The Studio School by a group of educators, parents and others. See info about The Studio School, including the proposed planning grant application at: http://www.madisonstudioschool.org .
The Board's meeting, which begins at 5:00 pm, will be held in the McDaniel's Auditorium at the district offices at 545 West Dayton Street. [map]
Arlene Silveira: Thanks for support, now it's on to work
A letter to the editor
Dear Editor: I want to thank my supporters and many volunteers during the spirited run for Seat 1 of the Madison School Board. I appreciate the challenging forums and discussions with the press and community members, who have shown why Madison is always considered among the top school systems in the United States.
I also thank those who voted for me in this close election a choice that was confirmed with a well-organized and competent recount.
I look forward to being sworn in on April 24 for Seat 1, and from then on, serving every child, school and family in the best way I know how. I will represent all the district and will seek information from all sources, listen carefully and make sound choices when voting on all issues.
I am eagerly anticipating being the School Board member I promised to be during the campaign: ensuring access to all, welcoming all, improving on a strong school system, and respecting taxpayer dollars in school spending.
Arlene Silveira
Madison School Board member-elect
Fitchburg
Voters in Denver, Colo., in 2005 overwhelmingly approved a $25 million tax increase to fund a new, nine-year performance-based pay system for the city's teachers. Brad Jupp taught in Denver's public schools for 20 years, and was the lead DCTA negotiator on the team that negotiated the pilot project in 1999, and for the next 5 years he worked on the team that implemented the ProComp pilot.
ES: Why were you able to develop a pay-for-performance model in Denver when other places haven't been?
BJ: Denver had a combination of the right opportunities and people who were willing, once they saw the opportunities, to put aside their fears of losing and work with other people to try to take advantage of those opportunities. The people included a school board president willing to say, "If the teachers accept this, we'll figure out how to pay for it. They included the teacher building reps who said, “This is too good to refuse outright; let's study it." They included a local foundation that, once we negotiated the pay for performance pilot, realized we might actually be serious and offered us a million dollars to help put it in place. They included the Community Training and Assistance Center, the group that provided us with technical support and a research study of our work. They were willing to take on the enormous and risky task of measuring the impact of the pilot. And they included 16 principals in Denver who were able to see that this was going to be an opportunity for their faculties to build esprit de corps, to make a little extra money, to do some professional development around measuring results. I don't really think there was a secret ingredient other than people being able to move past their doubts and seize an opportunity. It was a chance to create opportunities where the rewards outweighed the risks. I don't think we do that much in public education.
.........
But public schools have a harder time making changes, especially in the way people are paid, for a number of reasons. First, we don't have a history of measuring results, and we don't have a results-oriented attitude in our industry. Furthermore, we have configured the debate about teacher pay so that it's a conflict between heavyweight policy contenders like unions and school boards. Finally, we do not have direct control over our revenue. It is easier to change a pay system when there is a rapid change in revenue that can be oriented to new outcomes. Most school finance systems provide nothing but routine cost of living adjustments. If that is all a district and union have to work with, they're not going to have money to redistribute and make a new pay system.
Rick Burke remembers looking at his elementary-school daughter's math homework and wondering where the math was.
Like many Seattle schools, his daughter's school was teaching "reform" math, a style that encourages students to discover math principles and derive formulas themselves. Burke, an engineer, worried that his daughter wasn't learning basic math skills.
"It was a lot of drawing pictures and playing games," he said. "Her whole first-grade year was pretty much a lateral move."
So for the past few years, Burke and his wife have been tutoring their three children after school -- and this fall, they plan to switch them to North Beach Elementary, which uses a more traditional approach to math.
The biggest problem is that the teachers currently in service never learned enough math to begin with, and so can’t be expected to teach what they don’t already know. We only think our teachers know math because they know just as little math as we do. If you want to know how scarily ignorant of math our teachers are, I suggest reading Liping Ma’s Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics for a start.
I’ve written about this on my own blog, and I’m not just talking out of my butt here. I’ve taught math to these potential teachers. They lack the prerequisite skills to pass a college algebra class. You can tell who in the class is in the Elementary Education program; they’re the ones sitting in the back row, getting a D on every exam because they have to use a calculator to do three times two (and they think this is normal). So when Bob Brandt of Bellevue says "How do you know three times two equals six? Any idiot knows that," I would counter that an exceptional idiot must be teaching his kids math. We’ve raised an entire generation of teachers who don’t even know enough about math to know that they are ignorant of it.
I read with some confusion your letter [350K PDF] sent to all elementary school parents about the lack of measurable change in students marking period as too small to report to parents on their third quarter report cards.
Here's my confusion. I have complained many times about the lack of communication from MMSD to parents concerning students grades or progress. At the elementary level the "grade issue" seems to do with the lack of any measurable assessments. While I know testing is a bad word in the education world I find it amusing that between the end of Jan. and beginning of April, my two elementary students failed to have any measurable change in their grades. My 7th grader had a full report card.....with grades and everything. I'm old at 42, but we used to have report cards come home every 6 weeks. My parents could assess my progress rather well that way, and I got lots of candy from Grandma. I accept the quarter system as being more practical but seriously...you can't even accomplish quarterly reports.
I am wondering why my two elementary students were sent home early on April 4th. My tax dollars went to pay for what?.....four grades evaluated out of 31 (not including behavior grades). The teachers spent the time to log onto the computers to tell me about one grade in reading and 3 in math. My daughter who is in 5th grade tells me lots of social studies and science occurred from Jan. to April but I guess none was graded. The paper work, the early release, the time spent logging on for four grades has to rank up there with the last day of school with the amount of waste of tax payer money (last day is one and 1/2 hour of school with bus service and all).
We do not receive grades for the first quarter. We get a conference. Parents can then evaluate their child's progress after half the year is gone. Now I get to wait until the year is over. While I know your response will be if my child is failing her/his teacher would let me know.....I say great but I'd like to know if they are struggling, confused, or just not meeting MY expectations.
Study after study states a students success is highly correlated with parents expectations. But since MMSD has taken an attitude that THEY will let me know if my child is failing but not if they do not meet MY expectations a am unsure how I proceed. My expectations just might be different than yours.
You set up the schedule for 2005/2006 and you were unable to figure out how to get three report cards home to me during a 9 month period. This is my 6th year with MMSD and previous years I guess "changes a student experienced between the grade periods" were bigger then.
My confidence is weakening.
To those concerned about the success of the Madison Schools,
I am writing to express my support for the positive changes proposed by the district with respect to food policy. It is exciting that the district has been proactive in including students, parents, health providers, educators, and policy makers. As a pediatrician working with childhood obesity and childhood diabetes, I believe our schools do- and can have an even more positive influence- on the health of our children.
We are all struggling with the epidemic of childhood obesity, its costs, ramifications, and its effect on children and their families. We need to address this problem though our families, through our communities, and definitely through our schools. We continue to "leave many children behind" when it comes to healthy nutrition and physical activity. The State of California has shown that children with greater fitness levels, also have greater academic levels. Supporting an environment for achieving this is imperative for our children.
Healthy food choices should always be offered even if it means different fund raising methods in our schools including removing soda, and other unhealthy food practices. It is time for the Board to look carefully at how they can help be part of the solution regarding this problem and the long-term health of our students.
I hope that the board will also consider a minimum standard of physical activity for each student. The Surgeon General has called for 60 minutes of physical activity per day for children, (of which much could come through school), while in Canada, the recommendation for Healthy Active Living is 90 minutes of exercise (activity) per day.
This week, on a national level, a bipartisan coalition has introduced the Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act to improve students' eating habits and children's overall health. The legislation would update outdated federal nutrition standards for snack foods sold in school cafeterias alongside regular school meals and would apply those standards everywhere on school grounds, including in vending machines and school stores.
Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA), Arlen Specter (R-PA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), and Lincoln Chaffee (R-RI) sponsored the measure. "Many American kids are at school for two meals a day," said Harkin. "But instead of a nutritious school breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria, they are enticed to eat Cheetos and a Snickers bar from the vending machines in the hallway. Junk food sales in schools are out of control. It undercuts our investment in school meal programs, and steers kids toward a future of obesity and diet-related disease." According to the release, current federal regulations limiting the sale of junk food in schools are narrow and have not been updated in almost 30 years. And although a narrow category of junk foods cannot be sold in certain areas of schools, even those items can be sold anywhere else on-campus, at any time.
I realize there are many issues facing the board related to budget, academic curriculum, and overcrowding. I hope you will consider the food policy on May 1st and physical activity issues in the future with the same convictions. Thank you for considering.
Aaron Carrel
Aaron Carrel, MD
University of Wisconsin Children's Hospital
Pediatric Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Fitness
608-265-8182
Having said all this, let me turn, now, to some of the reasons for the growing public cries for better accountability, and some of the problems I think we need to address in our system of self-regulation:
1. Even in the best-performing universities, there is still considerable room for improvement. To mention one high-visibility area, I think it is nothing short of scandalous that, in 2006, the average six-year graduation rate is only around 50 percent nationwide. Either we are doing a disservice to under-prepared or unqualified students by admitting them in the first place, or we are failing perfectly capable students by not giving them the advising and other help they need to graduate. Either way, we are wasting money and human capital inexcusably. Even at universities like mine, where the graduation rate is now 80 percent, if there are peer institutions doing better (and there are), then 80 percent should be considered unacceptably low.
Now, if we were pressured to increase that number quickly to 85 percent or 90 percent and threatened with severe sanctions for failing to do so, we could meet any established goal by lowering our graduation standards, or by fudging our numbers in plausibly defensible ways, or by doing any number of other things that would satisfy our self-interest but fail the public-interest test. Who’s to stop us? Well, I submit these are exactly the sorts of conflicts of interest the accrediting organizations should be expected to monitor and resolve in the public interest. The public interest is in a better-educated public, not in superficial compliance with some particular standard. The public relies on accreditors to keep their eye on the right ball. More generally, accrediting organizations are in an excellent — maybe even unique — position to identify best practices and transfer them from one colleges to another, improving our entire system of higher education.
Some parents say the Madison School District's spending cuts, combined with its attempts to close the achievement gap, have reduced opportunities for higher-achieving students.
Jeff Henriques, a parent of two high-achieving students, said one of the potential consequences he sees is "bright flight" - families pulling students with higher abilities out of the district and going elsewhere because their needs aren't being met.
One of the larger examples of this conflict is surfacing in the district's move toward creating "heterogeneous" classes that include students of all achievement levels, eliminating classes that group students of similar achievement levels together.
Advocates of heterogeneous classes say students achieving at lower levels benefit from being in classes with their higher-achieving peers. But some parents of higher-achieving students are concerned their children won't be fully challenged in such classes - at a time when the amount of resources going to talented and gifted, or TAG, programs is also diminishing.
Working in conjunction with the Schools of Hope project led by the United Way of Dane County, the district has made progress in third-grade reading scores at the lowest achievement levels. But racial and income gaps persist among third-graders reading at proficient and advanced levels.
Other initiatives are taking place in the middle and high schools. There, the district has eliminated "dead-end classes" that have less rigorous expectations to eliminate the chance that students will be put on a path of lower achievement because they are perceived as not being able to succeed in higher-level classes.
In the past, high school students were able to take classes such as general or consumer math. Now, all students are required to take algebra and geometry - or two credits of integrated mathematics, combining algebra, statistics and probability, geometry and trigonometry - in order to graduate.
One of the district's more controversial efforts has been a move toward "heterogeneous" classes that include students of all achievement levels, eliminating classes that group students of similar achievement levels together.
Advocates of heterogeneous classes say students who are achieving at lower levels benefit from being in classes with their higher-achieving peers. But others say the needs of higher-achieving students aren't met in such classes.
And in addition to what schools are already doing, Superintendent Art Rainwater said he would like to put learning coaches for math and reading in each of the district's elementary schools to improve teachers' ability to teach all students effectively.
Five years ago we moved to Madison. A big factor in this decision was the expectation that we could rely on Madison public schools to educate our children. Our eldest went through West High School. To our delight the rigorous academic environment at West High transformed him into a better student, and he got accepted at several good public universities.
Now we are finding this promise betrayed for our younger children. Our elementary school appears to be sliding into disarray. Teachers and children are threatened, bullied, assaulted, and cursed at. Curricula are dumbed down to accommodate students who are unprepared for real school work. Cuts in special education are leaving the special needs kids adrift, and adding to the already impossible burdens of classroom teachers. To our disappointment we are forced to pull one child out of public school, simply to ensure her an orderly and safe learning environment.
Unless the School Board addresses these challenges forcefully and without obfuscation, I am afraid a historic mistake will be made. Madison schools will slip into a vicious cycle of middle class flight and steady decline. The very livability of our city might be at stake, not to mention our property values.
To me the necessary step is clear. The bottom five to ten percent of students, and especially all the aggressive kids, must be removed from regular classes. They should be concentrated in separate schools where they can receive the extra attention and intensive instruction they need, with an option to join regular classes if they are ready.
Meanwhile regular schools should be populated by children who can actually remain in their seats and do school work. Money can be saved by increasing class size. Achievement of underprivileged kids would improve when harmful distractions are removed and teachers can focus on teaching instead of constant discplinary management.
I have boiled things down to three theses, which I imagine most Madisonians would agree with:
I am willing to pay higher taxes to share the burden of those families who struggle to raise disabled children or other kinds of children with special needs.
I am willing to pay higher taxes to provide the special educational services needed to give underprivileged children a fair chance to succeed.
But I am NOT willing to sacrifice my children's education and happiness in school for either of the goals above.
I sincerely hope we can maintain a viable city and its great schools. In the case of Madison these two are inextricably tied together.
Twenty-five years ago, less than 10 percent of the district's students were minorities and relatively few lived in poverty. Today, there are almost as many minority students as white, and nearly 40 percent of all students are considered poor - many of them minority students. And the number of students who aren't native English speakers has more than quadrupled.
"The school district looks a lot different from 1986 when I graduated," said Madison School Board member Johnny Winston Jr.
The implications of this shift for the district and the city of Madison are huge, city and school officials say. Academic achievement levels of minority and low-income students continue to lag behind those of their peers. Dropout, suspension and expulsion rates also are higher for minority students.
"Generally speaking, children who grow up in poverty do not come to school with the same skills and background" that enable their wealthier peers to be successful, Superintendent Art Rainwater said. "I think there are certainly societal issues that are race-related that also affect the school environment."
While the demographics of the district's students have changed dramatically, the makeup of the district as a whole doesn't match.
The overall population within the school district, which includes most of Madison along with parts of some surrounding municipalities, is predominantly white and far less likely to be poor. And most taxpayers in the district do not have school-age children, statistics show, a factor some suggest makes it harder to pass referendums to increase taxes when schools are seeking more money.
Forty-four percent of Madison public school students are minorities, while more than 80 percent of residents in the city are white, according to U.S. Census figures for 2000, the most recent year available. And since 1991, the percentage of district students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches has nearly doubled to 39 percent; in 2000, only 15 percent of Madison's residents were below the poverty level.
Although the city's minority and low-income population has increased since the 2000 census, it's "nowhere near what it is in the schools," said Dan Veroff, director of the Applied Population Laboratory in UW- Madison's department of rural sociology.
Thoreau's most recent PTO meeting, which included 50 parent and teacher participants, illustrates a few of the issues that I believe are driving some families to leave: growing math curriculum concerns and the recent imposition of mandatory playground grouping without any prior parent/PTO discussion.
Student losses, or the MMSD's failure to capture local population growth directly affects the district's ability to grow revenue (based on per student spending and annual budget increases under the state's revenue caps).
The MMSD's failure to address curriculum and govenance concerns will simply increase the brain flight and reduces the number of people supporting the necessary referendums. Jason Shepherd's recent article is well worth reading for additional background.
An overwhelming majority of Ashland students who were given the choice between traditional math and the Core Plus curriculum decided to take algebra I courses next school year, according to a report given Monday by Ashland High School Principal Steve Gromala.
In a report to the Ashland School Board, it was noted that 83 percent of students signed up for algebra I, which was offered for the first time in several years after parents and board members demanded an alternative to the Core Plus curriculum.
A total of 170 students, including 115 incoming freshmen and 55 of next year’s sophomores, enrolled in the newly offered algebra I course for the 2006-07 school year. By comparison, 34 students enrolled in Core Plus 1.
The addition of algebra I next school year is the first step toward offering a dual-track math curriculum that will allow incoming freshmen to choose between algebra classes and Core Plus. Additional classes such as geometry, algebra II and pre-calculus will be added in future years as students advance.
"I want to ensure you that we will not need any additional staff next year," Gromala told the board. "For future years, we'll have to wait and see."
The 55 sophomores who chose to take algebra I next year will have to start over in the traditional curriculum and must take a minimum of three years of algebra to meet graduation requirements, Gromala noted.
To ensure that students had equal opportunity to choose either algebra or Core Plus, Gromala said the new algebra class was offered during each of the school's eight daily sections.
Board member Jeanne Thompson, a longtime proponent of implementing a dual math curriculum, thanked Gromala and Curriculum Director Barb O'Brien for setting up the new schedule.
"It's been a long road, but the parents' wishes are being met," Thompson said. "That's very important."
Now that enrollment numbers have been determined, the school's math department is trying to decide which textbook to purchase for next year's students.
Math teachers have already reviewed 14 different algebra books using a list of criteria and have narrowed their selection to two choices: Glencoe/McGraw Hill 2005 and McDougal Littell 2007.
"They're in unanimous agreement that either of these textbooks would be appropriate," O'Brien said.
However, because of the public's interest in the new math curriculum, O'Brien wanted to give community members an opportunity to review the two texts before the board approves a set of books at its April meeting.
As a result, over the next month, community members can stop by the school district's administrative offices, review each of the textbooks and fill out comment cards.
The Ashland School District's central office is located at 2000 Beaser Avenue, and Curriculum Director Barb O'Brien can be contacted at 682-7080, ext. 4.
Last year, Joan Blair's daughter enrolled at A. Mario Loiederman Middle School, the new creative and performing arts school in Silver Spring. She is learning high-school-level Spanish, ranks above grade level in math, and takes theater and arts courses that she loves. But her science and social studies classes, where students of different academic levels are grouped together, are not rigorous enough, Blair said.
"As a teacher, how are you going to meet the needs of all students if they are all mixed together?" Blair asked.
She was among the more than 100 parents, teachers and educators who filed into Francis Scott Key Middle School in Silver Spring on a recent Monday night to offer concerns and suggestions at a community outreach session aimed at helping the Montgomery County school system improve its middle schools. The event was the last of three such sessions that drew crowds of county residents and educators eager to participate in a middle school reform initiative launched last fall.
The initiative was partially prompted by a middle school audit released last year that showed a lag in achievement, particularly among African American and Hispanic students, students learning English, students with disabilities and those living in poverty. The independent audit found that county middle schools are not consistent in the application of curriculum standards, the quality of school improvement programs, teacher training opportunities and discipline procedures.
San Francisco is one of a handful of public school districts across the nation that mimic an education market. In these districts, the money follows the children, parents have the right to choose their children’s public schools and leave underperforming schools, and school principals and communities have the right to spend their school budgets in ways that make their schools more desirable to parents.
Thanks to weighted funding, schools get more money for harder-to-educate students. Principals decide how to allocate funds.
In San Francisco the weighted student formula gives each school a foundation allocation that covers the cost of a principal’s salary and a clerk’s salary. The rest of each school’s budget is allocated on a per student basis. There is a base amount for the “average student,” with additional money assigned based on individual student characteristics: grade level, English language skills, socioeconomic status, and special education needs.
. . . The more students a school attracts, the bigger the school’s budget. So public schools in San Francisco now have an incentive to differentiate themselves from one another. Every parent can look through an online catalog of niche schools that include Chinese, Spanish, and Tagalog language immersion schools, college preparatory schools, performing arts schools that collaborate with an urban ballet and symphony, schools specializing in math and technology, traditional neighborhood schools, and a year-round school based on multiple-intelligence theory. Each San Francisco public school is unique. The number of students, the school hours, the teaching style, and the program choices vary from site to site
The Madison school board voted 4--3 Monday night to include additions to Leopold Elementary School in next year's operating budget.
A final vote will come at a later meeting, but this essentially means that construction can start with our without a referendum.
Background on Leopold here. Johnny Winston, Jr., Juan Jose Lopez, Bill Keys and Shwaw Vang voted for the motion while Carol Carstensen, Lawrie Kobza and Ruth Robarts voted against it, preferring, I'm told, to consider this question with the entire 2006/2007 budget, which the board has not yet seen.
Student rep Connor Gants pointed out (he also voted for it) that the motion does not really matter as it could be changed when the 2006/2007 budget is actually approved. More on the budget, here.
Federal agency decides in Cedarburg case that releasing documents violated privacy rights.
Cedarburg - The next time a student threatens to sue a public school district, taxpayers probably won't know anything about it.
That's because the entire process can be kept secret unless the dispute enters a courtroom, after the U.S. Department of Education found that releasing notices of claim filed by two students in the Cedarburg School District violated federal student privacy rights. The finding directly conflicts with the state's long-standing practice that such notices - which serve as precursors to lawsuits - are considered public documents.
A behind-the-scenes dispute over whether Madison School Board member Lawrie Kobza should be allowed to vote on the district's next teachers contract has led to her questioning the legality of the teachers bargaining unit.
That, in turn, has brought charges from Madison Teachers Inc. that Kobza is trying to break up the teachers bargaining unit.
The issue of whether Kobza - whose husband is employed as a high school soccer coach under the MTI teachers contract -should recuse herself from negotiating and voting on the 2007-2009 contract was raised last fall by School Board member and former MTI president Bill Keys.
I sent the following letter to board president Carol Carstensen a few days ago:
In correspondence with MMSD Attorney Clarence Sherrod, I learned that the district and board have not complied with Board Policy 9000A 4, which reads:
Board members, the Superintendent, the Assistant Superintendent for Business Services, and all employees with District purchasing authority shall (1) file a Statement of Economic Interests with the Legal Counsel of the Board prior to April 30th of each year and (2) file a disclosure form with the Assistant Superintendent for Business Services or her/his designee within 30 days after entering into an employment or independent contractor agreement contemplating annual compensation of $1,000.00 or more.
When I requested copies of the Statements of Economic Interests filed in compliance with 9000A 4, Attorney Sherrod provided . . . copies. I summarized the filings by individual and year in the attached table. As you can see, very few board members or employees filed annually.
Board Policy 9000A provides the following sanctions for failure to comply:
Employees violating this policy or procedure are subject to discipline, up to and including dismissal. Board members who fail to file the required Statement of Economic Interest shall not be paid until such filing is effected.
I request that you, as Board president, direct the MMSD to comply with Board Policy 9000A 4 by April 30th, 2006, and annually thereafter, so that a formal complaint or other action will not be necessary.
The summary table shows, for instance, that Superintendent Rainwater has not filed a Statement of Economic Interest since he was deputy superintendent in 1998 and Ruth Robarts hasn't filed since 1997.
Shortly after I hand delivered my letter to the Doyle building, Attorney Sherrod called to explain that he had annually requested statements if the person felt that anything had changed from the previous year. He commented that his advice was based on what the board had intended when it adopted the policy, though he admitted that his advice was not "technically" correct. He assured me that the policy would be followed this year, and I assured him that I would request copies of this year's statements in early May.
These requests were overwhelmingly rejected by the voters with more than 70% of ballots cast as “no” on each of the measures. Perhaps voters recognize that many school districts are ignoring the elephant sitting right in their meetings.
Data from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB) database show that teacher health insurance costs have grown much faster than teacher salaries in recent years.i In fact, the average annual Wisconsin teacher health benefit costs in 2002-2003 were over 46% of the average annual base teacher salary. In 1984-1985, health benefit costs averaged just 14% of average annual teacher salaries. 2001-2002 data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that Wisconsin provides the second most generous fringe benefits in the nation, in terms of per-pupil costs, for teachers. Only New York teachers enjoy more lucrative benefit packages than educators in Wisconsin. In 2001-2002, Wisconsin taxpayers spent an average of $1,397 per pupil on public school teacher benefits while the national average was $884 per pupil.
Madison School Board candidate Maya Cole said today that she is still trying to decide whether to ask for a recount of the vote in her race.
Cole lost Tuesday's election to Arlene Silveira by 86 votes, less than one quarter of 1 percent of the almost 36,000 votes cast.
"My opinion is that I don't think a recount is going to bring about a change" in the outcome, Cole said in a telephone interview, adding that she doesn't want to waste time or money.
But Cole also said she has had some 20 people contact her since the election to urge her to ask for a recount.
It is hard to get people to vote at a time when national voting scandals have eroded confidence in the political process, she said, adding that she wants her next move, whatever it is, to still encourage her supporters to stay engaged. "I don't want people to feel like their vote didn't count."
Cole said she hopes she and her top advisers will have a consensus by later today or Friday.
Published: April 6, 2006
http://www.madison.com/tct/news/index.php?ntid=79201&ntpid=2
But assuming that Mathiak and Silveira will be joining the board, we think that this marks a major transition point.
Mathiak and Silveira are both smart and independent. They got to know each other well during the many forums that were held during the long campaign that preceded Tuesday's voting.
If they are as smart and committed as we think they are, Mathiak and Silveira will link up with Kobza, a relative board newcomer elected in something of an upset last year, and try to work together across the lines of division on the board.
It this trio does commit to work together for a set of smart and necessary goals budget transparency, administration accountability, and better analysis of minority achievement and curriculum initiatives they will become the dynamic core of a board that will be able to function far more smoothly as a whole. We believe that, for all the infighting that has caused concern in recent years, members as distinct as current board President Carol Carstensen and Robarts can be brought into that whole if the newer members of the board demand it.
Discussion of The Special Madison School Board Meeting on Student Absences
Madison School Board Member Juan Jose Lopez discussed tonight's of the Madison Board of Education meeting agenda with WORT's Tony Casteneda this morning. MP3 audio file. The MMSD has cancelled tonight's Board meeting based on a Wisconsin Statute.
I believe there has been enough ineffective communication on the school board and I am ready for decisions based on solid data and careful discussion. I believe that Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak will both bring that to the board.
I am also certain that if we do not vote for them, we will endanger the strings programs, the TAG program and others that current board members deem unnecessary, even though they serve a diverse population of students.
We are a family looking for other educational options for our kids because we are tired of fighting to get our children's needs met in the Madison Schools. We are tired of "being patient," as one teacher told us. We are ready for our children to have access to challenges. Cole and Mathiak will serve the board well in examining the current school district agenda and exposing the truth.
- Elizabeth A. Dohrn, Madison
March 30, 2006 - WI State Journal
I believe there has been enough ineffective communication on the school board and I am ready for decisions based on solid data and careful discussion. I believe that Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak will both bring that to the board.
I am also certain that if we do not vote for them, we will endanger the strings programs, the TAG program and others that current board members deem unnecessary, even though they serve a diverse population of students.
We are a family looking for other educational options for our kids because we are tired of fighting to get our children's needs met in the Madison Schools. We are tired of "being patient," as one teacher told us. We are ready for our children to have access to challenges. Cole and Mathiak will serve the board well in examining the current school district agenda and exposing the truth.
- Elizabeth A. Dohrn, Madison
March 30, 2006 - WI State Journal
NEW IDEAS NEEDED TO KEEP QUALITY SCHOOLS - Mathiak and Cole
Madison public schools have been ranked among the best in the country. That is one of the reasons we moved here 16 years ago. Unfortunately, financial pressures from state-imposed caps, coupled with bad curriculum decisions, have our district moving in the wrong direction.
We need strong leadership from the school board, board members who will connect with the public and find solutions that meet the needs of all of our students, new ideas and fresh perspectives. That's why I am voting for Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak. We can do better for our children and our community. We must.
- Jane Doughty, Madison
March 30, 2006 WI State Journal
Dear Editor,
For the past five years I've been a volunteer tutor at a Madison elementary school with high minority enrollment, and I've seen firsthand how the district has failed to respond adequately to its changing demographics.
Minority students remain underserved and under-educated by a rigid, one-size- fits-all curriculum that promotes politically correct symbolism more than solid academic progress by all its students.
The district desperately needs new leadership that will focus on matters of substance instead of better public relations, as advocated by Arlene Silveira. I urge readers to vote for Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak. If elected, they, along with Lawrie Kobza and Ruth Robarts, could form a new board majority that would improve public education in Madison.
- Carl Silverman, Madison
March 30, 2006 WI State Journal
The school board race has exposed beliefs among some citizens that I thought I had escaped by moving to a progressive city.
The people of Madison should be proud of the school board's efforts to create a real world environment for our kids in the classroom, a real world made up of all types of learners of all economic backgrounds. To say that a teacher cannot teach a variety of students in the same classroom is an insult to Madison's teachers.
Creating homogeneous classrooms would harm all students because it would deprive them of learning the skill and art of "getting along" with those who are different. The attitude that students should be segregated is outdated and prejudicial. It is also against the law. Students learn and absorb so much more in school than the content of a lesson.
I will vote for Arlene Silveira and Juan Jose Lopez because they are committed to maintaining an inclusive environment in our classrooms.
- Beth Moss, Madison
Letter to the Editor
Wisconsin State Journal, March 30, 2006
Now is the time for independent voices with fresh perspectives on the Madison School Board. Lucy Mathiak and Maya Cole offer both.
These two talented, qualified, progressive candidates will put children's education and classroom support first, work hard to grow Madison's schools of excellence and build community support for public education.
During March, the Madison School Board has had no discussions about next year's $320 million-plus budget that will include more than $8 million in educational cuts. They won't do this until late April. Meanwhile, administrators will mail staff cuts and levels to school principals on April 3.
Where is the public discussion about the budget? Where are the school board discussions on important issues of budget and curriculum policy, especially important during tight financial times?
Mathiak and Cole will bring leadership and governance of our schools back to the school board and back to the public.
Letter to Editor
Thursday, March 30, 2006 WI State Journal
Wisconsin State Journal Endorses Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak
The Madison School Board can no longer afford to do business as usual.
More to the point, families in the Madison School District can no longer afford a school board unwilling to take bolder action.
For that reason, voters should elect to the board on Tuesday two candidates promoting change: Maya Cole and Lucy Mathiak.
At stake is the School Board's ability to pull the district's budget out of quicksand, address shifting demographics, narrow the achievement gap between minority and white students and restore the public's trust.
Cole, 43, is a stay-at-home mom with three sons from 6 to 9 years of age. She has been involved in a variety of school and political organizations, from the Franklin/Randall Parent Teacher Organization to Mothers Acting Up, a group encouraging mothers to be politically active on behalf of children.
Mathiak, 50, is an assistant dean at the University of Wisconsin's College of Letters and Science. She has two teen-age sons, and her husband has two older daughters. She has been involved in several East High School organizations.
Cole and Mathiak come to the school board race from different backgrounds. But both believe that challenges closing in on the Madison schools demand action that the current majority on the School Board is failing to take.
They are right.
Their opponents, in contrast, are far too comfortable with the status quo. Running against Cole for Seat No. 1 on the board, being vacated by Bill Keys, is Arlene Silveira, 47, a marketing director for Promega Corp. of Fitchburg, and president of the Cherokee Middle School Parent-Teacher Organization. While Silveira would bring a welcome business perspective to the board, she lacks Cole's drive to change the board approach.
Mathiak's opponent for Seat No. 2 is incumbent Juan Lopez, a board member for 12 years who is too wedded to the way things have been done.
The Madison School Board is in an unenviable position. Outdated and unproductive state school financing rules have put school districts like Madison in a perpetual financial squeeze.
Meanwhile, the makeup of the district's population has been shifting. Minorities compose a greater proportion of the student population, and the population is shifting from where the schools are to where they aren't. In addition, the achievement gap between minority and white students continues to suggest that Madison's schools are failing to deliver for too many students.
The board has cut, combined and conserved to hold costs down, and it has made some encouraging progress on closing the achievement gap. However, the board's majority continues to shrink from new approaches, preferring to blame the state for a lack of money.
Yes, the Legislature should address school funding. But waiting for a magic solution from the Capitol only compounds the problem. Rather than looking to the state for answers, the board should look to itself.
The times require bold action. Between the two of them, Cole and Mathiak have some enlightened ideas, including plans to make the school budget process simpler, improve oversight of the budget and curriculums, reach minority students with more effective teaching and fairer discipline, challenge students with higher standards and consider the consolidation of administrative staff in the district's central office.
A year ago the State Journal endorsed incumbents in two school board races on the belief that the board would continue to set priorities and address challenges. But since then, a lack of public trust in the board contributed to the failure of two out of three questions on a school referendum, and the board's majority appeared to stick its head in the sand during the budget process.
In campaigning for the Madison School Board, I learned something that may be useful for voters. There are two very different kinds of political endorsements.
Endorsements that candidates seek. Some candidates seek the endorsement of organizations. In these situations, the organizations endorse the candidate only if the candidate passes its litmus tests. Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI) has this kind of process. Candidates are invited to complete a very long and detailed questionnaire and must appear before the Political Action Committee (PAC) to explain their answers. Endorsed candidates receive direct financial assistance from the PAC and help with the campaign (leafleting neighborhoods and get-out-the-vote phone banks). The PAC also buys "independent" radio and newspaper ads supporting the endorsed candidate.
Endorsements that candidates do not seek.. There is, however, a second kind of endorsement. Candidates who run as "independents" do not seek organizational endorsements and PAC funds. They do not make promises to move the organization's agenda forward. They make clear that they are not seeking PAC funds. Nonetheless, the organization decides independently to support the candidate. The organization decides without consulting the candidate. It exercises its independent right to buy ads in support of a candidate. In the April election, ads from the "Get Real" organization are an example of the second kind of endorsement.
Big picture? Independent candidates--as in the April 4 school board race---offer value choices to voters. They stand as individuals. They ask for support for their goals. The only promises that they make are the promises to the voters. If elected, they are free to work for the values that the voters shared. They are not in the position of the candidates who owe their election, at least in part, to organizations that have their own interests.
Madison School Board Leopold Expansion and New West Side School Discussion
Watch or listen to the Madison School Board's discussion and approval of expanding Leopold Elementary School and a new west side school. Though the Board did not vote on how to fund these schools. That decision will be taken at their April 10, 2006 meeting, according to Susan Troller. Video | MP3 Audio
As a member of the Memorial/West Task Force, I recently received an e-mail for BOE member Johnny Winston. Doing his best caped crusader, Johnny pontificates to us about saving the day for Leopold families. To wit,
[title of his e-mail] "The Leopold Community Needs School Board Leadership
By Johnny Winston, Jr., Vice President of the Madison School Board" and,
"I pledge to provide strong leadership in both the short and long-range plans for Leopold Elementary school and the affected communities."
Johnny's BID IDEA is to build more space at Leopold. Like we haven't proposed that before.
Among the proclamations he made in his mini missive was this sign off: "The time is now for the Madison school board to provide the leadership necessary to solve Leopold Elementary School's current overcrowding and the welcomed challenges that growth brings."
The only thing I like about this comment is how clearly it points to the lack of direction provided by too many of our incumbent school board members.
Johnny - the time to act was (at least) five years ago.
If I learned anything from the work of our task force, it is that the MMSD's Board of Education has - somehow, some way - been paralyzed over the past several years by long-range PLANNING vs. long-range DOING. Committees, sub-committees, task forces, and meetings. Signs of a political bureaucracy firmly entrenched.
Too many of the current BOE members need to get over themselves, roll up their sleaves, put aside their emotions and egos (which are usually on full display at BOE meetings), and get to work on problem-solving action to address overcrowding - for the long term.
I noticed that you haven't left your last couple of posts open for comments. I hope that you just forgot and didn't do it to keep people from engaging you in a discussion.
If the comments were open, I'd have asked you whether you will be asking the board tonight to support the MMSD string program. Will you be?
Live Animal Discussions Important - It's the Lack of Budget Discussion that Concerns Me and the Likely $8 Million in Cuts Going to Schools on Monday, April 3rd
Dear School Board Members:
When I looked at the School Board calendar for March, what jumped out at me was the lack of any Finance and Operations committee meetings on 06-07 budget issues even though a) allocations go to schools on April 3rd and b) tonight the School Board majority will likely vote to pay for the debt service on an addition to Leopold with what could amount to an additional $350,000 cut from the operating budget.
What I did see were meetings on Live Animals in the Classroom. My concern was not so much that I saw Live Animals in the Classroom on the agenda (although I wish this issue had been resolved positively and fairly when it first came up 1.5 years ago, I support and mean no disrespect to the members or the work of this committee) but that budget discussions were missing. Earlier this calendar year I was left with the impression that the Superintendent had informed the School Board that March would be filled with discussions about the budget.
I did see important issues such as the Equity Task Force meeting and board discussions about boundaries and schools, but I did not see any discussions about the budget scheduled, and I do not yet see any formal meetings re the budget on the School Board calendar as yet.
In her email to PTO Presidents, Carol Carstensen said the School Board decided not to consider cuts until after the School Board has the entire budget and they will have the document sooner this year rather than later this year, but not until the end of April, or thereabouts. I and others have made suggestion along these lines in previous years - you do want to discuss cuts in the context of the entire budget; however, the devil is in the details and that is where I have concerns.
The budget timeline the School Board is working from says the administration is going to send out allocations to schools on April 3rd. Straight forward administrative task - once again the devil is in the details. In his email to me, Superintendent Rainwater said that the timing of allocations is driven by the union contract deadlines for layoff notices (late May) and surplus notices (July 1 but MMSD gives them in mid-April). Also, Mr. Rainwater informed the School Board earlier this year that the District would be facing $8 million in cuts next year.
Now, as the Superintendent informed me, many things go into allocations. However, he will have $8 million less next year than he felt would be needed, so $8 million in cuts will have to be made. The question is when and how will these cuts be made? If the union deadlines drive the April 3rd date, then I would expect cuts will be included with the allocations that go out to schools on April 3rd as has been the case in preceeding years. If that is the same this year, I feel the School Board and the public needed to know what budget framework is being used to send out the allocations - class sizes, courses, etc. I feel there needed to be public discussions about this.
School Board members tell the public that final decisions about cuts are their decisions. That's true, but in practice it is not. By the time allocations are determined in mid-May, there will be little opportunity for the public or the School Board to have much, if any discussion about the budget and the $8 million in cuts. I don't agree with that. I think it is bad policy.
I believe live animals in the classroom are important. Re this issue, I only wish that more progress had been made by now - I looked up references to this as far back as Fall 2004. My daughter attended Franklin Elementary School and visited Mary Powell's classroom - so did I! Re. live animals in the classroom, I think we need a board policy that makes this experience part of our children's education. I guess I thought the existing policy, as Mary Powell pointed out in Fall 2004, addressed the issue.
MSCR committee planting questions at School Board forum
Ruth Robarts originally posted the following:
On March 30, the North Side Planning Council will host a public forum for school board candidates at the Warner Park Community Recreation Center starting at 7 p.m. Usually, the NSCP moderates a panel discussion with the school board candidates. During the forum, the candidates respond to a set of questions developed by NSCP. When time permits, the moderator facilitates questions from the audience.
There's a new twist this year. A citizen advisory committee for the Madison School Community Recreation (MSCR) program is planning to bring a list of its own questions.
On Tuesday, March 28 the MSCR Citizen's Advisory Committee will meet to "develop questions to ask Board of Education candidates" at the NSCP forum, according to the official agenda of the committee.
The citizen members of the advisory committee are all appointed by the Board of Education. Board member Johnny Winston, Jr., is currently the representative of the school board on the committee. Senior staff from MSCR participate in these meetings.
MSCR committee planting questions at School Board forum
On March 30, the North Side Planning Council will host a public forum for school board candidates at the Warner Park Community Recreation Center starting at 7 p.m. Usually, the NSCP moderates a panel discussion with the school board candidates. During the forum, the candidates respond to a set of questions developed by NSCP. When time permits, the moderator facilitates questions from the audience.
There's a new twist this year. A citizen advisory committee for the Madison School Community Recreation (MSCR) program is planning to bring a list of its own questions.
On Tuesday, March 28 the MSCR Citizen's Advisory Committee will meet to "develop questions to ask Board of Education candidates" at the NSCP forum, according to the official agenda of the committee.
The citizen members of the advisory committee are all appointed by the Board of Education. Board member Johnny Winston, Jr., is currently the representative of the school board on the committee. Senior staff from MSCR participate in these meetings.
At the end of an especially divisive Madison school board meeting, Annette Montegomery took to the microphone and laid bare her frustrations with the seven elected citizens who govern Madison schools.
“I don’t understand why it takes so long to get anything accomplished with this board!” yelled Montgomery, a Fitchburg parent with two children in Madison’s Leopold Elementary School. She pegged board members as clueless about how they’ve compromised the trust of the district’s residents.
“You don’t think we’re already angry? What do we have to do to show you, to convince you, how angry we are? If I could, I’d impeach every single one of you and start over!”
Impeachment isn’t being seriously considered as solution to the Madison Metropolitan School District’s problems. But infighting and seemingly insurmountable budget problems have increasingly undercut the board’s ability to chart a positive course for Madison schools.
And that’s not good, given the challenges on the horizon for a district of 24,490 kids with a $319 million budget. These include declining enrollment of upper- and middle-class families; continuing increases in low-income families and racial minorities; an overall stagnant enrollment which limits state funding increases; and prolonged battles with parent groups over everything from boundary changes to curriculum choices.
By Jason Shepard, Isthmus, March 23, 2006
Student achievement in Madison, while following statewide trends showing improvements over the past decade, still lags behind suburban districts in Dane County. Gaps between whites and minorities remain large.
Looming over everything is a school-financing system that may soon cripple the district’s ability to produce further achievement gains. State revenue caps hold districts to smaller annual budget hikes than are less than increases in costs; so, each year, districts must shave spending or get voters to hike their own taxes by passing referendums to exceed the caps. Even in Madison, that’s getting much harder to do.
The Madison district has cut nearly $46 million in services since 1993. For 2006-07, the district projects a spending increase limit of about 2.6%, which will force it to cut $7.96 million from its budget. If past years are an indication, debates over what to cut will further polarize parents and staff and burn precious political capital.
Meanwhile, the chorus of critics grows louder, on local talk radio and the popular blog, schoolinfosystem.org. Last spring, voters ousted an incumbent school board member endorsed by scores of local leaders, then rejected two of three school-spending referendums.
District leaders have never succeeded in drumming up widespread public outrage over revenue caps. Indeed, some think the board’s obsession with the funding crisis is paralyzing it from taking bold action or embracing creative approaches. And sometimes, the board acts as if questions and criticism are personal attacks, further alienating important constituencies.
“The differences of opinion are taken personally, and because of that, people don’t listen to what other people are saying,” says board member Lawrie Kobza, who unseated Bill Clingan last April. “You can’t move forward when no one is listening anymore.”
Election stakes
The two school board contests on the April 4 ballot are a referendum of sorts on Madison’s schools. Voters can send a message of support for the board’s current leadership and direction, or convey their desire for change.
In Seat 1, Maya Cole and Arlene Silveira are vying to replace longtime board member Bill Keys. In Seat 2, Lucy Mathiak is challenging incumbent Juan Jose Lopez.
A win by both Cole and Mathiak would dramatically alter the board. They would join Kobza and Ruth Robarts to create a majority in favor of significant change. And, for the first time in years, it would be a majority opposed by the Madison Teachers Inc., the powerful teachers union.
This could open the door for Kobza to be elected board president. (Robarts says she won’t seek re-election next year and is not interested in the presidency.)
Meanwhile, victories by Lopez and Silveira would retain the power of the current majority, who seem poised to elect Johnny Winston Jr. as board president. This could create something of a coalition, as Winston has vowed to make Kobza chair of the board’s budget committee.
Board members on both sides are making their cases. School board President Carol Carstensen warns “it will be very difficult for the administration to function” if Robarts, for example, were calling the shots. And Robarts says a Kobza presidency would bring about new transparency and hold officials accountable for presenting all sides of issues and a full picture of data.
The election is even more important given the expectation that Superintendent Art Rainwater will retire in the next few years. Thus whoever wins may select the next superintendent.
Acknowledging success
Carstsensen, a board member since 1990, says dire assessments of the district come mostly from those who are misinformed or who refuse to recognize how revenue caps are undermining the quality of public schools.
“When I look back at how far we’ve come in a number of areas, despite the budget constraints and significant demographic changes,” she says, “I think that we’re doing a far better job than I would have believed we could do.”
The school board has billed Madison as having one of the nation’s “premiere” school districts. And the city has long touted its public schools as a key draw.
On many measures, the Madison district continues to excel. For example, a high number of its students take and pass Advanced Placement exams. Madison ACT scores, a measure of college readiness, outpace the state average. And there’s been a consistent increase in the number of National Merit Semifinalists.
The district has made sustained progress since 1998 in three priority areas: third-grade reading scores, high school algebra completion, and school attendance. Says Rainwater, “We’ve stayed the course, and that’s allowed us time to train and implement and evaluate and change.”
Finally, the district’s graduation rates have risen dramatically, from 79% ten years ago to 94% today.
“The fact is, there are many markers that we’re headed in the right direction,” says Carstensen. “I don’t want people to say, ‘She’s just painting a rosy picture.’ But it’s important as a district to recognize that we’ve had some success. We need to acknowledge the success, celebrate it, then go back and keep working.”
Not all good news
But on many academic achievement measures, Madison is simply mediocre. Pointing this out, though, is sometimes seen as heresy by board members and district officials. That in itself is part of the problem.
Consider the scores from third-grade reading tests.
The Madison board and school district have regularly touted these scores as proof of significant progress. The numbers of students scoring advanced or proficient has risen from 58.9% in 1998 to 82.7% in 2005, according to the state Department of Public Instruction. In September 2004, a front-page Wisconsin State Journal headline declared, “One racial gap has closed,” based on data showing little or no racial disparity among those who failed the test.
But whether Madison can claim victory for rising test scores is debatable, given that the state as a whole has seen significant increases in scores. Madison’s rate of improvement is not much greater than the state and nearby districts. Indeed, Madison still ranks 16th among Dane County’s 16 school districts.
On other exams in 4th, 8th and 10th grades, Madison generally only matches statewide averages. Richard Askey, a UW-Madison emeritus mathematics professor, recently posted an analysis of district math scores on schoolinfosystem.org. While the number of Madison students passing the 8th-grade test rose from 40% in 1997 to 71% in 2004, the gains were smaller than statewide averages.
“We went from a district which was above the state average to one with scores at best at the state average,” Askey concluded.
And the racial achievement gap continues on virtually all measures. Two weeks ago, board member Shwaw Vang expressed his disappointment over racial disparities among those who attend the district’s summer school, targeted at struggling students: “If this number continues to be 80% minority and 87% low-income, it tells me that either we as a society or we as a school district are not educating our minority kids and low-income kids.”
Rainwater says the district should be especially proud of its successes given the significant changes in Madison’s student body. Scores have gone up at a time when they might have very well gone down.
“Not only have our demographics changed and we’ve continued to get better, but we’ve continued to get better with fewer resources,” says Rainwater, who segues into a less sanguine point. “There’s a limit, obviously, to how many creative workarounds we can develop. I don’t know where that limit is, but my sense is it’s approaching pretty quickly.”
Demographic changes
Many of the critical issues facing Madison schools are linked to how the district adapts to the changing demographics of its student body.
Madison has seen dramatic hikes in the number of students who require more intensive – and expensive – services. In 1991, 11% of Madison students received special education instruction; in 2005, it was 17%. During the same period, the share of English language learners went from 3% to 13%.
Racially, the district is becoming much more diverse. The number of African Americans and Hispanics has increased significantly, while the number of whites has declined in each of the past 15 years.
There have also been significant changes in income levels. In 1990, 20% of students attending Madison schools came from low-income families, as defined by those who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. By 2005, this had nearly doubled, to 38%.
Worse, the district’s low-income students are concentrated in particular areas and schools. Five of the district’s 31 elementary schools have more than two-thirds of their students come from low-income families, while seven have fewer than one-fourth from low-income families.
The district has been hesitant to redraw school attendance areas and increase busing to bring about balance, something educational research has shown is important. Robarts and Kobza have suggested giving extra funding to schools with higher levels of low-income students. A task force is now studying these equity issues.
Overall, the district’s enrollment – one basis for the level of state funding -- has been in decline since peaking in 1997. Projections show enrollment steadying in the next few years. But Dane County as a whole is growing, and surrounding school districts have seen significant increases in student population.
An analysis by Barb Schrank on schoolinfosystem.org estimated that Madison’s loss of 174 students from 2000 to 2003 translated into a loss of funding for 26-30 teachers, while student enrollment increases at the seven closest Dane County districts meant a net gain of 219 teachers.
“People decide where to live in large part on the quality of schools,” says Schrank. “The district doesn’t really have a strategic plan to market [itself] to everyone, including those who may be leaving and those who may be moving to Dane County.”
Some have speculated that families with means have enrolled their kids in private schools or moved into higher-performing suburban districts, although school officials say there’s no firm evidence of this. Parental threats to leave the district have surfaced in debates over whether the district’s curriculum is rigorous enough for high-achieving students.
Dysfunction
As it gets harder each year to find ways to find budget cuts that don’t directly affect classroom instruction, Carstensen has noticed an increase in “crabbiness” among local players. She agrees personality clashes often overtake the board’s ability to make important decisions.
“What has been frustrating to me,” she says, “is that philosophically we’ve got a board that, at least according to their own statements, cares about kids and cares about the achievement gap, and yet there’s been an unwillingness to work together.”
Carstensen, Kobza and Vang rarely stoop to personal attacks. But the board’s other members -- Lopez, Keys, Robarts and Winston -- often engage in throw downs that have stifled discussion and left some relationships frayed beyond repair. One example:
A few weeks ago, Winston was miffed by Robarts’ opposition to using a contingency reserve fund for projects Winston was backing. In an unrelated debate about possibly selling or leasing the Doyle administration building, Winston deemed it inappropriate for Robarts to participate because she works for UW-Madison, which could be interested in the land or the building. Robarts joked that she was pretty low in the university hierarchy, but later admitted the conflict-of-interest allegation caught her off guard.
“Ms. Robarts, I’m not going to play games,” Winston said angrily. “I’m not going play games with you, alright? Your passive-aggressive behavior is beyond reproach, and I’m tired of it.”
Or consider the board’s behavior at its Jan. 30 meeting, the one that led up to Annette Montegomery call for impeachment. At issue was overcrowding at Leopold Elementary School. Instead of having a serious, relevant and detailed discussion, board members degenerated into cheap shots and political grandstanding.
The debate began in earnest when Carstensen asked Kobza to explain comments she had made in a radio interview. In response, Kobza said she wouldn’t support building a new west side school or expanding Leopold without a five-year plan regarding boundary and facility needs. Keys immediately labeled Kobza’s idea a “red herring” and said she was a “little late in game.”
Lopez hammered home the importance for the board to be united in a 7-0 vote for any future referenda. Winston then turned on Kobza and Robarts, saying rejecting a task force proposal about Leopold “disrespects” the process. Winston said he hoped voters “see at the ballot box board members who don’t look at the recommendations,” drawing an audible “whoa” from spectators.
Kobza retorted that she “won’t be bullied” and reminded Winston of her own ballot box victory in April. Robarts said the majority was being hypocritical: they’ve long ignored ideas from her and Kobza, only to demand their allegiance at referendum time.
“We can play politics, Ms. Robarts,” retorted Lopez. “We’ve done it before. I’ve won some and you’ve won some.” Lopez then claimed Robarts’ “political” actions had come at the expense of “the children of this school district.” Of course, playing the “children” card – much like the “race” card – shattered any hope for meaningful discussion.
And so it seemed appropriate when Montegomery let board members have it.
“You bicker so much! You accomplish absolutely nothing!” she shouted. “How many times have we been here talking about the same things? You know where the parents stand. We know where you stand. You talk about trying to come together. Let’s face it. You people are never going to come together!”
This was not the Madison school board’s finest hour. But, searching over the past few years, it’s hard to point to many fine hours.
Seat 1: Silveira v. Cole Better PR, or fresh approaches?
Maya Cole and Arlene Silveira are articulate, involved moms who have adjusted well to the steep learning curve of their first campaign for public office.
Silveira, 47, is a single mom who’s served as president of two parent groups and actively campaigned for last year’s three school referendums. She works as a marketing director for Promega and holds a master’s degree in molecular biology.
Cole, 43, is a stay-at-home mom of three young boys who regularly volunteers in the schools. She’s active in progressive politics, attending peace rallies and lobbying against the Legislature’s concealed-carry bill. She has a degree in biological sciences and is a former zookeeper.
Each is supported by different factions on the board, with Silveira garnering endorsements from members of the current majority, along with many local political leaders. She’s also endorsed by Madison Teachers Inc., which is expected to pour significant money into the race.
Cole, meanwhile, is seen as more of an outsider and would-be reformer, and is supported by Ruth Robarts and Lawrie Kobza.
Perhaps the biggest distinction between the two is whether they see the problems facing the district as being more about perception or reality.
Silveira has made much of the need to improve the district’s public-relations efforts. “The board and the district have not done a good job in providing information to the public and promoting themselves,” she says. “It comes down to providing information, letting people know what is happening with their property tax dollars, and what it really takes to provide a quality education.”
Cole, meanwhile, is more likely to talk about educational research and think-tank studies that suggest ways to improve education. “I’m willing to say, we as a board screw up things sometimes. We’re not always the experts. And that’s sorely missing. The majority of the board doesn’t convey the feeling that they’re listening to people. They’re about window-dressing.”
Silveira says her business experience makes her better able than Cole to deal with complex issues. She also boasts a “much more positive viewpoint” about the city’s schools.
Cole, meanwhile, cites her passion and fresh perspective, saying says lacks the “baggage” that Silveira carries from her connections with referendum supporters and pointed criticisms of Robarts and Kobza.
Seat 2: Lopez v. Mathiak Attacking the achievement gap
Juan Jose Lopez and Lucy Mathiak are both veteran school advocates, Lopez as the consummate insider and school-district cheerleader, Mathiak as the parent advocate and scrappy outsider.
Lopez, 46, first elected to the board in 1994, is well known for his advocacy on Hispanic issues and his nonprofit jobs working with kids. He is currently a planning and policy analyst for Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager.
Mathiak, 50, is making her first bid for public office but has been involved for years in school committees, parent groups, and booster organizations. She holds a Ph.D. in history and works as a communications director for the UW’s College of Letters and Science.
Lopez says closing the achievement gap is among his top priorities: “It’s clear we’re moving in the right direction, from our reading results and our math completion rates, but we’re still not where we need to be.” His other priorities are increased funding and school safety.
Mathiak suggests Lopez has an achievement gap of his own, saying he’s failed to use his role as chair of the board’s performance and achievement committee to bring about real improvement. Instead, she claims, Lopez simply held “show and tell” sessions for district staff.
“There’s a palpable anger when I talk to parents and educators of color, when I talk about what’s happening with our students,” says Mathiak, whose family is biracial. She has aggressively campaigned on the disparate treatment of nonwhite students, saying the district has to move beyond token gestures like bringing in outside consultants.
The school board gets high marks from Lopez for its leadership through turbulent budget cuts. He calls disagreement on the board “healthy,” even though he’s often railed against dissent in board debates, saying it undermines public confidence.
Lopez says he and Mathiak are politically similar, but that he has three advantages: his experience, his compassion, and his life’s commitment to working with kids.
Mathiak, meanwhile, says she brings a stronger work ethic and a deeper commitment to dig into issues: “It’s not enough for me to say I’m here for the kids. I’m here for the kids, but I intend to do something about it.”
Unless you have a kid in the Madison schools, many of the issues discussed by the four Madison school board candidates in our weekly Take-Home Test may not strike a familiar chord.
That's why we asked our schools reporter Jason Shepard to provide an overview in this week's Isthmus of the trends buffeting the 24,000-student district. The cover story is: The Fate of the Schools: Will the Madison district sink or swim? April 4th elections could prove pivotal.
As you'll read, the growing number of poor students, decreased state funding and nasty board infighting provide a sobering context for the election.
Shepherd has written the definitive piece for the April 4, 2006 election. Pick up the current Isthmus and have a look or view the article online here. I've placed two charts from the article below (click continue reading..... if you don't see them).
I've got this stopwatch in my house that my campaign manager gave me for practicing speeches. The problem is that I can't figure out how to stop it; and, it occassionally will sound off from the deep recessess of my laptop bag. It goes off probably once a day.
My kids pretend it's a ticking timebomb. I think of it as a reminder to use every day wisely. It is a metaphor for my school board campaign that will be decided on April 4th.
So I kindly suggest to voters and supporters to concentrate on the issues. The task before you is one of choosing your school board; and make no mistake, this race is about status quo or investing in something new.
To help you out I have taken the liberty of providing five characteristics that make an effective school board. I see these suggestions as a guideline for change. Read them and then try to guess the source.
Links, articles and interviews with Maya Cole and her opponent, Arlene Silveira, are available here.
SHOULD LEOPOLD EXPANSION BE PAID FOR OUT OF THE OPERATING BUDGET?
A proposal is before the Madison Metropolitan School Board to approve a $2.8 million addition to Leopold funded under the revenue caps. The Board may vote on this proposal on Monday, March 27. While the Leopold overcrowding is a serious problem that absolutely must be addressed, the question for the Board is whether this should be addressed by cutting an additional $343,000 (the yearly debt service on the $2.8 million loan) from programs and services from our operating budget.
What would we have to cut to pay for this? We don't know yet, but examples of items that could be proposed for cuts include:
Elimination of the entire elementary strings programs (approx. $250,000)
Elimination of High School Hockey, Gymnastics, Golf, and Wrestling ($265,000)
Reduction of 4 Psychologists or Social Workers ($277,000)
Reduction of 7 Classroom Teachers ($350,000)
While no one wants to pit one educational need against another, that is what happens in the budgeting process when we are constrained by revenue caps. Paying for necessary physical improvements to Leopold now out of the operating budget means that other programs will be cut. On the other hand, failure to make those physical improvements now out of the operating budget means that either Leopold students will be required to deal with very overcrowded conditions without any assurance that a referendum to pay for a solution to the overcrowding will pass, or that boundary changes will have to be made that will affect many students in the West attendance area.
Difficult decisions must be made on what to fund out of our operating budget, and ultimately it comes down to a question of how we prioritize our District's different educational needs. I would appreciate readers' thoughts (click the comments below) on how to prioritize these needs and whether they believe the Leopold expansion should be paid for out of the operating budget.
MMSD Staffing Resources/Cuts Go To Schools April 3rd – Where's the School Board, Where's the Board Governance?
It’s nearly the end of March, and there’s a strange quiet at the Madison School Board. Every March for the past five plus years has meant public School Board discussions and meetings about next year’s budget, budget cuts and referendum. Earlier this year, Superintendent Rainwater informed the School Board there would be budget discussions throughout the month of March. Yet, here we are at the end of March – silence on a $320+ million budget, but cuts are being planned just out of the public’s eye while pets in the classroom take front and center stage.
On Monday, April 3rd, on the eve of the 2006 spring school board election, MMSD school principals will receive their staffing allocations for the 2006-2007 school year according to the District's published budget timeline (updated March 15, 2006). The administration will provide school principals with the number of staff they will have for next year, and the principals will need to provide the Human Resources Department of MMSD with information on April 10th about how they will use the staff – number of teachers, social workers, psychologists, etc. For the most part principals have little say about how their staffing is allocated, especially in the elementary school. These dates are driven in part by teacher contract requirements for surplus notices and layoff notices that are due in late May.
Earlier this year, the Superintendent advised the School Board that $8 million in cuts will be needed next year. That means the staffing allocations going out on April 3rd will need to include these cuts. There are also plans afoot to avoid a referendum to add an addition to Leopold and borrow the money in a way that does not require a referendum. However, this approach will negatively affect the operating budget. The estimated additional cost will mean $350,000 in cuts on top of the $8 million in cuts estimated for next year. Where will those $350,000 in additional cuts come from – you can expect more cuts in teachers in the classroom, districtwide classes such as elementary strings, social workers, TAG resources, books, larger class sizes.
In opinion, this is one of the worst, closed budget processes I have seen in years. On March 9th, I blogged about five points that I feel are important considerations in a budget process, especially when we are in a financial crisis. Our School Board majority is missing most, if not all of them and will not even discuss budget items in March! Parents and the community ought to be alarmed. Madison will have to pass referendums to keep our schools strong in these punative financial times that Madison and all WI schools are facing. Conducting Board budget business in this way - behind closed doors, will not build community confidence and will not pass referendums!
I asked Superintendent Rainwater where was the cut list and what budget was he using to determine the allocations. He said this year the Board would be discussing cuts in the context of the entire budget? Huh? Decisions about cuts and reductions in allocations are being made now – what budget is being used? Why isn’t the School Board publicly discussing the budget? Who’s making the decisions and governing the school district – not the current School Board majority. We need a School Board majority that will do the business the public entrusted them with and who will do their work in public.
Three years ago, a group of fifth-graders at Madison's Crestwood Elementary School took on "The Man," as they like to put it.
The students, dubbed the "Recess Rebels," tried to restore an outdoor recess that administrators had removed in a restructuring of the school day.
They didn't win, but they claimed a few victories along the way, such as forcing a districtwide vote by all elementary teachers on the issue.
The students, now eighth-graders at Jefferson Middle School, have given up the fight but not the passion.
Six of them will present a 90-minute workshop Thursday at the National Service Learning Conference in Philadelphia titled "Taking a Stand: Empowering Youth in the Community." The students wrote a proposal for the workshop and were accepted to present.
About 2,000 educators and 1,000 students are expected to attend the conference, which promotes an educational method in which students identify and address community needs. Former President Clinton is the keynote speaker.
By Doug Erickson, Wisconsin State Journal, March 21, 2006
derickson@madison.com 608-252-6149
At a recent meeting to plan their talk, the students reflected on their experience.
"I learned how to resist authority," said Nick Allen, 14. "Our principal was kind of against what we were doing and stuff. She was The Man' -- Big Brother and all that. We didn't listen to her."
Ben Brasser, 13, more of a diplomat, jumps in, "It wasn't that we didn't listen to her, we just continued on even though we were told to stop. In the process, we learned about teamwork and the value of completely believing in yourself."
In 2003, the Crestwood students started a petition to reclaim a 15-minute outdoor recess that had been replaced by a 10-minute indoor break. They researched the benefits of physical exercise, surveyed school and community members, lobbied the School Board and recorded public service radio announcements.
By the end, about 40 Crestwood students had participated in the effort. However, in a districtwide vote, elementary teachers said they preferred the indoor break. The issue died.
"I think we'll always be disappointed because we came so close," said Tessa Dorresteyn, 13.
The students' story is now a vignette in a new textbook titled, "Civics in Practice: Principles of Government and Economics," published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
In the years since the battle, the students have told their tale at various conferences and created a display at the Dane County Fair. Eight of them earned the highest possible rating at a national civics competition in San Francisco.
"The way they've stayed with this has been phenomenal," said Peter Plane, one of their Crestwood teachers.
Joyce Hemphill, mother of Carlton Hemphill, 14, jokes that her son learned how to resist authority a little too well. But she's proud that the students have become independent thinkers.
It will not be difficult for them to fill 90 minutes, she said.
Boundary changes create a larger effect on a district than the direct impact on the children and their families.
Neighborhood schools are vital for a community.
Transportation costs eat away at a budget.
Kids don't get the daily benefit from a walk to school every day.
These are a few reasons that I feel strongly that we need to support and maintain all of our neighborhood schools.
I think it's important to keep in mind that Madison has become a growing urban school district. Our community has undergone radical transformation in the past 20 years, and any plan to address the community's educational needs must take those changes into account.
My vision is to continue the work of the long-range planning groups and expand it to form a strategic plan along the lines of the University of Wisconsin strategic planning. Long-term goals for the district, in my opinion, should be at least ten years or more.
Michael Lauro, the district's new math coordinator, will discuss plans for a curriculum called FASTT Math.
PROVIDENCE - Osiris Harrell, an outspoken critic of the school district's math curriculum, has invited parents and school officials to a meeting March 22 to discuss the effectiveness of the math program.
The forum will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Federal Hill House, 9 Cortland St., Providence.
Michael Lauro, the district's new math coordinator, will discuss plans for a fresh approach to math called FASTT Math. The district is considering trying it on a limited basis next year.
Harrell has met with Lauro to discuss his concerns about the current math program and to agree on how to work together, according to school spokeswoman Maria Tocco.
Harrell, in a recent interview with The Providence Journal, said he was distressed by the district's approach to math instruction, a program called Math Investigations that teaches students how to think about problem-solving rather that drilling them in the basics. The district adopted it in 2003 at the urging of then-Supt. Diana Lam.
Harrell, who is forming a parents' watchdog group called Project Future 2000 and
Beyond, has been circulating a petition that asks the district to prove that its current math curriculum works. When Harrell gets 800 signatures, he said he will present the petition to Mayor David N. Cicilline and Schools Supt. Donnie Evans.
After Harrell's comments were published in The Journal, he said that a number of parents contacted him to share their frustration with Math Investigations, which encourages students to come up with their own solutions to basic math problems.
By contrast, FASTT Math is a return to the skill-and-drill approach familiar to many of today's parents. After taking an on-line test to determine their skill levels, students spend 10 minutes answering basic math problems. The problems get harder as the student progresses.
"The theory is that students need to be able to recall these facts within so many seconds so they can free up their minds for higher-order math skills," said Debbie Hodin, director of direct marketing for Tom Snyder Productions, the company that makes the software.
A number of school districts, including Hillsborough, Fla., Evans' former employer, have adopted the program, which is designed for students who are struggling with basic math, especially those who are performing at least one grade level below their peers.
FASTT Math was developed by Ted Hasselbring, a professor of special education technology at the University of Kentucky, and Laura Goin, the CEO of Designs for Learning.
Madison School Board candidates Juan Jose Lopez and Lucy Mathiak look at what is happening in schools here in very different ways, but on at least one issue they are in complete agreement: Public education here and throughout the Badger State is at a critical crossroads.
But the two candidates vying for School Board Seat No. 2, which Lopez has held since 1994, have quite distinct notions about the nature of the challenges facing the Madison Metropolitan School District.
By Susan Troller, The Capital Times, March 21, 2006
For Lopez, the major issue threatening the district is a dozen years of strict state-imposed spending controls that have hobbled public education. He says the financial situation jeopardizes educational progress and puts at risk Madison's reputation for academic excellence. Lopez said continuing budget cuts put the district "on the verge of severely cutting our basic instructional program."
Lopez takes personal pride in the district and its successes in raising minority achievement scores and graduation rates while continuing to turn out an enviable number of high-achieving National Merit Scholars and semifinalists - and this at a time when there has been a historic influx of low-income students.
For Mathiak, the biggest issue is not lack of money, but what she sees as lack of public trust in the School Board and the administration. She sees a multitude of missed opportunities and a board and a district that are fractured and not willing to look seriously at its very real challenges.
"The last election and failed referenda (to build a new school at Leopold Elementary and override revenue caps to fund the district's operating budget) spoke volumes," Mathiak said. "This city is blessed with smart, engaged parents and a community that is generally supportive of public education. I think people are loyal to their schools and teachers, and many of their principals, as well. But I believe they are not satisfied with the board."
Certainly she is not. Mathiak has been involved with Madison schools in various volunteer capacities since her children were in elementary school. But she says she became particularly frustrated with the board when she served on the district's Long Range Planning Committee in 2004 and 2005.
"I saw the good, the bad and the ugly," she observed. She said that the functional work of the committee was hindered by board members who attended the meetings and often gave long, rambling speeches that seemed designed to praise each other, but with precious little result.
"At the end of many meetings, there was no movement, no decisions made, no votes taken," she said.
She contrasted that with committees she has seen where parents and citizens drive the process.
"When we seriously ask for advice on these school-related issues from the parents, citizens and school staff who are on the front lines, they do a great job, like the work that came out of the East and West-Memorial boundary task force groups," she said.
Lopez is known as one of those board members given to a certain amount of speech-making and Mathiak does not mince words. She made a deliberate decision to challenge him rather than compete for the other seat on the ballot this year, from which the incumbent, Bill Keys, is retiring.
"Juan goes to a lot of meetings in the community and he is a nice guy but a board member needs to deliver," she said.
She noted that the performance and achievement committee Lopez chaired last year met only sporadically and had little substantive to show despite concerns on issues like the minority achievement gap and 4-year-old kindergarten.
Lopez focuses less on the process and more on the district's success stories.
"I'm not sure that many people in Madison actually recognize how different our student population is today from where it was even five or 10 years ago," he said.
He observed that there are new immigrants from all over the world that are coming to Madison to find good jobs, to start businesses and to have the opportunity to give their children an excellent public school education.
The result of this influx, and other demographic shifts in Madison's population, means that there are now many Madison schools with 40 or 50 percent of their students coming from low income families.
Despite those changes, and fierce budget cutting, the district is somehow succeeding to stay afloat and even make progress, Lopez said, making it a beacon of hope among urban school districts.
Lopez, who grew up and went to school in a segregated district in San Antonio, Texas, takes some of the credit for educational improvements over the last decade. Noting that he "led the charge" in creating the very successful Spanish immersion school, Nuestro Mundo, housed within Frank Allis Elementary School, Lopez also has been a strong advocate for programs the district has put in place to help minority and low-income students.
In a recent speech prepared for a community forum, he noted that shortly after he was elected, he and several other board members began to focus intensely on students who were failing.
"Our task was to lift them up, while maintaining our exceptionally high standards for middle class kids," he wrote.
The results, he says, speak for themselves, including distinctly improved numbers in three critical areas: percentage of third-graders reading at or above grade level (almost doubled since 1998), the percentage of ninth-graders who complete algebra and in the percentage of students graduating from high school.
These hard-won but potentially fragile achievements, he says, come in the face of budget cuts that will require nearly $8 million to be carved out of the current school budget.
Jeff Henriques, a Mathiak supporter and senior lecturer in the UW's psychology department whose sons attend West and Hamilton, said he believes Mathiak's tough approach and long history of activism on behalf of both gifted and minority students will benefit both of those groups, and every other student, as well.
"The role of high standards for all students is something that Lucy will bring to the School Board. She's a straight talker," Henriques said.
Mathiak's older son is African-American and she expresses frustration with what she sees as low expectations from some in the district.
"How is it that this diverse School Board has yet to take up some key issues that parents of minority students are concerned about?" she asked.
These include racial profiling and disparate discipline policies, equity issues in the schools, how increasingly scarce resources are being allocated and how some counselors and staff in the district are not placing high expectations on minority students.
These and a host of other broad, substantive conversations on subjects like curriculum, budget, process or contracts, sometimes appear to be off limits for serious consideration, Mathiak says.
"The discussions one would hope to be having aren't taking place, and those that are - like the animals in the classroom debate, for example - are sucking up hours of board time."
Curriculum: Teaching methodology sounds as dry as dust. But for parents who are seeing their children thrive or struggle with a particular learning program in subjects like reading or math, the issues surrounding curriculum are just about enough to make people put their homes up for sale and move in, or out, of a school district.
Lopez is well aware how passionately people feel.
"When we implement a new program, I look at it from a learning perspective. I want kids to learn academically, and I want them to learn socially," he said. He has been a key advocate for Nuestro Mundo, the language immersion school that has parents eagerly signing up for a waiting list.
He also supports new programs like the highly controversial core English programs at West High School that have eliminated ninth- and 10th-grade English electives in favor of classrooms where students of all abilities study a subject together, but with some individualized attention.
"I hate to see students segregated, and I think these classes help bring different kinds of kids together," he noted. The purpose of what's known as the heterogeneous classroom is to reduce the gap between high- and low-achieving students. Mathiak opposes the move toward this type of instruction. She explains that the needs of her own boys would make it unlikely that they would be well-served in the same classroom.
"It's scary to see West disemboweling its previously excellent English curriculum for some poorly articulated goals regarding achievement," Mathiak said. She noted that she believes curriculum issues must be discussed, and that data supporting these changes need must come from a source without a vested interested in the results.
Her willingness to focus on curriculum issues is not likely to win her a popularity contest with the district's administration, or with a majority of the current School Board.
School Board politics: As any observer of the School Board over the last several years cannot fail to see, there is often a sharp and occasionally acrimonious split between two factions. There are plenty of unanimous votes, and some realignments on random topics. But on many significant issues the Board votes 5-2, with the majority including Lopez, Board President Carol Carstensen, retiring incumbent Bill Keyes, Vice President Johnny Winston Jr. and Secretary Shwaw Vang. All have endorsed Lopez. Meanwhile, the usual dissenting voices from the board majority are Ruth Robarts and Lawrie Kobza, and both are supporting Mathiak.
The "negativity" of the critics of the Board and the district has become an issue in both this School Board race and the race between Maya Cole and Arlene Silveira for Seat 1. Supporters of the status quo charge that critics are a destructive and impossible to please; a small, cranky faction that has stirred up public dissatisfaction when they challenge the board majority, the budget process, general decision making, the superintendent, the teacher's union and the administration.
"God help us in a democracy if you can't ask questions," Mathiak responded. "I was raised to question authority, and I believe that's called critical thinking. We need to ask about the data that is supporting policy decisions and whether it makes sense. It's not critical or negative to expect people to bring solid, objective support for their ideas. It's part of the 'sifting and winnowing' tradition."
As for Lopez, he said he believes he can get along with anyone.
"I respect the people I don't agree with, and I respect the fraternity of the School Board and all its members." He also noted that it is the role of the challenger to criticize the status quo.
The national curriculum in England is to be revised so children are taught to read primarily using the method known as synthetic phonics [Full Report 432K PDF]
Correct me if I'm wrong (as if I need to even say it).
If the Board approves an addition at Leopold from the operating budget (without a referendum), won't the Board also have to cut an additonal seven teachers from next year's budget to cover the cost?
I hope that I'm wrong, because that divisive course, which the board majority seems poised to approve, would certainly pit Leopold and its expansion supporters against the teachers and parents of each and every school that might lose a position.
A less divisive course would be to ask voters in a referendum for funds for the expansion in the context of a complete plan for growth on the boundaries of the district.
According to the district's figures, Leopold serves only 23 students beyond its capacity, but parents and teachers tell of severe overcrowding. Either the parents and teacher are wrong, or the district numbers are wrong. I'm going to believe the parents and teachers, forcing me to raise the question: how many other numbers are wrong in the administration's spreadsheets.
One of Jamie and Kathy Malwitz's three children didn't fit in at Fond du Lac High School — known as having one of the largest enrollments in the state, about 2,400 students.
"We opted for school choice with Kaitlin. She's now a senior at Oakfield High School, plays varsity soccer and loves the atmosphere at a small school," Kathy said.
Through Wisconsin's open enrollment period — Feb. 6 to 24 this year — parents were able to choose which public school system in the state they wanted their children to attend.
Now in its ninth year, the open enrollment program continues to grow in popularity, from 2,464 student transfers the first year to more than 18,000 in 2005, said Joe Donovan, spokesperson for the state Department of Public Instruction.
"The number of applicants is pretty striking," he said.
So is the increasing number of students opting out of brick and mortar public schools and enrolling in one of 13 virtual schools in Wisconsin.
By Sharon Roznik, The Reporter, March 10, 2006, sroznik@fdlreporter.com
Kris Diener, originally from Fond du Lac, is principal of iQ Academies, Wisconsin's largest virtual high school, offered through the Waukesha School District.
"We had over a thousand new applicants and several were from Fond du Lac," Diener said.
iQ has a current enrollment of 550 students, bringing in about $5,700 in state aid per student into the Waukesha School District. That's a total of more than $3 million.
Financial loss
A high-count student exodus in Waupun (61) raises concerns for Bill Zeininger, director of business services and human resources. Because that same per pupil state aid follows every student wherever they go to school, the financial loss can be great.
"A total of 107 students are going elsewhere, at $5,700 a student. It's a crippling blow to our school district and will be a further drain on us financially," he said.
North Fond du Lac School District Administrator Sue McFarlane said enrollment figures can appear artificially high for a variety of reasons.
"I'm guessing at least 20 to 30 of those students (out of 60 requesting transfers) moved into the North Fond du Lac School District but continued to attend schools in their old district. We also have 10 to 12 students who were being home-schooled and applied to one of the virtual schools," she said.
Diener confirmed the Waukesha virtual school attracts home-schoolers, performance athletes and students who travel the world because of their parents' profession, yet still want a diploma from Wisconsin.
"We are aware of the feelings some public school administrators have about virtual schools," Diener said. "I understand there is competition in public schools, and it isn't something they had to deal with before. I tell them we can be partners in educating children that cannot, for whatever reason, attend public school on a full-time basis."
Oakfield School District Administrator Joe Heinzelman said he's pleased with the district's growing popularity. With 28 new enrollees added to the number of transfer students already at the school, there are 59 potential open enrollment students coming in, a hefty sum for a school district with 563 students.
"It makes us feel great, and I think it shows that parents look for schools where a child can participate and get personal attention. Students aren't just a number here," he said.
Virtual school offerings
Fond du Lac has plans to jump on the bandwagon and offer its their own virtual school, on a limited basis, to students in 2006-07. Plans to expand virtual school course offerings are now being considered by a district committee under a charter school grant.
"Virtual school continues to be an option for parents," School Superintendent Greg Maass said. "It provides yet another opportunity for students beyond the traditional school setting."
Numbers in New Holstein indicate 35 students are leaving through open enrollment compared to four coming into the district. School Superintendent Joe Wieser said that of those students, 16 are in 4-year-old kindergarten and travel with their parents to schools near their place of employment.
Still he has concerns about overcrowding in the schools prompting parents to look elsewhere, and he hopes voters will approve a November referendum asking for a new middle school.
"We are so crowded, we are renting classrooms from the church across the street," he said.
As for open enrollment trends, Donovan said parents' reasons for choosing open enrollment are as varied as the number of transfer requests.
"Up until last year, there was a cap on the number of students that could leave a particular district," Donovan said. "Last year, it was 10 percent; prior to that, 3 percent. Now there are no caps, so more parents are opting to move their students around."
Kathy Malwitz, a retired school teacher, said she and her husband, Jamie, picked the kind of education that fit each of their children.
"Jamie home-schooled Kaitlin her sophomore year," she said. "Our older daughter, Kari, attended Fond du Lac High School but spent her senior year attending classes at Moraine Park Technical College through the youth options program. Our son, Adam, was a good, quiet student, and he did fine at Fond du Lac."
The following commitment by Maya Cole seems particularly important to post given the lively discussion on healthy food:
I enthusiastically endorse the Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch Food Policy Recommendations, and I will work to win adoption of the recommendations if I have the opportunity to serve on the Board of Education of the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD).
Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch is a grassroots program whose goal is to enhance the Madison public schools' existing meal programs by introducing fresh, nutritious, local and sustainably grown food to children, beginning in the city's elementary schools. The program, like similar "farm-to-school" programs around the country, will provide an opportunity for children to reconnect with their natural world and will help establish a stable market for local farmers and processors.
I know elementary school teachers who give their students carrots and other fresh vegetables for snacks, and the children gobble them up, so children will eat healthy food when given the opportunity.
Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch is a joint project of the REAP Food Group and the University of Wisconsin's Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems.
Farmers markets are islands of pride and excellence in our community, and homegrown, locally purchased foods extends farmers markets into the lunch rooms of our schools. What could be better for farmers and children?
The Web site of Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch lists the following principles that it recommends for the MMSD:
• Healthy children are the foundation of a healthy society;
• Healthy, well-nourished children are better able to learn;
• All children deserve nutritious, safe, and deliciously prepared food;
• Eating habits developed in childhood will affect health throughout life;
• Knowledge of food—how it is grown, who grows it, how it is prepared, and its connection to tradition —is integral to a healthy education.
Performance and Achievement Meeting of 06-Mar-2006 Posted
The Performance and Achievement Committee of MMSD met on Monday, March 6, 2006 to discuss the Summer 2006 program and to review the 2005 program. A video of the meeting is available.
There was a public appearance by a student from La Follette arguing against continuation of the MMSD policy of forbidding headware in the schools.
n Hanover, where public school teachers are already the highest paid in the state, voters this week will decide whether a proposed teachers' contract is too generous, as some residents contend, or appropriate for the affluent school district.
People on both sides of the issue ask that voters compare the school district's $59,236 average teacher salary to the salaries of others.
Opponents of the contract, which includes the majority of the school district's finance committee, point out that the pay is 35 percent higher than the state average of $43,941. The finance committee has long noted a "premium" that residents pay for education, and is asking for evidence students are receiving an education proportional to that premium.
Teachers point to a different comparison: $70,877, the median household income in Hanover and Norwich, Vt., is 20 percent higher than last year's average teacher salary. Teachers said they are asking for salaries comparable to those in the schools' community.
"People can point to our salaries, and make claims or ask, 'Is it really worth it?'" said Pamala Miller, president of the Hanover Education Association, the teachers' union. "I would ask the parents in the community that question, and I guess we'll get the answer with the vote."
The debate comes as the Concord School Board and the local teachers' union are struggling to reach their own three-year contract; both salaries and health insurance are n disput
There's no doubt that Isthmus has the juice in this campaign. The traditional daily newspapers haven't covered any substantive issues in this race. I'd like to see some links/words that contrast my opinion on their lack of "beef" (Have they attended any forums?). Focusing on personalities is a simple, self made "pass" that avoids issues critical to our children:
Leadership that can pass referenda (will the current approach and personalities be successful?)
Transparency with respect to the District's growing $321M+ budget. Again, will the current approach pass the necessary referenda?
Isthmus's work represents the best of local journalism. Rather amazing, given the resources they have vs the enormous dailies. Interestingly, the Fitchburg Star has posted some useful articles as well.
The Memorandum to Local Media represented one attempt to at least look at the issues rather than simply compare and contrast personalities.
A 5 Year Approach to the Madison School District's Budget Challenges; or what is the best quality of education that can be purchased for our district for $280 million a year?
Two weeks ago, Roger Price presented a 5-year forecast for the district, which included a projection that there would be a $38 million budget gap, by 2011, if the district proceeded with it’s present operations. He emphasized the presumption that this was before changes are implemented to address the gap. He also emphasized his discomfort with the accuracy of any forecast beyond one year.
As a consultant who has done economic modeling and forecasting for almost 20 years, I can certainly understand this discomfort. However, I note that the district website contains a list of budget cuts enacted by the board since 1993, a list which includes over $32 million in cuts over the last 5 years. With prices only increasing over time, and with the special concerns raised over health care and energy costs, the initial $38 million deficit projection does not seem unreasonable. My preference would be to round it to $40 million, and to recognize that it may require six years (give or take) to achieve that gap. But the forecast makes clear that we are talking about a very large amount, and that there is a structural budget gap. By structural, I mean that anticipated revenue increases are expected to consistently fail to keep up with expenses, and that over time ever-more drastic cuts will be required to remain in budgetary balance.
How might the district address this ominous gap? I think there are two basic approaches that can be taken. One is to endeavor to cut approximately $8 million each year, to address each budget year on its own, and to effectively ignore the looming structural gap. This approach implies keeping the same district structure as today, and essentially tearing away different pieces of it each year. Of course, this approach continues to be more and more painful each year, as the easy cuts are long completed and now only more critical programs and services remain for the knife.
I would like to respectfully recommend a second approach. That rather than look at the budget picture one year at a time, that you instead look at where the budget will be (approximately) five years from now. In effect, that you determine how to cut $40 million from the budget, not $8 million. Last month, numerous efforts were made to find $3.77 in cuts from a $100 budget. Few were able to find that amount. I am suggesting a group be formed to find the equivalent of $15 in cuts, and by the way, they will have five years over which to implement those cuts. You may laugh at the prospect, but that is exactly the situation this district is facing – it indeed must find $15 or more in cuts over the next five years.
How to find $40 million? By asking a very different question, one which has nothing to do, and everything to do, with that amount. By asking, what is the best quality of education that can be purchased for our district for $280 million a year. Start with a completely clean slate. Identify your primary goals and values and priorities. Determine how best to achieve those goals to the highest possible level, given a budget that happens to be $40 million smaller than today’s. Consider everything – school-based budgeting, class sizes, after-school sports, everything.
When it’s all done, this group will have likely shaped an educational structure for this district that is quite different than the one you use today. The second task of this group, therefore, would be to determine how to implement the necessary changes. Perhaps one school is run under the new model in the first year, then additional schools, or perhaps all other schools, would be so run the following year.
I have no idea what this new structure, what this new district, will look like. But I am sure of this: I will be much more likely to prefer my two kids attend a district that is the outcome of a process such as this which is well-thought out and planned, than I will a district that has continued to endure the annual relentless torturing of it’s current structure.
I read these words during the public appearances segment of last night's School Board meeting.
The continued public discussion of "some" versus "no" ability grouping originally scheduled for tonight's Performance and Achievement Committee meeting has been postponed. Instead, according the the District website, the agenda for tonight consists of a 2005 Summer School report and 2006 budget recommendations.
In response to a suggestion that the discussion has been postponed because U.W. Sociology Professor Adam Gamoran's January 30 presentation to the Performance and Achievement Committee had not provided the "green light" on heterogeneous grouping that the BOE had hoped for, BOE President Carol Carstensen wrote, "I am not putting off the discussion on heterogeneous classes because of any information, pro or con, from any of the presentations so far. I have always said that this should be a complete discussion - and that the Board should not rush into any decisions. I am hoping that we can continue these discussions in May and early June." Ms. Carstensen also reminded us that Shwaw Vang is chair of the Performance and Achievement Committee.
In expressing our disappointment at this turn of events, we reminded Ms. Carstensen that as the BOE makes sure not to rush into any decisions, individual schools continue to make and implement curriculum decisions and individual families continue to make educational decisions for their children. (We perhaps should have also noted that as the BOE is careful not to rush into things, the District-wide middle school redesign plan moves forward with the core assumption of three years of complete heterogeneity in all curricular areas except math, where quite a lot of good thought has been given to the problem of how to meet the full range of educational need. It seems important to ask why the same level of thoughtfulness and responsiveness has not been brought to our middle schoolers' educational needs in the areas of language arts, social studies and science.)
If you would like to communicate with Ms. Carstensen and her BOE colleagues your own disappointment or frustration with this postponement -- or perhaps your own plans to move, go private, or home school your child -- please send an email to comments@madison.k12.wi.us. Because Mr. Vang tends to not check his email, feel free to call him at home -- 240-3552.
Finally, here is the summary we compiled for Ms. Carstensen -- at her request -- of the research on the effects of ability grouping on the academic performance and academic self-esteem of high ability students. The summary also contains a few articles on the performance and self-esteem of the remaining students when the highest performing students are allowed to leave the otherwise heterogeneous class. We have strongly encouraged Ms. Carstensen and Mr. Vang to invite U.W.-Whitewater Professor Pam Clinkenbeard and U.W.-Madison Professor Corissa Lotta to address the BOE on these issues. Both are nationally recognized experts on the educational (PC) and counseling (CL) needs of gifted students. As we wrote to Ms. Carstensen, "[we provided you with a summary of the research], but Pam and Corissa could really bring the literature to life for you and your BOE colleagues, as well as answer any questions you might have. Both of them are excellent speakers."
A few weeks ago, Madison school board member Johnny Winston Jr. circulated a message that urged readers to support community organizations that had submitted grant proposals for funding under the district’s Community Service Fund (Fund 80). His message began:
“We have a great opportunity! On Monday March 6th, the Madison School Board will be considering four proposals for funding that have an opportunity to have a positive impact on the student achievement in our school district. These programs are community based after school and summer programming that can supplement students’ academic achievement in the Madison Metropolitan School District. These programs are not subject to the state imposed revenue limits.” (emphasis added)
After describing the programs that he proposes to fund, Mr. Winston portrays the issue as whether one is for or against community programs that enhance student achievement. At a minimum, he frames the issue to suggest that one cannot support school-community partnerships and question the district’s Community Service Fund (Fund 80), when he writes:
“Please be aware that the school board and district are under attack from people who believe that programs such as these are "driving up their taxes." This is simply not true! Community services funding is included in this year's community services budget, but hasn't been allocated.” (emphasis added)
Contrary to Mr. Winston’s assertions, it is very possible to support the intent of the proposed grants and still have serious reservations about Fund 80 and its uses. Indeed, the grants and services that he describes make up only a small portion of the annual expenditures from this source. Whether or not the proposals are approved is less important than the much-needed public discussion of how the Madison school district is using its Fund 80 resources and whether taxpayers agree that those uses are worth the increase in their property taxes. With projected growth from $5.4 million 2001-2002 to over $16 million in 2011, most of it from property taxes, it is our elected representatives’ responsibility to engage the community in discussion to approve or reject the board’s uses of this fund.
(For the full document, please go to one of the links listed at the beginning of this post.)
Leveling the Playing Field: Creating Funding Equity Through Student-Based Budgeting
When the Cincinnati Public Schools devised a reform strategy for improving student performance, it became clear that the district's traditional budgeting system was inadequate. The authors trace the district's process of moving to a system of student-based budgeting: funding children rather than staff members and weighting the funding according to schools' and students' needs.
By Karen Hawley Miles, Kathleen Ware, and Marguerite Roza, from Phi Delta Kappan magazine, October 2003.
THE INCREASING local and national focus on accountability has districts and states scrambling to develop ways to hold all schools to the same high standards. But demanding equivalent achievement levels across all of a district's schools makes no sense if the financial resources are unevenly allocated and the schools aren't given the flexibility to use those resources in ways that address their own academic priorities and the particular needs of their students.
Most discussion about funding equity has focused on differences in levels of funding between districts, and it is often assumed that funds are distributed evenly to schools within districts. But recent research highlights startling differences within districts, with some schools receiving as much as 60% more funding than others with similar categories and numbers of students.1
The role of the district in ensuring a high-quality education for all students is the principal focus of School Communities That Work: A National Task Force on the Future of Urban Districts.2 This article was prepared in conjunction with the Task Force's efforts to understand, support, and develop the work of urban education systems that are seeking to level the educational playing field for all students in their jurisdictions.
Seeking Resource Equity
Redistributing resources within a district can be a painful and controversial task and can result in the loss of cherished programs and staff. But the equitable distribution of funds creates the basis for real equality of opportunity for all students, and the process of creating such equity can bring a district to a much clearer sense of purpose and strategy.
The Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) discovered the payoff -- and the pain -- when the district overhauled its inequitable school funding system in the midst of implementing an ambitious, long-range reform strategy that focused on accountability. Between 1998 and 2001, the district made the transition to a student-based budgeting formula that eliminated dramatic variation in funding levels between schools within the system. Beginning in 2002-03, the only differences in school funding were to be those driven by student need.
Cincinnati's process highlights the need for widespread community support and bold leadership from the administration and the school board. It also helps to clarify the idea of "resource equity" and its connection to other critical elements of a districtwide strategy for improving student performance. In this article, we use the CPS experience with student-based budgeting to show how funding equity and flexibility are inextricably linked to accountability and excellence. Then we focus on the reasons some schools get more than others, not only in Cincinnati but in most school districts. We show how CPS used student-based budgeting to distribute dollars more fairly and to create more flexibility in their use. Finally, we include a set of questions to ask in your own districts and states.
Students First: Cincinnati's Reform Strategy
Begun by Superintendent Michael Brandt and continued under the leadership of Superintendent Steven Adamowski, Cincinnati's strategic school reform plan, known as Students First, has been implemented over the past five years with the involvement of the entire community. A moral imperative for more equitable funding between schools and for more school-level flexibility in the use of funds gradually emerged from the interaction of the plan's four components:
* Establish standards for student performance.
* Decentralize resources and decision making to the school level.
* Hold schools accountable for results.
* Provide professional development and support for schools.
Cincinnati's reform strategy includes a powerful school accountability plan, which holds faculty members and schools responsible for student performance. Under the plan, the district rates schools annually according to gains in student performance. It then awards bonuses and other benefits to staff members in the highest-performing schools and provides intervention and support for those schools that perform poorly.
The Cincinnati strategy requires that all students meet the same standards, but it allows schools to choose the means of meeting those standards. An integral part of this strategy is the requirement that schools adopt a comprehensive school design from an approved list that fits with the district philosophy. Each of these designs combines research-based curriculum and instructional strategies into a schoolwide approach.
As principals and school instructional leadership teams set to work planning, hiring staff, purchasing materials, and grouping students to fit their school's chosen design, they began to demand more dollars and greater flexibility. They found they needed more resources to enable them to offer special design features, such as small seminars, extra foreign language classes, or increased social-service support for students. They also wanted the flexibility to change allocations so that they could, for example, fund an additional staff position with money earmarked for administrative costs or use funds for a librarian to hire a literacy specialist. These requests for flexibility were hard to accommodate within the traditional budgeting system, which allocated positions according to a standard staffing model.
In response to these demands, CPS developed a plan to allocate dollars to schools based on student enrollment rather than on staff positions, thereby freeing schools to craft their own staffing and budgeting models. In short, district leaders decided to fund children rather than staff members, and children with greater needs would be funded at a higher level.
Staff-Based Versus Student-Based Budgeting
Understanding why schools within a district receive different levels of funding requires looking closely at how districts allocate resources. Most districts use a formula that starts by allocating staff positions and other resources to schools, based on the number of pupils in the school. But then districts add staff positions and dollars on top of the formula-driven resources, using criteria other than student enrollment. For example, a school with a special arts focus designed to attract students from all over the district might get additional funding to support its program.
These standard practices sometimes result in the allocation of very different per-student dollar amounts to schools. In some cases -- such as differing allocations to cover the heating bills in older or newer buildings -- the reasons are fully justifiable. In other cases, the inequities are simply products of mathematical formulas, political influence, history, or the special interest of a district administrator or school board member.
In a system of student-based budgeting, it is the students who are funded, not the schools. The concept is simple: each student receives a base "weighting" of 1.0, which represents a foundational dollar amount. Then, weights are established for groups of students who have specific educational needs. For example, it costs more to educate a student with a disability than a nondisabled peer. In Cincinnati, the cost of educating an orthopedically handicapped student, for example, is 236% more than the cost of educating the typical student. So the weight for an orthopedically handicapped student is 1.0 + 2.36, or 3.36. This money follows the student to any district school he or she attends.
Phase 1: A Cautious Beginning to Student-Based Budgeting
In 1999-2000, CPS implemented the first phase of its new student-based budgeting system. District leaders agree that equity was not the primary motivation during this first phase. Lynn Marmer, a veteran school board member and chair of the finance committee, recalled, "Really, we were as concerned with decentralizing control and making the system more understandable as we were about equity." The district administration realized that it could not hold schools accountable for results if it did not give them control over the processes of education, and that included control over the use of resources.
After a seemingly endless review of financial scenarios that played out the effects of implementing student-based budgeting, the district and the school board agreed to a first-phase formula that disturbed existing funding practices as little as possible. As Marmer noted, "This was the first time the board really understood the extent of the funding differences by school. It was a new idea for us, and we pretty much left it alone. We needed to chew on it for a while."
While many of the inequities in funding remained during the first round of the student-based budgeting, the differences across schools had been made explicit and public for all to see and discuss. With this information, the administration and school board could grapple with the reasons for the differences and debate whether they were justifiable.
Cincinnati's student-based budgeting system highlights four reasons why some schools get more than others: student needs, school operating costs, political needs, and strategic investment.
During Phase 1, extra funding (through added weighting) continued to be given for special education students. Neither the staff-based formula nor Phase 1 of the student-based formula provided extra dollars for other student needs, such as the needs of second-language learners or of students in poverty.
Phase 1 also maintained the differences in operating costs by keeping them separate from the student-weighted formula and by adding dollars on top to cover the special costs for each school. Differences in school size, in organization, and in such costs as utilities and maintenance accounted for most of these operating differences. The old staff-based allocation had favored smaller schools because such staff members as principals, secretaries, and librarians are assigned to all schools regardless of size. In small schools, these costs were spread over fewer students, thereby resulting in a higher per-pupil allocation. In a straight student-based budgeting system, in which all district dollars are included in the weighted formula, small schools find it more difficult than large schools to cover the same overhead costs of a principal, a plant operator, and contract-required clerical support.
To protect its small schools, CPS added in Phase 1 a fixed amount on top of the allocation for each student in these schools to cover such overhead costs. However, the funds drawn off for this protection lowered the basic allocation for students in larger schools, since the practice reduced the total amount of money on which the value of the 1.0 weighting was determined.
The student-based calculations highlighted dramatic differences in funding across CPS high schools. For example, Hughes High School received 38% -- nearly $2,000 -- more per pupil than Walnut Hill High School. In fact, Walnut Hill students were shown to be receiving the same dollars as CPS elementary students, even though the traditional secondary school, with its subject-matter specialists and varied course offerings, costs more to operate than an elementary school. That funding level translated into core academic classes at Walnut Hill of 30 or more students. The Phase 1 funding levels did not change this inequity.
The third reason for inequitable funding -- political need -- can be difficult to justify. For example, Cincinnati funds magnet programs that attract middle- and upper-income parents to the system. Like most urban districts, CPS depends on middle-class support to sustain its tax base. CPS had worked hard to ensure that middle-class parents continued to send their children to district schools and actively supported the levying of taxes to pay for them. Magnet schools played a major role in keeping a diverse student body in Cincinnati's schools.
Eighteen of the district's 77 schools were designated "magnet schools." Each magnet school was organized around an educational philosophy and model, and, when first implemented, magnet schools received extra staff members who were funded by the state in an effort to promote desegregation. When that funding ended, the district continued to pay for extra staff members out of its general fund.
Students in magnet schools received additional weighting in Phase 1 of student-based budgeting. The district calculated these weights according to the costs of each particular program. For example, because Montessori elementary schools were costing the district 13% more than neighborhood schools, students who attended them were given a weight of 1.13. Paideia elementary schools cost 25% more to operate, making the weight of their students 1.25. Weighting students by magnet status clearly violated the "money follows the student" principle of student-based budgeting.
In its ranking of schools by student performance, the accountability system in CPS highlighted the disturbing fact that many of the nonmagnet schools were doing poorly compared to the magnets. It didn't take long for the school board and the district administration to suspect that schools that were underperforming might have fewer resources. As Lynn Marmer noted, "We could move so much further along than we could have five years ago. Now, we had performance data by school and could see that nonmagnet schools were not doing as well and didn't get as much funding. How can you demand equal results with unequal resources?"
Finally, a district may choose to invest more in a certain school or group of students for strategic reasons. For example, based on research showing the student performance benefits of small class sizes in early grades, a district might weight students in kindergarten through third grade at higher levels. Though Superintendent Adamowski had hoped to do this in Phase 1, the funds were not available at that time without taking significant dollars away from secondary schools. This higher weighting for the early grades was not accomplished until Phase 2.
Phase 2: Biting the Bullet
In December 2001, the school board approved a radical overhaul of the student-based-budgeting formula. Phase 2 eliminated extra funding for magnets and special programs, added a per-pupil weighting for poverty, and moved more dollars into the student-driven part of the formula by eliminating the fixed allocations to schools. The passage of a levy in November 2000 had allowed the district to increase funding to nonmagnet schools and to reduce the gap between magnets and others. The new funds also allowed the district to make a strategic investment in K-3 students by weighting them 20% higher.
Even with the levy, Phase 2 moved schools closer to equitable funding by taking significant funding from many schools. Sixteen schools lost more than 2% of their budgets -- in some cases, more than $100,000 -- while others gained significantly. Naturally, supporters of many schools and programs losing dollars reacted swiftly and passionately. CPS leaders reviewed each school's funding and the reasons for the losses.
As supporters of schools and programs that were losing money lobbied hard, board members found it hard to hold the line. Lynn Marmer recalled, "We had to keep reminding each other that the amount of money in the pot did not change. We kept holding up a piece of paper and ripping it into pieces, to show that it was a fixed pie. When we give to one school, we take from another."
In each case in which schools lost significant dollars, the district created a transition fund to phase in the changes with as little student disruption as possible. In some cases, such as that of a special school serving former high school dropouts, the district determined that students with such needs and characteristics would receive an explicit extra weight that would follow them regardless of school or administrative decisions.
A school board resolution describing the principles behind the new funding scheme was a powerful outcome of Phase 2, and it fortified board members and district leaders as they faced lobbying from those who were losing funding. The resolution established seven principles of funding that guide the new formula, each followed by an action statement (see "Principles of Student-Based Budgeting," below).
At that time, Lynn Marmer was in her last months on the school board. "As board members, we deal with so much that feels transitory," she recalled, summing up her last effort. "It felt so good to take on this powerful issue and leave something like this set of principles behind. Even as the details of funding change, district leaders can always go back to these fundamentals."
Questions to Ask About Equity and Flexibility
As Cincinnati discovered, when districts push for greater school accountability, they must reassess their budget systems and be more explicit about school funding levels. We offer the following questions to help begin that process.
* Does the district allocate resources to schools using staffing formulas or does it use a student-based-budgeting approach, allocating dollars for each student?
* How much flexibility do schools have to use dollars or staff in different ways?
* In dollars, what is the average per-pupil cost overall and at each school level -- elementary, middle school, and high school?
* Does the district allocate more dollars to support students from impoverished homes or homes in which English is the second language spoken?
* Does the district have certain types of schools that cost significantly more to operate than others? Are there student performance data that support this higher cost?
* Does the district track the characteristics and quality of teachers in each school and adjust funding or support in response?
As board members and district leaders in Cincinnati hammered out the new funding formula, the work was hard, the controversy sometimes draining. When asked why she devoted so much energy to the change, board member Marmer reflected, "I saw this as an opportunity to really benefit the kids who are most dependent on public schools. Other kids have options, but the kids in neighborhood schools, being funded at the lowest levels, didn't. It really became a moral issue for all of us."
1. This research is analyzed in School Communities That Work, First Steps to a Level Playing Field (Providence: Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Brown University, 2002).
2. Information on School Communities That Work is available at www.schoolcommunities.org.
KAREN HAWLEY MILES is president of Education Resource Management Strategies, Dallas, a firm that supports districts and schools in developing strategies, allocating resources, and creating organizations focused on improving instruction. KATHLEEN WARE is associate superintendent of the Cincinnati Public Schools. MARGUERITE ROZA is a senior research fellow at the Center for Reinventing Public Education, Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington, Seattle. This article was prepared in conjunction with their work with School Communities That Work: A National Task Force on the Future of Urban Districts (www.schoolcommunities.org), an initiative of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
Principles of Student-Based Budgeting
Principle. All budgeting will be easily understood, clearly comparable, open, and public.
Action. Annually, the administration will report -- to the public and the board -- school budgets in a manner that is clear, comprehensive, and easy to understand.
Principle. All schools will be treated fairly and equitably. All students are valued and equally entitled to resources.
Action. All students receive a weight of 1.0.
Principle. We recognize the intensive focus on grades K-3.
Action. All K-3 students receive an additional 20% weighting to lower the pupil/teacher ratio and to support early literacy and numeracy.
Principle. We acknowledge the importance of supporting students during a transition year.
Action. For all ninth-graders, there is an additional 5% weighting. Schools must use these additional funds for orientation, for building study skills, for supporting transition, and for retention.
Principle. We recognize the extra costs associated with students for whom English is a second language and for students from economically impoverished households.
Action. Students who are learning English receive an additional 47% weighting, and students who qualify for federally subsidized lunches receive an additional 5% weighting.
Principle. We use local money to supplement state funding for special education and vocational education.
Action. Vocational students receive an additional 60% weighting; special education students receive an additional weighting based upon their individual disabilities.
Principle. We promote special programming for gifted students.
Action. Gifted students (identified by state standards) receive an additional 20% weighting wherever special programming is available and described in the school's educational plan.
Source: Cincinnati Board of Education, Resolution passed 3 December 2001 (excerpt).
Public schools are public. Consequently, it seems a reasonable principle that unless privacy is at issue, the processes by which major decisions about them are made should be public, too. But too often this isn't the case. Teacher collective bargaining negotiations are a primary example. They're usually conducted behind closed doors and with some noteworthy exceptions it is generally difficult to find the contracts themselves despite the enormous influence they have. But, Rick Costa, the president of the Salem Education Association in Oregon is setting a good standard for how it should be done (via Intercepts). More transparency in bargaining is a key recommendation of Collective Bargaining in Education: Negotiating Change In Today's Schools
Assistant Superintendent Roger Price provided the following electronic copies of the proposals the Board of Education will for funding on March 6:
Kajsiab House and Freedom Inc.
Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network-South Central Wisconsin (GLSEN)
Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth (WCATY)
The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute, Inc. (CHHI)
Johnny Winston, Jr. explains the process for soliciting these proposals in a post on the blog, while Ruth Robarts raises some concerns.
Next year's projected operating budget shortfall is $8 million - projected expenses will exceed revenues by that amount. For 13 years the growth in expenses have exceeded what the district received and was allowed to receive from the a) state and federal government revenues and b) allowed growth in revenues from property taxes. Further, the state and federal governments do not pay for their promised share of expenses for mandates that local school districts are to provide special education and ELL, to name a few areas. The financing of public education is broken in WI and neither the Republicans nor Democrats are taking this issue on and working through toward viable solutions. One step we can all take is to write your legislators - local, state and federal. Tell our state legislators to stop twiddling their thumbs on financing of public schools, because the problem is "too tough for them to 'figure out.'"
At the same time, drastic financial times will continue to stress Madison's public schools and our School Board and administrative staff will have no choice but to think in different ways PLUS go to referendum. I'm a solid supporter of school referendums - I have voted yes each time. However, I feel the School Board needs to take a different, more proactive approach to how the School Board thinks about and addresses a number of issues, including administrative contracts. Not doing so, will only compound the difficulties and stresses of our current fiscal situation.
Lawrie Kobza pointed out last night that 2-year rolling administrative contracts may be important for some groups of administrators and that the School Board should consider that issue. Otherwise, if the annual pattern continues, extensions will occur in February before the School Board looks at the budget and makes their decisions about staffing. Even though the Superintendent has indicated what positions he proposes to eliminate for next year, when the School Board has additional information later in the budget year, they may want to make different decisions based upon various tradeoffs they believe are important for the entire district.
What might the School Board consider doing? Develop criteria to use to identify/rank your most "valuable" administrative positions (perhaps this already exists) and those positions where the district might be losing its competitive edge. Identify what the "at risk" issues are - wages, financial, gender/racial mix, location, student population mix. Or, start with prioritizing rolling two-year contracts for one of the more "important," basic administrative groups - principals. Provide the School Board with options re administrative contracts. School board members please ask for options for this group of contracts.
Ms. Kobza commented that making an extension of contracts in February for this group of staff could make these positions appear to be golden, untouchable. Leaving as is might not be well received in Madison by a large number of people, including the thousands of MMSD staff who are not administrators on rolling two-year contracts nor a Superintendent with a rolling contract (without a horizon, I think). The board might be told MMSD won't be able to attract talented administrators. I feel the School Board needs to publicly discuss the issues and risks to its entire talent pool.
Mr. Nadler reported that MMSD might be losing its edge in the area of administration. He gave one example where there more than a few applicants for an elementary school position (20 applicants); however, other districts, such as Sun Prairie, are attracting more applicants (more than 100). The communities surrounding Madison are becoming more attractive over time as places to live and to do business. If we don't recognize and try to understand the issues, beyond simply wages and benefits, the situation will continue to worsen. I feel the process in place needs to change in order to be a) more responseive to the issues, b) more flexible for the School Board in their decisionmaking processes, especially around budget time.
Last night the School Board discussed administrator contracts once again and made no decisions, only what appeared to me to be a vague recommendation. Mr. Nadler, Executive Director of Human Resources, made the following points in speaking to the School Board: a) wages in MMSD are higher than surrounding area but places such as Verona offer better total wage and benefit packages, b) MMSD is not attracting the same number of principals for an open elementary school position as Sun Prairie, and c) if MMSD does not offer two-year rolling contracts, our district will be out of line with the other school districts.
The issue was referred to the Human Resources Committee without much direction; but if I understood what was being said by MMSD administration, the administration has a policy to go ahead and extend the admin. contracts if the School Board does not make a decision. I hope they do not act now on that for all employees even though they feel they made need to do this.
I hope the administration considers adjusting its policy. This is not likely without School Board direction, and I don't blame administrators for staying the course given the existing policy. Also, though, these are their contracts, and it may be hard for administrators to step away and be "objective" about contracts directly affecting their jobs.
It is the School Board's responsibility, and for the past three budget cycles, I have not seen much change in practice, or thinking about how to go about a change in practice.
I understood Mr. Nadler's presentation to mean that we have to keep the present system in place if the district is to have any chance of remaining competitive with other districts. Also, a competive package is important in attracting minority and women administrators.
Maya Cole posted an interesting idea on her Web site:
Energy efficiency stands out as one island of excellence in the MMSD. The Wisconsin Focus on Energy program features the Madison school district in one of its case studies on energy-efficient schools.
I'd like to take the MMSD’s excellent energy-efficiency commitment one step further by directing the district to construct any new school or other building with environmentally sensitive practices, including natural lighting, energy efficiency, water conservation, recycled products, and other green building practices.
You can find examples of "green built" schools on the Web site of the U.S. Green Building Council. For example, the Third Creek Elementary School in Statesville, NC lowered electricity demand through energy-efficient equipment and design, including extensive daylighting. The Clearview Elementary School in Hanover, PA reduced water use by 30%. At Clackamas High School, Clackamas, OR "[t]he creation of a high-performance, green building was not considered a primary aim. In fact, at the time, there was little interest in sustainable design. However, energy efficiency, high-quality indoor environments, environmental responsibility, and resource efficiency became integral to meeting the school district's established goals," according to the Web site of the U.S. Green Building Council.
Best of all, healthy school buildings can be built for the same (or less) than a conventional school building and operated at a savings. For example, "the low-energy design of Clackamas High School will save the school district $69,000 per year in energy costs." The construction cost of $117 per square foot was "significantly lower than that of a typical high school, which averages $135 to $145 per square foot."
At a meeting on February 22 (audio / video), representatives of the Madison Metropolitan School District presented some data [820K pdf | html (click the slide to advance to the next screen)] which they claimed showed that their middle school math series, Connected Mathematics Project, was responsible for some dramatic gains in student learning. There was data on the percent of students passing algebra by the end of ninth grade and data from the state eighth grade math test for eight years. Let us look at the test data in a bit more detail.
All that was presented was data from MMSD and there was a very sharp rise in the percent of students scoring at the advanced and proficient level in the last three years. To see if something was responsible for this other than an actual rise in scores consider not only the the Madison data but the corresponding data for the State of Wisconsin.
The numbers will be the percent of students who scored advanced or proficient by the criteria used that year. The numbers for Madison are slightly different than those presented since the total number of students who took the test was used to find the percent in the MMSD presented data, and what is given here is the percent of all students who reached these two levels. Since this is a comparative study, either way could have been used. I think it is unlikely that those not tested would have had the same overall results that those tested had, which is why I did not figure out the State results using this modification. When we get to scores by racial groups, the data presented by MMSD did not use the correction they did with all students ( All 8th grade students in both cases)
MMSD
Wisconsin
Oct 97
40
30
Feb 99
45
42
Feb 00
47
42
Feb 01
44
39
Feb 02
48
44
Nov 02
72
73
Nov 03
60
65
Nov 04
71
72
This is not a picture of a program which is remarkably successful. We went from a district which was above the State average to one with scores at best at the State average. The State Test was changed from a nationally normed test to one written just for Wisconsin, and the different levels were set without a national norm. That is what caused the dramatic rise from February 2002 to November 2002. It was not that all of the Middle Schools were now using Connected Mathematics Project, which was the reason given at the meeting for these increases.
It is worth looking at a breakdown by racial groups to see if there is something going on there. The formats will be the same as above.
Hispanics
MMSD
Wisconsin
Oct 97
19
11
Feb 99
25
17
Feb 00
29
18
Feb 01
21
15
Feb 02
25
17
Nov 02
48
46
Nov 03
37
38
Nov 04
50
49
Black (Not of Hispanic Origin)
MMSD
Wisconsin
Oct 97
8
5
Feb 99
10
7
Feb 00
11
7
Feb 01
8
6
Feb 02
13
7
Nov 02
44
30
Nov 03
29
24
Nov 04
39
29
Asian
MMSD
Wisconsin
Oct 97
25
22
Feb 99
36
31
Feb 00
35
33
Feb 01
36
29
Feb 02
41
31
Nov 02
65
68
Nov 03
55
53
Nov 04
73
77
White
MMSD
Wisconsin
Oct 97
54
35
Feb 99
59
48
Feb 00
60
47
Feb 01
58
48
Feb 02
62
51
Nov 02
86
81
Nov 03
78
73
Nov 04
88
81
I see nothing in the demography by race which supports the claim that Connected Mathematics Project has been responsible for remarkable gains. I do see a lack of knowledge in how to read, understand and present data which should concern everyone in Madison who cares about public education. The School Board is owed an explanation for this misleading presentation. I wonder about the presentations to the School Board. Have they been as misleading as those given at this public meeting?
More MMSD Administrators in 2004-2005 than in 1998-1999?
Early 2005, School Board members received a spreadsheet that summarized administrative contracts from 1998-1999 through plans for 2005-2006. That spreadsheet showed 147 administrative contracts in the 1998-1999 school year and 149.65 administrative contracts planned for 2005-2006. In 2003-2004 the total administrative contract budget for wages and benefits was approximately $15.1 million ($100,000 average wage and benefit per administrative contract). This information differs from the information posted in a recent blog by Board President Carol Carstensen (15 central administrators vs. 10.8), and both these sets of numbers differ from what is reported to DPI.
I feel the School Board needs to consider definitions:
a) how are administrative personnel defined - activity, contract, b) how does the board want information about personnel who perform administrative tasks summarized and presented to them, c) what is the number of personnel doing various administrative tasks, d) how has this number and cost (wages and benefits) changed over time - over 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, e) how are these positions funded?
A bigger picture question, though, seems to me to be: what will happen to MMSD's administrative functions if 5%, 10%, 20% are cut? The public in the $100 budget process zeroed in on cutting administration, which was no surprise to MMSD's administration. However, telling us that "x" number of positions have been cut and will be cut does not give the type of information the public can use to understand what the loss is to the District's ability to function and to support educational services. Further, recent board discussions were over a February deadline date to give extension of administrative contracts where MMSD administrators felt this was a firm date. If the date can be flexible, don't Board members want to keep the flexibility? If the board does not do this, aren't they giving the appearance to the Madison community that the School Board values administrators more than teachers? I don't feel they do.
Clearly, an organization needs administrative functions to operate appropriately. I don't think that's the issue in anyone's mind. It's not for me anyway. I simply would like Madison's School Board to have the flexibility to make the decisions the board feels are in the best interest of the school district when the time comes to make budget cuts.
The State of WI's inability to address financing public education has put many school districts in the position of having to beg for funding via referendums and sadly for our children, this is not changing anytime soon. In the meantime, numbers need to be clear, consistent and understandable as do the risks and tradeoffs. I'd suggest starting with agreed upon definitions.
President to School Board: New ideas are OK, sometimes...
Carol Carstensen, President of the Madison School Board, announced in a recent letter to The Capital Times that new ideas are OK with her, so long as they are not illegal, in violation of contracts, can save money and are capable of implementation. School Board ideas must be feasible
The Madison district will spend $37M on health insurance for its employees this year. That's about 10% of the operating budget. The district also foresees an $8M gap between its expenses and revenues for 2006-07.
Looking for ways to provide high quality health insurance for the teachers at lower costs would seem like a good idea in these circumstances. The district had even set the stage for this new idea by forming a task force with the teachers union to explore options for different coverage.
However, Ms. Carstensen had zero interest in this new idea. Not one Board meeting on the topic, not one instruction to the district's representatives. She skipped the two meetings of the task force. When the union announced that the talks were over, she had no comment.
Illegal? In violation of contracts? Not a good way to save money? Impossible to implement? Which of the four tests did the health insurance task force fail?
Dear Editor: As soon as I saw my words quoted in boldface in the Feb. 21 Capital Times article about the school budget, I knew that someone would make the comments in the following day's Sound Off about the need for new School Board members.
I think new ideas and fresh perspectives are invaluable. However, there are a few qualifications: The ideas must not violate any laws or contractual agreements, they should actually save money, and they must be ones we can implement.
I can come up with a new idea of how to save money on transportation: outfit the buses with pedals for every seat and have the students provide some of the energy needed to move the bus, both reducing use of gasoline and providing kids with exercise. However, the plan is not very feasible, at least in the short term. I can also buy lottery tickets, but that approach is not very reliable.
A few additional facts:
The school district has been under revenue caps, and reducing expenditures, for the last 13 years.
• The city and county were faced with significant problems as they kept their budget increases to around 4 percent.
• The school district's budget increase was 2.5 percent (and the school district's tax levy actually decreased by $2 million).
One final qualification: Claiming the problem doesn't exist isn't a new idea.
What's not to like about funding new community programs?
On March 6, the Madison Board of Education will vote on Johnny Winston Jr.'s proposal for the district to spend approximately $200,000 this year on four community programs. Great Opportunity Needs Your Support
Sounds good. These are all good programs run by good people with good ideas and goals.
The question before the board, however, is not whether we like the programs or think that they would use our funds for good purposes. The question is whether the district should commit these dollars from this budget to these community programs at this time.
I think that the answer is no.
Fiscal policy problem:"These dollars" are the dollars remaining in the Reserve for Contingencies in our budget for "community programs and services" budget, aka Fund 80. Three months remain in our fiscal year. It is good fiscal policy to have money in reserve for emergencies. If an organization must spend its reserve, it is good fiscal policy to use the funds for one-time costs, rather than to create new programs that will need funds again the next year. It is bad fiscal policy to spend all of the Reserve for Contingencies on new programs. We will have no capacity to deal with emergencies in the remainder of the fiscal year if we make this commitment. The same programs will add $208,000 to next year's budget for Fund 80 (the basic allotment to each program plus 4.1% for increases in their costs).
Budget management problem:"This budget"--Fund 80--is a budget of more than $8M in local property taxes that the board collected for community services and programs in 2005-06. The board also oversees the much larger operating budget. For this school year, the local tax portion of the operating budget is about $294M.
Think of the operating budget as a checking account funded by local taxpayer contributions. Unless voters pass an operating budget referendum, the dollars in the budget from taxes for the next school year will increase by a very small percentage. That's what "revenue limits" do to the operating budget.
Think of the community service budget as a credit card paid off by local taxpayers. The board can spend to the maximum limit each year. It can also raise the maximum for next year by passing a bigger Fund 80 budget. No messy referendum votes needed for this budget.
Back to Mr. Winston's proposal. Tax payers gave the board $302M to spend in 2005-06 ($294M in our checking account and $8M in a line of credit). The board will spend the entire $302M. Next year it will need more for both budgets because costs of current services and programs on both sides will go up.
Good budget management would---at the very least---require holding the credit card expenses below the maximum limit. Bad budget management would be spending to the max on the credit card. Worse budget management would be this proposal, increasing expenses beyond the max for next year.
Selection process problems: If the board believes that community programs are necessary complements to the district's school-based programs, it should identify the unmet needs of our students and openly seek proposals from providers. There was no identification of unmet needs and no open competition in this case. "These communitiy programs" are programs that Mr. Winston asked to submit proposals for funding.
The Community Service Fund (known for its state accounting code, Fund 80) is not under the revenue cap; these services are funded by a combination of fees and a separate portion of the tax levy. Madison School Community Recreation (MSCR) represents more than 80% of these expenditures. Some of the MSCR programs are: adult exercise programs, youth swimming classes, summer day camp, adult sports leagues, and after school programming at the elementary and middle schools.
FEBRUARY 20th MEETINGS:
5 p.m. Special Board Meeting, executive session - expulsions
6 p.m. Finance and Operations Committee (Johnny Winston, Jr., chair):
5-year budget forecast shows that the district will need to make cuts of $8 million for next year, and by 2010-11 the 5 years of cuts will total $38 million. One caveat this is based on the assumption that current laws continue.
The Committee heard proposals from community agencies for after school activities that would be funded from unallocated money in the Community Service fund (Fund 80). The 4 community agencies are: WiCATY (WI Center for Academically Talented Youth), GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network), Kajsiab House, and the Youth Empowerment Academy. The Committee supported having these proposals go to the entire Board for funding.
7 p.m. Partnerships Committee (Lawrie Kobza, chair)
The Committee considered a policy governing gifts/donations to support activities during and/or after school; the policy will cover gifts of $10,000 or more and directs the Superintendent to review the impact of such a gift on the district to make a determination whether the district should accept it. This policy was approved by the Committee and will be on the Board’s agenda on March 6.
Future Meetings:
February 27:
5:00 p.m. Legislative Committee (Ruth Robarts, chair) legislation that would increase the number of administrators who could be designated “at-will” employees; requirements for school district reports; requiring developers to pay fees to support the building of new schools; newly proposed TABOR amendment.
5:45 p.m. Special Board Meeting: the Board will respond to the Swan Creek petition our original agreement with the Oregon School District requires both districts to reject any such petition; discussion of the East Area Task Force recommendations; the Task Force will have a chance to talk with the Board; discussion about future uses of the Doyle Building; administrator contracts.
March 6:
5 p.m. Performance & Achievement Committee (Shwaw Vang, chair) report on 2005 summer school and proposals for the 2006 summer school.
6 p.m. Special Board Meeting: report from the administration on possible land acquisition in Fitchburg and a look at long term use of space added to Leopold.
7:15 p.m. Regular Board Meeting
N.B. I spent most of Tuesday, Feb. 21 at the Capitol with Joe Quick (the district’s legislative liaison) lobbying our Dane County legislators to oppose the latest TABOR proposal. (Since the authors of TABOR seem only concerned about taxpayers, I have started referring to our students as “pre-taxpayers.”)
Carol
Carol Carstensen, President
Madison School Board
"Until lions have their own historians, the hunters will always be glorified." - African Proverb
Last week, Madison Teachers Inc. announced it would not reopen contract negotiations following a hollow attempt to study health insurance alternatives.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but anyone who suggests the Joint Committee on Health Insurance Issues conducted a fair or comprehensive review needs to get checked out by a doctor.
The task force’s inaction is a victory for John Matthews, MTI’s executive director and board member Wisconsin Physicians Service.
Losers include open government, school officials, taxpayers and young teachers in need of a raise.
From its start, the task force, comprised of three members each from MTI and the district, seemed to dodge not only its mission but scrutiny.
Hoping to meet secretly until Isthmus raised legal questions, the committee convened twice for a total of four hours – one hour each for insurance companies to pitch proposals.
No discussion to compare proposals. No discussion about potential cost savings. No discussion about problems with WPS, such as the high number of complaints filed by its subscribers.
Case closed. Never did the task force conduct a “study” and issue a “report” of its “findings,” as required by last year’s contract settlement.
Conspiracy theorists point to the power of Matthews – both in getting the district to play dead and in squelching any questions about conflicts of interest based on, as reported last week, his $13,000 income from WPS.
While the school board is often accused of dodging tough issues, this tops the list. A change in insurance could have resulted in higher pay for teachers and, some argue, could save the district millions in the long run.
Kerry Berns, a resource teacher for talented and gifted students in Madison schools, is worried about the push to group students of all abilities in the same classrooms.
“I hope we can slow down, make a comprehensive plan, [and] start training all teachers in a systematic way” in the teaching methods known as “differentiation,” Berns told the Madison school board earlier this month. These are critical, she says, if students of mixed abilities are expected to learn in “heterogeneous” classrooms.
“Some teachers come about it very naturally,” Berns noted. “For some teachers, it’s a very long haul.”
Following the backlash over West High School replacing more than a dozen electives with a single core curriculum for tenth grade English, a school board committee has met twice to hear about the district’s efforts to expand heterogeneous classes.
The school board’s role in the matter is unclear, even to its members. Bill Keys told colleagues it’s “wholly inappropriate” for them to be “choosing or investigating curriculum issues.”
Superintendent Art Rainwater told board members that as “more and more” departments make changes to eliminate “dead-end” classes through increased use of heterogeneous classes, his staff needs guidance in form of “a policy decision” from the board. If the board doesn’t change course, such efforts, Rainwater said, will likely be a “major direction” of the district’s future.
Most elementary and middle schools long ago abandoned “tracking” students based on test scores or prior grades. Now some question whether the “one size fits all” model is best for high schools.
In summarizing the research, Adam Gamoran, director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, urged board members to keep a close eye on failure rates and standardized test scores. [video from the recent performance and Achievement meetings: 1/30/20062/13/2006]
Heterogeneous classes aren’t a panacea, but Gamoran said grouping kids by ability has in the past led to lower-tracked classes with weaker teachers, lower standards and higher percentages of minorities.
Others share this same concern.
“While we can tell kids and we can tell each other that…we’re all the same, we’re all equal, separateness doesn’t communicate equality, and it doesn’t produce equality,” said Amanda Bell, a sixth grade teacher at Sherman Middle School. Indeed, she told the board, ability-grouping was “feeding into racism.”
But Jeff Henriques, a member of the group Madison United for Academic Excellence, told the board high-achieving students deserve to be challenged in classrooms of like-minded students. And Lucy Mathiak, who is challenging incumbent Juan Jose Lopez in April’s school board election, says heterogeneous classes aren’t the only solution to racial disparities in classes.
“You want to desegregate [advanced placement] and upper level classes?” Mathiak asked board members. “Then start desegregating the guidance system,” which she says often encourages minority students to take less challenging courses.
With scientific expertise sweeping the globe, the next generation of American scientists and engineers are going to face unprecedented competition, and college is too late to begin preparing them for it, according to the National Science Board.
The board released its “Science and Engineering Indicators, 2006″[pdf] report Thursday. The report, which focused on elementary and secondary education, cast a foreboding tone. According to the report, while the scores of American students on national math assessments have risen slightly in recent years, the same cannot be said for science. According to the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics Science Study , fourth and eighth graders in the United States performed better in math and science than the international average of industrial nations, but improvement since 1995 was modest for eighth graders, and fourth graders took a slight step backward.
Even a fourth grade student who is getting his or her first exposure to science might already be left in the starting blocks, according to Jo Ann Vasquez, a National Science Board member and the lead author of the report. “[Kids] have to get science by third grade,” she said, “or that wonderment disappears.”
Wouldn't the proper way to answer the question of why Blacks and Hispanics are lagging behind Whites and Asians be to conduct research on the factors that may be causing the discrepancies and remedy those rather than setting up a phony group of gifted students whose only gift may be that they have a teacher who holds self-esteem and looking diverse in higher regard than children actually learning anything?
With such unscientific inquiry, it is no wonder more and more parents are homeschooling or turning to private schools to educate their children. I foresee that the more schools substitute "diversity" for education, the more parents will take flight from the public schools.
In a report published by the Educational Research Service titled, Thinking Differently: Recommendations for 21st Century School Board/Superintendent Leadership, Governance, and Teamwork for High Student Achievement, recommended that school districts can effectively raise student achievement with strong leadership and teamwork from the school board and superintendent.
The study was supported by a Ford Foundation grant to the New England School Development Council.
The authors point to a new way of thinking:
Strong, collaborative leadership by local school boards and school superintendents is a key cornerstone of the foundation for high student achievement. That leadership is essential to forming a community vision for children, crafting long-range goals and plans for raising the achievement of every child, improving the professional development and status of teachers and other staff, and ensuring that the guidance, support, and resources needed for success are available.
If this country is serious about improving student achievement and maximizing the development of all of its children, then local educational leadership teams – superintendents and school board members – must work cooperatively and collaboratively to mobilize their communities to get the job done!
How does a board lead? With vision, structure, accountability, advocacy, and unity – to be used as criteria for continuous development and self-evaluation of a team’s leadership and governance.
Joanne Jacobs rounds up recent articles about teacher compensation:
The "qualified teacher" shortage is a myth, writes Michael Podgursky in the spring Education Next. Most public schools have enough money to recruit and retain competent teachers -- if they could raise pay for teachers with high-demand skills, such as physics and chemistry, without having to pay more for every teacher.
Podgursky compared teacher pay in low-poverty public schools with non-religious private schools. Private school teachers averaged 80 percent of the pay of public teachers with affluent students.
Paul Peterson observes that teacher pay systems reward the "credentialed careerist," not necessarily the most talented teachers.
Great Expectations critiques the cost-effectiveness of national board certification of teachers, suggesting a better system would look at the value added by exceptional teachers.
Middle School Design Team: Final Report to the Superintendent
The Madison schools middle school curriculum design team's final report is now available [1.7MB pdf]. Topics addressed include:
Math
Music
Art
World Languages
Health/Family and Consumer Education
Information and Technology Literacy
Student Services
The report closed with a discussion of the Future Areas for Discussion:
The Design Team had a very specific charge. As the team met, it quickly became apparent that additional areas that pertain to middle level education are ripe for discussion. The final recommendation from the team includes a wish to continue this discussion over time. The areas that are of interest include:
K-8 model
Scheduling around part-time staff. Sharing staff.
Distance Learning, i.e. district on-line course offerings
Mental health and severe behavioral issues
Alternative educational settings
Bus safety
Regular articulation meetings between middle and high school staff in all content areas
Regular articulation meetings between middle and high schools among student
services staff to increase communication and develop a set of agreed upon
expectations and practices regarding 8th to 9th transition.
Advisories
Safety issues, i.e. bullying, climate
City-wide projects and competitions
Revisit the juxtaposition of the MMSD Educational Framework, the Equity Framework, the MMSD Middle School Common Expectations, and the current middle school models used in MMSD.
The first Toolbox provided the most powerful argument by far for getting more high school students into challenging courses, my favorite reporting topic. Using data from a study of 8,700 young Americans, it showed that students whose high schools had given them an intense academic experience -- such as a heavy load of English courses or advanced math or Advanced Placement -- were more likely to graduate from college. It has been frequently cited by high school principals, college admissions directors and anyone else who cared about giving more choices in life to more students, particularly those from low-income and minority families.
The new Toolbox is 193 pages [pdf] of dense statistics, obscure footnotes and a number of insightful and surprising assessments of the intricacies of getting a college degree in America. It confirms the lessons of the old Toolbox using a study of 8,900 students who were in 12th grade in 1992, 10 years after the first group. But it goes much further, prying open the American higher education system and revealing the choices that are most likely to get the least promising students a bachelor's degree.
Toward the end of the report, Adelman offers seven tips. I call them the "College Completion Cliff Notes." They are vintage Adelman, very un-government-report-like, so I will finish by just quoting them in full:
"1. Just because you say you will continue your education after high school and earn a college credential doesn't make it happen. Wishing doesn't do it; preparation does! So . . .
"2. Take the challenging course work in high school, and don't let anyone scare you away from it. Funny thing about it, but you learn what you study, so if you take up these challenges, your test scores will inevitably be better (if you are worried about that). If you cannot find the challenge in the school's offerings, point out where it is available on-line, and see if you can get it that way. There are very respectable Web sites offering full courses in precalculus, introductory physics, humanities, music theory, and computer programming, for example.
"3. Read like crazy! Expand your language space! Language is power! You will have a lot less trouble in understanding math problems, biology textbooks, or historical documents you locate on the Web. Chances are you won't be wasting precious credit hours on remedial courses in higher education.
"4. If you don't see it now, you will see it in higher education: The world has gone quantitative: business (obviously), geography, criminal justice, history, allied health fields -- a full range of disciplines and job tasks tells you why math requirements are not just some abstract school exercise. So come out of high school with more than Algebra 2, making sure to include math in your senior year course work, and when you enter higher education, put at least one college-level math course under your belt in the first year -- no matter what your eventual major.
"5. When you start to think seriously about postsecondary options, log on to college and community college Web sites and look not so much for what they tell you of how wonderful life is at Old Siwash, but what they show you of the kinds of assignments and examination questions given in major gateway courses you will probably take. If you do not see these indications of what to expect, push! Ask the schools for it! These assignments and questions are better than SAT or ACT preparation manuals in terms of what you need to complete degrees.
"6. See if your nearest community college has a dual-enrollment agreement with your school system, allowing you to take significant general education or introductory occupational courses for credit while you are still in high school. Use a summer term or part of your senior year to take advantage, and aim to enter higher education with at least six credits earned this way -- preferably more.
"7. You are ultimately responsible for success in education. You are the principal actor. The power is yours. Seize the day -- or lose it!"
MTI has just informed the district that it will not agree to reopen negotiations to consider changes to health insurance. If the union had agreed to reopen negotiations on this point, the agreement was that any savings that resulted from a change in health insurance options would be used to increase salaries for staff.
FEBRUARY 13th MEETINGS:
5 p.m. Special Board Meeting Members of the Memorial/West Task Force spoke with the Board about their recommendations and how they arrived at them. They emphasized that they did not reach their recommendation (to build a new school and add on to Leopold) easily or quickly. It was only exhausting all other approaches that they came to agreement that the only truly long range solution involved building.
The Board then discussed the Memorial/West Task Force recommendation to build a new school on the far west side and to build an addition onto Leopold (known as the build-build approach). The Board decided not to put the issue on the April ballot but to provide more time for discussion and to look at the options if the community doesn’t support the build recommendation. The Board directed the administration to come back with information about the possibility of finding land in Fitchburg to build on and also to show how an addition to Leopold is necessary and would improve the current building.
FUTURE MEETINGS:
February 20:
5 p.m. Special Board Meeting, executive session - expulsions
6 p.m. Finance and Operations Committee (Johnny Winston, Jr., chair) 5-year budget forecast; proposals from community agencies for after school activities funded through the Community Service fund (Fund 80).
7 p.m. Partnerships Committee (Lawrie Kobza, chair) continued discussion about a policy governing gifts/funds to support activities during and/or after school.
February 27:
5:00 p.m. Legislative Committee (Ruth Robarts, chair) legislation that would increase the number of administrators who could be designated “at-will” employees; requirements for school district reports; requiring developers to pay fees to support the building of new schools; newly proposed TABOR-like amendment.
6 p.m. Special Board Meeting: discussion of the East Area Task Force recommendations; the Task Force will have a chance to talk with the Board at the start of the meeting; the Board will respond to the Swan Creek petition; discussion about future uses of the Doyle Building; administrator contracts.
Stay warm,
Carol
Carol Carstensen, President
Madison School Board
"Until lions have their own historians, the hunters will always be glorified." - African Proverb
School officials said they are weighing several options, including encouraging more non-honors or non-AP students to enroll in Algebra II by sophomore year instead of participating in an easier, two-year Algebra I course; financing the PSAT for sophomores and perhaps freshmen; and, on a more basic level, adding more testing sites within the county so that students can take the exam in a comfortable setting without having to commute long distances.
Want to know whether the Madison schools get a good health insurance deal for teachers? Forget it.
Most of the $37M that the Madison school district will spend this year for employee health insurance goes to the cost for covering our teachers and their families. That's about 10% of the total annual budget.
I support high quality health insurance for all of our employees. As a school board member, I also have a duty to ensure that all district dollars are spent wisely. I should know whether the district gets the best coverage that it can for teachers at the best cost that it can find. I cannot make good decisions regarding future contract negotiations or future operating budget referendums without this kind of information.
In nine years of service on the Madison school board, I have learned little in executive sessions on negotiations that would help me answer the basic question: are we getting a good deal on health insurance for teachers? When the district and Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI) agreed to form a joint task force that would publicly consider health insurance options, I hoped that open competition among providers would help me understand how the current commitments to Wisconsin Physicians Services and Group Health Cooperative compare to other options. I had hoped that the public would also learn something about how effectively the district negotiates over the cost of health insurance.
Forget it. The district and the union held two meetings on this topic and invited two insurance companies, in addition to the current providers, to make proposals. The union took an internal poll and decided to end the discussions. Teachers bar shift in health coverage
Business as usual continues. No direction from the board regarding the task force is one of many reasons that the public and the school board are no better informed as the result of creating the task force.
Madison's teachers union said Friday it will not agree to reopen its contract with the School District to renegotiate health-care benefits, dashing hopes the district could find cheaper coverage.
A joint committee of district and union representatives has been studying rising health- care costs, but both sides had to agree to reopen the 2005-07 contract to take any action. Either way, officials say taxpayers would not have seen savings, at least not in the short term.
John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., said a strong majority of union members like the coverage they have and don't want to jeopardize it, even though any savings would have gone to higher salaries.
"Members of MTI have elected to have a higher quality insurance rather than higher wages, and that's their choice," he said.
By Doug Erickson, Wisconsin State Journal, February 18, 2006
derickson@madison.com
The district is contractually obligated to give teachers a 3.98 percent total package increase in salaries and benefits in 2006- 07. It's largely the union's decision how it spends that pot of money.
While cheaper health insurance would have shifted more of the increase to salaries, the bottom line for taxpayers would not have changed.
Down the road, district officials say cheaper insurance might give them more spending flexibility, but they note that a state law called the qualified economic offer, or QEO, requires that districts provide annual total package increases of at least 3.8 percent to avoid union arbitration.
"I think the misperception out there is that there's going to be this huge windfall of savings to the district, which isn't going to happen," said Bob Nadler, the district's human resources director. "Most of what we save is going to go back into salaries."
Still, district officials sought to reopen the contract, saying higher wages would make it easier to retain and recruit high-quality employees, particularly much-sought-after minority teachers.
Superintendent Art Rainwater said Friday he was disappointed by the union's decision. While cheaper insurance is not a panacea for budget problems, "certainly, over the long haul, there could be savings to the district," he said.
The Madison School District spends $39.7 million annually on health insurance for about 4,000 eligible employees, according to chief negotiator Bob Butler.
Of MTI-represented members who enroll in health-care plans, slightly more than half choose a health maintenance organization (HMO) offered by Group Health Cooperative. The rest choose a preferred provider organization (PPO) offered by Wisconsin Physicians Service (WPS).
PPO enrollees have freedom to go outside the regular physician network for care and need no referrals to see specialists, although they pay higher co- pays to do so. The PPO option is more expensive per enrollee for the district.
HMO enrollees have fewer out-of-pocket expenses but generally must stay within a provider network. The district hopes more teachers will move toward HMO coverage, and that has been happening.
However, Matthews said that in a survey of members, 74 percent of teachers who responded ranked as "most important" the right to self- referral and the ability to select their physicians and clinics.
Critics contend Matthews has a conflict of interest because he's a paid member of the WPS board of directors. Matthews pointed to the survey results Friday. "The members speak for the union, not me."
According to the state Office of the Insurance Commissioner, Matthews was paid $13,000 as a WPS director in 2004, the most recent year on file.
Matthews stressed that in the last 25 years union members have assumed more of the financial burden to keep WPS coverage, agreeing to a deductible and co-pays for prescriptions.
The union's unwillingness to reopen the contract was expected by critics. Don Severson, founder of the watchdog group Active Citizens for Education, said he never expected the joint committee to amount to much.
"This whole exercise was a cosmetic, public relations approach to make it appear as if the district is trying to do something," he said.
Severson said many community members think Madison teachers have a "Cadillac" health-care plan. That doesn't necessarily mean teachers must sacrifice benefits to save money, but the union should at least be willing to bid contracts competitively, he said.
Matthews said he has yet to find an insurance carrier able to provide the same services as WPS at a cheaper price. Although the joint committee evaluated proposals from two carriers besides WPS and GHC, the two additional carriers submitted incomplete information, making a comparative analysis impossible, he said.
District officials say they think savings are possible, although only if teachers agree to give up some of the flexibility and coverage they now enjoy.
School Board member Ruth Robarts faulted the joint committee for seeking proposals from only two additional insurance companies.
"The district has done really nothing to seriously examine objectively and comprehensively the choices that might be out there," she said.
If nothing is expected of a man, he finds that expectation hard to contradict.
Frederick Douglas
The converse of what Frederick Douglas learned from his life experience has been tested and verified by educational researchers.
Research in Chicago schools looked at what happens when teachers expect more of students. In other words, if teachers expect much of students, are those expectations affirmed? The answer is "YES."
When students are expected — and supported — to do high quality work and to learn important content, that's exactly what they do.
More to the point, others wonder: Is the Gates Foundation making the right calls? The early results of its high school reinvention efforts--with many foundation-backed schools now in their fourth year of existence--are mixed at best. Outside researchers hired by Gates have found "positive cultures" at the new and redesigned schools but raise serious questions about such issues as the teacher burnout, attendance, and the quality of math instruction.
Particularly troublesome has been the effort to transform existing high schools rather than start from scratch. "Improving struggling schools remains a challenge," admits Vander Ark. Indeed, the foundation's own studies show that these restructured schools are often bogged down in their early years with questions about facilities, schedules, and staff. In some cases, says Vander Ark, instead of beginning with structural change, "it may be better to start with curriculum--getting rid of dead-end classes and encouraging students to take more challenging courses--and improving the quality of instruction."
A new Madison School District report that outlines how Lapham Elementary School students could be moved to the Marquette-O'Keeffe school site has rattled parents and staff, but the School Board member who requested the analysis says she doubts it will go anywhere.
As outlined in the report, the move would free up space at Lapham for other school district programs, including Affiliated Alternatives, which currently rents space on Brearly Street, MSCR (Madison School Community Recreation) programs and a day care facility. An early childhood program would remain at Lapham under the scenario sketched out in the report.
By Susan Troller, The Capital Times, February 16, 2006
Lapham, located on the near east side, serves kindergarten through second-grade students. Third- through fifth-graders in the same attendance area go to Marquette.
The summary analysis, dated Feb. 9, was circulated at a Lapham Parent Teacher Group meeting Tuesday night.
"It absolutely was not something we were expecting," said Sally de Broux, co-president of the Lapham PTG.
She noted that although the information included in the report was taken from data organized by a parent-citizen task force that studied issues related to under-enrollment in some east side schools, that group's final recommendations specifically removed school closings from consideration.
A School Board discussion of the East Area Task Force recommendations is scheduled for Feb. 27. De Broux said parents at the PTG meeting felt the report did not comply with the spirit of the task force recommendations and added that it seemed unfair that the report would be circulated before there had been an opportunity to discuss the final recommendations before the School Board.
Lapham parents wondered if the timing of the report was driven by an upcoming deadline for the Affiliated Alternatives program, which rents space for $130,000 per year. Notice for rental agreement termination is due by Feb. 28 of any given year.
The school district did the analysis at the request of School Board member Lawrie Kobza. According to Kobza, she made the request about a month before the task force made its final recommendations.
"I've always said all ideas should be considered," she said. "There should not be certain topics that are off limits.
"In the intervening time, the majority of the board has made it clear where their thoughts are, so I don't really expect anything to come of this," she said.
In addition to the East Area Task Force, the board is considering recommendations about school boundary changes from a west side task force.
On the west side, growth and overcrowding are major issues, while in the East High School boundary areas, underenrollment is a concern. The final recommendations of the west side task force include building a new far-west side elementary school and an addition at Leopold School.
Several board members, including President Carol Carstensen, have said they intend to follow the recommendations of both task forces, which were presented last month.
Alliances Are Unconventional In School Board Primary Race
Madison school politics make for some strange bedfellows.
Take the case of the Feb. 21 primary race for the School Board, in which three candidates are vying for the seat left open by incumbent Bill Keys' decision not to seek re-election.
The marketing manager of a Madison-based biotechnology giant has been endorsed by the powerful Madison teachers union and Progressive Dane. Meanwhile, an activist stay-at-home mom who helped put pink paper locks on legislators' doors to protest concealed carry legislation is aligned with voices in the community that challenge the district's status quo. As a critic of the board's budget, she has struck a chord with some conservatives.
And then there's the unanticipated late entrant into the race who forced the primary to be held, a UW doctoral candidate in medieval history who arrived in Madison last August.
By Susan Troller, The Capital Times, February 16, 2006
What's going on here?
The three newcomers seeking Keys' seat could be characterized as a pair of thoroughbreds -- Maya Cole and Arlene Silveira -- and a dark horse -- Michael J. Kelly.
Factions: In the buzz behind the candidates for School Board, there is a sense that this race is not just about issues affecting students, but also about the overall direction of the district, as driven by individual School Board members and those who support them.
Cole, 43, the activist stay-home mother, has the backing of an increasingly potent group that has criticized the district's fiscal and educational leadership.
With the School Information System blog (www.schoolinfosystem.org) as its informational home base, the group successfully backed board member Lawrie Kobza last year in an upset win over incumbent Bill Clingan. Kobza now backs Cole, as does board member Ruth Robarts, who has clashed frequently with the majority of the current School Board, the administration and Madison Teachers Inc.
If Cole wins and Lucy Mathiak unseats Juan Jose Lopez in another race on the April ballot, then the critics of the status quo would have a majority of board members.
Jim Zellmer, a parent and business owner who developed the School Information System blog, said in an e-mail interview that Cole is the right choice because she "has the right priorities for the district's long-term health: curriculum (high standards, particularly math and science), budget transparency and accountability, and expanding our islands of excellence."
Kelly, a 27-year-old doctoral candidate, has done no campaigning and has not received any public endorsements, but Silveira has a lengthy list of powerful backers. Aside from MTI and Progressive Dane, current board members Carol Carstensen, Bill Keys, Juan Jose Lopez and Johnny Winston Jr. have lined up behind Silveira, as has Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz.
Former School Board President Nan Brien, a local children's advocate, said Silveira, 47, is the best choice in part because of her background as the marketing director of Promega Corp.
"We're in danger of losing the district, primarily due to the fiscal challenges facing public schools," Brien said bluntly. "In these challenging times, I think both the business perspective and the depth of understanding of the district that Arlene would bring to the board is critical. Her background allows her to deal constructively with a broad range of issues and diverse opinions. That's going to be extremely important as the district moves forward."
Build new schools? A key issue that separates Cole and Silveira is their approach to building new schools in the district.
Silveira is a member of a boundary task force that unanimously recommended building a far west side elementary school and an addition at Leopold Elementary to address overcrowding. She advocates a fall referendum, and says she hopes the district will take the time necessary to develop a complete communications plan to explain the research and reasoning behind the recommendations to build.
Silveira's concerns about the impact of overcrowding on students, staff and education were forged during her years as an active Leopold Elementary parent, where capacity has been over 100 percent for years. She was part of the Madison CARES group that supported last year's failed referendum to build a new school on the Leopold site.
Silveira noted that the task force worked long and hard in evaluating option after option to address the overcrowding issues. "For a long-term solution, building was the only answer," she said.
Kelly was still in Boston during last year's referendum and he did not answer questions about his stance on further construction.
Cole supported the Leopold referendum last year, as well as the other referendums on overriding revenue caps for both operational and maintenance budgets, but now she advocates a cautious approach toward new construction.
"I think we need to slow down this whole process," she wrote in an e-mail interview. "Of particular concern is the rush to discuss, with no meeting of the Long Range Planning Committee on the specifics/questions pertaining to budget priorities and questions brought up by the public in those meetings.
"This is a situation where we may be asking the public to make another multi-million-dollar decision without first dealing with our budgeting process. It's putting the cart before the horse. It's a painful process but it has to be done," she said.
Budget concerns: Cole has made budget matters a major focus of her campaign, calling for "a more transparent budget process." What this means, she says, is a more concise budget that clearly outlines where money is coming from and where it is going, and how those decisions reflect the priorities of the district.
"Every time (budget cycle) there is a flurry of painful cuts that seem to pit the interests of one group of parents against another, and that, bottom line, removes money from the classroom where it belongs," she said. "I just don't buy that we're down to the bare bones, but I don't really know because the budget is basically incomprehensible."
Silveira says she prefers to keep any cuts that are necessary to the district's budget as far away from the classroom as possible. But it is an absolute priority, she maintains, to change the funding structure for public schools, noting that the financial cuts required each year to balance the budget are a genuine threat to the district's reputation for excellence.
Kelly, meanwhile, said the district needs to focus on both the future and on fundamentals. He encourages creative thinking, citing a Saturday school that he worked with in the Boston area. Staffed by volunteers, it provided additional instruction for students interested in doing more advanced work.
"It provided a valuable service to the community at no cost to the school system," he said. "We had more volunteers than we needed."
E-mail: stroller@madison.com
A Tale of Two Budgets: the Operating Budget for Madison Schools versus its Budget for Community Programs and Services
Everybody knows that the Madison School district has an operating budget for the district’s educational programs. The district also has a second budget for community programs and services. The second budget is sometimes known as “Fund 80”.
Things to know about the community programs and services budget:
1. “Fund 80” sounds like a source of outside funding, such as federal aid. It’s not. When the district spends funds for community purposes, it accounts for the expenditures under this accounting title.
2. The district cannot raise property taxes for the operating budget more than a small percentage from year to year without passing a referendum. That’s not true of the community program budget. The district can raise taxes for community programs and services by any percentage without going to referendum and it does. In other words, there are two budgets and two taxes.
3. State law does not require the district to spend any revenues in this way. State law allows the district to have a separate budget for community education, training, recreational, cultural or athletic programs
4. State law limits ways that districts can spend community program funds. For example, the district cannot use these funds for the regular instructional program or restrict programs to our students. It cannot fund “activities that provide instruction and supporting services to k-12 pupils” through this tax.
5. 2000-01 was the first year that the legislature exempted community programs from the “revenue limits”. The Madison district spent $3.8M for community programs that year. In 2003-04, the total for this budget rose to $9M. It dropped to $8.2M for 2004-05.
6. Taxes are not the only source of funds for community service programs. There are also fees, grants and sometimes state or federal sources of funds. However, the tax portion of the community service budget has grown from $3.3M in 2001-02 to $7.7M in 2004-05. For that year, residential property taxes provided 93% of the total community service budget.
7. Cutting spending on community service programs does not automatically result in more funds to spend on schools and programs through the operating budget. It could result in some reduction of a homeowner’s annual taxes for schools. The district would need to cut on the community service side and win a referendum to exceed the revenue limits on the operating budget in order to turn a cut in community service spending into a gain for the operating budget.
Moving Lapham to Marquette; Affiliated Programs to Lapham
The Lapham/Marquette PTG e-mailed the following to members today:
The Lapham/Marquette PTG will meet this evening from 6:30 - 8pm in the Marquette LMC. Childcare will be available.
Following are agenda items (not necessarily in this order):
1) Preschool Survey preliminary results
2) MMSD's Feb. 9th executive summary for Lapham School summarizing the impacts of moving Lapham to Marquette and moving the Alternative Affiliated Programs into Lapham. (So, they finally said it. How will we respond?)
WisPolitics hosted a recent Forum for GOP candidates for governor. Incumbent governor Jim Doyle has agreed to appear at a future forum, which I will link to when that occurs. Both GOP candidates addressed school funding, to some degree. Scott Walker said that he supported 2/3 state funding, but that it was not a "blank check". Mark Green said that given the state's structural deficit, he could not commit to maintain the 2/3's state funding.
By Invitation Only: How the MMSD-MTI Health Insurance Task Force Limited Its Options
In June of 2005, when the majority of the Madison School Board approved the two-year collective bargaining agreement with the teachers union, the agreement included a task force to study and make recommendations on possible changes in health insurance coverage for the teachers, the majority of the district's employees. Task force members would be the superintendent and his appointees and John Matthews, exuective director of Madison Teachers,Inc. (MTI) and his appointees. They were to issue a report no later than February 15, 2006.
From the beginning, the task force provision was a great deal for the teachers union. It was risk-free. If the parties could identify health insurance savings, the savings would go directly to increase teacher wages during 2006-07. The parties would re-open the contract to switch dollars from this important fringe benefit to wages. If not, the teachers would keep the current coverage and current wages.
A gain for the district was not so easy to identify. Superintendent Art Rainwater talked about the potential health insurance savings as a benefit in future negotiations. Lowering health insurance costs during 2006-07 would allow the district to continue high quality health insurance coverage for its teachers (as we should) and go into future negotiations with a reduced base for health insurance costs. With health insurance costs for all employees running at about $35M per year, any longterm reduction would help the board redirect significant dollars to school programs and staff.
If the task force had used the year to take a comprehensive, objective look at health insurance alternatives for the teachers, the school board might expect an important report this week. It would tell the board how dollars currently going to health insurance could be used for wage increase at no loss in quality of care for district employees. I don't expect anything like that because we have not seen a serious effort to seek out alternative insurance proposals and evaluate them and the board has exercised no oversight or direction.
The task force has met twice at MTI headquarters, on January 11 and January 25. It did not solicit a wide range of proposals for health insurance for the teachers.
Instead, the task force invited the current providers, Wisconsin Physicians Services and Group Health Cooperative, plus Dean Care and Unity to make presentations. They did not invite Alliant (whose insurance is good enough for MMSD administrators and the custodial union), Physicians Plus (a very competitive local provider with a doctors' network that overlaps the current providers), the State Health Plan (open to school districts) or WEA-IT (a company associated with the Wisconsin Education Associations Council). John Matthews, who continues to serve on the Board of Directors for WPS, did most of the questioning of the insurance companies at the task force meetings. The gist of his questions for Dean Care and Unity were whether they could provide what WPS currently provides, according to him.
The task force report is due in two days. The board has not met once during the year to discuss any aspect of the task force or its goals. The only information that the board has received in a copy of a memo from Human Resources Director Bob Nadler to Art Rainwater, dated February 7.
According to the memo, the district is "ready and willing to reopen the (collective bargaining) agreement if MTI decides to do so". MTI is surveying its members. [memo: 93K PDF]
A note from Superintendent Art Rainwater to the Madison Board of Education on 2006 Referendum scheduling:
At Carol's request we have prepared an analysis of the possible dates to seek referendum approval for one or more new facilities. The analysis includes our view of the positives and negatives of three dates: April 06, June 06 and September 06
A resolution for a referendum will go before the Madison school board Monday night.
The West-Memorial Task Force has recommended an addition to Leopold and to build a new school on the far west side of the city.
The Long Range Planning Committee chairman said there's not enough time to build a campaign for the April election, but a referendum is inevitable.
"I still believe Madison voters do not understand the need for those new schools," said chairman Bill Keys. "The population has shifted dramatically from the East to West side in terms of raw numbers."
Keys believes the board may push for a fall referendum.
Keys told WISC-TV he wouldn't be around for the final decisions because he plans to retire by then.
The Madison Metropolitan School District is hoping to address issues of overcrowding and future growth. One school board memember says Monday the board will decide whether to once again bring their concerns to the public in a referendum. The issues on that potential refereundum could include a new elementary school on the Linden Park site, operating costs for the school, and an addition a the Leopold Elementary site.
Board member Ruth Robarts believes if the board moves forward with the current plan, voters will likely vote down the referendum.
“All parents want to know which schools are going to be where two, three, five years from now. That involves more than just getting the report from our task forces back and then suddenly going to referendum," she says.
Decisions of this type usually come in two steps...first the vote of whether to hold a referendum, and then how it will be worded. But Robarts says the board has a deadline of February 17th to notify the city, and the public of their desire for a referedum.
What Is The Black Star Project? The Black Star Project is a Chicago-based nonprofit that works around the country to help preschoolers to collegians succeed. The group focuses on low-income black, Hispanic and American Indian students in low-achieving schools.
Problems of school districts that teach Black children and the solutions
These questions were developed in Wisconsin but are universal. Here are nineteen questions that an elected official (School Board, City Council/Town or Village Board, County Board, State Legislature) should be able to address after two budgets, or two years in office, whichever comes first.
Note: Some of the questions are premised upon faulty or erroneous assumptions, or the political view of the questioner. Other questions have no 'correct' answer but the answer should reflect the respondents' views on levels of taxation and redistribution of resources through taxation.
There was a sense of déjà vu when the Madison Metropolitan School Board met Jan. 30 when the schism that fractured it last year – and which appeared to be a key factor in the defeat of a referendum last spring – surfaced again. Four members of the board appear solidly in support of another referendum and two members appear steadfast in their opposition, although the board hasn’t officially acted on the matter.
The possibility of a divided board has already alarmed supporters of a new addition to Leopold Elementary School, who think it will provide additional ammunition to critics.
The discussion was often heated as Ruth Robarts and Lawrie Kobza charged that the board was rushing to a referendum without an adequate long-range plan.
Their stance irritated Juan Jose Lopez, who accused them of “playing politics” with the future of schoolchildren simply because they didn’t like the outcome. “I for one will not sit here and allow you to do that,” he said.
A key disagreement involved the weight accorded the recommendations of the task forces charged with formulating long-range options.
The Memorial/West Task Force endorsed a new school on far west side and an eight-room addition to Leopold.
“If we didn’t like what they said, we should have done it ourselves,” Johnny Winston, Jr. said, noting that it would be “an act of total disrespect” to ignore the recommendations.
No matter how hard they tried, the West/Memorial Task Force simply couldn’t ignore the “800-pound gorilla in the room,” – the need to expand Leopold and construct a new school on the far west side, said Bill Keys.
“It would be wholly inappropriate” to reject their recommendations, he said. “They are the experts” and the board could put “full faith and credit” in their findings.
“The task force did not enter this process with that (new construction) in mind,” Keys said.
But Kobza said overcrowding would be a greater problem in the Memorial and LaFollette attendance districts, based on projected enrollment for 2011. Carstensen said those concerns should have been addressed when the task forces were created and that crowding in the West/Memorial attendance district, particularly at Leopold where students must eat in shifts and classrooms have been jammed in hallways, demanded immediate attention.
“I don’t understand your refusal to build an addition at Leopold,” Keys said.
Carstensen asked Kobza how her long-range planning would differ from the four-month deliberations by the task forces. Carstensen insisted the recommendations of the task forces were a long-range plan and said Kobza’s request appeared to “come a little bit out of left field.”
Carstensen rebuffed charges of rushing to a referendum. Information concerning when a draft resolution must be completed in order to be placed on the ballot in April was simply a realistic timeline to avoid the need to call a special election, if the board approves a referendum.
The fate of students in Swan Creek occupied much of the discussion.
Kozba suggested moving students from the development into adjacent schools and claimed that one option, transferring them to Midvale/Lincoln, had never been seriously considered by the task force. “It would be tight” even if Swan Creek students were moved to Midvale/Lincoln, said Mary Gulbrandsen, chief of staff for the district.
Carstensen said students couldn’t be viewed simply as numbers, and that the attempt to balance enrollments at different schools shouldn’t take precedence over other objectives. The Memorial/West task force came to a similar conclusion. Christensen said parents especially objected to “third level” moves in which their children were transferred to accommodate students from another school.
Robarts questioned whether redevelopment plans for the Ridgewood apartment complex, located adjacent to Leopold, would markedly reduce the number of students. Gulbrandsen reiterated that the district couldn’t consider these factors until redevelopment plans had been officially approved, just as it couldn’t consider students from new developments until those developments had been platted.
Keys said proposals to bus Swan Creek students to other schools involved “gigantic distances” “We have done that to these kids (in the Allied Drive neighborhood) for too long. I wouldn’t want to put that kind of sacrifice on any other kids,” said Lopez.
Four residents of Swan Creek reiterated their desire to stay at Leopold, but said a better option was to construct a separate school in southern Fitchburg, citing a statistic by Gulbrandsenthat 1,000 students in the district lived south of the Beltline.
Wendy Cooper, a member of the task force, said they had considered every option but didn’t think a new school in south Fitchburg was realistic, considering voters’ previous opposition to new buildings. The reluctance of Swan Creek residents to consider moving to Lincon/Midvale largely reflected concern about long bus rides, Cooper said. She said such a shift represented only a temporary solution.
“I do not want to see a mega school for Fitchburg students,” said Renee Hammand, a Swan Creek resident, referring to the approximately 1,100 students that would attend Leopold if an addition was added.
“We cannot fail children again” if another referendum fails, said Deborah Gilbert, another resident of Swan Creek.
Annette Mongomery, a resident of Brynewood, angrily castigated the board for its indecisiveness and said residents of the Fitchburg subdivision were selling their houses because of the uncertainty. Two had already been sold and five residents were waiting to put their houses on the market, she said.
Kobza said the board was treating growth in Fitchburg no differently than in other parts of the district. The boundaries for Leopold should have been redrawn two years ago, she said. And she questioned whether the board’s policy of limiting bus rides to 45 minutes was too restrictive. Bus rides of up to 50 minutes would be acceptable, she said.
More support for school in Fitchburg?
Several members of the Madison Metropolitan School Board appear to be more receptive to building a school in Fitchburg, although there’s little likelihood that this will occur soon.
There have long been complaints that the school board had an unofficial policy of not building outside the city of Madison. The district has denied the charge.
In response to an e-mail inquiry, Ruth Robarts said “population expansion to the south will necessitate a Fitchburg-area school.” Lawrie Kobza said she “would support buying property in Fitchburg for an elementary school site. However, I would want to wait to decide whether the next new school (after the Memorial area school) should be built in Fitchburg or the LaFollette area.”
Board President Carol Carstensen wrote that a new school in Fitchburg “would be several years down the road. My experience is that finding land and then getting agreement on price can take a long time (up to two years) – and then it is another two-plus years to build. I am not ruling out supporting a school in Fitchburg, but that does not solve our immediate problem.”
Robarts and Kobza repeated their call for a long-range plan for the district, beyond the recommendations of the task forces. Kobza wrote that she didn’t think additional study was necessary. “I think we need to put all the pieces that we already have together into a written comprehensive five-year plan for the district.
“My personal feeling is that the timetable for the Leopold area would include immediate redistricting, the purchase of land for a future elementary site and continued evaluation of when that new school should be built, taking into account the growth in other areas of the district.
Robarts repeated her concern that the addition to Leopold would result in an elementary school that would pose educational and safety problems. A short-term solution to overcrowding at Leopold would probably involve moving some students from Swan Creek to Midvale-Lincoln, although not until there was a five-year plan, she wrote.
Kobza believes “there is enough capacity at Midvale/Lincoln to handle the overcrowding at Leopold for the next four to five years.”
Robarts also called for an analysis of “ending the practice of moving students from school to school to affect income levels of the student body.”
She also recommended moving school administrators to underused school buildings, and then leasing or selling the building currently used to house administration offices, and determining whether magnet programs could increase the voluntary movement of students to schools outside their attendance area.
“I believe we must deal with the overcrowding at Leopold first,” Carstensen wrote. Failing to build at Leopold would address overcrowding for no more than three years, she wrote. “Doing something that you know will be inadequate in a few years is not good long-range planning.”
BUDGET FACTOID:
Of the MTI-represented employees in the district, more than 50% take their health insurance with Group Health (the lowest cost of any of the HMO’s).
February 6th MEETINGS :
5 p.m. Finance & Operations Committee (Johnny Winston Jr., chair):
Report on the $100 Budget exercise in January 173 people participated in the exercise; their responses indicated that their highest priorities were: Academic Achievement and Specialized Services (special education, English as a Second Language).
Doug Pearson, in charge of buildings and grounds for the district, gave a presentation explaining that a combination of factors (drought in the Midwest, Hurricane Katrina and increased oil prices) have resulted in a huge increase in construction costs. As an example, when the district built Chavez (2000-01), construction costs were estimated at $85/sq.ft. today the estimate to build a new school is estimated to cost $162/sq.ft. These increases also affect all of the district’s maintenance projects.
6 p.m. Performance & Achievement Committee (Shwaw Vang, chair)
The Committee heard presentations about the elimination of tracking in the West High Biology course (begun in 1997) and in East High Algebra/Trig (started in 2004). In both cases the changes were the result of discussions by the teachers at the school and supported by staff from downtown. Likewise, both reported that they felt that they were serving all students more effectively and that their classes were more representative of the entire student enrollment. The Committee will continue looking at this topic.
7:15 p.m Regular Board Meeting:
Mostly routine business; the Board did approve hiring an architectural firm to plan for work on the East High patio roof.
NEXT WEEK’S MEETING:
February 13 (televised, McDaniels Auditorium)
5 p.m. Special Board Meeting discussion about the recommendations from the Memorial/West Task Force (the East Area Task Force recommendations will be discussed on February 27).
The Board will meet first with the entire Task Force to give them a chance to explain their work and their recommendations. Next there will be Public Appearances. After that there will be a discussion of information about the Doyle Building - possibilities for sale/leasing/remodeling to house alternative programs and costs of moving current staff elsewhere.
The Board will then discuss the Memorial/West Task Force recommendation to build a new school on the far west side and to build an addition onto Leopold. The Board will also have before it the wording for referendum questions. If the Board wants to put the building proposals on the April ballot it must act no later than February 17 (Friday of next week).
FUTURE MEETINGS:
February 20:
5:30 p.m. Finance and Operations Committee (Johnny Winston, Jr., chair) 5-year budget forecast; proposals from community agencies for after school activities.
6:30 p.m. Partnerships Committee (Lawrie Kobza, chair) continued discussion about a policy governing gifts/funds to support activities during and/or after school.
February 27:
5:00 p.m. Legislative Committee (Ruth Robarts, chair) legislation that would increase the number of administrators who could be designated “at-will” employees; requirements for school district reports; requiring developers to pay fees to support the building of new schools.
5:45 p.m. Special Board Meeting: discussion of the East Area Task Force recommendations; the Task Force will have a chance to talk with the Board at the start of the meeting.
Carol
Carol Carstensen, President
Madison School Board
"Until lions have their own historians, the hunters will always be glorified." - African Proverb
Good goals, flawed reasoning: Administration Goes Full Speed Ahead on English 10 at West High
At January and February school board meetings, Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater reported on the administration's plan to go ahead with one English course for all tenth graders at West High School starting in 2006-07. The goal of the plan is to increase academic opportunity for students of color. The mechanism is to teach all students the same curriculum, leaving it up to teachers to "differentiate" their approach and give equal challenge to every student. The school board has taken no action on this plan and does not plan to adopt, modify or otherwise vote on the plan before it is implemented.
I support the goal. I am not convinced, however, that the mechanism is based, as claimed, on the best research. The presentations to the Performance and Achievement Committee have raised my level of doubt.
At the January 30 meeting, the board heard from a University of Wisconsin expert. His published research on the subject of differentiated teaching concluded that more research is needed on this subject. Where the expert found successful differentiated teaching in high schools,the circumstances of the schools were far different from the circumstances at West High School. For example, successful "differentiated" classes occurred in schools where administration could match the skills and motivation of the teachers to the classes and where students vied for spots in the classrooms. We have a staff based on seniority and teacher options within the seniority system and must accept all students at tenth grade level into the program.
We were asked to consider the Biology I/ Advanced Biology I program at West High as a basis for making the change in the English program. In that program, approximately 20 students qualify for the advanced course and all others take Biology I. We were told that taking Biology I (rather than the advanced course) had not prevented a high percentage of West students from becoming National Merit Semi-Finalists. Never mind that the tests used for selecting the semi-finalists do not test science skills. At best, this correlation shows that taking Biology I did not harm the high-scoring students skills and aptitudes in non-science areas.
Two of our teachers made more persuasive arguments for caution in moving to "differentiated" courses. One cited research showing that the teacher training for these courses is a five to ten-year process. The other teacher gave us the factual background necessary to analyze the administration's proposal. That teacher's testimony follows.
Board of Education: Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you at Monday’s meeting. This is the information that was requested by Ms. Robarts.
I strongly support and applaud the efforts of the East Math Department in revising the Algebra/Trigonometry Course. However, I question whether the revision of this course at East HS is a model that will assure the success of the new English 10 course at West HS. These are the reasons for my concerns:
English 10 is a required course designed for 100% of the 10th graders. Alg/Trig is an 11th grade elective that is taken by 38.9% or 169 of the 11th graders. Students not yet ready to take Alg/Trig in 11th grade may take the course in 12th grade as 59 students did this year or if ready, take it earlier as forty-five 10th graders did this year. Essentially the students at East consist of higher 10th graders, middle 11th graders and lower 12th graders. This population does not include the highest or the lowest ability students and thus may make it easier to differentiate than the English 10 class.
The English Department at West may resist requests to skip English 10. At East fifty-four 10th graders skipped ahead to Pre-Calculus.
English 10 replaced as many 15 courses. Algebra/Trig has combined only 2 courses.
There are not other English courses available to 10th graders at West. At East, Advanced Algebra/Analytical Geometry, Integrated Math III, Trigonometry & Topics, & Pre-Calculus are also available as elective courses that cover similar material at differing pace and depth.
The East High course somewhat reflects the population of the school except for the populations of EEN & low-income students. The school has 1839 students. 23% are African American, 8% are Hispanic, 11% are Asian, 57% are white, 42% are low income, 13% are English Language Learners and 22% receive Special Education services. The Algebra/Trig class serves 273 students. 20% are African American, 111% are Hispanic, 10% are Asian, 58% are white, 31% are low income, 11% are English Language Learners and 11% receive Special Education Services.
Potential Cost: It has been stated that the District will allow academically capable students to skip English 10 through the In-Step process. It is not known how many students will access this option, but if we use the fifty-four 10th grade East math students as a possible number of 10th grade English students at West, we face a potentially large expense through the Youth Options program. Students that complete 4 years of English in 3 years could opt to take a UW course each semester at MMSD expense. The current credit cost for two 3-credit courses would be $1760 or for two 4-credit courses the cost would be $2346 per student.
One of the most significant occurrences in public education during my Superintendency has been the "No Child Left Behind Act" (NCLB) which was passed with the intention of changing and improving public education. The act is significant because it is the first time the federal government has inserted itself into determining the quality of K-12 education at the local level. NCLB captures both the best and worst of current educational thought.
The recognition of the importance in understanding our children's learning needs through good academic assessment has been a major positive change. Educators have the best chance for success when we are using academic performance data about each individual child to inform instruction.
MMSD's Enrollment & Capacity Picture: A Perspective
The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) is facing a significant challenge - growth. As a result of that growth - which is not evenly distributed across the district's region - some schools are facing, or will soon be facing, overcrowding. Other schools still continue to see languishing enrollment which calls into question the appropriate future use of their facilities. Two task forces were created to examine these issues, and to recommend up to three options to address them. The task forces were also asked to develop options so as to reduce concentrations of low-income students. This report endeavors to examine how the enrollment picture plays out over the next five years, particularly under the various options proposed by the task forces. Special attention is given here to the West Side task force options due to this author's greater familiarity with them, and his continued maintenance of a model tracking their proposals.
This report [121K PDF] first looks at the proposed options for the West & Memorial areas, and examines how projected enrollment and capacity compare over each of the next five school years. The report will then consider population projections over the next 25 years to try to get some sense of what one may expect as regards future demand for school facilities.
Disclosure, or why am I doing this?
I recently moved to Madison and saw this issue as a way to get involved in the community and to understand "how things work" here.
This particular issue is a complex problem, and therefore a rather interesting one to look at.
I have two children attending MMSD schools, and therefore am especially interested in the well-being of this district, and community.
Once I got started, it's been hard to stop (though my work and family demands have certainly constrained my efforts).
Conclusions
The following preliminary conclusions can be drawn from this analysis:
Elementary Schools
Some slight "tweaking" of the options may be warranted, particularly to address the near-term situation for Chavez.
Middle Schools
Jefferson & Toki are facing overcrowding risks in the next 5-10 years. In that light, particular attention will need to be given to the precise alignment of students attending a new school. If they are all aligned to attend only one of the middle schools, overcrowding will become an even greater risk.
Cherokee's longer-term situation appears all right, but that will definitely depend largely on the level of growth in the Fitchburg area.
Long-Term Outlook
The demographics and growth picture for Madison, and the country, suggest there will be continued increase in elementary school enrollment for some time. The projected increase in enrollment over the next five years does not appear to be a temporary phenomenon that will soon reverse itself
PDF Version for printing [121K PDF] Please contact me at GascoyneP@aol.com if you have questions, or post comments here.
More African-American kids at Morgan Park passed their AP exams in two courses -- English language/composition and European history -- than at any other high school in the nation offering AP courses last year, AP officials said.
The number of Morgan Park students required to achieve that feat was 32 in English language and 26 in European history.
That may not sound like much, but those numbers translate roughly into 1-1/2 classrooms full of kids, all of them testing at college-level standards, and all of them African American -- the racial group most under-represented in AP classrooms across the nation, state and city. Two sections of each course were offered last year at Morgan Park, where the student body is 93 percent African-American.
So the bottom line is that we shouldn't expect much from the federal government. The dilemma for the Board and the community is to find out what our priorities will be for the coming years in Madison.
Although we have been looking at our school budget as a $100 budget cutting exercise, I would like to look at a program already cut by the district.
One elementary school program in particular, the Ready Set Go conferences, have come to my attention repeatedly from both teachers and parents. It was both a commitment by the district to voice the educational expectations of the district and an opportunity for a family to share with the teacher their goals for the child.
Hardest hit was the area of curriculum research and staff development, which was targeted for reduction by 25 groups, followed by the superintendent's office and business services.
Superintendent Art Rainwater said that in the two groups he worked with, "People first, almost without exception, went to any form of administration."
"We will have to take a look at this and reconcile this input to our recommendations," Price said. "This is valuable information."
Even more valuable were the directives administrators received on what not to touch, Price said, adding, "Teacher and pupil services were areas very much protected by the groups."
Providing safe and secure schools ranked highest among participants' individual priorities, followed by academic achievement, minority achievement and specialized services, such as alternative programs and talented and gifted programs.
The MMSD is beginning to regularly broadcast live School Board committee meetings on Cable Channel 10. Most board committee meetings are held on Monday and begin around 5 p.m.
This is a first for the school district, and I welcome this outreach step. It's during the board workshops, special sessions and committee meetings that issues can be discussed in a fair level of detail over several meetings.
He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat.
Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making.
We believe that students, parents, school personnel, members of the BOARD, and the general public share the responsibility for the total educational program of the School District. We believe that this responsibility requires cooperation, effort, and dedication if the youth of the school community are to receive the learning opportunities necessary for them to become effective citizens in a free society.
I would like to see the School Board keep this point in mind when discussing heterogenous classes, changes to curriculum, redesigning middle school. Other school districts use on-going broader-based public coalitions when changes are being considered and as changes are being made leading up to board decisions.
The School Board took a positive step in this direction with the long-range planning task forces, and I hope this will extend to other areas in a meaningful way. I'd only add that the issues and timelines for the long-range planning task forces needed to extend beyond the task force work so next steps were better understood by all, including all board members.
Too often the School Board's approach seems to be the board and admin. vs. them (teachers, parents, for example) on any number of topics (heterogenous classes at the Board meeting tonight and social studies curriculum at West High tonight but over the past few years there have been issues - fine arts curriculum, math, reading, open classroom) rather than working toward approaches/solutions and bringing the various knowledgable, interested and concerned parties together. I think a change in conversation and how we work together is warranted, because we will have to pass referendums. This is not simply a case of folks not happy with decisions. I think the feelings run much deeper, and the implications for successful referendums are not good if we continue in this manner and that worries me.
The district has a grant development section (funded entirely from the grants the district gets). The grant developer averages about $3 Million a year in external funding.
January 30th Meetings:
5 p.m. Performance & Achievement Committee (Shwaw Vang, chair):
UW Professor Adam Gamoran spoke to the Committee about his research on the effects that different grouping practices (heterogeneous or by ability) had on achievement of various groups of students. He also provided information about the elements that should be in place so that teachers can successfully differentiate curriculum for the individual needs of students. There will be second meeting on this topic on Monday, Feb. 6.
6 p.m. Special Board Meeting:
The Board began discussing each of the recommendations from the two Long Range Planning Task Forces. No action was taken. The administration was asked to prepare questions for a possible referendum in April. This discussion will continue on Feb. 13.
February 6th MEETINGS : (these will be in McDaniels auditorium and televised on Channel 10)
5 p.m. Finance & Operations Committee (Johnny Winston Jr., chair): report on the $100 Budget exercise; presentation explaining the status of construction costs for repairs, remodeling and building.
6 p.m. Performance & Achievement Committee (Shwaw Vang, chair)
Further presentations on heterogeneous grouping a look at what is occurring in the district. Public Appearances will be after the presentations.
7:15 p.m Regular Board Meeting:
FUTURE MEETINGS:
February 13 (televised)
5 p.m. Special Board Meeting continued discussion about the recommendations from the 2 Task Forces.
Sorry for the cold weather I was hoping for more snow though.
Carol
Carol Carstensen, President Madison School Board
"Until lions have their own historians, the hunters will always be glorified." - African Proverb
Reader Reed Schneider on Curriculum and School Boards
Reed Schneider emails on recentposts regarding a School Board's role in curriculum policy:
I agree that the school board should be responsible for the district's curriculum. In fact, it is the most important thing they are charged with. 10 or more years ago, before widespread internet availability, the non-edu-estab person on a board would have the excuse that it would be impossible for them to know which curricula works. All decisions would be deferred to the so-called experts. That excuse doesn't work any more. Any board member can now go to www.nrrf.org and discover opinion and independent research showing programs like Reading Recovery and balanced Literacy have serious flaws. They can go to www.mathematicallycorrect.com and discover that math programs recommended by the NCTM like Everyday Math fail our children.
Even if the board becomes involved, it will take board members willing to do this. Just because they become involved with curriculum will not automatically mean they will critically evaluate administrators recommendations. Far too often they simply rubber stamp what the curriculum specialist puts in front of them.
The parents and tax payers are the only ones with the power to change this. A good question at a board candidate's forum would be: "What is your opinion of reading or math programs based on constructivist theory?" If they don't understand the question, can't answer, hem and haw, or embrace it, don't vote for them. It's really that simple.
MMSD School Board Says They Don't Do Curriculum: WI State Law Says Otherwise
The Madison School Board is directly and legally responsible for the curriculum taught in their district. The WI Administrative Code, which is law, sets forth the legal requirements for public instruction. Public Instruction, Chapter PI 8.01 (Download Admin. Code Public Instruction - School Standards)says:
2. Each school district board shall develop, adopt and implement a written school district curriculum plan which includes the following: a. A kindergarten through grade 12 sequential curriculum plan in each of the following subject areas: reading, language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, health, computer literacy, environmental education, physical education, art and music.
Does this mean the Madison School Board is responsible for designing and creating curriculum and curriculum plans? No, of course not. I feel, however, they are responsible a) for making sure a process is in place so that academically rigorous, sequential curriculum plans are developed and evaluated regularly for meeting stated goals (and with opportunity for public comment along the way) and b) for approving curriculum plans developed under the guidance of the administration. How does the process currently this work? It's not publicly clear, perhaps, because the Madison School Board has no written curriculum board policy and no written administrative procedures (that I could find and I've asked - see below) for the development and approval of curriculum plans.
I have been told by board members the Superintendent and his staff "do curriculum," because they are the experts. What does that mean? Of course, we hope they are the experts; and, being experts in education administration, we hope and expect they use the teachers and other professionals who are experts in their field to develop curriculum plans using a well defined process that is clear and known by all. Yet, the sentiment from the board that was heard again in the their discussions of heterogenous classes is simply, "We don't do curriculum." When I first heard this type of statement from board members several years ago, I was puzzled and then I found the WI Admin. Code, which identifies the Board's responsility over approval of curriculum plans. My question for the Madison School Board is: How do and will you execute your legal responsibility? How can the School Board make this clear to the public? Written board policies and procedures that are discussed and approved by a school board are how board members spell out publicly how they will execute their legal responsibilities. I feel such policies and procedures for curriculum, which ties directly with a board's top priority of student achievement, would be illuminating and helpful for the board, public, teachers, administrators, etc.
I'd like to share my understanding of what I've learned. Curriculum plans are legally required, must be approved by the local School Board; and, as I've learned, these plans are different from standards. Basically, standards identify what we want children to learn in a particular field, at a particular time in their development; and standards are most useful when they are developed by grade. At the state level, DPI's standards are developed for grades 4, 8 and 10, and in many cases, these standards were developed with input from professionals in the field, businesses, parents, community members, other. National and professional standards in a field might guide this, but groups with broad representation refined and recommended standards used as guidelines (not law) by DPI. Locally, to help guide their board-level oversight of student's achievement, standards by grade level would seem to be more appropriate to guide both administrators and teachers.
School districts in Wisconsin are required to have locally approved K-12 sequential curriculum plans in above identified subject areas that specifies objectives, course content, course sequence, resources, specified instructional time to meet the curriculum, and a program evaluation method. MMSD's School Board did develop standards in the late 1990s, but board approved curriculum plans are a bit trickier to locate. I know sequential, K-12 curriculum plans exist per state law and are current with state and national standards exist for music and visual art education. These documents were approved by the School Board. I don't know for other areas, but I would hope and expect that each teacher has the K-12 curriculum plan for the field(s) they are teaching. As a parent, I feel I ought to be able to walk into my daughter's school and ask for a K-12 sequential curriculum plan for math, science, etc.
At a March 3, 2003 Performance and Achievement meeting, I spoke during public appearances, asking about the curriculum process. From the approved minutes: "Barbara Shrank said she has not been able to find information about the process by which changes are made to curriculum plans that have been approved by the Board of Education, and at what point professional staff members are involved. (Art Rainwater responded that curriculum change - content - is not part of the budget process and would only come into play if the budget prevented implementation. Up to this point content has not been affected by budget cuts. If the district were not able to deliver curriculum standards, it woud become a curriculum issue.)"
My questions are: the admin does what, how? What's the process, who's included (for example, admin, teachers, non-MMSD professionals, parents), etc. A School Board curriculum policy would spell out the Board's expectation, including procedures, and a written policy would make this clear for all Board members, the administration, other MMSD staff and for the public of what is expected and how it is to be done. I feel a School Board curriculum policy is lacking and I would like to see the Madison School Board take the leadership steps to develop a board level curriculum policy. Without one, anyone can say and do anything about curriculum on whatever timeline in whatever way, and that sometimes appears to be the case to the public, giving the perception of confusion. A board policy could begin to change that.
Notes from Performance & Achievement Meeting on Ability Grouping
At this past week's meeting, Adam Gamoran from the UW Center for Educational Research spoke to the Board about ability grouping. Dr. Gamoran talked about how ability grouping often ends up grouping students by race and SES because these students enter school having had different early childhood experiences and different educational opportunities (recall Donna Ford discussing the number of books in the homes of low income and middle income families).
Dr. Gamoran noted that there are often differences in the classroom experiences of high and low ability groups of students in regards to teacher expectations, academic rigor, and teacher ability.
He also emphasized that there is no simple solution to the achievement gap. Heterogeneous or homogeneous grouping by themselves will not reduce the gap in achievement. However, there are some clear cut solutions that are obvious according to Dr. Gamoran.
No more dead end classes like general math for the low ability students;
high academic expectations for students of all ability levels; and
teachers should not be assigned in a way that results in only the newest and least experienced teachers working with the low ability students, in other words, all students deserve quality instruction.
In discussing heterogeneous grouping, Dr. Gamoran noted that differentiation is hard work for teachers, and they need a lot of support and training in order to be successful.
Dr. Gamoran also shared an example of a school where heterogeneous grouping was successful. This was a school that was 51% free and reduced lunch, but because the school had a strong, dynamic leader and had gotten grants, they were able to recruit a top notch staff. Not only was the principal able to select which teachers worked in the school, but approximately half of the student body had to go through an interview process to get into the school, so this magnet school was selective about its teachers and its students. Class size was kept to 15 students and instruction went at a fast pace. Students who were struggling were expected to attend tutoring sessions on Saturdays. I think there was an expectation that parents would be involved in their student's education, but I am not sure about that.
Obviously the situation in the Madison schools is different from this ideal, and that's why I think it is important for the Board and the administration to hear from students and parents what it is like in the classroom. I should add that Bill Keys was very annoyed that the Board was even discussing this issue because he believes that the Board has no place in the classroom. According to Mr. Keys this is the responsibility of the teachers and administrators and they know better than the members of the Board what should be done in the classroom. However, I would argue that the teachers and administrators don't know any better than the Board does about what happens in the classroom, and they certainly don't know what it is like for high ability students in those classes. Those of us who have sat around the kitchen table while our children talk about their boredom, frustration, and lack of challenge need to help them understand and make our voices heard.
The Madison School District should purchase land now for a future school in Fitchburg, rather than build an addition on crowded Leopold Elementary School, School Board member Lawrie Kobza said.
But in the interim, that would likely mean Fitchburg students who now attend Leopold would be reassigned to Lincoln and Midvale schools, where space is now available.
The proposal differs from the recommendations of a task force that was assembled to address crowding problems in the West and Memorial high school attendance areas. The task force advised building an addition at Leopold, which has dealt with crowding for five of the last six years.
School Board President Carol Carstensen said she supports that idea, adding that members of the task force considered building a school in Fitchburg but felt an immediate solution was needed.
We are facing a real crisis at Leopold. It's not only a space crisis," Carstensen said, adding the Leopold community's support for the district is also at risk.
A referendum to build a second elementary school adjacent to Leopold failed last year.
This election is about change. I want to see a Board that embraces change as a way to focus our limited resources on quality education for all kids.
I, for one, would like to see our Board work out of the box and get to a point where they are governing instead of bounding from issue to issue. We have an annual budget cycle. We need to look at a budget cycle of three to five years. The budget comes up every year and every year we talk about cuts to strings, cuts to janitorial services, cuts to art and physical education.
Let's revisit a commentary by Peter Hutchinson, president of the Public Strategies Group Inc. of St. Paul, Minnesota in Education Week in 1997.
Monday evening's Board meeting presented a rather animated clash of wills between, it appears, those (A majority of the Board, based on the meeting discussions) who support Fitchburg's Swan Creek residents and their desire to remain at a larger Leopold School vs. those who favor using existing District schools that have extra space for the 63 Fitchburg children (no other students would move under the plan discussed Monday evening), such as Lincoln and/or the Lincoln/Midvale pair.
Lawrie Kobza and Ruth Robarts suggested that the District's overcrowding priorities are:
the Memorial area first (District forecasts that area at 111% of capacity by 2011 [3:08 minutes into the video]),
LaFollette second (106% in 2011 [3:10], which was not addressed by the Task Forces)
and 3rd, the West attendance area (West currently under capacity, according to the District, will be at 98% capacity in 2011).
They further suggested that any building decision should be part of a district wide 5 year plan. Johnny Winston argued that the Board should "give the people what they want [28:42] and that the District should look for alternative financing options, such as naming rights [22:00]. The Board made a commitment to the community when it acquired land from Oregon. You will be attending Leopold School." Mary Gulbrandsen discussed bus routes and forecasting.
Facilities are always a tough issue. A reader emailed that Thoreau, for example, does not have a lunch room. Students march in and out of the gym.
Well worth watching, particularly when these questions are sent to the voters via a referendum.
As a parent, taxpayer and citizen, I very much appreciate the questions Lawrie Kobza raised Monday evening (I strongly supported her candidacy last spring). The District's fiscal challenges are not small: flat enrollment, revenue caps which limit growth in the district's $321M budget to 2.5% annually - as long as enrollment is flat, high property taxes and two recent failed referenda. In my view, the District must exhaust all options, thoroughly, before asking for more money. I was glad to see Johnny suggest that other means be pursued to fund these facilities. Finally, Fitchburg's public school climate is a challenge to read. Our neighbor to the south voted down the Leopold expansion referenda last spring. Linking Leopold expansion to a new far west school - built on land which was purchased last fall before the west task force began its work - (part of the Memorial attendance area) is an interesting approach to the question (and, perhaps the April School Board elections).
Another update: another reader emails that four members of the west side task force represented Leopold's interests vis a vis currently or recently enrolled children.
School Board split on referendum: must vote by Feb. 17
By Susan Troller, The Capital Times, January 31, 2006
Madison voters may be looking at another referendum on school building this spring to address overcrowding issues, but the School Board appears split in its support of taking the issue to the voters.
School Board President Carol Carstensen has recommended that the administration prepare language that would ask voters to approve spending for a new $17 million elementary school on the city's far west side and an addition to Leopold Elementary, south of the Beltline in Fitchburg. Both proposals were unanimously recommended by a citizen-led task force that has been studying boundary issues and overcrowding since last fall.
"From the beginning, I have said I would support the recommendations of the task force," Carstensen said. She emphasized that the time frame for a referendum question on the April ballot would be very short, and that in order to keep that option open, it was necessary to move ahead with the language request.
"We have until Feb. 17 to decide whether to present this to the voters," she said.
On Monday, board members reviewed task force recommendations for the West/Memorial attendance area as well as recommendations from an East attendance area task force on how to deal with declining enrollments in that area of the school district. No final decisions on the recommendations were made at the meeting.
The majority of the board seemed to support a referendum based on the task force recommendations, which were the result of hundreds of hours of work by dozens of citizen representatives.
But board member Ruth Robarts was wary about what she terms rushing to referendum. She said, "We have a problem if we make a building recommendation in a vacuum. People deserve a comprehensive multi-year plan that takes into account the needs of all sides of town."
Robarts joined board member Lawrie Kobza in questioning the process at Monday's sometimes contentious meeting. Kobza said she had hoped that the task force recommendations would be analyzed by the board as part of a broader examination of needs in the district.
"It never occurred to me that these recommendations wouldn't become part of a larger plan," Kobza said. She noted that the task force charge did not include any scrutiny of the La Follette High School area and its projected overcrowding within five years.
Kobza rejects the proposal to build a Leopold addition. She favors a solution to overcrowding at the school that includes busing students to the undercapacity Lincoln-Midvale paired elementary schools, even if it means bus rides that exceed 45 minutes.
"A 45-minute bus ride isn't the end-all and be-all," she said.
Other board members were vehement in their support of the task force recommendations. "We gave this task force this job and if we weren't going to respect their recommendation we should have done it ourselves," Johnny Winston Jr., board vice president, said.
"We need to make decisions and not prolong this to next fall," Juan Jose Lopez said, noting that the schools are crowded now.
Arlene Silveira, a candidate for School Board and member of the West/Memorial boundary task force, supports a referendum to build a new school and an addition at Leopold. But she said she hoped that the decision to go to referendum would wait until the fall.
"My concern is that April is too fast," she said. "I supported last year's referendum and one of the things we heard is that people want information about how we came to the decisions we made. We need a communications plan to tell our story."
Can professional business management practices improve the performance of troubled public schools? Several high-visibility projects have been undertaken to bring best management practices to the classroom, including Harvard's Public Education Leadership Project. But in the 1990s, a different approach was begun: Riding a wave of charter school legislation, for-profit and nonprofit startups called private education management organizations, or EMOs, were created, essentially private companies brought in to manage public schools
The result? Mixed, but promising, says Steven F. Wilson, a senior fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Wilson was founder and former CEO of one of those EMOs, Advantage Schools, which at its height had 10,000 students in its programs. He writes of his experiences in a new book, Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools, published by Harvard University Press.
When the task forces began, each had three stated goals to address, including the following:
Income dispartiy among schools
Just eyeballing the final reports of the task forces gives me the impression that the recommended changes will not significantly change the low-income percentages of kids in any of the schools.
Expanding on its efforts to increase the reading skills of elementary school students, the Schools of Hope project led by the United Way of Dane County also is focusing on helping middle school students develop the math skills needed to be successful in high school, college, employment and daily life.
Since the Madison School Board adopted the goal that all students would complete algebra by the end of ninth grade and geometry by the end of 10th grade, the option of taking less rigorous classes, such as general or consumer math, has disappeared.
All high school students are now required to take algebra and geometry - or two credits of integrated mathematics, combining algebra, statistics and probability, geometry and trigonometry - in order to graduate.
"These are really gate-keeping courses and skills," said Mary Ramberg, the district's director of teaching and learning. She added that without them, students "will have a lot of options closed."
Rafael Gomez is organizing a Forum on Math Curriculum Wednesday evening, February 22, 2006 at McDaniels Auditorium. Look for more information soon.
On a September day 4 1/2 years ago, nearly 1,100 ninth-graders — a little giddy, a little scared — arrived at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys. They were fifth-generation Americans and new arrivals, straight arrows and gangbangers, scholars and class clowns.
On a radiant evening last June, 521 billowing figures in royal blue robes and yellow-tasseled mortarboards walked proudly across Birmingham's football field, practically floating on a carpet of whoops and shouts and blaring air horns, to accept their diplomas.
It doesn't take a valedictorian to do the math: Somewhere along the way, Birmingham High lost more than half of the students who should have graduated.
It is a crucial question, not just for Birmingham but for all American schools.
High school dropouts lead much harder lives, earn far less money and demand vastly more public assistance than their peers who graduate.
Lucy Mathiak posted MMSD dropout data, including those who showed high achievement during their elementary years.
Jason Shepherd recently wrote an article on the Madison School District's Affiliated Alternatives Program. This differentiated program supports about 150 students:
Many of the school's students have multiple problems, from severe learning deficits to turmoil at home. A countywide survey found they use alchol and marijuana at three times the rate of other students in Dane County.
Academic classes follow state standards but are tailored to students' interests and needs, with a focuse on practical life skills.
One of the delights in spending time at Affiliated Alternatives is watching Principal Fischer in action.
It's clear she's in command, and she's set high expectations for staff and students. She talkes to students with respect, and kids say they feel as if they can share problems with her.
Sort of related: Carol Carstensen mentioned that the Board's Performance and Achievement committee, in a somewhat rare meeting, will discuss heterogeneous groupings at 5 p.m. Monday, January 30, 2006. This is apparently the first of several meetings on this topic. West High School's imminent English 10, one curriculum for all (apparently 40+ sophomore English electives reduced to none) has created no small amount of heterogeneous grouping discussion. I'm glad that a Board committee willsoondiscusscurriculum, in my view, the District's #1 priority.
Parent Group Presidents:
BUDGET FACTOID:
The district’s contract settlement with MTI for this year and next are 3.98% and 3.97% package increases. This is below the state average (about 4.5%), below the average for large districts and below the average for Dane County districts.
Jan 23rd Meetings:
5 p.m. Special Board Meeting:
The Board discussed the status of contracts for administrators but took no action. The administration has already proposed reducing 4 administrative positions next year.
6 p.m. Long Range Planning Committee Meeting (Bill Keys, chair):
The Committee received the reports and final recommendations from the East Area and the Memorial/West Areas Task Forces. The recommendations are as follows: East Area recommendations:
Do not close schools
2. Move Affiliated Alternatives to Marquette/O’Keeffe
3. Move MSCR to Emerson
4. Change the middle school feeder pattern to move either Emerson or Hawthorne students to O’Keeffe.
5. Move the undeveloped land near the intersection of Milwaukee St. and Fair Oaks to the East Area.
6. Possible boundary changes affecting the 4 schools on the north side (Gompers, Lakeview, Lindbergh and Mendota).
Memorial/West recommendations:
1. Build an addition onto Leopold and build a new school on the far west side.
The Task Force also provided the Board with 2 “fall-back” plans if the Board did only one of the above (either the addition or the new school). If the Board chooses to do neither (or if a referendum for both fails), the Task Force could not put together an option that provided enough space for the 5 years it was charged to consider. It did give the Board a sample plan of the kind of boundary changes that would be necessary, as well as the information that there were at least 14 other plans they had considered but none were supported by a majority of the Task Force.
The Committee accepted the reports and recommendations and voted to pass them to the full Board for further discussion and decisions.
JANUARY 30th MEETINGS : (these will be in McDaniels auditorium and televised on Channel 10)
5 p.m. Performance & Achievement Committee (Shwaw Vang, chair)
Several presentations on heterogeneous grouping. (This is the first of several meetings on this topic.)
6 p.m Special Board Meeting:
The Board will discuss the recommendations from the Task Forces and begin to make decisions. If the Board is going to authorize a referendum in April it must make that decision within a few weeks.
Last September, when the cost of natural gas skyrocketed I proposed that the Board pass a resolution to “cancel” winter this year. Do you suppose the recent unseasonably warm weather is a consequence of that?
Carol
Carol Carstensen, President
Madison School Board
"Until lions have their own historians, the hunters will always be glorified." - African Proverb
The plan advanced by Jerry Eykholt, a member of the task force studying ways to deal with overcrowding at schools on in west side of the Madison school district, would move students to Lincoln Elementary School.
One of the proposals had recommended moving Swan Creek students to Midvale and Lincoln elementary schools. Eykholt?s proposal would move them only to Lincoln, thereby reducing the length of the bus ride, which he said would address one of the major concerns of the residents.
Previous proposals would move elementary students to Lincoln (grades 3 through 5) and Midvale (grades K through 2). His proposal would require Lincoln to offer all elementary grades.
Eykholt called Lincoln "a very nurturing environment" that provided an exceptional level of assistance to students, a consequence of the district?s efforts to serve students from low-income families.
The key architect behind that transformation was the tough young executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., John Matthews, who had come to Madison eight years earlier from Montana.
Thirty years later, Matthews is still tough and, more than ever, still casts a powerful shadow across the public education landscape of Madison as a tireless and relentless advocate for teachers. With Matthews at the helm, MTI has remained a dominant force in education and labor.
One of these things is not like the others: School Board Oversees Task Forces Except When Savings in Health Care Costs at Stake
Recently, the Madison School Board has authorized a plethora of special committees to consider issues confronting the district and to make recommendations to the board. These committees have the potential to improve future board decisions by bringing new ideas and new information to our attention.
Currently, there is a special committee to advise the board on advertising. There are the two large task forces that recently issued recommendations regarding overcrowding and under-utilization problems in the West, Memorial and East High attendance areas. There is committee of parents, teachers, and administrators to suggest changes in our health and safety policies regarding animals in our classrooms. There is a committee to review whether staff and other resources are allocated equitably to the schools, taking differences in student populations into consideration. There are budget forums intended to seek community input on next year’s budget.
In every case, the board publicly discussed its goals for the committee before launching it. In every case, the board voted on a specific charge to the committee and set procedures and a timeline for meetings. In every case the board has received regular reports on the progress of the committee.
The glaring exception to this process was the creation of a task force of teachers union and district representatives to consider whether changes in health insurance programs for the teachers might make it possible for the district to shift dollars from health insurance payments to wages. Millions of dollars in potential savings are at stake.
In this case, the board did not set goals for the committee. It did not take the time to issue any instructions to the district representatives. Nor has the board required any reporting from the district representatives regarding the scope of its discussions or the nature of savings that the district representatives are seeking.
On January 23, the board discussed the report from the committee on animals in classrooms for more than two hours. The board clarified its prior charge to the committee and directed further work. It’s inexplicable that the leadership of the same board shows no interest in directing the work of its representatives in their discussions of potential health insurance savings with the teachers union.
weekly question-and-answer quiz of the five candidates vying for two seats on the Madison Board of Education.
Every week, we'll ask them a set of questions, one dealing with school board dynamics or the issues facing the 24,000-student-district, and the other more personal, aimed at revealing their experiences and attitudes.
My Jr. High student at Jefferson has been informed that there is a good chance his Family and Consumer Education (FCE) and his Technology classes will not be at Jeffferson next year. I have heard ramblings about foreign language being reduced at Jr. High level as well.
This is where I begin to think Public Schools are going to continue to lose students. My son would never choose to take a foreign language or FCE. He is my "jock" and the wonderful cultural and diverse information he is receiving from foreign L.A. and F.C.E are the reason we keep sending our kids to a public school. If the public offerings dwindle to nothing, why would we, a middle to high income family continue to send our children to public schools? If MMSD continues eliminate the diversity and class selection, they can continue to see the decrease in high income students. Money is required to offer these classes, however, if the extra-curricula activities and interesting diverse classes are eliminated, the district will deal with less students, higher numbers of low income students, and the continual decrease of middle and high income students. Many will not see the significance of these numbers, but it is significant as costs rise to educate students that demand more social and psychological needs. The district needs to evaluate the long term effects of eliminating these programs.
Candidate Forum: Dane County Public Affairs Council
Wednesday, 1.25.2006; 7:30 - 9:00a.m. @ US Bank Plaza [map / directions] Lower Level Conference Room:
A discussion of issues facing our school district and community such as: high costs and low achievement; the budget; revenue caps; referenda; reading and math curricula; health care costs; dministrative costs; contract negotiations; boundary changes and school closings/new buildings; violence in schools; Fund 80; and more. Primary election for seat one is Feb. 21. Final elections in April. Who will earn your support?
The second candidate interview is now available. Look for an interview with Lucy Mathiak soon (I've not heard back from Michael Kelly or Juan Jose Lopez). Maya Cole's interview is here
As many of the nation's school systems begin searching for new superintendents in the next few months, they will employ a traditional tactic: secrecy. In many cases, the process will involve only a select few who know who is being considered for what can be a municipality's most highly paid public...
Madison United for Academic Excellence [www site] held a Madison School Board candidate forum Tuesday evening, January 17, 2006. Maya Cole, Michael Kelly, Lucy Mathiak and Arlene Silveira participated (election website). Candidate statements and questions appear below:
What strategies/ideas do you have that can elevate academic success for ALL MMSD students while avoiding the pitting of parent groups against each other? [Video]
What is one of the most important things you want to accomplish as a board member? [Video]
Many people in our group are concerned that the District's single-minded strategy for closing the achievement gap is to eliminate "high end" learning opportunities and give all students -- regardless of ability, motivation or interest level -- the same curriculum, delivered in completely heterogeneous classrooms. They see this approach being enacted, for example, in the West HS "small learning communities" restructuring and they fear that it will permeate and determine the results of the middle school redesign effort. Do you think that this is a sound strategy for closing the achievement gap? [Video]
As a Board what oversight is currently in place to assess whether the district is sufficiently meeting the academic needs for gifted students? Do you believe the current oversight is sufficient? In particular for both the student population as a whole and on an individual student basis: How is/should progress be measured in the gifted context? [Video]
The school district is once again faced with the dilemma of cutting between 6-10 million dollars from the budget. Where do you think these cuts should come from in the budget? Please tell me where the money is going to come from without suggesting that state or federal funds are not important for all programs. [Video]
How would you address the often heard complaint that special education programs drain too much money from the budget? (Jeff): I later provided some additional information for this question: there are approximately 5000 special education students in the district and special education programs and services account for more than $15 out of every $100 that the district spends. [Video]
Almost three years ago, during the public comments section of a budget-focused BOE meeting, a parent was asking the BOE to put "TAG" ("talented and gifted") services on the "do not cut" list. In response, a BOE member said to him, "Friend, this has nothing to do with minority students. Why should I support it?" Q: How do you react to that assertion/position/logic? Do you think the "TAG" dollars have anything to do with the District's minority students? [Video]
Can you name five good things about the Madison [public] schools? [Video]
A story by Sandy Cullen in the Wisconsin State Journal reports on two groups that tried the $100 budget exercise:
The State Journal asked 10 people to participate in the exercise led by Superintendent Art Rainwater and his assistant superintendent for business services, Roger Price. District administrators will lead additional sessions of the exercise at Madison's 11 middle schools on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
"This is not a process to build a budget," Price said. Rather, the exercise is meant to give residents an opportunity to express their priorities to administrators and School Board members as the district puts together its 2006-07 budget.
Administrator and Teacher Contracts - Timing and Position do Seem to Matter
Teachers sign their contracts for the next year usually in March - however, this is not a guarantee of a job for next year. Teachers can still be surplused or laid off from their jobs. The process for this is governed by their MTI contract.
Surplusing teachers effects the school budget the next school year, so there is an "immediate" effect upon the number of teachers, upon the district's educational resources available for children's learning and upon the budget's bottom line. This is different for MMSD personnel on administrative contracts. Administrative contracts are in most cases two-year rolling contracts, except as stated in the Human Resources (HR) policy , so the financial effect of reducing administrative positions that are filled can take up to 18 months to be reflected in the budget. Wouldn't this reduce the Board's decisionmaking authority during the budget process and potentially put an additional burden of budget cuts on teachers, psychologists, social workers, custodians, etc.?
Does this mean that administrative employees on a two-year rolling contract have 18 months to retrain/to apply for an open position in MMSD or to find a new job while still keeping their current job and getting paid if their contract is not extended. WI law governs some of the policy in place, but I don’t know how much of MMSD’s policy is required by state law, and I don’t know if state law requires contracts for all administrative personnel.
For MMSD administrators, the administrative rules governing their contracts are contained in MMSD HR Policy 2.06 . There is no School Board policy that I could find on administrative contracts. Perhaps one is necessary to clarify a number of issues and to set policy/direction for the district.
The current HR policy on administrative contracts states: “An administrator who has been issued a two-year contract and whose performance is satisfactory shall be issued a one-year contract extension in the spring of each year, thereby creating a two-year rolling contract, except an administrator may not receive a two-year contract if the District is considering reorganization, reassignment, reduction in force or other personnel action that may result in the elimination of the administrator’s position.” Does that give the School Board the flexibility to hold on giving contract extensions to administrators at this point in the budget process. Holding on a contract extension is much different than a non-renewal notice. Which applies at the end of the month?
Teachers, custodians, social workers are covered by their union contracts. These personnel are paid for the year they worked, and these provisions are based upon collective bargaining. If these district personnel are laid off and not rehired into an open position, they do not receive pay after their contract ends.
If the administration feels all staffing is cut to the bone, maybe the school board needs to begin working on multi-year strategies. I'm concerned about relying on the state or referenda to pull us through, and this effort might make the needs/issues more transparent to the public.
Perhaps the School Board and its personnel committees would spend more time during the year talking about staffing strategies. This seems to me to be especially important to continue to do in these extremely tight financial times.
Additional information on surplus and layoff contract dates:
Teachers are often given surplus notices, usually in April, which can be a partial up to a 100% surplus from their job. Surplus notices can be given until July 1 (I think this is the date without checking the contract). These surplus notices often are based upon the budget cut proposed to the School Board, which always proceeds the budget before the School Board and seems to me to be the only focus in the budget once that list is made public.
Layoff notices can be given to teachers no later than 10 days before the end of the school year. While there is no contract language for administrators, a corresponding approach would be not to extend administrative contracts.
Barb Schrank, parent, artist, blogger
spouse of Madison school teacher
treasurer, Mathiak for School Board
I have noticed a movement about MMSD. There seems to be the following needs:
1. Make each grade/class the same across the district so that all
students have a equitable distribution of funds, resources, and knowledge. (Connected math, FOSS science, middle school curriculm, and West English)
2. Great concern from "legal" I assume that food, animals, and flammable paper present a hazard to the students and potentially invite a lawsuit. (pet proposal, upcoming food proposal to eliminate any homemade food in the school, and the fire code issue)
3. Boundary changes to solve growth and income disparity which causes financial stress on the district. (Task forces, failed referendum, spending cap)
So here's the solution:
I have a "solution" to help all these problems in one. The #1 health hazard to my children, I have learned over the years,are the other students my children attend school with and the germs they carry. So I propose we stop sending our children to school. We should purchase laptops for each student, pay for (or maybe Dave will provide) internet service for each household and teach all the students via the internet. Sale the buildings, fire the teachers, ditch the bus contracts and have a totally germ free, fire free, income disparity free, curriculm EXACTLY THE same throughout the entire virtual school district. One teacher could be retained to teach each grade level so all students receive exactly the same lesson. High schools could offer the same courses just the experience of group discusssion, band, and choir might not be the same.
This solves money issues, contract issues, disparity issues of every kind, and those germ and allergy issues that seem to plague our schools. It eliminates the growth problem and the need for more buildings. I was thinking we could keep the high schools for physical activity, but I can't figure out how they can play team sports without getting germs or how to have coaches that would provide students with the EXACT same experience......I'll have to keep working on that.
The first candidate interview is now available. Look for interviews with Arlene Silveira (Arlene's interview is now available here) and Lucy Mathiak soon (I've not heard back from Michael Kelly or Juan Jose Lopez).
Very disappointing start for MTI-MMSD health insurance task force
On Wednesday, January 11, representatives of Madison Teachers, Inc. (MTI) and the Madison school district met at the union's headquarters for three hours. MTI Executive Director John Matthews chaired the meeting. It was the first of two meetings at which MTI and MMSD will supposedly explore the potential for savings on health insurance costs for the teachers. Those expecting a serious effort by union and district representatives to compare costs and services from a range of health insurance providers and press the companies for savings will be seriously disappointed.
There were two presentations at the meeting: one from representatives of Wisconsin Physicians Services (WPS) and one from Group Health Cooperative (GHC). Despite a promise from the board president and superintendent that the meeting would be videotaped, the district did not tape the meeting. So far only the text for the WPS presentation (with accompanying PowerPoint) is available for public review.
At the meeting on January 25, 2006---also at MTI's headquarters at 821 Williamson Street beginning at 1 p.m.---the task force will hear presentations from representatives of Dean Care and Unity. There has been no explanation of why there will not be presentations from Physicians Plus or the State Group Health Plan. Both offer services comparable to those that teachers currently receive under the collective bargaining agreement between the parties at competitive rates.
The text from the WPS presentation follows.
MTI/MMSD PRESENTATION
January 11, 2006
Good Afternoon,
My name is Bill Bathke. I am the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Wisconsin Physicians Service Insurance Corporation. I also serve on WPS’ Board of Directors.
With me today are:
Richard Birrenkott -- Regional Vice President, WPS Sales
John Trochlell -- Director, WPS Actuarial Services
Jo Musser -- Senior Vice President, WPS Medical Affairs, Provider Relations, & Compliance
Caroline Berghammer -- Director, WPS Large Group Underwriting
Essie Whitelaw -- Senior Vice President, WPS Operations
Randy Lengyel -- Senior Vice President, WPS MIS
Annette Grosz-Ringdahl -- Senior Director, Marketing Services
We’re here today to reinforce the importance WPS places on the MMSD/MTI “PARTNERSHIP”...a partnership that began in 1952 and has continued for 54 consecutive years...a partnership built on trust, respect, commitment, determination, and performance.
WPS was incorporated in 1946 as a stand-alone “not for profit” service insurance corporation under Chapter 613 of the Wisconsin Statutes.
Although we are subject to the same tax obligations (sales, income, property) as a for-profit company, our unique structure limits acquisition and divestiture options and causes us to be extremely focused around our true mission...
“Providing health and life insurance and benefit plan administration to private and government customers...considered by our customers to be the very best.”
For 60 consecutive years, WPS has been HERE...providing Wisconsin residents with health care financing options emphasizing “FREEDOM OF CHOICE” insuring access and quality of care.
Our decisions are not driven by “stock price” or “quarterly returns for shareholders”...rather, they focus on the long-term goal of providing the very best service on a cost-effective basis for our customer...in this case, the Madison Teacher.
Given our business diversification, WPS is able to bring global experience...intelligence... technology...to the forefront of our relationship with MMSD/MTI.
As the largest fiscal intermediary for Medicare...which is the largest health care financing organization in the world today...WPS administers the Part B (physicians) reimbursement program in Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota. Given our cooperative agreement with Mutual of Omaha, WPS will become the largest Part A (hospital) benefits administrator in all states except New York.
WPS continues its 46-year history as a fiscal intermediary for the Department of Defense. Today, we administer over 70% of the military’s health care administration needs.
As fiscal intermediary for the Western Region, WPS processes claims in 22 states including California, Hawaii, and Alaska. As fiscal intermediary for foreign claims, WPS processes all military health claims originating outside the continental United States.
And as prime contractor for TDEFIC, TRICARE for Life, WPS oversees the administration of the military’s Medicare supplement plan worldwide.
On the commercial front, WPS is #2 in Wisconsin market share for individual health insurance and #6 for group. In addition to offering a Medicare supplement plan, WPS is one of only two Wisconsin companies certified to offer a Medicare Part D pharmacy product, which became available the first of this month.
All total, WPS will administer over $14 billion of benefits this year. With WPS, you get a demonstrated track record of excellence, integrity, unmatched program experience, and real commitment to each MTI beneficiary.
With WPS, you get PEOPLE you know and experience you trust. It’s hard to believe...I was just five years old when this partnership first began!
Rich will now talk more specifically about our partnership and what makes it so unique and successful.
Rich Birrenkott
Thank you, Bill. Over the next hour we’re going to share with you some insight about Partnership, Choice and Value Care.
#1
These are three important words that carry an enormous amount of responsibility for WPS.
As Bill indicated our partnership goes back to November 1, 1952. That’s a long time ago. As you can imagine, the health plan that is in existence today is nowhere close to the one that started this partnership. Through our relationship of working together the current plan has evolved into a health plan that is best for those who actually need health care.
Now that’s an important statement. Those who actually need health care. Because if you do not need health care, you’ll have no perception or idea of how important your health plan can be in a time of crisis. When a crisis strikes either you or a member of your family, knowing that your health plan will take care of you provides the security you need. One other important item to make note of is the fact that WPS cannot in any way modify your plan without prior approval from MMSD and MTI.
Choice is a word that gets bantered around each and every day. What does it truly mean to have choice? We will talk about that in more detail. But know that at WPS each person has the freedom to choose their provider based on the medical needs of themselves or their family members.
Value Care is a vehicle that helps to transport individuals who are engaged in a serious or not so serious health care crisis. And we’ll have a more detailed discussion about that later.
Let’s begin with Partnership.
#2
As has been previously indicated, our partnership began in 1952.
- As the slide states, health care has changed but our focused relationship has not. We understand your expectations because we know you our client. And we know the provider community which serves you while providing you with a freedom of choice plan.
- What does this mean to you? It means that you can count on WPS to be here tomorrow just as we are today. We cannot be divested or acquired. We have a commitment to serve the community and have done so for the past 60 years. We have been in our partnership longer than our local HMO competitors have been in business.
Neighbors working with neighbors.
- WPS has over 3,000 employees here locally. During our 60 years as an employer in the greater Madison area, we have undoubtedly had thousands of children of our employees who have and are attending the many terrific Madison schools.
- WPS employees participate in countless local activities which help guide our younger generation such as the Business Education Partnership programs. * Such as Starting Your Own Business & Schools Make a Difference.
#3
WPS knows and respects MMSD & MTI union.
- Through the many years of working together we understand the collective bargaining process and the need for responsiveness to priority concerns.
#4
WPS provides personalized service.
- Average tenure of operations staff is 10 years. Why is that important? Because when I am in a time of crisis I need to be able to count on the person I’m talking with for prompt accurate information. With our tenured staff you have a consistent highly educated and knowledgeable resource on which you can count.
- How many of you have heard of monthly satisfaction surveys? At WPS these are our lifelines to staying in touch with our customer. As you can see you have a 93% customer service satisfaction rate. *The sample that is utilized includes only those individuals who have had a claim processed. But what does that mean. It means that if we as a carrier can maintain high levels of satisfaction, we are providing for the needs of our customers. This is not just a one time level of 93%, we consistently achieve this level as indicated when WPS received two outstanding awards for Customer Service. One was the Entrepreneur of the Year Award for customer service from Marian College and the other was the distinguished Wisconsin Forward Mastery Level Award for customer service.
#5 - #6 - #7 - #8
As I mentioned in the beginning, Choice is a critical and integral part of the WPS plan. It gives each and every person the freedom to select a provider of their choice. This simply means you can choose whom you wish to use – whenever you wish to use them. If I want to see a doctor at the UW, I do it. If my wife prefers a doctor at Dean Clinics, she goes there. And even if our daughter wants to go and visit a doctor at Physicians Plus, she just goes there.
Now I do not know about you, but if my daughter were to encounter a serious illness and my present provider was unable to come up with a diagnosis, I know in my heart that I would want the ability to secure medical advice in order to determine the diagnosis, no matter where that provider may be located in Wisconsin or elsewhere. Or if necessary to utilize one of WPS’ Centers of Excellence located throughout the U.S., such as John Hopkins, Cleveland Clinic or St. Jude Children’s Hospital to name a few.
Choice also means the opportunity to have a selection of top quality providers from which to choose. With WPS you have the ability to access Top Quality providers from a resource of over 12,400 physicians and 140 hospitals. As illustrated by the two charts over here on my left. Access to this many providers creates an enormous amount of flexibility for our members and their families.
With regards to access to care, you can access any physician at any time and as we talked about earlier, each family member has the opportunity to access any physician of their choice. No restrictions. No primary care selection needed and no red tape or hoops to jump through. Just plain and simple free access to the provider that you want, when you want.
Additionally, WPS gives our members what I like to call a Travel Card. What I mean by this is that each member has access to providers all across the nation. Not just for urgent care but for all care.
Think about this for second.
My child Lynsee is away at college in California. After her classes she begins to feel ill. When she calls home and tells her mother that she is not feeling well, she asks what doctor she can see. Would I ask Lynsee to stop what she is doing and wait until she came home to receive care? Or if I was wintering in Arizona, and because I enjoy golfing, bent over to put a tee in the ground and my back goes out. Can I wait until you return home in the spring to receive care? I believe the answer in both of these cases is that I would want to receive the necessary medical care promptly and without delay or disruption.
The information that I just shared with you frequently becomes associated with the thought “Yeah, choice is great, but it costs more.” I know that for many individuals this is the perception. Freedom of choice is synonymous with higher cost. But that perception is a long way from the truth.
And here to give us the reality perspective on cost is John Trochlell. John is also a Fellow in the Society of Actuaries.
John Trochlell
I would like to say a few words about provider choice and its impact on your health insurance premiums.
#9
As many of you know, there exists a big difference in the premium rates of the two plan options available to you, the WPS PPO and the GHC HMO plans. What you may not know is what drives such a large difference in premiums. The WPS premiums are much higher as a result of something called adverse-selection. Adverse-selection occurs when employees are given a choice of multiple insurance options, each with different employee premium contributions. Quite naturally, employees tend to pick the option that best suits themselves, based on their own families’ needs.
#10
If you’re someone with current or imminent health care needs...if you’re older, or an early retiree who travels...if your family utilizes multiple provider systems, because you know that no one system has a monopoly on all the best docs...if you prefer to play an active role in the selection of your doctor...then you’re more likely to pay the existing premium contribution and choose the WPS open access PPO.
#11
If, however, you’re young, healthy...or more passive about who your doctor will be...then you’re more likely to save the premium contribution and choose the closed panel HMO plan.
#12
It is the result of this decision making process, taking place every year, that causes these premiums to be so different. Normal insurance plans have good risks offsetting the bad, younger, healthier members subsidizing the older members with health conditions; in this plan, the different risks are covered by different insurance companies, so the balance created by the pooling of risks does not occur. If you consider just the demographical component of this effect, you’ll see the impact. A 55-year old female on average may be 75% more expensive, from a health insurance perspective, as a 35-year old female. That’s a 75% impact before you even consider the self-selection between the two plans that is occurring based on that person’s own appraisal of their health. The WPS premium rates would be substantially lower if our plan covered the entire group rather than just those who most need health care.
#13
WPS has maintained a very transparent financial relationship with both the District and the Union. Both parties know where every dime of your health insurance premium has been spent. Because of the long relationship between our organizations and our corporate mission, we have not tried to avoid insuring your seriously ill members, through underwriting or other risk selection measures. Instead, we work hard to support and assist those members and families navigate through the complexities of Madison’s health care system.
To explain more about those efforts, I would like to introduce Jo Musser. In addition to a having background in nursing, Jo in the former commissioner of insurance for the State of Wisconsin.
Jo Musser
Thank you, John.
The high cost cases that John told you about are costly in emotional and quality of life terms, too. I would like to tell you about how WPS supports your members and their families when they are ill and need to interact with the health care system.
#14
Let me introduce you to Cathy and her success with the support of the WPS disease management program. [Jo read Cathy’s story off of slide]
DM programs do have short-term payoff in dollars and for families and patients. The average savings of $200/case may not sound like a great deal, but when you add up the large number of folks with risk factors and pre-catastrophic situations, it adds up to real money! But the real payback is over the long term. Hospitalizations that are prevented, ER visits turned into routine care and increased quality of life through education and support.
#15
Betsy participated in our case management program when she had colorectal cancer. [Jo read Betsy’s story off of slide]
All of WPS’ DM and CM programs are voluntary, but our participation rates are high and our satisfaction rates even higher. Again, the $1,100/case savings may not sound like a lot, but it is significant for the members and when multiplied by the number of cases, meaningful dollars for the district’s budget. Our data show that for every dollar of resources invested in care management programs, four dollars are returned in savings for you and your members.
#16
Rich and his wife had premature twins. Preemies can be very costly both financially and emotionally. Rich feels strongly that his family could not have navigated successfully through the system with out the ongoing support of our UM program. [Jo read Rich’s story off of slide]
WPS nurses and social workers help patients and family members navigate through an increasingly complex and technologically sophisticated health care system.
MMSD and MTI beneficiaries have stories just like those I told you about above. I didn’t use their stories to respect the privacy of all, but I can assure you, there are many success stories among your group, just like those I told you today.
Your members have been cared for here at home, at centers of excellence, in Milwaukee or at Mayo Clinic if they need it. They have been cared for while traveling or retired anywhere in the country.
The care is there for them and so is our staff of caring and compassionate nurses.
#17 - #18
WPS helps your members form active partnerships with their medical caregivers by making available easy to use tools to help them become better informed and better consumers.
Our Healthwise Knowledgebase provides easy-to-understand information on over 3,200 health-related topics. It helps patients navigate the system, provides information on treatment options, and through interactive tools helps them to ask the right questions of caregivers.
Patient safety and health system quality is a significant factor in overall health outcomes and cost. That’s why WPS helps direct member users of our website to links that provide detailed, independent analysis of hospital safety and quality.
Shown here is the Leapfrog home page. Many of you may be familiar with Leapfrog, a national organization that measures hospital quality.
The Wisconsin Quality Collaborative, Checkpoint and Medicare Quality Indicators are just a few of the sites we refer members to.
All of these WPS medical support programs help your members and help to control your costs.
Bill Bathke
A lot of effort has gone into making our past relationship the best it could be. WPS truly values the relationship we now have with Madison Teachers.
You have my personal as well as WPS’ commitment to work just as hard going forward...insuring that we provide the very best service on the most cost-effective basis possible.
Thanks for the role you play in educating our kids and thanks for the confidence you place in WPS when it comes to selecting your HEALTH BENEFIT PLAN.
You...our insured...make up what we know as “WPS” today.
Ms. Jennifer Solomon, a Madison teacher and WPS insured, shared the real meaning of partnership in a very personal letter to the editor of The Capital Times, last night’s edition. Thanks, Jennifer, for sharing your experience and for giving us the opportunity to help.
Program & staffing changes in my $100 budget exercise
$1.74 – Move all employees in Curriculum Research and Staff Development into classroom teaching and school administrative positions that will be vacated through normal attrition.
$0.40 – Replace Reading Recovery with Read 180
$0.15 – Move Associated Alternatives to Doyle. (Plenty of room with Curriculum Research & Staff Development leaving. Use UW facilities for gym. Use various large conference rooms for lunch.)
$?.?? – Move MSCR to Doyle. Mothball Hoyt subject to further review of best use or sale.
$0.043 – Eliminate one administrative position in superintendent’s office.
$0.043 – Eliminate Legislative Liaison position; rely on lobbyists of Wisconsin School Board Association.
$0.043 – Eliminate Director, Public Information.
$0.243 – Eliminate 9 positions in Gateways to Learning
$0.043 – Eliminate 1 position in research
$0.043 – Eliminate 1 position in Human Resources
Total reduction $2.791 or $7,256,600, without eliminating a single classroom teacher.
The irony is that public educators in Milwaukee believe choice has helped improve all the city's schools. "No longer is MPS a monopoly," says Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent William Andrekopoulos. "That competitive nature has raised the bar for educators in Milwaukee to provide a good product or they know that parents will walk." The city's public schools have made dramatic changes that educators elsewhere can only dream of. Public schools now share many buildings with their private counterparts, which helps alleviate the shortage of classrooms. Teachers, once assigned strictly by seniority, are now often hired by school selection committees. And 95% of district operating funds now go directly to schools, instead of being parceled out by a central office. That puts power in the hands of teachers who work directly with students.
Milwaukee schools are still struggling, but progress is obvious. Students have improved their performance on 13 out of 15 standardized tests. The annual dropout rate has fallen to 10% from 16% since the choice program started. Far from draining resources from public schools, spending has gone up in real terms by 27% since choice began as taxpayers and legislators encouraged by better results pony up more money.
In Wisconsin, the 'Taxpayers Bill of Rights' is being billed as a tool of democracy, but it's actually a tool to subvert the representative democracy that to reasonable people has worked pretty well. When Milwaukee-area resident Orville Seymeyer e-mailed me and suggested I "get on the TABOR bandwagon," this is what I told him:
Since there have been different ideas about using Doyle to solve some of the district’s space/funds problems, I thought I would list the questions that occur to me as I consider next steps.
1.Locate the Affliated Alternatives (at Brearly) in Doyle:
a. How much space will AA need?
b. What will be the cost of remodeling to accommodate students?
c. What about cafeteria and gym space?
d. Where would we move the staff that must leave Doyle to make room for the students?
e. What is the cost of the move and of remodeling the new space?
2.Sell or lease Doyle
a. Where would central office staff be located?
b. What is the cost of the move?
c. What is the cost of remodeling the new space?
d. What are the out-of-pocket costs (travel, time, etc) of locating Doyle staff in more than one location?
e. What is a realistic expectation of the money generated by a long-term lease?
f. What is a realistic expectation about the amount Doyle would bring if sold?
g. If there is development potential, why haven't there been proposals for the district/UW parking lots behind Doyle?
For nearly two years, a wide range of school officials and parents have puzzled over what to do about the lopsided enrollment trends. In the next few weeks, the emotionally charged issue will come to a head as two task forces offer their ideas to the Madison School Board.
A next step might include representatives from both task forces working with the school board, because these representatives bring to the table the two very different perspectives of these task forces, which the School Board will have to meld into one plan. Both task forces have worked thoughtfully and diligently, and representatives of these task forces would bring that experience to help with next steps.
As a community, we need to make this work for all kids fairly with consideration of their education needs and the financial resources available.
While serving as a member on the Long Range Planning Committee for the West/Memorial Task Force I came to a few insights I would like to share.
Our charge was to seek solutions for the over-crowded schools in Memorial and Leopold attendance area as well as address the low income disparity throughout the area.
Overcrowding in Memorial - with current data and projected growth to be over 100% capacity in 5 of the elementary schools I believe the only solution to this problem is a new school. With the purchase of the far west land the board must believe this as well. This should be the number one priority of the growth solution for MMSD. There is space at Toki/Orchard Ridge and a few seats at Muir for this attendance area and additions could be made to Falk, or an update and expansion of Orchard Ridge/Toki could be made, but otherwise there is no room without changing programmatically.
Leopold overcrowding is much more complicated, as you know. This huge expansive slice of Madison and the entire city of Fitchburg attendance area has somehow become one elementary school. I do not support an addition to this school for many of the same reasons I did not like two schools on the same land. It is lots of seats in one part of town and you create problems for the future. If Shorewood or Crestwood had 1000 seats we would be busing kids from Fitchburg to that school because that's where the space is. An addition without a new school means a principal, staff and others at this school are functioning like the other 4 - 5 hundred space schools but with double the students, is that fair to the staff of that school? Would you want to be the principal of 800 - 900 students? I would rather have a school in Fitchburg or south of the Beltline off of 14 to help Leopold and the Allis attendance area that currently is sent to the other side of Monona.
There is space at Midvale/Lincoln, Randall, Shorewood,and there is 110 seats at Hamilton, 94 seats at Wright, and 118 seats at Cherokee. And of course the strange building of Hoyt that must have ghost or something since no one wants to touch it. There is space in West. The move of Leopold to Chavez is wrong minded since it shifts the West area problem to the overcrowded Memorial area.
The Elephant in the Room throughout the entire Task Force was Midvale/Lincoln and the perceived lack of quality at that school. There is 75 seats at Lincoln and 62 seats at Midvale this year and each time the suggestion was made to shift students from Leopold to M/L it was met with distaste, (except for two apartment buildings of 30 students) as the memo from the Swan Creek neighborhood (see attachment) was an example. That memo, while it outraged me, is a glaring example why we can't solve Leopold overcrowding (see memo [pdf] from Midvale Parent Jerry Eykholt to the Swan Creek Parents). On the task force Leopold was sent to Chavez, Randall/Franklin, Thoreau over and under M/L, but somehow those 137 seats at M/L seemed too far away. I think the district is failing Midvale/Lincoln.
Our low income since 1989 has doubled in the district while it has not in the community. Pairing Midvale Lincoln did not solve the income disparity problem and I fail to see the solution in changing boundaries. If you move poor students you upset those relationships and it seems like busing, if you move a high income neighborhoods into the area you risk losing those kids to private schools. Midvale/ Lincoln has over 100 students electing to not attend public school because of the perceived problems. I have an interesting solution that would be progressive and possibly irritate the district's mode of all schools looking exactly the same: Use M/L as a "test site" for the always boasted curriculum of Singapore Math and Direct Instruction. Announce that to improve the (Achievement) Gap you are going to test these curricula at this school, which has a high rate of low income to see if the test grades there improve at a greater pace than a similar school using the districts accepted curricula. You would have higher income parents coming back to the school, reducing the disparity, improving the schools image and also show you are progressive and willing to do a scientific approach to curriculum selection for the district. You could test these two curricula, that are often sighted as better than what MMSD offers, and really analyze the improvement. If it works ....say in 5 years great...if not go back to the districts accepted curriculum.
The doubling of our low income in such a short period of time (as well as the minority data) show the district is no longer a reflection of the community and we are losing students to the private sector, like most urban schools. MMSD has always had a wonderful reputation and has boasted how well the community attends the public school compared to other communities. We are quickly losing that grip and I feel it is less about "boundaries" but about quality of the education or "perceived" quality. While I am not downing the diversity that I enjoy and elect to have my children be a part of, you must see the problem with losing middle and high income students in a district that needs all those parents to participate in the community schools. Improving the curriculum and making it overwhelmingly attractive to all is the best way to solve the disparity issues at many of these schools, not all of course. The Math stinks in this district and I know you hear this all the time but look at the data, you are losing kids because of the curriculum, not due to boundary lines.
And while many people say, "We need to spend more money on our schools," there actually isn't a link between spending and student achievement.
Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths," points out that "If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved … We've doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet schools aren't better."
He's absolutely right. National graduation rates and achievement scores are flat, while spending on education has increased more than 100 percent since 1971. More money hasn't helped American kids.
Ben Chavis is a former public school principal who now runs an alternative charter school in Oakland, Calif., that spends thousands of dollars less per student than the surrounding public schools. He laughs at the public schools' complaints about money.
I'm impressed ABC devoted so much effort to education. The article includes full text and video.
William Ouchi is giving a talk today on decentralized schools, and organizations. He's a management prof at UCLA and author of a best-seller, Making Schools Work. He says that before WWII there were 25 million students in public schools, now there are 50 million. Before WWII there were 116,000 school districts, now there are 16,000. School districts have become centralized.
Residents of Swan Creek have launched a spirited campaign against plans to bus students from the area to Midvale/Lincoln elementary schools.
A few days after Christmas, 185 households signed a letter [500K PDF] opposing the plan, which a task force had proposed to address overcrowding at several schools in the western part of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Students from Swan Creek now attend Leopold Elementary School.
The letter was presented at the Jan. 5 meeting of the task force. Another task force is preparing plans for the east side of the district where under enrollment is a greater concern.
According to the letter, said the plan being considered meant the “subdivision is used selfishly by the Madison school district” to “plug holes in a plan that has very little merit” and contradicts an agreement the district made when it exchanged land with the Oregon School District. During the negotiations prior to the land swap, the Madison district said children from Swan Creek would attend Leopold.
The letter cited behavioral and safety issues associated with long bus rides, the negative effects on parent involvement and neighborhood cohesion, and criticized the attempt to use children from the subdivision to achieve balanced income at the schools.
Prasanna Raman, a member of the task force who presented the letter, said busing students from Swan Creek could be a case of reverse discrimination.
UPDATE: Midvale parent Jerry Eykholt sent this letter [pdf] to the Task Force and Swan Creek residents.
Arlene Silveria, a member of the task force who’s running for a seat on the school board, said she was concerned that removing “new” neighborhoods such as Swan Creek from Leopold would endanger the future of the school, whose enrollment might consist of higher than optimum proportion of low-income students.
The task force has generally endorsed transferring students from new subdivisions in Fitchburg instead of those from established neighborhoods.
The task force has been meeting for more than four months to develop three plans for consideration by the board. The recommendations aren’t binding, however, and some members of the task force questioned how much effort they should expend on the proposals.
Members have largely agreed to three plans: one based on a new addition at Leopold, one based on a new school on the far west side and another that included both building projects. At the Jan. 5 meeting, the task force failed to agree on a plan that addressed options if no new space was provided.
Members discussed submitting four plans, or adding the no-construction option to each of the three plans. The task force agreed to meet again Jan. 11 to discuss the plans, which must be presented to the board before the end of the month.
Pending additional changes, the three plans associated with new building involve a change in schools for some Fitchburg residents. One would send students from Swan Creek to Midvale-Lincoln, although these students would stay at Leopold if one more classroom were incorporated in the Leopold addition. Fifty-six students in the High Ridge Trail area would go to Thoreau instead of Chavez.
Another plan would send all students south of Lacy Road to Chavez, but the 50-minute bus ride was longer than the 45-minute maximum recommended by the task force.
The most contentious deliberations involved a plan that would not involve any new construction. The initial proposal, which was slightly modified at the Jan. 5 meeting, would move more than 400 students and affect 13 schools.
Several members questioned whether they should even consider such a plan because the task force had previously decided that a satisfactory solution must include new classrooms.
Since the no-building plan involved a period of only three years, some members said it was inconsistent with the task force’s mandate to formulate long-range plans.
Others said some opposition to a 2004 referendum, which would also have authorized an addition to Leopold, was due to the failure of the board too present an alternative plan.
Some observers, who did not want to be identified, questioned whether race had a role in the opposition of residents of the largely white and affluent Swan Creek subdivision to Midvale/Lincoln. However, Swan Creek residents are asking to remain at Leopold, which is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse schools in the district.
The board is unlikely to endorse any arrangements that appear to show preferential treatment lest it be flooded with similar requests. The failure of Fitchburg to approve last year’s Leopold referendum may also weigh in the board’s decisions, although it’s not a factor that’s likely to be discussed openly.
Task force members occasionally had trouble remembering the numerous boundary changes and other aspects of the plans. Some were concerned that representatives of the school board assisting task force didn’t accurately implement their decisions. There were also complaints that some of the options considered by the task force were inconsistent with guidelines they had previously endorsed.
The lengthy deliberations have taken their toll on members of the task force. “I’ve actually lost my marbles on it,” said Annette Miller. “I really don’t want to have any more meetings,” especially since there’s no guarantee the board will endorse any of the task of the group’s recommendations.
O’Keeffe and Lapham/Marquette PTGs will host a forum on the Affiliated Alternative Programs at 6:45 p.m. in the all purpose room on Wednesday, January 18. A flyer on the meeting lists the following purposes for the forum:
* Provide an opportunity for O’Keeffe, Lapham/Marquette school community members to ask questions about the proposal to place the Affiliated Alternative Program at the O’Keeffe/Marquette site AND to have an open community forum among ourselves after the Q&A
* Steve Hartley, Director of Alternative Programs, will be presenting information on the Affiliated Alternative Program and its space needs.
* Loren Rathert, Chairman for the East Area Task Force, will answer questions regarding the task force process.
Andrekopoulos said those studies are showing that students in high value-added programs are decidedly more engaged in actual classroom activity than those in low value-added schools.
In a recent presentation to the School Board, he said MPS now understands why low-performing schools are that way. "We didn't know that two years ago," he said.
Milwaukee Public Schools has begun listing how individual schools are doing not only on the widely used measure of what percentage of students are proficient or btter in standardizd tests, (attainment), but also with a measure in which the average increase in student scores from year to year in each school is compared with the average for all of MPS (value added).
Rationale for Removing School Closings from Consideration
Message from the East Attendance Area Task Force regarding rationale for Removing School Closings from Consideration. It reflects contributions from several Task Force members. This is another reason to be impressed by the hardwork of both the East and West/Memorial Task Forces.
Rationale for Removing School Closings from Consideration:
1. While very accurate at the district level, enrollment projections are less precise at the individual school level.
2. If we assume some reliability, the LaFollette attendance area is likely to be over capacity in 5 years. Leaving space available in East area schools will allow for potential boundary changes that will delay the need for another school on the far east side-Sprecher area-for the foreseeable future.
3. There is research suggesting children in poverty may benefit from small school size, in addition to small class size. The East attendance area has some of the smallest capacity schools in the district; it also has the highest concentration of children in poverty. In addition to strong leadership, smaller class sizes in the East area are contributing to the decrease in the achievement gap among students and across schools.
4. Elementary school aged children in the East attendance area, while attending schools with the highest level of low income enrollment, benefit from the fewest number of children being bused and lowest distance busing rates. The advantage this presents children and their families is better access to, and opportunity to become involved in, a neighborhood school.
5. Excess space in the East area schools can be, and is being, used efficiently as numerous district-wide programs are housed in East area schools. Placing programs within East area schools is a better way to continue to meet the unique needs of students in the East attendance area.
6. The financial benefits of closing a school are not worth the costs of disrupting the education of children attending that neighborhood school. Madison schools that have been closed in the East area have all been re-opened.
7. District wide, the problem of over-crowding in West/Memorial area schools bears much greater weight and urgency; further, changes on the East side would have no direct or real effect on the problems faced by these attendance areas. Solutions to the East attendance area and the West/Memorial attendance areas are not linked fiscally nor should they be practically linked. The issues, compositions, needs and realities are very different for the two attendance areas and each deserve due, deliberate and unique consideration and resolution.
8. Renovations, investments in the School Improvement Process (SIP), great parental and neighborhood support…these kinds of things are considered to have much more value than what would be gained by closing a neighborhood school. The East attendance area has greater poverty because proportionally more families who lack economic resources live in the attendance area. Communities in this area benefit from having neighborhood schools where families and children are more likely to connect with one another at school and as a result are more likely to be connected to their neighbors and neighborhoods. This is a critical resource in more economically fragile communities. What benefits schools, benefits communities and what benefits communities, benefits schools.
9. The impact of central East attendance area in-fill development project, such as Voight Farms, Union Corners, and Don Miller lot development are unknown. These projects are different than the existing downtown projects in that they will have a mix of housing and retail and will include dwelling sizes and prices to better accommodate families
10. We do not see the school closing option as viable, cost-effective or real long-range solution to best meet the educational needs of children in the East High School attendance area.
West Attendance Area Task Force Discussion at a PTO Meeting
Summary of a West Attendance Area Task Force Discussion at the Thoreau PTO:
MMSD Chief of Staff Mary Gulbrandsen participated in a well attended Thoreau PTO meeting recently to discuss the options that the West Attendance Area Task force is currently evaluating. I thought the conversation was quite interesting and have summarized several of the points discussed below:
The May, 2005 referenda failed due to poor communication. What will the District due to improve that? There was some additional discussion on this topic regarding whether a referendum could pass.
Why don't the developers (and therefore the homeowners in these new subdivisions) pay for the costs of a new school? Discussion followed that included much larger building permit fees, a referenda question that asked whether the homeowners in these emerging subdivisions should pay for a facility and changes in the way that we fund public education. Some also suggested that people purchased homes in these areas knowing that there was not a school nearby and therefore should not be surprised that a bus ride is required. Mary mentioned her experiences growing up an a farm where a 45 minute bus ride was no big deal. Obviously, there are different perspectives on this - I rode the bus daily for several years.
Can't the District sell some of their buildings (excess schools, Hoyt, Doyle - next to the Kohl Center) to pay for this? That would be a strong statement that might support the passage of a referendum.
The District could borrow construction funds from the State (up to $10M) without a referendum. Mary mentioned that this type of borrowing typically has a shorter term than the referendum numbers and must be paid for out of operating funds - rather than a property tax increase.
Mary mentioned that most homeowners in the MMSD should have seen relatively flat property taxes the past few years. State aid increases have helped to keep them relatively flat while overall district spending grows annually. The District's per student spending is also significantly above the state average. Madison does suffer from "negative aid" (negative aid means that for every new dollar of property tax revenue, the Madison School District has to actually raise taxes by $1.70 [ballpark - I don't have the exact number handy] because of the reduction of state aids) due to its high property tax base. In other words, the more the MMSD spends above the revenue caps, the more state aid we forfeit and the more our property taxes go up. Say that again - quickly :)
Some discussed the need to efficiently use the facilities that the district has, including Midvale/Lincoln, Hoyt and some of the east side schools.
Reduce the options presented to the board to just two:
No Referenda: move children around to re-balance individual school population
Referenda passes for new construction
Mary seemingly has been on the go for months. She along with all of the task force members have spent quite a bit of time on these issues. They deserve our thanks.
The mission of the ICE is to provide a wholly independent, fresh and informed perspective on the District's finances and operations to ensure the right resources are available and aligned to help the District achieve its academic plan.
In high school now, at Madison Memorial, I see this achievement gap more clearly than ever. Where are all the minority students in my advanced placement classes? Or more specifically, where are all the black students? In my advanced classes I can count them on one hand. And of these students, most are from middle to upper class families. Their parents have degrees of some sort, and their parents have pushed education—just as my parents encouraged me.
This leads me to ask, “What happens to all the kids whose parents don’t have degrees and who aren’t pushed to learn?” It seems to me that in a lot of these cases, they get trapped in the system, just like the two boys who fought at my school. And do teachers and administrations really know how to help them? It surprises me that we are taught history, math, science, and English but we are never given answers to some of the more difficult questions. The questions that deal with our society and our lives as young people growing up.
What does all of this mean for the African American youth who are struggling? How will they advance in school, and what’s more, in society?
The idea's appeal lies in its simplicity, proponents say. If school districts were required to make their administrative operations more efficient, they could free up money for use in the classroom.
I don't think there is a more important story in this new year of 2006 than what happens to the country's growing charter schools.
But no matter what happens to the federal law, we are going to continue to try to improve schools in this country, one way or another. I would prefer to spend my time looking at the most interesting and encouraging efforts to do so, and that means checking on the charter schools -- independently run public schools -- since they have the most freedom to innovate.
Tax Base, City Growth and the School District's Budget
Paying my annual property tax bill recently, I wondered what the effect of Madison's development growth (some might call it sprawl) has had on overall spending growth and on an individual's tax burden (note, Madison Schools include Fitchburg, Maple Bluff and Shorewood parcels). I contacted the city assessor's office and asked how the number of parcels has changed since 1990. Here are the numbers (thanks to Hayley Hart and JoAnn Terasa):
Local taxpayers have long supported the Madison School District's above average spending per student. In light of our growing state tax burden (up 10% this year), and the political pressure to moderate tax growth or implement a tax "freeze" (Republican candidate for Governor Scott Walker advocates 2/3 state funding for schools and a property tax freeze [pdf]. Given the profile and sensitivity of this issue along with Doyle's desire to be re-elected, I wonder what promises will be made prior to November's election date?), I don't believe we'll see significant growth in state funding.
Former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, now working for Verona's fast growing (fast!) Epic Systems takes a different look at Madison's development challenges (self inflicted, in his view) and the implications for the City's schools and tax base. Well worth reading.
What does this mean for public education funds? Like most public and private organizations, districts will need to do more with what they have and plan for more of the same, essentially the current moderate budget growth.
CARE posted some useful numbers on the Madison School District's budget, staffing and enrollment changes over the past decade.
Finally, I've always wondered how the city's appetite for a growing tax base squares with the long term costs (new schools, staffing, transportation) of supporting the resulting parcel growth (or is it sprawl)?
Jason Shepherd writing in the December 29, 2005 Isthmus:
Superintendent Art Rainwater: says the "most frustrating" part of his job is knowing there are ways to boost achievement with more resources, but not being able to allocate them. Instead, the district must each year try to find ways to minimize the hurt.
Board member Lawrie Kobza wants the board to review its strategic plan to ensure all students are being challenged with a rigorous curriculum.
Carol Carstensen, the current Board President says the "heterogenous" groupings, central to the West controversy (English 10, 1 curriculum for all), will be among the most important curriculum issues for 2006.
With respect to funding and new programs, the district spends a great deal on the controversial Reading Recovery program. The district also turned down millions in federal funds last year for the Reading First Program. Perhaps there are some opportunities to think differently with respect to curriculum and dollars in the district's $329M+ budget, which increases annually.
In the context of the system's regular budget of about $15 billion a year, $311 million might seem insignificant. But the tax dollars come with so many strings that the administration has viewed private money as crucial for research and development and an array of experimental programs.
"You are able to do it without saying this is money that is going to come out of the classroom," Mr. Klein said in an interview.
So far, the mayor's and the chancellor's collections include more than $117 million to start new small schools; nearly $70 million to open an academy for principal training; $41 million for the nonprofit center supporting charter schools; $11.5 million to renovate libraries; $8.3 million to refurbish playgrounds; and $5.7 million to reshape troubled high schools.
New money or old, donors have been enthusiastic enough to write seven- and eight-figure checks. As a result, the school system has been the largest beneficiary in a mayoralty that has reached to the private sector, strategically and aggressively, for all sorts of support.
Donors to the schools, many of whom have been attending black-tie benefits together for years, said the mayor and the chancellor have transformed the way the school system relates to gift-givers, by improving communication and creating a sense of professionalism.
"I come from the business world; I'm used to a world where there is freedom and accountability and that never seemed to exist in the world of public education," Mr. Reich said.
"The very notion of a dynamic entrepreneur is that they want to make something happen," he continued, sipping from a demitasse of espresso served by an aide in chef's whites. "They want to be part of a movement. As mayor he believes in the ideal of these public-private partnerships."
After becoming chancellor in 2002, Mr. Klein created an Office of Strategic Partnerships and imposed on his wife's college friend, Caroline Kennedy, to serve as its chief executive. Mr. Klein made the pitch while visiting Ms. Kennedy and her husband, Edwin A. Schlossberg, on Martha's Vineyard.
Most Secretive Public Entity: Madison Schools
This summer, the school board announced plans to meet in closed session to discuss teacher bennies, until this was deemed improper. In fall, the district suppressed a report that criticized school officials over the stun-gunning of a 14-year-old student on grounds that there was “pending litigation” — which of course means the litigants had certain access. It also cut a secret deal to buy land for a new school on the city’s southwest side, with board members refusing to delay final approval for even one week to allow for public input. What might voters do the next time the schools come seeking more money? Shhh! It’s a secret!
The D.C. public school system's college-level test participation rate increased slightly in 2005, with the largest high school, Wilson, making the greatest gain, according to The Washington Post Challenge Index survey of area schools.
The participation rate for D.C. schools, calculated as the number of college-level tests per graduating senior, went from 0.776 in 2004 to 0.820 in 2005, an increase of almost 6 percent
One place where such heroic work is taking place is the Watts Learning Center (WLC) charter school, one of the most improved charter schools in California.
From 2000 to 2005, the WLC rose from a low test-score ranking to a level near the state’s proficiency target score of 800. The K-5 charter school was able to defy low expectations and accomplish this feat with a student population nearly all African American and low income. In an example of what the President called “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” these two factors are too often considered indicators of educational failure. WLC charter school proved defied that expectation.
Gene Fisher, founder and president of WLC, says that the school’s mission is to create a culture of learning and high expectations for students, parents, faculty and staff. He points out that, "The job of our teachers includes an emphasis on a proven curriculum while also reinforcing these high expectations – a belief that students can and will succeed."
The school uses the structured phonics-based Open Court reading program. WLC chose Open Court before the Los Angeles Unified School District adopted the same program. Open Court emphasizes continuous review and practice of already learned material. Sandra Fisher, the school’s executive director, says that it is important that the curriculum be structured because so many students lack structure in their lives.
But on November 15th, Jefferson saw a new kind of disruption: a march organized by the students and parents of Small Schools Alliance, to protest what they see as indifference to the inadequate learning environment at Jefferson. More than 500 marchers converged on LAUSD headquarters with a petition of 10,000 signatures calling for the district to relinquish control of Jefferson High School and transform it into six independent charter schools to be operated by Green Dot Public Schools, a local, non-profit charter school developer, created by former Democratic party activist—and Rock the Vote founder—Steve Barr.
Green Dot, which currently operates five high schools in the Los Angeles area, has vied for control of Jefferson High School for nearly a year and a half. Charter school critics—and there are many—have long decried Romer's own association with the Charter School Movement. As reported in this paper back in February of 2003, Romer then supported a contentious bill aimed at resurrecting the controversial Belmont Learning Center as a risky charter school program.
“I think the Left, which I'm a member of, has to pull our heads out of our xxxxx and come up with some solutions, and stop defending failed systems. Especially un-democratic, centralized bureaucracies that are not effective,” says Barr in an interview with L.A. Alternative. “We have no answers for the education issue. Our answer is to give more money to a failed centralized system?”
Here is an eduprediction: One way or another, things are going to change at Jefferson, Barr has let the genie out of the bottle and it's not going back in. And that is his endgame anyway, improving things. Those parents want fresh ground now that they know it's out there.
Barr has this old fashioned notion that the public schools are supposed to be a way up the economic ladder a few rungs -- for the kids not the adults.
Her question remains an important one. If the task force of representatives of the school district and Madison Teachers , Inc. identifies future cost savings from changes in health insurance providers, the district could save million of dollars per year after 2007. Although the savings would go to higher wages for teachers during the 2005-07 collective bargaining agreement, there would be possible savings for the district budget in future years. The district now pays about $37 M per year for health insurance for its employees.
Unfortunately, the history of the task force to date suggests that Ms. Jakobson's fears were well-grounded.
The deadline for determining whether savings are possible is February 2006. There were no meetings of the task force between the June ratification of the collective bargaining agreement that created the task force and the end of 2005. There has been no board discussion of the meetings or our goals for the task force.
At first, Board President Carol Carstensen publicly announced that the meetings would be closed. When the attorney for the school board corrected her, she conceded that the meetings to look for savings, rather than negotiate changes in the collective bargaining agreement, would be open.
How open? Not very.
If you go to the MMSD web site, then to Board of Education, then to Board calendar, then to January 2006, you will find two scheduled meetings of the task force, one on January 11 and one on January 25. Both meetings are at 1 p.m., during work hours for most people, including board members, who might want to observe the discussions. There is no location listed for the meetings except "MTI". So you need to go to the phone book to find out that Madison Teachers, Inc. is located at 821 Williamson Street in Madison [Map]. There is no information about the room. BOE calendar for January 2006
I asked President Carstensen to move the meetings to the Doyle building and to change the times of day to make the meetings more accessible. She declined to do either. I then asked that the district video-tape the meetings and broadcast them. After conferring with the superintendent, Ms. Carstensen told me that there would be video-tapes. Apparently broadcasting these meetings was out of the question.
So, stay tuned to this blog if you want information about these financially important task force meetings. I will post the videotapes as soon as I receive them.
As for what to expect, a recent Isthmus article reported that the task force will discuss the status quo health providers at the first meeting and others at the second meeting.
Some of the very changes that Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made his hallmark - uniform programs in reading and math for most schools; drilling that helped produce citywide gains last spring on standardized tests; changes in rules for admission to programs for the gifted and talented, designed to make them more equitable - have caused unease among that important constituency.
Many parents say, however, that there are extremely limited public school options in the middle school years, and some chafe at how the new rules for gifted programs in the elementary schools and for certain select schools have made competition for admission stiffer.
City officials say that judging by the number of children eligible for free lunch, the class divide in the system remains stable: About 80 percent of the children are poor, with no increase in middle class flight.
Yet Emily Glickman, a consultant who advises parents in the city on winning admission for their children to private schools, said, "The last two years the interest in private schools has exploded, as I see it with people coming to me."
Why is the MMSD Afraid to Have a General Discussion of Their Mathematics Program?
A year ago the Jefferson PTO planned to have a mathematics night, with a discussion of their math program. I was asked if I would appear and said yes. The Madison Metropolitan School District was asked and they refused to send anyone, saying that they did not want to do this school by school. but district wide. When Mary Ramberg was asked when this would be done, she said they had no plans to do this.
Here is part of the report from 1882 from the State Superintendent about textbooks. At this time changes in textbooks had to be approved by the State Superintendent. The following should be done:
3d. That regard shall be had to the merits of the books, and that if the change is sought to be made in the interests of better books, the superior merits of the books proposed to be introduced shall be stated.
4th. That the change shall not be against the pronounced public opinion of the locality interested.
Why is the MMSD afraid to have a general discussion of their mathematics program?
It may sound simple, but it helps illustrate the urgent need to change the state’s approach to improving failing schools.
As it stands, the state can deem a school underperforming if students fail to meet minimum standards for two or more years.
Then it’s six months to come up with an improvement plan, another two years to make changes and only then does the state even consider intervening. Meanwhile, another generation spends its most important years in schools that aren’t getting the job done.
Update: Concerning public accountability, one reader writes:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not defending these voucher schools, or any schools that hide from legitimate public oversight. But I’ve spent years now working on projects that required interviews with school personnel, site visits, documentation from the central office, etc., etc. And if you think that refusing to submit to outside evaluation is specifically or even primarily a problem of private/voucher schools, you’re nuts. There’s no stonewaller like the public school stonewaller. Administrative assistants are the worst. And don’t give me all that FERPA xxxx, either; they just don’t want people snooping around.
That's a fair enough point, it's not just a voucher school problem (though not every public school stonewalls either).
Public education is public business, that is, your business. However, the administration thinks otherwise, and I was raked over the coals a few days back for saying, "The MMSD's line certainly tells students, parents, teachers, and taxpayers that we don't know bleep about education, so we should sit down, shut up, and get out of the way while the administration does what it pleases."
I further commented, "The issue is MMSD's 'corporate culture,' and how it values the opinions of administrators vs. the rest of us."
In the draft of the minutes of Performance and Achievement Committee on November 14, 2005, we get a clear restatement of the MMSD's organizational culture:
The reason that the board and public will not be able begin thinking through the curriculum redesign is that the superintendent invoked a new form of 'executive privilege' at last Monday’s meeting. When I asked for information as soon as the committee makes its recommendations, the superintendent successfully argued that no one outside of administration should have access to the recommendations until he decides which recommendations he supports. According to Rainwater, public discussion of the recommendations before he makes his choices would interfere with his discussion with the experts on his staff. Apparently protecting administrative discussion is more important than opening the curriculum-choosing process to public scrutiny and input.
I'll now have to amend my earlier comment: "The MMSD's line certainly tells the BOARD OF EDUCATION, students, parents, teachers, and taxpayers that we don't know bleep about education, so we should sit down, shut up, and get out of the way while the administration does what it pleases."
I respectfully encourage the board to assert its appropriate role as the ultimate authority over the MMSD.
Report of Committee to Redesign Middle School Curriculum: Top Secret for Now
An administrative report recommending changes the middle school curriculum district-wide that was due in late December is now expected some time in January. Shwaw Vang, chair of the Performance and Achievement Committee of the MMSD school board, held a second meeting on the expected report on December 19. According to minutes of the November meeting on this topic, the December meeting would be an opportunity for Board members to provide feedback or input.
Unfortunately, the Board received no new information about the likely proposal of the committee, although the recommendations will affect most areas of the middle school curriculum, including Fine Arts, Life Skills, Mathematics, Wellness, and World Languages as well as Student Support Services. Among other things, the recommendations will result in equal minutes of instruction across subject areas.
At a November 14 meeting, the Performance and Achievement committee heard the following overview of the work of the Middle Grades Design Team to Develop a Consistent Curriculum for 6th, 7th, and 8th Grade Students.
"Pam Nash noted the design team was formed at the request of the Superintendent and charged to design a consistent sixth through eighth grade educational experience across the middle grades that address the areas of learning, engagement, and relationships. The goal is that all middle grade students will have an equal opportunity to gain the academic and interpersonal skills necessary to be prepared for the rigor of the ninth grade. She presented an overview of the work of the team to date. Recommendations will be provided to the Superintendent by the end of December and then to the Board of Education.
DISCUSSION:
• Considerations/affect on a magnet school program (Spring Harbor).
• Board opportunity to review recommendations. Board needs a real role before decisions come about budget and curriculum change.
• Focus of “learning” is that all students are prepared in the same way for the rigor of high school curriculum. Parents (not just low income) are concerned about rigor.
• Focus should be on priorities and a way to measure progress.
• Question is how to guarantee equal challenge as well as the opportunity to explore.
• Focus has been on emotional and social aspects and not enough academic challenge. Part of the issue will be bringing the staff along.
• Real goal is a consistent, rigorous academic program that does not look different from school to school, or teacher to teacher. Upgrade academic program and make it as consistent as possible.
• With continuing budget cuts, different schools made different choices about curriculum; widened from each other. Issue has been visited. At a point to do this now because it is the right thing to do for students.
• Ask for input from students as well. Need to know any budgetary impacts.
Follow-Up: Shwaw Vang asked for another presentation in early December. This would also be an opportunity for Board members to provide feedback or input."
From draft of Minutes of Performance and Achievement Committee on November 14, 2005.
Like the public, the Board of Education remains in the dark as to the scope and content of the committee’s likely recommendations to Superintendent Art Rainwater, let alone his thoughts. We will all get our first chance to review potentially sweeping curriculum changes in the New Year---at the same time that the board will be resolving school boundary and construction issues, monitoring the “$100 budget process”, developing the budget for the 2006-07 school year, and receiving the recommendations of the new task force on the district’s “equity policy”. A similar secrecy and delay last year kept the board from knowing about recommendations affecting high school sports until budget decisions were imminent.
The reason that the board and public will not be able begin thinking through the curriculum redesign is that the superintendent invoked a new form of “executive privilege” at last Monday’s meeting. When I asked for information as soon as the committee makes its recommendations, the superintendent successfully argued that no one outside of administration should have access to the recommendations until he decides which recommendations he supports. According to Rainwater, public discussion of the recommendations before he makes his choices would interfere with his discussion with the experts on his staff. Apparently protecting administrative discussion is more important than opening the curriculum-choosing process to public scrutiny and input.
The longer the curriculum design recommendations remain secret, the stronger will be the argument against implementing the recommendations at all middle schools in 2006-07. Parents, teachers and the public deserve sufficient time to review the recommendations and the basis for all proposed changes.
Residents of the Madison Metropolitan School District will be given the opportunity in 11 January sessions to make suggestions and set priorities for budget reductions necessary for the 2006-07 school year. The budget reduction exercise uses a $100 budget that reflects the proportionate share for 47 major program areas of the actual MMSD budget.
MMSD Press release, 12/22/05
Participants are asked to individually and in a small group determine which program areas should be cut and by how much to reach the projected maximum of $10 million that the school district will have to cut for next year to comply with state-imposed revenue limits. In the $100 budget model, $10 million equals $3.85.
“We’re interested in meaningful community participation in setting priorities for budget reductions,” said Superintendent Art Rainwater. “The major priorities that result from all the exercise participants will inform us as we develop the budget for the Board of Education.”
The $100 budget exercise will also show the difficulty of making up to $10 million in budget cuts for next year, and improve understanding of the impact of budget reductions.
The 11 sessions are scheduled at each of the Madison middle schools on the evenings of January 24, 25 and 26 (complete schedule is below.) One will be held at each of the Madison middle schools. All MMSD residents are invited to participate one time, and the sessions should run between 1 hour 20 minutes and 1 hour 45 minutes.
There will be four parts to the sessions: an overview of the MMSD budget and the exercise process; individuals making their own budget cuts using the $100 budget; reaching consensus with a group of four persons on the cuts; and individuals setting priorities by goals and programs.
Residents can get more information about the $100 budget exercise and can work on their own budget reductions after January 9, when the document will be at www.mmsd.org/budget/100dollar/
For more information, contact:
Ken Syke, 663-1903 or 575-6682, or
Joe Quick, 663-1902
Community Sessions of the Budget Reduction Exercise Using the $100 Budget Model
Every MMSD resident is invited to participate, but each is limited to participating one time. Length of the sessions will be between 1:20 and 1:45.
Tuesday, January 24
Cherokee Middle School 6:00 p.m. 4301 Cherokee Dr Cafeteria
Sennett Middle School 6:00 p.m. 502 Pflaum Rd. Cafeteria
Hamilton Middle School 7:00 p.m. 4801 Waukesha St. Cafeteria
Sherman Middle School 7:00 p.m. 1610 Ruskin St. Cafeteria
Wednesday, January 25
Jefferson Middle School 6:00 p.m. 101 S. Gammon Rd. Cafeteria
O'Keeffe Middle School 6:00 p.m. 510 S. Thornton Ave. Cafeteria
Spring Harbor Middle School 7:00 p.m. 1110 Spring Harbor Dr.Gym
Whitehorse/Schenk Schools 7:00 p.m. 218 Schenk St. Cafeteria
Thursday, January 26
Wright Middle School 6:00 p.m. 1717 Fish Hatchery Rd. LMC
Toki Middle School 6:30 p.m. 5606 Russett Rd. Cafeteria
Black Hawk/Gompers Schools 7:00 p.m. 1402 Wyoming Way Cafeteria
Two slots on the Madison School Board will be up for grabs in spring elections in which one incumbent will face a challenger while other candidates vie for an open seat.
Board member Juan Jose Lopez announced Tuesday that he will seek a fifth three-year term. He is facing a challenge by Lucy Mathiak, a parent and organizer of the advocacy group East High United.
Parents Arlene Silvera and Maya Cole, both active PTO members at different West Side schools, have declared their candidacy for the seat being vacated by Bill Keys.
Websites: Maya Cole | Juan Jose Lopez | Lucy Mathiak | Arlene Silveira (Arlene told me her site would be up soon).
Tim Olsen on Generating Cash from the Doyle Administration Land/Building
Tim Olsen's email to Madison Board of Education Member Ruth Robarts:
And below are the specifics you requested re calculating an estimated value for the Doyle site. You are welcome to share this email with anyone interested. And thanks for the opportunity to speak to the Board, for your comments, and for including Lucy Mathiak's blog-article. Someone told me about her article and I'm happy to receive a copy.
My estimate of the value of the Doyle Building is straightforward and based on current City assessments of the Doyle property and of Howard Johnsons just across the street. This public information is freely available via the City of Madison Assessor's site. Similar calculations can be made by anyone. The Excel spreadsheet I used (complete with embedded formulas) is attached as an example. Here's how anyone can make their own calculations:
You can do the same for the Howard Johnson property and compare the two. The Howard Johnson Motor Lodge street address is 525 W. Johnson and the back of the hotel is across the street from the front of the Doyle property (originally called Washington School when it was built).
The key calculation (per the attached spreadsheet [.xls file]) is figuring out the assessed value of Howard Johnson LAND (not including the "Improvements" i.e. building and parking lot etc) PER SQUARE FOOT. For HoJo's the calculation is $4,237,000 divided by 70,611 sq. feet in the parcel = $60 per square foot.
Then, to calculate an estimate for the Doyle property land value (ignoring the building value), simply multiply $60/sq.ft. * 115, 927 sq. ft. = $6,955,620.
Since the Doyle property is adjacent to the Kohl Center, and generally parcels in Madison sell for substantially more than assessed value, I'm guessing it's actually worth a lot more than $7 million.To sell, lease or develop the Doyle property, the zoning classification would have to be changed, which is not a trivial matter. But just as Ms. Mathiak points out with regard to City Landmarks, such obstacles have been overcome for good reasons many times in City history. The Hilton Hotel that was developed on Catholic Church property is a related example. It is quite unlikely that the Doyle property would ever qualify as a National Register of Historic Places landmark in my opinion but I'd suggest checking with the State Historical Society for a professional assessment.
I think it would be great to get selling/leasing/developing the Doyle property formally on the table.
My personal hunch is that the wisest option would be to develop the site, maintain ownership and lease space so that MMSD could continue to make money on it and maintain options for moving programs or administration in or out as enrollment changes over the decades. (Modeling needs for only the next 5 or 10 years is tremendously short-sighted. Extrapolating trends for such a short time is realistic in that projecting beyond that is highly speculative, but we need to recognize how just how limited our predictive powers are. That's the way it is.
But the fact is, that the property will maintain, and likely greatly increase in value for a long time, given its incredibly valuable location. Why sell the cow that will produce for generations?
But I'm sure that by putting it on the table, and giving it a thorough analysis with expert help would come out with very good, and well-prioritized solutions, that might even disagree my hunch.
Meanwhile, I understand that the State Cap really puts MMSD in a box. And that 7 million would not pay off $10 million of shortfall each year. Referendums will need to be passed to maintain the same quality of education over the long term. And we can't wait for a huge change in the attitudes, or representation of legislators required for overturning or modifying the cap(s).
Nonetheless, taking some initiative with the Doyle site could contribute positively to the district's inbalance in funding more significantly that reshuffling students among schools or building a new building. So, in sum I agree with you in that "we must take some steps of this kind to improve public confidence and build support for referendums that we will need in the near future."
So -- keep up the good work Ms. Robarts.
Cheers,
Tim Olsen
P.S. I would love to see MMSD Admin LEAD FROM THE FRONT by moving their offices to schools with space and low enrollments. That would be educational for all parties don't you think?
P.P.S. A calculation of the value of the Wingra School property on Monroe St. can be made similarly to above. To be more accurate, average the value (land and improvements) per square foot value of all adjacent property around the three sides of the parcel, then multiply the ($ average value/sqft) * (the total square footage of the Wingra School) parcel. My guess is that $750,000 is still way, way less than its market value -- beneficial as maintaning its current use/zoning may be to adjacent property owners. A $750,000 sale price to the school subsidizes private education with public property value, while the green space etc. enhances adjacent and nearby property values. I'd vote for leasing the property to Wingra at a realistic rate for a shorter term (not $1 per year). Think that's a tough approach? Ask Edgewood how much it would cost to lease a similar amount of land and/or facilities from them. That would be the 'market rate' for a private school.
Ms. Robarts, ..just some quick context for my 'specifics'.. Of course the City Assessor's Office, any good developer, or certainly a professional appraisor would point out that many more factors merit consideration in making an accurate appraisal. Factors as diverse as proximity to a freeway ramp, brown fields, street congestion, view, whether or not its on a lakeshore and non-linear relationships with parcel size are just a tiny tip of the iceberg. Nonetheless, a quick and fair calculation of the value of the LAND (excluding improvements which is more complicated; e.g. how would maintaining the exterior of a city landmark factor into developing the site) can be reasonably approximated the way I did it.
And for more context -- How do I know?.. some further qualifications:
dozen years on Tenney-Lapham Neigh. Assoc. Board with 2 as President inc. work on development,
building code and parcel assessment issues; most recently on the 800 E. Washington property (Don Miller autos) proposed for development by Gary Gorman (an excellent plan that deserves City support with TIF, in my opinion) -
PhD minor in Environmental Monitoring (remote sensing and Geospatial information systems science (as mentioned Monday eve. my PhD major is Curriculum & Instruction from Madison) GIS etc provides sophisticated means to estimate real estate value (along with many other applications).
I'd be happy to help contact some developers to encourage them to look at the Doyle property. Have a great day
Terry Pristin discusses the University of Washington's rental income generated by 11 acres of downtown Seattle real estate. A great example of thinking different.
Wisconsin residents and businesses paid a record $56.5 billion in state, local and federal taxes and fees this year, a 10% increase from last year and the biggest jump in more than two decades, according to a study by a non-partisan taxpayers group. = WISTAX
Wisconsin’s total taxes rose 1.4 percentage points in 2005 to 32.0% of personal income
Net local property tax levies rose 6.3% in 2005. At 4.3% of personal income, 2005 net levies were at their highest level in 10 years.
Those options would move between 316 and 620 students. Some students at Leopold, Chavez, Falk, Thoreau, Stephens and Huegel would go to existing schools, while some students from Crestwood, Huegel, Stephens and Chavez would attend a new school.
School Board member Lawrie Kobza questioned why an option moving fewer students, which had been presented at recent public forums, was off the table. "I had felt we were moving in the right direction when moving the least number of kids," she said.
Facilitator Jane Belmore said bus rides for some of those students would have exceeded 45 minutes each way.
....parent Tim Olsen called on administrators to "lead from the front" instead by selling the Doyle Administration Building.
Olsen said that selling the property adjacent to the Kohl Center could bring nearly $7 million to the district, which anticipates eliminating up to $10 million from its current budget next year to comply with state revenue limits.
With this spring's elections to the Madison School Board, the balance of power on the seven-member body hinges on the outcome of what surely will be two hotly competitive races.
MMSD Budget Mystery #5: Mumbo Gumbo in the Kitchen
Let me first say, daring detectives, we dismissed Sam Spade that language larruping lout. So uncouth!
So let’s get back to real sleuthing on the case of Mumbo Gumbo in the Kitchen, the MMSD kitchen to be exact.
The puzzling budget portfolio presented to the Board of Education says, “The Division [Food Service] is reviewing staffing levels for the 2005-2006 school year and expects to reduce the staffing level by approximately 2%.” (page 150)
Now here’s the first of the mysteries in this mumbo gumbo. The budget figures on page 149 (the page right before page 150!) show the Food Service budget RISING from $7,152,021 to $7,398,620, an increase of $246,599 or 3.5%! Mysterious!
Don’t go away. We’re just getting started on these numbing numbers.
“Fringe FTE” increased from $1,004,621 to $1,922,782, or $918,637 or 91.5%, according to the same budget figures. Do the Food Service employees have such a bold bargaining brigade as to wring such a wonderful increase from the MMSD contract negotiators?
The same table shows that “Other Salary and Benefits” leaped from $1,219,053 to $2,180,790, an increase of 78.9%.
What would cause such a dramatic increase in salaries and fringes in light of the professed reduction in staffing level “by approximately 2%?” (The simple solution won’t stump those who paid attention to Mystery #4: Body Count or 1-2-3 FTE.)
“Other expenses” in Food Services (still on page 149) yo-yo around from $2.1 million in 2003-2004, $3.9 million in 2004-2005, and settle at $2,395,600 in 2005-2006.
This is a most curious concoction!
Can anyone tell the okra from the rice in this gurgling mumbo jumbo?
We live in a world instantly connected via satellites, computers, and other electronic technology. Our children embrace the technology that makes those connections possible, but need the educational background through cultural and linguistic experiences that will prepare them for the global world of today and their international future.
Burmaster raises some useful points. Clearly, it is no longer sufficient to compare Madison's curriculum and achievement with Racine, Green Bay or Kenosha. Rather, the question should include Bangalore, Helsinki, Shanghai, Taipei and Osaka, among others.
An article by Joe Quick on MMSD's Web site lists the MMSD as one of the organizations opposed to legislation that would allow the UW-Madison to support a charter school in Dane County. Quick wrote:
Two Milwaukee-area legislators have proposed allowing the UW System to operate or contract for the operation of a charter school with the approval of the Board of Regents. According to the Legislative Reference Bureau analysis, "the school must be located in Dane County and may accept any pupil who resides in Dane County. The school may accommodate up to 700 pupils in its first school year (which may be no sooner than 2007-08), and up to 1,400 pupils thereafter."
. . . The bills are opposed by the: School Administrators Alliance, Wisconsin Association of School Boards, Wisconsin Education Association Council, Milwaukee Public Schools, Janesville and Madison Schools. As of December 15, no lobbying group or individual registered with the State Ethics Board has indicated support for the measure.
An individual does not have to register with the State Ethics Board unless they are a paid lobbyist working for a group like those listed above.
This report asks two fundamental questions: do the licenses that states require of school principals encompass the knowledge and skills those principals need to promote student learning? If not, what kind of policy framework would help decisionmakers, educators, and others rethink principal licenses and the school leadership they support? To find the answers, we examined licensure content for principals in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Based on that in-depth investigation, we reached the following conclusions.
Licenses don’t reflect a learning focus. No state has crafted licensing policies that reflect a coherent learning-focused school leadership agenda. On the contrary, licenses run between two extremes: a reliance on individual characteristics, such as background checks or academic degrees, that signal nothing about the purposes or practice of the principalship, and lists of knowledge and skill requirements whose scope and depth don’t clearly sum to a meaningful definition of the job. Neither approach represents a set of qualifications on which the public may rely or the profession may depend. In an era of standards and accountability, this omission stands out.
Licensing requirements are unbalanced across states and misaligned with today’s ambitions for school leaders.
We asked our nine districts what their biggest barriers were in achieving excellence at scale, and they described five categories of management challenges:
Implementing a district-wide strategy
Achieving organizational coherence in support of the strategy
Developing and managing human capital
Allocating resources in alignment with the strategy
Using performance data for decision making and accountability
If "homogeneous" is bad, is "heterogeneous" better?
An article from American Educator, a magazine of the American Federation of Teachers:
. . . detracking accomplished many transformations in a few short years. It transformed teaching from difficult to impossible. It transformed the ideal of equal instruction for all into practices offering less instruction for all. It transformed faster students from motivated allies to disengaged threats . And it transformed teachers from detracking enthusiasts into advocates for a return to tracking. These results pose challenges for researchers and practitioners. While tracking often has bad outcomes, detracking
is not necessarily better.
Researchers who have played a role in criticizing tracking must also consider the potential problems of detracking. Until such studies are done, high school practitioners should be cautious about proceeding to detracking reforms just because they sound appealing. There is too much at stake, and there is great risk of unanticipated negative outcomes. These teachers’ experiences indicate that good intentions and hard work are not enough to make detracking successful.
Substitue "homogeneous" for "tracked" and "heterogeneous" for "detracked," and see whether the article has any application to West's Curriculum Reduction Plan.
Since Thursday, “thousands and thousands” (and I mean - thousands) of e-mails have filled the e-mailboxes of Madison School Board members (and probably other members of school boards in Wisconsin). The message reads:
Dear Governor Doyle and Public Instruction Superintendent's office,
I am very much disappointed that Wisconsin, a state which preaches tolerance and diversity, has public schools which now teach intolerance and anti-diversity. Celebrating a Christmas witch and secularizing "Silent Night" while changing the words to the Christmas carol displays a very narrow-minded approach to education. You have a double standard which allows some religious symbols while banning others. This double standard is not in keeping with this country's religious freedom. Why not be inclusive and allow both Hanukkah and Christian Christmas songs?
Christmas is recognized as a federal and state holiday. That being the case, it appears illegal for the school board to ban Christian Christmas songs since our federal and state governments recognize Christmas as a holiday. It certainly isn't a good reflection on your state.
I hope you will act to change this religious bigotry on the part of some schools in Wisconsin.
Sincerely,
XXXXXXX (The name of sender)
The person responsible for doing this is very technologically savvy. Each name is different and the comments are for the most part different as well. I don’t know about other board members, but I figured out how to “filter” the messages so their not clogging up my “In-box”, however if Governor Doyle tries to get a hold of me, his message will probably end up in the “trash.” If anyone sees the Governor and he asks about me, tell him to give me a phone call or write me a letter via U.S. mail.
In the spirit of the season and being "politically correct", have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Holidays and Happy (fill in your holiday) to all!
Please see www.madison.k12.wi.us and click on the Long Range Planning section and view the updated options on this site. Or view the report that will be given to the BOE Monday evening. The W/M Task Force will have another meeting on Dec 20th and tweeking of the options may occur but many of us feel we have reached the near end. (Of course anything can happen so don't hold me to that.) Also, the East Task Force Report for the BOE is available on the LRP site.
Madison School Board looking for community members to serve on Equity Task Force
The Madison School Board is looking for persons interested in serving on an Equity Task Force. At this time we are targeting our efforts in finding citizens that live and/or have children in the LaFollette and Memorial attendance areas. Persons selected will need to be sensitive and understanding of issues of poverty, class, privilege, race, and disenfranchisement. Other attributes would include someone who has had experience working or living in a culture, community or environment that serves predominately low income or individuals in a minority group.
The Equity Task Force will recommend to the Board of Education an equity policy that includes:
- a definition of equity,
- a statement of the district's commitment to equity, and
- possible guidelines for implementing the policy.
Timeline will include several meetings with the Madison school district administration. The dates and times will be discussed amongst the selected membership.
This is an important Task Force! If you are interested in assisting in this effort, please contact school board President Carol Carstensen at 255-5931 or ccarstensen@madison.k12.wi.us. Thank you for your consideration in this important effort. Please respond by Wednesday December 21st.
Johnny Winston, Jr.
Vice President
Madison School Board
Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: A Look at the Educational Histories of the 29 West HS National Merit Semi-Finalists
Earlier this semester, 60 MMSD students -- including 29 from West HS -- were named 2006 National Merit Semifinalists. In a 10/12/05 press release, MMSD Superintendent Art Rainwater said, "I am proud of the many staff members who taught and guided these students all the way from elementary school, and of this district's overall guidance and focus that has led to these successes."
A closer examination of the facts, however, reveals that only 12 (41%) of West High School's 29 National Merit Semifinalists attended the Madison public schools continuously from first grade on (meaning that 59% received some portion of their K-8 schooling in either private schools or non-MMSD public schools). Here's the raw data:
NMSF #28: Montessori pre-K through 2nd; Shorewood 4th-5th; Eagle 5th-8th
NMSF #29: Shorewood K-5th; Hamilton
Looking at the sample in a little more detail, we find the following:
Elementary school (K-5) history: 31% attended private school for three or more years (an additional 21% attended non-MMSD public schools for three or more years -- total: 52%).
Middle school (6-8) history: 28% attended private school for two or more years (an additional 14% attended non-MMSD public schools for two or more years -- total: 42%).
K-8 schooling history: 28% attended private school for five or more of their K-8 school years (an additional 17% attended non-MMSD public schools for five or more of their K-8 school years -- total: 45%)
Although we do not have K-8 attendance data for the entire class, it seems unlikely to think that almost 30% of current West seniors attended private school for five or more of their pre-high school years. Thus on this single demographic variable, the 29 West National Merit Semifinalists are probably different from their classmates, generally.
Descriptive data like these are certainly interesting, though they often raise more questions than they answer. And of course, they don't prove anything. Nevertheless, with 45% of the West HS National Merit Semifinalist sample attending non-MMSD schools for over half of their K-8 years, it is recommended that the District temper its sense of pride in and ownership of these very accomplished students.
Many thanks to each of these fine young people for speaking with us on the telephone. Congratulations and good luck to each and every one of them!
Weekly Email From Board President Carol Carstensen
Parent Group Presidents:
BUDGET FACTOID:
The Qualified Economic Offer (Q.E.O.) law provides that a district which offers its teachers a combined salary and benefit package of at least 3.8% can avoid going to binding arbitration. The practical impact is that a district must offer at least 3.8%. Over the 12 years of revenue caps, the Madison district has settled at about 4.2% with MTI that means the total increase of salary and benefits (including health insurance) has been about 4.2%. This year the settlement was 3.98%.
December 5th meetings:
Legislative Committee (Ruth Robarts, chair) the committee discussed a bill introduced in the state senate which requires the legislature to pass a health reform bill by January 1, 2008 providing coverage for 98% of state residents. The second bill discussed was one which would allow the UW System to create and run a charter school (independent of any school district). The discussion focused on whether there was any interest by people or departments within the University in this bill. It was also noted that the Board has historically opposed creating charters that are not run by school districts.
Special Board Meeting: Wright Middle School one of the district’s charter schools came to the Board because it’s charter was up for renewal. The Board heard a presentation from Wright’s principal, Nancy Evans and comments from parents and staff. The new charter streamlines the governing board a bit; the school focus was enlarged from art and technology to include service learning. The Board was unanimous in its support for the charter. Board members specifically noted:
the academic progress students have made at the school;
the fact that there have been almost no students recommended for expulsion from Wright; and
the fact that Wright was created as the result of more than a decade of advocacy by a number of organizations and community members who felt the south side needed a middle school.
Regular Board Meeting: The Board gave final approval to the goals for the Superintendent for the 2005-06 school year. The goals are:
Develop targets and measures for each of the areas of the Strategic Plan (student achievement, challenging curriculum, student support, staff effectiveness, home and community partnerships and fiscal responsibility).
Develop a detailed plan to improve student’s performance in math.
Provide information to the Board twice a year on the district’s collaborations and partnerships.
Develop and provide a means to implement a plan to “grow our own administrators”.Week of Dec. 12th NO MEETINGS (Board members will try to catch up on their reading, responding to emails, shoveling sidewalks, and perhaps even preparing for the winter break.)
Dec. 19th Meetings televised from McDaniels Auditorium:
5 p.m. Partnerships Committee (Lawrie Kobza, chair) first consideration and discussion of a policy governing outside funding for school district programs and activities.
6 p.m. Performance and Achievement Committee (Shwaw Vang, chair) report from the Middle Grades Design Team
6:45 p.m. Long Range Planning Committee (Bill Keys, chair) preliminary recommendations from both the East Area and Memorial/West Areas Task Forces. (N.B. These are only preliminary recommendations final ones will be made at the end of January. The Board will likely hold forums to get further feedback from the public once the final recommendations are made.)
Q: So what can parents do to fight for better schools?
A: Former American Federation of Teachers president Al Shanker said the New York City union needed to "become a disaster" to be taken as seriously as a hurricane that had worked its way up the East Coast. Parents also need to be a "disaster." No one who has power in education got it by asking nicely. Public education is about politics, politics is about power, and if parents want control over what happens to their kids, they have to go out there and steal power from someone else. I'm not suggesting that parents be out there running schools, but if they were a little more demanding, we wouldn't be in this mess.
North Ave. is a microcosm of the wealth of things being done to help educate low-income black students and is ground zero in Milwaukee (which itself has been called ground zero in America) for school reforms of many kinds - all of them paid for with public money.
"This whole plethora of schools has inspired this community and given this community hope," Johnson says. "All of the schools along the avenue are sending a very strong message to the community that education is the key, and there are very strong options."
But if North Ave. illustrates how parents in Milwaukee have a wider array of choices in publicly funded education than parents elsewhere in America, it does not yet provide convincing answers of what will come from the innovations.
(Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent William) Andrekopoulos says: "We do things differently because we have to compete. We have a consciousness of all the options in the community."
At the Young Leaders Academy, Ronn Johnson says, "It's very clear to the school operators that you have to offer a high quality option or your customers will leave."
He calls the burst of new schools "a wake-up call to everyone that the power has shifted. It's no longer in the district. . . . Parents really have the power now."
Gov. Jim Doyle supports the push to increase the math and science proficiency of high school students, which is primarily coming from business leaders.
They say a lack of these skills among those entering the labor pool is putting Wisconsin at risk of losing jobs because there won't be enough qualified workers to fill positions ranging from manufacturing jobs to computer specialists, from engineers to mathematical, life and physical scientists and engineering and science technicians.
Art Rainwater, superintendent of the Madison School District, supports increasing the state requirements. Madison high schools require two years of each subject, but in recent years the district has strengthened its math requirement so that all students must now take algebra and geometry to graduate, Rainwater said.
If the state does not increase its math and science requirements, the district will likely consider raising them, he said.
But School Board President Carol Carstensen said she isn't certain requiring more courses is the way to best prepare all students to succeed after high school.
And just increasing the requirements (emphasis added) won't make the classes more rigorous, said Lake Mills chemistry teacher Julie Cunningham, who recently won the prestigious Milken Family Foundation National Educator Award.
Additional links and background on math and science curriculum.
Public Knowledge: Vote Database - A Fabulous Resource
Perhaps we'll see something like this for local officials, including our own Board of Education. Very impressive use of RSS.
Ideally, the district would publish a page with votes along with items that Board members requested be placed on an agenda. This information would provide the public with easily accessible voter data and illuminate issues that were prevented from being discussed by the then current President. What is RSS?
You don’t have to travel very far to hear snide remarks about Fitchburg. It’s a sprawling suburb. Unchecked growth. An enclave for white folks and their McMansions.
Of course, there’s an element of truth in all of these barbs, and I frequently indulge my doubts that this appendage of Madison is a manifestation of our most noble civilizing instincts.
But I confess to getting rather fond of Fitchburg, and occasionally entertain notions that its sprawling, disjointed character is normal. The city might be evolving toward something that resembles, well, a city.
My main reservations about Fitchburg have more to do with doubts that 21st century American culture is really creating a better world for the next generation. For better or worse, Fitchburg is a product of the times. It’s unrealistic to expect us to evolve into an enclave against virulent consumerism or to stanch the flow of SUVs.
All things considered, Fitchburg does about as well as can be expected, and maybe better than many other burbs.
While passers-by think that we allow development on every vacant field, the city struggles mightily – and at great length – to impose order and logic on the process. Yes, our roads are becoming more congested, but much of that is beyond our control.
One of the largest impediments to Fitchburg’s nascent sense of identity is the lack of separate school district, another factor beyond our control.
The current scheme of parceling the city among three school districts might have made sense at one time but it makes no sense – absolutely none – today. The actions of the school districts make sense for the respective bureaucracies (no bureaucracy would ever consider actually getting smaller) but the arrangement continues to fracture and divide Fitchburg.
The school districts can quantify how much it would cost to create a separate district for Fitchburg – and it would be expensive – but there’s no way to quantify the cost in diminished sense of community.
We have become a larger version of the Allied Drive area, where children of disadvantaged residents, who are most in need of a community anchored by a local school – are transported in every direction in the interest of achieving racial and economic balance. Such an arrangement is eminently logical for everyone except the hapless residents of Fitchburg.
Residents of the new upscale developments of Fitchburg now find themselves in a similar position. Their children will now probably be bused hither and yon forever. The arrangements will make sense when viewed through the prism of the district – but not from the perspective of the residents and their children.
Perhaps the most egregious example of how self-interest of a bureaucracy trumps the interest of Fitchburg residents occurred a few years ago when the Madison and Oregon school districts traded jurisdictions over portions of Fitchburg. Madison got Swan Creek and Oregon got an enclave in Hatchery Hill.
Madison’s schools are overcrowded. It would be eminently sensible to cede some of its jurisdiction to avoid problems instead of cobbling together a system.
We can probably expect more of the same of this type of logic as Fitchburg grows. All three districts will continue to assert that there aren’t enough students to warrant schools in Fitchburg. We are more likely to be visited by the Tooth Fairy before voters in these districts view matters from Fitchburg’s perspective.
Students derive absolutely no benefit from riding a bus. A community derives enormous benefits from accessible schools.
It’s time for Fitchburg residents to consider alternatives to the current system. They aren’t likely to have their demands met this time around but they should lay the groundwork for the decades ahead.
If we don’t articulate an alternative, rest assured that no one else will. It won’t be easy, but it’s time to start.
A number of years ago, Bill Linton offered the Madison School District Fitchburg land at no cost for a school. Unfortunately, the District turned this offer down. That land become home to Eagle School.
Could someone post a report on the December 6 meeting of the West/Memorial task force? At the meeting the members were going to consider the following 5 Base Plans.
* A2e- New School – Pair Chavez/Falk
* A2f- New School – Move some Leopold to Chavez
* C3 – No New School - Pair Chavez/Falk- Leopold to Thoreau
* C4 – No New School – No Pair- move a grade level to another location
* C5 – No New School – No Pair – Move some Leopold to Chavez (In all plans, students who live on Allied Drive will be assigned to Stephens and Crestwood)
The six "preliminary" options for consideration by the East task force at its meeting on December 8 are:
E-1 Move students from the West attendance area into the East attendance area schools
E-2 Move portions of the La Follette attendance area into the East attendance area
E-3 Move MSCR (Madison School Community Recreation) into the East attendance area schools
E-4 Move Alternative Education Programs in rented space into the East attendance area schools
E-5 Move Packers Townhouse area from Lindbergh to Mendota
E-6 Analyze East Attendance Area school pairings
Photo of Washington Public Grade and Orthopedic School, 545 W. Dayton St., Madison Trust for Historic Preservation. To see where it is located, click here.
Complex problems require creative solutions. But what happens when innovative ideas don’t get serious consideration?
This fall, the Madison School Board assembled two task forces to propose solutions to the knotty problems of shifting enrollments and facility use in the East and West/Memorial High School attendance areas. The people tapped to serve on the task forces have put in long hours and, in the process, have come up with some creative options that go beyond the “standard” proposals to close schools and/or move boundaries. Unfortunately, at least one credible idea for fully using space in East side schools with low enrollments has been taken off the table.
The proposal definitely represents “new thinking.” Rather than closing schools that don’t have “enough students,” the proposal is to sell the Doyle administration building and relocate district administration to one or more of the under-enrolled schools on Madison’s East side.
This idea makes sense. After all, the Doyle Building’s West Dayton Street address is in prime real estate territory. It was built as an orthopedic facility and is handicap accessible; it has parking and is within close distance to the Kohl Center, UW-Madison campus, State Street, and the state capitol. The number of apartment and condominium projects within a four block radius of the Doyle Building during the past 5 years and the planned reconstruction of nearby University Square attest to the interest in building, rehabbing, and developing properties in central Madison.
So why not explore this option? Several members of the task force were given the impression that selling the Doyle Building is not a viable option. The arguments against selling the building sound plausible at first blush, but can they be verified by available information?
Assertion: The Doyle Building would be unattractive to developers because it is a historic building. Facts: The Doyle Building is a Madison landmark. Decisions to deny demolition or modification of historic buildings can be and are routinely appealed to the Madison City Council. The building may be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. If it were placed on the National Register and a private developer decided to rehab it, it would be eligible for state and federal tax credits (see resources below).
There are numerous examples of buildings that were similarly declared “unattractive to developers” and “impossible to rehabilitate” historic buildings in the area and that have been successfully restored to viable economic use. Consider the following projects within a few blocks of the Doyle Building: the Machinery Row commercial and office building, Doty School and Lincoln School Apartments: Lorraine Hotel, City Market, and Quisling Clinic Condominiums; and the Wiedenbeck Warehouse Lofts. Certainly the notion that there are no developers or businesses with an interest in commercial uses of historic buildings would be a stunning idea to Randy Alexander, Isthmus Architects, Historic Madison, Gary Gorman, Stonehouse Development, Arlan Kay, or any of a number of other professionals who are engaged in the thriving business of preserving historic buildings.
Assertion: UW-Madison, another potential buyer because of the building’s proximity to the Kohl Center and the East end of campus, is not interested. Fact: If one reads closely the report from Roger Price to Art Rainwater (November 18, 2005), UW-Madison has indicated a potential interested in the space but is unlikely to make a commitment until it has followed its own planning processes. Ironically, the university, which shares the Doyle Parking Lot with the school district, has just completed a 20-year plan that includes several projects to rehab existing historic structures. In any event, the UW-Madison answer does not appear to be an unqualified “no.”
It may be that a sound analysis would conclude that selling the Doyle Building to a private developer or UW-Madison is a bad idea. The disturbing issue is that we will never know whether it is a viable option to sell, rent, rehab or raze this structure unless the proposal is put back on the table so that verifiable information can be used to decide whether the Doyle Building can and should be a part of the resolution to the district’s enrollment and facilities problems.
____________________
Additional resources:
State Historical Society of Wisconsin architectural services web site with information on funding, including federal and state investment tax credits for income producing historic buildings. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/hp/funding.asp
Madison Trust for Historic Preservation documents from and press coverage of July 2005 Summit on Historic Preservation’s role in Community Economic Development http://www.madisontrust.org/news/index.html
____________________
Text, Memo from Roger Price to Art Rainwater November 17, 2005
November 18, 2005
TO: Art Rainwater, Superintendent
FROM: Roger Price, Assistant Superintendent – Business Services
RE: U.W. Interest in Doyle Administration Building
As a result of a meeting on Thursday, November 17, 2005, with Alan Fish, U.W. Associate Vice Chancellor, Facilities Planning and Management, and Gary Brown, Director, U.W. Planning and Landscape Architecture, the following is the status of the Doyle Building relationship with the U.W.-Madison:
**The Doyle Building is not within the University’s official campus boundary set by the Board of Regents and is not included in specific plans in the recently completed 20-year master plan. The plan does designate land adjacent to campus, such as the Doyle Building, as joint planning areas with the city.
**If the Doyle Building was available for lease, the U.W. would have some interest, particularly if the lease included purchase at the end of the lease. The U.W. currently has no specific program need that would require using the Doyle Building.
**If the Doyle Building was available for sale, the U.W. would be interested in discussing; if there is interest, planning and acquisition would take a minimum of 4 to 5 years.
**The U.W. is aware of MMSD’s desire to accommodate functional replacement in other central Madison spaces to house core District administration and operations.
Steve Rosenblum on West's Planned English 10: Same Curriculum for All
Steve Rosenblum, writing to Carol Carstensen:
Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2005 15:07:45 -0600
To: Carol Carstensen ,"Laurie A. Frost" From: Steven Rosenblum Subject: Re: West English
Cc: raihala@charter.net, jedwards2@wisc.edu, bier@engr.wisc.edu, jlopez@madison.k12.wi.us, wkeys@madison.k12.wi.us, svang7@madison.k12.wi.us, rrobarts@madison.k12.wi.us, jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us, lkobza@madison.k12.wi.us
Carol,
Thank you for the response. I am somewhat confused however regarding your statement concerning the Board's role. Maybe you could define what is included under 'set policy' and what is excluded. I am aware of the situations you reference regarding the BOE and what some may consider poor decisions on subject matter and censorship. I also believe the public was able to vote boards out when the decisions made do not reflect community opinion. I thought our BOE was responsible to control the Administration's decisions regarding just these type of issues.
With a child entering West next year, I am personally very concerned with what I perceive is a reduction in education quality at West. We see this in English, in the elimination of Advanced Placement Courses, through the homogenization of class make-up which ignores student achievement and motivation. In addition, I really do not feel we can allow much time to resolve these issues, especially when decisions can be made in closed door sessions and without supporting data.
Personally I am confused how we can justify diluting content and rigor in the academic aspects of school while allowing stratification by ability and motivation in sports like Basketball and Soccer. Why is it that we allow our children to be stigmatized by being placed in a lower achieving section of the basketball team or not allowing them to participate at all due to their lower level basketball abilities but insist that everyone take the same English content. The system, as it is now evolving, encourages mediocrity and in no way reflects the world these people live in outside of school.
If nothing else, I hope this note indicates how dissatisfied this one parent of three school age children is with the direction of Madison schools.
Steven Rosenblum
#############################
At 2:18 PM -0600 12/2/05, Carol Carstensen wrote:
Laurie:
Thank you for your email. I have been following the discussion on the proposed changes to English 10 at West. I know that there have been various conversations between West High staff and parents and downtown administrators. I believe that a number of the concerns raised by parents are being given serious consideration. I really think you need to allow some time here.
I do see a broader policy issue of the question of heterogeneous grouping. Since this is really in the area of the Performance and Achievement Committee, I will talk with Shwaw Vang about having a meeting on this topic. Given the current schedule of Board meetings it looks as if January is the earliest we can have a meeting on this.
It is important to remember that the Boardís role is to set policy not to get involved in curriculum decisions. Just to remind you of some of the pitfalls of having politicians make curriculum decisions: there is the national controversy over the teaching of evolution and the example of the Dover PA board; there is also the current push to require the use of abstinence only programs; and lastly various attempts to censor what books are used in classrooms.
Carol
P.S. If you decide to forward or post this, please use the entire response.
#################################
At 08:32 AM 12/2/2005 -0600, you wrote:
Dear Carol,
I am writing to request that you put a discussion of the plans for English 10 at West HS (and the question of whether or not West's English 9 course has been appropriately evaluated, and whether or not the results of any evaluation support the implementation of English 10) on the agenda of a BOE meeting as soon as possible.
I believe it is time for the BOE to step in and take seriously its responsibility to students by insisting that the West administration make a sound, empirically-based decision.
Fascinating. Statements and questions from parents, including those who send their children to private schools. Well worth watching. Cherokee questions pending. Thanks to MMSD-TV for recording and broadcasting the Hamilton event.
06 - 07 Budget Positioning: HR and Business Services Presentation to the Madison School Board
The Madison School Board heard presentations this past Monday from The District's HR Director, Bob Nadler and Assistant Superintendent for Business ServicesRoger Price. Both described the functions that their organizations provide to the District.
The District's Budget increases annually ($329M this year for 24,490 students). The arguments begin over how that increase is spent. Ideally, the District's curriculum strategy should drive the budget. Second, perhaps it would be useful to apply the same % increase to all budgets, leading to a balanced budget, within the revenue caps. Savings can be directed so that the Board can apply their strategy to the budget by elminating, reducing or growing programs. In all cases, the children should come first. It is possible to operate this way, as Loehrke notes below. Learn more about the budget, including extensive historical data. Steve Loehrke, President of the Weywauga-Fremont School District speaks to budget, governance and leadership issues in these two articles:
Who would believe that I’d call any MMSD data excellent?
It’s true!
But first, the critical point: I respectfully urge the board of education to approve funding in the next budget to expand Read 180 to West as part of West’s English 9 and English 10. Read 180 would help those students who cannot read well enough to succeed in those courses, as well as all other West courses.
Now the background.
After I asked and asked for data on the costs of various programs, the MMSD finally posted (without any fanfare) useful figures on the cost of Read 180, a successful program used in Wisconsin and across the nation to teach reading to adolescents.
The MMSD praised Read 180, but the superintendent said the district had no funds to expand the program.
Now we see that the computer-based Read 180 curriculum costs about $40,000 per school for hardware and software, according to the MMSD figures.
Read 180 could address the lack of any current proposal for instruction for poor readers in English 9 and 10.
With real numbers about costs, the board of education can now decide whether it’s willing to find $40,000 in the next budget to round out West’s English curriculum. Once low-skilled readers can actually read at grade level, core English might begin to make sense. But not until all the students can read at grade level.
Currently -- having failed to receive any reply from BOE Performance and Achievement Committee Chair Shwaw Vang to our request that he investigate this matter and provide an opportunity for public discussion -- we are trying to get BOE President Carol Carstensen to put a discussion of the English 10 proposal (and the apparent lack of data supporting its implementation) on the agenda for a BOE meeting. Aside from the fact that there is serious doubt that the course, as proposed, will meet the educational needs of the high and low end students, it is clear we are witnessing yet another example of school officials making radical curricular changes without empirical evidence that they will work and without open, honest and respectful dialogue with the community.
As the bumper sticker says, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention!"
11/7/2005: West PTSO meeting, where the plans for English 10 were first introduced. A videotape of the English 10 portion of the meeting (along with additional background information) may be found here.
11/9/2005: After hearing from two independent sources who attended the 11/8 West faculty meeting that West Principal Ed Holmes represented the parents who attended the previous night's PTSO meeting as very supportive of the English 10 proposal, I write Mr. Holmes a forceful, clarifying letter.
11/9/2005: I request a copy of the report written by SLC Evaluator Bruce King that someone mentioned at the 11/7 PTSO meeting. I am told by West Principal Ed Holmes that the report is a "confidential" and a "draft."
11/14/2005: After several days of investigation and writing to the proper District authorities, I obtain a copy of the SLC report from MMSD Attorney Clarence Sherrod. http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2005/11/evaluation_of_t.php
11/14/2005: I re-send to West Principal Ed Holmes the list of questions that several of us submitted to him and West English Department Chair Keesia Hyzer before the 11/7 PTSO meeting because most of the questions were not answered at the meeting. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply and we have yet to receive answers, studies or data.)
11/18/2005: Several West HS attendance area parents meet with Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools Pam Nash. We discuss many important issues pertaining to the English 10 plan and request data and empirical studies that support what is being done at West.
11/20/2005: I send Pam Nash a follow-up email of thanks, reinforcing our request for West and MMSD data -- as well as empirical studies -- that support the implementation of English 10 and the move towards heterogeneous classes in our middle and high schools. I include the list of talking points that our group generated before our meeting with her because we did not get to all of them in our meeting. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply and we have yet to receive answers, studies or data.)
11/21/2005: I pen a request to BOE Performance and Achievement Committee Chair Shwaw Vang (copying several other District officials), asking that he obtain the data that forms the basis for a couple of important points in Bruce King's SLC report, points regarding the apparent failure of English 9 to impact the achievement gap. Several others sign the request. We ask that the data be made public and that the P& A Committee hold a public discussion of the data. Knowing that Mr. Vang doesn't "do" email, I hand-deliver a copy of my request to him, along with a hard copy of the SLC report. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Mr. Vang.)
11/28/2005: I write a follow-up email to Mr. Vang and his committee members (Ruth Robarts and Bill Keys), asking about the status of our request and stressing the time urgency of the situation. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Mr. Vang.
11/28/2005: I write a follow-up email to Pam Nash, urgently requesting an update on the situation at West. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Ms. Nash.)
11/29/2005: I leave a message on Mr. Vang's answering machine asking for a status report on our request. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Mr. Vang.)
11/30/2005: I receive an email from Bill Keys, essentially a forward of a brief message from Art Rainwater.
11/30/2005: I write back to Bill, copying Art Rainwater, Pam Nash, and Mary Gulbrandsen.
12/02/2005: I write an email to Madison Board of Education President Carol Carstensen that the Board discuss plans for English 10 at West HS (and the question of whether or not West's English 9 course has been appropriately evaluated, and whether or not the results of any evaluation support the implementation of English 10) on the agenda of a BOE meeting as soon as possible.
Chronology with emails follows below:
11/7/2005: West PTSO meeting, where the plans for English 10 were first introduced. A video of the English 10 portion of the meeting (along with additional background information) may be found here:
11/9/2005: After hearing from two independent sources who attended the 11/8 West faculty meeting that West Principal Ed Holmes represented the parents who attended the previous night's PTSO meeting as very supportive of the English 10 proposal, I write Mr. Holmes a forceful, clarifying letter.
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2005 08:15:05 -0600
To: eholmes@madison.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: English at West HS
Cc: pnash@madison.k12.wi.us,arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us,wkeys@madison.k12.wi.us,lkobza@boardmanlawfirm.com,robarts@execpc.com,ccarstensen@madison.k12.wi.us,jlopez@madison.k12.wi.us,svang7@madison.k12.wi.us,jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us
Dear Ed,
I have it on very good authority that you misrepresented Monday night's PTSO meeting at your full faculty meeting yesterday. It is not clear if this was a matter of positive spin, selective inattention, or willful calculation. Yes, parents were calm, well-behaved and non-combative, and they tried to compliment the good they saw in the proposed curriculum. There are some great books on the list (though someone has since pointed out that most are by male authors), plus we appreciate the goal of integrating the writing assignments with the literature being read. As I see it, though, our good behavior speaks to our respectfulness and willingness to collaborate, not to our support of the plan as presented.
More specifically, I would estimate that approximately 80%, possibly more, of the parent comments Monday night were not positive and accepting of the plans for English 10 as they currently stand. Almost every parent who spoke expressed concern about how the plan does not meet the needs of the students of high ability and enthusiasm in language arts. There was also concern that the curriculum is not a good match for students who struggle with reading. Parents were very critical of the details of the proposed honors designation and pessimistic about its effectiveness and success. You were asked several times to consider creating an honors section of English 10 in each SLC. (Same for English 9 and Accelerated Biology.) Why? Because, as parents pointed out, most any literary work can be taught at a wide range of levels, depending on the teacher and the students. Put another way, a student's experience of rigor, high expectation and intellectual stimulation in a class depends on the level, quality, depth and pace of the conversation in the room; and that, in turn, depends on who is in the room. There are very real limits on the number of grade levels across which even a masterful teacher can teach. It is also unfair to ask students who simply want to have their educational needs met to give up two lunch periods per week, along with the opportunity to participate in school clubs and other activities. That would not be necessary if the appropriate level of rigor were provided in their classroom experience.
Please stop the plans to implement the English 10 core as it was presented on Monday night until there has been a thoroughgoing, community-wide discussion about it and until you provide hard data -- from West and from the research literature -- that support it. (Note: this includes the recent report written by the SLC evaluator, Bruce King.) Otherwise, you risk alienating a large segment of the West community and hastening the "bright flight" that has already begun in our attendance area. (Did you know that almost one-third of the approximately 70 parents who attended the meeting were parents of elementary and middle school students in the West attendance area who are watching these developments very closely?)
Laurie Frost
Here is a link to a more complete report on what transpired at the West PTSO meeting on 11/7:
A videotape of the portion of the meeting dealing with the English 10 proposal will posted on schoolinfosystem asap.
11/9/2005: I request a copy of the report written by SLC Evaluator Bruce King that someone mentioned at the 11/7 PTSO meeting. I am told by West Principal Ed Holmes that the report is a "confidential" and a "draft."
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2005 09:49:28 -0600
To: eholmes@madison.k12.wi.us,hlott@madison.k12.wi.us
From: TAG Parents
Subject: SLC report request
Cc: arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us,pnash@madison.k12.wi.us,csherrod@madison.k12.wi.us
This is a formal request for a copy (electronic, if possible, perhaps as an attachment) of SLC evaluator Bruce King's recent report on the progress of the SLC initiative at West HS.
Please send this report as soon as possible, as time is of the essence. If it is easier for you, I would be happy to pick up a hard copy in the West HS office. Just let me know by email or phone call (238-6375) and I will drop by.
Thank you.
Respectfully,
Laurie Frost
_____________________________________________
Madison TAG Parents
Email: tagparents@yahoogroups.com
URL: http://tagparents.org
The document you have requested is a confidential draft that was sent
to me by our Smaller Learning Communities Grant Evaluator, Bruce King.
Clearly the front cover of the document says DRAFT and CONFIDENTIAL. I
want to be clear that it is Bruce King who has requested that this
information be kept confidential and that I will be honoring his
request.
Bruce King is currently working on an Executive Summary that will
outline his findings regarding establishment of the 10th Grade English
course at West. That document will be distributed to anyone interested
in reviewing his evaluative statement regarding the merits of the
process and the plans for implementation of the course.
As soon as I recieve the aforementioned document I will be happy to
pass it on to you.
Thank you for your ongoing interest in this important curriculum review
process.
Ed Holmes, Principal
West High School
_____________________________________________
Madison TAG Parents
Email: tagparents@yahoogroups.com
URL: http://tagparents.org
11/14/2005: After several days of investigation and writing to the proper District authorities, I obtain a copy of the SLC report from MMSD Attorney Clarence Sherrod. http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2005/11/evaluation_of_t.php
11/14/2005: I re-send to West Principal Ed Holmes the list of questions that several of us submitted to him and West English Department Chair Keesia Hyzer before the 11/7 PTSO meeting because most of the questions were not answered at the meeting. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply and we have yet to receive answers, studies or data.)
Note: These questions were first sent on 11/3 -- several days before the PTSO meeting -- and again on 11/14. "Kathy" is West PTSO President Kathy Riddiough.
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 09:38:15 -0600
To: eholmes@madison.k12.wi.us,ricciridd@tds.net
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: Questions for 11/7 PTSO meeting
Cc: pnash@madison.k12.wi.us
Hello, Kathy and Ed. Below are the questions a group of us submitted before last week's PTSO meeting. It seems to us that Questions 5, 8, 13 and 15 were answered, Question 10 was addressed by parents only (and constituted the bulk of the Q and A), but the rest were not addressed at all. Many of the parents who were present at the meeting would appreciate having the answers to the remaining questions asap.
We are especially interested in seeing West HS data that indicate the need for the structural/curricular change being proposed and West HS data and empirical studies from the education literature that indicate the likely success of the proposed change in addressing the problem. Please include, in particular, the studies you believe best indicate the effectiveness of heterogeneous grouping for educating well the full range of high school students.
We would also like to know what will be happening -- and when (there is some urgency, after all) -- to continue the dialogue that has only barely begun by the West administration and the parents of the children who will be affected by this change.
Thanks for your timely attention to this matter.
Respectfully,
Laurie Frost
I. Questions about 10th grade English
1) What are the West HS data that indicate there is a problem with the current system for 10th grade English?
2) What are the data that suggest the solution being proposed (i.e., a standardized, homogeneous curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes) will fix the problem? (Are there empirical studies you can tell us about?)
3) What are the data that indicate all students' educational needs will be well served by the proposed solution? (Again, are there empirical studies you can tell us about?)
4) What are the data that indicate no students will be harmed or poorly served by the proposed solution? (And again -- empirical studies?)
5) If the 10th grade English core is implemented, will some English electives be dropped from the course offerings? If so, which ones?
6) Will advanced students be allowed to "test out" or be "teacher-recommended out" of the 10th grade English core? If so, when would this happen? When they register for their 10th grade classes? At the end of 9th grade? At the beginning of 10th grade? In between semesters in 10th grade? Some or all of these times?
7) Will you extend this option to advanced 9th graders and allow them to "test out" or be "teacher-recommended out" of 9th grade English? (It is our understanding that this used to be allowed.)
8) Would you consider keeping the current system in place and adding the new curriculum as an additional elective for those students for whom it is a good educational match?
9) Will the grant be jeopardized or lost if you do not implement a homogeneous 10th grade English core? (If you are not sure, would you be willing to check into it and get back to us?)
10) We fear that the plan to offer an honors designation in 10th grade English that requires two lunchtime meetings per week is likely doomed to failure for the following reasons: a) it seems highly unlikely that students who have just endured a year of required "freshman resource time" during their lunch hour will be willing to give up two-fifths of their hard-earned midday freedom as sophomores; b) the plan puts having an honors distinction (which is really not the point -- having an appropriately challenging curriculum and the opportunity to learn with similar-ability peers is the point) in direct competition with participation in clubs and other activities that meet during lunchtime; c) the plan forces students to choose between more academics and social time or "down" time. Because so many reasons for students not to choose the honors option are being built into the plan, we feel the plan is likely to fail and that you will then use that as justification for discontinuing the option due to "lack of interest." Would you please comment on our concerns? What are your thoughts about the potential success or failure of the proposed honors designation, as it is currently defined?
11) Who conceived of the proposal to restructure sophomore English by eliminating electives and implementing a standardized curriculum to be delivered in heterogeneous classrooms (i.e., what are their names, please)?
12) Were District TAG staff included or consulted in the development of this proposal?
13) Who is developing the 10th grade English core curriculum (again, what are their names, please)?
14) Were District TAG staff included or consulted in the development of the new curriculum?
15) What is the process the group is using to develop the English 10 core curriculum?
II. General -- but nevertheless relevant -- questions
16) Would you please explain to us the difference between "tracking" and "flexible ability grouping"?
17) Would you please share with us your understanding of the research on ability grouping?
III. SLC questions
18) What were the West HS data that were used to justify the need for a change this drastic at West?
19) What were the data and studies that were used to justify the selection of this particular smaller high schools model for West?
20) Whose idea was the SLC initiative originally? That is, what is the name of the person who conceived of the idea in the very beginning?
21) What are the specific outcome measures that are being used to assess the impact of the SLC initiative?
_____________________________________________
Madison TAG Parents
Email: tagparents@yahoogroups.com
URL: http://tagparents.org
11/18/2005: Several West HS attendance area parents meet with Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools Pam Nash. We discuss many important issues pertaining to the English 10 plan and request data and empirical studies that support what is being done at West.
11/20/2005: I send Pam Nash a follow-up email of thanks, reinforcing our request for West and MMSD data -- as well as empirical studies -- that support the implementation of English 10 and the move towards heterogeneous classes in our middle and high schools. I include the list of talking points that our group generated before our meeting with her because we did not get to all of them in our meeting. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply and we have yet to receive answers, studies or data.)
Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 23:10:50 -0600
To: pnash@madison.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: thanks, and more ...
Dear Pam,
Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with us on Friday to discuss the matter of English 10 and related issues at West HS. We greatly appreciated your time, your honesty, your patience and your perspective. We would very much like to continue the dialogue with you as things unfold at West in the coming weeks and months. I am happy to continue as your contact or "point person" for the group.
As a follow-up to our meeting, I cannot overstate parents' interest in seeing both West HS data and empirical studies from the education literature that support the District's increasing use of a homogeneous curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classrooms at both the middle and high school level. We want to know more about the research base that the Administration is using as the empirical foundation for this reform, as well as about the evidence from within the MMSD that attests to its effectiveness for all students.
We came on Friday with several talking points, but didn't get to all of them. I've pasted in the entire list below. If you have thoughts to share about any of the ones that didn't come up in our meeting, please feel free to respond.
Again, thanks so much for taking the time to start a dialogue with us.
Sincerely,
Laurie
Talking points for 11/18 meeting with Pam Nash
1. The SLC report makes it clear that English 9 – a standardized curriculum delivered in completely heterogeneous classes – hasn’t had the desired effect on the achievement gap at West, on the English 9 failure rates for certain groups of West students, or on the participation rates in the more challenging English electives of those same students. It thus makes no sense to us to expand the approach into 10th grade English. The first order of business should be to understand why English 9 is not working as hoped, and fix it.
2. The English 10 course – as currently planned – is a set up for failure for struggling and low achieving students for whom the reading and writing demands will likely be too great. It is also not fair to expect high performing and highly motivated students to get their need for challenge met during the lunch hour and through extra independent work. Students in honors classes report that the single most important feature of those classes for them is the high level of discussion, a result of who is in the class. Thus, students at the upper and lower most ends of the performance distribution will not be well served by this plan.
3. One way to modify the plan would be to have one honors section and one skills and enrichment section in each of the four SLC’s. Students would self-select into these special sections of English 10 and – in the honors sections – would have to maintain adequate performance in order to remain in the section. The special sections would be less exclusive than, for example, the single section of Accelerated Biology at West because four sections would provide significantly more access for a wider variety of interested students. According to the SLC report, having special sections like this in each SLC is not inconsistent with the SLC model.
4. Such a modified plan would also bring West in line with Madison’s other high schools. East HS, for example, has TAG, AcaMo and regular classes in English, science, and social studies, as well as several different levels of math.
5. Increasing the number of AP classes at West would address another important disparity between our high schools, one that affects the educational opportunities for West’s high performing students. (We hope the AP grant that the MMSD has just received, along with several other Wisconsin school districts, will be used to do this.)
6. In general, the significant differences across our four high schools with regard to how and how well the learning needs of the high performing students are met is of great concern to us. We are concerned about the “bright flight” that is occurring, from one attendance area to another and to neighboring districts.
7. Middleton HS was just named a Blue Ribbon School for its academic excellence by the U.S. Department of Education, one of only two in the state. Middleton HS offers a diversified curriculum in each content area and thus appropriate educational opportunities for students with widely varying interests, abilities, and career aspirations. It seems to us that Middleton understands that “equal” and “equitable” are not the same thing; that equal educational opportunity and heterogeneous grouping are not synonymous.
8. What are the major empirical studies upon which the District’s move towards completely heterogeneous classrooms at both the middle and high school levels is based?
9. Are you aware of the District’s dropout data for the second half of the 1990's? The data indicate that 27% of the dropouts for that period had a history of high academic achievement and that over half of this high achieving group of dropouts were poor and over 40% of them were minority students. Of the four high schools, West had the largest percentage of formerly high achieving dropouts. How do you understand those data? (I will bring hard copies.)
10. Can you provide us with an update on the plans for Accelerated Biology at West next year?
11. Is there any update since the 11/7 PTSO meeting we should know about?
12. A point about the process -- the lack of partnership -- the stonewalling -- which has become part of the problem. In contrast to the way things have unfolded at West, East had a community-wide meeting last week, at the beginning of their process, and has set up a task force to review high end curriculum.
13. Would we ever keep a talented 9th grade basketball player off of the varsity team? No. We'd celebrate his ability and be excited about having him play varsity for four years. And we wouldn't worry about hurting the feelings or self-esteem of any less capable or motivated students. Why is this attitude so acceptable in sports, but not in academics?
14. We would like to see honors/accelerated/more rigorous classes throughout the curriculum -- e.g., English 9, Accelerated Biology, social studies, etc. Why not one honors section per SLC?
15. What do the data show regarding how (matched samples of) students from Wright, Hamilton and Cherokee do at West? We think much could be learned by taking a look and seeing if there are differences.
Laurie A. Frost, Ph.D.
Isthmus Psychotherapy & Psychiatry
222 South Bedford Street
Madison, WI 53703
(608) 256-6570
11/21/2005: I pen a request to BOE Performance and Achievement Committee Chair Shwaw Vang (copying several other District officials), asking that he obtain the data that forms the basis for a couple of important points in Bruce King's SLC report, points regarding the apparent failure of English 9 to impact the achievement gap. Several others sign the request. We ask that the data be made public and that the P& A Committee hold a public discussion of the data. Knowing that Mr. Vang doesn't "do" email, I hand-deliver a copy of my request to him, along with a hard copy of the SLC report. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Mr. Vang.)
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 20:02:40 -0600
To: svang7@madison.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: West HS SLC report -- request for examination and public discussion of 9th grade English data
Cc: robarts@execpc.com,wkeys@madison.k12.wi.us,jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us,ccarstensen@madison.k12.wi.us,jlopez@madison.k12.wi.us,lkobza@boardmanlawfirm.com,arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us,pnash@madison.k12.wi.us,talkingoutofschool@isthmus.com,edit@isthmus.com
Dear Shwaw,
We are writing to you in your capacity as Chair of the BOE Performance and Achievement Committee to ask that you address a critical situation currently unfolding at West High School.
Enclosed you will find a copy of a report entitled "Evaluation of the SLC Project at West High School," written by SLC Evaluator Bruce King and dated November 2, 2005. The report focuses on the West administration's plans to overhaul 10th grade English.
For many years West sophomores -- like West juniors and seniors -- have chosen their English courses from an impressive list of electives that range in content and difficulty level. According to the report, the overarching reason for changing the existing system for 10th grade English is the concern that the elective structure contributes to unequal educational opportunities across different student groups. Specifically, there is concern that some groups of students do not sign up for the more rigorous, higher level electives. There is also concern that some West students complete their English credits without taking any literature courses. In essence, the proposal makes 10th grade English a lot like English 9 -- a standardized curriculum delivered in heterogeneous classes. The thing is, English 9 has not had the desired effect on these indicators of student achievement.
When you read the report, you will discover that English 9 -- which has been in place at West for several years -- has not done much to close the gap in achievement in English among West students. Thus the report recommends that "ongoing critical reflection and analysis of both the 9th and 10th grade English courses [is] needed [in order to] address ... concerns [such as] the failure rate for 9th grade English and which students are failing [because] it is not clear if a common 9th grade course has helped close the achievement gap" (emphasis added).
The report also states that "in addition, an action research group might be formed to evaluate the 9th grade course, including levels of expectations and differentiation, failure rates by student groups, and the extent to which it has helped or hindered students to take challenging English courses in subsequent years. Apparently, it hasn't helped some groups of students that much (emphasis added). Why? What needs to be changed so it does, and so the 10th grade course does, as well?"
In a word, we find it unconscionable to think that the West administration would expand a program into the 10th grade that has so clearly failed to achieve its objectives in the 9th grade. We can't help but suspect that a look at the hard data would convince any reasonable person that the appropriate and responsible course of action, at this juncture, would be to figure out why English 9 hasn't worked and fix it before making any changes to the 10th grade curriculum.
As Chair of the Performance and Achievement Committee, would you please take responsibility for obtaining from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Department the 9th grade data that goes along with the above statements from the report? Would you also please make these data public and schedule a public discussion of them at a Performance and Achievement Committee meeting?
We must stress to you the time urgency of this matter. At the November 7 West PTSO meeting -- when the West administration and English Department first introduced the proposal for English 10 -- it was mentioned that the West course catalogue is due at the printer in December. This leaves very little time for the public discussion that should have been an essential element of this curriculum change process. Consequently, we ask that you please obtain the data and hold a public discussion of them immediately.
Many thanks for your prompt attention to this urgent matter.
Respectfully,
Laurie Frost, Jeff Henriques, Larry Winkler, Jim Zellmer, Joan Knoebel, Michael Cullenward, Ed Blume, Kathy Riddiough, Jane Doughty, Janet Mertz, Stephanie Stetson, Nancy Zellmer, Jan Edwards, and Don Severson
11/28/2005: I write a follow-up email to Mr. Vang and his committee members (Ruth Robarts and Bill Keys), asking about the status of our request and stressing the time urgency of the situation. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Mr. Vang.)
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:23:18 -0600
To: svang7@madison.k12.wi.us,wkeys@madison.k12.wi.us,robarts@execpc.com
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: West HS English 9 data request
Dear Shwaw, Bill and Ruth --
We are wondering about the status of our 11/21 request that the Performance and Achievement Committee obtain the West HS English 9 data that goes along with the comments in the text of Bruce King's report regarding the course's failure to impact the student achievement gap at West; make the data public; and hold a Performance and Achievement Committee meeting to discuss it?
The update from our end is that we have not heard from Pam Nash since our 11/18 meeting with her; we still have not heard from Ed Holmes about the answers to those questions we posed to him before the 11/7 PTSO meeting, but that were not answered at the meeting; SLC Evaluator Bruce King held two parent focus groups tonight; there is a 20-minute English Department meeting on Wednesday to discuss which English electives will be discontinued; and we understand English Department Chair Keesia Hyzer is working on an English 10 course catalog description.
Please, time is of the essence. Please get back to us. Please get those data. And please slow down the process that is unfolding at West, even as I write this email.
Laurie
P.S. I heard about yet another West family looking to move further west today.
11/28/2005: I write a follow-up email to Pam Nash, urgently requesting an update on the situation at West. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Ms. Nash.)
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:33:42 -0600
To: pnash@madison.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: update?
Pam,
Is there anything to report on the English 10 situation at West? Any data? Any articles? Any news about follow-up from the West administration or with you?
Parents are getting increasingly agitated again. Although there were two one-hour focus groups held this evening, it's not clear they were anything more than an opportunity for parents to say their piece -- i.e., they felt much like the 11/7 PTSO meeting, in terms of not having any real impact on the process.
That's in part because we understand that the English Department is having a 20-minute meeting on Wednesday to discuss which electives will be discontinued, and that Keesia Hyzer (English Department chair) is working up an English 10 course catalog description. It appears that everything is proceeding as planned, as if parents had never said a word, as if the SLC report told a glowing success story about English 9.
What's going on?
Please get back to us asap.
Thanks,
Laurie
11/29/2005: I leave a message on Mr. Vang's answering machine asking for a status report on our request. (Note: I have yet to receive a reply from Mr. Vang.)
11/30/2005: I receive an email from Bill Keys, essentially a forward of a brief message from Art Rainwater.
X-Apparently-To: lauriefrost@ameritech.net via 68.142.199.141; Wed, 30 Nov 2005 05:49:04 -0800
X-Originating-IP: [199.197.64.10]
Authentication-Results: mta819.mail.scd.yahoo.com
from=madison.k12.wi.us; domainkeys=neutral (no sig)
X-Originating-IP: [199.197.64.10]
X-Sender: wkeys@mail.madison.k12.wi.us
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 07:46:39 -0600
To: "Laurie A. Frost"
From: Bill Keys
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: West HS English 9 data request
Cc: Art Rainwater
X-Spam-Flag: Unchecked
X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.41
Laurie,
This is what I intended to send: Art's response, in bold and italics.
Bill Mary G, Pam and I met with Bruce King today. Bruce was very clear with us that his report did not say that the ninth grade English class had failed. What he actually said in the report was there was no data to make any kind of judgement about the success of the course. They would need to talk to Bruce about what data he has. My understanding was that he has none.
Art
11/30/2005: I write back to Bill, copying Art Rainwater, Pam Nash, and Mary Gulbrandsen.
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 12:57:58 -0600
To: wkeys@madison.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: West HS English 9 data request
Cc: arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us,pnash@madison.k12.wi.us,mgulbrandsen@madison.k12.wi.us
Bill --
First, thanks so much for responding and getting involved in this urgent matter.
Second, we have Bruce's report!
In fact, the following paragraphs from my email request to Shwaw contain verbatim quotes (in bold) from Bruce's report:
When you read the report, you will discover that English 9 -- which has been in place at West for several years -- has not done much to close the gap in achievement in English among West students. Thus the report recommends that "ongoing critical reflection and analysis of both the 9th and 10th grade English courses [is] needed [in order to] address ... concerns [such as] the failure rate for 9th grade English and which students are failing [because] it is not clear if a common 9th grade course has helped close the achievement gap" (underline added).
The report also states that "in addition, an action research group might be formed to evaluate the 9th grade course, including levels of expectations and differentiation, failure rates by student groups, and the extent to which it has helped or hindered students to take challenging English courses in subsequent years. Apparently, it hasn't helped some groups of students that much (underline added). Why? What needs to be changed so it does, and so the 10th grade course does, as well?"
Speaking as a well-trained social scientist with that whole other career behind me, I guess I see two ways to interpret these statements. One is that the West administration has looked at the data for English 9 and it does not show any effect on the achievement gap -- i.e., there is no effect on either the failure rate of certain groups of students (presumably in English 9) or the participation rate of certain groups of students in the more rigorous English electives. The other way to interpret the statements is that it's not clear if English 9 has had an impact on the achievement gap (i.e., those two specific indicators) because they have not yet looked at the data.
Now, Art says his understanding is that Bruce has no data. In all honesty, that possibility hadn't occurred to me. Wow. If that's true, I am even more appalled and outraged than I was before.
Bill (and all those I've copied), please try to understand, this is the kind of professionally irresponsible decision-making behavior that parents across the District are so enormously frustrated with. Think about it. A radical school-wide change is being implemented at one of our high schools -- one that will affect thousands of students -- despite an absence of data supportive of the change, that absence apparently due to the fact that the appropriate and necessary data have not even been collected and examined! I see that as a serious violation of the trust we parents have put in all of you, the decision-makers of our school district.
Please, I implore you once again, put a stop to this English 10 business and figure out what's going on with English 9 first!
Laurie
Here are the unchanged verbatim quotes from Bruce's report:
from page 4 ---
"Ongoing critical reflection and analysis of both the 9th and 10th grade English courses are needed. This analysis should address different but interrelated concerns:
1) The failure rate for 9th grade English, and which students are failing. It is not clear if a common 9th grade course has helped close the achievement gap."
From page 6 --
"In addition, an action research group might be formed to evaluate the 9th grade course, including levels of expectations and differentiation, failure rates by student groups, and the extent to which it has helped or hindered students to take challenging English courses in subsequent years. Apparently it hasn't helped some groups of students that much. Why? What needs to be changed so it does and so the 10th grade course does as well? " p. 6
At 07:46 AM 11/30/2005, you wrote:
Laurie,
This is what I intended to send: Art's response, in bold and italics.
Bill
Mary G, Pam and I met with Bruce King today. Bruce was very clear with us that his report did not say that the ninth grade English class had failed. What he actually said in the report was there was no data to make any kind of judgement about the success of the course. They would need to talk to Bruce about what data he has. My understanding was that he has none.
Art
At 07:24 AM 11/30/2005 -0600, you wrote:
Bill -- I don't think you sent what you intended to send. This looks like my own message only. Thanks for sending Art's response again. --Laurie
P.S. We have Bruce's report. Do you mean contact him for the actual data?
At 10:38 PM 11/29/2005, you wrote:
Laurie,
Here is Supt Rainwater's response to your request for information. I encourage you to contact Bruce King for the report.
Bill
Dear Shwaw, Bill and Ruth --
>
>We are wondering about the status of our 11/21 request that the
>Performance and Achievement Committee obtain the West HS English 9 data
>that goes along with the comments in the text of Bruce King's report
>regarding the course's failure to impact the student achievement gap at
>West; make the data public; and hold a Performance and Achievement
>Committee meeting to discuss it?
>
>The update from our end is that we have not heard from Pam Nash since our
>11/18 meeting with her; we still have not heard from Ed Holmes about the
>answers to those questions we posed to him before the 11/7 PTSO meeting,
>but that were not answered at the meeting; SLC Evaluator Bruce King held
>two parent focus groups tonight; there is a 20-minute English Department
>meeting on Wednesday to discuss which English electives will be
>discontinued; and we understand English Department Chair Keesia Hyzer is
>working on an English 10 course catalog description.
>
>Please, time is of the essence. Please get back to us. Please get those
>data. And please slow down the process that is unfolding at West, even as
>I write this email.
>
>
>Laurie
>
>
>P.S. I heard about yet another West family looking to move further west
>today.
12/2/2005: I write an email to Madison Board of Education President Carol Carstensen that the Board discuss plans for English 10 at West HS (and the question of whether or not West's English 9 course has been appropriately evaluated, and whether or not the results of any evaluation support the implementation of English 10) on the agenda of a BOE meeting as soon as possible.
Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 08:32:36 -0600
To: ccarstensen@madison.k12.wi.us
From: "Laurie A. Frost"
Subject: West English
Cc: wkeys@madison.k12.wi.us,lkobza@boardmanlawfirm.com,robarts@execpc.com,jwinstonjr@madison.k12.wi.us,jlopez@madison.k12.wi.us,svang7@madison.k12.wi.us,arainwater@madison.k12.wi.us,pnash@madison.k12.wi.us,mgulbrandsen@madison.k12.wi.us
Dear Carol,
I am writing to request that you put a discussion of the plans for English 10 at West HS (and the question of whether or not West's English 9 course has been appropriately evaluated, and whether or not the results of any evaluation support the implementation of English 10) on the agenda of a BOE meeting as soon as possible.
I believe it is time for the BOE to step in and take seriously its responsibility to students by insisting that the West administration make a sound, empirically-based decision.
They’re off and running: Three new faces seek seats on Madison's school board
This week is the official start of the spring campaign season, and three local parents are launching bids for Madison’s board of education.
Arlene Silveira, 47, the president of Cherokee middle school’s parent-teacher organization, and Maya Cole, 42, an active member of the parent-teacher group at Franklin-Randall, are seeking the open seat being vacated by Bill Keys. Both say they’ll circulate nomination papers starting Dec. 1, the first day the law allows.
And, in the race generating the most buzz, Lucy Mathiak is seeking the seat now held by Juan Jose Lopez. The most aggressive of the three candidates, Mathiak could significantly alter the makeup of the board.
“People are disgusted and worried about our schools,” says Mathiak, 50. “People are tired of speeches. They want action, and they’re not seeing it.”
Lopez hasn’t decided whether to seek a fourth three-year term, but says he’s “leaning toward running.” He adds, “There are two things I love most. The first one is working with kids and the second is working on the school board.”
By Jason Shepard, "Talking out of school" from Isthmus, December 2,2005
Besides the advantage of incumbency, Lopez is a well-known advocate for Hispanic causes who has achieved a high profile on the board. He also has a demonstrated knack for appearing to be on both sides of contentious issues in trademark passionate – sometimes rambling – speeches.
For instance, Lopez halted approval of new administrative hires earlier this fall to publicly criticize Superintendent Art Rainwater’s record of hiring of minority staff. Two months later, Lopez issued a press release praising Rainwater’s record on the same issue.
And, at a meeting about police policies last week, Lopez said that when he reads police reports about arrests in schools, he sees “racial profiling.” Seconds later, he added, “I’m not accusing anybody of anything. I’m for zero tolerance.”
Mathiak’s challenge, assuming it’s a two-way race, will be to articulate differences between herself and Lopez – something she seems excited to do – and continue to raise the issue of change. She sees signs of growing voter discontent: Last spring’s ouster of incumbent Bill Clingan, Carol Carstensen’s closer-than-expected margin of victory, and the defeat of two out of three school spending referendums.
According to Mathiak, the board has failed to move beyond blaming the state for its fiscal problems and continues to make budget cuts that directly hurt students and academic programs.
“There are entire sections of the budget that are safe from cuts, that aren’t even considered and that have no direct impact on schools,” Mathiak says. “It’s simply time for a change.”
Mathiak is closely allied with dissident member Ruth Robarts and maverick Lawrie Kobza, whose campaign treasurer Barb Schrank is also Mathiak’s treasurer.
A mother of four whose youngest child is a junior at East High, Mathiak works as director of communications for the College of Letters and Science at UW-Madison. She holds a Ph.D. in history and says she’s been involved in school issues for 17 years. In a letter to potential donors, Mathiak estimated she needs $18,000 to run a competitive race against Lopez.
Both Silveira and Cole appear to be the antithesis of Keys, who is seen by some as arrogant and unduly combative.
Silveira says that while the district is generally strong, she sees better ways to handle issues and improve communication with parents. Silveira supports the board’s effort to craft a “$100 budget model” to simplify for the community the process of making next year’s budget cuts, estimated to be at least $6 million.
A single mother of an eighth grader and director of marketing for Promega, Silveira holds a master’s degree in molecular biology and is currently a member of a school task force examining boundary changes on the west side.
Silveira says she hopes to follow in the mold of Carol Carstensen, the current board president, citing her open mind and responsiveness.
Cole, meanwhile, has sought early advice from Kobza and Robarts. She too stresses the need for greater parent involvement, citing her experience as a mother.
“I get the sense that this campaign is going to be about shaking things up,” says Cole, who feels that communication by the board needs to improve. She says her own frustrating experience in trying to understand the district’s budget has propelled her to push for more accountability and openness.
Like Silveira, Cole is a political novice. She holds a biological science degree from the UW-Madison and lives on the west side with her husband, 8-year-old son and twin 6-year-old boys. She volunteers for several organizations in addition to her PTO activities.
The general election is set for April 4, with a primary on Feb. 21 for any race with more than two candidates.
This is Not Your Grandchild's Madison School District
While viewing the MMSD web site I came across some data called District data profile that suprised me, and answered some of my questions concerning low income disparity. While sitting on the task force, I have been bothered by the districts solution for dealing with high numbers of low income students by rearranging school boundaries and/or paring schools, and wondered if you really solved the disparity issue or if you shifted the issue to another school or something that would have to be solved at another time.
Madison school district low income percentages per www.mmsd.org 1991 - 2005.
East High 2005 - 2010 Elementary Projections (click to view a larger version)
Memorial/West 2005 - 2010 Elementary Projections (click to view a larger version)
In 13 years, 1992 to 2005, MMSD low income percentage has gone from 24.6% to 42%.
Has the definition of low income changed during this time period?
Has the community as a whole really changed this much in 13 years?
As a community member that hears and believes there is no low income housing, where do these people live if 42% of our community is now low income?
We have lost 1000 elementary students in the same time period and doubled our minority students. Is this a wave of low births or are we losing students?
Middle School totals
In 1991 there were 4776 students with a 20.3% low income.
In 2005 there are 5297 students with a 38.6% low income.
High School totals
In 1991 there were 6435 students with a 12% low income.
In 2005 there are 8429 students with a 28% low income.
The question about pairing two schools and whether it improves low income percentage numbers over time was also in the data.
Lincoln in 1991 was at 51% low income, 1997 59%, and 2005 69%.
Midvale in 1991 was 42% low income, and 2005 it is at 64%.
It does not seem to have improved the high percentage of low income numbers.
I've attended a couple of the East / West Task Force Meetings (props to the many volunteers, administrators and board members who've spent countless hours on this) and believe that Wright Middle School's facilities should be part of the discussion, given its proximity to Leopold Elementary (2.2 miles [map], while Thoreau is 2.8 miles away [map])
Carol Carstensen's weekly message (posted below) mentions that Wright's Charter is on the Board's Agenda Monday Night. Perhaps this might be a useful time to consider this question? Carol's message appears below:
Parent Group Presidents:
BUDGET FACTOID:
The state has backed away from its promises to support the special education services required by state and federal law. Originally the state promised to fund 63% of local costs for special education today the state funds about 28%; in 1993 when revenue caps were first imposed the state funded 45% of special education costs. If the state had kept its share at that level (45%) the district would not be facing the need for budget cuts every year.
Special Board meeting on Monday, November 28:
Madison Partners in Special Education, an organization of parents of special education children, talked with the board about:
· the lack of consistency between schools;
· their concern that not all teachers and principals have adequate training in working with children with special education needs;
· concerns that some of the budget discussions seemed to be pitting children and families against one another;
· their desire to work cooperatively with other parents and with the Board to ensure adequate funding for the district.
Some of the parents are also part of the district’s Parent Advisory Council and Board members talked about using that Council to communicate concerns about specific schools as well as highlighting schools which are doing an excellent job. I agreed that I would help the leaders of Madison Partners to connect with other parents who are concerned about the district’s budget constraints.
The second half of the Board’s meeting was devoted to looking intensively at the budgets for Human Resources and Business Services. These presentations will be available soon on the district’s website, www.mmsd.org click on Financial and then on Reports. I will summarize the information in a future email. The Superintendent and the Assistant Superintendent for Business have created advisory committees for both Business Services and Human Resources. Professionals from the private sector and other governmental levels have agreed to serve and use their expertise and knowledge to help the departments become as efficient as possible.
Lastly the Board looked at a proposal from Virchow, Krause & Company to do a study of the administrative staffing levels in Business Services and Human Resources. The Board wanted to be sure that the study would help us determine what further budget cuts can be made without harming the ability of the district to carry out its legal and financial responsibilities. The administration will bring additional information about this in the next few weeks.
December 5th meeting schedule:
5:30 Legislative Committee (Ruth Robarts, chair) consideration of a charter school bill and also a bill on affordable health care.
6:15 Special Board Meeting renewal of the charter for Wright Middle School
7:15 REGULAR BOARD MEETING
Carol
Carol Carstensen, President
Madison School Board
"Until lions have their own historians, the hunters will always be glorified." - African Proverb
Juan Lopez, chair of the Board of Education Committee on Human Resources, released a report on the MMSD's worker's compensation experience after a critical story on Madison's WKOW-TV.
The new MMSD report seems only to repeat the information contained in the TV report.
Roger Price, assistant superintendent and author of the report, offered this conclusion, without directly responding to any of the issues raised in the TV station's story:
Great steps have been taken over the last few years to improve MMSD’s worker’s compensation reporting and claims (loss) experience. This has resulted in a significant drop in our experience mod and subsequently in our premiums. We have also realized adjustments in each of the last two years as a result of a positive loss experience. However, some of these improvements will be difficult to sustain with the limited staff assigned to Risk Management.
Work is underway to create a Safety Committee that could fill part of the void left by the reduction in staff.
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been talking tough in his bid to take control of the huge, but troubled Los Angeles Unified School District. Such a takeover could put Villaraigosa at odds with the teachers' union, a group he once served as a labor organizer
Report Proposes Employee Health Insurance Savings through Switch to State Health Care Plan
According to a recent report by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, the Madison school district could save $2.4M per year by negotiating health insurance coverage for its teachers through the state's employee health insurance plan, rather than continue with Group Health (HMO) and Wisconsin Physician's Service plans.
The following letter was hand delivered to Shwaw Vang a week ago, and email copies were sent to the Board, Superintendent Rainwater, and Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash. There so far has been no response. A follow up email was sent yesterday to the Performance and Achievement Committee again asking that they look into why the English 9 curriculum has not worked in raising student achievement before allowing West High School to implement changes in the 10th grade English curriculum.
Dear Shwaw,
We are writing to you in your capacity as Chair of the BOE Performance and Achievement Committee to ask that you address a critical situation currently unfolding at West High School.
Enclosed you will find a copy of a report entitled "Evaluation of the SLC Project at West High School," written by SLC Evaluator Bruce King and dated November 2, 2005. The report focuses on the West administration's plans to overhaul 10th grade English.
For many years West sophomores -- like West juniors and seniors -- have chosen their English courses from an impressive list of electives that range in content and difficulty level. According to the report, the overarching reason for changing the existing system for 10th grade English is the concern that the elective structure contributes to unequal educational opportunities across different student groups. Specifically, there is concern that some groups of students do not sign up for the more rigorous, higher level electives. There is also concern that some West students complete their English credits without taking any literature courses. In essence, the proposal makes 10th grade English a lot like English 9 -- a standardized curriculum delivered in heterogeneous classes. The thing is, English 9 has not had the desired effect on these indicators of student achievement.
When you read the report, you will discover that English 9 -- which has been in place at West for several years -- has not done much to close the gap in achievement in English among West students. Thus the report recommends that "ongoing critical reflection and analysis of both the 9th and 10th grade English courses [is] needed [in order to] address ... concerns [such as] the failure rate for 9th grade English and which students are failing [because] it is not clear if a common 9th grade course has helped close the achievement gap" (emphasis added).
The report also states that "in addition, an action research group might be formed to evaluate the 9th grade course, including levels of expectations and differentiation, failure rates by student groups, and the extent to which it has helped or hindered students to take challenging English courses in subsequent years. Apparently, it hasn't helped some groups of students that much (emphasis added). Why? What needs to be changed so it does, and so the 10th grade course does, as well?"
In a word, we find it unconscionable to think that the West administration would expand a program into the 10th grade that has so clearly failed to achieve its objectives in the 9th grade. We can't help but suspect that a look at the hard data would convince any reasonable person that the appropriate and responsible course of action, at this juncture, would be to figure out why English 9 hasn't worked and fix it before making any changes to the 10th grade curriculum.
As Chair of the Performance and Achievement Committee, would you please take responsibility for obtaining from the MMSD Research and Evaluation Department the 9th grade data that goes along with the above statements from the report? Would you also please make these data public and schedule a public discussion of them at a Performance and Achievement Committee meeting?
We must stress to you the time urgency of this matter. At the November 7 West PTSO meeting -- when the West administration and English Department first introduced the proposal for English 10 -- it was mentioned that the West course catalogue is due at the printer in December. This leaves very little time for the public discussion that should have been an essential element of this curriculum change process. Consequently, we ask that you please obtain the data and hold a public discussion of them immediately.
Many thanks for your prompt attention to this urgent matter.
Respectfully,
Laurie Frost, Jeff Henriques, Larry Winkler, Jim Zellmer, Joan Knoebel, Michael Cullenward, Ed Blume, Kathy Riddiough, Jane Doughty, Janet Mertz, Stephanie Stetson, Nancy Zellmer, Jan Edwards, and Don Severson
Conversations with current Board of Education members in mp3 format can be found here. Art Rainwater's September and October messages are posted (in mp3 format) here. Both can be used with itunes automated podcast subscription tools.
Erin Weiss and Gina Hodgson (Thoreau PTO) engage in some impressive grassroots work:
November 28, 2005
Dear Thoreau Families, Staff, Teachers and Friends,
Now is the time for you to get involved in the MMSD redistricting process! This Thursday, December 1 at 6:30pm, a Public Forum will be held at Cherokee Middle School. This forum is being sponsored by the Board of Education in conjunction with the District’s Long Range Planning Committee and Redistricting Task Force. Please come to this forum to hear about the progress of the Redistricting Task Force, but more importantly, to share your opinions and ideas.
On the following pages is a brief description of the current Task Force ideas (as of November 28). Please bear with us if all the information presented below is not completely accurate. These ideas are changing rapidly and we are doing our best to summarize them for you with the information that is currently available. Please know that Al Parker, our Thoreau Task Force Representative, has been working hard for Thoreau school at Task Force meetings. He is a strong supporter of our school as it exists today.
The PTO will strive to provide you with the most up to date information throughout the redistricting process this year. Please be assured that we support ALL Thoreau students, families, staff and neighborhoods and will not choose to support any one neighborhood or group over another.
We have been working to find “neighborhood leaders” for each area of students that currently attend Thoreau. These neighborhood leaders will help to inform their neighborhood or area of new redistricting ideas or options as they arise. If you are interested in being a “neighborhood leader” or in helping to organize any redistricting efforts in your area, please contact the PTO or your neighborhood leader listed below. We can and will help neighborhoods or groups disseminate information to the Thoreau community in hopes that sharing information will promote understanding of all points of view.
A group of parents from several Thoreau neighborhoods have developed some “talking points” as a response to some of the task force ideas. We have attached the talking points for your reference. Please contact Heidi Pankoke (contact information is below under Nakoma) with any questions about those.
Marlborough Heights Dunns Marsh/Crawford Heights
Carrie Wilkomm willkomm at charter.net
Kristi Sprague Klepzig bananamoon at charter.net
Alhambra
Debbie Pilona-Turner
Arbor Hills
Need a volunteer
Curry Parkway
Need a volunteer
Fish Hatchery Area
Need a volunteer
West of Midvale
Melissa Meyer healthysolutions at tds.net
Dudgeon Monroe
Jill Karofsky/Jason Knutson jkarofsky at ncbex.org
Nakoma
Heidi Pankoke hmpwis at charter.net
Andrew Olson noslo4 at charter.net
Allied Drive/Crescent Rd Area
Katy Farrens
katyfarrens at hotmail.com
*Nakoma includes areas East of Midvale, South of Odana Rd., North of the Beltline Highway (including Winslow Way, Mohawk, Doncaster, etc.)
##
Memorial/West Attendance Area Task Force
COMMUNITY FORUMS
November 28, 2005 Toki Middle School
6:30 p.m. All Purpose Room
November 29, 2005 Jefferson Middle School
6:30 p.m. Cafeteria
November 30, 2005 Hamilton Middle School
6:30 p.m. Cafeteria
December 1, 2005 Cherokee Middle School
6:30 p.m. Gymnasium
Madison Metropolitan School District
Madison, Wisconsin
Art Rainwater, Superintendent
BOARD OF EDUCATION
Agenda: SPECIAL MEETING – Open Session
Thursday Cherokee Middle School
December 1, 2005 4301 Cherokee Drive, Gym
6:30 p.m. Madison, Wisconsin
Special Meeting of the Madison School Board and the West/Memorial Attendance Areas Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force Community Forum
Call to Order
Purpose of the West/Memorial Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force Community Forum
Summary of the process and procedures used by the West/Memorial Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force to develop the options created by the West/Memorial Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force to address the issues of:
Elementary schools in the Memorial and West attendance areas that have overcrowded student populations
Projected growth of the elementary schools in the Memorial and West attendance areas
Disparity of the income of parents whose children attend elementary schools in the Memorial and West attendance areas
4. The A2a, A2c, B2a, B2b, and C3 options created by the West/Memorial Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
5. Public hearing on A2a, A2c, B2a, B2b, and C3 options created by the West/Memorial Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
6. Summary of what transpired at this community forum and next steps the West/Memorial Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force will take to complete its task
BOE Meeting Dates Task Force Meeting Dates
December 19 December 6
January 30 December 20
November 10
Redistricting Task Force Summary of Ideas – November 29, 2005
Following is a brief description of the most recent developments of the Redistricting Task Force. Please use this as a guide to what will be discussed the Public Forum on December 1 at Cherokee Middle School at 7pm. Also included is an Agenda for the December 1 meeting, as well as a list of dates and locations for all the Public Forums this week.
If you would like more detailed information, such as Task Force Meeting Minutes, district statistics, or to post a question or comment on the online forum, visit the district website at HYPERLINK "http://www.mmsd.org" www.mmsd.org and click on Long Range Planning toward the bottom left side of the page. In addition, contact Al Parker at 288-0214 addg04@sbcglobal.net, the Thoreau Task Force Representative, with your concerns, comments or ideas.
Following are the “values” the task force will be using to make decisions about ideas/options
No student in the district should have to ride the bus more than 45 minutes one way
Avoid high concentration of low income students at any school
Keep geographically defined neighborhoods together and consider proximity to schools.
Since the first Public Forum on November 15, the Task Force has broken its ideas into three main categories (called Group A, B & C).
Group A – Ideas involving building a new schools on the West Side (involves referenda)
Group B – Ideas addressing new growth and income disparity by major boundary change initiatives requiring moving of many students
Group C – Ideas addressing new growth and income disparity while moving the least students
The Task Force has developed several ideas under each group, a few of which have been dropped from discussion, and several of which remain as working ideas. Below we will describe current ideas and more specifically how each could affect Thoreau. Unfortunately, many of these ideas are not currently posted on the mmsd website, and even Task Force Representatives do not have all the details regarding the affects of these ideas.
Low-income percentages as a result of these ideas are not yet available. Hopefully, they will be available on or before Thursday evening. Check the mmsd.org website daily for any updates.
GROUP A IDEAS
Currently, one idea remains under Group A. It is a proposal to build a school on the far West Side (Idea A2c). The idea to build a school at the Leopold Site was removed, as the task force did not see the possibility of building two new schools as a viable option. Idea A2a (not listed here) was voted on and dropped at the last Task Force meeting on November 23, therefore, it is unclear why it remains on the agenda above.
Idea A2c – Effects upon Thoreau
Allied Drive would attend Crestwood and Stephens
Thoreau would gain students currently attending other schools
GROUP B IDEAS
Currently, two ideas remain under Group B. One includes a Thoreau/Leopold pair (Idea B2b) and the other includes a Leopold/Lincoln pair (Idea B2a). Both ideas have very significant ramifications for the students who currently attend Thoreau.
Idea B2b -Effects of Thoreau/Leopold Pair Upon Thoreau:
Only two grades would attend Thoreau, most likely grades 4 and 5.
Several current Thoreau neighborhoods would NOT be part of the pair.
Marlborough Height would attend Van Hise
Allied Drive would attend Crestwood and Stephens
Many more children would be bussed than are currently.
Idea B2a - Effects of Leopold/Lincoln Pair Upon Thoreau:
Many students who currently attend Thoreau would be bussed to other schools
Marlborough Heights to Midvale
Curry Parkway to Midvale
Alhambra to Midvale
West of Midvale toVan Hise
Allied Drive to Crestwood/Stephens
GROUP C IDEAS
Currently two ideas remain under Group C. The two current ideas, C1 and C2, do not have as significant an affect upon Thoreau. Under one of the C1 or C2 ideas (and it is unclear which one), Allied Drive students will stay at Thoreau. Under the other idea, it is possible that Allied Drive will go to Crestwood or Stephens and not Thoreau. These ideas are still being developed.
But issues facing MPS, including budget constraints, school closings and a recent decision by an arbitrator on a teacher contract that was widely unpopular among teachers, have subjected Andrekopoulos to increased heat.
The issues have underscored the way the board is frequently divided into two factions, with five members consistently supporting Andrekopoulos and the other four ranging from mild support to general opposition.
On the recent high-profile votes to close Juneau High School, the board repeatedly split 5-4, including six votes of 5-4 in one meeting.
The reasons for supporting Andrekopoulos are as clear now as they were in 2004. The superintendent may have the toughest job in Milwaukee. No one in the country, as far as we know, has been completely successful at turning around a big-city school district. But Andrekopoulos has a vision for reform and a plan to make that vision a reality. He was hired to carry out that vision - which includes a move toward smaller high schools and cutting the district's central bureaucracy - and has had some success in moving it forward. But much more needs to be done.
"After Tennessee tested its eighth-grade students in math this year, state officials at a jubilant news conference called the results a "cause for celebration." Eighty-seven percent of students performed at or above the proficiency level."
The WKCE test taken in Fall 2005 (reported in Spring 2005) shows statewide percent performing at minimal (below basic level) in Grade 4 Reading: 4%; Grade 4 Math: 16%; Grade 8 Reading: 6%; Grade 8 Math: 11%.
The WKCE test results for test taken in Fall 2004 (reported in Spring 2005) shows MMSD percent performing at minimal level in Grade 4 Reading: 5%; Grade 4 Math: 16%; Grade 8 Reading: 3%; Grade 8 Math: 10%.
National Assessment of Educational Progress - Also known as “The Nation’s Report Card” is the only national standardized continuing assessment administered periodically by the US Dept. Of Education in reading, math, science, writing, US history, civics, geography, and the arts to random schools in each state to evaluate national performance of students ages 7, 12, 14, and 17.
Madison Board of Education President Carol Carstensen:
Subject: Nov. 21 Update
Parent Group Presidents:
BUDGET FACTOID:
The school district has been under revenue caps since 1993 when all school district budgets were frozen and then permitted to increase only by an amount per pupil each year (this year it is $250). That amount approximates a budget increase of 2.5% (the city and county are both struggling with cuts to keep their budgets close to a 4% increase).
Board meetings on Monday, November 21:
The Board looked at a comparison of the school district policy on arresting a child at school and the Police Department’s guidelines there are some significant differences, mostly in the area of informing the parent/guardian before the child is questioned and in making sure the child fully understands his/her rights at the time of questioning. The Board took no action but did ask the administration to continue working with the Police Department to try to bring their procedures more in line with school district policy.
Human Resources (chair Juan Lopez) had a report on the district’s workmen’s compensation costs and experience over the last several years. It was noteworthy that our current record is slightly better than the average for similar districts and this has resulted in lower costs overall. The committee then began the discussion of the second part of the superintendent’s evaluation. This is an evaluation of the superintendent’s skills and performance in several areas: planning, organizing, leading, supervising and job knowledge.
Next week’s schedule meetings will be back at Doyle but in McDaniels Auditorium. We will be piloting the televising of Board committee and special meetings.
5:00 Special Board Meeting
Discussion with Madison Partners in Special Education a parent’s group
Review of the budgets, staffing and services, of Business Services and Human Resources.
Have a happy, safe, relaxing Thanksgiving break.
Carol
A letter-writing campaign by third-graders at Allis Elementary School encouraging an end to the war in Iraq was canceled because it violates School Board policy, district officials said Tuesday.
Julie Fitzpatrick, a member of the 10-teacher team that developed the project for the school's 90 third-grade students in five classes, said the assignment was intended to demonstrate citizen action, one of the district's standards in social studies.
By Sandy Cullen, Wisconsin State Journal, 11/23/05
"We saw peace as a common good," Fitzpatrick said. "We were just advocating that people keep working toward peace."
But Robin Reynolds, an Army veteran whose 8-year-old grandson is in Fitzpatrick's class, said she regards the assignment as a form of "anti-war protesting" that "is not suitable for elementary students."
"They're supposed to teach the facts and not opinions," she said. "That's brainwashing."
"It was certainly an unfortunate thing to have happen," Superintendent Art Rainwater said. "It's a direct violation of our board policy.
Madison School Board policy prohibits teachers "from exploiting the institutional privileges of their professional positions to promote candidates or parties and activities."
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"We don't want our staff ever using our students in a political activity, which this obviously was," Rainwater said. "I think the district would apologize to anyone who was offended. It should not have happened."
Allis Principal Chris Hodge said a letter was sent to parents Tuesday apologizing to anyone who was offended and informing them that the project was rescinded.
Reynolds, who served as a personnel assistant at Fort McClellan in Alabama during the Vietnam War and has three family members serving in Iraq, said she "blew up" last Friday when her grandson brought home a letter informing parents about the campaign, in which students were to write a letter every day for 12 days.
Letters were to go to other students, the state's U.S. senators and representatives, President Bush, and the secretary of the United Nations urging them to "join our press for peace." If the war were not over in 12 days, the sequence would be repeated.
Reynolds said her grandson was upset by the assignment. "He knows he's got an uncle and cousins over there."
Fitzpatrick and Hodge, said a misunderstanding resulted in the initial letter going out to parents.
"I left with the impression we could go with it," Fitzpatrick said.
But Hodge said she had wanted to find out what the School Board's policy was before the letter was sent home.
"I thought it was an inappropriate assignment," Hodge said, adding she felt the topic of war was "too vast" for third-graders to understand. "I just think it was too much to ask of a third- grader."
Hodge said she had only heard from one parent who also was concerned that the project was beyond a third- grader's level of understanding.
School Board President Carol Carstensen said board policy and the district's teachers contract also require teachers to withhold the expression of personal opinion unless asked a direct question when dealing with controversial issues.
While it would be appropriate for students to decide to write letters expressing their own views, Cartsensen said, "It isn't appropriate to mandate it."
U.S. Rep. Mark Green, R- Green Bay, who is seeking Republican nomination for governor in 2006, on Tuesday faxed Hodge a letter calling for the assignment to be rescinded.
Hodge said she had received Green's fax but had not had time to read it.
"We're really stunned by the reception," Fitzpatrick said. "In hindsight, I guess we should have anticipated it. It's kind of sad when peace causes a furor."
Fitzpatrick said many parents had sent envelopes and stamps as requested in the initial letter they received.
Sharon Johnson, co- president of the Allis's Parent Teacher Organization, and Toni Kress-Russick, both of whom have children in Fitzpatrick's class, said they were supportive of the project.
Kress-Russick, a special education teacher at Memorial High School, said it taught social responsibility and demonstrated to students that "people can make a difference" and that "just one little third-grader can matter."
"I thought it was a great assignment," Johnson said. "People just tend to blow things out of proportion all the time. I think this is one of them."
Susan Abplanalp, assistant superintendent for elementary and secondary schools, said she does not believe the teachers involved viewed the assignment as a political activity.
"They really looked at this as a peace project," Abplanalp said. "I don't think that the intent was to make this a political statement."
The assignment The letter sent home to parents last Friday said third-graders at Allis Elementary School would be "writing letters to encourage an end to the war in Iraq. The letter writing will teach civic responsibility, a social studies standard, while providing an authentic opportunity to improve composition skills and handwriting."
Students were to write a letter a day for 12 days to other students, the state's U.S. senators and representatives, the president of the United States, and the secretary of the United Nations "urging them to press for peace," as well as to the media.
If the war did not end in 12 days, the sequence would be repeated.
Parents were asked to provide 10 postage stamps and 12 envelopes.
An alternative assignment was to be provided for students whose parents did not want them to participate.
Bush Administration Grants Leeway on 'No Child' Rules
By Nick Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 22, 2005; A01
The Bush administration has begun to ease some key rules for the controversial No Child Left Behind law, opening the door to a new way to rate schools, granting a few urban systems permission to provide federally subsidized tutoring and allowing certain states more time to meet teacher-quality requirements.
The Education Department's actions could signal a new phase for school improvement efforts nearly four years after the law's enactment. Taken together, these actions amount to a major response to critics who have called No Child Left Behind rigid and unworkable. They also help the administration combat efforts to amend the law in Congress.
The latest shift, announced Friday by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, is an experiment allowing as many as 10 states to try "growth models" for determining whether schools make adequate yearly progress. Such models could enable states to credit schools for the academic growth of individual students even if their test scores fall short of state standards.
"It's a much more realistic measure of student performance," said Jack O'Connell, California's superintendent of public instruction. "It gives every school, every year, a shot at success."
The current rating system, much debated in education circles, centers on whether all groups of students in a given school meet standards.
The Education Department plans to send details about the initiative to states today. Marland officials said they were studying whether to apply. Virginia education spokesman Charles Pyle said the state would not qualify because of limits in its testing program in recent years. It was unclear whether D.C. public schools would qualify or apply; a school system spokeswoman had no information.
Local educators often vent frustration with the law because many schools show overall gains on test scores but fall short in No Child Left Behind ratings. These schools can face significant penalties if they fail to make adequate yearly progress, or AYP. Some schools that repeatedly fall short are required to allow transfers to better-performing schools and, if they aren't turned around, eventually could face state takeover.
Bradbury Heights Elementary School in Prince George's County and near Southeast Washington is a case in point. It has failed to make AYP three straight years. But its scores in the last round of Maryland's reading and mathematics tests rose substantially in grades 3 through 6. Similar examples abound in Maryland, Virginia and the District.
"If we're talking about labeling schools," said Bradbury Heights Principal Denise Lynch, "there does need to be a rating system in place that would be more accurate and give the community a better picture of how their school is perceived."
In California, just 56 percent of 9,200 public schools made AYP in the past year. But the state found that four out of every five schools made significant gains.
The nation's largest teachers union, a consistent critic of the law, praised Friday's development. National Education Association President Reg Weaver said the department had heeded "the calls of millions of educators for a 'growth model' that truly reflects the great progress we are making in the classroom."
Spellings said she would not compromise on essential principles. Foremost, she said, is ensuring that all students are tested in reading and mathematics from grades 3 through 8, and once in high school, with results reported separately for racial and ethnic minorities, disabled students and other groups. The law's twin goals are to close achievement gaps and ensure that all students reach proficiency by 2014.
"A growth model is not a way around accountability standards," Spellings said Friday in Richmond.
In recent months, Spellings has shown flexibility in other key regulations. She granted New York public schools a waiver to allow them to provide free tutoring to low-income students even though several areas of the city's massive school system are deemed in need of improvement. Ordinarily, the law would bar such areas from providing the subsidized tutoring.
Boston and Chicago have received similar exemptions. Virginia won another that allows Alexandria, Stafford County and two other school divisions to provide tutoring to students in struggling schools before the systems are required to offer a transfer to another school.
Responding to another widespread complaint, the department is also working to ease testing regulations for disabled students who receive special education.
And on Oct. 21, Spellings issued a major pronouncement on teacher quality. The law requires states to put in motion plans to have highly qualified teachers in all core academic classes by the end of this school year. Such teachers have at least a bachelor's degree, full state certification and demonstrated knowledge of their academic subjects.
States have scrambled to meet the requirement, but some still fall short. Maryland reports that a quarter of its classes are not staffed by a highly qualified teacher. In Virginia, year-old data show that 5.5 percent of classes didn't meet the standard. (Teacher quality rules vary widely from state to state.)
According to the minutes of the November 10 meeting of the East task force:
Task Force members requested information on savings from [closing] specific schools.
Unfortunately, the minutes do not mention the "specific" schools. Can a member of the task force or someone who attended provide the names of those schools?
I also wonder whether the meetings are getting a bit contentious.
The minutes say:
Rita Applebaum began this section of the agenda by reviewing the ground rules that were established at the Task Force’s initial meeting. She spoke about the need to respect both the members of the Task Force and their ideas and suggestions. Rita acknowledged the complexity of the task before the members, the challenges and the stress, that Task Force members may disagree with suggestions made by other members. However, she emphasized the importance of treating each other respectfully and asked for the cooperation of all Task Force members to create an environment of trust and respect as the group works toward addressing the charge given to it by the Board of Education.
It also sounds like the administration is trying to keep the task force from considering a full range of options. According to the minutes:
Rita Applebaum reviewed the charge to the Task Force with a focus on addressing the issues within the East Attendance Area. She also reviewed the steps within Board of Education document, “Elementary Schools with Declining Enrollment” that specifies beginning with steps to address excess space within the cluster or attendance area prior to going beyond the attendance area. (original emphasis)
Additional Charts: Enrollment Changes, Number of Minority Students | Enrollment Changes, Low Income MMSD Lost 174 Students While the Surrounding School Districts Increased by 1,462 Students Over Four School Years. Revenue Value of 1,462 Students - $13.16 Million Per Year*
MMSD reports that student population is declining. From the 2000-2001 school year through the 2003-2004 school year, MMSD lost 174 students. Did this happen in the areas surrounding MMSD? No. From the 2000-2001 through the 2003-2004 school year, the increase in non-MMSD public school student enrollment was 1,462 outside MMSD.
The property tax and state general fund revenue value of 174 students is $1.57 million per year in the 2003-2004 MMSD school year dollars (about $9,000 per student). For 1,462 students, the revenue value is $13.16 million per year. Put another way, the value of losing 174 students equals a loss of 26-30 teachers. A net increase of 1,462 students equals nearly 219 teachers. There are more subtleties to these calculations due to the convoluted nature of the revenue cap calculation, federal and state funds for ELL and special education, but the impact of losing students and not gaining any of the increase of students in the area is enormous.
What else can we see looking at these two school years? The number of low income students in MMSD increased 2,146 (total low income increase was 2,942), the number of minority students in MMSD increased 1,133 (total minority increase was 2,080). In contrast, the number of non-low income students decreased in MMSD 2,230 (total decrease was 1,654), the number of white students decreased 1,307 (total decrease was 792 students, because the surrounding districts showed an increase in the number of white students comparing the two school years).
What big picture questions do these data raise?
*The source of data for public school, private and home school data is the WI Department of Public Instruction. These two years were selected due to limitations in the number of years of economic status data available. Year to year enrollment numbers move up/down, but for MMSD the trend has been toward fewer students over the past 10 years.
A RECENT STUDY SHOWS HOW union contracts can hamper school improvement — and provides another compelling reason why having L.A.'s mayor run the schools could help.
The study by the nonprofit New Teacher Project found that teacher contracts place seniority over what's best for students, especially by favoring longtime teachers for desired teaching slots over newer teachers who might be better for the job. That's true even if the more senior teacher is needed in another school.
To see The New Teacher Project's latest report, Unintended Consequences: The Case for Reforming The Staffing Rules in Urban Teachers Union Contracts, click here.
The report shows how contractual staffing rules undermine urban schools and the educational needs of their students. To view the press release, click here.
Leading educators, researchers and policy makers have galvanized around the importance of sharing the report's data and recommendations. To view their statements of support, click here.
The second argument had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Mr Drucker argued that the world is moving from an “economy of goods” to an economy of “knowledge”—and from a society dominated by an industrial proletariat to one dominated by brain workers. He insisted that this had profound implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like cogs in a huge inhuman machine—the idea at the heart of Frederick Taylor's stopwatch management—and start treating them as brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realise that knowledge, and hence education, was the single most important resource for any advanced society.
Yet Mr Drucker also thought that this economy had implications for knowledge workers themselves. They had to come to terms with the fact that they were neither “bosses” nor “workers”, but something in between: entrepreneurs who had responsibility for developing their most important resource, brainpower, and who also needed to take more control of their own careers, including their pension plans.
Following up on my 10/12/2005 Open Records request regarding closed discussions (particularly the terms) of the Madison School District's purchase of land for a new elementary school on the far west side, I recently filed the following open records complaint with District Attorney Brian Blanchard: Background:
Mr. Brian Blanchard
Dane County District Attorney
City County Building
210 Martin Luther King Blvd. Room 523
Madison, WI 53703
Dear Mr. Blanchard:
Please find attached an open records complaint pursuant to Wis. Stat. § 19.37 against the Madison Metropolitan School District.
I believe that public knowledge of and confidence in government activities is vital to our society. Jefferson commented often on politics, people, public education and government, including these words: "Whenever our affairs go obviously wrong, the good sense of the people will interpose and set them to rights." --Thomas Jefferson to David Humphreys, 1789. ME 7:322
Disregard of the open records statutes undermines public confidence in our taxpayer funded schools. I urge you to address this matter forcefully and expeditiously.
Yours truly,
James E. Zellmer
##
OPEN RECORDS COMPLAINT
I, James E. Zellmer, file this open records complaint pursuant to Wis. Stat. § 19.37. I allege and complain as follows:
1. I am a resident of the City of Madison, Wisconsin and my address is 4224 Waban Hill 53711.
2. I file this open records complaint against the Madison Metropolitan School District which has a business address of 545 West Dayton Street, Madison, WI 53703.
3. I filed an open records request by e-mail-with Clarence Sherrod, the attorney for the Madison Metropolitan School District on October 12, 2005. A copy of the request is attached as Attachment A to this complaint. Later on October 12, 2005, Mr. Sherrod indicated by e-mail that he had referred my request to the District's legal custodian for a reply. A copy of Mr. Sherrod's response is attached as Attachment B to this complaint.
4. My open records request requested copies of any agreements signed this year by the Madison Metropolitan School District or its representatives to purchase land for a school site. I specifically indicated that I understood the issue of purchasing land for a school site was discussed by the Madison Board of Education on October 10, 2005.
5. On October 25, 2005, I received a reply to my open records request from Robert Nadler, the District's Custodian of Records denying my request as to the agreement discussed at the Board of Education's October 10, 2005 meeting. A copy of the reply is attached as Attachment C to this complaint.
6. The October 25, 2004 response indicated that the request was being denied because:
a. The agreement has not been finally approved by the Board.
b. The agreement has contingencies which have not been removed by the Board and release of the agreement would place the School District at a competitive disadvantage in the bargaining of the contract.
c. Because the School District has not removed certain contingencies, the School District may choose to renegotiated certain terms and conditions of the agreement and the release of the agreement would place the School District at an unfair disadvantage in that negotiation.
d. If the agreement was released, third parties may seek to enter the bargaining process and place the School District in a disadvantageous position in negotiation.
e. Release of the requested agreement would inhibit the competitive bidding process if all agreements concerning the School District's attempts to purchase property were released before final approval by the Board of Education.
7. I understand that on the afternoon of Friday, November 4, the School District released to the public as part of the School Board's packet for its November 7, 2005 meeting, the agreement sought by my open records request. The agenda for the Board of Education's November 7, 2005 meeting included purchasing land for a school site.
8. The agreement sought by my open records request was a Vacant Land Offer to Purchase. The Vacant Land Offer to Purchase is a written agreement signed by the seller on September 23, 2005, and the Madison Metropolitan School District as the buyer on September 26, 2005. The agreement was signed by Roger Price on behalf of the School District.
9. Given a written agreement exists which requires the seller to sell the property to the School District, and given that only the School District had the option to get out of the contract, there was no competitive or bargaining reason for the signed written agreement to be withheld from the public. This is consistent with 81 Op. Atty Gen. 139 (1994).
10. Public access to land purchase agreements after negotiations are complete but before final approval of the transaction is consistent with the policy behind the open records law as stated in Wis. Stat. § 19.31. "In recognition of the fact that a representative government is dependent upon an informed electorate, it is declared to be the public policy of this state that all persons are entitled to the greatest possible information regarding the affairs of government and the official acts of those officers and employees who represent them. Further, providing persons with such information is declared to be an essential function of a representative government and an integral part of the routine duties of officers and employees whose responsibility it is to provide such information. To that end, ss. 19.32 to 19.37 shall be construed in every instance with a presumption of complete public access, consistent with the conduct of governmental business. The denial of public access generally is contrary to the public interest, and only in an exceptional case may access be denied."
11. The School District's refusal to release the signed written agreement because the agreement had not been finally approved by the School Board, and the School District could therefore choose to renegotiate certain terms and conditions of the agreement, is contrary to the open records law. Indeed, if the School District's interpretation of the open records requirements is correct, then the School District would presumably be justified in not releasing any written agreement for any purpose until after the agreement was approved by the School Board. If that was the case, public comment, input and scrutiny on all District contracts would be foreclosed.
12. In order to protect the public's right to information about the School Board's important decisions, I make this complaint to the District Attorney for Dane County under the provisions of Wis. Stat. § 19.37(1)(b). I hereby request that the District Attorney for Dane County institute an action against the Madison Metropolitan School District and Robert Nadler, legal custodian, to recover the forfeiture provided in Wis. Stat. § 19.37(4) together with reasonable costs and disbursements as provided by law.
Parent Group Presidents:
N.B. The Board’s discussion regarding animals in the classroom has been postponed until January.
BUDGET FACTOID:
Why does the Madison district spend more than the state average per pupil? One part of the answer is that our student enrollment differs significantly from the state average in areas which require more services (and therefore greater costs):
Poverty Madison’s rate is 30% greater than the state’s average
English Language Learners (ELL): our percentage is more than 300% greater than the state’s
Special Education the district has a higher percentage (16.8% vs. 12.6%) of students with special education needs - and a significantly higher percentage of high needs students. Of 389 students in the state identified with costs over $30,000 Madison has 109 (nearly 30%).
Board meetings on Monday, November 14:
Long Range Planning (chair Bill Keys) heard an update on the East and Memorial/West Task Forces. There will be forums at several middle schools the week of Nov. 28 to get comments from parents and the community. Check the Task Force page on the district’s website (www.mmsd.org) to get dates, time and location. The Committee also approved a proposal to hire an architectural firm to work on a long range facility plan for both East and West High School. The maintenance referendum included major projects for these schools this plan will include both planned projects and improvements that will depend on private fundraising.
The Board approved the administration’s recommendation to proceed with a new Student Information System. This will be funded entirely out of reductions in staffing and other costs. Once in place, parents will be able to use the Internet to view their child’s attendance, test performance and progress reports.
Performance & Achievement (chair Shwaw Vang) heard a report from Pam Nash, Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools, about the Middle Grades Design Team. The team is looking at ways to ensure that middle schools in the district offer more consistent experiences to all students and also that students are adequately prepared to take challenging courses in high school. There has been one meeting with middle school parents and another is planned to get reactions to proposed changes. There will also be a parent survey on the website to get further information from parents.
Human Resources (chair Juan Lopez) continued the discussion on setting goals for the Superintendent for this year. When these are finalized and adopted by the Board I will summarize them. The committee had a report on the increased number of employees of color. This has been a priority of the Board; the report showed that the district has more than doubled the percent of employees of color since 1987 (from 5.8% to 12. 6%).
Next week’s schedule meetings will be at WRIGHT MIDDLE SCHOOL [map]
5:00 Special Board Meeting
The first part is an executive session hearing from the district’s investigator into the taser incident last winter.
The open part of the meeting will be a discussion about the areas of conflict between the school district policy relating to interrogation and arrest of a student and the Madison Police Department procedures.
7:00 Human Resources (Juan Lopez, chair) report on the status of the district’s Workmen’s Compensation record and continued discussion on the 2005-06 Superintendent Goals and Evaluation process
Looking ahead: We are experimenting with televising committee and special Board meetings starting with the meetings on Nov. 28th. The main focus of the meeting will be an intensive review of the budget and staffing of 2 departments: Business Services and Human Resources.
Carol
Carol Carstensen, President
Madison School Board
"Until lions have their own historians, the hunters will always be glorified." - African Proverb
All right, gice and galz. I been called in. Sam Spade, that is. No more pussyfootin' around like that little Nancy Drew kinda mystery ya been seein'. Dis is a tough one. Ain't none of ya gonna' figur it out. But I'm here ta make ya try.
When da Board of Education passed the MMSD buget on the first go round, that is, da balanced budget, da buget supposedly had 3781.23 FTEs (that's full time equivalent postions, for you beginners), compared to da 04-05 school year which supposedly had 3880.86 FTEs, and compared to da "same service" budget which supposedly had 3914.86 FTEs. Ya followin' me?
When da same said Board of Education passed da final buget, how many of dem so-called FTEs did it approve?
Ta give ya a hint, click here ta see a chart that shows some of da FTEs, but it's got lots of blanks, and I don't mean blanks in my .38. That's fully loaded.
The winnin' PI is da one can fill in da most blanks based on da MMSD buget documents.
A public forum was held to update the community on plans to address overcrowding in the West-Memorial attendance area at Leopold Elementary School Tuesday evening. Troy reports 150 people attended (in the comments, take a look at the video clip for details), rather decent, given some other events I've participated in - much more than my quick estimate of 40, which was wrong. [Editor: gotta love the quick feedback loop. Anyone else have a count? :)] In any event, substantive questions were discussed and raised.
A number of ideas were shared along with quite a few public comments. I've summarized a few below (from my notes) (there were many more - have a look at the video):
Why does Van Hise Elementary have such a small low income population relative to other schools?
What data supports the creation of "paired schools" from a student achievement perspective?
Why are we considering busing children all the way to Marquette / Lapham [map]?
(this comment was made after the official event closed) Why won't the MMSD build a school (farther south) in Fitchburg?
I asked: "Why were no scenarios / ideas presented vis a vis the nearby [map] Wright Middle School Facility?"
This 3 page pdf Forum / idea summary was sent to all Thoreau parents Tuesday. UPDATE: Arlene Silveira mentions, via email, that she thought about 120 attended.
A new study details obstacles in union contracts that schools in big cities face in terms of being able to hire and fire teachers. In as many as 40 percent of teacher openings in five large districts, the study says, school administrators had no say in the selection process.
Board of Education in No Rush to Explore Health Insurance Savings
Last June, the Madison Board of Education ratified the 2005-07 collective bargaining agreement with Madison Teachers, Inc. The agreement commits the district and the teachers union to form a task force to identify potential cost savings from changes in health insurance coverage. If the task force finds savings, the parties may renegotiate the health care provisions. The deadline for this work is February of 2006.
Months ago, both sides named their representatives to the task force. Months ago, the Board’s attorney declared that the task force meetings—--prior to possible renegotiation—--would be public meetings. Five months have passed without a public meeting of the task force. The Human Resources Committee, which has oversight of this process, has not mentioned the topic or called for a report from administration. In fact, the board has received more updates from the administraton about discussions on the future of guinea pigs in classrooms than it has on possible savings in health care costs. Now only a few months remain to collect information on this complex topic, analyze the options and, if possible, renegotiate the health insurance provisions in the two-year agreement.
Much is at stake. Last year, health insurance for employees cost the district $37M, more than 10% of the budget. Payments for teachers' insurance account for most of the costs. In addition, teachers stand to benefit from wage increases during the remainder of the 2005-07 agreement, because the parties agreed that the teachers, not district programs, will get the benefit of new savings.
Although the district cannot save money during the two-year contract, it might be in a better position to contain health insurance costs in future agreements, if the task force is productive. A rushed process at the last minute is unlikely to produce the needed changes or to raise public confidence in the board’s handling of district finances.
Wendy Kopp (President and Founder of Teach for America):
According to the annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup survey, the most recent of which was released in September, most Americans cite a lack of parental involvement, as well as problems in students' home life and upbringing and their lack of interest and motivation as the most important reasons for the huge gap between the achievement levels of students in upper- and middle-class neighborhoods and those in poor neighborhoods. More than 75% of those polled said they believe that white students and students of color have the same academic opportunities.
In contrast, Teach for America corps members, who are in those poor neighborhoods every school day, say the key to closing that gap is to train and employ better teachers and improve the quality of the leaders who make decisions in schools and school districts -- while simultaneously ensuring that teachers, principals and parents expect the kids to meet challenging academic standards.
Funding, in itself, is not the answer. Teacher quality and expectations of students outranked funding as both causes of and solutions to the gap. And as corps members spend more time in the classroom, the priority they place on funding gives way to other factors, such as school leadership. While some of their proposed solutions may require further investment, corps members express skepticism about increasing funding without addressing current allocation of resources.
Principal Ed Holmes, English department chair Keesia Hyzer, and teacher Mark Nepper presented information on the planned single English curriculum for all 10th graders at West this past Monday evening. Watch the video or listen to the audio by clicking on the links just to the left of this text. Background on this matter:
When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed...and not before
On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.
According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.
Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.
In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level”. We adopted this goal in response to recommendations from a citizen study group that believed that minority students who are not competent as readers by the end of the third grade fall behind in all academic areas after third grade.
“All students” meant all students. We promised to stop thinking in terms of average student achievement in reading. Instead, we would separately analyze the reading ability of students by subgroups. The subgroups included white, African American, Hispanic, Southeast Asian, and other Asian students.
“Able to read at or beyond grade level” meant scoring at the “proficient” or “advanced” level on the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test (WRC) administered during the third grade. “Proficient” scores were equated with being able to read at grade level. “Advanced” scores were equated with being able to read beyond grade level. The other possible scores on this statewide test (basic and minimal) were equated with reading below grade level.
Using proficient/advanced scores in this way made sense. The Department of Public Instruction’s definitions of the categories would help us distinguish between reading at grade level or beyond and reading at a level that did not satisfy our goal for our students. The following are DPI’s definitions of the categories.
Advanced: Distinguished in the content area. Academic achievement is beyond mastery. Test score provides evidence of in-depth understanding In the academic area tested.
Proficient: Competent in the content area. Academic achievement includes mastery of the important knowledge and skills. Test score shows evidence of skills necessary for progress in the academic area tested.
Basic: Somewhat competent in the content area. Academic achievement shows mastery of most of the important knowledge and skills. Test score shows evidence of at least one major flaw in understanding the academic content area tested.
Minimal: Limited achievement in the content area. Test score shows evidence of major misconceptions or gaps in knowledge and skills tested in the academic content area.
However, staying true to our goal and using the categories of scores as intended does not lead to the conclusion that the critical achievement gap associated with race has been closed. There has been real progress since 1998. For example, African American third graders scoring proficient or advance has risen from 41% in 1998 to 69% in 2004. Nonetheless, there are significant differences between the percentages of students in subgroups who score proficient or advanced and those who score basic or minimal.
The news is best for “other Asian” students. Ninety-eight percent of these students score proficient or advanced. The gap between their performance on the WRCT and our goal of all students in the group “reading at or beyond grade level” at the end of third grade is two percent. White third graders come in second, with ninety-six percent scoring at proficient or advanced and a gap of four percent not likely to leave third grade reading at the desired level.
Ninety-one percent of Southeast Asian third graders scored at proficient or advanced. For them a gap of nine percent remains. Eighty percent of Hispanic third graders scored at proficient or advanced, leaving twenty percent with less than the desired reading level. Finally, sixty-nine percent of African American third graders scored at proficient or advanced and thirty-one percent are likely to complete the year without the reading skills needed to succeed in the next grade.
What the superintendent is saying is that MMSD has closed the achievement gap associated with race now that roughly the same percentage of students in each subgroup score at the minimal level (limited achievement in reading, major misconceptions or gaps in knowledge and skills of reading). That’s far from the original goal of the board. We committed to helping all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level as demonstrated by all students in all subgroups scoring at proficient or advanced reading levels on the WRCT.
The District is currently conducting a Middle School Curriculum Review, lead by Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash (Formerly Principal of Memorial High School). Pam lead a Parent Forum Thursday evening, which I attended (one of about 28 participants). (7MB video clip of Pam kicking off the Forum). The goal of this event was to collect feedback from parents regarding these five questions (pdf version):
The school district is continually working to build more rigor into the learning experiences that students have. Rigor is defined as commitment to a core subject matter knowledge, a high demand for thinking, and an active use of knowledge. When you think of a rigorous academic curriculum in the middle school, what would it look like?
What experiences do you want your child to have in middle school to enhance his or her social and emotional growth?
What are your hopes and dreams for your child in middle school?
What are your greatest concerns for your child in middle school?
If you could design Madison middle schools in any way you wanted, what would they be like?
Pam mentioned that the parent comments would be posted on the district's website, hopefully next week. She also said that the district would post these questions online, in an interactive way so that parents who were unable to attend Thursday's event might add their comments.
My notes follow:
Superintendent Art Rainwater wants the middle school curriculum task force to report back to him by mid December (2005).
The task force "design teams" recently broke up into "work teams".
Recommendations will affect middle school allocations.
I asked Pam when this process began. She said it started one month ago.
Pam mentioned that they hope to pull the parent group together one more time, in December.
I was initially displeased that the group of 28 participants was broken up (I was interested in hearing all of the conversations). However, I thought that the format was rather effective in obtaining comments from all participants (at least those in my group). Kudos to Pam for collecting a good deal of information.
I spoke briefly with Pam when the event concluded. I mentioned that it appears to me, a layman, that it would be challenging to implement major changes via a two month task force. However, incremental changes occuring via the allocations are certainly possible (for better or worse).
I heard many useful suggestions on these questions and will point to them when available on the District's website.
Learn more about the "Middle Grades Design Team" via this Board presentation (800K PDF file) Email your comments on this initiative to the Madison School Board: comments@madison.k12.wi.us
A story in today's Wisconsin State Journal reports carries a headline saying "Schools show big boost in minority staff." It's just not so.
The MMSD chose to give the paper the number of minority employees in various job categories in 1987 and 2005 -- ignoring an MMSD press release issued October 9, 1995, comparing 1987 and 1994.
If the recent release had compared 1994 and 2005, the comparison would have shown a decrease in the numbers and percentages of minorities among administrators from 23 (17%) in 1994 to 22 (15%) in 2005. Minority employees in clerical and technical catetories decreased from 47 (18%) in 1994 to 15 in 2005. (The press release did not provide a percentage for clerical technical categories.) Among custodians the number of minority employees remained unchanged: 37 (15%) in 1994 compared to 37 (17.7%) in 2005.
Click here for a Word file with numbers and percentages for all of the categories, including figures showing increases in the proportion of minority employees in other categories.
Helen Fitzgerald, Sherman parent and president of the school’s parent-teacher group, wants high expectations set for Sherman.
"My kids want to compete!" she says, clearly frustrated. "They want to go to Brown. They want to go to Yale, to UC-Berkeley. My daughter wanted to go to Harvard when she was in the fourth grade! That’s their eye on the ball. That’s their expectation. And Sherman ain’t teachin’ those kids!"
In the modern middle school, however, competition is barely a footnote. Cooperation is king.
In the 1960s and 1970s, as an antidote to a hierarchical and often violent world, American educators proposed a middle-grades school for preteens that would place a premium on their social needs. Such practices as cooperative learning, peer tutoring and heterogeneous grouping would be kinder, gentler substitutes for the traditional top-down form of classroom organization in these "middle schools."
Press Release from the BOE Human Resources Committee:
The number of racial minorities employed by the Madison Metropolitan School District has increased substantially since 1987 according to a report released today. The data also includes information from 1994. “The Board of Education has made diversifying our workforce a strong priority, I am happy to see the increase in the numbers of staff that reflects the diversity of our schools” says Juan Jose Lopez, the Chair of the Human Resources Committee which also includes board members Shwaw Vang and Johnny Winston, Jr.
Minority employees in the district increased from 153 in 1987 to 331 in 1994 to 501 in 2005, an increase of 227% since 1987 and 51% since 1994.
Minorities in the district made up 5.8% of employees in 1987, 9.4% in 1994 and 12.6% in 2005.
The number of minority administrators increased from 12 to 23 from 1987 to 1994 and was reported as 22 in 2005.
Minority teachers increased from 91 in 1987 to 157 in 1994 and 233 in 2005. Minority teachers represented 5.4% of the teaching staff in 1987, 7.0% in 1994 and 9.3% in 2005.
Educational Assistant positions held by racial minorities increased from 15 in 1987 to 51 in 1994 to 85 in 2005. Minority EAs represented 4.6% of that work group in 1987, 10.6% in 1994 and 15.7% in 2005.
Minorities working in the clerical/technical field showed an increase of only one from 14 in 1987 to 15 in 2005. Minority food service workers increased from 2 in 1987 to 16 in 1994 to 32 in 2005 and represented 1.8% of the unit’s workforce in 1987, 12% in 1994 and 23.2 % in 2005.
Minority custodial staff increased from 19 to 37 from 1987 to 1994 and remained at 37 in 2005. However, since the custodial staff has been reduced in recent years, these numbers represent 8.5% of the unit’s workforce in 1987, 15% in 1994 and 17.7% in 2005.
The makeup of the minority groups in 2005 is as follows: 207 African Americans, 165 Hispanic, 103 Asian and 26 Native Americans for a total of 501 minority employees.
Mr. Lopez adds that although these numbers are increasing the district must remain diligent in these very challenging economic times. “Our school district is competing with other districts as well as public and the private sector to recruit qualified minority and culturally competent candidates. We have to provide good compensation and benefit packages that will help us attract those candidates to our district. By continuing our commitment to diversity efforts, we not only create a better school district but a better community as a whole to learn in.”
For more information regarding this press release please contact Juan Jose Lopez at 242-5473 (home), 267-1932 (work), e-mail jlopez@madison.k12.wi.us or Robert Nadler, Director of Human Resources at 663-1745, e-mail rnadlerjr@madison.k12.wi.us.
Should MMSD Board Follow Open Meetings Laws or Change Them?
In her posting, "Westside Land Purchase - was public if you were interested", Marisue Horton suggests that I, as chair of the Madison School Board's Legislative Committee "start making recommendations for change. Start changing the process instead of sitting around and bitching about it."
I am not suggesting that we need new processes. Like Lawrie Kobza, I am advocating that the Madison School Board follow the spirit and letter of existing Wisconsin law. I agree with the principles of the Open Meeting law.
As the law states,
" [a] representative government of the American type is dependent upon an informed electorate, [therefore]it is declared to be the policy of this state that the public is entitled to the fullest and most complete information regarding the affairs of government as is compatible with the conduct of governmental business." Only in specified exceptional cases may the school board go into closed sessions.
I also agree with Lawrie that the narrow exception allowing ongoing negotiations to be discussed behind closed doors did not apply to the October 10 meeting on the purchase of 8.3 acres of land near your home for a future elementary school. The Board's attorneys disagree. The legal issue will not be resolved until, as Bill Keys recommended, an official complaint has been filed with the Dane County District Attorney and we have his opinion. Isthmus newspaper has filed that complaint and in due time we will have a ruling by a neutral legal authority.
In this case, the Open Meetings law protects the public's interest in knowing how much the district planned to pay for this particular parcel and the conditions of the sale before the sale was complete. That interest was not respected. Maybe other sellers would have come forward with better offers, if they had known that we were poised to complete this purchase and were willing to sell the land back to them at less-than-appreciated value in the future. Maybe not. We will never know. Seven weeks passed between the signing of the deal by administration and the closed session meeting at which the board accepted the terms. The closing is not until November 15. What was the rush on November 7?
Isthmus, November 11, 2005, reports on the refusal of the MMSD administration and Board of Education to release details on a land purchase for a new school. Isthmus posted the full article and supporting documents in the Document Feed of thedailypage.com. Here are excerpts:
Jim Zellmer doesn’t know whether buying land for a new elementary school on the city’s far southwest side is a good idea. But he’s sure keeping the deal secret almost until the moment of final approval is a bad one. . . .
The deal was kept under wraps until 4:30 last Friday afternoon, when the school district put the contract into media folders just before closing for the weekend. At Monday’s meeting, Robarts and Kobza urged the board to delay approval for one week, to allow for public input, including that of a task force studying west-side school overcrowding. . . .
But Kobza’s motion failed on a 3-3 vote, with board members Bill Keys, Juan Jose Lopez and Johnny Winston Jr. opposed. Keys haughtily challenged critics of the secret deal to "go ahead and file charges"; Kobza urged members of the public to take up his suggestion.
On Wednesday, Isthmus followed through, asking Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard to investigate and prosecute. . . .
"It's the process the board goes through and developing public trust on decisions that were made, I was really trying to focus on that and it's disappointing the majority of the board didn't go with me," said Kobza.
"This isn't a secret, our community knows it's growing and we're going to have to build new schools in the future and we're going to have to purchase the land first," said Madison School Board Member Johnny Winston.
From Schenk-Atwood-Starkweather-Yahara Neighborhood Association council:
Long time Madison Board of Education member Carol Carstensen has agreed to be at our neighborhood association meeting next Thursday November 10 - 7:15 PM - at the Atwood Community Center - to talk about the future of east side schools, particularly Lowell and Lapham-Marquette elementary schools.
A school board task force is looking into underenrollment at some east side elementary schools - crowding at others - and what to do about it. Adjusting school attendance area boundary lines and / or closing schools are some of the options on the table. Emerson, Lapham and Lowell elementary schools -- all under capacity -- are said to be at risk if closings are considered.
In January the east side task force will recommend up to 3 options to the school board's Long-Range Planning Committee.
Public Information and Tonight's Land Purchase Vote
Tonight the Board of Education will vote on approving the purchase of land in the proposed plat of Linden Park located along Redan Road on the west side of Madison. The Board will vote on approving the purchase of 8.234 acres for the price of $535,258.83. One provision of the agreement requires the District to offer to sell the property back to the developer at the District's original purchase price plus the cost of improvements plus 5% interest compounded daily, if the District determines not to build a school on the site and instead to sell the property.
The Offer to Purchase this property was signed by the developer on September 23, 2005, and was signed by Roger Price for the School District on September 26, 2005. The Offer is contingent upon Board approval.
Despite the fact that negotiations over this contract were completed at the end of September, this signed contract was not available for public review until last Friday, November 4, 2005. In fact, the signed contract was deliberately kept from public review before then. A Board meeting to discuss the signed contract was held in closed session on October 10, 2005 (Ruth Robarts and I voted against going into closed session on this matter), and an open records request by Jim Zellmer for a copy of the signed document was denied.
The reason given for keeping this signed purchase document from the public was that the open meetings law permits a closed session for the purpose of "[d]eliberating or negotiating the purchasing of public properties, the investing of public funds, or conducting other specified public business, whenever competitive or bargaining reasons require a closed session." However, a 1994 Attorney General's Opinion issued by then Attorney General Jim Doyle
indicates that while a closed session is appropriate to formulate strategy while engaged in negotiations, once a governmental body has reached a tentative agreement, bargaining ceases as does the rationale for keeping matters from the public. At that point, the opinion states "[t]he question before the governmental body is no longer what strategy the body should adopt in order to obtain an agreement with favorable terms. The question is whether it is in the public's interest to ratify the terms as tentatively agreed to by the parties. Given that the governmental body is not actually engaged in negotiations at that point, it does not appear that "competitive or bargaining reasons" as that phrase is used in section 19.85(1)(e) exist to warrant discussing the agreement in closed session."
I am disappointed that the majority of the Board felt it was appropriate to keep this signed contract for the purchase of land for a new school site from the public until the Friday before we are asked to vote on the contract. I would have appreciated receiving public comment on the location of the proposed school site, the cost of the site, and the conditions included in the signed agreement. In particular, I would have appreciated receiving information from the Board's two long range planning task forces on their thoughts about the proposed site. I believe this information would help me make an informed vote on the purchase.
I also believe the public would have more confidence in the Board's decision-making if the public could see that information was made public in a timely way, if input was sought and considered, and if important matters such as the purchase of property were discussed openly.
The purchase of a new school site is a decision with important fiscal and long-range planning impacts. It could have a significant impact on the District for decades into the future. It is a decision that should be made in the light of day, not behind closed doors.
$293,000 Unspent in Library Aids; Mystery #2 Deepens
In our unrelently effort to unravel the mysteries of the MMSD budget, our loyal fans may remember the Case of the Disappearing Library Aids - Budget Mystery #2.
It all began with an innocuous inquiry from a schoolmarm and inquisitive assistant who claimed that their library did not receive library aids for the last school year.
After more than a month of pointed proding, Assistant Superintendent Roger Price responded with a most mystifying missive which includes the alarming admission that the MMSD did not expend $293,055 in library aids received from the DPI last year!
While Mr. Price's e-mail expounds on the expectations for satisfying last year's lingering obligation, he confesses that the plans do not satisfy this year's obligation. I take his candid comment to concede that the MMSD will collect $675,004 in library aids for this school year (by his own account) without a contingency for spending it all!
What a curious calamity! The povery-pleading MMSD doesn't have a plan to spend all of the cash in its flow! Should the case be renamed Fumbling Fudiciaries?
(If any of our intrepid investigators have another interpretation or corrections to my canny conjecture, please post promptly.)
In surfing through the information posted for the task forces, I have two questions about some of it.
First, I don't know why the MMSD staff presented the chart on Transportation_Students_Special Ed_ELL. However, the district does more busing and cabbing than just special ed and ELL students. Most children, I believe, in early childhood programs get bused or cabbed, but they may be included in the special ed students. In addition, children in TEP (Temporary Education Program) for homeless kids get bussed or cabbed (sometimes from Verona, Middleton, and Sun Prairie). If the chart were to include all kids who are bussed, the TEP kids definitely need to be added.
Second, another chart that shows classrooms set aside for districtwide programs does not show any districtwide program at Glenn Stephens Elementary. However, the 3rd Friday count shows 30 kids in an early childhood program at Glenn Stephens. Shouldn't those kids show up in rooms at Glenn Stephens?
I hope that someone on the task forces will ask MMSD staff for clarification on these two issues, since complete data will help produce better recommendations.
The MMSD Web site lists eight options for further review by the task force. Rather than try to list them here, you can link to the meeting minutes with the options.
The minutes from the West/Memorial task force include the following:
Seven Task Force members indicated that they had ideas for options to begin the discussion. Jane noted that we would have members bring up their ideas and then determine how to proceed in refining the ideas. She also noted that District staff would analyze the options further before the next meeting of the Task Force.
Board of Education's 2005-06 evaluation of superintendent: next steps
On October 31, the Human Resources Committee of the Madison Board of Education reviewed a memo from Juan Jose Lopez, the chair of the committee. According to the memo, the Board developed goals for the 2005-06 evaluation of the superintendent during its recent closed sessions to evaluate his performance between 2002 and now.
If so, I believe that the Board violated the requirements of the Wisconsin Open Meetings law in those sessions. The Open Meetings law permits the Board to meet in closed sessions to consider "performance evaluation data". That is, the Board may discuss how the superintendent's performance measures up under the performance standards. The law does not permit the Board to develop the standards for future evaluations behind closed doors. That's why the October 10 meeting was scheduled as an open meeting. The Board must hold its discussion of future standards for this evaluation in public.
The memo also refers to a still secret document, "the Superintendent's evaluation", and recommends that the next evaluation of Superintendent Art Rainwater focus on four categories. Did the Board evaluate the superintendent in just four categories? We can't say, because the sessions were closed. Were there other ideas about where improvement is needed? We can't say, because the sessions were closed. Is this memo an accurate summary of Board discussions? We can't say, because the sessions were closed.
The next step is another Human Resource Committee meeting. Board members are encouraged to submit recommendations for the next evaluation before this meeting.
The memo follows:
MEMORANDUM
October 31, 2005
TO: Members of the Board of Education
FROM: Juan José López
SUBJECT: Superintendent’s Goals for 2005-06
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following are goals that were articulated in the Superintendent’s evaluation:
1. Specific targets and measures need to be identified for each area of the Strategic Plan.
a) Following this first year of specific targets and measures, an Annual Report should be developed that identifies the base line measure.
b) This year, and in subsequent years, the Annual Report should give updates on the progress of each of these priorities.
2. The Board would like a detailed plan describing how the district will improve progress on our math goal.
a) The plan should include ways to measure our annual progress at specific elementary and middle school grades, as well as at 9th and 10th grades.
b) This year, and in subsequent years, the Annual Report should give updates on the progress of each of these priorities.
3. The Board would like more information on the district's collaborations/partnerships and to be kept informed of changes and developments.
a) Each collaboration/partnership should be identified in terms of participants, goals, and potential savings or benefit to district.
b) New collaborations/partnerships are encouraged, but are expected to have a net gain in terms of personnel, student benefit, resources, or long term goals when all staff time is considered.
4. The Board requests that the Superintendent develop a formal process to identify culturally competent potential administrators from within the District, and to develop their skills and experiences. The proposed process and potential participants should be identified by the end of the academic year, with implementation planned for the following year.
Equity and School Board - Hard Work Needed by School Board AND Equity Task Force
I've attended many of the School Board meetings where equity issues came up. I listened to parents and representatives from the Northside Coalition talk about their concerns about equity issues over the past several years, including concerns about the application of the equity formula over the past several years frustrated, in part, that the School Board was not implementing and overseeing the established, Board approved equity policy.
My daughter does not attend any of the schools represented by these parents, but my husband has taught in some of these schools, so I'm familiar with some but certainly not all of issues, and I've worked as a PTO Board member in support of many similar issues. I wholeheartedly support parent and community members' concerns, and I wholeheartedly believe we need to take steps to do the right thing for all our students, especially helping those who are in the greatest need of support to be successful learners.
I wasn't at Monday night's meeting, but I've heard Lawrie Kobza testify and speak on the need for the School Board to take steps to insure that the Equity Policy is implemented and to monitor the implementation of that policy as required. I agree with her recommendation that a first step for the Task Force would be to examine the existing equity policy, even though I believe this motion was defeated. I hope the Equity Task Force, when formed, will go ahead and begin their work by looking at the existing policy and keep the big picture in mind.
As I wrote yesterday, I believe that what is implicit in the equity issue is student achievement which very much depends upon closing the achievement gap. The second goal of the equity policy states: "that all students will achieve in accordance with the 100% success objectives." While the Equity Task Force begins their process, I hope the Performance and Achievement Committee will look at student achievement and the achievement gap more closely and as a regular part of their meeting agendas, using MMSD data.
I would hope that this committee raises questions about what is working toward closing the achievement gap? I know evaluators say it is difficult to “tease out” the right answer, but having been a program evaluator for more than ten years, I know these questions need to be asked and discussed in an ongoing fashion. The efforts of the Equity Task Force and the Performance and Achievement Committee are not mutually exclusive.
For example, even before the Equity Task Force even meets, the administration and/or staff/schools are already on a path to change 10th grade Enlish offerings in West High School, has removed regular foreign language classes from one middle schools substituting a reading hour for one academic hour, and is now started a redesigning process of our middle schools.
Where's the public discussions about these important academic issues that will affect student achievement at the school board level or on the Performance and Achievement Committee? These are not simply issues of which curricula, these are big picture issues, policy issues that will directly affect student achievement. The administration I can only assume believes these are necessary to close the achievement gap and necessary given our current financial situation - what does the Board think about this, what is our MMSD data showing us, are these our only options? However, what is the process for making these changes, when is the Board briefed and make decisions? Final decisions on curriculum are the legal responsibility of the School Board, but does that mean the School Board is only brought in at the last step? In any case, ongoing dialogue will help us all have a better understanding of these changes. When you look at the State Standards for various subjects, a wide variety of different people, including parents, business people are involved in the process. Doing otherwise runs the risk of constant us vs. them situations, which are counter-productive.
Last year, there was a presentation to the School Board by the District on their research-based reading curriculum. There continues to be great debate about the effectiveness of various district curriculum approaches and their results. Draft evaluations on certain reading curriculum have been prepared but not discussed at the Board level. Professionals with direct experience in how children learn to read have expressed concern about aspects of the District’s reading curriculum. Doesn’t the Board need to have a public discussion about the various approaches, results, directions? Don't we come to better understandings through public discussions?
I guess I believe student achievement is the primary responsibility of the School Board. The School Board needs to address these big picture questions, they need to set the parameters. They do not need to micromanage, but they need to set and monitor policy.
The district’s equity policy was originally adopted in 1994. Shortly after, the East Area Success Team came to the Board with a proposal that we adopt a more equitable approach to distributing resources. This became the Equity Resource Allocation formula; it was used, and is still used, to distribute additional resources (supplemental) to the neediest schools at the elementary level. The Board allocated a number of the supplemental positions to support SAGE programming at 16 schools in 2000-01. Since most schools used the supplemental resources to decrease class size this appeared to be a reasonable way to reduce class sizes and gain a bit more in state funding.
Last spring the Northside PTO Coalition, which has been very concerned about the equity policy, put this question before the school board: “If further cuts are required, will you commit to working with the community to try to protect smaller class sizes at the neediest schools, even if that means raising class sizes at schools with lower poverty levels?”
The Board discussion reported in the Capital Times earlier this week was about the questions and issues such an approach raises. My questions are:
How much do we take away from some schools and some programs to maintain resources at other schools?
Just to clarify, the first step the Task Force on Equity is directed to take is to review the district's current policy and the equity resource allocation formula.
Is the income of students to be the overriding criteria in funding discussions?
Do we end SAGE at those schools with poverty levels significantly below the district average (say less than 30%)?
Do we take away the .5 supplemental allocated to schools with lower poverty rates?
How do we handle programs that serve a lower percentage of low-income students?
Do we eliminate advanced courses at the high school or foreign language at the middle school in order to give additional resources to the secondary schools with the highest proportion of low-income students?
I do not have a ready answer to these questions – but they are ones that the Equity Task Force will discuss in considering their recommendations to the Board. The Equity Task Force was specifically requested by a number of parents and the Northside PTO Coalition.
Under the new program targeted for fall 2006, all sophomores will take the same English program in the first semester focusing on the American Dream. In the second semester, students will be able to select from the themes of justice or identity, according to Keesia Hyzer, chair of the school's English department.
In the past, 10th-grade students have had more than 20 options, but 85 percent have selected among five or six choices, she indicated. Current plans call for the curriculum to be taught next year in 18 sections.
Principal Ed Holmes said the core curriculum "will meet the needs of the struggling learner as well as those of our gifted and talented students." He indicated that there is concern among some parents, but he urged them to see what the core curriculum will mean to their students. The core curriculum is still "a work in progress," he said, but it will be explained at Monday's PTO meeting.
"The parents' concern is that we are going to give up the rigor and challenge for our most talented students. By no means!" he said in a Capital Times interview.
MMSD Equity Policy Exists - Board Not Overseeing Policy
On Monday, October 31st, the Madison School Board voted to establish an equity policy task force even though a board equity policy exists - http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/policies/9001.htm. The existing equity policy goals are twofold: (1) that all students will be provided an equitable educational opportunity in a diverse setting and (2) that all students will achieve in accordance with the 100% success objectives. MMSD School Board members are not taking the necessary steps to ensure that the existing School Board Equity Policy is being implemented as stated in the policy requirements. Why not? It seems to be easier for the Board majority to punt to another new task force and confuse the situation, further delaying action.
There are serious flaws and confusion in the 'reasoning' and applications of the 'equity policy' by the majority of the Board: equity and equal are NOT the same; nor do the equity policy and the equity formula mean, nor do the same things. The Board majority and the Administration conveniently hide behind the confusion and lack of accountability they create to 'assure' everyone they are doing everything they can given financial constraints that prevent them from doing more. The lack of prior board oversight, work and actions simply do not support the board majority’s statements on Monday night.
For example, as Chair of the Performance and Achievement Committee last year, Board member Juan Jose Lopez had both the power and the authority to set the agenda for his committee. Did his committee make closing the achievement gap a priority? No. Did his committee examine curriculum, identify where resources are being allocated and what support resources are needed, review test results, budgets and make recommendations for changes to improve the achievement gap? No. I attended all the Performance and Achievement Committee meetings. What was done? District administrators made “seminar type” information presentations on various subjects and curricula, but no data on MMSD’s students were presented.
Few decisions were made – none directly tied to improving student achievement and support services as needed, which is implicit in equity for our students. There was no attempt to find out what curriculum issues might exist that would hamper children’s academic achievement and which curricula or aspects of a curricula are helping our children achieve academically. No serious work was done on improving academic achievement for all our students. Further, after January 2005, while Mr. Lopez attended other Board and Board committee meetings, his Performance and Achievement Committee did not meet for the remainder of his term as Chair of that committee.
Why hasn’t the School Board overseen this policy more rigorously? The equity policy requires that “the Superintendent will present to the Board an annual report which will include each school's educational goals and diversity profile. The report will also contain the progress or lack of progress each school has made toward reaching its goals, and appropriate recommendations for further action designed to achieve the goals.” The Superintendent does report to the School Board on the Board’s three priorities. The information contained in this report is necessary but not sufficient to oversee and to monitor the implementation of the equity policy. Succinct summaries needed to be presented to the School Board for their review and discussion. Why weren’t they?
There is no oversight or consistent follow-up by the board or a board committee, there is no reporting from the administration to the School Board as required in the policy. There is no committee work to assess curriculum that may be contributing to the achievement gap. So, when Board members say they are concerned about equity, their prior actions do not appear to support their statements. Financial challenges definitely exist for the District (I voted yes on all three referenda last spring), but that does not explain the School Board’s absence of monitoring important policies so they and the public can learn what is working/not working and what needs improvement. There are steps that need to be taken before making broad, sweeping statements that make for good press. There is an equity policy in place – the Board needs to do its job and enforce this policy.
If all that were needed for reducing the achievement gap were dollars, the School Board could have made that money available this year, for example, by making extracurricular activities self-funding. With high school sports at $2 million – the district could instead use that money to pay for 20-40 positions that could be used to teach children who need help. Or, maybe the Board needs to revisit the Reading Recovery program, which helps the neediest (but not all the neediest) first grade students vs. other reading curriculum assistance designed to help teachers work with children needing help in grades K-5. Reallocating Reading Recovery personnel would make available 20+ teaching positions. Or, perhaps the District could revisit Federal funding for reading programs – at least have some public discussions about possible next steps before turning our backs on such funding sources. Or, perhaps, make more programs in fund 80 self-funding and use part of that budget to support for kids that would qualify under the fund 80 guidelines. Lastly, the School Board could have reduced administrative staff.
There are positive steps that can be taken, but first the School Board needs to do the work of monitoring important policies such as the existing Equity Policy. If differences exist between the administration and parents/community members (such as on Madison’s northside) re. the implementation of this policy, it’s up to the School Board to work through these issues in a public format. How much longer does this community have to wait for this School Board to wake up and do its job?
The MMSD Web site says that the West/Memorial task force "identified seven options for additional analysis" by MMSD staff. I asked Superintendent Rainwater's Chief of Staff Mary Gulbrandsen for a list of the seven options, and here is her reply:
The West Memorial task force has not even seen the seven ideas that
were put forth by the seven small work groups, as they were the last
thing that we did at the meeting on Thursday night. We are just pulling the ideas together and are going to work with some of the members to actually create options. As soon as we have something that is in a form to send out to the task force, it will be posted on the MMSD website for reviewing. Mary
It’s not too early to think about running, even though school board elections are “spring elections,” because it takes time to learn the issues and organize a campaign.
A lively debate during school board elections will help shape better policies and improve programs for Madison’s children. A lively debate, of course, requires more than one candidate in a race. You can be one of those candidates!
You won’t be alone. A strong network of experienced activists from all across the city will help with research, organizing, fundraising, and all the other necessities of running a campaign.
As a candidate, you would run city-wide for one of two numbered seats currently held by Bill Keys and Juan Lopez, both of whom I have encouraged to run again.
If you’d like to know more about how to run, feel free to contact Jim Zellmer, Webmaster of schoolinfosystem.org, (608) 213-0434, zellmer at mac dot com; Don Severson, Active Citizens for Education, (608) 238-8300, don at activecitizensforeducation dot org; Ed Blume, (608) 225-6591, edblume at mailbag dot com.
Pam Nash (Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools) emailed this notice:
Many of you have expressed an interest in participating and discussing the changes to our middle schools. There will be a middle school focus group meeting for parents on Thursday, November 10, 2005, 7:00-8:30 p.m. at the Doyle Building, 545 W. Dayton Street in Room 103. [Map]
At this meeting, we will be gathering thoughts of what parents would like to see in the middle schools in Madison. There will also be an on-line survey available for parents to complete if they were unable to attend the meeting.
The Madison Metropolitan School District HAS NOT CLOSED THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP. Black third graders are still not reading at the same level as white students, most school arrests involve African Americans and the graduation gap is as wide as ever. Black students are disproportionately referred to special education (and once in, rarely get out), and are overly represented in remedial classes that do not prepare them for higher education, or meaningful employment after high school.
The newsletters posted on the MMSD's Long Range Planning page say that the East task force narrowed its considerations to eight options, and the West/Memorial narrowed its considerations to seven.
Could someone please post a list of the options for each task force?
I am Greatly Distressed About La Follette High School's Four Block System
Dear La Follette Parents & Taxpayers,
I am writing because I am greatly distressed about conditions at La Follette High School under the 4-block system. I strongly believe that as parents and taxpayers you have the right to be included in the debate about your child's education. Because I believe the future of the 4-block will be decided in the near future I am compelled to provide you with some information.
Students in the traditional MMSD high schools are required to spend 50% of the credits required for graduation in academic areas. La Follette students are required to spend only 42% of their time in academic areas. Why does the district believe that La Follette students need less time in academic areas? Do the taxpayers support this decision? I understand that this is a debatable question. What I do not understand is why there is a different answer for La Follette students.
The 4-block is intended to deliver a “comprehensive” education. What does this mean? From my anecdotal experience, I have concluded that less than 25% of our students are able to take 8 credits per year. If the district can't provide the funds to deliver 8 credits per student, if most students are forced to take unwanted study halls and unwanted elective classes, what is the point of the block? Teachers have asked the district to provide data to refute this anecdotal conclusion.
Approximately one year ago, teachers requested that the district provide statistical data on a variety of questions. The MMSD School Board agreed that this information was necessary. To date, I have not received any data. Scuttlebutt informs me that the data gathered is both incomplete and inadequate. I hope the rumor mill is incorrect.
Under the 4-block, a La Follette student is one of 166 students assigned to a teacher of a full-credit class. In the other high schools, an individual child is one of 135 students assigned to a teacher of a full-credit class.
(In ½-credit classes the ratio is 332/1 at La Follette and 270/1 at traditional schools.)
This circumstance presents two questions:
A. Does a La Follette student receive equivalent attention from their teachers?
B. Can a La Follette student receive equivalent attention from their teachers?
4. La Follette full-credit classes are 18 weeks long. All other MMSD full credit classes are 36 weeks long. Do La Follette students have sufficient time to internalize knowledge and practice academic skills? As an academic teacher I do not understand why music is so important and difficult that it requires a year-long schedule, but academics do not. Why has it been concluded that academic knowledge and skills are easier to acquire or less important?
Under the 4-block, a La Follette student's full-credit classes have 15 fewer hours of instruction (direct teacher contact) compared to the other Madison students attending traditional high schools with the year-long 7-period day schedule.
(La Follette- 90 minutes X 90 days = 8,100 minutes; 7-period day schedule – 50 minutes X 180 days = 9,000 minutes).
This lack of instructional time has, historically, been exacerbated in the fall semester. In the fall semester instructional time is lost due to orientation activities associated with the beginning of school, WKCE testing, and Homecoming events.
This year (2005), MMSD has scheduled the fall semester for 88 instead of 90 days. This schedule places fall semester, 4-block, academic students at a distinct and measurable disadvantage. La Follette students must absorb all of these activities in an 88 day, 7920 minute course. In all other MMSD schools, operating in the traditional 7-period system, these activities would be absorbed in a 180 day, 9000 minute course.
Can a La Follette student learn as much content or as many skills with 15+ fewer hours of instruction? What content and skills are teachers forced to eliminate under these conditions?
Under the 4-block, many students do not have equivalent prerequisite knowledge and skills. Administrative/organizational concerns appear to be driving the schedule (see #9). Thus, it has been decided (for what reason?) that students will be grouped by half-year. It has been decided to group history with science and math with English.
This situation forces me to cope with serious pedagogical and ethical questions.
My fall semester Advanced United States History students have not had 9th grade English, my spring semester students have had English or are concurrently enrolled. The standards for Advanced United States History require critical thinking and extensive writing experience. My fall semester students do not and cannot have the same amount of instruction or experience in thinking or writing skills.
How, and to what extent, am I supposed to adjust the grading standards? How much time (which doesn't exist, especially in a shortened semester) can, or should, I spend on teaching grammar and writing? In the traditional system these subjects are taught concurrently which provides the student with continual and supporting instruction from both classes. This lack of consistent exposure to writing instruction also impacts the opportunity for La Follette students to succeed in the sciences.
My husband is a civil engineer and my son is working on his PhD in Chemical engineering (3rd year); both support my contention that writing skills are very important for all students.
Maturational development is also a problem under the 4-block. "Slow starters" struggle in the fall semester. Concepts and critical thinking skills that students can’t master in the fall may be possible six months later. However, under the 4-block these students are no longer in my class. Six months later they may be enrolled in foods, art, social dance, etc. These classes, while self-fulfilling, practical and hand-on, do not offer constant opportunities for the practice of critical thinking skills that are so necessary for success and active participation the 21st Century.
La Follette is an open enrollment school. How many of the transfers, to La Follette, enroll because they are credit deficient and are told that a semester or a year at La Follette is an easy way to make-up credits? In 2004-05, La Follette had to accept 262 new students. Additional allocation was not provided until teachers spoke directly to the MMSD School Board. Additional allocation was not provided or implemented until the end of the first ½-credit (semester class) grading period. Can La Follette students or teachers functional successfully under these conditions?
The scheduling at La Follette has been historically troubled. Historically, students have easy and difficult semesters. Teachers have grossly imbalanced workloads. This term I teach two sections of "America Since 45". One section has 10 students, the other section has 28. This course requires a substantial amount of class discussion and it is impossible to keep the two classes coordinated. Therefore, I confront three undesirable choices:
a. I plan 270 minutes every day (2 different sections of Am. S. 45 and one section of Adv. U.S. 9) – this is not logistically or intellectual possible.
b. I give the small class a significant amount of free time, camouflaged as enrichment.
c. I eliminate various topics/experiences from the larger class.
I have been informed that next semester I will have the full complement of students. It is impossible to deliver equivalent instruction under these circumstances. There are always injustices, but I believe that the 4-block exacerbates these problems.
The workload of 4-block teachers is significantly more than the teachers in other MMSD high schools (I can provide statistical data to support this statement). I believe this increased workload has a detrimental impact on the educational opportunities of La Follette students.
I promised myself that this letter would be short and to the point. Obviously, I could not keep my promise. Yet, there is so much more that I believe you, as parents and taxpayers, need to know. If you are interested, I am eager to provide more information. I hope you will contact La Follette and MMSD administration to ask questions and demand answers (supported by data).
Despite everything, I promise that I will work as hard as I can (a 60+ hour week) to help your child (every child). I have two children of my own (24 & 25 yrs old). I know it sounds stupid (corny), and that you may not believe me, but, I see my children’s "baby faces" reflected in your child. I deeply and truly want to help each and every one of my students. I am angry because I believe that the 4-block forces unnecessary and unjustified obstacles to my mission.
In the interest of honest disclosure, I must inform you that I am a Madison Teachers, Inc. building representative. I have taught at La Follette for 15+ years. I have taught under the block since it was implemented (8 years ago). I became a union representative, for the 1st time, this year. I campaigned for a position as an MTI building representative when I could no longer avoid or tolerate MMSD policies that, I believe, are hurting my students. From my perspective, insufficient time-on-task, adolescent brain research on attention span, lack of funding, scheduling problems, alterations in start and end times (we no longer have the ½ hour after school to help students) and MMSD's continual demand that teachers increase their workload is unacceptable (hence, this letter & my MTI campaign/position). I regret that I did not speak out on this matter several years ago.
Please ask questions. Please become involved. Please feel free to contact me (cgredell@madison.k12.wi.us) if I can provide any assistance or information.
Sincerely,
Cecelia Gredell
Teacher: Advanced United States History - 9
America Since '45 – 11
Advanced Placement United States History – 11 & 12
Massachusetts is the first state giving out grants to school districts to pursue a longer school day -- and 20 districts have applied for the money. Murphy Middle School in Boston is already experimenting with a longer day, offering help with homework and extra curriculum until late in the evening.
On October 17, the Legislative Committee of the Madison School Board voted unanimously to recommend that the district join the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools (WAES) The organization is a diverse, statewide coalition working for comprehensive school-funding reform.
Partners in the coalition believe in the following core principles that serve as "membership criteria" and the rationale for a school-finance reform proposal based on the Adequacy model, the Wisconsin Adequacy
Plan.
The four core principles are
1. Sufficient resources
Wisconsin’s public schools need a system of funding that provides all children with the resources needed to provide them with the equal opportunity for a quality education guaranteed by the Wisconsin Constitution, the Supreme Court and federal and state statutes.
2. Resources should be linked to high standards
A new system of funding should guarantee a base amount of
resources to educate regular students to high standards and also
provide enough resources to give the same opportunity to meet high
standards to children with special education needs, those who live in
poverty, students with limited English skills, and those with special
needs determined by the size, location, and/or demographics of their
school districts.
3. State tax reform
New resources as part of school-funding reform should come from
statewide — rather than local — taxes in a way that lowers property
taxes while increasing fairness to all taxpayers.
4.
Local control
A new system should build on Wisconsin’s successful tradition of local control by trusting individual communities to decide how
additional funding will be utilized and by assuring accountability and improved student performance.
More information about the organization is available at http://www.excellentschools.org.
To some Colorado residents, Referendum C is the best chance to spare the state’s schools from deep budget cuts. To others, the ballot measure—which will go before voters Nov. 1—represents a steep tax increase and gives lawmakers too much power over how state revenues are spent.
Referendum C is a proposed five-year suspension of Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR. TABOR is a voter-approved 1992 constitutional amendment that imposed a formula-driven cap on state spending and required the state and local jurisdictions, including school districts, to give back to taxpayers any revenues in excess of the cap.
“It is by far and away the most restrictive tax and spending limitation in the country,” said Wade Buchanan, the president of the Bell Policy Center, a think tank in Denver. “It really is a measure that gives fiscal decisionmaking powers almost exclusively to the voters.”
From "Colorado Referendum Targets Revenue Cap: Easing restrictions would free up more tax dollars for schools and colleges", by Linda Jacobson in Education Week, October 19, 2005.
With efforts to get TABOR amendments passed in other states, including Wisconsin and Kansas, policymakers are closely watching the outcome of the vote in Colorado.
Because Colorado’s formula limits spending growth to the rate of inflation, plus annual population growth, Mr. Buchanan explained, the state’s spending limit was permanently lowered when the economy went sour in 2001.
“When you have a recession, [TABOR] essentially moves the cap down,” he said. “It’s like not being able to refill the reservoir after a severe drought.”
As the economy improved, rebates to taxpayers grew larger and larger, reaching a total of about $1 billion out of an $8 billion general fund in fiscal 2005.
That’s why Mr. Buchanan’s group and education associations in the state are supporting the referendum, which was placed on the ballot following a bipartisan agreement struck in March between Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, and top Republicans and Democrats in the legislature.
In his March letter to the state, Mr. Owens wrote: “I have never been one to shy away from spending cuts. But we have cut what we can responsibly cut.” He added that he thought residents would rather forgo their rebates than see more cuts to important programs.
If it passes, Referendum C will set a new cap at the highest level of state revenue reached between now and 2011, and allow those extra tax dollars—roughly $3.7 billion—to be spent on schools, higher education, and health care.
“This will help us keep the status quo,” said Jana Caldwell, a spokeswoman for the Englewood-based Colorado Association of School Executives, which includes principals and other administrators. “If it fails, we’re really going to be hurting. We are estimating that districts can plan to lose 3 to 5 percent of their current budget.”
In an effort to protect K-12 schools from TABOR, the voters also passed Amendment 23 in 2000, which requires per-pupil spending and funding for special “categorical” education programs to increase annually by at least the rate of inflation, plus 1 percent.
If Referendum C passes, Colorado will be able to fully fund that formula, which lawmakers have not yet done because of a dispute over the formula.
A Tight Race
If the K-12 system is hoping for the measure to pass, then higher education officials are desperate for its approval. Since 2001, spending on higher education in the state has declined from 20 percent of the state budget to 10 percent, even though enrollment has continued to increase, according to the Colorado Office of Planning and Budgeting.
Hank Brown, a former Republican U.S. senator from Colorado and now the president of the University of Colorado, has said he supports Referendum C and has warned that if it doesn’t pass, serious cuts are likely.
A companion ballot measure—Referendum D—would authorize the state to issue $1.56 billion in bonds to repair and maintain public schools in poorer school districts, build roads and bridges, and make facility improvements at state colleges and universities. Gov. Owens and education groups back the measure.
Observers presume that if one measure passes, the other is also likely to pass. But if C passes and D does not, the legislature will have more say over how the additional revenue is spent.
Recent polls have shown that the votes on referendums C and D will be very close, and that those who are portraying the adjustment to TABOR as a huge tax increase are also getting their message to the voters.
In an op-ed essay that appeared in The Denver Post on Sept. 4, former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, who co-chairs a conservative Washington-based organization called FreedomWorks, wrote: “If the people vote ‘yes,’ TABOR will change and the government will collect and spend $3.7 billion more in taxes than is currently allowed. That’s a tax increase—no matter how much political spin supporters try to put on it.”
FreedomWorks is one of the organizations pushing for TABOR amendments in other states.
Colorado’s Independence Institute has also been a leading opponent of both measures. The institute’s president, Jon Caldara, argues that Colorado taxpayers need the money more than the government does.
Pamela Benigno, the director of the Golden, Colo.-based institute’s education policy center, said that the condition of school funding is not as dire as some claim. In an e-mail message, she said, “Even if Referenda C and D pass, school districts will continue to demand more money.”
Amazing solution to Mystery #3: Unknown Authorization
Try your decoder ring on this cryptic missive to solve Mystery #3, Case of the Unknown Authorization:
Major Division Highlights and Anticipated Challenges [for the Department of Educational Services]:
- Expand programming and placement options for elementary age students with severe Emotional Behavioral Disability (EBD) and significant mental health needs. Budget & District Profile, page 79
Create two new classrooms at Marquette Elementary for students with EBD;
Put two teachers, two aids, and a school psychologist in the two classrooms;
Spend a minimum of $350,000 on the classrooms.
A slick sleuth might ponder the source $350,000+ in the MMSD's rare resources for a new program. Superintendent Rainwater has the answer: “The new program at Marquette was accomplished through a reallocation of funds within special education.”
And we guileless gumshoes believed that the MMSD had no money for new programs! At least, that’s what Superintendent Rainwater said in a Capital Times story which said:
In the early years of state controls, spending curbs could be managed by cutting overhead and administrative expenses, but they now are impacting directly on education. For example, the number of supplemental teachers deployed to help poor children has dropped from 54 to 24 people, he said. The controls also prevent any new programs from being developed. (emphasis added)
Now add insult to injury! On the official third Friday count of students, the $350,000 program had NO STUDENTS. That’s right! NO STUDENTS!
Which reinforces what this intrepid investigator suspected all along! The classrooms were hastily created by the MMSD administration without adequate consultation with district staff and the board of education. The planning should have been done and the students selected last winter and spring or done now for the program to begin in the second semester.
Put that $350,000 in your pipe and watch it go up in smoke, Sherlock.
Public's Right To Know: Madison School District Land Purchases
Two weeks ago, I emailed this Open Records request to Madison School District Attorney Clarence Sherrod:
Good Afternoon, Clarence:
I hope this note finds you well.
I am writing to make an open records request under sec. 19.35 of the Wisconsin Statutes. I would like copies of any agreements signed this year by the Madison Metropolitan School District or its representatives to purchase land for a school site. I believe the issue of purchasing land for a school site was discussed by the Madison Board of Education on 10/10/2005.
I believe that these sort of land/facilities discussions should be public knowledge, particularly in light of the East / West task force activity.
Thank you very much and best wishes.
I received a response today from Bob Nadler, the District's Custodian of Records. Essentially, this response means that the public has no right to know about the District's purchase of land for a new school site until after the Board agrees to purchase. Read Bob's letter here. I will post the document he referenced upon receipt.
So far, undaunted detectives, Mysteries #1 and #2 remain largely unsolved, and I’ll shortly update the faithful followers on those.
In the meantime, train your magnifying glasses on Mystery #3, The Case of the Unknown Authorization.
The Unknown Authorization took place in the MMSD budget approved by the Board of Education. It created two new classrooms at Marquette Elementary for a cost of at least $350,000.
Find the authorization and the funds in the MMSD budget documents . . . if you can.
No one appreciates Mary Gulbrandsen's contributions to the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) more than her boss, superintendent Art Rainwater. When we included Gulbrandsen in Madison Magazine's 2004 People You Should Know list, Rainwater was the first to let us know we'd made an inspired choice. As MMSD chief of staff for the last two years, Gulbrandsen's influence on all aspects of Madison's K-12 schools is undeniable. From long-range planning to finance and operations to performance and achievement, district administration minutes suggest Gulbrandsen has spent the last two years in meetings. But seeing her in action on some of the most difficult issues, like the school environment for kids and families of color, proves what a skilled administrator she's become. Add on top of all that her striking warmth and good sense, and Gulbrandsen seems a perfect fit for her behind-the-scenes position of power.
The Budget: Same Service = Cost to Continue = Baseline
Jim Zellmer, and others have taken the district to task for having a "same service" budget - alledging that nothing changes as a consequence.
But let's clarify the use of some terms. The district uses the term "same service" to estimate the next year's costs - the city and county do the same thing, but use the term "cost to continue." This is not the entire process, but merely the starting place. The district and Board then make changes - both to comply with the state revenue caps and to improve our programs. We can figure what the changes will cost (or amount saved) by the difference from the same service budget.
Change and how to achieve it in a large system such as the school district is a major concern. Some changes have significant budgetary impacts, e.g. equipping schools with adequate computers (and the infrastructure to support this), reducing class sizes in the primary grades.
However, the one of the most far-reaching changes needed is to change what is occurring in the classroom. This change is brought about through intensive staff development - and is aided by smaller class sizes, but once the district budget includes funding for staff development and for smaller classes the critical factor is not the budget for these but how the funds are used.
Lookout Sandy Cullen, Matt Pommer, Jason Shepard, and Mitch Henck! Professor Jack Mitchell's Journalism 335 class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is teaching the next generation of media. For several weeks these students learn about the Madison School Board and the City Council. I asked Professor Mitchell if I could share the stories with all of you. Enjoy.
This message was posted on the Communities United list serve by Yolanda Woodard, attorney for Mr. Mom's Transportation Service.
Dear Concerned Community & Business Leaders:
Recently the local newspapers and electronic media have reported on the Mr. Mom's Transportation Service. This coverage has been in the most unfavorable light possible. While some missteps have been made with the current operation of the business, the sensational, negative media coverage far exceeds the true nature of the situation.
Corrective actions have already begun, long before it became fashionable for the local media to "bash" Mr, Mom's.
Accordingly, we respectfully request that those of good conscience support Jeff and Cathy Smith and their company Mr. Mom's. We are asking the community to support this company's long standing presence in our community and its efforts to address the public concerns by attending a Press Conference to be held on Wednesday, October 21st at 10 am at the Genesis Economic Development Center, 313 W. Beltline Hwy. (Next to Nedrebo's).
UNITED WE STAND!
Yolanda S. Woodard
Attorney for Cathy and Jeff Smith
608-277-1950
Eyewitness Report: School Board Decisions on Bus Contracts
A recent editorial in the Wisconsin State Journal claims that the Madison school board rejected Superintendent Art Rainwater's "painstaking" analysis of known problems with local bus companies when it granted long-term contracts to transport our students to locally owned companies. According to the editorial, the administration informed the Board about safety and reliability problems with some of the companies, but---safety and reliability be damned--- the Board rushed ahead. The administration, having taken its stand, then meekly agreed to commit the districts to contracts likely to fail our students and their families.
Time for a fact check. I was there for the administration’s presentation, for the votes on the contracts and for recent Board discussions about the problems that have developed with one of the local companies, Mr. Mom's.
This is my eyewitness report.
The Madison Board of Education rarely rejects the recommendations of Superintendent Rainwater. I recall only two times that we have explicitly rejected his views. One was the vote to authorize Nuestro Mundo Community School as a charter school. The other was when we gave the go-ahead for a new Wexford Ridge Community Center on the campus of Memorial High School.
Here’s how things happen when the superintendent opposes the Board’s proposed action.
Following the usual battle cry (“I would be remiss in my duties if I did not tell you….), the superintendent forcefully states his views. The storm of opposition that follows is at least a Category 5. We endure a tsunami of PowerPoint presentations and waves of legal and educational objections. Memos recommending other decisions fly our way. Our lawyers argue with their lawyers. Supporters of the proposed decision rally at meeting after meeting, trying not to be swept aside by the gale and watching the rough weather.
In contrast, here is what happened in the months preceding the Board’s decision to include two local bus companies---Badger Bus and Mr. Mom’s—in the group of companies that would receive five-year contracts to transport our students.
In December of 2004, our Business Services department under Assistant Superintendent Roger Price, completed a process that “pre-qualified” companies to bid on these contracts. In that process companies provided information that included their failure rate in a recent vehicle inspection by the State Patrol. On the low end, the Riteway Company reported a failure rate of .5%. On the high end, Mr. Mom’s reported a failure rate of 75%. The administration did not provide this information or any other information to the Board of Education that indicated concern about safety or reliability of any company.
Months later, the Board learned that two local companies had not qualified to bid. Both were locally-owned companies. The companies objected to this exclusion. So did some of the local media.
The Board questioned the exclusion of these companies. The administration defended its qualification process. They did not, however, tell us that either company failed our safety or reliability standards. They told us that the companies had not completed certain parts of the paperwork.
Believing that the national companies, which are much larger companies, had qualified to bid because of their larger, more efficient staffs, I concluded that all things were equal in terms of safety and reliability factors. I therefore voted with the majority to require the administration to negotiate contracts with the local companies as well as the national companies.
This month, The Capital Times reported that Mr. Mom’s company had a history of vehicle inspection failures going back to 2002. It also reported on a very recent brake failure on a field trip and on problems such as the drivers leaving a child at the wrong location and leaving a child on the bus by mistake. Accordingly, at our meeting on October 10, I asked the administration what they had known about vehicle inspection problems as the result of the “pre-qualification” process.
The answer from the administration was that they didn’t know. They’d need to investigate. They’d get back to me the next day. Not a word about their “painstaking” analysis or any long-term concerns about problems with Mr. Mom’s services.
In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery because he draws the correct inferences from something that did not happen. When the hounds should have been howling, they weren’t.
As an eyewitness to the events surrounding the school board’s decisions on transportation contracts, I notice what did not happen in this situation. If the administration knew that one of the companies posed serious risks to our children’s safety and might not be able to provide reliable transportation, where was the storm of opposition? Where were the howls of protest? Why would they tell me that they had “to investigate” in order to know what was known when the Board went forward with the Mr. Mom’s contract?
Minority Overrepresentation in Special Ed. Targeted
From Education Week, October 12, 2005
By Christina A. Samuels
A new provision of federal law taking effect this school year allows, and in some cases requires, school districts to focus some of their federal special education money on reducing the enrollment of minority students in such programs.
The provision, contained in the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, requires some districts to spend as much as 15 percent of that federal aid on what are called “early intervening” services, which are meant to bolster the achievement of students before they are officially referred for special education.
Educators generally support the provision but some special education advocates worry that the proposed regulations surrounding the provision may not be clear, or could divert federal money from the students who are most in need of services.
When Congress previously reauthorized the IDEA, in 1997, it added a provision that required districts to monitor the racial and ethnic breakdown of students who receive special education services. Advocates have long argued that special education has become a holding place for minority students.
Early Services
A provision in the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act says that districts may use up to 15 percent of their federal special education funding for "early-intervening services," such as literary instruction, before they place students in special education.
K-3 pupils: Although such services may be provided to any student, the law encourages districts to focus on pupils in grades K-3 who need additional academic and behavioral support to succeed.
Minority Students: Districts that have determined that they have a disproportionate share of minority students in special education must use the entire 15 percent for such early-intervening services. The law encourages districts to target such services toward children in minority groups that are overrepresented in special education.
In the 2004 reauthorization, lawmakers added the new provision to take the monitoring process a step further. Districts with an overrepresentation of minority group members in special education are now required to set aside 15 percent of their federal aid for students, particularly those in grades K-3, who need “additional academic and behavioral support to succeed in a general education environment,” according to the law.
Districts that do not have minority students overrepresented in special education can still use up to 15 percent of their federal special education money for early-intervening services, but they are not required to do so.
States are given the discretion under the revised IDEA to determine what constitutes overrepresentation for the purposes of the provision. Many do so by comparing the proportion of minority students in special education categories with the proportion of minority students in the overall school population. Other states compare how frequently minority students are assigned to certain special education categories, compared with how often white students are assigned to those categories.
Nationally, black students are overrepresented in certain special education categories compared with the student population as a whole, according to a 2003 report to Congress by the U.S. Department of Education’s office of special education programs.
About 17.4 percent of black students are considered mentally retarded, compared with 10.3 percent of all students. Also, about 11.3 percent of black students are considered emotionally disturbed, compared to 8.1 percent overall.
Programs Under Way
By reaching out to members of minority groups earlier, supporters of the new provision say, the numbers of minority students in special education should drop, because they would be receiving extra academic help sooner.
“This is an item that Virginia has supported from the get-go,” said H. Douglas Cox, the state’s assistant superintendent for special education and student services. Mr. Cox is also the president of the Alexandria, Va.-based National Association of State Directors of Special Education. Thirty of his state’s 133 school districts are required to use 15 percent of their federal special education funds for early-intervening services, he said.
W. Mabrey Whetstone, Alabama’s director of special education services, said his state has worked aggressively for the past five years to reduce its overrepresentation of black male students classified as mentally retarded or emotionally disturbed. Nine of the state’s 66 districts will be required this year to spend 15 percent of their federal aid on early-intervening services.
Several programs are already under way that would qualify as early-intervening services, Mr. Whetstone said. They include a teacher-training program that helps educators adapt their lesson plans for particular student needs and early reading and math initiatives.
Experts say that children who receive inadequate instruction, especially in basic subjects like reading, are more at risk for being wrongly identified later as having mental retardation or learning disabilities.
“If you’re overidentifying [students for special education], there ought to be something you’re doing” to address the issue, Mr. Whetstone said. The funding helps draw attention to the problem, he said.
The problem with the set-aside is that the federal government is not providing its fair share of total special education funding, said Deborah A. Ziegler, the assistant executive director for public policy for the Council for Exceptional Children. The Arlington-based council is the nation’s largest special education advocacy group.
“We support the idea of early intervention,” Ms. Ziegler said. However, her group believes that special education services are already underfunded by the federal government.
“We’re struggling to provide the services we need to under IDEA,” she added. “Do we rob Peter to pay Paul? We need more money in both pots.”
Unclear Rules?
Mr. Cox of the state directors’ group said he can understand the perspective of the CEC.
“But if we can work on some of the early-literacy issues, maybe you wouldn’t have to refer children to special ed,” he said, giving an example of an intervention that the set-aside could support.
DanielJ.Losen, a legal and policy-research associate with the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, said he believes the U.S. Department of Education has not provided enough guidance on the IDEA’s 15 percent provision.
He said he was concerned about how the money would be spent by districts which find they have an overrepresentation of minority students in special education classes.
The money is intended primarily for students who have no special education classification. But, once a district finds that it has enough overrepresentation to trigger the automatic 15 percent set-aside, he believes that at least some of the money should be spent on programs for the children who are already in special education, since the district has already noted a problem.
“How are you going to help address the issue, if the kids who triggered [the 15 percent set-aside] get none of that money?” Mr. Losen said.
The regulations should say that the law will not prevent districts from spending the set-aside money on students who happen to already be in special education, he believes.
Ronald Felton, a former head of special education for the Miami-Dade County, Fla., district, and an educator who has been involved in special education for 30 years, said that the focus on overrepresentation of minorities is positive.
However, there needs to be more research on the issue, he believes. For instance, he said, “we’re still arguing on how to measure disproportionality.” And, if a district has overrepresentation problem, it might not need to divert a full 15 percent of its federal special education funding to the problem, he said, but the law still requires it.
“The 15 percent [option] is a good thing,” said Mr. Felton, who retired from the 370,000-student district in July. “The mandate is a problem.”
A gift of nearly $3 million is being used to boost teacher training at the UW-Madison in a special, reading program.
But that program, Reading Recovery, has critics, who say it's not worth the necessary investment.
Training at a new UW-Madison Reading Recovery Center will involve videotaping teachers, as they instruct young children, in a one-on-one process between student and teacher that costs more than group programs.
Student progress with Reading Recovery in the Madison School District and across the country has been questioned.
The center's observation room will allow teachers from across Wisconsin and from other states to observe techniques as experienced teachers will instruct children behind one-way glass.
"It's an investment, but I think it's an investment that pays off in the long term," said Center director Catherine Lilly. "Many children in Reading Recovery avoid being placed in special education."
But UW-Madison Psychology professor Mark Seidenberg is skeptical. " The evidence that it works better than programs that can be done in small groups is lacking."
Seidenberg believes the new center will ciphon dollars from more proven, remedial reading approaches. "This program at the UW is going to train more Reading Recovery teachers. That means there will be more children that will be getting Reading Recovery," said Seidenberg.
"Where's the money coming from to pay for that? Answer: Other programs."
But Lilly argued one-on-one instruction does have advantages over group settings, and claimed student outcomes in Reading Recovery are improving.
In many states, Reading Recovery is excluded from getting federal funds earmarked for remedial reading programs, because of questions about Reading Recovery's effectiveness.
Reading Recovery involves first grade children with significant problems in reading and writing.
UW-Madison officials say Reading Recovery is used in approximately 300 Wisconsin schools.
FITCHBURG - A demolition crew on Monday began tearing down a fire-ruined apartment building at 2001 Post Road in the Ridgewood Country Club Apartments complex.
Though the work was the first visible activity in the 52-acre, 832 apartment subdivision since Madison developers E.J. Plesko & Associates bought the troubled property this summer, a spokesman said taking down the structure "is not a precursor to other actions" being planned there.
By Cliff Miller
Correspondent for The Capital Times
October 18, 2005
Brandon Scholz said the demolition was "a singular event" to remove a building that was made uninhabitable by fire in February. Plesko expects consultants to finish "an in-depth market analysis" of the complex within 60 days.
Plesko told officials at a recent Fitchburg City Council meeting that he intends to present preliminary concepts to the city by the end of March next year, outlining what he proposes to do with the rest of the complex.
The developers allowed police and firefighters to conduct training exercises in the building while reusable materials such as doors and windows were being removed for salvage.
Removing the building was a final step required to settle an insurance claim by previous owners of the complex, Plesko said in a press release.
Fires and vandalism, coupled with neglect by the previous owners and a host of building and fire code violation complaints by the city, were followed by a mortgage foreclosure action by lenders. Plesko bought the complex for $29 million in August to settle the foreclosure case. Plesko took over for Gary Gorman & Associates of Madison, which had proposed to redevelop the property before pulling out in August.
Plesko has given few hints of his vision for the future of the apartment complex, which is home to a large population of Hispanic immigrants and other minorities.
The Madison Board of Education Finance and Operations Committee will discuss student fees during their meeting tonight. Committee Chair Johnny Winston, Jr. kindly asked Barbara Lehman to forward two documents:
A Few Notes on the Superintendent's Evaluation & Curriculum
Severalwritershavementioned the positive news that the Madison Board of Education has reviewed Superintendent Art Rainwater for the first time since 2002. I agree that it is a step in the right direction.
In my view, the first responsibility of the Board and Administration, including the Superintendent is curriculum: Is the Madison School District using the most effective methods to prepare our children for the future?
There seems to be some question about this:
Language: The District has strongly embraced whole language (Troy Dassler notes in the comments that he has been trained in balanced literacy). I would certainly be interested in more comments on this (and other) point(s). [Ed Blume mentions that ""Balanced literacy" became the popular new term for whole language when whole language crumbled theoretically and scientifically."] UW Professor Mark Seidenberg provides background on whole language and raises many useful questions about it. Related: The District has invested heavily in Reading Recovery. Ed Blume summarized 8 years of District reading scores and notes that Madison 3rd graders rank below state wide average for children children in the advanced and proficient categories. (Madison spends about 30% more than the state average per student)
Math: The District embraces Connected Math. UW Math Professor Dick Askey has raised a number of questions about this curriculum, not the least of which is whether our textbooks include all of the corrections. A quick look at the size of the Connected Math textbooks demonstrates that reading skills are critical to student achievement.
"Same Service Budget Approach": I think the District's annual same service approach reflects a general stagnation.
Many organizations live on the fumes of their past. Is this the case with the Madison School District?
Superintendent Rainwater visited with the Capital Times on the day the Board released the report on the his evaluation. Matt Pommer briefly summarized the discussion and closes by mentioning that state budget controls prevent new programs from being developed. This statement reflects the "same service mantra". The District could certainly change expensive programs like Reading Recovery and invest in a different approach. The District could also strongly adopt virtual learning tools. Weyauwega-Fremont School Board President Steve Loehrke has spoken and written extensively on these questions. The District could also change the way in which it delivers information (there's a little movement on this).
I've not seen much, if any discussion of curriculum issues at the Board level, or the Performance and Achievement subcommittee, which has not met since 1/31/2005. I seem to remember (but can't find the quote) that Board President Carol Carstensen said at a District event, that "we leave the curriculum up to the staff". I could not disagree more with this approach.
I think it's time for a serious Board curriculum discussion. Madison is fortunate to have some fabulous resources just down the street at a world class University. Let's work with them, before they move on.
For the first time since 2002, the Madison School Board has produced a performance evaluation of Superintendent Art Rainwater. It’s a small step in the right direction. However, it’s important to understand how the evaluation fails to meet the requirements of the district’s employment contract with the superintendent.
The contract requires the Board to set specific, measurable goals for the superintendent by the first day of each school year. That did not happen.
It requires the Board to determine in advance what evidence and data will be used to measure his progress toward the goals. That did not happen.
It requires a confidential survey of administrators about his performance. That did not happen.
Having skipped those steps, the Board offers the community its own subjective views in a few general categories. More information will not be forthcoming because all discussions occurred in executive sessions.
For the 2005-06 school year, the Board proposes to set specific performance goals by November 1. This discussion does not yet appear on any meeting agenda. Whether we can quickly state our vision for the district and translate it into specific, measurable performance goals for the superintendent remains to be seen. I hope so. If we don’t hold our top employee accountable to clear goals, we will fail our students and the community.
Many good things are happening in the Madison Metropolitan School District! This viewpoint and the things we see conflict with the stated concern by some families as they tell us that they will be leaving the district rather than attend West high school. The one reason common to families is that they want their child to have a chance to take AP courses (limited numbers offered at West, in contrast to the other MMSD high schools) for the academic challenge offered to prepare their child for application to competitive colleges. (This viewpoint seems to be paired with a concern that the Small Learning Community approach at West may result in decreased opportunities for other challenging course work). It seems so sad that these families are choosing to leave the district. The contributions that children and parents have made to the district will be greatly missed.
AP offerings seem to be the norm across the nation, yet at least one West staff member opposes these offerings. Can we have an open discussion about issues of concern??? What are the pros and cons of increased AP offerings? Is it important to attempt to retain families currently attending our schools? What do you think? If you have a special interest in this issue, you may want to check below for additional information. . . .
Today was a good day at our school. Our son participated in a “Reader’s theater” in which the 6th graders did a wonderful job of entertaining a room full of supportive parents. Our daughter participated in one of the 3 bands (sponsored by the school), to which she belongs. A great principal welcomed parents and commented on their children, whom she quickly came to know well, shortly after the start of a new school year. My email message to a teacher thanking him for completing some extra paperwork for our son resulted in him taking additional time to send another message of support and compliment. In a discussion about people who have earned our respect, our son immediately identified a teacher. There are so many good things happening that we appreciate at MMSD!
However, in conversations with families, we hear information that indicates that several are concerned that the high school within their boundary area will not meet the needs of their kids and they will therefore be placing their children in school in another district or sending their child to Edgewood or considering Madison Country Day school (OR have already moved from the district). Can it be the same district?? Indeed, these concerns have been shared about West high school. Parents reported a variety of reasons for leaving. There was, however, one common reason among ALL of the families; that being the limited number of AP courses offered at West high.
My original concern about students leaving the district led to a search for information on AP as a central factor impacting their decisions. I fully expected to find that their perception was in error or that there was surely something simple that could be done to add AP courses to meet the needs of more children or that there was clearly something better available to better meet that stated need for challenge and a strong college resume.
As an attempt to gather the complete story about the AP/West issue, I was in contact with the following by email or phone:
and 2 members of the Board of Education. Additional information was obtained from written reports of the work by Valencia Douglas and Donna Ford, both supportive of AP courses offered for minority students.
A variety of comments were received:
“I’m not opposed to AP courses”,
“I think we should increase the number”,
“We want the schools to meet the needs of all students”,
“Nearly all schools offer a significant number of AP courses. DPI is working to help rural and poor schools provide these courses so that their students aren’t at a disadvantage when applying for college”.
“I am not on board with adding AP classes. I would be very depressed if that were to happen”.
“I don’t understand why the other MMSD high schools have so many AP offerings while West does not”.
“That can’t be right. West used to have such a good reputation”.
“Teachers at West do not want to teach these courses, as they find them boring”.
“Your kids will surely want to take AP classes”.
“Most applicants to college do have AP courses and we expect to see them on their transcripts, although we don’t penalize West students, as we know that few AP courses are offered there”.
There are many differing and contradictory viewpoints, within this group of district staff, posing a challenge in trying to determine the most valid viewpoint. Several asked me not to reveal their name out of concern for conflict with others. I heard the word “arrogant” twice as staff described others.
Jan Davidson, author of “Genius Denied” responded to my question (at her presentation regarding gifted education) “What would you say to a school official who opposes AP courses?” I had hoped for some words of wisdom. In fact, she was speechless, as she couldn’t understand why this would be the case. Following the presentation she said that she had heard such good things about Madison that she expected something much different with regard to education here.
To gain a broader perspective, I checked for additional information on AP offerings outside the district. I sent messages to 20 families who live elsewhere in the state or nation, asking them to identify the AP course offerings at their schools. I persisted until those same households responded. ALL 20 noted that their child’s school offered AP classes in
literature/writing,
history,
calculus,
at least one foreign language,
several science options,
as well as others, with several offering 30 such courses.
In a class that I teach on the UW campus, I asked students to tell me about their AP course background. Out of 38 in attendance, 37 had four or more AP classes. The one student who did not was over the age of 40 and didn’t have an opportunity for those courses when she attended high school.
It seems that AP courses appeal to a wide range of students, including many who plan on post-secondary education. Certainly AP courses are not a panacea for all who are concerned about challenging work. West does have some challenging and very well respected courses (although it was a bit difficult to locate that information). Some families who have very bright children are looking for courses even more challenging than the AP classes. In any case, we weren’t asking about “watered down” AP courses, but were hoping for consideration of courses to meet the need for challenges at the high school level. It is hoped that we could address the concern of families who may choose not to attend West for that reason and have an open discussion about any misunderstanding and work toward any needed changes as a team. Many of us believe that all students and families are valuable to the district and that we should actively work to meet all needs and consider all input. When a family who supports and contributes to a school chooses to leave, that seems so sad. I was hoping that representatives of the district may feel the same way. As for me, I was told “West is not in competition for your children”. Ouch!! I suspect that many in the district do not agree with the spirit of that statement.
There’s a great deal more information out there about AP courses and I’ve developed a special interest in that area. My primary concern though, is for families who may leave the district. I know that there are many in the district who DO care about these and all families. Let’s have a discussion about both sides of the AP issue as well as other issues that may result in families leaving the district.
Thanks to both Johnny & Ruth for posting the news of the superintendent's evaluation.
Since neither left their posts open for comments, I'll offer a comment and encourage others to use this post for additional comments.
I'm particularly pleased that the board said that it "would like the Superintendent to develop targets and measures for each priority and to provide an annual report on our performance in each area."
I've argued before (Was the board actually listening!) that the priorities have no power without measurable, time-specific goals. Now maybe they will.
Madison Board of Education President Carol Carstensen released this Report on Evaluation of the Superintendent earlier today. (PDF), or click below to read the release.
News Statement from the Madison Board of Education October 14, 2005
Report on Evaluation of the Superintendent
Hiring, supervising and evaluating the Superintendent are major responsibilities for the Board of Education. It is important to remember that this is a collective task for the Board and represents the combined views of seven very different individuals.
The Board of Education met three times (August 22, September 26 and October 11) to discuss our evaluation of Art Rainwater’s performance as Superintendent. We evaluated him in the areas of Leadership, District Climate and Morale, and Relations with the Board of Education. (See below for the full list of areas we evaluated). We ranked the Superintendent using the scale: Exemplary, Strong, Competent, Improvement Needed, and Unsatisfactory. We identified areas of strength and made note of specific areas for improvement.
The discussions were frank, open and extensive. As Board president, I have met with Superintendent Rainwater to give him the detailed evaluation report and answer any questions he had. I am making available to the public this summary of the results of the Board’s discussion.
In all areas the Board found the Superintendent’s performance either “exemplary” or “strong.” We felt that his greatest strengths were in representing the district in the community, maintaining productive relationships with employee unions and in carrying out the directives of the Board. The Board feels that the Superintendent is a strong, respected leader. We were in unanimous agreement that the Superintendent has been effective in all three areas of Board relations. The progress that the district has made in closing the achievement gap in third grade reading scores and in significantly improving the graduation rates for all students is a testament to the way he has worked with staff to improve our outcomes in these areas.
While we feel that the district is definitely moving in the right direction in narrowing the achievement gap, we, like many in the community, are distressed about the slow progress in the area of math. We would like to see a new plan for this area complete with ways to measure our progress. We felt that, as a Board, we had not paid enough attention to some of the priorities outlined in the Strategic Plan – we would like the Superintendent to develop targets and measures for each priority and to provide an annual report on our performance in each area. We also took note of the progress the district has made in hiring a diverse workforce, but we would like to see a plan for “growing our own administrators” – administrators who are culturally competent and can work effectively with our diverse families and communities.
The Board recognizes the personal investment Art Rainwater has made in maintaining this district as one of the best in the country. We are appreciative of the care he has given to our students and staff, and the special concern he has shown for our most vulnerable students. We feel the district and the community are fortunate in having such an outstanding Superintendent.
For further comments, contact:
Carol Carstensen, Board President, 255-5931.
(evaluation p 2)
Evaluation of the Superintendent
Leadership
Aligning the work of the district with the strategic priorities in the Strategic Plan
Organizing the district to make progress on the Board’s 3 goals (reading, math & attendance).
Representing the district in the community
Collaboration/cooperation with other organizations (city, county, school districts, community groups, etc.)
District Climate/Morale
Relations with unions
Hiring and supervision of senior administrative staff
Board of Education
Responding to Board member requests
Carrying out Board directives
Providing advice, information and recommendations to the Board
News Statement from the Madison Board of Education
Report on Evaluation of the Superintendent
Hiring, supervising and evaluating the Superintendent are major responsibilities for the Board of Education. It is important to remember that this is a collective task for the Board and represents the combined views of seven very different individuals.
The Board of Education met three times (August 22, September 26 and October 11) to discuss our evaluation of Art Rainwater’s performance as Superintendent. We evaluated him in the areas of Leadership, District Climate and Morale, and Relations with the Board of Education. (See below for the full list of areas we evaluated). We ranked the Superintendent using the scale: Exemplary, Strong, Competent, Improvement Needed, and Unsatisfactory. We identified areas of strength and made note of specific areas for improvement.
The discussions were frank, open and extensive. As Board president, I have met with Superintendent Rainwater to give him the detailed evaluation report and answer any questions he had. I am making available to the public this summary of the results of the Board’s discussion.
In all areas the Board found the Superintendent’s performance either “exemplary” or “strong.” We felt that his greatest strengths were in representing the district in the community, maintaining productive relationships with employee unions and in carrying out the directives of the Board. The Board feels that the Superintendent is a strong, respected leader. We were in unanimous agreement that the Superintendent has been effective in all three areas of Board relations. The progress that the district has made in closing the achievement gap in third grade reading scores and in significantly improving the graduation rates for all students is a testament to the way he has worked with staff to improve our outcomes in these areas.
While we feel that the district is definitely moving in the right direction in narrowing the achievement gap, we, like many in the community, are distressed about the slow progress in the area of math. We would like to see a new plan for this area complete with ways to measure our progress. We felt that, as a Board, we had not paid enough attention to some of the priorities outlined in the Strategic Plan – we would like the Superintendent to develop targets and measures for each priority and to provide an annual report on our performance in each area. We also took note of the progress the district has made in hiring a diverse workforce, but we would like to see a plan for “growing our own administrators” – administrators who are culturally competent and can work effectively with our diverse families and communities.
The Board recognizes the personal investment Art Rainwater has made in maintaining this district as one of the best in the country. We are appreciative of the care he has given to our students and staff, and the special concern he has shown for our most vulnerable students. We feel the district and the community are fortunate in having such an outstanding Superintendent.
It is no longer a secret that Mr. Mom’s Transportation Services currently faces significant challenges. Probably the biggest challenge for this small, local, minority owned business came from the school board last spring (2004). Mr. Mom’s and Badger Bus services were denied district transportation contracts. Our community was angered by this. In 2004, the Board received dozens of e-mails criticizing our decisions regarding contracts with local businesses. Here are some examples of the e-mails the school board members received:
Harold Gollman wrote:
I don't expect that 1 school board member who supports increases in
busing costs and closing out local and reliable businesses for out of
state one's should expect to be reelected ever. that's my guess. I
wouldn't be surprised if you were all out on your butts a lot quicker
than that. I would hope the school would hire teachers not out of state businesses. say bye bye.
William Graf wrote:
I'am concerned about Dunham School Services and First Student Inc. being awarded bus routes for the following reasons:
Badger has an unblemished record of loyal service to the city dating back to 1929.
- Badger was not allowed to use the MMSD as a reference in RFP #3037.
- Badger's and Mr. Mom's bid prices were significantly lower than the
recommended bidders and would save the district no less than $600,000 over the 3-year contract period.
- Why wouldn't the administration want to save money in light of the budget deficit estimated to be in the millions?
- Local ownership means more jobs and money stay in Madison.
- Mr. Mom's is minority owned and both Mr. Mom's and Badger recruit and hire minority applicants.
- Local owned companies serve as buffers and protect the interests of the district over the long term from price control if only the large national companies control the market.
- Badger has in the past come to the district's aid when other vendors were not performing up to expectation I would hope you will consider these points and reward Badger Bus and Mr. Mom's with the bus contract. WE are in very tight fiscial times and this makes sense to me. Thanks for your time.
Tracey Hensen:
It is disturbing to me to hear the news that the bus contract for the
Next three years may go to a company that is not locally owned! Badger Bus Company and Mr. Mom's has been providing quality service for many years. I also understand that the bids from Badger Bus and Mr. Mom's are less than the contracts being recommended. $600,000 is a lot of money when budgets are so tight! Please explain this decision to me and the community!! Not only is Madison trying to ruin local business by smoking bans, now we're trying to take our own business out of the state and take away jobs from local citizens! Please re-consider this direction for the good of our
community.
There are a lot more. The Board intervened and recommended that the Administration award contracts to local vendors, including Mr. Mom’s. I fought and voted for the Mr. Mom's contract last spring. Jeff and Cathy Smith are the people who own Mr. Mom's Transportation Services. Jeff is an African American man who is a long time Madison resident with very strong ties to this community. Cathy is a Latina woman who is President of the Latino Chamber of Commerce. So what happened that has resulted in their reduced district contract? It is obvious that their small business grew faster than their ability to keep pace with the increased service demand. This is not an excuse but a fact.
The community wanted Mr. Mom’s last year and now that they face challenges, the community is calling for their head on a platter and asking for an immediate contract termination. The community, fueled by incomplete information reported in the media, has rushed to judgment on what should be the fate of Mr. Mom’s district contract. Student safety is paramount and it cannot be judged by newspaper accounts and public sentiments. As an elected representative to the Board, I stand firm in my responsibility and accountability to see that our district operates in a legal and ethical manner in all of its business.
The school district’s attorney, Mr. Sherrod, is providing sound legal counsel to direct due process for review of Mr. Mom’s contract and all business contracts with the district. I would hate to have the district in litigation with Mr. Mom’s (or any other business) and lose because it didn’t abide by its contractual obligations. I implore the community to support the district’s fair and respectful treatment and review of its contract with Mr. Mom’s Transportation Services.
All of our businesses - minority owned or not – must be treated equitably.
The district is investigating how long the company was without insurance and also is looking into reports that some bus drivers did not have valid driver's licenses, Rainwater said.
Also last month, the brakes failed on a bus returning students to Spring Harbor Middle School after a field trip, Rainwater said. No students were injured, and the bus did not crash.
Attorney Clarence Sherrod said the district is in the process of preparing a notice of default, which could lead to termination of Mr. Mom's two contracts with the district.
Under the terms of its contracts, Mr. Mom's will have 20 days to respond to the default notice.
Price provided copies of the safety audits done on the five bus firms that serve the Madison district in response to questions raised Monday by School Board member Ruth Robarts.
The reports showed that other bus firms last year had far smaller percentages of buses needing repairs in inspections by the State Patrol. Two of 15 Badger buses needed work; one of 20 Rite-Way vehicles needed repairs; eight of 23 Durham buses failed; and five of 21 First Student buses inspected needed work.
Update: Mr. Mom's Bus Company Contract with the Madison School District
As reported in The Capital Times, I recently questioned Superintendent Art Rainwater about the process that the district used to determine that Mr. Mom's bus company was qualified to bid for contracts to transport our students in the years from 2005-06 through 2010-11. The process is known as the "pre-qualification evaluation".
In a memo today, Assistant Superintendent for Business Services Roger Price told the Board of Education that the pre-qualification evaluation for companies who wanted to bid on these six year transportation contracts was conducted in December of 2004. The process resulted in qualifying five companies to bid for the contracts. Mr. Price noted that "all vendors had some vehicles fail inspection" on the most recent inspections by the State Patrol.
His materials show very different failure rates for the companies.
Last night's Madison Board of Education meeting provided an illuminating look at two rather different perspectives on governance. The Board voted 4 (Carstensen, Keys, Lopez and Winston) - 3 (Kobza, Robarts, Vang) to support the Administration's approach to the growing problems with Mr. Mom's Transport Service (I believe there were two votes on this question - the minutes are not available as of this writing).
Many points were discussed, including the District's pre-contract vetting of Mr. Mom's and whether, given recent experience, the Administration should be allowed to subcontract with Badger Bus via Mr. Mom's (Badger Bus is replacing Mr. Mom's service on many routes). The District recently signed a five year agreement with Mr. Mom's Transport Service.
The motion passed 4-3 to allow the Administration to Subcontract Badger Bus service via Mr. Mom's (again, I think there was a 2nd vote on this). Watch the debate here
For what it's worth, I'm actually in favor of long term (5 year) contracts. They, hopefully allow vendors to optimize and perhaps manage costs more effectively. The subcontract to Badger Bus via Mr. Mom's, given the issues, seems unusual.
UPDATE: The 4-3 vote was on a Kobza motion, seconded by Robarts to contract directly with Badger Bus, rather than using a subcontract via Mr. Mom's. After this motion was defeated 4-3 (Kobza, Robarts, Vang), as noted above, the Board voted 5 - 2 (Kobza joined Carstensen, Keys, Lopez and Winston) to support the Administration's proposed subcontract with Badger Bus via Mr. Moms.
I previously posted a warning to take nothing from the MMSD at face value.
Here's another reason.
The MMSD claims that capacity at Lapham Elementary stands below 67%. However, the MMSD reports Lapham's maximum capacity at 304 students, and this year's attendance at 252 students, giving Lapham a current enrollment of 82.9% of capacity.
It's easy to believe that the MMSD administration has a hidden agenda to close an east side school when the administration plays with the truth.
Click here for a chart of enrollment and capacity.
Elementary schools considered most at risk are Emerson, Lapham and Lowell - which are at or below 67 percent of their capacity for students - as well as Lindbergh, Cohen said.
"We're rallying around Lindbergh," he said, adding that the school serves "probably the most fragile" population of low-income and minority families, including many from Kennedy Heights just across the street from the school.
Mary Gulbrandsen, director of student services and chief of staff to Superintendent Art Rainwater, said the Madison School District has no hidden agenda to close one or more East Side schools, as some parents fear.
Madison's Smart Growth (land use) plan was rolled out this summer, and it put a shiver into Burke residents.
"It showed Madison stretching north to Wisconsin 19, which is the southern border of DeForest," Miller said. "When Burke officials came to us they said the residents of the town go to the DeForest schools so they wanted to be part of DeForest."
No member of the current Madison School Board has been more willing to throw himself into the thick of a debate - even if that meant going it alone on principle - than Bill Keys.
Thanks to Lawrie Kobza for her post "Superintendent's Evaluation a Step in the Right Direction."
She stresses the need for the board to set goals and expectations.
As an example of board-set goals and expectations, I noticed a list created by the board of education of the Forest Grove School District in Oregon. (I first saw the list when looking at the way the Forest Grove district used the concept of the $100 budget, promoted for use by the MMSD by Johnny Winston, Jr.)
I would add, as I have previously said on the blog, that effective goals (whether set by the MMSD or the Forest Grove district) should be measurable and time-specific.
Take this Forest Grove goal:
Increase academic achievement for all students in the district, emphasizing mathematics, literacy in reading, writing and speaking.
I'd think that it would be stronger if it read something like:
Increase academic achievement by at least 5 percentage points for all students in the district, emphasizing mathematics, literacy in reading, writing and speaking.
I hope the board successfully tackles a goal-setting process before the 1st day of the next school year, when it will need the goals to once again evaluate the superintdent's performance.
Just wanted to let everyone know that while WI tries to figure out how to pay for schools, healthcare, balance the budget, care for the needy, etc..................
Your legislatures are spending time on SB286.
In a nutshell it says "school districts should teach abstinence" as the only way to prevent STD and pregnancy. Wow, what a waste of time and your money. I received my undergraduate degree in Secondary Health and Biology education and I can assure you that all the books, lectures, and information I received in college taught me that this was the only form of "birth control" that was 100%. While I agree a great Health or Human Growth and Development class is of utmost importance to a great school district, this legislation is the biggest waste of time and tax payers money, but the biggest laugh is there are communities that will not allow you to teach Sex Education, or Human Growth and Development as we like to call it, in their schools so where does the Senate assume this statement or lecture will occur in these ultra conservative districts?
Wisconsin Legislation could not scream any louder that it is ignorant and scared of SCIENCE. Look at the bills; ban cloning, teach abstinence only, alleviate health care providers of responsibility if there is a conflict with moral judgement, and the ever popular intellegient design in science classes. We as educated parents should be concerned with science education in this state and how new legislation could effect our children's view and evaluation of science and theroy. Science is currently on the chopping block of the evagelical right and I am very concerned about legislation at the federal and state level concerning what our children are taught in Science class and whether that is decided by scientist and educators or whether it is decided by a religious political group.
SUPERINTENDENT'S EVALUATION A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
Establishing Performance Goals Must Be Next
I ran for the Madison School Board because I believed the Board needed to change how it did business. The majority of voters agreed with me.
I have now been on the Board for five months, and it is fair to ask whether my election really will make a difference. Will it result in the change I called for?
I am hopeful it will.
One very positive sign is that the Board is finally doing a performance evaluation of Superintendent Art Rainwater. Supervising the Superintendent is one of the Board’s most important jobs, and a major component of good supervision is regular and meaningful performance evaluations. Meaningful performance evaluations require the Board to examine how the Superintendent’s performance compares to the Board’s priorities and expectations. Good performance evaluations should identify areas of strength, and areas of recommended improvement. No one is perfect, and it should be expected that the Board identify recommended improvements for Superintendent Rainwater.
An important part of the performance evaluation process is the need for the Board to examine its priorities and expectations for the Superintendent’s performance. What does the Board expect? Has the Board communicated its expectations to the Superintendent? How will the Board measure whether the Superintendent’s performance is meeting the Board's expectations? These questions require the Board to look at its own performance. If the Board has not established expectations, has not communicated expectations, or has not established performance standards to measure progress towards its expectations, it is the Board who has failed in its performance.
In many ways, the Superintendent’s review is a review of the Board. It requires the Board to look internally and this can be uncomfortable. Perhaps that is why the Board has not reviewed the Superintendent since 2002.
But the fact that the Board is conducting the Superintendent’s performance evaluation now is a positive sign. The Board is engaging in discussions that need to be held. Will we come to consensus on every point in the evaluation? I am sure we will not. Will the final evaluation represent the views of all Board members? I doubt it will. But whatever the final product, I believe the Board’s discussions that have occurred because of the need to conduct the evaluation have been valuable.
After the performance evaluation process is complete, the next step for the Board is to set performance expectations or goals for Superintendent Rainwater for the next year. Setting these expectations is important because it ensures that the Superintendent and the Board are moving in the same direction, on the same priorities. This is the time the Board can ensure that its expectations are communicated to the Superintendent. And it is on these expectations the Superintendent’s performance should be measured next year.
As with the evaluation, it may be difficult for the Board to come to consensus on its expectations for the Superintendent for the upcoming year. But this can be no excuse. Each of us asked to be elected to the School Board and we must do the job we were elected to do.
Will there be real change on the Madison School Board? I hope so. Change doesn’t happen overnight. It happens one step at a time. Conducting the Superintendent’s performance evaluation will be one step in the right direction. Setting priorities and expectations for the Superintendent for the 2005-2006 school year will be another.
Doyle Wants to Increase Math and Science Requirements
From NBC15.madison.com Gov. Doyle says he wants high school students to take another year of math and science. Doyle says the move will make students better prepared for the future.
"Part of my 2005 agenda is to require a 3rd year of math and science for all high school graduates."
Currently, high school students only need two years of math and science to graduate. But colleges often require at least three years, so most kids are already above the requirements.
"Our class of 2005 70 percent of our graduates took three or more years of math and science," says Joe Quick, spokesman for the Madison School District.
While Quick says this is a great idea on the surface, he says schools would have to add more math and science teachers and classes.
"It could be offset by dropping other classes. A kid who wanted to take a fine arts class– that might be something that gets dropped from the curriculum."
The kids that don't voluntarily take the extra math and science classes are not going to college, but Cora Marrett says one day, they might.
"One of the problems is that a number of students who think they might not go on to college find later that they do need the college experience."
Marrett works in Academic Affairs for the UW System, and she says many people who want to attend college later in life have even more work to do if they don't have the requirements in hand. Sometimes they just give up.
"The more limited the background in math and science the fewer the options."
Quick says there are definite pros and cons to the proposal, "Is three years of math and science necessary for every child who graduates from high school in Wisconsin? There will have to be a public discussion about that."
You can find the attendance by elementary school for the 2004-2005 school year compared to the newly release figures for the 2005-2006 school year. The comparisons are grouped by high school attendance area. Click here.
ps My apologies for the earlier and erroneous chart. I replaced it with one that should be accurate. If it isn't, please let me know. And always remember, take nothing at face value from me or the MMSD. Always check and double-check.
The task forces looking at eastside and westside enrollment and facilities operate under a set of "givens" that restrict the options they might consider, isolate them from publilc discussion, and control what items they can discuss at meetings.
The MMSD Web site lists the ground rules:
+ Options will avoid major program changes such as Year Round Education or the creation of Magnet Schools; options may include school pairings, closings, restructuring programs, etc.
+ The Task Force will create up to three options. The options are advisory to the Long Range Planning Committee and Board of Education. The options need to be viable for a five year period.
+ Major construction of a school building requires successful passage of a referendum and a three-year timeline.
+ As a Task Force of the Board of Education, only items listed on the agenda will be discussed.
+ Public appearances are not part of the Task Force meetings. Public appearances may be made during meetings of the Board’s Long Range Planning Committee. Dates for the Long Range Planning Committee meetings are Oct. 24, Nov. 14, Dec. 19, and Jan. 30, with a final special meeting on Feb. 6.
The danger in these grounds rules is that the public will react to the task force recommendations in the same way as it reacted to the recommendations on Leopold. The reaction may well be something along these lines: The task forces were not allowed to look at all the possible alternatives so that voters still won't get to consider what might be the best and most effective options for teaching children. In the end, the continued limits on options could mean the rejection of any referendum needed to implement task force recommendations.
"An uneasy amalgam of pride and discontent, Caroline Mitchell sat amid the balloons and beach chairs on the front lawn of Princeton High School, watching the Class of 2004 graduate. Her pride was for the seniors' average SAT score of 1237, third-highest in the state, and their admission to elite universities like Harvard, Yale and Duke. As president of the high school alumni association and community liaison for the school district, Ms. Mitchell deserved to bask in the tradition of public-education excellence.
Discontent, though, was what she felt about Blake, her own son. He was receiving his diploma on this June afternoon only after years of struggle - the failed English class in ninth grade, the science teacher who said he was capable only of C's, the assignment to a remedial "basic skills" class. Even at that, Ms. Mitchell realized, Blake had fared better than several friends who were nowhere to be seen in the procession of gowns and mortarboards. They were headed instead for summer school."
Illinois Teacher Calls Art Rainwater's Recent Message "Misquided"
Bruce Allardice, a public school teacher in Des Plains, ILL wrote a letter to the Capital Times in response to Madison Schools Superintendent Art Rainwater's recent article on the need for public education:
Dear Editor: If I was grading the Tuesday guest column of Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater titled "Free public education is cornerstone of country," I'd give the superintendent a D. His rhetoric is nice, but the logic is horribly misguided.
Mr. Rainwater's mistake comes when he proclaims public education "free." There's no such thing as a free lunch, and there's no such thing as a free education. Public education is paid for by government, which gets the money by taking it from our wallets. School taxes are taking an ever-increasing bite out of all our paychecks, with ever-decreasing results. Free? Ask anyone who pays taxes.
Any school superintendent who claims education is "free" should be sent back to school, preferably to the private schools to which so many public school teachers send their own kids.
I agree wholeheartedly with Johnny Winston’s comments that were reported in the Isthmus article on the upcoming board evaluation of the performance of Superintendent Rainwater. The article by Jason Shepard says:
Winston . . . cites Rainwater's reluctance to take risks to solve educational problems: “If we have an issue related to student achievement, I’d like the superintendent to say, ‘You know what? It’s not working right now, and I’d like us to try something different.’ I’d like Art to lead the charge on that.” Winston would also like Rainwater to "be more critical of the organization" as a means of self-improvement.
Unfortunately, I often sense that the school board itself cannot admit that a policy or program of the administration, board, or district might be less than ideal. Nor can the board say let's "try something different." As an example, the video of the discussion of Carol Carstensen's suggestion that the board seek an independent analysis of the district's business services operations starts with a strong defense of the business services operations. Board members offered a wide variety of opinions during the long discussion, and ended without any agreement on assessing the status quo in business services.
I too would like to see the school board be more critical of the organization as a means of improving the academic success of the district's students.
Wooldridge says three reasons account for this: 1) the Fed plays a limited role, unlike in a France or Germany; 2) schools compete for everything, including students and teachers; and 3) our universities are anything but ivory towers, instead being quite focused on practical stuff (Great line: "Bertrand Russell once expressed astonishment at the worldly concerns he encountered at the University of Wisconsin: 'When any farmer's turnip go wrong, they send a professor to investigate the failure scientifically,'" So true, as anyone who's grown up in Wisconsin farmland can attest.)
Two interesting data points: listing of top global universities features 1 from Japan, two from UK and 17 from U.S. Wisconsin, my alma mater is 18 (ahead of Michigan!) and Harvard is number 1.
Also interesting: Of the students who travel abroad, 30 percent come to America. Britain is next at 12%, then Germany, then Australia, then France and Japan. After Australia it's all single digits.
I guess America isn't exactly out of the source code business, at least in the most important software package known to man.
SECRETS OF SUCCESS
Sep 8th 2005
America's system of higher education is the best in the world. That is
because there is no system
IT IS all too easy to mock American academia. Every week produces a
mind-boggling example of intolerance or wackiness. Consider the twin
stories of Lawrence Summers, one of the world's most distinguished
economists, and Ward Churchill, an obscure professor of ethnic studies,
which unfolded in parallel earlier this year. Mr Summers was almost
forced to resign as president of Harvard University because he had
dared to engage in intellectual speculation by arguing, in an informal
seminar, that discrimination might not be the only reason why women are
under-represented in the higher reaches of science and mathematics. Mr
Churchill managed to keep his job at the University of Boulder,
Colorado, despite a charge sheet including plagiarism, physical
intimidation and lying about his ethnicity.
With such colourful headlines, it is easy to lose sight of the real
story: that America has the best system of higher education in the
world. The Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai's Jiao Tong
University ranks the world's universities on a series of objective
criteria such as the number of Nobel prizes and articles in prestigious
journals. Seventeen of the top 20 universities in that list are
American (see table in article[1]); indeed, so are 35 of the top 50.
American universities currently employ 70% of the world's Nobel
prize-winners. They produce about 30% of the world's output of articles
on science and engineering, according to a survey conducted in 2001,
and 44% of the most frequently cited articles.
At the same time, a larger proportion of the population goes on to
higher education in America than almost anywhere else, with about a
third of college-aged people getting first degrees and about a third of
those continuing to get advanced degrees. Non-traditional students also
do better than in most other countries. The majority of undergraduates
are female; a third come from racial minorities; and more than 40% are
aged 25 or over. About 20% come from families with incomes at or below
the poverty line. Half attend part-time, and 80% of students work to
help support themselves.
Why is America so successful? Wealth clearly has something to do with
it. America spends more than twice as much per student as the OECD
average (about $22,000 versus $10,000 in 2001), and alumni and
philanthropists routinely shower universities with gold. History also
plays a part. Americans have always had a passion for higher education.
The Puritans established Harvard College in 1636, just two decades
after they first arrived in New England.
The main reason for America's success, however, lies in organisation.
This is something other countries can copy. But they will not find it
easy--particularly if they are developing countries that are bent on
state-driven modernisation.
The first principle is that the federal government plays a limited
part. America does not have a central plan for its universities. It
does not treat its academics as civil servants, as do France and
Germany. Instead, universities have a wide range of patrons, from state
governments to religious bodies, from fee-paying students to generous
philanthropists. The academic landscape has been shaped by rich
benefactors such as Ezra Cornell, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins
and John D. Rockefeller. And the tradition of philanthropy survives to
this day: in fiscal 2004, private donors gave $24.4 billion to
universities.
Limited government does not mean indifferent government. The federal
government has repeatedly stepped in to turbocharge higher education.
The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 created land-grant universities
across the country. The states poured money into community colleges.
The GI Bill of 1946 brought universities within the reach of everyone.
The federal government continues to pour billions of dollars into
science and research.
The second principle is competition. Universities compete for
everything, from students to professors to basketball stars. Professors
compete for federal research grants. Students compete for college
bursaries or research fellowships. This means that successful
institutions cannot rest on their laurels.
The third principle is that it is all right to be useful. Bertrand
Russell once expressed astonishment at the worldly concerns he
encountered at the University of Wisconsin: "When any farmer's turnips
go wrong, they send a professor to investigate the failure
scientifically." America has always regarded universities as more than
ivory towers. Henry Steele Commager, a 20th-century American historian,
noted of the average 19th-century American that "education was his
religion"--provided that it "be practical and pay dividends".
This emphasis on "paying dividends" remains a prominent feature of
academic culture. America has pioneered the art of forging links
between academia and industry. American universities earn more than $1
billion a year in royalties and licence fees. More than 170
universities have "business incubators" of some sort, and dozens
operate their own venture funds.
NOTHING QUITE LIKE IT
There is no shortage of things to marvel at in America's
higher-education system, from its robustness in the face of external
shocks to its overall excellence. No country but America explores such
a wide range of subjects (including some dubious ones such as
GBLT--gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender studies). However, what
particularly stands out is the system's flexibility and its sheer
diversity.
For a demonstration of its flexibility, consider New York University.
NYU used to be a commuter school with little money and even less
prestige. In the mid-1970s, it was so close to bankruptcy that it had
to sell off its largest campus, in the Bronx. But today it is flush
with money from fund-raising, "hot" with would-be undergraduates across
the country, and famous for recruiting academic superstars. The
Shanghai world ranking puts it at number 32.
The academic superstars certainly helped, but two other things proved
even more useful. The first was NYU's ability to turn its location in
downtown Manhattan into an asset. Lots of universities have fine
economics departments, but having the stock exchange nearby adds
something extra. The second was the university's ability to spot market
niches.
What made all this possible was the fact that power is concentrated in
the hands of the central administration. Most universities in other
countries distribute power among the professors; American universities
have established a counterbalance to the power of the faculty in the
person of a president, which allows some of them to act more like
entrepreneurial firms than lethargic academic bodies.
The American system's diversity has allowed it to combine excellence
with access by providing a wide range of different types of
institutions. Only about 100 of America's 3,200 higher-education
institutions are research universities. Many of the rest are community
colleges that produce little research and offer only two-year courses.
But able students can progress from a humble two-year college to a
prestigious research university.
To be fair, one reason why America's best universities are so good is
that they have borrowed liberally from abroad--particularly from the
British residential universities that grew up in Oxford and Cambridge
in the Middle Ages, and from Wilhelm von Humboldt's German research
university in the early 19th century.
SERPENTS IN PARADISE
But America's academic paradise harbours plenty of serpents. The
political correctness that has plagued Mr Summers is just one example
of a deeper problem: America's growing inclination to abandon the very
principles that have made it a world leader.
Ross Douthat has recently created a stir with his expose of Ivy League
education, "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class".
High-school students compete furiously to get into Ivy League
universities such as Harvard, but Mr Douthat, who graduated from there
only three years ago, argues that they are seldom stretched when they
arrive. A few professors try to provide overviews of big subjects, but
many stick with their pet subjects regardless of what undergraduates
need to learn. Mr Douthat wanted to pick a comprehensive list of
classes in his chosen subjects, history and literature, but ended up
with a weird mish-mash taught by "unengaged professors and overburdened
teaching assistants". Looking back on his experience, he feels cheated.
He is not alone. In many ways, undergraduates are the stepchildren of
American higher education. Most academics pay more attention to
research than to teaching, and most universities continue to neglect
their core curriculums in the name of academic choice.
From time to time, universities try to improve the lot of the
undergraduate, as Mr Summers is currently doing at Harvard: reforming
the core curriculum, taming grade inflation and asking professors to
concentrate on teaching rather than self-promotion. But reformers are
fighting in hostile territory. The biggest rewards in academic life are
reserved for research rather than teaching, not least because research
is easier to evaluate; and most students are willing to put up with
indifferent teaching so long as they get those vital diplomas.
Complaints about the neglect of undergraduate education are as old as
the research university, but the past few years have produced a host of
new criticisms of American universities. The first is that universities
are no longer as devoted to free inquiry as they ought to be. The
persecution of Mr Summers for the sin of intellectual rumination is
symptomatic of a wider problem. At a time when America's big political
parties are deeply divided over profound questions, from the meaning of
"life" to the ethics of pre-emptive war, university professors are
overwhelmingly on the side of one political party. Only about 10% of
tenured professors say they vote Republican. The liberal majority has
repeatedly shown that it is willing to crush dissent on anything from
speech codes to the choice of subjects worth studying.
There are signs that scientists, too, are turning against free and open
inquiry, though for commercial rather than ideological reasons.
Corporate sponsors are attaching strings to their donations in order to
prevent competitors from free-riding on their research, such as forcing
scientists to delay publication or even blank out crucial passages from
published papers. When Novartis, a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, agreed
to invest $25m in Berkeley's College of Natural Resources, for example,
it stipulated that it should get a first look at much of the research
carried out by the plant and microbial biology department.
The second criticism is that America's universities are pricing
themselves out of the range of ordinary Americans. Between 1971-72 and
2002-03, annual tuition costs, in constant 2002 dollars, rose from $840
to $1,735 at public two-year colleges and from $7,966 to $18,273 at
private four-year colleges. True, the federal government spends over
$100 billion a year on student aid, and elite universities make every
effort to subsidise poorer students. One study of admissions to
selective colleges shows that, in 2001-02, students with a median
family income paid only 34% of the "sticker" price.
Still, the sheer relentlessness of academic inflation is worrisome.
Elite colleges have little incentive to compete on price; indeed, they
tend to compete by adding expensive accoutrements, such as star
professors or state-of-the-art gyms, thus pushing up the cost of
education still further. And the public universities that played such a
valiant role in providing opportunities to underprivileged students are
being forced to raise their prices, thanks to the continual squeeze on
public funding. The average cost of tuition at public universities rose
by 10.5% last year, four times the rate of inflation.
The dramatic rise in the price of American higher education puts a
heavy burden on middle-class families who are too rich to qualify for
special treatment. It also sends negative signals to poorer parents who
may be unaware of all the subsidies available. Deborah Wadsworth, an
opinion pollster, points out that universities may be courting a
popular backlash. Americans increasingly regard universities as the
gatekeepers to good jobs, but they also see them as prohibitively
expensive. The result is a steady erosion of public admiration for
these formerly much-esteemed institutions.
This points to a third criticism: that universities are becoming
bastions of privilege rather than instruments of social mobility. From
the 1930s onwards, America's great universities did much to realise the
American creed of equality of opportunity. James Bryant Conant,
Harvard's president from 1933 to 1953, opened up scholarships to
academic merit, and the vast post-war expansion of higher education
extended Conant's meritocratic principle to millions of students.
"Flagship" public universities such as Michigan, Texas and Berkeley,
California, provided world-class education for next to nothing.
MERITOCRACY IN RETREAT
But the march of academic meritocracy has now slowed to a crawl, and,
on some fronts, has even turned into a retreat. William Bowen of
Princeton University and two colleagues, in a study of admissions to
elite universities, found that in the 11 universities for which they
had the best data, students from the top income quartile increased
their share of places from 39% in 1976 to 50% in 1995. Students from
the bottom income quartile also increased their share very slightly:
the squeeze came in the middle.
Mr Summers points out that Harvard now offers free tuition to students
whose families earn less than $40,000 a year, and greatly reduced fees
to students from families earning $40,000-60,000. Other elite
universities have followed suit. Yet at the same time those
universities give priority to athletes, people applying early (who
often come from privileged backgrounds) and the children of alumni
("legacies"). Duke University encourages the offspring of wealthy
parents to apply early and considers their applications
sympathetically.
The real threat to meritocracy, however, comes not from within the
universities but from society at large. One consequence of the squeeze
on funding for public universities, created by Americans' reluctance to
pay taxes, has been an academic brain drain to the more socially
exclusive private universities. In 1987, seven of the 26 top-rated
universities in the US NEWS & WORLD REPORT rankings were public
institutions; by 2002, the number had fallen to just four.
The biggest risk to American higher education is the erosion of the
competitive principle. The man often cited as the architect of American
academia's current success is Vannevar Bush, who was director of the
office of scientific research and development during the second world
war. After the war he insisted that research grants be allocated to
universities on the basis of open competition and peer review. But in
the 1980s universities began undermining this principle by lobbying
their local congressmen for direct appropriations. In 2003, the amount
of money from the federal research budget awarded on a non-competitive
basis topped $2 billion, up from $1 billion in 2000.
American academia's merits still outweigh its faults. Many American
undergraduates are savvy enough to get a first-class education. Many
academics resist the temptation to censor ideological minorities. The
vast bulk of research grants are allocated on the basis of merit. Yet
American universities are acquiring a growing catalogue of bad habits
that could one day leave them vulnerable to competitors from other
parts of the world--though probably not from Europe, which has
overwhelming academic problems of its own.
At large representatives representing an ethnic group who reside within the attendance areas:
Prasanna Raman
Brenda Gonzalez
Name
Community member without children in the district:
Tim Otis
Student Liaison to the Board of Education:
Connor Gants
School & Representative
Chavez - Rich Rubasch - Jennifer Sheridan (Alternative)
Crestwood - Marisue Horton - Mary Kay Battaglia (Alt.)
Falk - Dr. Matthew Raw - Karl Woodruff (Alt.)
Huegel - Laura Lenzen (Alt.)
Muir - Ann and Brett Larget
Orchard Ridge
Stephens - Carol Quintana
Jefferson - Wilma Gurl
Spring Harbor - Don Jorgensen
Toki - Sue Mowris
Memorial - Mary/Scott Whitcomb - Mary Fahey (Alt.)
Franklin/Randall - Michael Maguire
Leopold - Rusty Shoemaker-Allen
Lincoln - Lori Mann Carey
Midvale - Jerry Eykholt - Brian Tennant (Alt.)
Shorewood - Janice Ferguson - Michelle Vassallo (Alt.)
Thoreau - Gina Hodgson - Erin Weiss (Alt.)
Van Hise - Wendy Cooper - Jim Bauman (Alt.)
Cherokee - Arlene Silveira - Marcia Bastian (Alt.)
Hamilton - Mark Kaiser - Alan Kim (Alt.)
Wright - Fern Murdoch - Sandra Willis-Smith (Alt.)
West - Michelle Reynolds
Shabazz - Paula Volpiansky - Stacy Sandler (Alt.)
Affiliated Alt
Invited Observers:
Alderpersons
Neighborhood Association Representatives
Board of Education Members
Memorial and West Attendance Area Principals
Memorial and West Attendance Area parent/family/teacher organization Presidents
Central Office Representative and Chair:
Mary Gulbrandsen
Principals from outside the attendance areas:
Principal
Anne Nolan (Whitehorse)
Mike Meissen (LaFollette)
At large representatives representing an ethnic group who reside within the attendance areas:
James Howard
Ramona Natora
Name
Community member without children in the district:
Pat Mooney
One East High School student:
Rebecca Berkenstadt
School & Representative
Emerson - Linda Galang - Michelle Rawlings (Alternate)
Gompers - Amy Riedemann
Hawthorne
Lake View
Lapham - Mike Wygocki - Chris Oddo (Alt.)
Lindbergh - Tonja Prodehl
Lowell - Maria Doyle
Marquette - Laura Chastain - Kimberly Neuschel (Alt.)
Mendota - Michelle Brokaw - Mike McCabe (Alt.)
Sandburg - Lisa Kind
Black Hawk - Jill Jokela
O’Keeffe - David Wallner - Josh Day (Alt.)
Sherman - Vicky Nelson - Angela Nash (Alt.)
East - Brenda Robinson
Shabazz - Kim and Richard Karlin-Kamin
Affiliated
Invited Observers:
Alderpersons
Neighborhood Association Representatives
Board of Education Members
East Attendance Area Principals
East Attendance Area parent/family/teacher organization Presidents
Central Office Representative and Chair:
Loren Rathert
Principals from outside the attendance areas:
Nancy Yoder (Stephens)
Karen Seno (Cherokee)
Ed Holmes (West)
Research and Evaluation:
Kurt Kiefer
School-Funding Update from WAES (WI Alliance for Excellent Schools)
Referendum soundly defeated in Phillips School District
Greendale voters support $14 million tax levy
North Carolina will use lottery proceeds for schools
Slot machine revenue not best bet for public schools
What's new in the anti-TABOR toolbox?
School-funding reform calendar
The Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools (WAES) is a statewide network of educators, school board members, parents, community leaders, and researchers. Its Wisconsin Adequacy Plan -- a proposal for school-finance reform -- is the result of research into the cost of educating children to meet state proficiency standards.
Referendum soundly defeated in Phillips School District
An $830,000, non-recurring five-year referendum for operation and maintenance was soundly defeated last week by the voters in the Phillips School District, with 851 people voting yes and 1,783 voting no (http://www.phillipswi.com/bee/index.php?sect_rank=1&story_id=205231 ).
According to superintendent Jerry Trochinski, if approved, the referendum would have covered expenses in the 2006-07 school year and thereafter (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9339382/).
The official vote tally found the referenda going down to defeat in all 12 of the district's voting locations, including the village and town of Catawba, home of the Catawba School which, according to Trochinski, may be closed along with staff and other cuts throughout the Phillips School District.
****************
Greendale voters support $14 million tax levy
Greendale School District residents voted overwhelmingly at their annual meeting in support of a $14 million property tax levy for the upcoming school year (http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/sep05/355316.asp). The "yes" vote came despite strong opposition from the Greendale Taxpayers Group, who expressed concerns over high property tax bills in the village.
The budget was approved by a show of hands raised with green cards. No more than two dozen of those in the crowd raised their green cards to reject the budget. Hundreds of others raised green cards to approve it.
During the questin-and-answer session of the annual meeting, voters on both sides of the issue expressed a need for state officials to stop relying on property taxes to fund schools and, instead, suggested a new funding source, something WAES has been working on for several years. The Wisconsin Adequacy plan can be found at http://www.excellentschools.org/resources/WAPMay04.pdf.
****************
North Carolina will use lottery proceeds for schools
After repeated failed attempts, North Carolina legislators have narrowly passed a lottery bill, the proceeds of which will be used to fund numerous school projects (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/09/14/03nc.h25.html?rale=KQE5d7nM%2FXAYPsVRXwnFWfexbqxLpd7mLxw4YDtlKayPnLCzCDElj9sMlxY89XSR7QmktnpPGi%2Fx%0A4pt7OcRvxTItMxMjQ42Z4dBdh%2F1WjGKFjjH8y1um1L%2FbALHX%2BP8DM35SUTdxNkXqEZv%2F%2BQnhgM6i%0AfzE8pMRc7DfJK26GvUy%2F2wCx1%2Fj%2FA4PF%2FZeKYrpQNHIG4grfnrFW6EcvM0Mhz7rmfyiFbcFCNETp%0A2dE%2FNlq369EL0VzQ3WQIWm97xO3oG4Vq8QquBwJtbKRiuPAsGPCZUov0EXF5cg16gPcZvjUj036y%0AX%2Bpl8YSrVNOpQdeBEmNiFbD7juQUG1A8bwN%2B9R3HaoSuELqEfPQJhwmIQbCE9H1X5CjtQOoRm%2F%2F5%0ACeGAUtB%2Bo4zXcfBO6yzglnsJ%2F84lcsvfLqKNjN190Ex%2F%2BFThCXspsDAG50F3JFxMd5OE4vc17Tas%0A938ZgEl%2FF7Q3cs3R6cnZVvfFLiX%2B92Y%2FcS3uEX9T3aGTFbDHEeo3Gtsj0WCLFK8xN85BiGDoBwGJ%0ARdjMQkLTOog8Ko%2FhcOxcgNbuEX9T3aGTFYFqjnFa9C%2BthKtU06lB14HqOVqMH6NH1KlehWnUCSLo%0Acg16gPcZvjWZ3NC%2BysLspgFDXmI%2FlcT08UJlcz%2BxSLABL4jpNHdkvJgS%2FdCdQtsH5nWlYSGYj1xL%0AvDt5SwDQTLlhoSio8hJKZZ8wxCNS%2BJ2cJ1W2VVRS5P6tTBEFOWBIv8Q7jS6UKXWKLJ5OrOr%2Flohp%0ATs300jgeSchyqvxyxb6RyG6pP2u3FWNmcRrJsIYv74sOed%2BSGHFqQz vhf Mpn aK%2BLo2WpfbrU ).
Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue cast the deciding vote in the state Senate to approve the controversial measure, 25-24.
The lottery is expected to reap more than $400 million annually, money that is slated for college scholarships, school construction, needy school districts, class-size reduction, and the state's pre-school initiative.
*****************
Slot machine revenue not best bet for public schools
Although the revenue would be used to provide up to $1 billion in property tax relief (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05256/570432.stm), not all the school district in Pennsylvania are thrilled with a plan proposed by Gov. Ed Rendell.
Only 111 school districts decided to take part in the program, known as Act 72, a 20-percent participation rate that was a political embarrassment to Rendell. The Governor has pledged to force boards to take part in Act 72, but will face strong opposition from the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.
According to Scott Shewell, an association spokesperson, "We are not in favor of mandating Act 72 because it doesn't address the longer-term issues of controlling costs for school districts, addressing state and federal mandates or creating a comprehensive public education funding system for Pennsylvania."
***************
What's new in the anti-TABOR toolbox?
The revenue limits put on Wisconsin's public schools back in 1993 have had a devastating affect on many schools and children. Despite that track record, there are a handful of state legislators and others who want to make it worse.
This group is trying to amend the state constitution in order to force every unit of state and local government to freeze spending at current levels. Known as TABOR (which stands, facetiously, for Taxpayers Bill of Rights), the amendment, if passed would also allow any local government to ignore any new state law that isn't "paid for." TABOR has been in Colorado’s constitution since 1992, and residents in that state are now facing serious problems because there is not enough money to run state operations effectively.
If TABOR should ever go into effect in Wisconsin, hope for needed school-funding reform will be dashed. To learn what you can do to fight for local control, top-notch state and local government services, and adequate school funding, go to http://www.wisconsinsfuture.org, click on "Projects," then on "Taxes," and, finally, on "TABOR."
**************
School-funding reform calendar
Sept. 21 -- "Building Community Support for School-finance Reform" discussion for public school superintendents at the "Red Gym," 716 Langdon Street, Madison (next to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union), 3:45 to 5:45 p.m. (contact Tom Beebe, 414-384-9094 or tbeebe@wisconsinsfuture.org). If you haven't registered but still want to attend, this click on "Reply" to this e-mail and let me know you're coming.
Sept. 22 -- School-funding reform presentation at 7 p.m. at the North Side Public Library in Kenosha (sponsored by the Kenosha/Racine AAUW)
Sept. 23 -- School-funding presentation at the Wisconsin Valley Business Officials, Building & Grounds Supervisors and Food Supervisors meeting, 9 a.m., Club 64, Merrill
Sept. 27 -- School-funding reform discussion with the Board of Directors and State Legislative Committee of the Wisconsin Retired Educators Association, Baraboo
Oct. 1 -- School-funding reform presentation at the Wisconsin PTA Leadership Conference in Racine (go to http://www.wisconsinpta.org/ and click on "Conference Registration")
Oct. 5 -- School-funding reform discussion at staff inservice for the Baraboo School District, 2:30 to 3:30 p.m., at the Jack Young Middle School
Oct. 13-14 -- School-funding reform presentations for the Northwestern Wisconsin Education Association at Eau Claire Memorial High School, 2225 Keith Street (presentations at 12:25 p.m. on Oct. 13 and 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 14)
Oct. 18 -- School-funding reform presentation fo Grassroots of Waukesha County, 7 p.m.
Nov. 16 -- School-funding reform presentation at the "Taking Care of Business" presentation of the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials in Pewaukee
Please feel free to share your copy of the WAES school-funding update with anyone interested in school-finance reform. Contact Tom Beebe (tbeebe@wisconsinsfuture.org) at 414-384-9094 for details.
--
Tom Beebe, Outreach Specialist
Institute for Wisconsin’s Future
1717 South 12th Street
Milwaukee, WI 53204
414-384-9094 (office)
920-650-0525 (cell)
tbeebe@wisconsinsfuture.org
http://www.excellentschools.org
http://www.wisconsinsfuture.org
Carol Carstensen provided updated information on the people selected by the Board of Education to serve on the attendance task forces:
West-Memorial
- Prasanna Raman (nominated by Ruth Robarts to fill a position as an Asian member of the task force)
- Tim Otis (nominated by Bill Keys to fill a position as a resident with no children in the district)
- Brenda Gonzalez (nominated by Juan Lopez to fill a position as an Hispanic/Latino member of the task force)
- Charlie Daniel (to fill a positon as an African American member of the task force)
East
- James Howard (nominated by Lawrie Kobza to fill a position as an African American member of the task force)
- Pat Mooney (nominated by Carol Carstensen to fill a position as a resident without children in the district)
- Ramon Natera (nominated by Juan Lopez to fill a position as an Hispanic/Latino member of the task force)
- A represenative of the Asian community has notyet been named
Carol Carstensen says that the district may soon release the names of the members selected by the principals and PTOs.
6:30 p.m. Special Meeting of the Madison School Board and the East
Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
Sherman Middle School
Library Media Center
1610 Ruskin Street
Madison, WI
1. Call to Order
2. Welcome and Introductions of the East Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force Members, Invitees, and Madison School Board Members
3. Members of the East Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range
Facility Needs Task Force going through the "Getting to Know one
Another" Activity
4. Charge to the East Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
5.
a. Role of the Madison School Board
b. Role of the Invitees
c. Role of the East Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
d. Role of Facilitator of the East Attendance Area Demographics and
Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
e. Process of How the East Attendance Area Demographics and Long
Range Facility Needs Task Force will work together
6. Specific issues to be addressed by the East Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force:
a. Elementary schools in the East Attendance Area that have a declining student enrollment
b. Elementary schools in the East Attendance Area that have
overcrowded student populations
c. Disparity of the income of parents whose children attend elementary schools in the East Attendance Area
d. Projected growth of the elementary schools in the East Attendance
Area
7. Timeline for completing the work of the East Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
8. Future meeting dates of the East Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
9. The criteria adopted by the Madison School Board to plan space usage as recorded in the following documents:
* Definitions: Purposes of Enrollment Calculations
* Enrollment trends
* Maximum Physical Plant Capacity Worksheet
* Considerations when Redrawing Boundary Lines
* Process for Dealing with Overcrowded Schools
* Process for Dealing with Elementary Schools with Declining
Enrollment
* Chart of Student Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE) Schools
10. Summary of what transpired at the East Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force meeting and the next steps that the Task Force will take
11. Adjournment
6:30 p.m. Special Meeting of the Madison School Board and the Memorial and West Attendance Areas Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
Toki Middle School
Library Media Center
5606 Russett Road
Madison, WI 53711
1. Call to Order
2. Welcome and Introductions of the Memorial and West Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force Members, Invitees, and Madison School Board Members
3. Members of the Memorial and West Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force going through the "Getting to Know one Another" activity
4. Charge to the Memorial and West Attendance Areas Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
5.
a. Role of the Madison School Board
b. Role of Invitees
c. Role of the Memorial and West Attendance Areas Demographics and
Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
d. Role of Facilitator of the Memorial and West Attendance Area
Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
e. Process of How the Memorial and West Attendance Area
Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force will work
together
6. Specific issues to be addressed by the Memorial and West Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force:
a. Elementary schools in the Memorial and West attendance areas that have overcrowded student populations
b. Projected growth of the elementary schools in the Memorial and
West Attendance Areas
c. Disparity of the income of parents whose children attend
elementary schools in the Memorial and West Attendance Areas
7. Timeline for completing the work of the Memorial and West Attendance Areas Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
8. Future meeting dates of the Memorial and West Attendance Areas
Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force
9. The criteria adopted by the Madison School Board to plan space usage as recorded in the following documents:
* Definitions: Purposes of Enrollment Calculations
* Enrollment trends
* Maximum Physical Plant Capacity Worksheet
* Considerations when Redrawing Boundary Lines
* Process for Dealing with Overcrowded Schools
* Process for Dealing with Elementary Schools with Declining
Enrollment
* Chart of Student Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE) schools
10. Summary of what transpired at the Memorial and West Attendance Area Demographics and Long Range Facility Needs Task Force meeting and the next steps that the Task Force will take
11. Adjournment
Government is still in the old broadcast mode of press conferences and press releases and talking at you rather than with you. Government only seems to have time to converse with lobby groups, mass media reporters and interests that are going to make them or their friends money. Money from the government.
The conversations are growing – mass media is at a loss to understand how to deal with or contend with the number of blogs, cross-linking of blogs and the sheer volume of people getting involved in the conversation. It is no holds barred and far more interesting than the scripted Q&A being spouted from press conferences. Mass media is so flabbergasted, that they have resorted to reading blogs on their broadcasts! How crazy is that – broadcasting elements of the conversations from the blogosphere on TV. Media is stunned. The administration is stunned. It is only going to get worse for all of them.
For more than a week, I've been trying to get the names of the people appointed to the East and West/Memorial task forces on attendance and facilities.
I have the following partial list of the names of people who were nominated by board members and the board member who nominated each.
Ruth Robarts nominated:
- Prasanna Raman
- Rafael Gomez
Bill Keys nominated:
- Tim Otis
- Laura Gutknecht
Juan Jose Lopez nominated:
- Fabiola Hamdan
- Brenda Gonzalez
- Teresa Tellez-Giron
- Cheryl Knox
- Carola Gaines
- Mark Fraire
- Ramon Natera
- David Hart
- Dora Zuniga
- Debie Evans
- Sandra Magana
Lawrie Kobza nominated:
- James Howard
- Ed Blume
- Don Severson
Johnny Winston, Jr. nominated:
- Faustina Bohling
- Angela Nash
- Par Jason Engle
- Andrea Teresa Arenas
- Earnestine Moss
- Deborah Speckman
- Eugene Fujimoto
Carol Carstensen nominated:
- Pat Mooney
- Lucia Nunez
- Carolyn Mungan
- Connie Smalley
- Keetra Burnett
- Judy Reed
- Eileen Sutula
- Jane Richardson
- Mike Moskoff
- Anne Arnesen
I have no information on whether Shwaw Vang nominated anyone.
Two nominees don't want their names released and three nominees have not contacted the MMSD about the release of their names, as of September 13.
When I asked for the names of people who have been selected from among these names, Board President Carol Carstensen responded:
The list of the Board appointees to the task forces is not yet complete but I hope that we will be able to release the names of all the task force members in the next day or so.
The West/Memorial task force meets on at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, September 20 at Toki Middle. The East Task Force meets at 6:30 p.m. at Sherman on Thursday, September 22.
Each school in the East, West, and Memorial attendance areas can appoint a member, but the board has not yet received a nominee from each of the schools.
Madison School District Superintendent Art Rainwater is beginning to write a series of monthly articles which he will use as his Superintendent's Report. Listen to this month's report by watching this 5 minute video clip. I looked around the District's site and did not immediately see a text version of this report. UPDATE: The message was circulated via email Tuesday morning, 9/13/2005. Click the link below to read a text version:
**********************************************************************
* E-MMSD *
* An electronic community newsletter about Madison's schools *
*--------------------------------------------------------------------*
* September, 2005 *
**********************************************************************
E-MMSD Newsletter subscribers,
This is the first in a series of columns about education by
Superintendent Art Rainwater. You are receiving this because you are a
subscriber to the E-MMSD Newsletter. As such, we think you will find
this column at least informative, and at best the springboard for
thoughts and discussion about public education.
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September, 2005
The Need for Public Education
Public Education is inherently political, often based on the critical
issue of the day. Somewhere in all of the rhetoric, though, we have
lost sight of the fundamental need for an appropriate education for
all of our children.
Our free public education system is the cornerstone of our country.
Throughout our history each generation has provided the support
necessary so that the next generation of students receives an
education that allows it to take its place as both economic
contributors and active citizens. It feels like we are losing that
commitment and what a terrible thing it would be to lose.
For the first time people are questioning the need to provide for the
education of "other people's children." As we look to the future
there are no "other people's children." "Other people's children"
*are* our future. They are the leaders and creators who will give us
a better country. But most importantly, they need to be strong,
caring and thoughtful adults who pass on and improve our country's
legacy for their children.
The fulfillment of the dream of our country's past with all of its
promise depends not on us but on this year's kindergarten student who
will enter a world very different to ours. This student is the one
that the continued diminishing of our commitment to a high quality
free public education for all will ultimately handicap. And in
handicapping him or her, we handicap us all.
Are there problems in our current system? Absolutely! Our current
public system of education serves the vast majority of our children
incredibly well. The answer to serving *all* children well lies not
in one size fits all testing and punishments. Rather, it calls for
careful analysis of the underlying causes of problems and attention to
addressing those causes by the whole community. Certainly our public
schools own a share of the solution and must change in many ways.
However, many of the causes are beyond our ability to affect change
and must be a wide community effort.
Through our state constitution the schools belong to all of us -- not
to parents, or students or superintendents, but to everyone. Not only
our community, but all communities throughout the country have to
accept the challenge of providing the best possible chance for every
child to have the opportunity that our country promises. "Our
children" are all of the children, the mathematical genius and the
child who is just learning English; the child who has the latest
computer and the child who doesn't know where he or she will sleep
tonight. If we fail any of them, then we fail all children.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Want more information? Call 663-1879 or check out the district's web
site at .
COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS? PLEASE CONTACT:
Madison Metropolitan School District
Public Information Office
545 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53703
608-663-1879
----------------------------------------------------------------------
To change or remove your Madison Metropolitan School District e-mail
subscriptions, please go to: http://www.mmsd.org/lists/edit.cgi
Clarification of Tonight's Special Board Meeting Regarding the Equity Policy
I wanted to clarify (via the Board President) the reason for the equity policy meeting tonight. If you remember last winter a majority of the Board indicated it wanted to set up a task force to look at the equity policy - but did not give any further directions. Tonight’s meeting is to bringing the issue back to the Board for further discussion and to get more direction from the members about a possible composition and charge to a task force. In President’s defense, she gave her commitment to the community that the board would have a citizen group work on this issue and she’s following through.
Regarding “special meetings” regarding this or other board items – A special meeting is called when a topic isn’t assigned to a committee or needs further discussion. It is an opportunity for the board to discuss an item and take action to possible “next steps.” Now to be clear, the Board could make this the final step by someone making a motion. However, I don’t believe that is the Board President’s intent.
Personally, I am fine with the proposed equity policy. I have made these feelings known through my statements this past winter/spring and voting record. The equity resource formula that the district has been operating from for several years takes the politics out of the recourse allocations (which is a great concern for me) and allocates resources based on student populations. In essence, the district’s most needy schools get more resources but not at the expense of the other schools in the district.
There are some in our community who have raised issue regarding the proposed equity policy as well as some members of the school board. If members of the board and community would like to further study the proposed policy, I won’t stand in the way. Given the financial constraints of school districts throughout Wisconsin an equity policy is not going to stop the cutting of millions of dollars from the budget. Lastly – “Equity does not mean Equal.”
Two gubernatorial candidates endorse school-funding reform
Check out the school-funding reform calendar
What's new in the anti-TABOR toolbox?
School-funding reform calendar
The Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools (WAES) is a statewide network of educators, school board members, parents, community leaders, and researchers. Its Wisconsin Adequacy Plan -- a proposal for school-finance reform -- is the result of research into the cost of educating children to meet state proficiency standards.
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Two gubernatorial candidates endorse school-funding reform
Speaking at separate events in Florence County, last week, Governor Jim Doyle, a Democrat, and his possible Republican opponent, Congressman Mark Green, both backed comprehensive school-funding reform while talking about the recent decision by the school board to dissolve the district (http://www.florenceminingnews.com).
According to Green, "every governor for the last couple of decades has recognized that the school-funding formula isn't working, that it is collapsing on itself." He said reform needs to be pushed by the governor because too many lawmakers represent districts that do well under the formula. You've got to have leadership from the man or woman who represents the entire state."
For his part, Doyle said his budget addressed one significant cost to rural schools, transportation. He bemoaned, however, the Legislature's failure to even include in the 2005-07 budget a change in the way enrollment is counted that "would have made several hundred thousand dollars difference in Florence." "Republicans in the Legislature," he said, "many of whom represent small school districts, never even gave it a hearing; just knocked it out."
**************
Check out the schol-funding reform calendar
As the school year begins, the pace of WAES school-funding reform presentations picks up throughout the state, with events scheduled in the next two months including Kenosha, Madison, Kelly Lake, Merrill, and Baraboo ... among others.
The full schedule is at the end of this e-mail update. If you need more information on any event, give me a call or e-mail.
It's also time for you to sign up for a presentation and get involved in the school-funding reform effort. All you have to do to get the ball rolling is go to http://www.excellentschools.org and click on "About WAES" and then on "Sign up for a free presentation." It's as easy as that.
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What's new in the anti-TABOR toolbox?
The revenue limits put on Wisconsin's public schools back in 1993 have had a devastating affect on many schools and children. Despite that track record, there are a handful of state legislators and others who want to make it worse.
This group is trying to amend the state constitution in order to force every unit of state and local government to freeze spending at current levels. Known as TABOR (which stands, facetiously, for Taxpayers Bill of Rights), the amendment, if passed would also allow any local government to ignore any new state law that isn't "paid for." TABOR has been in Colorado’s constitution since 1992, and residents in that state are now facing serious problems because there is not enough money to run state operations effectively.
If TABOR should ever go into effect in Wisconsin, hope for needed school-funding reform will be dashed. To learn what you can do to fight for local control, top-notch state and local government services, and adequate school funding, go to http://www.wisconsinsfuture.org, click on "Projects," then on "Taxes," and, finally, on "TABOR."
**************
School-funding reform calendar
Sept. 21 -- "Building Community Support for School-finance Reform" discussion for public school superintendents at the "Red Gym," 716 Langdon Steet, Madison (next to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union), 3:45 to 5:45 p.m. (contact Tom Beebe, 414-384-9094 or tbeebe@wisconsinsfuture.org)
Sept. 22 -- School-funding reform presentation at 7 p.m. at the North Side Public Library in Kenosha (sponsored by the Kenosha/Racine AAUW)
Sept. 23 -- School-funding presentation at the Wisconsin Valley Business Officials, Building & Grounds Supervisors and Food Supervisors meeting, 9 a.m., Club 64, Merrill
Sept. 27 -- School-funding reform discussion with the Board of Directors and State Legislative Committee of the Wisconsin Retired Educators Association, Baraboo
Oct. 1 -- School-funding reform presentation at the Wisconsin PTA Leadership Conference in Racine (go to http://www.wisconsinpta.org/ and click on "Conference Registration")
Oct. 5 -- School-funding reform discussion at staff inservice for the Baraboo School District, 2:30 to 3:30 p.m., at the Jack Young Middle School
Oct. 13-14 -- School-funding reform presentations for the Northwestern Wisconsin Education Association at Eau Claire Memorial High School, 2225 Keith Street (presentations at 12:25 p.m. on Oct. 13 and 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 14)
Oct. 18 -- School-funding reform presentation fo Grassroots of Waukesha County, 7 p.m.
Nov. 16 -- School-funding reform presentation at the "Taking Care of Business" presentation of the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials in Pewaukee
Please feel free to share your copy of the WAES school-funding update with anyone interested in school-finance reform. Contact Tom Beebe (tbeebe@wisconsinsfuture.org) at 414-384-9094 for details.
--
Tom Beebe, Outreach Specialist
Institute for Wisconsin’s Future
1717 South 12th Street
Milwaukee, WI 53204
414-384-9094 (office)
920-650-0525 (cell)
tbeebe@wisconsinsfuture.org
http://www.excellentschools.org
http://www.wisconsinsfuture.org
The issue of the district’s equity policy is on the agenda for this evening’s discussion to get more direction from the Board. The last time the Board looked at this issue it indicated the need to establish a task force but did not specify membership, charge or process. When I described my goals as President (and during the spring campaign) I specifically said I would follow through with creating a task force to look at the equity policy. This is on a Special Board meeting because it is being brought to the Board for discussion not action. I am sorry that there seems to be some confusion about this.
Madison School Board Votes on Equity Policy On September 12: what's at stake? what's the rush?
On Monday, September 12, the Madison Board of Education will vote on proposed revisions to the district's Equity Resource Policy. The revisions gut the current policy and replace it with an already existing formula for allocating staff to schools based on socioeconomic factors. The meeting is a Special Board meeting called by President Carol Carstensen. At the meeting administrators will recommend this change and the full Board will vote on the recommendation. Not much notice to the public, not much opportunity to hear public opinion and analysis, no analysis by any Board committee. Only very savvy people who closely watch the Board agendas will know that this vote is coming.
What's at stake?
Equity Policy 9001 makes five important promises.
1. Staff will review and prioritize the needs of each school in the district.
2. There will be an annual examination of student "success indicators" including student achievement, participation, and
school climate.
3. After the review, the superintendent will recommend appropriate strategies for each school to the Board of Education.
4. The Board will vote on the strategies.
5. If necessary, strategies may result in different staffing, facilities and program options at individual schools. That is,
schools that need different resources to improve student success would receive them based on the superintendent's recommendation for the schools.
In contrast, the "Equity Resource Formula" that will be recommended to the Board drops all of these commitments to the individual schools. It continues a policy of allocating staff to schools based on socioeconomic and other factors. The ERF is based on total number of students, number of low income students, school attendance rates, level of education of parents, number of adults living with the student, and the number of students identified as needing Special Education services or assistance learning English.
What's the rush?
For many years parents have told the Board that they want Equity Policy 9001 implemented. In particular, parents and organizations on the Northside of Madison have told us that implementing Policy 9001 is essential to improving student results at many of their schools. They are not satisfied with the results of the ERF policy. They want to see the kind of high-level review of their schools and high level commitment to change that Equity Policy 9001 promises but does not deliver.
As recently as the North Side Planning Council's forum on the 2005 referendums in May, leaders from the community forcefully drew the attention of the Board to their desire to see individual school resource allocations depend on planning, review and strategies. They were clear. As far as they are concerned, the ERF does not produce the planning or the resources that they believe their schools need.
I will not support the proposed Equity Policy changes. I believe that the parents are right: Without the review and planning process required by current Equity Policy 9001, individual schools do not get the high-level attention, analysis and planning that they need and deserve. Moreover, I will not be voting for any policy changes handled in this manner. One of the most important duties of school board members is the duty to carefully review administrative recommendations and give the public an opportunity to comment on recommendations before we take the final vote. Special Board meetings that collapse the whole process into an hour undermine our ability to meet our obligations as elected representatives.
To comment on this meeting and the proposed policy change, send your thoughts to comments@madison.k12.wi.us. The entire Board receives messages at this address.
Carol Carstensen sent me the following about the task forces:
Because not all schools have named representatives yet, the first meetings of the task forces has been moved back a week - Sept. 20 for West/Memorial and Sept. 22 for East.
A person who was apparently appointed to one of the task forces to study attenance and facilities on the east and west sides says that the task forces have been scheduled to meet next week.
The MMSD has released no information about the task forces.
Lawmaker and Educator Propose Incentive Pay for Teachers in Troubled Schools
David M. Herszenhorn: Representative Charles B. Rangel and Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, urged the Bloomberg administration and the teachers' union yesterday to create pay incentives of $10,000 a year or more to entice educators to work in some of city's lowest-performing schools.
Mayor Dave issued the following message on how he hopes city residents can help shape Madison's next budget. I hope that the Board of Education uses a similar approach during the district's budgt process next spring.
Thanks to the combination of state levy limits and higher costs for providing City services (due to factors such as escalating fuel costs),the City of Madison faces a $4 million budget gap for 2006.
Closing this gap will force the City to make a number of tough choices.
As I work on developing my budget proposal, I want to hear from the public about what priorities we should set for scarce City resources.
To help get that input, I am holding a series of interactive "Build
Your Own Budget" forums this month. At these forums, participants will get to put themselves in my shoes, and balance the City budget through their chosen combination of spending cuts and revenue increases.
Background and worksheets will be provided to guide participants
through the budget process and outline various spending and revenue options to choose from. I will use the information gathered at these forums as I craft my executive budget for introduction in October.
The forums are all free and open to the public. The forum schedule is
listed below. I hope that you will take this unique opportunity to make your voice heard on how the City should set its priorities in the year to come.
"BUILD YOUR OWN BUDGET" FORUM SCHEDULE:
September 7, 6:30 p.m.: Mayor's Budget Workshop Alicia Ashman Branch
Library, 733 North High Point Road
September 14, 6:30 p.m.: Mayor's Budget Workshop Warner Park Community Recreation Center, 1625 Northport Drive
September 15, 6:30 p.m.: Mayor's Budget Workshop Catholic
Multicultural Center, 1862 Beld Street
The great achievement of No Child Left Behind is that it has forced the states to focus at last on educational inequality, the nation's most corrosive social problem. But it has been less successful at getting educators and politicians to see the education problem in a global context, and to understand that this country is rapidly losing ground to the nations we compete with for high-skilled jobs that require a strong basis in math and science.
American taxpayers have heard a fair amount about the fact that their children lag behind the children of Britain, France, Germany and Japan. But American students are also bested by nations like Poland, Ireland and the Czech Republic. Worst of all, they fall further and further behind their peers abroad the longer they stay in school.
"We have to turn things around right away," he said. "They didn't bring me in to be safe. They brought me in to be a change maker."
So he has tossed out troublemaking students and offered ambitious plans for historic schools Crispus Attucks and Shortridge. He's demanded more from all, from teachers to students to janitors.
White has been the city's top newsmaker since becoming superintendent of the state's largest school system July 1. He seems to have commandeered space on the front page.
An observation on what makes a good school board member
The first paragraph of the link recommended by Barb Schrank says:
An effective school board plays an important watchdog role in keeping your local school on track, and setting policies that affect your child and your school. The school board sets the vision and goals for the school district, and holds the district accountable for results. One school board member cannot do the job alone. Effective school board members contribute their unique talents while collaborating and working as a team with other board members.
I find the Madison Board of Education and superintendent do well on collaboration, except for attacking Ruth Robarts, but I'd like to see the board improve dramatically on being a watchdog, setting policy, setting the vision and goals for the district, and holding the district accountable for results.
Great Schools a non-profit California organization writes about what it means to be a great school board member.
A North Carolina school board looked out 10 years asking where they wanted to be and set annual goals accordingly: "Griffin [a school board member in a North Carolina school district] began his first term on the board by asking the tough question: “Where do we want our schools to be in 2010 and how will we know that we have gotten there?” He then worked with his board and superintendent to set the vision and goals for their district. When a new superintendent was hired, he insisted that the adopted school district goals be written into his contract, and that the superintendent be evaluated annually based on the goals."
Milwaukee Public Schools teachers will begin shouldering a larger share of the costs of their health care under an arbitrator's ruling issued Tuesday.
The decision ended 2 1/2 years of work on a two-year contract for more than 6,000 teachers with a victory for the School Board and the administration of Superintendent William Andrekopoulos.
After management and the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association deadlocked - almost entirely over health insurance issues - the dispute went to the arbitrator, Marquette University Law School Professor Jay Grenig, who was required to pick between the final offers of each side without making any changes.
Under the MPS plan, teachers would begin paying portions of the cost of their health care, including deductibles and co-pays on many services. Administrators say the district pays more than 60 cents in fringe benefits for every dollar it pays in salaries.
By mid-December of 2005, a task force appointed by the Madison School Board will make recommendations about future school construction and possible school boundary changes in the West and Memorial High School areas of the district. In the following article from The Capital Times, August 30, writer Cliff Miller reports that developer Gary Gorman has withdrawn from his role in the redevelopment of a large apartment complex adjacent to Leopold Elementary School. The complex---Ridgewood Country Club Estates---has housed low-income families whose children have attended Leopold and Chavez Elementary Schools. The nature of the new housing and the timing of the redevelopment could have significant implications for west side elementary school enrollments, particularly the future enrollment at Leopold School.
Gorman drops Ridgewood plans
FITCHBURG - Redevelopment of Ridgewood Country Club Estates will move forward, new owner E.J. Plesko and Mayor Tom Clauder promised, despite Monday's stunning withdrawal from the project by Madison developer Gary Gorman in a disagreement over issues of "vision" and decision-making control with the 52-acre apartment complex's new owner.
"After a series of discussions with E.J. Plesko & Associates, the new owner of Ridgewood, our team concluded that we do not share a common vision for the property and regrettably had no choice but to withdraw," Gorman announced in a press release Monday afternoon.
Plesko pledged in a statement released this morning to continue to redevelop the property: "I want to assure the community of Fitchburg that our commitment is absolutely solid and that we have taken immediate steps to move this project forward."
Explaining his withdrawal as developer, Gorman said, "There aren't specific things, although I think it's fair to say E.J.'s vision is more conventional than ours. We truly embraced the urban village type of approach. He's more conventional. Nobody's right and nobody's wrong."
Plesko, a Madison investor, settled a foreclosure action against the 832-apartment complex's West Allis owners two weeks ago by buying it for a reported $29 million from bankers holding the mortgage.
"The real estate redevelopment business is a continuing process and a business that is not without bumps in the road," Plesko said in the statement. "We are moving forward with this project. We enjoyed working with Gary Gorman and his folks, and we are putting the team together to accomplish what we set out to do. We have an excellent working relationship with Fitchburg Mayor Tom Clauder and the City Council, and we'll continue on that road as we move the project forward."
Clauder said Monday he assured fellow city officials and staff, "We're changing the jockey, we're still going (forward.)" Clauder said Gorman called him on his cell phone while the mayor was driving Sunday afternoon. Hearing Gorman's decision, "I almost hit a big old oak tree," Clauder confessed.
Clauder and other officials persuaded Gorman, a Fitchburg resident, to take on the redevelopment project after a series of discussions earlier this year. The city has been working with Gorman to write an urban renewal plan for the physically and financially neglected neighborhood. The city now must shift gears to work with Plesko, who apparently has assumed the added role of developer.
Gorman said originally Plesko was to be the owner, Gary Gorman & Associates the developer and decision maker. Discussions in the following two weeks yielded a different picture.
"E.J. wanted to have a vigorous voice in the process, and I came to the conclusion that you can't have two pilots flying the airplane." "He has a $30 million investment and I don't," said Gorman, a high-profile developer behind several other projects under way or being planned in Fitchburg, Madison and other communities in Wisconsin and other states.
After Plesko's announcement of buying the Ridgewood complex, Gorman described a vision of an "urban village" containing rental and owner-occupied apartments, condominiums and houses within walking distance to shopping, open space, recreation and other amenities.
Plesko's assumption of control leaves in question those ideas as well as the fate of the city-owned Nine Springs Golf Course, an issue that aroused strong concern of residents during public meetings on the project early this year.
Clauder noted that except for the golf course, "It's private property. It doesn't belong to the city."
Pleska said he had retained Fiduciary Real Estate of Milwaukee to continue as property manager while redevelopment continues. In addition, Madison-based Suby, Von Haden & Associates will consult on the project, a new real estate legal counsel will be hired, the current urban land master planner will be retained and a highly respected redevelopment company will become part of the team.
Conn. Files Long-Awaited Lawsuit Challenging No Child Left Behind Act
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has made good on his nearly 5-month-old threat to sue the U.S. Department of Education over the No Child Left Behind Act, making his state the first to take its objections about the law to the federal courts.
Filed Aug. 22 in U.S. District Court in Hartford, the state’s complaint in Connecticut v. Spellings argues that federal funding to the state for the No Child Left Behind law falls far short of what is needed to meet the law’s testing and accountability requirements. The suit contends the failure to fully fund the law violates a provision in the nearly 4-year-old education statute itself that says states will not be required “to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this act.”
From Education Week, August 22, 2005
By Jeff Archer
“Our message today is: Give up the unfunded mandates, or give us the money,” Mr. Blumenthal said at a press conference in his office after filing the lawsuit.
Although surrounded by key Connecticut education leaders and policymakers who expressed their support at the announcement, Mr. Blumenthal said no other state had joined the legal action. Since first threatening to sue over the law in April, he has said one of the reasons he has waited to do so was to give other states a chance to take part.
The 28-page complaint recounts how Connecticut’s attempts to get waivers of some of the student-assessment provisions in the No Child Left Behind law have been repeatedly denied in recent months by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
In particular, Connecticut education officials sought unsuccessfully to get out of the law’s requirement that they expand their testing system—which assesses students in mathematics and reading in grades 4, 6, and 8—to cover the entire span of grades 3-8. An estimate by the state department of education pegs the cost of putting in place those and other additional assessments called for in the law at $41.6 million by 2008, compared with $33.6 million that the state is slated to receive from the federal government by then for test implementation.
“The additional tests, as imposed by the requirements of NCLB, are of questionable merit,” state Commissioner of Education Betty J. Sternberg said at the Aug. 22 press conference. “There is no research base that tells us that additional testing of this type will yield better results.”
Connecticut also has unsuccessfully sought flexibility in the law’s requirements on the testing of special education students and students who are learning English.
The state’s legal case rests largely on the so-called unfunded-mandates provision in the No Child Left Behind law, which says that “nothing in this chapter shall be construed to authorize” the federal government to “mandate a state or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this chapter.” The complaint also cites the spending clause in Article I of the U.S. Constitution, which has been construed by the courts as requiring Congress to make unambiguous any conditions attached to states’ acceptance of federal money.
Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Education Department, called the lawsuit “unfortunate” in a written statement. Arguing that Secretary Spellings has worked to meet states' concerns about the law, she added nonetheless that testing in each grade, from 3-8, is needed to catch problems in a timely manner.
“Today's action doesn't bring the state any closer to closing its achievement gap, which is among the largest in the nation,” Ms. Aspey said.
In June, the department asked a judge in U.S. District Court in Detroit to dismiss a similar lawsuit filed by the National Education Association, arguing that the No Child Left Behind Act is not an unfunded mandate because states are under no obligation to take the federal money allocated for it. The department’s motion is pending. ("U.S. Asks Court to Dismiss Lawsuit Over NCLB," July 13, 2005.)
Turning that argument around at his press conference, Attorney General Blumenthal said that by threatening to withhold money from the state if it doesn’t comply with the law’s requirements, the federal government is putting hundreds of millions of dollars for Connecticut’s schools at risk. That fear, he added, is partly why other states haven’t joined the suit, although he left open the possibility that some other states may yet do so.
“That’s money that goes to schools that serve our neediest children,” he said. “It goes to school lunch programs, after-school programs, reading-achievement programs, all of the kinds of programs that are necessary for meeting the objectives and goals of No Child Left Behind.”
The federal Education Department has 60 days to file a legal response, which could be a motion to dismiss the case.
Meanwhile, the case has been assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Mark R. Kravitz.
“We’re hoping he will expedite our case, and it won’t be years, but a matter of months,” Mr. Blumenthal said.
At Memorial, Athletic Director Tim Ritchie said he hopes kids who get cut will find a team in an expanded intramural basketball league through Madison School Community Recreation.
"You hope that you have a good intramural program that keeps kids working towards making the team next year," he said.
I worry about the kids for whom basketball or volleyball would have been their only school activity. And I'm even more worried about the kids who won't try out because they fear not making the grade.
Those are the missing kids that Joe Frontier worries about.
Sometimes, there's no real way to know the true cost of saving money.
Lampert-Smith mischaracterizes this decision as a "cost of saving money." The Madison School District's budget grows annually (including the generation of grant funds, which is to be commended), this year to $320M+. Rather, the Madison School Board's decision to eliminate no-cut freshman sports reflects choices made, or not made, such as:
Shifting programs to MSCR, which is funded by Fund 80. Fund 80 is a growing, controversial source of local property tax revenue that is not constrained by state spending caps.
Loehrke's recent speech to the Florence schools provides a roadmap for such decision making: putting students first.
What can you do? Send your thoughts on these matters to the Madison School Board: comments@madison.k12.wi.us and ask 2006 Madison School Board Candidates about these issues. Two seats are up for election in April, 2006; those currently held by Bill Keys and Juan Jose Lopez.
Isthmus featured a story on the concerns of Juan Lopez about MMSD hiring of people of color.
I sent Juan the following e-mail telling him that I shared his concern:
Juan,
I agree completely with your concerns about minority hiring in the district, as reported in Isthmus. When I attended committee and board meetings in the past, Valencia Douglas was the only district staff of color (unless Clarence attended). Now that she's gone, we'll only have a sea of white faces! So sad.
Ed Blume
As an afterthought in a second e-mail, I said:
Juan,
As chair of the Committee on Human Resources, you're in a great spot to look at district hiring. When you do, I hope that you can make some changes.
Ed
He responded in the following e-mail:
Mr. Blume,
Apparently you have not been closely following the BOE because I have been involved directly and indirectly in the district hiring especially as it relates to hiring people of color. I was also involved prior to being elected to the BOE as a member of the District's Affirmative Action and the Superintendent's Human Relations Advisory Committee. The only other people I know who have been as involved and outspoken were Jerry Smith, Jr. and Ray Allen. Johnny Winston and Shwaw Vang have also begun to make a difference. Not only have we been critics, we have actually done something about it. Thank you and have a great weekend.
Juan Jose Lopez
And I responded:
Juan,
I meant my comments as a compliment and support. You seemed to take them as a criticism.
I sincerely wish you luck in getting more people of color into the top administrative positions in the district.
It's been a concern of mine for years. I did a lot of analysis on the issue and tried to get the Cap Times, State Journal, and Isthmus to write stories, but they never did. If I'd had the blog at those times, I would have had a place to post my analysis. Now it's out of date, and the data is harder to find to redo the analysis because the district no longer posts reports on minority hiring on the Web site. The last useful information was posted in a press release in 1995. I'd love to see the district prepare a similar analysis comparing the 1995 figures on minority employees to today's figures.
Dallas Schools Require Some Principals To Learn Spanish
The Dallas School Board has approved a policy that will require some school administrators to learn Spanish. The new policy, approved by a 5-4 vote on Aug. 25, now requires that all elementary school principals who work in schools in which at least half of the students are English-language learners, or formerly carried that designation, must learn the native language of those students.
From Education Week, August 26, 2005
By Mary Ann Zehr
In the Dallas Independent School District, where 65 percent of the system’s 160,000 students are Hispanic, that basically means some principals must learn Spanish. Those administrators have one year from now to enroll in a Spanish course and three years to become “proficient,” which isn’t defined in the new policy. The district will pay for the courses.
Elementary schools that have received a “recognized” or “exemplary” label in the state’s accountability system are exempted from the policy. The policy applies similarly to middle and high schools with large numbers of English-language learners, but those schools are permitted to select a principal, vice principal, or dean of instruction to fulfill the requirement—rather than just the principal.
“I’ve never heard of a school board ever requiring this,” said Dora Johnson, a senior program associate who monitors school foreign-language issues at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington. She said some police departments have mandated that officers learn rudimentary Spanish, but she hasn’t heard of a school district requiring its administrators to learn the language.
Opponents Critique Policy
The policy is the brainchild of Joe May, a Dallas school board trustee and Mexican-American. Mr. May grew up in a Spanish-speaking household in Laredo, Texas. He first learned English after he enrolled in school.
The policy is intended to increase parent involvement in schools with large percentages of parents who don’t speak English, Mr. May said. “The new [educational] approaches that are coming out are collaborative approaches,” he said. “That means working together with parents. If you are going to be applying it to kids whose parents don’t speak English, the only way that’s going to happen is through the requirement that the principal learns the language of the parent.”
But Ron Price, a board trustee who voted against the policy, said it is unfair. “To ask people who have active lives and busy schedules to learn a second language and become proficient is almost impossible in some cases,” he said.
It is important for school staff members to be able to communicate with parents who don’t speak English, he said, but the responsibility for that shouldn’t be put on administrators. Schools have other options, such as hiring bilingual liaisons to talk with parents, he noted.
“When you connect a person’s employment to the ability to speak a second language, that might be unconstitutional, and it’s un-American,” Mr. Price said.
In response to the characterization of the policy as “un-American,” Mr. May gave a little laugh.
“I chuckle,” he said, “because this is how naïve these people are. In Texas, a good portion of Hispanics are raised speaking Spanish and when they go to public schools, they learn English.”
Mr. May said the new policy will affect almost 50 schools in the district. Out of 14 elementary schools that have a high percentage of English-language learners, a dozen already have a principal who speaks both English and Spanish, he pointed out. But only about half of the middle and high schools with large percentages of English-language learners have a bilingual administrator, he added.
Rubric for School Improvement Posted on Performance and Achievment Blog
The Performance and Achievement Blog contains a new posting describing a rubric for school improvement. The rubrics allow one to estimate the current status of the schools and District with regard to the following: Student Achievement, Quality Planning, Professional Development, School Leadership, Partnerships with Community and Parents, Continuous Improvement and Evaluation.
Rep. Black: Democrat to Offer Constitutional Amendment to Limit Governor's Veto Power
Representative Spencer Black will introduce a constitutional amendment that would limit the power and scope of the Governor’s veto.
Black said “This amendment is an attempt to move beyond the partisan gridlock and political game playing that has stymied efforts to reform the partial veto power for more than three decades. Amendments to our constitution should not be political footballs – they should be thoughtful attempts to improve the functioning of state government.”
Black said the constitutional amendment he will offer is based on the recommendation of the bi-partisan Legislative Council Study Committee on Improving Wisconsin’s Fiscal Management. Black’s proposed amendment to the State Constitution provides that the Governor may not use the veto to create new laws not passed by the Legislature. It would also prohibit the Governor from increasing appropriations beyond what was approved by the Legislature.
“This amendment would eliminate so-called ‘creative vetoes’ that have allowed Governors to single handedly write new laws and make new appropriations. The amendment would restore a true partial veto. The veto was originally intended to be a negative power, a check on the power of the Legislature,” said Black. “Instead, because of the State Supreme Court interpretations, the Wisconsin partial veto now allows the Governor, by creatively deleting words or digits to write new law, to raise taxes or make appropriations without legislative approval.”
“What was originally intended as a check on the power of one branch of government (the Legislature) has instead become an excessive grant of power to another branch (the Governor). The current veto power of Wisconsin’s Governor far exceeds that of any other Governor in the country or of the President,” Black noted. “The Wisconsin partial veto is a deep infringement on the separation of powers designed by our founding fathers,” stated Black.
Black noted that attempts to reform the partial veto have been considered by the Legislature for at least three decades, but dropped as the party control of the Governor’s office has changed. “In the mid seventies, Tommy Thompson led the charge to amend the constitution, but he dropped his support when a Republican (Lee Dreyfus) was elected Governor. Likewise, as Attorney General, Jim Doyle supported reform, he has now dropped his support for an amendment. Interestingly, the Republicans who are now sponsoring an amendment were silent when Tommy Thompson vastly expanded the use of the partial veto in the 80’s and 90’s. I suspect that if a Republican were to win the Governor’s race in 2006, some of the Republican legislators would drop their support for a constitutional amendment like a hot potato.”
Black said three factors that may allow the amendment to move beyond the usual partisan bickering are:
1. It is sponsored by a legislator from the party of the Governor.
2. It is the wording agreed to by a bi-partisan committee after much study and discussion.
3. It would not be effective until a new Governor is sworn in 2011. Otherwise, since an amendment would have to receive second consideration and a referendum vote in the 2007-08 session, the amendment would affect the sitting Governor and become a partisan battleground.
The proposed amendment would add the following language to Article V of the state constitution:
“In approving an appropriation bill in part, the governor may reduce the dollar amount of an appropriation as shown in the bill, but may not increase it.
In approving an appropriation bill in part, the governor may not approve any law that the legislature did not authorize as part of the enrolled bill.”
Press release from Rep. Black's office
8/24/2005
State Capitol P. O. Box 8952 Madison, WI 53708 (608) 266-7521
How Will the Madison School Board Evaluate the Superintendent? Stay tuned.
Since 1999, the Madison School Board has had a written employment contract with Superintendent Art Rainwater. It contains a job evaluation process that is fair to the superintendent and that requires the Board to perform its most important function, setting clear goals for the district.
Before the first day of each school year, the Board must set performance goals that are "measurable to the extent possible". By July 30 of the next year, the Board must meet with the superintendent, review his progress toward meeting the performance goals, review his self-evaluation, and review confidential evaluations by other administrators in the district.
If the Board followed the contract, the superintendent and the public would know what's expected of the most powerful employee in terms of "improvement in programs, projects and activities to be undertaken" during the upcoming year.
According to the MMSD Human Resources department, the last time the Board evaluated the superintendent was in 2002. It did not follow all of the requirements of the contract in that evaluation.
The first day of the school year is September 1. The Board has not set measurable performance goals for the superintendent for 2005-06, although it has had two discussions on the subject.
When the evaluation does occur, I suggest that we all compare the provisions of the contract with the evaluation. If the Board does not set measurable performance goals for the superintendent in 2005-06, it will again fail in its duty under the contract.It will again fail to inform the public about its priorities for our children and fail to hold the superintendent accoutable under the priorities.
The contract spells out the evaluation process very clearly.
PERFORMANCE EXPECTATIONS: Each year before the first day of school, the Board and superintendent must establish performance expectations for the next year in writing based on his duties and responsibilities under the contract and any other criteria mutally agree upon.
MEASURABLE OUTCOMES: "To the extent possible, all performance expectations shall have measurable outcomes".
JULY 30 DEADLINE: After setting performance expectations, the Board must meet with the superintendent to discuss his evaluation no later than July 30.
Two types of appraisals are required.
SPECIFIC RESULTS & ACCOMPLISHMENTS BASED ON PERFORMANCE EXPECTATIONS: The written performance expectations must include goals that reflect the superintendent's priorities for the improvement programs, projects and activities to be undertaken. Prior to meeting with the Board for his evaluation, the superintendent must complete a self-evaluation that summarizes his progress on each goal.
5 PERFORMANCE CATEGORIES---PLANNING, ORGANIZING, LEADING, SUPERVISING AND JOB KNOWLEDGE: In each category the Board must indicate the type of evidence of performance and data sources that will be used to evaluate the superintendent's performance.
SURVEYS OF OTHER ADMINISTRATORS: The Board must distribute surveys about the superintendent's performance in the five categories to individuals who report directly to him and a random selection of other administrators.
Why not target school ads at adults, not students?
No doubt that the Madison Schools would benefit from revenues that might come through increased advertising, as recently proposed by Johnny Winston Jr., chair of the Board of Education's Finance and Operations Committee.
On the other hand, increasing advertising to our students is undesirable for many reasons. Schools should not treat students as consumers, but as learners. Our students already live in an environment saturated with encouragements to consume. In addition, many of the advertisers with strong incentives to advertise to young people sell food products that are not in the kids' best interest.
My hope is that the Finance and Operations Committee will consider limiting any expansion of advertising opportunities to ads that target adults, not students.
Below is my proposal to this committee.
To: Johnny Winston, Jr. & Finance Committee
From: Ruth Robarts
Date: August 18, 2005
RE: Proposal for revised advertising policy for MMSD
I agree with you that the Madison School Board must consider whether there are significant opportunities to increase district revenues through increased advertising. At the same time, I am very reluctant to support more advertising to our students. In my opinion, we are already providing too many venues for advertising questionable products to students, particularly food and beverages that are unhealthy or are poor substitutes for healthier products.
Therefore, I propose that the Finance and Operations Committee consider limiting its exploration of this issue to researching the opportunities for advertising directed at adults. For starters, we have a web site and two cable TV channels. We have newsletters that go from schools to parents regularly as well as district publications that circulate widely. We have also a fleet of trucks and vans that move around the district every day. The demographics of our web site users, cable TV audience and recipients of school and district newsletters and publications alone should be attractive to many businesses that depend on adult expenditures, such as car dealerships, realtors, apartment managers, technology providers—especially those who sell education-related technology such as virtual learning tools---hardware stores, etc.
One advantage of this approach would be that we would protect our students from more marketing during the school day and school activities, while offering businesses that sell to adults a variety of venues and a good audience for their ads. Another would be that potential advertisers might be more willing to discuss their interest publicly, during our exploration of policy changes, because they would not be seen as preying on young consumers.
Obviously, if we raised significant dollars through ads, for example, on our cable TV offerings to the general public, we could use those dollars to reduce our dependence on taxes raised for “community services” and begin to expand the TV coverage of all Board of Education meetings. Dollars raised through other ads could be used to reduce the tax revenues that go to Business Services or Building Services.
The only change needed in our current policy on ads would be to add the words "to students". See below.
Policy 3660 - Advertising
The Board does not endorse the advertisement of any commercial or non-commercial product, materials, or service to students. Employees shall neither distribute to students nor otherwise use in school instructional or non-instructional materials that contain commercial or non-commercial advertising except as provided in Procedure 3660.
Advertising
1. Non-instructional Materials:
a. Non-instructional materials such as calendars and posters that contain advertising may be placed in schools by employees, subject to the approval of the principal of such school.
b. Non-instructional materials that contain advertising that are not covered in 1.a. above shall not be distributed to pupils or used in schools except as approved by the Superintendent or her/his designee.
2. Instructional Materials:
Instructional materials that contain advertising shall be selected in accordance with the program materials selection criteria and may be used in schools if such materials are not obtainable through usual educational resources.
Board & Admin Don't Know Whether Read 180 Received Funding
Since May I've been asking the administration and board members, collectively and individually, whether the budget for this school year includes funding for a promising middle school remedial reading program called Read 180. The headline on a State Journal story on January 29, 2005, read: District Eyes Reading Program For Expansion. The subheadline said: Teachers Want More Students In The Read 180 Program, Which Has Raised Reading Levels Quickly.
But NO ONE seems to know whether the program received any funding at all in the budget!
At least no one has answered me when I've asked by e-mail and at various committee meetings of the board.
The failure of anyone to know highlights one of the weaknesses of the budget process, that is, no one (board and administration alike) has much control over academic achievement when no one knows whether a promising program did or did not get funding.
The MMSD needs a budget process that tells the board and administration, as well as the public, three things about spending on important programs and budget areas. In fact, we all need to know:
1) How much was budgeted last year.
2) How much was spent last year.
3) How much is budgeted for this year.
Until the budget includes these pieces of information, no one knows how taxpayer money is being spent.
According to a story in the Capital Times, the University of Wisconsin may scrap software that the MMSD is attempting to use. Like the UW, which spent 6 years and millions beyond the budget for the software, the MMSD devoted "16 hours a day" to get the software to generate a budget for the board to consider in the spring of 2005.
1. Keep our school in our community. Make the school a focal point in our community. Create opportunities for community involvement in our school. Maintain and increase school pride.
2. Balance the budget. Keep looking for costs savings that do not negatively affect the education of our students. Continue plans to balance the budget after the referendum money ends.
3. Provide the best education possible within the budget. Educate the most students possible for the dollars allocated by the revenue cap.
4. Improve test scores. Results must improve in every area tested. Hold the administration and teachers accountable for the test scores. Find ways to obtain test scores that make our students, parents, teachers, administrators, and members of our community proud.
5. Improve teachers. Reward the good teachers. Retrain, eliminate, or replace any ineffective teachers. Increase morale. Require accountability.
6. Improve administration. Reward the good administrators. Retrain, eliminate, or replace any ineffective administrators. Review and recommend updates to school procedures. Require accountability.
7. Improve the school board. Seek responsible board members. Hold the school board accountable for reaching the goals of the board.
8. Work with the parents of home-schooled and parochial school students to see if our school can find ways to help the students achieve a well-rounded education.
9. Listen & Learn. Listen to the concerned members of our community, students, parents, teachers, administrators, and staff. Implement the constructive suggestions of the Steering Committee and Action Teams for Long Range Planning that relate to board goals.
10. Pay attention to details. Review and update board policies and school procedures. Update union contracts. Require a day’s work for a day’s pay. Monitor expenses. Protect the assets of the school district.
I have been the President of the Weyauwega-Fremont School Board for the last four years. I own a small realty and appraisal company,a small computer, and Internet website development company. I recently founded a non-profit charitable corporation to help underprivileged children in Wisconsin. I serve on the school board primarily as a concerned parent of school aged children and as a taxpayer
I always tell my employees “Don’t bring me a problem without bringing me at least two possible solutions.” So I’m going to tell you what I perceive to be the problem and give you some possible solutions. Some people perceive the problem to be not enough money for education and their only solution is to dig deeper into taxpayer’s pockets. From where I sit, the problem is “How do we maintain or improve the quality of education in Wisconsin while controlling the current and future costs to taxpayers?”
Most people associated with schools in Wisconsin are worried about some type of tax freeze because they think it will limit the money available to schools. I am not. Here’s why: Historically, school districts budgeted for what they thought they would need to run their respective district and raised taxes to match. Then, around 1993, as part of the QEO law changes, the State of Wisconsin established revenue caps. So instead of a bottomless billfold, school districts suddenly had a fixed amount of taxpayer’s money placed into their billfold each year. They had to learn to spend no more than they made, just like most people with regular jobs. However, instead of learning to do with what was available, school districts did things like promote referendums to exceed the revenue cap.
Before I got on the Board, our school district tried three times until they finally received voter approval for a referendum. When I got on the Board, I was told that our district would have to plan for another referendum when the existing one ran out in order to keep our district afloat. Demographics showed that our school district would be switching from an increasing enrollment to a declining enrollment. I have observed that an increasing enrollment hides many financial problems while a declining enrollment emphasizes the problems. Our school district had been running deficits budgets and was depleting its fund balance to pay regular expanses. Our mill rate was one of the highest in the area. Our administrative overhead was one of the highest in the county. Our employees’ health insurance costs were one of the highest in our neighborhood. Our post retirement costs were the highest in our conference. Yet, everyone said they expected another referendum to sustain the bloat. No one wanted to tighten the belt.
Collaboration or collusion: What should the public expect from MMSD-MTI Task Force on Health Insurance Costs?
In a recent letter to the editor of Isthmus, KJ Jakobson asks "whether the new joint district-union task force for investigating health insurance costs be a truly collaborative effort to solve a very costly problem? Or will it instead end up being a collusion to maintain the status quo?"
Here is the full text of the letter, published on August 10, 2005, and her challenge to the Madison School Board.
A Conflict of Interest
John Matthews would like us to believe that he was fully cleared in 1994 of any conflict of interest concerning his dual role as Madison Teachers Inc. union official and board member of Wisconsin Physicians Service ("District Ties to WPS Prove Costly", Isthmus, 6/10/05). This is not the case.
On February 1, 1994, then Commissioner of Insurance Josephine Musser stated in a letter to school board member Nancy Mistele that her office did not address numerous concerns that Mistele had raised, including "conflict of interest issues which may arise under labor law or raise questions as a matter of public policy" and "the reciprocal concern of a potential conflict of interest by a union official who is involved in negotiating coverage for union membership".
Musser suggested that the Madison school district "may wish to give serious attention to a number of questions, which are not within the scope of this office's authority" and that the district may want "to seek further clarification of this issue" from the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.
I have been unable to uncover any documentation in the WERC database that the school board ever followed up on Musser's suggestions. I believe it is time to do so.
Given the history of Matthews holding health insurance hostage at the bargaining table and the district not raising a serious challenge in recent years, Matthews' allegiance to WPS makes me wonder: Will the new joint district-union task force for investigating health insurance costs be a truly collaborative effort to solve a very costly problem? Or will it instead end up being a collusion to maintain the status quo?
Junk Food Nation: Who's to Blame for Childhood Obesity?
In recent months the major food companies have been trying hard to
convince Americans that they feel the pain of our expanding waistlines,
especially when it comes to kids. Kraft announced it would no longer
market Oreos to younger children, McDonald's promoted itself as a salad
producer and Coca-Cola said it won't advertise to kids under 12. But
behind the scenes it's hardball as usual, with the junk food giants
pushing the Bush Administration to defend their interests. The recent
conflict over what America eats, and the way the government promotes
food, is a disturbing example of how in Bush's America corporate
interests trump public health, public opinion and plain old common sense.
The latest salvo in the war on added sugar and fat came July 14- 15,
when the Federal Trade Commission held hearings on childhood obesity and
food marketing.
by Gary Ruskin and Juliet Schor The Nation, August 29, 2005
Despite the fanfare, industry had no cause for concern;
FTC chair Deborah Majoras had declared beforehand that the commission
will do absolutely nothing to stop the rising flood of junk food
advertising to children. In June the Department of Agriculture denied a
request from our group, Commercial Alert, to enforce existing rules
forbidding mealtime sales in school cafeterias of "foods of minimal
nutritional value"--i.e., junk foods and soda pop. The department
admitted that it didn't know whether schools are complying with the
rules, but, frankly, it doesn't give a damn. "At this time, we do not
intend to undertake the activities or measures recommended in your
petition," wrote Stanley Garnett, head of the USDA's Child Nutrition
Division.
Conflict about junk food has intensified since late 2001, when a Surgeon
General's report called obesity an "epidemic." Since that time, the
White House has repeatedly weighed in on the side of Big Food. It worked
hard to weaken the World Health Organization's global anti-obesity
strategy and went so far as to question the scientific basis for "the
linking of fruit and vegetable consumption to decreased risk of obesity
and diabetes." Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy
Thompson--then our nation's top public-health officer--even told members
of the Grocery Manufacturers Association to "'go on the offensive'
against critics blaming the food industry for obesity," according to a
November 12, 2002, GMA news release.
Last year, during the reauthorization of the children's nutrition
programs, Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois attempted to
insulate the government's nutrition guidelines from the intense industry
pressure that has warped the process to date. He proposed a modest
amendment to move the guidelines from the USDA to the comparatively more
independent Institute of Medicine. The food industry, alarmed about the
switch, secured a number of meetings at the White House to get it to
exert pressure on Fitzgerald. One irony of this fight was that the key
industry lobbying came from the American Dietetic Association, described
by one Congressional staffer as a "front for the food groups."
Fitzgerald held firm but didn't succeed in enacting his amendment before
he left Congress last year.
By that time the industry's lobbying effort had borne fruit, or perhaps
more accurately, unhealthy alternatives to fruit. The new federal
guidelines no longer contain a recommendation for sugar intake, although
they do tell people to eat foods with few added sugars. The redesigned
icon for the guidelines, created by a company that does extensive work
for the junk food industry, shows no food, only a person climbing stairs.
Growing industry influence is also apparent at the President's Council
on Physical Fitness. What companies has the government invited to be
partners with the council's Challenge program? Coca-Cola, Burger King,
General Mills, Pepsico and other blue chip members of the "obesity
lobby." In January the council's chair, former NFL star Lynn Swann, took
money to appear at a public relations event for the National Automatic
Merchandising Association, a vending machine trade group activists have
been battling on in-school sales of junk food.
Not a lot of subtlety is required to understand what's driving
Administration policy. It's large infusions of cash. In 2004 "Rangers,"
who bundled at least $200,000 each to the Bush/Cheney campaign, included
Barclay Resler, vice president for government and public affairs at
Coca-Cola; Robert Leebern Jr., president of federal affairs at Troutman
Sanders PAG, lobbyist for Coca-Cola; Richard Hohlt of Hohlt & Co.,
lobbyist for Altria, which owns about 85 percent of Kraft foods; and
José "Pepe" Fanjul, president, vice chairman and COO of Florida Crystals
Corp., one of the nation's major sugar producers.
Hundred-thousand-dollar men include Kirk Blalock and Marc Lampkin, both
Coke lobbyists, and Joe Weller, chairman and CEO, Nestle USA. Altria
also gave $250,000 to Bush's inauguration this year, and Coke and Pepsi
gave $100,000 each. These gifts are in addition to substantial sums
given during the 2000 campaign.
For their money, the industry has been able to buy into a strategy on
obesity and food marketing that mirrors the approach taken by Big
Tobacco. That's hardly a surprise, given that some of the same companies
and personnel are involved: Junk food giants Kraft and Nabisco are both
majority-owned by tobacco producer Philip Morris, now renamed Altria.
Similarity number one is the denial that the problem (obesity) is caused
by the product (junk food). Instead, lack of exercise is fingered as the
culprit, which is why McDonald's, Pepsi, Coke and others have been
handing out pedometers, funding fitness centers and prodding kids to
move around. When the childhood obesity issue first burst on the scene,
HHS and the Centers for Disease Control funded a bizarre ad campaign
called Verb, whose ostensible purpose was to get kids moving. This
strategy has been evident in the halls of Congress as well. During child
nutrition reauthorization hearings, the man some have called the Senator
from Coca-Cola, Georgia's Zell Miller, parroted industry talking points
when he claimed that children are "obese not because of what they eat at
lunchrooms in schools but because, frankly, they sit around on their
duffs watching Eminem on MTV and playing video games." And that, of
course, is the fault not of food marketers but of parents. Miller's
office shut down a Senate Agriculture Committee staff discussion of a
ban on soda pop in high schools by refreshing their memories that Coke
is based in Georgia.
A related ploy is to deny the nutritional status of individual food
groups, claiming that there are no "good" or "bad" foods, and that all
that matters is balance. So, for example, when the Administration
attacked the WHO's global anti-obesity initiative, it criticized what it
called the "unsubstantiated focus on 'good' and 'bad' foods." Of course,
if fruits and vegetables aren't healthy, then Coke and chips aren't
unhealthy. While such a strategy is so preposterous as to be laughable,
it is already having real effects. Less than a month after Cadbury
Schweppes, the candy and soda company, gave a multimillion-dollar grant
to the American Diabetes Association, the association's chief medical
and scientific officer claimed that sugar has nothing to do with
diabetes, or with weight. Industry has also bankrolled front groups like
the Center for Consumer Freedom, an increasingly influential Washington
outfit that demonizes public-health advocates as the "food police" and
promotes the industry point of view.
Meanwhile, public opinion is solidly behind more restrictions on junk
food marketing aimed at children, especially in schools. A February Wall
Street Journal poll found that 83 percent of American adults believe
"public schools need to do a better job of limiting children's access to
unhealthy foods like snack foods, sugary soft drinks and fast food." Two
bills recently introduced in Congress, Massachusetts Senator Ted
Kennedy's Prevention of Childhood Obesity Act and Iowa Senator Tom
Harkin's Healthy Lifestyles and Prevention (HeLP) America Act, both
place significant restrictions on the ability of junk food producers to
market in schools.
Interestingly, this is a crossover issue between red and blue states.
Concern about obesity and excessive junk food marketing to kids is
shared by people across the political spectrum, and some conservatives,
such as Texas Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs and the Eagle Forum's
Phyllis Schlafly, as well as California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger,
have argued for restricting junk food marketing to children. This may be
one of the reasons New York Senator Hillary Clinton has once again
become vocal on the topic of marketing to children, although Senator
Clinton has called not for government intervention but merely for
industry self-regulation, requesting that the companies "be more
responsible about the effect they are having"--exactly the policy the
industry wants.
A vigorous government response would clearly garner the sympathy of the
majority of Americans. The growing chasm between what the public wants
and the Administration's protection of the profits of Big Food is a
powerful example of the decline of democracy in this country. Let them
eat chips!
Ads in Madison Schools: Correction of Capital Times article
Thanks to Christina Daglas for her coverage of the Madison School Board's "cautious" approach to increasing advertising in the schools. If there is serious business interest in more advertising, the Board must consider the possibilities and the public deserves advance notice that we may increase ads.
I am not, however, concerned "about businesses that, in (my) opinion, fail to advance positive messages in their advertisements, such as fast food companies", as the article states.
I said that I will not support more advertising of products that undermine our curriculum. I gave Coca-Cola ads as an example because I believe that ads for soft drinks undermine the messages of our health curriculum. The Board should not increase advertising for products whose consumption contributes to demonstrated increases in childhood obesity, diabetes and heart disease. We are already a venue for too many of these ads and products.
The debate about advertising in Madison schools continued Monday night as School Board members came a step closer to forming a subcommittee to examine the issue.
After years of stiff opposition to similar proposals, board members are being cautious. In a meeting of the Finance and Operations Committee, board member Johnny Winston Jr. said district policies currently do not allow advertising. But with tight budgets, no avenue should be overlooked, he said.
I cringe when I hear people in any organization discussing "our experts know the best", or generally advocating a top down, command and control approach. Paul Graham recently wrote a wonderful article on the lessons we can learn from "Open Source". He refers to open source software and blogging among other avocations. Graham includes three lessons from the open source and blogging worlds:
People work harder on stuff they like
The standard office environment is very unproductive
Physical education is one of 27 online courses now offered by the Minneapolis Public Schools, which had none four years ago. Thousands of other districts nationwide are adding online courses, said Susan Patrick, director of educational technology at the federal Department of Education.
"We're seeing just tremendous growth," Ms. Patrick said, "in enrollments and in the kinds of courses offered."
In a survey, the department estimated that there were 328,000 student enrollments in online courses offered by public schools during the 2002-3 year. Ms. Patrick said enrollments had probably doubled since then.
This is a great example of the "out of the box - non same service thinking" that is required today. Johnny's post illustrate's the District's same service financial challenges:
Revenue caps limit spending growth (though Madison spends $13K+ per student, among the highest in Wisconsin)
A "same service" budget approach has reached its' limit.
Choices need to be made, one of which could be growth in virtual tools.
Virtual programs may, in some cases and for some students, be far more effective. We all use virtual learning tools daily. I believe our children will increasingly do so as well.
Dear Editor:
Thank you for your comments regarding the reductions in Madison Metropolitan School District’s 4th and 5th grade elementary strings program and other Fine Arts programs. I personally know the importance of the strings program. I played the violin many years ago as a student at Lindbergh Elementary School. I continue to support Fine Arts programming. My board motions, budget amendments and voting record reflect those priorities. However, given our budgetary challenges I cannot make a strong commitment to any program in the future.
The reason that I cannot make this commitment is the reason for the threats to fine arts and public education funding itself. The MMSD like every other district in this state has a very difficult challenge with the state imposed revenue limits, state and federal mandates and high community expectations. The state imposed revenue caps allow a district to increase spending by only 2.6% every year. The percentage of everything else needed to operate the school district such as salaries, benefits, equipment, textbooks and utilities continue to increase beyond 2.6%. This leaves a “gap” in the budget, which in order to make up means we have to cut services or ask local taxpayers to increase their taxes to exceed the revenue cap. This is why the majority of the members of the Madison School Board voted to ask the community via referendum on May 24th for additional money for operating expenses. Although, this referendum failed, members of the school board made budget amendments that kept the 4th and 5th grade elementary strings program continuing at least one day a week. Additionally, the board decided to make additional cuts to restore smaller class sizes in elementary school gym, music and art classes. Making these decisions were very difficult and probably even more difficult for the Madison community to understand.
In closing, I share your feelings of frustration regarding the reduction of services to our school children. This is a very complex problem that is not only happening in Madison but around the state. For instance, the Florence County School District decided to close due to fiscal limitations that made it impossible to continue to operate an effective school district. I assure you that service reductions are not just targeted toward Fine Arts although very vocal advocates continue to make that assumption. Reductions have also been made in sports, academic class sizes, special education, bilingual resources, library services, building custodians, administration and other departments to the total of around $8 million dollars this year. If state and federal school financing does not change, coupled with the non-passage of future operating referenda will force the school board to make even more difficult decisions that affect our school district.
Although, the circumstances of school finance make things difficult, I am committed to providing a quality educational experience for all 25,000 students in this district. As a member of the Board of Education, I will always be equitable in reductions of service and try to think of alternatives for the MMSD to continue having a quality Fine Arts program as well as other educational and extra-curricular activities for students to learn and enjoy.
Johnny Winston, Jr. was elected to the board of education in 2004. Mr. Winston is currently Vice President and chairperson of the Finance and Operations committee. He is employed as a firefighter for the City of Madison. He is the father of three daughters including two school district graduates.
Madison School Board Workshop: Superintendent Review
The Madison School Board discussed their planned Superintendent Review (which has not been done for several years) at their recent workshop (7/18/2005). Watch the video or listen to an mp3 audio file (superintendent review discussion starts about 20 minutes into the audio clip)
Thanks to Ed Blume and Larry Winkler for their time capturing the video clips.
There were a number of interesting discussions in this 30 minute video clip, including the recent Long Range Planning Committee and the recent referenda
Madison School Board Workshop: Evaluate Business Services?
The Madison School Board had several interesting discussions Monday night. The first was a proposed 3rd party evaluation of the District's Business Services Department. This discussion is somewhat in response to the complaint that, given budget choices, the Madison School District lays off teachers rather than accountants.
The 50 minute video provides a very interesting look at the different perspectives that the Madison School Board Members have on evaluating district operations and general decision making. I thought Carol did a nice job making the discussion happen.
Carol Carstensen, Lawrie Kobza and Ruth Robarts provided written comments on the Business Services evaluation - click the link below (well worth reading).
I also understand that the Board will start looking at next year's budget this fall, rather than waiting until the spring.
Carol Carstensen's comments on the proposed business services review (PDF Version):
I suggest the RFP for business services be centered around these questions: As we face the need to make further cuts to the school district budget please:
1. identify ways that we can carry out our current functions more efficiently (in terms of time andlor staff)
2. identify the areaslfunctions that we can reduce and/or eliminate without harming the district's legal responsibilities;
a) with a O0/0 increase for next year
b) with a 3% decrease from this year's level
c) with a 5% decrease from this year's level
Lawrie Kobza's comments on the proposed business services evaluation (PDF Version):
While I like the idea of an external review of the business services and human resources budgets, I don't believe the proposed RFP will get us the information the Board and the public wants.
The Project Description as set forth in subsec. 1.2.1 of the RFP states as follows:
"The Board of Education is seeking a qualified consultant to study existing organizational and operational aspects of all business (non-
instructional) operations of the District and to benchmark these services against comparable districts nationwide. This study is being undertaken to answer the question "Are we overstaffed in Business Services and Human Resources?" This question is being asked in light of on-going budget shortfalls."
This Project Description doesn't ask (and won't answer) the question, I want to know which is: "What would be the impact of additional cuts in the Business Services and Human Resources budgets?"
Knowing how the District's Business Services and Human Resources staffing compares to benchmarks from other comparable districts would be interesting, and if the study indicates the District is overstaffed, that would provide the District with information they could use to make staffing changes. But, if the study indicates that the District is not overstaffed, what then?
For the most part, our budget cuts are not based upon whether we are overstaffed in a particular area. I don't feel that we cut teachers, or social workers, or custodians because we felt that we were overstaffed in those areas. We didn't compare the District to benchmarks from other districts on custodial staffing levels to determine appropriate staffing levels for the District. We cut custodians because we had a budget that we had to meet.
I believe that Roger has told us that staffing in Business Services is as thin as it can be if Business Services continues to perform the same functions it is currently performing. I believe that he also indicated that further staff cuts would mean that functions would have to be dropped. I accept that statement. But, what I would like to see from Business Services and Human Resources is a written report on what functions or services they would pull back from if their budgets had to be reduced by lo%, 20%, or 30% (or whatever percentages we ask about), and what it would mean to the District if those functions or services were reduced or eliminated. I believe that we should ask staff to prepare that written report for us. They have the most expertise on this, and undoubtedly they have given the issue of budget cuts in their departments a lot of thought.
After the written report is prepared by District staff, it could then be provided to a third-party consultant for their review, comment and recommendation. The Board would need to hire this third-party consultant, and the consultant would report directly to the Board. This third-party review would give the Board an outside review of staffs report on the impact of further cuts to the Business Services and Human Resources budget. From my perspective, this third-party review of staffs budget cut or reduction in services plan would be much more useful than that proposed in the current RFP.
I think the work we are asking be done in the current RFP is too broad, would be too expensive, and it won't give us the information we really want. I strongly believe that the Board must think about the information it wants, why it wants it, and what it will do with that information once it gets it. Being able to say that we are not overstaffed in the Business Services area according to established benchmarks, does not answer the public's question of why we are laying off teachers rather than accountants. We need to show what laying off accountants means - and this can be done through the written plan developed by staff and reviewed by the outside consultant.
Ruth Robarts' comments on the proposed Business Services Evaluation (PDF Version)::
Thanks for the advance opportunity to review this proposal. I agree wholeheartedly with Lawrie's analysis and conclusions. 1 will not vote for spending any funds on this proposal, for the reasons that Lawrie expressed.
Her counter-proposal makes much more sense. In effect, we need to direct the administration to analyze the effect on functions of several levels of cuts. They should be able to use the Virchow-Kraus model as a guide, without our spending more money to purchase an analytical framework. I suggest 0%, cutting 3% and cutting 5%.
After we receive that report, we should follow Lawrie's suggestion of hiring an independent consultant who reports directly to the BOE and direct the consultant to advise us on the impact of the various levels of budget reduction. Then benchmarks from other districts and local governmental bodies become relevant.
We should accomplish this as soon as possible, so that we have the data in time to develop reduction-in-force policies and procedures consistent with the already existing H.R. policy that recognize the need for RIF procedures for budget reasons.
Finally, I recommend that we keep in mind that our obligations to employees on administrative contracts are created three ways:
by authorizing positions using the operating budget,
by using grant, state or federal funds to fund administrative positions
and by authorizing funds for community service for administrative positions.
I believe that we must approach the administrative staff in a coherent and coordinated way. The BOE needs to know which positions are essential and which are not regardless of the funding source. It does not make sense and is bad public relations to continue using retirements and resignations to cut positions that we may need for business or other reasons and at the same time growing central office or MSCR positions.
Task Forces Need Community Expertise & Open Debate
I delivered the following statement to the MMSD Long Range Planning Committee on July 11:
Back on October 18, 2004, I spoke to the Long Range Planning Committee at a meeting at Leopold School. I suggested that “the Long Range Planning Committee take the time to think beyond an April referendum on a new school” at Leopold. I see the West side task force as just that, and I compliment the board for forming the group.
I also made the statement that “citizens of the broad Madison school community include people with a tremendous amount of expertise in education, management, finance, urban planning, real life, and more. You should use every possible opportunity to tap their knowledge.”
I’m here again tonight to restate my plea that the Long Range Planning Committee draw on the vast knowledge and experience of people in the community, because as I said in October, “I have this perhaps naive democratic belief that the more ideas you get the better the final outcome.”
I’ve also suggested to the Board of Education at a meeting earlier in July that you need not avoid controversy. “. . . [B]attles over substance, managed well, can be constructive. A furious volley of fact is met with a fierce counterattack of analysis—and the battlefield is littered with useful information. The self-interest on both sides tends to cancel out as long as the boss stays neutral.”
To edit that quote from a Fortune magazine article posted on schoolinfosystem.com, I urge the board and administration to stay neutral while the task forces work. Don’t stake out a position and expect the task forces to justify a predetermined outcome.
To ensure battles over substance on the West task force, I urge the board and long range planning committee to appoint Don Severson to serve on the board, because 1) his personal views (not the views of the Active Citizens for Education or ACE) match those of a large segment of us who wanted to vote for a solution to Leopold overcrowding but felt like the process had not explored all of the options, and 2) he can also tap many professional and business people who will freely give of their time and knowledge to help the task forces.
With Don’s help and the help of the whole community, I’m confident that the task forces can find widely supported options to improve the education of the children of Madison.
Sam Dillon, NY Times: For Parents Seeking a Choice, Charter Schools Prove More Popular Than Vouchers
CLEVELAND - When Ohio enacted a pilot program of school vouchers here a decade ago, David Brennan, an Ohio businessman, quickly founded two schools for voucher students.
Three years later, with voucher programs under attack, Mr. Brennan closed the schools and reopened them as charter schools, another educational experiment gaining momentum at the time.
That decision reflected the fortunes of the two parallel school choice movements that once shared the cutting edge of the nation's school reform efforts. Charter schools, which are publicly financed but privately administered, have proliferated across the nation, with 3,300 such schools now educating nearly one million students in 40 states. In contrast, voucher programs, which use taxpayer funds to pay tuition at private schools, serve only about 36,000 students in Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.
"Vouchers are moving slowly," said Paul T. Hill, a professor who studies school choice as director of the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education. "The American people don't want a complete free market in education. They want some government oversight of taxpayer-funded schools."
Last month voucher advocates achieved a rare victory when the Republican-dominated Ohio legislature created 14,000 new publicly financed "scholarships" or vouchers to allow students in failing public schools to attend private schools. That will make Ohio's voucher program, which began in 1996 with the Cleveland pilot program, the largest in the country. Earlier this spring the Utah Legislature also created a small voucher program that will allow disabled students to study at private schools at public expense.
But those twin victories were the meager results from the most ambitious legislative campaign yet by voucher advocates. Republicans introduced proposals in more than 30 legislatures for voucher or tuition tax credits, an arrangement under which parents receive a subsidy for children's private schooling through the tax code rather than as a direct grant. Vouchers were defeated in Florida, South Carolina, Texas, Indiana and Missouri.
Still, in the view of voucher proponents, the legislative sessions brought significant advances, and they are celebrating, especially because this is the 50th anniversary of the 1955 essay in which University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman suggested the use of vouchers.
In an interview, Dr. Friedman, now 93, said he believed that vouchers would eventually become more widespread than charter schools. But he acknowledged disappointment with vouchers' modest growth. "My personal belief is that the rapid expansion of charter schools will be a short-lived phenomenon, because they are only a halfway solution."Dr. Friedman said.
Many voucher students attend parochial schools like St. Agatha-St. Aloysius, housed in a crumbling brick hulk of a building on Cleveland's East Side. The neighborhood has changed much, from mostly Irish-American to mostly black, but the school, where Sister Sandra Soho has been a teacher or principal for 35 years, has not. Boys wear white shirts and ties, shelves in the basement library are stocked with trophies won by teams a half-century ago, discipline is strict and daily homework is a given.
Charter schools here and elsewhere encompass a range of curriculums and styles. The several Hope Academies in Cleveland, managed by Mr. Brennan's company, follow a back-to-basics approach. Some charter schools, like the City Day Community School in Dayton, are intimate academies. Others are technology-rich, where students take notes in class on computers.
Legislative debates over voucher programs and charter schools have tended to become fierce political brawls. "The entire educational establishment - the unions, the administrators, the school boards - is opposed to vouchers," said Kent Grusendorf, a Republican Texas state representative who chairs the House Education Committee.
Several Republican lawmakers voted with Democrats to defeat a voucher proposal in Texas last month. "This is one area where management and unions work in perfect unison," Mr. Grusendorf said.
The nation's first voucher program and its first charter schools began at about the same time. In 1990, Wisconsin enacted the first voucher program, in Milwaukee. A year later, Minnesota voted the nation's first charter school law. Many legislatures approved charter schools because they seemed less radical and aroused less opposition than vouchers, said Clint Bolick, president of the Alliance for School Choice, a Phoenix-based group.
"Charters are glasnost and vouchers are perestroika," Mr. Bolick said, referring to Mikhail Gorbachev's twin reform policies in the Soviet Union, the former a halfway measure of openness, the latter a more radical restructuring. "The educational establishment has been willing to allow charters in some states just to forestall vouchers."
As an example, he cited Arizona, where in 1995 lawmakers came within a few votes of enacting a broad voucher program. Instead, the Legislature passed a law that has made it easier to create charter schools there than anywhere else in the nation. Arizona now has 500 charter schools, but no voucher program. This year, the Legislature enacted a tuition tax credit, but Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, vetoed it.
Voters got a chance to give their opinions on voucher programs in 2000, when proponents succeeded in getting initiatives on the ballot in California and Michigan. That year vouchers programs got much positive publicity when George W. Bush spoke in favor of them during his presidential campaign. But voters overwhelmingly rejected the two state proposals that November.
Ohio launched its pilot voucher program in Cleveland in 1996, offering taxpayer-financed "scholarships" to about 2,000 students. By this past school year, the program had grown to about 5,600 students attending 44 private schools.
Also over the past decade, more than 200 charter schools have been started in Ohio. Mr. Brennan, the businessman who opened and then closed the two voucher schools in Cleveland, today runs 34 profit-making charter schools across Ohio.
The Cleveland voucher program has become quite popular, especially with black parents like Andrea Holland. Black children make up about half of the city's voucher school students.
Ms. Holland, who runs an electrical contracting business with her husband, enrolled their son Jonathan, 13, at St. Agatha-St. Aloysius parochial school two years ago, transferring him from a public elementary school where he had faced bullying, she said.
"I'm not otherwise able, like rich folks, to take my kid out and put him into a private school," Ms. Holland said. "But with this program I can afford to."
Kim Metcalf, an education researcher who conducted a nine-year study of the Cleveland voucher program, concluded that average achievement levels of Cleveland's voucher students were in some instances significantly higher, and were never lower, than those of students in the Cleveland public schools. In contrast, achievement levels at most of Cleveland's charter schools were somewhat lower than in Cleveland's traditional public schools with similar student populations, according to a 2003 study by Ohio's Legislative Office of Education Oversight, a nonpartisan agency.
Because voucher programs divert tax dollars from public to private schools that are not subject to the same government accountability measures - standardized tests, for example - both national teachers' unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, oppose them. Officially, at least, the unions support charter schools, as long as they are governed by nonprofit groups, are held accountable for student achievement and meet other criteria. In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers is working to start its own charter schools.
In states like Ohio that permit private companies to govern whole chains of charter schools, the unions have fought them bitterly.
"Charters and vouchers are equal on our agenda," said Tom Mooney, the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. "We consider charters more insidious right now, because they've grown larger, but vouchers could grow, too."
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
July 13, 2005
For Parents Seeking a Choice, Charter Schools Prove More Popular Than Vouchers
Planning for MMSD Legislative Committee for 2005-06
As chair of the MMSD School Board's Legislative Committee for 2005-06, I post information about state and federal laws and legislative issues related to the Madison Schools on this blog under Hot Topics , Madison School Board Legislative Committee blog.
In June I asked MMSD staff for the committee, Joe Quick, for his ideas on future directions for the committee. My questions and his answers are available under as well as news reports and background materials.
My June memo to Legislative Committee:
At the first meeting of the Legislative Committee’s for 2005-06, I will ask the committee to review a plan of action for the year. I hope that we can meet with Dane County legislative representatives soon after we approve a plan. Their viewpoints should help us decide how to proceed.
In view of the Joint Finance Committee’s recommendations for the proposed biennial state budget, we must focus on the most promising strategies for reversing reductions in state support for K-12 schools. I have asked Joe Quick, the MMSD staff for the committee and longtime legislative liaison for the district, to help us get started by outlining a possible plan. I will review and revise the plan before presenting it to the committee.
Although I do not have Joe Quick’s experience with K-12 legislation, I served as the legislative lobbyist for a statewide healthcare union for many years and have previously served on the Legislative Committee as a citizen and member of the Board of Education. I look forward to working with the committee which includes citizen and Board members who also have prior experience working with the state legislature.
On June 11, I sent the following memo to Joe Quick.
Carol Carstensen appointed me to chair the Legislative Committee and communicated her goal for us to use the committee “more effectively”. I am trying to envision how the committee could become more effective.
I am asking for your guidance and ideas as staff. I believe that the committee should set its goals for the year only after it has the benefit of your advice and experience. I will convene the committee after you have drafted an outline for our consideration that answers these questions.
What should be our core message to the legislature and other advocates?
What should be our calendar for meetings and activities?
What resources will we need to convey our messages effectively?
What will be the role of staff and what should be the role of Legislative Committee members and Board members?
What should be our plan for building media support for our messages?
What barriers should we expect? (opposition from allies, positions of legislative majority, disconnect between MMSD calendar and legislative calendar, limits on the capacity of the Legislative Committee and Board of Education to commit time necessary for statewide organizing efforts???)
I am looking for a realistic and concrete plan for the next year of the Legislative Committee.
Ruth
The response from our legislative liaison, Joe Quick:
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2005
From: Joe Quick
To: RUTH ROBARTS
Cc: Art Rainwater, Carol Carstensen, Mary Gulbrandsen
Q: What should be our core message to the legislature and other advocates?
A: I think our core message should be the need to re-examine school funding particularly, school funding/revenue limits, underfunded mandates (specifically, special ed. & bilingual) and tax fairiness (given that the property tax payers burden is 70% residential compared to 40%in 1946).
Q: What should be our calendar for meetings and activities?
A: This can't be determined until the committee decides its activities. the agenda the committee determines will dictate how often meeting is needed.
Q: What resources will we need to convey our messages effectively?
A: Our resources are "human" not financial. For example, fostering opportunities for Madison parent advocates to meet with parent advocates from say Racine, or Stoughton to discuss school funding issues would provide Madison parents/BOE members with a wider perspective.
Q: What will be the role of staff and what should be the role of Legislative Committee members and Board members?
A: To articulate the message of the need for tax fairness in order to prevent the annual ritual of cuts by school districts in order to comply with revenue limits.
Q: What should be our plan for building media support for our messages?
A: Let local media know about meetings with parent advocates from Racine and other communities and invite them to hear about the problems of school finance in OTHER communities.
Q: What barriers should we expect? (opposition from allies, positions of legislative majority, disconnect between MMSD calendar and legislative calendar, limits on the capacity of the Legislative Committee and Board of Education to commit time necessary for statewide organizing efforts???)
A: The barriers will be a Legislature that believes K-12 finances are adequate and posits that "tax fairness" is really just a "tax shift" and a governor and Legislature that campaigned for and was elected on a "no new taxes" platform. Certainly, the WI Manufacturers & Commerce will oppose and changes to the tax system unless the proposal provides another tax break.
Blame State Leaders if Schools Close: WI State Journal Editorial
The Wisconsin State Journal's July 11th editorial says Blame State Leaders if Schools Close "...state leaders are just as much if not more to blame if the Florence School District shuts down. And don't be surprised if more school districts, particularly in rural areas, are soon forced to consider such a drastic option."
When will our state leaders get down to business? How much more do our kids have to take?
Does the MMSD Web site have a link to the document titled "Common Expectations for All Middle Schools," which the superintendent mentions as the guide for MMSD middle schools? If the site has a link, I couldn't find it.
Letter from Art Rainwater to Sherman Parents About Changes at Sherman and Plans for all Madison Middle Schools
In response to inquiries from Sherman Middle School parents, Art Rainwater wrote a letter to parents/guardians dated June 27, 2005. In that letter he mentioned District plans to revisit the core courses taught middle school students - "...we will revisit this document [Common Expectations for All Middle Schools] again, beginning this summer, and address each of the areas in the document to ensure that our middle schools are consistent in the courses offered to each student." I didn't read anything about parents being included in such a process. If you have comments re your child's middle school academics and/or what processes you hope the administration follows - send them to the School Board at www.comments@madison.k12.wi.us. Download Superintendent Rainwater letter to Sherman parents/guardians
Something New: Sun Prairie's Website is Now a Blog
The Sun Prairie School District has launched a new website, essentially a blog with links. The key for Sun Prairie or any organization is to embrace all that that internet offers (audio, video, links, background information) and provide timely and useful information. They must frequently update the site. I wish them well. PBS's Frontline provides a great example. Their stories include video/audio clips, transcripts, documents and extensive background data.
Ed,
My vote re the proposal to fund two West High JV soccer teams was about the kids and was for the kids. MMSD's athletic budget for next year will fund 8 teams in each high school for soccer, but at West the demand from kids is for 10 teams, so the parent proposal was to fundraise for the two teams that school would be short under next year's team allocation matrix.
I appreciated the parents' efforts to be proactive on behalf of 50 high school kids who want to play soccer. I appreciated that the parents from West High expanded the name of their group to Madison, recognizing the possible future need to help kids across the city who want to play soccer. I hope we can harness these parents' positive efforts for future discussions about what we need to do to keep athletics and other educational opportunities strong for our kids.
Further, in my opinion the long-term issue regarding extra-curricular sports is not about the number of teams (by the way, it's up to 66 teams for all grades per high school in several sports, not just soccer), but a) what high school athletic program do we want for Madison's children, b) how much does that athletic program cost, c) how much can the District afford to pay, and d) how will we pay for the amount not covered in the budget. The School Board has not had this discussion and needs to have this discussion ASAP.
In the meantime, as a community member on the Partnership Committee I supported this proposal and will continue to be open to new ideas from the community in all educational areas for different ways to build community linkages that will support a strong, complete educational environment for all our kids.
I Voted Yes to Privately Fund Two West High Soccer Teams
At its June 27, 2005 meeting, the Partnership Committee listened to a request from West High School parents (Friends of West High School Soccer) to fundraise money for an additional 2 soccer teams this fall. A committee member made a motion to allow parents to fundraise the money and that motion passed unanimously. The entire School Board will vote on the Partnership Committee's recommendation on Monday, July 11th and I hope the majority of the School Board votes yes.
I am a community member on the Partnership Committee, and I voted yes because I want as many children as possible who want to play sports (soccer in this case) to have that opportunity, and I appreciate the parent group stepping forward to take on the job of fundraising the necessary money to field two more teams. I would also like to thank the parent group for changing their name from Friends of West High Soccer to Friends of Madison Soccer, intending to form a city-wide support group if that becomes necessary so kids can play sports in high school.
Was I concerned about equity issues among the 4 Madison high schools who field athletic teams when I voted yes? Not in this instance, because during the 2005-2006 school year each high school will have the opportunity to field up to 66 freshman, sophmore, junior varsity, varsity and combination athletic teams (264 teams in total). This district-wide team structure has a $2 million+ budget for next year that the School Board approved in June 2005.
Further, the up to 66 teams per school that is budgeted for the 2005-2006 academic year is more than the number of teams East and Lafollette High Schools had during the 2004-2005 school year and less than the number of teams that West and Memorial High Schools had this past school year.
The West High proposal is NOT about one school having teams and another school not having teams because of any disparity due to access to funding. The Athletic Committee that came up with the team structure for next year treated each school equally when it came to the number of teams per sport and total teams that would be funded.
To me, this proposal is about parents and community members a) seeing a demand for soccer greater than the District's budget can afford next year, and b) working together to come up with a proposal for helping kids play sports. Helping kids - that's what made so much sense to me in this proposal.
Will the School Board have to have discussions about equity when funding school activities, public vs. private funding for different activities? Yes, definitely, but I don't think those needed future discussions should stop the School Board from going forward with a proposal that makes sense. I hope a majority of the School Board supports this proposal on Monday, July 11th. I think it's a proposal that is good for kids, works within the existing athletic infrastructure, and we will be able to learn from this effort for future discussions about how sports are funded. Thank you, parents and community members for coming forward to help Madison's students.
Jason Shepherd wrote about the nature of the Madison School District's joint committee with MTI (Madison Teachers Inc.)regarding health care costs. Initially, according to Shepherd, Madison School Board President Carol Carstensen said that "the open meeting law does not apply to the committee".
KJ Jakobsen, a parent studying the District's health insurance costs, wants to attend the meetings to see if the district is conducting an appropriate review. "Questions have been raised for 20 years," she says. "Change won't happen if these meetings are secret".
But Carstensen, in an e-mail to Jakobsen, barred her from the meetings, claiming the committee is "part of the bargaining process" and thus excluded from the open meetings law. That raised the ire of [Ruth] Robarts, who said, "The public has a right to know what the distrct has been doing about its health insurance costs".
From Debroah Bush-Suflita, Communications Manager of the Capital Region Board of Cooperative Educational Services, Albany, New York:
The most important element of an effective public information program is credibility. Indeed, credibility is the most important element in an effective educational program. You cannot lie or obscure the truth, because you will quickly lose credibility. . . .
Unfortunately, you can also lose credibility even when you are telling it like it is. People mistrust government, and so they are naturally suspect of anything coming from the mouths of government officials. Here are some tips on how a district can develop credibility through its communications:
*Don't concentrate your communications on only the good news. School districts have problems. Talk about those problems and what the district is doing to resolve them. Believe it or not, the public is very forgiving of frailties, particularly when they see that school district officials recognize those frailties and are trying to do something about them.
* If you are going to use any opinion in a newsletter story or a public presentation, make sure you back it up with facts. For example, if you describe a teacher contract settlement as fair, show exactly how much the raises are. If you describe a sports program as being good for students, show how many sports teams you have, how many students are involved, and what value they receive from that participation. People can argue with opinion, but it's hard to dispute or dismiss the facts.
* Don't be afraid of controversy. If the community is talking about it, you should be writing or talking about it. Many times, bringing issues right out on the table diffuses the controversy. Here again, you should lean more heavily towards facts then opinion.
* Become sensitive to what people out in the schools and community are saying and what they are grumbling about. This will help you avoid writing or saying something that will be easily dismissed as lies.
* Be timely with your communications. People in the community should learn about new developments as they are occurring. They also should learn about problems as soon as the school district identifies them. And they should hear the news first from the district, not from other sources (such as over the back fence or at cocktail parties).
* Don't overlook your staff in your communications. Remember that school districts work on the reverse pyramid concept. As far as the public is concerned, the least credible sources of information are the people at the top. The most credible are those people at the bottom of the pyramid. You can write stories till your blue in the face about how economically the school district is being run, but if the teachers (or worse yet, the custodians or bus drivers) are talking out in the community about the incredible amount of waste they see, then you are dead in terms of credibility.
* Most importantly, have faith in the public - both internal and external. Don't be afraid to discuss any topic or share any kind of information with them. Being open will sometimes get you into trouble, at least temporarily so. In other words, the district will get criticized by some people once certain things are shared with them. But we have plenty of evidence to show that in the end, openness is the only way to develop trust. These very same people who criticize you will also come to respect you, particularly as they dialogue with you over the information you have shared; and in the end, they often will support you (or at the very least, they will lose the desire to stand in your way).
Since the committee chairs announced goals for their committees on June 7, only three committees - Long Range Planning, Finance and Operations, and Partnerships -- have met. No committees have meetings scheduled for July or beyond.
Since 1998-1999 school year, Florence School District:
student population declined 15%
property tax share of school costs increased 16%
state contribution to school costs decreased 15.7%
cost to educate a child increased 23.3%
With changes like this coupled with the recent absence of meaningful discussions by the WI government on public education, more school closing/mergers are likely.
When are we going to have the discussion - what does it cost to educate a child? When will the WI government get down to seriously discussing the business of financing the public education of Wisconsin's children and stop the unproductive rhetoric saying we're spending more on schools than ever without having any idea of what level of investment is needed to fund public education? The state is happy to avoid the question blathering on about taxes and giving money to special projects all the while shifting the costs of education to property tax payers, an approach that won't work much longer.
How many more school districts have to close? How many more kids have to be displaced?
School district leadership bears some of the responsibility of meaningful strategic discussions about the future of financing public education and examining different approaches. More on that topic in a later blog.
Immediate issue is a state government that is not seriously undertaking the issue of school financing but is giving tax credits to home and private schooling while avoiding important discussions about the financing of public schools, which is part of the state's constitution. The United States is littered with examples of state governments who have avoided this responsibility - why does WI have to be one of those states?
Moreover, he will lead the campaign for a mill levy to fund ProComp, the pay-for-performance model that has been approved by teachers and that also has Hickenlooper's support. Indeed, Bennet is so committed to that model that he hopes to negotiate such a provision as part of his own employment contract, a sure sign of confidence that the job is doable and the challenges are not intractable.
On Monday, Bennet said naming a chief academic officer would be among his highest priorities, and that he expects to start a national search for that person soon. That decision, perhaps more than any other he makes early in his new post, could determine whether he achieves the ambitious goal he has set for Denver: to be the best urban school district in the country.
Joanne Jacobs has some useful links behind this story, one of which is Siegfried Englemann's piece on students "who are victims of the unshifted paradigm".
On Friday, the state Department of Public Instruction ruled that under Wisconsin law, instrumental music instruction must be available to all students in grades seven through 12 during the regular school day.
"It is unusual to pull students from one class to meet instructional time in another class," said Michael George, director of the Content & Learning Team for the state Department of Public Instruction, who issued Friday's ruling. "Clearly, they're not getting the same experience as other students."
Besides music instruction, Sherman parents are concerned that few students have the opportunity to take 8th grade algebra and that no child will have the opportunity to take a full year of foreign language prior to high school.
Yehle said middle school is a time when students should be sampling many subject areas to gauge their interests and skills, and should be introduced to what it's like to study a foreign language, rather than develop proficiencies.
It's hard to see where Sherman Middle School's curriculum is not being dummed down for its students compared to other Madison middle schools and to school districts surrounding Madison WI.
The current issue of Fortune (2nd of a 2 part 75th anniversary edition) includes some fascinating examples of leadership and decision making. Jerry Useem summarizes the article.
If surmounting your anxieties is step one, step two is letting go of your inner perfectionist because there is no such thing as a perfect decision-maker. Even if you had all the information in the world and a hangar full of supercomputers, you�d still get some wrong.
But there�s a big difference between a wrong decision and a bad decision. A wrong decision is picking Door No. 1 when the prize is actually behind Door No. 2. It�s a lousy result, but the fault lies with the method. A bad decision is launching the space shuttle Challenger when Morton Thiokol�s engineers predict a nearly 100% chance of catastrophe. The method, in this case, is no method at all.
The distinction is important, because it separates outcomes, which you can�t control, from process, which you can. Wrong decisions are an inevitable part of life. But bad decisions are unforced errors. They�re eminently avoidable—and there are proven techniques to avoid the most predictable pitfalls (see Great Escapes).
Message from Mitch Wolfe, parent organizer for the program:
The WIAA Board of Controls approved a 7 school co-op which includes all four Madison city schools, Middleton, Waunakee, and Monona Grove for the upcoming 2005-6 season.
Retiring Memorial Athletic Director, Gary Kolpin attended the meeting in Green Lake and presented important background information to the WIAA. Stipulations included that the co-op arrangement would be evaluated after the first year and that no additional girls could be added to the roster after the first game played, which will be 6:30 pm Friday, November 18, 2005 @MIA vs. Superior High School. We are disappointed that the Board of Controls did not allow inclusion of all 10 interested schools for this season. We understand their concern about creating a "powerhouse." The WAHA census data suggests that all current hockey players (not playing for the Capitols) at the 10 schools would all be able to participate and still have less than 20 skaters total.
The time is ripe for the other three schools (Verona, Edgewood, and Oregon) to be part of co-ops for the following 2006-7 season. We have already begun discussions to facilitate the development of Dane County team #2. We are very optimistic that girls from these three schools and the additional five Dane County high schools that currently offer boy's hockey (McFarland, Stoughton, Deforest-Poynette, and Sun Prairie) will have a WIAA opportunity within the next 1-2 years. It will require parental interest and effort at every single high school. Please contact your athletic director and volunteer to organize your parents at your individual school. It can happen.
Once again, a huge thanks to Gary Kolpin, Art Rainwater, Johnny Winston Jr. and the entire Madison BOE, and many others who have supported and encouraged this historic process. There is still much to be done and everyone will need to pitch in.
Please pass the word to all other interested girls and report interest to either Marty Cleveland, Deb Lloyd, Kent Klagos or myself.
Reminder: July 11-14, from 3:30-5:00 Capitol with Troy Ward will be a camp for high school girls at the entire 10 schools. The WIAA permits 5 days of team practice prior to August 1. This should be an excellent opportunity to gain skills, have fun, and meet your teammates.
There will be more to come in the next several days. We are compiling a list of all girls from the 7 high schools and will make that available soon.
Mitch
*Just a friendly reminder that this program is supported by a benefactor and not taxpayer funds. - Johnny Winston, Jr.
What criteria does the district use to select SAGE schools?
The board has before it on Monday, June 27, a motion to drop SAGE at Lapham/Marquette (37/24% low-income) and Crestwood (23% low-income). Huegel (41%) and Sandburg (42%) will replace them. The agenda also lists all of the schools scheduled to be designated SAGE schools.
The following schools will be SAGE schools though they have a lower percentage of low income students than Lapham’s 37%: Chavez (29%), Muir (29%), Shorewood (28%), Stephens (32%).
The following schools with particularly high percentages of low-income students do not appear on the list: Glendale (67%), Lincoln (70%), Mendota (73%), Midvale (65%), and Nuestro Mundo (45%).
The MMSD Web site has a list of low-income students in all schools.
Here are the schools with the percentage of low-income students in 2004:
Capital Times Editorial: Board backs school quality
Newly elected Madison School Board member Lawrie Kobza was wise to move to use $240,000 in money made available by insurance savings to revive Lincoln Elementary School's Open Classroom Program and to restore "specials" - music, art and gym classes at the elementary schools - to their regular sizes. And the board majority was right to back her move to maintain broadly accepted standards of quality in the city's public schools.
Kobza's proposal was challenged by Superintendent Art Rainwater, who argued that the money should remain unspent. He said he was uncertain about the precise amount of the insurance savings that will result from recent contract negotiations with employee unions, and warned that the district could lose another $3.1 million in state funding if the anti-education budget proposed by legislative Republicans is adopted.
Rainwater was expressing legitimate concerns. But the School Board cannot base decisions about the programs and the opportunities that are made available to the community's children on fears about what particular legislators will do.
These are hard times for the schools. The defeat of last month's referendums, the threats from the Legislature and the general uncertainty about funding have put a great deal of pressure on the board.
But the board majority has signaled its determination to continue to err on the side of what is best for the kids.
Taught at Home, but Seeking to Join Activities at Public Schools by James Dao, New York Times
The New York Times
June 22, 2005
STRASBURG, Pa., June 16 - Mary Mellinger began home-schooling her eldest sons, Andrew and Abram, on the family's 80-acre dairy farm five years ago, wanting them to spend more time with their father and receive an education infused with Christian principles. Home schooling could not, however, provide one thing the boys desperately wanted - athletic competition.
But the school district here, about 60 miles west of Philadelphia, does not allow home-schooled children to play on its teams. So Mrs. Mellinger reluctantly gave in and allowed the boys to enroll in public high school, where Andrew, 17, runs track and Abram, 15, plays football and both perform with the marching and concert bands.
"We grieved about losing the time we had with the boys," Mrs. Mellinger, 41, said outside the 150-year-old red brick house where Mellingers have lived for seven generations. "It seems so unfair. We're taxpayers, too."
Mrs. Mellinger's plaint has become the rallying cry for an increasing number of parents across the country who are pushing more public schools to open their sports teams, clubs, music groups and other extracurricular organizations to the nation's more than 1 million home-educated students.
This year, bills were introduced in at least 14 state legislatures, including Pennsylvania's, to require school districts to open extracurricular activities, and sometimes classes, to home-schooled children, say groups that track the issue. Fourteen states already require such access, while most others leave the decision to local school boards.
But many districts strongly resist the idea, citing inadequate resources, liability issues, questions about whether students would be displaced from teams and clubs, and concerns about whether home-schooled children could be held to the same academic and attendance standards. In some states, districts also lose state aid when children leave to be home schooled, although that is not the case in Pennsylvania.
The push for access is in many ways a new chapter for the home-schooling movement, which for years viewed public education as a hostile, overly regulated system that should be avoided at all costs.
But as the movement has gained more acceptance and grown in size and diversity, more parents want their children to be involved in school activities like chess, basketball or Advanced Placement courses, say home-schooling advocates and educators. Even people who do not want the services argue that other families should not be denied them, seeing access as a civil rights issue for people who pay school taxes.
"We found enough activities within the home-school community to satisfy our needs," said Maryalice Newborn, who runs a support network for home-school families outside Pittsburgh. "But if somebody else wants to participate, shouldn't they have that right?"
Christopher Klicka, senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association, a nonprofit group based in Virginia, said polls showed that a majority of home-school parents remained wary of letting their children participate in public school activities. But as earlier battles over the right to home schooling fade from memory, that attitude is likely to change, he said.
"The further we get from those early days, when there was real persecution, the more people will forget," Mr. Klicka said. "And they will want equal access more."
In Oregon, Colorado and other states that distribute aid based on enrollment, some districts have begun encouraging home-schooled students to take courses, typically in advanced subjects like calculus or foreign languages, said Mike Griffith, a policy analyst with the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit group.
But most states do not provide per-pupil aid for extracurricular activities, so there is less incentive to allow home-schooled students to participate, Mr. Griffith said.
In Pennsylvania, where the number of home-schooled students has risen steadily in recent years to more than 24,400 children, more districts each year are allowing those students to participate in extracurricular activities, and sometimes classes.
But nearly half of the state's 501 school districts prohibit such access, including many here in rural Lancaster County, a conservative area with one of the largest populations of home-schooled students in the state. Stephany Baughman of Strasburg led the fight to change that policy in one of the districts last year.
Mrs. Baughman has always home-schooled her four children, calling it a way "to speak into their lives." But two years ago, her eldest child, Derek, wanted to join the high school soccer team. The Lampeter-Strasburg district said no. So she petitioned the school board last year to change its policy, turning the drive into a civics lesson for her children.
The board refused to change its policy. So she sent Derek, 15, to a private Christian academy, where he has played on the varsity soccer and basketball teams. Mrs. Baughman hopes the state legislation requiring access will pass so that her 12-year-old son, Brandon, can join the high school lacrosse team while continuing to be educated at home.
"Some families don't want to mix in," said Mrs. Baughman, who gave up a career as a commercial photographer to teach her children. "We're not like that."
Brian Barnhart, assistant superintendent of the 3,250-student Lampeter-Strasburg School District, said the school board remained unconvinced that home-schooled children could be held to the same standards as public school students.
Mr. Barnhart said many parents also worried that home-schooled students would take coveted positions from public school students. "We see extracurricular activities as a reward for students who are complying and who are working through school," he said.
Tim Allwein, assistant executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said many boards believed that allowing home-schooled students into sports and clubs would be an administrative nightmare that raised questions about costs, transportation and liability. For that reason, the association opposes the state bill, saying the decision should be left to the individual districts.
"The single main ingredient to making this work is to have a school board that is open to the idea," Mr. Allwein said. "Not all of them have been."
Such arguments infuriate home-schooling advocates, who say hundreds of districts in many states have resolved those issues.
"It's institutional prejudice," said Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican whose wife is home-schooling the couple's four school-age children. "It's offensive."
The Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state teachers' union, has joined the school board association in opposing the legislation, which was sponsored by State Senator Bob Regola, a Republican from near Pittsburgh, and would require districts to allow home-schooled students to participate in extracurricular activities.
Nevertheless, the bill was approved by the Senate Education Committee, and opponents and supporters give it a strong chance of clearing both houses of the Republican-controlled legislature this fall. It is not clear, however, whether Gov. Edward G. Rendell, a Democrat, would sign it.
"He will review the bill when it reaches his desk, but he believes that this is a local decision," said Kate Philips, the governor's spokeswoman.
Both Abram and Andrew Mellinger said that if the bill became law, they would probably return home for their education but continue playing sports and music at the high school.
"I'd love to have them back," said Mrs. Mellinger, who is also home-schooling three of her four other children. "But I can't provide all the opportunities they need. We can practice music. But we can't put together an orchestra."
The long range planning committee approved motions to address the East and West side "demographics and long range facility needs, including the development of a task force, a charge to the task force, task force membership, task force timeline, and task force process."
The West side task force will presumably tackle the problem of Leopold overcrowding. The body should definitely include representatives of those of us who voted against the referendum on building a second school at Leopold. Hopefully, an inclusive group will produce a proposal that can win wide-spread support. A task force only of supporters will likely fail to gain needed public confidence.
Sandy Cullen summarized last evening's Madison School Board meeting where:
Board members approved an administrative staff hiring freeze (5-2 with Bill Keys and Juan Jose Lopez voting against it)
Voted to use 200K in excess district insurance funds for elementary art, music and gym class sizes at 15 students in SAGE schools. (4-3 with Bill Keys, Juan Jose Lopez and Johnny Winston, Jr. voting against it)
Adopted the 2005-2006 budget 5-2 with Ruth Robarts and Shwaw Vang opposed
Animosity Toward Band, Orchestra and Vocal Music Curriculum Unnecessary - Alienates Parents, Community
I think what I found most disturbing about the elimination of band, orchestra and vocal music from the school day in Sherman Middle School was the exclusion (almost isolation) of music staff by other Sherman staff from the front of the room at the parent meeting in early June to present the exploratory changes being mandated including questions/issues surrounding the music curriculum at Sherman. I found the a) open irritation by some Sherman Middle School staff toward the music staff shocking, b) the lack of music curriculum assessment and planning for the changes unsettling, and c) the exclusions of parents and students in the process alarming.
An experienced teacher who taught my daughter has done important developing ways and approaches to actively include minority families into the school environment said it best, "Teachers and administrators do not have the corner on all the answers and creative ideas - we need to interact openly and in meaninful ways with our parents and community members." I think this is advice the Sherman leadership would do well to heed. As the new high school principal at East indicated - my plan won't succeed but our plan will.
I think roles, responsibilities, oversight of curriculum quality could stand to be revisited.
Ruth Robarts wonders what the future is for advertising & the Madison Schools. Reader Troy Dassler, seeing an opportunity, quickly created a mockup for Ruth. Click on the image above for more "details" :)
Johnny Winston Jr., chair of the Finance and Operations Committee of the Madison School Board, kicked off a new discussion of the possible role of business ads to raise money for our schools at the June 13 meeting of his committee. Committee member Lawrie Kobza asked the administration to bring back information about what other districts are doing beyond the advertisements in yearbooks, school newspapers and the like. Good ideas, both.
However, why stop there? Maybe there are products looking for School Board member endorsements.
Maybe our reputation for long, contentious meetings could help us turn a profit for kids.
Imagine the ads.
Close-up of tired School Board member (me).
Voice over: You know Ruth Robarts as a voice for dissenting views on the Madison School Board. But do you know what she does about Monday night headaches?
Me: Ever get headaches at meetings where everybody says the same thing? Even you? Nobody listens to you? When you're ready to go home, they start up another PowerPoint presentation and hand out the spreadsheets?
Me, too, but I found a solution---School Board Strength Excedrenol. If it works for me, it will work for your Monday night headaches.
Madison Schools & Board Communication with the Public
Madison School Board Vice President Johnny Winston, Jr. held a Finance & Operations Committee meeting this evening. Winston discussed and sought feedback on new methods that the Board and District might use to interact with the public. Notes and links are available on the Finance & Operations Committee Blog.
Madison Teachers, Inc., the Madison teachers' union, has recently ratified its collective bargaining agreement with the Madison school district for 2005-06 and 2006-07. Later this month, the Board of Education will have its chance to ratify the agreement, although the board gave preliminary assent on June 6.
On June 10, Isthmus writer Jason Shepard provided an excellent analysis of the ways that providing Wisconsin Physicians Service (WPS) to the teachers drives up the cost of each contract. The article also questions the relative quality of the WPS coverage. See "District ties to WPS prove costly", available at many locations in Dane County.
The following graphs, based on data from MMSD, illustrate the impact of high cost WPS coverage on the cost of the two-year contract and the extent to which access to WPS coverage for roughly half of the teachers receiving health insurance through MMSD erodes wage gains.
Graph 1 shows that the cost of the total package (wages and benefits) for Madison teachers has increased 27 percent from $155.9 M in 2000-01 to $197.7 M for 2006-07. In the same years, the cost of WPS has increased 31 percent from $12.2 M to $16 M. Graph 2 demonstrates the impact of the cost of fringe benefits, including WPS, on teacher wages. Between 2000-01 and 2006-07, wages as a percentage of total compensation drop from 74% to 70 percent.
Clearly, the Board of Education must pursue similar health insurance coverage at lower costs for its teachers and other MTI-represented employees. There are millions of dollars at stake and every dollar not saved is another unnecessary staff or program cut. Unfortunately, the contract for 2005-07 continues WPS for the teachers. If the parties agree to make a shift away from WPS during the term of the agreement--a possibility that could come from the new joint task force on health insurance--the savings will go to the wage scale, rather than to reinstating positions and restoring programs, unless MTI agrees to give the savings back to the district. What seems likely as the result of a shift from WPS is a multi-million dollar windfall for teachers in the form of higher wages. Higher wages, of course, drive other costs up, such as Wisconsin Retirement System and Social Security payments. In turn, higher wages going into the 2007-09 contract will force more teacher reductions.
The agenda of the Finance and Operations committee meeting for Monday, June 13 contains these items:
4. Communication to the Public about the Proposed 2005-06 Budget
6. Nontraditional Communication Strategies to Speak to Community Stakeholders.
Mark Twain once remarked: "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening bug."
For me, "communication to" and "speak to" is vastly different than "communication with" and "speak with" -- like the difference between "lightening" and "lightening bug".
I can hear the failed referenda supporters and the supporting press editorials: Just needed a little better PR.
"With" has this strong flavor of team work, working together, listening: dialog!. "To?" Well, that has been the legacy of the Administration and Board.
But, no, folks. "With" is not a four-letter word. It needs to be used, again and again, until it becomes part of the Administration's and Board's culture.
Why is the MMSD annexing more students on the West side when there's such a concern about space? What attendance areas include the annexed land? I wonder too about the fiscal impact of adding more students. Will more students lead to more program cuts, so that the additions really become a fiscal drain rather than a fiscal benefit?
I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm genuinely asking why adding students is a good idea. It may be a perfectly good approach, but it just seems odd given the controversy about West side enrollment and overcrowding.
I've actually been wondering whether the MMSD shouldn't give up some kids to other school districts on the West side. In particular, I wonder about the penninsula that feeds into Leopold. Or by contrast, annexing the land and kids who lie between the penninsula and Chavez and building an elementary school in that annexed territory to relieve the overcrowding at Leopold.
I'm not advocating anything, so don't "bust my chops." I'm just thinking out loud.
Have you ever seen the television show, “Kids Say the Darndest Things” hosted by Bill Cosby? Since becoming elected to the Madison school board, I have had students say all kinds of the “darndest” things to me. Here are a few examples…
During my school board campaign last year, I visited Randall Elementary School and talked with a 5th grade class. One of the students asked, “Who’s place are you taking on the board?” I replied, “I’m running for the seat number 4, that Ray Allen has.” Another student replied, “I really liked Ray Allen, too bad the Bucks traded him.” The student was referring to the former Milwaukee Bucks basketball star (and movie star in Spike Lee’s “He Got Game”) that was traded to the Seattle Supersonics. Who says that students know their elected officials?
A few weeks ago, I was invited to walk several blocks with students at a Sherman Middle School. This school wide program helped to promote good diet and exercise. After returning to the school a student asked me, “Are you Art Rainwater?” I replied, “No, I’m not Art Rainwater, he’s far better looking than me!”
On Monday night, a student spoke during public appearances and testified about the importance of fine arts to the district. After his speech I was totally caught off guard when he stated to the full auditorium that I had come to his classroom during my campaign and said regarding saving the fine arts, “I would take care of it.” While I don’t remember that specific conversation, I was caught so off guard that for one of the few times since being elected to the school board, I was speechless!
Finally, I received the brutal honesty and truth about being an elected official. On Tuesday afternoon, I made an unannounced visit to the Open Classroom program at Lincoln Elementary. I was given a tour of the classrooms and met many wonderful students, teachers, staff and parents. I was even given a rap performance by some of the children about the importance of the Open Classroom. As I prepared to leave, one kindergartener rushed out to the hallway to see me. He yelled, “If I have to go to a different school next year, you better get a new job!”
On the day Dante Hamilton came to Nathaniel Hawthorne Elementary School on Milwaukee’s North Side, he was like most African-American children who enroll in urban school districts in the United States. He was already behind. . . .
Fortunately for Dante, he had what the Chinese call the luck of time and place when his mother enrolled him at Hawthorne. Today, at age 10, he is a fourth-grader who reads at a sixth-grade level.
The article continues for several pages and insightfully covers a wide range of relevant topics on schools.
Thank you to Troy Dassler, Marisue Horton, and others who commented on my report on the meeting of the Long Range Planning Committee on Monday, June 6.
Several people objected to my characterization of the some of the presentations as nasty and bitter. I know that it’s hard to perceive Leopold leaders and supporters as anything but polite, but I was shocked when they launched into immediate denunciations of Ruth Robarts and Lawrie Kobza, blaming them for the defeat of the referendum.
I video taped the meeting, and I hope to see the tape on the blog in the near future so that we can all assess the presentations, especially a particularly passionate personal attack on Don Severson, who stayed for the remainder of a long board meeting.
Several people also contend that the Long Range Planning Committee considered numerous options before settling on a recommendation to build a second school at the Leopold site. I’m not aware of the “many alternatives” weighed and rejected by the Long Range Planning Committee. As I look at the options on the MMSD Web site, I see two options -- build or not build a new school on the Leopold site. Granted, there are variations on boundary changes based on the build/not build options, but the Web site does not show “many alternatives.”
Neither do I see on the MMSD Web site any discussion, maps, or other considerations of building one or more new schools at one or more different sites, re-opening Hoyt, purchasing and reopening Dudgeon, opening one or more charter or magnet schools in the area, building a school within Fitchburg city boundaries, or any combination of the above, just to name a few possible alternatives. If I missed information on these options, please let me know.
Immediately after the referendum failed, I wrote the following in an e-mail to Arlene Silveira:
My heart goes out to you, even though I voted no. You did everything you possibly could on the Leopold referendum.
Fortunately, you might still be able to win support for a West side school, and maybe even on the Leopold site, but as I posted on the blog, I beg the board and Leopold supporters to do two things:
1) Lay out three or four alternative locations and configurations for a new Westside school with a lot of public input, draw possible boundaries, develop cost projections, and then debate which alternative seems to be the most likely to achieve academic excellence on the West side.
2) Invite organizations or individuals to propose a charter school on the Westside. Several people during the debate suggested a charter or magnet school, so let's see whether one might emerge as the best option for providing excellent education in the area.
If you need help with the process, I'm certainly willing, and I assume that everyone who posts on the blog would help too.
I hope that the Leopold supporters will ask to sit down with people like me to work out a solid process and plan to address overcrowding at Leopold and facility needs throughout the district. I want to relieve the overcrowding. I will vote for a solution based on a review of all of the alternatives, even an alternative that costs more than building a second school at Leopold.
Who will invite me, Don Severson, and other “no” voters to talk with them?
A smaller-than-expected contract for Madison teachers would leave about $400,000 for the School Board to spend on cash-strapped programs, although critics say more was available.
Superintendent Art Rainwater and board President Carol Carstensen would not speculate Tuesday on what programs could benefit, but board member Ruth Robarts said maintaining the Open Classroom program at Lincoln Elementary School and alleviating planned class-size increases for art, music and gym teachers could be possibilities.
Rainwater, Carstensen and Madison Teachers Inc. Executive Director John Matthews presented the proposed contract at a news conference at MTI headquarters Tuesday.
Q: How many board members does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: "WHAT!!?!?! CHANGE?" they gasp in horror
No one is going to win as long as there is a divide between the board and the community. It would be great if it were as easy as "we need to educate people," or, "we need to reach more people," to pass a referendum as Carol Carstensen has suggested. But that does not appear to be the case.
The issue is not educating, it is persuading people that the board's strategies are the best options. That cannot be done until all options are on the table with accurate, verifiable, comparative costs and impacts presented so that people can join the board and the administration in supporting its strategies.
This has not happened and, based on the last school board election and the referendum votes, more mailings and radio ads with the same positions is not likely to get more support for the board or its choices.
Using committee meetings to denounce members of the board and citizens who care enough to come to meetings as enemies of public education is not a step forward, either. Particularly when the bashing is based on assumptions rather than fact, as in Juan Lopez's decision to bash Barb Schrank. Apparently Mr. Lopez was unaware that Barb voted yes on all three questions AND openly urged others to do so. Just how does attacking her publicly win him support for his stated cause?
Similarly, militant speeches that take a tone that "people voted against the referendum so let's punish them with draconian cuts" is pushing the supporters needed to pass the referendums away. Nor are hostile speeches advocating "close an East Side school" because the Leopold referendum didn't pass going to build support for Leopold. Especially when the near East and near West sides voted heavily FOR Leopold. By this logic, why not punish Fitchburg, where the total votes were against - not for - the Leopold expansion?
As for the suggestion that we are complaining without giving the board clear options, the record will show that many of us HAVE come forward with clear, viable plans despite the current president's statements to the contrary. And we have reminded the board that that is the case. In some instances those plans have clearly stated objectives and cost savings analyses. In others, the ideas are put forward as a request to consider with little or no response and certainly no follow up discussion.
At this point, many of us would settle for the board discussions ANY of the choices - theirs, mine, or others. To get a sense of what this statement means, go back and find the hard work on the budget and options for cuts/alternatives to referendum in board minutes and board committee minutes. If the discussions are happening, they are not happening in public. Either way, this is a loss for everyone.
Simply put, many people who support public education would like to see change that begins with meetings devoted to discussion of clear proposals - with costs and details included - rather than passive listening to administration power point presentations. When the board gets past speeches and down to the ideas and facts, they will have a chance at persuading voters that their strategies are viable.
Until we see a return to civility and issue-focused debate rather than character assassination, we will see the gap between board and voters grow rather than shrink.
President Carol Carstensen's Board Goals 7MB Video Bill Keys' Long Range Planning Goals 8MB Video Lawrie Kobza's Partnership Committee Goals 6MB Video Juan Jose Lopez's Human Resource Committee Goals 3.5MB Video Ruth Robarts' Legislative Committee Goals 3MB Video Shwaw Vang's Performance & Achievement Committee Goals 4MB Video Johnny Winston Jr.'s Finance & Operations Committee Goals 4MB Video
The Madison Board of Education's Long Range Planning Committee met on the 6th. Arlene Silveira and Beth Zurbuchen lead along with many others spoke about the failed referenda and next steps. Results and background here. Arlene and Beth were prominent members of Madison Cares, a group that spent heavily in favor of the referenda.
Don Severson, President of Active Citizens for Education also spoke at this event and recommended that the District look at the entire west side, not just Leopold. Severson also argued for a very open discussion with the community.
Union and district officials announced today a tentative teaching contract settlement for the period beginning July 1, 2005 through June 30, 2007. The contract was given preliminary approval by the Board of Education Monday night, and the union membership will vote this Thursday.
Terms of the contract include:
2005-2006
Base Salary Raise - .75%
Benefits – 3.32%
Total – 3.98%
2006-2007
Base salary raise - .90 %
Benefits – 3.07%
Total – 3.97%
Superintendent Art Rainwater said, "This is a good contract that serves the interests of both our taxpayers and teaching staff. I'm also encouraged that a joint committee comprised of union and management will conduct a thorough examination of district health care costs and discuss potential alternatives to lower insurance expenses." Rainwater said the terms of the tentative contract would allow the contract to be re-opened if there is consensus on health care changes.
Key contract provisions include:
* Modifications in the salary schedule that will allow beginning MMSD teachers' starting pay to increase from the current $29,324 to $30,724. (According to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, MMSD starting teacher salaries rank 126 out of 322 school districts reporting data.)
* Three separate union and management committees of ten members each at the elementary, middle and high school level will review and make recommendations by July 30, 2005 about the content and frequency of report cards.
* Memorandum of Understanding creating a Joint Committee on Health Insurance. The six-member committee (3 members assigned by both the superintendent and MTI executive director) will study health and dental insurance and make recommendations on several issues including long term disability, sick leave and retirement insurance. The 2005-07 contract could be re-opened for negotiations only related to health insurance and salary issues, and then, only by mutual consent of the parties.
Editorial note: Carol Carstensen contacted me to correct the sequence of events at the Long Range Planning Committee meeting on Monday, June 6. She initially suggested the formation of a task force, but couldn't make the motion because she does not formally serve on the committee.
I apologize that I missed her suggestion. Many of the people who spoke earlier had begun to leave and two or three board members seemed to be talking at the same time.
I edited my original post to include Carol's role in making the suggestion. Ed Blume
Leopold school supporters packed room 103 of the Doyle Building to speak at a meeting of the Long Range Planning Committee on Monday evening, June 6.
Arlene Silveira led off with a bitter attack on Ruth Robarts and Lawrie Kobza, accusing them of causing the defeat of the referendum to build a second school on the Leopold school site.
Beth Zurbachen followed with an equally nasty attack.
Nearly two dozen more Leopold supporters continued the assault for almost two hours.
Ironically, Lawrie Kobza, at Carol Carstensen's suggestion, kept their hopes alive. Carol offered the idea of forming a task force. Since she isn't a formal member of the committee, she could not make a motion. Instead Lawrie made, Juan Lopez seconded, and the committee approved a motion to form a task force to explore attendance issues on the West side.
If Carol hadn't made the suggestion and Lawrie had not made the motion, the committee would have adjourned with absolutely no movement on solving the overcrowding problem at Leopold, and probably no possibility of considering the issue until late in the summer.
Carol deserves praise for recognizing the need to restart an examination of the overcrowding on the West side.
Lawrie also deserves praise for not behaving vindictively against the Leopold supporters who blasted her. Instead she was more than willing to move toward an inclusive process that might just give the Leopold supporters and all West side children an option to overcrowding.
Band and Orchestra To Remain In the School Day at Sherman
This is a letter from Sherman Principal, Ann Yehle via Superintendent Rainwater to school board members regarding NOT moving Band & Orchestra to "8th Hour" for the upcoming year. I do have a copy of her original rationale to why she wished to do it. I will send it to anyone who wishes to read it. No changes will take place in the 2005-06 school year.
To all:
There appears to be lack of a clear understanding relative to what constitutes the school day as well as what bell schedule changes require a waiver and what bell schedule changes do not require a waiver from the state DPI. From communications with other principals in WI who have performance music at a zero hour, over lunch, or during an "8th hour" there isn't consistency on whether a waiver from DPI is necessary. At this point given our most recent email communication from Mike George at DPI, there is a possibility that DPI would require us to obtain a waiver. While the reasoning we would provide on the waiver would meet the criteria necessary to get a waiver, align with MMSD strategic plan, Sherman CSR work, and while there is precedence for this move in other WI districts, a public meeting in front of the BOE is necessary. The timing on this would present a challenge for next school year. Furthermore, even though we may not need a waiver, I believe the course of action I outline below to be in the best interests of Sherman Middle School students, staff, families for the 05-06 school year.
Members of the Sherman Middle School Exploratory team worked on adjustments to 8th hour over the weekend and then met again this morning. Based on our weekend work and today's meeting, we have decided to proceed as follows.
Next steps
1. We remove the performance music courses of band and orchestra from 8th hour and offer them between 7:40 and 2:40. We allow students at each grade level to take a performance class regardless of whether or not they took a performance class the year before. This should help with access. It appears as though we are getting some commitment from parents to come in and work with these students during what we would still call 8th hour. We will contact East High Principal Alan Harris and determine whether or not it would be feasible for East High students to come to Sherman during 8th hour and serve as music tutors to our students. In addition, we will still offer a variety of elective offerings during 8th hour such as drumming, technology, Sherman Musical, etc.
2. Students in the lit lab can take music lessons during 8th hour and Sherman music teachers and parents will help facilitate this. These students would be allowed to perform during concerts and would be treated as members of the performance group.
3. Our exploratory team will meet with parents next school year. We will use this as a forum to get support for all exploratory courses and assist parents in supporting these courses as well as performance music courses. In addition, we will explain to parents that through working together if we are unable to address the concerns of the exploratory team, we will continue to explore moving performance music classes to 8th hour in 06-07. This would give us time to address any waiver needs with the state DPI as well as determine if intermediate steps could address the present concerns of our exploratory team.
4. Parents will work with the exploratory team to hold an exploratory week that will culminate with our school-wide musical next year.
5. We can work to engineer heterogeneity in performance music classes next year. With new teachers I will require them to address the standards in a more culturally competent manner. It does appear I have some parent support to help with this as well.
6. We will work to continue to educate all of our parents on what is a middle school. Although we have been working to do this, it is clear folks needs some additional information.
7. We will send a letter home with students today via backpack mail detailing the adjustments to 8th hour. We will send this letter out electronically to our Weekly Recap list. We will also send it to our feeder elementary principals and Loren Rathert and Alan Harris at East High.
Change is hard! This fact holds true to most businesses or organizations including the Madison Metropolitan School District. Though the MMSD is not dying in the sense of being gone forever, the failure of the operating referendum on May 24th has given the school district the opportunity to develop new service delivery models that may enhance student opportunities for success.
As of late, school board members have been receiving e-mail communications from concerned parents related to changes in band and orchestra at Sherman Middle School. The Sherman principal has decided to move band and orchestra to an “8th hour” or after school. My question is, “Why just band and orchestra at Sherman?” Why not facilitate this change throughout the school district in other academic areas?
Local colleges and universities have adopted this model. These models offer courses during multiple times of day and the evening that provide advantages to the traditional and the non-traditional student. Why shouldn’t the MMSD look to these models?
Changes in service delivery such as those at Sherman Middle School could be an opportunity to enhance other programs and curricula throughout the district. Can you imagine students having the opportunity to take advanced placement courses or talented and gifted programs after school while earning grades/credit? How about students needing to recover deficient credits? How about teachers who would like to flex their work schedule in order to take an early morning collegiate course or to better accommodate their childcare arrangements? This could be a “win-win” situation for all involved.
Change is hard. But change is a must given the challenges facing the Madison Metropolitan School District. Change is also an opportunity to explore new ways of teaching and learning for the betterment of the entire school district.
Speaking just between us - between one who writes columns and those who read them - I've had this nagging question about the whole enterprise we're engaged in.
Is persuasion dead? And if so, does it matter?
The significance of this query goes beyond the feelings of futility I'll suffer if it turns out I've wasted my life on work that is useless. This is bigger than one writer's insecurities. Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn't already believe? If so, are there enough places where this mingling of minds occurs to sustain a democracy?
The signs are not good. Ninety percent of political conversation amounts to dueling "talking points." Best-selling books reinforce what folks thought when they bought them. Talk radio and opinion journals preach to the converted. Let's face it: the purpose of most political speech is not to persuade but to win, be it power, ratings, celebrity or even cash.
By contrast, marshaling a case to persuade those who start from a different position is a lost art. Honoring what's right in the other side's argument seems a superfluous thing that can only cause trouble, like an appendix. Politicos huddle with like-minded souls in opinion cocoons that seem impervious to facts.
- Expect several public appearances related to the Sherman strings/band programs
ALSO
- Articulation of committee goals for 05-06
- Recommendations regarding transfer of parcels from Middleton-Cross Plains and Verona districts and related boundary changes
- Purchasing recommendations
Juan,
I wrote to you by e-mail previously and invited you to submit on the blog goals for the Human Services Committee, which you chair.
I have not yet received a response.
You may recall that I wrote that schoolinfosystem.org will soon launch a page dedicated to the committees of the Board. We hope to post the following items for each committee:
* Goals for the coming year, as set by each chair or committee.
* Meeting agendas.
* Meeting minutes.
* Documents provided to the committee. (We’d like to post these prior to the committee meetings.)
* Notes and videos of the committees if people submit any to the blog.
I’m once again inviting you to provide the goals that the Human Resources Committee will pursue in the coming year. You can post them directly by asking Jim Zellmer to give you a password so that you can post, or you can send the goals to me, and I’ll post them for you.
I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.
NY School Board Actions After a Failed Renovation & Expansion Referendum
Reader Rebecca Stockwell emailed this link to a PDF document published by the Public Schools of the Tarrytowns (Westchester County, NY) after a renovation & expansion referendum failed. The newsletter begins:
The referendum was to finance a major school facilities renovation and expansion project. The proposal, which was the result of more than two years of analyzing our facilities needs and evaluating options for addressing them, was defeated by a vote of about 1200 to 1000.
Factors that appear to have contributed to the “no” vote include 1) concern about the cost of the project in a community that had not faced a major facilities referendum in 50 years, 2) some disagreement with the scope and/or conceptual design elements of the project, 3) some confusion and mis- trust over the district's analysis of the tax implications, and 4) the perception by some that they had not had an adequate opportunity to participate in or be fully informed about the process leading up to the project referendum.
At the same time, feedback also strongly indicated widespread support across all segments of our population for continuing to take a long-range, comprehensive approach in addressing our facilities needs.
We have listened carefully to the feedback.
Moving forward, we seekpublic input as we re-evaluate our options. Once the Board selects the option we wish to pursue, we will convene committees that include community members to help us make the final plan as cost effective as possible and to help us make sure that our financing plan and the analysis of the tax impact are as credible as possible.
This newsletter will provide a review of steps that led up to the 2004 referendum and a description of the process we now propose to follow.
Due to space limitations and increasing enrollment, the High School Chorus now rehearses in the Korean Church, which is located next door to the high school.
Sherman Middle School Principal Mandates Change by Fiat – Renames Afterschool an 8th hour and Kicks Academic Performance Music Out to Afterschool
The current music education upheaval at Sherman Middle School is about
what Madison values for our children’s education, such as academic music education during the school day and
who makes those decisions.
It is not about money, because teacher allocations will be needed to teach the 8th hour same as during the school day.
Making changes that seem to be by fiat may be desirable to the person in charge, but the students and parents are the school's and district's customers - please listen to us at the start of a process, let us have time to have meaningful input and comment! Isn't it the School board who are the district's policymakers, especially curriculum policy and what defines a school day. Those are the basics! A longer school day might make sense - but not by what appears and feels like fiat and not without public discussions, deliberations and decisions by our School Board.
The Madison School Board, not a principal, is responsible for making the value decisions about what Madison’s children learn and the length of a school day. Our school board is given this responsibility by the State of WI constitution and by the public who elect members to a local board. In the case of the issues at Sherman Middle School, the School Board is currently not part of the process; they are definitely not the policymakers and decisionmakers in this important change – but they need to be, because this affects learning for all Madison’s children.
For music education, WI state law requires that a local school board approve a sequential, K-12 curriculum plan for music instruction. Madison’s School Board has approved a district-wide curriculum plan for music education with standards that meets state requirements. School boards don’t write the educational plans, but they are required by law to approve them and board members need to be sure these plans are developed with input from appropriate professionals and community members – teachers, music professionals in Madison, administrators, parents. Once the curriculum plan is approved, our district-wide and school administrators need to follow that curriculum as teachers develop classes to meet the curriculum. A school principal mandating that children take General Music at Sherman Middle School does not meet district curriculum standards and does not comply with state law.
Other middle schools in Madison with high numbers of low income and minority populations are devising ways to grow and to have strong performance music classes during the day (for example, Sennett, Jefferson, Hamilton, Cherokee). Why should Sherman Middle School’s children have less equitable access to this beneficial academic subject? A principal needs to work on addressing problems that face his/her school while complying with School Board directives. Why didn’t the Sherman principal form a team of parents, elementary and high school music teachers to determine what the barriers are to higher participation in performance music in Sherman Middle School and develop options for discussion and review at the school level? Isn’t that what we want our principals to be doing when they run into a challenge? In the case of music education, put children’s learning in music education first and pull together a team that includes, not excludes parents, from the process to tackle issues facing Sherman and develop options. Why didn’t a school team approach the challenge from how do we make this work for our children?
The continued deterioration of music education in Madison’s schools is not about money. Academic music education classes are cost effective and positively benefit children’s learning in so many areas, including the core academics. The entire K-12 MMSD music education program, including performance music that begins in Grade 4, costs less than $250 per student and nearly 20,000 students participate in music education districtwide. Compare that to $350+ per participant spent on high school extracurricular sports and $600 per student spent on the district’s administrative contract budget. If you had seen any of the wonderful music performances this spring, including the citywide strings festival, you would know that the Madison community is getting a huge bang for its buck and that our children worked very hard.
If we need to make changes, let’s work together for our children. Our School Board makes the decisions on our behalf about what our children learn. They must make these decisions in open meetings following processes that engage teachers, administrators, students and the community in order to make the best decisions for our children’s learning. That’s their responsibility.
This information was given to Madison School Board members by Joe Quick
Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos warned Tuesday that if limits on how much Wisconsin school districts can increase their spending are held down by the Legislature, dozens of additional teaching positions in city schools will be cut.
The legislature's Joint Finance Committee is expected in the next few days to take up proposals to allow school districts to increase their spending over the next two years, but by amounts that are smaller than what Gov. Jim Doyle has proposed.
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly of other Blog Sites
Since the May 24th referenda, I began looking at other blog sites such as the Madison.com/ post and the Isthmus “Daily Page.” Here are a few highlights of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
The Good
“I can't imagine a more worthy expenditure than public education. As a graduate of Madison's public schools that has gone on to college and work outside of Wisconsin, I am always amazed at the disparity between my secondary education and that of my peers from other cities. Unfortunately it appears that the people of Madison have become less and less appreciative of what made Madison a special place.”
The Bad
“Now I concur that students need sports programs, and band, and all the other fluff that makes school more than just a place for book learning, but I don't agree that it should be solely funded out of the public till. Back in my school days, students and parent organizations helped subsidize these things, and it should still be so. These are things you choose to do with your time. Math and English are things you need to make the future, as well as sanitary and structurally sound schools.”
“They also need to reevaluate extracurricular programs. The parents of the children need to shoulder more of the costs of these programs, not the taxpayers. Should the fourth and fifth grades have their beloved Strings program? It’s not really necessary for quality education. It’s just a nice thing to have. Make the parents pay a larger percentage of the cost to run those programs.”
The Ugly
“I was a public school student more than 53 years ago, in Chicago and in West Hollywood, California. Our classrooms then minimally had 30 kids per teacher. There was little or no staff, other than a principal, the office secretary, and maintenance personnel. The blackboards were actually used for teaching lessons, rather than wallspace to be festooned with all sorts of political correct but curriculum-irrelevant suggestions or rantings. All the classroom seat faced that blackboard, where the teacher did his or her work.”
“…a Madison resident who has no children, said she voted against all three referendums because she believes parents should be footing more of the bill for their children's education, especially when she sees public school students driving expensive cars, talking on cell phones, taking lavish vacations and living in large houses.”
“Kids in the 70's and 80's didn't walk around with their asses hanging out of their pants? I was at the Mobil station a few days ago and saw a kid literally waddling because his belt was around his shins and his legs couldn't get more than about 18 inches of separation…Ok, I changed my mind... just shut the schools down altogether.”
By looking at the Bad and Ugly, this school district is in serious trouble. I believe only God can help this school district. And because of district policy, he’s not allowed.
On Thursday, based upon Superintendent Rainwater's recommendation, the Madison School Board approved 20 FTEs for layoff. These layoffs included 60% of the elementary string staff - the largest percentage of one academic personnel group ever laid off in the history of the Madison Metropolitan School District. How come a program that cost less than 1/10 of one percent of the $318 million budget resulted in nearly 50% of the teacher layoffs? Elementary string teacher are less than 3/10 of 1% of the total teacher population. What happeded? No evaluation of the music education curriculum, no planning (not exploring the allowed use of federal dollars for fine arts education for low income children) and some might say vindictiveness from top administrators and some Board members toward string teachers because of the community outcry in support of elementary strings - our community cannot tolerate the latter. Money is not the issue - data do not support money being the issue.
I don't think it was necessary for any of the 20 layoffs to take place. School Board members said they had no choice, because the operating referendum did not pass. I don't agree. We have had revenue caps for 10 years. Our School Board makes decisions piecemeal (labor contracts, maintenance, etc.) in isolation from the overall budget and an assessment of the impact of their decisions on children's learning. You simply cannot do this with revenue caps in place, because a board is always fighting against costs rising faster than revenue caps and board members end up making last minute drastic cuts to certain areas out of proportion to their percentage of the budget.
There was no professional evaluation and redesign of MMSD's music education curriculum prior to making recommendations to cut music this year. There are numerous studies that document the positive benefits of music education on children's learning and academic achievement. Cuts to music education should not be made until a detailed evaluation shows there is absolutely NO other option and a well thought out plan is put into place. MMSD administration has not taken this important step.
Cuts to music can still be avoided if the School Board decides to look hard at next year's budget and the grant dollars that come in over the next few months. Here's what is in the 05-06 budget and how many teachers' jobs this cost for examples:
Increase of $1.2 million in the administrative contract budget over two years - 23.76 teaching positions (14.6 teaching positions per year)
Extracurricular sports (not required for high school graduation) - $2 million plus ($1.4 million net of fees and gate receipts) - 29.7 teaching positions. The administration kept this budget out of the Board discussion and public view, giving more weight to HS sports than to academic areas and support for students.
Had the School Board considered increases to textbook/supply fees - each $10 increase would have generated about $180,000 - 3.56 teaching FTEs.
These examples are easy to find. There are other areas where savings would be possible that would protect a) children's learning and b) teachers' jobs. Children and teachers are being made to suffer the failed referendum and we need to do everything we can to minimize the impact on their learning!
Even the worst business managers do everything they can to protect their employees' careers and livelihoods, because that is what is best for the customers in order to remain competitive and in business. Madison is no longer competitive with the surrounding school district's music education program offerings - surrounding districts have stronger music education curriculums, because these school district's administrators support the curriculum.
Our children need and deserve better efforts on their behalf from our school district's leaders.
That said, the more homogeneous a group of people are in their thinking, the narrower the range of ideas that the group will openly consider. The more open minded, creative, and courageous, a group is, the wider the pool of ideas they’ll be capable of exploring.
I ran for the School Board, and voted No, No, No on the referenda because of my profound disagreement with how the School Board conducts itself and their lack of leadership and direction, and my strong sense of a deteriorating school system, not all to be blamed on draconian measures by Federal and State politicians.
Marshalling the ideas of other contributors to this site, ideas from the National School Board Association, other sources and my own ideas and goals, I have drafted a rough set of goals that I think the School Board and Madison citizens in general should address. It is meant as a possible starting point for discussions.
The document's basic purpose is to ensure a high level of student achievement through public accountability, honest and open assessment, transparent setting of priorities, and alignment of the budget with the priorities. It makes an initial attempt to distribute the goals across the BOE's committees, so they are working toward the same goals.
It is my strong sense that the Board views these committees as somehow dealing with issues that are orthogonal to each other; for example, there were arguments that the Long Range Planning committee must not concern themselves with the decisions of the Finance and Operations committee (which actually wasn't doing anything, anyway).
I certainly do not believe the current majority on the School Board is willing to make or is capable of making the necessary changes to how it conducts its business to set appropriate priorities and ensure their execution. Certainly comments made by supporters of the referenda after they were voted down indicated that they don't get it.
In any case, I would like comments and suggestions, agreement, disagreement on this document. Better ideas are welcome.
Tracey Bietz: Dear Editor: I was deeply disappointed by the defeat of the first two Madison school referendums. The cuts may force redistricting of my son's school, which may mean he attends a new school next year. I am happy with his current situation, and I am not pleased that he may have to change situations in September.
I would have voted "yes" on the first two referendums whether I had a son in the Madison schools or not. The case for a new school to avoid overcrowding at Leopold has been convincing to me. I care about education and want to see Madison schools continue their high nationwide rankings and reviews. I don't mind paying slightly higher property taxes to ensure a good education for the children around me. I hope when I'm 85 that I still live in Madison and that even if my grandchildren are being educated in some other state, I will still vote "yes" on a strong funding base for local schools.
Tracey Bietz
Madison
Published: 9:34 AM 5/28/05
James Nikora: Dear Editor: I am a "liberal" citizen of Madison who supports education for both civic and selfish reasons. I believe education is essential to successful representative government and provides a better quality of life for the entire community. But I voted "no" on the school referendums and my reasons were not just about money. They are about our educational system, the people who run it, and the lack of ideas on the table.
Our current system of education was designed before the Industrial Revolution. We cannot compete in the 21st century using an 18th century model. We need to step outside of this obsolete box, engaging and challenging students with relevant material, while rethinking everything from our physical plants and schedules to teaching methods and systems.
I understand that the system is suffering societal pressure from the overall cuts to social programs at state and federal levels and the economic need families have to provide two incomes. Thirty years ago, in my high school, there was one principal, only one vice principal and two guidance counselors for 1,200 plus students. There were no social workers or psychologists and no executive athletic director. Our parents were biological - not provided by the school district. We need to remove this burden from our schools and make it, once again, their business to educate.
Perhaps I could have been persuaded to vote "yes" had it not been for the arrogance, distorted facts and dogmatic approach of the referendum supporters. I never once heard a proposal to cut administration before placing sacrificial lambs, like the strings program, on our altars. Even now, after defeat, they are looking only for teachers to cut. Their campaign claims of previous cuts to staff and budget were disingenuous and they vilified opponents as "anti-education."
I will continue to support education, first by advocating new leadership in the administration. The district would be better served by an administration that looks in earnest for solutions and seeks to unite the community, rather than divide it.
Dear Editor: I am dismayed at the expression of joy on the faces of the Vote No for Change group on the front page of the TCT on Wednesday. It is hard to fathom that people can celebrate the fact that teachers are losing their jobs, programs are being cut and a neighborhood school is being torn apart.
The referendums took place and people voted. Fair enough. However, to celebrate what will be the misfortunes of others is appalling. They continue to say they did this to help children. I sure hope they don't try to "help" my child anytime soon.
I agree with Ruth Robarts that the Board should explore all options before laying off classroom personel and that revisting the ongoing MTI negotiations is the place to start.
I think that this issue is also linked to a key to the failure of two of the referenda -- the transparency of the process. Wages and benefits are by far the largest budget item, yet the negotiations with MTI are shrouded in mystery. I've looked through the newspapers, the MTI site and the MSMD site and can find very little information about the current negotiations. Perhaps this is a legal question and negotiations must be secret (does anyone know?). But if they can be public and publicized, they should be.
If, as many believe, the administration and the Board need to be tougher with MTI, then public scrutiny woulkd make this more likely. If the administration and the Board are already sufficiently tough with MTI (as many others believe), then public scrutiny would undermine the position of those who question the contracts.
I see many potential benefits and little if any harm coming from shining a light on the negotiations.
Madison School Board Member Bill Keys and Parent/Activist Arlene Silveira appeared on WORT's 8 o'clock buzz this morning. Unfortunately, I only heard the last 12 minutes. MP3 Audio WORT is starting to stream online - which is great.
John Nichols on the Latte Drinker Madison CARES campaign
William Barnett Lewis::
Dear Editor: It was with a heavy heart that I voted against all three referendums on Tuesday. However, in the long term, this is simply what needed to be done. For too long the School Board has acted as a rubber stamp for the wishes and fantasies of the district's administration.
Perhaps now, in the wake of the defeat of two of the three referendums, the School Board will decide to actually do their job and provide oversight and require accountability of the district's administration. As it stands, Mr. Rainwater has not shown himself capable of anything other than wasting money on yet another unnecessary assistant superintendent while trying to gut important academic programs. Meanwhile, as reported in this paper on Tuesday, test scores are declining.
We need to put the administration on a diet and get the money back into academics where it really belongs. It is time for the School Board to wake up and do the job they have been elected to do - to lead the school district. If they are unwilling to do this, then we need new School Board members.
Dear Editor: In your paper Wednesday, you quoted School Board member Bill Keys stating to all of us who voted against two of the three school referendums: "I want everyone who voted no to walk up to a child tomorrow and say, 'I voted against you.' "
Not only is that one of the most insulting and inaccurate statements I have heard in a long time, it also is a prime example of how disconnected many of the School Board members are to the real world and to the public they supposedly represent.
If Mr. Keys was in tune with the general taxpaying public he was elected to represent, he would realize that those of us who voted down two of the three referendums were actually voting against the School Board's extreme mismanagement of educational priorities and finances and not the kids.
I do realize that there are not always easy answers when it comes to funding and to what programs/educational resources have priority. I do appreciate School Board members who volunteer much of their time and resources to trying to make our schools better. Many of the School Board members do a good job, and many times their effort is not appreciated by the public.
However, Mr. Keys' insulting comments do nothing but polarize people and frankly hurt the budgeting process Madison needs to implement to get out of the box the school district has painted itself into.
What will fix the problem is having the School Board and administrators start to use the large amount of resources they currently have in a much more efficient manner. Many times those are difficult, unpleasant decisions. However, those decisions can and must be made, and all of us who voted down the two referendums think these decisions can be made without impacting the quality of education the Madison School District offers.
Matt Brandrup
Madison
Dear Editor: Was I the only Madison resident sickened at the photo of Dorothy Borchardt and Brian Schimming celebrating with the Vote No for Change group after two of three referendum questions were shot down? I didn't think so.
It's certainly OK to have your beliefs that our current system requires some changes. Hey, I'm all for some changes! But would it be more responsible to have something else in place before the current system is shot down? Do we need to completely fail before we fix?
I'm so glad I was not captured on film with my arms waving wildly at celebrating the loss of good teachers and good classrooms. I would rather be captured on film talking to legislators and School Board members, smiling as I tried to fix the system. But that's just me.
Needed: New Opportunities and Directions for the School District
On May 24th, the Madison School Board participated in the democratic process by involving local citizens in its budgetary process by putting forth a referendum. Regardless of how you voted, I thank you for taking the time to listen to the issues, weigh in on the debate and cast your ballot the way you saw fit.
I am not surprised at the outcome of the referenda votes. While I voted, Yes, Yes, Yes, and encouraged others to do the same, I can understand why someone voted No, No, No or any other combination. I am sympathetic to community concerns regarding higher property taxes and the uneasiness that leaves in the community’s sense of economic security. While I am disappointed in the outcome of the referenda for the district’s operating budget and building a new school at Leopold elementary, I do believe that these defeats allow for exploring creative opportunities to capitalize on in the future.
To capitalize such opportunities I believe that the board should revisit and change some of its policies, like those regarding business partnerships for instance. While I am not advocating advertising during the school day or privatizing schools, the fiscal reality that the district is in necessitates that viable options for funding educational activities be considered. I believe strongly that the district could bring in additional revenue that could be used to operate extracurricular activities that are most at-risk for future budget reductions.
The enrollment concerns at Leopold elementary school need further exploration as well. Many may question the proposal to build a new school while there are several schools currently under enrolled. However, these schools are located on opposite sides of town, which do not lend themselves easily to transferring young children long distances to disperse uneven enrollments. The vote not to build a new school on the current Leopold site only delays inevitable decisions that will eventually also have to be made for Madison’s far west and far east sides given the growth of housing developments. Most immediately, we will have to reconsider closing schools on Madison’s north side and the isthmus. The school board will have to make these difficult decisions as growth dictates and perhaps even sooner as the financial challenges warrant. We also will have to reconsider boundary change options.
To assist with these financial challenges, the district should also look to models of successful private and public partnerships such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the City of Madison. These successful partnerships have resulted in the first-rate athletic arena and newly approved public pool facilitated by Senator Herb Kohl and the Goodman brothers, respectively. In looking for partnerships, we should revisit Promega’s offer for the acquisition of free land they were prepared to give the school district for a middle school in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Rather than choosing the politically correct “person of color” after which to name a new school, why not look for an individual in the community who would like to make a sizable contribution to the district with naming rights? Politically correct is one thing, economically correct is another.
The Board should inform and consult the community in finding solutions to the difficult and complex fiscal crisis of the school district. The solution is not to pursue a “do over” by going to referendum again in November. This situation needs much further study; exploration and the development of more options. Not to do this in my humble opinion, would be a mistake.
As a Board member, my role is to represent the concerns of the people and to ensure that the Madison school district is accountable to them and to the students who rely on us to make good, sound policy to facilitate their successful education. The results of the referendum underscore the need for creating alternatives and seizing opportunities to solve long-standing, complex issues.
What does it cost to adequately fund K-12 education in Wisconsin? A nationally recognized expert in school finance at UW-Madison is leading an effort to address this critical question.
The Rockefeller Foundation of New York has awarded Allan R. Odden, professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, $500,000 over two years to determine the costs of educational adequacy in Wisconsin.
Madison School Board member Ruth Robarts wants fellow board members to delay today's vote to lay off about 20 teachers next year in order to ask the Madison teachers union if it would agree to smaller wage and benefit increases to avoid the layoffs.
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"Before you do something as severe as layoffs, I think you need to exhaust your alternatives," said Robarts, who estimated that keeping the 20 teachers positions would cost about $1 million.
Joan Knoebel offered her thoughts on how to win support for the operating referendum, and I whole-heartedly second them.
On the Leopold referendum, I'd ask the board and supporters to do two things:
1) Lay out three or four alternative locations and configurations for a new Westside school, draw possible boundaries, develop cost projections, and then debate which alterantive seems to be the most likely to achieve academic excellence on the West side.
2) Invite organizations or individuals to propose a charter school on the Westside. Several people suggested a charter or magnet school, so let's see whether one might emerge as the best option for providing excellent education in the area.
Current overcrowding is not an issue at Leopold. Leopold is overcrowded, but I'll vote no again on a second school at Leopold if its supporters rotely drone, "This is the only option. This is the only option. This is the only option."
Madison Board of Education Should Not Rush to Vote on Layoffs
In the aftermath of the votes on the May 24th Madison School referenda, it is critical that the Madison School Board not rush to vote on layoffs of teachers and other staff. Currently, the Board is scheduled to vote on layoffs at noon on Thursday, May 26. This deadline for layoff votes is self-imposed by the district and Madison Teachers Inc (MTI). State law sets a later deadline. The district and the union could change the May 26 date by mutual agreement. In 2003 the vote on layoffs following a referendum for the operating budget was scheduled for June 4.
Certainly our employees deserve for the district to put an end to the uncertainty in their job futures as soon as we reasonably can. Families counting on our programs also need an end to uncertainty about 2005-06. However, I hope that the Board will not vote on layoffs until it has considered asking MTI to look for mutually agreeable options to limit or avoid layoffs. We would be very late to start this discussion. On the other hand, there is precedent in recent Dane County history for local government and unions to avoid layoffs through negotiations. In October of 2003, County Executive Kathleen Falk and AFSCME union leaders did exactly that. County Executive Falk Announces No COLA / No Layoff Labor Union Agreements with County Workers
It is also important to remember that the Board of Education has not finalized the budget for 2005-06. That budget is the basis for the current list of $7.4M in staff and programs. A four-vote majority could make changes within the budget. That flexibility might be helpful to the negotiation process.
MMSD Partnership Committee - Citizen Members Sought
The MMSD School Board Partnership Committee has two openings for citizens members. Letters of interest, mailed to the School Board President, Carol Carstensen, are being sought. The deadline for applying is Friday, May 27, 2005.
The MMSD Partnership Committee, which will be chaired by Lawrie Kobza in the 2005-2006 school year, focuses on community partnerships and MSCR. The other two board members on the committee are Ruth Robarts and Johnny Winston, Jr. Information on application for appointment follows:
Excert from MMSD board Policy #1031:
5. Citizen Members; Application for Appointment. Any adult resident of the District or pupil in a District high school or alternative high school program is eligible to apply for appointment as a citizen member of any standing committee with citizen members. Applicants shall mail or deliver to the BOARD PRESIDENT a letter containing the applicant's name, address and telephone number and a statement not exceeding 500 words of the applicant's qualifications and interest in appointment to a specified committee. A person may apply, by separate letters, for appointment to more than one standing committee, or subcommittee of a standing committee, but shall not simultaneously serve as a citizen member of more than one committee. Letters of application may be submitted at any time and shall be kept on file for at least two years from the date of submission. Letters of application shall be open to public inspection and shall be reviewed by the BOARD PRESIDENT prior to nominating citizen members to any committee. District staff and BOARD members may encourage any person they deem qualified to apply for appointment as a citizen member of a standing committee. After consultation with the chairperson of each committee on which citizens serve, the Board President shall recommend to the Board the nomination of citizens to serve on each committee on which citizens serve. The Board shall vote to approve such nominations.
# Citizen Members; Terms. Citizen members of standing committees or subcommittees of a standing committee shall be appointed for two year terms, except as otherwise provided in this paragraph. If there is a vacancy in the office of a citizen member, a citizen shall be appointed to fill the unexpired term, but if the unexpired term is less than six (6) months, the person shall serve for the unexpired term plus one full term. Terms of citizen members shall commence June 1st and end May 31st. Citizen members shall serve staggered terms. High School pupils appointed to a standing committee or subcommittee of a standing committee may be appointed to either 1 or 2 year terms, as the BOARD PRESIDENT directs. No citizen member shall be eligible to serve more than two consecutive terms on the same standing committee.
# Citizen Members; Vacancy. If a citizen member resigns, establishes residence outside the District, becomes a member of the BOARD, or is removed by the BOARD, his or her office as a citizen member shall be deemed vacant. A citizen member may be removed by the BOARD upon motion by the chair of the standing committee on which the citizen member serves and a showing that the citizen member has failed to attend or otherwise perform his or her duties on a grievous and continuous basis, despite the chair's warning the member of the possibility of removal for such dereliction of duty.
"You're tax dollars are paying for printers to work overtime this weekend. 89,000 ballots for Madison school's May 24th referendum contain wrong information, and it has created quite a mess. . . ."
Question Needs to Be: What Does It Cost to Educate a Child in Today's Society?
I am tired of legislators who look at the amount of money spent to educate a child today compared to prior years and then say: "Look at how much more we are spending to educate our children today. We have fewer children. We have more teachers. It's a whole lot of money."
Yes, public education costs a considerable amount of money. Yet, I never hear the legislature take up in a meaningful manner: "What do we need to educate our child in terms of standards, in terms of curriculum to have high school graduates who are well-educated and can compete in the modern workplace? What is this cost? What is the cost to society of not making this investment - in terms of number of crimes committed and prison costs, in terms of the attractiveness to businesses of our schools?"
There was the Governor's task force on education, and the issue of the cost to educate a child was raised, but the discussion did not go very far. Until you know how what is needed and what that costs, comparing current dollars spent on education to dollars spent before provides little information and no guidance for next steps, processes to follow, etc.
In previous blogs I left the impression that Johnny was pro sports and dropping the ball on fine arts academic curriculum because there was a sports committee last year and not a fine arts committee.
The admin made that decision, not the school board. My apologies to Mr. Winston for assuming as Chair of the Partnership Committee that he had been involved in this decision.
I still believe we need a fine arts committee that includes parents, teachers, fine arts organizations, uw staff, etc., to discuss long-term issues facing MMSD's fine arts academic curriculum. I hope School Board members urge the administration to get this rolling rather than wait until next spring when it's too late.
Later in the night, when the board was going back and forth over whether it might keep kindergarten art, music and computer class sizes from doubling next year - a move that would have saved around $270,000 - Robarts said she was struggling to understand how that discussion was taking place when the district next year will pay $21 million for health insurance.
"Excuse me, that's not germane," board member Bill Keys said. Earlier Monday, the board had been meeting in closed session about the teachers' contract currently under negotiation. No financial terms have been disclosed.
"OK, that's it. I'll shut up," Robarts said. "It just seems very backward."
Although board members were able to save several programs, particularly those that had become visible and controversial lately, several of them complained about the limited role they end up playing as the budget is determined.
Shwaw Vang, for example, proposed a $30,000 cut in the travel, conference and advertising fund as budget amendments were being prepared this month and requested that the administration find a way to do that. What he got back was a plan that said his proposed reduction would have to come out of the travel fund for the district's coordinator for minority recruitment. It would also drain the advertising account that's dedicated to drawing a diverse work force.
Vang said that was not what he had in mind, and other board members quickly said they felt the same frustrations.
Ruth Robarts, who unsuccessfully proposed several general cuts of varying amounts to the business services department, was told they would come by eliminating custodians and deferring maintenance.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I just don't find that very credible."
Beth Zurbuchen isn't the only pro-referenda advocate who cannot understand referenda opponents who support quality schools but will vote no to force the board and administration to consider better budgeting, management, and curriculum.
To school board member Bill Keys, "the people who have doubts about the referendum seem to belong to two camps."
One, he said, is composed of those who oppose additional school funding whenever the opportunity comes along. . . .
"These people are always against education," he contended. "That's their history, that's their life. They've made a career of being against education."
In the other camp are those, he said, who just don't want to engage in the complexities of the problem and study the real constraints that exist in school finance.
On May 24th, citizens in the Madison school district will vote on three referenda questions affecting whether to build an addition to Leopold School, exceed revenue caps, and renew the maintenance referendum.
For many people the answers are an easy yes or no vote. Others, like me, have wrestled with their choice for each question.
Why is the choice so difficult? It should be easy, right? Strong public education is a good thing. We want to support teachers and students in the district. We know that overcrowded schools all too often undermine education.
I can't speak for others, but I know that I have several barriers to an automatic yes vote. The issues are different for Leopold than for the operating and maintenance questions. For me, the issues come down to what I do - and do not - know about what the questions mean. I feel that my duty as a representative of the community is to make informed decisions on behalf of our children and not to commit to proposals that lack sound justifications.
In the case of Leopold School, my sticking points come down to:
1) We don't know how the Ridgewood Apartment complex redevelopment will affect enrollments at Leopold, although we know that the numbers of low income apartments near the school will drop soon.
2) We are fairly certain that significant future growth is more likely to happen farther west, making a new school at a site that would accommodate some Leopold students and students from the new growth areas, a more practical choice.
3) A 1,100 student K-5 school is unprecedented in the district and something that we haven't prepared for in terms of educational and safety challenges.
4) We know that we can accommodate the current enrollment for next year in the current building.
5) We know that we can borrow enough money, without going to referendum, to expand the building to serve the students in the attendance area if overcrowding remains a problem.
I struggle with the operating budget vote for other reasons:
1) The district has threatened cuts to teachers, staff, and programs that affect the daily school experience of our students; business services, discretionary spending, and administration are essentially held harmless if the question fails.
2) The budget was developed by using a formula based on last year's spending rather than on discussion and decisions about priorities, program effectiveness, or how funding choices affect district priorities.
3) Although the figures were set earlier this year, the board and the public did not receive anything close to a comprehensive 2005-2006 budget document until days before the referendum vote.
4) The Finance & Operations Committee met only three times this year and the board did not discuss the details of the operating budget question even though we knew that there was certain to be an operating budget referendum question.
5) We continue to spend huge amounts on health insurance choices for our employees at the expense of maintaining jobs and keeping programs for our children. For example, this year we will spend a total of $24 M on health insurance for Madison teachers, including $21 M for the WPS option, but eliminate $7.4 M in programs and staff if the budget referendum fails.
6) Because of the state’s equalization formula, we must tax more than $11 M to gain $7.4M each year for the operating budget. Paying such a high premium to fund operating expenses projects means that the budget priorities must be more carefully chosen than they have been.
Finally, I am unable to endorse the maintenance referendum without reservation because:
1) The only document outlining the maintenance referendum is an Excel spreadsheet (spreadsheet accuracy study link). There is no narrative that explains how the district will make choices if projects go over cost.
2) There has been no accounting for the district’s exhausting the maintenance budget this year with three months to go and zeroing out the reserve for contingencies to fix leaky plumbing and like projects.
3) The state’s equalization formula has the same impact on the maintenance budget as it does on the operating budget. To gain $5 M for maintenance projects, we must tax more than $7 M. Paying this premium should force us to choose the projects more carefully.
I wish I did have easy, automatic, answers to these questions that surely affect day to day operations for our schools. Unfortunately, no matter how much I value the general objectives of the three questions, I also am painfully aware that, as a board, we simply have not done the work that would assure voters that they will get the results that they expect by passing these questions on May 24.
Carol Carstensen on Isthmus' Recent Madison Schools Coverage
This article, by Madison School Board President Carol Carstensen, appeared in Isthmus' May 12, 2005 edition:
Over the last two years, Isthmus' articles on the Madison school district, especially its approach to teaching reading, have reminded me of a favorite quote from Adlai Stevenson: "These are the conclusions upon which I base my facts."
The Madison school district has gotten a great deal of negative coverage from Isthmus, despite the fact that the district has seen continued improvement in the numbers and percent of children achieving at the two highest levels on the state's third-grade reading test.
This improvement comes at the same time as the district is ensuring that more students are tested, while the students themselves represent an increasingly diverse community. That is, more students in poverty, more students of color and more students whose first language is not English.
Here are some of the facts that Isthmus has ignored:
4 Children learn, and learn to read, in many different ways.
The district's Balanced Literacy program is not one method but an approach in which teachers are trained in different strategies to meet the needs of individual children. This is why small class size at the primary level is so critical.
Many teachers throughout the district are trained in Direct Instruction, and they use it when it is appropriate for a specific student or group of students.
Reading Recovery is meant for the bottom 20% of the grade level, for the children who lag the most in learning to read. Of all the first-grade children who received Reading Recovery in 2002 and were still in the district two years later to take the third-grade reading test, 89% tested at grade level (66% scored proficient or advanced).
These are more appropriate figures for judging the program's effectiveness than
the one Isthmus prefers to emphasize, the 53% who "successfully complete" the program.
I am puzzled by the Isthmus focus on Lapham/Marquette. Let me state up front that I think these two schools are excellent; my children went to Marquette, and my granddaughter went to Lapham and Marquette. The Lapham/Marquette staff is outstanding. However, there are also excellent staff in many of the district's other schools.
In looking for outstanding performance on the third-grade reading test, Isthmus has ignored Schenk and Mendota elementary schools. Both have high levels of poverty. Schenk is at 49% this year, Mendota is at 74%, while Lapham/Marquette is 36%. Both Schenk and Mendota use Balanced Literacy as the core of their literacy programs, and their students have done extraordinarily well on the third-grade reading test. Looking just at low-income students, 85% at Marquette, 91% at Schenk and 83% at Mendota scored in the proficient or advanced range.
It is important for the community to have good information about the successes and failures of the school district. Good reporting, however, should reflect an objective look at all the data, not just selective data that supports a particular.
This is a wonderful site! Their ideas and the details well frames the issues and points in directions which many have been espousing for some time.
From the Forward to Key Works of School Boards:
"In an effort to help local school boards best fulfill their role, the National School Boards Association has created the Key Work of School Boards, a framework for raising student achievement through community engagement.... The framework is based on the premise that excellence in the classroom begins with excellence in the boardroom.... The guidebook provides a framework of eight "key" action areas that successful boards have focused their attention on: vision, standards, assessment, accountability, resource alignment, climate, collaboration, and continuous improvement."
In a Cap Times story on Thursday, May 12, the superintendent seems to be trying to:
1. Control the news by telling the paper how to report on board action.
2. Tell Johnny Winston, Jr. that what Johnny thinks is irrelevant to the superintendent.
3. Put the board in its place by telling it that he will cut strings if the referendum fails, no matter what resolution the board passes.
Fortunately, Johnny seems to be speaking up.
The newspaper reports, "But Wednesday, a day after the resolution passed, Rainwater wrote an e-mail to Winston and told The Capital Times that continuing strings while still keeping the $550,000 cut assigned to it would be impossible."
The newspaper story continues:
"But Rainwater, speaking to The Capital Times, said it was a mistake to say - as this newspaper reported Wednesday - that some form of stringed music will continue in Madison schools next year regardless of the May 24 referendums.
"There is absolutely no vote that has restored the strings program," Rainwater said. "It doesn't matter what Johnny thinks. It matters what the resolution says."
Rainwater said that even if the administration had come up with some way to continue strings, that proposal would again face board approval, so nothing the board has done so far has saved the program or some variation of it.
Winston said Wednesday that he was "disappointed" by Rainwater's e-mail.
"All I can do is make a motion and hope that the administration can carry it out," he said. "So far, it doesn't look like they can do that."
"I would like to see the strings program continued somehow, some way," Winston added. "I think the community wants that. I think that's loud and clear."
After an eight year absence from analyzing data from the Madison School District, C.A.R.E., Citizens Advocating Responsible Education, has returned to the local scene with updates to the data profiles which it prepared through 1997. Current reports include a Ten Year Profile, 1994 through 2004, of MMSD’s school enrollment, full time equivalency (fte) staffing history, student to staff ratios, annual operating budgets, annual pupil costs compared to the state average, and tax levies in excess of spending caps. The second report is a profile of the same items but in snapshot form in ten year increments since 1980. (300K PDF)
Virgil and Sarah Kidd began to study MMSD annual budgets and district profile data after attending their first school board meeting in June of 1990. After a public protest demonstration led by Virgil Kidd in July of 1990 a small group of concerned citizens came together to form the new group known as C.A.R.E., Citizens Advocating Responsible Education. Previous presidents of the feisty citizen group after Virgil Kidd’s initial term were well known community leaders John Alexander and former school board president Nancy Harper.
Sarah Kidd, Virgil Kidd’s widow, has decided to update the data that has been compiled by C.A.R.E. over the past years and make it available to citizens in Madison who value factual data and historical perspective when making important decisions concerning public education.
C.A.R.E. data sources: The 2004-05 Budget & District Profile Book, June 2004, MMSD and DPI Websites and Annual MMSD Budget Documents from the years described. Contact: careinfo05 at yahoo dot com
I would like to be perfectly clear. I want a Madison Metropolitan School District strings program in elementary schools. I have been very clear about this since my first televised board meeting last year, where I exclaimed, “I want a strings program in the budget!” However, with unfunded mandates, revenue caps, additional academic testing requirements and possible annual referendums, it is very hard to continue to make that exclamation.
For the past several months, I have been in contact with many people that have given me insight on the 4th and 5th grade strings program. These people include:
Superintendent Art Rainwater
Assistant Superintendent Jane Belmore
Interim Fine Arts Coordinator Rita Applebaum
MSCR Arts Coordinator Cristine Reid
Retired MSCR Coordinator (and my campaign treasurer) Nan Gilbert Dwyer
Building Principals
Retired Principal Joe Cullen
Jane Peschel, Director of Instruction and Principal Prairie View Elementary in Oregon
Jack Young, Strings Teacher at Randall Elementary School
Rhonda Schilling, Music Teacher at Thoreau Elementary School
Mary Rasmussen, Music and Strings Teacher at Van Hise
Marie Breed, Executive Director of Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras
As well as many parents, teachers and community members.
My proposal of the 4th & 5th grade strings program is a combination of many proposals that were given to board members by the Administration in addition to conversations that I have had with the people listed above. My proposal would look at each individual elementary school schedule and fit the program to meet scheduling and budgetary requirements. For example, in some schools, students could choose between REACH and strings or General Music and strings or lunch and strings. Again, this would be a local school decision made by the local Principal and their staff. At the same time, it is very clear that we have students that are advanced in their talent and should be challenged. This is where a before school or after school program could be developed. This could be funded by community service funds (Fund 80), which are not effected by the state revenue cap. I believe that this is an appropriate way to utilize those funds. It is the community that benefits greatly from the strings programming. In addition, strategic partnerships could be developed with WYSO, MCCCA, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and others to strengthen the program.
My motion will be to direct administration to develop a 4th and 5th grade strings program that satisfies both the budget and scheduling requirements should the operating referendum not pass on May 24th. This program should encompass before school, during school and after school programming. Contents of the program and a presentation should be given to the board by Monday May 23rd.
Finally, I have to say, I take great exception to those who would like to characterize me as a “jock” that cares only about sports and not Fine Arts. Or those who believe my budgetary amendments demean and relegates the strings program to a mere “afterschool program” without as so much as to ask me to explain. These same people don’t even bother to ask the school district personnel who would have to live with the decision, “Can you do it?”
It was 15,683 adults in this community that elected me to serve as a member of the Board of Education with a student population of 24,710 not just 1,866. I was a participant in the 4th and 5th grade strings program at Lindbergh Elementary School. I know the first hand benefits of the program. Also, I played clarinet in the Lincoln Middle school orchestra and I remember the words of the teacher Lonnie Nofzsinger who would say, “Just because you’re playing the loudest note, doesn’t mean your playing the right note!”
If the Madison School Board doesn’t start working together like students in the 4th and 5th grade strings program. There will be silence. And that would be a shame.
The MMSD Web site includes a map that shows a "future MMSD boundary" around Crestwood, Huegel, and Chavez.
The map raises many questions. Why would the MMSD want to expand its boundaries? When might the expansion occur? What are the figures on population growth in the areas to be included? Will the expansion require a referendum to build another school?
Can anyone provide any insight into the MMSD plans?
Dear Editor: It is perplexing that the Madison School Board can approve a labor contract without actually having read it except through a summary provided by the administration. Why bother with a board at all if it simply behaves as though the administration and the board are one and the same? The words "rubber stamp" come to mind.
Evidently another contract ( five year transportation) was approved on May 2 - without presentation of the full financial details. (9 minute video clip of the discussion - the award was approved 4 - 2 with Kobza & Robarts voting against it due to lack of information. Check out the video). Generally, I think a five year deal is not a bad idea, IF all of the costs & benefits are known.
My real question, however, pertains to the district's payment of $1,358 per month for families through WPS Health Insurance under the contract for the clerical and technical bargaining group. I hope board members will question this amount, which seems to me to be a very high figure, especially when compared to the $1,013 per month family plan payment assessed for the Dean Care HMO insurance under the state employee annuity system. The WPS premium is 34 percent higher than the Dean Care that I pay for, which, by the way, has no co-pays or deductibles for office visits or other medical services and only a small co-pay for drugs.
In short, I can't imagine what type of service the extra 34 percent in costs would represent. Could it be routine dental services? My family gets that. Could it be counseling services? We get that. Could it be eye exams? We get that. Could it be ... Well, I ask the board, what could it be?
That is not to say that Dean Care is even a particularly reasonably priced provider; rather I use it as an example because I have long experience with its system.
It is no wonder the board can't make ends meet and feels it is necessary to repeatedly bludgeon us with threats to the strings program, or increases in athletic fees, or just about anything except an actual decrease in costs.
In this way the board can once again foist upon the electorate a referendum cynically scheduled to minimize voter participation, and thus convince themselves they'll get a result that is favorable to the board and to the administration and to the teachers, although not likely to anyone else.
The problem will not be solved with this referendum any more than it was after the previous one. Throwing money at the problem, in fact, is part of the problem. Rather than scheduling referendums, what the board should be doing is scrutinizing costs such as health care, which I'm sure take up an increasingly large chunk of the overall budget, and then looking for alternative providers who even in my own limited personal experience seem to be able to offer just as much for much less.
I have every confidence that Ruth Robarts will make the best of this situation. I believe it's important, however, to also call out Carol Carstensen, like her predecessor Bill Keys, on their partisan, petty nonsense.
Making inappropriate committeee assignments is just one manifestation of a larger problem, the marginalization of those who do not march in lockstep with the administration as well as the teachers' union and their handpicked board members. The public needs to hold board members accountable every day, not just on election day.
I fail to see the cup half empty on the BOE selection of Ms. Roberts to the Legislative Committee, Ms. Kobza to the Partnership Committee, and Mr. Winston to the Financial and Operations Committee. What an opportunity to shake up the way we keep the "status quo" every year in this community. I agree with Ms. Carstensen that a committee is what you make of it. This is an opportunity to make Madison go in a new direction away from depending on the union and administration to make decisions for our kids education. Consider the current law suites against NCLB, the opportunity to fund strings and athletics in a new way, a revised budget reviewing process by the BOE. Maybe these committees are currently weak, but they could be strong. These three board members tend to be thoughtful of the communities concerns and could lead the district into a new direction with innovative leadership. Let's encourage them to be progressive and lead, not follow in their decision making and planning to educate Madison kids.
Since the comments section is mostly closed, (thanks Viagra peddlers), I want to post a letter I sent to the board on this subject. I urge others to do the same. Ms. Carstensen must think she has some kind of mandate. It might help if she got some feedback.
To: comments@madison.k12.wi.us
Dear Ms Carstensen,
I read with dismay your transparent attempt to marginalize Ruth Robarts with an assignment to a committee of little import. From the community's standpoint, you are wasting Ms Robarts' talents; but of course that must mean little to you, determined as you and some of your fellow board members are to squash new ideas and independent thought.
Let me remind you what you seem to have forgotten: this is about the education of our children, not some petty political agenda. If you had any capacity for it, I'd say shame on you.
A message to school board members from Superintendent Art Rainwater:
I am pleased to inform you that I will recommend Allan Harris, currently the Principal of Blackhawk Middle School, to be the Principal of East High School for the 2005-06 school year.
Allan has a strong background in school administration at all levels. His career prior to joining the MMSD was in Clovis Calif. Allan served in numerous administrative roles in that District including Middle School Principal and Deputy Principal of a 3,000 student diverse high school.
Allan's familiarity with the East community and his commitment to it's success will make him an outstanding leader for the school.
I mentioned to a few friends recently that I think the Madison School's "same service" budgeting approach (year after year) needs to be replaced by a new, largely curriculum based process that recognizes globalization, changing demographics and the fact that we should not simply compare our performance and curricula with those of Racine, Green Bay or Ann Arbor. Rather the comparison should be with Helsinki, Bangalore, Shanghai, London, Nagoya and (insert your city here).
Parents have a growing number of choices these days (some don't realize that they have them - yet). Homeschooling appears to be the elephant in the room along with the slow rise of virtual schools.
Julie Leung sent a timely bolt of lightning to the blogosphere with her essay on education, including a discussion of her reasons for homeschooling:
Our desire to preserve our childrens' organic curiosity plays a large part in our desire to homeschool. Too often the school system crushes curiousity out of a kid. Kids have a natural desire to learn.
Read Doc's post for more background & links along with Gatto
Thank you for your heartfelt comments regarding the 4th & 5th grade strings program. I know first hand about the program. I was a strings program participant at Lindbergh Elementary School in 1977. I know that strings are a very beloved program within our district. However, I don’t believe that our community understands the complexity of our budgetary challenges. This is not something you merely can “bake sale”, “brat fest” or write grants to solve.
Because of this, I feel compelled to write you and speak my truth about what is going on in the Madison Metropolitan School District. The school district has had a budget shortfall for many years. This is why you have seen 4th and 5th grade strings on a cut list for the past several years. This is why you’ll see many more programs that benefit our students on cut lists in the future. State revenue caps, unfunded federal mandates and rising costs associated with running a school district will contribute to funding gaps. This year, the district has an $8.6 million dollar gap. The Administration has proposed cutting 1.2 million, which doesn’t include the strings program. The majority of the school board has chosen to ask taxpayers via referendum to make up the difference for the $7.4 million dollar shortage. In addition to the strings program, also on the cut list are programs and positions such as specials teachers, stress challenge course, psychologists, social workers, coordinators, custodians, librarians, rising of class sizes, parent-teacher conferences and many other things that are in the best interests of our students no matter their race, ethnicity, family income status or ability.
Many people have written the board about the cost of the strings program in comparison to the budget. The cost of the strings program is around $500,000. That is not much when you consider the budget is 319 million dollars. However, priorities must be made. While suggestions of making small reductions to other parts of the budget sounds good in theory, it could have unintended consequences that could be disastrous to school district programming and curriculum. It also doesn’t speak to each individual board members budgetary priorities or preferences. In my opinion, all the people and programs in our district are important to the success of all of our students. Unfortunately, they’re not all equaled depending on you or your child’s best interests but all very important as I see them being a member of the Board of Education. This is why I’m choosing to support a referendum so that all the programs can be spared.
This is a very serious situation. This situation is not unique to Madison. This is a problem with many school districts across Wisconsin and the entire country. Unfortunately, there are not enough financial resources to go around. Even though this is the case, I am personally committed to having a strings program in the Madison Metropolitan School District. However, it must meet the budgetary requirements. Should a referendum not pass on May 24th, it is highly doubtful that the strings program that is currently implemented will exist unless someone donates a half million-dollars specifically targeting the strings program to the district. This person would have to make this commitment each and every year.
Even though the district’s financial outlook is bleak, I have been imploring school board members, Superintendent Rainwater, Central Administrative staff and the interim Fine Arts Coordinator to explore all available budgetary and scheduling options. I have also been taking suggestions from Principals and music and strings teachers. I’m cautiously optimistic that we can find creative solutions however, a referendum would give our district the best opportunity to continue wonderful programming that benefits all of our students.
I thank you for your passion of the strings program and hope that you will consider supporting the operating referendum on Tuesday May 24th and encourage others to do so as well.
In her recent letter to the Wisconsin State Journal Chris Kolar, co-president of the Leopold Elementary School Parent Faculty Organization, criticizes me for my "early departure" from a Madison School Board meeting on April 25. She states that I "walked out of the board of education meeting at about the time Leopold was to be discussed".
Please consider the facts that Ms. Kolar did not include in her letter.
On April 25, the board began meeting at 5:30. We held a series of meetings and an award ceremony that night. At 10:30 I excused myself. I explained that this time of year is the busiest for me as Assistant Dean for Students at the UW Law School. As I said, I felt that I could not be ready to meet my obligations to my students in the morning and continue meeting later into the evening. Board member Shwaw Vang left at the same time. I "walked out", just as I had walked in. I did not leave the meeting in protest or to avoid discussion or voting.
The meeting that included Leopold issues began at 8:45. During the meeting, the board heard from the public in regard to Leopold school and other issues. I reported on a recent hearing at Lake View School. I offered motions on boundary issues at Hawthorne and Lake View Schools that were discussed and passed unanimously. I made the motion to maintain current boundaries at Leopold School for 2005-06 and make alterations to the building. This was the only item regarding Leopold that required action on Monday. The motion passed unanimously. It committed the Board to a plan for Leopold School for 2005-06. The final item on the agenda was not scheduled for a decision and there was no vote on the item after Mr. Vang and I left. After I left, the staff made a fifteen minute presentation and the meeting adjourned.
Here is Ms. Kolar's letter.
Robarts: Stay For Discussion
Saturday, April 30, 2005
As co-president of the Leopold Elementary School Parent Faculty Organization, I write to express our disappointment with the early departure of Ruth Robarts from the Monday, April 25, board of education meeting. Robarts has publicly expressed her reasons for not supporting the referendum question on the expansion of Leopold Elementary, citing her dislike for the proposed population size of the pair schools. While we can respect her opinion, the Leopold plan has been under discussion for almost five years. Ruth had supported the proposal all along. Her recent change of heart has been frustrating for our organization.
We want to publicly state that Robarts needs to be present for all discussions regarding referendum issues and in particular, the issue with Leopold, since she has been quite vocal in her opposition. She walked out of the board of education meeting at about the time Leopold was to be discussed. We welcome continued dialog on solutions for Leopold, and encourage public support of the referendum issue.
Bersin's departure provides an opportunity to ask what we have learned from his highly visible and often contentious tenure. To explore that question, and with the district's full cooperation, last year I assembled a team of analysts to examine the San Diego reform push. For me, five key lessons emerged from their appraisal.
First, the centralized, "managed instruction" model of improvement depends critically on the presence of a personnel and managerial infrastructure and on quality curricula. Alvarado gave unstinting attention to his centerpiece "Institute for Learning" training program for principals and faculty, and to building a corps of "peer coaches" to assist teachers. But his single-minded focus on these activities resulted in a lack of attention to infrastructure and curricula. As a result, the coaches, the Institute, and attempts to assign faculty where needed most ran afoul of the collective bargaining agreement's provisions on professional development, staffing, and teacher transfers. A balky human resources operation reliant on outdated technology inhibited district efforts to speed up hiring or promote more flexible staffing.
Finally, perhaps the most important lesson from San Diego is how limited the prospects are for radical improvement in urban public education absent structural change to personnel systems, technology, accountability, leadership, and compensation. For all their sweat and struggle, Bersin & Co. found their efforts to build the workforce they wanted stymied by statute and contract language. An outdated information system meant the district had to try to build on the fly the tools it needed to enable serious improvements to school accountability, human resource management, and budgeting. Bersin began his tenure with multiple advantages, including dazzling local and national contacts, personal charisma, a facile mind, polished negotiating skills, impeccable public service credentials, and a deft fundraising touch. If the legacy of his seven-year run is in doubt, the San Diego experience illustrates, above all, that even the boldest attempts to overhaul urban schooling are today undermined by the same institutional and organizational failings that they are intended to address.
The Madison School Board is facing some of the biggest challenges that a school district can face. These challenges include three referenda on the ballot on May 24th. One of the most unique challenges is the potential boundary changes throughout the district. These situations are very complex, political, frustrating and exhilarating at the same time. They’re complex because it affects so many people. It is political because of the many parent organizations it involves. It is frustrating because it takes so much work and time. Finally, in the case of Hawthorne and Lakeview it is exhilarating because the school board took action.
Being a member of the school board for one year, I have learned that no one really likes change. Unless that change has something to do with someone’s school or program that doesn’t affect them. This is especially true when it involves parent’s own children. The board has been inundated with e-mails from concerned parents regarding the proposed boundary changes. All of them are very compelling regarding the effect that it will have on their children or their own involvement in parent leadership groups and organizations. But let’s be honest, families move, teachers transfer and friends change. My personal priorities in this process are to: First, alleviate overcrowded schools. Second, make efficient use of space that will lead to substantial savings (without breaking the law as in the case of our paired schools) that can be used for our operating budget. Lastly, listening to the needs of communities that are under represented at board meetings and gauging their needs and concerns and balancing them with the needs of the district and effected schools. Unfortunately, my own personal second priority won’t be realized this year, but I feel confident that the school board will address this in the future.
As we address the issue of space, I have learned about the concept of neighborhood schools. People buy homes and settle down in a particular neighborhood because of a school. It is obvious that this concept is in the “eye of the beholder.” A neighborhood school means much more than just being able to walk to it as I did at Lindbergh Elementary school kindergarten through fourth grade many years ago. School is a place where students and family call their own.
In conclusion, a communication was sent to board members very early in our process that really struck me. It suggested that the administration was changing boundaries “to make the map look pretty.” If you have ever seen a district map (www.mmsd.org - click on boundary change options), I can see why they would believe that. I believe that the administration has done what the board asked them to do. Present viable options and begin the process of working with community groups such as parent organizations, neighborhood parents, students and the Long Range Planning Committee to narrow the choices until one can be made. Be assured that I won’t support “just making the map look pretty.” I’ll be listening to parents, organizations and students with the other members of the Board of Education and make decisions that take everyone’s view point into consideration. By doing this, we will all be part of a process to help students achieve in a healthy environment, wherever they call their neighborhood school.
Despite common characterizations of Madison’s school board as split along liberal and conservative lines, it just ain’t so.
The seven members of the board of education have to be among the most liberal people in Madison. I’d guess that all seven voted for John Kerry in the last presidential election, and they’ll all probably vote for the Democratic candidate in the next presidential election, no matter who the candidate might be.
The true fault line runs between a group determined to defend the status quo and a group whose few members ask whether the board and district could be better.
The status quo defenders say things like “Madison is the best school district in the nation” and “We follow the best possible decision-making processes. No change could make any improvement.”
By contrast, the questioners raise queries like “How can equity be improved in the district?” and “How can we make decisions on budget cuts before we’ve seen the budget?”
Forget liberal vs. conservative. Think in terms of status quo vs. improvement.
Out of all the local media, only Isthmus probes for insights into the curriculum and governance of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Isthmus stories on reading, special education, talented and gifted, and board infighting support the best of democratic processes by sparking lively debate necessary to effective public policy decisions.
The rest of the media, the MMSD administration, and the majority of the school board condemn healthy discussions as divisive and destructive. Yet, the absence of debate will quietly slide the district deeper and deeper into stagnation.
Keep up your excellent reporting, Isthmus.
Ed Blume
ps. If you have an opinion on Isthmus' reporting, feel free to post a comment.
Back in October, I testified at a meeting of the Long Range Planning Committee. I asked the committee "to do only three simple things." To my knowledge, the Board and Long Range Planning Committee have not done them, so I'm going to vote against the referendum on Leopold.
If the Board has done what I suggested, I welcome a response on all three points.
Here's what I said in October:
First, take the time to understand the budget consequences of a new school. By this I mean that you needed a referendum for operating expenses for this school year. How much additionally will you need to ask from taxpayers in annual referenda to fund a new elementary school?
Second, take the time to understand the enrollment impact of a new elementary school on the middle school and high school it will serve.
Third, citizens of the broad Madison school community include people with a tremendous amount of expertise in education, management, finance, urban planning, real life, and more. You should use every possible opportunity to tap their knowledge.
The California of the 50's and 60's was the embodiment of the "American Dream". Their schools were the best. Today, the California school system ranks at the bottom in the nation, with Mississippi and Guam. Proposition 13 in 1978, and revenue caps require referenda to exceed the caps to be passed by 2/3! majority. Some now admit the California schools have achieved Third World status.
Today, most schools are like the Santa Monica-Malibu School District, serving one of the richest districts in California. The schools here do not have PE, Arts, Music, counselors, and minimal or no electives. A educational fads have taken hold: whole language, new math, multiple choice testing. And, of course, loss of local control to the State legislature.
For a sobering look at a failed school system, click on the transcript.
Drastic Changes at Ridgewood Apartments Don't Factor into School Board Plans for Leopold School
On Monday, April 25, the Madison School Board will hold a special session to vote on a plan that affects hundreds of west side families and six to eight elementary schools in the event that the May 24 referendum to build a second school on the Leopold site fails.
Options before the Board do not mention the drastic changes taking place in the Ridgewood apartment complex that is near Leopold Elementary School and home to many current Leopold students and their families. While it appears increasingly likely that the large low income community near Leopold will be displaced by changes in ownership of the apartment complex, the Board will be voting on plans that do not take this factor into account. Instead, at the insistence of Board member Carol Carstensen, the Board seems poised to lock into
a plan for 2006-07 that does not recognize the likelihood that the
Leopold School population will not grow as rapidly as current projections suggest and will change in its portion of low income families. Earlier this spring, the board voted not to change the Leopold school boundaries for 2005-06. The options before the Board on April 25 would be implemented for 2006-07.
Carol Carstensen appears to have suggested the options that the administration now recommends. The options first became available on April 21, four days before the final vote. They have not been through the Long Range Planning Committee process nor has the public had the opportunity to analyze the plans and comment at hearings.
While the administration's previous "fallback" option would move 1137 west side elementary students to different schools, the new recommendations move 168 to 304. The majority of students moved under both options are low income students. The plan to moves 168 students affects students at Chavez, Crestwood, Leopold, Stephens, Thoreau and Van Hise schools. The second plan affects students at Chavez, Crestwood, Falk, Huegel, Leopold, Muir, Stephens and Lincoln schools. MMSD Boundary Change Page; See Options 3D1 Revised & 3D3 Revised
Additional School on the Leopold School Site Facts
This information was provided to school board members via public information department
· Leopold Elementary School is overcrowded, and will become more and more overcrowded. The schools capacity is 655 students; 668 students currently attend the school. In five years the school is projected to have a minimum of 750 students and as many as 830 students, that is 95 to 175 over capacity.
· In addition, because of overcrowding there, 111 students who live close to Leopold are assigned to elementary schools outside their neighborhood. One of these schools is Chavez Elementary which currently needs and will continue to need seats for students moving into new developments close to this school on the southwest side.
· This question asks for authorization for up to $14.5 million to build and equip a new elementary school adjacent to the existing school on the Leopold site, and to renovate, remodel, equip and add to the existing Leopold building, and to make related site improvements.
· Building on the existing site precludes having to purchase at least 15 acres of additional land for an elementary school.
· Included in the $14.5 million is up to $1.6 million for the existing Leopold building to convert and remodel the former library and current cafeteria into small and large classrooms.
· If this referendum is approved, the new school will open for the 2007-08 school year, and plans call for the two schools to be paired. Just as its done in other school district paired schools, one building would have kindergarten 2nd grade students, and the other building would have 3rd 5th grade students.
· Construction of this new elementary school will be consistent with the school district practice of having schools close to where students live, and of all students in a given neighborhood attending the same school.
· Without the new school on the Leopold site, and in the optimal boundary changes scenario presented to the Board of Education, at least an additional 64 current Leopold students will be assigned to schools outside their neighborhood. Under this scenario, over 300 students will be moved to different West side elementary schools Thoreau, Van Hise, Stephens and Crestwood.
· Other boundary redistricting scenarios under consideration would move 828, 1063 or 1137 students to different elementary schools due to overcrowding. *(soon there will be an option to move around 300 students but the school board has yet to receive the information)
· The new school will cost the average homeowner an average of $25 per year for 15 years, and will generally maintain present school boundaries. (The median value of Madison homes is $205,400.)
For more information about the May 24 referendum, go to the districts Web site at www.mmsd.org
DATE: April 6, 2005
TO: Madison School Board Members
FROM: School District Employee
RE: MMSD Budget Concerns/Questions
As a Madison taxpayer, parent, and employee of MMSD, I have a unique perspective on the workings of this school district. I also feel a great responsibility to write my concerns. The Board should address:
� How can food service/custodial/secretarial personnel be cut/surplused at the same time that more administrators are added and given substantial raises?
� How can the Board consider cutting services at the schools when incredible amounts of money are spent on conference attendance by administrators and teachers?
� How many assistants does the Superintendent need? While a few Assistant Superintendents have retired/left in recent years, Supt. Rainwater now has a "Chief of Staff' and "Special Assistant for
Parent and Community Relations." How can these expensive staff be justified?
� How much money is being spent on the new Lawson purchasing and Kronos payroll systems? It takes staff triple the time to do the same work in this cumbersome, on-line purchasing system. Lawson is simply not working efficiently. The accuracy of its accounting reports is very questionable. The Kronos (timeclock) system is being forced upon the District's hard working employees because some employees were not working when they were supposed to. Rather than administrators tighten
control over those select few, an entire, new and expensive system is being implemented for certain groups of staff (custodial, food service, secretarial). Administrators, teachers & many other school
based staff are exempt from this system. My exposure to the Kronos and Lawson systems has demonstrated that they are highly inefficient. Employee morale is extremely low. Good employees, who often work extra, without overtime pay - will no longer go the extra mile to complete projects or to serve the public and students.
I suggest that before you cut any services for the students or increase student fees, the following options be
investigated:
� Seek a wage freeze from MTI members for a year - union members, as a gesture of concern/empathy to the community, should consider this option;
� The Board should cut your losses and cancel expensive and inaccurate systems like Kronos and Lawson;
� Freeze hiring of administrative staff. Other staff have been required to do more - with less.
� Cancel all out of state conference attendance for administration and teaching staff.
The Board has lost its credibility in the sight of voters. The referendums in May will not pass (nor should they). Board members must ask some serious questions, make sure you are being given the while picture from administration, and take action.
Newcomer Lawrie Kobza surprised a lot of people with her win in Tuesday's voting for the Madison School Board, which saw her upset incumbent Bill Clingan by a comfortable 53-47 percent margin.
Her win is being read as something of a municipal Rorschach test.
Some members of the current board majority, who vigorously opposed her candidacy, fear that Kobza will be another Ruth Robarts, the dissident board member who has angered her colleagues by picking fights on budget issues and accusing other board members of being rubber stamps for Superintendent Art Rainwater.
Jason Shepard speculated on how a majority might form on the MMSD school board when Lawrie Kobza officially takes a seat.
�Lawrie Kobza�s win . . . over Madison school board incumbent Bill Clingan by a 53% - 47% margin will almost certainly alter the board�s ideological alignment. The only question is how.
Kobza credits a surprise endorsement from The Capital Times as the tipping point of her campaign. But a last minute mailing signed by Ed Garvey and former Mayors Paul Soglin and Sue Bauman questioned whether Kobza is really a liberal.
Kobza, an attorney with a sharp mind, says her election proves voters want changes in school governance. Soon-to-be colleague Ruth Robarts is thrilled: �There�s going to be a new dialogue.�
At election�night parties, there was speculation that Kobza could side with Robarts on what would normally be 6-1 votes, and also of a coalition made up of Kobza, Robarts and moderates Shwaw Vang and Johnny Winston. But Carol Carstensen says her big win . . . shows public support of the board�s liberal majority. We�ll see.�
-- Isthmus, April 8, 2005
Lake Mills Superintendent Dean Sanders will speak to the Johnson Creek School Board at the end of April about the possibility of the districts sharing a superintendent, a business manager and possibly a pupil services director.
The move might not only save money, but it could also avoid cuts to staff and services, he said. Sanders said both districts face financial challenges.
"We all have to look at ways of making our districts run, short of cutting programs and hurting kids," Sanders said.
Timing is everything. Timing is the reason that I believe a one-year operating referendum has a better chance of passage than a two or three year referendum.
Since being elected to the Madison school board last year, it has been very clear to me that many people in our community are educated in school board politics via local media. Unfortunately, television snippets, radio sound bites and newspaper articles rarely tell the entire story. However, in the March 31st Opinion section of the Wisconsin State Journal gets the story right! The article states, Tapping property taxpayers for more money is a regrettable option, but the finger of blame does not point to the board. Rather, outdated and unproductive state school financing rules are at fault. They put school districts like Madison's in a no-win situation. In response, the School Board, with a few exceptions, has been taking the right approach. By cutting, combining and conserving, the board has held down spending while keeping school quality high. Thank you Wisconsin State Journal for telling readers the truth!
I support the one-year operating referendum because I believe it is the right thing to do and the right time given the other referenda on the ballot (building a new school and maintenance being the other two). I am also sympathetic to community concerns regarding higher property taxes and the uneasiness that leaves in the communitys sense of economic security. For instance, gas prices are increasing, President Bush is advocating privatizing social security and many lawmakers are still promoting the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR).
The timing for any school board referendum will never be optimal. However, it is important to make any referenda as palatable as possible for as many people as possible. Given our circumstances, the time to do that is for one year. That time will be on Tuesday May 24th.
Larry Winkler, Candidate for Madison School Board Seat 7, Madison School Board forwarded his presentation to the Madison Rotary Club. (PDF Version) Learn more about the candidates here.
We need significant change on the Board of Education.
There is no real and consistent leadership. Having watched the Board up close for a couple of years now, that is my perception. That is the perception of many in the public who follow the Board�s activities. That is the perception of former Board members � you can supply the names -- you know them.
The Board does not listen. Yes, there have been some election-time conversions; and yes, when the public is so outraged by the decisions made by the Administration or the Board that they protest en mass, they sometimes listen; and, yes, they too often listen when asked to take on more responsibilities than we can afford. But, when ideas are presented to the Board in times of quiet with the goal of improving how the district does its business, those ideas and suggestions are ignored.
I don�t like to be ignored. I don�t like to see good ideas from others ignored. I do not like to waste my time. I do not like to whine. I like to get things done. That�s why I�m running for School Board.
I have the knowledge and experience.
I have a BA in Psychology, with emphasis on child psychology, and heavy dose of statistics and experimental design. I worked for almost 10 years at UW�s Research and Development Center for Education involved with the design and analysis of research into curriculum and teaching.
I have a Masters degree in Computer Science and I have taught advanced certificate courses at MATC. I�m currently a project manager at the University of Wisconsin.
I also have a Law degree from UW.
I have a 16 year old daughter who is a sophomore at West, and has been on the honor roll every semester. I, and especially my daughter, understand the hard work necessary to succeed. We adopted her from Peru when she was 5 years old. She spoke Spanish and Quetchua. She had never seen a book, crayon, or a pencil.
I, my wife, and especially my daughter understand what is required to close the gap. But I�m not referring to the gap you keep hearing about, the gap that tells you the percentage of minorities reaching advanced or proficient on tests vs whites. I�m talking about the real gap � the gap between where she was and where she could be. She�s not there yet, not close enough.
However, the District would consider its job done, and count her in its �success� column � the column that says 80% of the students are performing at the advanced or proficient level. I keep forgetting she is a minority, and, for some statistical reason, that is important. So, she�s in another column showing the percentage of minorities performing at advanced or proficient.
The Board has not been doing its job. The Board�s and the Administration�s processes must change.
The Board has to evaluate the effectiveness of each program and service it provides. It must account, on its books, for the cost, by program and service. It must ensure that the curriculum is moving everyone forward � that everyone is getting a year�s worth of education every year -- closing the real gap: between where the student is and where he/she could be in a year.
It is important that students be reading at the first grade level at the end of first grade, or the goal is reached that third grade students be reading at third grade level, but it is also crucial, that a child entering first grade reading at third grade level, must be reading at the 5 grade level at the end of first grade. If they are not, then the curriculum must be adjusted.
I�ve had parents tell me their children came into first grade already knowing how to add, subtract, multiple and divide, but by third grade were back to counting on their fingers, having lost previous mastery.
And there is a research paper by one of the teachers in the District who recounts, in a self-satisfied manner, how the most perturbed and angry parents are engineers, architects and math Ph.Ds who are no longer able to guide and help their kids with fractions, because of the new methods of teaching fractions, and further the teacher makes the claim that these same parents really don�t understand fractions.
There is another reason we need to look at curriculum effectiveness. The recent report by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that United States students were significantly below average compared to 40 other nations in problem solving skills. The majority of our 15-year old students have only basic (level 1) skills, with only less than 10% scoring as proficient compared to 30% from the top countries. The Madison School district is not going to be much different as it compares its achievements to other U.S. schools, which we now know, should not be the gold standard.
For the $13,000 per student per year, we need to get better results. But the Board keeps repeating it�s not the process that is the problem, they don�t have to change anything significant, perhaps just tweak a little around the edges. That the problem is money. We simply need to spend more money.
The problem is not money. But that�s what we hear. From the movie Jerry Maguire it�s �Show me the money�. �Show me the money�. The staff say �Show me the money�. The Board says �Show me the money.� (Or education will be cut). I say, �Show me the results!�
I would lay a bet, that no one here, regardless of finances or political stripe, would be bothered by the money, if there were the results.
That�s what I intend to do on the Board. Get results.
is mobilizing neighbor-to-neighbor education, grassroots visibility, and volunteer energy. We're working from community to community, and neighborhood to neighborhood. We also will communicate through Madison-area media, the World Wide Web, and printed literature.
The link above includes an introduction along with several documents. I'll post additional links as they become available.
Kobza for School Board - Our Kids Deserve the Best
I submitted the following letter of endorsement for Lawrie Kobza to the local papers.
Dear Editor,
I am deeply concerned about the lack of commitment to school financing at the federal and state levels and I support changes in school financing. However, I am equally concerned about our local Board of Education�s tepid leadership given the current fiscal constraints.
The school board�s decisions seem to move from one crisis to another, and each spring, the board holds our community hostage to its budget cutting process. The board appears to be paddling feverishly in a canoe without steering. And the canoe continues to go in circles because there is no planned destination. Given the withdrawal of federal and state dollars for schools, the challenge rests with our local school board to begin to chart new waters.
That will only happen if there is a change in leadership on the school board. That�s why I�m supporting Lawrie Kobza candidacy for the board. Ms. Kobza is an exceptionally well-qualified candidate, who is dedicated to excellence in public education and has a proven record of leadership and creative collaboration. She has worked successfully with the community, MMSD staff and current board members on a number of school issues.
A good school board candidate needs to be a) a strong advocate for student achievement and excellent instruction, and b) a strong facilitator of meaningful dialogue between the community, educators and the administration. Only then can we develop the best policies � educational and fiscal � for Madison schools.
A group of parents and community members who are concerned about the current school board�s governance have made numerous suggestions for alternative approaches. These are posted on www.schoolinfosystem.org. Many of us believe that voting the status quo in the April school board election will continue more of the same feverish paddling without any direction, while the community faces continued threats of cuts to great programs and services.
Madison will need educational referendums to fund our schools, but we need to know those dollars are spent wisely. This requires a clear vision of what excellent public education means for Madison, how we�ll get there, what the costs are and what different investment options are needed. Various new collaborative financial relationships with the community may also be necessary in some instances, such as for sports or fine arts � two areas Madison values.
Our school board members won�t know what�s possible by talking among themselves. School board members need to invite community members and parent organizations to the table, so that we can identify issues and work together to maintain our excellent public education system. The only trumpet call from the current school board is a call to referendum. One call will not work much longer. Madisonians expect more from their school board.
I know Lawrie Kobza can meet those expectations. She will be thoughtful and thorough in her approach to the issues facing Madison schools. She will navigate us through tough times. I am sure her opponent cares about public education, but Madison needs a school board member who does more than that. Lawrie Kobza not only cares about public education, she also brings independence to the board. She will provide much-needed critical analysis of programming decisions and an openness to community involvement. Madison�s lucky to have a better choice for our kids on April 5, 2005 � Lawrie Kobza.
I encourage the expression of any and all points of view on schoolinfosystems.org. To that end, I posted below a recent letter to the editor on public confidence in the Madison school board.
Ed Blume
The Capital Times :: EDITORIAL :: 9A
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Janet Morrow, Madison
Dear Editor: I am concerned by the "fact" that the public has lost confidence in the Madison School Board.
This is a lie. There is evidence to the contrary. The current board has engaged the public this school year more than ever. Board members have actively listened to public input and responded accordingly.
Take, for example, the possible boundary changes presented by the school district. Board members rejected the changes based on public input, altered them using ideas and suggestions from the community and directed the administration to come up with new boundary changes.
Through this process the public has steadily gained confidence in the School Board. Ignore the rumors and embrace the facts.
Think about the School Board that you want, Vote on April 5
I believe that our community strongly supports high quality schools. I know that the state and federal governments do not provide sufficient funding for the programs that we want. I am willing to pay higher property taxes to make up the difference when necessary. However, before I commit to higher taxes, I must have a high level of confidence in the decisions that put the matter on the ballot. I think that you do also.
Today I ask that you think about the qualities that you want in school board members as you prepare to vote on the May referendums, especially the referendum for the operating budget.
This referendum is a bail-out for our decisions on employee contracts. Because the Board refuses to see the connection between its budget shortfalls and total package increases of 4.2 to 5.9% per year for employee contracts on two-year contracts, we will be back next year with another referendum that doubles the price tag for this one. The only alternative will be major lay-offs of non-administrative employees.
Referendums are serious business. They are not about who�s for public education and who�s against. They are about persuading people whose property taxes are already high that the Board has spent its share of property taxes effectively and will spend the additional money wisely.
Successful referendums depend on accountability and openness in governance. In the past year, the Board has not met these standards. When employees have failed in their duties, the Board has permitted buyouts of their contracts without review. When an internal report on our expensive Reading Recovery program informed us that the program fails 43% of the children, the Board did not require changes in the program. When the superintendent rejected millions of federal dollars for improving the teaching of reading in schools where our low income students have low reading scores, the Board refused to discuss the matter and continued supporting the programs that fail these students. When it reviewed its strategic priorities, the Board did not include the public in the process or look for ways to measure whether we are truly providing a �diverse, up-to-date curriculum that is challenging for all children�. This happened, despite continuous complaints from parents that advanced course offerings are becoming too few.
Please think about these decisions when you vote next Tuesday. We must pass referendums in the very near future. Candidates who are likely to improve the accountability and openness of School Board decisions are also likely to bring you referendums that you can evaluate for yourselves and that you can wholeheartedly support.
This post is the text of comments that I made at the Downtown Rotary Club meeting on the Madison School Board races and referendums.
Voter Fact Sheet: April 5, 2005 School Board Election
Consider the following facts and issues regarding the Madison school district to help determine whether you will vote for Board of Education candidates who will continue in the same direction as indicated; or, vote for candidates who will change the direction for the future of the District.
1. There is continuous dissemination of incomplete and misinformation, any of which are misleading to the public and self-serving of the Board and administration.
2. There is a continuous �cheerleading� approach to how great things are in terms of the education in the district and how awful things are financially due the state and federal governments and the economy.
3. There is a continuous approach to the absolution of and by the majority of the Board of Education for responsibility and accountability for actions, or lack thereof, in the leadership and management of the district and its educational and fiscal stewardship.
I found the story on the Stoughton superintendent interesting because the school board conducts an evaluation twice a year. Madison's board has failed to evaluate the MMSD superintendent for years!
Bill Clingan, chair of the MMSD's human resources committee responsible for evaluating Superintendent Art Rainwater, admits that Lawrie Kobza, his opponent in the upcoming election, is right to highlight an oversight in the superintendent's evaluation, according to a story in Isthmus.
The story on the Stoughton board's action in the Wisconsin State Journal says:
"According to the board's policy, the superintendent is evaluated twice each year, the first during an informal session in the fall. The second evaluation is a formal session before the board's April reorganizational meeting and includes written evaluation statements from each board member.
The president of the board then writes a composite evaluation based on the written work of the board members, and it is then reviewed by the board."
Ive noticed in several postings that people have criticized the Madison School Board for lack of leadership. I believe that true leadership happens in the community and then comes to the board level for action. This has been the case in many actions that have been taken place in the past, present and will undoubtedly be the case in the future. All of these actions have had or will have a profound impact on the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Fifty-one years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated formal school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Twenty-five years later, this ruling forced the Madison School District to dramatically change how it educated elementary students. In 1979, South Madison residents lead by Dr. Richard Harris filed a lawsuit with the federal Office of Civil Rights concluding that the Madison School Board had knowingly created and perpetrated racial isolation by closing schools and changing boundaries on the city's heavily populated minority South Madison. This lead to the creation of a task force that created the current school pairings we know today.
This community leadership has also lead to new initiatives such as Nuestro Mundo Community School, the districts dual-language charter school. This school is responding to Latino community leaders concerns regarding the changing demographics in the city and school district. English speaking families wanting to expose their children to Spanish and Latino culture are also enrolling their children in the school.
In addition to Nuestro Mundo, the Madison School Board is supporting the building of Wexford Ridge Community Center on the grounds of Jefferson Middle and Memorial High Schools. Wexford Ridge Neighborhood Center currently runs adult and youth programming out of a two-bedroom apartment. Again, community leaders and residents supported the proposal that initially didnt have the support of the Superintendent or a majority of the board. I am proud to state that voting for this proposal was one of my first acts as a member of the school board.
In the near future, on April 11th the School Boards Partnership Committee will convene a meeting to discuss a proposal from a group of parents to form a girls hockey program. This program will be a cooperative effort with girls from Memorial, West, East and LaFollette as well as schools outside of Madison being able to participate on one team. I am in favor of this program because it allows girls to participate positively in athletics and uses parents creativity and community resources to fund the proposal.
In conclusion, the school board is elected to lead the school district, however, it is the community that truly leads schools. It is the above stated community initiatives that lead me to believe that the real leadership comes from the community, not solely from school board members. I look forward to seeing what future initiatives come from the community, so we can work together to make them happen for the betterment of the Madison Metropolitan School District.
On March 28, the Madison School Board will vote to place three referendums on the ballot in a special election on May 24. The total bill for the referendums will be $85.1M if the operating budget referendum is for three years, as proposed by Finance Chair Carol Carstensen.
The operating budget referendum will increase to the MMSD share of the property tax by $44.4M cumulatively by the third year. The $22.2M increase for the third year will be permanent. This referendum allows the school district to exceed state revenue limits by $7.4 each year. In effect, the $7.4M doubles in the second year and triples in the third year. In other words, a successful referendum adds $7.4M to the MMSD tax in the first year, $14.M in the second year and $22.2M in the third year.
According to Assistant Superintendent Roger Price, the increase in the MMSD property tax on the average property currently valued at $204,500 would be $82.99 in 05-06, $211.64 in 06-07 and $331.17 in 07-08. At the end of three years, tax payers will have spent an additional $44.4M on the operating budget over and above state revenue limits. Because the changes in the revenue limits will be permanent, the tax level will remain at an additional $22.2M forever. However, because the state legislature raises the limits on school property taxes each year, the base for the school tax will also be larger with each year. The district does not include this additional amount in its calculations of the costs of the operating budget referendum.
Until last week, the administration estimated the new taxes caused by an operating budget referendum at $164 per year on the average home. That estimate assumed that the Board voted for a one-year referendum to raise $8.6M, not the up-to-three year referendum that the Board now prefers.
The referendum to construct a second school on the Leopold School site will add $14.5M to the homeowner�s tax for schools over a fifteen year period. The district estimates that the school referendum adds $20 per year to the taxes paid on the average Madison home.
The referendum for maintenance and other items will cost $26.2M over five years. This referendum will not increase property taxes. It prevents a decrease of $82 per year for the average home owner. The maintenance referendum asks taxpayers to forgo a drop in taxes that will occur when the last five-year maintenance referendum lapses.
Until March 14, the revenues from this referendum would have gone only to maintenance of the district�s facilities. However, Carol Carstensen persuaded the majority to amend the maintenance referendum. Now money from the referendum could be used to building maintenance or for operating needs such as the purchase of computers, microscopes, and textbooks. If the operating budget referendum fails, the dollars from the maintenance referendum could easily be used for operating costs.
Janet Morrow says that the "fact" that the public has lost confidence in the Madison Board of Education is a "lie". She points to the Boards reaction to the District Administration's recent proposed Boundary changes as an example of their listening and acting on public input.
Although there are certain things that you get with age, there are also certain things you don't have with age. I can walk into a high-school classroom and sit down any day and act like a high-school student. I can sit down in a meeting with the teachers union and tell them what didn't work in our class. I can also call up some friends who go to Franklin, and Grant, and say, "What's happening?" I can do that; these folks can't. When they hear information, they hear it through administrators and teachers.
I realize that many people in this community arent happy about the recent decision made by the Madison School Board to go to referendum for the operational budget shortfall. This will indeed raise property taxes. I am more than sympathetic to senior citizens (or others) on fixed incomes and how this decision affects them. I also empathize with those who might not agree with the direction of the district by stating additional cuts in services should be considered or discussed. While Im agreeable with those rationales, I will NOT stand for what I believe is blatant racism by members of this community who will use the changing demographics of the school district and community as an excuse for not voting for a referendum. Listed below is a copy of an e-mail recently sent to school board members. The sender is a City of Madison bus driver who has sent e-mails to the School Board before. I have retracted the senders name.
dear board members;i think it is an insult for you , not all of you.to ask for tax increases for the school budget problems.these schools are supposed to be so great in this city.they dont seem to be any better than when i went to school here.my niece was going to east high until a black girl that was 14 years old and already had 2 kids was giving her a hard time.my niece ended up going to another school.and just the other day, a gang of black kids were beating up a white kid at the east transfer point.also at east high.i know some people that said they have seen the black girls walk down the halls and push the white girls out of the way.i bet the public doesnt know about half the things that go on in this city.if you ask me i think you people should actually have better schools than just say you do.i thought schools were bad when i went and they were,i would hate to be a kid going to school here now.getting bullied and the school doesnt do anything about it.and you want us to pay more.i not only think that these schools suck ,this city is starting to also.
This is my response:
It is absolutely incredible to me that in 2005, there are people who perform public services in our community that are without question racist. It seems to me that you are indeed troubled with the changing demographics in the City of Madison. I want to remind you that as an employee working as a bus driver for the City of Madison, taxpayers are paying your salary as well. And, so are the thousands of Black and other racial and ethnic minority persons who probably ride the bus that youre driving. To be frank, it must be very difficult to drive with the white sheet covering your eyes. Thank you for wasting the taxpayers time for me having to respond to your ignorance.
Johnny Winston, Jr.
School Board member, who is Black and deeply offended by your bigoted comments. And I wish we didn't have to ask you for your money!
I am more than willing to understand those who disagree but racism has no place in our schools and in our community! I hope we can all agree on that!
Several westside PTO's hosted a candidate forum Wednesday evening. The candidates discussed a wide variety of questions, including referendums, the budget process, strings, local education media coverage and differences with their opponents. Listen to the entire event (34.6MB mp3 audio file), or click on the links below to review specific questions & answers.
Q1: Referendums: Where do you stand? All four candidates Video
Q2: Do you agree with the proposed cuts? All four candidates Video
Q3: What can you do to protect TAG, arts and other programs due to the continuous funding changes? Bill Clingan & Carol Carstensen Video
Q4: How would you respond to a parent who said that they were leaving the Madison Schools because their child would have better AP, arts or sports opportunities in another district? (Larry Winkler & Lawrie Kobza) Video
Q5: For the incumbents: What specific initiatives have you taken to raise math scores particularily with low income & minority students? (Bill Clingan & Carol Carstensen) Video
Q6: For the challengers: What are the substantive differences between you and your opponent? (Lawrie Kobza & Larry Winkler) Video
Q7: Will you promise to evaluate the Superintendent annually, as his contract calls for? (Bill Clingan) Video
Q8: You said you would vote for a 3 year operating referendum at the recent MAFAAC Forum, now you say you won't. Why have you changed your mind? (Lawrie Kobza) Video
Q9: Does the Administration's budget document reflect School Board priorities? (Carol Carstensen) Video
Q10: Do you think we should be fund raising from corporations, and asking them for money? (Larry Winkler) Video
Q11: Do you feel the media covers school issues and how do you feel about the fact that there are no media representatives here tonight? (Bill Clingan) Video
Q12: Comment on the proposed reduction in Program Support Teachers? (Carol Carstensen) Video
Q13: How important do you think no-cut freshman sports are? (Lawrie Kobza) Video
Q14: How do you propose to address growth in extended parts of the Madison School District? (Larry Winkler) Video
Q15: Strings is part of the Board approved standards. Why is the Administration proposing to eliminate it? What are your views on this issue? (All 4 candidates) Video
Candidate Closing Statements (All 4 candidates) Video
A note on local media coverage. Indeed, no members of the traditional media were present (perhaps this explains why?), but several internet writers were there, and have written about the event on this site.
No Point in Cutting MMSD Administrators, They Just Grow Back
In January of 2005 Superintendent Art Rainwater told the Madison Board of Education that two administrative positions would be eliminated for 2005-06. He would cut the positions of Risk Manager and Data Manager when the incumbents retired at the end of 2004-05.
Imagine my surprise on March 14, when the superintendent cut half of the position of Risk Manager for a second time.
The propensity of administrative positions to grow back may be the explanation for some otherwise inexplicable facts. One such fact is that the Madison Metropolitan School District had 147 full-time administrative positions in 1998-99, after five years of cuts caused by the state �revenue limits� enacted in 1993. Although cuts continued, administrative staff positions grew to 156 in 2001-02. Three years later MMSD still has more administrators than in 1998-99.
Graph based on MMSD data presented to the School Board on January 24, 2005. For more information see the Minutes of Special Board meeting.
Board Scares Parents-Threatens All District Can Teach Kids for $13,000+ is Reading and Math: Yet MMSD Board Has No Budget, Keeps $2 Million for Extracurr. Sports, Increases Admin. Budget $1.5 Million in Two Years, Turned Away $10+ Million Fed. Rdg. Grant
This is not the headline of an article in The Onion. Rather, as the Astronauts on the Apollo Mission said, "Houston, we have a problem."
After 10 years of continually reducing services to our children and community . . . long past the time that we can solve our revenue cap problems by being more efficient or eliminating things that are �nice but not necessary� (MMSD budget cut document - not budget) More than $13,000 per student and all the Distict can do is teach math and reading. This should send a huge red flag up. It is - to those who can afford to, they are moving their kids, home schooling, paying for private tutoring and other lessons, and sending their kids to private schools. Who's losing inthis picture - underprivileged kids in education and priviledged kids by not being part of a diverse school environment. All the kids are losing - big time and the negative impact on the economics and culture of the city will follow - that's why my parents kept me out of NYC schools and I went to high school in Connecticut. That is not what I wanted for my daughter, but I need to protect her education - she's only got the next 5 years.
There is no budget governance and leadership by board members and by the Finance and Operations Committee, which Ms. Carstensen chairs - threatening statements are made to other board members and to the public, no questions are asked, no budget is visible and the state is to blame. I suggest board members hold up a mirror, and I suggest that other progressives in Madison who share my concerns and want an excellent public education system in Madison, vote for a positive change in leadership on April 5th and read the following:
Lets' examine this incorrect and misleading statement: Budget - Don't have one
Where Does the Money Go?
Last year, the $14 million increased revenue did not go to pay for more teachers in the school budgets - in fact there was a $2 million real cutin the elementary and secondary school budgets from the year before - every other department saw increases.
Nice but not necessary things all eliminated - NO. $2 million budget for extracurricular high school sports (20% comes from fees/ticket sales). There will be NO cuts in what kids play at the high school level. We need these sports but the board let an athletic committee work on moving small dollars to MSCR, which keeps taxes up. If you have no money, how can you ask parents to pay this amount. Why wasn't the board working with the community on this, asking the sports community for help and guidance? Why is the current board putting kids at risk?
Administrative Contract Budget - increased $1.5 million from 03-04 to next year. Board members needed to hold the admin. budget to 03-04 and direct the Superintendent to hold the line on number of staff or increases. That's the board's responsibility - did they do this? No.
Reading First Grant - Turned away $10+ million in federal Reading First Money over several years - because we do it better? Who believes that? Madison, like the rest of the state, has made great progress in reading, but the money in this federal grant would have helped tremendously training teachers, buying curriculum materials (many options, not just direct instruction to choose from) - this money would have helped the overall infrastructure of the district's reading curriculum as we moving into helping the 20% who are struggling with reading.
Why don't the kids deserve this help and why would the current board be so reckless in not a) reviewing publicly the issues surrounding this grant and taking steps to address them while pursuing the grant and getting the grant - we cannot afford not to use these funds for the kids or for the district's financial well being, b)reviewing publicly the questionable district reading recovery program that is costing $1-$2 million and showing results no better than other interventions in use, and d) putting down direct instruction and refusing to evaluate and report/discuss publicly the continued success at lapham elementary. A new teacher told to use balanced literacy and running problems into teaching children to read is turning to direct instruction at the end of the year so the kids will be able to read.
What does the Board do? Bill Keys and Art Rainwater do a public service announcement with a staged dialogue in front of cameras at the end of a public hearing. Any real public review and questions - of course not!
This school board says I'm critical of what they do and make no suggestions. Link on budget, fine arts and governance and you will read suggestions made up to one year ago. Board make any changes - no. Can we do things? Yes, more to follow.
Oh, and that only one item that board members think I focus on - elementary strings. More on that district disgrace to the 1,800 kids (600+minority, 400+ low income) and their academic achievement to follow - stay tuned. We'll be providing information - with data, which the district does not do, showing this course is THE ONLY course that will be cut if a referendum fails that affects so many kids so positively.
In a departure from their usual procedure, the two sides are first considering all the changes in contract language put forward by Madison Teachers Inc.
This proposal, covering such changes as whether teachers would gain free access to after-school events and intellectual property rights to the curriculums they design for the classroom, was presented Wednesday afternoon to Superintendent Art Rainwater and his staff.
It's Not Board Attendance that's the Issue, Mr. Clingan, It's Committee Leadership
At Wednesday, March 17, 2005, candidates' forum, Lawrie Kobza provided information that Mr. Clingan did not convene the Human Resouces Committee, which he chairs, to evaluate the Superintendent. As Chair of that committee he also did not follow through on a review of an administrative RFP from last spring that was developed in response to the public's concern about administrators (source: board minutes spring 2004). No follow-up, same issue with administrators this year as last and an increase in the administrative budget from $1.5 million in two years even with 2 less FTEs - it's about leadership and putting children's learning first.
Mr. Clingan pointed out that he had attended more than 200+ meetings. Attendance is important, but it does not demonstrate leadership and does not lead to meaningful committee work being done effectively on behalf of children's education and achievement.
Committee Chairs are leadership positions as is Vice President of the Board. Mr. Clingan said that the Board evaluates the Superintendent and they do so at each meeting providing him direction. You can evaluate the Superintendent at each meeting, but that is not very strategic and tends toward wasteful micromanaging.
The superintendent's contract requires the establishment of yearly goals. This is one of the most important undertaking's the board does. Historically, the Human Resources committee takes the lead in the Superintendent's evaluation - Ray Allen the former chair undertook coordinating this review.
If Mr. Clingan did not want to do this as Chair of that committee he needed to advise the Board president - apprently, since there are no goals in place for the Superintendent, this was not done.
The annual establishment of goals with the superintendent, which should be in place before the start of the school year sets the direction for the rest of the district and its employees and is an important communication goal with the community about what the district will be accomplishing in the short-term towards its long-term goals. What's so complicated about that? Why isn't it done?
Ms. Kobza also pointed out that last year that when Mr. Clingan chaired the Long Range Planning, this committee met for updates, but did not take on issues of boundaries, new schools, maintenance in a) any detail nor b) determine ways to involve the public in what would be a lot of work. In other words, no groundwork was laid last year for the enormous amount of work for the Long Range Planning Committee. Leopold families believe it's board votes this year that affected Leopold.
Yet Johnny Winston, Jr., at a previous board meeting, reminded board members that 20 year ago or more there was the knowledge that Leopold needed a new building.
Carol Carstensen Says I'm Angry and Threatens Elementary Strings: Raises Confidence and Governance Issues for Me
Carol Carstensen told me last night that I've been "angry" over elementary strings for the past four years. I learned many years ago never to "tell" people what they are feeling - 90% of the time you're wrong, and in this case Ms. Carstensen is dead wrong about me.
Her comment to me came after I asked her why the board would agree to a recommendation that puts the ENTIRE elementary strings program at risk if a referendum does not pass yet the board did not ask nor would it even consider a) reducing the administrative budget (increased $1.5 million over two years even with cut of 2 positions), b) reducing any of the services to high school children for extracurricular sports ($2 million budget) - which makes sense. They are paying 20% of the cost of the program, and, so are the elementary strings children. Plus, the board has an athletics committee - not a fine arts committee. Something wrong with this picture? Yes, very much so, and it's resulting in discrimination against underprivileged children who study instrumental music.
Elementary strings is not about me being angry - once again, Ms. Carstensen misses the point. This program is about 1800+ children all of whom are at the mercy of the referendum (more than 600 who are minority and more than 400 who are low income) - no other curriculum or course is put at such a risk nor affect as many children as this cut would. As a matter of fact, Ms. Carstensen, Mr. Clingan, Mr. Keys and Mr. Lopez took the budget cut document (not even a budget) and said - yep, this it, we can't do anything. It's a referendum, or you're done. They did this before even getting the budget.
Even though I have been one of the more visible advocates for strings, I am not the only person caring and asking questions about elementary strings. There have been hundreds of children, their parents and the community who have also been asking: why hasn't the administration and board come up with ways in which to make the program work and meet the curriculum standards and understand the performance results in other curricula that the fine arts contribute so significantly to?
On Monday, Mr. Rainwater said he has tried EVERYTHING and can't come up with anything, but what he is really saying is they won't come up with anything that he was not willing to involve teachers, principals, parents and the community to help us.
This is one more example of the "closed shop" our current School Board has become. The only way to change this is to change the board with new energy, new ideas and an openness to work meaningfully with the community - not to lecture the community about how right you are and how wrong I am - it's about kids' learning and achievement. We will need to do this to build public confidence in the board's ability to govern before referendums will pass. I'm afraid that is not there at the moment.
Maybe it was Ms. Carstensen who was mad when I also informed her that I had hoped to be able to vote for her, but based upon her under-management of the budget, recent decisions and her comments at the forum - we've done everything and if the referendum fails, maybe we can cobble something together for "those kids" at MSCR, that I would no longer be able to support her as a candidate for the MMSD School Board. I was sad about not being able to support her candidacy, not angry. But before I accused her of being angry, I would ask her.
We need a change - fresh, good old practical, progressive ideas. Referedums need to be one of a mix of options, not the only and we need a School Board that gets it by listening, not telling and threatening.
Alliance Residential Management is reportedly now in charge of managing Fitchburg's Ridgewood Apartments. Visit Alliance's searchable apartment database here to check out the type of properties and prices they offer.
Mary Battaglia recently mentioned Fitchburg's possible condemnation of the Ridgewood Apartments.
It seems change is in the wind at Ridgewood, with implications for the planned Leopold expansion (Learn more about the Leopold Referendum) Leopold is 0.20 miles from the Ridgewood Apartments (map).
Carol Carstensen�s recent letter to the editor of the Wisconsin State Journal (�Carstensen replies to Robarts�) illustrates the choices before the public in this spring�s school board elections. Many of these choices revolve around the core question of whether one can support progressive ideals and challenge the board�s go along and get along status quo.
I believe that it is not only possible but necessary for progressives to question the status quo � particularly if it results in serious board consideration of balance between employee wages and benefits as part of a comprehensive search for ways to preserve our current staff levels and programs in view of current funding realities.
In her letter, Carol Carstensen erroneously reduces my suggestions to one simplistic idea and then condemns the idea as anti-teacher and ill-informed. Perhaps it is easier to attack a straw-person concept, but it doesn�t move the community or the board closer to the honest problem-solving that is required at a time when we need all of the input and ideas that we can get.
To set the record straight, I did not recommend cutting teachers� wages and benefits. I did recommend looking for ways to keep their increases in line with the community�s ability to pay as part of a larger plan. I did not propose to hold teacher wages and benefits to any particular percentage or to roll back employee wages. I have not suggested that any or all of my ideas would eliminate the total budget gap for next year; I do believe that this is not a zero sum game and that any reduction in the gap is a step in the right direction, an idea that Carol dismisses in her letter.
The larger plan that I have promoted includes changes that Carol and others on the board have rejected: meaningful reductions in administrative staff, serious evaluations of whether we are getting a good return on our investments in educational programs such as reading and math, and reductions in purchasing contracted services.
If we are to solve the serious dilemmas facing our city and our schools, the board must engage in a serious discussion of facts, analyses, ideas, and clear proposals rather than posturing and labels. That is not happening with the current board. A board that calls itself pro-education, pro-teacher and progressive needs to do the serious work involved in keeping teachers and custodians in the buildings and with the kids. As a progressive member of the board, it is my right and my responsibility to continue to promote informed decision-making to make the best use of scarce resources for our schools and for our community.
The Madison School Board of Education and the District administration are proposing nearly $50 million worth of referenda and are begging for the support of the taxpaying public to significantly raise taxes. At the same time, Superintendent Rainwater bashes the business community for not contributing more tax dollars to fund public education. By accusing businesses of "eating their own young" and "contributing to their own demise" he is creating a very divisive atmosphere that makes it very difficult for taxpayers to see the value in more and more spending for mediocre results.
Ditto for Board President Bill Keys and his remarks about State Legislators, referring to them as "bastards with no regard for human beings." One of the fundamentals for gaining financial support for any effort is to reach out through the development of positive relationships.
These charges leveled by Rainwater and Keys cannot be construed in any way, shape or form as contributing to the development of positive relationships.
Furthermore, the Board and administration are not showing good cause for the need, nor are they showing good stewardship of the increasing amounts of money the District has been receiving from the taxpayers over the past few years. More money does NOT equate with better quality education. Every business operating within the boundaries of the Madison school district pays property taxes to support this school district. Rainwater and the Board continue to put the support of the public school system at risk with their divisive, accusatory and demeaning remarks.
My March 9, 2005 Presentation to the Madison Board of Education [PDF]
Lee Sensenbrenner summarizes last night's Madison School Board meeting where the board approved going forward with the third of three planned May referendums.
FOIA, Blogshine Sunday & Madison School Board Election
Freeculture.org sponsored blogshine Sunday, a day when news organizations run stories and editorials in support of public access to government information.
The internet has substantially improved citizen's ability to see who is funding elected officials directly and indirectly.
The Madison City Clerk conveniently posts campaign finance information on their website. I took a quick look at PAC (political action committee) spending on school board races and found this:
Madison School Related PAC's:
Citizens for investing in Madison Schools: apparently setup to support the June, 2003 referendum. Current Board Members Bill Keys and Bill Clingan's campaigns contributed to this PAC (1000 and 800 respectively), as did Madison Teachers, Inc. (MTI) ($1500). This PAC raised and spent more than $30K in 2002/2003.
Get Real, a PAC that supported candidates who were not endorsed by Madison Teachers. Get Real raised and spent less than $1,000. Get Real made small donations to unsuccessful candidates Sam Johnson & Melania Alvarez. This organization's campaign finance disclosure documents are signed by former Madison School Board member Nancy Harper.
Madison Teachers'sMadison Voters raised more than $40K in 2004 and spent about $34K on direct and indirect support of endorsed candidates (Johnny Winston, Jr., Shwaw Vang and Alix Olson - who lost to incumbent Ruth Robarts). MTI Voters July 20, 2004 report [pdf] showed cash on hand of $52K
Progressive Dane raised and spent less than $2,000 last year, including small contributions to Johnny Winston, Jr. and Shwaw Vang.
Every active member of the Madison School Board was endorsed by and received direct and indirect support from Madison Teachers, Inc. The only current exception is Ruth Robarts, who, while supported in the past by MTI, was opposed by MTI in her 2004 successful re-election campaign.
Wisconsin has a number of perspectives on this, from Feingold to Sensenbrenner to Doyle:
Russ Feingold generally refused 3rd party PAC money during his recent campaigns.
Milwaukee Area Republican Jim Sensenbrenner, operating from a safe seat, has taken great advantage of special interest money over the years, accepting 63% of his campaign funds from PAC's during the 2003/2004 cycle.
Current Governor Jim Doyle has raised more money faster than former Governor Tommy Thompson (Thompson was known for raising buckets of campaign cash).
Milwaukee's recent election difficulties were largely uncovered by Greg Borowski, who writes today about looming threats to our right to know.
What does this all mean? Perhaps nothing or everything. Sensenbrenner, a friend of Hollywood, accepts junkets to Hong Kong.
Closer to home, should Madison School Board candidates accept funds from special interests?
Current Board Member Bill Clingan (Candidate for Seat 6 in the April, 2005 election) chairs the Board's Human Resources Committee which is currently negotiating a new contract with Madison Teachers. This issue was discussed at the recent Northside PTA candidate forum. Carol Carstensen, when asked for a yes or no answer to whether Madison Teachers should spend thousands of dollars to protect incumbents, answered no according to Lee Sensenbrenner. In the same article, Bill Clingan endorsed the rights of PAC's and is proud to have their support. I did not find any PAC contributions to Lawrie Kobza's campaign (pdf); Bill Clingan's opponent or Larry Winkler (pdf) who is running against Carol Carstensen. I'll update this information as additional filings (later in March) occur.
Background Links:
The District has a policy on Board Member's public responsibilities (1540).
Our School Board Needs a Budget: No Budget Yet We Have a Cut List that Harms Underprivileged Children's Education and Divides Parent Groups
The inside, unsigned cover page of MMSD's non-budget cut list that tells the public that the administration is protecting math and reading for young children. For $12,000+ per student, the administration will teach our kids to read and to do math - what happened to science and social studies? What happened to educating the whole child or the district's educational framework - engagement, learning and relationships?
You don't put a cut list before a budget - no family would do that with their own budgeting process. How does a board member know where the money is going and how can board members ask needed, important questions about policy and direction? Looking at the proposed cuts in the elementary school you can easily see these cuts harm the academics and academic support for underprivileged child the most � it's hard to determine if consider educating the whole child.
As an example, District administration by proposing a 100% cut to elementary strings is creating an environment where �Underprivileged children will suffer the most,� says Davis in a March 10, 2005 Isthmus article, Axing the Arts. �It�s another way of letting only those who can afford it get the opportunities. The fear is that you�re going to have a very one-sided, warped community, where one world will have all of the exposure and sophistication, and the other world won�t.� There are many alternatives to a 100% cut.
The board needs to say no one group should bear such a burden, especially such young underprivileged children for whom access to opportunity is hard enough already. 100% of this academic curriculum will be cut if the board goes to referendum and the referendum fails.
Open classroom, TAG, fine arts, homeless support advocates are stunned by the cut list. They should be. The administration's proposed cut list has nothing to do with student achievement and everything to do with holding the community hostage and protecting turf. Our current board asks no questions, and they go along for the ride. It's a tiring tactic, and I'm feeling abused this year with the complete elimination of the elementary strings on the chopping block if a referendum fails.
What's on the cut list may be those courses or services that a) district administration does not support (or like, in the case of elementary fine arts) or b) district administration knows board members will put back into the budget, saving the moment, but missing the big picture - student achievement. Without the budget, it's hard for the school board to ask the questions they need to in order to understand where the dollars are being allocated and if these allocations make sense.
Further the cut list is developed could be seen to divide the parent groups, not bring them together. I know this from my experience with the fine arts curriculum. For four years, the administration has targeted this curriculum, in particular elementary strings, mercilessly, without equity in bearing the cuts. This year, the administration took their apparent hostility towards the academic elementary fine arts to a new level, cutting elementary fine arts $1 million (25% cut over the 25% cut last year - 100% of the elementary strings program) while hiding or protecting other areas. Administrators began telling teachers last fall their program was gone next year. Where is academics and children�s achievement in statements like this? Only 9.5 FTEs teach more than 1800+ students in 30 elementary schools.
District administration is keeping extracurricular activities ($2 million) not subject to the results of a referendum - and the administration can bury this information in the budget, because the budget will not be released until May 2005. In the meantime, the administration has everyone focused on the cut list and there is no budget. Board members are not asking questions about what�s in the budget.
What else? MMSD's administration is 25% higher than the state average of #students/administrator - that cost is $2 million. The District administration protects administrators from layoffs, but not teaching positions. Even with revenue caps and the QEO, staffing costs are likely to increase $8-10 million for teachers (an amount for this is already included in the budget gap). Where is the leadership Kathleen Falk demonstrates when presenting a budget - protect employees from layoffs, protect services. MMSD's district administration protects its administrators from layoffs, sacrificing teachers instead.
Is there more? Reading Recovery, which costs $1-2 million has not been discussed. Yet this program was shown to be no more effective than other reading strategies. The board needs to ask for alternatives � needs to see the data, needs to have a public discussion.
What does the District administration do? The public is continuously told that MMSD turned away up to $10+ million in federal funds for reading over several years, because we do it better. We get a seminar on why MMSD is better - no data to support this decision was presented.
Has MMSD done a great job to date? In some areas, you bet, and I believe a large part of that success is the tremendous public support behind the reading goal. But, the children who are challenged the most, are those children for whom the administration is proposing to stay the course, not even looking closely at Laphams' success. I find it hard to believe that MMSD administrators could not figure out a way to make this work. Board members need to tell the Superintendent to follow up with this
These items are only the tip of the iceberg. When the Board does not have the budget, board members cannot discuss the big picture when making decisions. There is no way to keep student achievement as a top priority. we need our board to have these discussions publicly. We need to know how much more mandates are costing, utilities, etc.
Public education is about student achievement - discussions of boundary changes, new schools, maintenance costs need to flow from that objective one would think that would make sense. The confusion is everywhere - boundary changes, new school - why didn't we start from instruction and build the budget out from there.
Our Superintendent says to our School Board, "Board, you have to make a suggestion to replace what's on the cut list. To the Superintendent and the School Board, I ask isn't that your job to provide a budget and alternatives for public discussion. With only one options and no meaningful discussion, there is room only for very limited public discussion, but lots of intimidation."
If we have the education vision, build the budget, down the road, won't we be better able to make our case to the state and to the citizens of Madison for a referendum? I value excellent education, music and art, but I don't trust a cut list that that puts one group of students at risk totally while protecting another group. More than 30% of the elementary strings program students come from underprivileged environments.
Music teachers, parents and community activists are already agitating against Madison schools Superintendent Art Rainwater�s call to eliminate the elementary strings program, as part of a proposed slate of budget cuts.
�This creates a very disturbing environment in the community,� says Marie Breed, executive director of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra. �It�s particularly shocking for a strong arts community like Madison to dismiss elementary string education so easily, saying essentially, �We�re not going to support these children.��
By eliminating the fourth- and fifth-grade strings program, Rainwater says the district can cut nearly ten full-time equivalent positions, saving about $500,000 in salaries and another $100,000 in equipment, repairs and books. In all, the district needs to trim $8.6 million to comply with state-imposed revenue caps -- or else secure referendum approval to exceed them.
Breed, a former classroom teacher, says the benefits of the strings program are many, as teachers and parents have attested in recent years of budget debates, in which this program has been a mainstay on the chopping block.
�The strings program is important because it teaches kids about art for the sake of art -� and that teaches humanity,� Breed says. �But it also helps kids work on life skills, on finding pride in accomplishments, and with self-esteem and time management.� She cites research showing a link between studying music and higher scores on academic achievement tests.
David Lovell, chairman of the youth symphony, says lasting damage may be done if the local arts community does not get more involved -� including searching for partnerships to keep programs alive in the school. �I don�t think speaking out on school budgets is traditionally our role,� he says. �But because of what�s been happening, there�s a growing willingness to get involved.�
Richard Davis, a UW-Madison emeritus professor of music and an internationally known bassist, has won dozens of awards in Madison and around the world for his work with young musicians. He worries that the elimination of the strings programs in Madison will be a blow to minority students.
�Underprivileged children will suffer the most,� says Davis. �It�s another way of letting only those who can afford it get the opportunities. The fear is that you�re going to have a very one-sided, warped community, where one world will have all of the exposure and sophistication, and the other world won�t.�
The strings program is just one of many flashpoints for the embattled fine-arts program in Madison schools. Teachers complain about increased class loads and the loss of music rooms. Last fall, a dozen arts teachers petitioned the school board to appoint a committee to craft a �vision� for a fine-arts curriculum; the board took no action.
This week, Rainwater announced that he will wait until the summer to hire a fine-arts coordinator. The position has been vacant since last fall, much to the chagrin of arts advocates.
�This community has clearly told the Madison school district that Madison values music and art,� says citizen activist Barb Schrank. �I�m not sure they�ve been responsive to the community.�
Rhonda Schilling, a music teacher at Thoreau Elementary, says fine-arts teachers are getting fed up with the barrage of budget attacks: �It seems to be year after year in which they are cutting the arts left and right. We�re getting very tired. Clearly our opinions are falling on deaf ears.�
Rainwater�s proposed cuts also include eliminating some athletics programs and reducing to half-time the district�s gay and lesbian outreach position. These cuts, too, are sure to prove controversial.
There are those -- including the two candidates challenging incumbents on the April 5 ballot -- who suggest the board hasn�t been proactive enough in prioritizing cuts. And the contention is sure to continue after the election, as voters will be asked to decide as many as three referendum questions to approve up to $50 million in additional spending.
A meeting Monday night turned ugly when citizen critic Don Severson accused the board of �irresponsible leadership� and slammed its president, Bill Keys, for suggesting in a TV interview that the cost to taxpayers to hold a special election in May, rather than the general election in April, is minimal. In fact, this special election will cost taxpayers about $90,000 extra. Keys angrily said he misspoke on TV based on sloppy notes, then proceeded to question and lecture Severson during what was supposed to be the public comment portion of the meeting.
Board members, at virtually every opportunity, blame the state Legislature for the district�s fiscal crisis. But with no legislative changes in sight, such cries begin to ring hollow.
Moreover, several board members continue to lob bombs at outsiders, while remaining particularly sensitive to criticism directed at them. In recent weeks, Keys has referred to lawmakers as �bastards,� and Juan Jose Lopez has called a local Web site devoted to school issues, open to everyone, �destructive.� On Monday, Lopez also criticized colleague Ruth Robarts for writing an op-ed column that questions the board�s budgeting process, saying Robarts shouldn�t be questioning the process just because she�s upset with the outcome.
In fact, what�s needed is more questioning, not less. Can it really be that there is no other way for the district to operate than to continually point a gun to the head of popular programs and demand of taxpayers, �Give us more money or else?�
Background Links: Strings | Budget Send your thoughts on this issue to the Madison School Board: comments at madison.k12.wi.us
Lawrie Kobza Leads the School Board - Superintendent Art Rainwater's goals
Good for Lawrie! She's leading the School Board and showing Bill Clingan how a board member needs to lead.
At the Northside Planning Council candidates' forum, Lawrie Kobza emphasized that she would have public discussions to set annual measurable goals and objectives for the Superintendent. The last time his goals were set with the School Board was in 2002!!!!!!
Guess what? All of a sudden the Human Resources Committee is meeting to discuss administrator goals - first the meeting was set for March 28th, now it's set for March 14th. But, it's a power point about the process for setting administrators' goals - not their goals. AND, no Superintendent's goals - AGAIN. What does it matter anyway - goals should start the school year, not end the year!!!!!
The Human Resources Committee, which Bill Clingan chairs, has not led the work of this committee, until Lawrie Kobza pointed out the work was not getting done. Mr. Clingan said he was ill with pneumonia last fall. Okay, but he's been chair since last spring, and he has a MMSD staff person assigned to this committee to work with him to set the calendar.
Got to have time to toot your horn during the last few weeks of the campaign, Mr. Clingan! Too little for the district, too late for the public. We see this action for what it is - election year politics!!!!!! Play ball.
3/7/2005 Madison School Board Meeting Budget Comments
Board Members and citizens discussed the Madison School District Administration's proposed budget changes (reductions in the increase, cuts and program eliminations - see this post for details. The overall budget will go up, from 317M to 327.7M as it does annually.) this past Monday evening:
Don Severson & Bill Keys on special election costs, spending and the budget process. [29.8MB Quicktime Video]
The Fitchburg city council unanimously approved a redevelopment resolution Tuesday night that calls for a possible condemnation of the Ridgewood Apartments, and may use tax increment financing to support improvements.
These are the apartments across the street from Leopold Elementary. The Board is basing much of its claim that the school will remain at a high capacity due to these low income apartments.
There may be several years until these apartments are full again and will the population and price of these apartments affect the population?
Vote in the April 5th School Board Election - Next Important Opportunity for Public's Vote to Make a Positive Difference
The most important vote to me is the April 5th School Board election, and I will be voting to change the School Board by voting to elect Lawrie Kobza to Seat 6. If we don�t change the school board, current board members will continue to accept the administration�s recommendations for budget cuts year after year without asking to see the �priorities� that remain in the budget. We need transparency, not smoke and mirrors, and serious school board discussions and decisions at meetings. Download file April 5th Board Election Critical
Comments to School Board - Where Are You Putting Your Increased Revenue for Next Year, Why Do You Form Collaborations With Parents and the Community for Sports, Pets but after Four Years - Still Fail to Collaborate with the Community on Fine Arts?
Dear School Board Members,
Good evening. I plan to comment on the following � a) net reductions in classroom instruction budgets while the total budget grew this year, b) cutting elementary strings 100 % inequitably targets low income (minority) children and says you do not deserve what others in Madison have, c) limited options offered to the public and pursued by the board - fourth year that the board has not pursued with parents and the community ideas and possibilities for collaborations/partnerships for fine arts.
The budget discussion items document distributed last week is not a budget it�s only one option of cuts. The board needs to ask where the increased revenue dollars for next year will be spent and they need to ask for additional sets of budget cut options.
Annually advancing only one set of a seemingly random list of cuts out of context of where the money will be spent makes parents and voters skeptical about the board�s decisionmaking ability and this year public skepticism will threaten the passage of an operating referendum for instruction.
We may very well need money for instruction, but what do we need and what options can we pursue � referendum, private funds, grants for what Madison values. The current school board will not get people to vote for a referendum if what Madison values is threatened and important questions are not asked now. Voters will not have confidence in how and where the money is being spent and in how the board is protecting children�s learning and achievement through alternatives.
We cannot continue the path of current decisionmaking, because this board continues to lead us toward a narrow, conservative vision for public education bankrupting our children�s learning.
There has been a good deal of debate over suggestions that the proposed plans to add a second building to the Leopold School site would create a "megaschool" of undesirable proportions. Arguing that 'everyone' knew that the physically linked (MMSD calls it 'paired') schools would have a combined enrollment of more than 1100 students, proponents of the administration's plan are confident that a school this size would have no additional challenges or needs. The idea that the addition should be built but for a smaller number of students is considered heresy by those who fear critical assessment of administration ideas.
Anyone who is interested in the debate - pro, con, apathetic - will benefit from taking a close look at the schematics for the addition, which are available on-line at:
Of particular interest is the size/layout of the cafeteria(s) [one room separated by a folding divider], the number of ESL class rooms for a school that can be expected to have 250 - 300 ESL students, and the size/location of the playground space, parking lots, and school bus drop off/pick up locations.
Overseeing the building of a new school on the Leopold site is one of the responsibilities of the Long Range Planning committee, of which I am a member. On this committee, board and citizen members have voted to ask the public via referendum to build a school on the Leopold grounds. This has been part of a long-range plan for quite some time. In 1988, I worked at Leopold Elementary School as a Parent-Community Liaison. My supervisor was the late Don Stern who was Principal at the time. Mr. Stern always told me that Leopold was the biggest elementary school in the district and the Leopold community was going to get bigger. Despite Leopold being the biggest elementary school, he had no Assistant Principal. This was never a burden for him. He loved Leopold School. But he knew that eventually another school would be built on the property. He told me this, and this was in the late 80s!
Im not supporting this building referendum only because of Mr. Stern. Im supporting this because it is the right thing to do. The Leopold neighborhood has grown by leaps and bounds as will the whole Westside of Madison. The increased enrollment dictates that something must be done to alleviate the overcrowding in the school. Building on the current grounds is a fiscally efficient thing to do. Building else where in the community would add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the project. Building a smaller facility with a reduced capacity puts the community back in the same place it is now and will cause additional overcrowding at other west side schools. Not building a school on the Leopold site will increase the timetable for which another new school will have to be built on the far west side of Madison. One thing that is for certain, as these new developments are built and enrollments increase on the far west and far east sides of Madison, new schools will need to be built. The effect of this action will cause closing schools to be strongly considered on the north side and Isthmus. Future school boards will make these difficult decisions in five to ten years as growth dictates or perhaps even sooner as the financial challenges warrant.
The current school board receives many opinions regarding its lack of long range planning. In the case of Leopold, a great deal of planning has been done for the new school. The PTO, community leaders, parents, teachers and students have been heard loud and clear. This is what they want. If there are additional questions and concerns, they need to be addressed in the Long Range Planning committee. We have yet to have such concerns placed on the agenda. Anyone who has a dissenting opinion should use the Long Range Planning committee meetings as a forum to vent their concerns. Although, I am supportive of building a new building on the Leopold grounds, I want to hear from those who might question this logic or have concerns. Once these concerns are addressed, school board members can make an informed decision and be able to live with their decision and the decision of the voters on May 24th.
These video clips were taken from the March 1, 2005 Long Range Planning Meeting on the proposed Leopold Referendum (arranged in discussion length order):
I'd like to ask more about rejecting $2 million for reading
Barb Schrank started a discussion below about questions people would like to ask the board and superintendent during the MMSD's budget deliberations. Here post actually hasn't generated much discussion, so I'm re-posting the questions that I'd like to ask:
I'd like the Board and Superintendent to tell the community more about why the Superintendent choose not to use the Reading First funds ($2 million approximately) to expand Read 180 which is currently used and supported by the district.
Here's what was reported in the newspaper about Read 180: "Read 180 has expanded from a pilot program at Wright Middle School in the 2001-02 school year to 15 schools serving 1,100 students, said Sharyn Stumpf, secondary language arts resource teacher. The district wants to add 150 more students and upgrade materials, which would cost about $154,400." You can read the full story here.
Read 180 is a highly scripted program, but the district said it didn't want the Reading First funds because they would have to be used for a highly scripted reading program. Read 180 is so highly scripted that the students work on a computer. What could be more scripted?
The district rejected the money because the scripted Reading First programs would take the teacher out of the learning process, so the Superintendent said. Yet, Read 180 takes the teacher completely out of the teaching process when the student works at a computer.
The Superintendent said the district didn't want the Reading First funds because the federal government has no place in directing the education of Madison children. If that's true, will the Superintendent and school board return ALL federal money that requires the district to meet certain standards or provide certain programs?
There have to be other reasons for why the Superintendent decided not to pursue $2 million in federal funds. What were the REAL reasons? There's more behind the decision than anyone has been told. I'd like parents, students, teachers, and taxpayers to press for answers.
Where did the budget increase? Building Services, Student Services, Human Resources and Education Services - $18.3 million
Where was the budget cut? Elementary, Middle and High Schools took the biggest cuts - $2.1 million.
The MMSD School Board needs to start here, ask for an estimate of revenues for 05-06 and ask for scenarios with different allocations of these revenues. The School Board would then have a place to start a dialogue with the community.
The Madison School District's Administration announced a series of 2005/2006 budget changes (eliminate some programs, reduce the increase in others, eliminate some positions). The overall budget will increase by about 10M+, from 316.8M in 2004/2005 to 327.7M in 2005/2006 (via Roger Price's recent budget presentation. [slides pdf]).
Barb Schrank looks at where the money went last year (.xls file) and finds that the instructional budget took the biggest cut while Building Services, Student Services, Human Resources and Education Services grew by 18M+
Read the District's introduction to the discussion items by clicking on the link below. This intro summarizes the priorities the Administration used to create the proposed budget changes (page 1 of the pdf link).
After 10 years of continually reducing services to our children and community, putting this budget together has been a difficult and heart wrenching experience for the Administration. We are long past the time that we can solve our revenue cap problems by being more efficient or eliminating things that are �nice but not necessary.�
This year�s budget cuts include things that all of us value, believe in and which make our District one of the best in the country. Placing these services on the reduction list has been the most difficult decision that the Management Team members have ever faced. The Team has been guided throughout the process by the Board of Education�s directive to utilize the District�s strategic plan in making its decisions. In addition to using the Strategic Priorities delineated in the Strategic Plan we utilized the Board of Education�s three goals in determining its priorities for making the service reductions:
All students complete 3rd grade reading at grade level or beyond.
All students complete Algebra by the end of 9th grade and Geometry by the end of 10th grade.
The district-wide attendance rate is at least 94%.
In keeping with these goals, we have sought first to protect the reading and mathematics instruction in our primary grades. Every effort has been made to keep small class sizes and to keep reading interventions, mathematics instruction and staff development focused on these first critical grades.
Research shows that children who are successful at this early stage of their education are successful learners throughout their K-12 experience.
Our next priority was to protect classroom instruction and safety in our middle and high schools. Although it was necessary to make some reductions in staff in these schools, we have protected the fundamental instructional needs and supported the measures necessary to maintain safety at each level.
Our decision to place the highest priority on these programs meets the Board of Education�s direction to follow the Board�s priorities and goals in making our recommendations. By prioritizing our limited resources to assure that children can successfully meet the Board�s goals, many other very important things must be reduced or eliminated. We recognize their importance and value but realize we can no longer keep them a reality in our district.
Every year, all of our staff are called on to give more to keep our children�s education sound. This year will be no different. The Board of Education will weigh our recommendations and make the final decisions that it feels are in the best interest of our students and our community. We wish the situation were different, but it is our reality.
On March 1, 2005, the Northside Planning Council held an excellent, well run and informative school board candidates' forum at Warner Park in Madison, WI. Candidates for Seat 6 (Bill Clingan - incumbant and Lawrie Kobza) and Seat 7 (Carol Carstensen - incumbant and Larry Winkler) answered a wide variety of questions on many topics.
Following are videoclips from that forum. The format for the forum following opening statements by the candidates was in three parts: 1) 3 questions developed by the Northside Planning Council, 2) each candidate asked their opponent a question, and 3) written questions submitted from the floor.
II. Part 1: Questions developed by Northside Planning Council
A. Question 1 - City-School District Relationship: What is already being done to promote collaboration between the city and the school district and what creative suggestions do you have to further it?Candidates' Answers to Question 1: City-School Relationship
B. Question 2 - Parental Involvement: What would you do, as a School Board member, to insure that the District is getting direct feedback from parents of color and low-income parents? How would you overcome the barriers that keep them from participating?Candidates' Answers to Question 2: Parental Involvement
C. Question 3 - Changing & Developing District Policy: The District almost succeeded in eliminating or changing its current Equity Policy without substantial public dialogue. What measures would you implement to insure accountability, transparency, and meaningful public input into future District decision-making?Candidates' Answers to Question 3: Changing & Developing District Policy
III. Candidates Ask Their Opponents A Question
A. Bill Clingan asks Lawrie Kobza about her position on building a second school to total 1100 K-5 students at Leopold Elementary School. Lawrie Kobza asks Bill Clingan why, as Chair of the Human Resources Committee, Superintendent Rainwater has not developed meassurable goals approved by the School Board since 2002. She noted that the Human Resources Committee has met only once since Mr. Clingan became chair.Clingan and Kobza Ask Each Other a Question - Leopold and Superintendent Goals
Budget Time: Madison School District's Credibility
The credibility of the Madison Metropolitan School District comes into serious question with the public when Board of Education members and district staff present erroneous information through the media to the public.
Recent examples include:
May, 2005 Special Election Costs: 1. Bill Keys, President of the Board of Education, on the TV Channel 27 early morning news show, February 3, 2005, in referring to proposed referenda for a May 2005 vote stated that "it's only $15,000 more ($90,000) to wait until May rather than go for the April election, which will only cost $75,000." A vote on school referenda at the time of a regular countywide election incurs only a minor cost (less that $2000) to the District for graphics and ball space. Special balloting, such as that proposed for school referenda in May will incur more that $87,000 in expenses billed to the District by Dane County, the City of Madison and eight other involved municipalities with voters in the school district. A detailed report of these costs billed to the District for the June 2003 referendum ballot will be presented to the Board at its regular March 7, 2005 meeting.
Community Input: 2. Carol Carstensen, Board of Education member, complains that critics of the Board aren't really interested in seeking solutions to complex questions and is quoted in the "Talking Out of School" column in Isthmus, February 11, page 8, "I get a little concerned when people say, 'You should be doing this,' but then are unable to give me a better plan for how to achieve what they want." As a representative of Active Citizens for Education we have presented the Board of Education and administration with more than 29 documents including recommendations, plans, proposals, reports and analyses on a variety of issues with which the Board is faced. A list of the documents, along with duplicate copies, will be presented to the Board at its next meeting to refresh memories.
Taxpayer Costs: 3. Joe Quick, MMSD administration staff member, in discussing the proposed $26.2 million referendum for maintenance projects aired on the 10:00 p.m. TV Channel 27 newscast, February 28, stated that the request for revenue to support this referendum "would have no impact on taxes." The fact of the matter is that if there is no referendum or if the referendum fails, property taxes will decrease due to the retirement of revenue bonds for previous capital indebtedness.
In order for the general public to understand the implications and consequences of financial decisions for which the public is requested to support, the Board of Education members and the administration must present accurate and complete information within the context of the total framework of the district's budgeting, taxing authority and actions.
What to Look for in the Next Few Weeks? Based upon the single macro-forecast of a revenue gap of $8+ million, School Board members were told a list of budget cuts would be presented to the School Board on March 7th. Without benefit of a budget, the School Board will hold public hearings, not meetings, where parents/public have an opportunity to comment on the proposed cuts.
At no time can the public have meaningful comment on the overall budget by department or the allocation of next year's revenue. Why? This information will not be presented to the School Board until May 2005, and there is only one hearing scheduled after this date. Because the cuts are distributed on March 3rd, the public will only be focusing on the cuts and not the overall budget, budget priorities, etc. This approach takes advantage of parent's wanting to protect their child's education first. Since parents are in panic mode, they cannot clearly see the bigger picture and often feel as if they are being held hostage without any alternatives or a chance to pursue/discuss alternatives.
What's Driving this Timeline? The Superintendent has said in the past that the data are not available and that the teachers' contract is another the main driver for the timeline. The teacher's contract includes dates for notices for surplus and layoff. The teacher's contract says nothing about the School Board's budget decisionmaking process. Surplus notices are not due until July 1. Layoff notices are due 10 days before the end of the school year. If the School Board had a policy directive to the Superintendent of no teacher layoffs, as they implicitly do with Administrators, the backend timeline would not be as tight. This is apparently not the case - existing teachers can be laid off but not existing administrators. Even though the amount of administrators is smaller than teachers, the policy is not equitable across all employee groups. The Superintendent says licenses requirements differ, etc. This is noise - there is no equitable policy in place.
What have I observed? a) The public is not engaged at the start of the budget process. It's February 28th and tonight the Board is taking up the discussions of communications with the PTOs. What?
Parents are only "scared into paying attention" when the cut list comes out, because we don't pay attention the rest of the year. I see no backpack mail from the board to parents on the budget, next steps, what the board wants to hear from parents, etc.
Our ideas and comments are not solicited in meaningful ways or forums. That would have had to take place in the fall.
b) Allocation of new revenues is not discussed. A brief analysis done last fall for the Board said this would mean cuts to deep to non-instruction if all dollars were allocated to instruction as a first priority. End of discussion. A next step for the School Board would have been to come back with more specific impacts and to develop a dialog with the community and an iterative process that would put the School Board more in a leadership position with the direction of the budget - something that does not exist with the existing decisionmaking process.
What am I missing, and why is there only once choice? If I was reviewing my home budget, and I felt I could manage the cuts in my budget, I would think this current board budget decisionmaking process is just fine. My husband and daughter might complain about the changes but not for long.
If I looked at my home budget and saw I could't buy all the food I needed or medicine or pay my mortgage, I would be in rapid action mode. As soon as I had an idea this was my budget problem, I would be doing something and fast. I wonder why our Superintendent, who says the district is facing this type of financial crunch, isn't more actively using his school board and getting the public on board beginning last July.
Explicit budget details are not needed to have public discussions about the annual budget, financial planning, priorities, allocation of scarce resources and different models of funding children's services that Madison values.
Yes, the feds and state are not holding up their end of the bargain - now, what are we going to do about this. Referendums are only one option, but more are needed - we are here again with only one option being presented as viable - oh yes, or cut educational services.
On March 28, the Madison School Board will cast the final vote on the proposed referendum for $14.5M to build a second school on the Leopold Elementary School site. The proposed "paired" school will open its doors to students in September of 2007 and will house up to 550 Kindergarten through second grade students and another 550 third through fifth grade students. If the Leopold community's current population mix holds, a school of 1100 or more will include 275 (25%) students for whom English is a second language and 121 (11%) who have Special Educational needs. Over half of the students will come from low income homes. Unlike other Madison paired schools that are on different sites, Leopold's buildings will be on the same grounds and will be physically linked in an L-shape. Students from both schools will share lunch rooms and playground facilities. Students will have separate entrances, but will share buses to and from school.
My duty as a board member is to weigh the pros and cons of this recommendation from the administration. Although I see why current Leopold parents expect great positives from the new building, I believe that these are short-term gains for the school and community and that the negatives of creating an extremely large elementary school may outweigh the short-term advantages. I am particularly concerned that the short-term relief for overcrowding will be undermined when the building reaches full capacity and houses two schools, each of which is far bigger than any K-2 or 3-5 school today. It is my responsibility to ask whether we have the experience to make such a joint school work and what additional resources will be required to assure student success under such conditions.
In the short-term, the proposal meets some, but not all, of the needs of Leopold's current students. It would end the overcrowding. Because it would open at 75% of capacity, the students at the school in 2007 would have small classes in an over-sized facility. On the other hand, the school could not open until the fall of 2007. In the interim there must be a plan to control enrollment size through such means as freezing enrollment, sending grades to other schools or changing school boundaries. So far the Board has not seen the interim plan.
In the long-term, it is difficult to imagine ways in which a very large paired school offers new educational benefits to our children, but easy to list the problems that likely will arise from turning away from our goal of keeping schools small. Madison's standard is consistent with national trends for school size which prefer small over large schools. Research and our experience link smaller schools with higher academic achievement (especially for low income children), more engagement in school activities by students and families, and less truancy, discipline problems and need for Special Education services.
The Madison school district has remained true to this standard, even during difficult economic times. Currently, our largest elementary school--after Leopold-is Chavez School. Enrollment there is capped at 650. The biggest paired school is Franklin-Randall at 716 students. Even our largest middle school, Hamilton, has only 705 students. At the middle and high schools, we are working hard to break the schools into "smaller learning communities". Nationally, millions and millions of dollars are going into reducing the size of schools at all grade levels for the sake of improving the academic achievement of low income and minority students.
I greatly regret that I underestimated the need to focus on the educational dimension of the question before us from the very beginning. I realize that it is late in the game to raise such questions. However, I learned a painful lesson when I did not question or oppose the Board's decision to go ahead with construction of Chavez Elementary School, despite our doubts about the general contractor for the project. The scenario was similar. We had overcrowding problems on the west side and urgently needed a solution. We voted yes to move the project ahead. The result was a poor construction job and a new school that opened and, within a few months, closed again due to serious problems. Despite our good intentions, our rush to resolve one problem created a new problem and disrupted the children, families and staff of seven schools for most of a school year.
Although my thinking disappoints proponents of a new building, I do not believe that I will have fulfilled my responsibilities if I fail to raise the issue. It is possible that the current proposal for an 1100 student school will prove to be educationally sound. However, it is my goal to avoid creating additional problems for the Leopold community by thoroughly discussing plans before, rather than after, they are implemented.
This chart is based on the student enrollment data for the Madison Metropolitan School District after the 3rd Friday in September of 2004. All paired schools except the proposed new Leopold School are located on different sites.
The proposed Leopold Expansion discussion continues:
Visiting with some Leopold Parents at a recent event, a number of points were discussed:
Parking is currently a problem and will be worse as the school expands.
"We keep taking away their playground space. Where are all of the children going to play? They need space to run around."
"Why can't Madison build a school in Fitchburg (ie, closer to where all the homes are going in)? Verona has - Stoner Prairie, in Fitchburg [Map illustrating Leopold & Stoner Prairie]. Many homes are as far from Verona shools (in Fitchburg) as they are from Leopold."
"Where are all of these children going to go after Leopold?" "Will they be bused over to a Memorial/Middle School combination?"
"I'm concerned about the (proposed) shared library and cafeteria. Will they be adequately staffed for a school this size? The previous addition did not address the lunch room and library needs.
"I don't want to pay any more taxes, it seems like every year we have a budget crisis but my taxes continue to go up. Couldn't they plan better?"
Arlene Silviera is puzzled about Ruth Robarts recent questions regarding the size of the proposed Leopold school.
I'm volunteering with a conservation group in Mexico, so I don't have a lot of time to write a post. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to take a few minutes to respond to (Madson School Board Member) Juan Lopez who said of www.schoolinfosystem.org, "I think this kind of forum is destructive." See the story in the Wisconsin State Journal
I respectfully disagree.
A healthy democracy requires healthy debate. The tradition dates back to the Roman forums where citizens debated freely, and support for the necessity of public debate runs through the writing of our country's founders and our constitution.
Mr. Lopez and other board members might sense an unusual flurry of spirited commentary on this forum, because the board may not have provided a forum for the honest exchange of ideas. Suddenly, this blog provides the opportunity. Granted, the board holds public hearings, but they are rarely discussions. Instead, people speak and the board listens. It is most unusual from my experience when the board engages the speaker in a real discussion.
I encourage Mr. Lopez and the other members of the board to debate issues vigorously at board meetings, as well as post on this blog, which represents the best of what democracy offers for free and open debate.
Ulimately, the exchange of ideas on any pending school district decison will produce a better outcome than a decision without debate.
Ed Blume
The comments section is open on this post. Please feel free to agree or disagree. I welcome any comments.
Board Governance Lacking - No Timely Information on Taser Incident From Board President to Public: Chooses to Attack Robarts
Bill Keys, President of the MMSD School Board, chose to attack Ruth Robarts today in The Capital Times saying she was not the first board member to be concerned about the taser incident. Bill Keys' letter seems to be unnecessarily spiteful and misses the point that was raised in The Capital Times' editorial on February 15, 2005 . The editorial ended:
"Robarts is asking questions that need to be asked. And she is doing so in a thoughtful, forward-looking manner that invites the rest of the board and the community to join in a debate that needs to take place."
There was no criticism of the School Board - just praise for raising questions publicly, which is what the School Board needs to do in a situation where children's safety is an issue. The taser incident happened at Memorial High School on January 21, 2005. The incident was first reported in The Wisconsin State Journal on January 31, 2005, 10 days after the incident took place. In that article, Ruth Robarts commented that:
"School Board member Ruth Robarts said she was concerned that she didn't hear about the incident until a reporter's phone call." I find this incredible that she would hear about an issue such as this nearly 10 days after it happened from the press.
In that same article "Member Bill Clingan said it's appropriate that police authority trumps the school's, and that the incident is a police issue. But as an individual, he doesn't like to hear that a youth was subdued with a Taser."
What's missing - board governance. Neither Bill Keys, as president of the School Board, nor Bill Clingan, as vice president of the school board, did not appear to notify their colleagues about the incident in a timely manner; because, as it turns out, it's not clear from public documents when they learned of the incident. How can that be? I would expect the first question Bill Keys might ask Superintendent Rainwater is: Why wasn't the Board notified of this incident (at least before board members were contacted by the press) and what steps are you taking?
However, after learning about the incident, our School Board officers did not put the incident on a school board special session agenda so that they could 1) hear a public update about the incident from the Superintendent and what he was doing (such as, hiring an outside attorney to undertake an investigation), 2) provide the community with information about the incident that could be presented publicly and 3) have a public board discussion about next steps and what, if any, additional direction from the board to the Superintendent was needed. As an alternative, either school board officer could have written a letter to the paper about what the school board was doing to address the issue, complementing the questions raised by Ruth Robarts and letting the community know that this issue was of great concern to the board and that other board members were equally concerned as Ms. Robarts and were asking similar questions.
Instead, the public heard nothing from the school board president or vice president about an issue of importance to them (student safety) and what the school board would be doing. Rather than taking the opportunity to keep us updated, Mr. Keys decided more than one month after the taser incident to attack his colleague rather than thanking her for what she said, letting the public know what other board members were doing, and updating the public about what steps would be taken.
"You're manipulating my vote," said Mary Kay Battaglia, who has children at Crestwood Elementary and Jefferson Middle School. "You're giving me a choice to move my child and 1,100 others or to vote for a referendum I don't think is necessary."...
...Board member Bill Clingan said that the board was neither efficient nor intelligent enough to be manipulative...
Truth-in-Advertising: The Proposed Paired Leopold School is a HUGE Elementary School
On February 21, the district administration presented its recommendations for resolving overcrowding problems at Leopold Elementary School and accommodating children from new and future housing developments on the west side of Madison to the Long Range Planning Committee.
During the discussion, I questioned the educational merit of creating a paired K-5 elementary school on the Leopold grounds that will house 1100 students. If the voters approve the proposed May referendum to spend $14.5M to construct a new school at the Leopold site, the school will hold 1100 students in two buildings joined in an L-shape.
Superintendent Art Rainwater dismissed my concern. According to the superintendent, the enrollment number for the proposed pair is a non-issue. The superintendent assured us that �you can find research that supports any size of elementary school from 250 to 650 students�. In other words, there is no optimal size for an elementary school. He pointed to current Madison K-5 schools as a standard.
Joining in, Board President Bill Keys told me that the �beauty� of the Leopold recommendation is that the proposed K-2 and 3-5 schools are �completely separate schools�. Like the superintendent, he saw no difference between a K-5 school with 500-600 students and the proposed k-5 with 1100 students.
I see a big difference. The proposed paired Leopold School is not an elementary school of 650 students. The school will enroll 550 students in kindergarten through second grade and another 550 students in third through fifth grades. MMSD currently does not have any elementary schools with 550 students below third grade level. One of the important educational questions before the Board in evaluating the May referendum proposal is whether we should create an elementary school of this size.
Simply put, a K-5 school with 550 students is a smaller school at each grade level than a paired K-5 with 1100 students. In the K-5 school, a kindergarten child is one of fifteen children in his/her class and one of 90 kindergarteners in the school. There are six kindergarten classes. In contrast, at the proposed Leopold School, a kindergarten child is one of fifteen in a class, but one of 200 kindergarteners in the school. There are 12 kindergarten classes in the school. The same is true for first and second grade students if the district continues to offer small �SAGE� classes in schools with large numbers of low income students. There are at least 12 classes at each grade level.
Currently, the administration recommends that the Board add an assistant principal at elementary schools with more than 500 students. The reason is that the larger number of students and staff create management problems beyond what one principal can handle. Why would we not have the same kind of management problems at the proposed paired Leopold School? Would two more assistant principals solve all of the likely problems? Why is 1100 students suddenly a desirable size for an elementary school? Is this the size school that parents want for their primary grade students or for their third, fourth and fifth graders?
Parents have asked me these questions and I have asked the administration. So far, I don�t think that we have satisfactory answers.
MMSD's Kurt Keifer on the Administration's Boundary Plans
Kurt Kiefer via email:
I'm writing in response to your questions from last week re: boundary change options. Tim Potter, research analyst on my staff who is handling all of the GIS work on the project, provided the details.
a) Leopold at 1040 students. I seem to recall the original plan was 800? (it's now much less than that) Is this correct?
We are not sure how the 1040 figure is derived. Leopold with current boundaries is projected to have 750 students by 2010. Since the new developments are all within the Leopold attendance boundary they are incorporated in that projection. The McGaw Park development, for which there is no plat yet created, would not be included in the projection. Capacity at the Leopold site WITH a new school would be 1120. Students in Leopold in the various modules ranges from 582 to 875.
b) What are the implications of that growth on cherokee and west?
Depending on which plan you are referring to, yes, there could be an impact on Cherokee and West. Cherokee is currently projected to reach 100% capacity in 2010. The two new, platted developments (i.e., Swan Creek and Oak Meadow) are already in the Leopold attendance area so they are already in the projections. Thoreau already feeds into Cherokee and West so the return of those areas to Leopold would not have an impact at middle/high. The return of the area from Chavez could have an impact. On 3rd Friday, there were 31 and 33 middle high students in this area. On 3rd Friday, 21 of the middle school students were enrolled at Toki and 5 at Cherokee. Of the 33 high school students in this area, 11 attend West and 18 attend Memorial. Capacities at Cherokee and West are 648 and 2173 students, respectively.
c) What about Wright Middle School?
Wright is listed with a capacity of 324 and currently they have 207 students. Wright could alleviate any problems at Cherokee that might be caused by new developments.
d) Some wondered why Velma Hamilton was not affected by any of the
scenarios.
Any changes being made to the elementary schools which feed Hamilton would affect the latter. None of the plans affect Franklin, Randall, Shorewood Hills or Van Hise Elementary Schools. These schools are not experiencing significant changes in enrollments due to changing housing patterns or developments.
Let us know if you have any further questions.
Kurt Kiefer
Madison Metropolitan School District
Planning/Research & Evaluation
608-663-4946
kkiefer at madison.k12.wi.us
Big props to the very active Kiefer's - Kurt's better half Jone' is an excellent elementary school teacher while son Oliver is the student representative on the Board of Education.
Question for Ruth Robarts: Better fallback plan required, or new building?
Thanks, Ms. Robarts, for calling attention to the problems with MMSD's fallback proposal for boundary changes on the west side, if a referendum to build a new elementary school should fail. You point out that under the fallback plan, too many kids would be coming and going from some schools, and that the boundary changes would disproportinately affect certain schools on the west side.
Do you know if anyone has come up with a better proposal to handle west side growth, in the event we can't build a new school?
I studied MMSD's posted proposals on the web site and came away with the impression that the administration couldn't figure out a way to make room in the west side elementaries to cover 2010 projections without either building a new school or reshuffling a lot of kids around now. It was my sense that they were trying for a solution that would preclude the need for new boundaries, at least for 5 years.
It did also cross my mind that maybe on purpose they're making all the alternatives to building a new school look bad.
If this is the case, I would think someone should be able to propose a better fallback plan. Do you know if anyone has? In other words, in objecting to the administration's fallback proposal, are you saying we need a better fallback plan (and that you know of one), or that we'd better pass a building referendum?
Thanks for any help with this, and also for your alert.
Why I Oppose the Administration's Recommendation for School Boundary Changes if the Leopold School Referendum Fails
On Monday, February 21, the Long Range Planning Committee of the Madison School Board will hear the administration�s explanation of five options for reducing overcrowding at Leopold School and providing seats for students from new housing developments on the west and southwest side of the district. Last Monday, after I asked the administration to withdraw options that it will not recommend, a set of nine options dropped to five. Of the remaining five options, the administration recommends only two choices. Option A (3A2 PDF) depends on passage of a referendum to build a second school building on the Leopold grounds. Option B (3D1 PDF) assumes that the referendum fails. Madison Schools Boundary Change web page.
I cannot support Option B, the fallback option in the event that the proposed Leopold referendum fails. There are important but unanswered questions about how the proposed school boundary changes would affect the middle and high schools on the west side. However, more compelling to me is that this option moves 1137 students to new elementary schools, including 516 low income students, and moves them in a way that will excessively disrupt many of the eleven affected schools.
It is difficult to measure the disruption to a school of students moving both in and out of the attendance area. Net changes in the school enrollments do not capture the impact of moving students in both directions.
For example, the current enrollment of Stephens Elementary School is 444 students. Option B moves 214 students to new schools. At this point only 230 ( 51%) of the current students remain at Stephens. Then Option B adds 100 new students from other schools and the enrollment rises to 330. The net change looks small�90 additional students. However, 314 students have changed schools to make this adjustment. My approach gives Stephens a disruption rate of about 71%.
My chart compares the total number of students moved in and out of ten elementary schools on the west side to the current enrollments of those schools. I use the resulting percentage as a rough measure of disruption to the school. This approach demonstrates that the net change in students may be small, but the number of students changing schools is very large in proportion to the current size of the school in Option B. It is only a rough measure. However, the chart directs attention away from what appear to be minimal net enrollment changes to the impacts that families and schools will experience when coping with moves of students in and out of the same schools.
Option B also has an important impact on one east side school. It moves 120 students from Midvale-Lincoln School to Glendale Elementary School. Glendale School enrollment would increase from 267 to 387, a 45% increase in students in one year.
I agree wholeheartedly with the Capital Times February 17, 2005, editorial statement ( Editorial - February 17, 2005that the Madison Metropolitan School district ��seems to be determined to offend every supporter of public education in the city and surrounding communities�� The district administration�s proposed boundary changes and redistricting proposals presented to the board on February 14th was no �sweetheart proposal,� and once again demonstrated the lack of meaningful communication and collaboration between the school board and the public.
The Superintendent and his senior staff work in what appears to many as a heavy handed and an alienating manner, because the majority of the school board lets this happen. Do we want a board that allows the district administration present incomplete proposals and then drive the discussion with the board coming along for the ride? I know I don�t.
If Carol Carstensen, Bill Clingan, Juan Jose Lopez and Shwaw Vang did not support closing schools, then this criterion needed to be communicated to the district administration clearly via a public meeting prior to the development of and release of a district administration report with options for easing overcrowding in schools.
As Chair of the Long Range Planning Committee last year, Mr. Clingan had the opportunity to put in place such an approach for addressing these big planning issues. As Lucy Mathiak wrote in two previous letters ( February 2, 2005, February 14, 2005 )to the Capital Times editor, ��he squandered his opportunity.� This is not a hind-sight comment. A long range planning committee needs to continually be looking long range and adjusting planning as needed.
As hard as the LRPC has worked this year (meeting bi-monthly) trying to meet fast-approaching deadlines, that committee and the public advisory committee has not had an opportunity to discuss strategically and to plan for new buildings, maintenance and redistricting as a package. All of these piecesare interrelated and need to be considered in the context of the impact of various options on decisions about building a new school, closing a school(s), maintenance, etc.
From here on out, I would recommend that board members direct the district administration to work closely with the community and the Long Range Planning Committee prior to releasing a detailed report with recommendations. At a minimum, the Chair of the Long Range Planning
Committee (Ruth Robarts this year) should not be receiving administration recommendations on the fly as they are being released to the public.
Emerson is now off the table for discussion, in part because of Capital Times editorial and public outcry. Also, Ruth Robarts directed the administration to take the option out, because a) there was no support for this option and b) further public discussions would be necessary before revisiting this option.
The proposal, which drew strong, immediate opposition from parents on the northeast side of the isthmus, was part of sweeping enrollment boundary changes that the district plans to decide this spring.
I wonder if this will popup again later, perhaps after the planned referendums? [speculation]
The Madison Metropolitan School District administration, which seems to be determined to offend every supporter of public education in the city and surrounding communities, was recently forced to back off from a foolish proposal to close two east side elementary schools and a middle school. But the administration is still recommending that Emerson Elementary School be closed.
Isthmus: Talking out of School: Don Severson's Letter to the Editor
Don Severson has written a letter to the Isthmus editor regarding Jason Shephard's 2/10/2005 article: Talking out of School (Shephard looks at the upcoming school board races in this article). Here's Severson's letter to the editor:
Madison School Board member Carol Carstensen complains that critics of the Board aren't really interested in seeking solutions to complex questions. She states that "I get a little concerned when people say, 'You should be doing this,' but then are unable to give me a better plan for how to achieve what they want." The significant issue here is that Ms. Carstensen is unwilling and unable to consider, discuss and evaluate other processes, approaches, criteria and recommendations for alternatives and solutions.
As a representative of Active Citizens for Education (ACE) I am one of the critics of the Board to whom she specifically refers in her above statements. We have presented her, along with the entire Board of Education, and the district administration with numerous recommendations, plans and proposals which are matters of record with Board of Education. Specific recommendations, proposals and solutions have been offered in such areas as maintenance, after school programs, Community Services, Fund 80, the budgeting process, extra-curricular activities funding, administration costs and staffing levels, cost analysis of programs and services, and many more.
For the most part, these suggestions and requests have been ignored and, more often than not, derided. "Complex" problems for Ms. Carstensen and the majority of the Board members are not discussed as matters of public policy and are not discussed and decided upon with complete and accurate information.
Even more seriously, most decisions made by the Board are made in isolation of one another, thereby ignoring the interrelationships and consequences of choices and long term impacts. Some examples of this piecemeal decision making process include the Leopold elementary school building initiative, reading instruction programs, maintenance projects, attendance boundaries and school closings, fees for extra-curricular activities and coordination for fine arts programs.
We have statements written by Board members that say they have the best ideas, they will make the decisions that are best for the district and they don't need the help of others to do that. The message from the majority of the Board is that if the ideas of others are not in agreement with theirs the ideas of others are not worthy of consideration. That mentality is not conducive to the consideration of the processes and solutions proposed by others to the "complex" problems for which the Board already believes it has the correct answer.
In the meantime, the "school house" is tumbling down under the weight of their arrogance. Ms. Carstensen brags about her 15 years of experience as a member of the Board. I dare say it is more like one year of experience fifteen times. We have consistently and vigorously offered ways and means to seek better informed decisions and solutions and to partner with our elected representatives in seeking to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the school district that belongs to all of us and not just to them.
Madison School District's Boundary Change Scenarios
The Madison School District has posted quite a bit of information, including an executive summary (in html!) on their web site. The details include a number of scenarios along with a school by school analysis. (very nicely done - fewer pdf's would be wonderful, but it's a great start).
There are a couple of related meetings Monday, February 14, 2005 that we'll record and post shortly thereafter:
Special Board of Education Meeting @ 5:00p.m. where they will discuss the Board's Equity Policy and the District's projected budget gap from 2005 to 2009.
The Board's Long Range Planning Committee meets at 6:00p.m. to discuss the boundary change options.
These meetings are held in the Doyle Administration Building [Map] in room 103 (enter from the back of the building).
Sandy Cullen writes about some parent's reactions. Lee Sensenbrenner on the District's 8.6M in pending reductions (or reductions in the increase).
A reader forwarded me comments that were sent to the Madison School Board regarding the proposed athletic field fees:
As you would guess, many of us who have watched a soccer game, t-ball game or football game and enjoyed the unencumbered spirit and play of our children and have personally mowed the grass, or lined a field, you may oppose the school board proposal of a user fee for the athletic fields during non-school hours.
I sent a letter to the comments section of MMSD school board. Send yours to: comments@ at madison.k12.wi.us
My letter to the school board stated:
I notice there is a proposal whereby the school board wants to consider placing a user fee on the school athletic fields for any use of these fields outside of school functions and MSCR activities. I am opposed to this proposal for a few reasons:
1. The school boards refusal to look at cutting administrative costs downtown as part of any budget proposals. Continuing to cut teaching positions and programs that affect learning is not reasonable and needs to be discouraged. Also would encourage looking at savings in terms of health care costs by negotiating HMO contracts rather than giving the teachers the comprehensive health insurance they presently receive.
2. The lack of maintenance of the fields by the schools. I have personally mowed the soccer fields at Cherokee, lined the fields and have watched coaches donate time and equipment (goals) to make the fields playable. I doubt that the maintenance or quality of equipment will improve with the user fee proposed.
3. Anything that can be done to encourage childhood fitness rather than discourage it should be the stance of the school board. Using the fees towards an improved PE curriculum with daily PE through 12th grade, improved athletic facilities both indoor and outdoor or promises of daily physical activity time outside of PE would be a first step in garnering my support of such a fee.
If the fee is assessed, I will not be interested in supporting the proposed referendum for a new school or capital improvement.
Update on Lowell Elementary School and Emissions from Kipp Corp.
On Monday evening School Board members heard from parents, professionals and a local business about emissions from Kipp Corporation.
Parents and Clean Air Madison are concerned that emissions from changes in manufacturing and a permit from the WI DNR will negatively affect the health of Lowell Elementary School children. Kipp Corporation maintains they are operating within both state and city guidelines. Both CAM and Kipp made presentations of their positions to the board.
After much discussion by board members, Ruth Robarts made a motion to ask the state Department of Natural Resources to install an air monitoring device at Lowell Elementary School. Her motion, seconded by Juan Lopez, passed unanimously.
Dear Editor: I am writing in response to Bill Clingan's Jan. 27 letter regarding the second Leopold School. A second school is long overdue. It is the right thing to do.
While there is no doubt that Mr. Clingan will be a vocal advocate for the Leopold referendum, one wonders where his passion for this initiative was in 2003-04 when he chaired the Long Range Planning Committee. As chair, he had the power to move the school forward, and he squandered that opportunity.
According to the school district Web site, the Long Range Planning Committee met a total of three times under Mr. Clingan's leadership. Planning for a Leopold building referendum was not an agenda item at any of those meetings. The committee did not meet again while Mr. Clingan was the chair.
Before February 1 of each year, the Madison School Board must decide whether to renew its administrators' contracts. If the Board plans to cut administrative positions, it must give the administrators notice that their employment contracts will not be renewed. Otherwise, the contracts automatically renew for one or two years.
Because continued shortfalls in state and federal aid for schools force budget reductions each year, the number of administrators and the total cost of their wages and benefits is a factor in the budget for the next year.
On January 24, 2005 Superintendent Art Rainwater used the following graph and table as evidence of a trend of reductions in the MMSD administrative staff.
This presentation has two conspicuous features.First, the columns that contain numbers of administrators for each year have no totals. Second, the graph separates administrators into four categories based on the source of funding.
I made a different chart using the superintendent's data. For this chart I used the total administrators on contract for each year and charted the change in numbers from year to year. I did not separate contracts by funding source because the source of funding does not change the district's relationship to the administrators. Administrators have contracts with the district that continue whether or not outside funding continues. Note that the final column on this chart is the administration's proposed number of administrators for 2005-06.
Three of the four candidates for Wisconsin DPI Superintendent participated in a Madison Forum Saturday morning. The League of Women Voters Melanie Ramey kindly moderated. Watch the forum here (video and audio clips). You can also read individual questions and watch/listen to the candidate responses.
Incumbent Libby Burmaster was unable to attend, though the three candidates mentioned that she has not participated in any primary events to date. I find this disappointing. These challenging education times require more debate, a more engaged citizenry and leadership.
I was impressed with the three participating candidates. They addressed the issues and were willing to put their names on a position.
In days long gone, it was likely sufficient to rely on special interests and avoid direct public interaction. Our current President certainly avoids any sort of critical engagements. Russ Feingold, to my knowledge, has always mingled easily with the public. [Melanie mentioned that incumbent non-participation is a growing problem around the state.]
The internet era is dramaticallychanging the way in which we all communicate, are informed and express our points of view. Any candidate seeking office would do well to participate in the conversation.
I also want to thank the local media for their extensive coverage:
3, 15 and 27. Their coverage enabled these three candidates to have a few broadcast words with Madison voters.
Isthmus posted the event in their weekly calendar.
Sheryl Gasser emailed and mentioned that Wisconsin Public Radio will be interviewing the four DPI candidates individually starting this Monday morning from 7 to 8a.m. through Thursday morning. I'll post audio links to these conversations.
Take a look at the forum page and email the candidates with questions. The primary is Tuesday, February 15, 2005. Vote!
Monday night a majority of school board members voted to go to referendum in May 2005, one month after the April 5th election. To be on the ballot in May, the board will have to vote on referenda language by late February.
Why wait one month? In one month, board members expect to have more information about what the financial needs will be for the next year for educational programs and services. In reality, board members will have an estimate of the revenue gap for the operating budget. Carol Carstensen, before voting yes on a maintenance referendum, wants to see what the revenue gap is and what programs/services might be affected by the revenue gap.
To the public this seems like a jumble of information - vote to build a new school in January, vote to redistrict/close school in February, vote to redistrict so there's a better balance/mix of students in schools in the near future, maintenance for schools that may be closed, and the real budget - the operation budget.
Madison Schools Maintenance Referendum: Fox 47/27 Report
Fox 47/WKOW 27 broadcast a report on the Madison Schools planned maintenance referendum Tuesday night [3.9MB Quicktime Video] The story included an interview with Superintendent Art Rainwater and ACE's Don Severson. Lee Sensenbrenner has more here and here. UPDATE: Aubre Andrus has more on the recent board meeting.
Editorial: School Board Must Show Unity - A Capital Times Editorial - January 24, 2005
In an editorial in today's Capital Times, School Board unity is identified as a key factor before deciding on going to a referendum. I couldn't agree more with this editorial.
At this point in their deliberations, MMSD's School Board is not ready to make a decision to go to referendum(s), because they have more work to complete and more discussions are needed with the public before making these important decisions. And, I do not count public hearings as conversations with the public.
Board members must be united and they must be able to present a complete, viable package to the public where they can demonstrate other options considered and decisions that led them to this as the best choice for our children's education.
What is some of the work yet to do? Before voting on Leopold, review updated options for boundary changes and school closings. You won't have a successful vote on a new school at Leopold if you vote to go to referendum on Leopold in January and come back in February with suggested closings on the east side of Madison. That won't work.
The "maintenance referendum" is only one part of the operating budget. School Board members need to have the complete budget, and they need to know what the estimate of all revenues are for next year. Waiting for a same service budget won't get them there and won't let the Board make the decisions about where scarce resources are allocated. Board members need to begin a process to look out 3-5 years and tell Madison voters what our schools need to be successful, how much that will cost and what options do we have for funding our investment in education.
As a minor aside, the administration continues to tell the board that the maintenance referendum will not cost any additional property tax dollars. Wait a minute - isn't it the School Board's decision about how to finance their operating budget. Why wouldn't School Board members want the "no tax increase option" to go toward the general operating budget.
Let's get the whole picture - our children cannot afford piecemeal approaches to decisionmaking. Our children deserve leadership and hard work from our School Board members without threats that this list will be cut if you don't vote yes on a referendum. That option won't cut it with the voters.
As the Capital Times Editorial writes, "...voters have a right to expect that any referendums placed before the community will have the support of all board members, including Robarts, who was re-elected by an overwhelming margin last year despite the fact that she faced an able opponent and a concerted campaign against her. Robarts is not always right, but she is never so wrong that board members should feel comfortable going into a referendum fight without her."
Robarts' Long Range Planning Conmmittee, which she chairs, and the public advisory committee, which she asked the board to form, have been working hard and asking good questions. The advisory committee's discussions have been substantive and well thought out. The advisory committee's continued work on the school and maintenance issues will make an important contribution to referendum decisions by board members.
Had Bill Clingan, who, chaired Long Range Planning Committee last year convened his committee from late December 2003 through mid-April 2004, the current members of the Long Range Planning Committee might be further ahead in the process and Leopold Elementary parents would be in a new school in Fall 2006 vs. Fall 2007. Four months of no meetings last year potentially delayed the overall process and opening of the new Leopold School by one year - that's an unfair burden for the kids.
Don Severson forwarded a pdf [67K] of ACE's presentation to the Madison School District's Board of Education on the proposed maintenance referendum.
Don also forwarded ACE's suggestions for the Board of Education's strategy. [97K PDF]
ACTIVE CITIZENS FOR EDUCATION
Public Hearing Presentation to Long Range Planning Committee of MMSD Board of Education
January 19, 2005
By law, the members of the Board of Education of the Madison Metropolitan School District are to be held in a fiduciary responsibility to the public in the operation of the schools. As elected officials, this responsibility is expected to be based in trust, confidence and openness to those served.
Trust, confidence and openness are key factors by which the greater Madison community of taxpayers will judge your decisions regarding the promulgation of a referendum seeking tax revenues for future maintenance projects in our schools. Your decisions and communications will be expected to demonstrate that the public can have confidence that:
1. expenditure requests for maintenance
a. are an integral and continuous part of the total budgeting process
b. show the implications for projected near term and long term revenue shortfalls
c. differentiate clearly one-time projects proposed for referendum support from ongoing operations budget maintenance expenditures
d. show the potential for seeking taxpayer approval to raise the revenue cap for general operations monies
2. maintenance is an ongoing business expense addressed in the operations budget with expenditures prioritized by using written objective criteria
3. funds allocated for maintenance in the operations budget will be �held harmless� from reduction and/or re-allocation to other budget line items
4. proposed maintenance projects are considered in relation to proposed and/or actual closing or change of functional status of school buildings or other facilities
5. maintenance decisions are related to purposes which are good business decisions according to established criteria
6. balanced assessment of infrastructure and equipment using actuarial studies of probable useful life combined with appropriate evaluation of the current condition of the systems within the context of same use and/or changed use
7. there are separate categories and prioritization of energy conservation projects; capital projects; and, day-to-day operational maintenance
8. policies are initiated and implemented consistently and fairly with regard to Request for Proposals (RFPs) and for scoring projects for contracting out vs projects for possible completion by in-house staff with follow-up evaluation
9. energy saving a. initiatives are planned and costs are determined in advance b. calculations are delineated and justify the investment and return on investment c. paybacks and savings are accounted for and re-invested in the maintenance program by the district
10. accountability for the true costs of management and administration and staffing levels for projects is spelled out in project estimates and final costs
For the District to continue along the same pathway as has been evident the past few years is NOT acceptable. The highly questionable accountability will indeed put the children of this community further at risk. The lack of sound decision-making and poor performance will continue to put more and more homeowners and renters at risk thereby forcing us out of our homes, neighborhoods and the community. The taxpayers of this community have long been abundantly generous in the support of the Madison school system (and we believe will likely continue to be so). There are, however, higher expectations and demands for effectiveness, performance and efficiency within affordable means. Every household in this community is impacted through taxes levied for the schools--over 70% of these households do not have children. We are expecting much better and higher levels of accountability from the policy makers and administrators of the school district.
Presented by: Active Citizens for Education; Don Severson, President; 238-8300; info @ activecitizensforeducation . org
Haven't yet had your fill of political shenanigans in California? Then keep an eye on San Diego where one of the nation's longest serving urban superintendents is facing political trouble. National implications as this episode shows what can happen when push comes to shove on NCLB.
Superintendent Alan Bersin is poised to reorganize several of the city's chronically underperforming schools. At two of the three schools a majority of teachers have voted to make the schools charter schools to help facilitate this and at all three 60-80 percent of parents voted to do the same. Remember, these are not schools that didn't do well "on a single test" but schools that have not done right by students for years.
Yet the school board member who represents these schools has apparently decided to oppose this and in the process force a vote on buying out the remainder of Bersin's contract because he won't play ball. Possible reasons for her move? (A) It's a great way for her to make a lifelong friend of the Bersin-loathing teachers' union there. Or (B) concerns that if several schools in her district become semi-autonomous it will hurt her political clout and power on the board. There is no (C) because it's generally agreed that changes are in the interest of the kids....600 parents showed up at a recent school board meeting to push for these changes.
So the pressure is on Bersin to ignore the chronic problems for children at these schools and go against the wishes of a majority of parents and in two cases teachers or see one more (possibly decisive) board vote slip into the union's column.
Board meeting on Tuesday. Could be the second time in a month the establishment does in a Democratic education reformer in California.
Report on Rainwater meeting about East principal selection
An author, asking to remain anonymous, prepared a summary of the meeting on January 18, when Superintendent Rainwater met with community members and discussed the process for selecting a new principal at East High School. The author concluded:
"If you believe that our superintendent cares about East and wants to get it right this time (like he finally did at Sherman and Black Hawk), then you left the meeting feeling good. If you question the process and his decision-making ability given some of his poor choices in the past, you probably left the meeting feeling disappointed, which is mostly what I heard. Nothing has changed."
"It was not said, but we pay for the mistakes for a very long time. A great principal can turn a school around in weeks, but a bad principal or several principals for several years can really hurt the students going through those schools. It is not just failing to master academics, but their feeling of connection gets hurt as well. It could be argued that some of the problems East is having today stem not only from the void at the top at East, but also from the fact that two of its feeder middle schools and some of its feeder elementary schools have been struggling due to poor leadership."
Winkler Letter to Keys & School Board on Administrator Contracts
Madison School Board Candidate, Parent and activist Lawrence Winkler forwarded a letter to Board President Bill Keys regarding Madison School's budget process if cuts must be made for the 2005-2006 School Year.
Winkler provides some useful background information and offers a suggestion to move forward with an improved decision making process. Click below to read his letter or here for a 37K pdf print version.
Dear Mr. Keys, Members of the Board
The Board is to consider issuing non-renewal notices for administrative staff positions at the Special Board meeting of January 24. Unlike others, I do not at this time recommend issuing non-renewal notices. It does not foster my goals toward establishing a better decision-making process.
The Board�s decision-making process is flawed, in part, because the timing of critical budget-related decisions occurs piecemeal (sequentially) throughout the year. The result of sequential decision-making has several negative consequences.
1. Not all stakeholders are at the table during the budget negotiations
2. The Board and other stakeholders are unable to negotiate in light of the total needs of MMSD and other stakeholders.
3. The degrees of freedom open to the Board have been lost.
4. Different interests groups dominate at each stage, desiring only to �get their cut�, without being forced to consider the best interests of all.
5. It is well known that the result of sequential decisions is less than optimal (and certainly different) compared to a process where all decisions are made at once.
The Board is bound by Section 118.24 Wis. Stats. regarding the timing of non-renewal notices, appeal processes by affected staff, etc., but the timing is based on contract expiration date, and the contract expiration date is not explicitly determined by statute.
Therefore, I propose that the Board consider extending the expiration date of the Administrative contracts to August 31 from the current June 30, and modify HR Policy 9.04 accordingly.
Because the Administration offers a proposed budget model in February, with the Board approving the potential cut list in March, there will be opportunity to better consider the budget as a whole. Letters of non-renewal, if so decided in light of the whole budget, would occur on April 1, with hearings requested by affected staff on May 1.
I believe this proposal offers a viable alternative to the current process, and would allow the Board to make better budget decisions.
Thank you and the Board in advance for considering this proposal.
Madison School Board Candidate, Parent and PTO activist Lawrie Kobza forwarded a letter to Board President Bill Keys regarding Madison Schools financial priorities if cuts must be made for the 2005-2006 School Year.
In past years, the district limited its budget options when it passed on non-renewal of administrator contracts by February 1 (the MMSD is required to provide six months non-renewal notice prior to the July 1 administrative contract start date).
This date, February 1, passes long before detailed public discussions begin on the next budget. Inevitably as cuts, or reductions in the increase must be made, school staff such as teachers and custodians (or wrestling, or stringsin2004) are the target (because the administrative contracts have not been given the required six month non-renewal notice).
Kobza's letter (28K PDF) & Linda Hall's Administrative contract background 2 pager. (77K PDF)
KOBZA ANNOUNCES FOR MADISON SCHOOL BOARD
Seeks Improved District Decision-Making
MADISON�Lawrie Kobza, a school activist for over a decade,
announced her candidacy for the Madison Metropolitan School District
Board District 6 seat today. Submitting the maximum 200 nomination
signatures, Kobza launched her campaign with a promise to improve
District decision-making.
"When resources are limited, it is especially important to make good
decisions ", Kobza said. "My professional and community experience
has taught me that the best decisions come from listening to a variety of views, asking tough questions, and carefully considering the possible alternatives. I think the School Board needs to do a better job of this."
A first-time candidate, Ms. Kobza served as President or Vice
President of the Sherman School parent group since 1998; she was a
2004 recipient of the North Star Award from the Northside Planning
Council for her service to schools on Madison's north side.
Ms. Kobza has three children in the Madison schools: two sons attend
East High School and her daughter attends Sherman Middle School. With husband Peter Oppeneer, she is an active supporter of Northside youth soccer, basketball, baseball, and softball.
"In allocating our limited resources, I want to be sure services
for our kids are preserved while taking a fresh look at how we might
be more efficient and effective," Kobza said. "I will seek
out the best information with an open mind to make sure we have a
clear picture of all available alternatives in these tight economic
times."
Ms. Kobza is an attorney and partner with the Boardman Law Firm in
Madison, concentrating in municipal law with an emphasis on utility
and environmental issues. She is a graduate of UW-Madison Law School
and the UW-Madison Business School. Madison Magazine named her a top
attorney in environmental law for 2005.
END
Authorized and paid for by Lawrie Kobza for School Board, Barbara
Schrank, Treasurer
Capital Times Editor Dave Zweifel recently praised former Lapham principal Barb Thompson, calling her a "crackerjack school superintendent" for the astonishingly successful commuity-wide holiday luncheon in New Glarus, just as she organized a similar and equally popular holiday luncheon at Lapham.
By contrast MMSD Superintendent Art Rainwater passed over Thompson in the search to replace East High Principal Milt McPike, instead hiring and then firing a woman who could not lead East.
Taxpayer Information I'd like to see from the Madison School District
Given this and the probability of three spending referendums this spring, I would like to see the Madison School District's finance folks publish the following information (in html, on their web site):
The District's sources and uses of funds over the past 10 years, including:
total spending (education, special ed, services, staff/admin, other)
Employment numbers (teachers, staff, part time, mscr)
revenues (by source: grants, local taxes, state & federal funds), fees
Student counts, including low income changes, special ed and population changes across the district (from school to school)
Supporting numbers, notes and comments to the data.
This type of detailed, background information would be rather useful to all Madison citizens as we contemplate further increases in education spending. There's been some discussion of eliminating the deduction for state & local taxes for federal tax purposes. IF that happens, there will be quite a blowback from places like Wisconsin that have relatively high taxes.
Wisconsin State Journal
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
East Parents Lack Faith In Principal Hiring
by Sandy Cullen
Parents of East High School students say they lack confidence that the School District will hire a principal who can successfully lead what one described as a school "under siege."
About 50 people attended a meeting at the high school Tuesday with Assistant Superintendent Valencia Douglas to discuss the process for hiring a successor to Catherine Tillman.
"We all know what a successful candidate is," parent Lenny Alston told Douglas. "We want to make sure you guys know."
Soon after the start of the school year, Tillman was abruptly reassigned to an administrative position. She recently reached a settlement with the district, and her resignation becomes effective March 31.
Alston was one of several parents who said they had no confidence in the selection process that resulted in Tillman's hiring in September 2002. The district hasn't disclosed the reason for reassigning Tillman, but some parents were concerned early on that she lacked experience to lead the school's diverse population of 2,100 students, 40 percent minorities.
"I can't get over the fact that this place is under siege. We've got problems over here galore," said Alston, a parent of two East graduates and one freshman. "It isn't just a black problem, and it isn't just a race problem ... You guys aren't listening to us, that's the problem."
Other parents wanted to know what would be different from the last time. "It just has to be done right," said parent Pam Cross-Leone. "We cannot afford to fail this time."
Parents advocated for more input earlier in the selection process, before the search is narrowed to eight candidates who are interviewed by a 12-person committee of parents, students, teachers and other high school principals. That group selects three finalists to be interviewed by Douglas and other administrators.
Douglas said the process has resulted in the hiring of many successful principals. She agreed there are problems at the school and pledged that "there will be a very, very good pool of candidates."
By Lee Sensenbrenner, The Capital Times
December 11, 2004
A hiring freeze has been declared in the Madison Metropolitan School District, as Superintendent Art Rainwater tries to deal with a possible $1 million shortfall in the utilities budget.
Rainwater made the announcement Friday in a letter to board members and the district's management team. It says that "the prospect remains that additional actions may be required."
MMSD Equity Policy - Board Member's Comments and Community Member's Response to Those Comments
The following exchange of e-mails is between Lawrie Kobza and Johnny Winston Jr., regarding the District's proposed elimination of the equity policy.
As I read the two authors' comments, I become more convinced that board policy changes ought to be discussed first at a Board committee meeting prior to a final vote. The substance of the changes merit public discussion and comment. The District Administration's Questions and Answers sheet on this topic would have been a good place for the School Board to begin their discussions.
Subject: Equity - Response to Johnny Winston, Jr.
Prepared by Lawrie Kobza
The District is saying that the Board's Equity Resource Policy
(Board Policy 9001) has been replaced for all practical purposes by the equity resource formula. There is an important difference, however, between the Equity Policy and the equity resource formula. The Equity Policy is codified as an official Board policy - and therefore the Board should require that the District follow the policy. The equity resource formula, however, does not appear anywhere in Board policy, and therefore, its use appears to be discretionary by the District.
While supplemental allocations have been provided historically, they
are discretionary in nature and could be eliminated. (emphasis
added)."
In the email from Board Member Johnny Winston, Jr., he says that the
change should not be of concern, and that "the essence of the
proposed change is for resources to be distributed based on MATHEMATICAL FORMULAS rather than POLITICS. During these times of fiscal constraints and crisis, it is more important than ever that this occurs."
This statement gives little comfort, however, because while the
supplemental resources are allocated between schools based upon a
mathematical formula, the actual number of supplemental allocations
provided to address equity issues is totally discretionary with the
District, and we have seen that these supplemental allocations have
been disproportionately cut over the last several years.
In fact, the District's consultant, Virchow Krause, stated in its
report dated March 11, 2002, at page 146, that although supplemental
allocations (which result from the equity resource formula) have
been provided historically, they are discretionary in nature and could be eliminated.
More specifically, the Virchow Krause report said the following:
"Supplemental allocations currently exist at varying levels for
elementary, middle and high schools. The number of allocations for
each individual school building is created through formulas based mainly on Educational Need Index (ENI). ENI attributes include EEN/ESL attributes as well as free & reduced, parent education and home status factors.
This allocation methods results in a building with a high index
typically allocated more supplemental positions, while other buildings receive fewer supplemental allocations as a result of low ENI indexes. The supplemental FTE allocations are currently utilized differently by
each building with the most common uses as additional psychologists,
social workers, guidance or clerical staff.
An allocation chart provided by the Administration a year or two ago
shows allocations from 1998/99 to 2003/04. A copy of that document
is attached to this email. That document shows that from 1998/99 to
2002/03, supplemental allocations were cut 58.9% at elementary
schools, while total allocations at elementary schools were cut 6.1%.
Supplemental allocations were cut 27.5% at middle schools, while
total allocations at middle schools were cut 5.5%. And, supplemental allocations were cut 100% at high schools, while total allocations
in the high schools increased 4.6%. So, for high schools, the
mathematical formula applied to zero allocations is zero.
The number of allocations provided by the District to address equity
issues is an important issue. This has been cut disproportionately
over the last several years, and I expect we will see it cut even more at the middle schools for next year. The impact is that our neediest
students take the biggest cut.
Johnny Winston, Jr., letter to Ms. Kozba and I presume other community members who wrote him about the equity policy issue.
> Dear members of the community:
>
> A few days ago an e-mail was distributed to the various list serves
> regarding a policy change for the MMSD (Equity Policy - Board Policy
> 9001).
> The policy that was proposed to be deleted at last Monday's school
> board meeting was outdated in that it has been replaced by the equity resource formula which is now being used to ensure the equitable distribution
> of staff to ALL schools. The formula takes into consideration such
things as the number of students of poverty, the number of English language learners, the number of special education students, mobility etc. at each school to determine the staffing allocations for that particular school.
>
> This change in policy should not be construed that the district is
not committed to equity for all students. Rather, the essence of the
> proposed change is for resources to be distributed based on MATHMATICAL FORMULAS rather than POLITICS. During these times of fiscal constraints and crisis, it is more important than ever that this occurs.
>
> Superintendent Art Rainwater and his staff have produced a "Question
> & Answer" paper regarding the change in the Equity policy. I have a
> copy and would be happy to send it to you.
>
> Thank you for those of you who have expressed your concerns in
writing or just had questions regarding this policy. Your advocacy efforts assist in helping the MMSD provide a quality education for all students.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, comments or concerns about this issue and any other regarding the Madison Metropolitan School District.
>
> Johnny Winston, Jr.
> Madison School Board Member
> 441-0224
>
MMSD Board Policy Changes - Administration Proposes Eliminating Equity Policy / Northside PTO Coalition Says No, Not a Good Idea
Mixed in with other MMSD Board business on December 6, 2004 was a change to District Policy 9001 regarding equity.
From the Board Agenda - X Other Business - Item C.
It is recommended that the Board approve: 1) the changes that are attached relative to Board Policy 9000A and 9000B which have to do with a Code of Conduct for employees and Board members; 2) the deletion of Board Policy 9001 regarding equity; and 3) the changes that are attached relative to Board Policy 10,000 regarding charter schools.
The Northside PTO Coalition opposed the MMSD Administration proposal to eliminate the Equity Policy. Board members decided to postpose a decision on this policy and asked the administration to rework the policy with consideration given to equity issues.
This is the second time in little over a month that a policy change raised concern among the public. Earlier, the District administration had proposed eliminating the policy that required professionals to be included in the hiring of teachers in certain aeas: physical education, special education, fine arts, for example.
Fine arts teachers said they needed this professional help to ensure the quality teaching professionals are hired in specific areas.
Maybe the Board needs to consider an interim step in the policy revision process that first passes through a Board committee if the change is more than simple updating.
In a statement released on Monday, December 6th, the Northside PTO Coalition stated:
"The School Board must hear public input and carefully consider this proposed elimination because the Equity Policy is a statement of what the Board believes is important in providing an equitable education to all children. This is a Board policy, yet the Administration is recommending that it be eliminated
The proposed Equity Policy elimination raises concerns that the district is not committed to equity for all, even at a time they a spouting the rhetoric about equity issues and students of color. If this is the case, it will significantly impact students of color and the gap will continue to widen. We know that this cannot be true, so we call for the School Board to give the matter a full hearing by not voting to accept the proposed elimination, and instead call for a full review of the Equity Policy.
If the School Board determines that a more effective and encompassing Equity Policy is needed, then the current Equity Policy should not be abandoned until an acceptable replacement has been crafted and approved."
We're engaging in a bit of demand side democracy. I've posted a link to a page urging madison citizens to run for the school board. We take so much for granted here.
Andrew Jakowleff has posted some stunning VR scenes from Kiev as the Ukrainian people protest their recent election process.
The Madison School Board Performance & Achievement Committee met monday night, to discuss "Research-Base Underlying MMSD Mathematics Curriculum & Instruction" Here are some video clips from the meeting:
Here's a 2 page pdf copy of a recent Beaver Dam mailing to all residents asking them to participate in a survey on "continuous improvement" of their public school system. Many of the questions relate to budget challenges the district is facing. [264K PDF] Beaver Dam School District Site
WSJ Opinion: Reading between the lines of rigidity
The WSJ Editorial page published a very useful editorial this morning on the Madison School District's rejection of $2M in federal Reading First funds for reading improvement programs:
Taxpayers have the right to ask why the Madison School District would turn its back on a $2 million grant.
Given that its own evaluator says the Madison School District�s Reading Recovery program is not working as well as was hoped, it seems clear the district acted too quickly in turning down a possible $2 million federal grant for reading instruction.
Earlier this fall, superintendent Art Rainwater informed the Madison School Board that the district was ending its participation in the federal "Reading First" program after one year. Rainwater said federal evaluators refused to accept the district�s homegrown reading program, called the Comprehensive Literacy Instruction Program (CLIP), and insisted the district switch to one of many federally approved reading programs.
Rainwater noted that the $2 million federal grant would not have translated directly into a $2 million savings in local taxes because the federal money had to be devoted to materials and staffing specific to "Reading First."
He said that the tightly scripted phonics-based "commercial" programs approved by "ReadingFirst" would hamstring teachers� ability to use different methods with different children. He also contended that none of the federally approved programs are backed by data demonstrating success. In contrast, under CLIP 80 percent of Madison third graders were reading at the proficient level or better, so, Rainwater claimed, there was no need to change.
But what about the other 20 percent? How can one of the nation's finest school systems accept sub-par outcomes by a fifth of its students?
Just five out of 30 elementary schools qualifed for participation in "Reading First" - Glendale, Hawthorne, Lincoln, Midvale and Orchard Ridge. All have substantial minority and low income populations and all are below the 80 percent proficient ideal.
Despite Rainwater's contention that students continue to improve using CLIP, third grade reading scores have actually declined since 2001 at Lincoln, where (as at Glendale) fewer than 70% of students are proficient or better.
Meanwhile, a district analysis of Reading Recovery an intensive, expensive program aimed at helping the worst first grade readers improve asked whether the program is really worth the money. Reading Recovery, which costs about $8,400 per graduate, does not yield statistically significant achievement gains when participating students� performance is compared to nonparticipating students. This analysis echoes the findings of reading re searchers throughout the country, who advised Congress and the federal Department of Education that Reading Recovery should not be included among the federally approved Reading First programs.
If Reading Recovery isn�t helping the 20 to 30 percent of Madison school children who struggle with reading, it�s the district�s responsibility to find a program that can. Maybe the answer is in one of the approved "Reading First" curricula - but we�ll never know, because of the district�s decision to pull out of the program.
That was a mistake. The district should have taken the money and tried a new approach at the five qualified schools, while simultaneously getting the federal evaluators to take a good hard look at CLIP. It is possible that CLIP could get a federal OK - but again we'll never know because the district pulled out of the process.
School Board Member Ruth Robarts was right: A decision this important should have been made by the board, not the administration. Taxpayers have every right to ask why the district would turn its back on a reading program funded by a $2 million grant.
The head of the East parent network e-mailed the letter below to people who'd signed up to get news about East.
Ed
November 22, 2004
Dear East High School Parent, Family or Community Member,
You are invited to attend a special meeting to discuss the selection and hiring of the next principal of East High School. The meeting will be held on Tuesday, December 14 at 6:30 PM in the forum at East High School. Valencia Douglas, Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Education for the Madison Metropolitan School District will be facilitating the meeting.
This meeting is the first step in the formal process that will culminate with the hiring of the new principal. Your input is important. If you have any questions, please contact the main office at East School at 204-1600.
"Madison School District parents could face a difficult community discussion next spring over whether to close one of the district's 30 elementary schools.
Superintendent Art Rainwater said Thursday that all options, including closing a school, must be considered to deal with an expected shift in student population from the city's East and North sides to the South and West sides."
An article in the Wisconsin State Journal on Tuesday, November 16, reports that Carol Carstensen and Bill Clingan will run for re-election to the school board.
A lively debate during school board elections will help shape better policies and improve programs for Madison�s children. A lively debate, of course, requires a candidate to challenge the incumbents.
You can be a candidate!
You can begin circulating nomination papers on Sunday, December 1, barely three weeks from now! You need only 100 signatures by January 7, 2005, to get your name on the ballot! You can get full details at the Web pages of the city clerk.
You won�t be alone. A strong network of experienced activists from all across the city will help with research, organizing, fundraising, and all the other necessities of running a campaign.
As a candidate, you would run city-wide for a one of two numbered seats currently held by Bill Clingan (Seat 6) and Carol Carstensen (Seat 7).
If you�d like to know more about how to run, you can find the details on the Web site of the city clerk. Or, feel free to contact Jim Zellmer, webmaster of www.schoolinfosystem.org, (608)271-9622, zellmer@mac.com; Don Severson, Active Citizens for Education, (608)238-8300, donleader@aol.com; Ed Blume, (608)225-6591, edblume@mailbag.com.
Reading Jason Shephard's excellent "Robarts Gets The Treatment" made me think about what we should expect from our elected officials.
Here are my initial thoughts:
Act Professionally Debate is essential to our form of government. Our elected leaders should engage in and value substantive debate. Nothing engages the public more than this type of dialogue.
Use Data to Make Decisions There's a reason that the CBO (Congressional Budget Office), and LAB (Legislative Audit Bureau) exist
Communicate: Tell the Whole Story Use the internet to converse with constituents.
Ask Tough Questions
Ruth Robarts and Kathleen Falk seem to be two local elected officials who are willing to challenge the status quo. Shephard is correct when he refers to Robarts as "Public Ally Number 1"
I consider Russ Feingold to be nearly a perfect politician. He's idealist, yet has classic political abilities. He's also very smart. Idealist in terms of compaign finance and local communications, political in terms of timely, political votes (NRA and Tax Giveaway) and smart (debates: where he shows that he knows the game very well). To his credit, he's always willing to chat and ask questions. I'm interested in hearing your views. Click comments and write.
On October 8, 2004, Isthmus newspaper ran a story about how the Madison Schools replaced two not-for-profit after school day care programs with its own "Safe Haven" programs run by the Madison School-Community Recreation department.
Jane Sekulski, a mother whose child was in a displaced program, provides her responses to the article. This letter is a longer version of a letter published in Isthmus on November 11.
To the Editor:
As a parent of a 5th grader at Midvale-Lincoln school, I would like to respond to the article "Not just for rich white kids" by Jason Shepard, Oct 8, 2004.
Our school is a "paired" school, meaning that the combined population of both the Midvale and Lincoln neighborhoods attend the Midvale "campus" for grades K-2, and then they attend grades 3-5 at the Lincoln "campus". The schools are about 8 miles apart.
As a single mother, working full time, I need full time after school child care. For 5 years my son has attended the Wisconsin Youth
Company After School program at the Midvale campus. Grades 3-5 take the regular school bus from Lincoln to the program at Midvale. We live near Midvale.
After School has served Midvale as a K-5 program for 25 years, and over the years its program has gotten better and better. I have had many interactions with staff about issues that have come up, and in some cases my son's teachers and the school counselor were also
involved. I am glad to say that I respect After School all the more for being able to work out situations with parents, kids and teachers
in a caring and professional way, where it was so obvious that the
most important goal was the welfare of my child.
When a Safe Haven program was started at the Lincoln campus, some years ago, I thought it was great that the Lincoln neighborhood kids
would have a program too. No one has to tell me how much kids benefit from an after school program. I assumed that the Lincoln
Safe Haven was K-5, like After School at Midvale. But, in 2003they started a K-2 Safe Haven program at the Midvale campus, and each day when I picked up my son I saw taxi cabs and Mr. Mom's vans loading up kids to take them home to the Lincoln neighborhood. Many parents wondered why these kids weren't taking the regular buses to Lincoln at 3pm to attend the Safe Haven there. It seemed odd -- why would Lincoln families prefer to have their kids 8 miles away, and
separated from their siblings in grades 3-5? For one year, Safe Haven and After School both operated programs at Midvale.
In spring of 2004, the K-2 parents were told that After School would
no longer provide care at Midvale, and that instead the care would be
by Safe Haven. The hours of Safe Haven would be until 4:30pm (After School is 5:45). There would be care at ONLY the Lincoln campus on days when the kids are off school. There would be no care anywhere for Spring or Winter break. (After School provides this.) And, the K-2 children would attend the Midvale Safe Haven, while the 3-5 children (like my son) would attend the Lincoln Safe Haven, with transportation home provided back to the children's home neighborhood.
They were told that the reason for the change was sothat "substantially more" low income kids would be served.
The After School parents of grades 3-5 were not informed of any of this. The principal, alas, forgot to tell us. We heard about it several weeks later, when we got a flyer from MSCR saying that "due to excellent parent input" they had decided to change several things with Safe Haven. Evidently the K-2 parents had something to say.
The hours were increased to match After School's, and the programs were changed completely to BOTH be K-5 programs, with the children
to attend the one near their homes. The fee structure now allowed for
part time care (which After School had always provided). Full time care was to cost $32/month MORE than After School, while the cost of
Monday-only care would be $50/month LESS than After School had charged.
Many of us met with the principal then and beseeched him to reconsider. We felt that After School had been such a great asset to our community and a very good partner with the school district. We knew that After School was non-profit, and felt it was probably not in the business to make money, but rather that it seemed really devoted to children. The program was by no means "all white rich kids". One of the lead counselors was African American, and our kids loved him and the other staff, too. We asked why the district couldn't contract out with After School to serve kids who needed
scholarships. We couldn't believe that such a good program, with 25 years of experience, was being replaced by a program that didn't even know that a working parent needs care past 4:30pm.
I pointed out to him that the cost of full time care for me would go up $32/month with Safe Haven, while the 'Monday-only' part-time care would be, strangely, $50 less. Later, MSCR changed the full time tuition to match After School's, but kept the bargain rate for Monday-only care.
The reason After School charges more for fewer days of care seems
obvious -- it is less cost effective to staff a program that is tilted to more attendence on Mondays. How does Safe Haven do it? Ah, that is the question. Safe Haven has something that After School doesn't have -- Fund 80.
I requested and received the following figures on the enrollment and expensesat the Lincoln and Midvale Safe Havens, from the director of MSCR:
Lincoln Safe Haven: Total cost in projected budget: $69,047
Revenues: United Way $15,000
Fees paid and Dane County funds: $8,500
Tax Levy: $45,547
Children enrolled: 28
Children on assistance: 23
Children paying full fees: 5
Full time children: 28 out of 28
Midvale Safe Haven: Total cost in projected budget: $87,914
Revenues: United Way $0
Fees paid and Dane County funds: $35,000
Tax Levy: $52,914
Children enrolled 35 (Capacity = 60)
Children on assistance: 3 (2 others unknown yet)
Children paying full fees: 30
Full time children: 10 out of 35
So, even though only 5 out of 35 students at the Midvale program are on public assistance (15%), about 60% of the budget comes from Fund 80 tax levy. More importantly, ONLY 10 of the Midvale children are full time. This is about 30%. For 5 low-income children, scholarships for full time at After School would have been $11,070. This seems a lot less than the $52,914 the tax payers are now
paying for Midvale.
And, as a tax payer, where would you rather have your tax dollars go -- to fund a child at Safe Haven, where the Monday-only "rich white kids" pay $50/month LESS, or at After School, where the paying families are pulling their own weight?
MMSD has communicated to me that, "It will take a few more months to get the Midvale program filled up with low-income children, with the help of the school social worker and the principal making referrals and contact with families who need the program." It is true that the principal may recommend more students to Safe Haven. But for the district to assume that 25 more of them are living near Midvale and will attend the Midvale program is unrealistic -- if not impossible.
Much more likely is that new low-income referrals will attend the Lincoln Safe Haven.
Mr. Shepard says in his article that "private providers have not done a good job recruiting students from low-income families who would qualify for scholarships paid for by Dane County and outside grants". The question is, who is responsible for "recruiting" students for Safe Haven? The Wisconsin Youth Company has said that
they did not turn away any students at the Midvale program last year. Is Wisconsin Youth expected to have a list of students in each school who need after school services, so that they can recruit those that are low-income? But at the same time, does even Safe Haven itself do this? MMSD seems to say that the principals and
social workers at the schools make referrals, not Safe Haven.
Could the principals refer students for subsidized care and ask that they be funded to attend After School instead of Safe Haven? After School has expressed interest in providing such care, including the homework component. Why is it considered ok for Safe Haven to receive Fund 80 tax payer funds to do the job of serving low-income kids, but After School is somehow expected to do that job by
"recruiting students from low-income families who would qualify for scholarships paid for by Dane County and outside grants"?
A lively debate during school board elections will help shape better policies and improve programs for Madison�s children. A lively debate, of course, requires more than one candidate in a race. You can be one of those candidates!
You can begin circulating nomination papers on Sunday, December 1, barely three weeks from now! You need only 100 signatures by 5:00 p.m. on January 4, 2005, to get your name on the ballot! You can get full details at the Web pages of the city clerk.
You won�t be alone. A strong network of experienced activists from all across the city will help with research, organizing, fundraising, and all the other necessities of running a campaign.
As a candidate, you would run city-wide for a one of two numbered seats currently held by Bill Clingan (Seat 6) and Carol Carstensen (Seat 7).
If you�d like to know more about how to run, you can find the details on the Web site of the city clerk. Or, feel free to contact Jim Zellmer, webmaster of www.schoolinfosystem.org, (608)271-9622, zellmer@mac.com; Don Severson, Active Citizens for Education, (608)238-8300, donleader@aol.com; Ed Blume, (608)225-6591, edblume@mailbag.com.
Cell Phones R Us: Avoiding Fiscal Responsibility the Madison School Board Way
Recently Governor Doyle directed state agencies to �examine all operations to bring accountability and fiscal responsibility to government�. As a result, the state has reduced the use of cell phones and saved thousands of dollars. The Department of Administration characterized the use of cell phones before this change as �part of the carelessness� that marked state spending under prior administrations.
Dane County and the City of Madison have written procedures that limit the assignment of cell phones to specific categories of employees. For example, the city permits assignment of a cell phone �where it is required that an employee be reachable at all times, or where an employee must be regularly able to make business telephone calls while in the field�.
In contrast, the Madison Metropolitan School District does not have a policy or an administrative procedure to restrict the use of cell phones at MMSD expense. Don�t expect that to change anytime soon, even though the annual cost of employee cell phones has increased 60% since 2001 from $51,225 to $82,259, including the monthly fee for each cell phone.
The majority of the Board does not favor budget targets for the superintendent or controls on how the administration spends the budget. The expanding use of cell phones by MMSD employees is just another example of this bias against fiscal controls.
At my request, Carol Carstensen scheduled a discussion of cell phone costs at the October 25, 2004 meeting of the Finance and Operations Committee. The administration provided a memo for the meeting and a list of the 257 current users of MMSD cell phones and their jobs, also at my request. The majority of the 3-member committee-- Carol Carstensen and Juan Lopez-- decided that no action was needed. Board president Bill Keys and members Bill Clingan, Shwaw Vang and Johnny Winston, Jr. also participated in the discussion.
In the administrative memo, Assistant Superintendent for Business Services Roger Price explained the rationale for the district�s 257 cell phones:
�We experienced a significant increase in the need and use of cell phones following 9/11 and as we have continuously stressed safety of our students and staff�. A number of our building services personnel are on call for bomb threats in addition to their specific areas of responsibility. We have also added phones for custodial use for second and third shift where personnel are often isolated in our larger buildings.�
On its face, Price�s safety rationale seems to track the reasons that the city assigns cell phones to certain categories of employees. Of course, we should use cell phone technology to increase the safety of our staff and our students, whether the cell phones are needed inside the buildings or when staff work in the community or on field trips.
I recommended that the Board adopt a policy or procedure similar to the City�s procedures for that reason. No takers. Much indignation that I was trying to �micromanage� the administration�s work.
Why do I care?
First, because a policy or procedure that limited cell phone assignments to employees with special responsibility for safety could reduce costs about $30,000. That amount is enough to pay a half-time teacher for one year or purchase about 600 new textbooks. That amount is as much as the district gained from some of the fee increases that parents are paying in 2004-05.
Second, because the list of current users suggests that safety is not always the reason for the cell phone. Often the reason seems to be administrative convenience.
Here is the pattern of current cell phone assignments.
Our 30 elementary schools have 39 cell phones. Most are assigned to the building and checked out as needed. The 11 middle schools have 15 cell phones and the high schools have a total of 19, mostly in the hands of administrators and the athletics department. Alternative programs and external programs have 13 cell phones. Altogether the schools and these programs control of 33% of the cell phones. These assignments make sense and no doubt contribute to safety for students and staff. Moreover, this pattern of assignments seems to avoid monthly charges for phones not needed on a regular basis.
The remaining two-thirds of the cell phones are assigned to staff in Special Education (47 phones including 17 for administrators or coordinators), Business Services (9 phones), Building Services (29 phones), General Administration (32 phones) and Madison School Community Recreation Department (54 phones). Some of these employees fit the city�s criteria in that they �must be reachable at all times� because of the scope of their duties and their roles, such as assistant superintendents who must be reached by schools with crises. Some of the Building Service cell phones are appropriately assigned to custodial staff regularly working in isolated areas when schools are closed.
However, the General Administration staff assigned cell phones includes the downtown Athletics Coordinator, the top five staff in Human Resources, Legislative Liaison, the Public Information Officer, the secretary to the Board of Education, the Director of Research and Evaluation, the Lead Elementary Principal, the Director of Risk Management, 4 staff in the Teaching & Learning Department and 5 staff who work on Title I funding projects. It is difficult to understand why these employees could not share a few phones assigned to their buildings for the rare situation when their work would meet the city�s criteria. It is equally hard to imagine the 9/11 reasons for these phones.
The largest user of cell phones is MSCR with its 54 phones or 21% of all MMSD cell phones. Here again it seems that a cost-conscious administration would assign a smaller number of phones to locations or programs and require staff to sign them out when needed. Among MSCR staff assigned cell phones are employees responsible for aquatic programs, after school programs, canoeing and outdoor programs, pontoon boats, camps, and bus tours. Again, it seems that the MSCR use results in many monthly charges for many phones where more centralized assignments would meet the safety need but cut the monthly cost.
If you have comments on this topic, you can reach all Board members at comments@madison.k12.wi.us. No further action is currently scheduled on this topic.
Ruth Robarts,
Member, Madison Board of Education, 1997 - present
Madison Board Will Not Discuss Superintendent's Decision to Quit Federal "Reading First" Program
In a recent submission, I discussed three reasons why I believe that the Madison School Board should receive more information about Superintendent Rainwater's decision to end participation of five elementary schools in the federal "Reading First" program. See "What the Board Should Know Before Rejecting "Reading First" Funding".
I remain unconvinced that Rainwater's memo makes the case for declining $2M in federal reading assistance at Hawthorne, Glendale, Orchard Ridge and Lincoln/Midvale schools. In particular, the Board should be concerned about the reading achievement gap at each of these schools between economically disadvantaged children and children who are not economically disadvantaged. The results on the reading test at fourth grade in 2003--part of the Wisconsin Knowledge Concepts Evaluation tests---show these gaps between the economically disadvantaged students scoring "proficient or advanced" and their peers.
Hawthorne: Econ. Disadvantaged = 57%
Not Disadvantaged = 77% Glendale: Econ. Disadvantaged = 73%
Not Disadvantaged = 82% Orchard Ridge: Econ Disadvantaged = 55%
Not Disadvantaged = 90% Lincoln: Econ. Disadvantaged = 66%
Not Disadvantaged = 88% For District elementary schools combined: Econ. Disadvantaged = 66%
Not Disadvantaged = 88%
However, President Bill Keys has polled the Board members and told me that they all agree that discussion is not necessary. Here is our exchange of e-mails.
Bill: Please arrange for the Board to discuss the continuation of the Reading First funding at Hawthorne, Glendale, Orchard Ridge and Lincoln/Midvale. I don't think that the Board has sufficient information to approve the superintendent's action. Ruth
Ruth,
As I stated in an earlier email, I do not believe a meeting of the Board to discuss any one particular grant is appropriate. Historically, the Board has neither approved applications for grants, nor disapproved them so long as they are consistent with Board policies and MMSD practices and mission. Applying for grants is the work of the Administration and staff, and I believe that its action regarding the grant you refer to is consistent with their charge. I have polled all other Board members, and all feel the same: the Superintendent's action does not need their approval. Thus, I won't arrange for the Board to discuss the continuation of the Reading First grant at Hawthorne, Glendale, Orchard Ridge and Lincoln/Midvale.
Bill
Ruth,
I need to correct the wording of my last email re your request to have the Board discuss this subject. I simply polled the members and they said that they do not want to meet on this subject.
Bill
Bill: I believe that when the district receives grants, the Board
votes each time to increase the budget to include the grant. We also
regularly hear presentations about why the district is pursuing a
curriculum-related grant, such as funds for Comprehensive School
Reform.
What the School Board Should Know Before Rejecting "Reading First" Funding
According to John Dewey, the public school system "should want for every child what a good and wise parent wants for his child. Anything less is unlovely and undermines democracy".
I think that this principle must guide the Madison Board of Education in deciding whether to permit Superintendent Rainwater to reject approximately $2M in federal funding for early reading programs at Hawthorne, Glendale, Orchard Ridge and Midvale/Lincoln Schools. Unless the superintendent can demonstrate that all families in these schools can expect better reading achievement from continuing the current reading curriculum than from adopting the curriculum required by the "Reading First" program, we should continue to participate in the program.
For me, key questions were not answered in the October 14, 2004 memo that the Board received from Mr. Rainwater.
First, why did these five elementary schools qualify for "Reading First" funding? According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the Reading First grants target Wisconsin schools where there is a documented gap of two to four years in reading levels between low-income students, racial/ethnic groups, students with limited English proficiency, Special Education and higher-performing peers. Are these the kinds of gaps that existed in these schools when MMSD sought the extra funds?
Second, why did the Reading First expert, Dr. Howe, require that the schools adopt a different reading curriculum? Did Dr. Howe offer solid reasons for the Madison schools to conclude that changing reading programs would close these achievement gaps? Specifically, what improvements might occur in reading achievement of low-income, racial/ethnic groups, students with limited English proficiency or Special Education students?
Third, why should parents of children in these schools who are significantly behind in reading believe that the district's program is better than the program proposed by Dr. Howe? What's the evidence that keeping on with our current program will be the better alternative for these children?
In his memo Superintendent Rainwater argues that MMSD should refuse to make the proposed changes at the five schools because we are a "successful" district. He states that our reading program is a success because more than 80% of all third graders score at grade level or above ("proficient or advanced") on the Wisconsin Reading Comprehension Test. Unfortunately, that's not true for the schools that qualified for Reading First grants. As Rainwater admits, more than 30% of the third graders in these schools fell below "proficient or advanced" scores in recent years. See "Madison Superintendent Declines $2M in Federal Funds Without Consulting the Board" below.
Bottom-line: It's not logical or responsible to refuse to adopt a different reading curriculum at five especially challenged schools because reading scores are better in the aggregate in the district. What matters is the gaps in achievement within these schools.
Since 1998, a major priority of the Board of Education has been that all children read at grade level by the end of third grade. Until the superintendent provides more complete information to answer my basic questions, I am inclined to think that the Reading First funds might be another step in the direction of achieving that goal.
Ruth Robarts,
Member, Madison Board of Education
1997-present
John Matthews, writing in the Wisconsin State Journal:
For many years, recognizing the value to both children and the community, Madison Teachers Inc. has endorsed 4-year-old kindergarten being universally accessible to all.
This forward-thinking educational opportunity will provide all children with an opportunity to develop the skills they need to be better prepared to proceed with their education, with the benefit of 4- year-old kindergarten. They will be more successful, not only in school, but in life.
Four-year-old kindergarten is just one more way in which Madison schools will be on the cutting edge, offering the best educational opportunities to children. In a city that values education as we do, there is no question that people understand the value it provides.
Because of the increasing financial pressures placed upon the Madison School District, resulting from state- imposed revenue limits, many educational services and programs have been cut to the bone.
During the 2001-02 budget cycle, the axe unfortunately fell on the district's 4-year-old kindergarten program. The School Board was forced to eliminate the remaining $380,000 funding then available to those families opting to enroll their children in the program.
School districts such as Madison have not been able to provide 4-year-old kindergarten because under existing state-imposed revenue limits, there is no state aid for pupils enrolled in the first year of the program. Under the antiquated state school finance law, it takes three years for a school board to achieve full funding for the program. The Madison board recently estimated the need for an additional $4 million in 2005-06 alone to implement a 4-year-old kindergarten program.
While 4-year-old kindergarten is expensive, it provides substantial benefits. According to the often-cited Chicago Longitudinal Study, the positive impact of an early and extensive early childhood program saves the public significant money over the long haul. Under the leadership of UW-Madison professor Arthur J. Reynolds, the 16-year study found that early intervention programs reduce expenditures for school remedial services of grade retention and special education, among other costs. In fact, overall, $7.10 was returned to society at large for every dollar invested in pre- school.
With Gov. Jim Doyle and state schools Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster promoting funding of 4-year- old kindergarten in the next state budget, the Madison board is discussing making this valuable program available to Madison's children once again.
Madison Teachers Inc. is supportive of this proposal, but only if the board keeps control of the program to assure its quality and employs teachers who have achieved the education and license to carry out the district's mission.
The children and the taxpayers deserve this assurance. The quality of education depends on it. MTI believes that the success of the program depends on the quality of the teachers, as well as the coordination and supervision of the program.
The children deserve this educational opportunity. They will benefit significantly from it and for their whole lives. Society will benefit from it. Taxpayers will benefit from it. But no one will achieve the full benefit if it is not done well.
Madison�s Accredited Early Educators Propose Solution for Four-Year Old Kindergarten
Several times in recent years, the Madison School Board has considered ways to create a four-year old kindergarten program for all Madison children. The goal of "universal" four-year old kindergarten is to assure that every child enters elementary school ready to learn. In the past, the administration's proposals involved partnerships with private accredited daycare programs in Madison.
On Monday, October 18, the Performance & Achievement Committee of the Madison School Board will review a report from Superintendent Art Rainwater that recommends against going forward with four-year old kindergarten and rejects a July 2004 proposal from the Madison Area Association of Accredited Early Care and Education Providers.
The meeting will begin at 5 p.m. at Leopold Elementary School, 2602 Post Road. Below is a summary of the Association's proposal in "question-and-answer" format.
What is the Madison Area Association of Accredited Early Care and Education Providers?
The Association is a not-for-profit membership organization composed of 30 accredited early childhood programs that serve the Madison area. Membership is open to all city and nationally accredited early childhood programs, including accredited family child care.
What is the goal of the Association?
The Association seeks to improve the quality of early care and education for Madison�s children.
What is the Association proposing for four-year-old kindergarten?
The Association is proposing to provide four-year-old kindergarten for four-year-olds currently enrolled in member programs as a first step towards a universal offering of four-year-old kindergarten. The features of this proposal are largely the same as those worked out through 3 years of collaborative work with School District administrators.
What is the advantage to Madison�s children of the Association plan?
� The Association plan allows children to stay in one high quality setting throughout the longer child care day. Transitions and long bus trips would be avoided.
� The Association plan has the potential to incorporate lower income children into high quality mixed economic settings.
� Association member programs and buildings are designed for young children. Learning occurs throughout the day, not just in a compressed 2.5 hour time slot. Playgrounds and free play choices contribute to the child�s overall learning.
� The Association proposal has the potential to improve the overall quality of the early childhood system, as revenue increases and members are able to pay fairer wages for degreed teachers. Education and stability could improve for 2 and 3-year-old children as well as four-year-olds.
� The Association plan has the potential to build a real partnership between the School District and the very important, but much less visible part of the educational experience of Madison children: early childhood education.
How much would this cost?
In the first year, Association members would offer to enroll children at no cost to the School District. Teachers and curriculum already meet the D.P.I. standards for a four-year-old program. The Association programs are reviewed annually by the City of Madison under standards that exceed the minimum state requirements, or have similarly rigorous national accreditation. With a substantial number of four-year-olds enrolled at no cost or minimal cost to the District in the first year, the barrier of the large start-up costs is eliminated. The Association member contributions would have to be structured as a grant to meet DPI requirements. Second year revenues could be used to expand the program to more children.
How many 4-year-old children does the Association membership serve? Association Members currently serve 1200 4-year-old children residing in the City of Madison.
How will the Association move to universal coverage within the 3 years allowed by the State?
If District projections are correct, there are about 1,800 resident four-year-olds. An estimated 85%, or 1,530 might request service. The Association members serve 78% of that number. Because of recent declines in preschool enrollments, Association members could serve additional children given the necessary revenue.
Even so, adding 330 children to the accredited programs may not be feasible. We believe that an additional 180 children (15% of the current number) could be added without strain, leaving a need for approximately 150 students, or 10 classrooms that the school district might ultimately have to open.
What about low-income children?
The latest 4C survey shows that Association programs served 644 children on child care subsidies. (City accredited programs served 532 of those.) If 40% of four year olds are low-income, then 720 of the 1800 total would be low-income. Given the fact that 3 and 4-year-olds constitute the largest groups served in accredited program, it is most likely that about half of the subsidized children are four-year olds. Accredited Head Start programs alone serve 350-400 local children whose families are at the poverty level. Therefore, it is safe to conclude that Association members already serve more than half of the low-income four-year-olds in the district.
While it is difficult to determine exactly how many additional low-income children would need to be served, the number is probably between 100 and 300 children. Since Head Start and several small city-funded preschools in low-income neighborhoods are already part of the accredited system, the number unserved is smaller now than even a few years ago.
Unserved low-income children would need transportation. Head Start already has a well-developed transportation system, and with revenue could add to that system.
WHEN MY DAUGHTER FINISHED HER FRESHMAN year at Johnston High School, in Austin, where she was a student in a liberal-arts magnet program, I paid a visit to the college adviser to find out her class ranking. "She's thirty-seventh in a class of 750," he told me. "That's good," I said. "Top five percent. Good enough to get into the University of Texas."
"Not really," the adviser said. "We know from experience that only 250 freshmen, at most, will graduate. So think of her as thirty-seventh out of 250. That's not in the top ten percent."
That was bad news�both for my daughter and for the state of education in Texas. I did some quick calculations. There were around 100 freshmen in the magnet program. Presumably, almost all of them would graduate. This meant that of the remaining 650 or so students in her class�those who lived within Johnston's regular boundaries, almost all of them Hispanic or black�fewer than 150 would graduate with their peers. If his prediction was accurate, the dropout rate at Johnston would be 67 percent. In fact, the rate was even worse: Only 223 of the original 750 graduated.
Nancy and I lived in Dallas some years ago and very much enjoyed reading the excellent Texas Monthly Magazine, where Paul Burka is the senior executive editor.
Think of all the schools with demographics similar to Johnston's in Texas�in every city and along the border�and imagine what the statewide dropout rate must be. Would you believe one percent? I don't believe it either. Yet, when the Texas Education Agency (TEA) calculated the state's official dropout rate for 2000�-2001, the year my daughter graduated, that's what it came up with. This number is bogus and everybody�except perhaps the TEA�knows it.
My daughter is a senior in college now, and I had all but forgotten this incident until I read "I Hate School!"�Mommy X's account, beginning on page 138, of the changes that have buffeted public education in the time that my generation went from being students to being parents of students. Social change, as Mommy X observes, is overwhelming the public schools, and the statistic that best explains what is happening is the dropout rate�the real one, that is. Not the TEA's.
What is the real dropout rate? Every calculation but the TEA's�which requires schools to determine the reason why students left school and allows many exceptions for classifying dropouts as non-dropouts�produces a much higher rate. Perhaps the simplest way is to figure out, as I did for Johnston, how many students enter the ninth grade and exit the twelfth grade as graduates. A San Antonio research group says that the statewide class of 2001 lost 40 percent of its members between the ninth and twelfth grades. Another method is to figure the percentage of Texans of recent high school age (18�-24) who do not have a high school diploma. The U.S. Census Bureau says it's 29.3 percent. Meanwhile, the state continues to embrace an absurd system that tries to define away the problem.
How does the TEA come up with its fictitious number in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary? As I found out when I was a member of the Campus Advisory Council (CAC) at Johnston, TEA is more concerned with counting than with kids. During one meeting, we learned that the school had decided to hire a dropout prevention specialist. This sounded like a necessary, if belated, step: By using poor grades and erratic attendance as benchmarks, the specialist could identify which students were most likely to become dropouts and try to keep them in school. Or at least that's what I assumed the dropout specialist would do�until he came to a CAC meeting to describe his work.
He brandished a sheaf of pages of names of students who the school district said had been enrolled at Johnston but were no longer attending. His goal was to find out where those students were. If he could ascertain that they were attending another school in Texas or that they had moved out of state or that they were in jail or deceased or were pursuing a General Educational Development (GED) certificate, the TEA would not count the departed student toward Johnston's dropout rate. So the specialist spent all day on the telephone, trying to track down students who had left Johnston, never to return, instead of trying to retain students who were still in school but on the verge of dropping out.
This seems to make no sense, but in fact it makes perfect sense if you understand the accountability system by which Texas schools and school districts are rated. A dropout rate of more than 5.5 percent brings with it a rating of "unacceptable." The easiest way to reduce the dropout rate is to locate the "leavers," as the TEA calls them, and assign a benign cause for their departure (such as getting a GED). The incentive, then, is for school officials to game the system by writing in causes for departure that don't count toward the dropout rate. The Austin Independent School District paid a $5,000 fine in 1999 for falsifying dropout rates after a criminal-fraud investigation found that there was pressure from higher-ups to report reasons for leaving that did not trigger classification as a dropout.
The most infamous example, reported by Dan Rather on 60 Minutes, is Sharpstown High School, in Houston. The school reported a zero dropout rate for 2001�-2002 despite having a student population that included many children of poor immigrants�and despite losing 463 students during the school year. All of the departed students were reported to the TEA as having left for reasons that exempted them from being counted as dropouts. The revelation tarnished the reputation of former Houston superintendent Rod Paige, whose success in reducing the dropout rate had helped him become George W. Bush's Secretary of Education.
A lot has been said in recent years about the improvement in the Texas public school system, as measured by standardized tests, but the good scores may just be a manifestation of the dropout rate. Many of the lowest-achieving students leave the system; at Johnston, the CAC heard from the principal that during the previous school year, 50 percent of the ninth graders had flunked all four core courses�English, math, science, and social studies. In late June the Census Bureau reported that only 77 percent of Texans over 25 years of age have a high school diploma. It's a familiar refrain by now, but Texas ranks last among the states, well short of the national figure of 85 percent. State demographer Steve Murdock has said that educational attainment is the best predictor of income, so it comes as no surprise that dropouts earned an average of just $19,000 in 2002. Their unemployment rate has been 75 percent higher than the rate for graduates. They are more likely to end up in prison: Two thirds of the state's inmates don't have diplomas. The well-known Texas economist Ray Perryman has estimated that a 10 percent reduction in dropouts would produce 175,000 new Texas jobs and $200 billion in economic output.
This is the point in a policy story at which the author, having proved the seriousness of the problem with alarming statistics, proceeds to provide the solution. I wish I could. But the worst thing about the dropout dilemma is that nobody knows what to do about it. The politicians' approach has been to treat the dropout issue like educational performance, by holding schools and school districts accountable for reducing dropouts, as they are held accountable for teaching kids to read and to compute�skills that can be measured on standardized tests. But skills are taught in the early grades, when children are malleable; the dropout crisis occurs in high school, when, as you may have noticed, kids have minds of their own. Some dropouts leave because they want to�or have to�make money. Some leave because they get pregnant and have to raise a child. Some leave because of frustration over the current obsession with rules and discipline and zero tolerance. Some are convicted of crimes. Some leave because they fall too far behind academically.
Most of these reasons are beyond the school's capability to fix. They are the result of societal problems�poverty, teenage pregnancy, depression, alienation, parental indifference, drug use. To hold schools accountable for circumstances over which they have no control makes no sense. So why do we do it? When I asked an education consultant I know, he said that before counting dropouts became part of the accountability system, schools did nothing to stop kids from falling through the cracks; indeed, school administrators were only too willing to see them go. They regarded dropouts as problem kids who had trouble learning and trouble obeying the rules and trouble scoring well on standardized tests. Those who didn't drop out were shunted into vocational programs that were a sham: outdated equipment, menial work.
The hope was that by holding schools accountable, you could change the behavior of high schools. But, the consultant went on to say, high schools are impervious to change. Things that might work�individual attention, keeping in close contact with families of potential dropouts, and arranging partnerships with career programs in community colleges�are seldom tried. If he had his way, urban high schools would be much smaller than they are today, and there would be more alternative schools where students who don't fit into discipline-oriented high schools could learn at their own pace. But then you wouldn't have big-time football and marching band and cheerleaders and all the other extras of mega high schools.
I don't know what the ultimate solution to the dropout crisis is, but I do know where to start. The Texas Education Agency must stop concealing the extent of the problem with phony numbers. Otherwise the public pressure for change will never come.
Assistant Superintendent Valencia Douglas assured East High parents that a national search would be conducted to find a replacement for removed Principal Catherine Tillman. East High parents might want to talk with members of the West High PTSO since West went through a principal search this past spring.
How much slack should a big-city district cut its schools to maximize student performance? That�s the question that New York City school leaders want to explore with an experimental governance model they are calling the "autonomy zone."
Started this month with 30 secondary schools, the pilot project sets specific performance targets for schools to meet in exchange for removing them from the bureaucratic hierarchy governing most of the city�s 1,300 public schools.
.....
For his part, Louis Delgado hopes that the autonomy zone might help his 400- student Manhattan high school gain greater independence in hiring decisions. The 11-year-old Vanguard High School uses the district�s "school based" option for hiring teachers, which allows a committee of teachers and administrators at the school to screen candidates and offer them jobs. But those candidates can be bumped by more senior teachers who are laid off elsewhere in the system, the principal said, a situation he hopes the zone can help change.
Response to "What's Missing from the 'Strategic Plan' for Madison Schools?"
Ruth Robarts raises very valid issues about the goals of the MMSD.
As we all know, goals are supposed to be measurable and time specific, among other things. Not even the "goals" for academic achievement meet those criteria, let alone the other goals.
Each goal for academic achievement should be written something like this one on reading (with the added italics giving them more specificity) and they might have intermediate goals/steps leading to the final goal:
All students complete 3rd grade reading at grade level or beyond by the end of the school year in 2007; a. Scores for reading at grade level will increase by a minimum of 5 percentage points a year until all students read at grade level.
Without putting numbers and timelines on the goals, they aren't very useful. For instance, the MMSD can claim that it's closing the achievement gap in reading between white and minority students, but it's closing at a fraction of a percentage point a year. At the current rate, it will take decades before "all students complete 3rd grade reading at grade level or beyond."
What's Missing from the "Strategic Plan" for Madison Schools?
According to the National School Board Association, a school district's Strategic Plan must include "student performance standards that clearly define what students are supposed to know and be able to do at each grade level". Toward that goal, the Strategic Plan should clearly state the benchmarks for assessing yearly progress in student achievement.
On September 20, the Madison Board of Education revised its Strategic Plan. Conspiciously missing from our Strategic Priorities are benchmarks for most of our priorities.
As revised, our "Strategic Priorities" are defined as "the most critical challenges that face us today". 1. Instructional Excellence
* Improving student achievement
* Offering challenging, diverse and contemporary curriculum and instruction
2. Student support
* Assuring a safe, respectful and welcoming learning environment
3. Staff Effectiveness
*Recruiting, developing and retaining a highly competent workforce that reflects the diversity of our students
4. Home and Community Partnerships
* Strengthening community and family partnerships and communication
5. Fiscal Responsibility
* Using resources efficiently and strategically
Only the "Instructional Excellence" Priority includes any benchmarks. Under "Board Priorities", the district states:
As part of the evolution of the strategic plan, the Board of Education identified three key elements connected to the plan's 'Instructional Excellence' component as targets for continuous improvement.
1. All students complete 3rd grade reading at grade level or beyond;
2. All students complete Algebra by the end of 9th grade and Geometry by the end of 10th grade;
3. The district-wide attendance rate is at least 94%.
I have strongly supported the achievement of these three benchmarks as one step toward eliminating the achievement gap between white and minority students in our district and will continue to do so. However, I question why our Strategic Plan does not include other specific measures of "Instructional Excellence" and does not provide any benchmarks for the other priorities.
I believe that we are making progress, particularly in the areas of early reading and attendance, because the Board has set measurable goals and the community has come to expect improvements of student performance according to these measures. Why do we not set the same kinds of benchmarks for "a challenging, diverse and contemporary curriculum and instruction" and for "a safe, respectful and welcoming learning environment", for example?
So far, the Board is not interested in attaching benchmarks to its stated priorities. Instead the adminstration will recommend "critical indicators" for our adoption later this year. An early sample of these "indicators" strongly suggests that they will not be specific and measurable goals. One possibility is that "Fiscal Responsibility" will include "indicators" such as "keeping the district legal".
The MMSD Web site has the materials posted for the September 27, 2004, meeting of the Long Range Planning Committee's consideration of recommending a new school building.
The materials aren't self-explanatory, so maybe someone can help make sense of them.
For instance, the table titled Elementary School Potential Maximum Physical Capacity Worksheet shows 2004-2005 K-5 Enrollment, but it shows more than one enrollment figure for each school. The table shows enrollment at Allis as 501, 549, 513. Do the three figures mean different things? A separate table titled Unofficial Third Friday in September K-5 enrollment shows enrollment at Allis at 452. Sooooooo, how many kids are enrolled at Allis?
These are critical figures to determining whether the MMSD has sufficient capacity or needs a new school. It would be nice to know what they mean.
On September 13, the administration for the Madison Metropolitan School District advised the Long Range Planning Committee of the Board of Education that the district needs $27M for maintenance projects between 2005 and 2010.
A referendum would be necessary to raise this amount, because the administration is seeking a total of $46M for maintenance over the five years. The $27M would be in addition to $19M that the Board will spend on maintenance if it continues to earmark $3.8M from each annual operating budget for maintenance.
At the meeting the LRP and its advisory members reviewed documents summarizing this recommendation. The administration also offered a PowerPoint presentation in support of its recommendation. Here is the administration's presentation for your review: PDF Version
Smart, knowledgeable, independent thinkers need not apply for East principal
�. . . the loss of Barb Thompson highlights a major Rainwater weaknesses. In filling key administrative jobs, he�s gravitated to loyalists, or looked outside for the district for candidates who will fit comfortably into Team Rainwater.
Smart, knowledgeable internal candidates with deep understanding of Madison and its problems, but who like Thompson are independent thinkers, are passed over.
. . .�She�s a bulldog, but that ain�t bad, � observes the blunt-talking [Milt] McPike [former East High Principal}. �Some people can�t handle that. Do you understand what I�m saying? I was a bulldog for my school, too.� �
Marc Eisen�s opinion piece Isthmus, June 13, 2003
As taxpayers and parents, the public should get more than "it was a personnel change." What went wrong? Why? What will be done to prevent a similar disaster for the next principal?
These are legitimate questions Dr. Rainwater and the school board should address.
Diary of an Advisory Committee: Switch from Maintenance to New Building Issues
On September 13, 2004, The Long Range Planning Committee of the Madison School Board reviewed a recommendation from the MMSD administration that the district spend $46M for school maintenance projects from 2005 through 2010. Because the Board dedicates approximately $3.8M per year for maintenance from the operating budget (%19M over the next five years), the administration's cost estimates amount to recommending referendum for $27M. In 2004-2005 the district will exhaust the $20M provided by the 1999 maintenance referendum. Some projects, however, remain to be done.
Citizen advisors asked many good questions to clarify the recommendation of the administration. The Committee will not, however, act on the administration's recommendation in the next few months.
According to a timeline developed by the MMSD administration, the Board has until January of 2005 to make its decision on a maintenance referendum. Meeting a January deadline would allow time for the Board to place the maintenance referendum on the April 5, 2005 ballot.
The same timeline will not work for a referendum to build an addition at an existing school or to build a new school. The full Board must decide to go to referendum for an addition or new school by early October in order for the district to open the new facilities to students by January of 2007. A decision made after October of 2004 will mean that the new facilities would not open until fall of 2007, at the earliest, assuming that the referendum passes.
Given these timelines, the Long Range Planning Committee will suspend discussions of maintenance in the short run and focus instead on the question whether new construction is needed.
Soon all materials that have been presented to the Long Range Planning Committee, including minutes of meetings since May of 2004, should be available on the MMSD web site at http://www.madison.k12.wi.us under "Long Range Planning". When I checked tonight, the icon appeared on the site but was not working.
Understanding Superintendent Art Rainwater�s employment contract with the Madison Metropolitan School Board goes a long way toward answering a common question: �Who runs the Madison schools?�
Answer: Superintendent-for-Life Rainwater runs the Madison schools.
In January of 1999 the Board promoted Art Rainwater from Acting Superintendent to Superintendent. Voting for the contract were Carol Carstensen, Calvin Williams, Deborah Lawson, Joanne Elder and Juan Lopez. Ray Allen and I voted no.
The contract includes terms that significantly limit the Board�s ability to hold the superintendent accountable or direct his work.
First, the contract is open-ended. Most contracts for superintendents must be renewed every two or three years. The renewal requirement forces Boards of Education to evaluate the superintendent regularly. It also provides an opportunity to change superintendents at the end of a contract period without having to fire them.
However, the MMSD contract with Mr. Rainwater does not need renewal. Unless the Board acts to terminate the contract, the employment of the superintendent continues from year to year. Inertia is definitely on the side of the superintendent.
Second, the resignation of the superintendent will cost the district $250,000. Under the contract, if the majority of the Board votes to ask for the superintendent�s resignation, he must resign. In exchange, the Board owes him a quarter of a million dollars as a �golden parachute�.
Third, discharging the superintendent �for cause� also has costs. If the Board tries to discharge the superintendent for poor performance or disciplinary reasons, it must use the full adversarial hearing process and risk paying his attorney�s fees. If the case settles, instead of going to hearing, the district pays the superintendent�s legal costs. Such cases usually settle because hearings on a superintendent�s conduct are extremely disruptive for the district. Payment of attorney�s fees might be only part of a negotiated agreement to settle a discharge case.
Fourth, the contract automatically grants a 4-7% annual wage and benefits increase to the superintendent. There is no connection between performance evaluations and the annual increases. There is no requirement that the Board have the ability to pay a 4-7% increase. The contract contains a formula that automatically grants Mr. Rainwater between 4-7% increases each. No other employee in the district can depend on such increases.
Furthermore, the Board does not use its contractual power to evaluate the superintendent to hold the superintendent accountable for results, such as improved student achievement.
Under the contract, the Board must meet with Mr. Rainwater "on or before the 1st day of each school year" to establish his performance expectations. It must, "to the extent possible", use measurable outcomes to assess his performance. The contract states: "Each year, the Superintendent shall be evaluated on the specific results and accomplishments of the goals established by his performance expectations".
More than five years have passed since Mr. Rainwater became superintendent of MMSD. According to the Human Resources Department, the Board has completed only one formal evaluation. The evaluation occurred in 2002. At that time, Bill Keys was President of the Board and Ray Allen chaired the Board�s Human Resource Committee that conducted the evaluation.
No evaluations were completed in 2000, 2001, 2003 or 2004. Presidents and Human Resource chairs during those years were: 2000 and 2001 (Calvin Williams, President, and Bill Keys, Chair of Human Resources Committee); 2002 and 2003 (Bill Keys, President, and Ray Allen, Chair of Human Resources); and 2004 (Bill Keys, President, and Bill Clingan, Chair of Human Resources).
Ruth Robarts, Member
Madison Board of Education, 1997 - present
MMSD Administrative Costs & Staffing Levels - ACE White Paper
Don Severson: Active Citizen's for Education White Paper [212K PDF]:
MMSD has one of the highest per pupil costs of any school district in the state. MMSD administration proposed a FY 2004-05 budget with a $10 million shortfall in revenues to deliver the same services as that which was delivered in the 2003-04 budget year. This white paper compares MMSD administration costs, staffing levels and per pupil costs with peer school districts at Appleton, Green Bay, Kenosha andRacine.
Diary of an Advisory Committee: Madison Board of Education Selects Citizen Advisors
On August 13, Madison Board President Bill Keys and I agreed to recommend nine citizens plus the two student School Board members to the 2004-05 Advisory Committee to the Long Range Planning Committee.
On August 30, the Board will vote on the nominations:
Hardin Coleman (nominated by Johnny Winston, Jr.)
Dawn Crim (nominated by Johnny Winston, Jr.)
Joan Eggert (nominated by Bill Keys)
Jill Jokela (nominated by Carol Carstensen)
Lucy Mathiak (nominated by Ruth Robarts)
Patrick Mooney (nominated by Bill Clingan)
Jan Sternbach (nominated by Juan Lopez)
Teresa Tellez-Giron (nominated by Juan Lopez) and
Xa Xiong (nominated by Shwaw Vang).
The student members are the students elected to serve on the Board for 2004-05: Oliver Kiefer and Lena Song (alternate).
The first meeting with citizens as non-voting advisors is also on August 30.
At this meeting the citizens will review decisions of the Long Range Planning Committee from last May and June. During the year, the Long Range Planning Committee will review administrative recommendations regarding referendum for deferred maintenance and for new elementary schools.
Several of the nominees were active supporters of the June 2003 referendum for operating funds, including Jan Sternbach who provided leadership for "Citizens for Investing in Madison Schools", a pro-referendum campaign organization.
Diary of an Advisory Committee: the Long Range Planning Committee of the Madison School Board Reaches Out to Citizens
In the late spring of 2004, I had the idea that inviting a group of citizens to work with the Long Range Planning Committee of the Madison School Board might help the Committee ask better questions of the administration and explore more options during the next year. In 2004-05, the Committee will consider the possibility of another referendum to fund maintenance of the district's buildings and try to solve overcrowding problems at Leopold Elementary School. It will also develope a 3-5 year long range plan for presentation to the Board by the end of the spring semester
In this log, I will relate our progress toward this goal.
May 2004
I proposed that the committee appoint nine non-voting citizens to help us: three who use our facilities, such as parents and staff; three from other local governments or the University of Wisconsin; and three from the general community, such as business or organization leaders. I thought that having a range of viewpoints and experience would improve our discussions and decisions.
I presented the proposal for an advisory committee to LRP Committee members Carol Carstensen and Johnny Winston, Jr. at a meeting. After discussion, the committee modified my proposal. In addition, the Committee decided against making its own appointments of citizens. Instead, the Committee voted that each Board member would submit names of three nominees by August 1. It also added the student Board representatives as advisory committee members. After the deadline, President Bill Keys and I, as Committee chair, were to choose nine citizens to recommend for approval by the Board.
June - July 2004
Over the summer I began to plan the twice-monthly LRP meetings so that the committee and citizens will receive information about issues and administrative proposals at the first meeting and the committee would take action at the second meeting. I met with Mary Gulbrandsen, Chief of Staff (deputy superintendent) to plan the meetings. We scheduled the first of the fall meetings and discussed the most efficient ways to get information to the Committee and its Advisory Citizen Committee. We hope to post all information relevant to our discussions on the MMSD web site, so that our citizen members and the public can review the same materials presented to LRP.
August 2004
By August 13, all Board members had made their nominations.
On Thursday, August 19 , President Bill Keys and I will meet to select the nine citizens whom we will recommend to the Board. He invited staff member Mary Gulbrandsen to join us to "interpreting where various qualifications, etc., fit". I have objected to her participation because the Board specifically directed only the two elected members of the Board to make these recommendations. Especially when we are selecting a citizen group to help us review information and recommendations from the administration, it seems inappropriate to let the administration screen the citizens.
I hope to meet with Mr. Keys tomorrow and conclude this stage of the selection process.
Ruth Robarts, Chair of Long Range Planning Committee
He is a fierce critic of traditional top-down thinking on aid, by governments and non-governmental organisations alike. They tend to see the poor as victims to be helped, he says, not as people who can be part of the solution�and so their help often creates dependency. Nor does he pin much hope on the �corporate social responsibility� (CSR) programmes of many large companies. If you want serious commitment from a firm, he says, its involvement with the poor �can't be based on philanthropy or CSR�. The involvement of big business is crucial to eradicating poverty, he believes, but BOP markets must �become integral to the success of the firm in order to command senior management attention and sustained resource allocation.�
Madison Schools Need Strong Community Partners to Provide High Quality After School Care to All Children
This article is a Letter to the Editor submitted to the Wisconsin State Journal.
Thanks for the editorial, ?What?s going on after school?? Questioning the Madison School Board?s rush to replace private, non-profit after school day care providers with tax-supported Safe Haven programs operated through the Madison School Community Recreation program is a public service.
Last year we had 4,437 low-income children in our elementary schools. As a community, we should support all of them with high quality after school care. However, the district must continue to work with community providers to reach this goal. The scope of the problem is far beyond the district?s capacity.
You were correct in your facts about the proposed change. Some key
points bear repeating.
As you said, ?nothing is wrong with existing programs?. Safe Haven programs meet only the state?s child care standard, a minimal standard.
They do not meet the higher standard of city accreditation met by current providers such as the YMCA and After School, Inc. Lacking city accreditation results in lower rates of state reimbursement for low-income children in Safe Haven programs. Less funding is one cause of less-qualified staff in Safe Haven programs.
In terms of academic opportunities, City evaluations of Safe Haven in 2003 criticized MSCR?s program for lack of ?activities that encourage children?s independent learning experiences? and recommended additional training for staff on developmentally appropriate choices for children. As the City has told the superintendent, ?it is our experience that the orientation of the MSCR programs is not generally toward after school childcare. It is recreation-based?.
?Safe Haven will cost parents and taxpayers more money?. That is beyond dispute. By rushing into this change without consulting parents served
by the current programs, we guarantee that some parents will leave with the displaced programs, depriving MSCR of their fees. We lose the rent paid by the providers that off-sets some of our building and custodial costs. We incur greater staffing, training, transportation, and administrative costs and pass those to the parents and taxpayers.
?Transportation costs are a non-issue?. Also correct. Whether we contract with current providers to transport more low-income childrenhome or pay for transportation to Safe Haven sites, the costs will depend on the number of children added, not on the nature of the provider.
The Board is poised to make this change at Allis and Lincoln-Midvale Schools on August 30. As Superintendent Rainwater told us in June, the money is the next year?s budget, although the Board had no notice of the dollars or this new purpose and has never considered the academic issues, the financial impacts or the effects of our action on our partners in providing after school care?the non-profits and the City of Madison.
The time to contact Board members with your concerns is now. You can reach all Board members at comments@madison.k12.wi.us.
Parent Responds to MSCR Editorial About Safe Haven Programs
Judy Sekulski is a parent at Midvale-Lincoln School in Madison. In this article she responds to the Madison district administration's recent public statements about Safe Haven programs.
I am writing in response to Lucy Chaffin's column on
July 12, 2004, ("Schools Offer Quality Childcare"),
about the Safe Haven after-school programs run by
MSCR. She states that, "The district doesn't support
separate programs running side-by-side in elementary
schools (as was the case last year at Midvale) because
this results in segregation by income and race."
This implies that the Safe Haven program at Midvale will
integrate the children in one program. This is not accurate.
There will be a K-5 Safe Haven at both Midvale and Lincoln
campuses, with children who attend each campus returning
to their neighborhood campus for Safe Haven care, so that
siblings from grades K-2 and 3-5 can be together, near
their homes. So, this will not integrate the children who
currently attend the K-5 Midvale AFTER SCHOOL
program and the Midvale Safe Haven program.
It was unfair of her to imply that those of us who want
to keep AFTER SCHOOL at Midvale somehow
condone the separation of the kids there by race. In
September 2003, the district created the "side-by-side"
situation at Midvale (where AFTER SCHOOL has
operated for 25 years), by installing a K-2 Safe Haven
there, when there was already a Safe Haven at Lincoln.
AFTER SCHOOL is already a diverse program, with
staff and students of color. If it had access to the
tax dollars to which Safe Haven does, it could expand its
existing programs to serve more low income children.
It is by no means elitist. It has been a good partner
with our schools for over 25 years, providing high
quality care in an environment of respect, equality,
and fair play.
The California Performance Review team that drafted the efficiency plan is recommending a constitutional amendment to abolish all 58 county Boards of Education, the 53 elected county superintendents and the five who are appointed. School districts, with their school boards and superintendents, would remain intact.
In place of the county offices of education would be 11 super centers doing the same work -- running programs for severely disabled students and kids in trouble with the law, helping teachers improve their skills, acting as fiscal watchdogs over school districts and more.
Home Delivery for Madison School Board - Your Tax Dollars at Work
Every Thursday before the Monday meetings of the Madison School Board, a school district employee driving a district vehicle pulls up at each of the seven homes of the board members to deliver a packet of information for the upcoming meeting. Sometimes the vehicle is a van. Sometimes it's a diesel truck.
On June 17, a driver in a truck brought me a folder that included the following: a copy of Education Week, photocopies of the monthly meeting schedules for June and July, a photocopy of the agenda for the committee meetings, and two small plastic folders. In the folders were a second photocopy of the committee agendas and photocopies of materials for each meeting. In all, the driver brought me 35 pages of photocopied materials. The final page was a photocopy of a message telling me that ?there will be another delivery of materials tomorrow, June 18.?
On July 18 I received another 32 pages of photocopies via courier.
I have asked the Board President to end courier delivery of paper copies and to initiate electronic delivery programs similar to those adopted in higher education and state, county, and local government levels. Where implemented, electronic delivery has proved to be an expedient way to distribute and share materials while saving labor, duplicating, and paper costs.
Electronic distribution has the additional benefit of being environment-friendly since materials are printed only when the end user feels that it is necessary to do so. Similarly, electronic distribution saves on expenditures for and consumption of gas used to drive bundles of paper across town one or more times per week.
Such a plan should be easy to implement because the district provides to each board member a free laptop computer and printer on request. Under this plan, board members could pick up commercial and other materials that are not time-sensitive on Mondays. On July 12 the Board will consider my request.
So far, Board President Bill Keys is "adamantly opposed? to these changes, even though the district purchased over 200 tons of mixed office paper in 2003-04 and even though schools are already recycling paper to save money.
Here?s a summary of my e-mail request to President Keys and his responses.
Bill:
According to Doug Pearson's recent report, MMSD purchased 220 tons of mixed office paper last year. That's 32,040 trees and lots of dollars that could go to the classroom.
I am requesting that the Board of Education set a good
example by changing how we receive information in order to save money, time and materials. Given that the district provides laptop computers and printers to Board members who want them, it seems that we could institute the following practices.
1. End weekly delivery of materials to our homes via MMSD staff in vans or trucks. Savings: cost for use, fuel and upkeep of the vehicles and staff time, if over-time involved. Better use of staff.
2. Have Board secretaries save all written materials that are not
time-sensitive for distribution at Monday meetings. Examples,
magazines, ads, publications, letters, school bulletins, weekly
newspapers. Savings: same as 1.
3. Have all administrative reports and materials delivered
electronically to the Board on the Thursday prior to the Monday meeting. Savings: paper, use of copying machine, staff time.
4. In situations such as expulsions, where many of the materials are copies of boilerplate provided to every student's family, limit the materials sent electronically to Board members to those items that are unique to the student under consideration. To the extent feasible, have staff summarize the unique materials, such as hearing transcripts, reports from neutral-site teachers, etc. for electronic delivery. Savings: paper, use of copying machine, staff time.
I ask you to consider this suggestion and get back to me. ?Thanks for considering the idea.
Ruth
++++++
Ruth:
I disagree with you on every recommendation. If you wish to bring this up to the Board, I will certainly respect your right to do so, and will guarantee you an impartial opportunity to be heard by your colleagues. But I will not make any of these recommendations.
Bill
++++
Bill:
Would you mind telling me why you disagree on each item? It's hard to see whether we could achieve any agreement with a blanket statement of your disagreement. Thanks.
Ruth
++++
Ruth:
I repeat. I encourage you to bring this up at a board meeting for a full discussion by the full board if you wish to, and I will guarantee you a fair opportunity to make your case. The suggestions you have made I am adamantly opposed to: I appreciate getting materials early, in print form, (which certainly means the magazines, bulletins, and other relevant publications as well as school news and correspondence because I can read them at my leisure, and well before the Board meetings, and without the problems that e-mail, or computers can cause through the very nature of their technology. The "boiler plate" packages for the expulsions actually save time because separating them item by item, student by student takes up more time than the money expended in simply bundling them together; additionally each bundled expulsion papers creates a more complete case, possibly protecting us from later litigations for improper procedures. Certainly the legal office is not responsible for even a significant portion of the 220 tons of office paper.
How can we "achieve agreement" when I don't agree in any way?
I can't be any clearer than this.
"Charter Schools: A New Vision of Public Education in Wisconsin."
Date: July 7, 2004 (Wednesday morning)
Time: 9:00 am to 11:30 am
Site: Madison - Concourse Hotel (Capital Ballroom A - 2nd Floor) Concourse Hotel
Purpose: Discuss the significance of the evolving charter schools sector as an institutional innovation within Wisconsin's public education system. You and your colleagues are invited to participate in the discussion, sponsored by the Wisconsin Charter Schools Association, along with:
JOHN WITTE --- John Witte bio
John is a UW-Madison Professor of Political Science & Public Affairs. He directs a major study of charter schools in Wisconsin --- LaFollette Insitute
JOE GRABA --- Joe Graba bio
Joe is a Senior Policy Fellow at Education/Evolving in Saint Paul. His
career in public education spans forty years and an impressive array of leadership positions including teacher, union leader, state legislator and higher education administrator.
PO Box 628243, Middleton, WI 53562
Email: sennb@charter.net Tel: 608-238-7491
Barbara G.
608.836.0616
Madison Area Family Advisory/Advocacy Council
MAFAAC~Closing the achievement gap through information, advocacy & support
mafaac@aol.com
Join MAFAAC and be part of the solution
To learn more about Alan Harris, the new principal of Black Hawk Middle School, you might want to visit the site that has the "report card" for the school he's leaving.
It appears that 27% of the students scored advanced or proficient on English language arts in 2002-2003, compared to 50% for the district, and 35% for the state average.
Wired's James Surowiecki has an interesting look at authoritarian vs democratic governance cultures (he argues that collective intelligence is far more effective, than a top down structure)
Instead of looking to a single person for the right answers, companies need to recognize a simple truth: Under the right conditions, groups are smarter than the smartest person within them. We often think of groups and crowds as stupid, feckless, and dominated by the lowest common denominator. But take a look around. The crowd at a racing track does an uncannily good job of forecasting the outcome, better in fact than just about any single bettor can do.
I've summarized my recent emails to and from MMSD Board of Education President Bill Keys below. I want to thank Bill for taking the time to respond to my notes. I'll post any further messages and/or links.
My emails to and from the MMSD Board of Education (along with some to and from President Bill Keys):
Good Evening, all (May 25, 2004):
I am writing, first to thank you for the time and effort you devote to the MMSD.
Second, I'm writing to find out why some of you voted recently to increase administrative compensation ($589K), while at the same time eliminating gym instructors AND increasing student fees?
Perhaps there is an opportunity to re-think this?
I would suggest telling the administrators to find 589K from their budget to fund the comp increase. In return, the student fee increases can be reduced/rolled back and perhaps a few more gym instructors retained.
Let's fund student curriculum & programs first, then deal with administrative costs.
Thanks for your email regarding this year's budget. In truth, administrators will be taking a pay cut because for the first time they will have to pay part of their health insurance. Like the rest of the staff and students they are having to pay for the inadequate school financing structure that the state legislature continues to inflict on public schools in Wisconsin.
I do understand the issue of fees very much, and truly wish that no students would pay any fees for anything. Unfortunately, we must raise the money in order to sustain programs. Last year we did it with a referendum giving us permission to exceed the revenue caps. This year, surprisingly, we have found little opposition to raising the fees.
Bill
At 10:47 AM 5/28/2004 -0500, you wrote:
hi Bill:
Thanks for your note, and your time.
You are correct that the (is it 5%?) health care cost participation will affect net compensation (many other folks, unfortunately, pay a much larger percentage of health care costs than that).
However, total admin compensation costs still have gone up ($589K).
I continue to believe, given the issues we face today (health care, obesity, more and more jobs that require extended periods at a desk), that we are better off shifting the 589K increase back into the admin budget (surely possible) and funding the gym instructors (and perhaps a few other student items).
Another option would be to stop paying for powerpoint licenses..... :) A complete waste.
With respect to fees; that is one approach. However, as you know there is a collection and management cost to any fee; not to mention an irritation factor for some.
I support Ruth's efforts to develop the MMSD budget from the ground up, based on student curriculum and achievement. We live in changing times.
Going from year to year with a same service approach (and a discussion of "cuts" or reduction in the increase prior to a full budget analysis) eliminates our opportunities to rethink the way we do things, why we do what we do, and results in a rather short analysis of the implications of budget decisions.
Finally, I urge you to put forth some ideas with respect to local education funding. There are many options, and frankly, the MMSD board is in an excellent position to convey a point of view!
Best wishes, and enjoy your weekend.
Jim
----
Jim,
Frankly, Ms. Robarts misrepresents the budgeting process when she characterizes it as anything BUT building from the ground up. Having been a teacher for 31 years in Madison, I have been involved in many budgets, and do know that we always built from the ground up, and always around educational services. But a system cannot exist without administrative costs, even admitted to in your own email regarding the mere collection of fees. There are bills to pay, supplies to order, reports to file, and on and on. The system cannot exist at all without these. As a teacher I could not have ever functioned without these services. And I certainly always wanted my administrative staff to be well paid, to be respected through sound salaries, and to feel valued in the system. If they were, my work as a teacher was easier and better, and students invariably benefited. I grow weary of attacks on administrators, just as I did with attacks on teachers. They are one and the same. These attacks are also launched against secretaries, custodians, and trades people.
We are always working hard at advocating through our legislators and governor and numerous organizations who want to provide full support to public education through equitable taxation. We are at a crossroads in our nation's cultural attitude: will we fund schools or prisons, health care or war, the collective good or individual profit.
Bill
----
At 06:24 PM 5/28/2004 -0500, you wrote:
Hi Bill:
Can I post your note online? (along with my question and followup email)?
These things are public, of course, but I prefer to ask.
Jim
----
Jim,
Sure! Thanks for asking, but I know that what I write is available for public consumption. In fact, I like to see it get even wider circulation. I don't believe that the public has yet come to understand how desperate this situation is, and how even more desperate it is going to get without significant changes to funding formulae.
Bill
----
Hi Bill:
Thanks for your notes, and your time!
My concerns with respect to the present budget "process" are frankly twofold:
a) Equitable treatment of curriculum issues, salaries/benefits for all (your message mentions these things); Which is why I was surprised to see you propose a rather large & unusual strings fee (vs. spreading the pain, as it were). I also felt that the issues that received board attention are generally hot button topics (wrestling, strings, for example vs. other aspects of the budget). Those programs are a tiny portion of the current 308M+ annual expenditures.
I think the recent process is indicative: cuts, or reductions in increases were floated before the actual budget. Further, evidently, due to a software migration, it's not possible to compare year to year numbers? (Please comment on my observations here, if you see things differently).
b) Change is difficult, without question. I am concerned, though, that MMSD is perhaps too oriented to a "same services" approach. This can significantly limit future budget flexibility. One example: the recent discussions with respect to math and english curriculum deserve more attention at the Board level. (There's been no shortage of national discussion on our K-12 science and math problems).
(Friday's Cap Times column by Doug Moe talks about a McFarland High School Grad who is VP of a Twin Cities based online University with 11,000 students!): "Smithmier, a 1988 McFarland High School grad, is vice president of the Division of Professional Studies of Capella University, an exclusively online (and fully accredited) university that now has nearly 11,000 students enrolled from all 50 states and many foreign countries.")
I've learned things in so many ways over the course of my 41 years......
Looking at this from a technology/services and business process perspective (my working world), I smell revolution in the air. Any time you have growing costs (in fact, needs not being met), growing demands and to an extent, entrenched interests all around ("same services"), things are ripe for change. Perhaps it will play out over my children's lifetimes, but it will indeed come.
I like to think the MMSD can lead! This is why I mention the funding issue.
Why not put forth a plan? Sometimes, the state/federal folks need a push.
Finally, as to writing, I encourage you to write online and I will, of course link to it!
I am writing, first to thank you for the time and effort you devote to the MMSD.
Second, I'm writing to find out why some of you voted recently to increase administrative compensation ($589K), while at the same time eliminating gym instructors AND increasing student fees?
Perhaps there is an opportunity to re-think this? I would suggest telling the administrators to find 589K from their budget to fund the comp increase. In return, the student fee increases can be rolled back and perhaps a few more gym instructors retained.
Let's fund student curriculum & programs first, then deal with administrative costs.
Ruth Robarts offered an excellent model for rationally crafting a goal-specific budget for the MMSD, and we all surely support it. But how are we going to make it happen? The Superintendent won't adopt it willingly, so we're faced with requiring the Superintendent to use the process. That means getting four board members to vote for the requirement. How are we going to make that happen? We'd need some sort of campaign to get the four votes. Would we need a big public splash like a one-day conference to learn about the budget model? Could we get the job done by privately talking with board members? Again, how do we proceed to get the board to adopt the budet model proposed by Ruth?
Please join me (Don Severson) in a MMSD Board of Education watch Monday evening, May 17 at about 6:00 p.m. The agenda is copied below. The Board will start discussing amendments to the 04-05 budget proposed by Supt. Rainwater sometime by 6:00. The Board will ostensibly make decisions on $9.9 million worth cuts and changes to the budget. The rules of the Board discussion on the budget preclude public input at this meeting.
It is critical, however, that we have a strong show of community interest in
their deliberations.
They need to know people are concerned and watching. You will be frustrated and probably disappointed, but you really need to see and hear how they 'function' to really get a sense of what is going on. We have
to show them that there is interest and concern by others than the few of us
who have been watching and working on them since last fall. We must take this
action as a visible next step in the ground swell of initiatives that must be
taken to get change to occur insofar as how this school board, administration
and system operates.
Please let me know that YOU WILL ATTEND the meeting MONDAY NIGHT!
Reply to me with this email. Call me at 238-8300 or 577-0851. THANK YOU.
Speak with your feet and your presence!!
Encourage friends to also go to the meeting--even if you can't go yourself.
Monday, May 17, 2004
5:00 p.m.Special Board of Education Meeting - Executive Session
pursuant to Wis. Stat. Sections 19.85(1)(a)(e)(f)(g); 118.125; and
120.13(1)(c)
Approval of Executive Session Minutes dated April 19, 2004
Review of Disciplinary Action Recommended to be Taken Against Three Students
Bus Vendor Proposals for Providing Transportation Services for 2004-07 School
Years
Special Board of Education Meeting continued in Open Session Announcements
2004-05 Association of Madison School District Administrators (AMSDA) Salary
and Benefits Proposal
Resolution regarding 50th Anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education - See
Appendix 1
2004-05 Amended Proposed Budget and Board Amendments to the Superintendent�s
2004-05 Amended Proposed Budget
Other Business
Adjournment
Doyle Administration Bldg
Room 103
545 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53703
Don Severson forwarded his presentation to the Madison School Board Thursday evening:
Inasmuch as the BOE and district administration are engaged in the leadership of an educational enterprise this is a good time to reflect on our experiences in the operation of the system and its processes. Let me suggest a �lesson plan�. This lesson plan has been prepared for the BOE and administrative leadership of the district and intended for their collaborative planning and implementation with teachers, parents, students and the community.
OBJECTIVES:
Develop a base line of trust and respect among selves and others significant to the processes
Facilitate the efforts and skills of those who are learners, those who are teachers, those who support the processes, as well as parents and citizens
Adhere to decision-making processes without disruption to the educational processes
Apply policies and processes equitably with all groups/persons involved, but differently according to needs when appropriate
Demonstrate leadership for systemic change based upon adequate research, performance indicators and value to the community
Undertake initiatives for making the system work more effectively
Balance social services with educational performance for all students
EXERCISES:
Functional role and responsibility development as a Board and in relationships with administration and the unions
Skill development in strategic, long-term planning
The art of shared communications and listening among selves and with constituencies
Collaborations and partnerships with other stakeholders
RESOLVE:
Muster the political will, fortitude and abilities to make a difference for the reasons appropriate for educational needs and outcomes
Accept accountability and responsibility for those actions under local control
To change the �ain�t it awful� syndrome in assigning blame to others for the fix we are in
Add value and significance with leadership and vision
There are many ways to press forward this kind of systemic reform, Mr Pritchett argues. Vouchers and a �market� for education might work well in some circumstances, but other approaches could achieve good results too in some cases: school autonomy (as granted to �charter schools� in the United States, for instance), decentralisation of control, community management, and the use of non-government providers, could all, Mr Pritchett argues, serve the goal of structural reform that he regards as necessary if the application of extra resources is to succeed.
One striking indication of how easy it is to spend money fruitlessly in education comes from the rich countries. According to one study cited by Mr Pritchett, Britain increased its real spending per pupil by 77% between 1970 and 1994; over the same period, the assessment score for learning in maths and science fell by 8%. Australia increased its real spending per pupil by 270%; its pupils� scores fell by 2%. Extra spending by itself is likely to be no more successful in the poor countries than it has been in the rich.
Jonathan Gramling, editor of the weekly Madison Times, has an editorial wondering whether a number of recent school district policies merge into a "big picture" of disadvantage to people of color.
As a sophomore at Madison West High School, Danny Cullenward tookCalculus 1, a yearlong advanced math class that put the only B on theotherwise straight-A student's transcript.
The same happened with Sam Friedman, the former captain of West's mathteam. Friedman, who is now at the University of Chicago, got two B's incalculus at West but went on, as a high school student, to get an A inadvanced calculus at the University of Wisconsin.Chris Moore, who is a junior at West and is already ranked among the top 30high school math students in the United States, also had trouble in his highschool course. He got a B when he took calculus as a freshman.
UW Professor Janet Mertz knows of all these cases, and cited them in aletter to administrators. She argued, as other parents have for more than ayear, that something is not right with the way calculus students at West aretested.
It's unfair, she wrote, and it's hurting students' chances to get intoelite colleges such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for whichMertz interviews student applicants.
For more than a year, a group of West High parents have beencomplaining about the way calculus students at West are tested. This week theywent public -- voicing their concerns before the Madison School Board.The first complaint came from Joan Knoebel and Michael Cullenward, M.D., onbehalf of their son, now a senior at West. They decried the fact that KeithKnowles, West's calculus teacher, reuses old tests or parts of old tests thatare available to some -- but not all -- students.
According to the formal complaint, "students have obtained copies fromolder siblings, prior students, through study groups, private tutors, or by awell-defined grapevine." The school itself does not keep the tests on file.
School district administrators contend that Knowles did nothing wrong andthat there's no evidence to conclude that having access to old tests washelpful to students.
George Kelly, English chairman at East High School, said teachers share thesame interests as committee members -- to ensure that students have access tothe tests they've taken and to make the playing field level for all students.But he said a districtwide policy would be cumbersome.
"There's a larger issue here," Kelly said. "How much micromanaging does theboard want to do in instruction and evaluation?"
West parent Joan Knoebel said Tuesday that the district continues to avoidthe real issue that her family raised, which is that a particular teacher atWest is not following the test return policy already in place at that school.Although she would like to see districtwide guidelines, she has neversuggested that the problem is widespread.
"(The district) is attacking this globally, when what you really have isone teacher who, in my opinion, is acting unethically," she said. "They'reusing an elephant gun to shoot a starling."
Common sense tells us that students with an advance copy of a test have asignificant advantage over their classmates. Assessment is meaningless underthese circumstances.This is the basis of our complaint. And this isn't just about one teacherat West. The decisions in this case emanate throughout the Madison SchoolDistrict.
What's the teacher's job? To teach the principles of calculus and to fairlyevaluate whether his students learned the math. He undoubtedly knows the math,as some former students enthusiastically attest. However, because old examswere not available to all, the only thing his tests reliably measured is whoma student knows, not what a student knows.
And -- this point is critical -- he also couldn't tell whether the tests heconstructed, or copied, were "good" tests. A good test is one a well-preparedstudent can complete successfully during class time. Think of it this way.Assume there were no old tests to study -- all students were on a levelplaying field. The teacher gives a test. No one finishes or gets a high score.Did no one understand the material? Possibly, but many of these hardworkingstudents come to class prepared. The better explanation is that there was aproblem with the test itself; for example, it was too long or too complex tofinish within the time limit.
This mirrors the experience of students who didn't study the old tests.Unfortunately, they were sitting alongside classmates who'd seen an advancecopy and could thus easily finish within the class period.
Ten years ago, West High enacted a test return policy. Why? Because thiscalculus teacher, among others, wouldn't give the tests back. The policy was acompromise to give families a chance to review tests, but only underconditions that gave teachers control against copies being handed down.
This calculus teacher had a choice: offer in-school review, as is done atMemorial High, or let the tests go home under tight restrictions, including awritten promise not to copy or use them for cheating. After this policy washammered out, he elected to return his tests unconditionally yet continued tore-use his tests. The district says that was his prerogative.
What was the administration's job here? To conduct a fair formal complaintprocess and to ensure that assessment is non-discriminatory. The "outsideinvestigator" the district appointed is a lawyer who together with her firmroutinely does other legal work for the district. Had we known of thisconflict, we wouldn't have wasted our time. In reality, the administration andits investigator endeavored mostly to find support for the foregone conclusionthat a teacher can run his class as he wishes.
We greatly appreciate our children's teachers, but with all due respect,autonomy does not trump the duty of this teacher, the administration and theboard to provide all students with a fair and reliable testing scheme.
The only remedy the district offers is to let students repeat the course,either at West or at UW-Madison at their own expense -- $1,000 -- andsubstitute the new grade. This isn't a genuine remedy. It punishes studentsfor a problem they didn't create. Furthermore, it is only truly available tothose who can afford UW-Madison tuition and the time.
What was the School Board's job? To tackle public policy -- in this case,non-discriminatory assessment. With one brave exception, the board ducked, andchose to protect the teacher, the administration and the union -- everyoneexcept the students.
The solution is easy. If teachers are going to re-use tests or questions,safeguard them using the test return policy or make an exam file available toall. Otherwise, write genuinely fresh tests each time.
After 14 months of investigation and a 100-plus page record, it's worsethan when we started. Now the district says that this teacher, any teacher,can re-use tests and give them back without restriction, and that it isperfectly acceptable for some but not all students to have copies to preparefrom.
For six months, we sought to resolve this matter privately and informally,without public fanfare. Confronting the dirty little secret of the calculusclass didn't sully West's remarkable national reputation, but openly paperingit over surely does. Simply put, this teacher didn't do his job. Theadministration and six board members didn't do theirs, either. "Putting kidsfirst" needs to be more than just a campaign slogan. -->
In the Madison West High calculus class, tests are the only way astudent is evaluated -- not by quizzes, homework or classroom participation,just tests. The teacher admits he duplicates or tweaks old tests. He knew somebut not all students had copies, yet he wouldn't provide samples or an examfile.
Common sense tells us that students with an advance copy of a test have asignificant advantage over their classmates. Assessment is meaningless underthese circumstances.This is the basis of our complaint. And this isn't just about one teacherat West. The decisions in this case emanate throughout the Madison SchoolDistrict.
What's the teacher's job? To teach the principles of calculus and to fairlyevaluate whether his students learned the math. He undoubtedly knows the math,as some former students enthusiastically attest. However, because old examswere not available to all, the only thing his tests reliably measured is whoma student knows, not what a student knows.
And -- this point is critical -- he also couldn't tell whether the tests heconstructed, or copied, were "good" tests. A good test is one a well-preparedstudent can complete successfully during class time. Think of it this way.Assume there were no old tests to study -- all students were on a levelplaying field. The teacher gives a test. No one finishes or gets a high score.Did no one understand the material? Possibly, but many of these hardworkingstudents come to class prepared. The better explanation is that there was aproblem with the test itself; for example, it was too long or too complex tofinish within the time limit.
This mirrors the experience of students who didn't study the old tests.Unfortunately, they were sitting alongside classmates who'd seen an advancecopy and could thus easily finish within the class period.
Ten years ago, West High enacted a test return policy. Why? Because thiscalculus teacher, among others, wouldn't give the tests back. The policy was acompromise to give families a chance to review tests, but only underconditions that gave teachers control against copies being handed down.
This calculus teacher had a choice: offer in-school review, as is done atMemorial High, or let the tests go home under tight restrictions, including awritten promise not to copy or use them for cheating. After this policy washammered out, he elected to return his tests unconditionally yet continued tore-use his tests. The district says that was his prerogative.
What was the administration's job here? To conduct a fair formal complaintprocess and to ensure that assessment is non-discriminatory. The "outsideinvestigator" the district appointed is a lawyer who together with her firmroutinely does other legal work for the district. Had we known of thisconflict, we wouldn't have wasted our time. In reality, the administration andits investigator endeavored mostly to find support for the foregone conclusionthat a teacher can run his class as he wishes.
We greatly appreciate our children's teachers, but with all due respect,autonomy does not trump the duty of this teacher, the administration and theboard to provide all students with a fair and reliable testing scheme.
The only remedy the district offers is to let students repeat the course,either at West or at UW-Madison at their own expense -- $1,000 -- andsubstitute the new grade. This isn't a genuine remedy. It punishes studentsfor a problem they didn't create. Furthermore, it is only truly available tothose who can afford UW-Madison tuition and the time.
What was the School Board's job? To tackle public policy -- in this case,non-discriminatory assessment. With one brave exception, the board ducked, andchose to protect the teacher, the administration and the union -- everyoneexcept the students.
The solution is easy. If teachers are going to re-use tests or questions,safeguard them using the test return policy or make an exam file available toall. Otherwise, write genuinely fresh tests each time.
After 14 months of investigation and a 100-plus page record, it's worsethan when we started. Now the district says that this teacher, any teacher,can re-use tests and give them back without restriction, and that it isperfectly acceptable for some but not all students to have copies to preparefrom.
For six months, we sought to resolve this matter privately and informally,without public fanfare. Confronting the dirty little secret of the calculusclass didn't sully West's remarkable national reputation, but openly paperingit over surely does. Simply put, this teacher didn't do his job. Theadministration and six board members didn't do theirs, either. "Putting kidsfirst" needs to be more than just a campaign slogan.
After hearing West High graduates who had returned home for winterbreak defend their former calculus teacher, the Madison School Board decidedit would seek the advice of department heads before potentially changing anypolicies on math tests.
Noah Kaufman, a freshman at Dartmouth College, told the board Monday nightthat complaints against calculus teacher Keith Knowles -- who parents sayrepeated exam material without providing universal access to the old tests --were "entirely unreasonable.""Had I memorized numbers and calculations from old exams, and passed themoff as my answers, I would have failed my class, without question," Kaufmansaid.
"Mr. Knowles did not use the same questions on different tests. What he diddo was ask questions that involved similar applications of the concepts. Allof these concepts were explained thoroughly in the textbook, as well as by Mr.Knowles himself.
"A student could have access to the concepts and examples of applicationsby simply doing the homework and paying attention in class."
arents of a Madison West High School senior urged the School BoardMonday to make sure that teachers who recycle exams from year to year also tryto keep copies of the old tests from circulating among students.
Either that, or a sample test should be made available to all studentsequally, said Joan Knoebel.She said her son, Danny Cullenward, and other students were at adisadvantage during several semesters of advanced math, because the teacherrecycled tests even though he knew that some but not all students had accessto old copies. Danny said that when he privately asked for help, the teachertold him to find old tests but refused to supply them.
Said his mother: "Exams should be about what you know, not who you know."
She said her son, a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, becamesuspicious when some students breezed through the exams while he struggled tofinish on time.
Barb Schrank published a Strings Call to Action last week. This evening, many parents and children attended, demonstrated and performed at a School Board Meeting.
Intel CEO Craig Barrett on US K-12 Math & Science Education
In a USA Today interview, Intel CEO Craig Barrett discusses outsourcing, competition and US K-12 Education: "We do not send our basketball teams to compete against the rest of the world, saying the other teams have to play slower because our folks aren't fit enough to run as fast.":
Q: In K-12 education, what would you like to see that you are not seeing?
A: If we could capture 1% of the hot air that has gone out on this topic and turn it into results, it would be wonderful. The results are how our kids compare to their international counterparts, particularly in math and science. The longer kids stay in the system, the worse they do compared to their international counterparts. In fourth grade, our kids are roughly comparable. By eighth grade, they are behind. By the 12th grade, they are substantially behind other industrialized nations.
Q: What are the hurdles?
A: One is very simply the teachers. I'm not criticizing teachers, per se, but 25% to 30% who teach math or science in K-12 are not educated in the math and science they teach. If you are going to be an engineering major, you are going to need 12 years of solid math. What are the odds of getting 12 consecutive good teachers in a row if 30% of them are not qualified?
Today's Wisconsin State Journal has a useful opinion piece on MMSD's budget process & governance. This editorial is timely, given the current discussions regarding the district's $310M+ budget:
The Madison School Board is in the midst of tackling the district's budget woes, which include a $10 million shortfall between what the district can spend and what it wants to spend.
Board members can whine all they please that the "current way (the state) funds schools is broken," but here's the bottom line: The state school funding formula is not going to change this spring. If they want to fix something broken closer to home, they should start with their own flawed budgeting instead.
How bad is the district's budgeting? Well, for starters, the board began debating cuts to the budget March 11, according to Barbara Schrank, a parent who was active in protesting last year's proposed budget cuts, but they didn't see the actual budget until three weeks later, on March 31. A month later, board members were told they couldn't compare this year's "same service" budget to next year's "same service" budget because of computer software problems. And the board isn't expected to finalize the budget until June, although layoff notices must be turned in by May 22
A. Introduction:
There's no need for community action if the MMSD Administration and BOE state support for the current elementary strings academic curriculum. They don't. When the Board members don't say yes, it means no, given their recent history with this curriculum.
The MMSD Board of Education adopted and approved the elementary strings program as a necessary component of its Music Education Curriculum in the late 1980s. Standards and benchmarks were added in the late 1990s. The BOE has neither discussed nor changed its decisions on this curriculum.
The recent treatment of the elementary strings curriculum is another example of what happens when our BOE is lacking Long Range Plans for curriculum, for funding and for letting the Administration call the shots for kids rather than the BOE.
B. Background:
For the 2 previous MMSD budget cycles, the District Administration has used various approaches to try to eliminate the 4-5th grade strings academic curriculum.
Spring 2002 - included elimination of Grade 4 strings on cut list - at least this approach gave parents, teachers and the community notice - opportunity to propose ideas for alternative funding, etc. There was no follow up by the Administration during the 2002-2003 school year.
Spring 2003 - after waiting until BOE completed its budget amendments, the District administration proposed a huge fee for families (a fee so large that the BOE would have cut the program rather than charge the fee). The District Administration and the BOE did not use this interim academic year (2003-2004) to engage the community and to seek alternative options or funding by foundations, different fee structure, etc
Spring 2004 � There is no Administration proposal to cut the elementary strings curriculum, but Board President Bill Keys has asked the District Administration for the kind of information that would justify elimination of the program.
I directly asked Mr. Keys and all of the other Board members during public appearances at the Board meeting on Monday night, April 26th, whether a cut proposal was coming � I did not get an answer. Based upon the Board�s lack of response, a rally was discussed among parents, teachers and community members. The decision to share the information and to take action on Monday, May 3, 2004 was decided.
C. Concerns/Issues:
It was irresponsible and unfair of Mr. Keys to singularly identify this curriculum/activity without applying the same request to all district activities. It is unclear what criteria were used in the analysis the School Board received and if the same criteria have been applied to other activities/curricula. I prepared a critique of the District Administration�s analysis, which was given to the Board on Monday, April 26th.
The District Administration said that eliminating this academic curriculum would save 5% of the needed budget cut. What does that mean out of context of educational goals and objectives for the district, etc.?
Why doesn�t the district have a comprehensive set of criteria to use for a cost analysis which is applied to ALL programs, curricula and activities? The board does not have an understanding and agreement about what is curriculum, what an extra-curricular activity is and what a co-curricular activity is.
Upon determining the base-line costs of all activities, then an equitable decision framework can developed as to how and to what degree such activities can/should be funded on an equitable basis across the total list. It�s not okay simply to say sports yes, elementary strings no. Attached is a proposal for equitable funding prepared by Don Severson.
It�s not okay to eliminate a valued Board approved academic subject that is in high demand (more than 50% of 4th and 5th graders � about 1900 kids in September) by many students who cannot afford to study privately. Each year the demand from minority and low income students increases.
Why does the School Board continue to consider cutting an academic curriculum that is part of a Board approved curriculum that has standards and benchmarks in place? Why would the School Board want to dumb down its curriculum two years? (Current 12th graders in strings would have two years fewer of study.) Colleges often look to a student�s sports and music accomplishments in addition to core academics.
What are the motivations of board members to identify �lightening rods� of selective programs for parents, teachers, and the public to �fight� against each other to �save� whatever program/activity? Our excellent school system demands that we work together to problem solve the issues facing us.
Why isn�t the Administration and the School Board working with the community?
Administration uses specific, measurable goals to review student achievement inprior year according to district?s ?Strategic Priorities?. For example, it reviews reading, math, social studies, science curriculum for all student groups as well as programs aligned to district standards. Administration should ensure that suggestions for change come from the staff level that will implement the changes. Board committees, such as Performance & Achievement, monitor the review throughout the year.
Opportunities for public, staff input
Administration reviews facility, maintenance and non-instructional departments for prior year seeking efficiencies. Board committees, such as Budget & Finance and Long Range Planning, monitor the review throughout the year.
Opportunities for public, staff input
Before January, Administration recommends curriculum & program changes to improve student achievement. Appropriate committees review recommendations before sending them to full Board.
Opportunities for public, staff input
In January, Administration recommends budget for the next year allocating resources based on its analysis (connection between curriculum and programs and desired student achievement).
Opportunities for public, staff input
Where recommended budget exceeds revenue forecast for coming year, Administration presents funding alternatives including private partnerships or changes in fees.
Opportunities for public, staff input
Administration recommends modifications and cuts necessary to balance budget for coming year.
Opportunities for public, staff input
Board reviews recommendations for modifications and cuts, adopting or revising administrative recommendations.
Board approves budget for coming year. If budget exceeds revenues, Board considers referendum or further cuts.
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WRITING about the same analysis of Los Angeles public school teachers my colleague 
It was a pleasure to meet and visit with Fitchburg's 
IT WAS never reasonable to expect that Barack Obama's budget proposal, delivered to Congress on February 1st, would do much to bring down America's vast deficit in the near term. True, the economy has returned to growth. But a big part of that consists of restocking after a savage downturn that has left inventories depleted. Consumers are still struggling with the collapse in the values of their homes and other assets. And unemployment stands at a stubborn 10%: the administration forecasts see only a fractional fall in joblessness this year.
I enjoyed meeting and talking with Ellie Schatz recently. Listen to the conversation via 
I recently had an opportunity to visit with Todd Barry, 
Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes 
The 
Long time teacher, former school board member/president and activist 
At the end of an especially divisive Madison school board meeting, Annette Montegomery took to the microphone and laid bare her frustrations with the seven elected citizens who govern Madison schools.
Unless you have a kid in the Madison schools, many of the issues discussed by the four Madison school board candidates in our weekly 
